

The Magic Table

by  
Luca Kelleher
Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22
**Chapter 1**

The world ended three months ago. It was a tiny world of quiet souls and common contests. The final moments were orderly and quiet. A police officer stood in my front yard and read aloud an order of the court. I grabbed my gear and ambled down the road. How strange that so few words could end such a long fight. I had thrown this journal into my pack on my way out the door but had forgotten it until last week. I have little interest in keeping a diary and I do little that is worth recording but I must have something to lessen this boredom.

This journal or diary if you like is a neat little design. No more than four or five inches square, it has a waterproof cover of canvas. The zipper makes it virtually airtight with a pen securely tethered inside the front leaf. The pen has an extraordinarily fine point, an important feature when writing on pages so small. The designers obviously puzzled over every feature, including attractive, deep green color of the canvas.

I have plenty of time to consider such small details. There is a miniature combination lock to secure the front flap but privacy will not be a problem. No one but I will be able to decipher my garbled language, the first benefit of my physical inconveniences.

The journal was in my closet since I received it as a Christmas gift from my wife. A day planner was included. Contrary to popular opinion, a day planner will not cure a tendency to forget appointments or misplace things. Less than a week after that Christmas morning, I returned to my system of sticky notes inside the billfold. The day planner went missing before New Years Eve along with my latest umbrella.

I have thought quite a bit over the last few days about how I should organize what I write. I was committed to describing only what has occurred since I hit the road. I finally decided that only those events after the commencement of the journal would be appropriate but I have already deviated from that format in the previous paragraphs. Each afternoon I am almost too tired to think and thinking is the tiring part of writing. The trick is to compose and run at the same time. I experimented in the last hour of my run today and it worked quite well. Transcribing in the evening is not too taxing and can actually be relaxing if you have already worked out what you want to say. With no television or stereo or other people around it is easy to understand how reading, writing, talking and singing were once considered home entertainment.

A new acquaintance led me to enter my first words. I had planned to write a letter about him but I realized that there was no one to whom I could send it. To whom would I be writing? Dear diary was never an option. Should I assume the reader knows something about me? Is he or she as knowledgeable as a friend, a relative or an acquaintance? What about grammar? I decided that it would be best to treat the reader as a stranger. Who knows how long I might need this diversion? Paying some attention to grammar and clarity would require more concentration and occupy extra hours.

I had stopped at a small restaurant on a country road just south of an old coal town. I had made excellent time that morning so I decided to reward myself with a few beers. He was at the opposite end of the bar when I sat down. White light from a window at his back concealed all but a silhouette. I had finished my fries and giant fish sandwich, the world's largest according to the menu, and was just into my third beer when he sat on the stool beside me. I had worked for 15 years in government hospitals. I believed I had seen just about every human deformity.

"How are you doing?" He was still mostly in shadow but I could make out the outlines of a smile across what should have been his face.

"I'm doing just fine. It looks like you really enjoyed our giant fish sandwich."

"World's largest I'm told."

He extended a wet, hairy arm over my plate. "I'm the proprietor of this establishment."

His handshake was a good one, neither competitive nor submissive. "I couldn't help looking at your gear while you were eating. I hope I didn't make you uncomfortable."

"I couldn't really see you with the sun blasting through the window."

He stood on his toes, stretched over the bar and pulled a beer from the cooler. "It's from a fire, when I was about sixteen." He worked the cap from the sweaty bottle. "I've learned over the years that it's best to explain it up front, put the customer at ease. Most folks are more than just a little curious about this." He pointed both thumbs toward his head. "But if this is a little tough on your appetite, I will excuse myself."

"I did work for many years until just recently in federal hospitals so I am not unfamiliar with such situations."

He turned to face me, his back against the bar. The sun, no longer behind him, spotlighted his head. I could not help coming a few inches off my seat. It was as if a pink sausage had grown between his shoulders. There was not a hair on his head or neck. One nearly immobile slit functioned as an eyelid. What should have been his other eye was nothing more than a flat, sheet of scar tissue. He appeared to have no nostrils.

He told me his story with confidence and flair. I suspected that he was relieved to meet a fellow freak but he left no doubt that his optimism and serenity was genuine. He radiated a glow that did not lessen even as he provided the most grisly and tragic details. The more he spoke the more I wanted to discover the source of his strength. Maybe I could learn to apply that strength to my own sorry state of affairs. I could read his mind. "And what about you? How did it happen? You can tell me." He might as well have said it aloud. I should have told him. I meant to tell him but I left the moment the conversation slowed.

I stopped for the night at a public park just west of town, about 3 or 4 miles from the restaurant. Tightness in my left calf canceled my plan to cover another ten miles by sunset. I found a nice, private spot for my bivy sack inside a row of shrubs at the brow of a hill. It had taken me two months to figure out that sleeping on the south face of a hill cut the wind chill by as much as twenty degrees. That was not so important in early September but ten or twenty degrees of wind chill in late November could be a life and death proposition.

This really is an ideal spot. I am high enough on the hill to make it unlikely that anyone will happen by. My bivy sack fits perfectly onto the flat, grassy ledge ten feet below the hilltop. The hill blocks the heavy wind from the north and the shrubs stop any swirling winds from the south. The overnight forecast calls for a low of 34, winds from the northwest at about 8 to 10 miles per hour and a wind chill of 25 degrees. My bivy sack and sleeping bag can withstand temperatures as low as 5 degrees. It should be a comfortable night.
**Chapter 2**

I awakened to significant soreness. My left calf and the bottom of my right foot were extremely tender. This is the first hint of injury since the transformation. It is strange that it happened after such a light travel day. I loafed until almost noon. Two gel packs, a bagel left over from last night and two packs of Starburst made for an adequate brunch. My wine skin was still almost full with cheap but tasty burgundy but I found just enough self-discipline to trudge to a vending machine in the park for a bottle of orange juice. God help me if those machines ever ask for something other than two of the big coins. I was surprised to discover when I reached the bottom of the hill that it had rained over night. I had not noticed inside my bivy beneath the shrubs. Around noon, I rolled up my gear and hiked toward town to find a place to wash. I did not look for long. A new health club had just opened next to an upscale subdivision. I knew from my previous life that upscale exercise clubs love to give free samples to prospective members. I had never taken advantage of those offers before I left home. I was running 5 to 10 miles, 5 days per week. There was no time to drive to a health club and no reason to struggle through 12 laps to the mile inside an overheated gym. I understand the lure of the sweaty meat market but I was a married man during the years I can remember.

I look like a runner and dress like a runner and have become quite adept at shielding most of my face inside my hood. My routine has become quite impressive. The woman at the front desk did not suspect a thing.

"Good morning. Welcome to Northgate Health Club. How can I help you?"

"Good morning. I am in town looking for a house, been thinking of accepting a job offer in the area. I was out on my run and saw your sign. I am primarily a runner but I would like to find a good place for cross training. Do you mind if I take a look around?"

"Certainly not but we can do better than that. We can provide an informational tour and then you can try any of the facilities you like." She glanced at my face and immediately directed her gaze to some papers on the counter. Her smile did not waver and her voice remained steady. Her self-control was as good as I had seen.

"That sounds fine. I usually use swimming to cross train. I would love to try your pool but I am rather gamey from my run. I think I overdressed for the weather.

"You can shower before the tour and the continental breakfast is still out in the gathering room. The locker rooms are at the end of that hallway to your left. Towels and toiletries are on the counters inside the door. Just keep this visitor pass clipped to your shirt."

I stayed for two and a half hours. I went from twenty minutes in a steam shower to an extended soak in a whirlpool the size of a pond. After another steam shower, I consumed about four thousand calories of bagels, yogurt and fresh fruits. The tour was short and to the point. It really was informational. I ended the morning floating on my back in the pool until my fingers were blue and puckered. I finished my orange juice and blueberry scones with an extremely attractive personal trainer. They had done a masterful job. I was truly sorry to decline the membership.

I felt guilty the moment I stepped outside. I always do. It does not matter how many times I tell myself that the costs of my showers and soaks are negligible.

"You just stole a golf." There is always the memory of my mother chiding and my teenage buddies and me for sneaking onto the course at a local country club for a quick eight holes. We non-members always started on the second hole to avoid starters and clubhouse windows. "Stop now or you will do this your entire life." Was she at that moment watching me from a spiritual perch, her finger wagging, and a look of triumph on her face?

Today is Thanksgiving. I did not celebrate. The season has not found me very thankful. The holidays I lost during my big sleep do not count. I spent the afternoon with a pile of books and magazines in a big soft chair at one of those massive booksellers. It was lucky that I had remembered to clean my running suit and underwear at the health club. I may be a vagrant but I have learned to be an appropriately groomed vagrant.

I left the bookstore at sunset with a large coffee and a bag of muffins. I already had a good idea where I would end up for the night. A development of expensive houses had been in sight from my chair in the bookstore. Most of the houses had not progressed much beyond framing and roofing so I was confident that no one would bother me. There is always the risk that an excited owner might stop by to check on the builder's progress but that was not likely to occur until late the next morning, especially after a holiday. I have been discovered inside new construction on two previous occasions. Neither experience was unpleasant. My stock explanation served me well. It is not an entirely untrue explanation. Folks are usually willing to give a person the benefit of the doubt if you look and act the part and you truly mean to do no harm. They might even provide the explanation for you. The first contractor did exactly that. He came upon me inside the master suite of a provincial behemoth. It contained at least 6000 square feet and every feature was included. Local fieldstone covered the exterior and the interior contained some of the finest tile and woodwork. I had entered through an unlocked French door in the basement and spent the night inside a closet that was no less than 30 feet square. I was just rolling my bivy into my pack when he found me. I watched his eyes take inventory of my belongings and the clothes I was wearing.

"You some kind of triathaloner, one of those iron men?"

"Something like that."

He ran his fingers across the edge of the bivy then pinched the lapel of my jacket. He was a huge man in late middle age, neither fat nor particularly lean with a nose bulbous from rosacea. He was undoubtedly accustomed to doing whatever he liked without fear of physical challenge. "This is some of that special micro-fiber stuff?"

"That it is. It keeps the wet out and wicks the moisture away from your body. It can keep you warm in cold weather and it can cool you in the heat."

"And what's that you're folding up?"

I unfolded the bivy and handed it to him. I remembered to look around the room for an escape route.

"It's called a bivy sack. It acts kind of like a tent for one. It is only as wide as I am except toward the head and neck where it fans out so you can move your arms and turn over." I threw the sack onto the floor. "The seam toward the head is rigid, like a hoop." He bent down and peered inside. "It looks like one of those cat scan tubes."

"You are correct. Give it a try." I set my back foot for a quick take off and watched him wiggle into the sack. I showed him how to unzip the mesh skylight. He was like a kid in an amusement park.

"And you say this thing can keep out the rain."

I zipped the skylight tightly shut. "Not just rain but heavy downpours and snow and wind."

He lifted himself from the vestibule, hopped to his feet and extended his hand. "Thank you very much for the demonstration. I will definitely have to get me one of these outfits for hunting and fishing trips. It will be great to be out of the same tent with my brother in law and his beer gas. You going clear across country?"

"I'm not sure. I haven't exactly decided."

"Good luck whatever you decide and I hope you win your race."

He trotted down the stairs and out the front door.

I did not sleep too well last night. It is not that I was ever completely awake and I did not once need to go outside in the cold to take a leak. It was a shallow sleep broken by pieces of nightmares. The bookstore was the trigger. A horrible scare I had with the daughter kept looping through my head.

She had just turned two when I started taking her to music time at the library. I had cut back to four days at the hospital soon after she arrived. Friday was our time while mommy put in one of her two workdays. Music time always ended with the kids scrambling through a duffle bag for a musical instrument to carry in a procession through the stacks. They paraded for five minutes or so behind the teacher who strummed a guitar and sang.

I usually walked parallel to the procession and waited for the daughter to pass each row of shelves. She was never out of sight for more than a few seconds. There was never a thought of someone snatching her. Tripping and falling or the periodic scraps over the ownership of an instrument were the only concerns. The procession passed two stacks without her. I waited a second or two before I walked to the end of the next stack. She had been a straggler before. All the children in the class were at one time or another. I knew all the parents. No one would worry under those circumstances. I turned the corner and found that she was not there.

I sprinted down the main aisle, glancing to my left and right, telling myself aloud to breathe. An old woman put the baby down when she saw me heading in her direction and hurried out the front door. The little one appeared to be fine. She giggled while I covered her with desperate hugs and kisses. I worked very hard to keep from blubbering. The woman was gone by the time I was able to look about me. I am still not sure what happened. Did my daughter just walk off and approach the woman with her arms extended for a hug? I had seen her do that once or twice with strangers. Did the old woman hurry away only because I looked so homicidal? I had spewed some rather vile language in her direction. That day I believed that I had endured the worst scare of my life. I still cannot reproach myself for that deficit of imagination.

My calf has not improved. It is actually much worse. Today, it began to weaken after only about 25 minutes of running. I was passing through the park where I had slept two nights earlier. It was the only road from town in a southwesterly direction. There was a searing inside the calf followed a few seconds later by a ripping sensation at the midpoint. Pain, swelling and immobility were not an instant behind. I did what any experienced runner would do. I lapsed into a deep state of denial but after a half mile of walking, jogging and stretching, I accepted the fact that the growing purple bruise was not a cramp. I hobbled through a grassy meadow and spent the remainder of the morning watching the parade of walkers, bikers and joggers. Two miniature boxes of raisins crushed inside my back pocket were all I had for lunch. I was too sore to search for more. My wine skin was still nearly full of the Chianti I had purchased 3 days earlier. I decided that bad calories were better than no calories. Three hours later the skin was empty. You can imagine my condition after drinking almost two bottles on an empty stomach. I fell into a deep sleep and did not wake until one side of my face had been severely sunburned. I had slept in the same position for over six hours. It was nearly sundown and I was hung over, in pain and extremely hungry. When I awakened, I thought I recognized a trace of desire but it lasted only an instant. It is getting harder every day to remain patient where that is concerned. I guess I should be thankful that most mornings the mechanicals have demonstrated proper working order.

I hiked further up the hill to find a private spot. While I tended to my business, I spotted an orchard about three quarters of a mile to the east. I limped back to the bivy and packed. It had started to drizzle. I would be free to stuff myself with fresh fruits and vegetables while the farm hands dodged the rain inside the house or barn. Within twenty minutes, I was hard at work on a pile of Granny Smith apples and red bell peppers. Eating only what had recently fallen to the ground is one ethical precept I have not abandoned. There is little guilt in eating food destined to rot. I cannot help but wonder how solid my scruples will be if I am not far to the south within the next few weeks.

A farm dog came to visit while I was eating my dinner. Farm dogs often come to visit. They always detect an intruder but are seldom confrontational. A runner learns that the breed usually fits the neighborhood. Farming regions, where real crops are grown, almost never harbor dangerous dogs. I have run through endless fields and orchards, lakeside vineyards and Chinese bamboo forests and I have never encountered a territorial occupant. I have even jogged for several hundred yards through a barley field with my hand inside the mouth of a retriever-collie mix. The big pup simply wanted to hold my hand. It gently released me when we reached the main road.

Farm dogs are not to be confused with country dogs, especially hill country dogs. The latter do not welcome a runner near their territories. Often of the Rottweiler or Doberman persuasion, they learn to communicate terror and confusion. The general state of repair of the owner's property is a reliable predictor of the friendliness of a non-farm, rural dog.

I have learned to approach city dogs with extreme caution. Territories are smallish and populations much larger. Expect to meet a surly dog with a surly owner. Small city dogs demand as much caution as the big breeds. A terrier can remove a toe through a running shoe and a pit bull can inflict more carnage than a Rottweiler.

Animal teeth have not touched me in over twenty years of running. I have run in inner city ghettos and hill communities where piles of trash are often larger than the owners' houses or trailers. I have run on beaches, in the mountains and through suburbs and gated enclaves. A single word has been my armor wherever I have gone. "Stay," I yell as I set my feet. "Stay," I screamed when a porcine owner, brandishing a Budweiser tall boy, exhorted his pit bull to get the fag.

"Stay," I said as a golden retriever charged through an electric fence to fall against my legs for a nuzzle and belly rub. Virtually all retrievers are friendly. It does not matter where you encounter them. You do not see them as often inside the city limits but I think that is self-selection on the part of the owners. A frightened homeowner in Gotham City wants something menacing chained outside his building. The affable appearance of the Lab is not well suited to that role. The irony is that these intelligent dogs are merciless hunters and often vicious in defense of those they love.

I have always preferred out and back runs based on time rather than distance. Run 30 minutes away from the house in no particular direction, retrace your steps and you will have an endless variety of hour runs. The same streets can actually look completely different when approached from the opposite direction. Out and back runs can invite dog trouble. Every dog will smell you on your way out and bark the alarm up the line. They will be waiting for your return. There can be a half dozen dogs loitering about a street that was entirely empty the first time you passed through the neighborhood. One must learn to anticipate this phenomenon and be willing to hike around a street to avoid nasty breeds.

Beware also of the possum. This character projects a neutral demeanor when you pass his yard. Do not be fooled. He intends to follow with the stealth of an army ranger. I have discovered a few possum dogs stalking me more than a mile from his home.

I am tempted to talk about running with my dog, a dog that now belongs to someone else. I am tempted to go on and on about it but my aching calf, soaking in a hollow log filled with cool rainwater, demands more and more attention. The writing has kept my mind off the pain, which has become surprisingly strong. Doleful recollections of my beloved pup will not be helpful.
**Chapter 3**

Days 3, 4 and 5 did not merit a separate entry. I was bored enough to take the bridge. Boredom brings on thought and reflection and reflection is my quickest route to mortality. I know I would be fine if I could just get moving. It is so damn frustrating. I suppose it was foolish to believe that a permanent transformation had taken place. I had literally run from home. I covered no less than sixty miles per day for an entire month. Of course, I walked for long stretches, and I obviously had to stop for meals and bathroom calls but the point is that until this week I did not sustain a single injury? I must admit that since that first month, my daily mileage has steadily decreased but an average of 400 miles per week without injury is still astounding. My emotional state was no small factor. I was quite the lunatic when I first took flight.

I have known since childhood that lunatics are capable of amazing physical feats. A neighbor in my hometown schooled us well. October was always his worst month. There was something about those autumn leaves. When particularly bothered he could rip a thick oak door from the hinges with his bare hands. It could take as many as six police men to tackle him and he usually did not quit until choked into unconsciousness.

He took a particular dislike to me. I never knew exactly why but I think it sprang from a delusion that I was getting somewhere with the girl next door. His family lived to the left of our house, hers on the right. He could not have been more wrong about my romantic prospects. In the tenth grade I was as mature as an eleven year old and at sixteen, she could have passed for twenty-one. No rational male would have considered me a rival.

Ours was a dead end street, the last suburban lane before the woodlands and cornfields. We spent many dark evenings seated on fresh, warm asphalt talking and joking beneath a street lamp. His eyes never left her. She was already accustomed to the stares of men wherever she went but this was a visual inspection of the creepy sort. Poised on one knee like a sprinter in the starting blocks, his face a mix of desperation and starvation, he appeared ready at any moment to pounce and carry her into the dark woods.

One night she decided to hold my hand. It was a long while before my head cleared and I realized that his eyes had finally left her for me. I have not the skill to describe the sudden change in his expression. I asked her many times to stop the charade but she knew that she had found a winning strategy. It did not matter how many times I changed my seat. Each night she sat beside me to touch and whisper until he shook and sweated. Many times, I thought I saw the skin crawl across his arms.

His illness grew worse with each passing summer. Baseball bats, police cars and letters in the style of Son of Sam became part of every day life. Vigilance became my occupation especially during nights when my father was out of town on business. All my friends eventually became witnesses to some violent incident. On my fourteenth birthday, they presented me with a large turkey fork. The two prongs of stainless steel had been machined to fine, deadly points in the school metal shop. During countless nights, I carried the fork about the house like a divining rod, hoping that a charging intruder would simply run into the prongs, relieving me of any decisions that might brand me for all time as a coward. I was nearly forty when I finally slept without that fork beneath my side of the bed.

Being on the road has made me less vigilant. I sleep more soundly than ever. Maybe it is the absence of walls. There are no windows or doors to worry about, no locks to check and recheck and no noises to decipher except the wind and an occasional critter. These small towns and rural crossroads have gradually put me at ease. I know that nights out in the open in the big city would be quite different. That is why I am sticking to the roads less traveled. Running at night in my undergraduate days taught me that merely slowing the pace in some cities is not a healthy option. Stopping and bedding down for the night would be out of the question. Bloated and too wired to sleep after a crawl through the pubs, I often ran after midnight, through places with names like the combat zone and crack alley. Such a need for danger is now entirely beyond my understanding. I say good riddance to thrills and good riddance to youth.

The leg has not improved. Regular soakings in cool puddles have no doubt prevented a catastrophe but I am a long way from being able to run. Important decisions are at hand. I have been running for so many months without any plans. The sums necessary to sustain conventional room and board and medical treatment would force me back into the known world. I do know that I am not mentally capable of holding a job. Those tests of mental gymnastics by the neurologists and occupational therapists did not bolster my confidence. My license to practice optometry is long gone. It is unlikely that the most expensive lawyer in the world could do anything about that.

Running had been essential to my good humor long before I began this trek. Many gloomy days have healed during a hard workout on the track or an easy jaunt along a pretty trail. Those typical ups and downs required nothing more. That kind of running is like taking an aspirin for a mild headache. This running orgy of the last few months is more like a morphine drip.

I spent the morning watching a football game. The field was about a 300 yards from my camp. The crowd noise awakened me about a quarter past ten. I hobbled through the woods and sat in a clearing across from the 20-yard line. I was quite far from the playing surface, at least as high as the upper deck of a major college stadium. The players looked to be about eleven to thirteen years old. The uniforms were fantastic. One side wore the colors of the Los Angeles Rams circa 1967. The detail was exquisite especially the blue ram horns on each side of the helmets. Their opponents were dressed like the Cleveland Browns of the same era and were no less impressive in dark brown jerseys over white pants.

It was easy from even that distance to pick out the kids who were smitten. Their moves were clearly not their own. They juked and posed in the fashion of their heroes with no care for the instructions of the exasperated coaches. The phenomenon is relatively timeless. An individual of not so exceptional talent witnesses the skills of one who is particularly gifted. Music passes into the spectator and he becomes aware that there must be great pleasure in the doing of what he has observed. Gale Sayers was my first spark. His artistry appeared to defy the laws of nature. He ran sideways faster than straight ahead and could go from full speed to a complete stop within the space of a stride. During long runs, he flowed across the width of the field like a wave of improvised music. I was ten when I set out to master his moves. By the age of twelve, I had been well convinced that I would never be Mr. Sayers but I had learned that even one percent of Gayle Sayers could be a wonderful thing.

It is one of nature's best little kindnesses. On very rare occasions, our average minds and bodies may catch a glimpse of the brilliant side of the universe. My first taste was addictive. The entire neighborhood had come to their front porches to watch us play baseball in the street. This was long before back yard decks had become popular. We often continued under street lamps until only a few remained. I usually positioned myself behind a telephone pole in left field. It was a good place to hide my poor defensive skills. As neither an outfielder nor an infielder, I was confident that one of the older kids would run down any balls in my vicinity.

There was nothing to predict that the evening would be memorable. I passed the first two innings beside my pole without catastrophe, daydreaming about the orange sun wedged between two garages. The older boys treated me as if I belonged even though I was no threat at the plate and nothing more than an obstacle in the field. The world made sense and for four innings, I whistled Hey Jude, laughed at the teenagers' dirty jokes and tried to ignore a quickly growing need to dash to the bathroom, more than two blocks away. It started with just a hint of nausea. I cursed the day I was born. Just a week earlier at a critical point in the game, I had abandoned the outfield without notice to run home to the bathroom. I was able to live down one miscalculation. Two incidents so close in time would certainly earn me a shameful nickname.

A powerful vertigo came over me. I steadied myself against the pole and dropped to one knee. Perspiration covered me from head to chest. Several parents bounded from their porches to help but I was on my feet and completely recovered before they could reach me. A pleasurable lightness replaced the sickness. I bounced in place, convinced I could jump as high as the street lamps. A cinematic premonition popped into my head. What if a line drive flew to the other side of the pole and I dove across the sidewalk, snagged the ball and rolled into the front yard? The next several seconds passed in slow motion. I turned and took a few steps toward the sidewalk before the pitch reached the batter. The ball arrived just as I passed the pole. Just a flick of my toes and I began to fly. I floated over the sidewalk, extended my arm and watched the ball steer into my glove. The seconds passed so slowly that I had time to decide whether I should perform an extra roll when I hit the grass.

That was the third out. We tossed our gloves to the other team and ran for the bats. It was my turn to hit. Almost invariably, from little league to the majors, a player who makes a great play in the field is the first batter of the next inning. The lightness had not diminished. The bat sat weightless inside my hands. My practice swings whipped the air like a switch. I hurried to the batters box, afraid that the spell would suddenly be broken. The ball left the pitcher's hand and started to grow. It was as big as a beach ball by the time it reached the plate. I felt the ball crush like a soft tomato against the meaty part of the bat. It cleared the left fielder by a considerable margin, bounced high on the sidewalk and rolled to the next block. It was the first time I had hit anything other than a weak ground ball. I did not come to bat again nor did I have another chance in the field but the delightful lightness stayed with me to the end of the game.

I was my old self the next evening. I knew it the moment I left the house. It would be three long years before I would enjoy a second magical day. A sick stomach was again the first sign. We were driving to an away game where my teammates and I were to face a flamethrower with a premature mustache and primitive mutton chops. My mother twice pulled the car to side of the road while I heaved and shook.

I was still quite ill when I reached the on deck circle before the first inning. That this might be one of those days had not entered my mind. I tried to take some practice swings in time with the pitcher's warm up tosses. He lobbed three or four change ups and signaled to the catcher that he was ready. Had God intervened in our favor? I wished injury to no one but this behemoth had beaned me earlier in the season. It was obvious that he had hurt his arm. Why had none of my teammates or coaches told me the secret?

I watched the first two batters strike out on three pitches. I could not believe it. We had dreaded that fastball. I was partly to blame for that fear. I should not have told anyone who would listen that I had never seen the pitch that hit me. Since that first game, we had steeled ourselves to face him. For two weeks, the coaches had challenged our reactions by throwing batting practice from far in front of the mound. We were like coiled springs. It was such a cruel trick. He was beating us with change ups, slow balls.

The second hitter stopped at the dugout entrance, heaved his bat against the fence and shook his head. "How the hell am I supposed to hit what I can't see?"

"What you can't see? He's lobbing the ball up there." I tried to hold him by the shirtsleeve but he pulled away and stalked into the dugout.

The sickness had subsided. It felt so comfortable to step into my batting stance. The pitcher looked small and distant. He rolled his fingers across the seams and waited for the catcher to call for the pitch he wanted. I could see dried dirt under his fingernails and a small cut on the back of his wrist. The painful result of our first encounter came to mind and I moved a little farther from the plate. His first pitch would almost surely be close to my head, an intimidating reminder to break my resolve. The ball spun so slowly from his hand that I could distinguish individual rotations of the red seams. The weak pitch exploded against the catcher's mitt.

The second pitch approached the plate even slower than the first. The ball grew to at least three times its normal size and collapsed like putty against the bat. I did not see the ball clear the fence and I do not recall trotting around the bases. Every at bat was a joy and every chance in the field was an exhibition. Immediately after the game, the coach of a traveling, all-star team mistakenly offered me a place on his roster. How could he have known that the magic deserted me the second I left the field and would not return for six years and never again on a baseball diamond. There were minor echoes throughout my late teens and early twenties. Fantastic days to be sure but there would be just two more bona fide recurrences and both of those would happen on the rugby field.

Playing rugby is like swimming in tall ocean swells. A rugby player comes to expect an elevated level of emotion and physical awareness. One does not expect his body to defy the laws of physics. It was the first day of spring and the first game of my sophomore season. The feeling just suddenly appeared. My legs felt weakly anchored to the field. The usual sensation of pushing my weight upward from the earth had vanished. My legs dangled from my hips and I extended my toes to meet the grass, afraid that I could actually float away like a balloon. I was suddenly two steps quicker than my fastest teammates. Premonitions of the other side's strategy would come to me several minutes in advance. I believed that I could see with the back of my head. I felt no fatigue and injury was impossible. The sweetness vanished before I had crossed the field at the end of the game to shake hands with the opposing team. It returned for the very last time thirteen months later. That was twenty years ago.

The football game ended and I hobbled along the hillside toward my tent. The leg had improved slightly. The football memories led me in a roundabout way to think of Elvis Presley. I tried to imagine him as a child hearing for the first time that strange southern melancholy that is at once Celtic and African. Was it love at first sound or did it soak into him a little bit at a time? We called him an old man, a relic of the fifties and hardly noticed his passing during our senior year in high school. Others called him a thief but I think it is more likely that there was a musical Gale Sayers somewhere in Mr. Presley's childhood.

A few hundred yards from my camp, I began to see footprints. The treads of new trail runners had left a detailed cast in the soggy mud. I knew right away that they were female. The prints led right to my things. She had twice walked round my bivy, stopping on each lap near the entrance. I could not remember how I had left the flap. She had not been afraid to stop at the front door. Taking a peak inside would not have taken much more courage.

The footprints continued down the steep hillside. The long strides suggested an almost reckless rate of speed through the dense thickets of pines. She must have felt very safe or been very lost to have strayed so far from the trails. A blown knee or broken leg in one of these isolated valleys would be a serious event. A badly hobbled runner would find it almost impossible to climb these steep cuts and screams could go unheard for many days. I detected movement far below. She bounded from the tree line onto a dirt road. I watched her fade to a powdery plume.
**Chapter 4**

This morning there were fresh tracks beside my bivy. She must have been out very early. I was awake at sunrise and I did not hear anything but the chirping of nuthatches. She probably came by before going to the park police. I cannot blame her. I packed and headed to a restroom near the football field. It felt so good to lather up and scrub down with a clean, damp towel. My dental floss ran out two days ago. I have been flossing so long that I do not feel clean without it. My beard has begun to scrape my lips. I wanted very much to shave but that will have to wait until I am safely beyond the reach of the park police. My deodorant fell under the sink into a puddle of black water. I did not mind all that much. I have learned which shampoos leave a pleasant fragrance over the entire body. Deodorant is extra weight I do not need.

I had evidently forgotten to clip my toenails for a very long time. The nail on my largest toe had gradually ripped the front of my right shoe. I am usually quite adept at tearing away toenails with my fingers but I was in such a hurry that I removed a large chunk of skin.

My gear felt surprisingly light on my back. I had needed the rest more than I realized. My leg is about 80 to 90 percent healed. For once, I will do the right thing and ease gradually into running. At three miles per hour, I should be able to walk at least 20 to 25 miles per day. By next week, I should be well ahead of the coming winter.

I had a great breakfast. Almost every shop on Main Street had free samples on the counters. The sky was blue, the wind was light and almost everyone was in a good mood. I could have spent the entire morning at the bakery and no one would have noticed. It was perfectly crowded. There was enough warm bread, bagel chips and doughnut holes to feed two hundred people. The stainless steel vats of free coffee radiated as much heat as a February fireplace. I wanted to spend hours in that chair chomping on fresh bread, sipping mugs of Hazelnut. The line for bread snaked past my chair. Several of the locals made eye contact or shared a sincere good morning. I knew it was time to move on. I bought a coffee to go and walked across the street to the butcher shop. It was just as crowded as the bakery. Some of the well-wishers from the bakery nodded when they saw me again. Carrying a large coffee embossed with the bakery's logo made me feel less conspicuous but anyone who looked hard would peg me as a moocher. I did my best to look nonchalant about using a toothpick to spear cubes of salami and sausage from plates atop the glass cases. I made two stops at each plate. There was no problem making a quick, quiet exit. The line had spilled onto the sidewalk. Those waiting outside were just happy to see one more person leave.

I walked to the western edge of town, parked on a dry wooden bench beside a bus stop and watched people go about their mornings. No one took much notice of me sipping my portable tankard. This town is just large enough for that. The caffeine hit me very hard. Sixty ounces of black coffee in one sitting is beyond my limit. One side of my brain argued with fine conviction that I should not run for at least another week. The caffeinated side of my brain put his hands over my ears and hummed.

Carrying all my gear on the first run after the injury was particularly stupid especially with no warm up or stretching. I had traveled less than two blocks when the calf tightened into a rigid ball. I hobbled back to the park bench and sulked. It was noon before the caffeine faded and I could rationally consider my next move. There was too much risk in staying so long in one place. Small town folk are relatively tolerant of the occasional moocher but moochers who overstay their welcome quickly start to look like vagrants. I had nearly become a sociology experiment two months earlier. What a frightening taste of compassion that turned out to be. I was never so happy to leave a place. The local experts had insisted that I was a highly functioning autistic. They prescribed a lengthy program of government financed therapy. I did not argue about it. I would have signed my name to any diagnosis as long as it got me out of there.

Finding a new camp was my first priority. The park was still the smartest option. My best estimate was that it covered at least 30 square miles. It would not be too difficult to find a spot hidden from the habits of the lonely, long distance runner. She had very likely given a report to the park police. I decided to wait until late afternoon, when the park would be most crowded. I could no longer lie to myself about the calf. It definitely felt like a four to six week injury. An experienced runner can usually give an accurate estimate of the healing period just a few hours after a serious injury but this becomes more difficult with age. Soreness from a minor injury can be especially problematic. A thirty year old usually feels the pain of an excessive workout within twenty-four hours. A forty year old may not experience the same soreness for another one to two days. It is quite paradoxical. Anyone would expect older muscles and connective tissue be quicker to cry out sooner? The problem multiplies itself. An older runner who injures himself on Monday can wake up feeling fine on Tuesday and maybe even as late as Wednesday. He is already injured but does not yet know it and hits the asphalt on both days after an exhausting eight hours at work. Friday he can hardly walk. Most of us suffer through several episodes of plantar fasciitis, shin splints or ileo-tibial band syndrome before we figure it out.

I left the bus stop just past two. My mood was dangerously introspective. I had to keep moving. It was too early to scout the park. I wandered a while looking for another place to elevate my swelling calf. I hit the jackpot five blocks beyond the bus stop.

It was the most awful Holiday Inn I had ever seen. Tucked away in a sooty, industrial block, it could not have held more than ten rooms. A tarnished copper plate the size of an envelope was the only identification. The front door was a cheap fiberglass replacement from a DIY superstore. One had to wonder if the franchise had run out years ago and the owners simply kept the name, the grimy location a guarantee that no one from the corporation would ever discover the charade.

I walked inside and closed the door as quietly as I could. The lobby was surprisingly large and bright. It was evident that someone cared a great deal about the place. The ornate decor of the grand theater it had once been was lovingly preserved. Soft yellow light from gargoyle sconces spread a warm hospitality. It was all I could do to keep from flopping onto one of the overstuffed, leather sofas. I bypassed the sofas, entered the gift shop and found the magazine rack. It had been at least twenty years since I had cased a hotel lobby from behind a magazine but the skills were still there. My eyes automatically searched for an easel or showcase. Both were close enough to read. I could not believe my good fortune. The tiny establishment was hiding an indoor pool and Jacuzzi. Strict supervision of hotel facilities was unlikely in this part of town. The list of daily events was even more exciting. Dollar pitchers of beer and free appetizers would be the perfect way to follow a long soak.

A tiny 'pool this way' sign hung from two strands of fishing line on the opposite side of the lobby. I had no choice but to walk past the front desk. The elderly fellow on duty did not even look up from his News of the World. The hallway behind the lobby was in somewhat worse repair but was still much cleaner than I would have expected from the street. The door to the pool area had been propped open with a bucket. A cleaning woman was stacking towels into a wooden box beside the locker room entrance. We exchanged good mornings and I strode into the locker room. Her smile made me confident that she had no interest in exposing Jacuzzi theft. I was down to my running shorts and out of the locker room in less than a minute but experience reminded me to slow down.

It had always been difficult to decide where best to store my gear. I never settled on the safest strategy. A legitimate guest would use a locker. A large pile of clothes or an oversized gym bag beside the pool could call attention to an interloper but a few incidents that called for a quick exit taught me to keep my things handy. I returned to the locker room and retrieved my pack.

The housekeeper had gone. The water temperature was just right. Drowsiness came as soon as I settled onto the ledge of that steamy tub. I tried my best to enjoy the moment but I feel asleep in less than five minutes. I awoke more than two hours later, drunk with relaxation. The pool furniture was stacked and folded. Someone other than the housekeeper had not cared that I was there. I loitered in a steam shower for at least another thirty minutes. When I finally toweled, the skin on my hands and feet were pink and papery.

I knew in my heart that taking advantage of the pub specials would be pushing my luck but hunger got the better of me. Despite my sleepiness, I had the presence of mind to avoid the front desk. A facilities map outside the locker room showed me the way. Three floors, two corridors and one elevator later I was standing outside the Flat Iron Cafe. The joint was packed. I had envisioned myself hidden away in a dark corner while one or two heavy drinkers occupied the bartender. This had definitely turned out to be my lucky day. The bar stools were filled and the only free table was in the corner farthest from the action. I pulled a local entertainment rag from a rack and rushed for the table, taking stock along the way of the weathered clientele. Getting the table was one thing. Holding it would be another matter. I pulled two chairs together and bridged my pack across the arms. The magazine, divided in two and placed on opposite sides of the table, suggested that a couple would soon return from the buffet.

A waitress found me before I started for the bar. Tips are not a luxury I can afford but I decided to make an exception. I ordered two pitchers because free food usually means tiny pitchers and two pitchers on the table would give the impression that I was waiting for friends. Ordering two pitchers eliminated the need for a second tip. It was a good deal. Two pitchers for three dollars and another small bill for the tip. I would not need much more food for two or three days. I had the good sense to order light beer. It was nearly sundown. Time for finding a secure place to sleep would be short. It would not be a good night for my drunken stumblebum routine.

Free buffets progress through predictable stages and I was anxious to see how far this spread had advanced. Phase 1 is all about optimism and good intentions. Metal silverware and large plates are usually available along with taco fixings or finger foods in the style of Spanish tapas. The customer has wide discretion over bins of meats, vegetables and toppings. Only the size of the hard taco shell limits the size of the portions. A plate will hold only a few shells and each shell can contain a limited amount of fixings. Eventually, the shells are eliminated after someone figures out that the plate will hold more food if the taco and fixings are heaped in thick layers directly onto the plate. Ground beef forms the base of what is essentially a step pyramid of food. Greens sit atop the beef with cheeses added next. Picante, taco or red-hot sauces in amounts large enough to cover all the rest come last. This harbinger of doom has many names but I remember it as the Texas straw hat. The popularity of this innovation spreads quickly and a buffet meant to last an evening vanishes in less than an hour.

Almost every restaurant manager responds by switching to tiny plates. The gluttonous moocher cannot be deterred. Smaller straw hats and more trips to the buffet are a fair price. Silverware is next to go. This too is a futile strategy. Everyone has access to silverware. I once walked around for two years with a fork inside my coat pocket. Most owners throw in the towel at this point. Deeper discounts on drinks replace the free munchies. Free food is limited to bowls of chips and pretzels. Even the nacho and cheese machine are disconnected.

I must say in my own defense that I have never partaken of hors d'oeuvres without buying something from the bar or kitchen. My drink purchases were often quite handsome during the happy hours of my youth but the food I consumed was probably worth three time what I drank. I suppose there had to be a more admirable course of action. I was not destitute or demoralized. Young, happy and free is a more accurate description but it was rather difficult to live on a grocery budget of ten dollars per week even as long ago as the early nineteen eighties.

I laughed aloud when I reached the buffet. I had never seen such a spread of taco delight. A fellow on the opposite side of the buffet returned his taco shells to the basket when he saw the mammoth straw hat I had constructed on my full size dinner plate.

"Hey, that's a great idea. Can you hand me a fork? I guess they wouldn't put out silverware if they didn't want anyone to do this?"

I handed him a full set of silverware inside a monogrammed napkin. "It's probably alright, but I wouldn't pile everything too high. It calls attention to the thing if you know what I mean." He yanked the spoon from his napkin and shoveled a lump of cheese the size of a softball onto his plate.

"Thanks buddy. It'll be our little secret." His friends made quite a scene when he returned to his table. Everyone in the bar turned to get a look at the skyscraper on his plate. Every bin was empty in ten minutes. The manager personally removed the silverware and plates before filling the bins one last time. Next Friday there would be no hors d'oeuvres.

I lingered over a magazine long after my plate was clean. The watered down beer had hardly made a dent. The heat from the stone fireplace across the room was just right and the speaker above my table was broken. I wished I could stay all night in my cozy, quiet corner but I had no more money. The table of frat boys had taken the rap for the straw hats. The manager spent most of the evening scowling at them from the kitchen door. It was time to count my blessings, at least my blessings for that day. I left the hotel about a half hour before dark. Only for a second did I consider searching for an unlocked hotel room. The beer was having an effect but I was a long way from doing something so reckless.

I got lost twice on my way to the park but each time a patient local showed me the right direction. The after work crowd had filled the park. Walkers and bikers far outnumbered runners. My slow saunter in sweat clothes was the perfect disguise. I happened upon a map of the park. My lucky day was evidently not yet over. It was easy to pinpoint where I had first made camp. It would not be difficult to find a secluded thicket far from my original location.

I had just turned from the road to a narrow trail when I detected a growing racket. Something was crashing downward through the heavy brush. In the fading light, it was not possible to identify exactly what it was but it was definitely not a small animal. A creature closer in size to a pony was flattening large bushes on its way to the bottom. I hesitated for only a moment and my chance to run had passed. I set my feet and braced my back against a stout maple. An article I had read years before about how to handle a bear attack came to mind but I was too frantic to remember whether it was better to fight or play dead.

It stopped just short of the trail, stood still and quiet behind a tall screen of hemlocks. The hemlocks rustled. I had forgotten the tree behind me. I turned to run and cracked my nose and forehead against the trunk of a second maple. I knelt against the tree and listened. A familiar sound came from behind the hemlocks, a gentle alluring sound. She sighed. It was definitely a she. The bushes parted. In an instant, she was by me and beyond the tree line.

It was long past sunset when I reached the northeast corner of the park. I had just enough strength to throw my pack to the ground. There was no point in trying to set up the bivy. I pulled my hood over my eyes, held a knife against my chest and dropped onto the wild grass. All through the night, accompanied by the memory of a lovely whisper, I studied that single glimpse of her features and fragment by fragment, hour by hour I pieced together a picture of her beautiful face.
**Chapter 5**

I had not moved in over twelve hours and could not remember taking the knife from the secret pocket inside my jacket. All the anxiety from the previous night had vanished. Blackberry bushes covered the hill below me, the nearest bushes within reach. I sat up and quickly devoured at least ten handfuls of berries as big as my thumb then set out to find some water. I did not search for long. A clear creek passed within fifty yards of where I had slept. I ran back and retrieved my pack. I stripped, dipped my head into the creek, worked shampoo into my hair and spread the suds across every inch of my body. After toweling, I brushed my teeth until I drew blood.

"What the hell am I doing?'' Anyone within a mile could have heard me. I pounded my gear into the pack and stalked back to camp. I did my best to resist the impulse but I turned around and ran to the creek. My reflection was crisp and bright on the calm surface. I cursed the momentary illusion of adolescent enthusiasm and well reminded of what I had become, I removed the comb from my tangled hair and returned it to my shirt pocket.

I started toward the center of the park with no particular plan. I had not yet noticed the considerable improvement in my leg. An elderly fellow at a nearby picnic table peaked around his newspaper and reached for the collar of the German Shepard beneath his seat. I hurried onto the road, my face turned to spare his frightened eyes.

"Please give me patience, empathy, forgiveness and faith." I clenched my fists until my fingernails sliced my palms. "Don't you even think about it." I did not look to see if anyone was watching. The desire to pray had vanished the instant my feet had left the front porch of my last real home.

Just ten years earlier, I had struggled to return to prayer. It was a typical crisis. Invincibility and immortality exist for no one. It was an important lesson but the suddenness of the realization left me dazed and defeated. Giving in at a time of crisis would have tainted the relationship. Neither party would ever know for sure whether my motives were anything more than desperation. I had not been in touch for nearly two decades. It would have been bad form to start asking for this and that. For two years, I hammered away at myself and the world I had built. Recovery was cruel and exhausting. I tried to convince myself that nothing more than the passage of time had healed my wounds but I had to acknowledge the assistance.

How was I to begin? Does one simply recite the standard prayers or should I immediately make a confession and ask for favors. The skills needed to answer those questions had faded like a discarded foreign language. Several years of experimentation followed. The process was so gradual that I cannot recall exactly when I arrived at the final product. At some point, I realized that I had started providing spontaneous updates about my thoughts and feelings. It became comforting to whisper into a trusted ear in times of stress especially at work or during catastrophes within the family.

Our talks were never complicated. It was much the same as it had been in my teens. I quickly reclaimed my role as an obstinate son. I could not find enough ways to be angry over imperfections and misfortune. Why must I ask? Why must I praise? Good people just did the right thing. How could I accept anything less from a god?

I decided to do what all doubters throughout history have done. I devised a test. I would ask and if I received the correct answer, would award a passing grade. The form of my request put me into brain lock for several months. I was never so silly as to ask for a genuine miracle or at least not a huge one. I finally decided that my chances for success would be best if I prayed for something that might also benefit others. Asking that he change the outcome of some future event was just too frightening and my appetite for trinkets and trophies had never been strong. Indecision made my work long and complex but in the end, I did not have to go far for the source of my prayer. I still believed that I had come into the world with a free mind. I also knew that I carried flaws that sometimes led me to use that freedom in hurtful ways. The improvement of those flaws could only lead to good things for everyone. How could he resist? I was old enough to own my shortcomings. Half of me had descended from a long line of famously impatient Irishmen. Impatience of that caliber is painful to the owner as well as those he claims to love.

Forgiveness does not come easily to that kind of man and those who cannot forgive do not often have much faith in anything important. I finally came to my request, my test, my prayer.

Please give me patience, with others and myself.

Let empathy flow from that patience so that I might be kind when it is most difficult. Help me to forgive those who have hurt me. Let me forgive myself when I am weak of character.

Give me faith that both you and I will do the right thing. I seldom used the entire prayer. Most often, I muttered a shorthand version.

"Please give me patience, empathy, forgiveness and faith." I would repeat the words in a crowd or while engaged in a heated conversation. These four requests were always included but in special circumstances, I sometimes added to the list. Pleas for poise and wisdom were frequent. Progress was slow but the prayer became a regular part of my day. I kept at it for five years and eventually came to expect results. The feeling of relief was usually immediate. I had received my answer. Cause and effect was obvious. How wonderful to realize that the day just ended had been a good one in spite of stubborn sorrows. Moments of quiet occurred amidst the worst calamities. One simply had to know where to look for help.

It had taken ten years to repair the rift. I was so sure of my formula. Ask not for the result.

Ask instead to overcome the weaknesses that can prevent that good result. We need not ask for anything new. With help, we can make the most of our virtues. It is addition by subtraction like making a budget to eliminate wasteful expenses. The paycheck is no larger but a little something remains after the bills are paid.

He behaved admirably during the darkest days of my career. The descent of the health professions and my workdays into a bureaucratic hell inspired uncountable prayers. It is difficult to describe the terror of orders to cut corners with patients to please some faceless bean counters in Washington. I prayed for a change in the wind. I prayed for new leadership. I prayed that I would not blind or kill someone.

Many years I practiced under the same stern overseers. The conditions became more and more difficult but I did not harm anyone and I did not lose myself. Patience was not so difficult to find. When tired and disgusted I became less likely to forget the fears and concerns of my patients. Grudges were fewer and shorter and I usually had faith or a least a little hope that things would somehow work out for the best. I could not then imagine a power strong enough to overwhelm that relationship but then he left me. He just up and left me.

Worse fates are all around. I still have enough of a brain to understand that. It makes no difference. I did not try to forget him. He left me.

I can still push the most horrible pictures from my mind. He permits me that. I would have gone insane had he done otherwise. He was at least able to continue to torment me?

The old man clipped a leash onto the Shepard's collar and trotted down the road in the opposite direction. Every few seconds he looked back to be sure that I had not followed. I dismissed a second frightful picture from my mind and broke into a trot. I turned one last time to be sure that the old fellow retained firm control of the dog. Just ahead of them, a tractor-trailer leaned around a curve, jack-knifed, straightened and jack-knifed again before toppling sideways into the bushes. Dog and master disappeared behind the wreck. I almost ran the other way when I thought of what I might see beneath those wheels or inside that crumpled cab.

The driver had already extricated himself by the time I arrived.

"I'm OK." He waved me toward the rear wheels. "Someone needs to keep traffic away from the truck." A thick line of blood ran from the top of his head to the tip of his nose. A steady rhythm of black fluid spurted from each nostril. I slipped my t-shirt over my head and covered his face. "I told you. I'm fine." The fluid in his throat and nose muffled his voice. He snatched the shirt, held it to his face and pointed toward the back of the rig.

I fell near the rear wheels onto a carpet of broken glass. Cases of beer continued to crash onto the road all around me, the bottles exploding like firecrackers. I scrambled to my feet and hurried to the other side of the trailer. There was no sign of the man or the dog. I checked behind each wheel, beneath the listed trailer and under the bushes along the road. I trotted one or two hundreds yards in the direction they had last been walking then returned to the rig to find the driver. He was holding a piece of broken mirror at arms length, shaving with an electric razor.

"What were you looking for?" He tilted the mirror to see my face.

"An old guy and his dog were on the curve where you lost it. Didn't you see them?"

"Buddy, at a moment like that, all your attention is on getting control of the rig. Ten naked broads could have run across that road and I wouldn't have seen them." He tossed the mirror into the bushes and wiped his cheeks with a handkerchief. "I can't believe the cops haven't showed. You had better tend to those cuts before the alcohol gets in there."

Lacerations covered my palms, knees and elbows. Blood diluted by beer had left maroon blotches on my socks, shorts and shirt. Gravel and glass filled the wounds but there was no pain and the bleeding had stopped despite the pounding of my heart. Bottles, wooden cases and broken glass sailed past my ankles on a shallow river of ale. I intercepted an unbroken bottle and chugged the contents. I needed less than a minute to polish off two more. A fleshy lump the size of a golf ball erupted on my forehead. When had I injured my head? I drained three more bottles. A sizeable crowd of runners formed around the wreck. The trucker had picked the perfect location to dump his cargo. He climbed onto a case and called for quiet.

Anyone who helped salvage the unbroken cases could have as much beer as he liked as long as he drank it before the job was finished.

All around me people gulped beers and laughed. A makeshift assembly line quickly formed and the work proceeded at a respectable pace. Runners cannot abandon their self-discipline even for something as unstructured as the pursuit of drunkenness. I was at the end of the line lifting cases into the truck but accepted a transfer to the cargo bay after several falls and dozens of broken bottles. I did my best to slow my drinking and concentrate. It had been so long since I had been to a party. My co-workers made it clear that the next dropped bottle would end my workday. I slipped again but managed to save two bottles of their precious juice.

"Easy does it. Just take your time. I cannot believe you saved those two bottles. You were very lucky." I had not seen her climb into the truck. I secured the next case before I turned to look at her.

"What was so lucky about it?" The near darkness inside the cargo bay shielded our features.

"Didn't you hear that you would be fired if you broke another bottle? But I suppose you are in no shape to care." She reached around me and took a case from the fellow to my left.

"I'm sorry. I guess I've become the weak link in the Jane."

"You mean chain?"

"That's what I said, weak link in the chain. I was thanking you for taking that case."

"I understand why you thanked me but you said Jane. It's no big deal. I was only teasing."

She took another case before I could grab it. "Sit down on these boxes and take a rest."

I allowed her to take my arm and lead me from the work. She arranged three stacks, eased me into a sitting position then lifted my feet until I was flat on my back.

"Look at all those cuts and filled with so much dirt and gravel. At least you were smart enough to sterilize your wounds by falling into a puddle of alcohol. You still need to clean those things as soon as possible."

She hurried to the front of the truck, climbed out and jogged away. A few minutes later, she was sponging my legs with a clean, damp towel. "That's much better. You can do the rest." She handed me the towel and returned to the line. I still had not seen her face. I thought about the people I had met during my travels and I thought of one of the few who had approached me in a more or less normal fashion. Construction sites, parks and roadhouses at odd hours are not usually bright and cheery.

The sun was about to turn the corner and fill the truck with light. I imagined her expression. I could not stand the thought of seeing her draw back. I draped the towel over my head, hunched as low as possible and made my way toward the exit. I started to run as soon as my feet hit the asphalt.

"Where are you going?" The quick patter of her shoes told me that she would soon overtake me. I stopped, turned my face to the truck and wrapped the towel tighter around my head.

"Where are you going in such a hurry?" She peered around my shoulder, her face so close that I could feel the heat of her breath on my neck. "Are you having some kind of an alcohol induced blackout? Is there anyone in there?"

"I've go to get back."

"Can you speak up? I can hardly hear you through that towel."

"I said I had better be getting back. I've got to get some car parts."

She pulled downward on a corner of the towel. "Car parts? You are not driving anywhere. I will have your buddies on the truck here in no time flat. We will tie you to one of those trees on the hill and let you watch us drink beer."

I eased the towel from her fingers. "I wasn't going for a while. I was obviously going to wash up and rest first."

She grabbed the towel again, her grip much firmer. "That is a very odd explanation. Nothing but convenience stores will be open for at least two hours. You talk as if you have an appointment to pick up car parts. I've never heard of such a thing." She yanked harder on the towel. "What is the deal with this towel? What are you hiding? Are you bleeding?"

"That's it. I cut my temple the last time I fell. It started to spurt when I ran."

"Let's have a look at it before the ambulance leaves. You might need a doctor." She pulled with both arms. I fell to my knees and dropped my neck into my shoulders.

"Just let go. Can you just let it go?"

She released the towel and knelt beside me. For several minutes, we sat side by side without speaking. Every now and then, she tried to steal a peak but my face was only inches from the truck and the towel remained locked inside my fists. Her right arm slid around my waist. I did not notice her left hand easing the towel from my forehead. I looked into her eyes. She did not look away.

"That's not so bad." She dabbed my forehead with the hem of her t-shirt. I waited for her face to betray her distaste. "That truck driver told me that you ran directly to help him. Those ruffians in the truck should have been more respectful to an aspiring hero. I suppose that includes me."

Her face was humble and warm, an invitation to look behind the beautiful facade. I am just like you or soon will be. It was easy to imagine her saying the words. Her arm was still around my waist.

"You look a little steadier on your feet." She released me and took a step backward. "Are you going to be OK or should I find someone to ride you home?"

"I'm feeling much better. I'm not far from here."

"Take care of yourself." She was already running. "I run the park on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at about 8 am." She turned to face me, running backwards while she talked. "Maybe I'll see you around here."

I was too astonished to answer. As soon as she was out of sight, I hobbled along the incline toward my camp. Maybe I had grown too accustomed to seeing myself in a bad light. Something had obviously changed for the better. An angel would not have been so friendly to a mutant.

I fell three times within fifty yards of the creek. I slid to the bank on my belly like a baseball player diving into second base. For several seconds I lay with my face toward the water, my eyes clamped shut. The wind against my cheek was barely a puff. The reflection would be smooth and honest. I opened my eyes and stared into a pool of ripples. Tiny feet pattered like tap shoes on wood.

"Get the hell home." The lithe creature bounded across the stream, toddling upright as if on solid ground. Sunlight lit his translucent skin from all sides and he seemed to smile. "Get the hell off the water." It stopped, sank to its waist and turned toward my voice. "That's right. I am talking to you. Clear the pool." He returned his feet to the surface, skipped to the bank and sauntered into the brush. The surface was instantly calm but I was not able to comprehend the crisp reflection. For a few seconds I saw a snapshot of what I once had been but like the changing of slides in a projector a second, persistent image emerged. I was at once exhausted and demoralized. I dropped onto my back and stared between my fingers at the passing clouds.

"One, two, three." The cool air tickled my nostrils. "Four, five, six, seven." I remembered the prayers I would add when I had first learned to meditate. "Eight, nine, ten." There was no point in going on. A man who cannot pray has no business trying to meditate. I crawled back to the creek. This time there was no confusion. I had seen pity in her eyes. A warm heart had reached out to me. I had imagined something more. At least I could be thankful for that warmth.

I kicked myself the entire afternoon for allowing my hopes to rise so high. The crash was pretty awful. My legs smarted. My head ached from the beer and I gave up trying to convince myself that her charity had made the day a good one. Sleep came long before sundown. I almost hoped that the authorities would find me and drag me to jail.

My departure was long past due. Dangerously cold weather was not far off and my calf had finally healed. The magical running spell had surely run its course. A fast walk was the most I could expect. Perhaps three miles per hour, 24 miles per day would not be overly ambitious. I could travel 600 miles over the next month, plenty far and fast to beat the winter. There would be orchards and crops along the way. With luck, the ATM card would never leave my pocket.

I awoke just before midnight to vomit. It was over before I could leave my bed. I was too tired, too low and too hung over. I just turned my back to the mess and fell asleep.
**Chapter 6**

I wasted no time this morning. I opened my eyes just as the sun lighted the bottoms of the trees. I was packed and moving before the circle had crested the horizon. There was no point in making the campsite look as if I had never been there. I had no plans to return. I left the pile of vomit for the weather, which made me feel just a little guilty. I have prided myself on being a neat camper. I was not going to worry about it. There was almost no chance a hiker or jogger would happen through such a thickly overgrown spot.

My hangover was substantial but not debilitating. My legs were free of pain and I had a plan. I skipped down the hill to the site of the truck wreck. Every sign of the incident had disappeared and the memory of her face and voice did not occur to me until I was far beyond the curve. A sign announcing that the park extended another nine miles did not depress me. I had not yet seen the southern third of the park. Someone had told me that the prettiest terrain lay in that direction. The curiosity felt good. I tripped over an empty video box. The pictures on the label would have sickened a frat boy. My brief flirtation with serenity was at an end. There is no telling what one will see on the side of the road while running. I have run thousands of miles and seen thousands of discarded items. I thought I had seen it all. I see dirty magazines along the shoulder of the road much less frequently than I did four or five years ago. The emergence of the internet I think is somehow to blame. Sadistic sex toys and soiled under garments, no doubt flung from a moving car late the previous night, can be rather startling to the daydreaming runner. Avoiding troubling mental pictures can require great effort.

Animals have from time to time interrupted my way. Ground hogs have sometimes filled me with terror by standing on two feet and baring their teeth just as I crested a hill though one has never actually attacked. I have jumped over huge snakes and mangled deer not yet dead. Only once or twice have I encountered the corpse of a family cat and never have I seen a dead or injured dog. Ground hogs are risk takers who often lose despite their quickness while slow- footed wild turkey and geese always make it to the other side by traveling in crowds that bring traffic to a complete stop. Costume jewelry, clothing and used diapers have all tripped me more than once. I have stopped many times to examine electronic devices of unknown purpose. A friend once suggested that I consider a coffee table book of the above items. It is hard to imagine a more morbid and trivial collection of photos over which to eat cake and sip hot beverages.

I had been walking about an hour when I decided to run. Walking was the right thing to do but I had exhausted all my self-discipline during the healing period. At least I had the good sense to veer onto a soft path that ran parallel to the road. It felt so delightful to trot beneath the trees. The sky was clear and I passed through corrugated pockets of hot and cool air. There was some residual tenderness in the calf muscle but not enough to make me worry. I slowed to a jog and took extra care around the many sharp and dark corners. One hour at a time would be my focus. Look forward to the next meal and look upon a night of dreamless sleep as a special treat. Take satisfaction in manufacturing survival out of nothing or at least next to nothing. Every so often, allow yourself some hope that the future might be better. It was as much resolve as I could muster. Patience, empathy, forgiveness and faith did not cross my mind.

The next corner was particularly shady. It turned ninety degrees to the left and fell downward for about thirty yards to meet another turn that bent just as acutely in the opposite direction. I descended much faster than I would have liked but braking under those conditions would have been too traumatic for my fragile calf. It was too late to stop when I realized that someone was turning the corner from the other side. The ferocity of the collision proved that he had not heard my approach. Our chests collided with only slightly less force than our foreheads. He crumpled backwards and I sailed into the trunk of an oak more than ten feet down the trail. I knew before I hit the ground that the calf had torn anew. It was an accident. I knew that but I still wanted to kill him with my fists. Many years I had run hard intervals on a track in complete darkness without colliding with runners coming from the opposite direction. I had become more of danger to everyone in bright, morning sunlight. "Are you alright?" He lay inside a patch of berry bushes. His shorts were blue and he was extremely thin. "Can you hear me? At least wave or jiggle a leg to let me know you're not dead." I raised myself to one knee and massaged my calf. "Are you OK? Damn it. Hang on. I'll be up there in a few seconds." My calf was already swollen and changing colors. The ankle on the same side was growing just as quickly. I followed a line of red droplets. I was not sure that I could keep from hitting him even if he was unconscious. Our entanglement would be for him just a bump on the head, a few days away from running. I on the other hand remained stranded with cold weather approaching. I had exhausted the good graces of the town. One could expect only so much tolerance for mooching and squatting.

My first impulse was to run away. She displayed no outward signs of injury but she was definitely unconscious. I rolled her onto her back.

"Are you OK? Are you OK?" I shook her shoulders. She opened her eyes just wide enough to see me.

"My head hurts so much." I began to fear that she might be seriously injured. How would I ever get her out of there? I shook her again.

"Please wake up." Her eyes opened and she raised herself onto her elbows.

"What happened? My head is splitting?"

"We collided on the trail, on that curve. There was no way for us to avoid it. Our heads collided. Look at this mouse on my forehead. Let me look at your eyes. I used to work with this." I turned her face toward the sun, remembering only vaguely that I should somehow check her eyes, her pupils perhaps or maybe the reflections from the surface.

"Do they look OK?"

I rocked her face back and forth between the shadows and the sunlight. My movements were smooth and honed. There was no doubt that I was doing something right.

"What do you see? Is something wrong?" I eased her head to the ground.

"It's all fine. There is nothing to worry about." My mind gave up the search for the meaning of what I had been trying to do.

"Can you walk?" Her balance was precarious but she stood under her own power. We shuffled toward the road using one another as a crutch. I was beginning to feel a bit faint. She seemed not to recognize me. A van stopped as soon as we reached the road. An elderly couple ambled across the grass and helped us into the back seat. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to fall asleep.
**Chapter 7**

I have seen her, actually spent time with her, every day since our collision on the trail. She talks to me, listens to my rambling conversation and holds my hand. She has even kissed me once or twice. I was not wrong about her beauty. I could convince myself that the situation is doomed. I cannot bring myself to do it. I am not afraid of that moment when she explains that we are friends. A thousand years could pass and I would not grow tired of hearing her voice while we walk arm in arm through the woods. I cannot imagine needing more than that.

She does not ask about my present circumstances. I have been trying every day to prepare a feasible story. My deficits have remained largely disguised although I had a narrow escape this afternoon. We stopped for ice cream. It was only the second time we had done something involving money and she had paid that first tab.

I have limited my ATM withdrawals to twenty dollars or less. I always pay with small bills to minimize the gains of dishonest people. A person who has lost the ability to do simple arithmetic has to make many allowances. I can still recognize some numbers but computations throw me for a loop. I just hand over the money and hope for the best. It is not as risky as it sounds. People are largely honest. I withdraw the same amount every other week and usually purchase the same stuff. That would not be possible if some folks some weeks were keeping more than they should. I cannot complain. That weekly withdrawal has lasted months longer than the attorneys had predicted.

It is my turn to pay. I have been a little nervous about coming up short. Three trips to the ATM this week has filled my pockets with more bills than I can understand.

"That's two large vanillas, one in a cake cone, and another in a waffle cone. That will be six dollars and eighty-seven cents please." I plucked a single bill from the wad in my pocket and handed it to the teenage girl on the other side of the window.

"That's six, eighty-seven, Sir." I slid a second bill across the counter.

"Six, eighty-seven, Sir." I dropped the entire roll onto the counter. She stared at the clump of cash, searched my face and looked again at the pile of bills.

"Here's your change. You folks have a nice afternoon."

We walked for several blocks without speaking. I could not lift my eyes from my shoes. She had chosen to ignore my esthetic deficiencies. She had now seen the bad brain inside the bad body. I felt ugly from the inside out.

"How is your cone? I wish I had gotten the waffle. May I have a taste of yours?"

My shoulders squashed my ears. I wanted to hide my head inside my arms.

"I am going to be busy for the next few days." I braced myself for a killing blow. "But I look forward to talking more when we get together on the weekend. Maybe you will let your guard down and give me a peak behind that man of mystery act." She turned to face me. "Can I assume that you will be available on Saturday?" I nodded. "Then I will see you at the boathouse about noon. I'll be the person carrying the yummy lunch." She hopped onto her bike and pedaled into the woods.

Excitement would have been most appropriate but I could not help but feel somewhat frightened. Trying every second to be less than repulsive was hard enough. Fashioning a fake biography was just too much pressure. Of course, talking could simply mean talking about nothing in particular. That intimate kind of sharing was for new lovers. I did not have to worry about that complication. I could hold it together for three days.
**Chapter 8**

I will not recount my ruminations throughout the days preceding our Saturday picnic. I survived to arrive at the boathouse on time and reasonably composed. The weather was perfect, the food was indeed tasty and she could not have looked better. There was no touching and her demeanor was surprisingly businesslike but this somehow put me at ease. I cannot recall exactly how she induced me to start. I was suddenly in the middle of the beginning, my memory clear, and my words to my surprise were almost crisp and organized.

There was no reason to worry that she would have to hear too much about my wife. I had rid myself of any illusion that these meetings would lead to any meaningful romance, at least on her part. I welcomed the opportunity to let her know that I had once been a man. Perhaps she could look at me and wonder what might have been. Her questions were few and to the point. The motivation behind important decisions seemed to interest her most. She displayed no impatience with my confusion regarding dates, ages and sums of money. I was encouraged to stick to the time line. She had no interest in flipping to the last page. I did not understand her curiosity and often told her so.

"I met my wife when we were teenagers. I caught her staring at me from the stands while I was playing baseball." That event was for me the logical starting point.

She waved at me and shook her head from side to side. "I'm sorry. Could you jump ahead a bit? I don't really need to hear about that."

I could not disguise my surprise. "I didn't mean to offend you." She placed her palm on my knee and looked directly into my eyes. "Please don't feel bad. You didn't offend me." I managed to avoid saying something stupid about what I hoped might be behind her reluctance to know about my first love.

It is not easy to pinpoint the moment when one's life began to disintegrate. All the bad moments may actually grow out of one truly good event. How can one understand a catastrophe without first learning about the good that is ultimately lost? It is that way for me. Any sorrow that runs through me begins with memories of my wife and the days and nights when our love was new and immortal. A return of those regrets, which I had so tenaciously restrained for these several months, was what I had most feared in the days since she had invited me to picnic.

The snapshots were so familiar. I talked about the fried chicken and potato salad but inside my head, I was watching my wife put on her coat to leave for court to save another impoverished defendant from himself. I am like anyone else. The very small impressions remain most vivid. I remembered hugging her when she wore one of her heavy winter sweaters, her hair falling from her forehead to cover one eye and the way she curled around me without waking up when I crawled into bed. It would have been easy to list a thousand examples.

We had time, we had enough money and we were young. There was no reason to deviate from the conventional wisdom. It seemed so important to enjoy the fruits of our labor while we had the chance. No sane person would trade sports cars and Provence for a toddler, at least not until it was necessary. Real life could wait until after thirty. The ensuing irony was predictable.

Spending the final years of our educations in Boston provided a useful framework for some good choices. Big coastal cities with one party rule, astronomical real estate prices and usurious taxes were out. Medium size towns with new cache made our list. Seattle, Indianapolis and Miami were the leaders in a field of about ten cities. All three had scenery, art and nightlife. Seattle was the economic star of the three. Jackie Gleason's Miami was becoming an affordable, American St. Tropez. Indianapolis had architecture, the most affordable real estate and featured reasonable airfares to Europe and beyond, no small consideration for a couple who had worked in mills instead of taking summers abroad. Indianapolis's political machine was a concern especially after our stint in Boston but we were naive enough to believe that change for the better was inevitable.

She became a public defender at the astronomical salary of $17,000 per year. I commanded about twice that much seeing patients in a government hospital. That we thought ourselves rich was the best result. Idealism could exist side by side with the good life if one did not have to fork over fifty percent of the monthly salary for rent and taxes. Compromises were inevitable. Expectations started far below the best of everything but growing up in a collapsing rust belt had taught us that there is less worry and almost as much good air just beneath the stratosphere. The real thing is often just of out sight, quietly making magic, unconcerned about glory and focused on all the right reasons.

General George Patton was a genuine American hero, courageous and charismatic but many soldiers preferred the retiring Omar Bradley. The French Riviera deserves its reputation as one of the most tantalizing and hypnotic regions on earth but few Americans know that just around the corner the Spanish Costa Brava has just as much to offer.

Purchasing automobiles, especially those of the exotic persuasion, is a fine illustration of the Omar Bradley principle. The price of a new Porsche, even an entry-level model, exceeded my annual salary every year of my working life. It was lucky for me that many Porsche owners care for their vehicles like precious works of art. It was even more fortunate that the Porsche 911, the most revered and expensive model often sits in the garages of individuals who have little or no love for fine automobiles. The car snob is unmoved by the sculptural design of the 911. The engine note does not arouse his tin ear. The happy irony of piloting a piece of technology so finely crafted across a grassy plain would never enter his mind. Status is what he seeks. That he belongs to a very exclusive club is what is most important. Any attempts by Porsche, Jaguar or Ferrari to offer models less expensive than the top of the line will elicit anger and condescension from the car snob. The car snob is the best friend of the true car lover with limited funds.

The Porsche 914 debuted in the early nineteen-seventies as an entry-level ticket into the exotic car club. A true mid-engine, two-seater, it was a beautiful blend of Mediterranean curves. It was a fine convertible in the summer and the rigid, removable roof did a reasonable job of taming the winter cold.

Financial realities had led me to postpone my first vehicle purchase until age 25. I knew next to nothing about cars and even less about Porsches. Porsches were ridiculously expensive sports cars driven by magnates and professional athletes. I had never read the automotive classifieds when I began my quest for that first vehicle. How astonishing to discover a few used Porsches offered for considerably less than $10,000. It was no doubt too good to be true but I could not resist having a look. Rust, dents and missing parts were what I anticipated. Avant-garde design, throaty engines and flawless leather were what I found. I had driven friends' corvettes, mustangs, MG's and a few Jaguars. Perhaps I was not then ready to fall in love. The spare and nimble 914 had my heart after the first test drive. It was an impossible loophole. Metallic silver over pristine black leather was ours for $4500. The odometer read 45,000 but it looked nearly new. Few knew what it was and many guessed it to be a newly introduced exotic from Italy.

The wife cried the day I brought it home. The impracticality was just too much. It was after all supposed to be her car. It was not long before she too was smitten. I was not entirely surprised when she soon suggested that we rent a garage to shield her precious bambino from the elements. We enjoyed that 914 for just over two years. Mounting student loans and a looming down payment on a first house forced the decision. It was gone the first day we advertised and for twice what we had paid.

Five years passed before I again felt the Porsche itch. I was ready to move up. The 944 was my target. The wife wept again when I led her to the driveway for a first look. "I thought you just liked to test drive them."

I had been reading, hoping and test-driving for months. Waiting for Christmas morning as a kid did not make me nearly as anxious. I did so much research but simple good fortune trumped all of my hard work. I saw it out of the corner of my eye driving past a tiny used car lot. Bright guardsman red over black leather, it had a removable roof panel and alloy wheels arrayed like telephone dials. The odometer read a nearly new 27,000 miles. The $10,000 price tag was at least $5000 below what I would have expected. There had to be a very black heart behind that beautiful face.

I was in the driver's seat less than ten minutes later. The dealer did not even ask me to leave the keys to my car. There was no mistaking his desire to unload the vehicle. I started cautiously. There had to be some major mechanical problem. I was not going to die trying to uncover it. Poise at highway speed seemed like a reasonable place to start. I was determined to be conservative. Imagine my shock when I glanced at the dashboard and discovered that I was traveling uphill at 95 mph while still in third gear. I exited the freeway and headed for the back roads.

Even at low speeds, the hills in the western part of the state can be quite dramatic. Driving at the limit of my skills, I crested many steep inclines with no view as to what might be on the other side. I sailed through narrow curves like a bullet train on rails. Downhill at nearly one hundred was no challenge. It fit around me like a tailored suit. It understood me. A final speed trial on the freeway reached 131 mph without a hint of shimmy or instability.

A rash decision was in the air. I parked at the front of the lot and hurried along the sidewalk before the salesman could molest me. There had to be something wrong, something very costly. Winter driving was another matter. No one drove rear wheel drive in our hilly region. The repair costs would be astronomical and insurance would surely be a deal breaker. Perhaps a compromise was possible. A request to have it examined by a neutral mechanic would no doubt bring matters to a head.

"Don't mind at all. Just give me a call and I'll even have one of my guys drive it over to your mechanic's place." There was not a hint of hesitation. My mind immediately turned to the wife. I was so used to sharing exciting news with her. Keeping my emotions in check while I did research to bolster my case was going to be difficult.

I left nothing to chance. I chose the most Teutonic garage in the tri-state area. The Bavarian Motor Werks would either burst my bubble or provide the magic bullet for the marital negotiations to follow. The salesman was true to his word. One of his mechanics pulled the 944 into the Motor Werks promptly at 9 am the following Saturday. I hung around for the entire two-hour ordeal, which was surprisingly thorough considering the thirty-dollar fee. I could not read the mechanic's expression when he exited the vehicle after the final test drive.

"What was it: timing belt, engine mount?" I had read enough to know the most costly defects.

"Are you going to buy this car?" He reminded me of my father hanging up his coat after a long workday, his voice severe but with no real anger as my mother whispered a list of my crimes.

"That depends on what you tell me about the car. Is the odometer for real? Are there really 27,000 miles on that car? That's the first thing I want to know. I have to believe that there is a catch. The price and the miles just seem too good to be true."

"Will you definitely buy the car if I tell you that the car is clean and the odometer is accurate?"

My wife's face popped into view. "We need something practical, something we can drive all year round. What about the repairs and parts? That car is seven years old. You probably will not even be able to find parts and the ones you do find will probably cost three times as much. I hope you called Phil about the insurance. What if we get pregnant? Don't you think it's time we started to plan ahead?" I congratulated myself on keeping the appointment under my hat.

My eyes traced the glistening red curves of the hood. She was correct that front wheel drive was better in the winter but had we not learned in massive American cars with rear wheel drive? With the weight distributed 50/50 between the front and rear, the 944 could not have been more stable. Was it not likely that someone like me might be safer in such a vehicle? How much could a pair of snow tires cost? The four-cylinder engine was no gas-guzzler. That was a practical financial decision. I was safely over thirty and married. The insurance for an older car might actually be less than what we were currently paying. It would be impractical not to buy it.

"Give me the straight scoop. What's wrong with it?"

"Not a damn thing. I will buy this car if you don't."

"Are you serious?"

"Absolutely."

"The miles are good?

"You bet."

"What about parts? Will I be able to get parts?"

"They made tens of thousands of these things. It costs more to fix a Ford Taurus."

"Then why do think they gave me such a low price?"

"Why the hell should you care?"

"Good point."

I had to move quickly. She would understand. Such a great find would not be around for long. I had not actually excluded her. I had been openly discussing my intentions for months and had encountered little argument.

A reasonable monthly bill would be impossible without a substantial down payment. I would have to sell my car quickly and apply the cash to the line of credit we would use to buy the Porsche.

It took just fifteen minutes to complete the paper work. I dialed our number but hung up before she could answer. Why poison the well. An unrehearsed announcement of my blessed event might send her running to her sister's house. Who then would drive me back to the lot for my old car? A terrible case of buyer's remorse was upon me by the time I reached our street. What was I thinking? I had behaved like a love struck teenager. How could I have deluded myself into believing that the insurance would not be a problem? It was a bright red Porsche for God's sake. I should have listened to her. I should have called our insurance agent.

An adult would have walked away from the rear wheel drive. My vehicle had to get me to work in every kind of weather. This was a rich guy's car, an extra toy for blue-sky days. A winter or two would reduce the resale value to almost nothing.

The reckoning was painful. There were tears and accusations, predictions of dire financial consequences and heartfelt pleas for my safety. I was nearly convinced. I was especially worried about unloading my current ride but it sold in just three days. The insurance premiums increased very little owing to my marital status and advanced age. Snow tires made for the best winter driving I had ever known. I no longer had to park at the top of the driveway whenever the overnight forecast called for fresh snow. Gas mileage was great. Replacement parts were everywhere. She was totally convinced by the next summer when she drove at my urging through the 100 mph barrier on a flat, country road near the Delaware shore.

Two years later, she was again behind the wheel when my negligence nearly ended our lives. We were traveling through a summer thunderstorm on the state turnpike. I was dozing in the passenger seat when she announced that something was wrong with the steering. We lost control a few seconds later on a gentle curve at about 60 mph. I had been over that stretch of road hundreds of times. I had always assumed that the guardrail protected every foot of the roadway. The car listed to the left for a moment before settling into a series of lazy spins. For the first time I noticed gaps in the guard rail, some near steep hills that fell into groves of massive trees. Huge limbs of oak were going to crash through the windows and then through us. The image looped through my mind like a video clip. She lowered her forehead to the steering wheel. There was no screaming, no thrashing. We just spun and waited. We glanced off a jersey barrier then careened across the road. The guardrail flexed and bounced us again toward the centerline. We had not yet lost any speed. It went on like that for hundreds of yards. Would we find the guardrail or hurtle through a gap? Each successful ricochet increased the odds that we would eventually come to calamity. I wondered how long it would be before our lives returned to normal. Twice more we traversed both lanes. Twice more we managed to find a piece of guardrail. The rear bumper crushed one final time against the metal rail before coming to a stop. We climbed out and scurried across the road, barely avoiding the many vehicles who braked only to steer around our wreck.

"Look at your car. I am so sorry." We held one another and surveyed the dozens of dents and red blotches along the guardrail and Jersey barrier. I could not tell which one of us was

shaking. I did not care that I was crying.

"Holy Christ, don't even think about the car."

I remembered to retrieve my wallet from the glove compartment. A quick jog from the hood to the trunk and I knew that the car could not be driven. I stopped to lift one of the rear mud flaps. How could I have been so negligent? The tires were nearly bald. The state had inspected my car and put a sticker on the windshield. Safe for another year, they had told me, good to go. I knew better. Everyone in state knew better. We had hydroplaned for several hundred yards because of my carelessness. My eyes followed the long skid marks. Guardrails protected less than half of that stretch of road. At least six times, we had somehow managed to win a flip of the coin. I was years away from considering that 'somehow' might encompass more than a dry analysis of probabilities.

It was not yet time for a more practical vehicle. We had the car restored to the most exacting standards. We loved that car. Perhaps it was that I had found it after such a long search. So much beauty and technology for relatively little cash was easy to love. It was an orphan in the exotic sports car community and we had rescued it from the destructive clutches of some reckless boy racer. Waiting for it to emerge from the body shop was like waiting for a relative's discharge from the intensive care unit. A 911 owner was there to complete the experience.

A mechanic opened the window above the cashier's desk. "You the owner of the red Porsche?"

"That's me," I answered with loud enthusiasm. The mechanic had been pointing at an elderly woman wearing a T-shirt bearing the words 'makin bakin.' Below the lettering, a cartoon depicted two pigs intimately entwined. The mechanic looked at me and laughed. "Just take it easy. It'll be out soon."

"Don't worry about it. These guys don't understand. They've been doing this so long they have forgotten what it's like or they were never able to afford one in the first place." The fellow to my left extended his hand and offered his name.

"How long have you been waiting?"

"About an hour but I don't mind. Taking care of that car is my labor, l-a-b-o-u-r, of love. I'm also waiting for a Porsche, the black '92' Carrera. This must be your first."

"My second, actually."

"Aren't they great? Nothing like it in the entire world. What do you have?"

"An '86 and a half 944."

"Don't tell me you have one of those things?"

This was familiar territory. "Have you ever driven a 944?"

"Never have, never will."

"Have you ever eaten a buffalo steak?"

"I don't believe I have?"

"Do you like the taste?

"I just told you I've never tried buffalo." His voice trailed off. He returned to his seat and hid his face behind a beauty magazine.

I had retreated into my own little world, rambling for God knows how long about cars despite having vowed for days that I would not behave like a buffoon. She had been kind to ask me to picnic. Why on this day had I not behaved like a normal human being? The odds were in my favor. My conversational skills are usually passable.

"I never knew there was so much bigotry in the sports car world." I could not tell whether she was irritated or trying to be funny. She handed me a blueberry bagel. "I have always liked art but I never really thought of automobiles as sculptural. I am sure I will in the future I look forward to it. You have opened my eyes to an entirely new medium. Thank you."

"You mean you were not bored by all that, the way I went on and on."

"I am a bit insulted that you would think that about me. It was interesting. I have never known much about the subject. I do think that we should eat this food before it gets dark. I must be somewhere in an hour or so."

We ate in comfortable silence, our backs against the trunk of a red maple, our shoulders touching. It was enough that she occasionally looked at me. I remembered how my daughter had loved restaurants when she was very young. She would eat so little so slowly. She would have had us stay for hours. Beside that red maple I chewed as slowly as I could hoping that time would stop or at least slow down.

Not long after we parted, I began to feel very weak and hungry. A thorough search of my pockets netted only three of the big coins. I immediately thought of the ice cream stand. It seemed sacrilegious to consider grifting so soon after being in her presence but I had not eaten much since the previous morning. I scouted from across the street to be sure that the same girl was not on duty then circled around back. I walked between several parked cars in the side lot to reach the front window.

"Can I help you, Sir?"

"Do you have those baby cones?"

"We do. Would you like that in a cake or waffle cone?

"Let's have a waffle cone and you better make that vanilla. The baby is not a very neat eater. That is not a very big cone. She just turned two.

"It's a little, bitty waffle cone. Would you like eyes or jimmies on that?"

"Eyes and jimmies would be nice. Do you also have doggy treats?"

"We do. It's a bowl of chocolate or vanilla ice cream with a milk bone on top."

"That's just fine. Let's go with vanilla for the pup." While she worked, I peered around the corner of the building several times as if monitoring my child and dog.

"There you go. What would you like, Sir?"

"Nothing for me. I will have to get those two home before everything melts. I won't be able to drive and eat a cone. What do I owe you?"

"Baby cones and doggy treats are free."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course, I'm sure."

I tossed my coins into the tip cup being careful to shield the denominations with the back of my hand.

"Thank you, Sir."

She lifted a brow and shifted her weight. I felt properly warned and scolded. I finished the cone in two bites then devoured the contents of the bowl much like a poorly trained family pet.

I made it to my bed just ahead of a rain shower. A widening hole near the foot of the bivy consumed what was left of my duct tape. Sleep came quickly. The night brought frightening dreams I would not remember in the morning.

I awoke thinking about a girl I knew in college. I had worn the remnants of a chocolate bar on my upper lip for the entire evening of our only date. She never said a word. I did not discover the joke until we had parted for the evening. The thought of it still makes me wince. A thousand winces were bound to accompany each memory of this newest embarrassment. I had been such a spellbinding conversationalist.

We had spent a long time together. She had seen more than enough. I could be thankful. I would always be thankful for those hours.
**Chapter 9**

My thankfulness, my bravado lasted no more than a few hours. Each day I staked out her favorite running trails. She had vanished. After five days I began to prepare for travel but I was essentially sleep walking. She had made me want. My moods could not withstand the graying skies and colder nights. Anger I had no right to feel began to replace my disappointment.

The money ran out in the middle of the week. I was in no shape for the challenges of an ATM but there was nothing else to do. I was careful to follow all the appropriate procedures. The bank was in a small plaza where the park turned to farmland. I did not approach the machine until after 10 p.m. even though I had not eaten for more than 36 hours. A pizza joint and a bookstore, the only other shops in the plaza, had closed two hours earlier. The process had never been smoother. I placed the card correctly into the slot on my first try. Green and red coding of the yes and no buttons allowed me to navigate the queries. I pushed the green key in response to each. I always push the green key. The machine paused for an unusually long time. Two minivans swung into the lot and parked. At least six of the laughing passengers, some holding drinks, exited the vehicles and lined up behind me. The characters returned to the screen.

I searched for fast cash or at least the word fast. Just settle down and look for that word, that damn word. The letters appeared to melt and slide off the glass.

"Let's go. I have to go to work on Monday." I did not look back. Where was fast? What had happened to fast? It had to be there. I traced my index finger across each line of text.

"Come on, honey, don't hurt yourself." The speaker was obviously drunk. I traced the writing repeatedly. Several others began to voice their impatience. They too sounded drunk.

"Shut up you animals." She slid her arm under my elbow and whispered. "Do you need a little help?" I nodded without looking at her.

"What are you trying to do, a withdrawal or a deposit?"

"I need to get some money out."

"Any particular amount?"

"Phyllis always had a thing for retards." She turned and slapped the drunk closest to her.

"Why'd you slap me? It was Harvey who said it."

"Maybe that will motivate you to slap Harvey if he does it again."

She lifted my index finger from the screen. "How much do you want to withdraw?"

"The fast cash would be OK."

"You're still logged in. Let me see." She banged on the keyboard, changing the screen several times.

"The quick cash is $60. Is that alright?"

"That's fine." It was quick cash not fast cash. No wonder I had missed it. "Could you show me where that is?"

She pointed to some characters along the left edge of the screen. I whispered as softly as I could. "Which word is quick?" She underlined the word with my hand. I concentrated with all my strength to memorize the characters.

"All the machines in this state say quick cash instead of fast cash."

"Thank you." I stuffed the bills and receipt into my pocket then ran without turning to see what she looked like.

I procrastinated for three more days. I could have left at any time but I could not make a firm decision. I still could not define exactly what I hoped to win from her. My anger had subsided.

I convinced myself anew that her simple friendship and kindness would be satisfactory. I had to see her again if only to gain some relief from my racing mind. Dangerous thoughts were bubbling to the surface but one more day was all I could spare. The road and movement would occupy my mind. There I could begin to forget her and everything else.

I spent the afternoon at a delightful outdoor cafe, sipping free refills of coffee over a Sunday newspaper I had found in a trash can. She walked up to me as if we had seen one another every day since the picnic.

"Look at you. You might as well be on the Left Bank in April."

I was almost disappointed to see her. My things were packed. I had bills in my pocket. My legs were healthy. Only hours had passed since I had made up my mind. Only minutes had passed since I had begun to feel good about it. She sat down and leafed through the travel section. "Look at this. Here is a deal for $367 round trip to Rome, Frankfurt and Barcelona. Isn't shoulder season great? Odds are that the weather in Europe this time of year will be comfortable for sight-seeing." She folded the paper and stacked all the sections neatly into two piles. "What's the matter? Have you caught a bug?"

"I'm just tired. I was up late packing. I am going away for a while."

"You don't say. Is it business or pleasure?"

"Perhaps, it will be a little of both. There may be a new job in it somewhere."

The bratty expression left her face. I realized I was staring and forced myself to look away but I had already seen too much. We chatted for at least another hour but I do not remember anything we said. She took me by the hand and led me like a balloon on a string. We crossed the street and continued along a trail of soft pine needles.

"How did you come to be here, in this town?"

I had promised that any woman who spoke to me in the future would be talking only about herself. A boring monologue about me was never again to leave my lips. She asked two times more.

"You don't want to know?"

"Now there's a mysterious answer. Why would I not want to know?"

"It's just not the kind of thing you tell people when you first meet. I like that you sometimes seem to want to be around me. I don't want to make you think badly of me."

"Wow. That went from mysterious to scary. Let me get this straight. I would not want to associate with you if you were to be honest with me about yourself. On the other hand, you think that I might want to be your friend as long as I do not know any details even though I already know that the details are bad enough to make me run screaming. Do I have it right?"

Perspiration erupted across my upper lip. My left calf froze into a solid ball of stone. I hopped along the trail trying to decide whether flexing or straightening the leg would relieve the cramp. She tripped me, grabbed my toes and pushed my foot toward my shin. "You have me wondering whether or not I am alone in the woods with a violent pervert. You better tell me something that is going to change my mind." She pushed harder. I was determined not to cry out. She pushed twice as hard and I yelled for her to stop. "We are agreed? You will allow me to decide whether or not you are worthy of my company and you will be man enough to stay away from me if that is what I ultimately decide." I nodded and crossed my heart. She tossed me her handkerchief and walked away, her arms tight around her chest. I hobbled to catch her.

"Everything was going fine until we tried to have kids." We stopped for a moment and looked at one another. She nodded and rolled her hands as if to say get on with it. She no longer looked fearful. The rules had changed. I had assumed that she had asked about me out of kindness or pity. It had not occurred to me that she might be interested in her own safety. I was after all just a well-scrubbed vagrant. I would tell it to her. There was no other choice. Boring her was the least of my worries. It was likely that she would come to loathe me. Having no choice was the best sort of liberation. Bored or sickened, the result would be the same. The nights were getting colder. Either reaction would provide a much-needed kick in the pants.

Two more swings of the axe and the trail would be clear. I checked to be sure that the handle was still in my hands. I had lost all sensation in my fingers several logs back. That perspiration made it impossible to see exactly what the blade struck was not important.

The axe flew from my hands onto the pile of logs. I collapsed onto my knees. The exhaustion was complete but not enough to pass out. I had given it my best. I looked over the massive tower of stumps and wondered how I would make it up the hill to the house. Perhaps it would be better if I simply spent the night in the woods.

"How could you bring up something like that after all these years?" The memory of those words, her voice so drained of hope would never leave me. "You walk around here like someone just died." Someone _had_ died. He or she, although I usually thought of it as a he, would never be born. They had certainly been out there somewhere waiting for the right moment to come to us. Only recently had I realized how much I had always believed that to be true.

"You have never once said that you wanted to be a father. I have had to drag you kicking and screaming to every appointment and every test. My God, you delayed that last semen test for three months. What do you think that does to me? Every day counts. I may already be too old."

I had never said that I wanted to be a father. On many occasions, I had declared that I should never be a parent. She was so right about that. Maybe I was the devil. Normal people could look ahead and know that parenthood might agree with them. It was one thing to have fatherhood just happen. How different to spend a decade chasing every bizarre medical concoction. One part would be from me, another might come from her or a percentage of an anonymous donor. The total cost of our educations, including student loans, did not come close to the amount we had spent for ten years of disappointment now turned to bitterness. The statute of limits expired. No grievance, no matter how long passed, was off limits.

I tried to concentrate on the piles of great trees that the storm had scattered across the valley below our property. It was good that I was too exhausted to make it back to the house. I pushed her from my mind and tried to recapture the excitement of the storm. The winds had begun two days earlier just as I was ending my run. Lightning felled two sixty-foot oaks less than a hundred feet behind me. My first thought was of the amount of labor to clear my running trail. I knew I had much bigger worries when several deer and a raccoon ran to my side, one large buck so close that he brushed against my ribs like a bullfighter working close. Five hundred year old trees bent like saplings. Nuts rained down like grape shot and the air turned grey with dirty wind and summer sleet. Several ancient giants fell while I climbed the hill to our yard. I did not see our house until I was within thirty feet. The phone was ringing when I entered the basement.

"Who's this?"

"Who's this? I don't have time for this shit. I was just nearly killed by a tornado."

"This is your mother in law. Are you alright? I just saw on the TV that a terrible storm was coming your way. I guess it's already there. Are you sure you're OK?"

"I'm sorry. I was coming back from my run on the trails when it started. I have never seen anything like that." I ran up the steps into the living room. "Wait a second. I'm turning on the Storm Channel. I want to see how long this is going to last."

I flipped through the channels. An odd glow grew across the screen. I stepped backward and peered with one eye from behind the refrigerator. A cylinder of indigo light exploded through the screen and seared the carpet. The television teetered then fell onto the floor, smoke and sparks rising to the ceiling.

"Hello, are you there? What's going on there?"

I fetched the phone from the floor behind the refrigerator.

"I'm here. Sorry I dropped the phone. A lightning clap startled me."

"Please tell me that my daughter is not driving home in that storm."

"Don't worry. She's a smart girl." A plastic swimming pool sailed by the kitchen window. "Besides, it looks like the storm is pretty much over. I'll have her call you when she gets home."

My eyes returned to the scarred forest. The green reflections and gnarly shapes had become a pale brown. I would have never said some of those things if she had not pushed so hard. There was nothing phony about her difficulties. No one denied that but when did she decide that my wants and needs no longer mattered? Others had concluded that 'alternative strategies' were not necessarily the way to go. I had said yes to everything, no matter how bizarre or dehumanizing. Could I never expect an end to it?

I reclined inside a hollow log that looked like the rough stage of a barrel chair. A huge limb teetered by a thread ten feet above my head. The exhaustion had helped more than just a little. A night in the woods might do wonders but I would first have to go home and tell her. Where would I find the energy to come down the hill again and hurdle the obstacle course of logs and underbrush? The troubles at work began to surface but I immediately pushed those worries aside. There was no point in adding to the crisis.

I sat there past nightfall listening to the damaged limb gradually work free from its trunk, caring little that it might crush me during the night but in the end I gathered my tools and climbed the mossy hill of logs and boulders. I found her sitting upright in the darkness on a sunroom couch.

"Don't turn on the lamp. Just turn on the kitchen light. My eyes are used to the dark."

Her shoulders hunched and wringing her hands, she looked as if she had been in a fistfight. I sat down without touching her. "I will agree to one more test but this time we do the collection here at home."

"But you know what happened last time. You barely got to the lab in time because of morning traffic. Who knows how much of the sample was spoiled by the cold when you tried to warm the vial in your armpit while you drove?"

"You said you would agree to meet me half way. You cannot agree to this one condition? I am just taking orders. That's hardly showing me that you understand."

"You're right. We will do it here. I guess I will just have to have better aim with that tube. What else is there? You're almost hyperventilating?"

"There is one more thing. I will consider adopting. I will seriously consider it."

She sat up and rested her head on my shoulder, her eyes telling me that my willingness to negotiate had been mistaken for a definite promise to act. Her adversaries would scarcely recognize the hardened litigator. I gathered her hands inside mine. A glance across the spacious room reminded me just how much I would be asking her to give up. "Slow down. I said I would think about adoption. I guess I mean we will talk about it."

She squeezed my hands. "So, let's talk."

"Let's do it tomorrow. I am very tired from splitting logs and from the argument that sent me down there."

"Please don't do that to me." I pointed to the open glass door and held a finger to her lips. She lowered her voice to a whisper. "You can't tell me that you will finally talk about this and then say you want to wait until tomorrow. At least give me a general idea of what you have in mind."

I crossed the room, closed the glass panel and remembered how I had felt the first time I had looked across those hills. I had expected her to put up a fight. We had looked at so many newer houses that were just slightly more expensive. It was hard to ignore all the extras, all the toys. I had promised to compensate for the old kitchen and the absence of hard wood floors. So what if there was no back yard. I would fix it. I would fix it all.

She had watched me walk onto the deck. A steep valley of Oaks fell 400 feet from the back of the house to a transparent creek with banks of green down. The rise from the opposite bank was just as steep. It was easy to dream that this was the first dwelling ever to stand on that stretch of ground. Cantilevered over a view to rival Bear Run, we could forget that the city was less than ten miles to the south. I should have recognized that her resistance lacked the usual energy. She had seen my face. My happiness had made her happy. She admitted as much not long after we moved in. She also hoped that her generosity would bring reciprocity. That miscalculation had brought us to our present situation.

"Let's be clear that there will be no open adoption."

"We can talk about that."

"That one is non-negotiable." I paused to check my anger. "I won't have some turd showing up 13 years from now, just as the kid is starting to hate me. I do not want the kid telling me that her 'real' dad would not treat her the way I do. That probably rules out domestic adoption. Hell, you can hire people to find birth parents or kids decades after the adoption. Have someone raise your kid so you don't miss any spring breaks and then show up in your thirties when all the heavy lifting is over. I won't have that and you would not survive that six month look back rule."

"That hardly ever happens."

"There is no damn way you could raise a baby for six months and give it up because the birth mother changed her mind. You would end up in a rubber room and I would probably be there with you. I do not care that there is only a 1% chance. I don't want that risk. It's been depressing enough around here for too damn long to go ahead and court that kind of misery."

Throwing my arms around her would have been the right thing to do. She raised her eyes several times as a signal for me to do just that. Her head was still against my shoulder. I took inventory of the room. The raised hearth and built in book shelves on each side of the fireplace would be missed but not nearly as much as the view over the valley. It already felt like someone else's house. Living there would not be easy if she insisted on staying. The lab trotted to her and laid his snout on her knee. He was not taking sides. Appearances had fooled him. How could he have known that my need for consolation was just as great?

"I hate to bring this up but there is the issue of money."

"You don't have to worry about that. We won't have any hospital bills by the end of the summer. We're in good shape."

What would we do after the adoption? I decided to leave that question for another day.

I eased her head from my shoulder. The Labraboy lifted his almond eyes to say slow down, take a deep breath and think before you speak. "I have been reading some of the stuff you gave me last month."

"I am so glad."

I held up a hand. "I got the impression that China is the best chance for getting a healthy baby and there is obviously not much chance that the other parents will suddenly show up on our door step. Did I read it right that we would be looking at about twenty grand, not counting spending money?"

"All the foreign adoptions are about that much except for some of the eastern European countries but there seems to be more problems there."

"You mean like kids born to addicts and alcoholics. That was also in those articles. There was also quite a bit about orphanages that were little better than dirty warehouses. I think that those folks who take on damaged kids are saints. I do not know where they get the strength. I feel like a coward for saying this but after all these years, I just do not have the energy. I don't think I could handle going from the frying pan to the fire. I want to explore options that would maximize the odds of getting a healthy kid."

"People who can have their own kids don't have any guarantees about that."

"I know that." I again checked my volume. "I am just telling you what will give you the greatest chance of convincing me. I do not think that I am a bad person because I don't want to take on a disabled kid in my forties. It would not be right to go into something like that without the proper enthusiasm."

Several stray branches, charred from lightning strikes, crashed onto the deck. Hundreds of twigs loosened by the storm rained throughout the valley like arrows. It was easy in the midst of our violent, little battle to imagine the long bows, raised toward the sun, firing volley after volley, the prelude to horses, foot soldiers, pikes and maces. She sobbed into her hands. The rest would have to wait. I returned to the couch, covered her with my arms and buried my face into her neck. "There, there, everything's going to be alright. There, there."

"We can call it off any time you want."

"Of course, you will."

"Don't laugh at me. I mean it. I appreciate that you are willing to look into this and I appreciate all the other things you have been willing to try." She held my head with both hands and looked into my eyes. "Have I been that hard to live with? I know I have."

I kissed the tip of her nose, pulled her arms around my shoulders and crawled onto the floor. "You have been wonderful. You cannot laugh yourself through this one. You would have to be a robot to be unaffected by this crap. We do have more to talk about, details that are important to making this work but we will talk about that later.

She squeezed my hand and pointed to her watch. I had actually forgotten that she was with me. Hours might have passed. She had no doubt by this time had her fill of my defects. Cruel curiosity had led others to provoke an exhibition of my idiosyncrasies. Minimal observation revealed the right buttons to push. I searched her face. I knew right away that my fears were unfounded.

"I wish I could stay but I really have to be somewhere. We can pick this up right where you left off. Is Tuesday OK?"

"You mean this coming Tuesday, day after tomorrow?"

"Will you be busy?"

I must have nodded my head.

"Then it's settled. We will meet here Tuesday, around four, rain or shine." She bent down and kissed me on the cheek. It was not a peck. I am sure it was more than just a peck. Her hair fell tress by tress from my shoulders to my knees and to this day, I can still feel her over me and through me whenever I close my eyes.
**Chapter 10**

The night was cold but I hardly noticed. I read the following morning that the temperature had dipped below thirty. Dinner had again slipped my mind. I was sleepy but energetic, a sensation I have not experienced since my twenties. There was much to do. I had to prepare a meal even if I did not feel like eating. I circled the camp to check for footprints. I had evidently slept through an overnight shower of considerable strength. My uncovered head must have dried just before sunrise.

My feet skipped along the road and I did not criticize my optimism. The sudden realization that my stomach had become somewhat concave was of no concern. My appetite was bound to improve. Cool mists and the smell of fresh coffee filled the park. The overnight rain had turned the grass a happy, lime green. Everyone was smiling and no one was in a hurry to get to work.

I crossed the soccer fields to reach an all night supermarket, my only option at that hour. I was too hungry to worry that there would be no crowd to screen my mooching. A few caffeine addicts, in line awaiting the opening of a shabby kiosk, took no notice of my entrance. I hit pay dirt in the first aisle. Two trays of leftover pastries, cut into small slices and shorn of frosting, sat atop a glass case. I filled my mouth until I was too dry to swallow.

"Is that from yesterday? You should have cleaned that up. It's a good thing that I saw you before the boss did. That's the second time you forgot to do that since he bitched you out."

I searched for somewhere to spit before he reached my end of the aisle. He squeezed my shoulder just as I leaned toward a stack of empty boxes. I clamped my jaws, turned around and smiled as best I could.

"I beg your pardon. I thought you worked here in the bakery. He is always forgetting to clean up the samples. I like to bust his balls a little. It looks like he remembered this time. I will just take these trays away. He should have taken the trays and not just the bread. The manager would be just as pissed off seeing two crumby trays. You don't look so good. Are you going to be OK?"

I nodded behind a toothless grin.

"Are you sure? Would you like some of today's samples? I owe you a little something for startling you so early in the morning. You just stay right there." He shuffled into the side aisle. I heard his tennis shoes skid to a stop. "Would you like some coffee with that?"

He returned a minute or so later with three large cinnamon rolls, a steaming pot of coffee and several tubs of cream. "No sugars. We get a shipment this morning. Here you go. Have a good one." He was gone before I could reply.

"Thank you, thank you." The increasing bustle inside the store made it likely that he did not hear me even though I hollered as loudly as my dry throat would permit.

The smell of pepperoni and smoked turkey was easy to follow. A plate left behind the previous night by the same lackadaisical employee was within reach on a metal cart. Most of the samples were spoiled but a half dozen or so retained some healthy color. I was long past worrying that some bore scars, left no doubt by tiny teeth when mommy's eyes were occupied. I particularly liked the Dutch loaf, a meat I had refused to eat throughout elementary school although I could not recall why.

The store was filling rapidly. I emptied the plate as fast as I could. The reaction was instantaneous. I was on my knees before I reached the second aisle. Perspiration cascaded down my face and over my ears. There was a distinct possibility that vertigo would prevent me from leaving the store. An image of me on my back in a pool of accident provided the strength to hobble to the restroom.

I punched the door and fell amongst the stalls. The sound of the door hitting the wall was as loud as a cannon shot. I crawled under the door of the nearest stall. It was a disgusting scene. I struggled for what seemed like five minutes to raise myself. Even in my misery, I had enough sense to avoid the seat. Another poor soul had obviously met the same fate after visiting that deli tray. I lifted the seat and hovered over the bowl. The explosion was a solid column. For several moments, I was unsure of the source. An industrial sprayer could not have more thoroughly painted the wall behind the toilet. A managerial type entered the room just as I reached the door.

"You OK, Buddy?" I had no choice but to remain doubled over.

"I think it's the flu."

I was outside the store when he yelled. Why did he have to choose that stall? "Dear God in heaven." None of the several dozen shoppers on the sidewalk had any trouble hearing him through the windows. I crawled and hobbled in the general direction of my bed not yet aware that the skies had grown dark and metallic. A headwind was above thirty miles an hour by the time I stepped onto the trail. Two steep hills, each at least 400 meters long, stood between my cozy bivy and me. I fell onto my hands and knees and continued with little hope of success.

About half way up the first grade, I encountered an excavation site. I barely avoided falling into a deep pit that held a corroded oil tank. The heavy equipment, still warm and caked with fresh mud, was unattended. I shouted several times for help knowing that it was futile. A sane foreman would never keep his crew on such high ground, amongst tons of metal during an electrical storm. I gritted my teeth, grasped the metal treads of an earthmover and raised myself to a standing position. A passing image of doomed teenagers running beside a tank through a Belgian forest did not strengthen my resolve.

"Do not fall. Do not fall." Slick goo covered the treads but I managed to maintain contact by pressing my palms against the metal. Thirty feet was all I needed. "Just make it to the end of the damn machine." The bucket was not quite against the ground. There was just enough room to crawl underneath the overhang. "Just squeeze between the port - a - john and the last wheel and you will almost be there. I could ride out the storm under the bucket provided a lightning strike did not intervene. Only a few feet from the bucket, I began to slide on goo that had leaked to the ground. Twice I thought I had regained my balance before it became clear that vertigo and mud would win out.

I fell backwards. I almost laughed to see my shoe tops rise above my eyes. My head struck the corner of the machine just below my left ear. Flesh and bone collapsed like a home run ball leaving the bat. I was convinced that I had been unconscious for only a few seconds but the fresh snow that decorated the trees and dusted my clothes was clear and convincing evidence that I had been asleep for a very long time. Within minutes, I lay covered in a coating of sleet. I felt underweight and entirely powerless against the cold. Why not just curl up and sleep? That deadly cold should bring on the desire for a nap had never made any sense to me. The temptation was overpowering. I sat up and slapped myself across the face with both hands. I fell onto my back and vomited, not bothering to turn my face to avoid the returning geyser. Any movement, even a slight turn of the eyes, was enough to make me heave until my ribs ached. I risked a glance at the bucket, a mere ten feet away. The dry ground beneath looked cozier than a warm bed of comforters. I was lucid enough to know that I would never make it that far. I tried to remember the specifics of hypothermia. Did the risk start below fifty degrees or was time of exposure the main factor? There was really no point in puzzling over a formula. I was outdoors during a sleet storm, soaking wet and too ill to move. I had been a runner long enough to know what thirty degrees felt like. Whatever the criteria, I was well inside the danger zone. Another more powerful craving for sleep came over me. I sat up and slapped myself until vertigo returned me to the ground. I laughed aloud. Dozens of nights outdoors without so much as a bad cold and a rotten sausage in the afternoon puts me at death's door. Another craving for sleep came and went before I could sit up. A Cooper's hawk circled above me in a sky of beveled glass.

I turned my head from side to side. Nothing to see except the bucket, at least a mile away and the port-a-john, the door securely latched at an insurmountable height of 3 feet. It was colder now, definitely below thirty. Underneath the bucket with wet clothes was not much of a chance but it was certainly better than floating in the muck. Every movement of my head made a spongy sound against the snow. I ran my hand along the wound. The snowball inside my palm was black with blood and gravel. I looked beside each leg. The red snow did not become white until well past my knees.

I imagined how I would have reacted in my younger, stronger days. Growling, filled with righteous determination, I would have clawed for miles, finally tossing a rock to hail a passing vehicle just before I blacked out. Perhaps, but much had occurred to drain my fortitude. Within a few minutes, I would be asleep. It was just a question of where. Under the bucket or inside the port-a-potty, I was probably too wet for my body heat to dry my clothes. What would be the harm in trying?

The world continued to move in waves and a precise estimate of the distance to the john had become impossible. The desire to sleep began to feel delicious and correct.

It was quickly apparent that wriggling along the ground like a snake would not work. The mud and snow, turned to slush by my body heat, permitted no traction. I would have to turn over and attempt to crawl or at least roll to the door. I rocked back and forth dozens of times before I fell onto my belly. The sickness returned. I ignored the stench and my aching ribs and continued.

"Patience, breathe, empathy, breathe, forgiveness, breathe, faith and maybe throw in a little poise for that damn meeting this afternoon. Relax, start from the top of the head, down the chest, up and down the arms, then the legs and feet. Just float. Let it all float by like clouds. How am I supposed to force myself out of this wonderful, hot bath, get dressed, eat breakfast and leave for work by six thirty? That damn meeting is supposed to be about clinic policy but I know it will eventually come around to me cramming more patients onto my schedule. How am I supposed to hurry an 80 year old in a wheel chair through an eye exam in 15 minutes? This water is heavenly. I probably should have at least turned on the night light. It is going to take 15 minutes for my eyes to adjust when I get out of the tub. I will never make it on time."

The stench from my clothes was overwhelming. I had made it inside after all. I would have paid much to see how I had done it. A steady drip fell onto my forehead. I looked up at the cheap plastic urinal, the contents thawing over the lip. I raised my head from the toilet seat and cracked the door with my shoeless, right foot. An orange sunrise hovered atop a wall of snow three feet high. It was as if someone had commanded the wind to insulate the walls and seal the door. I massaged my bare toes and searched for shoes. I tried to will myself back to sleep, back to dreams of meditation in a hot bath before the workday.

I awakened again or was it for the first time and lifted my head from the seat. Neither shoe was missing. The stench was no more bearable and the drip was just as revolting. The sunrise looked to be about ten minutes old. The snowdrift was at least a foot higher. Fifteen minutes later, exhausted from kicking and squirming, I was standing under my own power outside my filthy hotel room. The crisp morning air soothed my aching head and swimming gut. It could have been the morning after a night too long on the town. I shuffled forward allowing the snow to numb my toes and ankles. I opened and closed my eyes to avoid the painful crystals that lighted the waves of snow.

I was feeling better by the time I crested the last hill. A warm bed inside my bivy with the world zipped outside was a heavenly thought. I shed my clothes at the first sight of camp and rolled them into the snow. Melted snow might at least make a start on the stains. My briefs were caked with colors I did not recognize but I was too tired to remove them. I slid into bed and fell instantly to sleep. Lingering sickness kept me from worrying that I had no food. Fatigue and weakness prevented thoughts of her. I congratulated myself for having wanted to survive the night.
**Chapter 11**

Her perfume awakened me. She was in the middle of a sentence. I almost forgot myself and pulled her onto me, a grimy catastrophe that she could not have possibly forgiven. The sun was directly behind her head, her face in soft shadow. It had been years since I had wanted so desperately to kiss a woman.

"Aren't you going to finish?" She ran her fingers through my hair. All of the sudden you cannot talk after going a mile a minute?

"I was talking? What I was saying?" My eyes closed each time her fingers approached my head.

"You were telling me about the adoption or actually about planning the adoption."

"Are you serious? How long have I seemed to be awake? How long have I been boring you?" A whiff of body odor drifted over us. "I have got to be killing you with my stink. I am so embarrassed."

"You are a bit gamey. You must have had some wild night."

"Please don't think that. I got sick from some sausage samples at the supermarket. The storm stranded me outdoors for most of the night. I was not drunk. Please believe that."

"Take it easy. I was just teasing. What business is it of mine if you had a few too many? It's not like you were driving a school bus to a kindergarten."

"Please don't talk like that."

She walked to the nearest tree and returned with my clothes, laundered and folded. It was tempting to imagine that she walked that way for me, to cement what she had to know I was feeling. It would be such a perverted choice for her but attractive woman do sometimes make destructive choices. There was a time when such a neurotic match would have struck me as joke but I had never before played the part of the destructive choice.

"Come into my office and shut the door."

I pushed away the bio-microscope and placed the condensing lens on the counter.

"Could you excuse me for a few minutes, Sir? That is the big boss, the Chief of this Eye Department. He's only going to be down here for a few minutes. He will be in surgery the rest of the day. I was going to have you sit a while anyway so the drops could make your pupils larger."

"I'm retired. I've got all day. Do you think I want to go home and stare at the wife until eleven o'clock? Besides, I can barely see after all the goddamn drops and lights you put in my eyes. The shuttle doesn't leave until all of us are finished with our appointments. I won't be leaving this place until at least four. I think I'll go back to the waiting room. Vanna White is just about to come on the TV."

I said a quick Hail Mary while I crossed the hall. The clock above the door said three o'clock. I remembered the weekend trip to the in-laws. He had once again postponed bad news until the last hour before the weekend.

"Shut the door and sit down."

"Patience, empathy, forgiveness and faith." I repeated the words several times before I reached the chair.

He formed a steeple with his fingers and leaned back in his chair. "This morning I met with the Chief of Staff and the Product Line Manager. We agreed that you are not doing enough. You must see more patients. They are very unhappy about the follow-ups. You are having patients come back too soon and too often. Patients you have been seeing every year must be seen every two years and those who have been examined every six months will return in 12 months and so forth. At the meeting, I learned that optometrists at the Memphis facility schedule a patient every eight to ten minutes. The front office wants to know why we can't do that here."

"You can't be serious. The average age of these patients is about eighty. One in three arrives late for his appointment. We fetch them from the waiting room, bring them down the hall to the exam chair, hang up their coats, lift them out of wheelchairs and then try to perform a full exam in what is left of thirty minutes. The records are often missing and you cannot get much of a history out of those memories. Just figuring out the prescription for eyeglasses can take fifteen minutes. You and I have been through all of this before. Thirty-minute exam slots are the norm for federal eye clinics throughout the country. I was in private practice and worked for an HMO before I came here and thirty minutes was the norm for healthy, young patient populations and that was with a nurse or tech to help each doc, neither of which we have here."

"I am only telling you what the Chief of Staff told me. I can unfortunately not do much about it. I am only a messenger in these matters. The problem is that you are too thorough. You do too much with these patients. I give you all the easy consults, the ones that say the patient needs glasses or complain of blurry vision. I have looked at many of your exam notes. You just do too much. Why does an optometrist need to do gonioscopy?"

"Is that a serious question?

He folded his hands under the desk and leaned forward. His lips pursed sideways and he blew short puffs of air like a teapot releasing steam. "Of course it is. You should just be formulating a prescription for eyeglasses and taking a quick look inside the eyes."

I felt queasy. "My reasons for performing gonioscopy or any other test are no different than yours: narrow angles, suspicion of glaucoma, looking for new blood vessels in the drainage angle. You and I must adhere to the same standard of care. I must take a history, test for the patient's complaints, assess those tests and formulate a plan. The patients, especially these old veterans, only know that they cannot see as well as they used to. They think they need only have their glasses updated but there is often something much more serious going on. My patients are just as likely to have cataracts, glaucoma and retinal diseases. Am I not supposed to take the time to look for the things that would surely blind or kill them like tumors, retinal tears, diabetes or circulatory disease?"

"The people upstairs want the waiting times to come down. The wait for a new appointment is now past 200 days. They want it to be under thirty days by the end of the year. The new optometrist is scheduling eighteen exams per day."

"I saw his daily schedule. He has two patients scheduled through lunch and two before he is supposed to be here. I am not under any obligation to do that. Besides, during the lunch hour we usually see the patients who show up late. If you take away any gaps in the schedule, we will just have to reschedule the ones who show up late. It is better to see the late patients the day they are here. That will go a long way toward dropping the waiting time to thirty days."

"You want special treatment because you have been here so long?

"I simply expect to be treated like a full-time staff member. I do want time for lunch or catching up if I am behind schedule. I do not want you to schedule my first patient before my shift begins. I should have at least a few minutes to hang up my coat, check my mail and messages and get the exam room ready for the day, return phone calls, find records and the million other things we must do.

His fingers reformed the steeple. "They are not paying you to hang up your coat."

"They most certainly are. I am here on their time. I am not coming in early without pay to open up the clinic. Do you schedule a patient the very minute you are due to be in the hospital?"

His puffs grew faster and deeper. "We are not talking about me. We are talking about you."

"And we are not talking about someone who has been here one day per week for the last six months. We are talking about me, someone who has been seeing these old, sick patients for fifteen years. There is a big difference between running a marathon and running a fifty yard dash."

We sat for a minute, avoiding one another's eyes. I understood the boot that was on his neck and I wanted to let him know that I understood. "I know that a lot of this stuff comes from way above you and -"

"Why did you send that memo to the Chief of Staff? If you had a problem with the diabetic policy, you could have come to me. Was that payback for changing your schedule? There was no reason for us to discuss it beforehand." He had stood over his desk to deliver the last sentence.

"Absolutely not."

"You do not do enough and the salary board is blocking me from getting your salary for the new optometrists."

"The salary scale is based on years of service. How the hell do you expect to get a new hire the same salary as someone who has been doing this for fifteen years?" We were at that point yelling at one another.

"Why did you write that memo?"

"I thought I might actually be giving you cover. "

"Giving _me_ cover?"

"Yes, giving you cover. You know that a diabetic patient must have an annual eye exam by an eye doctor. A screening photo is not a reasonable substitute. I thought that having someone on your staff broach the subject with the higher ups would help you argue that the photos are not enough. I worded the memo so that the department heads would see it as a legal issue, a risk that we were violating the standard of care and exposing the hospital to liability."

He pounded his fists on the desk, his jaw jutted and his puffs became loud and wet. "But I want to do the photographs. We have to do the photographs." He reached onto the shelf behind him, picked up a stack of papers a foot thick and dumped it on the desk so that it toppled onto my lap. "Those are the requests for diabetic eye exams that we have not scheduled. I stopped counting at two hundred and that was not even half the stack. We must screen every diabetic for eye damage every year. There is no way to get around that. It is now almost 6 months to schedule any kind of eye exam. The year will go by without any exam for most of them. A photograph is better than nothing.

Nineteen ninety-six is an election year and Washington has just made everyone eligible for prosthetic devices, including eyeglasses. That means millions more will be requesting exams and free glasses. It is a two or three hundred-dollar gift certificate from the government. Even patients with private insurance are going to line up for freebies. The big guns want the waiting time for an eye exam reduced from 6 months to one month by the end of this year, while central office is freezing the budget, including hiring and wasting time and resources on bizarre indoctrination sessions for sexual harassment and diversity training. I understand that sexual harassment training is an ironic mandate from this leadership but we must meet the requirements.

I agree that the photographs are not as good as an exam but it is better than nothing and if we allow the waiting time to go up and up many patients will get nothing." He fell back into his chair, a huge leather relic bequeathed by his predecessor. "If you have any better ideas, I'd be glad to hear them."

My legs had fallen asleep. A gradual move toward the door would have to wait. Nights staring at the ceiling worrying that a mistake had somehow harmed a patient ran through my mind. Something massive was pulling at me. "I just don't want to make mistakes. I don't want to be moving so fast that I hurt someone."

"Don't give me that crap. Eighteen patients are too much for you?" He was back on his feet. "The optometrists at the Eye Foundation are scheduled every 15 minutes. You don't know how good you have it."

"Fifteen minutes? It takes fifteen minutes to get some of these old folks down the hall and into the chair. Eighteen of these patients could mean 13 hours of work. Hurrying leads to mistakes."

"You don't have to worry about that here. The feds will defend you. You don't even have to pay for malpractice insurance."

My gut twisted, my neck stiffened. I thought again of the plaster patterns across the midnight ceiling. "I don't want to commit malpractice in the first place. I just do not want to rush anyone. I don't want to hurt anyone." He did not seem to hear the last two sentences. I was not sure I had actually said them aloud. "We'll still be in the data bank. Our malpractice will still be in the registry when we try to work anywhere else, but isn't that beside the point?"

"It is all arranged. I will change your schedule again according to _needs._ You will be going one day more per week to the other hospital. You are in this building only 3 days a week.

There is no reason that you should keep an office here. We are very strapped for space. Everyone has to make adjustments. Clean out your office of any personal effects. It will be used for other needs when you are not here."

"But the diabetic screening is a fraud. The government has dangled new benefits irrespective of need to induce these guys to abandon their private healthcare. They are relying on us to do right by them. We cannot just take a picture of their eyes once a year, year after year and expect that they are going somewhere else for the rest of the exam. They think they are getting some kind of high tech eye exam that will pick up anything that goes wrong. They tell me that. The techs who take the photos do not even take a history. They do not even ask them if anything is wrong with their eyes. We are eye doctors in a clinic full of old people and many of our patients will never be asked if they have had a stroke. Hundreds maybe thousands who have lost their peripheral vision from a stroke are out there driving because we shirked our duty. Can we not at least have them read the eye chart?

Some patients are legally blind from cataracts and we only discover that if they ask for a separate appointment to get a prescription for glasses, and only about half of the diabetic patients ask for a glasses appointment. Isn't it ironic that most of our diabetic patients, the patients most at risk for serious eye diseases, don't get a complete eye exam unless they come to me for an eyeglass prescription?"

"You should not be doing that. You are clogging the schedule. They will expect a full exam every year. You should simply give them a prescription for their glasses and tell them to return in a year to have their eyes photographed for diabetic problems. That is what all the other optometrists and ophthalmologists in this hospital do. You are not special that you can do differently."

"There is absolutely no way I can do that. The standard of care is clear. A diabetic patient should be unambiguously advised to have a complete eye exam every year, not just a photographic screening."

"The patients are mailed a letter with the results stating that they have received a photographic screening. We do not claim that they have received an eye exam."

"The distinction between a screening and an exam is a technical one. Mentioning the word screening once in a form letter without providing a definition does not come close to satisfying informed consent. We are not talking about a blood pressure screening on a card table at a supermarket. These patients expect that a university medical center is giving them the best of everything. They tell me so. That letter is nothing short of fraud."

He walked to the door and pointed to the hallway. I got up without checking to see if my legs were still asleep. Something had ended, perhaps the world but no one would hear about it. The newspapers would trumpet it as progress, a leap forward for efficiency. Expanded healthcare benefits for the elderly they would call it. There would be no mention of battlefield surgeons forced into early retirement. The big boys and girls in Washington needed yes-men and yes-woman. Practical nurses with clip boards would run the operating rooms and social workers could be hospital directors. Bizarre decisions made in Washington for the benefit of the party in power made it all the way to the local hospitals without a syllable of dissent. Anyone with the bona fides to raise an argument faced termination or harassment.

I walked past him and headed toward my exam room.

"I wouldn't go in there right now if I were you." She held my arm and stepped between the exam room door and me. "Mr. visual field problem is in there with his wife."

"What are talking about?"

She moved my arm up and down like a water pump. "You remember, last week, a billion strokes, blind as a bat, still driving a pick up truck. He and the Missus got their notification from the state that his driver's license has been revoked. I already called security. Don't go in until the coppers get here."

"You already called security? I talked to him about this for twenty minutes last week. Christ, he barely has tunnel vision. He had something like nine strokes in five years. It is a goddamn miracle he has not already killed someone. I am in no mood for this. What the hell did he say?"

"Nothing coherent, but I definitely heard the words kill and mother f----." I allowed her to guide me into my office and into a chair.

"You look like death. It was pretty unpleasant in there?"

"It's nothing you haven't already enjoyed. Your photographic work was a big part of the discussion. I am a little confused about this patient. I suggested he get a second opinion. He told me that I could be sure of that. I distinctly remember writing in his chart that he should get a second opinion from neuro-ophthalmology. I remember sending an email warning that he might get nasty over the driving issue. I worried that he might get physical. Who scheduled him back with me? Give me a minute."

I trotted to the waiting room and waited while the clerk registered a patient. "Can you check the computer and tell me who scheduled the patient who just checked in?" His fingers pounded the keyboard, the pages turning across the screen only long enough for his expert eyes to scan the headings. A hand cupped over his lips, he pointed across the hall to an open door and whispered. "It was her."

"Who are you pointing at and why the hell are you whispering?"

He pointed again, this time his arm fully extended. A woman carried a box across the threshold and continued down the hall. "You mean that practical nurse? She changed my written orders? I thought she was coming down here to help the techs prep patients for exams?"

"I don't know what to tell you. She told me that she was sent down here to help run the clinic."

I was in the hall and running before I had time to think. I caught her just before she went into the restroom. "Excuse me. Have we been introduced? Didn't you start last week?"

She turned with a hand extended, wearing a smile that was pleasant only by practice. Her demeanor was friendly and relaxed. We exchanged handshakes and names. It was easy to slow down and smile. "I was just talking to one of the clerks about a minor confusion with the scheduling."

"How is that?"

"He seemed to be of the opinion that you had inadvertently changed something on my chart." The smile grew broader. Her shoulders fell back. She leaned against the wall. "Can you be more specific? Yesterday was so crazy. There was so much to do. Getting this place into shape is going to take a lot more effort than I thought."

"Getting this place into shape?" I decided to leave that for later. "I had a problem patient last week whom I referred to a colleague for a second opinion and he was somehow scheduled again with me today. I am sure it is just a mix up. The clerk seemed a little confused. The patient just checked in. He's sitting in my exam room."

The smile turned slightly sideways. She glanced over my shoulder to get a glimpse of the slumped figure in my exam chair. "Oh yes, I think I remember. He was the patient who had several strokes. I was at the desk when the clerk was telling him that he would have to go over to the other building to see neuro-ophthalmology. I did not see any reason for him to have to go all the way over there. He knows his way around this hospital. It's best to keep all his appointments here."

I looked down to see if my shirt betrayed the pounding of my heart. My mind scrambled to gain the upper hand. My voice remained steady. "You are new here. What department did you say you came from?"

"General Medicine?"

"And you did what there?"

"Prepped patients for the docs, ancillary testing, stuff like that?"

"As an R.N.?"

"I am a licensed practical nurse."

"A licensed practical nurse? In this clinic, we often refer problem patients for a second opinion. By a problem, I mean that he has shown inappropriate anger or exhibited the possibility of becoming violent. I don't have to tell you that we have plenty of mentally ill and demented patients to worry about. The second opinion usually calms them down. That was the case with this patient. I told him last week that I would have to send a form to the state because his vision no longer meets the legal requirements for driving. He called me a liar and a quack and made some threats. I told him I would get him a second opinion with a specialist and we agreed that I would not send the form until I got the results of that exam. I was trying to give him a chance to deal with some very bad news and I was also trying to prevent gun play in the clinic."

Not a hint of concern was detectable. Her posture remained loose, her features aloof and sunny. There was an aura of hidden reserve, a confidence that she could summon sufficient power. She humored me. "I just thought you didn't feel like seeing him again. I didn't think it was a good idea."

"You didn't think it was a good idea? I have tried to talk nicely to you about this but it is clear that you do not understand. You will never again countermand my written orders."

"I don't mind talking about these issues."

"You will never again countermand my written orders especially when it comes to issues of clinic safety."

"We can certainly talk about that."

"There is nothing to talk about. We will not talk about this. This is non-negotiable. The next time you try to practice optometry without a license, and that is what you are doing when you alter orders, I will fry you with the state board of nursing."

"I've been sent down here to help run the clinic and everyone is going to have to expect some changes. I look forward to hearing everyone's concerns." She walked into the restroom grinning and humming.

A prudent man would have repaired to his office for a few calming minutes. I stalked directly to the exam room. The patient sat in the exam chair, his wife stood beside him, her right hand across his chest as if she anticipated a charge. His chest heaved, his jaw jutted and his fists were clenched white. He was a small man, inches shorter than his wife and half her width. I kept my distance. Maybe he had once been a champion, a bantamweight terror, one of those men who had learned the valuable lesson that the infliction of pain is more a function of skill than size.

"Hello Sir, what brings you to see us today?" My tone was surprisingly chipper.

"This is what brought me in here." He tossed a sheet of paper in my direction. The wife caught it on the fly just before it fell behind the trash bin. She crossed the room and gently handed it to me. I did my best to fake a reassuring smile. I unfolded the paper, taking my time to ease the violent tension.

"Read it, you turd."

"I see that this is a Department of Transportation form."

"Did you send that thing to the state?"

I reached for the chart and removed the visual field tests. "Let's look at the results of your peripheral vision tests. Was this the third or the fourth time we repeated it?" I rolled my stool a few feet closer but just beyond his reach. "You can see here on this summary printout that there really has not been any change on any of the repeats. The first test was accurate. The many strokes you have suffered over the last few years have left you with little better than tunnel vision. Here in the upper left is a normal field of vision. See how much smaller yours has become. You have lost more than 70 % of your sight. You have less than half of what you need to pass a drivers test. I know this is bad news and I understand how difficult it will be to stop driving but I know that you are a nice fellow, you would never want to hurt anyone and we do not want any harm to come to you. The good news is that this condition almost never affects your vision straight ahead. You should be able to continue reading and watching TV or anything straight ahead for the rest of your life."

"Just shut the hell up and tell me if it was you that sent a form to the state to take away my license." His wife leaned some of her considerable weight against his shoulder.

"I don't have the power to take your license away and I would not want that power. The law requires an eye doctor to fill out a form whenever a patient's vision does not meet the legal standards for driving. We hate the law but our hands are tied. The form will only cause you to get another opinion and pass a test administered by the state. The form does not automatically mean you lose the license but I can tell you that another test is not likely to change the outcome. I know this is tough but also I know you would not want to hurt anyone."

He stood with his hands gripping the arms of the chair. His knees flexed like a sprinter waiting for the gun. I could not decide whether my anger was the residue of the earlier conversations with the Chief and the nurse or a direct reaction to his aggressiveness, a damnable thought in light of his unfortunate medical condition. "Would you just stop that shit? We had to hire an attorney to sort out the mess you started. All I do is drive down to the supermarket and over to my club and you had to go and ruin it. Who do you think you are to go around ruining peoples' lives?" The wife was almost sitting on his hip. I could not help admiring the strength required to continue standing under so much weight. He did not seem like the kind of man who could calmly accept that age and illness had left him weaker than his spouse.

"Don't people who go to supermarkets, kids in supermarket parking lots deserve to be safe? The law doesn't say that people at shopping centers are fair game for drivers with poor vision."

Midway through the last sentence, I turned to open the door. The hunch that I might need the help of a passerby was a good one. His fist was against my temple before the wife could yell a warning. I was pinned against the wall, his face touching mine, resisting with all my strength the urge to push him back and throw punches as fast as I could. At times, I can still smell the feminine lavender of his shaving lotion. To this day, the stale breath from cheap cigars makes me ill.

He deftly executed a combination of punches to the side of my head at a speed that would have made a twenty-five year old proud. I had cocked my arm to deliver an overhand right when the wife bear hugged him from behind and lifted him off the ground. I will be forever grateful to her for sparing me the consequences of that single blow.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." His voice was less than a whisper, his rage entirely spent. He appeared now as a child, the extent of his disability manifest and pitiful." She hoisted him onto the exam chair like a droopy doll. He continued to mutter, occasionally striking the heel of a hand against his forehead.

"Holy Jesus, Doctor. Did he hurt you? Please say you're alright?"

I actually hated myself. I should have waited just a little longer before coming to the exam room. He had sensed my anger and impatience. I had teased the bear. I had provoked a sick, old man to violence. He had not injured me but I wished that he had. She stroked the side of my head and held my hand. Neither of us worried about a second charge.

Security soon arrived. I walked to the Chief's office and opened the door without bothering to knock. "That last patient just punched me in the head. I have no more patients. I'm going home."

He did not answer nor did he lift his eyes from the computer screen. I stopped at my office only long enough to compose a memo about how an old man had given me an ass beating because an interloper had changed my orders. I addressed it to the Chief of Medicine knowing that his new boss, the Leader of the Medical Consumer Products Line would overrule anything that might hamper the spies and meddlers she had inserted into the clinics.
**Chapter 12**

"Patience, empathy, forgiveness and the hell with it." I tried again to clear the horrid workday from my mind. I had no memory of walking to the hospital parking lot. Ten miles had passed before I realized that I had been battling heavy traffic. Several more attempts at spiritual sedation were unsuccessful. A precipice was at hand. I could feel it moving closer. A good night of sleep was not going to smooth this over. I had gone to school with the right intentions. I had surely cared about making a good living but a desire to do something meaningful had been more important. Early in my career, I had placed too much stock in technical expertise but had learned that listening and explaining were the essence of good medical care. How very far I had sunk. Hurrying had replaced listening. Irritation had displaced kindness.

I wanted to drive the car to the nearest lot and accept the first unreasonable offer. It was too red, too conspicuous, too much, overdressed and pretentious. This was not the first moment of doubt. Throughout that year, the sense of falseness had grown to include the house, the neighborhood, the restaurants and the expectations of our relatives. I wanted to be behind the wheel of a clunker, on my way to something other than a four bedroom, three and one half bath behemoth with rooms I might not enter for months at a time.

I was afraid. I wanted to be afraid, call out the monster and thrash him. Go to school, learn to do something indispensable and meaningful and live happily or at least somewhat predictably ever after. Mill closings, layoffs and insecurity would never touch me. I did not need a pop psychologist to explain that. Reluctance and caution permeated all of us who had grown up in that time and place. I was better off than most. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming but at least I had made it to the altar, bought a house, built a life. So many classmates had remained frozen at nineteen, frightened of dragons appearing out of nowhere to lay waste to the community especially anyone who dared dream of a place stable enough for love and children.

She remained curled inside my arm, her head on my chest. How and when she had come to be there I could not remember. I kissed her hair before I had time to think. She did not awaken to protest but instead nudged tighter against me. I took a deep breath. My odor had improved considerably. Curtains of wind flapped through the pine trees and we shivered and breathed in a soothing rhythm. Inch by inch I eased the bivy flap into place then closed the zipper. It was not quite sundown but inside the vestibule, we were in early evening twilight. Memories of nights in the woods with my wife came rushing back. A red and blue blanket at the ready in the trunk of the car, a mental catalogue of our favorite spots, we rented the sun and hid beneath the stars. Tucking the blanket around her, filled with a desire to keep her safe was a picture untainted by bitterness and I was as sleepy and euphoric as that young man in the woods had been. I nodded off in a painfully unsuitable position, one arm already asleep, knowing that physical discomfort could not force me to move.

The morning broke cold and blue, perfect weather for a cozy wake up. I watched her for at least an hour. She opened her eyes one at a time, stretched and sighed. A smile under hooded lids betrayed no hidden regret. I slid my numb arm from behind her and rolled off the sleeping bag.

"You certainly look a darn sight better than last night and you smell less gamey, too."

"Good morning to you as well. I know I still need a bath. I'll get to it right after breakfast."

She sat up and rested her chin on my shoulder. "Do you have a pantry inside this little dwelling?" She lifted the bivy and pretended to search under my feet.

"There is no pantry in there. I only have a pantry at my summer house."

"I should have known." Her chin was back on my shoulder. Red sunlight shined through her long hair and her eyes glowed like polished silver. "You know it's not polite to stare, especially at a haggard woman who just woke up. I must look like death."

"Beautiful. You look just beautiful." I had spoken too quickly, too seriously.

"You are too nice. I can't believe anyone would voluntarily look at me at this hour." Her playful tone was the perfect response.

I wanted to know about her life. What were her private thoughts? What did she love?

There had to be a level of imperfection that could never stir her heart.

It was easy to imagine the whispers. What had she been thinking? Is it a platonic relationship or a cruel trick of fate? He must be very rich or she very deranged. Perhaps he was in the war just after they met. What a kind and loyal woman she must be. I don't think I could be so good in such circumstances. I mean, for God's sake, look at him. What do you call that problem with his face? I would never blame others for thinking what was in my own heart.

There was also the smallest chance that she was not kind at all. Could she touch me so gently and listen to my interminable babbling just to have a bit of sport? I continued to watch her comb her hair, convincing myself of the unlikelihood of meeting such a cunning personality in that little park by the lake.

"You look as if you've just eaten something nasty. Was it something I said?"

"My head is a bit sore. I am definitely on the mend. Let me get that pocket by the zipper. I've kept some things for special occasions."

"Is that coffee and French roast to boot? And from one of my favorite hotel chains."

I pulled four packets from the pocket. "Here we have strawberries."

"Those flat, sorry looking things are strawberries?"

"They surely are. A fellow I met near the West Virginia border gave them to me. He had a supply job in the military. It's some kind of freeze dried process. I know it does not look so tasty. He really had to coax me to try them and I was extremely hungry. Do you mind chocolate this early in the morning?" I handed her a nugget the size of a golf ball.

"This is gorgeous. I mean it is really gorgeous and evil. The smell seems right but that pretty package must have turned into something hideous by now."

"Not so fast. Give the credit to the same clever fellow from wild and wonderful West Virginia."

She removed the wrapper fold by fold. She danced around the bivy, squealing and flapping her arms. "This is absolutely and divinely delicious. You bought that yesterday. That is the best chocolate I have ever tasted. It's like it just came out of the vat."

"Three months ago or thereabouts."

"Say again." She stopped dancing.

"I got that chocolate about three months ago in West Virginia."

"And all that time it has been inside that stinky old sleeping bag?"

"It's not a sleeping bag."

She pulled the zipper then tossed the flap to the side. "Shaped like a bag, zipper on the side and you sleep in it under the stars. Do you not?"

"That I do."

"Looks like a sleeping bag to me."

"It's a bivy sack. It does a lot more than that."

"And garbage men are sanitary engineers."

I stood up. We smiled and moved toward one another. I intended a peck but the softness, the chocolate, and the warmth of her breath were irresistible. She pushed closer and permitted me to linger.

She broke away and ran, towing me by the arm. Tree swallows by the hundreds emerged from the high grass, their blue wings shimmering like tropical fish, darting in random orbits, sometimes touching our arms and faces, shadowing us like divers on a coral reef. She halted at the tree line. For several moments, the birds hovered all around us. Leaving, they flew with more restraint as I stole a second chocolate kiss.

I steered sharply to the right across two lanes, accelerated to 90 mph and yelled to no one in particular. "Pass on the left, slow on the right." About a mile ahead, a tractor-trailer blocked the left lane. I hurried toward the empty third lane on the far right and several dozen vehicles gave chase. I returned to the center lane just ahead of a student driver, passed the tractor-trailer and returned to the far right lane. In my rear view mirror, I watched a silver pick up pass and swerve to avoid a potential box in the left lane. The student driver, oblivious to the rage on all sides, moved into the left lane just ahead of the silver pick up. The pick up wiggled and paused before veering onto the right shoulder of the road, a red truck on his tail.

I pushed the accelerator past one hundred ten. The ride was as stable as it had been at half that speed. The perfect box loomed ahead. Solid lines of traffic, at least a dozen cars long, clogged all three lanes. The left lane moved fastest. In a single awkward motion, I turned from right to left across all three lanes, positioned myself within inches of the last car in the left lane and waited for the pick-ups to arrive. Watching their frustration in my rear view mirror, all the way to my exit would be great fun. The silver pick up pulled to within inches of my bumper, his loyal partner beside me in the center lane. I tapped my breaks and made a show of laughing each time they hit their brakes.

The left lane slowed. The nose of the red truck drew even with my passenger door. I veered to the left edge of the lane to look ahead then moved a few inches closer to the bumper in front of me. I took a second look. Three vehicles ahead, a hat atop a tiny head was barely above the dashboard of an ancient sedan. Traffic was moving away from his flesh colored vehicle and cars from the center lane flowed into the gap in front of him.

"Get the hell out my lane, you old turd." Red truck, now even with the car ahead of me, awaited his chance to swing from the center lane to the left lane. Silver moved into the space beside me. His window was down. He was hollering but I kept my eyes on the car in front of me. A cup of coffee flew through my open window and scalded my cheek and elbow.

I crashed into the door. The steering wheel drifted a full turn to the left. I stood on the brakes, the rear wheels bounced from side to side and I skidded onto an overpass. A wall of jersey barriers guarded the left side of the bridge. For just a moment, I was certain that I would launch from the bridge but I managed to straighten the vehicle just before impact. My bumper scraped the concrete wall sending a shower of multi-colored sparks, chunks of concrete and metal high into the air. I had managed to stay inside my lane and traffic had shifted far to the right of me. I spun to a halt about 300 feet from where I had lost control. A far as I could tell the coffee burn was my only injury.

A meat wagon approached. My front quarter panel teetered across a jersey barrier, my bra shot from lane to lane beneath the wheels of trucks and the gate to the car pool lane lay broken beside my rear bumper. I looked through the rear window. The pickups had pulled to the side of the road to watch. Through the darkly tinted glass, I could see that they were laughing. Did they know one another? Did they know me?

I tried the ignition. The engine note was healthy. I did not pause to check the brakes or tires. I drove toward my tormentors. A timid voice said something about self-control but I continued to accelerate not knowing what I planned to do.

They reacted the moment I turned the key but I caught them before the next exit. The line of cars to the exit ramp had put them into a new box. I pulled alongside and parked to block their escape. They were out of their vehicles before I had cut my engine. I have no recollection of chasing them on foot but I somehow came to be holding a head in both hands and bouncing it off the pavement as fast and as hard as I could. The other suspect had scrambled up a hill and run toward a fence that guarded the highway from the forest. I listened to be sure that the fellow beneath me was still breathing, wiped my hands on his shirt and sauntered to my car.

"You're home?" Her chipper voice startled me. She had not beaten me home from work in five years. I stripped, rolled my bloody clothes into a clump and tossed them behind the furnace. Red gravel bounced across the concrete floor and peppered the water tank. She flung open the basement door, descended three steps and bent to look at me. "Why are you naked?

"And why are you home so early?"

"There was some kind of plumbing problem in the building. The top floors flooded. There was some concern about the electrical system, about getting electrocuted using the computers or some such nonsense. Let's forget about that. What is going on with you? You look worse than hell. What is that over there? My underwear had missed the water tank by several feet.

"I got some stuff on my clothes. I had some car trouble, a little fender bender." She bounded down the stairs and ran into the garage.

"You had some car trouble? Half the car is missing. Are you hurt?" She returned to the basement to examine me from head to foot. "Where did this blood come from?" Her hands palpated like a machine. "Your eye is swollen." She ran across the room, pulled the chain on the ceiling light and returned to resume her examination. "Your cheek and jaw are black and blue. Please tell me what happened. Tell me right now."

I needed something to set me off, send me running around the basement screaming, breaking my fists against the cinder blocks. "There was sort of a fight but I couldn't really do anything about it. The guy was old, a patient. I almost hit him. You have no idea how close I came. I was so out of it after a meeting with the Chief and some of the new staff. It was really my fault. I should have never gone in there so pissed off. That poor old son of a bitch; his wife was tougher but I have to give him credit. He can still throw a right cross. He must have boxed somewhere, probably fifty or sixty years back. He still did it right, no loop whatsoever, straight as a bell, but I did not realize he had left any marks. Of course, it could have happened in the wreck or during the fight afterwards. I don't know. I am very tired right now. The car still drove OK. I am so damn tired."

She knelt beside the furnace and spread my clothes on the floor. "Where did all this blood come from?" She began to cry. "What is going on? You are scaring me. I think I understand that you had an argument with the Chief. For some reason, a patient punched you. There is a wrecked car in the garage and you said something about another fight. There is blood all over these clothes. Did that patient follow you out of the hospital?"

I trudged up the stairs, too tired to grasp the railing. She passed me in the kitchen, hurried to the couch in the family room, piled the pillows and patted the cushion beside her. I raised an index finger to request a momentary delay and went into the powder room. My elbows on the sink, I studied the indigo mouse that extended from my forehead to my jaw. It was unlikely that the patient's haymaker had done so much damage. A second, third or fourth blow would have been needed to produce such a lesion. How could I not remember? Perhaps I had already snapped, entered the first phase of a nervous breakdown, whatever that meant.

She opened her arms when I turned the corner. I rested my face on her chest and pulled her legs around me. "Just start at the beginning and tell me what happened, step by step." Clammy perspiration ran down my back and across my chest. My heart fluttered, my gut ached. The urge

to hurt someone was undiminished and I was disgusted with myself. "Where's the boy?"

"He's still locked in the bedroom. I'll get him later. Just tell me from the beginning."

"I'll go get him. He'll make me feel more human." I stood with no real intention of moving." She pushed me onto the cushions. "I'll be right back."

In a few seconds, the lab leaped onto the couch and burrowed his snout into my armpit. A low whimper told me that he understood. He always understood. She slid beside me and wrestled the lab for position. "Get off the couch, you poop eater."

"So that's why he was in solitary?"

"I am so frustrated with him. He has not done that for months and then this afternoon he suddenly got nervous. About an hour later, I was looking out the kitchen window and saw him having a snack. It was not even his. It was deer poop. It is so disgusting. I don't know what to do but we can talk about that anytime."

"After lunch I had another heated discussion with the Chief. Just as I was leaving that little festival, I learned that a clipboard nurse had countermanded my written orders about a problem patient. Do you remember me telling you a few weeks back about another patient who insists on driving even after several strokes? He has lost almost all of his peripheral vision. I gave him one more chance, repeated the peripheral vision test again a couple weeks ago and the result was no better. I told him by phone that we mailed the results to the highway department. He went nuts, threatened to cut my balls off, shoot me, all that good stuff. He scheduled to see me again this week. I wrote orders for him see someone else. Everyone in the clinic does that with unusually angry patients. Sometimes a second opinion breaks the ice and helps them understand and the first doc is less likely to be murdered. I have done the same thing for others in the department.

I was leaving the Chief's office in a state of mental chaos when I found out that this angry patient was in my exam chair. Some LPN had cancelled my referral."

"I don't understand. Can she do that?"

"That's just it. I do not know who she is. She wasn't introduced to any of the staff as far as I can tell. She talked as if she's my new supervisor."

"She's a practical nurse? You have to be kidding me. What the hell could she know about what you do?"

"Don't get carried away. Some of the LPN's in our hospital know plenty. I can think of a few who could qualify for sainthood. Some are better at patient care than just about anyone in that medical center is. They are not the problem. It's the damn take over. They called it a re-organization but it was really a play to take the power away from the medical staff." I paused to steady my voice. I wanted her to know, should have told her long ago but had flattered myself that I was being chivalrous and strong. Her expression shifted between pain and fear. It was time to fall down. It would not be the first time she had propped me up. "We have gone from a patient population of two and a half million to almost seven million in the two years since the last election. To buy votes, the administration made everyone in the plan eligible for just about everything, including eyeglasses and eye exams while at the same time cutting staff. Our waiting time for a new eye appointment increased from two weeks to ten months."

"But that doesn't make any sense. Why would all those people who have private health insurance and private doctors switch to your system?"

"It's like getting a three-hundred dollar gift certificate. Glasses are not cheap. These guys tell me all the time that they just had an exam with their private eye doctors but got in line with our clinic for the free glasses or free hearing aids. Who can blame them? But the problem is that the folks with medical eye problems like diabetes, glaucoma and cataracts, the ones who don't have anywhere else to go, who would have been seen within a few weeks, now have their appointment pushed months and months into the future, their eye diseases getting worse by the day."

"How could you let this happen? Why aren't the doctors and nurses fighting this?"

"The medical staff has been neutered, permanently and absolutely. The hospital departments are now called product lines. The chiefs of the medical departments report to the leaders of the product lines. Take my situation. You know that for decades eye care has been under the Chief of Surgery but there has been no Chief of Surgery for several years."

She scratched her head, wrung her hands and ignored the lab's nudges. His head tilted and his ears drooped. "How can you have a department of surgery without a Chief of Surgery? What happened to the Chief of Surgery I have met at every Christmas party for the last 15 years? I thought he'd never leave that place."

I pulled the lab around the coffee table and hugged him. "His new boss, the leader of the surgical product line, turned out to be a nurse. The fireworks were instantaneous."

"I don't understand. A professor of surgery, a former battlefield surgeon was told to take orders from a nurse?"

"You are not listening to what I am saying." My voice was loud and angry. "I'm sorry. It's been a difficult day."

"You don't have to take it out on me. I'm on your side." The speed of the hand wringing increased.

"I am sorry." My mechanical attempt to hold her hands elicited a mechanical response. "What I meant to say was that it was no longer his department to manage. The supervisors advertised the product lines as a means to improve the efficiency of the administrative, clerical side of things. It was actually a takeover of the medical staff by policy wonks from managed care. It is nationwide, from the top down. The administration promised eligibility for everyone just before the last election without any way to pay for it. They had to cut costs, which meant cutting staff and services. You cannot do that without endangering quality of care. The Chief of Surgery was one of the few with power who stood up and said no. They transferred him to a four-room satellite clinic outside the city limits. They humiliated him out the door. He sat in a cubicle eight hours a day for a year. All that expertise and experience down the drain. He was like a walking medical library and it is all gone. He had no choice but to quit."

"Who replaced him as Chief of Surgery?"

"There is no replacement. No surgeon would even interview for a position as Chief of Surgery in a department where a nurse gets the final say.

"But who makes all the decisions in the surgical department?"

"The head of the surgical product line does."

"All the surgeons are under this nurse?"

"That's right."

"Even the transplant surgeons, the world famous ones from the university, must defer to the nursing staff?"

"Now you're getting it." Her hands were now quiet, clasped above her eyes as if in prayer.

"This set up obviously includes you?"

"I'm just a small fish in a very big and stormy lake. The waves got a lot bigger today."

"You and the Chief went at it?"

"You're really on your stride now."

"What did you fight about this time?"

I was almost too tired to speak but the look on her face and the knot in my gut told me that there would be no relief in quitting the conversation. The pieces of a declaration were falling into place. Avoidance was probably the prudent strategy. It was not the best time to make the big parlay but giving in and laying the bait would take far less energy than warding off her cross examinations. She had certainly earned an explanation. For months, she had endured my insomnia, mood swings and surliness.

"The folks in Washington declared some months ago that every diabetic patient must be seen in the eye clinic every year. That mandate has quadrupled our patient load. The majority of patients have always gone to their private eye docs for diabetic eye care. From now on, even those with private insurance will automatically be scheduled each year for what is called a diabetic eye screening."

"Isn't that a good thing? Diabetic patients should have their eyes examined every year.

"That is correct but we don't have enough staff to see that many patients. For the last 18 months, the technicians have been taking photographs of the eyes of diabetic patients. The Chief takes a look at the photo and a letter is mailed to the patient telling them when they should be screened again."

"That sounds like a good idea."

"That does sound like a good idea until you realize that the patient is not checked for anything else. Hell, they do not even have them read a chart. Peripheral vision is never checked. A huge percentage of our patients have lost peripheral vision from strokes. Those patients will never know if it is still safe for them to drive. These poor sons of bitches, the ones who don't have any private health insurance, think they are getting comprehensive eye care or health care for that matter. They don't know they are being denied care. They don't know the difference between a screening and a full exam. All they see is white coats and high tech machinery and they become convinced that everything is beautiful."

"Are you sure that serious conditions are being missed?"

"How can we not be missing things? It is like going to a cardiologist who does not use a stethoscope. The patients who ask the photographers for an eyeglass prescription get an appointment with me. You can imagine what I find: cataracts, tumors, dry eyes, retinal diseases. The screening is blind to all of those conditions. I see only a small percentage of the diabetics, only those who ask for a second appointment to have their glasses checked. The rest of them will go year after year without so much as reading a chart or having their history taken. Without a history, how are to know if they are taking any of the medicines that might harm their eyes?"

She could not disguise her alarm. Another obstacle blocked the road to motherhood. I was convinced that I had heard her thoughts. Her head rolled, her thumbs twiddled and the tears flowed. I took her hands in mine, this time with authentic affection.

"In the last few months I have been called on the carpet several times and told to stretch out my follow up appointments. Change your six-month follow-ups to one year, your annuals to two years. You are doing too much during the exam. Do not be so thorough. They might as well tell me to roll the dice, kill a few people, blind one or two patients for the sake of better statistics.

You know that information from an eye exam can often prevent a heart attack or a stroke. You need more than just a quick glance under the hood. It takes time. Pupil dilation is essential. The patient must be somewhat cooperative for the exam to go smoothly and the average age of my patients is nearly eighty. They move so slowly. There is no way to rush a demented, eighty five year old.

Many of them are in wheel chairs or lying on stretchers. How can we eliminate crucial parts of our exams, the kinds of tests that uncover serious disease?

"Why would nurses take these jobs? Who wants to do a job that she is not qualified to do, especially one where lack of expertise means people get hurt or die? Who can live with that kind of guilt?"

"You have got to be kidding me. You cannot be that naive. You were a public defender for Christ's sake. It is a simple formula. Offer money and titles and travel beyond an individual's wildest dreams. Offer it to hundreds and you will come up with one or two who are willing to be hatchet men or hatchet women. They get to carry lap top computers and fly around the country, play executive and rub elbows with dignitaries in Washington.

Suppose that testing annually for a certain deadly disease will uncover virtually every case but the disease affects only three out of a thousand patients. Some will say that testing every year for that disease is not cost effective. A new protocol is ordered. Test every five years or not at all. In the following twelve months, fifty thousand patients might come to one hospital. One hundred and fifty patients at one facility, 3 out of every 1000, will die this year without that test, 750 over five years and their families will have no idea that the dying did not have to happen. 'Thank you doctor,' they will say. 'I know you did everything you could.'

All the free trinkets like hearing aids and eyeglasses and drugs will have convinced them that someone cared but bean counters and bureaucrats will have made all the big decisions about who lives and who dies. Our diabetic patients are a good example. A patient without diabetes can expect a full eye exam but those with diabetes, because of some edict form afar, receive only a quick glance. The patients most at risk get the least. Mark that as a trend."

She sat closer, folded her hands and took a deep breath. "Are you telling me that something bad happened to one of your patients? Did you make a mistake? Is that why you have been acting so strangely these last few months? Please do not be afraid to tell me. I know you would never intentionally hurt anyone. We will get through it." She slumped as if a cement block sat on her shoulders. I lifted her by the arm.

"I appreciate your courage but that has not happened, at least not yet. I've told you that some of the diabetic patients, those who want glasses are sent to me after the camera screening. Many of them have never received a complete eye exam. I do a comprehensive exam and tell each patient to return in one year. Throughout the country, a full exam every year is the standard of care for diabetics. It would be malpractice for me to tell them that a photo is sufficient. No one in private practice would take that risk.

Today the Chief said that I must stop doing full exams for diabetic patients. I must give them only a prescription for eyeglasses and schedule them for an annual photo. I tried to tell him that we must still adhere to the community standards of care. We can end up in front of a state disciplinary board even if we practice in a federal facility. He laughed at me. I work too slowly. I am too thorough. I don't see enough patients. That the government has an endless supply of money for malpractice defense makes everything all right. He actually said that.

I cannot tell those poor bastards to have a snapshot year after year, a sometimes-blurry snapshot and pretend that I am doing the best I can for them. I told him finally that I just did not want to hurt anyone, reminded him that all of us have nights staring at the ceiling, worrying that we may have injured a patient. He did not budge. He only became angrier."

In the darkness, I could just make out her bobbing shoulders. The time for negotiation and compromise had arrived. Without strong action, we would surely fail. I surveyed the room, the neat brick hearth, the kitchen beyond and the beloved forest outside the French doors. Those niceties had been the culmination of our labors, our emblems of success, the undeniable evidence that we had arrived. So many nights I had sat on the terrace, drink in hand, soaking in the sounds and shapes of the tall trees, adrift in the satisfaction that we had earned the right to such beautiful surroundings. We had done meaningful work. Our income could have been greater but not much and without that meaningfulness, the woods would not have looked so right, would not have felt so satisfying. I would not miss it. The truth of that statement amazed me. It would not be a step backward. Something was opening up. I stood on the bank, ready to jump into the rushing water, certain somehow that the torrent would take us where we needed to go.

I lifted her chin and brushed the matted hair from her cheeks. She tried to smile. She snorted and puffed like a five year old who had cried too long. "Whatever you want to do is alright with me. Just quit. We can make it for a couple months on my salary. The student loans will be finished in less than two years. The medical bills from the infertility are on the home equity line of credit. We can make smaller payments. Start looking. You will find something."

I drew a long breath. "Quitting would not be so simple. We have been paying into that pension fund for over 15 years. If I quit now, the pension amount at retirement will be calculated using the pay scale from this year. It is a way to keep people from leaving early. We won't retire for at least 15 years. Fifteen years of inflation will eat away at least half the value of that pension. I cannot let them take that away from us.

I have been doing this geriatric thing for fifteen years. It has been that long since I examined kids or contact lens patients. It would be like going back to school and from what I have read and heard; things are not a whole lot better in private practice. Medicare, Medicaid and HMO's have reimbursement regulations that impact on clinical decisions."

"What are you going to do?" Her tone betrayed a hint of irritation. "You have obviously decided that you can't do what the Chief is asking and you don't want to look for a new job. I do not have to ask where adoption fits into this mess. That is clearly out of the question. I would not be surprised if you were a little relieved by all the chaos at the hospital. You now have a new and compelling reason to avoid adoption. You have boxed in me in nicely. You win again."

She ran from the room. I waited until she reached the top of the stairs. "There is another way." My voice was clear and confident. The crying stopped. I could picture her on the landing, stock-still in the darkness, her eyes suspicious and weary. "There is another way. Would you care to hear about it?"
**Chapter 13**

Eleven months later, we moved to an apartment. I wish I could say that we were a team from the moment I presented my proposal but the ensuing months contained much regret and indecision. She had said at the outset that she understood my need to travel lightly. She understood that future demands at work were likely to be increasingly troubling. That my dissent would bring us closer to financial reversals was obvious. She understood and empathized. She had agreed to proceed but letting go, actually going backwards as our families described it, was much more difficult.

"Maybe we can save money for the adoption by cutting some other expenses? Maybe we can keep the house. Do you really believe that they would fire you? They have not bothered you for a few months. We have already sold the cars and bought a less expensive one. It has not been so hard sharing a single car. Haven't I been good about that? The property taxes will not be that much better even if we find a house that is 50,000 less. Explain again to me that three point strategy." She repeated the questions every day and what bad behavior it provoked. The sacrifices were all mine. She would have her child. I asked only that she permit me an escape route. Saying no to orders that originated five levels above me could only lead to a final confrontation, one that could become public. It was certainly better to shed toys and trinkets on our terms.

Many times, I too had paused, felt that sickening cowardice in the pit of my stomach. I was not immune to the lure of houses, cars, investments and retirement dreams. She should not have mentioned college tuition. Such doubts could not stand in the way. She had always been the better person. She would never compromise her duty to get along. Our golden or at least bronze handcuffs had to come off.

"I must be able to say no. I have to know that I can walk away. I have to know that we can get by on part-time work if they fire me." A patient, pleasant voice sometimes delivered the restatements of my strategy but most often I shouted and bullied her, my own confidence in the enterprise shaken each time she expressed her misgivings. "For the five-thousandth time, it is a three point strategy. We sell the house ourselves and pocket the real estate commission. We use what we make on the sale to make a big down payment on a cheaper house. We take out a thirty-year mortgage to get the lowest monthly payment. We should cut our housing costs by about $1500 per month. I doubt you are going to want to work full time once you have a baby. You have hinted as much. Moving over the county line will also help. Our property taxes will fall by half."

"Of course I want to stay home. Do you think I waited this long just to have some stranger spend all day with my child? You act as if I am undecided about this. How could you even think that I would do that?"

"And how in the hell are we were going to keep paying for that house and those cars if you quit and I'm between jobs or working part-time? Don't forget all those in vitro tabs and student loans. I do not want to be miserable, trapped and hating myself for telling lies to my patients. I would be a nasty, angry son of a bitch, but at least we would have 3500 square feet, four bedrooms and two and a half baths. Isn't that what you dream about?"

Finding a house in our preferred price range and on my terms added to the stress. I had certainly taken advantage of the situation. She would have her baby but I had some requests of my own. Simplifying and building down for the sake of my crumbling industry would not be enough. I had compromised on the location of our first two houses. Her predictions of unbearable sorrow had won me over, but this time I had the advantage. She was to become a country girl, the wife of a gentleman farmer.

The complications that a Chinese adoptee might encounter in the countryside were unimportant. I remained bewitched by images of long runs in the woods, starry nights on the porch and minuscule property taxes beyond the reach of the political machine. I had proposed my terms like a CEO angling for a hostile takeover. That I should choose how we would adopt would be the thorniest of my demands.

"I have actually been reading some of the stuff you threw on my dresser. There were very scary stories about all the birth defects and alcoholism in Eastern Europe and the problems in those orphanages. The open adoption stuff is out. That is non-negotiable. If you insist on that, we are done. I do not want the kid clamoring to go live with her younger, hipper, nicer _real_ parents when she is fourteen and pissed off at us for some reason or another. I do not want some idiot who just turned thirty to turn up on our doorstep. She gives up the kid to avoid missing spring break and years later, wants to fill the hole in her gut. The kid will become all confused and clinical wondering why this healthy, un-impoverished person gave her up in the first place."

"It is for the best that some people give their babies up. What if the mother is only fifteen?"

"I understand but the situation I am talking about is not unusual or so I have read. The important thing to me is that she knows only us as her parents. That is why China seems like the best choice. It seems, although I guess we can never be sure coming from the Chinese, that the some of the orphanages are somewhat caring.

There is the remotest possibility that we could someday open the front door and hear, "How you go? Hey, New York Yankees, Niagara Falls, Where's my cousin? Where's my room."

"I have also been thinking about China, and the future for a little girl who grows up in one of those orphanages. She would have a family and she would be free."

I did not mind that she spoke like a schoolteacher. She had earned the right to press her advantage. A touch of condescension was a fair response to the indignities she had endured. "China is the best choice. She will know only you as her daddy and me as her mommy. I know we will be happy. I know you may not believe this but you are going to be wonderful father."

"I have no idea how I will react to this deal. How can you be so sure?"

"I just know."

"I think you are already so in love with this mystery baby. "We sounded like general managers negotiating a late season, multi-player trade."

Since my surrender, she had appeared at moments to look several years younger. Once in love, always in love a flirtatious elderly woman had once said while reading my palm over a display case in her jewelry store. She was right. Some bonds were stronger than a million injections, sample cups and tirades.

"You do realize that it will be easy enough in the not too distant future for these Chinese kids to find their biological parents and vice versa?"

She threw up her hands. "I can't wait to hear this. You would have to go and cook up a theory about the one in a million possibilities that could screw this up. Let me have it."

"It's quite simple especially now with computers and the internet. In ten years or so some enterprising chap in Shanghai will interface with an ambitious fellow here. There will be by that time tens of thousands of Chinese kids in this country. The entrepreneurs will advertise in China for parents who abandoned their children. Ads in America and elsewhere will target adoptive children who want to find their biological __ parents. The parents and the children will send a lock of hair to a lab in their respective countries. Computers will make the match and receptionists will make appointments. It all depends on whether or not both parties agree to join the database but I have no doubt that enough will be interested to make it work. How I love technology."

She feigned a scowl and shook her fist. "I want to slug you. Only you would think of that at a time like this." She fell onto my lap, her arms around my neck. "But you said yes and I know you won't back out. Even your goofy hair lock, computer match theories cannot rain on my parade. This will be good. You will be happy about this."

She had promised that a smaller house would not disappoint her. I had agreed to adopt. What more could she want? I knew her and I knew better. My task was a daunting one. Find a less expensive house but one not so modest as to incite a mutiny. I was for the moment her golden boy but I knew that the glow would fade. I was determined to press my advantage and find a place in the country but I knew there were limits to what she would endure.

My plan was to find a house in less than a month, two at the most. Funds from a line of credit would cover the down payment. I anticipated a mob of prospective buyers in a frenzied bidding war for the privilege of buying our current house. Our take from the sale of the white elephant would reimburse the line of credit. This would happen without a hitch and without the services of a real estate agent. How hard could it be to sell a house? Why should we give someone thousands of dollars just to walk strangers through our house?

Weeknights we rushed home from work to clean for the occasional, sudden tour. From Friday evening to Sunday night, I searched the adjacent counties for that little farm from heaven. My Iowa upbringing had led me to believe that all farming regions were tidy fabrics of rolling color and meticulous farmhouses. That Iowa was somehow unique or at least not typical of all rural regions came as a crushing shock. Some properties lived up to my boyhood notions but none was within the price range of a couple looking to build down in the face of career setbacks, infertility bills, student loans and foreign adoption fees. My goal was a small house, perhaps a mail order bungalow, on at least 5 to 10 acres, lovingly preserved by a friendly, elderly couple of hard working immigrant stock. I was prepared to work at it. I would smooth the edges. The reduced property taxes would provide enough money for major renovations. I would certainly find at least one place like that.

I drove thousands of miles, searched property titles in county courthouses and lived on the internet. I knew virtually every road, even the unpaved side lanes, across three counties. My beautiful Iowa was back in Iowa. Ramshackle trailers far outnumbered orderly farmhouses and fields of trash, sometimes acres of trash were more common than amber waves of grain. I often found myself on desolate dirt roads, some absent from the most detailed county surveys, amidst immense squalor crafted by hands wealthy enough to own fifty acres or more within 30 miles of one of America's most livable cities. On those narrow paths, dark inside neglected hills I would sometimes suffer sudden attacks of foreboding that sent me speeding for the comfort of bigger skies and lighter air.

My search area had once contained neat and sturdy farmhouses. Several Realtors assured me that my plans had only recently become obsolete. How could there be so much land and so few houses? What had become of all the homes, barns and outbuildings? I understood that I was only one of thousands fleeing the city and county. It did not take a genius to see that the machine was not likely to change within my lifetime. Everyone had figured it out and many were searching. I expected competition from others looking to escape the charms of big city, big county schools and governments.

We were fools. The politicians in the city had purchased large tracts of farmland in the adjacent counties. They bulldozed the farmhouses and offered the already bald fields to developers. They increased taxes and regulations that drove people from the city into the waiting arms of the countryside, waiting arms that increased the land values for those same politicos. They had us coming and going. The king was behind us, the king was in front of us.

I had almost given up when I drove by a lawn sign that was barely visible from the road. Tired and cranky after five hours of driving, I parked and walked to the front of the property, certain that the dense screen of foliage concealed a hideous eyesore. The lane that led from the sign to the woods revealed tall hemlock trees that bent from each side to form a solid tube of green. Dappled shards glowed from the tips of tree branches and filled the tube with warm light. I told myself to take a breath. It occurred to me that at least one nasty dog might be watching. A smart man would have jogged back to the car and driven toward the house but I kept on walking. It did not seem possible that such a wondrous lane could end in disappointment.

I walked 300 feet before the tube opened onto a vast lawn carved inside a forest of sixty-foot pines. It was as if I had emerged from a tunnel onto the field at Yankee Stadium. The house, which sat on about four acres, was neither beautiful nor shabby. I knew immediately that it would do. I walked directly to the front steps and climbed onto the wrap around porch. I knocked until I was sure that no one was home then risked a look inside the living room window. A massive hearth of fieldstones and dark wood floors, the planks at least six inches wide were proof that the house was not a recent imitation of a colonial farmhouse. I moved to the dining room window. Pocket doors, stained glass and leaded glass told me that I was probably looking at something far outside our price range. No longer wary of dogs, shotguns or embarrassment, I hopped through the bushes along the driveway and chinned onto a windowsill. Another stone fireplace, an older but smart kitchen and a panoramic view through a window wall left no doubt that someone cared about the place. I skulked back to the car and scrawled the phone number and name from the realtor's sign. Perhaps she might have something a bit less upscale.
**Chapter 14**

Two weeks passed before I again thought about the house on Big Elk Road. It was such a perfect name for a house in the country. The top of my dresser had become an incomprehensible heap. Fear of yet another important document turning up months after the expiration date had led the wife to lobby for a clean up. I moped through the task after dinner one Thursday night until the scrap of paper containing the realtor's phone number fell from a map onto the floor. I did not recognize it and placed it atop the refuse pile. It caught my eye just as I reached the trashcan beside the garage.

I stopped on my way back to the bedroom. I knew the call would be a waste of time but wasting time would keep me away from the dresser for at least a few minutes. The Realtor picked up her phone after the first ring.

"I didn't expect anyone at this hour. Is this the answering service? I was calling to leave a message for Jane Orly."

"This is Jane Orly. What can I do for you?"

"Do you always answer your own phone?"

"Not always, but the secretaries are gone. And to whom am I speaking?"

"I was just wondering about the price of one of your properties. I drove past the sign a couple weeks back. It was on a dirt lane off Big Elk road. I don't know the address but it was a white, colonial farmhouse."

"The James place is a wonderful property. It is still available. Let me get my PDA and I'll find the price and any other specs you need." Her voice was that rare, alluring blend of femininity and competence. "Sorry for making you wait. It's a 102 year old farm house: 2 stone fireplaces, four and one half acres, 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths and they are asking-"

"Say that again. I think I caught some static just as you said the price."

"There is an additional acre available along the private road leading back to the main property." She repeated the prices.

"I thought that's what you said. What's wrong with it?"

She chuckled. I could hear papers shuffle, zippers open and close. "I know the place well. There is nothing wrong with it. The sellers are building a new house further north. It's close to completion. They are anxious to sell. The farmhouse is about 60 to 70% renovated. It is sound from a structural standpoint but there are some incomplete floors and ceilings. The septic and well not new but a serious buyer would have to initiate tests of those systems. I think the sellers would be flexible on price if the mechanicals require work. There is only a shell of a garage. It is rather unsafe and should be demolished. There is no driveway but I would not want to disturb the feel of that lane. Did you notice the hemlocks and the red clay surface?"

"I noticed the trees. You are certainly disclosing some not so attractive features of a property you are trying to sell?"

She laughed again. "That's the way I do business. It is better for me and for you if the facts are on the table. You wanted to know how the buyers arrived at their price. You or anyone else is not going to be interested if you think the price does not make sense. You assumed that there was some hidden, horrible issue. It is a great opportunity for someone to come in and finish the work. Why don't you have a look? It will come down to price plus the costs for renovation. Bring a contractor if you like then run the numbers. That is the only way you will convince yourself that the final costs will come within your budget. That is the case for any older property. I assume, since you are interested in this property, that you are not limiting yourself to homes in move in condition."

Fate had intervened. This house had waited to be ours. It had arrived just in time to complete all our plans. I dreamed of a little Chinese girl skipping with her Labrador retriever across fields of wild flowers, family hikes and spiritual runs along leafy trails. I was absolutely and hopelessly smitten. I imprudently agreed to meet her the following morning.

The drive north was not a pleasant one. Our workdays had been trying, hers in particular and the anticipation of finally finding a house, a dream house no less, had left me high strung and flinty. The commute was more competitive than usual owing to poorly timed construction projects. Pulses of heavy rain jerked traffic to a halt several times before we managed to escape the county.

"How long is this going to take? I have work to do at home. Where did you say this piece of crap is?"

"It is not a piece of crap. I told you I have already seen it and it is definitely not a piece of crap. It needs very little work. The sellers have already done most of the heavy lifting."

She did not bother to look away from the window. Her fingers drew ringlets in her hair. "Then why is the price so low?"

"I told you I talked to the realtor at some length. She was very candid. What she said made perfect sense."

"Listen to yourself. You are shilling for the realtor, for the sellers. I think you've been driving around looking for houses so long that you may be going a little loopy."

"Why don't I just call and cancel the damn appointment? Hand me the phone. You are so damn negative. I sure as hell don't want you screwing this up."

She snatched the phone from the dashboard and dropped it into her briefcase. "Just settle down and watch where you're going." A green minivan cut in front of us then continued into the passing lane.

"Control your temper. We don't need another assault and battery on the highway."

"I nearly died that day. I did what I had to do. What a fool I was to confide in you? You are without doubt the most selfish individual in this world."

"Why is it so selfish to want to keep my house? You can't expect me to jump for joy about moving to some broken down Hootersville."

"You are perfect. You are your own best illustration. You constantly admit how selfish you are."

"What does that mean? I am merely saying that I don't understand why we have to move."

"Have you gone totally deaf and daft? How many times do I have to go over this? I have agreed to everything you have asked: the tests, the Dr. Frankenstein egg experiments and now the adoption. We agree that you should cut back on work as much as possible. All I ask, which is nothing compared to all that, is that we simplify a little to give us some wiggle room to pay for everything, especially if I have to change my job or career. And I will crash this car if you ask me to again explain the three point plan."

My sense of martyrdom was at an all time high. I began to doubt my first impressions of the property. Perhaps there was something wrong with the place. Loopy was not the word I would have used but there was no denying that the enterprise had worn me down. I felt so tired. Only hours earlier I had learned after many anxious weeks that I had not failed to diagnose a deadly ocular tumor.

Of course, it was too good to be true. An authentic find would have been gone before I had called the realtor. I had raised expectations far too high. The ride home would be long enough. Extended combat could wait until we were outside the car. I took her hand. "Let's just take a look. You are probably right that this is a pig in a poke. We will stay for five or ten minutes and be home by six for dinner."

"What did you say?" Her voice was a lazy drawl, as if she had just stepped from a warm bath. She tilted her face to the window to catch the sunlight, a smile growing beneath a web of shadows. "Did you say something?" She still had not turned toward me.

"I was just going to say that these are the hemlocks I was telling you about."

"This is beautiful. Stop the car. Let's just sit here a minute. The house will be a pig in the poke but this little lane."

We sat hand in hand for almost ten minutes, she turning now and then to smile.

The owner had been waiting on the front porch. "Come on in for a cup of coffee." He was at her window before we had time to answer.

"He just could not stand the fact that I was relaxing in this God forsaken Hootersville." He smiled and beckoned us to follow.

I squeezed her hand and rubbed her forearm. "Let's get this crap over with. I promised I would be a good wife and take a look and look I shall.

I held her inside the car until the owner was out of earshot. "What is with you? It's one thing to resist living in the country but you are acting like a damn snob. You might as well be making fun of our relatives. You might as well make fun of us. Do you think that insulting this guy and embarrassing me will make me give in? I am changing my life for you and I'm asking you to meet me 10 % of the way and you can only react like a petulant child." I was proud to have maintained a civil tone. She pulled away, jumped from the car and slammed the door. After a few strides, she pivoted, retraced her steps and poked her head inside the open window. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Are you coming?" I could not help but laugh at her fake smile.

"Is everything alright out there?"

"Just fine, Sir. My husband and I are just polishing our negotiating strategy."

The rear of the house was entirely of glass except for a floor to ceiling fireplace of rough granite. Beyond the glass stretched 3 acres of flat lawn bordered by a forest of pines that extended beyond the horizon. Every other room needed work. Tacky, do it yourself projects were everywhere. Victorian furniture clashed with rustic finishes. Partial repairs showed through missing wall panels and open ceilings. The garage was too fragile to enter. I suppressed a strong urge to push it over in one great rush. Despite the many defects, I had lost my heart the moment I had gazed through those rear windows. I was sure that my face betrayed nothing but nothing escaped her antennae.

While the owner secured the garage doors, she risked a whisper. "It's not as bad as I imagined." My mind began to race. The property taxes were less than nine hundred dollars per year. Plenty would be available for private tuition if she decided against home schooling. The surrounding roads were not flat but winter driving would not be much more challenging. Negotiations for the acre bordering the hemlock trees would be crucial. I could not expect her to vote for expensive renovations if someone could build a shack in our side yard. We were still holding hands and smiling at one another when the owner came to find us.

"So what do you love birds think? Is it something that might interest you?"

"Where is the realtor who is handling the sale, the woman who set up this showing?" She walked toward him as she spoke.

"I let that outfit go yesterday, didn't like their style. From here on out, it's strictly for sale by owner. You can deal directly with me."

"I see. I noticed the sign on the parcel bordering the hemlocks. Is that included in the asking price?"

"I've decided to sell that acre separately. It's the house and 3.5 acres for the price I mentioned and twenty thousand for the additional acre."

She whistled through her teeth and rolled her eyes.

"Do you think that's high, Miss?"

"You bet it's high. We are thirty miles from town, the house needs extensive work, the garage is about to fall into a hole and you needed a new septic tank. There is no way any mother is going to let her kids sleep above a basement that contains an oil tank the size of a battle ship. That kerosene tank must move to the yard. The duct work will probably have to be completely redone, most of the rooms are only half finished and that is only for starters." He scratched his pate and trotted to answer the phone. She turned to me and laughed without making a sound. "You didn't think I was going to come all the way out here without at least taking a glance at those papers on your dresser? Quiet now. He's coming."

I closed my mouth and shook his hand. I could not wait to get on the road to find out what she would say next. "Well anyway, thanks for letting us take a look. It's a nice area and I'm sure that a handy fellow or someone with unlimited cash will snap this up." I regretted the last crack about the money.

My plan was to wait her out but five minutes of silence was more than I could handle. "You surprised me back there. You know the research and you seemed more than just a little interested. I know it is a little isolated but there are new houses going up a few hundred yards down the road. That means kids and probably more folks like us, commuters looking for a little piece of the country and we have talked about money being available for private school or cutting back on work for home schooling but there is always the chance that the elementary schools could be Ok and it really is a beautiful piece of property. We would of course have to find out who owns the bordering lots and what they have planned. You are certainly on top of the potential projects. I'm only talking now. It certainly does need a lot of work. We have looked at so many things and all of them so very bad. You really have been great about the looking, especially with all the paper work for the adoption falling on your shoulders. Have I thanked you for that? Thank you. I really mean it. Thank you."

"Enough. I am totally against this. We need to be in a neighborhood but - "

"Didn't you see the new houses off to the south?"

"Can I please finish? You have worn me down. We have spent nearly a year looking for something reasonable in the unreasonable price range you have fixed in your mind. I am tired of the searching and the arguing. I realize now that I am not going to change your mind and I have always appreciated that you finally agreed to adopt. You were right that I should meet you half way. I just hoped that seeing all these horrible places would bring you to your senses. A normal human being would have realized nine months ago that you could not get what you want for your price, at least not close enough to the city for a reasonable commute. Make no mistake. It is very bad, just much better than rest of your hellholes. Make the deal. Find a great house inspector and then I will sign on the bottom line. I have only one condition. We must get that lot beside the road. I think we can agree that it would be foolish to pour money into the place only to have someone build an eyesore right beside the entrance to our property."

"Our monthly payment will go down by more than a thousand dollars even if we do add the second parcel. Interest rates are still falling. The low property taxes will free up hundreds each month for remodeling. We'll work slowly so we won't put ourselves in a bind once you start maternity leave."

"You can stop pitching. I said yes. Make a good deal with Mr. Haney or Eb. I am not going to back out. I know when I am beaten. You war of attrition is won. I was going to suggest that you call him when we get home but you look so excited that I am afraid that you will end up offering more than full price. Give yourself a few hours to settle down. Offer him ninety percent of what he wants and he will jump at it."

I pulled onto the shoulder, parked and peppered her face with kisses.

She had orchestrated our time together like a courtesan. I vowed many times to talk only about her but invariably found myself divulging the most personal information without any recollection of how I had been induced to begin. I hungered to know anything about her. How could I not imagine the worst possible scenarios? Was she hiding something quite terrible? There could be no other explanation. I had tired of outdoor living. During her long and unpredictable absences, I spent most of time in search of shelter. I was fast losing my anonymity. Fresh schemes dwindled. I would soon be the resident vagrant. There did not seem to be any others.

I slept last night in the vestibule of the post office. I had forgotten that I had slept there just 2 weeks earlier. How could I have not recalled that comfortable armchair? I awoke as I had planned with a pile of envelopes, each bearing a false address, neatly piled on my lap.

"Must be some important letters?" I recognized him as the same guard who had gently jostled me that first morning after.

"Some bills due and some work stuff. You know how it is."

"I surely do, young Fella. Money problems and problems in general always seem to be there."

I slid my palm over the corners of the envelopes. The fake stamps I had drawn did not look so authentic in the morning light.

"Let me take those for you." He reached for the stack. "Go on over there and get some of that hot coffee behind the counter. I made it about 15 minutes ago. You were really sawing logs, louder in fact than this old perker. These things are still the best way to do it, at least in my opinion and I've been drinking coffee going on fifty years."

I tried to set the envelopes under the chair but he was too quick. Before I knew it, he was walking toward the outbound slot, my stack of felonious envelopes in hand. He shuffled the stack like a deck of cards, glanced at the fictitious addresses then looked in my direction. I measured the distance to the exit. Our eyes met. He smiled and walked away from the door. "There's also some fresh doughnuts back there by the coffee. Just leave me one of those crullers."

The coffee was thick with a touch of vanilla. We talked about football for a good half hour. He divulged the he had recently begun treatment for diabetes. His wife would skin him alive if she knew he ate doughnuts. He never ate more than two but he bought a dozen almost every morning. The coupon deals in the newspaper were too good to pass up. He did not violate his self-imposed limit that morning. At his request, I tossed the empty box into the dumpster on my way around the building.

Near noon, I met her at the football field in the park. She had left a note containing the time and place of the meeting inside my bivy the day before. She materialized from behind a tall hedge. The realization was as sudden and permanent as it had been with my wife. Sitting arm in arm in a dark theater, I had kissed her hair and known. I needed nothing more than her voice on the telephone, her hair falling across her eyes or the way she skipped beside me in a crowd. Any detail was enough to make me see and feel only her.

"You look like you are in some kind of a daze?" The smile was knowing and affectionate.

"You look unfairly pretty today."

She slid beside me, threw both arms around my neck and kissed me. "And you, Mr. Woodsman, don't look so bad yourself." We sat for a long while just leaning against one another. I wanted to tell her what I felt but was also determined to avoid another goofy monologue. I lived nowhere and was incapable of doing anything meaningful or useful. Catastrophe was inevitable and I did not care. Perhaps I was becoming one of those people who could love and lose but still go on. I had almost completed the trick in my previous incarnation.

The junior varsity took the field for a light workout. Her observations surprised and impressed me. She chose to holler her criticisms to the coaches but no admonition from the sideline could have drawn my attention away from her. The team jogged to the far end of the stadium to practice goal line defenses. The coaches out of earshot, she turned her attention to me.

"What about you?" She pushed against my chest as she spoke.

"What about me indeed." She leaned toward me until our foreheads touched. I allowed her to push me backwards a few inches.

"You have an odd look in your eyes, Sir. I get the impression you want something from me, that maybe you would like to tell me something. Perhaps there is something you would like to take from me." Had she not smiled I would have been afraid. I lifted her hand from my chest and kissed it. She pushed me onto my back and hovered over me, her eyes sad and searching.

"Don't you know this is a school? Why don't you get a room? Now get out of here before I call the cops."

She did not look to see who commanded us. She took my hand and led me through the hedge, far into the woods.
**Chapter 15**

Two days had passed since we had toured the farmhouse. I could not bring myself to call and make an offer. It was not a matter of anxiety or indecision. Procrastination had become pleasurable. Each passing hour brought a growing sense of confidence and self-control. I would propose the deal, mold the deal and close the deal. He would come to me on my terms.

"Are you trying to drive me nuts?"

I looked up from my newspaper as slowly as I could. "Did you say pass the nuts? I did not see you put a bowl of nuts on the table?" I made a show of examining the table.

"Have you changed your mind? That cannot be true. This search has been your obsession. You called him. You made an oral agreement without even asking my opinion."

"You told me to go make the deal. I'm sorry if I took that to mean that I should go make the deal."

"I said it but I expected that we would agree on the final price. When have we ever made a big decision or a major purchase without talking it over?"

"Will you slow down? I have not called. You had better choose your words more carefully. Anyone would have assumed that you were finished with these negotiations. Distaste has been the most positive attitude you have shown toward this endeavor."

She stomped into the kitchen and returned with the telephone. "This is like waiting on death row. Go to it."

"Is this like instructing your attorney to stop the appeals so you can get on with your execution?"

"You're not so dense for someone with such an oversized melon."

I put the phone on the table and reached for the applesauce but she pulled the bowl out of reach and slapped my hand. "Quit stalling and I don't want to hear any crap about a letdown, about how the hunt is more satisfying than the kill. It is time to put it to rest.

"I fully intend to call. Would you mind if I first ate just a little something? I am so hungry from the hill run I did after work."

The bowl of applesauce slid across the table. I caught it just before it went airborne. I managed to down four spoonfuls while dialing. That he answered on the first ring was not as significant as I hoped.

"This is Jones,"

"Mr. Jones, is this a bad time? Are you folks eating dinner?"

"We eat early around here. It gets dark a little earlier with all the big, beautiful trees and no streetlights or city lights to drown out the stars and moonlight. It is surely very pretty around here."

I covered the phone and whispered. "He's pitching like it's the seventh game of the World Series." We had the upper hand. The long wait, the exhausting search had been necessary. This house, this land had somehow been reserved for us. Perhaps it was recompense for the years of agony, just payment for finally surrendering to adoption. We were due for some good fortune. Maybe it was just time for probability to work in our favor but it was much more satisfying to imagine a mystical, romantic design.

"It must be difficult for you and your family to leave the place."

"You are right on that count, but my wife and I teach up at Willow Creek College. Our families are up there. Our parents are getting up in years and the thirty-mile commute north is rough in winter. They don't plow the roads going north like they do the roads toward downtown."

"I didn't know you and your wife are professors. What do you teach?"

"We teach Environmental Science, the both of us. The wife is the heavyweight in the family. She flies all over the world on the government dime. She was just in China last month for a conference. I believe that realtor mentioned something about you folks going to China sometime soon."

"We leave in about six to eight months to adopt a child, a little girl."

"That's a long time to wait."

"It is a long haul owing to the Chinese government and the red tape from our own government agencies. There is usually at least a year between the application and the adoption."

"Do have to go over there? They won't bring the baby to the states? I had a student who adopted from Korea and I think they got the baby at the airport in New York."

"China is different. We will be over there for about two weeks."

"Well that sounds like a very fine thing and this property would be a very fine place for a youngster to grow up, what with all the trees and fields. It's a damn bit of bad luck to be an orphan but she will be lucky to end up here."

"It's not such an unusual bit of bad luck for little girls in China to end up as orphans. There may be millions, at least hundreds of thousands. They are usually abandoned."

"I had no idea. Why do they want to go and abandon all those little girls?

She reached across the table and tugged my sleeve. "What the hell are you doing?" Her palms slapped the table, rising and falling in rhythm. "Easy, slow down." Each syllable escaped from her bared teeth as a muffled hiss. I covered the phone.

"Just stop. This guy is an idiot."

"Are you absolutely insane? You are trying to buy that idiot's house." I waved her off and turned my back.

"Mr. Jones, are you not familiar with China's One Child Policy?"

"Well I know that they have one hellish overpopulation problem over there. I went to a conference not too long ago about UN environmental policy and the speaker mentioned that the Chinese were way ahead of the Indians in taking positive steps toward managing the population dilemma. She said she admired them for what they were doing."

"What the UN refers to as managing a population problem is more akin to thinning a herd. It is under Chinese law a major felony to have more than one child. There has been testimony in our Congress by persons who have worked in that system that illegal, second children are sometimes surgically removed from the mother. Family members might be tortured to divulge the whereabouts of a pregnant woman. In China, the elderly depend on sons to take care of them. The killing of a first-born female is common. Girl babies are often abandoned outdoors and if they survive will live in an orphanage until young adulthood"

"They must have a terrible situation to resort to such serious methods.

"The other day I was packing books for the move. I came across an almanac of world facts. It was about 5 years old. I was shocked to discover that the population densities in Massachusetts and Connecticut are twice that of mainland China."

"But aren't most of the people in China crowded into a few urban areas?"

"As are the residents of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Hong Kong has forty times the population density of the mainland and they don't seem to have a need for the population control strategies the UN finds so admirable."

"I can see that you are very passionate about this adoption. She will be one lucky little girl. What can I tell you about the house?"

She had left the room long before Jonesy and I had left the subject, convinced no doubt that I had blown the deal and doomed her to an endless search for my rural nirvana. She had kept her bargain. She would believe that my recklessness released her. She would get her baby and she would decide where we would live. I could picture her face; hear each word of her arguments. She could not have been more wrong. Reckless enthusiasm had been leading me to a regrettable bargain. His callousness was a gift. An appropriate measure of disdain would work to my advantage.

"It needs quite a bit of work."

"I can't deny that some updating might be necessary but you must admit that much good remodeling is already there and you couldn't draw up the property any better."

"My wife is very, very reluctant to move so far from the city. The deal would have to be a good one and money is a little tight with the adoption and all."

"I have been married for 22 years. I hear what you're saying."

"It is 135 for the house and twenty for the acre and a half along the road?"

"That's right. One fifty-five will get you the house, the road, nearly five acres and the pole barn in back. Don't forget the barn is only seven years old."

"The garage will have to be rebuilt."

"The pole barn is bigger than a garage and the back road to the barn was covered with new gravel and crushed stone not more than a year ago. I have driven over that road in six inches of snow. It is a unique opportunity for a young family and someone such as yourself who is partial to the woods and the country. You must have come from this kind of country."

"Our house growing up was on the edge of a small town in Iowa. All we had to do was walk out the back door and we were in the fields and the woods. It went on forever. I was hoping to find something like that. This is very nice but I'm not thrilled that the acreage borders houses."

He forced a laugh, cleared his throat and I could hear him drumming on a table or some other hard surface. There was a long pause before he continued. A small part of me hoped to detect a note of anger, would not have been disappointed to hear the phone click. "You and your lovely wife will need to decide if this humble property is up to your standards. It's not much but I think we have done a good job with it."

"Let's do this. I will give you 140 for the entire property. That includes the lot beside the road."

"That is what I was hoping to get for the house."

"That is a little better than ninety percent of your asking price."

"There is another couple very interested in that side parcel. I am pretty sure that they will pay full price or at least very near to it."

"But you can unload everything now for almost your asking price. The house and main parcel are not nearly as attractive without the road and the extra acre. It would be hard to justify pouring a lot of money into the house with the risk that something unpredictable might end up on that road. How could anyone be sure that a separate owner would not cut all those beautiful trees? Without those trees that road would be just another gravel driveway."

"I made up my mind when I decided to sell that whoever bought that side parcel would have to sign something saying that they were going to build a nice house and that they would only touch those trees for trimming or maintenance. I already made that clear to the other couple. They said they are going to put a custom-built place on that parcel. They showed me the plans. One of those mcmansions must be at least 4000 square feet and they were more in love with that road and those trees than anyone who has come to look. They are city commuters like you, up here to live in the country. They almost fainted when I suggested that some folks might cut down those trees. There is very little doubt that those folks would increase the value of this house and in a big way."

"I will give you one fifty for the whole shooting match."

"I think I owe it to that other couple to talk to them before I say anything."

"Mr. Jones." I did not care that my voice had sharpened. "I have just offered you full price for the house and fifteen thousand for a twenty thousand dollar lot in an area where acreage is plentiful."

"Don't get me wrong. That is a reasonable offer. I just think that it would not be right to come so close with that other couple and not give them another chance."

"Are you telling me that you already accepted an offer from them?"

"Not exactly."

"What exactly do you mean? Have I been negotiating for something that you have already sold?"

"There is not anything in writing."

"But you verbally agreed to sell them the lot beside the road?

"They wouldn't sign anything."

"But you verbally agreed on price?"

"They said they had to check on some finances first."

"Mr. Jones, did you verbally agree or shake hands on it?

"Not exactly."

"Here's the deal; one fifty for everything. Talk to the other couple. My offer is good until 6 pm tomorrow. After six, I will assume that the lot is no longer for sale. The house is not attractive to us without the side parcel. Goodnight, Mr. Jones."

The joy of our time together in the woods was short lived. Ten days passed without a word from her. I fought an endless barrage of revolting thoughts. That she could be so cruel led me at rare moments to believe that I truly hated her. To think that something terrible might have happened to her made me ill. I had no way to find her and I knew no one who could help me. I stalked about the park and the town. People stepped aside to avoid me often clutching their children until I passed. I barked at strangers in a voice I did not recognize. No longer properly concerned about my anonymity or my personal hygiene, I spent most of each day loitering in a winter garden decorated with Christmas displays from around the world. I ate and drank from trashcans all over town, every comment and stare of onlookers a reason for a growling, cursing spectacle. My fist cocked and my knees atop his chest, I stopped just short of assaulting an Armenian Santa Claus who dared to question one of my boorish outbursts.

On the eleventh day, I awoke to find a package beside my bivy. My first impulse was to smash the thing and throw it into the creek. That she might be watching never crossed my mind. I slowly peeled away the wrapper. Glossy wood, tile and crystalline stone so improbably fused could have come only from her. She had hinted at an artistic inclination. Her happy observations about the older houses that ringed the park, her poetic appreciation for the materials and workmanship was entertainment I welcomed and encouraged. The way she glowed when the landscape reminded her of a favorite painting was in retrospect far beyond what one would have expected of a dilettante.

When the object was unwrapped, I again raised my fist to destroy it. Did she really believe that a consolation prize would absolve her? What was I to do with such a delicate thing? Did she expect me to buy a wagon and pull it along the highway? Obliterate it, scatter the pieces into the rushing creek and forget it. Send an unmistakable message.

She covered me with her warmth. I had neither heard nor seen her approach. I hated myself for knowing that I could not push her away. Another had once disarmed me and robbed me of a proper resolve. The need of her, the physical joy of her had overpowered me. I should have left but I stayed knowing all the while that the addiction was a dead end. My angry vows dissolved beneath this new power. Push this one away and zip the tent. Lock this one out and say all the things you wished you had said to that first love. Do now what you should have done then and take two victories for the price of one.

"Did you miss me?" She smiled to see that her whisper made me wince.

"Just a little. Have you had a good two weeks?" I managed to turn away.

She laughed. "It has not been two weeks. I missed you but some family matters kept me busy. I did come by about four days ago but you were evidently on the town. Quite a few empty beer bottles decorated the yard. Did you have a big old time?

"I have been taking it easy, thinking and planning."

"You don't say and what is it that you have been planning?" She rose to her knees. I pulled her back to me.

"I was thinking of what we might do the next time you came around." She tightened her arms around my neck and kissed the tip of my nose.

"That is what I was hoping you would say." She tilted her head and grinned. "Do you love me?"

"More than I should." She did not hide her surprise.

"That is an interesting answer. I must confess that I did expect you to say that. Perhaps absence does not always make the heart grow fonder."

"Maybe not fonder, but definitely clearer. Clearer is better for everyone in the long run. There is nothing wrong with loving as long as everything stays clear. I have to make sure things are as clear as possible."
**Chapter 16**

"Just look at those leaves? The foliage is so much further along up here. I don't know that I have ever seen that shade of red. You must be in your glory. It's a big day for you with bright sunshine, fall colors and the final walk through your dream spread."

"You seem more excited than I am. Who would have predicted as much six weeks ago? I cannot tell you how much it means to have you on board with this. Everything is going to work out. I promise. We have at least six months until we leave for China. I am going to spend every spare minute working on this place. You will not even recognize it by the time we get back with the baby. It is going to be a wonderful place to raise a kid. She will love the woods and fields. The extra money we will save on taxes will make it easy to cut back on work or pay school tuition if that becomes necessary."

"I was serious the other day when I said that I might want to home school her. I would even say that it is more likely than not that I will give it a try."

"It's your call. There is plenty of time to make that decision." I parked beneath the hemlocks and pulled her onto my lap. "Thank you for this."

"You are right. We are going to be happy here. This beautiful day is a send off or at least a good omen. I must admit that I am a little nervous about closing on this place before we have sold our house."

I parked well short of the house in order to enjoy the walk across the lawn. "Did Jonesy fax you the copy of that agreement about the side lot?" She had used her official lawyer voice.

"I told him he could give it to us today at the walk through."

"It would have been nice to look it over beforehand."

"It should not take long to proofread the document. He promised to use only the language you suggested. I did not give him more than three sentences. They are going to build a custom home. They will only trim the trees that border the lane. He said they were glad to sign it. This should be good for our property value. A two hundred and fifty thousand dollar house up here is like a four hundred thousand dollar house nearer the city. They even promised to take care of snow removal on the lane."

There began from the thicket behind us the sound of something large bounding in our direction. I grabbed a stick from the ground and pushed the wife behind me.

"Hello there. I was hoping to see you today." She had vaulted her corpulent form over the hedge like a champion steeple chaser. A final hop put her directly in front of me, her right hand extended. "I knew it had to be you. Jones told me how much you loved the access road. I'm Margie and this is obviously your lovely wife. We were so happy to get this property. It's not nearly as big as what you folks have but plenty big enough for our trailer. We plan to have it here, the trailer I mean, by the end of the month. I think Jones probably told you that we are building our own house. We should get started by next year. My husband and his brother will be doing all the work but I honestly don't know where they are going to find the time. It is just so exciting. And you folks will be moving in soon."

"The closing on the sale of our current house isn't scheduled for a couple months." I was traveling backward, her figure shrinking, her voice echoing inside the tunnel of green. She and the wife chatted for a few minutes but I did not hear a word. I mechanically shook hands, exchanged what I hoped were appropriate pleasantries and went to the porch to meet Jonesy.

During the walk through, I somehow convinced myself that a trailer sitting beside our house would have no negative impact on our property value. Was it not possible that our new neighbors were skilled members of the building trades? Without any formal training or experience, my father in law had built entire wings onto his house including brick fireplaces and elaborate window walls. Who was I to say that these folks were not as talented? I remembered the neighborhood where I had grown up where ragged tarps covered the muddy foundations of homes that never left the planning stage. It could not happen here. They had signed an agreement and we would hold them to it. The temporary trailer would hardly be visible from our house. It was best to slow down and take a breath. Everything would work out for the best.

We had been in the car for at least ten minutes when she finally spoke. "What do you think?"

"I like it more than ever. I noticed a few more things that need fixing but I think we have a gem, a real find."

"That is not what I am talking about. I cannot believe that you made it through that entire tour without saying anything. I know you had to be just bursting at the seams. I kept expecting you to pull me aside. Are you ill?"

"I think it went fine." I was convinced that I meant it.

"It went fine?" Her head in her hands, she rocked from the waist so that her face bounced off her knees. "What do you mean it went fine? They are going to put a trailer on the lot next to our house." She had adopted a clipped, military cadence, which for some bizarre reason made me think of Estelle Getty. "We are going to invest at least fifty thousand dollars in improvements and they might build a house all by themselves. I cannot wait to see who themselves turns out to be. What happened to the custom-built house? How could you have gotten us into this? Maybe we can still put a stop on the down payment. This is a disaster. Are you going to say something? How can you be so calm? We have made a down payment on a house that needs thousands of dollars of improvements just to become livable and it will probably be half as valuable after we have spent what is left of our savings.

Until that moment, I truly believed that I believed that nothing was wrong. How frightening to think of my own mind as a separate and devious entity. My forehead dropped against the steering wheel. I pounded my left fist on the dashboard. "I am going to kill that lying son of a bitch."

She slapped me hard across the back. "Get hold of yourself. You had better pay attention to the road. I swear you drove at least a quarter mile with your head down. Now settle yourself. Let's talk about this." She sat back, made herself small against the door and studied me. "Do you mean to tell me that you just now realized that something was not quite right? It did not dawn on you that a trailer, not a custom-built house was going to be the entrance to our yard. I know you heard what our new and special neighbor was saying. How did you get through that tour without screaming? I was ready to bust and this deal was never a plus for me. Maybe that's it. It is so important to you. You went into shock when she told us about the custom double wide."

It was becoming increasingly likely that I might have to stop the car. "I don't feel so well. Would you please just stop. I might have to pull over and puke."

She rubbed my belly, this time as if she meant to do some good. "You are really that bad off? You deluded yourself until it reached critical mass. Tell me the truth. Did you really just now understand that something was wrong?"

"It is not as if I did not understand what she said about the trailer. I just figured that we would somehow work it out. I kept telling myself not to go off half-cocked, look at it from all angles. I understood that they might totally screw up the road and the hemlocks. I was thinking that we could cut a road beside the pole barn to bypass the trailer. I admit now that we have to get out of this."

She was back against the door wearing her courtroom face. "Hold on a minute. I like what you said about an alternate road. I cannot imagine that someone as dishonest as Jonesy is going to give up our deposit without a fight. You were right to keep your cool. It just might work. That back road is level and seems to have more gravel than mud. We could probably cut in right near the barn. We need a new garage. Would not that pole barn be a usable garage for at least a few years?"

"Would you just stop it? It is over. I am calling him tonight and demanding a refund. He lied to us. The custom-built house is only a possibility of a maybe. We will have invested tens of thousands of dollars before we know whether that trailer will always be outside our dining room window. What about the road and the trees? I sit at work and imagine how the light will come through autumn leaves, icicles and snow. I think about friends and relatives parking on the road and walking to the front porch. The deal is nothing to me without that road and those trees. At least a dozen trees will have to come down before a double wide will fit on that lot. Can you tolerate port-a-potties in your side yard? Didn't you hear Jonesy ask how they planned to plumb the trailer?"

"Did he really say port-a-potty? I guess you were not the only one who went into shock. That is definitely it for me. I could handle cutting a new driveway into the pole barn. A bank of evergreens may have saved the view. The road and trees were not as a big deal to me. I suppose I was willing to do just about anything to avoid a new search for houses but I draw the line at port-a-potties outside my kitchen window. Call John as soon as we get home and ask him to write something on legal letterhead. It is unlikely that the rat will refund our down payment but we might get lucky. This is a disaster. We need money for China. The timing could not be worse. I swear I am never going to be a mother. God is against me. This is some kind of sign."

Great sobs lifted her from her seat. I parked on the side of the road and held her. "Things are not nearly so bad. We are going to China. We are not going to buy that house. I don't understand why you are so desperate. It seems like things are actually working out the way you wanted. The trailer saved you from moving out here."

"Everything is going my way? I wait years for you to agree to adopt and you treat it like a business deal. I spend all my time looking at broken down houses on broken down farms because you are afraid that you might be out of job. Wonderful, new viruses in China have delayed the adoption at least six months and now we are looking at a potentially expensive legal fight for our down payment. You talked me into selling our beautiful house and we now have no place to go."

"It's no big deal. We will get an apartment and store the furniture until we find another house."

It did not seem possible that her delicate frame could generate such dreadful sounds. I could not tell whether she was weeping or screaming. I covered my ears and steered with my knees.
**Chapter 17**

In less than a week, we had moved from our house, stored our furniture and moved into an apartment, the only one within thirty miles that would accept a Labrador retriever. Interviews, fingerprinting, background checks, home visits and piles of paper work filled the next six months, followed by new requests for HIV tests and more fingerprints. Reports of the new SARS virus caused several expectant mothers in our travel group to take to their beds for days at a time, their long-suffering hopes too fragile to endure another delay.

A week before departure we found a house within our budget. Sixty years old and long neglected by elderly sellers, it returned us to the suburbs and high property taxes. The downsizing was substantial. I could take solace in that. The house was not without charms. How could one not like stone, wood, plaster and terra cotta tile? It was a fair bargain. Together we would learn how to bring the old girl back to life. SARS delayed our departure by nearly three months. Relatives and friends argued that one of us should stay behind, an impossibility after we had stood for an hour in the living room of our apartment gaping at the little face in a grainy, black and white photo.

Throughout the long months of SARS, I was filled with fear that I was somehow constitutionally incapable of caring for a child. Jet lag fed that anxiety. Exhaustion multiplied misgivings. Glimpses of the arctic outside my window, a change of plane in Tokyo and a night in Shanghai barely caught my attention. How could such a horrid year have passed so quickly?

The group met in a hotel conference room the day after we arrived in Shanghai. I had never been so tired. I thanked God that we still had a day and a night to rest before the babies arrived. I was asleep before our guide had finished his introductory remarks. The wife sat rigid and tall, pen and paper at the ready, like a deranged stenographer.

"Attention please, there has been a change in plans. Gather your luggage and proceed to the bus outside the window. We can be in Hangzhou in three hours. Babies will be waiting."

The bus is quite old. I do not remember boarding. We bounce along the smooth and surprisingly modern highway as if on a rutted mountain road. We will crash unless I remain awake. I remind myself often that this is an irrational thought but fatigue wins out and I cling to consciousness until we arrive at our hotel in Hangzhou. Our guide stops by the room to announce that fatherhood will begin in two hours. I dive into bed. Ten minutes later, the crying wife shakes my shoulders.

"They're here. She's here. The babies are here. Get up. They have already called two couples. The babies are in a room down the hall."

"Fammy nummer tan." Our guide's voice is barely audible over the procession of weeping mommies and daddies streaming past our door. "Fammy nummer tan."

The wife looks like a statue in the Vatican, a saint in the ecstatic state. She does not hear our number called.

"I think I heard our number. Aren't we family number ten?"

She seizes my arm and buries her face into my shoulder. "You are still half asleep. He hasn't called us."

"Fammy nummer tan."

I stand in a room beside the elevators. All is chaos. Chinese women bark Chinese instructions to shocked Americans who nod in agreement, their eyes never leaving the child in the new mother's arms. The weeping here is quieter. I search the room for the tiny face in the picture tacked these many months to our refrigerator. Several times, I am sure I have found her only to see the child carried out of the room and down the hall.

"Fammy nummer tan, fammy nummer tan, fammy nummer." It seems now that twenty people are calling us from all directions. I cannot decide whether I am crying. I have no doubts about the wife.

"You baby seek. You baby seek." I recognize her. A young woman holds her at arms length before the wife. The Chinese instructions are emphatic and serious. A bottle of Mandarin herbs falls into my hand. At each sentence break, we look up from the tiny personage and nod in unison.

Our guide pulls us aside. "You understand? You baby very, very sick - pneumonia. You give baby this Chinese medicine four times a day. I come by your room after supper."

We sit on the bed. I do not remember how we came to be there. The tiny one sits propped against the wife's arm, staring at us, calm and inquisitive. She trills like a songbird and wiggles her fingers as if to say hold me, hold me. I imagine her lying on her back for hours and days, performing so that someone, anyone will stop and pick her up. Her papers tell us that she is nine months old but she cannot roll over and her arms cannot support her twelve pounds. Her hair is pale, dry straw, her eyes red rimmed and boggy. Coughs and wheezes erupt from deep inside her chest. We undress her like surgeons removing bandages of gauze. The ragged fabric crumbles in our hands like old bread. She yawns and closes her eyes. We suddenly realize that the crib we ordered has not arrived. We discuss the safest positions for a bed against a wall. She is asleep before we lay her down.

Until dawn, we take turns at her side. She seems to stop breathing for minutes at a time. My ear hovers near her nose, my eyes watch for her chest to rise and fall. She finally sputters and coughs, her breathing difficult and strange. "Is she alright? D you think she is all right? I wish we could get her to a doctor today. You don't think she will die?" The wife assumes full repeater mode, an insult my nerves cannot patiently absorb. Our fatigue is immense. I bark at her and ridicule her questions and I hate myself for it. We are afraid, tired and amazed. She announces the dawn like a hungry rooster. We feed her and change her diaper. She is awake for less than five minutes. No longer able to resist, we too fall asleep, our ears positioned inches from the delicate face.

I awaken to see her striding toward the creek, a tempo of long limbs and youthful colors. The tall grasses sway to the rhythm of her hips and a silver butterfly rides on her hand, its bright eyes studying her smile. It is sad for both of us that something so simple should give me so much pleasure. She bends to the creek, pushes her long hair behind one ear and fills a plastic container. Her loose clothing reveals only a sketch of her figure, but it is enough. The will to resist enters my mind but only briefly. She skips toward me, water spilling onto her toes. She giggles and falls on top of me. The air is already warm. The sky is grey and blue and near. She informs me that we will spend the entire day on the hill, talking, laughing and loving. I am to have no choice in the matter.

We fell into a comfortable routine. Still unable to adjust our bodies to Chinese clocks, we fell asleep at five PM and awakened every night near two in the morning. We huddled in the bathroom reading and drinking green tea until daybreak. The pneumonia had not improved but our terror had lessened and the wife did not mind that I left the hotel for a few short runs.

The air was thick with fog the first time I came within sight of West Lake. A squad of Red Army running in tight formation shadowed me for a few blocks before turning right as I turned left onto the causeway. I continued toward the center of the lake, my visibility limited to less than ten feet. I passed dark, massive shapes that did not move with the swells. I realized I was quite alone and the memory of the Red Army filled me with a longing for the freedom of home.

I turned around at the end of the causeway and paused to search the horizon for some of the sights mentioned in the guidebook. The sun appeared from behind me. I followed my shadow through the fog. Sunbeams singed the back of my neck and mist dropped like a curtain into the waves. The gray world gave way to willows and peonies. Walls of red lacquer rose from the lake, the color so intense that I averted my eyes. When I looked again, an ancient temple, multicolored in tall timbers, had materialized on an island of brilliant flower gardens. My pace quickened until I was nearly sprinting. I passed several pagodas, each perhaps a thousand years old. Several times more, I closed my eyes against a sudden explosion of color. At the east end of the lake rose a choppy hill capped by a stepped pagoda, at least thirty stories high. I ran faster still but felt no fatigue. Only seconds later, I was at the bottom of a great stone staircase. Above me, if I craned my neck to the point of discomfort, I could see the top of the pagoda through the trees. I bounded the steps three at a time until I popped onto the summit. All around the base of the temple, dozens of people were in the midst of their morning rituals. Some waved long swords while executing slow, dance-like moves while others practiced martial arts or tai chi exercises. A few, their movements no less intricate and strong, could have been a hundred years old. The silence in the midst of so much activity was somewhat frightening. There was reverence in every face. Had I blundered into a place of worship? I had never felt so embarrassed.

I had drifted somehow into the center of the square. I moved backwards with mincing steps, my rubber soles squeaking loudly against the damp stone slabs. My head bobbed, an involuntary gesture meant to approximate a bow. Some paused to watch me. Some dropped their hands in an apparent expression of disgust. A few smiled. I skipped down the staircase like a drum major, past tired faces and questioning eyes.

I returned to the room to find the wife dressed and excited. "Take a shower, quickly please. It's time we took this little urchin out and about." She seated the baby in the stroller. "I mean it. You stink. Get into the shower. I'm dying to see some of the stuff you have seen on your runs."

I waited for her to look up again. I wanted to be sure that my eyes were clear, that the lingering intoxication of my visit to the pagoda was not distorting my senses. "Why are you standing there, staring like that? Honey, are you ill." She stood on her toes to look into my eyes. "Can I get you some water? Come sit down in this comfy chair. We don't have to go anywhere if you are not feeling well. I can meet the other moms in the playroom down the hall." Moms was framed by a momentary grin. I let her lead me by the hand to a chair. "You just sit there and I'll get some water." She continued to jabber while she worked. "It's the jet lag. You think you feel OK after a few days but a twelve-hour time difference has to affect every aspect of your biorhythms. Maybe you should cool it with the running for a few days or at least until we are able to go to sleep on their time. You probably should be eating more. Everyone expects to lose a little weight but a runner should be particularly careful. What is it? You are staring like a zombie." She stopped in the middle of the room, a glass of water in one hand, two aspirin in the other.

I studied the beautiful curves of her face. The careworn lines of ten sad years had disappeared. I was startled by the supernatural intensity of her eyes, so brilliant was the green that surrounded the warm, black centers and the color of her hair was as it had been when we were teenagers. She moved toward me, clearly taller, her shoulders straight and loose. She pulled my chin downward and lifted the glass to my lips. "Isn't that just a little better?" I lifted my head like a dog each time she combed her fingers through my hair.

"You are so beautiful. I don't know that you have ever looked more beautiful."

"You are sweet. I know I must look like a hag, what with so little sleep." She was across the room before I could answer. "Do you feel like going out? I thought we might go over to the lake and have some tea or a beer at one of those outdoor cafes or we could go some place in the city if you like. You had better get ready. The baby falls asleep at two every day and who knows how long this weather will hold."

"I'm fine. Just give me a few minutes."

The baby was in her arms. "Meet us in the playroom. I have everything we need in this bag. Just bring yourself and without that zombie face, if you please." She paused in the doorway to look over her shoulder. "I love you." I had forgotten that her voice could sound like that.

"And I love you. I love both of you." When the door closed, I turned to face the lake outside the window. "It's a miracle, a damn miracle." A strong urge to thank someone came over me but I stood in silence until the feeling passed then walked to the shower.

A sea of ballroom dancers, tai chi battalions and sword players stretched from the door of the hotel to the shores of the lake. For a few minutes, we debated the propriety of taking a sick child outdoors. She ended the discussion by joining the ballroom dancers, gliding through line after line, oblivious to the mostly smiling eyes that followed her and the baby in her arms.

We towed a small crowd by the time we reached the causeway. Old women fussed with the baby's clothes until not an inch of flesh was exposed. The wife enjoyed long conversations with her entourage, none of whom spoke English. Encouraged by an audience of grinning faces and nodding heads, she attempted to translate by speaking louder and slower. Moving eastward, we passed two ornate temples surrounded by groves of exotic trees. Tiny islands dotted the lake, their mature and intricate gardens, evidence of generations perhaps centuries of consistent care. Newborn color, against a spring green background, was all around us. I hailed a cab and ushered the family inside.

We squeezed into the back seat and searched for safety belts. The driver turned to scold us. "No belt." He changed lanes without looking at the road. I grasped his temples and rotated his eyes forward.

"Watch the road." I tapped the windshield with my knuckles. "Watch cars." He laughed and pointed to his eyes, both hands off the steering wheel.

"What kind of cab is this? How old is this thing?" Hunched and pale, she clutched the daughter inside her jacket. "Holy Jesus, look at this traffic. Are there any lanes?" We passed under a red light without pausing. "Wasn't that light red? We are going to die before we have had her a week."

"Calm down. Look at him. He obviously knows what he is doing." I braced my leg between her and the front seat. A spring popped through the frayed leather and lacerated my sleeve.

"This is the smallest cab I have ever seen. It must be a Yugo."

"Looks like an old Honda Civic. It must be at least twenty-five years old. It fits the scenery. Doesn't it remind you of pictures of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War? I feel like I'm ten years old watching the evening news."

"I am sure that under different circumstances I would find it all extremely fascinating but right now all I care about is getting this little one onto safe ground." She closed her eyes, tightened her arms around the child and pressed her face to a small patch of sickly hair.
**Chapter 18**

I latched the toolbox then slid the baby across the basement floor. The ten-foot separation would allow just enough time to drive two more nails. "Daddy wants the little baby to stay right there." The routine had become a game. She pretended for a few seconds to obey my command before crawling back to me. I finished the second nail long before she wrapped her arms around my legs. She laughed and lifted her safety goggles so that I could kiss her forehead. "I am never going to get this broken down old house in order. I think I must again ban you from job site. I love having you around but I'm going to have to break out the heavy machinery in a few minutes."

The wife appeared and collected her. "Is she getting in your way?"

"I don't mind. It's just that I am going to try out this concrete grinder. It won't be safe for her to be around."

"What concrete grinder?"

"It's actually a grinder and a saw. I rented it last night. You should look it over. It's beside the dryer. You just push it like a lawnmower and these rotating diamond blades on the bottom grind away the concrete. I will just keep grinding until this black glue from the old linoleum is gone then I'll use this saw blade on the side to cut lines in the floor. A few coats of Cherokee red paint and this old basement floor will look something like Frank Lloyd Wright's red tile. Add a ceiling of wide, pine planks and the mildewed paneling and orange shag carpet will be just a bad dream. Such a majestic stone fireplace deserves a decent supporting cast."

"Is that thing safe? Does something cover that blade? My God, look at the size of it."

"This is the entire apparatus."

"Have you ever used one before?"

"Are you joking? Until yesterday, I had never used a circular handsaw. You know all this home improvement stuff is new to me. I have to remind you one more time that while we may save money you may find yourself wishing that we had hired professionals for most of this work. It is going to take me three times as long and I will probably spoil a trainload of materials in the process."

"Just be careful and call my father if you get confused." She placed the child on the floor. "Are you going to use the war wagon right away or can I leave her while I take this laundry upstairs?"

"You can leave her. There is at least a half hour of prep work to be done and I want to read the instruction manual again before I start hacking the floor."

I took a beer from the fridge and sat on the steps, the young foreman on my hip. I told myself that the alcohol would be out of my system before I fired up the machine. Rectangular rainbows, shaped by glass block windows at opposite ends of the basement, filled the air with musty glitter. Her black hair, now long and healthy, glowed like fine silk. She squeezed my nose and tugged my eyebrows. How had this little person come to be in my house? How had she so quickly become part of me? It was easy to imagine a grand design, a miracle even. The match was a perfect one. She was meant for us. The suffering had been necessary. Success in the past would have kept us from her, from this wonderful now. I thought of those who had brought her into the world. Had the cruelty of their bondage forced them to give her up? I could hardly imagine their grief. I tried with all my strength to send them my thoughts. "Please know that she is fine, better than you could have hoped. We love her more than can be measured. Be at peace. She is safe and loved."

A warm sweat broke over me. The walls again came into focus through the dust and fumes. I could not help but laugh. Her arms were around my neck. Her head cocked to one shoulder, she searched my face. "Don't be scared. Daddy just took a short trip to the sixties." She stood on her tiptoes and rubbed her nose against mine.

It was possible that they had not been so reluctant to part with her? I imagined her in a basket, left alone in the cold night air, relinquished to chance, exposed to unspeakable dangers. They did that to my daughter. My anger was black and violent and I believed that I transmitted it directly into them but I was confident that they would receive my wrath only if their motives had been evil. "You have failed. She lives in a world you will never understand. She has beaten you. I can only wish you guilt and misery. She deserved much better and she has it. She is treasured."

I had not expected the first truly painful realizations to occur until adolescence. She had just turned four when she forced me to acknowledge the depth of my ignorance. I should have known that we could have never been sufficiently prepared.

"Please do not lie across the table. Ask for more potatoes and I will pass them." My voice retained the residue of a meeting that afternoon with the Chief of Staff.

"I want some more tatoes."

"I don't know that word."

She slid her skinny belly from the table and dropped into her chair, the only captain's chair in the set. "Some more tatoes please."

"Say the entire request correctly." I knew that I was behaving like an ass but my sour mood would not permit me to acknowledge my error.

"May I have some more tatoes, please?"

"We don't say some more and these are not tatoes. Try it again."

"May I have some more potatoes, please?" She barked the last two words like an exasperated drill sergeant.

"Remember what we have been saying about some more. There is no such word."

"Can you stop acting like a teacher and please just pass me some more potatoes? You are not my teacher. You're not even my real daddy." A mature rage smothered her delicate features. In a crowd, I might not have recognized her. "You are not my daddy." This time she said the words slowly and precisely to be sure that I understood. She turned toward the wife. "And you are not my mommy. You never carried me in your belly like a real mommy."

We sat frozen and silent, our eyes meeting and averting, our minds hurrying to find the right words. The wife's noble attempts to stifle her tears did not budge the hard, little face.

"We're not your daddy and your mommy?" My voice broke. Others who had adopted long ago had warned us to be ready. I had been so confident that their difficulties would never touch us. How could the daughter of a perfect father be anything other than perfectly happy? "We have talked many times about what it means to be adopted. Do you remember what we said about that?"

"My real mommy and daddy are in my China. You took me away from them. I don't get to see my brothers and sisters because of you."

The wife reached for the little fist on the table. The little one withdrew her fist and punched the air in the direction of her mother's face. "Your mommy and daddy in China weren't able to keep you and we wanted a baby, a baby just like you so we went to China and adopted you from the orphanage." Her voice was steady, her eyes filled with sadness and love.

"My mommy misses me. She is very sad. You made her sad and now I will never see my brothers and sisters. I know you bought me. My mommy and daddy were very poor. They needed money and you bought me."

"Where did you hear something like that?" Several neighborhood kids of dubious conduct came to mind. "Tell me who told you these things?"

The anger left her face. She fought to maintain a defiant front but tears flowed from her clamped lids. "Mark told me. His grandpa was in China in the army and told him all about what you did."

All the explanations carefully crafted for every occasion deserted me. My mind filled with hateful images of tyrants, fertility police and forced abortions. An expression of terror crossed her face. She withdrew her gaze from mine and fell into her chair. Had she read my mind?

"I want to tell you something very important. Are you calm?"

She nodded. A strong arm fell across my back and a firm hand squeezed my shoulder. My anxiety and anger dissolved and floated toward the windows in the sunroom. Had the wife seen anyone come into the room? I almost asked her. "The man who gave us this table and all the furniture in this dining room also lived in an orphanage, just like you. He was there many years before he came here to America all by himself from across the big ocean. He was very young and very alone. There was no new mommy and daddy to come get him and bring him home. No new mommy and daddy loved him before they ever laid eyes on him, no new mommy and daddy who just could not wait to see him. He came all by himself to America from a place called Italy. He worked very hard and lived all by himself until one day, many years later he met a mommy with two little girls who needed a new daddy. The little girls' first daddy had died. He loved the mommy and little girls very much and they loved him. They became a new family. A few years later they had a new baby in their family. That baby was my mommy, your Grandma Sophia."

She nodded.

"When Grandma Sophia's mommy and daddy died, they left a piece of paper that said we should have this furniture as a present. We have eaten our dinner at this table for many years. We eat almost every meal here, even though we have a table in the kitchen, because this table is a magic table. It helps sad people feel better. It makes bad days seem not so bad."

It was true. I had seen the magic before I was old enough to ride a bike. I had watched from my grandparents' kitchen, having crept up the stairs from the basement where my cousins raced to be the first to eat gigantic loaves of Italian bread. It was so pleasant to see the old country wood, thick plaster and oversized goblets of red wine. The somber laughed, the prickly joked and I dreamed about the day when I would sit in that dining room at the big table, a day that never arrived.

As a young adult, I became convinced that the romance and warmth I had observed from that kitchen were nothing more than the effects of a family cocktail party. When the table at last sat inside my dining room, I began to notice that my darker moods seldom survived a family dinner. I rationalized the effect as merely the childish longings of a middle-aged man.

Friends and acquaintances who rudely wore their artistic discontent, political rage and professional disillusionment through every restaurant and dining room in town became lighter and younger in those creaky chairs. The result was not entirely predictable but my skepticism could not withstand so many conversions.

"You are right about one thing, my beautiful, wonderful daughter, whom Mommy and Daddy love more than anything in the whole world."

"And the Labraboy, too?"

"The Labraboy, too. He loves you just as much as Mommy and Daddy." A four year old once more, we smiled cautiously at one another. "You are right to think that your Chinese mommy and daddy miss you. It is very likely that someone else made them give you to us. They would have kept you if they could. They gave you to us to be sure that you had a good home. Most children have only one mommy and one daddy to take care of them and love them and that is usually plenty. You are very blessed because you have two mommies and two daddies in this world who care about you. Some day you will grow up to be a good mommy just like Grandma Sophia's daddy grew up to be a good daddy and a good grandpa even though he started life in an orphanage across the big ocean, just like you. I think that he knew that someday you would be our little girl and that your story would be like his story. Maybe he wanted this table to remind you every day that your story will be a happy one, filled with cousins and friends and Labraboys, no matter how or where it all started."

"And don't forget filled with mommies and daddies." I was thankful that she asked no more questions about our Asian counterparts.

Had I painted too rosy a picture, set her heart to someday search for a couple who may have behaved monstrously? I had followed the only reasonable course. Let her heart fill with love for others. We had entered this lifelong enterprise fully aware of the pitfalls. We seemed to have survived the first assault. Experience might bring wisdom. There would be no danger of quietly fading into old age. An exciting and possibly perilous ride was before us. I am thankful that I had not the imagination to envision all that awaited us.
**Chapter 19**

I coached myself to show no anger. There was every reason to trust her and I had earned no favors. Three days was not so long. It helped to concentrate on the day we had spent on the hill. That was our reality. She had no doubt a very good reason for staying away. I was not so very angry. She had to expect that I would worry. How could I love her and not worry? There would be a reasonable explanation and I must not spoil the moment with jealousy or weakness.

She found me in the woods behind the ice cream stand. I knew before she spoke that her mood was serious. "And how are you?" I smiled but found it difficult to meet her eyes.

"I'm fine. Been thinking quite a lot about you and the stories you told me the other day. I have been thinking very much about that."

"Is that so?" I passed both arms around her waist and nuzzled her neck. "You have turned me into quite the spinner of yarns. Maybe I should go on the county fair circuit as a teller of tales."

She slipped from my arms and sat on a block of yellow sandstone. "You were a very lucky man. I am dying to know how you ended up here, how you lost all that."

" _I_ did not lose anything. Everything was taken from me."

"I am anxious to hear about it, extremely anxious."

I joined her inside the smooth stone saddle. I lifted the hair from her forehead. "Wouldn't you rather have an ice cream cone? I made it through the cash machine today without help. It's on me. I might even spring for a float if you let me off the hook."

"You have built the suspense quite well."

The burden of concealment gave way to the opportunity for relief. I did not pause to consider the costs. My fingers locked behind my head, I reclined onto the cool saddle and watched the clouds speed past the sun. "I hope I don't bore you."

I left more than two hours after the party. My drinking had not been excessive, light in fact for half an Irishman on St. Patrick's Day. An unusually fast time in the five-mile race had left me in a mood to celebrate but the thought of an anxious three-hour drive prevented me from overdoing it. I drank several light beers then spent two hours drinking pop and coffee while watching an Irish band in the back room of a neighborhood pub. My friends, much less wary of the highway patrol, had dispersed the moment the kegs in the main tent had run dry. I could not convince them of the romance of pubs that from the outside were indistinguishable from mail order bungalows. I served my two hours in the back room without touching a drop and hurried to battle a fresh wave of lake effect snow.

"How did you do? You smell like beer and cigarettes. Should you have been driving?" The wife jogged to the far side of the kitchen. I noticed that she was austerely bejeweled and casually chic.

"I had my last beer about five hours ago."

"It's a good thing the cops didn't stop you. You smell like a stale brewery and no one would believe you don't smoke like a beatnik."

"I spent the last couple hours in McCarthy's watching the band. It was wall to wall and some of the locals were smoking like fiends."

She trotted across the hall and returned with the little one. "You are home in one piece and just barely on time. You have fifteen minutes to get ready. Did you remember to get the wine?"

The little one stood on my feet, one hand reaching upward, the other rubbing a sleepy eye. I picked her up and kissed her forehead while she patted my back like a satisfied coach. "I am supposed to be getting ready for something? I was on my way to the tub for an extended stay. Are you going somewhere?

"Don't tell me you forgot about dinner with the new neighbors. I told you about it last week and reminded you before you left this morning."

"You did not say anything this morning."

"You bet I did. You were sitting right there reading the paper, ranting about some headline."

"There it is. I was obviously thinking about something else. You should have realized that I was concentrating on the paper. You did not make sure that I was listening. Can we get out of this? I am dead tired. I was in the car for six hours, ran a five-mile race, and then stood around for hours in the cold. I just want to lie in the tub then spend a quiet evening on the couch."

"I am so sorry that you had to go to a St. Patrick's party. How can you live under such oppressive conditions? No one forced you to drive up there. You know we can't get out of this. We cannot cancel forty-five minutes before dinner. I would not do that to our worst enemy. Please tell me you at least remembered to get the wine. I stuck out my tongue. "We'll just have to stop along the way."

I glanced at the clock above the stove. "It's a quarter to eight. The state store closes in fifteen minutes. I will shower when I get back."

The little one latched onto my leg. "I want to go. I want to go."

"Daddy's in a hurry. I will be right back."

"Let her go with you. She hasn't seen you all day. She missed you."

"But I'll bet not as much as her mamma. You may come along but you have to listen to everything daddy says. Will you be a good girl in the wine store?" She nodded. "And promise me that this time no bottles will be broken." She rammed her forehead against my thigh and ran in place. I hoisted her across my shoulders.

"At least she will force me to make a quick job of it."

"And you are definitely OK to drive."

"Don't you trust me? I told you I had my last beer hours ago."

"Don't get mad at me for being a mother. Get going but do not drive fast. Who cares if we are just a little late?"

Two 1.5-liter bottles in the bargain bin just inside the door seemed acceptable and had the daughter not toppled an immense cardboard display of cheerleaders in bikinis we would have been back in the van in less than 5 minutes. Snapping her into her car seat was a struggle and her whine told me that her nap had not been a good one. Seconds from the parking lot in the thick of weekend traffic, she released the straps across her chest and strained to free her legs.

"Do not touch that strap. Stay in that seat or you are going right to bed when we get home. I will call Miss Julie on this car phone. "I held up the phone for her to see. "She will come and stay with you while mommy and I go to your best friend Mary's house." She continued to struggle like Houdini inside the water closet. My left hand on the wheel, I reached into the back seat and pinned her legs beneath the straps. My eyes had been off the road for no more than two seconds.

The door crushes softly inward and I am flying above the front seat. Why is there no sound?

We move in slow motion. One of her legs is still inside my hand. I try to see her face but we are spinning too fast. I remember the tress. There are so many oaks along this stretch of road. A thousand summer days I have run this route to hide beneath their shade. I wait for the huge limbs to punch through the windows. We will get through this. I cannot let her go. I tighten my grip on her knee, my arm contorted between the seats. I see blackness rushing behind a shaft of red light.

She is still in her seat when I awaken, upside down as I am, her feet inserted into the darkness above. Our faces nearly touch. "Wait, wait, and think now. You can fix this. Concentrate. If you concentrate hard enough it will come to you. Of course, there is a way. The only way to learn the secret is to live through something like this. Adrenaline can give people superhuman strength. There is a way. Reverse this." I cannot look at her. Please, not that beautiful face. The blackness again moves toward me, this time as a flat rectangle. It warns me. This time there will be no resistance.

I am strapped to a gurney. There are many faces and voices. One of the voices sounds familiar. I try to sit up and search through the din and the lights for a friendly face but a strong hand pushes me down.

"Where is my daughter?"

"She is in good hands. God will take care of her."

The pain is gone. There is only what I already know to be true. My limbs stiffen, then convulse. Shrieks explode from my dry throat. "Where is my daughter?"

"It's going to be OK. Just try to relax."

I hear laughter. A familiar face passes above me. How could anyone be laughing? I remember the little face. I watch myself scream until the room is quiet.
**Chapter 20**

I woke up two weeks later. My thoughts were terribly disordered but I understood that I had made a mistake while driving and that alcohol had been involved. Every face that looked my way wore undisguised rage and contempt. I had no memory of that final day but whispered hints convinced me that I had killed my precious daughter and rendered myself a fractional man. I hated myself far more than any of the friends and relatives who floated past my bed.

I was only occasionally aware of my surroundings and I saw the world as if I had opened my eyes under water. Each day my drowsy mind hitched a ride on a restless body. Many times, I allowed a nurse to help me into my bedclothes in a darkening room with no memory of anything that had transpired since breakfast. For weeks at a time I would lose the ability to speak, my face was a puzzle, and my facility with written words and numbers had essentially disappeared.

There were rare moments of remission. I have read that my behavior during my many court appearances was not so strange. I mostly nodded or simply shrugged my shoulders but my answers were usually reasonable and consistent. I held as fast as I could to the snippets of lucidity and prayed for the strength to stand up for the horrible wrong I had done. I wanted to suffer but they just let me go.

I was not entirely free. There were fences and uniforms but my new home most resembled a facility for assisted living. It was far more than I deserved.

My voice returned to normal and I was eventually able to walk without a limp but my face could become paralyzed between laughter and science fiction. The smallest amount of stress could trigger a display. A police officer once described me as a deranged jack-o-lantern. No witnesses to one of my episodes could disguise their revulsion including the doctors and nurses who made their living ministering to the deformed. Knowledge of my crimes no doubt magnified the effect.

I stepped off the stone to stretch. "I need a break. Had enough? This is intermission, your chance to plead headache or a previous engagement. Get going if you like. I can take it. Get going." I wondered how I could have seen anything but bad coming from the telling.

Her jaw had locked so that her lower teeth overlapped the uppers. She pulled me by the hand. "This is true, you killed, you were drunk and your little daughter, the one you adopted from China, died because of it?"

"It is very complicated. I will be glad to finish it for you. You might be surprised if you stick around."

"But you had been drinking at that party."

"I had and at a pretty good clip earlier in the afternoon but the accident did not occur until around eight o'clock in the evening."

"Are you running from the police? Is that why you live like this, like a hobo? I think I have a right to know whether I am abetting a fugitive, especially if you were involved in something so serious."

"No need to run and get a lawyer or call the cops. That part of it, my guilt or innocence, concluded years ago, at least as far as the criminal courts are concerned. The courts of public and private opinion are another matter. Last chance to fly along if you must or sit tight for the climax."

Her hand was still in mine but a look of disgust covered her face. How admirable that she struggled to spare me the sight of it. A euphoric freedom was growing within me. I could be without her. My general prospects were no better but my face had improved and thinking was not so exhausting. I was certain that I could make it without her. I ran the back of my hand across her forehead, perhaps for the last time but the pain was not too strong.

Sad, dirty light filtered through the leaves, drawing grotesque patterns over the hillside, revealing streaks of red in the stone beneath us. She turned away and nodded to the forest. She needed to hear it. Only then could she decide.

For two years, I paced about the neighborhoods that bordered the hospital, wondering aloud how I could have been capable of the horrors I had visited upon my family. Had I always been a bad seed, the malignant gene dormant within in me, waiting decades to gain the most devastating expression? Perhaps my spiritual defects were to blame. Depraved thoughts had indeed crossed my mind. Why should my soul have remained pure in the presence of such rot?

Three years passed. The doctors told me that I was a very lucky boy. Three years had produced a thirty percent improvement in all parameters, much more than they had expected. I walked in my sleep through much of the day, wore a Halloween mask most days of the year and had the math skills of a three year old. Perhaps justice had gained her victory

It was a Christmas Eve morning when Mary Ann Kavocik first came to see me although until her holiday greeting I had known only that it was Wednesday. Her eyes were red and swollen. We sat on a faded yellow couch within sight of vigilant eyes behind tall plastic windows. She forced smiles across an exhausted and fearful face. I wanted to tell her that the baby she held on her lap was a beautiful child but the child disappeared.

"My name is Mary Ann Kavocik. Thank you for agreeing to see me." Her voice echoed from the newly shined linoleum. I wanted so badly to cover my ears. "For many years you were my husband's eye doctor. Do you remember him?" I shook my head from side to side, no longer in possession of the sense of humor that would have once led me to quip that I did not even remember who I was. She pulled the child onto her lap and adjusted the buttons on her coat. "He had many health problems over the last ten years of his life including several strokes and heart attacks. The family was amazed at how he kept going. He was a proud man, a hard worker. He had built his trucking business out of nothing and with only a ninth grade education. That business put the three boys through college and later set one of them up in a new office. He was very proud of that business, very hands on, even drove some jobs every day, even when he could have just stayed in the office. He could never feel like he was earning his keep just sitting behind a desk, giving orders and talking on the phone. I am sorry to ramble but I have been waiting a long time to tell you this.

He came through the first stroke OK. His patience was not what it used to be. The grandkids could get him irritated pretty fast. That was new but it did not happen all the time. We were just glad to have him alive. Things moved fast after the second and third strokes. He had always been stubborn but always kind. The doctors told us that he would improve but the meanness never left. One side of him was paralyzed for good and he could no longer see well enough to drive. You told us that. Maybe he was angry about his health. Maybe something was physically wrong with his head. It was probably a little of both.

He came to see you shortly after the worst stroke. Because of his poor vision he had failed a state physical to renew his license and he wanted you to make the numbers work, fill out the form to say that he was OK to drive. You filled out the form honestly and mailed it to the department of transportation. The state suspended his license about a week later. He was so angry. I am sure you remember how badly he behaved. I shook my head from side to side. He was in a rage for months. Everyone in the family told him repeatedly that you had done the right thing, that the law required you to notify the state but any mention of your name just made him angrier. You probably don't remember those times I called you at home with questions? Of course you don't.

He continued to drive, not often mind you, because everyone tried to keep an eye on him but he probably got out on the road at least once or twice a week. He sometimes even convinced me to ride with him. That is not exactly true. He ordered me to come with him and I did it. I know I should have stopped him but I have always depended on him to make the decisions and he had always done right by us. We were together 52 years. I am not trying to excuse what I did. I just want to make you understand.

Everyone thought that I told him what to do, probably because I got bigger and bigger while he seemed to dwindle away to nothing. After the strokes, after he changed I always seemed to be holding him back from someone. He had gotten so weak. It was hard to convince people that he had once been a very strong man, quite a football player as a teenager.

I suppose it was lucky I was with him that night. Otherwise, we would have never known what happened. We left the house just before dinnertime. My eldest son had taken his keys and put his car up for sale but he had made several duplicate keys a year earlier when we had first asked him to stop driving.

As soon as we left our street, we came alongside someone driving like a maniac, jumping from lane to lane, tailgating and sliding through red lights. He nearly side swiped our car just before the big intersection at Logan and Eighteen. I grabbed the wheel and shouted at my husband to let him pass but he ignored me and followed that crazy man's bumper right under the red light. We hit the other fellow's rear bumper, ran onto the sidewalk and grazed the wall of the tile store. We were able to walk away from the car, a little banged up, but not seriously hurt. Dad recognized you right away. He had seen you running in the neighborhood in the years after he lost his license. There was a tirade on each occasion about how you had ruined his business and stole money from our grandchildren.

Broken wine bottles were everywhere and you smelled of alcohol and we saw your daughter." She passed a hand across her eyes. "Anyone coming upon that scene would have believed that you were drunk, that you had caused the accident. That a father could be so careless with his child filled me with hatred. My senses just left me. I was unable to remember the true sequence of events. It took a while for me to be sure that I was actually awake. A police officer held me by the arm to keep me from falling and Dad talked to him in a strong, confident voice.

"He was right beside us. We could not believe it. He was driving with that bottle glued to his mouth and with that little baby in the car seat. We rolled down the window and yelled for him to stop but he was too far-gone. Most horrible thing we ever saw. He knocked us clean through the intersection and turned right in front of that poor son of a bitch."

"I was drinking from the bottle while I was driving?"

"He never saw you do that. You were on the other side of the intersection waiting to make a left turn. The old fellow who nearly side swiped us ran the red light and hit your car when you made your turn. He was already dead when they pulled him out of the car. I didn't get it all straight until days later. I had taken a mild knock on the head and with the shock of the crash I was in no shape to contradict my husband for the first time in my life especially in front of police officers." She leaned forward and put her hand on my knee. "I am not trying to excuse my actions. I just hope I can make you understand. It did look as if you had been drinking and driving like an animal. It was almost impossible to look at you as an innocent victim.

Perhaps if you had been alone in that car I could have said something right away. I could not help believing that you could have somehow prevented everything if you had not been drinking.

We received quite a bit of money from your insurance company. I am ashamed to admit that our injuries were not as severe as we let on. My husband said you owed us. Cosmic justice had placed us in that intersection at just that moment. He said he knew all along that you were scum. No one questioned his story. No politician wanted to appear soft on drunk driving. The TV and radio people had a field day. You were a hated man. Why would anyone try to disprove what seemed so obvious?

Your behavior at those hearings stayed with me. At first, I was like everyone in that courtroom. Your grunts and gyrations made me wonder why they had bothered to hold a hearing. You pounded on the table and cried and when anyone mentioned your child, I was certain that you would have a stroke and die right there in front of the judge. After a few days, some of your gestures and sounds began to make sense to me. Raising five babies is good training for that sort of thing. I finally realized that you were begging the judge to give you the worst possible punishment. I could not imagine that a reckless drunk would behave like that.

Dad passed away about a year ago. Not long after the funeral, I began to think about you and your daughter. I went to the wine store many times without asking any questions. I have a cupboard full of unopened bottles. I had to know whether I had been right to hate you. It was quite easy to learn the truth once I found the nerve to open my mouth. The staff in the wine store had not changed in the four years since the accident. They remembered you well. How could they forget such a big event? You had purchased two bottles of red wine and the police found two broken bottles inside your van. The accident occurred less than two miles from the store. There was no way you could have been drunk on wine. There was just not enough time.

Your wife testified that you had been at a party earlier in the day but no one at the wine store thought that you had been drinking. They train to look for the signs and can lose their jobs if they sell to a drunk. I talked to two of your friends who had been with you at that party and they were quite confident that you drank your last beer many hours before the accident. On the other hand, my husband had testified that you had been swigging a bottle while driving your child. One person was dead, most likely from a heart attack or stroke according to his son but that family also received a pile of money. No one including me wanted to upset the apple cart. No one talked to the clerks at the wine store. No one talked to your friends and who could blame your wife. She was in such a state.

"The old man was killed, no one else? Are you telling me that I did not kill my daughter?"

"Killed your daughter? Who told you that your daughter had died?"

"Isn't that why I'm in this place?"

"You are in this place because you were found by the court to have caused the death of a man while driving drunk but I have told you that you are not to blame. You killed no one and you certainly did not kill your daughter. She is alive. I have seen her more than once with my own eyes. Her injuries were quite severe. That was very much against you. It took a very long time but she has recovered. I have seen her. She is a beautiful, active child."

"I heard them in that court room. They talked about finding her, hurt so bad, killed instantly."

"You have confused the stories. You are remembering the testimony about the old man, the one who ran the red light. You have not in all this time asked anyone about it?"

"Why would I ask? I knew it to be true."

She lay back in her chair, moaning and muttering. She nearly tumbled to the floor. Her words had been clear enough but I did not believe any of it. I had lived too long knowing myself to be a monster. "I am sure this must be the most horrible shock but it is good news."

"Why have they never brought my daughter to see me? That is not possible. My wife would not do that."

The old woman sat up and stared into my eyes. "You must listen to me. Please do your best to understand. Only I know the truth. Everyone in that courtroom, everyone in this county still believes what my husband said and what I failed to correct. Your daughter very nearly died in the weeks after the accident. Has your wife not visited you? That would indeed be harsh but not entirely out of bounds. Are you sure that she has not come to visit? Maybe she did bring the little girl to see you. Is it possible that in your state you have forgotten?"

I stared at the pine planks under my feet and considered the possibility. When I raised my eyes from the floor, the room had turned to night and I was alone.
**Chapter 21**

She slumped beside me, barely visible in the leftover light. The telling had left me weak and guilty. I debated whether to walk off the hill. I could not decide whether mercy or cowardice was inside my heart. What had possessed me to speak so graphically, so casually? For many minutes, I was not sure whether she or Mrs. Kavocik was in front of me.

"Shall I go? It might be best that I just go."

"Why are you here?" Her voice was full of contempt.

"What are you asking?"

"You said your daughter is alive and it appears that you probably did not have anything to do with her injuries." I nodded. "Why in the hell are you here, living like an animal, like a child, like a bum?"

"How can you be angry with me? I tell you that I took the blame for doing the most heinous things, things that caused my child to go through hell. I explain why I can no longer do simple arithmetic, handle money or read a map and you are angry at me?"

She stood, pulled a handkerchief from her back pocket and wiped her face and hair. Even at that moment, I could not help but feel her beauty. "I understand but that is only half the story. Why, I ask you again are you fooling around with me when somewhere out there you have a wife and a daughter?" She waved her arm across the horizon. "Don't you want to be with them?"

"My God, don't you think I tried? You have been with me all these weeks and months and you ask whether I abandoned my child? You should know that I did everything in my power, exhausted every option. It went on for years. Mrs. Kavocik warned me not to expect anything. Her sons and their families run through most of the settlement money. She told me that no one would back me up. Her guilty feelings went only so far. Do you have any idea what is like to be under a court order to stay at least 300 yards from your wife and child? Three times, I spent months inside a jail cell for trying to see my daughter despite those court orders. You must understand that my wife and daughter, my in-laws, my neighbors and even my own parents still believe that I am a homicidal drunk. My father in law, a man I loved like my own father once stood on my chest and put the barrel of a shotgun in my mouth. He told me he would blow my monster face across the street if I ever went near that house again but I did go back. Despite the courts, the cops and the guns, I still went back. I went back to her, hoping for an opportunity to explain. Did I do enough to satisfy your delicate sensibilities?

The new husband was a big wheel in big ketchup. He had a lot of pull. He even got my attorney, my best friend since junior high, to stop representing me. I could not get another attorney. They really got the word out. They had me evicted. I could not get an apartment. The judge said that he had gone easy on me because of my physical situation but the next time I ignored one of his orders I was going to spend hard time in a state prison. That was it for me. I could not drive. Hell, I could barely think straight. Riding a bicycle was for me like climbing Everest and I was lucky sometimes to remember the four-digit pin number written inside my shoe. Only recently have I consistently been able to remember what to do with those numbers. Running was the only thing that came back to me. It was almost as good as it had been before the accident. I took it as a sign of what I should do.

A cop gave me the bad news in one dose. He had the Judge's order about prison, the last eviction notice and some friendly warnings about some horrible accidents that might soon be coming my way. I just grabbed some stuff and left. I ran out the door and kept running until I dropped. I kept at it until I was completely exhausted, day after day, week after week, sometimes 8 or 10 hours at a stretch and without a single injury. It was if I had become some kind of animal. I suppose it was no different from using pills or booze although I did do some drinking along the way. It is ironic how I have taken to drinking more than ever since I learned that I am not a drunken criminal. Don't you see that I took it as far as I possibly could?" I knelt and tried to take her hands in mine but she clutched her knees tighter to her chest and rolled from side to side.

"But you should not be here."

"How long would you expect me to bang my head against that concrete wall? Can you see that I did everything I could? You have said that you love me."

"This has nothing to do with whether I love you. No, that is wrong. I say these things only because I do love you. You have a daughter. You obviously love her deeply. That you suffered so much to be with her is proof of that. That she suffered so much means even more. You should be with her. You should have that love with you always. I do understand why you ran away but time is up. You have been keeping this from me because you knew in your heart that I would tell you to go back. You have had your holiday, your rest. It is time for you to go back and face your responsibilities. Your choice does not exist here. You brought her to this world. She is yours to look after until she is old enough to be on her own. You cannot this job anytime you like. Four years or forty years, you must go on trying."

"You can go to hell. You can just go straight to hell. Who do you think you are? Four years, forty years; what kind of horseshit is that? You spend your days running through this park, messing around with me. How could you possibly know anything about life? Have you ever done a day's work? Have you even once lost someone you loved? Can you imagine what it is like to have that person think that you are a monster? Your childishness makes me ill"

She smiled and clapped her hands. "I am not angry. I understand why you say such terrible things to me but I know that I am right. You must go back or you will never truly be alive. Believing that you are to blame for her injures and for the death of that old man will chill every hour of that girl's life. You must go back. For both of you, you must go back and try again."

I was surprised to laugh. "We have gone over this enough. I am never going back. No one can change my mind. Nothing can make me go back."

Her eyes turned old and mean. She looked as if she might spring from the stone to bite and claw me. "I can make you want to leave this place. I can make you go back."

I laughed again. "How, Master of the Universe, will you do such a thing?"

She marched to the trailhead and stopped. She raised her chin and extended the index finger of her right hand but did not speak. "Good riddance, you loony bitch." I was not sure that I had spoken loudly enough for her to hear. Wind piped through the trees, taunting and singing. 'Coward,' I heard someone say. Twice again, I heard it. I pictured her in the distance, throwing her voice like a ball, the sound rolling to a stop beside my ear. Chills rolled from my shoulders to my knees, my fingernails clawed at my temples and I sprinted in the opposite direction until the hill chucked me onto a creek bed of jagged stones.
**Chapter 22**

Posters advertising an informal cookout for a running club appeared on telephone poles around the lake. It would be the perfect free meal. In that crowd, my gaunt appearance would be normal evidence of high mileage. Conversation would likely be enjoyable. All runners love to talk about their running. I was determined to eat a mountain of food.

I stood at the end of the driveway that led to the lodge until a large crowd had assembled. The smells from the barbecue was heavenly and for the first time in weeks I felt a healthy hunger. It took great discipline to wait until a line had formed at the buffet. The line moved slowly but I fell easily into a discussion with a couple behind me about the difference between tempo runs and lactate threshold workouts. How fine it was to feel so relaxed and invited. That my appearance might appear other than normal did not once enter my mind. The affable voices and faces validated my confidence.

Then I saw her. The smirk made it clear that she had been waiting for me to notice. Very slowly, she extended her arm to his neck and slithered against him. A slight turn of the head, another smirk and she closed her eyes to savor the pleasure. He puckered for a kiss and she promptly complied. Once more, the enraptured eyes turned my way. I took two steps toward her, spilling plates from the hands of my new friends. I reversed direction and several more trays were overturned. I careened through the crowd, my face twitching as it had in the first days after the accident.

I took to my bivy two days later. I could not remember where I had been since leaving the cookout. I slept without interruption for more than seventy hours. I awoke feeling relieved and refreshed. I had not forgotten what I had seen at the cookout but something in the night had worked to calm my nerves and quiet the hurt. Thankful for the relief, I did not question the source. I was convinced that analysis would precipitate a collapse and I remained in motion all waking hours so that sleep would be deep and dreamless.

Weeks passed. I loitered and read and my resolve to forget her grew stronger. I believed in the authenticity and durability of this strange optimism. Things were changing for the better. Strangers were reacting to me in an apparently normal fashion. My face had clearly improved. The relapse at the cookout had been a temporary reaction to stress. Numbers and printed words were no less cryptic but I allowed myself to hope that those skills might also improve.

I would sometimes feel a tinge of longing in the night but every morning the comfortable emptiness returned. By week six, the tinges had become a twenty-four hour ache. Freedom had been so near. Being with her had started me toward a better path but she and the blackness had become intertwined. I had to expect that bonds so strong could only be broken with great pain. It could not last more than a few days. Week 8 found me searching for her around the clock. I was certain that I was doing wrong but my body carried me from place to place in every kind of weather. That she likely had no desire to see me was of no importance.

Only when I reached the point of fainting did I consider schemes to procure food. Veins like blue cords bulged through my skin. Food, even fruit fresh, was without taste. The dwindles worked slowly and efficiently upon my body and spirit. Better, healthy thoughts occasionally surfaced but my body continued to demand her presence as the only acceptable cure. I began to despise my camp and took advantage of a key drop at a local automotive service. I had noticed the flimsy rubber opening many weeks earlier. That my memory had so easily retrieved the information should have been a reason to celebrate.

Every evening, customers left their cars for next day repairs. The key drop, a rubber slot in the garage door, was just wide enough for my arm. I raked the keys across the floor with a twig from a nearby cherry tree. The first five or six nights I simply grabbed the keys closest to the opening but as I grew confident that no one would rouse me before sunset, I became more discriminating, taking my time to find keys to large vehicles with reclining rear seats or benches that dropped into the floor. I began to sleep through the night without dreams or ruminations.

There was no way to get money for food. I had forgotten the pin numbers and proper procedures to access my ATM account. I had no cause to complain. The accountant had said that the money would last no longer than 2 or 3 months. I later learned that I had made it last for more than forty weeks. When most ravenous and discouraged, I experienced the pleasure and terror of an ecstatic state. I wandered for hours through the woods, seeing and hearing the beautiful as hideous and the repulsive as lovely. I spent an entire afternoon mourning the death of a pumpkin that lay shattered in the middle of the road. To my ailing eyes, the vivid orange innards were the entrails of a desperately injured creature and I wept as if I had lost a beloved friend.

The decision to capitulate came in an instant. A plan to spend at least three days eating, resting and making myself presentable lasted only until noon of the first morning. I began to run to her but forced myself to return for a cursory sponge bath. The under shorts she had cleaned and folded weeks earlier were stacked inside my sleeping bag. My limbs would not be still. Only with great concentration and after several falls did I finally manage to dress.

She had once described the general location of her father's house. It was easy to see that she was instantly displeased with herself for revealing that single fact about her personal life. I scampered through the forest. So much lighter and in such a state of agitation, I believed at moments that I left the ground and floated across the grassy hills.

I paused at his door to ponder my reflection. My haggard features were otherwise symmetric, virtually normal. I could not decide if my eyes deceived me. He opened the door. Had I knocked?

"What can I do for you, young fella?" His genial expression made me forget that I looked like a sick and dirty vagabond.

"I knew or know your daughter. I wanted to see her. Can you tell me where I might see her?"

"You're a runner?"

"I guess so. How did you know that?"

"Almost all her friends were on the cross country or track teams and that suit your wearing is almost as good as a name tag. That running introduced her to a whole lot of good friends, starting way back in junior high. That talent for running paid for her education. Did you know her in college? She was really something to watch in those days. Beat a couple girls who ended up going to the Olympics." He stopped and waited for my response. I felt hungry. I tried to ignore a buzzing that passed from ear to ear. He returned to the doorway. When had he walked away?

"Sit down and eat this leftover spaghetti. That scrawniness was one thing I did not like about the running. Thank God my girl never got into trouble with that stuff." I took the pot and wooden spoon and collapsed onto the stoop.

"Wash it down with this." He dropped a beer bottle over my shoulder then read his mail until I finished.

"I'll walk you over, if you're up to it."

"That is really not necessary. Just point me in the right direction and I'll stop making a nuisance of myself."

"I'm used to it. All her old teammates and coaches come to visit. I look forward to taking them over. Besides you still don't look so hot and I am past due for a visit myself."

How were we to have the reunion I so desperately craved? I was frantic to think of a way to convince him. He led me over cornfields broken by islands of birches until we crested a slope of crown vetch. He removed his fishing cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The purple sun was large and painful. I closed my eyes and stood behind him.

"Some don't think it proper that she's out here but I didn't want her place to be like all the others. I wanted her close to me and this seemed like just the right spot." I jumped past him onto the summit and searched across the horizon for a house, certain that I would recognize the one she had chosen. "She used to sit up here every morning after she ran. She would write in her journal, meditate and pray or just look at the beauty of the place. She called it the most beautiful spot in the world." He bent to brush some leaves from the base of the stone. "I would not have felt comfortable being in a place with row after row, just one of thousands. This is the best place. Someone told me right after it happened that visiting her would be a comfort. I thought he was nuts but this many years later I believe he wasn't so wrong."

The last thing I remember is that slab of stone, her picture inside an oval cameo, faded by time and weather. I do not remember falling nor do I recall striking my head.

Imagine my confusion upon awakening in the same group home where I had lived in the year after my accident. It is now 2 years since her father brought me back. I still do not know how he figured out my name and where to take me. The doctors and I go round and round about her. They explain that my injured brain had taken bits and pieces of what I heard from people in the town and created an ideal of what I needed. They insist that I probably ran across her stone on one of my jaunts through the woods. I embedded her pretty face into my memory then molded her to the needs of my injured soul. That makes about as much sense as Mozart coming from a big bang of rocks. The cameo could not have told me about her love for running. Her father's address does not appear on the head stone and long, soft strands of auburn hair still cling to clothes I will never wash.

There has been a great improvement in my physical condition. My movements are smooth and crisp. My face is obedient. The brain has not been as cooperative. I have come to accept that I will probably never again see patients. I have enough to occupy my time.

One autumn day, I received a visit from the ex-wife. It seems that a few weeks before her death, Mrs. Kavocik mailed a letter. Meetings were arranged. Reassurances were provided. I must admit that the new husband is not a bad sort.

I report each morning to the ex-wife's front door. Thank God for two earner couples and the empathy they demand. An angel takes my hand and we walk two blocks to the bus stop. At 3 o'clock, I meet her at the same corner and we walk hand in hand to my apartment. It sits above a garage on the estate of a retired county judge. I repair what I can or clean this and that. I plant as well as I can manage. The judge and I must often forgive the imperfections in my work. The angel is always hungry. We faithfully set the table, a magic table and we eat and laugh and talk.
