Heroes of the Frontier

V

THIS WAS A DIFFERENT WAY OF MAKING PLANS. Sam had said that she would meet Josie at five p.m. on Monday, and because Josie had no phone and Sam never picked up hers, that plan would have to suffice and be honored. By Josie’s calculations, if they drove straight from Seward to Homer they’d make it by noon, five hours early. There was supposed to be a barbecue on the beach to welcome them, Josie and her kids.

She caught Paul looking at her in the rearview mirror. He was assessing, gauging whether or not his mother knew what she was doing. She looked back at him, projecting competence. Her hands were on the wheel, she had her sunglasses on, she had a map on the passenger seat, and directions to Homer.

I’m dubious, his eyes said.

Screw off, her eyes responded.

Josie turned the radio knob left and right, occasionally securing a signal in the middle, and when it was clear, it seemed to be broadcasting a Broadway marathon. Gwen Verdon in Redhead. These were obscure songs, songs known only to someone whose formative years were engulfed by the maniacal sounds of musicals known and obscure, failed and world-dominating — most of them sounding tinny now and desperate to please. Her relationship to the music was complicated at best, tied up as it was with her parents’ work and devolution.

The musicals had happened when she was nine. She hadn’t known her parents to be interested in any music at all. The family owned no stereo. There was a radio in the kitchen, but when it was on, rarely, it was tuned to the news. There were no records, no tapes, no CDs, but then one day there were boxes of records, vinyl black holes spread all over the floor. Her parents were nurses in the psych ward, though they brought little of the work home. As a child Josie heard them mention restraints and Thorazine burps, heard them discuss the man who thought he was a lizard, the man who made imaginary phone calls all day, using a spoon. But now there was homework. They’d been put in charge of bringing music to the ward. Their supervisor had encouraged them to keep the music upbeat and clean and distracting. Everyone had settled on Broadway musicals as the least likely to provoke murder and suicide.

With a borrowed record player and fifty LPs bought at an estate sale — a music teacher in the next town had died — their home was filled, for the next few years, with Jesus Christ Superstar (deemed too thought-provoking) and Anne of Green Gables (wonderful, foreign, unrelatable) and On the Town (perfect, as it described a healthier approach to the home life of enlisted men). They would listen to a new one every night, were required to examine every song, every word, for its appropriateness, its ability to cut through misery and uplift. Patterns emerged: Irving Berlin was fine, Stephen Sondheim too complex, morally problematic. West Side Story, including as it did gangs and knives, was out. My Fair Lady, being about nothing the veterans recognized as their lives, was in. Older musicals about presumably simpler times prevailed. Oklahoma! and Carousel and The King and I quickly made their way into rotation, while South Pacific was shelved; they wanted nothing about soldiers still fighting any foreign war. So many well-known shows were tabled in favor of less troubling but forgotten shows that now only Josie could recall. Jackie Gleason in Take Me Along—a vehicle for Gleason to be Gleason. Richard Derr and Shirl (Shirl!) Conway in Plain and Fancy, about New Yorkers in Amish country. Pippin was out, the words circled by her father, then crossed out: “And then the men go marching out into the fray/Conquering the enemy and carrying the day/Hark! The blood is pounding in our ears/Jubilations! We can hear a grateful nation’s cheers!” That wouldn’t work.

The first musical Josie remembered well was Redhead, a show built around Gwen Verdon. The first seconds of the record were a revelation: everything was manic. The wall of delirious optimism appealed to her as a child, though her parents studied the words for controversy. They consulted her sometimes, danced with her occasionally — there was a time when their home had something in common with the bizarre happiness of dozens of people singing from a stage to darkened strangers who’d paid for joy and release. She remembered her mother, on her back with her legs in the air, doing some kind of yoga stretch, her father trying to put Josie on his shoulders to dance, finding the ceiling too low, her hitting her head, the two of them laughing, her mother admonishing, and the musical went on. Josie, in those years, pictured her parents’ lives at work as a similar sort of nonstop party, the soldiers dancing, too, with their simple and solvable problems — broken arms and legs, a few days in and then out again, her parents serving them jello and fluffing their pillows.

“It smells,” Ana said from the back.

Josie turned down the radio.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Paul agreed, something was off. Ana suggested skunk, but it was not skunk. It smelled like something in the engine, but then again it wasn’t the smell of oil or gears or gasoline.

Josie opened the windows in the cab and Paul opened the kitchen windows. The smell dissipated but was still present.

“I can really smell it here,” Paul said. Ana said her head hurt, then Paul had a headache, too.

At a rest stop Josie pulled over and crawled back to the kitchenette. Now the smell was much stronger — it was a faintly industrial smell that spoke of great evil.

“Get out,” she said.

Ana thought this was funny, and pretended to be asleep, her head resting on the kitchenette table.

“Now!” Josie yelled, and Paul unbuckled her and pushed her in front of him until the two of them were down the steps.

“Get on the grass,” Josie said. Now she knew what it was. The gas was on. All four knobs had been turned full right. She had the momentary thought that she should jump out, that the whole vehicle might explode if she even touched the stove. But, inexplicably wanting to preserve the Chateau, their new home, she reached over, turned all four knobs hard left and then jumped down from the doorway, pushing Paul and Ana, who were standing on the grass, Paul behind Ana, hands on her shoulders, until they were all fifty yards away and panting. The Chateau stood still, unexploded.

A car passed, heading toward the RV, and Josie ran to the parking lot, directing them to make a wide berth around the Chateau. “What is it?” the man asked. He was a grandfather with three kids in the backseat.

“Gas was turned on. From the stove,” Josie said.

“You should turn it off,” Grandpa said.

“Thank you,” Josie said. “You’re very helpful.”

He turned his station wagon around, and Josie crouched in front of Ana, who was holding her ThunderCats figure in front of her in self-defense. How had she grabbed that on her way out? She had found time to grab her ThunderCats figure while fleeing an imminent gas explosion. “Did you know you almost caused a very bad accident?” Josie asked her.

Ana shook her head, her eyes wide but defiant.

“She turned the gas on?” Paul asked Josie. He turned to Ana. “Did you turn all the knobs on the stove?”

Ana looked at her knees.

“Ana, that’s really bad,” he said. This was, Josie knew, the worst thing he’d ever said to her. Ana’s chin shook, and she began to cry, and Josie stood, satisfied. She wanted Ana to cry for once, to feel remorse for once. Ana’s nickname for most of last year was Sorry, given how often she had to say the word, but this had almost no effect on her tendency to put herself and her family in grave danger.

This is a kind of life, Josie thought. She stood, looking around, noticing now that they had parked next to a beautiful round lake, the surface so clean and placid that the sky was reflected in it, in perfect symmetry. Looking at it, Josie felt a certain calm as she cycled through some questions and observations. She wondered how close to death they’d actually been. Could they have all died at midmorning, on a sunny Alaskan day? She wondered, with some seriousness, if Ana was an emissary from another realm, disguised as a child but tasked with the murder of Josie and Paul. She wondered how long they needed before the Chateau was clear of deadly fumes. She wondered what a life was — if this was a life. Was this a life? And she wondered about the gene she possessed, some strangling DNA thread that told her, daily, that she was not where she should be. In college she changed her major every semester — first psychology, then international studies, then art history, then political science, and all the while she was on campus she wanted to be away, away from the pedestrian workaday nonsense of most of her classes and the directionless pathos of most of her peers. She went to Panama, and felt briefly vital, but then tired of shitting in a hole and sleeping under a net, and wanted to be in London. In London she wanted to be in Oregon. In Oregon she wanted to be in Ohio, and in Ohio she was sure she needed to be here, in Alaska, and now, she wanted to be where? Where, for fuck’s sake? For starters, somewhere high above all this filth and calamity.

“Mom, take my picture.” It was Ana. Her pants were around her ankles, her hands outstretched, as if ready to catch a falling man.

Josie took her picture.

—

They made it to Homer. It was only one o’clock. Josie pulled into the Cliffside RV park and paid sixty-five dollars for the night, and then they headed out again, down the road, toward the spit. Or the Spit. It was where most of the action in Homer was, Sam had said, so Josie descended from the hills and down the two-lane road onto the narrow promontory jutting into Kachemak Bay. Sure, it was pretty, Josie thought, without being Seward. For Josie nothing had compared to Seward. Maybe the closeness of those mountains. The hard mirror of that bay. The icebergs like lost ships. Charlie.

On the Spit’s main drag there were some old buildings that had real or former fishing operations in them, and there was a stretch of stores and restaurants, so, realizing they hadn’t eaten, Josie parked the Chateau next to another, far more luxurious recreational vehicle, knowing this would make its owners happy, to know they were better than her, than her children. Josie ducked under the sink, pulled a handful of twenties from the velvet bag, and they left.

She took Paul and Ana by their hands and crossed traffic, heading for a pizza restaurant that looked, from the outside, as though it had been made from broken ships — the exterior was a mess of bent walls and masts and crooked windows, everything blue-grey, like driftwood. The door was covered in stickers denying entry to those without shoes, with dogs, to unaccompanied children, to smokers and Republicans. Under that last admonition were the words “Just Kidding,” and under that, “Not Really.” Inside it was light-filled and warm and staffed exclusively by women. It seemed to be some kind of political pizza place, a pizza restaurant embodying its version of utopia. There was a giant stone oven in the middle of the first floor, and five or so young women buzzed about it, all in white aprons and blue shirts, all with short hair or ponytails. Josie ordered a pizza, afraid to look at the price, and the woman behind the counter, with a pixie cut and exhausted eyes, told her to sit upstairs anywhere.

The second floor was bright, glassed in and overlooking the sound. The sun was so hot there that they all took off their jackets and long-sleeve shirts and were still warm in their short sleeves. Ana asked if she could have a knife and Josie said no. Paul tried to explain to his sister why knives were dangerous but Ana had already gone to the bathroom and in seconds there was the sound of something falling. She returned to the table, saying nothing.

“Can you check the bathroom?” Josie asked Paul, and he leapt up, knowing he was on a mission that combined his dual loves: checking after his sister, and pointing out the wrongness of someone else’s behavior.

He returned. “Looks pretty bad,” he said, and turned to Ana. Ana wasn’t listening; she had caught sight of a motorboat cutting across the bay.

Josie stepped into the bathroom and found a towel rack on the ground, knowing Ana had made it this way, and knowing that only Ana could have separated the towel rack from the wall this quickly. Hundreds, if not thousands, of customers had no doubt used this bathroom and this rack without breaking it, but Ana had done so in less than ninety seconds.

The political pizza place had had an intoxicating effect on her already, for Josie found herself not caring about the towel rack. In fact she was briefly stunned, undeniably impressed, that this girl had that acute a sense for the weakness of objects. That she could enter any room, any bathroom in Homer, and know the object most likely to be broken, and just how to go about it.

She went down and told one of the women that one of her kids had broken the towel rack.

“How’d he do it?” the woman said. A different woman — with feathered earrings — was pulling something from the oven.

“It was my daughter,” Josie said, and now Josie knew she wouldn’t have to pay for the damage. Her leverage was invisible but real.

“Just leave it up there,” the woman said. “We’ll get it.”

Josie ordered a glass of chardonnay and two milks.

Upstairs, it was two p.m. but felt like sunrise. The light on the water was tap-dancing wildly, trying too hard, really, and there was some boat out there they were watching — some great yacht with a thousand white sails. Josie finished her chardonnay and when one of the political pizza women, a third, with a sheep’s black curls all over her big head, brought the food up, a lumpy pizza served on what appeared to be a piece of bark, Josie ordered another glass.

This was why people linger. Sometimes a place asks you to stay, to not rush anywhere, that it’s warm, and there’s the tap-dancing water, and the powder-blue sky, and they had the second floor to themselves. Josie felt that if anyone else came up there she would drive them away, she would throw a knife. This was now their home.

Soon Ana was standing on the floor, using her chair as her table, eating her slice with her elbows on the seat. She was a disgusting shark-child but Josie loved her monumentally at that moment. Her never-questioning confidence in herself, in how her limbs should work, made clear she would always do things her way and never wonder if it was the right way — this meant she could be president and certainly would always be happy. She wiped her mouth on her arm like a feasting barbarian, and Josie smiled at her and winked. The sun swished around in the gold in her glass and it sang a song of tomorrow. Josie drank it down.

The kids ate two slices each and Josie had two, and then wanted more wine. She asked the kids if they wanted anything. They didn’t, but she convinced them they wanted some of the cookies she saw in a jar on the counter downstairs. Then she convinced Paul it would be great fun if they wrote an order down on paper, and if he brought it down to the political pizza women. Josie didn’t want to see their eyes or puckered mouths when they heard her order a third chardonnay at three p.m. on a Monday. And besides, Paul was at a stage where he liked to be entrusted with making a phone call, with punching in ATM codes, with running into the 7-Eleven himself. He knew it would be a decade before Ana would be allowed to do this kind of thing. He knew he was responsible and he liked proving it.

She wrote out the order: 1 milk, 2 cookies, 1 chardonnay, and the check, and Paul took it downstairs. He returned a few minutes later with another bark plate, all the items balanced on top. He was struggling a bit, and Josie thought, for a fleeting second, that she could get up and help him, but would he really want that? She stayed put.

He made it to the table, and looked at her with a terror that seemed to question whether or not his parent really knew what she was doing. To put him at ease Josie smiled benevolently, like a grandma-saint. She wanted to toast him, and briefly raised her glass, but thought the better of it. “Look at the new ship,” she said, before turning toward the bay and realizing it was the same one she’d seen before.

The chardonnay ennobled her, made her stupid. Her tongue grew and could no longer form words. She didn’t want her children hearing her slur in the afternoon so she said she was resting her eyes, to soak in the warmth of the sun, and she raised her face to the streaked glass ceiling. Josie saw Jeremy’s face, then her father’s, and heard her father, in his white nurse’s uniform, joking about sticking his head in the oven. Josie opened her eyes and saw Paul and Ana standing, his face near the back window, watching a pair of dogs humping in the dunes.

After Carl she’d alternated between complete indifference to any carnal pursuits — she had no urges, no drive, made no plans, could muster nothing approaching an effort — and then, once every six weeks, there would be a calling within her, something like possession, and she would be in heat. She occasionally slept with Tyler, a high-school boyfriend. No, not a boyfriend. Someone she’d known glancingly in high school and with whom, through the miracle of internet nostalgia-sex, she had reunited. He’d written to her one day, attached a photo of her in her Halloween costume — she’d gone as Sally Bowles from Cabaret after her unsuccessful audition (I defy thy verdict, Ms. Finesta!). She recalled the feel of the tight satin on her legs in the cool night, the silver wig, and remembered her many admirers that evening and in the days after. A pair of satin tights, a black vest and the imaginations of hundreds of boys were alive for decades. So Tyler re-found some picture, called, said he was in town — passing through. Okay, fine. They ate pasta, drank numbing red wine and later, in his hotel, he did a fine job with his small cock until he became determined to stick his finger in her ass. He tried it once and Josie moved herself in a discouraging way. Five minutes later he tried again, and this time she gently pushed his hand away, assuming the matter settled. He tried once more, though, five minutes later, and this time she tried to make it funny, laughing a bit as she said, “Why are you so hellbent on sticking your finger in my ass?”—but despite her caution and obvious decorum he pulled away, pulled himself out of her, no great loss, and then — this part was delightful — he smelled his finger. Very slowly, very discreetly, as if he was just scratching his nose. He even looked away when he did it! Out the window! As if hoping he’d gotten at least a little bit of her feces on his forefinger before she’d thwarted him. That was why he’d been sticking his finger in there. To smell the finger afterward. He was memorable. And there was the other man, the one who died. The last man she’d slept with had died a few weeks later. How did she feel about this?

Vincent. He had been a kind man. A kind man who had said he would never leave her. For the children, he’d said, and she had appreciated this, his grave seriousness about not damaging her children in any way by entering and exiting their lives, for he knew about their father, Carl’s powers of invisibility. I won’t leave you, he said. I won’t do that to your kids, he said. Never mind that he barely knew them and they couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. It was too soon. She understood he meant well, but after two months of seeing each other, he had said that if they were ever to break up it would have to be her doing it. He could not abandon her. He would be in it for the long haul. She was flattered, maybe even impressed, but it was a bit constraining, no? She asked her friends: This was constraining, yes? To be told that this man would be attached to you, for the sake of the children he does not really know, for eternity.

He had a habit of watching her as she watched movies. He caught her tearing up during an Iraq War soldier-widow movie and after that, every time there was an emotional scene of any kind on the screen before them, he turned to her. She could always sense in the dark his face angling toward her, to see if she was crying, or about to cry, or welling up. To what end? What internal score sheet was he keeping? He didn’t carry a handkerchief and never offered her a tissue. But he’d been indoctrinated. Stay with woman for sake of children. Watch woman and her displays of emotion.

“Come to Normandy with me,” he said once. “The kids, too. I want you all to see something.” He wouldn’t tell her why he wanted to go to Normandy. He thought it would be some wonderful surprise. She explained the difficulty in leaving her practice, and trapping her small children for fourteen hours on two planes — all without knowing why they’d be going to that French beach. Finally he told her: He’d been learning more about an uncle — no, a great-uncle; he corrected himself the next day, apparently after some phone calls to his Salt Lake genealogists — who had fought and died on D-Day. He wanted to go, pay his respects, and apparently because he’d decided whatever was his was hers, he wanted to share it all, the field of graves, with Josie.

She’d suggested a few weeks away from each other and he’d nodded, agreeing, praising her wisdom, and then two weeks later he’d died. He’d collapsed on the beach. At Normandy. He’d gone to lay flowers at the grave of his great-uncle, then, apparently after that he’d gone jogging, and suffered a venous thromboembolism. The funeral, back in Ohio, was a mess of ex-girlfriends and sisters — the man had a life full of women, and they had all loved him, so why hadn’t Josie tried harder?

The check from the political pizza makers arrived. They wanted eighty-two dollars. With a tip she would be paying a hundred dollars for a pizza, two cookies and three glasses of wine. This was Alaska. It looked like a cold Kentucky but its prices were Tokyo, 1988.

Josie paid and walked down the steps, out the door, and felt so free, out in the open, and happy that the women of pizza hadn’t seen her, drunken afternoon mother. Then she felt the afternoon’s new chill, and looked at her children, and realized they didn’t have coats on. Where were their coats? Josie turned around to find one of the women of pizza, standing at the door, holding their coats and long-sleeved shirts, smiling like she could have Josie imprisoned.

Josie took the coats, hustled Paul and then Ana into them, and they wandered down the street. Three shops down was a kiosk full of hand-woven hats and sweaters and Josie was sure she’d never seen such beautiful things.

“Were these made here?” Josie asked the woman, grey-haired and with bright opal eyes. The woman was grinning with joy barely contained, as if to be in Homer, selling handicrafts, was more than she deserved.

“No,” the woman said. “Bolivia, mostly.” She purred the liv portion of the nation’s name, implying this was the only place or way to do it, to live, and it seemed to Josie the only way to say the word.

Josie fondled the sweaters and hats, thinking she must purchase these Bolivian goods in Alaska, and if she didn’t, she would have missed an opportunity to fully seize this moment.

“You let me know if you have any questions,” the woman said, and sat on a nearby stool, raising her face to the sun with a beatific smile.

Josie found a scarf, wrapped it around Paul’s neck and stood back to admire him. He looked five years older, so she took it off.

“Mom, how do you know Sam again?” Paul asked.

This was unusual for him. Normally she didn’t have to tell him anything twice; his memory was airtight for unusual information about the adults in his life. Before she could explain, this time more memorably, he asked, “Have I met her?”

He had met her. Or Sam had met him, held him as a baby. Josie told Paul this, and made up something about how he had really bonded with her, that she was sort of a godmother to him.

“So she’s my godmother?” he asked.

Josie looked quickly to the opal-eyed woman, expecting judgment, but her ecstatic expression hadn’t changed.

The truth was that Josie hadn’t given Paul godparents yet. When he was born, she held off, wanting to wait till his personality had formed, to better match him to the right people. It had seemed radically enlightened at the time, but since then she’d plainly neglected the task. Now, this notion of Sam seemed inevitable.

“Sure,” Josie said.

Anyone would be better than Ana’s godparents, friends of Carl’s, who received the honor like a bad wedding gift quickly shelved. Ana hadn’t seen anything from them — never a card, nothing.

Sam, well, it could go either way. She would not likely be a smothering sort of godmother, but perhaps she could be the distantly inspiring sort? She could ask Sam about it when they saw her. No one ever said no to being a godmother, so it was as good as done.

“Sam’s the best,” she added. “Did I tell you she had a crossbow?” Sam wasn’t the best, and she was only guessing about the crossbow, but Josie was overcome with a sudden longing to see Sam, and to strengthen their ties over this godmother notion. She did love Sam in a complicated way, and hadn’t seen her in five years, and they’d walked the same strange path, and above it all and most important for Josie this day, Sam was an adult. Besides Stan and magic-show Charlie, Josie hadn’t said more than please and thank you to anyone over eight years old since they’d been in Alaska.

“She’s your stepsister?” Paul asked.

This was true in a general sense. Telling the whole truth of their sisterhood wasn’t possible, not to an eight-year-old. Though she’d tried, Josie hadn’t arrived at a simple enough storyline to explain Sam to her children.

“Right,” Josie said. “Pretty much.”

Now the grey-haired woman opened her eyes. Josie caught her looking at Paul, as if assessing if he had the strength to live through all this — cloudy step-aunt and godmother, tipsy mother. Josie bought sweaters and hats for Paul and Ana, showing the woman her competence and love by spending $210 on bright Bolivian clothing that her children would wear only reluctantly.

—

Josie did some math and realized she had spent all of the money she’d brought, $310 in an hour, while in a state of being most would consider intoxicated. Across the street she could see the Chateau beckoning, warm and still.

“Who wants to watch Tomás y Jerry?” she asked.

They went back to the RV, the kids settled into the breakfast nook and she started the movie. Josie crawled upstairs, fully clothed, lay down on the sunny mattress. Before she fell asleep, she heard Paul say to Ana, “Are you going to get your coloring book? I don’t know how long you can play with a carrot.” Were they watching the movie or not? How did it matter? She drifted off, and woke up an hour later, sweating heavily. She looked down to find Paul and Ana asleep, with their headphones on, hair matted.

She closed her eyes again, feeling the heat of the afternoon, thinking that what she had done, taking the kids up here, notifying no one, especially not Carl, might be considered criminal. Was it illegal? Insane? Carl would use that word. For Carl, good things were insane. Bad things were insane. Josie was insane. “You grew up next to a nuthouse!” he would say, as if that meant something. As if the entire town where Josie had been raised would have been deranged by osmosis. As if Josie growing up near the Rosemont Veterans’ Administration Hospital, formerly the Soldiers’ Home, better known as Candyland, would explain whatever he hoped it would explain. He thought her childhood, her proximity to the scandal, her emancipation from her parents at seventeen, gave him some kind of leverage. He was from sturdier stock, went the implied logic, so he was entitled to drift — was allowed to do nothing. This was nonsense, of course. His father was part of a beef conglomerate that deforested some large swath of Costa Rica to make room for cows and grass, cows that would eventually be chopped into American steaks. That’s why he grew up in some luxurious expat school in San Jose — Costa Rica’s, not California’s — and why he’d grown up with servants, and why he had no idea how to work, what work meant. And because he’d never seen any connection between work and the ability to pay mortgages and the like, he felt at will to judge Josie’s every quirk. And because Josie had been born to two nurses — an occupation Carl associated with the servant class he’d exploited as a child — and because both of them were implicated in the Candyland scandal, any variance in her behavior, any flaw or weakness, could be exploited, tied to this VA tragedy.

When she and Carl were together, they’d decided not to tell the kids anything about Candyland, but now, as she lay in the Chateau, soaked in sweat, breathing the stale air inches from the ceiling, she knew she would have to be on guard around Sam. Sam, she knew, had told her twins about it all, Sunny and her own emancipation, and would be determined to bring it up in front of Paul and Ana.

Josie’s parents had been nurses at a hospital. She could tell her kids that — she had told them this. This was enough for now. At Ana’s age that was all Josie knew. Her parents wore white when they went to work at Rosemont, and came home together, changed out of their whites and said nothing about their day. Josie’s knowledge of their work came in stages. When she was seven she realized their hospital was for veterans. When she was nine, there were the musicals at home, and she became aware of Vietnam, and that most of Rosemont’s patients had fought there. But she didn’t know what ailed them: she pictured rows of beds of happy soldiers with sprained ankles and black eyes. She didn’t know, as a child, where it was exactly, if the war was still on or not.

Occasionally her parents talked about the patients. There was a man who spent the days knocking the side of his head, as if to free up some loose bolt. There was the man who, not wanting to disturb the perfection of the made bed, slept under it.

“I hope your parents aren’t part of that Candyland mess.” One of Josie’s teachers said this one day. Josie had never heard of any Candyland mess. But the news that year became inescapable. The suicides. Rosemont had been overprescribing their psych patients and they were dying in alarming numbers. They slept eighteen to twenty hours a day and when they weren’t drugged into a stupor they were killing themselves at the rate of one every few months. Most of the suicides happened in the psych ward itself, a few after discharge, and all were horrible in their strange detail. A man of thirty-two using a bedsheet to hang himself from a doorknob. Another drinking bleach, rupturing his lower intestine. A man of thirty-three throwing himself from the roof, landing on another patient’s mother, breaking her neck, and then, realizing he was not dead, using a piece of broken glass to slice open his wrists and jugular, there on the sidewalk.

That was the one that opened Rosemont up to national scrutiny. The newspapers discovered the place had a nickname among the vets, Candyland, and that macabre touch stoked public fascination. Eighteen suicides in three years, five accidental overdoses, maybe more. The faces of each young man, most of them in uniform, stared out from the paper each day. We sent them to Nam to be killed, the editorials said. When they came back alive, we killed them again. The head of the ward, Dr. Michael Flores, was arrested, and most of the blame fell on him—“I only wanted them to live without pain,” he said — but Josie’s home became loud. Her parents had been questioned, had been blamed privately and publicly. Four of the suicides had happened on their watch, and the whispering grew. How could they have let it happen? Their colleagues at Rosemont stood by them, said they hadn’t been negligent, but the doubts persisted and grew. The ward was closed, then the hospital itself was closed, her parents were out of work, and Josie learned the meaning of the word complicity.

Then, in what she saw, as a teenager, as a stunning display of irony, they both began abusing the very drugs, Dilaudid and Thorazine and Dilantin, that Flores had overprescribed. Just after her fourteenth birthday her father moved out and, a year later, moved to Cambodia, where he stayed and still lived. When Josie was sixteen, her mother was working as an in-home nurse for a family fifty miles away, caring for an elderly woman, Mrs. Harvey. “I’m in love, Joze,” she said one day. She’d gotten involved with Mrs. Harvey’s middle-aged son, another vet, another addict, and wanted Josie to come live with them in this new home, with the dying woman and her son, making specious promises about their lives being good again.

Josie thought: No. She had two years of high school left. She broke down one day at the dentist’s office, in the waiting room, and the receptionist had come to her, had brought her to the bathroom, had sat her down on the toilet and dabbed her face with a warm wet towel, and this had made Josie cry harder, louder, and soon she was lying in one of the examination chairs, face soaked with tears, and Dr. Kimura was next to her, initially thinking it was some body image breakdown. When the receptionist had caught Josie weeping, she had a People magazine on her lap, open to a story about heavy teenage girls being bullied. So she and Dr. Kimura thought Josie, who towered over both of them, was upset about her size, had been harassed at school. They brought her into a back room, where surgeries were done, and they huddled around her like saints. There was something in Dr. Kimura’s wet eyes and chandelier voice that invited Josie to talk. And when Dr. Kimura asked the receptionist to leave, and told Josie she had the afternoon free, Josie told her everything. Her father was in Chiang Mai and, according to Josie’s mother, lived with a paid harem of four women, one of them thirteen years old. Her mother had been sleeping on the couch for two years. Now she was in love, but was using again and was marrying an addict. There had been new people in the house. They were dealing, they weren’t dealing, Josie didn’t know. She remembered backpacks lined up in the foyer, always different backpacks, and the new men would arrive and leave with one of these backpacks. Josie began hiding in her room.

Through Josie’s ramblings, Dr. Kimura said very little. But her eyes seemed to have settled on something. “Why don’t you come here after school for a while? Tell your mom it’s an apprenticeship,” she said. “You need a calm place to be for a few hours every day.”

The first week Josie sat in the waiting room, doing her homework, feeling the thrill of betraying her mother in this small way. But she grew accustomed to the calm, to the simplicity, the predictability of the office. People came, went, paid, talked. There was no chaos, no screaming, no mother on the couch, no mother interacting with skittish men with hollow eyes. Sometimes Dr. Kimura brought her back to show her something interesting — an unusual X-ray, how the molds were made. But usually she spent those hours in Sunny’s office — Dr. Kimura had told her to use her first name — doing her homework, sometimes napping, occasionally wondering about the photo of a teenager, a dishwater-blond girl who looked so unlike Sunny that Josie assumed it was a patient. After the last patient, Josie would help close up the office, and Sunny would ask for updates about happenings at home. Sunny listened, her eyes angry, but never said a disparaging word about Josie’s mother. They were about the same age, Sunny and her mother, somewhere in the late thirties, but Sunny seemed a generation or two removed, far more settled and wise.

One day she closed the office door. “I know this might be the last time I talk to you,” she said. “Because what I’m about to suggest will trigger a series of events that might get me in a world of trouble and might cost me my practice. But I think you should pursue emancipation from your parents, and if you do it, I’d like you to come to live with me. I know a lawyer.”

The lawyer, a quiet but persistent woman named Helen, was a friend of Sunny’s. They met the next day. She had a tight mound of curly hair and unblinking eyes. The two of them, Sunny and Helen, sat across from Josie, shoulder to shoulder. “We won’t do this if there’s any possibility of it getting ugly,” Helen said. “You already have enough drama in your life,” Sunny added. “If your mother objects…” Helen began, but Sunny finished the thought: “then we can reassess. What do you think?”

Their eagerness was both unnerving and infectious. Josie wanted to do it. She wanted to be around these sober, functioning, efficient women who made grand plans quickly.

“Okay,” Josie said, utterly unsure.

“Good,” Sunny said, and took Josie’s hand. “Come home and have some dinner with us tonight. I want to introduce you to someone.”

So Josie called home, told her mother the truth — that she was eating dinner with her dentist, and because her mother had lost all hold on propriety, she agreed, told her to be home by ten. Josie rode in the backseat, Sunny’s car old but clean, Helen in the front seat, Josie feeling very much like they were in a getaway car, sure that the three of them would be thereafter best friends and an inseparable trio. She entered Sunny’s house, walking between Sunny and Helen as if being protected, like a president or pope.

“Samantha!” Sunny yelled, and a girl tromped down the stairs and stopped midway. She was the girl from the picture.

—

So Josie was Helen and Sunny’s second project. The realization knocked her back. Samantha had been taken in a year before, fleeing a mother who beat her and a trucker father who had photographed her in the shower. Samantha lived forty miles away, and Helen had been alerted to her case by a high school counselor there. Samantha’s emancipation process was quick. Now Samantha was home-schooled in some self-guided arrangement that Josie didn’t immediately understand. She didn’t understand, either, why Sunny hadn’t told her about Samantha before the emancipation discussions had begun.

“I couldn’t tell you about Samantha before we were sure,” Sunny said. After dinner that night, Sunny had suggested a walk, and so, under a dark canopy of trees, she explained Samantha’s situation. “It’s best if she keeps a low profile. We have the restraining order on her dad, but it’s best not to risk it. You understand? Does the existence of Samantha change your mind about all this?”

It did. During the drive from Sunny’s office to her home, Josie had believed Sunny was taking her in an act of bravery, of wild and even irresponsible courage. But it was more mechanical than that. She and Helen had a system.

“You coming to me after Sam was serendipity,” Sunny said, trying to return the situation to something closer to a fairy tale. “You two are only a year apart, and could make each other stronger.”

Or we could drag each other into a succession of feral teenage dramas, Josie thought.

“I know it’s awkward,” Sunny said that night and often thereafter. “But it’s quiet here, and safe.”

It was awkward. Josie and Samantha were put in the same room, meaning Samantha’s room had been instantly halved and her personal space evaporated. “What have those two sluts done now?” she muttered to herself while loudly moving her belongings around the room to make way for Josie’s. She cooperated, seething, competitive one month, then aloof, prone to occasional eruptions. Josie stayed in her school, and they had different friends, so their contact was incidental, and avoidable. Sam treated Josie like a freeloading drifter who had come in from the rain to share a room she’d paid for.

Eventually there was detente, and they revealed each other’s weaknesses, only to have them exploited later. They were smart and angry girls who were not properly grateful to Sunny or Helen, who argued with their teachers, who flirted with each other’s boyfriends, who stole or broke each other’s things.

But their home was sane and calm, and Josie’s own emancipation was accomplished without resistance. “I laid out the pros and cons for your mom,” Helen said one day, and Sunny smiled — the implication was that they’d utterly overpowered Josie’s mother; it gave Josie a twinge of guilt. Josie visited her mother every month for the next year, and their meetings, always at a highway Denny’s situated between their two towns, were cordial and tense, and they talked mostly about how good it would be in a few years, when all was settled, when whatever resentment had burned off between them and they could return to each other as adults and equals. Ha.

There were some whispers about Sunny and Helen, just what they were up to — building some kind of cult, one lost teenager at a time? Were they lesbians? Were they lesbians starting a lesbian cult? But after Josie there were no more strays, not that year at least. Eventually Sunny’s home became a known haven for young women fleeing calamity, and the power of Sunny’s interest in Josie was diluted by all the girls who followed. Sunny knew it, and worried Josie and Sam would feel neglected. Don’t worry, Josie told her. Never worry.