Crossroads

Only he had seen it. The group’s merriment level was high; a piece of turnip had been flung. He had to pretend to be surprised when, after dinner, he led the group back up the hill and found the school door, which he’d been careful to padlock, standing open. The doorframe was splintered, the hasp dangling from the lock.

David Goya, speaking for everyone, said, “Uh-oh.”

Quietly, as a group, in wandering flashlight beams, they went inside and surveyed the room where they slept. Suitcases and duffel bags had been emptied on the floor, sleeping bags tossed around, a bottle of talcum powder thrown against a wall, but Bobby Jett’s expensive camera was sitting where he’d left it. Frances took Russ by the arm. He could feel her looking up at him, but he didn’t want to look at anyone. The fault was clearly his.

“Where’s my guitar?” Darcie Mandell said.

“You’re missing your guitar?” Russ said in a choked voice.

“Uh, yeah.”

“They took mine, too,” another girl called from across the room. “It’s definitely not here. They freaking stole my Martin!”

Catching a note of hysteria, Russ removed himself from Frances and found his voice. “All right, ah—listen up. This is obviously not good, but we need to stay calm. Let’s get the lanterns on and do a careful inventory. If anything’s broken, anything’s missing, I want to hear about it.”

“My guitar is missing,” Darcie Mandell reported dryly.

“So, yes, we seem to be missing two guitars, but let’s see if there’s anything else. We’re in a place of underprivilege, and sometimes these things happen. The important thing is that we’re together as a group. We’re safe as long as we stay together.”

“I’m not feeling especially safe,” Darcie said, “despite our being together.”

“Let’s straighten up the room and see what we’ve got.”

Still unable to look at Frances, he lit two lanterns and checked his own belongings. He wasn’t angry; he was struggling not to cry. The sorrow pertained to everything—the hardness of reservation life, the fears and hurt feelings of forty good kids, the cultural and economic gulf between New Prospect and Kitsillie—but especially to his own vanity. He’d imagined himself a friend of the Navajos and a bridger of divides, imagined he knew better than the people who’d warned him not to come here. He hated to think what God thought of him.

It emerged that only the two guitars had been stolen. The greater damage was in the violation of their space, the chill that Clyde’s aggression had put on their fellowship. When the group gathered again around the candle, the contrast to the previous night couldn’t have been starker. Unhappiness or fear was in almost every face.

“So we’ve encountered our first adversity,” Russ said. “Adversity can strengthen us as a group, but it’s important that I hear from every one of you tonight. We’ll go around the circle and hear what each of us is feeling. Speaking for myself, I’m very sad—sad for us and sad for whoever broke in. It could be that we’ll decide not to stay here, but my own inclination is to stick it out and deal with the issue, not walk away from it. In practical terms, at least one adviser will now stay in the building at all times, and tomorrow morning I will deal with this. I will try to get Darcie and Katie’s guitars back.”

“How about just calling the police?” Ted Jernigan said unpleasantly.

“We can report this to the tribal police, but I’d like to understand better why it happened. Let’s see what we can achieve with listening before we bring the law in.”

It took more than an hour to go around the circle, and Russ wasn’t Ambrose. He didn’t have limitless patience with the self-drama of adolescents, the Crossroads-encouraged inflation of emotional scrapes into ambulance-worthy traumas. He himself was upset, but his fault gave him the right to be, and although he’d asked to hear from everyone, because this was the Crossroads way, it tried his patience to sit in a world of real social injustice, real suffering, and make such an opera of the theft of two guitars, easily replaceable by their owners’ parents. The outpouring of support for Darcie and Katie was comparable to what Alice Raymond had received when her mother died. Of all the feelings voiced at the long candle, the only one Russ respected was the group’s frustration with being quarantined from interaction with the Navajos. He shared that frustration.

In the end, they voted to stay at least one more day. All the advisers except Ted Jernigan favored staying. Afterward, while the group bedded down, its spirits subdued, Russ went outside to look at the sky. He hoped to reconnect with God, but the door behind him opened. Frances had followed him.

“I thought you handled that well,” she said.

“I feel bad for the kids, especially the sophomores. This is their first experience here.”

“They respect you—I could see it. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t be a youth minister.”

His eyes filled with gratitude. “Now I’m the one who needs a hug.”

She gave it to him. The blessing of her touch, the palpable reality of the woman in his arms, was making a believer of him. It was as if he’d yearned to know God without actually believing that He existed. Now he could feel that, far from overhoping, he might have underestimated his chances—that Frances’s decision to come to Arizona had been, in fact, a decision about him.

“We’re having the full experience,” she said.

Behind them, the door creaked open again.

“Whoops,” a girl said.

As if excited to be discovered with him, Frances squeezed him harder, and again he thought of kissing her. To let himself be seen as the man she’d chosen, to cement his status with a public kiss, was worth the cost of what Becky would learn from her friends, what Ambrose would say. But to do it on a night when his group was in crisis could send a bad message. He contented himself with breathing his thanks into her hair.

The next morning, very early, after sleeping essentially not at all, he stole out of the school and walked down the road. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge, but a flock of mountain bluebirds was awake, foraging among bitten tussocks, perching on fence posts glaucous with frost. Daisy Benally was chopping onions in the chapter-house kitchen, her sister still asleep. When Russ told Daisy what had happened, she just shook her head. He asked where he could find Clyde.

“Don’t go there,” she said.

“But where is he?”

“You know the place. Up the canyon where Keith lived.”

“Are you saying Clyde is a Fallen Rocks?”

“No, he’s a Jackson. You shouldn’t go there.”

Russ explained why he had little choice but to go. Daisy, who’d reached an age where she greeted anything the world did with resignation, allowed that he could borrow Ruth’s truck. He would have liked to leave immediately, before he had time to be afraid, but he waited until the group came down for breakfast. Everyone’s hair was flat and dirty, every eye red from a night on a hard floor. By way of mending fences, Russ asked Ted Jernigan, who’d sat down with Frances, to take charge of the group for the morning.

Frances, too, looked dirty and poorly slept. “You’re not going alone,” she said.

“It’s fine. I can take care of myself.”

“She has a point,” Ted said. “Why don’t you and I go together?”

“Because I need you to stay here with the kids.”

“I’m going with you,” Frances said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t care what you think.”

Her eyes were on the table, her expression sullen. Russ wondered what he’d done to make her angry.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Yes I want to do that,” she said crossly.

He guessed she was embarrassed. Embarrassed by her fear for his safety, embarrassed by her need to stay close to him.

Ruth Benally’s truck was barely big enough for him to fit behind the wheel. If the fuel gauge could be trusted, there was half a tank of gas. As he followed the old road along the wash, he told Frances about the first time he’d driven it, the Enemy Way ceremony he’d blundered into. The road had since been widened, but the surface was no better. Negotiating the ruts and stones, he was slow to notice that Frances wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the windshield, her mouth tight. He asked what she was thinking.

“I’m thinking,” she said, “I’d rather just buy two guitars with my own money.”

“Do you want to go back?”

Not getting an answer, he stopped the truck. “I mean it,” he said. “I can easily take you back.”

She shut her eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Russ, but I’m a fearful person.”

“Someone else could have come with me. It didn’t have to be you.”

“Just drive.”

He reached for her, but she jerked away from him. “Just drive.”

He didn’t understand her. He couldn’t sort out the mixture of confidence and fear, self-love and self-reproach. In her own way, she was as odd as Marion. He wondered if all women were odd or only the ones he was attracted to.

The farther he drove up the valley, the less he recognized it. The land had always been dry, but he didn’t remember it being so utterly denuded. Gone were the sheep and cattle, gone every conceivably edible leaf and shoot, gone even the fence wire. All that remained were rough-hewn fence posts and erosion-scored slopes. Except that the rocks were white, not red, the landscape could have been Martian. Even the sky had a strange yellowish-gray pall. The haze was too pale and diffuse to be from a fire, and it wasn’t a dust storm—there wasn’t any wind. It was more like the pall over Gary, Indiana, on a clear Chicago day.

The alienation deepened when he passed the last of the fallen rocks and saw, in the distance, Keith’s old farmstead. He’d assumed he would find people here, maybe Clyde himself, but there was nothing. No grass, no garden, no animals, only gnarled junipers and dead cottonwoods, their broken limbs barkless and silvery. In his mind, the farmstead had remained unchanged, alive with Keith and his extended family, their chickens and goats. To see what time had done to it was to become aware of how old he was.

“Amazingly enough,” he said, “this is where I spent a summer.”

Frances wasn’t listening. Or was listening but was too tense to speak.

The little house, where he’d had his sexual revelation, had been stripped of its doors and its windows and its roof, leaving only the walls. The sunlight on it was bright but not as bright as it should have been. As Russ proceeded along the road, across the canyon and up the ridge opposite the farmstead, the yellowish pall became more pronounced.

Reaching the top of the ridge, he saw where it was coming from. In the middle of the wide plain below, the earth had been torn open—was being torn open. Dust was billowing from a gash that might have been a mile wide. Industrial trestles and a raw new road extended from the gash to the northern horizon. Russ had a sense of betrayal, born of his loyalty to the primitive mesa of his memories. Keith had mentioned that the tribal council permitted coal mining on the reservation, but Russ hadn’t had any reason to travel in this direction until now. He hadn’t imagined that the mining was so close to the Fallen Rocks land—so close, indeed, to Kitsillie itself—or that the scale of the operation was so immense.

Half a mile down the road, he saw Clyde’s pickup. In a clearing among sparse, stunted pine trees were two unhitched camper trailers, a structure of sticks and tarpaulin, a woodpile, and a larger, rusted truck with a water tank on its bed, everything filmed with road dust. Russ pulled over behind the pickup and cut the engine. A second sticker on its bumper said CRAZY HORSE WASN’T.

“So,” he said to Frances. “Maybe you should stay here.”

She was still staring at the windshield. “What did I ask you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“What was the one thing I asked you to do.”

It was interesting that her fear expressed itself as anger, as if it were his fault that she needed him to include her.

“Okay, then,” he said, opening his door.

As they approached the trailers, the flimsy rear door of one of them banged open. Clyde came out in his bare feet, dressed only in brown jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket, unbuttoned. His chest was bare and hairless. “Hey, white man.”

“Hello, good morning.”

“That your wife?”

Frances had stopped a step behind Russ.

“No,” he said. “She’s an adviser in our fellowship.”

“Hey, pretty lady.” Again the smiling insolence. “What brings you up here?”

“What do you think?” Russ said.

“I think you didn’t get the message.”

“I got the message, but I didn’t understand it.”

“Get the fuck out of here? Seems pretty clear to me.”

“But why? We’re not bothering you.”

Clyde smiled at the sky, as if his amusement were cosmic. He was handsome in a strong-browed way, handsome and fit. “If I walked into your house in Chicago and you said, ‘Hey, red man, get the fuck out, I don’t like you people’—I’d get the message.”

Russ could have objected that his group wasn’t in Clyde’s house. But the Navajos’ home was in the land, not in structures, and white people had certainly given them reasons to hate them. It was only by chance that Russ, until now, had dealt with Navajos who didn’t hate them. He glanced back at Frances. She seemed entirely occupied with managing her fear.

“You’re right,” he said. “If you don’t want us here, we shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s better.”

“But first I want you to hear me as a person. Not as a white man—as a person. I want to hear you, too. I didn’t come here to argue with you, I came to listen.”

Clyde laughed. “Like hell you did. I know why you’re here.”

“If you’re talking about the guitars, then, yes, we will need those back. We’re not leaving the mesa without them.”

“You people are all the same.”

“No, we’re not.”

“Your possessions, your money. You think you’re different, but you’re all the same.”

“You don’t know me,” Russ said angrily. “I don’t give a damn about possessions. I do care about the two young girls you hurt by stealing from them.”

“How many guitars do you need? I left you three of them.”

“How many do you need?”

“I already gave them to my buddies. That’s the difference between you and me.”

“That’s bullshit. The difference between you and me is you steal from teenaged girls.”

Clyde’s smile became pained. He looked around at the pine trees and then, shaking his head, walked over to the other trailer. From the dirtied sky came a faint sigh of industry, from the trees the chirring of a nutcracker. Frances’s eyes were fastened on Clyde as if she expected him to get a gun.

“We’re safe,” Russ said gently.

Her eyes moved to him without seeming to see him. Clyde emerged from the other trailer with the two guitar cases and set them on the ground. “Now get out of here,” he said.

“No.”

“Seriously, white man. You got what you came for.”

Clyde went inside his own trailer, and Frances gripped Russ’s arm. “We should go.”

“No.”

“Please. For God’s sake.”

Russ’s anger had turned to sorrow. There was beauty in a young man’s righteous anger and no joy in overpowering it—no satisfaction in bringing a white man’s legal rights to bear, asserting white ownership, reclaiming his possessions from a man who had nothing. The moral victory was Clyde’s. Thinking of what it cost him, Russ felt sorry for him.

He went and rapped on the door of the trailer. Rapped again.

“Listen to me,” he said to the door. “I want to invite you to come down to the school and talk to our group. Will you do that for me?”

“I’m not your performing Navajo,” came the voice from inside.

“Goddamn it, I’m showing you respect. I’m asking you to do the same.”

After a silence, the trailer shifted with movement inside it. The door opened a crack. “You’re a friend of Keith Durochie.”

“I am.”

“Then I have no respect for you.”

The door fell shut. Russ opened it again. Inside the trailer were the smells and disarray of solitary male living. “We came here to listen,” he said.

“Your lady looks at me like I’m a rattlesnake.”

“Can you blame her? You make threats, you break into the school.”

“But you’re not afraid of me.”

“No. I’m not.”

Clyde pursed his lips and nodded to himself. “All right. I’ll show you who your friend is.”

He stepped into a pair of boots, and Russ gave Frances a reassuring smile. She looked furious about what he was putting her through, but when Clyde came outside and led him down a sandy trail, through the pine trees, she followed them.

The trail was short and ended at an outcrop overlooking the devastated plain. Dust continued to billow from the strip mine, and the intervening slopes were treeless, lifeless—water-starved and grazed to death. Clyde stood so close to the cliff’s edge that Russ’s rectum tightened.

“Looking at this,” Clyde said, “is like watching you rape my mother.”

“It’s bad,” Russ agreed.

“It’s sacred land, but it’s full of coal. You see that smoke?” He gestured to the north. “That’s electricity for your cities. It’s not for us—there’s no electricity on the mesa.”

“Do you want electricity?”

Clyde looked over his shoulder at Russ. “I’m not a moron.”

“I’m just trying to understand. Is the problem the coal mine, or the fact that you don’t have electricity?”

“The problem is the tribal council. Your friend thinks this shithole is a good thing. Modern economy, man. Gotta deal with the bilagáana, fact of life, can’t live without ’em. That’s what your friend says.”

“Keith cares about his people. I don’t like what I’m seeing here any more than you do, and I don’t guess Keith likes it, either. But the money has to come from somewhere.”

“Keith doesn’t have to see it. He’s down in Many Farms.”

“He’s not well, you know. He had a stroke last week.”

Clyde shrugged. “Somebody else can cry over that. He fucked my family, and we’re not the only ones. The leases are shit and they last forever. We should be getting two or three times the money. And the jobs? My buddies are down there right now, eating coal dust. That’s the new Navajo—Peabody Fucking Coal Company.”

Frances was faintly shaking her head, her expression neither frightened nor angry, merely desolate, as if here were another door she was sorry to see opened.

“What did Keith do to your family?” Russ asked.

“This whole slope, he had the grazing permit for it. His wife had the permit on the back side, too. We knew the back side was no good—you probably saw it, coming in. But this side was still good. Keith cleared out and sold us the permit, and bang, a year later the council signed the deal with Peabody. He knew what was coming—we didn’t. We had healthy herds, the maximum allowed, and now look. You see any stock down there?”

There wasn’t an animal to be seen, not even a raven. From the direction of the mine came a muffled boom.

“The mine sucks water,” Clyde said. “Peabody could shut it down tomorrow, the water wouldn’t come back for twenty years. And you think Keith didn’t know that? He read the leases, and the leases came with water rights. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

Russ didn’t want to believe it—there had to be another side of the story. And yet what did he really know about Keith Durochie? He remembered being smitten with him, remembered the delight of feeling accepted by him, the pride he’d taken in being friends with a full-blooded Navajo. What he couldn’t remember, now that he thought about it, under the dust plume from the strip mine, was any particular warmth from Keith’s side—any real curiosity or sentiment.

“That’s your friend,” Clyde said bitterly. “That’s your tribal council.”

“I feel for you,” Russ said.

“Oh yeah? You know the Sierra Club? They’re the crazy bilagáana that stopped the government from flooding the Grand Canyon. We went to them to try to stop the mine. We said we didn’t want a power plant on sacred land, and they were exactly like you. They said, ‘We feel for you.’ And they didn’t do shit for us. They only care about saving white places.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Frances said suddenly.

Clyde seemed startled that she had a voice.

“If we’re the bad guys,” she said, “if everything we do is automatically bad, if that’s the way you feel about us, why should we try to do anything?”

“Just stay the fuck away,” Clyde said. “That’s what you can do.”

“So you can go on hating us,” she said. “So you can go on thinking you’re superior to white people. If somebody like Russ comes along, somebody who actually cares, somebody who takes the time to hear you, somebody who’s good, it messes up your whole story.”

“Who’s Russ?”

“I’m Russ,” Russ said.

“I don’t hate your guy,” Clyde said to Frances. “At least he came up here—I respect that.”

“But we’re still supposed to get the fuck out,” she said. “Is that the idea?”

Talking to a woman appeared to discomfit Clyde. He kicked some gravel over the edge of the cliff. “I don’t care what you do. You can stay the week.”

“No,” Russ said. “That’s not enough. I want you to come down and talk to our group. You can do it tonight—bring your friends.”

“You’re telling me what to do?”

“It won’t change anything. You’ll still have this nightmare on your mesa—nothing’s going to change that. It makes me sick to see what’s happened. But if you’re angry enough to steal from us, we have a right to hear why you’re angry. I promise you the kids will listen to you.”

“Have their little Navajo experience.”

“Yes. I won’t deny it. But you’ll experience who we are, too.”

Clyde laughed. “The thing about your promises? There’s always something you didn’t tell us.”

“That’s bullshit,” Russ said. “That’s self-pitying bullshit. If you keep getting cheated, you need to be smarter. If you end up feeling like we’ve cheated you, you can go ahead and say so—we can take it. The question to me is whether you have the guts for an honest dialogue. From what I’ve seen, the only thing you’re any good at is saying ‘Fuck you’ and walking away. I’d hate to find out you’re nothing but a bully and a thief.”

Did words give expression to emotion, or did they actively create it? The act of speaking had uncovered a love in Russ’s heart, a love related to Clem, and he could tell, from the uncertainty in Clyde’s sneer, that his words had had an effect. But the fact of the effect was problematic. The very act of caring was a kind of privilege, another weapon in the white arsenal. There was no escaping the imbalance of power.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to us.”

“You think I’m afraid of you?”

“No. I think you’re angry and you have good reason to be. You’re under no obligation to spare us the discomfort of your anger.”

Now every word he said seemed to aggravate the imbalance. It was time to swallow his love and shut up.

“Thank you for giving us the guitars,” he said.

He beckoned to Frances to go ahead of him on the trail through the pines. Following her and looking back, he saw a complicated smile.

“Fuck you,” Clyde said.

Russ laughed and proceeded up the trail. Halfway up it, Frances stopped and threw her arms around him. “You’re amazing,” she said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“God, I admire you. Do you know that? Do you know how much I admire you?”

She held him tight, and there it was: the joy. After all the dark years, his joy was shining forth again.

Returning to the camp, they collected the two guitars and laid them on the bed of Ruth’s truck. The sun was now white, the glare intense on the road down the back side of the ridge. (To Russ, when he’d stayed with Keith, it had been the “front” side.) Dangling from the rearview mirror was a small plastic Snoopy, not necessarily an indication that Ruth liked Peanuts. All sorts of random trinkets turned up on the reservation.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” Frances said.

“Don’t be. It was brave of you to be here at all.”

“It’s like the feeling comes over me and I can’t control it. I wonder if it has to do with Bobby—the way he died. I don’t remember always being so afraid.”

“The important thing is that you did it. You were afraid, but you did it.”

“Can I say something else?”

Russ nodded, hoping for a stroke in return.

“I desperately need to pee.”

The canyon was devoid of shrubs to pee behind, but the old farmstead was close ahead. Russ increased his speed, Frances squirming at every bump. When he pulled into Keith’s old yard, she had the door open before he stopped. She hobbled behind the shell of the little house, and he took his own leak behind a cottonwood. Watching the wood go dark with his urine, he thought of the bare ground going dark with hers, her pants around her ankles. In the sun and the thin air, he felt dizzy.

Returning to the truck, he saw her inside the roofless house and joined her there. The bedroom wall was still extant, but the door and its frame were gone, the floor covered with drifted sand. Nearly thirty years had passed since he’d lain in the bedroom and pictured the Navajo dancer. Even now, when he was enlightened enough to deplore a white man’s lust for a Native American fifteen-year-old, the thought excited him.

“I don’t know what to think,” he said.

“About what?”

“About everything. About Keith. I hate to think he deliberately cheated Clyde’s family. But that’s the thing about other cultures—an outsider can never really understand what’s going on.”

“That’s why you have your own culture,” Frances said. “That’s why you have me. I’m easy to understand.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Want to bet?”

In two quick steps, she was pressing against him. Her hands were inside his sheepskin coat, her neck straining upward for a kiss. He gave it to her, tentatively.

She wasn’t tentative. She gave a little hop and he lifted her off the ground. She was a very determined kisser, harder of mouth than Marion, more aggressive, and it was entirely up to him to keep her aloft. How sharp the discontinuity between fantasy and reality! How disorienting the step from the generality of desire into the specificity of her kissing style, the hundred-odd pounds of dead weight he was holding. When he set her down, she backed against the wall and drew him after her. Her hips were as aggressive as her mouth, denim grinding against denim, and he thought of the heart surgeon. He thought of the lakefront high-rise apartment in which, he could now be certain, she’d done with the surgeon exactly what she was doing with him. Far from dismaying him, the thought helped him make sense of her. She was a widow who wanted sex; was good at it; had recent practice at it.

She paused and looked up at him. “Is this all right?” She seemed genuinely worried that it wasn’t. He loved her all the more for that.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said.

“It’s the nineteen seventies?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs. Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleepy. “There we are.”

It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life.

“We should get back, though,” she said. “Don’t you think? They’re probably wondering what happened to us.”

She was right. But now, being felt by her, he lost his mind. He covered her mouth with his, unbuttoned her jacket, pulled out her shirttails, reached underneath. The smallness of her breasts, in contrast to Marion’s, was extraordinary. Everything was extraordinary—he’d lost his mind, and she wasn’t saying no. She wasn’t saying they had to go back. The sun was warming his head and raising a smell of old smoke from the wall, but the place had lost its sound. Not a vehicle had passed on the road. No croak of a raven bore tidings of a reality larger than the two of them. In his madness, with the back of his hand scraping against her open zipper, he dared to part her private hair. She tensed and said, “Oh, Jesus.”

His madness made him bold. “Just let me.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s just—hoo. Shouldn’t we go back?”

They definitely needed to go back, but he was touching Frances Cottrell’s vagina, a few steps from the spot where he’d entered the world of conscious pleasure, and there was no withstanding it. He’d come too far and waited too long. He opened his own pants.

“Oh, wow, okay.” She looked down at what was pressing against her belly, and then at the hole in the front wall where a window had been. “Maybe this isn’t the best time?”

His voice wasn’t his own; wasn’t under his control. “I can’t wait any more.”

“It’s true. I did make you wait.”

“You tortured me and tortured me.”

She nodded, as if conceding the point, and he tried to take her pants down. She looked around more nervously. “Really?”

“Yes, please.”

“I had no idea you were like this.”

“I am utterly in love with you. Didn’t you know that?”

“No, I guess I did wonder.”

When he tried again to get her pants down, she gently pushed him away. “Can we at least be less visible?”

In the time it took him to lead her into what had been the house’s bedroom, remove his coat, and spread it on the floor, the character of his madness changed—became less of the body and more of the head. Now everything centered on the deed and its attendant practicalities. She sat down on the coat and pulled off her shoes and pants. “I’m on the Pill,” she said, “in case you were wondering.”

He wanted to ask if she truly wanted what he wanted, but there was a chance that her assent would lack enthusiasm, a chance that it would start a conversation. The air was still cold enough that she left her hunting jacket on. At the sight of her lying back in it, naked below the waist, he thought he might throw up with excitement. Before she could change her mind—before he could lose the mad determination to do the deed, before he could consider how far from ideal the time and the setting for it were—he tore off his own pants and kneeled between her legs.

“My goodness, Reverend Hildebrandt. You’re rather large.”

If large meant comparatively large, it was a comparison that no one had ever made. The stroke (oh, what a suggestive term Ambrose had coined) made him even larger. To his surprise, he found the largeness to be a difficulty.

“Sorry,” she said. “You’re big, and I’m—tense.”

It couldn’t have been clearer that he was making a mistake. Each passing minute would only add to her tension. But he simply couldn’t wait any more. As if time were a thing he could grasp in his arms and bend to his will, he kissed her and touched her with soothing unhurry. Her responses were ambiguous, speaking possibly of arousal, possibly of tenseness. Gone, either way, was her aggressiveness.

“We can wait,” he admitted.

“No, try it again. Just go slow. I don’t know why I’m so tight.”

How quickly, once clothes had been shed, the wildly unmentionable became the casually discussable. It was like being whisked to a different planet. He felt as if he’d learned more about Frances in an hour than he’d learned in half a year. Thankfully, his heart still recognized her; his reservoir of compassion was still there to be tapped. He loved that a woman so confident of her desirability should have trouble relaxing for him. But alongside her specificity as a person, the sweetly imperfect person in whom he’d invested so much hope and so much longing, was the necessity to be, if only once, inside a woman who wasn’t Marion. How absurd the necessity, and how funny and human the constriction that impeded it, the quarter-inch out for every half-inch farther in, the lump in the sheepskin jacket that was murdering his elbow. In the end, he didn’t make it quite all the way in, and his satisfaction was pinched. But, God help him, he was keeping score, and this absolutely counted. Freed, at long last, from the weight of his inferiority, his heart returned to Frances. He shuddered with gratitude for the woman whose grace had saved him.

“So, number one,” she said, “I need to pee again. Number two, we should definitely go back.”

She gave him a sloppy kiss, the pleasure of it heightened by their union, their mouths like twins or proxies of other wet parts. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to feel that he’d had, by far, the better half of the experience. He wanted to satisfy her, too. But the desire he’d turned on with his taming of Clyde now seemed to be turned off. She scrambled to her feet and put her pants on. Two minutes later, they were in the truck again.

“So,” he said.

“Right, so.”

“I love you. That’s where I am.”

“I appreciate that.”

He started the truck and drove for a while in silence. There was no point in repeating that he loved her—he’d already said it twice.

“It’s strange,” she finally said. “The thing that makes you so attractive to me is the thing that makes it wrong of me to want you.”

“I’m not so good. I think I told you that.”

“But you are good. You’re a beautiful man. It’s all very confusing to me.”

“You’re regretting what we did.”

“No. At least not yet. It’s just confusing.”

“I’m fantastically happy,” he said. “I have no regrets at all.”

The hour was nearly noon, and he was driving as fast as he dared, too focused on road hazards to sustain a conversation, even if Frances had been inclined to say more. And so it happened that when he approached the chapter house and saw a big Chevy truck and a red-jacketed figure, Wanda, standing with Ted Jernigan and another man, Rick Ambrose, the latter glowering at Russ and Frances and registering their guilty lateness, waiting with the only kind of news that could have brought him to the mesa—bad news—the last words Russ had spoken were that he had no regrets at all.

In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.

On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.

Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequelae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities. His rationality was blazing and tireless and all-seeing, and the problem of Larry made him sensible of the cost of ceaseless blazing, the body’s need for a little boost. The emptier of his two aluminum film canisters was in his pants pocket. He could rub sustenance into his gums without a sound, but he was plagued by unknowns, such as whether his sleeping bag would sufficiently muffle the sound of a lid’s unscrewing. Whether he could open the canister blindly without spilling. (Even a microgram of spillage was unacceptable.) Whether it was wise to partake at all from a canister already so depleted. Whether he shouldn’t at least wait until he could give himself a superior boost nasally. Whether, on second thought, it wasn’t such a bad idea to strangle the person whose interminable throat clearings were standing between him and that boost …

Unh! The whether whether whether was of the body and its arrangement, its side deal, with the powder. Wholly apart from his body, lambent in his mind even now, was a key to millennia of fruitless speculation. It happened that, very recently, less than a week ago, he’d solved the puzzle of the world’s persistent talk of God. The solution was that he, Perry, was God. The realization had frightened him, but it was followed by a second realization: if a felonious and drug-addicted New Prospect Township High School sophomore was God, then anyone at all could be God. This was the amazing key. The amazement, indeed, was that he hadn’t seen it sooner. It had stared him in the face the previous summer, when he’d inked out the Gods in the Reverend’s clerical magazine and replaced them with Steves. How had he failed, that day, to grasp a key so exquisitely simple? The key was that Steve could be God. So could every other Tom, Dick, and Harry—all any of them had to do was open his eyes to his divinity. The instant a person experienced the mind’s truly limitless capacities, God’s existence became the opposite of preposterous. It became preposterously self-evident.

The revelation had occurred on Maple Avenue, minutes after he’d withdrawn $2,825.00 from his brother’s passbook account at Cook County Savings Bank. The teller had counted the bills and then counted them again out loud, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty, and five, and tucked them into a nifty brown envelope. The rush of success was so titanic, he imagined an ejaculation blotting out the heavens. Knowledge so perfect could only have been God’s, and if he, Perry, possessed it, then what did this make him? In his earlier lunch-hour casings of the bank, he’d ascertained that the older, gray-haired teller, with whom he’d had dealings, was nowhere to be seen at 12:15. Behind the window, instead, was a frizzy-haired mademoiselle still sporting orthodontia, thus undoubtedly (beyond all question!) too new at the bank to know Clem. The scarlet-nailed hand that had taken his passbook was marvelously inexpert.

“That’s a lot of cash. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a cashier’s check?”

“I’m buying a sailboat.”

“Wow. That’s exciting.”

“It’s a beauty. I’ve been saving for three years.”

“Do you have some ID?”

She couldn’t have asked a question more perfectly foreseen. Everything had been foreseen: withdrawing an innocently precise number of dollars; wearing a nerdy cardigan and the disguise of his new eyeglasses; not only replicating and laminating a University of Illinois student ID card but meticulously abrading and soiling it with an emery board and charcoal, labors performed within feet of his soundly sleeping little brother and underwritten by his powder, which was also a focuser of attention, an enhancer of manual precision. He’d invested rather a lot of little boosts in his project, but the investment would be dwarfed by the avalanche of dividends he perfectly foresaw. When the metal-mouthed teller returned the ID card, having scarcely glanced at it, the investment had already paid off handsomely. Counting time spent manufacturing the card and practicing Clem’s signature, minus incidental drug expenses, he’d made $236.25 an hour. Not bad. But still far less than he stood to make—even factoring in the additional hours of labor in Arizona and the return of Clem’s money—after his transactions had unfolded as foreseen.

There was no peyote, not one button, in Chicagoland.

Thousands of Chicagoland hippies were desperate to try it.

Only one person in the world had identified the demand and positioned himself to meet it.

He owed the development of this logic to an earlier realization: for three years, he’d been treating the wrong disorder. He’d believed his mind to be diseased, in want of chemical palliation, when in fact the problem was somatic. It was his body, its exhaustible muscles, its irritable nerves, not his mind, that needed support. As soon as his guy had introduced him to Dexedrine and he’d learned the proper function of a Quaalude, which was to let his body rest, he’d entered a phase unprecedented in its excellence and serenity. Each day, the world was like pinball played in slow motion. His timing with the flippers was precise to the millisecond; he could run up the score arbitrarily high. He also knew exactly when to stop, allow the ball to drain, and eat his ’ludes. Everything he did in early January had a rightness so complete that it controlled the world around him. Example: the very day he exhausted his Dexies, the very day, three thousand dollars appeared in his savings passbook, courtesy of his sister. Example: his bank did not require parental countersignatures. Example: his guy was not only at home and not only compos mentis, more or less, but willing to part with the entire remaining contents of his Planters Peanuts jar. The thought did cross Perry’s mind that he was overpaying, but the agreed-upon price was a minor fraction of three thousand dollars, and the guy fell upon his twenty-dollar bills with poignant greediness, suggestive of an individual who’d seriously hit the skids. As Perry fled down Felix Street, chewing pills, the world seemed even righter. His money had brought great happiness to both him and the guy. Their transaction, in theory zero-sum, had somehow doubled the money’s value.

For yet a while longer, all had been righter than right, but by the time Bear delivered his judgment of speed, Perry was ready to hear it. What had seemed in the moment of purchase an all but inexhaustible number of pills had dwindled unexpectedly fast, and although their function was somatic he was experiencing less than salubrious mental side effects. Jay in particular was intolerably impatient-making, their sharing of a room a misery. Likewise his mother’s tender touchings. Likewise any Crossroads activity requiring physical contact. The world’s slowness had become more infuriating than capacitating, and meanwhile his body kept saying, “More, please.” His body had created a problem. He hated it for its inroads on his dwindling supplies, hated its drag on the flight of his mind. In a state of towering crankiness, when he ran out of pills, he returned to the guy’s little house on Felix Street, and this time no dog was there to howl at him. The front stoop was littered with rain-eaten advertising folios. Pasted to the door was a bright-yellow sheriff’s notice that he didn’t dare step close enough to read.

“I’m not surprised,” Bear said. “That shit is pure evil.”

That Perry liked Bear was irrelevant. That Bear liked Perry, and allowed him to make house calls, was a blessing portending a new phase of rightness. Bear, who’d also sold to Ansel Roder, had zero personal attributes in common with the guy on Felix Street. He was burly and mellow, seemingly unafraid of the law, and reassuringly acquainted with several such Crossroads alumni as Laura Dobrinsky. His house, a trek of thirty minutes from the Crappier Parsonage, belonged to a grandmother who now dwelt in a nursing home. Perry had never had a grandmother, but he recognized the grandmaternal smell in the walls, the grandmaternal hand in the embroidered sheer curtains in the living room, where Bear, of an afternoon, drank Löwenbräu and read the many magazines he subscribed to. Clearly, the key to longevity as a dealer was to be like Bear. He dealt exclusively in naturally derived substances, mostly pot and hash but also, as Perry learned after explaining his energy requirements, the odd gram of cocaine, to oblige some of the musicians among his clientele.

On his first visit, Perry left with a forty-dollar sample. Did someone say love at first snort? He was back two days later. This time, Bear had company, a comely personage in a leather miniskirt, drinking her own Löwenbräu, and Perry feared that his arrival was unwelcome. But Bear was mellow, and his lady friend, on learning what Perry was about, brightened as though she’d remembered that today was a holiday. Already, after only two days, Perry wondered how a person even casually acquainted with cocaine could ever, for a moment, not be wondering if some of it might be close at hand; how the thought had managed to absent itself from her head. Further speeding his heart, as Bear convivially treated them, was the thrill of his singularity (if anyone else at New Prospect High had used the fabled drug of Casey Jones, Perry was unaware of it) and his inclusion by two sophisticated people in their twenties. Among their topics of lively discussion were the most interesting drug they’d ever taken, the drug they were keenest to try (“Peyote,” Bear declared), the lucky star that Perry could thank for not having been robbed by a needle-using freak, the contrasting benignancy of a plant-based alkaloid that didn’t turn its users into paranoid maniacs, the experiments of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the hypocritical distinction between prescription drugs and street drugs, and the rumors of the Beatles reuniting, the grating self-importance of Grand Funk Railroad. Perry was very merry, and his very merriness served the ends of his unsleeping rationality. His first-order need was that Bear like him and trust him. His second-order need was to deflect attention from a glaring difference between himself and Bear, namely, that Bear was mellow. One snort made Bear an even happier Bear and was enough. Perry, who was the nth degree of the opposite of mellow, struggled fiercely to control his eyeballs, which wanted only to follow the coke.

Bear’s mellowness, it emerged, concealed a stubborn will. His coke sales were a sideline, subject to constraints of availability at the wholesale level, and his other buyers, though few and irregular, were loyal to him. Perry, as a newcomer, was eligible for only half a gram. When he offered to pay a premium for more, Bear pretended not to hear him. Bear was being irrational—it was tiresome and risky to make Perry come a-scoring so often—but Perry, guided by rationality, gave their relationship some weeks to grow before he made his proposition.

Bear whistled. “That’s a shitload.”

“I’m more than happy to prepay you for your trouble.”

“Cost isn’t the issue.”

“As much as I enjoy our little chats, it might be better if we had them less frequently. Don’t you think?”

“Honestly? I think you’ll blow through whatever you get and be back here in a week.”

“Not true!”

“I’m not cool with where this is going.”

“But—you’ll see—that is—it’s cool. Just give me a chance.”

It might have been the sight of twenty fifty-dollar bills, crisp from the presses, satisfying to riffle, that turned the tide in Perry’s favor. Bear grumpily took the money and sent him away with his nearly weightless allowance. In the ensuing fortnight, Perry visited him twice more without getting his thousand dollars’ worth. Did there then come a night when he focused the full might of his mind on imagining into existence—on willing into being—a trace of the powder that had so lately and whitely existed but now, owing to a traitorous improvidence of the body, did not? There came more than one such night. And did there then come a day when Bear answered the doorbell and merely handed him a slip of paper?

“His name is Eddie. He’s got what you paid for.”

“May I come in?”

“No. Sorry. You’re a sweet kid, but I can’t see you anymore.”

The door closed. For various reasons, sheer physical exhaustion perhaps primary among them, Perry burst into tears. Was it then that the speck of dark matter first appeared? He felt that he loved Bear, admittedly on short acquaintance, more than he’d ever loved any other person. His forfeiture of Bear’s affection was a blow so devastating that it actually chased from his mind all thought of white powder. Only when he was home again, having blubbered himself out, did he recollect what the seven digits on the slip of paper represented. His mind exploded as if he’d inhaled the whole of it.

He did not love Eddie, and Eddie did not love him. Their first encounter had a flavor of Felix Street, and their one subsequent transaction, which more than completed the exhaustion of the funds that Becky had transferred to him, left him seething with hatred of Eddie, who he was absolutely sure had cheated him. Again, it was only afterward that he recalled how fucking much drug, even after being cheated, he’d come to possess. Three tightly lidded film canisters: that was something. Never again, or at least not for an extremely long while, would he find himself dying of empty-handedness.

And yet, if three canisters was excellent, how much more excellent six would have been. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. Was there a multiple of three of whiteness large enough to permanently set his mind at rest? The dark speck, the mental floater, was there again. It no longer seemed that money spent brought double benefit. Money spent was simply money gone. In his savings passbook, perilously exposed to prying parental eyes, stood the sorry figure of $188.85, and even genius had its limits. He didn’t see how one hundred and eighty-nine dollars could be compounded, quickly, into thirty-five hundred …

Larry was snoring. The sound accorded so closely with the platonic form of “snore sound” that Perry wondered if it might be fake. He lay still, and the snores grew louder. By and by, they terminated in a choking gasp, the rustle of Larry repositioning himself. There followed fainter snores, unquestionably authentic. Perry now dared—first things first; throw the nerves a bone—to open the canister and insert a moistened finger. He tapped the finger on the canister’s rim, very carefully, and introduced it to his mouth. He dipped again and pushed the finger deep into a nostril, removed it and breathed deeply, sucked the finger clean and used his tongue as a gum swab. The localized numbing was metonymic of a more general cessation of his nervous system’s hostilities against the mind. Although the rush had of late been feeble, he at least was no longer at odds with himself. He capped the canister and slowly sat upright. His boots were by the door, the money in the toe of one of them, everything perfectly foreseen. The now deafening beating of his heart served also to deafen Larry, because it had to; because the sound was God’s own. As maternal heartbeats were said to soothe prenatal babies, His own cosmic heartbeats lulled every one of His children. Oh, how He loved them! He felt He could have killed them all or saved them all, just by willing it, so loud were His coked-up heartbeats as He proceeded to ease open the dorm-room door.

An exit sign glowed in the dark hallway. At the far end, fluorescent light spilled weakly from the lounge. It was difficult to return to human chronology and make sense of his watch, but he grasped that he still had thirty-five minutes. He pocketed the money, put on his boots, and crept past other rooms commandeered by Crossroads. From one of them, he could hear the muted squeak of girl voices, distressingly awake. What needed to be done about them must have been self-evident, because he found himself, a seeming instant later, sitting in a bathroom stall and propelling into his sinuses, from the base of his thumb, a large and sloppy pour. It was very curious. How did an all-seeing Entity end up on a toilet seat without knowing how he’d gotten there? Casting his mind’s eye back over the preceding moments, he encountered an occlusion. The speck of dark matter now seemed larger; could, indeed, no longer be referred to as a speck; was perhaps better described as an uneasy semitransparency, a poorly demarcated blob. He couldn’t pin it down for examination, but he sensed its malignant saturation with knowledge contradicting his own. It was unbelievable! Unbelievable that God Himself should have a floater in His eye! God was very, very wrathful. His wrath, having nowhere else to vent itself, took the form of three further massive boosts in quick succession. If wild excess killed the body, then so be it.

He got his pants down just in time. The body, rather than dying, was defecating like an upside-down volcano. Into the stench, amid a flashing of alien lights, an apocalyptic pounding in his chest, came a blessedly rational insight: this was what happened when a person overindulged. To entertain this thought, however, was to perceive its irrelevance. Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit. Instead he shat again, and none of this had been foreseen. If foreknowledge of this supremely unpleasant lavatorial digression had resided anywhere, it had been in the hazy blob of dark matter, not in his mind.

Wiping his ass in a cramped Navajo bathroom stall, shackled by dropped trousers and distracted by the flashes of a thousand splinters, by the choking engorgement of his carotid, he forgot to be mindful of his canister’s whereabouts. As soon as he remembered, he confidently foresaw that he’d capped it and set it aside. But no. Oh, no no no no no. He’d knocked it over on the floor. Its scattered contents were thirstily absorbing a trickle from the toilet’s leaking seal. They’d formed a watery paste that he now had no choice but to urge, with the side of his finger, back into the canister, even at the cost of dampening the powder still inside it. Nothing made any sense. The embodied clairvoyance that had crept down the hallway toward the execution of its masterstroke was now wiping up, with bits of toilet paper, a whitish alkaloid smear contaminated with fecal and perhaps even tubercular bacteria, sullying itself with the question of whether the alkaloid had antiseptic properties, whether the toilet paper could later be applied to his gums without the swallowing of pathogens, and whether, although he still felt close to throwing up, it wouldn’t be better to lick the floor than let any milligrams go to waste.

A gag reflex dissuaded him from licking. He tamped the saturated toilet paper into the canister and screwed on the lid. And just like that—in an n-dimensioned wave of ecstasy, a rolling pan-cellular orgasm—he recalled that the object of his masterstroke was to secure an abundance of drug better measured in kilograms than in milligrams. Just like that, he emerged from life-threatening turbulence into the smoothest of highest-altitude flying, and everything made sense again. How had he questioned the rightness of his actions? How had he imagined that he’d overindulged? God didn’t err! He was superb! Superb! He’d pushed through the body’s limits to the highest realm of being. The speck of dark matter had shrunk to the point of disappearing, was again so tiny that God could love it, was dear and unthreatening and did not, after all, know anything, or maybe one small thing …

now you’ve seen hadn’t you better won’t take but a minute

Getting the speck’s message—that there might come, tonight, a moment when he felt a notch less superb, which couldn’t be allowed to happen—he stole back down the hallway and slipped into his room. His other canister, the full and fully dry one, was at the center of a sock ball in his duffel bag. He’d brought it along with no intention of dipping into it. He’d been motivated by a last-minute paranoia, a seemingly irrational fear of leaving his entire reserve in the parsonage basement, well hidden behind the oil burner but unguarded. Now he saw that it hadn’t been irrational at all. It had been perfect foresight.

“Perry?”

The voice, in the dark, sounded like Larry’s, but this didn’t mean that Larry was awake. Part of becoming God was hearing the voices of His children’s thoughts. So far, the voices had been too low to be intelligible. More like the random murmur in Union Station. He unballed the sock and put the wonderfully weighted canister in the leg pocket of his painter pants. Sweet-caustic alkaloid juices continued to drain behind his septum.

“What are you doing?”

If Perry’s vision had truly been perfect, unmarred by the dark speck, he might have succeeded in extinguishing Larry. The power to kill by thinking was divine. The flaw in his power was like a smudge on the lens of an infinitely powerful telescope.

“Perry?”

“Go to sleep.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to the lounge. Stick your nose in the bathroom if you don’t believe me.”

“I’m having the opposite problem. I’m totally constipated.”

Perry stood up and moved toward the door. Already he felt a notch less superb.

“Can we talk for a minute?”

“No,” Perry said.

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“All I do is talk to you. We’re together all the time.”

“I know, but…” Larry sat up on his bunk. “I don’t really feel like I’m with you. It’s like you’re in some kind of … place. Do you know what I mean? You haven’t even had a shower since we got here.”

If Larry couldn’t see the absurdity of showering, didn’t have a deity’s intense distaste for it, there was no point in explaining.

“I’m trying to be honest,” Larry said. “I’m telling you how you seem to me. And one thing I think is you really need to take a shower.”

“Understood. Sleep tight.”

“It’s not just me, though. People think you’re being really weird.”

Perry now sensed an alliance between Larry and the speck of dark matter, a kindred possession of contradictory knowledge.

“I just wish you’d tell me what’s going on with you,” Larry said. “I’m your friend, we’re in Crossroads. You can tell me anything you want.”

“I think you’re evil,” Perry said. The rightness of this verdict was thrilling. “I think the powers of darkness are gathered in you.”

Larry produced an emotional sound. “That’s—a joke, right?”

“Far from it. I think you want to fuck your mother.”

“Jesus, Perry.”

“My dad’s the same way—I have it on good authority. You need to mind your own business. All you people, just stay the fuck out of my way. Can you do that for me?”

There was a silence made imperfect by a Navajo’s distant hot rod. Larry’s pale face, in the obscurity above, was like a death’s-head. The thought came to Perry that infinite power was infinitely terrible. How could God endure all the smiting He had to do? With infinite power came infinite pity.

Larry swung his legs off the bunk. “I’m getting Kevin.”

“Don’t do that. I was—my joke was in poor taste. I apologize.”

“You’re really scaring me.”

“Do not get Kevin. What we both need now is shut-eye. If I promise to take a shower, will you go back to sleep?”

“I can’t. I’m worried about you.”

However he might extinguish Larry, whether with blunt-object blows or strangling hands, there was bound to be an overhearable commotion.

“Just let me visit the facilities again. I’m having quite the roiling and boiling. Quite the industrial gas factory. Just stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Without waiting for a response, he darted from the room and flew down the hallway on wings of powder. As if he’d sailed off a cliff, he achieved fabulous velocity before hard ground, in the form of coronary limits made stricter by low atmospheric oxygen levels, stopped him dead. He turned, gasping, to see if the evil one had left their room. Not a sound!

The dormitory doors were locked at night, but from the lounge’s window to the pavement was a jump (or climb, as the case would later be) of only five feet. Outside, in freezing air, he paused to touch the money in his jacket, the canisters in his pants. One more quick boost: advisable? Though he was now perhaps two notches below the most sensational high he’d ever experienced, the cold was bitter. A metallic taste of blood was in his windpipe, and he still wasn’t far from throwing up. Press on, sir. Press on.

The young Navajos he’d befriended the night before were meeting him at the off-brand gas station up the road from the dormitory. He’d found the two of them shooting baskets beneath a billboard for the Best Western Canyon de Chelly whose lights indirectly illuminated a hoop and a crude backboard bolted to one of its stanchions. The younger Navajo had a deep, irregular scar from the bridge of his nose to his jaw. The older fellow was groovier and longer-haired, dressed in bell-bottom corduroys with a large silver belt buckle. At their urging, Perry had displayed his pathetic lack of ball skills, and by submitting to their derision, giggling along with it, he’d secured their trust. When he then broached the crucial subject, their laughter reached new heights.

“But seriously,” he said.

Their hilarity was ongoing. “You want to try peyote?”

“No,” he said. “That is—no offense intended—it’s not for my own use. I’m looking to obtain a large quantity. Perhaps a pound of it or more. I have the money.”

Of everything he’d said, this was apparently the most pants-wettingly funny. His foresight had allowed for the necessity of casting many a line before he got a bite, and he judged that it was time to try a different pond. He sidled away.

“Hey, wait, man, where you going?”

“It was nice to meet you both.”

“You said money. What’s your money?”

“Do you mean, is it legal tender?”

“How much you got? Twenty?”

Offended, he turned back to them. “A pound of peyote for twenty dollars? I have a hundred fifty times that much.”

This disclosure ended the hilarity. The groovier Navajo asked him, with a frown, what he knew about peyote.

“I know that it’s a powerful hallucinogen employed in Navajo ceremonies.”

“That’s wrong. Peyote isn’t Navajo.”

No word in the world hurt more than wrong. All his life, it had made Perry want to cry.

“That’s disappointing,” he said.

“Peyote’s not our thing,” the groovier fellow said. “It’s only for people in the church.”

“They take it and they sweat,” his friend said.

“It doesn’t even grow here. It comes from Texas.”

“I see,” Perry said.

Out of the now revealed imperfection of his knowledge rose a weariness compounded over many weeks of sleepless nights, a weariness so immense that he suspected no amount of boosting could overcome it. He shut his eyes and saw the überdark speck against the blackness of his lowered eyelids. The two Navajos were exchanging words that he was tantalizingly close to understanding. The gap between knowing no words of Navajo and knowing all words of Navajo seemed no wider than a micron. Were it not for the dark speck, the weariness, he could have crossed it effortlessly.

“So there’s a guy,” the groovier fellow said to Perry. “Guy named Flint.”

“Flint, right.” The younger fellow seemed excited to remember him. “Flint Stone.”

“He’s in New Mexico, just over the state line.”

“Just over the state line. I know the place.”

“Who is Flint?” Perry said.

“He’s the man. He’s got what you need. He brings peyote up from Texas.”

“He’s a Navajo?”

“Didn’t I just say that? He’s in the church and everything.” The groovier fellow turned to his scar-faced friend. “Remember that time we went out there?”

“Yeah! That time we went out there.”

“He had a bag of buttons in his shed. It was like a five-pound bag of coffee, pure peyote.”

“That wasn’t coffee?”

“No, man. I saw it. He opened the bag, he showed me. It was all peyote. He gets it for the church.”

Flint Stone was a name from a cartoon. Perry’s doubts about the story, which were substantial, all emanated from the speck. The speck’s essence was that everything was hopeless and he was deathly tired. For a moment, in the billboard’s reflected light, he sank deeper into weariness. But then—O ye of little faith!—his rationality blazed forth. His weariness was itself the proof that he could go no farther; didn’t have the strength to accost further Navajo strangers. By definition, if he could go no farther, he’d reached a logical terminus. In the light of perfect logic, the coffee sack overflowing with peyote became incontrovertibly real. The surety was the balance of $13.85 in his passbook account, the scarcely larger sum in Clem’s. The only way to replenish these accounts, while realizing a profit sufficient for his ancillary drug needs, was to buy peyote in bulk and resell it at a fivefold markup in Chicago. Ergo, there had to be a man by the unlikely name of Flint Stone, the man had to sell peyote at a depressed reservation price, and the first individuals Perry had accosted had to know it. Had to! It couldn’t have been otherwise, because God had only one plan.

Weightless with logic, ebullient, he’d arranged to return in twenty-four hours. In the small eternity of those hours, the sack of peyote had become even realer, so real that he could feel the heavy weight of it; he could smell its earthy fungal smell. The weight and the smell were a turn-on that persisted through a morning of scraping paint from the side of a tribal meetinghouse, an afternoon of holding forth to Larry on the atomic structure of matter, the creation of matter in a Big Bang that even now propelled the universe ever outward, the key role of Cepheid variable stars in the discovery of this expansion, the unbelievably providential circumstance (it had to be) that a Cepheid’s period of variation was proportional to its absolute luminosity, thus enabling precise measurement of intergalactic distances, across which an all-seeing mind could zip at will, zoom in for closer looks at the quasars and nebulae of its Creation, survey the dark outer limits of material existence …

Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage. The air had an acrid scent of burned heating oil, and the only glow of warmth was in his head. He considered the possibility that he’d erred in not wearing long johns and a second sweater before dismissing it as incompatible with perfect foresight. His nose and mouth were so numb that his snot ran onto his chin before he noticed it. He pushed it into his mouth and savored the everfreshness of the naturally derived substance dissolved in it. Conceivably he’d snorted more than half a gram …

The gas station was closed. Standing outside its dark office were the scar-faced fellow and, smoking a cigarette, a shaggy figure Perry didn’t recognize. Mr. Stone, I presume? The figure was much younger than he’d imagined Flint.

“This is my cousin,” the scar-faced fellow said. “He’s driving.”

The cousin had a thick neck and radiated stupidity. Types of this sort haunted the high-school locker room.

“Where is our other friend?” Perry said.

“He’s not coming.”

“That’s a pity.”

The cousin threw his cigarette toward the gas pumps, as though daring them to ignite (stupid), and walked over to a dusty station wagon parked in shadow. When Perry saw that the car was of the same make and model as the Reverend’s, and of similarly advanced decrepitude, he felt a pinprick on his scalp. Pure goodness and rightness coursed through him, washing away his last lingering speck-sponsored doubts. The cousin’s vehicle had to be a Plymouth Fury. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be!

He wouldn’t have guessed the speeds of which a Fury was capable. On the state highway, from the back seat, he saw the speedometer needle enter regions that recalled his overindulgence in the bathroom. But there had been no overindulgence, and the cousin wasn’t stupid. To the contrary, his driverly intelligence was profound. Lone lights flashed by like the galaxies God glimpsed in his zooming. Supernaturally invisible, slouched behind two Indian heads silhouetted like rock formations in a desert lit by headlights, he stickied his finger inside the tainted canister and applied it to his gums and nostrils. He took a deep, sweetened breath and sniffed repeatedly.

“You can totally trust me,” he said. “I couldn’t be more perfectly indifferent to the particulars of our buttons’ provenance. Whether every last link in the chain of possession was strictly legal is no concern of mine. Indeed, I might argue that larceny, being forbidden, entails a level of risk that could be considered hard labor, as deserving of reward as any other form of labor.”

He chuckled, divinely pleased with himself.

“The counterargument would be that larceny deprives a second party of the fruits of his own hard labor, and it becomes an interesting economic question—how value is created, how lost. If we had time and you had basic algebra, we could look into the mathematics of larceny—whether it really is zero-sum or whether there’s some x factor that we’re failing to account for, some hidden deficit in the party who’s been stolen from. Although, again, for the narrow purposes of our transaction, it’s no concern of mine. By the same token, if there’s one link in the chain that you don’t have to—”

“Man, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that however legitimate, or perhaps less than legitimate—”

“Why are you talking? Shut up.”

His scar-faced best of buddies! Perry giggled at how colossally he loved him. That God had chosen specially to favor a disfigured Navajo whose education had probably ended in eighth grade: all the angels in heaven were laughing with Him.

“What’s so funny? What are you laughing at?”

“Stop laughing,” the cousin said. “Shut up.”

He kept laughing, but at a wavelength deeper than hearing, a radio or telepathic wavelength that entered every heart, waking or sleeping, around the world, and brought a comfort that human understanding could not explain. Into his own hearing came a multitude of voices, a collective murmur of gratitude and gladness. One voice, rising above the murmur, distinctly said, “That’s a crock.”

The voice was insidiously close and stopped his silent laughter. The voice sounded like Rick Ambrose, and the sentiment was odd. Crock of what? Only shit and butter came in crocks.

“Not butter,” the voice clarified. And added—one was tempted to say snarled—something in a language (Navajo?) that would have been intelligible if spoken more slowly. Hearing an alien language in one’s head was nearly as frightening as recognizing one’s divinity, but it was likewise followed by a reassuring realization: the mind that could speak all human languages without having studied them could only be God’s. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Like overindulgence inverted, the Fury’s smooth sailing gave way to spine-crunching turbulence. On a narrow dirt road whose craters were inky in the headlights, the cousin maintained a speed inviting reassessment of his intelligence. One needed both hands to steady oneself, three further hands to ensure that the two film canisters and the folded envelope of cash weren’t falling from one’s pockets. A chalky-tasting powder filled the passenger compartment, and the road went on and on. One could only hope that they were rushing to meet an impatient seller at some appointed hour; that the return drive could be taken at lower velocity. Beneath the physical pain of being battered by armrest and door and one’s own flying limbs, a deeper kind of pain began to grow, but the accelerations and counteraccelerations were so unpredictable and violent that to open a canister was out of the question …

The Fury stopped.

No longer the best of buddies, the scar-faced fellow turned and put his elbow on the backrest. “Give me the money and wait here.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather go with you.”

“Wait here. He doesn’t know you.”

This made enough sense to be construed as foreordained necessity. The fellow took the envelope of money, and his cousin cut the engine and the lights. The sky must have clouded over the moon. After the door had opened and closed, the only light was from the fellow’s flashlight. Its beam, crisply defined by the dust the car had raised, caught barbed-wire fencing, a corroded cattle guard, pale weeds along a rocky driveway, before it receded into negligibility. The cousin lit a cigarette and inhaled like a gusting wind. There was much to say and nothing that could be said. The speck of dark matter was malignant, and yet its darkness was tempting. One became so very tired of the brightness of one’s mind …

The flashlight beam bobbed back into view. The back door opened.

“He’s got the peyote, but he wants to talk to you.”

As cold as the air in Many Farms had been, it was twice as cold in the dark of nowhere. The flashlight beam kindly pointed out stones and holes to be avoided on the driveway. Ahead, in its incident light, a stone structure became visible, a fence of bleached wood, the rear end of a skeletal truck. The fellow kicked open a sagging gate in the fence. “Go on,” he said.

It was difficult to speak with jaws clenched against the chattering of teeth. “Give me the money.”

“Cliff’s got it. He’s counting it.”

“Who’s Cliff?”

“Flint. He wants to talk to you.”

Deep pain and brutal cold, a shuddering of chest muscles. He’d still had his wits in the warmth of the car. The thing he’d always had was wits, but now they’d abandoned him. He was stone-cold stupid.

“Go on. Take the flashlight.”

He took the flashlight and proceeded through the gate. Stupidity had reduced him to hoping for the best. Hope was the refuge of the stupid. A paddle-limbed cactus loomed up, a nest of rust-eaten oblong cans, ragged sheets of unidentifiable building material, a charred tree stump. The signs of abandonment were unmistakable, but he went around to the back of the stone structure.

There was no back of it. Only the edges of a wall that had collapsed into rubble.

He heard a sound as familiar as his father’s voice, the whinny and rumble of a Fury wagon’s engine starting up. He heard wheels spinning, an automatic transmission shifting gears.

He was too cold to be angry, too shaky-limbed to run.

The speck of dark matter had been tiny only in spatial dimension. It was the negative image of the point of light that had given birth to the universe. Now, in its explosive expansion and consumption of the light, the speck’s hyperdensity became apparent: nothing was denser than death. And how tired he was of running from it. All he had to do was lie down on the ground and wait. He was so malnourished and exhausted, the cold would quickly do the rest—he knew this; could feel it. The dark negative that had replaced his rationality was equally rational, everything equally clear in its antithesis of light.

But the body wasn’t rational. What the body’s nervous system wanted, absurdly, at this moment, was more drug. His money had been stolen but not his canisters.

He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.

Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.

Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.

His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.

A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.

Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.

Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.

Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.

The moment he stopped to spit, his chest was gripped with chills. He was getting no warmer, and the flashlight’s batteries had failed to the point where he could see no worse by turning it off.

This was a thought and his last one. His mind went dark with the flashlight, and then there was only a frigid blackness, its only features a slightly less black sky, a matchingly less black passage forward. The passage seemed eternal, but by and by it developed an incline. At the top of the incline, the sky lightened to reveal a boxy shape in the distance, darker than the road, higher than the horizon.

He was still trudging toward this shape after flames had engulfed it.

He still wasn’t there when he’d been there for a while.

Even as he stood clear of the inferno and toasted himself, he was still on his way to it.

A thing that hadn’t happened yet had happened. A large wooden building with a metal roof and wide doors had been broken into. The frozen metal of the tractors it contained, the deep chill of its concrete floor, had made the inside even colder than the outside, but the totality of the darkness had made even a dim flashlight useful, and there had been a box of matches. There had been a tower of wooden pallets. Gasoline. A splash of gasoline, just enough to kindle one pallet for some warmth. And then a blue flame snaking with terrible speed.

A bird blazing yellow, an oriole, was singing in a palm tree. In the background, around the pool at the apartment complex, she could hear the cheeping of smaller birds, the clacking of hedge clippers, the sighing of the megalopolis. Somewhere in the night, her third in Los Angeles, she’d regained an acuity of hearing that she hadn’t noticed losing. A similar thing had happened toward the end of her confinement in Rancho Los Amigos. A return of ordinary presence.

Of the city she remembered, only the mild weather and the palm trees hadn’t changed. East of Santa Monica, where the streetcar had run, there was now a freeway ten lanes wide, an elevated immensity of automotive glare. Driving from the airport, she’d been tailgated, veered in front of, honked at. Formerly orienting mountains had vanished in a claustrophobic smog. The buildings that loomed up in it, mile after mile, were like players in some cancerous game of trying to be the largest. The city no longer invited her mind to be sky-wide. She was just a frazzled tourist from Chicago, an ordinary mother who was lucky that her boy could read a road map.

It wasn’t so bad, being ordinary. It was nice to be present with the birds again. Nice to be unembarrassed in a bathing suit, nearly at her target weight. How nice it would have been to spend the whole day in Pasadena, see Jimmy in the nursing home again, and let Antonio, who’d become quite a chef, make dinner. How unexpectedly unfortunate that she had to get into her rented car and navigate the freeways.

She’d misplaced the urgency of seeing Bradley. For three months, consumed by the urgency, focused on losing weight and getting to Los Angeles, she’d given little concrete thought to what would happen when she got there. It had been enough to imagine a wordless locking of gazes, a delirious reblossoming of passion. When Bradley, in his second letter to her, had offered to come to her in Pasadena, she hadn’t foreseen the terrors of freeway driving. She’d insisted on going to his house, because Antonio’s apartment in Pasadena, with Judson underfoot, was obviously not a place for passion.

“Mom, look at me.”

Judson, on the neighboring recliner, in baggy new swim trunks, was aiming his camera at her. The camera briefly whirred.

“Sweetie, why aren’t you in the water?”

“I’m busy.”

“You have the whole pool to yourself.”

“I don’t feel like getting wet.”

Something moved in her, a flutter of fear or guilt—a memory. The girl she’d been in Rancho Los Amigos had had a phobia of water on her skin.

“I want to see you dive in the water. Can you show me your dive?”

“No.”

He hunched over the camera and adjusted a dial. The camera seemed too complicated for a nine-year-old, and she’d tried to discourage him from bringing it on the trip. On the flight from Chicago, instead of reading a book, he’d fiddled with the thing incessantly, clicking and turning every clickable or turnable part. He’d done the same thing at Disneyland. He had only three minutes of film, and he was anxious, visibly stressed, about misusing it—kept raising the camera and hesitating, fiddling with it, frowning. She was anxious herself, about the freeway, and needed more cigarettes than she felt she could smoke in front of him. It was only three thirty when he ran out of film. Money had been spent, Frontierland not yet visited, but he said he’d had enough. In the Disney parking lot, before returning to Pasadena, she’d smoked two Luckies.

“Put the camera down,” she said. “You’ve played with it enough.”

He set it aside with a theatrical sigh.

“Are you unhappy about something?”

He shook his head.

“Is it me? Is it my smoking? I apologize for smoking.”

The oriole was singing again, so very yellow. He glanced at it, reached for the camera, and caught himself.

“Sweetie, what is it? You haven’t seemed like yourself.”

His expression became morose. With the return of ordinary hearing came a more general sharpening of her senses.

“Will you tell me what’s bothering you?”

“Nothing. Just … nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Perry hates me.”

She had another flutter of guilt, more pronounced.

“That’s not true at all. There’s no one Perry loves more than you. You’re his special favorite.”

Judson’s mouth curled inward as if he might cry. She moved over to his recliner and pressed his face to her chest. He was so skinny and unhormonal, she could have gobbled him up, but she could feel his resistance. Her old bathing suit now gaped at the top and gave her breasts a wanton latitude. She let him pull away.

“Perry’s sixteen now,” she said. “Teenagers say all sorts of things they don’t really mean. It has nothing to do with how much your brother loves you. I’m sure of that.”

Judson’s expression didn’t change.

“Did something happen? Did he say something that upset you?”

“He told me to leave him alone. He used a bad word.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

“He said he was sick of me. He used a really bad word.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

She embraced him again, this time positioning his head on her shoulder. “I don’t have to see my friend today. I can stay here with you and Antonio. Would you like that?”

He squirmed out of her grasp. “It’s okay. I hate him, too.”

“No, you don’t. Never say that.”

He picked up the camera and clicked something. Clicked it. Clicked it. She’d never had to worry about Judson, but his absorption in the camera recalled her own unhealthy absorptions. Out of nowhere, she was seized by an image so vivid that she quaked with it, an image of her soul mate on top of her, rampant in her utter openness to him. Her bathing suit was loose on her—she’d lost thirty pounds—for him—it was crazy. Oh, the relief of being obsessed, the blessed banishing of guilt. The switch in her was still there to be flipped.

“Judson,” she said, her heart beating hard, “I’m sorry if I haven’t been myself. I’m sorry Perry hurt you. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay here with you?”

“Antonio said he’d play Monopoly with me.”

“You don’t want me to stay?”

He gave a shrug, a child’s exaggerated shrug. The right thing was to stay with him, but an afternoon of Monopoly would pass quickly enough, and Antonio had promised to make crispy tacos. Nothing she could do today was so urgent that it couldn’t be done tomorrow, except seeing Bradley.

“Let’s go inside, then. Maybe Antonio will make you a smoothie.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Did you not see the sign? No unaccompanied children under twelve.”

Antonio had introduced Judson to the concept of a “smoothie,” a sort of milkshake blended with banana. Antonio had retired from the job that had brought him and Jimmy to Los Angeles, but he was still vigorous, his hair splendidly white, his face handsomer than ever. He could easily have found a new lover, but instead, every morning and every evening, he visited the nursing home where Jimmy was bedridden. She saw that in her youthful prejudice, because Antonio was Mexican, she’d misread his relationship with her uncle. Antonio, not Jimmy, had always been the man of the house. Jimmy’s art had never really found a market, and now he was just a sack of bones, his vertebrae so badly crumbled that even a wheelchair was uncomfortable. All he had left were his wits. When she’d inquired about his brother, Roy, he’d mentioned that Roy’s first great-grandchild had been born on the day Nixon was elected. “I’ll let you guess,” he’d said, “which of those two events made him happier.”

It wasn’t easy to apply eyeliner with a shaking hand. The face in the guest-room mirror again had prominent cheekbones, but her skin was finely scored with wrinkles previously hidden by fat; poor light was required to see her as the girl she meant to be. At least her new dress fit this girl. She’d asked the dressmaker on Pirsig Avenue for something summery, something of the sort that Sophie Serafimides said lifted a man’s spirits, and she’d delayed the final fitting as an incentive to keep shedding pounds. The dressmaker, declaring that she looked darling, had taken the money she’d earned by proofreading a reader’s guide to Sophocles.

When she’d exhausted the money embezzled from her sister’s estate, and had charged as much as she dared on the family BankAmericard, she’d asked around the church for leads on work suitable for a literate person with no employment history, and a parishioner had connected her to a woman on maternity leave from the Great Books Foundation. The proofreading work was tedious but doable with frequent cigarettes. It kept her mind off food and further limited her interactions with Russ and the kids. In four weeks, she’d made nearly four hundred dollars, enough to pay the credit-card bill, cover the cost of a rental car and Disneyland, and buy sundries like the rolls of film that Judson wanted for their trip. Bradley had once said it himself, in a sonnet: she was capable.

Before going to say good-bye to Judson, she stepped onto the guest-room patio with her purse. It took her a while, after she’d smoked, to notice that she was crossing the lawn toward the parking lot, rather than going back inside. Apparently it wasn’t necessary to say good-bye?

She was too terrified to judge. Her brain felt like a banana in a blender. It was unclear if the source of the terror was the prospect of the freeway or simply the arrival of the moment—the moment when past and present would connect and thirty intervening years would disappear. Obsessed though she’d been with creating this moment, its arrival had caught her by surprise.

She wasn’t capable. She’d memorized the directions that Bradley had sent her, she’d tested herself by reciting them verbatim, and now she couldn’t remember a word of them. She had his last letter in her purse, but she couldn’t read and drive at the same time.

She started the car, which was baking in the sun, and turned the air-conditioning on full blast. The fabric of her dress had sparse green paisleys on a background of ecru that would show her sweating, which was already considerable. She would have to talk to Mr. Shen, the dry cleaner in New Prospect. Mr. Shen was ever pessimistic when she showed him a bad stain, ever able to perform the miracle of removing it. The thought of Mr. Shen returned her to ordinariness. The worst case—that she’d be back in Pasadena in four hours, able to swim in the pool, unphobic, ordinary—wasn’t such a bad case. Tiny treats, an air-conditioned car, a drink by the pool, an after-dinner cigarette, could get a person through her life. Looking forward to treats was a coping skill for which Sophie Serafimides had praised her. It was strange that she’d felt compelled to inflict such terrors on herself.

Another adage of the dumpling: It’s better to function than not function. Once she was on the freeway, she found that she remembered the directions perfectly. The freeway experience was itself a helpful obsession, a state of mind so consuming that the world outside it barely registered. All she had to do was stick to the rightmost lane and attend to road signs. Of the millions of people who drove in Los Angeles every day, very few were killed. When she’d made it past the San Diego Freeway without dying, she had the thought that, if she ended up moving here, she might even come to enjoy driving.

It was a mistake to think this. Only by luck did she emerge from her fantasies in time to take the exit for Palos Verdes. Pushed relentlessly by cars behind her, she drove all the way to Crenshaw Boulevard before she could pull over and collect herself. She angled a cold-air louver at her face, which felt red, and patted her underarms with a tissue from her purse. The haze outside the car had a marine quality, cooler in color than smog, merely dimming, not effacing. A sign on a nearby awning said PERRY SUMMONS REALITY.

The words swam in her vision.

Their reemergence as PERRY SIMMONS REALTY didn’t lessen her fear. Not wanting her dress to stink of smoke, she got out of the car. The air was ocean-cool and sharply scented with asphalt from a repaving job across the street. The words on the awning were too strange, too apt, to be anything but a sign from God. But what did it mean?

She hadn’t had a real talk with Perry since the night of his sixteenth birthday, three weeks ago. She’d detained him in the kitchen, after dinner, and privately handed him two hundred dollars, the same amount she’d given Clem at Christmas. After Perry had thanked her, she’d noticed that someone’s slice of cake had hardly been touched, and he’d admitted it was his. Did he not like chocolate cake anymore? “No, it’s delicious.” Then why wasn’t he eating it? “My butt is fat.” His butt wasn’t fat in the slightest! “You’re the one with the crazy weight-loss program.” She was just trying to get back to her proper weight. “I’m doing the same thing. You don’t have to worry about me.” Was he sleeping? “Sleeping fine, thanks.” And he wasn’t still … “Selling weed? I told you I wouldn’t.” Did he still smoke it? “Nope.” And—did he remember what else he’d promised her? “Trust me, Mother. If I notice anything amiss, you’ll be the first to know.” But he seemed a little—agitated. “Said the pot to the kettle.” What did that mean? “Your own mental health doesn’t strike me as the finest.” She was—it was only some trouble between her and his father. The point here was that a growing boy needed to eat. “What sort of ‘trouble’?” Just—nothing. The sort of trouble that married couples sometimes had. “Does it have a name? Is it Mrs. Cottrell?” What made him—why did he ask that? “Things I’ve heard. Things I’ve seen.” Well—yes. Since he was nosy enough to ask—yes. And, well, yes—it was very upsetting. If she hadn’t seemed like herself lately, that was why. But the point—“The point, Mother, is that you should worry about yourself, not me.”

With the help of two Luckies, by the side of the road, she understood that the building with the awning was just an ordinary realtor’s office. Looking around, she saw ordinary asphalt, ordinary streetlights, a hillside covered prettily with coastal heather. She unwrapped a stick of Trident and got back in the car.

Palos Verdes was one of countless neighborhoods she’d had no reason to visit in her youth. The streets were empty of pedestrians, and the houses were blander, more homogenous, than the ones in West Los Angeles. In the dimming marine mist, the place seemed abandoned and melancholy. Reaching the street called Via Rivera, she found that she was ten minutes early.

Bradley’s house was less than grand, and it didn’t have the ocean view that she’d imagined; a burgundy Cadillac was in the driveway. She stopped her own car well short of it and took the gum from her mouth. Would her smoking repel him? Or would the smell of her Luckies take him back, as it took her, to the Murphy bed in Westlake?

His first letter, which had arrived a week after she’d written to him, contained sentences of inexhaustible interest—I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you, how often I’ve wondered where you were, how worried I was that something terrible had happened to you—and many smaller items of interest, such as the fact that he wasn’t married. He’d been divorced from Isabelle after their younger boy finished high school, and divorced a second time, more recently, from a woman I should have known better than to marry. Also of interest were the excellence of his health and certain suggestions of wealth. He was now in the vitamin business, not as a salesman but as the owner of a company, based in Torrance, that employed more than forty people. Although his report on his sons was not of interest, she’d studied the details and filed them in a mental drawer that also held the name of every member of First Reformed. She was a pastor’s wife, skilled at politely remembering, no longer scary, and she wanted Bradley to know it.

At one minute past twelve thirty, she rang his doorbell.

The man who answered was somewhat like Bradley but jowlier, sparser of hair, wider in the hips. He was wearing loose linen pants and an oversize sort of toreador blouse, pale blue and halfway unbuttoned. Also a frightful pair of sandals.

“My God,” he said. “It really is you.”

She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. If she’d daydreamed for a hundred years, she couldn’t have imagined him in sandals. This led to a third and very unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find me,” he said, beckoning her inside. “How was the freeway? It’s usually not bad at this time of day.”

He shut the door and made a move to hug her. She stepped sideways. The house was a split-level and smelled faintly of old person. The art and the furnishings were tamely Far Eastern.

“What a lovely house.”

“Yeah, I have the vitamin craze to thank for that. Come in, come in, I’ll show you around. I was thinking we could eat on the patio, but it’s a little too cool, don’t you think?”

“It was nice of you to make lunch.”

“God, Marion. Marion! I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I can’t either.”

“You look—you look like yourself. A little older, a little grayer, but—great.”

“It’s good to see you, too.”

Broad in the beam, favoring an apparently sore hip, he led her down into the living room, from which a tall hedge and a flower garden were visible. The clamminess of her dress, a vestige of her terror, seemed sad to her now. On a wall lined with bookshelves, she noticed recent Mailer, recent Updike.

“I see you still read.”

“God, yes. More than ever. I’m still working, but the company kind of runs itself. A fair number of days, I don’t even go down to the office.”

“I don’t read the way I used to.”

“With a house full of kids, that’s not surprising.”

Her fourth thought was terrible: she’d killed the baby he’d fathered. Not once in three months had it occurred to her that she might have to mention this to him. She wondered if she should do it right away. Their entire history was coiled up tightly in her head. If she let it out, it might obliterate the reality of how he looked to her, the sad smell in his house. But was this a favor she felt like doing? It was confounding to recognize how much she had, compared to him. Not only many more years to live but full knowledge of their history. The story resided in her head, not his, and she felt a curious reluctance to share it, because she was its sole author. He’d merely been the reader.

He was staring at her, his smile almost goofy. In her evident fascination to him, she felt a stirring of the role she’d once played, the role of dangerous-crazy, the role of bluntly saying whatever came to mind.

“Did you live here with your second wife?”

He didn’t seem to hear her. “I cannot believe I’m seeing you. How many years has it been?”

“More than thirty.”

“God!”

He came at her again, and she slipped away to the rear windows. He hastened to open a French door. “I’ll show you the garden. I love the privacy of it.”

In other words, he didn’t have an ocean view.

“I’ve got the gardening bug,” he said, following her outside. “It comes on like clockwork when you’re sixty. I always hated yard work, and now I can’t get enough of it.”

There was a large bed of roses. The sky was gray-blue in the haze, the shadows of the patio furniture indistinct. A bird was buzzing in the hedge, perhaps a wren. She could hear it very clearly.

“Your second wife,” she said. “Did she live here with you?”

He laughed. “I’d forgotten how direct you are.”

“Really? You forgot?”

It was an unfair thing to say. She’d forgotten, too, for many years.

“I want to hear about everything,” he said. “I want to hear about your kids, I want to hear about—your husband. Your life in Chicago. I want to hear about everything.”

“I’m just curious about your second wife. What was she like?”

His face soured. “It was painful. A mistake.”

“She left you?”

“Marion, it’s been thirty years. Can’t we just…” He gestured limply.

“All right. Show me your garden.”

The wren buzzed again in the bushes, as uninterested as she in Bradley’s gardening. While he held forth about aphids and pruning cycles, morning sun versus afternoon sun, the mysterious death of a lemon tree, her idealization of him entirely disintegrated. The stiffness of his joints, when he crouched to show her a virginal hydrangea blossom, foretokened a near future in which, unlike Jimmy, he wouldn’t have a loyal mate devoted to his care—not unless he married a third time. And why should she, who already had a husband, even younger than herself, do a blowsy old man such a favor? Why, indeed, if she wasn’t going to marry him, had she come to his house at all?

It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.

The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.

“Oh, Bradley,” she said. “Do you have any idea how much you meant to me?”

She meant something definitively past. In the present, he was holding some weeds that he’d pulled, perhaps unconsciously.

“You were good to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I put you through.”

He looked at the weeds in his hand, let them fall to the gravel path, and took her in his arms. The two of them fit together as they once had. His chest, against her cheek, exposed by his half-open blouse, was still nearly hairless. Her eyes moist with pity for him, pity that he’d gotten older, she held him tight. When he tried to raise her chin, she averted her face. “Just hold me.”

“You’re every bit as beautiful to me.”

“I haven’t eaten in three months.”

“Marion—Marion—”

He tried to kiss her.

“What I’m saying,” she said, extricating herself, “is I’m extremely hungry.”

“You want lunch.”

“Yes, please.”

The tacky Oriental screen in his dining room saddened her. The disclosure that he’d become a vegetarian and a teetotaler saddened her. The vitamin pills he swallowed with his iced tea saddened her. The hemisphere of egg salad, on a bed of lettuce, saddened her so much she couldn’t touch it. Her chest was obstructed with the wrongness of her being there at all. That she’d imagined fucking—because this was what it was, this was the truth, this was why she’d starved herself and invented a pretext for going to Los Angeles—seemed so senseless to her, she wished she’d never done it with Bradley. She wished she’d never done it with anyone. To be fifty years old in a convent, to rise every morning and hear the sweet birds, to devote herself to loving God, to have that have been her life, instead of this one …

“I thought you were hungry,” Bradley said.

“I’m sorry. The salad looks delicious. I’m just—do you mind if I have a cigarette first?”

His expression told her that he minded. He’d really become quite the health nut.

“I can step out on the patio.”

“No, it’s fine. I have an ashtray somewhere.”

“I know,” she admitted. “I’m still the same mess. I was hoping I could fool you.”

A suspicion appeared to dawn on him. “Do you—you do have a family?”

“Oh, God, yes. That’s all real. I’ve got pictures I was going to show you. Here—”

She jumped up and went to the front hallway. There, uppermost in her purse, were her Lucky Strikes. It wasn’t as if one cigarette would ruin his curtains. As she returned to the dining room, smoking it, she saw that there was no telling what else she might do. The intention to be fucked, her pesky little obsession with it, was, however senseless, persistent.

Dropping a stack of snapshots on the table returned her to her senses. Invisible among the smiling faces of her children was the fetus she’d aborted. Bradley, too, no longer seemed sure he wanted her in his house. He went so far as to wave her smoke away from his nose. The pictures lay on the table unexamined. She asked him if he believed in God.

“God?” He winced. “No. Why do you ask?”

“God saved my life.”

“That’s right. You married a minister. It’s funny it didn’t occur to me.”

“That I have a relationship with God?”

“No, it makes sense. You were always…”

“Crazy?”

He stood up, with a sigh, and went to the kitchen. She had no reason to keep starving herself, but cigarettes had become part of her autonomy. Bradley returned with a yellow ceramic ashtray. On its side were the words LERNER MOTORS.

She smiled. “What ever happened to Lerner?”

“He sold out after the war. The dealerships were moving farther out, and nobody wanted custom bodywork. That was always where Harry’s margin was.”

She tapped the ashtray with her cigarette. “To Harry’s memory I dedicate this ash.”

Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.

She put out the cigarette and took a bite of salad. Bradley picked up his own fork.

Only when she was leaving, an hour and a half later, might something have happened. She’d showed him her few photos, noting how he lingered on a recent school picture of Becky, and suffered through an interminable showing of his own. She would happily have spent another hour in his garden to spare herself a minute of his grandson pictures; her boredom was so aggressive, it verged on loathing. But she played the role of pastor’s wife, fascinated by Bradley’s offspring, and said nothing further to provoke him.

At the front door, as she was leaving, he tried to revive her interest. To her loose farewell hug, he responded by gripping her fanny and pulling her into him.

“Bradley.”

“Please kiss me.”

She gave him a brisk peck, and his hands were all over her. There was a blindness to his pawing, his nuzzling of her throat, his squeezing of her breasts, and this was how she knew for certain. She felt invisible, not excited. She patted his head and said she needed to get back to Judson.

“You can’t stay another hour?”

“No.”

This wasn’t true. She’d told Antonio she might be out all evening. Bradley gripped her head and tried to make her look at him.

“I never got over you,” he said. “Even when you were crazy, I didn’t get over you.”

“Well. Maybe now is a good time.”

“Why did you write to me? Why did you come here?”

“I guess—” She laughed. Everything was light. The world was full of light. “I guess I wanted to finally get over it. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was God’s plan, not mine.”

At the naming of God, Bradley let go of her. He ran a hand through what was left of his hair.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s not—I have a perfectly nice lady friend from work. Better than I deserve.”

“Oh.”

“It’s just—she isn’t you.”

“Well. I suppose no one is, except me.”

“Her family’s Japanese. She does our books.”

“And I’m so grateful that you mentioned that.” She picked up her purse and clicked it shut. “I’d hate to think of you alone.”

To walk away from his house without having surrendered herself—to be bathed in God’s approval; to know, for once, that she deserved it—was immeasurably better than to surrender. She felt so elated, she almost floated to her car. And she recognized this elation. A similar feeling had filled her thirty years ago, after Bradley, at a Carpenter’s drive-in, had ended their affair. It was true that the earlier elation had only intensified her obsession, had unspooled into madness, the making and unmaking of a baby. But this time it was she who’d done the ending. This time, the elation was of God, and she was sure that He would keep her safe.

To survive the grandkids, she’d promised herself a cigarette, but now she saw that she didn’t have to smoke. God took and took, but He also gave and gave. Freed of the ghost of Bradley, freed of the morbid urgency of dieting, she could be free of cigarettes, too. Her elation held until, north of downtown, the freeway traffic came to a dead halt. She wanted to get back to Pasadena in time to swim before dinner, to be enveloped by water, and the traffic jam infuriated her. It turned out that she needed to smoke after all. And there was something else, a nasty little itch. With a glance at the car to her left, she felt herself between her legs. It was shocking how Bradley’s assault, which had left her unmoved in the moment, now aroused her. Would it really have been so bad to give him what he wanted? For the sake of her private parts, which three months of longing had tantalized and primed, she was sorry that she hadn’t. Smoke was drifting from the driver’s side of the car in front of her. She unrolled her own window and punched the lighter on the dashboard.

Antonio’s apartment, when she finally got back, smelled of fried onions. The Monopoly box was on the living-room coffee table, evidence of an afternoon of fun. As soon as Antonio heard her, he came hurrying from the kitchen.

“Russ called. You need to call him back.”

She wondered if Russ had somehow sensed, via God, the choice she’d made; if he missed her, too. But a foreboding told her otherwise. God gave and God took. There was no phone service in Kitsillie.

“Did he say what it was about?”

“Just to call him right away. He left three different numbers.”

“Where’s Judson?”

“He’s grating cheese. I left the numbers by the bedroom phone.”

And so began the remainder of her life. In the glass doors of the master bedroom was a lovely honey-toned light, in the garden the cheeping of birds, from the swimming pool the shouts of children, from the kitchen a smell of fried onions and beef, above Jimmy’s bare dresser his painting of the old Flagstaff post office, atop the other dresser a sepia photograph of Antonio’s mother in a filigreed silver frame: the first impressions were the ones that stayed with you forever.

Russ’s voice was piteously pinched. He was at a hospital in Farmington, New Mexico, and Perry was—sleeping. They had him heavily sedated. The attempt—he’d tried to—dear God, he’d tried to harm himself. They’d brought him to the hospital, his head was bandaged, he was heavily sedated. Thank God, thank God, the juvenile hall hadn’t wanted him—at least the police knew enough to take away his shoelaces. All he could do to himself—all he had was an ugly bump on his forehead. But the reason—what had happened was—he’d burned down a farm building on the reservation. And then felony drug possession. Felony—two felonies. The lawyer—it was a mess—the crimes were federal but Perry was not of sound mind. They were taking him to Albuquerque in the morning because nobody in Farmington wanted the responsibility. The cops didn’t want him, the sheriff didn’t want him, the hospital didn’t want him, the juvenile hall absolutely didn’t want him—there was a place for mentally ill minors in Albuquerque. If she could get a flight to Albuquerque, he could meet her at the airport.

Each fact that Russ conveyed fell into place as if it had been meant to be there all along. Without noticing how, she’d come to be holding a burning cigarette on the patio outside the bedroom. The base of the telephone was at her feet, its cord stretched to its limit. Although the sun was still golden in the west, its light seemed dark in a deeper dimension, but this didn’t mean that God had left her. With the new darkness came a feeling of peace. To bask in His light, to experience the elation of that, was a privilege to be earned, a privilege to feel anxious about forfeiting. Now that her long-deferred punishment had commenced, she didn’t have to struggle or be anxious. Secure in God’s judgment, she could simply welcome Him into her heart.

“Marion? Are you there?”

“Yes, Russ. I’m here.”

“This is terrible. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened.”

“I know. It’s my fault.”

“No, it’s my fault. I’m the—”

“No,” she said firmly. “It’s not your fault. I want you to make sure Perry’s being looked after. If you think he’ll be all right, I want you to get some sleep. See if one of the nurses will give you a sleeping pill.”

A wet, choking sound came through the long-distance hiss.

“Russ. Sweetie. Try to get some sleep. Will you do that for me?”

“Marion, I can’t—”

“Hush now. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Her calmness was like nothing she’d ever experienced. It seemed to reach to the very bottom of her soul. In everything she proceeded to do—carrying the phone back inside, finding her plane ticket and calling the airline, speaking to Russ again briefly, calling Becky and then explaining the change of plan to Judson, assuring him that Becky would be waiting at the airport in Chicago, and finally sitting down and eating, with leisurely relish, three crispy tacos dripping with warm beef fat—she could feel her feet securely grounded. She wasn’t afraid of what was still to come, wasn’t afraid of seeing Perry and dealing with the consequences, because her feet had found the bottom and beneath them was God. In coming to an end, her life had also started. Within you a calm capability—how funny that Bradley, in his sonnet, had been the one to notice. She wished the calmness had descended a day sooner, before she’d gone to his house. She could have said everything to him, instead of hardly anything, although maybe, not knowing God, he wouldn’t have cared to hear it.

In the morning, at the airport, after meeting a gate agent and a stewardess, Judson asked why he couldn’t have stayed on with Antonio through the week. He was pouchy-eyed and grumpy from a short night of sleep. She, for her part, had slept astonishingly well, not waking once. The worst had happened—she didn’t have to fear it anymore.

“You’ll have fun with Becky,” she said. “I bet she’ll take you out for pizza.”

“Becky isn’t interested in me.”

“Of course she’s interested in you. This is a chance to spend some time alone with her.”

He looked down at his camera. “When is Perry coming home?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. He had a kind of breakdown. It could be a while before you see him.”

“I don’t know what ‘breakdown’ means.”

“It means something went very wrong in his head. It’s frightening, but there is a bright side. Whatever bad things he said to you, he wasn’t himself. Now that you know that he wasn’t himself, you don’t have to feel hurt.”

“That’s not a bright side.”

“Maybe consolation is a better word.”

“I don’t want consolation. I want Perry to come back.”

Outward the ripples of harm expanded: Judson would henceforth be a boy with a mentally ill brother. His own first impressions, the sound of her phone calls the night before, the morning smog on the freeway, the airplane he had to board by himself, would always stay with him. But God had made Judson healthy and strong. She could sense it in his love of Perry and in the contrast between them: Perry had never, in her hearing, expressed anxiety on his siblings’ behalf. The harm her sins had caused was immense, but only with Perry was it potentially irreparable. Judson bristled when she offered to go on the plane with him and get him settled. He said he wasn’t a baby.

Before she boarded her own flight, she bought a paperback, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She didn’t expect that she could focus on a novel—it was several years since she’d been calm enough to read one—but she was sucked right in. She read all the way to Phoenix and then, on a second plane, all the way to Albuquerque. She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

Her reading had turned morning in California into late afternoon in Albuquerque. Russ was waiting just inside the gate, in his sheepskin coat. He looked ashen and unslept. When she put her arms around him, she felt him shudder. As a kindness, she let go.

“So,” he said. “They did transfer him.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No. You and I can go together in the morning.”

In her homesickness, she’d lost sight of the trouble in their marriage. To see Russ in the flesh, so tall, so youthful, was to recall her cruelty to him and his pursuit of the Cottrell woman. Although she gathered that Cottrell had opted out, plenty of other women were available to distract him from the awfulness of a mentally ill son. In the wake of the calamity, it seemed all the likelier that he would end up leaving her. And she deserved to be left; she felt as capable of accepting divorce as she was capable of everything else. But the prospect did remind her that she hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving Pasadena.

When she lit up, in the baggage-claim area, he sighed with displeasure.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do as you please.”

“I’m going to quit. Just not … today.”

“It’s fine with me. I’m tempted to take it up myself.”

She extended the pack to him. “Want one?”

He made a face. “No, I don’t want one.”

“You just said you were tempted.”

“It was a figure of speech, for God’s sake.”

Even his sharpness was sweet to her. She and Bradley had never come close to being sharp with each other. It required long years of togetherness.

“We need to rent a car,” he said. “Kevin Anderson drove me down here—he’s on his way back to Many Farms. Do you have the credit card?”

“I do.”

“You didn’t wear it out in Los Angeles?”

“No, Russ. I did not wear it out.”

In the rental car, which conveniently already stank of smoke, he acquainted her with the financial dimension of the calamity. A tribal council administrator, Wanda, had recommended a lawyer from Aztec, oddly named Clark Lawless, whom Russ had met the day before and been impressed with. Because Lawless was the best, he was expensive, and Perry had committed two felonies in the state of New Mexico. As a mentally incapacitated juvenile, he would be charged with the crime of “delinquency,” for which the sentence would typically be confinement in a mental-health facility, followed by at least two years in a reformatory. But Perry was an Illinois resident. Provided that his parents agreed to have his mental illness treated, at their own expense, Lawless was optimistic that a judge would grant them custody. Lawless was well liked at the district courthouse.

“That’s a blessing,” she said.

“You haven’t seen Perry. He hasn’t said a coherent word since they picked him up. He just moans and covers his face. I give a lot of credit to the Farmington police. They put him in the cell that was closest to the desk. If they hadn’t been on top of it, he might have broken his skull open. My guess is that he’s—I mean, based on my counseling experience— I suspect he’s manic-depressive.”

She gasped, in spite of herself, at the evil hyphenated word. Outside the car, a blighted part of Albuquerque was passing by. Warped plywood on storefronts, broken bottles in the gutter. Her father in the evil state, playing ragtime at three in the morning, before the crash.

“Are we sure it wasn’t the drugs? What drugs did he have?”

“Cocaine.”

“Cocaine? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Neither have I. Neither has Ambrose. Where he got it, why he had so much of it—no idea.”

“Well, could that be why he crashed? If he was withdrawing—”

“No,” Russ said. “I’m sorry, but no. It’s my fault, Marion—I knew he wasn’t right. David Goya told me he wasn’t right. He was obviously not right, and now—there was another thing, last night. Early this morning. When he came out of sedation, they had to restrain him again. He’s psychotically depressed.”

A pair of hands was moving randomly in front of her. She directed them toward the cigarettes in her purse. It was good to give them a task.

“Anyway,” Russ said, “we’re looking at a long recovery. I don’t know if they’ll bill us for his time in the facility here, but Lawless is going to cost at least five hundred dollars, probably a lot more. Then however many weeks or months in a private hospital, and further treatment after that. Are you sure you want to be hearing this now?”

She’d got a cigarette lit. It helped a little. “Yes. I want to know everything.”

“We also need to pay for the barn he burned. It was on tribal land, and I’d be shocked if the owners had insurance. I gather there were tractors, other equipment, plus the building itself. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars, but it’s thousands. I called the church office while I was waiting for you, and Phyllis checked the liability policy—it won’t help us. We do have the three thousand that Becky gave Perry. We can also borrow some of the money she gave Clem and Judson. But we’re going to need a lot more.”

“I’ll get a full-time job.”

“No. This is my responsibility. The question is whether I can get a big enough loan.”

“I’ll work until I’m eighty, if that’s what it takes.”

Russ veered over and braked to a hard stop, so he could look at her directly. “We need to get something straight. This is entirely my responsibility. Do you understand?”

She shook her head emphatically.

“I didn’t listen to you,” he said. “A year ago. You wanted to send him to a psychiatrist, and I didn’t listen. Five days ago—again, I didn’t listen. He was as good as telling me he’d lost his mind. And—God! I didn’t listen.”

She sucked on the cigarette. “It’s not your fault.”

“And I’m telling you it is. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

Through the windshield, she watched an emaciated kid, not much older than Perry, shamble out of a liquor store. His shirt was untucked, his pants barely clinging to his hips. He had a bottle in a paper bag.

“Where are we going? I’m already sick of this car.”

“It is entirely my fault, and that’s the end of it.”

“I don’t care whose fault it is. Just get me out of this car. I’m having a panic attack.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t smoke.”

“Where are we going? Why are we stopped here?”

With a heavy sigh, Russ put the car back into gear.

The next thing she knew, they were in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn, and her desperation to leave the car had passed. The car now seemed relatively secure to her. She closed her eyes while Russ went inside to register.

It was strange, considering God’s everpresence in her, how rarely she felt moved to pray. In her guilt, in Arizona, she’d prayed incessantly, but she’d stopped when she married Russ, just as she’d stopped keeping a diary. Only after the births of her children, for which thanks were manifestly due, could she remember really praying. The weekly prayers she said in church were more lateral than vertical, more about belonging to a congregation. God already knew what she was thinking, so she didn’t need to tell Him, and it seemed silly to trouble an infinite Being for minor favors. But the favor she needed now was large.

Dear God, I accept your will, and you’ve given me no more than what I deserve. But please let it be your will that Perry gets better, the same way you once let me get better. Please also let it be your will that I don’t go crazy again. I want to be myself, I want to be fully present for Russ, and you know how I love you. If you would keep my mind clear enough to recognize your will, I would be so very grateful. Whatever your will requires of me, I will gladly do.

She opened her eyes and saw two sparrows, one more boldly patterned than the other, picking through detritus at the base of a concrete parking strip. She felt calmer for having asked. It was the asking that mattered, not the answer. She decided that, for the remainder of her life, she would pray every day. In a world suffused with God, prayer ought to be as regular as drawing breaths.

Cheered by this insight, she got out of the car with her purse. Russ was crossing the parking lot with the room key. She ran up to him and said, “Have you prayed?”

“Uh, no.”

“Let’s go do it. We can get the luggage later.”

He seemed worried about her, but she didn’t feel like stopping to explain. Their room was at the very end of the first floor. She hurried ahead while he followed with the key.

The room was stuffy, the late sun beating on the curtains. She immediately kneeled on the floor. “Here, anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Will you kneel with me?”

“Um.”

“We’ll pray, and then we can talk.”

He still seemed worried, but he kneeled by her and knit his fingers together.

Oh, God, she prayed. Please be merciful to him. Please let him know you’re there.

This was all she had to say, but Russ apparently had more. It might have been five minutes before he stood up and turned on the air conditioner.

“I know it’s private,” she said, “but—did you find Him?”

“I don’t know.”

“If we’re going to get through this, we need to stay connected.”

“I’m not like you. You were always so—it was always easy with you and God. It’s not so easy for me.”

He made her access to God sound slutty, like her talent for quick orgasms. She joined him in the air conditioner’s coolish outflow. It was a very long time since the two of them had been alone in a hotel room, almost as long as since Bradley had taken her to one. Had she ever been alone with a man in a hotel room without having sex? Possibly not.

“Usually it helps to be in a bad place,” Russ said. “But the place I’m in now is so bad…”

His shoulders began to shake, and he covered his face. When she tried to comfort him, he shuddered.

“Russ. Honey. Listen to me. I ignored things, too. I could see Perry wasn’t right, and I ignored it. This isn’t your fault.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I believe I do.”

“You have no idea what I’ve done! No idea!” He looked around wildly. “I’m going to get the luggage.”

She took her purse to the bathroom and unwrapped a drinking glass. The thinness of the woman in the mirror was a continuing surprise. Russ would now be stuck with this woman indefinitely, and she wondered if he might want her again. However deserving she was of God’s punishment, she was surely still allowed some pleasure. She wondered, indeed, if priming herself for Bradley but returning to Russ, excited and unsatisfied, had been part of God’s plan. She freshened her lipstick.

Russ was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, as if replicating Perry’s condition. She sat down by him and touched him. When he shuddered, yet again, a suspicion crept into her.

“So,” she said. “What is it that you think you did?”

He rocked himself and didn’t answer.

“You said I had no idea. Maybe you’ll feel better if you tell me.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“So you keep insisting.”

“I—oh. What to say. God told me what to do, and I didn’t listen. And then Ambrose…”

“Ambrose?”

“He was waiting for me. Kevin reported Perry missing, and the sheriff had already put out a bulletin, so Kevin went straight to Farmington, but Wanda and Ambrose had to wait for me in Kitsillie. They waited an hour. An hour.” He shuddered. “I don’t think I mentioned to you— I didn’t mention that one of the parent advisers in Kitsillie was … So, Larry Cottrell was down in Many Farms, and his mother was on the mesa, and we’d had some trouble. The group, I mean. One of the Navajos broke into the school, and I had to … we had to … that is, I and, uh…”

“Larry’s mother.”

“Yes.”

“Frances Cottrell was with you in Kitsillie.”

“Yes.”

Now, at last, she saw the totality of the punishment God intended. Since her fight with Russ at Christmas, he’d made any number of overtures to her, and she’d spurned every one of them. From the overtures, and from his generally low spirits, she’d inferred that the Cottrell woman had opted out of an affair; Marion had gone so far as to make fun of him. Now, in a flash, she saw why he’d returned to Crossroads. Once upon a time, he’d beguiled her with his talk of the Navajos, and it had worked, and so he’d tried it again with the Cottrell woman, and again it had worked. The Cottrell woman was a fool. She herself was a fool. She had no one but herself to blame.

“And now you’re here with me,” she said. “It must be very strange for you. That we have to deal with this together. That we still happen to be married.”

He gave no sign of hearing her.

“I want you to leave me here alone,” she said. “Let me take responsibility. I want you to go and be as happy as you can. This isn’t your problem to deal with.”

He was hitting himself in the head with the heels of his hands. He was lost in his misery, like a little boy, and she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. He was her big little boy, entrusted to her care by God, and she’d driven him away. She grabbed one of his hands, but he kept hitting himself with the other.

“Honey, stop. I don’t care what you did.”

“I committed adultery.”

“So I gather. Please stop hitting yourself.”

“I was committing adultery while our son tried to kill himself!”

“Oh dear. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? What is wrong with you?”

The ground beneath her was firm. She was secure in God’s punishment.

“I’m just thinking how terrible that must feel. If the two things really did happen at the same time—that’s terrible luck. No one deserves that.”

“Terrible?” He staggered to his feet. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s beyond redemption. There’s no use in praying—I’m a fraud.”

“Russ, Russ. I’m the one who gave you permission. Don’t you remember?”

“Stop looking at me! I can’t stand you looking at me!”

She wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be saying that he still cared what she thought of him, still in some way loved her. To spare him from her gaze, she went outside with her purse.

The sun was low, the distant mountains furrowed with deep shadows. At the edge of the parking lot, in the dry residue of a puddle, a sparrow was giving itself a dust bath. The air smelled like Flagstaff and was cooling off rapidly, as it had in the years when she’d walked home at this hour from the Church of the Nativity, counting her steps. She lit a cigarette and watched the sparrow. It was groveling on its belly, prostrating itself, raising its little face to the sky, flicking up dust with its wings, cleansing itself in dirt. She saw what she had to do.

She put out the cigarette and returned to the room. Russ was slumped on the edge of the bed.

“Are you in love with her? You can tell me the truth—it won’t kill me.”

“The truth,” he said bitterly. “What is the truth? When a person is utterly fraudulent, what does love even mean? How can he judge?”

“I’ll take that as a qualified yes. And what about her? Do you think she loves you?”

“I made a mistake.”

“We all make mistakes. I’m just trying to think practically. If you love her and you think she might love you, I don’t want to stand in your way. You can let Perry be my responsibility.”

“I never want to lay eyes on her again.”

“I’m saying I release you. This is your chance to walk away, and I’m warning you. Right this minute is the time to take it.”

“Even if she loved me, which I doubt, the whole thing is too vile.”

“That’s only because you’re feeling guilty. The minute you see her again, you’ll remember that you love her.”

“No. It’s poisoned. Having to sit in that truck with Ambrose for three hours…”

“What does Rick have to do with it?”

Russ shuddered in his sheepskin coat. She’d bought it for him in Flagstaff.

“Do you know what I did to you?” he said. “Three years ago? Marion, do you know what I did? I told a seventeen-year-old girl that I’d lost interest in you sexually.”

Suddenly cold, she went to her suitcase for a sweater. The summer dress was uppermost. She couldn’t bring herself to handle it.

“And you know what else? I never told you the real reason the group kicked me out. It was because I was drooling all over that girl. I didn’t even know I was doing it, but she could see it. And Rick—Rick was there, too. He knows who I am, and—God, God.”

A low voice spoke, her own. “Did you touch her?”

“Sally? No! Absolutely—no. Never. I was just lost in my vanity.”

She had her own vanity. She no longer felt like reciprocating his confession.

“It wasn’t even true,” he said. “When I saw you coming off the plane—what I said to that girl simply wasn’t true. You are very, very attractive to me.”

“Yeah, wait until I’m fat again.”

“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t deserve to be forgiven. I just want you to know—”

“That you’ve humiliated me?”

“That I need you. That I would be completely lost without you.”

“Nice. Maybe you should fuck me while you’re at it. It seems to be your thing.”

This shut him up.

“Better do it while you can. I’ve started eating again.” She moved into his field of vision and ran her hands down her flanks. “These hips aren’t going to last.”

“I know you’re hurt. I know you’re angry.”

“What does that have to do with fucking?”

“I mean, yes, if you could forgive me—if we could find our way back—then, yes, I would very much like to … find our way back. But right now—”

“Right now,” she pointed out, “we’re alone in a hotel room.”

“And our son is in a ward three blocks away.”

“I’m not the one going on and on about what I’ve fucked. Or couldn’t fuck but really, really wanted to.”

He covered his ears. Her chest was heaving, but not only with anger. In taunting him with the dirtiest of words, in a hotel room, she’d accidentally turned herself on. There was an itch to be scratched, and it really did seem as if everything else could wait. She pushed his knees apart and dropped to her own.

“Marion—”

“Shut up,” she said, unbuckling his belt. “You have no rights here.”

She unzipped him, and there it was. The beautiful and hateful thing. Interested in seventeen-year-olds, interested in home-wrecking forty-year-olds, apparently even somewhat interested in his wife. She lowered her face to it, and—good Lord. He hadn’t showered.

A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable. It was as if, instead of repulsing the assault she’d provoked from Bradley, she’d surrendered to it and were catching a whiff of the aftermath. Though the matter of the seventeen-year-old still had to be dealt with, the Cottrell matter seemed settled. Withholding her mouth would suffice as punishment. She pushed him onto his back and stretched out on top of him.

“With a kiss,” she said, “I forgive thee.”

“You don’t seem right.”

“I suggest taking the kiss while you can.”

“Marion?”

She kissed him, and everything was interchangeable. Not just he and the other man, not just she and the other woman, but past and present. They hadn’t made love in so long, it might as well have been twenty-five years. She in her younger body, he pulling off the coat she’d bought, the air as dry and thin as Arizona’s, the fading light a mountain light. And how easy it had been in Arizona. Along with a faulty mind and a believing heart, God had given her an oversexedness so scratchable that she could relieve it in a public library without attracting notice. And how easy it was again. Seizing on some incidental contact and running with it, she promptly convulsed. She opened her eyes and saw gleaming, in Russ’s eyes, a memory of that orgasmic girl. He’d liked that girl, oh, yes, he had. The gift she’d been given had made him feel powerful. Although she’d misplaced it in the swamp of motherhood, lost it altogether in the wasteland of anxious depression, her refinding of it made him powerful again. His thrusting abandon hurt around the edges, and she would pay for it later, but his excitement excited her. She urged him on, urged herself on. She heard an almost barking sound, an ongoing laugh of surprise, until further convulsing silenced her. He redoubled his efforts, but here, too, the past recurred. As in Arizona, once sated, she remembered her guilt.

When he’d finished, he rested his full weight on her, his scratchy cheek against her neck.

“Not so bad,” she said. “Right?”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“Well. No rush.”

The only light remaining was from the bedside alarm clock, the only sound the passing of cars in the distance. He kissed her neck.

“To be with you like this—I’d forgotten.”

“I know,” she said.

“It’s such a simple gift.”

“Shh.”

The sound of a car passing was like a breaking wave of water. Guilt fluttered in her again.

“Turning and turning,” he said. “‘Till by turning and turning, we come round right.’ That’s how this feels. Like I’ve been turning and turning…”

The song was devotional, but she knew what he meant. To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed. In the plain words of the song was a joy so deep that its roots were inextricable from sorrow’s, and the release of sorrow was even sweeter than the other kind of release. Sorrow was of the heart, and she gave herself to it. As she wept, she felt him hardening inside her. It made her cry harder. She was his again.

He brushed at her tears with his fingertips. “I never want to leave you.”

“That’s nice,” she said, sniffing. “But I should probably use the bathroom.”

“I’m no good for this world. We never should have left Indiana. We should have spent our whole life there, just the two of us and the kids, a community of believers…”

She moved beneath him, hinting at the bathroom, but he wouldn’t let her go.

“All I want is a family to provide for. A Lord to worship. And a wife who … Marion, I swear. If you’ll forgive me, simple gifts will be enough.”

“Shh.”

“You always know the right thing to do. How you knew we should—this is the last thing I would have imagined happening, but you were right. You’re always right. You were right about—”

“Shh. Just let me pee.”

Careful not to stub a toe, she felt her way to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. There was a magician’s trick to be performed, a snap of the fingers that would make Russ’s remorse disappear. His confessions had been piteously sincere, like a little boy’s, and it was time to make her own confession. The sparrow had told her it was time.

And yet: what if she didn’t? What exactly would be gained by dragging him through Bradley Grant, through Santa, through the abortion, through Rancho Los Amigos? She could clear her conscience by groveling in the dirt, but was it really a kindness to her husband? Now that Perry’s calamity had brought Russ back to her, might it not be better to simply love him and serve him? He was like a boy, and a boy needed structure in his life, and wasn’t remorse a kind of structure? She would never be simple, but she could give him the gift of thinking he’d wronged her more than she’d wronged him. Might this not be kinder than dumping her complexities on him?

It could have been Satan asking, but she didn’t think it was, because the temptation didn’t feel evil. It felt more like punishment. To not confess her sins to Russ—to renounce her chance to be chastised, maybe pitied, maybe even forgiven—would be to carry the burden for the remainder of her life. The unending burden of being alone with what she knew.

I need help here. Any kind of sign would be welcome.

She waited, shivering, on the toilet seat. If God was listening, He gave no indication of it, and while she waited something shifted in her. Although she could always ask Him again later, she’d made her decision.

Russ had peeled back the bedspread and pulled a sheet over himself. She joined him beneath it. “I have something to say to you, and I want you to listen.”

He put a hand on her breast. She gently removed it.

“So you know,” she said, “my father was manic-depressive—”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you knew he was a suicide. But I never told you about my own troubles. I never told you how disturbed I was when I was Perry’s age. I was afraid of scaring you away, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. Russ, honey, I couldn’t bear it. I loved you so much, I couldn’t bear it.”

“I knew you were a little crazy.”

“But it was more than a little. You had a right to know before you married me. I knew what the danger was, and I didn’t tell you. So I don’t want to hear about this being your fault.”

“It is my fault. I was the—”

“Shh. Just listen. You’re mixing up two different things. You feel bad about your … indiscretion. And even that, you shouldn’t feel bad about. I gave you my permission.”

“That doesn’t mean I had to use it.”

“You were hurt. I hurt you because you’d hurt me—these things happen in a marriage. My point is that you had bad luck. You’re embarrassed by what happened in Kitsillie, you feel guilty about it, and I understand that. But it’s enough. You don’t have to feel guilty about Perry, too. His troubles all come from me.”

“I knew very well what God wanted me to do.”

“Sweetie, I didn’t listen to Him, either. From now on, we’ll have to try to do better. That’s why I want us to pray together every day. I want us to change. I want us to be closer. I want us to experience the joy of God together.”

He shuddered.

“A terrible thing happened, but there can still be joy. I was looking at the birds outside—can’t we still take joy in Creation? Can’t we take joy in each other?”

He gave a cry of pain.

“Shh, shh.”

“I don’t deserve you!”

“Shh. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t deserve joy!”

“No one does. It’s a gift from God.”

And Becky had been so happy. Finally a spring-semester senior, walking among underclassmen but feeling a new commonality with the Class of ’72, she’d made a point, every day, of being friendly to at least one classmate she’d never spoken to before, a boy taking metal shop, a girl from the Baptist church where she and Tanner had worshiped. It was a kind of daily Christian service, and then, on the weekend, if she and Tanner had time, they stopped by a party approved by Jeannie Cross and stayed for half an hour, not drinking, just putting a seal on the proceedings, before slipping away to a realm beyond high-school reckoning.

By late March, she had an acceptance letter from Lake Forest College and realistic hopes for Lawrence and Beloit. The anticipation of sweater weather in Wisconsin, a dorm room looking out on a quadrangle dappled with fallen leaves, new school spirit to be developed, new social heights to be scaled, was almost one blessing too many, because she already had a summer in Europe to look forward to. Earlier in the month, at a gig in Chicago not attended by her, Tanner had met a young couple from Denmark who’d loved his show and happened to be the organizers of a folk-music festival in Aarhus. American folk was huge in Europe, a whole circuit of summer festivals had slots to be filled by American performers, and a solo billing in Aarhus, which the Danish couple had offered Tanner, could open doors to all of them. Tanner had returned from the gig more excited than Becky had ever seen him. Wouldn’t it be amazing, he said, to experience Europe together, be part of the scene, and meet the likes of Donovan, if not Richie Havens?

Becky hadn’t been thinking of Europe at all. After Christmas, to abide by her promises to Jesus, she’d shared her inheritance with her brothers. She could no longer afford a big European trip with her mother, and given how her mother had been acting, smoking her cigarettes, paying little attention to anyone but herself, she’d quietly decided to stay home with Tanner. But to be in Europe with him? To whirl in his arms on the Champs-Élyseés? Cross the Alps together in a sleeper car? Toss coins into the Trevi Fountain and make wishes for each other? All she needed to do was save up money and disinvite her mother.

Owing to some marital strife about which Becky had learned only enough to be revolted by her father, her mother had moved into their house’s third-floor storage room, fashioned a bed for herself in a low-ceilinged corner of it, and positioned an old escritoire beneath its window. When Becky ventured up to the third floor, after a school day rendered useless by visions of Europe, her mother was sitting at her desk in a haze of stale smoke. In lieu of smoking, she twisted a mechanical pencil while Becky laid out her plan.

“I don’t need to go to Europe,” her mother said. “But I’m not sure your going with Tanner is a good idea.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“I’m not questioning your good sense. I was impressed by the decision you made about your money—it was a very loving thing to do. But my understanding was that you were saving your share of it for college.”

“I hardly have to pay for anything but the plane ticket. If Tanner gets into other festivals, they’ll cover our expenses.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll still have enough for two years of school. After that, I’ll be working summers, and I can get financial aid.”

Her mother continued to twist the pencil. She’d lost so much weight that a resemblance to Aunt Shirley had emerged. It couldn’t have been healthy to lose that much weight so quickly.

“I haven’t wanted to ask,” she said, “because I know it’s uncomfortable for you. But—have you and Tanner had sex?”

Becky felt her face burn.

“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” her mother said. “A simple yes or no will do.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Okay.”

“That is—no. We haven’t.”

“That’s fine, honey. It’s more than fine—it’s lovely. I’m proud of you. But if you want to go to Europe with your boyfriend, I’ll need to know you have good protection.”

Becky blushed again. Her friends all assumed that she and Tanner were having intercourse, and she’d done nothing to disabuse them. She’d enjoyed the secret that she and Tanner shared, the secret of her chastity, and the feeling of power and goodness it brought her. But to hear the same assumption from her mother was weirdly awful.

“Do you have protection?” her mother said.

“Do you want me to be having sex?”

“Dear God, no. Why would you think that?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Honey, I know you can. It’s just—I also know how things can happen.”

“What are you doing up here, anyway?”

Her mother sighed. “I am proofreading for the Great Books Foundation.”

“I mean sleeping up here. Hiding up here.”

“Your father and I are unhappy with each other.”

“Yeah, who would have guessed.”

“I know. I know it’s been uncomfortable for you. I apologize for that.”

“It’s your life. I just don’t feel like listening to your advice.”

Her mother set down the pencil. “It’s not advice. If you want to go to Europe with Tanner, it’s a requirement. In fact, I think you should see a doctor right away. Will you let me make you an appointment?”

“I can make my own appointment.”

“Whatever you prefer.”

“I’ll go do it right now. Do you want to listen on Dad’s phone? Make sure I get my appointment?”

“Becky—”

There were three doors to slam on the way to her bedroom, and she slammed all three. The world seemed upside down to her. Premarital sex was supposed to be wrong, but Tanner had already had it with someone else, her friends expected her to have it, Clem expected her to have it, even her mother expected her to have it. Probably Judson, too, if anyone had asked him!

She wasn’t a prude. She liked necking and petting and—coming. There had been moments when she was carried away into wanting Tanner inside her, moments when sex seemed like a blessing that God intended her to crave. What had saved her, each time, was Tanner’s own hesitation. By firmly defining her limits from the outset, she’d made her virginity a thing for which the two of them shared responsibility, a jewel they participated equally in guarding, so that, when she forgot herself, Tanner was there to catch her. If this wasn’t how real love worked, she didn’t know what real love was.

Resentfully, as though forced to do chores while her friends were at the swimming pool, she went to her mother’s gynecologist and submitted to being “fitted” for a diaphragm and tested on her ability to properly insert it. She was given a tube of jelly like the one that Laura Dobrinsky had once thrown at her face. The gear she brought home reduced love to something medical. It connected her, sordidly, to all the other girls in New Prospect with similar gear in their drawers.

And yet: wasn’t it wrong to feel superior to those girls? Despite much prayer and reading of the Gospels, she had yet to recapture the spiritual ecstasy she’d experienced after smoking pot, the bodily yearning to be Christ’s servant, but the essence of her revelation had stayed with her: she was sinfully proud and needed to repent. Ever since that revelation, and beginning with the sharing of her inheritance, she’d endeavored to be a good Christian, but the paradox of doing good was that she felt even prouder of herself. It was as if, although the terms had changed, she was still pursuing superiority. In the Gospels, Jesus paid more attention to the poor and the sick, to the iniquitous and the despised, than to the righteous and the privileged. Now that she’d taken the step of obtaining contraception, she wondered if withholding herself from the man she loved might constitute, in itself, a kind of vanity. Hadn’t God revealed Himself to her precisely at her lowest moment? Might it not paradoxically be more Christian to humble herself, accept that she was one of those girls, and yield up her jewel?

As soon as she had the thought, she knew what she wanted. She wanted to fall, and by falling to deepen her relationship with Tanner and Jesus. And she knew exactly how it would happen.

Her fervor for Crossroads had cooled when her father returned to the group, and she’d been too busy with Tanner to earn the “hours” she needed to be eligible for Arizona. Kim Perkins and David Goya had pressured her to do some marathon last-minute hours-earning, so she could join them in Kitsillie, but when the trip roster for Kitsillie was posted she saw the name not only of her father but of Frances Cottrell. Kim and David still expected Becky to come along with them, but now she had a better plan for Easter vacation. She wouldn’t give herself to Tanner in his van. She would do it with proper ceremony, in the privacy of her otherwise empty house.

Her only misgivings were related to her family. She was disgusted with her father, because she had reason to believe that he was trespassing against her mother, committing adultery with Mrs. Cottrell. Although Becky wouldn’t trespass against anyone by giving herself to Tanner, she would still, in a sense, be sinking to her father’s level. Worse yet, she’d be sinking to Clem’s, and she was very sorry to give him that satisfaction.

She hadn’t missed Clem at Christmas, not one bit. His insult of Tanner, his uttering of the word passive, continued to rankle in her heart, and she was sure he would ridicule her discovery of God as well. The mere sight of his empty bedroom, the reminder of the many late nights when she’d lain down on his bed and confided in him, was upsetting to her, vaguely sickening. Her aversion was so strong that it extended to Tanner’s room at his parents’ house. When Tanner showed it to her, during Christmas vacation, she gave it a once-over from the doorway without going in. The room reeked of Laura, who’d been a kind of foster sister to him, a sister he had sex with, and Becky wanted nothing to do with it.

When her parents, at Christmas dinner, in a rare moment of unity, lamented Clem’s betrayal of the family’s pacifism, she didn’t say a word in his defense. When Tanner, to her surprise, declared that he was blown away by the courage of Clem’s moral convictions, she insisted that Clem was just being an asshole. When Clem proceeded to send her a letter, apologizing for missing the holidays and laying out his rationale for quitting school, she crumpled it and tossed it in her wastebasket, because he hadn’t apologized for insulting Tanner, and when he began to leave phone messages with her mother, asking Becky to call him at such-and-such time on such-and-such day, she ignored them.

The night before he caught up with her, in February, she’d accompanied the Bleu Notes to a cocktail lounge surprisingly more crowded than it had been in January. Parties of older women had claimed the tables nearest the band, and they were obviously there—drinking away, spending money—because of Tanner. Halfway through the second set, Gig Benedetti himself showed up and joined her at a table in the rear. Gig did the booking for a great many bands, and it pleased her to think that by letting him admire her looks and touch her elbow, by letting him believe they had a private understanding, she’d increased his attention to Tanner. “It hurts me to say it,” Gig said, “but you were right. He’s better off without what’s-her-name. He’s packing in the ladies, and that’s dynamite.” To be complimented on her intelligence, and to see the adoring expressions of Tanner’s fans, to hear their tipsy hooting when he strapped on his twelve-string and played a solo number, and to know that she was the girl who got to be alone with him: she was almost too happy with her life to breathe.

She came home, well kissed and well petted, at two in the morning. Not many hours later, she was awakened by a ringing phone, her mother knocking on her door. The light in her window was still gray. “Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m sleeping.”

“Your brother wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him I’ll call back after church.”

“Tell him yourself. I’ve had enough of taking messages.”

The intensity of Becky’s irritation cleared the sleep from her head. She threw on her Japanese robe and stamped past the doors of her sleeping father and younger brothers. In the kitchen, she fumbled with the phone, pressed its cold plastic to her ear, and heard her mother hang up on the third floor.

“Sorry to wake you,” Clem said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“How about calling at a decent hour?”

“I already tried that. Like, eight times.”

“Give me your number. I’ll call you back after church.”

“I have a job, Becky. I can’t just talk when it’s convenient for you. Which apparently is never.”

“I’ve been really busy.”

“Right. Although somehow you’re free every night for your boyfriend.”

“So what?”

“I just don’t get why you’re avoiding me.”

He seemed to think he owned her. She seethed with silent irritation.

“Is it that thing I said about Tanner? I’m sorry I said that. Tanner’s fine. He’s a perfectly decent guy.”

“Shut up!”

“I can’t even apologize?”

“I’m sick of you poking around in my life.”

“I’m not poking around in your life.”

“Then why did you call me? What did you wake me up for?”

Over the phone lines, from some unpicturable room in New Orleans, came a heavy sigh. “I’m calling,” Clem said, “because everything’s gone to shit and I thought you might sympathize. I’m calling because I’m fucked. The draft board fucked me over.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they don’t want me. Their quota was tiny, and they’d already filled it. I could still theoretically get called up, but not for Vietnam. Everybody there is coming home.”

Far from sympathizing, she was wickedly pleased his plan had failed. “You’re probably the only person in America who’s sorry we’re getting out of Vietnam.”

“I’m not sorry, I’m just frustrated. I thought I’d be in basic training by now.”

“Then maybe you should volunteer. If killing people is so important to you.”

Another sigh in New Orleans, more patronizing. “Did you even read my letter? It’s not about wanting to fight. It’s a question of social justice.”

“I’m saying, if that’s so important to you, why not volunteer? Or do you just passively do whatever the draft board tells you?”

“I took an action, Becky.”

“Yeah, you scored your point. Too bad it didn’t count.”

Stretching the phone cord, she filled a glass with water at the sink.

“I made a mistake,” Clem said. “I should have quit school a year ago. Do you think I’m happy about it?”

The water was deliciously cold, February cold.

“No,” she said, “I’m sure it’s very frustrating. When do you ever make a mistake?”

“I called you because I was thinking of coming home for a while. You’re not exactly making me want to.”

“What did you expect at seven in the morning?”

“How else was I supposed to reach you?”

“I’m really busy. Okay? I don’t care if you come home, but don’t do it for my sake.”

“Becky.”

“What.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on with you.”

“Nothing’s going on. I’m really happy. At least I was until you woke me up.”

“I turn my back for one minute, and it’s like you’re a different person. I mean—the Baptist church? Seriously? You’re going to the Baptist church? You’re giving away your inheritance?”

Now she saw why he’d been trying to reach her: he had no other way to control her from a different city. She additionally resented her mother, for telling tales to him.

“I’m not your baby sister anymore,” she said. “I can do my own thinking.”

“You don’t remember talking about this? You don’t remember me fighting with Dad about it? You said you were keeping the money. You said you wanted to go to a great school.”

“That’s what you wanted for me.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I still have enough money for two years at Lawrence or Beloit. I can do the rest with financial aid.”

“But I don’t want your money.”

“If you don’t understand Christian charity, there’s no explaining it.”

“Oh, there we go. Is this something Tanner talked you into?”

“You mean, because I’m too stupid to think for myself?”

“I mean the Holy Roller thing. He was always kind of a Jesus freak.”

She was flooded with pure hatred. Clem had managed, in a single breath, to insult her intelligence, her boyfriend, and her faith.

“For your information,” she said coldly, “Tanner loves First Reformed. I’m the one who doesn’t.”

“And he goes along with it? ‘That’s cool, babe, whatever you say’?”

So much for his being sorry he’d called Tanner passive.

“Tanner accepts who I am,” she said. “That’s more than I can say for you.”

“Accept what? That you believe in angels and devils and Holy Spirits? That I’m bound for hell because I don’t believe in fairy tales? Forgive me for thinking you were smarter than that.”

“Do you have any idea how sick I am of hearing that?”

“Hearing what?”

“‘You’re too smart for this, you’re too smart for that.’ You’ve been saying it all my life, and you know what? Maybe I’m sick of being made to feel stupid.”

“Yeah, well. I guess you don’t have to worry about that with Tanner.”

She was too offended to speak.

“Maybe you should go ahead and marry him. Pop out a kid, forget about college, join the Baptist church. Nobody will expect you to be smart there. I’ll be roasting in hell, so you won’t have to worry about me.”

“This is why you woke me up? You needed to insult me?”

Something rustled at Clem’s end of the line. “I was pissed off,” he said, “that you never call me back. But you’re right—I get it. If I were you, I’d rather be out boning a rock star myself. He has such a cool van.”

“Jesus. Are you drunk?”

“You think I give a shit who’s boning who? You’ve got your rock star, Dad’s got his little parishioner—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about penis and vagina. Do I really have to explain it to you?”

She was appalled that she’d ever confided in him, appalled that she’d admired him.

“What parishioner?” she said.

“You didn’t know about that? Him and Mrs. Cottrell? Why do you think Mom is on strike?”

Becky shuddered with disgust. “I don’t know anything about that. But I would appreciate you not making false assumptions about me.”

“Whoa. Really? False assumptions?”

“Yes, really.”

“You’re, what—too Baptist to go all the way? Or do you just like controlling him?”

“Fuck you!”

“I’m sorry, but it’s kind of pathetic. If you’re not even having sex, I honestly don’t see the point. The least you could do is learn something about yourself.”

Her hatred had entered a new dimension—Clem seemed outright evil to her. His antipathy to God, his contempt for every prohibition, had destroyed his soul. Her hand was shaking so badly, she could hardly hold the phone.

“You’re the pathetic one,” she said, shaking. “You think you’re so superior and rational, but your soul is dead.”

“My soul? That’s another fairy tale.”

“I don’t know what happened to you, I don’t know what your girlfriend did to you, but I don’t even recognize you.”

“I’m the same person I always was, Becky.”

“Then maybe I’m the one who’s changed. Maybe I’m finally old enough to see how totally different we are.”

“We’re not so different.”

“How totally different! You make me sick!”

She slammed the receiver into its holster. Then she lifted it again and set it on the floor, to forestall his calling back, and wandered out of the kitchen, sick with hatred. She tried going back to bed, but her hatred wouldn’t let her sleep. When Tanner picked her up for church, two hours later, she was reluctant to look at him, for fear of polluting him with Clem. At the Baptist church, she sang hymns and sat through the sermon with hatred in her heart.

Only at the end of the service, during the final prayer, did she reconnect with Jesus. Picturing the face of her Lord, the infinite wisdom and sadness of his gaze, she was seized with pity for her brother. She would never understand why he’d tried to go to Vietnam, but going to Vietnam was what he’d set his heart on, it was what he’d proclaimed to everyone that he was doing. Beyond his disappointment, he must have felt embarrassed when his plan fell through. Unhappy in New Orleans, presumably friendless, working the deep-fry station at Kentucky Fried Chicken, he’d repeatedly left messages for his sister, who in the past had always been there for him, and when he’d finally reached her on the phone she’d rejected him. In her sinful pride, her offended vanity, she’d lashed out at a person who’d loved and protected her all her life. If he’d lashed out at her, too, it was only because he was hurt and embarrassed.

She returned to the parsonage intending to call him and apologize, but when she went upstairs and saw his empty bedroom the sickness boiled up in her again. A visceral loathing, compounded by his contempt for everything that mattered to her, overwhelmed her sentimentality. Clem had actively attacked her, she’d merely defended herself. It seemed to her that he, not she, should be the first to apologize. For the rest of the day, and for several days afterward, she expected him to call her again. Even a small gesture of regret and respect, if he’d offered it sincerely, might have opened the door to her better self. But apparently he had his own pride.

In her abundance of happiness, as February turned to March, their fight receded in her mind. Tanner had sent letters to a dozen festivals in Europe, along with copies of a solo tape he’d recorded in his basement and clippings of a newspaper review of the Bleu Notes. Becky had helped him with the letter, rewording it more assertively, and the two of them now dwelt in states of parallel anticipation, he waiting to hear from Europe, she from Lawrence and Beloit. After a thorough, Crossroads-flavored discussion of her readiness to give herself to him, they also shared the anticipation of a week alone together in the parsonage.

Whatever Clem might think, she wasn’t stupid. Though it had warmed her heart and deepened her faith to share her inheritance with her brothers, she’d kept enough money to attend an expensive private college, surrounded by people as ambitious as her aunt Shirley had encouraged her to be. She’d encouraged Tanner to be similarly ambitious, and if he happened to get a record contract, and started touring nationally, she could see herself taking time away from college to be part of that. But going along with him to gigs had made her aware of how many other musicians had the same ambitions, how much competition even a brilliant talent faced. She didn’t like to think of Tanner languishing in New Prospect while she moved into new social spheres in Wisconsin; it didn’t bode well for their future as a couple. But her own personal future held two equally luminous possibilities, either the glamour of the music world or the privileges of college, and she was very happy.

On the Friday before Palm Sunday, as she walked home from school, her heart began to race. Easter vacation had commenced; her moment of falling was suddenly at hand. She and Tanner had chosen Monday as the night. She’d wanted to make him something special and European for dinner, possibly a cheese soufflé, but after consulting with her mother, who actually knew how to cook, she’d settled on beef bourguignon. She’d already bought two long candles for the table and, boldly, at the liquor store, a bottle of Mouton Cadet red wine. For the night to be perfect, it had to be about more than just sex.

She came home to a house in the process of emptying for her and Tanner. Her father had left for First Reformed, and Perry’s duffel bag was packed and waiting by the door. The only sign of her mother was a note asking Becky to drive Perry to the church. Upstairs, she found Judson neatly packing his own suitcase for his Disneyland trip. He didn’t know where Perry was. Returning to the kitchen, she heard a dull clank from the basement. She opened the door and peered into its gloom. “Perry?”

No answer. She turned on a light and ventured down the stairs. From the far corner of the basement, where the oil burner was, came an odd huffing, another clank of metal.

“Hey, Perry, you ready?”

“Yes, I’m ready, can’t a person be alone?”

“If you want a ride to church, now is when I’m offering it.”

He came sauntering out from behind the oil burner. “Ready.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“The question seems more apposite to you. You’re supposed to be a creature of the light. Why aren’t you shining in the world where you belong?”

He skipped past her and up the stairs. She didn’t smell pot, but she wondered if he might be doing drugs again. For a short while, at Christmas, she’d enjoyed the novelty of hanging out with him, but their “friendship” hadn’t taken off. Since she’d added a shift to her schedule at the Grove, to earn money for Europe, she’d barely spoken to him.

Emerging from the basement, she saw him lugging his duffel bag into the bathroom.

“What are you doing?”

“A moment of privacy, sister, if you would be so kind. Would do me that gentle favor.”

He locked the bathroom door behind him.

“Hey, listen,” she said, through the door. “You seem weird. Are you okay?”

She heard him huffing, heard the rasp of a heavy-duty zipper.

“If you’re doing drugs again,” she said, “you need to be open with me. Remember what we said about walking away? I’m not the enemy.”

No confession was forthcoming. Behind her, in the kitchen, the telephone rang.

She expected the caller to be Jeannie Cross, but it was Gig Benedetti, asking for Becky. She hadn’t known Gig even had her number.

“This is Becky speaking.”

“Ha, didn’t recognize your voice. How is our beautiful girl today?”

“She’s fine, thank you.”

“Do you have a second?”

“Actually, it’s better if you call me back a little later.”

“Reason I’m calling is—Tanner tells me he’s going to Europe with you. Were you aware of this plan? Did you know about this plan and not tell me?”

Her heart clutched. Apparently she’d betrayed their special understanding.

“I talked to him this morning,” Gig said. “I’ve been working my butt off, booking him into the Holiday Inn circuit, and what do I find out? He’s ditching the band and taking you to Denmark!”

“Well—yes.”

“Do you realize what a toilet Europe is, professionally? Do you know why his Danish pals are so happy he’s coming to Aarfuck? It’s because any act with half a brain can see it’s a freaking waste of time! I thought you and I were on the same wavelength!”

He was yelling, and she wanted to tell him not to. She couldn’t stand being yelled at.

“We are on the same wavelength,” she said. “This is only for one summer.”

“Only one summer—I like that. Only one summer. And Quincy and Mike? While the lovebirds are off on their honeymoon, Quincy and Mike are supposed to do what? Twiddle their thumbs and hope you send a postcard? It’ll take Tanner four months, minimum, to put together new backup and break them in. Suddenly we’re in 1973 and nobody remembers him. Does that sound like a plan to you? I thought you were smart.”

“There’s a huge folk scene in Europe,” she said stiffly.

“Pfff. If we were talking about the UK, it sort of halfway might make sense—the labels still scout London. But the Continent? Are you kidding me? Can you name one Top Forty hit that ever came out of France or Germany?”

“It’s not just about the labels, though, right? It’s about developing an audience.”

“Damn straight it is. And how do you do that? You play the Holiday Inn Rockford and then you move on to Rock Island. Hit enough big little cities, you start to get a name, and that’s what the A&R guys are looking for. You’ve got to trust me on this, Becky. Your guy is literally better off playing Decatur, Illinois, than Paris, France. There’s an act I booked into Decatur eight months ago that just signed a major-label deal. I’m not lying to you.”

“But he can still do that—I mean, the Holiday Inns. He’ll come back even better, with new contacts.”

“Listen. Baby. Sweetheart, listen. Your guy’s okay. I admit I kind of signed him as a favor, because I like your style, but I’m not keeping him on as a favor. He’s a pro, he takes direction, he’s a hit with the ladies, everybody’s making money. But my honest opinion? I’m not in love with his original material, and neither are the audiences. Time will tell if he’s got better songs in him, but there’s a million and one acts at his level. The best thing he’s got going is he’s young and super easy on the eyes, and you know what they say about the record business—the vampire thirsts for youth and beauty. The last thing your guy needs is to sit on the shelf for a year.”

“Okay,” she said in a very small voice.

“I told him, if he wants me to represent him, he’s got to flush this Europe thing where it belongs. He didn’t want to hear me, but he’ll hear it from you. You need to take him in hand and lay down the law. Will you promise to do that for me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the brains of the outfit. He’ll do whatever you say.”

When she hung up the phone, the sun was still strong in the windows, but the kitchen seemed dusky, as if what had brightened it weren’t the sun but the dream of Europe. She felt punished and guilty and disappointed; sorry for Tanner, sorrier for herself. Tuning out Perry’s weird patter, she mechanically drove him to the church and mechanically drove home again. Never had she felt less like working her Friday-night shift.

To ignore Gig’s advice, at the cost of his firing Tanner, would obviously be the height of selfishness. But Shirley had died imagining her niece on a Grand Tour of Europe, Becky had already given away nine thousand dollars of her money, and the alternatives to Europe were dismal: either another summer with her parents, waitressing at the Grove, or a succession of cornfields and depressing small cities, the steambath of July in the Midwest. She understood that this was the reality of the music business, but the vision of going to Europe and advancing Tanner’s career was too perfect to be defeated by reality. She didn’t see how she could give it up.

Her problem was still there in the morning, when she took her mother and Judson to O’Hare. She’d expected to feel liberated by her family’s absence, but Gig’s judgment of Tanner, its echoing of Clem’s, had deflated the romance of the coming week. As she watched Judson run ahead of their mother with his little suitcase, the two of them bound for a city of palm trees and movie stars, she felt desolated.

From the airport, she went straight to the Grove. Gig’s first move as Tanner’s agent had been to pull the plug on his Friday-night shows there, and Becky, having now seen better places in the city, understood why. The Grove’s earth-tone decor and potted trees were tired, not trendy, its lounge acoustics lousy, its patrons tightfisted and Nixonite. By the time her shift ended, she felt so worn down that she called Tanner’s house and left a message with his mother, excusing herself from his gig in Winnetka. Interestingly, Tanner didn’t call her back.

The next morning, however, his van rolled into the parsonage driveway at the usual Sunday hour. For reasons she didn’t immediately understand, she’d not only put on her best spring dress but applied a lot of makeup. The face in the bathroom mirror was not at all a girl’s, and maybe that was it. Maybe she wanted to place herself in a future from which she could look back at herself.

Tanner had dressed up, too. In the misty morning light, wearing the suit he’d bought for his grandmother’s funeral, his hair thick and glistening on his shoulders, his eyelashes batting at the sight of Becky in her finest, he was absurdly gorgeous. Whatever else might be the case, she could never get enough of looking at him, and she was the woman whose mouth he then kissed. The kiss, exciting her nerves in the usual places, made her problem seem less consequential.

“I was thinking,” he said, “do you want to go to First Reformed?”

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know—it’s Palm Sunday. It might be nice to be someplace familiar.”

“I would love that.” She kissed him again. “It’s a great idea. Thank you for suggesting it.”

She was happy that he’d made a definite wish explicit. And happy, after all, to return to First Reformed, on a Sunday when her father wasn’t there. Happy to see faces of surprise when she and Tanner made their entrance, happy to accept a palm twig from the greeters, Tom and Betsy Devereaux, happy to claim the pew she’d shared with Tanner at the first service she’d attended with him. It was strange to recall how she’d imagined, at that service, that they were there as a couple; strange how wishing for a future life and then actually inhabiting it made time feel unreal. As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.

And so it happened. Near the end of the service, when she stood with Tanner to sing the Doxology and heard his tenor voice ringing forth, heard her own voice quavering to stay in tune with him, the golden light entered her again. This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over—the goodness of God, the simplicity of the answer to her question—and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away. The answer was her Savior, Jesus Christ.

She hadn’t found the answer in the other churches where she’d been looking. She’d found it where she’d started. This seemed to her a crucial fact.

The spring morning into which she and Tanner emerged, after being cooed over in the parlor, admired by dewy-eyed matrons, was the warmest of the year so far. In the wake of her paroxysm, her senses were alive to the caressing breeze, to the fragrance of flowers and spring earth, to the blazing of the dogwoods by the bank building, to the song of unseen birds, and to her body’s own springtime urges. Because a visitation from God had stirred them up, they didn’t seem the least bit wrong to her. They were simply part of being His creature.

“Let’s take a walk,” she said.

“Your feet are going to hurt in those shoes.”

“It’s so beautiful, I’ll go barefoot.”

The sidewalk on Maple Avenue still had winter beneath it, a thrilling contrast to the warmth of the sun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone walking barefoot. The eight-year-old girl she’d once been was now eighteen and someday might be eighty. Her sense-memories of spring were confirming her insight from the sanctuary: time was an illusion.

“It just happened again,” she told Tanner. “What happened at Christmas—it happened again while we were singing the Doxology. I saw God.”

“You—really? That’s far-out.”

“What’s strange is that yesterday was the total opposite. Yesterday I felt so dead, and now I’m so alive. Yesterday I had no idea what to do, and today the answer is so clear to me.”

“What do you mean?”

In a few words, she recounted her conversation with Gig. To spare Tanner’s feelings, she omitted Gig’s judgments, but Tanner was angry even so. Although she gathered that Laura had been quite the screaming bandmate, Becky had only once seen him really angry, when Quincy made the band late for a gig in the city.

“What the fuck? He called your house? Behind my back?”

“You didn’t give him my number?”

“That guy? No way. If he has something to say to me, I’m the one to say it to. Did you tell him that? Tell him he should be talking to me, not you?”

“All I did was answer the phone.”

“God, I am sick of this. He’s a good booker but a total sleaze. He’s been all over you since day one. I can’t believe he called you behind my back!”

Tanner’s outburst, its assertiveness, was extremely pleasing to her.

“I guess he thought,” she said, “that I was making you go to Europe.”

“I already told him why I’m going. I told him I’ll find another agent if he can’t deal with it.”

“Yeah, but, here’s the thing. Tanner, here’s the thing. Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

He stopped dead on the sidewalk. “You don’t want to go?”

“No, I do, but—that’s just vanity. I couldn’t see it yesterday, but now I do. I want what’s best for you, not me. And Gig says it’s better not to go.”

“Of course he says that. He’s all about the money—if I’m in Europe, he’s not taking his cut.”

“But what if he’s right? What if it’s a career mistake?”

“He knows zilch about the scene there. He said it himself—‘I know zilch.’”

“He knows about the business here, though. If you want a record contract and you want to really break out, don’t you think you should listen to him?”

Tanner stared at her. “What did he say to you?”

“Just what I told you.”

“I thought Europe was a thing we were doing together. That it wasn’t just about the music—I thought we wanted to have an experience together.”

“That’s what I want, too. But … maybe it doesn’t have to be this summer.”

“Becky. Do you not want to be with me?”

There were tears in his eyes. They made her want to be with him.

“Of course I do. I’m in love with you.”

“Then fuck it. Let’s go to Europe.”

“But, sweetie—”

“Who cares if it’s a ‘career mistake’? The only things I care about are being with you and celebrating life with music. As long as I’m with you—Becky. As long as I’m with you, there’s no such thing as a mistake.”

Across the street, in a yard dotted with eruptions of shaggy green grass, a man started up a lawn mower. It coughed and backfired in a cloud of blue smoke. The day was getting warmer by the minute, and the parsonage was just around the corner. Seeing the tears in Tanner’s eyes, and hearing him express, spontaneously, the exact same thought she’d had in the sanctuary—that only love and worship mattered—she felt as if her body might float into the sky. She took his hand and pressed it flat on her hip.

“Let’s go to my house.”

He knew right away what she was saying. “Now?”

“Yes, now. I’m so ready.”

“I’ve got practice at one thirty.”

“You’re the front man,” she said. “You can tell them it’s canceled.”

In Rome, in early September, in the apartment where they were crashing, they met a German couple in their twenties who were heading to a farmhouse in Tuscany that the woman’s father owned, and Becky had jumped on their invitation to come along with them, although technically it was Tanner, not she, whom the Germans had invited, after hearing him play. Her own fishings for an invitation, her feigning of a lifelong desire to see the Tuscan countryside, her unfeigned rapture at the description of the farmhouse, had gone unnoticed, and this was ironic, because Tanner cared more about people than places and had no gripe with Rome. Becky was the one who couldn’t wait to get away. The heat in Rome was suffocating, and the crash pad, though huge and well situated, within sight of the Campo de’ Fiori, was essentially unfurnished—room after room with sun-damaged parquet floors and nary a table, nary a chair. She and Tanner were camped out in the corner of what might once have been a ballroom, beneath a window open to a smell of rotting vegetables. In the far corner was an unfriendly young couple, purportedly from behind the Iron Curtain, who traipsed around naked and coupled, unquietly, on the room’s only piece of furniture, a gilded sofa twelve feet long. Half a dozen other long-haired travelers were accepting hospitality from a man named Edoardo, a spritelike Italian who wore tight white pants and thin-soled loafers, without socks, and lived in two properly furnished rooms behind the kitchen. Becky and Tanner had met Edoardo on a side street where Tanner was busking and Becky was sitting on the pavement, writing in her travel diary. When Edoardo had dropped a five-thousand-lire note in Tanner’s guitar case and invited them to crash with him, they hadn’t needed to be asked twice. The night before, under a pillow in their tiny hotel room, near the train station, they’d discovered a balled-up, crusty tissue that hadn’t been there in the morning.

The folk festival in Rome took place in the last days of August, and the organizers, while rejecting Tanner’s application, had allowed that performance slots sometimes opened up at the last minute. On the strength of that hope, and because Aunt Shirley had especially loved Rome, and because their Eurail passes were about to expire, they’d come down from Heidelberg four days early. In Heidelberg, where Tanner had played as an official invitee, albeit at eleven in the morning and to a disappointing crowd, they’d eaten free food, slept on cleanly sheeted German beds, and avoided cashing any of their remaining traveler’s checks.

In Rome, they subsisted on tavola calda and agonized about buying a gelato. There were a thousand sights to see, but the only safe place Becky could be while Tanner busked was either right beside him or in the baking, furnitureless apartment; she couldn’t walk alone without being hassled by Italian men. Although Edoardo had urged them to stay for as long as they liked, they were camping on a parquet floor with only sleeping bags for padding. The image of a Tuscan farmhouse, shared with a pair of privacy-respecting Germans, was like a dream of respite. The Roman heat had frayed her nerves, no performance slot had opened up for Tanner, and they had a week to kill before they hitchhiked to Paris for an outdoor concert, headlined by the Who and Country Joe McDonald, that people had been talking about all summer. There was also the matter of Becky’s period being overdue. She was only a few days late, but she worried that the exhaustion of her tube of jelly, which she’d understood to be redundant and hadn’t replaced yet, had been a bigger deal than she’d supposed.

The overnight flight from Chicago to Amsterdam, the cool rainstorms in Denmark, the warmth of Tanner’s reception in Aarhus, were now memories so distant that they might have been a different person’s. According to the little check marks in her travel diary, she and Tanner had made love three times in Aarhus and forty-six times since. Every day, whether she was seeing the sunflowers of van Gogh or just hanging out with American musicians, whether picnicking on the green flank of an Alp or being confounded by a shower that sprayed all over the bathroom floor, without a curtain or a sill, she’d felt delighted afresh to be in Europe, but every night she’d returned to a bitterness from which being loved and possessed by Tanner was her only escape.

Tanner’s kindness, to her and to everyone they met, was basically a miracle. Even when she was bleeding and bitchy, he didn’t get cross with her. When they sprinted to catch a train, only to watch it pull out of the station, he just shrugged and said it wasn’t meant to be. When she had the stomach flu in Utrecht and begged him to go alone to the mainstage event, he not only refused to leave her, he said that even the sound of her throwing up was dear to him. When she caught herself wishing he were more assertive, she had only to think of his openhearted curiosity, his readiness to be amazed, his honest praise of singers farther along in their careers, his head-shaking bemusement when someone insisted on being a jerk, and his beautiful way of slipping into a jam session—how he followed along unobtrusively, observing the other players, and then, when the moment was right, cut loose and really jammed, displaying his superior musicianship, and was always happy to explain, if someone asked, how he’d played some difficult lick. The back pages of her travel diary were filled with addresses of Europeans who hoped to see him again and had offered him and Becky lodging. The Continental music scene, with its ethic of sharing, could sustain them long after their traveler’s checks ran out. Though Rome and its heat, all the assholes on their scooters, weren’t to her taste, and though Tanner would eventually need to restart his career in the States, she was in no hurry at all to go home.

With the exception of Judson, who was too young to be relevant, her family had abandoned her. She hadn’t heard from Clem since their fight in February, Perry had spent four months in residential psychiatric treatment, at ghastly expense, and her parents had done their best to ruin her life. Not only had her father dispossessed her, with scarcely an apology, but her mother, instead of siding with her or sympathizing, had deferred to him without a murmur of resistance. Never in her life had her parents been so united against her or so cloyingly into each other. They’d returned from Albuquerque, after Easter, like a pair of newlyweds—little pats on the fanny, wet smooches, treacly endearments, her father mooning at her mother, her mother breathy and submissive. Equally obnoxious was their new religiosity. Her father now began every meal with a lengthy prayer, applauded by her mother with tremulous amens. Although Becky had her own faith, she knew better than to inflict it on people waiting to eat. Although she herself had been guilty of public smooching, she had the very good excuse of not being a parent with grown children.

Again, as when she received her inheritance, there had been a summons to her father’s home office. The third floor smelled of cigarettes—her mother had returned to her proper bed, but she hadn’t quit smoking—when Becky climbed the stairs to it. Her father’s desk was strewn with bills and legal documents. He kept glancing at them, repositioning them, while he explained his financial predicament and her mother gazed at him supportively. The upshot was that, to pay reparations to the Navajos whose barn Perry had burned, he wanted to “borrow” Becky’s college money.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that Perry should be the one to pay for that.”

“Unfortunately, there’s no money left in Perry’s account.”

“I’m talking about the money I gave him.”

“It’s gone, honey,” her mother said. “He spent it all on drugs.”

“It was three thousand dollars!”

“I know. It’s a terrible thing, but it’s gone.”

The news was both sickening and vindicating. Becky had long suspected that Perry was soulless and amoral. At least she could stop pretending she wanted a relationship with him.

“What about Jay, though? What about Clem?”

“We are borrowing the money you gave Judson,” her father said. “I’ve also obtained a loan from the church, which will help with the legal and medical expenses. But we still have a large shortfall.”