Butcherback Argosy

by Jessica Lackaff

Ⅰ

I saw him coming from a mile away. I was on the porch with a riveting paperback Reggie had given me the first earthly second she was done with it. The opener was about a leviathan drifting through the ocean, barely moving its tail, not hunting, just letting things glide into its ever-gaping mouth. On the cover, a naked woman swam the forward crawl and beneath her, blossoming from the depths, a shark rose, enormous, piranha-toothed, mouth like a bottle opener. As I read I often returned to the cover to reorient myself in the thrill.

I saw the car come around the point, and when it slowed for our lane I had to stop in the middle of a paragraph. A sign on the telephone pole said ‘Private Drive,’ but the car turned in without hesitation. I put my finger in the paperback and waited. How easily he drifted into our territory, and even now I see the white car rippling up the lane between the fields, blackberries in fruit and flower, Queen Anne’s lace. I retied my headscarf and dusted my slacks and slid on my sandals. I riffled the paperback to smell Reggie’s cigarette-scent and set the book on top of a weather-warped National Geographic with a sleepy beaten-gold lion on the cover. It was my last drop of real solitude, the last day of school in June.

It took him a moment to unfold himself from the car. He was easy-looking and tall, in shirt sleeves and his suit vest, and he buttoned his collar and tightened his tie, with a rueful smile up at me as he put on his jacket and shot his cuffs. I wasn’t interested in what he was selling, and I didn’t want to invite him in, but there I was, obviously doing nothing.

Our ranch house was built into the slope, with wide steps to the verandah, and a raggedy circle of gravel down in front. I was alone on the property, which ran upslope into old orchards and, below, fanned out into farmland. The front door stood open, and deep in the house the washing machine stopped swishing and clicked to silence. At that moment, the brown rabbit came through the door and paused on the top step, one ear straight up. Buck or doe, its name was Adelaide.

The salesman was struck, beguiled, his mouth open in amazed delight. With a boyish lunge he was halfway up the steps, and he reached out gently, letting Adelaide smell him. Then his long fingers kneaded the sable ruff. I stood up. I didn’t want him to see my things, my accoutrements of thought: cigarettes, matches, pulp novel; the magazine glued to the table with rain.

I pressured him back from my private space, and he ducked his head under the shade of the porch and shyly offered his hand. ”Luxevac,” he said, smiling, a little lost, a vacuum cleaner salesman who had wandered off his route.

He gave me his card, bounced a little on his toes, and laughed with dazed joy as the rabbit lop-lopped across his foot and vanished through the dimness of the front door.

”Enchanting!” he said. ”You can imagine I’ve seen a lot of things in my travels, but a rabbit that lives in the house? My wife will never believe this.”

He was supposed to be back in the city by five, but he was all turned around on these country roads. Yes, he sold vacuum cleaners, the high-powered ones that eliminate dust mites. Did I know about dust mites?

He pulled a flier from the breast of his jacket. I could not resist the scanning electron image of a dust mite, head on—a chitinous hairy rutabaga with sucking mouthparts extended. I wanted that flier, wanted to wow and horrify Reggie with it. ”These things are everywhere!” I’d say authoritatively. ”Crawling all over us!”

He put his hands in his pockets like Fred Astaire and jogged sideways down the steps. Then he smiled up at me, and patted the canopy on his car. ”You wanna take a look?”

I was curious to see the technology that extracted mites. He unlocked the hatch and flipped it open as I came up. Heat unfolded in my face. The bed of the car was carpeted, packed with atomic streamlined chrome.

”I’ve got the Duchess and the Argosy, and my favorite, the Princess. Look at ‘er. The power of a jet engine. Detachable parts. Brushes. Does drapes, stair runners, shag carpet, floors. You’ll never sweep again.”

I liked the Argosy, a canister that looked like a chrome rocket pack. He showed me the brushes that went with it, and then caught me gazing over the countryside as the school bus swung around the point of Craig Hill. Nan would be home in a minute. He’d cut short my precious time alone, the last of my true selfhood. I smiled with my teeth locked.

He understood my look, and straightened up, preparing an argument. He had a soft, kind mouth, and harsh eyebrows that he wore pushed harmlessly back.

”I’m sorry but—we’re a Hoover family,” I said, thinking he’d find that amusing. I turned my foot on its side, curling my toes.

”—So, ‘maybe next time,’ ” he murmured. He was still, his hand on the raised hatch, his tie fallen on the perpendicular drop, and he watched the school bus disappear beyond the wild plum thickets at the bottom of the pasture. He had clicked to a different setting, a void where he waited for a letdown in mood to stop fighting him and settle into acceptance. Then he slammed the hatch.

In the distance, asbestos brake pads sang.

He turned and reached for me, and I breathed in, but he only plucked the bent advertising pamphlet from my hand and shoved it back inside his jacket. Opening the door of his car, he let it pivot to the end of his arm, and then, struck by a thought, looked back, squinting his eyes to block out the sight of me. ”I think you’ll regret not getting the Butcherback,” he said artfully.

I acquiesced, glad I’d wasted his time as he’d wasted mine. And, as he drove away, and I climbed the steps, I did feel regret, because he put the image in my head of a humped beast with a ruff of bloody arrows, gnawing its way through dirt, its belly full of desiccated mites. I wanted the Butcherback. I saw it growling its way hungrily down the hall runner, leaving a trail sucked so clean that it was paler than the rest of the rug, every strand of fiber standing up like stubble after the chaff cutter passes.

The school bus gave a dusty sigh and the accordion door folded open. Nan leapt free and ran with short steps in her patent-leather Mary Janes, flailing her lunch box and a handful of papers. She always leapt from the bus and ran as fast as she could and ended up gasping, trudging the last torturous bit up to the house, played out.

Big heaps of brambles encroached along the lane, spangled with bees, and, halfway up the road, as Nan hit the hyperventilation point, she met the white car.

The car stopped, and I shaded my eyes, critically observing the sunshot filaments of her fraying braids, hoping she’d remember her manners. As he said hello, his arm emerged from the window and folded itself on the ledge. She nodded vigorously, baring her gappy smile, and danced a few steps to the side. The car began to roll forward, in a drifty way, and she hurried on to me.

Up the porch steps she clattered, and into my arms. Full against me, she looked up. She could not know how it made me feel to see my own mother’s swan-like cheekbones, rebuilt in miniature. ”Nana-banana,” I said thoughtlessly. The trapped animal of her heart against me was part of our nexus, like the harebell-blue edge of accusation in her eyes. I was expected to divine everything she experienced at school; we both saw my inadequacy. Honestly, the fact that we were actually discrete beings—that our lives operated separately—still surprised us both.

Nan pulled away, leaving the papers pressed to my front, and went into the house. She reserved the really catapulting hugs for Andreas; ours was a far more complicated love.

I sank back into my book. Inside the house, Nan put on a record, Bolero, Toscanini’s sped-up version that had so insulted Ravel, with its devil’s intervals—those maddening, terrifying lags.

I thought she was getting a cookie, but she came out with her sable rabbit in her arms, and sat down in the swing beside me. Floating through the open door, Bolero started out sounding like springtime, a breathless, deceptive air of promise.

We had already discussed the cover of my book, but again she asked: ”Does the shark eat the lady?”

”No, it just kind of bites her leg,” I said. ”Oh, the shark bites with his teeth, dear,” I sang into her neck, on the opposite side of the rabbit. She laughed quietly, so as not to disturb her baby, her eyes tearful with excitement. She held the curved brown back like someone patting a baby’s diaper. My favorite parts of the rabbit were the felted piss-yellow bottoms of its feet, I don’t know why.

Nan kicked one foot in time with the militaristic buildup of sound. Her white tights were grubby across the knees and there was a blood-darkened shred stretched across her patella. I reached over to put my finger in the hole, my cool Mom finger on her hot crusty flesh, and she twitched her leg away, and I felt stupid with nowhere to put my affection.

I pushed off the floor and Nan and the rabbit and I glided forward, weightless. I looked sightlessly down at my book. Reggie was meeting an old school friend for lunch in town and this had eaten me the entire day. In high school, Reggie was a greaser, with a chiffon scarf around her head and a slutty sneer. She had invented a mode of being as unrelated to the past as the code on a computer punch card. She took me from the depressing world of my parents and made me funny and true. And suddenly, we were out of school and she revised what I’d assumed was a permanent code of nihilism and remade herself as a wife and mother—skilled and sarcastic, cooking and sewing in a fabulous flurry, having sex, glugging rum into a blender—and so, following along, did I.

Deliriously, I raised the paperback and smelled it. Nan looked up, the imprint of her father’s blonde Italian blood in her high, clear brow. Andreas joked that she looked like the girl who married the Lonely Goatherd.

”This music’s scary at the end,” said Nan.

”It’s certainly hectic,” I said. ”But then so is ‘drip drip drop little April showers.’ ” It was fascinating to watch her relationship with art emerge. She had shown preference from the moment she was born. Her musical taste lay necessarily alongside all of ours—from Santana’s Abraxas, in her father’s collection, to the Bay City Rollers of Shawnee’s devotion. ‘Saturday Night’, now that was the song! Andreas and the kids in the living room, thrown into a frenzy of disco fingers.

*       *       *       *

Andreas was thudding uncharacteristically as he came in from work; he entered the kitchen long and lithesome in his three-piece polyester suit, teeth glowing under his big Elvis sunglasses as he lurched along with Nan attached to his side, her feet riding the forklift of his Weejuns. ”We swung the deal, passed the merger, big day at the bean factory, big day, big day,” he said in his mild, husky voice, holding Nan’s head against his ribs as he hitched closer so I could lean over the ironing board and kiss him. ”Where’s Nantucket?” he asked me, as if we were alone.

”Look on a map,” I said.

Laboriously, he dragged his mummified leg down the hall, garishly groaning.

I started dinner and went outside. When Andreas was home, the garden was the place to be. It sprang up at the wave of his hand over Honeoye loam, and when he was in it, the air rainbowed with sprinkler spray. He was wearing surfer shorts and a ‘Beach Bum’ T-shirt with a footprint on it. A stray hen hovered at his heel. Nan was barefoot, in a pair of underwear, her braids down her back. When he saw me, Andreas started singing ‘This Was a Real Nice Clambake,’ one of his happy songs. Showily he sailed a knot of lambsquarters over the fence into the henyard and the rooster shrilled a hawk warning that made the hens crouch. The three of us laughed madly. Nan laughed so sharply that her pale shoulder blades touched.

”Hey, your wascally wabbit’s in the radishes!” cried Andreas.

The rows of baby vegetables were just speckled stripes, and Nan dodged carefully after Adelaide across the frilly potato patch Andreas had planted on Good Friday. She was beginning to exhibit the long bones of her father, and her changing limbs made me feel I had to focus harder. The brown rabbit sat up, feeding a Swiss chard stem into the corner of its mouth like a kid at the pencil sharpener. Andreas leaned on his hoe and laughed, his eyes on mine in the pure concord of parenthood.

*      *      *      *

Reggie and I read Milton. We read Virginia Woolf, Sidney Sheldon, Ways of Seeing. We had classical records; folk music; Carousel and Oklahoma!—we had Sticky Fingers and Led Zeppelin III. We lay on the living room rug surrounded by the big art books, overcome by what people had done. We made long Modigliani line drawings of each other. We hammered copper. We loved Polanski’s Knife in the Water, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. We loved James Bond. We passed through a period of batik; a season of pysanky eggs; several rounds of Shibori tie-dye. Reggie wanted to be a fashion designer; she could iron a placket like a filet knife. I studied palmistry, and didn’t get far with it. We made our own bracelets, halter tops, winged helmets; we cut each other’s hair.

We didn’t know how to get to the Big Art. We didn’t know how to take a stab at originality or honesty without displeasing all those around us. It was my sense that you had to withdraw into the gyre of yourself, to the detriment of your outer life, and I was always talking about the impossibility of this. Meanwhile, we learned how to wear fake eyelashes, taught the kids to swim, made piles of sandwiches; we dressed Nan as Woodstock, Shawnee as Snoopy; Arnie as the Red Baron. We were helplessly caught in our lives. We didn’t know how to write a poem that wasn’t trite. We didn’t know how someone could make a summer movie so overwhelmingly scary that it wanted to come out of the screen and kill you.

We saw the movie with our husbands, who laughed at our terror, and then, somewhat seasoned, Reggie and I went back, this time with Arnie. It was not a film for children, but Arnie was thirteen, and had shocked us into it by taking a startling switchback toward adulthood. Reggie had come home from shopping and found him blitzed on the couch. Sleepy-drunk. She was appalled: he could barely stand, and from the smell of him, he’d been into the schnapps. Arnie had always been nice as pie, one of those kids who perpetually seem like they’re seven, walking around in underwear and a blanket, but at the same time he’d begun to dismantle radios behind our backs, destroy things, crack windows. And now we had to lock up the liquor cabinets. So, to keep him close, and to haze him, we took him to Jaws.

Years before, on that Friday afternoon that would be Jack Kennedy’s forever, I was sitting in an OB/GYN waiting room with Arnie in my lap. He was growling to himself and gnawing the pasteboard corner of a Little Golden Book: Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams. Down the hall a door opened and Reggie came out past the reception desk, her hand closed around her throat, and she stopped and stared at us as if permanently establishing who we really were, Arnie and I.

She would never see the world the same way again. She told us this, lowering herself down beside me. She was already pregnant with Shawnee; I was nineteen and still in college, still unmarried. We were coming to grips with the fact that there was real evil in the world, and we vowed to protect Arnie from it. The Little Fur Family, so sleepy and tender—

‘warm as toast

smaller than most’

—seemed unassailable until that moment, but we were rattled for months, and a mention of JFK returns me to the pictures in that book, and Arnie’s little head as I kissed him, his tiny slumped shoulder like a crookneck squash. Arnie was, essentially, my first baby, and his growing up was a betrayal, forcing us to acknowledge the coursing atavism that rises in adults.

So, Arnie was between us in the station wagon, scared out of his wits, hugging his knees as the shark fin came through the water. Reggie and I laughed heartlessly. It struck me that he didn’t quite understand what was going on in the autopsy scene, and I barely cognized it myself—it was too untenable to register as something that could happen—pieces of a girl in a box. I think what shocked me the most was that there were people who had the job of looking at such things.

*       *       *       *

Why don’t you like Phil? Reggie always asked. Why don’t you like Phil? It was a good question. She’d been saying it for years.

We lolled to the movement of the porch swing, sipping boozy tonic water with chunks of watermelon. Across the corn fields the sun’s longest wavelengths reached for us through the red-hot atmosphere of the west. Andreas and Phil were locked over a basketball like two Knicks playing to the death, down on the gravel turnaround, surrounded by screaming kids. Oh, I liked Phil Thalasso, but he didn’t care much for me.

”Phil says you play your cards close to your chest,” Reggie said.

”What’s it to Phil,” I said dreamily. Phil read books on how to read people, which seemed predatory, but if I had to run a supermarket like him, maybe I’d worry more about understanding the human race. On the lawn, the violet hare browsed, and from the henhouse came the wing-drumming squawk of a hen going to roost. Reggie reached over and guddled in my drink with her strong fingers, and found the watermelon. Vodka vaporized on my hot skin, down inside the sleeveless blouse we’d made together from a Butterick pattern, as we made everything; both our sewing machines set up in my living room, our tops interchangeable because we were the same size.

I crunched ice. The game below us was invented when we weren’t watching; you could only guess at the subtleties involving a basketball, a pink hand towel embedded in the dirt, and Arnie guarding the open tailgate of one of the station wagons with a jai alai cesta. Phil wore a whistle around his neck like a coach, and blew it when it was time to switch sides. He was even taller than Andreas, and he dodged, whistle in his mouth, planning tricky plays with Shawnee. Phil and Shawnee were twenty times more advanced than Andreas and Nan, who could barely pass the ball, but a fouling penalty frequently sent one of them sprinting down the road to the first telephone pole while the game continued.

At any rate, Reggie and I were too crocked to play, too dreamy and sweaty, worn out from a day of summer with the kids. My head fell back and I pushed off the floor with my toes, and we glided with the pinchy squeak of chains in their hooks, the ice in our drinks crackling. ”Remember that time we stole Rafe’s car?” I asked. In high school we had sneaked the keys to her brother’s car and hit the highway, and when we opened the sunroof, rotten snow dumped over our heads.

Reggie had a horrible laugh, a demon goat’s blaat. That laugh turned me into a thief in the night. She closed her fancy eyelashes and threw back her head, while I laughed because she was laughing. We were out of breath when Phil came lunging, stringhalted, up the stairs. He groaned and laid himself out on the top step clutching a charley horse in his calf. Reggie gave me her glass and leapt up.

She knelt over him like a goddess in a halter tie blouse, her sunglasses propped in her satyr curls. Bracelets slid down her arms as she took up his black-furred shank and massaged it. Phil lounged on his elbows. ”You won’t believe this story I heard,” he said, making sure I was listening. Phil also read books on thinking big, and tried to get the rest of us to grasp business concepts, so I suppressed a roll of my eyes. ”There was this girl who had a snake,” said Phil. He glanced at Reggie and she bit her lip knowingly, and that, coupled with her caparisoned fingers deep in his calf, made me look quickly away.

”…a Burmese python,” said Phil. ”First it was a little baby snake with perfect brown spots,” he said, craning back until I met his eyes. He had to shave twice a day, his jaws dark as pencil shading. ”She did a heck of a job with it, and it was so tame. Well, the damn thing got bigger and bigger. And she loved that snake and the snake loved her.”

Phil glanced up at me again, and I shuddered to indicate my thrall. I was holding both glasses and I lifted Reggie’s and just barely sipped from it.

He watched an airplane draw a streak of silver across the evening. ”And the snake came when she called. No, really. And every evening, when she laid down, the snake would appear and stretch out at her side. They were happy as two clams, and she’d look into its beautiful eyes. She started thinking of herself as an amateur herpetologist. Then one day, she got the chance to talk to a real herpetologist, and she proudly described how well she’d tamed it. And this guy says: ”No, you have to get rid of that thing immediately! Every time it stretches out beside you, it’s measuring you!”

Phil, grinning, looked back, and his eyes went right through me. I flinched. Phil wanted to force an issue. He knew it and I knew it, but it was a problem that was usually underlying, only turning up from time to time like the fleck of tinfoil in a wad of gum, zapping my fillings and tasting alchemic.

Shawnee came pounding up the porch stairs and paused to expertly billow and snap her gum as she pulled up her knee socks. ”Me and Dad are beating the pants off ’em. What’re you guys talking about?” She was eleven, perpetually scented with esters of Dubble Bubble, her strawberry hair artfully feathered.

” —’Dad and I,’ ” instructed Reggie, standing over Phil and looking down at him with her dirty-velvet eyes.

“Shawnee, bring your old Dad a glass of water,” said Phil.

Shawnee smiled slyly, slammed the screen door and thundered through the house.

I got up and leaned on the porch rail. As I watched, Andreas and Nan seized their moment and pressed up the court, Nan on his shoulders with the basketball held above her head, terror and hope in her face. She heaved the ball through Arnie’s defense and into the back of the Thalasso family station wagon. Then Andreas, in a well-oiled movement, plucked her over his shoulder, held her close, and set her down.

Shawnee with her directionless fire was standing over Phil. ”Goodnight, John-Boy,” she said, and dribbled water in a long strand into his eye. Phil just closed his eyes and took it, but Reggie snapped her fingers like the Fonz, and Shawnee’s nerve failed. Phil shook the spray from his head. Then he came to his feet, grabbed the glass from Shawnee, put her in a headlock, and gulped the rest.

I flicked a watermelon seed from the porch rail and by the time I was aware of everything around me Phil was back in penalty limbo, sprinting down the lane in puffs of dust while Andreas and Nan exchanged a look of wry patience and Arnie lazed on the tailgate and Shawnee with her Farrah Fawcett hair drove up the court towards some imaginary triumph. The dusky farmland air was polleny and soft, and they were nearly in silhouette, figures against the scrim of the far horizon; the graceful leap of a man in the sunset air, guarded by a little girl.

*       *       *       *

That summer, we needed to repaint the bathroom. I hauled all the paint cans out of the garden shed and rose to this watery task, a naiad loosed, describing ribbony stripes of lavender, cyan, amber, moss; tinting the paint oxygen-pale near the ceiling so that you could feel the surface of the sea. Reggie was amazed. I grew willful. My hands and eyes and body squared with providence; I was high and cocksure, and if you could have got a mile away, it would have looked right. If you just could get back far enough to see.

At the end of August, riding on this artistic confidence, I began construction on a cob oven. Reggie and I loved the little beehive stove in the magazine pictures. For her it formed the centerpiece of an outdoor kitchen, perfect for garden parties, and in her sketches she placed it on a terrazzo with a Hellenic bench and a potted palm. For me it embodied a yen to function tribally, using only fundamentals: grain, stone, fire. To Andreas, it was a pizza oven; to Phil, a waste of time. The cob was a mixture of clay and sand, water and chaff, so for the kids it promised the glories of stomping in mud.

We built it at the top of the lawn, near the garden, where the hillside ran into the old orchard. We should have begun during the hottest part of summer, to give it time to cure. The magazine article made it look easy, and then it became the hardest thing we’d ever done. I spent days harvesting blue clay from the hillside above the orchard, toiling with wheelbarrow and gummy shovel, filling washtubs with clay and water. I knelt over buckets, mashing out roots and lumps, pouring off the debris, and ran liquid clay into a gunny sack to sieve out the water. I splatted this semi-refined clay onto a tarp that I kept covered with painter’s plastic. Silty grey water ran down the lawn. Then we needed sand to mix in, to form our cob, and this meant a trip to our beach on Lake Ontario.

*

I was a reality said not to exist, but I came from somewhere time out of mind, all my connate convictions part of a longer campaign. My feelings were unspeakable, and I was aware of that, of course, but also this: I kept them to myself, they did no harm. They ate at me, after all; I was the one who suffered, when I allowed myself to admit them. Only me. I said nothing about the feelings and expected them, out of kindness, to go unacknowledged. But Phil was big on facing facts.

Considering what came after, it’s telling that when I think of my life’s abruption I see Phil rising from the waves, a frogman from another realm come to divide me.

*

Our beach was off the lake road, a concealed place, and our station wagons wallowed like prairie schooners across the trackless no-man’s-land between the highway and the shore, the kids and dog running toward the edge of the bluff—the last stable holdout before the surface of the planet blossomed into jellied light. At the edge, they leapt, and disappeared.

We parked the station wagons and hiked down an eroding dirt bank to the rocky shingle cluttered in driftwood and fishing line. Here a miniature point curved out into the waters, with a frisky little alder on its crest. The summer before, we had built a stone fish trap, and it languished now with fingerling brown trout flashing across its submerged walls. A small ooze, filmy and noxious, seeped from the bank. It was not a lovely spot, and always windy, but it was our own, and when the kids dug below the magnetite wrack line they found ample coarse, pebbled sand.

Andreas strolled the shore watching for the Toronto fata morgana, that floating, mythy sky-line none of us had ever seen. Phil in his sleeveless wetsuit vanished like a combat swimmer into boundary waters, to the agony of the border collie Rags, who stood in the wavelets, barking. ”Let’s hope he doesn’t run into our old pal Charybdis,” I said, and came to regret it. I had no idea how Phil oriented out there, and imagined myself lost in the chop, the Great Lakes fingering my bones. ”How can he forget the shark movie?” I asked. Nothing could have convinced me that sharks didn’t hunt these waters.

”Phil wasn’t scared of it to begin with,” said Reggie, as we wedged our folding chairs among the rocks. ”He said all you have to do is punch it in the eye. He said the shark looked fake.”

We blocked the wind for each other as we lit our cigarettes and put our sandaled feet on the ice chest. The whole point of that movie had been wasted on Phil. The kids, grim as miners, trudged up the bluff with pails, filling a washtub in the back of my station wagon. If they flagged, we leaned forward and clapped threateningly, but soon we all tired of this, there was a general air of dispersal, and Reggie opened a New Yorker. I noticed Arnie out on the lake, straddling the deck of Phil’s kayak, sailing with a windbreaker tied to a paddle. Reggie read aloud. Wonderfully, astoundingly, Georgia O’Keeffe did not claim any theories of art. Under the guidance of Reggie’s voice, new modes of being plucked at me. Sometimes I saw myself painting, not as a hobby but as a force, with grit, my entire being in motion. I would fill enormous canvases: waves, prairie skies, pack ice. I’d paint things you’d have to get back a mile to see.

”Where’s my shell?” Nan called in a high-strung voice. Phil had bought her a 7-Up at the gas station and her voice had a sugared whine. Shawnee was carrying her around piggyback, saying they were twins, and the dog leapt around them, snapping at sand fleas.

”In your bucket, Silly,” Shawnee said breathlessly. They cantered up. They looked nothing alike; Shawnee was big for her age and showy; Nan was a fairytale girl, elfin, flaxen, her jaw chattering. Reggie and I felt a pride in their beauty we would never admit.

Nan laughed in nervous relief, letting go to clap a hand to her heart, an affectation learned from her grandmother. She was often astonishingly like my mother, in an inborn way that charmed Andreas and appalled me. She was beginning to seem a little high-strung, but the start of school had us all on edge, even Shawnee, who was as prepared as you could ever be for fifth grade with her quartz-blue eyelids and her striped roller-skating socks.

Nan dropped a pocketbook mussel shell into my palm, jerking her hand away as the dog danced up. The kids, tasked with gathering tesserae to mosaic the oven, brought garnets, Petoskey stones, beer can tabs, blue slag; I tossed it all in a pail.

Left alone, Reggie and I sighed. We parked close in our wobbling chairs, a knee pulled up to hide the transfer of a roach nipped in a hemostat; we were in an idyllic phase, believing the kids hadn’t figured it out. We thought we were subtle, but if challenged, we became the authorities, rising combatively to defend all that was unwholesome. After all, the children had brought us to unforgivable levels of drear that included plunging fouled diapers into toilets with our bare hands. Secretly we resisted, with codewords and muttered curses. We were good at hiding things, muffling sex, jamming dirty novels under mattresses, for we lived two different sets of lives, one on top of the other—a glorious, invisible alt-layer of adulthood that nevertheless garnered a residue of houndish exhaustion like nights spent dancing in a fairyland.

Ms. magazine said we could have it all, but I didn’t see how that was possible, because we were also supposed to have waxed floors and French manicures. We’d gone through every art book in the library, but we were always waiting for a different time to really start our lives, for the children to be the right age, for Phil to switch jobs. ”Do you think that a person’s fullest expression is always restrained by convention?” I asked Reggie. It was the kind of wild, answerless question I liked to ask.

”We’re going to start taking night classes,” she said firmly, managing my education as she managed everything else, and repositioning her gladiator sandals on the ice chest. ”Or what we should do is just go to Europe.”

Europe was a castle in the air. We longed to see the Blue Grotto of Capri, Georges de La Tour’s use of light and shadow, the Trafalgar lions; but the reality was laughably far off. The kids were growing with startling speed, they always needed dental work, and Phil had taken a ‘Nixon shock’ hit in the market.

The evening waters parted around Arnie’s sneaker toe. He drifted slowly, his dark head bowed with concentration, successfully tacked, and plied the shore. ”Look how Arnie finds the hardest way to do the laziest thing,” said Reggie, over the fluttering magazine. She checked her watch. Pride was detectable in her voice. We thought that Arnie might be a genius, the sort of genius for whom everything is a knot of difficulty.

A black-backed gull stood near us, a garbage-gull, sullen, avoiding our eyes, pretending it had nothing to do with us. Lacking, as gulls do, a dividing septum between its nares, it turned its head and lake-light knifed through its nostrils like a crack in perception. For a moment, I was so high that my head lolled.

Reggie got up and climbed the stones of the point and stood clasping the alder, looking over the lake. She timed Phil’s swims, and had reached the worry stage.

”Mom!” Shawnee called.

Above me on the rocks, Reggie penciled an unlit Virginia Slims behind her ear and descended without hurry. ”Oh, what now!” she said. I ungripped my hands from the chair, and righted my mind. The gull began to run, opening its wings.

Shawnee guided Nan, who held one hand tight with the other, her shoulders drawn up and a look of ringing focus in her eyes as she stared at me.

Reggie sat down beside me and we leaned forward, assessing.

”It was an accident!” Shawnee said. ”He didn’t mean it.”

”Rags bit me!” squeaked Nan.

Rags trotted up, smiling stupidly. ”Her hand got in the way! You didn’t mean it, did you, Ragsy?” said Shawnee.

The kayak scraped over the cobbles and Arnie squelched up the shore.

Reggie wiped sandy slobber from Nan’s palm with her manicured thumb. There was no blood, but I saw, with a uterine jolt, the puncture in the flesh of her hand, above the heart line. I couldn’t seem to react. ”Oh, Nanny, he really got you!” Reggie said, her tone a perfect modulation of sympathy and sarcasm. She nudged me. ”Nurse, we’re going to have to amputate.” I reached down among the towels in her straw bag for the flat glass bottle of Olmeca tequila, unscrewed the lid, and hesitated.

Nan watched me, shocked. Shawnee was irritatingly close, clumsily patting her, and the wet dog had pushed in among us, tipping his ears curiously. Arnie hung back, his lip going white between his teeth. Reggie took the bottle. ”Now this’ll sting a teeny tiny bit,” she said, and splayed open the small hand and sloshed tequila, once, twice, while we all sucked air through our teeth, Nan and I most of all.

Nan’s teeth chattered and she wrung tequila from her fingers. Reggie bundled her in a plushy Aztec-patterned beach towel and pulled her close.

They gazed over the water, into the sunset. I knocked one back while no one was looking. Reggie rubbed Nan and squeezed her tighter. ”My God, you’re brave,” she said thoughtfully, and may have meant it. She nuzzled Nan’s cheek, and said, closing her eyes against the rush of power in the words: ”The thing is, you’re the only one who can make it happen. You’ve got to try, and keep trying.” She was talking to me, but Nan nodded gravely, plucking towel piling with her teeth, and Reggie smiled at me in secret amusement.

Shawnee and Arnie, cutting their eyes soberly, brought a long piece of driftwood and then another, wedging them into the rocks and propping them against each other. A little wigwam began, irresistibly, to form. Soon Nan pulled away from Reggie and clattered over the cobbles in her salt-water sandals.

”I hope she doesn’t have rabies,” said Reggie, as we settled our nerves with a shot. She lifted Arnie’s bird binoculars, glassing the waters. Beside her chair lay the compressed spring of border collie, chin on paws. Reggie had only to point at an animal or child to make it behave, and Rags shuddered and moaned, seemingly clasped by an invisible force.

”It’s hard to watch things happen to her,” I said.

Reggie took the cigarette from behind her ear and leaned confidingly close, lighting it off the tip of mine in a damnable whiff of minty tobacco and demon drink. ”Isn’t that just being a parent, though,” she said. ”In your heart you know you’ve doomed a complete innocent to the worst things imaginable.” She studied me, her cigarette hand cocked back at the wrist, thumbnail clicking under a fingernail.

“Just by having them.”

“So we prepare them as best we can, and then figure out how to live with ourselves.”

Arnie, weighted with importance, began to build a campfire in the rocks, with Nan crouched beside him.

Andreas was coming along the shore. He scanned the glistening waters through his oversized sunglasses, the far-seeing immortality of sunset and solitude on his faun-face. His hair bleached cinnamon every summer. He had made it to adulthood with the sort of purity it would be tragic to crush; Nan had the same sort of innocence, and I hoped that Reggie was wrong. I got up, waited out a dizzy spell, drew a louche knitted shawl across my shoulders, and went to meet him.

“Toughen up Nan, toughen up Nan,” Andreas murmured experimentally, when I explained that we needed to toughen up Nan. “It’s not that she’s not tough: she never cries, and she hiked the Niagara Gorge.” But he was hopelessly blind when it came to Nan, and I was inclined to trust Reggie’s judgment. We came upon a soccer ball and he began to scissor behind it, slowly, hands in his pockets. “She’s grown up so much this summer; I’ve grown up this summer,” he said, his voice cracking, and then, softly, chivvying himself toward the idea: “How to toughen up Nan.”

Shawnee shot in and fought him for the ball, and he laughed, shuffling his huaraches and calling out in his mild boy’s voice that she was being unfair, looking up to include us all in the game. As he sauntered up in his ‘Hang Loose’ T-shirt, the camp, centered by the fluttering fire, felt like a lark. Nan ran to meet him and he took off his sunglasses and tried not to exhibit dismay over her bitten hand; he had noticed the look on Reggie’s face, and he went straight up the bluff to signal across the empty dark waters with the station wagon headlights. It was, at that point, all we could do.

Reggie stood on the point with the alder, a sea-widow gazing out. I flipped the kayak to make a table and got the kids started on their hot dogs. The darkness was thickest on the bluff, where Andreas stood; a seemingly unquenchable light lay over the waters. The children sat quietly on a driftwood log. Arnie, demonstrating for Nan, blew across the lip of a 7-Up bottle and under his careful embouchure the bottle whuffed softly. The fire seemed thieved out of thin air, and the children also, in their row. 

Then a whoop went up from Andreas and I shuddered. Out in the waves there was a stirring, a heavy shoulder parting the membrane, and, in a dense resumption of gravity, Phil rose from the roll of the seiche.

*       *       *       *

All the following week, I remembered the huge joy in our camp as Phil came out of the water, his face drawn tight to the bones and sightless; how the dog spun down the beach and launched into his arms. Phil let the dog lick his chin and then tossed him aside and pulled off his fins and limped barefoot up the rocks to the weenie roast. Andreas tossed him a towel and Phil caught it without looking. The worry and then the joy, the glacial lake water and the warmth of the fire; how chiaroscuro unhappiness and happiness are, twined close, showing three-dimensional form in two strokes.

He stood drying his arms and observing the kids anew, the three of them, firelit. Reggie fussed around him. The water had taken his edges off, and he seemed, as I had rarely observed him, humbled.

”What did you see out there, my good man?” called Arnie in his soft voice.

”Well, I swam to Canada,” Phil said slowly. He buried his face in the towel and, emerging, said: ”I bought a house, lived a life. Time is different there. I had better luck with the stock market. I invested in a Mars colony. Eventually, I just got in a rocket and went.” He worked his shoulders out of his wetsuit, with Reggie’s help.

Arnie and Shawnee glanced at each other. Between them Nan gaped wonderingly up at Phil. He stared back at her, unsealing his bathing cap. Then he shook his head until his devilish hair spiked. ”You know, I didn’t like that red dirt,” he went on. His chest continued to rise and sink profoundly. ”Looks like Oklahoma. One fine day on Mars, I looked down into a puddle.” He took his thermos cup from Reggie and slurped hot coffee. ”I saw a tiny man, down in the water, swimming. I got down and looked closer, and it was me in Lake Ontario. And the sky was just this looking down—” Phil pulled down the skin under his eye and rolled his wild orb.

”Ew!” cried the kids. Phil looked at them over his thermos cup, hiding his grin.

”I didn’t even know you were gone!” Nan chirped, and Phil broke, leaning over to spit coffee.

We all laughed, looking at each other—it was infectious, but Nan’s laugh was hesitant, and her eyes were on me. She was confused by our indifference to her dog bite, and as she adjusted to our callous reaction I felt her conspicuous distance from me. I was again surprised to find that life intended to pry us slowly apart. From the way she held her shoulders I imagined her hand was throbbing, a centralizing shock. I was ready to take her home, feel her brow for fever, give her half an aspirin ground in a teaspoon of honey.

Shawnee noticed Nan’s new layer of courage and disaffection, and patted her and leaned close, grotesquely displaying an incisor she had chipped while running through a parking lot. When Phil heard about the dog bite, he began showing Nan his terrible bike wreck scars. Half his hairy body was bared, his wetsuit sloughed to the waist like a banana peel, and he had glorious silver scars all over his elbows. Phil was no stranger to pain. He’d detached a retina barnstorming off the Helderbergs; he’d stepped on a whiptail stingray.

Reggie, wiping the gummy neck of the ketchup bottle, described the long midline incision acquired during Shawnee’s birth. Even Andreas, who glowed with luck and perfection, had once jammed his finger rolling a dune buggy. And I had a muffler burn on my calf from clinging behind one of Reggie’s boyfriends on the Mohawk Towpath.

Then Phil claimed he’d been shot at with rock salt and had a scar on his buttock, and in the firelight he turned around and prepared to show us, while the kids screamed with laughter. So there we all were, none the worse for wear, possibly even proud of the things that had toughened us up, and Andreas smiled at me, thinking the same thing.

All that week, in the distance, I saw the campfire on the beach. Through all the evenings of my life I will see that bouquet of sparks and the chorus of children with their marshmallow sticks, Nan sitting straight-backed between the bigger Thalasso kids. Reggie was beside me, her foot near mine on the kayak, and she had an oxeye daisy flowering in her goatherd’s curls like a diadem, a glow of mosquito-spray at her throat, and the dog’s leash wrapped around her long uplifted wrist—Cleopatra with the asp. I lay back in my chair, admiring this, storming heaven, and perhaps I was a little drunk, a little remiss, for a quiet settled over the group, that cold silence that forms the base note of ostracism. By the time I looked up, a troubling voltage had passed among the adults. Phil and Andreas were standing together, reading each other, and Phil had taken Andreas by the shoulder as if he were about to tell him something profound, and at that moment they turned as one and looked at me. I discovered that a jolt of perfect guilt had waited all along like a poison capsule pinned between my molars. And I bit down.

*       *       *       *

All week, that warm September, our last week, I was unable to work on the oven, unable to sew or sketch or keep the kitchen clean, but I dug potatoes, and I read for hours, lying in the orchard on an old coat until the woodlice uncurled and went on with their lives in the fallen leaves around me, and now and then an apple plunked onto an overturned bucket. I hadn’t seen Reggie since the beach, although she’d called to ask if Arnie had left his football spikes at our place. School started: the bus coming around the hill, the Pink Pearl eraser and the Pluto thermos of cold milk. The final night was a warm evening, a Thursday. Around the abandoned cob oven lay tarps, buckets of sand, stacks of brick, and the empty wine bottles needed for the insulation layer. If I could have crawled out of my skin, I would have, and I felt inexorably vile, but I kept my mouth shut and hoped no one would notice.

Nan had math homework that night; we had put it off. If they can’t teach the kid at school, how do they expect the parents to do it at home? It wasn’t even New Math, but I ended up stymied. Diabolically, there were some of the answers in the back, but not the ones we needed. I slammed the book. Nan had gone away inside herself, her eyes closed. Self-righteously, I cursed a third grade textbook for not making sense, and went out on the porch for a cigarette, slamming the screen door.

Andreas took over immediately, although he’d worked all day. I leaned on the porch rail. The stars bent their light-rays as if I were the only person on Earth looking up and the moon seemed closer than usual, nearly full. Pointless, very hot tears sat in my eyes. There were many things, I realized, that I never should have been allowed to do, and there were many sensible systems of knowledge that ran contrapuntal to my useless visions. When I heard Nan’s chortle in the kitchen, I smiled helplessly, and felt worse. Andreas had a way of demonstrating that math was simply a game invented by humans to amuse themselves.

Out of shame, I avoided Nan for an hour. I was not in the mood to apologize. I needed anger to give myself substance. I was folding towels on the dryer when I heard her in the bath. I put my head in the door, and put a warm towel on the rack, and said, cooly, ”There’s clean underwear in your drawer, so don’t come to me saying you can’t find any.”

She was floating a cottage cheese carton lid on the surface of her bubble bath, and she looked up at me curiously. Her braids were tub-dipped, dark as wildflower honey. She had perfect, natural posture, with her little child’s chest and her winged scapulae, and against my sea-striped wall her silver-blonde head was so beautiful that I burned with silent, artistic pride.

On the cottage cheese carton lid rode a tiny tableau: a teacup the size of a thimble, and a plastic farm animal. I snorted, snatched up her scattered clothing, and went on my way.

On her way to bed, she looked in on me. I was lying in bed reading In This House of Brede, which I never finished—to this day I don’t know if the novice stuck with the abbey or returned to the real world—and I held out my arm without looking up, trying not to lose my place. She put her arms around me. ”Okay, Chick?” I asked. Her head was in the hollow of my shoulder. I kissed the top of it, nettling myself for not washing her hair, for not ironing her dress or making her lunch. The morning would be a jumble of irritability, and I tightened my arm around her and shook her slightly, and kissed her again. I saw her through the eyes of the adults at school; teachers, bus drivers, the other mothers. PTA mothers, judging Nan with a practiced eye, a judgment which bent like a light ray back onto me.

She lifted her head, pure acceptance in her eyes. ”Don’t be friends with your child,” people said, but I had never been smart enough to side-step the pitfalls of life, and I couldn’t seem to avoid showing her my sadness, my flaws and stupidity and rotten personality; nor could I avoid leaning on her for comfort. She was not just a child, she was Nan, with a scar on her tummy where we were joined. I was certain we’d be friends for life. She’d seen me at my worst—trying to get to the bathroom naked, early in the morning, snarly, some unnamable substance slipping from me. She’d watched me slam the horn. She’d seen me sobbing at the movies; kicking a washing machine; flirting my way out of a ticket. She’d once hit her head on the dash when I flipped a doughnut in a snowy lot. Built-in between us was a troth of truth—utter, endless forgiveness that I tended to lean on hard.

”Okay, Mom,” she said, and patted me.

Alone, I lay moping, the book closed around my hand. In the living room, Andreas put ‘Moon River’ on the stereo to help her fall asleep. He made things run beautifully. I got up and eased down the dim hall, silent past her bedroom door, Audrey Hepburn’s untrained dianthus voice pulling me. For years it had been Mary Poppins singing ‘Stay Awake’, a song that would lay waste to the grimmest insomniac. Then for an interminable stretch it was ‘Little April Shower’ from her Bambi record. But now she frequently asked for ‘Moon River’, with its mature longing and its wistful sense of already having lost the game, and I knew she was growing up.

Andreas was at his desk in the living room, a goose-necked lamp pulled low over a piece of graph paper. The music was unbearable, drawing out hope on a frangible thread. He put his free arm around my waist, and clicked his mechanical pencil. ”Okay, Mama?” he asked.

”It’s not your fault,” I said, petting his grassy hair and stroking the soft spot behind his ear. I couldn’t at that moment think what I was referring to. He had his Rodale’s open and was designing a garden. He drafted expertly and I loved to watch him slash lines with a protractor, his mind working through infinitesimal difficulties as if they were nothing at all. At the same time he was so blithe that if you mentioned ice cream, he would cross his hands on his knees and Charleston across the kitchen. As he bent to pencil in a tiny square I clearly saw that each of us struggled to live the life we needed to, at variance with the others, in fealty to our mute, underground selves.

Ⅱ

In the morning, I opened Nan’s door and winced into the bright silence. The pale animal nest of her bed was splayed open, a sheet-end swirled on the braided rug.

Irritably, I looked for her in the bathroom, then put the kettle on for instant coffee and stood on the front porch, tightening my bathrobe. I lit a cigarette. My feet curled against the cold boards and sunlight warmly fingered my throat; before me the morning lay breathless and far-seeing, the cow pastures sparkling with prisms. The day had promise, and my hand had a faint tremble that a glass of water would set right.

I faced the months of getting up at the crack of dawn and braiding Nan’s hair while she pivoted one heel, biting too deeply into her toast so that it lent a jammy extension to her smile. Minutes before her departure, I’d sink into a fury of self-consciousness as if she were a piece of dubious art I struggled to cohere; snapping a hairband onto the end of her imperfect braid, restraining her by the wrist and scrubbing at her cheek. We both loathed the antagonism of these moments, an electrostatic repulsion that culminated in the hellish fury of getting her down to the bus on time.

”Run!” I’d scream from the porch, thrilled to be free of her, while she pelted down the lane with her lunch box, jinking the potholes like a rabbit, the school bus heaving fatefully around the point and hovering for a mysterious moment beyond the plum thickets at the bottom of the pasture, then appearing, marigold-orange at the end of our lane, carapace humped, snow chains slapping the undercarriage. Nan always turned, safe on the bus steps, waving wholeheartedly, and I’d wave back, our impatience with each other elided in the larger face of separation. I’d endure the burn of love, leaning my head on the porch column, and then she’d be gone and the insistence of art would again consume my mind.

My bare feet ached on the moon-cold boards, and I went down the steps tapping ash off my cigarette. The dew on the lawn was refrigerator-cold. I stuffed my menthol-bright lungs with enough air to yell her name, balancing to flick away grass-clippings pasted to the arch of my foot, and that was when I saw the screen in the flower bed, the screen from Nan’s window, leaning against the house behind a sprawl of thyme and the peppermint that grew where the faucet dripped. The window, like all the windows in our house, had been wide open for the night breezes. Inside the house, the kettle whistled hysterically up the scale. ”Nan!” I breathed, and rotated vaguely, holding my robe closed, the circle of my existence expanding outward with a surge that made me dizzy.

Then the scream of the kettle cut off, and Andreas was on the porch. He saw my expression, bailed over the railing and ran to me. I pointed at the screen.

We ran through the house together, calling her, looking under the beds, in the closets. I dressed, feverishly, and stamped my feet into tennis shoes. I heard Andreas shouting her name in the orchard. He had checked the garden, the sheds, the henhouse, the car. We spread out, covering the property. The caged rabbit drummed a warning as I passed. We ran into the cow pastures and the brushy land below the house; we went up the hill above the orchard. We looped back and checked in with each other, and then, as Andreas poised to start over the hill to the neighbor’s pond, the school bus braked with a hiss at the end of the lane.

It thrummed there, the doors closed. I was panting and felt too sick to respond, but Andreas, holding my arm, wheeled angrily and shooed it on. Then he ran uphill past the mess of the outdoor oven and disappeared into the trees. I raced into the house and called Reggie, who called the school while I called the police. My ears weren’t working, and my voice came out in clouds of sound I could barely hear.

Then I was in the station wagon, dropping the keys as I tried to start it. I went too fast over the bumps in the lane, drove like Go, Dog. Go! into town and back, and then down the neighboring road below our house between sloping corn fields, past the hog farm. In the confines of the car I called aloud for her in a dream-squeak. As I raced home up the lane, I was ensnared in a cavalcade of local police and Erie County sheriffs, all rolling their lights, and I floated in among them, parking where I could find a spot, men with their hands on their holsters surrounding me as I got out of the car.

Now our house was full of stone-faced men in creaking leather, who poked into rooms or hunkered down at my side to question me. Had Karen Ann ever run away before? Did we have a fight? Was she at her grandmother’s? Could she open the cover to the well? Could she have gotten a ride to school? Had I seen anyone suspicious around the place? Had she taken any money? Was anything missing? Did she like to play jokes? Did she have a friend who was a bad influence? Had she ever hitchhiked?

”She’s eight years old!” I said. I was clammy from shaking, my mind stupid with fear, and I startled out of my skin every time the screen door slammed. A dozen voices talked at once. Officers took photographs out of frames and bagged them, milled on the verandah, or stood switching channels on their walkie-talkies. More cars pulled up. Andreas was questioned separately.

”Whoa-whoa-whoa,” said the cops, as Phil and Reggie came in the door, followed by one of Phil’s co-workers in a supermarket uniform. Reggie ran straight through all the whoaing officers and grabbed me tight, trembling like she had the time we climbed out of a wreck on Route 33.

A force surrounded Phil. He commandeered the kitchen wall phone. His co-worker stood beside him, taking notes. Phil called the FBI field office in Buffalo. He called Marlene, the school secretary, and closed the school, set up a search headquarters in the high school gym, and got a verbal promise of several hundred volunteers. He called Search & Rescue, ordered up a brace of bloodhounds, and enlisted executives from his supermarket chain to hit the freeways heading toward Rochester, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Niagara. He called the newspaper, the local television station, and, rolling his eyes back for a moment, ad libbed a brief, powerful bulletin for the local radio station, to be read every fifteen minutes. He tossed a map across the kitchen table and drew circles on it. He ballparked how much money we could amass if we needed a ransom. He was on the point of ordering roadblocks when the Amherst chief of police stepped into the kitchen and took the phone from his hand. The detectives from Cheektowaga had arrived.

Reggie and I sat at the kitchen table and watched the struggle for jurisdiction grow ever more complex. The detectives sealed off Nan’s room. I was fingerprinted, and, at some point, a polygraph cleared me as a suspect, despite my tachy heart rate. I went outside with Reggie when the bloodhounds arrived. Down along the highway, a police detective searched for tire tracks at the edges of the road. The cornfields shook with volunteers running along the rows. Over the hill, the fire department was dragging the pond. Two bloodhounds sniffed Nan’s undershirt and ran from her window to the rabbit hutch, to the driveway, to the fence, then circled in confusion. ”The little girl was carried,” the dog wrangler said. ”She never touched the ground.” People looked at him as if he’d said something obscene. Even the hounds looked uncomfortable. They sat on command, gazing up sadly from the pouches of their eyelids, then were packed up in disgrace.

As I stood on the lawn, a man with a miner’s headlamp edged painfully out of the crawlspace in the foundation, and a helicopter thundered slowly, oppressively over, chopping apart my brain. Reggie put her hands over my ears. It was a relief that the dog wrangler and his horrific suggestion had been proven incompetent. We had once lost little Arnie in a mall parking lot in Buffalo, and I remembered how the future had simply stopped, how the option of life continuing felt impossible as we ran up and down the miles of parked cars in the hot sun. We both dreamed of it for months.

The fire department was opening the wellhead. The local grocery store had donated sandwiches, and there was a table set up on the lawn, surrounded by people. I noticed two men in formal suits threading their way among the firetrucks and cruisers that blocked the lane. The FBI agents from Buffalo had arrived.

The place was a circus. The agents stood for a moment, threw narrow looks at the helicopter, then exchanged an unreadable glance. Then they tapped our phone, bagged up clothing, blankets, and the window screen, and confiscated a plaster tire track lifted from the edge of the highway. They had summoned a K-9 unit. The dog was an intense black German Shepherd in a vest, and he left a wake of admiring whispers. Silence was called for as he worked. Thoroughly, he examined Nan’s room and the window frame and flower bed, and then led his handler down the lawn to the cow pasture fence where he sprang like a deer over the barbed wire. He trotted with a surety down the meadow to the plum thicket along the highway, where they had found the tire track.

The dog’s confidence was undeniable. I stepped back into the shade of the house and leaned against the cool siding. I uncrumpled a cigarette from the end of a pack. A young deputy was beside me. I didn’t know him, although I knew half the police by sight, especially Sheriff Ormiston, whose son was in Nan’s class. The young deputy turned and lit my cigarette for me, his hands shaking. ”Big day!” he said cheerfully.

I blinked, exhaling with my head back against the wall.

”We just took some training on this,” he said, lighting his own cigarette, ”kind of a coincidence, I guess. On guys like Albert Fish, and the Candy Man of Texas…”

The FBI agents were examining the wire fence, and I was only half-listening, the cool wall against my shoulder blades, shade across my brow. I had no idea what he was talking about, but all at once Sheriff Ormiston wheeled and came toward us. He was a tall, sorrowing man as sheriffs tend to be, and kind, but I’d never seen anything remotely like the expression on his face at that moment. The deputy’s cigarette fell out of his mouth, and he dodged aside as if expecting a blow.

I saw many people I knew that day pushed to unrecognizable limits. Phil underwent an interview in the bedroom, and when he emerged he dropped down at the kitchen table with the rest of us. He could not speak. For half an hour he was a suspect because of his intense interest in the case and his suspicious knowledge of law enforcement, but then they dropped him and took up as lead suspect one of our neighbors, an old man with an automotive pit beneath his garage.

An FBI agent pulled up a kitchen chair. Phil had his head down on the table, and Reggie was beside him, working on a press statement. Andreas had lapsed into a fugue state, and I rubbed his arm, trying to keep him with me.

The agent had an actual flak scar beside his eye, and I sank all my hopes into him and his agency. I had found my voice again and, in the hopes that it would help Nan, I answered every question he threw at us.

I said that Nan would never run away, and she didn’t think practical jokes were funny: she worried about worrying us—she was a kid with manners and sense. She had our number memorized. She had saved eighteen dollars to buy a pony; the money was still in her room. She was mature for her age, concerned about whales, yet so innocent that she believed Sea Monkeys would come out looking like that ad in the comic books.

Reggie smiled at me through her tears. The agent wrote everything down. The telephone rang on the kitchen wall, and he got up to answer it.

I wandered into the living room as the phone rang again, and held the screen door for a rescue worker who was running a cable out onto the porch for the television crew. Suddenly Phil, animated again and growling in his throat, brushed past me, jumped off the top step of the porch and pelted down the lane towards his car. He was supposed to do the press conference with Andreas, and I looked after him, bewildered.

”I need you all seated,” said the FBI agent.

We sat down on the living room sofa, Reggie and Andreas and I, gripping each other’s hands. I wondered again where Phil had gone. The afternoon was crisp, brilliant, and the front door was open to the porch, the television crew chatting on the steps. The agent went into a crouch, down on our level, looking us each in the eye, his flak scar tightening. ”That was the lab,” he said. ”We sent her bedding to the lab. Halothane. There was a drop of Halothane on her sheets.”

Everyone in the room was watching us. I didn’t know the word, and I was trying to understand what the whisper in those syllables meant. Halothane. Then concern rippled through the assembly and people hurried towards us. Beside me, Andreas had swooned dead away, fading onto Reggie, who was as pale as he was.

They stretched him out on the sofa and called him back, and I saw that there was still fingerprint ink on his languid fingers. A volunteer firefighter knelt, patting his cheek.

Reggie and I went out to the porch swing. We said nothing. We weren’t to discuss Halothane, which was an inhalant anesthetic. Someone was smoking below the porch, and my wet eyes stung. The FBI agents hit the road, and the television crew milled around us, checking their watches.

The press statement fell to me. I stood there on the porch, and the cameraman, hunched beneath his great mechanical shell, bore down on me with an intensity, curling his lip. I read the statement as clearly as I could through my tight throat, and as I read the only sound on the property was a hen growing flustered in the chicken yard. Then I felt Andreas beside me, his arm around me as my eyes stumbled down the script and found the word ‘abduction’. I appealed for Nan’s safe return and offered reward money. Then, off-script, I looked into the glossy eye of the camera and gasped, ”Nan, don’t worry, we’ll have you home so soon.”

The phone rang in the kitchen, Phil calling to tell Reggie that Arnie had been pulled from a search team and taken to the police station where he was interviewed by a detective without the consent or knowledge of his parents, the questions so disturbing that when the school superintendent—a friend of Phil’s—picked him up, Arnie clung to him and sobbed.

Reggie, incensed, dropped the receiver and went outside. I longed for Arnie then, with his inaudible mumble, longed to comfort him, but the Thalassos had already agreed that their kids shouldn’t see the frightening situation at our house. ”Shawnee,” I said aloud, to no one, because I desperately needed to hold a kid—one of our kids. But Shawnee was with Reggie’s parents in Getzville and had not been allowed to join the town search. I had a lump in my throat over Shawnee, who would be worried sick, and was stuck out there in Getzville.

In the days that followed, the school janitor was interrogated by the FBI until he broke and confessed. The school was closed, the town in an uproar. His confession was completely false, but the man, humiliated, resigned his job. The town’s streets were devoid of children. Reggie and Arnie and Shawnee made thousands of flyers with Nan’s second grade school picture and stapled them up as far away as Batavia and Buffalo.

Halothane cut, cleanly and chemically, a midline down the center of our lives. It was a word that etherized hope. When I tried to sleep, I’d wake with a jolt as someone reached stealthily toward me with a vapory, reeking rag.

Andreas and I half-slept the long hours of the day, waiting for the phone to ring. The henyard gate was open, and as we lay listlessly, threadbare half-wild Rhode Island Reds scratched up the garden and roosted in the orchard. At night, we got in the car and drove, without direction, because not looking for her was unbearable. We were recognized everywhere we went, and at late-night drive-throughs aghast teens refused our money. Andreas and I had little to say to each other, and in the car, our aloneness together was weirdly pronounced. But we hated the house, the closed door to her room, the edges of the lawn gouged with tire tracks. We hated the fact that we had been asleep when it happened.

It was impossible to sleep in that house. It was impossible to sleep. It was impossible.

It was.

It.

*       *       *       *

One evening, the FBI called. A child had been found in Vermont—a little girl approximately eight to ten years old. She was 48 inches long. We needed to get to Montpelier.

Andreas held the receiver between us. The man had a growly voice and was brisk with instruction, speaking too quickly, too authoritatively. Andreas was shivering. I began to grasp that this child was not alive. The term in extremis was used. I didn’t know what it meant, but I also knew exactly what it meant, the way you supposedly recognize the language of Heaven, and because Andreas began to slide down the wall, and I with him, so that we were both sitting there on the kitchen floor, propped together, the receiver between us. The term ligature asphyxia was used. We were asked, once more, to describe the nightgown. Right there above our heads were the marks on the wall where we’d measured Nan, with a ruler on her head, while she held her breath with the precise intensity of it.

The man’s crisp, motoring instruction cut off, and I got up and found a cloth tape measure. The highest mark on the wall said Nan 3/18/1975. It was nearly forty-nine inches from the floor, but it was hard to be sure, with the baseboard trim. I kept laboring over this measuring, trying to change the outcome, and finally Andreas turned from his dull fog, the curly phone cord still falling over him and the receiver beeping, lying there on the floor. He took the tape and measured the empty space once again, and then he went into the bathroom and threw up.

At midnight we were lying in bed with an open suitcase at our feet, the overhead light on, and Andreas was on the phone with Reggie and Phil. He hung up, and immediately the FBI called back. Andreas and I sat up, and he grabbed my hand. This time, the man apologized. He was deeply sorry to have troubled us, but the victim had been identified, and it was not our daughter. His mistake. On behalf of the FBI, his sincerest apologies. It was, he said, simply the remarkable correlations between the cases.

*       *       *       *

Andreas and I changed toward each other. We were the parents, sort of lumped together in a category; but we were no longer parents. We were awful parents.

Until that phone call, we had told ourselves that she was alive. Several times Nan had confided daring ambitions: to live with the wild ponies of Assateague Island; to be shipwrecked with a black stallion; to camp out secretly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. None of these things were completely, if you thought about it, beyond the realm of possibility, at least to my desperate mind.

However, the FBI didn’t entertain such possibilities. They looked at the worst possible scenarios, and I hated them for it. They had found a pattern and fit Nan into it, and I could see that Andreas believed them, and believed in the pattern, as he had believed in the Halothane, which could have been a lab error, a crime-scene mix up, anything other than a surgical anesthetic dripped in our little daughter’s bed. He instantly believed the worst. Reggie pretended to side with me, but she also believed the worst, just like Andreas.

Andreas and I drank so that we could sleep, and so that we could stand each other. There were several months of drinking and arguing, of sleeping all day, of driving, silently, on the rainy freeways, of picking up the ringing telephone with a delirious rush of hope. Andreas, always slim and burnished, sat like a crushed thicket of arms and legs, staring at nothing. Asleep, he muttered vile things. He complained of being cold. He had a perpetual sore throat and responded to everything I said with a bitter laugh. Arnie and Shawnee were not allowed to see us much, although I missed them desperately.

One evening I went out, drunk, and opened the rabbit hutch. The rabbit had received grudging care, and had gone without water several times. The hutch stank, but Adelaide’s softness startled me. Her hind legs kicked hard until I supported them on my forearm and held her close, listening to her audible watch-tick pulse. Nan had named her as we stood at the cash register in the tractor supply place. I drew the throbbing ears through my hand, neatening them, and kissed the top of her head, flossy as my mother’s bobcat stole.

I set her down in the grass. She was free, but she didn’t move. I ran at her, stamping my feet. Poised, she watched with her red-pupiled eye. Loose in the countryside, she would be torn to shreds. I saw her as a baby cottontail, cupped in Nan’s hands, and I screamed something. Andreas was coming, and when he saw what I was doing, he ran up the lawn and the rabbit shot away. Then he chased me. My head whirled, and I was screaming and laughing. It was too dim to see and I tripped over a bucket near the wreckage of the cob oven and went down in the grass and rolled around on my back like a bitch and then he was on me, hands around my throat.

I lay in a sweaty thrill; longing for the pleasure of death. His hands were warm and his thumb lay in my suprasternal notch, pressuring my trachea. He hardly squeezed, and I looked up into the dark dilemma of his eyes, the glossy evening sky above, and shuddered.

His hands flew apart and he rolled away. ”I can’t stand you,” he said. He punched the lawn with his fist.

Reggie had once told me that when the Ancient Greeks petitioned Hades, they pounded on the ground to make him hear. Hades hardly listened and didn’t care. Now we pounded so that Nan might hear. The grass was springy, the ground beneath it relentless as stone. I pounded the burning green knife-side of my hand until fractures seemed to form in the ulnar border. Andreas crawled around me, his fists sending percussive hoofbeats up the lawn, sounding stony substrates and worm tunnels, the mineral fundament registering dully. I writhed on my back again, biting my hand, stars flashing and swimming through the mess of my face, his thuds jarring my back and echoing through what was left of my heart. And that was how I viscerally remembered Andreas after that, as a knocking that attenuated through me, into the Nekromanteion.

*       *       *       *

I drifted to my mother’s house in Clarence Center, filled her garage with boxes and set myself up in the armchair where my father had left off eight years before with an ischemic stroke. I chain-smoked with his plaid sandbag ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair, my feet on his ottoman, and, like my father, became instantly hooked on Days of Our Lives. It was the Doug and Julie era—star-crossed, fabulous—obstacles to their love wherever they turned. My mother and I had a stiff, silent relationship, but we were in complete accord over Days of Our Lives, a story that turned as endlessly as life, and with far more vivacity than our own.

Between our chairs was a lace-covered table with a lamp, ceramic praying hands, ashtrays, and detectives’ calling cards. My mother sat stiffly on the edge of her armchair, hands folded around a handkerchief, knees tucked to one side. Her hair was rolled and sprayed into a Gibson tuck and her fine-boned face glanced sideways, as if the television had only caught her attention for a moment. As teenagers, Reggie and I had deliberately defied this style of sitting by pressing our knees together and coltishly scissoring our lower legs, turning a foot on its side.

My mother had the framed second grade picture of Nan—her only grandchild—on top of the television, along with a portrait of my young father in uniform, a pleasant and unfamiliar smile on his face, before the Bougainville campaign and my birth rendered him permanently taciturn. When I finally rose from twelve or fourteen hours of sleeping-pill coma and entered the fog-machine of the world, we sat together facing these lares and penates on their flashing color altar. The television was always on, a giant Zenith, the only animate thing in the room.

In the late afternoons I bundled up and walked down the highway to the dog pound. There I took a leash from the wall and opened a sound-proof door and stepped onto a Death Row as resonant with barking as a circle of hell, a cacophony that matched the one inside me. I did not particularly enjoy dogs; they were too human with their varying personalities and snap judgements, but these were dogs, like me, at the end of the line. There were dogs who grumbled warningly as I entered the kennel; dogs who pissed themselves at the sight of me; dogs who tried to climb me in a frantic need for love. I was unafraid and unresistant. We put on the leash and went out the back door and took a slow turn around a big empty lot bordered by blackberries.

The lot was dead grass and trash. It was always raining, growing dark, the highway rude with noise, and each dog, though an island of misery, began sniffing and sneezing, forgetting itself.

There was a dark, reserved shepherd who was said to be dangerous. Time had run out for him. On our walks he wore an ugly wire muzzle that made him look like an umpire, and when we changed direction he would glance politely up through this contraption into my eyes. I always took him twice around the field. If things had gone differently in his life, he might have been like the police dog who had searched for Nan.

At dusk it was misting softly as we returned to the building. I was weeping without realizing it, as I sometimes did, just a meaty hotness around my eyes. A city-stark moon hung in the Buffalo sky, and the smoke from the crematoria chimney glittered. The shepherd stopped. He turned and pushed his brow under my hand. I felt the buckled strap and the puppy fluff behind his ears.

By prime time I would be back at my mother’s with a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of Mad Dog, drinking myself into a torpor in front of the television. One evening as I walked up to her little white fence, Andreas was waiting in the driveway in our family station wagon.

He had two grand in an envelope. He’d held an auction that day at our place, and was putting the house on the market. I sat in the car with him, glad to be with someone enduring the same experience. My hand went straight into his and we squeezed and squeezed each other’s fingers. We were getting a mid-term divorce terrifying in its cold logic—everything split down the middle, five years of alimony for me; house and property gone, all that had bound us together ripped away. The paper sack of cash and fruity wine was heavy on my lap as I twisted into his arms. Illogically, I kissed his throat as he leaked boiling tears into my shoulder. Andreas, meaning ‘man’. My hands smelled of dogs. His body was warm and slinky and he smelled and tasted as he always did, like a hot croissant.

We pulled apart and he admitted that the same thought nagged at him: what if she comes home and we’re not there? ”It would be like we didn’t believe in her,” he said. ”But this sort of thinking has nothing to do with reality.” He was still working with the investigators, and he spoke of a pattern of abductions, and something called an M.O. I rubbed my thumb on the sharp edge of the envelope and tried not to listen.

”They say she wouldn’t have made it twenty-four hours,” he said, his voice like a teenaged boy with a sore throat.

I really, really couldn’t hear this stuff. He offered me the car and anything else I wanted, but I didn’t want things, I didn’t want to make decisions, and I was grateful that he was dealing with it all. I was exhausted and I only wanted at that moment to go in the house and drink Mad Dog in the chair my father had died in, and watch The Rockford Files with my mother who had adored Nan, and who didn’t expect me to talk.

*       *       *       *

My mother drove me to the Streamline Moderne Greyhound station in Buffalo. She parked in the taxi stand and gave me, as a talisman, her favorite book, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea. It was not a book I would read in a million years, sensing that it contained elegant thoughts on marriage and faith. All the same, I was moved. My mother thought my place was with Andreas; she believed I would soon discover this in New York City, and return. She meant the book as a survival guide; the Lindbergh baby had been a terrifying landmark of her junior high days.

I thanked her in a voice gone hoarse in the past months. I wasn’t the most thoughtful house guest, but she gave no indication that she was relieved to see me go. She lifted her white chamois driving glove from the wheel of her Breezeway and patted my hand. Nan had adored these soft gloves and the cardigan my mother wore over her shoulders like a shawl, and the tulips in her yard and her funny rendition of ‘Three Little Fishies’. I’d spent my entire youth fighting with my mother, while Nan had seen immediately how dear and finite she was.

A taxi honked behind us, and my mother covered her heart with both gloved hands and gulped. Even before this happened, living without my father was a daily act of courage.

Ten minutes later, I sat enthroned among my impedimenta in the back of the bus. Across the aisle was Ray-Shawn, a king of the road in a velvet jacket. He was an effervescent man in constant, dynamic motion, and he was advising the fellow in front of him how to transfer to Boston. He turned and, compatibly, sized me up as a traveling companion. He read, in a glance, my books and clothes, my hangover; saw that no one was there to wave at me, even though I rolled my forehead on the frosty window as we rode the dog out of Buffalo, suddenly missing my fragile mother in her antique car.

Ray-Shawn and I occupied the cool kids seats. We held court together, settled arguments and ran a communal system of childcare, entertainment and vice. People came back to have their portrait done—sitting with Ray-Shawn while I sketched across the endpapers of Gift From the Sea. An emotional, bus-wide conversation sprang up about life philosophy, the big picture, the meaning of it all. Most of us were in the process of changing our lives as we rolled toward one of the planet’s mystic cities, and we felt generous and bittersweet, full of the nervous optimism of change.

By afternoon a naptime had settled over our wards, and Ray-Shawn sat looking past me as I drew him. I could not capture his long wrist hung over the seat back; his glistening skin and golden aura. I restarted, over and over. ”I’m going to New York to drink myself to death,” I found myself saying, and I felt happy finally admitting it—it was a solution, but it sounded a bit melodramatic.

”There’s no law against it,” he said, watching the view from under the hoods of his eyes. ”My mother did that. Grief was down on her back all the time.”

”Oh—!” I said.

”She’s an anesthesiologist now,” he said, the dazed look of a child in his eyes, ” —down in Cleveland. Amen, how far can we go?” He shrugged, drew one long hand through the other, and watched an aged fellow named Charlie, who was rowing his way up the aisle, reaching for each seatback. ”Here you go, baby,” he said to Charlie, dispensing one of my cigarettes and receiving in payment two sticks of Wrigley’s and a respectful duck of the head.

We clapped when the driver honked at a fellow Greyhound, and when he assisted Sylvie, a stumping house-cleaner, down the steps with her bags in Scranton. When Sylvie sat for me, she had prattled cheerfully in an unbreakable flood so rich with alveolar trill that I could hardly follow, while her startlingly sad eyes glared past.

We applauded the Port of Newark, and the Manhattan skyline, and especially the back of the Statue of Liberty, glimpsed to our right, spotlight-pale, gazing away.

By then it was evening, and I had lived a life, passed my flask, sang along, and smoked at each pit stop in a huddle of companions every bit as shit-out-of-luck as I was. People patted me on the back, praised my pictures, wished me all the luck in the world. And then we were rolling into Fear City at a grim hour and I was elated by the wildstyle scope of the graffiti artists, unpaid visionaries, working as big as they could, so aggressive and fluid, gorgeous.

And here, quite suddenly, my clan dispersed, as if I’d imagined them.

I went with the crowd, lugging my mother’s leather hatbox suitcase, with a heavy tennis racket bag across my back. A family approached, bundled in sweatshirts under Levi’s jackets, the emaciated mother turning abruptly to the wall in my path to rapid-scratch a flint lighter. The father, giant and sullen in his cloud of teased hair, eyes flaring bitter dislike, lifted the tiny dangling legs of his little girl over my head as she rode the hydraulics of his immense arm, her mouth open in an incessant whine, her head covered in plastic clips. How precious and impermanent they were! I smiled at the ground.

The city lay in financial ruin, garbage piled around every light pole. I assumed this was how the place always looked. I had a rolled raincoat around my neck, a splitting grocery bag of books. The eyes of hunters flicked over me. I was weak-kneed on cheap liquor; a rube with two thousand dollars and a book by a woman whose child was kidnapped and killed. I didn’t expect to last the night.

*       *       *       *

Creativity generates nothing we need. The actors, especially, surprised me, and the dancers: producing work that existed for only a flash. A painting, at least, sticks around. The amount of effort that went into a play astounded me, all for something that hung in the air the length of a breath. True, a human life leaves nothing but memories, lucid and graphical and in some ways more solidified than the life around you, and so did the plays, the ballets, the operas; the avant-garde pieces, the poetry readings, the subway buskers—because art makes you bigger than you are.

I starched acres of muslin with a push broom. I wobbled on bridges three stories above the stage, squinting through a stinging mist, house paint running in rivulets down my arm. My arms ached, my back and neck and knees, and I often worked into the night, but when I got back, there was a forest at Fontainebleau or a stained London alley; heaven and hell.

I painted at work, and I painted at home, blurry things on canvases that I swiped with house painting brushes or a wad of velvet, but which, when you got back, had a twist of detail that reminded you of something. I painted naked lady parts on a t-shirt and sweatpants and wore them for Halloween. I painted bacon and eggs on a thick diner plate and gave it to the café where I had breakfast.

For years I attended a school run by Lester, a Polish scenic artist who’d mounted productions from Denmark to Cleveland. I’d seen him calmly sew a dancer into a bustier five minutes to curtain, and he claimed to have once lit entirely with storm lanterns a production of Cymbeline in a Parisian courtyard. He spoke, in one breath, of the Globe Theater exploding into flame during Henry VIII, and Edward Gorey’s Broadway production of Dracula. He reminded us that Coleridge used Gregorian chants in Remorse at Drury Lane. He mixed in his congested throat Renaissance couplets, fighter pilot terminology, Slavic curses, thespian superstition, and New York patois. He had lost more family and friends than could be counted on his thick lobster fingers, and he saw, the first time we met, my bedevilment, and put it to work.

”Girl, somewhere there is war,” he said, as we had a drink together in the evenings, with his girlfriend Gita. ”Diabeł! Somewhere there is heaven.”

”But not here,” I’d say.

I worked off-off-Broadway, in warehouse playhouses, in old churches, and up steep flights of stairs in tiny lofts. I worked on enormous cycloramas for the Met. In the early ’80s, Lester and I designed the drops for a television title sequence. First, we went down to SoHo with Gita and watched Polanski’s Repulsion. Lester sketched in the dark as Gita slept on his shoulder and I nuzzled my Prohibition hip-flask. Once we were nicely oppressed, we drafted our sequences. A terrorized girl ran down false corridors and into dead ends, up against our painted trompe-l’oeils.

I slept on a loveseat shrouded in laundry and tissuey New Yorkers pleated open to half-read articles. I did my best not to sleep, or be alone with myself, tried not to glimpse the reflection of my paint-speckled childlike simplicity. I blackout-drank. I climbed piles of dirty snow. My cracked guffaw rang out in underground theater tunnels, in scene shops; across the dismantled stages of Lincoln Center. I held jobs by the grace of God. I’d been dished a blow, and I used this as an excuse for just about everything, not least my willingness to throw down and party.

Sex never seemed to coincide with love for me, but I dabbled in both. To my detriment, I’d fall shakily in love with a mind, and the miraculous human who bore it. Everyone around me paired up readily, with confidence, but I had no clear blueprint for attraction. At any rate, I wasn’t cut out for relationships. Other people lived; I merely weathered.

I loved the backstage version of ballerinas—villainously made-up, trembling, their thinness-unto-amenorrhea, their murderous intent; their smelly pointe shoes and deformed and ravaged feet: taped, callused, bunioned, the metatarsals gnarled, the nail-beds blackened. I loved the hungry way they smoked at the stage door, their toplofty disdain, their foreign accents; the hard ‘m’ in merde. They were cutthroat, sexually competitive—athletes built of steel rope, ruining themselves for the intangible divinity of a moment’s expression.

The found sound of my life was a wine bottle rolling in a gritty circle, or Pavarotti, out on a distant stage. Time had folded over, and one part of me had stopped, and the other was only a silent tracking shot, a dim persona floating down a corridor of hanging black leg curtains and fly system ropes, through phantom performers—as soft as Satan drifting through crowds of demons, down into Pandæmonium.

     Ⅲ

In a dim way I was aware of the Oakland County Child Killer. It was impossible, of course, in New York City, to ignore the Son of Sam. In 1978 John Wayne Gacy was caught, and for the third time, Ted Bundy. The Atlanta Child Murders began. These activities were a layer of canvas-sizing beneath my life, over which I madly cross-slapped gallons of latex with a house-painter’s brush. I shrouded from myself the fact of the Golden State Killer, even as we drifted through the endless, unsubtle decades of the Green River Killer.

Over the years, I spoke to Andreas on the phone, and signed paperwork near the squiggle of his signature. He called me on her birthday, and he’d mention Nan and I jointly, as if we were off together. ‘I love you and Nan forever,’ he wrote in a Christmas card. He remarried, and had more kids, ”—but none at all like Nan.”

I imagined it would be like a figure-ground reversal, and I watched for her on the streets: she would be fourteen—she would be twenty; taller than me, with a platinum cap. The others were wrong, with their bald, ugly theories. And the void space rushes to the fore.

In 1985, the FBI formed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, VICAP, and a few years later, I was summoned for an interview. Andreas called to warn me. Twice, in 1978 and 1981, the bodies of children were found in New York State, and he worked with the police and reported back to me.

I took a long train ride to D.C., and was whisked to Quantico by staff car. I sat smiling woozily in the grim little office of an FBI agent while he tensely whisper-argued with someone at the door. My eyes fed across bulletin boards, award plaques, framed photographs of jumbo jets; it was nothing terrible on the surface, but the work done here was the most sinister kind. There was a row of freakishly indistinct Polaroids on a cork board. A train calendar, a hanging trench coat. The agent’s desk formed a sort of console of files and wire baskets around a blotter.

What a set! Restrained, yet macabre. The window: blinds cracked, string tangled, rain spangling bomb-proof glass.

Braced against the coming interview, I comforted myself with my immoderate plans for an evening with Georg and Merv and a fifth of Heaven Hill as we broom-painted cirrus on a giant piece of sky canvas spread over the floor of the theater shop.

The FBI agent shut the door and turned to deal with me. He was grim, time-strapped, middle-aged; brown with a wheyish cast. A forehead pinched as if from clay; shoulder holster over a snowy oxford. He’d told me his name which I quickly forgot. ”Nineteen-seventy-five,” he said, orienting both of us in time and sinking into the cockpit of his desk. ”East Amherst, New York.” He signified a ‘V’ sign at me, and depressed two keys on the tape recorder before him. My heart indented like the lid of a paint can.

”Hasn’t the trail gone cold?” I asked, thinking about my ragged Janis voice on the tape.

He winced irritably and pinched his fingers under the bridge of his glasses and said: ”It’s not a cold case when I’m looking at it.” His eyes flicked over the tops of his glasses at me as he opened a file. Thick and interesting—Nan’s file. ”I understand you had a curtain drain installed around the foundation that spring. Can you tell me about the contractors?” The door of his office opened, and he pointed at it and said ”No!” and the door shut.

Suddenly before me stood the contractors, clay-splashed, at the edge of the ditch, kidding around and smoking. I was amazed that my memory extended that far; much of my life now seemed fogged and irretrievable. ”There were three of them, they came from Amherst,” I said. ”Andreas hired them.” I wondered if Andreas, too, had been in this office, uneasily shuffling his huaraches as his honey-throttled voice was caught on tape.

”Did they see your daughter?”

”We watched them run the trencher.” It was exciting to have our green lawn torn open, and we were curious about the clay layers. After they left for the day, against their stern cautions, Nan and I climbed down into the trench. Nan was such a well-behaved child that Reggie and I had discussed teaching her to gauge when to break a rule. Down in the trench, I was fascinated with the German chocolate cake layer and the strata of round creek stones in green clay, and a long streak of rusty-gold sand. Nan played in the trickle of water.

”Did you buy a refrigerator? Were there Jehovah’s Witnesses, salesmen, was there a frozen food truck? Who came to your house that summer?” asked the agent. We’d been asked these questions a million times.

”We had a property line surveyed,” I said, feeling pallid. ”Some guys from the county came out.”

He looked down at the file and drew a long-suffering breath. I picked at an iron-on patch on the knee of my coveralls. I had some kind of inexplicable brain damage. I was dense, in a cloud world, my shortcomings many, everyone just trying to get through to me. Plus, there was a limit to the effort I would rise to: what was the point?

”Think bigger,” he said. His velour mustache curved downward as he grimaced. ”Respective of his larger pattern, he was from out of the area.” He watched me, waiting. ”Maybe nobody’s told you, but we have markedly similar cases in surrounding states. We’re talking about Mr. Patient. Mr. Patient knew Karen Ann was there in that house. He waited weeks, maybe months, and he thought about her, and he came back when the moon was right. He operated by the moon. You’ve forgotten him, but something tells me he hasn’t forgotten you.”

”Mr. Patient,” I said, and out of nowhere, a crawling body-shudder took me.

He nodded encouragement.

”There was a vacuum cleaner salesman, but it was a long time before, in the late spring. May or June. I was alone at the house.”

Even though the tape recorder was running, the agent wrote down ‘vacuum’.

”He saw Nan’s rabbit.”

He looked sharply at me. ”Did you tell him it was your daughter’s rabbit?”

”I can’t remember,” I said. The man had not seemed dangerous at all, in fact I was a bit rude to him for wasting my time and because he had a sort of pathetic quality that made it easy. I’d been so young that my rudeness made me feel powerful.

The FBI agent wrote down ‘rabbit’. ”What did you talk about?”

I experienced a contraction of the wasted years, the lack of leads, Nan’s suffering, and the ineptitude of every member of law enforcement I’d ever dealt with. ”Vacuums,” I said testily. ”He was trying to sell me a vacuum cleaner.”

The agent lowered his face and pinned a look on me over his steel rims. Grudgingly, I took myself back to that June day, the porch swing, the shameful mess of love I’d got myself into. ”We talked about the rabbit,” I said. ”He came up on the porch and petted it. He really liked it.”

”Did he introduce himself? Give you his card? Were his plates out of state?”

The picture of the dust mite rose in my mind, blinded, with a faceful of crushing mouthparts. I shrugged and stared at my snow boots, unfocused, perturbed by an overcharged feeling, a whirring of wings in my ears as if I were about to cry, although I never did. Maybe I’d hit my limit. Twelve years of Nan missing; investigators either forgetting her entirely or hammering me with pointless questions. The damage done was never conceded, or the fact that the foggy environs of my head were simply an autogenous response to attack: nacreous layers lapping a foreign irritant.

“I think he was mad at me when he left. He said I’d regret it.”

“He made a threat?”

“He said I’d regret not getting the something-vac. I thought he said ‘butcherback’, but that can’t be right.”

He studied me from an arcane, hooded distance.

”What if she’s alive?” The question popped out of me like a hiccup, facile and hopeful, flustering. The agent had a look of wonder. ”I mean, of course she’s not,” I said. He wasn’t accustomed to my unchecked foolishness, but for a homicide cop he fielded the moment with kindness. ”No one’s ever been honest with me about this,” I said, although I’d always let Andreas deal with the worst details. ”There’s no books on how to survive it. We couldn’t even have a funeral. Nothing I feel really makes sense. It’s like he did it to me. I live it over and over. I’m terrified in the dark, and I feel like he’s coming after me, and I’d almost welcome it.”

”Grief plays with your head,” he said. ”I lost my wife six months ago. Cancer. Every morning I reach for her. If I don’t reach for her, it’s as if I cede to the possibility that we are not, even today, anything but essential to each other.”

”Oh, honey,” I said. I reached through the piles of binders and patted the bundled willow-sticks that made up his hand. He looked down, attending this gesture with mild dubiety. He was indeed too thin, his brow a bed of stress-lines, and politely he drew his hand away.

He turned off the tape recorder and repositioned his tough-cop visage, tightening his mustache. ”You want the truth?” he asked. ”He’s not coming after you. He’s a mysoped. A sadist. A preferential pedophile, a criminal paraphilic. You’re important to this investigation because you’re one of the early ones. He hadn’t perfected things. He might have been sloppy. There’s a crack in his armor, and I’m going to find it.”

When he spoke of the man, his eyes shone, and left me for a map on the wall of the Eastern Seaboard.

”Abduction sites of fifteen eight-to-ten year-old girls in as many years. All blondes. We have ten bodies. His pattern is one-story houses off the beaten track, no dogs. He leaves cut screens, no fingerprints, anesthetic residue. He’s smart and careful, and he feels a blissful vindication in his deeds.”

His pouched, lit gaze was on the ceiling. I’d bumped the ambit of an alliance that had little to do with me. His passion was for this man, this huge, phantom man, invisible, all-powerful, leaps ahead of everyone, bent and feasting in wordless glory over something hidden in the ground.

 *       *       *       *

Three years later, they caught the vacuum cleaner salesman. When they went to trial I was forced to testify. The lawyers had their hands full. I didn’t bother to take the time off work, but was nevertheless dragged off the set of Lohengrin by the District Attorney’s office, stuffed into a jacket, and steered into the courtroom.

I did my best to mask an amygdala circus of fury and memory. I couldn’t look at him, but he and I were the only people who existed in that packed courtroom. I was a key witness for the prosecution; a fidgeting, uncooperative mess, yearning for a cigarette, swan boat paint on my tremulous hands. Later, I managed to laugh about it, my moment of fame complete with a sketch artist’s hilariously awful rendition of me that was printed in Time magazine, and which my friends Bev and John framed as a joke.

But for one afternoon I was in the same room as the man who had put his teeth against me and, through the filter of my soul, sucked out my existence. Every word I spoke was a communication dropped between us, sealing my own demise. I sat in the witness box, kept my eyes unfocused, and, to the degree that I was able, considered technical problems we were having with the Lohengrin swan boat. I don’t know what part of the trial it was or if there were multiple trials. My memory guttered fitfully, but I pointed when the prosecution told me to point, over at counsel. He was sitting at the counsel table, polite, affable, his legs in chains, and suddenly my mind’s eye popped like a flashbulb, and there was the summer’s day, our lane with the blackberries, and the white car coming.

Despite my description of our meeting there was no real evidence, and he didn’t confess to Nan or give up her location, and in the end he was put away for life for other things.

*       *       *       *

In 1996, Andreas’ lawyers contacted me. I was standing in the stage manager’s office with a telephone to my ear as the ghost light of my existence, never allowed to wane, went out. The FBI had found Nan’s body. I was informed that Andreas had signed off on the morgue papers, conferred with the FBI, issued a statement to the press, discussed the re-sentencing trial, and updated the National Center for Missing or Exploited Children. The funeral was at the end of the week.

The whole thing pissed me off, because I felt like the last to know; because the tip was so casually traded for prison privileges; and because the pessimists who had believed the worst from the start were now vindicated. (Although how could you be sure, how could you be certain that it really was her?) I should have been there as they excavated her like an archaeological dig, with a grid of string. She was found in West Virginia, near Harpers Ferry, a fact that threw my polarities awry, permanently altering the map of my life. All those years while I was off doing things, part of me lay in silence in the panhandle forest, under snow or sun or green.

I put my head on Mervyn’s shoulder, sitting on a roll of canvas in the back halls of Lincoln Center, as a radial arm saw lifted and ripped in remorseless metronome. My eyes burned. He knew it was grief, and didn’t ask. I picked at my OshKosh hasp. My cuffs were full of sawdust. A Dickensian whore sat down to pat my foot—Rickie, a career extra, with a sucker in her mouth and a Village Voice.

I spent the final evening repairing a carved foam pillar that a Joffrey buck had taken out with a tour jeté. At midnight I left the city in Merv’s van, embarking on one of the few excursions out of town I’d made in recent years. Stripes of silver and black rolled over me. I went at my own Truckin’ tempo, and mountainous semi trucks frosted in grime honked and floated around me. I hadn’t had a driver’s license in fifteen years. The whole thing was a close-your-eyes crapshoot, the highway visibly rolling beneath the rusted-out flooring, and for heart, I sang.

After a couple of hours, my nerves gave out and I pulled over behind a gas station in Scranton, climbed into the back and dossed down on a pile of canvas. I peeled back the foil on a wedge of zucchini bread contributed by Bev and John. My hip ached. The van ticked. The gang had chipped in on the wad of cash in my pocket, and it gave me some trouble. I bunched a Mervyn-redolent sweatshirt over my eyes, blocked out the parking lot lights, and passed out.

A zap of myoclonus threw my gears. Despite the coyote music of the freeway, the place was quieter than the city. I lay watching the van’s back doors. The windows held an unpromising heaven of vapor light, but I knew in my bones that a face had looked in. Had I locked all the doors? Did I hear footsteps, fingers trailing the side panels, feel the greasy splay of a whorled thumb on the handle of the door?

I was over fifty, thickened, battered, my voice shot from yelling above table saws and live music. I had sailed gamely to this point on a current of grappa and black humor. The van might have been cast adrift in the universe; I dared not look outside. I sweated sharply, and pulled the sleeping bag over my head.

In the morning, tooling up the Thruway, I gnawed a gas station corn dog and sang ‘It’s My Life’ along with the Animals. But my voice began to fail as I got closer to the old towns outside Buffalo. The urbanization was startling, vindicating my belief that the real world was gone, replaced with sketchy backdrops.

The funeral was at a Catholic church outside of West Seneca, which was handy because I had an appointment in Swormville, just up the road. The area had sprawled. I’d forgotten the directions, so I wheeled around the suburbs watching for a steeple. If memory served—and, to be honest, it usually didn’t—the church was called Our Lady Queen of the Sea, which made it sound like a tuna factory, never mind that it floated in a land-locked zone of housing projects. In the end, it wasn’t that hard to find—an ugly modern church surrounded by an enormous parking lot, and enfolded in the slopes of a cemetery.

I had no room to criticize the venue, since I hadn’t offered input, and the church we’d attended perfunctorily in East Amherst had become a fundraising center for the humane society. As it was, I thanked God—or in this case, our virginal Queen of the Sea—that the thing wasn’t in East Amherst, where people I actually knew might show up.

I rumbled into the parking lot with the radio on too loud and parked the getaway van as far from the other cars as I could, nuzzled into a hedge.

The brick church hung in the big side mirror. Compulsively, I lit a Swisher Sweet. Now that I thought about it: give me anonymity, give me bland conformity; give me a bad-taste characterless church with blonde wood and TV screens, with a sound system, for fuck’s sake. It was almost easier. Inanity covers the twisted facts of the world, and the irony of this was actually perfect.

My mouth was full of whiskey, and I got the show on the road, tossing the bottle aside and spit-pinching the cigarillo. After all, I had a schedule to stick to, if I was going to make it back before rush hour.

There was a hectare of pavement to trudge, and I coughed good-naturedly, hands in my pockets. While I had the chance, I looked around for mountains. Mountains: mountains. I was working through an objective problem with the layers of distance in a mountain range, each ridge fainter than the last. A touch of violet in the paint, make it smoky, with a little sun flare scumbled at the edges, maybe daub it. Daubing might look right, if you could get back far enough. If you could just get back far enough to see.

I coughed.

A car door slammed and I quartered away, hoping to go unrecognized in the guise of an eccentric relative.

Andreas stepped in front of me.

I stood there, gaping up at him. He was middle-aged now, solidified but still slender, still caramel-tan, his eyes, both silly and intelligent, riveted on mine. He was holding a boy on his hip, and this was not the moment to meet, in the parking lot with everyone getting out of their cars, kids whining, parents hissing threats.

”I see her in you,” he said. ”I see her face.” He stared at me in agony. Nan hadn’t looked the least bit like me, but he soaked me up as I dug my tire-tread sandal against the asphalt, woozily grinning and glancing around for his wife. He had a new car, one of those minivans, with various kids disembarking from it.

Andreas, with a dazed finger, touched the Ash Wednesday spot above his eyes. ”I see her again, and I—”

”Where’s Nantucket,” I whispered.

He went completely still. Then his lovely dad-face crushed, and he looked beseechingly into the eyes of the small, sullen boy on his hip. ”Look on a map.” 

The little boy returned the gaze critically. He wore a tie tucked into a tiny sweater vest. Andreas held his free arm out for me, and I was in the lanky niche of his body, so pliant, so giving. He dropped his head beside mine. When I closed my eyes I was in the garden, and he was handing things over the rows: spiny cucumbers, cherry tomatoes belladonna-rich and hot as the sun.

A hard contraction came through him, so intense that there was an anxious lag as I waited for him to draw the next breath. His son began to shiver. In the garden, Andreas rucked back dewy husks for a sneaky skunk-bite of corn. Hose water, profoundly deep and mineral, surged from the brass coupling and ran down my chin as I glugged, his hand on my back.

The kid was there in the middle of it all, my wrist crossing his Velcro shoe fastener. Andreas gasped into my shoulder, and the Velcro prickled deep into my wrist, and the little boy’s leg trembled. There was a drowning feeling at the back of my eyes. We used to laugh until we cried, all those years of rolling around together on couches and floors and lawns. I remembered lying together in our bed in the summer light, baby Nan on his chest, a tractor going by on the road below, Andreas singing a funny little song, and Nan pensively lifting her clunky baby head on a wavery neck, with that velvety chevron in her brow that held us both in thrall. Her little lady face. I knew exactly the spot he meant.

I opened my eyes and saw his wife behind the open passenger door, blocking the wind from her hateful eyes as she watched us, a dullard of a girl standing beside her waiting to have her collar fixed. Andreas had remarried and had three kids—I had known and not cared, but they surprised me all the same.

The church was as I’d expected—modern and soulless, with plushy carpet in a liturgical purple that faithfully reproduced, interestingly enough, the predatory ink of crushed sea snails. Some kind of toe-curling praise music misted from on high. I slid into an empty blonde pew, Andreas and his family directly behind me, and congratulated myself on my predictions, contentedly blinded by a swarm of stained-glass sunlight.

As we settled in, I winched myself around in the pew and nodded fondly at them. Their dark judgmental eyes drank me in. The kids looked nothing like Andreas. They had pure ashy-alabaster faces and ash-brown hair and an unnerving impassivity, only their nostrils flaring in a rapture of distaste as they stared at me. In the center of it all, Andreas beamed, effervescent with love and pain. Their mother, made of sterner stuff, looked past. 

How could I possibly be the mother of the golden, saintly Nan, against whom they were eternally measured? It was a question for the ages. I was not maturing well, and I had a thumb that was permanently flattened and blackened, like an arctic explorer’s. Gita’s sister had given me a sort of Ziggy Stardust haircut, and I’d slept on it wrong. I’d purchased my sandals on the street. I wore overalls and my nicest shirt, a vintage silk splashed with big, goopy daisies. It had all looked fine in the funhouse mirror we kept propped at one end of the carpenter shop; I was rolling this trip upstate into several business ventures and had dressed for every eventuality on the agenda, which included dropping off a painting in Waverly, collecting a load of barn wood, and scoring, in Swormville, a soap bar of polleny hashish.

Someone huffed into a microphone. I turned to the front and smiled into my sunbeam. There was a dental squeal. We were probably supposed to sit closer to the front, both Andreas and I, but there were plenty of people up there, and all around, really, the sort of shadow-people who attend churches and do things right. I settled back and sighed at the road bumps and unwrapped a Brach’s butterscotch and salted it away in my cheek. Amplified undersea voices began to speak in the rafters, muffled as thunderheads. I stared into the milky paradise of the sun shaft. A polite interval and I’d be back on the road, but I had not foreseen that I would fall, however temporarily, back in love with Andreas—one of the dearest men I’ve ever known—and the old euphoric pleasure made me sleepy. 

Then a cloud shifted, the room darkened and grew clearer and seemed to tense, and, drawn in by easels of photographs and banks of white lilies, my eyes were led to the transept. Among the lilies was a small hardwood casket.

My ankle was balanced across my knee, foot jiggling, and I grabbed it to make it stop.

With great care, crushing my socked foot in its sandal, I relocated my gaze to the hymnal rack in front of me. Beneath my sternum, two hands cupped a frantic moth. I had known, of course, that I would see Nan again, but I had not considered that she would see me.

I gripped the hymnal rack. I was up. Thick purple carpet. Murex. Murex. Tyrian purple. Phoenician red. I helped myself down the pew toward the outside aisle, with a warning smile at anyone who got close. Light fell dustily from the high windows. There was actually a bad-taste EXIT sign. An usher, waiting tensely, cast open the side door with the timing of a grip, and I was free.

The wind found me, blasting away all thought. I sought out the grade of the parking lot and hiked briskly upward. The gusts were dulled somewhat by several outbuildings on the hill, and, out of breath, I ducked behind one into a lull of air under oak trees, and found, hulking and hidden from sight, the cemetery backhoe. It was gargantuan, school bus-yellow, pistons blue with grease, its bucket folded in and resting on the ground like a knuckle. ”There you are,” I said. The bucket was crusted with fresh soil, and I knew instantly why, and I touched it, raw dirt clawed from the wounded ground, the only truth I’d had all day. I clutched the damp earth and rested my forehead on the cold iron of the dipper arm, and breathed.

Back in my van, I found the clove cigarette, half-smoked. I hummed something vaguely, exhausted, and glad to be out of the wind. My hand shook, but I’d gone a round with fate, or whatever it was that sneaked its punches, and felt slightly worse for wear. At least I’d made an appearance, as much as you could expect from someone like me, and, if the watch taped to the dashboard was right, it was time to hie on up to Swormville with the remnants of my nerves.

I sighed out smoke and gazed at the hedge—something dense, like laurel, and full of tiny birds, their intense little world exactly like ours, played out in miniature. There was a hoof-click, a scrape of hard shoes on pavement, and an apparition brewed up in the van’s passenger window. I started. The regal mystery of Jackie O—headscarf, Lancôme moue; spectacular dark glasses. Reggie Thalasso, hooking her wrist through the trapezoidal construct that held the side mirror.

As I stared, she opened the clunky door, squealing its springs, tossed in her bags, and, with remarkable difficulty, labored into the cab like a greenhorn mounting a horse. The door screeched shut. Her scent—White Shoulders—rushed into my throat. Once, before a party, she tapped a wet finger on my collarbone. ”Now we’ll both smell like rich bitches.”

We looked at each other. Her sunglasses made her expressionless, but she unstuck her lips. ”Hey, doll,” she said, and opened her straw bag.

”Goddamn, I didn’t know you’d be here.”

She laughed her horrible laugh, shaking her head, and didn’t look up from her rummaging. ”You almost got away.” Her wrists were a clutter of African bangles. She produced a cigarette case, thoughtfully selected a pure white coffin nail, leaned out of her bucket seat to light it off my cigarillo, and crossed her legs. The cab of the van was a smoke box, and she delicately worked the crank on her window, careful of her painted nails. Smoke slid into the church parking lot and I heard organ music, faint as afterlife.

”I mean, this is pretty pointless,” I said. ”He put her in the ground twenty years ago, that was her grave.”

”I know,” Reggie said consolingly, without quite agreeing. She recrossed her legs elegantly, there in Mervyn’s horrible van, the floor covered in trash. ”I wanted to talk to you at the trial,” she said, when she had straightened the crease in her slacks.

I was startled. ”You were there?”

”We watched the whole thing,” she said, and plucked something from her tongue.

”We were breaking down Coppélia,” I said apologetically. ”They had to subpoena me to testify. They whisked me in and whisked me out.”

”You were a star witness.”

”I didn’t want to see him,” I said. ”I couldn’t stand it.”

She nodded, staring at the hedge. ”Neither could Phil,” she said. ”They had to remove him from the courtroom.”

Then she hooked off her sunglasses, turning to me. Her eyes were ruined—swollen, as mascara-blurred as the time we got into a cloud of tear gas at a Fats Domino concert. She showed me the damage, then flipped down the visor mirror, clucked dispassionately, handed me her cigarette and set to work.

I toked experimentally on her minty cigarette. ”I didn’t want him to see that he’d killed me, too,” I explained. ”Anyway, it’s not like he told us where Nan was. He only pleaded guilty to the others to save his neck.” I coughed, a chesty, unhealthy cough, and rolled down my window.

Reggie kicked her elegant foot among the fast food wrappers, dotting moisturizer with her wedding ring finger. ”He seemed helpful, like a regular guy,” she said. ”That was the scary thing. I wanted to speak with him…I wanted to ask him…”

She had a tiny brush that somehow recurled her eyelashes. I unscrewed the lid of the whiskey and wondered how many hours of my life I’d spent contentedly leaning against roller towels while Reggie gazed into locker room mirrors with the intensity of a dryad breaching the netherworld.

”Phil wanted to kill him,” she said. “They banned him from the rest of the trial. So it was just me and Shawnee watching it, from the pre-trial on, day after day, and Andreas, of course, and talking to the parents of other victims around the motel pool at night. You missed Andreas’s impact statement. Shawnee lost her internship, she was in real trouble at work, and she didn’t care. She took notes in shorthand every inch of the way. We lived on Fritos and Coke.”

Shawnee: thundering and breathless, pulling up her knee socks; hopelessly boy-crazy. We’d joked that she’d end up in the topless Roller Derby. It was hard to picture her sitting still for a months-long criminal trial, but, to be fair, I hadn’t seen her since she was eleven. ”How is ol’ Shawnee?” I asked.

”She went into criminal law. She works for the Department of Justice in Connecticut.” Reggie closed her bag and looked at me. Her eyes were only a tired approximation of her real, velvety-black eyes, but they met mine steadily.

”What?”

”She fights for children,” Reggie said.

My scalp moved. ”Because of Nan.”

Reggie nodded as she took the flask from my hand and huffed out a breath. We had one for the road. She put on her sunglasses. ”Shall we?” she asked, and opened her door.

”Maybe you didn’t realize the impact on the kids, on all of us,” said Reggie, in the parking lot. The wind was bad. She took my arm, and I cocked my elbow and stuffed my hand under my overall bib like a Regency gentleman. Reggie held the back of her head and glanced into the sky. We strolled very casually, barely moving, one way and then another, cloaked in her opulent scent. ”Everything we did after that, Phil’s run, Europe—it was all because of Nan,” she said.

”Phil’s what?”

”Phil’s run across America. Didn’t you hear about it? From Boston to San Francisco. Oh, sure: three thousand miles, police escorts, news teams in helicopters, the kids and I in the pace car. You know Phil. He raised twenty-seven thousand dollars for the National Child Safety Council. Sometimes Arnie ran with him, and sometimes me—for half a mile. We were on the road for months, skipping fall semester, eating junk. Adidas gave us a lifetime of shoes. Phil ran three thousand miles, through heat and rain and snow, bawling his eyes out, and at the end of it he said he no longer wanted to kill the person who took Nan, although apparently he changed his mind again at the trial.”

”Phil loved Nan?” I asked in surprise. The dads lashed canoes onto station wagons, played tennis, or stood around with clicking drinks while the kids clung to their pants legs. Phil had a way of gathering the drama around himself. He’d probably meant well, but I was relieved I’d missed the whole thing.

”It was like one of ours was taken,” Reggie said. ”You know it was. And then you were gone. And Andreas. We lost all three of you.”

I pulled at my Bowie forelock.

”We couldn’t seem to cope anymore,” Reggie said. ”Phil quit his job. We started thinking differently. We took the kids to Europe, and we didn’t come back. If you keep moving, they can’t throw you out. We were lost, but we were closer, and in a way, happier.”

We had climbed to the level of the backhoe, and we started along a golf-cart path. ”It was more like we decided to stop being afraid,” said Reggie. ”The worst had already happened.” She strolled to the cadence of our words, sedately and without purpose, bumping against me. ”Phil flies helicopters for Médecins Sans Frontières. Our youngest—Odaline—we had in seventy-seven, a complete accident: insanity to have a child after that!”

We glanced at each other, but all I could see was my own dimness sliding from the lenses of her shades.

“She’s nineteen now, and thinks she’s French. Born in Paris. Hates the States.”

”I don’t believe this,” I said happily, for I believed it easily. The Thalassos always landed on their feet.

We were at the top of the cemetery, looking down into the crowns of trees, and Reggie pointed casually, as if at a bird. A fence divided the cemetery from a golf course, and far down it loitered a sullen pixie, her cigarette arm propped on a post. Two young men hovered.

”Odaline dans les bas-fonds,” said Reggie, in a critical tone, and we continued on.

Below us, boys in black trousers ran laughing among the trees, escaping some stifling ceremony, a gathering of people half-hidden.

I sought another fantastic glimpse of Odaline Thalasso. Someone was following us. Reggie looked back along the path, but said nothing.

”Arnie has women problems,” Reggie said. “He works at the embassy in Malta.” She stopped, and we stood there on the path. I patted the bib of my overalls and discovered my Prohibition garter flask—I’d had it for years and years and it was worn soft as a heart. Reggie took it but her nails prevented her from opening it. We each had a belt. The person following us was a woman, dressed in black, tall and rangy. Reggie turned me away from her, shielding me, and we gazed down the hillside of headstones and grass. ”The first time I saw her,” Reggie said, lowering her voice to a hypnotic level and contracting her arm around mine. I understood immediately that we were speaking of Nan. Sparrows lifted from a lilac and left it shuddering. I sighed with happiness, for here was Nan’s origin story, which she’d adored. ”The first time I saw her, I just walked into the hospital nursery; no one was around,” Reggie said, ”and there was a bassinet with a tiny little baby in it. She had kicked her feetsies out of the blanket, and she stopped and looked up at me, right into my eyes. I picked her up. It was like we already knew each other. Just—swoop. I could have sailed off with her.”

I laughed, choked up despite myself. ”Oh, that terrible, terrible hospital,” Reggie always said. ”I could have just stolen Little Baby Nan.”

She looked away, pressing at her nose. I leaned around her. The woman approaching wore a geometric power suit and a whipping black gossamer scarf. Her hair was a burnished mane, her makeup so refined that she had a diamond-like glow; yet her eyes, fixed on mine, were wide with fear. I found myself in the odd position of pitying her. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted until she arrived before me and put her hands on her long thighs and, ignoring Reggie, scrunched herself down to my level.

”Shawnee,” I said.

Shawnee’s eyes flared in wonderment. ”Do you remember me?” she asked.

”Oh, Shawnee,” I said.

”We watch Live from Lincoln Center and think of you,” she said, sounding as if all the air had been pressed from her lungs. Nan would have been twenty-nine, now; so Shawnee was in her early thirties. Reggie was signaling something, and I sensed machinations. Shawnee straightened up, the old artful look on her face. In a snap of chiffon, she faded back.

Down the hill a hymn lifted faintly in the wind. Reggie adjusted her grip on me and steered me straight out into space, off the edge of the path and down the hill amid ledger stones and cypresses tilted with creep; the footing was treacherous and we were slightly drunk, gathering momentum, careening as we went. ”Putain!” she blurted, stepping wrong, and I snorted and our linked arms tightened; we were in it together, Reggie and I, as we had always rolled along together, as real painters paint—free from ego, free from sense—down all the troubled hillsides of the world, through car wrecks and childbirth and killers; the sheaves of ourselves falling away and whatever was left of us—whatever remained true through it all—still motoring along together.

A marquee was visible through the trees. We’d stumbled to the bottom of the slope, and found the outskirts of a trailing group of mourners. The running boys hurtled by, like starlings blown inside-out—wild-eyed with stifled laughter, dodging the grasping adults.

Someone spoke inaudibly into a microphone. I balked, then, and Reggie stopped with me. We stood beneath a leafy tree. She rubbed my arm with her free hand, and we listened to the non-words. I stood shaking my head, fixed with a cottonmouthed dread. I felt her sigh with nerves and the fugue of my mind turned the air to stage smoke so that I could hardly see.

She raised her hand in the air and then made a highly inappropriate throat-cut signal at someone in the front, and the speaker went silent.

Reggie turned to me. A streak of sunlight plumbed the euphotic zone of her sunglasses and I saw the whisk of her lashes. She’d always had expectations of me as a human being that I couldn’t meet, but as she pulled at me again, very gently, and one of my numb feet dragged forward, I began to follow, as I had always followed her.

The grass was mesmerizing, a faint spray of leafhoppers rising around my socks-in-sandals. Green is a primary color—not a secondary—on the color wheel of light. A warm green. My socks were misnamed hot pink, which is a secondary cool red; given to me at Christmas by Terri and Georg and their little girl Inga and their whippet, Sky. Reggie was at my shoulder, sniffing steadily, face lowered with the effort of propelling me forward, her bangles clicking as she readjusted her grip on me, fingers working busily between mine so that our hands were palm to palm, really locked, and now there was an opening in the crowd, an aisle through. Mute shadow-mourners turned away, elbows out, hiding their faces with programs.

The shame of my inadequacy was something usually I laughed off, but now, in the silent munificence of the crowd, I had to close my eyes to bear it, to endure it, stumping with stage weights for feet as I was led down into Hell—’with wandering steps and slow’—Reggie guiding me and the entirety of my life visible in the followspot, suddenly evident that it did matter, that every second had mattered; it all had mattered so much.

A young tree whispered overhead and we entered a forest of flowers. Eyes closed, I halted mutely when she did. The dread was terrific. The people around us were so oddly silent, just a whisper of coughs and the rustles of shoes in grass. The wind had fallen. There was no reason to open my eyes. She swung my hand forward and placed it. My hand, with Reggie’s over it, was on a wooden box. My teeth chattered, then, and I labored, each breath scented with hothouse lilies. I set my jaw tight. I felt the wood of the box. It was only wood, and it was warmed by the overcast sun.

There was a sound in Reggie’s throat. She patted my hand as she struggled with herself, and when she could manage, tipped her head against mine. ”It’s Nan,” she said. ”We got her back.”

*       *       *       *

At the point of her disappearance, the FBI had, with their infinite pessimism, collected Nan’s x-rays from our family dentist. For some reason, after her recovery, and despite the fact that Andreas had borne every bit of responsibility in the interim years, the FBI sent them to me.

Sometimes I woke to sunlight picking out raindrop residue on the window of my seedy loft. Sometimes my dry, paint-engrained hand looked more authentic than anything I’d ever seen. Sometimes I pulled, from a book on the floor, the panoramic radiograph on Ektaspeed film. Held to the window, it revealed something I’d been completely unaware of. It showed Nan’s clamped teeth, her skull packed in petaled layers from the nostrils to the chin bone with the eerie waiting buds of teeth, a hyperdontia of adult life lurking inside her, waiting its turn to rise.

BIO

Jessica Lackaff feels that if cell phones have one redeeming societal virtue, it is the Amber Alert. She is a self-taught writer with work forthcoming in Cottonwood, and has published in The New World Writing Quarterly, Jaded Ibis Press, and Eternal Haunted Summer. She would like to thank the dear and wonderful writers Kasey Myers and Fiona Cox for twice proofing this story.