 
The Wide Night Sky

A novel by

Matt Dean

Smashwords Edition

© 2015 Matt Dean

Cover Image: The Wide Night Sky

© 2013 Angela Morgane

Used by permission of the artist

License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Also by the author: _The River in Winter_

Dedication

For Sarah, Mina, and Angela, my sisters by choice.
Table of Contents

The Second of September

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

The Last Wednesday in October

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Thanksgiving

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

The Beginning of December

Chapter 25

The Friday Before Christmas

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

The Fifth of June

Chapter 31

Acknowledgments
The Second of September
Chapter 1

He'd been born in this house, not in a hospital. Five decades within these walls, under this roof—precisely fifty years, almost to the minute—and he'd never loved the place more. The drafty rooms, the windows that rattled, the crooked drawers that jumped their tracks, the cupped floorboards: he loved every splinter, every nail, every flake of alligatored varnish.

Sometimes, at a certain time in the afternoon, with the sun slanting through the western-facing windows at just such an angle, casting skewed rectangles of milky light on the kitchen floor, Leland found himself leaning against the island, just like this. With the chill of the granite seeping into the palms of his hands, he looked across the kitchen, looked down the hallway—gazed, really—and his heart swelled with longing, the peculiar longing of fully requited love, a possessive craving for this beloved place he already owned.

_Daydreamer. Woolgatherer. Fool._ He'd stopped in the middle of tidying the island, clearing away the cutting board, the knife, the papery scraps of onion skin. He'd thought he should put on some music, but then he'd gotten stuck. He had yet to take a single step toward the corner shelf, where his iPod lay between a pair of softball-sized speakers. Sometimes, at a certain time in the afternoon, he found himself doing this, yes, but these moments of abstraction, these sentimental idylls of his—they were coming upon him more and more often, weren't they, and stretching themselves out longer and longer?

Going to the shelf, he picked up the iPod and slid the wheel around with his thumb. The gadget chittered, _pip-pip-pip, pippip, pip_. His thumb brushed back and forth on the wheel, clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise again. Album titles rolled up and down the tiny screen, but Leland wasn't reading them. He barely saw the words at all. His mind was elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. He gave up and laid the gadget down again and returned to the stove, where he'd left several pounds of sliced onions caramelizing in a stock pot. He rattled the pot, dug a wooden spoon into it, stirred. The onions hissed their sweetness into the air. The whitish-yellow slivers he'd dumped in by handfuls had half-melted and taken on the color of maple syrup. He breathed deeply—the smell of happiness, of home, as agreeable in its way as the scent of cinnamon and apples and pastry dough. The smell of happiness, and he was a happy man, after all.

Wait. He'd been going to the iPod for a particular thing he'd wanted to hear. He laid the spoon aside and crossed again to the corner shelf. He'd meant to find a recording of his wife's voice—Strauss's _Four Last Songs_ , in a performance she'd given five or six years ago with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. This time, Leland's thumb had a sense of purpose, and he easily found the album, the songs, the undulating strings, Anna Grace's clear voice.

She was his first and second wife: That was the running joke of their long marriage. They'd met and married young, had a child, divorced, and married again. The second time, Corinne, their daughter, had been their flower girl. Surly and unforgiving—though endearing in her blue lace and white Mary Janes—the child had stomped down the aisle, doing her damnedest to smite the carpet with her handfuls of petals.

When Leland and Anna Grace had married the first time, now almost thirty years ago, her singing had driven him insane. In the highest passages she'd unfailingly sounded as if she were chiseling the notes out of a granite wall. "Oh, if only I could scatter the clouds" from _Il Pirata_ , Kundry's curse from _Parsifal_ , "No Word from Tom" and "Quietly, Night" from _The Rake's Progress_ —all so sharp, so shrill. For months, leading up to a concert performance of Ariadne auf Naxos, she'd filled the house with arpeggios, trills, vocalises. She'd distracted Leland from his research and his writing, and once or twice he'd taken Corinne and fled from the house.

As she'd aged, Anna Grace had lost a bit of her top range, but with it the metallic harshness that had always raised his hackles. Leland knew what _vibrato_ meant, of course, and _timbre_ , and _chest voice_ and _head voice_ , and even if he didn't understand how the words applied to what his wife had been training herself to do all these years, he could, and did, appreciate what her voice had become. As she nimbly climbed to the first high notes of the Strauss song—the words having something to do with the sky—he heard only clarity, solemnity, restraint, beauty.

Although the song was called "Frühling"—"Spring"—to Leland it sounded strikingly autumnal, valedictory, even slightly morose. Even so, the lovely tone of his wife's voice—austere, but somehow lavish, too—lifted his mood. A feeling of tenderness, of joy, bubbled up in him. For half a second he teetered between laughter and tears. He cleared his throat.

Humming tunelessly along with the music, he returned to the stove. The onions were darker now, but also duller, more gray than golden. They weren't ruined, but they _were_ past the point of perfection. He cut the heat and dragged the pot off the burner. Stupid, wasn't it, to make onion soup for a party? Hardly the ideal finger food. But at lunchtime he'd had a culinary vision of sorts—a mental image, clear as a snapshot, of some otherwise unremembered party his mother had thrown some thirty-five years ago, and of a tray of ramekins bubbling over with melted Gruyère. His tongue had bristled ahead of time with the salty tang of the cheese and the meaty savor of the broth, and he'd set to work with his best chef's knife and a big mesh bag of onions.

Behind him Anna Grace sang a downward-leaning melody. The orchestra played a stuttering rhythm. Anna Grace had somehow managed to match the clarinets' tone—a smoky plumpness, Leland might call it—and by some acoustical miracle the instruments seemed to be singing close harmony with her, not just in pitch but in words too.

This was the second song of the four. "September," it was called, and it was the reason he'd wanted to hear the _Four Last Songs_. It was his birthday, and he'd wanted music that celebrated the day, or at least the month—September, the best month of his year. But Strauss's song was a lament for the death of summer. Leland tried to remember the exact translation, tried to recall the words from the program, all those years ago. "The garden is in mourning"—wasn't that the first line? Here in the American South, in Charleston, the garden was in full flower. Outside, a battalion of snapdragons, the color of sangria, bobbed their heads. In Germany, though: "Summer awaits his peaceful end."

On the recording there was a cough somewhere in the audience, in a far corner of the auditorium. It was the dry clap of wood against wood, the sound of that cough. And now, because of it, Leland could place himself in the audience again, looking up from the gray half-dark to the stage, where Anna Grace had stood poised and calm, confident, cool and gleaming as a jewel. He pictured the fulvous wood of the acoustical shell, the familiar backdrop of Gaillard Auditorium curving around behind her, arching above her. She'd worn a blue-black gown, the color of night itself, and when she'd turned for a moment toward the conductor and the silk had glinted under the lights, Leland had thought, _How sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes_.

How sweetly. How sweetly flowed the music, the voice, the clarinets, the smoky plumpness of Anna Grace's voice, the surprising softness of the German syllables. _How sweetly flows—_

His _father_ , all those years ago, had made the onion soup, not his _mother_. In the seventies, his father had taken up cooking. Starting from nothing—from "how to boil water"—he'd learned to make French onion soup, chocolate mousse, cheese soufflé, beef Wellington, and all sorts of odd meats in strange sauces. He'd baked endless quiches and pies and tortes. Once he'd roasted a goose for Christmas. Where would he have gotten a goose?

Leland kneaded the tight skin at his temples. His head was in such a muddle. His thoughts kept wriggling away from him. This morning, as she'd left, after wishing him a happy birthday, Anna Grace had said, "They say fifty is nifty. _I_ say there's a sucker born every minute." She was fifty-one.

Corinne had gotten married in June. She wanted to have a baby as soon as she could. In December, Ben would come home from Afghanistan with a record of honorable service and, presumably, all his limbs. John Carter had just begun his freshman year of college. Someday he'd be a serious musician, perhaps the Glenn Gould of his generation. How could Leland fail to be happy with such a year—with such a _life_ —ahead of him? Why _shouldn't_ fifty be nifty?

He stared into the pot of onions. Stringy, lifeless, unappetizing. Ruined after all. He lifted the pot and took a step back from the stove. His knees buckled. His eyes rolled in their sockets. Helpless suddenly, limp as a drooping leaf, he tripped backward and crumpled to the floor. His hipbone, and then his shoulder blade and the back of his head, cracked hard against the tile. The last thing he saw, before he passed out, was the big aluminum pot spinning through the air above him, and the slivers of caramelized onion pouring out of it.
Chapter 2

The Humvee's headlamps scraped a few meters of light out of the black. Baker drove slowly, leaning so far forward that her chest nearly touched the steering wheel. Littlefield's head bobbed like an ear of wheat on a broken stalk. Above and behind them, in the gun turret, Evans watched the road and swung side to side in his creaky harness.

Littlefield felt a yawn blooming at the back of his throat, but he was too exhausted to open his mouth. He stared at his watch. Seven minutes past midnight. After a series of sluggish, half-assed calculations, he reckoned he'd gotten ninety minutes' sleep in nineteen hours. That didn't take into account some five- and ten-minute dozes he'd had here in the Humvee—but if he tried to add those in, he figured, he'd put himself to sleep for sure.

A stainless steel mug of black coffee sat on the seat between his legs. When he'd brewed the stuff, just before they'd left Camp Dwyer, it had been so hot that he'd immediately burned his mouth. His tongue _still_ felt numb and barren, and as if to prove it to himself, he kept dragging the tip of his tongue across his teeth.

Evans said something. Littlefield didn't catch it, but Baker heard, and she started braking. Motes of dust swirled up into the beams of the headlamps. A pair of tiny green lights cut through the rising fog of dirt. LEDs. What else could they be, if not LEDs?

_Now_ Littlefield was awake.

Even before the Humvee had come to a stop, he swung his door open. He slid to the ground, his boots landing with a pair of soft thumps in the powdery pale dust. He set his mug on the floor of the vehicle and hoisted his weapon. With a flick of his little finger, he disengaged the safety.

"I got ya," Evans said.

Littlefield gave a thumbs up. _Good to go._ He nudged his door closed with his hip.

Now that he'd left the Humvee, he couldn't find the green lights again. He walked forward, watching the ground for wires, for signs of digging, for anything too messy or too tidy. His boots crunched in the grit. The road was in poor shape, yes—rutted, strewn with sharp rocks, pocked with potholes—but it was, after all, just what you'd expect of a dirt road in a shit-poor district of Afghanistan, a torn-up narrow track stretching from the north end of nowhere to the south side of fuck-all.

He heard something. Froze. Cocked his head and closed his eyes. Strained his ears.

The sound had come only once, whatever it had been. And what _had_ it been? A wheel with faulty bearings? A swinging gate with a rusty hinge? A soft-spoken bird?

It came again, quieter this time, lower in pitch. Littlefield felt for his helmet-mounted scope and tipped his night sight forward on its pivot. The landscape in front of him brightened and turned green. A dozen or meters ahead, in the middle of the road, lay a bushy-haired, broad-nosed dog. Littlefield moved closer. A mutt, brindled on its neck and head, dingy white everywhere else. One haunch was matted with dried muck or blood. The dog looked up at him and folded back one of its pointed ears. The other ear twitched. Light flashed off the backs of its eyes. No LEDs, then. The eyes of a dog, that was all. And no birds, no ball bearings, no hinges—only a whimpering stray.

Littlefield turned. He'd come farther than he'd thought—fifty meters or more. He cupped a hand around one side of his mouth and called to Baker and Evans. "It's a fuckin' _dog_."

Evans hollered back. "I _know_ , Littledick. That's what I _said_."

"Fucker," Littlefield muttered.

"What the fuck, Littledick? Let's go."

"Eat a bag of buttholes. It's a fucking _dog_."

" _Jesus fu—_ " If Evans finished the word or said anything more, the wind carried the sound away.

Hunkering down, cradling his rifle against his belly and chest, Littlefield duckwalked forward. The dog eyed him warily, but let him come within an arm's length. He held out his hand, knuckles first, to give the dog his scent. Staring up, it whined and licked its chops, but it didn't sniff him. It turned its head away.

Lifting his night sight, Littlefield stepped aside to let the headlamps shine fully on the dog's haunch. It was difficult to see—the distance, the glare, the floating dust, the trembling shadows—but he was fairly sure the mutt's flank was covered in mud, not blood.

Without warning, the dog yelped and leapt up. Littlefield yelped, too—he could hardly help it. He tumbled backward, landing on his ass and sending up a billow of dust. He froze. His heart flailed in his chest. The dog backed away and stood on three feet. It kept the mud-caked leg tucked up against its belly.

Evans's voice came to him, high-pitched and urgent: "What happened?"

And then Baker: "You all right out there? Littlefield?"

Littlefield raised his arm high above his head, waved, and gave a thumbs up. When his breathing had slowed, he returned to his squat and yelled over his shoulder. "Unharmed. All clear." If the dog had been part of a booby trap, or if it had covered one, both it and Littlefield would be dead. That sufficed for an all clear.

Laying his weapon on the ground at his feet, Littlefield clapped and whistled. The dog looked at him sidelong. It seemed ready to bolt. On the other hand, it had yet to touch down that injured leg.

Littlefield remembered that he had a Clif Bar in his breast pocket. He took it out and ripped away the foil. Twisting a hunk from the bar, he offered it to the dog.

"Come _on_ , puppy. It's food. Yummy-yummy. Good for you. Ten grams of protein. Builds strong bones and—" To himself, he said, "Speaking English to a foreign dog. Fuckin' brilliant, Littlefield."

But the dog came closer. It smelled, then licked, the lump of food. After some moments of hesitation, it bared its teeth. Littlefield had never been much afraid of dogs—he loved _all_ dogs, more or less—but at the flash of the white eyeteeth he shrank back. His hand shook, and he had to stop himself from jerking it away. But the dog gently took the sticky slab of food, that was all. Though its tongue flicked out, it never touched Littlefield's fingers.

In two bites, the bit of Clif Bar was gone. The dog came closer. Now it touched Littlefield, freely snuffling around his fingers and the back of his hand and the cuff of his sleeve. He broke off another piece of the bar, a bigger one this time, and the dog grabbed it. It circled away, its back to Littlefield, and sat down to eat.

Behind him, the lights flickered and jumped. Littlefield looked over his shoulder. The Humvee rolled toward him. It couldn't have moved any slower if a single marine had decided to push it from behind. Evans swung the spotlight around. Blinded, Littlefield held up his hand, palm out, to shield his eyes.

"Just a fucking second, asshole," Littlefield shouted. He turned his hand and raised his middle finger.

The dog was looking for more food. Littlefield pinched another chunk off the Clif Bar. This time, just as the dog reached for it, Littlefield yanked it away. The dog paused, then stepped forward. Its bum leg quaked, reached vainly for the ground, and sprang back up. Littlefield lured the dog closer and again closer. He reached out to scratch under its chin, and it consented. He rewarded it with another piece of the Clif Bar. It let him stroke the top of its head, and he rewarded it again.

Moving swiftly but—he hoped—not too aggressively, he scooped the dog into his arms. It thrashed and nearly broke free, but he opened his hand to show it the last chunk of Clif Bar. The dog snapped it up and licked Littlefield's hand clean and nestled against him. Skinny as fuck, poor mutt.

Littlefield crooned into the dog's crooked ear. "You're all right. Good boy. That's it."

Tucking the dog under his left arm, picking up his rifle with his right hand, he walked back to the Humvee. Baker was waiting for him, standing a couple of paces in front of the vehicle, her feet planted far apart, her arms folded across her chest.

"The fuck you think you're doing, marine?"

"I can't just leave him," Littlefield said.

"Sure as fuck can," Evans said from the turret. "Sheet far."

With time and careful attention to context, Littlefield had learned that _sheet far_ —or, on occasion, _sheesht far_ —was Tennessean for shit fire. Littlefield shot Evans a dark look but didn't answer him. He turned instead to Baker.

"Look at this poor guy." He twisted his body so that the light of one headlamp fell across the dog's body. "He's nothing but dirt and fur. And I think he's injured."

After a moment's thought, Baker said, "How do you know it's not crawling with bubonic plague or some fucking—"

"We'll get a doc to look at it." The dog strained and whimpered. Littlefield nearly lost his grip on both the dog and his rifle, but he shifted and juggled and got them both under control. "Fuck," he said. "I'm done fucking around." He carried the dog to the side of the Humvee. "Kiara. Open my door?" He banged the door with his knee—lightly, just for emphasis.

"It's against regs, asshole," Evans said.

"Says the asshole who makes pruno in his CamelBak." To Baker, he said, "Please?"

For the better part of a minute, Baker stood put. But then, with a terrible sigh, she came around and popped the door open. Littlefield laid the dog on the floor of the Humvee. It curled up and yawned and chewed its foot.

Baker said, "You do know it's actually a female, right?"

Littlefield poked his head in through the door. The dog lay with its tail toward him and its hind legs spread, and sure enough—female. He'd grown up thinking all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. Some habits never die. The dog stopped gnawing her foot long enough to stare back at him. Her eyes were wide and—he might be imagining it—reproachful, as if he'd violated her privacy.

To Baker, he said, "I never said I was a fucking biologist."

"If she pisses or shits in my vehicle," said Baker, "I'm rubbing _your_ nose in it."

Littlefield climbed in and slammed his door behind him. The dog flinched, and he ruffled her neck to comfort her. Baker rounded the Humvee. As she crossed in front of it, she glared at Littlefield. He tried to grin.

Evans crouched down in his harness. "Littledick, what the fuck's your dysfunction?"

Baker took her seat at the wheel and shifted into gear, and they started forward. One of the rear tires almost immediately hit a pothole. Evans thrashed in his harness, but he laughed. It was a full-on hearty guffaw that showed his gums and his gapped teeth.

"I knew you were hard up for female attention, Littledick," he said, "but this is—"

Another bump, and this time Evans cracked his head on the edge of the hatch. His helmet must have absorbed most of the shock, but still, he cussed up a storm—a whole weather system, in fact.

Baker pounded the overhead. "Get up there and watch the road, numb nuts. Holy Christ."

Littlefield shifted his feet, planting one boot on either side of the dog. She curled up against his right calf. But— _fuck_ —he'd kicked up something wet. Whatever it was, it seeped through the cloth of his trousers. He leaned forward and felt around on the floor. There was— _fuckety-fuck_ —a puddle. He swiped his fingers through it.

Baker was staring at him. "You heard what I said. Her piss, your muzzle."

Already grimacing in anticipation, Littlefield raised his fingers and— _fuckety-fuck-fuck_ —sniffed. "Coffee." He was so relieved that he had to stifle a laugh. Wiping his fingers on his pants, he said, "I knocked my coffee over. Or _she_ did. Come to think of it, maybe _you_ did, when you hit that pothole."

Before Baker could say anything, Evans rapped on the roof. "Got a row of rocks."

Baker stopped the Humvee. When Littlefield got out, the dog whimpered and hauled herself up on her three good feet. Littlefield scratched the top of her head and eased her back down. He closed his door gently. No need to startle her again.

From the turret, Evans called down, "If it's another fuckin' dog, man—"

"Fuckin' Christ, Evans, you got an off button?"

"Nuh-uh. I'm the motherfuckin' Energizer Bunny. I go on and on and on. Don't take my word for it. Ask your mama."

"Fuckwit."

Littlefield didn't need the night vision to see what Evans had seen—a row of flat rocks, laid end to end along the side of the road. In another place and at another time they might resemble a decorative border, though for sure a half-assed one. On a cliff above the Helmand River valley, if you saw a dozen clean rocks strung out at the edge of the road, you were looking at something that might kill you.

Littlefield turned and motioned for Baker to fall back. The Humvee moved away, ten meters, twenty meters, thirty, fifty.

The rocks lay on top of a long low hummock of loose dirt. Beyond that, the ground sloped downward and away from the roadbed. Littlefield fished his flashlight out of his pocket. He shone the beam along the rocks, the berm, the scrub-strewn hill. He caught sight of a brown, slender thing that glimmered when he held the flashlight a certain way.

For a second, he thought it must be one of the vipers that hid in burrows during the day or buried themselves in the sand. At night they climbed trees or flew over the ground, the sidewinding little cunts—or they coiled around themselves, rasping their scales together in warning, making a sound like a slab of bacon frying on a griddle. Some of the vipers were gray, some greenish, some rust-colored. Some were just this shade of shit-brown. But this particular shit-brown thing couldn't be a snake, or at least not a living one, or by now it'd be somewhere else.

Littlefield stepped over the rocks and over the mounded dirt and walked crabwise down the bank. The brown thing was, after all, an electrical cord. Here it lay on the bare soil, there it was covered with another row of stones, and further along it had been heaped haphazardly with loose weeds. He swept the beam of the flashlight ahead of him. Halfway down the hill there was a sprawling bush, apparently dead.

Keeping clear of the wire, Littlefield sidled down the slope. The bush wasn't a bush at all, really—or rather it had been a bush, but one that had lived its piss-poor life somewhere else, until someone uprooted it and dragged it here. Now it lay on its side, its knobbly roots hanging in the air. It was clear of snakes.

On the ground beyond, he found the trigger—nothing more complicated than a nine-volt battery. And here was the end of the wire—nothing fancier than a household extension cord, split down the middle.

Littlefield pocketed the battery and trudged back up the hill, his rifle thumping against his back. When he got to the road, he squatted alongside the row of rocks. He took out his utility knife, opened it, and flaked away a bit of the dirt underneath the stones. He aimed the flashlight beam into the crevice, and the light glinted back at him. There was something white under there. Some fat PVC pipe, packed with powder—or maybe, if these dudes were highfalutin, they'd used C-4. There'd be nails, tacks, shards of metal, buckshot, broken saw blades, anything that could slice, mangle, or kill. The gruesome beauty of these things was that they cost their makers almost nothing.

With his knife, he cut the wire. He left about six inches hanging off the end of the pipe. He cocked his head and squinted out across the surface of the road. The dirt was packed down hard, and there were no signs of digging. He got up and walked the road on either side, checking for more rocks, more wires, more devices. Nothing. No electrical cords, no pipes, no snakes.

He could spend hours or days going up and down this road and back and forth across it. He could search until he collapsed or died. Even if he never uncovered another bit of PVC pipe or another length of wire, he couldn't be sure there was nothing to find. _You can't prove a negative._ He heard it in his father's voice.

Back to the row of rocks. He lay in the road and pried up one of the stones, a centimeter or two at first, just enough to get light in. He looked for a pressure plate or a spring or a mousetrap. Nothing—not that it meant anything to find nothing.

Son, you know you can't prove a—

_For fuck's sake._ He nearly dropped the rock. He laid it gently down and sat up on his haunches. He hung his head. It was the second of September. No, the third. Here, it was the third. In the States, it was still the second. His dad's birthday. Into the dusty air, for what it was worth, he said, "Happy birthday, Pop."

Sighing, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, Littlefield lay down and went back to work. He held the flashlight between his teeth. Catching and holding his breath, he lifted the stone by degrees. Tiny, tiny degrees. When it was clear of the ground—with daylight, so to speak, all the way around it—he set it aside. He pried up another stone—slowly, assuming nothing. Another. Another and another and another, until finally he'd laid the pipe bare. It was a foot long, two or three inches in diameter.

At a glance he could see that there was nothing clever about it, no booby traps within booby traps, no decoys or dodges. It was all just as it appeared. Whoever had made this thing was a linear thinker, through and through—bomb, wire, trigger, boom. Even so, Littlefield was reluctant as all fuck to pick the thing up. He had to. Didn't want to, but had to.

With one hand, he raised the pipe from the ground. Heavy fucker. With the other hand, he trained the beam of his flashlight underneath. One last search. One last check for tripwires and triggers. Nothing—not that he could prove a negative, _Thanks, Dad, and happy birthday_. His hand shook, the light shook, the pipe shook.

_Breathe, Littlefield_. He forced the air out of his lungs, only to find that he had to force it back in again. Butt of his flashlight between his teeth, he cradled the pipe in his cupped hands. He got to his feet.

Back down the hill. He went straight for the dead shrub, carrying the pipe at arm's length. He kept his eye on it, as if it were a viper that might strike him. It wasn't the first time he'd done this—and it wasn't the first time he remembered carrying, as a boy, some repugnant dead thing from the edge of the Ashley River to the house, his baby brother capering and clamoring behind him, giddy with the sheer grossness of their plan to leave it, whatever it was, in Corinne's bed. Then as now, he'd walked fast and with a stiff-legged, flat-footed gait.

When he got to the uprooted bush, he knelt and laid the device on the ground. He found the wire and dusted it off. With his knife he stripped a couple of inches of fresh wire at the end of one of the strands. He twisted the bare wire to a point and bent it back like the head of a candy cane. He did the same with one of the strands hanging off the pipe—strip, twist, bend. He hitched the hooks together—loose wire to pipe's wire—and twisted each bit of wire back on itself. In a couple of seconds, then, he had the wires braided together into an almost unbreakable splice.

As he finished splicing the second pair of wires together, a wave of heat washed across his face. His ears burned. It was simple, irrational panic—the unfounded fear that he'd just completed the circuit and armed a roadside bomb, even though the device was down _here_ , right in front of him, not up _there_. Before he'd even understood why he was afraid, much less how baseless his fear was, his hand had gone to the breast pocket where he'd put the nine-volt battery, patting to make sure it was still there.

Sitting back on his heels, he paused to catch his breath. He switched off his flashlight and slipped it into a cargo pocket. He unclipped the chinstrap of his helmet and, tipping his head forward, let the helmet drop into his open palm. Sweat washed down his forehead, and he blotted it with his sleeve.

"I've been doing this too long," he said aloud.

He heard a footfall. _Fuck._ Heart thumping, he jammed his helmet on, got to his feet, and reached for his rifle.

"Thought you were whackin' off out here—or dyin'." Evans. "Scare you?"

" _Yes_ , motherfucker." Without a thought, Littlefield had swung his rifle up so that it aimed more or less at Evans's gut. He pointed the muzzle at the ground. "Lucky I didn't shoot your ass."

"About done here or what?" Evans looked toward the Humvee. "Your bitch is crying for you." He grinned. "The dog, too."

"I just have to finish this fucker off."

Littlefield nodded toward the top of the hill, but neither of them moved.

"What's up?" Evans said. He turned his head and spat.

"I don't—"

"We waiting for something?"

Littlefield sighed and started up the slope. "How's that nurse friend of yours? Still claiming those bumps're ingrown hairs?"

"Was you talking to yourself when I came down there? You know what they say about people that talk to themselves."

"They're from Kingsport, Tennessee?"

They'd almost reached the road. Evans backed away, toward the Humvee. "I'm counting the seconds." Grinning, he blew Littlefield a kiss. "Don't keep me waitin' too long."

"Evans, you're a motherfucking cartoon character," Littlefield said. But he was grinning too.

With one hand he plucked the battery from his pocket. With the other he felt on the ground for the wire. He got down on his belly. Here was the fun part. After the panic, the fear, the twitchy hands, here was the reward. He tapped the base of battery against his watch band. He blew dust out of the female connector.

" _Fire in the hole._ "

He drew a breath and held it. He touched the wires to the battery's connectors.
Chapter 3

The salon's phone chittered, and the receptionist answered it in her silvery voice. Two women in rimless glasses and pinstriped suits, calves-deep in the burble and fizz of their foot baths, grumbled about someone's wedding reception. A plummy-voiced man, speaking to a dumbstruck woman sitting beside him, told the endless, _endless_ story of his divorce. Music—some kind of multiculti ambient chill _Pure Moods_ mush, with sitar—played on a bookshelf stereo.

Amid the general hubbub, a child sat at the edge of the rattan couch with her hands lying motionless in her lap and her gaze fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance. She wore an orange T-shirt, green jeans, purple socks, and red Keds sneakers, like any kindergarten-aged girl who'd been given leave to dress herself—but she was so prim and silent and straight-backed that Corinne found herself staring in overt fascination. When the girl looked over and her black eyes locked on Corinne's, and her small jaw clenched and flexed, Corinne flinched and turned away. She scanned the salon. Whose child was it, anyway?

"Round or square?" Corinne's manicurist had spread a cloth across the table, and now she arranged her instruments and touched everything lightly with the tips of her fingers. Her mask hung from one ear by its elastic strap and bobbled in the air. Her own fingernails, cut to the quick, were flecked with polish—red, black, purple, pink, blue.

"Round, please," Corinne said, laying her hands on the square field of white terry. She cut her eyes toward the couch, where the little girl had resumed her thousand-yard stare.

"Same color?"

Same color as Corinne's toenails, she meant. You Don't Know Jacques! It was a nonsensical name for a luscious color, a purplish gray that reminded Corinne of the wax bloom on the skin of a plum. She could almost _feel_ it down there on her toes. She could see in her mind's eye how it made her pale squarish feet look exotic and mysterious. "Yes, ma'am," she said, and moved the bottle across the table.

The manicurist turned Corinne's hands side to side in the light. She laid them down again and opened the bottle of You Don't Know Jacques! When the brush emerged from the bottle, suffused with the gray-violet polish, Corinne's heart lurched in her chest. The color made her happy—so absurdly happy. It was the color of travertine, of wine-poached pears, of the ginger-jar lamp she'd had in her childhood bedroom, of the Chuck Taylors she'd worn a thousand days in a row in middle school.

"It's the little things," she said. "Am I right?"

A drop of polish splashed onto Corinne's knuckle. The manicurist had stopped with the brush hanging in the air. Her eyes were fixed on a point beyond Corinne's right shoulder. It must have something to do with that odd little girl. Perhaps, to no one's surprise, the child's head had begun to spin around, or her eyes had begun to glow like hot coals. But no. The girl had stood up, and by standing had taken on the aspect of an ordinary child, a frail-looking and rather startled child at that.

As Corinne swung around in her chair, there was a resounding whump. The door trembled and squawked in its frame. Someone—the plummy-voiced man, Corinne thought—cried out in shock.

Outside on the concrete, a bird lay dazed and quivering. The poor thing must have flown into the window. Corinne went and looked out, though she stopped short of opening the door. A strange creature, this bird—white feathers, pink beak, pink feet. An albino crow, perhaps—or no, a grackle, given the size. The bird rolled over and shook itself. It staggered toward the salon as if it meant to march right in. Gasping, then giggling at her own jumpiness, Corinne stepped back and turned from the door.

All conversation had stopped. Everyone's eyes were on her. The eyes of the suited women and the nail techs and the plummy-voiced divorcé and his dumbstruck girlfriend—all on Corinne, as if she were bound to deliver an explanation for the bird's errant flight. The little girl appeared to be on the verge of tears.

"Albino," Corinne said, addressing the child's clavicle, more or less. "I think— I think it's a grackle."

Returning to her chair, she found her nail tech wearing a deeply bewildered expression. It was impossible to go on as if nothing had happened, wasn't it? But what else were they supposed to do?

Corinne thought she heard her phone buzzing in her purse. It was probably her mother. With five or six hours to go till the start of Daddy's birthday party, there could be any number of tasks still undone—streamers and banners to be hung, ice buckets to be filled, napkins to be ironed, wine to be decanted. And perhaps Corinne had already pledged to do something and had since forgotten. Was she supposed to pick up the cake? Polish the silverware? Fill the tiki torches with citronella oil? Weed the flower beds? Make three hundred sliders, half with cheese and half without?

She fished around in her purse until she found her phone. Not Mama, Andrei. Corinne turned to the manicurist. "It's my husband. I'll just—" She waved toward the lavatory. Grabbing her purse and tucking it under her arm, she got up and hurried across the room.

Conversation had resumed, more quietly than before. Corinne went into the restroom and flipped on the light. The overhead fan came to life with some preliminary rattling and squeaking, as if it needed to clear its throat. She tapped the button to accept Andrei's call.

"Hello, my love," she said. "Are you on your way?"

"You don't sound happy," Andrei said.

"I don't?"

"You sound lugubrious."

"I do?" Corinne stared up at the grate of the yattering fan. "I don't _think_ I do."

"Look," he said, "I don't want to argue."

Corinne sighed. Okay, so it was going to be like that. She said, again, "Are you on your way?"

"This is— Look, this is a complete goat rodeo. The DBA thinks the database needs to be refactored. There's this guy, this code monkey, who doesn't understand the concept of a goddamn view—"

"Andrei, sweetie. I don't know what any of that means."

He sighed. "We'll be here all weekend. I don't think I can get back until Tuesday at the earliest."

"Oh my God, Andrei. Tuesday?"

"I have to work if I'm the only one working. You know I'm not wrong."

How to answer that? Where to begin? She might say that a bachelor's degree in economics was virtually useless, particularly in a state whose fiscal policy comprised the prayer of Jabez, the Gadsden flag, and the Laffer curve. She might say that _he_ had talked _her_ into quitting grad school. That he'd said to her, _I don't want to be my kids' grandparents' age_. That he'd said, _You don't want your water breaking in the middle of your thesis defense_. That she might not be earning a wage, but she volunteered four or five days a week at the public library. That yes, she loved getting her nails done, but it was essentially her only indulgence. That she was a careful steward of their finances.

But she said none of that. She was not going to take the bait. She was not going to let him lead her into the same fight over and over. Instead, she stopped and took a breath. In a tight whisper, she said, "You can't make me pregnant unless you're _here_ , Andrei."

"Oh, shit," he said. "Is it that time again?"

Corinne felt, all at once, as if she were going to weep. If the sudden downtick in her basal body temperature weren't enough, if the tenderness in her breasts weren't enough, if the twinge in her left flank weren't enough, then put them all together and add in a big fat mood swing and there you had your answer: Yes. It was that time again.

More gently than before, Andrei said, "I'll come home, then. Or I'll try. Maybe I can grab an early evening flight tonight and come back here in the morning. It's a quick hop, ATL to CHS. It's not that long a flight. Only an hour in the air, right?"

Flattening her hand, Corinne looked at her unpainted nails. She still had that drop of polish on the first knuckle of her middle finger. "Daddy's party's tonight," she said. "His birthday party."

She closed her eyes and waited. The silence on the other end of the phone was like a solid object—black, opaque, dense as granite. It was a silence that had its own gravitational force.

At last, just as she'd begun to wonder if he'd disconnected the call, he said, "Tomorrow night, then. I can come home tomorrow night. That's not too late, is it?"

"I don't think so, no," she said, at once on the verge of both tears and laughter. "I don't think that's too late."

"All right," he said. And then, "I love you."

" _Moi aussi._ "

They said their goodbyes. She waited for him to disconnect, and he seemed to be waiting for her. At the sound of a knock on the door, Corinne quietly ended the call. She dropped her phone into her purse and went out. The receptionist scurried into the bathroom and banged the door shut.

It was strangely quiet. The _Pure Moods_ mush had ceased playing. The other customers had vanished, and the nail techs had gone outside to smoke cigarettes. That left Corinne alone with the little girl in green jeans and red Keds. The child sat in the same spot as before, only now the albino grackle lay in her lap, swaddled in a nest of hand towels. She stroked the creature's narrow white head.

"Okay," Corinne said, mostly to herself, " _this_ is unusual."

At the sound of her voice, the girl looked up. Her eyes were dark brown, flecked with gold—not nearly so black as Corinne had first thought. Holding the bird made her seem, if anything, rather tender and delicate. Corinne grabbed a wicker chair by the arm and dragged it over to the child and sat.

"You made a friend."

The girl nodded.

"Does he have a name?"

The girl shook her head.

"How about you? Do you have a name?"

The girl nodded. It seemed she might leave it at that, until at length she said, "Lorelei."

Lorelei. A suicide-cum-siren who lured sailors to their deaths. Perfect. At least this particular Lorelei had an ordinary child's voice—slightly nasal, slightly flat, and probably incapable of luring anyone to the nether reaches of anywhere.

Corinne glanced down, and the grackle's gleaming red eye seemed to hold her gaze. But then again—

Tilting her head, she watched the bird. In all the many moments she studied it, it neither breathed nor blinked nor moved a feather.

"Is your mother around, by chance?"

"Why are you talking to me?" the girl said. Her brown eyes flashed. "Strangers aren't supposed to talk to me."

The bathroom door opened, and the receptionist returned. She went to the front of the salon and rapped on the windows. The nail techs filed in again. The phone rang. Someone pressed a button on the stereo, and the sitar began to play.

One of the manicurists sat on the couch next to Lorelei. They exchanged a few words in low voices. Neither of them spoke nearly long enough to take in the topic of death, impermanence, and the possibility of grackle heaven. Still, Lorelei nodded and sniffled a little and let herself be led outside, where she swaddled the grackle with towels. What she and her mother did after that looked a lot like prayer.

Corinne's manicurist approached. "Okay," she said, motioning toward her station. It was, of course, just as they'd left it—the instruments laid out on the fresh white cloth, the bottle of nail polish standing to one side. "You ready?"

You Don't Know Jacques! no longer had the power to brighten Corinne's mood. It no longer looked exotic and mysterious. It looked merely dull. The color of wine-poached pears, sure—but also the color of limp, used-up grape skins. And hadn't her ginger-jar lamp and Chuck Taylors been a purer, prettier shade of violet? Maybe, as it turned out, she didn't know Jacques at all—or didn't want to.

"You know," she said, backing away, "thank you, but— I think that's all for today. Y'all must get some crazy reviews on Yelp."

She plucked a wad of bills out of her wallet and handed them to the receptionist. Way too much—it was way too much money for a pedicure alone. The receptionist's eyes widened. Just then, the salon's phone rang, and when the receptionist reached to answer it, Corinne slipped away without another word.

On the sidewalk, Lorelei and her mother were still giving the grackle its send-off to the great aviary in the sky. Corinne sat in her car and watched them until they went back inside. She couldn't see them after that—the salon's front windows reflected the parking lot and sky, and the glare across the glass admitted only the briefest glimpses of movement beyond—but she imagined Lorelei returning to the rattan couch. She'd be as starchy as before, in spite of her wet lashes and tear-dampened cheeks.

It must be strange to have a child like that, a sentinel at the margins of any given room, watching with her unwavering eyes, judging any parental missteps. For that matter, it must be strange to have _any_ child—an imp like Ben, say, or a naïf like John Carter. When Corinne thought at all about her future child—when she was driving and her mind wandered, or when she lay in bed in the morning, still in that liminal space between dreaming and waking—she pictured a tiny version of her father. Serious, handsome, bookish, affectionate, thoughtful. A little absentminded, but all the more endearing for it. But what if, instead, she got a duplicate Anna Grace? What if, as a mother, she _became_ a duplicate Anna Grace?

"I'm not ready," she said aloud. "I'm not ready."

As soon as she said it, she waved it away. Cold feet, that was all. Parenthood would be the biggest step she'd yet taken in life. That was all.

Her phone rang again. It was her mother, calling at last. She tapped the green button. "Hi, Mama. You'll tell me if I sound lugubrious, won't you?"

"Don't panic."

Corinne immediately began to panic. "What's wrong?"

"Your father's in the hospital." Somehow she seemed both to pause, as if letting the news sink in, and simultaneously to rush forward, as if hoping to thwart any kind of wild speculation. "It's nothing serious. He just sort of collapsed, is all, and they want to keep him overnight."

"What do you mean, he collapsed?"

On the other end of the line, there was a good deal of rustling, and then the dull clank of bottles. "Whatever it usually means when someone collapses. He just sort of fell over and, you know, _collapsed_."

"Mama," she said, scrambling for her keys. "Where are you? Where's Daddy? I'm coming. I'm on my way."
Chapter 4

For the third time in thirty minutes, John Carter knocked on the door of Dr. Cable's studio. No one had answered the first two times, and no one answered now. Looking left, looking right, making sure he had the hallway to himself, John Carter pressed his ear to the door. He heard no music, no talk, no movement.

It was clear, then: The studio was empty. Dr. Cable wasn't in there, even though John Carter's piano lesson had been set for three, and even though, according to both his watch and his cell phone, it was now 3:19.

Someone was whistling. John Carter cocked his head. The sound came from the other end of the hall, from the windowless north stairwell. It was strange, probably, to have a favorite stairwell, but John Carter _did_ have one, and that was it. With its walls of dimpled plaster and its high-gloss paint and its treads of concrete and clanging steel, the whole space hummed with echoes and overtones. It was, in a sense, a semi-tuned instrument—E-flats and B-flats resonated more richly than any other notes. The whistler's tune meandered around the E-flat an octave above middle C—he seemed to be trying out the acoustics, actually, rather than aiming for any particular melody—and whenever he hit the note and held it, the stairwell rang like a chime.

Turning and stepping away from Dr. Cable's door, John Carter watched the head of the stairs. A topknot appeared first—a fat bundle of black hair bound up untidily at the crown of the man's head, where it bobbed like a tassel on a cornstalk. And then more hair, a mad mess of it that hadn't gotten gathered up into the topknot with the rest. And then a crazy black beard and a face that, in all that shag, seemed beside the point.

The bearded man stopped whistling. He looked almost, but not quite, young enough to be a student. He was dressed like a student, too, in a rumpled pink button-down shirt with the sleeves turned up and the tails untucked over knee-length khaki shorts. He strode surely and nimbly down the hall, his flip-flops thwacking against his heels as he walked, his hand already extended for a handshake.

"You must be my three o'clock," he said, grinning merrily. He grabbed John Carter's hand in both of his. Not much of a shake, really—just a single motion, quickly up and firmly down, like a brick-smashing karate chop—but the professor's grip was crushingly strong. "I'm Scott Cable."

As he let go of John Carter's hand, the professor turned and glared at the nameplate on his door. _SCOTT A CABLE PHD._ Grunting, he bent down and snatched up a yellow Post-It note that had fallen to the floor. The tacky strip on its back had collected grime and strands of hair and a tiny constellation of bright red lint.

"I've been sending memos," he said. "I've been calling. I have no clue whether they're ever planning to..."

With his index finger Dr. Cable touched the Post-It's glue strip, as if to gauge its remaining stickiness. It had little or none, surely, but he pressed it to the nameplate anyway, covering the squat _PHD_. The square of paper immediately fell. In one deft motion Dr. Cable—or _Professor_ Cable, rather—caught it and crumpled it.

He shook himself off and smiled. "Anyway." Throwing open the door, he waved John Carter through. "Let's..."

Just inside the threshold, John Carter stopped and stared at the piano. It was a Steinway, a fat-legged parlor grand in dark walnut, obviously old but utterly pristine. As far as John Carter knew, it was one of only two Steinways in the Department of Music, and the other was an upright. This— _this_ was a treasure. John Carter's fingertips itched at the sight of it.

Under the window on the far side of the room, there was a plain formica-topped table with a padded piano bench underneath it. Except for a pen and a notebook lying at its center, the tabletop was bare. Professor Cable's other belongings were still boxed up, the boxes piled in a corner in stacks of three.

The professor closed the door. Holding the crumpled Post-It note, he spun around—looking for a wastebasket, probably, and finding none. Stuffing the twist of paper into his pocket, he stepped to the table, where he picked up the notebook, cracked its spine, and laid it down again. "I'm semi-terrible with names," he said. "Littlefield is easy, given that—you know—your mom..."

Given that John Carter's mom taught voice here, he meant, with a studio across the hall and three doors down. John Carter's shoulders slumped. On the first day of classes, his theory professor, Dr. Archambault, had spoken more sternly to John Carter than to anyone else, as if to foil any hope or claim of favoritism. On the second day of classes, John Carter's voice teacher, Ms. Treat, had cooed and clucked at him as if he were a dear little pet. On the third day of classes, he'd spotted two of his fellow freshmen, both piano majors, talking quietly and cutting their eyes at him, as if they suspected him of double agency. On the fourth day of classes, Kaitlin, a sophomore soprano who studied with his mother, had fawned over him, as if he were a long-awaited celebrity and she'd been dying to collect his autograph. Now, on the fifth day of classes, in spite of it all, it _still_ somehow surprised him that his mother's name loomed over him the way it did.

Professor Cable said, "No prejudice on my part, one way or the other, I promise. If it helps, I'll forget your last name and pretend you're an Grosvenor or a Finkelstein or a Pinkwater. Fair enough?"

"Um. Sure. Okay."

Brushing a fleck of something from the page of his notebook, Professor Cable tapped a spot near its middle. "John. Right." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Right?"

"John Carter."

"Carter? I think I'd go for Pinkwater myself, but to each their own."

"No, sir, that's actually my name. John Carter Littlefield, and I go by John Carter."

"Like the guy from Mars?"

"John Rutter plus Elliott Carter."

"That could've gone wrong in so many ways. You could've been Milton Crumb Littlefield or Luciano Ives Littlefield, and then where would you be?"

"Is that a rhetorical question? Sometimes I can't tell."

"Yes, don't worry, it's rhetorical. Got it in one." Closing his notebook, the professor turned and leaned back against the table. "Tell me about yourself. What do you do for fun?"

John Carter blinked at him. "Fun?"

Professor Cable touched his topknot, as if just remembering it was there. "Fun is a thing people have when they're not working or studying or suffering."

"It's just— It's unexpected. I wasn't prepared—"

"Running? Biking? Long walks along the beach? Domestic terrorism?"

John Carter swallowed hard. "I don't do any of that, no."

"Skating? _World of Warcraft_? Encaustic painting? Armed robbery?"

After a moment, John Carter said, "I like to browse random stuff on Spotify, to see if I can play whatever I'm hearing." The professor frowned and bit the corner of his lip and said nothing. John Carter pressed on. "I like it best when I come across some blues or jazz or something like that. Pop music's pretty simple, really—one, four, five, one, one, four, five, one—but blues is trickier." He cleared his throat. "Blues _are_ trickier?"

"In other words, your respite from playing the piano is...playing the piano."

"I— Yes, I guess so."

"Do you have a second major or a minor in something else?"

John Carter shook his head.

"Does the phrase 'well-rounded' ring a bell?"

John Carter stood dumbfounded, his lips moving but refusing to form words.

"Well. Let's just... Let's move on." One end of the table slid backward an inch or two, and Professor Cable— _Scott_ —jostled it until one corner came to rest against the wall. "Let's hear something."

John Carter tugged at the collar of his shirt. His neck was suddenly hot and itchy. "Was I supposed to prepare something? Did I miss an e-mail?"

"No, you didn't miss anything. And I don't really do e-mail, by the way, so..."

"So?"

"So don't e-mail me." The professor shoved the piano bench toward John Carter. "I figure you must have something or other by memory. After all, if you eat, sleep, and breathe the eighty-eights..."

John Carter dragged the bench to the piano and sat and lifted the fallboard. One of the white keys, the F two octaves above middle C, had a lengthwise hairline crack, blackened where countless fingers had struck it. He stroked the cracked key but didn't press it. In a small voice, he said, "I'm not sure."

"You're not sure if you have something by memory, or you're not sure what to play?"

"Both?"

"Then how about a little sight-reading?" Professor Cable went to the stacks of boxes in the corner. Humming something, he opened a box and dug around in it. He pulled out an old folio-sized book. It had shed its covers, and its yellowed, foxed signatures were held together by a fringe of unraveling thread. Professor Cable flipped through the pages and laid it open on the piano rack.

Intermezzo. Andante teneramente.

"Brahms. Give it a try." Scott scratched the nape of his neck, and his topknot wiggled. " _Teneramente_ means 'tenderly,' by the way."

John Carter nodded, as if the professor had just confirmed something he'd already known. In fact, he'd taken _teneramente_ to mean either _tentative_ or _tenuous_ , and he'd worried that he wasn't exactly sure what _tenuous_ meant.

The piece looked simple enough at the beginning. Halfway down the page the staves became thorny with sharps and naturals, and groups of eighth notes began to stretch their beams across the bar lines. Slightly scary. He took a deep breath and started.

As he'd suspected, the first few lines were nearly effortless, and then the syncopations and accidentals started to make him nervous. His heart thumped, but he kept playing. On this piano, even a thrashing slog through an unfamiliar piece sounded like a festival overture, a fanfare, a Christmas oratorio.

Professor Cable was tapping the top of his table—how long had he been doing that?—at a tempo that spectacularly mismatched John Carter's. It was faster, maybe twice as fast. John Carter willed his fingers to move more and more quickly, until at last he fell into line.

" _Teneramente_ ," Professor Cable said. "Tenderly, tenderly." He moved to the piano, clapping his hands to keep time. Coming up behind John Carter, he dropped his voice to a murmur. " _Tenderly_."

A glance up and down the page told John Carter that, other than one long crescendo to _forte_ , the music was never supposed to raise its voice above a whisper. John Carter _was_ playing more loudly than before. It was hard— _so hard_ —not to push the dynamics along with the tempo. He felt like a sideshow plate spinner. If he thought about playing softly, he started to play more slowly. If he thought about phrasing, he missed some of the accidentals. But somehow, somehow, he drove through, until at the top of the next page, he reached a couple of bars of _ritardando_. Yes, he probably slowed a little too much, but he was grateful for the chance to catch his breath.

His heartbeat thumped in his ears. He'd been playing for all of three minutes, but he felt as if he'd run a marathon. His wrists felt wobbly. Soon he'd need to turn the page, and if he had to turn it himself, he'd have to stop playing. He knew this as well as he knew his own name.

"Professor—"

Before he could say more, Professor Cable was there, turning the page.

The last section of the piece repeated the first, and it lay easily under John Carter's hands. When he came to a spot marked _espressivo_ , he did his best to make it expressive. He played with all the tenderness he could muster. He came, finally, to the end. When he softly played the final chord, it sounded, on this piano, this gorgeous old instrument, like a lullaby.

Professor Cable had never left his side after turning the page. He closed the tattered old book and nodded and said, "Beautiful."

He was hard to read, Professor Cable. He said the word _beautiful_ the way another man might say _cream-colored_ or _battery-operated_ , as if it referred to any mundane object or appliance. His face seemed almost like a postscript to his beard and hair. The black shrubbery was a mask, a barrier, a prop.

"Thanks. That'll do for this week."

As if John Carter had already left, Scott went back to his makeshift desk. Bending over to rest his elbows and forearms on the tabletop, he pored over his notebook. His fingers pantomimed the playing of some piece, a rhythmic figure in the left hand, a series of arpeggiated chords in the right. Abruptly he popped up again and returned to the piano.

"Hey," he said. He tipped the Brahms book off the piano rack and handed it to John Carter. "Take this. Look at three, four, and six."

The book lay flat across both of John Carter's outstretched hands. He stared down at it. It had been published in Berlin in 1893, if the front page were to be trusted. A long leafy vine decorated the title itself.

"Three, five, and six," John Carter said.

"Three, _four_ , and six." Scott opened the door and guided John Carter toward it. "Just do whatever you would've done for your last teacher. We'll start with that. See how much damage there is to undo." He grinned.

After the studio door had closed behind him, John Carter stood staring at the nameplate. _SCOTT A CABLE PHD._ A strange name, Cable. Strange name, strange man.

Walking away, walking down the hall, John Carter opened the Brahms to the third piece, a ballade. _Allegro energico._ He looked it over. B-flat. No, not B-flat—of course not. G minor. It was strange, probably, to have a favorite key, but John Carter _did_ have one, and it happened to be G minor.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and the unexpectedness of it nearly made him drop the Brahms. Closing it and tucking it under one arm, he fished out his phone. He had a text message from his sister: _Daddy in hospital. Collapsed. Where are you?_

And now John Carter _did_ drop the Brahms. It hit the linoleum with a hearty _splat_. He snatched up the book and ran down the hall. As he hurried down the musical stairwell, his swift footfalls bonged like church bells.
Chapter 5

A man was leaning over Leland's hospital bed, gently holding open his right eyelid, blinding him with a penlight. "Sorry for the rude awakening," the man said. He had a North Carolina accent. "I tried to rouse you, but you were out—and I mean _out_."

"Have we met?" Leland's tongue felt weighty and slow in his mouth. His head thumped.

"We have, actually."

Switching off the penlight, the man straightened and stepped back. Leland blinked away spots of purple and green until he saw, finally, the wire-framed glasses, the glossy black hair, the clean-shaven face of the doctor he'd met in the ER.

"Ramanujan," Leland said. "Like the mathematician."

"You remembered."

"Couldn't hardly forget. You haven't, um, seen my daughter, by any chance?"

Ramanujan held his hand in the air, level with his eyebrows—Corinne-height, more or less. "Yay tall? Blondish? Blue shirt? She asked where the cafeteria was—said she wanted coffee. There was a boy here, too." He lowered his hand to his chin. "Long hair. Very sweaty."

"Must be John Carter. My son."

Ramanujan scrubbed his hands together to warm them. Tipping forward over the bedrail, he probed Leland's abdomen—left, right, center. "Any pain? Nausea? Cramping?"

Leland shook his head. A mistake: The thudding in his skull worsened. The locus of the pain lay an inch or two above his right eyebrow, where the pot must have landed. He searched with his fingertips for the precise spot, touched the gauze bandage that covered it, and pressed on it until he sucked in his breath and tears pricked the corners of his eyes.

"Hands off," the doctor said. "You have a couple of stitches under there."

"Stitches, not staples? I thought it was all staples now."

"Not on your face, unless you want a really gnarly scar."

"I've always wondered if they just, you know, hit you with a Swingline." Leland clenched his fist as if squeezing the trigger of a staple gun. Even though he was closing his fingers around empty air, the feebleness of his grip alarmed him. He dropped his hand and let it lie on his chest.

Whether or not Ramanujan understood the miniature drama unfolding before him, the tiny crisis of debility and denial, he put on a compassionate face. "You're doing great," he said. "Your blood pressure's coming up, your lungs sound good, heart sounds good, you're not concussed. Unless something changes unexpectedly, we'll send you home in the morning."

Leland smoothed his blanket across his chest. A strand of yarn had snagged free, three or four inches of it. Twisting it around his finger, he looked up. "Are you sure? I mean, _totally_ sure? Everything felt muddled all day today. I couldn't seem to keep my head on straight. It's not—? It wasn't—?"

But Ramanujan was already shaking his head. "A stroke? I don't think so. We did a CT scan, and there's no sign of any bleeding. We'll do another one in the morning."

The CT scan had been a joy. Leland had had to put on a funny blue hat and lie on a cold slab with his head in a big white tube. It was a pleasure to have another one to look forward to.

Ramanujan said, "Have you experienced any issues with erectile dysfunction?"

"Erectile dysfunction?"

"Can you keep it up? You know, _it_."

Leland's cheeks flushed. "I understand the question. I just wasn't expecting to be asked."

"And?"

"I'm not _incapable_." Leland licked his lips, swallowed hard, wished he could hide under the blanket. "Slower than I used to be, maybe, if you see what I mean. But not incapable. Not _usually_ incapable, anyway."

"How about dry mouth? I see you're looking a little parched."

" _Now_ I am, sure. But usually, or frequently? I don't know. I mean, I don't think so."

"Incontinence? Constipation? Excessive snoring?"

Leland clutched at the edge of the blanket, until—again—the weakness of his grip worried him, and he had to let go. He said, "You have something in mind, and you're freaking me out."

The doctor pursed his lips and exhaled though his nose. He seemed to be weighing his words—or perhaps he was deciding whether to say anything at all. At last, he said, "I'm almost a hundred percent sure it's nothing. I'd call it idiopathic hypotension. Your blood pressure dropped and you fainted, and we don't exactly know why. It happens in older people."

_Older people_ , Leland thought. _I've become older people._

"But you'll follow up with your family doctor," Ramanujan said. "There are some long shots we want to rule out. There's Parkinson's, for example. There's also a degenerative disorder called MSA, which starts out like Parkinson's, but has— Well, it's one of the Parkinson's-plus syndromes."

Leland knew next to nothing about Parkinson's disease, except that it was a horrifying guest all on its own, without inviting any plus-ones to the party. He was just about to ask exactly how long these long shots were, when Ramanujan said, "I'm kind of a fan, by the way."

"What?" Leland said. "A fan?"

"Of your writing. I just finished your history of the Preservation Society."

A rarish thing—meeting a stranger who'd read one of his books. There must be some perfect way to react, some optimal blend of humility and aplomb, but Leland had yet to find it. It was especially difficult to talk about this book, his latest. Of the seven he'd written, it was his least favorite. He'd been so anxious about offending anyone in either the Preservation Society or the Historical Society that he'd ended up with a series of hagiographies rather than a decent history. It would have been better not to have written it at all. And it would be better now, he thought, to keep his mouth shut. Better not to solicit opinions he'd rather not hear. But he lifted his head again and said, "And?"

"I just picked it up because it was yours. But it was good."

That word, _good_ , said in just this way—an upward inflection, a roughness of tone—could sound as if it meant almost anything. It could even, conceivably, mean _good_. Leland felt no particular hankering for clarification.

"What are you working on now?" Ramanujan asked.

The question wearied Leland unutterably—though it might only be that his head had never stopped pounding and the wound beneath the bandage itched and his right eyelid was dragging itself downward. "I thought, this time, I'd try fiction. Some German scientists came here to study the transit of Venus in eighteen eighty-two, so I'm basing a novel on—"

Ramanujan was looking at his watch. "Shit. I have to run." He looked at Leland over the top of his glasses. "Rest up. We'll get you on your way tomorrow. Sleep if you can." He switched off the overhead light. With a thumbs up, he left the room and swung the door shut behind him.

Much of the afternoon had vanished from Leland's memory—the evening, too, given that it must be after seven o'clock by now—but he remembered waking to find EMTs in his kitchen. There'd been two of them, two serious-faced men with starched blue shirts and high-and-tight haircuts. They'd brought a scuffed oxygen tank and an intricate gurney with a fat-barred frame, objects that weren't much needed in the presence of robust good health. And they'd spoken to Leland—though one of them had spoken barely at all—in deep-throated voices, with exaggerated calmness, as if his hearing and intellect might be impaired. People talked that way in times of crisis, not routine.

Still, it was interesting—was _interesting_ the right word?—that Leland had felt so little fear. In the kitchen, in the ambulance, in the ER, he'd felt no panic, no worry. Even now, he felt strangely untroubled.

Death was—for this moment, at least—something he could explore in wonder rather than terror, as if he were discovering a new room hidden in some corner of his house. A library—why couldn't it be a library? On one side there'd be books he wanted to reread. On the other side there'd books he wished he could burn. With any luck, the numbers would be about equal.

In a corner—behind something, out of sight behind a hanging tapestry, maybe—there'd be an unlit closet, and in it all the things he'd gotten from his father. A mishmash, a clutter of objects he'd once treasured and had since forgotten, mixed in with trash he'd meant to discard but had inexplicably kept. The manner and method of the old man's death. The funeral and the strange preacher's ghastly eulogy. Grief, guilt, fear. His mother's terrible, terrible silence. The set of her jaw. The sickening smell of rum and Dr Pepper. Leland pictured a series of lidded containers—matryoshka boxes, all stacked together, each one somehow larger than the one that enclosed it. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply.

When he opened his eyes again, the room was less dim than before: The door stood open, and light from the corridor cast a broad yellow parallelogram across the floor. Corinne and John Carter stood shoulder to shoulder, hanging over the bedrail like a pair of morose vultures.

"Morning, Pop," John Carter said.

Leland struggled to sit up, but the slant of the mattress worked against him. "Is it morning already? Shit. It can't be morning already, can it?"

If death was a library full of books and tapestries—just another room, nothing to fear—then mental impairment was the deepest dungeon of the coldest, loneliest, remotest prison on earth. The possibility that he might someday be unable to reason and remember was unbearable. The prospect of recent days leaking away through some cranial fissure, leaving him with an ever-shrinking collection of decades-old memories—that was intolerable. Terrifying.

What would he do, anyway, if he had Parkinson's? Clear his browser history and drive his car into an embankment? Could he leave his children fatherless if it meant sparing himself the humiliation of diapers and aphasia?

Corinne patted his shoulder, gentling him. "It's almost eight o'clock on Friday night."

Practically gasping with relief, Leland fell back against the pillow. He'd lost barely any time at all—a half hour or so at most, and possibly as little as five or ten minutes.

His mouth was still dry. "Is there a pitcher of water around here anywhere?"

"Sure, Pop," John Carter said. He stepped away for a moment and returned with a mauve carafe and a translucent plastic cup.

"Aren't you supposed to be at work?" Leland said. He'd called in a favor and gotten the boy a job at a tour company—answering phones, sweeping floors, handing out leaflets, that sort of thing. This was his first evening on the schedule.

John Carter handed him a cup of water. He and Corinne cut their eyes at each other.

"No call, no show," Corinne said. "He got fired."

"By text message," John Carter said. He pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen. "Somebody named Doris. Do you know her?"

Leland shook his head. "Never heard of her." He emptied the cup in two gulps. John Carter refilled it, and Leland drank again.

John Carter gazed at his phone again. "I don't know if this is really legitimate, you know? I mean, it's from this person named Doris, whoever that is—"

"What does it _say_ exactly?" Leland said.

"'This is Doris at Truluck Tours. Denny says you're fired. Direct quote but I'm leaving out the cuss words.'"

"Knowing Denny Truluck," Leland said, "I'd say it's legit."

"It was unavoidable," John Carter said. "Wasn't it? _You_ were here, so _I_ had to be here."

John Carter, having refilled the water cup again, held it out, but Leland waved it away. "Did Andrei make it back?"

Corinne shook her head. "Tomorrow."

"Where's your mom?" he said.

"She's at home," said Corinne. "The party must be—"

Air passed noisily through Leland's throat. He said, "She's having my birthday party without me?"

"So I'm not just imagining things?" John Carter said. "That's weird, right?"

Weird, yes, Leland thought, but not unprecedented. All through their first brief marriage she'd managed to surprise him, practically every other week, with similar little acts of negligence and abandonment. Not once but three times, she'd called him from some distant city, having gone there to sing without having bothered to tell him beforehand. She spoiled his plans for their first wedding anniversary by accompanying her two best friends on a cruise to Cozumel and the Grand Caymans.

He'd never gotten used to the sting of it. Even now, thinking of these things he'd long ago forgiven and tried to forget, he felt wounded all over again. Luckily, for the much longer stretch of their second marriage, she'd been dutiful, if not always perfectly solicitous.

"Didn't she tell you herself?" Corinne said.

"What? When?"

"When I talked to her on the phone, she said she was the one who found you and called nine-one-one. She said she came with you to the ER."

"I can't remember." Closing his eyes, Leland tried to picture the scene in the kitchen. EMTs. Oxygen tank. Gurney. No Anna Grace. He couldn't place her there. But his head was hurting again. His wound pulsed. The very sutures seemed to throb. With a sigh, he said, "I'm sure it'll be a beautiful party. I wonder what kind of cake she ordered."

A woman's voice warbled from a speaker somewhere behind the bed. Unintelligible, mostly. Hospitals were bizarre places. A magical clothespin could shine a light through your finger and report the oxygenation of your blood on a monitor the size of a cigar box, but a simple loudspeaker could only transmit a garble of consonants.

"What was that?" John Carter said. He looked at his phone again. "End of visiting hours?"

Corinne said, "They don't do that any more."

"What?" John Carter said.

"Shoo people out when visiting hours are over."

"So do they still have visiting hours or not?"

"I don't know," Corinne said, touching John Carter's elbow, "but Daddy looks pretty worn out. We should go anyway."

Leland was sure he'd never loved her more than at that moment. She kissed the bare side of his forehead. John Carter leaned over the bedrail for mostly unsuccessful attempt at a hug. "Happy birthday, by the way," he said.

"Oh!" Corinne gave a start, as if someone had poked her in the small of the back. "That reminds me."

With some difficulty, she took a package from her purse. It was wrapped in plain red paper, and it was clearly a book. A corner of the paper ripped away and fluttered to the floor. "We all chipped in. Even Ben."

Leland took the thing from Corinne and weighed it in his hands. Yes. Definitely a book. He tore away the paper. _The Transit of Venus_. A novel by Shirley Hazzard. He stared at the image on the cover—Mars embracing Venus.

"Signed first edition," Corinne said.

"Because of _your_ book," John Carter said. "Since it's about the transit of Venus and all. _This_ book...and _your_ book. _Both_ books."

Leland didn't think of himself as a writer, per se, not in the way that Shelby Foote was a writer, or E.L. Doctorow—or, presumably, Shirley Hazzard. But he wondered if Shelby Foote's kids, in the run-up to _Shiloh_ , had given him a copy of _The Red Badge of Courage_. Intended message: We pay attention to what you do. Unintended message: Somebody else did it better a long time ago.

His children turned to leave. When Corinne reached the threshold, something else apparently occurred to her, and she turned back. "Red velvet," she said.

"What?"

"The cake. John Carter told me he heard Mama ordering a red velvet cake."

"Oh," Leland said. "Interesting choice."

Corinne blew him a kiss, waved, and went out. He watched the open door, half-expecting her to return, having remembered something new: The _Post and Courier_ had just run a rapturous review of a new book about the Preservation Society, twice the length of Leland's. Both the author and the critic would be at the party. And the mayor. There'd be plenty of red velvet cake for everyone.

Red velvet was everywhere now—Starbucks, the Barnes and Noble Cafe, every bakery and grocery store—and Anna Grace had probably thought only that it would be a hit at the party. Leland could hardly blame her for choosing it. She wouldn't know, of course— _couldn't_ know—that red velvet cake reminded him of madness and grief.

In the eighties, his father had become obsessed with the stuff. He'd baked dozens of cakes, emptied dozens of bottles of red food coloring, tinkered with dozens of recipes. Once, once only, an aunt or great-aunt had baked him a perfect red velvet cake. All his efforts were aimed toward recreating it.

When he died, a cake—half consumed, never finished—stood for weeks under the crystal dome of the cake stand, the oblong cross-sections of its four exposed layers reminding Leland of raw meat. Smears of buttercream frosting and pastry cream filling even, in a way, resembled the marbling of fat. It had fallen to Leland, eventually, to scrape the sticky, dried-up mess into the trash.
Chapter 6

In the small hours, they arrived at the patrol base. A marine stood guard outside an enormous gate the color of honeydew melon. Above him, stacked terraces—two corbeled slabs with iron railings all around—sat on pairs of concrete posts. A ten- or twelve-foot wall, also concrete, ran away on both sides.

Evans called from his turret—"Friendly, friendly"—but the guard barely seemed to care. Slack-jawed, he watched the Humvee roll to a stop.

Littlefield opened his door and got out. The dog stirred and whimpered. Lucky bitch—she'd had an hour's solid sleep. He stroked her head and scratched her under the chin. She licked the palm of his hand.

Baker handed him a clipboard with a stack of papers on it. Tucking it under his arm, Littlefield knocked his door shut with one hip. Somewhere a windsock slapped the breeze.

The guard—one PFC Jones, according to his nametape and insignia—was puffing a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette. When he turned his head into the light of the Humvee's headlamps, Littlefield spotted some brownish fuzz on the kid's upper lip, more wishful thinking than mustache.

Littlefield said, "PRP from Dwyer." Jones blinked slowly. "Personnel Retrieval and Processing? Mortuary Affairs?" Nothing. Littlefield wondered what the kid could be smoking, in addition to or instead of tobacco. "We're here for—" He held the clipboard up to the light and scanned the page for the name of the deceased. Valery Lyubovich. Jesus. The fucking-with that poor chump must have endured in middle school, not to mention boot camp. "We're here for Lance Corporal Lyubovich."

Finally, Jones's porch light came on. "For the _body_. Hold up." Propping his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he pounded on the gate. "Purdy!" he called. "Dude's here for Lube Job."

The green gate opened, and Purdy, also a PFC, stepped through. He waved the Humvee forward. "Thanks for coming out," he said. "IED got him. Probably an old one. Been quiet 'round here long as anyone can remember. The guys on patrol with him brought him back." Purdy grimaced. "Well. Most of him."

"Most of him?" Littlefield said.

"They couldn't find— Well, follow me."

They passed through the gate into a floodlit courtyard. A man came toward them, his boots crunching in the grit. Skinny. Bearded. Pre-MARPAT cammies. Dust-streaked black T-shirt. Civilian.

"Howdy," he said, squinting and craning his neck forward. "Corporal Littlefield?"

Littlefield narrowed his eyes. "Have we met?"

The civilian shook his head and gestured toward Littlefield's chest. "Saw your stripes and your name tape." He stuck his hand out.

_Chevrons_ , Littlefield thought, _not stripes_ , but he kept his mouth shut. He shook the man's hand. Big hand, firm grip.

"You guys're PRP?"

"You know my name, sir, but I don't know yours."

"Jimmy La Flamme." While he dug around in his hip pocket—whatever he was looking for, it wasn't there—he mumbled something.

Littlefield cocked his head. "Sorry, I didn't—"

" _Hilo Free Weekly_ ," Purdy said. "That's the paper he works for."

"You're an embed?" Littlefield said.

"Following up on a series I did in 'oh-one," La Flamme said. " _Afghanistan: A Decade Later_ —that's the gist of it. I happened to be on patrol with the guys when Lyubovich, you know—" He glanced at Purdy, cleared his throat. "I was wondering if I could"—he cleared his throat again—"observe."

Littlefield turned toward the Humvee. Evans had gone around to the far side of the vehicle to take a leak. The dog poked her head out into the light and sniffed at the air. When she spotted Littlefield, her tongue lolled out of her mouth and her eyes brightened in an unmistakable display of doggy adoration. Baker stood with her legs and feet together, her arms steepled, her head thrown back, her spine arched. Even in boots and utes, she held the pose solidly and with grace, and Littlefield helplessly felt his dick start to pudge.

With no sound but the seething of Evans's piss in the dust, the six of them, counting the dog, stood in a pair of dioramas. It occurred to Littlefield that they represented just about the entire range of animal endeavor—love, sex, death, exertion, excretion, and journalism. Give Purdy a sandwich, and it'd be a done deal.

La Flamme was snapping his fingers. "Hey, champ. Everything okay?"

"Sorry, sir," Littlefield said, "I don't think we can let you observe."

Shrugging and putting out his hands— _no harm, no foul_ —La Flamme backed wordlessly away. Littlefield and Purdy walked to the Humvee.

Nodding toward the dog, Purdy said, "Made a new friend, eh?"

"Found her in the road," Littlefield said. "Maybe your corpsman—" Baker glared at him. "Where's the angel?"

Purdy made a face.

"The body," said Baker. "Lyubovich. Did you bring him back here?"

Purdy nodded. "This way."

Baker pulled a cadaver pouch from the Humvee and followed Purdy. Littlefield grabbed a folded stretcher and hustled after them.

Purdy took them to a doorless storage room filled with wooden crates and flat-packed HESCOs. Four crates had been pushed together to form a makeshift bier for Lyubovich's body. Someone had covered the dead man's face with a red bandanna. His left foot and about half of his right leg were missing. The room was thick with the ferric smell of the man's blood and the sour-sweet reek of bad meat.

Leaning the stretcher against the wall, Littlefield turned to Purdy, but Purdy had vanished. Littlefield found him outside, where he stood with his back to a concrete column and his forearm covering his nose and mouth. His eyes were wild.

Littlefield took the PFC's elbow, spun him around, steered him out into the open. "Fuck, man, it's tough the first time. You can't prepare for it, not really, but I should've warned you."

Purdy gulped the air. He moved his head oddly—not quite a nod, not quite a shake. Tears puddled at the corners of his eyes. "Fuuuu—"

"That about sums it up."

Purdy blundered forward and puked.

Littlefield touched him lightly in the center of the back. "It's okay," he said. "Happens to everyone. I swear."

Purdy held up his hand. "I'm fine." He hawked and spat and hawked and spat again. "You can go back. I'm fine."

Bending over beside Purdy, Littlefield said, "We'll be bringing him right by here. Just so you know."

Purdy nodded. Littlefield moved away.

In the storage room, Baker had shoved crates together, building a second bier parallel to the first, and she'd unrolled the stretcher and spread out the cadaver pouch. The bag lay unzipped, open, ready. With a nod, Baker pointed Littlefield toward Lyubovich's head. She tossed him a pair of nitrile gloves. Staring in silence at the thickset body—the dome of a gut, the ham-sized forearms, the bulky thighs—Littlefield blew into a glove to open it up. He wriggled his fingers into it. He lifted away the bandanna.

There were ragged tracks along Lyubovich's left cheek. A hunk was missing from his left ear. If he'd lived, he'd have lost his left eye.

Even if you imagined all that away, you weren't left with a good-looking kid. A short, sloping brow, a crooked nose, a weak chin. Poor fuck had probably been the biggest loser in school, the last picked for kickball, the kid whose ass got thwacked with rolled-up towels in the locker room. Probably joined the Marines with something to prove. A dream of making himself into a hero—or at least A Real Man, whatever the fuck that was. Now here he was, blasted apart, stinking like a side of rotten meat—Valery Lyubovich, a.k.a. Lube Job, fuck you very much, PFC Jones.

After he'd put on the second glove, Littlefield opened Lyubovich's collar and unbuttoned the top buttons of his blouse. The dead man's dog tag rested in a deep cleft between his pecs. Holding the tag to the light, Littlefield read the name, the blood type, and the social security number. Baker read each item back from the clipboard. Everything matched. Outstanding. Good to go.

Littlefield looked at Lyubovich's mangled legs. "I can take that end if you—"

Baker shook her head. "He's heavier on your end."

Cradling Lyubovich's neck against his forearm, Littlefield jimmied his hands one by one underneath the shoulder blades. He grabbed fistfuls of fabric at the back of Lyubovich's blouse. They eased the body to the very edge of the crates. Now came the hard part, the lifting.

"On your go," Littlefield said.

Baker nodded, renewed her grip, nodded again. "One. Two. Go."

Rigor hadn't fully set in. When they lifted the body, it sagged at the waist.

"Up," she said, grunting.

Littlefield held his breath, set his jaw, stood up on the balls of his feet, and cocked his forearms. Huffing with effort, Baker lurched upward as well. They hoisted Lyubovich's body across the gap and laid him down with a series of thumps on the second set of crates. In the transfer, the cadaver pouch had gone askew, but it was good enough.

Baker was breathing heavily. "I didn't think we'd make it."

"I thought there was a weight limit in the Corps."

"Come on now, you know it was mostly the angle." She kicked the side of a crate. "Fuck. Why'd they put him up so high?"

"Maybe they haven't been lugging bodies around for eighteen fucking months?"

Baker turned and looked toward the door. "Where's Evans?"

"Not sure. You think we need him?"

She nodded. "I'd hate to drop him 'cause one of us loses a grip and there's no backup. I'll finish up here. Go get him and move the Humvee as close as you can get it."

Out in the compound, he found no sign of Purdy or La Flamme, no sign of the dog, no sign of Evans. Hard to know where to begin looking. The Humvee, at least, was where they'd left it, with its front doors still standing open. There was no reason to expect otherwise, but still.

Maybe Evans had curled up in the back of the vehicle to sleep. Littlefield made for it. As he walked, the hard earth crunched underfoot. But it was strange—the rhythm of the crunching didn't exactly match the rhythm of his steps. He stopped, and the noise continued. It was getting louder and faster. He looked around. Evans emerged from the shadows on the far side of the courtyard. Running. He was, for no conceivable reason, running. He'd tucked the dog into an empty backpack, and she bounced along behind him, a paw on each shoulder, her tongue bobbing on one side, saliva drizzling down the back of Evans's blouse.

"Dude," Littlefield said. "What the fuck?"

Evans trotted toward him. "What the _fuck_ , what the fuck?"

Littlefield drew a breath to answer, but then let it go. Not worth it—so fucking not worth it. He reached up and petted the dog's head. She licked his wrist.

"You need me?" Evans asked.

"He's heavy as fuck."

"I thought he was in pieces or some shit."

"Nope. The remains are nearly _entire_. And heavy as a fuckin' bag of bricks."

Evans tipped his head back. The dog licked the bare crown of his scalp. "Help me get her down."

"Dude, what the—?" Nope. Still not worth it. "Turn around, fucker."

When they returned to the storage room, Baker said, "We're never getting rid of that dog, are we?"

The mutt had hopped after them on her three good legs, and now she stood watching them. She sniffed the air and looked up at Littlefield. Her brown eyes gleamed.

"I can think of worse things," Littlefield said.

"You planning to name her?"

Evans answered. "I was thinking Mary." He looked from Baker to Littlefield and back again. "Short for Marines. Marines, Mary, Mary, Marines? Get it?"

Baker scowled at him. "One of you get his head, please?"

As she'd promised, she'd finished filling out the paperwork and had zipped the body into the black bag. She'd even managed to shove or tug Lyubovich's body sideways, to correct the slip they'd made earlier. Littlefield moved to the head of the stretcher. Evans went to its foot and stood facing away from Littlefield so that he could take the lead without walking backward. If Baker had intended to carry either end, she didn't insist on it now.

On Littlefield's count, the two men lifted the stretcher off its platform of crates and carried it out through the door.

Baker followed them. "Littlefield, you didn't move the fuckin' Humvee?"

"Fuck, I forgot all about it." He could _feel_ her glaring at him. "It's the middle of the night, goddammit. I'm lucky I'm remembering to motherfucking breathe."

"We got this," Evans said. He tugged forward—unexpectedly, so that Littlefield nearly stumbled and lost his grip. "Just fuckin' _walk_."

The body was off-balance—maybe they hadn't compensated properly for the missing limb—and the whole way to the Humvee, the stretcher jerked forward and back. Baker went ahead of them and opened the rear hatch. Coming up alongside Evans, she took one side of the stretcher. He moved aside.

They lifted the stretcher up until it was parallel to the rack in the back of the Humvee. Evans and Baker set their poles down. Littlefield pushed the stretcher forward, and Evans and Baker helped guide it along. The stretcher slid neatly into place in its slot.

Laying his hand on the cadaver bag—on the dead man's shoulder, or thereabouts—Evans said, "Sleep tight, Marine. Sleep well."

Baker closed the hatch, and then they stood silently. Littlefield's heart still pounded from the effort of the long swift carry. Baker had a moony, far-away look on her face. She fiddled with her ID tag and stared deep into nowhere.

"You know," she said, "we have to find his foot and leg."

Littlefield said, "Not saying I disagree—but wouldn't they have brought them back if they'd been there to find?"

"You'd think so," Baker said. "But they ain't us, after all."

"We'll find some specks of something, at least," Evans said. "We gotta go out."

"Affirmative." Littlefield slumped against the Humvee. "We need to catch some sleep though. I can't fuckin' see straight. Better to wait for light anyway, right?" He turned to Evans. "You know where Purdy went to?"

Evans pointed toward the gate where they'd come in.

"I'll see if there's a spot where we can get some sack," Littlefield said.

He was already on his way, backing off across the courtyard, but Evans shook his head. Littlefield halted.

"I asked already," Evans said. "Motherfuckers don't have a place except the storage room."

"I've slept in worse," Littlefield said, shrugging. "Haven't we all?"

"He means _the_ storage room," Baker said, cutting her eyes toward the back of the Humvee.

Shielding his eyes from the floodlights with his flattened hand, Littlefield looked around the compound. On the second-floor terrace of the nearest building, there was a ladder leading to the roof. "Got an idea," he said, again backing away.

Up top, above most of the floodlights, it was reasonably dark. And there was a low wall all the way around: If they bedded down right against it on the courtyard side, they'd lie in deep shadow. He was about to lean over the parapet and holler down for Baker and Evans to join him, but he heard something—the scrabble of boot soles over the concrete. The ladder was the only way up, he was sure of it, and accessible only from inside the courtyard. No need for alarm, but when he went to investigate, he kept his hand on his sidearm.

In a far corner of the roof, La Flamme had tucked himself into a slot between two walls. Quite a setup he'd made for himself, too. A bedroll, inflatable pillows, a nightstand made from a busted-up crate, a battery-operated lantern, a Toughbook, a pouch of tobacco and a packet of rolling papers—and who could say what other comforts he had hidden in his seabag? Sitting cross-legged on his bed, holding a spiral-bound sketchbook on his knee, where it caught the light of his lantern, he stippled some lines with a pencil.

"Thought you were a writer," said Littlefield.

Tapping the page with the blunt end of his pencil, La Flamme said, "This too."

Littlefield took a step closer. "Can I see?"

La Flamme handed over the sketchbook and set to rolling himself a cigarette. On the page, three Marines carried a stretcher toward a Humvee. The stretcher and vehicle were incomplete, but the three human figures were meticulous. Their gear had real weight. Their bare heads were damp with sweat, their jaws tight with effort. Littlefield could almost hear the creaking of the boot leather. Add ink and color and the thing would be ready for print.

Through a puff of white smoke, La Flamme said, "Your companions are calling."

It was true. Evans was yelling Littlefield's name.

Handing back the sketchbook, Littlefield said, "Night, sir." He started across the roof, stopped, paused, went back. "You don't need me to tell you this, but that's beautiful work."

He returned to the parapet and waved to Baker and Evans. They grabbed the bedrolls and made their way up the ladder. Evans brought the dog. As they settled in, Evans tried to get Mary to lie next to him, but she moved away and curled up in the open, where the shadows weren't so deep. Littlefield and Baker lay head to head. Baker lay toe to toe with Evans.

Baker said, "I'm-a say this once and once only, and then I'll deny it forever. Littlefield, you're a genius."

"Smarter than he looks," Evans said. "But then he'd pretty much have to be."

"Sleep tight, assholes," Littlefield said.

The sky was bright with unfamiliar stars. He lay on his back and stared straight up until he felt dazzled, hypnotized, dizzied. He willed his eyes to stay open in the hopes that the effort, paired with his exhaustion, would put him to sleep. He looked for stars and planets he could name—Jupiter, Mars, Rigel, Polaris. But the constellations turned in the sky above him, alien and unrecognized.

At some point he woke to the arrhythmic ticking of Mary's toenails on the concrete. She snuffled around him, bumped him with her body, and laid herself alongside him. Half-awake, his eyes half-open, he stroked her dirty fur and whispered into her pointed ear, "Mary, Mary, Mary." She grunted, and he took it as a kind of acceptance, a bond sealed with a name.

The next time he woke, the stars had vanished and the sky was yellow-gray. Littlefield nearly wept. Dawn, and he was so fatigued, so sleep-deprived, that he wasn't sure he could speak in sentences—forget the business of PRP.

But then he woke again with Baker crouching over him and the sun well up in the sky.

"We're going," she whispered. She held out his steel travel mug. "Coffee. The real deal. Fifteen percent Kona. That guy, La Flamme, has all kinds of crazy shit in his seabag. You take it black, right?"

Again, Littlefield felt close to weeping, but this time it was because everything made sense. He'd awakened in precisely the spot where he'd lain down. The dog sat gazing at him as if he'd invented kibble. And sixteen ounces of real brewed coffee steamed in front of him. It was almost like any morning anywhere.

"Black," he said, and took a sip. "Right."
Chapter 7

Assessment: She lay in her own bed. Between the quilt and the duvet. Leland's side, Leland's pillow. Drool-dampened pillowcase.

Bra, panties, slip. One leg bare, the other covered to the knee in pantyhose and sweat. She'd started, at least, to undress.

The post of one earring jabbed her neck. She wondered where the other had gone and when or if she'd taken it off. Lifting her head, she removed the remaining earring and set it on the nightstand.

She stared at the alarm clock. The red digits doubled, smeared, resolved. 3:42.

Closing her eyes again, she kept still and wished vainly for sleep to return. But the worry had started—the vague worry that she'd overlooked something important or authored some irrevocable disaster. She might have forgotten to lock the door. She might have neglected to turn out the lights or close the refrigerator or put away the ice. She might have wandered away from her guests and passed out.

Her throat felt sticky. Her tongue tasted foul.

She needed a glass of water. Or just a sip.

Maybe a bite of cake.

No, not cake: When she imagined a smear of frosting coating her tongue, a clot of crumbs mashing against the roof her mouth, her stomach buckled. She spread her arms and legs, seeking the cool places in the bed. She sucked hard at the air.

She hadn't tasted the cake, but she could at least say it had been beautiful. Three square tiers, the largest about a foot wide. Buttercream frosting, pastry cream filling. Cream cheese frosting was standard, but Anna Grace—remembering the way Leland, with the glisten of tears in his eyes, had described his father's red velvet—had ordered buttercream and pastry cream. She should have saved it for him. She should have waited to watch his face as he cut into it and saw the thick crimson slabs filled with golden custard.

In a little while, if sleep didn't come, she'd go downstairs and eat something. Not cake, but something. There were plenty of leftovers. The guests had barely eaten. They'd flipped from mood to mood like a crowd of manic-depressives—first knocking back drinks and cackling at their own jokes as if determined to make a wild time of it, then tilting their heads in pensive silence as if Pink Martini's arrangement of "Que Sera, Sera" were the most sophisticated and perplexing composition in the history of music.

Early in the evening, Anna Grace had come into the kitchen to find Winston Haynes standing over the iPod, running his thumb around the wheel. "You know," he said with a cluck of his tongue, "this kind of thing—" Sighing, he rolled his eyes toward the speakers—toward "Que Sera," as it were. "It's been done. This faux-retro, über-ironic, hipster bullshit. Done and done. And Karen Holmes is a _lounge_ singer, by the way, not a _jazz_ singer. You should tell Leland—" But at the mention of Leland's name, his mouth snapped shut, as if he were afraid of summoning a demon.

Later, Kate Popyrin, usually so dour and stooped and cranky, told a long series of Soviet jokes. "On Red Square," she said, playing up her accent, "drunken man with Stolichnaya bottle shouts for all to hear, 'Brezhnev is ee-diot, Brezhnev is ee-diot.' The KGB arrests him, nat-u-ral-ly. When trial comes, he is given fifteen years in gulag. 'Five years,' pronounces the People's Judge, 'for insulting esteemed General Secretary of Party. Ten years for divulging state secret.'" After the laughter tailed off, she launched another _anekdoty_ : "Journalist from _Pravda_ comes into hospital and says—" But no one ever learned what the journalist said. Kate turned as crimson as the cake and, clearing her throat, went to refresh her drink.

Michele Treat, who'd never struck Anna Grace as much of a reader, spent the whole evening with her face inches from Tim Warren's, her hand on his forearm, urgently, urgently trying to convince him to read a series of books she'd been racing through— _A World of Ice and Fire_ , was it? Or _A Fire of Icy Worlds_? _An Icy World of Fire_? "Every chapter has me on the edge of my seat," she said in a whisper. "Just when I think things are calming down, somebody gets beheaded or run through with a sword. You just never know when a major character's going to—to—" She seemed reluctant to finish her sentence, with Anna Grace in earshot, but in a small voice, eventually, she did: "Die. You never know when somebody's going to die."

_All right, then_ , Anna Grace thought at last. _We shouldn't have had the party without him_ —without Leland. People would say so, wouldn't they? They'd been thinking so already, whether they'd said it or not. But she'd needed it. That was her reason, if not her excuse: She'd _needed_ it.

Her daily allotments—a single white wine at lunch, half a bottle of red wine rationed out into four half-servings at night—were never enough. If she over-served herself a single time, it would disrupt the whole system. It would mean pulling a cork every day rather than every other day. And that soft _thwop_ every evening before dinner: Leland would hear, John Carter would hear, and if Corinne stopped by, she would hear. They'd catch on, if they hadn't already. They'd see the pattern. If they hadn't already.

It demanded real effort—maintaining an eye for volumes, a sensitivity to the weight of two-and-a-half ounces versus five. As the weeks passed, her cravings grew stronger—nearly intolerable, until she felt almost as if her skin were growing tighter, cinching in, threatening to burst open. And then, and then, the day of a party would come, and she'd pull one cork after another, a _Symphonie Fantastique_ of _thwops_. She could fill and empty her glass over and over. Five ounces, six ounces, eight. She could effortlessly drink her way to the sweet spot, halfway between buzz and oblivion, when everything went slippery and soft, when reality itself seemed malleable and amenable. It must be how the tide felt, when the moon pulled it inland at last, and it could flood the shore.

Sleep wouldn't come. The two hours of dreamless oblivion she'd already had were all she could expect for tonight. And she needed a glass of water.

With a grunt, she tossed away the covers. Sat up. Waited for the room to stop tilting.

A funny thing occurred to her: As a child, choking on the steel-plant smog of her hometown, gritting her teeth against the twangy, corny music her parents loved, she'd chosen to sing opera because it was the strangest career she could imagine. She couldn't think of anything else that would take her so far, in so many senses of the word, from the pokey dead-end street in Youngstown where she'd grown up, from the two-story shotgun house with gray smut clinging to its asphalt siding, from the wood-paneled bedroom with no posters on the wall and no lock on the door. Even as a child of nine or ten, she'd thought the worst thing she could be was the spitting image of her mother and the apple of her daddy's eye. But now here she was, aping both of them at once, drinking her wine the way her father used to drink his beer—daily and greedily—and yet stretching it out the way her mother used to conserve everything that came into her hands—ground chuck, or bits of fabric, or overgrown zucchini from the neighbor's garden. It was a funny, funny thing—not that Anna Grace was laughing

Lying down, she'd felt steady, but when she stood, the floor seemed to lurch away from her feet. She stripped off her hose and bra and slip. Let them fall. Holding out her hands, groping her way through the feeble light, she crossed to the closet. She found a nightgown hanging on the door and put it on.

From the threshold of her bedroom, she peered across the hall. John Carter's door stood open. She'd have to tread softly as she passed.

No. On second thought, no. He hadn't come home. He was staying at Corinne's.

Down the stairs. Careful on the treads. Hold the bannister.

She _had_ turned out the lights. Good. At the bottom of the stairs, she crossed the entryway and checked the door. She'd locked it. Also good.

The kitchen was a wreck. Wine bottles, beer bottles, empty tumblers, stacked plates speckled with crumbs, napkins in bunches and wads. But the refrigerator and freezer were closed. No ice on the counters. No puddles on the floor. Good, good, good.

She found a basket of rolls and took a small bite of one. Too dry, too salty. She tossed it into the trash can.

At the island she hefted all the bottles. Empty, empty, dregs, empty, dregs, empty. There were unopened bottles somewhere. She hoped so, anyway. And yes. Here was a screw-capped bottle of moscato. It opened with a snap as the seal broke. She rinsed a tumbler and filled it with wine.

Young or cheap or both: She could smell the grape skins. She took a sip. Tepid. Too sour and too sweet. Revolting. Her stomach boiled, but she drank half the glass. And then she set it down on the counter with a clunk. A few drops splattered the back of her hand.

For a moment, she thought everything was going to come back up—the bit of bread she'd just nibbled, a sandwich she'd eaten hours ago, and a lot of wine, both red and white—and yet she could do no more than clutch the edge of the island and clench her teeth and hope. The wave of nausea passed. She caught a whiff of the moscato and quickly turned her head.

Enough.

She'd come to the kitchen for water, her belly churning and her mouth gummy from the wine she'd already drunk, and then she'd immediately poured another glass. She needed help—whatever that meant. What did that mean?

Meetings. Her father had quit drinking in the nineties, and he'd done it by going to meetings. There were steps and prayers and—what? rap sessions?

No, not rap sessions. No one had rap sessions any more.

Group therapy, then. Support groupery. She pictured a lot of old men in Ban-Lon shirts, stout and unaffectionate men like her father, bluing the air of a room with cigarette smoke.

What could she do now, though, in the middle of the night? There'd be no sessions to rap in, no groups to get support from. She could call her father and ask him what to do—but no, that was unthinkable. She hadn't asked anything of him since nineteen eighty-three—not even to pass the salt at the dinner table—and she wasn't going to start now.

Maybe there was a hotline or a chatroom. If you could go online for full episodes of _Californication_ and _F Troop_ , why not for steps and prayers? Everything had moved into the virtual world, maybe the old men in Ban-Lon were there, too, each bluing his own private room with smoke.

The music room, the entryway, the dining room—all, as she moved through and past them, bore the marks of the party. A champagne flute here, a half-moon of sandwich there, a handful of smeared fingerprints on the piano. The piano bench stood open and empty, as if it had been ransacked for sheet music. Anna Grace had no memory of anybody playing. Jean-Marc Archambault usually, at some point in any given evening, slogged through his latest atonal sonata, but this time he'd only _explained_ his latest sonata, and unlike the music itself, the explanation had made a great deal of sense.

Maybe someone had asked her to sing—or worse, maybe she'd insisted on singing. She hoped not. A couple of years before, after a poor performance of _Kindertotenlieder_ , she'd called an end to all that. No more recitals, no more singing, period.

A poor performance? A _humiliating_ performance. Thinking of it again now, she felt just as she had then. A wave of cold passed down the back of her neck. Her scalp prickled with heat. She wanted simultaneously to freeze and to flee.

Throughout the performance, her voice had been rough and shaky, and then she'd barely made it through the last song. One might even say she _hadn't_ made it through. Near the end, she'd choked on a sustained high note. It had taken her about three bars to recover, and she'd skipped an important phrase. _In this storm, they rest as if in their mother's house._

Did she drink because her career had ended so shamefully, or had her career ended so shamefully because she drank? She couldn't quite get a lock on the order of things.

At the door of Leland's study, she felt along the top of the doorframe until she found the key. She unlocked the door and went in. Leland's MacBook sat in its usual place in the center of the desk. Rolling the chair across the plastic mat, taking a seat, Anna Grace opened the laptop. While the hard drive whirled to life, she rehearsed her web search.

_AA_ , maybe. But no. If she used the acronym she'd get American Airlines, and she couldn't bring herself to spell out that first A-word.

_Find a meeting._ No, there were millions of kinds of meetings in the world. She'd get ads for WebEx.

_How to get sober._ She shuddered. _Sober_ : such a staid-sounding word.

When the screen lit up, she squinted and blinked and waited for her eyes to adjust.

A browser window was already open to a photograph of two men. Older and younger. Taller and shorter. Dark-haired and blond. They were both naked. The older man was standing. The younger man was kneeling. The older man had his hands in the younger man's hair. The younger man was fellating the older man.

Anna Grace looked up at the window's title bar. _Daddies Love | Hot Dads Horny Sons Bi Married Straight Dudes Together._ The skin at her temples tightened. She dug her fingers into her cheeks and forced her jaw to open.

What did she think about this? What did she feel? She had no context, no frame of reference. With the kind of elaborate, sluggish effort a dull child might make to sound out a difficult word, she thought it through.

Leland was gay.

For a long while, she stared at the wall. Her thoughts spun in circles. Her heartbeat whammed in her ears. She needed a goddamn drink.

Somewhere or other she'd read that an electron could be in two places at once. This was, as she understood it, the underlying principle of alternate reality. If an electron could be _here_ and also _there_ , then two mutually exclusive realities could exist simultaneously. Electrons could do whatever the hell they wanted, but the human heart could only be in one place at a time—she was sure of that. A man who lived a double life loved only one person—himself.

She got up and went back to the kitchen. The tumbler of moscato sat just where she'd left it. She drained it in one long gulp. It was terrible stuff, really terrible—too young, too weak, and too warm. She opened the freezer drawer and crouched down and dug around inside it. Under a bag of frozen artichoke hearts, she found a half-full bottle of Absolut Citron. She filled the tumbler with ice and then with vodka. One hearty swallow. A shard of frozen glass in her throat. A pool of cold lava in her belly.

Standing with her bare legs in the light and chill of the open freezer, she drank more. Half the glass. She felt steadier by the sip.

After topping off the glass with more vodka, she added a splash of the moscato. For sweetness. Why not? She tasted it. Not disgusting. A new invention. Presenting to the world: The Moscatini.

She returned to the study and sat at the desk. Took a sip of her drink. Set down the glass. An ooze of moisture spread across the polished wood.

She clicked the browser's back button. Another pair of men—older, younger, standing, kneeling, sucking, receiving. Back. A video: She clicked play, but the moaning was too much to bear—both too private and too stagy. Back. Back, back, back. Videos, photo sets, profiles. Men in pairs and trios, oral sex, anal sex, more anal sex. She paused on a photo of a man about Leland's age. Shaved head, salt-and-pepper goatee. He had his head tipped back, his mouth open, his tongue extended. His eyes were closed as if in religious ecstasy.

Anna Grace wondered: Was Leland only virtually gay, a chatter and surfer and masturbator? Or had he put his mouth on another man? Maybe he played the hard-up husband, the man whose wife _never_ got on her knees. He wouldn't have to be Brando. No Method required.

She reached the head of the trail, the empty window where he'd started. _You've turned on private browsing..._

She should be angry, shouldn't she? Her blood should be boiling. The vodka, though—the vodka was very cold. She took a big gulp of it, swished it around in her mouth, and swallowed. Very cold.

An idea came to her as if by stealth, forming gradually, with no conscious reasoning at all on her part. It was perhaps not a good idea. It was perhaps not perfectly ethical. But it made her feel positively light of heart.

If Leland ever accused her of drinking too much, or challenged her to drink less, or in any way objected to the nightly _thwop_ of a wine cork, then she could counter with this.

This. This. _This_ meant the end of half-servings. This meant the end of rationing.

Carefully, taking pains not to disrupt the chain of Leland's browser history, she clicked the forward button. When she'd reached the final page, she closed the laptop, used her sleeve to mop up the sweat of her glass, and backed out of the study. He would never know she'd been there.
The Last Wednesday in October

Chapter 8

A book lay open on the kitchen island, but Leland wasn't reading it. Instead, he'd been staring at an appointment reminder the size of a business card. He'd already undergone two CT scans, a PET scan, a nerve conduction test, an impressive array of blood work, and a series of intradermic allergy tests—and now this, an MRI scheduled for eleven o'clock today. He'd grown so weary of negative results and inconclusive findings that he halfway hoped something would turn up—a harmless little blotch in the medulla oblongata, a pinprick in the hippocampus, some tiny mark somewhere that explained everything.

"Morning, Pop." John Carter had just come into the kitchen from the hallway. His wheat-colored hair stood up in forty different directions. He went to the refrigerator and opened it and stared vacantly into it, as if he were a preschooler, incapable of reading labels. "Any bread?"

Laying the appointment reminder across the open face of his book, Leland got up to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee. "There's a loaf of challah six inches from your face."

"Yes!" John Carter took the bread and some butter from the fridge and swung the door shut. He began pulling knives one by one from the knife block, settling finally on a butcher knife. When he dug its blade into the challah, one whole end of the loaf collapsed under it.

With the back of his hand, Leland nudged his son aside. He opened a drawer and took out a bread knife. Hefting it, clanging its blade on the counter, he said, "Thick or thin?"

"Thin. I'm making toast." He shaped his mouth around that word, _toast_ , as if were the name of his soulmate.

Leland plumped up the misshapen loaf and cut two slices from the middle. "Have a good sleep?" He wiped the bread knife with a dish towel and returned it to the drawer.

"Can't say," John Carter said through a yawn. He dropped the bread slices into the toaster. "Slept through the whole thing."

"How's school? How's the new piano teacher?"

"Hairy."

Returning to his barstool, Leland wondered who or what was hairy? Was this person or thing literally or figuratively hairy, or both? And was there any point in asking for clarification? He decided on a new tack. "How's the job? Are you getting along with Jo Barber? She's not hairy, too, is she?"

John Carter shrugged. For a moment it seemed that would be his entire reply, but then he said, "She's basically got me leafleting every day. Like a carnival barker or whatever. Ms. Treat says I should quit before all that yelling wrecks my voice."

"You could sing instead of yelling, couldn't you? It could become a kind of signature."

"I thought of that. Ms. Treat just gave me the stink-eye, so I don't think she approved."

The toaster popped, and John Carter buttered his toast. He went to the fridge, where, again, he stared at the cartons and packages as if their labels were printed in foreign languages—Swahili, Esperanto, Romanian. Finally, he took a plastic bottle from the door. Maple syrup. Of course. Holding the bottle with both hands, shaking it, he coaxed drips and oozes of syrup into the spout and onto his toast.

Maple- _flavored_ syrup, in truth. The good stuff, the Grade A Light Amber from Vermont, was too runny and too sweet, if you asked Ben and John Carter. They'd always preferred this gunk, this concoction of noxious chemicals and old-time marketing. More than once, Leland had caught Ben in the kitchen with the bottle upended over his mouth. As a small boy John Carter had always, always spread the stuff on his toast. The last time Leland had seen him do it, there'd been a table, not an island, in the middle of the kitchen, and John Carter had been only just tall enough to reach the countertops.

How could this child be nineteen years old? A red-faced mewling newborn, an alien in receiving blankets, had mysteriously turned into a whole person—still an alien, but an alien capable of memorizing an entire sonata by Mozart or Beethoven. Leland suppressed an urge to go and tug the boy away from the counter and crush him in a bear hug.

"Oh, hey," John Carter said over his shoulder, "is it MRI day? Are you nervous?"

That did it. Leland went to his son and turned him around and hugged him hard. John Carter grunted and sputtered, his arms limp at his sides. Leland buried his face in the boy's hair. Remarkable: He smelled exactly as he had as a baby, like talc and fresh laundry.

"Dad..."

"I love you, son."

"Dad..."

"Bear with me," Leland said. "Thirty more seconds. Suck it up."

"Dad..."

"Okay, okay."

Leland let go and went to the French doors. A moment passed. A piece of silverware clattered in the sink. John Carter came up behind him.

"I love you, too, Dad. But you're weird." He left the kitchen.

Some minutes later, the clap of Anna Grace's heels on the floorboards roused Leland from a daydream. He'd been staring sightlessly into the side yard, his mind having wandered far, to a campus dance. He remembered the glittering pink light of a long hall, an auditorium or a cafeteria with arched windows. There'd been a boy, a cross-country runner Leland had halfway wished he could dance with. Beer had been served. Anna Grace had drunk too much of it.

She kissed his cheek. "Morning."

Taking her in his arms, rocking her from side to side, he eased her into the kind of shuffling slow-dance they'd surely done in the pastel lights of the dance hall. He tipped her into a deep dip. Her leg swung upward so sharply that her shoe flew off and landed on the floor with a slap.

"Leland, _stop_ ," she said, her voice sharp. "My _shoe_."

He let her go, and she went looking for the shoe. "John Carter warned me you were being weird," she said. "Now I see what he meant."

"You don't know the half of it. I'm awkward and lame, too."

Crossing to the coffee maker, he took a cup down from the cabinet and filled it. He sprinkled in half a packet of Sweet'N Low. They sat at the island. He slid the cup toward her. She touched his hand, perhaps as an apology for barking at him, and he wrapped his fingers around hers.

"I'm feeling sentimental," he said. "Getting soft in my old age."

"Mm," she said. "I think I'm getting _less_ sentimental."

_That_ was certainly true, he thought. He sipped his coffee and said nothing.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked him.

"Not much to say."

That wasn't true, though, was it? There was too much to say. Words fell short.

_Nostalgia_ , for example: a miserably inadequate word. Earlier, Leland had been thinking about John Carter as a kid smearing maple syrup on his toast. That had been nostalgia, of course—but it was more than that. Leland felt affection and longing for the erstwhile John Carters, but he didn't want his son to regress to boyhood. No, he wanted all the John Carters at once—all the past, present, and future John Carters. When he'd hugged his son, it had been out of love for all of him, for all his minutes and moments, all his failings and flaws, and—of course, of _course_ —all his brilliance and beauty.

It was inarticulable. If he tried to put his thoughts into words, they'd turn to ashes and splinters in his mouth. Something easier, then: "Do you ever miss having babies?"

Anna Grace yanked her hand away. She straightened her back. "I'm hot-flashing right now as we speak—and you want to talk about _babies_?"

So then. No matter what, he'd have the taste of ashes on his tongue. "I don't mean we should have _more_. I'm not _insane_." Anna Grace didn't relax. "I mean in a totally sentimental way—remembering having our babies." She narrowed her eyes. "Not having them—not you giving birth. I mean being with them—cuddling and bathing and kissing them and—"

"And changing their diapers and rearranging your whole life around breastfeeding—"

"And hearing their first words and helping them take their first steps—"

"And hearing them cry their heads off when they take their first fall—"

"And getting to know their personalities. Corinne was curious but cranky. Ben was so easygoing. John Carter was afraid of everything, including teddy bears, for God's sake. And—"

"I was always wet. For years on end, I was wet. Constantly. Spit-up, tears, milk, blood. Diarrhea."

Leland looked at his wife. "It's like we remember a completely different bunch of kids."

"You didn't get morning sickness. You didn't get thrush from breastfeeding. God almighty, how that itched. And then mastitis with John Carter. _Ouch_. And I smelled like sour milk for a year at a time. Milk stains never come out. You wash a blouse and the stain's gone, and then you take it out of the closet and there it is again."

"I know there were bad things, too," Leland said. "That time Ben crushed his finger in the car door and we thought they'd have to amputate it. And John Carter fell through the floor in that old house. Got that gash on his leg."

"Remember when the boys found that dead— What was it? A frog?"

"A dead bowfin, totally rotten."

"They put it down the back of her shirt—"

"Well, Ben did. Could you even see John Carter—"

She howled and clapped her hands over her mouth. "My God, no. There's no way—"

"And Ben didn't dare to do it twice."

"Not after he— Not after he—"

She couldn't catch her breath. Leland collapsed against her. They both gasped and cackled. Anna Grace wadded up a napkin and crushed it against her face.

_Not after he had to get stitches_ —that was, no doubt, what she'd been trying to say. Corinne had thrown a rock at Ben and had clocked him in the back of the head as he'd fled from her. A rock sharp enough to split open his scalp.

Talk about _wet_. The three children had stampeded into the house, all of them wailing, each wet in his or her own way—Corinne with fish goo and pluff mud, Ben with his own blood, and John Carter with miserable tears.

Ben had gotten a shaved head and ten stitches, and Leland and Anna Grace had ordered him to hand-wash Corinne's fishy clothes over and over until they no longer stank. Corinne had done extra chores as well, each assigned a wage and carefully recorded, until she'd paid for Ben's stitches and antibiotics. John Carter had received nothing but a stern lecture. If he'd been put on restriction, it would have been bad enough for him, but to have to live with the guilt of his complicity and to have no better way to compensate than to apologize over and over—that nearly killed him. It was funny now, twelve or thirteen years later, but back then the house had seemed, for months, to have become a maximum-security lockup.

Gradually, Anna Grace and Leland came back to themselves. As their breathing returned to normal, they wiped the tears from their eyes. Anna Grace examined her napkin. It was smeared with black mascara and eyeshadow the color of cocoa powder. Dabbing at the corners of her eyes with the corners of the napkin, she got up from her barstool.

"Damn," she said, stifling fresh giggles, "now I have to touch up."

"Oh! That reminds me of the time that—"

"Don't you dare," she said, panting. "Don't you dare, don't you dare." She went down the hall. He heard her climb the stairs.

His appointment reminder still lay across the gutter of his open book. He picked up the card. The office assistant who'd written it out had a backward-sloping hand. The number 11 leaned leftward—a drunkard supporting himself against a light pole. It wasn't funny, but the sight of it cracked him up all over again.

When Anna Grace came back to the kitchen, she had her purse in one hand and her phone in the other, and she was already talking. "—sure I already mentioned it, but I may have—" She stopped and looked from Leland's face to the card and back again. "What's that?"

"Nothing." He tucked the card into his book and closed it. "What did you forget?"

"Dinner tonight."

"Catch me up, please?"

"Tonight. Dinner. Seven p.m. Scott Cable is coming for dinner."

"Scott Cable?"

"You've met him. John Carter's piano teacher."

Leland shook his head. He was absolutely certain he'd never met anyone named Scott Cable. In fact, he was so certain that he suspected he must be wrong.

"I didn't tell you about this?" Anna Grace tapped her phone with her thumb. "I thought I e-mailed you, but— Oh, never mind." She dropped her phone into her purse. "Scott's pretty down to earth, so don't go to too much trouble."

"What?"

"It's Wednesday," she said. "I have lessons until six. I can get back in time to eat, but not in time to cook."

"Oh. Of course. Obviously."

She kissed him goodbye. With her thumb, she wiped a bit of lipstick from the corner of his mouth. "Your skin is dry. You should put some lotion."

"Thank you?" he said.

She kissed him again and hurried out the door.

Half an hour to the imaging center in Mt. Pleasant. Two hours for the MRI. Half an hour back, plus a stop at either Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. He'd have two or three hours for cooking. Plenty of time, especially if he made something simple.

But still. He'd had so much blood drawn and been injected with so many strange compounds—allergens, tracers, contrast dyes—that he sometimes felt slightly foreign to himself, as if his bodily fluids had been replaced with synthetic goop. After this MRI, he could easily foresee himself trying to draw the flatware across the table with his personal magnetism, or attempting to stop a clock with a wave of his hand.

Enough was enough. If there was something wrong with him, it would show up on its own. He plucked the card from his book and ripped it into tiny flecks, which he scooped up in the palm of his hand and tossed into the trash.
Chapter 9

Corinne woke to the gurgle of the coffee maker and the hiss of something frying in a pan. Pleasing sounds, to be sure—a real breakfast in the making, and with no effort on her part. She arched her back and stretched her limbs and breathed deeply through her nose. Garlic, cumin, anise. Andrei must have thrown together a batch of _mici_ , the skinless Romanian sausages his grandmother had taught him to make. Corinne had praised them once—only once, on their fourth or fifth date, when it had been inconceivable _not_ to praise them—and now he could scarcely enter the kitchen without slapping a couple of pounds of ground beef into a bowl and fumbling around among the spice jars.

Soon she felt his weight on the edge of the mattress and then the warmth of his lips on her shoulder. She rearranged her pillows and sat up. He held two plates. Buttered toast, scrambled eggs, and yes, _mici_. He'd undercooked the eggs and overcooked the sausages. It was, apparently, the Romanian way. She longed for a stack of pancakes and some rashers of bacon.

Still. Last night's romantic dinner had devolved into an argument about Catholic schools, and it was better not to begin the day with an argument about breakfast foods.

"Good morning," she said, as if to the _mici_.

"Forks." Andrei set his plate on the end table. "And coffee. Shit."

She watched him as he leapt up and hustled to the kitchen. He was naked—boldly so, for a man who'd just been standing over a skillet full of hot grease. When he came back again, his cock swung heavily as he moved. The sensation of desire buzzed from her brain to her belly to her limbs. She felt dizzy and lightheaded, but heavy, too, as if wanting had weight. But before she could satisfy her wanting, she would have to eat his ugly little sausages.

Sitting once again on the edge of the bed, he handed her a fork. She cut one of the _mici_ in half and tasted it. Too much cumin. He never measured the spices—his grandmother never had, so why should he?—and every batch was a new adventure. She chewed and nodded, chewed and nodded.

Grinning, eyes glistening, Andrei took up his plate and forked some eggs into his mouth. Corinne wondered if other marriages were like this, if every common little thing meant something else. A plate of eggs and sausages was both signifier and signified, both breakfast and apology. Chewing, likewise, meant more than chewing—it also meant _I forgive you._

On second thought, it was probably the other way around. Cooking was absolution, and eating was penance. She set her plate aside.

"You're not hungry?" His eyes lit up. "Morning sickness?"

She could tell him. She could just say it right out: _Either Romanian food is gross or you're a terrible cook or both._ But no, on second thought, she couldn't say anything of the kind. What she said was, "I usually have coffee first, that's all."

Wincing, leaping up again, he said, "I never brought the coffee."

This time she followed him to the kitchen. He'd been watching CNN while he cooked, and the TV on the kitchen counter burbled at low volume. Beside the coffee maker, there were two mugs, his with a finger of half-and-half at the bottom, hers with a tiny mound of sugar. Corinne filled both mugs. When he lifted his cup to drink, a bit of coffee splashed his bare knee, and as he brushed it away, he seemed to notice for the first time that he was unclothed. Or perhaps he recognized that his penis had pulled up a bit, so that it wasn't quite so bulky-looking as before. Men were vain about such things—or so it had always seemed to Corinne. Setting down his coffee, he went into the other room.

She stood at the pass-through and watched him put on a pair of jeans. She liked the way he looked naked—the slenderness of his waist, the craggy jut of his shoulder blades, the glide of small muscles beneath his skin, the unlikely high fullness of his ass—but he was somehow even sexier half-dressed.

"Are you going back today?" she asked him. She suddenly had a vision of a languid day spent in bed. Make love, nap, eat, nap, repeat.

"Eventually." He gathered their plates and brought them into the kitchen.

"Oh."

He began scraping the uneaten food into the trash can. "I'm in no hurry."

"Driving?"

"Mm-hm," he said.

Since the beginning of September, he'd been coming home on Monday nights and leaving again on Wednesday afternoons. It was better, he said, if he and his team worked on Saturdays and Sundays, when the client's office was closed. Servers could be rebooted without having to get anyone's permission. Databases could be rebuilt or reindexed without anyone complaining.

Corinne understood all of that, but not why he insisted on driving rather than flying. His client had never yet questioned an expense report. His subcontractors flew in and out of Atlanta from Chicago, Vancouver, and Portland, Maine. Why should Andrei drive six hundred miles a week in his own car? Yes, okay, he could claim the mileage as a tax write-off, but what about the ten hours a week he spent in the driver's seat rather than in the company of his wife? There was no write-off for that.

"Hey," he said, scrambling for the TV remote. He raised the volume. "Check this out."

A strip mall, sunlight glinting on the sidewalk, cars passing. It could be almost anywhere in America, but after a second or so, Corinne recognized it. The cars were driving on East Bay Street. The strip mall contained, among other things, the nail spa where Corinne had had her last pedicure. A chyron at the bottom of the screen read, _MIRACLE WORKER?_

In voice-over, a female reporter was saying, "Mrs. Thủy has her skeptics, but she says she's certain her daughter performed a miracle. A flock of believers agree."

After a jump cut, the camera showed the front of the nail spa, where a small crowd of people had gathered on the pavement. Crosses and burning votives lined the sidewalk. Another cut, and the face of a manicurist filled about half the frame. Corinne thought she might be Lorelei's mother.

Mrs. Thủy spoke into a microphone, but the reporter's voice continued offscreen. "Mrs. Thủy doesn't want her daughter to appear on camera or to be mentioned by name, but she says pilgrims are welcome to seek this modern-day saint."

And now Mrs. Thủy's voice, thinned somewhat by the sound of the breeze whooshing across the microphone. "We are bless that our child is happy and healthy and the Lord give her this gift. We hope people of all faith will be touch by it."

"And as for the bird?" The reporter again. "He's doing just fine."

The scene shifted to the interior of the salon, where a white-haired man—Mr. Thủy? Lorelei's father? her grandfather?—sat on the familiar rattan couch, holding a bundle of towels. As the camera moved closer, the man folded back the edges of the linens, and the head of a white bird popped out. The albino grackle. It looked around in its twitchy way and blinked its red eyes.

Andrei switched off the TV. "Crazy, huh? Gives new meaning to 'Holy City.'"

Corinne was still staring at the blank screen. She hardly knew what to say.

"You went there, right?" Andrei asked her. "Didn't you try that place?"

"I was there."

"That's what I thought."

She looked at him. "No. I was _there_. When it happened."

He narrowed his eyes. "You witnessed a miracle and never said anything?"

"That's just it," she said. "There was no miracle. Not that I saw. The bird died."

Andrei peered at the ceiling. He looked as if he were doing trigonometry in his head. "But if you saw the bird die, and now the bird is not dead, then there _was_ a miracle. You didn't see the actual resurrection, but—"

"Resurrection?" she said, laughing. "The bird didn't actually die. Obviously."

"But you just _said_ the bird died. You said you saw it."

"That's not what I said."

"It happened after you left," he said, "that's all."

She threw up her hands. "I have to pee."

By the time she returned from the bathroom, he'd folded up the sofa bed, put on a shirt, and begun to wash the breakfast dishes. She paused in the living room, watching him through the pass-through. His back was very straight.

He said, "I know you converted as a means to an end, but most people actually believe what they say they believe."

Corinne flung herself onto the couch. Of all their stock-in-trade fights—the one about grad school, the one about the tiny apartment, the one about Catholic education—this was the one fight to rule them all, the one fight to bind them. He advised her, cajoled her, convinced her—and then when she did what he wanted, he turned it against her.

She'd converted to Catholicism for him. She'd converted because it mattered so much to him and his family. Yes, that was true. It was also true that, even after six months of conversion classes, she'd never be mistaken for a devout Catholic. But at her baptism she'd had—or she believed she'd had—a true conversion experience. To deny it or to forget about it when it suited his purposes was maddening, if not actually cruel.

"I'm so exhausted," she said.

Andrei finished scrubbing a dish or pan, rinsed it, and put it in the draining rack. He said, rather flatly, "We went to bed at eleven and I let you sleep till ten."

Her mind was wandering. The bird had been merely stunned, not dead. She'd watched it carefully. She'd thought it stopped breathing. But she never touched it, never held it. People used to bury the comatose all the time, when doctors cupped and bled their patients and had no very great understanding of the body. The bird napped for a bit in its bundle of hand towels, and then a child mistook its waking for a resurrection. There was no other interpretation of events.

"If you look at any poll on the topic," Andrei was saying, "you'll find that most people believe in God. Most people believe in miracles. I'm one of those people. At every single Mass, every single day, all over the world, a miracle occurs. The Host becomes the body of Christ. That's a miracle. It's one of the things you professed to believe when you were baptized."

She'd been baptized in April. They'd been married in June. That meant he'd attended Mass twice in the two-and-a-half years she'd known him.

"Andrei," she said. "Why do you want to have children with me?"

"It's a biological drive, isn't it?" He didn't move from the sink. "Doesn't everyone want kids? Even gay people want kids now."

"That wasn't the question. Why do you want to have children with _me_?"

"What you're saying is, _you_ don't want to have children with _me_."

Was that what she was saying? She admitted—only to herself, and grudgingly—that he might be right.

He came out of the kitchen, his hands still damp with dishwater, a cluster of soap bubbles still clinging to one wrist. A droplet of water fell from his thumb and splashed the parquet floor near his bare foot. "What do I need to do?" His eyes were wet. "Do I need to be home more, is that it? I can talk to Suresh about taking the lead in Atlanta. It means a smaller piece of it for me, but then again, it frees me to take other work, so I can—"

She stared at his mouth as he talked, as if trying to read his lips, as if his dialogue had been badly dubbed and what she was hearing didn't match what he was saying.

"Or you can come with me." He brightened, warming to his own idea. "Yes. Come with me to Atlanta. It's a really great hotel. I'll upgrade us to a suite for the week. It's not like there's anything keeping you—"

Having come once again within spitting distance of the One Fight, he broke off.

Without realizing it, she'd shrunk from him: She was sitting now in the corner of the couch, her shoulders hunched forward, her arms folded across her chest. An outside observer, just entering the apartment, might think he'd threatened her or raised a hand as if to strike her.

In truth, she was thinking of him at his finest. After her baptism, he'd walked her home. It was a beautiful clear night with a mild chill in the air. They barely spoke but hardly needed to. She might have been walking inches above the pavement. The candlelight, the singing, the murmur of the priest's voice as he recited the liturgy, the quiet plash of holy water in the font—all had left her feeling strangely and pleasantly insubstantial, as if her bad deeds and unkind thoughts really had been washed away, leaving her lighter, actually physically lighter, than she'd been before.

By then Andrei had been sleeping in her bed three or four times a week, but on that night, when they reached her door, the door to this very apartment, he took both of her hands in his, kissed each on the knuckles, and bade her good night. It was exactly what she needed and wanted, and he'd given it to her by instinct, without asking or having to be asked. To be understood, to be known so perfectly, she thought now—that was the essence of romantic love.

Andrei crouched in front of her. He dried his hands on the tail of his shirt and held them out to her. She took them. As he had on that April night, all those months ago, he kissed her knuckles.

"Are we okay?" he said. "If we're not okay, help me fix it. Whatever it is, I'll do it. Just tell me."

"We're fine."

Any fool, she thought— Any fool could hear that her tone belied her words, but Andrei said, "Okay," and then, "I love you."

With a grim smile, she said, " _Moi aussi._ "

"I suppose I should—" With a sigh, he got to his feet. "The drive doesn't get any shorter."

"I _would_ come," she said. "I _would_. But I'm volunteering every day. Thursday through Monday. They count on me."

"Okay," he said, and then, "Of course they do."

He brushed his teeth and showered and shaved, all with the bathroom door standing open, all with Corinne looking on from the couch. Finally, he stood at the bathroom sink and combed his hair with his fingers. He wore a towel wrapped around him, knotted just above his hipbone.

"You should take a week off," he said. "Week after next? A free week in a luxury suite?"

"They have a pool?"

"They have a pool." When he put on his deodorant, he held his arms out from his sides, apelike. "We'll be done soon. I've got some leads for the next gig. One's in Pittsburgh. I can maybe stay with Vic and Jodie."

Vic and Jodie were his brother and sister-in-law. Corinne had never met them.

"That'd be..." Convenient, handy, cheap—multiple adjectives applied, but she couldn't muster the strength to choose one. Andrei didn't seem to notice.

After he'd dressed, he slipped his laptop into his briefcase and patted his pockets to make sure he had his keys and wallet. He kept a set of clothes in Atlanta, in luggage that he checked at the front desk every Monday, and so he had no packing to do. Corinne roused herself to see him off. They kissed goodbye. She waited in the doorway until he waved farewell one last time and stepped into the elevator.

Once she'd closed and locked the door behind her, she didn't quite know what to do with herself. Until he'd left, she'd craved solitude. Now that she had it, it seemed like a stupid thing to have wanted. Five days of loneliness, uncertainty, anxiety, and yes, sexual frustration. She would miss him terribly—until he came back. Were other marriages like this, she wondered? If so, what on earth kept everyone together?

Andrei had dropped his towel on the bathroom floor, as ever. She picked it up. It smelled vaguely chocolatey. The scent of his body wash. His smell, the native scent of his skin, always reminded her of nutmeg.

She turned on the shower and let it run. Even though Andrei had finished showering barely thirty minutes before, the water would take ages to warm up again. Sitting on the toilet lid, Corinne buried her face in his discarded towel and tried to make herself cry. She could cry for the man who'd walked her home after Easter Vigil, whom she'd barely seen since. She could weep for the sad cluster of people gathered around the nail salon, hoping some miraculous thing would bloom from the dull, workaday concrete. She could mourn the foolish young woman who'd given up a Master of Public Administration in order to have babies. She could, in theory, cry for all those things—but she didn't.

The water ran hot. The mirror fogged over. Drops of condensation drizzled off the bottom of the glass and puddled on the vanity. She shrugged off her nightgown and stepped into the tub.

Just as she drew the shower curtain, the bathroom door opened with a suck of cold air. Corinne yelped in surprise and, covering her breasts with her arms, shrank back against the tile. One foot slipped on the wet floor of the tub, and she began to fall. She saw in a flash how she would come to her end—wet, naked, concussed, and humiliated. Just as quickly, she reached out to save herself, hoping the shower curtain would sustain her weight just long enough, just for the second or two she needed to get her feet under her. But instead of the curtain, she grabbed hold of Andrei's hands, or his hands grabbed hold of hers—impossible to say which.

He'd come back for something—toothbrush, phone charger, another round of arguments, _something_ —and now here he stood, his shirt soaking through, his eyes twinkling, his crooked arms holding her upright.

"Are you all right?" he asked her.

"I think so," she said. She had yet to catch her breath. Her heart had yet to stop slamming in her chest. But she was indeed all right.

"I couldn't leave," he said. "Not without—"

"I know it was only about eight minutes," she said, "but I think I kind of missed you."

"Is there room for me?" He was already stripping off his wet clothes.

Grinning, nodding, and yes, God help her, shedding tears at last, she stepped aside for him, and he climbed in. He was already hard, his erection bobbing in the steamy air. She bent her head as he kissed her neck, breathed the nutmeg scent of his skin, pressed her body against his. The water washed over them both. She said his name, told him she loved him, said his name again. He pushed her wet hair back, away from her ear, and said in a low growl, " _Moi aussi, moi aussi._ "
Chapter 10

Dust. Fucking dust got into everything. Food, boots, socks, hair, the folds of your clothes, the crack of your ass. Every. Fucking. Thing. When Littlefield tried to draw—dragging a balky gel pen across the shitty college-ruled notepaper he'd bought at the PX—the dust powdered the ink and caused the tip of the pen to skip. When he jerked off at night, the grit in the creases of his palms rubbed him raw. When he ran in the morning with Mary hopping three-legged at his side, they sucked in dust, the two of them, until she drooled in shades of brown and he spat mud.

And when, as now, he went to the open-air gym to get on the rowing machine and sweat some of the dirt out of his pores, he found that grime had coated the rail and clogged the fan, so that the sled moved sluggishly and the cord pulled in jerks and jitters and the whole apparatus squealed like a rat getting fucked by an elk.

He let go of the bar. It snapped back, flopped left and right, and rattled against the rowing machine's frame and foot plates. As he stood, the bar knocked against his shin. It didn't hurt, but he hollered at it anyway, called it a motherfucking cocksucker, picked it up, hauled it back, flung it away. For a second he had his hands on a pair of kettlebells. If he picked them up, he'd launch them into the wall of the adjacent tent. He knew this, saw it in his mind's eye like a prophesy. If the weights shattered the fluorescent tube that hung against the tent wall, if they splintered the dumb-ass hand-lettered sign that hung beneath the light— _This Is A BITCH-FREE Zone, Bitch_ —he'd still feel no better. In fact, he'd feel like an asshole, and that in turn would only make him angrier.

Lunging forward, he took hold of the kettlebells and hefted them. He was ready for it, the broken lamp and the cracked sign and the whole tantrum—but then, hearing Evans call out in his Tennessee twang, he dropped the weights.

"What's your malfunction, dude? Heard you way the fuck over there. Mary came running with her tail tucked, crying like sixty."

"Fuck off, Evans."

"Brought you your mail, asshole." Evans was carrying a smallish cardboard box. He shook it. Something rattled inside. "You're fucking _welcome_."

Littlefield yanked the package out of Evan's hands. The return address was Corinne's. _Jackpot._

Sitting on a taped-up crate that served as a weight bench, pinning the box between his knees, he tore at the packing tape. The cardboard gave way first. He stretched the tape on one side and split the cardboard on the other and made an opening big enough to get his hand through. He plucked out a wadded-up twist of kraft paper. Underneath it, there were pencils in a hinged tin, a spiral-bound sketchbook in an acetate sleeve, and a Staedtler eraser in a blister pack. _Jack-fucking-pot._

There might be more, but Evans stood by, squinting into the package and absentmindedly pinching the end of his dick through his trousers. Littlefield looked him up and down, eyes to crotch to eyes, and he unhanded his junk and tucked his fists into his armpits.

"Who's it from?" Evans said.

"My sister."

Evans took a seat on the weight bench. "The hot one?"

"I only have one sister."

"Right." Evans drummed his fingers on his knees. "I saw her picture that time."

"What?" As if shielding Corinne herself from Evans's eyes, Littlefield folded his arms across the box. "When? Where?"

"Facebook, dude, where else? She's hot."

Littlefield narrowed his eyes. "Dude. You put my sister in your spank bank?"

"Second or third string. I might could take another look, actually."

"She's married."

"So?"

"If you Facebook-stalk my sister, I _will_ block you," Littlefield said.

"Motherfucker. I've seen you wash your asshole in the shower, but I can't look at your damn Facebook page? That's fuckin'—"

Littlefield raised his hand. "Hold up. Why are you watching me in the shower?"

"It's impossible _not_ to. You got a whole fuckin' routine. Neck, pits, chest, then your back and legs. After all that you go for the crotch and crack. You get all loving and tender on that shit. You hum a little love song and everything."

"That is seriously fucked up."

"Sheet far. You're the one making love to your own booty hole."

For a long moment, Littlefield blinked numbly at Evans. There didn't seem to be anything worth saying.

Eventually, Evans cleared his throat and nodded toward the box. "What'd she send you, anyway? Red Vines? I could eat the shit out of some Red Vines."

Littlefield still had nothing to say.

Evans sighed. He glanced away, sighed again, and turned back. He poked at the torn edge of the cardboard. "Gummi bears? Swedish fish?"

"Okay," Littlefield said. "I'm out." He stood up and backed away. He shook the box. "Thanks for bringing me this, though, you fuckin' freak."

"If you talk to your sister," Evans said, tugging his earlobe, "ask her to send Red Vines."

"I'm leaving in thirty-eight days, dumb fuck. I'm not asking anybody to send me anything. And if you mention my sister again, so help me."

As he walked, Littlefield dug around in the box. There was a note. He stopped to read it. John Carter had a job with a tour company. Andrei was in Atlanta all the time. Mama was choosing an opera for spring, and the house on Montagu was full of weird music. All of that took a few sentences. For most of the rest of the page Corinne wrote about their father and listed all the specialists he'd seen and all the tests they'd run on him. No one knew why he'd collapsed on his birthday, and Corinne was afraid no one ever would.

Once he got home, he thought, he'd tolerate zero fucking-around on this medical shit. If he had to drag the old man by the ear from one hospital to another, all the way to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo fucking Clinic, that's what he'd do. He wasn't even halfway ready to be the ranking male of the Littlefield family.

Mary trotted over and leapt up to greet him. He scratched her ears and scuffed her chest with the back of his hand. Stuffing Corinne's note into the box, he went on. Even hobbling on three legs, Mary was faster than he was. She loped in circles around him, her tongue lolling out across the ridge of her yellow teeth.

The wind was up. Dust eddied around Littlefield's feet and clung to the hair on his legs. He could taste it on his tongue, too. Everywhere on base there were buckets filled with bottled water and signs that read _HYDRATE OR DIE_. He passed a bucket, grabbed a bottle, cracked it open, chugged.

He went to the chapel. Wind whipped the canvas and strummed the guy-wires. Littlefield opened the door a crack. The place was, as he'd hoped, empty of people. Mary stuck her nose in, then pushed through. He went after her.

Except for a meager yellow bulb burning above the altar, the space was dark. About a hundred folding chairs sat in tight rows. Everything else was plywood: bulkheads, deck, dais, pulpit, even the cross and altar. Everything makeshift, grimy, ugly as fuck.

He sat directly under the light, his back against the altar. He set aside his water bottle and unpacked the box. Underneath the things he'd already seen—the sketchbook, the graphite pencils, the eraser—there were other supplies. Colored pencils—awesome. Dual-tipped markers—outstanding. A pair of double-holed sharpeners—crucial. Hard and soft pastels—useless.

He sharpened an HB pencil. The rasp of the wood against the blade was a beautiful sound. He opened the sketchbook. It wasn't terribly large—just eight by five, and only a hundred sheets—but it felt nicely heavy in his hands. The page was so white that he hesitated to touch it. He lifted the book to his chin and blew across the surface of the paper, scattering some grains of dust that had already gathered.

He told Mary to sit, and she did. It was the closest she could come, anyway, with her one wonky leg sticking out at an angle. Her mouth hung open with her tongue flopped over on one side. A string of drool puddled on the dais at her feet. She might not look intelligent, but she did at least look happy.

With his first mark on the page, he outlined the slope of her head, neck, and back. He looked at what he'd drawn, meager as it was, and hated it. He reached for the eraser.

The hatch flew open. A bearded man stumbled in, puffing and grunting, slapping himself and flapping his canvas jacket, scuffing his boots on the deck. It was the reporter, La Flamme. The hatch thwacked shut behind him. Startled, Mary leapt to her feet and hid behind the pulpit. A growl rumbled low in her belly.

"Oh," La Flamme said. "I didn't know anyone was—" Head cocked, eyes narrowed, he came down the aisle. "I remember you. But your name— Litton? Linton?"

"Littlefield." He put aside the sketchbook and got to his feet.

"Right," La Flamme said. "You picked up Lube Job's body."

They shook hands. La Flamme glanced around, and his gaze fell on the drawing supplies. "You too, huh?"

"Taking it up again after a long break. Trying to get unfucked."

"Can I see?"

"I was just about to erase it and start over."

La Flamme sat on the dais and flipped open the sketchbook. One line on one page. That was all. "Huh. I'd say you must be pretty fucking fucked."

"Are you actually a reporter?" Littlefield said.

As if by way of answer, La Flamme reached for Littlefield's pencil. He turned the sketchbook to a clean page. With a few light strokes of the pencil tip, he sketched in a slender, slope-shouldered body and an egg-shaped head. Pressing more heavily, making darker lines, he added boots with their tongues slouching out, rumpled trousers, a T-shirt, a camera hanging on a strap. The figure reminded Littlefield of something he'd seen somewhere. As La Flamme roughed in the facial features, it became clear. He was drawing a character named J, the protagonist—antihero? narrator? witness?—of an old comic called _Terrorstan_. Littlefield had followed it in the free weekly paper in Charleston, and later he'd bought the paperbound collection.

"You drew _Terrorstan_?" Littlefield said. He watched J's face emerge—the crooked nose, the lopsided wedge of a mouth, the cleft chin—and compared the features to La Flamme's. Even allowing for the beard, even considering the translation from person to toon, J didn't look much like Jimmy. "Are you J? Is J you?"

"Well, _you_ know..." La Flamme hatched in a flattop and stippled in a three-day beard. He puffed air across the page to chase away the dust and flakes of graphite, then handed Littlefield the sketchbook and pencil. "All fiction is memoir. All memoir is fiction."

"And what about that paper?" Littlefield said. "The _Hilo_ something?"

"You need credentials to get access. Every week they send me a list of stories and I pick one and send back a pocket cartoon. In exchange I get credentials."

Littlefield laid the sketchbook on the dais. The drawing was perfect. No erasures. No wobbly lines. It had taken five minutes, tops.

"It's the smell," he said. "That's why I need to get unfucked. The smell."

La Flamme sniffed the air. "I don't smell anything."

"It's on _me_ , on _us_. It gets on our clothes. Our skin. You can't get rid of it."

After a moment's thought, La Flamme seemed to understand. He nodded, a grimacing sort of nod.

"For a while, I thought I had it figured out," Littlefield said. "Cops put Vicks VapoRub under their noses, but I couldn't get any, so I just started keeping a cough drop going all the time."

"And?"

"Tongue went numb. I couldn't taste salt, but I could still smell the fucking decomp."

Behind La Flamme, Mary moved around inside the pulpit and knocked against the plywood panels. La Flamme wheeled around. Mary stared at him for a moment and then receded.

"Has that dog always been there?" La Flamme said.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"Good to know. I have a— My head is kind of—" La Flamme twiddled his fingers alongside his temple. "I guess I should stop worrying. So far everything's turned out to be real. Even the impossible shit's totally real, somehow." He cleared his throat. "Reminds me. I just about forgot why I came in here."

He dug around in his jacket's inner pockets until he found a thick pen with a filigreed silver barrel. When he tugged off the cap and unscrewed the nib, a fat little joint dropped out. With a disposable lighter from his hip pocket, he lit the joint and swallowed a deep hit of smoke.

"Dude, you came to the _chapel_ to smoke that?"

Shrugging, La Flamme said, "I'm an atheist. Want some?"

"Fuck it." Littlefield sat next to La Flamme and took the joint. "I've only got thirty-eight days left."

"Are you guys allowed to have pets now?"

"We're training her to be a cadaver dog."

Cocking his head, narrowing his eyes, La Flamme said, "'Training.' Uh-huh."

No one was training Mary for anything—Littlefield had, for no good reason, invented the story on the spot—but still, he couldn't help feeling defensive. Was it really so hard to believe? When they'd gone after Lyubovich's leg, Mary had snuffled the ground in concentric circles, eventually taking them to the severed limb. Littlefield had wondered at the time if she'd had some training—as a retriever, say, or as a tracker.

"I know about dogs," he told La Flamme. "When I was a kid, I had a Lab mix named Bozo, and—"

But La Flamme wasn't listening. He took another toke. Through the smoke, he said, "Smells better than dead guys, huh?"

In silence, they passed the joint back and forth a few times. When Littlefield waved it away, La Flamme licked his fingers and pinched the end of it to smother the cherry. A thread of smoke curled into the air.

Littlefield drank some water. Just as they'd passed the joint, they now passed the bottle from hand to hand, taking smaller and smaller sips so that neither of them would be the one to get the last swallow.

" _Terrorstan_ 's the reason I'm here," Littlefield said. "Or part of the reason."

La Flamme's lips moved as if he were speaking, but he said nothing.

"It had heroes in it," Littlefield said. Panels and pages from the comic floated across his mind's eye—the smudgy backdrop of distant mountains, the mastodonic bulk of Humvees, the gear-fattened figures of men on patrol. "Rodrigues pulled his buddy out of that ditch. Nasr got his legs blown off and warned away the corpsmen. Taylor saved that Afghan kid. If some skinny farm fucker from Idaho could do something brave, it made me feel like I could, too."

La Flamme hung his head and kneaded the back of his neck. He growled low in his throat. In the hollow of the plywood pulpit, Mary whined.

"But they sent me to Twentynine Stumps, which was so boring I thought I might—" La Flamme was still groaning. Littlefield touched his shoulder. "Are you okay, dude?"

La Flamme got to his feet and paced halfway up the aisle and back again. "Did you know, since thirty-six hundred B.C., there's only been two hundred and ninety-two years without war?" He flumped into one of the folding chairs. It skidded back a few inches. "Less than three hundred years out of five and a half fucking thousand."

Littlefield waited.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For _Terrorstan_. I'm sorry. If it brought you here, to this shit—if my comic was even a tiny part of that, I'm sorry."

"Okay," Littlefield said. It came out sounding like a question. "I forgive you?"

When La Flamme got up, his chair tipped backward and its back came to rest, with something approaching delicacy, on the seat of the chair behind it. He retreated down the aisle, staggering as if slightly drunk or extraordinarily stoned, and crashed out through the hatch. At the slapping of the door against the frame, Mary crawled out of the pulpit. Whimpering, her belly puffing and collapsing like a pair of bellows, she looked around. When she saw that she and Littlefield were alone again, she curved herself around the small of his back. Her weight and heat reassured him.

The new sketchpad still lay open to La Flamme's drawing. It was good, crazy good. Someone as skilled as La Flamme could make art out of anything—a journalist in a baggy uniform, an eruption of smoke and shrapnel, an Iranian-American teenager lying legless in the dust. Littlefield felt a gnawing in his gut, a deep pain like the knife-twist of real hunger. It came either from the certainty that he'd someday draw as well as La Flamme, or from the fear that he never would. Somehow both things existed at once.

He drained the water bottle. When he drew it away from his mouth, a fat drop splattered in a ragged oval across the drawing, marring J's waist and torso. With a yelp of panic, Littlefield wiped the page with the side of his hand, but he managed only to smear the lines.

He leapt to his feet. He grabbed the sketchbook by its cover, yanked it up from the floor, and hurled it across the chapel. The pages fluttered in the air. The notebook struck the plywood bulkhead with a satisfying whump and dropped like a duck filled with birdshot.

On four feet and then three, Mary scrambled across the dais and pounced on the sketchbook. She nosed it over and clenched a few pages between her teeth and dragged the thing across the deck toward Littlefield. The pages held for a bit, but soon they started to give way and finally tore free. Mary stumbled and fell, ass over ears, and came to rest, belly up, at Littlefield's feet. She spat out the pages and gazed up at him in pure doggy joy. For the first time in weeks, he laughed. He laughed until tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.
Chapter 11

A hazy Indian summer funk hung over Market Street. Tourists filled the pavement, walking heedlessly in pairs and trios. John Carter avoided them as best he could, lumbering right, left, forward, and back in a clumsy box step that encompassed a whole concrete square of the sidewalk. He waved a handbill in the air and called out, mostly ignored, to the passersby: "Graveyard tours, ghost tours, darkside tours. Chucktown Tours. Best tours in Charleston, right here." Thanks to the unexpected afternoon warmth, he sounded as limp as he felt. If Ms. Treat were here, he thought, even she would say he wasn't shouting half loudly enough.

One leg of his box step took him toward a plate-glass window and narrow door beneath a red awning. Blocky gilt letters filled the window— _Chucktown Tours and Best In Charleston_. Partly hidden behind the glass and glare and glitzy lettering, his boss, Jo Barber, moved from one end of the office to the other. She looked harmless enough, like a certain kind of young grandmother—eyeglasses that were too large, heels that were too high, stretch pants that were too tight. His dad, who'd known her for years and years, thought she was rather silly. But John Carter found her utterly terrifying. The sight of her invariably made him think of triremes and galley slaves churning gigantic oars.

Dipping his head, he wiped his forehead on his sleeve. The handbills had been printed on glossy card stock, as slick as soft butter, and they were difficult to handle, especially with sweaty hands. They started to slip from John Carter's grasp, and just as he began to straighten the stack, someone brushed by him and jostled his elbow. Every card but one went flying across the sidewalk. When he hunkered down to gather them, a man stepped on his hand, stumbled, and hollered back that he should watch himself.

"Damn Yankees."

A woman had spoken. John Carter glanced up—he saw straight brown hair and little else—and went back to recovering the handbills. She crouched down beside him, and with her long pink fingernails began prying up the loose cards.

"Thank you," he said in a murmur. "You're very—"

Even with the sourness of his own sweat-damp T-shirt so much in his nose, John Carter suddenly caught a whiff of her perfume or shampoo. Something floral, but sweet, too, like sugar-cookie dough. His head snapped up, and he looked at her more closely. What color were her eyes, exactly? Hazel? Brown? No, definitely not brown. Brown was by far too dull a word.

They stood. She handed back almost all of the leaflets she'd collected, keeping one with a dusty footprint across the corner. She pored over it, as if it contained volumes of information.

"Openings for tonight," he told her. "All tours."

"Thanks, handsome." She put the card in her purse.

"Thank _you_ ," he said, his voice sticking in his throat, his penis stiffening in his jeans. He fanned out the handbills. "Thank you for—" _For these_ , he meant— _thank you for helping with these_ —but he couldn't get the words out.

When at last she turned and strode away, her plump calves clenched like fists. The back of each knee bore a pair of curved dimples, like parentheses. Her cutoffs hugged her round hips, and her purse slapped against her left buttock, rippling the flesh of her thigh. She rounded the corner and passed out of view, and John Carter could breathe again. His erection subsided.

He held up a leaflet. Left, right, back, forward. "Revolutionary War," he called. "War Between the States." Left, right, back, forward. "Walk where Washington walked. See where Beauregard slept."

At the curb, he spun on the ball of his foot—just another corner of the box—but for once he didn't think to turn his head first and make sure the path was clear.

"Revolutionary—"

Instead of _War_ , he blurted out _wah_ or _whoa_ or something in between. The strange-eyed woman had returned, and he had to stop short to avoid stepping on her toes. He stumbled back.

She was carrying a bottle of Evian. A haze of condensation covered the plastic of the bottle. Fat droplets of water dripped from its base. She held it out to him. "You looked thirsty."

"I—I can pay you back."

Some dark strands of her hair clung to her neck and cheek. With a grin, she said, "It cost a dollar. I didn't have to take out a title loan."

Her smile discomfited him. Whenever anyone seemed to be enjoying a joke, he assumed he must be the butt of it. Old habit, impossible to break. He thought of things he might say to make her leave. But when he spoke, he said, "Umber."

She cocked her head.

"Your eyes are raw umber. The color of your eyes. Like the crayons, you know?"

Shaking the Evian, she said, "You don't want it?"

He took it from her. Water dripped from it and splashed the toes of his shoes. He turned the bottle sideways and pressed it against his forehead.

"I'm Doris." She wiped her hand on her cutoffs. "And you?"

John Carter stammered, but he managed eventually to speak his name.

"Pleased to meet you, John."

"John _Carter_ ," he said.

"I heard you. I'm Doris Park."

"No, what I mean is—"

"You don't remember me."

"Oh." He paused. It was true. He didn't remember her.

"I work for Truluck."

Doris who worked for Truluck. _Now_ he remembered. "You fired me," he said.

"Denny Truluck fired you. I just conveyed the message."

Bad enough to consort with the enemy. He was not, in addition, going to consort with the girl who'd given him the axe. He handed back the bottle of Evian. Taking a step back, he wiggled the stack of handbills. "I'm still on the clock."

"I'll be on my way, too. But—" Taking him by the wrist, she pulled him across the sidewalk and into the doorway of a neighboring shop. For the first time, she seemed unsure of herself. "Do you ever plan something in your head—something you want to say—and then you can't force yourself to say it that way at all?"

John Carter made an involuntary noise, half laugh, half sigh. "Only about twenty or thirty times a day," he said.

Doris giggled so artlessly that for once John Carter felt he was in on the joke. Brushing her hair back, pulling free the strays that had clung to her skin, she said, "Even though I work for the opposing camp, so to speak—"

"And you fired me."

She went on as if he hadn't spoken. "Do you think you'd be willing to—?"

She stopped and made a face. She was staring at a point beyond John Carter's shoulder. With a wince, he followed her gaze. He fully expected to find Jo Barber standing behind him, glowering through the lenses of her extraordinarily large, astonishingly scarlet eyeglasses. But there was no one there—or rather, no one but the usual parade of tourists.

"Do you have a cell phone?" Doris asked him.

"What? Of course," he said, and pulled his phone from his pocket.

Doris grabbed it away from him and replaced it with the water bottle. The wet plastic slapped against his palm. To keep from dropping the thing, he clapped his other hand around it. The handbills fell to the ground all over again, and this time he let them go.

"What are you—?"

Twiddling her fingers in the air, she shushed him. She tapped the screen of his phone. She tapped and tapped and tapped. John Carter opened the Evian and drank. The water was, after all, so beautifully cold that, once he'd started gulping it down, he couldn't stop. He swallowed about three-quarters of it in one long chug.

Doris held up his phone, showing him what she'd done. She'd added herself to his contacts—name, phone number, e-mail. And somehow, without his noticing, she'd even snapped a photo of herself. "It means you can call me." He must have looked confused. Speaking very slowly, she said, "For a date."

John Carter stiffened again in his jeans. His face went hot. He considered pouring the rest of the Evian over his head.

"Unless," she said, "that's something you wouldn't ever do?"

"It's something I would do," he said, his voice high and hoarse.

She began backing away. She looked, above all, relieved, and that surprised him. Had _she_ needed courage to approach _him_? That was completely backward, wasn't it? A girl this beautiful and a boy this ordinary—and _she'd_ needed courage? He couldn't get his mind around it.

"All right, John, before I get you in a heap of trouble, I'll—"

"John Carter." He said it as gently as he could. "My name is John Carter."

"I know. John Carter, like the guy on _ER_."

"No. Yes. I guess so. But no."

She frowned.

"John Carter Littlefield. That's my whole name, and I go by John Carter."

" _Why?_ "

Mouth open, he stared at her.

"You have to admit," she said, "John Carter is a lot of syllables."

"It's only one more syllable than Doris."

"What about J.C.?"

"I already tried that. Nobody would switch. Besides, it's only one less syllable."

"Jo Co? Jay Car? Jacky? Jay Kay? Jakey?"

John Carter wrinkled his nose.

"Something with panache. Jean-Cartier." She affected a comic French accent: _Zhahn caught-ee-YAY_.

"That _adds_ a syllable."

Doris shrugged. "I'll think it over and get back to you."

After a moment, as if by wordless agreement, they emerged from the doorway into the open air. The foot traffic had dwindled. A block or so west, a modest crowd had gathered in front of Bubba Gump's. John Carter fought back a surge of raw panic. He'd let Doris distract him through much of the pre-dinner rush, and he was probably—okay, _definitely_ —in a whole lot of trouble.

"I forgive you for not remembering me," she said.

"Me too," he said, and then, "That answer made no sense."

"Not at all."

Waving toward the handbills that had fallen, he said, "I guess I should—"

"Okay," she said. "Call me." And she turned away.

He bent to retrieve the leaflets. Any that hadn't already been wrecked were certainly ruined now. He'd wasted about a dozen of them. He'd be fortunate, he thought, if Jo let him finish out the night.

"Hey. John _Carter_."

He looked up and looked around. Doris had called to him from half a block away.

"Doris _Park_ ," he called back.

"You're kind of adorable."

"I have no idea what to do with that information," he said.

"Say 'thank you.' Duh."

Leaflets in hand, he walked toward her. "What were you planning to say? You know—what was it you were practicing in your head?"

"Oh, that." She blushed. "It was a _Romeo and Juliet_ thing. Chucktown and Truluck, Capulet and—and—"

"Montague?"

Long-faced and rabbity, she glanced at something beyond his right shoulder. She caught his chin in her hand to keep him from turning his head. "If it turns out— _hypothetically_ , you understand—that I got you in big trouble with Jo, then I hope—"

"John Carter?" And that was Jo. Although she'd called his name from a hundred or more yards away, her voice was piercingly clear. "John Carter Littlefield."

"I'll call you later," he told Doris. "I promise."

"Good luck," Doris said.

With a nod, he turned and hurried toward Jo and her big red glasses.
Chapter 12

The stuff of Leland's workday lay scattered across one end of the kitchen island. His laptop. A German-English dictionary older than his daughter. A spiral-bound notebook. Forty-three pages of text in pre-War German. Some strands of hair he'd yanked in frustration from his head.

One year of high school German, as it turned out, hadn't prepared him for the sustained effort of translation. Thirty minutes' labor had produced a single sentence. It was not a good sentence. It was not even a lucid sentence.

A tapping on the French doors roused him. He hopped down from his stool and opened the door to a young man with a great deal of long black hair and an enormous beard. A killer beard, in fact. A few of the longest whiskers reached his sternum. The man had a messenger bag slung over one shoulder, and he clutched its strap with both white-knuckled hands. Without letting go of his bag, he gave a finger-twiddling wave.

"Hi," he said. "Um, I think..."

At the same time, Leland thrust out his hand for shaking and said, "Dr. Cable, I presume."

A safe presumption, surely. John Carter had said his piano teacher was hairy, and almost the first thing anyone would say of this fellow was that he was hairy. On the other hand, he couldn't, by the look of him, be much over thirty—not too young for a college professor, but younger than Leland had expected—and he frowned in confusion, exactly as if he'd been mistaken for someone else.

After a moment, though, the bearded man let go of his bag and shook Leland's hand and said, "Scott. Please. Call me Scott."

"Leland. But I guess you knew that already."

Feeling an eddy of cool air at his feet, Leland nearly said something about Charleston weather—absurd this time of year, hot all day, cold at night—but if they had to talk about the weather until Anna Grace arrived, he'd surely lose his will to live. He'd expected his wife to do the conversational heavy lifting, and he hadn't prepared at all. He knew exactly two facts about Scott: he taught piano, and he was hirsute. Two men couldn't possibly talk about hairiness for more than a minute—Leland was sure of it—and the piano was entirely out of the question. For a moment, he imagined himself sinking to the floor and staring disconsolately at his own toes. The handshake went on and on.

"You must be freezing out there." He clenched his back teeth, swallowed, and went on. "The weather this time of year is—"

Before he could finish, Scott pushed past him and crossed the room. At the island, he dropped his bag on the floor and hunched over Leland's MacBook, goggling at it as if he'd never seen a laptop before.

"The transit of Venus," Scott said, a statement, not a question.

The screen saver, then. It was the screen saver that had transfixed him. A photo of the sun's disk filled the display; Venus, having crossed the solar limb, appeared as a crisp black circle. In the next image, a haze of cirrus clouds obscured the sun, and Venus was a roundish smudge. Leland was fairly certain he'd left his browser window open to an online translator—nothing more damning than that—but even so, his fists kept clenching and unclenching. He kept picturing himself leaping across the room and slamming the laptop shut.

"Is this the 'oh-four transit?" Scott asked.

"I'm not actually sure." Clench. Unclench. "I've been grabbing them whenever—"

"I made a special trip to Maine to see the 'oh-four transit. That was as far east in the U.S. as I could get. My flight got delayed, and then delayed again, and then canceled, and it was a Tuesday during finals, so I couldn't really..." He sighed. "I didn't get to see it at all."

"The next one's in June."

Scott raised his right hand. "I swear to Neil deGrasse Tyson and the ghost of Edmond Halley you're the first person I ever met who already knew about the transit of Venus."

"I'm writing a book."

Scott's jaw sagged open. He tugged so hard on his beard that Leland half-expected clumps of it to come loose.

"Anna Grace maybe didn't mention it? I write history books. Popular history is the official, you know, 'genre.'" He made air quotes around _genre_. The word embarrassed him, as if he used it to claim something he didn't deserve. It turned out, though, that the air quotes embarrassed him more. His face went hot. "This time I'm trying fiction. Some German scientists came here in eighteen eighty-two, and—"

He paused. He'd never gotten farther than that. But Scott, still silent, pulled out a stool and sat.

Leland went on. "Julius Heinrich Franz and Hermann Albert Kobold came here—Aiken, actually—and built an observatory. It's still there. Part of it, anyway. They didn't see anything of the transit, so I thought it'd make an unsatisfying narrative as non-fiction."

Scott looked over the papers and books laid out on the island. He picked up the document Leland had been trying to translate—a short memoir by Hermann Kobold—and then the notebook that contained the translation. Leland groaned. Even if he never had to admit to Scott, or anyone else, how long he'd worked to achieve so little, what he'd achieved, in itself, was an embarrassment.

As if to prove that very point, Scott screwed up his face. "Who did this?" he said. "It's way off. See here? This is the wrong sense of _Einrichtung_. It should be _configuration_ rather than _establishment_." Setting down the notebook, he scratched and scribbled and scratched and scribbled again. He chuckled. "Don't you love how German piles up all the verbs at the end?"

No. Leland did not love that. Not at all. But he said nothing. When Scott finished, he leaned to one side so that Leland could read what he'd written. It was a good sentence. A perfectly lucid sentence.

"I spent a year in Germany," Scott said. "I guess your translator...ah...didn't?"

"No. I've never been."

"Germany is so..." Whatever Germany was, Scott never said. Instead he opened one hand, as if he'd been holding a small bird and now wanted to set it free. He stared at Kobold's memoir. "It's your book—well, obviously—but if you ask me, if you really want transit action, Chappe is your _homme_."

"What is who is what?"

"A French astronomer. Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche. Chappe. Total rock star. In seventeen sixty-one, he went to Siberia for the transit. He had to hire these giant sledges that ran along the courses of the frozen rivers, with the spring thaw chasing him all the way and the ice cracking and the water coming up under the runners. When he got there— _there_ being Tobolsk, in the middle of nothing—he set up his observatory up on a hill and started taking his measurements. But the river flooded—the thaw, right?—and here he was, this citified weirdo, pointing stuff at the sky and making mysterious marks in a ledger, so the villagers thought..."

"They thought he was a witch."

"Right? And in seventeen sixty- _nine_ , he went south to Baja California, where—" Scott stopped himself. He grimaced and blushed, as if chastened by his own enthusiasm. "I get worked up. If I had the remotest idea how to do math, I'd be an astronomer myself, but..."

Leland made his commiserating face. "Math is hard."

"I know you're probably looking for the South Carolina connection, but the nineteenth-century transits weren't as..." Open hand. Another bird took flight. "If I were you, I'd write a novel about Chappe, not Franz and Kobold. Or even better, not a novel at all, but a comprehensive history of _all_ the transits, from Jeremiah Horrocks in sixteen thirty-nine, right up through NASA's observations of the next one in June. No one's ever done anything like that, as far as I know."

Pulling an empty stool toward him, Leland flumped down onto it. This suggestion of Scott's could take some time to parse—if it could be parsed at all. Instead of a novel about one transit, write a history of them all. Or, instead of having a daughter and two sons, have a son and two daughters. One would be as easy as the other.

No. That was crazy. The kids were grown, but he hadn't committed a single word of the novel to the page. What if he changed course? It would be more work, sure, but of the kind he loved best.

"Is this Karen Holmes?" Scott asked.

"What? Oh. The music. Yes, it's Karen Holmes. I meant to change it."

The iPod had been shuffling for so long that Leland had tuned it out altogether. Half in a daze— _all the transits? a history? not a novel? what would that mean?_ —he stumbled toward the corner shelf. As he crossed, "A Cockeyed Optimist" began with a series of crazy leaping chords on the piano.

"Leave it," Scott said. "I like it. A friend of mine—a mentor, really, someone I taught with in San Francisco, Jonah—he's a major Karen Holmes junkie. And I mean _major_. He flies to New York to see her cabaret act every summer. Every. Summer."

"That's dedication."

"Do you have her disco album?" Scott said. "That was the one thing Jonah couldn't buy."

"Not even as a guilty pleasure?"

"He would have, but he could never find it."

"It's on iTunes. That's where I got it."

Leland hadn't intended to admit owning the Karen Holmes disco album. He had an excuse, if he needed one. He was prepared to explain that if you saw _Rhythm and Dance_ listed alongside _Bewitched_ and _The Song Is You_ and _That Old Feeling_ , you'd never guess it belonged in a different genre altogether. But he didn't need to say anything: Scott was stuck in a different groove.

"Jonah's one of those vinyl people, you know? He'd never buy anything on a computer. And apparently all the _Rhythm and Dance_ LPs burned up at Disco Demolition Night."

"Disco Demolition Night? I'm surprised you even know about that. You weren't even born yet."

Scott laughed. "You're sweet. I was six, seven, eight, somewhere around there. But to be honest, I'd forgotten all about it till Jonah wrote a one-act opera based on it."

It took a few seconds for all of that to sink in. An opera, of all things, about a publicity stunt, a record burning that turned into a riot. A one-act opera, at that—an oxymoronic-sounding thing, as strange to contemplate as a big detail or a jumbo shrimp. And one final thing: If Scott had been six or eight years old at the end of the disco era, that meant Leland had misjudged his age by a decade.

"You know," Scott was saying, "I think the whole concept of a 'guilty pleasure,' at least in terms of music, is suspect. It assumes there's good music and bad music, as if in a moral sense."

"Are you saying disco is a sin?"

It was a joke, but Scott didn't laugh. "A music professor might say all classical music is good and all popular music is bad. This"—he nodded toward the iPod and speakers—"wouldn't be good music. It might not even be music at all. Maybe he'd just think it's noise."

For a time, as if by agreement, they listened to "My Funny Valentine," the gold standard of standards. The piano and bass maundered through a duet. Karen's voice came in high and floated down a blues scale as a waft of mist might drift downward along a dark slope. Lovely. Amazing. Art, not noise.

Scott went on. "Maybe it's even narrower than that. Maybe the prof thinks Mozart was a hack, but Stravinsky was a genius. The kids mostly think Mozart and Stravinsky are equally full of shit, and all classical music is just so boring it seems more like cuneiform. They're all listening to hip hop, which to me sounds like a bunch of shouting. Our musical taste isn't just about the music. It's about who we are. When you're a teenager and you start fall in love with a certain kind of music, it's part of inventing your adult self. It's hard to admit it when you like something that doesn't fit the persona you created. We call that a 'guilty pleasure,' but why be guilty about loving something that was created in the hopes that you'd love it?"

After "Valentine," the first cut of _Rhythm and Dance_ began. Leland had never been a fan of disco, but this track was its own thing. A simple piano riff, a funk bass, and a four-on-the-floor beat in the drums. No strings, no brass. All the color and flash came from Karen's voice. It was so perfect that it must have seemed like low-hanging fruit—a disco cover of "Get Rhythm," a song that recommended rhythm as a cure for the blues. But it was also so unlikely that no one else had ever thought of it—a disco cover of a rockabilly rave-up by Johnny Cash.

"Is this it?" Scott's eyes were wide. "This is it, isn't it? The Karen Holmes disco album?"

"Sure is." Leland's hips and shoulders moved as if of their own accord. "You can't not get rhythm when there's all this rhythm to get, am I right?"

"You know, when I said all that about good and bad music and not feeling ashamed, I didn't mean to imply that this is good music."

Leland been just about to hustle up some boogie, but he stopped cold. "What?"

"C'mon, man. You're too easy." Scott kicked off his flip-flops. "Do you know the bump?"

"What's to know? You just...bump."

"It's the only dance I ever learned. Miss Mahaffey taught us in first grade. We always spent Monday mornings doing the bump."

In the space of a single beat Scott could leap and spin a hundred and eighty degrees. The way his hips shimmied and gyred, they seemed to be constructed of magic and wishes rather than muscle and bone. He had some fine goddamned moves. Whirling around, he knocked his pelvis against Leland's, so forcefully that Leland lost his balance and had to scramble to regain it.

"Ow," Leland said, but he couldn't stop laughing.

"I'll never be able to prove it," he said, "but I think Miss Mahaffey probably spent all weekend dancing and snorting coke."

"Hold up, though," Leland said. "This is the best bit. Are you ready?"

Scott opened his arms to the air, the room, the world. "Let's go."

The piano exploded into a wild solo. Bluesy, jazzy, honky-tonky: Somehow it crammed a century's worth of booze-drenched dance music into a single series of chord changes. A sax came out of nowhere and chattered along. A string orchestra had shown up after all—who knew when?—but for once the strings weren't there for sweetness. These violins and cellos played straight raunch, the catgut equivalent of "The Stripper." The men danced, shimmied, boogied, twisted, and bumped.

"I just realized..." Scott took Leland by the hand and turned him around so that they were face to face. "I lied before. Miss Mahaffey taught us the hustle, too. Watch my feet."

He started a pattern of steps that got him nowhere—a step back, a step forward, a step to his right, a step to his left. Leland watched and waited for the right place to jump in.

The front door slammed. China clinked in the cabinets. The iPod slid off its shelf and dangled by its speaker cable. Leland hurried to the corner and scooped up the device in both hands. Its own weight had loosened its connection with the jack, and now it slipped entirely free. The music stopped. Whoever had slammed the door—John Carter, it _had_ to be John Carter—galumphed directly up the stairs.

Scott and Leland looked at each other.

"Do you need to...?" Scott said in a whisper.

"Intervene? See what's going on? Maybe. I don't know." Gently, as if to make up for all it had been through, he laid the iPod on the shelf. "After he calms down, I'll investigate. It's a teenage tantrum, that's all."

The door opened and closed again, this time without violence. A brief silence followed, complete except for the distant drone of a jet crossing some far quadrant of the sky, and then Anna Grace called out from the front hallway.

"I don't think I understood that," Scott said. The expression on his face was alarmed and slightly alarming.

"She's washing her hands and taking off her shoes."

"Should I...? Maybe I should..."

"No. Stay," Leland said. "We haven't eaten yet."

Upstairs, a door slammed. And then another sound, a thunk-clang.

Scott grabbed his flip-flops by their straps and took a seat on one of the barstools. "You know, I think..." Leaning over, he slipped his sandals onto his feet. "I think there's a bunch of family stuff going on right now and I'm just..."

Leland sighed. "I'll walk you out."

Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Scott patted his pockets and glanced around him. "Ever feel like you're forgetting something?"

"At least you didn't forget to bust some beats."

Scott grinned. "I had fun. I've been here for three or four months now, but I've had some trouble, you know..."

"Making friends? I was born in this house, and I've been giving tours in this town for twenty-three years, and _I_ have trouble making friends."

"You were born here?" With the forefingers of both hands, he pointed to the floor. " _Right_ here?"

"Upstairs."

"That's crazy."

"A tree fell across the driveway—big storm—and they couldn't get out. Mama wouldn't hear _word one_ of a taxi. She said if she had to give birth in a moving vehicle with a hired driver watching in the rearview, Daddy wouldn't have another moment of peace in his whole sorry life."

In the entryway, all the picture frames had gone askew. It was a thing that happened sometimes, particularly when a careless or angry teenager threw the door wide open and it bumped the wall. Leland spun the thumb-turn, and the deadbolt unlocked with a clack. He opened the door a few inches.

Just as he'd done at the beginning of the evening, before he'd come in, Scott held the strap of his bag with both hands and rocked from foot to foot. His eyes were a beautiful greenish gray. The exact color of Spanish moss. "Thanks again." He made for the door, ducking as if he were too tall to fit through. As he set foot across the threshold, he jerked to a stop and turned back. He let go of his bag strap. "Would you...?"

Leland found himself moving toward him and folding him into a hug. Scott was surprisingly slender, all bones and hair. And so much hair. For a moment, Leland imagined he could wrap himself in it, or part it like a curtain and walk through. His cock begin to harden. He quickly withdrew from Scott and stumbled back a step.

Scott's face, wherever it was bare of beard, had reddened. He opened his bag and reached in. Shuffling aside some papers and books, he took out a fat manila envelope. He cleared his throat and said, "What I was saying was, um, would you give this to...?"

Of all his half-finished sentences, this was the easiest to complete: _give this to Anna Grace_. Scott, or someone, had written her name across the front of the envelope.

"It's Jonah's opera," Scott said. " _Under the Volcano_. I told her I'd..."

"Right. I'll—I'll make sure she gets it."

With a nod and a smile of sorts, and a face somehow redder than before, Scott backed through the open door. Halfway across the piazza, he turned and hurried down the steps. Leland rushed to the door, closed it, locked it, slumped against it. Twice in a day, though for very different reasons, he'd hugged an unwilling man. He was a hug robber, a squeeze seizer, a serial clincher. Cradling the envelope against his chest—yes, hugging even that—he rapped his forehead against the door.

Behind him, the stairs creaked. Anna Grace said, "How'd you get along with Scott? He's so odd, don't you think?"

Leland made a noncommittal noise. How long had she been watching or listening? Had she seen the hug? His erection had vanished, but he discovered that he'd thoughtlessly extended his arms, so that the envelope concealed the fly of his dungarees.

"Should we invite him for Thanksgiving?" Anna Grace said. "I was thinking we should."

In a little while, Leland thought, he'd force himself to turn around and answer his wife's question. But he needed some time, just a minute or so more to wish vainly for the floorboards and the crust of the earth to collapse beneath him and swallow him whole.
Chapter 13

There was a dose of Plan B in her purse. She'd paid cash for it in West Ashley, miles from home, at a Rite Aid where she'd skulked through the aisles like a mortified teenager. When the cashier offered to sign her up for a Wellness Rewards card, she very nearly abandoned the whole project and flew from the store on guilty feet.

In the end, though, she'd come away with one white tablet in a blister pack. A single pill. It weighed almost nothing. You'd never break a sweat lifting it. Still, she had a sense that that one tiny pill was throwing off the car's balance, slowing it down, dragging it to the right.

She drove aimlessly, playing _The King Is Dead_ on shuffle but barely listening. She stopped at the Barnes and Noble Cafe in West Ashley and bought a tall coffee, but she was so distracted that she forgot to add sugar. She kept trying to decide what she thought, what she felt, what she did and did not know. She kept trying to make lists of pros and cons. She kept hearing Andrei's voice in her head: _What you're saying is,_ you _don't want to have kids with_ me.

He'd gone to Atlanta, of course. She understood. Romance was all well and good, but he had a contract. What else was he supposed to do? Before leaving, he'd once again invited her to come along, but she couldn't, or wouldn't. It was a long drive, and she was sure they'd spend at least nine-tenths of it slogging through one argument after another. Five hours would seem like twenty.

Now that he'd gone and she'd stayed, she could admit to herself that he was right. She didn't want to have children with him. But was that true for now, or for always? Did she have cold feet, or a cold heart, or a dying marriage?

What she needed, she thought, was a new way of thinking about the problem. Her father liked Andrei a great deal, which had always seemed like a happy accident. Her mother barely tolerated him, which had always seemed like par for the course. If she could see Andrei reflected, for just a moment, in the rosy mirror of Daddy's good opinion, and also at the same time in the wavy funhouse glass of Mama's antipathy, maybe she, Corinne, could see him more clearly for herself. Maybe it was a stupid idea. But it was worth a try.

She drove to Montagu Street and parked opposite her parents' house. Holding the steering wheel at ten and two, staring blindly into the shadowed street, she let the CD play, let the music wash away her thoughts. _Nobody, nobody knows._ She popped the white tablet out of its blister and washed it down with cold coffee.

Cutting the engine, she got out of her car and crossed to her parents' driveway. As she drew even with the piazza steps, the door swung open and a man stepped across the threshold. He was backlit, but she could tell that he had a bushy beard. He wasn't anyone she knew.

From the doorway, she had to be plainly visible in the glow of the nearest streetlamp, but if the bearded man spotted her, he gave no sign. Instead, he halted abruptly and spun around. Corinne saw, then, that her father was standing in the entryway, too, and presumably had been all along. He moved swiftly forward, toward the bearded man, and grabbed him hard in a sturdy embrace.

Corinne had no words for how strange that seemed.

It wasn't that her father had never hugged anyone. Far from it—he was an inveterate hugger. No, it was the fact that the hug itself seemed so—

Well, it seemed like an unusually close hug. That was one word she might use— _close_.

Her father's eyes were shut. His lips were parted. He had the look of a man who'd abandoned himself completely, a man for whom everything had disappeared except for the intimacy of two bodies in immediate contact.

Another word she might use: _Intimacy_. It was a particularly _intimate_ hug. There was something vaguely illicit about it. It was a hug, but it might as well have been a kiss.

Each man stepped back from the other. Her father's face turned bright red. Though he was gaping at the other man, he only had to glance away to see that everything had not disappeared after all, and that there'd been a witness to this close hug, this act of intimacy.

Corinne turned and fast-walked to her car. She'd locked it—of _course_ she'd locked it, though she wished just this once she'd forgotten. She had zero time to fish around in her purse for her keys. She dashed around the back of the car and ducked behind the rear fender on the passenger's side.

She felt so foolish hiding practically within view of her old bedroom window that she popped back up again. The bearded man appeared in her parents' driveway. Where it met the sidewalk, he looked left and right, as if preparing to cross the street. Again, he made no sign of having seen Corinne, but she dipped out of sight anyway—she had to, she couldn't help it. The smell of gasoline was sharp in her nose. She took her phone from her purse, so that if necessary—if the man walked by and saw her, as he seemed sure to do—she could pretend to make a call. _Hello, yes, Triple-A?_

The man didn't cross. Instead, he hurried away. Corinne waited while the quick snap of his flip-flops faded into the whoosh and buzz of the city.

What was she supposed to do now? Sneak away? Breeze into the house as if nothing had happened? She could make a scene, she supposed. She could stomp through the door, arms flailing, demanding an explanation.

But an explanation of what, exactly? A sentimental and demonstrative man had hugged someone. Not the first time, not the last.

After a time—a stretch of two or three minutes, maybe, though it felt like an age—she got to her feet. She'd been hunkered down so long that her legs had gone to sleep. While she shook them out to restore the circulation, she decided to hunker down in her empty apartment and medicate herself with rum raisin ice cream, to induce a carbohydrate coma and pretend the twenty-sixth of October had never happened. Even so, once she stepped off the curb, her tingling feet led her inexorably toward her parents' piazza steps. She climbed them and went to the door and peered through the sidelight. The entryway was vacant now.

She should go in, shouldn't she? Rattle her key in the sticky lock, shake the door on its tarnished hinges, call out in her cheeriest voice— _Hey, y'all, it's me!_

But she didn't do that. Instead, she walked softly to the kitchen door and stood back from it, shielding herself behind an azalea.

Mama was sitting at the island, legs crossed at the ankle, hands folded in her lap, mouth turned down at the corners. Daddy stood with his back to the corner shelf where he kept his iPod and speakers, as if his wife's irritation or unhappiness—or perhaps her very personality—had consumed all the available space, leaving him just this tiny triangular patch of floor to occupy. She was dressed as if for work in an iron-gray skirt and crisp white blouse. He, in jeans and a T-shirt, was as rumpled and untucked as she was tidy.

He was speaking. Corinne could hear his tone, at least when the wind was right, but not his words. Without quite knowing it, she'd expected him to be pleading with Mama, begging forgiveness or understanding. If anything, he sounded cross.

Corinne's phone jangled at full volume. The noise so startled her that her purse slipped from her fingers and fell to the patio with a _whap_. Her keys tumbled out, jangling on the bricks. A bottle of concealer, a pair of lipsticks, and her compact spilled out and tumbled away with a series of clacks and clatters. While she bent down to gather her things, the French doors opened.

"Coco?" It was her father. "What brings you out on a school night?"

Hugging her purse to her belly, clutching her phone in her fist, she rose and turned. "Just in the neighborhood." She didn't sound quite as breezy and carefree as she'd hoped to. A tampon half out of its wrapper lay against the doorsill, barely an inch from her father's big toe. "Thought I'd, you know, drop by."

He hugged her and kissed her cheek. "Come in, come in," he said. "Hungry?"

Mama had a musical score spread out in front of her—wide, accordion-folded pages crammed with hand-drawn notation. She folded it up and tucked it into a manila envelope. Corinne greeted her with a kiss and hug. As they were parting, Corinne caught sight of her phone, which was still in her hand. She'd gotten a text message from John Carter: _Mamas an asshole_. She thrust the device into the deepest abyss of her purse.

"Hungry?" Daddy said again. "I made croutons."

" _Just_ croutons?" Corinne said, sliding onto a barstool.

"Everyone's doing that Paleo diet now," he said. "I like to zig when everybody else is zagging."

He bustled through the kitchen—taking a casserole dish from the oven, fetching plates from the cupboard, scooping forks from the drawer, setting two open wine bottles and three glasses on the island—but the plink of flatware and glass did little to break the deepening quiet. He scooped Caesar salad onto three plates, and they dug in. Corinne chewed slowly, trying to muffle her crunching.

"It didn't start _out_ contentious," Mama said at last. She'd meticulously segregated all her croutons on one side of her plate, and now she set about stacking shards of parmesan cheese in the middle. "I was only trying to give him a little advice. A mother can still advise her son, can't she?"

Dad wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Mary Worth meddles less than you do."

Corinne said, "Y'all know I have no idea what we're actually talking about, right? Who's Mary Worth?"

Mama clucked her tongue. "When I got done with my last lesson, I found him in a practice room, working on his Brahms intermezzo."

"She's talking about your brother," Daddy said.

"I still don't understand," Corinne said. "Isn't he _supposed_ to be practicing?"

"He got fired again," Daddy said. "He was supposed to be working till close."

"Ah," Corinne said. "What happened? Did he just forget to show up or something?"

"Jo Barber is persnickety," Daddy said, dismissing the whole thing with a flick of his wrist.

"He was flirting with some girl," Mama said.

With a laugh, Corinne said, "Go, John Carter!"

Daddy closed his eyes and shook his head. Mama scowled.

"Sorry," Corinne said. "I guess that was inappropriate."

"He needs to get his shit together," Mama said. "Someone needs to tell him to get his shit together." She turned to Corinne. "Maybe you should talk to him."

"Me?" Corinne said. "Don't look at me. I don't even know who Mary Worth is."

"Leland, would you back me up for once? I'm trying to get _one_ of these kids through college and into a decent career."

"What are you talking about?" Corinne said. " _I_ went to college. I graduated third in my class. I met Paul Krugman once, and he'd actually heard of me."

"And where are you now? Getting knocked up—or trying to—is not the same as having a career."

"Anna _Grace_ ," Daddy said, slapping the top of the island.

"What goes on between me and my husband is—" Corinne clenched and unclenched her jaw. "What goes on between my husband and me is our business, not yours."

After a moment, her mother said, "When someone loves you, they want for you what you want for yourself—or better yet, what you don't yet dare to want for yourself. If someone says they love you, but they expect you to give up your dreams for theirs, then they don't really love you."

"So then," Corinne said, blinking. "Just to be clear—are we talking about Andrei and me, or you and John Carter?"

" _Coco_ ," her father said. It was only barely a word, and rather more like a weary sigh.

"I give up," said Mama. Seizing the manila envelope containing her musical score, she held it with both hands, so tightly that she wrinkled the paper. "If the two of you are planning on ganging up on me, I give up."

"Anna _Grace_ ," Daddy said again, more weakly than before.

Taking her wineglass and her envelope, Mama glided away on silent bare feet. Corinne watched her retreating back until she disappeared into the front room.

"You're not going to leave it like that," her dad said gently. "You'll apologize."

It was neither a command nor a suggestion. It was nothing more than an incontrovertible fact. Soon, perhaps even tonight, Corinne would go to her mother and make amends. For now, though, her molars were still grinding together. Blood still pounded like surf in her ears. She nodded toward the stove, where her father had set the casserole dish.

"What's the main course?" she asked him, her voice cracking. Hoping to steady herself, she laid her hands on the granite.

"Something going on?" he said. "Anything I can help with?"

"Well, there is _one_ thing." Her voice had evened out. The cool solidity of the granite calmed her. "I'm ravenous, even after that salad."

Getting down from his barstool, rounding the island, he gave her a quick sideways squeeze. It was a comradely, slightly gruff gesture, the kind of hug a Little League coach might give the runt of the team. Ridiculous, inept, and exactly right.

"It's eggplant parmesan," he said, kissing the top of her head. "Sound good?"

She leaned into him. "Sounds perfect."

He got fresh plates and a spatula and dished up a big helping for each of them. Garlicky steam wafted from her plate, and she took a moment to breathe it in, to savor the perfume of it. The sauce would be his Famous Marinara, the stuff he made and froze by the gallon in late May, when you could buy bushels of ripe tomatoes at the farmer's market. They ate, silent except for Corinne's murmurs of approval.

"I've been meaning to ask." He blotted his lips with a napkin. "Do you have names yet? For the baby?"

"I don't—" Corinne smoothed her napkin across her thigh. _Nobody, nobody knows_ , she thought. "It's pretty early for names. We don't even have a blastocyst yet."

"Your mother and I named you on our third date, before we'd even— _you_ know."

Cringing, Corinne said, "Yes. I do know."

"She said she liked Corinne for a girl and Bennett for a boy. I picked the middle names. I _l_ iked the a _ll_ iteration," he said, leaning in the _l_ 's. " _C_ orinne _C_ onor. _B_ ennett _B_ aines. Names from my family."

"Your grandmothers' maiden names. My middle name was your father's middle name. I know, Daddy. I've heard this story before."

"Sorry," he said, blushing a little. "Wait twenty years, and then see how you do, generating all-original content all day long." After a moment, he said, "Paul Krugman actually heard of you?"

Corinne cleared her throat and took a sip of water. "Just between you and me?"

He drew his fingers across his lips, as if zipping them.

"He had me confused with Elizabeth Littlefield."

"Who?"

"A presidential appointee. She runs OPIC, which is— Well, it's not important." She sipped a little more water. "I usually tell that story as a joke, but this time I thought it'd work better without the punch line."

"Uh-huh," he said. "You fibbed. If I'd known that, I'd've sent you to bed without supper."

"That reminds me," she said. "I don't know _why_ it reminds me, but it does. How was your MRI? It was today, right? Did you get claustrophobic?"

Now he blushed a little deeper. "I didn't...uh..."

"What? Daddy, no! You _skipped_ it?"

"I canceled it. I didn't just...blow it off." He screwed up his napkin and left it on the counter to untwist itself. "Do you kids still use 'blow it off' in that sense, as in 'to skip'?"

She gave him a long, level look.

"We had a guest coming for dinner. I had to cook." He sighed. "They haven't found anything. They're not _going_ to find anything. I'm _fine_. Maybe I hadn't eaten yet that day or something. I just...fainted, that's all."

She took his hand. "If it turns out you have some silent disease that's eating you up inside, I will kill you before it does. Get me?"

Clasping her hand in both of his, he said, "Got you."

While he cleared away the plates and filled the sink with water, she went to the corner shelf. She picked up his iPod and ran her thumb around the wheel. _Pip-pip-pip, pippip._ He'd been listening to something called _Rhythm and Dance_. Karen Holmes—one of his customary choices for entertaining.

"Will you hyphenate?" he said over the splash of water and clatter of dishes. "You know, since you kept your name? Littlefield-Long is kind of a lot for a newborn to take on." He paused for a moment. "I guess it's better than Long-Littlefield. Sounds vaguely Elizabethan. Aye, plowman! Harrow ye long little field ere the eventide turneth the sky's rosy cheeks." He gave a short bark of laughter. "Not bad, huh? Maybe I'm doing okay after all—you know, on the whole original content thing?"

On the other hand, Corinne thought, when she'd arrived, the eggplant parmesan had been warming in the oven, as yet unserved. The salad had been pristine in its wooden bowl, as beautifully arranged as something from a magazine. She set down the iPod and turned toward the sink.

"Who were you having for dinner?" she said. "Was it that bearded guy? Why didn't he stay?"

The plinking of silverware and china abruptly stopped. He didn't say anything. He blushed again, more deeply than before. His neck, the quarter-sized bald spot at the crown of his head, the very tips of his ears—all turned brilliantly red.

"Daddy?"

Moving rather slowly, he reached for a dish towel. Wiping and wiping and wiping his hands, he crossed toward her. It was a day of days, she thought: Men kept giving her plates of food and washing her dirty dishes and coming at her with dishwater hands. Soon, he stood quite close to her, and his face was going white and red now in waves, and it briefly occurred to her that she ought to be at least mildly frightened. Not that he would strike her, or even raise his voice. No, he'd always been a calm sort of parent, slow to rage, reluctant to bluster. But she sensed that something had altered just now, and that the alteration was not a minor one.

"I should tell you—" he said. He twirled the towel around into a kind of braid. "It's not a very easy thing—"

"Jesus." She grasped his wrist. "Oh, Jesus. Is this about the MRI—about why you skipped it? Or why you fainted?"

"Oh, God, no," he said. He cleared his throat and took a step back. "No, not at all. It's like I said. I just fainted. That's all."

"You promise?"

"Cross my heart." With his forefinger, he drew a little X on the left side of his chest, and then with a halfhearted smile, a vague aspiration of a smile, he added, "And hope to not die." Looking down at his hands, he went on. "What I was going to _say_ is— I should _tell_ you—" Now, all at once, he straightened his back and held her eyes with his own. "I should tell you that I'm very proud of you."

She waited for more.

"Things get tricky sometimes with you and your mama. I know that. But she's proud of you, too."

Corinne bit her lip. He'd had to do this kind of patch-up job more times than she could count on all her fingers and all her toes. It couldn't possibly have caused him any worry or required any great mustering of courage. There was something else, some shift beneath the surface of things. And what else could it be, other than his health—some horrible decline yet to come? Maybe the bearded man had been a counselor of some sort. He'd had that hippyish look about him, the look of someone who'd burn incense and show you a mandala and help you accept your mortality.

"Thank you, Daddy," she said at last, because she could think of nothing better to say, and she hugged him and held him tight.
Chapter 14

What had she expected? Something jaggedly impossible to sing. Muted trumpets. Occasional caricatures of mariachi music. A lot of thorny contrapuntal quartets and choruses, incomprehensible to the ear. A staging that bent toward kitsch: faux-painted stucco, piñatas, sombreros, Sam Browne belts. She'd been wrong, happily wrong, on all counts

Sitting on the sofa in the study, Leland's laptop balanced on her knees, a glass at her elbow, Anna Grace had watched the DVD twice. Some of the instrumental interludes reminded her of Richard Strauss's _Metamorphosen_. In a duet between the two brothers, Hugh and Geoffrey, she thought she heard a near-direct quote from _Tristan und Isolde_. A chorus of bar patrons, late in the opera, sounded at certain moments like Stravinsky's _Symphony of Psalms_. But in truth she'd never heard a score quite like this one.

Scott had lent her the score and DVD in the hopes that she'd stage the opera in the spring term. She wouldn't. She couldn't. There were no tenors in the music department who could sing Hugh, no sopranos who could sing Yvonne. Even if she could cast all the roles, the opera was already becoming a dear and private thing to her. She couldn't bear to pull it apart into its constituent pieces. She couldn't even bring herself to follow along in the score. If she had to stop her teenage students in the midst of flubbing the arias, if she had to hear the texture and subtlety of the strings reduced to the _chunkety-chunk-chunk_ of a rehearsal-room piano, she'd never love the music in quite the same way again.

Once, not so long ago, Anna Grace could have sung Yvonne. No, on second thought, that wasn't true. She'd had the voice for it, not so long ago, but not the life. She would have nailed the notes, even to the top of the range—high C? C-sharp?—but the singing would have been empty. The passion, the empathy, would not have been there. Nowadays, although she couldn't trust her voice—she could never bring herself to trust it again—she could nevertheless imagine how it would _feel_ to sing Yvonne.

Well, of course she could. She'd sing Yvonne as a gift to her husband, as a way of telling him she knew what it must be like for him, to live with an alcoholic.

_Alcoholic, alcoholic, alcoholic_ : The word no longer stung. For nearly two months, she'd spent part of every day among the alcoholics of the Internet—lurking in chat rooms, scrolling through bulletin board posts, skimming through LISTSERV digests. At first she could bear only a few minutes at a time, until her heaving stomach and tightening throat drove her away.

Still, she kept coming back, hoping the stories she read online—the lost weekends, the DUIs, the wrecked fortunes, wrecked marriages, wrecked bodies—would pave the way vicariously downward to rock bottom, and then as if by magic, she would no longer want to drink. Instead, the narratives, which were somehow all the same and yet all unique, had become a kind of comfort. After an extra drink at lunch, her first lesson of the afternoon was a wasted hour, both useless and unkind to the student, but so what? At least she'd never slept with the married best man at her ex-husband's wedding. Almost every night, she searched her husband's browser history, hoping to find—and also hoping not to find—some new evidence of misconduct, but so what? At least she'd never driven her car into a neighbor's house. Since the night of Leland's birthday party, she'd never found anything untoward—not so much as a single bare-chested or bare-legged man—and that, somehow, more than direct evidence of guilt, made her want to drink and drink and drink. But so what? At least she'd never spent ninety days in jail for public intoxication and reckless endangerment.

She refilled her wineglass. Unaware that Scott was a teetotaler, Leland had opened a bottle of Barolo and a bottle of Pinot gris. Ever the good host. Anna Grace had finished the white not long after Corinne had left. The second bottle now contained, at most, half a glass. Sad.

A footfall on the stairs.

She moved the wine bottles from the end table to the floor. At the same time, she tried to pause the DVD. The laptop slid sideways. At the last second, just before it crashed to the floor, she caught it by the edge of the display, but she also knocked over the empty Pinot bottle. It struck the floorboards with a clank. Cringing, she pushed the bottle under the sofa with her foot.

John Carter leaned in through the door. "Ma?" he said, his voice clotted with sleep. He stumbled into the room. He yawned and stretched. "Can't sleep? What doin'?"

"Watching this." She'd smeared about a quarter of the screen with her fingers. She must have gasped or cried out, too: Flecks of her spittle clung to the display and the trackpad and some of the keys. She wiped the surfaces with the hem of her T-shirt.

"What's it?" Still yawning—one long chain of yawns—he sat on the sofa beside her.

" _Under the Volcano_." Did she seem rude or curt or cold? She hoped not, but after a bottle and three-quarters, she was fairly sure she'd be slurring her speech. She took pains to clip her syllables, keep her enunciation crisp. "An opera."

"I thought I heard guitar."

"You did. Probably."

She pressed the space bar to resume playback. As it happened, the guitar had a moment of prominence, a flashy spray of notes. The bassoon overtook it. A group of women in black, a chorus of widows, marched downstage and sang a wordless fugue. Prayers for the dead.

"I don't understand what's going on," John Carter said. "What're they doing?"

His face was all pinched together, his eyes narrowed. To Anna Grace he hadn't looked or sounded so much like a little boy in a long time. She smoothed his hair, and he leaned sideways to lay his head on her shoulder.

The opera went on, and Anna Grace watched it through for a third time. John Carter's breathing deepened, and he slept curled against her. Afraid to wake him, she let her wineglass sit on the end table. For two hours, not even a sip.

Late in the final act, Yvonne appeared at the center of the stage. Popocatépetl and Ixtaccihuatl loomed above her on the scrim. Patterned stars filled the night sky. She sang the names of stars and of constellations. "I'm so far from home, yet all are in their places."

The home Yvonne had in mind—it became clear as she went on—had never existed. A cabin by a far northern sea. A house among the trees. The trees gleaming with frozen fog, with blades and needles of ice. The dark seawater still and quiet and cold beyond the shore.

John Carter stirred. He propped himself on one elbow and squinted at the screen. "What's she doing?"

"She's singing."

"I know _that_ , but what—?"

"She's singing about a lost dream. She and her husband dreamed of moving away." To her surprise, Anna Grace felt mostly sober. Her tongue obeyed her. No slurring. "They could've pared away everything extraneous. They could've lived simply, as if on love alone. But it was only ever a dream. Hopeless. Now she's imagining that it's on fire. Burning away."

"Hm?"

She kissed the top of his head. "You should go to bed. You're practically sleepwalking."

"Hm," he said, and he got up. He trod flat-footed to the door of the study, then turned back. "I'm sorry I got so mad."

"I know, sweetie."

"It's not like I meant to get fired."

"No one ever means to do anything," she said.

"Mama." Half word, half groan.

"Listen to me, now. You've lost two jobs in two months. I don't want you to be one of those people who can't hold a job. And Jean-Marc told me you're currently between a C and D in theory? You have to work harder."

The boy was swaying, half-asleep on his feet, but beginning to wake up. They'd had a nice moment there, a rapprochement of sorts, and she was doing her damnedest to ruin it.

His eyes welled. "You think I'm smart, Mama, but I'm just not."

Anna Grace shoved aside the computer and got to her feet. She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him toward her and folded him into her arms. Smart or not, responsible or not, employable or not, he was for sure never going to be tall. She barely had to raise her chin to speak into his ear. "Oh, my beautiful, beautiful boy," she said. "You're smart and talented and perfect and thus have you always been."

"No," he said. It was the single most sodden-sounding word she thought anyone had ever uttered.

" _I_ think," she said, holding him at arm's length. " _I_ think it's the middle of the night and you're tired and cranky like a baby."

He smiled, more or less.

"Go on to bed," she told him. "Go to bed, and everything will be perfect again in the morning."

After a brief bit of grumbling, he subsided: His shoulders sagged and and his eyes went slack. He kissed her and trundled out.

She waited and counted his footfalls until he'd climbed all the stairs. She drained her wineglass and poured again.

He _was_ smart and talented and perfect. All the children were smart and talented and perfect. But John Carter was also her last hope. After Anna Grace had left Leland and come back, Corinne wouldn't have sung a note or picked up an instrument on pain of death, not if it made her mother happy. Ben had shown some early promise with the violin, but then he'd discovered the Cub Scouts and—as he'd called it—"boy stuff." John Carter was all she had left. Now that she'd stopped singing, there'd be no more music if not for her second son.

She'd overestimated what remained in the bottle. Barely a swallow. The hours without a drink had banked the fires, so to speak, and this tiny splash of Barolo wasn't enough to rekindle them. Another bottle? Could she risk another bottle? She should brazen it out, throw the empty in the recycling bin and think no more of it. She still had her ace in the pocket. _DaddiesLove.com. Hot dads and horny sons. Bi married dudes together._

If only there were some mescal in the house—or tequila, which would be close enough. _Under the Volcano_ was fairly drenched in mescal. Geoffrey drank almost nothing else. Anna Grace had developed a craving.

There _was_ vodka. Anyone in the house might count the bottles in the recycle bin, but she kept the vodka underneath bags and boxes of frozen vegetables. As far as she knew, no one else had ever noticed it was there.

Holding quite still, she listened for the creaking and complaining of the joists under her son's weight, or her husband's. All clear, it seemed.

Closing the laptop and tucking it under her arm, collecting her glass, she went to the kitchen. She laid the laptop on the island. In a crouch at the open freezer drawer, she added ice and vodka to her glass. The dregs of the Barolo imparted a pale pink tint. When she took a sip, she tasted only the Citron. Nothing like tequila—she'd never drink tequila cold, for a start—but the vodka had the bite she'd wanted.

She sat at the island. Opened the laptop. Touched the space bar.

Yvonne's final aria continued. A mad song now, more and more fraught with terror and despair. Their home by the sea—the imaginary cabin, the hopeless dream—was gone. Burned. The eaves under which she and Geoffrey would have made their marital bed, the garden, the forest, the jack-in-the-pulpits: All had turned to ash. Her song was a farewell to everything she'd wished for. She described the rising sparks as if they were genuine things that she could see before her. The embers whirled into the air and met the clustered stars, and the bright stars chased each other through endless space.
Thanksgiving

Chapter 15

From the guest room at the top of the stairs, Corinne heard the _tink-tink-tink_ of metal on china and the _ka-whump_ of an oven door slamming. It had to be Jodie, her sister-in-law, getting an early start on the big meal. That was strange, though, wasn't it? They were supposed to eat at five o'clock, and it wasn't yet nine a.m. Eight hours was an awfully long lead time, even if you were cooking for fifteen people, and there would only be seven at their table. A twenty-five-pound bird wouldn't have to go into the oven for another three hours, and the turkey in Jodie's fridge was a twelve-pounder, tops.

Corinne had just opened _Poor Economics_ , a book that had lain almost untouched on her nightstand since before her wedding. She'd started the foreword on the flight to Pittsburgh, but Andrei had wanted to talk about work—the whole history of his project in Atlanta. In the whooshing dry air of the cabin, his over-caffeinated patter had washed over her and made her half-dizzy with sleepiness, but in any case hadn't allowed her to read more than a line or two. Here in her in-laws' house, she'd picked up the book several times a day, but something always came along to distract her—the television, Vic's outsized voice, the clatter of sheet pans against the range-top grate.

There was, too, the familiar pinching cramp, the monthly pang of fecundity, right on schedule. She'd wanted a dose of ibuprofen and ten or fifteen minutes to luxuriate in miserable self-pity. Or maybe she'd just wanted to hide.

She got up and went downstairs. In the family room, Andrei and Vic were watching the parade and drinking coffee out of pint mugs. Corinne went into the kitchen, where Jodie was standing at the enormous island, peeling and dicing potatoes. She'd already cleaned and cut several pounds of them, with a largish pile yet to go. She worked quickly with her paring knife, dropping the slick white flesh into a vast pot of water and the gritty brown peels into a melamine bowl.

"Put me to work," Corinne said. "What can I do?"

"Don't be silly," Jodie said, a little too breezily, a little too smilingly. She quartered a potato and quartered the quarters. "You're our _guest_."

"I'd love to help if I can." Corinne leaned against the edge of the island. "I'm a whiz with a potato. When my baby brother was four, maybe five, he wouldn't eat anything but mashed potatoes. All the time, every meal, for months. I was my dad's kitchen helper, which meant I spent a lot of time peeling and chopping spuds. Every night we'd sit down to lasagna or moussaka or whatever, and there John Carter would be with a bowl of mashed potatoes and butter. And then, miraculously, one Thanksgiving, he asked for big helpings of everything—everything _but_ potatoes. We kept passing them around the table, but no one wanted any."

"Your Southern accent is just so cute," Jodie said.

"Oh. Um." Corinne felt herself blushing. She tugged her ear. "Thank you?"

"No, I mean it. _You_ -all—" Jodie's face reddened. Her attempt at a Southern drawl came out sounding vaguely Russian, or maybe Swedish. Nevertheless, she persisted. " _You_ -all sound so charmin'."

"Thank you, ma'am," Corinne said, her face still hot. "Are you sure there isn't something I can—"

Jodie made shooing motions with her starch-whitened hands. "Not one single thing. You go enjoy your day."

Corinne ambled away. When she came to the family room, she found Andrei and his brother staring open-mouthed at the sixty-inch television. The parade had stopped so that Daniel Radcliffe and a dozen men in suits could hop around while pretending to sing "Brotherhood of Man." They must be lip-syncing to their own voices. Raw material for a joke, Corinne thought, but she couldn't quite get it from setup to punch line.

She took a seat next to Andrei. The couch was so deep from front to back that her feet dangled off the edge. She tucked herself under Andrei's arm, and he clasped her hand in his.

Vic waved his coffee mug toward her, and then toward a towering vacuum-pump urn he kept at his elbow. "Get you some joe?"

"I've hit my limit for today," Corinne said, rubbing her belly.

Tipping his head back, Vic called out for Jodie. "Make another pot, would ya? Hey, Jo!"

"I'm fine, really, Vic," Corinne said.

"It's no problem," Vic said. "Did ya hear me? Hey, Jo! Hon?"

Jodie answered from the kitchen. Corinne couldn't understand what she said, but it didn't apparently indicate an unwillingness to brew coffee.

Leaning toward Andrei, Corinne said, "I thought I might take a drive."

Andrei peered at her. "Where to? Everything's closed, 'least till tonight." After few days with Vic and Jodie, his consonants had started to grow little spines around their edges.

"My granddad's about an hour from here," she said. "He came to the wedding, remember? But I haven't been to see him since I was, oh, four or five."

"Vic and I are watching the games," Andrei said, with a nod toward the television.

"Who's playing?"

"Green Bay at Detroit, Miami at Dallas, San Francisco at Baltimore."

With a twinkle in his eye, Vic said, "That's football, hon. Touchdowns, not home runs."

"Vic." The final consonant of his name clicked at the back of her throat. She wished she were close enough to kick his shins. "You know what—?"

Andrei broke in. "What about dinner? Will you be back in time?"

Jodie charged into the room with a carafe of coffee. "Dinner's at five. All the time in the world." She set about refilling the urn.

"Thanks, lover," Vic said. "You'll make some man a fine wife someday."

"If you find a fine man for me, you just let me know."

Vic guffawed and smacked her affectionately on the ass. Huffing in mock disgust, she turned on her heel. He caught her hand and pulled her toward him. She leaned over him, giggling, and gave him a kiss.

"We could go tomorrow," Andrei said, squeezing Corinne's hand, "when there's nothing else on the schedule."

"Oh," Corinne said, glancing at Jodie. "Tomorrow we're—"

"It's Buh- _lack_ Friday," Jodie sang. "Us girls've got doors to bust and deals to grab."

"Like she said, doors to bust, deals to grab." As Corinne got to her feet, she turned to Andrei. "So, then. I'll have the rental car and...you won't."

Andrei stood up, too. "Okay," he said. "You talked me into it. Let's hit the bricks."

"But I thought you and Vic—"

"Bah. He's a lousy cheesehead." Andrei ruffled his brother's hair. "Better if I just walk away. Besides, there's an inch of snow out there. Last time you drove in snow was exactly never."

As they left the room, Vic called over his shoulder, "Your ma didn't raise no Detroit fans, needer." It took Corinne a few seconds to understand that _needer_ meant _neither_.

While Andrei bounded up the stairs to fetch his wallet and keys, she waited in the foyer among the fat-legged console tables and iron-limbed chandeliers. She had to fight against disappointment. She'd been looking forward to the unique solitude of a longish drive on unfamiliar roads. Even with the GPS on her phone, there was the tantalizing possibility of getting lost in the exotic landscape of rocky bluffs and leafless maples. Now, instead of quiet and time to think and the pleasure of discovering new terrain, there'd be the well-trod ground of marital small talk, the long, straight, bumpy road of their customary arguments.

It had occurred to her, too, that she might find a drugstore that was open for part of the day. She and Andrei had made love the night before, moving slowly to keep the bed from squeaking, stifling their giggles like half-drunk teenagers. The sex itself had been remarkable, enlivened by the idea that they were getting away with something, but now came the worry and the wondering. _What you're saying is,_ you _don't want to have kids with_ me _._

Andrei returned with his keys in one hand and her purse in the other. After helping her into her coat, he took her arm and led her down the snowy walk to the driveway. He handed her into the passenger's seat of their rented sedan. The vinyl creaked like the wood of an old ship.

An inch of snow had fallen—Tuesday, was it? or Wednesday?—but by now the streets and sidewalks were clear and dry. The pavements were glittery and white with salt. Andrei drove slowly along the curved, nearly treeless subdivision streets—Appleglen, Oakridge, Kingsbrook, Forest Edge.

Taking her phone from her purse, she began searching for her granddad's address. She'd expected to find it among her favorites, but it wasn't on the list.

"What's typical?"

"Developers." She waved her hand, taking in the faux-riche houses, the bucolic street names, the very idea of suburbia. "They rip out all the trees to turn into toilet paper and toothpicks, and then they name the streets Oakdale Avenue and Forest Glen Drive."

Andrei drummed the steering wheel with his fingers.

She went on. "Either it sounds like it was a forest lane until they paved it twenty minutes ago, or it sounds like the houses have been there since seventeen seventy-six. Even better if it sounds like both."

After scrolling up and down two or three times, she finally found her granddad's house near the top of her favorites list. He lived on John Street. There was a street by that name in Charleston, too, and she'd mistaken one for the other.

Andrei was looking at her.

"What?" she said.

"Our living room window overlooks Colonial Lake," he said. "The street where you grew up is named after a royal governor of the colony of South Carolina." Her phone announced a turn. Flinching, he said, "Don't turn that on yet. I want to show you something."

In silence, then, they drove through the coiled streets. They drew to a stop before a red-brick Georgian house a bit bigger, a bit older-looking, than the rest. Hip roof, dormers, tall mullioned windows aligned in two perfect rows. It was of course impossible to tell from the facade how many rooms the house would have—but from the facade alone, it looked like it might have twenty or thirty. A for-sale sign hung from a yellow post at the end of the front walk.

Andrei leaned over the console to peer out the passenger's-side window. "What do you think?"

"It's...large," Corinne said.

"That's some mighty faint praise you're damning it with."

"It's very...very...large."

"What would you think about living in it?"

All this time, she'd been staring at the house. Now she cut her eyes at him. "I guess I'd think, 'How do we move a house that size all the way to Charleston?'"

"Here." He slipped his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it with a swipe. "Take a look."

On the screen there were pictures of rooms, starting with a large square parlor and a dining room with hardwood floors and built-in shelves. A photo taken at one end of the kitchen showed it stretching seemingly to infinity. The four bedrooms were rampages of toile and dentil molding. Everywhere you looked, the lighting was magnificent.

"We can't see it today, obviously," Andrei said. "But maybe tomorrow? After you've busted doors and grabbed deals?"

"Is this why we're in Pittsburgh?" She handed his phone back to him. "To see this house?"

"Vic just mentioned it yesterday. The current owners went off to Zimbabwe or somewhere to be missionaries."

"How on earth could we ever afford it?" she said.

"The market's still shit here. Housing costs are ten or eleven percent lower." He polished his phone with the tail of his shirt. "If I get this contract, it'll be long-term. I mean, like, years. They'd basically be hiring me, only the accounting works better if I'm a contractor."

On Monday and Tuesday, he'd met with his prospective client. Afterward, he'd said almost nothing about it. Now that she thought it over, his silence probably meant he'd all but landed the account. He believed in jinxes. He thought that the Fates were real, that they enjoyed practical jokes and were susceptible to reverse psychology. If he had no hope of getting the account, he'd say so, as a way of daring the world to prove him wrong. By saying nothing, on the other hand, he almost surely hoped to hide himself from impish destiny.

He gestured toward the side of the house, or toward the gap between it and its neighbor. "You can't see it from here, but their backyard butts up against Vic and Jo's."

Corinne sank lower in her seat. "We could live that close to them. Sure. Wow."

Scowling, he said, "That's so terrible?"

"I didn't say terrible."

"He's my brother. You love your brother, too."

"Brothers," she said. "I have two. You met Ben, remember? He was in Afghanistan, but he actually came to the wedding."

"Vic and Jo have two kids in college, Corinne. College is expensive, especially if you've got two at once. And they did send us a gift." He narrowed his eyes. "They can read you, you know. Vic and Jodie. They can tell you're judging them. Moping around, barely talking, hiding in the bedroom all the time. What was all that with Vic just now? So he made a dumb joke. He makes a lot of dumb jokes. You don't have to lose your shit every time."

Shifting the car into gear, he pulled away from the curb. He drove more quickly than before. At first, she assumed he'd call a halt to their original mission, or that he'd drop himself off at Vic and Jodie's and let her go on by herself. But soon they'd left the subdivision behind them and the sedan rolled up and down the wooded hills and among the fallow fields of western Pennsylvania.
Chapter 16

The drive from Charleston to Carolina Beach took four hours. In that time, Anna Grace spoke six words. For many miles, she sat in the passenger's seat with her arms folded tightly across her chest. She reached into her pocket now and again for her phone, each time putting it back without looking at it, as if she'd momentarily forgotten and suddenly remembered to make the trip unbearable even for herself.

While they waited at a traffic light in Georgetown, Leland glanced over and saw that she'd dozed off with her head lolling sideways. He reached into the back seat for his jacket and rolled it into a cylinder. Lifting Anna Grace's head, he wedged the makeshift pillow between her cheek and shoulder. Half an hour later, near Murrells Inlet, she woke and blinked away her sleep.

"Good nap?" he asked.

Anna Grace studied the bundled jacket. She touched her cheek. "My face is all creased now," she said. Those were the six words.

As they passed over the Cape Fear River, she craned her neck to get a better look at the lift bridge, only so she could grimace at it. She thought it was ugly—he could see it on her face. Wilmington itself was ugly. Carolina Beach was seedy. The hotel wasn't much to look at. The elevator was grubby. The decor in the room was garish. He could see it all on her face.

They had a third-floor room. An ocean view. Standing at the sliding glass doors, Leland looked out across the narrow balcony, the empty swimming pool, the wind-scalloped dunes, and the calm green Atlantic. Two paddle surfers in gleaming wetsuits, standing assuredly on a pair of longboards, paddled away from the shore. A large ship of some kind, a tanker or freighter, crossed the horizon. Seabirds dove through the bright air.

Anna Grace banged around behind him. He heard the chair knocking against the desk, her shoes dropping to the floor with a pair of thuds, the door of their room closing with a whoosh and a hollow _ker-thunk_.

Out on the low waves, the surfers tacked toward each other. Their boards flashed in the sun, uncannily, cleanly white. They passed, then turned again, each reversing course. They were slaloming, cutting a pair of overlapping sine curves across the water. He watched until the light dazzled his eyes and the surfers' swooping motion made him feel slightly dizzy. It looked like fun. Even to go out alone would be fun, in spite of the November chill—not that Leland knew how to paddle surf.

The door slammed again. Anna Grace had come back. He turned from the window. She was empty-handed, and that puzzled him. He thought she'd gone for ice.

"What kind of a hotel _has_ a bar," she said, "but doesn't keep it _open_?"

Leland stammered in reply. "It's North Carolina," he said eventually. "Maybe they can't serve on a holiday. Why do you want a drink at one fifteen in the afternoon?"

"I don't," she said. "Obviously. I just happened to notice." She rolled her tongue around in her mouth. "Did you pack toothpaste?"

He blinked at her. "Um," he said. He went to the bed, where the suitcase lay open.

"I looked," she said. "I didn't see it."

If she'd looked and hadn't seen it, he thought, why ask? He stared at her. Words—what words to use? He said, "Hm."

He dug through the bag of toiletries. A razor but no shaving cream. Toothbrushes but no toothpaste. Cotton balls shedding fluff. Publix-brand hand sanitizer. Baby oil in a travel-size bottle. He picked up an eyelash curler and absentmindedly opened and closed it. If the stiff, squeaky hinge were any indication, Anna Grace hadn't touched the thing in ages.

He'd had such a simple plan in mind: Pack in secret, load the car while she slept, whisk her away, bask in the sea air, enjoy a few days free of worry and habit. Simple. Even if he'd started with the basest, mousiest kind of motive—a prehistoric flight response, a cowardly desperation to avoid Scott Cable—they could still enjoy themselves, couldn't they? The weekend could be companionable, if not precisely romantic—couldn't it?

When he turned, he found Anna Grace leaning against the dresser, her arms folded across her chest.

So.

_Neither_ companionable _nor_ romantic.

He must be the slowest-witted fool on earth, not to have foreseen precisely this outcome. His wife was a woman who had rules and expectations and routines. They'd never needed or used ice in a hotel room, not that he could recall, but she always sent him to fill the ice bucket right after checking in. At the end of a stay, just before checking out, she insisted on stripping the bed to make sure they hadn't left anything hidden among the sheets. When she packed for herself, she had a particular way of rolling up her stockings, and it wasn't the same way she used at home. How had he ever believed he could pack a suitcase _for_ her? How had he ever convinced himself she'd appreciate, or even tolerate, a surprise getaway?

"I'll go down to the desk and get some toothpaste," he said.

"I went down already."

"Ah." _Now_ he understood why she'd come back without an ice bucket. "And?"

"There's just this crazy vending machine."

"Vending machine?"

"The kind that usually has potato chips and candy bars in it, but this one has sewing kits, toothpaste, and shoe polish—stuff your husband might not have packed."

"Why didn't you get toothpaste, then?"

"I think it'd be complimentary in a decent hotel, don't you?"

Leland took a breath. It _was_ a decent hotel. It was a _fine_ hotel, so new or so newly remodeled that the air smelled of paint and carpet adhesive.

"If it _isn't_ complimentary, we can buy it here, or we can drive down the road and buy it somewhere else." He made motions with his hands—here, down the road, somewhere else.

"Fine." She turned on her heel. "I'm going for a run."

"What?"

Elbowing him aside, she rummaged through the suitcase—T-shirts and undershorts flying—and tossed her track suit onto the bed. "I'm going for a run," she said again, slowly, as if to a non-native speaker. She peeled off her sweater and stepped out of her jeans. "Did you pack a Jogbra, by any chance?"

This time he answered by not answering.

"Leland. Goddammit. How do you think of the track suit but not the—" She threw her hands up in the air. "Never mind." She slipped on a T-shirt—one of his, he noticed—and sat on the bed to put on her track pants.

"We have a reservation at five," he said.

"So early?"

"We usually eat Thanksgiving dinner by two or three, and I didn't figure we'd have a big lunch—and in fact we haven't had lunch at all, right?—so I made a reservation at five. Do you see how it might not be the most insane thing a person ever did?"

Her eyes were darting around again, and he could only imagine what else he'd forgotten. But no, she found what she was looking for: her running shoes. They lay on their sides, sole to sole, under the desk. She grabbed them and untied the laces. "You know," she said, "I can't even talk to you while you're like this."

Without a word, Leland left the room and closed the door quietly behind him. He slumped against the jamb and slapped his hand against the wall. Now that he was alone, he could allow himself the tantrum, the full-on hissy fit, he badly wanted. But no. The bellowing and foot-stomping would have to wait after all: A housekeeper was trundling a cart down the hallway. He bit his tongue, literally, crushing the meat of it between his molars.

When the elevator came, he tumbled through the door, intending to beat his fists and possibly his forehead against the back wall, but a maintenance man in green coveralls already stood inside the compartment. A most happy fellow, too: He smiled and said "Howdy" and rocked jauntily on the balls of his feet. Leland grunted and tipped his chin by way of greeting.

In the lobby, the front desk clerk waved to him and called out, "Happy Thanksgiving, sir," and Leland forced himself to unknot his fists so that he could wave back. He stabbed the tip of his tongue with his eye teeth and hoped his wince of pain might pass for a smile. He shoved through the front door, whamming it hard with the heels of his hands, and scuttled across the parking lot.

Two windburned surfers, a man and a woman, loosed their boards from the top of an SUV. A pair of elderly couples shuffled, arm in arm and arm in arm, toward a rusted-out Buick. In time, Leland might take some comfort from the fact that other idiots had brought their wives to Carolina Beach in late November—he put that thought aside for later, that he wasn't the only idiot—but at the moment, it constrained him to be among people. He felt close to bursting.

Finally, finally, when he got into his car, he let go. A wordless cry at first, then a string of expletives, then a series of arbitrary vowels. He battered the steering wheel with his fists. When his voice broke, he sat gasping for air, a thread of spittle hanging from his lip. He blotted his mouth with his sleeve.

Something flashed across the side mirror. He turned the rearview, panning it across the parking lot. Whatever or whoever he'd seen had disappeared, but it was enough to give him a sense of himself, of what he must look like, a fifty-year-old man shouting and drooling in the driver's seat of a first-generation Prius. He started the car and sped away from the hotel and drove with no higher purpose or more elaborate plan than _away, away, away_.
Chapter 17

Doris's mother lived in a ranch house built into the side of a hill. To John Carter, a lowcountry boy through and through, the novelty of even a modest elevation was practically inexhaustible. He stood at the window of Doris's bedroom, looking out on the scraggly firs that lined the slope below.

From the bed, Doris said, "I've never seen anyone so fascinated with the idea of a _hill_." She sat with her back to the headboard, cuddling a stuffed Tigger against her chest. "I didn't spirit you away from Charleston to look at trees, you know."

"I can't help it." He lifted the window. Clutching the sill with both hands, he breathed in the winter smell of fallen leaves and woodsmoke. "Even the air's different. Is this what they mean when they talk about mountain air?"

Doris laughed. "I don't think so. It's Greenville, not Quito."

Still hugging Tigger, she got up. John Carter turned from the window at last and watched her as she crossed to her desk. Even in her simplest and most comfortable clothing—gray sweatshirt, pink sweatpants—she looked inexpressibly beautiful.

She set Tigger in her chair, arranging him so that he faced the desk and not the bed. She sorted through a stack of CD cases, moving them off the pile in twos and threes. When she found the one she'd been looking for, it turned out to be empty. The disc was already in the stereo. She pressed play.

Crowd noises, people whistling and cheering, and then a piano riff, a sequence of arpeggios descending chromatically. The voice, when it came, belonged to Carly Simon, one of Doris's great idols, along with Carole King, Diana Ross, and Dusty Springfield. It was a song he'd heard before. A sexy song, all about how good _It_ was with one particular man. _It_ , with a capital _I_.

His knees weakened. He made his way to the bed and sat down.

Turning from the desk, Doris lifted her sweatshirt over her head and tossed to it the floor. Underneath, she wore a white V-necked T-shirt. No bra. He could see the tight buds of her nipples and a hint, even, of their color. The color of teak. He'd seen them before—her nipples, her areolae—but only like this, obscured by cotton or lace.

She walked toward him, one foot directly in front of the other, catlike, her hips swaying. She lifted the bottom hem of her T-shirt, just enough to get at the drawstring of her sweatpants. She yanked one end of the string, and both ends fell limp.

When she reached the bed, he took her hands in his and moved them aside.

"No?" She bit her lip.

"No! I mean, yes! But let _me_."

He let go of her hands, and she smoothed her palms down her hips. He tucked his fingertips into the waistband of her sweatpants. She shivered. He jerked his hands away.

"Okay?" he said.

She nodded.

Again, he slipped his fingers between fabric and skin. Slowly—though not with the suavity he'd hoped for—he eased her sweatpants down. Her underwear was plain blue cotton.

The smell of her came to him, musky and sweet, nearly indescribable. It was too complex and unfamiliar to name, but it reminded him of apple cider. She stepped out of her sweatpants and he kicked them aside. With the tips of his fingers, he stroked the back of her thigh, and she shivered again.

When he lifted her shirt, she shooed his hands away. He fell back and looked up at her.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." She smiled—sort of—but she wouldn't meet his eyes. "I— Nothing."

"If you don't want to— It's okay, if you don't—"

He was so hard in his jeans that he thought he might faint, but he was sincere. If he were honest with himself, he was terrified of disappointing her. Part of him thought it'd be a mercy if they could wait a while longer.

All at once, Doris was kissing him. She grabbed his shirt by the fistful. He had the sense that he'd been in the middle of saying something, but he couldn't remember what. Returning the kiss—grunting, in fact, with the intensity of it—he hugged her tight against him. He touched the hem of her shirt.

"Can I leave it on?" Her eyes darted around the room. "If it weren't so bright in here—"

The song changed again. More cheering, more whistling, and then a broken-chord figure on electric guitar. It gave him an idea. A crazy idea. An idea he should ignore. But then—

He leapt off the bed and stumbled across the room to the desk. By luck, the CD he wanted—another Carly Simon CD, _Boys in the Trees_ —lay on top of all the others. He swapped out the discs and skipped ahead to "Tranquillo." A disco number if there ever was one—cymbals chattering, rhythm guitar scratching, strings squalling. You could almost hear the swish of polyester. Ordinarily he skipped it, but right now, the corniness of it was perfect for his dumb idea.

Bobbing his head, tapping his feet, he taught himself the song's rhythm. Within a bar or two, he felt his shoulders popping with the upbeats, and then his knees and hips loosened and he began dancing for real. He tried undoing the rubber buttons of his rugby shirt, but he succeeded only in ripping the second one off its threads. Crossing his arms in front of him, he lifted the shirt by the hem and eased it up and up and finally pulled it off and let it fall.

Doris sat on the edge of the bed. She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. "What are you _doing_?"

As if in answer, he tugged hard at the button of his jeans. He'd forgotten that he'd worn pants with a zipper fly. Buttons were innately sexual, the way they more or less burst open if you worked them right, but zipper was just a zipper. He'd never given the matter a moment's thought before now, but the proof was in the popping.

He turned his back to Doris and shimmied his ass. Thumbs hooked in hip pockets, he wiggled his jeans down his legs. He let them fall and kicked them away. He glanced over his shoulder. By now, Doris was laughing so hard that tears gleamed on her cheeks. She'd stuffed her mouth with her fist.

In his mind's eye, he saw his next move clearly—a spinning jump that would end with him facing the bed, his feet spread wide, his hands out at his sides. He'd seen it in countless music videos and YouTube skating clips. Simple enough in theory, but in real life he stubbed the toe of one foot on the opposite calf. First one ankle and then the other struck the desk chair—two different spots on the chair, but the same place on each ankle, right where the nerve crossed the bone. Making the sound anyone would make, halfway between _ow-wow-wow_ and _oh-ho-ho_ , he staggered to the bed.

Still laughing, Doris met him partway and took him by the hands. She towed him toward her and sat him down beside her. He saw that he'd knocked poor Tigger to the floor.

"Sweetie," she said. "What on earth were you doing?"

John Carter rubbed his ankles. "I just wanted to—"

"Show some skin? Get me hot? Lighten the mood? Be a complete dope?"

He turned sideways and drew his legs up under him. He folded her hands in his. She turned to face him. Her eyes—the splendor of her umber eyes—broke his heart, as they had at least once a day for the past month.

"I was just trying to make you feel comfortable. Whatever you think you're hiding under here"—he plucked at the hem of her shirt—"it doesn't matter."

Leaning back, he touched an angled white line on his belly. "Appendectomy," he said. He lifted his right foot. With his fingertip, he traced a long thin scar on the inside of his leg. Jagged at the top, wobbly at the bottom. "Fell through a rotten floor. Got scraped up on a rusty nail. About a billion stitches and a tetanus shot. Totally Ben's fault, but _I_ got grounded."

Standing up, he took a step back from her. "One more thing."

What had come before had been easy. This took courage. He steeled himself. In a single quick motion— _get it over with_ —he jerked his boxers down to his ankles. He plucked the end of his foreskin to give himself a bit of length.

He lifted his penis out of the way with one hand. With the other, he plumped his scrotum and let it lie in the cup of his palm. To his eye, the peculiarity was plain, unmissable. On the left side, his sac was normal and full. On the right, it was as flat as a deflated balloon. But she didn't see it, didn't understand. She looked him up and down.

"There's only one," he said. "The right one never descended. They did surgery. I was just a baby, so I don't remember, but there's a scar." He looked for it—a short diagonal mark somewhere below his appendectomy. He couldn't find it. He pulled up his shorts and sat next to her on the bed.

"I feel like such a fool," she said. "I'm self-conscious about my weight, is all. I'm usually a do-it-with-the-lights-out kind of girl."

They fell back and lay side by side.

"This didn't go like I planned," he said.

When he rolled onto his side to face her, she turned toward him. She lay with one hand cradling her face and the other draped across her belly, so that her arms formed a kind of frame around her breasts, pressing them together. At the same time, the neck of her shirt sagged open, and he could see the upper edge of one areola. He hardened again. As his penis stiffened, it poked out through the fly of his boxer shorts.

With a finger under her chin, he brought her face to his and kissed her. She scooted toward him and he wrapped his arms around her. He crushed her body against him. He couldn't get her close enough.

He couldn't get her close enough— But—

He pulled away. "I'm not sure if this is the time or not—"

"The time for what?"

"I brought some...um...protection. Should I...?"

"I'm on the pill."

He blinked at her, thinking, _Aspirin...Tylenol...Advil..._

" _The_ pill," she said. "Birth control."

"Oh," he said. " _Oh_. Well, then. Um." He touched the fabric of her shirt. "Is it—is it okay now?"

She shifted her weight, lifted herself, helped him remove the shirt. When she lay bare to the waist, arms across her breasts, he splayed his fingers across the mound of her belly. She trembled. He kissed her skin in each of the gaps between his fingers—mumblety-peg with kisses—and then moved his hand to stroke her from her navel to the cleft between her breasts.

She let her hands slide away and drop to the coverlet. He gazed at her breasts. He'd waited for ages, it seemed. Tenderly, he held them and kissed them. He took one nipple into his mouth, but he soon released it again. He feared he might come.

Doris grabbed at his hands and heaved him toward her. Reaching down, fumbling, she shoved and prodded the waistband of his shorts. He lifted himself up just enough to slip them down his legs and kick them away, and then he stripped off her panties.

As soon as they were both naked, the logistics of the next step escaped him. When he'd thought about this moment before—and he _had_ thought about it, millions of times—it had seemed like a natural thing, simple as breathing. But now—

Her hand stole into the space between them, and she guided him. And then, and _then_ , it was as simple as breathing.
Chapter 18

In Charleston, a stroll along the two blocks of John Street would lead you past restaurants and boutiques to a museum and an antebellum mansion. In Youngstown, John Street's single block was a stretch of weedy lawns, crooked houses, and rusted chain-link fences. It didn't appear to be the kind of neighborhood where people went strolling. The cracked sidewalks looked like strings of Morse code. The snow had all but vanished, leaving the neighborhood looking soggy and dispirited.

The driving directions led to a two-story shotgun house with dun-colored vinyl siding, a windowless steel door, and a slanting porch. Corinne didn't see either a mailbox or a house number. The nearest neighbor, also an unexceptional shade of tan, sat only a few dozen paces away. Neither structure matched the memory of her childhood visit. One seemed too small, the other too large. And she dimly recalled something darker in color—reddish brown, maybe, or maroon. Could her mother have sprung from a maroon house?

"Is this it?" Andrei said. "There are no cars. Does he know you're coming?"

She hadn't spoken in an hour, but then neither had he. They'd been listening to the Lions-Packers game on the radio, and the only voices they'd heard in the last fifty miles had been those of Dan Miller, Jim Brandstatter, and Tony Ortiz.

"I e-mailed him," she said. "I might not have been very specific about the time. He said he'd be glad to see me whenever I got here."

"And you figured, well, he's old, so where would he be, if not at home?"

"It sounds pretty ageist when you put it like that."

"What should we do?" Andrei said. "Do you want to call him?"

"Let's just knock on the door, like people used to do in historical times."

Andrei backed the sedan onto a strip of bare earth alongside the house—the nearest thing in sight to a driveway. They got out of the car and climbed the concrete stoop. The porch was so narrow that the two of them couldn't stand abreast. The doorbell button was broken, but the tiny orange light bulb at its center was lit. Corinne turned one ear toward the door as she pressed the button. Inside the house, an electronic chime played a tune.

"'Camptown Races'?" Andrei said.

"Doo-dah. Doo-dah."

An old white van turned onto John Street. As it slowed and halted in front of the dun-colored house, Corinne peered in through the windshield. At first she could see only vague movement, but then it became clear: Her granddad was waving to her from the driver's seat.

His door opened with the squawk of metal on metal, and he hopped out. His limp had worsened since June, but otherwise he seemed somehow to have grown slightly younger. Maybe it was his haircut—shorter than it had been at the wedding, so that it appeared sandy rather than white. It might be his clothing—a chambray shirt and jeans that fit him well and made him look hale and spry, rather than an ill-cut green suit that made him look gaunt and sickly. Or maybe it was only that, in June, he'd felt ill at ease in the presence of so many Catholics and his surly daughter.

"Happy Thanksgiving, darlin'," he said. He hobbled around the van, his stiff left leg lagging behind him. He carried a brown paper sack under his arm.

"Happy Thanksgiving to you, too." Corinne went to meet him and hugged him and gave him a kiss. "You remember Andrei."

Taking him by the arm, she helped him up the steps. There was scarcely room on the porch for all three of them. Granddad unlocked the door and led the way inside. He hung all their jackets in the entryway, and Corinne and Andrei followed him through the living room.

She had expected a certain amount of untidiness, or even filth—he was a widower, after all, in his twenty-fourth or -fifth year of living alone in a squalid part of a run-down city—but she couldn't find so much as a cobweb or dust bunny anywhere she looked. The house smelled mainly of roasting meat and apple pie, but also of floor wax.

"Coffee?" Granddad said over his shoulder. "Got a pot all set up to brew. Just had to run out and get some Cremora." He held up his brown bag, crinkling the paper.

"Don't go to any trouble," Corinne said.

But he seemed not to hear. "Didn't know when you were coming, so I aimed for early, just in case. It's chicken, not turkey. Hope that's okay."

Corinne and Andrei traded looks behind his back. Whatever complaint Andrei might be thinking up, she had it coming, but he kept it to himself. She widened her eyes at him, a wordless plea. He let his head fall back. Hopeless resignation was as good as she was going to get, and she grabbed at it.

"That's fine, Granddad. Turkey's so bland anyway, don't you think?"

"My pappy used to hunt 'em. Good eatin' then." He laughed. "Nowadays I guess they call that 'free-range.'"

In the kitchen, Granddad pulled two chairs away from the table by way of invitation, and Corinne and Andrei sat down. Going to the counter, Granddad began pulling coffee things out of the cupboards—a sugar bowl, a handful of spoons, some surprisingly dainty china cups. He brought everything over on a tray. The cups rattled against each other as he moved.

Corinne heard something gurgling. It was a familiar sound, though for a moment a misleading one. She thought she had to be hearing a washing machine in some other room. But when she glanced over at the counter and saw the gleam of her granddad's old percolator, she understood. That churning, chugging, hissing sound. The murky reflections in the scuffed surface of the pot. The wash of darkening liquid inside the clear bubble at the top. The smell of coffee growing sharper and richer by the moment. These sensations _were_ Granddad's house.

She looked at Andrei, studied his face for signs of recognition, as if her memories were not exclusively her own, as if the two of them had been here together as children. He smiled at her, fondly, a little absently.

His phone rang, and he dragged it from his pocket. "Suresh." He was already on his feet, already halfway to the back door.

"Suresh from Atlanta?" Corinne said. "I thought Atlanta was all done."

"I'm sure it's a personal call. His wife's about ten months pregnant." His phone was still ringing. "I'd better—" Swiping the phone to answer it, he let himself out onto the back porch. "Suresh? What's the news? Are you a daddy?"

Granddad was standing at the counter, spooning Cremora into a china bowl. "Ten months pregnant," he said. "Must be a skosh uncomfortable."

"Must be," Corinne said. "That'll take a few minutes, won't it? The coffee?"

"A few," he said.

"I'll just use your facilities, then, if it's all right."

"Remember where it is?"

It had to be upstairs. Otherwise, they would've passed it on the way into the kitchen. "I'll find it," she said.

The stairs creaked under her tread. The wallpaper of the second-floor hallway was patterned with tiny white lilies on a field of purplish gray. She would never have been able to describe it, but now that she saw it, she recognized it instantly. In the master bedroom, her grandmother's silver brushes and cut-glass atomizers stood on her vanity table, arranged as if by her own hand.

There were two other doors, both closed. Corinne opened one of them and found a second, smaller bedroom with wood-paneled walls. The room had a deep chill to it, and a smell of stale linens and old glue.

Just inside the door, there hung perhaps two dozen framed photos and newspaper clippings. She went in to take a closer look. The frames were mismatched, and some of the photos were too small for the frames that held them, and most of the yellowed clippings had curled and slumped against their corrugated backing boards—but for all that, the display showed signs of real love and effort. It was a wall of honor. Its object was Anna Grace Littlefield.

Here she was in a simple white dress, standing before a piano. Here she wore a black gown and stood with an orchestra at her back. An Egyptian tunic, a doublet and hose, a _robe à la française_ with wide panniers. A black bob, a red pageboy, a pile of blond curls. There were reviews and interviews where her name was mentioned. Crobyle in _Thaïs_ , Stéphano in _Roméo et Juliette_ , Zerlina in _Don Giovanni_. There were pages from recital programs and college newspapers. She'd sung _Die schöne Müllerin_ in San Luis Obispo, _Hermit Songs_ in Minneapolis, _Harawi_ in Omaha, Strauss's _Four Last Songs_ in Charleston.

The stairs creaked. An uneven rhythm. It must be Granddad. Corinne felt as if she'd been doing something naughty, and maybe she had. Maybe he'd closed the bedroom door on purpose, to keep her out. On the other hand, he'd closed the bathroom door, too, and hadn't told her which was which.

They met in the doorway. He said, "You found it. I was just comin' up to show you."

"The pictures, you mean?"

Moving to the center of the room, he turned to admire the display. He shifted to one side, so that his stronger right leg bore more of his weight. "I'll tell you," he said. "Still to this day, I never have heard her sing."

"Really?" Corinne looked at him. "But you have all this."

"Let me give you a piece of advice," Granddad said with a smile. "It's good to be friends with librarians."

"Actually," Corinne said, returning his smile, "I happen to know that already."

They stood abreast, gazing quietly at the wall. Corinne had seen all she wanted, but he had apparently not yet gotten his fill.

After a time, he turned to her. "Do you remember when you came here to visit?"

She nodded. "I was four or five, right?"

He was looking at her. "You don't remember why you were here?"

"It wasn't just a visit? For its own sake?" It occurred to her, a little too late, that they might have come for her grandmother's funeral.

"Annie—your mother—wanted to come back here with you. To live." He sat on the edge of the bed. "She wanted to live here so's your gran and I could take care of you when she went away to sing."

Corinne sat beside him. "And you said no."

He nodded. "We said no."

Moments passed. Corinne's mind raced in many directions at once. Mama and Daddy had divorced in 'eighty-five. Why had she never linked it up with that one visit to Youngstown? Why had she never guessed that the information was so asymmetrical? What else had she failed to notice? What other connections had she failed to make?

"Why?" she said. "Why'd you say no?"

"We thought, 'Well, you made your bed.' That's what we told her." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Divorce wasn't something people in our set looked on kindly."

Divorced in 'eighty-five. Remarried in 'eighty-eight. Corinne returned to the wall of honor and looked again at the clippings. Mama had sung her three opera roles—none of them leads, it appeared—in late 'eighty-five and early 'eighty-six. And then what? Nothing, until long after John Carter's birth, when she'd begun doing college recitals.

"As long as I can remember," Granddad was saying, "Annie was always ready to be somewhere else. I think she thought she should leave home at twelve instead of eighteen. So I don't think it would've been good for her to come back here. I think she would've been itching to get out again the minute she set her suitcase down. But what if we said yes? I always wonder. What then?"

Downstairs, the back door opened and shut, and Andrei called out, "Hello? Where'd everybody go?"

Granddad got up. "I'll go pour that coffee. You ready, darlin'?"

"Still haven't made it to the little girls' room."

He gestured toward the hall. "Next door along."

"That's where I'll be."

While she went into the bathroom and peed, he descended the stairs, his boots thumping on the treads. When she'd finished, she tiptoed back to the small bedroom. She looked for some progression among the opera photos, some sign that her mother had begun to despair, or to long for home, or something. But of course there was no sign of any such thing. Wherever Mama was in costume, she was also in character, aping or prancing or posing or simply waiting for her next cue.

In one photo, though—the one in which she wore the black dress—there was something. An expression of hope, or wonder, or love. She looked like a woman who had never made a regrettable decision in her life.
Chapter 19

Gradually, the discipline of driving calmed him, and he contrived an aim for himself, a near-term goal. On their way into town, he'd seen a grocery store—a Harris Teeter, wasn't it? He'd go and buy the largest tube of toothpaste he could find, and maybe half the toiletries in the store.

On second thought, that was absurd and childish and passive-aggressive, and—

Yes, then. That's _exactly_ what he'd do. He'd bring back six kinds of toothpaste, dental floss, and a Waterpik.

He spotted a sign near the shoulder of the road. _Adult Books and Novelties_. Black letters on a white rectangle, unmistakably plain, but plainly unbelievable. A dirty bookstore? Out here? He blinked and squinted. At the last second he turned into the dirt parking lot.

_Childishness?_ he thought. _Absurdity? Passive-aggressiveness? Yes, yes, and yes—and no half measures._

The store itself was a dowdy clapboard cube. By the look of it, it had originally been someone's house. It could still in fact be mistaken for someone's house, if not for the neon _OPEN_ sign flashing in the front window.

There were only two cars in the lot, a mud-spattered pickup and some sort of hatchback. Leland parked at the back and sat in his car, staring, numb, trying to think. _Unable_ to think. The windows on this side of the house—three of them—had been filled in. A sloppy job. The siding in the patches didn't match the original clapboards.

He should go. This was a shabby place. He had no reason to be here.

No. That wasn't exactly true. He had no _excuse_ for being here.

He got out of the car and walked to the front door. When he opened it, a bell jingled. This particular bell, he presumed, had no connection with an angel getting its wings. Maybe it rang whenever a devil got its pitchfork. He went in. Racks of DVDs on the walls, a sales counter, an arcade at the back. There were signs everywhere— _No One Under 21, Interracial, $5 Arcade, Amateur, NO CHECKS, Bi, Lesbian, Kink, ONE PERSON PER BOOTH._ Everything was well-worn, dusty in the corners, blackened around the edges.

A jowly, half-bald woman raised her head above the counter. She was wearing a flowered housecoat. "Help you, sugar?"

Leland stuffed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. "Just looking," he said, though the sound might not have made it out of his mouth. He made a show of browsing the racks, all the while edging around the perimeter of the room, trying to get a look at the arcade.

Once, he'd gone into an adult bookstore in Charleston, and in the back corner there'd been an arcade full of video booths. For every quarter you dropped into the slot, a TV screen lit up with porn for about thirty seconds. It had taken Leland a dollar's worth to run through the sixty channels and find a video he liked. Skinny boys with dark hair and furry legs. His weakness.

How long ago? Twenty years?

_More_ than twenty. Before Ben's birth. After Anna Grace had left him, well before she'd come back. Just before his dad's death.

A quarter of a century ago, then. Half a lifetime.

Nowadays he could get all the porn he wanted in the privacy of his own study—but his study was four hours away.

He stepped toward the counter. His mouth had gone dry, but he managed to say, "Arcade. Please."

"Sure thing." The clerk spoke with a cheerfully backwoods accent: _Shore thang._ "That'll be five dollars." _Fah dawlers._

As he reached for his wallet, Leland felt a twinge of worry—was he carrying any cash? He couldn't pay with a credit card, not here. But of course, he'd _filled_ his wallet with cash. He was on vacation. He might forget toothpaste, and he might not know what a Jogbra looked like, but he would always, always bring cash. Among his ATM-fresh twenties, he found a much-creased fiver. He handed it to the woman and waited.

She stuffed the bill into the register. After a moment, she looked up at him. "That's it, sugar. You can go on back."

The arcade, as it turned out, hardly deserved the name. A hallway, a row of six closets, that was all. All but one of the doors stood open. Each cubicle contained a wall-mounted television and a folding metal chair. He went down the line. Something different played on each screen. Two women. Two women. Three women. Two women and a man. A woman and a man.

He went into the second from the end, the male-female couple. He closed and locked the door and sat down. The chair slid sideways and bumped against the wall, or rather against a long block of unfinished lumber held in place with quarter-round molding. He scooted the chair sideways, centering his weight and the width of his back on the crack of the door.

Slouching, folding his arms across his chest, he watched the video. The woman wore a fishnet bodysuit, a garment of breathtaking impracticality and zero appeal. Her improbably spherical breasts bobbed and collided like moored zeppelins buffeted by high winds. The man was thickset—not exactly plump, not exactly muscular. Except for a rectangle of tidily cropped fur above his cock, his body was completely hairless.

Leland heard something. Wood scraping wood. He looked around. The block of lumber shimmied between the strips of molding and slipped sideways about half an inch. He'd thought it was a patch, nailed or screwed to the wall. He'd thought the quarter-rounds were adornments or buttresses. But no. The whole contraption was a kind of sliding panel; the quarter-rounds were tracks. He reached for the wood block, touched its splintery edge, yanked his hand away again. Once again, it rattled. In a moment, Leland understood that someone was knocking on the other side, rapping gently to get his attention.

Bewildered, he slid the panel away. Behind it there was a smooth-edged hole, large enough to get a fist through, with a dark and long-lashed eye hovering near it. Leland shrank back, then moved closer for a better look.

The eye belonged to a man. No surprise there. He must be young—no older than Ben, judging by the fitful black scruff on his cheeks. His eyebrow and lip were pierced, each with a tiny silver ring. "Hey," he said in a whisper. "You want some company?" With the tip of his tongue, he nudged the jewelry at the corner of his mouth. He tipped his chin up, beckoning. Leland caught a glimpse of his pale chest. Shadows gathered in the hollows of his clavicle. "Door's open."

What was the boy offering, exactly? A circle jerk? Could you call it a circle with only two men doing the jerking?

On the other end of the store, the bell rang. Another devil, another pitchfork. Leland turned his ear toward the door. The clerk's voice and the voice of the newcomer were baffled by intervening walls, their words obscured, but the particular, familiar cadence of their shared accent was plain enough. Leland kept thinking he could almost make out what they were saying, but the sounds never coalesced into meaning.

"Psst," the boy said. "Don't worry about Sue. She don't care what goes on back here."

Leland shook his head in confusion, but the boy seemed to take it as a refusal. "Suit yourself, Daddy," he said genially. His face receded from the hole. His chair creaked.

Leland sat back, too, and his chair uttered a matching creak. _Daddy?_ he thought. _Guten Tag, Herr Doktor Freud._

On the TV screen, the porn actors labored inexorably at their sex, like oiled robots. The woman squealed with every thrust, as if the machinery might need a spritz of WD-40. The man was so silent, so bland of affect and appearance, that he could've been replaced by almost anyone. He played his part with all the enthusiasm of the leather couch or the silver lamp or any other element of the set dressing.

Leland felt his erection wilting. He hadn't been aware, exactly, that he'd _had_ an erection. The boy next door had given him a hard-on, and the golems on the screen were taking it away. Leaning forward again, he peered sidelong through the opening in the wall. Leland's movie cast a beige light, the color of a UV-bed tan, but whatever the boy was watching on the other side of the hole, it filled the space with a clean pink luster. It gave his face an almost saintly glow, as if he sat before the rose-colored windows of a chapel.

The boy had taken off his shirt and shoved his jeans down to his ankles. His legs weren't hairy—a scarce patch of dark fluff on each shin, that was all—but he _was_ skinny. His hands—big hands, puppyish paws—lay on his thighs. In his scuffed round-toed boots, his feet looked enormous. Although he made no sign of having seen Leland's eye at the hole, it was clear that he had: He began a subtle but overt kind of stagecraft, a dumbshow of desire, hefting and squeezing his cock, tugging one pierced nipple, sucking in and puffing out a breath of air.

What—again, _what_ —was on offer here? Leland felt as if he'd gotten all the way to the end of a mystery, only to find the last chapter missing. He'd never watched pornography in the presence of another human, and he had some trouble thinking of it as a communal activity—especially here, in the land of _One Person Per Booth_ , where the on-screen sex was so boring that he barely wanted to watch it by himself.

He'd glanced up again at the robots, and when he turned back, the boy was crouched before the hole, two fingers tapping the lower rim. Just like that, at last, it all came clear. Leland slid the little panel back in place, so that it covered the hole. It would be senseless and embarrassing to masturbate in the presence of another man, any man, but touching was cheating. Wasn't it?

He owed it to Anna Grace to—

Well, what? What did he owe her?

Fidelity? Sexual faithfulness presumed the existence of sex.

Honesty? He could be exactly as truthful about his visit to this arcade as she was about her wine bottles, and in the end she wouldn't know a thing.

Kindness? Yes, he owed her that. Hadn't he striven, in his own fumbling way, to be kind to her?

In another second, he'd be telling himself his wife just didn't _understand_ him. They were more like _roommates_. No. If he meant to cross this particular threshold, he couldn't do it by accident. He'd have to admit to himself that he wanted it, and then he'd have to pretend he wouldn't regret it later. No big deal. He'd already spent half his life stuffing his desires into one tiny box and his regrets into another.

He slid open the wooden panel and put his eye to the hole. The boy was still there, still naked, still hard. As before, he made a show of touching himself. No hard feelings, then—so to speak.

Closing the hatch, Leland stood and wiped his sweaty palms on the legs of his jeans. He lifted his chair and moved it away from the door: It seemed important now to make as little noise as possible.

Mindful of his squeaking soles, he went out into the narrow hallway. The voice of the clerk came back to him—coarser than before, rattling with smoker's phlegm. She was wound up about something. Leland paused, eavesdropping. Obama. Of course. She was on a rant about Obama, whose policies meant the end of America.

It wasn't safe here. It couldn't be safe. Leland stared at the closed door of the boy's cubicle, at the pink light spilling out underneath. It could _not_ be safe to go in there and be with that boy—not here, not in a place this rural and seedy. He bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to take flight, but before he could, the door opened, and the black-haired boy welcomed him in.
Chapter 20

Two marines had shed their ILBEs—their backpacks—in the shade of a spindle tree. The remnants of their lunch still lay strewn across the dirt—foil pouches, a grimy bandanna, a rocket-shaped NeuroGasm bottle that had been shot clean through. When the sniper had started firing, the boys had run up the hill and taken cover behind a pile of logs. Above the gravelly plain where they'd sheltered, there was a higher level yet. The shooter had picked them off from there.

One of the fallen, a kid named Punk, had been almost eighteen, but he looked as if he'd barely started puberty. He was plump, pale as uncooked bread dough. Splinters from the logs had raked across his face. Dashed with his blood, the boy's round cheek looked almost like a peach that had been crushed underfoot.

The other marine, Bello, had been a little older, and looked it. Spots of black stubble—five o'clock shadow at noon—covered his chin and upper lip. Between his eyebrows there was a cluster of acne scars. He'd been shot only once, in a spot marked by a surprisingly, pitifully small black mark in the center of his forehead. The back of his skull had blown off and taken his helmet with it. The PRP crew had yet to find the helmet.

Flores and Pittman were working the search area. They were something of a matched set—identical height, similar stringy build, same short black hair, same cinnamon skin—though Flores was the son of fruit pickers from Paso Robles, California, and Pittman was the daughter of an injury lawyer and a judge from Clearwater, Florida. Without a word between them they crept across the plateau.

Standing at the southern end of the plateau, Littlefield clamped a sheet of paper to a clipboard and sketched the site. An oblong lot roughly the shape of Vermont, the old logs halfway along on the east side, three trees in the northeast corner, a dirt track feeding into the southeast corner and starting up again from the northwest corner. The ground dropped steeply on the east side and rose just as steeply on the west side. Somewhere above, Evans was keeping watch.

Littlefield paced off the distances. From the northeast corner of the site, he could see across a dusty valley to another craggy ridge. He walked sixty-seven paces, about eighty meters and a half, to the pile of logs. At his feet the slope dropped away into a grove of trees. Somewhere among them stood the spindle tree where Punk and Bello had left their packs. Closer, a few meters down, he saw something that could be a dusty rock or Bello's helmet. He marked it and then went on measuring the length of the east side of the site. A hundred and ninety-eight paces.

When he'd finished, he looked over his sketch and checked the numbers. Good enough for now. He handed the clipboard to Pittman. "I think I saw Bello's cover," he said. "I'm going after it."

She nodded, said nothing. Flores looked over, nodded, said nothing. The two of them were eerie as fuck sometimes.

Littlefield trudged up the hill. Evans sat on a low limb of a tree, swinging his legs in the air. Mary had been dozing on the ground below him. At the sound of Littlefield's step, she woke up and licked her chops and thumped her tail on the dirt. He'd thought by bringing her along on searches he could make good on the lie he'd told La Flamme, that he really could train her as a cadaver dog. So far, she'd learned that when he and Evans suited up and made for the motor pool, she had a ride and a nap to look forward to.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Littlefield squinted up at Evans. "Saw the brain bucket," he said. "Going after it."

"'Kay. So?"

"While I'm at it, let's go back for those boys' deuce gear. Want to?"

Evans screwed up his mouth. "Dumb idea, ain't it? We have to go right by there on the way back."

"You'd rather sit on your increasingly flabby ass?"

"I'm looking out."

"Get down here, dumb fuck."

"Sheet far," Evans said, but he hopped down. He sprang clear of the tree and held his arms out to either side like a gymnast sticking a tricky landing. "Lead on, MacDouche."

Littlefield blinked at him. "Was that a Shakespeare reference? Did you just—" He shook his head. "You're one-third monkey, one-third pig, and three-thirds gonad. You could _not_ have thrown down a literary allusion right there."

"Shows what you know, Einstein. It's from a _game_."

Barely, just barely, Littlefield resisted the urge to slam Evans in the nose with the heel of his hand. Instead, he set his jaw and gestured toward the track that led down the hill. As they descended, half-jogging because of the sharpness of the pitch, Mary loped ahead of them.

"The cover's down the hill there," Littlefield said, pointing toward the log pile and the slope beyond. "Or at least I think it's the cover. It's too far down to reach from the top, and too steep to come up from the bottom. It'll save some boot leather and time if I just slide down. Go around. I'll meet you below."

"What about _my_ boot leather and time?"

Littlefield answered with a sigh and both middle fingers. At the end of the track, Evans went around to the right and made for the path on the opposite side. He slapped his thigh and whistled for Mary, and she stayed with him. Littlefield went to the left, walking along the north side and then the east. At the stand of logs he sat in the dirt and crawled frogwise down the bank.

The object he'd seen from above was Bello's helmet, as he'd suspected. He kicked away some of the dust. Pebbles and porous clumps of dirt rolled away, exposing a jagged outcrop of an enormous boulder or perhaps of the mountain itself. The helmet had come to rest in a crag, its front side facing downhill.

Wedging the heel of his boot against the outcrop, Littlefield shrugged off his rucksack. From it he took a pair of recovery tags, a pen, and two ziplock bags, one large and one small.

He called out to the crew up top. "Pittman. Flores. Echo number." They were so long in replying that he started to repeat himself more loudly. "Pittman. Flores."

Pittman answered. "Seventeen."

"Papa number?"

After a moment, Flores answered. "Three."

"Lima Charlie." _Loud and clear._

On one of the recovery tags, Littlefield wrote _E-17_. On the other, _P-3_. Below those numbers, once on each tag, he wrote a code that tied the helmet to the present search operation. He dropped in the E-17 tag into the large bag and P-3 tag into the small one. Once he'd stowed the pen, he hunted up a surgical mask and a pair of nitrile gloves and put them on.

With care, he picked up the helmet. It was intact, and it was Bello's—his name was on it, front and back. It was intact—no bullet hole. With his index finger, Littlefield touched the center of his own forehead, the spot that corresponded to the entry wound on Bello's forehead. If Bello had had his head down, the helmet might or might not have saved him, but the round would definitely have struck armor. He must have been looking right at the sniper, whether he'd known it or not.

Where the helmet had come to rest, blood had blackened the ground. Littlefield turned the helmet over and looked inside. Blood, bone, globules of brain tissue. They didn't call these things brain buckets for nothing. Littlefield opened the large bag and slipped the helmet into it with all the care he could manage, as if it were an object of unimaginable fragility, as if all the Belloness of Bello resided in the helmet along with his brain matter. It was the best Littlefield could do— _all_ he could do.

He zipped the bag and set it aside. Sitting on the ground, now, with his legs splayed out on either side of the outcrop, he examined the bloodstained swath of ground where the helmet had come to rest. He scanned minutely for splinters of bone and scraps of tissue. _No piece or portion was too small_ —that was the protocol, that was the mantra.

From a side pocket of his rucksack he took a plastic container not much bigger than a child's pencil box. He popped it open and took from it a pair of plastic forceps in translucent cellophane. With his teeth and the fingers of one gloved hand, he peeled open the cellophane packet. Plying the tiny tips of the forceps through the bloody muck, he found a bit of bone after all. He placed it in the small bag. He found another chunk, no bigger than a toothpick. Into the bag. The blood had congealed, and it came away from the rock in strings that immediately fell apart. Mixed in with that he found scraps of skin and tissue and more chips of bone, these nearly infinitesimal. He collected what he could find. It added up to about a quarter cup of red-brown goo. He sealed the bag and attached the P-3 tag to it.

Standing again, he bagged his trash and stowed it in his rucksack. From here, the rest of the way down looked far and steep. No way to be dignified about it. He shouldered his pack and, cradling Bello's cover and the bag of partial remains on his lap, he slid down.

Chapter 21

He found the Harris Teeter. _Open 24 Hours_ —but closed for the holiday. Half a mile away, there was an Exxon station with a Handee Hugo's convenience store. _Open Till Midnight Every Day_ —but not today. He passed a handful of other places—CVS, Walgreens, Food Lion, Kangaroo—all shut up and dark. Just after he'd given up on finding something, anything, he came to a BP with a Scotchman Store. Lights on, one car at a pump, two more in the small side lot—open for business. He parked and went inside.

At the back of the store, he found the toothpaste. Crest and Colgate, both travel-size, the boxes no longer than the width of his hand. Just as well: The mere thought of his original scheme—to acquire planetary quantities of toothpaste—made him queasy. After spending forty-five minutes or an hour in a grimy closet, entwining himself with a skinny boy named Travis, he'd surrendered the right to be petty. Passive-aggressive toothpaste wouldn't do. He'd have to buy honest toothpaste.

Travis's scent was still on him. He could think of no better way of describing it than _country boy_ —hay, dirt, boot leather, soap, talcum powder. Leland kept tasting him, kept tasting the musk of his cock. He wanted to sit on the floor and cry. He wanted to scrub his hands with lye and rubbing alcohol. He wanted to wash his mouth out with scouring powder and toluene.

Instead, he grabbed the Crest off the shelf, and then, just in case, the Colgate as well. On his way to the front counter, he noticed some flowers in a narrow refrigerated case. Sad gas station flowers. Carnations and lilies mostly, orange and red fall arrangements with silk leaves and twists of dried corn husk, but also some roses, red as winter cardinals, each in a cellophane sleeve.

If only there were hyacinths. Leland knew exactly one thing about the language of flowers: To ask forgiveness, you gave purple hyacinths. It was something his father had told him, and he'd never forgotten it. He'd given them to Anna Grace more times than he could count. How many fights and lapses and omissions of one sort or another? How many times had he apologized, with or without flowers, even when he was sure she'd been wrong?

In _this_ case, of course—

Leland scooped up the roses, seven in all, and went to the checkout and laid his purchases on the counter. On a shelf behind the register there were some fist-sized bottles of mouthwash. Two kinds, blue and yellow—the color of a swimming pool, the color of piss. The yellow would go down like a scourge, flensing the skin from his tongue and throat. He asked for the yellow.

Driving south toward the beach, he swigged the mouthwash and swished it around in his mouth. It scalded his soft palate and scorched the underside of his tongue. He swallowed, and as it ran down his throat it split him in half. Just as he'd hoped.

By the time he parked the car at the hotel, he'd just about drained the bottle. He felt queasy and drunk, and he couldn't tell whether he still had tastebuds. When he got out of the car, he cradled the roses in the crook of his arm and stuffed the toothpaste into his back pocket.

The restroom at the back of the hotel bar was, luckily, a single-seater. He locked himself in, stepped to the sink, and laid the roses on the vanity.

While the water ran from tepid to hot, he unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed his sleeves up. Pumping handfuls of white foam from the soap dispenser, he scrubbed his hands, his forearms, his face, his neck. The paper towels turned to mush on contact with water. They were nothing more than they were something—a possible proof of dark matter. He dried himself as well as he could.

When he got back to the room, he noticed first that the bedside clock read 3:45 and then that Anna Grace hadn't returned. He went to the sliding doors. The sky over the ocean had dimmed to indigo. The surfers had gone. He stepped onto the balcony and leaned over the railing and looked up and down the beach. No sign of Anna Grace's tracksuit.

After stripping out of his clothes, he held his jeans to the light and checked for stains on the knees. All clear. He draped them over the back of an armchair. Everything else—shirt, underwear, socks—he wadded up and shoved into a back corner of an empty dresser drawer. Better to hide them there, he thought, than to discard them in a wastebasket.

Standing at the sink, he brushed his teeth and tongue twice with each kind of toothpaste. By the time he'd finished scrubbing his gums and tongue for the fourth time, the foam he spat into the sink was pink with his blood. _Good_ , he thought, _I deserve to bleed, and then he felt so foolish for thinking it that his face reddened. He watched in the mirro_ r as the color spread in blotches in the hollows of his cheeks.

He took a shower with the hottest water he could stand. An unasked-for mental picture came to him: Travis on his knees, his head tipped back, his face and bare chest gleaming in the garish light, his eyes closed, his mouth open. Leland's cock hardened again and found its way somehow into his fist. He tugged at himself a couple of times, but soon let go. Twice in a day? Half a lifetime ago, maybe.

No, not really. Half a lifetime ago, at twenty-five, he hadn't been particularly lustful. Sure, he'd once gone to the dirty bookstore in Charleston, but nothing could have lured him back a second time. Men had stood around in the corridors, slouching against the pinball machine or leaning their hunched backs against the walls. They'd stared at the floor, hangdog and apparently sightless, as wretched as the gluttons in Dante's Inferno. The experience had struck him as an excellent cure for lust.

And yes, in his room at night, he'd thought about his runner—his first serious crush, a skinny, dark-haired cross-country runner with hairy legs—but he'd been a full-time student, a part-time tour guide, and the divorced father of a kindergartner. As he remembered it now, he'd been so exhausted so much of the time that he'd fallen asleep most nights before a thought or a mental image could turn into a fantasy.

He imagined himself as he'd been then, lonely and bewildered in his childhood bedroom. He and Anna Grace had been apart for years. They'd swapped out the twin bed of his boyhood for a double, and then she'd left him to sleep in it by himself. The kitchen and bathroom hadn't yet been rehabbed. The old garage had still stood at the back of the house.

The garage. Funny: For a year or more at a time, he could forget it had ever existed, and then when he remembered it, it came back whole. Wet and cold in winter, airless and hot in summer. A smell of grease and oily sawdust. Cobwebs in the rafters. A dead freezer, a defunct water heater, a dented water cooler. Three dozen horseshoes from the nineteenth century. A chainless chainsaw, a bitless drill press, a bladeless bandsaw. So much of that stuff had sat in the garage for decades. When Dad started hauling it out and throwing it away, how could Leland fail to see—?

_No. Stop._ It was stupid to second-guess himself now. His father had just come out of a dark summer of strange hours and odd rituals—red velvet cake at three a.m., onion soup at dawn, croque-madame at midnight. After the first frost snapped the spines of Mama's daylilies, Dad rented a dumpster and emptied the garage to the walls. At the time it seemed like a good sign. A fresh start.

Twisting the tap little by little, he ran the shower hotter and hotter, until when he looked down at himself he saw great streaks of pink where the water had flushed his skin. He turned off the faucet and opened the shower curtain. The movement of the curtain drove eddies of steam toward the clouded mirror. He went to the sink and wiped the glass with a dry towel, clearing an oval space.

While he wetted the blade of his razor, he remembered that he hadn't packed shaving cream. Soap would work well enough; his dad had used it every day. Rather than open a new bar, Leland went to the tub and fetched the last bendy sliver he'd left in the soap dish. He scrubbed it between his hands to work up a lather.

Shaving every morning: a good sign. Sleeping every night: a good sign. Dad had kept on with the red velvet cakes, but in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, he suddenly switched to a rational schedule, sleeping all night, baking all day. He kept his face clean and his fingernails clipped. Once a week, he put a fair amount of trouble into shining his shoes—an excellent sign, how else to see it? He cleared even the cobwebs from the garage—and how else to see _that_ , if not as an attempt to tidy the cluttered attic of his own mind? Bundled up in sweatshirts and a windbreaker, he planted hyacinth bulbs for the spring—purple ones, supposedly, though when they came up they were white—and who would do such a thing except in the hope of seeing them bloom?

The lather had never made it from Leland's hands to his face, and he no longer had any desire to shave. He rinsed and dried his hands. Naked, he staggered to the bed and climbed in. The sheets were cold against his skin and so soft that he found himself nearly in tears.

Another unbidden image came to him, one that sickened him as much as it saddened him: his father, kneeling, head tipped back, mouth open. Clothed, at least, unlike Travis—but in this mental picture, Dad, too, was poised to take something in his mouth.

Garage, video booth. Gun, cock. A devil's diptych.

There was no real connection between the two things—he knew that. His father had not shot himself because Leland liked boys. But the timing, the timing. On a Saturday evening, Leland had spent his quarters on porn. The following Tuesday, his father had died.

Leland's body lay quite still in the beautiful bed, but his mind was a many-limbed thing, clawing with its sharp nails at the seams of his skull and the flesh of his throat. Nested boxes, each bigger than the one that held it. Boxes within boxes, rooms within rooms, closets within closets. Eight quarters' worth of skinny boys with hairy legs. Eight quarters' worth of cock.

Red velvet cake. The color of raw beef.

Death is not a library.

Phallus, gun, bullet, semen. _Guten Abend, Herr Doktor._

Death is death is death.

In the largest, innermost box, there was a loaded pistol. Leland wondered, not for the first time, where on earth his dad had gotten the goddamn gun.

Would Leland follow, if he could? Would he choose sleep, rather than a divided life? Would he bury the matryoshka boxes once and for all?

Not with a gun, never with a gun—but some other way.

If he could braid the sheets into a rope, would he rappel from the balcony to the ground and walk the two hundred, three hundred, five hundred yards to the roaring sea? If he could stride or swim far enough against the waves and somehow hold himself to the sandy bottom, would he look up through the false sky, the churning surface of the ocean, to the stars? Would he watch the far-away constellations split and double and collide, all the while filling his lungs and belly with the cold brine that would stop his heart?

Whether he would or not barely mattered: He'd no sooner scramble down a makeshift rope than return to Travis's grubby closet in the adult bookstore. He got up and put on his clothes and left the room. He went out through the door, like an ordinary man on an ordinary evening.
Chapter 22

Afterward, as they lay in Doris's bed with _Boys in the Trees_ playing endlessly on repeat, John Carter rehearsed a delicate question in his mind. Once, on their fourth or fifth date, when he'd gotten himself tongue-tied, he'd tried to make a joke of it by saying, "Words aren't my forte. Music is my forte." What he'd actually said was, "Words aren't my music. Forte is my forte."

Now he thought he had better dive in, or he'd never ask what he wanted to ask. "Is it ever acceptable to ask your partner—?" He cringed. "Not partner. That sounds gay. The person you've had love with— _made_ love with—or is it—?"

"Are you asking did I come?"

He looked away. In a small voice, he said, "That, too."

"Oh, John Carter." She sounded miserable. She rolled onto her back.

He tucked the covers under his chin and stared up at the ceiling.

"Not counting going steady with Trey Turner in the seventh grade," she said, "which was just passing notes and one kiss with no tongues, I've had three serious boyfriends, and this is the part I hate most."

"The sex part?"

Smiling a little, finally, she kissed his shoulder. "I love the sex part, actually. But getting from the before-sex part to the having-sex-on-the-regular part—that's what I hate." She sighed. "Up till now we've been doing kind of a dance."

_A dance_ , he thought. _Yes. Exactly._

For weeks, she'd been doing all the choreography. Two steps forward, one step back, and—surprise!—a sudden slide to the left. The anticipation, and even the occasional frustration, had been mostly—or almost—pleasurable, though at times John Carter had wondered if she might be one of those purity ring people, if she'd promised God she'd wait for marriage, and what he'd do if that were the case.

"Now, like _bam_ ," she said, "we're in the land of squishy noises and dampness and self-consciousness, but we still have to pretend there's some mystery. We still have to close the bathroom door. I still have to sneak out of bed before you wake up and check my eyeliner."

"Why would you do _that_?"

Sighing, she said, "Being a girl is exhausting."

Because he didn't know what to say, he said nothing. He pulled her toward him and kissed her, and just like that, he was hard again. He ruffled her pubic hair, at first barely brushing the ends of the curls with his fingertips, but then combing his fingers through it.

Suddenly, Doris lifted herself off him. She stepped into her panties and scooped up the rest of her clothes. There was tremor coming up from below, a rumbling. The garage door opener.

"Is that—?"

Doris nodded. "Mama's home."

"Already?"

"Well, yes. It's after five."

"After _five_?" He tumbled out of bed and scrambled around on the carpet. Where had his boxers gone? "When did _that_ happen?"

"I don't know how to answer that," she said. "Twice a day, it gets to be five, and then after that, it's, you know, _after five_."

"We were just— Your _mother_. Cripes."

He peered under the bed. Maybe he'd accidentally kicked his shorts under there. No, not there. When he got up again, Doris was laughing, covering her mouth with her hand.

"It's not funny!" he said. His face went hot. "Moms can, like, _smell_ things."

"One, my mother doesn't go around sniffing people, and two, we're both adults." She pulled on her T-shirt. "We don't have to pretend we don't have sex."

"Where the heck are my drawers?"

Doris stripped the covers off her bed and _there_ , wadded up at its foot, were his boxers. Blushing, he stepped into them. When he put on his shirt and jeans, they felt tighter than before, as if he'd grown a size.

Doris opened the door.

"Where are you going?" John Carter said.

"Simmer down," she said. "I have to pee."

After she'd gone, he sat on the bed. And sat. And sat. How could it take _so long_ for a girl to pee?

But wait. Somewhere in the house there were voices. Female voices. He crept to the door and listened through the crack. Doris was out there somewhere, talking to someone.

He stepped into the hall—and onto the black-booted foot of a uniformed policewoman. For a second or two, he stood with most of his weight on her toes. In a blur, seeing but not seeing, he glimpsed the shine of her badge, the blue of her blouse, the cleft of her pale chin. They both cried out in shock. Her voice was somehow lower than his, a woof against his squawk.

Doris appeared, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "Oh, hi. I see you've met Mama."

"This must be your young man," Doris's mother said. "John Hancock, is it?"

John Carter began stammering his name, but Doris interrupted him. "She's teasing you."

"I've heard of starting off on the wrong foot," said Doris's mother, "but this..."

John Carter looked down at her feet. "I'm so sorry about that, Mrs. Park. Did I hurt you? I hope I didn't hurt you."

"No harm done." Mrs. Park clomped her feet on the carpet. "Steel toes. And please don't call me Mrs. Park."

"Alice?" he said.

"Certainly not. Officer Park will do."

John Carter swallowed and nearly gagged on his own spit. "Officer Park. Yes, ma'am."

Doris swatted his arm. "She's still teasing you. Come help me."

Taking him by the hand, she dragged him through the living room to the kitchen, where there was a woman in a tight ponytail and a canvas apron. She'd just shoved something into the oven, and now she let the door clap shut. "How 'bout ya?" she said.

"This is my auntie," said Doris. "Her name's Bridget. We all call her Biddy, and she'll be absolutely _charmed_ if you do the same."

Bridget regarded John Carter darkly from under her eyebrows. She brandished a large knife. "If you call me that, they'll never find your body."

"Okay," John Carter said. "Good to, um—"

Taking a cutting board from a nook above the stove, Bridget began shredding a head of iceberg lettuce. "If you want to get along in this bunch, don't believe a word anyone says unless you confirm it with three other sources."

John Carter bit his lip. "But there are only two of you."

Bridget turned and looked him up and down. "Quick study."

"College boy," Doris said with a grin. She thrust a saucepan and a wooden spoon at him. "Here. Make gravy."

John Carter felt his throat closing up. "I can barely make toast."

"You're starting a food-and-bev job next week," Doris said. "You can't be that helpless."

"It's Jimmy John's," he said. "Not like real cooking."

"The gravy is over _there_ ," Doris said. "In that _tub_." She pointed to the counter, to a stack of plastic containers. "You just heat it up."

"But stir it," Bridget said. "If you don't, it'll scorch. If it scorches, you'll be hanged."

At the stove, John Carter opened the tub of gravy and upended it over the saucepan. Nothing happened. He shook the container and squeezed the sides and spanked the bottom, but still, the gunk didn't budge. As Doris passed by on her way from one spot to another, she paused just long enough to stab the base of the tub with the point of a butcher knife. The gravy fell into the pan with a splat.

"I've never seen gravy like this," John Carter said.

"It'll loosen up as it comes to temperature," Doris said. "Just keep stirring."

While he stirred, Bridget chopped a red onion. Doris dumped stuffing into a casserole dish.

After a minute or so, Bridget said, "Dodo?"

"Yes, Biddy?"

"Can you explain to your college boy that food heats quicker when the burner's on?"

Without a word, John Carter lit the burner. He kept the flame low. No scorching, no hanging. He stirred and stirred.

"John Carter of Mars." Alice leaned in through the doorway. She'd changed out of her uniform and into a T-shirt and jeans. "Grab me some silverware, would you? There are fourteen of us."

Doris pointed him toward the silverware drawer. He took the entire cutlery tray into the dining room and followed Alice around the table, laying silverware as she set each plate.

The front door opened. A tall man came in, followed by a teenage girl and a pair of gawky twin boys. The girl leapt into the kitchen and breathlessly reported on the speed of someone's car. The tall man turned on the TV and punched buttons on the remote. The boys wrestled on the floor. Alice went to greet them all with hugs.

A second group arrived—another tall man, a tiny woman with a pale green flattop, and a girl and boy in black shirts and rolled-up jeans. The men clasped hands and bumped shoulders and began discussing The Game, as if there'd only ever been one.

Chairs were carried from the dining room to the living room. The men settled around the flat-screen. The women gathered in the kitchen. Faces kept passing the dining room and looking in on John Carter. There wasn't a piano the house, so far as he knew, but he couldn't shake the terror that someone would ask him to play "Für Elise" or "Over the River and Through the Wood."

A new couple arrived with two toddlers and an infant. More hugging, more hullabaloo. John Carter fled the dining room. He went to the bathroom and locked himself in and sat for a while on the closed toilet lid. The silverware tray lay in his lap, and it occurred to him that he could never, ever explain to Doris how her mother's flatware got into the bathroom.

Someone knocked. He set the silverware in the bathtub and drew the shower curtain. When he opened the door, he found Doris waiting for him.

"You were hiding, weren't you?" she said.

"A little."

"I know they're all a bit much."

"We're a lot quieter at our place," he said. "If someone asks you to pass the butter, it practically sets off shockwaves. Once, my dad went off on this riff about gravy boats and how they're unitaskers and shouldn't we use the creamer that we never put cream in?"

"Was that terribly controversial?"

" _I_ thought it was funny."

"Come on," she said. "We're ready to eat."

She led him back to the dining room table. There were so many people, so many conversations going on all at once, that John Carter found it difficult to keep up. The bunch of them were like a trio of bands playing different marches on the same field. He sat next to Doris, who sat next to Bridget, who sat next to the woman with green hair, whose name was Candy. They talked about roller derby, whatever that was.

The iced tea ran out, and Candy went to get more. When she came back, she handed one pitcher to Alice and another to John Carter, of all people. Clutching the sweaty glass with both hands, he jerked his head a couple of times, beckoning her. She leaned closer.

"What is it?" he said, his voice cracking and fading nearly to silence. "Roller derby—what is it?"

Candy frowned at him. He was sure he'd asked the dumbest question in the history of questioning. But it wasn't that—she simply hadn't heard him. Turning, waggling her hands in the air, she shushed the nearest Parks. "John Carter's trying to tell me something. Hush your mouth. Danny, Alex, Biddy, hush."

John Carter had already blushed so deeply that he imagined waves of red light radiating from his face. When the chatter died away and all the Parks turned toward him—every last one of them, right down to the toddler who'd climbed up into Bridget's lap—he had to set down the pitcher. Otherwise, he feared the heat of his skin would melt all the ice.

"Roller derby," he said, and gulped the dry air. "H-how do they—? How do they keep the skates on the horses' hooves?"

At the other end of the table, somebody dropped a fork, and it clanked hard against a plate. There was an explosion of laughter. The tall men and the twins roared. The girls giggled until hiccups set in. Alice blotted her eyes with her napkin. John Carter wished he were dead. He'd go to his grave without understanding roller derby, but it'd be worth it.

Bridget reached across and patted his hand. "We need to work on your timing, honey. But that was a good one."

John Carter found that he could breathe again, and he began, ever slowly, to smile. He wished there were piano after all. He'd play "Für Elise." He'd play "Over the River and Through the Wood." He'd play "Bad Romance." He'd play anything anyone wanted to hear.
Chapter 23

The air was still, hazy, as cool and dry as a mausoleum. Even after he patted his utilities and brushed himself off, he was coated in white dust, as if someone had dipped him in talc. Gently, he tipped Bello's helmet and shook the dust from the bag.

Crouching, he peered through the gaps among the thorny trees. He saw, just beyond them, the pale and rutted surface of the wadi. And on the other side of that, more trees, thicker and more tangled. They looked like illustrations of witches' hands in an old fairy tale.

Passing through the grove, he turned to his right and followed the wadi-bed until it curved and began to rise. He paused for a moment, just to get his bearings, and when he did, he heard movement across the wadi. His heart seized like a bad engine. In about a week's time, he was supposed to be home, but he'd get there a lot quicker if he got himself killed today.

Backing into the thicket, he hid Bello's helmet and the little bag of remains at the foot of a squat-trunked tree. With his knife he blazed the tree's bark—not a proper blaze, just a hasty X about six inches above the top of the grass, just enough to find the helmet again.

He lay still and watched the trees on the other side. All was still.

He drew his pistol, checked the magazine, flipped the safety. He patted both his shoulder pockets, looking for his earplugs. A dumb habit—he was right-handed, and the plugs were always on the left. Yellow side in, so that he could fire his weapon without going deaf, but he wouldn't miss the next rustle in the underbrush. Still on his belly, he crawled forward to the edge of the thicket and squinted through the haze.

There was movement. Something brown, then something white: the colors of an Afghan's robe and headdress. And then he heard the report of a firearm. There was nothing else it could be. Littlefield was sure of it. He aimed and fired.

He heard a bleat of pain, not a human cry. He'd shot a goat. He'd shot someone's goat.

A man emerged from the trees, an ancient-as-fuck Afghan man, grizzled and stooped and limping, with craggy, pockmarked skin and a long beard hennaed to the shade of cherry Kool-Aid. Howling in Pashto, he made a beeline for Littlefield and, taking him by the sleeve, dragged him to his feet and across the sand of the wadi.

Yes. He'd shot a goat. The animal's twitching body lay in a covert, surrounded by blood-spattered trees. It had been a pitiful creature—so skinny, so mangy—and now it was straight-up fucking tragic. The single shot had shattered its jaw without actually killing it. Littlefield's belly grumbled and clenched. He wished he could have five minutes alone in the woods, so that he could either puke or shit.

The first thing he had to do, though, was end the goat's misery. He motioned for the Afghan to plug his ears. Whether he understood or not—and apparently he didn't—the old man kept ranting and waving his arms. The goat's feet scrabbled in the dust. Holding his breath, Littlefield shot the animal in the side of the head. The twitching stopped. Briefly, the air was heavy with quiet. Even the old man was, for once, silent.

Littlefield holstered his weapon and plucked out his earplugs. He heard distant yelling and the barking of a dog. Cocking his head, he listened. It was Pittman, calling his name: "Littlefield. Do you hear me? Littlefield. Are you okay?"

"Here," he called back. "Unharmed. All clear."

"Loud and clear."

The air had not moved within the space of Littlefield's memory, and he swam in his own sweat. It was as if the world above had sucked all the air out of this tiny cleft in the earth. The dog was still barking. It must be Mary. Littlefield worried that, at the sound of his voice, she'd come barreling down the hill to find him.

He began backing away, checking behind him every couple of steps so that he didn't trip over a branch or a hump of earth or his own damn feet. The old man stood pat and watched him. When he reached the trees on the other side, Littlefield fetched Bello's helmet and remains. He didn't even need his half-assed blaze to find them. When he looked up again, the old man had gone out of sight. Littlefield hustled through the thicket and followed the line of trees.

A hundred meters on, the thicket petered out. Ahead of him lay a tract of moon dust, pocked in places by goat tracks. Beyond that, he saw, at fucking last, the spindle trees where Bello and Punk had eaten their lunch. Mary, spotting him from afar, leapt and spun and trotted out to meet him.

Evans had everything bagged and tagged, and he was cleaning his fingernails with the point of a penknife. When Littlefield got closer, Evans said, "Heard a couple of shots. You okay, Littledick? I was worried sick, thinking I might never again get to watch you finger your bunghole."

"I'm intact, bunghole and all."

"Who's your buddy?"

Before he turned to look, Littlefield knew what he'd see. And yes, sure enough: There, maybe a little less than a klick away, was the old-timer, the old Afghan with his crazy red hair. He was carrying his dead goat draped across his shoulders. The gore oozing out of its head had darkened one sleeve of his garment.

Littlefield's shoulders slumped. "I shot his goat."

"Why in the everlasting fuck would would you do _that_?" Evans said.

"It was an accident, you fucking idiot."

They waited while the old man approached, but he walked so slowly and unsteadily it seemed he'd never arrive. Littlefield gestured, and Evans nodded, and they set off to meet the old Afghan partway.

"You got any cash?" Littlefield said.

"The fuck for?" Evans said.

"Thought I'd pay him for his goat. I'm guessing he followed me 'cause he wants compensation."

Mary snuffled the ground, sniffed the air, went back to the ground again. When she came upon the trail of goat's blood, she clawed at the dirt and thrust her nose into the hole she'd made.

The old man shifted away from her. He'd been quiet, but now he started hollering. He leapt from foot to foot, trying to get away from Mary, or trying to get her away from him. In turn, the dog ran circles around him. She'd seen or smelled the goat. Its tail and one hind leg hung down almost within reach of her snout.

"Shit," Littlefield said.

"Littlefield," Evans said. The last syllable seemed to go on and on, until it shaded into a kind of low growl.

No, that wasn't right. The growling came from Mary. Littlefield called her name, whistled for her, slapped his thigh. She only seemed to become more fixated on the bloody goat. He stumbled forward and tried to grab for her. If she saw him or heard, she gave no sign. The Afghan's ongoing stream of Pashto became louder and more frantic. Littlefield couldn't understand a word of it, but it sounded to him like a lot of swearing. He was doing some swearing of his own. Mary barked in frustration.

"Littlefield," Evans said again. "Littlefield."

"I'm aware of the fucking issue," Littlefield said. He paced out a half-circle around the dog, the goat, and the old man. "You planning to help at all, you fucking dick?"

Evans stammered something or other—nothing that made any sense or helped even a little bit. _Useless_ , Littlefield thought. _Fucking useless._

He moved in, closer to the dog, closer to the Afghan and his goat. The old man kept howling in warning or fear or rage. In another two seconds, Littlefield thought, all the yelling was going to make his head explode. He hurtled forward, driving Mary away from the old man. She leapt right, hopped left, dodged around him. He reached for a handful of ruff and got a fistful of loose fur instead. In her frenzy, she turned and snapped at him. He yanked his hand away. She bit at the air where his fingers had just been.

Littlefield shrank back, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open. Had she tried, really tried, to bite him?

Surely not. She wanted the goat, and Littlefield was merely in her way. Racing back to the old man and his blood-soaked burden, she jumped up and grabbed for the goat's haunch. The Afghan's sandaled foot shot out and landed squarely in the center of Mary's chest.

With a yelp, she flew backward and twisted in the air and landed hard on her shoulder. For a moment she lay in the dust, stunned and immobile. Evans took a few steps toward her. He was calling her name. The Afghan got to her first and delivered another kick, this time to the side of her head. She cried out and kept crying. Crying like sixty. Her feet twitched against the dust.

Evans crouched down beside her. Except for Mary's wheezy, panicky squealing, all was quiet. Evans touched her, and she flinched at the touch. She bared her teeth as if to bite him, but she didn't, or couldn't, lift her head.

"Littlefield," Evans said. "I think—" He couldn't bring himself to say more.

Once more, Littlefield drew his sidearm and flipped the safety. This time, he aimed it squarely at the old man's forehead. "You motherfucking _cunt_ ," he said.

Evans was on his feet. "Whoa, whoa, whoa," he said. In a second, he was at Littlefield's side. Through clenched teeth, he said, "Don't do this, dumb fuck. Don't do this."

Trembling now, the old man began murmuring in Pashto. Scrawny as it was, the goat must weigh as much as a person—as much as a child, at least—and the old man had already been carrying it for nearly thirty minutes. He buckled under the weight, took a step back, stumbled, nearly righted himself, and finally fell hard on his ass. A spray of blood issued from the goat's carcass and soaked the ground. The old geezer scrambled to tuck his feet under him.

"Eight fuckin' days, motherfucker," said Evans. "Eight days till you're back with hot sis. Eight days till you see your ma and pa and— What the fuck do you call him? Spuds? Your little brother, Spuds?"

"Tater." Littlefield could barely hear himself talk. The buzzing in his ears, the whine of blood speeding through his veins, was that loud. "We call him Tater."

Mary lay still. Even from a hundred paces away, it was clear that she couldn't move. The old fucker had probably broken her spine. In return, Littlefield thought, he ought to have his own miserable neck wrung for him. Littlefield had never hated another human being more than this. His heart was a hard, tiny, jagged thing.

His guts, though. His bowels felt like liquid. A lake in flood. He feared that, if he fired his weapon, the force of the recoil would make him shit himself.

"Do not do this," Evans was saying. "Put the weapon down. Walk away. No one but us'll ever know what went down. Holster your motherfucking weapon, corporal."

The sun had been hidden all day in a dusty bright haze, but now both the sun and the haze had dimmed. Above the far ridge, the sky had faded to yellow and green, like an old bruise. Night birds or bats fluttered upward into the air. Littlefield watched them fly and fly until they seemed to evaporate into the ambient dust. He holstered his weapon.
Chapter 24

The sheets were clammy against her skin. The hotel bed was so soft, so deep, that she wasn't convinced she could climb out of it. She lay a while on her side, staring at the nearest wall and wishing for a cold drink. Her tongue tasted of stale wine. Cigarettes, too, though she didn't remember smoking. In truth, she didn't remember much.

Her tracksuit had twisted around her in her sleep. She sat up and straightened it. Blue-gold light filled the room. The curtains were wide open, and the early sun, glittering on the water, made her eyes ache. There was no sign that Leland had shared the bed with her. She got up.

Walking across the room was an adventure of shifting planes and receding surfaces. Music seemed to be playing somewhere, just barely within her hearing—next door, across the hall, or in some bean-sized bulb of her own brain. Even with the sliding glass doors closed, she could smell the sea.

When she tried to draw the curtains, they turned out to be heavier than she'd expected. The hangers stuttered along the track. Sunlight hammered the orbits of her eyes, and she shaded them with one hand. She lost her grip on the pull rod and stumbled against the arm of the sofa.

For a few uncanny seconds, the center of her vision became frighteningly crisp, as if she were looking through a small but powerful lens. A narrow column of light fell along the length of the sofa, where Leland lay with his legs crossed and his eyes wide and bloodshot. He was barefoot but otherwise fully clothed. The legs of his jeans were damp almost to the knee and flecked with grains of sand.

"Good morning," he said.

She forced her mouth open; it felt like tearing Velcro apart. She needed a drink. Vodka or water would do—either or both over ice, cold enough to crack her teeth. Speaking with care, mindful of slurring, she said, "Did I wake you?"

"Haven't slept."

"You've been walking on the beach?"

"That too. Where did _you_ go?"

Her mind was nimble enough to understand that she couldn't answer truthfully, but too sluggish to provide a quick lie. She slumped against the arm of the sofa. Just as she opened her mouth to say something, anything, whatever happened to come out, Leland cut her off.

"Never mind." He sat up and patted the cushion beside him. "We should talk."

He smelled unpleasantly of seawater and rotting kelp, and Anna Grace didn't trust her stomach. She had a pinching cramp under her rib cage. Her belly seemed to hold a large amount of dirty cooking grease. She wheeled the chair away from the desk and sat across from him, on the far side of the coffee table. She glanced at him. Only a glance. She was afraid to meet his eyes.

After a moment, he began speaking. He was staring at the backs of his hands. "I was so angry about yesterday. _So_ angry. But I never had any right to be pissed. From the beginning, this whole trip"—he waved his hand in the air—"was disingenuous. I didn't bring you here just for a romantic getaway."

Anna Grace could guess why he'd brought her here. This was the intervention. At last. She'd been waiting. He'd spend the next few hours explaining how her drinking had set their lives on fire. Rehab would follow, assuming she agreed to it. Meetings, then. Inventories, amends, more meetings—assuming she agreed. Assuming she didn't, instead, turn the intervention around on him. _Hey, Daddy, what do you know about DaddiesLove.com?_

Leland turned to the window, and the light fell across one cheek. For the first time that Anna Grace could recall, he'd gone two days without shaving. Overnight, his whiskers had grown from shadow to stubble, and a patch of gray had emerged on either side of his chin. He said, "I've been all over the map. Emotionally, I mean. Rage, fear, misery, contrition."

How far did one go with amends? She had sins aplenty to confess to her husband and children. But would she have to come back here and apologize to the housekeeper who cleaned the restroom in the lobby bar?

"I couldn't stop thinking about him. For hours."

She homed in on her husband's mouth, his eyes, his words. He was talking about his father. Garage, ocean, hyacinths, horseshoes: What did any of it have to do with anything?

"It was just a coincidence," he said, chuckling and shaking his head. "Took twenty-five years, but I finally see that—just a coincidence. Not my fault after all."

Late at night, she'd stumbled into the hotel, very near—she'd thought—to shitting her pants. At the back of the bar she'd found a unisex restroom. Locking herself inside, she'd stripped to the skin and found that she'd _already_ shit her pants.

With a terrible clarity—and yet at a saving distance, as if she were remembering a vivid dream or a gruesome film—she saw herself grubbing around on the restroom floor, trying to mop up her mess. The paper towels had been all but useless. They'd dissolved instantly in her hands.

There'd been some roses on the vanity—roses wrapped in crinkly cellophane. She'd bumped against the cabinet somehow, knocking the flowers head first into the trash can. The blooms had landed on top of her soiled panties, and that, of all things, had made her cry.

"It's so easy to minimize," Leland was saying. "Easy and tempting. One time in twenty-three years, that's all. One time. But it's just...inexcusable. It's the intent, the desire, the—" He paused, his damp eyes drifting upward as he searched for the right word. "The thing is," he said. "The thing is, the thing is." He said it a few more times, until Anna Grace thought she might be hallucinating.

She wanted suddenly to check the legs and hems of her track pants. Maybe she'd dreamed the worst of it. The memory of a dream was, after all, virtually indistinguishable from the memory of a drinking bout. The roses were a tip-off—they had to be. Why would there be roses in a unisex restroom at the back of a hotel bar?

"I'm sorry," he said. "I hate having to say this as much as you hate hearing it, but everything needs to come out." He blushed. "So to speak."

She propped one foot on the edge of the coffee table, and there, on the cuff of her track pants and on her bare ankle, was a crusty spattering of something brown. Her stomach gurgled and oozed deeper into her gut, and her throat seemed to burst upward into her mouth. Tears wetted her eyelashes. Returning her foot to the floor, clenching her jaw shut, she willed her heart to stop pounding, her head to stop spinning, her gullet to stop turning itself inside out.

Slowly, quietly, Leland said, "I think I'm— I have to be— I must actually be—"

What? He _thought_ he was obliged to send her to treatment? He _had to be_ crazy to put up with her? He _must actually be_ prepared to leave her? Fine. She was ready. If only he would _say_.

But she couldn't answer him, couldn't urge him on, couldn't save him the trouble of forming the words. By clamping her back teeth together and lodging her tongue against her front teeth, she was—just barely—keeping herself from vomiting. If she opened her mouth to speak—

She sprang from her seat. The chair rolled away from her and slammed into the desk. Covering her mouth with her hands, she lurched to the bathroom. The toilet had a seat but no lid. Even as she dropped to the floor with a knee-cracking thud, some devil at the back of her brain recorded a grievance. Commercial toilet, no lid: He'd brought her to _that_ kind of hotel.

She gagged and heaved, but all that came out was a mess of foamy pink spit. There would be more, she thought. This was just the proverbial calm. She waited. She could still hear music, and now she knew that it came from the wrecked wiring of her own brain, not from next door or across the hall, because she recognized it as Yvonne's final aria from _Under the Volcano_. Distant, muffled, distorted—but unmistakable. Ashes, embers, stars.

At last she vomited for real, her body rocking and aching from the irresistible spasmodic convulsions. Leland had followed her into the bathroom—she could hardly say when—and he flushed the toilet and crouched beside her and held her hair back. He was sobbing and apologizing—but then she was, too.

When she retched again, what came up was thick as tar and nearly as black. It left the tang of metal on her tongue. Blood. It was blood, and more followed.

"Leland," she said, rearing back, reaching for him, tasting blood on her lips. "Leland," she said again, or tried to say, and then there was the sensation of falling.
The Beginning of December

Chapter 25

Ben came home as quickly as he could. When he arrived at the Charleston airport near midnight on Wednesday, his father, sister, and brother were waiting for him outside the security checkpoint. He dropped his seabag to the floor and stumbled into his dad's embrace. His dad cried, which made Ben cry. Corinne and John Carter hugged them both and each other, and then everyone's sleeves got very damp.

When they began moving again, it was at first as a clump, with their arms intertwined and their feet colliding. For the first time in days, Leland laughed. "It's like the last episode of _Mary Tyler Moore_ ," he said. All the way to the parking garage, he sang "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," or at least the four or five lines of it he knew.

At the house on Montagu, everyone settled around the kitchen island. Corinne and John Carter practically emptied the refrigerator onto the countertop—a platter of cold cuts, a loaf of Sunbeam bread, ham biscuits, muffin-sized coffee cakes, store-bought sweet tea, all the things that neighbors and friends had brought. Ben ate everything within reach. John Carter placed a tumbler of iced tea at his elbow and kept refilling it.

Between bites, Ben told them about his long journey. Two days of short, bumpy hops on military aircraft. Twenty hours of coach and business-class flights across Europe and the Atlantic. A child at Fiumicino gabbling at him in Italian and receiving his answers with squeals and giggles, as if English were just the silliest-sounding language. Free Heineken in the Crown Lounge at Schiphol, courtesy of a former marine who'd spotted his seabag and wanted to thank him for his service. The surreality of the tulip concession, with its canal house of bottle-green glass appearing to scrape the airport ceiling.

During the lapses and silences, Leland thought perhaps he should try to explain what had happened. He should tell his children about their mother's last dash for the bathroom. He should describe, or attempt to describe, the madness of her eyes searching the room and the terror giving way to nothing, to the dead-weight droop of her body. Then again, they'd probably already guessed at all of that, and if by some mercy they hadn't, why would they ever want to?

A little after one o'clock, Corinne left for home, and the men went to their respective beds. John Carter had taken the bigger bedroom years ago, leaving Ben the smaller one at the front of the house. Ben had known that, of course—known he was coming back to the little bedroom, just as he'd come back to it every year on leave—but he'd forgotten what a monkish cell it was. Except for a framed poster of Klimt's _Forest of Birch Trees_ , the stone-colored walls were bare. Except for a glass lamp, the desktop was empty. A grid of pale light and thick shadow lay across the ebony floor, the shapes suggesting somehow that the window was barred instead of mullioned. Ben lay in the twin-size bed, on a mattress so limp that it made him miss his rack from boot camp, and tried to ignore the shush of wind outside, the occasional thump and whine of a passing car's tires, the clatter of limbs and leaves in the nearby trees.

He rolled over onto his side and stared at the empty bookcase. Someone had stowed his gear. His model rockets, his graphic novels, his posters, his sketchbooks, his pencils and markers—wherever they were, they weren't here. He had no doubt that it was his mother's doing. She wouldn't have thrown anything away, but she would've told John Carter to carry everything up to the attic. Probably. On the other hand, she'd once surrendered his dog, Bozo, to the pound.

If he could get his hands on the shit now, he could read himself to sleep. Have another look at _Terrorstan_ , maybe, and search J's slouchy figure and drifty dialogue for signs of his creator.

Ben stood up and pulled the sheets and blankets off the bed. Shoving everything into the bottom of the closet, he made a nest for himself. He dumped his seabag onto the floor and scattered his crumpled-up laundry on top of the bedclothes for extra cushioning. Once he got in and pulled the door shut, the space was black and nearly silent. He finally began to doze—at least until he had to piss.

Across the hall, John Carter lay awake, too. Propping himself up in bed, he grabbed his phone and texted Doris: _You know what's a funny word? Varix. Who ever heard of a varix?_

It was three o'clock in the morning. He didn't expect an answer. But she replied almost immediately. _Are you getting autocorrected like whoa? What are you even saying rn?_

He stabbed the buttons on his phone. _Something we never even heard of before._

Varix, plural varices. Who ever heard of that.

But that's what mama had. That's what did it.

So sudden. Can't get my head around it, yknow?

_Back .21. Cannot. Get. My. Head. Around it._ He corrected himself: _*B A C_

Someone was moving around in the hall. John Carter put his phone down on his bedside table. Creeping to the door, he looked out. It was Ben, stumbling to the bathroom, grunting and scratching himself like a bear. When John Carter got back to his bed, Doris had answered his message.

Did you know she was drinking so much? Did you notice?

Strange, he thought, that this conversation could seem so simple and clear via text message. In real life, the words— _varix, varices, blood alcohol content_ —had the power to invoke physical pain. And those were just the words he knew how to spell. Most of the complicated words, the medical words that came from Latin and Greek, had disappeared from his memory, leaving only the gist of the story: A vein had burst in his mother's gut, and she'd bled to death.

A series of thunks and creaks came from across the hall, and then a squeal and a bang. The bathroom walls collapsing, or possibly the roof caving in—that's what it sounded like. John Carter rushed into the hall. Ben was there, too, coming from the little bedroom, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open.

The brothers peered into the bathroom. Their father was trying to pry one of the travertine tiles off the wall with a claw hammer. Already he'd succeeded in chipping off part of one tile and crazing the one next to it. The wall above bore a deep divot. A long swath of paint and paper had peeled away, revealing the powdery white plaster beneath.

"Dad," Ben said.

Leland looked into the space between his sons. His eyes were strangely absent of emotion, unless purposefulness counted as an emotion. It was possible to believe—if only for a sliver of a second—that he might wield the hammer against Ben or John Carter. But after a moment, he turned away and went back to work. This time he swung the hammer and struck the center of a tile. The travertine split into shards, but except for a shower of dust and some fragments barely the size of cornflakes, the pieces remained affixed to the wall. One of the chips sliced Leland's cheek. A trickle of blood oozed into his beard.

"I'm freaking out a little bit," John Carter said through his teeth.

"No shit," Ben said, also through his teeth.

"Should we call someone?"

"Like who? Batman?" Ben said. "He's making a lot of dust. Maybe we should call Alfred."

John Carter's phone buzzed in his hand. He'd carried it with him from his room. Doris had texted him again, but he couldn't concentrate on what she'd written. Instead he tapped out a new message to Corinne: _come now 911!!!_

While he waited for the message to go though, John Carter glanced away from the phone and saw that his brother's skivvies were gaping open at the fly. He threw up his hand to block the view, though in fact he'd seen nothing more than an egg-shaped patch of shadow. "Put on some effin' pants," he said. "Jeez."

Squinting and cocking his head, Ben said, "Tater, did you really just say 'effing' instead of 'fucking'?"

"I really just did," John Carter said. "I think."

With a shrug and a shake of the head, Ben went away, and when he came back, he had on a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt. He spread his arms and spun around. "Better?" he said.

Corinne had texted back. _What? I was just there like 2 mins ago. Wtf?_

Two hours ago, John Carter thought, not two minutes. Maybe she'd been asleep.

Well, of _course_ she'd been asleep. She had a husband, a warm bed, a cozy apartment where there were no ghosts whispering _varix, varix, varix_ at all hours of the night.

He typed a reply: _Just come. You'll see._

After a moment, she texted to say she was on her way. Sitting side by side on the floor of the hallway, the brothers waited for their sister. Leland continued his attack on the stone and plaster, the banging, pounding, cracking. Now and then there was a lull. During a quiet spell, Ben said, "Wish I'd taken a shower. Looks like I'm SOL for the duration of hostilities."

Craning his neck, John Carter peered around the doorjamb. So much dust had fallen to the floor that dunes had formed. Leland had knocked away three or four square feet of tile, along with much of the drywall underneath. He'd bloodied his feet stepping on the splinters of broken limestone. The hammer's wooden handle had raised blisters on his palms and forefingers.

"How long can it take her to get here?" John Carter said, looking at Ben.

"Dude," Ben said, "it's been less than ten min—"

A deep rumble inside the bathroom interrupted him. The noise swelled and burst in a near-deafening explosion, a reverberant metallic din, the sound of a life-altering catastrophe. A strangely musical plinking followed, the racket of innumerable small bits of something scattering across the floor. A shower of tiny glass pebbles rolled out into the hallway, pattering dully on the carpet.

John Carter turned to Ben, but Ben had fled. He lay at the far end of the hall, flat on the floor, his mouth open, his hands and arms shielding the back of his head. When he rolled over and got up again, after a minute or so, he blushed to the roots of his hair. He made a pair of fists and shook them loose.

"Are you okay?" John Carter said.

Still red-faced, Ben shrugged and waved away the question and nodded toward the bathroom.

The brothers leaned into the doorway. Their dad had broken one of the shower doors, and the safety glass had shattered into uncountable bits. Most of the pieces had tumbled into the shower itself, but a layer of them blanketed every surface. A few small grains gleamed like gems in the folds of Leland's pant legs. Shell-shocked but unharmed, he dropped the hammer. The air seethed with white dust. He coughed and spat a clot of gypsum into the sink.

Downstairs, the front door opened and shut. Corinne trod up the stairs. She looked tired and cranky—hair everywhere, eyes bloodshot, mouth turned down at the corners. She'd adopted an expression she'd worn a hundred thousand times in her life, whenever one of her brothers had claimed ignorance or inculpability or ceded some difficult responsibility to her. Make a line drawing, Ben thought, and you could put it next to the dictionary definition of _fuck off_. Snap a photo and float it on a bruise-colored background, John Carter thought, and she could become an Internet meme. Done-With-Your-Bullshit Girl.

The moment her eyes flicked upward to their faces, her features rearranged themselves. Peevishness gave way to resolve. Her back straightened. She strode directly into the bathroom. Glass crackled under the soles of her sneakers.

Within a very few seconds, she and Leland emerged from the bathroom. To the boys it looked like a kind of miracle, but Leland had shocked himself into docility. He was easily led. Corinne took him by the hand and he followed, that was all. She coaxed him down the stairs, along the hall, and into the kitchen.

Ben and John Carter crept to the bottom of the stairs and listened. It occurred to Ben that they were behaving like ten-year-olds, but he couldn't bring himself to the point of shame. In fact, he was just about sick of not being a ten-year-old. He longed for a good old-fashioned prepubescent tantrum, the kind that required a buildup, a whole day or weekend of sulking and snarling— _itching for a switching_ , his grandmother might have called it—until finally it erupted in a blood-pumping, throat-ripping shouting match. _It's not fair! You like Tater best, always have! He's got the piano, and what do I get? I don't get nothin'! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!_ Of course, what he really wanted was the mending, not the breach; he wanted one more chance to crawl into his parents' bed and allow his tears to be dried and his apologies to be accepted.

At the kitchen sink, Corinne soaked a clean washcloth in warm water. With a corner of the cloth she dabbed away the blood that had crusted the hairs of Leland's beard. He winced, but she kept at it.

"When I was a little girl," she said, "you would have described this as 'acting out.'"

Fresh blood welled in his cut. She got him a napkin and guided his hand, setting him the task of holding pressure on his wound.

"What the hell happened?" she said. "At the airport you were laughing and singing. At midnight you were drinking sweet tea and joking about the House of Tulips. Now this."

"We laugh that we might not cry," he said with mock grandeur, and then, after a moment, "I don't sleep much, but when I do, I have dreams. I had a bad dream."

"But why take it out on the poor bathroom?"

Corinne turned to the sink and rinsed out the cloth. Leland examined the napkin, the bright red crescent of blood.

Why take it out on the bathroom? Good question. A lot of time and money had gone into redoing it. Purplish gray travertine, etched glass, nickel knobs and fittings, farmhouse sinks, a cherry vanity. It was beautiful, tasteful, completely up to date. It belonged in _Architectural Digest_ —and he hated it. He'd consented to every decision, and yet he hated the outcome.

"When I woke up from my dream," he said, "I just wanted to put everything back. I wanted it all to be like it was when I was a kid. When you were a kid, even."

"Maybe you should call a contractor like everyone else," Corinne said.

When she turned from the sink, she found her father glaring at the island as if he meant to do it harm. She sat him down on one of the stools and knelt to clean the cuts on his feet.

"Do you believe in God?" he asked her. "I mean, now that you're Catholic?"

The old question, she thought. Did she believe? Andrei had grown up thinking of God as a literal being with intelligence and purpose, someone who could be talked to, interceded with, praised and thanked and beseeched. She'd never believed in that kind of a God. She didn't think she ever could. But did she, or could she, believe in something more transcendent, more intangible? She'd experienced something akin to religious ecstasy at her baptism, but what was ecstasy, after all? A bit of dopamine fizzing around in the brain, just that and nothing more.

"I don't know," she said, looking up at her father. "I really don't know."

"When I was a kid, I think we believed in something. Not a hellfire-and-damnation kind of God. Nothing so Baptist as all that. A very nice God, sort of like Captain Kangaroo—or at least that's how I think I pictured him. Fat lot of good He did us."

She went to the sink again and rinsed the cloth. "Apparently, I witnessed a miracle once. A little girl raised a bird from the dead."

"Why do Catholics get all the miracles?" He paused a moment. "Wait. Did I see that on _Huffington Post_?"

"Oh...probably." She wrung out the washcloth and laid it over the edge of the sink to dry. Wiping her hands on a towel, she said, "Why did you stop believing in God?"

When she turned back, she saw that he'd gone pale as talc. She went to him, hugged him, held him.

"I should tell you—" But he couldn't go on from there. He sighed.

"If you tell me you're proud of me," she said into his ear, "so help me, I'll kick you in the shins."

"Fair enough."

After a while, she led him to the study. Her brothers' footsteps thudded on the stairs as they scurried into hiding. She tucked her father into his makeshift bed on the sofa, where he'd been sleeping for days. She called her goodbyes up the stairs, and the boys answered back more or less in unison, "'Night, Coco." Exhausted and chilled through, she went home.

Ben settled into his nest in the closet. After a while, when he heard someone moving around, he opened the closet door.

John Carter had come in, dragging his blankets and a pillow. Flopping onto the bed, he said, "Thought it'd be like old times. Like when we had the bunk beds. You remember?"

"Yeah, of course."

"And sometimes when there was a storm, I'd get scared and ask to sleep on your bunk?"

He was talking about a time long past, when he'd been four or five and Ben had been seven or eight. Ben said, "I recall."

"Would it be weird to do that now?" John Carter paused. "It would, wouldn't it?"

After a moment, Ben said, "Naw. But if I get a hard-on, just keep still and pretend your name is Ashley."

John Carter said nothing.

"That was a joke, Tater," Ben said. "Obviously."

John Carter dragged his blanket and pillow to the closet. Kneeling, he felt his way along the floor until he came to the edges of Ben's bedclothes. They lay back to back. Ben waited and listened, and when John Carter's breathing fell into the unmistakable rhythm of sleep, Ben rolled over and clung to his brother. In the space between waking and dozing, it was just possible to believe that they were small again, safe in their footed pajamas, sheltered from anything sadder or scarier than a mislaid toy or the rumble of thunder.
The Friday Before Christmas

Chapter 26

In the 700s, a girl in a plaid jumper was sitting cross-legged on the floor, paging through a book as large and square as the top of an end table. When Corinne stepped around the girl to reshelve a survey of Renaissance frescos, the child glanced up. Corinne smiled and nodded hello—absently, already thinking ahead to the next batch of books on her cart—and then realized she'd met the girl before. Lorelei Thủy, manicurist's daughter, alleged resurrector of birds.

"Hi," Corinne said. "Do you remember me?"

The girl nodded with great solemnity.

Whenever Corinne had thought of her earlier conversation with Lorelei, she'd tended to remember it going on and on. In truth, it had barely been a conversation at all. Corinne had asked two or three questions, the girl had answered mostly with silent gestures, and the whole thing had lasted less than a minute. Maybe Lorelei was a strange child. Maybe Corinne was no good with kids. Either way, there was no point expecting some long and friendly exchange. Better to get on with the day.

By way of farewell, Corinne said, "Got everything you want? Need any help?"

"I can _use_ the catalog," Lorelei said. "I'm not a _baby_."

"All righty." Corinne stepped away. She got as far as the end of the aisle, and then she had to come back again. She had to. "How's your bird?"

"He died."

"I'm sorry to hear that. You couldn't raise him up twice?"

"I don't know. I mean, he wasn't heavy or anything."

"No, not— Wasn't there a miracle? Couldn't you do a second miracle?"

The child clucked her tongue. "There's no such thing as miracles."

"Your mom, though. She was on TV."

"I _told_ her the bird was just sleeping, but she thought he died, so we put him out on the sidewalk and we were going to bury him later." Lorelei spoke with unutterable weariness, like a character in a _fin de siècle_ comedy. "But then the bird woke up and my dad said we should call it a miracle. For, like, ratings."

"You mean publicity?"

Lorelei nodded.

"What did he die of for real, then?"

"Some bird disease, I guess. I don't think you should be talking to me. Strangers—"

"Right," Corinne said, backing away. "Strangers aren't supposed to talk to you."

She usually loved reshelving books. Sometimes she'd run across a volume that a real librarian had shelved incorrectly, and it tickled her to return it to its rightful place. Today, though, as she finished emptying her cart of books, she had little appetite for the task, and even less appetite for the company of eldritch children with staring black eyes.

When all the books were in their places, she was done for the day. She gathered her purse from her locker, said goodbye to the librarians and Merry Christmas to the volunteer at the information desk, and rode the elevator down to the parking level. She crossed the garage, her heels clacking on the concrete, and searched her purse for her keys.

"Hey, beautiful," someone said.

She already had her keychain in her hand—the ring clutched in her fist, the keys bristling out between her fingers like tiny knives—when she looked up and saw that it was her husband who'd spoken. He'd parked his car next to hers. Grinning, arms open, he came toward her.

"Andrei," she said. "What are you—?"

By then he'd begun kissing her. It was, even by Andrei standards, an excellent kiss. Her hands went limp, and her keys dropped to the floor with a clank.

"Wow," she said, blinking up at him. "What's— Um— What's up?"

"I got the job," he said, stooping to fetch her keys.

"Pittsburgh?"

"Pittsburgh. Let's celebrate. Lunch. Anywhere. Name a place. Eighty-two Queen. Blossom." He stopped, looked at her, twirled her keys around his finger. "You're not happy. Why did I think you'd be happy?"

"Oh," she said in a small voice. "It's not that I'm not—"

He clapped his hand over his mouth. "It's your mother, isn't it? Of course. I'm so sorry."

"No, Andrei, don't—"

"It's not that I forgot or anything," he said. "It's just that it's such a fantastic opportunity, For us, not just for me."

"Me too," she said. "But—"

He sat on the bumper of his car with a flump. "Your mother, though. Less than a month ago, and here I am trying to 'celebrate.'" With two fingers of his right hand, he made half-hearted air quotes around _celebrate_. "I'm such a selfish pig."

"Andrei, no, really," she said gently, prying her keys from his hand. "It's not that at all. It's just— Well, I'm a Southern girl, Andrei. I never pictured myself living above the Mason-Dixon line."

"Oh," he said. "I can't commute by plane, Corinne. I can't fly every week. I _hate_ flying. You _know_ I hate flying."

"You do?"

He looked at her with disappointment and sadness, as if she'd never bothered to learn the correct spelling of his name, as if she'd failed to notice something as crucial and basic as that. To be understood, to be known perfectly, she thought—if that was was the essence of love, she'd fallen short.

She said, "I guess you do."

A woman came out of the elevator lobby with an armload of books and three kids in tow. The youngest child was crying, but the woman moved along briskly, seeming to ignore him. They all climbed into an old SUV. The mistuned engine sounded like a battalion of drummers beating out of time. The boom and bumble of it reverberated through the garage.

"I saw that little girl," Corinne said. "The one with the bird? You know, at the nail salon? We saw it on TV?"

He nodded. "I remember."

"There was no resurrection. It was just like I said. The bird didn't really die."

"She told you this," Andrei said. "The little girl."

"She said her dad made it up as a publicity stunt."

"Huh."

"I don't believe in God the way you do, Andrei. I don't believe in angels or the intercessory power of Mary or the wine turning to blood. I don't think I have the genes for it."

"So when we have kids, you don't want to raise them in the church."

"I don't know." She flung her hands in the air. "I don't know."

Andrei was quiet for some time. Finally, he said, "When I was in school, I always heard about girls who were there for an 'M-R-S degree.' It meant they didn't give a shit about academics—they only wanted to meet their future husbands. I always thought it was sexist—you know, a way of saying pretty girls couldn't be smart. I mean, it's a private school. Who'd spend forty thousand dollars just to meet a husband?"

"Only forty thousand," Corinne said. "Those were the days."

"Since the wedding, I feel like maybe I gave you your M-R-S degree. Maybe you don't want to be married to _me_. Maybe you just want to be married."

She looked at him.

"I know," he said weakly. "It's probably not true."

"Sometimes," she said, "I feel like you want a mother for your children, and—oh, well, whatever—it might as well be Corinne."

"Here we are then," he said.

"Here we are."

The air was clammy. Corinne's teeth began to chatter. Andrei stood up and pulled her toward him. He opened his coat and she huddled against him. She thought of getting into one of the cars and turning up the heat, but the damp chill seemed suitable, even perversely satisfying.

"When Mama left Daddy, she tried to take me with her."

"She did?"

"You didn't see it," she said. "At my granddad's house. He had this little shrine." She described the photos, the clippings, the recital programs. Andrei listened with his chin propped on top of her head. "He dedicated part of a room to making this apology, this wall-sized apology, so if she ever came back to the house, he could show it to her and say, 'Here. Look. I understand now. This is your life and it's important to you. I'm sorry I didn't see it when you were young.'"

"Sounds like a reasonable interpretation."

"But at the same time, I feel like he was right all along. He didn't think she could make a living as an opera singer, and—what do you know?—she couldn't. Three supporting roles, and then she quit. Why? I mean, just— Why?"

Andrei held her at arm's length. He was half-smiling, as if ready to laugh with her at some joke. As he searched her face, his smile faded. "It never occurred to you? The simplest answer?"

"Simplest answer?" She frowned at him. "It seems like— I— I can't see anything simple about it at all."

"She missed you," he said. "She missed her child."

Corinne backed away from him. Plucking at her lower lip, she gazed into the distance. _She missed you._ Could that be the entire explanation? _She missed her child._

All at once she began to felt queasy. She clutched her stomach. It was difficult to breathe.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"I don't know, I don't know."

"Do you need to sit down?"

She shook her head and waved him off. She thought she might vomit. She stumbled to the wall and laid her forehead against the cool concrete. It helped. Andrei came up beside her and smoothed her hair away from her face. Her breathing slowly returned to normal.

"That had to be a panic attack," he said.

Corinne didn't turn from the wall. "I was a shitty daughter and I'll be a shittier mom."

"Corinne."

"I know I'm almost twenty-nine years old and I should have everything figured out and be more than ready to live in the suburbs in a gigantic Georgian house with toile curtains and a dozen Catholic babies, but I'm not ready. I'm not ready."

Andrei said nothing. He rubbed her shoulders.

"That's it, then," she said. "We're at an impasse."

"How do you figure?"

"You want babies, I don't want babies."

"Well, but I thought—"

Now she turned around to face him. "You talked me into quitting school so I could have a baby," she said. "Don't pretend that—"

"No, no, no," he said, his hand in the air. His face reddened. He took a step back. "No."

"You said, 'Well, Corinne, I don't want to be my kids' grandparents' age.' You said, 'Well, Corinne, you don't want your water breaking in the middle of defending your thesis.'"

"You remember everything _I_ said, but nothing _you_ said? You said you couldn't plan a wedding and conduct research at the same time. You said you hated Public Administration because it wasn't wonky enough. You said you'd rather start over somewhere and get a Master of Economics. You said, 'Andrei, your job is to talk me into or out of quitting school.' When I asked you which way you were leaning, you said, 'Okay, your job is to talk me into quitting school.'"

Corinne slumped against the wall. Here it was again, the one fight to rule them all, the one fight to bind them. She advised him, cajoled him, convinced him—and then when he did what she wanted, she turned it against him.

"There's no impasse," Andrei said. "I mean, maybe we're at odds over Pittsburgh. Maybe _that's_ an impasse. But if you're not ready for babies, then how can we have babies? If you think I'm the kind of a guy who'd try to"—he swallowed hard—" _make_ a woman have a baby, then I don't know. I just don't know."

She looked at him from under her eyebrows. "We're not talking about the rhythm method here, are we? Because—"

Laughing, he pulled her to him. "Not even my mother is that Catholic."

_Now_ , she thought. _Now_ would be the time to tell him about Plan B. That she'd taken it in October. That she would've taken it again in November if they'd been apart. That she wasn't sorry she'd done it—even if, at the same time, she wished she hadn't needed to do it.

She laid her head on his chest and listened to his breathing and the thump of his heart. Even though they'd been married for half a year, she wasn't sure she was any more ready to be a wife than she was to be a mother. And if there were evidence at all that Andrei was well-suited to husbandhood, it was scant evidence indeed. In truth, they'd barely lived together since their wedding. It was no comfort to remember either their few days together each month or their many days apart.

Still, for now, here they were, she and her husband, in exactly the same place.
Chapter 27

Music began to play. It was his mother's voice, familiar and unmistakable, but also strange—thinner and more shrill than he was used to. The recording had to be an old one, from her coloratura days. Her youthful soprano, half arioso, half fire alarm, shoved long vowels and burred consonants up the stairs and through his bedroom door. He went to investigate.

In the study, his father's laptop sat on the desk, streaming the music through a pair of blocky little speakers. Dad lay on the couch, legs crossed at the ankle, hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed. He was still in his boxers, of course, for what was this household, if not a stew of gap-flied men? He didn't stir when John Carter came into the room, or when, a moment later, the doorbell rang.

Without a thought for the sidelight or the peephole—or for the fact that he was wearing pajama pants and a Buzz Lightyear T-shirt at noon on a Friday—John Carter went to the door and opened it. Scott Cable was standing on the piazza.

"Hey," Scott said, waving. He glanced at his own hand, seeming to notice for the first time what he was doing with it, and let it fall to his side. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Thank y—"

The _you_ transmuted into an _oof_ , because Scott abruptly grabbed him by the sleeve and drew him in for a long hug. Into John Carter's ear, he said, "Do you need anything?" He let go and stepped back. "I could help with the music for the service. "Have you ever heard the Pie Jesu from John Rutter's Requiem?"

"Mama didn't really believe in Jesu, I don't think."

"But she definitely believed in John Rutter. We could put something together. Just say when and where."

Ben had brought their mother's ashes home from the Cremation Society. The urn, a cube of black marble, sat on the console table in the entryway. There was talk of a burial—but so far it was only talk. No one knew what Mama would've wanted. Even if the plain truth of it was that she simply wouldn't have cared, no one could imagine her sealed up behind a polished slab, slotted into some dank cubbyhole like a wheel of cheese. And so nothing had happened, nothing had been planned. John Carter suspected that nothing would continue to happen, until the absence of a plan _became_ the plan.

He said, "I guess we're, um, still deciding?"

Scott tugged his beard. "Can I come in? I wanted to..."

John Carter stepped back and bumped the door open with his hip. The chirpy aria was still playing in the study. As he came into the entryway, Scott cocked his head one way and then the other, like a puppy hearing a sound for the first time.

"Maria Callas?"

John Carter shrugged. "I guess. Maybe. I don't know." He thought of his dad—or actually of his dad's open fly—just on the other side of the entryway wall. Backing down the hallway toward the kitchen, he said, "Do you want something to drink?"

Scott followed him. "Sure. Yes, sure. Whatever you've got."

"There's orange juice. People brought us a ton of stuff, but Ben kind of ate it all. Somebody brought a whole chicken—no kidding. I'm pretty sure there are multiple lasagnas in the freezer." He frowned. "What was the question?"

"OJ is fine," Scott said.

In the kitchen, John Carter poured two glasses of juice and set them on the island. Scott pulled out a barstool, then put it back. He took a drink and wiped his mouth with his thumb. He stroked his mustache with his fingertips, smoothing the hairs, pushing them out to either side. In the study, the music continued to play. In full shriek, Mama hit a remarkably high note with the brass blaring behind her.

"What's it about, _Maria Callas_?" John Carter said. "Is it based on Shakespeare or something?"

"Shakespeare?" Frowning, Scott tugged his beard. His eyes cleared. "No, John Carter. Maria Callas is the _singer_. I think it's"—he tilted his head, listening—" _Il Pirata_."

"But it's not—"

"What am I saying? I know it's _Il Pirata_. I used to have a mixtape of mad scenes, including this one. I also had Beverly Sills singing _Anna Bolena_. Joan Sutherland from _Lucia_. Waltraud Meier as Kundry." He sipped, wiped, combed. "Whenever I needed to relax, I used to smoke a bowl and play it over and over."

John Carter sucked a bit of pulp from his knuckle. "Scott, I think—"

"I should _not_ have said that." Scott wagged his finger. "Don't. Do. Drugs."

"Huh? No, I meant—"

"Other people's delusions used to make me feel sane, especially if they were deluded in Italian." Scott nodded toward the hall. "Nobody's better than Maria Callas, though."

"But this _isn't_ Maria Callas. This is—was— _is_ my mother."

Head turned, jaw slack, Scott stood and listened. Like a man drawn by a hypnotic suggestion, took a few steps down the hall. When he came back, he looked as if he'd witnessed something horrifying or inspiring or both. "She was..."

_Screechy?_ John Carter thought. _Annoying? Ear-piercing?_

Hands out, stumbling forward, Scott returned to the island and now, finally, sat on a barstool. "Ravishing," he said. "I really thought I was hearing Maria Callas. All year long, I was down the hall from this voice and I never knew it."

The mad scene ended. They fell into a fragile silence, holding their breath for the next aria, the next bit of madness. But there was no other music. A minute passed. Ninety seconds. Two minutes. John Carter wanted— _needed_ —to say something, but the only word he could summon was _lasagna_.

Having drained his glass, Scott set it gently on the counter. He blotted his mouth and fixed his mustache. "About this semester..."

What _about_ this semester? What about the missed classes, the skipped lessons, the unfinished papers, the untaken finals? "Talk about a mad scene," John Carter said.

"Do you still have that book of Brahms pieces I gave you?"

John Carter nodded.

"Beautiful," Scott said. "Is it here?"

"I'll get it," John Carter said.

He hadn't played since before Thanksgiving. He imagined the piano cowering from him, a rejected lover shrinking from his gaze, but when he walked down the hall to the music room and looked in, there was nothing to see, really. It was the same old place where he'd spent half his waking life, a space as familiar as his own thoughts. The piano gleamed in the halogen light, mute but not at all unwelcoming.

He walked in and opened the bench. The Brahms lay on top of some other stuff. When he turned to go back to the kitchen, he had to stop short. Scott was standing in the doorway. He reached out his hand, and John Carter passed him the book. Scott flipped through the pages as if looking for signs of defacement.

But no. That wasn't it at all.

He opened the book to the second piece— _Intermezzo, Andante teneramente_ —and laid it open on the piano rack. "Here," he said. "How 'bout a run-through on this bad boy?"

John Carter narrowed his eyes. "What are you trying to prove?"

"Nothing." Scott grinned. "I happen to like Brahms."

"This feels weird."

"Just do it," Scott said, his eyes widening.

With a sigh, John Carter sat on the piano bench. A scum of dust covered the fallboard. He wiped it with his sleeve. Opened it. Stared at the keys.

"Tenderly," Scott said. " _Teneramente_ means 'tenderly.'"

"I remember," John Carter said, more crankily than he'd intended.

He laid his fingers on the keys. He lifted them again, mustered his courage, and played. The first few bars were perfect—not too loud, not too slow, as tender-sounding as anything he'd ever played. The damper pedal warmed swiftly under the touch of his bare foot. Starting halfway down the page, there was a series of short phrases, each marked with a crescendo and decrescendo. He took pleasure in making them sing. He imagined them as a string of affectionate whispers, endearments between lovers.

Everything was marked _piano_ or _pianissimo_ , but the dynamics kept getting away from him. With his fingers drumming the keys, the felted hammers might have been the mechanism that powered his own heart. The piano might have been a calliope. The room might have been a fairgrounds, a carnival, a circus. The instrument's full-throated voice filled the whole house—the whole city, for all he knew—with joy.

At the end of the piece, he nearly went back to the start—anything to keep playing, playing, playing—but Scott touched his shoulder. John Carter stopped, finally, and looked around, blinking.

"So." Scott wiped away a bit of dust that clung between a pair of keys. "That was the second time you played that, ever, right?"

John Carter nodded.

"And you didn't hit a single wrong note. You maybe have a lot to learn in life, but how to push down piano keys and make notes come out isn't one of them."

"But the dynamics—"

"Balls to the wall, I know. But still." Scott stroked his beard. "As I see it, you have two paths open to you. One. You work like a demon to raise your GPA. You take all your makeups and maybe start some of your pre-reqs all over again. Whatever it takes, you finish school so you have a shot at a career."

"That sounds hard. What's option two?"

"I didn't think that far ahead. You were supposed to jump on option one."

"I bombed out in music theory," John Carter said. "That's pretty crucial."

"Between you and me," Scott said, "Jean-Marc Archambault is not the best theory teacher I ever met."

"Maybe I'm not the best student you ever met."

"You're good," Scott said. His expression was unusually sharp. "You're good because you love to play. You don't get this good because your mother made you practice when you were five. If you give up on music, you'll regret it forever."

Just like that, John Carter's eyes were itchy and hot, and he was perilously close to real tears. For a yeti in flip-flops, incapable of working a razor or completing a sentence, Scott had a knack for the awkward truth.

He touched John Carter's arm. "Y'all here in the South are taught to listen to your elders, right? So listen. You have to stick it out."

Feeling dumb in all the senses of the word, John Carter blinked and nodded. As if in obedience to some signal, they stood. Scott squeezed his shoulder and walked away. John Carter heard the snap of his flip-flops receding, and then suddenly he was coming back with a quicker, heavier tread, his footsteps a series of thuds.

"Right now," Scott said, pointing toward the front of the house. "Hurry." Except for two spots of color in the hollows of his cheeks, just above the line of his beard, his face was as white as piano keys. "There's a lot of..."

John Carter pushed past him and hurried to the study, where his dad, still in his stupid boxers, lay in a heap near the desk. Scott, in his last unfinished sentence, could only have been referring to _blood_. There was a lot of _blood_.

It had pooled under his dad's head—a lot of it, yes, but then again, once a person's blood started coming out of his body, anything more than a little seemed like a lot. John Carter knelt at his father's side. The air tasted like pennies. He gently lifted his dad's head and searched his scalp for wounds. One spot felt mushier than the others—that must be it.

Scott had been hovering around outside the study door. John Carter sent him for towels, and he came back with an armload—two dozen at least, ranging in size from washcloths to beach towels. John Carter folded a hand towel into a square and pressed it to the back of his dad's head.

"My phone," he said to Scott. "It's in my room. Call nine-one-one."

Scott blinked at him but didn't move.

"Now? Please?" John Carter said.

After a moment, Scott sprinted up the stairs, one of his flip-flops tumbling away behind him.

John Carter folded two more towels and slipped them into place under his dad's head.

With a groan, Dad said, "My head hurts."

"I'm not surprised. You hit it pretty hard on something, not sure what." John Carter studied the nearest corner of the desk, thinking he might see some trace evidence—a smear of blood with some hair in it, some tiny, gruesome clumps of flesh. "Something sharp."

But his dad had already faded out again, his mouth lolling open.

Scott returned, holding John Carter's cell phone as if it were something stinky. "I don't know the passcode." He edged forward, put the device into John Carter's hand, and stumbled back as if from a rush of flame. "I can't..."

Holding the towels and his dad's head with one hand, John Carter used the other to unlock the phone and dial. He asked for an ambulance. He said there was a fifty-year-old man with a head injury. By the time he disconnected the call, he could already hear the distant cry of a siren. He sent Scott outside to flag down the ambulance. This time, Scott obeyed instantly and without complaint.

The paramedics, when they arrived, were two weary-looking men in slouchy uniforms. It didn't seem possible that two adults, a gurney, and a couple of plastic tackle boxes could take up so much space, but once the men had rolled their equipment into the study, there wasn't a square inch left over. John Carter flattened his back against a wall.

One of the paramedics looked around. His eyelids were heavy, as if he'd just woken from a nap. "I remember this place," he said to his partner. "Remember, Hank? Last time, he was in the kitchen." Now he turned to John Carter. "This your dad? We'll get him fixed up, don't you worry."

The other paramedic, Hank, had crouched on the floor. He snapped open one of the tackle boxes and poked around among its contents. Looking up, he said, "Hey, Joe? A little help here?"

"Awesome kitchen," Joe said, squatting next to Hank. "Remember? Granite countertops? Stainless appliances?"

While they went to work with stethoscopes and bandages and a blood pressure cuff, John Carter slipped from the room. The front door stood open. When he went to shut it, he caught a glimpse of Scott pacing the lawn. John Carter left the door ajar and, stepping into his dad's gardening clogs, went outside into the gummy air. The cloudy sky seemed either very high or very low, he couldn't decide which. An ambulance sat in the driveway, its rear doors hanging open, its red and amber lights strobing.

"How's it going in there?" Scott asked, panting like an exhausted dog. "Blood's not my thing."

"We have an awesome kitchen," John Carter said.

"What?"

"My mom picked out all the stuff. In the kitchen, I mean. The granite, the cabinets, the sink. All of it. The bathroom, too."

Frowning, Scott reached out a hand, touched John Carter's arm. "Are you feeling okay?"

"I remember them talking about it all. Going over everything. Together. Sitting in the study—together—looking at magazines, picking colors. They did all that together—shoulder to shoulder, like." He paused. "Or maybe not. Maybe she picked everything." He paused again. "Of _course_ she picked everything."

Behind him, the door banged open. In the entryway, a photo dropped from its hook. Even from five or six yards away, John Carter heard the glass break.

The kitchen-admiring paramedic, Joe, stood in the doorway and made a face. "Oops," he said. "Sorry."

The gurney nudged him from behind, pushing him through the door. He stepped aside, and Hank wheeled the gurney onto the piazza. From a distance, it was difficult to tell whether Hank was pissed off or merely purposeful. Then again, it was also difficult to tell at close range.

Hank and Joe loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance. John Carter and Scott waited on the lawn. A drop of rain struck John Carter's forehead. He winced and wiped it away with the heel of his hand.

Joe came over. "Riding with us?"

John Carter hadn't dared to hope that he could ride in the ambulance. It was such an exhilarating possibility that he'd assumed it must be forbidden. He gave a nod. Joe opened the passenger's-side door for him and boosted him into the seat.

While John Carter was fumbling around, looking for the seat belt, Scott knocked on the window. John Carter couldn't figure out how to roll it down—no crank, no button, no lever—so he opened the door and leaned out.

"I'll meet you," Scott said. He glanced toward the piazza. "I have my bike."

There _was_ a bike, John Carter saw now, a bright red fixie with low handlebars and a high seat. It was leaning against the piazza railing. "Okay," he said. "You don't—" _You don't have to_ , he was about to say. _You don't have to_ , but then, but then— "If you don't mind, then, yes? Please?"

"Do I need a key to lock the house? Do you have your dad's wallet, ID, insurance card?"

"Oh, rats," John Carter said. "I didn't think— I'd better—"

John Carter opened his door a little way, waited for Scott to take a step back, and then swung the door wide open. Before he could slip to the ground, a hand stopped him, a hand around his biceps. It was Joe. "T minus ten seconds, little buddy."

"My wallet's in my room on my desk," John Carter told Scott. "Dad's is in the front room. Keys in the entryway."

Scott gave a thumbs up. "I got it. It's handled. I'll meet you there."

The ambulance doors closed— _whump, whump, whump_ —and Joe cranked the engine and they were moving. It was just a few blocks, a drive of no more than four minutes. At the hospital, he followed Joe and Hank into the emergency room. The big glass doors parted with a hiss and shut again with a whoosh and thump. Faces swam by him. The bluish fluorescents hummed above him, B-natural against C-sharp.

He had no idea what was expected of him. He should do something. What was he supposed to do? He should talk to someone. It was okay to ask questions. He should ask someone what to do.

His phone chimed. Nothing important—someone had liked something on Facebook—but it was enough to remind him that he held the device in his hand. A miracle! A lifeline! He did what he should have done at the beginning. He called Corinne.
Chapter 28

Ben ran along the Battery, the grayish brown of Charleston Harbor on his right, the brownish green of White Point Garden on his left. He turned west on Tradd Street and loped past houses of pink and gray stucco, fences of mottled brick, gates of hand-wrought iron. Somewhere to the north, a siren was blaring.

A drop of rain landed on the bridge of his nose. Another struck his cheek. A third hit the nape of his neck and rolled down his spine. Blinking, flinching, he turned north on Rutledge. At Broad, he hopped from foot to foot while he waited for traffic. The siren wailed louder and louder and abruptly ceased.

Sure, he thought, he _could_ be an all-weather runner, humping through the streets come rain or shine or hundred-percent humidity. And it _was_ good to get his heart pumping again. After the deep powdery dust of Helmand Province, running on stone flags and concrete slabs made his legs feel springy and strong. So his shirt'd get wet. So his shoes'd get muddy. He was a fucking marine. He was used to it.

Still, on the other hand, fuck that shit.

He crossed Broad. A sprinkle of rain, a half-hearted shower that was ending almost as it began, spattered the surface of Colonial Lake. The blocks flew by under his feet. His endorphin high was just kicking in. He was just beginning to feel as if he might never want to stop running.

At Montagu, he sprinted toward home. Someone was standing in the side yard. Skinny. Bearded. Pre-MARPAT cammies. Jimmy La Flamme. Ben pivoted on the ball of one foot and jogged up the driveway. Arms akimbo, La Flamme stood staring at the house as if it were a puzzle that needed solving.

"Shit," La Flamme said, grinning. He stuck his hand out. "There you are."

Ben wiped his palm on his shirt and shook La Flamme's hand. "Sorry about the sweat." He nodded toward the house. "No one home?"

"Rang the bell a couple of times. Peeked in and didn't see anyone moving."

"My dad and brother were here when I left." Ben patted his pockets—except that he didn't have any pockets. He sprang up the piazza steps and tried the door. Locked. Double-locked. "Fuck."

La Flamme had followed him onto the piazza. "I take it there's no spare hidden under a rock somewhere?"

Ben shook his head. Now that he'd quit moving, sweat streamed down his cheeks and the back of his neck. He mopped his face with the tail of his shirt, which hardly helped at all. He looked around, searching in vain for likely hiding places, as if he could fucking retcon a spare key into existence.

Wind shook the trees. All went quiet and still, and then after a moment's pause came a steady drenching wash. Water sang in the downspouts.

"Welp," La Flamme said. " _I'm_ not going anywhere for the time being." He fiddled with the collar of his shirt, where he'd somehow hidden a joint.

Ben stared at it. "You're smoking that out here?"

As if by way of reply, La Flamme produced a lighter and fired up. "I'm white and it's less than an ounce. Statistically speaking, I'm safe."

"Dude. No. I mean this is my parents' house."

"So...you don't want any?" La Flamme offered the joint.

"Didn't say that." Ben grinned and took a hit.

La Flamme dug around in his back pocket. "Almost forgot why I came." He handed over a smallish Manila envelope, much crinkled and bulging at the bottom. "From your buddy Owens."

"Evans," Ben said.

"Evans. Sorry." La Flamme sat down with his legs crossed at the ankle and his back propped against the door. "I told him I was coming through here and he asked me to bring it. He also says you should send him some Red Vines."

"He gave you my address?"

La Flamme shook his head. "There's only one Littlefield in the white pages. I took a shot. I thought I might see you last night. I was signing at Captain's Comics."

"Fuck," Ben said. "Didn't even know about it."

"Aren't you a little bit fucking curious?" La Flamme said, nodding toward the envelope.

Evans had sealed up the flap with two or three layers of packing tape. Ben tore open the ass end. A long, narrow strap of braided parachute cord dropped into his hand. Just about everybody aboard Dwyer, including Ben, had woven something or other out of paracord. A bracelet, usually—but this was no bracelet. It measured almost two feet. A nickel-plated O-ring had been woven into each end. He dangled the strap in the air for a moment, studied it, wound it around his fingers. "Sheet far," he said.

Between tokes, La Flamme said, "He told me you'd know what it was for."

Ben looked again into the envelope, hoping to find a note. No such luck. He kicked himself for thinking Evans would know how to spell his own name, much less write a letter. He crumpled the envelope into a tiny ball and flung it into the rainy yard. He'd just have to go get it again later, but for the moment it made him feel better to see it fly.

"The fuck is it?" La Flamme said. "A necklace?"

After weighing the thing in his hand and turning it over on itself, Ben understood. It was a collar, a slip collar for Mary. All the air went out of him. He slumped back against the porch railing. Now that he knew what it _was_ , he knew even less what it was _for_. Was it a souvenir? A reproach? A piece of mourning jewelry? He pulled the strapping through one of the rings and held up the collar for La Flamme to see.

Nodding, La Flamme licked his fingers and pinched the head of the joint until it went dead. He spirited it away to wherever he'd gotten it from. "He told me about the dog. What's his name again? Evans?"

"Yeah, Evans." Ben sniffed the paracord. It smelled like nothing, least of all like dog. Mary had never worn the thing. Ben could get his head through the opening with room to spare. He put it on. "What did he tell you about her?"

"Just that she died in the line of duty. I mean, that's what he said. 'Line of duty.' He didn't go into detail. He did show me where you buried her."

They'd brought her back to camp, hoping a corpsman could do something for her, but somewhere along the way she'd stopped breathing. The two of them, Evans and Littlefield, had dug a grave for her outside the HESCOs, where she'd never be trod on or uncovered by accident. Someday the Marines would leave, and the Afghan National Army would take control of the camp. It wouldn't be right to leave her there under the feet of strangers, beneath the marching grounds of men who'd never seen her or heard her name, who'd mistake her bones for a wild animal's.

Ben peered into the house through the sidelight. He could just make out the shape of his mother's urn sitting on the console table. There'd been no discussion at all, not a word, but everyone—Ben included—had assumed he'd be the one to handle the remains. He hadn't minded. It was fitting enough. He was used to the solemnity of it. He had his own private rituals and superstitions for handling the dead.

Held in the hands, the urn seemed to weigh nothing at all. Ten or fifteen pounds—far less than the smallest kettlebells in Dwyer's outdoor gym. How did a hundred-odd-pound woman burn down to ten or fifteen pounds of ash?

Dumb question. Dumb fucking question. The body could turn out to be as illusory as the soul. He'd seen it first-hand. On one of his earliest recoveries, he and Baker had had to go into a Humvee with dental spoons and Q-tips. An IED blast had liquefied everyone inside. Three men—six hundred pounds or more of adult male—had been reduced to a scum of rust-colored gelatin.

Dirt and goo. That's all anyone amounted to, in the end. Mary. Mama. All those guys he'd put in steel coffins. His private rituals and superstitions were no help at all, no protection whatsoever from suffering or grief.

He yanked on the collar around his neck. He wanted to smash something. He wanted to batter the door down, kick the console table to splinters, crush that fucking black marble urn with his naked hands. Once he got into the house, he'd finish the work his dad had started and strip the bathroom down to the studs, using his fingernails and teeth if necessary. If he could go back in time, back to that spot among the spindle trees, he'd beat the ever-loving fuck out of that old Afghan. If he were Superman, he'd punch the earth out of its orbit.

La Flamme had gotten to his feet. He said, "Did you hear me?"

"Fuck. What?" Ben ran his hands through his sweaty hair. His heart was pounding harder now that it had during his run. "No. What?"

"Said I was sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"'Cause I gave you shit about that dog. I thought you were pulling my chain, no pun intended. Cadaver dog? Sounded like you made it up."

"Dude, you apologize a lot."

La Flamme smiled, a little awkwardly, and backed up about half a step. "Do I?"

"You're kind of an idol of mine," Ben said. "I know I missed your signing, but don't think it's because I don't love your comics, 'cause I do, man. I do."

"Th-thanks?" La Flamme said.

"It's weird to hear you apologize for shit all the fuckin' time. I mean, you actually fuckin' apologized for _Terrorstan_. Dude, you can't apologize for _Terrorstan_. That's like Frank Miller apologizing for _Sin City_."

"It's not _Sin City_ ," La Flamme said weakly. "I mean, thanks, but—"

"Don't apologize for your shit. Own it."

Raising his hands as if in surrender, La Flamme backed up another step and said, "Fuck, dude. If you're this aggressive _after_ smoking weed..."

Ben hunkered down and bounced on the balls of his feet. He took a couple of deep breaths and touched the rings of Mary's collar. "My mom died," he said. "I'm off the map here. I never lost anyone before."

"Well, there was the dog."

If that was supposed to be a joke, Ben thought, he'd kill La Flamme in hot blood, right where he stood. But when he looked up and scanned the other man's face for signs of irony or mischief, he found none. The opposite, in fact. La Flamme looked like a man about to lead a graveside prayer.

"My mom and I are close," La Flamme said. "It'd be the hardest thing in the world, losing her."

"Let me tell you about my mother," Ben said. He sank to the floor and sat with his arms resting on his knees. "I never got to be an Eagle Scout."

La Flamme sat facing him. "Because of your mother."

"My project was fostering puppies, doing basic obedience stuff till they were ready to be trained as hearing ear dogs. My dog was named Bozo. I got some other guys to do it, too, you know, for the leadership part of it, but I guess maybe—" He kneaded the back of his neck. "I must be a shitty leader, 'cause they all fuckin' bailed on me."

"Sucks."

"I could've maybe squeaked by anyway, except Bozo took a shit in the house. If you knew my mother, man—" He shook his head. "Straight to the fucking pound. And that was the end of my project."

"Well, fuck."

"Mama then decided the Boy Scouts are a paramilitary organization and homophobic to boot, so I shouldn't participate. So I quit scouting and joined the Marines."

"Let me understand this," La Flamme said. He licked his lips. "You enlisted...in wartime...passive-aggressively?"

Ben shrugged.

Shaking his head, La Flamme said, "Man, I think I get why you told me that story, but I'm on your mom's side. The BSA _is_ a paramilitary organization and homophobic to boot."

The rain had let up. Ben got to his feet. "Come help me with something."

He led the way through the squishy side yard to the narrow front lawn. La Flamme was slow to follow. When he finally caught up, he looked flustered, like a bird that had had its feathers ruffled.

"What are we doing?" he said.

"I need a boost."

"A boost?"

"The only window in the house that doesn't have a lock is that one." Ben pointed to his bedroom window on the second floor. "Just give me a boost. I'll come down and unlock the door."

La Flamme laughed until his laugh broke up into coughing.

"What?" Ben said.

"This is not going to work, dude."

"Have a heart." Ben plucked at his sweat-damp shirt. "I'm kind of freezing out here."

"It's not about heart." La Flamme nodded toward the piazza. "That's a metal roof. There's nothing to hold on to."

"I used to climb in and out when I was in high school. There was a tree." Ben waved toward the spot halfway between the house and the fence where an oak had once stood—not that there was any sign of it now, other than a broad shallow dip in the middle of the lawn. "I just need to get some height, that's all."

La Flamme gave a shrug and a sad shake of the head. They positioned themselves under the piazza roof. In the downpour, the leaf-choked gutters had overflowed, and the spill had churned up a marshy bog along the front of the house. There wasn't a particularly firm place to stand. La Flamme braced himself with one foot on the best ground he could find and the other buttressed against the piazza's foundation. He locked his fingers together and crouched over. An awkward pose—so awkward that Ben nearly decided to abandon his plan. But he _was_ cold. More than anything in the world, he wanted a change of clothes and a hot cup of coffee.

Ben braced the toe of one foot against the piazza railing. He tucked the heel of the opposite foot into the slot La Flamme had made with his hands. He reached up and grabbed hold of the gutter. He pulled himself up, and La Flamme boosted him.

All at once, Ben found himself mostly airborne. His flight lasted for no more than a second or two, and then his chest thumped hard against the rim of the gutter. He scrabbled at the rain-slick surface of the piazza roof, but just as La Flamme had predicted, there was nothing there, no handhold. He slid backward and down, his legs pinwheeling in the air, his nails scraping the metal roof. He grabbed for the gutter, but the gutter came loose in a shower of water and rotting leaves. When he landed, it was with a thud, but with La Flamme to break his fall.

Hugging his bruised ribs, moaning, panting, Ben rolled away into the soupy lawn. La Flamme was bleeding from the nose and mouth, and the blood-smeared white thing he had in his hand appeared to be a tooth, but he was cackling like a fool, a motherfucking fool.
Chapter 29

Leland woke to the sound of screaming. It was a woman, he thought. A woman in a great deal of pain. But not Corinne. Not Anna Grace.

Well, no. Of _course_ it wasn't Anna Grace. She'd have bitten a wooden dowel in half before straining her voice like that. More to the point—

Where was he, anyway? He opened his eyes.

Yes. Right. The emergency room. A beige bed in a beige room at the back of the unit. He remembered, now, being wheeled in, having his vitals taken, shivering under a pile of blankets. He remembered Ramanujan joking with him—"We've got to stop meeting like this"—and shaking his hand and asking when the new book would be out.

The screaming went on and on, ragged and inexhaustible, until Leland wondered what kept the woman's vocal chords from breaking. Her throat should have given out long ago. It frustrated him that he could neither help her nor make her shut up, and it shamed him that he wanted so very, very badly to make her shut up. _Just...please...shut...up. Please...please...please._

"She lost an eye."

Leland flinched. He'd thought he was alone, but here was a voice at his elbow. When he looked up, he expected to see Ramanujan, but no. Scott Cable had somehow, for some reason, materialized at his bedside.

"You," said Leland.

Peering into the hallway, Scott spoke in a low voice. "Were you awake when she was asking why she couldn't see?"

Leland shook his head.

"She didn't know until someone told her." In a stage whisper, he said, "'Why can't I _see_? What's wrong with my _eye_?'"

"God," said Leland. "That's..."

"Unnerving. Terrifying. Unimaginable."

Leland tossed aside the blankets. He patted his limbs and torso, searching for IVs and electrodes. All clear, except for his hospital ID bracelet. He tugged at it, trying to tear it free, but it wouldn't give. He got to his knees and leaned over the side rail, fumbling around underneath for a lever or switch.

"What're you doing?" Scott said.

"Getting out of here."

Splotches of color bloomed in Scott's cheeks, spreading upward from the margins of his beard. "Do you think you should...?" He put out his hands, patted the air. "You really shouldn't."

"I feel fine," Leland said. It wasn't strictly true—he was headachy and queasy and he couldn't shake the dread that he was dying of something horrible—but he still had both eyes, that was the thing. "Where is the goddamn—?"

He couldn't operate the rail, and he had no intention of somersaulting over it like a child on a jungle gym. He scooted to the foot of the bed and dropped his legs over and hopped down. Standing barefoot and bare-legged on the linoleum, he became aware, somewhat belatedly, that he was more naked than not. Boxers underneath a hospital gown, that was all.

For a moment, he and Scott looked at one another. Leland shifted his weight from foot to foot. Scott opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it again.

Leland spotted a paper grocery bag sitting on one of the hard plastic chairs. He looked at Scott, the sack, Scott again. Scott's eyes flicked away. Leland lunged across the small room, grabbing the paper bag as if Scott might try to get to it first.

In fact, Scott appeared to have no interest in the bag. He went to the door and closed it and stood with his back against it. He said, "You know, I hate to say this. I think I might have to stop you from leaving."

In the bag, Leland found a pair of jeans, neatly folded, and a wadded-up white T-shirt. The jeans must have come from his bedroom. The shirt might have been the one he'd been wearing earlier in the day.

Turning away, he stripped off the hospital gown and let it fall to the floor. He thought of Carolina Beach, of that boy in the bookstore arcade. Travis. God, that horrible, self-parodying name. Why not Jethro or Jim Bob or Li'l Abner?

But never mind the name. When he imagined displaying himself as Travis had, that day in the video booth, the idea of it was shockingly potent. The vulnerability of nakedness, even of near-nakedness, made his heart thump against his ribs, and he was getting an erection.

At the same time, in another part of his mind, he was thinking about Anna Grace—or if not of her explicitly, not by name, then at least of his betrayal. The weight of it fell on him all over again. A craving for expiation gnawed at him. Whose job was it to forgive you if you didn't believe in sin?

Stepping hurriedly into his jeans, he stuffed his hard cock down one pant leg and zipped up. He put on his shirt and tugged at the bottom hem, stretching it downward. Finally, he turned back.

"You've got stitches," Scott said, as though that would settle everything. "You don't remember getting stitches?"

Leland didn't trust himself to speak while he still had a hard-on. He shook his head.

"I think they'd prefer it if..." Scott made the familiar gesture, opening his hand, setting free a captive bird.

Leland touched his forehead, where he'd been sewn up on his birthday.

"In the back," said Scott, twirling his finger in the air.

At the back of his head, right of center, Leland found a gauze bandage surrounded by cloth tape and stubble. It was difficult, working only by feel, to take the measure of the spot, but he guessed it had to be six inches long and three inches wide. "Shit," he said.

"I don't think it's anything major." Scott held up his thumb and forefinger, showing a gap of two or three inches. "Ten stitches, I think? There was—" He cleared his throat. "There was a lot of blood."

Leland half-remembered searching in his desk drawers for AA batteries, grumbling to himself because his speakers had gone dead. His legs had simply folded beneath him. Maybe one knee had given way before the other, turning him in such a way that he'd struck his head on the edge of a drawer. He touched a tender spot through the bandage, winced, dropped his hand.

Useful in its way, that twinge of pain: He needed some help staying in the present moment. He still wanted to get out of here, but the longer he talked with Scott, the less likely he was to escape. He drummed his toes on the floor. Still barefoot, and there were no shoes in the bag. He needed to decide, and quickly. Would he attract too much attention without shoes, and if so, what should he do about it?

Stepping away from the door, Scott kicked off his flip-flops. "Wear mine?"

"So you're _not_ going to stop me from leaving?"

With a shrug, Scott said, "I'm having a moment of self-awareness. I'm a lover, not a fighter. Do you want me to create a diversion? I could start hollering."

The door opened suddenly. It was Ramanujan, hair agleam, eyes flashing, one side of his mouth turned up. He was carrying a file folder. "Are you doctoring and dashing?"

"Look," Leland said. "Look. I don't belong here. I fell. That's all. I still have both eyes. Thank you for the stitches. I'm fine to go home."

The doctor peered at him over the wire frames of his glasses. He tapped the edge of the folder against the palm of his hand. Chastened, Leland sat on the edge of the bed. He glanced at Scott, but Scott was gazing at the ceiling and combing his fingers through his beard.

"There was something in your blood work," Ramanujan said. "I want to draw another sample and do some follow-up testing."

"'There was something'? What kind of something?"

"Two hormone levels that are out of balance. I want to do an antibody test to check for Hashimoto's. I'm also sending you for a PET scan."

"I've had PET scans," Leland said.

"Months ago. Things change in the body over time. For example, in September, these hormone levels weren't so out of whack. So now we check things again, to see what else has changed." He waited a moment. "Okay?"

"Okay," Leland said.

With a nod, Ramanujan left the room. While the door was open, Leland realized that the one-eyed woman had stopped screaming. Had she been sedated? Had they taken her to surgery? Had she died? What would it be like to live with one eye? Would simple things—walking, driving, watching movies—become more awkward?

"What exactly is Hashimoto's?" he said.

"I don't know." Scott moved a chair to the bedside and sat down. "Were you aware there was a doctor here, not thirty seconds ago?"

"Funny thing. It didn't even occur to me to ask him." Leland looked at Scott. "Don't take this the wrong way, but why are you here? Where's John Carter?"

"He's in the waiting room. He seemed kind of..." Scott gestured vaguely with his fingertips.

"Freaked out?"

"I told him I'd sit with you while he cooled off. I have an ulterior motive as well. I think I need to make amends. It's about Anna Grace." He took a breath. "I saw..."

_I saw... I saw..._ While Leland waited for the end of the sentence—and what were the odds that it would ever come?—he tried to fill in the blank for himself. _I saw your wife on the sly, every afternoon for months. I saw your hard-on after you hugged me that time. I saw you go into that bookstore._

"I knew she had a problem." Scott spoke more hastily than usual, more hoarsely. "There's a kind of tremor in the voice. If you've been a drinker yourself, you recognize it."

"A tremor," Leland said.

"I can't explain it any better than that. It was subtle with Anna Grace, but I noticed it almost the day we met."

"In October?"

"Not you and I, Anna Grace and I. When she and I met, I noticed it. I should have said something. Something more direct. Instead, I gave her that opera, as a hint."

"What?"

" _Under the Volcano_. Someone gave me the book when I was drinking, and I couldn't get all the way through it. I was drinking so much I kept passing out. It wasn't the book itself that convinced me, but the fact that I couldn't read it. I couldn't focus, I couldn't parse the sentences. I couldn't _read_. That was my reality check. I hoped the opera might help Anna Grace the same way." Scott shook his head. His cheeks reddened. "It all made perfect sense to me, until I put it in words just now."

Some while ago, after sampling a number of operas—stabbing knives of music, soprano and tenor voices jangling together like glass shards in a tin box—Anna Grace had gotten stuck on one of them. Sometimes Leland had come upon her in the kitchen, humming or singing one of the arias. He'd remarked on it. The loveliness of the melodies, the lyricism of the words. _A bearded devil. A thing of dreams._ Why had he never thought to ask her what she was singing, why she was humming a tune about a bearded devil?

"She had a beautiful voice," Scott said. "I wish I could've heard her sing. You know, in person."

"She flubbed something at her last recital. Ah, what's it called? _Kinderlieder_? _Kindertottenlieder_?"

" _Kindertotenlieder_. It's Mahler."

"She wasn't in good voice. She—" Leland clutched at the bedclothes. He felt close to gagging. "You think _you_ should've said something. Jesus."

"Have you ever been to San Francisco?"

"No, never."

"The summer after my husband died was the hottest and sunniest anyone could ever remember. Grief is hard enough on a day like today, when the rain just makes you want to curl up and sleep. It's worse on the sunniest, warmest day of July. Everyone's out in sundresses and tank tops. People are humming and whistling without even realizing it. I even caught a MUNI driver smiling to himself." He looked sidelong at Leland. "You'll just have to trust me on this. That is absolutely unprecedented."

"Husband?" Leland said. "You had a husband?"

"For a second," Scott said. "Back in 'oh-four. San Francisco started issuing marriage licenses in February, and we got ours on the second-to-last day. March tenth, two thousand four. That was my actual wedding anniversary. You have to understand. I never thought I'd _have_ an actual wedding anniversary.

"It got voided anyway, later on, but we never stopped using the H-word. He was already sick on our first anniversary, and he didn't make it to the second. Pancreatic cancer. It got to stage four before we even knew about it."

"I'm sorry," Leland said. A failure of words, he thought—bailing the _Titanic_ with a teacup, bringing a toothpick to a knife fight, battling a forest fire with an eyedropper—but he had to say _something_.

"After he died, I felt like someone had wrapped me in bubble wrap, you know? I couldn't hear. I'd be listening to a student or sitting in a recital— I'd be listening, but I couldn't _hear_. Music I loved and knew by heart sounded like..."

"Noise?"

"I decided the Victorians had it right. The whole mourning thing. We should cover the mirrors. We should dress in black. We should withdraw from society and hide ourselves away in darkened rooms."

"I destroyed my bathroom. Does that count?"

Scott seemed not to have heard. He stared at a point in the air somewhere to his right. "The alternative is standing dumbfounded in Cliff's Variety with a package of light bulbs in one hand and ten-dollar bill in the other, staring at some equally dumbfounded cashier who just asked you something and you don't even know what she asked you and you find yourself saying, 'My husband died.'" His eyes met Leland's. "I wanted to say it like a mantra. 'My husband died. I am a widower. My husband is dead. I am a widower. I will never be anything else again but a widower.'"

The word should feel like a blow. Leland was a widower, too, after all. Instead, it felt like nothing. Maybe he'd always thought of himself as a parent first and a husband second. Maybe he was operating his bereavement incorrectly.

"What you're feeling now," Scott was saying. He put up his hands: _Don't get me wrong!_ "I'm not saying I know exactly what that is. But whatever you're feeling now, you'll think it's going to go on forever. You'll think it'll never, ever get better—not even a tiny bit. And then someday, something will happen. Someone will smile, and you'll realize you smiled back. You'll walk by a car with an open window, maybe, and Beethoven's Seventh will be playing on the radio, and you'll be humming along without even knowing it. Whatever it is, something will happen, and you'll see that happiness is possible again after all."

It was the truth, Leland knew that. After months of numbness and living by rote, his mother had slowly returned to the world, blinking like a bear emerging from hibernation, and then, as if sunshine and salt air could cure everything, she escaped to Boca Raton. Meanwhile, Leland had things to do, classes to attend, a daughter to feed and bathe. He stumbled along, halfway in his life, halfway out of it, feeling almost nothing, until Anna Grace came back.

He had an image of her charging through the front door, parking a Rollaboard suitcase in a corner of the entryway, bustling about the house, setting everything right—straightening picture frames, tidying shelves, cutting Corinne's sandwiches into crustless triangles, coaxing Leland back to love and life. It was a false memory, to be sure. Her return had been more tentative—and yes, somewhat painful, especially for Corinne. But it was nevertheless true that she'd come to his rescue. She'd saved him.

Scott's cheeks were wet with tears. After all this time—six years? six and a half?—the loss could still drive him to weeping. Leland remembered crying on Thanksgiving night, for the loss of his marriage, not for the loss of his wife. Had he cried since then? He didn't know.

He thought of getting up and putting his arm around Scott. Holding him. As if _that_ was just what he needed: another hug. Leland stayed where he was, and just as well. Scott quickly calmed himself and dried his face on his sleeves.

"So." Scott got up. "I said what I needed to. Thanks for hearing me out."

Leland stood. He offered a handshake. Scott took his hand and shook it and then pulled him into a bear hug. Leland gasped—equal parts surprise and relief. For a second, he halfway resisted, but then he tightened his arms around Scott's waist, locking his hands together as if he meant to hold on forever.

His heart battered against his ribs as if it were leaping around in his chest trying to get out. His cock stiffened again. He was sure that Scott could feel his erection, and he was sure, too, though a bit less so, that Scott was also hard. Leland's first instinct was to hide—to step back, to put his hands in his pockets, to make a diversionary joke. But he disobeyed that instinct. He held the embrace a little longer. When at last he let go, his eyes met Scott's. Those pale green eyes. Spanish moss. Lichen. Sea glass.

Scott's lips parted as if he were about to speak, but before he could say anything, Leland stepped forward again and kissed him. He'd never kissed a man before, not even Travis. It was at once familiar and strange—like any other kiss, except that Scott's mustache tickled his nose. And what should he do with his tongue? If he were kissing a woman, he'd take the lead, as if in a dance.

Not that kissing his wife had ever been simple. Not that he'd ever been able to abandon himself in a passionate moment. Making love to Anna Grace had been delicate, tentative work. Every kiss, every caress, every embrace had been a treacherous sail between Scylla and Charybdis. Too rough, and he'd offend her. Too gentle, and he'd lose her interest. And then, too, while fixing so much attention on _her_ responses, he'd had to worry about his own. For two decades, his erections had been either legitimate and halfhearted or forbidden and robust. He was harder now from a clothed kiss than he'd ever been in bed with his naked wife.

Abruptly and with a sharp intake of air, Scott broke away. He touched his lips. His cheeks whitened and then turned scarlet. Leland's own cheeks burned. He clapped his hands over his mouth.

The door opened. The men staggered back from each other. A woman in scrubs came into the room, pulling a cart behind her. "Mr. Littlefield?" she said. "I'm here for your blood."

"Oh," Leland said. He was looking at Scott, not the nurse.

Scott moved toward the open door. "I'll go..." He raised his hand as if to touch his lips again. "I'll go."
Chapter 30

She found her baby brother in the waiting room, huddled in a seat near the wall, clutching his phone to his chest as if it were a tiny light-up teddy bear. She went and sat next to him.

He touched the back of his head. "Ten stitches."

"Where is he?"

"Having a PET scan."

"You did good," she said. "You took care of business like a champ. Take a second to be proud of yourself, okay?"

He somehow managed to nod in agreement without quite looking like he agreed.

The automatic doors opened and—of all the extraordinary, improbable things—her other brother limped in out of the rain. He was wearing running clothes and, for some reason, a dog collar. Someone followed him in, a bearded man in camouflage pants. Both men were muddied and bloodied and soaked through, shedding a trail of brownish sludge as they walked. While the bearded man checked in at the desk, Ben ambled over to Corinne and John Carter.

"What's up?" He said it as a greeting, not a question, as if they'd all arranged to meet here for coffee or a late lunch.

"Daddy collapsed again," Corinne said.

Ben all but fell into a chair. Wincing, he pressed his hands against his ribs. "That's fucking bullshit. Is he okay?"

As before, John Carter touched the back of his head. "Ten stitches."

"Are _you_ okay?" Corinne said. "You and your buddy look pretty rough."

Just then, the friend hobbled over. Ben made introductions, but he gave the wrong names, and they all had to introduce themselves anyway.

"You can call me Jimmy. Only Littlefield calls me La Flamme."

"Corinne, not Coco. Pleased to meet you."

"John Carter, not Tater. Cripes, Ben. Stop calling me that."

Using a little pantomime and a lot of profanity, Ben and Jimmy described the "cluster fuck" that had brought them to the ER. The gist of it seemed to be that weed and boys and the laws of physics were a poor mix. Ben had scraped up his hands and wrists. He might have cracked some ribs, but he wouldn't hear of seeing a doctor. He'd kicked Jimmy twice in the face, once with the heel of each sneakered foot.

"I was bleeding like a mother," Jimmy said.

"Luckily he had, like, an old T-shirt in the car," Ben said.

"To soak up the blood," Jimmy said.

"But he couldn't drive," Ben said.

"So I gave him my keys," Jimmy said.

"But I flooded the engine," Ben said.

"It has a carburetor," Jimmy said.

"Car's old as fuck," Ben said.

"So we walked," Jimmy said.

"It's only five blocks," Ben said.

"Wasn't like I was in much pain," Jimmy said.

"We smoked up the rest of what he had on the way," Ben said.

"Medicinal purposes," Jimmy said.

Their banter had the timing of a Vaudeville comedy routine. Corinne's head began to ache. She excused herself and went outside to call Andrei. In the last twenty or thirty minutes, he'd texted her about seven times, nothing but a bunch of web pages. News articles, maybe. Some fresh disaster in the world. She held her breath and dialed his number.

"My love." He wasn't using his disaster voice. In fact, he sounded as if he'd been napping. "How's your dad?"

"I haven't seen him yet. He's getting a PET scan."

"Did you see my messages?"

"Sort of."

"There are two grad schools in Pittsburgh that offer economics, and two more within an hour's drive. There's a list of research topics here. They sound pretty wonky to me. Hold on a second."

Why had she expected some world-scale disaster, when she should have foreseen only this? When they'd decided to get married, he'd sent her the names of caterers and signed her up for The Knot. When they'd decided to have a baby, he'd sent her a period tracker for her phone and bought her a basal thermometer. Now they'd more or less decided to move to Pittsburgh, and so he'd begun plotting their life there. Of _course_ he had. He managed complex systems for a living. Of _course_ he'd treat his marriage as if it were a project to research, plan, and direct.

"This is from Carnegie Mellon." She heard the click of his mouse, the clack of his keyboard. "Okay, here we go. Research Topics. Real Business Cycles. Expectations and Indeterminacy of Monetary Equilibrian Experimental Economies. What does that even mean? No, don't tell me. Distribution of Income Within and Across Households. International Trade Policy. Female Labor Supply and Fertility."

"Very wonky," Corinne said.

"You don't sound happy. You sound lugubrious."

"I'm distracted, that's all. My Dad—"

"Of course. Sure. Sorry. But it's wonky enough? Maybe wonky enough to apply?"

"I think so. I'll take a look tonight."

"We do pretty well for ourselves when we talk about stuff," he said. "At least, you know, _I_ think so."

"Me too," she said—but she was thinking, _Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh_. They'd be living in the land of snow shovels and Yankees. Andrei, Vic, and Jodie would be the only people in her entire state of residence whose names she new.

"I should go," she said.

"Do you want me to print out some of this stuff for you?"

"You can," she said. "I should— I should go, though."

When she went back inside, a nurse was just calling "James La Flame-y." The boys all clomped off together, as if medical exams were a group sport. Corinne went looking for her father. She didn't find him, but so many of the exam room doors were shut that it hardly counted as a proper search.

By following the sound of Ben's voice, she found her way to Jimmy's room. A doctor in a white lab coat had just finished putting a stitch in Jimmy's lower lip. Soon, an orderly came to take him to radiology. Corinne and John Carter sat in the two little hard chairs in the corner. Ben sat on the foot of the bed and swung his legs. A clump of mud knocked loose from one of his sneakers splattered across his brother's shin. John Carter grunted and glowered and brushed off his leg.

"Hey, Tater," Ben said, "how come you're still in your PJs?"

"Fucking...don't...call me...fucking...Tater."

"Two out of ten," Ben said. "Try this. 'Don't fucking call me Tater, you fucking fuck.'"

Corinne gave him a look.

"What?" said Ben, opening his hands. "I offer the benefit of my fucking expertise."

"Nothing makes any sense anymore," John Carter said in a small voice.

"It's just simple grammar, bro," Ben said. "Unless you put the fucks in the right place—"

John Carter flushed so deeply that his cheeks turned nearly purple. "Shut the fuck up," he shouted. "How's that?"

"Points off for lack of creativity, but I give it a solid seven."

"Children, please," Corinne said.

John Carter said, "What I _meant_ was, nothing makes sense anymore without Mama."

"Fuck that," Ben said. "Nothing made sense _with_ Mama."

John Carter glared at Ben. "What?"

Ben bared his teeth. A cruel smile or an anxious snarl—Corinne couldn't have said which. "She never wanted kids and a family," he said. " _That's_ fuckin' obvious. So she made everybody suffer."

"Shut up," John Carter said. "Shut _up_."

"She gave away my dog," Ben said. "She was the drunkest person at Coco's wedding. The drunkest person in a room full of Irish fucking Catholics."

"Romanian fucking Catholics," Corinne said.

"What dog?" John Carter said.

"Bozo," Ben said.

"Bozo? Bozo the _dog_?"

"No, Bozo the Commander-in-motherfucking-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet," Ben said. " _Yes_ , Bozo the dog, who the fuck else are we talking about, Tater?"

"That's not what happened, though," John Carter said. "Mama didn't give Bozo away."

Ben blinked a few times. "What?"

"You were at the Jamboree. He got hit by a car. Mama took him to the emergency vet, but they couldn't do anything for him. She told you she took him to the pound?"

"That's what she told him," Corinne said. "I was there when she said it."

"See?" Ben said. "This is exactly what I'm fucking saying. Nothing made sense with Mama. Why would she do that? Why would she say she gave him away when she didn't?"

"To protect you, dummy," John Carter said. "So you'd think he was still out there somewhere, happy being a dog. It's not _that_ hard to figure out—is it?"

Ben got down from the bed and stalked to the door and back. He made a fist and let it go. "I have to walk away for a minute. I just have to— Yeah. Walk away."

He bolted from the room as if a part of him were on fire, swinging the door so hard that it banged against the magnetic stop and stuck there. Within a few seconds, Corinne heard another door slamming on the other side of the unit. The ward went momentarily silent, and then there were voices murmuring in other rooms, the rhythmic hiss-thud-hiss of a respirator, instruments quietly beeping.

"Should I try to smooth things over?" Corinne turned to John Carter. "Or will you?"

"Let him figure it out for himself," John Carter said dully. He polished his phone on the leg of his pajama bottoms. "I should call Doris. We were supposed to go see the Festival of Lights. I'd better tell her we probably can't."

Corinne listened while he retreated down the corridor, his rubber clogs squeaking softly on the linoleum. Rather than sit around in some stranger's room, she thought, she should try again to find Daddy. But instead, she succumbed to the peculiar inertia of the ER, that curious—or was it incurious?— tendency to stay where you were until someone came and got you and put you somewhere else. She played her brothers' argument over in her mind, choosing the precise moments when she could have—should have—intervened and made peace.

Somewhere a woman was sobbing. Someone was pushing or pulling a cart with a squeaky wheel. Corinne got up and paced the room. Her ER inertia was giving way to entropy.

The white-coated doctor who'd stitched Jimmy's lip glanced in and nodded to her as if in greeting. Before she could acknowledge him, he turned to the room opposite. He knocked twice on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. Corinne had the briefest glimpse of her father—he was inside the room, sitting at the end of the bed—before the doctor closed the door.

After a couple of minutes, it opened again and the doctor backed partway through it. "I wish I had good news," he said. "But at least now we know." Moving aside his lab coat, he glanced down at a pager hooked to his belt. "Sit tight. I'll swing by as soon as I hear from the radiologist. Shouldn't be long." He hurried away.

Corinne dashed across the hall and caught the door before it could swing shut. Daddy was sitting sideways on the bed, swinging his legs. He was barefoot. When he saw her, he grinned and rushed to meet her.

"Coco," he said, wrapping her in a bear hug and rocking her side to side. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"John Carter texted—" She took a breath. "I came to— But I just overheard the doc—" Another breath. "He said there's bad news. What is it? What's going on?"

Holding her at arms' length, still grinning, he said, "I have a disease, and it's called—" He gave it a second's thought. "Nope. I've already forgotten the name of it. It's _incredible_ , whatever it is."

"Daddy, what—? Incredible? What kind of a disease is _incredible_?"

"It's my thyroid. It's enlarged or something. Hypo or hyper, whichever. I probably have to have part of it taken out and go on Synthroid." Hugging her again, he said into her ear, "But I don't have Parkinson's-plus. I don't have Parkinson's-plus."

What was Parkinson's-plus? Which was it, hypo or hyper? What were the complications and side effects of a thyroidectomy? Why was he barefoot? There was so much to take in, so much to wonder about, but for the moment, she let herself dissolve into his weird infectious joy.

Someone tapped on the door. It was Ben. "Hey, Pop. How's your nod?"

"Been better."

"Let's see," Ben said.

"It's bandaged," Daddy said, but he turned anyway and showed the back of his head.

Ben turned, too, and ran his fingers up from his hairline to his own scar, a white lightning bolt slashing across the right side of his occipital bone. "We'll be twins," he said.

"Scar twins," Daddy said. "Is that a thing?"

"That's not a thing, Daddy," Corinne said.

"La Flamme's all clear," Ben said. "They gave him Motrin. He's _pissed_."

"No doubt."

"Can you carry us back to the house?"

"Sure," she said. "Where's John Carter? Do you know?"

"Talking to Doris, I think."

"Did someone apologize?" she said. "Please tell me at least one of you apologized?"

Ben shook his head. "We brawled out back. I kicked his ass, then we hugged it out." He ducked out of the room again.

Sighing, Corinne turned to her father. "I guess we're just waiting for you, then."

He kneaded the back of his neck. "I'll see if I can find Ramanujan."

"Ramanujan like the mathematician?"

"Exactly. Who's La Flamme?"

"He's Ben's— Well— Are you familiar with the word 'bromance'? Or 'man-crush,' which I think is perhaps a more traditional term?"

Daddy blanched, no doubt for exquisitely parental reasons—the ongoing degradation of the language and culture, etc. "There's a certain self-explanatory quality to each of those. Let's leave it there."

While he went to find the doctor, she poked her head into the other room. "Ten-minute warning," she said.

"Coco," Ben said. "We're doing this thing." He turned to Jimmy. "Say it again how you said it before."

"It's like _Nickel and Dimed_ plus _On the Road_."

"But as a comic," Ben said.

"We travel wherever we can get to," Jimmy said, "but probably mostly red states, just on what we can earn from minimum-wage jobs, day labor, shit like that."

"Sounds like fun," Corinne said. "But who am I kidding? Not really."

Ben said, "The greatest challenge right now to our economy is— Aw, fuck it. I can't remember. I'm just in it as the control group."

"Income inequality," Jimmy said. "And, yeah, _I'm_ actually the control group. Littlefield here's a quote-unquote 'war veteran, and I'm just your average dickhead. So we'll get see if people really give two shits about veterans or not."

"Uh-huh," Corinne said with a nod. "Ten minutes. Meet you out front."

Keys in hand, she trudged into the damp, shimmering night to fetch her car. The rain had gone, leaving a chill in the air. From somewhere on the other side of the Ashley River, she heard the squeal of a siren—whether headed toward them or away, she couldn't tell. Closer at hand, probably on the Crosstown, a truck's Jake brakes stuttered and growled. She paused to look up at the stars, what few there were. The violet sky had a strange kind of purity to it, as if the firmament and the spheres were tangible objects and the day's storms had scrubbed them clean.

The sky in Pittsburgh probably looked exactly the same. A few degrees of latitude wouldn't make much difference. The constellations wouldn't be unrecognizable. The heavens wouldn't be green instead of black.

But still. She couldn't reconcile herself to the idea. _Pittsburgh._ It might as well be Hong Kong or Rabat. At least in Morocco there wouldn't be any snow.

Once she started walking again, she heard the wet slap of footsteps behind her—someone trotting to catch up with her. She rearranged her keys in her hand, ready for the second time in the day to use them as weapons—but this time, like the last, the approaching stranger was no stranger at all. It was her father.

"Coco," he said. "Coco, wait."

She turned back and went to meet him. "What are you doing? You must be freezing."

He _was_ shivering. He had on only his T-shirt, no jacket. He'd gotten his gardening clogs back from John Carter, but they couldn't be much use in keeping his feet warm or dry.

"Before we get back to the house and everyone's around and all— That guy Jimmy— I don't know if he's— Anyway, I wanted to say—"

"Daddy," she said. "Slow down. Finish a sentence. What on earth?"

"I should tell you—" He paused and took a step back. "I should—"

"Here we go again." She grasped his hands. Both her knuckles and his whitened with the force of her grip. "You don't get to do this to me over and over. We're standing here just like this until you say it. Whatever it is, just tell me, straight out."

After a moment, he said, "Coco, I'm gay."

She dropped his hands and stumbled backward a step. She didn't know what to say. She said nothing. She didn't know what to feel. She felt—

Well, what? Bewildered.

Yes. Bewildered.

"Oh, shit," he said. He reached out for her. "Oh, God, shit. God. Forget it. Forget I said it. Let's just—go back—"

All at once, he was crying—choking, gagging, sobbing, slobbering. He seemed about to crumple, to tumble in on himself. She rushed toward him and threw her arms around him, to embrace him, yes, but also to keep him from sinking to the wet pavement. She couldn't support his weight. If he dropped, she would, too. But she couldn't let him fall. She couldn't let him be uncomforted. She couldn't allow him to believe he'd repulsed her. She stumbled backward against the trunk of a palmetto tree and somehow kept both herself and her father mostly upright.

"Daddy," she said. "Daddy, It's okay. I'm here. I love you, Daddy."

She didn't know what else to do but that—to call out to him, to call him back to himself. Gradually, it seemed to work. He stood on his own. He spat and clawed at his eyes and pinched his runny nose. She dipped into her purse and handed him a wad of tissues.

"I can't—" He wiped his face with the tissues. "I can't lose anything more to this. My father, your mother. I'll just be— I'll be like a monk. I won't— I won't do anything. I won't even look. I'll just—"

She touched his arm. "Daddy, I don't understand what you're saying."

"I went into that bookstore, and then my father— I know it was a coincidence. It was. But then your mother— I was about to tell her—"

Corinne still didn't understand, not entirely, but it was clear enough that he'd been in a great deal of pain for a long time, probably his whole life. He'd been dividing himself in two for as long as he'd been alive, keeping a part of his soul in hiding, even—or especially—from the people who loved him best.

"I loved your mother. Genuinely, truly. That was never a lie. I loved her. And our family. She came back for me. When my father died, she came back. She came back for me. She taught me how to feel again. I loved her for that. I would not have wished—" He was breaking down again.

Corinne put a hand on his shoulder. "Of course not, Daddy."

"But maybe— Maybe it's some kind of penalty— Some kind of—"

She wouldn't let him go on. Not if, as it seemed, he was about to argue that the Captain Kangaroo God of his youth had punished him in adulthood by smiting his father and wife. It verged on the insane. She was no priest, no theologian—and perhaps only nominally a Catholic—but she would argue to anyone, anywhere, that a God as cruel as that might as well be a devil.

Taking his hand, she said, "You've done the best by this family that you know how."

"But what you don't know is—"

She said it again: "You've done the best you know how. I will fight anyone who says different, and that includes you."

"Fair enough," he said, almost in a mumble.

"I think you told me this because—" She squeezed his hand. "Is it because you wanted someone to forgive you? You wanted me to...absolve you?"

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe so."

"I can't do that," she said. "I'm not a priest. I'm barely even Catholic."

He smiled, albeit faintly.

"And you don't need to be forgiven," she said. "Not for—not for being what— _who_ you are."

He looked at her, his eyes wet, his smile fading.

"I'm going to love you for the rest of my life, no matter what." She joggled his hands until he met her gaze. "Do you believe me?"

"I believe you."

"Let's— Oh, God, then— Let's just get everybody home, okay?"

"Okay," he said, and he clung to her for a moment. As he let her go, he kissed the top of her head.

Corinne pointed into the shadows ahead of them. "I'm parked on the next block. Are you walking with me?"

He nodded and waited for her to lead the way down the darkened street.

Soon, she thought—the sooner, the better—she would have to sit in privacy and silence and rewrite the history of her family. The stories she'd always told herself, the roles in which she'd cast her parents and her brothers—they'd been only about three-quarters correct.

She'd always thought that, Tolstoy be damned, all unhappy families _were_ alike. Fate or God or pheromones always paired a tyrant with an apologist. A martinet and a helpmeet, a Leo plus a Sonya, could serve as a bare minimum, but for a top-of-the-line unhappy family, the misery-luxe edition, you had to add a prodigal, a naïf, and mediator. The trick was to play your role faithfully. The alternatives were chaos or isolation. That was, at least, how she'd always thought of it.

The truth of it was more complex. Her father had a bit of the Leo in him. Her mother had occasionally done her duty as apologist and helpmeet. And it wasn't as if Ben had never been naïve or John Carter had never been impetuous. They were all a little bit of this and a little bit of that, weren't they?

And what about Corinne's own little family? What about _her_ marriage? She couldn't quite admit to being a tyrant, but on the other hand, if she were the Sonya of her household, she'd have no qualms about following her Leo to Pittsburgh. Her trunks would already be half-packed. The coachman would already have harnessed the horses.

Maybe Daddy had loved Mama enough to hide part of himself for decades. Maybe Mama had loved Daddy enough to sacrifice her career to their marriage. Or maybe they'd both settled for comfort—comfort of a sort, anyway. Corinne didn't think she could do the same. She didn't love Andrei as much as he loved her, that was the truth of it, and she couldn't go to Pittsburgh with him or bear his children or love him the way he deserved to be loved.

Her heart swelled a little, as if she'd received a piece of welcome news. At almost the same instant, she shuddered so hard that her teeth knocked together. The next hours, days, and months were not going to be easy. She was going to break his heart.

The sidewalk broadened a bit. Her father quickened his step and drew even with her. She took his hand.

"Daddy," she said. "Daddy, do you mind if I sleep on your couch tonight?"

He stopped and looked at her. "Why? I mean, of course you can—but why? Is Andrei out of town again?"

"No," she said. "That's not it. That's not it at all."
The Fifth of June

Chapter 31

The way the gaps and margins of the venetian blinds glowed with ash-colored light, Leland could tell that the clouds hadn't broken, but he went to the window anyway. Gloom gathered under the piazza roof. A spot of damp, the last tiny residue of a halfhearted rain, lay on the driveway. The sky was as flat and gray as old asphalt.

No matter. The transit of Venus would stream live to his laptop. He wouldn't miss it. He wouldn't _want_ to miss it, even though he'd abandoned his book on Franz and Kobold.

He'd been crazy to think of writing fiction at all. His books were souvenirs of Charleston rather than proper histories—anthologies of ghost stories, roundups of two-hundred-year-old gossip, collections of Colonial puff pieces, aggrandized postcards. His book about the Preservation Society had turned out to be a series of hagiographies—and that was what everyone had wanted it to be.

His year so far had been spent preparing new editions of his earliest books. It was easy work, easy to do on autopilot, easy to fit in among the days when he felt bubble-wrapped and dumbfounded. When widowhood deafened and blinded him, he thought of Anna Grace, but also of Scott Cable, of high summer in San Francisco and buying light bulbs at Cliff's Variety.

As if the thought had summoned the man, Scott himself strode into the driveway. He moved with such heedless urgency that, when he lost a flip-flop, he appeared to consider not going back for it. After a moment's hesitation, he _did_ go back, and when he did, his messenger bag slipped sideways and dropped toward the ground. Scott caught it just before it struck the driveway. Whatever was in there, it had to be something he valued. He clutched the bag to his chest and took a series of deep, calming breaths.

By the time Leland got to the front door and opened it, Scott was just raising his hand to knock. He flinched, stepped back, smiled. He was still breathing heavily. "You're here."

"I'm here," Leland said. He could've hidden under his desk, he thought. He could've pretended no one was home. Why hadn't he thought of that?

"You shaved your head."

In December, after he'd gotten home from the hospital, Leland had had no choice but to finish what the ER nurses had started. He'd buzzed himself bald. He'd resigned himself to wearing a lot of hats, but as it turned out, baldness made him look tougher and more shrewd than he really was. He liked it. Jutting his chin toward the topknot at the crown of Scott's head, he said, "And you didn't."

"Nope," Scott said, and he touched the hair at his nape. "I didn't. But. Um. It's just that I don't have a car, see, and I got Kate Popyrin to look on the Internet and see where the clouds are right now, and at the _moment_ , it looks like we have to go to Columbia, which is obviously too far to go on a bicycle, and I know I could've rented a car, but I accidentally let my license lapse, so..."

"What?"

Scott pointed upward. "The transit. It starts in an hour or so, and the clouds..."

"Oh. Of course. The transit. Come on in."

Nearly bursting with relief, Scott stepped past him. They went into the study. Motioning toward the sofa, Leland said, "I have a projector and screen around here somewhere." He stroked the stubble at the back of his head. When he was thinking about something, he often searched for the bare place, the longish scar that nearly matched Ben's. "Let me just think where."

Scott hadn't sat. "What are you...? I don't..."

"We can watch it more easily that way," Leland said. "Rather than hunching over my laptop."

"I was hoping we'd..." Scott took a deep, deep breath. "Is there some way that we could actually— I mean, if we—you—actually _drove_ us up there...? I'll reimburse you for gas, of course—and dinner, maybe."

If they had to drive as far as Columbia, that would mean a minimum of three hours in a car with Scott. The transit itself could take another hour. Add at least thirty minutes for dinner. That was a long, long, _long_ time to spend with a guy you'd inappropriately kissed in a hospital room. Leland cast about for alternatives, escape routes, patsies.

"A hundred and five years," Scott said. "The next transit is in a hundred and five years."

"NASA is streaming images from space." Leland motioned toward his laptop. "I'll set up the projector and—"

"Please. Please, please, please." Scott clasped his hands together, as if in prayer. He eyed the rug, and for a second, it looked like he might literally drop to his knees. "Dammit, man. I ain't too proud to beg."

Leland knew he was going to agree, but he so very much didn't want to—that was the thing.

"If you don't say yes," Scott said, "I'll be forced to remind you that I spent the entire last semester tutoring your son in theory for free, not to mention teaching him the Rachmaninoff _Études-Tableaux_ and the Brahms Third Piano Sonata and—"

"I'll just go get dressed," Leland said, putting up his hands.

"You look fine," Scott said.

Leland was wearing a shirt with a hole under the arm and a pair of gym shorts he'd owned for thirty years. "I wore this to sleep in." He plucked at the frayed hem of one leg.

"You look _fine_ ," Scott said again. He sounded like an impatient, overtired six-year-old.

"Two minutes," Leland said. "Two minutes."

He hurried up the stairs, stripping off his shirt as he went, and rushed to his bedroom. In spite of himself, he let Scott's impatience govern him. He grabbed a not-quite-clean pair of dungarees from the top of the hamper and the first shirt that came to hand in the closet. He was still pulling on the shirt when he stopped at John Carter's bedroom door.

He knocked softly and waited for an answer. Doris had come over, and they were studying—but there was always a chance they were "studying."

"Come in," John Carter said.

Leland opened the door and leaned in. John Carter and Doris were sitting sideways on the bed, entirely clothed. Music was playing, something that sounded like small, untamed animals clomping up and down a piano keyboard, and John Carter was following along in the score. Doris had the Charleston tour guide training manual spread across her lap. She smiled and waved hello.

"Hi, Doris," Leland said. "How's the studying?"

" _So_ much to remember," she said.

"Right?" Leland said. "I was in maybe the fourth or fifth group to take—"

"Dad," John Carter said. "I'm listening to Shostakovich. Did you have something to ask me or what?

"Oh," Leland said. "Sorry. Yes. I'm going out for a while. No idea how long."

"Okay," John Carter said.

"It's transit-related."

"Okay," John Carter said again. "I have to leave for work in, like, thirty-five minutes."

Since January, he'd been working at the Starbucks nearest to campus. He'd gotten the job on his own and worked as many hours as he could get. Maybe at first he'd only wanted some task to fill the time, some mechanism by which he could order his days. Leland had books to edit, John Carter had espresso shots to pull.

But a little order did John Carter a lot of good. He hadn't missed a class all semester. He volunteered as accompanist to two voice majors and a trumpet major, meaning that he had five lessons to attend lessons every week, instead of only two. He took to carrying a Day Runner, long after Leland had assumed Day Runners had ceased to exist. By the end of his second semester, he'd raised his GPA three-quarters of a point.

"Happy studying," Leland said to Doris. And to John Carter: "You'll lock up? Yes?"

"Sure, Pop." As Leland was closing the door, John Carter called out, "Did you take your Synthroid?"

" _Yes_ ," Leland said, as if it were just the most absurd question—and then he dashed across to the bathroom and took his Synthroid. His thyroidectomy scar, near the base of his throat, had faded to a thin white line.

In the entryway, Scott was huffing and grumbling. Leland hurried down the stairs. While he scooped up his wallet and phone and keys from the console table, Scott hurtled through the door. Leland paused halfway across the piazza and patted his pockets, but he had everything he needed. The feeling of having forgotten something came from the absence of Anna Grace's urn. It had sat on the console table for so long that it had become a fixture. Now that it was gone, the place where it had been had become a kind of worry spot, like the missing piece of a chipped tooth.

Scott was already in the passenger's seat of the Prius. Leland got in and drove them north to the Crosstown. As they crept through construction traffic, the Prius's tires buzzing on the milled pavement, Scott clenched his fists and ground his teeth.

Leland couldn't think of the urn without thinking of Ben. The _Nickel and Dimed_ project with Jimmy had never materialized, but Ben had bought a car and taken off on his own. He had the urn with him, and he planned to spread a bit of his mother's ashes at every opera house he could find. From Mobile, he'd sent a sketch of a tallish, vaguely deco theater surrounded by hedges and sago palms. On a narrow scrap of lawn at the front, there stood the figure of a woman—Anna Grace—in a wide-skirted gown.

Anna Grace had been a materialist through and through. She'd believed that her essence, whatever it was that had made her Anna Grace, would perish with her last heartbeat, her last breath, the last synaptic transmission. She wouldn't have cared what became of her ashes. Still, Ben's plan wasn't entirely absent of poetry.

At last, on I-26, the traffic began to flow. Scott hadn't said a word since they'd gotten into the car, but the drumming of his fingers and the bouncing of his knees spoke well enough. Leland's foot grew heavy on the accelerator. On the far side of Summerville, where rows of tall pines lined either side of the freeway, he kept the speedometer in the high eighties. Head against the window, Scott squinted up to the sky.

Leland slipped his phone out of his pocket and passed it over. "Take another look at the satellite map. See how far we have to go."

Scott stared at the phone as if it were something with sharp teeth. "I don't know how..."

Steering one-handed, navigating one-eyed, Leland switched on the phone, unlocked the screen, and opened the browser. He glanced at the signal strength. Good enough. "Tap there." He pointed at the browser's address bar. When the QWERTY keyboard scrolled up to cover the bottom half of the screen, Scott recoiled as if the teeth had bitten him. "Type in what I tell you."

After a couple of false starts, and not without mistakes and misunderstandings along the way, Scott found a satellite map of the Carolinas. It showed that they might not have to go as far as Columbia.

"Something just popped up," Scott said. "Is this what a text message looks like?"

Leland glanced at the screen. He'd gotten a text message from Corinne. "Do you mind reading it?"

"'Got a three thirty-nine. Your job is to talk me into or out of retaking.'"

"She's trying to get into Duke."

"Oh," Scott said, "so this is the GRE? She's talking about her GRE score?"

"I don't think she's taken a breath since she left the testing center," Leland said. "Tell her three thirty-nine is—" But Scott had turned very white. "Never mind. I'll call her later."

In the distance, Leland already saw a lightening in the sky, a band of apricot clouds here, a clot of pinkish mist there. No blue yet.

"You have Holst on here," Scott said. Somehow he'd opened up the music store, and somehow he'd figured out how to work the search.

"That's where you'd buy it," Leland said. "If you wanted to buy it."

"Oh. And then what? They'd send you a CD?"

"No, it— Never mind. Give it." Leland took the phone. He tapped a couple of buttons and put in his password. Holst's _Planets_ began downloading. He returned the phone to Scott.

"Can I play it now?"

Growling in spite of himself, Leland snatched the phone away and plugged it into the stereo. He tapped the screen, and the first track began to play. To Leland, it sounded as if a battalion of cellists were striking their strings with mallets instead of stroking them with bows. He slipped the phone into a cup holder.

"I guess 'Venus' would be more appropriate," Scott said. Leland reached for the phone, but Scott clasped his wrist to stop him. "No, no, leave it. I love 'Mars.' It makes everything seem like an emergency." He laughed. "Going to see the transit—emergency. Filling up at the gas station—alert the authorities. Going to the grocery store— _crisis_." Scott raised his fist. "Bloodshed in the produce section. Call the heavy infantry. Someone's choosing"—he gasped—"a cantaloupe."

As if on cue, the horns reached a crescendo. Leland trod a little harder on the accelerator.

"Holy shit," Scott said, pointing. "Look."

Off to the right, the sky was blue. They passed an exit. It occurred to Leland a second too late that, if he'd taken it and followed whatever meander of country blacktop it led to, in time they might have come to a clearing. Too late now.

Fumbling around in the back seat, Scott found his messenger bag. He took from it an enormous pair of binoculars, a roll of black electrical tape, and two small ziplock bags. Each of the bags contained a black disk the size and shape of a hockey puck. Unlike hockey pucks, though, the objects seemed to have no weight at all.

Scott laid the binoculars in his lap with the objective lenses aimed more or less at the windshield. Prying open one of the little bags, he took out a black disk, which turned out not to be a disk at all, and certainly not a hockey puck, but rather a cap. Scott reeled off a few inches of tape, bit it, tore it free. He aligned the cap with one of the binocular's lenses. A solar filter, then, of course—but the wrong size. He taped it in place. He repeated the process with the second lens and cap. Grinning, he held it up.

"Trailer park astronomy," Leland said.

Scott held up the binoculars as though to use them, but instead he looked over them. His mouth hung open. He pointed. The lower half of the sky was blue.

"Next exit," Scott said. "How far?"

"I don't—"

Leland scanned the road and his mirrors. There were no signs anywhere. After four or five miles that seemed like a hundred, they came to an exit. The sun broke through the clouds. Happy to see it, Leland flicked his eyes up at it and stared until it stamped a dancing purplish-black afterimage on his vision. He signaled and exited the freeway.

At the top of the ramp, there was a stop sign. An Exxon station across the road. To the left, another station, this one closed, the windows boarded up. Leland turned right and found a weedy field surrounded by chain link. A steel sign, lopsided and faded, warned against trespassing on school property. There didn't appear to be a school anywhere in sight.

Scott leapt from the car while it was still moving. When Leland got out, Scott already had the blank black eyes of the binoculars trained upward at the sky. He let out a gasp and then a whimper. "My God," he said. "My God. It's..."

Thoughtlessly, on heedless impulse, Leland glanced up toward the sun. But he'd already blinded himself once, and the spots were just fading. He shielded his eyes with his hands.

"Come look," Scott said. "Come. Come look."

Leland went around the car. Scott offered the binoculars. His eyes were wet.

Taking the binoculars—heavier than they looked—Leland raised them and pointed them toward the sun. Black. All black. A lightless hole.

"I don't see anything," Leland said.

Standing close behind him, Scott put his hands on Leland's and guided them by tiny increments. Something flashed through the black.

And then there it was. A perfect orange circle, dark at the edges, brighter and yellower in the middle. A few flecks of black at its center. And in the upper right quadrant, there was a half-circle, far larger than Leland had expected. Venus. It didn't appear to be a sphere. There was no sense of distance or dimension. The planet might have been a sticky dot pasted to a construction-paper cutout. A fat bug crawling across a round lamp.

But it wasn't any of those things. It wasn't. It was a planet—a planet almost the size of earth crossing in front of a star. Standing here at the edge of a plot of scrubland behind a rumor of a school, tiny Leland Littlefield found himself watching a planet pass in front of a star. He could _see_ it move. Right before his eyes—and yet nearly unfathomably far away—one astral body moved across another.

When his neck ached, he returned the binoculars to Scott. He meant to say something—but what was there to say?

Scott looked again. He looked and looked and looked and looked. "What time is it?" he said in a whisper.

Leland reached into his pocket for his phone, but it still sat in the cup holder. Holst still played on the stereo. It must be "Venus" now, "The Bringer of Peace." Quiet and lovely music, though a little mournful. Leland poked his head in through the window. It was a little after five-thirty, and he said as much.

"I didn't think...," Scott said. "They said it'd start at five. I thought by the time we got here—" He lowered the binoculars and looked at Leland. "You know, when we got to where we could see—" Some weighty emotion seemed to come over him, stopping him.

"What?" said Leland.

"I thought we'd miss the black drop." Scott gave Leland the binoculars. "Look."

Nearly all of Venus was visible now, all but a sliver.

"Just before the smaller body is entirely within the larger body, there's an illusion. A teardrop."

Leland knew about the black drop, but eighteenth-century observers hadn't expected it. They'd been unable to mark the planet's precise moments of ingress and egress into the sun. The illusion had wrecked the scientists' attempt to calculate the astronomical unit. And now, hundreds of years later, here they were, these two amateurs with a pair of jury-rigged binoculars, dying to see it.

Raising the binoculars, Leland found the sun again. The sun. The planet. The black drop.

"This is—" Leland swallowed and drew a deep breath. His eyes were wet, too. "This is officially the most awe-inspiring thing I've ever seen." People said that all the time, of practically anything. A picture of the moon could be awe-inspiring, or a sentimental quote on a calendar, or even a large room with a particularly high ceiling—but he meant it literally. He was fully in awe.

"Now you know what Chappe saw, and Pingré, and Planman, and Captain Cook..." Scott spoke in a hush. He laid his hand on Leland's shoulder. "Children born today or tomorrow probably won't live to witness the next one. And think of all the people alive right now who could be watching but can't be bothered. But you and I—we get to _see_ it. We get to see it. All we have to do is look up."

Chappe, Pingré, Planman, Cook—they'd all traveled far and at great expense to observe the transit. But there'd been others, too—Le Gentil and Maskelyne—who'd sailed to the farthest edges of the known world, only to see the gathering of heavy clouds, the sky lowering itself like an awning.

The world was so bewildering and cruel that you could forget how full of beauty it was—the Grand Canyon and Machu Picchu and the luminous blue of a parrotfish and emeralds the size of baking potatoes, sights and creatures and objects that demanded your attention and smacked the words right out of your mouth. But the simplest thing could hypnotize you, if you let it. A few pinprick stars glimmering in the indigo night. The fragrance of honeysuckle. The natural sweetness of really well-brewed iced tea. A blueberry or a cherry tomato bursting in your mouth. The illusion of infinite depth in a human iris. The simple warmth of human contact.

All of this, Leland thought, all of this belonged in a book. Once long ago, as a young and ambitious man, he'd started to write because he'd wanted to make people love history. He'd wanted to make it feel alive and important. He'd wanted to cast whatever little bit of light he could on the hair-thin and nearly invisible threads that connected the past to the present and the present to the future.

It was time again to find the hidden threads, time again to write. Fiction or history, it didn't much matter—it only mattered that he had the power of words, and words had the power to stand a reader at Chappe's elbow in San José del Cabo, or at Anders Planman's side in his Finnish observatory, or on a deserted road somewhere in South Carolina, where two awestruck men passed a pair of binoculars back and forth.

Venus seemed to be moving so quickly. Leland offered the binoculars again to Scott—he deserved to see the last few seconds of the ingress—but Scott had moved away. He was, of all things, dancing. Gobsmacked—and there was no better word—Leland glanced across the road, where there sat a brick ranch house, and across the empty field, where there seemed to be nothing but brush and sand, and back along the road, where cars uneventfully entered and exited the Exxon station as if nothing important had ever happened anywhere. And Scott danced and whooped and seized Leland by the wrists and hugged him tightly and waltzed him off the graveled shoulder of the road into a suddenly beautiful patch of wild bergamot. And above them, all the while, a planet crossed a star.

###
Acknowledgments

In this book, Scott Cable claims there's no comprehensive history of all the transits of Venus, but of course there _is_ at least one such history, if not more. I referred to _The Transits of Venus_ by William Sheehan and John Westfall (Prometheus Books, March 2004). I also consulted and highly recommend _Chasing Venus_ by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, May 2012), a compulsively readable and fascinating history of the 18th-Century transits.

This novel would not exist if not for the encouragement and advice of my beloved husband, Todd; the insightful and candid members of my critique group, Amanda, Emma, Krysti, and Maddie; and my dearest friends in all the world, Sarah, Mina, and Angela.

And finally, I must thank my mother, who bought me my first electric typewriter and fearlessly slogged through all of my ridiculous early attempts at writing. Without her, I would surely never have written a word of anything.
