Forgiving Ararat

1

I arrived at Shemaya Station after my heart stopped beating and all activity in my brain irreversibly ceased.

This is the medical definition of death, although both the living and, I can assure you, the dead, resent its finality. There’s always cause for hope, people argue, and sometimes miracles. I myself used to think this way, but my views have changed. I’ve discovered, for example, that even if a miracle fails at the final moment to keep you alive, there’s still the possibility one will come along later, at the Final Judgment, to keep you from spending the rest of eternity wanting others dead.

I didn’t know I had died when I arrived at Shemaya Station, nor did I have any reason to suspect such a thing. Nobody announces that your life’s over when it is. As far as I was concerned, my heart was still beating and my brain still functioning; the only hint that something out of the ordinary had happened was that I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. I simply found myself alone on a wooden bench in a deserted urban train station with a high arched dome of corroded girders and trusses and broken glass panels filthy with soot. I had no memory of a train ride, no memory of a destination. A dimly lit board in the middle of the waiting area showed arrival times but no departures, and I assumed, as most who come here do, that the board was broken or there were problems with the outbound tracks.

I sat and stared at the board, waiting for it to flash some piece of information that would give me a clue about where I was or at least where I was going. When the board refused to divulge anything further, I stood and gazed down the tracks, as anxious passengers do, hoping to see some movement or a flicker of light in the distance. The rails vanished into utter darkness, either a tunnel or a black starless night, I could not tell which. I glanced back at the board again and then, forlornly, around the station: ten tracks and ten platforms, all vacant; ticket counter, newsstand, waiting area, shoe shine, all empty. The building was completely quiet: no announcements over the loudspeakers, no whistles blowing, brake shoes screeching, or air compressors shrieking; no conductors shouting, passengers complaining, or panhandling musicians playing. Not even the sound of a janitor sweeping in a far corner of the building.

I sat back down on the bench and noticed I was wearing a black silk skirted suit. The sight of this suit made me feel a little safer and a little less alone. I had been a lawyer during my life, and lawyers always wear suits to feel more confident and less vulnerable. This particular suit was my favorite because it made me feel the most confident and least apologetic as a young woman when I entered the courtroom. I smoothed the skirt on my lap, admiring the heavy weight and rich texture of the fabric and the way it glided over my stockings. It really was a beautiful suit-a suit that attracted glances from colleagues, opposing counsel, and even men on the street; a suit that said I was a lawyer to be taken seriously. The best part of all was that I had found it on a clearance rack at an outlet store-a power suit and a bargain. I loved that suit.

So there I was, sitting all alone on a bench in this deserted train station, infatuated with my black silk suit, when I noticed some small stains on the shoulder and lapel of my jacket. The stains were crusty and yellowish-white, and I assumed I had probably spilled cappuccino on myself earlier in the day. I scratched at the stains with the edge of a polished but chipped fingernail, expecting the aroma of coffee to be released; but a very different scent floated into my consciousness instead: baby formula.

Baby formula? Do I have a child…? Yes, of course…a child…a baby daughter…I remember now. But what’s her name? I think it begins with an S…Susan, Sharon, Samantha, Stephanie, Sarah…Sarah? Oh yes, Sarah.

But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember anything about Sarah’s face or hair, or the way she giggled or cried, or the smell of her skin, or the way she might have squirmed when I held her. I remembered only that a child had grown inside of me, had become part of me, and then left to join the world around me-where I could see her and touch her but not protect her the way I did when she was inside me. And yet, even though I couldn’t remember anything about my own daughter except her name, I wasn’t bothered by this in the least. Sitting there on the bench in Shemaya Station, I was far more worried about the stains on my jacket-terrified somebody would see what I had allowed to happen to my favorite “I belong” black silk suit.

I scraped more vigorously at the stains. When they wouldn’t go away, I lapped at my fingertips to moisten them. But instead of disappearing, the stains grew larger and changed in color from yellowish-white to deep wine red. The transformation was subtle at first, like the change from clear afternoon to streaked and pigmented sunset.

The dye’s beginning to run…that’s why the suit was on the clearance rack.

But the stains started behaving differently too. They liquefied, sending crimson streaks down my jacket, skirt, and legs. This fascinated me. I dabbed my fingers in the red fluid, tentatively at first, like a child given a jar of paint, then with growing confidence, drawing two little stick figures with it beside me on the bench-a mother and her young daughter. The liquid felt warm and viscous and tasted pleasantly salty when I put a finger to my tongue. A pool of it gathered on the concrete floor of the station, and I slipped off my heels and tapped my toes in it, lost in the creamy sensation.

In the middle of all this, an old man walked up to my bench and sat down beside me.

“Welcome to Shemaya,” he said. “My name is Luas.”

Luas had moist, gray eyes, as if he were always thinking something poignant, and an annotated, gentle sort of frog’s face, flabby and wise like a worn book. The face seemed familiar, and after a moment I recognized it as the face of my mentor, the senior lawyer who had hired me out of law school.

Now what was his name…? Oh yes, Bill, Bill Gwynne. But the old man sitting next to me said his name was Luas, not Bill.

Luas welcomes everybody to Shemaya. He appears differently to each of us, and to each in his own way. He might be an auto mechanic or a teacher to one, a father or a preacher to another, or maybe a madman or all of these combined. In Shemaya, we dress each other up to be exactly who we expect to see. For me, Luas was a composite of the three older men I had adored during my life: he wore a white shirt with a tweed blazer that smelled of rum pipe tobacco, the way my Grandpa Cuttler’s clothes smelled; and, as I said, he had Bill Gwynne’s flabby face; but when I showed him my feet and my left hand, all covered in red, helpless like a little girl playing in her spaghetti, he flashed my Pop Pop Bellini’s knowing smile as if to say: Yes, my granddaughter, I see; I see what you’re afraid to see, but I’ll pretend not to have noticed.

“Come along, Brek,” Luas said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

How did he know my name?

I looked down again, but now my clothes were gone-my black silk suit and cream colored silk blouse, my bra, panties, stockings, and shoes. They had never been there actually. There had been only the idea of clothes, as I was only an idea, defined by who I’d insisted on being during the thirty-one years of my life. Only my body remained, naked and covered with blood. I knew now the red liquid was blood, and that it was my blood, because it was spurting through three small holes in my chest, and because it felt warm and precious the way only blood feels. Suddenly my perspective shifted, and it seemed as though I was watching it all from the opposite bench.

Who is this woman? I wondered. Why doesn’t she put her fingers in the holes and stop the bleeding? Why doesn’t she call out for help? She’s so young and pretty, she must have so much to live for. But just look at her sit there-she does nothing but watch, and she feels nothing but pity: pity for the platelets clotting too late, pity for the parts of her body that had once been the whole; and there-see how her brain flickers, losing reasoning first, then consciousness, contracting her muscles to force the blood back to her heart, slowing the beats, slowing the respiration, ordering the mass suicide of millions of cells in a wasted attempt to prolong her life. Listen. The roar of nothingness fills her ears.

Luas removed his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I was crying now, and he hugged me like the granddaughter I might have been. I was crying because I remembered a past that existed before Shemaya Station and Luas, before the baby formula stains and the blood. I remembered my eyes, Irish green like my father’s, and my hair, long, thick, Italian black like my mother’s. I remembered the empty right sleeves of my clothes: pinned back, folded over, sewn shut. I remembered people wondering-I could see it in their faces-what an eight year old girl could have done to deserve all those empty right sleeves? I remembered wanting to tell them, to remind them, that God punishes children for the sins of their parents.

Yes, for one brief and unbearable moment, I remembered many things when I arrived at Shemaya Station. I remembered crayfish dying in the sun and the cruelty of injustice. I remembered the stench of decaying mushrooms and the inconceivable possibility of forgiveness. I remembered the conveyor chain on my grandfather’s manure spreader amputating my right forearm from my elbow and flinging it into the field with the rest of the muck. I remembered the angelic face of my daughter, Sarah, just ten months old, young and fresh and precious like blood. I remembered formula dripping from her bottle down the empty right sleeve of my suit and the pinch of guilt for leaving her at the daycare that morning and the punch of guilt for feeling relieved. I remembered dust on law books and the bitter taste of coffee. I remembered telling my husband I loved him and knowing I did. I remembered picking up my daughter at the end of the day and her squeals of delight when she saw me, and my squeals of delight when I saw her. I remembered singing Hot Tea and Bees Honey to her on the way home and wondering what my husband had made for dinner, because he always makes dinner on Fridays. Most of all, I remembered how comfortable life had become for me…and that I would do anything…give anything…stop at nothing…to make it last.

And then my memories vanished, as if the plug had been pulled on time. There was just baby formula turned to blood, everywhere now, all over my face, neck, and stomach, streaming down my elbow and wrist, streaming down the stump of my right arm, turning red my legs and feet and toes, washing away my life and spilling it onto Luas, painting us together in an embrace, soaking through his jacket and shirt, spreading across his face, pooling onto the floor and clotting into ugly red crumbs around the edges.

This is how I arrived at Shemaya Station when I died.

And somewhere in the universe, God sighed.

2

Luas led me from the train station to a house not far away. We followed a dirt path through a wood, across pasture, a garden, an apron of lawn. The city I’d imagined beyond the walls of Shemaya Station didn’t exist. We were in the country now.

The sky as we walked was moonless, dark violet and iridescent like a pane of stained glass. Luas led me on in silence, supporting me when I stumbled. I was still stunned from seeing myself bleed to death. Every few yards the weather raged between the extremes of hot and cold, wet and dry, as if even the heavens were stunned too and couldn’t decide what to be and so were all things at once. I felt no physical pain. In an obscure corner of memory my torso throbbed and my nerves shrieked-but these were distant sensations, recollections more than feelings. More immediate was the dampness of the ground against my feet, the changing temperature of the air on my skin, the opalescence of the earth and trees. These were present sensations and the sum my consciousness could bear.

The house to which Luas led me had a broad porch with a white balustrade and wide green steps. An octagonal lamp hung from the ceiling projecting blocks of light onto the lawn, some of it green and leafy and the rest frozen over with ice and snow. The house reminded me of my great-grandparents’ house along the Brandywine River in northern Delaware with the same threatening Victorian turret and gables and pretty scrollwork along the eaves and trim, like so many large homes built in the nineteen twenties. Everything about it was permanent and massive, a bulwark against fate and time: the heavy red brick and fieldstone, the slate roof, the tall windows and ceilings, the thick porch columns and solid brass doorknobs. Even the trees on the lawn and the hills beyond the trees were eternal and massive. It was too dark to see all these things, but I knew they were there in the same way I knew I was there.

On the porch stood an old woman waving excitedly in our direction. Luas squeezed my hand and stiffened to help me up the steps.

“Our guest has finally arrived, Sophia,” he announced.

They exchanged polite hugs the way older couples tend to do, and I braced myself for the old woman’s shrieks when she realized her husband had brought home a nude woman half his age and covered in blood; but for all the scandal and gore of my appearance, you’d have thought this was the condition in which all her guests arrived. She rushed forward and wrapped herself around me, carelessly staining her blue chamois dress with my blood before peeling herself just far enough away to see my face and caress my cheeks, laughing and sobbing, stroking my hair, her hands shaking with emotion.

“Thank you, thank you, Luas,” she said, breathlessly, almost crying.

Luas winked at me and walked back down the steps into the darkness from which we’d come, leaving a trail of bloody shoeprints on the green planks.

They’re obviously mad, I thought.

Sophia had an ethnic face, Mediterranean and expressive and proud, with an angular forehead and thin lips that curled like a faded purple ribbon around a box of secrets. Her tarnished silver hair coiled into a bun, and she spoke with an Italian accent that added syllables to the English words.

“Oh, Brek,” she whispered. “My precious, precious child.”

“Nana?”

The word exhaled from my lungs with a whimper, accompanied by the recollection of an old photograph, the face of my great-grandmother, Sophia Bellini, my Nana. She’d died from a stroke when I was three years old.

“Yes, child, oh yes,” she said.

My only memory of her was from our final time together at the funeral home. I’d thrown a tantrum when my mother made me kiss Nana Bellini goodbye in the open coffin. Above my screaming, I remembered a sound, plastic and horrible, produced when my shiny black shoe fell from my foot and landed squarely on Nana’s pallid forehead. The shoe bounced once and lodged in her hair like a tiara. I remembered the slap of my mother’s hand across my face, and that Nana’s eyes did not open, and that her smile, serene and insane, did not change.

“Nana?”

“Yes, child, ” she said again, squeezing me close. “Welcome home.”

I grinned and pushed myself away.

There comes a moment in every nightmare when disbelief can no longer be suspended and one must choose between waking or allowing the drama to play on, comforted by the thought that it is, after all, only a dream. A nightmare explained everything that had happened to me: the mysterious train station, the baby formula turned to blood, the holes in my chest, the appearance of my dead great-grandmother.

I stepped around Nana, the illusion, and ran my fingers along the white column at the top of the steps. Sure enough, there were my initials-B.A.C.-carved with an eight penny nail one August afternoon when I sat on the porch drinking iced tea and wondering whether summer would ever end and middle school would finally begin. The scent of mothballs and garlic wafting from the kitchen was as distinct to my grandparents’ home as the scent of lilacs to late spring. The screen door chirped twice as it had always done, and our family pictures were arranged on the dry sink in the hall: Nana and my great-grandpa Frank, my grandparents and my great-uncle Gus and his wife, my mother as a little girl and her brothers and cousins-me as an infant and a teen, with and without a right arm.

“I’m dreaming,” I said to Nana. “What an odd dream.”

A smile crossed her face, the same knowing smile that had crossed Luas’ in the train shed, as if to say: Yes, my great-granddaughter, I understand. You’re not ready to accept your own death yet, so we must pretend.

“Is it a lovely dream?” she asked.

“No. It’s a scary one, Nana,” I said. “I’m dead in it and you…you’re here, but you’re dead too.”

“But isn’t that a lovely dream, dear?” she asked. “To know that death isn’t the end of everything?”

“Yes, that is lovely,” I said. “I’ll try to remember it when I wake up, and I’ll try to remember you too. I can never seem to remember your face, Nana; I was too young when you died.”

Nana smiled at me, amused.

“My, this is such a long dream,” I said, stretching and yawning. “I feel like I’ve been dreaming all night. But that’s a good thing. It means I’m sleeping well. I’m so tired, Nana. I want to sleep some more, but I don’t want to be scared. I want this to be a nice dream now. Can we make it a nice dream so I won’t have to wake up and chase you away?”

“Yes, dear,” Nana said, hugging me again. “We can make this a nice dream. We can make this the nicest dream you’ve ever had.”

She led me upstairs without another word, drew me a bath in the claw-footed iron tub off the main hall, and hung a thick terry cloth robe from the door. The dream was improving already. Before leaving me to soak, she paused to look at the stump of my right arm. Even though the accident happened after her death, she seemed neither shocked nor saddened by it, just curious, as though she were studying a cubist painting for the meaning of a missing limb. I smiled, as I always did when someone noticed the amputation, to put her ease. She kissed my forehead and closed the door.

Although the bleeding had stopped, I flushed red water from the tub and refilled it several times. There were three holes in my chest: one in my sternum and two through my left breast. I fingered each hole indifferently, as though I were merely touching a blemish. I could feel the soft tissue inside-torn, fatty, and swollen-and jagged edges of broken bone. My lungs expanded and contracted, sucking on my finger like a straw. I took none of this seriously. Doubting Thomas had probed the holes in Jesus’ hands and come away convinced, but the effect on me was just the opposite. I knew now I had to be dreaming.

I wrapped myself in the robe Nana left for me behind the door and crept through the second floor of the old house, resurrecting memories both pleasant and sad. There was the happy photograph in the master bedroom of Nana and great-grandpa Frank posing before the Teatro Alla Scala on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. One month later, great-grandpa Frank confessed to having escorted his mistress to the very same opera house while on a business trip to Milan. Nana somehow overcame her humiliation and anger and offered him the forgiveness he sought; in return, on the papered wall between the windows, great-grandpa Frank hung a large crucifix with a large Christ whose mournful eyes watched over his side of the bed as a reminder. A heart attack took him the following year.

My grandparents moved into the house after Nana’s death and their belongings now filled the room, but the crucifix remained: alert, watchful, reminding. It was really their house I remembered, not Nana’s. Beneath the cross stood a small bookcase filled with hard bound volumes by Locke, Jefferson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and lesser treatises on contracts and procedure. They were my grandfather’s law books, and after the accident with my arm and the lawsuit that followed, I began to look upon their impressive leather bindings and heft with a sort of reverence and awe. The pursuit of justice seemed to me a more noble and honest religion than the one I heard preached each Sunday in church; my grandfather’s law books contained the sacred texts and liturgies of that religion, making the words of the Bible seem puny and childish by comparison. I was proud my grandfather owned them, and I read them over and over, understanding a little more each time. I ignored the things in the room that would have attracted most girls: my grandmother’s collection of Limoges boxes and silver hair brushes, her treasure of costume jewelry, perfumes, and shoes. She would shake her head when she found me paging through the books and tell me to run along because young ladies shouldn’t waste their time studying law.

Next door, my Uncle Anthony’s room was a time capsule sealed in nineteen sixty-eight, the year after Nana died. In some of the black and white photographs on the walls he’s slumped against a howitzer, the strain of fear and fatigue twisting his face into a haunted smile. In other photographs his eyes are glassy and unfocussed, the muscles of his face sagging in a narcotic stupor that everyone in the family insisted was some rare form of jungle fever but that I knew was either marijuana or heroin. Dog tags and a crucifix with the right arm broken off hung from a chain around his neck in these photos. The only color photograph in the room was taken two years prior to these. In this photograph, First Lieutenant Anthony Bellini stands gallant and brave in full dress uniform next to an American flag. My grandparents kept this picture on the dresser beside the dog tags, the broken crucifix, and the sad blue triangle of cloth presented to them at Uncle Anthony’s funeral. I loved that broken crucifix: Jesus was missing the same arm as me and, when I touched it, I believed he somehow understood. Uncle Anthony died before I was born; when I asked about him I was told only that he was a hero and the subject was quickly changed.

The bedroom across the hall belonged first to my grandfather’s brother, Gus, and, next, to Uncle Alex before he shipped out to Vietnam two years after Uncle Anthony. Uncle Alex returned in one piece from the war, so my grandparents had no need to create a second shrine. Instead, they used the room to store broken chairs, boxes, and clutter that couldn’t find a home in the rest of the house.

My mother was the oldest of the three Bellini children. After she married, her room became the guest room, but they kept her things. The bed was white, with a dingy canopy I detested; a pair of ragged old dolls sat glumly against the pillows, yearning for affection and needing a bath. The lacy curtains she had sewn from an old tablecloth decorated the windows, and at the foot of the bed sat a pine hope chest filled with silly letters and pleated skirts and photographs of horses and kittens. It was a little girl’s room, and, in many ways, my mother remained a little girl all her life. Her room was way up high in the turret where a princess would sleep-an oval-shaped refuge protected from robbers and dragons with small windows facing the front and side of the house. Mom and I lived here for an entire year after she divorced my father; I slept next to her every night in the same bed. We ate popcorn and read books, and sometimes she cried herself to sleep. I was the grownup in that bed, and this made me feel safe. Grownups were always safe.

After my bath, I had intended to dress and go back downstairs to talk to Nana, but I suddenly felt drowsy and weak, as though I were descending within my dream into a deeper level of sleep. I succumbed to the urge, sliding with the dolls beneath the crisp cotton ticking of my mother’s bed and turning out the white unicorn lamp. I fell fast asleep. During this sleep, I began dreaming of my last day on earth.

3

It’s early morning and I’m nursing Sarah in bed with the television on. We’re watching her daddy in his first month as the new anchorman of the Channel 10 Morning News, trying to make cunning chit-chat with Piper Jackson, Channel 10’s incredibly dull but incredibly beautiful new weather girl. Regardless of atmospheric conditions, Piper’s tight skirts and blouses guarantee fair skies and high pressure. Bo and Piper make a picture-perfect couple on the set and smiling down together from the slick, new billboards along the highways that have helped increase ratings for the show ten-fold. I seethe with jealousy every morning-until Piper opens her mouth. Today, while talking with Bo about a tsunami that has just devastated the northern coast of Japan, she mispronounces it “samurai” and speculates that this must be how Japanese warriors got their name. Bo cringes.

“It’s pronounced sue-na-me, Piper,” he says, wincingly.

Piper looks bewildered, like a puppy hit with a newspaper for peeing on a rug.

“What is?” she asks.

“The Japanese word for tidal wave.”

“Oops,” she replies airily, her strawberry red lips ripening from scolded-girl pout into naughty-girl smile. “Well, I guess that explains why they call Japanese warriors tsunamis.”

The cameraman knows exactly what to do. The shot widens to take in her low-cut top and admittedly impressive cleavage. You can almost hear the spontaneous applause of men all over central Pennsylvania and the spontaneous groans of their wives, girlfriends, and mothers. I pleaded with Bo to stick to reporting the news, but Piper and her breasts were bigger and better than the news; advertising revenue at the station increased in direct proportion to the number of minutes she was on screen and the amount of chest she exposed.

Sarah finishes nursing, oblivious to TV ratings, tsunamis, and samurais, perfectly content to see a miniature of her father talking from a box on the dresser no matter what he says. Sometimes she tries to talk back, as though they’re having a conversation.

I shower quickly, planning as I scrub where to pick up with the summary judgment motion I’d been working on and sticking my head out to be sure Sarah’s still on the bed. When the network news replaces her daddy at seven, we switch to Big Bird and I finish applying my makeup and put on my cream silk blouse and black silk suit. I carry Sarah into the nursery and change her diaper, dressing her in a light cotton jumper before switching to pants and a sweatshirt after remembering Piper’s warning that a cold front will be moving through late in the day. Sarah’s hands swing over her head and she stares at them in astonishment, as though she’s seeing them for the first time, a pair of birds from nowhere, soaring and swooning to the music whispering through her tiny mind. With all my might I try to store this moment away-the wide fascination of her eyes and the delicate contractions of her fingers, the sunlight that celebrates her revelation, the polished perfection of skin on her belly-all locked up in my memory like a jewel in a safe deposit box to be taken out later and adored.

I drive Sarah to a daycare operated by Juniata College as a teaching practicum; it’s an excellent facility, bright, cheery, and clean, with bright professors and students eager to try the latest methods and techniques for developing infant minds. The classes are small and Sarah never lacks for stimulation or attention; she’s always laughing and playing and her pediatrician says her verbal and cognitive skills are advanced for her age (although I think he says this to every parent to keep them coming back). When I visit during the day, I’m convinced she’s better off here than if I cared for her at home; but when I kiss her goodbye in the morning and she waves her little hands and looks after me with those sad brown eyes, I wonder whether I’m fooling myself-or whether I’m worse off even if she isn’t. It’s a debate I have with myself in the parking lot every morning but that I always resolve in favor of her exposure to other children and adults instead of being trapped all alone with one crazy woman in the same house day after day the way I was raised. While unbuckling her from her car seat, she flips her bottle upside down and deliberately squirts formula on the shoulder and lapel of my jacket.

“Hey, stop that!” I say, pretending to be angry. “Nobody messes on mommy’s favorite suit, not even a cutie like you.”

I reach the office by eight-thirty and wave to frog-faced Bill Gwynne, who’s already on the phone with a client and whose desk, restored to order by his secretary last evening, is already a mess. Our offices occupy a historic red brick row house next to the county courthouse in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, used first as a blacksmith’s shop at the time the town was founded in the late 1700s and decorated with period antiques. I toss my briefcase and purse into my office on the second floor, pour a cup of coffee, and head up to our small law library on the third floor where I continue the legal research I’ve been working on for the past four weeks, trying to come up with a defense that will allow our very wealthy-and very lucrative-client, Alan Fleming, to avoid repaying the $500,000 he borrowed from a bank. This might seem like a fool’s errand, if not a little unscrupulous, but it’s actually my favorite part of legal practice: the intellectual challenge of winning a case that most lawyers would, and should, lose, by uncovering an overlooked fact, finding a forgotten law, or creating a novel legal argument from the thousands of statutes, regulations, and cases that constitute American jurisprudence-all to arrive at what we think of as justice-which, like it or not, has been defined for centuries not as the divine balancing of equities but as what the rule of law requires when applied, without bias, to the facts-and explains why the robed lady holding scales in front of the courthouse wears a blindfold. Otherwise, the theory holds, we would have favoritism and chaos rather than law and order.

This particular morning, the blind lady of justice bestows upon me a generous gift in the form of a little-known federal banking regulation from the Great Depression called Regulation U that forbids banks from making loans used to purchase securities if the securities pledged as collateral are worth less than fifty percent of the debt. The regulation was intended to prevent stock market crashes from taking the banking system down with them, but it catches my eye because Alan purchased stocks with the loan he’d defaulted on and, as I recall, pledged stocks worth only thirty-five percent of the debt-which is why the bank is now suing him for the balance. If the loan officer knew at the time he made the loan that Alan was using the proceeds to buy stocks, the bank violated the regulation by not demanding more collateral. I research further. The blind lady of justice bestows a second gift upon me in the form of a companion statute stating that if the bank violates Regulation U, it’s prohibited from suing the borrower to collect the debt. In other words, a bank error excuses Alan Fleming from repaying the half million dollars he borrowed, and the bank’s case against him must be dismissed. I slap the table with my hand in triumph and clench my fist. “Yes!” I shout. I feel like a football player stopped cold at the one yard line but who scores a touchdown anyway because he extends the tip of the ball across the front edge of the goal line. It’s a technical argument and arguably unfair-just as extending the tip of the ball across the goal line is only a technical touchdown and arguably unfair-but the rules of the game are the rules of the game and a touchdown is a touchdown. I race back down to my office for the transcript of the deposition I took of the bank’s loan officer, Jorge Mijares, to see whether he knew about Alan’s intention to buy stocks with the loan.

The transcript comprises several hundred pages of testimony given under oath before a court reporter with each line of testimony numbered for easy reference. Scanning through it, I recall how, like most of the male witnesses I had confronted during my short legal career, Jorge Mijares had refused to take me seriously from the moment he was sworn in by the court reporter. That I could be a young woman, handicapped, and an attorney at the same time was inconceivable to him; that I could have delivered a baby six months earlier, and would need to adjourn the deposition to pump breast milk, was a shock from which he never fully recovered. With all the dignity and splendor his perfumed Latin masculinity could summon, Jorge wished for me to know that things are not done so in his native Chile, where women are spared the vulgarities of law and business. Jorge had emigrated to Huntingdon at the age of ten when his father accepted a professorship in anthropology at the college. He and his family returned often to their native land and maintained their Chilean accent and customs. Their dark, handsome conquistador faces and exotic voices made them a delicious curiosity in the very white, very rural, very conservative Borough of Huntingdon, population: 15,000.

On page one hundred and fifty-five of the transcript, I locate the testimony I’ve been hoping for-the testimony that destroys the bank’s case:

Q. Do you know why my client wanted the loan, Mr. Mijares?

A. Well, you see Ms. Cuttler-you know, such formality makes me so uncomfortable. May I call you Brek, dear?

Q Oh, yes, please do, Mr. Mijares. You are so very kind to ask.

A. There it is again, Stephen, that look. Did you see it?

Stephen was the bank’s lawyer, Stephen Russ, and Mr. Mijares was commenting to him about the way I had allowed my eyes to linger over his face and my lips to spread into a capricious smile before covering my mouth with my hand as though I were a school girl swooning in the presence of a teen idol. It was the third time I had done it that afternoon. This was not a sign of a weakening of my marital fidelity: I was not in the least bit attracted to Jorge Mijares, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of cheating on my husband. This was, instead, my strategy for coaxing Mr. Mijares to answer my questions. I had discovered that rather than resent and resist the arrogance of men like this, I could more easily defeat them by flirting with them and using their prejudices against them; their unbounded conceit inevitably led them to become distracted and careless-and to say more on the record than they intended. This may have made me no better than Piper Jackson, but at least I knew the difference between a tsunami and a samurai. In any event, Stephen Russ, the bank’s lawyer, saw what was coming and knew that his client-a well-known womanizer-was in deep trouble; he rubbed his sunken gray temples as though he were hoping a genie would pop out of his head and make it all go away.

Q. I’m sorry, Mr. Mijares. Please continue.

A. Thank you, dear. And, please, call me Jorge. You know, I simply must say this. You remind me, Miss Brek, of a statue at one of our most famous museums in Santiago. It is of a young princess beseeching the moon. She is, how do you say it…? Ravished? No, no…ravishing. And do you know, forgive me, the arm is missing and this makes her all the more alluring.

Q. Oh, my, how you flatter me, Mr. Mijares. I see now why you’re such a powerful and well respected man in this community. Alan warned me that if I wasn’t careful, you would end up deposing me. But we should continue or we will be together all night. [Jorge’s eyes widened when I said this, like a child tempted with a piece of candy.] These business dealings are so confusing for a woman. I hope you can help explain them to me. Alan wanted to buy stocks with the loan, is that right?

A. Now who is flattering whom, Miss Brek? Yes, of course, I will help you with these things. It is very simple, really. You see, Alan told me he had a tip from his broker and wanted to buy some stocks, but he was a little overextended at the time and needed to finance the purchase…excuse me, do you know what I mean by “finance”? You know, to pay over time, just as you would use your husband’s credit card to buy yourself a nice dress or something? You see? It’s all the same thing, it’s not so difficult. He wanted to buy the stocks on credit and we gave him the loan. Alan and I have done business together many years. Until this unfortunate incident, he had been a very good customer.

In truth, neither Jorge Mijares nor I understood the significance of his testimony at the time; but Stephen Russ, who had represented the bank for many years and knew all the banking regulations, understood all too well; he jolted forward in his chair as though the building across the street had just exploded and immediately asked for a recess. I thought maybe his lunch didn’t agree with him and he needed to use the bathroom, but I was happy for the break because damp spots were beginning to form on my blouse and I needed to pump. And so, while Stephen Russ squeezed the bad news from his client in one room, a small battery-operated milking machine squeezed the milk from my breasts in another. I kept up this torture and humiliation for a couple of months after returning to work from giving birth to Sarah before switching, mercifully, to baby formula most of the time; I read all the studies saying breast milk is best-and I believed those studies and did my best for as long as I could-but I was a lawyer, not a milk cow; I had survived on formula and so could she.

Back in my own office now a few months later, I finally realize that Jorge’s testimony is fatal to the bank’s case and cinches our defense. I take the transcript and the regulation over to Bill’s office and lay them on the last open patch of mahogany on his desk. He’s buried in a file and doesn’t look up as he speaks.

“Yes?” he grumbles.

Bill’s always irritable in the morning, and this morning even more so because he’s preparing for hearings in two cases at once; his large frog’s eyes dart from file to file as if hunting insects, fingers snapping at the papers like a sticky tongue. He’s wearing a conservative gray suit and matching vest, white shirt, and maroon tie. He’s old school and never takes off his jacket in the office, even in the middle of the summer.

“Read it,” I say proudly.

“Why?”

“Because it’s how we’re going to win a case we’re supposed to lose.”

He glances up at the regulation. “What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Alan used the loan to buy stocks and pledged stocks as collateral. Regulation U says the stocks had to be worth at least fifty percent of the loan. Alan’s stocks were worth only thirty-five. Mijares testified he knew. The loan’s void and unenforceable as a matter of law. We win.”

The frog eyes dilate and the fingers snatch the transcript from the desk. There’s silence as Bill reads the testimony, then he starts laughing. “Jorge got a little carried away with himself, didn’t he?”

“He’s very charming,” I reply.

Bill puts down the transcript, picks up the regulation and reads it. “He won’t be so charming when he finds out you outfoxed him in the deposition,” Bill says. “I’m glad to see you know how to handle men like that… By the way, I’ve seen the statue he’s talking about; I went to Santiago when I represented the grape growers in the cyanide case.”

“You handled that case, too?” I ask, always amazed at Bill’s remarkable legal career. I was in college during the public scare over red Chilean table grapes being laced with cyanide; when the news stories broke warning people not to eat them, my dorm roommate promptly started snacking on them by the bunches. She hated red grapes but her boyfriend had just broken up with her; she said she didn’t have the courage to slit her own wrists and figured grapes would be the easier way to go.

“I thought you only represented plaintiffs back then, not defendants,” I say.

“The growers were the plaintiffs,” Bill replies. “There was no cyanide. The scare was a hoax but the Chilean farmers lost everything-thousands of tons of fruit was embargoed and destroyed. Jorge’s father, Professor Mijares, asked me to take the case; the Mijares still own vineyards in Chile. We sued the government to lift the embargo and we sued the insurers to pay the claims.”

Outside the window beside Bill’s desk, the morning sun strikes the bright yellow fall leaves of a maple tree, making the tree appear as though it has burst into flame. A small sparrow lands on a branch, risking immolation.

“There’s an interesting myth behind that statue,” Bill continues. “Legend has it that when the princess was a young girl, the king forced her to eat her vegetables. To spite him, she shoved the arm she used to hold her fork under a millstone and it was crushed. Now she pleads with the heavens for forgiveness.”

I consider this strange tale for a moment. “I think the heavens should plead for her forgiveness,” I say.

Bill arches his bushy eyebrows. “The king only made her eat her vegetables, Brek; he didn’t force her to marry the old pervert running the kingdom next door.”

“What law says she has to eat her vegetables?”

Bill smiles and shakes his head. “Let’s have this conversation again when Sarah turns six.” He waves the regulation at me. “Any cases on point?”

“None,” I say, but I’m unwilling to drop my defense of the one-armed princess just yet; I know how much she’s suffered and how she’s been judged by every person who sees her, because it’s human nature to assume that another person’s misfortune must be some form of divine retribution. “You know,” I say, “maybe it had nothing to do with eating vegetables. Maybe her father was ignoring her and she was just trying to get his attention.”

Bill doesn’t respond and an awkward silence follows. I realize I’m rubbing the stump of my own right arm and he’s watching me. The bird in the maple flies away having survived the inferno.

“When can you finish the brief?” he asks.

“Rough draft by Tuesday.”

He puts down the regulation and starts in on one of the files in front of him. “I’ll be in court all afternoon and then I have a board meeting,” he says. “Have a nice weekend.”

“Thanks. You too.” I gather my materials and get up to leave.

“It’s a creative argument,” he says without looking up. “Few lawyers would have thought of it.”

“Regulation U or the princess?” I ask.

“Both.”

I turn to leave but stop. I’m gratified by the rare compliment but suddenly remorseful about the outcome. “So, Alan Fleming keeps five hundred thousand dollars that don’t belong to him because of a technicality?”

The frog’s mouth frowns as if the insect it has just swallowed tastes bitter. “Yes, and with any luck this afternoon I’ll put an arsonist back on the street. But next week I’ll have an innocent man freed on the same technicality, and a legal technicality will win an injunction against the landfill that’s discharging dioxin and killing all the bass in Raystown Lake. You can’t have one without the other, Brek; justice wears a blindfold because she isn’t supposed to see who’s loading the scales.”

“Or with what.”

Bill ignores my wisecrack and goes back to his work.

“See you Monday,” I say.

4

I return to my office and begin outlining my summary judgment brief on a legal pad, stopping to look outside at the pale green film of the Juniata River dappled with the reflection of scarlet and jasmine leaves on the trees, each a unique frame of autumn. Bill’s right. I’ve done nothing wrong; in fact, I’ve done my job perfectly. The system is working exactly as designed, which is more than can be said for the system that maimed the princess in Santiago-or the system that allows someone like Piper Jackson to do weather forecasts. Which reminds me to telephone Bo at the studio.

“Hi,” he says. “I was just getting ready to call you.”

I yawn, rather loudly and unexpectedly. “Wow,” I say, “sorry about that. It’s been a long morning… So what’s the latest? Did they ever catch that samurai warrior who attacked the northern coast of Japan? I heard he did a lot of damage.”

“Very funny,” he says.

“Sounds like he really sakéd the coast.”

Bo groans. “I’ve heard that one three times already this morning-interestingly, all from women. You people can be so jealous and mean-or you just love making puns out of rice wine. How did Sarah’s drop-off go?”

“You people? Jealous and mean? She’s a babbling idiot! How can you stand her?”

Bo hesitates, pretending he’s trying hard to find a reason. I know he likes her even though she’s an embarrassment. Finally he says, as though helpless before an irresistible force: “Well, she does have beautiful…weather forecasts.”

“You’re a pig, Boaz,” I respond. He hates it when I call him by his first name. His parents named him Boaz after King David’s great-grandfather and the American soldier who rescued his mother’s family from the Nazis during World War II. “With all the money the little weather tart is bringing into the station, you’d think they could find her some clothes that fit and maybe arrange to give her another shot at elementary school since the first time didn’t seem to take. Sarah was fine. She spilled formula all over my suit.”

“She loves doing that. I’m on my way to Harrisburg. Holden Hurley is being sentenced this afternoon. They want me to cover it since I broke the story.”

My secretary, Barbara, sticks her head in to tell me Alan Fleming’s on the line. I tell her to take a message. “When will you be home?”

“Around six unless things get crazy,” Bo answers. “I should still be able to fix dinner.”

“What are we having?”

“Any requests?”

I start glancing over the outline of my summary judgment brief again and don’t hear his question.

“Hello?” he says. “Food? Any ideas? I can tell you’re working on something.”

“What? Yeah…the brief in the Fleming case. Sorry. No, I can’t think of anything, whatever you want.”

“Hurley’s skinhead buddies from The Eleven will be protesting at the courthouse. Did you shave yours this morning?”

“No, but I’m very cute bald,” I reply. “You’ve seen my baby pictures.”

“You know,” Bo says, baiting me because Bill and I are members of the American Civil Liberties Union, “I value free speech as much as the next guy, particularly because I’m a reporter, but rallies advocating the subjugation of ethnic groups go a little too far, don’t you think? Why should they have the right to use public property to incite hatred and violence?”

I lose my train of thought and have to go back to the top of the outline.

“Really, I want to know,” Bo presses, actually sounding agitated. “How can you defend them?”

“We’ve been through this before,” I explain. “It’s fascinating how you liberal Jews suddenly get conservative when the subject is anti-Semitism.”

“Hurley’s not just any anti-Semite; he diverted public school funds to finance a white supremacist group intent on starting a race war. Would you defend a group of men who come out to demonstrate in favor of legitimizing and encouraging gang rape?”

“Oh, you mean the financial industry…? Look, I would be among the first to organize a counter-protest to shout them down; but, yes, I would defend their right to say it. Who decides what speech is okay and what speech is forbidden? Using your theory, Jews should be banned from demonstrating in favor of Israel because Israel subjugates the Palestinians. That it’s a state instead of a small group of extremists is only a matter of degree. Your mother lived through the Holocaust and even she thinks anti-Semites have the right to express themselves. Maybe you should listen to her once in a while.”

“My mother’s biased. And crazy. She tells everybody you’re a better Jew than I am because you went to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services with her this year. Do you have any idea how difficult you’re making life for me?”

“I like challah bread. Besides, it’s the Day of Judgment and the Final Appeal; there’s nowhere else a lawyer would rather be: the most important cases before the highest court in the universe and lots of desperate clients willing to pay anything to get off. For lawyers, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are like the Olympics, Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, and Stanley Cup all rolled into one.”

Bo muffles the phone and I hear him talking to someone.

“Sorry,” he says, “the crew’s waiting for me in the van. I’ve gotta get going. When are you finishing tonight?”

“Around six.”

“You’re pushing it kind of close with the daycare, don’t you think? Even with two salaries I don’t know how much longer we can afford the five dollar per minute penalty for picking her up late. At some point, they’re going to kick her out and then what will we do?”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll be there on time.”

“Okay. Bye. I love you.”

“Have fun. I love you, too.”

I hang up and look at the photograph on my shelf of Bo and me at his sister, Lisa’s, wedding. He’s wearing a yarmulke and looks so sweet and happy.

I had actually assumed Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, would be a festive and gay celebration, like New Year’s Day, but it turned out to be just the opposite-brooding and ominous, the day God judges the lives we’ve lived during the previous year. The shofar blasts calling the congregation to worship inside the synagogue were terrifying-the voice of God condemning the entire human race-but the liturgy for the day, the Musaf tefillah, had the effect of reaffirming my belief that God and justice are inseparable and one, and that as a lawyer trained in pursuing justice I had an inside track on redemption.

Still gazing at the photograph and recalling the Days of Awe, as the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known, I acknowledge to myself for the first time that I married a Jew for the same reason I had become a lawyer: to be closer to justice. I suppose I had always known this, but I concealed it from myself and from my Irish-Italian Catholic family-who were not particularly pleased with my selection of a mate, but not unbending either. In arguing with them that I loved Bo as a man and that religion shouldn’t matter, I had been less than completely honest; religion did matter-very much so-just not in the way they were thinking. For a Catholic girl raised in a community of fundamentalist Protestants, Bo’s Jewish heritage, with its stories of struggle and heroism and promise of being chosen by God, glittered like an exotic jewel; I found myself attracted to him in the same way I would have found myself attracted to a rock star, an actor, or a professional athlete-because he could give me inner access to a rare and alien world and the status in life I desired. I fell in love with Bo Wolfson for all the normal and best reasons-because he was incredibly handsome, wonderful, sensitive, and caring, a man who made me feel special, loved, and complete, and who even accepted my disability as a charming attribute rather than a cause for fear and revulsion. It’s just that his religion made the package, for me, irresistible. The Catholic Church and Jesus’ teaching of turning the other cheek-which, to me, formed the bedrock of Christianity-made no sense in a world filled with warfare and violence, a world filled with people like Holden Hurley, a world that allowed an eight year old girl to lose her right arm. I thought Moses had it right with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth;” this rule better reflected my personal experience and understanding of the way the things worked. I sometimes thought I was a Jew trapped in a Christian’s body, like one of those poor souls who believes they’re a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice-versa; only in my case I was not a transsexual but rather a “transspiritual.” Marrying Bo enabled me to experiment safely with being a member of the opposite religion without having the theological equivalent of a sex-change operation-a full religious conversion.

I focus now on the yarmulke Bo wears in the photograph- the universal symbol of Judaism, which suddenly recalls for me, as a Gentile, not the blessings of a chosen relationship with God but the horrors of five thousand years of tragedy-and I feel frightened. I think of Bo’s mother, Katerine Schrieberg, at the age of seventeen fleeing through the German woods with her family, wondering whether they would survive the night. I think of Bo’s grandfather, Jared Schrieberg, who died in those woods, and of the heiress, Amina Rabun, whom Bill and I sued for reparations on behalf of the Schriebergs because her family made their fortune by constructing the incinerators at Auschwitz and robbing the Schriebergs of their Dresden home and movie theaters. I think of Holden Hurley and The Eleven, trying to re-ignite the hatred of the Nazis and, perhaps, the incinerators. I imagine how it would feel to be hunted and murdered across the centuries. Am I brave enough to bear that pain? Do I want it for my daughter? And then, I wonder whether my name was sealed in the Book of Life or the Book of Death at nightfall on Yom Kippur.

I go back to my summary judgment brief, working through lunch and stopping only when I realize I have ten minutes to get to the daycare to avoid the dreaded five dollar per minute fine. When I arrive, Sarah is the last child there, gumming a Nilla Wafer into a sticky brown paste on her face and watching a videotape of Barney the Dinosaur. The shame of being the last mother to pick up her child spoils my joy at seeing her. She’s covered with dull red paint stains, all over her little sweatshirt and sweatpants, hands, neck, and face. She toddles toward me as fast as she can, arms outstretched, smiling and cooing. I kneel down. Miss Erin, the day care intern from the college, grins.

“Hi baby girl,” I say to Sarah, sweeping her up into my arm and kissing her face, inhaling the sweetness of her hair. I look up at Miss Erin. “How was she today?”

“Great,” Miss Erin says. “She’s been a very good girl.”

Miss Erin is a junior at the college and has definitely found her calling. She looks like a cartoon come to life with two small black dots for eyes, thin sticks for arms and legs, and freckled cheeks framed by long ropes of braided orange hair; she wears a trademark yellow smock with the sun embroidered on it. She loves little kids, and they love her.

“Sorry about the mess,” Miss Erin says. “I’m going to miss her so much. She was my favorite.”

“Are you leaving?” I ask, assuming from her response that she won’t be seeing Sarah again.

“Well, I am going home for the night,” she replies, puzzled by my question.

“But when you just said you were going to miss her and she was your favorite… I guess you meant for the weekend.”

Miss Erin looks at me strangely and gives Sarah a kiss. “Goodbye sweetie,” she says. “I love you.”

Sarah gives Miss Erin a peck on the cheek.

“Thanks for taking good care of her,” I say, grabbing Sarah’s bag of nearly empty milk bottles and art projects and glancing over her activity sheet for the day. “Have a nice weekend.”

I carry Sarah out to the car, buckle her in, and slip a cassette of Hot Tea and Bees Honey into the tape player. As we drive away, I glance at Sarah in the rearview mirror and ask her how her day went. She pretends to answer with cooing and babbling sounds.

We stop at a convenience store on the way home to buy milk. The parking lot is empty. An autumn breeze freshens the car when I open the door. It’s not even six-thirty yet but it’s already dark as midnight. I unbuckle Sarah from her car seat. She reaches for my hair and I tease her by tilting away; she giggles, exposing a single tooth; her hair falls into her eyes, dark and full of curls like her daddy’s. Carrying her across the parking lot, I’m humming the song we had been listening to on the cassette.

We enter the store and head for the dairy case in the back. I have to juggle her with one arm as I pick up a half gallon of milk; she giggles at nearly falling. We turn and head back toward the counter through the pastry aisle. Sarah reaches out with her tiny hand and knocks a row of cupcakes onto the floor. As I stoop to pick them up, the overpowering smell of decaying mushrooms fills the air. How strange, I think. I turn to locate the source but, suddenly, find myself back at Shemaya Station, on the bench beneath the rusting steel dome. Sarah’s gone. I’m sitting next to Luas, covered in my own blood.

5

Dead people doubt the finality of their own deaths. We either don’t believe it’s happened or we hope for some miracle to change it. We learn to accept it only gradually, at our own pace and on our own terms; but this creates confusion, because we extend the torn fragments of our lives into the open wound of the afterlife, grafting the two together. For sensitive souls-the souls of saints and poets who lived their lives in the knowledge that truth exists only in the spiritual world-the transition to Shemaya might seem perfectly seamless and immediate; but for the rest of us, including people like me, who placed their faith in logic and reason and what could be measured with instruments and seen with our own two eyes, the transition from life to death takes much longer. We resist, deny, and explain away our mortality at every turn. Thus, the very first thing we forget when we die is how it happened, or, more accurately, this is the very first thing we choose not to remember, because to remember such a momentous event is to concede the inconceivable.

The next morning, which was my first morning in Shemaya, I awoke to the smell of coffee and cinnamon. These were the aromas I’d become accustomed to on Saturday mornings during my life, and as far as I was concerned this was just another Saturday morning. Bo would get up early for a jog and bring breakfast home from the bakery, slipping quietly out of the house and returning with a bag full of sticky buns and other goodies. I loved him for this. While he was gone, it was my privilege and vice to linger in bed with my eyes closed, drowsy, warm, and contented beneath the covers. That morning in Shemaya, I lingered in bed just this way, in the blissful state on the border of sleep, unable to discern the meaning of the bizarre dreams about the train station, Luas, and my great-grandmother, trying to commit them to memory before they dissolved into the noise and distractions of a new day. What was it she said that I wanted to remember…? I’d forgotten already. Dreams can be illusive that way. The house was quiet, Sarah still asleep. The surreal images from the night and the possibilities of the day floated through my mind like fireflies and I chased after some and let others get away. It would be a beautiful autumn weekend. Friends had invited us on a hike up Tussey Mountain and later to an apple orchard for cider and a hayride; Sarah would fall asleep in her backpack to the rhythm of Bo’s steps; there were leaves to rake, floors to vacuum, and groceries to buy. And, I’d have to return to the office for a few hours on Sunday to work on my brief.

The thought of winning Alan Fleming’s case was the brightest firefly on the lawn of my mind and off I went. Lying there in bed, I considered the possibility that I might just be turning into a good lawyer after all-despite being a woman and a mother and having only one arm to carry a briefcase and shake hands. What a wonderful feeling to wake up to. I reanalyzed Regulation U and the cases in my mind and outlined the sub-arguments; I thought again about the hike and the hayride and breakfast, and chased away doubts about the fairness of my client keeping money that didn’t belong to him; by that time I realized I’d completely forgotten the dreams and Nana, and that it was time to get up and nurse Sarah.

I pushed back the covers and opened my eyes. There was blood everywhere, all over the sheets and my body; I screamed and jumped out of bed, banging my head against a post that didn’t belong in my bedroom-the white post of my mother’s canopy bed in my grandparents’ house in Delaware. How clever, I thought, rubbing my head and trying to calm myself down. I’ve awakened from the second dream but not the first.

I went to the window facing the front of the house and peeked outside. Only a dream could explain what I saw. Half of my grandparents’ estate glowed golden, orange, and umber in the fading colors of autumn, while the other half shimmered in the fluorescent greens and pastels of spring. Sunflowers wilted and pumpkins ripened at one end of the garden as daffodils and tulips blossomed at the other. Red squirrels gathered acorns among robins searching for earthworms; two flocks of noisy Canada geese flew by overhead, one going south and the other north, separated by a dissonant zone in between where a fierce winter blizzard exhausted itself beneath a scorching August sun. I marveled at the merging seasons, struck by the enormity of their compression in space and time. It explained the hot and cold, wet and dry I’d experienced walking up to the house with Luas the night before; yet the more I stared into the continuum, the more it acquired the unfocussed Wizard of Oz quality of an illusion in two dimensions cast on a screen: the squirrels and geese made the same series of motions; leaves swayed in repeating patterns; squalls unleashed by the blizzard swirled in a constant velocity vortex.

Nana must have heard my scream; she entered the room without knocking, dressed in her pajamas and a flower print bathrobe. Through the hall window behind her, the faint gray shadows of dawn dissolved into a morning blue sky streaked orange with the rays of four different suns rising over the Brandywine Valley through the prism of four different seasons and merging into one brilliant fiery ball. It was beautiful.

“Are you ok, dear?” she asked with concern in her voice.

“It isn’t real,” I said calmly, pointing out the bedroom window. “It’s scripted and mechanical…a dream…like you.”

Nana opened the window, allowing the scents and temperatures of the four seasons to flood into the room in equal and opposite waves, canceling each other into one temperate climate.

“But it’s not a dream, dear,” she corrected me, dusting small mounds of yellow tree pollen and powdery white snow from the windowsill. “During your life you only dreamed of being awake.” She started making the bed, ignoring the fact that the sheets were soaked with blood. Pulling the comforter taut, she said: “Let’s go downstairs and have breakfast; I made carrot muffins just the way you like. We can go on that hike up Tussey Mountain later today. I know you were looking forward to it.”

I watched her, amused by the dream. “But it isn’t morning and I’m not awake yet,” I insisted. “If I were awake, you’d be gone, so I think we’d better change the subject.” Nana placed her hand on my arm-an old woman’s hand, wrinkled and rough against my skin; she was trying to convince me that I wasn’t dreaming; the effect was authentic, but I wasn’t impressed. “Dead people don’t talk to each other,” I said. “And they don’t have eyes to see each other or bodies to touch each other.”

She squeezed my arm. “That’s true, dear,” she said. “But it’s easier now for you to think of death that way. You aren’t ready yet to let go of life.”

“But I’m not dead,” I said, “look-”

I jumped up and down, doing a little jig in the bedroom and waving my arm around to prove it.

Nana indulged me with a smile. “You know,” she said, “I remember the shoe. Your mother shouldn’t have slapped you like that; I would have been scared too. I can’t imagine what she was thinking. Making a three year old kiss an old dead woman? Yuck.”

I looked at her in sheer horror. This was one of those nightmare moments just before waking when the thing you’ve been dreading is about to happen and you know you’re powerless to stop it-the moment that produces maximum terror, causing you to scream out in the middle of the night-which is exactly what I did. I ran down the stairs shouting “Nooooo!” at the top of my lungs. Through the kitchen and out the back door I ran, past the sink cluttered with baking dishes and the table with the plate of fresh carrot muffins. I stopped on the back porch and closed my eyes, hoping it would all go away; I even imagined reaching across the bed for Bo and finding his hip with his boxer shorts bunched up, and his legs, warm and downy, pulled up to his chest. I nuzzled close, contouring my body to his, the way a river conforms to the shape of its bank, defining itself by what it is not; his skin smelled masculine and strong and his whiskers thrilled my arm when it brushed his chin; I kissed him on the back of the neck and adjusted my breath to the gradual expansion and contraction of his chest. He stirred and smacked his lips softly. It must have been two or three in the morning because I swore I could hear the faint laughter of the college students who lived on our street returning home from their Friday night parties. But when I opened my eyes to see the clock on the dresser, I found myself still standing on Nana’s back porch in Delaware with the seasons-and my sanity-colliding.

“Bo! Bo!” I yelled.

“Brek, honey, it’s ok,” Nana called from the kitchen. “I’m right here.”

“Bo! Hold me! Hold me!”

But I couldn’t feel him anymore. I leaped from the porch and raced around the house, hoping a sudden burst of exertion would jar me awake. Through winter, summer, spring and fall I ran, past the oak with the tractor tire swing, around the herb garden simultaneously leafy and barren, through beds of tulips dripping with dew and chrysanthemums covered with snow. I tripped over the hump of a root surfacing through the soil beneath the white pine at the northern end of the house and landed face down on the soft needles, my robe spread out around me like the wings of a fallen dove. I stayed there for a moment, catching my breath, inhaling the sweet pine scent and searching for answers-logical, material answers. What was happening to me? Why couldn’t I wake myself up? It was the most terrifying dream I’d ever had.

I brushed the needles from my robe and looked around. The convulsing seasons had transformed the lawn into a paradise of climates-an entire year of days condensed into a single, dazzling moment of nature in rebellion against time. The apple tree I’d climbed as a child extended its limbs through all four seasons at once: some branches in blossom, some leafy, others tipped with ripe green apples and still others bare, like an unfinished painting. I reached from spring into winter, scooped up a handful of snow, and watched in amazement as the summer sun melted it into water that evaporated and began falling as rain on the other side of the lawn. Even more wondrous than this was the light produced by the coupling seasons: the rays of four suns, describing four distinct arcs across the sky, fusing into a shimmering aurora that passed through the objects it touched like an X-ray, exposing every darkness and allowing no possibility of shadow. The light was a feeling more than a physical phenomenon-a pervasive sentiment of brightness, uninhibited by the laws of physics and obedient only to the lawlessness of joyful emotion. I rose to my feet and twirled with my head back, dissolving into the light like my handful of snow, drinking in its warmth, allowing it to flush away my fears.

When I stopped spinning I saw my car, for the first time, parked behind the rhododendrons. The magical light retreated, taking with it the idea that this was all a dream, as if reason itself had been a passenger trapped in the car, waiting to be released by my glance. Hot and cold, night terrors, hallucinations. A fever? Yes, of course. A fever would explain everything that had been happening to me! I even remembered not feeling well on Friday and wondering whether I was catching a cold, that my skin had felt cool and damp. I gazed around the lawn again and up at the house; I looked down at my legs and feet and flexed my left hand. Everything was right where it was supposed to be, and everything worked as it was supposed to work. Only the seasons were out of place, and that surely could be the result of a fever. I must have driven to my grandparents’ house in some sort of delirium and collapsed.

Nana was gone when I went back inside. The dishes in the sink were put away, the counter cleaned. A thin film of dust coated everything, as though it hadn’t been used in weeks. The oven was cool. Not even the aroma of the muffins lingered in the air. I had made it all up after all. I really was at my grandparents’ house in Delaware.

I ran upstairs to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. There was my black hair, intact but disheveled, and ashen skin and bloodshot eyes. Carefully, I pulled open my robe. The holes in my chest and the red stains were gone. I laughed ruefully for having even looked. I took the mercury thermometer from the medicine cabinet and slipped it under my tongue: it read one hundred and six, confirming my self-diagnosis. I obviously needed to get to a doctor, but equally obvious: I was alive.

I went into my grandparents’ room and phoned home but got the answering machine: “Bo, it’s me,” I said, “are you there? Bo? I don’t know what’s happened…I think I’m really sick. I’ve got a fever and I guess I blacked out; I’m all the way down in Delaware at my grandparents’ house. I don’t know how I got here, I can’t remember anything after picking up Sarah at the daycare yesterday; oh, my God, I hope she’s all right. She’s not here with me, nobody’s here…I’m so sorry. She must be starving, there’s formula in the cupboard… I don’t know whether to come home or try to see a doctor here… I think I’m feeling a little better so maybe I’ll try to make it home and see how I do. I can always turn around. Ok…I’ll be there in a few hours. Give Sarah a kiss for me… I love you. Bye.”

My clothes were piled beside the guest room bed-my black silk suit with formula stains-no blood-on the lapel and sleeve, my blouse, stockings, underwear, and shoes. I dressed quickly and left a note for my grandparents that I’d been there and would explain later.

6

The fall sun warmed the interior of my car, dry-roasting the confetti of autumn leaves on the hood even as budding trees and blooming crocuses swelled in the same sunlight at the opposite end of the driveway. Between them, a snowstorm melted into the sultry vapors of a midsummer day. I must have contracted some sort of rare tropical disease like Dengue fever. Whatever it was, it was better than being dead.

I inserted the key into the ignition and held my breath, still not certain my fever had broken and worried there might be more surprises in store. “Thank God!” I said aloud to myself when the engine roared to life. My car had always been my sanctuary, the one place in the world where, despite a missing arm, I was equal to everyone else and in control. I didn’t have special license plates, and I didn’t park in the special places close to stores, but my car was in all other respects a vehicle for the handicapped. My parents gave it to me for my high school graduation and Grandpa Cuttler made the necessary alterations himself in the tool shed behind his barn. He bolted a rotating aluminum knob to the steering wheel so I could turn it with one hand and moved the ignition switch and stereo to the left side of the column. Extenders on the shifter, wiper stalk, and heating controls enabled me to operate them with the stump of my right arm. I refused to wear a prosthesis, but I wasn’t ashamed to drive one. The day they surprised me with it was among the happiest days of my life, and theirs as well; the car purchased for me the independence I’d dreamed of and, for them, a penance for the sin of my disfigurement at such an early age.

I took a deep breath and nudged the shifter into gear. The car accelerated forward smoothly and I actually enjoyed negotiating my way through the seasons, blasting through the alternating bands of rain, slush, snow, and dry pavement. The drive from northern Wilmington to our home in Huntingdon took about three hours, arcing west along the Lincoln Highway through the flat farmlands of Lancaster County, then turning north at Harrisburg and crossing the Susquehanna River on Route 322, following the Juniata River Valley into the Allegheny Mountains. I tried to remember the trip down to Delaware from Huntingdon the night before-what I’d seen, what I’d been thinking, what I’d been listening to on the radio. I couldn’t recall anything. I’d always had an excellent memory: I remembered the first chapters of the novels I read as a teenager, and the holdings of the Supreme Court decisions I read as a law student; I remembered the lyrics to old TV theme songs and all the birthdays in my husband’s family to three degrees of consanguinity; but I couldn’t remember anything after picking up Sarah yesterday at the daycare and stopping by the convenience store on the way home.

The gas gauge indicated the tank was full when I left Delaware and it didn’t move the entire drive home. Strange, but no more so than anything else that had been happening to me. The trip was otherwise uneventful: the typical number of cars and trucks occupied the highway and did the typical things cars and trucks do; the landscape, sky, road signs, buildings, and billboards looked as they had always looked, except everything was wrapped in variegated bands of winter, summer, spring, and fall. The mountains crawled along the banks of the Juniata River like gigantic striped caterpillars, their deciduous forests alternately ablaze in reds, oranges, and yellows, snow covered and white, just budding and speckled green, and deep leafy jade. Gorgeous. Another pleasant but unexpected aspect of the drive was the serendipitous way the radio stations seemed to play the music I wanted to hear, when I wanted to hear it, without any DJs or commercial interruptions. All in all, things looked brighter for me with every mile, and I believed an end to my misery was near; but as I turned toward Huntingdon on Route 522, an anxious feeling overcame me that washed my optimism away. I began to worry about the nature of my illness and what it might mean. Maybe I had a brain tumor? I worried. Or maybe my hallucination of being dead was a premonition of the real event to come? Bellini women from my great-great-grandmother on down swore they were visited by an angel in the middle of the night to prepare them before somebody close was about to die. Was Nana Bellini that angel, coming to prepare me for my own death? Suddenly the possibility of a terminal illness was more unbearable than the possibility of already being dead. I imagined receiving the news from the doctor and falling to pieces, then telling Bo and holding Sarah close, knowing I wouldn’t see her grow up. Who would braid her hair, or make her Halloween costumes, or teach her to bake cookies? Who would introduce her to Louisa May Alcott and Harper Lee, or take her camping or to the ballet, or comfort her through puberty and adolescence? Who, but her own mother, could convince her that there’s nothing in life that she, as a girl, or a woman, couldn’t do? I was nearly hysterical by the time I turned down our street.

Bo’s car was parked in front of the house and I screeched to a stop and ran inside. Everything looked as I’d left it Friday morning, but no one was there. Bo’s cereal bowl with a puddle of milk in the bottom sat on the coffee table next to the unread back sections of the New York Times; bagel crumbs and empty jars of strained peaches and pears cluttered the kitchen counter; our black Labrador retriever, Macy’s, food bowl was half full, but she didn’t bark when I entered and was nowhere to be found; our bed was still unmade and the romper I’d decided not to dress Sarah in that day was still draped over the rail of her crib. I checked the garage and found the jogging stroller, so they couldn’t be out for a run. There was no note by the phone. The only message on the answering machine was the one I had left from my grandparents’ house. I called the Channel 10 studios but nobody answered the switchboard-worrisome, but not necessarily uncommon for a Saturday. There was no answer at either my mother’s or father’s, no answer at Bo’s parents either. I went back outside and looked around the house and in the garage. Nobody. The entire neighborhood was deserted.

We lived on a Lilliputian street in Huntingdon near Juniata College with small brick homes dwarfed by old sycamore trees shaped like giant broccoli. Having been born and raised in Brooklyn, Bo insisted on living in a town with a college; it was his only hope of transitioning from Manhattan to Appalachia. His dream was to be a reporter and news anchor in New York City, but the television stations there told him he needed small market experience before they would even consider looking at his audition tape. This disappointed and terrified him. He thought of small market television as a forsaken third world of vacuum tubes and static that existed somewhere between the Hudson River and the Hollywood Hills. Applying to Channel 10 in Altoona was my idea, actually; it was one of the stations I had grown up with on visits to my Cuttler grandparents’ farm in the fertile valley outside of State College, one of only two stations with VHF transmitters strong enough to reach the arrowhead antenna strapped to the brick chimney on their house in Warriors Mark. Channel 10 in Altoona was just about as small market as you could get. Central Pennsylvania is mostly dairy farms where the land is tillable and coal mines where the mountains rise up-still populated by black bears, white tail deer, elk, and more cattle than people. Schools and businesses there close for the first day of buck hunting season; and, in contrast to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, silos and coal tipples are the tallest manmade structures. When Bo got the job, I called Bill Gwynne, the lawyer in Huntingdon who had represented me and my family after the accident with my arm. Although Huntingdon was even deeper in the middle of nowhere than Altoona, Bill was considered one of the top trial lawyers in the state and he happened to need an associate. The timing and location seemed just right, almost destiny.

I heard music playing in the house next to ours and went over, hoping to find somebody who might have seen Bo and Sarah. Nobody answered the door when I knocked. I pounded on the front doors of all the houses on our street, some with frosted windows, the sidewalks in front covered with slush and snow, and others baking in the afternoon heat; nobody answered, and I started to get worried. I walked over to Washington Street. The hoagie shop and bookstore were open but empty-no customers or employees. The entire commercial district was strangely silent except for the occasional sound of passing cars and buses. Growing more frantic, I ran down the sidewalk past bicycles chained to parking meters and cars parked at the curb, looking in the doors of vacant shops and cafés for any sign of life. It made no sense. This was the busiest part of town on a Saturday in the fall. I eventually ran out to a line of cars queued at the stoplight to ask if anybody knew what was going on, but as I approached and peered inside the windows, I saw no drivers or passengers in any of them. Even so, when the light turned green, they revved their engines and proceeded on their way down the street in the normal flow of Saturday traffic. Astonishing-and creepy. I thought back over my drive from Delaware and realized that I’d passed hundreds of cars and trucks that stopped, turned, yielded, and accelerated, but I’d been so preoccupied with my thoughts of fever and death that I hadn’t noticed drivers or passengers in any of them.

A tormented howl suddenly shattered the eerie silence of the street. I looked around to see where it was coming from and discovered it was coming from me. It was the sound of madness. I made a wild dash through the cafés and shops, throwing things from tables and shelves, smashing dishes and glasses. I wanted someone, anyone, to come and restrain me. When no one appeared, I tore out into the middle of the street without looking, daring the cars to hit me. On cue, they screeched and smoked to a halt.

“Where is everybody?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Why won’t somebody help me?”

I climbed onto the roof of one of the cars to get a better view and watched in disbelief as traffic backed up in both directions through the changing seasons: some cars had their windows down, some up, wipers and lights on and off. Two police cruisers raced to the scene, red and blue lights flashing and sirens blaring but no officers emerged; the cruisers just pointed menacingly at me.

I broke down sobbing on the roof of the car. There was nothing left to do. I’d been frightened this badly only once before, as a child in the emergency room of Tyrone Hospital when the attendants laid me on a gurney and placed my severed forearm inside a lunch cooler beside me. I had been amazingly calm until that point; I believed my Grandpa Cuttler when he promised me in his pickup truck racing to the hospital that if I kept my eyes closed everything would be all right. But then they started wheeling me down the hall and I saw the anguish on his face and tears pouring down his cheeks; the gurney crashed through the swinging doors and deposited me into the nightmarish hell of an operating room. I was crazed with terror. They slashed away my clothes, stabbed needles into my wrist, and removed my severed arm from the cooler and held it up to the light like a wild game trophy. The arm didn’t seem real at first: the skin was slimy and dishwater gray, the white elbow bone protruding from the end like the plastic connector of a doll’s arm, tinged with smears of cow manure and blood, the fingers-my fingers-gnarled into a grotesque fist. I fought the nurses until they forced an anesthesia mask over my mouth and I lost consciousness.

Losing consciousness…howling on top of the idling car in the middle of gridlocked Washington Street, this was all I hoped for now, losing consciousness and awakening on the other side, in a hospital room where my mother and father would be there to hold me and tell me everything would be all right. But it wasn’t to be. I stayed on top of the car that first afternoon in Shemaya until the sun overhead divided back into four suns, each setting over the mountaintop at different points and different times, torching the sky into a blaze of pink and gold flames. Inconsolable, I crawled down and walked back home. The traffic jam cleared as the cars continued on their way to nowhere.

When I reached our house, I heard a voice.

“I’m sorry, child,” Nana Bellini said. She was sitting in the rocker on our front porch, enjoying the beautiful evening as though she’d just stopped by for dinner. I was certain now that I’d be locked up soon and sedated. I was obviously insane and dangerous. I talked to her while I waited to be taken away.

“How was your drive?” I said flatly, adopting her everything’s normal and we’re all happy to be here attitude.

“We’re not there, dear,” she said.

“We’re not where?”

“Do you remember when you were a little girl and your bedroom turned into a palace and knights rode beneath your windows on great white horses?”

“Who are you?”

“Remember, child? You pretended to lounge in long flowing gowns, dreaming of the prince in the next castle. You created a world within the world that had been created for you; you painted its skies, constructed its walls, and filled its spaces; like a tiny goddess, you caused a land to exist with nothing more than your mind; but as you grew older, you found the existing structures of time and space more convincing and put aside your own power to create in favor of the creations of others. The power to create wasn’t lost, Brek. It can never be lost. It’s natural at first for you to re-create the places that have been dear to you.”

“Where’s my husband and my daughter?” I demanded. “Where is everybody?”

Nana smiled-that patient, knowing smile of hers and Luas’, as if to say: Yes, my great-granddaughter, reach now, reach for the answers.

“We’re not there anymore, child,” she said. “It was a wonderful illusion, but it’s gone; you’ve returned home. You won’t see them again until they come home too. Free will is absolute; we can’t direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm-”

She was scaring me again. “Leave me alone!” I shouted. I ran back down the walk toward my car.

“Wait, child,” she said. “Where are you going?”

I didn’t know where. I just knew I had to find Bo and Sarah. I had to get help. Maybe it wasn’t Saturday, maybe it was still Friday and I could pick Sarah up from daycare and start all over. It’s all just a dream, I kept telling myself, just a bad dream; you have a fever and you’re sick. I climbed into my car and started the engine. Nana called out to me:

“What would the daycare look like?”

As soon as I thought about it, I was there. The house vanished, and with it my car, the trees, the street, the entire neighborhood. The rough brick wall of our neighbor’s house transformed into the daycare’s smooth white wall decorated with paper blue whales that Sarah and the other children had colored with Miss Erin’s help. Bright, freshly vacuumed play rugs now covered what had been the lawn; the cubby I’d crammed with fresh crib sheets, diapers, and wipes on Friday morning stood where the passenger seat of my car had been; colorful plastic preschool toys were stacked neatly near the curb; a craft table with boxes of Popsicle sticks, bottles of glue, and reams of colored construction paper sprang forth from the porch steps; and a row of shrubs became shelves holding clipboards filled with blank activity sheets for each child, ready to document the food consumed, bowel movements produced, and fun had during the day. The scent of baby powder and diaper rash ointment filled the air. But there was no laughter in the daycare, no squeals or cries. Not a child. Not a teacher. Not a sound. Nana stood in the doorway, watching me explore the space, probing it for hidden gaps, searching for the wizard behind the curtain. The movement between locations had been seamless, immediate. I wasn’t transported: my surroundings simply evolved, and I caught on quickly.

The next thought that came into my mind was the set of the morning news where Bo had tried to banter with Piper Jackson. As quickly as the memory arose, the wall of colored whales metamorphosed into the sunrise mural of the Horseshoe Curve that served as a backdrop for the newscasters. Studio cameras with TelePrompTers stood where the cribs had been; lighting racks dangled from the ceiling, and a green background for the computer generated weather map emerged from a closet; coffee mugs with large “10”s on their sides steamed next to sheets of script with last night’s sports scores and the latest national news. Fresh doughnuts and fruit covered a small table behind the cameras. Like my neighborhood and the daycare, the set was deserted.

I thought of my law office next. My desk, computer, files, bookshelves, treatises, diplomas, and pictures of Bo and Sarah surrounded me instantly. Then came Stan’s delicatessen on Penn Street and my Bellini grandparents’ beach house in Rehoboth Beach, followed by my Cuttler grandparents’ barn in Warriors Mark and my bed in the physical therapy ward at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where I watched Bobby Hamilton, with both arms amputated, learn to tie his shoes with a long crochet hook in his mouth. I revisited the cinder track behind my high school where I’d won several races against two-armed opponents and amazed myself and the small crowds. I sat at the bar at Smoky Joe’s on Fortieth Street near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where I had danced the night away with my girlfriends during law school. I knelt before the altar at Old Swedes Church, where my best friend, Karen Busfield, who had become an Episcopal priest, asked whether I would pledge my troth to Boaz Wolfson before God and a rabbi and pronounced us husband and wife. I wept in the delivery room at Wilmington Hospital where my mother had given birth to me, and then again at Blair Memorial Hospital in Huntingdon where I’d given birth to Sarah and Bo’s tears dropped onto my lips. Each room and space from my past came as fast as I thought of it, as though I were plunging down a shaft cored through the center of my life.

I went back to linger, walking the sands of the Delaware shore, climbing the hay mow in my grandfather’s barn, pulling on the Nautilus machine that strengthened my left arm to do the work of my right. I revisited not only the locations but the reality, every detail: the sinewy saltiness of Stan’s corned beef, the burning smoke and stale beer of Smokey Joe’s, the warm rain on our wedding day, the cold stirrups of the delivery room bed. Nana accompanied me, but did not interfere. Her fascination with how I had lived my life nearly equaled my fascination with the power to re-create it; but the exertion of doing all this exhausted me, and soon portions of one space began blurring into others: ocean waves lapped at the corn crib on my grandparents’ farm three hundred miles from the coast; Bo’s anchor chair sat behind the high altar of Old Swedes Church, and in it sat the ornate gold altar cross, staring into camera three as if delivering news of the Judgment Day. The images, the realities, congealed into a single nonsensical mass that finally ground to a halt under its own weight.

And then, everything went blank and filled with an indescribable light that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere. Through this light Nana extended her hand to me in a gesture of love, smothering the blaze of fear that had nearly consumed me.

“You’re dead, child,” she said. “But your life has just begun.”