Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Howl and Other Poems

Upon my return to St. Gallway and the commencement of Winter Term, the first odd thing I noticed about Hannah — rather, what the whole school noticed (“I think that woman was committed to an institution over vacation,” surmised Dee during second period Study Hall) — was that over Christmas Break, she’d cut off all her hair.

No, it was not one of those cute 1950s haircuts labeled by fashion magazines as chic and gamine (see Jean Seberg, Bonjour Tristesse). It was harsh and choppy. And, as Jade noticed when we were at Hannah’s for dinner, there was even a tiny bald patch behind her right ear.

“What the hell?” said Jade.

“What?” asked Hannah, spinning around.

“There’s a — hole in your haircut! You can see your scalp!”

“Really?”

“You cut your own hair?” asked Lu.

Hannah stared at us and then nodded, visibly embarrassed. “Yes. I know it’s crazy and looks, well — different.” She touched the back of her neck. “But it was late at night. I wanted to try something.”

The acute masochism and self-hatred behind a woman willfully defacing her appearance was a concept that featured prominently in the angry tome by proto-feminist Dr. Susan Shorts, Beelzebub Conspiracy (1992), which I’d noticed peeking out of the L. L. Bean canvas tote belonging to my sixth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Joanna Perry of Wheaton Hill Middle. In order to better understand Mrs. Perry and her mood swings, I procured my own copy. In Chapter 5, Shorts contends that since 1010 B.C., many women who’d tried and failed to be self-governing were forced to take action upon their very selves, because their physical appearance was the lone thing on which they could immediately “exert power,” due to the “colossal masculine plot at work since the beginning of time, ever since man began to walk on his two stubby, hairy legs and noticed that he was taller than poor woman,” growls Shorts (p. 41). Many women, including St. Joan and Countess Alexandra di Whippa, “crudely chopped off their hair,” and cut themselves with “clippers and knives” (p. 42–43). The more radical ones branded their stomachs with hot irons to the “distress and revulsion of their husbands” (p. 44). On p. 69, Shorts goes on to write, “A woman will mar her exterior because she feels she is a part of a greater scheme, a plot, which she cannot control.”

Of course, one never thinks about damning feminist texts at the time, and even if one does, it’s to be theatrical and over-the-top. So I simply imagined there came a point in a mature woman’s life when she needed to radically change her appearance, discover what she really looked like, without all the bells and whistles.

Dad, on Understanding Why Women Do the Things They Do: “One has a better chance of squeezing the universe onto a thumbnail.”

And yet, when I sat next to Hannah at the dinner table and looked over at her as she daintily cut her chicken (haircut poised boldly atop her head like an atrocious hat worn to church), I suddenly had the nerve-racking feeling I’d seen her somewhere before. The haircut strip-searched her, uncovered her in a shoulder-cringing fashion, and now, crazily enough, the carved cheekbones, the neck — it was all vaguely familiar. I recognized her, not from an encounter (no, she was not one of Dad’s long-lost June Bugs; it’d take more than glamorous hair to camouflage their brand of monkey face); the feeling was smokier, more remote. I sensed instead I’d seen her in a photograph somewhere, or in a newspaper article, or maybe in a snapshot in some discount biography Dad and I had read aloud.

Instantly, she noticed I was staring at her (Hannah was one of those people who kept tabs on all eyes in a room) and slowly, as she took an elegant bite of food, she turned her head toward me and smiled. Charles was talking on and on about Fort Lauderdale — God, it was hot, stuck at the airport for six hours (telling this rambling story as he always did, as if Hannah was the only person at the table) — and the haircut drew attention to her smile, did to her smile what Coke-bottle lenses did to eyes, made it huge (pronounced, “HYOOOGE”). I smiled back at her and sat for the remainder of the meal with my eyes taped to my plate, shouting silently to myself in a dictator voice (Augusto Pinochet commanding the torture of an opponent) — to stop staring at Hannah.

It was rude.

“Hannah’s going to have a nervous breakdown,” Jade announced flatly that Friday night. She was wearing a jittery black-beaded flapper dress and sitting behind a huge gold harp, plucking the strings with one hand, a martini in the other. The instrument was covered with a thick film of dust like the layer of fat in a pan after frying bacon. “You can quote me on that.”

“You’ve been sayin’ that all fuckin’ year,” said Milton.

“Yawn,” said Nigel.

“Actually I kind of agree,” said Leulah solemnly. “That haircut’s scary.”

“Finally!” Jade shouted. “I have a convert! I have one, do I hear two, two, going, going, sold at the pathetic number of one.”

“Seriously,” Lu went on, “I think she might be clinically depressed.”

“Shut up,” Charles said.

It was 11:00 P.M.. Sprawled across the leather couches in the Purple Room, we were drinking Leulah’s latest, something she called Cockroach, a mishmash of sugar, oranges and Jack Daniel’s. I don’t think I’d said twenty words the entire evening. Of course, I was excited to see them again (also grateful Dad, when Jade picked me up in the Mercedes, said nothing but “See you soon, my dear,” accompanied with one of his bookmark smiles, which would hold my place until I returned), but something about the Purple Room now felt stale.

I’d had fun on these types of nights before, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I always laughed and sloshed a little bit of Claw or Cockroach on my knees, and said quick things that sailed across the room? Or, if I’d never said quick things (Van Meers were not known for stand-up comedy), hadn’t I allowed myself to drift in a pool with a deadpan expression on an inflatable raft wearing sunglasses as Simon and Garfunkel went “Woo woo woo”? Or if I hadn’t allowed myself to drift with a deadpan expression (Van Meers did not excel at poker), hadn’t I let myself become, at least while I was in the Purple Room, a shaggy-haired counterculture biker on my way to New Orleans in search of the real America, hobnobbing with ranchers, hookers, rednecks and mimes? Or if I hadn’t let myself be a counterculture roadie (no, the Van Meers were not naturally hedonistic) hadn’t I let myself wear a striped shirt and shout in a frankfurter American accent, “New York Herald Tribune!” with eyeliner jutting out from my eyes, subsequently absconding with a small-time hood?

If you were young and mystified in America you were supposed to find something to be a part of. That something had to be either shocking or rowdy, for within this brouhaha you’d find yourself, be able to locate your Self the way Dad and I had finally located such minuscule, hard-to-find towns as Howard, Louisiana, and Roane, New Jersey, on our U.S. Rand-McNally Map. (If you didn’t find such a thing, your fate would sadly be found in plastics.)

Hannah has ruined me, I thought now, pressing the back of my head into the leather couch. I’d resolved to dig an unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere and bury what she’d told me (shoe box it, save it for a rainy day much like her own alarming knife collection) but of course, when you deep-sixed something precipitously, inevitably it rose from the dead. And so, as I watched Jade pluck the harp strings in the absorbed manner of plucking hairs from an eyebrow, I couldn’t help but envision her tossing her skinny arms around the barrel torsos of various truck drivers (three per state, thus the grand total for her journey from Georgia to California was twenty-seven grease-prone gear-jammers; roughly one per every 107.41 miles). And when Leulah took a sip of her Cockroach and some of it dribbled down her chin, I actually saw the twenty-something Turkish math teacher looming behind her, sinuously grooving to Anatolian rock. I saw Charles as one of those golden babies gurgling next to a woman with her eyes punched in, body naked, curled up on a carpet like overcooked shrimp, grinning madly at nothing. And then Milton (who’d just arrived from his movie date with Joalie, Joalie who’d spent Christmas vacation skiing with her family at St. Anton, Joalie who sadly had not fallen into a mile-deep crevice on an unmarked trail), when he dug into his jean pocket to remove a piece of Trident, I thought for a split second he was actually removing a switchblade, similar to the ones the Sharks danced with in West Side Story as they sang—

“Retch, what in hell’s the matter with you?” demanded Jade, squinting at me suspiciously. “You’ve been staring at everyone with freaky-ass eyes all night. You didn’t see that Zach person over the break, did you? There’s a good chance he turned you into a Stepford wife.”

“Sorry. I was just thinking about Hannah,” I lied.

“Yeah, well, maybe we should do something instead of just thinking all the time. At the very least, we should stage an intervention so she doesn’t keep going to Cottonwood, ’cause if something happens? If she does something extreme? We’ll all look back on this moment and detest ourselves. It’ll be a thing we won’t get over for years and years and then we’ll die alone with tons of cats or be hit by cars. We’ll end up road pizzas—”

“Will you shut the fuck up?” shouted Charles. “I–I’m tired of hearing this shit every fucking weekend! You’re a fucking moron! All of you!”

He banged his glass on the bar and raced from the room, his cheeks red, his hair the color of the palest, barest wood, the soft kind you could dent with your thumbnail, and then seconds later — none of us spoke — we heard the front door thump, the whining motor of his car as he sped down the driveway.

“Is it me or is it obvious none of this ends happily,” Jade said.

Around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., I passed out on the leather couch. An hour later, someone was shaking me.

“Want to take a walk, old broad?”

Nigel was smiling down at me, his glasses pinching the end of his nose.

I blinked and sat up. “Sure.”

Blue light velveted the room. Jade was upstairs, Milton had gone home (“home,” I suspected, meant a motel rendezvous with Joalie) and Lu was sound asleep on the paisley couch, her long hair ivying over the armrest. I rubbed my eyes, stood and blearily plodded after Nigel, who’d already slipped into the foyer. I found him in the Parlor Room: walls painted mortified pink, a yawning grand piano, spindly palms and low sofas that resembled big, floating graham crackers you didn’t dare sit on for fear they’d break and you’d get crumbs everywhere.

“Put this on if you’re cold,” Nigel said, picking up a long black fur coat that’d been left for dead on the piano bench. It sagged romantically in his arms, like a grateful secretary who’d just fainted.

“I’m okay,” I said.

He shrugged and slipped it on himself (see “Siberian Weasel,” Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.). Frowning, he picked up a large, blue-eyed crystal swan that had been swimming across the top of an end table toward a large silver picture frame. The frame featured not a photo of Jade, Jefferson or some other beaming relative, but the black-and-white insert it had ostensibly been purchased with (FIRENZE, it read, 7" x 91/2").

“Poor fat drowned bastard,” Nigel said. “No one remembers him anymore, you know?”

“Who?”

“Smoke Harvey.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what happens when you die. Everyone makes a big deal about it. Then everyone forgets.”

“Unless you kill a state employee. A senator, or — or a police officer. Then everyone remembers.”

“Really?” He looked at me with interest, nodding. “Yeah,” he said cheerfully. “You’re probably right.”

Customarily, when one stopped to consider Nigel — his face, ho-hum as a penny, his fiercely gnawed fingernails, his thin, wired glasses that forever evoked the image of an insect brazenly resting its tired, transparent wings on his nose — one was hard pressed to imagine what, exactly, he was thinking, what was the reason for the eyes that sparked, the tiny smile, reminiscent of those cute red pencils used to mark voting ballots. Now I couldn’t help but assume he was thinking of his real parents, Mimi and George, Alice and John, Joan and Herman, whoever they were, tucked away in maximum-security prison. Not that Nigel ever looked particularly glum or brooding; if Dad were ever permanently incarcerated (if a handful of June Bugs had their way, he would be) I’d probably be one of those kids always jaw clenching and teeth grinding, fantasizing about killing my fellow students with cafeteria lunch trays and ball point pens. Nigel did a remarkable job of remaining positive.

“So what do you think about Charles?” I whispered.

“Cute but not my type.”

“No, I mean.” I wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase it. “What’s happened between him and Hannah?”

“What — you’ve been talking to Jade?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think anything’s happened except he thinks he’s madly in love with her. He’s always been madly in love with her. Since we were freshmen. I don’t know why he wastes his time — hey, you think I could pass for Liz Taylor?” He set down the glass swan, twirled. The mink dutifully Christmas-treed around him.

“Sure,” I said. If he was Liz, I was Bo Derek in Ten.

Smiling, he pushed his glasses higher onto his nose. “So we need to find the loot. The bounty. The big payoff.” He spun on his heel, then darted out the door, across the foyer, up the white marble stairs.

At the top of the landing, he stopped, waiting for me to catch up. “Actually I wanted to tell you something.”

“What?” I asked.

He pressed a finger to his lips. We were outside Jade’s bedroom, and though it was completely dark and silent, her door was half open. He motioned for me to follow him. We crept down the carpeted hall and into one of the guest rooms at the very end.

He switched on a lamp by the door. Despite the rose-colored carpet and floral curtains, the room was claustrophobic, like being inside a lung. The musty, forsaken smell doubtlessly was what National Geographic correspondent Carlson Quay Meade was talking about in the account of his excavation of the Valley of the Kings with Howard Carter in 1923, in Revealing Tutankhamen: “I daresay I was troubled of what we might find in that eerie sepulcher, and though there was most certainly an air of excitement, due to the sickening stench, I was forced to remove my linen handkerchief and place it over my nose and mouth, proceeding thus into the cheerless tomb” (Meade, 1924).

Nigel closed the door behind me.

“So Milton and I went over to Hannah’s early last Sunday, before you showed up,” he said in a low, serious voice, leaning against the bed. “And Hannah had to slip away to the grocery store. While Milton was doing homework, I went outside and took a look inside her garage.” His eyes widened. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I found. For one thing, there’s all that old camping equipment — but then, I checked out some of the cardboard boxes. Most of them were full of junk, mugs, lamps, stuff she’d collected, a photo too — guess she went through a serious punk phase — but one huge box only contained trail maps, a thousand of them. She’d marked some with a red pen.”

“Hannah used to go camping all the time. She told us about that incident when she saved someone’s life. Remember?”

He held up his hand, nodding. “Right, well, then I came across a folder sitting right on top of everything. It was full of newspaper articles. Photocopies. A couple from The Stockton Observer. Every single one was about a kid disappearing.”

“Missing Persons?”

He nodded.

I was surprised how the reappearance of two simple words, Missing Persons, could instantly make me feel so, well, disturbed. Obviously, if Hannah hadn’t launched into that hair-raising sermon about The Gone, if I hadn’t witnessed her stonily reciting all those Last Seens, one by one, like some sort of severely unbalanced person, I wouldn’t have been unsettled by what Nigel reported in the least. We knew Hannah, at some point in her life, had been a seasoned mountaineer, and the folder of photocopies as an isolated item didn’t mean much. Dad, for one, was a person with a highly impulsive intellectual mind and he was forever taking sudden explosive interest in a variety of haphazard subjects, from Einstein’s early versions of the atomic bomb and the anatomy of a sand dollar, to gruesome museum installations and rappers who’d been shot nine times. But no subject matter for Dad was ever a fixation, an obsession — a passion, sure; mention Che or Benno Ohnesorg and a gauzy look would appear in his eyes — but Dad did not memorize random facts and recite them in a brutal Bette Davis voice while puffing on cigarettes, his eyes whizzing madly around the room like balloons losing air. Dad did not pose, posture, cut off his own hair leaving a bald spot the size of a Ping-Pong ball. (“Life has few absolute pleasures and one is sitting back in that barber chair, getting one’s hair trimmed by a woman with capable hands,” Dad said.) And Dad did not, at unanticipated moments, fill me with fear, a fear I couldn’t put my hands on because as soon as I noticed it, it slipped through my fingers like steam, evaporated.

“I have one of the articles if you want to read it,” Nigel said.

“You took it?”

“Just a page.”

“Oh, great.”

“What?”

“She’s going to know you were snooping.”

“No way, there were fifty pages there at least. She couldn’t notice. Let me go get it. It’s in my bag downstairs.”

Nigel headed from the room (before disappearing out the door he gave a sort of delighted bulge of the eyes — a silent-movie Dracula expression). He returned a minute later with the article. It was a single page. Actually, it wasn’t an article, but an excerpt from a paperback published by Foothill Press of Tupock, Tennessee, in 1992, Lost But Not Found: People Who Vanished Without a Trace, and Other Baffling Events by J. Finley and E. Diggs. Nigel sat down on the bed and wrapped the mink tightly around himself, waiting for me to finish reading.

96.

Chapter 4

Violet May Martinez

So do not fear, for I am with you;

so do not be dismayed, for I am your God.

— Isaiah, 41:10

On August 29, 1985, Violet May Martinez, 15, vanished without a trace. She was last seen in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park between Blindmans Bald and the parking lot near Burnt Creek.

Today her disappearance remains a mystery.

It was a sunny morning on August 29, 1985, when Violet Martinez took off with her Bible study group of Besters Baptist Church in Besters, N.C. They were heading to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a nature appreciation trip. A sophomore at Besters High, Violet was known by her peers as fun and outgoing and had been voted Best Dressed by the yearbook.

Violet’s father, Roy Jr., dropped her off at church that morning. Violet had blond hair and was 5'4". She was wearing a pink sweater, blue jeans, a gold “V” necklace and white Reeboks.

The church trip was chaperoned by Mr. Mike Higgis, a favorite church leader and Vietnam Vet who’d been active at the church for seventeen years.

Violet rode in the back of the bus next to her best friend, Polly Elms. The bus arrived at the Burnt Creek parking lot at 12:30 P.M. Mike Higgis announced they’d hike the trail to Blindmans Bald, returning to the bus by 3:30 P.M.

“‘Stand still,’” he said, quoting the Book of Job, “‘and consider the wondrous works of God.’”

Violet hiked to the summit with Polly Elms and Joel Hinley. Violet had snuck a pack of Virginia Slims in her jeans pocket and smoked a cigarette at the summit before Mike Higgis told her to put it out. Violet posed for pictures and ate trail mix. She became anxious to start back, so she left the summit with Joel and two friends. A mile from the parking lot, Violet started walking faster than everyone else. The group had to slow down because Barbee Stuart had a cramp. Violet didn’t stop.

“She called us slow pokes and skipped ahead,” said Joel. “When she reached the last visible part in the trail, she stopped to light another cigarette and waved at us. She walked around the bend and out of sight.”

Joel and the others moved on, assuming Violet would be waiting at the bus. But at 3:35 P.M., when Mike Higgis took roll,

“Where’s the rest?” I asked.

“That’s all I took.”

“All the articles were about disappearances like this?”

“Pretty odd, huh?”

I only shrugged. I couldn’t remember if my oath of secrecy extended exclusively over the Blueblood Histories or the entire night’s conversation with Hannah, and so all I said was: “I think Hannah’s always been interested in the subject. Disappearances.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I feigned a yawn and handed him the page. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He shrugged, obviously disappointed by my reaction, and folded the paper.

I prayed — for my continued sanity — that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, for the next forty-five minutes, as we wandered the Whitestone rooms, the dust-iced tables, the never-sat-in chairs, no matter what I said to pacify him, he wouldn’t stop blathering about the articles (poor Violet, wonder what happened, why would Hannah have those papers, why should she care). I assumed he was simply vamping, doing Liz in The Last Time I Saw Paris, until his little face caught the light of a constellation — Hercules the Giant — flickering in the kitchen ceiling and I saw his expression: it wasn’t affected, but genuinely concerned (surprisingly weighty, too, a seriousness usually associated only with unabridged dictionaries and old gorillas).

Soon we drifted back into the Purple Room, and Nigel, removing his glasses, instantly fell asleep in front of the fireplace, clutching the mink possessively like he was afraid it’d tiptoe out before he woke. I returned to the leather couch. A marmalade smear of morning was spreading through the sky, visible beyond the trees through the glass-pane doors. I wasn’t tired. No, thanks to Nigel (now snoring), my mind was circling like a dog after its tail. What was the reason for Hannah’s addiction to disappearances — Life Stories brutally cut off so they remained beginnings and middles, never an end? (“A Life Story without a decent ending is sadly no story at all,” Dad said.) Hannah couldn’t be a Missing Person herself, but perhaps her brother or sister had been one, or one of the girls in the photographs Nigel and I had glimpsed in her room, or else the lost love she refused to confirm the existence of — Valerio. A connection between these Missing Persons and her life, however distant or gauzy, had to exist: “People only very, very rarely develop fixations wholly unrelated to their private histories,” wrote Josephson Wilheljen, MD, in Wider Than the Sky (1989).

There was, too, the supremely itchy feeling I’d seen her somewhere before, when she had a similar eggshell haircut — a feeling so persistent, the next day, sunny and freezing, when Leulah dropped me off at home, I found myself weeding through some of the contemporary biographies in Dad’s library, Fuzzy Man: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (Benson 1990), Margaret Thatcher: The Woman, The Myth (Scott 1999), Mikhail Gorbachev: The Lost Prince of Moscow (Vadivarich, 1999), flipping to the centers and inspecting the photographs. It was a pointless exercise, I knew, but frankly, the feeling, though relentless, was also sort of vague; I couldn’t vouch that it was authentic, that I wasn’t simply mixing Hannah up with one of the Lost Boys in a production of Peter Pan Dad and I caught at the University of Kentucky at Walnut Ridge. At one point, I actually thought I’d found her — my heart swooped when I saw a black-and-white picture of what had to be Hannah Schneider reclining on a beach in a chic vintage bathing suit and headlight sunglasses — until I read the caption: “St. Tropez, Summer of 1955, Gene Tierney.” (I’d stupidly picked up Fugitives from a Chain Gang [De Winter, 1979], an old biography of Darryl Zanuck.)

My next foray into Private Investigation led me down into Dad’s study where I searched for “Schneider” and “Missing Person” on the Internet, a survey that belched up nearly five thousand pages. “Valerio” and “Missing Person” yielded 103.

“Are you down there?” Dad called into the stairwell.

“Doing research,” I shouted.

“Have you eaten lunch?”

“No.”

“Well, get your skates on — we just received twelve coupons in the mail for Lone Steer Steakhouse — ten percent off All-You-Can-Eat Spare Ribs, Buffalo Wings, Molten Onions and something they call, rather disturbingly, a Volcanic Bacon-Bit Potato.”

Quickly, I scanned a few pages, seeing nothing remotely interesting or relevant — court documents detailing motions of Judge Howie Valerio of Shelburn County, records of Loggias Valerio born in 1789, Massachusetts — and switched off Dad’s laptop.

“Sweet?”

“I’m coming,” I called.

I hadn’t had time to conduct any more recon work on Hannah or Missing Persons by the time Jade picked me up that Sunday, and when we arrived at Hannah’s house, I thought to myself — more than a little relieved — perhaps I’d never have to again; Hannah, with renewed exhilaration, was dashing around the house in bare feet and a black housedress, smiling, engaged in six things at once and speaking in chic sentences that snubbed punctuation: “Blue did you meet Ono — is that the timer going off — oh Christ the asparagus.” (Ono was a tiny green shaving of bird missing an eye who apparently hadn’t taken to Lennon at all; she was putting as much birdcage between herself and him as she could.) Hannah also had taken the trouble to make the haircut look marginally more stylish, urging some of the edgier, meaner parts to lie down, chill out off to the side of her forehead. Everything was fine — perfect really — as the seven of us sat in the dining room eating our steaks, asparagus and corn on the cob (even Charles was smiling and when he told one of his stories he actually told it to all of us, not Hannah exclusively) — but then she opened her mouth.

“March twenty-sixth,” she said. “The beginning of Spring Break. It’s our big weekend. So mark your calendars.”

“Big weekend for what?” asked Charles.

“Our camping trip.”

“Who said anything about a camping trip?” asked Jade.

“I did.”

“Where?” asked Leulah.

“The Great Smokies. It’s less than an hour’s drive.”

I almost choked on my steak. Nigel and I locked eyes across the table.

“You know,” continued Hannah brightly, “campfires and ghost stories and gorgeous vistas, fresh air—”

“Ramen noodles,” muttered Jade.

“We don’t have to eat ramen noodles. We can eat anything we like.”

“Still sounds wretched.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“My generation doesn’t do wilderness. We’d rather go to a mall.”

“Well, maybe you should aspire to something beyond your generation.”

“Is it safe?” Nigel interjected, as offhandedly as he could.

“Of course.” Hannah smiled. “So long as you’re not stupid. But I’ve been up there a million times. I know the trails. I just went actually.”

“With who?” asked Charles.

She smiled at him. “Myself.”

We stared at her. It was, after all, January.

“When?” Milton asked.

“Over vacation.”

“You weren’t freezin’?”

“Forget about freezing,” said Jade. “Weren’t you bored? There’s nothing to do up there.”

“No, I wasn’t bored.”

“And what about the bears?” Jade went on. “Even worse, the bugs. I’m so not an insect person. They love me though. Every bug is obsessed with me. They stalk me. They’re crazed fans.”

“When we go in March, there won’t be bugs. And if there are, I’ll drown you in Off,” Hannah said in a severe voice (see “1940 publicity still for Torrid Zone,” Bulldog in a Henhouse: The Life of James Cagney, Taylor, 1982, p. 339).

Jade said nothing, bulldozing her spinach with a fork.

“For goodness’ sake,” Hannah continued, frowning at us, “what — what’s the matter with you? I try to plan something fun, a little different — didn’t you read, weren’t you inspired by Thoreau, Walden? Didn’t you read it in English class? Or don’t they teach that anymore?”

She looked at me. I found it difficult to look back. In spite of her styling efforts, the haircut was still distracting. It looked like one of those alarming styles directors used in 1950s movies to illustrate that the main character had recently spent time in an institution or been branded a harlot by bigoted townsfolk. And the longer you looked at her, the more her shorn head seemed to isolate and float on its own like Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo, when he suffers from a nervous breakdown and psychedelic colors, the pinks and greens of madness, swirl behind him. The haircut made her eyes unhealthily huge, her neck pale, her ears vulnerable as snails missing shells. Perhaps Jade was right; she was going to have a nervous breakdown. Perhaps she was “sick and tired of going along with Man’s Great Lie” (see Beelzebub, Shorts, 1992,p. 212). Or a more frightening possibility: perhaps she’d read too much of the Charles Manson Blackbird book. Even Dad said — Dad who wasn’t in the least superstitious or fainthearted — such an explicit dissection of the workings of evil was truly not safe for the “impressionable, the confused, or the lost.” For this very reason, he no longer included it on his syllabus.

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

Her eyes were bumper-stickered to my head.

“‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,’” she started to recite. “‘I wanted to suck all that marrow out of life, and — and afterwards, learn that if I had not lived, that — that I,’ what is it, something or other deliberately…’”

Her words slumped to the ground and stopped moving. No one spoke. She chuckled, but it was a sad, dying sound.

“I need to read it again myself.”

The Taming of the Shrew

Leontyne Bennett skillfully dissected in The Commonwealth of Lost Vanities (1969) Virgil’s renowned quotation: “Love conquers all.”

“For centuries upon centuries,” he writes on p. 559, “we have been misinterpreting this famed trio of words. The uninformed masses breathlessly hold up this dwarfish phrase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swarms of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations — when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this oft-quoted phrase. The Latin poet wrote ‘Amor vincit omnia,’ or ‘Love conquers all.’ He did not write, ‘Love frees all’ or ‘liberates’ all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely, this cannot be a positive thing. And then, he wrote ‘conquers all’—not exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but all, including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil’s words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including our sense of self.”

Dad and I always snickered about Bennett’s long-winded protestations (he never married and died, in 1984, of cirrhosis of the liver; no one attended his funeral but a housekeeper and an editor from Tyrolian Press) but by February, I actually noticed the value in what he prattled on about for over eight hundred pages. Because it was love that caused Charles to act increasingly sullen and inconsistent, wandering St. Gallway with his hair disheveled, a consumed look on his face (something told me he wasn’t contemplating The Eternal Why). During Morning Announcements, he fidgeted restlessly in his seat (often banging the back of my chair) and when I turned around to smile at him, he didn’t see me; he gazed at the stage the way sailor widows probably stared at the sea. (“I’ve had it with him,” Jade announced.)

Love, too, could pick me up and chuck me into a bad mood with the relative easiness of a tornado uprooting a farmhouse. Milton would only have to say, “Old Jo” (what he called Joalie now — a pet name the most devastating of all high school relationship developments; like superglue, it could hold any couple together for months), and instantly I’d feel like I was dying inside, as if my heart, lungs and stomach were all punching their time card, closing up shop and heading home, because there was no point of beating, breathing, day in, day out, if life was this sore.

And then there was Zach Soderberg.

I’d completely forgotten about him, with the exception of thirty seconds during the plane ride home from Paris, when a frazzled stewardess accidentally spilled Bloody Mary mix on an elderly gentleman across the aisle. Instead of growling, the man’s face crinkled into a smile as he dabbed his now gruesome-looking jacket with napkins, and he said without a smidgin of sarcasm: “Don’t worry about it, my dear. Happens to the best of us.” I’d thrown Zach contrite little smiles every now and then during AP Physics (but didn’t wait to find out if he caught them or let them fall to the floor). I was taking Dad’s counsel: “The most poetic of endings to love affairs isn’t apology, excuse, extensive investigation into What Went Wrong — the St. Bernard of options, droopy-eyed and slobbery — but stately silence.” One day, however, immediately following lunch, when I slammed my locker door, I found Zach standing directly behind me, smiling one of those tent smiles, one side hoisted way up, the other limp.

“Hello, Blue,” he said. His voice was stiff as new shoes.

My heart, rather unexpectedly, began to jump-rope. “Hi.”

“How are you?”

“Fine.” I had to come up with something decent to say, of course, an excuse, an apology, my reason for forgetting him at the Christmas Cabaret like a winter glove. “Zach, I’m sorry abo—”

“I have something for you,” he interrupted, his voice not angry, but cheerfully official, as if he were Deputy Manager of Such-and-Such, happily emerging from his office to inform me I was a valued customer. He reached into his back pocket and handed me a thick blue envelope. It was emphatically sealed, even at the very, very corners, and my name had been written in schmaltzy cursive across the front.

“Feel free to do whatever you want with them, you know,” he said. “I just got a part-time job at Kinko’s, so I could inform you of some printing options. You could do a blow-up, poster-size, then total lamination. Or you could go the greeting card route. Or a calendar, wall or desk. Then there’s the T-shirt option. That’s pretty popular. We just got in some baby tees. And then, what do they call it — there’s art print on canvas. That’s very nice. Higher quality than you’d expect. We also offer sign and banner options in a range of sizes, including vinyl.”

He nodded to himself and seemed on the verge of saying something more — his lips were cracked, barely, like a window — but then, frowning, he appeared to change his mind.

“I’ll see you in Physics,” he said, turning on his heel and heading down the hall. Instantly, he was greeted by a girl who’d walked by only a minute ago — watching us out of the corner of her coin-slot eyes, then stopping by the water fountain and taking a drink of water. (She must have just trekked the Gobi Desert.) She was Rebecca of the camel teeth, a junior.

“Is your dad preaching this Sunday?” she asked him.

With a pang of irritation (as they continued their sacred conversation down the hall) I ripped open the giant envelope and inside, found glossy foe-toes of Zach and me stationed around his living room, our shoulders rigid, irregular smiles pressed deep into our faces.

In six of them, to my horror, my right bra strap was visible (so white it was almost neon purple and if one looked at the bra strap, then at something else, it drifted in one’s vision), but in the last foe-toe, the one Patsy had taken in front of the sun-lit window (Zach’s left arm rigid around my waist; he was a metal stand, I a collector’s doll) the light between us had gone buttery, splattering the lens, dissolving the outline of Zach’s left side and my right so we blended together and our smiles went the same color of the white sky poured between the naked trees behind us.

Frankly, I barely recognized myself. Usually in pictures I was either Stork Stiff or Ferret Frightened, but in this, I looked strangely bewitching (literally: my skin was gold, there were paranormal pinpricks of green in my eyes). I looked relaxed too, like the kind of person one might find squealing in delight while kicking up sand on a piña-colada beach. I looked like I could be a woman who could forget herself entirely, let go of all the strings, let herself float away like a hundred helium balloons and everyone, everyone bound to the earth, stared at her enviously. (“A woman for whom reflection is as rare as a Giant Panda,” Dad said.)

Without thinking, I turned to look after Zach — maybe I wanted to thank him, maybe I wanted to say something more — but realized stupidly he was gone and I was left staring at the EXIT sign, the stampede of kids in stockings and shabby shoes rushing toward the stairs on their way to class.

A week or two later, on a Tuesday evening, I was sprawled across my bed, trudging through the battlefields of Henry V for AP English when I heard a car. Immediately, I went to the window and, peering through the curtains, watched a white sedan slink down the driveway like a punished animal, coming to a timid halt by the front door.

Dad wasn’t home. He’d left an hour before to go have dinner at Tijuana, a Mexican restaurant, with Professor Arnie Sanderson, who taught Intro to Drama and History of the World Theater. “A sad young man,” said Dad, “with funny little moles all over his face like enduring chicken pox.” Dad said he wouldn’t be home until eleven o’clock.

The headlights switched off. The engine died with a bloated belch. After a moment of stillness, the driver’s door opened and a pillarlike white leg fell out of the car, then another. (This entrance of hers, at first glance, seemed to be an attempt to act out some red-carpet fantasy, yet when the woman came into full view, I realized it was nothing but the sheer challenge of maneuvering in what she wore: a tight white jacket doing its best to bind her waist, a white skirt like plastic wrap around a bouquet of stocky flowers, white stockings, exceedingly high white heels. She was a giant cookie dipped in icing.)

The woman closed the door, and, somewhat hilariously, set about trying to lock the doors, having a hard time finding the keyhole in the dark, then the correct key. Adjusting her skirt (a movement akin to twisting a pillowcase around a pillow), she turned and tried not to make a sound as she boosted herself up onto our porch, her swollen hair — a citrus yellow color — shuddering over her head like a loose lamp shade. She didn’t ring the bell, but stood for a moment at the door, an index finger in her front teeth (the actor about to enter, suddenly uncertain of his first line). She shaded her eyes, bent to the left and looked in the window of our dining room.

I knew who she was, of course. There’d been a series of anonymous phone calls just prior to our departure for Paris (my “Hello?” was met with silence, then the hiccup of hanging up), and another less than a week ago. Swarms of June Bugs before her had shown up like this, out of the blue, in as many moods, conditions, and colors as a box of Crayola crayons (Brokenheart Burnt Umber, Seriously Pissed Cerulean, etc.).

They all had to see Dad again, wanted to pin him down, corner, cajole (in Zula Pierce’s case, maim) him, make a Final Appeal. They approached this doomed confrontation with the weightiness of appearing in federal court, tucking their hair behind their ears, sporting no-nonsense suits, pumps, perfume and conservative brass earrings. June Bug Jenna Parks even toted an unwieldy leather briefcase for her final showdown, which she primly rested on her knees, opened with the clichéd bite of all briefcase openings and, not wasting any time, returned to Dad a bar napkin on which he’d written, in happier days, “‘A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.’” They always made sure to add sexy punctuation to this expert appearance (crimson mouth, complex lingerie under a faintly transparent blouse) to tempt Dad, hint at what he was missing.

If he was home, he ushered them into the den in the manner of a cardiologist about to deliver bad news to a heart patient. Before closing the door, however, he’d ask me (Dad the all-knowing doctor, me the flighty nurse) to prepare a tray of Earl Gray tea.

“Cream and sugar,” he’d say with a wink — a suggestion that made an unlikely smile sprout on the June Bug’s bleak face.

After I put on the kettle, I’d return to the closed door in order to eavesdrop on her deposition. No, she couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t touch or even look at another man (“Not even Pierce Brosnan and I used to think he was wonderful,” Connie Madison Parker confessed). Dad would speak — something muffled, inaudible — and then the door would open and the June Bug emerged from the courtroom. Her blouse was untucked, her hair full of static and, in the most disastrous part of this metamorphosis, her face, before, so meticulously made up, now, a Rorschach test.

She fled to her car, a little frown between her eyebrows like pleated fabric, and then she drove away in her Acura or Dodge Neon, as Dad, all resigned and weary sighs, settled comfortably into his reading chair with the Earl Gray tea I’d fixed for him (as he’d planned all along) to tackle another lecture on Third-World Mediation, another tome on Principles of Revolt.

It was always a tiny detail that made me feel guilty: the dirty grosgrain bow barely hanging on to the front of Lorraine Connelly’s left high heel, or Willa Johnson’s ruby triangle of polyester blazer; caught in the car door, it flapped in terror as she sped down the driveway not bothering to check for oncoming traffic before making the left onto Sandpiper Circle. Not that I hoped Dad would permanently keep one. It was an irksome thought, watching On the Waterfront with a woman who smelled like apricot potpourri from a restaurant bathroom (Dad and I rewinding our favorite scene, the glove scene, ten sometimes twelve times as the June Bug crossed and uncrossed her legs in huffy annoyance), or listening to Dad explain his latest lecture concepts (Transformationism, Starbuckization) to a woman who did forceful, newscaster “Uh-huh uh-huhs,” even when she didn’t understand a word. Still, I couldn’t help but feel ashamed when they cried (an empathy I wasn’t entirely sure they deserved; apart from a few flat questions about boys or my mother, none of them ever talked to me, eyeing me as if I were a few grams of plutonium, unsure if I was radioactive or benign).

Obviously it wasn’t fantastic what Dad was doing, making perfectly realistic women act like — well, as if they were determined to resurrect old story lines of Guiding Light—but I did wonder if it was entirely his fault. Dad never lied about the fact he’d already logged his one Great Love. And everyone knew one was the maximum of Great Loves a person could stumble upon in a lifetime, though some gluttonous people refused to accept it, mistakenly muttering on about seconds and thirds. Everyone was quick to hate the heartbreaker, the Casanova, the libertine, completely overlooking the fact that some libertines were completely candid about what they wanted (excitement between lectures) and if it was all so appalling why did everyone keep flying onto their porches? Why didn’t they spiral off into the summer night, expiring with peace and poise in the soft shadows of the tulip trees?

If Dad wasn’t home when a June Bug unexpectedly materialized, I was to follow his specific instructions: under no circumstances should I allow her into the house. “Smile and tell her to hold on to that fabulous human quality which, unfortunately, people no longer have the slightest sense of—pride. No, there was never anything wrong with Mr. Darcy. You may also elucidate that the saying is true: it will all feel better in the morning. And if she still insists, which is likely — some of them have dispositions of pit bulls with bones — you’ll have to let drop the word police. That’s all you need to say, poelease, and with any luck she’ll fly from the house — if my prayers are answered, from our lives — like a chaste soul out of hell.”

Now I was tiptoeing downstairs, more than a little nervous (it wasn’t easy being Dad’s Human Resource) and just as I reached the front door, she rang the bell. I looked through the peephole, but she’d turned to look over her shoulder at the yard. With a deep breath, I switched on the porch light and opened the door.

“Howdy,” she said.

I froze. Standing in front of me was Eva Brewster, Evita Perón.

“Nice to see you,” she said. “Where is he?”

I couldn’t speak. She grimaced, burped “ha,” and pushed both the door and me to the side as she walked inside.

“Gareth, honey, I’m home!” she shouted, her face upturned as if expecting Dad to materialize from the ceiling.

I was so shocked, I could only stand and stare. “Kitty,” I realized, had been a pet name, which she’d doubtlessly had at some point in her life and resurrected so they’d have a secret. I should have known — at the very least thought about it. They’d had them before. Sherry Piths had been Fuzz. Cassie Bermondsey had been both Lil’ and Squirts. Zula Pierce had been Midnight Magic. Dad found it humorous when they had catchy names that tripped off the tongue, and his smile, when saying this name, she probably mistook for Love, or, if not Love, some seed of Caring, which would eventually grow into the massive vine of Affection. It might be a nickname her father gave her when she was six or her Secret Hollywood Name (the name she should have been called, the one that would have been her passport to the Paramount lot).

“You going to speak? Where is he?”

“At dinner,” I said, swallowing, “with a — a colleague.”

“Uh-huh. Which one?”

“Professor Arnie Sanderson.”

“Right. Sure.”

She made another sulky noise, crossed her arms so her jacket winced, and continued down the hall to the library. Dimly, I followed. She sauntered over to Dad’s legal pads neatly stacked on the wooden table by the bookshelves. She grabbed one, ruffling the pages.

“Ms. Brewster—?”

“Eva.”

“Eva.” I took few steps closer. She was approximately six inches taller than me and sturdy as a silo. “I–I’m sorry, but I don’t know if you should be here. I have homework.”

She threw her head back and laughed (see “Shark Death Cry,” Birds and Beasts, Barde, 1973, p. 244).

“Oh, come on,” she said looking at me, flinging the legal pad to the floor. “One of these days you’re going to have to lighten up. Though with him, yeah, I got you — it’s a tall order. I’m sure I’m not the only one he keeps in a constant state of terror.” She moved past me, out of the library, down the hall toward the kitchen, affecting the air of a real estate agent inspecting the wallpaper, rugs, doorjambs and ventilation in order to determine a price the market could bear. I understood now: she was drunk. But she was a concealed drunk. She’d vigorously zipped up most of the drunkenness so it was scarcely visible, only in her eyes, which weren’t red, but swollen (and a little bit sluggish when they blinked), also in her walk, which was slow and forced, as if she had to organize every step or she’d topple like a FOR SALE sign. Every now and then, too, a word jammed in her mouth and began to slide back into her throat until she said something else and it coughed out.

“Just taking a teensy-weensy look around,” she muttered, trailing her chubby, manicured hand along the kitchen counter. She pressed PLAY on the answering machine (“You have no new messages.”) and squinted at June Bug Dorthea Driser’s ugly cross-stitch quotations hanging in rows along the wall by the telephone (“Love Thy Neighbor,” “To Thine Own Self Be True”).

“You knew about me, didn’t you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Because he was weird that way. All the secrets and lies. Remove one from the ceiling and the whole thing collapses on top of you. Nearly kills you. He lies about everything — even ‘Nice to see you,’ and ‘Take care.’” She tilted her head, thinking. “Any idea how you get to be a man like that? What happened to him? Did his mother drop him on his head? Was he the nerd who wore an ugly brace on his leg and everyone beat him to a pulp at lunchtime—?”

She was opening the door leading down to Dad’s study.

“—If you could shed some light on that it’d be great, because I, for one, am pretty confounded—”

“Ms. Brewster—?”

“—keeps me awake at night—”

She was clunking down the stairs.

“I–I think my dad would prefer that you wait up here.”

She ignored me, walking the rest of the way down. I heard her fumble with the switch to the overhead lights, then yank the chain of Dad’s green desk lamp. I hurried after her.

When I entered the study she was, as I both expected and feared, inspecting the six butterfly and moth cases. Her nose was almost touching the glass of the third case from the window and a small cloud had formed over the female Euchloron megaera, the Verdant Sphinx Moth. It wasn’t her fault she was drawn to them; they were the most riveting things in the room. Not that Lepidoptera displayed in Ricker cases was an unusual thing (“Let’s Make a Deal” Lupine told Dad and me they were a dime a dozen at estate sales, and could be purchased on the street in New York City for “forty big ones”), but many of these specimens were exotics, rarely seen outside of a textbook. Apart from the three Cassius Blues (which looked quite dreary in comparison to the Paris Peacock just next to them — three wan orphans standing beside Rita Hayworth), my mother had purchased the others from butterfly farms in South America, Africa and Asia (all of them supposedly humane, allowing the insects a full life and natural death before collection; “You should have heard her on the phone drilling them about the living conditions,” Dad said. “You’d have thought we were adopting a child.”). The Cairns Birdwing (4.8 in.), the Madagascan Sunset Moth (3.4 in.) were so luminescent, they looked as if they weren’t real, but crafted by Nicholas and Alexandra’s legendary toymaker, Sacha Lurin Kuznetsov. With the most dazzling materials at his fingertips — velvet, silks, furs — he could craft chinchilla teddy bears, 24-carat dollhouses in his sleep (see Imperial Indulgence, Lipnokov, 1965).

“What is this stuff?” asked Eva, moving to examine the fourth box, jutting out her chin.

“Just some bugs.” I was standing right behind her. Gray lint balls pimpled the sides of her white wool jacket. A strand of her sulphur orange hair swerved into a? on her left shoulder. If we’d been in a film noir it would’ve been the moment I jammed a pistol into her back through the pocket of my trench coat and said, through teeth: “Make a funny move and I’ll blow you from here to next Tuesday.”

“I don’t like this kinda thing,” she said. “Gives me the creeps.”

“How’d you meet my dad?” I asked as cheerfully as I could.

She turned around, narrowing her eyes. They really were an incredible color: the softest blue-violet in all the world, so pure, it actually seemed cruel to make it witness this scene.

“He didn’t tell you?” she asked suspiciously.

I nodded. “I think he did. I just can’t remember.”

She stepped away from the cases and bent over Dad’s desk to scrutinize his desk calendar (stuck in May 1998) covered with his illegible scrawl.

“I’m the type of person who stays professional,” she said. “A lot of the other teachers don’t. Some father comes by, tells them he likes their teaching style and suddenly they’re in the throes of some cheap romance. And I tell them over and over, you’re meeting at lunch hours, you’re driving by his house in the middle of the night — you really think it’s going to turn into something cute? Then your dad comes along. He wasn’t fooling anyone. The average woman, sure. But me? I knew he was a fraud. That’s the funny thing, I knew, but I didn’t know, you know what I mean? Because he also had such a heart. I’ve never been one of those romantic types. But suddenly I thought I could save him. Only you can’t save a fraud.”

With her long fingernails (painted the pink of kitten noses) she was riffling through Dad’s mug of pens. She picked one out — his favorite actually, an 18-carat gold Mont Blanc, a good-bye gift from Amy Pinto, one present from a June Bug he’d actually liked. Eva turned it in her fingers, sniffing it like a cigar. She put it in her purse.

“You can’t take that,” I said, horrified.

“If you don’t win Hollywood Squares, you still get a consolation prize.”

I couldn’t breathe. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable in the living room,” I suggested. “He’ll be home”—I looked at my watch and to my panic it was only nine-thirty—“in a few minutes. I can make you some tea. I think we have some Whitman’s chocolates—”

“Tea, huh? How civilized. Tea. That’s something he would say.” She threw me a look. “You should watch that, you know. Because sooner or later we all turn into our parents. Poof.”

She slumped down into Dad’s office chair, pulled open a drawer and started to page through the legal pads.

“Won’t know what hit…‘Interrelationships Between Domestic and International Politics from Greek Site-Cit — City States to the Present-Day.’” She frowned. “You get any of this crap? I had a good time with the guy, but mostly I thought what he said was a load of dung. ‘Quantitative methods.’ ‘The role of external powers in peacekeeping processes—’”

“Ms. Brewster?”

“Yeah.”

“What are your…plans?”

“Making it up as I go along. Where’d you move from, anyway? He was always fuzzy about it. Fuzzy about a lot of things—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I think I might have to call the police.”

She threw the legal pads back in the drawer, hard, and looked at me. If her eyes had been buses I’d have been run over. If they’d been guns I’d have been shot dead. I found myself wondering — ridiculously — if she perhaps had a gun on her and perhaps she wasn’t afraid to use it. “You really think that’s a good idea?” she asked.

“No,” I admitted.

She cleared her throat. “Poor Mirtha Grazeley, you know, crazy as a dog struck by lightning, but pretty organized when it comes to that Admissions Office. Poor Mirtha came back to school on Monday. Last term. Found her place not as she’d left it but with a couple of moved chairs and messy seat cushions, a liter of eggnog gone. It also looked like someone had lost her cookies in the bathroom. Not pretty. I know it wasn’t a professional job because the vandal left her shoes behind. Black. Size 9. Dolce & Gabbana. Not a lot of kids can afford the hoity-toity stuff. So I narrow it down to the big donors’ kids, Atlanta types who let their kids run around in the Mercedes. I cross-reference that with the kids who went to the dance and come up with a list of suspects that, surprisingly, ain’t all that long. But I have a conscience, you know. I’m not one of those people who get a kick out of wrecking some kid’s future. It’d be sad. From what I hear the Whitestone girl has enough problems. Might not graduate.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment. The hum of the house was audible. As a child, some of our house hums were so loud, I used to think an invisible glee club had gathered in the walls, wearing burgundy choir robes, mouths open in earnest Os, chanting all night and all day.

“Why were you calling out my name?” I managed to ask. “At the dance—”

She looked surprised. “You heard me?”

I nodded.

“I thought I saw you two running toward Loomis.” She made an odd “rumph” sound and shrugged. “Just wanted to chew the fat. Talk about your dad. Kinda like we’re doing now. Not that there’s much to say anymore. Jig is up. I know who he is. Thinks he’s God, but really, he’s just a small…”

I thought she was going to stop there, at the searing declaration, “He’s just a small,” but then she ended it, her voice soft.

“A small little man.”

She was silent, crossing her arms, tipping back in Dad’s office chair. Even though Dad himself had warned me, one should never take notice of the words that barged out of an irate person’s mouth, I still hated what she said. I noticed too, it was the cruelest thing to say about a person — that they were small. I was only consoled by the fact that, in truth, all humans were small when one considered them in the Grand Scheme of Things, put them side by side with Time, the Universe. Even Shakespeare was small and Van Gogh — Leonard Bernstein too.

“Who is she?” Eva demanded suddenly. She should have been triumphant, having made all those groundbreaking assertions about Dad, but there was a discernible sprain in her voice.

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You don’t have to tell me who she is, but I’d appreciate it.”

She was obviously referring to Dad’s new girlfriend, but he didn’t have one — at least, not to my knowledge.

“I don’t think he’s seeing anyone, but I could ask him for you.”

“Fine,” she said, nodding. “I believe you. He’s good. I’d never know, never even suspect if I hadn’t been friends since second grade with Alice Steady who owns the Green Orchid on Orlando. ‘What’s the name of the guy you’re dating again?’ ‘Gareth.’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she says. Guess he came in, blue Volvo, used a credit card to buy a hundred bucks’ worth of flowers. Said no to Alice’s offer of free delivery. And that was sneaky, see — no delivery address, no evidence, right? And I know the flowers weren’t for himself because Alice said he asked for one of the little message cards. And from the look on your face, they weren’t for you either. Alice’s one of those romantic types, says no man buys a hundred bucks’ worth of barbaresco orientals for someone he isn’t madly in love with. Roses, sure. Every cheap piece of ass gets roses. But not barbaresco orientals. I’ll be the first to admit I was upset — I’m not one of those people who pretends they never cared in the first place, but then he started not returning my calls, sweeping me under the rug like I’m crumbs or something. Not that I care. I’m seeing someone else now. An optometrist. Divorced. His first wife I guess was a real clinker. Gareth can do whatever he wants with himself.”

She fell silent, not out of exhaustion or reflection, but because her eyes had again snagged on the butterflies in front of her.

“He really loves those things,” she said.

I followed her gaze to the wall. “Not really.”

“No?”

“He barely looks at them.”

I actually saw the thought, the light bulb illuminating her head as if she were a comic book character.

She moved quickly, but so did I. I stood in front of them and hastily said something about receiving the flowers myself (“Dad talks about you all the time!” I cried rather pathetically) but she didn’t hear me.

A garish flush bleeding into the back of her neck, she yanked open Dad’s desk drawers and hurled every one of his legal pads (he organized them by university and date) into the air. They flew around the room like giant scared canaries.

I guess she found what she was looking for — a steel ruler, which Dad used for orderly cross-comparison diagrams in his lecture notes — and to my shock, she brutally shoved me aside and tried to stab it through the glass of one of the Ricker’s cases. The ruler, silver aluminum, would have no part of it however, so with an infuriated “Fuckin’ A,” she threw it to the floor and tried punching one of the boxes with her bare fist, and then with her elbow, and when that didn’t work, she scratched the glass with her nails as if she were some lunatic scraping the silver skin off a lottery ticket.

Still thwarted, she turned, her eyes swerving around Dad’s desk until they stopped on the green lamp (a parting gift from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville). She seized it, jerking the cord out of the wall, and raised it over her head. She used the base, solid brass, to shatter the glass of the first case.

At this point, I ran at her again, lurching at her shoulders, also shouting, “Please!” but I was too weak and, I suppose, too stunned by it all to be effective. She pushed me again, elbowing me right in the jaw so my neck twisted to the side and I fell down.

Glass rained everywhere, all over Dad’s desk, the rug, my feet and hands, all over her, too. Tiny shards glittered in her hair and stuck to her thick white tights, trembling like beads of water. She couldn’t remove the cases from the wall (Dad used special screws to hang them) but she ripped through the pieces of mounting paper and tore the brown cardboard backing from the frames, ripping every butterfly and moth from their pins, squashing their wings so they became colored confetti, which, with eyes wide, her face creased like a wad of paper smoothed out, she tossed around the room, making something of a sacrament out of it like a priest gone mad with holy water.

At one point, with a muffled growl, she actually bit into one, and resembled for a horrifying and faintly surreal moment, a massive orange tabby eating a blackbird. (In the most peculiar of instances, one is struck by the most peculiar of thoughts, and in this case, as Eva bit into the wing of the Night Butterfly, Taygetis echo, I remembered the occasion when Dad and I were driving from Louisiana to Arkansas, when it was ninety degrees and the air-conditioning was broken, and we were memorizing a Wallace Stevens poem, one of Dad’s favorites, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” “‘Among twenty snowy mountains / The only thing moving / was the eye of the blackbird,’” Dad explained to the highway.)

When she stopped, when she finally stood still, astonished herself by what she’d just done, there was the utterest of all utter silences, reserved, I imagined, for the aftermath of massacres and storms. You could probably hear the rustle of the moon if you concentrated, the earth too, its whoosh as it whirled around the sun at 18.5 miles per second. Eva then began to shiver an apology in a trembling voice that sounded as if it were being tickled. She cried a little too, a disquieting, low-pitched seeping sound.

I can’t be sure of her crying, actually; I, too, had been hauled into a state of disorientation under which I could only repeat to myself This did not actually happen as I gazed at the surrounding debris, in particular, at the top of my right foot, my yellow sock, on which rested a brown and furry torso of some moth, the Bent-Wing Ghost Moth perhaps, slightly crooked, as if it were a bit of pipe cleaner.

Eva then put the lamp down on Dad’s desk, tenderly, the way one handles a baby, and, avoiding my eyes, walked past me, up the stairs. After a moment, I heard the front door slam and the sputter of her car as she drove away.

With a samurai-like precision and clarity of mind that promptly settles over one following the weirder episodes of one’s life, I resolved to clean everything up before Dad returned home.

I obtained a screwdriver from the garage and, one by one, removed the destroyed boxes from the wall. I swept up the glass and the wings, vacuumed under Dad’s desk, along the edges of the floor, the bookshelves and stairs. I returned the legal pads to their respective drawers, organizing them by university and date, and then carried to my room their cardboard moving box (BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE) in which I’d put all that was salvageable. It wasn’t much — only torn white paper, a handful of brown wings still in one piece and the single Small Postman, Heliconius erato, which had emerged from the slaughter miraculously unscathed after hiding behind Dad’s filing cabinet. I tried to read more of Henry V as I waited for Dad to return home, but the words snagged my eyes. I found myself staring at a single point on the page.

Despite the throb in my right cheek, I had no illusions Dad was anything other than the pitiless villain in this evening’s freaky drama. Sure, I hated her, but I hated him, too. Dad had finally gotten what was coming to him, except he’d been otherwise engaged, so I, his guiltless direct descendant, had gotten what was coming to him. I knew it was melodramatic, but I found myself wishing Kitty had killed me (at the very least, knocked me provisionally unconscious) so when Dad returned home, he’d see me lying on his study floor, my body saggy and gray as a hundred-year-old sofa, my neck twisted at the disturbing angle indicating Life had caught a bus out of town. After Dad fell to his knees, uttered King Learean cries (“No! Noooo! Don’t take her, God! I’ll do anything!”), my eyes would open, I’d gasp, then deliver my mesmerizing speech, touching upon Humanity, Compassion, the fine line between Kindness and Pity, the necessity of Love (a theme rescued from the trite and the maudlin by sturdy support from the Russians [“Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”] and a little Irving Berlin to keep things snappy [“They say that falling in love is wonderful, it’s wonderful, so they say.”]). I’d end with the pronouncement that the Jack Nicholson, Dad’s customary modus operandi, would henceforth be replaced by the Paul Newman, and Dad would nod with his eyes lowered, his face pained. His hair would turn gray, too, a uniform steel-gray, like Hecuba’s, the emblem of Purest Sorrow.

What about the others? Had he hurt the others as much as he’d hurt Eva Brewster? What about Shelby Hollows with her bleached moustache? Or Janice Elmeros with cactus-prickly legs under her sundresses? And the others, like Rachel Groom and Isabelle Franks, who never came to see Dad without bearing gifts like contemporary Wise Men (Dad, mistaken for a Christ Child), cornbread, muffins and straw dolls with wincing faces (as if they’d all just eaten a Sour Patch Kid), their gold, frankincense and myrrh? How many hours had Natalie Simms slaved constructing the birdhouse out of popsicle sticks?

The blue Volvo cruised down the driveway at a quarter to twelve. I heard him unlock the front door.

“Sweet, come down at once! You’ll laugh your eyes out!”

(Laughing one’s eyes out was a particularly irritating Dadism, as was crying until the bulls come home and being the pear of one’s eye.)

“Turns out little Arnie Sanderson couldn’t hold his liquor! He fell down, I swear to you, fell down in the restaurant on his way to the men’s room. I had to drive the thug home, to his Calcutta-inspired university housing. A terrifying place — tatty carpeting, a stench of curdled milk, graduate fellows wandering the halls with feet that appeared to support more exotic life forms than the Galápagos Islands. I had to carry him up the stairs. Three flights! Do you remember Teacher’s Pet, that rather delightful film starring Gable and Doris we watched — where was it? Missouri? Well, I lived it this evening, only without the perky blonde. I believe I deserve a drink.”

He was silent.

“Have you gone to bed?”

Dad dashed up the stairs, knocked lightly, pushed open the door. He was still wearing his coat. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall with my arms crossed.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

When I told him (doing my best to keep my manner like that of the Loosened Steel Girder, dangerous and unforgiving) Dad turned into one of those things twirling outside of vintage barber shops: he went red when he saw the red splotch on my face, white when I escorted him downstairs and expertly reenacted the scene (including snippets of actual dialogue, the exact position in which I was ruthlessly chucked to the ground and Eva’s revelation that Dad was “a small”), and upstairs again, when I showed him the box full of butterfly and moth remains, red again.

“If I’d known such a thing was possible,” Dad said, “that she could became a Scylla—worse than a Charybdis in my book — I’d have murdered that nut.” He pressed the washcloth full of ice to my cheek. “I must think what measures to take.”

“How’d you meet her?” I asked gloomily, without looking at him.

“Of course, I’ve heard stories of this nature from colleagues, seen the movies, Fatal Attraction being the gold stand—”

“How, Dad?” I screamed.

He was taken aback by my voice, but rather than getting angry, he only lifted the ice, and frowning in grave concern (his impression of the nurse in For Whom the Bell Tolls), touched my cheek with the back of his fingers.

“How did I — let’s see if, what was it — late September,” he said, clearing his throat. “I made that second trip to your school to discuss your class ranking. Remember? I found myself lost. That officer in charge, that off-the-wall Ronin-Smith — she told me to meet her in a different room because her office was being repainted. But she gave me the wrong location, and thus I made an imbecile of myself knocking on Hanover 316 and encountered an unpleasantly bearded History professor attempting to clarify — rather unsuccessfully, I gathered from the benumbed expressions of his class — the Hows and Whys of the Industrial Age. I stopped by the main office to inquire after the correct location and encountered the manic Miss Brewster.”

“And it was love at first sight.”

Dad gazed at the box of remains on the floor. “To think all this might have been avoided if that goat had simply told me Barrow 316.”

“It isn’t funny.”

He shook his head. “It was wrong not to tell you. I apologize. But I was uncomfortable with it, my”—he held his breath in discomfort—“connection with someone from your school. I certainly didn’t mean for it to escalate as it did. In the beginning, it all seemed rather harmless.”

“That’s what the Germans said when they lost World War II.”

“I take full responsibility. I was an ass.”

“A liar. A cheat. She called you a liar. And she was right—”

“Yes.”

“—you lie about anything and everything. Even, ‘Nice to see you.’”

He didn’t respond to this, only sighed.

I crossed my arms, still glowering at the wall, but I didn’t move my head away when he pressed the cold washcloth to my cheek again.

“As I see it,” he said, “I’ll have to call the police. That, or the more appealing option. Going to her house with an illegally obtained firearm.”

“You can’t call the police. You can’t do anything.”

He looked at me. “But I thought you’d want that beast behind bars.”

“She’s just a normal woman, Dad. And you didn’t treat her with respect. Why didn’t you return her phone calls?”

“I suppose I didn’t feel much like talking.”

“Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world. Haven’t you read Hit and Run: Crisis in Singlehood America?”

“I don’t believe I have—”

“The least you can do now is leave her alone.”

He was about to add something, but stopped himself.

“Who’d you send the flowers to anyway?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“Those flowers she was talking about—”

“Janet Finnsbroke. One of the administrators in the department who dates back to the Paleozoic Period. Her fiftieth wedding anniversary. I thought it’d be nice—” Dad caught my eye “—no, I most certainly am not in love with her. For Pete’s sake.”

I pretended not to notice, but Dad looked sort of deflated there on the edge of my bed. A lost, even humbled look was wandering around his face (quite surprised to be there). Seeing him like this, so un-Dad, made me feel sorry for him — though I didn’t let on. His befuddled expression reminded me of those unflattering photographs of presidents The New York Times and other newspapers adored sticking on their front page in order to show the world how the Great Leader looked between the staged waves, the scripted sound-bites, the rehearsed handshakes — not staunch and stately, not even steady, but frail and foolish. And though these candid photographs were amusing, when you actually thought about it, the underlying implication of such a photograph was scary, for they hinted how delicate the balance of our lives, how tenuous our calm little existences, if this was the man in charge.

Deliverance

And so, I come to the perilous part of my story.

If this narrative were a quotidian account of the history of Russia, this chapter would be a proletarian’s account of the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917, if a history of France, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, if a chronicle of America, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.

“All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence,” Dad said. “If you don’t believe me, simply reflect for a moment on the utter horror of having something threatening lurking outside your front door, hearing it huff and puff and then, cruelly, callously, blowing your house down. It’s as horrifying as any story on CNN. And yet where would the ‘Three Little Pigs’ be without such brutality? No one would have heard of them, for happiness and placidity are not worth recounting by the fire, nor, for that matter, reporting by a news anchor wearing pancake makeup and more shimmer on her eyelids than a peacock feather.”

Not that I am trying to imply my story can hold a candle to complex world histories (each one worth over one thousand pages of fine print) or three-hundred-year-old fables. Yet one can’t help but notice that violence, although officially abhorred in modern Western and Eastern cultures (only officially, for no culture, modern or otherwise, hesitates using it for the pursuit of their own interests), is unavoidable if there is to be change.

Without the disturbing incident of this chapter, I’d never have taken on the task of writing this story. I’d have nothing to write. Life in Stockton would have continued exactly as it was, as placid and primly self-contained as Switzerland, and any strange incidents — Cottonwood, Smoke Harvey’s death, that strange conversation with Hannah prior to Christmas Break — might be regarded as unusual, certainly, but in the end, nothing that couldn’t be dully reviewed and accounted for by Hindsight, forever unsurprised and shortsighted.

I cannot help but anticipate a little, run on ahead (much in the manner of Violet Martinez in the Great Smoky Mountains), and so, given this lapse in patience, I will only hopscotch through the two months between Eva’s destruction of my mother’s butterflies and moths and the camping trip, which Hannah, in spite of our patent lack of enthusiasm (“Won’t do it, couldn’t pay me,” pledged Jade), maintained was scheduled for the weekend of March 26, the beginning of Spring Break.

“Make sure you bring hiking shoes,” she said.

St. Gallway doggedly marched on (see Chapter 9, “The Battle of Stalingrad,” The Great Patriotic War, Stepnovich, 1989). With the exception of Hannah, most teachers had returned from Christmas vacation cheerfully unchanged, apart from small, pleasant enhancements to their appearance: a new red Navajo sweater (Mr. Archer), shiny new shoes (Mr. Moats), a new boysenberry rinse that turned hair into something that had to be consciously matched, like paisley (Ms. Gershon). These distracting details caused one to daydream in class about who had given Mr. Archer that sweater, or how Mr. Moats must be insecure about his height because all of his shoes possessed soles thick as sticks of butter, or the exact look on Ms. Gershon’s face when her hairdresser removed the towel from her head and said, “Don’t worry. The plum tones just look extreme now because it’s wet.”

St. Gallway students were also the same, rodentlike in their ability to carry on foraging, storing, burrowing and eating a huge amount of plant food in spite of humiliating national scandals and harrowing world events. (“This is a critical time in our nation’s history,” Ms. Sturds was always informing us during Morning Announcements. “Let’s make sure we look back in twenty years and feel proud. Read the newspaper. Take sides. Have an opinion.”) Student Council President Maxwell Stuart unveiled elaborate plans for a Spring Term Barbecue Hoedown, complete with square dancing, bluegrass band and Faculty Scarecrow Contest; Mr. Carlos Sandborn of AP World History stopped using gel in his hair (it no longer looked wet, as if it’d been swimming laps, but windblown, as if it’d been doing figure-eights in a propeller plane) and Mr. Frank Fletcher, crossword maharishi and monitor of second period Study Hall, was in the throes of a divorce; his wife, Evelyn, had apparently made him move out (though whether the deep circles under his eyes were due to the divorce or crosswords, no one knew), citing Irreconcilable Differences.

“I guess when they were doing the nasty on Christmas Eve, Mr. Fletcher shouted out, ‘Oh, Eleven Down!’ not ‘Evelyn, Down!’ That was the last straw,” said Dee.

I saw Zach all the time in Physics, but apart from a handful of hellos, we didn’t speak. He never materialized at my locker anymore. Once, during the Dynamics Lab, we found ourselves at the back of the room together and just as I looked up from my notebook to smile at him, he bumped into the corner of one of the lab tables and spontaneously dropped what he was carrying, a ring stand and a set of known masses. But even as he picked up the equipment, he didn’t say anything, only returned swiftly to the front of the room (and his lab partner, Krista Jibsen) with an official spokesperson look on his face. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

Clumsy, too, were the occasions I passed Eva Brewster in the hallway. We both pretended to be suffering from the effects of Walking and Thinking an Elaborate Thought at the Same Time (Einstein suffered from it, Darwin, de Sade too), and hence the person suffered from an obliviousness toward his/her immediate surroundings that approached that of a temporary blackout or complete loss of consciousness (this, though as we slipped past each other, our eyes fell like curtains when a hooker strolls through a prairie town searching for accommodation). I felt as if I were now privy to a dark, grisly secret about Eva (in certain rare instances, she transformed into a werewolf) and she begrudged me for knowing it. At the same time, as she marched down the hall with an absorbed expression, a hint of lemony perfume, as if she’d spritzed herself with a cleaner for kitchen countertops, I swore I detected in the hunch of her beige sweater, in the angle of her meaty neck, that she was sorry and she’d take it all back if she could. Even if she didn’t have the guts to say it to me outright (so few people had the guts to really say things), it made me feel less anxious, as if I understood her a little.

Ms. Brewster’s rampage did have some constructive effects, as all disasters and tragedies do (see The Dresden Upshot, Trask, 2002). Dad, still guilty about Kitty, had adopted a permanently contrite manner, which I found refreshing. The day we returned from Paris, I’d learned I’d been admitted to Harvard, and we finally celebrated this milestone on a blustery Friday evening in early March. Dad donned his Brooks Brothers, French-cuffed dress shirt, his gold GUM cufflinks; I, a gum-green dress from Au Printemps. Dad chose the four-star restaurant purely on the basis of its name: Quixote.

The dinner was unforgettable for many reasons, one of them being that Dad, in an uncharacteristic display of self-command, paid no attention at all to our gorgeous waitress with the voluptuous body of a swan-necked flask and an astoundingly cleft chin. Her coffee-colored eyes trespassed all over Dad when she took our order and again when she asked Dad if he wanted fresh pepper (“Had enough [pepper]?” she inquired breathily). Yet Dad willfully remained indifferent to this intrusion, and so, somewhat dejectedly, her eyes went back the way they came (“Dessert menu,” she announced grimly by the end of the meal).

“To my daughter,” Dad said grandly, clinking his wineglass on the rim of my Coke. A middle-aged woman at the table next to us with heavy hardware jewelry and a thickset husband (whom she seemed anxious to unload like armfuls of shopping bags) beamed at us for the thirtieth time (Dad, a stirring example of Paternity: handsome, devoted, wearing tweed). “May your studies continue to the end of your days,” he said. “May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth — your truth, not someone else’s — and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory and philosophy I have ever known.”

The woman was practically blown off her seat by Dad’s eloquence. I thought he was paraphrasing an Irish drinking toast, but later I did check Killing’s Beyond Words (1999) and couldn’t find it. It was Dad.

On Friday, March 26, with the same innocence of the Trojans as they gathered around the strange wooden horse standing at the gate to their city in order to marvel at its craftsmanship, Hannah drove our yellow Rent-Me truck into the dirt lot of Sunset Views Encampment and parked in Space 52. The lot was empty, with the exception of a swayback blue Pontiac parked in front of the cabin (a wooden sign slapped crookedly over the door like a Band-Aid: MAIN) and a rusty towable trailer (“Lonesome Dreams”) chucked under an evangelist oak tree. (It was in the midst of some violent enlightenment, branches stretched heavenward as if to grab hold of His feet.) A white sky ironed, starched, folded itself primly behind the rolling mountains. Garbage floated across the lot, cryptic messages in bottles: Santa Fe Ranch Lay’s potato chips, Thomas’ English Muffins, a frayed purple ribbon. Sometime in the last week or so, it had sleeted cigarette butts.

None of us knew how we’d gotten there. We’d been unenthused with the idea of a camping trip from the beginning (including Leulah, who was always the first to go along with something) and now, here we were, in old jeans and uncomfortable hiking shoes, our distended camping backpacks rented from Into the Blue Mountaineering slumped against the van’s backseat windows like fat men who’d dozed off. An empty, nervous canteen, a tired bandana, Special K and ramen noodles rattling, the sudden evaporation of an entire can of contact solution, fitful whines of “Wait, who took my wind-resistant parka?”—it was a testament to Hannah’s influence, her startling yet subtle way of getting you to do something when you’d sworn to everyone, including yourself, you never would.

For reasons we never discussed, Nigel and I hadn’t said anything to the others about the articles he’d found or Violet May Martinez, though when we were alone, he hashed them over incessantly. True tales of unsolved vanishings tended to hang around the darkest confines of one’s mind long after one read about them — doubtlessly the reason why Conrad Hiller’s poorly written and scrappily researched 2002 account of two teenage kidnappings in Massachusetts, The Beautiful Ones, hung around the New York Times Bestseller List for sixty-two weeks. Such stories were as pervasive as bats, flying around at the slightest provocation, circling over your head, and though you knew they had nothing to do with you, that your fate would probably not be like theirs, you still felt a mixture of fear and fascination.

“Everyone have what they need?” sang Hannah as she retied the bright red laces on her leather boots. “We can’t come back to the truck, so make sure you have your backpacks and maps—do not forget the maps I gave you. It’s very important you know where we are as we hike. We’re following Bald Creek Trail, past Abram’s Peak to Sugartop Summit. It moves northeast and the campground’s four miles away from Newfound Gap Road, U.S. 441, that thick red line. See it on the map?”

“Yep,” said Lu.

“The first aid kit. Who has it?”

“Me,” said Jade.

“Fantastic.” Hannah smiled, her hands on her hips. She was dressed for the occasion: khaki pants, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, a puffy green vest, mirrored sunglasses. There was an enthusiasm in her voice I hadn’t heard since Fall Term. During Sunday dinners of late, we were all aware she wasn’t herself. Something very slight had shifted within her, a change difficult to pinpoint; it was as if a painting in one’s house had secretly been moved an inch to the right of where it’d hung for years. She listened to us as she always did, took the same interest in our lives, talked about her volunteer work at the animal shelter, a parrot she was hoping to adopt — but she didn’t seem to laugh anymore, that girlish giggle like a kick through pebbles. (As Nigel said, that haircut was an “eternal rain on her parade.”) She was prone to silent nods and abstracted stares, and I couldn’t tell if she simply couldn’t help this new reticence, if it was born of some unaccountable grief, which had rooted and spread inside of her like leafy liverwort, or if it was deliberate, so we’d all worry about what was troubling her. Certain June Bugs, I knew, willed themselves into abnormal moods that ranged from dour to delicate, simply so Dad would ask them, in tormented tones, if there was anything in the world he could do. (Dad’s actual response to such calculated behavior was to comment she looked tired and suggest making it an early night.)

After dinner, Hannah no longer put on Billie Holiday’s “No Regrets,” singing along in her low, bashful, tone-deaf voice, but sat meditatively on the couch, stroking Lana and Turner, not saying a word while the rest of us hashed over college, or Headmaster Havermeyer’s wife, Gloria, who was expecting twins and hauled her great stomach around campus with the same pleasure of Sisyphus with his boulder, or the outrageous story that broke in early March, that Ms. Sturds had been secretly engaged to Mr. Butters since Christmas (a pairing as dubious as an American Bison with a Grass Snake).

Efforts, both stealthy and obvious, to have Hannah join our conversations were like playing volleyball with a shot put. And she hardly ate the dinner she’d so painstakingly prepared, just pushed the food around her plate like an uninspired painter with a palette of dreary oils.

Now, for the first time in months, she was in a grand mood. She moved with the bright quickness of a sparrow.

“Are we ready?” she asked.

“For what?” asked Charles.

“Forty-eight hours of hell,” said Jade.

“For being at one with nature. Everyone have their maps?”

“For the twentieth time, we have the goddamn maps,” said Charles, slamming the doors at the back of the van.

“Perfect,” Hannah said cheerfully and, making sure the doors were locked, she hoisted her enormous blue backpack onto her shoulders and began to walk away, briskly heading toward the woods at the opposite end of the parking lot. “And they’re off!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Old Schneider’s first out of the gate and holds the lead. Milton Black moves up on the outside. Leulah Maloney is coming up from fifth place. On the final turn it will be Jade and Blue battling it to the finish line.” She laughed.

“What’s she talking about?” asked Nigel, staring after her.

“Who the hell knows,” said Jade.

“Get going, thoroughbreds! We have to get there in the next four hours, otherwise we’ll be hiking in the dark!”

“Great,” said Jade, rolling her eyes. “She’s finally lost it. And she couldn’t lose it when we were buoyed by civilization. No, she had to lose it now, when we’re in the middle of nowhere, when it’s all snakes and trees and no one to come to our rescue but a fleet of friggin’ rabbits.”

Nigel and I looked at each other. He shrugged.

“What the hell?” he said. Flashing his tiny smile, a pocket mirror catching light, he started after her.

I held back, watching the others. For some reason, I didn’t want to go. I felt, not dread or apprehension, only an awareness that something grueling was looming in front of me, something so vast I couldn’t see all of it, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to take it on (see Nothing but a Compass and an Electrometer: The Story of Captain Scott and the Great Race to Claim Antarctica, Walsh, 1972).

Tightening the straps of my backpack, I headed after them.

A few yards in front of me, at the opening of the trail, Jade tripped on a root. “Oh, stunning. Simply stunning,” she said.

The northwest passage of Bald Creek Trail (a dotted black line on Hannah’s map) started out amiably enough, broad-shouldered as Mrs. Rowley, my second-grade teacher at Wadsworth Elementary, puffy with mulch and late afternoon sunshine, and fine, wispy, flyaway pines like the hair loosened from her ponytail at the end of the day. (Mrs. Rowley possessed the enviable knack for turning all “frowns upside down,” and all “snuffles into smiles.”)

“Maybe this isn’t so bad,” said Jade, turning around and grinning as she trudged along in front of me. “I mean it is kind of fun.”

An hour later, however, after Hannah’s yell for us to “keep right at the fork,” the road revealed its true character; it resembled not Mrs. Rowley, but the prickly Ms. Dewelhearst of Howard Country Day who dressed in dirt browns, with a posture taking cues from an umbrella handle and a face so withered she looked more walnut than human. The trail shriveled, forcing us to proceed single file and in relative silence as we skirted past painful brambles and weeds. (“Not a twitter during the examination or I’ll hold you back a grade and your life will be in ruins forevermore,” said Ms. Dewelhearst.)

“This freaking hurts,” said Jade. “I need a local anesthetic for my legs.”

“Stop complaining,” said Charles.

“How’s everyone doing?” shouted Hannah at the front, walking backward up the hill.

“Marvelous, marvelous. This is fucking Candy Land.”

“Only a half hour to the first lookout point!”

“I’m going to throw myself off,” said Jade.

We trudged on. In the woods, with its endless procession of malnourished pines and lop-eared rhododendrons and wan gray rocks, time seemed to speed up and slow down without provocation. I fell into a strange lull as I lumbered along in the very back, staring for minutes at a time at Jade’s red kneesocks (hiked up over her jeans; some precaution against rattlesnakes), the thick brown roots caterpillaring through the trail, the splotches of fading gold light staining the ground. The seven of us seemed to be the only things alive for miles (apart from a few invisible birds and a gray squirrel skittering up a tree’s torso) and one couldn’t help but wonder if Hannah was right, if this experience she’d forced us into was, in fact, a gateway to something else, some brave new understanding of the world. Pines frothed, imitating the ocean. A bird fluttered up, up, swiftly, like an air bubble, to the sky.

Oddly enough, the only person who appeared not to have fallen under this plodding spell was Hannah. Whenever the path stiffened into a straight line, I could see she’d hung back to walk with Leulah and talked animatedly — a little too animatedly — nodding and looking over at Lu’s face as if to memorize her expressions. And every now and then, she laughed, an abrupt and harsh sound, puncturing the bland peace of everything.

“Wonder what they’re gossiping about,” said Jade.

I shrugged.

We reached the first vista, Abram’s Peak, around 6:15 P.M.. It was a large rock promontory off to the right of the trail that opened up, like a stage, to reveal a grand expanse of mountains.

“That’s Tennessee,” Hannah said, shading her eyes.

We stood next to her in a line, staring at Tennessee. The only immediate sound was Nigel unwrapping the blueberry Pop-Tart he’d removed from his backpack. (As fish are impervious to drowning, Nigel was impervious to all Quietly Profound Moments.) The cold air tightened my throat, my lungs. The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed out against the horizon, were so pale, you couldn’t see where their backs ended and the sky began.

The view made me sad, but I suppose everyone, when happening upon a sprawling expanse of earth, all light and mist, all breathlessness and infinity, felt sad—“the enduring gloom of man,” Dad called it. You couldn’t help but think, not only about shortages of food, safe water, shockingly low averages of adult literacy and life expectancy in various developing nations, but also that shopworn thought about how many people were, at this precise moment, being born, and how many were dying, and that you, like some 6.2 billion others, were simply between these two ho-hum milestones, milestones that felt earth shattering while they were happening, but in the context of Hichraker’s 2003 edition of the World Geographical Factbook or M. C. Howard’s Finding the Cosmos in a Grain of Sand: The Nativity of the Universe (2004) they were ordinary, run-of-the-mill. It made one feel as if one’s life was no more imperative than a pine needle.

“Fuck you!” Hannah screamed.

The sound didn’t echo, as it would in a Looney Tune, but was swallowed immediately, like a thimble hurled at the sea. Charles turned and stared at her. The look on his face clearly indicated he thought she was crazy. The rest of us shifted like nervous cattle in a boxcar.

“F — Fuck you!” she shouted again, her voice hoarse.

She turned to us. “You should all say something.” She took another deep breath, tipped her head back and closed her eyes in the manner of someone preparing to sunbathe on a deck chair. Her eyelids trembled, her lips too.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments!” she screamed.

“You okay?” Milton asked her, laughing.

“There’s nothing funny about this,” Hannah said with a serious face. “Put some muscle into it. Pretend you’re a bassoon. And then say something. Something that comes from your soul.” She took a deep breath. “Henry David Thoreau!”

“Don’t be afraid to be afraid!” Leulah gasped rather abruptly, sticking out her chin like a child in a spitting contest.

“Nice,” said Hannah.

Jade huffed. “Oh, God. I guess we’re going to be born again from this experience?”

“I can’t hear you,” Hannah said.

“This is fucking ridiculous!” Jade shouted.

“Better.”

“Dang,” said Milton.

“Wimpy.”

“Dang!”

“Jenna Jameson?” shouted Charles.

“Is it a question or an answer?” said Hannah.

“Janet Jacme!”

“Get me the fuck out of here!” screamed Jade.

“Set limits and goals with equal precision!”

“I want to fucking go home!”

“Say hello to my leetle friend!” yelled Nigel, his face red.

“Sir William Shakespeare!” shouted Milton.

“He wasn’t a sir,” said Charles.

“Yes, he was.”

“He wasn’t knighted.”

“Let it go,” said Hannah.

“Jenna Jameson!”

“Blue?” Hannah asked.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t shouted anything. I felt like a person who couldn’t unstick her stutter. I believe I was trying to think of someone with a decent last name, someone who deserved this privilege of being sent into the wind. Chekhov, I’d been about to say him, but he seemed too stilted, even if I added the first name. Dostoevsky was too long. Plato seemed irritating, as if I were trying to one-up everyone by choosing the Very Root of Western Civilization and Thought. Nabokov, Dad would have approved, but no one, Dad included, seemed certain of the pronunciation. (“NA-bo-kov” was incorrect, the pronunciation of amateurs who bought Lolita under the impression it was a bodice ripper; yet “Na-BO-kov” fired like a defunct pistol.) It was even worse with Goethe. Molière was an interesting choice (no one had yet mentioned a Frenchman) but there was a problem shouting the guttural R. Racine was too obscure, Hemingway too macho, Fitzgerald fine, but in the end it was unforgivable what he did to Zelda. Homer was a good choice, though Dad said The Simpsons had bastardized his reputation.

“Be — be true to yourself!” shouted Leulah.

“Scorsese!”

“Behave yourself!” said Milton.

“That’s not a good one,” said Hannah. “Never behave yourself.”

“Never behave yourself!”

“Just do it!”

“Be all that you can be!”

“Don’t rely on the sound-bites of American advertising to tell you how you feel,” said Hannah. “Use your own words. What you have to say, what’s in your heart, is always powerful.”

“Full-sleeved tattoos!” shouted Jade. Jade’s face was now screwed up with emotion like a wringing out washcloth.

“Blue, you’re thinking too much,” said Hannah, turning to me.

“I — uh—” I said.

“The Canterbury Tales!”

“Mrs. Eugenia Sturds! May she live happily ever after with Mr. Mark Butters but may they not procreate and terrorize the world with their offspring!”

“Say the first thing that comes into your head—”

“Blue van Meer!” I blurted.

It slipped out like a big catfish. I froze. I prayed no one had heard me, that it’d swum into the air, far ahead of everyone’s ears.

“Hannah Schneider!” shouted Hannah.

“Nigel Creech!”

“Jade Churchill Whitestone!”

“Milton Black!”

“Leulah Jane Maloney!”

“Doris Richards my fifth-grade teacher with the incredible tits!”

“Hell yeah!”

“You don’t have to be lewd to be passionate. Dare to be real. To be serious.”

“Never listen to the awful things people say about you because they’re jealous!” Leulah pushed her hair out of her tiny, demure face. She had tears in her eyes. “One — one must persevere despite great adversity! One can never give up!”

“Don’t just be that way here,” Hannah said to us. She pointed at the mountains. “Be that way down there.”

The remaining hike to Sugartop Summit (now a disturbing dotted line on our keyless map) took another two hours and Hannah told us we needed to pick up the pace if we wanted to get there before dark.

As we walked, the light weakening, bony pines crowding closer and closer around us, Hannah again became engrossed in a private conversation, this time with Milton. She walked very close to him (so close that, at certain moments, she with her great blue backpack and he with his red one collided at the shoulders like bumper cars). He nodded at something she said, his large frame hunched down on the side where she walked, as if she were causing him to erode.

I knew how complimentary it could feel when Hannah talked to you, when she singled you out — opened your meek cover, boldly creased the spine, stared inside at your pages, searching for the point at which she’d stopped reading, anxious to find out what happens next. (She always read with great concentration, so you thought you were her favorite paperback until she abruptly put you down and started to read another with the same intensity.)

Twenty minutes later, Hannah was talking to Charles. They broke into screechy seagull laughter; she touched his shoulder, pulling him to her, their arms and hands for a moment entwined.

“Aren’t they the happy couple,” said Jade.

Not fifteen minutes later, Hannah was walking next to Nigel (I could tell from his lowered head and sideways glances, he was listening to her a little uneasily), and soon, she was in front of me talking to Jade.

Naturally, I assumed she’d eventually move back to talk to me, that this was a Hannah — Student Conference, and I, bringing up the rear, was the last on the list. But when they finished their conversation — Hannah was encouraging Jade to apply for a summer internship at The Washington Post (“Remember to be kind to yourself,” I also heard her say) — she whispered something more, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and then hurried to the front of our procession without so much as a glance in my direction.

“Okay! Don’t worry, guys!” she shouted. “We’re almost there!”

I was a mixture of indignation and melancholy by the time we reached Sugartop Summit. One tries not to pay attention to blatant favoritism (“Not everyone can be a member of the Van Meer Fan Club,” noted Dad), but when it is so unashamedly flung in one’s face, one can’t help but feel hurt, as if everyone else gets to be pine needles, but one is forced to be sap. Mercifully, the others didn’t realize she hadn’t talked to me, and so when Jade threw her backpack to the ground, stretched her arms over her head, a big smile sunseting her face and said, “She really knows what to say, you know what I mean? Amazing,” I admit I lied; I nodded in emphatic agreement and said, “She does.”

“Let’s try to get the tents up first,” Hannah said. “I’ll help with the first one. But go take a look at that view! You’ll be speechless!”

Despite Hannah’s patent enthusiasm, this campground I found dreary and anticlimactic, especially after the sprawling majesty of Abram’s Peak. Sugartop Summit comprised a circular dirt clearing flanked by mangy pines, and a blackened campfire where a few logs had recently burned, soft and gray around their edges like the muzzles of old dogs. Off to the right, beyond a cluster of boulders, was a bald rock ledge, narrow as a nearly closed door, where one could sit and spy on a naked, purplish mountain range sleeping under a shabby bedspread of fog. By now, the sun had drained away. Runny oranges and yellows clogged the horizon.

“Someone was here five minutes ago,” said Leulah.

I turned from the lookout point. She was standing in the middle of the clearing, pointing at the ground.

“What?” asked Jade next to her.

I walked over to them.

“Look.”

In front of the toe of her boot was a cigarette butt.

“It was burning three seconds ago.”

Crouching down, Jade picked it up as one picks up a dead goldfish. Carefully, she sniffed it.

“You’re right,” she said, throwing it on the ground. “I can smell it. Great. All we need. Some mountain scab waiting for nightfall to come fuck us all in the ass.”

“Hannah!” shouted Lu. “We have to get out of here!”

“What’s wrong?” asked Hannah.

Jade pointed at the cigarette butt.

“This is a very popular place to camp,” Hannah said.

“But it was burning,” Leulah said, her eyes saucered. “That’s how I saw it. It was orange. Someone’s here. Watching us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But none of us were smoking,” said Jade.

“It’s fine. It was probably a hiker stopping for a rest on his way up the trail. Don’t worry about it.” Hannah strolled back over to Milton, Charles and Nigel, who were trying to set up the tents.

“It’s all such a joke to her,” said Jade.

“We have to leave,” said Leulah.

“That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning,” said Jade, walking away. “Would anyone listen to me? No. I was the killjoy. The wet blanket.”

“Hey,” I said to Leulah, smiling. “I’m sure it’s okay.”

“Really?”

Despite having no evidence to back up my claim, I nodded.

Half an hour later, Hannah was starting a campfire. The rest of us were sitting on the bald rock eating rigatoni with Newman’s Own Fra Diavolo tomato sauce, heated up on the ministove, and French bread hard as igneous rock. We faced the view, even though there was nothing to see but a cauldron of darkness, a dark blue sky. The sky was a little nostalgic; it didn’t want to let go of the last frayed streak of light.

“What would happen if you fell off this rock thing?” asked Charles.

“You’d die,” said Jade through pasta.

“There’s no sign or anything. No ‘Please Remain Alert.’ No ‘Bad Place to Get Wasted.’ It’s just there. You fall? Too damn bad.”

“Is there any more parmesan cheese?”

“Wonder why it’s called Sugartop Summit,” said Milton.

“Yeah, who cooks up the lame names?” asked Jade, chewing.

“Rural folk,” said Charles.

“The best part is the quiet,” said Nigel. “You never notice how loud everything is until you’re up here.”

“I feel sorry for the Native Americans,” said Milton.

“Read Redfoot’s Dispossessed,” I said.

“I’m still hungry,” said Jade.

“How’re you still hungry?” asked Charles. “You ate more than everyone. You commandeered the hot pot.”

“I didn’t commandeer anything.”

“Thank God I didn’t go in for seconds. You probably would’ve bitten my hand off.”

“If you don’t eat enough, your body goes into starvation mode and then when you eat a slice of angel food cake your body treats it like it’s penne à la vodka. You balloon within twenty-four hours.”

“I don’t like the fact that someone was here,” Leulah said suddenly.

Everyone looked at her, startled by her voice.

“That cigarette butt,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry about it,” Milton said. “Hannah’s not worried. And she goes camping all the time.”

“Anyway, we couldn’t leave now if we wanted to,” said Charles. “It’s the middle of the night. We’d get lost. Probably would stumble into whatever it is that wanders around—”

“Convicts,” said Jade, nodding.

“And that guy who bombed abortion clinics.”

“They found him,” I said.

“But you didn’t see Hannah’s face,” said Leulah.

“What was wrong with her face?” asked Nigel.

Lu looked forlorn in her blue windbreaker, her arms hugging her knees, that Rapunzeled cord of hair roping her left shoulder, touching the ground.

“You could tell she was as scared as I was. But she didn’t want to say so because she thought she had to be an adult, responsible and everything.”

“Anyone pack a firearm?” asked Charles.

“Oh, I should have brought Jefferson’s,” Jade said. “It’s this big. Adorable. She keeps it in her underwear drawer.”

“We don’t need guns,” said Milton, lying back, staring at the sky. “If I had to go — I mean if it was really my fuckin’ time — I wouldn’t mind doing it here. Under these stars.”

“Well, you’re one of those contented morbid people,” said Jade. “I for one will do anything I can to make sure my number doesn’t come up for at least seventy-five years. If that means shooting someone in the head or biting off some parkie’s chu-chu, so be it.” She looked in the direction of the tents. “Where is she anyway? Hannah. I don’t see her.”

We carried the plates and pots back to the clearing and found Hannah eating a granola bar in front of the fire. She’d changed her clothes. She was wearing a green-and-black checkered button-down shirt. She asked us if we were still hungry and when Jade responded in the affirmative, suggested we make S’mores.

As we roasted marshmallows and Charles told his ghost story (cab driver, ghoulish fare), I became aware that Hannah, sitting on the opposite side of the fire, was staring at me. The campfire jack-o-lanterned everyone, made them orange, carved certain parts of their faces away, and the sockets around her dark eyes, blazing with light, appeared unusually hollow, as if they’d been further dug out with a spoon. I smiled as fiddle-dee-deeishly as I could, then pretended to be entranced with the Art of Roasting a Marshmallow. Yet, when I glanced at her not a minute later, her gaze hadn’t budged. She held on to my eyes, then, almost imperceptibly, pointed to her left, toward the woods. She touched her wristwatch. Her right hand motioned Five.

“And then the cab driver turned around,” Charles was saying. “The woman was gone. All that was left on the seat? A white chiffon scarf.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” said Charles, smiling.

“Suckiest ghost story I ever heard.”

“Sucked balls—”

“If I had a tomato I’d be throwing it at your head.”

“Who knows that one about the dog with no tail?” asked Nigel. “He goes around looking for it. Terrorizing people.”

“You’re thinking of ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’” said Jade, “that awful short story you read in fourth grade but will remember for the rest of your life for unknown reasons. That and ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’ Right, Retch?”

I nodded.

“There is one about a dog, but I can’t remember it.”

“Hannah knows a good one,” said Charles.

“I don’t,” said Hannah.

“Come on.”

“No. I’m an awful storyteller. Always have been.” She yawned. “What time is it?”

Milton checked his watch. “A little after ten.”

“We really shouldn’t stay up too late tonight,” she said. “We need to be rested. We’re starting early tomorrow.”

“Great.”

Needless to say, Fear and Anxiety typhooned through me. None of the others appeared to have noticed Hannah’s signal, not even Leulah, who’d forgotten all about the ominous cigarette butt. Now, rather blissfully, she ate her S’more (lint of melted marshmallow on her lip), smiling at whatever Milton was going on about, those tiny dimples splintering her chin. I sat on my knees and stared at the fire. I considered ignoring her (“When in doubt, feign oblivion”), but after five minutes, I noticed with horror Hannah was staring at me again, this time expectantly, as if I were playing Ophelia and had gotten so deep into character, into the throes of mental illness, I was missing all my cues, forcing Laertes and Gertrude to ad-lib. From the sheer force of her gaze, I found myself standing up, dusting myself off.

“I’ll — I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Where’re you going?” asked Nigel.

Everyone stared at me.

“To the bathroom,” I said.

Jade giggled. “I’m dreading that.”

“If the Native Americans could do it,” said Charles, “so can you.”

“Native Americans also scalped people.”

“Might I suggest dry leaves? A bit of moss?” said Nigel smirking.

“We have toilet paper,” Hannah said. “It’s in my tent.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“In my bag,” she said.

“Is there any more chocolate?” Jade asked.

I walked to the other side of the tents where it was dark and sandpapery and waited for my eyes to adjust. When I was certain no one had followed me, when I could hear their voices crackling with the fire, I stepped into the woods. Branches rubber-banded against my legs. I turned around and saw with surprise that the pines had fallen into place behind me, like those hippie beads decorating a doorway. Slowly, I moved along the arc of the clearing, back in the trees, so no one would see me, and stopped somewhere near the far left side, where I thought Hannah had pointed.

The campfire was close, some ten yards in front of me, and I could see Hannah still sitting with the others, resting her head in her hand. Her face looked so sleepy and satisfied, for a second I wondered if I’d been hallucinating. I told myself that if she didn’t appear in three minutes, I’d go back and never speak to that crazy woman again — rather, two minutes, for two minutes was all it took for almost half of the nuclei in a lump of aluminum-28 to decay, for one to die from VX exposure (pronounced “VEEKS”), for 150 Sioux men, women and children to be shot at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, for a Norwegian woman in 1866 by the name of Gudrid Vaaler to give birth to a son, Johan Vaaler, future inventor of the paper clip.

Two minutes was enough time for Hannah.

Heart of Darkness

I watched her stand up and say something to them. I heard my name, so I guessed she said she wanted to check on me. She walked toward the tents and out of sight.

I waited another minute, watching the others — Jade was doing her exaggerated impression of Ms. Sturds during Morning Announcements, feet wide apart, that bizarre rocking movement as if she were a ferry crossing a choppy English Channel (“This is a very scary time for our country!” Jade cried, clapping her hands together, eyes bulging) — and then I heard spine cracks of branches and leaves, and saw Hannah coming toward me, her face smudged by the dark. When she saw me, she smiled and pressed a finger to her lips, motioning for me to follow her.

Obviously, this surprised me. I didn’t have my flashlight and the wind was picking up; I was wearing nothing more substantial than jeans, a T-shirt, the sweatshirt Dad had given me from the University of Colorado at Picayune and a windbreaker. But she was already moving swiftly away, weaving in and out of the trees, and so, with a quick glance back at the others — they were laughing, their voices tightly woven together — I headed after her.

Out of earshot from the campground, I was going to ask what we were doing, but when I looked at her, I saw the focused, intense look on her face, and it silenced me. She removed a flashlight — she was wearing one of those fanny packs in black or dark blue, which I hadn’t noticed before — but that meek circle of white light could barely shove back the dark, illuminating nothing but a handful of skinny tree-shins.

We followed no path. At first I tried keeping a mental Hansel and Gretel trail of crumbs, noticing the irregularities — discoloration of bark, okay, giant toadlike rock next to that dead tree, skeleton branches stretched out in an upside-down crucifixion, that’s promising — but such distinctions were rare and ultimately pointless, and after five minutes, I stopped and walked blindly next to her, like a man no longer dog-paddling, allowing himself to drown.

“They’ll be fine for a little while,” she said. “But we don’t have much time.”

I don’t know how long we walked. (In what turned out to be an unbearable oversight, I was not wearing a watch.) After ten minutes or so, she stopped suddenly, and, unzipping the pouch around her waist, removed a map — different from the one she’d given us, colored, much more detailed — as well as a tiny compass. She studied them.

“A little farther,” she said.

We walked on.

It was odd, the blind way I followed, and even now, I can’t quite explain why I went, without protest or questions or even fear. During those episodes in one’s life in which one assumes one will be paralyzed with dread, one isn’t. I floated, as if I were doing nothing more than riding the mechanical brown canoe on the Enchanting Amazon River Ride at Walter’s Wonderworld in Alpaca, Maryland. I noticed peculiar details: Hannah chewing the inside of her lip (the way Dad did when grading an unexpectedly apt paper), the toe of my leather boot kicking the flashlight beam, the pine trees’ restless shifts and heaves, as if they were all unable to sleep, the way she placed her right hand, every minute or two, on that satchel clipped around her waist, like a pregnant woman touching her stomach.

She stopped walking and checked her watch.

“This is good,” she said, turning off the flashlight.

Slowly my eyes calibrated to the darkness. We appeared to be standing in a spot we’d walked through five minutes before. I could make out the fine corduroy of all those trees enveloping us, and Hannah’s rapt face, shiny, a sort of bluish mother-of-pearl.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said, staring at me. She took a deep breath, exhaled, but said nothing. She was nervous, worried even. She swallowed, took another beleaguered breath, pressed her hand to her collarbone and left it there, a white, wilting hand-corsage. “I’m terrible at this. I’m good at other things. At math. Languages. Orders. Making people comfortable. I’m horrible at this.”

“At what?” I asked.

“Truth.” She laughed, a weird choking sound. She hunched up her shoulders and looked up at the sky. I looked too, because looking up at the sky was contagious, like yawns. There it was: hoisted into the air by the trees, a heavy black patch, the stars, little rhinestones like the ones in June Bug Rachel Groom’s cowboy boots.

“I can’t blame anyone, you know,” Hannah said. “Just myself. Everyone makes choices. God, I need a cigarette.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“No. Yes.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe we should head back.”

“No, I–I understand if you think I’m nuts.”

“I don’t think you’re nuts,” I said, though as soon as I said it, of course, I began to wonder if she was.

“It’s not bad, what I have to tell you. More for me. Awful for me. Don’t think I don’t know how awful. How sick. Living like this — oh, you’re afraid. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be like this, deep in the enchanted forest, I know, it’s a little medieval. But it’d be impossible to talk without one of them coming up, Hannah this, Hannah that. Oh, God. It’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible?” I asked, though she didn’t seem to hear me. She appeared to be saying these things to herself.

“When I thought about how I was going to say it — God, I’m a coward. Deluded. Sick. Sick.” She shook her head, touched her hands to her eyes. “See, there are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I–I’m pathetic, aren’t I? Sick. I hate myself, I really do. I…”

In many ways, there is nothing more disturbing than an adult who reveals herself not to be an Adult and all that word is supposed to imply — not solid, but leaking, not fixed, but seriously unglued. It was like being in first grade again, watching some adorable hand puppet rising up, revealing the monstrous human attached. Her chin crinkled with strange unknown emotions. She wasn’t crying, but her dark mouth curled down at the edges.

“You’ll listen to what I say?” Her voice was low, quivery like a grandmother’s, but needy like a child’s. She stepped forward, a little too close to me, her black eyes swerving over my face.

“Hannah—?”

“Promise me.”

I stared at her. “Okay.”

This seemed to calm her slightly.

“Thank you.”

Again, she took a deep breath — but didn’t speak.

“Is this about my father?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure why, without thinking about it, that particular question flew out of my mouth. Maybe I hadn’t quite gotten over the revelation of Kitty: if Dad had lied so smoothly about her, it was entirely possible he’d lied about other clammy trysts with St. Gallway staff. Or perhaps it was a reflex; throughout my life, without explanation, teachers had pulled me aside in hallways and lunchrooms, by cubbyholes and jungle gyms, and as I hyperventilated, waited to hear I’d been bad, would be harshly punished, that I’d botched a Unit Test and would be held back a year, they always surprised me by leaning in with their grayed eyes and coffee breaths and asking me inane questions about Dad (Did he smoke? Was he single? / When’s a good time to call and mingle?). Frankly, if I was to form a hypothesis for such cases of being bizarrely singled out, it’d be: It All Comes Down to Dad. (Even he upheld this premise; if a supermarket check-out person was sullen, Dad concluded it was because of the condescending way Dad had accidentally looked at him while piling our groceries on the conveyor belt.)

I couldn’t gauge Hannah’s reaction, however. She stared at the ground, her mouth open a little, as if in shock, or perhaps she hadn’t heard me and was trying to think of something to say. And as we stood in that endless carbonated fizz of trees and I waited for her to respond with “Yes,” or “No,” or “Don’t be crazy”—a few yards behind us, there was a small but distinct shift of something.

My heart lurched. Instantly, Hannah switched on the flashlight, pointing it in the direction of the noise, and to my horror, the light actually snagged something — a reflection of some kind, a pair of glasses — and then it began crashing away from us, barging through the branches and bushes and pine needles and leaves on what was, indisputably, two feet. I was too horrified to move or scream, but Hannah clamped a hand over my mouth and held it there until we couldn’t hear it anymore, until there was only the stark night and the sound of the wind shivering in the trees.

She turned off the flashlight. She pressed it into my hand.

“Don’t turn it on unless you have to.”

I could barely hear her, she spoke so quietly.

“Take this, too.” She handed me a thick piece of paper, the map. “A precaution. Don’t lose it. I have the other one, but I’ll need this when I come back. Stay here. Don’t say a word.”

It happened so quickly. She squeezed my arm, let it go, began to move away in the direction of that thing, which I wanted to believe was a bear or wild boar — the most widely distributed land animal, known for running over 40 mph and ripping meat off a man’s bones faster than a truck driver could eat a buffalo wing — but I knew in my heart, it wasn’t. No reference book could second-guess the truth: it had been a human being close to us, what zoologist Bart Stuart calls in Beasts (1998), “the most vicious animal of all.”

“Wait.” My heart felt as if it was being toothpaste-squeezed into my neck. I started to follow her. “Where are you going?”

“I said stay here.”

It was a harsh voice and it stopped me cold.

“I bet that was Charles,” she added gently. “You know him — so jealous. Don’t be afraid.” Her face was large, serious, and even though she smiled, that small smile floating there like a Fall Webworm Moth in the dark, I knew she didn’t actually believe what she said.

She leaned forward, kissed me on the cheek. “Give me five minutes.”

Words tangled in my mouth, in my head. But in the end, I just stood there. I let her go.

“Hannah?”

I began to snivel her name after a minute or two, when I could still hear her footsteps and the realization I was standing alone in this wild jungle hit me, when the woods’ indifference seemed to imply I’d probably die here, shivering, alone, lost, a statistic to be tacked to a police station’s bulletin board, my stiff-smiling class picture (I hoped they didn’t use the one from Lamego High) stuck to the front of a local newspaper, some article about me hashed, rehashed, then recycled into toilet paper or used for house training a pet.

I called her name at least three or four times, but she didn’t answer and soon, soon I couldn’t hear her anymore.

I don’t know how long I waited.

It felt like hours, but the night whirred on, without interruption, so maybe it was fifteen minutes. It was the one thing, oddly enough, I found utterly unbearable: not knowing the time. I understood in full why convicted murderer Sharp Zulett had written in his surprisingly glib autobiography Living in the Pit (1980) (a book I wrongly once thought exceedingly hyper and melodramatic), that “in the fleapit”—the “fleapit” was the pitch-black four-by-nine-foot cell at Lumgate, the maximum-security federal prison outside of Hartford—“you have to make yourself let go of the rope of Time, let yourself float there in the dark, live in it. Otherwise you’ll go mad. You’ll start to see devils. One guy came out of the fleapit after only two days, and he’d pulled out his own eye” (p. 131).

I did my best to live in it. Aloneness settled over me, heavy, like that thing they put over you during X-rays. I sat down on the prickly pine-needled ground, and soon found myself unable to move. Sometimes I thought I heard her coming back, that sweet munch of footsteps, but it was nothing but the trees crashing their arms together as if pretending, in the escalating wind, to play the cymbals.

Whenever I heard an awful noise, one I couldn’t identify, I told myself it was nothing but Chaos Theory, the Doppler Effect or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to lost people in the dark. I think I repeated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in my head at least one thousand times: the mathematical product of the combined uncertainties of concurrent measurements of position and momentum in a specified direction could never be less than Planck’s constant, h, divided by 4?. This meant, rather encouragingly, that my uncertain position and zero momentum and the Beast Responsible for the Sound’s uncertain position and uncertain momentum had to sort of null each other out, leaving me with what is commonly known in the scientific world as “wide-ranging perplexity.”

When a person is unaided and terrified for over an hour (again, an approximation), the fear becomes part of the person, another arm. You stop noticing it. You wonder what other people — people who never let others “see them sweat,” to use a familiar phrase — would do in your shoes. You try to let that guide you.

Dad said at the end of his Musical Chair Survival: The Quintessence of Predicaments seminar at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch that one or two individuals in times of crisis turn into Heroes, a handful into Villains, the rest into Fools. “Try not to be a simpering idiot, the Fool category, where one descends into simian simpering, paralyzed by the desire to just die, quickly, painlessly. They want to roll over like possums. Well, decide. Are you a man or are you a nocturnal animal? Do you have courage? Can you comprehend the meaning of ‘do not go gentle into that good night’? If you’re a worthwhile human being, if you’re not just filler, Styrofoam, stuffing for a Thanksgiving turkey, garden mulch — you must fight. Fight. Fight for what you believe in.” (When Dad said the second-to-last “fight,” he slammed his fist onto the podium.)

I stood up, my knees stiff. I turned on the flashlight. I hated the seedy light the flashlight made. I felt as if I were shining it into an orgy of trees, gaunt, naked bodies crowding together to hide themselves. Little by little, I began to proceed in what I guessed was the direction Hannah had gone. I followed the flashlight, playing a little game with myself by pretending I wasn’t directing it, but God was (with the help of a few bored angels), not because He favored me over everyone else on earth in a quandary, but because it was a slow night, and He had very little on his radar in terms of Widespread Panic or Genocide.

At certain times, I stopped, listened, tiptoed around grimy thoughts of being followed, raped and killed by an enraged parkie with pointy teeth and a chest like a sandbag, my life ending up nothing more than an agonizing? in the vein of Violet Martinez. I concentrated instead on the laminated map Hannah had given me, labeled at the top “The Great Smoky Mountain National Park” (underneath this headline, rather meekly: “Courtesy of Friends of the Smokies”), with its helpful labels and blobs of mountains, color corresponding to elevation—“Cedar Gorge,” I read, “Gatlinburg Welcome Center,” “Hatcher Mountain,” “Pretty Hollow Gap,” “6,592 ft. above sea level.” Having no inkling where I was, I’d have been just as well off with a page from Where’s Waldo? (Handford, 1987). Still, I took great care to shine the flashlight onto it, study all those squiggly lines and the pleasant Times New Roman font, that prim Key, little pledges, little pats on the back, assuring me that in this dark there was an Order, a Grand Scheme of Things, that the armless, headless tree standing in front of me, was somewhere, a speck, on the map here, and all I needed to do was find the thing that would link the two elements and suddenly (with a little poof of light) the night would flatten and divide into asparagus green squares I could follow home, A3ing, B12ing, D2ing back to Dad.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about the blueprint of a story Hannah had mentioned back in the fall (no details, only bare bones dimensions of what had happened) — the occasion in the Adirondacks when she’d saved the life of a man who injured his hip. She’d said she “ran and ran,” eventually finding campers with radios, and I thus started mentally cheerleading: perhaps I, too, would come across Campers with Radios, perhaps Campers with Radios were simply around the bend. But the longer I walked and the trees swarmed like prisoners wanting to be fed, the more it occurred to me I was as likely to find Campers with Radios as I was to find a brand-new Jeep Wrangler parked in a clearing with keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas. There was nothing here, nothing but me, the branches, the quicksand darkness. I couldn’t help but wonder what screwy environmentalists were always complaining about, the “diminishing environment” and such, because there was a surplus, an overkill of Environment; it was time to come in here and start clear-cutting, put up Dunkin’ Donuts and a parking lot as far as the eye could see, big, square and exposed, lit up at midnight like an August afternoon. In such a wonderful place, one’s shadows were not mangled but drifting behind you in long neat lines. You could take a protractor to them and effortlessly determine the exact angle to your feet: thirty degrees.

I’d been walking for a while, maybe an hour or so, forcing my head to float on these rickety rafts of thought to avoid sinking — when I first heard the noise.

It was so acute, so rhythmic and confident, the entire night-tarred world seemed to quiet itself like sinners at church. It sounded — I stood very still, tried to rein in my breathing — like a child swinging. (“A child swinging” sounds très horrorfilmesque, but I found nothing immediately frightening about the sound.) And though it appeared to fly in the face of reason and common sense, without thinking very much, I began to follow it.

It ceased every now and then. I wondered if I was hearing things. Then it resumed, shyly. I walked on, the flashlight thrusting all those pines back, trying to think, trying to figure out what it could be, trying not to be afraid, but pragmatic and strong like Dad, trying to follow his Determination Theory. I found myself channeling Ms. Gershon of AP Physics, because whenever there was a question in class, she never answered it outright, but turned to the dry-erase board and without a word, dully wrote out five to seven bullet points explaining the answer. She always stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the dry-erase board because she was shy about her back. And yet Ms. Pamela “PMS” Gershon’s back told stories; there was a spot of thinning hair on the back of her head, her pants in tan and taupe clung to her like baggy second skins, her bottom was squashed like a sat-upon Sunday hat. Ms. Gershon, if she were here, would attempt to illuminate all there was to illuminate about this sound, this child on a swing, writing at the top of the dry-erase board (she stood on tiptoe, her right arm high above her head as if she were rock climbing): “Phenomenon of a Child on a Swing in a Heavily Wooded Region: The Seven-Point Spectrum of Conceptual Physics.” Her first bullet point would read, “As Atoms: Both Child on a Swing and Swing are composed of small moving particles,” and her last bullet point would read, “As Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity: If a Child on a Swing had a Twin who boarded a spaceship and traveled close to the speed of light, the Twin would return to Earth younger than the Child on the Swing.”

Another step forward, the sound was louder now. I found myself in a small open space paved with pine needles, fragile, trembling bushes at my feet. I turned, my yellow light shuffling, tripping like a roulette ball across the tree trunks, and then it stopped.

She was astoundingly close, hanging by her neck by an orange rope three feet above the ground. Her tongue bulged from her mouth. My flashlight electrified her giant eyes and the green squares on her checkered shirt. And her inflated face, her expression — it was so inhuman, so sickening, I still don’t know how I knew, in that instant, it was she. Because it wasn’t Hannah, it was unreal and monstrous, something no textbook or encyclopedia could ever prepare you for.

And yet, it was.

The aftermath of seeing her has been locked away into an unassailable prison cell of Memory. (“Witness traumatization,” Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper later explained.) Despite nights lying awake, trying all sorts of probing keys, I cannot recall my screams, or falling down, or running so fast that I sideswiped something and cut open my left knee, which would need three stitches, or even letting go of the map she’d asked me to hold on to in that dry whisper like a piece of paper touching your cheek.

I was found the next morning, at approximately 6:45 A.M. by one John Richards, age 41, on a trout fly-fishing excursion with his son, Ritchie, 16. My voice had ripped to nothing. My face and hands were so covered in needlelike scratches and mud, a little bit of my own blood, too, they told Dad when they first saw me — (close to Forkridge Trail, nine miles from Sugartop Summit) sitting against a tree, a dead-eyed look on my face, still gripping a dying flashlight — they thought I was the boogeyman.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I opened my eyes and found myself on a bed in a curtained cubicle. I attempted to speak, but my voice was a scrape. A white flannel blanket covered me from chin to woolly green ankle sock. I seemed to be wearing a light-blue cotton hospital gown patterned with faded sailboats, an Ace bandage on my left knee. Jabbering incessantly, everywhere, was hospital Morse Code: beeps, toots, rings, clicks, a page for Dr. Bullard to pick up Line 2. Someone was talking about a recent trip to Florida with the wife. A square piece of gauze and a small hypodermic needle were stuck into my left hand (mosquito), which was linked by a thin tube to a bag of clear liquid hanging over me (mistletoe). My head, rather my whole body, felt helium-ballooned. I stared at the folds of the spearmint curtain on my left.

It swooshed. A nurse came in. She swooshed it closed behind her. She glided over to me as if she weren’t on feet but casters with wheel locks.

“You’re awake,” she announced. “How do you feel? Are you hungry? Don’t try to talk. Sit tight and let me change this bag and then I’ll get the doctor.”

She replaced the IV bag and wheeled herself away.

I smelled latex and rubbing alcohol. I stared at the ceiling, at the white rectangles mottled with brown specks like vanilla ice cream. Someone was asking where Johnson’s crutches were. “They were labeled when he came in.” A woman was laughing. “Married for five years. The key is to act like it’s your first date every day.” “Got kids?” “We’re trying.”

Another swoosh and a small tan doctor appeared, girlishly boned with crow-black hair. Around his neck he wore a plastic Backstage Pass that featured, beneath a pixilated picture of himself with the skin tone of a jalapeño, a barcode, as well as his name: THOMAS C. SMART, SENIOR ER RESIDENT. As he walked over to me, his considerable white lab coat whimsically floated out behind him.

“How’re we doing?” he asked. I tried to speak — my okay came out like a knife spreading jelly on burnt toast — and he nodded understandingly, as if he spoke the language. He jotted something down on his clipboard, and then asked me to sit up and take slow, deep breaths as he pressed the icy stethoscope into my back in different places.

“Looking good,” he said with a tired, fake smile.

In a gust of white, a swoosh — he disappeared. Once again, I stared at the glum spearmint curtain. It trembled whenever someone rushed past it on the opposite side, as if it were afraid. A phone rang, was hastily answered. A stretcher rolled down the hall: chick peeps of wobbly wheels.

“I understand, sir. Fatigue, exposure, no hypothermia, but dehydration, the cut to her knee, other minor cuts and scrapes. Evident shock too. I’d like to keep her here a few more hours, have her eat something. Then we’ll see. We’ll give her a prescription for the knee pain. A mild sedative too. The stitches will come out in a week.”

“You’re not following me. I’m not talking about stitches. I want to know what she’s been through.”

“We don’t know. We notified the park. There are rescue personnel—”

“I don’t give a flying fuck about rescue personnel—”

“Sir, I—”

“Do not sir me. I want to see my daughter. I want you to get her something to eat. I want you to find her a decent nurse, not one of these guinea pigs who’d unwittingly kill any kid with an ear infection. She needs to go home and rest, not relive whatever ordeal she’s been through with some bozo, some clown who couldn’t even graduate from high school, who wouldn’t know a motive if it bit him on the ass, all because some chicken-’n-biscuits police force doesn’t have the proficiency to figure it out themselves.”

“It’s standard, sir, with these sorts of mishaps—”

“Mishaps?”

“I mean—”

“A mishap is spilling Kool-Aid on a white carpet. A mishap is losing a fucking earring.”

“She — she’ll only speak to him if she’s up to it. You have my word.”

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than your word, Doctor what does that thing say, Dr. Thomas, Tom Smarts?”

“Actually, it’s without the s.”

“What is that, your stage name?”

I rolled off the bed and, making sure my arm and the other plastic cords to which my chest was attached did not fully tear out of whatever machine I was rigged to, I walked the few feet to the curtain, the bed reluctantly trolleying after me. I peered out.

Standing next to the large white administrative hexagon in the middle of the Emergency Room was Dad, in corduroy. His gray-blond hair flopped across his forehead — something that happened during lectures — his face was red. In front of him stood White Lab Coat, clasping his hands and nodding. To his left, behind the counter, sat Fuzzy Hair and, faithfully at her side, Mars Orange Lipstick, both of them gazing at Dad, one pressing a phone receiver to her pink neck, the other pretending to scrutinize a clipboard but eavesdropping.

“Dad,” I scraped.

He heard me immediately. His eyes widened.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

As it turned out, although I had no recollection of it whatsoever, I’d apparently been quite the Talk Show Host with John Richards and his son, when they carried me, their limp bride, half a mile to their pickup truck. (White Lab Coat was very informative when he explained, where memory was concerned, I could “expect anything and everything”—as if I’d only bumped my head, as if I’d merely had a head-on collision.)

With what I imagine to be the energized yet charred voice of someone recently struck by lightning (over 100 million volts of direct current) with dilated pupils and splinter sentences I told them my name, address, telephone number, that I’d been on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains, that something bad had happened. (I actually used the word bad.) I didn’t respond to their direct questions — I was unable to tell them specifically what I’d seen — but apparently I repeated the words “She’s departed” throughout the forty-five minute ride to Sluder County Hospital.

This detail was particularly unsettling. “She’s Departed” was a grim nursery song Dad and I used to sing on the highways when I was five, learned in Ms. Jetty’s kindergarten in Oxford, Mississippi. It followed the generic melody of “Oh, My Darlin’ Clementine”: “She’s departed, she’s a nowhere, she’s my girl and she’s a-gone / She went drownin’ in the river, washed up somewhere in Babylon.”

(Dad learned most of this after bonding with my two knights in shining armor in the Emergency waiting room, and though they left well before I was awake, Dad and I later sent them a thank-you note and three hundred dollars’ worth of new fly-fishing equipment blindly purchased from Bull’s-eye Bait and Tackle.)

Due to my bizarre lucidity, Sluder County Hospital had been able to contact Dad immediately, also alert the Park Ranger on duty, a man by the name of Roy Withers, who began a search of the area. It was also why the Burns County Police dispatched an officer from their Patrol Unit, Officer Gerard Coxley, to the hospital, so he could talk to me.

“I’ve already made arrangements,” Dad said. “You’re not talking to anyone.”

Once again I was behind the spearmint curtain in the spongy bed, mummified by heated flannel blankets, trying to eat with one pipe cleaner arm the turkey sandwich and chocolate chip cookie Mars Orange Lipstick had brought me from the cafeteria. My head felt like that colorful balloon they used in the classic film Around the World in80Days. I seemed to be able only to stare at the curtain, chew and swallow, and sip the coffee Fuzzy Hair had brought according to Dad’s specific instructions (“Blue likes her coffee with skim milk, no sugar. I like mine black.”): stare, chew, swallow, stare, chew, swallow. Dad was on the left side of the bed.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “My girl’s a champion. Not afraid of anything. We’ll get you home in an hour. You’ll rest. Soon be right as rain.”

I was aware Dad, all Trumanish voice and Kennedyesque grin, was repeating these cheerleader phrases to inspire team spirit in himself, not me. I didn’t mind. I’d been given some sedative via the IV and hence felt too balmy to grasp the full extent of his anxiety. To explain: I’d never actually told Dad about the camping trip. I’d told him I’d be spending the weekend at Jade’s. I didn’t mean to be deceitful, especially in lieu of his newfound McDonald’s-styled approach to parenting (Always Open and Ready to Serve), but Dad despised outdoor activities such as camping, skiing, mountain biking, para-sailing, base jumping and, even more, the “dimwitted dulls” who did them. Dad had not even the remotest desire to take on the Forest, the Ocean, the Mountain or the Thin Air, as he detailed extensively in “Man’s Hubris and the National World,” published in 1982 in the now-obsolete Sound Opinions Press.

I present Paragraph 14, the section entitled “Zeus Complex”: “The egocentric Man seeks to taste immortality by engaging in demanding physical challenges, wholeheartedly bringing himself to the brink of death in order to taste an egotistical sense of accomplishment, of victory. Such a feeling is false and short-lived, for Nature’s power over Man is absolute. Man’s honest place is not in extreme conditions, where, let’s face it, he’s frail as a flea, but in work. It is in building things and governing, the creation of rules and ordinances. It is in work Man will find life’s meaning, not in the selfish, heroin-styled rush of hiking Everest without oxygen and nearly killing himself and the poor Sherpa carrying him.”

Due to Paragraph 14, I didn’t tell Dad. He’d never have let me go, and though I hadn’t especially wanted to go myself, I also didn’t want the others to go and have a mind-blowing experience without me. (I had no idea how mind-blowing it would actually be.)

“I’m proud of you,” Dad said.

“Dad,” was all I could scuff. I did manage to touch his hand and it responded like one of those mimosa plants, but in the opposite way, opening.

“You will be fine, little cloud. Fine. Fine as a fiddle.”

“Fit,” I scratched.

“Fit as a fiddle.”

“Promise?”

“Of course I promise.”

An hour later, my voice had begun to tiptoe back. A new nurse, Stern Brow (illicitly kidnapped by White Lab Coat from another floor of the hospital, in order to placate Dad) took my blood pressure and pulse (“Doin’ fine,” she said before humphing off).

Although I felt bug-snug under the sunshine lights, the hospital beeps, clicks and toots soothing as fish noises one hears in the ocean while snorkeling, gradually, I noticed my memory of the night before had begun to show signs of life. As I sipped my coffee listening to the aggravated mutters of a croaky gentleman recovering from an asthma attack on the other side of the curtain (“Reely now. Got to get home and feed my dog.” “Just another half hour Mr. Elphinstone.”), suddenly I was aware Hannah had snuck into my head: not as I’d seen her—God no—but sitting at her dining room table listening to one of us, her head tilted, smoking a cigarette, then ruthlessly stabbing it out on her bread plate. She did that on two occasions. I also thought about the heels of her feet, a tiny detail not many others noticed: sometimes they were black and so dry, they resembled pavement.

“Sweet? What’s the matter?”

I told Dad I wanted to see the policeman. Reluctantly, he agreed and twenty minutes later I was telling Officer Coxley everything I could remember.

According to Dad, Officer Gerard Coxley had been waiting patiently in the Emergency waiting room for over three hours, shooting the shit with the attendant nurse and other Low Priority patients, drinking Pepsi and “reading Cruising Rider with such an immersed expression I could tell it’s his secret instruction manual,” Dad reported with distaste. Yet Still Life patience appeared to be one of Gerard Coxley’s predominating characteristics (see False Fruits, Drupes and Dry Fruits, Swollum, 1982).

He sat with his long skinny legs crossed like a lady’s on the low blue plastic chair Stern Brow had carried in for the occasion. He balanced a withered green notepad on his left thigh and wrote on it, left-handedly, in ALL CAPS, with the speed of an apple seed burgeoning into a ten-foot tree.

Midforties, with messy auburn hair melting over his head and the drowsy squint of a late-August lifeguard, Officer Coxley was also a man of reductions, of distillations, of one-liners. I was propped up with pillows (Dad shadowing Coxley at the foot of the bed), trying my hardest to tell him everything, but when I completed a sentence — a complex sentence, full of invaluable details painstakingly mined from all that darkness, because confusingly, none of it seemed real anymore; every recollection now seemed Mr. DeMille-lighted in my head, all klieg lights and special effects and lurid stage makeup, pyrotechnics, atmospherics — after all of this, Officer Coxley would write down only one, maybe two words. ST. GALLWAY 6 KIDS HANA SCHEDER TEACHER DEAD? SUGARTOP VIOLET MARTINEZ.

He could shrink any plot of Dickens into haiku.

“Only a few more questions,” he said, squinting at his e.e. cummings poem.

“And when she came and found me in the woods,” I said, “she was wearing a large satchel, which she hadn’t had on before. Did you get that?”

“Sure I got it.” SATCHEL

“And that person who followed us, I want to say it was a man, but I don’t know. He was wearing large glasses. Nigel, one of the kids with us, he wears glasses, but it wasn’t him. He’s very slight and he wears tiny spectacles. This person was large and the glasses were large. Like Coke bottles.”

“Sure.” BOTTLES

“To reiterate,” I said, “Hannah wanted to tell me something.”

Coxley nodded.

“That was the reason she took me away from the campsite. But she never got to tell me what it was. That was when we heard this person near us and she went after him.”

By now my voice was nothing more than wind, at its most emphatic, a jet stream, but I wheezed on and on, in spite of Dad’s concerned frown.

“Okay, okay. I got it.” CAMPSITE Officer Coxley looked at me, raising rambutan-eyebrows and smiling as if he’d never had an Eyewitness quite like me before. In all probability, he hadn’t. I had a disturbing feeling Officer Coxley’s experience with Eyewitnesses was geared not toward murder or even burglary, but motor vehicle accidents. The fifth of his series of questions (posed in such a bland voice, one could almost see the paper labeled EYEWITNESS QUESTIONNAIRE thumbtacked to the station bulletin board next to a sign-up sheet for the 52nd Annual Auto Theft Weekend Roundtable and the Police Intra-Personals Corner, where department singles posted their Seekings in twenty-eight words or less) had been the supremely disheartening: “Did you notice any problems at the scene of the mishap?” I think he was hoping I’d say, “Out-of-order traffic signal,” or “Heavy foliage obscuring a stop sign.”

“Have any of them been found yet?” I asked.

“We’re working on it,” said Coxley.

“What about Hannah?”

“Like I said. Everyone’s doing their job.” He ran a thick podlike finger down the green notepad. “Now can you tell me more about your relationship to—?”

“She was a teacher at our school,” I said. “St. Gallway. But she was more than that. She was a friend.” I took a deep breath.

“You’re talking about—”

“Hannah Schneider. And there’s an ‘i’ in her last name.”

“Oh, right.” I

“Just to be clear, she’s the person I think I saw…”

“Okay,” he said, nodding as he wrote. FRIEND

At this point, Dad must have decided I’d had enough, because he stared at Coxley very intensely for a moment and then, as if deciding something, stood up from the end of the bed (see “Picasso enjoying high times at Le Lapin Agile, Paris,” Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p. 148).

“I think you must have everything then, Poirot,” Dad said. “Very methodical. I’m impressed.”

“What’s that?” asked Officer Coxley, frowning.

“You’ve given me a new respect for law enforcement. How many years on the job now, Holmes? Ten, twelve?”

“Oh. Uh, going on eighteen now.”

Dad nodded, smiling. “Impressive. I’ve always loved the lingo — DOA, DT, OC, white shirts, skels — isn’t that right? You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve watched more than my share of Columbo. I can’t help but regret never going into the profession. May I ask how you got into it?”

“My father.”

“How wonderful.”

“His father too. Go back generations.”

“If you ask me, there aren’t nearly enough young people going into the force. Bright kids all go for the high-flying jobs and does it make them happy? I doubt it. We need sound people, smart people. People who know their head from their elbows.”

“I say the same thing.”

“Really?”

“Good friend of mine’s son went to Bryson City. Worked as a banker. Hated it. Came back here, I hired him. Said he’d never been happier. But it takes a special kind of man. Not everyone—”

“Certainly not,” said Dad, shaking his head.

“Cousin of mine. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t have the nerves.”

“I can imagine.”

“I can tell straight off if they’re going to make it.”

“No kidding.”

“Sure. Hired one guy from Sluder County. Whole department thought he was great. But me. I could tell from the look in his eyes. It wasn’t there. Two months later he ran off with the wife of a fine man in our Detective Division.”

“You never know,” said Dad, sighing as he glanced at his watch. “As much as I’d love to keep talking—”

“Oh—”

“The doc out here, I think he’s pretty good, he suggested Blue get home to rest and get her voice back. I guess we’ll wait to hear about the others.” Dad extended his hand. “I know we’re in good hands.”

“Thank you,” said Coxley, rising to his feet, shaking Dad’s hand.

“Thank you. I trust you’ll contact us at home in the event of additional questions? You have our telephone number?”

“Uh, yes, I do.”

“Terrific,” said Dad. “Let us know any way we can be of service.”

“Sure. And best of luck to you.”

“Same to you, Marlowe.”

And then, before Officer Coxley knew quite what had happened to him, before I knew what had happened to him, Officer Coxley was gone.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

In severe circumstances, when you inadvertently witness a person dead, something inside of you gets permanently misplaced. Somewhere (within the brain and nervous system, I’d imagine) there’s a snag, a delay, a stumbling block, a slight technical problem.

For those who’ve never had such bad luck, picture the world’s fastest bird, the Peregrine Falcon, Falco peregrinus, splendidly diving toward its quarry (unwitting dove) at over 250 mph, when abruptly, seconds before its talons are to strike a lethal blow, it feels light-headed, loses its focus, goes into a tailspin, two bogies, three o’clock high, break, break, Zorro got your wingman, barely managing to pull up, up, righting itself and floating, quite shaken, to the nearest tree on which it could once again get its bearings. The bird is fine — and yet, afterward, really for the rest of its life span of twelve to fifteen years, it is never able to nosedive with quite the same speed or intensity of any of the other falcons. It is always a little off-center somehow, always a little wrong.

Biologically speaking, this irreparable change, however minute, has no right to occur. Consider the Carpenter Ant, who allows a fellow ant recently found dead on the job to remain where he is a total of fifteen to thirty seconds before his lifeless body is picked up, hauled out of the nest, and tossed into a pile of debris composed of bits of sand and dust (see All My Children: Fervent Confessions of an Ant Queen, Strong, 1989, p. 21). Mammals, too, take an equally humdrum view of both death and bereavement. A lone tigress will defend her cubs against a roving male, but after they are slaughtered she will “roll over and mate with him without hesitation” (see Pride, Stevens-Hart, 1992, p. 112). Primates do mourn—“there is no form of grief as profound as a chimpanzee’s,” declares Jim Harry in The Tool-Makers (1980) — but their anguish tends to be reserved only for immediate family members. Male chimpanzees are known to execute not only competitors but also the young and disabled both inside and outside their clan, occasionally even eating them, for no apparent reason (p. 108).

Try as I might, I could summon none of the c’est la vie sangfroid of the Animal Kingdom. I began to experience, over the course of the next three months, full-blown insomnia. I’m not talking about the romantic kind, not the sweet sleeplessness one has when one is in love, anxiously awaiting the morn so one can rendezvous with a lover in an illicit gazebo. No, this was the torturous, clammy kind, when one’s pillow slowly takes on the properties of a block of wood and one’s sheets, the air of the Everglades.

My first night home from the hospital, none of them, not Hannah, Jade or the others, had been found. With the rain blathering endlessly against the windows, I stared at my bedroom ceiling and was aware of a new sensation in my chest, the feeling that it was caving in like an old piece of sidewalk. My head was seized by dead-end thoughts, the most rampant of which was the Moving Picture Producer’s Yen: the tremendous and supremely unproductive desire to scrap the last forty-eight hours of Life, rid myself of the original director (who obviously didn’t know what He was doing) and reshoot the entire affair, including substantial script rewrites and recasting the leads. I sort of couldn’t stand myself, how safe and snug I was in my wool socks and navy flannel pajamas purchased from the Adolescent Department at Stickley’s. I even resented the mug of Orange Blossom tea Dad had placed on the southwest corner of my bedside table. (It read, “A Stitch in Time Saves Nine” and sat there like an unpopped blister.) I felt as if my fortunate rescue by the Richardses was akin to a first cousin with no teeth and a tendency of spitting when he talked — downright embarrassing. I had no desire to be the Otto Frank, the Anastasia, the Curly, the Trevor Rees-Jones. I wanted to be with the rest of them, suffering what they were suffering.

Given my state of turmoil, it will come as no surprise that in the ten days following the camping trip, St. Gallway’s Spring Break, I found myself embarking on a sour, irksome and altogether unsatisfying love affair.

She was an insipid, fickle mistress, that two-headed she-male, otherwise known as the local news, WQOX News 13. I started seeing her three times a day (First News at5, News13at5:30, Late Night News at11:00), but within twenty-four hours, with her straight talk, shoulder pads, ad-libs and commercial breaks (not to mention that backdrop of faux sun permanently setting behind her) she managed to strong-arm her way into my unhinged head. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t try to sleep without supplementing my day with her half-hour programming at 6:30 A.M., 9:00 A.M., noon and 12:30 P.M..

Like all romances, ours began with great expectation.

“We have your local news next,” said Cherry Jeffries. She was dressed in Pepto-dismal pink, had hazel eyes, a tight smile reminiscent of a tiny rubber band stretched across her face. Thick, chin-length blond hair capped her, as if she were a ballpoint pen. “It’s called the Sunrise Nursery School, but the D.S.S. wants the sun to go down on the center after multiple allegations of abuse.”

“Restaurant owners protest a new tax increase by city hall,” chirped Norvel Owen. Norvel’s sole distinguishing characteristic was his male pattern baldness, which mimicked the stitching of a baseball. Also of note was his necktie, which appeared to be patterned with mussels, clams and other invertebrates. “We’ll talk about what it means for you and your Saturday night on the town. These stories coming up.”

A green square popped up and hovered at Cherry’s shoulder like a good idea: SEARCH.

“But first, our top story,” said Cherry. “Tonight an intensive search continues for five local high school students and their teacher reported missing in the Smoky Mountain National Park. Park authorities were alerted early this morning after a Yancey County resident found a sixth student near Route 441. The student was admitted to a local hospital for exposure and was released in stable condition earlier this evening. The Sluder County Sheriff says the group entered the park Friday afternoon, expecting to camp for the weekend, but later became lost. Rain, wind and heavy cloud cover have decreased visibility for the rescue squads. But with temperatures staying well above freezing, Park rangers and Sluder County Police stay optimistic the others will be rescued without injury. Our hearts go out to all the families and everyone involved in the search.”

Cherry glanced down at the blank piece of paper on the plastic blue desk. She looked up again.

“People are horsing around at the Western North Carolina Farm Center with the arrival of a brand new pony.”

“But this is no ordinary horse, of course, of course,” piped Norvel. “Mackenzie is a Falabella Miniature Horse standing a little over two feet tall. Curators say the pony originates from Argentina and is one of the rarest breeds in the world. You can go see Little Mac for yourself at the petting corral.”

“It happens every year,” said Cherry, “and its success depends on you.”

“Later,” said Norvel, “details on Operation Blood Drive.”

By the following morning, Sunday, my fly-by-night infatuation had congealed into obsession. And it wasn’t just the news I was anticipating, yet still had not heard — that rescue teams had at last found them, that Hannah was alive and safe, that Fear (renowned for its hallucinogenic qualities) had conjured everything I’d heard and seen. There was something undeniably gripping about Cherry and Norvel (Chernobyl, I called them), a quality that forced me to withstand six hours of talk shows (one theme of significance, “From Frog to Prince: Extreme Male Makeovers”) and cleaning commercials featuring housewives with too many stains, kids and not enough time, to catch their second segment together, Your Stockton Power Lunch at 12:30. A wide and triumphant smile elbowed through Cherry’s face when she announced she was the sole anchor this afternoon.

“We’re power lunching today with breaking news,” she said, frowning as she arranged the blank papers in front of her, though visibly thrilled to preside over the entire blue desk, rather than merely the right-hand side. The white piping of her navy suit, edging around her shoulders, patch pockets and cuffs, delineated her petite frame like white lines marking sudden swerves of an unlit road. She blinked at the screen and looked grave. “A Carlton County woman was found dead this afternoon by rescue workers searching the Smoky Mountain National Park. This is the latest development in the search for five local high school students and a teacher that began yesterday. News 13’s Stan Stitwell is live at the rescue center. Stan, what are the police saying?”

Stan Stitwell appeared, standing in a parking lot, an ambulance parked behind him. If Stan Stitwell had been wine, he wouldn’t be robust or full bodied. Stan would be fruity, acidic, with a hint of cherry. Limp brown hair hung into his forehead like wet shoelaces.

“Cherry, Sluder County Police have not yet made a statement, but we hear they’ve positively identified the body to be that of Hannah Louise Schneider, a forty-four-year-old teacher at the St. Gallway School, the well-known private school in West Stockton. Park personnel had been searching for her and the five other students for over twenty-four hours now. Authorities haven’t yet told us what condition the body was in, but minutes ago, detectives arrived on the scene to determine if there was foul play.”

“And the five students, Stan. What’s the latest on them?”

“Well, despite the bad conditions out here, rain, wind, heavy fog, the search continues. An hour ago rescue teams managed to get a National Guard helicopter into the air, but they had to bring it back due to bad visibility. But, still, in the past two hours or so, at least twenty-five more civilians have joined the volunteer search effort. And as you can see here behind me, the Red Cross and a medical team from the University of Tennessee have set up operations for food and aiding injuries. Everyone’s doing what they can to make sure the kids get home safe.”

“Thank you, Stan,” said Cherry. “And News 13 will continue to keep you updated as the story unfolds.”

She glanced down at a blank piece of paper on her desk. She looked up again.

“Up next, it’s the little things in life you take for granted. Today, as part of our ‘Wellness’ series, we’ll show you a lot of time and money goes into designing that little thing your dentist wants you to use twice a day. News 13’s Mary Grubb has the story of the toothbrush.”

I watched the rest of the news, but there was no further mention of the camping trip. I found myself noticing all the Little Things about Cherry: her eyes scurrying across the teleprompter, the way her facial expressions morphed between the Look of Restrained Dismay (salon heist), the Look of Deep-seated Sorrow (infant dead in apartment fire), the Look of Quiet Community Consciousness (battle revs up between motocross riders and trailer-owners in Marengo) with the ease of trying on slips in a dressing room. (Staring at the blank papers in front of her seemed to be the switch that prompted this mechanical expression-wipe, similar to shaking an Etch A Sketch.)

And the next morning, Monday, when I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 to catch “Waking You Up in the Morning!” I observed the maniacal way Cherry unilaterally leeched all attention from Norvel, rendering him an appendix, a hubcap, an extra packet of salt one misses at the bottom of a bag of fast food. Norvel, if one visualized him with a full head of sandy hair, had probably once been competent, perhaps even commanding in his news delivery, but like a Dresden church with Byzantine architecture on the eve of February 13, 1945, he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Paired with Cherry, prey to her Ways to Upstage by Way of Large Plastic Earrings, her Modes of Stealing Thunder Via the Application of More Eye Makeup than a Drag Queen, not to mention the Art of the Indirect Castration (i.e., “Speaking of toddlers, Norvel has the story of a new Montessori day care center opening up in Yancey County.”) — it had left him in ruins. He spoke his allotted portion of the broadcast (forgettable stories about mayoral appearances and farm animals) in the uncertain, rickety voice of a woman on a diet of pineapples and cottage cheese, her spine emerging from her back like a banister when she bent over.

I knew she was bad news, that it wasn’t the most wholesome of affairs.

I just couldn’t help myself.

“Five local high school students were found alive this morning by rescue personnel in the Great Smoky Mountains following an intensive two-day search,” said Cherry. “This is the latest development in the story after the body of their teacher, Hannah Louise Schneider, was recovered yesterday. We’re live outside the Sluder County Hospital with News 13’s Stan Stitwell. Stan, what can you tell us?”

“Cherry, there were cheers and tears here as Park rescue squads brought to safety the five high school seniors missing since Saturday. The heavy fog and showers tapered off early this morning and K-9 rescue dogs were able to track the students from a popular Park campsite known as Sugartop Summit to another section more than twelve miles away. Police say the kids had become separated from Hannah Schneider and the sixth student found on Saturday. They tried to locate a path out of the park but became lost. One of the male students is allegedly suffering from a broken leg. Otherwise, they’re all confirmed in stable condition. A half hour ago they were admitted to the Emergency Room, which you can see just behind me. They’re being treated for cuts and scrapes and other minor injuries.”

“That’s great news, Stan. Any word from the police about the teacher’s cause of death?”

“Cherry, Sluder County Police have issued no statements about the body of the woman found, except to say that for the progress of the investigation, all evidence will be held at this time. We’ll have to wait for the Sluder County coroner’s ruling, which is expected next week. For now, everyone’s relieved the kids are safe. They’re expected to be released from the hospital later today.”

“Great, Stan. And News 13 will keep you tuned as news breaks in this camping tragedy.”

Cherry looked down at the piece of paper and looked up again.

“It’s small. It’s black. It’s something you shouldn’t leave home without.”

“Find out what it is,” said Norvel, blinking at the camera, “in our ‘Get Technical’ series. Coming up next.”

I watched the program until the very end, when Cherry smiled and twittered, “Have a great morning!” and the camera zoomed away from her and Norvel like a fly zipping around the studio. From her triumphant grin, it appeared she was hoping the camping tragedy would be her claim to fame, her Fifteen Minutes (That Could Potentially Lead to a Full Half Hour), her First-Class Ticket to Somewhere (with Fully Reclining Seats and Champagne before Takeoff). Cherry seemed to see it all twisting into the distance like a four-lane highway: “The Cherry Jeffries Talk Show: Spill Your Heart Out,” CHAY-JEY, a conservative clothing line for the serious blond working woman (“No longer an oxymoron”), “Cherry Bird,” the Cherry Jeffries Fragrance for Women in Motion, the newspaper article in USA Today, “Move over, Oprah, Here Comes Cherry.” A car commercial roared onto the screen. I noticed Dad standing behind me. His tattered leather bag, stuffed with legal pads and periodicals, hung heavily around his shoulder. He was on his way to the university. His first seminar, Conflict Resolution in the Third World, started at 9:00 A.M.

“Perhaps it’s not a wise idea to watch anymore,” he said.

“And do what instead,” I asked blandly.

“Rest. Read. I have a new annotated copy of De Profundis—”

“I don’t want to read De Profundis.”

“Fair enough.” He was silent for a moment. Then: “You know, I could phone Dean Randall. We could go somewhere for the day. Drive to a—”

“Where?”

“Perhaps we could take a picnic to one of those lakes people are always praising to the high heavens. One of these local lakes with ducks.”

“Ducks.”

“You know. Paddleboats. And geese.”

Dad walked around to the front of the couch, ostensibly so I’d peel my eyes off the TV and look at him.

“To get on the highway,” he said. “It might remind us that no matter the tragedy, there’s always a world beyond it. ‘Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’”

I continued to stare at the TV, my eyes sore, my thin bathrobe, the color of tongues, limp around my legs.

“Did you have an affair with Hannah Schneider?” I asked.

Dad was so shocked he didn’t immediately speak. “I—what?”

I repeated the question.

“How can you ask such a thing?”

“You had an affair with Eva Brewster, so maybe you also had an affair with Hannah Schneider. Maybe you had an affair with the entire school and kept me in the dark—”

“Of course not,” Dad said irritably, then he took a deep breath and added very quietly, “I did not have an affair with Hannah Schneider. Sweet, you should stop this…brooding—it isn’t good. What can I do? Tell me. We can move somewhere. California. You always wanted to go to California, didn’t you? Any state you like…”

Dad was grabbing at words the way drowning people grab at floating bits of plywood. I didn’t say anything.

“Well,” he said, after a minute. “You have my office number. I’ll be home around two to check on you.”

“Don’t check on me.”

“Sweet.”

“What?”

“There’s that macaroni—”

“In the fridge, which I can reheat for lunch — yes, I know.”

He sighed and covertly I glanced over at him. He looked as if I’d punched him in the face, as if I’d spray-painted PIG on his forehead, as if I’d told him I wished he was dead.

“You’ll call if you need anything?” he asked.

I nodded.

“If you’d like, on my way home I can pick up a few videos from — what is that—?”

“Videomecca.”

“Right. Any requests?”

“Gone with the Fucking Wind,” I said.

Dad kissed me on the cheek and walked through the hall to the front door. It was one of those instances one feels as if one’s skin has abruptly become thin as one layer of phyllo dough on a triangle of baklava, when one desperately doesn’t want the other person to go, but one doesn’t say anything in order to feel isolation in its purest form, as a periodic table element, one of the noble gases, Iso¹.

The front door closed, locked. To the far-off tune of the blue Volvo driving away, it slipped over me, sadness, deadness, like a sheet over summer furniture.

I guess it was shock, the body’s spin on distress, what Jemma Sloane drearily refers to on p. 95 of her book on “confrontational children,” Raising Goliath (1999): “child coping mechanisms.” Whatever the psychological grounds, for the next four days following their rescue (as my beloved Chernobyl reported during First News at Five, returned to their homes like damaged parcels) I adopted the character and deportment of a nasty ninety-year-old widow.

Dad had to work, so I spent the rest of Spring Break alone. I said little. What I did say tended to be to myself or to my colored companion, the TV (Chernobyl proved more enjoyable than any show-offy grandchild). Dad was the grossly underpaid yet loyal caretaker who showed up at regular intervals to make sure I hadn’t burned down the house, that I ate my prepared meals and didn’t fall asleep in strange positions that could lead to injury or death. He was the nurse who held his tongue when I was irritable, in the off chance I might keel over.

When I felt up to it, I ventured outside. The rueful weekend of rain had given way to conceited sunshine. It was too much — the glare, the grass like straw. The sun harassed the yard with a shamelessness I’d never noticed before, inundating the leaves, scalding the pavement. Also offensive were the earthworms, those vagrants, visibly hungover from the downpour, so wasted they were unable to mobilize and fried themselves into orange french fries all over the driveway.

I scowled, kept my bedroom shades pulled, hated everyone, felt grouchy. As soon as Dad drove away in the morning, I rummaged through the kitchen trash to retrieve the latest Stockton Observer, which he’d thrown out early in the morning, so I wouldn’t see the headlines and fester over what had happened. (He didn’t know my well-being was a lost cause; I had little appetite and sleep remained likely as phoenix eggs.)

Around five o’clock, before he came home, I returned the newspaper to the trash can, carefully repositioning it below last night’s rigatoni with tomato sauce (the UNCS Political Science Department assistant, Barbara, had given Dad a few “comfort food” recipes; supposedly they’d been the rock that helped some wayward stepson, Mitch, through rehab). It was a stealthy exercise, much like hiding one’s medication in the elastic of a fitted sheet, crushing it up with a soupspoon, using it to fertilize geraniums.

“Teacher Death Shocks School,” “Dead Woman Beloved Teacher, Community Activist,” “Investigators Hold Details of Local Death”—these were the keyed-up articles about it, us, her. They rehashed the specifics of the rescue, the Stockton community’s “shock,” “disbelief” and “sense of loss.” Jade, Charles, Milton, Nigel and Lu all got their names and grinning yearbook pictures in the paper. (I did not — another blow for being the first found.) They quoted Eva Brewster: “We can’t believe it.” They also quoted Alice Kline, who’d worked with Hannah at the Burns County Animal Shelter: “It’s so sad. She was the happiest, kindest person in the world. All the dogs and cats are waiting for her to come back.” (When someone died prematurely they routinely become the Happiest, Kindest Person.)

Apart from “Investigation Continues into Park Death,” which explained that her body had been discovered two miles from Sugartop Summit, that she had been hanging by an electrical cord, none of the other articles said anything new. After a while, I found it all stomach-turning, especially the editorial, “WNC Murder, Evidence of Voodoo,” by R. Levenstein, some “local critic, conservationist and Web blogger” speculating that her death was occult related. “The police’s continuing reluctance to disclose the details of Hannah Schneider’s death steers the astute observer to a conclusion local authorities have been trying to cover up for years: there is a growing populace of witches in Sluder and Burns Counties.”

No, it wasn’t like it was in the Olden Days.

Due to my new fondness for trawling through the trash, I was able to locate something else of note Dad had discarded for the sake of my mental health, The St. Gallway Bereavement Pack. Judging from the date on the large manila envelope in which it’d come, apparently The Pack had been launched with the velocity of a Tomahawk cruise missile as soon as news of the catastrophic event hit school radars.

The Pack included a letter from Headmaster Havermeyer (“Dear Parents: We are saddened this week by the death of one of our dearest teachers, Hannah Schneider…”), an overexcited article from a 1991 issue of Parenting magazine, “How Children Grieve,” a schedule of counseling times and room numbers, Crisis Team constituents, a pair of 24-hour 800-numbers to call for psychological assistance (1-800-FEEL-SAD, and another I find difficult to remember, 1-800-U-BEWAIL, I believe) and a tepid postscript about a funeral (“A date for Ms. Schneider’s memorial service has yet to be arranged.”).

One can imagine how strange it was for me to read these carefully prepared materials, to realize they were talking about Hannah, our Hannah, the Ava Gardnered person across from whom I’d once eaten pork chops — how scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead. Chiefly unsettling was the fact that The Pack mentioned nothing of how she’d died. True, The Pack had been prepared and mailed well before the Sluder County Coroner’s Office would release its autopsy report. Yet the omission was bizarre, as if she hadn’t been murdered (a sensational word; if I had my way there’d be something a little more serious at the intersection of Death, Murder and Slaughter — Mauleth, perhaps). Instead, according to The Pack, Hannah had simply “passed” she’d been playing poker and decided not to take another card. Or, reading Havermeyer’s spongy wording, one had the sense she’d been seized (“taken from us”), King-Kong-style (“without warning”), by the gigantic, smooth hand of God (“she’s in good hands”), and though such an event was gruesome (“one of life’s toughest lessons”) everyone should nail a grin to their face and continue robotically with daily life (“we must continue on, loving each day, as Hannah would’ve wanted”).

St. Gallway’s Grief Management began, but certainly did not end, with The Bereavement Pack. The day after I found the thing, Saturday the 2, Dad received a phone call from Mark Butters, Head of the Crisis Team.

I eavesdropped on the conversation from my bedroom phone with Dad’s silent complicity. Prior to Butters’ appointment to the Crisis Team, he’d never been a confident man. He had the complexion of baba ghanoush and his flabby body, even on bright, sunny days, reminded one of nothing more robust than a much-used carry-on suitcase. His most obvious personality trait was his suspicious nature, the unflagging conviction that he, Mr. Mark Butters, was the secret subject of all student jokes, quips, puns and personal asides. Over his table at lunch, his eyes searched student faces like drug dogs in an airport for the chalky residue of ridicule. But, as evidenced by his sonorous, newly confident voice, Mr. Butters had simply been a person of untapped potential, a man who needed only a Tiny Calamity in order to shine. He’d given up Hesitation and Doubt with the surprising ease of anonymously returning erotica in the middle of the night to the RETURNS slot at the video store, had effortlessly replaced them with Authority and Daring.

“Your schedule permitting,” said Mr. Butters, “we’d like to arrange a half-hour session with both you and Blue in order to discuss what’s happened. You’ll be sitting down with myself and Havermeyer, as well as one of our child counselors.”

“One of your what?”

(Dad, I should mention, did not believe in anyone’s counsel except his own. He thought psychotherapy promulgated nothing more than a great deal of handholding and shoulder massaging. He despised Freud, Jung, Frasier and any person who thought it fascinating to instigate a lengthy discussion of his/her own dreams.)

“A counselor. To share your concerns, your daughter’s concerns. We have on hand a very competent, full-time child psychologist, Deb Cromwell. She’s come to us from The Derds School in Raleigh.”

“I see. Well, I have only one concern.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Hit me with it.”

“You.”

Butters was silent. Then: “I see.”

“My concern is that for the entire week your school has remained mute — out of terror, I suppose — and now, at long last, one of you has mustered the courage to come forward, at, what time is it, three-forty-five on a Saturday afternoon. And all you have to say is that you’d like us to schedule a time to come in and be psychoanalyzed. Is that correct?”

“This is a just a preliminary question-and-answer session. Bob and Deb would like to sit down with you, have a one-on-one—”

“The true intention of this phone call is to intuit whether or not I plan to sue both the school and the Board of Education for negligence. Am I right?”

“Mr. Van Meer, I’m not going to try to argue with—”

“Don’t.”

“What I will say is that we wish—”

“I wouldn’t say or wish anything if I were you. Your reckless — let me rephrase that — your deranged staff member took my child, a minor, on a weekend field trip without securing parental permission—”

“We’re well aware of the situa—”

“Endangered her life, the lives of five other minors and, let me remind you, managed to get herself killed in what is looking like a highly disgraceful fashion. I am this close to calling a lawyer and making it my life’s ambition to ensure that you, that headmaster of yours, Oscar Meyers, and every person associated with your third-rate institution ends up wearing stripes and leg irons for the next forty years. Furthermore, in the off chance my daughter does wish to share her concerns, the last person with whom she’d choose to do so would be a private-school counselor named Deb. If I were you, I wouldn’t call here again unless you wish to beg for clemency.”

Dad hung up.

And though I wasn’t in the kitchen with him, I knew he didn’t slam down the phone, but gently returned it to the wall, much in the manner of putting a maraschino cherry atop a sundae.

Well, I did have concerns. And Dad was right; I had no intention of sharing them with Deb. I had to share them with Jade, Charles, Milton, Nigel and Lu. The need to explain to each of them what had happened from the moment I left the campground to those seconds I saw her dead was so overpowering, I couldn’t think about it, couldn’t attempt to outline or ABC it on note cards or legal pads without feeling dizzy and dumb, as if I were trying to contemplate quarks, quasars and quantum mechanics, all at the same time (see Chapters 13, 35, 46, Incongruities, V. Close, 1998).

Later that day, when Dad left to go buy groceries, I finally called Jade. I estimated I’d given her enough time to recover from the initial shock (perhaps she’d even continued on, loving each day, as Hannah would’ve wanted).

“Who’s calling please?”

It was Jefferson.

“This is Blue.”

“Sorry, honey. She’s not taking calls.”

She hung up before I could say anything. I called Nigel.

“Creech Pottery and Carpentry.”

“Uh, hello. Is Nigel there? This is Blue.”

“Hey there, Blue!”

It was Diana Creech, his mother — or rather, adopted mother. I’d never met her, but had talked to her countless times on the phone. Due to her loud, jocular voice, which snowplowed everything and anything you said, whether it be a lone word or the Declaration of Independence, I envisioned her as a large, cheery woman who wore men’s overalls covered with clay smears from her own gigantic fingers, fingers that in all probability were wide as naked rolls of toilet paper. When she talked, she took big bites out of certain words, as if they were bright green, solid Granny Smiths.

“Let me go see if he’s awake. Last time I looked in on him he was sleeping like a baby. That’s all he’s been doing for the past two days. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Nigel’s all right?”

“Sure. I mean, we’re still in shock. Everyone is! ’Specially the school. Have they called? You can tell they’re nervous about a lawsuit. Obviously we’re waiting to hear what the police say. I told Ed they should have made an arrest by now or come forward and said something. Silence is inexcusable. Ed says no one has a clue what happened to her and that’s why they’re holding out. What I will say is that if somebody did do it—’cuz I don’t want to think about the other possibility, not yet — you can be sure he’s on his way to Timbuktu with a fake passport in a first-class seat.” (The few times I’d spoken to her on the phone, I noticed Diana Creech always managed to stick the word Timbuktu into the conversation as many youths stuck in like or whatever.) “They’re dragging their feet.” She sighed. “I’m sad about what’s happened, but I’m thankful you guys are safe. But you turned up Saturday, didn’t you? Nigel said you weren’t with them. Oh, here he comes. Hold on, sugar.”

She put the receiver down and walked away, the sound of a Clydesdale trotting down on a cobblestone street. (She wore clogs.) I heard voices and then the hooves again.

“Mind if he calls you back? He wants to eat something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You take care now.”

No one answered when I called Charles.

At Milton’s, the answering machine picked up, a whine of violin accompanied by a woman’s fanciful voice, “You’ve reached Joanna, John and Milton. We’re not home…”

I dialed Leulah. I sensed she’d be the most unglued out of all of us, so I hesitated calling her, but I had to talk to someone. She answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Jade,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

“Oh, it’s Blue actually.” I was so relieved, I oil-spilled. “I’m glad you picked up. How are you? I–I’ve been going crazy. I can’t sleep. How are you?”

“Oh,” said Leulah. “This isn’t Leulah.”

“What?”

“Leulah’s asleep,” she said in a strange voice. I could hear, on her end, a television. It was thrilled about house paint, only a single coat necessary for total coverage, Herman’s Paints are guaranteed to last five years regardless of exposure to rainfall and wind.

“Can I take a message?” she asked.

“What’s wrong?”

She hung up.

I sat down on the edge of my bed. The bedroom windows were crammed with late-day light, soft, yellow, the color of pears. The paintings on the wall, oil landscapes of pastures and cornfields, looked so shiny they might have still been wet. I might have run my thumb through them and made a finger painting. I began to cry, dumb, lethargic tears, as if I’d cut into a scarred old gum tree and the sap could barely leak out.

This, I remember distinctly, was the worst moment — not the insomnia, not my wasted courtship of the TV, not the endless chanting in my head of a certain hysterical phrase that became less alive the more I said it—someone killed Hannah, someone killed Hannah—but this awful desolate feeling, desert-island aloneness. Worst of all, I knew it was the beginning of it, not the middle or the end.

Bleak House

In 44 B.C., ten days after he stabbed Caesar in the back, Brutus probably felt the same way I did when the student body returned to St. Gallway for the commencement of Spring Term. Brutus, strolling down the dusty roads of the Forum, doubtless came face-to-face with the harsh realities of “Corridor and Country Road Ostracism,” with its principal tenets, “Keep a wide girth,” and “As you come closer, fasten your eyes to a point immediately north of the leper’s head so for a second he/she thinks you’re acknowledging his/her pitiable existence.” Brutus most likely became well versed in “Modes of Seeing Through,” the most startling of which were the “Pretend Brutus Is a Diaphanous Scarf” and “Pretend Brutus Is a Courtyard-Facing Window.” Though he once drank watered-down wine with the perpetrators of this unspoken cruelty, once sat next to them at Circus Maximus and rejoiced in the overturning of a chariot, once bathed with them, naked, in both the hot and the cold pools of the public baths, these things meant nothing now. Because of what he’d done, he was and always would be their object of disgrace.

At least Brutus had done something productive, albeit controversial, carrying out a meticulously laid plan to seize power for what he believed to be the continued well-being of the Roman Empire.

I, of course, had done nothing at all.

“See, if you remember, everyone thought she was amazing, but I always thought there was something hair-raising about her,” said Lucille Hunter in my AP English class. “Ever watch when she’s taking notes?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Barely looks up from the page. And when she’s taking an essay test she mouths what she’s writing the whole time. My grandmother in Florida, who my mom says is totally going senile, does the same thing while watching Wheel of Fortune or writing checks.”

“Well,” said Donnamara Chase, leaning forward in her seat, “Cindy Willard told me this morning that Leulah Maloney announced to her entire Spanish class that…”

For some reason, it perpetually slipped both Lucille and Donnamara’s meager minds that my assigned seat in Ms. Simpson’s AP English class was, and always had been, immediately behind Donnamara’s. The girl handed me The Brothers Karamazov handouts still warm from the Faculty Lounge copier and seeing me, nervously bared her long and pointy teeth (see “Venus Flytrap,” North American Flora, Starnes, 1989).

“Wonder if she’ll leave school,” mused Angel Ospfrey, four seats away.

“Absolutely,” whispered Beth Price. “Expect some announcement in the next few weeks that her dad, Account Executive for Whatever Corp, was recently promoted to Regional Manager of the Charlotte branch.”

“Wonder what her last words were,” said Angel. “Hannah’s, I mean.”

“From what I hear Blue doesn’t have too long to say hers,” said Macon Campins. “Milton detests her. He said, and I quote, that if he ever meets her in a dark alley, he’ll ‘Jack-the-Ripper her ass.’”

“Ever heard that old wives’ tale,” asked Krista Jibsen in AP Physics, “that it’s okay never to be wealthy or famous or whatever because if you never had it, you won’t miss it? Well — and I bet this is how Blue feels — if you’ve tasted fame, then lost it, that’s like, extreme torture. You end up with a cocaine addiction. You have to spend time in rehab. And when you come out you make vampire movies that go straight to video.”

“You got that off the Corey Feldman True Hollywood Story,” said Luke “Trucker” Bass.

“Well, I heard Radley’s mom is over the moon,” said Peter “Nostradamus” Clark. “She’s throwing a Return-to-Power party for Radley because after undergoing such an ordeal, the girl won’t be able to hold on to Valedictorian.”

“I heard from a very reliable source — wait. No. I feel bad spreading it around.”

“What?”

“She’s a full-scale lesbian,” sang Lonny Felix that Wednesday during Physics Lab 23, “Symmetry in Physical Laws: Is Your Right Hand Really Your Right Hand?” “The Ellen kind, by the way. Not the Anne Heche kind, when you can go either way.” Lonny pony-tossed her hair (long, blond, the texture of Wheaties) and glanced toward the front of the room where I was standing with my lab partner, Laura Elms. She hunched closer to Sandy Quince-Wood. “Guess Schneider was one, too. That’s why they went off together in the middle of the night. How two women get it on is beyond my comprehension but what I do know is that something went fatally wrong during the sex act. That’s what the police are trying to figure out. That’s why it’s taking so long for them to have a verdict.”

“That same thing was on CSI: Miami last night,” said Sandy distractedly as she wrote in her lab manual.

“Little did we know what’s going on on CSI: Miami is happening right here in our physics class.”

“For gosh sakes,” said Zach Soderberg, turning around to look at them. “Would you guys keep it down? Some of us are trying to figure out these laws of reflection symmetry.”

“Sorry, Romeo,” said Lonny with a smirk.

“Yes, let’s try to keep things quiet, shall we?” said our substitute teacher, a bald man named Mr. Pine. Pine smiled, yawned and stretched his arms high over his head revealing sweat stains the size of pancakes. He resumed his scrutiny of a magazine, Country Life Wall & Windows.

“Jade’s trying to get the Blue girl kicked out of school,” whispered Dee during second period Study Hall.

Dum scowled. “For what?”

“Not murder, but like, coercion or brute force or something. I heard her pleading her case in Spanish. I guess Hannah was all bueno. Then she goes off with this Blue person and five minutes later ends up muerto. It’s all not going to hold up in court. They’re going to declare a mistrial. And no one can use a race card to get her off.”

“Stop acting like you’re all Greta van Susteren with an eyelift because here’s a breaking headline for you. You’re not. Neither are you Wolf Blitzer.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dum shrugged, tossing her crumpled copy of Startainment on the library table. “It’s like so obvious. Schneider pulled a Sylvia Plath.”

Dee nodded. “Not a terrible assumption actually. Think about my last Intro to Film class.”

“What about it?”

“I told you. The woman was supposed to give us an essay test on the Italians, Divorce Italiano Style, L’Avventura, Eight and a Friggin’ Half—”

“Oh, yeah—”

“But when we showed up, all prepared and everything, yet again she was all flailin’ and flappin’. It’d totally slipped her mind. She played it off, said not having the test was our surprise, but everyone was creeped out — it was obvious she was blowin’ those excuses out the wazoo. She plain old-fashioned forgot. So she hastily puts in Reds, which isn’t even Italian, right? Plus we’d already seen it nine times because three days in a row she forgot to bring in La Dolce Friggin’ Vita. The woman had no teach cred, was hopelessly ding-headed, suffered epizootics of the blowhole and was full of booty-cheddar. But what kind of teacher forgets their own essay test?”

“A bugged-out teacher,” whispered Dum. “One who’s mentally unstable.”

“Damn straight.”

Unfortunately, my instinctive response to overhearing campus-wide chitchat of the aforementioned kind was not The Pacino (godfather-styled vengeance), The Pesci (urges to stick a ballpoint pen in someone’s throat), The Costner (flat, frontierlike amusement), The Spacey (scathing verbal retaliation accompanied by a blank facial expression) nor The Penn (blue-collared bellows and moans).

I can only compare how I felt to being inside an austere clothing store when one of the workers silently follows you around to make sure you don’t steal anything. Though you have no intention of stealing anything, though you’ve never come close to stealing anything in your life, knowing they see you as a potential shoplifter unexpectedly turns you into a potential shoplifter. You try not to peer suspiciously over your shoulder. You peer suspiciously over your shoulder. You try not to look at people sideways or sigh artificially or whistle or shoot people nervous smiles. You look sideways, sigh, whistle, shoot nervous smiles and put your extremely sweaty hands in and then out of your pockets over and over again.

Not to complain all of St. Gallway was hashing me over like this, and certainly not to whimper about such abysmal treatment or feel sorry for myself. There were some extraordinary kindnesses, those first few days back at school, such as the moment my old lab partner, Laura Elms, who at four-feet-nine and approximately ninety to ninety-five pounds typically exuded the personality of rice (white, easy on the stomach, went well with every kid), suddenly snatched my left hand as it was copying down F = qv x B from the dry-erase board: “I totally know what you’re going through. One of my best friends found her father dead last year. He was outside on their driveway washing their Lexus when he just collapsed. She ran outside and she totally didn’t recognize him. He was this really weird blueberry color. She went crazy for a while. All I’m saying is if you ever want to talk I’m here for you.” (Laura, I never took you up on your offer, but please accept my thanks. I apologize for the rice comment.)

And there was Zach. If velocity affected the mass of all objects, it wouldn’t affect Zach Soderberg. Zach would be the Amendment, the Correction, the Tweak. He was a lesson in durable materials, a success story of sustainable good moods. He was c, the constant.

On Thursday, in AP Physics, I returned from the bathroom to find a mysterious folded piece of notebook paper sitting on my chair. I didn’t open it until class was over. I stood very still, right in the middle of the hallway with all those kids gushing past me with backpacks, sagging hair and lumpy jackets, staring at the words, at his schoolgirl’s handwriting. I was refuse in a river.

HOW ARE YOU

I’M AROUND

IF YOU WANT TO TALK

ZACH

I kept the note folded in my backpack for the rest of the day and surprised myself by deciding I did want to chat with him. (Dad said it never hurt to glean as many perspectives and opinions as possible, even those one suspects will be unsophisticated and Calibanesque.) Throughout AP World History, I found myself fantasizing about going home not with Dad, but with Patsy and Roge, having a supper not of spaghetti, lecture notes, a one-sided debate of J. Hutchinson’s The Aesthetic Emancipation of the Human Race (1924), but roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, a discussion of Bethany Louise’s softball tryouts or Zach’s recent paper on The American Dream (the most ho-hum of paper topics). And Patsy would smile and squeeze my hand while Roge embarked on an impromptu sermon — if I was lucky, “The Fourteen Hopes.”

As soon as the bell rang, I hurried out of Hanover along the sidewalk to Barrow, up the stairs to the second floor where I’d heard Zach had his locker. I stood just inside the doorway and watched him in khaki pants and a blue-and-white striped shirt talking to that Rebecca girl, the one with prehistoric carnivore eyeteeth. She was tall, propping a stack of spiral notebooks against her jutted-out hip, her other bony arm hooked on the top of the lockers so she resembled an angular Egyptian character scrawled on papyrus. And something about the way Zach gave her his full attention (aware of no one else in the hall), the way he smiled and ran that giant hand through his hair made me realize he was in love with her, that they were doubtlessly both Kinko’s employees always shoulder-to-shoulder and engaged in tons of color-copying, and now I’d stand there trying to talk to him about Death with that Hieroglyph breathing down my neck, her eyes sticking to my face like smashed figs, bushy black hair flooding her shoulders like the River Nile — I couldn’t do it. I spun around, darted back into the stairwell, shoved open the door and raced outside.

I also can’t overlook the Good Samaritan Kindness of another occasion, that Friday in Beginning Drawing, when I, exhausted from the sleepless nights, dozed off in the middle of class, forgetting about my Line Drawing of Tim “Raging” Waters, who’d been chosen to sit at the center of this week’s Life Drawing Circle.

“What on earth is wrong with Miss Van Meer?” roared Mr. Moats, glaring down at me. “She’s green as El Greco’s ghost! Tell us what you ate for breakfast and we’ll make a point of avoiding it.”

Mr. Victor Moats was, for the most part, a gentle man, but at times, for no rhyme or reason (perhaps it was moon phases) he relished degrading a student in front of the class. He snatched my Strathmore drawing pad from the easel and held it high over his seal-slick head. Immediately, I saw the tiny disaster: there was nothing, nothing at all in the Pacific Ocean of the white page, except way down in the lower right-hand corner, I’d drawn Raging the size of Guam. I’d also drawn his leg over his muddled face, which would have been fine if Mr. Moats hadn’t spent ten minutes at the beginning of class detailing the essentials of life drawing and proportion.

“She is not concentrating! She must be dreaming about Will Smith or Brad Pitt or any number of brawny heartthrobs, when what she should be doing is—what? Can someone please inform us what Miss Van Meer should be doing instead of wasting our time?”

I gazed up at Mr. Moats. If it’d been any Friday before Hannah’s death, I’d have turned red and apologized, perhaps even sprinted to the bathroom, locked myself in the handicapped stall and wept over the toilet seat, but now, I didn’t feel anything. I was impassive as a blank sheet of Strathmore drawing paper. I stared up at him, as if he wasn’t talking about me but about some other wayward kid named Blue. I felt all the embarrassment of a desert cactus.

I did notice, however, that the entire class was nervously glancing around at each other, carrying out some impressive routine of alarm like tree-dwelling Guenon monkeys alerting each other to the presence of a Crowned Eagle. Fran “Juicy” Smithson widened her eyes at Henderson Shoal and Henderson Shoal, in response, widened his eyes in the direction of Howard “Beirut” Stevens. Amy Hempshaw bit her lip and removed her caramel hair from behind her ears and lowered her head so it swiftly covered half of her face like a trap door.

What they were signaling to each other, of course, was that Mr. Moats, notorious for preferring the works of Velázquez, Ribera, El Greco and Herrera the Elder to the company of his clam-faced Gallway coworkers (who neither dreamt about, nor were overly eager to wax poetic on, the genius of the Spanish Masters) had also apparently thrown out, unopened, all recent interoffice mail delivered daily to his Mailbox in the Faculty Lounge.

Hence he had not familiarized himself with Havermeyer’s “Emergency Memorandum,” nor the article written by the National Teaching League, “Preparing a Student Body for Grief,” or, most critically, that confidential list prepared by Butters entitled “Ones to Watch,” which included my name, as well as the Bluebloods’: “These students in particular will be affected by the recent loss. Pay close attention to their behavior and academic performance and alert myself or our newly appointed counselor, Deb Cromwell, of any abnormalities. This is a very delicate situation.” (These confidential faculty documents had been stolen, Xeroxed and illicitly trafficked among the student body. By whom, no one knew. Some said it was Maxwell Stuart, others said Dee and Dum.)

“Actually,” said Jessica Rothstein across the room, crossing her arms, “I think it’s okay to excuse Blue today.” Her kinky brown curls, which at distances greater than fifteen feet resembled one thousand wet wine corks, trembled in perfect unison.

“Is that so?” Mr. Moats spun around to face her. “And why is that?”

“She’s been through an ordeal,” said Jessica loudly, displaying the thrilling conviction of a young person who knows she’s Right, the old guy in front of her (who should, in theory, have Maturity and Experience working for him) Flat-Out Wrong.

“An ordeal,” repeated Moats.

“Yes. An ordeal.”

“What sort of ordeal are we talking about? I’m intrigued.”

Jessica made a face of exasperation. “She’s had a rough week.” She was desperately glancing around the room now wishing someone else would take over. Jessica preferred to be Captain of this rescue, making the phone call, giving the order. Jessica had no desire to be the Private who flew the HH-43F helicopter from Bin Ty Ho Airbase, emergency-landed in enemy territory, crawled through rice paddies, waterholes, elephant grass and landmines with over seventy pounds of ammo and C-rations tied to her, carrying the wounded solider seven miles and spending the night on the mosquitoed bank of the Cay Ni River before boarding a rescue bird coming at 0500 hours.

“Miss Rothstein enjoys beating around the bush,” said Moats.

“I’m just saying she’s had a hard time, okay? That’s all.”

“Well, life isn’t a cakewalk, is it?!” asked Moats. “Eighty-nine percent of the world’s most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velázquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!”

“No one’s talking about Velázquez,” said Tim “Raging” Waters, slumped on the stool at the center of the Life Drawing Circle. “We’re talking about Hannah Schneider and how Blue was with her when she died.”

Usually no one, including myself, paid any attention to Raging, so typical his sullen voice and the bumper stickers all over the trunk of his car, I LOVE PAIN, BLOOD TASTES GOOD, and the words scrawled in black permanent marker all over his backpack, . Whiffs of cigarette smoke followed in his wake like a Just-Married convertible trailing cans. But he said her name, and it floated out into the center of the room like an empty rowboat and — I don’t know why — in that moment, I think I would’ve run away with that pale angry kid if he’d asked me to. I loved him desperately, an agonizing, overwhelming love, for three, maybe four seconds. (That was how things were after Hannah died. You didn’t notice someone and when you did you adored him/her, wanted to have his/her offspring, until the moment passed as abruptly as it had come.)

Mr. Moats didn’t move. He raised a hand to his green plaid vest and kept it pressed there, as if he was going to be sick, or else he was trying to remember words to a song he once knew.

“I see,” he said. Gently, he returned my sad Strathmore pad to my easel. “Resume your drawings!”

He stood next to me. When I started drawing again, beginning with Raging’s leather shoe in the middle of the page (a brown shoe, on the side of which a word was scrawled, Mayhem), Mr. Moats, oddly enough, bent down next to me so his head was inches from the white paper. I sort of glanced over at him, reluctantly, because like the sun, it was never a good idea to stare directly into a teacher’s face. Inevitably, you noticed things you wished you hadn’t — sleep, moles, hairs, wrinkles, some calloused or discolored patch of skin. You were aware there was a sour, vinegary truth to these physical details, but you didn’t want to know what it was, not yet, because it’d directly affect one’s ability to pay attention in class, to take notes on the many stages of club mosses reproduction, or the exact year and month of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863).

Moats didn’t say anything. His eyes traveled all over my blank paper, stopping on Raging down in the corner with his leg over his face, and I watched him, spellbound by his craggy profile, a profile that bore a striking resemblance to the southeastern coast of England. And then he closed his eyes, and I could see how upset he was, and I started to wonder if perhaps he’d loved Hannah. I was aware too how strange adults were, how their lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

“Maybe I should start over on another piece of paper,” I said. I wanted him to say something. If he said something, it meant he might bear extreme heat, freezing temperatures at night, the odd sandstorm, but otherwise be all right.

He nodded and stood up again. “Continue.”

That day after school, I went to Hannah’s classroom. I’d hoped nobody would be there, but when I walked into Loomis, I saw two freshman girls taping things — it looked like Get Well Soon cards — to Hannah’s door. On the floor to their right was a giant picture of Hannah, as well as a pile of flowers — carnations for the most part, in pinks, whites and reds. Perón had mentioned them on the intercom during Afternoon Announcements: “The outpouring of flowers and cards shows us that, despite our different backgrounds we can band together and support each other, not as students, parents, teachers and administrators, but as human beings. Hannah would be overwhelmed with joy.” Immediately, I wanted to leave, but the girls had seen me so I had no choice but to continue down the hall.

“Wish we could light the candles.”

“Let me do it. You’re going to ruin the whole design, Kara—”

“Maybe we should light them anyway. For her sake, you know?”

“We can’t. Didn’t you listen to Ms. Brewster? It’s a fire hazard.”

The taller, pale girl was taping a large card to the door, which sported a giant gold sun and read, “A star has dimmed…” The other girl, bowlegged, with black hair, was holding an even larger card, this one handmade with crude orange lettering: TREASURED MEMORIES. There were at least fifty more cards propped up on the floor around the flowers. I bent down so I could read a few.

“Rest in peace. Love, the Friggs,” wrote the Friggs. “C U N HEV N,” wrote Anonymous. “In this world of bitter religious hatred and unmitigated violence against our fellow man, you were a shining star,” wrote Rachid Foxglove. “We’ll miss you,” wrote Amy Hempshaw and Bill Chews. “I hope you’re reincarnated as a mammal and our paths cross again, sooner rather than later because when I go to med school I doubt I’ll have a life,” wrote Lin Xe-Pen. Some cards were introspective (“Why did it happen?”) or harmlessly irreverent (“It’d be cool if you could send me a sign that indicates there’s a discernible afterlife, that it’s not just eternity in a box because if that’s what it is, I’d rather not go through with it.”). Others were filled with remarks suitable for Post-its, for shouts out of unrolled windows of cars driving away (“You were an awesome teacher!!!”).

“Would you be interested in signing the Condolence Card?” the black-haired girl asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

The inside of the Condolence Card was graffitied with student signatures and read: “We find peace and comfort knowing you are now in a Perfect Place.” I hesitated signing, but the girl was watching me so I squeezed my name between Charlie Lin and Millicent Newman.

“Thank you very much,” said the girl, as if I’d just given her enough change to buy a soft drink. She taped the card to the door.

I walked outside again and stood in the shade of a pine tree in front of the building until I saw them leave, and then returned inside. Someone (the black-haired girl, self-appointed Executor of the H. Schneider Memorial) had placed a plastic green tarp beneath the flowers (all stems pointing in the same direction), as well as a clipboard next to the door that read, “Sign here and pledge a special amount to raise money for the Hannah Schneider Hummingbird Garden. (Minimum donation $5.)”

To be honest, I wasn’t especially thrilled with all the grief. It felt artificial, as if they’d taken her away somehow, stolen her, replaced her with this frightening smiling stranger whose giant color faculty photo was laminated and propped up on the floor by a squat unlit candle. It didn’t look like her; school photographers, armed with watery lighting and smeary neutral backgrounds, cheerfully leveled everyone’s uniqueness, made them look the same. No, the real Hannah, the cinematic one who sometimes got a little too drunk with her bra straps showing, she was being held against her will by all these limp carnations, wobbly signatures, humid sentiments of “Missing U.”

I heard a door slam, the stark punctuation of a woman’s shoes. Someone pulled open the door at the end of the hall, letting it slam. For one mad moment, I thought it was Hannah; the slim person walking toward me was wearing all black — a black skirt and short-sleeved shirt, black heels — exactly what she wore the first time I saw her, all those months ago in Fat Kat Foods.

But it was Jade.

She looked pale, gutter-thin, her blond hair slicked back in a ponytail. As she passed under the fluorescent lights the top of her head flashed a whitish green. Shadows swam through her face as she walked, staring at the floor. When she finally noticed me, I knew she wanted to turn back, but didn’t let herself. Jade hated all retreats, U-turns, backpedaling, and second thoughts.

“I don’t have to see you if I don’t want to,” she said as she stopped in front of the flowers and cards. She leaned down and inspected them, a pleasant, relaxed smile on her face as if she were peering in at cases of expensive watches. After a minute, she turned around and stared at me.

“You planning to stand there all day like a moron?”

“Well, I—” I began.

“Because I’m not going to sit here and lug it out of you.” She put a hand on her hip. “I assumed because you’ve called me like some lunatic stalker for the past week you had something decent to say.”

“I do.”

“What?”

“I don’t understand why everyone’s angry at me. I didn’t do anything.”

Her eyes widened in shock. “How can you not understand what you did?”

“What did I do?”

She crossed her arms. “If you don’t know, Retch, I’m not going to tell you.” She turned and leaned down to inspect the cards again. A minute later, she said: “I mean, you disappeared on purpose and made her go look for you. Like some weird game or something. No, don’t even try to say you went to the bathroom because we found that roll of toilet paper still in Hannah’s backpack, okay? And then you — well, we don’t know what you did. But Hannah went from laughing with us without a care in the world to hanging from a tree. Dead. You did something.”

“She signaled for me to get up and disappear into the woods. It was her idea.”

Jade made a face. “When was this?”

“Around the campfire.”

“Not true. I was there. I don’t remember her—”

“No one saw her but me.”

“That’s convenient.”

“I left. She came and found me. We walked into the woods for ten minutes, then she stopped and said she had to tell me something. A secret.”

“Ooo, what was the secret? That she sees dead people?”

“She never told me.”

“Oh, God.”

“Someone followed us. I didn’t see him clearly but I think he was wearing glasses, and then — this is the part I can’t figure out — she went after him. She told me to stay where I was. And that’s the last time I saw her.” (It was a white lie, of course, but I’d decided to remove the fact I’d seen Hannah dead from my history. It was an appendix, a functionless organ that could become infected and thus it could be surgically removed without upsetting any other part of the past.)

Jade stared at me, skeptical. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth. Remember the cigarette butt Lu found? Someone had been there.”

She looked at me, eyes wide, and then shook her head. “I think you have a serious problem.” She allowed her bag to fall to the floor, on its side. It belched up two books, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy, 1996 ed.) and How to Write a Poem (Fifer, 2001). “You’re desperate. And completely sad and embarrassing. Whatever your lame excuses are, no one gives a shit. It’s over.”

She was waiting for me to protest, fall to my knees, moan, but I couldn’t. I sensed the impossibility of it. I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life’s answers worked out the day they’re born and there’s no use trying to teach them anything new. “They’re closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday,” Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they’ll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor’s hand felt like (see Living in Darkness, Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor’s hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free.

“We don’t think you’re like, psychotic, or a Menendez brother,” Jade said. “You probably didn’t do it on purpose. But still. We talked it over and decided if we’re honest with ourselves we can’t forgive you. I mean, she’s gone. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means the world to us. Milton, Charles loved her. Leulah and I adored her. She was our sister—”

“That’s breaking news,” I interrupted. (I couldn’t help myself; I was Dad’s daughter and thus prone to blowing the whistle on Hypocrisy and Double-Talk.) “Last I heard, you thought she was responsible for estranging you from mint chocolate chip ice cream. You were also worried she was a member of the Manson Family.”

Jade looked so enraged, I wondered if she was going to fling me to the linoleum and rip out my eyes. Instead, her lips shrunk and she turned the color of gazpacho. She spoke in pointy little words: “If you’re so dumb that you can’t understand why we’re upset beyond all possible belief, I’m not having this conversation. You don’t even know what we went through. Charles went out of his mind and fell off a cliff. Lu and Nigel were hysterical. Even Milton broke down. I was the one who hauled everyone to safety, but I’m still traumatized by the experience. We thought we were going to die, like those people in the movie when they’re stuck in the Alps and forced to eat each other.”

“Alive. Before it was a movie, it was a book.”

Her eyes widened. “You think this is a joke? Don’t you get it?”

She waited, but I didn’t get it — I really didn’t.

“Whatever,” she said. “Stop calling my house. It’s annoying for my mother to have to talk to you and give you excuses.”

She leaned down and picked up her bag, heaving it up onto her shoulder. Primly she smoothed back her hair, displaying the self-consciousness of the Ones Making an Exit; she was well aware that a great deal of Exiting had been done before her, for millions of years and millions of different reasons, and now it was her turn and she wanted to do a decent job. With a prim smile on her face, she picked up The Norton Anthology of Poetry and How to Write a Poem, took great pains to tuck them neatly into her bag. She sniffed, pressed her black sweater over her waist (as if she’d just completed a first round of interviews at Whatever Corp.) and began to make her way down the hall. As she walked away, I could tell she was considering joining the elite subgroup within the Ones Making an Exit, a sect reserved for the wholly unsentimental and the completely hard-boiled: The Ones Who Never Looked Back. She decided against it, however.

“You know,” she said smoothly, turning to look at me. “None of us could figure it out.”

I stared back, unaccountably afraid.

“Why you? Why Hannah wanted to bring you into our little group. I’m not trying to be rude, but from the beginning none of us could stand you. We called you ‘pigeon.’ Because that’s how you acted. This grimy pigeon clucking around everyone’s feet desperate for crumbs. But she loved you. ‘Blue’s great. You have to give her a chance. She’s had a tough life.’ Yeah, right. It didn’t make sense. No, you have some weirdly dreamy home life with your virtuoso dad you blather on about like he’s the fucking second coming. But no. Everyone said I was mean and judgmental. Well, now it’s too late and she’s dead.”

She saw the look on my face and did a Ha. The Ones Making an Exit had to have a Ha, a truncated laugh that brought to mind videogame Game Overs and typewriter dings.

“Guess that’s life’s little joke,” she said.

At the end of the hall, she pushed open the door and was illuminated for a second by a puddle of yellow light, and her shadow was tossed, elongated and thin, in my direction like a piece of towrope, but then she stepped nimbly through the doorway, and the door slammed and I was left with the carnations. (“The only flower that, when given to someone, is only marginally superior to giving dead ones,” Dad said.)

The Big Sleep

The next day, Saturday, April 10, The Stockton Observer finally published a terse article on the coroner’s findings.

LOCAL WOMAN’S HANGING DEATH RULED SUICIDE

The death of Burns County woman, Hannah Louise Schneider, 44, was ruled a suicide by Sluder County Coroner’s Bureau yesterday afternoon. Cause of death was determined to be “asphyxiation due to hanging.”

“There was no evidence whatsoever of foul play,” said Sluder County Coroner Joe Villaverde yesterday.

Villaverde said there was also no evidence of drugs, alcohol or other toxins in Schneider’s body and the manner of death was consistent with suicide.

“I’m basing my ruling on the autopsy report as well as the evidence found by the sheriff’s department and state legislators,” Villaverde said.

Schneider’s body was found March 28 hanging from a tree by an electrical cord in the Schull’s Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had accompanied six local high school students on a camping trip. The six students were recovered without injury.

“This can’t have happened,” I said.

Dad looked at me, concerned. “My dear—”

“I’m going to be sick. I can’t take this anymore.”

“They just might be right. One never knows with—”

“They’re not right!” I screamed.

Dad agreed to take me to the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department. It was astonishing he actually consented to my outlandish, fitfully proposed demand. I assumed he felt sorry for me, noticed how pale I looked of late, how I could barely eat, didn’t sleep, how I sprinted downstairs like a Beat junkie looking for a fix to catch First News at Five, how I reacted to all questions, both ordinary and existential, with a five-second transatlantic delay. He was also familiar with the quotation, “When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk” (see Rearing the Gifted Child, Pennebaker, 1998,p. 232).

We found the address on the Internet, climbed into the Volvo and drove for forty-five minutes to the station, located west of Stockton in the tiny mountain town of Bicksville. It was a bright, chipper day, and the flat, sagging police building sat like an exhausted hitchhiker on the side of the road.

“Do you want to wait in the car?” I asked Dad.

“No, no, I’ll come in.” He held up D. F. Young’s Narcissism and Culture Jamming the U.S.A. (1986). “I’ve brought some light reading.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, sweet.”

“Let me do the talking.”

“Oh. By all means.”

The Sluder County Sheriff’s Department was a single ransacked room that resembled the Primates section of any midlevel zoo. All efforts, within budget, had been made to lead the ten or twelve captive policemen to believe they were in their natural environment (bleating phones, cinder-block walls painted taupe, dead plants with leaves like tendriled bows on birthday presents, chunky filing cabinets lined up in the back like football players, Department star patches barnacling their clay brown shirts). They were given a restricted diet (coffee, donuts) and plenty of toys to play with (swivel chairs, radio consoles, guns, a ceiling-suspended TV hiccupping the Weather Channel). And yet there remained the unmistakable whiff of artificiality to this habitat, of apathy, of everyone simply going through the motions of being a law enforcer, as struggling for survival was no longer an immediate concern. “Hey, Bill!” shouted one of the men pacing in the very back by the water cooler. He held up a magazine. “Check out the new Dakota.” “Already did,” said Bill, coma-staring at his blue computer screen.

Dad, with a look of unmitigated distaste, sat down in the only seat available in the front, next to a fat and faded girl wearing a tinseled halter top, no shoes, her hair so coarsely bleached it resembled Cheetos. I made my way to the man behind the front desk flipping through a magazine and chewing a red coffee stirrer.

“I’d like to speak to your chief investigator, if he or she is available,” I said.

“Huh?”

He had a flat red face, which, discounting his yellowed toothbrush mustache, recalled the bottom of a large foot. He was bald. The topmost part of his head was grease-spattered with fat freckles. The name tag under his police badge read A. BOONE.

“The person who investigated the death of Hannah Schneider,” I said. “The St. Gallway teacher.”

A. Boone continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a “power distender,” a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.

“What’s your business with Sergeant Harper?”

“There’s been a grave error in judgment regarding the case,” I said with authority. It was essentially the same thing Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry announced at the beginning of Chapter 79 in The Way of the Moth (Lavelle, 1911).

A. Boone took my name and told me to have a seat. I sat down in Dad’s chair and Dad stood next to a dying plant. With a look of faux-interest and admiration (raised eyebrow, mouth turned down) he handed me a copy of The Sheriff’s Starr Bulletin, Winter, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which he detached from the bulletin board behind him, along with a small sticker of an American Eagle crying an iridescent tear (America, United We Stand). In the section of the newsletter on p. 2, “Activity Report” (between Famous/Infamous and Bet You Didn’t Know…) I read that Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper, for the last five months, had made the greatest number of Fall Arrests in the entire department. Detective Harper’s Fall Captures included Rodolpho Debruhl, WANTED for murder; Lamont Grimsell, WANTED for robbery; Kanita Kay Davis, WANTED for welfare fraud, theft and receiving stolen property; and Miguel Rumolo Cruz, WANTED for rape and criminal deviant conduct. (In contrast, Officer Gerard Coxley had the lowest number of Fall Arrests: only Jeremiah Golden, WANTED for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.)

Additionally, Sergeant Harper was featured in the black-and-white team photo of the Sluder County Sheriff’s Dept. Baseball League on p. 4. She was standing on the right, at the very end, a woman with a sizable crooked nose, and all other features crowded around it as if trying to keep warm on her arctic white face.

Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes later, I was sitting next to her.

“There’s a mistake with the coroner’s report,” I announced with great conviction, clearing my throat. “The suicide ruling is wrong. You see, I was the person with Hannah Schneider before she walked into the woods. I know she wasn’t going to go kill herself. She told me she was coming back. And she wasn’t lying.”

Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper narrowed her eyes. With her salt-white skin and bristly lava hair, she was a harsh person to take in at close range; it was a swipe, whack, a kick in the teeth no matter how many times you looked at her. She had broad, doorknobbish shoulders and a way of always moving her torso at the same time as her head, as if she had a stiff neck.

If the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department was the Primates section of any midlevel zoo, Sergeant Harper was obviously the lone monkey who chose to suspend disbelief and work as if her life depended on it. I’d already noticed she narrowed her eyes at everyone and everything, not only at me and A. Boone when he escorted me over to her desk at the back of the room (“All right,” she said with no smile as I sat down, her version of “Hello!”), but she also narrowed her eyes at her TO BE FILED paper tray, the exhausted rubber-and-metal Hand Stress Reliever next to her keyboard, the sign taped above her computer monitor that read, “If you can see, look, and if you can look, observe,” even at the two framed photographs on her desk, one of an elderly woman with cotton-hair and an eyepatch, the other of herself and what I assumed was her husband and daughter; in the photo they bookended her with identical long faces, chestnut hair and obedient teeth.

“And why do you say that,” Sergeant Harper asked. Her voice was dull and low, a combination of rocks and oboe. (And that was how she asked questions, not bothering to hoist up her voice on the end.)

I repeated, for the most part, all that I’d told Officer Coxley in the Sluder County Hospital Emergency Room.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “or disrespectful to your — your systematized process of upholding the law, which you’ve been doing for years, probably quite effectively, but I don’t think Officer Coxley wrote down the specifics of what I told him. And I’m a very pragmatic person. If I thought there was even the slightest chance of the suicide ruling being true, I’d accept it. But it’s not feasible. First, as I said earlier, someone followed us from the camping ground. I don’t know who it was, but I heard him. We both did. And second, Hannah wasn’t in that kind of mood. She wasn’t depressed — at least, not at that moment. I’ll admit she had her moments of being down. But we all do. And when she left me, she was acting very sane.”

Sergeant Harper hadn’t moved a muscle. I became acutely aware (particularly from the way her eyes gradually drifted away from me before being jerked, by a certain emphatic word of mine, back to my face) she’d seen my type before. Housewives, pharmacists, dental hygienists, banking clerks, undoubtedly they’d all come to plead their cases, too, with their hands clenched, their perfumes rancid, their eyeliner skid-marking their eyes. They sat on the edge of the same uncomfortable red chair I was sitting on (which made woolly nonfigurative prints on the back of one’s bare legs) and they wept, swore on a range of Bibles (Today’s English, King James, Illuminated Family Edition) and graves (Grandma’s, Pa-paw’s, Archie who died young) that, whatever the charges against dear Rodolpho, Lamont, Kanita Kay and Miguel, it was lies, all lies.

“Obviously, I know how I sound,” I tried, attempting to iron the twinges of desperation out of my voice. (I was slowly gathering Sergeant Harper didn’t do twinges of desperation, nor did she do pangs of longing, worries to distraction or hearts broken beyond all possible repair.) “But I’m positive someone killed her. I know it. And I think she deserves for us to find out what really happened.”

Harper thoughtfully scratched the back of her neck (as people do when they vehemently disagree with you), leaned to the left of her desk, pulled open a file cabinet and, narrowing her eyes, removed a green folder an inch thick. The labeled tab, I noted, read #5509–SCHN.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, slapping the file on her lap. “We did account for the person you think you heard.” She flipped through the papers — photocopied, typewritten forms, too small a font for me to make out — until she stopped on one, glancing through it. “Matthew and Mazula Church,” she read slowly, frowning, “George and Julia Varghese, two Yancey County couples, were camping in the area at the same time as you and your peers. They stopped at Sugartop Summit around six, rested for an hour, decided to continue on to Beaver Creek two and a half miles away, arriving around eight-thirty. Matthew Church confirmed he was wandering the area looking for firewood when his flashlight went dead. He managed to make his way back to the site around eleven and they all went to bed.” She looked at me. “Beaver Creek is less than a quarter of a mile from where we found her body.”

“He said he saw Hannah and me?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. He said he heard deer. But he’d had three beers and I’m not sure he knows what he saw or heard. It’s a wonder he didn’t find himself lost, too. But you probably heard him wandering around, crashing through the brush.”

“Does he wear glasses?”

She thought about this for a moment. “I think he does.” She frowned, scanning the paper. “Yes, here it is. Gold frames. He’s nearsighted.”

Something about the way she’d said that particular detail, nearsighted, made me think she was lying, but when I sat up imperceptibly and tried to glimpse where she was reading, she closed the file quickly and smiled, her thin, chapped lips pulling away from her teeth like tinfoil off a chocolate bar.

“I’ve been camping,” she said. “And the truth is, when you’re up there, you don’t know what you’re seeing. You came across her hanging there, am I right?”

I nodded.

“The brain dreams up things to protect itself. Four out of every five witnesses are completely unreliable. They forget things. Or later on, they think they saw things that weren’t there. It’s witness traumatization. Sure, I’ll consider witness testimony, but in the end I can only consider what I can see in front of me. The facts.”

I didn’t hate her for not believing me. I understood. Because of all the Rodolphos, Lamonts, Kanita Kays and Miguels and other delinquents she caught red-handed wearing dirty underwear, watching cartoons, eating Cocoa Puffs, she assumed she knew everything there was to know about The World. She had seen the bowels, the guts, the innards of Sluder County and thus no one could tell her anything she didn’t already know. I imagined her husband and daughter found this frustrating, but they probably tolerated her, listened to her over a dinner of sliced ham and peas, all silent nods and supportive smiles. She looked at them and loved them, but noticed a chasm between them, too. They lived in Dream Worlds, worlds of homework, appropriate office conduct, unspoiled milk mustaches, but she, Fayonette Harper, lived in Reality. She knew the ins and outs, the tops and bottoms, the darkest, most mildewed corners.

I didn’t know what else to say, how to convince her. I thought about standing up, knocking over the red chair and shouting, “This is a veritable outrage!” as Dad did when he was at a bank filling out a deposit slip and none of the ten pens at the Personal Banking Counter had ink. A middle-aged man always arrived out of the blue, zipping, buttoning, tucking in shirttails, palming wisps of antenna-hair off his forehead.

Sensing my frustration, Detective Harper reached out, touched the top of my hand, then abruptly sat back again. It was a gesture intended to be comforting but one that came off like putting a nickel in a casino slot machine. You could tell Sergeant Harper didn’t know what to do with Tenderness or Femininity. She treated them like frilly sweaters someone had given her for a birthday that she didn’t want to wear, yet couldn’t throw away.

“I appreciate your efforts,” she said, her whiskey-colored eyes seeing, looking, observing my face. “You know. Coming out here. Trying to talk to me. That’s why I decided to see you. I didn’t have to see you. The case is closed. I’m not authorized to discuss it with anyone but immediate family. But you came here out of worry, which was nice. The world needs nice. But I’ll be straight with you. We have no doubts about what happened to your friend, Hannah Schneider. The sooner you accept it, the better.”

Without saying anything more, she leaned across her desk, picked up a blank sheet of white paper and a ballpoint pen. In five minutes, she drew four tiny detailed drawings.

(I’ve often thought back to this moment, perpetually awed by the simple brilliance of Sergeant Harper. If only everyone, to prove a point, didn’t resort to pushy words or aggressive action, but quietly took out a pen, blank paper and drew their reasons. It was shockingly persuasive. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice this treasure for what it was, and didn’t think to take her drawing with me when I left the station. Hence, I’ve had to draw my own approximations of what she sketched, so meticulously that, intentionally or not, what she’d drawn actually looked a little like Hannah [Visual Aid 26.0].)

“These here are the kinds of marks left on a body when you got a murder,” Sergeant Harper said, pointing to the two sketches on the right side of the paper and glancing at me. “And you can’t fake it. Say you decide to strangle someone. You’ll leave a mark on the neck that’s straight across like this one here. Think of it. The hands. Or say you use a rope to kill ’em. Same thing. Most of the time, it comes with bruising too, or fractured cartilage ’cause the perp’ll use more force than necessary due to adrenalin.”

She pointed to the other two drawings on the left.

“And this over here is how it looks when someone does it suicide. See? Rope’s an upside-down V from the hanging position, the rope being pulled up. Usually there’s no evidence of a struggle on the hands, fingernails or neck unless he had second thoughts. Sometimes they try to get out of it because it hurts so bad. See, most people don’t do it right. Real hangings, like in the old days, you had to fall straight down, six to ten feet, and you cut straight through the spinal cord. But your average suicide, he’ll do it off a chair with the rope tied to a ceiling beam or a hook, and he’ll only fall two or three feet. It’s not enough to sever the spine so he chokes to death. Takes a couple minutes. And that’s how your friend Hannah did it.”

“Is it possible to murder someone and have an upside-down V?”

Detective Harper leaned back in her chair. “It’s possible. But unlikely. You’d have to have the person unconscious maybe. String them up that way.

VISUAL AID 26.0

Else take them by surprise. Be a trained assassin like in the movies.” She chuckled, then shot me a suspicious look. “That didn’t happen.”

I nodded. “She used an electrical cord?”

“It’s fairly common.”

“But she didn’t have an electrical cord when I was with her.”

“She probably had it in the pouch around her waist. There was nothing in it but a compass.”

“What about a suicide note?”

“Didn’t leave one. Not everyone does. People with no family usually don’t. She was an orphan, after all. Grew up at the Horizon House, a group home for orphans in New Jersey. She had no one. Never did.”

I was so surprised I couldn’t immediately speak. Like an unexpected result in a Physics lab, this ruthlessly canceled out all I’d believed about Hannah. Of course, she’d had never told us anything about her past (apart from a few anecdotes, dangled like sausages in front of hungry dogs before snatching them away), and yet I’d assumed her childhood had been teeming with sailboats, lake houses and horses, a father with a pocket watch, a mother with bony hands who never left the house without her Face (a childhood that, funnily enough, overlapped my own mother’s in my head).

I hadn’t pulled such a past out of thin air — had I? No, the way Hannah lit cigarettes, put her profile on display like an expensive vahze, chaise-longued over everything, the way she idly picked out words for sentences as if choosing shoes — these details hinted, however loosely, she’d come from a privileged background. There was, too, all that rhetoric she’d droned on about at Hyacinth Terrace—“It takes years to overturn this conditioning. I tried my whole life.”—words symptomatic of “Waiting Room Righteousness,” but also another one of Dad’s phrases, “Bloated Plutocrat Guilt,” perpetually “slipshod and short-lived.” And even in Cottonwood, when Hannah had slipped into the Country Styles Motel, Room 22, after Doc, one could just have easily assumed she was entering a La Scala opera box for Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte (1790), so straight her spine, so heiressesque the angle of her chin.

Sergeant Harper took my silence for grudging acknowledgment. “She tried it once before, too,” she went on. “The exact same way. Electrical extension cord. Right in the woods.”

I stared at her. “When?”

“Just before she left the home. When she was eighteen. Almost died.”

Harper leaned forward so her big face hovered six inches from mine. “Now”—she leaned in another inch, her voice raspy—“I’ve told you more than enough. And you got to listen. Time and again, I’ve seen innocent people get ruined by these things. And it’s no good. Because it’s not them that did it. It’s between that person and God. So you got to go home, get on with life, not think about it. She was your friend and you want to help her. But I’ll tell you, plain as day, she planned it all along. And she wanted the six of you there for it. You understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Someone who would do that to innocent children isn’t worth getting worked up over, understand?”

I nodded.

“Good.” She cleared her throat, picked up Hannah’s file and slid it into the filing cabinet.

A minute later, Dad and I were walking to the car. Heavy sun drooped over Main Street, made it a compost heap of mushy shadows falling off the hot cars hunched along the curb, and the spindly parking signs, and the bicycle dead on its side, chained to a bench.

“Everything’s fine now, I trust?” he asked merrily. “Case closed?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did Big Red treat you?”

“She was nice.”

“You two seemed to have a rather tantalizing conversation.”

I shrugged.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman so obscenely orange in all my life. You suppose her hair naturally sprouts from her head that precise shade of carrots, or do you think it’s a special kind of peroxide rinse one buys in the hope that it will temporarily blind people? A deliberate police weapon for her to use against the dissolute and depraved.”

He was trying to make me laugh, but I only shaded my eyes and waited for him to unlock the car.

Justine

Hannah’s Memorial Service, held the following Friday, April 16, was a sham. It was a Gallwanian ceremony, so naturally there was no coffin. On Tuesday, when Havermeyer announced the date of the service (also that we were free from class afterward, a Hannah Holiday), he further clarified in a voice with the unmistakable tone of an Epilogue or Afterword, that Hannah had been buried in New Jersey. (It was a dismal prospect. I’d never even heard Hannah say New Jersey.)

And so it was only us that day, the students, the faculty dressed in earth tones, the St. Gallway Choral Society (seventeen humdrum kids who’d recently tacked the word Society onto the end of their name in order to taste exclusivity) and St. Gallway’s part-time chaplain, who wasn’t Reverend Alfred Johnson, Preacher Johnson or Evangelist Johnson, but the spayed and sanitized Mr. Johnson. Supposedly he’d gone to divinity school, but “as what” nobody knew. He was a minister of indeterminate denomination, a truth Headmaster Havermeyer forbade him to disclose or even indirectly allude to during his Friday morning service, in order to avoid offending the one kid whose parents were Latter-Day Saints (Cadence Bosco). In the St. Gallway Admissions Catalogue, Higher Learning, Higher Grounds, the two-story stone chapel was described as a “sanctuary,” technically unaffiliated with a particular religion (though during the holiday season, there were “secular tidings”). It was simply a “house of faith.” Exactly which faith was anybody’s guess. I doubt even Mr. Johnson knew. Mr. Johnson didn’t wear a vicar’s collar but khakis and short-sleeve polo shirts in forest green and royal blue, giving him the air of a golf caddy. And when he talked about a Higher Power, he used words like gratifying, restorative and life-changing. It was something that “got you through the tough times,” which “any young person could manage with a little hard work, trust and tenacity.” God was a trip to Cancun.

I sat with the seniors, second pew from the front, staring down at the play I’d brought with me, A Moon for the Misbegotten (O’Neill, 1943) in order to avoid any eye contact with the Bluebloods. Apart from Jade and Nigel (whose mother had dropped him off one morning directly in front of the Volvo — which I stalled leaving by unzipping and zipping my backpack until he disappeared inside Hanover), I hadn’t seen the others a single time.

I’d heard tidbits of rumor: “I can’t remember what I ever saw in Milton,” said Macon Campins in AP English. “I was next to him in Biology and he totally doesn’t look hot anymore.” “Joalie broke up with him for that very reason,” said Engella Grand. During Morning Announcements and lunch (occasions when I hoped to sneak a speedy look at one of them the way Dad and I had peeked inside the trailer of the world’s smallest she-male at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus) they were nowhere to be found. I could only assume their parents had made some sort of arrangement with Mr. Butters and all five of them were attending rigorous morning and afternoon counseling sessions with Deb Cromwell. Deb, a short, yellow-complexioned woman, slow in movement and fatty in word (a walking wedge of Camembert), had made herself right at home in Hanover Room 109, erecting a variety of posters and cardboard displays. On my way to AP Calculus, as I darted past her room, I noticed, unless Mirtha Grazeley had wandered in (probably by accident, they said she often confused other rooms in Hanover with her office, including the Men’s Room), Deb was always sitting in there alone, keeping herself occupied by paging through her own Depression pamphlets.

Now, behind us on the balcony, the Choral Society started to sing, “All Glory, laud, and honor,” and the Bluebloods were still missing. I was just starting to presume, yet again, they were marooned in Deb Cromwell’s office, Deb turning them on to the pleasures of Self-Acceptance and Letting Go, when Deb herself, a smile gooped onto her face, hastened into the chapel with Ms. Jarvis, the school nurse, lumping herself onto the end of a pew where Havermeyer was sitting with his wife, Gloria, so massively pregnant she looked like she’d been pinned to the ground by a boulder.

Then, I heard someone gasp — it was Donnamara Chase sitting behind me; she needed smelling salts — and most of the school, including a few teachers, swiveled around to watch the five of them saunter in, single file and self-loving (see Abbey Road, The Beatles, 1969). They were head to toe in black. Milton and Nigel looked like ninjas (one XS, the other XL), Leulah, in a long-skirted, high-necked chiffon number, looked vaguely vampiric. Jade was blatantly ripping off Jackie at Arlington (saucer-sized sunglasses on her head and a vintage black alligator handbag were stand-ins for the veil and John-John). Charles was the charred elephant bringing up the rear. He was in black, too, but the giant plaster cast on his left leg (ankle to upper thigh) jutted out like a giant ivory tusk. As he limped along with his crutches, glowering at the floor, disturbingly pasty and thin, his face wet with sweat (gold hair stuck in Os along his forehead like soggy Cheerios in a bowl), I felt sick — not because I wasn’t with them or dressed in black (I hadn’t thought about my outfit; I’d put on a stupid short floral thing), but because he looked so unlike that first time I’d seen him, when he tapped my shoulder during Morning Announcements back in the fall. He was a different person. If once he’d been a Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947), now he was a Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963).

The Bluebloods wedged themselves into the row in front of me.

“We gather here today in this sacred haven both to grieve and to give thanks,” began Mr. Johnson in the pulpit. He licked his lips as he paused to glance down at his papers. (He was always licking his lips; they were like potato chips, salty and addictive.) “Since our beloved Hannah Schneider left us over three weeks ago, throughout our community there have been resounding accolades, words of warmth and kindness, stories of how she affected our lives in ways both great and small. Today, we join together to give thankfulness for being blessed with such an extraordinary teacher and friend. We give thanks for her kindness, her humanity and caring, her courage in adversity and the overwhelming joy she brought to so many. Life is eternal and love is everlasting and death is nothing but a horizon and a horizon is nothing but the boundary of our sight.”

Johnson went on and on, giving an equal amount of eye contact to every third of the congregation with the mechanized surety of a sprinkler system, most likely having learned this from a course, How to Give a Mesmerizing Sermon, with its concepts of Bringing Everyone In and Evoking a Feeling of Togetherness and Universal Humanity. The speech wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t at all specific to Hannah. It was teeming with She Was a Lights and She Would Have Wanteds, mentioning nothing of her real life, a life that Havermayer and the rest of the administration were now all deeply afraid of, as if they’d secretly discovered asbestos in Elton House or found out Christian Gordon, St. Gallway’s Head Chef, had Hepatitis A. I could almost see the paper on the lectern filled with (Insert Deceased’s Name Here) (see www.123eulogy.com, #8).

When it was over, the Choral Society erupted, marginally off-key, into “Come Down O Love, Divine,” and students began to spill out of the pews, smiling, laughing, loosening their ties, tightening their ponytails. I took my last contraband look at the Bluebloods, shocked at how still they sat, how stony their faces. They hadn’t whispered or grimaced a single time during Johnson’s speech, although Leulah, as if feeling my eyes on her, had abruptly turned her doilied face in my direction during Eva Brewster’s Psalms Reading and, teeth clenched so her cheek dented, looked straight at me. (But then, almost immediately, she’d turned into one of those Highway Window Gazers; Dad and I would speed past them in the Volvo all the time, and they always stared past us, at something infinitely more interesting than our faces: the grass, the billboards, the sky.)

As Havermeyer made his way down the aisle, smiling a lead pipe smile with no joy behind it, rolling Gloria along next to him, and Mr. Johnson after her, jolly as Fred Astaire fox-trotting with one helluva girl (“Have a great day everybody!” he sang), without a word to anyone, chins held at the exact angle Hannah held hers while salsaing with her wineglass to Peggy Lee’s “Fever” (or at dinner, pretending to be interested in one of their meandering stories), one by one, the Bluebloods rose and paraded down the aisle, disappearing into the bright bland day waiting for them.

I’d forgotten to tell Dad it was a half day, so I hurried down the deserted first floor of Hanover to use the pay phone.

“Olives,” I heard someone shout behind me. “Wait up.”

It was Milton. I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of chatting with him — who knew what sort of abuse I’d have to endure, unleashed by that tepid memorial service — but I forced myself to stand ground. “Never retreat unless death is certain,” wrote Nobunaga Kobayashi in How to Be a Shogun Assassin (1989).

“Hey,” he said with one of his sloth smiles.

I only nodded.

“How ya doin’?”

“Great.”

He raised his eyebrows at this and shoved his big hands into his pockets. Yet again, he took his Grand Ole Time with conversation. One Ming Dynasty rose and fell between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

I didn’t say a word. Let the big ninja do the talking. Let him scrounge around for a few sentences.

“Well.” He sighed. “I don’t see how she coulda killed herself.”

“Not bad, Quiet Man. Now why don’t you tie that notion into a noose and see if it’s strong enough to hang yourself?”

He looked stunned, maybe even flabbergasted. Dad said it was nearly impossible to flabbergast a person in this tawdry day and age, when “kinky sex was mundane,” “a flasher in a trench coat in a public park, routine as cornfields in Kansas,” but I think I’d done it to this kid — I really did. Obviously, he wasn’t used to my tough ranchero tone of voice. Obviously, he wasn’t used to the new Blue, Blue the Conqueror, the Hondo, King of the Pecos, Blue Steel, the feral Born to the West Blue, that Lucky Texan, that Lady from Louisiana, who shot from the hip, sat tall in the saddle and rode the lonely trail. (Obviously, he’d never read Grit [Reynolds, 1974]. It was what Buckeye Birdie said to Shortcut Smith.)

“Want to get the hell out of here?” Milton asked.

I nodded.

I suppose everyone has his/her Open Sesame, his/her Abracadabra or Presto Chango, the arbitrary word, event or unforeseen signal that knocks a person down, causes him/her to behave, either permanently or for the short term, out of the blue, contrary to expectation, from nowhere. A shade is pulled, a door creaks open, some kid goes from Geek to Glamour Boy. And Milton’s Hocus-Pocus, his Master Key, happened to be a flowy sentence in Mr. Johnson’s generic speech, a speech Dad would call “stirring as a wall of cinder blocks,” indicative of the “Hallmark fever infecting our politicians and official spokesmen of late. When they speak, actual words don’t emerge, but summer afternoons of draining sun and tepid breeze and chirping Tufted Titmice one would feel gleeful shooting with a handgun.”

“When he said that thing about Hannah bein’ like a flower,” Milton said, “like a rose and all, I felt kinda moved.” His big right arm lumber-rolled on top of the steering wheel as he edged the Nissan between the cars and out of the Student Parking Lot. “I couldn’t stay angry ’bout what happened, ’specially not at my girl, Olives. I tried telling Jade and Charles it wasn’t your fault, but they’re not seein’ straight.”

He smiled. It was like one of those Viking ships in amusement parks, swerving up onto his face, dangling there for a few seconds nearly vertical to the ground, before swinging off again. Love, or more accurately, infatuation (“Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation,” Dad said.) was one of those no-good drifter emotions. After everything that had happened, I didn’t think I felt a thing for Milton, not anymore; I assumed my feelings had skipped town. But now he smiled, and there they were, those old sweaty sentiments slinking down the road again, waiting for me to acknowledge them by the bus station in a greasy wife-beater, cowboy hat, muscles frighteningly potholed and slick.

“Hannah told me I had to take you to her house when we got back from the camping trip. I figured we’d head over there, if you can handle it.”

I glanced over at him, confused. “What?”

He let my words sit on the dock of the bay for at least thirty seconds before answering.

“Remember Hannah had those private conversations with each of us hikin’ up the mountain?”

I nodded.

“That’s when she said it. I forgot about it ’til a couple of days ago. And now—”

“What did she say?”

“‘Take Blue to my house when you get back. Just the two of you.’ She repeated it three times. Remember how crazy she was that day? Orderin’ everyone around, screamin’ off mountaintops? And when she said it, I didn’t even recognize her. She was mean. Still, I laughed it off and said, ‘I don’t get it. You can have Blue over anytime.’ Instead of answering directly, she only repeated the sentence. ‘Take Blue to my house when you get back. You’ll understand.’ She made me swear I’d do it and that I wouldn’t say anything to the others.”

He switched on the radio. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, so when he shifted gears, the cute burnt toes of the tattoo angel became visible like the edge of a seashell peeking out of sand.

“What was strange,” he continued in his buffalo voice, “was that she said you. ‘When you get back.’ Not when we get back. Well, I’ve been thinking about the you. It can only mean one thing. She never planned to return with us.”

“I thought you didn’t think she committed suicide.”

He seemed to tobacco-chew this for a minute, squinting in the sun, shoving down the sun visor. We were speeding along the highway now, barreling through the thickened sunshine and the limp-rag shadows of the trees standing stiffly on the shoulder of the road. They held their branches high in the air — as if they knew the answer to an important question, as if they hoped to be called on. The Nissan was old and as Milton shifted the gears it rattled like one of those famished motel beds one feeds quarters to, a bed I’d never seen firsthand, though Dad claimed he’d counted seven within a one-mile radius in Northern Chad. (“They don’t have running water or bathrooms, but never fear, they have beds that buzz.”)

“She was sayin’ good-bye to us during those talks,” he said, clearing his throat. “She told Leulah, ‘Never be scared to cut your hair.’ And Jade. She said, ‘A lady should be a lady even when she removes her little black dress’—whatever the hell that means. She told Nigel to be himself, then somethin’ about wallpaper. ‘Change the wallpaper as much as you like and screw how much it costs. You’re the one who has to live there.’ And she said to me, before the thing about you, she said, ‘You just might be an astronaut. You just might walk on the moon.’ And Charles — no one knows what she said to him. He refuses to say. But Jade thinks she confessed she loved him. What’d she say to you?”

I didn’t answer, because obviously Hannah hadn’t said anything to me, not a single sentence of encouragement, however inscrutable and bizarre it sounded (no offense to Milton, but frankly, he didn’t strike me as the astronaut type; it was dangerous for a kid that size to float through the shuttle at zero gravity).

“See, I don’t want to believe suicide,” he went on thoughtfully, “because it makes me feel stupid. In hindsight, though, it adds up. She was always alone. That haircut. Then, there’s what happened to the Smoke guy. And her thing for truckers who eat at Stuckey’s. Shit. It was all just sittin’ there. Obvious. And we didn’t see it. How’s it possible?”

He looked to me for help, but obviously I didn’t have a decent answer. I watched his eyes ski down the front of my dress, stopping somewhere around my bare knees.

“Any idea why she’d want me to take you to her house? Alone?”

I shrugged, but the way he asked made me wonder if Hannah, after my flat-falling attempt to fix her up with Dad (mind you, that’d been B.C., or, before I knew about Cottonwood; A.C., or after Cottonwood, I’d sort of decided, for health reasons, she really wasn’t Dad’s dish), wanted to return the favor and had decided to tuck this sexy question mark of a sentence into Milton’s breast pocket, thereby ensuring at some point, in the Big-Bang aftermath of the camping trip (it was a simple scientific principle: after explosions, new beginnings) we’d conveniently find ourselves together, alone, in her empty house. Maybe she’d caught wind of my fixation from Jade or Lu or had figured it out on her own, given my graceless behavior at dinner. (I wouldn’t be surprised if all Fall and Winter Semester I’d had bird-nervous eyes: at Milton’s slightest movement, instantly airborne.)

“Hopefully, she left you a suitcase full of cash,” Milton said, smiling lazily. “And maybe if I’m nice, you’ll split it with me.”

As we approached Hannah’s house, slipping past the pastures, the quiet barns, the horses waiting like men in bus stations (the sun had cemented their hooves to the grass), the corkscrew tree, that little patch of hill where Jade always floored the Mercedes so the car flew over the top and our stomachs flipped like pancakes, I told Milton my account of what had happened on the mountain. (As with Jade, I omitted the section where I found Hannah dead.)

When he asked me what I thought Hannah was going to tell me, why she’d led me away from the campground, I lied and said I didn’t have a clue.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. I didn’t know. But it wasn’t as if I hadn’t outlined, in the middle of the night, in meticulous detail, in the library silence of my room, on my Citizen-Kane desk (switching out my light if I heard Dad skulking around the stairs to make sure I was asleep), the Infinite Possibilities.

After laying some groundwork, I’d concluded there were two generalized schools of thought arising from this mystery. (This wasn’t including the possibility Milton had just disclosed, that Hannah might have wanted to hand me a few lukewarm good-byes — that one day I’d be strolling Mars, or that I shouldn’t hesitate to repaint my house in a flamboyant color since I was the one who lived there — stale, crumbly, oyster-cracker phrases she could have easily said to me as we hiked the trail. No, I’d have to assume what Hannah wanted to tell me was entirely different, more vital than anything she’d whispered to the Bluebloods.)

The first school of thought, then, was that Hannah had wished to confess something to me. It was an attractive idea, considering her hoarse voice, moth-moving eyes, the fitful starts and stops of her sentences as if she were operated by sporadic electricity. And what she had wanted to confess could have been any number of things, ranging from the crass to the crazy — her Cottonwood habit, for example, or an accidental affair with Charles, or that somehow she’d managed to kill Smoke Harvey; or perhaps she’d cultivated (another one of Jade’s shot put accusations, flung out with all her might, then forgotten as she strolled back to the locker room for stretches) a secret association with the Manson Family. (Incidentally, I still had Hannah’s copy of Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night stored in a bottom desk drawer. My heart had stopped when I’d overheard Dee mention in second period Study Hall that Hannah had asked her Intro to Film class if anyone had removed a book from her desk. “Some bird book,” Dee said with a shrug.)

If this thesis was true — that Hannah had hoped to disclose a secret — I could only surmise she had chosen me to confess to, over, say, Jade or Leulah, because I looked unthreatening. Maybe she sensed, too, I’d read all of Scobel Bedlows Jr., his essays on judgments; basically, you weren’t allowed to have any so long as “devastation was directed inwards, at yourself, never other people or animals” (see When to Stone, Bedlows, 1968). Hannah also seemed to have had an innate understanding of Dad and perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I’d found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they’ll work for you.

The second school of thought, and obviously the more disturbing one, was that Hannah had wanted to disclose a secret All About Me.

I was the only one, out of all of them, who hadn’t washed ashore and been collected by Hannah after some tempest of a home life. I’d never run off with an old Turk, tried to throw my arms around the torso of a trucker (and strained to touch my hands together on the other side), suffered a street-life blackout, had a parent who was a junkie or in maximum-security prison. I wondered if Hannah knew a secret that revealed me to be like them.

What If Dad really wasn’t my dad, for example? What If he’d found me like some penny on a public promenade? What If Hannah was my real mother who’d given me up for adoption because no one wanted to get married in the late eighties; everyone wanted to go roller-skating and wear shoulder pads? Or What If I had a fraternal twin named Sapphire who was everything I wasn’t — gorgeous, athletic, funny and tan with a carefree laugh, blessed not with an Osmium Dad (the heaviest metal known to man) but a Lithium Mom (the lightest) who slaved not as a vagabond professor and essayist, but was simply a waitress in Reno?

Such paranoid What Ifs caused me, on more than a few occasions, to run downstairs into Dad’s study and quietly rummage through his legal pads, his unfinished essays and faded notes for The Iron Grip, to stare at the photographs: the picture of Natasha at the piano, and the one of her and Dad, standing outside on a lawn in front of a badminton net, holding racquets, arms pretzeled, wearing antique outfits and expressions that made them look as if it was 1946 and they’d survived a World War, rather than the year it really was, 1986, and they were surviving the Brat Pack and Weird Al.

These frail photographs cordoned off my past again, made it staunch and impermeable. I did, however, venture asking Dad a few off-hand yet probing questions, and Dad responded with a laugh.

Dad, on Secret Bastard Siblings: “Don’t tell me you’ve been reading Jude the Obscure.”

Milton had no further light to shed on this conundrum — why Hannah had singled me out, why I wasn’t with them when Charles, trying to ascend a jutting rock promontory in order to get a sense of direction, perhaps spot an electrical tower or a skyscraper sign for a Motel 6, “fell down this Grand Canyon sorta thing and started to yell so loud we thought he was bein’ stabbed.” After I finished telling Milton the remainder of my story, which had drooled a little into my confrontation with Jade in Loomis, he only shook his head in bewilderment and said nothing.

By then we were inching down Hannah’s deserted drive.

For lack of a better plan — embarrassingly inspired by Jazlyn Bonnoco’s Fleet Book Evidence (1989) — I suggested to Milton, maybe Hannah wanted us to find a clue in her house, a treasure map or old letters of blackmail and fraud—“something to tell us about the camping trip or her death,” I explained — we decided to peruse her possessions as discreetly as we could. And Milton read my mind: “Let’s start with the garage, huh?” (I suspected we were both afraid to enter the actual house, for fear we’d find some specter version of her.) The wooden one-car garage, standing a decent distance from the house with a flabby roof, crusty windows, looked like a giant matchbox that’d been in someone’s pocket too long.

I’d been worried about what had happened to the animals, but Milton said Jade and Lu, who’d hoped to adopt them, found out they’d gone to live with Richard, one of Hannah’s coworkers from the animal shelter. He lived on a llama farm in Berdin Lake, north of Stockton.

“It’s fuckin’ sad,” Milton said, pushing open the side door to the garage. “Because now they’re gonna be like that dog.”

“What dog?” I asked, glancing at Hannah’s front porch as I followed him inside. There was no POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape on the door, no immediate sign anyone had been there. “Old Yeller?”

He shook his head and switched on the light. Neon light spilled through the hot, rectangular room. There wasn’t space for two tires, much less an entire car, which explained why Hannah always parked the Subaru in front of the house. Heaps of furniture — blistered lamps, injured armchairs, carpets, chairs — not to mention a few cardboard boxes and random camping gear — had been brutally tossed on top of each other like bodies in an open grave.

“You know,” Milton said, stepping around one of the boxes. “In The Odyssey. The one always waitin’ for his master.”

“Argos?”

“Yeah. Poor old Argos. He dies, doesn’t he?”

“You want to stop, please? You’re making me…”

“What?”

“Depressed.”

He shrugged. “Hey, don’t mind me.”

We dug.

And the longer we dug, through backpacks, boxes, armoires and armchairs (Milton was still fixated on his suitcase-full-of-cash idea, though now he figured Hannah could have stuffed the unmarked bills into seat cushions and goose-down pillows), the more the experience of digging (Milton and I, cast as unlikely Leading Man and Woman) became sort of electrifying.

Scrutinizing those chairs and lamp shades, something began to happen: I started to imagine myself a woman named Slim, Irene or Betty, a dame who wore penciled skirts, a cone bra, had zigzag hair over an eye. Milton was the disillusioned tough-guy with a fedora, bloody knuckles and a temper.

“Yep, just makin’ sure the old girl didn’t leave us somethin’,” Milton sang cheerfully as he gutted an orange couch cushion with the Swiss Army knife he’d found an hour ago. “No stone unturned. Because I’d hate her to be an Oliver Stone movie.”

I nodded, opening an old cardboard box. “If you end up a well-publicized mystery,” I said, “you no longer belong to yourself. Everyone steals you and turns you into anything they want. You become their cause.”

“Uh huh.” Thoughtfully, he stared down at the cottage-cheesed foam. “I hate open-ended stuff. Like Marilyn Monroe. What the hell happened? Was she gettin’ too close to somethin’ and the president had to shut her up? That seems crazy. That people can just take a life, like it’s—”

“Free fruit.”

He smiled. “Yeah. But then maybe it was an accident. Stars align a crazy way. Death happens. Could just as well’ve been the lottery or a broken leg. Or maybe she had a thought that she couldn’t go on. We all have thoughts like that, only she decided to act on hers. She forces herself to. Because she thinks that’s what she deserves. And maybe seconds later she knows she was wrong. Tries to save herself. But it’s too late.”

I stared at him, unsure if he was talking about Marilyn or Hannah.

“S’how it always is.” He was setting aside the seat cushion, picking up an ashtray and turning it over, staring at the bottom of it. “You never know if there’s a conspiracy or it’s just how things unravel, the — I don’t know, one of…”

“Life’s hairball pincurves.”

His mouth was open, but he didn’t go on, apparently floored by a Dadism I’d always thought kind of irritating (it was a sentence you could find in his Iron Grip notes if you were patient enough to sit through his handwriting). He pointed at me.

“That’s good, Olives. Very good.”

I criss-crossed, detoured, fell out of the past.

After two hours of searching, although we’d found no direct clue, Milton and I had managed to dig up all kinds of different Hannahs — sisters, cousins, fraternal twins, stepchildren to the one we’d known. There was Haight-Ashbury Hannah (old records of Carole King, Bob Dylan, a bong, tai chi books, a faded ticket to some peace rally at Golden Gate Park on June 3, 1980), Stripper Hannah (I didn’t feel comfortable going through that box, but Milton exhumed bras, bikinis, a zebra-striped slip, a few more complicated items requiring directions for assembly), also Hand Grenade Hannah (combat boots, more knives), also Hannah, Missing Person Possessed (the same folder full of Xeroxed newspaper articles Nigel had found, though he’d lied about there being “fifty pages at least” there were only nine). My favorite, however, was Madonna Hannah who material-girled out of a sagging cardboard box.

Beneath a raisined basketball, among nail polish, dead spiders and other junk, I found a faded photograph of Hannah with cropped, spiky red hair and brilliant purple eye shadow painted all the way to her eyebrows. She was singing onstage, a microphone in hand, wearing a yellow plastic miniskirt, beetle-green-and-white-striped tights and a black corset made from either garbage bags or used tires. She was midnote, so her mouth was wide open — you could possibly pop a chicken egg in there and it’d disappear.

“Holy fuck,” Milton said, staring down at the photograph.

I turned it over, but there was nothing written on it, no date.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Hell yeah, it’s her. Shit.”

“How old do you think she is?”

“Eighteen? Twenty?”

Even with boy-short red hair, clown-like makeup, eyes wincing due to the angry look crashing through her face, she was still gorgeous. (Guess that’s absolute beauty for you: like Teflon, impossible to deface.)

After I found the photograph and looked through the last cardboard box, Milton said it was time for the house.

“Feelin’ good, Olives? On your game?”

He knew about an extra set of keys under the geranium pot on the porch, and jamming the key into the dead bolt, suddenly his left hand reached back and found my wrist, squeezing it, letting go (a bland gesture one did with a stress ball; still, my heart leapt, did an agitated “Ahh,” then fainted).

We crept inside.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t frightening — not in the least. In fact, in Hannah’s absence, the house had taken on the solemn properties of a lost civilization. It was Machu Picchu, a piece of ancient Parthian Empire. As Sir Blake Simbel writes in Beneath the Blue (1989), his memoir detailing the Mary Rose excavation, lost civilizations were never frightening, but fascinating, “reserved and riddle-filled, a gentle testament to the endurance of earth and objects over human life” (p. 92).

After I left a message for Dad telling him I had a ride home, we excavated the living room. In some ways, it was like seeing it for the first time, because without the distractions of Nina Simone or Mel Tormé, without Hannah herself gliding around in her worn-out clothing, I was able to really see things: in the kitchen, the blank notepad and ballpoint pen (BOCA RATON it read in fading gold) positioned under the 1960s phone (the same spot and type of notepad on which Hannah supposedly had scrawled Valerio, though there were no exciting indentations on the page I could shade over with light pencil — as TV detectives do so effectively). In the dining room, the room where we’d eaten a hundred times, there were actually objects Milton and I had never seen before: in the big wooden and glass display case behind Nigel’s and Jade’s chairs, two hideous porcelain mermaids and a Hellenistic Terra-cotta female figure, approximately six inches tall. I wondered if Hannah had just received them as gifts a few days prior to the camping trip, but judging by the thick dust, they’d been there for months.

And then, from the VCR in the living room, I ejected a movie, L’Avventura. It was fully rewound.

“What’s that?” Milton asked.

“An Italian movie,” I said. “Hannah was teaching it in her film class.” I handed it to him and picked up the video box, alone on the coffee table. I scanned the back.

“Laventure?” Milton asked uncertainly, staring down at the tape with his mouth pushed to the side. “What’s it about?”

“A woman who goes missing,” I said. My words made me shiver a little.

Milton nodded and then, with a frustrated sigh, tossed the videotape onto the couch.

We combed the remaining rooms downstairs, but found no revolutionary relics — no drawings of bison, aurochs or stags from flint, wood or bone, no carving of Buddha, no crystal reliquary or steatite casket from the Mauryan Empire. Milton suggested Hannah might have kept a diary, so we made our way upstairs.

Her bedroom was unchanged from the last time I’d seen it. Milton checked her bedside and vanity table (he found my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, which Hannah had borrowed and never returned) and I did a quick tour of the bathroom and closet, finding those things Nigel and I had exhumed: the nineteen bottles of pills, the framed childhood photos, even the knife collection. The only thing I didn’t find was that other schoolgirl picture, the one of Hannah with the other girl in uniforms. It wasn’t where I thought Nigel had put it — in the Evan Picone shoe box. I looked for it in some of the other boxes along the shelf, but after the fifth one, I gave up. Either Nigel had put it back somewhere else, or Hannah had moved it.

“I’ve lost steam,” Milton said, leaning against the part of Hannah’s bed where I was sitting. He tilted his head back so it was less than an inch from my bare knee. A strand of his black hair actually slipped off his sticky forehead and touched my bare knee. “I can smell her. That perfume she wore.”

I looked down at him. He looked like Hamlet. And I’m not talking about the Hamlets enamored with the language, the ones always thinking ahead to the upcoming sword fight or where to stress the line (Get thee to a nunnery, Get thee to a nunnery), not the Hamlet worried about how well his tunic fits or whether he can be heard in the back. I’m talking about the Hamlets who actually start to wonder if they should be, or not be, the ones who are bruised by Life’s Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear, the ones who, after the final curtain, can barely speak, eat or take off their stage makeup with cold cream and cotton balls. They go home and do a lot of staring at walls.

“Goddamn miserable,” he said almost inaudibly to the overhead light. “Guess we should go home. Forget this stuff. Call it a day.”

I let my left hand fall off my bare knee so it touched the side of his face. It had a dampness to it, a humidity of basements. Immediately, his eyes slipped onto me and I must have had an Open Sesame look on my face because he grabbed me and pulled me down onto his lap. His big sticky hands covered both sides of my head like earphones. He kissed me as if biting into fruit. I kissed him back, pretending to bite into peaches and plums — nectarines, I didn’t know. I think I also made funny noises (egret, loon). He gripped my shoulders, as if I were the sides of a carnival ride and he didn’t want to fall out.

I’d imagine it occurred a great deal during excavations.

Yes, I’d wager quite a bit of money that more than a few hips, knees, feet, and bottoms have rubbed up against royal sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings, hearth remains in the Nile Valley, Aztec portrait beakers on an island in Lake Texcoco, that a lot of fast, rabbity sex transpires on Babylonian-dig cigarette breaks and Bog Mummy examination tables.

Because, after a strenuous dig with your trowel, your pickax, you’ve seen that sweaty compatriot of yours from every critical angle (90, 60, 30, 1), also in a variety of lights (flashlight, sun, moon, halogen, firefly) and all of a sudden you’re overwhelmed with the feeling that you understand the person, the way you understand stumbling upon the lower jaw and all the teeth of Proconsul Africanus meant not only that the History of Human Evolution would be transformed, forever afterward mapped with a little more detail, but also that your name would be up there with Mary Leakey’s. You, too, would be world renowned. You, too, would be entreated to write lengthy articles in Archaeological Britain. You feel as if this person next to you was a glove you’d managed to turn inside out, and you could see all the little strings and the torn lining, the hole in the thumb.

Not that we did It, mind you, not that we had the blank-faced handshake sex rampant among America’s twitchy youths (see “Is Your Twelve-Year-Old a Sex Fiend?” Newsweek, August 14, 2000). We did take off our clothes, however, and roll around like logs. His angel tattoo said hello to more than a few freckles on my arm and back and side. We scratched each other accidentally, our bodies blunt and mismatched. (No one tells you about the frank lighting or lack of mood music.) When he was on top of me, he looked calm and inquisitive, as if he were lying at the edge of a swimming pool, staring at something shiny at the bottom, contemplating diving in.

I will thus confess a stupid truth regarding this encounter. For a minute afterward, lying on Hannah’s bed with him, my head on his shoulder, my skinny white arm garlanding his neck, when he said, wiping his drenched forehead, “Is it fuckin’ hot in here or is it me?” and I said without thinking, “It’s me,” I sort of felt — well, fantastic. I felt as if he was my American in Paris, my Brigadoon. (“Young love come like roseth petals,” writes Georgie Lawrence in his last collection, So Poemesque [1962], “and like lightning boltheth flees.”)

“Tell me about the streets,” I said softly, staring at Hannah’s ceiling, square and white. Then I was horrified: without thought, the sentence had drifted out of my mouth like a boat Victorian people float around on with parasols, and he hadn’t immediately answered so obviously I’d blown things. That was the problem with the Van Meers; they always wanted more, had to dig deeper, get dirtier, doggedly cast their fishing line in the river over and over again, even if they only caught dead fish.

But then he answered, yawning: “Streets?”

He didn’t continue, so I swallowed, my heart on the edge of its seat.

“I just meant…when you were involved with your…gang—you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll talk about anythin’ with you,” he said.

“Oh. Well…you ran away from home?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

“Wanted to on plenty of occasions, but I never did.”

I was confused. I’d been expecting shifty eyes, words jamming in his throat like coins in a faulty pay phone.

“But then how did you get your tattoo?” I asked.

He turned his right shoulder around and stared at it, the corners of his mouth plunging down. “My older bro, fuckin’ John. His eighteenth birthday. He and his friends took me to a tattoo parlor. Total shithole. We both got tattoos, only he royally fucked me, because his, freakin’ salamander, is this big”—he displayed the width of a blueberry in his fingers—“an’ he talked me into getting this monster motherfuckin’ can of worms. You shoulda seen my mom’s face.” He chuckled, remembering. “Never seen her so pissed. It was classic.”

“But how old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Not twenty-one?”

“Uh, not unless I fell into a coma.”

“You never lived on the streets?”

“What?” He scrunched up his face like he had sun in his eyes. “I can’t even sleep on those fuckin’ couches at Jade’s. I like my own bed, Sealy Posturepedic or whatever — hey, what’s with the questions?”

“But Leulah,” I persisted, my voice crashing out of my mouth now, determined to hit something. “When she was thirteen she ran away with a — a Turkish math teacher and he was arrested in Florida and he went to jail.”

“What?”

“And Nigel’s parents are in prison. That’s why he has a preoccupation with suspense novels and is vaguely pathological — he doesn’t feel guilt and Charles was adopted—”

“You can’t be serious.” He sat up, looking down at me like I was loco. “Nigel feels stuff. He still feels bad for ditchin’ that kid last year, what’s his name, sits next to you in Mornin’ Announcements and second of all, Charles is not adopted.”

I frowned, feeling that vague sense of irritation when tabloid stories turned out not to be true. “How do you know? Maybe he just never said anything.”

“Ever met his mom?”

I shook my head.

“They could be brother and sister. And Nigel’s parents aren’t in prison. Jesus. Who told you that?”

“But what about his real parents?”

“His real parents own that pottery place — Diana and Ed—”

“They didn’t serve time for shooting a police officer?”

That particular claim made Milton guffaw (I’d never heard a real guffaw, but what he did was definitely one) and then, seeing I was serious and more than a little worked up — blood was rushing into my cheeks; I’m sure I was red as a carnation — he lay back and rolled toward me so the bed went ugh, and his puffy lips and eyebrows and the tip of his nose (on which stood, rather heroically, a freckle) were inches from my own.

“Who told you this stuff?”

When I didn’t answer, he whistled.

“Whoever he is, he’s a nut case.”

Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana

“I do not believe in madness,” Lord Brummel notes dryly at the end of Act IV in Wilden Benedict’s charming play about the sexual depravity of the British upper class, A Bev’y of Ladies (1898). “It’s too uncouth.”

I agreed.

I believed in the madness of destitution, drug-induced madness, also Dictator Dementia and Wartime Whacked (with its tragic subsets, Frontline Fever, Napalm Non Compos Mentis). I could even confirm the existence of Checkout-Aisle Crackers, which abruptly afflicts an ordinary, unassuming person standing behind a man with seventy-five exotic grocery items, none of which sport price tags, but I did not buy Hannah’s madness, even though she had the hair for it, had killed or hadn’t killed herself, had slept or hadn’t slept with Charles, had picked up strange men and shamelessly fashioned lavish lies out of the plain cotton histories of the Bluebloods.

Thinking about it, I felt dizzy, because it’d been such a classy con; she’d been Yellow-Kid Nickel, the most acclaimed confidence man in history, and I’d been the easy mark, the fall guy, the unwitting casino.

“If Jade rode a mile in some cruddy eighteen-wheeler then I’m Elvis reincarnated,” Milton said as he drove me home.

Naturally, I now felt dim for believing her. It was true. Jade wouldn’t go fifty feet unless there was fur, silk or fine Italian leather involved. Sure, the girl disappeared into handicapped stalls with men who had faces like busted-up Buicks, but that was simply her brand of thrill, her bump of cocaine at fifteen minutes a pop. She wouldn’t ride out of the parking lot with one of them, much less into a sunset. I’d also completely overlooked how much the girl shirked responsibility. She had trouble dropping a History class. “Can’t deal with the paperwork,” she said, the paperwork being a slip of paper requiring three lines to be filled out.

When I admitted to Milton that Hannah had told me these stories, he declared her certifiable.

“In your defense, I see how you’d believe her,” he said, stopping the Nissan by my front door. “If she told me that story about myself, that I’d joined a gang — hell, that my parents were aliens — I’d probably believe it. She made everythin’ real.” He hooked his fingers on the steering wheel. “So that’s it, I guess. Hannah was bojangled. Never woulda guessed it. I mean, why go through the trouble to invent that shit?”

“I don’t know,” I said grimly as I climbed from the car.

He blew me a kiss. “See you Monday? You. Me. A movie.”

I nodded and smiled. He drove away.

And yet, as I made my way upstairs to my room, I realized that in my life, if I’d known someone certifiable, it wouldn’t be Hannah Schneider. No, it’d be June Bug Kelsea Stevens whom I caught in Dad’s bathroom having a conversation with herself in the mirror (“You look marvelous. No, you look marvelous. No, you loo — how long have you been standing there?”) or even June Bug Phyllis Mixer who treated her skittish Standard Poodle like a ninety-year-old grandmother (“Up-see-daisies. Good girl. That too much sun for you? No? What would you like for lunch, honey? Oh, you want my sandwich.”). And poor June Bug Vera Strauss, whom Dad and I found out later had been manic for years — looking back, she’d had actual signs of lunacy: her eyes were severely depressed (literally, into her face) and when she talked to you, there was something scary about it, as if she were actually addressing a ghost or some sort of poltergeist hovering just behind your left shoulder.

No, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, I didn’t believe that was the trapdoor out of the maze — that Hannah Schneider was simply nutty as a fruitcake. Any professor worth his salt would throw out that sort of essay, if some kid dared to turn in such an ill-considered, hackneyed Thesis. No, I’d read The Return of the Witness (Hastings, 1974) and its sequel and I’d watched Hannah; I’d seen how she’d marched so assuredly up that trail (there’d been a discernible jaunt in her step) and she’d shouted off that mountaintop with conviction, not despair (there were vast differences in a voice’s timbre between those emotions).

There had to be another reason.

In my room, I threw down my backpack and removed the materials I’d filched from Hannah’s house from the front of my dress and my shoe. I hadn’t wanted Milton to know I was swiping things. I’d started to feel more than a little embarrassed by the way my mind was working. He’d said, “Look who’s sleuthin’,” “Olives’ got her sleuth on,” “That’s so sleuthy, baby,” six times and it’d sounded less and less cute the more he said it, and so, when we climbed into his Nissan I’d said I’d left my birthstone necklace on the bureau in Hannah’s garage (I didn’t have, nor had I ever had, a birthstone necklace) and while he waited, I ran inside and grabbed those materials I’d already set aside in the cardboard box in the back corner. I shoved the thin folder of Missing Person articles down my dress so it was pressed around my waist, put the photograph of Hannah with the spiky rockstar hair into my shoe, and when I climbed back into the car and he said, “Got it?” I grinned, pretending to zip it into the front pocket of my backpack. (He wasn’t the most perceptive person; I sat stiffly the entire ride home as if perched on pinecones and he didn’t bat an eye.)

Now, I switched on the bedside lamp and opened the manila folder.

The shock with which the revelation came to me wasn’t because the idea was particularly intricate or inspired, but because it was so excitingly obvious, I hated myself for not considering it sooner. I read the newspaper articles first (Hannah appeared to have gone to a library and photocopied them from grainy microfiche): two from The Stockton Observer dated September 19, 1990, and June 2, 1979, “Search for Missing Backpacker Underway,” “Roseville Girl, 11, Found Unhurt,” respectively; another from The Knoxville Press, “Missing Girl Reunited with Father, Mother Charged” one from Tennessee’s Pineville Herald-Times, “Missing Boy Prostituted” and finally “Missing Woman Found in VT, Using Alias,” from The Huntley Sentinel.

I then read the last page, the book excerpt, which concluded the story of Violet May Martinez, the day she disappeared from the Great Smoky Mountains on August 29, 1985.

97.

the group was one person short. Violet was nowhere to be found.

Mike Higgis searched the parking lot and questioned strangers who’d parked there, but no one had seen her. After an hour, he contacted the National Park Service. The Park immediately launched a search, closing the area from Blindmans Bald to Burnt Creek. Violet’s father and sister were notified and they brought Violet’s clothes so the search dogs could identify her smell.

Three German Shepherds tracked Violet to a single spot by a paved road, 1.25 miles from the last place Violet was seen. The road led to U.S. 441 leading out of the Park.

Ranger Bruel told Violet’s father, Roy Jr., that could mean Violet made her way there and was picked up by someone in a vehicle. She also could have been abducted against her will.

Roy Jr. rejected the idea Violet had planned her disappearance. She did not have a credit card or identification with her. She had taken no money from her checking or savings accounts prior to the trip. She was also looking forward to her 16th birthday the following week at Roller-Skate America.

Roy Jr. tipped the police off to a potential suspect. Kenny Franks, 24, released January 1985 from a correctional institution for violence and theft, had seen Violet at the mall and become infatuated. He’d been spotted at Besters High and harassed Violet with phone calls. Roy Jr. contacted the police and Kenny left her alone, though his friends reported he still was obsessed with her.

“Violet said she hated him, but she still wore the necklace he gave her,” said her best friend Polly Elms.

Police investigated the possibility of Kenny Franks having a hand in her disappearance, but sources testified on Aug. 25 he’d been working all day as a busboy at Stagg Mill Bar & Grill and was cleared of suspicion. Three weeks later he moved to Myrtle Beach, S.C. Police investigated if he was in contact with Violet, but no evidence to support this claim ever emerged.

A Final Enigma

The search for Violet ended September 14, 1985. With 812 searchers, including Park Personnel, Rangers, the National Guard and FBI, no further leads in her disappearance came to light.

On October 21, 1985, at Jonesville Nations Bank in Jonesville, Florida, a black-haired woman tried to cash a check from Violet’s checking account, made payable to “Trixie Peanuts.” When the teller informed the woman she’d have to deposit the check and wait for it to clear, the woman left with it and never returned. The bank teller, when presented with a picture of Violet, was unable to confirm it was she. The woman was never seen in Jonesville again.

Roy Jr. swore his daughter would never have cause to disappear from her life. Her friend Polly thought otherwise.

“She was always talking about how much she hated Besters and hated being a Baptist. She got good grades so I think she could plan it so people thought she was dead. That way they’d stop looking for her and she’d never have to come back.”

Seven years later, Roy Jr. still thinks of Violet every day.

“I put it with God now. ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart,’” he quotes from Proverbs 3:5, 6, “‘and lean not on your own understanding.’”

All of the articles in the folder were not merely concerning Missing Persons, but disappearances that had appeared to have been staged — definitively, in the case of the Huntley Sentinel article, which detailed the vanishing of a fifty-two-year-old woman, Ester Sweeney of Huntley, New Mexico, married to her third husband, Milo, and owing over $800,000 in back taxes and credit card bills. Police ultimately concluded she’d ransacked her home, slashed her kitchen screen and her own right arm (her blood was found in the foyer) in order to make it look like a violent break-in. She was found three years later in Winooski, Vermont, living under an assumed name and married to her fourth husband.

The other articles were more informative, detailing police procedures, a National Park abduction, search methods. The Missing Backpacker article specified the ways the National Guard conducted a search of Yosemite: “Rangers, after screening search-and-rescue volunteers for physical fitness, employed a grid system, assigning each group sequential areas of the Glacier Point area to sweep.”

I couldn’t believe it. And yet it wasn’t unheard of; according to the Almanac of American Strange Habits, Tics and Behaviors (1994 ed.) one in every 4,932 United States citizens planned their own kidnapping or death.

Hannah Schneider had not meant to die, but to disappear.

Somewhat sloppily (and it wasn’t exactly meticulous work; if she’d been a Doctoral Candidate her advisor would’ve reprimanded her for lethargy), Hannah had compiled these articles as exploratory research before she made a break for it, took it on the lam, copped a sneak, polished off her former life like a button-man did a squealer.

Anjelica Soledad de Crespo, a pseudonym for the drug-trafficking heroine of Jorge Torres’s stirring nonfiction portrait of the Pan-American narcotics cartel, For the Love of Corinthian Leather (2003), fed up with la vida de las drogas, had designed a similar death for herself, though she’d ventured to La Gran Sabana in Venezuela and appeared to tumble over a thousand-foot falls. Nine months prior to the supposed accident, a boat of nineteen Polish tourists had gone over in the same fashion — three of the corpses were never recovered due to the powerful undercurrents at the waterfall’s base, which held the bodies under in a vicious spin cycle until they were ripped to shreds, then devoured by crocodiles. Anjelica was declared dead within forty-eight hours. The truth was, she’d slipped out of her rowboat, making her way to the scuba gear planted for her on a convenient rock formation, which she’d donned and, fully submerged, swam the four miles to a location upriver where her handsome lover, Carlos, originally from El Silencio in Caracas, awaited her in a tricked-out silver Hummer. They hightailed it to an uninhabited section of the Amazon, somewhere in Guyana, where they still live.

I stared at the ceiling, racking my brain to recover every detail from that night. Hannah had changed into heavier clothes while we were eating dinner. When she came to find me in the woods, she wore a satchel around her waist. As she led me away, she’d known exactly where she was going because she’d walked resolutely, checking the map and compass. She’d intended to tell me something, a confession of some kind, then abandon me. Using the compass, she’d intersect with a predetermined trail, which would lead to one of the minor Park roads, then to U.S. 441 and a campground where a car awaited her (perhaps it was Carlos in a silver Hummer). By the time we were rescued and she was declared missing — a lag time of at least twenty-four hours, most likely longer, given the weather conditions — she’d be states away, maybe even Mexico.

And maybe the stranger who’d come upon us had not been so strange. Maybe he was Hannah’s Carlos (her Valerio) and the ambush, the “Give me five minutes,” the “I said stay here,” had been a hoax; maybe she’d intended to go after him all along, and together they’d make their way to the trail, the road, car, Mexico, margaritas, fajitas. In this case, when I was found, I’d report to authorities someone had come upon us, and when no sign of Hannah turned up, when German Shepherds tracked her to a spot on a nearby road, the police would suspect Kidnapping or other Foul Play, or, that she’d planned to vanish, in which case, unless she was WANTED for something, they’d do little. (Detective Harper had not hinted at Hannah having a criminal record. And I could only assume she wasn’t related to the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese or Colombo crime families.)

Sure, it was a brutal thing she’d done, to purposefully abandon me in the dark, but when people were desperate they did, with little conscience, all kinds of brutal things (see How to Survive “The Farm,” Louisiana State Prison at Angola, Glibb, 1979). Yet, she hadn’t been totally without concern; before she left me, she’d given me the flashlight, the map, told me not to be afraid. And during the afternoon hike up Bald Creek Trail, on four or five occasions, she’d pointed out on our maps, not only our location, but the fact that Sugartop Summit was only four miles away from the Park’s main road, U.S. 441.

If I could determine the reason Hannah had wished to flee her life, I could determine who’d killed her. Because it’d been a first-rate rub out, a button man well acquainted with autopsies, because he’d understood the consequence of the ligature marks, how to make them look like suicide. He’d planned in advance the ideal spot for the lynching, that small, round clearing, and thus he’d known she was running away and what trail she was taking to reach the road. Maybe he’d been wearing night-vision goggles, or hunter’s camouflage — like the disturbing kind I’d seen in Andreo Verduga’s Wal-Mart shopping cart in Nestles, Missouri, ShifTbush™ Invisible Gear, Fall Mix, “the accomplished hunter’s dream”—and, “instantly invisible in his woodland surroundings,” he’d stepped onto a tree stump or some other sturdy, elevated position, silently waiting for her, poised with the electrical cord in a noose, which was in turn rigged to the tree. As she stumbled past, trying to find her way, trying to find him—because she’d known who he was — he looped it over her head, wrenching his end of the rope hard so she rose into the air. She didn’t have time to react, to kick or scream, to organize the last thoughts of her life. (“Even the devil deserves last thoughts,” wrote William Stonely in Ash Complexions [1932].)

As I reenacted this scene in my head, my heart began to thud. Sickening chills began to inchworm down my arms and legs, and then, rather abruptly, one more detail fell motionless at my feet like a lead-poisoned canary, like a pugface nose-toasted by a mean right to his chin.

Hannah had instructed Milton to take me to her house, not to play matchmaker (though perhaps that played a part; I couldn’t discount the movie posters in her classroom), but so I, a thought-ridden and inquisitive person, would engage in a little gumshoe: “You’re such a perceptive person; you don’t miss anything,” she’d told me that night at her house. She had not foreseen her death, and thus presumed, after she’d disappeared, when the search party turned up no trace of her, the Bluebloods and I would be left with the maddening question of what had happened, the kind of question that could kill a person, turn a person into a Bible-spewer, a rocking-horsed corn-shucking mountie with no teeth. And thus I, along with Milton, had been meant to discover, sitting entirely alone on that strangely immaculate coffee table (ordinarily littered with ashtrays and matchbooks, National Geographics and junk mail) an item that would be our reassurance, the end to her story: a film, L’Avventura.

I felt faint. Because it was chic, oh, yes, it was brilliant, très Schneideresque: neatly precise yet sweetly hush-hush. (It was an act of personal punctuation even Dad would’ve considered nimble.) It was thrilling because it illustrated a premeditation, a craftiness of action and mind of which I hadn’t thought Hannah capable. She was hurtfully beautiful; sure, she could listen to you, and rumba remarkably well with a wineglass; she could also pick up men like they were socks cluttering the floor, but for a person to orchestrate, however gently, such a subtle end to her life — at least, her life as everyone at St. Gallway knew it — that was something else, something dramatic, yet sad, because this murmur of an ending, this classy question mark, had not happened.

I tried to calm myself. (“Emotion, especially excitement, is the enemy of dick work,” said Detective Lieutenant Peterson in Wooden Kimono [Lazim, 1980].)

L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s lyrical black-and-white masterpiece of 1960, happened to be one of Dad’s favorite films and thus, over the years, I’d seen it no less than twelve times. (Dad had a soft spot for all things Italian, including curvy women with poofy hair and Marcello Mastroianni’s squints, shrugs, winks and smiles, which he tossed like overripe cherry tomatoes at women strolling Via Veneto. When Dad fell into a Mediterraneo Bourbon Mood, he’d even do bits of La Dolce Vita with pitch-perfect, seedy Italian flair: “Tu sei la prima donna del primo giorno della creazione, sei la madre, la sorella, l’amante, l’amica, l’angelo, il diavolo, la terra, la casa…”)

The film’s simple plot unraveled as follows:

A wealthy socialite, Anna, goes on a yachting trip with her friends off the coast of Sicily. They go ashore to sunbathe on a deserted island. Anna wanders away and never returns. Anna’s fiancé, Sandro, and her best friend, Claudia, search the island and, subsequently, all of Italy, pursuing a variety of dead-end clues and embarking on a love affair of their own. At the film’s end, Anna’s disappearance remains as mysterious as it was the day she disappeared. Life continues — in this case, one of hollow desire and material excess — and Anna is all but forgotten.

Hannah had hoped I’d find this film. She’d hoped — no, she knew—I’d perceive the similarities between Anna’s unexplained tale and her own. (Even their names were virtually identical.) And she was confident I’d explain it to the others, not only that she’d planned this departure but that she wanted us to move on with our lives, with dancing barefoot with a wineglass, with shouting off of mountaintops (“Living Italian-Style,” as Dad was fond of saying, though being Swiss-born it was violently against nature for him to follow his own advice).

“L’Avventura,” Dad said, “has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination — we’re talking about a country that invented spandex — but also because they are a confident, self-assured nation. They know Family. They know Right from Wrong. They know God — many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all — not the lives of our friends or family, not even ourselves — is a thought they’d rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head on. Personally, I think there’s something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man’s feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands, say, ‘Who knows?’ you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive, rather like the paparazzi, the puttane, the cognoscenti, the tappisti…” (Around here, I always tuned Dad out, because when he went on in Italian he was like a Hell’s Angel on a Harley; he loved to go fast and loud and for everyone to stop in the streets and stare at him.)

By now, it was after 6:00 P.M.. The sun was loosening its grip on the lawn and frilly black shadows had collapsed all over my bedroom floor like skinny widows killed with arsenic. I rolled off the bed, putting the folder and photo of punk-rocked Hannah in the top left desk drawer (where I also kept her Charles Manson paperback). I considered calling Milton, telling him everything, but then I heard the Volvo swerving down the driveway. Moments later, Dad was in the hall.

I found him by the front door, which he hadn’t closed because he was reading the front page of South Africa’s Cape Daily Press.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered disgustedly, “poor disorganized fools — when will the madness — no, it won’t end, not until they educate — but it’s possible, crazier things have happened…” He glanced at me, a dour expression on his face, before returning to the article. “They’re slaughtering more rebels in the D.R.C., sweet, some five hundred—”

He looked at me again, startled. “What’s the matter? You look exhausted.” He frowned. “Are you still not sleeping? I went through quite a nasty period of insomnia myself, Harvard ’74—”

“I’m fine.”

He studied me, about to argue, then decided against it. “Well, never fear!” With a smile, he folded the newspaper. “Remember what we’re doing tomorrow or have you forgotten our bid for a day of repose? The great Lake Pennebaker!”

I had forgotten; Dad had been planning the day trip with all the excitement of Britain’s Captain Scott planning the world’s first expedition to the South Pole, hoping to beat Norway’s Captain Amundsen in the process. (In Dad’s case, he hoped to beat the retirees so he’d be first in line for a paddleboat and a picnic table in the shade.)

“A lake excursion,” he went on, kissing me on the cheek before picking up his briefcase and moving down the hall. “I must say I’m stirred by the idea, especially since we’ll be catching the tail end of the Pioneer Crafts Fair. I think you and I both require an afternoon in the sun, to take our minds off the flabby state of the world — though something tells me when I see the onslaught of RVs I’ll realize I’m not in Switzerland anymore.”

Things Fall Apart

By Monday morning, I hadn’t slept a wink, having spent Saturday night and most of Sunday reading all 782 pages of The Evaporatists (Buddel, 1980), a biography about Boris and Bernice Pochechnik, husband-and-wife Hungarian grifters who, some thirty-nine times, staged their deaths and rebirths under aliases with the meticulous choreography and grace of the Bolshoi Ballet doing Swan Lake. I’d also reexamined disappearance statistics in the Almanac of American Strange Habits, Tics and Behaviors (1994 ed.), learning that while two out of every thirty-nine adults who absconded from their lives did so out of “sheer boredom” (99.2 percent of these were married, the ennui a result of a “lackluster spouse”), twenty-one out of the thirty-nine did so because of heat, the “iron-cleated sole of the law descending quickly upon them” they were criminals — petty crooks, con artists, embezzlers and felons. (Eleven out of thirty-nine did so due to drug addiction, three out of thirty-nine because they were “made” and fleeing the Italian or Russian mobs and two for unknown reasons.)

I’d also finished The History of Lynching in the American South (Kittson, 1966), and it was in that book I’d made my most exciting discovery: popular among Georgia slave owners and later reemerging during the second founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, there was an effective hanging technique supposedly invented by Judge Charles Lynch himself, nicknamed “The Flying Demoiselle” due to the “quick soaring motion of the body as it is yanked into the air” (p. 213). “This method stayed popular due to its convenience,” the author Ed Kittson writes on p. 214. “A man with sufficient musculature could hang someone single-handedly, without the assistance of a mob. The noose and pulley is detailed but easy to learn with practice: a type of running bowline, tightening under strain, usually a Honda Knot, coupled with a Logger’s Hitch, around a strong tree limb. Once the victim is pulled three to six feet into the air depending on the slack, the Logger’s Hitch tightens and holds like a constrictor knot. Some thirty-nine lynchings transpired in this manner in 1919 alone.” The accompanying Visual Aid featured a lynching postcard—“common souvenirs in the Old South”—and written along the edge was “1917, Melville, Mississippi: ‘Our Flying Demoiselle / his body soars, his soul goes to hell’” (p. 215).

Enthused by this illuminating development, during second period Study Hall I opted to blow off Operation Barbarossa in my AP World History textbook, Our Life, Our Times (Clanton, 2001 ed.), opting instead to tackle Death Codes (Lee, 1987), a gory little paperback I’d brought from Dad’s library penned by Franklin C. Lee, one of L.A.’s greatest private snoopers, which I’d started reading during first period. (“Blue! Why are you sitting in the back?” Ms. Simpson had demanded in AP English, visibly aghast; “Because I’m solving a homicide, Ms. Simpson, because no one else will get off their ass and do it for me,” I’d wanted to shout — but didn’t, of course; I said there was a glare on the dry-erase board and I couldn’t see from my usual seat.) Dee and Dum, by the Hambone Bestseller Wish List, had just started their daily round of gossip, egged on by their accomplice, Little Nose Hemmings — Mr. Fletcher with The Ultimate Crossword Omnibus (Johnson ed., 2000) once again turning a blind eye — and I was just about to stalk over and tell them to shut their mugs (it was incredible, the resolve crime-solving gave a person) when I began to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“I heard Evita Perón telling Martine Filobeque in the Teacher’s Lounge she thinks the Hannah Schneider suicide verdict’s a load of dung,” reported Little Nose. “She said she knew for a fact Hannah didn’t commit suicide.”

“What else?” said Dee, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

“Nothing — they noticed me standing by the photocopier and that was the end of their conversation.”

Dee shrugged, looked uninterested and calmly studied her cuticles.

“I’m all sick of talking about Hannah Schneider,” she said. “Total media overexposure.”

“She’s out like carbs,” explained Dum with a nod.

“Besides, when I told my mom some of the films we’d been watching in her class, movies that were totally black marketed to us, never on the syllabus, Mom wigged. She said it was obvious the woman was captain of team nutjob, totally schizophrenical—”

“Mixed up,” translated Dum, “all jumbled inside—”

“Natch, mom wanted to launch a complaint with Havermeyer, but then she figured the school’s been through enough. Admissions applications are in a downward spiral.”

Little Nose wrinkled her nose. “But don’t you wanna know what Eva Brewster was talking about? She must know a secret.”

Dee sighed. “I’m sure it’s something along the lines of Schneider pregnant with Mr. Fletcher’s child.” She raised her head, throwing a grenade-gaze at the poor, unwitting bald man across the room. “It was going to be a carnie.” She giggled. “The world’s first living crossword omnibus.”

“They were going to name it Sunday Times if it was a boy,” said Dum.

The twins erupted into squealish laughter and slapped each other five.

After school, standing outside of Elton, I watched Perón making her way to the Faculty Parking Lot (see “Leaving Madrid, June 15, 1947,” Eva Duarte Perón, East, 1963, p. 334). She wore a short, dark purple dress with matching pumps, thick white tights and carried an enormous stack of manila folders. A lifeless beige sweater was knotted around her waist, about to fall off, one of the arms dragging on the ground like a hostage being hauled away.

I was a little afraid, but I made myself go after her. (“‘Keep tightening the screws on those chippies,’” entreated Private Peeper Rush McFadds to his partner in Chicago Overcoat [Bulke, 1948].)

“Ms. Brewster.”

She was the kind of woman who, when hearing someone shout her name, didn’t turn around but continued to charge forward as if riding a moving platform on an airport concourse.

“Ms. Brewster!” I caught up to her at her car, a white Honda Civic. “I was wondering if we could talk.”

She slammed the door to the backseat where she’d placed the folders and opened the driver’s seat door, brushing her mango-colored hair off her face.

“I’m late for a spin class,” she said.

“It won’t take long. I–I’d like to make amends.”

Her blue eyes pounced on me. (It was probably the same daunting stare she gave Colonel Juan, when he, along with the other flabby Argentine bureaucrats, voiced a lack of enthusiasm for her latest great idea, the joint Perón-Perón ballot for the 1951 election.)

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” she asked.

“I don’t care. I wanted you to help me with something.”

She checked her watch. “I can’t right now. I’m due at Fitness Exchange—”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with my Dad, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What’s it have to do with?”

“Hannah Schneider.”

She widened her eyes — evidently that topic was even less favorable than Dad — and she pushed the car door wider so it hit my arm.

“You shouldn’t be worrying about that stuff,” she said. Struggling against the purple dress, which had the effect on her legs of a narrowed napkin ring, she heaved herself into the driver’s seat. She jingled her car keys (on the key-chain, a bright pink rabbit’s foot), jamming one in the ignition quickly, like she was knifing someone. “You want to talk to me tomorrow I’ll be here. Come to the office in the morning, but right now I do have to go. I’m late.” She leaned forward, grabbing the handle to slam the door, but I didn’t move an inch. The door hit my knees.

“Hey,” she said.

I stood my ground. (“‘I don’t care if they’re giving birth, don’t let a witness fly the coop,’” ordered Miami Police Detective Frank Waters to his immature partner, Melvin, in The Trouble with Twists [Brown, 1968]. “‘No brush offs. No rain checks. You don’t want them to reflect. Surprise a witness and he’ll inadvertently send his mother to the slammer.’”)

“For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” Evita asked with irritation, letting go of the handle. “What’s that look — listen, someone dying isn’t the end of the world. You’re sixteen for Pete’s sake. Your spouse left you, you got three kids, mortgages, diabetes—then we’ll talk. Concentrate on seeing the forest through the trees. If you want, like I said, we can talk tomorrow.”

She was turning on the charm now: smiling up at me, making sure her voice curled sweetly on the ends like gift-wrap ribbons.

“You destroyed the only thing I have left of my mother in the world,” I said. “I think you can spare five minutes of your time.” I stared down at my shoes and did my best to look miserable and melanchólica. Evita responded only to the descamisados, the shirtless ones. Everyone else was a complicit member of the oligarchy and hence, worthy of imprisonment, blacklisting, torture.

She didn’t immediately respond. She shifted, the vinyl seat moaning beneath her. She pressed the hem of her purple dress over her knees.

“You know, I was out with the girls,” she said in a quiet voice. “I had a few kamikazes at El Rio and I got thinking about your father. I didn’t mean—”

“I understand. Now what do you know about Hannah Schneider?”

She made a face. “Nothing.”

“But you don’t think she committed suicide.”

“I never said that. I don’t have a clue what happened.” She looked up at me. “You’re a strange girl, you know that? Does pa know you’re running around, intimidating people? Asking questions?”

When I didn’t respond, she checked her watch again, muttered something about spinning (something told me there was no spin class, no Fitness Exchange, but I had bigger fish to fry), then yanked open the glove compartment, removing a packet of Nicorette gum. She shoved two pieces in her mouth, swung her left then her right leg out of the car, crossing them and making a big to-do about it, like she’d just sat down at the bar at El Rio. Her legs were like giant thick candy canes minus the red stripe.

“I know what you do. Next to nothing,” she said simply. “My only concern was that it didn’t seem like her. Suicide, especially hanging yourself — I guess, I could understand pills, maybe—but not hanging.”

She fell silent for a minute, chewing thoughtfully, staring out across the parking lot at the other hot cars.

“There was a kid couple years back,” she said slowly, glancing at me. “Howie Gibson IV. Dressed like a prime minister. Couldn’t help it, I guess. He was a fourth and everyone knows sequels don’t do well at the box office. Two months into Fall Term his mother found him hanging from a hook he’d put up in his bedroom ceiling. When I found out”—she swallowed, crossed and recrossed her legs—“I was sad. But I also wasn’t surprised. His dad, a third, obviously no blockbuster himself, he was always here to pick him up in the afternoon in a big black car and when the boy got in, he sat in the back, like his dad was the chauffeur. Neither of them ever talked. And they drove away like that.” She sniffed. “After it happened we opened up his locker and there was all kinds of stuff taped to the door, drawings of devils and upside-down crosses. Actually, he was a pretty talented artist, but let’s just say in terms of subject matter, he wasn’t going to be designing any Hallmark cards. The point is — you saw signs. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think suicide happens out of nowhere.”

She fell silent again, examining the ground, her purple pumps.

“I’m not saying Hannah didn’t have her share of problems. Sometimes she’d stay late and there was no reason for her to—film class, what do you do, you pop in the DVD. I got the feeling she hung around because she needed someone to talk to. And sure, she had a lot of lint in her head. At the beginning of every school year, it was always her last. ‘Then I’m getting out, Eva. I’m going to Greece.’ ‘What’re ya gonna do in Greece?’ I’d ask. ‘Love myself,’ she’d say. Oh, boy. Usually I have zero tolerance for that kind of self-help crap. I’ve never been the type to buy improvement books. You’re over forty and you still haven’t won friends or influenced people? You’re still the poor dad, not the rich dad? Well, I hate to break it to you, but it ain’t gonna happen.”

Eva was laughing about this to herself but then, suddenly, the laugh fluttered awkwardly in her mouth and flew away, and she sniffed, staring after it maybe, at the sky and the sun tucked into the trees with a few wispy clouds.

“There were other things, too,” she went on, chewing the Nicorette with her mouth open. “Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved, her friend — she didn’t go into details, but said not a day went by when she didn’t feel guilt over what she’d done — whatever it was. So sure, she was sad, insecure, but vain too. And vain people don’t hang themselves. They complain, they whine, make a lot of noise, but they don’t string themselves up. It’d ruin their looks.”

She laughed again, this time a pushy laugh, one she probably used on the radio soap opera Oro Blanco, a laugh to intimidate bacon-fingered Radio-landia writers, beef-backed generals, yoke-cheeked compadres. She blew a small bubble and popped it in her teeth, a smacking sound.

“What do I know? What does anyone know about what goes on in someone’s head? In early December she asked to take a week off so she could go to West Virginia, to see the family of that man who drowned at her house.”

“Smoke Harvey?”

“Was that his name?”

I nodded and then remembered something. “She invited you to that party, didn’t she?”

“What party?”

“The one taking place when he died.”

She shook her head, puzzled. “No, I only heard about it afterward. She was pretty upset. Told me she wasn’t sleeping at night due to the situation. Anyway, she ended up not taking the vacation. Said she felt too guilty to face the family, so maybe I didn’t know the extent of her guilt. I tried telling her you have to forgive yourself. I mean, one time I was asked to watch a neighbor’s cat when they went to Hawaii — one of those long-haired jobs straight off a Fancy Feast commercial. Thing hated me. Every time I went into the garage to feed it, it jumped onto the screen door and hung there by its claws like Velcro. One day, by accident, I pressed the button to the garage door. It hadn’t gone up three inches before the thing motored out of there. Left track marks. I went outside, searched for hours, couldn’t find it. A couple days later, the neighbors came back from Maui and found it flattened on the road, right smack in front of their house. Sure, it was my fault. I paid for the thing. And I felt terrible about it for a while. Had nightmares where the thing was coming after me with rabies — red eyes, claws, the whole shebang. But you have to move on, you know. You have to find your peace.”

Maybe it had to do with her bastardized birth and impoverished Los Toldos upbringing, the trauma of seeing Augustin Magaldi naked at fifteen, shoving to great political heights the wide load of Colonel Juan, the twenty-four-hour workdays at the Secretaria de Trabajo and the Partido Peronista Feminino, looting the National Treasury, stockpiling her closet with Dior — but she had, at some point over the years, become uninterrupted asphalt. Somewhere, of course, there had to be a crack in her where a tiny seed of apple, pear or fig might fall and flourish, yet it was impossible to locate these minuscule fractures. They were constantly being sought and filled.

“You have to lighten up, kiddo. Don’t take it so hard. Adults are complicated. I’m the first to admit — we’re sloppy. But it doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’re young. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because later, that’s when things get really tough. The best thing to do is keep laughing.”

One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow — A Collector’s Dream. Obviously Dad had his theories, but he always expounded on them with the silent footnote that they weren’t answers, per se, but loosely applied suggestions. Any one of Dad’s hypotheses, as he well knew, applied solely to a smidgin of Life rather than the entire thing, and thinly applied at that.

Eva checked her watch again. “Now I’m sorry, but I do want to make it to my spin class.” I nodded and moved out of the way so she could close the door. She started the engine, smiling at me like I was a tollbooth collector and she wanted me to lift the barrier so she could drive on. She didn’t immediately reverse out of her parking space, however. She turned on the radio, some jittery pop tune, and after a second or two of digging through her purse, unrolled the window again.

“How is he, by the way?”

“Who?” I asked, even though I knew.

“Your pa.”

“He’s great.”

“Really?” She nodded, tried to look casual and disinterested. Then her eyes inched back over to me. “You know, I’m sorry about that stuff I said about him. It wasn’t true.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. No kid should hear those things. I’m sorry about it.” She was giving me the once over, her eyes climbing my face as if it were a jungle gym. “He loves you. A lot. I don’t know if he shows it, but he does. More than anything, more than — I don’t even know what to call it — his political hooey. We were at dinner once and we weren’t even talking about you and he said you were the best thing that ever happened to him.” She smiled. “And he meant it.”

I nodded and pretended to be entranced by her left front tire. For some reason, I didn’t love discussing Dad with random people who had nectarine hair and careened between insults, compliments, terseness and compassion like a driver three sheets to the wind. Talking about Dad with these kinds of people was like talking about stomachs in the Victorian Age: inappropriate, gauche, a perfectly sound reason to look through them at future assemblies and balls.

She sighed resignedly when I didn’t say anything, one of those adult throw-in-the-hand-towel sighs that indicated they didn’t understand teenagers and were delighted those days were far behind them. “Well, take care of yourself, kiddo.” She was rolling up the window, but stopped again. “And try to eat something once and a while — you’re about to disappear. Have some pizza. And stop worrying about Hannah Schneider,” she added. “I don’t know what happened to her, but I do know she’d want you to be happy, all right?”

I smiled stiffly as she waved at me, reversed (her brakes sounded as if they were being tortured), then barreled out of the Faculty Parking Lot, her white Honda the limousine to carry her through the poorest pig-pungent barrios where she’d wave from an unrolled window to the hungry, enchanted people in the streets.

I’d told Dad he didn’t need to pick me up. When Milton drove me home on Friday, we’d arranged to meet at his locker after school and I was now a half hour late. I hurried up the stairs to the third floor of Elton, but the hall was empty apart from Dinky and Mr. Ed “Favio” Camonetti standing in the doorway of his Honors English classroom. (As many people enjoy hearing details of the hot and heavy, I shall quickly mention: Favio was Gallway’s hottest male instructor. He had a bronzed, Rock-Hudsony face, was married to a plump nondescript woman who wore pinafores and appeared to think he was just as sexy as everyone else did, though personally, I thought his body resembled an inflated raft suffering from a clandestine pinprick.) They stopped talking as I walked past.

I walked up to Zorba (where Amy Hempshaw and Bill Chews were vined together in an embrace) and then the Student Parking Lot. Milton’s Nissan was still parked in his assigned space, so I decided to check the cafeteria, and when I found no one, Hypocrite’s Alley in the basement of Love, the center of St. Gallway’s black market, where Milton and Charles sometimes rubbed noses with other frantic students trafficking illegal Unit Tests, Final Exams, Straight-A Student Notes and Research Papers, trading sexual favors for a night with the latest copy of The Trickster’s Bible, a 543-page ghostwritten manual on how to swindle one’s way through St. Gallway, categorized by teacher and text, method and means. (A few titles: “A Room of One’s Own: Taking the Makeup Test,” “Toy Story: The Beauty of the TI-82 and the Timex Data Link Watch,” “Tiny, Handwritten Diamonds on the Soles of Your Shoes.”) As I made my way along the dark corridor, however, peering in the small rectangular windows of the seven musical practice rooms, I saw shady figures huddled in the corners, on piano benches, behind the music stands (no one practicing any musical instruments, unless one counts body parts). Not one was Milton.

I decided to try the clearing behind Love Auditorium; Milton sometimes went there to smoke a joint between classes. I hurried back up the stairs, through the Donna Faye Johnson Art Gallery (modern artist and Gallway alumnus Peter Rocke ’87 was deep in his Mud Period and showing no signs of surfacing), out the backdoor with the EXIT sign, across the parking lot with the scabbed Pontiac parked by the garbage dump (they said it was the jam jar of a long-lost teacher found guilty of seducing a student), quickly making my way through the trees.

I saw him almost immediately. He was wearing a navy blazer and leaning against a tree.

“Hi!” I shouted.

He was smiling, and yet as I neared, I realized he wasn’t smiling because he saw me, but at something in the conversation because the others were there too: Jade sitting on a thick fallen branch, Leulah on a rock (holding on to her braided hair as if it were a ripcord), Nigel next to her and Charles on the ground, his giant white cast jutting out of him like a peninsula.

They saw me. Milton’s smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in Grease when Sandy says hello to him in front of the T-Birds, a Mrs. Robinson when she tells Elaine she didn’t seduce Benjamin, a Daisy when she chooses Tom with the disposition of sour kiwi over Gatsby, a self-made man, a man engorged with dreams, who didn’t mind throwing a pile of shirts around a room if he wanted to.

My heart landslided. My legs earthquaked.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Jade.

“Hi, Retch,” Milton said. “How are you today?”

“What the fuck’s she doing here?” asked Charles. I turned to look at him and saw, with surprise, that simply due to my close proximity his face had turned the angry shade of Red Imported Fire Ants (see Insecta, Powell, 1992,p. 91).

“Hello,” I said. “Well, I guess I’ll see you late—”

“Hold on a minute.” Charles had stood up on his good leg and begun to hobble toward me, awkwardly, because Leulah was holding one of his crutches. She held it out to him, but he didn’t take it. He chose to hobble, as veterans sometimes do, as if there is greater glory in the hobble, the shamble, the limp.

“I want to have a little talk,” he said.

“Not worth it,” said Jade inhaling her cigarette.

“No, it is. It is worth it.”

“Charles,” warned Milton.

“You’re a fucking piece of shit, you know that?”

“Jesus,” Nigel said, grinning. “Take it easy.”

“No, I’m not going to take it easy. I–I’m going to kill her.”

Although his face was red and his eyes bulged from his face in the manner of a Golden Mantella, he was on a single leg, and thus as he leered at me, I wasn’t afraid. I knew very well if it came down to it I could push him over with very little force and spirit away before any of them could catch me. At the same time, it was highly unsettling to think I was the reason his features had contorted into the wrenched expression of an infant in a delivery room; why his eyes were so narrowed they looked like cardboard slits you stick pennies or dimes into, thereby donating to Kids with Cerebral Palsy, so unsettling that the thought actually crossed my mind maybe I did kill Hannah, maybe I suffered from schizophrenia and had been under the influence of the malevolent Blue, the Blue who took no prisoners, the Blue who ripped people’s hearts out and ate them for breakfast (see The Three Faces of Eve). It could be the only reason why he hated me so, why his face was so wounded, scrunched up and bumpy like tire treads.

“You want to kill her and end up in juvie hall for the rest of your life?” asked Jade.

“Bad plan,” said Nigel.

“You’d be better off hiring a bounty hunter.”

“I’ll do it,” said Leulah, raising her hand.

Jade stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe. “Or we could stone her like they do in that short story. When all the townspeople descend and she starts to scream.”

“‘The Lottery,’” I said, because I couldn’t help myself (Jackson, 1948). I shouldn’t have said it, though, because it made Charles gnash his teeth and jut out his face out even more, so I could see the minute spaces between his bottom teeth, a little white picket fence. I felt his broiler-hot breath on my forehead.

“You want to know what you did to me?” His hands trembled, and on the word did some of his spit jumped ship, landing somewhere on the ground between us. “You destroyed me—”

“Charles,” said Nigel warily, walking up behind him.

“Stop acting like a madman,” Jade said. “If you do something to her she’ll get you kicked out. Her superhero dad will make sure of it—”

“You broke my fucking leg in three places,” Charles said. “You broke my heart—”

“Charles—”

“And you should know, I think about killing you. I think about stringing you up by your ungrateful little neck, and — and leaving you for dead.” He swallowed loudly. It sounded like a rock dropped in a pond. Tears stormed his red eyes. One actually threw itself over the wall, sliding down his face. “Like you did to her.”

“Fuck, Charles—”

“Stop.”

“She’s not worth it.”

“Yeah, man. She’s a terrible kisser.”

There was a silence, and then Jade sizzled with laugher.

“She is?” Charles instantly stopped crying. He sniffed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

“The worst. She’s like kissin’ tuna.”

“Tuna?”

“Maybe it was sardines. Shrimp. I don’t remember. I tried to block it from my mind.”

I couldn’t breathe. Blood was flooding into my face, as if he hadn’t spoken, but kicked me in the face. And I knew it was one of those devastating moments in Life when one had to address one’s congress, pull The Jimmy Stuart. I had to show them they were not dealing with a wounded, fearful nation, but an awakened giant. Yet I couldn’t retaliate with any old cruise missile. It would have to be a Little Boy, a Fat Man, a gigantic head of cauliflower (bystanders would later claim they saw a second sun) with scorched bodies, the chalky taste of atomic fission in the pilots’ mouths. Afterward I might feel regret, probably think the inevitable, “My God, what have I done?” but that never stopped anyone.

Dad had a small black book he kept on his bedside table, Words of a Glowworm (Punch, 1978), which he turned to at night, when he was tired and craved something sweet the way some women craved dark chocolate. It was a book of the most powerful quotations in the world. I knew most of them. “History is a set of lies generally agreed upon,” Napoleon said. “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way,” said General George Patton. “On stage I make love to twenty-five thousand people and then I go home alone,” moaned Janis Joplin, bleary of eye and disheveled of hair. “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company,” said Mark Twain.

I stared at Milton. He couldn’t look at me, but pressed against the trunk of that tree, as if he wished it would eat him.

“‘We are all worms,’” I said carefully, “‘but I do believe I am a glowworm.’”

“What?” asked Jade.

I turned and began to walk away.

“What was that?”

“That’s what you call taking a moment.”

“Did you see her? She’s totally possessed.”

“Find an exorcist!” Charles shouted, and laughed, a sound like poured gold coins, and the trees bore the sound up with their perfect acoustics and made it float in the air.

When I reached the parking lot, I encountered Mr. Moats walking to his car with textbooks under his arm. He looked startled when he saw me coming out of the trees, as if he thought I was the ghost of El Greco.

“Blue van Meer?” he called out uncertainly, but I didn’t smile or speak to him.

I’d already started to run.

The Nocturnal Conspiracy

It was one of the biggest scandals of Life, to learn the cruelest thing someone could say to you was that you were a terrible kisser.

One would think it’d be worse to be a Traitor, Hypocrite, Bitch, Whore or any other foul person, worse even to be a Way-out-there, a Welcome Mat, a Was-Girl, a Weasel. I suspect one would even fare better with “bad in bed,” because everyone has an off day, a day when his/her mind hitchhikes on each and every thought that cruises by, and even champion racehorses such as Couldn’t Be Happier, who won both the Derby and the Preakness in 1971, could suddenly come in dead last, as he did at the Belmont Stakes. But to be a terrible kisser — to be tuna—was the worst of all, because it meant you were without passion, and to be without passion, well, you might as well be dead.

I walked home (4.1 miles), replaying that humiliating remark again and again in my head (in slo-mo, so I could mentally draw agonizing little circles around my every instance of fumbling, holding, intentional grounding and personal foul). In my room, I broke down into one of those headachy weeps one would think would be reserved for the death of a family member, for terminal illness, the end of the world. I cried into my clammy pillowcase for over an hour, the darkness swelling in the room, the night slinking up and crouching in the windows. Our house, the elaborate, empty 24 Armor Street, seemed to wait for me, wait like bats for darkness, an orchestra for a conductor, waiting for me to calm myself, to proceed.

Stuffy of head and crimson of eye, I rolled off my bed, wandered downstairs, played the message from Dad about dinner with Arnie Sanderson, removed from the fridge the Stonerose Bakery chocolate cake Dad had brought home the other day (part of the Van Meer Brighten Up Blue Initiative) and, grabbing a fork, carried it up to my room.

“We’re tucking you in tonight with breaking news,” sang the imaginary Cherry Jeffries of my head. “It took not the police force, not the National Guard, Park Rangers, K-9, the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, not preachers, clairvoyants, palm readers, dream catchers, superheroes, Martians, not even a trip to Lourdes, but simply a brave, local area teen to solve the murder of Hannah Louise Schneider, age forty-four, whose death had been erroneously declared a suicide by the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department just last week. A gifted senior at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, Miss Blue van Meer, who happens to have an I.Q. that will knock your pants off, 175, flew in the face of adversity from teachers, students, and fathers alike when she deciphered a range of nearly imperceptible clues leading her to the woman’s killer, now in police custody and awaiting trial. Dubbed the Schoolgirl Sam Spade, Miss Van Meer has not only been a regular on the talk-show circuit, from Oprah and Leno to the Today show and The View, also gracing the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone, but she’s also been invited to the White House to dine with the President, who, despite her tender age of sixteen, asked her to serve as a U.S. Ambassador on a thirty-two-country Goodwill Tour promoting peace and world freedom. All of this prior to her matriculation at Harvard this fall. Christ. Isn’t that something else, Norvel? Norvel?”

“Oh. Uh, yes.”

“It just goes to show you that this world isn’t falling apart too bad. Because there are real heroes out there and dreams really do come true.”

I had no choice but to do what Chief Inspector Curry did when facing a dead end in one of his investigations, as he did on p. 512 of Conceit of a Unicorn (Lavelle, 1901), when “every door remains bolted and every casement firmly latched, concealing the wickedness at which we, my esteemed Horace, may only fitfully turn our discouraged minds to, much as the lean mongrel wandering our city of slate and stone, poking through rubbish, fraught for a careless scrap of mutton dropped by an unwary merchant or solicitor on his journey home. Yet, there is hope! For remember, my dear lad, the starving dog misses naught! When in doubt, return to the victim! He will light your way.”

I pulled out a neon pink five-by-seven note card and wrote out a list of Hannah’s friends, the few names I knew. There was the late Smoke Harvey and his family who lived in Findley, West Virginia, and the man from the animal shelter, Richard Something, who lived on the llama farm, and Eva Brewster, Doc, the other men from Cottonwood (though I wasn’t sure one could classify them as friends, more acquaintances).

All things considered, it was a paltry list.

Nevertheless, I decided to begin, somewhat confidently, with the top, a member of the Harvey family. I hurried down to Dad’s study, switching on his laptop and typing Smoke’s name into the People Search on Worldquest.

There was no record of him. There were, however, fifty-nine other Harveys, also a record of one Ada Harvey in Findley registered on one of the advertising links, www.noneofyourbusiness.com. Ada, I remembered, was one of Smoke’s daughters; Hannah had mentioned her during the dinner at Hyacinth Terrace. (I remembered, because her name was one of Dad’s most beloved books, Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor [1969].) If I paid just $89.99 to the Web site, I could not only obtain Ada’s home telephone number, but her address, birthday, background check, public record report, National Criminal Record Search, as well as a satellite photo. I ran upstairs into Dad’s bedroom and took one of his extra MasterCards out of his bedside table drawer. I decided to pay the $8.00 for her phone number.

I returned to my room. I wrote out a list of detailed questions on three other five-by-seven note cards, each neatly labeled at the top, CASE NOTES. After I’d reviewed the questions three, maybe four times, I slipped downstairs to the library, uncapped Dad’s fifteen-year-old George T. Stagg bourbon, took a swig straight from the bottle (I wasn’t yet completely at ease with shamus work, not yet, and what detective didn’t dip the bill?) and returned to my room, taking a few moments to collect myself. “‘Youse got to picture the steel bed the stiff is on an’ make that your manner, broads,’” Sergeant Detective Buddy Mills demanded of his relatively bashful all-male police force in The Last Hatchet Job (Nubbs, 1958).

I dialed the number. A woman answered on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“May I please speak to Ada Harvey?”

“This is she. Who’s callin’ please?”

It was one of those scary, antebellum, I-do-declare Southern voices, purdy, feisty and preternaturally elderly (all wrinkle and quiver no matter the age of the person).

“Um, hello, my name is Blue van Meer and I—”

“Thank you very much, but I’m not interested—”

“I’m not a telemarketer—”

“No, thank you, much obliged—”

“I’m a friend of Hannah Schneider’s.”

There was a sharp gasp, as if I’d stuck her in the arm with a hypodermic needle. She was silent. Then she hung up.

Puzzled, I pressed Redial. She picked up instantly — I could hear a television, a soap opera repeat, a woman, “Blaine,” then, “How could you?”—and Ada Harvey slammed down the receiver, hard, without a word. On my fourth attempt, it rang fifteen times before the operator recording came on informing me my party was unavailable. I waited ten minutes, ate a few bites of chocolate cake and tried a fifth time. She answered on the first ring.

“The nerve—you don’t stop I’m goin’ to call the authorities—”

“I’m not a friend of Hannah Schneider’s.”

“No? Well, who the heck are you then?”

“I’m a stude — I’m an investigator,” I amended hastily. “I’m a private investigator employed”—my eyes veered onto my bookshelf, landing between The Anonymous (Felm, 2001) and Party of the Third Degree (Grono, 1995)—“by an anonymous third-degree party. I was hoping you could help me by answering a few questions. It should only take five minutes.”

“You’re a private investigator?” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“Then the Lord wears pantaloons and saddle shoes — how old are you? You sound no bigger than a minute.”

Dad said one could dig up a great deal about a person from his/her phone voice and from the sound of hers, she was in her early forties and wore brown leather flats with tiny tassels on them, tassels like miniature brooms sweeping the tops of her feet.

“I’m sixteen,” I admitted.

“And you said you work for who?”

It wasn’t a good idea to keep lying; as Dad said: “Sweet, your every thought walks through your voice holding a giant billboard advertisement.”

“Myself. I’m a student at St. Gallway, where Hannah taught. I–I’m sorry I lied before but I was afraid you’d hang up again and I”—frantically, I stared down at my CASE NOTES—“you’re my only lead. I happened to meet your father, the night he died. He seemed to be a fascinating person. I’m sorry about what happened.”

It was a detestable thing to do, to drag people’s deceased family members into it, in order to get what one wants — any mention of Dad dead, I’d doubtlessly sing like a magpie — but it was my only hope; it was obvious Ada was on the fence between hearing me out and hanging up and leaving the phone off the hook.

“Because,” I went on shakily, “your father and the rest of your family were, at one time, friends with Hannah, I was hoping—”

“Friends?” She spit out the word like it was rancid avocado. “We were not friends with that woman.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought—”

“You thought wrong.”

If before her voice had been miniatured and poodled, now it was rottweilered. She didn’t go on. She was what was commonly called in the gumshoe world, “one helluva cemented dame.”

I swallowed. “So, then, uh, Ms. Harvey—”

“My name is Ada Rose Harvey Lowell.”

“Ms. Lowell. You weren’t acquainted with Hannah Schneider at all?”

Again, she didn’t say anything. A car commercial was assaulting her living room. Hurriedly, I scribbled “None?” in my CASE NOTES under question #4, “What is the nature of your relationship with Hannah Schneider?” I was just about to move on to #5, “Were you aware of her scheduled camping trip?” when she sighed and spoke, her voice stark.

“You don’t know what she was,” Ada said.

Now it was my turn to stay silent, because it was one of those dramatic comments that come up halfway into a sci-fi action movie, when one character is about to inform the other character what they’re dealing with is not “of this earth.” Still, my heart began to clang in my chest like a voodoo funeral march in N’awlins.

“What do you know?” she asked with a note of impatience. “Anything?”

“I know she was a teacher,” I tried quietly.

This elicited an acerbic, “Heh.”

“I know your father, Smoke, was a retired financier and—”

“My father was an investigative journalist,” she corrected (see “Southern Pride,” Moon Pies and Tarnation, Wyatt, 2001). “He was a banker for thirty-eight years before he was able to retire and pursue his first loves. Writin’. And true crime.”

“He wrote a book, didn’t he? A — a mystery?”

“The Doloroso Treason was not a mystery. It was ’bout the illegal aliens and the Texas border and the corruption and drug smugglin’ that goes on.” (She callously squashed the word aliens; it became Aileens.) “It was a huge success. They gave him a key to the city.” She sniffed. “What else?”

“I–I know your father drowned at Hannah’s house.”

She gasped again; this time it sounded like I’d slapped her across the face in front of a hundred guests at a toffee pull. “My father did not”—her voice was trembly and shrill, the scrape of Lee Press-On Nails down pantyhose—“I — Do you have any idea who my father was?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“He was hit by a tractor-trailer when he was four riding his tricycle. Broke his back serving in Korea. Got trapped in a car that went over Feather Bridge and then went out the window like they do in the movies. He’d been bit twice—once by a Doberman, another time a Tennessee rattler, and almost had a shark attack off the coast of Way Paw We, Indonesia, only he’d watched a special on the Nature Channel and remembered to punch it straight in the nose, which is what they tell you to do when one’s comin’ at you only most people don’t have the guts to do it. Smoke did. And now you’re tryin’ to tell me his medication mixed with a little Jack was going to finish him off? Makes me sick. He’d been takin’ it for six months and it had no effect, period. That man could be shot in the head six times and he’d go right on — you mark my words.”

To my horror, her voice tore a hole on “words”—a sizable hole by the sound of things. I wasn’t positive, but I think she was crying too, an awful held-back hiccuping sound that faded into the mumbles and elevator music of the soap opera, so you couldn’t tell the difference between her drama and the one on television. It was very possible she’d just said, “Travis, I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t have feelings for you”—not the woman on the TV, and it was also possible the woman on the TV, not Ada, was crying over her dead father.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just kind of, confused—”

“I didn’t put it all together ’til later,” she sniffled.

I waited — enough time for her to stitch together, however crudely, the hole in her voice.

“You didn’t put what…together?”

She cleared her throat.

“Do you know who The Nightwatchmen are?” she asked. “’Course you don’t…don’t even know your own name, probably—”

“I do, actually. My father’s a political science professor.”

She was surprised — or maybe relieved. “Oh?”

“They were radicals,” I said. “But apart from an incident or two in the early seventies, no one’s sure if they actually existed. They’re more a — a beautiful idea, fighting against greed — than something real.” I was paraphrasing bits of “A Quick History of the American Revolutionary” (see Van Meer, Federal Forum, Vol. 23, Issue 9, 1990).

“An incident or two,” Ada repeated. “Exactly. So then you know about Gracey.”

“He was the founder. But he’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Other than one other person,” Ada said slowly, “George Gracey is the only known member. And he’s still wanted by the FBI. In ’70…no, ’71, he killed a West Virginia Senator, put a pipe bomb in his car. A year later, he blew up a building in Texas. Four people died. He was caught on tape so they made a sketch of him, but then he dropped off the face of the earth. In the eighties there was an explosion in a townhouse in England. Homemade bombs. People had heard he was livin’ there, so they assumed he was dead. There was too much damage to recover the teeth on the bodies found. That’s how they identify, you know. Teeth records.”

She paused, swallowing.

“The Senator killed was Senator Michael McCullough, Dubs’s uncle on his mother’s side, my great uncle. And it happened over in Meade, twenty minutes from Findley. Dubs said it all the time when we were growin’ up: ‘I’ll fly to the ends of the earth to bring that sonuvabitch to trial.’ When Dubs drowned, everyone believed the police. They said he’d had too much to drink and it was an accident. I refused to believe it. I stayed up all night goin’ through his notes even though Archie cussed me out, said I was crazy. But then I saw how it all went together. I showed Archie and Cal too. And she knew of course. She knew we were on to her. We’d called the FBI. That’s why she hanged herself. It was death or prison.”

I was bewildered. “I don’t understand—”

“The Nocturnal Conspiracy,” Ada said softly.

Trying to follow this woman’s logic was like trying to watch an electron orbit a nucleus with the naked eye.

“What’s The Nocturnal Conspiracy?”

“His next book. The one he was writing on George Gracey. That’s what he was going to call it and it was going to be a bestseller. Smoke tracked him down, see. Last May. He found him on a fantasy island called Paxos, livin’ high off the hog.”

She drew a shaky breath. “You don’t know what it felt like, when the police called and told us our father, the one we’d just seen two days before at Chrysanthemum’s baptism, was gone. Snatched from us. We hadn’t heard the name Hannah Schneider in all our lives. At first, we thought she was the loud divorcée the Rider’s Club had trouble nominatin’ for treasurer, but that was Hannah Smithers. Then we think, maybe she was Gretchen Peterson’s cousin who Dubs took to the Marquis Polo Fundraiser, but that’s Lizzie Sheldon. So”—by this point, Ada had ripped out most of her punctuation, some of her pauses, too; her words stampeded into the receiver—“after two days of this, Cal takes a look at the picture I asked the police to get for us and what do you know? He says he remembers her talkin’ to Dubs at the Handy Pantry way back in June, when they were coming back from Auto Show 4000—this is a month after Dubs got back from Paxos. So Cal says, yeah, Dubs went inside the Handy Pantry to get gum and this same woman shimmied up to him. Cal has a photographic memory. ‘It was her,’ he said. Tall. Dark hair. A face shaped like one of those Valentine chocolate boxes and Valentine’s was Dubs’ favorite holiday. She asked for directions to Charleston and I guess they stayed talkin’ for so long, Cal had to get out of the car to go get him. And that was it. When we went through Dubs’ things, we found her number in his address book. Phone records showed he called her at least once or twice a week. She knew how to play it, see. After my mother, there’s never been anyone special — I–I still talk about him in the present. Archie says I have to stop that.”

She paused, took another labored breath, started to speak again. And as she talked, I was struck by the image of one of those itsy-bitsy garden spiders that decide to make their web not in some sensible corner, but in a gigantic space, a space so huge and far-fetched, in it one could fit two African Elephants end to end. Dad and I watched such a determined spider on our porch in Howard, Louisiana, and no matter how many times the wind unrigged the mooring, how many times the web buckled and sagged, unable to hold itself up between the fake columns, the spider went on with its work, climbing to the top, free-falling, silk thread trembling behind it, dental floss in the wind. “She’s making sense of the world,” Dad said. “She’s sewing it together as best she can.”

“We still don’t know how she managed it,” Ada went on. “My father was two hundred and forty pounds. It had to be poison. She injected him with something, between his toes…cyanide maybe. ’Course the police swore they checked all that and there was no sign. I just don’t see how it was possible. He liked his whiskey…won’t lie about that. And there was his medication—”

“What kind of medication was it?” I asked.

“Minipress. For blood pressure. Dr. Nixley told him you’re not supposed to drink with it but he had before and it never messed with him. He drove home all by himself from the King of Hearts Fundraiser right when he first went on it and I was there when he got home. He was fine. Believe me, if I thought he wasn’t fine I’d have caused a stink. Not that he would’ve listened.”

“But Ada”—I kept my voice subdued, as if we were in a library—“I really don’t think Hannah could’ve possibly—”

“Gracey was in contact with her. He told her to kill Smoke. Like she’d done with all the others. She was the temptation, see.”

“But—”

“She’s the other one,” she interrupted flatly. “‘Other than one other person.’ The other member — weren’t you listening?”

“But I know she’s not a criminal. I talked to a detective here—”

“Hannah Schneider’s not her real name. She ripped it off a poor missing woman who grew up in an orphanage in New Jersey. She’s been livin’ as that girl for years. Her real name’s Catherine Baker and she’s wanted by the FBI for shootin’ a police officer right between the eyes. Twice. Somewhere in Texas.” She cleared her throat. “Smoke didn’t recognize her because no one’s sure what Baker actually looks like. ’Specially now. They have old testimony, a composite that’s twenty years old — in the eighties everyone had weird hair, freaky looks—you know those awful leftover hippies. And she’s blond in the sketch. Says she has blue eyes. Smoke had the picture, along with the stuff on George Gracey. But it’s one of those things — it could be a drawin’ of me, you know. Could be a drawin’ of anyone.”

“Could you send me copies of his notes? For research purposes?”

Ada sniffed and though she didn’t exactly agree to send them I gave her my mailing address. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. I could hear the end credits of the soap opera, the outburst of another commercial.

“I just wish I’d been there,” she said faintly. “I have a sixth sense, see. If I’d gone to the Auto Show, I could’ve gone in with him when he went to get the gum. I would’ve seen what she was doin’—prancin’ by in tight jeans, sunglasses, pretendin’ it was a coincidence. Cal swore he saw her a couple days before, too, when he and Smoke were in Winn-Dixie pickin’ up ribs. He said she walked right by with her empty shoppin’ cart, all gussied up like she was goin’ somewhere, and she looked straight at Cal, grinned like the Devil himself. ’Course, there’s no way of knowin’ for sure. It gets busy on Sundays—”

“What did you say?” I asked quietly.

She stopped talking. The abrupt change in my tone of voice must have startled her.

“I said there’s no way of knowin’,” she said apprehensively.

Without thinking, I hung up the phone.

Che Guevara Talks to Young People

The Nightwatchmen have always gone by a variety of names—Nächtlich, or “Nocturnal,” in German, also Nie Schlafend, or “Never Sleeping.” In French, they are Les Veilleurs de Nuit. Membership, in its supposed heyday, 1971 to 1980, is wholly unknown; some say it was twenty-five men and women across America; others claim over a thousand around the globe. Whatever the truth — and, alas, we may never know it — the movement is whispered about with greater enthusiasm today than at its zenith (an Internet search yields over 100,000 pages). Its present-day popularity as part history lesson, part fairy tale, is a testament to The Freedom Ideal, a dream to liberate all people, regardless of their race or creed, a dream that, no matter how fractured and cynical modern society becomes, will not die.

Van Meer,

“Nächtlich: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting,”

Federal Forum, Vol. 10, Issue 5, 1998

Dad had raised me to be a skeptical person, a person unconvinced until “the facts line up like chorus girls,” and so I had not believed Ada Harvey — not until she’d described the Winn-Dixie incident (or perhaps a little before, with “tight jeans” and “sunglasses”); then, it’d sounded as if she were describing not Smoke and Cal in Winn-Dixie, but Dad and me at Fat Kat in September, when I’d first seen Hannah in Frozen Foods.

If that weren’t enough to knock the wind out of me, she had to go entirely Southern Gothic, dragging the Devil and his grin into it, and whenever someone with a fudgethical Southern accent said devil, one inevitably felt they knew something one didn’t — as Yam Chestley wrote in Dixiecrats (1979), “The South knows two things through and through: cornbread and Satan” (p. 166). After I hung up, my bedroom stalagmited with shadows, I stared at my CASE NOTES on which I’d written in famished handwriting Officer Coxley — style haiku (NIGHTWATCHMEN CATHERINE BAKER GRACEY).

My first thought was that Dad was dead.

He, too, had been Catherine Baker’s target, because he, too, had been working on a book about Gracey (it was the logical explanation for Hannah stalking us the same way she’d stalked Smoke Harvey), or, if he wasn’t at work on a book (“I’m not certain I have the stamina for another book,” Dad admitted in a Bourbon Mood, a sad acknowledgment he never made in daylight), then an article, essay or lecture of some kind, his own Nocturnal Conspiracy.

Of course — I ran across the room to switch on the overhead light and thankfully, the shadows were instantly whisked away like out-of-fashion black dresses in a department store — I reminded myself, Hannah Schneider was dead (the petit four of truth I knew for certain) and Dad was safe with Professor Arnie Sanderson at Piazza Pitti, an Italian restaurant in downtown Stockton. Still, I felt the need to hear his sandpaper voice, his “Sweet, don’t be preposterous.” I ran downstairs, tore through the Yellow Pages and dialed the restaurant. (Dad didn’t have a cell phone; “So I may be available to others twenty-four hours, seven days a week like some minimum-waged dunderhead working in Customer Service? Much obliged, but no thank you.”) It took only a minute for the hostess to identify him; few sported Irish tweed in spring.

“Sweet?” He was alarmed. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing — well, everything. Are you okay?”

“What — of course. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” A paranoid thought occurred to me. “Do you trust Arnie Sanderson? Maybe you shouldn’t leave your food unattended. Don’t get up to go to the bathroom—”

“What?”

“I’ve discovered the truth about Hannah Schneider. I know why someone killed her, or — or she killed herself — I haven’t quite figured that part out yet, but I know why.”

Dad was silent, obviously not only weary of the name, but thoroughly unconvinced. Not that I blamed him; my breathing was a madwoman’s, my heart was teetering like a wino in a jail cell — altogether an unconvincing figure of truth and forethought.

“Sweet,” he said gently, “you know, I dropped off Gone with the Wind earlier this afternoon. Perhaps you should watch it. Have a piece of that chocolate cake. I should be no more than an hour.” He began to say something more, something that started with “Hannah,” but that word yoga-twisted in his mouth so it came out “hands” he seemed afraid to say her name, in case it encouraged me. “You sure you’re all right? I can leave now.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said quickly. “We’ll talk when you get home.”

I hung up (infinitely reassured; Dad’s voice was a pack of ice on a sprain). I collected my CASE NOTES and raced downstairs to the kitchen to brew some coffee. (“Experience, intellectual prowess, forensics, fingerprints, footprints — sure, they’re important,” wrote Officer Christina Vericault on p. 4 of The Last Uniform [1982]. “But the essential element of crime solving is a fine French Roast or Colombian blend. No murder will be solved without it.”) After jotting down a few additional details from the Ada Harvey conversation, I hurried downstairs to Dad’s study, switching on the lights.

Dad had only written one relatively short piece about The Nightwatchmen, published in 1998, “Nächtlich: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting.” Every now and then, too, for his Civil War seminars, he included on reading lists a more extensive commentary about their methodologies, an essay out of Herbert Littleton’s Anatomy of Materialism (1990), “The Nightwatchmen and Mythical Principles of Practical Change.” With little trouble, I located both on the bookshelf (Dad always purchased five copies of any Federal Forum issue in which he was featured, not unlike a paparazzi-hungry starlet when her picture graces “Around Town” in Celebrastory Weekly).

I returned to Dad’s desk with the two publications. To the left of his laptop sat a hefty stack of legal pads and various folded foreign newspapers. Curious, I paged through them, my eyes having to adjust to decode his barbed-wire handwriting. Unfortunately, their subject matter had nothing to do with The Nightwatchmen or the whereabouts of George Gracey (thus paralleling Smoke’s story like a dream). Instead, they featured Dad’s obvious cause célèbre, civil upheaval in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other nations of Central Africa. “When Will Killing Stop?” demanded the awkwardly translated editorials in Afrikaan News, the small Cape Town political newspaper. “Where Is Champion for Freedom?”

I put those papers aside (returning them to their original order; Dad knew snooping the way dogs smell fear) and began my orderly investigation into The Nightwatchmen (or “Mai addormentato,” as they were called in Italian and apparently in Japanese). First, I read Dad’s Federal Forum article. Second, I browsed the long-winded Chapter 19 in the Littleton book. Lastly, I turned on Dad’s laptop and searched for the group on the Internet.

In the years since 1998, the number of pages referencing the radicals had mushroomed; the 100,000 had become 500,000. I scanned as much as I could, no resource excluded for bias, romanticism or even conjecture (“Within prejudice grows all kinds of remarkable truths,” Dad said): encyclopedias, history texts, political Web sites, Leftist blogs, Communist and Neo-Marxist sites (a favorite, www.thehairyman.com — alluding to Karl Marx’s lionlike appearance), conspiracy and anarchist Web sites, sites about cartels, cults, hero worship, urban legends, organized crime, Orwell, Malcolm X, Erin Brockovich and something out of Nicaragua called Champions of Che. It seemed the group was like Greta Garbo when she first went into retirement: mysterious, impossible to pin down and everyone wanted a piece of her.

It took me a little over an hour to look through everything.

When I finished, my eyes were red, my throat dry. I felt drained and yet — scandalously alive (pronounced “a-LIVE”), giddy as the bright green Darning Needle Dragonfly that careened into Dad’s hair at Lake Pennebaker, making him dance like a marionette, go “Ahhhhh!” and barge through a crowd of geriatrics wearing yellow visors identical to the yellow halo Christ sports in old frescoes.

My heart-thumping excitement was not simply because I knew so much about The Nightwatchmen I felt oddly confident I could deliver a Dadified lecture on them, my voice a tidal wave, rising up, up over the shabbily combed heads of his students, and not because, rather incredibly, Ada Harvey’s information had held up heroically upon further examination like the British blockade against the Germans in the First Battle of the Atlantic during World War I. My exhilaration wasn’t even because Hannah Schneider — all that she’d done, her strange behaviors, her lies — had suddenly come crashing open at my feet like the outer stone sarcophagus of Pharaoh Heteraah-mes when Carlson Quay Meade, in 1927, fumbled his way through a murky mummy cache high up in the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings. (For the first time, I could crouch down, take my oil lantern directly to Hannah’s bone-smooth face, see, in startling detail, its every angle and plane.)

It was something else, too, something Dad once said after recounting those final hours in the life of Che Guevara. “There is something intoxicating about the dream of liberty and those who risked their lives for it — particularly in this whiny day and age, when people can barely manage to roll off their Barcalounger to answer a doorbell for a pizza delivery, much less a cry for freedom.”

I’d solved it.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d recovered the values of both x and y (with the vital assistance of Ada Harvey; I wasn’t vain like many applied mathematicians, desperate to appear unaccompanied in the Annals of History). And I felt both terror and awe — what Einstein experienced in the middle of the night in 1905 in Bern, Switzerland, after waking from a nightmare in which he’d witnessed two pulsing stars crashing together creating strange waves in space — a vision that would inspire his General Theory of Relativity.

“It vas ze sceriest end most beautiful sing I haf ever seen,” he said.

I hurried over to Dad’s bookshelf again, this time pulling Colonel Helig’s treatise on murder from the shelf, Machinations Idyllic and Unseen (1889). I paged through it (so old, pages 1–22 dandruffed out of the spine), searching for the passages that would cast the last puddles of light on this sprawling truth I’d uncovered, this surprising — and obviously, treacherous — New World.

The oddest insight into the workings of The Nightwatchmen (an incident Dad would deem evidence of “a legend’s potential to be worn like a trench coat, used for good, warding off the rain, and evil, streaking through a park, frightening children”) was an episode detailed on www.goodrebels.net/nw, in which two eighth graders from an affluent Houston suburb committed suicide together on January 14, 1995. One of them, a thirteen-year-old girl, had written a suicide note — posted on the Web site — and in stark handwriting, on frighteningly sweet stationery (pink, rainbows) she’d written: “We hereby eliminate our selfs in the name of The Nightwatch Men and to show our parents their money is dirty. Death to all oil pigs.”

The creator of the site (when you clicked on “About Randy” he revealed himself to be an emaciated woolly-mammoth type with a serious red mouth zipped tightly into his face, of indeterminate age) complained about this, the “heritage” of The Nightwatchmen being abused in such a fashion, because “nowhere in their manifestos do they say kill yourself because you’re rich. They’re champions against capitalist abuses, not wacko members of the Manson Family.” “Death to all pigs,” of course, was written in blood on the front door of Cielo Drive (see Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson, Ivys, 1985, p. 226).

According to most sources, Randy was correct; nowhere in the manifestos of Nächtlich did they urge suicide under any circumstance. In fact, there were no manifestos at all penned by the group, no pamphlets, brochures, outlines, recorded sound-bites or fervently worded essays detailing their intentions. (It was a choice Dad would deem remarkably astute: “If rebels never broadcast who they are, their enemies will never be sure of what they’re fighting.”) The only paper evidencing the group’s existence was a single notebook page attributed to George Gracey, dated July 9, 1971, marking the birth of The Nightwatchmen — at least, as the nation, the police and the FBI knew it. (It wasn’t a welcomed nativity; The Establishment already had their hands full with the Weather Underground, Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society, among a handful of other “hallucinating hippie quacks,” as Dad called them.)

On that day in 1971, a Meade, West Virginia, policeman discovered this notebook page Scotch-taped to a telephone pole ten feet from where Senator Michael McCullough’s white Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-five had exploded in a wealthy residential community known as Marlowe Gardens. (Senator Michael McCullough climbed inside and was killed instantly in the blast.)

The Nightwatchmen’s sole manifesto could be read on www.mindfucks.net/gg (and Gracey was no Spelling Bee Winner): “Today dies a crooked and gluttonus man”—it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis—“a man who gets rich by the suffering of women and children, a greedy man. And so I, and the many with me, will be The Nightwatchmen, helping to divest this nation and the world of the capitalistic greed contemptuous of human life, undermining democrisy, blindfolding its people, forcing them to live in the dark.”

Dad and Herbert Littleton supplied insight into the objectives of The Nightwatchmen, inferred from the 1971 assassination, as well as Gracey’s subsequent explosion of an office building in downtown Houston on October 29, 1973. Littleton reasoned Senator McCullough had become the group’s first known assassination due to his involvement in a 1966 toxic waste scandal. Over seventy tons of toxic waste had been dumped illegally into the West Virginia Pooley River by Shohawk Industries, a textiles manufacturing plant, and by 1965, the tiny, impoverished coal mining towns of Beudde and Morrisville had suffered an increase in cancer among their low-income population. When the scandal broke, McCullough, then the governor, voiced his outrage and grief and his highly publicized, heroic mandate to clean up the river, never mind the price tag (what it cost taxpayers), had won him a seat in the senate the following election year (see “Governor McCullough Visits Five-Year-Old Boy with Leukemia,” Anatomy, Littleton, p. 193).

In truth, however, in 1989, Littleton exposed that McCullough had not only known about the dumping, and the toll it would take on the communities downstream, but he’d actually been well compensated for keeping mum, an amount estimated between $500,000 and $750,000.

The Houston bombing of 1973 illustrated, according to Dad, The Nightwatchmen’s resolve to wage war against “capitalistic greed and exploitation on a global scale.” The target was no longer a single man but the corporate headquarters of Oxico Oil & Gas (OOG). An AN/FO-based (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) explosive was planted on the executive floor by George Gracey masquerading as a maintenance man; a security camera taped him hobbling out of the building early that morning, as well as two other figures wearing ski masks beneath janitor caps — one purportedly a woman. The blast killed three high-ranking executives, including the company’s long-time President and CEO, Carlton Ward.

Littleton contended the assault was provoked by Ward’s approval, in 1971, of a secret cost-saving initiative for Oxico’s South American oil refining interests. The proposal outlined that Oxico should stop lining their crude oil waste pits throughout refinery fields in Ecuador, allowing seepage and severe environmental contamination, yet saving $3 per barrel — an action “illustrative of the flagrant disregard for lost human life in favor of amiable profit margins.” By 1972, toxic drilling waters were actively contaminating the freshwater supply of more than thirty thousand men, women and children; and by 1989, five different indigenous cultures faced not only escalating cancer rates and severe birth defects but also total extinction (see “Girl Without Legs,” Anatomy, Littleton, p. 211).

The Houston bombing marked a sea change in tactics for The Nightwatchmen. It was then, according to Dad, that “the reality of whiny radicals ended and the legend began.” The Oxico executive assassinations disheartened (others said “defeated”) the sect; it did nothing to modify South American refinery policies — it only strengthened building security, forced the maintenance crews to suffer increasingly vigorous background checks, many losing their jobs; and an innocent secretary, a mother of four, had been killed in the explosion. Gracey was forced to go underground. The second to last confirmed sighting of him was in November 1973, a month after the Houston bombing; he was spotted in Berkeley, California, eating at a diner close to the university with an “unidentified dark-haired child, a girl between thirteen and fourteen years of age.”

If The Nightwatchmen had once been highly visible — if solely through their use of explosives — in January 1974, Gracey and the twenty to twenty-five other members resolved to carry out their goals wholly unseen, according to Dad, “without pomp and circumstance.” While most revolutionaries (even Che himself) might consider such a move unwise and self-defeating—“What is civil war if it isn’t fought in the open, deafeningly, colorfully, so the masses are encouraged to take up arms,” contends Lou Swann, Dad’s artless Harvard peer who’d penned the well-received Iron Hands (1999); “He purloined my title,” Dad noted sourly — it was actually a strategic shift Dad would deem both clever and highly sophisticated. In his various essays on insurrection, Dad maintained: “If fighters for liberty are forced to use violence, they must do it silently to be effective in the long term” (see “Cape Town Fear,” Van Meer, Federal Forum, Vol. 19, Issue 13). (This actually wasn’t Dad’s idea; he’d plagiarized it from La Grimace [Anonyme, 1824].)

For the next three or four years, The Nightwatchmen did just that; silently, they restructured, educated and recruited. “Membership tripled not only in America, but internationally,” reported a Dutch theorist who ran a Web site called “De Echte Waarheid,” “The Real Truth.” They supposedly formed a tangled web, a mysterious network with Gracey poised at the center surrounded by other “thinkers,” as they were called, and spangling the outside of this maze, countless ancillary members — the majority never meeting Gracey or even each other.

“No one knows what most members were up to,” wrote Randy on www.goodrebels.net.

I had an inkling. Charlie Quick in Prisoners of War: Why Democracy Won’t Stick in South America (1971) (a regular on Dad’s syllabus), wrote of a necessary period of “gestation,” when it was beneficial for a potential freedom fighter to do nothing but “learn everything about his enemy — including what he has for breakfast, his brand of aftershave, the number of hairs on his left big toe.” Perhaps that’s what each member had been assigned to do, collect (with the precision and patience of collecting butterfly specimens, even the rare, shy species) personal information on the men Gracey deemed their targets. Hannah had shown this level of detail when discussing the Harvey family at Hyacinth Terrace; she’d known the Civil War story about his house, Moorgate, and intimate particulars about people she’d never met, probably never even seen. Maybe Gracey was like Gordon Gekko (“You stop sending me information and you start getting me some.”) and each of the ancillary members were Bud Foxes (“He had lunch at Le Cirque with a group of well-dressed heavyset bean counters.”).

(After scribbling these speculations in my CASE NOTES, I read on.)

During this particular period, the group also abandoned the too-obvious, too-unproductive Group Meeting — in March 1974, police had come close to raiding one of their gatherings in an abandoned Braintree, Massachusetts, warehouse — in favor of more covert, well-disguised meetings, private “one on ones.” According to www.livingoffthegrid.net/gracey, these encounters typically began “at a roadside diner, truck stop or local dive bar and continued in a Holiday Inn or some other cheap motel — the intention being that the meeting would look to observers like a random pick-up, a one-night-stand,” and hence, “totally unremarkable.” (Obviously, I wanted to jump for joy when I read this, but I made myself stay focused, reading on.)

According to www.historytheydonttellyou.net/nachtlich, in early 1978, whispers of a renewed, silent presence of The Nightwatchmen began to surface again, when MFG Holdings CEO Peter Fitzwilliam died in an electrical fire at his fifty-acre Connecticut estate. Fitzwilliam had been in clandestine merger talks with Sav-Mart, the discount retailer. In the aftermath of his death, the negotiations fell apart and by October 1980, MFG (whose manufacturing sweatshops in Indonesia were deemed by Global Humanitarian Watch “some of the most atrocious in the world”) had filed for bankruptcy. Their stock had gone to zero.

In 1982, Gracey’s radicals — now purportedly going by the name Nie Schlafend (also according to www.mayhem.ru, Russian for “awake in the night”) — were again discussed throughout countless left-wing and Conspiracy Theory journals (Liberal Man, and something called Mind Control Quarterly), when the four Senior Managers directly responsible for the design and distribution of the Ford Pinto ended up dead within a three-month period. Two died from sudden cardiac arrest (one, Howie McFarlin, was a health nut and exercise freak), another from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and the last, Mitchell Cantino, drowned in his own swimming pool. Cantino’s autopsy revealed his blood-alcohol level to be.25 and a large dose of a Methaqualone was found in his system, a sedative prescribed by his doctor for sleeplessness and anxiety. He’d been in the process of divorcing his wife of twenty-two years, and she told police he’d confessed he’d been dating another woman for six months.

“Said her name was Catherine and that he was madly in love. I never saw her but I know she was a blonde. When I went to the house to pick up some of my clothes, I found blond hair in my comb,” Cantino’s ex-wife informed police (see www.angelfire.com/save-ferris80s/pinto).

Police ruled the drowning an accident. There was no evidence “Catherine,” or any other person, had been present at Cantino’s house on the night of his death.

It was during this period, 1983–1987, that Catherine Baker — or at the very least, her myth — began to materialize. She was referred to on countless Web sites as the Death’s Head Hawkmoth, or Die Motte, as she was called on an anarchist site out of Hamburg (see www.anarchieeine.de). (Apparently everyone in the group had a nickname. Gracey was Nero. Others [none of them ever identified with an actual person and widely disputed] were Bull’s-Eye, Mohave, Socrates and Franklin.) Dad and Littleton barely mentioned The Moth in their essays; she appeared as a postscript in Littleton’s piece and Dad only mentioned her toward the end, when discussing the “power of the freedom fairy tale, when men and women fighting injustice are assigned attributes of movie stars and comic book heroes.” I could only assume this slight was because while Gracey’s identity was real, both documented and validated — he was Turkish in origin, had undergone hip surgery following an unknown accident, leaving his right leg a half-inch shorter than his left — Catherine Baker’s life was cast with more hairpin curves, loopholes, murk and Muddy Footprints Leading Nowhere than the plot of a film noir.

Some claimed (www.geocities.com/revolooshonlaydees) she’d never technically been linked to The Nightwatchmen, and the fact that the town of the last confirmed George Gracey sighting and the location of her own brutal crime happened within two hours (and twenty-three miles) of each other was simply a coincidence and, subsequently, an overeager conclusion of “extremist ties” by the FBI.

There was no way of knowing for certain if, on September 19, 1987, the blonde spotted with Gracey in a Lord’s Drugstore parking lot in Ariel, Texas, was the same blonde pulled over by a State Trooper on a deserted road off Highway 18 outside Vallarmo. Fifty-four-year-old Trooper Baldwin Sullins, following the 1968 blue Mercury Cougar onto the shoulder of the road, radioed headquarters to say he was on a routine stop for an extinguished taillight. And yet, something unusual about the woman must have made him ask her to step out of the vehicle (according to www.copkillers.com/cbaker87, he’d asked to see the inside of her trunk, where Gracey was hiding), and as she climbed from the driver’s seat wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt, she pulled out an RG.22 handgun, commonly called a Saturday Night Special or Junk Gun, and shot him twice in the face.

(I’d hoped Ada Harvey had been embellishing that particular detail; I’d wanted the Unintentional Tugged Trigger, the Slipped My Mind Safety Off, but sadly, it seemed Ada was not prone to ornamentation.)

Trooper Sullins had called in the Mercury Cougar’s license plate tags before he’d left his police car, and the car was registered to one Mr. Owen Tackle of Los Ebanos, Texas. It soon came to light Tackle had put the car up for sale at Reece’s Cars-for-Less in Ariel three months prior, and a tall blonde, who gave her name as Catherine Baker, had purchased the car the day before, paying in cash. Seconds before the shooting, a Lincoln Continental happened to drive by, and it was that driver’s testimony — Shirley Lavina, age 53—that led to the police sketch of Catherine Baker, the only certified portrait of her in existence.

(A grainy posting of the composite is featured on www.american outlaws.net/deathmoth and Ada Harvey was right; it looked nothing like Hannah Schneider. In fact, it could very well have been a rendering of June Bug Phyllis Mixer’s Standard Poodle.)

There were hundreds of other details to read about Die Motte (according to www.members.aol/smokefilledrooms/moth, she looked like Betty Page, while www.ironcurtain.net claimed people mistook her for Kim Basinger) and it was these details — not to mention the startling reappearance of “Lord’s Drugstore” (where Hannah had said Jade had been stopped by police at the end of her phony road trip) — that made me wonder if I might faint from sheer incredulity. But I forced myself to press on with an unyielding countenance and bearing, much like old British pinch-faced spinster Mary Kingsley (1862–1900), the first female explorer, who without batting an eyelash traveled up the crocodile-ridden Ogooué River in Gabon to study cannibalism and polygamy.

While some sources contended Catherine Baker was British and French in origin (even Ecuadorian; according to www.amigosdaliberdade.br her twin had died from stomach cancer due to the Oxico-contaminated water, prompting her to join the group), the resounding, and least refuted, idea was that she was the same thirteen-year-old Catherine Baker who’d been reported missing by her parents in New York City the summer of 1973. She was also “almost certainly” the “unidentified dark-haired child, a girl between thirteen and fourteen years of age” who’d been spotted with Gracey in Berkeley, November of that same year, a month after the Houston bombing.

According to www.wherearetheynow.com/felns/cb3, the parents of the mislaid Catherine Baker had been stratospherically wealthy. Her father was a Lariott, a descendant of Edwards P. Lariott, the American capitalist and oil tycoon, once the second richest man in the United States (and archenemy of John D. Rockefeller), and it was her rebellious spirit, a disenchantment with her home life and a childish infatuation with Gracey (who some estimated she’d met in New York, early in 1973) that had motivated her to escape her life of “capitalist privilege and excess,” never to return to it again.

Naturally, to me, this rarefied upbringing looked infinitely more at home around the bare and bony shoulders of Hannah Schneider than Sergeant Detective Harper’s contention that she’d been an orphan, raised at the Horizon House in New Jersey — a difference between a mink stole and a Member’s Only. If Ada Harvey was to be believed (and thus far, there was no reason not to), Fayonette Harper’s mistake was that she’d investigated the life of Hannah Schneider the Missing Person, the orphan whose identity Catherine Baker had apparently absconded with (the overcoat she’d donned and blithely strolled out of the store with, without paying). And yet, frustratingly, I couldn’t confirm Ada’s conjecture as fact or fiction; searching for “Hannah Schneider” and “Missing Person” yielded not a single result, which I initially found strange until I remembered what Hannah herself had said that night at her house: “Runaways, orphans, they’re kidnapped, killed — whatever the reason, they vanish from public record. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that’s forgotten in the end.”

It had happened to the person whose name she’d taken.

As I read the first startling details about Catherine Baker’s life (www.greatcommierevolt.net/women/baker was particularly well researched, complete with bibliography and links to Additional Reading), I started sprinting like an Errand Boy all the way back to that conversation with her, when I was alone at her house, retrieving her every word, expression and gesture, and when I dumped that splintered cargo at my feet (something “night,” police officer, The Gone), I turned around and sprinted back for more.

Hannah had claimed it was the truth about the Bluebloods, when in fact, it was her own past she’d narrated between all those cigarettes and sighs. She’d assigned each of them a portion of her own history, neatly sewing it into them using an invisible appliqué stitch, garnishing it with a few erroneous, baroque details (“prostitute, junkie,” “blackouts”) in order to floor me, make it look so astonishing, it had to be real.

It’d been her father, not Jade’s, “from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands.” And it had been she who’d run away from home, from New York to San Francisco, and those six days of travel had “changed the course of her life.” When she was thirteen, she, not Leulah, had absconded with a Turkish man (“handsome and passionate,” she’d called him) and she, not Milton, had wanted something to believe in, something to keep her afloat. She’d joined not a “street gang,” but “something night”—The Nightwatchmen.

She’d cut out the police officer killing from her own past and tacked it onto Nigel’s parents as if dressing paper dolls.

“Life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming,” she’d said broodingly (so broodingly, I should have known she could only be talking about herself, a tenet of Dad’s Life Story principle: “People will always reserve The Brood, The Glower and The Heathcliff-Styled Mope for their own Story, never someone else’s — call it the narcissism that leaks out of Western culture like oil from an Edsel.”).

“Some people pull the trigger,” Hannah had said (a palpable glower on her face), “and it all explodes in front of you. Other people run away.”

Leading criminologist Matthew Namode wrote in Chokes Alone (1999) that individuals who suffer a serious trauma — a child who’d lost a parent, a man who’d committed a single brutal crime—“may often, subconsciously or no, obsess over a lone word or image that may be directly traced back to the incident” (p. 249). “They repeat it when they’re nervous, or idly doodle it in the margins of a piece of paper, write it on a windowsill or in the dust along a shelf, often a word so obscure it may be impossible for outsiders to discover the shattering ordeal at its root” (p. 250). In Hannah’s case, it wasn’t obscure: Leulah saw the word Hannah had unknowingly scribbled all over the notepad by the telephone, but in Hannah’s haste to hide the paper from her, Leulah had misread it. Perhaps it had not said, “Valerio,” but “Vallarmo,” the Texan town where Hannah had killed a man.

And then — at this point I had Box Office Mojo; if they’d stuck me on a track I would’ve broken some hurtling records; in front of the high jump, I’d have soared so high, spectators would swear I had wings — I realized the truth behind the camping story Hannah had told us.

Hip injury, hip surgery, one leg shorter than the other: the man whose life she’d saved on the camping trip, the man who’d injured his hip, was George Gracey. He’d been living in the Adirondacks. Or perhaps she’d invented that detail; maybe he’d been hiding along the Appalachian Trail or in the Great Smokies like the Vicious Three detailed in Escaped (Pillars, 2004). Perhaps this was why Hannah had become a seasoned mountaineer; it’d been her responsibility to bring him food and supplies, keep him alive. And presently, he was living in Paxos, an island off the western coast of Greece, and Greece was where Hannah had told Eva Brewster she longed to go at the beginning of every St. Gallway school year, so she could “love herself.”

But then — why had she decided to tell me her Life Story in such a roundabout way? Why had she been living in Stockton, not with Gracey in Greece? And what were the present movements of Nächtlich—if any at all? (Solving crime-related questions was like trying to rid one’s house of rodents; you kill one, blink, six more dart across the floor.)

Perhaps Hannah had decided to tell me because she sensed I, out of all the Bluebloods, had the wits to solve the riddle of her life (Jade and the others weren’t methodical enough; Milton, for one, had the mind — and body, for that matter — of a Jersey Cow). “Ten years from now — that’s when you decide,” Hannah had said. Obviously, she’d wanted someone to know the truth, and not now — later, after she’d staged her disappearance. The night I’d shown up on her doorstep, she’d undoubtedly known all about Ada Harvey, and had been uneasy about what that dogged and determined Southern Belle (desperate to avenge the death of Big Daddy) might uncover and reveal to the FBI: Hannah’s true identity and crime.

She and Gracey couldn’t be together for security’s sake; they were still wanted by the Feds and thus it was crucial to cut off all contact, reside on opposite sides of the globe. Or else, their romance had gone flat as uncapped Pellegrino; “The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years,” wrote Wendy Aldridge, Ph.D., in The Truth About Ever After (1999). “After that you need a serious preservative, which can seriously harm your health.”

The resounding belief was that, even today, Nächtlich was alive and well. (Littleton supported this claim though he had no evidence. Dad was more skeptical.) “Thanks to inspirational recruitment,” wrote Guillaume on www.hautain.fr, “they have more members than ever. But you can’t go and join. That’s how they remain unseen. They choose you. They decide if you’re suitable.” In November 2000, an executive at the center of an accounting fraud, Mark Lecinque, had unexpectedly hanged himself at his family home twenty minutes north of Baton Rouge, and a pistol — fully loaded, apart for a single bullet — was found on the floor next to him. His apparent suicide was a shock, because Lecinque and his lawyers had acted smug and haughty when interviewed on network television. It was thus whispered his death had been the vigilante work of Les Veilleurs de Nuit.

Other countries, too, claimed similar silent assassinations of bigwigs, magnates, industrialists and corrupt officials. The anonymous editor in chief of www.newworldkuomintang.org wrote that between 1980 and the present, more than 330 moguls in thirty-nine countries, including Saudi Arabia (men with a combined net worth of $400 billion), had been “quietly, efficiently disposed of” thanks to The Nightwatchmen, and though it was unclear if such sudden deaths actually benefited the downtrodden and oppressed, at the very least, it sent corporations into a temporary state of upheaval, forcing them to focus immediate attentions on resolving internal leadership problems, rather than looking outward to the land and people they might sacrifice to turn a profit. Countless employees also started to complain of a steep decline in productivity in the years following the death of the CEO or various trustees — what some referred to as a “never-ending bureaucratic nightmare.” It was nearly impossible to get any work done or for anyone to make a final decision, because so many managers from different departments were required to sign off on the tiniest of ideas. Some Web sites, particularly those out of Germany, suggested members of Nächtlich were employed as supervisors at these behemoth conglomerates, their aim being to fan the flames of inertia by means of endless mandatory paperwork, circuitous checks and balances and labyrinthine red tape. Thus, the corporation, day after day, burning millions in what was becoming an endless waiting game, would “slowly eat itself from the inside out” (see www.verschworung.de/firmaalptraume).

I liked to believe Nächtlich was still active, because it meant Hannah, during her monthly trip to Cottonwood, had not been collecting men like they were tin cans she’d hoped to recycle as we’d all believed. No, she’d been engaged in prearranged encounters, “private one-on-ones” intended to appear like seedy one-night stands, while in fact, they were a platonic exchange of vital information. And perhaps it’d been Doc, sweet Doc with his reliefmap face and retractable trellis legs who’d informed Hannah about the recent movements and probing inquiries of Smoke Harvey and following that rendezvous — the first week of November — Hannah decided she had to kill him. She had no choice, if she wished to preserve her former lover’s hiding place in Paxos, his sanctum sanctorum.

But how had she done it?

It was the question that stumped Ada Harvey, but after reading about the other Nächtlich assassinations, I could now answer it with my eyes closed (also with a little help from Connault Helig’s Machinations Idyllic and Unseen).

If rumor could be believed, The Nightwatchmen, following their post — January 1974 creed of invisibility, employed correspondingly traceless murder techniques. Their repertoire had to include something akin to “The Flying Demoiselle,” described in The History of Lynching in the American South (Kittson, 1966). (In my opinion, Mark Lecinque of Baton Rouge had been killed this way, as his death was ruled a straightforward suicide.) They also must use another, more impermeable method, a procedure first documented by Connault Helig, the London surgeon summoned by a bamboozled police force to examine the body of Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim of Leather Apron, commonly known as Jack the Ripper. A venerated if furtive man of medicine and science, in Chapter 3, Helig details at length what he considers to be “the only flawless stealthy execution that exists in all the world”(p. 18).

It was flawless because technically it wasn’t murder, but a calculated setup of fatal circumstances. The plan was executed not by one person, but by a “consortium between five and thirteen like-minded gentlemen,” who each, on the chosen day, independently committed an act assigned by the central planner, “the engineer” (p. 21). Viewed individually, these acts were lawful, even ordinary, and yet in a concentrated period of time, they combined to elicit a “perfectly lethal state of affairs, in which the intended victim has no choice but to die” (p. 22). “Each man acts alone,” he writes on p. 21. “He does not know the faces, actions or even the final aim of those with whom he operates. Such ignorance is imperative, for his lack of knowledge maintains his virtue. Only the engineer will know the design from inception to end.”

Detailed knowledge of the victim’s personal and professional life was mandatory, in order to effectively isolate the “ideal poison” to facilitate the “slaying” (pp. 23–25). It could be any possession, weakness, physical handicap or idiosyncrasy of the doomed individual — a cherished gun collection, perhaps, the steep flight of stairs outside Belgravia townhouse (which became “startlingly slippery in the wee hours of a brisk February morning”), a secret affinity for opium, foxhunting upon skittish stallions, hobnobbing under rickety bridges with disease-ridden streetwalkers or most conveniently of all, a daily dose of medication prescribed by the family physician — the concept being that all weapons utilized against the prey were his/her own, and thus the death would appear accidental to even the “craftiest and most inventive of investigators” (p. 26).

This was how Hannah had done it — rather, how they’d done it, because I doubted she’d acted alone at the costume party, but had a number of ghouls to assist her, most of them conveniently wearing masks—Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii, maybe; he’d looked squinty eyed and suspicious, or the astronaut Nigel and I had overheard speaking Greek to the Chinese woman in the gorilla suit. (“Membership expanded not only in America but internationally,” reported Jacobus on www.deechtewaarheid.nl.)

“The primary gentleman, whom we shall hereafter refer to as One, will prepare the poisons prior to the day in question,” Helig writes on p. 31.

Hannah had been One. She’d ingratiated herself with Smoke, pinpointed his poisons: his blood-pressure medication, Minipress, and his favorite booze, Jameson, Bushmills, maybe Tullamore Dew (“He liked his whiskey…I won’t lie about that,” Ada had said). According to www.drug data.com the medicine was “incompatible with alcoholic beverages,” and when combined, the individual may suffer the effects of “syncope,” dizziness, disorientation, even a loss of consciousness. Hannah herself had acquired the drug — or perhaps she’d had it already; perhaps that nineteen-bottle stash of prescription pills in her bedroom cabinet was never for herself, but for her hit jobs. She pulverized a predetermined quantity (the exact amount of the daily dosage, so the elevated levels of the drug discovered in the autopsy could be easily explained in the absence of other signs of foul play; the coroner would assume the victim accidentally took his dosage twice on the day in question). She dissolved the powdered drug into the alcohol and served it to him when he arrived at the party.

“One,” writes Helig on p. 42, “is accountable for relaxing the victim, ensuring his defenses are down. It may serve the group well if One is a person of great physical beauty and charm.”

They passed Nigel and me on the stairs, went to her bedroom, talked, and shortly thereafter, Hannah excused herself, maybe under the guise of getting them another drink, taking both glasses with her, heading downstairs to the kitchen, rinsing them out in the sink, destroying the only piece of incriminating evidence in the entire plot — and so concluding what Helig designated the initial setup, “The First Act.” She never returned to him for the rest of the night.

The Second Act comprised the seemingly random relay race that “gently guides the man toward his own conclusion” (p. 51). Hannah must have known Smoke would wear the olive-green Red Army uniform, and thus the assigned individuals knew not only his physical description but also what costume to watch for. Two, Three, Four, Five (and I wasn’t certain how many there were) — they appeared at prearranged locations, approaching him, introducing themselves, handing him another drink, chatting breathlessly as they escorted him from the bedroom, down the stairs, outside onto the patio, each of them bold, engaging, ostensibly drunk. Perhaps one or two of them were men, but the majority were women. (Ernest Hemingway, who wasn’t keen on the fair sex, wrote, “a young dame with pretty eyes and a smile can make an old man do just about anything” [p. 278, Journals, Hemingway, 1947].)

This carefully choreographed relay continued for an hour or two until Smoke was positioned by the edge of the pool, his face swollen and red, his eyes unable to pick themselves up off the scales and angel wings and dorsal fins to see where he was standing. His head was a bag of feed for chickens. That was the moment Six, standing in a group, bumped into him, making him lose his balance, fall, and Seven — Seven must have been one of the rats playing Marco Polo — made certain he was helpless, if not holding his head under water, then simply ensuring he splashed, drifted to the opposite end of the pool, the deep end, and was left alone.

And so the victim dies, completing the Second Act, “the most noteworthy Act of our little tragedy” (p. 68). The Third Act begins the moment the body is found, ending with each implicated person “dispersing into the world like the withered petals off a dead flower, never to come together again” (p. 98).

I rubbed my eyes after scribbling this last bit into my CASE NOTES (now occupying twelve pages of a college-ruled legal pad), threw down my pen and pressed my head into the back of Dad’s office chair. The house was quiet. In the lone window by the ceiling, darkness clung like a flimsy nightgown. The wood-paneled wall, where my mother’s six cases of butterflies and moths had once hung, stared back at me, expressionless.

Remembering old Smoke Harvey, shadowing him through the costume party, his Long Night’s Journey into Death — it rained all over the parade of secret revolution against corporate greed.

That was the problem with causes, the cheap toy within their Happy Meal; inevitably, there came a point when they looked exactly like their enemy, when they became what they fought so hard against. Freedom, Democracy — the big breathy words people shouted with their fists in the air (or else whispered, wimpy looks in their eyes) — they were beautiful mail-order brides from far-flung countries, and no matter how long you insisted they stick around, when you actually took a good look at them (when you stopped feeling woozy in their presence), you noticed they never actually fit in; they barely learned the customs or language. Their transplant from a textbook into the real world was slipshod, rickety at best.

“Just as no imposing character in a book may be cleverer than its minuscule author,” Dad remarked in his lecture “Landlocked Switzerland: They’re Nice and Neutral Only Because They’re Tiny,” “no government can be greater than its governors. And provided we’re not invaded by Little Green Men anytime soon — reading a week’s worth of The New York Times, I’m not so sure that’d be a bad thing — these governors will always be mere humans, men and women, cute little paradoxes, forever capable of astounding compassion, forever capable of astounding cruelty. You’d be surprised — Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, Totalitarianism — whatever ism it happens to be doesn’t matter all that much; there will always be the tricky balance between the human extremes. And so we live our lives, make informed choices about what we believe in, stand by them. That’s all.”

It was 9:12 P.M. and Dad still wasn’t home.

I turned off his computer, returned the copy of Federal Forum and the other books to the bookshelf. Gathering together my notes, I switched off the study lights and hurried upstairs to my room. I threw the papers on my desk, took a black sweater out of my closet and pulled it over my head.

I was going back to Hannah’s. And I had to go, not tomorrow, not in the bleaching daylight that killed everything, made it laughable, but now, while the truth was still squirming. I wasn’t finished. I couldn’t tell anyone about my theory now. No, I needed something else, physical evidence, facts, papers — Minipress in one of those nineteen prescription bottles, a photograph of Hannah and George Gracey hand in hand or an article from The Vallarmo Daily, “Policeman Shot, Woman Escapes,” dated September 20, 1987—something, anything that would handcuff Hannah Schneider to Catherine Baker to Smoke Harvey to The Nightwatchmen. I believed it, of course. I knew Hannah Schneider was Catherine as surely as I knew a turtle could weigh a thousand pounds (see “Leatherback Turtle,” Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.). I’d been with her in her living room and on the mountaintop, painstakingly collected those splinters of her Life Story she’d scattered on the ground. I’d always suspected something beautiful and grotesque lived in her shadows, and now, finally, here it was, shyly inching out of the gloom.

But who’d believe me? Lately, my average of persuading others of my beliefs was around zero for eight. (I’d make an appalling missionary.) The Bluebloods thought I’d killed Hannah, Detective Harper thought I had Witness Traumatization and Dad seemed to be deathly afraid I was soft-shoeing into madness. No, the rest of the world, including Dad, needed proof to believe in something (it was a crisis the Catholic Church faced with its rapidly diminishing numbers) and not the kind of proof that was a faint shadow darting through a doorway, a hiccup on the stairs, but proof like a stout Russian schoolmarm standing directly under a floodlight (and unwilling to budge): three chins, frantic gray hair (barely pacified by bobby pins), a big orange skirt (under which an adult orangutan could hide fully undetected) and a pince-nez.

I’d find this proof if it killed me.

As soon as I finished tying my shoes, however, I heard the Volvo cruising into the driveway — a snag in my plan. Dad would never let me go to Hannah’s now, and by the time I’d explained everything, fielded every one of his tenacious, sticky questions (trying to convince Dad of something new, one had to be outfitted like God in Genesis), the sun would be rising and I’d feel as if I’d just fought off a Giant Squid. (I’ll admit, too, even though I felt I’d proved it satisfactorily, I was nevertheless afraid that, unlike the Boltzmann Constant, Avogadro’s Number, Quantum Field Theory, Cosmic Inflation, my feeble premise could very well collapse within twenty-four hours. I had to get moving.)

I heard Dad enter the front door, chuck his keys onto the table. He was humming “I Got Rhythm.”

“Sweet?”

Wildly, my eyes veered around the room. I ran to a window, unlatched it, heaved the thing up with all my might (it hadn’t been opened since the Carter Administration), then the rusty screen. I stuck my head out, looked down. Unlike a clammy family drama on network television, there was no mighty oak with ladderlike branches, no lattice, rose-garden grill or well-situated fencing — only a three-story drop, a sloping ledge above the bay window in the dining room and a few feeble strands of ivy clinging like hair to a sweater.

Dad was playing messages on the answering machine, his own, about dinner with Arnie Sanderson, then Arnold Schmidt of The New Seattle Journal for Foreign Policy, who spoke with a lisp and slurred the last four digits of his phone number.

“Sweet, you upstairs? I brought home some food from the restaurant.”

Hastily, I slipped on my backpack, swung one leg out the window, then the other, awkwardly sliding onto my elbows. I dangled there for a minute, staring down at the shrubs far under my feet, noting I could very well die, at the very least, break both arms and legs, maybe even my back, end up a paraplegic—then what sort of crimes would I be able to solve, which of Life’s Great Questions would I ever answer? It was a moment I was supposed to wonder if It Was Worth It, and so I did: I wondered about Hannah and Catherine Baker and George Gracey. I pictured Gracey in Paxos, tan as rawhide holding a margarita by an infinity pool, the ocean jaded in the distance, skinny girls fanning out on either side of him like celery sticks on a dip tray. How faraway Jade and Milton had become, and St. Gallway, even Hannah — her face was already receding like a set of history dates I’d crammed into my head for a Unit Test. How lonely and absurd one felt dangling out a window. I took a giant breath, opened my eyes — I wasn’t the sort of drip who closed her eyes, not anymore; if this was my last moment before total paralysis, before it all went haywire, I wanted to go down seeing it: the huge night, the grass shivering, the headlights of a passing car scissoring through the trees.

I let go.

“Good Country People”

The bit of roofing jutting out like stiffened, hair-sprayed bangs over the dining room’s bay window braced my plummet to the earth, and though my entire left side was scratched by the side of the house and the rhododendrons in which I landed, I stood up, brushed myself off, remarkably unscathed. Obviously, I now needed a car (if I risked creeping through the front door for the Volvo keys, I risked encountering Dad) and the only decent place that came to mind, the only person who might help was Larson at the BP gas station.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was dinging into the Food Mart.

“Look who’s come back from the dead,” announced the intercom. “Beginnin’ to think ya bought a car. Beginnin’ to think you didn’t like me.”

Behind the bulletproof glass, he crossed his arms and winked at me. He wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off that read, CAT! CAT! Next to the batteries stood his latest girlfriend, a string-bean blonde in a short red dress eating potato chips.

“Senorita,” he said. “I missed ya.”

“Hi,” I said, hurrying to the window.

“What’s goin’ on? How come ya haven’t come seen me? Ya been breakin’ my corazón.”

String Bean surveyed me skeptically, licking salt off her fingers.

“How’s high school?” he asked.

“All right,” I said.

He nodded and held up an open book, Learning the Spanish Language (Berlitz, 2000). “Been doin’ some studyin’ myself. Came up with a plan to break into the film industry. You stay here, you gotta do it from the ground up, too many people. Go to a foreign country? You can be a big fish in a little pond. I decided on Spain. I hear they need actors—”

“I need your help,” I blurted. “I–I was wondering if I could borrow your truck again. I promise to have it back in three or four hours. It’s an emergency and—”

“Typical chica. Only comes to see ya when she wants somethin’. Can’t ask yer pops cuz things are rough with him — you don’t have to tell me. I pick up on the símbolos. The signs.”

“It’s not about my father. It’s something that happened at school. Did you hear about the teacher who died? Hannah Schneider?”

“Killed herself,” said String Bean through shards of potato chips.

“Sure,” said Larson, nodding. “Been thinkin’ ’bout that. I was wonderin’ how yer pops was. The male species mourns different from women. Before he left, my pops was datin’ Tina who worked at Hair Fantasy, took her out only a week after my stepma died of brain cancer. I had a fit. But he sat me down, told me people show their loss different, is all. Got to respect the mournin’ process. So if yer pops starts datin’ again, can’t hold it against him. I’m sure he’s upset. A lot of people come through here, all different kinds, an’ I can spot real love like I kin spot an actor who’s not in the moment, just readin’ lines—”

“Who are you talking about?”

He smiled. “Yer pops.”

“My pops.”

“Figure he’s pretty broken up.”

I stared at him. “Why?”

“Well, yer girl ups and dies on ya—”

“His girl?”

“Sure.”

“Hannah Schneider?”

He stared at me.

“But they barely knew each other.” As soon as I said it, the sentence sounded absurdly frail. It curled, began to fall apart like an empty straw wrapper when a drop of water falls on it.

Larson didn’t continue. He looked uncertain; sensing he’d stumbled into the wrong stairwell, he couldn’t decide if he should keep going down or back the way he came.

“What made you think they were a couple?” I asked.

“Way they looked at each other,” he said after a moment, leaning forward so his freckled forehead was an inch from the glass. “She came in here while he waited in the car once. Smiled at me. Bought Tums. The other time they paid for gas with a credit card. Didn’t get out of the car. But I saw her. Next thing I know her picture’s in the paper. Her face was so pretty, it gets etched in yer mind.”

“Are you positive? It wasn’t a — a woman with yellow-orange hair?”

“Oh, yeah, I saw her. Crazy blue eyes. No. This one was the one in the newspaper. Dark hair. Looked like she wasn’t from around here.”

“How many times did you see them?”

“Two. Maybe three.”

“I can’t — I have to”—my voice was scary, coming out in clumps—“Excuse me,” I managed to say. And then, all at once, the convenience store became highly inconvenient. I whirled around, because I couldn’t look at Larson’s face anymore, and the whole place looked smeared, out of focus (or else all gravitational fields had gone limp). As I turned, my left arm smacked the display of greeting cards, and then I crashed into String Bean, who’d left her position by the batteries to go get a cup of scalding coffee the size of a small child. It erupted all over us (String Bean screaming, wailing about her burnt legs), but I didn’t stop or apologize; I lurched forward, my foot hit the rack of beaded eyeglass chains and angel air fresheners, the door dinged and finally, the night jammed into my face. I think Larson might have shouted something, “Make sure yer ready fer the truth,” in his chainsaw accent — but maybe it was the screeches of the cars as they honked to avoid hitting me, or my own words as they skidded through my head.

The Trial

I found Dad in the library.

He wasn’t surprised to see me — but then, I can’t remember a time when Dad was ever surprised, except when he leaned down to pet June Bug Phyllis Mixer’s chocolate Standard Poodle and the thing leaped into the air in an attempt to bite his face, missing it by half an inch.

I stood in the doorway for a minute, staring at him, unable to speak. He put his reading glasses in their case with the air of a woman handling pearls.

“I gather you didn’t watch Gone with the Wind,” he said.

“How long did you date Hannah Schneider?” I asked.

“Date?” He frowned.

“Don’t lie. People saw you with her.” I opened my mouth to say more, but couldn’t.

“Sweet?” He leaned forward slightly in his reading chair, as if to better observe me, as if I were an interesting principle of Conflict Resolution scrawled across a blackboard.

“I hate you,” I said in a quivering voice.

“Excuse me?”

“I hate you!”

“My God,” he said with a smile. “I — this is an interesting turn of events. Rather ridiculous.”

“I’m not ridiculous! You’re ridiculous!” I lurched around, yanked a random book from the bookshelf behind me and hurled it at him, hard. He deflected it with his arm. It was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, 1916) and it fell open at his feet. Instantly, I grabbed another, Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Bicentennial ed. 1989).

Dad stared at me. “For God’s sake, get a hold of yourself.”

“You’re a liar! You’re an ape!” I screamed, throwing it at him. “I hate you!”

He deflected that one too. “The use of the phrase, I hate you,” he said calmly, “is not only untrue, it’s—”

I threw A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens, 1859) at his head. He deflected it, so I grabbed more, as many as I could hold in my arms like some mad, starving woman ordered to grab as much food as she could from a cafeteria buffet. There was The Strenuous Life (Roosevelt, 1900), Leaves of Grass (Whitman, 1891), This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald, 1920), a very heavy, green hardback—A Description of Elizabethan England (Harrison, 1577), I believe. I launched all of them at him, rapid fire. He repelled most, though Elizabethan England hit him on the right knee.

“You’re a sick, sick liar! You’re evil!”

I threw Lolita (Nabokov, 1955).

“I hope you die a slow death riddled with unbearable pain!”

Although deflecting the books with his arms, and sometimes legs, Dad didn’t stand up or try to restrain me in any way. He remained in his reading chair.

“Get a hold of yourself,” he said. “Stop being so melodramatic. This isn’t a miniseries on AB—”

I hurled The Heart of the Matter (Greene, 1948) at his stomach, Common Sense (Paine, 1776) at his face.

“Is this necessary?”

I threw Four Texts on Socrates (West, 1998). I picked up Paradise Lost (Milton, 1667).

“That’s a rare edition,” Dad said.

“Let it be the blow to kill you then!”

Dad sighed and shielded his face. He caught the book in his hands and closed it, placing it neatly on the side table. Immediately, I hurled Rip Van Winkle & the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving, 1819), hitting him in the side.

“If you would collect yourself and behave as a rational person, I might be inclined to tell you how I came to know the supremely unhinged Miss Schneider.”

Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau, 1754) struck his left shoulder.

“Blue, really. If you would simply calm down. You’re inflicting more harm on yourself than me. Look at yourself—”

A large-fonted Ulysses (Joyce, 1922), thrown over my head backhandedly after tossing The King James Bible as a decoy, managed to avert his dodge, knocking him on the side of his face, close to his left eye. He touched where the spine of the book hit him and looked at his hand.

“Are you finished bombarding your father with the Western canon?”

“Why did you lie?” My voice was hoarse. “Why do I always find out you lie to me?”

“Sit down.” He moved toward me but I aimed a battered edition of How the Other Half Lives (Riis, 1890) at his head. “If you could calm down, you might spare yourself the stress of getting so hysterical.” He took the book from me. That soft part just under a person’s eye — I don’t know what it’s called — it was bleeding. A beadlike drop of blood glistened there. “Now calm down—”

“Don’t change the subject,” I said.

He returned to his chair.

“Are you going to be reasonable?”

“You should be reasonable,” I said loudly, though not as loud as before because my throat hurt.

“I understand what you must think right now—”

“Every time I go somewhere I find out something from other people. Things you didn’t tell me.”

Dad nodded. “I understand completely. Who were you with tonight?”

“I don’t reveal my sources.”

He sighed and put his hands in perfect This-is-the-church-this-is-the-steeple architecture. “It’s really quite simple. You introduced us again on the occasion she drove you home. Sometime in October, wasn’t it? You remember?”

I nodded.

“Well, the woman called me shortly thereafter. Said she was worried about you. You and I weren’t on the best of terms, if you recall, so naturally, I was concerned and accepted her invitation to meet for dinner. She chose a rather inappropriately ornate restaurant, Hyacinth something, and over the course of the seven-course meal proceeded to inform me it was a swell idea for you to start seeing a child psychiatrist to work out some issues you had with your deceased mother. Naturally, I was livid. The sheer gall of the woman! But then, when I came home, saw you — saw your hair, the natural color of feldspar — I began to worry if perhaps she was right. Yes, it was an idiotic, insulting assumption on my part, but all the same, I’ve always been nervous, raising you without your mother. You could say it’s been my Achilles’ heel. And so I had dinner with her two more times, in order to discuss the possibility of your seeing someone, at the end of which I realized, not only did you not need help, she needed help. And rather urgently.” Dad sighed. “I know you liked her, but she was not the most stable of people. She called my office a few times after that. I told her you and I had managed to work things out, that we were fine. And she accepted it. Shortly thereafter, we flew to Paris. I hadn’t talked to or heard anything about her since. Until she committed suicide. Tragic, certainly, but I can’t say I was surprised.”

“When did you send her the barbaresco orientals?”

“I — the what?”

“Obviously you didn’t buy them for Janet Finnsbroke who dates back to the Paleozoic Period. You bought them for Hannah Schneider.”

He stared at me. “Yes. I — well, I didn’t want you to—”

“Then you were madly in love with her,” I interrupted. “Don’t lie. Say it—”

Dad laughed. “Hardly.”

“No one buys barbaresco orientals for someone they’re not in love with.”

“Then call Guinness. I am the first, my dear.” He shook his head. “I told you. I thought she was rather sad. I sent her flowers after one of our dinners, after I told her, rather harshly, what I thought of her — that she was one of those despairing people who concoct madcap theories about others — and doubtlessly for herself — purely for entertainment as their own lives are so dull. Such people wish to be bigger than they actually are. And naturally, when one speaks one’s mind — tells someone the truth, or one’s personal version of it — it never goes over well. Someone always ends up crying. Remember what I’ve always said about truth, standing in a long black dress in the corner, feet together, head down?”

“She’s the loneliest girl in the room.”

“Precisely. Contrary to popular belief, no one wants anything to do with her. She’s too depressing to be around. Trust me, everyone prefers to dance with something a little sexier, a little more comforting. And so I sent flowers. I didn’t know what kind they were. I asked the florist to pick something—”

“They were barbaresco oriental lilies.”

Dad smiled. “Well, now I know.”

I didn’t say anything. The position at which Dad was sitting, turned away from the lamplight, made his face old. The wrinkles on his face textured him. Lines cut toward his eyes and along his face, in his hands, tiny tears all over him.

“So it was you calling that night,” I said.

He looked at me. “What?”

“The night I ran away to her house. You called her.”

“Who?”

“Hannah Schneider. I was there when the phone rang. She said it was Jade, but it wasn’t Jade. It was you.”

“Yes,” he said softly, nodding. “Maybe that’s right. I did call her.”

“See? You — you have an entire relationship with her and you—”

“Why do you think I called her?” Dad shouted. “That nut job was my only lead! I didn’t know the names or telephone numbers of any of those other pieces of fuzz you’d befriended. And when she told me you’d just materialized on her doorstep, immediately I wanted to come get you, but again, she proposed one of her squishy psychoanalytic ideas and I, being something of a fool when it comes to my daughter as we’ve well established this evening, I went along with it. ‘Leave her alone. We need to talk. Just us girls.’ Dear God. If there’s one supremely puffed-up concept in all of Western Culture, it’s the talk. Doesn’t anyone remember that cute little phrase, which I happen to find rather illuminating? Talk is cheap?”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I suppose I was embarrassed.” Dad gazed at the floor, the landfill of books. “After all, you were completing your application to Harvard. I didn’t wish to upset you.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have been upset. Maybe I’m more upset now.”

“Granted, it wasn’t the wisest decision, but it was a decision I thought best at the time. Anyway, this business with Hannah Schneider is finished. May she rest in peace. The school year’s nearly over.” Dad sighed. “It’s one for the books, is it not? I think Stockton is certainly the most theatrical town in which we’ve lived. It has all the elements of a good piece of fiction. More passion than Peyton Place, more frustration than Yoknapatawpha County. And it’s certainly up there with Macondo in terms of sheer elements of the bizarre. It has sex, sin and that most painful quality of all, youthful disillusionment. You’re ready, sweet. You no longer need your old pa.”

My hands were cold. I walked over to the yellow couch in front of the windows and sat down.

“It’s not all finished with Hannah Schneider,” I said. “You have blood here.” I showed him.

“You got me, huh,” he said sheepishly, touching his face. “Was it the Bible or An American Tragedy? I’d like to know for symbolic purposes.”

“There’s more about Hannah Schneider.”

“I might need stitches.”

“Her real name was Catherine Baker. She was an old member of The Nightwatchmen. She murdered a policeman.”

My words were like a ghost passing through Dad; not that I’d ever seen a ghost passing through a person, but his face drained of color — fell out of him like water poured from a bucket. He stared at me, expressionless.

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “And if you want to confess something about your own involvement, recruiting or — or murder or blowing up one of your capitalist Harvard colleagues, you’d better do it right now, because I’m going to know everything. I won’t stop.” The resolve in my voice surprised Dad, but especially me; it was as if my voice was stronger than I was. It threw itself onto the ground, leading the way like slabs of stone.

Dad was squinting. He looked as if, suddenly, he had no idea who I was. “But they never existed,” he said slowly. “Not for thirty years. They’re a fairy tale.”

“Not necessarily. It’s all over the Internet that—”

“Oh, the Internet,” Dad interrupted. “As powerful a source as they come. If we open that gate, we must also usher in Elvis, still alive and kicking, popup ads — I don’t understand why you’re bringing up The Nightwatchmen. You’ve been reading my old lectures, Federal Forum—?”

“The founder, George Gracey, is still alive. He lives in Paxos. A man named Smoke Harvey drowned in Hannah’s swimming pool last fall and he’d tracked him down and—”

“Of course,” Dad nodded, “I remember her whining about it — obviously yet another reason why she went bananas.”

“No,” I said. “She killed him. Because he was researching a book about Gracey. He was going to expose him. All of them. The entire organization.”

Dad raised his eyebrows. “Well, you’ve obviously done quite a bit of work figuring this out. Go on.”

I hesitated; Burt Towelson wrote in Guerrilla Girls (1986) to preserve the purity of any investigation one had to be vigilant about whom one spoke to concerning the scary truths that had emerged; but then, if I couldn’t trust Dad, I couldn’t trust anyone. He was staring at me as he’d stared at me a thousand times before, whenever we moseyed through my thesis for an upcoming research paper (his expression interested but doubtful he’d be wowed) and so it seemed an inevitable thing to walk him through my theory, My Grand Scheme of Things. I began with Hannah plotting her own exit because of what Ada Harvey knew, how she left me L’Avventura, “The Flying Demoiselle,” the costume party, a version of Connault Helig’s elimination technique employed to murder Smoke, Hannah’s history of the Bluebloods paralleling Catherine Baker’s history, her preoccupation with Missing Persons and, finally, my telephone conversation with Ada Harvey. In the beginning, Dad stared at me as if I were a lunatic, but as I went on, he began to hang on my every word. In fact, I hadn’t seen Dad this engrossed since he obtained a newsstand copy of the June 1999 issue of The New Republic, in which his lengthy satiric response to an article entitled “Little Shop of Horrors: A History of Afghanistan” had been printed in the Letters section.

When I finished, I expected him to hurl questions at me, but he remained thoughtfully silent for a minute, maybe two.

He frowned. “So who killed poor Miss Schneider?”

Naturally, Dad would have to ask the one question I had only a rickety-bridge answer to. Ada Harvey had said she thought Hannah had committed suicide, but since I’d heard that stranger bounding through the trees, I tended to think someone in Nächtlich had done it; Hannah had been a liability when she’d killed the State Trooper, and with Ada telephoning the FBI and the possibility of her capture, Gracey, the entire group’s clandestine existence was at risk. But I didn’t know any of this for certain, and as Dad said, one should never “dribble speculation like a leaky garbage bag.”

“Well, I’m not sure, exactly,” I said.

He nodded and said nothing more.

“Have you written about Nächtlich recently?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. Why?”

“Remember the way we met Hannah Schneider — she was in Fat Kat Foods and then she reappeared at the shoe store?”

“Yes,” he said, after a moment.

“Ada Harvey described the same thing when she told me how Hannah met her father. She’d planned the whole encounter. So I was worried maybe you were her next victim, because you were writing something—”

“Sweet,” Dad interjected, “as flattered as I’d be for Miss Baker to choose me as her target — never been anyone’s target before — there is no Nightwatchmen, not any longer. They’re considered by even the most laid-back of political theorists to be a mere fantasy. And what are fantasies? What we use to pillow ourselves against the world. Our world, it’s a cruel parquet—murder to sleep on. Besides, this isn’t the age of revolutionaries, but an age of isolationaries. Man’s proclivity today is not to unite, but to cut himself off from others, step on them, grab as much dough as he can. As you know too, history is cyclical and we’re not due for another uprising — even a silent one — for another two hundred years. More to the point, I remember reading an in-depth piece about Catherine Baker being a Parisian gypsy in origin, so however thrilling it may sound, it’s still rather tenuous to assert Schneider and Baker were the same woman. Given the odd way she told all of this to you, how do you know she didn’t simply read a book, a real page-turner about the mysterious Catherine Baker, then let her imagination run wild? Maybe she wanted you to believe, for everyone to believe before she killed herself, that that had been her life, a life of upheaval and causes — she, Bonnie, some other dope, Clyde. That way she might live forever, n’est-ce pas? She’d leave behind a thrilling Life Story, not the dreary editorial that was her truth. Such are the lies people tell. And they’re a dime a dozen.”

“But what about the way she met Smoke—?”

“All we know for certain is that she liked to pick up men in food settings,” Dad said with authority. “She was looking for love amidst frozen peas.”

I stared at him. He did have a few infinitesimal points. On www.iron butterfly.net the author claimed Catherine Baker had been a French gypsy. And given the heaving-bodice posters in Hannah’s classroom, I could conceive how it was somewhat plausible she might devise a more exciting life for herself. Just like that, Dad could poke serious holes in my rowboat theory, make it look embarrassingly overdesigned and ill considered (see “De Lorean DMC-12,” Capitalist Blunders, Glover, 1988).

“So I’m nuts,” I said.

“I didn’t say that,” he said sharply. “Certainly, your little theory is elaborate. Far-fetched? Absolutely. But it is, in a word, remarkable. And rather exciting. Nothing like news of silent revolutionaries to get the blood rushing into one’s head—”

“You believe me?”

He paused and turned his face up to the ceiling to consider this, as only Dad could consider things.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I do.”

“Really?”

“Of course. You know I’ve a soft spot for the far-fetched and fantastical. The wholly ludicrous. I suppose there are a few details to further shape—”

“I’m not crazy.”

He smiled. “To the ordinary, untrained ear you might sound slightly unhinged. But to a Van Meer? You sound rather ho-hum.”

I leapt from the couch and hugged him.

“Now you wish to hug me? So I take it you’ve forgiven me for not telling you about my imprudent encounters with that strange and wayward woman, whom we shall now call, given her subversive connections, Blackbeard?”

I nodded.

“Thank God,” he said. “I don’t think I could have survived another blitzkrieg of books. Especially with that twenty-pound edition of The World’s Famous Orations still on the shelf. Do you feel like eating something?” He brushed hair off my forehead. “You’ve grown too thin.”

“All of this must have been what Hannah wanted to tell me on the mountain. Remember?”

“Yes — but how are you planning to dispense your findings? Will we coauthor a book, entitled, say, Mixed Nuts: Conspiracies and Anti-American Dissidents in Our Midst or Special Topics in Calamity Physics, something with a bit of rumba to it. Or will you write a bestseller with all the names changed, the proverbial ‘Based on a true story’ written on the first page to sell more copies? You’ll have the entire country terrified that unhinged activists are working as teachers in their schools, poisoning the minds of their dear dullard children.”

“I don’t know.”

“Now here’s an idea — you’ll simply jot it down in your diary, an anecdote for your grandchildren to read upon your death when they go through your belongings neatly arranged in an antique steamer trunk. They’ll sit around the dinner table, murmuring in incredulous voices, ‘I can’t believe Grandma did that, all at the tender age of sixteen.’ And via this diary, which will be auctioned at Christie’s for nothing less than $500,000, a story of small town terror will float away by word of mouth into one of magical realism. Blue van Meer will be said to have been born with a pig’s tail, the troubled Miss Schneider driven to fanaticism due to a love that went unrequited for centuries, a Love in the Time of Cholera, and your friends, the Miltons and the Greens, they will be the revolutionaries staging thirty-two armed uprisings and losing every one. And we can’t forget your dad. Wise and withered in the background, the General in His Labyrinth on his seven-month river voyage from Bogotá to the sea.”

“I think we’ll go to the police,” I said.

He chuckled. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“No. We have to go to the police. Immediately.”

“Why?”

“We just have to.”

“You’re not being realistic.”

“Yes, I am.”

He shook his head. “You’re not thinking. Let’s say there’s truth to it. You’ll need evidence. Testimonials of former group members, manifestos, recruitment processes — which will all be rather difficult to find, won’t they, if your suspicions about undetectable murder tactics are correct. More important, there’s an inherent risk when someone comes forward, pointing a finger. Have you thought about that? Coming up with a theory is all very thrilling, but if there’s truth to it, it’s no longer a round of Wheel of Fortune. I won’t allow you to draw attention to yourself, assuming, of course, any of this is true, which we will probably never know with any certainty. Going to the police is gallant for simpletons, for nitwits — but what purpose would it serve? So the sheriff can have a story for his donut break?”

“No,” I said. “So lives can be saved.”

“How touching. Just whose life are you saving?”

“You can’t just go kill people because you don’t like what they’re doing. That makes us animals. Even — even if we can never find it we still have to try for…” I trailed off into silence, because I wasn’t exactly sure what we had to try for. “Justice,” I said weakly.

Dad only laughed. “‘Justice is a whore who won’t let herself be stiffed and collects the wages of shame even from the poor.’ Karl Kraus. Austrian essayist.”

“‘All good things may be expressed in a single word,’” I said. “‘Freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy. And hope.’ Churchill.”

“‘As thou urgest justice, be assured / Thou shalt have justice more than thou desirest.’ Merchant of Venice.”

“‘Justice wields an erratic sword / grants mercy to fortunate few / Yet if man doesn’t fight for her / ’Tis chaos he’s left to.’”

Dad opened his mouth to speak, but stopped, frowning. “Mackay?”

“Gareth van Meer. ‘The Revolution Betrayed.’ Civic Journal of Foreign Affairs. Volume six, issue nineteen.”

Dad smiled, tilted his head back and gave a very loud “Ha!”

I’d forgotten about his “Ha!” Usually he reserved it for faculty meetings with a Dean, when a fellow colleague said something humorous or stirring and Dad was slightly perturbed he hadn’t thought to say it, so he said a very loud Ha! partly an expression of annoyance and partly to suck the room’s attention back to him. Now, however, when he looked at me, unlike those faculty meetings with a Dean (Dad allowed me to sit in the corner whenever I was out sick with a mild head cold and, without stirring, swallowing all potential sneezes, I listened to the assembled Ph.D.s with chalky complexions and thinning hair, speaking in weighty voices of Knights at the Round Table), Dad had big, bare tears shivering there, ones that threatened to slide shyly from his eyes like modest girls in bathing suits removing their towels, making a slow, embarrassed move toward the pool.

He stood, put a hand on my shoulder and moved past me to the door.

“So be it, my Justice-seeker.”

I sat in front of the empty chair for another moment or two, surrounded by the books. They all had a silent, haughty perseverance about them. They weren’t going to be destroyed by any launch at a human, oh no. With the exception of The Heart of the Matter, which had belched up a clump of pages, the others were intact, gleefully open and showing off their pages. Their tiny black words of wisdom remained in perfect order, sitting in pristine rows, unmoving, attentive like schoolchildren impervious to the influence of a naughty child. Common Sense was open next to me, peacocking its pages.

“Stop moping and get in here,” called Dad from the kitchen. “You must eat something if you’re going to wage war on flabby-armed, potbellied radicals. I don’t think they age all that well, so you’ll probably be able to outrun them.”

Paradise Lost

For the first time since Hannah died, I slept through the night. Dad called such sleeps “The Sleep of Trees,” which was not to be confused with “The Sleep of Hibernation” or “The Sleep of Dead-Tired Dogs.” The Sleep of Trees was the most absolute and rejuvenating of sleeps. It was only darkness, no dreams, a leap forward in time.

I didn’t stir when the alarm went off, nor did I wake up to hear Dad shouting from downstairs the Van Meer Vocabulary Wake-up Call.

“Wake up, sweet! Your word of the day is pneumococcus!”

I opened my eyes. The phone was ringing. The clock by my bed read 10:36 A.M. The answering machine clicked on downstairs.

“Mr. Van Meer, I wanted to notify you that Blue is not in school today. Please call us and give a reason for her absence.” Eva Brewster curtly recited the number to the main office and hung up. I waited for Dad’s footsteps to come through the hall to find out who’d called, but I heard nothing but the clinking of silverware in the kitchen.

I climbed out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water on my face. In the mirror, my eyes looked unusually large, my face thin. I was cold, so I pulled the comforter off my bed, wrapped it around me and walked with it down the stairs.

“Dad! Did you call the school?”

I entered the kitchen. It was empty. The clinking I’d heard was the breeze through the open window hitting the silverware wind chime over the sink. I switched on the downstairs light and called into the stairwell.

“Dad!”

I used to dread a house without Dad in it. It could feel empty as a can, a shell, a blind desert skull of a Georgia O’Keefe painting. Growing up, I had a variety of techniques to avoid the truth of the house without Dad. There was the Watch General Hospital with Very Loud Volume (surprisingly comforting, more than one would imagine) and the Put On It Happened One Night (Clark Gable without an undershirt could distract anyone).

Late morning light poured through the windows, bright and vicious. I opened the refrigerator and saw with some surprise he’d made a fruit salad. I reached in, picked out a grape, ate it. Also in the refrigerator was lasagna, which he’d attempted to cover with too small a piece of tinfoil; it left two corners and a side exposed like a winter coat leaving entire shins bare, half the person’s arms and neck. (Dad was always unable to correctly eyeball the required length for tinfoil.) I ate another grape and called his office.

The Political Science Department assistant answered the phone.

“Hey, is my dad there? It’s Blue.”

“Hmm?”

I glanced at the clock. He didn’t have a class until 11:30 A.M. “My dad. Dr. Van Meer. Can I talk to him please? It’s an emergency.”

“He’s not coming in today,” she said. “There’s that conference in Atlanta, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought he went to Atlanta, replacing the man who was in the car accident—?”

“What?”

“He requested permission for a substitute this morning. He won’t be in for the—”

I hung up.

“Dad!”

I left the comforter in the kitchen, raced down the stairs to his study, switching on the overhead light. I stood in front of his desk, staring at it.

It was bare.

I yanked open a drawer. It was empty. I yanked open another. It was empty. There was no laptop, no legal pads, no desk calendar. The ceramic mug was empty too, where he usually kept his five blue ink pens and five black ink pens next to the green desk lamp from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville, which also was gone. The tiny bookshelf next to the desk was completely empty too, apart from five copies of Marx’s Das Kapital (1867).

I sprinted up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the hall, yanking open the front door. The blue Volvo station wagon was parked where it always was, in front of the garage door. I stared at it, at the egg-blue surface, the rust around the wheels.

I turned back inside and ran to his bedroom. The curtains were open. The bed was made. Yet his old sheepskin loafers purchased at Bet-R-Shoes in Enola, New Hampshire, were not capsized beneath the television, nor were they beneath the upholstered chair in the corner. I moved toward the closet and slid open the door.

There were no clothes.

There was nothing — nothing but hangers jittering along the pole like birds, frightened when people stepped too close to the bars to stare at them.

I ran into his bathroom, swung open the medicine cabinet. It was bare. So was the shower. I touched the side of the tub, feeling its stickiness, the few remaining drops of water. I looked at the sink, a trace of Colgate toothpaste, a tiny drop of shaving cream dried on the mirror.

He must have decided we’re moving again, I told myself. He went to fill out a Change-of-Address card at the Post Office. He went to the supermarket for moving boxes. But the station wagon wouldn’t start, so he called a taxi.

I went into the kitchen and played the answering machine, but there was only the message from Eva Brewster. I looked on the counter for a note, but there wasn’t one. Again, I called the Political Science Department assistant, Barbara, pretending I knew all about the conference in Atlanta; Dad said there was “a motor-mouth on Barbara, coupled with the foul stench of the ridiculous.” (He cheerfully referred to her as “the Haze woman.”) I called the conference by a specific name, quickly decided beforehand. I think I called it SPOUFAR, “Safe Political Organization for the Upholding of First Amendment Rights,” or something to that effect.

I asked her if Dad had left a number where she could contact him.

“No,” she said.

“When did he notify you?”

“Left a message at six this morning. But, wait, why don’t you—?”

I hung up.

I wrapped the comforter around me, turned on the television, watched Cherry Jeffries in a yellow suit the color of a road sign with shoulder pads so sharp they could cut down trees. I checked the clock in the kitchen, the clock in my bedroom. I walked outside and stared at the blue station wagon. I sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. It started. I ran my hands along the steering wheel, over the dashboard, stared at the backseat, as if there might be a clue somewhere, a revolver, candlestick, rope or wrench carelessly left behind by Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum after killing Dad in the library, conservatory or billiard room. I examined the Persian carpets in the hall, searching for singular imprints of shoes. I checked the sink, the dishwasher, but every spoon, fork and knife had been put away.

They’d come for him.

Members of Nächtlich had come for him in the night, placed a linen handkerchief (embroidered with a red N in the corner) dabbed with a bit of sleeping potion over his unsuspecting snoring mouth. He hadn’t been able to struggle because Dad, although tall and hardly skinny, wasn’t a fighter. Dad preferred intellectual debate to physical assault, eschewed contact sports, considered wrestling and boxing “faintly preposterous.” And although Dad respected the art of karate, judo, tae kwan do, he himself had never learned a single move.

They’d meant to take me, of course, but Dad had refused. “No! Take me instead! Take me!” And so the Nasty One — there was always a Nasty One, the one who had scant regard for human life and bullied the others — pressed a gun to his temple and ordered him to call the university. “And you’d better sound normal or I’ll blow your daughter’s brains out while you watch.”

And then they made Dad pack his own bags in the two large Louis Vuitton duffle bags June Bug Eleanor Miles, age 38, had given to Dad so he’d remember her (and her spiky teeth) every time he packed his bags. Because even though, sure, they were “revolutionaries” in the classical sense of the word, they were not barbarians, not South American guerrillas or Muslim extremists who relished the odd beheading every now and then. No, they held fast to the belief that all human beings, even those held against their will, waiting for certain political demands to be met, required his/her personal belongings, including corduroy pants, tweed jackets, wool sweaters, Oxford shirts, shaving kits, toothbrushes, razors, soaps, dental floss, peppermint exfoliating foot scrubs, Timex watches, GUM cufflinks, credit cards, lecture notes and old syllabi, notes for The Iron Grip.

“We want you to be comfortable,” said the Nasty One.

That night, he still hadn’t called.

No one had, with the exception of Arnold Lowe Schmidt of The New Seattle Journal of Foreign Policy, telling the machine how thawry he was that Dad had declined hith invitathon of writhing a cover pieth on Cuba, but to pleath keep the periodical in mind if he wanthed “a preeminent repothitory for the publicathon of hith ideath.”

Outside, I walked around the house some twenty times in the dark. I stared into the fishpond, devoid of fish. I returned inside, sat on the couch watching Cherry Jeffries, picking at the half-eaten bowl of fruit, which the radicals had allowed Dad to prepare before they carried him away.

“My daughter has to eat!” Dad commanded.

“Fine,” said the Nasty One. “But be quick about it.”

“Would you like some help cutting the cantaloupe?” asked another.

I couldn’t stop picking up the phone, staring at the receiver, asking, “Should I report him missing to the police?” I waited for it to tell me, “Yes, Definitely,” “My Reply Is No” or “Concentrate and Ask Again.” I could call the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department, tell A. Boone I had to speak to Detective Harper. “Remember me? The one who talked to you about Hannah Schneider? Well, now my father’s missing. Yes. I keep losing people.” Within an hour, she’d be at the door with her pumpkin hair and complexion of refined sugar, narrowing her eyes at Dad’s vacant reading chair. “Tell me the last thing he said. Does your family have a history of mental illness? Do you have anyone? An uncle? A grandmother?” Within four hours, I’d have my own green folder in the filing cabinet next to her desk, #5510-VANM. An article would appear in The Stockton Observer, “Local Student Angel of Death, Witness to Teacher’s Demise, Now Missing Father.” I hung up the phone.

I searched the house again, this time not allowing myself to whimper, not allowing myself to miss a thing, not the shower curtain, or the cabinet under the bathroom sink full of Q-tips and cotton balls, or even the roll of toilet paper inside of which he might have taken a moment to scrawl, They’ve taken me do not worry with a toothpick. I examined every book we’d returned to the shelves the night before in the library, for he might have swiftly slipped a page of legal paper into its pages on which he’d written, I’ll get out of this I swear. I turned over every one, shook them, but found nothing at all, apart from The Heart of the Matter losing another clump of pages. This searching continued until Dad’s bedside clock read that it was after 2:00 A.M.

Denial is like Versailles; it isn’t the easiest thing to maintain. To do so took an astounding amount of resolve, oomph, chutzpah, none of which I had, starfished as I was across the black-and-white tiles of Dad’s bathroom floor.

Clearly, I had to accept the notion of Dad’s kidnapping being up there with the Tooth Fairy, the Holy Grail or any other dream concocted by people bored to tears with reality, wanting to believe in something bigger than themselves. No matter how charitable these radicals were, they wouldn’t have permitted Dad to pack each and every one of his personal items, including checkbooks, credit cards and statements, even his favorite needlepoint by June Bug Dorthea Driser, the tiny, framed “To Thine Own Self Be True,” which had been hanging to the right of the kitchen telephone, now gone. They also would have put their foot down when Dad took a half hour to cherry-pick the selection of texts he wished to take with him, Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press 1955 two-volume edition of Lolita, Ada or Ardor, the Paradise Lost he hadn’t wanted me to throw, the hulking Delovian: A Retrospective (Finn, 1998), which featured Dad’s favorite work, the appropriately titled Secret (see p. 391, #61, 1992, Oil on linen). Also missing were La Grimace, Napoleon’s Progress, Beyond Good and Evil and a photocopy of “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka, 1919).

My head throbbed. My face felt tight and hot. I pulled myself out of the bathroom into the middle of Dad’s spongy bedroom carpet, the one thing he loathed about the house—“one feels as if one is walking on marshmallows”—and began to cry, but after a while, my tears, either bored or frustrated, sort of quit, threw in the towel, stormed off the set.

I didn’t do anything but stare at the bedroom ceiling, so pale and quiet, dutifully holding His tongue. Somehow, out of pure exhaustion, I fell asleep.

For the next three days — frittered away on the couch in front of Cherry Jeffries — I found myself imagining Dad’s final moments in our house, our beloved 24 Armor Street, setting of our last year, our last chapter, before I “conquered the world.”

He was all plan and calculation, all bird-quick glances to his wristwatch, five minutes fast, silent steps through our dim-drenched rooms. There was nervousness too, a nervousness only I’d be able to detect; I’d seen him before a new university, giving a new lecture (the barely discernible trembling of index fingers and thumbs).

The change in his pocket rattled like his withered soul as he moved through the kitchen, downstairs to his study. He turned on only a few lamps, his desk lamp and the red one on his bedroom nightstand that drowned the room in the jelly-red of stomachs and hearts. He spent a great deal of time organizing his things. The Oxford shirts on the bed, red on top, followed by blue, blue patterned, blue-and-white stripe, white, each folded like sleeping birds with wings tucked under them, and the six sets of cufflinks in silver and gold (including, of course, his favorite, those 24-karat ones engraved with GUM, given to Dad for his forty-seventh birthday by Bitsy Plaster, age 42, a misprint by the jeweler due to Bitsy’s bubbly handwriting) all tucked into the Tiffany felt pocket like a bag of prized seeds. And then there were his socks herded together, black, white, long, short, cotton, wool. He wore his brown loafers (he could walk fast in them), the gold and brown tweed (faithfully hanging around him like an old dog) and the old khaki slacks so comfortable he claimed “they made the most unbearable tasks bearable.” (He wore them trudging through the “squishy Thesis Statements, fetid quagmires of Supporting Evidence” inevitably found within student research papers. They even allowed him to feel no guilt as he wrote C-next to the kid’s name before continuing on, relentlessly.)

When he was ready to load the boxes and duffle bags into the car — I didn’t know what waited for him; I imagined a simple yellow cab driven by some sea urchin driver with goose-bumped hands, tapping the steering wheel to Public Radio’s Early Bluegrass Hour, waiting for John Ray Jr., Ph.D., to emerge from the house, thinking about the woman he left at home, Alva or Dottie, warm as a dinner roll.

When Dad knew he’d forgotten nothing, when it was all gone, he walked back inside and up to my room. He didn’t turn on a light, or even look at me as he unbuckled my backpack and perused the legal pad on which I’d scrawled my research and theory. After he reviewed what I’d written, he returned it to the bag and hung it on the back of my desk chair.

He was incorrect putting it there. That wasn’t where I’d put it; I’d placed it where I always did, at the end of my bed on the floor. Yet he was pressed for time and no longer needed to worry about such details. Such details mattered very little now. He probably laughed at the Irony. At the most unlikely of moments, Dad took time to laugh about the Irony; or, perhaps it was one instance he didn’t have time to, because if he moved toward Laughter, he might have to continue down that shoulderless, exitless road of Feeling, which could lead one, rather swiftly, into Whimpering, Full-on Howling and he didn’t have time for that kind of detour. He had to get out of the house.

He looked at me as I slept, memorizing my face as if it were a passage of an extraordinary book he’d come across, the crux of which he wished to commit to memory in the off chance he found use for it during an exchange with a Dean.

Or else, staring at me — and I like to think this was the case — Dad came undone. No book tells one how to look at one’s child one is leaving forever and will never see again (unless it’s clandestinely, after thirty-five, forty years, and only then from a great distance, through binoculars, a telephoto lens or an $89.99 satellite photo). One probably gets close and tries to determine the exact degree of the nose from the face. One counts freckles, the ones never noticed before. And one also counts the faint creases in the eyelids, in the forehead, too. One watches the breathing, the peaceful smile — or, in the absence of such a smile, one willfully ignores the gaping, wheezing mouth, in order to make the memory polite. One probably gets a little carried away, too, introducing a little moonlight to silver the face, covering up those dark circles under the eyes, sound-looping adorable insects — better still, a gorgeous night bird — to lessen the cold, cell silence of the room.

Dad closed his eyes to make sure he knew it by heart (forty-degrees, sixteen, three, one, a sea way of breathing, peaceful smile, silvery eyes, enthusiastic nightingale). He pushed the comforter close to my check, kissed me on the forehead.

“You’ll be fine, sweet. You really will.”

He slipped from my room, downstairs, and outside to the taxi.

“Mr. Ray?” asked the driver.

“Dr. Ray,” Dad said.

And just like that — he was gone.

The Secret Garden

The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn’t notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night.

I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors — childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernible joy of biting into a Whitman’s chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floated like noodles in soup.

I ditched school like a boy with rusty breath and glue-stick palms. Instead, I took up with Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605) — one would think I’d have driven to Videomecca and rented porn, at the very least Wild Orchid with Mickey Rourke, but alas, no — then some steamy paperback I’d kept hidden from Dad for years called Speak Not, My Love (Esther, 1992).

I thought about Death — not suicide, nothing that histrionic — more a begrudged acknowledgment, as if I’d snubbed Death for years, and now, having no one else, I had no choice but to exchange pleasantries with him. I thought about Evita, Havermeyer, Moats, Dee and Dum forming a nighttime Search Party, wielding torches, lanterns, pitchforks, clubs (as bigoted townspeople did when hunting a monster), discovering my wasted body slung over the kitchen table, arms limp at my sides, my head facedown in the crotch of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1903).

Even when I tried to collect myself, pull myself together as Molly Brown had done in that Titanic lifeboat, or even find a productive hobby like the Birdman of Alcatraz, I failed. I thought Future. I saw Black Hole. I was spaghettified. I didn’t have a friend, driver’s license or survival instinct to my name. I didn’t even have one of those Savings Accounts set up by a conscientious parent so their kid could learn Money. I was a minor, too, would remain so for another year. (My birthday was June 18.) I had no desire to end up in a Foster Home, the Castle in the Sky of which was to be supervised by a pair of retirees named Bill and Bertha, who wielded their Bibles like handguns, asked me to call them “Mamaw” and “Papaw,” and got tickled pink every time they stuffed me, their brand new turkey, with all the fixins (biscuits, poke salad and possum pie).

Seven days after Dad left, the phone began to ring.

I didn’t answer it, though I remained poised by the answering machine, my heart banging in my chest, in case it was he.

“Gareth, you’re causing quite a stir around here,” said Professor Mike Devlin. “I’m wondering where you are.”

“What on earth have you done with yourself? Now they say you’re not coming back,” said Dr. Elijah Masters, Chairman of the English Department and Harvard Alumni Interviewer. “I’ll be sorely disappointed if that is the case. As you know, we have an unfinished chess game and I’m beating you to a pulp. I’d hate to think you’ve disappeared simply so I have to forgo the pleasure of telling you, ‘Checkmate.’”

“Dr. Van Meer, you must call the office as soon as possible. Again, your daughter Blue has not appeared in class all week now. I hope you’re aware that if she does not begin to make up some of the work, the idea of her graduating on time will be more and more—”

“Dr. Van Meer, this is Jenny Murdoch who sits on the front row of your Patterns of Democracy and Social Structure seminar? I was wondering if Solomon is now going to be in charge of our research papers, because he’s like, totally giving us new parameters. He says it only has to be seven to ten pages. But you wrote on the syllabus twenty to twenty-five, so everyone’s totally baffled. Some clarification would be much appreciated. I also wrote you an e-mail.”

“Please call me as soon as possible at my home or office, Gareth,” said Dean Kushner.

I’d told Dad’s assistant, Barbara, that I’d written down the incorrect contact number for Dad at the conference and asked her to let me know as soon as she heard from him. She hadn’t called, however, so I called her.

“We still haven’t heard,” she said. “Dean Kushner’s having a heart attack. Solomon Freeman is going to have to take over his classes for finals. Where is he?”

“He had to go to Europe,” I said. “His mother had a heart attack.”

“Ohhh,” said Barbara. “I’m sorry. Is she going to be all right?”

“No.”

“Gosh. That’s so sad. But then why hasn’t he—?”

I hung up.

I wondered if my steady stupor, my inertia, marked the onset of madness. Only a week ago I’d believed madness to be a far-fetched idea, but now I recalled a handful of occasions when Dad and I had encountered a woman muttering expletives as if she were sneezing. I wondered how she’d become that way, if it was a debutante’s dreamy descent down a grand flight of stairs or else a sudden misfire in the brain, its effects immediate, like a snakebite. Her complexion was red like raw dishwasher hands and the soles of her feet were black, as if she’d meticulously dipped them in tar. As Dad and I passed her, I held my breath, squeezed his hand. He’d squeeze back — our tacit agreement he’d never allow me to wander the streets with my hair like a bird’s nest, my overalls marred with urine and dirt.

Now I could, with no trouble at all, wander the streets with hair like a bird’s nest in overalls of urine and dirt. The That’s-Ridiculous, the Don’t-Be-Absurd had happened. I’d be selling my body for a frozen Lender’s bagel. Obviously, I’d been wrong all along about madness. It could happen to anyone.

For those who are Marat/Sade aficionados, I must deliver bad news. The shelf life of a depressed torpor for any otherwise healthy individual is ten, eleven, at the most, twelve days. After that, the mind can’t help but notice such a disposition is as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest, and that, if one didn’t stop bouncing around like a big girl’s blouse, Pimms and strawberries, Bob’s your uncle and God save the bloody Queen, one just might not make it (see Go See a Man About a Dog: Beloved Englishisms, Lewis, 2001).

I didn’t go mad. I got mad (see “Peter Finch,” Network). Rage, not Abe Lincoln, is the Great Emancipator. It wasn’t long before I was tearing through 24 Armor Street, not limp and lost, but throwing shirts and June Bug needlepoints and library books and cardboard moving boxes marked THIS END UP like Jay Gatsby on a rampage, searching for something — even if it was something minor — to give me proof of where he’d gone and why. Not that I let myself hope I’d discover a Rosetta Stone, a twenty-page confession thoughtfully tucked into my pillowcase, between mattresses, in the icebox: “Sweet. So now you know. I am sorry, my little cloud. But allow me to explain. Why don’t we start with Mississippi…” It wasn’t likely. As Mrs. McGillicrest, that penguin-bodied shrew from Alexandria Day, had informed our class, so triumphantly: “A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.”

The shock of Dad gone (shock didn’t do it justice; it was astonishment, stunned, a bombshell — astunshelled), the fact he had blithely hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned (again, too tepid for my purposes — hoodzonked) me, me, me, his daughter, a person who, to quote Dr. Luke Ordinote, had “startling power and acumen,” an individual who, to quote Hannah Schneider, did not “miss a thing,” was so improbable, painful, impossible (impainible), I understood now Dad was nothing short of a madman, a genius and imposter, a cheat, a smoothie, the Most Sophisticated Sweet Talker Who Ever Lived.

Dad must be to secrets as Beethoven is to symphonies, I chanted to myself. (It was the first of a series of stark statements I’d concoct in the ensuing week. When one has been hoodzonked, one’s mind crashes, and when rebooted, reverts to unexpected, rudimentary formats, one of which was reminiscent of the mind-bending “Author Analogies” Dad devised as we toured the country.)

But Dad wasn’t Beethoven. He wasn’t even Brahms.

And Dad not being an unsurpassed maestro of mystery was regrettable, because infinitely more harrowing than being left with a series of obscure, incomprehensible Questions — which one can fill in at one’s whim without fear of being graded — was having a few disquieting Answers.

My rampage through the house uncovered no evidence of note, only articles about civil unrest in West Africa and Peter Cower’s Inside Angola (1980), which had fallen in the crevice between Dad’s bed and bedside table (as nutritionless pieces of evidence as they come) and $3,000 in cash, crisply rolled up inside June Bug Penelope Slate’s SPECIAL THOUGHTS ceramic mug kept on top of the refrigerator (Dad had purposefully left it for me, as the mug was usually reserved for loose change). Eleven days after he left, I wandered down to the road to collect the day’s mail: a book of coupons, two clothing catalogues, a credit card application for Mr. Meery von Gare with 0 % APR financing and a thick manila envelope addressed to Miss Blue van Meer, scrawled in majestic handwriting, the handwriting equivalent of trumpets and a stagecoach pulled by noble steeds.

Immediately, I ripped it open, pulling out the inch-thick stack of papers. Instead of a map of the South American White Slavery network with rescue instructions, or Dad’s unilateral Declaration of Independence (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a father to dissolve the paternal bands which have connected him to his daughter…”), I found a brief note on monogrammed stationery paper clipped to the front.

“You asked for these. I hope they help you,” Ada Harvey had written, then scrawled her loopy name beneath the knot of her initials.

Even though I’d hung up on her, hacked off her voice without a word of apology like a sushi chef chopping off eel heads, exactly as I’d asked, she’d sent me her father’s research. As I raced back up the driveway and into the house with the papers, I found myself crying, weird condensation tears that spontaneously appeared on my face. I sat down at the kitchen table and carefully began to page through the stack.

Smoke Harvey had handwriting that was a distant cousin of Dad’s, minuscule script blustered by a cruel northeasterly. THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, the man had written in caps in the top right corner of every page. The first few papers detailed the history of The Nightwatchmen, the many names and apparent methodology (I wondered where he’d gotten his information, because he referenced neither Dad’s article nor the Littleton book), followed by thirty pages or so on Gracey, most of it barely readable (Ada had used a photocopier that printed tire treads across the page): “Greek in origin, not Turkish,” “Born February 12, 1944, in Athens, mother Greek, father American,” “Reasons for radicalism unknown.” I continued on. There were photocopies of old West Virginia and Texas newspaper articles detailing the two known bombings, “Senator Killed, Peace Freaks Suspected,” “Oxico Bombing, 4 Killed, Nightwatchmen Sought,” an article from Life magazine dated December 1978, “The End of Activism,” about the dissolution of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society and other dissident political organizations, a few papers about COINTELPRO and other FBI maneuverings, a tiny California article, “Radical Sighted at Drugstore,” and then, a newsletter. It was dated November 15, 1987, Daily Bulletin, Houston Police Department, Confidential, For Police Use Only, WANTED BY LOCAL AND FEDERAL AUTHORITIES, Warrants on file at Harris County Sheriff Warrant Section, Bell 432-6329—

My heart stopped.

Staring back at me, above “Gracey, George. I.R. 329573. Male, White, 43, 220, Heavy build. Fed. Warrant #78-3298. Tattoos on right chest. Walks with limp. Subjects should be considered armed and dangerous”—was Baba au Rhum (Visual Aid 35.0).

VISUAL AID 35.0

Granted, in the police photo, Servo sported a dense steel-wool beard and mustache, both doing their best to scrub out his oval face, and the photograph (a still taken from a security camera) was in sloppy black and white. Yet Servo’s burning eyes, his lipless mouth reminiscent of the plastic gap in a Kleenex box with no Kleenex, the way his small head stood up against his bullying shoulders — it was unmistakable.

“He always hobbled,” Dad had said to me in Paris. “Even when we were at Harvard.”

I grabbed the paper, which also featured the sketch of Catherine Baker, the one I’d seen on the Internet. (“Federal Authorities and the Harris County Sheriff’s Department are asking for public assistance in obtaining information leading to the Grand Jury indictment of these persons…” it read on the second page.) I ran upstairs to my room, yanked open my desk drawers, and dug through my old homework papers and notebooks and Unit Tests, until I found the Air France boarding passes, some Ritz stationery, and then, the small piece of graph paper on which Dad had scribbled Servo’s home and mobile telephone numbers the day they’d left me and gone to La Sorbonne.

After some confusion — country codes, reversing ones and zeros — I managed to correctly dial the mobile number. Instantly, I was met with the hisses and heckling of a number no longer in service. When I called the home number, after a great deal of “Como?” and “Qué?” a patient Spanish woman informed me that the apartment wasn’t a private residence, no, it was available for weeklong lettings via Go Chateaux, Inc. She pointed me toward the vacation Web site and an 800-number (see “ILE-297,” www.gochateaux.com). I called the Reservations line and was curtly told by a man that the apartment hadn’t been a private residence since the company’s inception in 1981. I then tried to wrench free whatever info he had on the individual who’d leased the unit the week of December 26, but was informed Go Chateaux wasn’t authorized to disclose their client’s personal records.

“Have I done what I could to assist you on this call?”

“This is a matter of life and death. People are being killed.”

“Have I satisfied all of your questions?”

“No.”

“Thank you for calling Go Chateaux.”

I hung up and did nothing but sit on the edge of my bed, stunned by the blasé response of the afternoon. Surely, the sky should have split open like plumber’s pants; at the very least, smoke should be unraveling from the trees, their topmost branches singed — but no, the afternoon was a dead-eyed teenager, a weathered broad hanging around a dive bar, old tinsel. My revelation was my problem; it had nothing whatsoever to do with the bedroom, with the light like drunk wallflowers in shapeless gold dresses slouching along the radiator and bookshelf, the windowpane shadows like idiot sunbathers sprawled all over the floor. I remembered picking up Servo’s cane after it had toppled off the edge of a boulangerie counter, rapping a woman standing behind him directly on her black shoe making her gasp and light up red like she was a twenty-five-cent theme park game of sledgehammer and bell, and the top of the walking stick, a bald eagle head, had been hot and sticky from Servo’s steak-fat palm. As I returned the cane to the spot by his elbow, he’d tossed words over his left shoulder, hastily, like he’d spilled salt: “Mmmm, merci beaucoup. Need a leash for that thing, don’t I?” I supposed it was no use berating myself for not quilting together, in a more timely fashion, these obviously well-matched scraps of life (How many men had I ever known with hip trouble? None but Servo was the pitiful answer) and naturally (though I resisted) I thought of something Dad had said: “A surprise is rarely a stranger, but a faceless patient who’s been reading across from you in the waiting room the entire time, his head hidden by a magazine but his orange socks in plain view, as well as his gold pocket watch and frayed trousers.”

But if Servo was George Gracey, what did that make Dad?

Servo is to Gracey as Dad is to—suddenly, the answer came lurching out of hiding, hands up, throwing itself to the ground, begging for forgiveness, praying I wouldn’t flay it alive.

I raced to my desk, seized my CASE NOTES, scoured the pages for those odd little nicknames I’d taken such haphazard note of, eventually finding them cowering at the bottom of Page 4: Nero, Bull’s-Eye, Mohave, Socrates and Franklin. It was farcically obvious now. Dad was Socrates, otherwise known as The Thinker according to www.looseyourrevolutioncherry.net — of course, he’d be Socrates — who else would Dad be? Marx, Hume, Descartes, Sartre, none of those nicknames were good enough for Dad (“out-of-date, blubbering scribblers”), and he wouldn’t be caught dead going by Plato (“hugely overhyped as a logician”). I wondered if one of The Nightwatchmen had dreamt up the nickname; no, it was more likely Dad himself had casually suggested it in private to Servo before a meeting. Dad didn’t do well with subtlety, with off the cuff; when it came to All Things Gareth, Dad wore indifference like a socialite thin as a cheese cracker forced to lunch in a football jersey. My eyes were staggering down the page now, through my own neatly written words: “January 1974 marked a change in tactics for the group from evident to invisible.” In January 1974, Dad had been enrolled in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; in March 1974, “police had come close to raiding one of The Nightwatchmen’s gatherings in an abandoned Braintree, Massachusetts, warehouse” Braintree was less than thirty minutes from Cambridge, and thus The Nightwatchmen had been less than thirty minutes from Dad — a highly likely intersection of two moving bodies across Space and Time.

It must have been Dad’s admittance into The Nightwatchmen that led to their shift in strategy. “Blind Dates: Advantages of a Silent Civil War” and “Rebellion in the Information Age” were two of Dad’s most popular Federal Forum essays (every now and then he still received fan mail), and it was a Primary Theme that had served as the basis for his highly regarded Harvard dissertation of 1978, “The Curse of the Freedom Fighter: The Fallacies of Guerrilla Warfare and Third-World Revolution.” (It was also the reason he called Lou Swann a “hack.”) And then there was Dad’s palpable Moment of Turning, a moment he spoke lovingly about in a Bourbon Mood (as if it were a woman he’d seen in a train station, a woman with silky hair who had tilted her head close to the glass so Dad saw a cloud where her mouth should have been), when he stood on Benno Ohnesorg’s stiff shoelace at a Berlin protest rally and the innocent student was shot dead by police. This was when he realized that “the man who stands up and protests, the lone man who says no—he will be crucified.”

“And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak,” Dad said. “When I decided to storm the Winter Palace.”

When charting what I knew to be my life, somehow I’d managed to omit an entire continent (see Antarctica: The Coldest Place on Earth, Turg, 1987). “Always content, aren’t you, to hide behind the lecture lectern?” I’d overheard Servo shouting at Dad. Servo was the “hormonal teenager,” Dad, the theorist. (Frankly, Servo had hit the nail on the head; Dad didn’t like dishwasher soap on his hands, much less the blood of men.) And Servo doubtlessly paid Dad well for his theorizing. Though Dad, over the years, had always pleaded poverty, when it came down to it, he could still live it up like Kubla Kahn, renting an ornate house like 24 Armor Street, staying at the Ritz, shipping a 200-pound, $17,000 antique desk across the country and lying about it. Even Dad’s choice of bourbon, George T. Stagg, was considered by Stuart Mill’s Booze Bible (2003 ed.) “the Bentley of all bourbons.”

In Paris, had I come upon them arguing about Hannah Schneider, or the encroaching problem of Ada Harvey? Highly hysterical, problem, Simone de Beauvoir—the overheard conversation was a mule; it wouldn’t come back willingly. I had to coax and cajole it, tug it back into my head, so by the time I lined up the shards of conversation for inspection, I was just as confused as when I began. My head felt hollowed out with a spoon.

After the initial sting, my life — jam packed with highways, Sonnet-a-thons, Bourbon Moods, notable quotations by people who were dead — it peeled away with remarkable ease.

Frankly, I was astonished how unfazed I felt, how unflappable. After all, if Vivien Leigh suffered from hallucinations and hysteria, requiring shock treatment, ice packing and a diet of raw eggs simply by working on the set of Elephant Walk (a film no one had ever heard of except descendants of Peter Finch), surely it’d be conceivable, maybe even mandatory, for me to develop some form of dementia over the fact my life had been a Trompe l’Oeil, Gonzo Journalism, The $64,000Question, the Feejee Mermaid, a Hitler Diary, Milli Vanilli (see Chapter 3, “Miss O’Hara,” Birds of Torment: Luscious Ladies of the Screen and Their Living Demons, Lee, 1973).

After my Socratic revelation, however, the subsequent truths I unearthed weren’t nearly so jaw dropping. (One can be only so hoodzonked before one’s hoodzonk maxes out like a credit card.)

In the ten years we’d traveled the country, Dad appeared to have been concerned, not so much with my education, but with a rigorous Nightwatchmen staffing exercise. Dad had been their powerful Head of HR, his voice intoxicating as the Sirens, most likely directly responsible for that “inspirational recruitment,” detailed by Guillaume on www.hautain.fr. It was the only logical explanation: every professor who’d come to dinner over the years, the quiet young men who listened with such intensity while Dad delivered his Sermon on the Mount, his story of Tobias Jones the Damned, his Determination Theory—“There are wolves and there are brine shrimp,” he’d said, going for the Hard Sell — not only were they not professors, they didn’t exist.

There was no hearing-impaired Dr. Luke Ordinote spearheading the History Department at the University of Missouri at Archer. There was no fig-eyed Professor of Linguistics Mark Hill. There was a Professor of Zoology Mark Hubbard but I couldn’t speak to him because he’d been on sabbatical in Israel for the last twelve years studying the endangered Little Bustard, Tetrax tetrax. Most chillingly, there was no Professor Arnie Sanderson who taught Intro to Drama and History of the World Theater, with whom Dad had had a riotous dinner the night Eva Brewster destroyed my mother’s butterflies, also at Piazza Pitti the night he’d disappeared.

“Hello?”

“Hello. I was trying to get in touch with an Associate Professor who taught in your English Department in the fall of 2001. His name is Lee Sanjay Song.”

“What’s the name?”

“Song.”

There was a brief pause.

“No one by that name here.”

“I’m not sure if he was full-or part-time.”

“I understand, but no one by that—”

“Perhaps he’s left? Moved to Calcutta? Timbuktu? Maybe he was flattened by a bus.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just — if anyone knows anything, if there’s someone else I could talk to I’d be grateful—”

“I have supervised this English Department for twenty-nine years and I assure you, no one with the last name of Song has ever taught here. I’m sorry I can’t be of better assistance, miss—”

Naturally, I wondered if Dad too had been an imposter professor. I’d witnessed him speaking in lecture halls on a handful of occasions, but there were more than a few colleges I hadn’t visited. And if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes the closet-office Dad referred to as his “cage,” his “crypt,” his “and they think I can sit in this catacomb and come up with novel ideas to inspire the featureless youths of this country”—perhaps it was similar to that tree falling in a forest. It never happened.

I was entirely off the mark on this front. Everyone and their grandmother had heard of Dad, including a few departmental secretaries who’d just been hired. It seemed, wherever Dad went, he’d left a blinding Yellow Brick Road of adulation in his wake.

“How is the old boy?” inquired Dean Richardson of University of Arkansas at Wilsonville.

“He’s fantastic.”

“I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Thought of him the other day when I came across a Virginia Summa article saluting Mideast policies in Proposals. I could just hear Garry howling with laughter. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen an essay of his in a while. Well, I suppose it’s tight these days. Mavericks, nonconformists, those who march to the beat of their own drum, speak up, they’re not finding the same forums they used to.”

“He’s managing.”

Obviously, if a corner of one’s life ended up covertly cultivating a shocking amount of slime mold, one must switch on unflattering fluorescent lights (the cruel kind of chicken coops), get down on one’s hands and knees and scrub every corner. I thus found it necessary to investigate another thrilling possibility: What If June Bugs were not June Bugs, but Spanish Moon Moths (Graellsia isabellae), the most captivating and well bred of all the European moths? What If they, too, like the bogus professors, were gifted individuals Dad had meticulously handpicked for The Nightwatchmen? What If they only pretended to bond vigorously to Dad as lithium does to fluorine (see The Strange Attractions of Opposite Ions, Booley, 1975)? I wanted it to be true; I wanted to pull my boat up next to theirs, rescue them from their wasted African violets and quivery-voiced phone calls, from their tepid waters with nothing flourishing in them, no reefs, parrot or angelfish (and certainly no sea turtles). Dad had left them stranded on that boat, but I’d set them free, send them away on a powerful Trade Wind. They’d disappear to Casablanca, to Bombay, to Rio (everyone wanted to disappear to Rio) — never heard of, never seen again, as poetic a fate as any they could hope for.

I began my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Jessie Rose Rubiman, still living in Newton, Texas, and still heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise: “Mention his name one more time — know what? I’m still considering finding out where he lives, coming into his bedroom while he sleeps and chopping off his doohickey. That’s what that son-of-a-bitch’s got coming to him.”

I ended my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Shelby Hollow: “Night watch? Wait — I won a free Indiglo Timex?”

Unless June Bugs were skilled actresses in the tradition of Davis and Dietrich (suitable for the A movies, not the B or C movies), it seemed evident that the only moth flying through this sticky night, doggedly figure-eighting (like a confused kamikaze pilot) around every porch light and lamppost, refusing to be deterred even if I switched out the lights and ignored her, was Hannah Schneider.

That was the startling thing about this business of abandonment, of finding oneself so without conversation, one’s thoughts had the entire world to themselves; they could drift for days without bumping into anyone. I could swallow Dad calling himself Socrates. I could swallow The Nightwatchmen too, hunt down every whisper of their workings like a private detective desperate to find The Missing Dame. I could even swallow Servo and Hannah as lovers (see “African Egg-Eating Snake,” Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.). I could assume Baba au Rhum hadn’t always rattled and Mmmmed; back in the stringy-haired summer of 1973, no doubt he’d cut an arresting rebel figure (or resembled Poe just enough that thirteen-year-old Catherine decided to be his Virginia forevermore).

What I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t stare at with the naked eye, was Dad and Hannah. I noticed, as the days drifted past, I kept tucking that thought away, saving it like a grandmother for a Special Occasion that would never come. I attempted and sometimes succeeded diverting my mind (not with a book or play and, yes, reciting Keats was an idiotic idea, boarding a rowboat for refuge in an earthquake) but with TV, shaving and Gap commercials, prime-time melodramas with tan people named Brett declaring, “It’s payback time.”

They were gone. They were giant specimens splayed in glass cases in dim, deserted rooms. I could stare down at them, ridicule my stupidity for never noticing their blatant similarities: their awe-inspiring size (personas larger than life), brightly-colored hind wings (conspicuous in any room), their spined caterpillar beginnings (orphan, poor little rich girl, respectively), taking flight solely at night (their endings swathed in mystery), boundaries of their distribution unknown.

If a man bemoaned a woman as noisily as Dad (“commonplace,” “strange and wayward,” a “sob story,” he’d called her), behind Curtain #1 of such severe dislike there was almost always a brand new Sedona Beige Love parked there, big, bright and impractical (destined to break down within the year). It was the oldest trick in the book, one I never should have fallen for, having read all of Shakespeare, including the late romances, and the definitive biography of Cary Grant, The Reluctant Lover (Murdy, 1999).

BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE. Why, when I forced myself to consider Dad and Hannah, did that old moving box crash into my head? They were the words Dad almost always used to describe my mother. After the fuss of battement frappés and demi-pliés, the Technicolor Dream dress, those words often showed up like unwanted, impoverished guests at a splendid party, embarrassing and sad, as if Dad were talking about her glass eye or absence of an arm. At Hyacinth Terrace, her black eyes like clogged drains, her mouth stained plum, Hannah Schneider had said the same frilly words, spoken not to the others but to me. With a stare pressing down on me, she’d said: “Some people are fragile, as — as butterflies.”

They’d used the same delicate words to describe the same delicate person.

Time and again, Dad handpicked a cute slogan for a person and rudely bumper-stuck it to them for all ensuing conversations (Dean Roy at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville had been the uninspired “sweet as candy”). Hannah must have heard him say it once when describing my mother. And just as she’d blatantly recited Dad’s favorite quotation to me at the dinner table (happiness, dog, sun) and planted Dad’s favorite foreign film in her VCR (L’Avventura) (Hannah was now dusted, cast in ultraviolet light; I could see Dad’s fingerprints all over her), she had tantalizingly tossed me that phrase, thereby letting bits of her dark secret, the hot one she’d clutched tightly in her hands, fall through her fingers, so that I might see it, follow it like the barest trail of sand. Not even when I was alone with her in the woods did she have the guts (Mut, in German) to let go of it, throw it all into the air so it showered over our heads, got caught in our hair and mouths.

The truth they’d hidden (Dad with Fifth Symphony ferocity, Hannah messily) that they’d known each other (since 1992, I calculated) in the movie-poster sense of the word (and I’d never know if they were Il Caso Thomas Crown or Colazione da Tiffany or if they’d flossed their teeth next to each other three hundred times), it didn’t garner a gasp from me — not a whimper or wheeze.

I only went back to the moving box and sat on my knees, running my fingers through the velvet splinters, the antennae and forewings and the thoraxes and torn mounting papers and pins, hoping Natasha had left me a code, a suicide letter identifying her traitorous husband just as she’d identified the part of the Red-based Jezebel that indicated it was repugnant to birds — an explanation, a puzzle to pore over, a whisper from the dead, a Visual Aid. (There was nothing.)

By then, my CASE NOTES filled an entire legal pad, some fifty pages, and I’d remembered the photograph Nigel had shown me in Hannah’s bedroom (which she must have destroyed before the camping trip since I’d been unable to find it in the Evan Picone shoe box), the one of Hannah as a girl with the blonde floating away from the camera lens and on the back, written in blue pen, 1973. And I’d driven the Volvo to the Internet café on Orlando, Cyberroast, and matched the gold-lion insignia, which I recalled from the pocket of Hannah’s school uniform blazer, to the crest of a private school on East 81st Street, the one Natasha had attended in 1973 after her parents made her quit the Larson Ballet Conservatory (see www.theivyschool.edu). (Salvaveritate was their irksome motto.) And after staring for hours at that other photo of Hannah, the one I’d stolen from her garage, Rockstar Hannah of the Rooster-Red Hair, I’d realized why, back in January, when I’d seen her with the madwoman haircut, I’d felt that persistent itch of déjà vu.

The woman who’d driven me home from kindergarten after my mother died, the pretty one in jeans with short red porcupine hair, the one Dad had told me was our next-door neighbor — it had been Hannah.

I cut out pieces of evidence from every other conversation I could remember, gluing them together, awed, but also sickened by the resulting graphic collage (see “Splayed Nude Patchwork XI,” The Unauthorized Biography of Indonesia Sotto, Greyden, 1989, p. 211). “She had a best friend growing up,” Hannah had said to me, cigarette smoke pirouetteing off her fingers, “a beautiful girl, fragile; they were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun — for the life of me, I can’t remember her name.” “There are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I–I’m pathetic, aren’t I?” she’d said to me in the woods. “Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved,” Eva Brewster had said, “her friend — she didn’t go into details, but not a day went by when she didn’t feel guilt over what she’d done — whatever it was.”

Was Hannah the reason Servo and Dad (in spite of their dynamic working relationship) warred with each other — they’d loved (or perhaps it was never anything so grand, simply a case of poorly wired electricity) the same woman? Was Hannah why we moved to Stockton, remorse over her dead best friend who committed suicide from a broken heart, the reason she’d showered me with breathy compliments and squeezed me against her bony shoulder? How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon (“Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long,” wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]), and yet mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?

Yes, Not Sure, Probably, and Who the Hell Knew were my answers.

Fourteen days after Dad was gone (two days after I received the cordial greeting from Mr. William Baumgartner of the Bank of New York notifying me of my account numbers; in 1993, the year we left Mississippi, it seemed Dad had set up a trust fund in my name) I was downstairs in the storage room off of Dad’s former study, weeding through the shelves piled with damaged stuff, most of it belonging to the owner of 24 Armor Street, though some of it was junk Dad and I had accumulated over the years: matching lamps in mint green, a marble obelisk paperweight (a gift from one of Dad’s worshipful students), a few faded picture books of little consequence (A Travel Guide to South Africa [1968] by J. C. Bulrich). I happened to push aside a small flat cardboard box Dad had marked SILVERWARE and saw, next to it, wedged in the corner behind a crinkled, jaundiced newspaper (the grimly titled, Rwandan Standard-Times), Dad’s Brighella costume, the black cloak in a ball, the bronze mask with its peeling paint and fishhook nose sneering at the shelves.

Without thinking, I picked up the cloak, shook it loose and pressed my face into it, a sort of embarrassing, lost thing to do, and immediately, I noticed a distantly familiar smell, a smell of Howard and Wal-Mart, Hannah’s bedroom — that old Tahitian acidic sap, the kind of cologne that barged into a room and held it up for hours.

But then — it was a face in a crowd. You noticed a jaw, eyes or one of those fascinating chins that looked like a needle and knotted thread had been stuck and pulled tightly through the center and you wanted, sometimes were desperate, to glimpse it one last time, but you couldn’t, no matter how hard you fought through the elbows, the handbags, the high-heeled shoes. As soon as I recognized the cologne and the name panthered through my head, it slipped out of sight, drowned somewhere, was gone.

Metamorphoses

I knew something screwballed and romantic would happen on Graduation Day, because the morning sky wouldn’t stop blushing over the house and when I opened my bedroom window, the air felt faint. Even the girlish pines, crowded in their tight cliques around the yard, shivered in anticipation; and then I sat down at the kitchen table with Dad’s Wall Street Journal (it still turned up for him in the wee hours of the morning like a john returning to a street corner where his favorite hooker had once strutted her stuff), switched on WQOX News 13 at 6:30 A.M., The Good Morning Show with Cherry, and Cherry Jeffries was missing.

In her place sat Norvel Owen wearing a tight sports jacket the blue of Neptune. He wove his chubby fingers together, and with his face glowing, blinking as if someone were shining a flashlight in his eyes, he began to read the news without a single comment, plea, passing remark, or personal aside about the reason for Cherry Jeffries’ absence. He didn’t even throw out a bland and unconvincing “Wishing Cherry the best of luck,” or “Wishing Cherry a speedy recovery.” Even more astonishing was the show’s new title, which I noticed when the program cut to commercial: The Good Morning Show with Norvel. The Executive Producers at WQOX News 13 had erased the very being of Cherry with the same ease of deleting an eyewitness’ “uhs,” “ers,” and “see heres” out of a top news story in the Editing Room.

With his half-a-slice-of-pineapple grin, Norvel turned the floor over to Ashleigh Goldwell, who did Weather. She announced Stockton could expect “high humidity with an eighty percent chance of rain.”

Despite this dismal forecast, as soon as I arrived at St. Gallway (after running my last few errands, Sherwig Realty, the Salvation Army), Eva Brewster made the announcement over the intercom that proud parents would still be ushered to their designated metal folding chairs on the field in front of the Bartleby Sports Center precisely at the stroke of 11:00 A.M. (Five chairs maximum were allotted per student. Any relative spillover would be relegated to the bleachers.) The ceremony would still begin at 11:30. Contrary to the circulating rumors, all events and speakers would proceed as scheduled, including the post-ceremony Garden Hour of Hors d’oeuvres (music and entertainment provided by the Jelly Roll Jazz Band and those St. Gallway Fosse Dancers who were not graduating), where parents, faculty and students alike could circle like Pallid Monkey Moths among the whisperings of Who Got In Where and the sparkling cider and the calla lilies.

“I’ve telephoned a few radio stations and the rain isn’t forecast until later this afternoon,” Eva Brewster said. “As long as all seniors line up on time we should be fine. Good luck and congratulations.”

I was late leaving Ms. Simpson’s classroom in Hanover (Soggy Ms. Simpson: “Can I just say, your presence in this classroom has been an honor. When I find a student who demonstrates such a deep understanding of the material…”) and Mr. Moats also wished to detain me when I turned in my Final Drawing Portfolio. Even though I’d been meticulous in making sure I looked and behaved exactly as I had before my abrupt hiatus from school, a total of sixteen days — dressing the same, walking the same, having the same hair (these were the clues people bloodhounded when trying to chase down Domestic Apocalypse or a Deteriorating Psyche), it still seemed Dad’s desertion had altered me in some way. It had revised me, but only very slightly — a word here, a bit of clarification there. I also felt people’s eyes on me all the time, though not in the same envious way as in my Blueblood Heyday. No, it was the adults who noticed me now, always with a brief yet baffled stare, as if they now noticed something old within me, as if they recognized themselves.

“Glad to know things are back on track,” Mr. Moats said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“We were worried. We didn’t know what had happened to you.”

“I know. Things became hectic.“

“When you finally let Eva know what’d happened, we were relieved. You must be going through a lot. How’s your father doing by the way?”

“The prognosis isn’t good,” I said. It was the scripted sentence I’d sort of relished saying to Ms. Thermopolis (who responded by reminding me they can do wonders “fixing” cancer as if it was just a bad haircut) and Ms. Gershon (who speedily changed the subject back to my Final Essay on String Theory), even Mr. Archer (who stared at the Titian poster on the wall, rendered speechless by the ruffles in the girl’s dress), but now I felt bad when it rendered Moats visibly sad and mute. He nodded at the floor. “My father died of throat cancer too,” he said softly. “It can be grueling. The loss of the voice, a failure to communicate — not easy for any man. I can’t imagine how tough it’d be for a professor. Modigliani was plagued with illness, you know. Degas. Toulouse too. Many of the greatest men and women in history.” Moats sighed. “And next year you’re at Harvard?”

I nodded.

“It’ll be hard, but you must concentrate on your studies. Your father will want it that way. And keep drawing, Blue,” he added, a statement that seemed to comfort him more than me. He sighed and touched the collar of his textured magenta shirt. “And I don’t say that to just anyone, you know. Many people should stay far, far away from the blank page. But you—you see, the drawing, the carefully considered sketch of a human being, animal, an inanimate object, is not simply a picture but a blueprint of a soul. Photography? A lazy man’s art. Drawing? The thinker, the dreamer’s medium.”

“Thank you,” I said.

A few minutes later, I was hurrying across the Commons in my long white dress and flat white shoes. The sky had darkened to the color of bullets and parents in pastels drifted toward Bartleby field, some of them laughing, clutching their handbags or the hand of a small child, some of them fluffing their hair as if it were goose-feather pillows.

Ms. Eugenia Sturds had mandated that we “load” (we were bulls to be unleashed in a ring) in the Nathan Bly ’68 Trophy Room no later than 10:45 A.M., and when I pushed open the door and made my way into the crowded room, it seemed I was the last senior to arrive.

“No disturbances during the ceremony,” Mr. Butters was saying. “No laughter. No fidgeting—”

“No clapping until all names are called—” chimed Ms. Sturds.

“No getting up and going to the bathroom—”

“Girls, if you have to pee, go now.”

Immediately, I spotted Jade and the others in the corner. Jade, wearing a suit in marshmallow white, hair slicked into a mais oui twist, reviewed her reflection in a pocket mirror, rubbing lipstick off her teeth and smacking her lips together. Lu was standing quietly with her hands together, looking down, pitching forward and backward on her heels. Charles, Milton and Nigel were discussing beer. “Budweiser tastes like fuckin’ rabbit piss,” I heard Milton remark loudly, as I skirted to the other side of the room. (I’d often wondered what they talked about now that Hannah was gone and I was sort of relieved to know it was hackneyed and had nothing to do with The Eternal Why; I wasn’t missing much.) I pushed past Point Richardson, Donnamara Chase sniffing in distress as she dabbed a wet napkin along a blue pen streak across the front of her blouse, Trucker wearing a green tie with tiny horse heads floating in it and Dee safety-pinning Dum’s crimson bra straps to her dress straps so they didn’t show.

“I all can’t fathom why you told mom eleven forty-five,” Dee said heatedly.

“What’s the big deal?”

“The procession’s the big deal.”

“Why?”

“Mom’s all not going to be able to take pictures. Because of your mal á la tête mom’s all missing our last day of childhood like a crosstown bus.”

“She said she was going to be early—”

“Well, I didn’t see her and she’s wearing that highly visible purple outfit she wears to everything—”

“I thought you forbade her to wear the highly visible—”

“It’s starting!” squawked Little Nose, perched on the radiator at the window. “We have to go! Now!”

“Grab the diploma with the right, shake with the left, or shake with the left, grab with the right?” asked Raging Waters.

“Zach, did you see our parents?” asked Lonny Felix.

“I gotta pee,” said Krista Jibsen.

“So this is it,” Sal Mineo said solemnly behind me. “This is the end.”

Even though the Jelly Roll Jazz Band had broken into “Pomp and Circumstance,” Ms. Sturds callously informed us No One Was Graduating Anywhere until everyone calmed down and formed the alphabetized line. We tapewormed, exactly as we’d practiced all week. Mr. Butters gave the signal and opened the door with American Bandstand flourish and Ms. Sturds, as if unveiling a solid new line of mules, arms raised, her floral skirt jitterbugging around her ankles, stepped out onto the lawn in front of us.

The sky was a massive bruise; someone had punched it in the kisser. There was an uncouth wind, too. It wouldn’t stop teasing the long blue St. Gallway banners hanging on either side of the Commencement Stage, and then, growing bored, turned its attention to the music. In spite of Mr. Johnson’s cries for the Jelly Roll Jazz Band to play louder (for a second I thought he was shouting “Sing out, Louise!” but I was wrong), the wind intercepted the notes, sprinting away with them across the field, and punted them through the goal posts, so all that was audible were a few shabby clangs and honks.

We filed down the aisle. Parents frothed excitedly around us, clapping and grinning, and slow-motion grandmothers tried to take foe-toes with cameras they handled like jewelry. A wiry lizard-photographer from Ellis Hills, trying to blend in, scurried ahead of our line, crouching, squinting as he peered through his camera. He stuck out his tongue before snapping a few quick pictures and scuttling away.

The rest of the class made their way into the metal folding chairs in the front and Radley Clifton and I continued up the five steps to the commencement stage. We sat down in the chairs to the right of Havermeyer and Havermeyer’s wife, Gloria (finally relieved of the boulder she’d been carrying, though now she had an equally disturbing pale, rigid, Plexiglas appearance). Eva Brewster was next to her and she tossed me a comforting smile but then almost immediately took it away, like lending me her handkerchief but not wanting it to get dirty.

Havermeyer sauntered toward the microphone and talked at length about our unparalleled achievements, our great gifts and glowing futures, and then Radley Clifton gave his Salutatorian Speech. He’d just begun to philosophize—“An army marches on its stomach,” he said — when the wind, obviously contemptuous of all scholars, truth seekers, logicians (anyone who tried to address The Eternal Why), I-Spied-With-My-Little-Eye Radley, joking with his red tie, mocking his hair (neatly combed, the color of cardboard), and just when one thought the mischief would subside, it started to rag on the neat white pages of his speech, forcing him to lose his place, repeat himself, stutter and pause so Radley Clifton’s Graduation Credo came out jarring, conflicted, confused — a surprisingly resonant life philosophy.

Havermeyer returned to the podium. Strands of sandy hair daddylong-legged across his forehead. “I now introduce to you our class Valedictorian, a highly gifted young woman, originally from Ohio, who we were honored to have at St. Gallway this year. Miss Blue van Meer.”

He pronounced Meer mare, but I tried not to think about it as I stood up, smoothed down the front of my dress and, in the moderate but perfectly respectable burst of applause, made my way across the rubberized stage (supposedly there’d been a bad wipeout a few years prior: Martine Filobeque, cunning pinecone, girdle). I was grateful for the applause, grateful people were generous enough to clap for a kid who wasn’t theirs, a kid who, at least academically, had outtangoed their own kid (as decent a reason as any Dad would find to crack “so this is what they call ‘outstanding.’”). I set the papers on the lectern, pulled down the microphone and made the mistake of glancing up at the two hundred heads facing me blankly like an expansive field of mature white cabbage. My heart was trying out new moves (The Robot, something called The Lightning Bolt) and for a harrowing second I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to speak. Somewhere in the crowd Jade was smoothing her gold hair back, sighing, “Oh, God, not the pigeon again,” and Milton was thinking, tuna tataki, salade niçoise — but I quarantined these thoughts as best I could. The edges of the pages seemed to panic too, trembling in the wind.

“In one of the first well-known Valedictorian Speeches,” I began; somewhat disconcertingly my voice boomeranged over everyone’s coiffed head, presumably reaching the tall man in the blue suit in the very back, a man I’d thought, for a split second, was Dad (it wasn’t, unless like a plant without light, Dad without me had withered, lost serious amounts of hair), “transcribed in 1801 at Doverfield Academy in Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Michael Finpost announced to his peers, ‘We will look back on these golden days and remember them as the best years of our lives.’ Well, for each of you sitting before me, I really hope that’s not the case.”

A blonde in the front row of the Parents Section wearing a short skirt crossed, uncrossed her legs and did a restless swinging gesture with them, a stretch of some kind, also a movement used at airports to direct planes.

“And I–I’m not going to stand here and tell you, ‘To Thine Own Self Be True.’ Because the majority of you won’t. According to the Crime Census Bureau America is experiencing a marked increase in grand larceny and fraud, not only in cities but rural vicinities as well. For that matter, too, I doubt any of us in four years of high school have managed to locate our self in order to be true to it. Maybe we’ve found what hemisphere it’s in, maybe the ocean — but not the exact coordinates. I’m also”—for a terrifying second my hobo concentration fell off the train, the moment started to speed by, but then to my relief it managed to shake itself off, sprint, hurtle on board again—“I’m also not going to tell you to wear sunscreen. Most of you won’t. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in June 2002 skin cancer in the under-thirty demographic is on the rise and in the Western World, forty-three out of every fifty people consider even plain-looking people twenty times more attractive when they’re tan.” I paused. I couldn’t believe it; I said tan and a little seismic laughter quaked through the crowd. “No. I’m going to try to assist you with something else. Something practical. Something that might help you when something happens in your life and you’re worried you might never recover. When you’ve been knocked down.”

I noticed Dee and Dum, front row, fourth from the left. They stared up at me with evenly weirded-out faces, half-smiles caught up in their teeth like skirt hems caught in pantyhose.

“I’m going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life,” I said, “not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus — though I’m sure they’re helpful — but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish.”

There was party favor laughter, little bits of it strewn here and there for fun, but I pressed on.

“People make fun of the goldfish. People don’t think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of ’42, appears in The Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don’t think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us.”

I glanced up and my gaze smacked right into Milton, first row, fourth from the left. He had tilted his chair back and was talking to someone behind him, Jade.

“If you live like a goldfish,” I continued, “you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts — the guppy, the neon tetra — go belly up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America — a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice — luckily she’d done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn’t quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years.” I cleared my throat. “They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven’t seen soap in a year. And they don’t die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they’re abandoned.”

One or two restless people were dribbling into the aisles, hoping to escape my notice, a silver-haired man needing to stretch his legs, a woman bouncing a toddler, whispering secrets into its hair.

“If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone.”

The wind taunted the edges of my papers.

“The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present — it’s a gift. They are free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. No inner demons. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn’t forty years ago when you still had all your hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it’s still going on, this very moment.” I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. “And this moment, too.” Another three seconds. “And this moment, too.” Another. “And this moment, too.”

Dad never talked about not moving people during a lecture. He never talked about the funny human need to impart something, anything, to someone, build a tiny bridge to them and help them across, or what to do when the crowd twitched ceaselessly like a horse’s back. The endless sniffing, the clearing of throats, fathers’ eyes that skateboarded one side of a row to the other side of a row, doing a 180-ollie around the hot mom, sixth from the right — he never said a word. Standing around the rim of the football field the hemlocks stood tall, watching protectively. The wind tugged the sleeves of a hundred blouses. I wondered if that kid, far end, third row, red shirt (oddly gnawing his fist and frowning at me with James-Deanian intensity), if he knew I was an impostor, that I’d secretly cut out only the beautiful part of the truth and discarded the rest. Because, in reality, goldfish were having as rough a time with life as the rest of us; they expired all the time from the shock of new temperatures and the faintest shadow of a heron prompted them to hide under rocks. And yet, maybe it didn’t matter so much what I said or didn’t say, what I kissed on the cheek or what I gave the cold shoulder. (My god, Red Shirt, hands clamped over his mouth, biting his fingernails, he was now sitting so far forward, his head was nearly a flowerpot on the sill of Sal Mineo’s shoulder. I didn’t know who he was. I’d never seen him before.) Lectures and Theories, all Tomes of Nonfiction, maybe they deserved the same gentle treatment as works of art; maybe they were human creations trying to shoulder a few terrors and joys of the world, composed at a certain place, at a certain time, to be pondered, frowned at, liked, loathed, and then one went to the gift shop and bought the postcard, put it in a shoe box high on a shelf.

The end of my speech was a disaster, the disaster being that nothing happened. Obviously, I’d hoped — as all people do when they stand before an audience, show a bit of leg — for culmination, illumination, a flake of sky to loosen, crash down on everyone’s stiff hair like the big chip of plaster on which Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel had taken a stab at God’s index finger, when, in 1789, it unexpectedly freed itself from the ceiling, hitting Father Cantinolli on the head and sending a bevy of visiting nuns into eye-rolling seizures; when they came to, their prevailing line of defense for all actions, from the sacred to the seedy, was “because God told me to” (see Lo Spoke Del Dio Di Giorno, Funachese, 1983).

But if God existed, today, like most days, He chose to remain mum. There was only wind and faces, yawning sky. To applause that might as well have been laughter on a late, late show (it had the same sense of obligation), I returned to my chair. Havermeyer began to read the list of graduating names, and I didn’t pay much attention, until he came to the Bluebloods. I saw their Life Stories flash before my eyes.

“Milton Black.”

Milton lumbered up the stairs, his chin held at that deceitfully sweet angle, around 75 degrees. (He was a lethargic coming-of-age novel.)

“Nigel Creech.”

He smiled — that wristwatch catching light. (He was an unsentimental comedy in Five Acts, sequined with wit, lust and pain. The last scene tended to end on a sour note, but the playwright refused to revise.)

“Charles Loren.”

Charles hobbled up the stairs with his crutches. (He was a romance.)

“Congratulations, son.”

The sky had yellowed, performing one of its best magic tricks, overcast yet making people squint.

“Leulah Maloney.”

She skipped up the stairs. She’d cut off her hair, not as harshly as Hannah, but the result was just as unhappy; the blunt pieces banged against her jaw. (She was a twelve-line poem of repetition and rhyme.)

Raindrops the size and texture of wasps started to zing off the shoulder pads of Havermeyer’s navy blazer, also off some mother wearing a pink sun hat that sun-rose high over her head. Instantly, umbrellas blossomed — a garden of black, red, yellow, a few striped — and the Jelly Roll Jazz Band began to pack up their instruments, evacuating to the gym.

“Things aren’t looking good, are they?” Havermeyer noted with a sigh. “Better hurry things along.” He smiled. “Graduating in the rain. For those of you who think this is a bad omen, we do have some spots available in next year’s senior class, if you’d like to wait for an exit that looks a little more promising.” No one laughed and Havermeyer started to read the names quickly, jerking his head up and down: microphone, name, microphone; God was fast-forwarding him. It was difficult to hear what name he was on because the wind had found the microphone and sent ghostly, theme park “Woooooooos” out across the crowd. Havermeyer’s wife, Gloria, stepped up onto the stage and held an umbrella over his head.

“Jade Churchill Whitestone.”

She stood up, carrying her orange umbrella Statue-of-Liberty-style, and grabbed her diploma from Havermeyer as if doing him a favor, as if he were handing her his résumé. She stalked back to her seat. (She was a breathtaking book written in a bleak style. She often didn’t bother with “he said” or “she said” the reader could figure it out. And now and then a sentence made you gasp it was so beautiful.)

Soon it was Radley’s turn to go, and then my own. I’d forgotten my umbrella in Mr. Moats’ classroom and Radley was holding his over himself and a strip of rubberized commencement stage on his other side, so I was getting drenched. The rain was an oddly soothing temperature, just right, Goldilocks’ porridge. I stood up and Eva Brewster, with her small pink cat umbrella, muttered “Christ,” and shoved hers into my hands. I took it, but felt bad because the rain started to stick to her hair and bang against her forehead. I quickly shook Havermeyer’s cold pruned hand and returned to my seat, handing the umbrella back to her.

Havermeyer rushed his closing — something about luck — the crowd applauded and began to disband. There were the wet picnic mechanics of moving inside — do we have everything, where’d Kimmie go, what’s my hair doing, it’s seaweed, hell. Dads with pained faces wrenched toddlers out of chairs. Mothers in soggy white linen were unaware they admitted to the world their underwear.

I waited another minute, doing my About-To act. One doesn’t look suspiciously alone, without blood relation, if one appears industriously About To do something, and so I stood up, made a big deal of removing the mythical rock from my shoe and scratching the fictitious itch on my hand, another one on the back of my neck (they were like fleas), pretending I’d lost something somewhere — granted, for that I didn’t have to pretend. Soon I was alone with the chairs and the stage. I slipped down the stairs and began to make my way across the field.

In the past few weeks, when I’d imagined this day, I’d pictured, at this precise moment, Dad, making a Grand Final Appearance (for One Night Only). Just as I figured all along — there he’d be, far in front of me, a black figure on an empty hill. Or else he’d have climbed up into the topmost branches of one of those hulking oaks, decked in Tiger Striped camouflage in order to spy, unobserved, on my graduation proceedings. Or else he’d be sealed inside a limousine, which, just as I realized it was he, would come swooping down Horatio Way, almost knocking me over, cruelly reflecting me back to me before roaring around the curve, past the stone chapel and the wooden Welcome to The St. Gallway School sign, disappearing like a whale in a sound.

But I saw no swarthy black figure, no limousine and not a single lunatic in a tree. In front of me, Hanover Hall, Elton and Barrow lounged like dogs so old they wouldn’t raise their heads if you threw a tennis ball at them.

“Blue,” someone shouted behind me.

I ignored the voice, continuing up the hill, but he called out again, closer this time, so I stopped and turned. Red Shirt was walking quickly toward me. Instantly, I recognized him — well, let me revise that. Instantly, I was aware I’d inadvertently done the highly improbable thing of following my own advice — all that goldfish business — because it was Zach Soderberg, sure, yet I’d never seen him before in my life. He looked radically different, because sometime between our last AP Physics class and graduation, he’d decided to shave his entire head. And it wasn’t one of those heads plagued with disturbing potholes and dents (as if tipping people off to the fact the brain inside it was a bit squishy), but a pleasantly strong head. His ears, too, were nothing to be ashamed of. He looked brand new, a newness that hurt the eyes and was unsettling, which was why I didn’t say, “Sayonara, kid,” and break into a sprint, because the Volvo was packed, waiting for me in the Student Parking Lot. I’d said so long to 24 Armor, tallyho to the Citizen Kane desk, returned the three sets of house keys to Sherwig Realty in a sealed manila envelope, including a handwritten Thank-You note to Miss Dianne Seasons, throwing in a few!!! for good measure. I had organized road maps in the glove compartment. I had neatly divided the states between North Carolina and New York (like they were equitable pieces of birthday cake) into audiotapes from the Bookworm Library on Elm (most of them pulpy thrillers Dad would loathe). I had a license with an unfortunate picture and I planned to drive in every sense of the word.

Zach noticed my surprise at his new haircut and ran a hand over the top of his head. It probably felt like velveteen on a threadbare fainting couch. “Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Last night I decided to turn over a new leaf.” He frowned. “So where are you going?” He was standing close to me, holding the black umbrella over my head so his arm was stiff as a drying rail on which one could hang wet towels.

“Home,” I said.

This surprised him. “But it’s just getting good. Havermeyer’s dancing with Sturds. There’s mini quiche.” His bright red shirt was doing that buttercup experiment to his chin — you held it there and if it glowed the person liked butter. I wondered what it meant when red glowed there.

“I can’t,” I said, hating how stiff it sounded. If he’d been police and I’d been guilty, he would have known, immediately.

He studied me and then shook his head, as if across my face someone had written an incomprehensible equation. “Gosh, you know, I liked your speech…I mean…man.”

Something about the way he said that made me feel the urge to laugh — only the urge, though; it lost steam somewhere around my collarbone.

“Thanks,” I said.

“The part about the — what was it…when you talked about art…and who you are as a person…and art…that was so amazing.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Nowhere in my speech had art or who I was as a person been mentioned. They weren’t secondary or even tertiary themes. But then, as I stared up at him, so tall — strange, I’d never noticed the minute creases at the edges of his eyes; his face was cheating, throwing out hints of the man he’d become — I noticed perhaps that was the point; if we wanted to listen to someone, we heard what we needed to in order to inch closer. And there was nothing wrong with hearing art, or who they were as a person, or goldfish; each of us could choose whatever materials we liked for our rickety boat. There’d been something, too, in his leaning so far forward, so awkwardly trying to get to me (giving goosenecked lamps a run for their money), wanting to catch every word I threw into the air, not wanting to let one hit the ground. I liked this little bit of truth, tried to think it twice, three times, so I wouldn’t forget it, so I could think about it on the highway, the best place to think about things.

Zach cleared his throat. He’d turned to squint at something, at Horatio Way, the part where it squeezed past the daffodils and the birdbath, or maybe higher up, the roof of Elton where the weathervane pointed at something off-screen.

“So I take it if I invited you and your dad to join us tonight at the club for the roast beef buffet, you’d say no.” He looked back at me, his eyes touching my face the sad way people look out, put their hands on windowpanes. And I remembered, in the click-stutter of Mr. Archer’s slide projector, that tiny painting trapped in his house. I wondered if it was still there, hanging bravely at the end of the hallway. He’d said I was like that painting, that unmanned boat.

He arched an eyebrow, another tiny talent I’d never noticed. “Can’t tempt you? They have great cheesecake.”

“I actually have to get going,” I said.

He accepted this with a nod. “So I take it if I asked if I could…see a little of you over the summer — and it doesn’t have to be the whole you, by the way. We could decide on…a toe. You’d say it’s impossible. You have plans ’til you’re seventy-five. You have grass stuck to your shoes, by the way.”

Startled, I leaned down and wiped the grass caked to my sandals, which hours ago had been white but now were blotchy and purpled like old ladies’ hands.

“I’m not going to be here this summer,” I said.

“Where’re you going?”

“To visit my grandparents. Maybe somewhere else.” (“Chippawaa, New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, Homeland of the Roadrunner, Blue Gamma Mosquito Grass, the Cutthroat Trout, Industries, mining, silver, potash…”)

“You and your dad, or just you?” he asked.

The kid had an uncanny ability to nail every question, again and again. Dad was the first to debunk the No Wrong Questions policy thrown out to make dimwits feel better about themselves; yes, whether one wanted to accept it or not, there were a handful of right questions and billions of wrong ones and out of these, out of all of these, Zach had selected the one that made me feel like I’d sprung a leak in my throat, the one that made me afraid I’d cry or fall over, also causing an outbreak of those pretend itches on my arm and neck. Dad probably would have liked him — that was the funny thing. This one, this bull’s-eye, would have impressed Dad.

“Just me,” I said.

And then I walked away — without really realizing it. I headed up the wet hill, across the road. Not upset or crying or anything like that — no, I was remarkably fine. Well, not fine (“Fine is for dulls and slows.”) but something else — something I actually didn’t have a word for. I felt a shock from the blankness of the pale gray sky on which it was possible to draw anything, art or goldfish, as tiny or as huge as I wanted.

I continued up the sidewalk, past Hanover and the lawn in front of the cafeteria littered with branches, and the Scratch, the rain turning it all to soup. And Zach, without “Wait,” or “Where are you—?” he stayed right there, right by my right shoulder without needing to chat about it. We walked without formula, hypothesis or detailed conclusion. His shoes moved cleanly through the rain, fishtail splashes in a pond, the fishes themselves mysteries — mine too. He held the umbrella a precise distance over my head. And I tested it — because Van Meers always had to test things — inching a little outside the shelter of it, imperceptibly to the right; I accelerated, slowed, paused to wipe more grass off my shoes, curious if I could get a small percentage of my knee or elbow, some part wet, but he held it over my head with remarkable consistency. By the time we reached the top of the stairs and the Volvo, and the trees crowding the road danced, but only very slightly — they were extras after all, not wanting to distract from the leads — not a new drop of rain had touched me.

Final Exam

Directions. This all-inclusive final examination will test your deepest understanding of giant concepts. It consists of three sections to be completed to the best of your ability (percentage of Final Grade specified in parentheses): 14 True or False Questions (30 %), 7 Multiple Choice Questions (20 %) and 1 Essay (50 %). ¹ You may have a clipboard to write upon, but no supplemental textbooks, encyclopedias, legal pads or extraneous papers. If you are not presently sitting with one seat between you and anyone else, please arrange for this now.

Thank you and good luck.

Section I: True/False?

1. Blue van Meer has read too many books. T/F?

2. Gareth van Meer was a handsome, charismatic man of big (and often long-winded) ideas, ideas that just might, when vigorously applied to reality, have unpleasant consequences. T/F?

3. Blue van Meer was blind, and yet one can’t hold it against her, because one is almost always blind when it comes to considering oneself and one’s immediate family members; one might as well be staring with naked eyes at the sun, trying to see in that blinding ball sunspots, solar flares and prominences. T/F?

4. June Bugs are incurable romantics, known to turn up at even the most formal gatherings with lipstick on their teeth and hair as frazzled as any businessman stuck in rush hour traffic. T/F?

5. Andreo Verduga was a gardener who wore heavy cologne, no more, no less. T/F?

6. Smoke Harvey clubbed seals. T/F?

7. The fact that Gareth van Meer and Hannah Schneider have the same sentence underlined—“When Manson listened to you it was like he was drinking up your face,” on p. 481 of their respective copies of Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson—probably doesn’t mean as much as Blue would like to think. The most she should take from this tidbit is that they both found the behaviors of lunatics fascinating. T/F?

8. The Nightwatchmen still exist, at the very least, in the minds of conspiracy theorists, neo-Marxists, bloodshot-eyed bloggers and champions of Che, also individuals of all races and creeds who take pleasure in the thought that there may be teaspoons of, if not justice, per se (justice tends to hold up in the hands of men the way Chabazite does in HCl — disintegrating slowly, often leaving slimy residue), then a simple leveling of a tiny section of the world’s playing field (currently without referee). T/F?

9. The Houston police photograph of George Gracey is unquestionably Baba au Rhum; Blue can conclude this simply from the man’s unmistakable eyes, which are like two black olives pushed deep into a plate of hummus — no matter if the rest of the head, in the grainy picture, is obscured with facial hair denser than the neutron (1018 kg/m³). T/F?

10. Each of the impromptu films Hannah played for her Intro to Film class, movies that — as Dee revealed to her sister, Dum—never appeared on the actual syllabus, had subversive themes, evidence of her freaky flower child politics. T/F?

11. Hannah Schneider, with the help of other Nightwatchmen (rather sloppily), killed a man, to the infinite exasperation of Gareth van Meer; while he took pleasure in his role as Socrates (the job fit him like a bespoke suit from Savile Row) — touring the country, lecturing new recruits about Determination and other compelling ideas detailed in countless Federal Forum essays, including “Viva Las Violence: Transgressions of the Elvis Empire”—Gareth still preferred to be a man of theory, not violence, the Trotsky, rather than the Stalin; you may recall, the man eschewed all contact sports. T/F?

12. In all probability (though admittedly, this is the conjecture of someone with little more than a remembered photograph to go on), Natasha van Meer killed herself upon learning that her best friend, with whom she had attended the Ivy School, had been having a hot-breathy affair with her husband, a man who adored the sound of his own voice. T/F?

13. One can’t really believe it, but Life is, rather confusingly, both sad and funny at the same time. T/F?

14. Reading an obscene number of reference books is greatly advantageous to one’s mental health. T/F?

Section II: Multiple Choice

1. Hannah Schneider was:

A. An orphan who grew up at the Horizon House in New Jersey (which required its children to wear uniforms; the house seal, a gold pegasus that could also pass for a lion if one squinted, was stitched into the jacket on the breast pocket). She wasn’t the most attractive of children. After reading The Liberation’s Woman (1962) by Arielle Soiffe, which featured an extensive chapter on Catherine Baker, she found herself wishing she’d done something that bold with her life, and in a moment of gloomy restlessness found herself hinting to Blue that she was, in fact, that fearless revolutionary, that “hand-grenade of a woman” (p. 313). In spite of these efforts to align her life with something a bit more majestic, she was nevertheless in jeopardy of turning into her worst fear, one of The Gone, if it weren’t for Blue writing about her. Her house is currently #22 on Sherwig Realty’s “Hot List.”

B. Catherine Baker, equal parts runaway, criminal, myth, moth.

C. One of those lost civilization women, poorly lit but with astonishing architecture; many rooms, including an entire banquet hall, will never be found.

D. Flotsam and jetsam of all the above.

2. Miss Schneider’s passing was really:

A. A suicide; in a sloppy moment (and she’d had many), when she’d danced too long with her wineglass, she’d slept with Charles, an error in judgment that began to corrode her from the inside out, prompting her to spin fantastical stories, hack off her hair, end her life.

B. Murder by a member of The Nightwatchmen (Nunca Dormindo in Portuguese); as Gareth “Socrates” and Servo “Nero” Gracey hashed over during their emergency powwow in Paris, Hannah was now a liability. Ada Harvey was digging too deeply, was weeks away from contacting the FBI, and thus Gracey’s freedom, their entire antigreedian movement, was at risk; she had to be eliminated — a difficult call ultimately made by Gracey. The man in the woods, the person Blue is positive she heard as surely as she knows the Bumblebee Bat is the smallest mammal on earth (1.3 in.), was their most sophisticated button man, Andreo Verduga, decked in ShifTbush™ Invisible Gear, Fall Mix, the accomplished hunter’s dream.

C. Murder by “Sloppy Ed,” the member of the Vicious Three still at large.

D. One of those muddy events in life, which one will never know with certainty (see Chapter 2, “The Black Dahlia,” Slain, Winn, 1988).

3. Jade Churchill Whitestone is:

A. A phony.

B. Beguiling.

C. Irksome as a stubbed toe.

D. An ordinary teenager who couldn’t see the sky through the air.

4. Making out with Milton Black was like:

A. Kissing squid.

B. Being sat upon by an Octopus vulgaris.

C. Doing a jackknife into Jell-O.

D. Floating on a bed of frontal lobes.

5. Zach Soderberg is:

A. A peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off.

B. Guilty of lion sex performed in Room 222 at The Dynasty Motel.C. Still, after myriad explanations and Visual Aids presented to him by Blue van Meer as they toured the country for a summer in a blue Volvo station wagon, somewhat disturbingly unable to grasp even the most rudimentary concepts behind Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He is currently learning to recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places.

D. An Oracle of Delphi.

6. Gareth van Meer abandoned his daughter because:

A. He had had enough of Blue’s paranoia and hysterics.

B. He was, to quote Jessie Rose Rubiman, “a pig.”

C. He finally had the guts to take a stab at immortality, follow his lifelong dream to go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; this was what he and his sham professors across the country had been organizing in secret; this was also why countless African newspapers were found strewn around the house in the immediate aftermath of his departure, including Inside Angola.

D. He couldn’t bear to lose face with his daughter, Blue, Blue who always thought The World of him, Blue who, even after learning he was an intellectual outmoded as the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917, a disaster-prone dreamer, a showboat theorist (and only a very minor one), a philanderer whose illicit affairs caused the suicide of her mother, a man who doubtless will end up like Trotsky if he isn’t careful (ice pick, head), still can’t help but think The World of him, Blue who whenever she is running late to her lecture “American Government: A New Perspective” or passing by a park with trees that whisper overhead as if they wish to let slip a secret, can’t help but wish to find him sitting on a wooden bench, in tweed, waiting for her.

7. Blue’s detailed theory of love, sex, guilt and murder scrawled across fifty pages of a legal pad is:

A. 100 % Truth, as things are 100 % Cotton.

B. Preposterous and delusional.

C. A frail web spun by a garden spider, not in some sensible porch corner, but in a massive space, a space so huge and far-fetched one could easily fit two Cadillac DeVille Stretch Limos in it, end to end.

D. The materials Blue used for her boat, in order to pass without serious injury through a harrowing patch of sea (see Chapter 9, “Scylla and Charybdis,” The Odyssey, Homer, Hellenistic Period).

Section III: Essay Question

Many classic films and published academic works do their best to shine tiny lights on the state of American culture, the surreptitious sorrow of all people, the struggle for selfhood, the generalized bewilderment of living. Nimbly utilizing specific examples from such texts, structure a sweeping argument around the premise that, while such works are enlightening, amusing, comforting, too — particularly when one is in a new situation and one needs to divert the mind — they can be no substitution for experience. For, to quote Danny Yeargood’s exceptionally brutal memoir of 1977, The Edgycation of Eyetalians, life is “one blow after another and even when you’re on the ground, you can’t see nothin’ ’cause they hit you on the part of the head where sight comes from, and you can’t breathe ’cause they kicked you in the stomach where breathin’ comes from, and your nose’s all blood ’cause they held you down and punched you in the face, you crawl to your feet and feel fine. Beautiful even. Because you’re alive.”

Take all the time you need.