Sourland

The Beating

Still alive! from the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

So long I’ve been away. So long I’ve traveled, and so far.

Yet nothing seems to have changed in my absence. My mother and two other visitors are standing beside my father’s bed, their backs to me. From their demeanor you can deduce that my father is still “unresponsive” after the morning’s surgery to reduce swelling in his brain; he is unmoving except in random twitches and shudders; he is breathing — arduously, noisily — by way of a machine; his every heartbeat is being monitored on a screen above his bed; on this screen as on a TV screen an erratic scribble is being written, accompanied by an electronic beeping that reminds me of the cheeping of baby chicks. Grotesquely my father’s wounded head has been swathed in white gauze exposing a single bruised eye like a peephole someone has cruelly defaced so you can’t see in.

Earlier that day my mother had asked me to leave, there wasn’t room for me at my father’s bedside. Descending then three floors to the first floor of Sparta Memorial Hospital where there was a small visitor’s lounge adjacent to a small cafeteria beneath dim-flickering fluorescent lights. Such a depressing place! Such chill, such smells! This was July 1959. That long ago, you have to smile — I don’t blame you, I would smile in your place — to think that people like us took ourselves so seriously. You think But you’re all going to die, why does it matter exactly when? Yet this was the time, and this was the place, when my father was still alive.

Madelyn! heard the news about your father, what a terrible thing, what a shock how is he?

Madelyn! tell us all you can remember, all that you must have seen?

Hadn’t changed my clothes since my father had been brought to the hospital two and a half days before. Slept in the clothes I’d been wearing at the time of the beating, Rangers T-shirt, khaki shorts, sneakers without socks, we’d been visiting my grandmother earlier that afternoon and we’d dropped by the Sparta Blues Festival on the river on our way home, and after that, a detour, as my father called it, to his office on East Capitol Street, and now my clothes were rumpled and smelly for I’d slept in them sprawled on top of my bed without the energy to undress and anxious to be prepared should someone from the hospital call in the night, if my mother came to wake me Hurry! get up! they want us at the hospital, your father may be dying. This terrible call had not yet come and yet every breath I drew was a preparation for it, I was fourteen years old and found myself in one of those cruel fairy tales in which a daughter must perform certain rituals and tests without question, that her father will be allowed to live. And when we were at my father’s bedside in the chill of the ICU where your fingernails turned blue without your noticing, and you could fall asleep on your feet like a zombie, and begin to crumple to the floor without your noticing, it could not happen that the terrible call would come waking us from our exhausted sleep for already we were awake and we were at the hospital. Softly my mother spoke my father’s name: Harvey? Harvey? I love you. And in an urgent undertone I said: Daddy? Daddy? It’s Madelyn. For to say I love you was not possible. For so desperately I loved my father, to have spoken such words I love you was not possible. I could not have explained why, there were no words to explain why. Seeing me you’d have thought, A sulky girl, when she should be a good girl. My mother who was ordinarily very alert to my moods and to my “personal appearance” hadn’t seemed to notice that I’d been sleeping in my clothes and smelled of my body for having washed only my sticky hands and rubbed a washcloth over my feverish face, my red-rimmed pig eyes. (Those pig eyes in the mirror, I could not bear to see. Brimming with hot-guilt tears that spilled and burned like acid.) In the past two and a half days I hadn’t been able to sit down at any table to eat and had not been able to eat much as a consequence but I made certain that I brushed my teeth until my gums bled for I could not bear the sensation of anything between my teeth.

Who was it? they’d asked. Who did this to your father?

Try to remember if you saw. Must’ve seen.

Hospital rules for ICU differed from rules for the rest of the hospital: no more than three visitors at a time were allowed at a patient’s bedside. And so when my father’s older brother and his wife came to see my father, my mother asked me to leave. Of course this was a reasonable request. Of course I was not angry at my mother, or my relatives. Yet quickly I walked away, avoiding the friendly smiles of the ICU nurses who’d come to recognize me and my family Don’t look at me! Please don’t smile at me! You don’t know me! Leave me alone. I took the stairs down to the foyer, not the elevator. I dreaded being trapped inside an elevator with strangers, still more I dreaded encountering someone who recognized me as Harvey Fleet’s daughter who would take my hand in sympathy or hug me, and I would push rudely away, my face would break and turn ugly with tears glistening like snot.

How small the Sparta Hospital was, in 1959! Yet no one then seemed to have known.

Such silly people. It’s easy to laugh at us.

The very air exuded a spent, sepia cast as if faded by time like an old Polaroid photograph. Though the hospital was air-conditioned, cold as a refrigerator, yet there was a just-perceptible odor of stale urine, fecal matter, rot beneath the sharper odor of disinfectant. Visitors to the hospital and hospital staff appeared stiff and clumsy as mannequin figures in a painting by Edward Hopper. Voices were overly shrill and emphatic as TV voices and if there was laughter it was not convincing laughter but reminded me of canned TV laughter. Of course I was one of those figures myself, a solitary girl of fourteen in rumpled clothes sitting at a table, at the edge of the cafeteria. My eyes stung with fatigue, my head ached, and there was a sour, dark taste at the back of my mouth. Badly I did not want to be in this place but had nowhere else to go, for if I left the hospital, and went home, my father might die, and I would not be at his bedside. I’d brought a library book with me but couldn’t concentrate, how insubstantial were printed words, passages of type in a book of dog-eared pages, I could think only of my father trapped in his hospital bed in the intensive care unit, unconscious, made to breathe in anguished gasps by a machine, his ravaged head and face swathed in white gauze and a single bruised and bloodshot eye exposed…. And I thought of how I had found him lying on the floor of his office on East Capitol Street. Thinking at first that he had lost his balance somehow and fallen, struck his head on the sharp edge of the desk, for he was bleeding from a head wound, and he was bleeding from injuries to his face. He was whimpering and moaning through clenched teeth. The door to my father’s office had been left open and so I stood in the doorway for an astonished moment uncertain what it was I was seeing. Before I had time to be frightened the thought came to me Daddy would not want me to see him like this. He would not want anyone to see him like this.

I began to see how memory pools might accumulate in such places as this cafeteria and in waiting rooms through the hospital. In corners, in the shadows. Beneath tables like mine. These memory pools made the worn tile floor damp, sticky, discolored as by mildew. And maybe there were actual tears, soaked into the floor. I felt a shiver of dread: you could not walk anywhere in such a place without the anguished memories of strangers sticking to your shoes. Their dread of what was to come in their lives, what ruptures, what unspeakable losses. Early that morning my father had undergone emergency surgery to reduce pressure on his brain, into which burst blood vessels had been bleeding since he’d suffered “blunt force trauma” to the head. Yet my father was but one of how many thousands of patients who’d been hospitalized at Sparta Memorial Hospital over the years…. One day with precise scientific instruments certain of these memories might be exhumed, I thought. Like organic matter identified from the stains of long ago. And so there might be a future time when these thoughts that so tormented me now would be calmly recalled; when all this, in which I was trapped — the hospital, the visitors’ lounge, the slow-ticking afternoon in July 1959 — would be past.

He lived! He did live, he survived.

He died. “Passed away.” There was nothing to be done.

Yet at this time, I was safe from such knowledge. At this time, my father, Harvey Fleet, was still alive.

“Madelyn?”

Vaguely I had been aware of someone approaching my table, coming up behind me, as frequently individuals were making their way past in this crowded space, and I had been aware of someone pausing, looming over me. I looked up in expectation of seeing one of my male relatives but instead I saw a man whom I didn’t recognize at first, with a two days’ growth of beard on his jaws, amber-tinted sunglasses, and thick disheveled graying hair that seemed to rise like a geyser at the crown of his head. “Madelyn Fleet. It is you.” The surprise was that this man was my seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Carmichael, whom I had not seen in more than two years and then only in our school building. The way in which Mr. Carmichael had intoned Madelyn Fleet was his teacherly teasing way, which I remembered. I had to remember too, with a quick stab of emotion, that I’d been in love with Mr. Carmichael, in secret, when I was twelve years old.

Now I was fourteen, and much changed. In my former teacher’s eyes this change was being registered.

Smiling down at me, Mr. Carmichael was smoking a cigarette for in 1959 it was not forbidden to smoke cigarettes in a hospital, even in most hospital rooms. How strange it was to see my seventh-grade math teacher unshaven as none of his students had ever seen him, and his hair that had always been trimmed short now grown long, curling languidly behind his ears, and threaded with silvery gray wires. It was a warmly humid midsummer and so Mr. Carmichael had rolled up his shirtsleeves to his elbows; the cuffs hung free, at a rakish angle. The front of Mr. Carmichael’s shirt was damp with perspiration and looked as if it hadn’t been changed in days. From such signs I understood that Mr. Carmichael too was an anxious visitor to Sparta Memorial Hospital, yet even in his state of distraction and dread he was smiling at me, and his eyes behind the tinted lenses of his glasses were alert and intense in a way I did not remember from when I’d been his student. When he inquired what I was reading I had no choice but to show him the cover of the book, which was a novel by H. G. Wells that elicited from Mr. Carmichael a remark meant to be clever and knowing, for at our school Mr. Carmichael — whose first name we giggled to see was Luther — had a reputation for being clever and knowing if also, at times, sarcastic, sardonic, and inscrutable; a teacher who graded harshly, at times; for which reason, while some girl students admired Mr. Carmichael and strove to please him, most of our classmates were uncomfortable in his classes, and disliked him. Even boys who laughed at Mr. Carmichael’s jokes did not wholly trust him, for he could turn on you, if you were not cautious. There were rumors about Mr. Carmichael being complained of by the parents of certain students and perhaps by certain of his fellow teachers and vaguely last year I’d heard that Mr. Carmichael no longer taught at the school…. As if he could hear my thoughts and wished to commandeer them, Mr. Carmichael leaned over me, saying, in a lowered voice, that he thought he’d recognized me as I crossed the lobby and came here to sit, he’d thought it might be me — “Or some older sister of little Madelyn Fleet” — but he wasn’t sure that he could trust his eyes — “You’ve gotten taller, Madelyn. And you carry yourself — differently.” In embarrassed confusion I laughed, leaning away from him; my face throbbed with blood; I was overwhelmed by such attention, and did not know how to reply. There was nowhere to look except at Mr. Carmichael’s flushed and roughened face, and his eyes so warmly intent upon me beyond the smudged lenses of his sunglasses. Mr. Carmichael’s breath smelled of — was it whiskey? — a sweetish-sour odor with which I was long familiar, for all my male relatives drank whiskey at times, and certainly my father drank whiskey. It had not been the case during my year of seventh-grade math that Mr. Carmichael had singled me out for any particular attention, or praise; I could not have claimed that Mr. Carmichael had ever really looked at me, as an individual; though I’d been one of five or six reliable students who’d usually received high grades, I hadn’t been an outstanding math student, only a doggedly diligent good-girl student. Nor had I been one of the popular and flirtatious girls in our class who’d had no trouble attracting Mr. Carmichael’s attention. Yet now he was asking, “Why are you here in this depressing place, Madelyn? I hope it isn’t a family emergency….” He did not seem to be teasing but spoke sincerely, with sympathy; lightly his hand rested on my shoulder, to comfort. I was frightened now for such sympathy left me weak, defenseless; I did not want to cry; in my bedroom I’d cried until my eyes were reddened and swollen like blisters but I had not cried in front of anyone except my mother. It would be held against Harvey Fleet’s daughter that she was “cold” — “snotty” — stiffening in her relatives’ embraces and shrinking from their kisses with a look of disdain. Yet how could I bring myself to say to Mr. Carmichael, My father is upstairs in the intensive care unit, he had surgery this morning to reduce swelling in his brain, he has not regained consciousness after a terrible beating…. Quickly I told Mr. Carmichael that my mother had come to see a friend in the hospital who’d had minor surgery and I’d been with them for a while then became restless, couldn’t breathe, came downstairs to read my novel but couldn’t concentrate, and now I was thinking of going home. (For suddenly it came to me; I could leave this hateful place, I could go home without my mother.) Mr. Carmichael said he’d had enough of the hospital too. More than enough. He’d drive me home, Mr. Carmichael said now, nudging my ponytail, and I laughed, saying thank you but I could take a city bus, or I could walk. (In the heat, the three-mile walk would be punishing. My mother would be astonished and would not know if she should be apologetic or disgusted with me.) Mr. Carmichael squinted down at me through his sunglasses, saying in his brisk-bemused-teacher voice that his car was out back: “C’mon, Madelyn. I’ll drive you home.”

How was it possible to say no?

“This is a little detour, kid. Our secret.”

It was dusk. We were late returning home. Yet we were driving east along the river, back toward Sparta. If we’d been headed home, as we were expected, my father would have been driving us west. The air at dusk was humid and porous as gauze and through the Cadillac’s lowered windows warm air rushed that smelled of something overripe like rotted fruit and beneath, a fainter, sour smell of rotted fish.

It was a festive time of evening! I was very happy. On the river there were ghostly white sailboats and power-driven boats that glittered with lights against the darkening, choppy water and on shore, in the park where the blues festival was being held, there were steadier lights like flames.

A detour. Our secret. These mysterious pronouncements of my father’s were usually made in a playful voice that carried an unmistakable warning: do as I say, without acknowledging that I have said it.

By these words I was given to understand that my father didn’t want my mother to know we’d gone back into the city. I liked it that there were such understandings between my father and me, which excluded my mother.

On the evening of the beating that was never to be explained, for which no “assailant” or “assailants” would ever be charged, my father was distracted and appeared to be in a hurry. We’d left the blues festival abruptly for he’d said that we had to get home and now, not ten minutes later, he was headed for downtown Sparta and his office on East Capitol Street. Gripped between his legs was a bottle of ale he’d brought with him from the festival. The dashboard of the car gleamed and glittered with so many dials, switches, controls you’d have thought you were in the cockpit of a fighter plane.

The car was my father’s newest: a showy 1959 cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with Spanish red leather interior, a chrome grille like shark’s teeth, swooping tail fins and flaring taillights. A massive vehicle twenty feet in length, like a yacht it glided past ordinary traffic seemingly without effort. Within the family it was believed that Harvey Fleet had acquired this car from one of his gambler friends in Sparta in need of quick cash but my father typically offered no explanations, he’d only just driven the Cadillac home: “Look out in the driveway. Anybody want a ride?”

My father was like that: impulsive, unpredictable. He was a man of secrets and he was generous when he wanted to be generous and not so generous when he didn’t want to be. He owned properties in Sparta and vicinity, mostly rentals, and recently he’d become a developer, with partners, of a new shopping center north of the city. Business was the center of my father’s life. Yet you could not gain entry into that life by asking him about his work, for when relatives asked him such questions he would say, with a disarming smile, “Can’t complain.” Or, “Holding my own.” He would not elaborate. He had as little interest in boasting of successes as he had in acknowledging failures. If a question was too personal or pointed he would say, “Hell, that’s business” — as if his business affairs were too trivial to speak of. Yet you knew that what Harvey Fleet meant was None of your damned business.

We had stayed at the blues festival for less than an hour and during that time I’d seen how my father, in his trademark white cotton shirt (no tie, open at the collar) and seersucker trousers (melon colored, for summer), and canvas shoes (white), moved easily among the crowd shaking hands with people who were strangers to me; being greeted by the musicians, most of whom were black men (young, middle-aged, elderly) eager to shake Harvey Fleet’s hand for Harvey Fleet was one of the sponsors of the festival — “A friend to blues and jazz music.” (Was this so? At home, my father never listened to music of any kind, never even watched television.) In Sparta, my father had many friends: local politicians, the chief of police, the district attorney, county officials. On a wall of his office were framed caricatures of Sparta personalities, including Harvey Fleet, crude but clever line drawings by a cartoonist for the Sparta Herald who’d exaggerated my father’s vulpine good looks, his thick dark hair springing from a low forehead, his fistlike jaw and his trademark smile so wide and emphatic it looked riveted in place. Years later I would see on TV the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice with flawlessly blond Lana Turner and darkly handsome John Garfield and it would be a shock to me, how closely my father had resembled Garfield when he’d been young. At the blues festival to the sexy-seductive strains of “Stormy Weather” — “Mood Indigo” — “Sleepy Time Gal” — I’d seen how my father was acquainted with women who were strangers to me, some of them very attractive, and I thought, My father has his secret life, which none of us can know.

I wondered if it was better that way, our not knowing.

Though you couldn’t question him about his past, my father sometimes spoke of his youthful nomadic adventures: he’d quit school at fifteen and gone to work on a Great Lakes freighter bearing iron ore from Duluth to Buffalo; he’d hitchhiked out west, worked in Washington State, and in Alaska, where he’d worked on salmon fishing boats. His own father, Jonas Fleet, who’d died before I was born, had been exhausted and broken by the age of fifty, having worked in a Lackawanna steel mill; my father was determined not to emulate him; he said, “There’s better use for a man’s lungs than to be coated with steel filings.” In the army, in World War II, he’d been stationed in Italy, and the names of Italian regions and towns — Tuscany, Brescia, Vicenza, Parma — rolled off his tongue like an exotic sort of music, which meant little to his listeners. Of these long-ago adventures he’d had before he returned home to Sparta he spoke in a tone of wistfulness and pride; he’d made it through the war without being seriously wounded or “drove crazy” and of ugly memories he did not speak, at least not to us.

He laughed often. He liked to laugh. There were some in our family who distrusted my father’s laughter, which made them uneasy. Why is Harv laughing? Is Harv laughing at us? You understood that there was a prevailing joke to which my father’s joking alluded, but it was a private joke not accessible to others. “The only laugh that matters is the last laugh,” my father said. “And that isn’t guaranteed.”

“Wait here in the car. Read your book. I’ll be a few minutes. Don’t come looking for me.”

My father had parked at the rear of the Brewer Building, on a back street not far from the river. Buildings on the other side of this street had been razed and lay in heaps of rubble behind a ten-foot fence posted NO TRESPASSING: DANGER and a half block beyond was a wharf at which battered-looking fishing boats were docked. This was not the Sparta Yacht Club marina several miles to the east on the Black River, where my father kept his Chris-Craft powerboat; this was the old Sparta waterfront downtown. On Sundays the area was nearly deserted except for a few taverns and riverside restaurants; except for East Capitol, there was little traffic. Seagulls flew overhead and the air was pierced by their sharp cries; river smells — briny water, rotted pilings, dead fish — made my nostrils pinch. These were mostly pleasurable smells, and I liked being here. From time to time my father brought me with him to his office where his secretary Charlotte smiled to see me: “Madelyn, hello. Come to help us out today?”

The Brewer Building, owned by a real estate broker friend of my father, was the tallest building in the neighborhood and impressive with a smooth-shiny facade like polished marble. Inside was a foyer with a barbershop, a smoke shop, and a newsstand, all of which would be closed on Sunday. Only dimly could you see the stately mosaic figures on the foyer ceiling meant to suggest Egyptian pyramids, ancient hieroglyphics. There was an elevator with an elaborate grillwork door. Yet at the rear and sides of the Brewer Building you saw only weatherworn dark brick; the facade was what a facade meant — just a showy front. Especially from the rear, the building looked shabby. On each floor were ugly fire escapes. Some of the windows were cracked and opaque with grime. My father’s office on the eighth floor overlooking East Capitol Street and in the near distance the gleaming spire of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church was nothing like these. Years ago when my father had told me to wait in the car for him I’d disobeyed him, gone inside, and dared to take the elevator to the tenth, top floor of the building; on the tenth floor, I’d dared to climb a brief flight of steps and pushed open a door marked NO ADMITTANCE: ROOF and stepped outside on a shimmering-hot tar roof. So high! A sensation of vertigo overcame me, a sense of being physically drawn to the edge of the roof where the parapet was no more than two feet high; in halting steps I made my way to the edge; my eyes blinked in amazement, at this height I could see the S-curve of the Black River, boats on the river, more tall buildings than I would have imagined in Sparta, rooftops, church spires, chimneys. Airplanes droning high overhead, pigeons and seagulls. Everywhere were bird droppings, white crusted like concrete. How exhausting the wind, and hypnotizing. It was both exhilarating to me and frightening that no one knew where I was. If someone were to glimpse me from a window in another tall building, he would not know who I was; he would not care. When I turned back to the heavy door a chilling thought struck me — Now the door will be shut and locked against you.

The door wasn’t locked. I’d been eleven at the time. I did not tell my father that I’d dared to walk on the roof of the Brewer Building that day and I never walked on the roof again.

Don’t come looking for me, my father had said. I would wait for him in the car, reading my book. I’d opened the passenger’s door so that I could sit sideways, with my legs dangling. Close by the river where there were no buildings obscuring the setting sun it was still light enough for me to read and I had only the vaguest awareness of my surroundings. In the near distance waves lapped against the wharf and from farther away came muffled sounds of music. At the periphery of my vision I might have been aware of another car turning onto the street behind the Brewer Building and parking a short distance away but this awareness was scarcely conscious and failed to register. Did you see — anyone? Must’ve seen! Try to remember. I was captivated by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which was the first of Wells’s Seven Scientific Romances that I’d discovered in the public library. I was captivated by the brashness of the Time Traveller — flinging himself onto the “saddle” of his home made time machine into not the near future but the distant future, with none of the provisions you would take on an overnight camping trip. You could foresee that the unnamed Time Traveller would return from his journey to the year 802,701, since he was telling his one story, but the way would not be easy for he’d discovered that humankind had evolved into two distinct subspecies: the “graceful children” of the Upper World and the “obscene, nocturnal Things” that dwelled like humanoid spiders underground. In much of my reading at this time in my early adolescence there was a terrible logic: something virulent and vengeful prepared to rise up in the night, beneath us as we slept, like an animated earthquake, to punish us. Why we were to be punished was not explained. Punishment was something that happened, and could not be averted. Punishment suggests a crime: but what is the crime? Born bad, it was said of some people. Born bad, it was said even of some individuals in Sparta. Yet I could not understand how an infant could be born bad, for no infant in my experience could plausibly be described in such a way.

Out on the river, men’s voices lifted in shouts of laughter, muffled by a motor’s roar. The sun was starting to set; I was losing the light at last. I left the car and took up a position nearer the river, leaning against a great cracked slab of concrete. If at this time the vehicle that might — or might not — have been parked behind the Brewer Building was driven away — if someone had hurriedly exited the building, gone to the car, and driven away — I had no awareness of it. I was in no position to see. Didn’t see. Don’t know. Leave me alone!

Another powerboat passed by, trailing drunken laughter. Vaguely it seemed to me that my name had been called — Madelyn! Madelyn! At the blues festival there had been several boys whom I knew from school, older boys at the high school, they’d called to me Madelyn! Madelyn Fleet! But I’d only just waved to them, I’d been standing with my father listening to a black jazz quartet playing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” Now I seemed to hear my name in a faint, failing voice, my father’s voice, but unlike my father’s voice as I had ever heard it. Quickly I closed The Time Machine, and returned to the car.

My father had been inside the building for more than a half hour, I thought. A ripple of pain pulsed in my eyes. How garish the Cadillac Eldorado looked, the cream-colored luxury car with Spanish red leather interior, parked amid rubble. I tossed The Time Machine onto the passenger’s seat and entered the building, into dim, humid heat and despite the heat I began to shiver. There was the elevator in the foyer: I could not bring myself to take it up to the eighth floor. What if the power failed, what if I was stuck between floors? Instead I took the stairs. Only dimly was the stairwell lighted by naked lightbulbs at each landing. The heat in the stairwell was stifling and by the time I reached the eighth floor I was panting and sweating. My Rangers T-shirt clung to my sticky skin. My hair stuck to the nape of my neck. On the eighth floor I struggled with the heavy door and another time the cruel taunt came to me Now the door will be locked against you, this is your punishment. But another time the door wasn’t locked against me, I ran down the corridor to my father’s office where the door was open….

At first I thought that my father had fallen somehow, struck his head against the sharp edge of a desk. He was bleeding from a head wound and from cuts to his face. His white cotton shirt was dappled with blood, and torn. His melon-colored seersucker trousers were dappled with blood, and torn. One of his sporty white shoes had been wrenched off. He was conscious, trying to sit up. I could hear his terrible labored breathing and his grunting with the effort of maneuvering himself into a sitting position. “Daddy —,” I called, and ran to him, and his glassy eyes fixed on me without seeming to recognize me: “Get away, get out of here” — “Don’t touch me.” Drawers had been yanked out of his desk and out of the green filing cabinet against the wall. There was a sharp, rank animal sweat of panic, male sweat. And a prevailing smell of cigarette smoke. By the time my father managed to stand shakily, he was calling me “Madelyn” — “honey.” He assured me he was all right — “Nothing to worry about, honey.” He was wiping at his dazed and bloody face with the front of his ruined shirt. When I asked him what had happened, had someone hurt him, he seemed not to hear. I asked if I should call an ambulance or the police and quickly he said no. In his stricken and disheveled state my father hovered over me. I could feel the heat of his skin. He was trying to explain through swollen lips that someone whose face he hadn’t seen had forced his way into the office and tried to rob him, he had not seen who it was because he’d been attacked from behind. Yet then my father said whoever it was had been waiting for him in his office when he’d unlocked the door, surprised him with a blow to the head. And maybe there was more than one of them, he hadn’t seen. I asked him what had been taken from the office and he said nothing had been taken because he’d surprised the thieves. I asked him if I should call the police and he said, with an angry laugh: “Didn’t I say no police?”

Now he would wash up, he said. As if his injuries could be washed away! Like a drunken man he leaned heavily on me, making his way to the men’s restroom outside in the corridor. “Stay out here. I’ll be all right. Don’t look so scared, your old man isn’t going to die.” My father spoke disdainfully, dripping blood. And in the restroom he remained for what seemed like a long time. I could hear water rushing from faucets, a groaning of aged pipes. I heard a toilet flush several times. I stood at the door calling, Daddy? Daddy? in a plaintive voice until he staggered back out. His face was washed, his hair dampened though not combed; he’d removed the torn and bloodstained shirt, and was in his sleeveless undershirt of ribbed cotton, which was also bloodstained. Fistfuls of wiry dark hair bristled on his chest, covering his forearms like pelt. He was walking lopsided because he’d left his left shoe back in his office, where I fetched it for him. I also shut the door, and locked it. Afterward I would realize that my father hadn’t seemed to be afraid that his assailant or assailants would return, and do more injury to him. He’d seemed to know that his daughter wasn’t endangered. The beating was finished, and would not be repeated.

To my amazement my father insisted upon returning to the car and driving home. “I can handle this. My head is clear.” Though he was obviously weak, dazed, swaying on his feet. Though his eyes seemed to be swerving out of focus even as he spoke to me in such emphatic terms. So we took the elevator down to the foyer, and returned to the cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado parked so conspicuously behind the building. In the west the sun resembled a lurid red egg yolk bleeding into banks of dark thunderhead clouds. I was reminded of the “huge red-hot dome of the sun” the Time Traveller had encountered hundreds of millions of years in the future, swollen to one-tenth of the sky. Once in the car, my father tried to behave as if nothing had happened. He was muttering to himself, giving himself instructions. The fingers of his right hand were strangely swollen; I had to insert the ignition key and turn it for him. By this time I’d begun to cry. I was trembling badly, my bladder pinched with a panicked need to pee. Another time I asked my father if we shouldn’t call an ambulance or the police and another time he said no — “No police.” This seemed strange to me, for my father was friendly with the chief of police and with other men on the Sparta police force. Yet it seemed to infuriate him, the prospect of summoning police. Another time I asked him if he’d seen who had beaten him and another time he said Goddamn no, he hadn’t seen. Strange it seemed to me that my father’s anger was directed at me, not at whoever had hurt him.

“They jumped me from behind. They were waiting inside. I never saw their faces. It was over before it began.”

And, “Might’ve been just one person. All I know is, he was white.”

On Route 31 headed east, the cream-colored Cadillac drifted out of its lane. My father had forgotten to switch on the headlights. He winced with pain, his injured head and face had to be throbbing with pain. At the hospital it would be revealed that he’d suffered a concussion, several of his ribs were cracked, his right wrist and fingers sprained. Teeth had loosened in his jaws, deep cuts would leave scars in both his eyebrows. He’d been beaten with something like a tire iron, and he’d been kicked when he’d fallen. In our wake on the river road the horns of other vehicles sounded in reproach. I begged my father to pull over to the side before we had an accident and at last he did, after a mile or two. He was too dazed and exhausted to keep going. On the littered shoulder of the highway the cream-colored Caddie limped to an ignoble stop. Traffic passed us by. My father slumped over the steering wheel like an avalanche suddenly released, a stream of bright blood trickling down his neck. I scrambled out of the car to stand at the edge of the highway waving frantically until at last a Sparta police cruiser appeared. “Help us! Help my father! Don’t let him die.”

The cry that came from me was brute, animal. I had never heard such a cry before and would not have believed that it had issued from me.

Madelyn, tell us what you know.

Anything you can remember, Madelyn. If you saw a car anywhere near. If you saw someone. In the street behind the building. Entering the building. If your father mentioned anyone. Before your father passed out, all that he said to you. Whatever he said to you. Tell us.

In July 1959. That wild ride into the countryside, when my father was still alive.

Mr. Carmichael asked me where I lived and I told him. Then he said we were taking the long way round, a little ride out into the country, how’d I like that; and I said yes, I loved the country, loved riding in a car with the windows rolled down and the radio on loud. Love love love you, Mr. Carmichael, shutting my eyes to be kissed. Giggling to think if he sniffed at my armpits —! But Mr. Carmichael looked as if he’d been sleeping in his clothes too.

He hadn’t forced me to drink, I would say afterward. None of what happened he’d forced me to do.

Exiting the hospital by the rear revolving door. Inside, the sickish refrigerated air and outside, hot-humid-sticky midsummer sunshine. “Know what a hospital is, Madelyn? — a petri dish breeding germs. Have to get the hell out, sometimes. Save your own life.”

I think it was then — on our way to the parking lot — I asked Mr. Carmichael if someone in his family was in the hospital, and Mr. Carmichael, rummaging for his car keys in his trouser pocket, took no more notice of my question than in our seventh-grade class he’d taken notice of certain students who were not his favorites, waving their hands in the air to ask silly questions.

Repeating in a brisk staccato voice tugging at my ponytail:

“Save — your — own — goddamn — life.”

Mr. Carmichael’s 1955 Dodge station wagon had faded to a dull tin color and was stippled with rust like crude lace. The front bumper was secured by ingenious twists of wire. I might have thought that it was strange, my former math teacher Mr. Carmichael was driving such a vehicle, very different from any vehicle my father, Harvey Fleet, would have driven. Mr. Carmichael was clapping his hands as you’d clap your hands to hurry a clumsy child, or a dog: “Got to keep moving. Like the shark, perpetual motion or it drowns. Chop-chop, Maddie!” Exuberantly Mr. Carmichael gathered up clothes, empty beer bottles, a single shoe out of the front passenger’s seat of the station wagon, tossed out into the already messy rear.

Out of Sparta we drove west along the Black River. On the radio, pop music blared, interrupted by loud jocular advertisements from a local radio station. Though I had told Mr. Carmichael where I lived, it did not seem that Mr. Carmichael had heard, or he’d forgotten. He was in very good spirits. It is unusual to see a man, an adult man, in such good spirits. The front windows of the station wagon were rolled down and wind in crazed gusts whipped at our heads. In the gauzy-humid sunshine the wide choppy river glittered like a snake’s scales. In Sparta you are always driving along the river, for the river intersects the city: you are driving on Route 31 East, or you are driving on Route 31 West; you are driving on Route 31A West, or you are driving on Route 31A East. Yet the river seemed always different, and sometimes it did not look familiar. That day there was a massive freighter on the river, ugly and ungainly as a dinosaur. Far away downtown were high-rise buildings and one of these was the Brewer Building but it was lost in haze. At Sentry Street beside the railroad trestle bridge a train was passing thunderous and deafening. Mr. Carmichael shouted to be heard over the noise but his words were blown away. It did not seem to matter if I replied to Mr. Carmichael or not. From the side, Mr. Carmichael did not resemble anyone I had ever seen. A faint doubt came to me, was this Luther Carmichael? My seventh-grade math teacher? This man’s face was flushed as if he’d been running in the heat. His skin looked as if it had been scraped by sandpaper. His silvery brown beard was poking through like tiny quills. The thought came to me If he brushes his face against my face…I laughed, and squirmed as if I was being tickled. By now the train had passed, Mr. Carmichael glanced sidelong at me, smiling. “Something funny, Maddie?” His smile was quick and loose and crinkled his face like a soft rag. More clearly I could see how the tinted lenses of Mr. Carmichael’s glasses were smudged, and his eyes beyond, staring. My hair was streaming in the wind, I had to blink tears from my eyes. How reckless I felt, and how happy: I was sitting as I’d never have dared to sit in my father’s cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with the Spanish red-leather seats, my left leg lifted, the heel of my sneaker on the seat nudging the base of my left buttock. I saw how Mr. Carmichael’s gaze moved over my leg — the tanned smooth skin with fine brown hairs, the muscled calf and sudden milky white of my upper thigh.

“Open the glove compartment, Maddie. See what’s inside.”

Fumbling to remove from the glove compartment a quart bottle of amber liquid: whiskey. Mr. Carmichael instructed me to unscrew the top and take a drink and quickly I shook my head no, shyly I shook my head no, and Mr. Carmichael nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, winking: “Yes, you’d better, Maddie. Kills germs on contact and where we came from — ” Mr. Carmichael shuddered, as if suddenly cold.

It is death he is taking me from, I thought. I had never loved anyone so much.

With a gesture of impatience Mr. Carmichael took the bottle from me, and drank. Fascinated I watched, the greedy movements of his mouth, his throat. Mr. Carmichael handed the bottle back to me with another nudge in the ribs and so — must’ve been, I lifted the bottle to my mouth, and drank cautiously. Searing-hot liquid flooded my mouth, down my throat like flames. My eyes leaked tears as I tried not to succumb to a spasm of coughing.

Here is a secret Mr. Carmichael was never to know: I knew where he lived, on Old Mill Road beyond the Sparta city limits. I knew for, with the cunning of a twelve-year-old girl in love with her seventh-grade math teacher, I had looked up “Carmichael” — “Luther Carmichael” — in the Sparta telephone directory. More than once I had bicycled past Mr. Carmichael’s house, which was approximately four miles from my house, a considerable distance. But I had done this, in secret. And I’d forgotten more or less, until now. On a mailbox at the end of a long driveway was the name CARMICHAEL. And the name CARMICHAEL, in black letters shiny as tar, seemed to me astonishing. So suddenly, so openly — CARMICHAEL. It had seemed to me a very special name. In secret I’d written it out, how many times. And sometimes with only my finger, tracing the letters on a smooth desktop. On the Old Mill Road where Mr. Carmichael lived with his family — for it was known, Mr. Carmichael had a wife and young children — I dared to bicycle past the end of his driveway, and once dared to turn into the driveway, hurriedly turning back when it seemed to me that someone had appeared at the house.

In math class when Mr. Carmichael handed back our test papers marked in red ink, though Mr. Carmichael spoke my name in a friendly way and may even have smiled at me I did not smile in return, I kept my eyes lowered out of superstition and dread for the red number at the top of the paper was my fate for that day: my grade. You would not have guessed, surely Mr. Carmichael would not have guessed, which of the seventh-grade girls was most desperately in love with him.

So long ago! You have to smile, to think that people like us took ourselves, and one another, so seriously.

And so on Old Mill Road beyond the Sparta city limits it wasn’t surprising to me when Mr. Carmichael turned the station wagon onto the bumpy cinder drive leading back to his house. I knew, this was where we were headed. And there was the mailbox with CARMICHAEL in black letters on the sides, stuffed with newspapers — this wasn’t surprising to me. (So Mr. Carmichael hadn’t been bringing in his mail, reading the local paper. Which was why he hadn’t seen the front-page news of Harvey Fleet’s “savage” beating.) “Won’t stay long, Maddie,” Mr. Carmichael was saying, “ — unless we change our minds, and we do.” The sweet warm sensation of the whiskey in my throat had radiated downward like sunshine into my belly, into my bowels, and below between my legs and my response to this was breathy laughter. Out of excitement — or anxiety — I was asking Mr. Carmichael silly questions, for instance, did he own horses? — (no, he did not own horses) — did he know a Herkimer County judge who was a friend of my father’s, who lived on Old Mill Road? — (yes, Mr. Carmichael knew the man, but not well). Surprising to see how much shabbier — sadder — Mr. Carmichael’s house looked now than it had two years before, when I’d dared to bicycle partway up the driveway. The large front lawn had become a field of tall grasses and wildflowers and the cinder driveway was badly rutted. The house that looked ugly but dignified from the road looked, up close, only just ugly; a squat two-story block-shaped cobblestone with a steep-slanted slate roof, the kind of house (I bit my lower lip to stop from bursting into a fit of giggling at the thought) in which, in a fairy tale, a troll would live. “Glad to see you’re laughing, Maddie,” Mr. Carmichael said. “Damn lot better than crying.”

Mr. Carmichael parked the Dodge station wagon close beside the house. In the backyard was a children’s swing set among tall grasses. Cicadas were shrieking out of the trees. Close up the cobblestones were misshapen rocks that looked as if they’d been dredged up out of the earth with dirt still clinging to them. The back screen door was ajar as if someone in the house had rushed out without taking time to close it. One of the first-floor windows had been shoved open to the very top and a yellow-print muslin curtain had been sucked out by the wind, wanly fluttering now. The thought came to me He is living alone here. There is no wife now. With the cruelty of a fourteen-year-old female I felt a stab of satisfaction as if I’d known my math teacher’s wife, a youngish blond woman glimpsed by me only at a distance, years ago; a figure of idly jealous speculation on the part of certain of Mr. Carmichael’s girl students, in fact a total stranger to us. That Mr. Carmichael had young children was of absolutely no interest to us. “Won’t stay long,” Mr. Carmichael repeated, nudging me between the shoulder blades, urging me into the house, “but damn we are thirsty.”

It was true. I’d been drinking from the quart bottle out of the glove compartment and I was very thirsty now, my throat on fire.

All going to die. Why’s it matter exactly when.

This raw and unimpeachable logic emerges like granite outcroppings in a grassy field, at such moments. You will remember all your life.

“Welcome! ‘Ecce homo.’” Inside it looked as if a whirlwind had rushed through the downstairs rooms of Mr. Carmichael’s house. In the kitchen the linoleum stuck to my feet like flypaper. In grayish water in the sink stacks of dirty dishes were soaking. Every square inch of countertop was in use, even the top of the stove with filth-encrusted burners; in the hot stale air was a strong odor of something rancid. Flies buzzed and swooped. Mr. Carmichael seemed scarcely to notice, exuberantly opening the refrigerator door: “Voilà! cold beer! Not a moment to spare.” He grabbed a dark brown bottle, opened it, and drank thirstily and offered it to me but I could not force myself to take more than a cautious little sip. I hated the taste of beer, and the smell. I asked Mr. Carmichael if there was a Coke in the refrigerator and he said no, sorry, there was not: “Only just beer. Made from malted barley, hops — nutrients. Not chemical crap to corrode your pretty teen teeth.” I saw Mr. Carmichael’s eyes on me, his smile that looked just slightly asymmetrical as if one side of his mouth was higher than the other. Impossible to gauge if this smile was on your side or not on your side, I remembered from seventh grade: yet how badly you yearned for that smile. “C’mere. Something to show you” — lightly Mr. Carmichael slipped his arm around my shoulders and led me into a dining room with a high ceiling of elaborate moldings and a crystal chandelier of surprising delicacy and beauty, covered in cobwebs. This was the room with the opened window through which the yellow-print curtain had been sucked and here too flies buzzed and swooped. Around a large mahogany dining table were numerous chairs pulled up close as if no one sat here any longer, except at one end; the table was covered with books, magazines, old newspapers, stacks of what appeared to be financial records, bills, and receipts. On sheets of paper were geometrical figures, some of them conjoined with humanoid figures (both female and male, with peanut heads and exaggerated genitals), which I pretended not to see. Idly I opened a massive book — Asimov’s Chronology of the World. It came to me then: a memory of how Mr. Carmichael had puzzled our class one day “demonstrating infinity” on the blackboard. With surprising precision he’d drawn a circle, and halved it; this half circle, he’d halved; this quarter circle, he’d halved; this eighth of a circle, he’d halved; as he struck the blackboard with his stick of chalk, addressing us in a jocular voice, as if, though this was mathematics of a kind, it was also very funny, by quick degrees the figure on the blackboard became too small to be seen even by those of us seated in the first row of desks; yet Mr. Carmichael continued, in a flurry of staccato chalk strikes, until the chalk shattered in his fingers and fell to the floor where in a playful gesture he kicked it. No one laughed.

“‘Infinity.’ Ex nihilo nihil fit.”

It wasn’t clear what Mr. Carmichael wanted to show me. He’d wandered into the living room, sprawled heavily on a badly worn corduroy sofa, tapping at the cushion beside him in a gesture you might make to encourage a child to join you, or a dog. Tentatively I sat on the sofa, but not quite where Mr. Carmichael wanted me to sit.

This room was not nearly so cluttered as the other rooms. You could see that Mr. Carmichael often sprawled here at his end of the sofa, which had settled beneath his weight. Close by was a small TV with rabbit ears on a portable stand and beside it a hi-fi record player, with long-playing records in a horizontal file, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, a piano quintet by Mozart, a piano sonata by Schubert…. These were only names to me, we never heard classical music in our household; eagerly I asked Mr. Carmichael if he would play one of his records? — but Mr. Carmichael said, “Fuck ‘Mr. Carmichael.’ You’d like to, eh?” Seeing the shock and hurt in my face quickly Mr. Carmichael laughed, and in a tender voice said: “Anyway, call me ‘Luther.’ No ‘Mr. Carmichael’ here.”

Mr. Carmichael passed the icy-cold beer bottle to me, and I managed to swallow a mouthful without choking. Hesitantly I tried the name: “‘Luther.’” Biting my lower lip to keep from laughing, for wasn’t “Luther” a comic-strip name? — then I did begin to cough, and a trickle of beer ran down inside my left nostril that I wiped away on my hand, hoping Mr. Carmichael wouldn’t notice.

Another time I wanted to ask Mr. Carmichael who he’d been visiting at the hospital, and where his family was, but didn’t dare. Against a wall was an upright piano with stacks of books and sheet music on its top. I could image a girl of my age sitting there, dutifully playing her scales. The living room looked out upon the vast front yard now overgrown with tall grasses and yellow and white wildflowers. The walls were covered in faded once-elegant wallpaper and in this room too was sculpted molding in the ceiling. On the coffee table near the sofa were ashtrays heaped with butts and ashes. I resolved, if Mr. Carmichael lit another cigarette, I would ask if I could have a “drag” from it as girls were always doing with older boys they hoped to impress. Mr. Carmichael took back the beer bottle from me and drank again thirstily and asked me which year of high school I would be in, in the fall, and I told him that I was just starting high school: I would be in tenth grade. “That sounds young,” Mr. Carmichael said, frowning. “I thought you were older.”

To this I had no ready reply. I wondered if I should apologize.

“You were my student years ago, not recently. How’s it happen you’re just going into tenth grade?”

Our math teacher’s displeasure showed itself in a quick furrow of Mr. Carmichael’s forehead and a crinkling of his nose as if he were smelling something bad — and who was to blame? He asked if I had a boyfriend and when I said no, the bad-smell look deepened. Stammering, I said, “People say — I have an ‘old’ soul. Like maybe — I’ve lived many times before.”

This desperate nonsense came to me out of nowhere: it was something my grandmother had told me when I’d been a little girl, to make me feel important, I suppose, or to make herself feel important.

Still frowning, Mr. Carmichael said suddenly, “The Stoics had the right goddamn idea. If I was born a long time ago, that’s what I was — ‘Stoic.’ Y’know who the Stoics were? No? Philosophers who lived a long time ago. Marcus Aurelius — name ring a bell? ‘In all that you say or do recall that the power of exiting this life is yours at any time.’”

“You mean — kill yourself?” I laughed uncertainly. This didn’t sound so good.

Mr. Carmichael was in a brooding mood so I asked him if he thought there might be memory pools that collected in certain places like the hospital, the way puddles collect after rain; in places where people have had to wait, and have been worried, and frightened; if there were places where you left your trace, without knowing it. Mr. Carmichael seemed to consider this. At least, he did not snort in derision. He said, “‘Memory pools.’ Why not. Like ghosts. Everywhere, the air is charged with ghosts. Hospitals have got to be the worst, teeming with ghosts like germs. Can’t hardly draw a deep breath, you suck in a ghost.” Mr. Carmichael made a sneezing-comical noise that set us both laughing. “Could be, I am a ghost. You’re a sweet trusting girl, coming here with a ghost. Or maybe you’re a ghost yourself — joke’s on me. Some future time like the next century there’ll be explorers looking back to now, to 1959 — what’s called ‘lookback time’ — y’know what ‘lookback time’ is? No?” Mr. Carmichael’s teacherly manner emerged, though as he spoke he tapped my wrist with his forefinger. “‘Lookback time’ is what you’d call an astronomical figure of speech. It means, if you gaze up into the night sky — and you have the look of a girl eager to learn the constellations — what you see isn’t what is there. What you see is only just light — ‘starlight.’ The actual star has moved on, or is extinct. What you are looking into is ‘lookback time’ — the distant past. It’s only an ignorant — innocent — eye that thinks it is looking at an actual star. If our sun exploded, and disappeared, here on earth we wouldn’t know the grim news for eight minutes.” Now Mr. Carmichael was circling my wrist with his thumb and forefinger, gently tugging at me to come closer to him on the sofa. “Eight minutes is a hell of a long time, to not know that you are dead.”

I shuddered. Then I laughed, this was meant to be funny.

Somehow, we began arm wrestling. Before I knew it, with a gleeful chortle, Mr. Carmichael had kicked off his moccasins, worn without socks, slouched down on the sofa, and lifted me above him, to straddle his stomach. “Giddyup, li’l horsie! Giddyup.” My khaki shorts rode up my thighs, Mr. Carmichael’s belt buckle chafed my skin. Beneath the Rangers T-shirt he ran his hard quick hands, where my skin was clammy-damp; he took hold of my small, bare breasts, squeezing and kneading, running his thumbs across the nipples, and I slapped at him, shrieking in protest. Suddenly then Mr. Carmichael rolled me over onto the sofa, pinned me with his forearms, and gripped my thighs, between my legs he brought his hot, rock-hard face, his sucking mouth, against the damp crotch of my shorts and my panties inside my shorts, an act so astonishing to me, I could not believe that it was happening. Like a big dog Mr. Carmichael was growling, sucking, and nipping at me. “Lie still. Be still. You’ll like this. L’il bitch goddamn.” Wildly I’d begun to laugh, I kicked frantically at him, scrambled out of his grasp on my hands and knees — on the floor now, on a carpet littered with pizza crusts, dumped ashtrays, and empty beer bottles. Cursing me now, Mr. Carmichael grabbed hold of my ankle and pinned me again, mashing his mouth against mine, his mouth and angry teeth tearing at my lips as if to pry them open. By this time I’d become panicked, terrified. No boy or man had ever kissed me like this, or touched me like this, so roughly — “Why’d you come here with me? What did you think this was — seventh grade? You’re a hell of a lot older than you let on. Hot li’l bitch.” With each syllable of hot l’il bitch Mr. Carmichael struck the back of my head against the carpet, his fingers closed around my throat. Fumbling, he tried to insert his knee between my thighs, he pressed the palm of his hand hard against my mouth to quiet me, I struggled, desperate to free myself like a fish impaled on a hook desperate to free itself at any cost, I would have torn open my flesh to be free of Mr. Carmichael’s weight on me. Now he lurched above me, grunted and fumbled, unzipped his trousers, I had a glimpse of his thick engorged penis being rammed against my thighs, another time Mr. Carmichael grunted, and shuddered, and fell heavily on me; for a long stunned moment we lay unmoving; then he allowed me to extricate myself from him, to crawl away whimpering.

Somehow next I was in a bathroom, and I was vomiting into a sink.

Must’ve been, Mr. Carmichael had led me here. In this sweltering-hot little room, which was very dirty — shower stall, toilet, linoleum floor — I ran water from both faucets to wash away my vomit, desperate to wash all evidence away. I could not bring myself to look into the mirror above the sink, I knew my mouth was swollen, my face burned and throbbed. On the front of my T-shirt were coin-sized splotches of blood. (Was my nose bleeding? Always in school I’d been in terror of my nose suddenly beginning to bleed, and the stares of my classmates.) With shaking hands I washed away the sticky semen on my thighs, which was colorless and odorless. Outside the bathroom Mr. Carmichael was saying, in an encouraging voice: “You’ll be fine, Maddie. We’ll take you back. We should leave soon.” Yet the thought came to me He could kill me now. He is thinking this. When I come out of here. No one will know. But when I opened the bathroom door Mr. Carmichael was nowhere in sight. I heard him in the kitchen, he was speaking on the phone, pleading, and then silence, the harsh laughter, and the slamming down of a telephone receiver. A man’s raw aggrieved voice — “Fuck it. What’s the difference….”

When Mr. Carmichael came for me, his mood had shifted yet again. In the kitchen he too had been washing up: his flushed face was made to appear affable, his disheveled hair had been dampened. His badly soiled sport shirt was tucked into his trousers, and his trousers were zipped up. The moccasins were back on his feet. It was with a genial-teacher smile that Mr. Carmichael greeted me: “Madelyn! Time to head back, I said we wouldn’t stay long.”

In the Dodge station wagon, in late-afternoon traffic on Route 31 East, Mr. Carmichael lapsed into silence. He’d forgotten about driving me home, there was no question but that we were returning to Sparta Memorial Hospital. From time to time Mr. Carmichael glanced anxiously at me as I huddled far from him in the passenger’s seat, trying to stop my nose from bleeding by pinching the nostrils and tilting my head back. So distracted and disoriented was Mr. Carmichael, as we passed beneath the railroad trestle bridge, he nearly sideswiped a pickup truck in the left-hand lane of the highway; behind the wheel of the pickup was a contractor friend of my father’s. He saw me, and he saw Mr. Carmichael at the wheel beside me, not knowing who Mr. Carmichael was but knowing that it was very wrong for a fourteen-year-old girl to be with him, this flush-faced adult man in his mid-or late thirties. I thought, He sees us, he knows. With the inexorable logic of a dream it would happen then: my father’s friend would telephone my mother that evening, that very night Luther Carmichael would be arrested in the cobblestone house on Old Mill Road. Mr. Carmichael would be dismissed from his teaching position because of me, of what he’d done to me; because of this — having been seen with me, in the Dodge station wagon this afternoon. And now, telling this story, I remember: Mr. Carmichael hadn’t yet been dismissed from his teaching job, as I’d said. All that lay ahead of him. The remainder of his foreshortened life lay ahead of him. He would be arrested, he would be charged with sexual assault of a minor, providing alcohol to a minor; he would be charged with the forcible abduction of a minor, and with kidnapping. He would be charged with keeping me in his house against my will. Some of these charges would be dropped but still Luther Carmichael would kill himself in the ugly cobblestone house on Old Mill Road, hanging from a makeshift noose slung over a rafter in the smelly earthen-floored cellar.

All this had not happened yet. There was no way to accurately foretell it. All I knew was, I had to return to my father’s bedside. I was desperate to return to my father’s bedside. Before Mr. Carmichael brought the station wagon to a full stop in the parking lot, I had jumped out, I was making my way into the chill of the hospital that never changes, taking the stairs two at a time to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor, avoiding the elevator out of a morbid fear that, at this crucial time, the elevator might stall between floors, now breathless from the stairs and my heart pounding in my chest as if it might burst —

Still alive! From the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

Bounty Hunter

Is there a soul I have to wonder. Look inside myself like leaning over the rim of an old stone well and the danger is, you might lose your balance and fall and there is no water inside to break your fall. Hello? Hello? Anybody there? Old stone well with a broken hand pump, I’m thinking of. That well was old when I was a kid. My grandfather’s farm that’s just “acreage” now north of Herkimer waiting to be sold, how many years. Nobody wants to live in the country now, we’ve all moved to town.

It’s a fact: there’s fewer people living in the country in this century than fifty years ago. New houses and a shopping mall going up south of Herkimer and along the highway halfway to Sparta. The new Church of the Risen Christ like a great shining ark rising out of the moldered earth, sailing the waves of the righteous as our pastor says. From the outside the prow of the ark is a beacon of light, inside there is a dazzle of shining surfaces, pinewood pews in long curving rows too many to count and in the balcony more pews rising farther than you can see. At the front of the ark is a great floating gold cross illuminated in light. Each service, three thousand individuals worship here. The Church of the Risen Christ is the fastest-growing church in all the Adirondack region. Started in a store front in downtown Herkimer, now there’s people coming from as far away as Utica, Rome, Watertown, Potsdam. Our tabernacle choir is on cable TV each Sunday morning. What is beautiful is the congregation singing hymns. Nobody laughs at my voice here. My voice is wavering as a girl’s but gains strength from the voices close about me, I am not so self-conscious here. Shut your eyes in the Church of the Risen Christ you could be any of these.

In this pew with strangers but we are all children of God. Feeling my heart quicken because this is a secret time for me. My husband is not a churchgoer. I have not yet brought the girls, they would be restless and it makes me angry to see restless children at church. Is there a soul is a question I ask myself when I am alone, I am afraid of my thoughts when I am alone. One Sunday I asked Reverend Loomis and he gripped my hand in both his hands smiling he saying Who is it who asks this question, Diane? Who is it looks through your eyes that are such beautiful eyes? My face flushed like sunburn. My eyes filled with tears. It was after the service, so many of us anxious to speak with Reverend Loomis and waiting in the aisle for him to take our hands, ask our names and repeat our names as a blessing. So many of us and most of us are women wishing to “seek counsel” with our pastor but Reverend Rob Loomis’s time is limited. His special smile for women like me, oh God I hope it isn’t pity.

A wife and mother, not yet thirty-five. Yet not young. You feel it at the waist, a bulge of flesh. Turning, and in the mirror a ridge of fat at the small of the back, a crease beneath my chin, I felt so hurt! — betrayed! — until the girls, until I got pregnant, I’d been lean like a boy. Is there a soul because if there is and I am lacking a soul, just this body going to fat, I am not like other people but a freak. But if there is a soul and there is one inside me waiting to emerge into the light this is a thing that scares me more.

So what my cousin Michie Dungarve would say. Who gives a damn, why’s it a big deal. Michie who’d been in the navy and then apprenticed to a bail bondsman/bounty hunter up in Watertown, it would be said of him he was a cold-blooded killer without a soul and Michie conceded that was probably a fact.

In the Church of the Risen Christ, three thousand of us lift our voices in a joyful noise to the Lord and to His Only Begotten Son that Jesus will drive out the devils from us and dwell in our hearts forever-more and I know this to be true. Rock of ages we are singing cleft for me let me hide myself in thee we are singing. I feel the waves buoying our ark, I feel how we are lifted like the gold cross floating in air. Reverend Loomis teaches us to laugh at sin, laugh away Satan for he is helpless in the face of Jesus. There is not a thing to regret nor even to remember once Jesus is in your heart. Like a light so bright and blinding why’d you even make an effort to see. I tell myself Jesus understands, He was in my heart even then.

When I was DeeDee Kinzie. That long ago.

This thing that happened when we were kids living out north of Herkimer. The Rapids it was called, where we lived that wasn’t a town but had a post office and a volunteer fire company that shared the building. We went to school at Rapids Elementary then at Rapids Junior-Senior High. My cousin Michie Dungarve who was two years older than me but just one year ahead of me in school. These guys he hung out with in eighth grade, Steve Hauser and Dan Burney. And me. This thing that happened.

Like a sudden storm, like lightning striking. You can be standing on a porch watching the rain out of a boiling-dark sky like my mother’s older sister Elsie smoking a cigarette and there’s a flash of something like fire and a booming noise so loud it near-about knocked her over, lightning had struck the porch post and splinters shot into the side of her face like buckshot. Happened that fast, my aunt would tell that story the rest of her life thanking God, He had spared her blindness, or worse.

This thing that happened. Except I guess it had to be something we made happen. Not like a lightning storm that’s an act of God out of the empty sky.

This single time I was granted an appointment with Reverend Loomis asking why you would call some terrible thing an act of God, for isn’t everything that happens an act of God. And Reverend Loomis gives me this frowning smile saying an “act of God” means a great cataclysm beyond any mortal to control. And I say yes, Reverend. But why.

There is something dogged about me, I know. Seeing how our pastor smiled harder at me, that I was a challenge to his kindly nature. I was trying not to stammer saying what I meant is, if God did not wish a terrible thing to happen, why’d He let it happen?

Reverend Loomis spoke calmly and carefully as you would speak to a child. Saying we can’t demand such questions of God, he grants us freedom of will to sin or not to sin. Freedom of will to take sin into our hearts or cast it from us. You don’t need theology to know this, Mrs. Schmidt!

I felt the man’s warmth touch my heart that has such a chill upon it like an old spell.

But needing to say, I wasn’t speaking of myself but of this boy that something happened to. When we were children out in the Rapids.

My voice cracked then. For why’d I say that: children. We were not young children, none of us. And why say the Rapids. Reverend Loomis has family in Watertown, he would scarcely know rural Herkimer County.

Somehow I was talking fast. I was nervous, and I was anxious, and I was missing my painkillers, that keep my heart from racing and sweat from prickling in my armpits. Saying I don’t understand, Reverend. See, I don’t understand!

Reverend said let us pray together, Diane. Then you will understand.

Reverend smiled and touched my arm. His smile is a flash of white flame, each night following I will sink into sleep into that white flame.

My cousin Michie said it’s good to have a little evil in you, people know not to fuck with you. Like a vaccination where they put germs in you, to make your blood stronger.

This swampy woods off the logging road. A thing that scares me is snakes. When we were kids, tramping through the woods back of our houses and after a heavy rainfall or the thaw in spring there’d be sheets of water in the woods, the creeks overflowing, the ditches, even the ravine and afterward a deposit of mud, silt, storm debris. Snakes in the swampy woods and some of them water moccasins. Four feet long and thick as a man’s leg. I never saw one of these but knew of them. Copperheads are smaller snakes but poisonous, too. Even garter snakes and grass snakes in just our backyard, in our woodpile in the garage, I’d be terrified of. There was this story of what happened to a ten-year-old boy a cousin of Dan Burney he was tramping in the woods with his dog and the dog waded into a pond and started swimming and something in the water attacked it, the dog was howling and yipping and the boy waded in to rescue it and turned out to be water moccasins, they came swarming out of the cattails and rushes and attacked the boy, sank their fangs in his legs, pulled him down and sank their fangs in his belly, his chest, his face thrashing and swarming at their prey and he screamed for help but nobody could hear him, his heart stopped there in the swamp.

Pressed my hands over my ears. I was feeling sick just to hear this. Begging the guys to stop it, I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t believe them but the guys just laughed at me.

The boy we hurt, his name was Arvin and he was Michie’s age or older but in special ed. not in eighth grade. In special ed. that was taught by a man teacher, in a corner of the school building by the shop/vocational arts, students who couldn’t read like the rest of us or couldn’t talk right or had things wrong with them you could see, like in their eyes, in their faces, or maybe they’d be very fat or very thin and had trouble walking, or had ways of acting that were signs of their strangeness like laughing too much or twitching their shoulders or shrinking away when you saw them. On the school bus, they sat together at the front, near the driver. That way, they’d be protected.

Arvin Huehner, 14. The name in the newspaper.

We were surprised, the way the name was spelled. You just called them Hugh-ners, the family.

Arvin was taller than Michie and his friends but bony-thin, with rounded shoulders and something wrong with his chest: “pigeon-breasted” it was called, he’d been excused from gym classes and swimming. His shoulder blades curved forward as if he’d been stooped over too long and couldn’t straighten his back. His neck was at an angle like he was leaning away from himself. His face was pasty-pale and hairless like something skinned. His lips were rubbery and loose. His teeth were crooked and stained and his eyes were weak behind thick lenses and he had a high-pitched whiny voice you’d hear sometimes when he was scolding his younger brother and sisters who rode the bus with us, in mimicry of an adult Arvin would cry, “Bad! Bad!”

When I saw Arvin Huehner my eyes seemed to sting. Quickly I looked away. The thought came to me There is someone like myself.

(Why this was, I don’t know! There was nothing of DeeDee Kinzie in Arvin Huehner, or in any of the special ed. kids.)

Michie said, There’s the freak.

In a freak, there is something that draws the eye. You resent it, having to look.

My cousin Michie was thirteen, when I was eleven. Michie wasn’t tall but solid-built for a boy his age. He had a wedge-shaped face, a heavy jaw. You could see how he would grow into a heavy man like the older Dungarves. But his cheeks were soft and smooth-looking and had a natural flush like sunburn. His eyes were bright and shrewd. Already in junior high, Michie Dungarve was “sexy” in the eyes of older girls. He hated school and cut classes when he could. He had a posse he called it, guys who hung out with him. When he was younger Michie used to paint stripes on his face like an Indian, red clay to give him a wild scary look. On a leather thong around his neck he wore an animal jawbone and a black turkey vulture feather. In the family Michie was known for his mule-stubbornness. Aged two, his mother said, he’d dig in his heels in the ground, even an adult man could hardly budge him.

I was DeeDee, short for Diane. I was the only girl.

Why it happened I was with them, it had to do with where we lived. Red Rock Road, that ran along Red Rock Creek from Rapids to Route 14 which was a state highway. Red Rock Road was just two miles, not a through road so you’d wind up at the old logging site where the woods look ravaged even now. It’s mostly wild woods and fields and a big swampy marsh where only rushes and cattails grow and there’s a terrible smelly black muck through late summer. There were six houses on this road and naturally you got to know the kids if they were your age and took the bus to school. The Dungarves lived next-door to us, my mother was all the time over visiting her sister Elsie, or Elsie was at our house, and when he’d been younger, Michie sometimes came with her. There was a path through the field to the Dungarves’ house. My cousin Michie was only two years older than me but when you’re a child two years is a long span of time and always I wanted Michie to like me.

Showing off for Michie, to get Michie’s attention. My aunt Elsie would tease me.

At school, Michie would protect me. Not because he liked me but because I was his cousin. Fuck with DeeDee Kinzie, you’d be fucking with Michie Dungarve.

I hated girls! Mostly, girls hated me.

I wore clothes like the guys. Jeans, zip-up parkas, shirts pulled over shirts. My chest was flat as a guy’s chest. My hips were lean as a guy’s. Where my legs came together there was a frizz of pale brown hair, it wouldn’t be for another two years or so that hairs began to grow in my armpits and on my muscled legs sharp as tiny thorns. My face was small and oliveish-pale and my eyes deep-set like shiny black glass.

I had a mouth on me, my mother said. She stopped slapping that mouth by the time I was eleven. She’d learned.

Water moccasins. Slow-moving and mud-colored in the stagnant swamp water. I’d be wading in the swamp and see the snake-shapes start toward me beneath the surface of the black water, a faint ripple all you’d see, oh God I could not move my legs I could not scream for help the snakes swimming toward me surrounding me in a circle rushing at me to sink their fangs into me…

How many times I dreamt this, it makes me sick to think. At school I asked a teacher why’d God make poison snakes and she answered some bullshit answer like they do and I had to pretend to believe it, like I always did.

Tell Nose Pick c’mere, Michie said to me.

Nose Pick was one of the names they called Arvin. On account of him always picking at his nose, his mouth, his ears like he had terrible itches all over. Arvin had a way of watching the rest of us, kind of smiling at us, laughing if we did something meant to be funny, wanting to be with us except most of the time, at school, if we were outside on the school grounds, he couldn’t: there was a yellow line painted on the pavement dividing one part of the paved ground from the rest and the special ed. students were not allowed to cross this yellow line or vice versa. This was a school rule. You could figure that it protected some of the special ed. kids from being teased or tormented but also it was meant to protect other kids from being teased or tormented by the special ed. kids who were bigger and older and kind of unpredictable in their behavior. Arvin Huehner was between these, you could say. He’d be picked on by the guys but, tall and kind of bossy like he was, Arvin sometimes picked on younger kids himself. That high-pitched nasal voice scolding Bad!

The Hugh-ners as they were called lived on Red Rock Road in a house that was just a basement, you could see the basement windows and part of the first floor that resembled a skeleton, just boards and planks where rooms would be, except work stopped on the house years ago and never started again. There was no outside to the Hugh-ners’ house only just raw planks and strips of something like canvas that became ripped and flapped in the wind. This house, that people called an eyesore, and were contemptuous of, was about a mile from where we lived, and the Dungarves lived, toward the dead end of the Red Rock Road. The older Hugh-ners were said to be “normal” but the children were all special ed. Arvin had only younger sisters and a brother, no older relative to protect him.

Hey Arvin, I said, Michie wants you to come with us.

Arvin narrowed his eyes at me not trusting me exactly. This was in April, a day that smelled of wet earth. Warm when the sun came out and chilly when the sun went in. Arvin was wearing a parka that was an ugly mustard color and corduroy trousers that fitted his legs narrow as pencils. That Arvin would believe my cousin Michie and his friends would want him to join them, that Arvin was so stupid hardened my heart against him. Why’d you think you could be their friend I wanted to laugh in his face.

Arvin adjusted his glasses on his nose, blinking at me. He was licking his loose rubbery lips excited and scared.

O.K. c’mon, I told Arvin.

We weren’t taking the school bus after school. There was a way we hiked home along the railroad embankment then along the creek for maybe a mile.

So Arvin trotted with us like a scrawny dog. Along the railroad embankment and into a thicket of trees and there was the edge of the swamp and the ravine you had to cross over some fallen logs. Below was a marshy ditch thick with rushes and cattails and water that smelled like sewage, that was high after some days of rain. Below were bullfrogs croaking so loud and hoarse, you can’t believe the noise is coming from something so small. The guys threw rocks at the frogs but the frogs were too quick for them. Turtles sunning on logs, they’d slip off and disappear at the sound of a voice.

A surprise how a turtle can see you and hear you and maybe feel your footsteps at a distance. How a creature with such a thick clumsy shell can move so fast, to save its life.

Michie told Arvin go climb down into the ravine where there was something glinting in the mud, looked like a car hood ornament. Arvin began to whimper saying he didn’t want to, his mother would be angry if he came back muddy. And maybe then Michie or one of the other guys pushed him. Or maybe Arvin decided to climb down. We told Arvin we’d be friends with him, he could come home with us. So he climbed into the ravine which was maybe thirty feet deep, slipping and sliding in the mud. I said to Michie what if there are water moccasins in that water and Michie just laughed. Arvin managed to get hold of the hood ornament but his feet were sinking in mud. He began to cry, he was stuck in the mud. The guys were laughing and yelling down at Arvin it was quicksand he’d gotten into. He was red-faced and snivelling and his glasses were crooked on his nose. I saw a swirl of something in the water just a few yards from where Arvin was struggling. I saw the ripples, I saw the rubbery-thick black snakes just below the surface of the water. We were waiting for Arvin to be sucked into the quicksand. Like in a TV movie where a man was trapped in quicksand in a jungle, you watched as the quicksand sucked him down, the lower part of his face disappeared into the mud, his mouth, then his terrified eyes, then he was gone, the quicksand shut above his head only just frothy bubbles.

In the movie, monkeys were flying through the trees overhead and chattering and shrieking. At the top of the ravine, the guys were laughing at Arvin. I said, Hey we better pull him up. Laughing like the guys but getting scared. I didn’t say anything about the snakes because the guys would only laugh at me. I wasn’t sure I had seen snakes, maybe it was just wind blowing the rushes.

Arvin was trying to grab hold of some vines, to pull himself up. His legs were sunk in mud to his knees. He was crying, bawling like a calf. A calf bawls for its mother, just a few hours old and already its lungs are strong enough it can bellow. But a human scream is thin and weak and can crack if you’re afraid. Arvin was bawling like a calf, bawling with no words, like he’d forgotten what words were. Michie and Steve were tossing stones and mud-chunks at him. Dan Burney dragged a heavy rock to the edge of the ravine, let it drop and roll down the slope at Arvin but missing him. There was a broken tree limb shaped like a spear, I threw. The spear fell short of Arvin where he’d fallen in the mud and was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, he was bawling but not so loud as before. The guys got into seeing who could hit Arvin with the most stones. The biggest rocks. The sky was darkening like something begun to boil. It happens that fast, east of Lake Ontario. There came a harder wind, and rain like warm spit. We backed off and left Arvin in the ravine.

Hiked through the woods to Red Rock Road, and to our houses. Michie, Steve, Dan. And DeeDee who was me.

Two years later in ninth grade my name would be Diane. I had a close girlfriend through high school who called me Di. And Frank calls me Di sometimes. Nobody calls me DeeDee now, if I heard this name I would freeze.

It was years later my cousin Michie was arrested for what he did to a girl named Sheryl Ricks over at Alcott. Michie denied it at first saying it must’ve been some other guy, Sheryl was seeing other guys not only him. The rumor was, Sheryl was pregnant with Michie Dungarve’s baby but that turned out to be false, the Niagara County coroner reported.

When you die every fact of your body can be exposed. Not just are you pregnant but have you ever been pregnant. Have you ever had a baby. Are there “bruises and lacerations” in the vaginal area, meaning have you been raped. Or maybe not raped but you’ve had sex. Once you are dead they can know everything about you.

By the time of Sheryl we were out of school. Michie was twenty-two. What he’d done was beat his girlfriend then twist her head with both his hands so that the vertebrae in her neck broke. In his bare hands. Michie was that angry and that strong. He’d been in the navy for two years and the family was proud of him then he tested positive for amphetamines and was discharged “less than honorable” and came back to Herkimer where his family was living then. Then there was a few months he worked for a bail bondsman up at Watertown and was apprenticed to a licensed bounty hunter which was work he liked, he said. His name wasn’t Michie now but Mitch.

Mitchell Dungarve is my cousin’s actual name. In the papers and on TV it would be Mitchell Dungarve, 22.

Mitch would tell anyone who asked him, Sheryl Ricks had it coming. She’d known it, too, which was why she’d tried to run from him in the parking lot. Mitch told the Herkimer Journal reporter he’d kind of wanted to see what it was like killing somebody, anyway. Since he’d been a kid, he was curious. And in the navy, he’d never seen “combat.” The reporter said, well — what was it like? and Mitch said it happened so damn fast like a fire flaring up almost he hadn’t felt anything at all.

Mitch said it isn’t that big a deal killing somebody who deserves it except for all that comes afterward. People make so much of it, Jesus! That’s what he hadn’t guessed, how his life would be fucked up afterward.

It was his freedom he missed. Worse than in the navy, once you get arrested. Fuck Sheryl, she had it coming.

Cold-blooded murderer lacking a soul it was said of Mitch Dungarve but anybody who knew Mitch, his family and relatives, his close friends, knew Mitch wasn’t all that different from anybody else.

What had happened to Arvin Huehner was different, it never got beyond what was reported in the papers. A “special education” student at the Rapids school had a “fatal accident” coming home from school. He’d tried to cross a deep ravine on some rotted logs but fell and injured himself on rocks below, fractured his skull and died. Arvin had been a clumsy boy even his family conceded. They could not understand why he hadn’t come home from school on the bus as he always did. It was revealed that, that day, the special ed. teacher had had to discipline Arvin for harassing a girl in their class, and Arvin had been upset about that and hadn’t wanted to ride the bus home. There was no witness to what had happened to Arvin but Sheryl Ricks was a different situation, plenty of people had seen Mitch Dungarve with her at a tavern in Alcott the night she’d died.

In the prison at Attica, Mitch gave interviews. He said he was not afraid to die, he’d done what needed to be done and that was all. His lawyer told him show remorse but that was bullshit, he would not.

He never spoke of Arvin Huehner, never told our names, that we were involved. It came to me one day, he’d forgotten.

The ravine and the logging road in the woods have not changed much in twenty years. I drove out once, to investigate. We’d all moved into town by then. I was married and had my girls by then. What is strange is how much of Red Rock Road is abandoned now, houses collapsed in tall weeds and scrub trees and the Huehner house, what there was of it, hardly visible from the road. Some people live in our old house but the Dungarves’ house next-door is boarded up. Properties like my grandfather’s old farm are overgrown like jungles. The big interstate I-81 cuts a swath through the countryside north of Rapids so there’s heavy traffic only just a mile or so from the ravine but not even an exit at Rapids.

Arvin was found in the ravine the next day, after seven hours of searching it was said.

Everybody in the special ed. class was asked about him. And kids on the bus. The driver was questioned, why hadn’t he waited for Arvin, or gone to look for him. Arvin’s teacher was questioned, and made to look bad in the paper. Even the school principal. Arvin’s sister and brothers riding the school bus had not seemed to miss him. Acted like they hadn’t noticed Arvin wasn’t there.

Some of us, who lived on Red Rock Road, were asked if we’d seen Arvin after school, where he’d gone, and we said no we had not seen Arvin Hugh-ner, he wasn’t in our classes and wasn’t our friend and nobody we knew had much to do with him or with any of the Hugh-ners.

That poor boy not right in the head was how people spoke of Arvin afterward. Like my mother, and my aunt Elsie. You’d think his parents would keep a closer watch, a retarded boy like that wandering and getting lost.

In Herkimer where I live now, I see Steve and Dan sometimes. I see their families at the mall. Steve married a girl I knew from school, they have two children at least. I think they live on Buell Road, Steve works for a contractor. Dan Burney was in the navy with Michie, got sent overseas and when he came back he got married and later divorced and he works at the stone quarry where my husband Frank Schmidt is foreman. Dan is grown to three hundred pounds muscle-and-fat and shaves his head so his head and face look swollen like something made of hard rubber. Dan lives with his mother who has some wasting disease like Parkinson’s.

We see each other at Kroger’s, or Eckerd’s, or at the mall. There’s a glaze over our eyes when we meet. Steve Hauser, Dan Burney. If they tried to call me DeeDee, I’d tell them no: I am Diane. But they don’t call me any name at all. We talk together trying to remember why we know each other. The guys always ask about Mitch but there’s nothing to say about Mitch, he will spend the rest of his life in “death row” at Attica. The death penalty in New York State is lethal injection but no one has been executed for a long time.

Steve Hauser and Dan Burney and me, there’s a nagging feeling between us. But we don’t know what.

We ask about one another’s families. Dan takes his mother to the Church of the Risen Christ some Sundays, helps the old woman with her walker. Dan doesn’t always sit in the pew with her but waits out in the parking lot, smoking. He’s a big man but soft and vague in the eyes. Sometimes he will push into the pew beside his mother. I see Dan Burney, I smile and wave and Dan will wave back. I wonder if Dan sings with the rest of us! The way some men sing under their breath like they don’t want anyone but Jesus to hear.

I have two daughters: Kyra who will be in seventh grade next year and Tamara who will be in fourth.

Their eyes! The most beautiful eyes. When I tell Steve Hauser and Dan Burney about my family I tell them my daughters are getting to be big girls but I don’t tell them how beautiful my daughters are, it’s hard for me to speak of it. The other day Frank said, You see those girls, you know why you were born.

Out of nowhere Frank said this. It isn’t like him, or any of us to speak in such a way. But I’m hoping it is that simple, what Frank said. All I’d needed to do to be saved was have my babies, that is my purpose on earth. You would not need a soul for that!

A feeling used to come to me sometimes, a true life is being lived somewhere, but I am not in that life. Since having my babies, I don’t feel this way. It’s a stronger feeling even than Jesus in my heart.

Because you can backslide and lose Jesus. But you can never lose the fact you have given birth.

Strange that it’s water moccasins I dream of, that I never saw. I never dream of Arvin Huehner. I dream of myself in the swamp and the snakes and the quicksand but I never dream of Arvin Huehner and there is probably nobody who knows that name Huehner where we live now.

I saw the hood ornament on a four-wheel-drive pickup, a long time ago. I think it was the same kind.

Things that scare me are any kind of snakes. Even a picture of a snake, a feeling like faintness comes over me. Also the shadows of clouds passing on the ground. In the countryside you can see these shadows miles away on the hills, it takes your breath away watching them move so fast. Sunshine and green fields and the swift shadow rolling toward you taking away the green. I think The valley of the shadow of death.

Another thing that scares me: mammograms and pelvic exams. Pap smears. My legs tremble so, though I have given birth from my body yet I am frightened of the sharp instruments. I am frightened of the doctor seeing into me. For one day it will be revealed You have tested positive for cancer, Mrs. Schmidt. Your punishment was deferred but will now begin.

And I am afraid of my own anger sometimes. Wanting to smash things, precious things to me like the girls’ faces when they are stubborn and mouth off at me. Kyra is the worst, the way her eyes slide over me in scorn. Beautiful eyes so liquidy-brown and their faces are beautiful yet I could grab these faces and squeeze until the bones broke. My husband says, God damn it, Diane, keep it down, you should see yourself, Jesus. Frank starts toward me and I back off, fast. Frank could break my face in his hand if I hurt the girls so this is O.K., this is good. I’m grateful for that.

I asked Reverend Loomis what is the root of anger, why I am angry sometimes at my family I love, and Reverend Loomis said it is a test put to me. Every day and every hour of my life is a test, will Satan triumph, or Our Lord. Diane, it’s that simple!

Soon as I heard those words, I was comforted.

After you leave school, there are people you’d been seeing every day of your life you never see again. Even relatives.

Last time I saw my cousin Michie close up, I guess he’d been Mitch by then, it was at the 7-Eleven out on the highway and I was only just married then and not more than a few weeks’ pregnant which I hoped Mitch would not know. It was after 10 P.M., I was going for milk and cereal and cigarettes and Mitch was going for beer and cigarettes and there was no one else in the lot, the pavement was wet with snow. By then Mitch had been discharged from the navy and was back but not living with his family. It was rumored that Mitch was dealing in drugs. Also Mitch was said to be apprentice to a bounty hunter in Watertown. You had to have a license to be a bounty hunter, you were allowed to carry a concealed weapon. Mitch was wearing his hair long and tied in a pigtail and his jaws were covered in whiskers and in the midst of these whiskers he was smiling at me. Heat lifting from his skin and I could see the swell of his eyeballs moist and quivering like gasoline somebody might hold a match to, it would explode into flame.

He’d just jumped down from his pickup. Every vehicle I see, my eyes slide over the hood, I can’t stop myself looking for a shiny hood ornament, Mitch was driving a four-wheel pickup like a jeep, with no ornament on the hood. Smiling at me with just his teeth saying, Hey there, DeeDee, like there was something between us and it wasn’t that we were blood kin. I was smiling at Mitch quick and breathless which was my way around guys like Mitch, I felt this faintness come over me thinking He has a knife he carries, he can kill me any time. And my cousin’s hands were big-knuckled, and scarred. It was six months before he’d kill his girlfriend Sheryl Ricks at Alcott but there was no sign of that now. Seeing he’d scared me Mitch was in a teasing mood pushing close to me, laughing like there was some joke between us, I smelled beer on his breath, he’s saying, How’re you doing, DeeDee, you and Frank, and I said, trying to keep my voice even, not stepping back from Mitch like he was daring me, We’re doing really well, Mitch. But I’m not DeeDee these days.

The Barter

Let something of mine be taken from me! Let Father be returned to us.

So the son David Rainey, thirteen years old, who prided himself on not-believing-in-God, prayed.

In the medical center whose higher floors were frequently shrouded in mist, in the men’s lavatory in the eighth-floor cardiac unit, he hid away to cry. What he hated about crying was his face shattering into pieces like a pane of struck glass. His eyes turned to liquid. His ridiculous nose ran. In a fury he tore off a long strip of toilet paper in which to blow it. A Möbius strip, unending. In despair thinking I hate them all! For it seemed to him that all of the family, not only his stricken father, had betrayed him.

His father would be nine days in the cardiac unit. On the first interminable day, David entered the lavatory to hide and realized too late he wasn’t alone. Somebody was in one of the stalls, sobbing. A helpless muffled sound as if the invisible person (a boy David’s age?) was jamming his knuckles against his mouth.

Quickly, David retreated. He was in dread of meeting another so like himself.

The father was down, the Rainey family was stricken.

For years they’d been Meems and Dadda, Kit-Kit, the Goat, Pike, and Billy-o. They were Granmum Geranium, Auntie Bean, and Uncle Ike. (True, Pike and Billy-o had left home. Uncle Ike wasn’t married any longer to Dadda’s sister Bean.) These were their secret family names in the big old red-brick Colonial on Upchurch Street on the highest hill of the hilly city. David, who was the Goat, knew the secret names were sort of silly, but he hadn’t realized how sad-silly until Dadda was admitted to the medical center as “Mr. Rainey” (which was how the staff on the fifth floor referred to him, often as if he weren’t even present) or “Marcus J. Rainey” (which was imprinted on the stiff paper bracelet around his left wrist, along with a computer number). And suddenly there was Mother who’d been Meems for so long, a pretty, freckle-faced, flurried woman with corn-silk hair and a laugh like a tickle in her throat, that made you laugh with her, now overnight a wooden-faced not-young woman with bulgy eyes, rat’s-nest hair, and a misbuttoned black cashmere coat.

Kit-Kit, the vigilant daughter, sixteen years old, scolded in an undertone as three Raineys ascended in an elevator to the eighth floor. “Mother. Your coat.” “What?” Mother blinked as if she’d become hard of hearing. Kit-Kit growled, “Your coat.” Still, Mother was confused. Her face visibly heated. “What — about my coat?” “The buttons!” Kit-Kit, exasperated, deftly rebuttoned the coat herself. There!

Kit-Kit’s true name was Katherine. No one called her Kathy.

David, the Goat, the youngest Rainey child, observed his mother and sister from a corner of the elevator. There were two or three strangers between himself and the stunned-looking woman and the tall girl who was breathing with an open mouth, so he might not be identified as belonging with them. Did all the Raineys resemble one another? Not the Goat! He was thinking how pointless to rebutton their mother’s coat since they were headed for Father’s hospital room where the coat would be unbuttoned and removed anyway.

Nobody’s thinking clearly any longer except me, David thought grimly.

The night before, he’d been working on geometry problems in his bedroom after he’d been supposed to turn off his lights at 11 P.M. weekdays. Then he’d gone to bed and was wakened, it seemed, almost immediately, by his mother’s panicked cry outside his door, and from that moment onward the world’s surfaces had become tilted and slip sliding. Always he would be hearing Help! Help us! in a woman’s terrified voice he’d hardly identified as belonging to his mother. Something has happened to my husband!

(And that, too, was strange to his ears: My husband.)

So Mr. Rainey who’d been Dadda, the children’s father, was taken away by ambulance in the night. Now the Raineys had to know themselves unprotected by God or by the general good fortune they’d taken for granted. As Kit-Kit told David, swiping at her nose with a look of somber disbelief, “I guess anything can happen to us now. Anything.”

The father hadn’t died, though he’d been near unconscious and on an oxygen machine, three hours in the emergency room and eleven hours in intensive care and then transferred to room 833, a private room where at last anxious relatives could visit him, cautioned not to crowd around his bed and not to tire him. The diagnosis was not a heart attack exactly but severe atrial fibrillation, with a possibility of blood clots in the heart and elsewhere.

It isn’t him, I don’t know him. Who is it? Amid the tense whispery talk it was the Raineys’ youngest son who held back, shyly staring at his father in the cranked-up hospital bed. Overnight the father had become strangely sunken chested and feeble lying there in a hospital gown through which his graying chest hair faintly glowered, only fifty-one years old (but, thought David, fifty-one is old) yet stricken as if with a sledgehammer. Into his bruised right forearm two IV tubes were running, attached to clear-liquid sacs on poles beside the bed; around his upper left arm a blood-pressure cuff was tightly wrapped, and this cuff was timed to take readings every few minutes with a peculiar whirring sound. (The patient’s vital signs, as they were called — heartbeat, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood pressure — were indicated on a monitor in his room and in a nurses’ station: if one of the readings dipped or soared too much, an emergency alarm would be sounded and help would come running.) When it was David’s turn to speak with his father, he didn’t know what to say as the pale, squinting man in the bed smiled at him, fumbling for his hand, icy cold the man’s fingers, poor Dadda — as if this stranger was Dadda or could ever have been. “Davy, don’t worry — I’m a little under the weather — all these drugs they’re pumping into me — ” his father was saying, insisting, as if there weren’t a reason for the powerful drugs or for his being in this strange place, and David smiled anxiously and nodded, having to lean close to hear his father’s voice. For overnight the change was upon Mr. Rainey, you could see it, and you could smell it — “don’t worry, I’ll be home soon, I promise. Things will be as before. I love you” — this, David couldn’t be certain he’d heard, his face crinkling suddenly like a baby’s, and this was the signal for his mother to embrace him, or to try, as if he weren’t thirteen years old — but the Goat was quick to sidestep her, mumbling words that might have been See you later! or Leave me alone.

They let him go. Knowing he wouldn’t go far. To a men’s lavatory on the floor. To hide, to cry.

It was like he’d been tricked. And he didn’t know who to blame.

The Goat, or Little Goat, was so called because as a very small child he’d scampered up stairs before he could walk, on hands and knees like a frisky kid. Meems and Dadda laughed at him in delight and clapped. Look at that baby billy goat climbing the mountain! The Goat was proud of his talent, wouldn’t have known that such talent was only just showing off for the family. And long after he’d ceased scampering up stairs in the big old red-brick house on Upchurch Street, he’d be known within the family as the Goat, as his sister was Kit-Kit, and his brothers were Pike and Billy-o. And none of this sad, silly stuff mattered in the slightest in the real world.

That night kneeling bare-kneed on the hardwood floor in a corner of his bedroom. Let something of mine be taken! He was breathless and fearful as if God in whom he didn’t believe might be in the very room with him. Let my father be returned to us.

It would be a simple trade, barter. It would be a secret transaction. None of the others would know. Not even Father.

For it was a fact: all was changed now. Even if his father’s heartbeat could be returned to normal. Even if there were no clots sifting through his blood to strike him dead like bullets. Even if the house on Upchurch Street that looked now as if winds had blown through the rooms, where the phone was forever ringing, returned to normal. His father had promised things would be as before but David no longer believed his father. For nothing could be as before. He was angry that they’d think him so young, and credulous, to believe such a lie.

It was like a theorem in his geometry text. It was irrefutable. There is no before without after.

In the dark he went to his desk, switched on a lamp, and took up his geometry compass. He stabbed the sharp point into the palm of his left hand and pressed, grunting with the surprise of the pain. The skin was punctured and blood oozed grudgingly out. His upper lip was beaded with sweat. Push it all the way through, like a spike.

The compass slipped through his fingers and fell to the floor gleaming faintly with blood.

Coward.

“The Cheetah” — so David called the boy, in secret.

This was the person, David believed, who’d been crying in the men’s lavatory the first day of the Raineys’ vigil at the medical center.

He was a slender, handsome, foreign-looking boy of about fourteen whose father, too, was a heart patient in the cardiac unit. In room 837, two doors from 833. David began noticing him on the second day. After that, he couldn’t not notice him. The boy was “foreign” though dressed like an American teenager in jeans, T-shirt, expensive running shoes. He spoke English with no evident accent (that David could overhear) though his relatives, crowded into room 837, spoke a language David couldn’t recognize, or heavily accented English the medical staff had trouble understanding. Maybe they were Middle Eastern? Turks, Lebanese, Arabs? Or were they Pakistanis? Or — Portuguese? Their language was rapid, harsh, and sometimes sibilant, teasingly familiar to David (from TV?) yet mysterious. In David’s suburban school there were few ethnic or minority students and most of these were Asian-Americans. The Cheetah was black haired, olive skinned, with distinctive features that reminded David of a cat’s, and he was catlike in his movements, restless, inclined to impatience. Sometimes he appeared stricken with grief; at other times he looked sulky, even bored. He and David often saw each other in the eighth-floor corridor, in the visitors’ lounge, just stepping out of an elevator, with relatives, or alone, eyes turned downward. The Cheetah was taller than David by several inches, about five foot five. He only vaguely acknowledged David, with a glance, though David was certain he recognized him. The Cheetah was the most striking boy of his age that David had ever seen up close.

His father has been struck down, too. Maybe dying.

The Cheetah’s father lay as if near comatose in his bed, breathing oxygen from a plastic tube. His dark-skinned face was ravaged though probably, David thought, he wasn’t any older than David’s own father. He looked like a big man who’d lost weight suddenly, like a partly deflated balloon. His room was the most frequently visited in the corridor, and many of these visitors brought young children with them. The nursing staff repeatedly asked them not to speak so loudly, to watch their children more closely, to “be considerate” of other patients. Always, they obeyed at once; yet shortly afterward, others arrived, and there was more commotion. Mr. Rainey complained that the “foreign” family stayed past 11 P.M. sometimes and woke him on their way out. David would have liked to inquire what nationality they were, what their name was, but didn’t want to appear curious.

There was another boy, older than the Cheetah, about seventeen, who came to visit the patient in room 837 less frequently. They were obviously brothers, the one a taller, heavier version of the other. The older boy, whom David came to call “the Hawk,” was handsome, too; his nose was prominent, beak-like — like a hawk’s. His black hair had been severely trimmed to a buzz cut. The Hawk was a swaggering high school kid in a black Pearl Jam T-shirt, ratty designer jeans, a gold stud glittering in his left earlobe. He, too, was taking his father’s hospitalization hard, you could see that, but he was more readily bored than the Cheetah and prowled about the cardiac unit talking to the West Indian orderlies and nurses’ aides. When the brothers were together, the Hawk was clearly dominant. He talked, and the Cheetah listened. It was easy to imagine their childhood: the older brother bossing the younger. David’s brothers, too, were older than he was, but so much older (Pete by ten years, Billy by six) they’d been protective of him rather than bullying, though mostly they hadn’t had time for him. Seeing the way the Cheetah glanced at the Hawk, alert and even admiring, David felt a stab of envy.

The Hawk took no notice of David but the Cheetah was different, at least some of the time. One night at 10 P.M., when David was sent to get fruit juice for his father, there was the Cheetah on a similar errand. Their gazes locked for an awkward moment. David might have mumbled, “Hi,” and the Cheetah might have mumbled something inaudible in passing.

That night in his dream he was Little Goat! He and the Cheetah were in kindergarten together. Playing on the slide and on the swings. They’d climbed, clambered up a steep staircase. A feeling of overwhelming happiness spread through David.

For the first time since the ambulance had come for his father, taking away Dadda to die amid strangers, David was able to sleep through to morning.

The puncture wound in his hand had come to nothing; he was a coward. His father wasn’t improving and until Mr. Rainey was stronger, the cardiologist couldn’t “proceed.” A voice taunted him, the God-in-whom-he-didn’t-believe. What would you give up to bring your father home?

His eyesight? The vision in one eye? His hearing? What about an arm? Which arm? His right? What about a leg? And what of his “future” — would he give that up? Never play any game again: softball, soccer, basketball? Would he give up his trombone? His friends? His high grades? His special feeling for math? His soul?

A sacrifice must be made. But what?

Around the house he was a sleepwalker-zombie; it wouldn’t be a surprise if an accident happened. Turning an ankle on the stairs and falling. Shutting a car door on his hand. All of them were distracted and not themselves. Mother on the telephone, Mother walking slowly through the rooms she seemed not to recognize. There was nothing for them to talk about except the father’s condition, yet there was so little for them to say of it that they hadn’t already said. Through this, the God-voice taunted the Raineys’ youngest son, the coward.

What would you give up? give up? give up?

He did return to school for a morning. There was a midterm test in solid geometry he didn’t want to miss. He made certain he failed, hoping his teacher wouldn’t be suspicious. He got enough answers wrong so he calculated his numerical grade was about 55 %, a letter grade of F.

Maybe that would help?

On the fourth morning Mr. Rainey was strong enough to endure a heart-probe procedure, and afterward Mrs. Rainey was crying, clutching at their hands. “It’s all right! The doctor said there were no blood clots.”

Yet the father’s arrhythmia didn’t respond to medication as the cardiologist expected. There was the probability that, if Mr. Rainey was removed from his intravenous medication, the atrial fibrillation would return. For that was the rhythm which his fifty-one-year-old heart, like a suddenly deranged clock, had taken on. So they might try electric shock.

Admittedly this was a more extreme procedure with some element of risk.

How much “element of risk” the Raineys wanted to know.

The cardiologist’s reply was lengthy, tactful, and, in the end, vague. For each heart patient is a unique problem, each heartbeat a unique beat, and any general anesthetic is a trauma to the brain.

“And to the heart?” Mrs. Rainey asked.

“Well, yes.” The cardiologist cleared his throat.

David wondered if the Cheetah had noticed: room 833 and room 837 were mirror-rooms.

Each was private and of the same proportions, bathroom to the rear, a single window. In each, as you approached, you could see a gowned man in bed, attached to intravenous sacs on poles. In each, you often saw visitors sitting or standing around the bed. Each room exuded the possibility of the empty bed.

After a few days, David began to worry not just that he’d return to room 833 and see his father’s bed empty, but he’d return to see the bed empty in room 837, too. That would mean he’d never see the Cheetah again. For the Cheetah’s father did seem sicker than David’s father. He was still breathing oxygen through a tube in his nose. There was more often a curtain drawn around his bed. Rarely did the Cheetah’s father sit up to talk with visitors or watch TV as David’s father had done since the second evening, and not once had David seen the Cheetah’s father walking in the corridor as David’s father did, slowly but gamely, twice a day, with one of the West Indian orderlies, hauling his two jingly IV poles and his blood-pressure paraphernalia with him. (“Like a cyborg.”) Once, when David was prowling the corridor, he passed the open door of 837 and happened to see the patient being prepared by two orderlies for a trip on a gurney, lifted stiffly out of his bed like a dead weight. There was the Cheetah at the foot of the bed, and there was the plump, anxious-looking woman David supposed was the Cheetah’s mother. David circled the floor, and when he returned to his corridor, there was the ravaged man, barely conscious, being wheeled to an elevator; in his wake, the Cheetah and his mother followed slowly, gripping each other’s hand. David would have liked to say, “If it’s the blood-clot test, it isn’t too bad. My dad had it and he’s okay. Good luck!” Of course, he said nothing.

Yet the Cheetah glanced at him in passing, a swift sidelong look of fear, hurt, anger, and an obscure shame.

He wasn’t spying on the brothers. Yet it happened he saw them everywhere.

In the parking garage, for instance. By what coincidence did Mrs. Rainey park one morning, on level B, close by the “foreign” family’s car? Both cars were large, new-model luxury cars, but the Raineys’ was mud splattered and its chrome fixtures dimmed as if in mourning while the other family’s car gleamed and glittered as if it had been driven directly out of a dealer’s showroom.

The Hawk was driving. In the harsh early sunshine he looked older than seventeen. He drove with a slight edge of impatience, pulling into the parking space and braking almost simultaneously. Beside him was his mother; in the backseat were an elderly white-haired woman, a young girl, and the Cheetah slouched and sullen, a baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. David looked quickly away.

“Those people,” Mrs. Rainey sighed. “Either they all look alike, or they’re everywhere.”

On the morning of the sixth day the father began to cry, whispering he’d failed them. The children were sent out of the room. The cardiologist came to explain the electric-shock procedure in such clinical detail, Mrs. Rainey began to faint — “Oh, God. An electric shock to his heart.”

That night, David opened his window wanting the ache and hurt of cold. Damp sleeting rain like needles. What would you give up? What would you give? Quietly he went downstairs in his pajamas, barefoot. Stepped outside into the harsh cold air. His head, which had felt fevered, like a burning lightbulb, was immediately wet, and it wasn’t much but it felt good.

How long he wandered about in the sleety rain, on the driveway, in the grass, tilting his head back, exposing his throat, he wouldn’t know. Lost track of time. Thinking This might be the last night I have a father.

Next morning, his head ached, his eyes were running, and his nose — “Oh, Davy. You’ve given yourself a cold.” Somehow, his mother knew, scolding him, but kissing him, pressing him against her so he hadn’t any choice but, gently, to push away.

Mother was saying in her new, wondering voice, “The life we live in our bodies, it’s so strange, isn’t it? You don’t ever think how you got in. But you come to think obsessively how you’ll be getting out.”

Later, when they were preparing to leave for the medical center, she laid her hand on David’s arm in that way he’d come to dread. “Your father loves you very much, honey. You know that.”

David nodded, yes.

“He told me. He’s thinking of you. All the time. He wants you to know that. I hope you do.”

“Okay, Mom.”

Desperate to escape, but where to escape to?

Like puppets on a string! That was what the Raineys had become.

Even Mr. Rainey in his cranked-up bed, listening to the beat-beat-beat of his crazed heart.

For no sooner did they arrive in room 833 than they were informed by the head nurse that the electric-shock procedure was postponed until the next morning. When Mr. Rainey’s vital signs might be more stable.

“Hell,” said Mr. Rainey, managing a ghastly-ashy smile, “I’m set to go right now.”

“Hey-hey!”

A sharp little cry not meant for him. As the flat stone came skittering and skidding across the icy pavement.

Behind the medical center, adjacent to the parking garage, there was a construction site and in the foreground, an unused, slightly littered space.

It was truly chance! David hadn’t followed the brothers here, hadn’t had any idea they might be here at all. He’d fled the eighth-floor corridor and the stifling air of room 833 where even the numerous fresh-cut flowers exuded an odor of dread. He hadn’t taken time even to put on his jacket, desperate to flee.

And there, in early winter sunlight were the brothers kicking a stone like a hockey puck between them. It was an idle, desultory game. A cigarette slanted from a corner of the Hawk’s fleshy mouth. The Cheetah, languid and sulky-seeming, wore a gray baseball jacket. During the night the sleet had turned to snow; there was a light dusting on the ground and ice patches on the pavement. The brothers communicated with each other in grunts of challenge or derision. The Hawk was the louder and the more skilled at the impromptu game. “Hey-hey!” — he kicked the flat stone so hard it ricocheted and caught his brother on the ankle; the Cheetah winced, then laughed. David was uncertain whether he should acknowledge watching the brothers or pretend not to see them; he continued along the edge of the pavement as if he had a destination and wasn’t just walking to kill time, as the brothers were playing their aimless game to kill time. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the younger brother run to catch the skidding stone with his foot and give it a sidelong kick. There came the stone as if by magic, skittering in David’s direction, so with a clumsy, eager kick he sent it spinning back toward the Cheetah, and with a haughty nod the Cheetah both acknowledged David’s charitable gesture and dismissed it, sending the stone flying back toward his brother with renewed zest — “Hey-hey-hey!”

Elated, David walked on. The brothers continued their rough play behind him; he didn’t give them a second glance.

Tomorrow morning?

Something would be decided.

David’s mother urged him and his sister to return to school for the afternoon at least. “Some semblance of a normal life” — but neither David nor his sister wanted a normal life right now. Their older brothers Pete and Billy were grimly waiting, too.

In the mirror-room 837, the Cheetah’s father seemed little changed. The door was only partway closed, as if in the patient’s stuporous state privacy made little difference. David passed on an errand, hoping he wouldn’t be seen by anyone inside, and he wasn’t.

The patient continued sleeping as before and several visitors were sitting about watching TV.

Entering the men’s lavatory which he’d come to know in too much detail. And there at a sink, washing his hands, was the boy he’d remember for the rest of his life as the Cheetah.

Loud splashing water from the faucet, and anger in the very sound. The boy’s eyelids looked inflamed as if with fever.

David halted just inside the door. He swallowed, embarrassed. The Cheetah was watching him in the mirror. David tried to show no emotion though a shock ran through him as if he’d carelessly touched an electric wire.

For the first time, the Cheetah smiled. His lips smiled. He was watching David in the mirror. “Somebody in your family sick, eh?” His voice was low and hoarse, almost inaudible.

David said, swallowing again, “Yes. My father.”

The Cheetah nodded, drying his hands on a paper towel. “My father, too.”

David said, “Something happened to my dad in the middle of the night. He hadn’t ever had any heart trouble before. He couldn’t breathe, his heart was racing. My mom called an ambulance. That was last week. They said, in the emergency room, my dad’s heartbeat was two hundred twenty beats a minute.”

“Je-sus.” The Cheetah whistled, as if impressed. “I’ve been seeing you around here, it’s shitty, eh? Y’want to go out back for a smoke?”

“ — smoke?”

“Just hang out, then. Get out of this shitty place.”

David smiled uncertainly. He heard himself say, “Okay.”

On his way out of the lavatory the Cheetah cuffed David lightly on the shoulder as a big cat might, in play. He winked at David and drawled, showing the tip of his tongue between his lips. “O-kay. Out back.”

When David left the lavatory, the Cheetah was nowhere in sight.

He returned to 833; his parents were expecting him. It was almost 6 P.M. when an orderly brought his dad a special-diet supper. He wasn’t certain whether he was supposed to meet the Cheetah outside immediately, or another time. He kept glancing at the doorway when someone passed by. The network news came on TV. Every night that he’d been strong enough to sit up, Mr. Rainey watched the news. David’s mother propped pillows behind him. He’d become one of those patients bent upon “cheering up” visitors. He was saying to David, “ — should be in school, Davy, shouldn’t you? Don’t want to fall behind and I’m going to be fine in a day or two, you’ll see.” David said “I can’t fall behind, Dad, it’s like a Möbius strip. Anyway, it’s after school now. See? — it’s dark.” He pointed toward the window at the rear of the room as if his father required proof. But his father was laughing, a dry, mirthless laugh, the remark about the Möbius strip was so clever. David reached for his jacket, laid over the back of a chair. His mother called after him but he didn’t hear. He’d let forty minutes pass; he was in a desperate hurry.

Where the brothers had been playing their rough game earlier that day, there were patches of ice treacherous underfoot. A boy who might’ve been the Cheetah signaled to David from the far side of the open space, near the parking garage. He walked rapidly away, turned, and beckoned to David mysteriously. They’d entered the parking garage at the rear. This was level A, now mostly deserted. The Cheetah was smoking a cigarette and trailing smoke over his shoulder, exhaling through his teeth. He held out a pack of cigarettes and David was about to stammer, “Thanks, but — I don’t — ” when he understood that he must accept the cigarette from his friend and learn to smoke it. He laughed, excited at the prospect. His hand reached out and the Cheetah’s hooded eyes flashed and in that instant David was grabbed from behind, and his arms yanked painfully back. Someone had been waiting behind one of the posts. A tall, strong boy, of course it was the Cheetah’s brother. David was too surprised to cry for help. He might have thought this was part of a game. He heard his cracked voice, “What? — what — ” Already a flurry of hard blows like horses’ hooves struck his chest, his stomach, his thighs. He fell, or was pushed. Sprawled on the gritty pavement. The Hawk stooped over him, his breath in short steaming pants. He punched and kicked him and spat in his face and the Cheetah, making a high, whimpering sound like a malicious child, stooped over him too, striking him with his fists, not so hard or with so much fury as his brother.

The beating was quick and cruel and could not have lasted more than two minutes. The Hawk kicked him in the groin, cursing, “Fucker! Little fag!” The Cheetah drew his foot back for another kick but changed his mind. He pulled his brother, “Hey, no more.” He called the older boy by a name David couldn’t recognize, a name whose syllables were foreign, but in fact David heard little, the terrible fiery pain in his groin, his eyes misted over in shock, there was a roaring like a waterfall in his ears. Yet he would always remember the Cheetah hesitating. He would see the Cheetah not-kick. That glisten of fierce happiness in the Hawk’s face David would never forget; it would be one of the great riddles of his life even as he would cherish the gift of the Cheetah’s withheld kick. For both brothers might have kicked and kicked, leaving him limp, broken, bleeding; they might have kicked him to death for that was within their power, yet they had not. The younger boy panted, “Hey, no more. C’mon.”

The brothers walked swiftly away. David lay where he’d fallen. He was alone, dazed. Never such pain as the pain between his legs, yet he seemed to know it would pass, he wouldn’t die, wouldn’t even be crippled. Afterward he would realize that the brothers had deliberately spared his face. He wasn’t bleeding, he’d have no visible marks.

Always, he’d be grateful for this.

Honor Code

Seems like forever I was in love with my cousin Sonny Brandt, who was incarcerated in the Chautauqua County Youth Facility outside Chautauqua Falls, New York, from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-one on a charge of manslaughter. You could say that my life as a girl was before-Sonny and after-Sonny. Before-manslaughter and after-manslaughter.

That word! One day it came into our lives.

Like incarceration. Another word that, once it comes into your life, the life of your family, is permanent.

No one says “incarcerate” except people who have to do with the prison system. “Manslaughter” is a word you hear more frequently, though most people, I think, don’t know what it means.

“Manslaughter.”

Those years I whispered this word aloud. Murmured this word like a precious obscenity. I loved the vibration in my jaws, my teeth clenched tight. “Manslaughter.” I felt the thrill of what Sonny had done, or what people claimed Sonny had done, reverberating in those syllables not to be spoken aloud in the presence of any of the relatives.

“Manslaughter” was more powerful than even “murder” for there was “man” and there was “slaughter” and the two jammed together were like music: the opening chord of an electric guitar, so deafening you feel it deep in the groin.

What Sonny did to a man who’d hurt my mother happened in December 1981, when I was eleven. A few years later my mother’s older sister Agnes arranged for me to attend a private girls’ school in Amherst, New York, where one day in music class our teacher happened to mention the title of a composition for piano — Slaughter on Tenth Avenue — and in that instant my jaw must have dropped, for a girl pointed at me, and laughed.

“Mickey is so weird isn’t she!”

“Mickey is so funny.”

“Mickey is funny-weird.”

At the Amherst Academy for Girls I’d learned to laugh with my tormentors who were also my friends. Somehow I was special to them, like a handicapped dancer or athlete, you had to laugh at me yet with a look of tender exasperation. When I couldn’t come up with a witty rejoinder, I made a face like a TV comedian. Any laughter generated by Mickey Stecke was going to be intentional.

“Hurry! No time to dawdle! This is an emergency.”

It was Hurricane Charley in September 1980 that broke up our household in Herkimer, New York, and caused us to flee like wartime refugees. So Momma would say. That terrible time when within twenty-four hours every river, creek, and ditch in Herkimer County overflowed its banks and Bob Gleason’s little shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek where we’d been living got flooded out: “Near-about swept away and all of us drowned.”

Momma’s voice quavered when she spoke of Hurricane Charley and all she’d had to leave behind but in fact she’d made her decision to leave Herkimer and Bob Gleason before the storm hit. Must’ve made up her mind watching TV weather news. This confused time in our lives when we’d been living with a man who was my brother Lyle’s father, who was spending time away from the house after he and Momma had quarreled, and every time the phone rang it was Bob Gleason wanting to speak with Momma, and Momma was anxious about Bob Gleason returning, so one night she ran into Lyle’s and my room excited saying there were “hurricane warnings” on TV for Herkimer County, we’d have to “evacuate” to save our lives. Already Momma was dragging a suitcase down from the attic. “You two! Help me with these damn bags.” Momma had a way of keeping fear out of her voice by sounding as if she was scolding or teasing. It became a game to see how quickly we could pack Momma’s old Chevy Impala in the driveway. Momma had just the one suitcase that was large, bulky, sand-colored, with not only buckles to snap shut but cord belts to fasten. She had cardboard boxes, bags from the grocery store, armloads of loose clothes carried to the car on hangers and dumped into the back. Already it was raining, hard.

Our destination was my aunt Georgia’s house in Ransomville, three hundred miles to the west in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains, we’d last visited two summers ago.

I asked Momma if Aunt Georgia knew we were coming. Momma said sharply of course she knew. “Who you think I been on the phone with, all hours of the night? Him?”

Momma spoke contemptuously. I was to know who him was without her needing to explain.

When a man was over with, in Momma’s life, immediately he became him. Whatever name he’d had, she’d once uttered in a soft-sliding voice, would not be spoken ever again.

“Pray to God, He will spare us.”

It was a frantic drive on mostly country roads littered with fallen tree limbs. From time to time we encountered other vehicles, moving slowly, headlights shimmering in rain. Ditches were overflowing with mud-water and at every narrow bridge Momma had to slow our car to a crawl, whispering to herself. Where it was light enough we could see the terrifying sight of water rushing just a few inches below the bridge yet each time we were spared, the bridge wasn’t washed away and all of us drowned. To drown out the noise of the wind, Momma played Johnny Cash tapes, loud. Johnny Cash was Momma’s favorite singer, like her own daddy, she claimed, lost to her since she was twelve years old. In the backseat in a bed of wet, rumpled clothes Lyle fell asleep whimpering but I kept Momma company every mile of the way. Every hour of that night. I was Aimée then, not Mickey. I wasn’t sorry to leave the shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek that was run-down and smelled of kerosene because Lyle’s daddy was not my daddy and in Bob Gleason’s eyes I could see no warmth for me, only for Lyle. Where my own daddy was, I had no idea. If my own daddy was alive, I had no idea. I had learned not to ask Momma who would say in disdain, “Him? Gone.” From Momma I knew that a man could not be trusted except for a certain period of time and when that time was ending you had to act quickly before it was too late.

Through the night, the rain continued. In the morning there was no sunrise only a gradual lightening so you could begin to see the shapes of things along the road: mostly trees. Then I saw a shivery ray of light above the sawtooth mountains we were headed for, the sun flattened out sideways like a broken egg yolk, a smear of red-orange. “Momma, look!” And a while later Momma drove across the suspension bridge above the Chautauqua River at Ransomville and when at midpoint on the bridge we passed the sign CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY she began crying suddenly.

“No one can hurt us now.”

These words that came to be confused in my memory with Johnny Cash’s manly voice. No one can hurt us now the words to a song of surpassing beauty and hope that was interrupted by applause and whistles from a vast anonymous audience. No one can hurt us now soothing as a lullaby, you drift into sleep believing it must be true.

My aunt Georgia Brandt lived in a ramshackle farmhouse at the edge of Ransomville. Of the original one hundred acres, only two or three remained in the family. Georgia was not a farm woman but a cafeteria worker at the local hospital. She was a soft-fleshed fattish woman in her late thirties, six years older than my mother, a widow who’d lost her trucker husband in a disastrous accident on the New York Thruway when her oldest child was in high school and her youngest, Sonny, was five months old. Aunt Georgia had a way of hugging so vehemently it took the breath out of you. Her kisses were like swipes with a coarse damp sponge. She smelled of baking powder biscuits and cigarette smoke. To keep from crying when she was in an emotional state Aunt Georgia blurted out clumsy remarks meant to amuse, that had the sting of insults. First thing she said to Momma when we came into her house after our all-night drive was: “Jesus, Dev’a! Don’t you and those kids look like something the cat dragged out of the rain!”

If Sonny happened to overhear one of his mother’s awkward attempts at humor he was apt to call out, “Don’t listen to Ma’s bullshit, she’s drunk.”

Aunt Georgia was a hive of fretful energy, humming and singing to herself like a radio left on in an empty room. She watched late-night TV, smoking while she knitted, did needlepoint, sewed quilts — “crazy quilts” were her specialty. Some of these she sold through a women’s crafts co-op at a local mall, others she gave away. After her husband’s fiery death she’d converted to evangelical Christianity and sang in a nasal, wavering voice in the choir of the Ransomville Church of the Apostles. She was brimming with prayer like a cup filled to the top, threatening to spill. Even Sonny, at mealtimes, bowed his lips over his plate, clasped his restless hands and mumbled Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive through Christ-our-Lord AMEN. My aunt Georgia was the second-oldest of the McClaren girls who’d grown up in Ransomville and had always been the heaviest. Devra was the youngest, prettiest, and thinnest — “Look at you,” Georgia protested, “one of those ‘an-rex-icks’ you see on TV.” In an upscale suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, lived the oldest McClaren sister, my aunt Agnes who was famous among the relatives for being “rich” and “stingy” — “snooty” — “cold-hearted.” Agnes was the sole McClaren in any generation to have gone to college, acquiring a master’s degree from the State University at Buffalo in something called developmental psychology; she’d married a well-to-do businessman whom few in the family had ever met. Agnes disapproved of her sisters’ lives for being “messy” — “out of control” — and never returned to the Chautauqua Valley to visit. Nor did she encourage visits to Cleveland though she’d taken an interest, Momma reported, in me: “Aggie thinks you might take after her, you like books better than people.”

I did not like books better than people. I was nothing like my aunt Agnes.

I hated Momma’s brash way of talking, that my cousin Sonny Brandt might overhear.

First glimpse I had of Sonny that morning, he came outside in the rain to help us unload the car, insisted on carrying most of the things himself — “Y’all get inside, I can handle it.” Sonny was just fifteen but looked and behaved years older. Next, Sonny gave up his room for Lyle and me: “It’s nice’n cozy, see. Right over the furnace.” The Brandts’ house was so large, uninsulated, most of the second floor had to be shut up from November to April; the furnace was coal-burning, in a dank, earthen-floored cellar, and gave off wan gusts of heat through vents clogged with dust. Sonny was always doing some kindness like that, helping you with something you hadn’t realized you needed help with. He was a tall, lanky-lean boy with pale ghost-blue eyes, said to resemble his dead father’s. His eyebrows ran together over the bridge of his nose. Already at fifteen he’d begun to wear out his forehead with frowning: one of those old-young people, could be male or female, Momma said, who take on too much worry early in life because others who are older don’t take on enough.

Like his mother, Sonny was always busy. You could hear him humming and singing to himself, anywhere in the house. He slept now in a drafty room under the eaves, at the top of the stairs, and his footsteps on the stairs were thunderous. He had a way of flying down the stairs taking steps three or four at a time, slapping the wall with his left hand to keep his balance. He could run upstairs, too, in almost the same way. It was a sight to behold like an acrobat on TV but Aunt Georgia wasn’t amused calling to him he was going to break his damn neck or worse yet the damn stairs. Sonny laughed, “Hey Ma: chill out.”

Sonny was in tenth grade at Ransomville High but frequently out of school working part-time or pickup jobs (grocery bagger, snow removal, farmhand) or helping around the house where things were forever breaking down. The previous summer, Sonny had painted the front of the house and most of what you could see of the sides from the road but the color Georgia selected was an impractical cream-ivory that looked thin as whitewash on the rough boards and would have required a second coat. Sonny gave up, overwhelmed. If he’d had any brains, he said, he would’ve worked those weeks for a painting contractor, at least he’d have been paid.

Momma teased Sonny for being a “natural-born Good Samaritan” and Sonny said, scowling: “Natural-born asshole, you mean.”

Lyle and I were crazy for our cousin like puppies yearning for attention, any kind of attention: teasing, swift hard tickles beneath the arms, attacks from behind. Sonny never hurt us, or rarely. He was sometimes clumsy, but never cruel. He was just under six feet, built like a whippet with shoulders and arms hard-muscled from outdoor work. His hair was the color of damp wheat and sprang straight from his head. By fifteen he had to shave every other day. His skin was often blemished and he wore grungy old jeans, Tshirts, sweatshirts yet girls called him on the phone after school, giggling and shameless. If Georgia happened to answer she spoke sharply, “No. My son is not available.” Sonny basked in the attention but couldn’t be troubled to call any girls back. Still Georgia complained, “All that boy has got to do is get some silly girl pregnant. Wind up married, a daddy at sixteen.”

A flush rose in Sonny’s face if he happened to overhear. He hated to be teased about girls, or sex. Anything to do with sex.

“Chill out, Mom. Or I’m out of here.”

One day, Sonny changed my name: he’d had enough of “Aimée,” he said. Especially the way my mother wanted it pronounced: “Aim-ée.”

“‘Mickey’ kicks ass, see? ‘Aimée’ gets her ass kicked.”

It was so! Clear as a column of numbers added up.

Sonny called Lyle “Big Boy.” (Which was a sweet kind of teasing, since Lyle was small for his age at six.) Sometimes, Sonny called my brother “Lyle-y” if the mood between them was more serious.

Sonny had a formal way of addressing adults, you couldn’t judge was respectful or mocking. He could provoke my aunt Georgia by referring to her as “ma’am” in the politest voice. In town, adults were “ma’am” — “sir” — “mister” — “missus.” (Behind their backs, Sonny might have other, funnier names for them.) But he took care to call Momma “Aunt Devra” both to her face and to others. To Lyle and me he’d say, “Your Momma,” in a serious voice. The way his eyes shrank from Momma, even when she was trying to joke with him, which was often, you could see he didn’t know how to speak to her. Much of the time, he didn’t speak. Though he did favors for Momma, constantly. Climbing up onto the roof to repair a drip in Momma’s bedroom, changing a flat tire on Momma’s car, taking a day off from school to drive Momma to Chautauqua Falls seventy miles away. (Sonny had a driver’s permit which allowed him to drive any vehicle so long as a licensed driver was with him. What Momma was doing in Chautauqua Falls wasn’t for us to know. She would claim she “had business” which might mean she was interviewing for a job, looking for a new place to live or contacting a friend. So much of Momma’s life was secret, her own children wouldn’t know what she’d been planning until she sprang the surprise on us like something on daytime TV.) When Momma tried to thank Sonny for some kindness of his he’d squirm with embarrassment and scowl, mumbling O.K., Aunt Devra or Well, hell and make his escape, fast. Momma hid her exasperation beneath praise, telling Georgia her son was the shyest boy — “For somebody growing up to look like Sonny is going to look.”

Georgia said defiantly, “I hope to God he stays that way.”

A few months in Ransomville, we’d begun to forget Herkimer. The shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek we’d almost come to believe, as Momma said, had been flooded and swept away by Hurricane Charley. The glowering man who wasn’t my daddy and had no wish to pretend he was. Now I was Mickey and not Aimée, I behaved with more confidence. I became brash, reckless. I infuriated my aunt and my mother by careening around the house at high speed, taking the stairs from the second floor two and three at a time, slapping my hand against the wall for balance. (Unlike Sonny, I sometimes missed a step and fell, hard. Skidding down the remainder of the stairs to lie in a crumpled heap at the bottom. The pain made me whimper but embarrassment was worse, if anyone happened to have noticed.) Another roughhouse game if you could call it a game was running and sliding along the hall on my aunt’s “throw rugs” Lyle imitated me, in a shrieking version of bumper cars. When Momma was home she scolded and slapped at me — “Aimée! You’re too old for such behavior” — but more and more, Momma wasn’t home.

Aunt Georgia’s was the kind of household where a single bathroom had to suffice for everyone and the hot water heater was quickly depleted. The kind of household where a shower, a bath, was an occasion. I hid in wait to catch a glimpse of Sonny hurrying into the bathroom barefoot, bare-chested and in beltless trousers, pajama bottoms, or white Jockey shorts dingy from many launderings, quick to shut the door behind him and latch it. Slyly I would draw near to hear him whistling inside as he ran water from the rusty old faucets, flushed the toilet, showered. I drew Lyle into teasing Sonny with me, rapping on the bathroom door when Sonny was inside, managing to jiggle the latch-lock open and reaching inside to switch off the light, to provoke our cousin into shouting, “Put that light back on! God damn!” More daring, we crept into the steamy bathroom when Sonny was showering, pushed aside the shower curtain so that I could spray Sonny with shaving cream from his aerosol can, all the while shrieking with laughter like a cat being killed. Nothing was more hilarious than Sonny flailing at us, streaming water, trying to grab the shaving cream can out of my hand. Once or twice I caught a glimpse of Sonny’s penis swinging loose, limp and seeming not much longer than his longest finger, innocent-looking as a red rubber toy between his narrow hips. In his rage, Sonny wouldn’t trouble to wrap a towel around his waist. The sight of my cousin’s penis did not upset or alarm me. If I’d been asked I might have said Anything that is Sonny’s, anything to do with Sonny, could never cause me harm.

Furious and flushed with indignation, Sonny lunged from the dripping shower stall to shove Lyle and me out of the bathroom with his wet hands, and shut the door behind us, hard.

“Damn brats!”

Of course, Sonny would exact his revenge. If not immediately, in time. Somewhere, somehow. We would not know when. We trembled in anticipation, not knowing when.

It would be years before I glimpsed another penis on another young male. And more years before I saw an erect penis. In my naïveté taking for granted that adult men looked like my boy cousin surprised naked in the shower. In my naïveté taking for granted that, like my protective boy cousin, no man would truly wish to harm me.

That environment my aunt Agnes would say, after Sonny was arrested. Those people, that way of life my aunt would speak in disgust as if any sensible person would agree with her. And I would want to protest It wasn’t like that! I would want to say I loved them, we were happy there, you don’t understand.

“If I could trust you, Dev’a. My mind would be more at peace.”

It was difficult to interpret my aunt Georgia’s tone of voice when she spoke like this to Momma. She didn’t seem to be scolding or sarcastic. She didn’t sound reproachful. She laughed, and she sighed. (Fattish people sighed a lot, I knew. Like they were made of rubber pumped up like a balloon and when they felt sad, air leaked out more noticeably than it did with thinner people.) The way Momma murmured in reply as if she was too much in a hurry to be angry, “Georgia, you can trust me! I’m an adult woman,” I understood my aunt and Momma had had this conversation before and that, on her way out of the house, Momma would pause to kiss Georgia’s cheek, squeeze her hand and say, in her taunting-teasing way, “And you can mind your own business, Georgia. Any time you want us out, we’re out.”

This hurt my aunt, I knew. (It hurt me, overhearing. Momma was so careless in her words slashing like blades.) So Georgia would say no she didn’t mean that, didn’t want that, Momma had to know she didn’t want that.

Through the winter and into January 1981, Momma sold perfume in a department store at the mall. Then, Momma was “hostess” in a restaurant owned by a new friend of hers. Then, Momma was “receptionist” at Herlihy’s Realtors whose glaring yellow and black signs were everywhere in Chautauqua County, and Mr. Herlihy (who drove a showy bronze-blond Porsche) was Momma’s new friend.

It seemed that every few days, a new friend called Momma. Male voices asking to speak with “Devra Stecke” but Momma wasn’t usually home. Some of the men left names and telephone numbers, others did not. Some of the men my aunt Georgia knew, or claimed to know, others she did not. This was an “old pattern” repeating itself, Georgia said. Complaining to anyone who would listen how her younger sister who’d already had such turmoil in her personal life was “growing apart” from her — “growing estranged” — “secretive” — and this was a signal of trouble to come.

Sonny roiled his mother by saying, in the way you’d explain something to a slow-witted child, “Ma, the fact is: Aunt Devra has got her own life. Aunt Devra ain’t you.”

The plan had been that Momma, Lyle, and I would live with my aunt Georgia only for as long as Momma needed to get a job in Ransomville, find a decent place for us to live, but months passed, and Momma was too busy to think about moving, and Georgia assured her there was no hurry about moving out, there was plenty of room in the house. My aunt’s daughters were grown, married, separated or divorced, and dropped by the house with their noisy children at all times, especially when they wanted favors from their mother, but Georgia liked the feel of a family living together day to day. “Like, when you wake up in the morning, you know who you’ll be making breakfast for. Who you can rely upon.”

It began to be that Momma “worked late” several nights a week at Herlihy Realtors. Or maybe, after the office closed, Momma had other engagements. (Swimming laps at the Y? Taking a course in computers at the community college? Meeting with friends at the County Line Café?) If Momma wasn’t back home by 7 P.M. we could expect a hurried call telling us not to wait supper for her, and not to keep food warm in the oven for her. Maybe Momma would be home by midnight, maybe later. (Once, our school bus headed for town passed Momma’s car on the road, headed home at 7:45 A.M. I shrank from the window trying not to notice and wondered if my little brother at the front of the bus was trying not to notice, too.) In winter months when we came home from school, ran up the snowy driveway to the old farmhouse so weirdly, thinly painted looking in twilight like a ghost-house, sometimes only our aunt Georgia would be home to call out, “Hi, kids!” Georgia would be changed from her cafeteria uniform into sweatpants and pullover sweater, in stocking feet padding about the kitchen preparing supper (Georgia’s specialties were hot-spice chili with ground chuck, spaghetti and meatballs, tuna-cheese-rice casserole with a glaze of potato chip crumbs); or, having lost track of the time, sitting in her recliner in the living room watching late-afternoon TV soaps, smoking Marlboros and rapidly sewing, without needing to watch her fingers, one of her crazy quilts — “Look at this! How it came to be so big, I don’t know. Damn thing has a mind of its own.”

Georgia tried to teach me quilting, but I hadn’t enough patience to sit still. Since I’d become Mickey, not Aimée, seemed like tiny red ants were crawling over me, couldn’t stay in one place for more than a few minutes. Momma said it would be good for me to learn some practical skill, but why’d I want to learn quilting, when Momma hadn’t the slightest interest in it herself?

Georgia Brandt’s quilts were famous locally. She’d made quilts for every relative of hers, neighbors, friends, friends-of-friends. For people she scarcely knew but admired. Georgia’s most spectacular quilts sold for two hundred dollars at the women’s co-op. She was modest about her skills (“I’m like the momma cat that’s had so many kittens, she’s lost count”) and scowled like Sonny if you tried to compliment her. It was difficult to describe one of Georgia’s quilts for if your first impression was that the quilt was beautiful, the closer you looked the more doubtful you became. For there was no way to see the quilt in its entirety, only just in parts, square by square. And the squares did not match, did not form a “pattern.” Or anyway not a “pattern” you could see. Not only did Georgia use mismatched colors and prints but every kind of fabrics: cotton, wool, satin, silk, taffeta, velvet, lace. Some quilts glittered with sequins or seed pearls scattered like constellations in the sky. Georgia said she could see a quilt in her mind’s eye taking form as she sewed it better than she could see a quilt when it was spread out on the floor. A “crazy” quilt grew by some mysterious logic, moving through Georgia’s fingers, grew and grew until finally it stopped growing.

People asked my aunt how she knew when a quilt was finished and Georgia said, “Hell, I don’t ever know. I just stop.”

May 1981 my cousin Sonny turned sixteen: bought a car, quit high school, got a job with a tree service crew.

Aunt Georgia had begged him not to quit school, but Sonny wouldn’t listen. He’d had enough of sitting at desks, playing like he was a young kid when he wasn’t, in his heart. The tree service job paid almost twice what he’d been making working part-time and he was proud to hand over half of his earnings to Georgia.

Georgia wept, but took the money. Sonny would do what he wanted to do, like her deceased husband. “Now I got to pray you don’t kill yourself, too.” We picked up the way Georgia’s voice dipped on you.

Sonny, the youngest member of the tree service crew, soon became the daredevil. The one to volunteer to climb one hundred feet wielding a chain saw when others held back. The one to work in dangerous conditions. The one to be depended upon to finish a job even in pelting rain, without complaining. He liked the grudging admiration of the other men some of whom became his friends and some of whom hated his guts for being the good-looking brash kid who clambered into trees listening to rock music on his Walkman and was still fearless as most of them had been fearless at one time, if no longer. “Hey Brandt: you up for this?” It was a thrill to hear the foreman yelling at him, singling him out for attention.

Sure, Sonny wore safety gloves, goggles, work boots with reinforced toes. Sure, Sonny insisted to Georgia and to Momma, he never took chances and didn’t let the damn foreman “exploit” him. Yet somehow his hands became covered in nicks, scratches, scars. His face looked perpetually sunburnt. His backbone ached, his muscles ached, his pale-blue eyes were often threaded with blood and his head rang with the deafening whine of saws that, on the job, penetrated his so-called ear protectors. Away from a work site, Sonny still twitched with vibrations running through his lean body like electric charges. One evening he came home limping, and Georgia made him take off his shoe and sock to reveal a big toenail the hue of a rotted plum, swollen with blood from beneath. Momma cried, “Oh, sweetie! We’re going to take you to a doctor.”

Sonny waved her off with a scowl. Like hell he was going to a doctor for something so trivial.

Drinking, the men were apt to get into fights. With men they met in bars, or with one another. Sonny was an accidental witness to an incident that might have turned fatal: one of his buddies slammed another man (who’d allegedly insulted him) against a brick wall so hard his head made a cracking sound before his legs buckled beneath him and he fell, unconscious. (No one called an ambulance. No one called police. Eventually, the fallen man was roused to a kind of consciousness and taken home by his friends.) On the job, Sonny tried to keep out of the way of the meanest men, who’d been working for the tree service too many years, yet once, in the heat of mid summer, one of these men took exception to a remark of Sonny’s, or a way in which, hoping to deflect sarcasm with a grin, Sonny responded, and before he could raise his arms to protect himself he was being hit, pummeled, knocked off his feet. His assailant cursed him, kicked him with steel-toed boots and had to be pulled away from him by others who seemed to think that the incident was amusing. Sonny was shocked, thought of quitting, but how’d he quit, where’d he work and make as much money as he made with the crew, so he reported back next morning limping, favoring his right leg that was badly bruised from being kicked, a nasty cut beneath his left eye, face still swollen but Sonny shrugged it off saying, as he’d said to his mother and his aunt Devra, “No big deal, O.K.?”

We began to notice, Sonny was getting mean. He was short-tempered with his mother, even with his aunt Devra. The kinds of silly jokes Lyle and I had played with him only a few months before just seemed to annoy Sonny now. One evening Lyle crept up on Sonny sprawled on the sofa, drinking a beer and clicking through TV stations with the remote control, and Sonny told him, “Fuck off.” His voice was flat and tired. He wasn’t smiling. His jaws were bristling with dark stubble and his T-shirt was stained with sweat. Whatever was on TV, he stared at without seeming to see. Compulsively he poked and prodded a tooth in his lower jaw, that seemed to be loose.

Poor Lyle! My brother crept away wounded. He would never approach Sonny again in such a way.

I knew better than to tease Sonny in such a mood for he didn’t seem to like me much any longer, either. I hate you! I don’t love you. Fall out of some damn tree and break your damn neck, see if I give a damn.

These brash-Mickey words I whispered aloud, barefoot on the stairs a few yards away. Where I could watch my boy cousin through the doorway, slumped on the sofa poking at a tooth in his lower jaw.

In the fall, Momma had her hair trimmed in a feathery cut that floated around her face and made her eyes, warm liquidy brown, look enlarged. She was living her secret life that left her moody and distracted vehemently shaking her head when the phone rang and it was for her and whoever wanted to speak with her left no name and number only just the terse message She’ll know who it is, tell her call back.

She was still working at Herlihy Realtors. Unless she’d quit the job at Herlihy Realtors. Maybe she’d been fired by Mr. Herlihy? Or she’d quit and Mr. Herlihy had talked her into returning but then after an exchange she’d been fired, or she’d quit for a second, final time? Maybe there’d been a scene of Momma and her employer Mr. Herlihy in the office after hours when everyone else had departed, when the front lights of HERLIHY REALTORS had been switched off, and Momma was upset, Momma swiped at her eyes that were beginning to streak with mascara, Momma turned to walk away but Mr. Herlihy grabbed her shoulder, spun her back to face him and struck her with the flat of his hand in her pretty crimson mouth that had opened in protest.

And maybe there’d been a confused scene of Momma desperately pushing through the rear exit of Herlihy Realtors, blood streaming from a two-inch gash in her lower lip, Momma running and stumbling in high-heeled shoes to get to her car before the man pursuing her, panting and excited, could catch up with her.

Maybe this man had pleaded Devra! Jesus I’m so sorry! You know I didn’t mean it.

Or maybe this man had said, furiously, snatching again at Momma’s shoulder Don’t you walk away from me, bitch! Don’t you turn your back on me.

It was 9:50 P.M., a weekday night in December 1981. Aunt Georgia picked up the ringing phone already pissed at whoever was calling at this hour of the evening (knowing the call wouldn’t be for her but for her sister Devra who’d been hiding away in her room for the past several days refusing to talk to anyone even Georgia, even through the door, or her son Sonny who’d been out late every night that week) and a voice was notifying her that it was the Chautauqua County sheriff’s office for Mrs. Georgia Brandt informing her that her sixteen-year-old son, Sean, Jr., resident of 2881 Summit Hill Road, was in custody at headquarters on a charge of aggravated assault. It seemed that Sonny had confronted Mr. Herlihy of Herlihy Realtors in the parking lot behind his office earlier that evening, they’d begun arguing and Sonny had struck Herlihy with a tire iron, beating him unconscious. Georgia was being asked to come to headquarters as soon as possible.

Aunt Georgia was stunned as if she’d been struck by a tire iron herself. She’d had to ask the caller to repeat what he’d said. She would tell us afterward how her knees had gone weak as water, she’d broken into a cold sweat in that instant groping for somewhere to sit before she fainted. She would say afterward, over the years, how that call was the second terrible call to come to her on that very phone: “Like lightning striking twice, the same place. Like God was playing a joke on me He hadn’t already struck such a blow, and didn’t owe me another.”

Sonny would say Well, hell.

Sonny would swipe his hand across his twitchy face, he’d have to agree Some kind of joke, like. How things turn out.

Cupping a hand to his ear, his left ear where the hearing had been impaired following a beating (fellow inmates at the detention center? guards?) he refused to speak of, refused to allow Georgia to report saying You want them to kill me, next time? Chill out, Ma.

Each time we saw him, he was less Sonny and more somebody else we didn’t know. In the orange jumpsuit printed in black CHAU CO DETENTION on the back, drooping from his shoulders and the trouser legs so long, he’d had to roll up the cuffs. The guards called him kid. There was a feeling, we’d wished to think, that people liked him, Sonny wasn’t any natural-born killer type, not a mean bone in that boy’s body my aunt Georgia pleaded to anyone who’d listen. If only Mr. Herlihy hadn’t died.

I only just hate that man worse, God forgive me.

Georgia made us come with her to church. Not Momma (you couldn’t get Momma to step inside that holy-roller Church of the Apostles, Momma proclaimed) but Lyle and me. Pray for your cousin Sonny, may Jesus spare us all.

I wrote to Sonny, saying how I missed him. How we all missed him. We missed him so! But Sonny never answered, not once.

Aunt Georgia said Sonny meant to answer, but was busy. You wouldn’t believe how they keep them busy at that damn place.

Momma said maybe Sonny didn’t “write so good.” Maybe Sonny hadn’t paid much attention at school when writing was taught, maybe that was it. So he wouldn’t want to show how like a little kid he’d write, that other people might laugh at.

Laugh at Sonny! I was shocked at such a thought. I could not believe that Momma would say such a thing.

Still, I loved Sonny. My heart was broken like some cheap plastic thing, that cracks when you just drop it on the floor.

“Aimée.”

Mrs. Peale’s voice was low and urgent. My heart kicked in my chest. I saw a look in the woman’s eyes warning Take care! You are a very reckless girl. Later, more calmly I would realize that Mrs. Peale could not have been thinking such a thought for Mrs. Peale could not have known why the dean of students had asked her to pass along the pink slip to me, discreetly folded in two and pressed into my hand at the end of music class.

My trembling hand. My guilty hand. My tomboy-with-bitten-finger nails-hand.

It was a rainy afternoon in October 1986. I was sixteen, a junior at the Amherst Academy for Girls. I had been a student here, a boarder, since September 1984. Yet I did not feel “at home” here. I did not feel comfortable here. I had made a decision the previous day and this summons from the dean of students was in response to that decision I could not now revoke though possibly it was a mistake though I did not regret having made it, even if it would turn out to be a mistake. All day I’d dreaded this summons from the dean. In my fantasies of exposure and embarrassment I’d imagined that my name would be sounded over the school’s loudspeaker system in one of those jarring announcements made from time to time during the school day but in fact the summons, now that it had arrived, was handwritten, terse:

Aimée SteckeCome promtly to my office end of 5th period.M. V. Chawdrey, Dean of Students

This was funny! Promtly.

My first instinct was to crumple the note in my hand and shove it into a pocket of my blazer before anyone saw it, but a bolder instinct caused me to laugh, and saunter toward the door with other girls as if nothing was wrong. I showed the note to Brooke Glover whom I always wanted to make laugh, or smile, or take notice of me in some distinctive way, but my bravado fell flat when Brooke, who’d wanted to leave the room with other friends, only frowned at the dean’s note with a look of baffled impatience, like one forced to contemplate an obscure cartoon. That Dean Chawdrey had misspelled promptly made no impression on Brooke for whom spelling was a casual matter. She’d misunderstood my motive in showing her the note, made a gesture of sympathy with her mouth, murmured, “Poor you,” and turned away.

Now I did crumple the incriminating note and shove it into my pocket. My face pounded with blood. A terrible buzzing had begun in my head like the sound of flies cocooned inside a wall in winter. I left Mrs. Peale’s classroom hurriedly, looking at no one.

Well, hell.

To get you out of that environment. Away from those people, that way of life. My aunt Agnes had come for me, to save me. Her expression had been frowning and fastidious as if she smelled something nasty but was too well-mannered to acknowledge it. Aunt Agnes refused to discuss Sonny with Georgia, though Sonny was her nephew. She refused to hear what Momma had to say about the situation. Yes it was tragic, it was very sad, but Agnes had come to Ransomville to rescue me. She would arrange for me to attend a girls’ boarding school in a Buffalo suburb, a “prestigious” private school she knew of since her college roommate had graduated from the Amherst Academy and was now an alumni officer. She would arrange for me to transfer from Ransomville High School as quickly as possible. At the time, I was fourteen. I was ready to leave Ransomville. Momma had accused her oldest sister You want to steal my daughter! You never had a baby of your own but Agnes refused to be drawn into a quarrel nor would I quarrel with my mother who’d been drinking and who when she drank said wild hurtful stupid things you did not wish to hear let alone dignify by replying Momma you’re drunk, leave me alone. Haven’t you hurt us all enough now leave us alone.

At this time Sonny was gone from Ransomville. There was shame and hurt in his wake. There was no happiness in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road. No happiness without Sonny in that house he’d started to paint a luminous cream-ivory that glowered at dusk. Sonny was “incarcerated” in the ugly barracks of the Chautauqua County Youth facility north of Chautauqua Falls and he would not be discharged from that facility until his twenty-first birthday at which time he would be released on probationary terms. I had not seen Sonny in some time. I still wrote to Sonny, mostly I sent him cards meant to cheer him up, but I had not seen Sonny in some time and from my aunt Georgia the news I heard of Sonny was not good. Like he doesn’t know me sometimes. Doesn’t want me to touch him. Like my son is gone and somebody I don’t know has taken his place.

When Sonny was first arrested, after Mr. Herlihy was hospitalized in critical condition, the charge was aggravated assault. He’d told police that he had only been defending himself, that Herlihy had rushed at him, attacked him. He had never denied that he’d struck Herlihy with the tire iron. But when Herlihy died after eleven days on life support without regaining consciousness the charge was raised to second-degree murder and Chautauqua County prosecutors moved to try Sonny as an adult facing a possible sentence of life imprisonment.

At this time, we’d had to leave my aunt’s house. Momma had had to move us to live in a run-down furnished apartment in town for she and Georgia could not speak to each other in the old way any longer, all that was finished. Always there was the shadow of what Sonny had done for Momma’s sake, that Georgia could not bear. There was no way to undo it, Momma acknowledged. Her voice quavered when she uttered Sonny’s name. Her eyes were swollen and reddened from weeping. When Georgia screamed at her in loathing, Momma could not defend herself. She spoke with the police. She spoke with the prosecutors and with the judge hearing Sonny’s case. She pleaded on Sonny’s behalf. She blamed herself for what he’d done. (She had not asked him to intervene with Mr. Herlihy, Momma insisted. Though she had allowed him to see her bruised face, her cut lip. She’d told him how frightened she was of Herlihy, the threats he’d made.) Momma testified that her nephew had acted out of emotion, to protect her; he’d had no personal motive for approaching Herlihy. He had never seen, never spoken with Herlihy before that evening. Sonny was a boy who’d grown up too fast, Momma said. He’d quit school to work and help support his family. He’d taken on the responsibilities of an adult man and so he’d acted to protect a member of his family, as an adult man would do. Others testified on Sonny’s behalf as well. Authorities were persuaded to believe that the killing was a “tragic accident” and Sonny was allowed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter as a minor, not as an adult, which meant incarceration in a youth facility and not in a nightmare maximum security prison like Attica.

Lucky bastard it was said of Sonny in some quarters. His tree service buddies seemed to feel he’d gotten off lightly: less than five years for breaking a man’s head with a tire iron when not so long ago in Chautauqua County, as in any county in New York State, the kid might’ve been sentenced to die in the electric chair.

At the Amherst Academy where I was one of a half-dozen scholarship students out of approximately three hundred girls, I would speak only guardedly of my family back in Ransomville. Now my mother had married, a man I scarcely knew. Now my aunt Georgia had sold the farmhouse and was living with one of her married daughters. In this place where talk was obsessively of boys I would not confess I’m in love with my cousin who is five years older than me. My cousin who killed a man when he was sixteen. Never would I break suddenly into tears to the astonishment of my friends I am so lonely here where I want to be happy, where I am meant to be happy because my life has been saved.

Three days of rain and the grounds of the Amherst Academy for Girls were sodden and treacherous underfoot as quicksand. Where there were paths across lawns and not paved walks hay had been strewn for us to tramp on. Soon most of the lovely-smelling hay became sodden too, and oozed mud of a hue and texture like diarrhea and this terrible muck we were scolded for tracking into buildings, classrooms. We were made to kick off our boots just inside the doors and in our stocking feet we skidded about on the polished floors like deranged children, squealing with laughter.

I was Mickey, skidding about. My laughter was shrill and breathless even when a husky girl athlete, a star on the field hockey team, collided with me hard enough to knock me down.

“Mickey, hey! Didn’t see you there.”

I had friends at the Amherst Academy, I could count on the fingers of both hands. Sometimes, in that hazy penumbra between sleep and wakefulness, in my bed in the residence hall, I named these friends as if defying Momma. See! I can live away from you. I can live different from you. Some of the girls at the Academy did not board in the residence hall but lived in the vicinity, in large, beautiful homes to which I was sometimes invited for dinner and to sleep over. And at Thanksgiving, even for a few days at Christmas. After my first year at the Academy, my grades were high enough for me to receive a tuition scholarship so now my aunt Agnes paid just my room, board, expenses. It was strange to me, that my aunt seemed to care for me. That my aunt came from Cleveland to Amherst to visit with me. That my aunt was eager to meet my roommates, my friends. That my aunt did not ask about Momma, or Lyle. My aunt did not ask about Georgia, or Sonny. Not a word about Sonny! You are the one I take pride in, Aimée. The only one.

Aunt Agnes was a slender quivery woman in her early forties. She did not much resemble her younger sisters in her appearance or in her manner of speaking. Her face was thin, heated, vivacious. Her teeth were small, like a child’s teeth, and looked crowded in her mouth that was always smiling, or about to smile. Where Momma would have been awkward and defensive meeting my teachers, having to say quickly that she “never was very good” at school, my aunt smiled and shook hands and was perfectly at ease.

At the Academy, it may have been assumed by girls who didn’t know me that Agnes was my mother.

Even those girls to whom I’d introduced my aunt seemed to hear me wrong and would speak afterward of “your mother”: “Your mother looks just like you, Mickey” — “Your mother is really nice.”

My mother is a beautiful woman, nothing like me. My mother is a slut.

My first few months at the Academy, I’d been homesick and angry and took the stairs to the dining hall two or three at a time slapping my hand against the wall for balance not giving a damn if I slipped, fell and broke my neck. I’d glowered, glared. I was so shy I’d have liked to shrivel into a ball like an inchworm in the hot sun yet there I was waving my fist of a hand, eager to be called upon.

I was Mickey not Aimée. Fuck Aimée!

I tried out for the track team but ran too fast, couldn’t hold back and so became winded, panting through my mouth. Staggering with sharp pains in my side. I helped other girls with their papers though such help was forbidden by the honor code we’d solemnly vowed to uphold. I said outrageous things, scandalizing my roommate Anne-Marie Krimble confiding in her that I didn’t have a father like everyone else: “I was conceived in a test tube.”

Anne-Marie’s mouth dropped softly. She stared at me in disbelief. “Mickey, you were not.”

“In vitro it’s called. My mother’s ‘egg’ was siphoned from her and mixed with sperm from a ‘donor male,’ shaken in a test tube the way you shake a cocktail.”

“Mickey, that did not happen! That is gross.”

Anne-Marie had taken a step back from me, uncertainly. I was laughing in the way my cousin Sonny Brandt used to laugh, once he’d gotten us to believe something far-fetched. “In vivo, that’s you: born in an actual body. But not me.”

Tales quickly spread of Mickey Stecke who said the most outrageous things. But mostly funny, to make her friends laugh.

“These are very serious charges, Aimée.”

Aimée. In the Dean’s flat, nasal voice, the pretentious name sounded like accusation.

Dean Chawdrey was peering at me over the tops of her rimless bifocal glasses. In her hand she held the neatly typed letter I’d sent to her the previous day. I was sitting in a chair facing her across the span of her desk, in my damp rumpled raincoat. I heard myself murmur almost inaudibly, “Yes ma’am.”

“You saw, you say, ‘someone cheating’ last week at midterms. Who is this ‘someone,’ Aimée? You will have to tell me.”

M. V. Chawdrey was a frowning woman in her early fifties, as solidly fleshy as my aunt Georgia but her skin wasn’t warmly rosy like my aunt’s skin but had a look of something drained, that would be cold to the touch. Her mouth was small, bite-sized. Her eyes were distrustful. It was rare that an adult allowed dislike to show so transparently in her face.

“Aimée? Their names.”

I sat miserable and mute. I could see the faces of the girls, some of whom were my friends, or would have believed themselves my friends as I would have liked to think of them as my friends. I could see even the expressions on their faces, but I could not name them.

Of course, I’d known beforehand that I could not. Yet I’d had to report them. It was the phenomenon of cheating I’d had to report, that was so upsetting.

At the Amherst Academy much was made of the tradition of the honor code. Every student signed a pledge to uphold this “sacred trust” — “priceless legacy.” The honor code was a distinction, we were repeatedly told, that set the Amherst Academy apart from most private schools and all public schools. On the final page of each exam and paper you were required to say I hereby confirm that this work submitted under my name is wholly and uniquely my own. You signed and dated this. But the honor code was more than only just not cheating, you were pledged also to report others’ cheating, and that was the dilemma.

Punishments for cheating ranged from probation, suspension from school, outright expulsion. Punishments for failing to report cheating were identical.

Who would know, who could prove. You have only to say nothing.

I knew this, of course. But I was angry and disgusted, too. If I did not want to cheat, I would be at a disadvantage when so many others were cheating. My heart beat in childish indignation It isn’t fair! It wasn’t just incidental cheating, a girl glancing over at another girl’s exam paper, two girls whispering together at the back of a room. Not just the usual help girls gave one another, proofreading papers, pointing out obvious mistakes. This was systematic cheating, blatant cheating. Especially in science classes taught by an affable distracted man named Werth where notes and even pages ripped from textbooks were smuggled into the exam room, and grades were uniformly A’s and B’s. In English and history it had become commonplace for students to plagiarize by photocopying material from the periodicals library at the University of Buffalo that was within walking distance of the Amherst Academy. Our teachers seemed not to know, unless they’d given up caring. It was easier to give high grades. It was easier to avoid confrontations. “Well, Mickey: I know I can trust you,” Mrs. Peale had said once, mysteriously. The emphasis on you had felt like a nudge in the ribs, painful though meant to be affectionate.

My first few months at the Academy, eager to be liked, I’d helped girls with homework and papers but I’d never actually written any part of any paper. I’d wanted to think of what I did as a kind of teaching. This isn’t cheating. This is helping. Uneasily I remembered how at freshman orientation questions had been put to the Dean of Students about the honor code, those questions Dean Chawdrey had answered year following year with her so-serious expression Yes it is as much a violation of the honor code to fail to report cheating as to cheat. Yes! A ripple of dismay had passed through the gathering of first-year students and their parents, crowded into pine pews in the school chapel. Aunt Agnes had accompanied me and now she murmured in my ear Remember what that woman is saying, Aimée. She is absolutely right.

I felt a stab of guilt, thinking of my aunt. Agnes had such hopes for me, her “favorite” niece! She wanted to be proud of me. She wanted to think that her effort on my behalf was not in vain. I seemed to know that what I was doing would hurt Agnes, as it would hurt me.

For nights I’d lain awake in a misery of indecision wondering what to do. In Ransomville, nothing like this could ever have happened. In Ransomville public schools there was no “honor code” and in fact there hadn’t been much cheating, that I had known of. Few students continued on to college, high grades were not an issue. Here, I’d come to think, in my anxiety, that our teachers had to know of the widespread cheating and were amused that girls like me, who never cheated, were too cowardly to come forward.

The irony was, I wasn’t so moral — so “good” — that I couldn’t cheat like the others. And more cleverly than the others. But something in me resisted the impulse to follow the others who were crass and careless in their cheating. I am not one of you. I am superior to you. Finally, I’d written to the dean of students a brief letter of only a few sentences and I’d mailed the letter in a stamped envelope. Even as I wrote the letter I understood that I was making a mistake and yet I’d had no choice.

I thought of my cousin Sonny whom I loved. Whom I had not now seen in years. My boy cousin who’d been beaten in the youth facility yet refused to report the beatings out of what code of honor or fear of reprisal, I didn’t know. I thought of Sonny who’d killed a man out of another sort of honor, to protect my mother. Sonny had not needed to think, he’d only acted. He had traded his life for Momma’s, by that action. But he’d had no choice.

Dean Chawdrey persisted, “Who was cheating, Aimée? You’ve done the right thing to report it but now you must tell me who the girl is.”

The girl! I wanted to laugh in the dean’s face, that she should imagine only one cheater at midterms.

I mumbled, “…can’t.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t’? Or ‘won’t’?”

I sat silent, clasping my hands in my lap. Mickey Stecke had bitten fingernails, cuticles ridged with blood. One of my roommates had tried to manicure my nails, painted them passionflower purple, as a kind of joke, I’d supposed. Remnants of the nail polish could still be detected if you looked closely enough.

“What was your motive, then, Aimée, for writing to me? To report that ‘someone was cheating’ at midterms but to be purposefully vague about who? I’ve looked into your schedule. Perhaps I can assume that the alleged ‘cheating’ occurred during Mr. Werth’s biology midterm, last Friday morning? Is this so?”

Yes. It was so. By my sick, guilty look, Dean Chawdrey understood my meaning.

“I hope, Aimée, that there is merit to this? I hope that you are not making a false report, Aimée, to revenge yourself upon a friend?”

I was shocked. I shook my head. “No…”

“Or is there more than one girl? More than one of your ‘friends’ involved?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. The buzzing in my head had become frantic. I wondered if a blood vessel in my brain might burst. I was frightened recalling how my aunt Georgia had described finding an elderly relative seated in a chair in his home, in front of his TV, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, blood “leaking” out of one ear.

“Aimée, will you look at me, please! It is very rude, your way of behaving. By this time, you must certainly know better.”

Through the buzzing in my head I heard the Dean chide me for my “mysterious subterfuge.” Wondering at my “motive” in writing to her. If I refused to be more forthcoming, how was the Academy’s honor code upheld? “I wonder if, in your mutinous way, you are not making a mockery of our tradition. This, perhaps, was your intention all along.”

At this, I tried to protest. My voice was shocked, hushed. In classes, as Mickey Stecke, I was a girl whose shyness erupted into bursts of speech and animation. I was smart, and I was funny. My teachers liked me, I think. I was brash and witty and willing to be laughed at, but not rebellious or hostile; no one would have called me “mutinous” I did not challenge the authority of my teachers for I required them desperately, I adored my teachers who were all I had to “grade” me, to define me to myself and my aunt Agnes. Dean Chawdrey should have been one of these adult figures, yet somehow she was not, she saw through my flimsy pose as my cousin Sonny had once laughed at me in a Hallowe’en costume flung together out of Aunt Georgia’s cast-off fabrics What in hell’re you s’posed to be, kid?

Dean Chawdrey had dropped my letter onto her desk, with a look of distaste. It lay between us now, as evidence.

“I’ve looked into your record, ‘Aimée Stecke.’ You are a trustee scholar, your full tuition is paid by the Academy. Your grades are quite good. Your teachers’ reports are, on the whole, favorable. If there is one recurring assessment, it is ‘immature for her age.’ Are you aware of this, Aimée?”

I shook my head, no. But I knew that it was so.

“Tell me, Aimée. Since coming to our school, have you encountered any previous instances of ‘cheating’?”

I shook my head, yes. “But I…”

“‘But’?”

“…didn’t think it was so important. I mean, so many girls were cheating, not such serious cheating as lately, so I’d thought…”

“‘So many’? ‘So many girls’? What are you saying, Aimée?”

An angry flush lifted into the Dean’s fleshy face. I tried to explain but my voice trailed off miserably. So stared-at, by an adult who clearly disliked me, I seemed to have lost my powers of even fumbling speech. Thoughts came disjointed to me as to one tramping across a field of mud half-conscious that her boots are sinking ever more deeply into the mud, being actively sucked into the mud, not mud but quicksand and it’s too late to turn back.

“But why then, Aimée, did you decide just the other day to come forward? If it has been so long, so many instances of ‘cheating’, and you’d been indifferent?”

“Because…” I swallowed hard, not knowing where this was leading. “…I’d signed the pledge. To uphold the…”

“To uphold the honor code, Aimée. Yes. Otherwise you would not have been permitted to remain at the Academy. But the honor code is a contract binding you to report cheating at all times, and obviously you have not done that.” Dean Chawdrey’s small prim mouth was creasing into a smile.

I was sitting very still as if paralyzed. I was listening to the buzzing in my head. Remembering how, in the late winter of our first year of living with my aunt Georgia, Lyle and I had heard a low, almost inaudible buzzing in the plasterboard wall in our room. Above the furnace vent where, if you pressed your ear against it, you could hear what sounded like voices at a distance. My brother had thought it might be tiny people inside. I’d thought it had something to do with telephone wires. It was a warm dreamy sound. It was mixed in with our warm cozy room above the furnace, that Sonny had given up for us. Then one day Aunt Georgia told us with a look of amused disgust that the sound in the wall was only flies — “Damn flies nest in there, hatch their damn eggs then start coming out with the first warm weather.” And so it had happened one day a large black fly appeared on a windowpane, then another fly appeared on the ceiling, and another, and another until one balmy March morning the wall above the furnace vent was covered in a glittering net of flies so groggy they were slow to escape death from the red plastic swatter wielded in my aunt’s deft hand.

“You were one of them, Aimée. Weren’t you.”

This wasn’t a question but a statement. There was no way to defend myself except to shake my head, no. Dean Chawdrey said in the way of a lawyer summing up a case, “How would you know, otherwise? And until now, for some quaint reason, you haven’t come forward as you’d pledged you would do. What you’ve alleged, because it’s unprovable, is dangerously akin to slander. Mr. Werth will have to be informed. His integrity has been impugned, too.”

I said, faltering, “But, Dean Chawdrey — ”

“The only person who has reported cheating at midterms is you, Aimée,” Dean Chawdrey paused, to let that sink in. “Naturally, we have to wonder at your involvement. Do you claim that, since coming to the Amherst Academy, you have never participated in ‘cheating’? — in any infraction of the honor code?”

It was as if Dean Chawdrey was shining a flashlight into my heart. I had no defense. I heard myself stammer a confession.

“…sometimes, a few times, freshman year, I helped other girls with their term papers. I guess I helped my roommates earlier this fall, with…But I never…”

“‘Never’ — what?”

I lowered my head in shame, trying not to cry. I could not comprehend what had gone wrong yet I felt the justice of it. Honor was a venomous snake that, if you were reckless enough to lift by its tail, was naturally going to whip around and bite you.

The rest of the visit passed in a blur. Dean Chawdrey did all the talking. You could see that the woman was skilled in what she was doing, other girls had sat in the chair in which I was sitting and had been severely talked-to, many times in the past. Behind the rimless bifocals, Dean Chawdrey’s eyes like watery jelly may have glittered in triumph. Her flat, nasal voice may have trembled with barely restrained exhilaration but it was restrained, and would remain restrained. I heard myself informed that I would be placed on “academic probation” for the remainder of the term. I would be summoned to appear before the disciplinary committee. More immediately, Dean Chawdrey would notify the headmistress of the Academy about my allegations and the confession I’d “voluntarily made” to her, and the headmistress would want to speak with me and with a parent or legal guardian, before I could be “reinstated” as a student. The buzzing was subsiding in my head, I knew the visit was ending. The terrible danger was past now that the worst that could happen had happened. I saw Dean Chawdrey’s mouth moving but heard nothing more of her words. Behind the woman’s large head an oblong-shaped leaden window glared with the sullen rain-light of October. It was no secret that the Dean of Students wore a wig that fitted her head like a helmet: the color of a wren’s wet feathers, shinily synthetic, bizarrely “bouffant.” Her right hand lay flat on my letter, that incriminating piece of evidence, as if to prevent me from snatching it away if I tried. I gathered my things, and stood. I must have moved abruptly, Dean Chawdrey drew back. I tried to smile. I had seen Momma smiling in a trance of oblivion not knowing where she was, what had been done to her or for her sake. I seemed to be explaining something to Dean Chawdrey but she did not understand: “It was a test, wasn’t it — ‘promtly.’ To see if I would say something. The misspelling. ‘Promptly.’” Dean Chawdrey was staring at me in alarm, with no idea what I meant. I turned and ran from the room. In the outer office, the Dean’s secretary spoke sharply to me. Under my breath I murmured Get the fuck away. In my stocking feet (I’d had to kick off my muddy boots in the vestibule of the administration building, all this while I’d been facing the Dean like a child in dingy white woollen socks) I ran down a flight of stairs, located my fallen boots covered in mud and bits of hay and kicked my feet back into them. I ran outside into the rain, across a patch of hay-strewn muddy lawn that sucked at my feet with a lewd energy. Somehow, it had become dusk. The edges of things were dissolving like wet tissue. A harsh wind blowing east from Lake Erie tasted of snow to come that night but for the moment it continued to rain as it had rained for days. Raveling-out was my word for this time of day, after classes, before supper. Neither day nor night. I thought of my aunt Georgia in the days before her son had been taken from her humming to herself as she’d unraveled knitting, cast-off sweaters, afghans, energetically winding a ball of used yarn around her hand. My aunt would use the yarn again, nothing in her household was discarded or lost. I would pack my things while the other girls were in the dining hall. What I wished to take with me of my things, my clothes, a few books to read on the bus, not textbooks but paperbacks, and my notebooks, my journal to which I trusted the myriad small secrets of my life in full knowledge that such secrets were of no more worth than the paper, the very ballpoint ink, that contained them. In a flash of inspiration I saw that I would leave a message of farewell on the pillow of my neatly made bed for my roommates and I would leave the residence hall by a rear door and no one would see me. I would never see them again, I thought. Aloud I said, preparing the words I would write: “I will never see any of you again.”

No time to dawdle! This is an emergency.

I had money for a bus ticket, even a train ticket. I had money to escape.

This was money scrupulously saved from the allowances my aunt Agnes sent me to cover “expenses” at the Amherst Academy. And money from Momma, five-, ten-, twenty-dollar bills enclosed as if impulsively in jokey greeting cards. Lyle & I say hello & love & we miss you. Your MOMMA. I’d hardened my heart against my mother but I’d kept the money she sent me, secreted away in a bureau drawer for just such an emergency.

It was my cousin Sonny I wanted to see. Somehow, I’d become desperate to see him. Not my aunt Agnes who loved me, not my mother who claimed to love me. Only Sonny whom I hadn’t seen in almost five years and who never replied to my letters and cards. I’d been told that in September, when he’d turned twenty-one, Sonny had been released into a probationary work program and was living in a halfway house in Chautauqua Falls. Momma had sent me the address and telephone number of Seneca House, as the place was called, saying she hadn’t had time to see Sonny yet but she meant to take the trip, soon. Sonny’s work was something outdoor like tree service, highway construction — “That boy was always so good with his hands.”

Momma was the kind of woman who could say such a thing in utter unconsciousness of what it might mean to another person. And if you’d indicate how you felt, Momma would stare in perplexity and hurt. Why, Aimée. You don’t get that sarcastic mouth from your mother.

The Greyhound bus that passed through Chautauqua Falls didn’t leave until the next morning so I hid away, wrapped in my raincoat with the hood lowered over my face, in a corner of the bus station. This night unlike any other night of my life until then passed in a delirium of partial sleep like a film in which all color has faded and sound has been reduced to mysterious distortions like waves in water. In the morning it was revealed that a gritty snow had fallen through the night, glittery-white like scattered mica that melted in sunshine as the bus lumbered into the hilly countryside north and east of Buffalo. Repeatedly I checked the address I had for Sonny: 337 Seneca. I hadn’t yet written to Sonny at this address, discouraged by his long silence. It was sad to think that it was probably so, as my mother had said, Sonny’s writing skills were crude and childlike and he’d have been embarrassed to write to me. I had the telephone number for the halfway house but hadn’t had the courage to call.

My fear was that Sonny wouldn’t want to see me. There was a rift between Momma and the Brandts, I didn’t fully understand but knew that I had to share Momma’s guilt for what she’d caused to happen in Sonny’s life.

I stored my suitcase and duffel bag in a locker in the Chautauqua Falls bus station. I located Seneca Street and walked a mile or so to the halfway house address through an inner city neighborhood of pawnshops, bail-bond services, cheap hotels, taverns and pizzerias and X-rated video stores. In the raw cold sunlight everything seemed heightened, exposed. I felt the eyes of strangers on me, and walked quickly, looking straight ahead. Seneca House turned out to be a three-story clapboard house painted a startling mustard yellow. Next door was Chautauqua County Family Welfare Services and across the street a Goodwill outlet and a storefront church, New Assembly of God. I rang the doorbell at Seneca House and after several minutes a heavyset Hispanic woman in her thirties answered the door. I said that I was a cousin of Sonny Brandt and hoped that I could see him and the woman asked if I meant Sean Brandt and I said yes, he was my cousin.

The woman told me that Sean was working, and wouldn’t be back until six. “There’s rules about visitors upstairs. You can’t go upstairs.” She must have assumed I was lying, I wasn’t a relative of Sonny’s but a girlfriend. My face pounded with blood.

“How old’r you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You got I.D.?”

The woman was slyly teasing, not exactly hostile. I wondered if there was a law about minors visiting residents of Seneca House without adult supervision. In my rumpled raincoat, looking exhausted and dazed from my journey, speaking in a faltering voice, I must have looked not even sixteen. I saw, just off the squalid lobby in which we were standing, a visitors’ room, or lounge, with a few vinyl chairs and Formica-topped tables, wanting badly to ask if I could wait for Sonny there, for it wasn’t yet 4 P.M. The woman repeated again, with a cruel smile, “There’s no visitors upstairs, see. That’s for your protection.”

I went away, and walked aimlessly. Outside a Sunoco station, I used a pay phone to call the latest telephone number I had for my mother in Ransomville, but no one answered and when a recording clicked on, a man’s voice, I hung up quickly. My latest stepfather! I could not remember his name.

I knew that I should call my aunt Agnes. I knew that, by now, the Amherst Academy would have contacted her. And she would be upset, and anxious for me. And she would know how mistaken she’d been, to put her faith in me. Her “favorite niece” who’d betrayed her trust.

“Fact is, I’m Devra’s daughter. That can’t change.”

The weirdest thing: I had a strong impulse to speak with my brother. Lyle was eleven now, a sixth grader at Ransomville Middle School, almost a stranger to me. We had Sonny in common, we’d loved our cousin Sonny in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road. Lyle would remember, maybe things I couldn’t remember. I called the school to ask if “Lyle Stecke” was a student there (though I knew that he was a student there) and after some confusion I was told yes, and I said that I was a relative of Lyle’s but I did not have a message for him. By this time the receptionist to whom I was speaking had begun to be suspicious so I hung up, quickly.

I walked slowly back to the mustard-yellow clapboard house with the handpainted sign SENECA HOUSE. It was nearing 6 P.M. I was very hungry, I hadn’t wanted to spend money on food and had had the vague hope that Sonny and I might have dinner together. I thought that I would wait for my cousin on the street, to avoid the Hispanic woman who suspected me of being Sonny’s girlfriend. At 6:20 P.M., a battered-looking bus marked CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY YOUTH SERVICES pulled up to the curb in a miasma of exhaust and ten, twelve, fifteen men disembarked. All were young, some appeared to be hardly more than boys. All were wearing work clothes, work boots, grimy-looking caps. Nearly all were smoking. A fattish disheveled young man with sand-colored skin and a scruffy goatee, several young black and Hispanic men, a muscled, slow-moving young Caucasian with a burnt-looking skin, in filth-stiffened work clothes, a baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead…The men passed by me talking and laughing loudly, a few of them glancing in my direction, but taking no special notice of me, as I stared at them unable to see Sonny among them, confused and uncertain. Waiting for Sonny, I’d become increasingly anxious. For soon it would be dark and I was in a city I didn’t know and would have to find a place for the night unless I called Momma and in desperation told her where I was, and why.

I had no choice but to follow the men into the residence. I saw that the young man in the filthy work clothes and baseball cap was Sonny, moving tiredly among the others, staring at the cracked linoleum floor. His jaws were unshaven. His hands were very dirty. I called to him, “Sonny? Hey, it’s Mickey.”

He hadn’t heard. One of the young black men, eyeing me with a smile, poked at Sonny to alert him to me. When he turned, the sight of him was a shock. His face had thickened, coarsened. The burnt-looking skin was a patchwork of blemishes and acne scars. I could recognize the pale blue eyes, but the eyes were hardened in suspicion. I’d expected that Sonny might smile at me, even laugh at the sight of me, in surprise; I’d expected that he would come to me, to hug me. But this man held back, squinting. There was something wrong about his gaze. I saw to my horror that his left eye seemed to have veered off to the side as if something had caught its attention while his right eye stared straight at me. His lips drew back from his teeth, that were discolored and crooked. “Dev’a? Are you — Dev’a?”

Devra! Sonny was mistaking me for Momma.

I told him no, I was Mickey. His cousin Mickey, didn’t he remember me?

I tried to laugh. This had to be funny. This had to be a joke. This had to be Sonny’s old sense of humor. But he wasn’t smiling, he continued to stare at me with his one good eye. The lines in his forehead had sharpened to creases. His nose was broad at the bridge as if it had been broken and flattened. However old you might guess this man to be, you would not have guessed twenty-one.

“Did you come to see me? Nobody comes to see me.”

Sonny spoke slowly, as if he had to choose his words with care, and yet his words were slightly slurred, like speech heard underwater. He’d been injured, I thought. His brain had been injured in a beating. But I came forward, to take hold of one of Sonny’s hands, so much larger than my own. Sonny loomed above me, six feet tall but somewhat slump-shouldered, his head pitched slightly forward in the perpetual effort of trying to hear what was being said to him. “I’m Devra’s daughter, Sonny. Remember, ‘Aimée’? I was just a little girl when we came to live with you and Aunt Georgia. You changed my name to ‘Mickey.’ ‘Mickey kicks ass,’ you said. You — ”

Sonny jerked his hand from mine, as if my fingers had burnt him. He might have heard something of what I’d said, but wasn’t sure how to interpret it. From what I could see of his hair, beneath the grimy cap, it had been shaved close, military-style, at the sides and back. His skin looked stitched-together, of mismatched fabrics like one of Georgia’s crazy quilts. His face shriveled suddenly in the effort not to cry. “You lied to me, Aunt Dev’a. That wasn’t the man, the man that I hurt, it was somebody else wasn’t it! Some other man you’d been married to. You lied to me, I was told you lied to me, Aunt Dev’a, why’d you lie to me? I hurt the wrong man, you lied to me.” Sonny spoke in the aggrieved voice of a child, pushing at me, not hard, but enough to force me to step backward. I was astonished at what he’d said. Though I’d heard something like this from my aunt Georgia, who’d had more than a suspicion that the man who’d actually hurt my mother had been Bob Gleason, not Herlihy. I couldn’t make sense of this, I couldn’t allow myself to think of it now. I was trying to smile, to laugh, in the old way, as if Sonny’s confusion was only teasing and in another moment he’d wink and nudge at me and we’d laugh together. I said, “Do you still like pizza, Sonny? We can have pizza for dinner. I have money.” Sonny said, “‘Piz-za,’” enunciating the word in two distinct syllables. His face shriveled and he clenched his fists as if he was considering breaking my face. A middle-aged black man who wore a laminated I.D. badge appeared beside us, laying a restraining hand on Sonny’s arm. “Hold on there, Sean. Take it slow, man.” I told this man who I was, I’d come to see my cousin, and the man explained to Sonny who listened doubtfully, staring at me. “I’m Mickey. You remember, your cousin Mickey. That’s me.” I spoke eagerly, hopefully. The filmy look in Sonny’s good eye seemed suddenly to clear. “‘Mickey.’ That’s you. Well, hell.” Sonny’s lips parted in a slow smile that seemed about to reverse itself at any moment. I said, “I’ll get the pizza. I’ll bring it back here. I’ll get us some Cokes, we can eat right there.” I meant the lounge area, where there was a table we could use. On the wall beyond, a mosaic of crudely fashioned bright yellow sunflowers in shards of tile that looked handmade.

I hurried outside. The fresh air was a shock after the stale smokey air of Seneca House. Up the block was Dino’s Pizza. I went inside and ordered a large pizza as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do. Years ago, in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road, Sonny had brought home pizzas for us on evenings Georgia hadn’t wanted to cook, our favorite was cheese with pepperoni and Italian sausage, tomatoes, no onions or olives. Lyle and I would drink soda pop, Georgia and Sonny and Momma, if she was home, beer. I wondered if beer was allowed in Seneca House and I thought probably not, I hoped not. I hoped that Sonny would be waiting for me in the lounge, that he hadn’t forgotten me and gone upstairs where I couldn’t follow. The guy behind the counter was about twenty, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, hair straggling to his shoulders. Half his face creased in a smile. “You don’t look like anyone from here.”

“What?”

“You don’t look like anyone from here but maybe I know you?”

I’d been pretending to be looking through my wallet, to see how much money I had. I laughed, feeling blood rush into my face. But it was a pleasant sensation, like the feel of hot sun on bare skin, before it begins to burn.