Babylon and Other Stories

Edgewater

When Luz was a baby she used to be afraid of the water, but she wasn't anymore, or said she wasn't. In winter, the water in Lake St. Louis was still and pale, ice-crusted, as gray as the surface of the moon, though in summer it took on a deeper, more alive tinge that she liked better. What she didn't like, even now that she wasn't scared anymore, was how the water slapping against the rocks at the shore turned them green with algae — a slippery, scary mold, akin to pictures of plaque on teeth — and how slippery her hand felt, too, when she dipped it in. Luz had an idea of what water should be like — she'd seen a picture of an ocean once, an endless, clean, turquoise one, with a white beach and pink sunset — and Lake St. Louis was a disappointment to her because of the many ways it didn't conform to this idea.

But she was getting used to it this summer, owing to all the time she spent down by the water with Marie-Claire. Although she wasn't with Marie-Claire so much as within shouting distance of her. While Luz played down by the rocks at the water's edge, Marie-Claire wandered around the park looking for secluded places to smoke a joint. Luz knew about this. She'd seen a joint at home, inside a tin box her father kept in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, and she knew what it smelled like when he smoked it, even in the middle of the night with the windows open. One thing she didn't know was whether her father knew about Marie-Claire. She hoped he didn't, because she was liking spending the summer out here, just thinking and looking out over the lake and pretending that the dim blue land opposite wasn't the south shore of Montreal but China or Mexico or France. She liked to picture the people over there, foreigners wearing strange hats and riding bicycles through foreign streets, never knowing they were being watched. This was a lot better than spending the summer at summer school or at the YMCA or in her backyard playing “imagination games” with her dolls, which was what her last babysitter, Maureen, used to make her do. Maureen would always say, “Let's see you use your imagination,” and then she would stand back, nodding, waiting for Luz's imagination to make an appearance. “Be creative,” she'd urge. Maureen was old, older than Luz's father, and had gone back to school to get her degree in early-childhood education. While Luz played she could feel Maureen's eyes fixed on her, memorizing her every move.

Marie-Claire was calmer; she had her own imagination games to play. When Luz looked back over the grass, Marie-Claire was sitting on a rock, a small black figure (Marie-Claire wore black every day) resting her chin on her knees. They waved at each other and went back to their own business. It was early Wednesday afternoon and not many other people were around. Beyond Marie-Claire, cars went by on Lakeshore Drive, taking the curves too fast. A mom with two babies in a stroller crossed the street toward the lake. Seagulls circled and squawked. Luz turned around and concentrated on watching a couple of boats on the water, sails dipping lazy and graceful and white. She believed that to a certain, impossible-to-prove extent her watching kept the boats and the people in them safe from overturning, and she took the responsibility seriously. She didn't want the people to land in the slippery, gunky water or to have to touch any of the green slime that hovered on the rocks under the surface. You could see how polluted the water was down at the shore: by Luz's feet, scattered over the rocks, were Coke cans and beer bottles and other pieces of disintegrating trash she tried to identify by poking them with a stick. She saw a shoe. A worn-out bicycle tire. She saw Popsicle wrappers and plastic bags and lots of cigarette butts.

Later, when she thought about what she saw next, she would picture it as something small, something that could have come off one of her dolls, and she would think about putting it in her pocket and taking it home and keeping it for herself forever, secret and safe. But in reality it was much too big to fit in her pocket. It was bigger than Luz's whole arm, and it was a weird light brown, almost pink, and it was batting against the rocks like an animal trying to escape a cage: a plastic leg.

On the next block over from the park was the Edgewater Bar & Grill. Inside, there was only one window from which you could actually see the water, and only one table at that window. This was Kelly's table, and had been for ten years. She first started coming to the Edgewater when she was underage, heavily made up, treading carefully in high heels, flirting with older men before retreating to the safety of her friends at the table. By the time she was eighteen she knew the jukebox, such as it was, by heart. She celebrated her birthdays here and was tearfully consoled here after breakups, threw up in the bathroom a few times, tried cocaine in the bathroom once and then twice, came here after classes and instead of them. When she started university she also started waitressing at the Edge a few nights a week to make extra money. She told Manny, the owner, that she spent so much time there, she might as well get paid for it. Then she stopped going to school, but she didn't stop working.

She met the first man she ever slept with here, as well as the last. The last one being almost a year ago, just before she took her chastity vow. Which she also did at the Edgewater. Quitting was easier than she thought, a hell of a lot easier than quitting smoking. It wasn't like she was giving up sex forever; she was just abstaining, taking a break, because she thought it would be good for her, the way some people who aren't even really Christians give things up for Lent. Her head was clearer and calmer than it was before the vow, when a space in the back of her head had always been devoted to the question of sex, of when and who and how and if, a churning little spot of energy that ran underneath and beside all her other mental activities. Now she'd freed up that energy and could just use it — well, what was she using it for? — to live.

What happened was this: on a Friday night — Friday nights at the Edgewater were an institution, and as usual the place was packed — Kelly looked around and counted nine men she'd slept or fooled around with. It wasn't the number that bothered her but that, looking at them, she couldn't stop picturing them all naked, and it was not an arousing picture. She was walking around trying to serve drinks and hear people's orders over the music and all the while seeing naked men, pale-skinned, dark-skinned, potbellied, muscled or flabby, hairy-chested or bare, hairy-backed or not, leaning against doors, sitting back in chairs, everywhere their freckled, spotted, rough or smooth skin. There was just too much skin. She took a deep breath and thought, No more.

That was last July, and she hadn't been with a man since. The chastity thing drove Manny crazy and he was always trying to set her up with somebody, most recently with his cousin from Kitchener who was coming to town for a visit. Manny's interest in her was by turns paternal, platonic, and sleazy. He often encouraged her to go back to school, patting her on the shoulder and telling her she was too smart for this dump, too young, too something; he'd also, every once in a while, look down her shirt or squeeze her butt. When he brought up his cousin, she was wiping down the bar while he flipped through catalogs of restaurant equipment. Manny dreamed about making the Edgewater more upscale, a thought that was wishful in the extreme. He wanted to put in stainless-steel chairs and sell microbrews. He also wanted to institute a no-jeans dress code, an idea that, when he floated it by a couple of regular customers, made them snort Miller Genuine Draft out their noses.

“He's a very interesting person, Kel,” Manny said. “You guys would have interesting conversations, I bet.”

“Okay, so I'll talk to him when he comes in. But that's it, talking.”

“Well, okay, but really talk to him. Get to know him.”

“Manny.”

“What?”

“You know I'm off men.”

“Off men? What does that even mean?” He looked around as if he had an audience for this question, but it was Tuesday night at seven-thirty and the place was almost deserted. “It's not normal, a girl your age. Hey, do you like these stools?”

She looked at the catalog. The stools were four feet high and upholstered in a black-and-white cow print. “Looks comfy.”

“You know what else?”

“What else, Manny?”

“My cousin? He's only got one leg.”

“Poor guy,” Kelly said. “How'd he lose it?”

Manny looked at her over the catalog. “Motorcycle accident.”

“Oh.”

“It's not the whole leg that's gone, it's actually cut off at the knee. The left one.”

“Poor guy.”

“Well, it's not the whole leg.”

When she came back from taking the order of the only occupied table, Manny still hadn't gone back to the catalog.

“So, that doesn't interest you at all?”

“What doesn't?”

“The leg.”

“What do you mean, interest me?”

Manny shrugged and studied a page of light fixtures, chrome and colored plastic descending from some invisible ceiling. “He says girls love the leg, that's all.”

“Great,” said Kelly. “Then he doesn't need me to talk to, does he?”

Manny's cousin's name was Lone. At first she thought she'd misheard, and that his name was Lorne, like Lorne Green, but no, it was Lone. A nickname, Manny explained, that referred to his one intact leg. He came into the bar around nine-thirty, while Manny was in the back. By now there were a few more customers, including a guy who'd never been in before and who therefore thought the name Edgewater Bar & Grill implied that food was being served. Which it kind of did. But Manny had just added the “& Grill” to the sign a couple of years ago because he thought it sounded better.

“You can't even make me a sandwich?” the guy said. “Some fries?”

“I think we have some chips by the register,” Kelly told him. “Do you want regular or barbecue?”

“If I wanted some goddamn chips I'd go to a goddamn store.”

“Feel free,” Kelly said.

“Hey, why don't you just leave her alone,” said a voice behind her.

Turning around she saw a man walk up close, very close, to the guy's table and jab a finger at his face. He was thick-armed and barrel-chested, definitely a weight lifter, wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. Below, his body turned slim at the hips, and then there were his legs. He was wearing jeans, and the leg that wasn't whole was wearing jeans too, with only a hollowness below the knee, an airy, smooth sort of quality in the fabric, to signal what was missing.

“You must be Lone.”

“And you must be Manny,” he said, and smiled. “Just kidding.”

“What's this, a reunion?” said the guy who wanted food.

“Shut up,” Lone said.

“I'm handling this,” Kelly told him.

“Not very well,” the other guy said.

“That's enough,” Lone said, turning to hit him, hard, in the face.

The guy howled, clutched his cheekbone, swore, promised to call the police, swore again, and left. Conversation at the other tables resumed.

“That really wasn't necessary,” Kelly said, wiping down the table.

“He was a jerk.”

“A jerk who hadn't paid yet.”

“Lone, my man!” Manny shouted, coming out from the back, and they exchanged an elaborate handclasp. Kelly could see a family resemblance: both were stout and thick-chested, although Lone's chest had a lot more definition than Manny's, and both had bushy dark eyebrows and stubble-shadowed chins.

“Lone, Kelly, Kelly, Lone.”

“We just met,” Kelly said.

“Great,” Manny said, clasping his hands together as if he couldn't stand that the handshaking was now over. “Let's sit down. Kelly, could you get Lone a beer?”

“Sure.”

When she came back, they were sitting at her old table by the window, looking at the lights of the neighborhood reflected over the water, red from a traffic light punctuating the paler yellows.

“So, how's Aunt Linda?” said Manny. “Thanks, Kel. Come, sit down and join us.”

“I don't know. She's okay, I guess.”

“Yeah? How's Mark?”

“He's on drugs.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it's too bad,” said Lone, scratching his neck and looking around the bar. “So, Kelly, tell me about yourself.”

“Not much to tell, I don't think.”

“Manny tells me you're, what, studying commerce?”

“I was. I'm not in school right now, though.”

Lone shook his head and looked concerned. “Shouldn't quit school, Kelly. You miss a lot of opportunities. For example. I'm looking, maybe, for like a business partner? I'm thinking of opening a bar just like this one right here.”

“Really,” Kelly said.

“Yes, really,” he said with exaggerated seriousness. His eyes were dark and small and bright. “I really am. And I'm going to need someone to, you know, keep my books.”

“I bet you'd like her to keep your books,” said Manny. “Since when are you opening up a bar?”

“It's an idea I have.”

“I can't believe it. You never mentioned that till just now.”

“I appreciate the suggestion,” Kelly said, “but I don't think I want to move to Kitchener.”

“Smart girl. See, Lone, I told you she had a good head on her shoulders.”

“Is that what you told him?” Kelly said.

Marie-Claire said, “Cool.”

She turned it over in her hands, the foot in one hand, the open, fluted top of the leg in the other. She'd come over as soon as she saw Luz sticking her own foot into the plastic leg, as if it were a boot. Luz had discovered it wasn't hollow all the way down when she looked up and saw Marie-Claire towering over her. That was the thing about Marie-Claire. She might be a stoner but she wasn't out of it. She grabbed the leg right away.

Luz put her shoe back on. “Is it from a store?”

“A store?”

“Like the models that wear the clothes in the windows.”

“What? Oh, a mannequin? No way, Luz, this is, like, a prosthetic.” She ran her fingers down the leg's shin, gently, as if it were a real leg and might be tender. She touched the foot, which had no individual toes or anything, just one big curve, more shoe than foot. There was a strap at the top of the leg, with a little buckle.

“What's that?”

“It's for people that are missing a leg. They can strap this one on.”

“And walk on it?”

“I guess so,” Marie-Claire said. “Maybe.” She stood up and rested one knee on top of the plastic leg, then tied the strap around the back of her knee and stretched her arms out, balancing. Her hands flashed in the sun. Marie-Claire wore a lot of rings.

“How do I look?” she said. Her hair was dyed black and stuck up above her head, and she was wearing three or four necklaces. She looked exotic and strange, like someone whose costume had tribal meanings, a picture on the front of National Geographic.

“It's backwards,” Luz said. The foot on the plastic leg was sticking out behind Marie-Claire, in a ballerina's pose.

“Shit.” She undid the leg and bent down to rearrange the strap, her face close to Luz's. She smelled like pot and sunblock. Marie-Claire was beautiful, a fact that seemed to horrify her, and she did everything she could to camouflage the situation. The rings around her eyes were thick and black, as if drawn with a Magic Marker, and her ears were pierced with safety pins. Her clothes were ragged and baggy and everything that wasn't black was olive green. She was regimented, like her own personal army. But whenever she got close Luz could see her smooth, light skin, the freckles on her small, upturned nose, the rosiness on her cheeks, her green eyes and her long eyelashes. All that was there, no matter what Marie-Claire put on top of it.

Marie-Claire stood up again. The foot was straight now, poking out next to her black running shoe like a faceless animal. She took a step with it and lost her balance right away, hopping around and coming back to face Luz, laughing.

“I want to try it,” Luz said.

“It's going to be way too big,” Marie-Claire said, but she took it off and buckled the strap around Luz's knee. Because she was too short to stand up straight with the leg on, she stuck it out in front of her, at an angle, like a tent pole. When that didn't work she picked up the leg and moved it to the back and started hopping along, dragging the leg behind her as if it were broken. Marie-Claire burst out laughing.

Luz tilted her head, raised her shoulders, and did a monster voice. “I am your servant, master,” she croaked, dragging a little circle around Marie-Claire. “I will follow your orders.”

“Oh my God, that's so funny,” said Marie-Claire. She was wheezing. Luz was laughing, too, and they both had tears in their eyes. The mom with the stroller was looking over in their direction.

“I am your monster,” Luz said. “I will live in your basement.”

Marie-Claire shrugged. “Too bad, I already live in the basement.”

“How come?” Luz asked in her regular voice. “Do your parents make you live there because you smoke pot?”

“Um, kind of. How do you know about pot?”

“From school,” said Luz, moving away from the water's edge. If she didn't keep hopping she'd lose her balance. “And from my dad. And from you.”

“God, your dad is such the aging hippie,” Marie-Claire muttered.

“No he's not, he's a teacher.”

“Right,” said Marie-Claire, motioning her back. “Come here, you better take that thing off. It's like time to go.” She bent down and undid the buckle.

“I want to take it home,” Luz said to the top of Marie-Claire's head.

“And do what?”

“Keep it. I found it, it's mine.”

“Okay, whatever. We'll see what your dad says. Let's go. Here, take my hand for when we cross the street.”

“I'm not a baby, Marie-Claire,” said Luz. She grasped the foot and held the leg out. “You can hold my leg, though.”

They crossed Lakeshore together, a leg's length between them.

At eleven-thirty, Manny gave Kelly the rest of the night off.

“Gee, thanks,” she said.

“Just don't say I never did anything for you.”

“You never did anything for me, Manny.”

“Oh, ouch. Okay, get out of here.”

She was turning the key in the ignition when Lone came out of the bar, walked over to the car — with a slight but definite limp— and knocked on her window. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I didn't think you were leaving so soon,” he said, leaning down, his hands on the car.

“Manny let me go home early.”

“Oh. Time off for good behavior.” He smiled, then shyly looked down at his legs.

Kelly looked there, too. “Something like that,” she said.

“I was wondering if you maybe wanted to go get a drink.”

“Where? Here?”

“Oh, that's right. You do work at a bar.” One hand came up and slapped Lone on the forehead, seemingly of its own volition. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and said, “Here. Someplace else. Whatever.”

Kelly sighed and shifted the car into reverse. “You know, I'm really tired, but thanks anyway.”

Lone put his hand on the side of the open window, inside the car, a gesture that aggravated her. If she backed away, at what point would he let go?

“Come on,” he said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I? And why do you care? Because Manny told you about me?”

“If you mean he told me about your vow thing, well, yes,” Lone said forthrightly. “I think it's interesting. I want to know why somebody would do something like that. Therefore I am interested in you. Therefore I am asking you to have a drink with me. Is that a good enough reason?”

“Maybe,” she said.

He insisted on driving, so they left her car at the Edge. His van was outfitted with equipment that met his special needs. This was what he called it, special needs, in a tone that sounded partly confessional and partly bragging. When he started the van, Metallica flared briefly from the tapedeck, disappearing suddenly when he switched it off.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

Kelly rolled down the window and felt the wind. She could smell the water, salty and close. It was nice, actually, not to be going home right away, to avoid the certainty of her apartment and her bed and a magazine to read until she fell asleep. If she missed anything about dating, she thought, it might be this: a moment of precarious silence in a stranger's car, nighttime air, hands in your lap, waiting for the night to settle into itself. This was the moment before things got defined, before you had to decide what would happen, who you'd be, what you'd do. She took a deep breath and watched the telephone poles flip by.

“This okay?” Lone said, pulling over.

They were out by the docks in Ste. Anne's, at a bar that was what Manny wanted the Edgewater to be. Upscale. Nicer decor, fancier people, waitresses in black skirts serving mixed drinks. A terrace was strung with colored lights, and voices rippled in waves of rhythm and laughter. Words stood out in small, quick bursts like names being called.

“Fine,” she said.

As they approached the entrance, Lone jumped ahead of her, awkwardly, and opened the door.

“Thanks,” she said.

He pulled out her chair for her, too. Once they'd settled their drinks, he said, “So why'd you quit school? You know that's no good.”

“Did you finish school?”

“No,” he said. “That's how I know.”

“What do you do, anyway?”

He looked at her. His skin under the stubble was dotted with small craters. He was wearing an earring, she noticed, a thin, small gold band that looked like it was pinching the bottom of his ear.

“Not a lot,” he said. “You didn't answer my question.”

“I don't really know. I couldn't get into it, I guess.”

“Uh-huh. Was it the same thing with men?”

“Not really.”

“You don't talk much, do you?”

“I just met you,” Kelly said.

“True enough,” Lone said, then nodded and tipped his drink to his mouth. Ice rattled against his teeth. “That's a fact.” He smiled and looked at her again, just at her face, and it made her blush.

She remembered this, now. The part of sex that wasn't about touching someone else but about being touched, feeling your own skin warm under a man's eyes and hands, alive to your own body, inside and out of it. She didn't know which was stranger, feeling somebody else's body for the first time or feeling how your own self could change.

“You look pretty,” he said.

Kelly rolled her eyes a tiny bit.

Lone just smiled and shook his head. “Oh, you're a hard one,” he said, and laughed as if this were a quality that he in particular was well positioned to appreciate. “You are.”

When they got home, Marie-Claire let Luz watch cartoons with a book balanced on her lap so that when her father came home she could pretend to have been reading it. The TV room was dark and cool, and the bright sunlight that filtered occasionally through the curtains seemed incongruous and strange. Luz sat with her legs out in front of her on the couch: her own legs next to her new leg, all three of them pointing at the TV. During the commercial breaks she would look at the plastic one and sometimes put her hand on it, as if to keep it from walking off. Marie-Claire wandered around the house for a while — what was she doing, Luz wondered, was she going through the tin box? — and then came back downstairs and stood in the door of the TV room, pretending she was watching Luz, not the TV, but after a while they were just watching cartoons on the couch together. When Marie-Claire fell asleep, Luz got up on her knees and edged closer to look at her face. It was weird how you could see flecks of her makeup stuck to her skin. Mascara was glopped onto her eyelashes, and there were streaks underneath where it had rubbed off, little eyelash flutters that looked like the marks of a feather.

Marie-Claire opened her eyes. “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

“Nothing,” Luz said, and scooted back to her side of the couch.

When Luz's father came home from school he found them silent on the couch, Luz with Nancy Drew #114 and Marie-Claire with a copy of Steal This Book that she must've found upstairs. He put his backpack down in the hallway and came into the room. “Hello, young women,” he said. “And how are we all today? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I hope.”

“Fine,” said Marie-Claire. She put the book down on the coffee table. “The day was totally fine.”

“Great, great,” said Luz's father. “You taking care of my baby, Marie-Claire? Luz, is Marie-Claire taking good care of you?”

“Yeah,” said Luz.

“Good,” he said. Then his eyebrows came together sharply in the center of his forehead. “What is that?”

Luz cradled it protectively. “It's my leg,” she said.

“Um. Marie-Claire?”

She shrugged. “We found it by the lake. Luz wanted to bring it home.”

“It's filthy,” Luz's father said.

“You liked it too,” Luz pointed out to Marie-Claire.

“Yeah, I did like it,” she admitted. “Actually, Mr. Howard, I'm thinking, you know, I might want to take it home with me.”

“No!” said Luz.

Marie-Claire ignored her and turned to her father, sitting up straighter on the couch. She spoke fast and low, imitation enthusiasm bubbling out from under shyness. “I've been doing this sculpture? I'm trying to work on, like, people? This'll be perfect, because I'm very into humans, and, like, artificial parts, because it's like society, you know?” Her black-rimmed eyes opened wide, then aimed down at the ground before she looked back up at him through her long, mascara-thick eyelashes.

Luz thought, please. She knew this was all a lie. Marie-Claire didn't have any sculptures.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Luz's father said. “Why don't you take it home.”

“How come she gets to have it and not me?”

“Luz,” her father and Marie-Claire said at the same time.

“Dad,” Luz said, “it's my leg.”

“Another way of looking at this, Luz, is that I really don't want you to have that thing in the house anyway. It's too, I don't know, it's not a toy. It's not meant to be played with.”

“It's not fair,” Luz said. Her shoulders shook and she started to cry.

“I know,” Marie-Claire said, putting a hand on her shoulder while her father watched. “I know it's not.”

Lone told her about the accident. He was twenty-one, at the height of his Evel Knievel years, and was coming down a hill in the Laurentians high on cocaine, shrieking his head off out of pure joy, when he took a curve too fast and smashed sideways into a truck coming in the opposite direction. He woke up in the hospital, and the doctors told him there hadn't been anything below the knee for them to try to save.

“What happened to the guy driving the truck?”

“Goddamn it,” Lone said. “People always ask me that.” He slamed his beer down on the table.

They were in his motel room, a Days Inn off the Trans-Canada. He wasn't staying with Manny because his apartment was a third-floor walkup.

“And I say hey, you know, I've been stuck with this prosthetic fucking leg ever since, what about that?” He grabbed his leg with both hands just where, it looked like, the real part ended, and shook it a little bit, for emphasis.

“So what happened to him?”

“He was fine,” Lone said. “He walked away. Unlike some people I might mention.”

“Oh, you mean you.”

“Yes, I mean me. Very funny.”

“Ha ha,” Kelly said solemnly. She took a swig of her beer, swallowed and sighed. “Anyway.”

“Anyway,” said Lone. “So, do you want to see it?”

“Do I want to what?”

“Do you want to see my leg?”

Kelly shrugged. The truth was that she did want to see it, badly. “If you want to show me.”

“Well, I only want to show you if you want to see it,” he countered.

“Then show me.”

Lone reached down, undid his left shoe and pulled it off, then his white athletic sock. Underneath was the pink plastic foot, toeless, curved, as delicate as a woman's shoe. He started to roll up his jeans, then stopped. “You know what? This would be easier if…” he said.

“That's fine.”

“Okay.” He took off his other shoe and sock, then stood up and undid the buttons at his fly and balanced himself with one hand while he pulled his jeans down with the other. When he sat down again he pulled them off completely and sat there in his boxer shorts.

She found herself looking back and forth between his face and his legs, as if this were somehow the most polite approach to the situation. He leaned back and rested his arms on the sides of his chair. “That's the prosthesis,” he said.

She nodded, and leaned closer. It was attached to the end of his leg with a brown strap. “Can I touch it?”

“Sure,” he said.

She started at the ankle, which wasn't really an ankle at all, no bone, little contour, just a thinness above the foot. The plastic was scratched and peeling in places, having been through God knows what trouble. Her fingers went from the ridge of the plastic onto Lone's real skin, which felt weirdly, almost wrongly soft. She rubbed her fingers up and down the hair on the side of his leg, and Lone exhaled a little laugh. She lifted his leg a bit with her left hand and slid her right hand underneath. They were sitting close together now.

“That tickles,” Lone said.

She unbuckled the strap that held the prosthesis to his leg and set it gently on the table next to the beer bottles. On the stub of his leg the skin was rippled and folded, as if the doctor had wrapped it like a present, and she slid her fingertips over the bumps. Some of the ridges were red, like welts. “Does it hurt?” she said.

“No.” Lone put his hand on her shoulder.

While they kissed, she kept her hand on his leg.

Up in her room, Luz watched Marie-Claire walk away. She couldn't breathe without crying. Marie-Claire swung the leg back and forth as she walked, like a baseball player warming up with a bat. After she turned the corner, Luz climbed under her desk and pulled the chair in as close as she could and sat with her knees up to her chin. One of her knees had a scab from when she fell at the park a week ago. She scratched it off and watched blood well up through the skin. Hearing her father moving around downstairs, getting a drink out of the fridge, she knew he was going to sit down at the kitchen table and open the mail. Then he'd read the newspaper because he never had time in the morning. Then he'd call her downstairs and have her sit in the kitchen while he made dinner, asking her questions about what the day was like, and then she could watch TV for an hour before she had to go to bed.

She pushed the chair away, softly, and crept out from under the desk. She could feel dry tears crinkling her cheek. She went into her father's bedroom and smelled the soapy smell that was always in there. When the floor creaked she stood still, but he didn't call upstairs or anything. Very slowly and quietly, she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand, lifted the stack of Macleans, and pulled out the tin box. She put the joint in her pocket, closed the box and the drawer, then went into the bathroom and shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror. First she wanted to practice, to make sure it looked right when she said, Marie Claire showed me how.

Afterwards, they were lying in bed, drowsing in and out of talk and sleep, when Lone murmured softly, “God, you know it's so true.” He shook his head.

“What's true?” said Kelly, looking at him. His eyes were closed.

He put his arm around her and stroked her hair. His skin was hot and sticky against hers. “Girls love the leg,” he said.

She slept for an hour or two. When she woke up, Lone was breathing steady and slow, his hand on his chest. She got out of bed and dressed. Starting for the door, she stopped at the table and picked up the leg. She was afraid someone might ask her about it, but there was no one around. At the parking-lot pay phone she called a cab to take her back to her car at the Edge-water. There was a suggestion of light in the sky, nighttime opening up and letting go. She guessed it was around four.

Back in her car, she put the leg on the dashboard. Then she put it on the seat beside her, the foot dipping down over the side of the upholstery, but no matter how she placed it, the leg looked splayed out, violent, accidental. There was no point, she decided, in keeping it.

She got out of the car and walked behind the bar to the water, where waves splashed and foamed, swirling detritus around the rocks, and heaved the leg into the lake as hard as she could. It bobbed a few times before floating beyond her sight. This action felt deeply satisfying, as if it were a part of her own self she wanted to leave behind. Driving home on the highway she saw dawn lifting into the horizon, though it was still far off and had a long way to go.