Excerpts

Excerpt:  Entertainment Weekly, an excerpt about Sasha

Excerpt:  The New Yorker, “What the Forest Remembers”

Podcast:  The Writer’s Voice, “What the Forest Remembers” read by Jennifer Egan

Chapter Five, Part 2

Shadow World

It all started with seeing the girl. Anna had gone outside to buy lunch over the disapproval of her supervisor, Mr. Voss, who liked them to bring their lunches from home and eat them on the same tall stools where they sat measuring all day. Anna sensed anxiety in his wish to keep them in sight, as if girls at large in the Naval Yard might scatter like chickens. True, their shop was pleasant to eat in, clean and brightly lit by a bank of second-story windows. It had conditioned air, a humming chill that had filled every corner during the hot September days when Anna first came to work there. Now she would have liked to open a window and let in the fresh October air, but the windows were permanently shut, sealing out dust and grime that might affect the measurements she and the other girls took—or was it that the tiny parts they were measuring needed to be pristine in order to function? No one knew, and Mr. Voss was not a man who welcomed questions. Early on, Anna had asked of the unrecognizable parts in her tray, “What are we measuring, exactly, and which ship are they for?”

Mr. Voss’s pale eyebrows rose. “That information isn’t necessary to do your job, Miss Kerrigan.”

“It would help me to do it better.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“I would know what I was doing.”

The marrieds hid their smiles. Anna had been cast—or cast herself—in the role of unruly kid sister, and was enjoying it immensely. She found herself looking for little ways to challenge Mr. Voss without risking outright insubordination.

“You are measuring and inspecting parts to ensure that they are uniform,” he said patiently, as if to a halfwit. “And you are setting aside any that are not.”
Soon it came to be known that the parts they were inspecting were for the battleship Missouri, whose keel had been laid almost a year before Pearl Harbor in Dry Dock 4. Later, theMissouri’s hull had been floated across Wallabout Bay to the building ways: vast iron enclosures whose zigzagging catwalks evoked the Coney Island Cyclone. Knowing that the parts she was inspecting would be adjoined to the most modern battleship ever built had indeed brought some additional zest to the work for Anna. But not enough.

When the lunch whistle blew at eleven-thirty, she was itching to get outside. In order to justify leaving the building, she didn’t bring a lunch—a ploy she knew did not fool Mr. Voss. But he couldn’t very well deny a girl food, so he watched grimly as she made for the door while the marrieds unwrapped sandwiches from waxed paper and talked about husbands in boot camp or overseas; who’d had a letter; clues or hunches or dreams as to where their beloveds might be; how desperately frightened they were. More than one girl had wept, describing her terror that a husband or fiancé would not return. Anna couldn’t listen. The talk stirred in her an uncomfortable anger at these girls, who seemed so weak. Thankfully, Mr. Voss had put an end to that topic during working hours, prompting an unlikely trill of gratitude in Anna. Now they sang songs from their colleges while they worked: Hunter, St. Joseph’s, Brooklyn College, whose song Anna finally learned—not having bothered to in the year she was a student there.

She synchronized her wristwatch with the large wall clock they all answered to, and stepped outdoors. After the sealed hush of her shop, the roar of Yard noise always shocked her: crane and truck and train engines; the caterwaul of steel being cut and chipped in the nearby structural shop; men hollering to be heard. The stench of coal and oil mingled with gusts of chocolate from the factory on Flushing Avenue. It wasn’t making chocolate anymore, but something for soldiers to eat when they might otherwise starve. This chocolate cousin was supposed to taste like a boiled potato, Anna had heard, so that soldiers wouldn’t be tempted to snack on it ahead of time. But the smell was still delicious.
As she hurried alongside Building 4, the structural shop, with its thousand dingy windows, she saw a girl climbing onto a bicycle. Anna didn’t register at first that it was a girl; she wore the same plain blue work clothes they all did. But something in her bearing, the flair with which she mounted, caught Anna’s eye, and she watched the girl glide away with a shiver of envy.

At a canteen near the piers, she bought her forty-cent boxed meal—today it was chicken, mashed potatoes, canned peas, and applesauce—and made her way toward Piers C and D, both close enough to her shop that she could eat (often while standing, even walking) and be back on her stool by twelve-fifteen. A ship had berthed at Pier C since the previous day, its sudden towering apparition almost otherworldly. With each step Anna took toward the ship, its height seemed to rise, until she had to tip her head fully back to follow the curved prow all the way up to the distant deck. It was thronged with sailors, identical-looking in their toylike uniforms and caps, all leaning over the rail to gawk at something below. In that same moment, a chorus of catcalls reached her. She went still, clutching her boxed lunch—then saw with relief that the object of their ardor was not her but the girl on the bicycle, who was riding back alongside the ship from the foot of the pier, a tousle of peroxide curls pried from her scarf by the wind. Anna watched her approach, trying to discern whether the girl was enjoying this attention or not. Before she could make up her mind, the bicycle hit a patch of gravel and skidded on its side, dumping its rider onto the brick-paved pier, to the jeering hilarity of the sailors. Had the men been within reach of the girl, they doubtless would have elbowed each other aside to rush to her aid. But at such a height, with only each other to show off for, they settled for an orgy of heckling:
“Aw, poor baby lost her balance.”

“Shame she’s not wearing a skirt.”

“Say, you’re pretty even when you’re crying.”

But the girl wasn’t crying. She stood up angrily, humiliated but defiant, and Anna decided then that she liked her.

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Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake

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Sisters of the Moon

Silas has a broken head. It happened sometime last night, outside The Limited on Geary and Powell. None of us saw. Silas says the fight was over a woman, and that he won it. “But you look like all bloody shit, my friend,” Irish says, laughing, rolling the words off his accent. Silas says we should’ve seen the other guy.

He adjusts the bandage on his head and looks up at the palm trees, which make a sound over Union Square like it’s raining. Silas has that strong kind of shape, like high school guys who you know could pick you up and carry you like a bag. But his face is old. He wears a worn-out army jacket, the pockets always fat with something. Once, he pulled out a silver thimble and pushed it into my hand, not saying one word. It can’t be real silver, but I’ve kept it.

I think Silas fought in Vietnam. Once he said, “It’s 1974, and I’m still alive,” like he couldn’t believe it.

“So where is he?” Irish asks, full of humor. “Where is this bloke with half his face gone?”

Angel and Liz start laughing, I don’t know why. “Where’s this woman you fought for?” is what I want to ask.

Silas shrugs, grinning. “Scared him away.”

********

San Francisco is ours, we’ve signed our name on it a hundred times: SISTERS OF THE MOON. On the shiny tiles inside the Stockton Tunnel, across those building like blocks of salt on the empty piers near the Embarcadero. Silver plus another color, usually blue or red. Angel and Liz do the actual painting. I’m the lookout. While they’re spraying the paint cans, I get scared to death. To calm down, I’ll say to myself, If the cops come, or if someone stops his car to yell at us, I’ll just walk away from Angel and Liz, like I never saw them before in my life. Afterward, when the paint is wet and we bounce away on the balls of our feet, I get so ashamed, thinking, What if they knew? They’d probably ditch me, which would be worse than getting caught–even going to jail. I’d be all alone in the universe.

Most people walk through Union Square on their way someplace else. Secretaries, businessmen. The Park, we call it. But Silas and Irish and the rest are always here. They drift out, then come back. Union Square is their own private estate.

Watching over the square like God is the St. Francis Hotel, with five glass elevators sliding up and down its polished face. Stoned, Angel and Liz and I spend hours sitting on benches with our heads back, waiting for the elevators to all line up on top. Down, up, down–even at 5 A.M. they’re moving. The St. Francis never sleeps.

Angel and Liz expect to be famous, and I believe it. Angel just turned fifteen. I’m only five months younger, and Liz is younger than me. But I’m the baby of us. Smoking pot in Union Square, I still worry who will see.

********

We’ve been talking for a week about dropping acid. I keep stalling. Today we go ahead and buy it, from a boy with a runny nose and dark, anxious eyes. Across the street is I. Magnin, and I get a sick feeling that my stepmother is going to come out the revolving doors with packages under her arms. She’s a buyer for the shoe department at Saks, and in the afternoon she likes to walk around and view the competition.

Angel leans against a palm tree, asking in her Southern voice if the acid is pure and how much we should take to get off and how long the high will last us. She’s got her shirt tied up so her lean stomach shows. Angel came from Louisiana a year ago with her mother’s jazz band. I adore her. She goes wherever she wants, and the world just forms itself around her.

“What are you looking at?” Liz asks me. She’s got short, curly black hair and narrow blue eyes.

“Nothing.”

“Yes, you are,” she says. “All the time. Just watching everything.”

“So?”

“So, when are you going to do something?” She says it like she’s joking.

I get a twisting in my stomach. “I don’t know,” I say. I glance at Angel, but she’s talking to the dealer. At least she didn’t hear us.

Liz and I look at I. Magnin. Her mother could walk out of there as easily as mine, but Liz doesn’t care. I get the feeling she’s waiting for something like that to happen, a chance to show Angel how far she can go.

********

We find Irish begging on Powell Street. “Can you spare any part of a million dollars?” he asks the world, spreading his arms wide. Irish has a big blond face and wavy hair and eyes that are almost purple–I mean it. One time, he says, he got a thousand-dollar bill–an Arab guy just handed it over. That was before we knew Irish.

“My lassies,” he calls out, and we get the hug of those big arms, all three of us. He inhales from Angel’s hair, which is dark brown and flips into wings on both sides of her face. She’s still a virgin. In Angel this seems beautiful, like a precious glass bowl you can’t believe didn’t break yet. One time, in Union Square, this Australian guy took hold of her hair and pulled it back, back, so the tendons of her throat showed through the skin, and Angel was laughing at first and so was the guy, but then he leaned down and kissed her mouth and Irish knocked him away, shouting, “Hey, motherfucker, can’t you see she’s still a child?”

“What nice presents have you brought?” Irish asks now.

Angel opens the bag to show the acid. I check around for cops and catch Liz watching me, a look on her face like she wants to laugh.

“When shall we partake?” Irish asks, reaching out with his cap to a lady in a green raincoat, who shakes her head like he should know better, then drops in a quarter. Irish could have any kind of life, I think–he just picked this one.

“Not yet,” Angel says. “Too light.”

“Tonight,” Liz says, knowing I won’t be there.

Angel frowns. “What about Tally?

I look down, startled and pleased to be remembered.

“Tomorrow?” Angel asks me.

I can’t help pausing for a second, holding this feeling of everyone waiting for my answer. Then someone singing “Gimme shelter” distracts them. I wish I’d just said it.

“Tomorrow’s fine.”

********

The singer turns out to be a guy named Fleece, who I don’t know. I mean, I’ve seen him, he’s part of the gang of Irish and Silas and them who hang out in the Park. Angel says these guys are in their thirties, but they look older than that and act younger, at least around us. There are women, too, with red eyes and heavy makeup, and mostly they act loud and happy, but when they get dressed up, there are usually holes in their stockings, or at least a run. They don’t like us–Angel especially.

Angel hands me the acid bag to hold while she lights up a joint. Across the Park I see three cops walking–I can almost hear the squeak of their boots. I cover the bag with my hand. I see Silas on another bench. His bandage is already dirty.

“Tally’s scared,” Liz says. She’s watching me, that expression in her eyes like the laughter behind them is about to come pushing out.

The others look at me, and my heart races. “I’m not.”

In Angel’s eyes I see a flash of cold. Scared people make her moody, like they remind her of something she wants to forget. “Scared of what?” she says.

“I’m not.”

Across the square, Silas adjusts the bandage over his eyes. Where is this woman he fought for? I wonder. Why isn’t she with him now?

“I don’t know,” Liz says. “What’re you scared of, Tally?”

I look right at Liz. There’s a glittery challenge in her eyes but also something else, like she’s scared, too. She hates me, I think. We’re friends, but she hates me.

Irish tokes from the joint in the loudest way, like it’s a tube connecting him to the last bit of oxygen on earth. When he exhales, his face gets white. “What’s she scared of?” he says, and laughs faintly. “The world’s a bloody terrifying place.”

********

At home that night I can’t eat. I’m too thin, like a little girl, even thought I’m fourteen. Angel loves to eat, and I know that’s how you get a figure, but my body feels too small. It can’t hold anything extra.

“How was school?” my stepmother asks.

“Fine.”

“Where have you been since then?”

“With Angel and those guys. Hanging around.” No one seems to notice my Southern accent.

My father looks up. “Hanging around doing what?”

“Homework.”

“They’re in biology together,” my stepmother explains.

Across the table the twins begin to whimper. As he leans over their baby heads my father’s face goes soft–I see it even through his beard. The twins are three years old, with bright red hair. Tomorrow I’ll tie up my shirt, I think, like Angel did. So what if my stomach is white?

“I’m spending the night tomorrow,” I say. “At Angel’s.”

He wipes applesauce from the babies’ mouths. I can’t tell if he means to refuse or is just distracted. “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” I tell him, just in case.

********

We spend all day at Angel’s, preparing. Her mom went to Mexico with the band she plays violin for, and won’t be back for a month. Candles, powdered incense from the Mystic Eye, on Broadway, a paint set, sheets of creamy paper, Pink Floyd records stacked by the stereo, and David Bowie, and Todd Rundgren, and “Help Me,” of course–Joni Mitchell’s new hit, which we worship.

Angel lives six blocks from Union Square in a big apartment south of Market Street, with barely any walls. A foil pyramid hangs from the ceiling over her bed. All day we keep checking the square for Irish, but he’s disappeared.

At sundown we go ahead without him. Candles on the windowsills, the white rug vacuumed. We cut the pills with a knife, and each of us takes one-third of all three so we’re sure to get the same dose. I’m terrified. It seems wrong that such a tiny thing could do so much. But I feel Liz watching me, waiting for one wrong move, and I

swallow in silence.

Then we wait. Angel does yoga, arching her back, pressing her palms to the floor with her arms bent. I’ve never seen anyone so limber. The hair rushes from her head in a flood of black, like it could stain the rug. Liz’s eyes don’t move from her.

When the acid starts to work, we all lie together on her mother’s huge four-poster bed, Angel in the middle. She holds one of our hands in each of hers. Angel has the kind of skin that tans in a minute, and beautiful, snaking veins. I feel the blood moving in her. We wave our hands above our faces and watch them leave trails. I feel Angel warm beside me and think how I’ll never love anyone this much, how without her I would disappear.

********

The city at night is full of lights and water and hills like piles of sand. We struggle to climb them. Empty cable cars totter past. The sky is a sheet of black paper with tiny holes poked in it. The Chinatown sidewalks smell like salt and flesh. It’s 3 A.M. Planes drift overhead like strange fish.

Market Street, a steamy puddle at every curb. We find our way down alleys, our crazy eyes making diamonds of the shattered glass that covers the streets and sidewalks. Nothing touches us. We float under the orange streetlamps. My father, the twins–everything but Angel and Liz and me just fades into nothing, the way the night used to disappear when my real mother tucked me into bed, years ago.

In the Broadway Tunnel I grab for the spray cans. “Let me,” I cry, breathless. Angel and Liz are too stoned to care. We have green and silver. I hold one can in each fist, shake them up, and spray huge round letters, like jaws ready to swallow me. I breathe in the paint fumes and they taste like honey. Tiny dots of cool paint fall on my face and eyelashes and stay there. Traffic ricochets past, but I don’t care tonight–I don’t care. In the middle of painting I turn to Angel and Liz and cry, “This is it, this is it!” and they nod excitedly, like they already knew, and then I start to cry. We hug in the Broadway Tunnel. “This is it,” I sob, clinging to Angel and Liz, their warm shoulders. I hear them crying, too, and think, It will be like this always. From now on, nothing can divide us.

It seems like hours before I notice the paint cans still in my hands and finish the job. SISTERS OF THE MOON.

It blazes.

********

We make our way to Union Square. Lo and behold, there is Irish, holding court with a couple of winos and a girl named Pamela, who I’ve heard is a prostitute. Irish looks different tonight–he’s got big, swashbuckling sleeves that flap like sails in the wind. He’s grand. As we walk toward him, blinking in the liquidy light, an amazement at his greatness overwhelms us. He is a great man, Irish. We’re lucky to know him.

********

Irish scoops Angel into his arms. “My beloved,” he says. “I’ve been waiting all night for you.” And he kisses her full on the lips–a deep, long kiss that Angel seems at first to resist. Then she relaxes, like always. I feel a small, sharp pain, like a splinter of glass in my heart. But I’m not surprised. It was always going to happen, I think. We were always waiting.

Angel and Irish draw apart and look at each other. Liz hovers near them. Pamela gets up and walks away, into the shadows. I sit on the bench with the winos and stare up at the St. Francis Hotel.

“You’re high,” Irish says to Angel. “So very high.”

“What about you? Your pupils are gone,” she says.

Irish laughs. He laughs and laughs, opening up his mouth like the world could fit in it. Irish might live on the streets, but his teeth are white. “I’ll see you in Heaven,” he says.

On the St. Francis Hotel the glass elevators float. Two reach the top, and two more rise slowly to join them. They hang there, all four, and I hold my breath as the fifth approaches and will the others not to move until it gets there. I keep perfectly still, pushing the last one up with my eyes until it reaches the top, and they are, in a perfect line, all five.

I turn to show Angel and Liz, but they’re gone. I see them walking away with Irish, Angel in the middle, Liz clutching at her arm like the night could pull them apart. It’s Liz who looks back at me. Our eyes meet, and I feel like she’s talking out loud, I understand so perfectly. If I move fast, now, I can keep her from winning. But the thought makes me tired. I don’t move. Liz turns away. I think I see a bouncing in her steps, but I stay where I am.

They turn to ghosts in the darkness and vanish. My teeth start to chatter. It’s over. Angel is gone, I think, and I start to cry. She just walked away.

Then I hear a rushing noise. It’s a sound like time passing, years racing past, so all of a sudden I’m much older, a grown-up woman looking back to when she was a girl in Union Square. And I realize that even if Angel never thinks of me again, at some point I’ll get up and take the bus home.

The winos have drifted off. By my Mickey Mouse watch it’s 5 A.M. I notice someone crossing the square–it’s Silas, the dirty bandage still around his head. I yell out to him.

He comes over slowly, like it hurts to walk. He sits down next to me. For a long time we just sit, not talking. Finally I ask, “Was it really over a woman?”

Silas shakes his head. “Just a fight,” he says. “Just another stupid fight.”

I straighten my legs so that my sneakers meet in front of me. They’re smudged but still white. “I’m hungry,” I say.

“Me, too,” Silas says. “But everything’s closed.” Then he says, “I’m leaving town.”

“To where?”

“South Carolina. My brother’s store. Called him up today.”

“How come?”

“Had enough,” he says. “Just finally had enough.”

I know there’s something I should say, but I don’t know what. “Is he nice,” I ask, “your brother?”

Silas grins. I see the young part of him then, the kind of mischief boys have. “He’s the meanest bastard I know.”

“What about Irish?” I ask. “Won’t you miss Irish and those guys?”

“Irish is a dead man.”

I stare at Silas.

“Believe it,” he says. “In twenty years no one will remember him.”

Twenty years. In twenty years I’d be thirty-four years old, my stepmother’s age. It would be 1994. And suddenly I think, Silas is right–Irish is dead. And Angel, too, and maybe even Liz. Right now is their perfect, only time. It will sweep them away. But Silas was always outside it.

I put my hand in my pocket and find the thimble. I pull it out. “You gave me this,” I tell him.

Silas looks at the thimble like he’s never seen it. The he says, “That’s real silver.”

Maybe he wants it back to sell, for his trip to South Carolina. I leave the thimble in my hand so that if Silas wants it he can just take it. But he doesn’t. We both look at the thimble. “Thanks,” I say.

We lean back on the bench. My high is wearing off. I have a feeling in my chest like feathers, like a bird waking up and brushing against my ribs. The elevators rise and fall, like signals.

“Always watching,” Silas says, looking at me. “Those big eyes, always moving.”

I nod, ashamed. “But I never do anything,” I say. And all of a sudden I know, I know why Angel left me.

Silas frowns. “Sure you do. You watch,” he says, “which is what’ll save you.”

I shrug. But the longer we sit, the more I realize he’s right–what I do is watch. I’m like Silas, I think. In twenty years I’ll still be alive.

On one side the sky is getting light, like a lid is being lifted up. I watch it, trying to see the day coming, but I can’t. All of a sudden the sky is just bright.

“I wonder what people will look like in 1994,” I say.

Silas considers. “Twenty years? Probably look like us again.”

“Like you and me?” I’m disappointed.

“Oh yeah,” Silas says with a wry grin. “Wishing they’d been here the first time.”

I look at the blue bandanna tied around his wrist, his torn-up jeans and army jacket with a Grateful Dead skull on one pocket. When I’m thirty-four, tonight will be a million years ago, I think–the St. Francis Hotel and the rainy palm tree sounds, Silas with the bandage on his head–and this makes me see how everything now is precious, how someday I’ll know I was lucky to be here.

“I’ll remember Irish,” I say loudly. “I’ll remember everyone. In twenty years.”

Silas looks at me curiously. Then he touches my face, tracing my left cheekbone almost to my ear. His finger is warm and rough, and I have the thought that to Silas my skin must feel soft. He studies the paint on the tip of his finger, and smiles. He shows me. “Silver,” he says.

She’d missed it, Phoebe knew by the silence. Crossing the lush, foggy park, she heard nothing but the drip of condensation running from ferns and palm leaves. By the time she reached the field, its vast emptiness came as no surprise.

The grass was a brilliant, jarring green. Debris covered it, straws, crushed cigarettes, a few sodden blankets abandoned to the mud.

Phoebe shoved her hands in her pockets and crossed the grass, stepping over patches of bare mud. A ring of trees encircled the field, coastal trees, wind-bent and gnarled yet still symmetrical, like figures straining to balance heavy trays.

At the far end of the field several people in army jackets were dismantling a bandstand. They carried its parts through the trees to a road, where Phoebe saw the dark shape of a truck.

She approached a man and woman with long coils of orange electrical cord dangling from their arms. Phoebe waited politely for the two to finish talking, but they seemed not to notice her. Timidly she turned to another man, who carried a plank across his arms. “Excuse me,” she said. “Did I miss it?”

“You did,” he said. “It was yesterday. Noon to midnight.” He squinted at her as if the sun were out. He looked vaguely familiar, and Phoebe wondered if he might have known her sister. She was always wondering that.

“I thought it was today,” she said uselessly.

“Yeah, about half the posters were printed wrong.” He grinned, his eyes a bright, chemical blue, like sno-cones.

It was June 18, a Saturday. Ten years before, in 1968, a “Festival of Moons” had allegedly happened on this same field. “Revival of Moons,” the posters promised, and Phoebe had juggled her shifts at work and come eagerly, anxious to relive what she’d failed to live even once.

“So, how was it?” she asked.

“Underattended.” He laughed sardonically.

“I’m glad it wasn’t just me,” she said.

The guy set down his plank and ran a hand across his eyes. Blunt, straight blond hair fell to his shoulders. “Man,” he said, “you look a lot like this girl I used to know.”

Startled, Phoebe glanced at him. He was squinting again. “Like, exactly like her.”

She stared at his face. “Catnip,” she said, surprising herself.

He took a small step away.

“You were friends with Faith O’Connor, right?” Phoebe said, excited now. “Well, I’m her sister.”

Catnip looked away, then back at Phoebe. He shook his head. She remembered him now, though he’d seemed much bigger before. And beautiful–that intense, fragile beauty you saw sometimes in high school guys, but never in men. Girls couldn’t resist him, hence his name.

He was staring at Phoebe. “I can’t believe this,” he said.

While Catnip went to extricate himself from the work crew, Phoebe struggled to catch her breath. For years she’d imagined this, a friend of Faith’s recognizing her now, grown up–how much like her sister she looked.

Together she and Catnip crossed the field. Phoebe felt nervous. There were blond glints of beard on his face.

“So you’re what, in high school now?” he asked.

“I graduated,” Phoebe said. “Last week, actually.” She hadn’t attended the ceremony.

“Well, I’m Kyle. No one’s called me Catnip in years,” he said wistfully.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six. Yourself?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen,” he said, and laughed. “Shit, when I was eighteen, twenty-six sounded geriatric.”

Kyle had just finished his second year of law school. “Monday I start my summer job,” he said, and with two fingers mimed a pair of scissors snipping off his hair.

“Really? They make you cut it?” It sounded like the Army.

“They don’t have to,” he said. “You’ve already done it.”

Traffic sounds grew louder as they neared the edge of Golden Gate Park. Phoebe felt like a child left alone with one of Faith’s friends, the uneasy job of holding their interest. “Do you ever think about those times?” she asked. “You know, with my sister?”

There was a pause. “Sure,” Kyle said. “Sure I do.”

“Me too.”

“She’s incredibly real to me. Faith,” he said.

“I think about her constantly,” said Phoebe.

Kyle nodded. “She was your sister.”

By the time they reached Haight Street, the fog was beginning to shred, exposing blue wisps of sky. Phoebe thought of mentioning that she worked only two blocks away–would be there right now if not for the Revival of Moons–but this seemed of no consequence.

“I live around here,” Kyle said. “How about some coffee?”

His apartment, on Cole Street, was a disappointment. Phoebe had hoped to enter a time warp, but a sleek charcoal couch and long glass coffee table dominated the living room. On the walls, abstract lithographs appeared to levitate inside Plexiglas frames. Still, a prism dangled from one window, and tie-dyed cushions scattered the floor. Phoebe noticed a smell of cloves or pepper, some odor familiar from years before.

She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor.

“You know,” he croaked, holding in smoke as he passed the joint to Phoebe, “a bunch of times I thought about dropping by you and your mom’s. Just see how you were doing.”

“You should’ve done it,” Phoebe said. She was eyeing the joint, worrying whether or not to smoke. Getting high made her deeply anxious, had paralyzed her more than once in a viselike fear that she was about to drop dead. But she thought of her sister, how eagerly Faith had reached for everything–how Kyle would expect this of Phoebe. She took a modest hit. Kyle was bent at his stereo, stacking records on a turntable. Surrealistic Pillow came on, the rich, eerie voice of Grace Slick.

“She remarried or anything, your mom?” he asked, resuming his seat.

“Oh no,” Phoebe said, half laughing. “No.”

As Kyle watched her through the smoke, she grew self-conscious. “I guess that phase in her life is kind of over,” she explained.

He shook his head. “Too bad.”

“No, she doesn’t mind,” Phoebe said, wondering as she spoke if she knew this for sure. “She’s sort of past the age of romance.”

Kyle frowned, toking on the joint. “How old could she be?”

“Her birthday’s next weekend, actually. Forty-seven.”

He burst out laughing, spewing smoke and then coughing with abandon. “Forty-seven,” he said, recovering himself. “That’s not old, Phoebe.”

She stared at him, stunned by his laughter. “I didn’t say she was old,” she said. The pot was confusing her.

Kyle’s eyes lingered on Phoebe. Smoke hung on the air in folds, dissolving slowly like cream into coffee. “What about you?” he said. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine, thanks,” she said guardedly.

By the time they finished the joint, the room seemed to pulsate directly against Phoebe’s eyeballs. Her heartbeat echoed. The pillows exhaled a cinnamon smell when she leaned back.

Kyle stretched out flat, hands cradling his head, legs crossed at the ankles. “I want to talk about it,” he said, his eyes closed, “but I don’t know how to.”

“Me too,” Phoebe said. “I never do.”

Kyle opened one eye. “Not even with your mom? Your brother?”

“I don’t know why,” Phoebe said. “We used to.”

“Plastic Fantastic Lover” came on, meandering and druggy, invading Phoebe’s mind with fluorescent splashes of color. They listened in silence.

“So…did you ever find out what happened?” Kyle said at last.

“You mean, how she died?”

“Yeah. How it happened exactly.”

As always when the subject turned to Faith, some pressure inside Phoebe relaxed. She took long, peaceful breaths. “Well, everyone says she jumped.”

Kyle sighed. “In Italy, right?”

Phoebe nodded. After a pause she asked, “Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle said. “I mean, the way I heard it–you’d know better than me–it would’ve been pretty hard to fall there by accident.”

“Except no one saw.”

Kyle raised himself on his elbows and looked at Phoebe. She gazed back at him, very stoned, trying to pinpoint what exactly had changed about Kyle since the old days.

“But I mean, why?” he said. “You know–why?”

He looked so earnest, as if he were the first person ever to pose the question in quite this way. It made Phoebe laugh, softly at first, then convulsively, tears running from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping them on her sleeve. Her nose was running. “Sorry.”

Kyle touched her arm. “I just wondered what the story was,” he said.

“Yeah,” Phoebe said, sniffling. “Me too.” Laughing had relieved her, the way crying did.

“You think it was an accident,” Kyle said.

“I’m not sure.”

He nodded. The subject was closed, somehow. Phoebe felt as if she’d lost a chance. It was her own fault, she thought, for laughing.

They drifted into silence. Phoebe’s thumb and middle finger were sticky with resin. Kyle relit the roach, and when he handed it over, she smoked without hesitation. Finally Kyle let the nub of roach drop to the floor and sat cross-legged, the fingers of one hand pressed to the other. “You look like her,” he said. “I guess you hear that a lot.”

“I don’t hear it,” Phoebe said, confused as to why. “Because”–she laughed, realizing–“well, I mean, no one sees us together.”

Kyle smacked his forehead, clearly mortified.

“But I wish they did,” Phoebe said. “Say that.”

He left her, crossing the room to the window. Phoebe stretched, reaching toward the ceiling in her painter’s pants and desert boots so the muscles pulled at her ribs. She was very stoned, but today it seemed all right. She even felt a loopy sort of confidence as she lay on her side, watching Kyle squint through his prism. A nylon thread attached it to the window. He twisted it, scattering smudges of rainbow light. King Crimson’s song “Moonchild” came on.

“I just had a weird feeling,” Kyle said.

“What?”

“I thought, if you told me right now you were Faith, I bet I’d believe you.”

Phoebe turned her face away to hide her pleasure. She still wore Faith’s clothing sometimes, frayed jeans and lacy flea-market blouses, a crushed velvet jacket with star-shaped buttons. Nothing quite fit. Her sister had been thinner, or taller, her black hair longer–something. Try as Phoebe might to bridge the gap between herself and Faith, some difference always remained. But one day that difference would vanish, she believed, part of a larger transformation Phoebe was constantly awaiting. She had thought it would come by graduation.

“I’m leaving for Europe pretty soon,” she lied, seized by a desire to impress and dazzle Kyle. “A long trip.”

“Oh yeah?” he said from the window. “Where to?”

“I’m not sure. I thought I’d just go, you know? Kind of be spontaneous.” There was some truth in this; Phoebe did intend to go one day to Europe, retrace her sister’s steps. She had always known it. But she’d enrolled at Berkeley for the fall semester, chosen five courses and even dorm space.

“I’m all for spontaneity,” Kyle said, sounding envious.

So had their father been. In his will he’d tried to ensure it, providing Faith and Phoebe and Barry five thousand dollars each after high school, to explore the world. “Do it first,” he’d said, “before you get tied down. Do things you’ll tell stories about the rest of your lives.”

“Just go, you know?” Phoebe said, losing herself in the lie. “Just take off.”

Kyle moved to where she lay, his bare feet sticking on the polished floor. A knee cracked as he eased himself on the cushions beside her. Phoebe shut her eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, touching her face. Phoebe opened her eyes and quickly shut them. She felt giddy, as if the room, like Kyle’s prism, were twisting on a nylon string. He leaned down, kissing her mouth. Phoebe kissed him back, some blind part of herself rushing forward. She was still a virgin. Kyle’s mouth had a sweet, applesauce taste.

He adjusted the cushions and stretched out beside her. As he touched Phoebe’s breasts through her T-shirt, she sensed his confidence, and it helped her relax. Kyle took her head in his hands, his palms cool at her temples, and Phoebe heard behind her covered ears a rushing, seashell noise. Kyle eased himself on top of her. She clung to the muscles along his spine, the heat from his body seeping through Phoebe’s clothes to her skin. The coiled strength of his stomach moved gently as he breathed; his erection pressed her thigh. She opened her eyes to look at him. But Kyle’s own eyes were clenched shut, as if he were making a wish.

“Wait–wait,” Phoebe said, squirming out from beneath him.

Kyle resisted her at first, then sprang to his feet as if a stranger had entered the room. Phoebe heard his shallow breathing. She sat curled like an egg, chin on her knees. Kyle moved to the couch and hunched at one end. “Shit,” he said.

But Phoebe had lost track of him. There was something she needed to remember. She shut her eyes, forehead pressed to her knees, and saw Faith and her friends swallow tiny squares of paper and sometime later start laughing, crazy weeping laughter that in Faith soon turned to helpless sobbing in her boyfriend’s arms–“Wolf” he was called for his brown skin and white teeth, brown hands on her sister’s head, “Shhh,” stroking her hair as if Faith were a cat, “Shhh.” Shirtless under a soft leather vest, his brown stomach muscles reminding Phoebe of the shapes on a turtle’s shell. And then Faith was kissing him, Phoebe watching, uneasy. “Come on,” Faith said, and tried to stand, but she couldn’t; she was sick, her eyes feverish. “Come on.” Kissing, kissing, but Wolf saw Phoebe crouched beside him, and their eyes locked.

“Faith, wait,” he said. “Babe, hold on.”

But finally he helped her up, Phoebe creeping behind them into the hall, where they tottered to the far end, her mother’s white bedroom door swinging shut behind them. Then silence. Phoebe waited in the hall for the door to open up again, growing frightened as the minutes passed–her sister was sick, could hardly walk! After their father got sick that door was always shut, sweet medicine smells in the hallway. Phoebe threw herself down on the rug and lay there in a kind of trance, the white door burning a hole through her head until finally after what seemed like hours she ran at the door sobbing, cool smooth paint against her cheek, but still she didn’t turn the knob. She was too afraid.

Then footsteps. Phoebe jumped back as Faith opened the door, her sister’s eyes wide and black, drops of water sticking to her lashes. Hugging Phoebe close, “Baby,” rocking her gently, “Baby, baby, what’s happened to you?” Smelling of soap–had she only been taking a shower? And Wolf, the hero, watching Phoebe with such pain in his face, as if he’d hurt her. No, Phoebe wanted to say, no, no, but how could she speak when she understood nothing, when everyone was mysterious?

Now Phoebe looked at Kyle, miles away on the couch. It was always this way–something she needed to remember pulling her back, like an undertow. A white door sealing her off, reminding Phoebe that her present life was unreal and without significance. What mattered was hidden from sight. At times she hated remembering, wanted nothing in the world but to rush forward into something of her own, lose herself in it. But this wasn’t possible. The only way forward was through that door.

“Do you miss her?” Phoebe said into the silence.

Kyle groaned up from the couch and sprayed water on the leaves of several spindly marijuana plants leaning toward an ultraviolet bulb. Delicate threads tied them to stakes. “Sometimes I feel like she’s still back there,” he said. “In that time. I miss it like hell.”

“Me too,” Phoebe said, an ache in her chest. “Even if I wasn’t really there.”

“Sure you were there.”

“No. I was a kid.”

There was a long pause. “I wasn’t there, either,” Kyle said. “Not totally.”

“What do you mean?”

“I kept circling, circling, but I never quite hit it.”

This admission made Phoebe uneasy. “You were there, Kyle,” she assured him. “You were definitely there.”

He grinned, seeming heartened. He sprayed his mister into the air, granules of vapor catching the light as they fell. Phoebe heard the cannon, fired each day at five o’clock from the Presidio military base. “I better go,” she said, wobbling to her feet. One of her legs was asleep. It was 1978. Faith’s boyfriend Wolf lived in Europe now. Phoebe’s mother hadn’t heard from him in years.

Kyle waited, hands in his pockets. “I’ll give you a call.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said, knowing he wouldn’t.

She walked carefully down the macadam steps to the street, gripping the rail. Sunlight glittered in the trees. There was a distant cable car prattle, silence around it.

“Hey,” she heard overhead. Kyle was leaning out his window. “I forgot, I wanted to five you something in case you get to Munich. I’ve got a cousin over there.”

Phoebe shielded here eyes. She’d forgotten her Europe story, and was startled now to hear it repeated as fact.

“C’mon back,” Kyle said.

Phoebe retraced her steps. Kyle handed her a joint wrapped in fluorescent pink rolling paper. It felt dry and light in her hand.

“Tell him it’s the same stuff we smoked at Christmas,” he said, copying from an address book onto the back of a receipt. “Steven + Ingrid Lake,” Phoebe read, with an address. The telephone number seemed short on digits. She rolled the joint carefully inside the address and slipped it in her wallet.

“Tell Steve to stay clear of the anthills,” Kyle said, laughing in the doorway. “He’ll understand.”

Descending the stairs a second time, Phoebe felt a curious excitement. As far as Kyle knew, she was going to Europe–next week, tomorrow–and this thought amazed

Phoebe, thrilled her with a sense that anything might happen.

On the street she looked up. Kyle was watching her from his window again, absently touching the prism. “When are you leaving?” he said.

“Soon,” she said, almost laughing. “Next week, maybe.” She turned to go.

“Send me a postcard,” he called.

Phoebe found herself smiling at the bony Victorian houses. Europe, she thought. Birds, white stone, long dark bridges. Going all the places Faith had —-exactly, one by one. Her sister’s postcards still lay stacked in a shoebox underneath the bed. Phoebe recalled awaiting them feverishly, right from the day her sister and Wolf had first left, a summer day not unlike this one. They’d driven to the airport in Wolf’s truck, with a girl who’d already paid him for it. Phoebe had stood on the sidewalk a long time after they’d gone, wondering what would happen to them. She’d been wondering ever since.

Her sister died on November 21, 1970, on the rocks below Corniglia, a tiny village on the west coast of northern Italy. She was seventeen; Phoebe was ten. Traces of drugs were found in Faith’s body, speed, LSD, but not enough that she would have been high at the time. If her neck hadn’t been broken, they said, she might have lived.

If Phoebe could string together the hours she’d spent circling this event, they would surely total years. She lost herself in these contemplations, her own life falling away like a husk as she sank into the rich, bottomless well of her sister’s absence. And the longer Phoebe circled, the more certain she became that a great misunderstanding was at work; that if Faith had taken her life, she’d done it without a hint of the failure or hopelessness the word “suicide” implied. When Phoebe thought of her sister’s death, it was always with a curious lilt to her heart, as if Faith had been lifted into some more spectacular realm, a place so remote she could reach it only by forfeiting her life. Like kicking away a ladder. Where was the failure in that?

Phoebe’s mother, Gail, had flown to Italy and returned with Faith’s ashes in a box. She and Phoebe and Barry scattered them from the clifftops near the Golden Gate Bridge, a place where their family used to picnic. Phoebe remembered staring in disbelief at the silty, uneven chunks, like debris left in a fireplace. Her hands had been sweating, and as she tossed fistfuls into the wind, the finest powder stuck in the creases of her palms. No matter how hard Phoebe shook, the powder remained. Afterward she’d locked the door to her room and gazed for a long time at her open hands. The house was quiet. Phoebe stuck out her tongue and lightly ran its tip along her palm. The taste was sour, salty. Horrified, Phoebe fled to the bathroom and scoured her hands and mouth in the sink, staring into the toilet and willing herself to be sick. Lately she’d wondered if what she tasted that day was her own sweat.

A white door at the end of a hallway. “Come on,” Faith had said, reaching for Wolf. They closed it behind them.

Phoebe pacing outside, driving her toes deep into the soft rug. Terrified–of what? That her sister was gone. That the door would never open. That when it finally did, she would find herself alone in a bright, empty room.

Chapter 1

The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn’t see this. What he saw looked solid as hell: two round towers with an arch between them and across that arch was an iron gate that looked like it hadn’t moved in three hundred years or maybe ever.

He’d never been to a castle before or even this part of the world, but something about it all was familiar to Danny. He seemed to remember the place from a long time ago, not like he’d been here exactly but from a dream or a book. The towers had those square indentations around the top that little kids put on castles when they draw them. The air was cold with a smoky bite, like fall had already come even though it was mid-August and people in New York were barely dressed. The trees were losing their leaves-Danny felt them landing in his hair and heard them crunching under his boots when he walked. He was looking for a doorbell, a knocker, a light: some way into this place or at least a way to find the way in. He was getting pessimistic.

Danny had waited two hours in a gloomy little valley town for a bus to this castle that never frigging came before he looked up and saw its black shape against the sky. Then he’d started to walk, hauling his Samsonite and satellite dish a couple of miles up this hill, the Samsonite’s puny wheels catching on boulders and tree roots and rabbit holes. His limp didn’t help. The whole trip had been like that: one hassle after another starting with the red eye from Kennedy that got towed into a field after a bomb threat, surrounded by trucks with blinky red lights and giant nozzles that were comforting up until you realized their job was to make sure the fireball only incinerated those poor suckers who were already on the plane. So Danny had missed his connection to Prague and the train to wherever the hell he was now, some German-sounding town that didn’t seem to be in Germany. Or anywhere else-Danny couldn’t even find it online, although he hadn’t been sure about the spelling. Talking on the phone to his Cousin Howie, who owned this castle and had paid Danny’s way to help out with the renovation, he’d tried to nail down some details.

Danny: I’m still trying to get this straight-is your hotel in Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic?

Howie: Tell you the truth, I’m not even clear on that myself. Those borders are constantly sliding around.

Danny (thinking): They are?

Howie: But remember, it’s not a hotel yet. Right now it’s just an old-

The line went dead. When Danny tried calling back, he couldn’t get through.

But his tickets came the next week (blurry postmark)-plane, train, bus-and seeing how he was newly unemployed and had to get out of New York fast because of a misunderstanding at the restaurant where he’d worked, getting paid to go somewhere else-anywhere else, even the fucking moon-was not a thing Danny could say no to.

He was fifteen hours late.

He left his Samsonite and satellite dish by the gate and circled the left tower (Danny made a point of going left when he had the choice because most people went right). A wall curved away from the tower into the trees, and Danny followed that wall until woods closed in around him. He was moving blind. He heard flapping and scuttling, and as he walked the trees got closer and closer to the wall until finally he was squeezing in between them, afraid if he lost contact with the wall he’d get lost. And then a good thing happened: the trees pushed right through the wall and split it open and gave Danny a way to climb inside.

This wasn’t easy. The wall was twenty feet high, jagged and crumbly with tree trunks crushed into the middle, and Danny had a tricky knee from an injury connected to the misunderstanding at work. Plus his boots were not exactly made for climbing-they were city boots, hipster boots, somewhere between square-tipped and pointy-his lucky boots, or so Danny thought a long time ago, when he bought them. They needed resoling. The boots were skiddy even on flat city concrete, so the sight of Danny clawing and scrambling his way up twenty feet of broken wall was not a thing he would’ve wanted broadcast. But finally he made it, panting, sweating, dragging his sore leg, and hoisted himself onto a flat walkway-type thing that ran on top of the wall. He brushed off his pants and stood up.

It was one of those views that make you feel like God for a second. The castle walls looked silver under the moon, stretched out over the hill in a wobbly oval the size of a football field. There were round towers every fifty yards or so. Below Danny, inside the walls, it was black-pure, like a lake or outer space. He felt the curve of big sky over his head, full of purplish torn-up clouds. The castle itself was back where Danny had started out: a clump of buildings and towers jumbled together. But the tallest tower stood off on its own, narrow and square with a red light shining in a window near the top.

Looking down made something go easier in Danny. When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom-those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto-the word was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably.

Danny wished he’d brought his satellite dish to the top of this wall. He itched to make some calls-the need felt primal, like an urge to laugh or sneeze or eat. It got so distracting that he slithered back down off the wall and backtracked through those same pushy trees, dirt and moss packed under his longish fingernails. But by the time he got back to the gate his alto was gone and all Danny felt was tired. He left the satellite dish in its case and found a flat spot under a tree to lie down. He made a pile out of leaves. Danny had slept outside a few times when things got rough in New York, but this was nothing like that. He took off his velvet coat and turned it inside out and rolled it into a pillow at the foot of the tree. He lay on the leaves faceup and crossed his arms over his chest. More leaves were coming down. Danny watched them spinning, turning against the half-empty branches and purple clouds, and felt his eyes start to roll back into his head. He was trying to come up with some lines to use on Howie —

Like: Hey man, your welcome mat could use a little work.

Or else: You’re paying me to be here, but I’m figuring you don’t want to pay your guests.

Or maybe: Trust me, outdoor lighting is gonna rock your world.

— just so he’d have some things to say if there was a silence. Danny was nervous about seeing his cousin after so long. The Howie he knew as a kid you couldn’t picture grown up–he’d been wrapped in that pear-shaped girl fat you see on certain boys, big love handles bubbling out of the back of his jeans. Sweaty pale skin and a lot of dark hair around his face. At age seven or eight, Danny and Howie invented a game they’d play whenever they saw each other at holidays and family picnics. Terminal Zeus it was called, and there was a hero (Zeus), and there were monsters and missions and runways and airlifts and bad guys and fireballs and high-speed chases. They could play anywhere from a garage to an old canoe to underneath a dining room table, using whatever they found: straws, feathers, paper plates, candy wrappers, yarn, stamps, candles, staples, you name it. Howie thought most of it up.

He’d shut his eyes like he was watching a movie on the backs of his eyelids that he wanted Danny to see: Okay, so Zeus shoots Glow-Bullets at the enemy that make their skin light up so now he can see them through the trees and then-blam!-he lassos them with Electric Stunner-Ropes!

Sometimes he made Danny do the talking-Okay, you tell it: what does the underwater torture dungeon look like?-and Danny would start making stuff up: rocks, seaweed, baskets of human eyeballs. He got so deep nside the game he forgot who he was, and when his folks said Time to go home the shock of being yanked away made Danny throw himself on the ground in front of them, begging for another half hour, please! another twenty minutes, ten, five, please, just one more minute, pleasepleaseplease? Frantic not to be ripped away from the world he and Howie had made.

The other cousins thought Howie was weird, a loser, plus he was adopted, and they kept their distance: Rafe especially, not the oldest cousin but the one they all listened to. You’re so sweet to play with Howie, Danny’s mom would say. From what I understand, he doesn’t have many friends. But Danny wasn’t trying to be nice. He cared what his other cousins thought, but nothing could match the fun of Terminal Zeus.

When they were teenagers, Howie changed — overnight was what everyone said. He had a traumatic experience and his sweetness drained away and he turned moody, anxious, always wiggling a foot and muttering King Crimson lyrics under his breath. He carried a notebook, even at Thanksgiving it was there in his lap with a napkin on it to catch the gravy drips. Howie made marks in that book with a flat sweaty pencil, looking around at different family members like he was trying to decide when and how they would have to die. But no one had ever paid much attention to Howie. And after the change, the traumatic incident, Danny pretended not to.

Of course they talked about Howie when he wasn’t there, oh yeah. Howie’s troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and oh it’s so sads you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn’t every family like having one person who’s fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him? If Danny closed his eyes and listened hard he could still pick up some of that long-ago muttering like a radio station you just barely hear: Howie trouble drugs did you hear he was arrested such an unattractive boy I’m sorry but can’t May put him on a diet he’s a teenager no it’s more than that I have teenagers you have teenagers I blame Norm for pushing adoption you never know what you’re getting it all comes down to genes is what they’re learning some people are just bad or not bad but you know exactly not bad but just exactly that’s it: trouble.

Danny used to get a weird feeling, overhearing this stuff when he came in the house and his mom was talking on the phone to one of his aunts about Howie. Dirt on his cleats after winning a game, his girlfriend Shannon Shank, who had the best tits on the pom squad and maybe the whole school all set to give him a blow job in his bedroom because she always did that when he won, and thank God he won a lot. Hiya, Mom. That square of purple blue almost night outside the kitchen window. Shit, it hurt Danny to remember this stuff, the smell of his mom’s tuna casserole. He’d liked hearing those things about Howie because it reminded him of who he was, Danny King, suchagoodboy, that’s what everyone said and what they’d always said but still Danny liked hearing it again, knowing it again. He couldn’t hear it enough.

That was memory number one. Danny sort of drifted into it lying there under the tree, but pretty soon his whole body was tensed to the point where he couldn’t lie still. He got up, swiping twigs off his pants and feeling pissed off because he didn’t like remembering things. Walking backward was how Danny thought of that and it was a waste of valuable resources anywhere, anytime, but in a place he’d spent twenty-four hours trying to escape to it was fucking ridiculous.

Danny shook out his coat and pulled it back over his arms and started walking again, fast. This time he went right. At first there was just forest around him, but the trees started thinning out and the slant under his feet got steeper until Danny had to walk with his uphill leg bent, which sent splinters of pain from his knee to his groin. And then the hill dropped away like someone had lopped it off with a knife and he was standing on the edge of a cliff with the castle wall pushed right up against it, so the wall and the cliff made one vertical line pointing up at the sky. Danny stopped short and looked over the cliff’s edge. Below, a long way down: trees, bushy black with a few lights packed deep inside that must be the town where he’d waited for the bus.

Alto: he was in the middle of frigging nowhere. It was extreme, and Danny liked extremes. They were distracting.

If I were you, I’d get a cash deposit before I started asking people to spelunk.

Danny tilted his head back. Clouds had squeezed out the stars. The wall seemed higher on this side of the castle. It curved in and then back out again toward the top, and every few yards there was a narrow gap a few feet above Danny’s head. He stood back and studied one of these openings-vertical and horizontal slits meeting in the shape of a cross-and in the hundreds of years since those slits had been cut, the rain and snow and what-have-you must have opened up this one a little bit more. Speaking of rain, a light sprinkling was starting that wasn’t much more than a mist, but Danny’s hair did a weird thing when it got wet that he couldn’t fix without his blow dryer and a certain kind of mousse that was packed away in the Samsonite, and he didn’t want Howie to see that weird thing. He wanted to get the fuck out of the rain. So Danny took hold of some broken bits of wall and used his big feet and bony fingers to claw his way up to the slot. He jammed his head inside to see if it would fit and it did, with just a little room to spare that was barely enough for his shoulders, the widest part of him, which he turned and slid through like he was sticking a key in a lock. The rest of him was easy. Your average adult male would’ve needed a shrinking pill to get through this hole, but Danny had a certain kind of body-he was tall but also bendable, adjustable, you could roll him up like a stick of gum and then unroll him. Which is what happened now: he unraveled himself in a sweaty heap on a damp stone floor.

He was in an ancient basementy place that had no light at all and a smell Danny didn’t like: the smell of a cave. A low ceiling smacked his forehead a couple of times and he tried walking with his knees bent, but that hurt his bad knee too much. He held still and straightened up slowly, listening to sounds of little creatures scuttling, and felt a twist of fear in his gut like someone wringing out a rag. Then he remembered: there was a mini-flashlight on his key chain left over from his club days-shining it into somebody’s eyes you could tell if they were on E or smack or Special K. Danny flicked it on and poked the little beam at the dark: stone walls, slippery stone under his feet. Movement along the walls. Danny’s breath came quick and shallow, so he tried slowing it down. Fear was dangerous. It let in the worm: another word Danny and his friends had invented all those years ago, smoking pot or doing lines of coke and wondering what to call that thing that happened to people when they lost confidence and got phony, anxious, weird. Was it paranoia? Low self-esteem? Insecurity? Panic? Those words were all too flat. But the worm, which is the word they finally picked, the worm was three-dimensional: it crawled inside a person and started to eat until everything collapsed, their whole lives, and they ended up getting strung out or going back home to their folks or being admitted to Bellevue or, in the case of one girl they all knew, jumping off the Manhattan Bridge.

More walking backward. And it wasn’t helping, it was making things worse.

Danny took out his cell phone and flipped it open. He didn’t have international service, but the phone lit up, searching, and just seeing it do that calmed Danny down, like the phone had powers-like it was a Forcefield Stabilizer left over from Terminal Zeus. True, he wasn’t connected to anyone right at that second, but in a general way he was so connected that his connectedness carried him through the dry spells in subways or certain deep buildings when he couldn’t actually reach anyone. He had 304 Instant Messaging usernames and a buddy list of 180. Which is why he’d rented a satellite dish for this trip-a drag to carry, an airport security nightmare, but guaranteed to provide not just cell phone service but wireless Internet access anywhere on planet earth. Danny needed this. His brain refused to stay locked up inside the echo chamber of his head-it spilled out, it overflowed and poured across the world until it was touching a thousand people who had nothing to do with him. If his brain wasn’t allowed to do this, if Danny kept it locked up inside his skull, a pressure began to build.

He started walking again, holding the phone in one hand, the other hand up in the air so he’d know when to duck. The place felt like a dungeon, except somehow Danny remembered that dungeons in old castles were usually in the tower-maybe that was the tall square thing he’d seen from the wall with the red light on top: the dungeon. More likely this place had been a sewer.

If you ask me, mother earth could use a little mouthwash.

But that wasn’t Danny’s line, that was Howie’s. He was heading into memory number two, I might as well tell you that straight up, because how I’m supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don’t know. Rafe went first with the flashlight, then Howie. Danny came last. They were all pretty punchy, Howie because his cousins had singled him out to sneak away from the picnic, Danny because there was no bigger thrill in the world than being Rafe’s partner in crime, and Rafe-well, the beautiful thing about Rafe was you never knew why he did anything.

Let’s show Howie the cave.

Rafe had said this softly, looking sideways at Danny through those long lashes he had. And Danny went along, knowing there would be more.

Howie stumbled in the dark. He had a notebook under one elbow. They hadn’t played Terminal Zeus in more than a year. The game ended without talking-one Christmas Eve, Danny just avoided Howie and went off with his other cousins instead. Howie tried a couple of times to come near, catch Danny’s eye, but he gave up easily.

Danny: That notebook’s messing up your balance, Howie.

Howie: Yeah, but I need it.

Need it why?

For when I get an idea.

Rafe turned around and shined the flashlight straight at Howie’s face. He shut his eyes.

Rafe: What’re you talking about, get an idea?

Howie: For D and D. I’m the dungeon master.

Rafe turned the beam away. Who do you play with?

My friends.

Danny felt a little stunned, hearing that. Dungeons and Dragons. He had a kind of body memory of Terminal Zeus, the feel of dissolving into that game. And it turned out the game hadn’t stopped. It had gone on without him.

Rafe: You sure you’ve got any friends, Howie?

Aren’t you my friend, Rafe? And then Howie laughed and they all did. He was making a joke.

Rafe: This kid is actually pretty funny.

Which made Danny wonder if this could be enough-them being in the boarded-up cave where no one was allowed to go. If maybe nothing else would have to happen. Danny wished very hard for this.

Here’s how the cave was laid out: first a big round room with a little bit of daylight in it, then an opening where you had to stoop to get through into another room that was dark, and then a hole you crawled through into room three, where the pool was. Danny had no idea what was beyond that.

They all got quiet when they saw the pool: creamy whitish green, catching Rafe’s flashlight beam and squiggling its light over the walls. It was maybe six feet wide and clear, deep.

Howie: Shit, you guys. Shit. He opened up his notebook and wrote something down.

Danny: You brought a pencil?

Howie held it up. It was one of those little green pencils they gave you at the country club to sign your check. He said: I used to bring a pen, but it kept leaking on my pants.

Rafe gave a big laugh and Howie laughed too, but then he stopped, like maybe he wasn’t supposed to laugh as much as Rafe.

Danny: What did you write?

Howie looked at him: Why?

I don’t know. Curious.

I wrote green pool.

Rafe: You call that an idea?

They were quiet. Danny felt a pressure building in the cave like someone had asked him a question and was getting sick of waiting for an answer. Rafe. Now wondering why Danny’s older cousin had so much power over him is like wondering why the sun shines or why the grass grows. There are people out there who can make other people do things, that’s all. Sometimes without asking. Sometimes without even knowing what they want done.

Danny went to the edge of the pool. Howie, he said, there’s a shiny thing down there at the bottom. You see it?

Howie came over and looked. Nope.

There, down there.

Danny squatted next to the pool and Howie did, too, wobbling on the balls of his big feet.

Danny put his hand on his cousin’s back. He felt the softness of Howie, how warm he was through his shirt. Maybe Danny had never touched his cousin before, or maybe it was just knowing right then that Howie was a person with a brain and a heart, all the stuff Danny had. Howie clutched his notebook against his side. Danny saw the pages shaking and realized his cousin was scared-Howie felt the danger pulling in around him. Maybe he’d known all along. But he turned his face to Danny with a look of total trust, like he knew Danny would protect him. Like they understood each other. It happened faster than I’m making it sound: Howie looked at Danny and Danny shut his eyes and shoved him into the pool. But even that’s too slow: Look. Shut. Shove.

Or just shove.

There was t he weight of Howie tipping, clawing arms and legs, but no sound Danny could remember, not even a splash. Howie must’ve yelled, but Danny didn’t hear a yell, just the sounds of him and Rafe wriggling out of there and running like crazy, Rafe’s flashlight beam strobing the walls, bursting out of the cave into a gush of warm wind, down the two big hills and back to the picnic (where no one missed them), Danny feeling that ring around him and Rafe, a glowing ring that held them together. They didn’t say a word about what they’d done until a couple hours later when the picnic was winding down.

Danny: Shit. Where the hell is he?

Rafe: Could be right underneath us.

Danny looked down at the grass. What do you mean, underneath us?

Rafe was grinning. I mean we don’t know which way he went.

By the time everyone started fanning out, looking for Howie, something had crawled inside Danny’s brain and was chewing out a pattern like those tunnels, all the ways Howie could’ve gone deeper inside the caves, under the hills. The mood was calm. Howie had wandered off somewhere was what everyone seemed to be thinking-he was fat, he was weird, there was no blood tie, and no one was blaming Danny for anything. But his Aunt May looked more scare than Danny had ever seen a grown-up look, a hand on her throat like she knew she’d lost her boy, her one child, and seeing how far things had gone made Danny even more petrified to say what he knew he had to say-We tricked him, Rafe and me; we left him in the caves-because that handful of words would change everything: they would all know what he’d done, and Rafe would know he’d told, and beyond that Danny’s mind went blank. So he waited one more second before opening his mouth, and then one more, another and another, and every second he waited seemed to drive some sharp thing deeper into Danny. Then it was dark. His pop put a hand on Danny’s head (suchagoodboy) and said,

They’ve got plenty of people looking, son. You’ve got a game tomorrow.

Riding back in the car, Danny couldn’t get warm. He pulled old blankets over himself and kept the dog in his lap, but his teeth knocked together so hard that his sister complained about the noise and his mom said, You must be coming down with something, honey. I’ll run a hot bath when we get home.

Danny went back to the caves by himself a few times after that. He’d walk alone up the hills to the boarded-up mouth, and mixed in with the sounds of dry grass was his cousin’s voice howling up from underground: no and please and help. And Danny would think: Okay, now-now! and feel a rising up in himself at the idea of finally saying those words he’d been holding inside all this time: Howie’s in the caves; we left him in the caves, Rafe and I, and just imagining this gave Danny a rush of relief so intense it seemed he would almost pass out, and at the same time he’d feel a shift around him like the sky and earth were changing places, and a different kind of life would open up, light and clear, some future he didn’t realize he’d lost until that minute.

But it was too late. Way, way too late for any of that. They’d found Howie in the caves three days later, semiconscious. Every night Danny would expect his pop’s sharp knock on his bedroom door and frantically rehearse his excuses-It was Rafe and I’m just a kid-until they ran together in a loop-It was Rafe I’m just a kid itwasRafeI’mjustakid-the loop played even when Danny was doing his homework or watching TV or sitting on the john, itwasRafeI’mjustakid, until it seemed like everything in Danny’s life was the witness he needed to prove he was still himself, still Danny King exactly like before: See, I scored a goal! See, I’m hanging with my friends!But he wasn’t one hundred percent there, he was watching, too, hoping everyone would be convinced. And they were.

And after months and months of this faking, Danny started to believe in it again. All the normal things that had happened to him since the cave made a crust over that day, and the crust got thicker and thicker until Danny almost forgot about what was underneath.

And when Howie got better, when he could finally be alone in a room without his mother, when he could sleep with the lights off again, he was different. After the traumatic incident his sweetness was gone and he got into drugs and eventually bought a gun and tried to rob a 7-Eleven, and they sent him away to reform school.

After Rafe died three years later (killing two girls from his class at Michigan in his pickup truck), the family picnics stopped. And by the time they started up again, Danny wasn’t going home anymore.

That was memory number two.

So now back to Danny, walking with his arms up and his cell phone on through the basement or dungeon or whatever it was in a castle that belonged to Howie. He’d come a long way to meet his cousin here, and his reasons were practical: making money, getting the hell out of New York. But also Danny was curious. Because over the years, news about Howie kept reaching him through that high-speed broadcasting device known as a family:

1. Bond trader
2. Chicago
3. Insane wealth
4. Marriage, kids
5. Retirement at thirty-four

And each time one of those chunks of news got to Danny, he’d think, See, he’s okay. He’s fine. He’s better than fine! and feel a bump of relief and then another bump that made him sit down wherever he was and stare into space. Because something hadn’t happened that should’ve happened to Danny. Or maybe the wrong things had happened, or maybe too many little things had happened instead of one big thing, or maybe not enough little things had happened to combine into one big thing.

Bottom line: Danny didn’t know why he’d come all this way to Howie’s castle. Why did I take a writing class? I thought it was to get away from my roommate, Davis, but I’m starting to think there was another reason under that.

You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are. My teacher, Holly, told me that.

I started the class with a bad attitude. For the second meeting I wrote a story about a guy who fucks his writing teacher in a broom closet until the door flies open and all the brooms and mops and buckets come crashing out and their bare asses are shining in the light and they both get busted. It got a lot of laughs while I was reading it, but when I stopped reading the room went quiet.

Okay, Holly says. Reactions?

No one has a reaction.

Come on, folks. Our job is to help Ray do the very best work he can do. Something tells me this may not be it.

More quiet. Finally I say: It was just a joke.

No one’s laughing, she says.

They were, I say. They laughed.

Is that what you are, Ray? A joke?

I think: What the fuck? She’s looking at me but I can’t make myself look back.

She says: I bet there are people out there who’d tell me Yes, Ray’s a joke. Who’d tell me you’re trash. Am I right?

Now there’s muttering: Ow, and Shit, and What about that, Ray-man? and I know they expect me to be pissed, and I know I’m supposed to be pissed and I am pissed, but not just that. Something else.

There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?

I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.

What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.

I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks-she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.

She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.

You can wait outside, she says. It’s only ten more minutes.

I think I’ll stay.

We look at each other. Good, she says.

. . .

So when Danny finally spotted a light in that castle basement and realized it was a door with light coming in around it, when his heart went pop in his chest and he went over there and gave it a shove and it opened right up into a curved stairwell with a light on, I know what that was like. Not because I’m Danny or he’s me or any of that shit-this is all just stuff a guy told me. I know because after Holly mentioned that door in our heads, something happened to me. The door wasn’t real, there was no actual door, it was just figurative language. Meaning it was a word. A sound. Door. But I opened it up and walked out.

After the accident, I became less visible. I don’t mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see. In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through space like being on the Tilt’o’Whirl (always a favorite of mine), feeling my body move faster than, and counter to, the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the windshield into the open air, bloody and frightened and uncomprehending. The truth is that I don’t remember anything. The accident happened at night during an August downpour on a deserted stretch of highway through corn and soybean fields, about twenty miles outside Rockford, Illinois, my home town. I hit the brakes and my face collided with the windshield, knocking me out instantly. Thus I was spared the adventure of my car veering off the tollway into a cornfield, rolling several times, bursting into flames and ultimately exploding. The air bags didn’t inflate; I could sue, of course, but since I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, it’s probably a good thing they didn’t inflate, or I might have been decapitated, adding injury to insult, you might say. The shatter-proof windshield did indeed hold fast upon its impact with my head, so although I broke virtually every bone in my face, I have almost no visible scars. I owe my life to what is known as a “Good Samaritan,” someone who pulled me out of the flaming wreck so promptly that only my hair was burned, someone who laid me gently on the perimeter of the cornfield, called an ambulance, described my location with some precision and then, with a self-effacement that strikes me as perverse, not to mention un-American, chose to slink away anonymously rather than take credit for these sterling deeds. A passing motorist in a hurry, that sort of thing. The ambulance took me to Rockford Memorial Hospital, where I fell into the hands of one Dr. Hans Fabermann, reconstructive surgeon extraordinaire. When I emerged from unconsciousness fourteen hours later, it was Dr. Fabermann who sat beside me, an elderly man with a broad, muscular jaw and tufts of white hair in both ears, though most of this I didn’t see that night–I could hardly see at all. Calmly Dr. Fabermann explained that I was lucky; I’d broken ribs, arm, and leg, but had no internal injuries to speak of. My face was in the midst of what he called a “golden time,” before the “grotesque swelling” would set in. If he operated immediately, he could get a jump on my “gross asymmetry–” namely, the disconnection of my cheekbones from my upper skull and of my lower jaw from my “midface.” I had no idea where I was, or what had happened to me. My face was numb, I saw with slurry double vision and had an odd sensation around my mouth as if my upper and lower teeth were out of whack. I felt a hand on mine, and realized then that my sister, Grace, was at my bedside. I sensed the vibration of her terror, and it induced in me a familiar desire to calm her, Grace curled against me in bed during a thunderstorm, the smell of cedar, wet leaves…It’s fine, I wanted to say. It’s a golden time. “If we don’t operate now, we’ll have to wait five or six days for the swelling to go down,” Dr. Fabermann said. I tried to speak, to acquiesce, but no moving parts of my head would move. I produced one of those aerated gurgles made by movie characters expiring from war wounds. Then I closed my eyes. But apparently Dr. Fabermann understood, because he operated that night. * * * * * After twelve hours of surgery, during which eighty titanium screws were implanted in the crushed bones of my face to connect and hold them together; after I’d been sliced from ear to ear over the crown of my head so Dr. Fabermann could peel down the skin from my forehead and re-attach my cheekbones to my upper skull; after incisions were made inside my mouth so that he could connect my lower and upper jaws; after eleven days during which my sister fluttered by my hospital bed like a squeamish angel while her husband, Frank Jones, whom I loathed and who loathed me, stayed home with my two nieces and nephew–I was discharged from the hospital. I found myself at a strange crossroads. I had spent my youth awaiting the chance to bolt from Rockford, Illinois, and had done so the moment I was able. I’d visited rarely, to the chagrin of my parents and sister, and what visits I made were impetuous, cranky and short. In my real life, as I thought of it, I had actively concealed my connection to Rockford, telling people I was from Chicago, if I told even that. But much as I longed to return to New York after the accident, to pad barefoot on the fluffy white carpeting of my 25th floor apartment overlooking the East River, the fact that I lived alone made this impossible. My right leg and left arm were sheathed in plaster. My face was just entering the “angry healing phase”: black bruises extending down to my chest, the whites of my eyes a monstrous red; a swollen, basketball-sized head with stitches across the crown (an improvement over the staples they’d used initially). My head was partly shaved, and what hair remained was singed, rank smelling and falling out in bunches. Pain, mercifully, wasn’t a problem; nerve damage had left me mostly numb, particularly from my eyes down, though I did have excruciating headaches. I wanted to stay near Dr. Fabermann, though he insisted, with classic Midwestern self deprecation, that I would find his surgical equal, or superior, in New York. But New York was for the strong, and I was weak–so weak! I slept nearly all of the time. It seemed fitting that I nurse my weakness in a place I had always associated with the lame and the useless. And so, to the bewilderment of my friends and colleagues at home, to the pain of my sister, whose husband refused to have me under his roof (not that I could have borne it), she arranged for me to move into the home of an old friend of our parents’, Mary Cunningham, who lived just east of the Rock River on Ridgewood Road, near the house where we grew up. My parents had long since moved to Arizona, where my father’s lungs were slowly dissolving from emphysema, and where my mother had come to believe in the power of certain oddly shaped stones, which she arranged on his gasping chest at night while he slept. “Please let me come,” my mother pleaded with me over the phone, having assembled healing pouches full of herbs and feathers and teeth. But no, I said, please. Stay with Dad. “I’ll be fine,” I told her, “Grace will take care of me,” and even through my croaking stranger’s voice I heard a resolve that was familiar to me–and no doubt to my mother. I would take care of myself. I always had. Mrs. Cunningham had become an old woman since I knew her as the lady who used a broom to chase away neighborhood kids trying to scoop the billowing goldfish from her murky backyard pond. The fish, or their descendants, were still there, visible in flashes of white speckled gold among a snarl of moss and lily pads. The house smelled of dust and dead flowers, the closets were full of old hats. The lives of Mrs. Cunningham’s dead husband and her children who lived far away were still in that house, asleep in the cedar filled attic, which is doubtless why she, an old woman with a bum hip, was still living there, struggling up that flight of stairs when most of her widowed, bridge-playing friends had decamped long ago to spiffy apartments. She tucked me into bed in one of her daughter’s rooms and seemed to enjoy a renaissance of second motherhood, bringing me tea and juice which I drank from a baby cup, slipping knitted booties on my feet and feeding me Gerber Apricot Puree, which I lapped down lustily. She had the lawn boy carry the TV up to my room, and in the evenings would recline on the twin bed beside mine, her waxen, veiny calves exposed beneath the hem of her padded bathrobe. Together we watched the local news, where I learned that even in Rockford, drug gangs had come to rule the streets, and drive-by shootings were the norm. “When I think what this town used to be,” Mrs. Cunningham would mutter as she watched, alluding to the postwar years when she and her husband, Ralph, had chosen Rockford above all American cities as the ideal place to make their home. “The most prosperous community in the nation,” some erstwhile pundit named Roger Babson had apparently anointed it; Mary Cunningham went so far as to heft a musty tome onto my bed and jab her bent, trembling finger at the very quotation. I sensed her bitterness, her disgust at the grave miscalculation that left her now, in her solitude, obliged by memory and experience to love a place she had come to despise. * * * * * It was four weeks before I left the house to do anything more than herd my various limbs into Grace’s car for visits to Dr. Fabermann and his associate, Dr. Pine, who was tending to my broken bones. When he implanted a walking plug in my leg cast, I ventured outside for the very first time in zebra striped sunglasses Mary Cunningham had worn in the sixties, Mary herself at my side, to walk gingerly through my old neighborhood. I hadn’t returned to this part of town since Grace had left for college, at which point my parents had bought a smaller place on a bit of land east of town, near the Interstate, and a horse, Daffodil, whom my father rode until he was too short of breath. By now it was late September; I had tracked the passing days in the obsessive belief that if I measured the time, it wouldn’t really be lost. We stepped through a warm breeze toward the house on Brownwood Drive where I had lain in bed for several thousand nights, staring into a cat’s cradle of Elm trees that were slowly expiring from Dutch Elm disease, where I’d listened to record albums in a basement with orange indoor-outdoor carpeting laid over the concrete, where I’d stood before a mirror in a prom dress, my mother plucking at its petals of rayon–and yet, for all that, a house I’d thought of hardly ever since I’d left. And there it was: flat, ranch style, covered with yellow bricks that must have been pasted on from outside, a square of crisp green lawn tucked like a napkin under its chin. So indistinguishable was this house from tens of thousands of others in Rockford that I turned to Mary Cunningham and asked, “Are you sure this is it?” She looked puzzled, then laughed, no doubt reminding herself that my vision was worse than hers at the moment, that I was doped up on painkillers. And yet, as we were turning to go, I had what I guess was a memory: this house against a dawn sky as I jogged toward it from my best friend Ellen Metcalf’s house, where I’d spent the night. The feeling of seeing it there–my house, with everything I knew inside it. The experience of that memory was like being hit, or kissed, unexpectedly. I blinked to recover from it. The next week, I made my way on crutches to the Rock River, where a park and jogging path meandered along the water’s eastern edge. I gazed hungrily at the path, longing to visit the rose garden and duck pond further north along it, but knowing I didn’t have the strength. Instead, I used a pay phone in the parking lot beside the YMCA to call my answering machine; Mrs. Cunningham’s phones were all rotaries. It had now been seven weeks since the accident, and the outgoing message I’d instructed my sister to leave on my machine explaining my plight while not revealing that I’d left my apartment–lest it get robbed, which would really have finished me–had provoked a rash of messages from worried friends that Grace had been dutifully collecting. But there were a couple she hadn’t retrieved yet. One from Oscar, my booker, who yelled through a polyphony of ringing phones that seemed otherworldly to me now, “Just checking in, Sweet. Call when you’ve regained the gift of speech.” He’d been calling every day, my sister said. Oscar adored me, though it had been years since I’d earned my agency, Femme, any serious money. The second call was from someone named Anthony Halliday, who identified himself as a private detective. Grace had taken two messages from him already. Having never spoken with a private detective before, I dialed his number out of curiosity. “Anthony Halliday’s office.” A wobbly, almost childish female voice. Not a professional, I thought; someone filling in. “He’s not here right now,” she told me. “Can I take a message?” I wasn’t giving out Mary Cunningham’s phone number, in part because she was a kind old woman, not my secretary, and because there was something perverse and incompatible in the notion of New York and its inhabitants storming the mausoleum of her house. “I’d rather call him,” I said. “What’s a good time?” She hesitated. “There’s no way he can call you?” “Look,” I said. “If he wants to reach–” “He’s ah…in the hospital,” she said quickly. I laughed–my first real laugh since the accident. It made my throat ache. “Tell him that makes two of us,” I cackled. “Too bad we’re not in the same hospital, we could just meet in the hallway.” She laughed uneasily. “I think I wasn’t supposed to say that, about the hospital.” “There’s no shame in hospitalization,” I assured her heartily, “as long as it’s not a mental hospital…” Dead silence. Anthony Halliday, a private detective with whom I’d never spoken, was in a mental hospital. “Maybe next week?” she said timidly. “I’ll call next week.” But even as I began my halting journey back toward Mary Cunningham’s, I felt the notion slip from my mind like those lists you make as you’re falling asleep. * * * * * Grace visited that night, pulling a chair between the twin beds where Mary Cunningham and I were ensconced as usual, watching “NYPD Blue.” When a man was pummeled in a restroom, his face beaten bloody, Grace covered her eyes and begged me to change the channel. “You change it,” I retorted. “I’m the invalid.” “Sorry,” she said, going sheepishly to the TV–apparently one of the last in the world to be controlled manually. “I shouldn’t be the one crying.” “You’re crying for both of us,” I said. “It just seems bizarre that you would come to Rockford without telling me,” she fretted, flipping channels. She’d said this a dozen times, apparently in the belief that, had she but known I was on my way, I would have arrived without incident. And much as I disliked this line of questioning (or any line of questioning, for that matter), I vastly preferred it to the topic Grace didn’t dare broach: What would I look like when all this was done? And what would become of me? “I wanted to surprise you,” I said. “My, and you still don’t remember what happened!” Mary Cunningham marveled. “Was it an animal in the road, dear, or were you feeling sleepy? Could you have dropped off at the wheel for a minute?” “I don’t remember. I don’t remember,” I said. For some reason, I covered my ears. “Her memory’s always been lousy,” Grace said. It was true–my memory was lousy, and Rockford was the place I remembered least. And yet the boredom and stasis of my present circumstances were driving me to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped up in an old house will eventually make her way to the attic and upend a few boxes. In moments, I found myself drenched in early childhood impressions of Rockford: a lush, sensuous world of sticky green lawns and violent thunderstorms, mountains of glittering snow in winter. In early adolescence, I’d done a school report on Rockford’s industrial achievements, reading at the public library about a self-tying attachment for grain binders, a knitting machine that made seamless socks, the oil lubricated “universal joint,” whose purpose I’ve forgotten; the “side by side,” a bookcase and desk combination; about lathes, reapers and their component parts. I remembered reading in a state of keen anticipation, awaiting the moment when Rockford would burst forth in triumph, the envy of the industrial world. I sensed this glory approaching with the invention of cars, for eleven Rockford companies had designed them, and one, the Tarkington Motor Company, built a prototype that was warmly received at an auto show in Chicago in the twenties. But no–the investors backed out, the car was never produced, and with this failure, my excitement began to congeal into something heavier. There was to be no limelight; Rockford remained a city known for its drills, transmissions, joints, saws, watertight seals, adjustable door bumpers, spark plugs, gaskets–“automobile sundries,” as such products are known–for its agricultural tools; in short, for dull, invisible things that no one in the world would ever know or care about. After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of “downtown,” across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the Interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the street. But I held still for a minute, clutching my bookbag, letting the smallness and meagerness of this forgotten place pour in around me. Rockford, I now saw, was a city of losers, a place that had never come close to being famous for anything, despite the fact that again and again, it had tried. A place revered among mechanics for its universal joint was not a place where I could remain. This was clear to me at age twelve: my first clear notion of myself. I was not Rockford–I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother’s car. Our father was an electrician, a man who pushed through walls to the hidden circuitry behind, who braided wires between his fingers and made the lights turn on. As a child, I had ascribed magical powers to his work, and arrayed myself in necklaces he made me from bolts and washers and colored wire. But after the library, I began to imagine a perspective from which my father’s life–and my mother’s, too–were small, earnest, and futile, too deeply touched by this place where they both had spent their lives. I grew up waiting to leave. And Grace grew up cleaving to me, knowing that I would go and she would stay. Now here I was, back in Rockford, fighting with my sister over who should change the TV channel, my head full of titanium bolts and screws invented here, for all I knew. I found this funny in a dark way, one of life’s little ironies. “The girls are dying to see you,” Grace said, reviving our ongoing debate over my nieces. “Please let me bring them.” “They think they want to see me,” I said. “Charlotte, will you get over it?” she said, and pressed my hand. “They love you so much!” “Not yet.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Allison and Pammy. In fact I hungered to snuff their mussed up hair and feel them bump against me the way kids do without thinking. But to them, I was Glamorous Aunt Charlotte, the fashion model whom they sometimes found grinning, hand on hip, inside catalogs that arrived on their doorsteps unwonted (for that was the level I’d sunk to) or wandering through the background of a Tampax commercial. That was me hawking deodorant on the Coney Island Cyclone (“Now this. Is stress.”); that was me in waders, wielding a fishing rod and declaiming the merits of antifungal foot powder. That pixie-faced brunette sprawled atop a Buick as if she’d fallen from a tree? The one in glasses, blushingly recounting the trauma of passing gas during a board meeting? Urging fortified granola upon her freckled son? Those were me, too. It was far short of the transcendent existence I once had envisioned for myself. But to my young nieces, I embodied a mythical ascension. I would let them believe in me in peace, I told myself, unencumbered by my present grotesqueness. I was ashamed to be seen. * * * * * One afternoon, I walked to the Cedar Bluffs Cemetery and parked my rear on a gravestone that was as near as I could recall to the spot where I used to sit with Ellen Metcalf. I lit up a Merit, my first since the accident, thus flouting Dr. Fabermann’s warning that smoking impeded the healing of bone. Before dinner and after, too, sometimes, Ellen and I would lean against these stones among the legions of dead Swedes, Olsens, Lofgrens, Larsens, Swensons like myself, and smoke Kools, which we believed were a cure for the summer heat. We talked about losing our virginity–not losing it, though, with all the haplessness that word implied, but yielding it up in a blaze of ecstasy that would leave us permanently altered. I tried to recall the sound of Ellen’s voice. I couldn’t, as if she’d been an imaginary friend, a projected figment of myself. Once, we had walked from East High School all the way to the pharmacy beside the Piggly Wiggly, then stopped before the section of plastic children’s toys. Only to find, as we looked at each other inquiringly, that neither one of us knew what we were doing there; we had each been following the other. After my next doctor’s visit, I asked Grace to drive past East High School. A rather grand building, it seemed to me now, large and mustard tinted, hundreds of canted windows juggling the sunlight. As I stood before its broad, empty steps, I had another jab of memory: seeing Ellen Metcalf for the first time outside that school, an olive skinned girl with long black hair. Watching her there, exotic, alone, and wanting to become her–the feeling sprang from my fingers to my throat. Later, Ellen said, of spotting me that day, “I could tell you didn’t belong here.” The highest compliment. Her father owned a company that made fertilizer, and her mother was a quasi-invalid, cloistered in a darkened master bedroom, consumed by some malady whose exact nature no one seemed sure of. They lived in a sprawling house just a few blocks from my own much smaller one. Ellen existed in a state of lonely hauteur, like the last surviving member of a royal family; her brother, Moose, had left the previous year for the University of Michigan. I knew about Moose. He was one of those high school boys whose athletic and romantic feats inspire the teenage equivalent of epic poetry, recited longingly in their absence. I had encountered him once, briefly, thrillingly, on a summer afternoon when I was practicing my golf swing on our front lawn and hit a sprinkler head, sending a geyser of water into a red Mustang convertible that happened to be driving past. The driver got out, shaking water from his longish hair: an older boy, tanned in a spotless white T-shirt, ambling over the grass like a person who had never hurried in his life. As I stammered my apologies, struggling to tamp the foaming crescendo of water with my foot, he scanned our yard and said, “Handle’s where, behind that hedge? Turn it off and let me take a look.” By the time I’d returned from that errand, he had removed the sprinkler head and was rattling its rusted parts in his hand like dice. His absorption allowed me to study him; a charmed, confident boy whose appeal was compounded, somehow, by the Neanderthal cast of his head. Twenty minutes later he had repaired the sprinkler, sauntered back to his car and driven away with a wave, and it was only then that an older girl from across the street stampeded over to tell me, breathlessly, in whose rarefied presence I found myself. But Moose was gone. Ellen was alone, marooned in a place that felt as desolate to her as it did to me. Everything good was gone from this crummy city, this home of reapers and ball bearings, and there was nothing for it but to plunder what few excitements remained. We talked about our lust–where exactly it resided within us; our stomachs, we thought, though Ellen said she felt it, too, in the back of her mouth. * * * * * By October, Dr. Pine had removed the last vestiges of plaster from my body. As Mary Cunningham raked her yard, I trailed behind her with a tube of green poison whose proboscis I shoved into the eye of each weed I spied, and pumped. Rockford was in the grip of a mania for Jack o’lantern leaf bags; at least one grinning orange sack squatted on every lawn, fat with leaves. Stalking weeds, I tried to recall each one of my sexual quarries that sophomore year with Ellen. Jeff Heinz: a shy and statuesque football playing senior, the sheer grace of whose movements set him apart from the sludge of players on the field. Jeff and I were in chemistry together, and I managed to insinuate my way into the role of lab partner, standing close, brushing his wrist as we puzzled over beakers full of colored liquid. Nothing. Meanwhile, Ellen had a boyfriend, Michael Ippen, with whom she expected to do it shortly. So I relinquished Jeff Heinz, who proceeded to Brown University (an unusual step for a Rockford boy), whence filtered back the electrifying news, a year or two later, that he was a fairy. I would have loved to snicker over that one with Ellen, but by then we were no longer speaking. Benji Gustafsen: blond, sweet, rippled muscles on his belly, the whole of whose intelligence, it seemed, was compressed into a knack for restoring small antique appliances: can openers, toaster ovens, vacuum cleaners. This was a boon for Benji’s friends and neighbors; less so for anyone trying to hold a conversation with him. But conversation wasn’t my goal, either, and I lost my virginity to Benji in his squalid basement workroom only two days after Ellen lost hers to Michael Ippen on his older brother’s squishy bed. We brushed snow from our respective gravestones and perched in the early dark, down parkas pulled tight around us, looking west toward the lights of the expressway that snaked alongside the Rock River. “The bed had a scratchy blanket on it,” Ellen remarked. “There were tons of McDonalds wrappers on the floor,” I said. “It smelled like catsup.” “Did it hurt?” “Killed. Plus I bled.” “With all the catsup around,” she said, “he probably didn’t notice.” We passed our last Kool back and forth. Ellen slipped off the gravestone and lay on her back in the snow. “Doesn’t that freeze your head?” I asked. “Yeah,” she said, “but the stars.” I lay down beside her. She was right, the stars. After I’d done it with Benji, an awful sensation had come open in me–who was this guy, stretching like a dog so his spine cracked? But then I’d thought of Ellen, telling it to her, strategizing, and the feeling had melted into a kind of sweetness. Marcus Sealander: a tattooed motorcyclist whose menacing black leather vest concealed, of all things, a potbelly. We did it standing up. Marcus had a nasty habit of shoving my shoulders against the wall as if it excited him to think of snapping my spine, so he got no second chance. Meanwhile, Ellen did it twice with Luis Guasto, a strange boy who’d pasted hundreds of beer cans to the walls of his parents rec. room with a glue gun. They did it downstairs, among the cans, and the first time Ellen thought she might almost, just barely feel something, but then Louis rolled off her and moments later was in the bathroom pissing loudly, so that was that. The second time was even worse–over in four minutes flat. Tom Ashlock. Lenny Bergstrom. Arthur Blixt. Stephen Finn. By spring we were sluts, sirens, alarming to girls and boys alike as we scoured in vain for someone to satisfy us. When Moose came home at Christmas, Ellen abandoned me for his sacred compass: a brutal disappointment, since I’d hoped to be included. For three lonely weeks I hardly saw her. Moose’s departure left her listless, but soon the alchemy of our union was back at work, plotting our rescue from the crushing banality that surrounded us like those shrinking rooms full of water from which TV heroes must escape. The streets, the sky, the lousy moon. What was wrong with these boys? Boys. We rolled onto our sides, staring at each other amidst the gravestones. The snow had melted, exposing a paper mache of last year’s soggy leaves. A revelation was upon us: the problem was boys–too young, too inexperienced to make us feel what we longed and deserved to feel, whereas men, with their years of practice–men would know exactly what to do! And finding men wouldn’t be so hard; Mr. Polhill, Ellen’s Driver’s Ed. teacher, was constantly leaning over her desk and sniffing her hair, and as for me…how old did he have to be? “Old,” Ellen said. “Thirties.” There was a man I’d caught watching me by the country club pool the summer before. A foreign guy–French, I thought, who’d worn a tight little bathing suit like boys on our swim team wore. I’d found him creepy at the time, but now I revised my opinion: he was French, he was a man, he was perfect. Mr. Polhill gallantly proffered the use of his personal car when Ellen asked him for extra driving practice after school, then suggested a small detour. That was all she would tell me. There was a blankness about her that I’d never seen before; I waited in the cemetery but she didn’t come, and when I chased her down at school she refused to elaborate. Meanwhile, through a friend of my mother’s who knew Mrs. Lafant, the Rockford girl who was married to the Frenchman, I managed to procure a Friday night babysitting job at his house, where two brats drizzled ice cream down the front of the tight, low-cut dress I’d worn for Mr. Lafant’s entertainment. Afterward, as he drove me home, I moved close to him in the front seat. He went still, as if in disbelief. “You are a very lovely girl,” he breathed carefully, in his marvelous accent. When I moved closer, he stroked my hair and I shut my eyes, opening them only when I noticed that Mr. Lafant had begun driving rather wildly. He screeched to a stop somewhere off Spring Creek Road, killed the engine and turned off the headlights. It took my eyes a few moments to adjust, and when finally they did, I discerned Mr. Lafant’s erect penis groping from his pants like a mole emerging from a tunnel. His hands, which moments before had been delicately stroking my hair, now were guiding my head most assertively toward it. I was frightened. His obvious hurry made it worse; when I squirmed my resistance, he seized the back of my head and shoved me toward his groin while also (I noticed) glancing at his watch, no doubt calculating how much longer he had before his wife began to wonder. A wave of revulsion roiled through me. “No!” I shrieked, “No, no!” at which point my employer began to panic. “Shut up,” he implored, shoving the inquiring penis out of sight. He drove me home in urgent silence, an angry muscle jumping in his face. I leapt from the car and he roared away without a word, his tires barking on our quiet street. I would have sprinted straight to Ellen’s house, but my mother had heard the car and padded onto the dewy lawn in her slippers and robe. “Well, that wasn’t very nice,” she remarked. “He should have waited until you went inside.” The next morning, Ellen met me at the back door of her big, empty house and led me upstairs with the same indifferent look she’d worn all week. “I Love Lucy” was on in the TV room. “So, did you do it?” she asked, her eyes not leaving the set. “He didn’t want to,” I said. “He wanted me to suck it.” Ellen turned to me with interest. “I couldn’t,” I confessed. “It was just too disgusting.” Then I asked, instinctively, “Did Mr. Polhill…want that?” Ellen began to cry. I had never seen her cry before, and I hovered near her, on the verge of hugging her as I would hug Grace when she cried, but hesitant. Ellen wasn’t like Grace. “Did you do it?” I whispered. “I tried,” she said, “but after about three seconds, he–you know, he–” “No! No!” “In my mouth,” she sobbed. “Oh my God!” “And then I threw up. All over him and on the bed.” I was quiet, stilled by my horror at the scene she’d conjured, and at the same time, tickled by some creeping mirth that seemed lodged within it. My mouth, of its own accord, twitched into a smile, at which point Ellen’s crying swerved into laughter, outright hysterics, tears still running from her eyes. By now I was laughing, falling with Ellen into aching hilarity until I, too, burst into tears. “He must’ve died,” I sobbed. “He ran in the bathroom and locked the door,” she said, and then we doubled over, both (as it turned out) helplessly wetting our pants. Later, having showered and changed, stuffed our jeans and underwear in Ellen’s washing machine, we put three Old Styles in a bag and carried them to the cemetery, along with a pack of Kools. “Forget the men,” Ellen said. “They’re perverted.” “The good ones wouldn’t do it with us,” I agreed. “They just want to do it with their wives.” We sipped the dry, cold beers. It was so warm, we no longer needed our jackets. We were fresh and clean, yet from somewhere within us–below us, it almost seemed, down among the dead Swedes–came a weight that was palpable. The weight of our boredom, our impatience. “I have the answer,” Ellen said, but without any of the jollity that had accompanied our prior inspirations. “What?” “Moose.” Moose. Who within the month, she informed me, would return from the University of Michigan for summer vacation, three friends in tow. Who would party and waterski with these friends for a couple of weeks, relubricating the vast machine of his social life before he commenced a summer job at his father’s factory. Whose friends would doubtless be the finest specimens the University of Michigan, or any university, had to offer. Not men, not boys. Experienced, but not perverted. And yet, for all the epic allure of Ellen’s brother and those within his hallowed ken, the very thought of another sexual undertaking exhausted me. I feared losing Ellen again after Moose’s return, as I had at Christmas. On his first Saturday home, we peeked down through the country club’s chain link fence at the river directly below, where Moose and his friends–Marco, Amos, Todd–stuttered over the brownish water at intervals presaged by the roar of Moose’s boat. Even at this distance, the sight of Ellen’s brother was arresting: a taut, athletic-looking guy in neon green swim trunks, the best waterskier of the four, by far. But he skied the least, preferring to cheer on the others from the wheel of the boat. “Which do you want?” Ellen asked. “Including Moose?” She looked at me oddly, then shook her head in adamant refusal. “Marco,” I said, crestfallen. “I’ll take Todd,” Ellen said, which mystified me; he was the palest of the three, angular and trim in a way that reminded me of my father. Moose’s destination that night was a party in one of the vast houses on National Avenue, just north of Downtown; our plan was to show up there, do it somewhere in the house with our respective choices, and afterwards, meet back at the country club beside the swimming pool. The party was disappointingly routine; Tom Petty straining some dad’s stereo, a throng of drunk, roaring guys older than our classmates, but otherwise identical. At last I observed Moose again at close range–in the kitchen, where he and another guy were scrimmaging with sponge mops for a can of Tender Vittles on the sticky linoleum. A towering presence, was Moose, big shoulders flicking under his white T-shirt like keys on a player piano as he wrested the cat food from his opponent with some fancy mop work, forearms buttery with tan, his appearance a winning amalgam of beauty, thuggishness, and faint embarrassment. And something else: an awareness on the part of Moose and everyone else, a crowd of admirers thronging the room for a glimpse of his folly, that he was special. Famous. At the sight of us–of Ellen–Moose abandoned the game. “Sis,” he said, discarding his mop and slinging an arm around her shoulders. Thus encompassed, Ellen looked childlike, serene–bland in a way I couldn’t have pictured. The crowd curled around her like a smile. I watched it all with jealous fascination. Later, across a patio drenched in buggy light, Ellen and I tossed ourselves at Moose’s friends with an abandon verging on carelessness. Moose cast acid looks in my direction, but as the party ground on, he lost track of us. Eventually Marco and I crept up a narrow flight of stairs to a third floor guest room that reeked of mothballs. He peeled the clothes from my body and was just lowering himself on top of me like a crane setting an old car onto a pile of old cars, when I recoiled. “No,” I said. “Stop, wait!” stricken with the memory of Mr. Lafant. It was too soon, I didn’t know this guy; I’d forgotten what I was supposed to do with him, and why. Marco, bewildered by this seizure of modesty after my slatternly behavior downstairs, went to take a piss. I fled the room and bolted from the house, sprinting north along the river toward the country club, already revived by the thought of seeing Ellen and swapping our tales of woe, like always. Except, I thought, still running, what if hers was not a tale of woe? What if finally, after so long, she and Todd had found what we were looking for? The thought sickened me. The club’s iron gate was locked, a variable we hadn’t foreseen. I stood outside, wondering whether to scale it. Finally I shimmied over the fence and dropped to the ground inside the club, intensely quiet under the bright moon and torn clouds. The warm golf course grass bounced under my feet. I ran down the concrete steps to the pool, whose turquoise bottom caught the light of the moon, and I saw something move in the water and it was Ellen. I felt such a shock of happiness that I called out her name and she hushed me, laughing, and I saw her clothes by the pool and flung off my own and dove into the wet, heavy silence. I felt the water move as Ellen swam past, her long hair fluttering over my skin. We burst into the air, giggling. “So, what happened?” I asked softly. “With what?” I stared at her. “Todd!” “Oh, he couldn’t,” Ellen said, with an indifference that overjoyed me. “Too drunk.” But we were grinning. There was no sense of failure; only this giddiness, as if we’d broken free–finally, somehow–from an onerous fate. We swam to the shallow end and looked at the sky. The air and water felt identical in temperature, two different versions of the same substance. It was strange and good to be naked in the pool where normally you had to wear a bathing cap. Clouds floated past the moon, milky, mysterious, and I heard a boat on the river below and thought, I’m happy. This is happiness–why was I looking for anything else? Ellen floated on her back, water pooling around her breasts, and no one had ever looked more beautiful to me. I reached for her. It was as if she had known I would, as if she’d reached for me, too. We stood in the water and kissed. Every sensation of desire I had ever known now amassed within me and fought, demanding release. I touched her underwater. She felt both familiar and strange–someone else, but like me. Ellen flinched and shut her eyes. For once, I had some idea of what to do. She clung to me tightly, then collapsed, trembling, her arms around my neck. When she laughed, I heard chattering teeth. We moved to the pool steps and sat, our bodies underwater, just our heads and necks above, and I took her hand and put it on me. She was tentative, afraid, but I kept my hand on hers until my heart snapped and my head hit the concrete behind me. We lay there, my head pounding, a lump forming on my scalp that would hurt for a week, and when the water made us shiver we got out of the pool and dried ourselves off with our clothes and spread them on the grass and lay on top of them and began again, more slowly now. Still, the intensity was punishing–we’re killing each other, I thought. We’re killing something. Afterward, we lay half asleep, and finally Ellen said, “We could teach these assholes a thing or two,” and we laughed and got dressed and walked back to Ellen’s house, talking thoughtlessly, as if nothing had changed. We were best friends. We slept naked in Ellen’s single bed, pressed together with her hair everywhere, and again I had that sense, as when I’d first touched her, that she was less a separate person than a variant of myself–that together, we made one thing. I woke at dawn and had an impulse to leave, with it all still so nice. This was odd because it was Saturday, and normally we would have made Swedish pancakes and watched cartoons, probably spent the whole day together. But I left Ellen sleeping there and walked home in the May sunlight, and only as I approached my own house, the flat, unassuming yellow house bleached almost white by the bare morning sun, did what had happened with Ellen begin to seem pretty strange. I almost couldn’t believe it. But when I remembered the feeling of it, the physical feeling, I felt that warmth in my stomach and all I wanted was to see her again, to have that again. Am I a lesbian? I wondered, incredulous. No other girl had ever attracted me. I waited until that night to call her. Moose answered the phone (coldly, having surely been informed of my antics with Marco) and handed it to Ellen. I heard a guardedness in her voice that instantly provoked an equal guardedness in me, and our conversation had a weird, stilted feeling that was completely unlike us. It never went away. After that, seeing Ellen was like seeing one of the guys I’d done it with; she made me self conscious, aware of the passing moments and the need to fill them with something. In the pauses I would wonder, Is she thinking about it? Does she want to do it again? But I didn’t, anymore, because now Ellen seemed no different from a boy. It was a horrible summer; I had no other friends. I saw Ellen only once, at the movies. “Wait,” I gasped, yanking Grace into the shadows as Moose and his entourage spiraled from the theater into the carpeted lobby. The guys were sparring, tousling, and Moose leaned down and hoisted Ellen over his shoulder–so easily, as if she were a coat, and her clogs fell off but Moose wouldn’t let her down, he ran with her through the glass doors and into the parking lot, where I heard the shriek of her laughter. Someone collected the clogs and brought them to her. I watched, incredulous. To be coddled, protected that way–what must it feel like? To be at the absolute center, adored by the boy whom everyone loved, without trying. What could compete with it? That fall, I saw Ellen walking home from school ahead of me. She was alone, sadness closing back around her now that Moose was gone. I forced myself into a trot and caught up. “I feel so weird around you now,” I said. “Me, too,” she said. “We have to forget about that. We have to go back to how it was before.” “We have to!” she agreed. Then silence. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and we pushed terse, empty comments back and forth as I counted the minutes to my house. When finally it came into sight, I pretended my mother was waiting for me and ran ahead, leaving Ellen by herself. I had thought it would be hard to make new friends, but it turned out that Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we’d been empowered by our accord. Eventually we settled down with boyfriends and went to proms and even signed each other’s yearbooks–Good luck with everything!–and except in the most abstract sense, I forgot about that night. I did pay one last visit to Ellen’s house. This time with Moose, who graduated from Michigan and returned to Rockford to work for his father. I picked him up my senior year at a state championship hockey game, where he was watching teenage boys scramble over the ice. By then Moose’s aura of fame had shrunk; even the youngest siblings of the kids who had revered him were gone, and East High, where once he’d reigned, no longer knew of his existence. He was still living at home, and I followed him up the dark familiar stairs, past the master bedroom where his invalid mother spent her days, past Ellen’s empty room (she was a year older than I, and had already left for college), to his own attic lair: faded sports posters loosening from the walls, dusty trophies lining shelves. There was a seriousness about Moose that I hadn’t seen before. As we sank onto his bed, I pointed to a series of ropes and pulleys connected to a box attached to the ceiling and asked what they were. “Nothing,” he told me. “Some old stuff I outgrew.” When it was over Moose faded into a doze. I stared at him, the bulky shoulders and slightly purplish cast of his eyelids; this locus of so many years of cumulative envy and mystery, idolatry and myth, now prone, snoring lightly into a pillow. His eyes opened. “What?” he said, groggy. “You,” I said. He looked puzzled, and raised himself onto an elbow. “Just…Moose,” I said, and shook my head. “Moose. Moose Metcalf. I can’t believe it.” Now he smiled, uneasy. He knew what I meant. Wind filled the bedroom from his tiny window. “Actually, my name is Edmund,” he said. * * * * * I was not a nostalgic person. I didn’t save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I’d thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events–so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future. Now, as I made my limping way among the tall bare trees toward Ellen Metcalf’s house, it was not with the intention of losing myself in misty-eyed recollections of my old friend, but to see the house now. To learn what it, and if possible she, had become. The Metcalf manse was a rambling Tudor style that has always been popular among the Midwestern rich. The lawn still impressed me, wide and lush despite the scorching summer that had just passed. On the grass were sundry child-oriented items: a bat, a large plastic gun, a smallish fluorescent orange bike. What age child they denoted I had no idea. I touched my face, stuccoed with Mary Cunningham’s thick, flower-scented pancake. I was still badly bruised; rather than fading, it seemed, my bruises simply changed color, like fireworks whose finale won’t arrive. I felt darkly conspicuous; a dour visitor, a drug-ravaged starlet incognito. The area behind the house had been re-landscaped; flower beds shaped like Lima beans blossomed with wine colored begonias. I stood on the flagstone patio and listened to the silence. I went to the screen door that led to the kitchen–the door Ellen and I had always used–and gently tapped. I rang the bell. When it was clear that no one was home, I opened the door and went in. The difference shocked me; I remembered the kitchen as a dark room with greenish walls and high windows that made you feel you were straining to see the sky from the bottom of a well. Now the windows were wide and lower down, and the room had been opened up, cracked wide so you saw light and sky and green lawn spotted with piles of raked leaves. Very California, I thought, tapping my heels against the pizza colored floor tiles, and an impressive array of beaten copper pots dangling above the stove. And if someone comes home? I asked myself, ascending the front stairs after a glance at the living room, where modern art had commandeered the walls. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt shielded–protected, somehow, by my dark glasses and mask of makeup, the silk headscarf tucked into the top of my trenchcoat to hide the bruises on my neck. This isn’t me, I thought, rounding the stairs and emerging into the upstairs hallway, whose crisp walls and luminous floors effaced all traces of its former dreariness. How could I be caught, when I didn’t look like anyone? As a model, of course, I’d carried my face like a sign, holding it out a foot or so in front of me–not out of pride or vanity, God knew; those had been stamped out long ago, or at any rate, disjoined from my physical appearance. No, out of sheer practicality: here’s what I am. Calling card, handshake, précis, call it what you like; it was what I had to offer to the world where I had spent my life. I was heading for the master bedroom, a room I’d glimpsed only when Ellen would go in or out, a shadowy peek, a gust of scented air, her mother’s hushed, plaintive voice. Now the door was open. I went in. The room was immense and spare, bars of sunset angling through wood blinds that looked custom-made. There were big ficus trees and a modern looking bed with long delicate posts. The walls were yellow-white. In a plush adjacent dressing room I smelled one of the Chanels, but my damaged nose could not distinguish which. Long mirrors, walls covered with framed photographs. I went closer to look–I wasn’t yet allowed to wear my contacts–curious about the family who lived here now. Instantly I recognized Ellen, aged by many years but still beautiful, the bones even stronger in her face. She was standing on a beach with a man at her side, her husband, presumably, who looked ten years older and had the tanned skin and white teeth of a German. Ellen Metcalf. I was in Ellen Metcalf’s dressing room. Straining to focus my bleary eyes, I studied other pictures: Ellen lounging with her husband in some foreign clime; the squashed face of a newborn; some youthful photos of Ellen’s parents done in the manner of Hollywood stills; a montage of two children, the oldest a girl who–poor thing–looked nothing like her mother. I wondered if she’d been adopted. Ellen and this daughter in matching bathing suits, lying beside the country club pool. As I surveyed the whirling narrative of Ellen’s life, I began, for the first time, to feel anxiety at the thought of her coming home and finding me there. It wasn’t my trespassing that concerned me; more a basic sense that I couldn’t be seen this way. I decided to leave. But no sooner had I left Ellen’s dressing room than I heard footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Appalled, I yanked my sunglasses over my monster-red eyes, shot back into the dressing room and hunched in a closet, gently coaxing the door shut behind me. I hid there, panting in a darkness full of filmy dresses scented with more of that mysterious Chanel, until it occurred to me that the humiliation of being caught inside a closet would surely exceed that of simply standing in a dressing room, and I flung open the closet door just as a girl of about thirteen, with earphones on her head, wandered in from the bedroom. She jumped, then gaped at me, startled and guilty, as if she were the one who’d been caught. It was the girl from the pictures, a sadly average looking girl with thin, drab hair and insect-like glasses on her face. She pulled off her earphones. “Who are you?” she said. “I’m an old friend of your mother’s,” I replied as casually as I could manage. “I was passing through town and thought I’d stop by. But I guess she’s not home.” This flimsy pretext seemed, bizarrely, to satisfy her. I saw how unlike her mother she was; Ellen would have been all narrow-eyed suspicion. But this was an open, curious girl. Thank God. “She won’t be back for a while,” she said. “Darn,” I said, and then, because it seemed only natural, “Where is she?” “Chicago, at the hospital.” “Nothing wrong I hope.” My ignorance clearly surprised her. “Ricky had leukemia? But now he’s in remission.” “Oh, that’s good,” I said. “That’s terrific. The house is beautiful. I haven’t seen it since your grandparents lived here.” “I’ll show you my room, if you want.” I followed her down the hall. She had a light, skipping step. Her room was Ellen’s old room, painted blue now and a little dark; she was one of those girls who pulls the shades and burrows in bed with a book (not the sort I ever knew well). Indeed, there was a pile of books heaped by the bed and even on top of it. The covers were mussed, as if she’d been underneath, reading. But the place where she led me out of pride or habit was a large rectangular fishtank. The water bubbled merrily. A chair was poised beside the tank, as if the girl spent time there, watching her fish. And they were beautiful fish, I had to admit, though I wasn’t fish-inclined. The two smallest were a phosphorescent blue, like peacock feathers. “Those are Damsels,” she said, seeing me notice. “Blue Damselfish.” “What’s that?” I asked dutifully, pointing at a fish with sharp prongs curved around its tail like a comma. “An Angel Flame,” she said, then added proudly, “This is a salt water tank.” Having no idea what difference that made, I kept quiet. The girl stood across the tank from me, eying my face through the percolating water. “Why do you wear sunglasses inside?” she asked. “I had an accident,” I said. “A car accident.” “I thought something happened,” she said. “Your face looks kind of strange. Does the light hurt your eyes, is that why you you wear the glasses?” “No,” I said. “They just look bad.” “Can I see?” “You don’t want to,” I said. “Really.” “Yes I do.” She did. She wanted to see my eyes, this girl, and came back around the tank for that purpose, slim, wiry, her head about the height of my chest. I’d been wrong about her age: she was older than thirteen. She seemed almost like an adult. “Believe me,” she said, “I can handle it.” I took off the glasses. The room wasn’t nearly as dark as I’d thought. The girl looked evenly into my eyes: the gaze of someone who has already seen her share of pain, and knows what it looks like. “How will you look after it heals?” she asked. “Like I looked before, more or less. These doctors, you know, they’re fantastic.” She nodded. I had the feeling she didn’t believe me. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Charlotte,” she said. I thought at first that I’d misheard her. I didn’t ask again–just let the surprise ricochet through me once, then dissipate. “No kidding,” I said. “Mine, too.” Right away I saw my mistake; she would tell Ellen, and Ellen would know what had happened to me. “That’s incredible!” she said. “I don’t know any other Charlottes. Only one Charlene.” “Charlotte is a better name.” “I think so, too,” she said. “It’s fancy.” There was a pause. To distract her, I asked, “And your uncle? Is he still called Moose?” The girl smiled, blood rising to her cheeks. Same old Moose, I thought. “You knew my uncle?” she asked, with excitement. “Before?” “A little,” I said noncommittally. “Before what?” “Everything that happened,” she said, and some memory grazed me, then, some disturbing thing I’d heard about Moose. I couldn’t call it back. “He’s still called Moose,” was all she said. I had been trying, in as relaxed a manner as possible, to steer us from her room in the direction of the front stairs. But just as I began my gimping descent, just as I was beginning to rejoice at having slithered from this potential debacle without having so much as roused the suspicions of my young hostess–just then, a shadow of prudence fell over her. “Don’t you…want to leave a message? Or a note?” she asked, pattering down the stairs behind me. “No, that’s okay.” I was struggling with the front door. “But I–I thought you–” Even as she helped me open it, I felt the beat of worry in her, which provoked in me a corresponding guilt, as if I’d nabbed the family silver and were about to make a run for it. “Tell your mom I’m sorry I missed–” “What’s your–” But I was out the door, loping across the lawn–a freakish sight that must have been–away from her. As I hurried back to Mary Cunningham’s, I was gripped by jealousy so sharp and unexpected that it felt like sickness. I wanted that girl. She was mine, she should have been mine; even her name was mine. I wanted that house, that life; even the kid with cancer–I wanted it. I wanted children, people around me. I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine. Such feelings of envy and remorse were so alien to me that I hardly knew how to respond. There was a voice that spoke to me at times of internal duress in exactly the way I spoke to Grace: briskly reassuring at first, and if that didn’t work, brusque to the point of bullying. All my life I had heard that voice, and when its scolding was not enough to still the fear in me, I took action–walked, danced, made phone calls–whatever was required to stop the whining. I despised whining, my own more than anyone’s. But now I was too tired to move. I collapsed onto the day bed Mary Cunningham kept in her front room, unable yet to attempt the stairs, and decided I would inquire that very evening about the precise contents of that swank liquor cabinet I’d noticed in her living room. In the Midwest you could usually count on a decent stock, even at an old lady’s house. My face ached and throbbed; I’d stayed out too long. Upstairs, when I wiped off my pancake makeup with the special creams Dr. Fabermann had given me, my monstrous reflection looked more angry and swollen than it had in days. Like a newborn, I thought, exchanging looks with my frantic, scalded eyes–a newborn howling in pain and outrage. I soaked a cotton pad in vitamin E oil and gently swabbed my face. I spoke to it in tones that were uncharacteristically soothing. “There, there, come on now,” I said, “It’s not so bad,” dabbing the oil on my hot skin. Everything will be fine. This is the angry healing phase, that’s all. It will end and then you’ll have a new face–your old face but new again, like Ellen’s house. This is your Charlotte, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. This is your Charlotte, and you must take good care of her so she’ll grow up to be a beautiful girl, and live an extraordinary life. * * * * * * * * * *