Now and Again

9.0 FREEDOM

9.1 Maggie

Maggie pulled a map of Phoenix out of its cellophane pouch, and after consulting it, she headed north. The bus station was located next to a busy airport. Planes were skirling overhead, and cars rocketed in all directions on roads that hadn’t been built with pedestrians in mind. When she finally succeeded in detaching herself from the airport’s grip, it was the pedestrians who surged around her with nearly lethal force, who knocked into her as they chased after unruly children or shouted into their cell phones or waved placards in her face and hissed, “Why are we rescuing animals when so many babies are being killed?”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, thought Maggie. Why can’t people get along!

A red-faced woman thrust a pamphlet into her hand. A bearded man stood on the corner shouting, “Half the people entering an abortion clinic don’t come out alive!” Someone else said, “Let the baby choose!” while across the street, an equally enthusiastic band of counterprotesters carried competing signs and shouted slogans of their own.

A smile is like a rainbow, Maggie told herself. So she smiled at the bearded man. She smiled at the red-faced woman. She smiled at a girl who rushed after her spouting a complicated story and causing a narrow miss with a panel van. “I’m sorry!” Maggie called out to the driver, who waved a fist at her. It didn’t help that she hadn’t slept in over a day. It didn’t help to be sweaty and hungry and short of breath or that the heavy backpack was cutting into her shoulders and neck.

When a man in a Hawaiian shirt called out, “This way, this way,” she allowed herself to be swept up in a swarm of cheerful vacationers and into a large arena that smelled of freshly dug garden soil and sour beer and doughy concoctions frying in deep cauldrons of hydrogenated fat. Instead of asking to see her ticket, the ticket-taker opened the gate for her when her duffel caught on the turnstile. “Come on, come on,” he scolded. “You’re holding up the line!”

Inside the building, people were crowded around a railing stuffing food into their mouths and cheering on a pack of frantic-looking dogs that were racing around a wide dirt track. Maggie bought a cheese sandwich and ate it as people holding winning tickets elbowed past her to a row of cashier windows. Then she wandered around in search of a restroom and found herself in front of a long, skirted table covered with glossy brochures.

“Do you want to adopt one of the dogs?” asked a large woman who straddled a stool that was pushed back from the table to accommodate her paunch. “This is our annual adopt-a-thon.”

“No, no, I can’t,” said Maggie. “But why are they for sale?”

“They’re not for sale,” said the woman. “They’re free to a good home if you pay the veterinary charges and adoption fee and make a donation to the rescue center.”

Maggie picked up one of the brochures. Inside it were pictures of big-eyed dogs with bony faces and names like Little Bo’s Majestic Queen. Apparently the dogs, which had been bred for speed, were not young enough or hungry enough for victory, and their owners didn’t want them anymore. “I couldn’t give it a good home,” she said, putting the brochure back on the table.

The woman handed her a thick stack of photographs. “The dogs are in cages now. I’m pretty sure you could give it a better home than that.”

“At least they’re safe,” said Maggie.

“Actually, they’re not. The ones that aren’t adopted will be euthanized.”

Maggie riffled through the stack of photos she was holding. A dog’s name was written in black marker across the bottom of each one. “Dancing Dinero,” Maggie read from the top card. “That’s kind of a fancy name. What would you call him for short?”

“What about Dino? Dino is cute. But feel free to look through the entire stack. You might find a dog you like better.”

“I don’t really like dogs,” said Maggie.

“That’s like saying you don’t like babies,” said the woman, but all Maggie could think of was Tomás. She pictured him trotting along the sidewalk behind her or scratching at the screen door, hoping to be let inside the house.

“We take credit cards,” said the woman. “And debit cards and, of course, cash.”

Maggie had a pocket full of rainy-day money, but taking the animal was out of the question. “I don’t live in Phoenix,” she said. “I don’t even have a place to stay.”

“Then you can really empathize with these dogs,” said the woman. “Imagine that you not only didn’t have a place to stay, but that someone was waiting to haul you off and jab you with a lethal dose of pentobarbital if you couldn’t find someone to take you in.”

Maggie was silent. The woman beamed out her disapproval from across the table, while Dino stared mournfully up at her from the photograph.

“I’ll tell you what. If you adopt one of the dogs, I’ll tell you where you can stay for free. You’ll make back the adoption fee in just a night or two.”

When Maggie still didn’t say anything, the woman said, “So Dino is the one you like?”

“Isn’t it more important that the dog like me?” asked Maggie. “It wouldn’t seem right to send him home with someone he isn’t comfortable with.”

“Not that you’re headed home,” said the woman. She rang a little bell that sat on the table in front of her and added, “The dogs are all very friendly. If they weren’t friendly, they wouldn’t be candidates for adoption.”

“What happens to the unfriendly dogs?” asked Maggie.

“Most of the dogs are friendly,” said the woman. “Really, almost all. But where is Peggy?” She rang the bell again, and this time a person with an oily ponytail and frizzy bangs entered the room holding a nylon leash. “It’s been wonderful chatting with you,” said the large woman. “Now, if you’d like to meet Dino, I can have Peggy introduce you.”

Maggie followed Peggy through a door into a room lined with tiered rows of steel cages. As soon as the women entered, the dogs in the cages started to bark and pace back and forth in the tiny space allotted to them. Maggie was immediately reminded of the prison. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. Suddenly it didn’t seem right to leave Dino in a cage when she could so easily do for him what she might never be able to do for Tomás or George. She mentally added the vet bill to the adoption fee to the donation and came up with sixty-five dollars. Dino was a mere sixty-five dollars from being free — she couldn’t turn her back on him now!

“Don’t look straight at him,” instructed Peggy, handing her a bone-shaped biscuit. “He will interpret that as a threat.”

Maggie turned sideways and stretched out the hand that held the treat. “Hello, Dino,” she said, but just as Peggy was trying to coax the dog out of his cage, a logical corollary occurred to her: the same could be said of all the dogs incarcerated there. Sixty-five dollars would free each and every one of them, and there was nothing, really, to distinguish Dino from the rest of them except that his card had been on the top of the stack. What if some of the other dogs were more deserving? She should probably choose the one that was poking its nose out between the bars of the cage rather than slinking into a corner the way Dino was doing. Or the one that was happily wagging its tail. But then she stopped herself. She had already exhausted the subject of merit and rights in thinking about Tomás. A creature shouldn’t have to earn its freedom, so being more or less deserving didn’t come into it. Besides, what if Dino’s card had been on top for a reason? But still she stood paralyzed by the grooming table, and only when Peggy called out, “Here he is!” did Maggie close her mind to further thought.

“Crouch down like this,” said Peggy, dropping to a squatting position. “And hold out your hand for him to sniff.”

The large woman trundled into the room with some paperwork for Maggie to sign. “The Catholic Charities is in an old church,” she said. “I’ve written down the address right here on your adoption agreement. If they don’t have room for you tonight, at least you can get on their list for tomorrow. And here is a starter kit with some dog food, a complimentary water bowl, and, of course, a leash.”

Maggie squeezed the dog’s things into her luggage and put the adoption papers into her pocket with the map. “I never thought of myself as a dog owner before,” she said.

“Guardian,” said the woman. “Owner isn’t a word we like to use.”

9.2 Maggie

Dino lumbered along at Maggie’s side as she walked north and then west into the setting sun. Whenever she passed a couple walking hand in hand, she wished Lyle were there to see the palm trees and the pretty red-tiled roofs and the line of muscled mountains that turned from pink to purple in the fading light. Now that the sun wasn’t beating down from above, the source of heat seemed to be the sidewalk beneath her feet, and she wondered again if the earth was the living thing and if all of its creatures were merely parts of a larger organism. Every now and then Dino sat down, so Maggie would stop to catch her breath and consult the map before encouraging him forward with gentle tugs of the leash.

It was nearly dark when she found herself in front of an old stone church. The spires and arches and leaded windows set Maggie’s heart to soaring until she remembered something her mother had said about how steeples were meant to strike fear into the hearts of wandering marauders by resembling giant swords. Even churches are weapons, she thought. When a security fixture mounted on an adjacent building came on, throwing daggers of light between the etched black branches of the trees that grew in the space between the buildings, she made her way up the pitted stone steps and tugged at the heavy door, but it was locked. “It will take more than that to foil our plan,” she said to Dino, who looked as if all of his plans had been foiled long ago.

She felt her way along a narrow path that led through a tangled garden, past a statue of Saint Francis and a dry fountain where concrete birds had come to drink, and then through a weedy plaza where the path abruptly ended. Maggie found herself facing a crumbling wall topped with a spiky iron fence. Just when she was about to retrace her steps, she noticed a small sign that was only visible because the security light was shining directly on it. The sign said DELIVERIES AROUND BACK, and an arrow pointed to a gap in the wall she hadn’t noticed in the darkness. Maggie scrambled through the gap and found herself in a dank courtyard where a series of concrete steps led down to a grimy basement door.

Before trying the door handle, Maggie whispered, “If God wants me to find Sandra Day O’Connor, the door will open.” Dino took a step forward at the sound of her voice, but he jumped back again when the door sprang open. “If God wants me to free Tomás and George, there will be a place for us to sleep,” Maggie said to Dino as they slipped inside.

The church basement was windowless and dark, but as her eyes adjusted, Maggie could make out an opening, and through the opening, a narrow stairway led up to a landing where a small window allowed some of the security light to filter through. Just off the landing was the sacristy, complete with a tiny bathroom and running water, and through the sacristy, the sanctuary and long, narrow nave of the church. Maggie’s footsteps rang out on the stones of the center aisle, and her heart nearly stopped when a cat jumped from a pew and hissed at her. Dino’s ears pricked for an instant and then flopped back against his head. Maggie searched in vain for signs of the Catholic Charities, but except for the cat, the church appeared to be abandoned.

“This can’t be right,” she said to Dino. “Unless we’re in the wrong place, or unless the Catholic Charities has moved.”

Maggie’s feet hurt. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since she had left home, and her heart sank at the idea of having to find another place to sleep. She sat on one of the pews and said a little prayer. Just as she said, “Amen,” it occurred to her that she was in the right place after all. Ever since getting off the bus, her moves had been anything but random: the protesters had frightened her into crossing the street; the tour guide had called, “This way, this way,” as if he had been waiting for her; the ticket-taker had opened the turnstile without asking for her ticket; the adoption lady had directed her to the church; the security light had come on just in time to illuminate the delivery sign; the sign had pointed the way to the door — a door that had opened almost by itself! Now her presence in the church seemed inevitable rather than inadvertent. She clasped her hands in front of her and whispered, “Thank you for watching over me, Lord. If you tell me what to do, I promise to do it as best I can.”

It was the first time in her life Maggie had made a promise to God and the first time she had felt him so near. As she waited, a little awed by the solemnity of the occasion, the tiredness lifted from her mind and body. She felt happy and hopeful and filled with certainty that she was exactly where she was supposed to be and doing exactly what she was supposed to do. “I won’t rest until I free Tomás and George,” she whispered. Then she found some cushions and lap blankets in the choir stalls, poured some of the kibbles onto the stone floor, and filled the complimentary adopt-a-thon dish with water from the sacristy bathroom before settling herself and Dino for the night.

The next day, Maggie took Dino with her and sought out the attorney, who assured her he had once been an actor and knew exactly how to play these things. “Ha, ha!” he chortled when Maggie failed to respond. “It’s just a little joke — never mind. But it’s true that actors make great lawyers. Frankly, it’s the secret of my success. Sometimes I feel sorry for my opponents, but not too sorry, of course — that was another little joke.”

Maggie had expected someone young and vigorous, but the man’s hair was white and he leaned heavily on a gnarled stick. “Experience,” he said. “That’s the thing you’re paying me for.”

“I’m not actually paying you,” said Maggie. “I’m working for you and devoting half of my paycheck to Tomás’s fees. That was the deal.”

“Ah, yes,” said the attorney. “That’s something anyway.”

“You told me that the arresting officer made a string of false arrests.”

“Now I remember!” said the attorney. “Now I know exactly who you are. I don’t mind saying that I’m very glad to see you. I’ve been without an assistant for weeks.”

He took a stack of files from his desk and handed them to her one by one. “This man is serving twenty-five years for breaking into a church kitchen that had once given him food,” he said. “And this one stole some videotapes for his nieces and nephews, and this one helped two girls shoplift a set of sheets, and, well, the point is, they were all handled by the same dirty prosecutor. One of the defendants was just granted a new trial, so now is the time to strike! Unfortunately, none of them can pay. It would help your man if we pursued all of the cases together and tried to establish a pattern, but I have to take three paying clients for each person I represent for free. So if you could contribute anything in the way of fees for the others…”

“I have a little cash,” said Maggie, and without thinking it through, she opened her backpack and handed over the entire packet of rainy-day money she was saving for her ticket home.

“Hmmm,” said the attorney as he counted out the bills. “It’s not much, but I guess it’s a start. Yes, we’ll establish a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct and see how it goes.”

The attorney showed her to a desk that was overflowing with loose papers and articles of clothing and unopened mail. “Why don’t you start here,” he said. “I have to be in court, but if the phone rings, answer it and write a note on this pad. I’ll be back around noon.”

Maggie left Lyle and Will a message saying she had arrived safely. Then she set to work imposing order on the chaotic office. When the attorney returned, he gave her two files and asked her to decide which case he should take.

“Can’t you take them both?” she asked.

“He who takes on too much accomplishes nothing.”

“That’s the way it is, isn’t it?” said Maggie. “The minute you choose a person to help it means you’re not helping someone else.”

“Yes,” said the attorney. “That’s the way it is.”

Maggie spent the morning reading through the files and couldn’t see that one defendant had a better claim than the other. First she thought it was the soldier who had given so much for his country, and then she thought it was the father who had five children to support.

“Let me show you a useful trick,” said the attorney. He took the files and hid them behind his back. “Which hand?” he asked.

After choosing, Maggie put the files in the proper stacks and didn’t look at them. That way, she wouldn’t know which person she had consigned to unrepresented limbo. “There are other attorneys who might help him, aren’t there?” she asked.

“That’s what we have to believe,” said the attorney. “Otherwise we’d shoot ourselves.”

“And of course he might be guilty.”

“Most people are guilty of something. Reminding yourself of that is another useful trick.”

Before Maggie left for the day, she asked the attorney if he knew Sandra Day O’Connor.

“Who doesn’t?” he replied.

“I was thinking she could help us.”

“Darn right she could.”

Maggie pulled the map of Phoenix out of her pocket and asked, “Do you know where she lives?”

“Somewhere around here.” The attorney poked a bent finger at the map. “One day I was walking along the sidewalk right about there”—he poked the map again—“and what do you know? There she was, surrounded by people who wanted her autograph! Of course, that was a few years back.”

Maggie used a pencil to mark the places on the map. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “What time should I be here?”

“Eight-thirty sharp,” said the attorney. “Do you have a place to stay?”

“I do for now,” said Maggie.

“And if you see Justice O’Connor, make sure to give her my regards.”

“I realize it’s a long shot,” said Maggie.

“Everything’s a long shot,” replied the attorney. “Unless you have money.”

“I’m afraid I gave you what I had,” said Maggie.

“In that case,” said the attorney, “what we need is luck.”

9.3 Lyle

Lyle was alone when the police stormed up to the door with determined looks on their faces. He recognized the shorter of the two men, and it was obvious the man recognized him too, for his face flushed in embarrassment when he saw Lyle. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rayburn, but we need to speak to your wife.”

“It’s Lyle, Ben. It’s Lyle from church.”

“I know it’s Lyle,” said Ben. “But this is official business. The sheriff doesn’t like us to use first names when we’re on duty.”

“Mrs. Rayburn isn’t here,” said Lyle stiffly. He didn’t say, She got out in the nick of time, but that’s what he was thinking when the taller of the two officers said, “You don’t mind if we take a look around, do you?” He took a step closer as he said it, which had the effect of pushing Lyle into the glassed-in alcove where he and Maggie and Will hung their jackets and stored their muddy boots. When the man took another step toward him, Lyle didn’t say yes or no; he merely shifted to one side as the two men barged past him and stood with their hands on their hips surveying the living room. Maggie’s bill-paying desk was pushed against the far wall, and the man who wasn’t Ben said, “You take the desk, Ben. I’ll look in the back.”

Lyle was vaguely aware that some defensive action was required of him, but he stood with his fists in his pockets and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as Ben pawed through the neat stacks of bills and receipts. It finally occurred to him to call Jimmy Sweets for advice. When Jimmy didn’t pick up, he called Lily De Luca and said, “Lily, it’s Lyle. The police are here, and my house is being searched.”

“Do they have a warrant?” asked Lily.

“Do you have a warrant?” asked Lyle, but Ben appeared not to have heard him. “Do you have a warrant?” he asked again.

“It’s best not to make trouble,” said Ben.

“Are you under arrest?” asked Lily.

“Am I under arrest?” asked Lyle.

Ben muttered something about stolen documents just as the larger officer came back from the kitchen and reprimanded Ben for chatting.

Lyle remembered something Maggie had said in relation to the prisoners, and it frightened him a little that he was considering using words that usually pertained to brawny felons. “You’re violating my constitutional rights,” he said.

Once the words were out of his mouth, the fear started to change into something else. He was almost shouting when he said, “Get out of my house, Ben. You and your friend need to get the hell out of my house.”

“Or what?” said the big man from the mouth of the hallway. “Or you’ll call the police?”

Ben said, “Come on, Reilly. We can get the warrant and come back later.”

“And let us know if you hear from your wife,” said Reilly. “You need to tell us right away. Obstructing an investigation is something we can arrest you for.”

“What investigation?” asked Lyle. “What investigation are you talking about?”

“You know we can’t tell you that,” said Ben as he hurried out the door.

Lyle rubbed his hand across his eyes as the sleek cruiser backed into the road and sped down the hill and around the curve toward town. Across the street, the hayfield was dotted with big round bales, left there after the summer cutting. If he didn’t hurry, he’d be late for work, but he stood a little longer contemplating the familiar scene, which had always seemed friendly to him but now seemed indifferent and bleak. Lyle wished he had a dog so the two of them could sit on the stoop together watching the cars go by, or he could pat its head and say, Now what the hey was that all about? and not be talking to himself. As he stood gazing into the distance, a car came into sight. Instead of passing, it turned in at the drive. Darned if it wasn’t Lily, stopping by on her way to work to find out what was going on.

“What do you think it was about?” she asked. “You don’t have some secret life I don’t know about, do you?” She gave him a smoky look before laughing at how unlikely that was.

“What if I do?” asked Lyle. “Am I as predictable as all that?” He was thinking of the time he had followed Lily home, but then he dropped the pretense and said, “It’s Maggie they’re after. I know you’ve heard the rumors…”

“People always gossip when someone doesn’t toe the line,” said Lily. “That’s something I know about firsthand.”

“Well, some of the rumors are true! She’s the one the Sentinel was referring to in that series on innocent prisoners! The reporter didn’t use her name, but everyone knows it was her.”

“Hmm,” said Lily. “Don’t tell me where she is, then. It’s better if I don’t know.”

“I don’t know where she is,” said Lyle, but he said it a little lamely.

“That’s good,” said Lily. “That’s exactly what you need to tell people. And next time you talk to her, tell her not to come home until you’re sure the coast is clear.”

It had been three weeks since the Glory Dayz celebration, three weeks since the official end of summer and the day Maggie had said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m only taking the rainy-day savings. I’ll send money when I can.”

Lyle had been shocked by the announcement. But now he could see how everything that had come before had been leading up to it.

“It’s now or never,” Maggie had told him. “I started something, and I have to see it through.”

They had been standing in the kitchen discussing the baseball game: Will’s home run, a brilliant play at third, the heartbreaking loss — at least he had been discussing it — when Maggie pointed to a list of instructions she had taped to the refrigerator. Her eyes were bright in the darkness, reflecting the moonlight that came in at the window, but also, Lyle decided now, a burning inner conviction.

“Will told me you were serious, but I didn’t think you were,” Lyle had said. Now he wished he had asked more questions, but it hadn’t occurred to him, and he still wasn’t sure what those questions should have been.

Maggie had said, “Sleep well, honeybun. See you tomorrow.” But when he awoke the next morning, the bed beside him was empty and she was already gone.

9.4 Pastor Price

What would Maggie Rayburn do?”

Beads of sweat were dripping into Pastor Price’s eyes, but he was on fire with the Holy Spirit. The arc lights had been installed when the television show was only a faint glimmering in his consciousness, and now he congratulated himself on his foresight. Here he was, on the last Sunday after Pentecost, preaching the word to the faithful, seen and unseen, his message blasting out across the radio waves, across the visible spectrum, beaming down from satellites and blazing along broadband and fiber-optic cables — who knew how far the signal spread? He could feel the spirit lighting up within him. He felt it burning down from above until he wanted to cry out with the beauty and torment of it. Tears were streaming from his eyes as he spoke the words of the Old Testament: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!”

He was filled with pain and love as he preached, but also with a righteous anger when he thought of Fitch’s innocence series and how, instead of condemning Maggie for stealing prisoner records, some people were turning her into a hero. Didn’t she realize she could go to jail? And then the question burst out of him again: “What would Maggie Rayburn do?”

He let the words echo according to the calculations of the acoustic engineers who had mixed resonant surfaces with sound-absorbing wood. A chord from the magnificent organ quivered and died. Then silence and only the hushed rustle of clothing as a thousand parishioners caught their collective breath to hear the answer to the very question they had been asking each other and themselves.

“I’ve heard some of you say it. I’ve heard that question fall from the trembling lips of the elderly as I held their fragile hands. I’ve heard it from the rosebud lips of little children and from the lipsticked mouths of the mothers who only want the best for them. I’ve heard it from parents and teachers who have held Maggie up as an example of righteousness, an example of someone who put the needs of others before her own needs, someone who gave up everything to do what she thought was right.”

Now the pastor adopted a conversational tone. “It sounds good, doesn’t it? Self-sacrifice. Duty before pleasure, others before self. Following the still, small voice instead of the crass and shouting crowd.

“Don’t get me wrong — I believe in those things. But whose version of the story are we listening to?”

Now he let his tone become honeyed and intimate, as if he were gossiping to a circle of friends. “Haven’t you ever been in a situation where one friend tells you something her spouse or another friend did to her, and you come away hopping mad that such a kind and beautiful person could be treated so unfairly? You’re ready to shun the lout who did this to your friend. You’re ready never to talk to him or her again. And your righteous anger lasts…oh, maybe it lasts all the way until you hear the other person’s side of the story, at which time you are equally outraged and convinced.

“Well, whose story are you listening to now? To Maggie’s story or the Lord’s?”

The pastor waited — one beat, two beats, three.

“Those of you who aren’t from our community might well wonder who I’m talking about.” Here, Pastor Price gave a nod to each corner of the church, where the television cameras were barely visible poking out through the acoustic slats, and then to the adjustable boom that was being operated from a control room on the balcony. He raised his eyes to the heavens — there was a camera there too — and said, “But Maggie’s story isn’t so special. We all know people who are put on a pedestal, people who are revered because they were blessed with wealth or athletic ability or good looks or charisma. We all know people like that, people who are considered good and righteous only because of superficial things and without regard to the truth of their characters.

“So what would Maggie Rayburn do?

“Apparently she’d leave her husband and her son. Apparently she’d leave her job without giving her employer so much as a chance to replace her. Apparently she’d take from her workplace things that were not hers to take.”

The pastor’s voice lacked emphasis. He let the facts speak for themselves.

“And the truth is that Maggie Rayburn took it upon herself to tell the judges and the prosecutors they were wrong. And to the juries made up of people just like you, she said, ‘You don’t know your business.’ Why, I bet she’d walk right up to the president if she got a chance and say the same thing. And I don’t mean the president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. I don’t mean the president of the PTA.”

Pastor Price let this sink in, and then his voice boomed out again. “I am referring to the President of the United States! I have no doubt she’d say the same thing to all of us who are sitting right here today. She’d say we don’t know our own business. But Maggie Rayburn does. There’s a word for this, and the word is ‘hubris.’”

Price knew the word was foreign to many listening ears, but he didn’t define it. He wanted people to ask each other about it at the coffee hour. He wanted them to look it up in their dictionaries and on the Internet. He wanted the conversation to reverberate long after the ringing of the end-of-service bell. And then, if Maggie dared to say anything about any of the other secrets she had stolen, people would remember the word and say to themselves, Hubris! This is exactly what the good pastor was talking about.

“So if you hear any of our lovely elderly people or any of the scions of our town or any of our beautiful little children ask each other, What would Maggie Rayburn do? you are not to sit silently by. You are not to let the question go unanswered, for silence in this case is the worst kind of lie. You are to tell them, Maggie Rayburn would spit in your eye. Maggie Rayburn would open the doors of the prisons and loose the murderers and rapists upon your sons and daughters. Let’s just hope there aren’t any terrorists locked up in there, for no doubt Maggie Rayburn would let them out too.

“You tell them that not because I told you to. You tell them that because it is the truth.”

The sweat was pouring down inside the pastor’s cassock. It was dripping from his neck and burning the skin behind his ears. His hair, which he had grown a little longer on the advice of his stylist and over his wife’s objections, was slick against his collar. He gloried in the animal strength of his body, flesh and blood lit by the spirit, and he thrilled with the truth of how God and man had come together in Jesus Christ. When the choir started up, it was as if the holy waters had broken and an ocean of sound engulfed the room. The new blue satin choir robes shimmered like quicksilver, and when the arc lights went out, their metallic piping caught the light from a thousand candles that had been lit for the Church of the New Incarnation’s television premier.

9.5 Tula

The studio audience was holding its breath while the girlfriend, who had clearly been coached to draw out the delivery of her lines, turned her poker face to the camera before opening her lips to declare, “Yes, Gary, you are the father!”

“Didn’t I say?” Tula sighed. She had known it all along.

After Maggie left, Tula went to the house most Sundays to keep Will company, and now they were sitting on the couch watching TV. “Didn’t I say it when she first came on?”

“You were right.” Will was staring at the screen, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention either to it or to Tula.

The announcer blared, “Next up on our program: an obese teenager confronts the mother she believes is sabotaging her weight loss attempts in order to keep her daughter for herself.”

“It’s cold in here,” said Tula.

“You can borrow one of my mother’s sweaters if you want. I think she keeps them in the chest.”

Without Maggie, the house seemed dirty and defeated. The kitchen counter was littered with empty soda cans and fast-food wrappers, and someone had left a pile of laundry on the floor near the washing machine as if it would magically wash itself. Tula’s instinct was to gather everything up and either put it in the trash or wash it, but she stopped herself and made her way down the narrow hallway toward the bedrooms.

Only in Will’s room was everything tidy and clean. A few of his Transformers robots remained on the bureau top, but they were lined up against the mirror instead of positioned for an attack. It seemed that things were missing from the walls too, even though she couldn’t remember how the room had looked before. The closet was similarly spartan: shirts arranged by color; baseball uniform neatly folded; mitt freshly oiled, a new ball in its jaws.

Lyle’s room was as chaotic as Will’s was neat. Clothing had been flung here and there, and most of the bed coverings were on the floor. The blinds at the windows were cocked, and dead flies littered the windowsills. The drawers of a small chest were open to varying degrees, and a tipped-over chair hadn’t been righted. Tula opened the drawers of the larger chest one by one, starting at the top: socks and underwear, nightgowns, T-shirts, shorts. The bottom drawer stuck on its tracks, so she had to kneel to open it. But when she reached beneath a blue cardigan, her hand hit a stack of magazines. She pulled one out at random and opened it, but instead of finding an article revealing the identity of the sexiest man alive, she found a government document with TOP SECRET written in red letters across the top. Folded inside it was a letter from Dolly Jackson introducing herself and asking Maggie if she had ever come across a report linking munitions to birth defects. Stapled to the letter was a photograph of a baby with a huge purple tumor growing from its mouth.

Tula sat on the floor and took out the magazines one by one. Then she looked through the house until she found a large cardboard box. As she packed the documents into it, she was thinking how the secret cache explained the recent changes in Maggie. She was also thinking how it would serve Mrs. Winslow right if she finished what Maggie had started and exposed whatever the great men of Red Bud were trying to keep quiet. It would serve Sammi Green right too — not that Sammi had ever done anything bad to Tula. In fact, it would teach a lesson to the entire town. You couldn’t clean house without getting your hands dirty. You couldn’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Purity, she thought, as she carried the box out to her mother’s car. What did purity even mean?

Tula was trying to decide whether or not to show Will what she had found, but when she returned to the living room, Will didn’t seem to notice that she had been gone for nearly an hour. He was still slumped on the corduroy couch, his eyes glassy and his ears red with cold. “Hey,” said Tula, peering from Will to the television screen. “Isn’t that the pastor from your church?”

Will didn’t say anything, and it took a moment before it dawned on Tula that the pastor was talking about Maggie. “Hey,” she said again. “Isn’t he talking about your mom?”

Instead of answering her, Will got up and turned the television off. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?” he asked her.

“Somewhere warm,” said Tula. “Somewhere with turquoise water and white sand.”

“I’d go to the Middle East,” said Will. “To Afghanistan or Iraq.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said Tula.

“Yes,” said Will. “I would.”

After that, Will grew more distant. He started to miss school. Every so often Tula went by his house to look for him, but most of the time he wasn’t there. Why had he mentioned Afghanistan and Iraq? But there was only one reason to mention them, or only one she could think of.

Tula, too, was restless. One evening she stood outside and watched a star shoot across the November sky, thinking, Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the familiar phrase failed to comfort her, and the future, which she had always thought of as nestled in a sunny valley at the end of a pretty country road, no longer seemed so easily reached. The weather had turned cold, but when she thought about going back inside, her thin shoes felt heavy on her feet, as if the dense clay soil of the yard were pulling at her, and beneath the clay, the earth’s magnetic core.

9.6 Lyle

Without Maggie around to tame it, the house started to make demands on Lyle. Great flakes of paint curled off the metal fretwork that held up the sagging roof of the porch, and a gutter rattled loosely in its bracket whenever the wind blew. A window cracked, seemingly without reason. The bathrooms sprouted mold. Even as they disintegrated, the objects around him seemed to have more life in them than they’d had before, if only because a thing first had to have life to lose it. The connection between the broken boards of the porch and the trees they had once been announced itself every time he mounted the front steps, and when he looked closely, he could see that the rusted screws that had held the boards in place for so many decades were slowly loosening their hold, as if the job was finished or they had somewhere else to be. Everything had a place in a grand scheme that was slowly making itself visible to Lyle, and the grand scheme was death and decay. The jagged piece of gutter, the rutted driveway, the rotting leaves, the screen door that had started to sag and whine. “Even the house misses your mother,” he said.

“It’s always been like that,” said Will, but Lyle didn’t think it had. Bills were piling up on the desk, and after brooding about it for a few days, he discussed the idea of paying them with Will.

“Go ahead and do it, Dad,” said Will.

“But your mother was always the one…”

“Well she’s not here now, is she?” Will’s usually placid face bloomed white in the darkened kitchen, where both lightbulbs had blown at once.

It wasn’t like Will to lose his temper. “I think Will’s drinking beer,” Lyle said to Jimmy Sweets when they met at the Merry Maid one evening after work.

“Jeezus, the kid’s seventeen,” said Jimmy. “It’s not as if he’s motherless. And he still has you, doesn’t he? He still has that hot little number he’s dating. What more does a growing boy need? Three squares and a little cha cha cha.”

“Don’t be crude, Jimmy,” said Lily, but everyone in the bar was laughing at the way Lyle’s ears were turning red.

“Jeezus, Rayburn,” said Jimmy. “You’re as sensitive as a girl.”

After that, all anyone had to say was “cha cha cha” and Lyle would slap a fiver on the bar and storm out the door.

“What’s eating him?” Jimmy would say loudly enough for Lyle to hear.

Sometimes Lily ran after him and they would sit in the front seat of Lyle’s truck and talk for a while before Lily got out and Lyle went home. It occurred to Lyle that he was being tested and he was failing the test. It was clear he had relied too much on Maggie, that she had sapped his strength in some way and it was up to him to get it back, but that seemed beyond him.

“I know what it’s like,” said Lily one evening when Maggie had been gone for almost three months. “Two years ago, my husband left me.”

“Maggie didn’t leave me,” insisted Lyle, but he wondered if she had. And not only had she gone, but she had left behind a great suitcase full of responsibilities. For the first time, a little tendril of blame wrapped around his heart. “Do you think it’s safe for her to come back?” he asked Lily. “I never heard from the police again, but I don’t know what that means.”

“No news is usually good news. If they wanted to go after her, they probably would have done it by now.”

“Probably,” said Lyle.

“But I guess you can’t ask without opening it all up again,” said Lily.

“No,” said Lyle. “I guess I can’t.”

Lyle thought about how he had followed Lily home and how she had said, “You might as well come in,” and how for a split second he had thought she was saying it to him. Now her eyes were filled with soft question marks, and he figured he had come to one of those moments where he got to decide something important about the future. He tried to look down the various roads that pinwheeled away from the truck where he and Lily were sitting, but all he could think about was how MacBride had said he wasn’t a visionary. He guessed MacBride had been right about that, for try as he might, he couldn’t see down any of the roads or even through the door Lily seemed to be holding open for him.

“MacBride told me I wasn’t a visionary,” he said, explaining his hesitation.

“Who the heck is?” asked Lily. “‘Visionary’ is just a word they slap on people who turn out to be right about something. For instance, if you come home with me now, I’m a visionary, and if you don’t, well then, I’m not.”

Lyle wondered if there was a way to go through a door and simultaneously not go through it, just so he’d know what he was getting into. “I guess I could come for a little while,” he said.

“Aw heck, Lyle,” said Lily. “Nobody’s forcing you. Maybe you and I are better off as friends.”

When Lily got out of the truck and started down Main Street, Lyle’s first instinct was to run after her. But his second instinct was to stay put. The two impulses held a battle in his imagination, and by the time he decided he should follow her after all, it seemed too late to do it gracefully, not that he’d ever been particularly graceful. Then he had to argue with himself about whether there was such a thing as too late in this case and if it was just habit that kept him from acting decisively. It was too late, anyway, to be decisive. That much he knew. And being indecisive was probably insulting to any woman, Lily included, which meant he was probably better off waiting for the future to come to him rather than rushing wildly off to meet it.

Of all the things Lyle had learned to do over the course of his life, the thing he did best was to blend in. So he sat in the truck as the lights in the shop windows went out one by one and the citizens of Red Bud hurried past him as if he wasn’t there until the only beacon for the weary left in Red Bud was the blinking neon BEER AND CHEER sign in the window of the Merry Maid.

After that, he did what was expected of him the best he knew how to do it, and when people asked him how he was doing, he mostly said, “I can’t complain.”

Early one morning two weeks before Christmas, Ben and Reilly returned with a warrant to search the house. When Lyle protested, Reilly pushed in through the glassed-in alcove as if Lyle were just another jacket hanging on the row of hooks. Lyle watched silently as the two men turned everything upside down before leaving empty-handed.

Ben said, “Be seein’ you, Lyle,” as if the visit had been a social call, but Reilly stormed out without a word, rattling the windows and slapping the screen door against the side of the house.

“Hey,” Lyle called out. “Are you happy now?”

Reilly didn’t turn back, but Lyle heard him mutter, “What about the phone records? Do you reckon we could get a warrant for those?”

It was almost eight-thirty when they left and Lyle was already late for work. Still, he waited for an hour in the Redi Mart parking lot, dialing the attorney’s office every few minutes until Maggie picked up the phone.

“The good news is that the police came back with the warrant, but they didn’t find anything,” he told her. “The bad news is that we can’t use the house phone anymore. If you can get to the office early on Mondays, I’ll try to call you then.”

“How’s Will?” was the first thing Maggie always asked when Lyle called. Then Lyle would tell her the local gossip and Maggie would tell him about her work. “That series of articles about innocent prisoners has sparked new interest in Tomás’s case,” she said now. “Did they ever figure out I’m the one who took his records?”

“Nothing official,” said Lyle, which was true as far as it went. He didn’t say anything about what everyone suspected.

“And how are you doing, honeybun?” was the last thing Maggie always asked before hanging up. Lyle would reply, “I can’t complain,” the way he always replied when anyone asked him how he was. If he had had a life philosophy, it would have involved not complaining and blending in.

9.7 Dolly

Dolly had always thought that something astonishing was going to happen to her, something to erase the ordinariness of her life — something, rather, that was the reason for the ordinariness, so that when the time came, she would be free to devote her whole attention to whatever it was. Instead of sitting back and waiting for the thing to happen, she believed in helping the gods or fate or whatever forces were in control of her destiny, so just before Danny came home, she had fixed up the apartment. After that, every time she walked in the door, it was as if she had spent a weekend away and come home unsuspecting, the way it happened on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And when she looked up one day and saw that the clinic waiting area had undergone a similar transformation, she was as surprised as anyone, even though she herself had done the painting and even though she had scoured the classified ads for secondhand furniture and taken on some hours at the hospital to pay the cost.

For the walls, she had chosen a color called Quiet Moments 1563. Against it, even the folding metal chairs looked inviting. She had hung sheer panels at the windows and put a rustic table and mismatched armchairs in the center of the room. “Shabby chic,” she said when the doctor cocked his eyebrows at her. But she was proud of her work.

“Decorating on a budget takes far more skill than your high-dollar projects,” one of her regular patients told her. Another said Dolly definitely had an eye. Someday she’d do the geraniums and the parking lot, but someday had always included Danny, and Dolly didn’t know what she was supposed to think about someday now that Danny had gone off with the members of his old unit.

“How’s that soldier of yours doing?” asked the doctor one afternoon when Dolly went in to give him his mail.

When Dolly blinked at him in astonishment, he said, “I keep my ears open. I know a thing or two about what’s going on.”

“He’s in New Jersey,” said Dolly. “He and some friends are starting something there.”

The doctor no longer seemed to be listening, but then he said, “I thought you’d be interested to hear that I’ve gotten involved in a study run by some people at the university. Don’t you go telling anyone about it yet — no sense drawing fire before we’re ready — but I thought you’d want to know.” He smiled kindly, which made Dolly want to weep. It made her want to throw her arms around his stooped shoulders and confide all of her worries in him. She wanted to say that she hadn’t told Danny about the tadpole because things were better with him gone, but she didn’t want to burden the doctor with her own troubles when he had troubles of his own. Instead, she wiped her hand across her eyes and said, “This was a good day!”

And it had been a good day, because all of the appointments had gone smoothly, and because no one had thrown a fit or yelled at her, and because that day all of the husbands and boyfriends had spoken softly to the women and held their hands.

Why wasn’t Danny there to hold Dolly’s hand? Because Danny was better off with his comrades. He was better off making critical information available to the public than sitting around in the fixed-up apartment with nothing important to do. And, frankly, she was better off too. It was a relief that he was no longer jumping at noises or straightening the silverware or smoothing the coverlet on the bed or roughing it up again to test how much disorder he could stand. The problem was that now she was doing it. Now she was lining up the pencils on the desk and making sure the folding chairs were evenly spaced against the wall and organizing the magazines into separate piles: Better Homes and Gardens next to Family Circle, Oprah and People next to Shape, Road & Track off in a corner by itself.

The week before, a handsome but careless driver had dented Dolly’s fender and sent her a check for the damage along with a bouquet of flowers. Then, when she called to thank him, he had asked her on a proper date of the kind Danny seemed to have forgotten about. Now she wondered if the tapestry of her life was the same as Danny’s tapestry or if it was just hanging next to it. “Rain check?” the careless driver had asked, and Dolly hadn’t answered yes or no. Whenever she was in a quandary, she liked to open the Bible and point to a passage at random. The last time she tried it, she had pointed to a depressing verse about the land of gloom and chaos. Now she thought of seeking guidance again, but instead of getting the Bible out of her desk drawer, she closed her eyes and picked up a magazine from the table in front of her — who was more likely to give her good advice, Job or Oprah? When she opened her eyes, she was looking at a headline that said: IS YOUR HANDBAG KILLING YOU?

She tried the November issue: COULD A MAN DRIVE YOU CRAZY? seemed pertinent. October: DO WHAT YOU LOVE! Then she opened Road & Track: My attitude changed within about five minutes behind the wheel of the Azera. From People magazine: After 23 days behind bars, the heiress took back her freedom in a Petro Zillia blazer and jeans from her very own denim line. From a book someone had left on the table: So it goes.

Out in the driveway, a car door slammed. It was a late patient, rushing to make the five o’clock closing. Dolly could see her hurrying through the mud with her scarf flapping in the wind and her arms around an unwieldy cardboard box. She hoped there wasn’t a stillborn baby in the box because so far, it had been an almost perfect day. “Do we have time for one more?” she asked the doctor.

“If you’re quick about it. It’s nearly five, and I have dinner plans.”

The young woman who entered the waiting room stood in the doorway, her scarf pulled up to her chin and her hood pulled down over her ears. She was shuffling her feet in a way that Dolly knew from long experience irritated the doctor. Before he could bark out that he was a busy man, Dolly said, “Please tell the doctor what you’ve come to see him about.”

The woman glanced nervously from the doctor to Dolly and back again. It was only when she set the box down on the rustic table and took off her jacket and unwound her scarf that Dolly recognized Tula. “Tula!” she cried. “I haven’t seen you in months! Are you all right? Are you here to see the doctor? I hope something isn’t wrong!”

“No,” said Tula. “I’m here to see you. There’s something in this box that I think you’ll want to see.”

9.8 Maggie

Just before Christmas, a FOR SALE sign went up in front of the church, and soon afterward, Maggie returned to find a group of real estate agents inspecting the garden. She lingered on the sidewalk and tried to figure out what they were talking about, but she only caught snatches of their conversation: “nonessential properties,” “abuse scandal,” “not remotely worth what they’re asking.”

On Saturdays, Maggie took Dino for long walks through the city, always keeping her eyes open for Sandra Day O’Connor. Many of the citizens of Phoenix looked at her suspiciously when she asked about the former justice, and others merely shook their heads. “What business do you have with her?” asked a crossing guard in a disapproving tone of voice.

“You’ve chosen a funny way to go about finding someone,” said a woman with two small children in tow. “I’m sure Justice O’Connor wouldn’t take kindly to stalkers.”

“I can hardly stalk someone I’ve never seen!” exclaimed Maggie.

One time, she tried to explain about the depleted uranium to a nice gentleman who was walking a retriever. He listened politely while the two dogs sniffed each other, and when she had finished, he said, “You shouldn’t speak so loudly. The shadow government might be listening.”

After that she stopped asking questions, only walked silently around the neighborhoods she had circled on her map with Dino trailing behind her, his long toes tapping on the pavement. And she did see the justice — at least she almost did. Once or twice a day she would spy a face with powdery skin and a halo of soft gray hair, or a small, gracious figure dressed in a smart suit. She would spy the figure from the back, from the side, just going around a corner or through a door. On those occasions, Maggie would call out, “Justice O’Connor!” and rush after her, causing bystanders to stare at her briefly before going about their business as if they had seen it all before — a woman in faded jeans accompanied by a droop-eared dog, searching for something she couldn’t find. On nice days Dino would linger in a patch of sun and look solemnly after her before starting forward again, one paw in front of the other, until one day he stopped in front of a gourmet deli and refused to budge.

“Justice O’Connor? She was in here just last week,” said the proprietor. “She bought a loaf of seven-grain bread and some of those Greek olives.”

Maggie couldn’t believe her luck — it was almost as if she had turned a corner to find herself face-to-face with the former justice herself. But past experience had made her cautious. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing and see the jovial face before her cloud with misgivings. “How often does she come in?” she asked.

“Now and then,” said the proprietor. “When she’s in town.”

“But she’s in town now, isn’t she?”

“She was last week, but she goes to Washington, DC, a lot. Her clerk said they were headed back there. She didn’t say when they were going, and of course I didn’t pry.”

“Her clerk?” Maggie had assumed she would find the former justice alone, with no one else to interfere. She had envisioned a kind woman in a long black robe sweeping toward her along the sidewalk or, in an alternate scenario, sitting on a portable dais and answering questions for people who stood in line before her, as if searching for the justice was not only acceptable, but commonplace. She saw herself explaining about the top-secret documents and the Iraqi babies and then about Tomás and George and feeling her burden lift as the ex-justice absorbed the facts in preparation for making a pronouncement about what to do. “Do you happen to know where she lives?” she asked.

Before the proprietor could answer, a customer came into the shop and mistook Maggie for an employee. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she said, tapping Maggie on the shoulder. “I need a little help.”

Maggie had the sensation that the roles had somehow been reversed — that the customer was looking for her the way she was looking for Sandra Day O’Connor and that she would be expected to offer thoughtful suggestions on the basis of a disjointed set of facts.

“I can’t seem to find that nice olive oil with the white truffle essence,” said the customer.

“If only my problem were that simple,” said Maggie when the customer had paid for her purchases and left. “If only I just needed a little olive oil.”

“Try me,” said the proprietor.

Maggie nearly burst into tears. She knew she would have to tell her story carefully so the proprietor wouldn’t scoff at her or clam up altogether, but even though she took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts before starting, the story came tumbling out of her: the missiles that spewed radiation into the air, the munitions plant that polluted the creek, the policies aimed at providing ever more bodies for ever more prison cells, Tomás and George and all the wrongfully incarcerated. “I don’t know what to do, and I thought Justice O’Connor could advise me.”

“You got Tomás’s file to an appellate attorney, didn’t you? And someone wrote an article publicizing his case, and the attorney is making progress on the appeal, isn’t he?” The proprietor was looking at her with admiration, as if she had done something out of the ordinary.

“Yes,” said Maggie. “But even so, nothing’s changed.”

“Well, unless you plan to go to law school, there’s not much else you can do. Most people wouldn’t have bothered at all.”

“How could I not have bothered? Once I realized all the terrible things that were happening, that’s all I could think about. It seemed selfish to be concerned with myself or even with Lyle and Will when innocent people were in cages. So I started to look for evidence, thinking that was the way to convince other people of the truth. But I didn’t convince them. They pointed to rules and procedures and only became more firmly entrenched in their positions. Which made me wonder — what if the important thing isn’t reason or evidence at all? What if it’s more to do with imagination? If you can imagine what it’s like for someone else, you still might lock that person up — you might even kill him — but you’d comprehend the tragedy of what you were doing, wouldn’t you?”

“Hmm,” said the proprietor. “You might be overthinking it…but at least you’re overthinking it at the best little deli in Scottsdale! You might as well take advantage of it. You might as well sit right here at the counter and have a cold drink and my signature eggplant and feta sandwich.”

The proprietor busied himself behind the counter before turning and presenting her with two thick slabs of bread pinned together with a toothpick and garnished with parsley and a radish. If he had understood anything of what she was saying, he gave no sign of it. “Now,” he said, “I want to hear more about Lyle and Will.”

Maggie’s heart leapt like it had finally been returned to water after lying helplessly on the bank. She had purposely put her family out of her mind, but now she poured out the story of her life in Red Bud. She told of dinners at the Main Street Diner and how the three of them had squeezed together in the front seat of the truck before she had quit her job at the munitions plant. She told how Lyle had loved turkey and cheese or ham and mayo in his lunch until she had stopped buying turkey because the birds were raised in such tight quarters that part of their beaks and toes had to be removed to prevent them from injuring each other and ham because of how the sows were confined to cramped gestation crates until they were too old to be useful, at which time they were killed. She was surprised to find herself voicing not only what she loved about Lyle, but also the things that irritated her. She described how Lyle would shake his head over a dilemma before declaring, “Who am I to say! There are experts for that sort of thing.” She recalled how she was always sticking up for Lyle, but when was the last time Lyle had stuck up for her?

“It sounds like you had a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. It sounds like Lyle took advantage of you. No wonder you ran away.”

“I didn’t run away!” she exclaimed. “And Lyle didn’t take advantage of me at all!” She tore a crust off her sandwich and tossed it to Dino, who was waiting for her by the door. It was disconcerting to be misunderstood. But how did a person tell his or her story exactly the way it was?

“When the responsibilities of your family became overwhelming, you traded them in for responsibilities of a different kind.”

“That’s not the way it was at all.”

Right from the start, Maggie had assumed Lyle needed her more than she had needed him. Even worse, she had let other people think it. Whenever Misty or True said, “I hope Lyle knows how lucky he is,” Maggie had never corrected them or said that she was lucky too. And if Lyle gave Will what she thought was bad advice, she would interrupt and contradict him, right in front of Will. Now she wondered if the proprietor was a little bit right about running away, and if what she was running away from had mostly been her fault.

9.9 Lyle

Every evening, the first thing Lyle would see when he walked into the house was the pile of bills on Maggie’s desk. He tried putting a kitchen towel over it, but that only made the pile seem to be taunting him. The Saturday after the phone service was terminated, Lyle got up early and cleared a space on the desk. After setting the checkbook and a blue felt-tip pen in the space, he poured a cup of coffee and sat in Maggie’s chair with his knees bumping up against the underside of the pencil drawer. He hadn’t worked at a desk in over twenty years, and his eyes automatically flew to the door and then to the window. A flock of crows settled on the lawn, their wings black and gleaming. Maggie’s bicycle, which he guessed now belonged to Will, rusted against the side of the shed, and the mud-spattered truck angled into its parking spot, indicating that Will had been the last to drive it. Lyle hadn’t heard him come in — where was Will going so late at night? He wished he could discuss it with Maggie, but he didn’t want to worry her. He wished he could discuss it with Jimmy Sweets without Jimmy always taking Will’s side and acting as if Lyle didn’t know his own son. When the crows flapped off, Lyle tore his eyes away from the window, half expecting Miss Proctor to slap her ruler against the side of the desk and say, Next time, Lyle, I’m slapping it against your head!

Each time Lyle wrote out a check, he sealed it in an envelope and fixed one of the self-sticking Liberty Bell stamps into the top right-hand corner. Then he printed his return address on the lines provided and dropped the envelope into a pile at his feet and carefully subtracted the amount from the balance column in the check register, just as Maggie had always done. “Look at this, Will,” he said when Will came into the room rubbing his eyes. He tapped the checkbook with the pen.

“Good job, Dad.”

Will’s big hand rested for a moment on Lyle’s shoulder, filling Lyle with something deep and joyful.

Besides bills, the pile contained credit card applications and mortgage refinance invitations and packets of coupons for things Lyle didn’t use. At the bottom of the pile were two letters on official school stationery — one inviting Will and his family to a meeting at the college counseling office, and the second saying that Will had missed two counseling sessions and also failed to turn in his scholarship application forms. A week later, a third letter arrived suggesting Will consider a trade school course if he didn’t plan to go to college. It included a final counseling date, this one printed in bold red type.

“What do you want to do?” asked Lyle.

Will seemed surprised that the counselor had taken the trouble to write so many letters. “I guess they believed their own story,” he said.

Will spent the weekend picking the letters up and putting them down again. “About becoming a doctor,” he said when they were clearing away the Sunday supper things.

“Yes?” said Lyle when his son didn’t continue.

“I mean, how do people know who they really are?”

The question unnerved Lyle, who had started to wonder the same thing. “Why don’t you call Mom in the morning?” he suggested. “She gets in early on Mondays. She’s sure to have some good ideas.”

“Mom’s a perfect example of what I mean,” said Will. “We went for years thinking she was one thing, and then, all of a sudden, she was something else.”

“People have sides to them,” said Lyle. “Your mother was just discovering a different side. Kind of like you discovering you want to be a doctor.”

“But I don’t want to be a doctor,” said Will quietly. “I don’t want to now, and I never did.”

“But I thought…” Lyle sat down at the table, stunned and silent. “Let’s call your mother,” he said. “I expect she’ll have some good advice for you.”

“What would Maggie Rayburn do — isn’t that how it goes? The thing is, I don’t want to know what Mom would do. It’s what Will Rayburn would do that counts, so don’t you go telling her anything about it.”

Lyle understood that in some way the conversation was about him, for all around him, people were changing while he sat stuck to his chair. He alone had no facets or hidden agendas. He suspected that when the doctors eventually cut him open, what they’d find would be a brown zip jacket and a red felt cap.

After that, he spent ten minutes a day at the desk and watched the dwindling pile of bills with a deep sense of satisfaction. Less satisfying was the fact that the total in the right-hand column of the check register was going down. “I guess I won’t be fixing that muffler,” he said to Will, who was sitting on the couch staring out the window at the crows.

“Did you ever notice that when one flies off, they all fly off?” asked Will.

“That seems to be in the nature of crows,” said Lyle.

“Yeah,” said Will. “Sometimes I think I must be part crow.”

One day a representative of the bank that held the mortgage on their house called to say the automatic payment had failed to go through for the second month in a row.

“My wife handles the mortgage payments,” said Lyle.

“In that case, perhaps you could put her on the phone.”

When Lyle couldn’t, the bank representative informed him that payment in full would be expected within a week. Then he told Lyle the amount of money owed, including interest and late fees. Lyle wrote the number down on a notepad and said he would send a check, but when he used his calculator to subtract the amount the bank wanted from the balance in the checkbook, the display blinked out -623.58.

Negative numbers had always seemed highly theoretical and dangerous to Lyle. They reminded him of words like “antimatter” and “implosion” because they didn’t correspond to real things, but to the opposites of real things. He tried to laugh it off — first to himself, and then to Will. “What’s the opposite of a couch?” he asked.

“There’s no such thing,” said Will.

“That’s my point,” said Lyle, walking over to show Will the bank balance. “That’s exactly what I’m getting at.”

“What about your paycheck, Dad? And didn’t Mom send you part of hers?”

“Oh gosh, of course,” said Lyle, breathing a sigh of relief. He adjusted the numbers in the check register and experienced a warm rush of competence. But there was also a car insurance bill hiding in the pile along with an unpaid speeding ticket and a charge for filling the propane tank, leaving the bank balance still veering toward negative territory even without the mortgage payments. “I guess I don’t absolutely have to pay the phone bill,” he said. “I guess I don’t absolutely have to fix the truck.”

“Nah,” said Will. “We can live without a telephone, and if the truck makes a little noise, so what?”

“Turn off the lights,” Lyle said to Will when he went off to bed. As he said it, he remembered all of the things Maggie had been reminding him about in the weeks before she left. Had she been planning on going to Phoenix all along? “And we don’t need the heat on high either,” he added. “Let’s use extra blankets instead.” But Will just sank farther into the couch cushions and didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn his head.

9.10 Will

The day after Will visited the recruiting station, he called his mother and told her he was following his dream just the way she was following hers.

“Will!” cried Maggie. “I’m coming home on the next bus.”

“I won’t be here,” said Will, misrepresenting his departure date. Then he relented and said, “I’m proud of you, Mom. At least you’re doing something you believe in. We can compare notes on our adventures someday. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to write.”

That evening he and Tula sat in their usual spot under the apple trees and had their first beer together. A few snowflakes sifted through the lacy branches as they laughed about how beer was a gateway drug and also about how straitlaced they’d always been.

“Every class has rebels and good kids,” said Tula. “I guess we’re somewhere in between.”

“We don’t fit in at all,” said Will. It was something he kept realizing and then forgetting again. He thought being straitlaced was generally a good thing, but he also didn’t want to be a stick in the mud. “Of course, I’ll have to follow the rules in the army, but I won’t follow them blindly. I mean, I’m going to think for myself.” The beer had loosened the gear that usually got in the way of speaking his mind, and he added, “Moderation — that’s the key, isn’t it?”

The beer also made him feel good. Tula said it made her feel good too. Good and also a little reckless, a little like having a second beer. “Was there a reason we said we were only going to have one?” she asked. “It seems kind of arbitrary, but if there was a reason for it…”

“It was kind of an assumption — I don’t really know.”

“I can see how you might say you’re not going to have any. That would be a line worth drawing, but I can’t really see the difference between one and two, can you?”

“Two never killed anybody.”

“That’s what I think. I think two would be perfectly okay.”

“It’s probably not even a good idea to stop at one,” said Will. “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

But there had only been two beers in the Rayburns’ refrigerator, and it wasn’t easy to figure out how to get more. “Everyone in town knows us,” said Will. “If we want to buy beer, we have to drive to Glorietta, which means we have to get the truck from my dad, who is probably at the Merry Maid…”

“Drinking beer,” Tula finished for him.

“Exactly right,” said Will.

The sky had been leaden and threatening all day, and now it started to snow for real, which only seemed to confirm that the world around them was changing and they would have to change too — either with it or in opposition. Either one would be good. They debated whether conformity was preferable to rebellion, and for once, they both agreed. It was exhilarating to run along the icy road in the knowledge that they had been marginalized by society and that, being excluded, they might not be bound by its laws at all. They whooped and hollered as they plunged down the hill past the athletic fields and through a dark stand of cottonwood trees to where a footpath ran beside the frozen slick of Ash Creek. They stopped for a long kiss, and Will located, deep within his alienation, a sense of belonging and completion.

The streets were unplowed and the snow was piling up, concealing the familiar. Then Tula tugged at him with her mittened hand and they were running again, past the turnoff to the Ash Creek settlement where Tula lived and past the municipal recreation center before heading up the slope to the Super Saver parking lot and down the street to where Lyle’s truck was parked next to an empty lot where the foundation for a new office complex had just been poured.

“Go inside and ask him for the keys,” said Will. “Tell him the truck is in the way of the snowplow and that you’ll move it for him.”

“I can’t say that,” said Tula. “It’s a lie!”

“You’d be protecting him,” said Will. “If he doesn’t know our plan, he can’t be held accountable for what we do. He can’t be pressured into revealing it to anyone.”

“Pressured by whom?” asked Tula.

“Whoever’s out to get us,” said Will, winking like a conspirator.

Tula blinked at him, her eyelashes heavy with snowflakes, and just when he was going to grab her again, right there on Main Street where anyone could see them, she pushed him away and sashayed into the bar, leaving him to stamp his feet on the icy pavement, trying to stay warm. After what seemed like a long time, Tula emerged, swinging her hips like a cheerleader and dangling the keys triumphantly above her head.

Will hadn’t expected there would be side effects to drinking. He hadn’t expected that he’d want to kiss Tula’s neck and her belly button or that he wouldn’t want to stop there. He hadn’t expected that driving the truck would become increasingly hazardous or that it would get stuck in a snowdrift driving back from Glorietta or that he’d push Tula into the drift instead of getting it unstuck or that he’d dive in after her when someone in a passing car stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Get a room!”

“We’ve got the truck, don’t we?” he said to Tula. “It’s even better than a room.”

“No, no, I can’t,” said Tula. She looked sorrowful and frail, shivering in her too-big parka. He wanted to protect her, so he put an arm around her shoulders, but instead of snuggling in close to him, she moved away. Tiny snowflakes were drifting down, and the light from a streetlamp made a halo around her head.

“Why not?” asked Will. Something had changed for him; or, rather, many things had changed. He was motherless. He had joined the army. He had a girlfriend. And pretty soon he’d be quitting school. He was giving up a lot, so it seemed right that Tula give up something too. Not that she’d really be giving something up — they’d both be gaining. He said the word “sacrifice,” but it wasn’t exactly what he meant. Apparently it was the wrong word to use because suddenly, Tula no longer seemed frail. Will suspected she was even angry, but the alcohol was affecting his perceptions and he couldn’t be sure.

“Give up. Abandon. Kill,” said Tula. “What kind of sacrifice are we talking about?”

Will was confused as to whether having sex or not having it entailed sacrifice and whether sacrifice was a good thing or a bad one, but before he could ask, Tula stepped beyond the circle of lamplight and faded away behind a veil of snowflakes, leaving him to ponder the effects of the beer, which no longer made him feel happy and light-headed, but leaden and angry and thick. He ran partway down the road in the direction she had gone, skidding and panicked and shouting for her to come back. Now and then a car pushed past him, its taillights smearing in the snowy dark. Then there was only silence and a small but growing blister of loneliness and desperation. He was walking back to the truck when an SUV stopped and the driver helped him push the truck out of the snow.

“Christ almighty, son,” said the driver. “You’re already at the Loop Road. Your girlfriend probably just walked on home. You must have really pissed her off.”

Will drove around the loop, slowly at first as he looked for Tula, but then more recklessly when he realized she had probably taken a shortcut across the fields to her house, which was no more than a mile away as the crow flies. He turned the wheel this way and that just to make skid marks in the pristine whiteness. He opened the window and shouted out into the swirling blizzard, “I think I know a little bit about sacrifice, Tula Santos! I joined the army after all!”

The snow absorbed the sound while Will absorbed the strange quiet of the town where he had lived his whole life. As he drove, he gazed at it in wonder, as if he had already left it or returned after an absence of many years. He was as good as gone, and he thrilled to imagine the adventures he would have while the citizens of Red Bud plodded around the same old track. He slammed on the brakes, turning into the skid before speeding up again and letting the thrill overtake him until he was riding the razor’s edge of chaos and control. He marveled at how the plumes of exhaust coming from a car that appeared in front of him turned red in the glow of the car’s taillights, at how the shapes of things seemed sharper and more brittle in the frozen air. He marveled at how things were already changing and would never be the same again. And he marveled at how slowly and inevitably the collision happened when the driver of the car he was following suddenly hit the brakes.