 
ELECTRIC ELIZABETH: A Novel

by Vincent C. Martinez

Copyright ©2014 Vincent C. Martinez. All Rights Reserved.

This novel was corrected and revised June, 2015.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the reader. It is the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Discover other titles by Vincent C. Martinez at his official author webpage.
CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

About the Author
Prologue

I want to believe that you're sleeping in the bedroom just down the hall, that there aren't hundreds of nail holes in the walls, and that there aren't hammer marks in the trim along the floor.

But the holes in the walls are there, the nail holes and hammer marks are there, and the bedroom is empty. You are not under the covers snoring, reading, or waiting for me to slip under the heavy blankets with you.

There is thunder outside, though it is snowing. I see its source stretching over the gap between the northern hills: brilliant blue and violet, a snaking, twisting crack in a black sky, a spark kilometers long extending cloud to ground.

I sit by this window and wonder.

I wonder if it is you.
Chapter One

Breezes tickled the treetops, and the roads and sidewalks were dotted with dampness from melted snow and ice. Our breaths formed clouds in the air, and I walked beside her, closest to the street, her hand in mine.

Elizabeth wanted to walk somewhere that morning. "Where?" I'd asked. "Anywhere," she'd said, "I want to walk with you." So we put on our coats and scarves, we locked the front door behind us, we walked out to the quiet street, then started west. It was a little past seven-o'clock, and the town was, save for an occasional car lumbering down a street somewhere or an occasional dog chorus at the edge of town, quiet, the loudest sounds the breeze in our ears, our feet against the ground, our breathing in the air.

I pulled her close, leaned down, and kissed the top of her head as I often did. She said nothing, and we moved apart, hands still joined. Our shadows wavered over asphalt and concrete, merging, separating, then merging again.

Her shadow crept beneath mine. Her black hair and black coat billowed in the breeze. Her yellow sweater burned like flame in the gray air. Her gray scarf drooped around her neck, almost onto her shoulders. She was all I saw. She was all I wanted to see.

When she took a deep breath, I'd squeeze her hand tightly, and she'd smile at me sadly, her gentle, round face luminous in the morning gray. If she wanted to say something, she would say it, even if it took days of mulling it over before she finally decided to share it. She was analytical that way: process, collate, process, reveal. I knew she'd let me know what was on her mind. Eventually.

We walked past the warehouse district and railyard entrance and through canyons of aluminum-sided houses. No one stirred in their homes, though sometimes I heard muted televisions or radios, static floating on the breeze. We walked past Cardinal and Warbler Streets, past Central and Shrike Streets, past the street where I worked at the Blackbridge Banner, and past the bakery where Liz once wondered why the walls and tables were covered with maps of human palms.

We turned onto the street that held the town's remaining stores, and she slowed. Our bond stretched, but didn't break. "Oops," I said, still gripping her hand. I smiled at her. She smiled back, but, again, sadly. Her dark eyes didn't meet mine but focused on my chest before she looked up.

"Oops," she whispered.

Across the street were Blackbridge Radio and Electronics, American Furniture, Worthington's Shoe Store, and Big Star Hardware. Just up ahead on our side was Leed's Clothing Store. Every building was a leftover from early twentieth century boom years: red brick and concrete, thick plate glass windows and doors, neon OPEN signs—all dark this morning. That morning, I didn't look at stereos or shortwave radios, and Liz only glanced at the storefronts, eyes searching the empty street for something.

The street continued for a mile to the hills bordering the town's eastern edge. Liz looked at the hilltop antennas, the warning light beacons glowing, throbbing like heartbeats, and she slowed to a stop. She let go of my hand, stared at the beacons' glow, then turned to the windows of Leed's. She walked to the windows where the spring coats were on display and stopped.

She turned to me, her eyes wide and watery. Her nose was reddening, and her face quivered. She stepped back. Two steps. Three steps. Four. Five. She reached out with her right hand.

I tilted my head and smiled. I began to walk to her, and I reached up to touch her hand.

Suddenly, there was a blue flash. A white fire. A burning over my body. A tearing of skin on my back, a crash in my ears, a concussion in my chest, and a rock-like hardness against my head.

And then there was only black.

***

I awoke days later to electronic beeping in my right ear and a deep hum in my left ear. The room was dark, dry, cold, and smelled of adhesive tape. Shapes were blurred at their edges. My head felt compressed, my chest and arms leaden, my upper back singed, my lower back crushed and twisted. I reached up and touched bandages wrapped around my skull. Tubes pierced my skin. Adhesive strips stitched gashes on my forehead and cheeks. I ached as if I'd been stretched and pulled from neck to foot. I lay flat and winced, listening to the beeping and the humming. My eyes searched the darkness until I closed them again.

***

Outside, a floor waxer whirred.

A woman with silver hair pulled into a bun sat beside the bed, drawing a vial of blood from an IV port in my arm. I turned my head and located the room's window. Through the blinds I saw only black.

I mumbled: "Who are you?"

Her head jerked up, and she pulled the vial from the IV port. Her blue eyes widened, as did her mouth. "Are you awake?" she whispered. She slipped the vial into a small rack sitting on a wheeled food tray beside the bed and reached behind me, pressing a button on the wall. She smelled like the alcohol hand cleanser I kept on my desk at work.

Two other women entered the room, one wheeling in a computer cart laden with air pressure arm cuffs, thermometers, and finger oxygen clamps, the other pulling a penlight from her pocket. They both jogged to my bedside, one on each side.

"He just woke up and asked me who I was," Blood Taker said, pointing at me.

"Mister Conroy?" Penlight asked. "Mister Conroy? Are you awake, Mister Conroy?"

"What's wrong with me?" I mumbled. Light flashed into my eyes.

"Mister Conroy, can you tell me your first name?"

"What?" I asked. A blood pressure cuff was wrapped around my arm. It tightened with a wheeze as a cold thermometer was rolled over my forehead. Cart Nurse tapped away at the keys on the cart-mounted computer. "My name?"

"What is your first name, Mister Conroy?"

"Milton," I said. "What's wrong with me?"

"Do you know where you are, Milton?"

"No, I"—the blood pressure cuff tightened again—"I'm in a hospital."

"Do you know which one?"

"No," I said. "What's wrong with me?"

"You were injured in an accident, Mister Conroy. Do you know your birthday?"

I told her my birthday, I told her my birthplace, I told her my name again, I told her where I hurt the worst and if I could give each pain a number on a scale of one to ten, how would they rank? They asked me my wife's name.

"Liz," I said. "Elizabeth. My wife's name is Elizabeth. Is she here?"

"Milton, can you tell us what you remember?" Another nurse appeared with a thin bag of clear fluid in her hands. Penlight turned to her and whispered, "You can just load that one up right now. He's got heavy pain in the lower back." Penlight stood up, walked to the end of my bed, and lifted the covers. My lower legs were wrapped in blue pressure cuffs that inflated and deflated on my shins and calves. She took out a small metal poker, tapped my toes and feet. "Can you feel this?" she asked. "How about this? Can you feel this here? Can you wiggle your toes? Can you raise your feet? Just a bit? Okay, that's good, that's fine."

The nurses moved around the bed like wind-spun leaves, touching, prodding, pressing, verifying.

"Does my wife know where I am?" I asked. "Is she okay?"

"The doctor's on her way," Penlight said. "She'll answer your questions. You're at West Scranton Hospital." Her voice deepened, and she placed her hand onto my non-needled arm. "You've been in an accident, and you've had some emergency surgery. The doctor'll give you all the specifics. We're just getting all your vitals right now, making sure you're seeing okay, that your legs and limbs are working, and if you need any immediate attention."

"I need to see my wife," I said. "I want her to know I'm okay. Can you call her?"

She smiled and squeezed my arm.

***

I couldn't tell Doctor McKullen's age. Her face was young, but her long, straight hair was silver-gray. As she sat on the bed, she looked at me with deep-green eyes and a worn smile as she cradled a thick folder in her arms and flipped through the pages. "Mister Conroy," she said, "do you remember anything that happened before you got here?"

I shook my head. "I was walking with my wife. We were standing in front of a store. There was something like a flash, and I felt like I was on fire. That's it. Then I woke up here."

She placed the folder on her lap and slid closer to me, her body so thin that it barely pushed the mattress down. "Mister Conroy, from what I've been told, there was a lightning strike right where you and your wife stood. It's possible you got a direct hit, I'm not sure. You don't have any serious electrical burns, and that's good, but you were thrown through a window. You have multiple lacerations on your head, face, and back, a couple of herniated cervical discs, and two lumbar discs so severely herniated that we needed to perform an emergency discectomy and laminectomy or risk having paralysis set in. That's the pain in your lower back. Usually we try to get patients up and walking right after surgery, but you've been out for a few days, so—"

"How many days?" I asked.

"Three days. You seem to be doing well right now, but we'll watch you for a bit longer, and we'll need to get you up and walking."

"What about Liz?"

"Who?"

"My wife."

"Yes, I'm sorry," she said, taking in a deep breath and biting her lower lip.

"Where's Liz?" I asked again.

She shook her head. "I don't know, Mister Conroy."

"You don't know? You don't know if she's at another hospital, or you don't know if she's still alive or not?"

"I just don't know."

"What kind of—"

"Mister Conroy," she lowered her hand onto my chest, "please slow your breathing. The reason why I say I don't know is because I don't. The last I heard, no one does."

"What kind of answer is that?" I said. I tried to raise myself, but my weakened back and arms held me in place.

"Milton, no one knows where your wife is. No one."

***

That night, I pulled the room's telephone onto my lap and dialed my home telephone number until the answering machine picked up. I listened to Liz's voice message. I left messages letting her know where I was, asking her where she was, telling her to call me, asking if she was okay, asking what happened to her. I sat in the dark room, dialing my telephone number until the answering machine was filled, but I continued dialing, hoping she'd pick up.

I dialed her cellular phone. I imagined the old-fashioned bell ringer sound that it made, and I imagined her holding it to her ear, her smile as she spoke, her flat bangs brushing over her face, her eyes squinting as she listened. Her voicemail picked up again and again. Again and again, I asked where she was, begging her to call me.

As the sun rose and filled the room with pink light, I held the phone in my lap and waited for a call that never came.

As the room filled with white mid-morning light, I held the phone to my chest and waited for a call that never came.

And as the room became black with nightfall, I cradled the phone close to my face and waited for a call that never came, the night filled only with the soft tones of heart monitors, the echoes of code blues and code yellows, the paging of doctors, the whirring of floor waxers, and the tap of wind and ice pellets against the window like gravel on glass.

***

At four the following morning, the telephone rang. I fumbled through the bedsheets, grabbed the handset, and put it to my right ear.

"Hello?" I said.

The line hissed like distant waterfalls.

"Hello?" I said, this time louder.

Something crackled and hummed. Something purred and thumped. Something buzzed and growled. And then I finally heard it rising above the white noise: low whispers . . . and a woman's laughter.

Then silence as the line went dead.

***

The next day, the nurses had me walking the hallways. When I was alone in my room, I limped to the bathroom and looked at my body in the mirror. From face to legs my skin was speckled with purple-black bruises, and my back and shoulders were crisscrossed with deep scrapes, some sealed with clear adhesive strips, some crusted over with blackened scabs. On the small of my back, a five-inch scar was sealed with scabs and plastic strips, a deep violet bruise blooming around the incision.

I'd no visitors for most days, though a large flower arrangement from the Blackbridge Banner was placed on the food tray beside my bed. During the day, I'd stare at the green and yellow flowers, the card that said "Get Well Soon," the lime cellophane plastic wrapped around the flowerpot. Next to it the telephone remained silent except when I picked it up and dialed my home telephone number or Elizabeth's cell phone again. I'd listen to her voice, wait for the answering machine or the voicemail system to tell me that they were full before hanging up, and then I'd dial again. Whenever the door opened, I hoped she'd walk in, tell me she was sorry for not being there sooner, then hold me in the darkening light.

***

On the fifth day, there was a soft knock, and the door cracked open. A woman with olive skin and brown eyes peeked in. "Milton?" she whispered. She pushed the door open and walked in wearing a black cold-weather police uniform. When she approached my bed, her face became clearer. "Milton?" Maria Lorenzo repeated, taking off her hat and letting her black hair spill over her shoulders. In a few months, her hair would reach down to her waist again.

She pulled up a chair. "How are you, Milton?" she asked. Her voice was soft, as if afraid that loud sounds would undo my stitches and re-open my wounds.

I shook my head. "They said they can't find Liz," I said.

Maria attempted a smile that looked more like a grimace. She leaned over and placed a hand on my shoulder. "No," she said. "We can't find a trace of her. I need to ask you, Milton. Can we search your house? Just to see if, I don't know, somehow she made it back home?"

I nodded.

"Thank you," she said. She held her breath before continuing. "Did the doctors say—"

"No one saw anything?" I asked. "Heard anything? No one?"

"No witnesses, Milt, just security camera footage. We're still looking it over. We've been going over it again and again."

"And?" I asked.

Maria said that the camera caught everything in color, that it watched us walk to the front of Leed's, watched Liz let go and step away, watched her turn and lift her hand to me, watched me reach out to her, watched as a white ball of electricity exploded where we stood, as my body was hurled through a front plate-glass window, as glass fell on me like rain, as the camera shook from the shockwave, as the dazzling stroke of lightning stretched and returned to the sky. Less than two seconds, and all that was left was my body lying in a glass-carpeted storefront and an empty sidewalk under gray morning light.

"We don't know what happened," Maria said. "We looked to see if there was an electrical conduit that blew, if there was some sort of malfunction under the sidewalk, maybe a steam or gas explosion, but nothing. We see the same thing over and over. Another camera down the street didn't see anyone running or walking from the scene. Just the two of you, then lightning, and then . . . just you."

I had the hospital bring up my belongings, and Maria pulled out the keys. Two of them had their tips welded together, but the house keys were intact. "We'll look through the whole house," she said. "We won't make a mess."

"I don't care if you make a mess," I said. "I don't care if you burn the house down. Please just find her."

"We'll try, Milton."

"Thank you."

"When're you discharged?"

"Tomorrow."

"Do you have a ride?"

I shook my head.

"I'll take you home tomorrow. She pocketed the keys and placed her cap back on her head. I'll call you as soon as we check the house."

"Thank you," I said.

She touched my shoulder and walked out the door, her wide hips and stocky body slicing the pale hallway light. The door closed quietly behind her, and I was alone again. The hospital room hummed from the heating system, and the disembodied voices from the hospital paging system floated on the air like ghosts.

***

I was discharged the next morning.

Maria was waiting by the front entrance, standing next to her black patrol car. A nurse wheeled me out in a wheelchair, then locked the wheels and allowed me to stand like a mother bird releasing her young from the nest. I hobbled to the patrol car, and Maria held my left elbow, guiding me into the front passenger seat. Snowflakes fell from a gray-green sky, and cold wind blew through my blue hospital-issued pajamas and robe, penetrating my skin, muscles, and bones.

Maria had called the previous afternoon, two hours after she'd left my hospital room. They'd searched the house, kitchen to attic, attic to basement. Liz's purse and cell phone were still sitting on her dresser, and the house itself was empty and quiet. Maria told me how the front porch light flickered when they arrived, so she said they checked the light switches and found them to be working fine.

"Nothing there," Maria said as the patrol car sped down the street. "The phone rang a few times when we searched the house but nothing else."

"Who was it?" I asked, my eyes squinting from the gray daylight.

"I'm not sure," Maria said, steering the car onto the road that would take us back to Blackbridge. "We thought maybe you were calling to check on things."

"I have been calling," I said. "I was hoping she'd pick up."

"We saw the answering machine was filled with messages. I picked up the phone when it rang. Wasn't you, was it?"

"No."

"Kind of figured," she said. "Just some noises. Like someone's got their phone wires crossed with yours. Buzzing and whatnot. You might want to get your wiring checked out. You know, when you get the chance."

I nodded.

"You don't need cross-circuited phone calls at all hours of the night. You have enough on your plate, Milton."

Maria steered the car over the wet, potholed Scranton streets. Christmas decorations still hung from streetlamps. Candy canes. Bethlehem stars. Candles. Twenty minutes later, we left Scranton behind and headed toward the low hills, now ashen in winterlight. We crossed a narrow yellow bridge above the icy rapids of the Lackawanna River, crossed old railroad tracks that still carried rolling stock through the narrow gaps in the hills, and turned onto Lowland Road. The road and railroad tracks ran parallel to the river, and we followed it south, followed it as it gently twisted and turned into the gap that closed Blackbridge off from the rest of the county.

I thought of the first time I drove Liz down Lowland Road, how the tall green trees closed off the light and shaded our way, how she stuck her arm out the window as the cool air pushed through her hair, and how I thought that it looked like she wanted the air to lift her up and out of the passenger seat and into the sky.

We rounded the last turn in the road, and Maria slowed the car. Lowland Road transformed into Polaris Avenue, pointing due north at the Susquehanna River gap during the day and the North Star at night. Blackbridge sat quietly under the flurried sky, the surrounding hilltops cottonballed with clouds, the forests dusted with snow. We crossed the town limits, passed Riverview Cemetery to our right, then turned right again onto Jay Street. The road rose up a slight incline as we passed quiet houses painted thick with reds and browns and greens.

At the curve's apex where it turned left and became Vela Street, my house sat alone on its corner lot, white and empty, the steep eastern hillsides backdropping it with gray. We pulled into the driveway where Mom's old cranberry Saturn sedan and Liz's baby blue Volkswagen Beetle sat, both crusted over with ice and snow, the white dust surrounding them untrammeled by tire or footprint. I'd hoped to see Liz pull aside a curtain and look out at the road, smiling, her hands beckoning me to come inside.

But the curtains remained closed, and the snow piled on the window frames was undisturbed.

I was home.
Chapter Two

Blackbridge, Pennsylvania, sits in a geological bowl formed by tall, steep hills ringing the circumference and the two rivers slicing narrow gaps through them: the Lackawanna River from the northeast and the Susquehanna from the north. The rivers carve twisting routes before merging at the town's far southern end, the slow-churning Susquehanna swallowing the narrow, fast-moving Lackawanna before snaking south, scything away land to form islands and muddy sand bars from the crumbling banks.

Four black steel rail bridges dot the riverscape, one over the Lackawanna River, three over the Susquehanna. Only one of the Susquehanna bridges is still in operation, still holding up the long lines of rail traffic that move from north to south and south to north. Decades ago, the bridges helped haul anthracite coal from mines to steel mills and factories. Eventually, the mines closed, and the town began to die. The two dormant bridges sit and rust, awaiting the day when their bones can no longer hold them up and eventually collapse into foam and dark brown waters.

The hilltops surrounding Blackbridge are dotted with antenna farms that scrape clouds with their tall, thin masts, red warning lights throbbing in timed sequences, bright and steady. Some of the antennas are owned by the state for police and fire departments. Some of them bounce television and radio signals across the rivers and the gaps. Some of the antennas seem to have no owner, relaying and radiating things that none of us know, maybe things we're not supposed to know.

Some nights, the town's edges are alight with balls of floating wisp light that float around the cemetery, the forests, or the pine swamp at the town's extreme northern edge, floating silently and seemingly without purpose, dim blue-green like light through dirty ice. They rise at twilight from the earth and drift like glass floats, pulling away when one tries to touch them. They dance silently, just out of reach, holding steady over the thickest forests and the roughest river currents, sometimes gathering around the antennas like acolytes praying to electric gods. At sunup, they flicker and die, leaving only empty spaces.

Some nights, luminous, vaporous green clouds rise from the cemetery or the hillsides and form legs, arms, torsos, and heads, then walk routes that only they know. They walk down streets and alleys, down sidewalks and past houses. They stop, look down, and stand as if in thought, then fade away. I saw my first vapor when I was five. I watched it from my bedroom window as my father raged in the kitchen downstairs. As the evening went from purple to black, a lone vapor ambled down the sidewalk, moving slowly as if unsure where each step would take it. It stopped beneath me, looked up, then formed a wide mouth and two dark, ragged eyes. It reached up to me as if wanting me to lift it to the window and take it inside, then faded like fog under sunlight, leaving the street dark again and my father screaming at my mother in the kitchen.

Some like to think the vapors are loved ones visiting us, consoling us, telling us that they're always with us to comfort us. Few seem to consider that maybe they're watching us with envy, wanting to bring us over with them. We often forget how loved ones tend to hurt us the most.

Sometimes Catholic mystic shrines appear by the roadsides, small altars of brick and hand-painted icons ablaze with dripping holy candles.

Sometimes there are fluttering sounds in empty homes, like invisible birds slapping their wings against the window glass to escape.

Sometimes the shadows whisper here.

Sometimes the streets cry.

And now, sometimes people disappear into shafts of lightning.

We live in houses built when the town still had dreams, before the dreams went to that other world. Some work in the ever-shrinking railyard on the western edge of town, the ever-shrinking school district or town government, or in the few remaining downtown stores. Most work over the hills in Pittston, Scranton, or Wilkes-Barre, leaving the town empty for most of the day until the late afternoon, when the residents return with paychecks and groceries, speeding home down the one road connecting the town to the rest of the county, trying to beat the falling dark. At night, most close up their homes and retreat to their living rooms or bedrooms, where the windows are painted blue from television light.

There is a newspaper, the Blackbridge Banner, and a small radio station, WCAM, that once reported the same information that most small-town media outlets usually do, at least before Bentley Burke took them over: sports news from the local high school, government news from town hall, classifieds from local residents, weather reports, and so on. Now the newspaper has subscriptions from as far away as Oregon, and the radio station has listeners several counties over who tune their radios and position their antennas to hear the broadcasts bounce into their homes.

Sometimes the outside world intrudes with vans or cars crammed with camera-carrying tourists and ghost hunters who seek a thrill, a postcard from that other world. Sometimes they leave empty handed, other times they get too close and leave town without a word, but always they ask us why we stay while the streets are alive with vapors, the treeline is afire with wisps, and the shadows are saturated with strange sounds.

And they never seem to understand that, no matter where we go, the ghosts of Blackbridge follow us everywhere.
Chapter Three

I was born miles away in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on a cold December night, my birth greeted with graupel and wind. The next morning, the streets were slick with ice, and power lines sagged and groaned with glaze ice under a cold sun. My father, Ronald, had been stuck miles away in Scranton at the Conrail office where he'd worked. My mother, Mary, had me alone at the hospital. It was another day until the roads were completely salted and cindered before I was taken home, my shivering body wrapped in a blue blanket covered with stars.

My first memory is of a room in late afternoon. I'm lying on a bed, and the walls, though painted white, are pink from sunset. There is a crucifix on a wall. There is a breeze tapping at the window.

There is a shout from a room beyond the closed door.

My father was a tall man, towering over me by almost a foot by the time I reached my height in high school. His eyes were coal, his hair salt and pepper, his body straight and solid like an antenna braced against the sky. Those dark eyes followed me whenever I passed them. That body blocked my path wherever I walked, and I always stepped clear of its shadow. I held my breath when I smelled his aftershave, deodorant, or shaving soap, keeping him out of my mouth, my nose, and my lungs. I cleaned my room spotless everyday to keep any of his particles out. I stayed out of the house as long as I could to keep his words from my ears.

At night, I couldn't tell the difference between the crash of boxcars in the railyard and the slamming of doors in the house, each violent slam shaking my chest and making me jump like sudden summer thunder. Even now, when a door slams, my nerve-numbed leg jumps, and I await the thump of work boots on hard wood, a shouted word, a heavy mumble outside my bedroom door.

When Dad punched me, the pain penetrated from one side of my body to the other like electricity finding its path. My chest and back were his favorite targets. Maybe because they were the largest targets, or maybe because they were the most easily hidden. And maybe he used his closed fist because using his feet meant using feet weary from walking around the office all day, or maybe he kept his hands closed because slapping meant using fingers weary from writing invoices and reports all day. I never asked him why he punched me in the back hard enough to bring blood to my mouth, or why he punched my chest hard enough to knock me flat on my back.

But I once asked Mom.

"The war," she said. "I think it was the war."

He never bothered to tell me. Like Blackbridge, he burned with his secrets, and when he died one hot July afternoon in a Scranton parking lot from a burst brain vessel and was interred at Riverview Cemetery a few hundred yards from our house, I burned with mine: That I was glad he was dead.

Mom burned with her secrets, as well.

I know that she told no one at City Hall what our home life was like, that she typed away and filed and collated without saying a word. That she told no one about the days of silence, the afternoons of rushing home to make sure dinner was on the table, the evenings of sitting by the front window waiting for him to come home. That she sat in silence when he raised his right fist to me. That her sentences were spoken in quiet tones. That even though our house had three living souls walking its hallways, it was more empty and lifeless than cemetery pathways. She just wore her bright dresses in summer, her dark sweaters in winter, her white shoes before Labor Day, and her black pumps after.

She'd grown up in Blackbridge, and she'd met Dad in their junior year at the high school. She went to secretarial school while he went to Penn State to learn accounting. Others have told me that she was always quiet and that the home that she'd inherited from her parents on Raven Street on the north side of town was a haunted one, which says nothing as are most homes in Blackbridge. She'd grown up quietly, and her house contained a mother and a father, and sometimes people saw the mother hanging clothes or sweeping the front porch, and they saw the father every morning and afternoon as he drove to and from work in the railyard, but otherwise saw nothing else except my mother walking by herself, clutching books to her chest as she made the two-block walk to school.

The people who live in that house now hear footsteps in the middle of the night, a slow shuffling that stops at every door. They hear doors slamming in the kitchen and a deep breathing when the moon is full.

Mom once pointed to the cemetery from our backyard at a pair of low concrete headstones at the graveyard's western edge sitting alone, edged by high grass. "That's my mom and dad," she said. "Did you know, Milton, my mom wanted to look out over the river after she died?"

"What did your dad want?" I asked.

Mom only folded her arms.

Mom said her silence was just her nature. When Dad was alive, I'd think about what her real nature was and what she wanted to be, or if, like me she'd sat in the Blackbridge High School cafeteria and stared at the hills, or if she wondered how far away the Atlantic Ocean was and how the salt water would feel against her ankles, how the Death Valley sun would feel against her face, or how fast she could run over the Midwestern grasslands, or, when she turned the car onto Polaris Avenue on her way to work or on her way to dropping me off at school, if she wanted to turn the car south onto Lowland Road and leave the town behind forever. Or if she wanted to drive the car right into The Swamps and leave everything behind forever. I knew she typed well, filed well, kept appointments well, managed the town hall well enough that it spared the town the expense of a larger staff, but I knew nothing about the dreams that kept her warm at night.

One early October day, the blue sky was alive with bird clouds that corkscrewed and rolled to the south. Mom drove her cranberry Saturn sedan to the edge of the longest bridge spanning the Susquehanna River on the town's western edge. The river was swollen from heavy rains in upstate New York, and the waters churned with swift currents. She had on her navy blue dress, and it flapped like a flag in the wind as she walked the span. She must have been wearing her blue pumps, her simple pearl earrings, and her butterfly pin that she used to secure her thick black hair. She must have. I couldn't find them afterwards. Mom stopped in the middle of the span, looked around, stepped off the bridge, then sank into a swirl of brown water and white foam.

That night, the police boat searchlights made haloes in the river mist.

The next day, they searched the riverbanks miles downstream, the sandbars, and the river islands. Some said they heard voices on the islands singing cryptic dirges.

That's when I was seventeen, when I lived alone in a house overlooking a cemetery in a town ringed by dark hills, in a town where vapors walked the streets, where wisps wandered the woods, where we were and where we are constantly reminded that our end is coming. Soon.

***

For weeks afterwards, I was visited by child protective services and police chief Robert Lorenzo. Child Protective Services wanted me in a foster home, but Chief Lorenzo said I'd be fine where I was, that I'd be eighteen in a month anyway, that I had no family nearby that he or I knew of, and that I could handle myself. A judge agreed, a life insurance check cut by a company most likely angered that Mom had leapt into the river two years after the suicide deadline on the policy arrived in the mail, and a court-appointed lawyer got me access to what was left in my mother's checking and savings accounts. He advised me to set aside money for bills, to get health insurance, to hold on to the house since it was paid-for, and that it would give me a place to stay while I worked through whatever life plan I had, if any.

I thought of Mom, and again of what she might have wanted in life. I got her a flat grave marker though she had no grave and had it placed at the far eastern edge of the cemetery, away from her parents and away from Dad. For weeks afterwards, I stared at the cemetery, watching the vapors rise in the night and walk the roads, their dim glow cutting paths in the darkness.

The local bank informed me of a safe deposit box in my mother's name sitting in their vault. In the thin, narrow box, she'd left a short note handwritten on yellow paper wrapped around a rolled bundle of what felt like sheets of parchment: I couldn't take the silence anymore. —Mom

I unrolled the parchment and unfurled a stack of drawings: the town, the bridges, the hillsides covered in snow, the hillsides covered in burning autumn flame, the streets wet with rain, the streets lit by walking vapors. My fingers pulled away charcoal grains, ink flakes, oil pastel dust. I sat in the private bank room, running my fingers over the drawings, running my eyes over the lines and colors. In the corner of each drawing, a small name: Mary Conroy. One drawing was dated the day before her suicide: a dark pencil sketch of her feet standing on a railroad track. She wrote her name in simple cursive in the lower right-hand corner: Mary.

***

The Blackbridge School District is not so much a district as it is a two-floor, two-winged building in the shape of an elongated L. The town's population is small enough that it was decided that the arrangement would suffice for any future projected growth in student population.

The building itself has been unchanged in my lifetime: redbrick and blocky like the buildings in the town's warehouse district, rectangular windows lining the top and bottom floors, a main entrance at the vertex of the L, and a flagpole near the entrance that clanged in near-constant breeze. The school is situated at the extreme northern end of town where it was supposed to have enough room to grow if need be, but since there was no population growth, a multipurpose athletic field was built alongside where students could watch the football team lose all but one game every season and watch the baseball team win almost every game every season but in front of almost no one.

My first days at school began in the north-facing wing. I, along with a new group of kindergarteners, was shuffled through the doors as my mother drove away to work. I spent the days sitting apart from the others, each door slam stopping my heart, each shout making me jump. I sat alone and other students would turn to each other, whisper, then look at me. I'd look down at any book nearby, or sketch simple line drawings in the newsprint drawing pad Mom had given me, anything not to meet their eyes. Through the windows, I'd watch seasons shift from red autumn, to gray winter, to brown spring, to green summer. During playtime, I'd listen to windsong and river murmur, snowflakes, raindrops, the whispers of the kids who pointed at me, and the whispers from things unseen that drifted across the playground.

By the time I entered first grade, I'd written a story about a ghost who lived on a bridge over the river. Every night, it would jump off the side and fly over the town. I illustrated it with crayon layered so thick that it made the paper stiff. I showed it to Mom when it was done. She smiled, but said nothing, only running her fingers over the pictures, feeling the waxen lumps and bumps.

The elementary and middle school years passed, and my stories became more numerous. I'd hide them in shoeboxes when they were completed then destroy them when I was home alone, my fingers aching from tearing apart reams of paper and shoving them to the bottom of trash bags where they'd be covered by coffee grounds, egg shells, and old newspapers.

One night, after Dad had finally gone to sleep after raging about the work he brought home with him and while my mother was sitting alone in the kitchen, I sat by my bedroom window and watched vapors lumber down the sidewalk. One stopped, floated to the middle of the street, and slowly spun in place. I pulled out my composition book and wrote a story about a dancer on a cloud. Her name was Miriam, and she swam through air like a fish through water. She saw a boy sitting alone in his backyard. He was doing nothing in particular, just looking at the clouds racing over the hillsides. She stepped from the cloud, floated to Earth, and stood beside him. Miriam reached out her hand and smiled. She had black, curly hair and was tall and thin. Let me show you how to dance on clouds, she said, and the boy reached up, took her hand, and they floated away together, the sun warming their skin.

By high school, most teachers knew better than to call on me, that I'd often be freeze in fear or fumble in ignorance. I caused no problems, lost myself in the assignments or in diagramming sentences, or write short stories or quick journal entries of what I saw, smelled, felt, or heard around me. For my elementary and middle school years, the afternoons consisted of rushing home before my father did. By high school, the afternoons consisted of running home, cutting through alleys, hiding behind houses and among trees and shadows to avoid having pens, pencils, beer cans, or rocks hurled at me from students' passing cars. By my junior year, I still had no girlfriend and no friends to speak of.

For years, avoiding and hiding had worked. It made me smaller, less noticeable, like furniture. I'd not known that high school was a bit different, that, strangely enough, hiding made one more visible, more vulnerable. Appearances and behaviors were amplified and spotlighted. One particular day when I was fifteen, the spotlight fell on my orange shirt.

The orange shirt wasn't particularly bright. It was, in fact, burnt orange. I'd had the shirt for two years, and I'd worn it several times, but it finally caught the attention of Anthony Lorenzo, the police chief's son. He was stocky and had powerful legs and thick arms, black hair shaved close to the scalp, and a square neck that gave him the appearance of a standalone mailbox. He'd been the Blackbridge football team fullback since his freshman year, where he enjoyed aiming his head at anything in his way and powering through it. Even though our teams had losing seasons, Anthony enjoyed the opportunity to push someone down or knock them aside. Not letting him hit you was disrespect.

The orange shirt announced my presence, and that was enough. He'd asked me if I was wearing my deer hunting gear, if it was my leftover Halloween costume, why my mom and dad didn't get me any decent clothes, who taught me how to dress, and if I wore it to get girls to notice me. Usually, I found sanctuary in the cafeteria where I could stare out the windows and watch the Susquehanna roll by. Sometimes I'd get lost in writing an observation or a thought. But Anthony sat with his coterie at the table next to mine. Things pelted my shirt. Eraser tops. Napkin balls. I was afraid to run, afraid to say anything. I looked out the windows, watched clouds darken the sky and threaten rain, saw my face in the window's reflection. My father was in my eyes, my mother was in my nose and lips. Shame from my orange shirt and face twisted my insides into a knotted rope.

After school, I darted around the back of the building, trying to outflank the student body, holding close to the treeline. I ducked down an alley just as it began to rain, the drops big and cold. I cut across an empty lot and made my way to Orion Street. I knew that if I walked fast enough, I could duck down another alley, cut across another lot, then cut over to Vela Street, which would take me straight home, but by the time I made it to the intersection of Shrike and Orion, Anthony was there. He'd not noticed me at first, and I tried to hurry past him on the other side of the street, knowing there was a house I could duck behind, so I cut across a yard, looking out the corners of my eyes, caching only the sight of the copper dome of St. Gemma Galgani Church two streets over as quick footsteps shuffled behind me.

A rock-like punch slammed into the right side of my face.

I fell forward, things going black before I hit the ground. Afterwards, I was thankful my face had landed in wet grass. Another five inches to the left and it would have struck concrete.

I'd come to under a shower of raindrops. Someone had rolled me over and was shaking me. Rain fell onto my face, into my eyes and mouth. I shook from cold, mumbled from disorientation. I saw blurs, then shapes, then an olive-skinned girl with long, black hair and dark eyes over me, grabbing me by the shoulders. "Milton," she said. "Milton, are you okay? Milton? Jesus, Tony, you just wait 'til I tell Dad. Milton?"

Then a faraway voice: "For crissakes, I was just playing around."

"Shut the hell up," she said. "Milton? Can you get up?"

She pulled at me, placed her hands beneath my shoulders. My teeth were chattering, and my head throbbed. The back of my head felt heavy, my neck tight and wrenched. Something was on my face, and I clumsily brushed it away. Dead grass and dirt. I pushed away, stood up. The world around me bounced and spun, and the rush of blood from head to body made the throbbing worse. I spotted my books sprawled over the wet grass and my glasses on the sidewalk, and I reached down, picking everything up one by one. The girl tried to help, reaching for the tablets and books, but I grabbed everything before she could. I finally recognized her: Maria Lorenzo, Anthony's sister.

"Milton? You want a ride home?" she asked.

I turned away, pushed my glasses back onto my face, and stumbled down Orion Street, the earth rolling beneath my feet. Maria kept calling to me, but I kept walking. There was throbbing in my head and tears in my eyes, but I stumbled through the downpour as if intoxicated, water-soaked books and paper clung to my chest.

By the time I got home, howling winds whipped rain through the river gaps.

That night, Dad asked me how I got the marks on my face and the knot on the back of my head. He saw blood that I'd not noticed caked in one of my nostrils. He asked who did it. "I tripped in gym class," I said. "We were playing volleyball, and I tripped when I tried to hit the ball."

"You don't know how to hit volleyballs?" he said.

"I just tripped."

"The volleyballs are slapping you around? Jesus."

I just tripped, I repeated in a whisper. I walked up to my room, softly closed the door, sat on my bed's edge, and watched the Blackbridge streetlights come to life and shimmer sodium orange.

That night, I held an ice pack to my head and let the cold numb me until there was nothing left to feel. I stuffed cotton balls in my ears until there was nothing left to hear. I counted the streetlights one by one until I fell asleep after midnight.

Days later, I wrapped the orange shirt around a stone and hurled it into the Lackawanna River. It sank in an eruption of bubbles and ripples.

***

No one knows where the vapors come from or who they must have been or even if they had been anyone at all. Some think they're just kinks in the energy of our corner of the universe.

Some think they're just illusions and nothing more, illusions that pass between walls, travel over roads and hillsides. Illusions that sometimes stand outside your bedroom window and fade when you awaken. Illusions that cry for attention but can't say what they want.

I never understood the motivations of vapors. If you're hidden, stay hidden. Hidden things can't be hurt.

Just keep your head down, disappear, let the pain pass.
Chapter Four

The town streets are usually empty by nine at night, everyone closed up in their homes until first light. The only ones on the streets are the occasional police cruiser or lonely soul, alive or not, that wanders aimlessly, turning the street grid into a circle, starting and ending in the same place.

Shortly after Mom's suicide, I took to night walking, first around the house then down the street, then, eventually, to the edge of Riverview Cemetery. I noticed how the night smelled different from the day, moist and heavy, and how noises moved through it like water: murky, directionless, but clear at longer distances. The dog barks at the northern edge of town bounced to the southern edge, the creaking of the wire-strung traffic lights downtown crept to the warehouse district, the hum in the hillside electrical lines filled the alleys like smog, the moans of the cemetery and forests dripped from eaves like rainwater, night sounds drifting everywhere until daylight burned them away.

One night I walked to the cemetery, my footsteps echoing between headstones and grave markers. Some Blackbridge residents would light headstone candles in red glass holders every night before they went home, either in remembrance or as beacons to guide loved ones back to where they slept before sunrise. The red glow threw shadows that twisted and intertwined. Near the entrance gate of the cemetery was the grave of a child whom I'd not known. Every few days, someone left flowers, toys, and inflatable figures to match the season. An inflatable Santa Claus was anchored to the ground, its plastic skin puckering and rippling. It leaned over, pushed by cold breeze, then righted itself, only to be pushed down again.

Mom's stone memorial marker was along the eastern side of the cemetery, far from Dad's grave, no body below ground, just a cold flat headstone resting on the earth. I'd not visited her marker or his grave for months and had no desire to visit them in the dark of night. I just stood at the gate, waiting.

Behind a concrete angel, a vapor emerged, dim green and poorly formed. It floated a foot off the ground, swirling like windblown smoke, and after a few minutes began to take shape. Arms snaked from a cloudy torso and legs dropped to the earth, forming thighs, knees, upper shins, but no ankles or feet. An oblong head with dark eye sockets and black mouth formed. It hesitated, then floated down the headstone rows, stopping, starting, stopping, passing through marble and tree, casting gloomy light over the snow-dusted ground. It approached the entrance gate, then stopped about twenty yards from where I stood.

Its mouth opened, then closed, and then the vapor backed away, farther and farther, exiting the cemetery's southern boundary, floating over the railroad tracks and Lowland Road, down the riverbank and into the rapids of the Lackawanna River until fading into the river water.

***

Classmates continued to avoid me, but also made me the subject of conversation, or, if not me, my mother's suicide, some saying they saw her as she leapt into the river, each account more dramatic than the other: she swan dived; she cannonballed; she stripped naked and ran off the bridge's midpoint, screaming as she fell; and so on; and so on.

"Nothing that dramatic," someone said.

I was sitting near a cafeteria window as usual, looking outside, avoiding what was inside. The trees were stripped of leaves, coloring the hillsides gray and brown. Clouds lowered over the hilltops, dropping light snow and swallowing the antenna lights completely. I looked over to my right at the student who'd said it.

His name was Robert Bentley Burke, or just Bentley. I never knew if he actually preferred that or if being called that had just become habit. He was the tall, brown-haired heir to the Burke name and family holdings. His family lived in a large white house on The Heights, a flat ridge cut into the eastern hills overlooking the town, which was also once home to a former regional state mental hospital that now sat empty a few hundred yards away from the Burke home. The Burkes had leased the hospital property to the state and had owned various properties around town, my home having once been one of them before the mortgage was paid off.

"It just . . . happened," Bentley said, picking at the sandwich on his lunch tray. I often wondered why he bothered to eat in the cafeteria when he could have taken his car and eaten anywhere or anything, but Bentley stayed close to school. None of us knew why he was in a public school in the first place when he could have gone to any number of private schools, in or out of state, and no one really asked him. He kept his choices and secrets close to his well-tailored vest. When I glanced at him, I became aware of my own clothing: the same jeans that Mom had bought me two years before, the same boots she'd bought for me three years before. I tried keeping my clothes and boots as clean as possible, trimmed away any stray strands, buffed away scuffs, but they were becoming threadbare and almost completely worn.

That day, Bentley wore blue jeans with fresh fabric and fresh creases, a brown cashmere sweater with a cream-colored shirt beneath, collar effortlessly popping above the sweater neck. His hair was slightly long, but styled and gelled. Beside him sat Anthony Lorenzo who drummed the table with a milk straw. I ran a hand through my hair and looked away, pointing my left ear in their direction.

"She was calm," Bentley said. "Just walked up the bridge and walked off."

Anthony shouted over to me: "You gonna jump off a bridge, too?"

"Jesus," Bentley said, "what the hell's your problem?"

"Oh come on."

"You think it's funny."

"I was just—"

"When something happens to your family, Tony, you better hope no one talks about it. You better hope people don't have stories to pass around for entertainment because they will." In the window's reflection, Bentley looked over at me, lowered his eyes, and said nothing more.

At that moment, I hated my mother. My father. Blackbridge. Anthony Lorenzo and his sister. Bentley Burke and his money. Outside, the hilltops were engulfed in snow, and I wished I was up there, so the clouds could completely surround me, wrap me in white, and erase me from Blackbridge forever.

***

When I turned eighteen, my parents' house became mine.

So did their cars, their clothes, their furniture, their anger, their sadness, their loneliness, and their silence.

***

No one knows why or when the rivers and hills around Blackbridge started to collect strange things. There are no ancient Indian legends, no songs from early settlers. One day, wisps floated from the woods, maybe one or two a month, then every week, then every day. And one day a vapor stepped out of the treeline or out of an early graveyard and walked over a dirt road.

Sometimes things are born out of nothing. Things need to be seen, heard, or loved. There's no equation or geometric axiom for it. The universe was not born from the physics of infinite smallness and density. It was born from the emptiness and loneliness around it, and loneliness makes the universe do strange things. People, too. Like the people who stayed in Blackbridge despite every vapor, wisp, whisper, and wail.

"People get used to things," Mom said to me once. "No matter what it is, they get used to things other people couldn't possibly imagine. Some people grow up with wars, some live with poverty. It just becomes a part of their lives, no matter how much it hurts, and they start accepting it."

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't know. Maybe because sometimes what you don't know is even more frightening to what you do know. You'd be surprised what people get used to when it's all they know. Strange, isn't it? Finding comfort in what you're afraid of because you're even more afraid of what you don't know."

I used to think that didn't make any sense.

Used to.

***

When one strikes pen to paper, it ignites a fire that burns beyond the desk. The words are embers that float out the window, settle on something dry, and set it ablaze. If not extinguished, it rages over homes and hillsides, scorching everything you love and hate.

Maybe that's what pushed me to start writing in earnest in sixth grade, picking up disposable pens and scribbling down thoughts, descriptions, stories on ragged-edged tablet paper. Sitting alone in the cafeteria, on the grassy hill behind the school, in my bedroom with the windows opened wide even on wintry nights, I began sketching with words. I'd start with observing something like a tree, then give the tree thoughts, what it sees, what it feels, and let the words spill down the page like waterfalls into a river. I'd combine the random images and sensations around me, gather them, give them form. Like a vapor, the story would build from formless cloud to arms, legs, head, heart. Hours and pages later, I'd have something solid but disorganized, incredibly messy but strangely beautiful to me. In those moments when I looked in a mirror afterwards and wondered how those thoughts came out of my head, I felt elated. I'd created something from nothing.

One day, sitting in the back of social studies class, I wrote about a town beyond the hills where there was a boy who spoke his mind and twirled a dance with a girl in the snow.

That afternoon, I ducked into alleys and behind trees, avoiding Anthony Lorenzo and dodging soda cans hurled from moving cars. I forewent dinner, locked myself in my bedroom, opened the window, sat on the floor, tablet on my knees, pen in my hand, and began to write, ignoring Dad's footsteps as they shook the house.

***

$250 is not a lot of money, but to a high school senior with very little money to begin with, it might as well be a box of treasure. When I saw the essay contest flyer tacked to the cork board next to my English teacher's blackboard, I copied the information on a corner of the back of my math notebook.

The contest was sponsored by the Coxton College Department of Journalism, a "Junior Reporter" initiative, though the contest didn't seem to be asking for a piece of journalism per se. No sources, no reporting, just an essay about an event in your life that made you want to write. I thought to myself about what event made me want to write and couldn't think of one, any more than I could think of an event that made me want to breathe. Something from nothing. Maybe that's just how it was for me: a quick image or thought transforming into something bigger than it had any right to be. Maybe I wasn't following the proper methodology of inspiration. I really didn't know.

But, I thought, maybe that is how it starts. Something unseen or insignificant connects the breakers in the brain, completes the circuit that powers up the machine, an unmanned factory that can't be turned off. That lunch hour, I flipped to a new page in my math tablet, which had more doodles than actual mathematics in it, and started to write.

Ten pages about how a voice leaps out of nowhere, drills into your ear, stays there until you're old, dying, and demented. Ten pages that started with started with trees that speak, climaxed with a mother who dies, ended with a boy sitting on a grassy rise behind a school with pen in hand and tablet on knees.

Something from nothing.

***

I was called into my English teacher's room on a somewhat-warm December day just before Christmas vacation. I was dressed in a heavy flannel shirt, sweating from the heat, silently praying for the cold winds to return before I walked home that afternoon. Clouds raced over the town, painting the room in shifting blue and pale sunlight. I sat in a wooden desk directly across from Ms. Lear, staring at my books wrapped in book covers that I'd fashioned from brown paper bags.

Ms. Lear picked a manila envelope off her desk and unclasped its flap. "This just came in today," she said. Ms. Lear said everything in the form of a question, the end of every sentence rising in tone. She wore one of her long red paisley dresses, its hem almost sweeping the floor. She was a large, curvaceous woman who filled her room with decorations for the season. Above her brown-haired head, Santa Claus and his reindeer traversed the sky in a long, graceful arc.

"I wasn't sure they'd want to see this essay, Milton, since it didn't really fit the rules," she said. "Too long, not really following the prompt. But they didn't seem to mind." She pulled a thin stack of papers from the envelope. She handed the stack to me, a cashier's check, and a letter attached to its front. "Congratulations, Milton. You know, I really wish you'd write more—a lot more. Some kids do math, some kids do football. Seems you do writing."

I looked at the check, at the note, at Ms. Lear. "I don't think people are that much interested in what I have to say," I said, folding the check and slipping it into my pocket.

"I don't think that's true," she said.

"How is Brian?" I asked.

She perked up at the sound of her son's name. "Brian's doing very well. He's in his soph— no, he's a junior this year down in State College."

I placed the essay and attached note in a pocket in my binder, cloud shadow crossing the room. "One time," I said, "three kids grabbed me down by the Lackawanna, down near the railroad crossing over Lowland. I was going for a walk. Just walking. Sometimes I just like to walk. Back when my dad was alive, I used to walk a lot during the day, usually in the woods or near the river. You know, stay out of the house. This one Saturday I was walking down there . . . and I didn't see where they came from. Three kids grabbed me by the arms and started pulling me toward the river. I kept screaming at them, begging them to stop, not to push me into the water, but before I knew it, they pushed me in."

I wasn't looking at Ms. Lear when I spoke but at my fingers, picking at them. "The water was so cold. I didn't think it would be, but it was so cold that my arms and legs started to hurt. I waited until they left before I got out of the river."

As I talked, I remembered the smell of my clothes that day. Moldy, muddy, as if buried in the earth and left to fester for weeks.

"When I got home I tried to sneak upstairs so Dad wouldn't see me, but he did. Told him I slipped on the riverbank, and he hit me really, really hard on the back. He hit me even though I asked him not to. Just went ahead and did it. Didn't listen to a word I said, just like those kids."

I stood up, picked my books off the desk, and walked to the door. I said: "Ms. Lear, like you said, some kids do math, some kids do football. For me, when I write, it's for me, not for anyone else. No one really listens. My father didn't, and Brian didn't."

"What's Brian got to do with it?" she asked.

"Who do you think pushed me into the river?"

Sunlight burst into the room, then faded to blue. I walked out, hurrying to my next class before the rooms emptied their students into the hallway.

***

Dear Mr. Conway,

It is with great pleasure that we have awarded you this year's Junior Reporter Essay first prize. We on the selection committee were more than pleased with your effort. The essay's vivid imagery, intricate elaboration, and subtle thesis went beyond what those of us on the committee were looking for. We sincerely hope that you will continue to practice your writing, develop your eye, your ear, your powers of observation, and the ability to synthesize them into a strong, coherent piece. We not only hope that you will continue to develop these abilities, but that you will also consider Coxton College as the place where you will develop them further.

Congratulations on your well-deserved award, and please feel free to contact me should you have any questions regarding the Coxton College Department of Journalism.

Sincerely,

Terrance Bradbury

Chairman, Coxton College

Department of Journalism

***

Mom's suicide left the house hollow, bare. Even after Dad's death, she stayed quiet, still on her schedule, still making dinner at the same time after work, still looking out the window thinking he would come home, even though his gray Buick sat in the driveway every day, immobile, collecting snow and leaves until one day I cleaned it, started the engine, and let it run for a few minutes. And even though Dad's death ended the thumping of his boots on the wooden floors, the slamming of doors, the shouts at the top of his lungs and the insults under his breath, Mom remained little more than a shade, quiet and without substance. She wailed at Dad's burial, and sat listlessly on the edge of her bed, holding a piece of his clothing in her arms, whispering to herself. I guess what she said was true: it's surprising the things we get used to.

But even a shade can fill a space, and without Mom, the hallways and rooms sat empty. For weeks, I stared at my parents' bedroom door, opening it only when the house groaned. When a plank in the floor creaked, I thought my father had returned and was walking the floor.

The times I opened the door, the cold creep of air pushed through window spaces, and the smell of Mom's department store perfume and Dad's drug store aftershave spilled into the hallway. Dust on the floor would roll out at my feet, and dust in the air would fill the light shining through the large windows. When I was satisfied the room was empty, I'd close the door again, sealing the remnants of my parents' lives behind it for a few more weeks.

It was over a month before I finally set foot into the room, when I threw open the windows in a late winter windstorm, letting the wind scoop up the stale scents from the air and sweep the dust off the furniture and floor, motes spinning into spirals, speaking a mysterious geometry.

It was the day when I finally picked up the telephone and called Coxton College.
Chapter Five

There has never been bus service to Coxton College from Blackbridge since the only road connecting the town to the rest of the county splits off the regular bus routes. I had a driver's permit, but no license. A court-appointed lawyer managed to get the insurance and approval I needed to take the test with my mother's car. When the test was over, they took my picture, they had me wait, and a small machine burped out a laminated driver's license. I stood holding it, examining the picture and the watermarks. Its background was holographic and shimmered rainbow ribbons when tilted against the light. I examined it not knowing what to do next.

On the day I visited the college, I drove the twenty miles of twisting road from Blackbridge, to Pittston, to Scranton, to the tree-covered campus of the college. Walking through the campus, I was struck how the sky's brilliant light burned my eyes unlike the amber and gray light common in Blackbridge. The air had the smell of dried leaves, damp soil, and car fumes. Ornate brick and granite buildings stood at the ends of stone walkways that radiated from a central point like rays from a dark sun. I stood at the center of the campus, in one hand a paper scrap with directions to the Department of Journalism, in the other my olive drab army surplus bag that I used for school books but today held a folio of my writing, my writing notebook, my pens, and college registration forms.

I walked to a building and stared at it for a few minutes, stomach twisting. I debated whether I should turn around and go home or just stand on the walkway. Slowly, I walked up the steps and through the front door.

***

"I was wondering when we'd hear from you," Terrance Bradbury said, "or if we'd hear from you at all."

Mr. Bradbury was a tall man with white hair that gleamed in the yellow light pouring through his office window. His metal desk was piled high with papers and books, and the bookshelves behind him were crammed with journals and magazines, thick and thin books jammed in seemingly without order. My eyes fell on the spine of Walden Two behind his head. The air smelled of decaying paper and floor wax, like the office where my father had worked. "You know," he said, "we don't get many students from Blackbridge here. They seem to like Pittsburgh or Penn State. What do you think? Think that's true? I guess they're filled with the need to get far away. The quicker, the better. It's natural. I was that way. Left Scranton, went to California, came back to Scranton. Funny how that works. I guess kids there get a bit stir crazy. Blackbridge is kind of—what's the word?"

"Isolated?" I said.

"Exactly."

"Creepy?" I added.

Mr. Bradbury stopped, shrugged. "Every town has its legends and lore, he said. Blackbridge has that reputation, sure. I've been there a couple times. Didn't see much."

"You should have stayed longer."

"No doubt," he said. "So!" he slapped his hands on his knees, chalk dust flying from his fingers. "You're enrolling. You need advising. It's a requirement. Kind of a silly requirement if you ask me. Usually students figure it out on their own. If not, they can chalk up their errors as learning experiences. Isn't that what college's for? So, you're interested in journalism. You know, it's not a lucrative field. It's kind of, well, unstable, unless you go for a job in public relations. Companies are always willing to shell out for shills."

"I don't think I'd be good at that," I said. "Not even sure I'd be a good journalist."

He had my folio opened on his desk and was flipping through the top essay. "Would be a waste of talent to push PR pieces for a macaroni company, that's for sure. So this house you live in. Overlooks a cemetery, does it?"

"Yes."

He flipped a page. "Way out on the edge of town," he mumbled. "Must be like living in a lighthouse. Your mind must race with thoughts."

"Sometimes," I admitted. "It's quiet there. I don't get any visitors." I didn't mention the graveyard moans, the whispers in the shadows, the vapors on the roads.

"No family," he said.

I shook my head. "None that are close," I said. There are some relatives, but the closest one's in Philadelphia, I think." Mr. Bradbury looked me up and down. "But—I've always been independent. It's . . . my nature." I tried to decode his gray eyes, if they showed amusement or skepticism.

He nodded, smiled, gray eyes returning to an essay in the folio. "A journalist needs independence," he said. "Any writer does. An ability to record, organize, verify without prompting." He softly turned another page. "You can't do any of that properly if you don't have a scintilla of independence." He turned the essay's final page and placed the essay back into the folio. "Being a journalist or essayist or writer of any sort can be very tough, Milton," he said. "It can be tough finding work, and it can be tough on your heart and soul. Do you think you're ready for that kind of pain, Milton?" He closed the folio, gently pushed it to the side. "And," he continued, his voice almost a whisper, "it seems like you've already had a lifetime of having your heart and soul battered. Even the toughest ship hits seas it can't handle."

I sat in silence for several seconds. "We all sink eventually, Mr. Bradbury."

He nodded. "That we do."

***

That afternoon, after the advising, the transcript reviewing, the financial aid consulting, I sat in the far parking lot of Coxton College. The day students were leaving, either for home or for the dorms, and the lot steadily emptied until it was just I in the lot's corner sitting in my mother's car with its sunbaked cranberry paint and mud-crusted wheels. I was thankful that the windows were darkly tinted and that the sun was beginning to set.

Because, for some reason that I still don't know, I placed my hands over my face and wept.

***

The final school year was coming to an end. I was enrolled at Coxton and thought about the final day at Blackbridge Junior-Senior High School, if I'd show up or just stay home. I thought about what college would be like, how people would look at me, if I could fade into the background without a spotlight following me.

Bentley Burke was on his way to the University of Chicago. The local newspaper had trumpeted it on the bottom of the front page right next to an article on programming changes at the town's radio station. The school administration arranged photographs for the newspaper as if the event was as rare as lightning from a clear sky, but for the Burkes things were preordained: large houses, new cars, new clothing, the steady rotation of companions, the admission to the Princetons, the Stanfords, the Chicagos. Some machines in the universe just run automatically, as unchanging and as regular as the rhythms of atomic clocks.

Which made it all the more odd when he sat next to me on a bench facing the western hills in that cold late April. I'd ducked out of the cafeteria when it had become too filled and the space around me had narrowed to a single barrier of chairs. The bench's cold metallic mesh offered distance and security. He sat next to me, hands thrust into his gray pea coat, cashmere scarf wrapped stylishly around his neck, almost as if he'd not noticed anyone else on the bench. "So," he said, "you're off to Coxton in the fall."

I glanced at him, inched my body farther away. "Who told you?" I asked, aware that my army surplus coat had a slight tear in one of the elbows while imagining how I'd look in a tailored gray pea coat, scarf around my neck, Italian shoes on my feet.

He took in a deep breath. "The scholarship," he said, "the New Journalist Scholarship. It's from the Burke family. I'd heard you gotten it. That's good. Usually goes to some kid from New York or Philly or wherever. Good to see someone local get it."

I nodded, saying nothing.

"That essay for that writing contest was really good, too. Felt honest. Not that kiss-up stuff you see in contests like that. That's what this town needs. Someone to look at it, hold up a mirror to it." Bentley dug his heels in the dirt. "You're usually in the cafeteria," he said.

"I needed—space."

"I know what you mean," he said. "But don't you think too much space can be, I don't know, harmful?"

"Too little seems to carry the most risk," I said. Behind us, the muffled cafeteria cacophony continued, before us the brown grass slope gently dropped into the churning Susquehanna River. "You're going to Chicago."

"Yes, I am."

"New city. Big-name school. Sounds nice."

He rolled his tongue in his mouth. "You think you'll be a journalist when you leave Coxton?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Really don't know what I can do. I can write, sort of."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Okay."

"Why're you so down on yourself? I know we don't know each other, but I've seen you since we were little, and you just keep getting quieter and quieter. You look down all the time, like you don't want the world to see you or like you don't live up to the world's standards or something."

"You really asking because you want to know," I asked, "or are you asking because your friends want to know? Are you going to tell them how I'm not going to Chicago but Coxton, or are you going to tell them that I'm as creepy as they think I am?"

"I'm just saying—"

"That you want to know why I'm out here or why I sit against a wall or why I avoid everyone when I leave school?" I said. "Maybe you should ask your friends instead. They might know." I gathered up my books and walked away, breathing hard. My eyes burned, my throat tightened. I knew most people didn't walk away from the Burkes. This time, someone did.

That night, I composed a letter to Coxton College rejecting the New Journalist Scholarship. I would pay for college with Mom and Dad's leftover life insurance money and whatever loans or grants I could get. I would owe no one in Blackbridge anything.

Bentley didn't speak to me again for the remainder of the school year. When I saw him at school, he'd glance at me and look away. In the cafeteria or on the benches outside, I had my zones of safety again. Two months later, we graduated. I didn't attend graduation and had them mail the diploma to my house. I threw it in a box with old tax forms, utility bills, and medical records. I'd heard Berkeley left town the afternoon of graduation aboard a private plane chartered out of the airport in nearby Avoca, his only reminder that he was from Blackbridge a contrail that floated like a fiery feather into the setting sun.

I wouldn't hear from him again for almost five years.

***

Coxton College was small, but it gave me space and anonymity that Blackbridge didn't. Every morning, I left home, drove the winding route to school, and stayed until late evening. I maneuvered the halls and paths of Coxton in silence, avoiding the student groups and spending most of my time in the library, the computer center, the tree-shaded benches, the isolated chairs and tables in the student union, the classrooms that had no classes for the day, the off-campus coffee shops with liberal policies toward students who showed up with only a few dollars in their pockets and a stack of books in their arms.

Serving on the Coxton student newspaper, the Coxton Clarion, was a requirement for all journalism majors. I was assigned to layout, handed how-to books for the computer software, and was soon laying out pages, shuffling columns, adjusting tracking and leading, cropping images, dropping in text from student reporters, and proofreading copy. Layout didn't require interviewing skills or socialization. Most interaction was with computer and printers, at least until Mr. Bradbury called me to his office one day.

"How come you're not on the reporting staff?" he asked.

"I'm an underclassman," I said. "Reporting is for upperclassmen."

"That the only reason?"

I shrugged.

"You know," he said, "it's really not a stringent requirement to be an upperclassman."

"I was told it was."

"More like a guideline to weed out the ones who can't write. You can write," he said, jabbing one of his thick fingers at me. "Don't get me wrong, it's good to know layout. Gives you technical skills, but you need to get out there, start getting stories for the paper, start getting sources, even if it's only about the library budget. You've got four years to start getting a portfolio of pieces together, or you'll be in a world of hurt come graduation time."

"Oh," was all I could say.

"Okay," he said, "here's what we're going to do: I'm moving you over to the reporting staff, but your first piece will be an editorial."

"I don't know how to do one."

"Hell you don't. It's just a matter of just keeping it under two-hundred words."

"What do I write about?" I asked.

"Ever see the previous editorials written by new additions to our reporting staff?"

"Yes."

"There you go. It's all pretty weak ale," he said. "It's the basic boilerplate about serving the campus community through journalism. Mostly a way of getting your feet wet. Don't worry, you'll move on to bigger things. Just give me a short editorial we can drop into the paper. Get it to me tomorrow by lunch. What the matter? Looks like you're staring at an oncoming train."

"I feel like I am," I said.

"Then get off the rails, find out the train timetables, who owns the rail line, where the train's headed, and what it's transporting. Got it?"

I said "Yes" but wasn't sure if I really did.

"Good. Two-hundred words or less. A little over two-hundred'll be fine. I know you can knock out something like that in under twenty minutes. Also, get some reporters' notebooks from the bookstore. No one'll take you seriously with those composition books under your arms."

I started and stopped writing the editorial five times before I finally managed to complete the first draft. Instead of an editorial on the duty of journalists to serve the campus community, I'd written an editorial on the necessity for students to critically evaluate what was printed in the Clarion and newspapers everywhere. I was afraid Mr. Bradbury would rage and throw it back at me, but it was approved and passed on to me to be placed in the editorial page layout. Carefully, I sized the editorial and slipped it gently beneath the editorial cartoon and next to the masthead. After checking it and re-checking it, I saved it and sent it to print.

***

I soon found that asking questions wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. It seemed to be a matter of dropping a small question and remaining quiet, letting pressure build on the interviewee for several seconds or even minutes. After enough uncomfortable silence, they'd fill the air with anything: a little laugh, a little elaboration, or even just a word that can be repeated back in the form of a question. Most people live in oceans of noise. Silences drive them to insanity. In my house overlooking a cemetery, silence was a given.

But when others spoke, my mind wandered. I found most of my subjects to be dull: a librarian discussing the cut in literary journals, a department chairperson mulling matters of changes in curriculum, and so on. Their words passed over me in a haze, and I was grateful to have a voice recorder on loan from the Clarion, or I'd wind up missing half of what the interviewee would say. Instead, I'd think of the burned-out home in Duryea I saw on the way to school, the abandoned coal mines along the road in Avoca, the overgrown graveyard in Taylor next to a cluster of dying birches. I tried focusing but would often fail, and I didn't know if it was from a life of avoiding others at every turn.

In my second month of reporting, I was assigned to interview a new freshman fullback for the college's Division III football team. He was a short, boxy eighteen-year-old who shaved his black hair close, which made the part in his hair look much like an axe wound. He spoke of his tough training, his work ethic, his faith in God, and how they contributed to his on-field success. As he spoke, I looked out the window behind him. The trees were swaying in the early evening breeze, the sky was turning pink from dusk, and a lone light shone on a distant hillside and flickered like starlight tired from millions of years of travel. I wondered if it was a streetlight, an antenna, a weather station, a house gone unnoticed over the years. It burned brightly, pulsing erratically. I watched it without thought, hypnotized by its erratic rhythms.

The football player stopped speaking and smiled. I turned my attention back to him. "How," I asked, "does your faith in God square with the off-campus parties your fraternity holds?"

***

That Saturday morning, I awoke early and placed my notebooks, pens, and second-hand camera on the passenger's seat of what used to be my mother's car. I drove past Coxton College just as the sun peeked over the Poconos, and took a snaking road up the distant hillside. The pavement became gravel, the gravel became hard dirt, and the hard dirt became a small lot cut into the hillside. I thought of The Heights overlooking Blackbridge, but this hillside notch was small, just large enough for a small house and a shed. Another dirt road led into a dense treeline and disappeared. The lot itself was gravel filled, and the car's tires sank into it slightly, leaving a clear set of tracks to the house's front door, a door painted pink with a yellow porch light glowing and flickering brightly beside it. A blue Ford station wagon sat out front, its faux wood side paneling sun bleached and peeling.

I turned off the engine and got out. The dawn chorus was deafening, the surrounding pines alive with sharp birdsong. I looked back at the twisting road, saw it disappear around a bend. In the valley below lay the grounds of Coxton College, its geometry a patchwork of gray and green.

The front door opened with a pop and squeak.

A woman in a green flannel shirt and worn jeans stood at the threshold, her face long and lined with age, her silver hair short and frizzed with flyaways.

I introduced myself, told her how that lone light snagged my curiosity for no other reason than it was a light on a dark hillside.

She looked over at the glowing light bulb and shielded her eyes. "I got the switch turned off," she said, "but the light keeps turning on." I don't know why. She sounded unsure of herself, her voice soft and wavering.

Her name was Alice Krenetsky. She was only fifty-two. She once had a daughter named Nancy. One day, Nancy walked to the Susquehanna River ten miles away, tied a large rock to her leg, hobbled across a busy beige concrete road bridge, then jumped.

Nancy was twenty years old.

She'd been a student at Coxton College.

***

No one was happy with my Nancy Krenetsky story. The Athletic Department was incensed that their fullback was only mentioned in a ten-line article. The School of Sciences wasn't happy that I'd mentioned a story that they thought was best forgotten. The staff at the Clarion weren't happy with the angry calls from angry departments or with the attention the story brought. Most weren't happy with me. At all.

"So what happened to the profile piece?" Mr. Bradbury asked.

I cleared my throat. "It's still there," I said. "A smaller one. Then I just . . . started another profile." I'd been concerned with Mr. Bradbury's reaction. He gave me a football player to interview, and I gave him a dead girl and a lot of baggage. Strangely, Mr. Bradbury seemed placid.

"You know The Scrantonian called," he said. "And The Citizen's Voice. They're looking into the story, you know that?"

I shook my head.

"A lot of angry people," he said.

"Why aren't they angry about Nancy Krenetsky?" I asked.

He sighed.

"She was a Coxton sophomore," I said. "A good physics student who suffered from depression then was hounded from day one by all the male students and faculty in the physics program. She was told she wouldn't be able to handle the material, that she was wasting her time, told to take up something more up her alley. Students and faculty said this."

"I know," he said.

"They pushed her until she jumped off a bridge," I said, my voice rising. "And when she was gone the good old boys of the physics department had one less female to deal with until they were just down to three. And now it's down to two women. I don't know, Mr. Bradbury, but I think it's a bigger story than some fullback talking about how great he is, and I don't think people really understand just how damned awful it is when someone—the only person you ever had a connection with—decides to wake up one morning, walk to a river, and sink forever."

Breath wheezed from my nostrils, and sweat tickled my back. Mr. Bradbury was quiet, pensive, looking down at his large hands folded on his metal desk. I knew I was in trouble and probably about to be let go from the Clarion, and maybe kicked out of the college. Most of my life I'd kept my head down, and now the one time I raised it I'd probably ruined what was left of my life.

"I think that's the most I've ever heard from you at one time," he said. "Milton, when you did the layout you pushed out the other columns that were supposed to be on the page."

"I worked on Nancy's story and ran out of time with my other two stories, so I . . . I laid out the page to fit her story."

"And that wasn't your call. You didn't run it by the editor, and you didn't run it by me."

"The editor was in Vermont at a wedding," I said, and I . . . I ran out of time to run it by you."

"And you just went ahead and did it." He let out a deep breath. You didn't run it by anyone, Milton. Is it an important story? Yes. But the Clarion is a newspaper, a small college newspaper, but a newspaper nonetheless. I'm glad you found passion for a story, but there's a chain of command. Without it, newspapers would be an unchecked free-for-all, and there's enough of that in this world as it is."

"Everything was accurate," I said.

"That's beside the point," he barked. "The Clarion isn't your personal newsletter. And you better learn that now before even thinking about taking another step as a journalist."

I lowered my head. "I know," I said. I closed my mouth, started thinking about enrolling at a Penn State campus. There was one near Scranton. They had a two-year computer technology program that might accept an expelled journalism student.

"What do you think I should do?" he asked.

"I know you have to do something," I said. "I know I'm on the chopping block. Maybe I shouldn't have followed that light into the hills, but I did. Maybe I was too enthusiastic. Maybe I felt that if I didn't insert it into the paper it would never get printed. But I broke the rules, I broke your trust and—"

I ran out of words. I knew my time at Coxton was over.

Mr. Bradbury folded the copy of the Clarion in front of him, dropped it on a book stack behind his desk, and folded his fingers. "From now on," he said, "you pass all stories through me. I don't care if it's a story on new library books or a piece about the new design of the campus parking decals, everything goes through me. And your editor-in-chief will pass every finalized copy of the Clarion to me before its printed. You just made more work for me, Milton, and I hate more work."

"You're not expelling me?" I asked.

"Some want to," he said, "but you didn't break any college regulations. Secondly, now that the story's gone off campus, no one's going to touch you. Lastly—he paused, looked up at the ceiling, then at me, eyes sad, voice soft—it was a terrific piece. It was actual news. It's got big people talking, it's got audits in motion over in the School of Sciences. Real journalism, Milton. You did the wrong thing in slipping it into the paper, but you did the right thing on following your nose, which reminds me: How did you know about this story?"

"I didn't," I said. "I just saw a light on the woman's porch and . . . followed it."

"Serendipitous."

"Yes, sir."

"And why didn't you think your piece would be given consideration?" he asked.

"Because no one's ever really been interested in what I have to say, Mr. Bradbury."

"They do now."

***

That evening, I drove the twisty road home over river and railroad tracks, through forests and town limits. I pulled into the driveway and walked up the house's creaking front steps over which my father used to stomp in his work boots and my mother used to tiptoe in her pumps right behind him. I locked the door and turned on the porch light, listened to the house groan and settle as I walked up to my room, sat in my chair, pulled out a stack of legal pads, a handful of ink pens, and began to write an essay about a quiet woman who, one day, walked to the midpoint of a black steel rail bridge, then jumped into a river's brown waters, never to be seen again.

After midnight, I finally slept and dreamt of another woman whom I didn't know, of clouds racing over her skin and odd disembodied voices floating on air.

And sometime after midnight, another woman named Elizabeth Valdez was writing a letter, proofreading it, and sealing it in an envelope that would arrive in my mailbox at the Clarion two days later.
Chapter Six

The letter was written in black ink on thick, beige paper and had the slight scent of vanilla. The handwriting was small, grid-like, the cleanest writing I'd ever seen:

Dear Mr. Conroy,

Thank you for the story about Nancy Krenetsky that you had written this past week for the Coxton Clarion. I am one of two remaining female students in the Coxton College physics program, and the problems of isolation and condescension on the part of the physics faculty toward female students is indeed real, and any effort by those of us who have tried to redress the problem have met with stone walls and deaf ears. The other female student is contemplating leaving the college, and I have also thought of changing majors myself. Since your article has appeared, things are in upheaval, and the long-tenured faculty seem—how should I say?—muted. I hope you continue to pursue this story, and I hope you know how much good your piece has done. I no longer feel invisible. I no longer feel alone and isolated. I hope someday you will allow me to thank you in person for your great work.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Valdez

For the rest of the day, my hands smelled of vanilla.

***

I didn't know if I should step into the Science Building. There were plenty of people outside the building that disliked me, and after the Krenetsky story, I imagined there were a lot more inside. Every article that we'd written in the Clarion had our headshot next to our byline, and I'd hoped that my thumbnail portrait would be small enough to make my face indistinct.

The building was a squat gray box that differed from the neoclassic style of the other buildings on campus, the department separating itself as much as possible from the rest of the college with a square-and-rectangle Modernism rather than ornate pillars and white eaves. Inside, it glowed with death-white fluorescent lighting that buzzed and hummed and burned out shadows. The wall paint was thick and glossy, and the air smelled of chemicals and plastic. From behind classroom doors, professorial voices murmured, punctuated by the tap of chalk on blackboards. I looked into each room, scanning the student body for signs of a female student. In one hand, I held a schedule of all upper-division physics courses. In my other hand, a black pen that I used to check off every room number. In room after room, every class was filled with men, often spaced around the room with desks crowded with scientific calculators and notebooks.

After thirty minutes, I came to a classroom with an open door. Inside sat maybe fifteen, twenty students. A rail-thin, gray-haired instructor scribbled equations on the blackboard for specular reflections and drew angles, marking them with Greek thetas and sloppy lettering. In the rear of the classroom, a small woman with dark Louise Brooks bangs scribbled away in a tablet, looking up only to note what was being sketched on the board. She wore a red sweater and black slacks, her face was soft and rounded, her skin white, her eyes obsidian. I watched from the hallway as she scribbled in her tablet and squinted at the blackboard, lost in equations and optical angles.

I slipped the class schedule into my bag. I had a fifty-fifty chance that it was her.

Minutes later, the class ended, and most of the students quickly stood up, gathered their books and calculators, and headed for the door. The professor swept the board clean with an eraser and shuffled through papers on his desk as the dark-haired woman slowly organized her books, slid them into a gray backpack, then made her way to the door. She had a nonchalant walk, her eyes seemingly looking at things that weren't there, her feet pointing outward slightly. When she walked into the hallway, I stopped her.

"Excuse me," I said. "Are you Elizabeth Valdez?"

She stopped suddenly as if roused from sleep and looked me over. "Yeah," she said while smiling and narrowing her eyes.

"I'm—"

"Milton Conroy. Recognize your picture from the paper. You got my letter."

"I did."

"Do you track down the sources of all your fan mail?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said. "First piece of fan mail I've ever gotten."

"Any angry letters?"

"None yet. Lots of angry phone calls to the paper and my advisor, though."

"But you expected that, right?" she asked. "You know, people don't like to be called sexist or racist, even if they are."

"I'm figuring that out," I said.

"So what brings you here?"

"Are you busy?" I asked.

"No," she said, shaking her head.

"Could I ask you some questions? About the department, your experiences, rumors on what you might be hearing? Off the record, of course. I don't want to get anyone in trouble."

"You can use my name," she said, "I don't care. I've been fighting this battle for too long now and dealing with nonsense like this since the start of high school. Some boys don't like girls playing in their sandbox, I suppose."

"Can we go somewhere to talk?" I asked.

"You're not one of those creepy guys who's going to start asking all kinds of personal questions and then start stalking me, are you?"

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out for a few seconds. "Some people might think I'm creepy, I guess," I said. "I usually don't talk to people much."

"Don't you think reporters should?"

I nodded. "I'm working on it. But I don't stalk. Stalking sounds like too much work."

She smiled, her small teeth bright white, her lips dark red. "Okay, Mister Conroy, non-stalker, let's go."

Elizabeth walked alongside me, her backpack hung loosely over her shoulder, her hair shining in the afternoon sun.

***

The groan-inducing name of the coffee shop was called the Campus Grounds. No one seemed to mind the name as long as the coffee was cheap and plentiful and that the owners didn't mind students completing projects for hours on the benches and tables inside and outside the building. Elizabeth and I found an empty booth in the back. We sat under the low amber light, our backs and legs cramped by the high-backed wood booth. We each ordered a coffee every half hour. We didn't realize that thirty minutes stretched into three hours, that the late afternoon was now the early evening, and that the sky had begun to rain a light drizzle, transforming the roads into black mirrors.

***

Milton, when I was a girl, my days were just days of getting by. My family was never much beyond poor. We kept clothing until they became cheesecloth, kept our old home until enough was saved for a new one, and even then the new house wasn't much bigger than the old one. We kept our family car until the front axle broke during a left turn on a drive to the supermarket. I think that was the first time I consciously viewed the world from an angle. Not a metaphorical angle, but a literal one. When I saw the tilting street, I added a second line to it in my mind and created a right triangle. I guess that's how I got started in math and physics: a hypotenuse and two legs.

Our lives were static and frozen. I guess that's what happens when all you do is sit around and watch a life instead of creating one.

Dad worked repairing televisions until people stopped spending time and money to have them repaired. Mom stayed at home vacuuming the same rug with the same dark stains on it, the same rug that we used to place near the front door with these tears on it that seemed to get longer and wider with every month. I spent the days looking out a window that overlooked a street in south Scranton where the same old ladies sat on the same front porches or the same roadside curbs. They only time the scene would change was when one of the old ladies stopped appearing on her porch or on the curb, mainly because she died.

I had this boyfriend once. He loved magic, disappearing coins and cards, that sort of thing. He loved jazz and 70's rock. He once performed a wonderful magic trick. Would you like me to tell you about it? Okay. He made himself disappear. Nice trick, don't you think?

I lived at home for a little while after high school, kind of like you, but not like you. You have a home that's yours, one without parents, but I had no money to move out, and, also, I'd never been anywhere and didn't know where to go. I stayed close to what I knew: that same house, that same Scranton street. It felt safe and familiar.

You know what I noticed watching that street? When people walked down those sidewalks at night, they avoided the spotlights that streetlamps cast on the ground. They'd just walk around the edges of small pools of light, like they were afraid the light would stick to their shoes and they'd wind up dragging it all over the carpeting when they got home. I wondered why for the longest time, but finally it made sense. No one wanted to be seen, except the porch ladies. No one wanted the world to see that, though they could be anywhere on this planet, they were still walking down that dark inconsequential street in that insignificant neighborhood.

I remember the first time I got home just as the sun was rising. It was a Saturday morning. The previous night I didn't want to go home after class, didn't want to see those old ladies on those porches or on those curbs. Didn't want to see people dancing around sidewalk spotlights like cats jumping around puddles, so I just pointed that junky Beetle of mine south and hit the Turnpike with no destination planned. Just wanted to drive and outrun the night. That morning when I got home, the sky was on fire, and the birds were singing and shrieking their heads off. I walked up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. And I wanted to talk to someone.

I don't know to whom or what about, just wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. So I picked up the phone and tried calling a former high school friend. Her name's Colleen. Wore this big blonde beehive hairdo. Big retro fan. Retro music, retro hair, retro eyeglasses, long skirts, Mary Janes. Come to think of it, I don't even think she needed glasses.

So I call her number, a number she'd given me when she went off to college in Louisiana. All I get is this computerized voice. Or is it a recording? I don't know. But it says the number's been disconnected. Just—poof—gone. I couldn't believe that, someone just dropping out of your life and only leaving behind these electronic impulses. You dial a number, and up pops this empty, spooky voice like a ghost that's been waiting for you for the longest time.

(And is it true about Blackbridge? The ghost stories? The weird lights and sounds? Science tells me it's bunk, but, even so, I think leaving behind a ghost is better than leaving behind a recorded voice saying your number's been disconnected.)

When Mom and Dad died a year ago on the Interstate, there was nothing there for me. Everyone had fallen away: Colleen, my friends, my parents, even my parents' house. I couldn't afford the remaining mortgage payments. Everything was just stripped away so fast. For so long everything was the same and then, suddenly, it changed. Before, I didn't know what I was going to do if my parents died, but now here I was throwing out or selling whatever they left behind, racing the clock set by some bank in New York. The day I had to leave, I remember just locking up the house, dropping the keys off at the bank branch, then pulling into a parking lot with my car packed with whatever I owned, crying so hard.

Everything in my life loaded into that sputtering mess of a car. I wished it was night so no one could see me in that parking lot. I drove past the house one last time, its doors and windows all locked up. I wanted to see Mom or Dad waving to me from a window, but all I saw were dark rooms. When I turned off that street for the last time, the sunlight looked different. It had a depth to it, and that depth just filled the world around me. I knew that even though everyone had left me behind, in my own selfish way, I needed them to have done that. I had to grope along in that dark room and find my own way out of it. It hurt a hell of a lot, you know? Of course you know, you've been there yourself, but you've pushed forward, lived life on your own terms.

Right?

I could have walked away from my physics degree, Milton. I could have run with my tail between my legs and just gotten a degree in, hell, fashion design, from some upstate college in New York. I could have let all the sneering jokes made by professors in the physics department, all the ignored questions, all the jokes behind my back, the sabotage during group assignments, the conveniently forgotten internship and co-op offers, the comments about my buttocks and breasts, all of it, just wear me down. And they almost did, but you know what? Where would I go or do? I had a lease with three roommates, a car barely alive, and a bank account barely breathing. If I'd left, I'd had been exactly where I was before, right on some old Scranton street, watching the old ladies sit and die and the people avoiding the streetlights until I eventually became one of them. I didn't walk away, Milton. I won't. I'll only walk away when it's my time.

That's why your piece was important to me, Milton. I really felt like I was on my own until your article came out. That girl you wrote about had enough problems in her life, and it didn't take much to wreck her. No one stood up for her, no one helped her hold on to her dream before it was ripped away from her. I'd never heard of her before your article, and that's what certain people in that department wanted. But you conjured up her ghost and sent it down the college hallways. When I read that article, it was almost like reading my own bio: a girl with parents who had almost nothing, growing up in some drafty, decaying house and finding peace in math and science, as if using equations to quantify the messiness of life; fighting the high school gauntlets of girls ignoring you and boys—when they're not trying to bed you—belittling you; then, having to deal with all this at Coxton.

The situation at Coxton didn't kill her, Milton. But it took away that one thing that brought her peace and a sense of actually mattering to the universe. Without that, what's the sense of anything? Equations can't solve that. We all use something to keep us alive, Milton. What's yours?

Tell me, Milton, what's yours?

***

We finished talking and agreed to meet the next day.

I watched her walk to her car as I walked to mine, the neon signage and streetlights painting her with electric rainbows.

I drove home, opened the windows of my house, and let in the cold air and the misty drizzle. It was past eight o'clock, but I began dusting furniture and window sills, sweeping out corners and mopping floors, vacuuming carpets, washing laundry and curtains, and throwing old clothes into boxes and books. I finished at three in the morning, as the air became colder and swept over the hardwood floors inside while blue-white wisps floated over the forest floor outside.

I slept in my parents' bedroom, wisplight setting the billowing curtains aglow, the sad call of cemetery voices mixed with the spring song of wind-blown trees. I slept with Elizabeth's dark hair and dark eyes all a-swirl through my dreams.

And though the house was still hollow, it began to feel, for once, less empty.

***

Summer was coming. We could both feel it in the warmth in the air and the color of the sunlight, when it becomes whiter and seems to have less weight. Liz and I watched the white light fall onto the greening grass alongside the student union. The metal bench was becoming warmer the longer we sat on it, and I felt sweat seeping under my thighs. We'd been meeting daily on and off campus for weeks. Today, she wore tan slacks and a brown shirt, and she'd been letting her hair grow a bit longer.

"I don't want kids," I said.

"No?" she said. "Why's that?" She took in a deep breath as if inhaling sunlight.

"And put them through a life like mine?"

"You saying you have your father's personality?"

"No," I said, biting my lower lip. The sun was warm, but sitting next to Liz, I felt even warmer. "Maybe I have my mother's. She was—passive. She had excuses for Dad, she had the house clean and the table ready, even though she worked all day. She did anything to keep everything stable."

"She was scared of your Dad," Liz said.

"Maybe. I thought about that. But after Dad died she was just lost. For all his rage, I guess he gave her life a purpose of some sort. Not much of a purpose, but a purpose. First she gives up on being an artist, then she accepts a life with a perpetually angry man. I guess it's true what she said to me."

"What's that?"

"That it's amazing what people get used to when it's all they know."

Very true, Milton.

I thought about the essay sitting on my writing desk. What started as twenty-five pages grew to over three hundred. I'd plumbed all I'd known about Mom's life then began to plumb my own. It was on its fourth draft, and with each draft the piece expanded or contracted like a bellows, but I found it easy to discuss my life when I wrote it down. Maybe because with an essay I didn't have to look someone else in the eye as I wrote out my life's details. Distance can be a gift.

"Keeping the peace is a tough job," Liz said.

"I suppose. You know, Liz, we didn't have much peace or happiness in that house, Liz, but Mom did do this one thing that made me happy."

"What was that?"

One year, around Christmas time, she drove me down to Wilkes-Barre on one of those nights where rain's mixed with snowflakes. Drove me to one of those Hess gas stations, you know the ones with the green signs? They sell these Hess toy trucks every year, and I'd mentioned a few weeks before how great I thought they looked, these big tanker trucks with plastic hoses attached to them and these bright functioning headlights, the whole deal. So she takes me on this ride to this station. Didn't even know that's where we were going until we drove over that bridge with the eagle sculptures at the ends of it—the one that looks like something out of the Third Reich—and pulls over into the gas station. She gets out of the car, and it's so cold outside that I'm afraid that the roads are going to ice over before we get home, but she gets out, walks into the gas station, and walks out with one of those toy trucks. It wasn't a Christmas gift, just a gift. I turned on the truck lights, and it looked so beautiful."

I paused. I didn't realize that I'd fallen silent for almost five minutes until I felt something soft and warm on my right arm. Liz had her hand on it, fingers gently rubbing my skin. I reached over, placed my hand on hers.

She said nothing, just smiled.

We sat, looking at each other, sun warming our bodies, trees budding with spring leaves.

***

That night, Elizabeth and I drove us along the Susquehanna River, then west on Route 6. The towns became fewer and fewer, and the forests became deeper and darker. We'd pull over and look up at the sky, the stars shimmering with icy light and the Milky Way white like haze. Her eyes glimmered in the starlight, and her lips tasted of the mint gum she loved to chew.

Outside a small town, we stopped at a twenty-room motel that sat alongside a small pond.

As we shifted under the bedcovers, blue sparks of static erupted over our skin.

As we lay in bed, my arms around hers, the stars rose and set over a tree-jagged horizon.
Chapter Seven

When writers send a nonfiction book to publishers with no agent, they are rolling dice. When college seniors whose only writing experience is on a small campus newspaper do the same, they are hoping to be struck by lightning while standing in an underground cavern and holding a winning lottery ticket. The advantage the college senior has is ignorance of those odds. The other advantage the college senior has is having no expectations. The manuscript is sent with cover letter, is dropped on a slush pile desk in some glass-towered city, is lost forever, and the universe is unmoved.

Low expectations were all I had when I slid the first four chapters of my book along with a cover letter in ten large padded envelopes and mailed them through the Coxton Clarion mail desk to avoid paying shipping charges. Ten partial manuscripts sent to the four corners of the nation, hoping to find a home. As the envelopes dropped into the mail bin, I thought about my final exams, a needed visit to the campus Career Services to find a job, and a final review of my graduation checklist. One month to graduation, and I'd yet to look for work. Liz thought it'd be a good idea if I started looking soon, and I agreed.

I left the Clarion offices and walked out into the college commons, the stone path sun rays freezing me in place as I wondered which path to take.

***

"The master's will take another two years," Liz said.

"And that's what you want to do?" I asked, my arm draped over her waist as we lay in the small bed shoved into a corner of her small room. Her room was cramped with furniture: a folding desk loaded with books and computer, a folding chair covered with clothes, an assembled bookcase densely packed with science and math textbooks, a small office refrigerator in the corner that her roommates couldn't raid. The walls were thin, and we listened to her roommate's television blaring a few feet away as my eyes rested on a book on the nightstand: Applications of Geometric Optics.

Liz nodded, her thick hair brushing against my nose. "It's where all the research jobs are," she said.

I kissed the back of her head. "It's so noisy here," I said.

"It can be."

"Have you thought about staying with me?"

"I'm thinking about it."

"You won't have to pay rent."

"I know."

"It's a lot quieter."

"I can imagine."

"How so?" I asked.

"Isn't your house next to a cemetery?"

"Yes."

"I'm sure the tenants don't speak much," she said.

"You'd be surprised how much talking goes on in that cemetery."

"That's just creepy."

"And that's why you never visit or stay with me?" I asked.

"Darling, you know it's a long drive for me in that junky car—"

"And you don't stay with me even when I offer to drive," I said. "I drive to school and to see you every day. I'm thinking you're afraid of me."

"That's why I'm in bed with you," she said.

"Okay, then you're afraid of my house."

( . . . )

"Is that it?" I asked.

"Everything you've told me about that place, that town," she said. "Everything it did to you. I don't know if I'd ever want to see that."

"My parents are gone. The people who've bothered me have moved on. Most of them, anyway."

Liz remained quiet, then let out a sigh. I could tell she was working through something in her mind. Had she been facing me, I would have seen her eyes, black in the room's nighttime blue, shifting as if sorting through columns of data. I would have seen her lips purse, her thick eyebrows knitting as her mind gamed out scenarios, figured and refigured options.

"Tomorrow's Saturday," she said. "Maybe you can drive me there tomorrow."

I smiled, held her tightly. She ran her fingernails over my arm, kissed my hand. We said nothing else that night. I fell asleep listening to the white noise of the television in the next room and the hiss of tires from passing cars on the road out front.

***

It's called sleep paralysis.

When I was a boy, I'd awaken when the house was at it quietest, when the room was at its darkest, and I'd be frozen in atonia. My eyes would search the room, my head unable to turn. I'd feel something in the room, something dark and moving like a ghostly tornado whirling in the shadows. There'd be voices in the room, black shapes flittering at the corners of my vision. I'd struggle to sit up, but something heavy and unmovable would push down on my chest until I'd fought with gasping breaths, and, like pulling myself from quicksand, sit up. The shapes would vanish, and the dark presence in the shadows would evaporate, leaving me in an empty room with curtains drawn back to a moonlit or star-filled sky.

Doctors told my mother it was common: the waking and sleeping cycles colliding, my brain aware that it's dreaming but not yet ready to wake up, sleep hallucinations walking through reality.

The night before I drove Liz to my house, I awakened on my side, atonic, my eyes wide, my head unable to move. There were no sounds except the ambient sound of the occasional car outside, the creak of thin walls, the popping of floorboards.

Out of my eyes' corners was a vision of Liz standing before the room's window, her body naked and carved out of the darkness by dim moonlight. She looked out the window, pressed her right hand against the pane and moved her fingers over the surface in slow circles, tiny blue sparks jumping from her fingertips, the arc light reflecting her face in the glass. As she swept her fingers over the pane, her dark eyes followed, unblinking, empty, her mouth closed, lips straight.

The air crackled like Fourth of July Sparklers, but soon I closed my eyes.

I awoke to a blood red sunrise and to Liz beside me, blanket up to her nose and snoring softly. I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

***

On the drive to Blackbridge, Liz looked out the window, watching the forests thicken as Lowland Road split away from the main route. She rolled down the window and took the wind into her face, blowing back her hair.

"Should I stick my head out the window?" she asked. "Lap up the air like a dog?"

"You could," I said. "Wouldn't you be swallowing a lot of bugs, though?"

"Good point." She stuck her arm out the window instead. Even though spring had arrived and the trees and weeds were in full bloom, the air was still cool, and I knew it would get even cooler as the road turned into the gap. The sharp hills rose around us as we passed into the gap, and the light took on that darker, heavier quality I'd grown used to in Blackbridge. As tree arches covered the road in darkness, Liz uttered a low "Wow." To our left, the Lackawanna River swelled from melting upstate snowpack, and the main rail line ran parallel to the shoulder. At one point, we passed a large gray Delaware and Hudson locomotive thrumming toward Blackbridge, its deep engine rumble rattling the road.

Soon, the trees parted, and the road curved right into the town limits and became Polaris Avenue.

"We're here," I said. Liz nodded, looked through the windshield with squinting eyes.

"It's a little bigger than I thought it'd be," she said.

"People actually wanted to move here at one time."

"And now?"

"People visit, see the freak show, then leave. Most everyone who lives here has been here for years. I never see anyone move in here anymore. Maybe in fifty years there'll just be the cemetery filled up and that's it."

"Kind of morbid," she said.

"Certainly is." I turned the car onto Jay Street, past the few houses, past the empty lots, up the rise, and finally to my house. We pulled into the driveway, and I shut off the engine. Liz just sat, unmoving. "What's wrong?" I said.

"That's the cemetery back there?" She pointed behind the house at the headstone-filled field a hundred yards away.

"That's it," I said, opening the door. She got out, closed the door, and looked around.

"You really are isolated out here."

"It's not so bad," I said, pulling her evening bag from the back seat. "See? There's a few houses down here, and if you turn the corner here, there's more houses. That's the Lackawanna River back there, and the Susquehanna's over there. They merge a little down that way. The locomotive that we passed rounded the bend and made its way to the railyard. That's where most of the noise comes from," I said, pointing at the locomotive. "Railyard over there. Used to be really busy decades ago, not so much now." I motioned for her to follow me into the house, and she followed, her eyes scanning the high hills, the antenna farm beacon lights throbbing with red regularity.

I took her through the house. The living room. The kitchen. The stairwell. My old bedroom. My new bedroom. The bathrooms upstairs and downstairs. The attic. The basement. I took her to the back porch and pointed out the Lackawanna, the road we'd just taken, the rail line, the gap through which we'd just passed, the cemetery she'd just seen.

"And that's where the town ghosts come from," she said.

"I guess you can call them that," I said.

Liz grabbed my hand. "You think I'll see them?"

"Everyone does."

She let out a deep breath. "What do they do?" she asked.

"Do?"

"The ghosts. The wisps."

"Not much, really. They float. They seem to want something, but no one knows what. They don't speak, but sometimes you'll hear wailing."

"Wailing? Jesus. You hear that every night?"

"Not every night."

"I don't know if I'm going to like staying here."

"Didn't your scientific mind say it was all bunk?"

"Bunk in a supernatural sense. It could be completely natural and still scare the hell out of me, like Tsunamis or earthquakes."

"It's not that bad," I said. "They never caused me harm. Just the people."

"Those are really high hills," she whispered.

"They sure are."

She put her arms around me, and I put mine around her. We stood on the porch under Blackbridge's heavy light listening to river rapids and wind in the woods.

***

That night, we sat in chairs on the back porch at dusk and waited, Liz kept warm with a throw blanket from the living room. An hour later, three greenish balls of light floated from the eastern hill treeline and drifted to the Lackawanna River. They stopped, grouped tightly around a lone tree, then moved in single file as if pushed by wind. They bounced off tallgrass and entered the cemetery where they wandered the paths for several minutes before winking out one by one.

She moved close to me, vanilla perfume filling my nose. I leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "You're the only other person who's been in this house besides my parents and I, you know that?" I said.

Liz looked up. "No other family?"

"None."

"Your parents didn't have anyone over to visit?"

"My family wasn't get-together people."

She looked at the cemetery again. "So what did you do? For fun?"

"Fun?"

"What did you do besides sit in your room?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Nothing. Sat in my room, kept the door shut, read and wrote. I used to take walks out along the river and the forest over there. I liked taking walks. Most of the time, anyway."

"Didn't you spend time with other people?"

"I spent most of my life running from people, Liz."

She pulled the blanket around her chin. "You know, Milt, in the time we've known each other, you've never had a friend that you've told me about."

"Never had any," I said.

"You have to have friends," she said.

"Some people do."

"All people do."

"Well . . . I've got you now," I said.

She sighed but said nothing.

In the next hour, the eastern hills erupted with wisplight, blue-white globes spinning and bouncing through bush and branch. When some made it to the river, their light cut luminous shafts in the mist. Some bounced over the river, floated up the southern hillsides then disappeared in the underbrush.

Liz watched the ghostly display, the light reflecting in the blackness of her shifting eyes.

***

"Have you ever touched one?" Liz asked. "One of those ghosts, or whatever?"

We lay in bed facing each other, the heavy comforter encasing us in warmth.

"Never," I said. "Some people said they have."

"They say what they feel like? Are they hot to the touch?"

"They're supposed to be cold to the touch, like shoving your hand in snow."

We'd left the curtains open, and the large windows gave Liz a complete view of most of the town and the hillsides. She pointed behind me. "Look," she said, "there's a bunch of them in that building up there."

I looked over my shoulder, caught a glance of The Heights aglow in wisplight. "That's the old mental hospital," I said. "Been closed for as long as I can remember. They get a lot of wisps up there; it's almost like a playground for them."

"Who lives up there next to it?"

"The Burkes. They used to own over half the town, own properties all over the state. I went to school with one of them, you know? He didn't go to private school. Just went to school like the rest of us. His name's Bentley. Have no idea where he is now."

"People live up there with all those things?"

"They're probably used to them. The Burkes get to look down at all of us from there, so I guess they don't want to walk away from that. There's really nowhere in this town to walk away to. Like I said, you get used to those things."

"What do you think those things want?" Liz asked.

"Maybe a mix of nothing and a desire to cause trouble. Like the old Will-o'-the-wisps that try to lead you astray. People outside town think they're gases of some sort or some sort of electrical charge in the air, but I don't know. People have followed them into the river, into The Swamps, into the paths of locomotives. I stay clear of them."

She nodded. "I still haven't seen those vapors."

"You going to move in?" I asked.

She smiled. "Should I?"

"Yes, you should."

She turned her back to me, grabbed my arm and put it around her. "I need to give thirty days' notice to my landlord."

"Okay."

"I'll need to store some of my things in your basement."

"That's fine."

"Okay then," she said.

I held her tightly, kissed her neck.

"Goodnight, Darling," she whispered.

"Goodnight."

As Liz breathed next to me, the atmosphere in the house shifted, like air after a lightning storm, clean and light.

As she slept, a green glow spilled in from the street—a vapor floating down the road in its search for its unspoken thing. The glow intensified, then faded with a soft moan.

I let Elizabeth sleep.

***

"Is it always windy here?" Liz asked while we walked north on Vela Street. She continuously brushed her hair from her eyes. The sun was bright that morning, the air cool and damp.

"Breezy days and windy days," I said. "Sometimes the air calms down, though. But usually it rushes through the river gaps. Even when it's calm on the other side of the hills, it gets breezy or windy here. Just part of life. You get used to it."

"Sounds like you get used to a lot of things here," she said.

"You have to."

We hopped over a large crack in the sidewalk, and Liz pointed at The Heights. "Ever been up there?" she asked.

"Never. The Burke's don't like visitors. Ever since the hospital closed they've kept most of the hill as their own. Sometimes service trucks go up there to work on the antennas, but that's it."

"I noticed the antennas," she said, pointing to the antenna farms on the hilltops. "Your whole town's ringed by them."

"Television antennas, microwave antennas, radio antennas, antennas I don't even know what they're for," I said. "Five sets of three antennas. We've got bridges for trains and bridges for electronic signals. Kind of poetic, right?" She seemed transfixed by the antennas, their blinking beacons, their candy cane-like orange and white paint, the long guy wires extending from the masts into the earth. "I used to think a lot about what the antennas were sending over the town," I said. "My mom had this cheap shortwave radio, and I'd hide in my room and listen to all these weird signals and imagine that the antennas were broadcasting secret messages or something. You think that's weird, don't you?"

"It's not weird, Milt," she said. "Let me ask you: Didn't you ever want to find out where those weird signals came from? Didn't you ever dream of hopping a bus or a train and just—going?"

"Why'd I do that?"

"To see what's out there. Past the hills, past Scranton, past the state line."

"Never gave it much thought," I said. "Maybe it's all the same. Just filled with a lot of bad people and bad things."

"You really think that."

"Why not?"

"Am I a bad person?" she asked.

"Of course not. I found the one good person." I put my arm around her and brought her close.

"There're lots of good people out there, Milt," she said. "There're lots of good things to see and feel out there."

I shrugged. "Probably. Like I said, never gave it much thought."

"I don't know if I'm a good person, Milt, but I know there are good people out there. My parents were good people. I've had friends who were good people."

"Was your friend Colleen a good person?" I asked.

"Low blow, Milt."

"I didn't mean it that way, Liz. I'm just curious what you think of her."

"What I think of her," she said. She lowered her head, probably working through her thoughts. We crossed the intersection of Apusa Avenue where the neighborhoods became denser, where the height and sharpness of the eastern hills became more stark. We kept walking straight where the street transformed into a hard-packed gravel trail that continued into a thick grouping of pine trees.

"Let's turn here," I said.

"Where's that trail go?" she asked.

"A chapel."

"A chapel? Back there? I'd like to see it."

"You sure?"

"Sure I'm sure."

"Okay then."

I'd not seen the St. Hildegard Chapel in years. It sat in a miniature forest that used to be a neighborhood until the 1920's when a fire destroyed sixteen homes in the area. The area was cleaned out, the homes never rebuilt, and the paved road was never extended beyond Shrike Street. Pine trees covered the area now, and someone, no one knows who, had built a small chapel in a clearing at the center. It was a simple stone structure, and the last time I'd seen it the chapel was clean and looked relatively new, but that was over ten years ago. Most people had no reason to visit it. The shadows were said to whisper angrily there while wisps and vapors roamed the grounds during full moons. Most felt it best to leave the place alone.

The gravel path passed through a passage of blue spruces and Mondell pines, dense and alive with birdsong. They occluded the sunlight, letting only dim splotches of gold speckle the footpath.

"It's pretty here," Liz said.

"Lot more trees here than I remember," I said. The path transformed from gravel to gray flat stone, the spaces filled with moss and lichen. Gradually, the trees parted and opened to the central clearing where the chapel sat in murky sunlight. We followed the path to the entrance, and I told Liz what little I knew about the chapel. We walked around its rectangular perimeter, Liz running her hands over the smooth stone, running her eyes over the sharp-pointed copper roof, the slanted copper crucifix at it apex, the small stained glass windows set into the walls with saints lifting their arms to the heavens.

"No one knows who built this?" she asked.

"Not really. I heard it was built over a winter, if you can believe that. One day there was nothing, a few weeks later, this place shows up. I know the church raised money to build this path to it years later, but no one knows who built it or who keeps it clean." I walked her to the front door and opened it. "My mom said she used to come here during the day."

"They leave it open like this?" Liz asked. We stepped inside, where it was cold and dark, the only light reds and blues from the windows and a row of lit candles flickering next to the door and behind an altar made of polished stones like the chapel itself. The floor was tightly packed flat stones, the six pews were gray wood. Somewhere, breeze whistled through a fissure. Behind the altar, a Byzantine-like Christ icon gazed from the shadows.

"It's always open," I said. "Someone comes, sweeps out the place, and lights the candles." We sat in a pew in the back. Liz looked at the windows, the ceiling, her eyes tracing every stone, every crack, every angle and spot of light.

"You believe in God?" she whispered.

"I don't know," I said. "You live here long enough and see and hear enough things, you start thinking there's more than what's in the science textbooks, but I don't think about it too much. Do you?"

"Sometimes. I know I'd like to believe in something, and I know I like places like this."

"I tried praying when I was a kid. Didn't amount to much. Stopped looking to churches and just tried to make it through each day. The one thing I learned is that belief in God and people can break your heart."

Liz stared at me. "You seem to really dislike people."

"I don't dislike you."

"You can't despise everyone except one person."

"And you never answered my question," I said.

"What question?"

"About what you think of your ex-friend Colleen. How she brushed you off."

"I never said she brushed me off."

"She changed her phone number, never contacted you again," I said. "Sounds like a brush-off."

"I don't know what it was, Milt. I don't know if she brushed me off or simply moved on. I can't really say. I can say this: I moved on from her. I was disappointed, but I moved on. I had other people in my life, other goals. I had a life. If she no longer wanted to be a part of it, that's her business, but I wouldn't let it ruin me. And it didn't."

"I'm glad," I said.

"And that worries me about you, Milt. I worry you get lost in your past or lost in your thoughts. You can't live a life without people, without exploration."

"I have people."

"More than just me or Mr. Bradbury." She shook her head, looked at the altar. "We've got one shot at this life, Milton. I believe that. And when that one shot is steeped in one thing or one person, then that is what breaks your heart. You've had enough heartache living this life, Milton."

I placed my hands in my lap, stared straight ahead.

"You're angry at me," she said.

"I'm not angry. I just know I've made it this far without killing myself or killing someone else. I'm getting a degree soon, and I might have a job soon. I have a house. I have you. I've more now than I've ever had, and I made it this far by making it through each and every day, by surviving. That's what self preservation's gotten me, Liz."

"You can preserve a flower in the pages of a book, but that doesn't mean it's alive." She reached over and grabbed my hands. I kept my eyes on the candle flame fluttering behind the altar.

***

That night was quiet. We lay in bed, and stars shimmered through the bedroom windows. Liz put her arm around me and fell asleep.

At that very moment, someone was walking through a dense patch of trees at the center of town, ghostly voices chattering in the darkness, blue and green wisps bobbing over the path. He or she pushed aside branches, stepped over stones, and opened the front door of St. Hildegard Chapel. A flame was touched to dark wicks, and the walls came alive in yellow light that danced in the drafts. And he or she sat in a pew, lifted eyes to the image behind the altar and began to speak. Maybe holy words, maybe angry words. A one-way conversation of pleadings and desperate questions.

And maybe the image replied in the person's dreams or in a waking vision, or maybe its words were carried away in the winds, or maybe it didn't reply at all.

The candles would die the next day, and the person would return, light them again, and plead for meaning, plead for love or forgiveness. Day would come, night would come, candles would die then burn anew, and mysterious hushed words and prayers would rise to the holy figure again where they'd float to the heavens or die on the winds.

***

Through hazy dreams, I saw Liz leave the bedroom and walk to the hallway bathroom. The bathroom door closed with a soft click. Soon, there was crackling like welding sticks touched to metal, and blue light reflected off the hallway floor.

***

Veronica's Bakery & Chiromancy sat in the extreme northwest corner of town. Situated in what used to be an old Lackawanna Railroad office near the edge of the railyard, it was one of the few new businesses to open in the past decade in Blackbridge. An aging rail-thin New Agey woman named Veronica Houghton had made it the home of her new bakery and coffee shop after taking a ghost hunting tour with friends from Cleveland. After experiencing what she claimed to be an "intense communication with the other world," she moved her bakery-coffee shop-palm reading operation to the abandoned building, remodeled the interior with tables covered with palmistry diagrams, wall posters of tarot card images, and a rear room where a lone candle burned in the dark where she conducted her "spiritual guidance" sessions. Most residents rolled their eyes at the psychic claims, but not at the coffee and baked goods. It was better than driving to the bakeries in Pittston.

Liz stared down at the huge palm diagram on the table, lifelines and money lines marked with astrological symbols. I just concentrated on the doughnut on my plate.

"My God, Milton, how are you?"

I looked up from the plate and at the woman standing over Liz and me. It took a few seconds, but I recognized Maria Lorenzo, her once waist-long hair now brushing her shoulders, her body still stocky and wide hipped, but without some of the softness she'd had in high school. She was dressed in black jeans, white sneakers, and a blue windbreaker. She had her hands on her hips and a smile on her face.

"Oh," I said. "Yes. Yes, I'm Milton," I stammered, thinking of a response." Finally: "Maria, hello. Didn't think you were back in Blackbridge."

"Visiting family. Dad, Tony, you know," she said.

At the mention of her brother's name, I tensed my by body and jaw. Liz looked at me quizzically. "What are you doing now?" I asked, folding my arms over my chest.

"State Police trooper," she said. "Mostly traffic stuff at this point, hoping to make my way up to major crimes someday. And you?"

"Why don't you have a seat?" Liz asked.

Maria nodded, "Sure, okay." She pulled out a chair and sat down. "I just stopped in for, you know, coffee, then I saw Milton here."

"I'm Elizabeth Valdez," Liz said, extending a hand, which Maria shook. I watched Liz's smile, felt my body tense even more. "Milton and I are living over in his house. We met at Coxton."

"Really? What're you studying?"

"Physics."

"Too much math for me." Maria's laugh filled the room. "No, I'm my daddy's girl. Got to have a cop in every generation, you know?"

"So where does your brother fit in the generational tree?" I said, my voice flat. Maria looked as though I'd struck her in the face. Liz's eyes grew wide.

"Well," Maria said, "Tony is, well, you know Tony."

"I don't know him, but I know what he does."

Maria sucked in a deep breath, looked down at the table. "I know Tony was a bastard to you, Milton. He was like that to lots of people. Dad tried setting him straight. We all did. We almost gave up on him. But he's changing, Milton. He feels bad about a lot of stuff."

"Sorry to hear he's feeling badly about everything," I said.

"He tried calling you," Maria said.

"Why? Wanted to tell me how my mom's body probably looked after years of decay?"

"Jesus, Milt," Liz said.

"It's okay," Maria said. "Milton had to put up with a lot from my brother. But he had problems he was dealing with, Milton. It's why he tried to call you. He was calling everyone he'd hurt over the years."

"Let me guess," I said, "AA."

"No," Maria said, "just trying to make amends."

"I'm sure he thinks a phone call will make everything right as rain," I said. "Can I tell you something, Maria? I just wrote a book, all about growing up in this place. About three-hundred pages. Your brother takes up a few of those pages, and no phone calls are going to erase those pages. I'm going to get that book published, even if I have to steal the money and print copies and leave them at bus stops. Everyone who reads it is going to know about him. You can tell him that. And please tell him never to call me, speak to me, or look at me. Ever."

I pushed away from the table and walked out. I walked down Raven Street, then down Orion Street, the same route I used to take every day after school. I didn't cut through any yards or through any back alleys. I didn't shrink from passing cars or passersby. I didn't see the homes lining the streets or the trees shading my path. I saw Anthony Lorenzo, the faces of the students who pointed at me in the cafeteria, the kids who threw me into the river, the kicks in the back and the punches to the face, my father leveling his fist at my chest, my mother sitting placidly at the kitchen table, everything in a gray blur.

I walked home, walked up to my old bedroom and sat at my desk. At my fingers, a manila folder at my fingers with the list of the publishers to whom I sent my manuscript. I picked up my telephone.

Some say writers shouldn't call publishers for a follow-up, but I didn't care what some said anymore.

***

"Leaving me at the bakery was a rotten thing to do."

Liza sat on the living room loveseat. I sat in a corner chair next to her, my eyes focused on the coffee table.

"Was she threatening to arrest you?" I asked.

"She was trying to be nice to you," Liz said.

"I'm sorry I left you there, Liz. I am. But I couldn't be around her. I didn't want her building a hagiography of her brother to my face."

"A what? Look, I know you're still angry, and you've got every right to be. But you've got to get past it or get help for it. She told me how you were so quiet and how the other kids treated you, told me about the time her brother knocked you out and how you wouldn't let her help you. She admitted how so many treated you like trash, but she also said she tried to be nice to you."

"A Lorenzo covering her family's ass isn't being nice," I said. "It's just ass covering."

Liz sighed. "You have to work through all this, Milt, or it's going to eat you up. It's going to eat up what life you've got left. No family. No friends. Just anger and distrust."

"That's what you think of me?"

"It's what you'll be if you don't watch out," she said, then stood up, walked over to me, leaned down, and kissed me. "And don't ever leave me sitting alone again." She walked out to the kitchen and began making coffee while I sat in the living room, fingers clasped in my lap.

Five days later, Liz moved in.

Three weeks later, a message was left on our home phone's answering machine.

A publisher had returned a phone call. They were passing the manuscript up the chain of command.
Chapter Eight

Working at a newspaper as a layout artist has no perks except that it is a foot in the door. There is a salary, there is a small benefits package that begins ninety days after the first day of work, but most of the time is spent cutting, splicing, adjusting, re-adjusting, coloring, and re-coloring, dropping in and shifting around various chunks of text and photographs on a computer screen. Sometimes the work is like that of a secretary, sometimes it's like that of a proofreader. For my new job at The Scrantonian newspaper, most of it involved laying out the local news and sports pages. Old Forge approves a new pothole repair budget. Taylor has a raccoon pest problem. Moosic is rezoning a vacant lot for a shopping center. Dunmore High School goes to the state football playoffs. I was sent the files, I did quick punctuation and grammar checks, I sized and resized grids and columns, slid photos into the appropriate fields, did one last check, then moved on to the next page. Every day was a new set of assignments, and every two weeks was a small paycheck.

Mr. Bradbury was correct in finding work. Few papers seemed interested in new journalism majors. Everything was moving to computer networks where anyone with access to a computer and a hook-up could publish an article or take high-quality photographs and lay them out as good or better than what newspapers could. Near the end of my senior year, I'd flooded the job market with my résumé and folios of my work at the Clarion, but most of the callbacks were little more than promises of future consideration if any new positions opened. I applied for layout positions, proofreading positions, newspaper librarian positions, and eventually thought about janitorial positions until Mr. Bradbury had called me into his office and told me about a position at The Scrantonian. "Minimal pay, grunt work layout stuff," he said. "Kind of like what you've been doing at the Clarion. You interested?"

I asked him whom I should call for the job.

A few weeks later, I was called by a mid-size Chicago publisher about my book. They offered an eight-thousand-dollar advance with whatever minor royalties on whatever revenues the book would generate, so I took it. Their editors were helping shape some parts of it to give it better direction, and the cover artwork was being completed. If all went well, it was given a quick December release date.

"Be prepared," Mr. Bradbury said. "A lot of newspaper reporters try to write books. They get a lot of rejections. You sold one right out of college. It might make a little splash, and if it does then the reporters'll really hate you."

On weekends, I would take Liz on drives. We never had a destination in mind and were content to turn down a road, see what was there. The hot days would transform into purple nights heavy with humidity. She and I would watch the evening storms boil high into the atmosphere then release curtains of rain deep into the valleys. We'd sit by the windows when the storms had passed, watched the wisps rise from the wet earth and the vapors take up their lonely walks at the town's edge. I'd hold her as the cool breezes billowed out the curtains and chilled our skin, and she'd stare out the window, sighing as the clouds left the sky.

"Where do you think the clouds are going?" she once asked.

"Maybe north," I said, "maybe south. Maybe way out to the east where they'll just empty themselves into the Atlantic."

"You know above lightning storms there are these large electrical discharges?"

"I didn't know that," I said.

"Yes," she said softly. "They shoot upwards into space. Sometimes they look like huge jellyfish with tendrils miles long. Blue, and pink, and purple. Jellyfish in a black ocean. She reached to the opened window, brushed the wet screen with her fingertips. Lightning helped create us, you know. Electricity and amino acids is all we are."

"Sounds a little depressing."

"No," she said, her voice quiet like breeze. "Electricity goes everywhere. It finds a path, it follows it."

"Relentless."

"Determined," Liz replied.

I held her tightly as the storm retreated over the hills, revealing the summer constellations.

"Everywhere," she said.

A month later we were married at the courthouse in Scranton and spent a short honeymoon in a cabin in the Poconos. Two weeks later Liz was to begin her graduate work at Coxton College.

***

The first week of her studies, Liz piled up her textbooks in the living room. I purchased her a new bookshelf and took it up the stairs to the study so she could work without interruption. Soon the desk became clogged with equation-riddled papers. By the third week of her studies, she spent the evenings behind the closed door, scribbling, wadding up paper, throwing it out.

Every day, I drove to work, laid out insignificant page after insignificant page. Every day, Liz would commute to Coxton, then drive home by late afternoon. Sometimes she'd already be in the study by the time I got home, and when the door was open, I'd see her almost facedown in a textbook, carefully writing on the pages, her eyebrows knit in determination, her eyes squinting almost as if in anger, and I'd quietly close the door.

In the evening, I'd walk upstairs to the bedroom when the hour got late, then wait for her to come to bed, the wedge of yellow light from the study cutting hallway darkness. I'd lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, watch the moonlight or the green light from a passing vapor, then fall asleep. When I'd awaken, Liz would be close beside me, sometimes with an arm around my chest, sometimes with her hand rubbing my back as if consoling me from a past pain or one about to occur.

Sometimes when I awoke, the light from under the study door would flicker blue and white, then stop, or Liz would be standing at one of the bedroom's large windows, wrapped in a robe, her face close to the glass, fogging it with every breath.

***

It was early October when Blackbridge was cut off from the outside world.

At 4:32 on a Friday morning, Liz and I jumped out of bed when a loud crash shook the house, rattling windows and shelves. We thought it was a morning thunderstorm until the crash was followed by several more in a steady succession. I looked out the back door and saw large, boxy heaps steaming under the violet sky, a pile that stretched from the railyards to past Riverview Cemetery. Three green diesel locomotives lined up in series had derailed, tumbling their rolling stock onto the earth, blocking the railroad crossing and any exit to Lowland Road.

I dressed quickly in my previous day's clothing and shoes, then headed out with my camera and reporter's pads shoved into my backpack. The air smelled of oil and fresh-churned dirt. Smoke poured from the third locomotive, and the engineers were already on the ground, walking the line, flashlights surveying the tumbled boxcars and hoppers.

"Good thing no one likes to come here anyway," an engineer muttered.

I wrote by flashlight and photographed by pre-dawn light, watching railyard workers and the three town fire engines arrive on scene. Liz stood in the back door, silhouetted by soft kitchen light.

***

The Scrantonian gave my article prime real estate, my photographs and copy filling the bottom half of the front page. The editor-in-chief called one shot really artistic: an accidental image of blue-green light cutting shafts through hovering smoke and dust from the smoldering locomotive. He thought it was a railway signal light, but it was a wisp that had floated up from the Lackawanna River in the confusion. I snapped a shot before it winked out of existence.

Liz and I were trapped in Blackbridge for two days while cranes removed the boxcars and locomotives from the track. We watched the activity from home, sitting on the back porch or from the kitchen window.

"For a small town, there's a lot to write about," Liz said while sipping coffee.

"I didn't think anyone could do that," I said.

"Do what?"

"Find value in Blackbridge."

"I don't know. I think you're a lot more tied to this place than you think."

"Meaning?"

"You'll never leave Blackbridge."

"I'll leave when we both get jobs somewhere else."

"We'll see," she said.

"What makes you say that?"

"Are you getting angry at me?"

"Just want to know why you'd think I'd stay in this place after all I've been through."

"It's because of all you've been through. You have a lot of gold to mine here, Darling, and I think you're just getting started. You've found your niche."

"Hell," I said.

"You'll see."

"I'll go wherever you go," I said.

"Don't say that."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Don't put your life plans in someone else's hands, Milton." She looked at me with a stern face and shook her head. "Don't rely on someone else for your goals or happiness. You talk about things that break your heart? That'll break your heart."

***

"So . . . why'd you turn down that scholarship?" The voice was calm and even. Over the telephone, it almost sounded robotic. I sat at my small desk in the corner of The Scrantonian's layout offices biting the end of a pen and staring into a paper-white computer screen, cradling the telephone handset between my neck and shoulder.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"You don't remember me, Milton?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't—"

"This is Bentley," the voice said. "Bentley Burke."

I placed my pen on the desk and turned away from the computer screen. "Yes," was all I said.

"You sound thrilled to be speaking to me."

"It's not something I thought I'd be doing when I woke up today."

"Fair enough."

"Still in Chicago?"

"Came back to Blackbridge yesterday," he said.

"That so?"

"That so."

"And the first thing you do when you get back in town is call me and ask why I didn't take that scholarship years ago—"

"I know you're busy," he said. "Sure, I'm curious about it, but it's not that important. But I do have another question for you."

"What's that?"

"What time do you get off work?" he asked, his voice trailing off, sounding almost sheepish.

"Why?"

"I would like to talk to you about something. We can meet somewhere in Blackbridge when you get out."

"Is it newsworthy?" I asked.

He was quiet for a few seconds. "No, Milton. No, it's not newsworthy, but you might find it . . . interesting. What time are you usually in town after work?"

"Six or so."

"Okay, we'll meet at seven. Your house."

"Why not yours?" I asked.

"You know why."

"Actually, I don't," I said.

"We'll meet at your house. Don't worry, it'll be interesting." The line clicked, then purred and went silent.

***

Bentley arrived in a teardrop-shaped black Audi coupe. My mother's old car sat next to it in the driveway, sunburns in the paint enlarging like mange. I wanted to tell him Liz wouldn't be able to park in the driveway with his car parked there, but he spoke before I could tell him.

"So," he said, sitting on the living room loveseat, dressed in black overcoat, black pants, black shoes and white shirt opened at the collar, "You've got your parents' house now."

"I do," I said, eyeing the large briefcase he'd set on the floor.

"Good to have a place free and clear. Very good. Debt can kill, Milton. Literally. I've seen it." He paused again, eyes darting around the room. "Married, too?"

"You've been researching me," I said.

"Actually, no. People just know you here. Word gets around fast. Even when you're not looking for information, it just comes your way. I'll . . . well . . . I'll give you an example: I was in Chicago a few months ago sitting at some dinner party not too far from the Mercantile Exchange. I was sitting next to a table of people with no idea who they were, and one of them mentions a book coming out this December. Starts talking about this, I think the phrase was, dark as hell, book about a small town in Pennsylvania. Then they say it's a memoir of a kid who lived in this small town called Blackbridge."

"Jesus," I said, throwing up my hands.

"No, no . . . wait a second," Bentley said, holding up a hand. "I turned to these people and said, 'Well, I'm from Blackbridge,' and they said, 'Really? Well, maybe you know this guy named Milton Conroy'. Do you see what I mean, Milton? Word just gets around, even if you can't help it."

"If you're worried about your family's name, don't," I said. "It's mostly about me, not you."

"I'm aware of that," he said. "They gave me an advance copy, and it got me thinking about what I was doing. You know what I was doing, Milton? This job at a hedge fund. Shuffling papers, looking at, for God's sake, mortgage-backed securities, energy futures, that sort of thing. I get these big checks, and have no idea what I did to earn them, and here you are, already got a book coming out with a small, but very respectable, publisher. You've got a legacy, Milton."

"Some legacy," I sniffed.

"More than that what most people leave behind. You left something that'll be floating around out there long after you're gone." Bentley looked away, pursed his lips. I saw that the sides of his hair already had flecks of gray. I'd seen pictures of his father, and I wondered how long before Bentley's smooth skin would wrinkle and drop like his. He said: "The two people at that table who read your book were really excited about it. You did what you wanted to do, Milton. I fell into what I'm doing now. So I'm thinking: What would I really like to do?"

I shrugged. In the kitchen, the coffeemaker gurgled and hissed.

He picked up his briefcase, opened it, and pulled out a thick fold of high-quality newsprint. "You know how those of us would always see those ghost hunters come in town? Ghost tours? Television crews that pop their heads up around Halloween? I was thinking how people think of us outside the valley. How they see us in this . . . dark light, like touched in a bad way."

"You're not going to build a ghost-centric amusement park, are you?"

"Give me more credit than that, Milton," he said, "No." He dropped the thick fold of paper onto the coffee table. He pointed at it. "Have a look."

I picked it up. It was heavy, the paper thick and bright white. I unfurled it, saw a richly colored banner of a town silhouetted under a night sky. In the background, black hills topped by red-beaconed antennas. Below the large banner, the words Blackbridge Banner. The paper was sturdy, the text was Greeked out but used an elegant typeface in headline and body text. Each page, each section laid out with large colorful pictures and infographics. The layout was rich and expansive. There was a small local section and two other sections that caught my eye.

"The new Blackbridge Banner," he said. "I'm remaking the whole newspaper."

"Bentley," I said, "papers are downsizing and consolidating all over the country. A paper with this quality—"

"Expensive," he said, nodding. "Yes. It'll be weekly, not daily."

"But only the front section is news," I said. "What are these other sections?"

"Milton," he said, "the Banner is on its last legs. Everything in print is on its last legs. Newspapers. Magazines. I was thinking of something different, something that would give people outside this town a reason to read it. Something more . . . traditional, but not . . . traditional, if that makes any sense. I have an idea, but it's not concrete yet. But I'll need you to help me shape it."

"Me," I said.

"You."

"Bentley, this is just a pipe dream," I said. " I know your family has money, but newspapers are money sponges, and you're thinking of remaking a tiny newspaper on the brink of bankruptcy for a town of less than ten thousand and thinking people will buy it."

"Like I said, I have some ideas, Milton."

"But if you don't have a solid idea of what it's going to be, I don't know what I can do. It's all a bit, excuse me for saying, crazy."

"I'm from Blackbridge, Milton," he said. "What else would you expect? Tell me, Milton, you like laying out stories about dog catchers in Dupont or city hall highlights in Scranton, or would you rather work on something that uses your real talents, namely your writing? And, let me ask: Do you like scraping by on that check they toss at you?"

I placed the paper back on the table. The coffee machine was silent, and the house filled with coffee aroma.

"Milton," he said, "you're a storyteller."

"I'm also married. I can't just jump into an experiment that may go belly-up in a few months. We need health insurance, we need to buy groceries."

"I know what you mean, Milton, I got married, too. Brought her back from Chicago. Have you—no, you haven't met her. You'll like her, which reminds me. . . ." He stood up and checked his watch. "Keep the sample of the paper, he said, but don't show or tell anyone else about it, except your wife. Think it over, think of a salary, call me back." He placed his business card on the coffee table.

"Why are you doing all this?" I asked. "Why'd you come back and want to be a Charles Foster Kane in some creepy little town? Why'd you call me in the first place?"

He buttoned his coat and picked up his briefcase. "Tell me, Milton, why'd you turn down that journalism scholarship?"

"I didn't want to owe anyone anything."

He nodded. "Please call me when you have an answer to my proposal." Bentley turned and made his way to the door. "Look forward to your call, Milton."

Before I could stand up, he opened the door, waved good-bye, and closed the door behind him. I sat in the living room chair, staring at the newspaper mock-up on the table.

Liz came home after nine. I was still sitting in the chair, still looking at the newspaper mock-up.

"Hi," she said, textbook-laden bag slung over her right shoulder.

"Hi," I replied.

"How was your day?"

***

"When does he want your answer?" Liz asked.

"I'm assuming soon," I said. I sat beside her on the loveseat, her hand brushing my right thigh. "I've got my job now. I don't want to be jobless in two months if I work at the Banner and it falls apart."

"Do you have a guarantee that the Scrantonian won't fall apart, Milt?" she said. "You're always telling me how hard it is to get jobs as a reporter, or as anything, in the newspaper business anymore, telling me how everything's downsizing. No move's a safe move, Darling." She kissed my cheek, stood up, and walked upstairs to the study, her footsteps padding and creaking through the ceiling like a ghost pushing through the walls.

I stared at the wall, sorting options through my head until they became a jumble.

When I went to bed, Liz was hunched over the desk, writing in a thick textbook, her nose almost touching the pages.

***

At one in the morning, I sat on the edge of the bed, looking aimlessly out the window, thinking of what was and what could be, living in near-poverty in the present, maybe earning a livable wage in the near-future. I'd earned little up to that point. The house was a hand-me-down, my car was a hand-me-down, my education was financed through life insurance money and government loans. My book advance was swallowed up by taxes and debt. Curled in the blankets was my wife, and I still wasn't sure why she'd married me, why I'd had any right to have wanted her to marry me. I didn't think marrying someone who was just barely scraping by was in her cards.

Liz's hand brushed against my back.

"Milton," she said, "take the job."

Through my shirt, static crackled over my skin.
Chapter Nine

I met Bentley at the Blackbridge Banner offices two days later. The newspaper occupied an entire floor at the top of a red brick warehouse in the center of town. Its large windows gave a complete panorama of the entire town and valley from rivers to hilltops, and its varnished hardwood floors creaked underfoot. Boxes were piled in corners and against a wall, and the air smelled of ink toner and new plastic. Bentley himself sat behind a clean gray metal desk in the corner editor-in-chief's office. The office had been cleaned out, the only decoration a wall calendar from the previous year. It was the office where an elderly man named Jeff Genell had his two reporters write reports on potholes and parking meters and where he had his layout staff of one paste up blurry photographs around his lengthy editorials about how much things were better in Blackbridge in the 1940's and 1950's. Mr. Genell was nowhere to be seen, just Bentley, who looked tired and dark-eyed. He'd just shaved that morning, fresh pink razor nicks visible under his nose.

I told him the salary and benefits I needed, that I needed them iron-clad for two years, and that I needed to know a job was waiting for me as soon as I turned in my two-weeks' notice at The Scrantonian.

"My wife and I are kind of living on the financial edge right now," I said.

Bentley nodded. "I understand."

I expected negotiation, but got none. "Does this mean my salary requirement is fine?"

"It is."

I fidgeted. "It's a high salary. Especially for someone new to it all, I mean."

He leaned forward, placed his arms on the desk, looked down at the green blotter. "Like I said the other night, Milton. It won't be a typical newspaper."

"Any solid idea of what it will be?"

"It's still in the works." He then looked off into space, like Liz when sorting through clutter in her brain. The office was quiet, and when I sniffed, it echoed loudly off the red brick walls. I didn't smell alcohol on his breath, only cologne that smelled vaguely like wood shavings. He stared off and nodded.

"So," I said, that's what I'm looking for. "I'm mostly concerned that my wife and I have some security."

"What does your wife do?" he asked, now looking over my shoulder at the wall behind me.

I cleared my throat. "She's started graduate study at Coxton College. Getting a master's in physics."

"Oh, that's interesting. Was she the source of your article on the physics department at Coxton?

"No, she wasn't. I met her after it was published."

"Oh."

"Yes."

We sat in silence for almost a minute before he stood up and extended his hand, which I shook. "I'll see you in two weeks," he said, walking me to the office door.

"I suppose so," I said. We walked into the main offices where new computers still in their boxes were stacked against the far wall. Two workers were busy unpacking large color printers from their crates. Bentley pointed to the boxes against the wall and the boxes strewn about the corners.

"The old ones seemed—inadequate," he said.

"They probably were," I replied. "For what you seem to want, I think."

He stood, folded his arms, nodded at the boxes.

"I'll be going, then?" I said.

"Okay," Bentley said, still nodding at the boxes.

I backed away slowly, leaving Bentley in reverie.

***

I called Liz on her phone from the house, but was routed to her voicemail. I told her that I'd accepted the position, that Bentley had accepted my salary, that the whole meeting was odd, like the first, and asked what she thought.

I walked through the house, forgetting how quiet the town and the house were during a weekday, how every pop and creak in the house's skeleton was amplified in the silence, how every brush of breeze against the windows brought rattling reports from room to room until Liz filled it with her voice, her laughter, her pens and pencils scribbling on paper and textbooks in the study. I ran my fingers over furniture and the bannister, remembering how the dust piled high after Mom's death, how the plates piled in the sink and the windows remained dirt streaked for months until I'd met Liz. I smiled when I thought about her laugh, about her face, about when she first touched me and how it made me vibrate from head to toe.

I walked into the study, saw how Liz kept her books arranged perfectly in her bookcase, alphabetized by subject matter, her paper stacked neatly at the center of the green desk blotter, the computer angled at the desk's edge against the wall. Three black pens were lined up neatly next to the paper stack. One had teeth marks in it, and I imagined her biting away at it while she worked through an equation. I picked up the pen and saw a small shape emerge behind it. I picked up the other pens and uncovered a postage-stamp-sized ink drawing of a pair of clouds over a flat plain. It was the first doodle of Liz's that I'd ever seen. I replaced the pens over the drawing, walked back downstairs, sat on the couch, and waited for Liz to return my call.

***

"I'm sorry, Milt. I was so busy. What did your message say?"

Liz paced her backpack on the floor, sat in the living room chair across from me.

I told her about the meeting with Bentley. "Just wanted to know what you thought about it," I said.

"Does it matter?" she asked. "You made your decision, and if you think it was the right one, then it was. You don't need my opinion, Milt." Her voice was slow, as if the air had to pull words from her mouth.

"You thought I should take the job."

"Didn't you want to?"

"I think."

"And now you don't?"

"Do you think I made the right choice?"

"It doesn't matter, Milt."

"But it does, Liz. What if Bentley can't follow through, and I lose my job and don't have an old one to go back to?"

"If it happens, it happens," Liz said, a smile on her face.

"It isn't funny," I said.

"No, it isn't," she said. "But you had to make a choice of some sort, right? You made it, you live with the consequences, good or bad. You asked me to marry you, I did. I saw choices, I made one. You can't get locked in fear cycles, Milt. No choice is ever going to be perfect, no situation's ever going to be perfect. You make it, see what happens. If it works, fine, if it doesn't, you walk away. You don't need other people's opinions or judgment on what you do with your life. It's like when you went and wrote that story on the physics program at Coxton. You made a choice and did it."

"And almost got expelled," I said.

"And you didn't. That might have been the first time you took a risk, and it paid off. If you don't take risks, you stay in the same place, you melt into the shadows until you become one. That's not for me, Milton, and I hope that's not for you." Liz stood up, walked over, and kissed me lightly on the cheek before walking to the kitchen.

***

That night, the street was alive with vapors that floated over the road and congregated in the short trees and low bushes across the street. They gathered in a green glow that seemed to set the branches afire before they moved away and slipped around the curve in the road. I watched them disappear around a bend, their light pulsing and dimming.

Liz worked behind the locked door of the study. I imagined her hunched over a book, writing notations in the margins and underlining paragraphs of importance, scribbling solutions on paper, calculating formulae on the computer or on her calculator. The light beneath the study door flickered intermittently, and I reminded myself to replace the bulbs in the study the following evening before Liz got home.

Later, I lay in bed, waited for her to fill the space beside me, to warm me with her body, to brush my lips with hers, to take away the heaviness of my day and the emptiness of the night. I smoothed over, then stared at her pillow and thought of the nights without her in my old bedroom with the door locked, the curtains drawn, when my dreams were dark and the only warmth was from heavy flannel blankets.

My eyelids drooped, then closed. I don't remember when I fell asleep.

I opened my eyes to a cantaloupe-orange morning light in the windows, an empty space next to me—Liz's pillow indented from her head—and the rough sound of Liz's VW Bug sputtering down the road.
Chapter Ten

When I began work at the Blackbridge Banner, I sat at my desk in the far corner, new computer humming on the metal desk, windows on both sides of me affording a wide view of the eastern and western hills. My eyes rested on the long black bridge from which Mom leapt, then traced the icy Susquehanna riverbank. A locomotive with the yellow and black Chessie System kitten logo painted on its side pulled into the railyard and coupled with a small line of boxcars before switching its line to the southern bridge. The corners of the office windows iced over with frost, and the last leaves of autumn clung to trees with brittle stems. I'd sit and wait for assignments from Bentley but would often create my own, driving to town hall to collect information on any recent news, looking at police reports to see what had transpired overnight, if anything. After a week, I'd begun to fear that I made the wrong decision, and my mind flooded with thoughts of unemployment, unpaid bills, uninsured health.

Bentley sat in his office most of the day, door closed. He often arrived at the office an hour or two before I did and stayed there hours after I left. Through the office windows, I'd see him shuffling through papers, looking at layout mockups, marking them up, setting them aside. I'd thought the overall design of the Banner was already completed, but it seemed Bentley wanted to make more modifications. An outside design agency was finalizing it, and all of us were waiting for the finalized design so we could begin dropping photographs and copy into it, but after another half-week, nothing had been sent our way.

On the Friday of the second week, I knocked on the door to his office and walked in.

"Bentley," I said, "it's been two weeks, and we're all just sitting out there."

He looked up from a legal pad on his desk. "Oh," he said. "Yes, I know. The design is completed. I think you'll like it."

"Really," I said, sitting down in the chair across from him. "Well . . . we're not quite sure what you want us to do. I've just been going out and—"

"Did you know that some newspapers used to publish creative work?"

"Sure," I nodded. "Long time ago, but not so much anymore. I really don't know of any who do that these days."

"I think we should do that," he said. "Bring in creative work from writers. Poets, fiction writers, that sort of thing."

"Bentley, just what are we doing here?" I asked softly. "I thought we'd have a newspaper."

"I was reading about colleges getting rid of their literary journals. Those two sections in the mock-up? Fiction and nonfiction. Poetry as well."

"Bentley—" I closed my eyes "—I'm not sure what you're putting together. We need to know what to do. Two weeks without a paper. We don't have a lot of subscribers to begin with—"

"And we won't get any more unless we reflect who we are," he said. "We're not like any other town out there, so why have a paper like any other out there? Why get swallowed up in the crowd?"

"You're talking about publishing something from some bygone era, Bentley."

"Milton, as long as we're in this town, we'll always be in a bygone era."

I sat back and rubbed my eyes. "You're going to need a fiction and poetry editor," I said. "Someone who could sort through the pieces, someone to acquire them—"

"My wife can do that," he said. "She's got her doctorate in English from Chicago. You still haven't met her yet, have you?" He gazed through a window, as if trying to remember.

"No, I haven't. Can she handle all that work?"

"I'm sure she can."

"Okay," I said, holding my hands out as if steadying myself. "You need to tell us what every section is, what our jobs are, what our assignments are. You're our owner and editor-in-chief. If you don't have a direction, we won't have a newspaper. I'm not sure what we have right now, and I'm getting worried."

"Everything'll be fine, Milton."

I left his office unconvinced.

***

"I think I made a huge mistake, Liz. Please call me when you get the chance."

After leaving the voicemail, I hung up the phone, left the Banner offices, and walked out into the street, collar turned up over my nose and mouth. The air was dry, the sky clear, but the skylight still had that dark Blackbridge quality, as if the hills soaked up the wavelengths and let only a few rays seep into the town. I walked up Polaris Avenue, past Shrike, Crow, Raven, and Rook streets, and up to the town's northern edge. The road continued on for another half mile past the town limits before breaking up into gravel and dirt. Ahead lay the dark pine forest of The Swamps. I stared at the dense green-black line stretching from the steep, nearly vertical feet of the eastern hills, to the churning brown of the Susquehanna riverbank. I looked to my right at the blocky buildings of Blackbridge Junior-Senior High School, at the hilltop antennas rising into the late autumn blue, then directly up at the sky as if expecting it to tell me what to do next.

A thin contrail crept east to west like a silver pin floating in sunlight.

***

Back at the office, I checked my voicemail. Liz hadn't yet responded. It was almost five in the afternoon. I sat at the desk, stared at the telephone, at the computer, then tapped a pen against the edge of the desk in a random rhythm.

Bentley sat in his office, the door and window blinds closed. He remained there when I left the building and drove home for the evening.

The house was empty and cold. I turned on the front porch, living room, and kitchen lights. I straightened out the study for Liz, dusted the desk, arranged the paper and pens. There were more cloud doodles on the blotter, and the desk light was burned out. I replaced the bulb, left it on, then went to the kitchen, made dinner, and waited on the living room loveseat. I fell asleep sometime around ten o'clock.

***

I awoke in darkness. Above me, footsteps creaked through the floorboards. I walked up to the study. The door was closed. Under the door, blue-white light flashed, and a deep hum vibrated through the doorframe. I reached for doorknob and turned it, but the lock was engaged. I knocked once, then again, then a third time until there was a click and the door swung open.

"What are you doing?" Liz asked. She stood in the doorway dressed in a blue Coxton College sweatshirt and blue pajama pants.

"What am I doing? I'm wondering why you didn't return my message today. I'm wondering why you got home so late. And I'm also wondering why you didn't even bother to wake me up."

"First answer," she said, "I didn't check my phone today since I was busy. Second answer is that I was busy, and the third answer is that I didn't want to wake you." She smiled.

"It's not funny."

"Milt, what's the matter?"

"The matter? The matter's that you're gone before I get up, you're in the study all night, you don't even bother to return messages I leave for you, and I don't know what's going on."

"Wait," she said, "you knew I'd be busy for a while and that we wouldn't see much of each other—"

"How much time does it take to return a call or to say 'Hello' when you walk in the door? Every day you leave, every day I wait, and every day you get home later and later. I see less and less of you."

She folded her arms. "You don't need to wait for me, Milton. You shouldn't always be waiting for me. Do you just go to work, come home, and wait for me every day?"

"What else should I do?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it, biting her lower lip. "You sit on that couch every day waiting for me."

I shrugged. "I sit wherever, sure."

"You don't go anywhere or do anything."

"Go where?" I asked. "With whom?"

"Anywhere, with anyone, Milt. How long have you been just sitting around the house?"

"How do you think the house gets clean, how there's always food in the kitchen for you, how the study's always clean and how it has new light bulbs, how your mail's waiting for you on the coffee table, and how you have all this time for your classes?" I barked the last word.

Her eyes moved back and forth, taking in information, then looked at me. "You really have no one else to talk to, do you?" she asked.

"I thought I did have someone," I said, turning away.

***

I was in bed an hour before she slipped under the covers. I faced the windows, tree shadows crisscrossing in the moonlight. Liz took in a deep breath, then rolled toward me and ran her fingers through my hair. I remained silent, watching the shadowy veins waver over the walls and floor, feeling Liz's fingers gently brush my scalp as I drifted to sleep where I thought I dreamt of a short woman with dark hair and wearing a white slip who faced the bedroom's western window, tree shadows cutting her body like black rivers, blue arcs crackling over her skin.

***

Bentley called me down to the office the next day, and I left Liz to sleep while I made my way to the Banner offices, the morning air swirling with cold wind that scattered dry leaves and paper down the quiet streets. When I walked up the warehouse stairs, wind howled through the corridor.

He sat in his office in the same clothing he'd worn the previous day, his hair freshly combed back, but his face darker with stubble. Beside him sat a tall red-haired woman dressed in a blue-green flannel shirt and jeans, her face heavily freckled. "Milton," Bentley said, "this is my wife, "Claire."

She sprung up, extended a hand to shake mine. "Hi," she said, "good to finally meet you." Her voice was somewhat husky, and the slight scent of cigarette smoke explained why.

"Hello," I said. "Bentley said he met you at University of Chicago."

"He did. Finishing my doctorate when he became a senior. I think he's got a thing for older women." She sat down. "You know we've been working on finalizing the newspaper format."

I sat down and combed my hair with my hands. "I thought it already had a format, I said. "I'm also a bit worried that it seems to be changing every day."

"Not every day," she said. "Bentley and I just thought that if we're going to do something different then let's do something different."

"Okay," I said, waiting for her to continue.

"We have the sections finalized," Bentley said, his voice soft and tired. "The Banner will have news in its front section, but the remaining two sections will be a creative nonfiction section, which you'll have complete control over, and the third section will be the literary section; that's Claire's. Front section will be usual local news, but since there's not a lot of it, it'll all be lumped together broken down into subsections."

"This is going to be an odd newspaper," I said.

"Like the town," said Claire.

"How d'you feel about Blackbridge so far?" I asked.

"I like its quirks."

"I guess that's one way to describe them," I said.

"How would you describe them?"

"I just put everything under the category of insanity."

Claire nodded again. "I see."

"You know," I said, "my book comes out next week. It's not going to make the town look pretty. Lots of people are going to hate me, if they get around to actually reading it. If that's the case, what makes you think they're going to keep reading the Banner?"

"They won't be our primary audience," Claire said. "For the first section, sure, maybe. But we're looking at the first section as a way of giving the paper a bit of local flavor. We want the fiction, the poetry, and your section to reflect the character of Blackbridge and towns like it."

"A literary journal with reports of creepy local phenomena and high school football scores attached to it," I said. "I don't know."

"Are you still afraid?" Bentley asked.

"You sound like my wife."

"Were you afraid when you wrote that book?" he asked.

"Not really."

"Then don't be afraid now," he said. "Fear"—he paused, glancing up at the ceiling—"fear locks things in place. Chains you can't feel. Wraps around your arms and legs." Claire was watching him from the corners of her eyes. She reached over and rubbed his arm like Liz would rub mine.

"Fear can also keep you alive," I said.

"That it can," he said, eyes still on the ceiling. I wondered if he looked to the sky for answers as well.

I drove home, and The Heights seemed to loom over the town larger than ever, like a mountain shaped by shifting bends of light, its slopes steeper, its summit higher, its mass greater. I glanced at the Burke house perched on the ridge cut into the hillside, the abandoned hospital mere yards away.
Chapter Eleven

A week before Christmas, I'd finally received a small box containing copies of my book. When I opened the box, it smelled of library bookshelves and dust. Twenty books shrink wrapped, the hardcover cover an illustration of a small town nighttime skyline of roofs, windows illuminated blue by television glow, and black background hillside shapes silhouetted by a crescent moon. I ran my hands over the title at the top and my name at the bottom:

Darkened Windows: Memories in a Dead Town

by Milton Conroy

I sat on the living room floor and stacked the books on the carpeting. When the twin stacks of ten were completed, I looked at them for several minutes, realizing I had very few people to whom I could actually give copies. I put one aside for Liz, pulled off the plastic wrap, and opened it to the dedication page where the publisher had typeset a single line of black text on a sea of white:

To Elizabeth, who lights lanterns in the windows and leads me home.

I took out a pen and wrote beneath it: All my love. —Milton.

I placed the book on the desk in the study then closed the door. I sat in the kitchen and listened to the wall clock tick away the twilight hour into the late evening until I walked up to the bedroom and fell asleep on the covers. I awoke to feel Liz move beside me, an arm draped across my chest.

"I thought classes are done for the semester," I whispered.

"They are," she said, her head resting on my shoulder, her breath warming my neck. I reached over and rubbed her arm with my hand.

"My book arrived today," I said.

"I see you left one on the desk. It looks lovely."

"Did you open it yet?"

"I didn't get a chance, Darling. I will this week, I promise." She let out a deep breath, rubbed my chest up and down. "What do you want for Christmas?" she asked.

"I got you. That's enough." She stopped rubbing my chest, buried her nose in my shoulder. "What do you want for Christmas?"

"I don't know what I want, Milton," she whispered, then rolled over. "I don't know what I want."

***

Claire stood over my desk as I typed. I looked up, saw she was dressed in a black sweatshirt and jeans. "You busy?" she asked.

I stopped typing, looked at the words on the computer screen, the legal pad notes strewn over my desk. "Not too busy," I said.

"We just got some real news. Chief Lorenzo died early this morning."

I saved my work, then leaned back. "Oh," I said. "Something for the local section?"

"Exactly. Bentley would like it if you wrote up a piece on Lorenzo. Human interest and news. Bio, probable cause of death, speak to family—"

"I'm not speaking to his son," I interrupted.

"That's right, forgot about your vendetta. You really dumped a pile on him in your book."

"It was honest and accurate. It's okay, there're enough Lorenzos around," I said. "I'll get enough." I started gathering up my notebooks, recorder, and camera.

"You going now?" she said.

"Of course."

"Mind if I go along? I'd like a break from sorting through manuscripts."

"It won't be exciting."

"Damn. And here I was hoping for a drive-by shooting." She reached into a back pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes.

***

The town was ringed with gray-green clouds, snow readying an assault on the streets and hilltops that night. The ground was hard-packed from the cold, and the rivers were beginning to pancake with ice. As Claire and I drove through the town, we saw residents stocking up on groceries and preemptively tossing salt onto stairs, sidewalks, and driveways. Through windows, Christmas trees blinked and tinsel twinkled.

"Did you know Chief Lorenzo at all?" Claire asked.

"Not well. He helped a bit after my mom died, but I mostly just knew his son and daughter," I said. "You know your husband used to hang around with his son?"

"That's what he told me."

"What else he tell you? I mean, about the town, about himself?"

"Whatever he feels like telling me," she said, pushing her red hair out of her eyes. "I asked him who his friends were once. Know what he said? Said he really didn't have any."

"For a guy who had a lot of people around him, that's an odd thing to say."

"Maybe, but people in close proximity aren't always friends. When I met him in Chicago, I used to see people gathering around him, and I used to see this look in his eyes, like someone looking for the exit door. Except when he saw me. Just came up to me and started talking, asking who I was and all that."

"So what did you like about him?" I asked, turning the car up Taurus Street.

"I guess I liked that he seemed to be in his own world but that he also wanted me to be a part of it."

"Fair enough," I said, turning the car onto Crow Street.

"This town has odd street names."

"Bird streets run east to west, northern constellation streets run north to south."

"There a story behind that?"

"There're actually a few."

We pulled up to the Lorenzo house, and the street on both sides was lined with cars, including the town's four police cruisers and one state police cruiser. I guided us down a nearby alley. "I don't think we're breaking any laws parking here," I said. We got out and began walking to the Lorenzo house.

"It's windy like Chicago here," Claire said. "But gloomy like Seattle."

"I wouldn't know."

"You haven't been anywhere outside the area?"

I didn't answer. We passed a house with a pine tree crisscrossed with tinsel and gumball-like lights. "So is there a Christmas tree up at the Burke compound?" I asked.

"There is," she said. "What about at the Conroy compound?"

"Soon." We stopped in front of the Lorenzo house, its red siding and twin upstairs windows giving the façade an appearance of a reddened face in mid-sneeze. Maria stood on the porch, leaning against the wall, hands in pockets, head down. "Maria?" I said. She looked up, and Claire and I walked through the front gate and up the front steps. Maria was dressed in her state police winter gear, thick coat and black boots. Her hair was a bit longer from the last time I saw her, and it was twisted up in a bun. Her face was white from the cold air, her eyes were red from tears.

"Milton," she said, straightening up. She eyed Claire.

"Hello, Maria. This is Claire Burke, Bentley's wife and editor from the Banner."

"Where's Liz?" she asked.

"Well, Liz is at home right now, and we're kind of here on newspaper business. Claire and I just heard about your father. We're both sorry—"

"Are you really, Milt?" she said. "Didn't seem you'd be too sorry from your book."

"Oh," I said. I don't remember if I smiled. Claire later said I did, but it didn't matter. "Okay, so you read my book."

"Really made us look good, Milton."

I took out my notepad. "Could you tell me what happened to your father?"

"Jesus," Claire whispered.

Maria looked at me, mouth agape.

"Look, I won't apologize for my book, Maria. Never. Your Blackbridge probably isn't one that I'd recognize, your life wasn't like mine, and if the worst you have to deal with is having a brother who's got to pay for past sins, then I'd say you're doing okay. Now I have to put together a story on your father. You can help me, or I can go to others. I can go to the Lackawanna M.E.'s office and find out cause of death, or I can go through—"

"Heart attack," Maria said. "They think that's all it was."

I scribbled it down. "Had he been dealing with heart problems for a while?"

"He didn't take care of himself," Maria said. "Especially after Mom died. He just kind of let everything go."

"Like?"

"Diet, attitude. Mom was everything to him, you know."

"So they had a close marriage?" I asked.

"Look, Milton, I know you're doing a job, but I really don't want to talk now, okay? Can we do this later?" She shoved her hands back into her coat pockets.

I closed my notebook. "Sure," I said. I pulled out one of my new business cards and handed it to her. "Office number's on top, cell number's beneath that."

"I'll meet you in an hour," she said.

"Okay, where?"

"High school parking lot," she said, grabbing the card and slipping into the house. As the door opened, I saw Anthony Lorenzo milling about next to a dark wood china hutch. His face looked swollen, his hair gray-flecked.

The door shut, and Claire turned to me. "Little bad blood there?" she asked.

"See? You can do this journalism stuff, too. You've got a keen eye."

"I want a keen cup of coffee," she said. "You two can hash things out in the high school parking lot if you want."

***

I ran the car heater full blast as I sat in the parking lot, looking at the blocky high school building that was closed up for Christmas break. The hilltops were lost in snow clouds, smeared and hazy, the red antenna beacons glowing angrily. Stray flakes swirled and fell over the lot, and a bright blue locomotive pulled a line of hoppers and boxcars over the Susquehanna bridge from which Mom had jumped. On the other side of the building were the cafeteria windows where I watched the seasons change for four years. I wondered if the metal bench was still outside.

A knock on the passenger's side window pulled my mind back into my body. Maria looked through the window, and I waved her in. She opened the door, and thick snowflakes fluttered onto the dashboard and floor as she got in and sat down, closing the door with a thud.

"You know I can arrest you for trespassing on school property."

"And I can sue you and the state police for entrapment since you directed me to come here," I said.

"You've changed, Milt."

"Have I?"

"You think you would have said something like that when you were in high school?"

"I don't think I would have been hanging around high school in my downtime," I said. "Which reminds me: Why are we meeting here?"

"I didn't think you'd want to talk to me at my house or at your house, so it was the first thing I could think of," Maria said. "Word really getting around about your book, which is pretty interesting considering how few people in this town read."

"Should I be afraid?" I asked.

"You're not as afraid as you used to be," she said. She took off her hat, and her hair, pulled out of its bun, spilled over her shoulders. "Dad was embarrassed by what you wrote about Tony. Just kept reading it over and over."

"I really hope you're not trying to blame me for his death."

"I'm not. Like I said, Dad stopped taking care of himself long ago. Everyone knew what an ass Tony was. Guess it's just harder to take when it's in print. How's Liz?"

"You seem interested in her," I said.

"She's interesting," she said. "When you walked out that day we talked a bit. I noticed that sometimes she's elsewhere when people talk to her."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she's listening but . . . not. I don't want to say she spaces out, but you can see her mind working through things. After you left, I told her about Tony and how he treated you. Told her how I'd see you just run home to avoid the other kids, how I'd tell other kids to lay off."

"And why did you do tell other kids to lay off?" I asked.

"Because," she said, shrugging. "You had no one else to stand up for you. Everyone knew how scared your mom was of your dad, how your family lived in that house over the cemetery. Some people said they heard screams inside the house, that they sounded different from the screams from The Swamps and the forest. You know my dad once talked to yours?"

"When was this?"

"I think you were a freshman in high school. My dad saw your dad yelling at your mother in their car outside town hall. Dad walked up to the car, knocked on the window with his baton, told your dad that if he ever saw him doing that to your mom or you again he and Lieutenant Lucci would take him out to The Swamps and give him the once over. When I saw Dad do that, it made me feel real proud." Maria's eyes watered and reddened. Outside, the snow swirled like fireflies. "People knew what you were going through, Milton," she said. "Some tried to help, you know. It must've been hard to see that, but some people cared. You just needed to look around."

"I told Liz," she continued, "just how amazed I was that you made it through high school and how you got into college on your own."

"What did she say?" I asked.

"She said she wasn't surprised, and she said she wished how you'd give yourself more credit. She wished you were happier with yourself."

I turned to the windshield. The clouds wrapped the hills in gray blankets. A brilliant blue wisp floated through the snowy haze on the opposite hillside and hovered next to the riverbank.

"Will Lucci be taking over for your dad?" I asked.

"He doesn't want it. Told me he's getting ready for retirement. Nobody wants the damned job. Everyone just seems used to their usual lot."

"Everyone's used to what they have," I said.

"The Blackbridge way," Maria said.

"So what's next for the Blackbridge police department?"

"New police chief."

"And you?"

"Haven't figured that out," Maria whispered. She was looking at the hat in her hands, pushing and pulling at its edges.

"I'm sorry about what happened at Veronica's," I said.

"I know."

"I'm sorry about your dad."

"Yeah," she said, wiping her nose and putting her hat back on. "Me too." She opened the door, and snowflakes fluttered into the car. She closed the door and waved a gloved hand at me. I waved back, and Maria walked to the patrol car that she'd parked three spaces away. As she pulled away, I sat in the parking lot watching the snow clouds creep closer to the base of the hills. The Blackbridge streetlights and bridge lights turned on. The wisp across the river was joined by a second, and they traveled up the hillside together before disappearing into the cloudbank.

***

The tree sat on a footstool that Liz had brought up from the basement and polished with spray wax. It was a three-foot-high potted blue spruce, its roots crammed into a tall red-foil-wrapped pot. Around the pot, Liz had wrapped a long red tree skirt that draped over the footstool and onto the floor. She'd strung strands of silver tinsel and white lights over its branches, and in the gray light of the late afternoon, their reflection gleamed in the living room windows behind the tree.

"You've been busy," I said.

Liz stood next to the tree, looking it up and down, her right hand gently gripping the lights' wire.

"Living trees are better than dead ones," she said, as if talking to the spruce itself.

"I've never planted a tree."

"Neither have I, so this'll be our first." She smiled. "It's going to snow a lot today."

"So I hear." I dropped my coat and bag on the corner chair and pointed at the tree. "How'd you fit this in your car?"

"I didn't," she said. "Cashman's Gardening dropped it off. It looks nice, don't you think?" Her skin was aglow in soft Christmas light. Tinsel reflections splotched her face like dappled sunlight.

"It does." She walked toward me, and the tree lights went out. She put her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. "I think the plug got knocked out," I said.

"I hope the tree grows a long time," she said, rubbing her left cheek against my chest, staring at the wall. "A long time after I'm gone." I kissed the top of her head, and she looked up. "Come on," she said, "walking me to the kitchen."

Around the base of the tree, the electrical plug was still neatly wrapped in its factory-twisted coil, the prongs still covered in their protective plastic covers.

***

When evening arrived, Liz uncoiled the cord, removed the prong covers, and plugged in the lights. We sat on the loveseat and watched the lights blink on and off. "If you listen," she whispered, you can hear the lights sing.

I listened, heard a barely-audible high-pitched buzz as the lights coursed with current. "I hear electricity," I said.

"That's their song. Singing like birds. They emit fields all around themselves, Milton, just like power lines by the roadside or antennas on the hills. Energy just scattering anywhere and everywhere." She leaned against me, transfixed by the twinkling lights that reflected in the dark night window. We watched the lights and watched the snow flutter by the windows like butterflies.

We went to bed late that night as snow pelted the windows like sand. She slept quietly in my arms.
Chapter Twelve

Two days before Christmas, the funeral procession made its way to Riverview Cemetery, the roadsides and hillsides now covered in snow. From our porch, Liz and I watched the line of cars, civilian and police, snake through the main gate and settle at the cemetery's eastern edge. Liz and I stepped off the porch and walked to the cemetery, my gloved hand in hers. She was dressed in her cranberry winter coat, and her black bangs were covered by a thick wool cap pulled over her ears. We walked over the salted sidewalk and turned into the cemetery, following the gathering of cars and mourners. Some headstones were completely snow covered or ice glazed. Some were swept clear by family members and had their candles relighted, casting soft red glows over the cold white carpet. My parents' markers remained piled high with fresh snow. They'd stay that way until the snowmelt three weeks later.

We walked in silence, our boots crunching snow and roadside gravel. We stood at the edge of the gathering of mourners and listened to the distant words of a Catholic priest who spoke of love and service and being one with a creator. Maria stood beside the coffin with her brother. She was wearing her state police dress uniform, and he was wearing a long black coat with a gray scarf wrapped around his neck, his face beet red in the frozen morning.

Liz and I had attended the memorial service the previous night, sitting in the back of the funeral parlor, watching people whom I'd known in high school walk in, hug others, then sit in the nearest empty chair. The casket was closed, and a picture of a square-faced man with short gray hair, round glasses, and two chins smiled out at the mourners and guests. In his face I saw Maria's eyes and Anthony's nose. There were prayers and rosaries, and I said none but sat quietly with Liz, who stared straight ahead at the casket. Red candlelight danced over the white ceiling, and I thought of wisps floating over a snowscape.

When the memorial was over, Maria came back to me and Liz. Liz hugged her, said she was sorry, and I hugged Maria and realized that she was only the third person in my life whom I'd hugged. "Thanks for coming, Milton, and for the flowers," she said, pointing to the large spray of white mums, snapdragons, and lilies on an easel at the foot of the casket.

"You're welcome," I said.

"How're you feeling?" Liz asked.

Maria shrugged. "Doing fine, considering. I'm hoping the ground will be thawed enough so they can, you know."

"I'm sure everything'll work out," I said.

Maria turned around, then turned to me again. "You know, Anthony's here."

"I know," I said.

"I don't know if you'd like to say something—"

"Can you pass along my condolences?" I asked.

Maria nodded. "Okay." She managed a tight smile, then hugged Liz again. "Good to see you," she said. Then she hugged me again and waved to both of us. "Have to make the rounds," she said. "Hope you'll be at the service."

"We'll be there," I said.

"Thanks, Milton." Maria turned and moved down the line of chairs, shaking hands, hugging, giving her thanks. Anthony sat next to the coffin, staring at his father's picture.

When we left the memorial, we walked into a cold night, air raking our faces with icy fog that had crept up from the rivers.

"Why didn't you say anything to her brother?" Liz asked.

"Maria can pass along my condolences," I said, wrapping my scarf over my chin. Streetlights and headlights were haloed in the fog, and Liz's face became smoothed over with white and gray mist.

"His dad just died," she said.

"My dad died, too, and I don't recall getting a single sympathy flower from him. Then when my mom jumped off a bridge, Anthony Lorenzo used it as a source of personal entertainment."

"You could be the bigger person."

"I thought I was being the bigger person by not cracking jokes about his father," I said. "Maybe this is his first taste of mortality, I don't know. But I'm not going to assuage his feelings when he did so much to damage mine."

"Don't get locked in being angry all the time," Liz said. "It's going to just lock you in place."

I stopped and raised my hands. "Locked in place? You're starting to sound like Bentley."

"That past life isn't a life. It's just memories, just a steady state you're still locked into."

"You're not using physics-speak on me, are you?"

"All I'm saying"—she took a deep breath—"is that you need to be you and stop being just a reaction to people."

"You're saying I should forget everything I went through."

"Of course not," Milt. She stopped, placed her hands in front of her mouth as if in prayer, then folded her arms. "What I'm saying is that you keep letting others shape your present through your past. Everything you did growing up was a reaction, and you did what you had to do to get through every day. I think about you, and I'm amazed how strong you were to get through that life. But, Darling, your life now isn't your life. It's a series of strategies you created to protect yourself. But you don't have to do that anymore. You've got people who care about you, you've got a talent that's yours and no one else's. You need to start being Milton instead of Milton's shadow."

The street became thicker with fog, and cars streamed from the memorial service, headlights and taillights swallowed in white soup.

"If I'm this rotten person," I said, "why'd you marry me?"

"Because you're not a rotten person, Milton. Because I met someone who loved me without reservation, but I worry that you don't feel the same way about yourself." She grabbed my hand and pulled me close. "I know you're angry at Maria's brother, and maybe you feel as though you have a score to settle with some of the people in this town. Okay, you've got plenty of reasons for feeling that way, but I don't want you being angry forever or feeling that the score settling never ends. Because if you don't do that, you'll never be the Milton that I know's in there." She pointed at my chest.

We started walking south along Orion Street.

"So you regret marrying a damaged man," I said.

"I never regret marrying you, Milton. And I never will. No matter what happens."

And that morning two days before Christmas, we stood at the edge of the group of mourners, the icy sun of winter wiping shadows from the snow, the Lackawanna River murmuring from the cemetery's edge. We stood together as the service ended, as the casket was lowered into the earth, as everyone began piling into their cars and driving back to the Lorenzo home, as Maria stood by the graveside by herself looking down at the grave into which her father was lowered. She looked over at us, and we waved slowly. She waved back and smiled sadly before stepping into her patrol car and driving away.

Liz and I walked back home. Around Blackbridge, the tall hills were blanketed in winter white, and the antenna farms stood placidly at the summits. Christmas tree lights blinked in our front windows, and the land was smooth and dazzling. But as we walked to the house, Liz let go of my hand and placed her hands in her pockets, and, for some reason, the bright sunlight and white land seemed darker than ever.

***

"When do classes at Coxton start again?" I asked.

Liz rolled over in bed to face me. "The middle of January," she said.

"You think you'll get one of those research positions?"

She shrugged. "Maybe. I'll have a better idea in a few weeks."

"Do you have your books?"

"Not yet, Darling."

"If you need money just take it from the checking account, you know that."

"I'll be fine," she said.

We lay facing one another, her face glowing in a full moon's light, shadows gently curving over her cheeks. "They say when Chief Lorenzo died, he was just sitting at his desk," I said. "He just slumped over and that was that. Just sudden. Didn't even say he was feeling poorly. Just gave up the ghost."

"I haven't heard anyone use that term in a long time," she said.

"I was thinking, when we were walking back home today, what I'd do if you died. And, really, I don't know what I'd do. I thought about . . . thought about how before you I had nothing to look forward to every day. I was like a wind-up machine going through motions. When this house was empty—"

"It was never empty, Milt," she said. "You were in it."

"It's not—"

"You were in it. You're not nothing."

"I had nothing."

"You had more than you think. We all do. If I died, you'd still have more than you think." She reached up and brushed hair away from my forehead. "You'd move on, you'd live, you'd fall in love again."

"Stop it."

"You would, Milton. All the things you've been through and you moved on. You always will." She turned away, grabbed my arm and wrapped it around her waist like a blanket. I pulled her close, listened to her breath, felt her heartbeat through her skin, felt her hair on my nose, my mouth, my face. "You always will," she whispered.

A cloud moved over the moon, and the room darkened as I fell asleep.
Chapter Thirteen

"Tell me," I said to Claire, "will Bentley ever come out of there?" I pointed at his office, the glass door shut, the window blinds closed. We'd completed the first issue in record time, and it was rough, but it was taking shape. I'd marveled at the strangeness of the newspaper, how it was more commentary and fiction and essay than actual news, and I still worried how long Bentley could pay my salary if no one bought into his odd vision. I had a guarantee of two years, but bankruptcy was known to break guarantees.

"He will if he wants," Claire said, straightening a stack of flash fiction submissions on her desk. Claire had been working especially hard getting submissions for her section from college friends, professors, and literary journal readers, and trying to find enough pieces for every issue was difficult, even though the tide of submissions gathered pace as desperate English and creative writing majors sought publication anywhere. She'd managed to get university and college libraries to buy subscriptions to the paper and built buzz in the literary marketplace. Subscriptions started trickling in the first few weeks and then built to a steady stream.

"He's changed quite a bit from high school," I said.

"Has he really?" she asked. "Maybe he was always that way. You ought to know, Milt. People see a façade, project what they want onto it. From the first day I met him, he was always the same."

"He just seemed more social back then."

"Maybe he just felt pushed into making appearances."

"Do you think this'll work?" I asked. "This paper?"

"It might, it might not. Sometimes the point is to make a mark, even if you fall flat on your face. Think about what we're doing, Milt. It's a complete throwback to a different era. It's a last stand."

"People die in last stands, Claire."

"But they're also remembered when the smoke clears. We're getting noticed. One issue out the door, and people are noticing." Claire reached over, grabbed my arm and shook it. "Come on, Milt, stop being scared all the time and enjoy the ride. You've got a book out, you're being allowed to write anything you want, and you've got a platform all your own."

"Why'd he offer me this job in the first place?"

"You're local, you're a good writer, and you're a known commodity."

"He really doesn't know me, Claire. He spoke to me a few times in school. That's it."

"Maybe he knows you better than you think he does." She leaned back in her antique wooden office chair, filling the office with squeaks. "And maybe you're not as different from him as you think you are."

"Care to elaborate?"

She shook her head. "It's not my place to, Milt. All I can say is this: Remember when you were younger? Remember when people just looked at you and made a spot judgment without ever bothering to say 'Hello'? Don't make that same mistake with Bentley." Claire patted my arm, stood up, and pulled her pack of cigarettes from her front pocket. "I need a visit with Doctor Nic," she said, walking to the stairway, cellophane crinkling in her hand.

***

I stood in the entryway to the Blackbridge Police Station, waiting just inside the glass doors, looking at outdated Most Wanted posters hanging over the reception desk. The room smelled of old paint and floor wax, the lighting dim and jaundiced. The receptionist sat in the break room in the back eating lunch. She'd been the receptionist at the station for at least thirty years, and the age and inactivity had sagged her body and paled her skin. She popped open a soda can and began to dig into a bag of potato chips just purchased from the aging vending machine. She watched me lazily before turning to the romance novel in her hand while I waited.

The front doors opened, and Maria stepped in, pulling thick gloves off her hands.

"Should I call you Chief yet?" I asked.

"Better wait until the town council finalizes it next week," she said, unzipping her heavy black coat and unwrapping the gray scarf from around her neck. She walked past me and led me to what was once her father's office. "Did Jean have you wait out here?"

"Guess she didn't want me to rob the armory," I said.

"If only we had one." We walked into the office, which had been stripped clean of her father's belongings except a picture of the Lorenzo family on the desk, and the thickly painted gray walls were bare except for a calendar on its last month and a clock stuck on the last hour. "Have a seat," she said. I sat across from her, pulled out my digital recorder and weathered notepad.

"Big news," I said softly. "We haven't had a new chief in a while." Maria placed her coat and scarf on a coat rack behind the desk and sat down. Her black hair was draped over her shoulders, falling like dark ribbons. I pointed at it. "You going to let your hair grow again?"

"When I'm chief, I'll change the regulation that says I can't. No one'll care." She smoothed her hands over the desk. "My dad sat at this desk for over thirty years," she said. She examined the surface as if looking through a window.

"And how do you feel about that?"

"I feel like he's still here," she said.

"You'll be the youngest chief we've ever had."

"Yes."

"The first woman."

"Yes."

"Why d'you think no one else threw their name in the hat?" I asked.

"Crime here's pretty much nonexistent," she said. "Beat cops just drive around a bit, put in their hours, go home. But the chief puts in longer hours, does the paperwork, the budgeting."

"Why would you want to do that?"

"Because my father did," Maria said. "And, I guess—"

Maria looked away, fell silent, tapped the desk with one of her fingernails. I let her think.

"I wanted to get bumped up to major crimes for the state police," she said. "I was doing the whole highway patrol thing, handing out citations, arresting drunk drivers, and things just got uglier every month. I know there's ugliness out there, I'm not naïve. But the more I ran into it, the more I thought of being back home. I know Blackbridge was a different place for you, but for me it was the one place where I felt safe, where I felt part of something. Outside Blackbridge, people see us all as freaks, cut off from the rest of the county, our ghost stories, the whole deal."

"True," I said.

"At first it bothered me, but then it didn't. I took pride in it. Took pride in being from someplace so different, in being from a place where rapes and murders aren't an everyday occurrence."

"That you know of."

"I know, I know," she said. "I know bad things happen here, but it's not woven into our town identity like some places. I know your life was rough here, but for me, it was everything. Go ahead and laugh, but I missed the rivers and the hills and the vapors and the wisps. I missed driving down the quiet streets. I missed having neighbors wave to me, the weird shrines and voices that pop up out of nowhere, all of it." Maria took a deep breath. "I'd been thinking about leaving the state police for a few months, Milton, maybe going to law school—"

"But then this happened," I said.

"Then this happened. I don't want this to sound selfish or evil, Milton, but it's almost like Dad gave me a final gift. Like he knew the job would be mine if I ever wanted it. That ever happen to you?"

"Did what ever happen to me?'" I asked.

"Where things just kind of happen unexpectedly, and you find yourself where you want to be?"

"Or with someone you want to be with," I said.

"Exactly."

"Sure," I said. "I do."

***

When I got home, a hole had been dug into the front yard, the snow around it transformed into brown slush. Small footprints led to the front door where Liz had left her muddy boots and a shovel and a pick axe.

She was sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, looking out the window at the cemetery below.

I leaned down, kissed her head. "We could have waited for the weekend to start planting the tree," I said. "When I had the day off."

She shrugged, sipping absentmindedly and staring out the window. "Gives me something to do over the break."

I sat next to her and took off my coat. "I didn't think you'd wear that sweater," I said. She looked down at her garish red and green sweater. On the front was an off-kilter image of a green Christmas tree surrounded by overly bright gift boxes. We bought gag holiday sweaters for each other for Christmas, and I wasn't sure if I'd ever get around to wearing the blue and white sweater with the battery-powered Bethlehem star affixed to the front that she'd given me.

"It's warm enough," she said. "I wanted to get the tree planted before the new year, before everything changes."

I placed my gloves on the table. "Every new year feels the same to me," I said. "Nothing ever changes."

"Walk with me somewhere," she said, "placing the cup on the table."

"Where?"

"Anywhere. I just want to walk with you."

I thought about the long day and how I just wanted to sit in a chair for the evening, but I nodded. I slipped on my coat and gloves again, Liz slipped on hers, and we walked out the front door, leaving the kitchen and front porch lights ablaze.

***

We walked gloved hand in gloved hand to the west. The sidewalks were clear, the sun already below the hills, and dusk painted in the west with thin bands of pale orange and bright purple. Venus glared as twilight darkened, and house windows glowed with television blue and light bulb yellow while residents began locking their doors against the night. Sparse streetlights bathed us in dim orange, and we walked through their light pools quietly, listening to the lights hum as we passed.

"Did you have a good day?" Liz asked.

"It was a day like every other," I said. "The same."

"Is Maria the new chief yet?"

"The council will approve it next week," I said. "It's weird."

"What is?"

"It's been less than six years and everything's changed. Maria's a police chief, her brother's trying to repent to everyone in sight, and Bentley's back and off in his own little world. Usually wealthy eccentrics go off the deep end a little past middle age."

"And what about you?" she asked.

"Still living in the same house, driving the same car, living in the same town."

"You really think you're the same person? It sounds like they're all the same and that you're the one who's changed."

"I don't feel different."

"Who does, Darling? Sometimes people and things change but we never see it coming, or we do and don't recognize it. I don't think you're the same person you were in high school. You're still dealing with it, but you're not the same. People around here sense that. I know Maria did when I spoke to her."

"You two must have had quite a conversation," I said.

"She was surprised at how angry you still were, but she was also surprised how you said what you were feeling, how you didn't shrink away." We kept walking under the darkening sky, under the humming streetlights. "She really cares about you," Liz said.

"Maybe she feels she's got to atone for the family's sins."

"I don't think so."

"She doesn't even know me."

"After your book," Liz said, "I think she does. I think a lot of people do."

"If I ever get a parking ticket, maybe she'll care enough to rip it up."

"Maybe," Liz said. "Maybe." I put my arm around her and drew her close. We'd walked all the way to the town's northern edge, so we turned on Rook Street and stopped where Polaris Avenue continued north into the darkness of The Swamps. The treeline was already alive with glowing blue orbs that bounced like balloons tethered by strings.

"When I was a kid I thought about running away with those things," I said. "Stupid, isn't it? Wanting to run away with balls of light. But then I thought, 'Wait, they don't go anywhere, they just stay here, like they're looking for something they'll never find, never at peace, just spinning in place'. You wonder if they'll ever find whatever it is they're looking for, do whatever it is they want to do, then move on. Not much of an existence." I let out a cloud of breath and looked down at Liz, who stared up at me, her eyes wide. A smile crossed her face, and she pulled off a glove and ran her warm hand over my cold cheek.

"You know you're a good man," she whispered. "Wherever you are, I want you to know that." She stood on her toes, pulled me down, and kissed me lightly on the lips. "Thank you for walking with me."

I blinked at her, saying nothing, feeling my heart race as it did when I first met her.

"I wanted to walk under the stars with you," she said.

"I'm glad I could accommodate you." We walked again down Rook Street, turning on Taurus Street, past businesses closing up for the night. "What's your New Year's resolution?" I asked.

"I'm still working on it," she said, looking up the eastern hills at The Heights, at the old asylum, at the antenna farm that burned red pulsing stars into the night.

That weekend, Liz and I planted the blue spruce in the front yard, silver tinsel strands still hanging from some of the needles. We cleaned off the tinsel, filled the hole with mulch and soil, covered the base in plastic, and left it to stand in the approaching January cold.

As the clock struck twelve on New Year's Eve, the sounds of faraway fireworks thundered through the river gaps, and the cemetery glowed with the light of a procession of vapors that floated through the entrance gate single file, past our house, and through yards and empty lots to Cardinal Street, where they paced the pavement like sentinels before fading at dawn.

Liz never told me her resolution. The new year passed with my arms around her in bed, her breaths marked with quiet sighs. As I drifted to sleep, she whispered, "I'll always love you, Milt."

And I slept, dreaming of shadows on empty roads and soft whispering above my head.

***

"We'd make good friends, don't you think?" Liz asked.

I kept my eyes on the road, watching for black ice patches and for hungry deer that would bound across Lowland Road, but the pavement seemed dry and clear of wildlife, the early New Year's Day sky a bright robin-egg blue and ice cold. The week's weather was supposed to be clear all the way through the following Sunday.

"Sure," I said. "We were good friends before we dated, right?"

"We were," she said. "I think I was your only friend."

"Unless you count Mr. Bradbury."

"But you've got friends now. You've got Maria. Claire. Bentley."

"No, I don't think it's like that with them."

"Don't sell them short."

"I think I'm more Bentley's employee," I said. "I don't think he has friends anymore. Don't know if he ever had any. So strange," I said, "how I'd see people around him all the time in high school. Probably not one of them was a friend."

"When I'm gone"—she said, pausing before continuing—"when the semester starts, I hope you won't sit around the house waiting for me all the time. Do things with your friends, go places."

"In Blackbridge?" I asked. "Not a lot to do there when the sun goes down."

"You can sit with people anywhere. You can talk anywhere, have a drink anywhere. Life doesn't start and stop at bars or nightclubs. It starts and stops where you want it to." She blew fog against the passenger's side window, traced curves into it with her fingers, then wiped it clean. "I don't want you to be alone anymore," she said.

"I'm not alone."

"Life's got a lot of pain in it," she said. "You know better than I do. I don't want you facing that pain by yourself anymore. I don't want you falling into your old self when life throws you another curveball."

"I'll try not to, "I said, steering the car through the turns and twists.

"Make sure you don't."

We continued on in silence, road rumbling beneath us, bare trees reaching to the sky with bony fingers.

***

"Walk with me somewhere," she said.

It was early Sunday, a bit past six. I was looking out the kitchen window noticing the sky was brightening with only a thin hazy layer of gray that would probably burn off come midday. Liz sat at the table, already dressed in her black slacks and yellow sweater, her hair freshly washed and styled, her face soft and white. She'd not had her morning coffee and had awakened long before I did. I'd asked her why she was up so early, and she'd only kissed my lips, saying she'd had a restless night.

"Walk where?" I asked.

"Anywhere," she said, almost in a whisper. "I want to walk with you."

"Okay," I said, nodding and smiling. "We'll go for a walk."

We put on our scarves and our coats.

We walked out the front door and locked it behind us.

We stepped onto the street. Down Jay Street. Up Gemini Street. Onto Crow Street.

We stopped in front of Leed's.

She turned away from me. Then faced me again, eyes and nose reddening. She stepped back. Two steps. Three steps. Four. Five.

She reached up with her right hand, her fingers perfect as porcelain as I'd always remembered.

I stepped forward, reached out.

Then there was the searing burn, the blinding flash, the concussion in my chest, the whip crack and explosion in my ears, the darkness swallowing me as my feet lifted off the sidewalk, my last thought wondering if she had said something just as I'd reached out to her.

***

Days later, there was the hospital room.

Days later, there was the empty house.

Days later, the air, the wiring, and the circuitry came alive with Elizabeth's electricity.
Chapter Fourteen

The house was cold, drafts creeping from the open basement door. I stood in the living room, the loveseat, the chair, the television undisturbed. The coffee table had a stack of mail at its center.

"We brought in the mail," Maria said behind me. "The mailbox was full, and it was—it was kind of hanging out."

"Thank you," I whispered, limping slowly to the kitchen, my right leg and foot numb, damaged nerves firing and misfiring in my back and calf, random impulses like ants crawling over my skin. My head and body ached, the muscles knotty and twitching.

"Can you walk okay?" she asked, following closely.

"I think so," I said, my voice phlegmy and worn. All of the cupboards and the kitchen closet were open. I looked down the hallway and saw every door had been left opened.

"We searched every space. Every closet, every room, you name it. We kept an eye on the house in case if there was any activity, but aside from some flickering lights, nothing. You should get the wiring checked when you get a chance."

I stood beside the kitchen table, looked down at the chair where Liz sat before we'd walked out the door that Sunday morning. "Where is she?" I asked the air.

"I wish we knew." Maria walked around the table, leaned against the counter, and thrust her hands into her heavy coat's pockets. "I don't think she's with us anymore, Milton." She tilted her head, eyes looking deeply into mine. "I think she's . . . gone."

"Gone," I said.

"Gone, Milton." She sucked air through her teeth and let out a quick sentence: "I think she died, Milton. I'm sorry, but there's no other possibility."

I ran my hand over the white tablecloth. "You can't believe that."

"I do. I believe it was just one of those horrible things like tornadoes dropping out of the sky without warning or trains derailing in the middle of the night."

"Lightning out of a clear sky?" I said.

She sighed. "It was a bit . . . overcast."

"We're not meteorological experts, Maria, but we both know lightning doesn't come from that."

Maria pushed off the counter, walked over to me, and placed her hands on my shoulders. "I know, but there's just no other explanation, and I just don't know what else to do, Milton."

"Please find her," I whispered. Her face blurred from the tears in my eyes. Maria put her arms around and held me.

"We're trying, Milton."

I placed my left hand on the table to hold me up, and wrapped my right hand around Maria, my face sliding over her police coat's stiff nylon, cold air whirling through the kitchen, through my hair, and over my skin. She held me up as I cried in gasps. "Please find her," I said again. Maria only held me tighter as the house creaked and the kitchen light over our heads flickered.

***

After Maria had left and the sky darkened, I sat in the living room listening to breezes brush against the windows. I waited on the loveseat, staring at the front door.

I slowly slid onto my left side and lay my head on the armrest. I smelled Liz on the armrest and in the air. Her shampoo. Her perfume. As the painkillers saturated my bloodstream, my eyelids grew heavy, and I fell asleep, serenated by a low hum in the wall behind me.

Liz never walked through the front door that night.

***

I awoke with redness and creases on my face, my hair mussed on one side, my eyes sore and dry. I pushed myself off the armrest, and sharp pain crept through my neck to the base of my skull. I sat up, rubbed my neck and my eyes then sat looking at the floor. Sometime during the night I'd pushed the shoes off my feet and had pulled the throw blanket around my body. I wrapped the blanket tightly around my shoulders and blew air into my hands to warm them, then looked up.

The television was on, tuned to a dead channel, static and hum bars rolling over the screen. I looked for the remote control, grabbing at the pile of mail on the coffee table, searching the room with my swollen eyes and the loveseat cushions with my hands.

I got up and limped to the television. The remote control was sitting exactly where it had been left before Liz and I walked out that Sunday morning. I'd no memory of turning the television on, or of having watched anything in my painkiller stupor. I grabbed the thin, black remote control and pulled away dust that had covered it and the television in a single, unbroken layer. I stared at the dust, wiping at it before pressing the power button and turning the television off.

Upstairs, something whirred to life. Four soft musical tones drifted down the stairs.

The computer in the study had been turned on.

I dropped the remote on the television and walked up the stairs, my right leg tiring after only three steps. By the time I got to the study, the computer had completed its start-up routine, loading up its operating system, checking its internal memory. The study was otherwise empty, the room's closet left open by the police, the curtains drawn to a rising sun, Liz's books still sitting undisturbed on her bookshelf. The upstairs rooms were warmer than those downstairs, but I kept the throw blanket around my shoulders as I walked to the desk.

The computer stopped whirring, and its screen glowed brightly, hurting my eyes. I stepped up to the computer, and the air around me hummed like bees. The computer screen changed: a square window indicating the word processing program had been opened. The window transformed into a white field beneath a long ruler.

The word processing program stayed opened, a black line blinking at the top of the white virtual paper. The hum intensified around me, vibrating the walls. The overhead light began to glow, its intensity rising as if controlled by a dimmer switch until the hum stopped and the light bulb popped. I ducked, shielding my face with my hands.

The computer screen continued to glow.

I moved my hands from my face, looked around the room, then back at the computer.

In bold, black lettering, a line of text sat at the exact center of the white field:

Find me, Darling. Find me.

***

I stared at the computer screen for twenty minutes, brushed my hands over the keys then reached over for a pad of paper and a pen and wrote down the text and the time. The words floated on the screen, unmoving, unchanging. I touched the screen, then deleted the text.

I turned away from the computer but stopped when three electronic tones chimed behind me. I whirled around, looked at the screen again: Please find me.

I hobbled down the stairs, pains shooting up my right calf and thigh, my head and neck pounding with aches, and walked to the kitchen. I lifted the telephone handset to call Maria at the police station, put it to my ear, then immediately dropped it as the earpiece screamed with static and squeals. Crosstalk and chatter exploded over the line before fading into soft buzzing, and I picked up the handset again, rubbing my ear before carefully holding it several inches from my head. Through the line came a voice like wind over water:

"Darling, please find me. Look for me."

There was a sound like deep breathing followed by more static. The voice repeated again and again and again, louder and louder, a woman's voice that phased in and out like tunnel echoes.

"Find me."

I spoke into the mouthpiece, a whisper: "Liz?"

"Milton," she said, "Find me."

And the line went dead.

***

"She isn't dead, Maria."

I could hear Maria sighing through the phone, and I imagined her placing one of her hands over her eyes and shaking her head.

"Milton—" she started to say before I interrupted her, told her about the television, the humming in the walls, the exploding light bulb, the computer, the voice on the telephone. "Jesus," she said. "Milton, someone's playing a game with you."

"A game," I said.

"A game. Someone's messing with your house and your phone line. Remember I told you to get the wiring checked out?"

"Her voice was on the phone. Maria, I know Liz's voice. I heard it every day for the past few years."

"Someone could be imitating her, someone could have audio samples of her voice."

"Maria—"

"Wait," she said. "I'm not saying you're lying. I believe you. But you have to do something for me."

"What?" I said.

"Get in touch with the phone company. Have them put a trace on your line. Anytime you get one of those calls, you punch in a number, and the computer tells you what to do next. Takes seconds. They'll send the information to us, and I'll start up a report right now saying you called about harassing phone calls so I can get them a case number—"

"But—"

"Please, Milton, just do this. We need to make sure what it isn't before we try saying what it is. Put a trace on the line. I'll write up the police report. We'll trace the calls coming in, and if they continue, we'll file another report. Then I want you to call an electrician. Have them check the wiring. All that should tell us what I think it is."

"And if it isn't what you think it is?" I asked.

Maria was quiet for several seconds. "Then we're both going to have to figure out what the next step is."

The line was quiet except for the usual distant buzzing.

"Milton?" Maria asked.

"Yes?"

"Are you okay? I mean—"

"I know what you mean, Maria," I said while rubbing my forehead, closing my eyes, and shaking my head. "No, I'm not okay. I spent last night staring at the front door. Just staring at it, as if she was going to walk through any minute. Don't even remember what time I fell asleep. Then I wake up, and all this started happening. Stupid, right?"

"No, Milton," she said. "It's not stupid. It's just . . . disturbing."

***

After we hung up, I sat at the kitchen table. I thought about how, at this time, I'd usually be at the Banner, working on an essay or putting together a layout. I thought about how I'd look out at the town and spot my house at the southern edge and think of Liz's car pulling into the driveway in the evening, of Liz stepping through the front door, of Liz putting her backpack on the floor and kissing me, her lips cold from the night air. And when I'd think about her coming home, my heart would lift, my mouth would smile, and I'd continue my work, knowing what the end of the day would bring.

But now I sat at the kitchen table, the house hollow once again, the hallways and rooms silent, the air colder than it had ever been.

***

My right leg kept burning with nerve fire and numbness. My face felt swollen and ached when I opened my jaw. My back felt scraped by steel claws as it buckled and weakened.

But I walked into the bedroom closet, stared at her clothes hanging on the rack, smelled her scent in the air, and touched her shoes with my toes. I ran my hands over the sweaters she'd folded and placed on the shelving, felt soft and coarse wool, saw yellows and reds and blues and grays. I picked up a thick red cable knit sweater, held it to my nose and stood there, breathing her in.

I knelt down to the floor, my body shaking with the effort, and slid out a small gray box that I'd almost forgotten about. I opened it, pulled out the emergency hand-crank radio that had sat there for two years, turned the power crank, then turned it to the weather band.

The radio blared with a mechanized voice reading humidity, wind, and temperature readings at the Avoca airport. I stood up and left the closet, carrying the radio in one hand and the sweater in the other.

***

"And you hear her?" Claire asked, her green eyes narrowing. She sat on the living room chair, cautiously eyeing the static-filled television screen flickering to her right, and the emergency radio tuned to a quiet AM channel to her left.

"I think it started when I was in the hospital," I said, rubbing my eyes. I'd taken two painkillers before Claire had shown up at the front door with a large floral bouquet in her arms that looked like a yellow and green firework detonation erupting from her chest—another get well gift from the Banner and from Bentley. He'd not shown up with her, but that didn't surprise me. Bentley didn't seem to show up anywhere much those days. He attached a note about getting better and about contacting him as soon as I could.

"How so?" she asked.

"When I woke up. Got these weird phone calls, all filled with static and whispering and thumps. I heard the same voice on the line, but I think I was so drugged up I couldn't make the connection until I heard her today."

"What do you mean by thumps?" Claire reached for the cigarettes in the breast pocket of her denim shirt, but slid them back in place, probably remembering that she wasn't at home.

"Remember those thumping noises back when the phone company used mechanical relays? Something like that. Maybe a bit louder, but sort of the same."

"Maybe someone calling from outside the country where they still use them?" Claire asked.

"No idea," I said. I reached for the radio, placed it in my lap. "Maria says they're still searching for her, but nothing yet."

Claire shifted in the chair, crossed her legs, uncrossed them again, then took a deep breath. "Milton, you do know what happened, right? It was a lightning strike."

"That's what they say," I said.

"Milt, I saw the camera footage. That's what it was."

"Camera footage.

"You can see plain as day what happened—"

"You saw the camera footage?" I asked.

She nodded. :"I did. It's only a few seconds, but you can see everything. The two of you standing there, and then, boom, she's gone and you're through a window. You know it blew out most of the front windows of Leed's?"

"Can you get me the footage?"

Claire leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. "You think that's a good idea? You just got out of the hospital, Milt. You're still processing all this—"

"Please," I said.

She sighed. "Milton, I can get you the disc, that's not a problem, but I'll tell you what it shows. It shows you and Liz. It shows lightning hitting her. It shows you flying through a window and landing on the floor of Leed's Clothing Store, and that's it. Milt, she just—disappears. She didn't run because she couldn't, and there wasn't anything left behind. She was just. . . ." Claire stopped and stared at me, wanting me to fill in the blank.

"Vaporized," I said. Claire nodded. I put the radio on the coffee table. "You've known Bentley for a few years, Claire, right?" She nodded again. " You've been in Blackbridge for a little while now, know the town, what it's about. If Bent didn't tell you all about it, I know you do know enough. You see it and hear it everyday. You and Bentley up on The Heights, just the two of you, and all of us down here see the lights in the old hospital, the lights that circle your house and the whole hilltop at times. I know what you see and hear every night because I see and hear them too. Maybe you've heard those whispers behind your back when you walk into the Banner offices, or maybe you've heard those moans that seem to come from nowhere. You know the things that happen here, the things that could happen here, and one thing that could happen is that Liz is out there, or that she's in here"—I pointed to the wall behind me—"and she needs me to find her. She wants me to find her."

Claire sat back, crossed her arms. "Of course I've thought about that, Milton. We all have, but did you ever think that maybe that what you're hearing, if it's her voice, is an echo of her? Like the vapors? Something just locked in a loop. If that's the case, then she's still gone, Milton."

I looked down.

"You say you keep hearing the same thing, the same phrase," Claire said. "She keeps wanting you to find her. Okay, let's assume the voice is real, that she's pushing through the phones and the lights and the computers and the televisions and that somehow what she is now floating through wires and circuits and through the air. What then, Milton?"

I rubbed my arms, cold draft sweeping over my skin.

"I hate saying that she's gone, Milton. It's only been a few days since you found out what happened, but she is gone. If that's her voice on the phone, and if that's her sending messages through your computer, then that's not the Liz you remember."

"I'm going to find her," I said. "I'm going to find out what happened to her."

"Okay," Claire said, "I understand." She held out her hands as if trying to calm me. "I'll do what I can to help, Milt, and I'll ask Bent to do what he can to help, but do yourself a favor. Do what Maria told you to do. Make sure someone's not playing a game with you."

"Fine."

"And then I want you to think about something. Are you listening? Okay. What if you find the answers you're looking for? And what're you going to do if you don't like them?"

The emergency radio popped and buzzed. I reached over and turned up the volume.

"I'm going to find her," I said.

Claire nodded and whispered, "Okay."

***

Throughout the house, I tuned radios to quiet frequencies, I turned up telephone ringers, I kept the television tuned to static and hum bars, I left the computer on, the word processor open, the front porch light on.

I sat in the studio as the days went from yellow mornings to pale afternoons to purple twilights and black nights. I watched the road out front, the cemetery out back, the street that snaked up to The Heights. I limped around the yard with the emergency radio in my hand, cranking the battery to full capacity, aiming the fully extended antenna at random points until I heard ear-splitting crashes, and I'd stand in place, arms outstretched, volume turned high. I'd listen for her voice, her laugh. Sometimes there'd only be oceans of static, rising and falling like tides. Sometimes, the white noise would become silent, the speaker would hum, and she'd float over the frequency and into my ears.

"Where are you, Darling? Please find me."

***

I held the disc in my hands and stood in the doorway. The morning sky was becoming heavy with gray clouds, and the air smelled of late winter rain. I shivered from the cold as Claire stood on the porch in her gray barn coat.

"Would you like to come in?" I asked.

"No thanks," Claire said. "I—I'm getting back to the Banner."

"How're things there?"

"Busy. We're trying to cover your section as best we can," she said. "You left those two essays, and we ran those."

"I didn't finish the series," I said.

"We know, but we're running out of material."

"I have other essays. Quite a few. Up on the computer. I'll need to write the third essay, but I only have notes."

"We could sure use anything that you think'll work," Claire said. "Some asked us if you're going to write about, you know, Liz." Claire glanced at the disc in my hands.

"Haven't thought about it," I said.

"Okay, that's . . . fine." We stood in silence before Claire backed away and asked, "Do you need anything, Milt? You've only been at home for the past couple weeks. You need food or a ride anywhere?"

"I don't think so."

"Well . . . you call us if you do, all right?"

"Sure," I said, turning the disc in my hands. "Sure." I stepped back inside, closed the door, and walked past the hallway mirror on my way to the living room, not noticing that I'd been wearing the same clothes for an entire week.

***

I watched the disc repeatedly, the color security camera footage clear and sharp. I watched Liz and I walk to the front of Leed's, watched us stop, watched Liz turn away, then turn to me and back away. Watched her lift her hand and reach out to me, watched me reach out to her, watched the bright flash that blinded the camera and shook the camera mount and threw me through the front window, glass falling like hail. Watched my body roll over glass shards, my hair and skin smoking.

Watched the space where Liz had stood remain empty.

I replayed the footage again, slowed it when Liz turned, stopped it when she held up her hand. I walked over to the television and touched the video image of her hand with mine, static crackling under my fingertips. I sat on the floor, running my hand over her image, whispering her name. I moved my hand away, lifting dust from the screen. I pulled off my shirt and ran it over the screen, clearing the dust from her final image before I stopped and examined her hand.

Her palm faced outwards, not parallel to the ground to reach out to me.

Perpendicular, as if she was trying to stop me.

***

My bedside telephone rang that night, and my heart leapt from the sudden shock. I rolled over and lifted the handset to my ear.

The line buzzed and purred. There was electromechanical thumping, regular and steady, and then there was Liz's soft voice: "Darling, find me."

"Liz?" I whispered. The thumping sounded again, and the line fell quiet. "Liz?"

I don't remember how many times I spoke her name into the mouthpiece, but I eventually hung up and dialed the number the telephone company had given me to start a trace. Afterwards, I hung up and lay in bed, holding Liz's pillow to my face, breathing in the scent of her shampoo and perfume until dawn arrived, its deep red light painting every wall and corner.

I got up and walked to the computer in the study, leaving the bed sheets twisted and falling to the dusty floor. I sat in the chair that Liz had once filled during her late night sessions— her nose in a book, her pens scribbling madly in the margins—awakened the computer from sleep mode, and searched the networks for information about radio signals, electrical signals, electromagnetic fields, antennas, telephones, and lightning.
Chapter Fifteen

One of the first things I learned was that Slinkys made good antennas, and I remembered I still had one stuffed in a box deep in the darkness of the basement. I found it wedged between old bath towels next to the water heater, and I found the toolbox just behind it. I grabbed both and hauled them up the creaking basement steps.

Dad had an old soldering kit with a functioning iron and a roll of aging solder. I sat at the kitchen table that day, radios and televisions on in every room, filling the house with white noise, and practiced touching the filler to the iron, cleaning the iron tip, joining small circuits into workable meringue-like connections. At times, the iron would slip and singe my thumb and middle finger or would roll onto the table and burn holes through the cloth, but I continued touching tip to filler, filler to practice wire, wiping the tip on the cleaning pad, completing connection after connection, stopping only when the house lights flickered or when Liz danced over the channels. And when she stopped, I returned to the iron.

The emergency radio had a socket in the back into which an external antenna could be plugged, and in the radio's box was a small plastic packet with two small external antenna leads. I pulled one out, connected the Slinky to it then soldered them together. I strung the Slinky on the wall over the living room loveseat, secured it into place with heavy staples, and stretched one end of it down to the end table beside the loveseat. I inserted the end into the back of the radio, turned the crank until it was fully charged, and turned it on.

The speaker came alive with static and muted splashovers from nearby stations. I turned the dial to find a quiet spot, and her voice phased into shape. A whisper, a giggle, an echoing "Darling?" bouncing in the ether.

I sat on the loveseat, leaned close to the radio, and held the speaker against my ear as she called to me repeatedly, telling me to find her. I spoke into the speaker, asked it questions, asked it to speak to me, but her voice would fade in and out, always saying the same thing like a repeating beacon.

All night I turned the radio crank, and I sat in the darkened living room, leaving only to find and eat whatever food was in the refrigerator, leaving the plates in the sink or on the table. As I began to doze at midnight, I concluded a small hand-crank emergency radio wouldn't be of much help. I needed a real radio, real antennas, real tools to locate, fix, and find her. Real tools to bring her back to me.

***

Claire hunched over the steering wheel of her too-large silver sport utility vehicle and shot quick glances at me. "You're not eating, are you?" she said as the vehicle bounced over a pothole in Gemini Street. The homes flew past in a drab-colored blur, taking on a foreign quality that always happens when you take in details passively.

"I'm eating," I said, looking in the passenger-side mirror. I'd only slipped on a pair of worn black jeans and an old blue Coxton College sweatshirt before calling Claire to see if she could give me a quick ride somewhere. My face was pale, my hair washed but uncombed, my eyes red and sunken. In my thin gray coat I had a pocket filled with folded paper from information I'd pulled off various computer networks: radio models, types, price ranges. I'd found one and called ahead to Blackbridge Radio and Electronics to see if they had one or one like it in stock.

Claire shifted her glance from me to the road ahead, then back to me. "You feeling okay, physically?"

"I can walk better. My head hurts, my back hurts."

"And why're we going to the radio shop, or should I not ask?"

"I need to get something.

"I gather that. Wouldn't happen to be a big shortwave or ham radio, would it?" When I glanced at her, she nodded. "We kind of figured that."

"'We'?"

"Me and Bent. When he heard about what you told me, he knew right off the bat what you were going to do. Weird. He said you were probably stringing the house with wires right now."

I turned away to watch the street blur again.

"You are, aren't you? Jesus, Milt." The vehicle rumbled over snow-loosed pavement and road seams. "Any more phone calls?" she asked.

"I get them every day. Six, seven times a day. I call the trace number, but haven't heard anything from the police so far."

"The voice . . . still saying the same thing?"

"Over and over."

"This sounds wrong, Milt. Wrong as in someone's up to something. Bent even says you need to stop now. He's worried you'll get sucked into this and never come out."

"I didn't know he was an expert on these things," I said.

"He says you'll buy radios and antennas and you'll get lost in your own little obsessive world."

"If he's worried I won't have time to write for him," I said, "he doesn't have to. I'm finishing up new pieces for him. I have several pieces that only need some editing. I'll send them when they're done."

"I don't think he's worried about that," Claire said as we stopped at an intersection. "It's like he's been detailing every little thing that's going to happen to you next, saying it over and over. And when he starts talking about it, well. . . ."

"Well what?"

Claire sighed. "It's like he gets lost in his own little world." She turned the vehicle onto Crow Street and parked across the street from the electronics store. She turned off the engine, and I stared at Leed's Clothing Store a couple of buildings down the street. I opened the door, stepped onto the sidewalk, and limped to Leed's, Claire following at a distance.

Springwear lined the windows, light jackets and shirts. Inside, a sign announced thirty percent off winter clothing, and dark figures moved about until one noticed me and pointed. The figures stopped, watching me stand on the sidewalk. The new thick glass reflected my pale face and the street behind me. Claire stood close to the curb, watching with sad eyes.

The spot where Liz had stood was bare, gray concrete. No sign of scorch marks, no gouges, no scrapes, only thin weathered cracks and silica sparkling in the morning sun like earth-bound stars. No marks to show where she'd been or to show where she held out a hand to me and mouthed something before everything became white.

***

I dropped the box on the kitchen table and cut it open with a steak knife. Claire offered to carry in the large bag holding the cable and wire spools, and she pulled out a chair and carefully laid the bag on it. As I pulled out packing materials and tossed them onto the floor, Claire looked around at the plates in the sink and on the table, the soldering iron and solder wire pushed to one side of the table, the snips of wiring on the floor, the pad next to the telephone marked with the times of each telephone call, the countertop AM/FM radio hissing static on an open channel, then back at me.

"How do you know what channel to turn to?" she asked. "You know, to hear her."

"I don't," I said. "She just comes through. Like she knows what frequency the radio's on or what channel the TV's tuned to, or when the computer's on. Just turn it to a quiet frequency and eventually she comes through, or she calls."

"When does she speak?"

"All day, all night. I can't find a pattern." Claire walked around the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

"Milt, there's almost nothing in here," she said.

"I've got food in the cupboards," I said, pulling the large, black radio out of the box. I placed it on the table and ran my hand over its sleek surface, its gray digital keypads, and digital waterfall readout. As I examined the various antenna sockets in the back, Claire made her way through the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards.

"I don't think a couple of boxes of rice and a few cans of soup are going to hold you over, Milt."

"I'll be fine," I said, thinking for a few seconds. "I'll need to put it in the study. Maybe I can run the antenna to the roof easier from there."

"You're going on the roof," she said. "In winter."

"Not today."

The countertop radio squealed and cut the air with blasts of static. Claire jumped, placed her right hand over her chest.

"Holy hell, Milt. You have the volume turned up all the way?"

"Probably just random—" I began to say before stopping and listening as the frequency fell silent. Out of the silence, Liz's voice whirled like mist carried on breeze, slight, almost indiscernible from the fading background noise. I walked from the table to the countertop radio. Liz whispered words I couldn't understand, laughed softly then spoke: "Darling. Find me. . . ."

Claire and I leaned into the radio, and I reached over and pulled it closer as Liz repeated Find me, the voice soft and whispery. I stared at the radio while Claire fumbled around in her pockets. She pulled out her cell phone, activated the voice memo feature, and held it up to the speaker. On the cell phone's screen, the voice registered as peaks and troughs on a sine wave display, every word spiking high, every silence dropping low. We listened to the voice, watched the display, Liz's voice filling the room.

"My God," Claire whispered.

"She speaks only when she wants to," I said. "She's always been that way."

***

After Claire had left with her cell phone in her hand, I took the new radio up to the study and realized there wouldn't be enough room on the desk for both it and the computer. I stood in the center of the room, listening to the steady Blackbridge breeze blow against the side of the house, listening to the heater kick on with a buzz and a thump. I stared at Liz's bookcase lined with her textbooks and decided to move the bookcase next to the desk and place the radio on a lower shelf.

I pulled at a few of the books and bent down to place them in a corner, but nerve shock radiated down my right leg, and I dropped them in a disordered pile. I bent down to stack them neatly, and picked up a book titled Quantum Optics. I opened it, wanting to run my hands over her neat block writing, feel the indentation of pen in paper.

Instead, I saw the book's entire inside cover covered with ink-drawn clouds. Blue clouds. Black clouds. Thin cirrus, high-piled nimbus. Some quick sketched, some carefully crosshatched and shaded. I turned the page.

Clouds.

Turned the page.

Clouds.

Every space was cluttered with drawings of clouds. Page after page, chapter after chapter. No text, no notes, no formulas or silly doodles, only clouds. I picked up a book titled Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics and opened it.

Clouds. Every page, every available space strewn with ink and pencil cloudscape.

I opened every book on the floor, pulled every book off the bookcase, opened it, placed it on the floor. After thirty minutes, I stood again at the center of the room surrounded by open textbooks, all filled with hundreds of clouds.

***

I counted the seconds as the kitchen clock struck nine in the morning, and I picked up the telephone and dialed. The night had been quiet except for soft moans from the cemetery, but I'd not slept more than two hours. I'd spent the night at the center of Liz's cloudscape, flipping through books again and again, and I'd sat at the desk looking down at the blotter she'd filled with clouds.

The line clicked. "Hello?" His voice sounded rougher, but I was happy to hear it again.

"Mr. Bradbury?" I said.

"Yes?" he said, almost shouting.

"This is Milton Conroy," I said, pointing to myself as if he could see me. "I was—"

"Hello, Milton, how are you? he boomed."

"I'm—I'm okay."

He took a deep breath. "I heard about your wife. My God, struck down out of nowhere—"

"It's been . . . difficult."

"I can imagine, Milton. I was sorry to hear the news. If there's anything you need."

I cleared my throat. "There is one thing. I . . . I hate to ask, but I didn't know who could help me. So, could you, you know, help me on one little thing?"

"Of course," he said.

"It may not be completely legal."

"I'm not robbing a liquor store for you, Milton."

I smiled. "No, no," I said, shaking my head. I told him about Liz's single graduate semester, how she consistently said she was too busy to return calls, how she never mentioned research jobs or even mentioned much about her classes. I told him about the books in the study, the clouds on the blotter, the clouds on the floor. "I need to know what she was taking last semester. I can't get access to her academic records just now, but if you could just take a look—"

"I have a few favors to call in in the registrar's office," he said. "Give me her student number, and I'll run it through."

"Thank you."

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

"I don't know what to think, Mr. Bradbury. I don't know if she was having a breakdown or she was just hiding something all along."

"You think suicide? But I heard it was lightning."

"I guess," I said—not mentioning her voice in the telephone, on the radio, through the wires—"I guess I just need to know what she was really doing."

***

When I hung up, I ran my hands over my face, the unshaved hair scraping against my palms, then ran them through my hair, felt the oily strands flow thickly between my fingers. I sat at the kitchen table, packing materials strewn all over the floor, wire and solder beads and burns all over the tablecloth, dishes peeking above the sink top. The countertop radio hissed, and the refrigerator rattled as sunlight burst through the kitchen window and reflected off dust that swirled like falling snow.

***

Though the sky was clear blue, morning wind raked the roof and snapped at the copper wire as I threaded it over the roof from the study window to a plastic sewer ventilation pipe at the rear of the house. The gray shingles were free of ice but were also brittle, my feet pulling away small white pebbles from their surface. I steadied my way over the apex, sometimes lowering myself to my knees and crawling across the roof when my right leg burned. I made it to the plastic pipe, drilled two small holes two inches from its top, through which I threaded the wire. I passed the wire through a cylindrical white ceramic insulator, then dropped the remaining length of the wire to the ground.

I made my way back to the study window, following the wire that was now tautly strung two feet above the roof's apex. It sliced the wind with a low whistle as it vibrated. I crawled the remaining few feet to the window and looked down at the road where Maria Lorenzo stood next to her patrol car, looking up and waving.

"Bit early in the year to be stringing up Christmas lights, Milton," she said.

I slipped into the window and made my way downstairs, my feet kicking aside opened boxes and wire spools. Before I opened the front door, I noticed I was still wearing my bathrobe over my black T-shirt and jeans. I whipped off the robe and threw it onto the chair.

"Do your doctors know you're walking over rooftops?" Maria asked as I opened the door.

I motioned for her to come in. She pulled off her cap, and it seemed her hair had grown another two inches since the last time I saw her. She stopped as soon as she walked in and surveyed the room. "The doctors said I couldn't drive for a month or lift anything heavier than fifteen pounds," I said. "They didn't say I couldn't run antennas over the roof."

"I don't think those were the only restrictions, Milt. She pulled out a small manila envelope from her coat pocket. Where'd all the boxes come from?"

"Just ordered a few things," I said, putting my hands in my pockets. I led her to the kitchen where we sat at the table, the coffeemaker burbling and gasping as it brewed.

Maria draped her coat over a chair and sat down. "When're you heading back to work?"

"I am working," I said. "From, you know, home. I send them my essays over the network, they lay them out. It's working okay so far." I didn't tell her that my essays were old ones that were just in need of revising. I'd not written much new work since arriving home.

"That's good, Milt, that's good." Her eyes darted around the kitchen, taking in the unwashed dishes, the unwashed dishtowels, the dust that formed layers on the countertop below the window. She opened the envelope and pulled out a few sheets of white paper. "The phone company gave us a list of all the times you initiated a trace in the past month," she said. "Over three hundred phone traces." She ran her finger down the papers, flipping from one page to the next before she placed the paper on the table and clasped her hands together. "Not one successful trace, Milt."

I rubbed my eyes. "So they're saying no one called and that I'm wasting their time."

"Not saying that at all," Maria said. "They saw someone using the lines to call you. But they don't know where they came from. I called them, asked if someone maybe could be using computer software to disguise numbers and locations, and they said it's possible but that that wasn't what was happening."

I leaned forward, put my hands on the table. "So what is happening?"

"They said they came out to your house, checked the circuits going in and out, everything looked fine, nothing physically attached to your lines. They checked the neighborhood phone cable boxes, everything looked fine. They kept checking every physical link. Seems they were really interested in your case, Milton. Prank phone calls are one thing. Messing with phone company hardware is another."

I said nothing, only motioned for her to continue.

"They found the calls weren't coming in through the phone lines from outside Blackbridge, she said. They were originating from two of their microwave relay antennas. One on the western hills on the other side of the Susquehanna, one on the eastern hills above The Heights."

"They're saying someone bounced the calls off them?" I asked.

"No," she said. "They're saying that that's where the calls originated from. They had workers check the antennas, all the hardware, even had a couple workers watch them overnight to see if someone was physically breaking in and somehow getting calls to you. They saw no one, even when the calls were being made to your house."

I nodded. "So what do you think, Maria?"

"I don't know, Milt. In this town, strange things happen every day. When I make the late night or early morning patrols, I see the vapors and the wisps around every corner and tree, just wandering by themselves. I hear the whispers when I'm sitting in my car drinking coffee. Sometimes I think I hear my dad walking the hallways at night. Sometimes I drive down one street then drive by an hour later and see that someone's put up one of those roadside shrines all lit up with candles." Maria put her elbows on the table and her hands under her chin. "And this morning I drove down your street and saw a guy in his bathrobe stringing a wire on his roof."

"I still have to ground it," I said.

"My point is, is that I can't make sense of half the things I see. Growing up here, I just accepted it as part of life in this town, and now that I'm faced with these things every day, I've no idea what to think about any of it."

"She wants me to find her."

Maria nodded. "Okay," she said, "let's assume you're right, that she's still out there in one form or another, let's ask ourselves what she might want. We, and it's still so weird for me to be saying this, think she may have been, I don't know, turned into something that allows her to communicate through every electrical device. It happened suddenly, without warning. You two go for a walk, one of you comes home."

"I don't think it was sudden," I said.

"No?"

"Let me show you something."

***

We stood in the center of the study, the air still cold from the window having been opened. I'd moved the bookcase next to the desk, and on it I placed the desktop shortwave receiver, an antenna amplifier, and an antenna switch. On the desk, the computer screen glowed white, the word processor open, lines of "Please find me, Darling" filling the screen. Maria stared at the floor and spun slowly in place. "Jesus, Milton," she said. "What is this?"

I pointed to the still-opened books on the floor, their ink clouds filling half the room. "Every book that she was supposed to be using in grad school is filled with this, page after page," I said. "The blotter on the desk, same thing. Maria stepped over the books and looked at the clouds covering the blotter. About three weeks ago I called someone up at Coxton College. I know it's not legal, but I asked him if he could tell me what courses Liz had been taking in her first graduate semester."

"And?"

"And Liz wasn't enrolled. She got her bachelor's degree, then nothing. She wasn't working, she wasn't doing research, she wasn't going to class, nothing. Everything I thought she was doing she wasn't."

Maria puffed air from her mouth, looked down at the books again, pulling at her hat in her hands.

"For months," I said, "Liz was disappearing every night, going somewhere, coming home late, then sitting in this room for hours drawing clouds. That's it."

"Any idea where she was going?" Maria asked.

I shook my head. "No, none." I leaned against the wall. "You know, I used to have these dreams. I thought they were dreams, anyway, but now I'm not so sure. Used to dream that I'd see her standing in front of the windows in the middle of the night. She'd run her fingers over the glass and this blue glow, like welding sparks would come out of her fingertips. I'd dream about seeing this blue flashing light coming from under this door when she was in here by herself," I said, pointing to the study door. I took in a deep breath and exhaled. "I used to have really vivid dreams as a kid. They'd get really bad when I was sick. Then, after a while, I stopped remembering my dreams, at least until I met Liz, and then I thought I was remembering every dream that she was in.

"My first big story at the college paper was when I saw this bright light on a hillside. Just had to go see what that light was. To this day, I still don't know why. I just drove up there the next day. It was this porch light, brighter than it should have been."

Maria rolled her tongue in her mouth as she seemed to think to herself. I remembered the day she tried to help me up off the sidewalk when I gathered my things off the ground and ran home. She stood where my bed once was, where I sat that evening with an ice pack on my head in the dark.

"A few days after the story gets published and after a hell storm breaks out, I get this letter from a student in the physics program named Elizabeth thanking me for my article. Interesting, isn't it?"

"What is?" Maria asked.

"How electricity brought her into my life and then took her out of it."

"I don't know," Maria said. "It looks like it's still keeping her in it, for better or worse."

***

The calls continued that night, Liz's laughter and whispers filling my ears.

I'd strung the dipole antenna into the study, had grounded it to a copper pipe in the backyard. I began to construct a shorter indoor antenna, ringing it around the study and securing it with wall staples. I surveyed the roof for another antenna, a longer dipole that would stretch off the roof and into the side yard and began to measure for a third antenna radiating from the southern end of the house. With each length of wire, her voice became clearer, sharper. She blared over the local radio station and crowded out frequency after frequency.

At night I slept in the study among the books, the warmth from the electronics rippling over me in waves. My hypnagogia was filled with her laugh and whispers, and my dreams were black and empty. I'd awake to the sounds of cable and amplifier hum, to the telephone ringing with the same voice and the same message:

"Find me, please, Darling. Find me."
Chapter Sixteen

The knock at the front door was slow and soft. Three raps, pause, three raps.

I opened it and was greeted by Bentley Burke standing at the edge of the porch dressed in a long gray overcoat, white shirt, black tie, black slacks, black shoes. His usual palette.

"I have another essay on the way," I said.

He nodded. "Oh," he said. "That's good." He was rubbing his hands together, his eyes wandering as if searching the porch for something.

"You want to come in?" I asked. He nodded again, slowly stepped forward, and entered the living room. "It's," I said, "kind of a mess." He looked at the empty boxes piled in the corner, the Slinky antenna, the wires stapled and nailed to the walls, the new antenna amplifier atop the television. "I've been busy with . . . things."

"Yes, yes," he said softly. "I see." He stood, fidgeting with his gloves.

"You want to take off your coat?" I asked. "Maybe sit down?" I pulled a pile of plastic packing materials off the living room chair and placed it on the pile of boxes. He thanked me, then sat down. I sat on the loveseat across from him. "Can I get you something?" I asked, knowing all I had to offer were coffee and water.

He shook his head. "I see you have a lot of antennas on the roof now. Four?"

"Five," I said, pointing to the television.

"Antenna amplifier," he said, then pointed to the large book now on the coffee table. "The Lightning Field. Ever been there?"

I'd ordered the book the week before, a hardcover picture book dedicated to the large land artwork in New Mexico, on its cover a picture of the artwork's grid of four-hundred stainless steel poles. On the desert horizon, a lightning bolt stabbed at the earth. "No," I said.

"I have," he said. "You know they make you stay there all day? You stay overnight, you watch the sun rise overhead, the poles making their shadows on the ground, the colors in the sky and in the desert. Went there five times, can you believe that?"

"I didn't think you were a big art fan."

"I'm not. Wasn't my idea. My dad's idea. You never met my dad. No, most people haven't. He was . . . he was okay as far as fathers go. I didn't have the . . . situation . . . that you had to deal with. He wasn't an art fan, either. Real estate, bonds, that sort of thing. Mostly real estate."

"I never—"

"He was really locked into real estate," Bentley continued. "Loved to visit all the family holdings from here to Philly. "And when he wasn't visiting those, he really liked checking to see how his real estate investment trusts were doing. The man liked real estate."

I waited until he paused. "Haven't seen Claire in a few weeks," I said.

"I know," he said. "She's fine. She's always fine. She's stronger than both of us, you know." Bentley shoved his gloves in his coat pocket and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees and aiming his eyes at the floor. "I asked her not to come over here," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Because she can't help you."

"Help me?"

"Help you." He looked up, his dark eyes sunken, almost empty. "My father—no, my mother. You heard about my mother?"

I searched my memory. "I heard she'd died in a boating accident. Long time ago, right?"

"Long time ago," he said. "Not a boating accident." Bentley looked around the room, peered out to the kitchen. "Looks like the sink's piled up," he said. I stared at him, folded my arms. "You got the antennas strung in the kitchen, too."

"If you're here to critique my housekeeping—"

"Last time I came here," he said. "Remember? Your house was so clean. You can string antenna wire on the roof but can't wash dishes."

"Maybe I should hire a maid, Mister Burke?" I said, my voice rising. "Tell me, just why are you here?"

"Liz disappeared, what, two months ago?" he asked. "Maybe a bit longer?"

"About."

Bentley stood up and walked to the television. "Does she come through the television as well?" I said nothing, only watched him tap his fingers on the small black antenna amplifier box. "My mom," he said, "she mostly came through the television." He turned to me. "My mother?" He pointed to the ceiling. "She's out there somewhere too. No boating accident, no death."

He bent down and whispered in my face: "Lightning."

***

As I said, my father was . . . okay. A decent man. He took care of us. Took care of the family fortune, even expanded it. We never wanted, never had to worry about the coal mines closing or the railyards shutting down. Had enough to live forever. Still do. Dad kept his eye on all that, all the ledgers, the properties, very analytical. They say I picked that up from him. I don't know about that. I hate analytical things. I don't want to look at a spreadsheet or a ledger or a currency exchange chart ever again.

But for Dad, well, he loved it. He could shift money from Column A to Column C and wind up with a fifteen-percent profit in Column E. He showed me how it was done, how to watch for good prices and how to watch out for false prices. Every day it was a new lesson. See? This is a production possibility curve and this is what it means. See? This is what Eurodollars are.

Mom was there, in the house and in our lives. She was a good mother, but sometimes she was like the air, substantial, but . . . not. She sat in the windows all the time looking out at Blackbridge. The town looks like circuitry up there, you know? A grid with light that never seems to really light anything. When the mental hospital was open, she'd sit next to the windows facing it and throw them open wide. Sometimes you could hear the patients in there. I was a kid when they closed the place, but I still remember the weird things I'd hear, and I'd plug up my ears with my fingers or cover my head with a pillow. Mom would just say, Honey they can't hurt you. They're sick, Honey. The things that can hurt you? They're not out there. They're in here, and she'd point to my head and my heart.

We didn't have maids or cooks. Mom never wanted other people in the house except friends, but we really didn't have friends. None that I remember. Dad would take us to these investor parties in Scranton or Pittsburgh or New York City. Big, fancy parties. Mom would be all dolled up, I'd be in a tux—Dad, too. We'd sit there, and Dad would talk about cash flows, revenues, stuff like that. Mom and I'd sit off to the side, listening, eating, and drinking whatever was there, and then we'd come back to Blackbridge, and she'd sit by the windows, all quiet.

There were never fights in the house. No tension, either, just routine. Dad got up, went to work, came home. Mom got up, made her rounds through the house, got me off to school, then stayed in the house. Sometimes she'd come down from The Heights, maybe shop at one of the stores. People thought she was spooky because she didn't say much, but she wasn't spooky. She just thought a lot to herself, her head just filled with all kinds of ideas. I'd ask her what she was thinking about when she looked out the windows, and she'd just say, Everything, Honey.

It was like that for years. Sometimes Mom and Dad would talk behind closed doors about this and that. No shouts, no threats, just discussion. Dad's voice even and steady as if he was at a shareholder's conference, Mom's voice quiet and a bit sing-songy. Years and years of quiet and routine. I guess, considering, it was fine. We had everything we needed, right?

One summer—I was in seventh grade then—Mom wanted to take a boat trip. A Chesapeake Bay boat trip. No, a yacht trip. She was from Maryland, you know? She used to tell me about riding on boats all up and down the Virginia and Maryland coasts on the bay. My mom had this long red hair, like Claire, and all these freckles. She said she got so many freckles from the water and the sun off the Chesapeake. She said she'd dreamt of taking a skipjack and sailing off into the sunset when she was a little girl.

Dad hemmed and hawed but eventually took us down to the bay for a few weeks. Mom showed me the lighthouses and the inlets and the sunsets that lit the water like fire. She fed me crab and oysters, held my hand while we walked over these shorelines that had these tall grasses that reached my chin.

Take me sailing, she'd say to my dad, and he did. Rented a small crew and a yacht that sliced through waves so smoothly that after a while you'd think the waves were moving out of the way just for us. You ever see the stars from the deck of a boat, Milton? It's like floating in space. Lie on that deck long enough, and you're with the stars. Mom pointed out the constellations, and then she started saying strange things. Things about how when I look at them I might see her someday. I just thought it was Mom being back in her element on the bay.

Then, one day, Dad says it's time to go home, and Mom says nothing, just one thing: Take me sailing. One more time.

And he did.

The sky was clear, blue with small clouds that looked like little drops of whipped cream. Never saw skies like that, Milton. You and me? We're used to the Blackbridge sky, that weird darkness it has, but not Mom. From the moment we cast off to the moment we were halfway across the bay, Mom held my hand and sat beside me on that wooden deck, her legs dangling off the side, water spraying against her feet. And she smiled at the sun the whole time. I thought her hair was catching fire in the light, that her freckles were multiplying and darkening.

Then, she stood up and kissed me on both my cheeks. She said, You be a good boy, Honey. You look at those stars and you think of me. And I watched her walk to the bow, her feet bare, her hair blowing in the wind. She stared out at the water, then turned to me. Dad was at the stern, flipping through a book. He was tapping his foot. I remember that. That tap-tap-tap. Always did it when he was impatient.

Mom smiled, blew me a kiss, and then there was this bright light, this explosion, this sound like a belt snapping. These fingers of electricity reached out and touched every metal part of the boat. Some hit the water. I'd never seen lightning hit water. Pieces of wood blew back over us, these small, sharp splinters. I grabbed onto this rope as the boat took this deep dip forward then bounced back up. We were all spread out on the deck, people screaming and shouting, Dad running over and grabbing me and pulling me away from the edge of the deck. The pulpit was glowing this cherry red and was scorched black. The jib was flapping, half of it shredded. The place where my mom stood? Just a narrow hole in the deck, maybe no wider than a silver dollar, but all around it, burn marks, splinters, the smell of burning wood. There was no damage to the hull, and we didn't take on any water, but we were floating in dead circles as the crew ran around trying to fix the jib, one of them screaming into the radio, calling for the Coast Guard.

And my dad . . . my dad's running all over the boat, screaming my mom's name, looking over the sides. He dived into the water, tried to look into that deep blue all around us. A crewman jumped in after him, and they kept shouting Mom's name, kept dunking themselves under the water, but they found nothing.

The Coast Guard pulled up about twenty minutes later. They called in boats. They called in helicopters. They laid out a grid and searched all afternoon and all night for her. Nothing, Milton, absolutely nothing. Just a small hole in the deck of a yacht, some burned wood and metal, some burned sail fabric, and nothing else. In a second she was gone. There were no explosives on that boat, no gas, nothing combustible. In the area of the bow where she stood, nothing.

Dad knew what it was. We both did. We both saw the electrical fingers reaching out and stabbing at the metal on the boat and at the Chesapeake. We knew it was lightning, Milton. Lightning from a clear, blue sky.

We stayed near the bay until the end of the summer, Dad renting this condo until I had to come back to town for school. I thought he'd send me off to Scranton Prep or some other private school, but he kept me in Blackbridge Middle, kept me close to home. Every weekend he'd make a trip to the Chesapeake Bay and have a boat take him out to the same coordinates where Mom vanished, like he thought the sky would open and she'd drop right on the deck as if nothing happened. Week after week he'd head to the bay, and week after week he'd come home and lock himself up in the house.

One day, Dad and I were sitting in the living room. We had the television on. It was a Monday in November, I know that. We had a football game on. We're just sitting, watching the screen, Dad just staring straight ahead. Everyone was saying how Mom fell overboard or how Mom was blown up by something, but he knew—we both knew—that that's not what happened. And we let what we knew fester between us, this strange unspoken thing that was like a glacier moving between us, slow and silent.

But we were sitting in that living room watching that television, and then the station dropped out, like someone pulling the plug. Just static like over on your television right now. There's just this static, and then there's this voice, quiet and whispery, like someone telling a secret joke to someone. This voice gets louder and louder, and then it starts talking to us. This woman's voice that said, Honey, are you thinking of me when you look at the stars?

That voice faded in and out, but we could tell whose it was. We could tell it was Mom.

Dad unplugged the television thinking it was some sick joke, but it kept happening. All the televisions in the house, day and night, whether there was a program on or not. Mom's voice asking if I'm thinking of her over and over. We'd unplug the televisions, and they'd turn on again, electricity from out of nowhere. When we walked past televisions in stores, she'd break through, when the house was quiet at night she'd break through. She came through whenever she wanted.

Sometimes Dad would shout at the screens, telling whomever it was to knock it off. Sometimes he'd just sit and listen. He called the police, friends in the electronics and broadcasting business, and none of them could find anything. We were getting transmissions from everywhere, but nowhere. Some guys came to the house with vans full of equipment trying to pinpoint the signal, but the broadcasts shifted position in seconds, one moment from the east, the next from the south, the next moment from inside the house. Months went by of this. Lots of questions, no answers.

Dad would start throwing things at the televisions, screaming at the top of his lungs, kicking at the screens, sometimes putting his feet through them. There would be months of quiet, then Mom would break through again for days, weeks on end. Dad stopped telling the voice to stop and started asking the voice why Mom left. Started telling it that he gave her everything she needed, everything she ever wanted. Started saying things like, You're a helluva' mother walking away like you did. And she'd pause, maybe there'd be a soft laugh or something that sounded like a sigh, and she'd start talking again, just to me. Honey this and Honey that.

Dad had one-way conversations with the screens, talking at them, accusing Mom of cowardice because the voice never responded to a single question. Me? I didn't say anything. Just stared at the televisions, or covered my ears and stared out the window, stared at those damned wisps that would empty out of the old asylum like kids going home for the day. Dad wanted answers and wasn't getting any. I wanted peace, and Mom wouldn't give me any.

Dad started having all these television antennas installed. More sensitivity for better reception. He placed a television in every room, kept them tuned to dead channels, you know, like what you're doing with your television, Milton. If I heard Mom speaking through one I was to let him know so he could run over to it and yell at it or demand answers. Sometimes he'd say That's it, I've had enough, and he'd start unplugging the televisions and say he was going to get rid of them, but the next day, he'd plug them in again.

My room? You know what he did to my bedroom? Had the walls lined with metal sheeting, floors, walls, ceiling. Wanted to make a Faraday cage so nothing electronic could get through. He wanted to do it to the whole house, or that's what he said, but every hour he'd be back to listening to Mom through the television speakers.

He started taking me to the Lightning Field in New Mexico, to Florida during the stormy seasons, even to Venezuela, the Catatumbo River right where it empties into this big lake that all these rivers feed into. Every night, we'd be out on the lake, the sky exploding with lightning. Non-stop. Blue and green and purple lightning. Never seen anything like it before or since. Dad would stand on the deck of the boat soaked with sweat from the humidity, and he'd stare at the lightning with his fists all balled up like he was challenging it to a fight.

That was my life for, what, maybe five years. Televisions, lightning, electricity, Dad getting quieter and quieter, even seeming to get smaller.

One summer we took another trip to the Lightning Field. Dad looked worn out by then, tired all the time. He stopped paying much attention to the family money, just handed it off to advisors who put everything on auto-pilot while Dad screamed at the televisions or at the late summer storms. He took me on this trip, and I remember how the sky looked when we flew into New Mexico. It had this gray, metallic look to it. We drove out there, just he and I in a rented truck. We stayed at the cabin there and sat in chairs watching these tall metal poles casting this grid of shadows. That afternoon, the storms built up in the western sky. I love those skies out there, how you can see clouds at the edge of the earth.

The storms moved closer, built higher until this black mass swallowed up the flat landscape, just eating it up as it moved toward us. And Dad . . . he started walking to the field and told me to stay next to the cabin, that he wanted to see something. He kept walking, kept walking, kept walking. The storm kept getting closer and closer, the clouds flickering with all this purple lightning. Here was Dad, now this dot in the center of the field as the rains started to fall, this cold, hard rain. The wind was horizontal, blowing everything over the flatland, so I ran back into the cabin. And then, I'll never forget this, this blue lightning bolt crawled to the ground, just crawled, and stopped right next to where Dad had been standing. There was this glow in that same spot for minutes as the whole sky turned black from the clouds and rain, lightning hitting the ground over and over, that thunder so loud it was like getting punched in the chest.

Then, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the storm passed. The winds died down, the clouds moved on, and the sun was setting, leaving everything all blood red. I left the cabin, looked for Dad, and I saw him walking toward me, completely soaked and dazed. He walked up to me, dripping wet, and looked past me as if I wasn't there, and he said, Pack your things; we're going home.

He didn't say anything on the way back to the airport, nothing on the way back to Pennsylvania. Over the years he'd been getting quieter and quieter, and then, he just fell silent. I asked him what he saw out in the field, and he never said. If he said anything, he'd say, Rain, then look away.

But Mom's voice stopped speaking through the television. For a long time, I didn't hear a word from her, no matter how long I sat by a television and listened. It's like one day she just up-and-left. Again. Dad never spoke to the televisions again, never took us to New Mexico or Florida or Venezuela again. Just sat at home looking out the window like Mom used to do. Sometimes he'd have one of Mom's blouses or pieces of jewelry in his hands while he sat there, touching them, looking at them, maybe remembering when she wore them. But that's all he did for months after while his hair got grayer and his face got longer. He didn't eat much, just maybe some toast or something like that. When I was at school, he probably ate nothing, I don't know.

You know where I found my dad one morning? Under one of those antennas on the hilltop. All by himself, dressed in pajamas, all covered in ice. He'd died sometime in the night. Died on a winter night under a big tower of steel in a patch of weeds. I shook him and shook him but . . . nothing. Wasn't even halfway through high school, and I'd lost one parent to exposure and one to lightning.

My dad loved my mom, Milton. Really did. I didn't see it until she was gone, how Dad had become unmoored, pushed around by the waves. I didn't know Mom had kept him anchored. I didn't know he needed her so much, but he did, Milton. We all do. My dad. Your dad. My mom. Your mom. You. Me. For some of us, when we lose that, we lose everything. Like my father.

***

"I'm hoping you won't put that in one of your essays, Milton. I've kept it quiet for years. Even Claire's in the dark about it, and I don't think she needs to know yet."

I leaned forward. "You're saying I'm going to become your father," I said.

"I'm saying you are my father, right now. It took him a couple of years before he started looking as bad as you do now. Granted, he wasn't injured like you, but some injures you can't see."

I rubbed my knees with my hands. "You ever find out what your dad saw in the field?" I asked.

Bentley nodded. "Dad left it in a note, a short note, maybe four, five lines. It said, 'Mom said she's sorry. She said her life was too small. She said to keep thinking of her'. Isn't that something, Milton? Keep thinking of her. Some people," Bentley said, shaking his head.

"Nothing more specific?" I asked.

"Does it matter, Milton? Does it, really? My mother left for her own reasons. Dad got his answers, and I saw what that did to him." Bentley stood up and started putting on his gloves. "Liz is out there, up there, sending you messages. I heard the recording Claire made, and it sounded just like how Mom would talk through the television. She wants you to find her, so find her, but all I can say is this: Get your answers, Milton, get them fast. Then move on. Don't let your life become this," he said while pointing to the wires over the loveseat.

He began to walk to the front door.

"I don't know how to find her," I said.

Bentley stopped, hand on the doorknob. "I'm sure she wants you to find her, Milton, and if you can't find her, she'll find you. Keep looking, but be careful. Sometimes answers are worse than mysteries."

He opened the door, stepped through, then closed it, leaving me to sit on the loveseat, living room illuminated by the electric blue of a dead-eyed television.
Chapter Seventeen

Around me the machines buzzed and crackled. I heard the tidal-like waves of Jupiter's magnetic belts, the shouts of Pacific mariners, the icy placidity of women reciting groups of numbers. At times the cosmos crashed through, an errant beam of radiation, an oscillation of energy, and as suddenly as it struck, it would fade.

During high winds, the antennas and cables would sing atonally to me, rising and falling. They'd call out as I listened, my fingers on dials, my ears cupped by headphones. Their songs howled and beckoned, broken only by the percussion of trains coupling and uncoupling in the railyard.

I carried cordless telephones with me, turned them on, listened to the dial tone. Sometimes I'd speak to the dial tone then listen for a slight waver in the tone, a static burst, a hum that ended with a soft laugh before the telephone company's computerized voice implored me to hang up and dial a number. I sat in the study tuning radio dials in the darkness, listening to the static in the speakers and the hum in the circuitry, feeling the warmth of the cables and the amplifiers. I thought of how she'd return home: leaping cloud to cloud, cable to cable, tower to tower.

My ears became attuned to electrons slipping through cables and energy slamming into antennas. My fingers could turn a dial a hair's distance without trembling. My eyes could track the smallest quiver of a meter needle or the slightest bump in bars on a television screen.

I'd recorded her voice on magnetic tape, on video tape, on digital cards and solid state memory. Her whisper, like wind through a dark alley, carried through dish and cable, outlet and antenna. She could ignore filters and insulation to find a way, as she always had, to enter my life. She filled wires with words that sined on oscilloscopes and ghosted on television screens. Lights flickered with her laughter, bulbs burst when she erupted in song, so I kept a flashlight in each room just in case. On stronger days, she'd trip the circuit breakers in the basement and become blue arcs in the streetlight out front.

For a while, I didn't see vapors or wisps floating past my house at night. My only visitor was Liz, and I followed her signal wherever it took me, even when I forgot my boots.

I'd forget them when the signal was strong and sudden.

I'd race out the door with a radio direction finder in one hand, a hand-held radio in the other, and an electric field detector hanging from a looped lanyard around my neck. On the coat rack next to the front door, I'd have a heavy coat if the day was cold or a small jacket if it was warm, and my old messenger bag packed with a notebook, a pen, a camera, a digital recorder. I'd grab what I thought I needed and head out into the street, my eyes on the direction finder, one ear tuned to the slight beeping of the field detector, the other to the staticky voice from the radio speaker. Sometimes I'd have casual shoes on my feet, sometimes I'd have sneakers. Often I needed boots, which I'd leave somewhere on the kitchen or living room floor.

On some days, the signals and fields were steady, pulsing from one direction, and on others, they'd swap directions wildly, and I'd wind up walking in circles, walking over the same pavement, sidewalks, or empty lots over and over. Sometimes the signals would lead me into an empty alley then vanish. Sometimes they'd lead me to the riverbanks or railroad tracks, intensify, then fade. Other times, they'd call from the hillsides, strong and urgent, her voice and laughter rising and rising in volume. I'd track the signal, follow the needle. I'd pass the treeline, get swallowed by forest, then trudge up the steep hillside, feet slipping on leaves and water-worn stones and sinking into snowmelt or rainfall ponds. The sun would disappear under the canopy, whispers would speak from the shadows, unnatural things would brush against my skin with icy coldness, and then the signal would fade again.

I'd find myself halfway up a hillside surrounded by dense forest and unseen things watching me as I'd spin in a circle trying to reacquire the signal, shoes caked in mud, socks waterlogged, feet feeling the creeping cold, and I'd think about the boots on the kitchen or living room floor and remind myself to keep them next to the door the next time.

But a few days later I'd find myself running out the door again with radio and detector and finder, casual shoes or sneakers on my feet.

I'd sit in the kitchen and heat toast and brew coffee for dinner or eat dry breakfast cereal out of the box. Before midnight I'd work on essays for the Banner, send them out, then sit by the radios again. I'd sleep a few hours before sunrise, waking just before the horizon became a line of ghostly light.

Sometimes Maria would stop by and ask how I was doing, looking me up and down, asking, "How are you feeling, Milton?" Sometimes I'd hear knocks on the front door, and when I'd answer it, bags of groceries would be sitting on the porch and the rear end of Claire's sport utility vehicle would be speeding down the street.

The cold winter passed into an early cold spring, and that's when I started having the same dream night after night:

I am lying in bed. It's the large bed that Liz and I shared, the large bed that now sits upstairs in what used to be my parents' room. In that room, there is the bed, the nightstands on both sides of the bed, a small lamp atop each one—the lamps Liz purchased one afternoon on her way home. Somewhere in the room, a clock is ticking, even though we did not own a ticking clock. At the end of the room, the two dressers—mine and Liz's—are in their corners, standing like sentinels on either side of the large window that normally faces the town. The closet door is closed. Aside from the clock, the house is quiet; it is not creaking from settling; it is not popping from temperature shifts. There are no train sounds outside, no night whispers or wailing vapors. Everything is still.

Outside the window there are no hilltop antennas, no hills, no townscapes, only endless stars on an ocean of night, and the bedroom is alight with deep blue. The walls, the opened curtains, my skin all awash in blue. The stars bob up and down, the room floating in night like a boat on rippling waters.

I reach over to wake Liz, and she's not there, only her imprint in the sheets and pillow, both still warm from her body, the scent of her shampoo hanging in the air. But under the bedroom door, I see the light from the kitchen. . . .

And then I'd awaken, jump from the bed, limp downstairs, and stumble into the kitchen. Sometimes I'd call out her name. Always I'd limp from room to room, turning on lights and checking each corner and closet, and then I'd limp upstairs and do the same, and then I'd limp up to the attic and check every shadow and behind every box.

Eventually, I'd sit somewhere, usually at the kitchen table across from where she used to sit every morning, my head in my hands.

***

Early May. Three months.

The light outside was sepia as morning clouds from a slowly crawling storm system peeked over the Lackawanna River gap and dimmed the sun. As the sun rose, the clouds rose with it, keeping the town in a reddish-brown shadow, and the inevitable cool winds of clashing air masses rolled down the hills and into the town streets. I sat in the study watching dust roll around on the floor from swirling drafts, all around me the cables and radios humming with electric atmospherics. Pops, crackles, squeals. There was lightning somewhere, making frequencies spit static.

On the computer behind me was a half-finished essay that was due for the Banner in two days. I'd run out of things to write about in my house. It was difficult to write about the darkness in the streets when one rarely emerged into the streets anymore.

I showered and brushed my teeth and convinced myself that that made the day productive since I'd done neither for two days and spent the morning sitting in the chair in which Liz once sat, my back against the desk on which Liz drew hundreds of clouds on the blotter, staring at dust motes dance around textbooks in which Liz constructed an entire sky. Liz was all around me. In the bedroom, her vanilla perfume still wafted from her dresser. In the closet, her clothes still hung. In the kitchen, her old dishes filled shelves in the cupboard. In the driveway, her baby blue VW Beetle sat. At night I still wrapped my arms around her pillows, still pushed my nose into them, still stared at the long black hairs that clung to the fabric.

As the clouds rose and the morning darkened, I began to doze, my head lolling back to the side or the back before snapping awake again. Almost every night for the previous three months, I'd slept little, my head turned in the direction of the clock radio tuned to a quiet area on the dial, or filled with dreams of floating among the stars in the bedroom with the sounds of Liz walking through the kitchen and living room. My eyes closed, body leaning to the side, drifting off to the warm hum of electricity.

Until the speaker next to the tabletop radio purred and growled.

The static rose like river rapids, slowly, quietly at first, and over the minutes as I slid closer to sleep, became a sharp crash of noise that rose to a squeal. I opened my eyes, the feedback-like squeal burrowing into my ears, and began to reach for the volume knob until, suddenly, the sound faded. The frequency immediately fell silent, as if someone had keyed a transmitter open and left it open. I leaned closer to the speaker, looked at the digital waterfall display on the radio and saw that something was broadcasting on the frequency, powerful, maybe close by. The waterfall twitched, red, blue, yellow, green smudges crawling down the screen. The transmission was continuous, but quiet, until there was a long breath drawn in, and soft words trickling out.

"Milton. Don't sit there. Milton. Listen. Look. Find me."

I picked up the radio direction finder that I'd dropped on the floor the previous night, turned it on, tuned it to the frequency of the transmission. The digital dial spun north, then south, dancing between the two directions until it rested gently to the east. I stood up, followed the dial's arrow until I was lined up with the source. Northeast. A straight line from my house to the eastern hills. A straight line to the antennas above The Heights, above Bentley Burke's house.

"Look for me, Milton."

I jogged down the stairs, limped to the front door, grabbed my coat, slid my feet into my boots, and waddled to my mother's car, pausing only to aim the radio direction finder at the hills again.

I got in the car and turned the ignition switch four times before the Saturn's engine burped to life, blowing a cloud of blue smoke and a heavy smell of gasoline into the air. I threw the car into reverse until it spun onto the street, pushed the gear shifter into drive, and sped to the east, where the road curved into Vela Street, the street I used to run down after school, the street where Liz and I walked home from the Saint Hildegard Chapel, the street that turned sharply right and became a narrow potholed road that forked into Riverview Cemetery and also into a private road that led straight to The Heights.

The car struggled as the road steepened, but I pushed on the accelerator, making the car gurgle before it downshifted for the hillside climb. The road was a series of gentle switchbacks that twisted left and right. Above me, the darkening clouds rolled over the hilltop, wrapping around the antennas, looming over the Burke home and the old hospital. I left the radio direction finder on the dashboard, eyeing it with quick glances as I steered. Like a compass locked on magnetic north, the arrow maintained its position on the source. Sometimes the finder chirped as the signal dropped strength, but it would again lock onto the transmission a split second later.

Thunder rumbled, and glowing white wisps darted over the road and disappeared on the other side, leaving only a cold glow in the treeline. The road continued to twist, continued up the hillside, continued to The Heights.

***

"Milton, what the hell are you doing up here?" Claire shouted as I pulled into the large man-made ridge cut into the hillside. The white-brick Burke home stood several yards from the road, its window shutters black, its front porch pillars high and Roman, simple, cylindrical, austere. Claire waved with both her hands, her red hair blazing in the sepia light. She had a cigarette in one hand, her brown barn coat wrapped around her torso, her jeans stuffed into a pair of black boots.

I checked the finder, saw the arrow dance then settle on its direction again, still pointing to the hill summit. I circled the car, looking for an outlet that led to the antenna farm, but the only road was a hard-packed dirt and gravel path that disappeared into the trees, its entrance blocked by a heavy, locked black iron gate. I grabbed the finder and got out of the car, following the arrow.

"This is private property, Milton, you know that!" Claire shouted as she ran up to me. "Bentley'll get so—"

"How do I get to the antennas?" I asked.

"What? You want to get up there?" Claire asked, pointing to the summit. "You see that storm coming, Milton? Storms get really nasty up here, you know."

"I need to get up there."

"There's just the utility access road, but that's kept locked."

I turned to the gate and walked toward it, holding the finder in front of me. Claire ran alongside and popped her cigarette into her mouth, taking a drag, then exhaling a cloud of burned tobacco.

"Milton, come on," she said, "can't this wait?"

"No, I have to get up there. I have to get up there now." Claire looked down at the finder in my hands.

"Aw, hell, Milton, please—"

"Claire," I said, "please go back home. Please, just . . . go." Claire stopped, and I kept walking. I turned only once to see Claire holding her hands up in exasperation and surrender and Bentley standing in a second-floor window. He waved, then closed the curtain.

"You better know what you're doing," Claire shouted. "I really hope you do."

I walked around the gate and up the pine-shrouded road.

***

The road was steep, the gravel at times too soft, and often my feet sank, my legs shook, and I fought to regain balance before starting again. Winds funneled down the road and through spaces in the trees, pushing me back and to the side. The pines whipped wildly, their needles cutting the air with whispers that sounded like the rising and falling static that I'd heard for months. I thought of the walks Liz and I took through the town streets in the cold rains and the warm evenings, the darkened hallways of the Coxton College physics building where I first saw her, the dark nights of waiting by the study window for her headlights to shine over the driveway, her body beside me in bed, her hands in mine, her lips on mine, her last smile, her hand reaching to me before that explosion of electricity, her perfume on the air.

The winds became icy, the clouds became rich with thunder and ozone.

The road steepened, the sky darkened.

The base of the antennas came into view, surrounded by a small field of tall brown grasses that slapped at the wind, grasses that rolled like waves on a turbulent sea, undulating in deep peaks and troughs.

The trees parted, and the road ended at a chain link fence that completely surrounded the perimeter of the antenna farm. All three antennas looked like they'd been sheared in half by the low cloud cover. I stopped and looked at the fence gate. It had been opened, the locks scattered on the gravel, chains piled in what looked like a mass of frozen mercury. The radio direction finder chirped again, then stopped.

Just ahead, at the foot of the central antenna, a dark figure stood dressed in a long-sleeve black dress, its hem flowing in the wind as if underwater. The figure stood, back to me, its black hair touching the tops of its shoulders, its feet in dark black ankle boots.

I walked through the gate and dropped the finder on the road.

The figure turned and looked at me. Its face was as round and soft as it had always been, its skin white, its eyes inky dark, its hands still porcelain perfect.

"Liz?" I said.

"I'm so glad you're here, Milton," Liz said, smiling. "So glad."

***

I stood, frozen. Three months without her, without seeing her face, only hearing her voice through television or telephone or radio. Three months of being so far away from me, yet all around me. Three months of quiet hallways and empty rooms.

Liz steadily walked toward me. "I knew you'd make it, Milton. You always do. You've always come through for me." She stepped up to me, grabbed my hands with hers. They were soft and cold. Sparks danced over my skin, and my hands jerked away. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm getting better at it. I really am. " She looked at me, her eyes glimmering strangely—as if speckled with stars. Her skin was perfectly smooth. Even the small chickenpox scar that she'd once had on the side of her nose was gone, and pores on her skin seemed to be burnished away.

"Liz," I said, my eyes welling up, my throat tightening. "Liz," I repeated, wrapping my arms around her. Between us, static crackled like it did when we slept under heavy blankets. Her body was soft, but felt cold. She smelled of fresh air, ozone. I kissed her cheek and placed my hands on her face and kissed her lips. She kissed back lightly, then gently pulled away, placing her hands on mine and bringing them down.

"I'd lift you up if I could," I said, "but the doctors don't want me lifting much of anything for a few months." I laughed, and tears trickled down my face. Liz kept a hold of my hands. She looked down at them, running her fingers over my knuckles.

"I didn't think you'd get hurt," she said. "I'm so sorry, Milton."

I shook my head. "It's okay."

"No—"

"It's okay," I repeated. "It's all okay. It'll get better. Everything'll get better."

"I hope you do get better, Milton."

"Liz"—I said, then stopped—"never mind. We should go. We need to go." I looked up at the heavy clouds that churned overhead. "We can get down to Bentley's house." I started to take off my coat to put around her shoulders, but she let go of my hands and stepped back.

"I'm not going with you, Milton," she whispered.

"We have to get off the hill, Liz. I don't want us to get hit by lightning again."

"It won't hit us, Milton," she said. "I brought it with me. We'll be okay. You'll be okay."

I stared at her, stared at her eyes that looked like pools of starry night. "You brought it with you? What d'you mean?"

"More like"—she looked up at the cloud bellies—"hitched a ride. It'll be on its way soon. And I'll be on my way."

"What do you mean 'on my way'?"

"I mean I'm not going home, Darling," she said. "I'm leaving for good."

We stood on the hillside, inches apart, the winds and the grasses swirling around us like the eye wall of a hurricane. Thunder rolled up one side of the hill and down the other, rumbling through my chest. I stood, mouth open without words, brain empty without thoughts as Elizabeth looked down at her feet and clasped her hands together.

"I'm leaving Blackbridge, Milton," she said. "I'm leaving Pennsylvania." She lifted her eyes to meet mine. "And I'm leaving you."

I stared at Liz, her black dress flowing on the air, her eyes narrowing, her mouth turning downward. Around us, the storm churned and threatened with deep thunder and rising winds as we stood in a calm pocket of breeze, as I stood wordless, a sensation in my stomach like that of falling in black space.
Chapter Eighteen

You know when I first saw you, Milton? It wasn't outside my optics class. It was on that woman's porch. It was when I saw you driving in your mother's car up that long, hilly road and stepping out and speaking to Ms. Krenetsky. I didn't expect to see anyone, Milton. I was just there, floating above you and her, and at first I didn't know how I was able to stay there. Usually, I'd found myself in streetlights and televisions. Just hopping from place to place without a plan, without control. I can't tell you when that started happening. It would happen in quick daydreams, where I'd be sitting at the kitchen table and then feel light, as if my body had become air. I'd see things, sparks in wires that looked like miles-long lightning bolts, electron clouds like dust bunnies, and then I'd be back where I was before. I thought it was daydreaming. I thought it was epilepsy. Until. . . .

Well, until one day I was lying in bed at my parents' house, and those ugly yellow streetlights outside came to life when the sun went down. And I got up and walked to the window. I saw the old ladies on their porches and saw people stepping around the puddles of light. I heard my parents in the kitchen, heard them talking about how they could stretch the grocery money another week and how my mom could earn a few extra dollars by cleaning houses on the other side of town. And I felt this heaviness, Milton, deep and hurting, in my chest and in my stomach. I started crying, crying like I'd never done before, and I put a pillow over my face so my parents couldn't hear, just heaved into that pillow as those streetlights got brighter and brighter until my whole room was filled with this yellow light.

I thought about being stuck on that street forever and sitting on a porch or on a curb, smoking cigarettes and counting pennies just waiting for death. I just balled up my fists and held my breath, and then I found myself out the window, as if I'd passed between the atoms in the glass and the window screen, as if I'd attached myself to a strand of particles, and I felt myself wrap around the coils and wiring in the streetlights, and just—screamed. And the streetlights, all three of them, Milton, they popped like Fourth of July fireworks, little balls of plasma falling to the street where they danced and spun until the street was dark again.

It took less than a second, Milton. And a second after that, I was back on my bed, shaking until I passed out. When I woke up, I was covered in sweat. I was tired, as if I'd come out of a seizure, and I thought maybe that's what it was . . . until I held up my right hand and ran my thumb over my fingertips, and these blue sparks danced between them.

It kept happening over the months and years, this . . . falling out of myself. Sometimes I could make it happen for a few seconds, sometimes I couldn't. I started studying physics. I hoped there would be an answer in those books somewhere. High school. College. No. No answers. Just formulas, principles, axioms. I'd spend nights standing in front of the window, running my fingers over the glass, thinking I'd find that one single key that would show me what to do. That one single key that would launch me over the city and into the sky, that sky that seemed so untouchable when I was a little girl.

Instead, I'd find myself rocketing over the street, through walls, through lamps, through telephone lines, ricocheting from antenna to antenna. I'd spin uncontrollably, as if it I was tied to something, and it was pulling me where it wanted to go, not where I wanted to go. The moments would last seconds, but I was traveling hundreds of miles, completing circuits from one end of the city to the other. I thought about wrapping myself in aluminum foil to make it stop, or wiring my room somehow so I couldn't escape. Something, anything. I thought about telling my parents, but then . . . I lost them. I was losing everything, Milton. My family. My life. My control. My days were spent trying to understand something that shouldn't have been happening, my nights were filled with worry that I'd fall out of myself and never come back, a random charge bouncing from ground to sky and back again.

One day, I found myself bouncing over antennas around Scranton, sometimes able to slow myself down, sometimes not. Then, like someone grabbing a hold of a branch in a flood, I forced myself into this circuit, and I cycled through the wiring over and over again. I heard this woman shouting as things were sparking up around her, but then I slowed, and I found myself above this front porch, looking out at this gravel lot with a road that twisted down the side of this hill. And, for some reason, I stopped, looked around, realized I was in this light bulb, and felt myself floating in place. I concentrated, really concentrated, but then I fell back into myself in my room.

The next day, I concentrated on that light bulb, and a second later I'm in it, testing the impedance, the voltage, testing how I could slow myself down. And then I see this car pull up in the lot, this cranberry-colored car. And out steps this young man who looks so scared, so . . . haunted. And he speaks to the woman on the porch. He talks about how this bright light bulb drew him up the hillside for almost no reason. He talks about the Coxton Clarion. He talks about himself. He talks about his father's death. His mother's suicide. About his days of running home to safety, of running up to his bedroom to hide.

And I watched this young man, this young man with so much pain that it just seemed to spill from his eyes, write down everything about this woman's daughter. Her life. Her loneliness. Her death. I saw him excuse himself and go in the bathroom to cry. I saw him looking into this mother's eyes, almost falling into them.

And then . . . he was gone. I was there in that circuit for over four hours, Milton. I watched you and listened to you and followed you as you left that house. I was like a child who'd had the training wheels removed from her bicycle, and I floated back over Scranton, this atmospheric charge who flew like a glider over thermals.

You know you gave me the sky, Milton? I never told you that before, but it's true.

I wrote you that letter, I saw you outside that classroom, and when we talked at the coffee shop and when we walked through the campus, I felt safe with you. Anchored and steady. I remembered how it was before that day you showed up, when I couldn't control myself, when everything flew by at the speed of electrons, when I felt like my atoms would spin out into the universe and never take shape again. But being with you stopped that. Maybe it was because I found you handsome, maybe it was because I met someone who'd had his own pain and could understand mine. There are any number of reasons why I loved you, just like there are your reasons as to why you loved me. And when you got on a knee and proposed to me under the stars, I felt a steadiness that I'd never felt before.

But the problem with the sky, Milton, is that when someone gives it to you, everything else seems so small.

For months, I was happy to be with you. For months, I was happy to sit with you and lay with you as you got lost in your past. All those hurts, Milton. All that loneliness and pain. Etched into you like carvings in a stone. I wondered why you looked at the ground so much, why you never spoke of friends, why you continually hurled yourself back into the pains of the past, and no matter what I could do, Milton, you seemed locked. Locked in your own circuit.

You loved me so much. I know that. Every time I felt you close to me, every time you held me, I knew it was genuine. I knew you'd never hurt me, that you'd give me whatever I needed, even if you had nothing to give you'd find a way to give it to me, rob a bank, jump from an airplane, it didn't matter. I knew I was everything to you. I knew you smiled every time you saw me, and I knew you sank into sadness when you didn't. Every night I'd see you waiting for me, and every day I'd know you were thinking about me. You were once my anchor, Milton. But then I became your only reason for living.

And, Darling, you can't share a life with someone unless you have a life of your own.

I started becoming electricity again. When you were asleep. When the door to the study was closed. I found myself above Blackbridge one second, then in Chicago a few seconds later. Cloud to cloud. Wire to wire. The things I could see in a few minutes, Milton. The things I could see. . . .

And I'd come home again. You, asleep in bed. Outside that streetlight buzzing like the ones outside my childhood homes. And I'd feel empty again, no matter how much you loved me.

I met others in the clouds. Others from everywhere. They watch, they explore. Some have seen so much in hundreds of years I can't begin to imagine. I realized no class could teach me that. No degree could offer any comparable education. So I dropped graduate school and spent my nights alone, riding the sky and the circuits after parking my car off the side of some road, or I'd just lock the study door and push through the window. Every time I pushed into the atmosphere, every time I pushed through homes and forests and cities or over mountains and rivers, everything here in Blackbridge, everything at home with you just seemed . . . limiting.

I wanted to tell you, Darling. I wanted to make up an excuse and have you divorce me. Anything. But I never wanted to hurt you, hurt someone who loved me so much, and I worried what would happen if I left you. All that loneliness growing up. I didn't want to make you lonely again.

But that last day we walked through town, the streets and buildings seemed to close in on me, smothering me. I knew I had to leave, Milton. I had to leave Blackbridge. My old life. You. The sky was waiting for me, and like the day I said Yes when you proposed to me, I made a choice as fast as I could, a choice that if I didn't make then, then I never would, a choice that . . . a choice that I knew would hurt you, but not like that.

I didn't know you'd be in the hospital.

I didn't know you'd be spending your days in that empty house, not eating, not sleeping, not living.

I knew I had to come back again, that you had to know everything. And I knew that I had to finally say Goodbye.

***

Liz lowered her eyes to the ground.

My breathing became shallow, and I looked at her through tears, her form blurring and darkening.

"Goodbye?" I said. "Goodbye? You"—I pointed at her, clenched my teeth—"you decide you've just had enough and then say Goodbye?"

"I know you don't understand," Liz said, "but—"

"Don't even think of saying that! Don't understand. What don't I understand? That you never told me about this? About this, what, thing you do? About you deciding that once you got everything under control that you could move on? About how you thought you could spark up and throw me through a plate glass window—"

"I never meant to do that—"

"No, my turn, Liz! My goddamned turn. You send me through a plate glass window, you almost kill me, you send me to a hospital in a coma where they had to open up my back and fix the mess you made. You send me back to an empty house to clean up another mess you made, back into a house where I didn't know where you were or what to do? Tell me, what part of that don't I understand?" I stepped closer to her, pointed at her face. "Do you know what I've been through the past few months? Do you even have the faintest idea what the hell I've been through?"

"I know, Milton."

"The hell you do. All this time I'm thinking something took you from me, and come to find out you were just kicking me to the curb once you got what you needed."

"I've watched you every day, Milton. It was difficult—"

"Do you know how every minute and second of my life the past few months was spent on trying to reach you?"

"I know."

"No you don't!" I screamed. "I'll tell you what you know, Liz. You want to hear what you know? Okay, here it is: You know there's something you want, then you grab it, then you move on. You walk away when something gets a little uncomfortable for you, and you walk over others when they don't serve a purpose anymore. You were happy that your folks were gone because that was one less piece of baggage, and I was just another piece of baggage to be dumped alongside the road."

I turned away, started back to the road, but Liz instantly appeared in front of me, blocking my path.

"Don't hate me, "she said.

I stopped and looked away from her. The trees whipped angrily in the wind while violet lightning flashed around the town below. "You know," Liz, I said, "when my mom died, I thought about what I might have done wrong, that maybe I did something to make her jump off that bridge. Then I said, 'No, Milt, it's not you. You were an okay kid'. Took me a while to start thinking that. But . . . maybe I wasn't an okay kid. Maybe I'm not an okay man. And maybe . . . maybe I give everyone reasons to leave me—"

"What she did had nothing to do with you, Milt." Liz put her hands on my cheeks. "And what I'm doing has nothing to do with you. Look at me," she said, and I did. "You're a good man, Milt. The best I've ever known. I think about all you've been through and all you've done on your own, and I think about how much you've loved me and how lucky I was that I was with you. Sometimes, Milton, people make choices that hurt others, no matter how hard they try not to. But those choices have to be made. Milt, I had to move on, and no matter how much you love me you have to move on. You have to put your past to rest somehow, you need to see that you're not alone, that people care about you, that there's a whole world for you, and if there's anyone in this world who deserves that, it's you."

I shook my head. "I don't have anyone," I whispered.

"Yes you do, Milt." She let go of my face. "You've got people all around you, people who want to be in your life. And there are people everywhere just waiting to be met, just waiting to be loved. And, Milton, you deserve to be loved."

Elizabeth put her arms around me, stood on her toes, and lightly kissed me on the lips. For a moment, I smelled the scent of air cleansed by rainstorms and the scent of vanilla wafting on the wind. She then released me and backed away.

"Please don't go," I whispered.

"Goodbye, Milton," she said, slowly stepping away. Two steps. Three steps. Four. Five.

"Please, Liz—"

"And I want you to go home and I want you to live, Darling." She stepped farther away. Six steps. Seven. Eight. Nine. "I want you to throw away the radios and the telephones and the antennas. I want you to put your past into the past. I want you to build a life with someone who gives you all the love you give them.

"Liz," I said, shaking my head, "I don't have anyone."

"Yes you do, Darling. And you will." Ten steps. Eleven. Then she stopped, tall brown grasses swallowing her legs like water. "And I want you to be the man you want to be." The winds whipped around her, cyclonic and steady.

"No," I said. "Just give me a chance."

"It's not about you, Milton. But I want your life to be about you." The winds built to a deep roar, and Liz shouted: "I want you to have everything I can't give you, Darling. Everything."

"I just want you, Liz," I shouted, walking to her.

"Someday—someday we'll see each other again. I promise."

She lifted her right arm, brought her hand to her mouth, and, smiling, blew me a kiss.

All around her, the light became blue, then white as a narrow bolt snapped and small balls of ghostly plasma bounced in the air like embers, sending a shudder of thunder that rolled downhill over the rivers, the streets, the cemetery, and my house at the southern edge of town.

And then, once again, I was alone.

***

I stood beside my car, staring at the driver's side door, the rain pouring off the roof and off my head. The cold air turned my breath to clouds, the cold rain turned my hair flat and ragged. I looked at my reflection in the window, the unshaven face, the pale skin, the coat and T-shirt dark with water. In my left hand, I held the car keys, in my right I held the radio direction finder.

After a few minutes, I pulled my right arm back and hurled the finder and the keys through the window then kicked at the door, my foot smashing through the plastic door panels. Somehow I pulled the door open and threw it forward as if trying to tear it from its hinges, but it would only bounce back, and I kicked at it, smashing the speaker housing and hurling the side view mirror onto the gravel lot.

Claire shouted something behind me, but I kept kicking at the car, its doors, its headlights, its trunk, kicking as the rain poured in sheets, as the lightning illuminated the hillside and the hulking abandoned asylum, as my right leg finally gave out, and I fell to the gravel where I sat with my back against the rear bumper, my head on my knees, Claire and Bentley running toward me, umbrellas in their hands.

***

Every countertop in Bentley's kitchen seemed covered in dark marble, every cabinet and cupboard in mahogany. I sat at the long main table and stared at the coffee cup between my hands, the dark wood floor under my feet. Rain sprayed and washed over the windows above the long sink and basin, throwing watery shadows over the walls. Bentley and Claire sat in silence after I told them about Liz, about how she held my hands and my face, about how she said goodbye. Claire attempted a wan smile. Bentley only looked down, a mirror image of myself.

"You need dry clothes," Claire said.

"I'm fine," I said, but Claire got up and walked out the kitchen, her heavy boots thumping down the hallway. Bentley looked through the doorway, then the window, then at me.

"I know you don't want to hear this—" he said.

"You're going to say I told you so," I said.

"No," Bentley said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. "I would never do that. I was hoping I was wrong, that maybe it'd be different for you, that Liz would come back and everything'd be fine, but deep down I knew that wasn't going to happen. But even though I knew something like this would happen, I only have to say this: You're lucky. Yes, I know you don't feel lucky. I know you feel like a truck just ran you down on the highway. Maybe several trucks. And it's going to hurt for months, maybe even years to come, but you've got this: You know. When Liz could, she came back to you, she gave you the answers you needed, maybe not the ones you wanted, but the ones you needed. With my mother, it dragged out for years. I watched my father just turn into this husk with nothing inside. I lost a mother and a father on the Chesapeake, Milton. And she never came back to me. Never. Sometimes I know she tries to pop up through the television, small sentences here and there. Claire thinks it's interference from the antennas, and I just say, 'Sure, it has to be, Honey', but I know it's Mom. I know she's up there and out there, seeing and doing things I can't imagine."

Bentley stood up and walked to the window. Shadows of rain rivulets crisscrossed his face like black veins. "You wanted to know why I came back to Blackbridge," he said, "why I bought the Banner. It's because I accepted who I was and where I came from. This is my home, where most of my family's buried, where I used to sit with my mother and talk about everything under the sun. And I didn't want to wake up one day and find that despite all the money I had in the bank that I really had nothing. With the Banner, maybe I'll leave behind something good. With Claire, maybe I'll leave behind a good family. I really think you can't expect much more out of life."

"Do you worry about Claire?" I asked. "If she'll decide, one day, to just step outside, realize there's something else out there that she wants, and then just, you know. . . ."

"Every day," Bentley said. "But all I can do is my best, just like you. If she ever decides to leave me for whatever reason, all I hope is that she tells me why and she tells me before she goes. You can't force someone to love you, Milton. You can't force someone to stay." He stared out the window, the rain slowing, the house popping and creaking in the wind. "Some people," he said, "just can't be contained. Not Mom—" he turned to me "—and not Liz. We just let them go, we hope they come back even though they never will, and we move on."

"I can't move on anymore," I said, rolling the coffee cup between my hands. "I'm tired of moving on."

"That's life," he said. "We have the lives we have. We can either build them into something or let them stay hollow. You see, Dad thought he'd built up a life, but he was just finding identity in other things. Cash. Real estate. Mom. When he lost Mom, everything else just fell away. I don't want that for me." Bentley took in a deep breath, then exhaled fog on the window pane. "Build a life on your own foundation instead of on other people's foundations, Milton. Took me a while to learn that; watched my father wither away because he never did. Make sure it doesn't happen to you."

The rain stopped, and the only sound in the kitchen was water dripping off the eaves and hillside runoff trickling through the forest.

***

I stood in my living room among the boxes and the wires and the cables and the antennas. Throughout the house, radios buzzed and crackled as the storm passed to the east, lightning pulses ripping through the frequencies. The air was cold and dense with dust. I walked through the house in the blue sweatshirt and sweatpants Claire had loaned me, walked through every room, ran my hands over wires strung through the hallways, brushed my fingers over radio tops and the television screen, plowing furrows in the dust. Through the front window, the blue spruce Elizabeth and I had planted gently rocked, raindrops falling from its needles like diamonds.

I walked up to the study and stopped in the doorway, seeing her in my memory, hunched over the desk, scribbling away, looking back at me with a smile. But all that remained was the empty chair, the powered-up computer on the desk, the radio equipment on the bookcase, and Liz's textbook sky strewn all over the floor.

And I collapsed in the chair and wept.

***

"What should I do now?" I asked.

Maria cleared her throat and said softly into the phone: "I think you should do what you need to do, Milton. Have Liz declared deceased, and, don't be angry with me saying this, move forward with your life."

"I don't know if I can move forward anymore," I said, staring at the radios and the nests of wires in the study.

"You can move on, Milt, and even if she's not dead to us, Liz is gone. She moved on of her own volition, and now so do you. You have the camera footage evidence, and that's all you need. We'll have her status moved from missing to deceased. It won't take too long, Milton. And in a few months, in a few years, you'll have a new life, a better one."

My eyes burned and ached. My right leg was completely numb, and my body was twisted and knotted up, shoulders and neck stiff, back tight and twitching. "Maria?" I asked.

"Yes, Milt?"

"Why do you think she left?"

"I don't know, Milt. I really didn't know her except for that day when you, you know, walked out of Veronica's. But, like I've said before, when I spoke to her, it's like she was there but not there, like she'd look at me but she was preoccupied with something, like something always going on behind those eyes. I think—I think some people just need to be elsewhere, no matter where they are. They need to keep moving toward something. She didn't hate you, Milt. Sounds like the opposite, but I think if she'd stuck around, if she felt tied down by you, she'd start resenting you. She probably left before it turned to that."

I inhaled deeply, then exhaled, lungs aching. "Thank you, Maria," I said.

"For what?"

"Everything," I sighed. "Everything. From when you stopped your brother from beating the hell out of me, to driving me home, to just . . . being there. I've no idea why you give a damn about me."

"Maybe I'm just a nice person," she said. I thought I could actually hear her smiling through the phone line.

"Maybe you are," I said. "Maybe you are."

After I'd hung up, my eyelids became heavy, and I sagged from exhaustion. I lowered myself from the chair and onto the floor where I slept into the night, my body surrounded by clouds sketched by a woman who was now among them.

***

I awakened in the study around midnight. The tabletop radio buzzed on the open frequency to which it was tuned. I lifted myself off the floor and listened to the background static through the speaker. I listened and listened until I lowered my head, reached over to the main power button—

"Goodbye, Liz."

—and switched it off.

***

Outside, spring stars pulsed in the sky. Vapors walked the streets, and wisps bounded lightly through the forests. Mouthless voices floated in the shadows. And somewhere someone was placing candles around a makeshift shrine to a martyred saint, lighting them, then walking away.

I dreamt through the night. I dreamt of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in black who waved to me beneath antennas high above a river. I dreamt she held my hands with her porcelain-perfect fingers. I dreamt she pulled me close, kissed me, then held me until the sun and the stars went black.
Epilogue

There are only brackets where the antennas once stood, holes where the cables and wires once hung. The winter is coming, and I am filling them with wood putty and with paint. Sometimes as I water the spruce we planted out front, I think I hear you on the winds, but know it's not you. But I wonder how the winds blow where you are. Do they warm your skin or flow through your hair as my hands once did? Do they churn into cyclones that carry you through the clouds? Do they scatter you over the earth's curve, and do you reform over grasslands that I'll never see? When they spin the new wind vane that I've mounted atop the roof and point the rooster's black iron beak, I wonder if they point to you. I wonder if you're in the hills or over the horizon, if you're watching me or forgetting me.

Sometimes I speak to the winds. I ask them: When you walked beside me and you looked at the sky, what did you think? When you swung our joined arms like a jump rope, then pulled me close and made me slow dance with you in a circle, did I dance well enough for you, even though you knew I never danced in my life? When you made me look into those obsidian eyes and put my arms around you while you spun us slowly in place, my feet shifting randomly, yours stepping gracefully around mine, and told me that it was the man's job to lead, did you hate me when I didn't know what to do?

I ask the winds so many questions, but I don't get answers. So I move through the days, the weeks, the months as I've always done—as best as I can.

This week was my birthday, but you knew that. I was going to stay home, sit in the study, work on essays for the Banner, but there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and Maria said she was arresting me, and took me back to the Banner offices where they'd planned a party. Someone bought pizza from the town of Old Forge. Someone else bought cake from Veronica's just down the street. Claire smoked indoors and didn't care if it bothered anyone. Bentley drank too much and didn't care if he spoke too loudly. And when I began staring out the windows at the antennas over The Heights, Maria would pull me back to the group of writers and layout artists and editors, and they'd toast me, my essays, my stories, my life.

Maria drove me home afterwards, and we sat on the back porch and talked while wisps lit up the Lackawanna, talked until the early morning.

This week I wrote an essay about the shrine to Blessed Mary of Jesus Crucified that appeared last Friday. The shrines are appearing more quickly this month, as they usually do before Christmas.

Last night I sat in the study, and I thought of you again and smiled, and I wondered if, wherever you are, that when you think of me, you smile.

Last night I turned on the computer in the study and began to type an essay. For now, it's just for me. It's about a woman, short and beautiful, dark haired and dark eyed. A woman who saw something in a man who thought he had nothing. A woman who, one day, vaulted to the clouds in a flash of white and blue. A woman who still inhabits my dreams and whom, she said, I'd see again someday.

A woman named Elizabeth who was once my wife and who, one day, became electricity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vincent C. Martinez was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and obtained his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He currently lives in the southwestern United States.

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