Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

Fugue

THE WOMAN DOESN’T KNOW HOW LONG SHE’S been here, or where she was before. It doesn’t matter: all that does is this hotel window with its sulfurous draft and the quiet street beyond. The trees scrape forklike against the sky, the mud is matte on the ground. This village rests in a hollow so deep the sun cannot reach into it. Up the street the abandoned hotels hunch in perpetual dim, awaiting the end of winter.

The only variation is the girl who makes the bed, cleans the bathroom, carries up meals. A strange one, all safety pins and pink hair, a new type, a punk. But gentle: the girl sometimes brings with her small gifts, evidence of the world’s quickening. A crocus bulb with a tender flag unfurling. An abandoned nest with a speckled green egg. When the woman holds those tiny things, she feels something rising in her that she is careful to chase away before it can catch and seize her.

This morning, the girl cleans, then stands beside the woman until she grabs one of her hands in its constant flight. Ma’am? she says. You a musician or something? Because your hands. They always look like they’re playing music.

In the girl’s bitten fingers, the woman’s hand is elegant, the type that probably played music well. I believe so, the woman says; she doesn’t know for sure. The girl nods and leaves, her footsteps echoing in the empty hotel.

Alone now, the woman recalls her own body. The filthy skirt, the cashmere sweater, the mud-caked calves. Unpleasant: she has begun to stink. She goes into the bathroom, dropping her clothes on the way. Under the hot hiss of the shower she notices what has been burning all along: the long, swollen cut in her thigh, the blood black at its edges. The water turns pink. The wound is deep.

Only when it is stanched with great handfuls of toilet paper can the woman sit again at the window, look out into the town, listen to the roar of the wind corkscrewing down into the hollow. Only then can she recapture all that stillness, all that peace.

I BELIEVE, BETTINA SAYS as she cuts the gizzard from the turkey, that she’s a ghost. A sad old ghost, yearning to go home.

Jason cracks pecans and winks at Jaime behind Bettina’s back; he seems to believe that Jaime and he are in some confederacy against his wife. Jason is handsome in a military, washed-out way, with features that blur into one another and buzzed, rust-colored hair. His fingers are long and delicate and can craft woodwork that seems a marvel of sensitivity, but he tells the raunchiest jokes Jaime has ever heard. He keeps her off balance.

Bettina turns toward them, her violet eyes, overstuffed lips, a beauty mark in a sickle shape across her cheek. She reminds Jaime of an iced cake, all fondant and sugar pansies. She is plump and British, too refined for this dark place, the falling-apart hotel in its sulfur-stinking valley. Jaime, she says, what do you think about our guest?

Bettina has only begun asking Jaime her opinions, though Jaime has been with them for almost nine months. Jaime’s family had come to Sharon Springs every year since her own grandparents were children, her Orthodox Jewish kin climbing the hill from the springs, their dark clothes damp. Bettina and Jason aren’t Jewish, but are fixing up the village’s grandest hotel, and Jaime’s mother loves them for it. One morning last summer, over blueberry pie, Jaime’s mother had confided to Bettina that her sweet girl had turned sullen, strange. Dressed in rags, wore makeup, refused her religion. Only the day before she came home in a police cruiser; she’d tried to buy cocaine from a boy at the Stewart’s up the hill.

We don’t know what we did, Jaime’s mother had wept in Bettina’s kitchen, her wig sliding slowly over one ear. How could a good girl become bad so fast? How could our little Jamina become so different? It is our fault, her father’s and mine. We gave her too much, now she wants none of it. The eighties! Jaime’s mother said savagely. Nowadays people think they can do whatever they want.

Bettina patted her lips and said, Why don’t you leave her with us for the winter? What trouble will she get into in Sharon Springs? Give her a few months with us in this old barn in the wintertime, nothing to do. She’ll run back to you.

That was that: at the end of the summer Jaime’s parents drove off, and Jaime stood staring at their exhaust. All fall and winter Jaime has been at this closed-up hotel. School had been her choice — she was sixteen — and she’d said, No thanks, thinking of the cloddish boys and passive-aggressive farm girls she’d find there. Without school her days stretched long. She learned to cook, to love the town in winter, empty of people. She’d go for long hikes in the mountains, wander in the huge, abandoned hotels, finding the postcards in odd corners, the cellulose dolls left by forgotten children.

The night the woman showed up, Bettina and Jason and Jaime had been in the parlor watching the show they all liked with the wily Texas rich folk: the main character, a raven-haired beauty, had begun to act strangely, an evil new glint in her eye. Then came a knock on the hotel’s dark window, and there was the woman, bedraggled in the rain, like a zombie from a horror film. She’d insisted on a room though the hotel was officially closed until May. She signed her name in an indecipherable scrawl, something like Danielle or Diane or Donna, then closed her door and has not emerged since.

Jaime wants to tell Bettina and Jason about this morning, when she’d plucked one of the woman’s hands from its graceful scrabble in the air, and felt her flesh, and knew she was real. But she only says, blushing, I just think she’s a really sad person. She told me she plays music.

Bettina massages butter and herbs under the turkey’s skin, her imagination afire. She speaks of a cellist she once knew who had been in a coma, who had dreamed of her soul wandering, desperate to find its body again. Jaime has stopped listening. Jason is watching her, his face impassive. He puts down the nutcracker. Jaime flushes. Bettina natters, back turned. A quiet lunge, and Jason pins Jaime’s hand on the cutting board, slides his own up her holey tee-shirt, cups her breast, squeezes it.

It is over: Jason is back to cracking nuts, and there is only the ghost-warmth of his hand on her chest. Bettina is still singing her little tale, tucking the turkey fat over the herbed flesh as if it were a coverlet. Jaime picks up a celery stalk and dices it.

This is a game, Jaime knows, but only Jason understands the rules. She believes the goal is to see how far he can go before Jaime squeals. For a month or so he has been catching her, squeezing her hips, letting his hand brush her ass in passing. A few nights ago, he caught her in the corridor on her way to the bathroom and pressed his body against hers hard and when his voice hissed in her ears for hours afterward, she didn’t know if she felt pleasure or alarm. She dices, she does not look at Bettina or Jason. She waits to know what she wants.

LILY WATCHES HER grandmother from under the silken fringe of the table. The old woman is crumpled into a wheelchair against the window; behind her the winter sun sets over the city. She has a cigarette in one hand, a martini in the other; once in a while she puts down the martini to gasp into her oxygen mask. She never, Lily notices, puts down the cigarette.

She’s like an old witch in your mom’s stories, says Sammy in Lily’s ear. Sammy is spiteful and bad, and Lily often has to discipline her because no one else can.

Shut up, Sammy, she says. The grandmother turns her head and sees Lily.

Come out of there, child, she snaps. Who’s that you’re talking to?

Lily worms out slowly, her hands floured with dust. Just Sammy, she says. Nobody. She can see herself now reflected in the glass beyond her grandmother’s head: pale and plump, her hair stringy, her red-framed glasses enormous on her face. At least she’s not like Sammy, who’s fat and moist and googly-eyed, like a frog.

The grandmother sighs, rattling, and says, You with your everlasting imaginary friend. And seeing Lily’s hand digging at her nostril, more sharply: Don’t pick your nose.

Maria moves out in the hallway, humming. She went all the way to the West Side to pick Lily up at school that afternoon. The girl had been sitting in the principal’s office for hours. Lily’s chest had grown tighter and tighter until at last her bladder exploded and she wet herself. Lily often does. She has severe anxiety issues, Dr. Kramer says. Her mother calls her Our Lily of the Furrowed Brow, and at school, the kids are mean and call her Lily-Wet-Butt. But today Maria only smiled at Lily with her potato-plain face, and helped wash the girl off. Maria is like that. She puts out two plates when it’s snacktime and always asks about Sammy’s health. Even Sammy likes Maria and Sammy likes nobody.

She’s real, says Lily to her grandmother now. Sammy’s real. She considers for a minute and says, But she’s ugly and dumb so you probably don’t want to see her anyways.

Stop clutching yourself, says the grandmother sharply. Do you have to urinate?

No, lies Lily, and then, feeling the old tightness in her chest, she stretches the neck of her shirt above her nose and down three times. All her shirts are floppy at the neck because of it. Dr. Kramer says she should do whatever helps. Sammy unfurls her long tongue into the grandmother’s martini, and Lily frowns: she’s going to have to punish Sammy for that later.

A dense wave passes over her, and Lily is suddenly tired. All she wants is home. To finish her homework, to see her dad, who scoops her up when he comes home and reads or talks to her until she sleeps. Routine. She feels a sharp stab of sorrow in her gut. When am I going home? she asks.

The grandmother says, I don’t know.

Lily blinks, makes a little squeak. Where are my parents? she says. She feels the pressure descending on her, fast. It’s bad, and Sammy draws near to watch, breathing her moist breath in Lily’s face.

We’re still trying to figure that one out, the grandmother says.

But seeing the way Lily’s face changes, seeing her slow collapse, she hurriedly croaks out, Maria, Maria, Maria as loudly as she can until, at last, Maria comes running.

KEY WEST, HYMN OF JOY: from the dark shadows of the room the girl emerges, a pale fish rising from the deep. Howie watches from the bed, heart throbbing in his throat, his own body struck to water. Hers is slim, smooth, a length of muslin, a sheet of music. Knees in-turned, gap in her teeth, the green moth tattoo on her buttock, turned away just now so he can only imagine it. Knowing it is there gives him such a pang, the last trace of her origins, the sad rundown farmhouse smelling of cat piss and mushrooms that he has imagined in full, though she has said nothing at all about where she is from. There is a part of him who longs for just this dirt in her. She is unlike anybody he’s ever known.

Her white body moves, and moves him. She’s just past adolescence, just a girl, young enough to be his daughter. Briefly there flashes in his mind his daughter’s face, such a fierce, lost thing, tiny. He has to focus on the lovely girl before him to regain his desire.

Outside, the lime-flavored sunlight tries to peer at them through the plantation shutters: in the sky, the birds rill the world alive. Above, the sun beats down on the island and urges the sea to singing.

Now that sweet face nearing, now those bitten lips, now the eye clear and blue as mint, that tender hollow in her collar. The girl, so young, smiles down at him. Howie reaches for her. At last, he forgets himself.

THE WOMAN IS IN the shower when the punk girl arrives in the morning. As she comes back into the cold room, bringing a cloud of steam with her, she finds the girl furiously pulling up the bedspread, her eyes red-rimmed. The woman cannot help herself: she touches the girl’s face and feels the soft childish skin, her warmth. There is something familiar about the loose mouth, the way it leaps and stretches wormlike with the girl’s emotions. Vulnerable is the word: and she doesn’t realize she’s said it aloud until the girl turns and flees, the laundry bunched in her arms.

The tray has no gifts on it this morning, which disturbs the woman most of all.

By the window later, as the sun sizzles out in the wet treetops, she falls asleep. When she wakes, there is the last fog of a story in her head — she’d seen it somewhere, or heard it. Television, book, movie, she doesn’t know where it came from. There was a woman, tall and beautiful: this she knows, though she couldn’t see the woman clearly. A letter plucked from a heap of mail, without return address or signature, a photograph falling from it, a menace of flesh. And, somehow connected, a night, a pond rimmed by dark trees, headlights spinning the fog, a car sunk to its bumper in the water.

She considers this for a minute, but there is danger there, and she pushes it safely away.

Now, as she awaits the knock on the door, the hot early supper on the tray, a voice in her mind rises up, sly and dark, an old woman’s voice. It says: Tabitha. It says: Sudden Pond.

The woman shivers: the radiator clucks out its warmth. Although she presses her hands against it, although she paces, counting her steps so she won’t think, she can’t get warm.

IT IS LATE. Bettina is in the kitchen popping popcorn over the stove; Jason is out, somewhere; Jaime’s hair is still wet from her second shower of the day and she is waiting for Roman Holiday on television. There is something tragic about Hepburn even when she’s happy. As if the princess knows that the one measly day in which she gets to eat gelato and smash a guitar over a secret policeman’s head and swoon into Peck’s arms will never be enough to compensate for her lonely life as a royal.

This makes Jaime think of the woman upstairs at her window. She pictures what she found when she was cleaning that morning and pushes her out of her mind again.

Bettina comes in with the popcorn as the credits roll. She settles into the couch beside Jaime, puts her arm around the girl’s shoulders. She smells of lemon balm and the camphor cow-udder medicine she rubs on her hands to keep them soft. Like this, leaning against Bettina’s bulk, feeling a wash of love come over her, Jaime wants to confess everything. How, this morning, in the shower, she looked up to see Jason’s head tucked behind the curtain and watching her, a grin on his handsome face. She’d clasped her arms over her breasts, her crotch. He didn’t touch her. He went whistling away. Despite herself, she grew warm. She sat on the floor until the water turned cold, not knowing what she’d wanted from him, whether just to leave her alone, or to intensify this game, teach her the rules. Jason was not an unkind man (she’d seen him put out kibble for the feral cats; he’d been the one to hold her when her parents abandoned her in Sharon Springs and she’d wept with fury). She was sure he would obey whatever she asked of him. Ex-soldier, married to Bettina, he was used to obeying. Jaime studied a handful of her hair. After two weeks the dye had lost its hold, the magenta turning into strawberry blond. Considering her hair brought her back to herself, made her stand, turn off the water.

Tonight, on the couch beside Bettina, Jaime feels safe. She lets herself think of the boy from the park a lifetime ago, the flowers frilly as Victorian children. Jaime had cut through the park on her way home from school and the boy had followed her, throwing horse chestnuts, his clothes ripped, his head shaved save for the spiky band down its middle. Stop it, she cried, but he didn’t until she ran away. At home, her mother, on the ottoman with her skirt hiked up over her knees, giving herself a pedicure: she saw Jaime’s face and cried, Jamina, Jamina, what’s wrong? her voice full of alarm as she followed Jaime through the house, her feet pigeon-toed as she walked to keep the polish from smearing on the rugs. Jaime wanted to push her away, to think angrily of the boy alone in private. Over supper, the endless questions, even though Jaime was still a good girl then. Top of her class, quiet, going to college. Horse-plain, the way good girls are. But even when she was amenable, her parents didn’t trust her to make her own decisions. Oppressive, their worry, their expectation.

The next day the boy was in the park again. He offered her a box of chocolates, stolen, she found out later, from a drugstore. She ate three right there, not caring if they were kosher. An immense thrill.

A few days later, he took her home. He didn’t live in the rat-infested hovel she’d expected, but a large apartment on the Upper East Side. Played her records imported from Britain: Punk, he’d called them, and leaped around the room to the noise. It sounded like some blistered creature’s death howls, but he loved it. He showed her a photo, the tight leather pants he wanted. He pulled a joint from his sock drawer (socks in neat buds, arranged by color by the maid), and she felt the world slow and become delicious. She didn’t even know his name when he pushed her down on the bed. He hiked up her skirt, and on his clean blue sheets shoved his way into her.

She knew him for one month; during it he dyed her hair, attacked her tee-shirts with scissors, played his music until she began to like it. In school, people gaped at her. She crept out at night and stayed in a club until morning. Pills, coke, acid. And then, just as she was beginning to not mind the moment when he climbed on top of her, her parents carted her off to Sharon Springs, and at the end of the summer they dumped her with Bettina.

No religion, no school, no good Jamina. It had been a relief, in its way. At first she thought she missed the boy. Now she can’t remember his face.

She’d wanted for a long time to tell Bettina about the boy, but if she was right to suspect that Bettina read her journal, the woman already knows. The commercials come on and Bettina moves off to make another aluminum pan of popcorn. Jaime follows her into the kitchen, where it smells of the coffee cake for tomorrow’s breakfast, cooling on the stove. She wants to confess, to come clean, but she can’t tell on Jason, and though she’d like to, she can’t make herself talk of the boy in the park. Instead she tells about the woman upstairs, what she’d found that morning when she was cleaning.

In her purse? Jaime says. When she was in the shower? I found a man’s button-up shirt. And it was all bloody. Like totally bloody.

Bettina stops shaking the popcorn over the burner. Her face has paled. A bloody shirt? she says, glancing at the ceiling.

That’s what I found, says Jaime. You think she murdered someone or something?

Bettina turns off the stove and sits at the table. I think, she says. Doesn’t matter what I think. She leans forward and Jaime is swimming in those violet, black-fringed eyes. Jaime, promise me, she says, don’t tell anyone else.

Jaime flushes, resentful. Duh, she says, then Hepburn’s bell-like voice chimes from the other room, and Jaime returns to the movie, feeling as if she’d just escaped something.

In the morning, when Jason comes inside, smelling of whiskey, Jaime is arranging the cake on the guest’s tray. Bettina is by the stove. Jason grins at them, settles heavily into a chair. His back is straight. He runs his hand tiredly through his grizzled hair.

Drinking, Jason? says Bettina calmly. Already or still?

Jason sighs. You don’t know, he says, his tongue slightly thick. You don’t know about what’s happening around here.

Bettina goes still. What don’t we know? she says in her softest voice.

Be quiet for a minute, I’ll tell you, says Jason. So we’re at the Springs last night playing pool, he says, the boys and me, when in comes Arnie.

Arnie snowplow or Arnie cop? says Bettina.

Arnie cop, says Jason. Anyways, Arnie says, Looks like we got us a missing person down in Roseboom, going to drag the pond, make sure nobody’s in it. He said to wait till morning, but we got carried away, got into our trucks, went up there to see what we could do. And get this, there’s this car halfway in the water, this Mercedes all filled with water. So Pete shines his light in, sees the seats, and they’re all covered with dark splotches. And he rubs his hand on it, and then says, Fuck! — here, Jason looks at Jaime and says, Pardon the French, then continues — Pete drops the flashlight and jumps back. It’s blood. A lot of blood. And so we wait out in the truck and luckily someone brought whiskey and just when it gets dawn we drag the lake. But not good enough, I guess, cause we didn’t find a body or anything.

He looks at the women, pauses for drama. Pretty clear, he says, slowly, somebody was murdered there.

Murdered? says Jaime, and looks at Bettina with alarm, but Bettina is calmly placing a poached egg on the tray for the woman upstairs.

Huh, she says. Any idea whose car it is?

Muckamucks from the city. Some kind of doctor and his wife. They think there was a hitchhiker or something, killed them both. Is there any coffee?

Bettina pours the coffee into Jason’s mug and looks at Jaime. Take the food up, Jamie, before it gets cold, she says.

Jaime weighs the woman upstairs and her bloody shirt against Jason, so bleary, his great paws around his mug, ears cold-reddened, making him seem almost childlike. At least she understands the danger that is Jason’s, a little.

Bettina? she says, helpless. I can’t.

Bettina’s mouth knots into a silken bow. She says, All right. Go on and do the dishes, then. She heaves the tray upstairs.

IT HAS BEEN THREE DAYS: Lily hasn’t been to school. She’s sure this is illegal, but Sammy said that if Lily told, her grandmother was probably too rich to go to jail and Maria would have to go instead. At night, Lily dreamed of Maria in jail and woke up in a puddle. She’ll never tell, not even if she was out for the rest of the year, not even if she was out for ten years and couldn’t go to college and get a good education and would never be a veterinarian, and would end up poor like Maria.

She feels the wildness rise in her again, tries to push it back. When she was just three, she would have such terrible attacks that she scratched her own cheeks until they bled. She remembers her parents talking, her mother’s slow drawl, her father’s clipped voice — Is it our fault? he said. Did we do this to her? God, I’ll never forgive myself if that’s the case; and Lily’s mother gave a small, tough laugh and said, For heaven’s sake, listen to yourself. Of course we did. We’re both neurotic as hell. In a softer voice her mother, who was never soft, said: Lil will grow out of it.

This is what Lily tells herself when she fears she will never be normal, when she feels the anxiety lurking in the corners of the room: I’ll grow out of it. And when she says it, to herself, she says it in her mother’s broken-glass voice.

Lily is on the couch between Maria and Sammy. Maria is watching her show and Sammy is itching for mischief. She’s been naughty all morning, spilling the milk, knocking over the grandmother’s oxygen tank, eating all the cookies from the jar. But Lily won’t let Sammy be bad right now: she has to keep Sammy in check. It’s exhausting.

On the screen a very beautiful woman with huge shoulders is walking across a wood-paneled office, a grin on her red lips. What’s going on? says Lily.

Maria says, without turning her eyes from the television, Oh, it is incredible! This woman is not this woman, but her evil twin. Everyone thinks she is she, but, no, she has her sister tied up in a basement. She is trying to steal her sister’s fortune and man. Maria pats Lily’s face, her hand smelling of the fennel she’d turned into soup for lunch.

Lily’s father knows stories about evil twins: he spends hours at night telling Lily stories, mostly fairy tales. Her grandmother has explained to Lily that her parents are lost. Now, as the show jitters on, she imagines her father out in the forest, barefoot in the snow, only frozen berries to feed him. Somewhere in a sleigh in the cold, her mother sits all dressed in white, her beautiful face icy, enchanted by bad magic into a snow queen.

With that, the great wave looms above Lily, threatening, keeping her from breathing.

Sammy has turned her froggy face toward Lily, is poking her in the side with a sticky finger. Together, the wave and the poke are enough to make Lily wail.

Into Lily’s hair, Maria says, Oh, hush-hush. When Lily won’t hush, Maria says, So you want to be a veterinarian? To doctor the animals?

Lily, crying hard, nods, and Maria stands and carries Lily through the French doors onto the veranda. It is freezing out there, the stripped trees in the park below bowing, the street noises billowing up to meet them. Maria puts her finger on her lips, and Lily tries hard to press her sobs into her chest. Maria carries her over to an enormous empty planter, where in the summer there sits a topiary in the shape of a swan.

They look down, and Lily gasps. There, blue with cold, peep three chicks, songbirds, opening their cocktail-straw throats to Lily, pleading for warmth and worm mash. They strain toward Lily, shivering with effort.

The world around Lily halts. In this moment, there is no Maria holding her, no grandmother smelling of sickness, no parents lost in the woods, no Sammy. Lily has stepped out of herself. It feels good. There is a rift inside her and on the far side of the rift, there are only the chicks, creatures so much weaker than even Lily that the girl feels herself filled with a kind of light, calm and blue; a light full of forgetting.

THE GIRL IS UP in the hotel room and Howie is swimming his laps in the pool, feeling the joy in his new muscles, how after these few days his skin has softened into tan. He dips below the water and comes up blowing in the bright Key West light. Salt on the air, terns screaming: he dips again to the blue water and its kind murmur. There, he imagines the girl inside the dim room, television washing her body with flickering greens. Her show is on, and she has never missed an episode. He’d tried to watch with her the day before, but got confused: it was about a woman who was seen in two places at once; impossible, and Donna’s explanation only confused him. There’s Texas in her voice, though she’s never been. His own Eliza Doolittle has learned a great deal from those oil-slick wives, their great powder puffs of hair, their avidity, their boldness, even the slow caramel drawl of their words. From the show she knows words that just a few months ago were foreign to her: yacht, Sauternes, carat.

Howie swims and his heart swims, too, rhythmic, longing.

Before the girl, he was gray. New York City snowfall gray, exhaust-dogdirt-gray. Gray as his office with its pleather couches, black-and-white photos on the walls, even home’s small comforts gray, all glass and steel. His wife is modern and loves all things modern, as well.

But one day he saw the girl on his couch in the waiting room, a peony in a sea of ash. When he walked into the exam room, he pretended to be taking notes, only looking up when the door closed to see that she’d forgotten the modesty gown. She sat there, slow-smiling, naked, cupping her breasts like nesting birds in her hands. Pretty girl, barely out of her teens, gaudy squares of zirconium in her ears.

I thought, she’d said, smiling at him, that I felt a lump.

No lump: also no further exam. He didn’t want to see anything belonging to the girl in a clinical light. He drove home dazed and saw coronas of sunlight on the cold glass of skyscrapers. His classical music station bored him and he flipped until he heard Neil Diamond warbling “America”: he listened, astounded. It was big and celebratory and bold, this song, like his heart put to music. This song was the zeitgeist, this new decade hungry and striving, where anyone could strike it rich and everyone was doing so.

There was a party at home when he arrived: he’d stood limply in the door, striving to place all those people in the house.

Then he shook himself, mingled, fetched drinks. Became again the good man his guests knew, the one without adultery thumping in his chest. Howie, tee-ball coach, kind father of a problem child, head of the Neighborhood Association, gentle gynecologist. His wife shimmered and dazzled, bon mots spinning from her mouth, and he laughed with the guests, Tabitha’s perfect audience. He squeezed her hand in passing, subject as always to her acerbic charm. His persona felt odd on him, as if he were wearing a mask from a Greek play, features fixed, mouth a loudspeaker.

In the midst of it all, he went to the bedroom, rolled up his cuffs, dialed the number the girl had written on his wrist: Donna, she’d written, and he knew by the way she’d smiled when she said it, tasting the word with such pleasure, that it was a name she’d given herself. Even here, in Key West, he still doesn’t know her true one.

Before she answered, he remembered those two small breasts in her hands and almost hung up. But she answered and what had to happen, happened.

Now, three months later, as March sludges on cold and gray in the city, he is dipping into sun, into water, into sun again. He comes to the end, clutches the concrete lip, and raises his face to the warmth. On the balcony, there is a butterfly flutter, magenta and gold, the girl in the fancy kimono he’d bought her. She’s laughing down at a gardener who gapes upward, his hose flaccidly gushing. Then she looks out and sees Howie in the pool, his thin hair slicked back, watching her. His breath leaves him under her transformation: from a mere girl she turns into a whole-body beckon.

THE DAY BEGINS: the woman rises from the bed, climbs into her chair. But even in the sulfurous draft she can’t concentrate a whit. The exact matte of the road mud holds no draw for her. She is restless, restless.

Her fingers fly off her lap and scrabble about. Her thigh-wound has made her skin taut and pulsing. It burns and leaks a clear fluid through her denim skirt. Worse, that voice has begun to speak in sentences and has not left her head. It is a stern old woman’s voice that barks out names in staccato: Donna, she says, Tabitha, Miriam Dubonnet-Quince. Howard.

Now the old woman says, Sudden Pond, with a crow’s caw of a laugh. The woman feels ill. She tries to ignore the old woman (she knows somehow the old woman’s fat, shrewd, a brusque old bat). She tries to think of other things. The water beneath the town, beneficial, beginning to melt: the veins in the ground, thick with ice, the sulfur, salt, magnesium water pressing up urgently against the ice. But there is something in this she doesn’t like either. It reminds her of something very unpleasant.

The woman curls into her chair, presses her hands against her ears. She doesn’t hear the door when it opens.

But rising to her, the scent of breakfast, lifesaving coffee, and she looks around for the girl. She finds tears of gratitude, of love, in her eyes. She loves the girl for something the girl reminds her of. She doesn’t want to examine exactly what it is.

But instead of the girl, it’s the large woman, the dark one with the British accent (the old woman in her spits out, Surrey, distastefully — how would she know?). The British woman is the wife of the gardener, he who chips ice from the walks — they own the hotel; she cooks the meals. The man is a Labrador retriever, earnest and stupid and simple. The woman is more difficult, secretive, and far too young to be the punk’s mother.

She wills the British woman to finish her cleaning and leave, but the woman isn’t cleaning at all. She’s watching her, lovely porcelain face on a swollen body. Laura Ashley cabbage roses, poofy sleeves, ridiculous. Stillness of a cat.

Where’s the punk? says the woman, nervous. I like her, she says.

Sorry, says the large woman. Jaime isn’t well today. She leans forward and does a curious thing. She takes the woman’s hands in her own and presses them.

For a long while, for the time it takes for the dawn to dip the highest chimneytop in gold, she holds her guest’s hands. They stare at each other. Then the British woman says, The day you came. Do you remember it?

Despite herself, the woman does now. She sees a three-quarter moon, raw; headlights; her whole skin chafed and wet. She shudders and pushes it out of her head.

I walked down the hill to the village, she says. It was dark. My shoes were wet. Your windows were the only ones lit and I knocked.

And before? says the British woman.

Before, says the woman. The road at the top of the hollow and the truck driver. He stopped for gas. The truck smelled unpleasant, and she got out and began to walk. She doesn’t say this. She shakes her head and says, No.

All right, says the British woman. She cocks her lovely head. Listen. I don’t know what happened. The less I know the better. But this afternoon, my husband and I are going to Richfield Springs for groceries and we can take you. There’s a coach, at three, to Boston.

Something in her voice when she says: Boston’s a large, large town. Easy to begin anew.

The woman is not sure what the other is trying to tell her. Oh, she says. No, thank you. I like this very much, and she gestures at the town, her window, the stark little room.

The British woman looks at her, then sighs and stands. Very well, she says, and turns to make the bed. When she leaves, she leaves the television on to some show. A black-haired woman with a pistol stands over a woman who looks just like her, bleeding on the ground. The music dramatic and bright. Under it, the old lady in her head speaks up. Well, now, she says grimly. I sure don’t believe that fat Brit is all she seems to be.

Hush, you, says the woman, agitated to standing. She turns off the television. The voice in her head goes silent.

The woman circles the room, feeling like a caged finch, picks up the musty books on the nightstand, puts them down again. Nothing is right anymore. There is no solace in the dead street, the dead town. She pauses before the television, but to invite such noise will make it hard to be quiet again.

After hours of pacing, she goes to the door. She has a vague idea that if she can find the girl she can talk to her. Jaime, the British woman had called her. The girl who reminds her of someone she doesn’t want to remember, though she thinks it may be necessary that she remember now.

EARLY AFTERNOON AND the hotel is empty, save for Jaime and the woman upstairs. Though Jaime is in her little brown bed, her nest, listening to the foggy pop music on her clock radio, she feels as if she’s tied to the woman with an invisible tether. She wonders what she had felt when she murdered her husband, the moment the knife entered his flesh. Jaime closes her eyes and thinks that she probably felt nothing. That she watched herself from the outside, and it was a wonderful relief.

In the past, when Bettina and Jason were both gone Jaime would wander the forbidden depths of the hotel. On the third floor, the begrimed windows and furniture hulked under blankets like beasts asleep. Pigeons entered through a broken pane, and when she came into the room the birds would rise and swirl about her in a confetti of down. There she’d found a box of old letters in the servants’ quarters, misspelled, stained, banal, infinitely tender. Jaime would go into Bettina and Jason’s suite, three rooms in ivory and pink, smelling of Bettina’s flowers, Jason’s things kenneled in their own closet. She loves to pick through Jason’s nightstand, his careful cache of treasures: the hunting knife in the handmade sheath that stinks of summer camp, the misspelled list in his adolescent hand: Things I Will Do Before I Die (number three, Be a Brigideer General; number nine, Be a Millionaire), the photographs of a younger Jason and a stunning, thin Bettina laughing, at Niagara. She runs her hands over Bettina’s floral dresses, searches through her lingerie.

In her journal she writes a loopy Bettina. It’s not enough to write the name; it is all she has.

Since that February night during an ice storm, when Jaime and Bettina stood in the kitchen rolling out dough for mincemeat pies, and the lights went out, and Bettina laughed and lit great conflagrations of candles in the room and in the flickering light Bettina glowed, Jaime had felt bubble within her a certain new helplessness. At that moment, she understood why she’d been happy these past few months. She’d understood, finally, a small piece of herself.

Good girls wear wigs and long skirts and marry men their parents choose and become mothers. Good girls don’t dream the way Jaime dreams about other women. With that bright pulse, she’d found a better way to escape her parents. She had felt powerful in the kitchen that night.

It was not impossible that Bettina knew. She read Jaime’s journal, after all, kept Jaime on a leash she’d tug from time to time to make sure that Jaime was attentive. Still, if what Jaime wrote about Jason bothered Bettina, she had yet to show it.

That morning, after Bettina went upstairs with the tray, Jaime’s face grew hot in the steam from the dishes and Jason sat at the table, watching her. Jaime, Jaime, Jaime, he said when she put the last dish in the rack. C’mere. I won’t bite.

Nah, she said. I’m okay here.

Fine, he said, standing. Then I’ll go over there. He was still a little wobbly from the whiskey, and Jaime stepped easily around the table to put it between them.

Jason laughed, leaned his fists on the table. Oh, Jaime, he said. You don’t fool me for a minute.

A sea rush in her ears. I don’t? she said, wondering what he meant. She strained to hear upstairs, and relaxed when she heard a door close, Bettina’s heavy tread on the stairs.

Jason heard, too, and his smile fell off his face. Nope, he said. You and my wife are hiding that woman upstairs, aren’t you? I’m not as stupid as I look. Soon as I heard about the people in the car, I thought of that woman. He sighed, sat down. He looked suddenly old.

Jaime, he said, Bettina’s a complicated lady, you know. She’s got her own reasons for what she does. I just don’t want you getting mixed up in something you don’t understand.

Jaime made a sound as if she’d been hit in the sternum, though it came out sounding like a laugh. And then there was Bettina in the door, frowning, with the empty tray.

Jason stretched, smiling. We should go into town now, he said. Ready, Bette?

In a jiff, she said. Jaime, you’ll hold down the fort?

Sure, said Jaime, though she wasn’t sure, at all. In a minute, they were in the car, gone.

They have been away for hours when she hears Jason’s truck coming to a stop before the hotel. She weighs Jason against Bettina and finds him lacking. The doors slam, the kitchen door opens, the rustle of bags on the counter. Jaime waits until she hears Jason crunch over the gravel outside, heading to his workshop, and then she’s in the kitchen, where Bettina has sliced open a melon and is eating a juicy crescent at the window.

Bettina laughs, guiltily. Couldn’t help myself, she says. Then puts the sweet fruit before Jaime’s lips for her to bite.

But Jaime looks at Bettina, and Bettina takes the fruit away. I have to tell you, says Jaime. I have to tell you about something. Up rises the kiss in the dark corridor, Jason’s face behind the shower curtain; Jaime feels the prickles on the back of her neck, as if she’s about to lob a grenade into a marriage. It’s about Jason, she says.

But Bettina is already nodding. I know, she says. He’s smarter than I gave him credit for. Called the police. While we were at the store, he took off and I know he did it then.

Jaime feels dizzy, and when Bettina smiles and leans forward, her pretty mouth close to Jaime’s, Jaime doesn’t at first know what is happening, and only thinks fuzzily of the woman upstairs.

LILY IS HIDING in her grandmother’s closet. It is a palace in there, mahogany and crystal, whole walls of spike heels and furs in plastic shrouds. Lily is trying to listen into the bedroom, but Sammy is odious. She’s pulled out the silk pockets from the grandmother’s spring coats, spilling used tissues to the ground like shriveled mushrooms, and is now standing in a pair of red heels, shimmying on her bowed legs, her belly pulsing in and out.

Lily mouths, Stop it, Sammy! but Sammy only chuckles and shimmies some more.

Her uncles are in the room with the grandmother, all stone-faced; her aunts are there, too, crying and patting at their cheeks with tissues. The lawyer is there, a family friend, a fat man with a big nose like a red lightbulb. Lily was standing on a chair on the cold veranda, peering at the birds, when Sammy hissed and pointed through the glass door, and Lily saw the slow march of the relatives and the lawyer toward the grandmother’s room. When she saw Maria pushing a cart full of drinks and snacks toward the door, Lily waved at the birds and their mother, who hopped in indignation on one foot. Bye, Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod, she said. Be good.

The lawyer is now saying something: a car found in a pond. Upstate. Howard. Blood. Missing. Tabitha.

Tabitha is Lily’s mother. Howard is Lily’s father.

And then the grandmother gives a curious sound, a half-shout, raspy and metallic. My Howard? she shouts. My Howard? Murdered?

Uncle Chan, the oldest uncle, begins to roar. Why?

A long pause. The lawyer honks into a handkerchief and folds it away. He says loud enough for Lily to hear, We’re not sure. But the evidence points toward. Well, there was a manuscript on the desk, unfinished. From what we can piece together, there may have been some, er. Indiscretion. On the part of. We’re running things by the credit card company, to make sure. And we’re looking for Tabitha now. Or her body. We’re just not sure.

Lily feels like she’s swimming. She can’t breathe. Sammy stands over her, staring down with a dirty finger in her mouth. Lily clutches a silk skirt and lifts it to her face, over her nose and down, three times.

Your mother, whispers Sammy, murdered your father. She grins a terrible grin.

Maria finds Lily hours later, folded into a ball beneath her grandmother’s dresses, wet, mute. The girl won’t speak through her bath, won’t eat the soup. And so, when she puts Lily to bed, Maria curls up beside her and breathes with her until Lily sleeps in her own small nest of pillows. She is careful to stay on the corner of the bed so that when Lily wakes in the night, Maria will not have rolled over and crushed Lily’s imaginary friend.

PARADISE, THE PARROT in the lobby on his brass hoop, Donna’s pale to tan, blonde to white. Their breakfasts of fruit, melon and papaya and pineapple.

This, Howard says to the girl over the coffee, watching her in the breeze in her kimono; this is the best gynecological conference I’ve ever been to in my life.

She snorts. Real diamonds, his gift, glow in her ears. Aren’t you glad I made us stay? she says, her voice still rough after all her painstaking finesse. What if we just didn’t go back? she says.

Yes, he says, but with the word there swims up a small unease. His wife, banging pots in the kitchen, coming up with her sloppy dinners to go back more quickly to her imagined worlds. He was supposed to have returned three days ago: he left messages with the answering service when he knew his wife would be out of the house, making excuses: they asked him to stay to address a medical school class, then the plane broke down and he had to stay overnight.

What would happen if he just remained here, soaking his flesh in the sun like lobster in butter, Donna beside him? Every day, this lascivious sun. He’d buy a yacht and sail it from island to island. Even in the midst of his fantasy, though, he knows he’d think of Lily, his pale, intense girl, and guilt would chase him. It would catch him, no matter where he was.

On the wind now there’s a trace, a hint of sound: Shostakovich, moderato. Someone in the kitchens, listening to a grainy radio. The mournful piano, unsuited to this thoughtless place, brings him back to the gray grandeur of New York, and he closes his eyes. He must get back, he knows. It makes him terribly sad. There’s his mother, sick in her bed, suffocating in broad air. His daughter, who breaks his heart. His wife. He listens to the movement of the music, the waves, the seabirds, until it is all smothered under the gardener’s electric hedgetrimmer.

Donna is looking at him, rubbing her hand on his knee. She says, What? a little crossly. He looks at her, the music heavy in his stomach: he opens his mouth. Howie doesn’t know what he’s going to say, only that it may be unpleasant. Donna’s lips purse, her pretty face suddenly waspish. And he hesitates just long enough for the phone to ring in the room behind him. He stands and answers it.

As he listens to that old, familiar voice on the line, he watches Donna on the balcony, drenched with light, her hair shifting in the wind like seaweed. The words at the end of the line put an urgency into his limbs. And a grief as clean as relief comes into his heart.

THE WOMAN CREEPS DOWN the curved stairwell in her bare feet, her heart bumping hard against her ribs. It is cold downstairs. Only her room has been heated nice and toasty; the rest of the hotel is frigid. There are voices, but in all this immensity, it is hard to tell where they are from.

Stink of the springs’ sulfur, heavy from one open window. Transistor music, some country song cloyed with longing. She sees the gardener scraping the wrought-iron gate, the black chips falling into the mud, his pink ears bobbing to the beat. She slides through the rooms like an eel in the deep.

But the way the light hits the glass of the antique windows makes her stop: that slick ripple is much like water. That pond rises again in her mind. And she sees it now, more clearly than ever, the car up to its steering wheel in the mud, ice like broken glass, windshield a broken cobweb. Blood everywhere, from when she opened the door, caught her leg on a sharp branch. She wrapped her husband’s shirt, ripped from the dry-cleaning hanger in the backseat, against her wound. The rain was hard as needles on her scalp.

Now she touches her leg and it burns warmly. Did she do something terrible by that pond? She feels that she did, though she doesn’t know what.

Ha, crows the old woman in her head: but the woman goes swiftly through the house now, trying to find the kitchen, the voices, the girl.

Now she emerges into the kitchen. Grocery bags tumbleweed on the floor. Pile of fruit on the table, a melon split and dripping. And there, in front of the sink, standing before the window that looked into the dim stretch of the street, the fat woman holds the girl’s face in her hands. The girl weeps. The fat woman gives her a long kiss on the mouth.

Not motherly, indeed, chuckles the old voice in the woman’s head. When the girl backs away, her face looks slapped and childlike.

In her mind, another voice, a different voice, one that sounds like her own, says, Lily. It sounds like grieving. She doesn’t know a Lily, she doesn’t think. The pang in her chest says otherwise.

But she doesn’t have time to examine it, for beyond the bodies of the woman and the girl, down the hill, come cars like birds gliding to water. Two are black and white, their lights discreetly off. The last a green Jaguar, sleek.

She watches these cars pass all the abandoned hotels. They park in the street before the window. The police emerge. From the last car there comes a bronzed, thin man, his handsome face set in wrinkles of worry. She is certain she knows him. Her hands float toward her mouth, hover in the air there. They write wildly in the air as she watches him.

Oh, she says, and the two other women spring apart. They turn to her, then follow her look out the window, see the police cars, the third man. The gardener drops his tools and bounds toward them, grinning madly, already talking.

Oh, dear, says the woman, joining the other two at the window. She feels a broad smile spreading across her face. As the four men move together toward the door of the hotel, she gives a happy laugh. And just before the men enter, the woman says, watching the bronzed man with his thin hair, Oh, I believe my doctor is here.

YEARS LATER, WHEN JAIME THINKS of this day, she will only remember the kiss. Not the subtle sighing recognition when the police reveal that the woman is famous, a writer whose books even Jaime has read, whose picture she had seen many times on dust jackets. Nor that Jason ratted the woman out and her husband came and took her away. She will remember Bettina, enormous and beautiful, pressing her lips on Jaime’s own in the silvery light of the day. The kiss is what she will see every time she sees the writer’s name, every time she sees one of her books on a girlfriend’s shelf. She will remember the kiss when she finally finds the woman’s novel in a quarter bargain bin. It had been an instant best seller: everyone loves a scandal. Only when she reads the book will she learn of the woman’s amnesia, of the marriage certificate she ripped up and sent in flutters into the midnight water, the wedding band she sent skipping into the dark. She will learn of the troubled daughter, look up pictures of that lost girl, and feel a surge of sympathy, a strange recognition. But when she finishes the book and fingers the title, Sudden Pond, Jaime will forget all that she knew about Tabitha and only remember the kiss in the window, and a darkness will fill her and slow the world.

ON THAT DAY, as the three of them stand in the window, watching the woman carried off, Bettina squeezes Jaime’s hand under the cover of drapery. The last icicle in the window melts a ratatatat on the screen. Jaime feels ill. Jason is laughing, counting the reward money in his head. When the cars are gone, he goes back outside to the wrought-iron fence and chips at it again, whistling intricate contrapuntal melodies to the music on his transistor.

Alone together, Bettina’s warmth pushes Jaime’s breath from her. The hotel without the woman feels empty and a little sad.

At last, Bettina says, Sit down, and she lowers herself on one of the overstuffed settees. Jaime traces the lilies in the fabric with her hand, feeling as raw and tender as a newborn. Bettina says, You know, Jaime, you remind me of myself.

Jaime is shaky and says nothing.

Bettina says, That’s not a compliment, strictly. I mean that I look at you, Jaime, and see a girl chased by herself. Like me.

A silence: Jaime tries hard to understand. If you want, I can tell you my story now, says Bettina. How I got here, of all places I mean, she says, and Jaime nods.

Bettina’s story is stark, has a strange ring to it. Childhood in the country, doting parents, bicycles and gardens and brothers and cousins and tennis and Pimm’s; her aunt paying for public school; blazers and experiments in the dormitories under lights-out. A-levels, Oxbridge. Balls and visits in London; boys and cigarettes. She was beautiful. A wild girl.

One summer, home from school, she drank too much at a bonfire outside her grandparents’ estate. She woke with the wild music playing somewhere, her face pressed into the dirt, a mouth full of cinders.

She could have just waited it out, until the boy heaved off her, and then walked home, taken a shower. But she found a broken bottle under her hand, and without thinking speared it up. And then his weight was a different weight, and there was a hot wetness spreading down her back, a darkness pooling on the ground. The boy was dead. The bottle in his eye.

Bettina panicked, ran back to her grandparents’, stole cash from their safe, showered, and left. She bought a ticket to India, but in the terminal crept onto a plane to America. There she changed her body, name, hair color, age, became a nanny. She met Jason at Niagara and after one drunken night they awoke married.

She could have run away again, but she was too tired. He left the military, took her to Sharon Springs, his hometown, where they bought the hotel, in foreclosure, with his savings, a grand place almost rotted to its studs. Nobody looking for her could ever find her in this cold, dim town that smelled of sulfur.

I believed it, Bettina says, bitterness in her voice. I believed in the American dream.

Bettina’s eyes are closed, lashes moving against her cheeks like wings. In the empty silence afterward, there is a strange metallic ring.

It sounds fake to Jaime. She cannot breathe. She has listened to it all, love flying from her like scales from a fish. Bettina is too composed, her story too composed. Something bad did happen to Bettina, clearly: she probably is from England, probably was chased away. But whatever happened was not what she just told Jaime. And the story feels like one so often told it has the warp of fairy tale to it. Worse, she suspects Bettina has come to believe it herself. Jaime can’t look at Bettina, now, for pity.

So, Bettina says, to the scrape of Jason outside, the parlor cold and damp. There are goose bumps on Jaime’s arms. We can do two things now. One, you stay in town, in our little arrangement. Or, two, you know what you know about me and can’t forgive me for it. Go home and be a good girl and go back to school and become who you were before. You tell me what you want to do.

For a moment, Jaime becomes Bettina, sees her long days of work, her nights beside snoring Jason; she can feel Bettina’s boredom heavy as a rock in her own torso. Jaime understands with this that all she’d ever been to Bettina was a plaything to stave off the tedium, the kiss only a promise, a way to keep Jaime around.

In this light, Jaime’s freedom is vast and wondrous. She is young, unfixed where she is. She can, she understands, do whatever she wants. She wants to laugh with surprise.

I think I’ll go home, she says. A watery beam of light from the window slides like a cat across Jaime’s legs and up the wall. The fast-falling night darkens the window. Jason comes into the kitchen, still whistling.

Bette? he calls, sounding lost. Bette? Somewhere in the hotel a draft plays a corner like a tin whistle.

Bettina sighs and says, We’re in the parlor, darling.

Jason comes in, bringing with him the smell of his sweat and the crisp outdoors. Oh, he says, relieved. But he says, Oh, again, when he sees Jaime, hunched over, face twisted, and the word is saturated with guilt. He thinks Jaime has told on him. Poor Jason, who had joined the military to become something better, who married Bettina in an act of aspiration, but who in the end found himself only the man he was always meant to be: hick, redneck, country boy.

Bettina stands and walks to the door: the windows in their panes tremble with her steps. Wonderful news, darling, she says. Jaime feels she has grown enough here with us that she can face the world. We’re letting our little chick fly. Isn’t that spectacular, darling? Her face is creamily reflected in the dark window.

Spectacular, says Jason, his voice confused. He straightens himself up into a military stance: he does this when uncertain. Jaime finds him newly endearing.

Our little girl, says Bettina, leading her husband out the door, and Jaime feels a heavy relief. Our little girl, says Bettina, is ready to grow up.

LILY IS SICK. She and Sammy are on the veranda in the cold March wind, watching the scattered clouds move, the shadows slide over the spots of sunlight in the park. Sammy has taken books from her dead grandfather’s locked cabinet and is tossing them over the edge. She throws one now and it flutters in midair and whips its pages around. It comes to a stop on the neighbor’s patio a few stories down, beside another book. The books riffle their pages at one another, communicating alarm.

Lily has no heart to stop Sammy. She is shaking, and even by breathing slowly she cannot control the wave that hovers above her, threatening to crash down. In the apartment, the grandmother had rasped at her father: Howard, you are irresponsible, so stupid, what do you think you were doing in Key West with that trash, I wouldn’t have blamed Tabitha if she had murdered you, and is now breathing air from her machine, cigarette trembling in her hands.

Lily’s parents aren’t dead. Worse. They had abandoned her without a second thought.

They don’t love her. She sees her mother as her mother had been the morning she disappeared, her sharp, elegant face drawn at the breakfast table, her coffee untouched, her cigarette spinning blue smoke into the air. Lily knew better than to approach her when she was like this. There were some times when her mother was brilliant, laughing, fiery with life; but she was unpredictable, and when she was working she was more likely to look at Lily as if she were a stranger. They were still looking for her mother, but it was her soft and kind father’s abandonment that made the panic rise up again.

Lily sees the mother bird dart back over the sky, flutter down. She moves over to the planter, peers inside. The baby chicks are fatter today than even yesterday, and the mother ignores Lily by now. She spits brown-pink pap into her babies’ gullets. Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod swallow and open their mouths again and again until the mother bird, emptied, flies off. The babies peep hungrily for more.

Sammy reaches down, but Lily says, No, in such a strange voice that Sammy backs away, sucking her finger and looking at Lily with her froggy eyes. And it is Lily who reaches down into the nest and cradles Winkyn in her palm. She knows this is bad, that the mama bird won’t touch him because he smells of Lily. She brings him up close to her eye. The chick must think she’s an enormous mother bird because he opens his beak extrawide. He chirps one sweet chirp.

Lily takes him to the railing and throws him.

Winkyn’s little body hurtling through space, falling like a clump of dirt, landing with a thud next to one of the books. For a moment, it feels good to be bad. The wave hanging over her lifts away for a moment.

She turns around, her heart drilling in her chest. There, behind the window, is Maria, watching her. Paper towel in one hand, spray bottle in the other, face stricken. Lily thinks, It’s not my fault, but Maria slides open the door and at first says nothing. The wind rises and blows her dark hair from her forehead. Then she says in a deep voice: They have found your mother, child. She closes the door and moves off.

Below, the books flap like beasts in distress. She knows that if she looks, Sammy will not be there. Sammy died when Lily threw Winkyn. Lily sits now on the flagstone veranda, feeling tiny and alone in the wind.

BEFORE THE HOMECOMING, the dark stretch of their apartment, before they find Lily a wet shivering mass on the couch, he and she, husband and wife, ride home in silence.

In the car, he squints through the rain on the windshield into the darkening day. The trees seem naked, and at a rest stop near Poughkeepsie he sees buds spangling a tree. Like nipples, he thinks at first, then grows angry, says, Ornaments, loudly, to himself. His wife is silent, clutching the purse on her lap, one thigh twice as fat as the other (at the hospital the next morning they’d whistle in awe when they uncover it). In his haste to get her home, he had wrapped it in clean bandages and carried her over the mush of the street to the car.

He drives; he thinks. Is that dull, gray woman really his wife? Can she be Tabitha, who is sarcastic, skinny, too chic, too flippant? Is his wife really the one about whom the fat British lady in her tea cake of a dress had said, Oh, but she was such a dear, really no trouble at all, quiet as a mouse, so quiet we didn’t suspect a thing. Those words rang so false he’d wanted to strike the phony British bitch in the face. In his fury, he’d paid them, thanked the officers, conferred with the psychiatrist from the local hospital, was reassured that it was probably temporary amnesia, and, at long last, left with his wife calm in his arms.

He carried her as gently as he could to the car, feeling the way they watched him in his shoulders. The punk, the hillbilly, the fat British lady: as if he were the horror show, not them. None of them had ever seen a chopstick in their lives, he was sure; none of them had ever found themselves with such yearning in their hearts like the yearning that lived in his. He longed to turn and shout at them. He did not.

In the car now he doesn’t know what to say. His wife gazes out the window dreamily, watching the landscape roll by. When it finally grows dark and begins to rain, he feels something pushing behind his eyeballs. When he brings his wrist up to wipe his nose, he can smell the coconut of Donna’s tanning oil. Lovely girl, whom he will never see emerge from a dark room into tropical light again, her kimono flapping like wings around her. One last time he lets his eyes flush and the golden headlights of oncoming traffic blur in the windshield.

Is it wrong? he thinks. Is it so wrong to want, just for a short while, to be someone else? Even when he asks this he knows the answer, has known it all along. When his eyes clear and everything is crisp again, his wife is smiling with her strange beatific smile.

She clears her throat. You’re a very good man, she says; aren’t you? She waits, smiling at him. She puts out her hand and pats him on the knee.

No, he wants to say. You know I’m not good. I’m not good at all. But when he looks at her next, the way she smiles, the way the light from the passing cars glints in her eyes, gives him pause, and makes him, for the moment, wonder if she is actually there, deep down. If, somewhere, she — the acerbic, the writer — does mean what she is saying. If this was all intricately plotted, as elaborate as one of her own Miriam Dubonnet-Quince books, that crusty old lady curmudgeon whom he’d never liked but all his wife’s fans think brilliant. Did he, in the wash of light through the windshield, just see her inhabiting her face again, mothlike, alighting for a moment, flittering away?

He rubs his own eyes, briefly hating her. He frowns at the long, wet road in the window until it fades, a dark worm pulsing before him.

At last, slowing down for the bridge, he says, I try. She doesn’t turn toward him, but he can sense that she’s listening. The moon is a hopeful shadow behind dark clouds; the car swims through the rain, steady and true. I’m only human, he says, and I try.