The Border of Paradise

BLESSINGS. MARIANNE (1972)

One time, I told myself as he left the convent. It will have to be only this one time. He’s married, and he has a child. Beg for forgiveness from Our Lord and Savior; pray that your stupidity doesn’t ruin you.

When I failed to bleed the next month, and then the next, I knew. I packed my things and told Sister Angeline that I would leave in the morning. I’d not yet begun to show, but my body had softened as my heart was hardening. I said nothing about the reasons for my departure. Sister Angeline said that she would pray for me, but as I left her small and austere room I could feel all prayers fading for me forever.

And when I later saw David, and when he gave me his largesse, I was making a deal with the devil; I was conscious of the bargain as I made it. I could never ask him to leave his wife and boy for me, because my only claim to him was our history and a few afternoons and now this child inside of me, and I asked, and still ask, myself why. What kind of insanity infected the life of the church I’d tilled for myself. Was it his familiarity? Was it the fact that I’d loved him once and could love him again, or that I actually did love him again, had never stopped loving him? Was it the wine that parted my legs? I don’t know. I hated him for it, but I hated myself more. He was only doing what he wanted, and who could blame a man for pursuing his desires? I should have, as the expression goes, known better.

My child was so well behaved even then, allowing me no morning sickness and barely any discomfort. The discomfort I did endure, such as back pain, I accepted and even welcomed as punishment. With every month I grew larger, the stretch marks on my soft belly snaking toward my sides. I was not one of those fallen women who could pretend that she was not pregnant — it was as evident to me as it was to everyone I encountered when I left the house to buy groceries or simply exercise my sore legs. Women stopped me in the street and gazed at my pregnant body, saying things like “I carried high like that” or “How far along are you?” No one asked, “Is this a bastard child?” I suppose because I seemed reputable enough, although this may not be a question that people ask if they are polite. I was completely aware of the baby every second of every day.

I was the one who named her Gillian. It is a form of the name Julian, meaning “belonging to Julius,” but I gave her that name because Gillian was my mother’s middle name, and my mother was perhaps not an exemplary mother, but endured so much that by the time I left home she had earned herself a steely exoskeleton that I couldn’t blame her for. I thought that by naming my baby Gillian, she might inherit some of my mother’s better qualities. On a more delusional level, I thought that by naming her, I was staking a claim. But I couldn’t have what I really wanted, though who was to say what I really wanted; nor could I care for a baby on my own. And yet the larger Gillian grew inside of me, the more inclined I was to keep her, even in poverty.

But it was the call David’s wife made that undid me. Daisy— what a name. I heard a goodness in her voice, and I’ve been clinging to that sound of a good soul for the last decade and a half of my life. Yes, I told myself, she would be Gillian’s mother. They would live in that house, that homey house in the great wide woods, and they would have the Nowaks’ resources to clothe and feed her. Her! Gillian! My offspring, a Nowak after all. I could give her nothing, and they could give her everything; she could be happy, she could wear nice things, she could read good books, David would teach her the piano, she would learn Latin, she would live a good life and grow up to be a better woman than I.

And months later my baby was in my arms in the apartment that David had rented for myself and the midwife, my baby a tiny squalling thing with a bright pink face that I loved with an immediacy more painful than the labor itself. I was twenty-two, penniless, husbandless. In labor I had lost all recollection of any sense but agony, but birthing Gillian put me solidly back into my torn and bloody body, and all I knew of it was that my love hurt like an echo of Hell and I did not want to let her go.

“Please,” David said. His hair was thinning. He was old in a young man’s body, his grotesquely scarred hand twisting between the fingers of the other. “Daisy and I will give her a good life. I promise you. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” The midwife, a softly shaped Russian woman with ivory hair, remained expressionless in the face of our unshared emotion.

I sobbed. I said no. I held Gillian to my breast, and she pressed against it, hot and wailing. I swear she was saying, You are mine. But in the end I let him leave with our child, and because of this I had to believe in David’s fundamental goodness. I trusted — had to trust — that she would be all right. For a time after he took Gillian from me, I fell into melancholia, and there was no one to catch me — I had no friends, I lived alone. There was no one to implore that I wash my face or brush my teeth or, Heaven forbid, take a shower; there was no reason to eat, and I lost twenty pounds, and had to tuck a cushion between my knees before I slept because in lying on my side, my own bones hurt me. I cried until my eyes hurt, and then I waited and more tears came and I cried some more. At times, I plotted getting Gillian back. I imagined that I’d go to their home in the middle of the night and thieve her from her crib, but these dreams were countered by the self who looked into the mirror on the way to the toilet and saw a gaunt, oily-haired woman with feral eyes, who clearly could not take care of herself and therefore could not take care of a child.

Once the melancholia lessened enough for me to function, I fled the apartment. I moved into a small home in Sacramento with David’s money, receiving calls from him every so often with updates, and when William and Gillian were feasibly old enough for a music education, I begged him to bring the two to see me, which is how the piano lessons began. He brought our daughter and his son for instruction every week as a concession, as a form of custody. I would sit on the sofa with my hands gripping my knees and stare at the door at one fifteen, knowing that they would be there by one thirty. The doorbell would sound its chime; I’d open the door and there they were, the child I had lost and the half-Oriental child that was David’s, both wearing white linens and clutching book bags of sheet music, while David smiled at me and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Kucharski,” which was my pseudonym in those days.

Every week I had to hold myself back from tearing little Gillian into pieces and stuffing them into my mouth, to not touch her too much or touch William too little. Instead, I carefully hugged her hello. I held her at arm’s length, examining her shape and the contours of her face that looked so much like mine. I did the same with William, although my attention was always elsewhere when I was with William; even when I taught William his lessons I had half an eye on Gillian in the living room while she read, or drew with crayons on the sketchpad I made available to her every time she came.

I always looked through her drawings. I do still have them. She had an eye for detail, even with the clumsy crayons. Her tigers always had stripes that seemed authentically placed.

Every week I cried after she left, pressing my hand to the door and the other to my belly as if ready to birth her again. Despite my broodiness, I was eating and washing myself — I made sure that Mrs. Kucharski would be a charming figure to the children, and then I shed her skin as soon as they left. It was likely bouffant-headed Mrs. Kucharski who applied for, and was rewarded with, a job as a secretary at a real estate agency. Mrs. Kucharski was asked on dates to which she never said yes.

On two occasions did David betray himself to me. The first: Gillian and William were halfway out the door. I had said my customary good-byes. “The bright spot of my week,” I managed to say, and David flashed me a look of such longing that I couldn’t have misinterpreted it, no matter how many times I replayed it afterward. David always had a particularly legible face.

The second time occurred a month before he died. “Don’t get yourself into trouble while we’re gone,” he teased. He was helping Gillian with her coat. Their drive home was a drive of microclimates.

I said, “I have no one to get into trouble with.”

He did not look at me, but replied, “You know I love you,” before turning away, his hands perched on his children’s shoulders. What possessed him to say this in front of them, I do not know. I don’t think they were listening. The door closed so firmly that it was like he hadn’t said anything at all, but the words remained with me. I even whispered them to myself at times, as if by doing so I could keep the fluttering thing alive.

I loved them both, and in both cases I imagined my wounds might fester less if I tried to harden my heart fully. But the truth is that I never made an honest go of moving on; I was constantly looking back.

His wife called me one night after I came home from work at the agency. She had never spoken to the persona of Mrs. Kucharski, and when I heard her voice and introduction on the line I nearly dropped the phone. I responded in a voice that was not entirely in my normal register for my role as the piano teacher. It was audibly different from the way I’d answered the phone, but that had only been the one word hello and it didn’t matter anyway, because Mrs. Daisy Nowak was calling to tell me that her husband and daughter had died in a car wreck.

“William will not come for lessons,” she said.

I couldn’t breathe, and then I was crying before I could stop myself. If she hadn’t suspected me before, she suspected me then.

“How terrible,” I said, barely choking out the words.

“It is terrible.”

“I’m — I’m sorry.”

After a long moment, Daisy replied, “I understand.”

A tin of ashes arrived in the mail a few weeks later. I scattered them in my garden, amid the rosebushes, and the piano lessons — Mrs. Kucharski — and my life ended then.

When I arrived home from work and saw her for the first time in four years, Gillian the ghost, fifteen years old, was sitting on my sofa with a TV tray and a glass of milk in front of her, looking grown, looking much the same as she did when I last saw her with her small hand in David’s as they left this Sacramento home. Her hair was hacked short. Her gold glasses were slightly crooked, and she squinted despite their presence on her face. She looked like a beautiful farm girl — healthy and nourished, with lean and muscled arms and shoulders — but her floral, no doubt homemade, dress hugged too tightly at the armpits, and though its hem was let out and ragged, the skirt still rode up her thighs.

“Mrs. Kucharski,” she said.

“Gillian.”

“My mother said you were dead, but I came to your house anyway. I didn’t know where else to go.”

I reached for her. Without being fully aware of doing it, I touched her hair, her face, her hands. Her whole body was cold like marble; she didn’t move. I worked to stop crying as I sat next to her with Marty watching from the kitchen, judging the girl who was my daughter and the daughter who was a Nowak all over her face, a Nowak in the slight hunch of her shoulders and the gold of her hair. It was a miracle; I couldn’t dissect a miracle.

But I asked her if something happened. I asked her how she got here. She shook her head. “I walked to town,” she said, “and asked someone how I could get to Sacramento. I took a train, which was… I’d never done that before. And I remembered how to get to your house, sort of. One-nine-eight-three Samson Drive.”

“You’re here.”

She wasn’t dead. I had to remind myself of this. I was not being pursued by an angel, but by my flesh-and-blood daughter, who had come to find me.

“I feel like I’m dreaming. I’m so absolutely tired,” she said.

“Are you hungry?”

Gillian nodded. Her hands crossed, one over the other, in her lap, one scratching its partner. Not hard enough for me to tell her to stop, but hard enough to make pink lines on the skin. I still wanted to touch her, to put my hands on her, to feel her solid body under my fingers before she vanished. My mouth watered as my eyes leaked; I was tired of crying, had wept too much over the years, but this made no difference to my body, which made the tears as fast as I could shed them.

“Marty,” I said, “is there anything? Leftovers? Sandwich fixings?”

“I think there’s meat loaf,” Marty said.

“Please.”

He went to the kitchen. I said, “Where is your mother? Where’s William?”

She looked to the side. “She’s dead,” she said. “Ma and William died in the Buick on the way to town. I wasn’t with them.”

“I thought it was you and your father who had died.” A proliferation of alleged car accidents, one crashing after the other. But she herself was not dead. “Are you sure?” I asked, and then corrected myself. “No — I’m sorry. Of course you’re sure. What about your father? Where is he?”

“He’s dead,” she said simply.

I asked, “How?”

“He stabbed himself. Didn’t you know? I don’t know why you’d think I was dead.” She turned her head. “What’s that sound?”

“The microwave. It’s heating your meat loaf.”

“Microwave. We don’t have one of those.”

“Not everyone does.”

She looked around the room. I tried to see it through her eyes: green walls, botanical illustrations in frames, refurbished furniture bought on resale. We remain frugal with David’s money. Blood money, Marty calls it with hatred, and yet he has no job and lives off it all the same, having been dishonorably discharged from the navy for years now.

“Everyone is dead,” she said.

“What?”

“Ma and William were in the Buick and a car hit them. I’m all alone.” She stared at me. Her eyes were, I realized, the color of mine. They’d changed over the years from hazel to a brighter shade of green, and they gleamed as she said, “I came here, Mrs. Kucharski, because I didn’t know where else to go. You’re the only other person I know.”

Everyone is dead. David killed himself. I’d wondered for all those empty years if it was going to happen, his self-obliteration, and there it was. He was dead, had stabbed himself. I tried to imagine it. As a teenager his demons had repelled me, but with age came a deeper understanding of demons. Always there had been that potential death. Here it was. Everyone was dead but Gillian. In the end, Gillian was left behind for me. The occasion: an extraordinary one, and terrifying if true; I had wanted her returned to me, and perhaps it was my endless desire that tangled up truth and fiction, the succession of accidents that were simultaneously true and false. I was her old piano teacher, and she’d had to come a long way to reach me. She hadn’t called. She hadn’t even written a letter. Surely there would be someone else who could help an orphaned child — someone who saw her regularly, perhaps a schoolmate’s parent or her own teacher. This was a miracle, I thought again. She is here because of a miracle. And then I wondered if this was what a miracle felt like — to be commanded by an archangel and to encounter my phantom daughter being the same thing, all things considered — a miracle thus inducing the swollen hot lump between my ribs and forcing electricity along my limbs.

Marty brought the meat loaf into the room and put it on her tray next to the milk. Gillian picked up the fork and cut herself a piece, and then she began to eat ravenously, gulping it down. Once the plate was clean of meat, she scraped the sheen of ketchup onto her fork and sucked it off the tines, and the entire time I didn’t look at Marty and I knew that Marty was looking at us and trying to see the resemblance. She had my hair. It was the color of David’s, too, but with a wave to it like mine.

“It was good?” I asked.

“Yes. Thank you.” She hesitated.

“Do you want more?”

She nodded, not shyly.

“I’m tired,” she said after a moment. “I’m really very tired.”

“You must be. You came from Polk Valley?”

“I came a long way. Rainstorms on the land for a good while, too. Where’s your bathroom?”

I told her. Gillian went, leaving her canvas tote. The living room suddenly felt devoid of life. Out of curiosity, I lifted the drooping tote and peered inside. A Bible, a change of clothes, a drawstring coin purse, a notebook. An enormous knife. I stared at the clean, heavy blade and its worn handle, not comprehending the implications of this weapon, because what could it be but a weapon and a danger to myself and to Marty. And yet the fact that she had a weapon compounded my guilt for snooping; I stared at it, not knowing what to do, and Gillian returned as I put the tote and its knife back on the sofa. She wiped her hands on her dress. “You have a nice bathroom,” she said. “I like the green tiles and the bottles.” She sat down again, touching the glass of milk. “We don’t drink milk at home,” she said.

“Would you like something else?”

“Yes. Water.”

I knew that Marty wanted me to pry. Why was she really here, and how long did she intend to stay? Someone must miss her back home. Her school would be inquiring. I did not want to tell Marty about the knife, which would remain a secret; if he knew about the knife, he would never let her stay. He was suspicious of her, but I couldn’t afford to be suspicious of her. I had been the one to let her go, after all, and I was her mother; it was my job to protect her from everything, and if my brother was one of those things, so be it. So be it, I thought, as Marty came back with the glass of water and Gillian swallowed it down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and I saw for the first time moon-shaped marks on her palms. Her eyes kept darting to Marty as she ate the second piece of meat loaf, a bit more slowly this time, and then she said, “I’d like to sleep now.”

I said, “You can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I want the couch,” she said. She paused. “Please.”

When I returned with some linens and a quilt I saw that she was lying on the sofa on her side, reading a notebook with her head propped up on one hand, and Marty had gone into his room, which was one relief.

“Do you keep a journal?” I asked.

“No.” She closed the notebook. “It’s not mine.”

I tucked her in. Had I dreamed of this? Had I imagined the movement of my hands with a blanket gathered in them, lifting the cloth over my daughter’s body to say good night? As I wrapped the blanket around her, she said, sleepily, “Why are you crying?” She put the notebook on the TV tray and my heart bled full into my chest. Could I kiss her forehead? I dared not. Instead I sat on the floor, next to the sofa, and though I hadn’t prayed in years, I did then.

In my diary on that night, I wrote: She came home. I waited for something more to come to me.

At six thirty Marty comes into my bedroom with coffee. He hands me a mug and says, “We should do something fun today. Bring that crazy kid of yours. We could take her to a diner. Visit a museum. Chuck pennies from a balcony at strangers.”

“Mmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Yes, let’s do something — something fun.”

Marty says nothing. How I hate this adult habit of his. I think it may come from years of psychoanalysis. Conversion therapy. He, of all people, ought to understand perverse desires.

“It’s hard,” I say.

“What’s hard.”

“She’s here. It’s a dream come true in the most literal sense.”

“But…”

“But all the old things come up…”

He makes a noise between a throat clearing and a snuffle. “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”

“Let’s forget I said anything.”

“No,” he says, “really. Just say it. Go ahead.”

I’d spent the morning thinking of David. I didn’t want to, but he was as present as our daughter in the Orlich home.

I said, “I’m not angry with him. I mourned Gillian — I was devastated about Gillian — but he did love me, I’m sure of it. We did love each other. There was no way we could be together, but he loved me. Isn’t that worth something?”

“Like what?” Marty asked, and I can tell from his tone that I’ve made an error in judgment, but he has begun to respond and it is too late. “It couldn’t have been any clearer to him that it was a bad idea. He was married, for God’s sake. You were going to become a nun. A nun. He let his prick get the better of him, and then he had the stones to go ahead and say, ‘Okay, I’m rich, and you live in a garret, let me take your baby. But don’t worry, I’ll let you see her once a week, and if you’re lucky, maybe you can hug her on her fucking birthday.’ Annie, I don’t call that love. I call it bullshit.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

His voice softens. “Loving your daughter, that I understand.”

“She’ll be awake soon.” I press my fingers to my throat; I don’t want to cry again. I am so tired of my own pain.

He pats my knee and squeezes it. “All will be well,” he says. So the saint said.

She is on her knees, leaning over the back of the couch with her hands parting the gauze curtains at not much of a view. The bottoms of her feet are made of rock, calluses on top of calluses. Even the lines that carve through are calluses themselves. Canyons. Marty is gone; he takes walks to clear his head before coming home to write, or he goes to see Leo — his lover, the printer.

“Good morning,” I say.

Her head turns. “Good morning,” she says, serious.

I boil water for oatmeal while I call in sick at the office.

“Eleven new articles came in over the weekend,” says Rob. “We go to press this week.”

“I’m really sick,” I tell him.

“You sound fine. Healthy as a horse, in fact.”

“I might feel better by Wednesday.”

He sighs. “I expect to see you by ten. Today.”

When I hang up, Gillian is in the kitchen doorway. “Who were you talking to?”

“My boss. Everything’s fine. I’m not going to work today,” I say, and smile. “I’m going to spend the day with you.”

“How can work be a place?”

“Work… is a job. My job.”

“A job is where you do things to make money.”

“Yes.”

“My parents didn’t have jobs,” she says. She looks out the window for a moment, as if they’re on the other side of the glass. “But we had money anyway.”

The water boils. In go the dry oats, cascading like rain. “Your parents were in an unusual situation. But your friends must have parents with jobs.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to tell me about them.”

“Sure.” And then, “We’re going to have a nice life together.”

This last line of hers reverberates, and I don’t know how to answer.

I ask, “How do you like your oatmeal?”

“Is that what you’re making?” She moves to stand behind me. I feel her height, her shoulders inches above mine. “Oh, owsianka.”

“Yep,” I say, my eyes stinging, “owsianka.”

“This is something my dad ate.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Ma put a fried egg in hers, and so did William. I did whatever my father did, so I had fruit and brown sugar in mine.” She wanders to the refrigerator and opens it, expelling a chill into the already cold kitchen. She leaves the door open for a long time, examining its contents.

“Where’s your husband?” she asks, her head still in the fridge. “Did he leave?”

I say, “I don’t have one.”

“But there’s the man who lives here.” She closes the fridge.

“Marty? He’s not my husband. He’s my brother. He lives with me because it’s easier.”

“Easier than what?”

Easier, I think, and spoon the oatmeal into two white bowls. “We like living with each other.”

She goes quiet. I serve her al dente oatmeal with berries and whipped cream, and she eats without speaking, staring into the center of the bowl until it’s empty. Her movements are quick, intense, as if her gears and springs promise to erupt into irreparable chaos.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask.

“I never realized that I look so much like you,” she says, but leaves it there. So I ask her what she’d like to see.

“I’ve seen you,” she says, “which is all I really came for.”

“What about the state capitol?”

“What?”

“The government building.”

She frowns. “It wasn’t in the atlas,” she says, as if that explains something.

I sift through my old clothes for something suitable, and then she emerges from the washroom in a dress that has long since ceased to be flattering on the ever-decreasing flesh of my body. I see that she doesn’t fill out the bust, but the waist sits well, and what’s knee-length on me hits her thigh, showing off her lean, long legs.

“It looks nice,” I say.

She reaches her arms out on either side of her like wings, causing the spare fabric at the bodice to billow and pucker. She looks at her hands and down at her legs, and shrugs.

“I don’t like to think about how I look,” she says. “But the dress is nice. It smells like you.” She lifts an arm to her nose.

I find a purse for her. Gillian touches the thin mahogany leather, running her long and crooked fingers across the crackling edges. “This is nice, too. Am I supposed to put something in it?”

“If you want.”

“Do we really have to go?” she asks.

“To the capitol?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“All right. We don’t have to go.”

“You’ll still let me live with you, won’t you?”

“Of course!” What a relief, to be asked something that I can answer with certainty. “I want you to more than anything.”

She says, “I’m glad. I wanted you to say yes. I knew you would — you always liked me. I was a good student.”

“All we have to do,” I say, more to myself than to Gillian, “is go through certain things. It will work out, though, all of the legal things. We’ll go to court. Look,” I add soothingly, alarmed by the suddenly animal look on her face, “it will be all right.”

“Court?” Her mouth twitches, eyes big. “Why are you talking about a court? Just let me live with you. You don’t have to tell anyone that I’m here.”

“Oh, it’s more complicated than that. When I get you a doctor, they’ll need to know that I’m your legal guardian — when you go to school here, for example—”

“I don’t need a doctor. I have never needed a doctor. And why do I need to go to school? I learned everything I need to know from my father.”

“But,” I say, trying to surmount this revelation, “if anything should happen to you, the police would need to know that I’m taking care of you.”

Her face spasms at the sound of the word police, and when I try to put my arms around her she jerks away, slapping me before skin touches skin. So this is how it goes, my own flesh and blood hell-bent on rejection. My skin burns where she’s struck me.

Next there is a key in the lock, and Marty enters. I pray that my face gives away nothing. He touches his left ear, the way he does when the air has turned them numb, and then he takes both ears with his hands, rubbing them absently. “Everything all right?” he asks. Leo is not with him.

Gillian says, pointing, “It’s because of him, isn’t it? He doesn’t want me to stay!”

“What’s because of me?”

“She’s never been to a doctor,” I say, not knowing what I mean by it, but needing to state it as a fact aloud. “She’s never been to school, Marty.” And I think again of the knife that I will not mention, which looms now in my mind as I make the decision, again, to not mention it. For a girl who has never been to school, who has never been to a doctor, a knife can mean so many things, and I presume the knife is safety for her. I tell myself that the knife is for self-defense and nothing else.

“You don’t understand.” Abruptly she stands. “That’s not my life. I don’t do those things. No one can make us do those things. That’s why we don’t go out…We Nowaks, we don’t do those things. We’re not like other people…”

After a bout of wild sobs she passes out on the sofa, a lump beneath a quilt. I go to the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, and down a handful of Valium while refusing to look at my face in the mirror. I go into Marty’s room and shut the door. His room is always at least seven degrees warmer than the rest of the house — he’s always cold, and cranks his space heater to maximum year-round. His room is also small, and crowded with things collected over years, most of which allegedly have sentimental value to him, but the importance of which he never bothers to explain when I ask. I sit on his rickety bed. He sinks into the easy chair.

“God. It’s like you dropped your baby off at the freak show, she’s raised by the mongoloids, and then…” A cough. “Sorry, sorry. I know I’m not being much help. Shit like this, I don’t know what to do with.”

“Shit like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know! Life’s various complications. What are you going to do with her?”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do with her? She’s my child.”

“She’s brainwashed.”

“It sounds so terrible.”

“What else did she say to you before I got home?”

“I don’t know. Things about not going to the doctor. Not going to school. I already told you.” Panic rises from the soft place between my ribs, but I push it down with effort because panic will do me no good at this moment. I must maintain some kind of control.

Marty says, “Christ.”

“I tried to hold her. She froze up like I was going to hit her.” I say nothing about being slapped.

“Well, you don’t know how she’s been living.”

“But I saw her until she was ten. I saw her every week. She seemed fine. Adorable. David obviously doted on her — she was, without a doubt, his favorite. I even felt a little sorry for William. I thought, Everything’s turned out okay. As if things were better for her. Oh God. I should have never…”

Marty reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He lights one and hands it to me. I take it.

“Do you think she’s really an orphan?” he asks.

I wipe at my eyes, suck at the cigarette. “Does it matter?”

“It wouldn’t matter if she were, say, a scrappy black Lab who followed you home. It matters if she has living parents and a brother who’ve called the cops, and it turns out that you’re harboring a lying runaway. For all of her craziness, she’s. . healthy. She doesn’t look malnourished or neglected, although she does have a terrible haircut.”

“Marty!”

“There’s no way that a normal girl goes out in public regularly with a haircut like that.”

“You’re trying to tell me what to do.”

“I’m trying to keep you out of trouble. And you’re going to hate this,” Marty says, “but I do have one suggestion.”

“What?”

“You said that Rob used to be a lawyer before he started the magazine.”

“I’m not getting Rob involved in this.”

“Bring it up as a hypothetical. Say it’s your friend.”

“Marty, that’s what people say when they’re obviously talking about themselves.”

“All right.” A cigarette flick into the air. “Preserve your precious ego. We’ll see how this goes.”

“He was a criminal attorney. It has nothing to do with my ego. Isn’t there some other way to find out if her family is…”

“Dead.”

“Yes.”

“Obituaries. You could call her house.”

“No, that was never an option — their number was disconnected years ago, after the wreck. I guess there wasn’t… that wreck. Another wreck happened, but not that one.” With this, the car accidents jumble in my brain again. David and Gillian died. They did not die: David killed himself, and Gillian lived. But then Daisy and William died in a wreck, and Gillian lived. Gillian lived, lives, is living, is in the next room with a knife in her bag.

“I know some of it. But not the details…” I can tell before I speak that my voice will come out irritable and bordering on cruel: “No, I didn’t tell you details. You can’t stand to hear his name — why would I tell you anything about any of them?”

“Fine. I’m glad he’s dead. But who knows? No one seems to stay dead in this story.” He looks at the door.

“David’s wife called to say that he and Gillian had died. She’d met me when I was pregnant. She knew me as Marianne, but she didn’t know that I was teaching her children piano. It was the whole ruse—I was Mrs. Kucharski, teaching her children music in Sacramento. She was never supposed to know it was me. She never came to the lessons. And maybe she’d known all along, but I was a mess as soon as she told me about the accident, and she was smart enough to guess.”

“She blamed you for having sex with David.”

“No. I don’t think that was it. It seemed that way in the beginning, but she never said a harsh word to me. And you know about the ashes. The ones in the garden. A week later, I called to try and see if there was any way she could be convinced about having William come back. I didn’t want to let them go, but the line was disconnected. I tried to find them through the operator, and their number was unlisted — if they still had a line. That was the end.”

Marty says, “You should have gone out to the house back then, if you really wanted to see them.”

“He was supposed to be dead.”

“Maybe. But if you cared about William so much… Or did you doubt the wife?”

“I cared. Did I doubt her? I had the ashes. Bone fragments. Why would I doubt that? I cried for months.”

“You should call Rob.”

“This is going to sound stupid,” I say, having smoked my cigarette dead, “but I’m afraid to call Rob.”

Marty sighs.

What I want to say is, David loved me, and then, What power that word has over us pathetic mortals. I love Gillian, and where will that get us? Marty stubs his cigarette on the arm of the chair, adding to a pointillist array of ash.

Gillian is still sleeping when the phone rings; I dash to answer, afraid that she will wake.

“Where are you?” Rob says. “These fucking articles are piling up. You said you’d be here at ten. It’s eleven fifteen.”

“I said I was—”

“No matter what is or is not going on between us, Marianne, I expect you to be professional. We are going to press. Or I really will have to find someone else, which is not going to make me very happy with you. In fact, it may very well cause me to fire you.” His threat may be real, or it might not be. Either way, there is Nowak money and there will always be Nowak money. We could live off blood money until we die.

I imagine Gillian on the sofa and smiling in her sleep, her hair the same soft shade as mine.

“I have to go,” I say.

“You’re not going to have a job the moment you hang up the line,” he says.

I hang up.

I had a daydream about the bus, which I took to work in the mornings, and which dropped me off downtown near a sandwich shop that I frequented for coffee. The fantasy always involved me facing the back, where the doors opened, and I would be sitting, alert. I would stop and some maternal inclination would cause me to turn; I would then see a slender girl of about twelve stepping across the threshold, perhaps holding a backpack casually over one shoulder.

Even though what she wore in the fantasy varied (I was never concerned with this detail), she would always take the farthest seat in back so that I’d have to turn to watch her. Her knees would be a soft pink. She would be tall, like David, and charmingly gawky.

I’d know her instantly. I’d say, Gillian? And I might even repeat myself, because she’d be absorbed in thought, and ask again, Gillian?

She’d look up from her hands — she always looked at her hands, which at first I thought was an attentive piano student’s habit, but which I now believe is a reflex born from always observing her father’s — and she’d stare at me.

Mommy, she’d say, with complete recognition and a smile.

The fantasy ended there. There was no better climax and no need for resolution. I could and did replay this fantasy over and over. The fantasy was sometimes a way to try to get to sleep, a self-comforting tactic, and sometimes a way that my mind would torture me and keep me awake like a record skipping, skipping. It was one volume in a small library. Perhaps I never believed Daisy when she said that Gillian was dead. Perhaps I felt so much guilt for agreeing to give her up that I forced myself to pay the consequences.

What I didn’t realize until Gillian actually showed up at my home was that I’d had no fantasies about what would happen if Gillian were actually in my life. All of them were about the reunion and the surprise and the happy shock. What would I do with real-life Gillian? I hadn’t thought of that. What did young girls like? What did adolescent girls like? Perhaps it didn’t matter. The thing about a true-blue fantasy is that it’s based on the assumption that it will never come to pass.

“I’ve lost my job,” I tell her. She’s making a tuna casserole for dinner. I’d told her that we could go out and eat anything she wanted, but she wanted this, so she’s boiling macaroni. The touchy subjects of court, of police, of the way Nowaks live — all of it has been set aside for now.

“So you have no job. No work. That’s great,” she says. “Now you can spend all your time with me.”

“Yes.” I kiss her on the head. “That’s exactly what I wanted.”

“How will you have money, if you have no job?”

“We…” There is no way to explain right now where our money comes from. Finally I say, “We have money saved up.”

“What will Marty think?”

“Oh, he’ll be glad. He’ll be glad that I can spend time with him, and glad that I can spend time with you.”

“Will he?”

“Of course.”

“He won’t be jealous of me?”

“What? No, he won’t be jealous. He’ll be glad that you’re staying with us.”

She stirs the noodles with a wooden spoon. “Do you love him? I need pot holders.” She finds them, and she finds a colander. She drains the pasta over the sink, and a cloud of steam rises and consumes her, making her look like an angel, fogging her glasses. When she puts the pot back on the stove, she says, wiping her lenses with her finger, “Gosh, I can’t see a thing. Sometimes I can’t stand wearing these, you know? Anyway. I was thinking about William. Do you remember him?”

“Of course.”

A long pause. “I don’t think I was very good to him.”

“Sometimes it’s hard for siblings to get along. That’s normal.”

“I made him miserable. But I couldn’t help it. It was like something was wrong with me. I know something was wrong with me. I don’t know what siblings are like, really, except for us, but now I know I really tortured him. But you’re kind to Marty, I can tell. You take care of him, and you let him be happy, which is something that I wasn’t any good at.”

“I’m sure your brother loved you.”

“That’s not the point. You understand, because you’re a good tongyangxi. I can tell.” She gives me a sidelong glance. When I don’t reply, she continues: “Will we still go to court, Mrs. Kucharski?”

“I don’t know. I want you to be comfortable. I don’t want to make you do anything you wouldn’t want to do. But what was it you said? About a tongyang—?” I ask, and she stares at me like she’s trying to do complex multiplication in her head. She seems to want to say something, but doesn’t. Instead, she turns to the noodles.

When it’s time for dinner I knock on Marty’s door. He opens it and he stands there in jeans and a white T-shirt under a black sweater with a hole at the breast, his face vacant the way it is when he’s been staring at his papers for too long under a too-dim light.

I say, “Gillian made tuna casserole.”

“It smells good,” he says. He lingers at the door.

“Well, come eat then. I’ve got plates out for everyone.”

He says, “I’m going to, uh, meet Leo.”

“Right now?”

“Clear my head.” I realize he’s got loafers on. “I’ll eat some if there’s any left when I get back.”

After the door closes behind him, Gillian asks, “Where does he go, when he goes away like that?”

“Oh, just around the corner, around the block.” I put on a big smile. “I’m really excited about your casserole,” I say, scooping her a shovelful. It smells like a home that I’ve never lived in. Gillian leans in and inhales the steam. She settles down in Marty’s chair. And though I haven’t had anything blessed in my life for years and years, I say grace with Gillian: “Thank you, Lord, for this, your bounty, our blessings.” I squeeze her hand.

Halfway through the meal, which is largely silent, Gillian says quietly, almost casually, “Don’t tell Marty, but I almost stabbed someone on the train.”

My fork is still in my hand, though my fingers loosen of their own accord. I grip the fork in a fist like a child, laying it down on the table.

She says, “I met a man on the train. He was going to rape me, so I took out my knife to scare him. I know where to put a blade so that an animal will die. I could have killed him if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to kill him. I only wanted to scare him.”

I try to imagine this scene. I see my daughter standing in the middle of a train car, wielding a dagger at some pathetic stranger, my daughter out of her mind with a fear that’s multiplied by the confusion that accompanies it.

“What did he do?” I ask.

“He just told me that I needed to put it away. It doesn’t matter what he said, only that I didn’t do it. But it’s true, isn’t it, that the world is a dangerous place? You can’t tell me it isn’t.”

BRIEF THOUGHTS OF WOMEN. MARTY (1972)

I think no one is ever so crazy in love as with whomever they were in love with when they were seventeen, and when I was seventeen I was crazy, I mean positively loopy, about David Nowak, of all people. And what draws a seventeen-year-old to the thing that gets him going, that gets his cock so hard it hurts, depends on the kid, and even though I know saying that an infatuation or whatever gets guys “in trouble” is cliché—for example, when a man says, “I saw that girl and I was in trouble, let me tell you what”—I do mean it literally. When I first felt that stirring, years back, for the athletic thirteen-year-old who shared my new school and my new church and, eventually, even my family, I knew it was all over for me, I might as well have become a murderer.

Because I still remember exactly how, at seventeen, the back of David’s skull made me twitch, with the curve of its base leading to those two lines of muscle that came down to his neck, and he had these great arms. And I’m not saying that the men whom I was attracted to after that were all just like him, but they all had certain qualities of his. One or more. I had an encounter in the park with a younger guy who had David’s particular forearms, that same dusting of gleaming hair that I could see clearly even in the moonlight. Another cliché: to say someone “made me weak.” But it’s true that every time I saw someone like that I lost my moral fiber, I fell apart. I felt guilty about everything, especially things that made or make me happy, and it doesn’t take much time on the couch to figure out how that started. But when I met Leo — dear Leo — in Monterey, within three hours he’d already told me everything that I needed to know about myself, including the fact that I thought I didn’t deserve happiness. He told me before I even opened my mouth. And how I loved that! How could I not love that — someone who saw myself before I did?

Leo also said that had I loved God, and not men, at seventeen, things wouldn’t have turned out any better than they did for Annie. “Had you not renounced God,” he said, chewing on a piece of sourdough, “you would have shot yourself. Because wasn’t your father,” he asked, “the sort of man who kept a gun around?” And I laughed. Annie and I knew he kept it in that cigar box behind his two pairs of good shoes. I came close plenty of times to opening that box, even after I’d decided that God and the Bible were full of shit, even though to think that God and the Bible were full of shit, strangely enough, didn’t have much to do with how I feel or felt about my desires. And about that Colt.45—sometimes I thought my father would shoot my mother with it. Sometimes I spent nights awake, wondering if he would. I told Leo all about that. We were in the back of a bar in Monterey. Neither of us mentioned that we were homosexual, but we knew all the same.

I remember being dumbstruck by his face. Even though I suspected that he wouldn’t punch me for saying it, I was afraid to tell him, as badly as I wanted to, that he had beautiful eyes.

“You want to tell me something,” he said.

He was like a palm reader, or like a Gypsy with a glass orb.

I said, “Look. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I only let them touch me,” and he nodded.

What do Annie and Gillian do? For the first week they do very little except talk, even though I’ve noticed that Gillian doesn’t say much about her growing up. She has stories about the woods and the deer and the insects. She speaks with an odd cadence, and occasional Nowak-isms come out of her mouth that make me cringe. But the ladies of the house don’t go anywhere. Not downtown or to Tahoe; not to San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. They are only satisfied by each other. Of course, I want Annie to be happy, but I have doubts. I bring Leo over, and Gillian gets nervous the way I used to when I saw lights flashing near the park at night. She goes into Annie’s bedroom and shuts the door.

I’ve told Leo everything about Gillian that I know, including the near-violence on the train. In my room I put my hand on the sleeve of his long navy overcoat. I look up at the fuzz between his proud eyebrows. Behind his head hangs a framed photograph of our mother in the corner; she is sitting at a table with a fishbowl, the bowl filled with water and one sad-looking goldfish.

“She’s got a long road ahead of her,” Leo says, “if, in fact, she’s been living in isolation, and perceives everything as a threat. And who knows? Maybe she was going to be raped.”

He removes his overcoat. Leo works in a printing shop, so he comes to me smelling of mineral spirits and ink and hands that never come clean. I’m hit by a waft of chemicals from the coat’s removal, and we sit side by side on the bed.

“Did I ever tell you,” he asks, putting his smudgy hand on my hand, “that my mother was stabbed when she was a girl?”

“No,” I say. I try not to be outwardly surprised by anything Leo says, which I first decided when he told me that he had his first sexual experience at the age of eight. I kept my face expressionless and listened to him tell me everything.

He says, “You know how people say, ‘She was never the same after that’?”

“Yes.”

“Well. I think my mother was never the same after that. She was a living wound. I could tell that just being in the world hurt her. I’d never met anyone else like that until just now, seeing Gillian.”

“Mmm. And what about Annie?”

“Annie’s tough. She’s been through her fair share.”

“Yes.”

“You have to be tough,” Leo says, “to be a woman. Everyone’s out to get you.” He lies on the bed and pulls me to him. “We have it easy, you and I, in comparison.”

“Yeah?”

“I know you don’t think so, but it’s true.”

“You’re right, I don’t agree. When you say that, I feel sick.”

He kisses the top of my head. “Let me tell you what happened to my mother. She was five or so, playing in front of her house. Her mother had gone inside for a moment. I don’t know why.”

“To use the restroom. To check on the pie.”

“Something like that. My mother was playing and a man came up to her with a puppy on a leash. She was playing with the puppy and the man stabbed her in the back and strolled away. He left the puppy, which is a detail that I find excruciating. The knife remained in my mother’s back. She screamed. Of course, she tried to pull it out. Thank God she didn’t, or she would have died. My grandmother found her on the lawn with the puppy licking her ear and the knife sticking out of her body. I don’t know how she didn’t die. But you know how some people take a thing like that and never talk about it? My mom talked about it. She talked about it all the time. She showed me the scar. Marty,” he says, “be glad you’re not a woman.” I didn’t ask Leo what had happened to the puppy, although I wanted to.

The first man to take me in his mouth was another sailor. His name was, appropriately, Richard. He sucked me off and I fucked him in the fields; he seemed to have no control over his body, which went every which way, but God help me if I could give a shit. And then there was the lieutenant. After that, there was no stopping me from officially being a pervert. I was dishonorably discharged for being caught drunk and naked with another man on my ship. Still. Being caught was a relief, in a way. For a stretch of time I traveled Asia alone, and when I was tired of Asia I thought of my sister.

I found out through our mother that Marianne was already living in Sacramento at the time. I suggested, somewhat hubristically, that I join her, and she had no problem with that; in fact, she asked only a few questions, perhaps because she had her own secrets to keep. In the car on the way from the airport she told me about the second set of keys that she’d made for me. She told me about the job she had, how she was making her way as a secretary and then as a copy editor. But by the time we were having coffee in her kitchen she said, “I have something to tell you,” and then she told me, without going into detail, about what had happened with David. She was vague. I was jealous, though I tried not to be, that she had gotten her hands on him. It wasn’t until later that she mentioned that a baby was involved.

I told Leo a little bit about David, but not very much, and it was Leo who’d asked about it in a different way, saying, “Who was your first love?” I wanted to tell him, You, but the only thing that I know about love is that it makes you sick and starving, and Leo doesn’t make me feel that way, so I was honest, and he just smiled at me as if to say, It’s not a test.

He’s the one who first made friends with Gillian. I let him in and hugged him; he walked to her and handed her something small and green, Gillian with her tangled blond head in Annie’s lap.

“Leaves of Grass,” he said. “It’s a book of poems.”

“I thought we had all the books,” she said, and we didn’t say anything about this but knew what it meant, and when we tried not to look like she was wrong she knew that she was.

Leo brought her books: poems, cookbooks, plays, novels. After a week of this she asked him to stay in the living room and talk about e. e. cummings, which was like nothing she’d read before, she said. So they read together. While Leo read, Gillian looked at her hands, and Annie and I looked at each other — how the hell were we to react to any of this? And then Gillian started talking more, in a way that seemed like she was getting comfortable around us, but she still wouldn’t leave the apartment. Leo said that Gillian had left one life of isolation for another, and that Marianne knew this but seemed unwilling to change it.

“When I was trying to find your house,” Gillian said to Annie, “I saw things that scared me, but I knew that I had to get through them if I wanted to find you. But I remembered. I’m clever. Now I’m here, and I don’t see why I have to go anywhere.”

We celebrated Thanksgiving, which Gillian had never done before. I’d wanted Leo to have his Thanksgiving with us. I’d even asked him, as stupid as it was, and he smiled sadly at me and said that his daughters love Thanksgiving, which was something that I didn’t want to hear — but it was my fault for asking a stupid question. I try not to ask those questions. I try not to make things worse for him than they have to be.

I must have looked sad during the Thanksgiving preparations, mashing the potatoes with an air of melancholy, because Marianne turned to me and asked, “Marty, have you ever asked him to leave his family?”

“What?”

“Leo.” She blushed, not looking at me. “I was just wondering if you’ve ever thought about asking him to… leave them. To be with you.”

“No,” I said. “No, never.”

“I see how happy you are together, that’s all. And things are changing in this country.”

I didn’t say anything after that. Not about the politics of homosexuality. Nor did I say, Leo loves his daughters and would never, ever leave them. And especially not, Being happy together has nothing to do with it, even though it’s the truest thing I could have said, or could ever say, about us.

So on Thanksgiving it was just the Orlichs and the single Nowak, gathered around the table with the biggest turkey that Annie could find. I watched Annie carve the turkey, her face glowing.

“There is much to be thankful for,” she said.

Gillian nodded, and I said, “Hear, hear,” which could have been interpreted as sarcastic, but I did want Annie to smile, and there hadn’t been so much enthusiasm in the Orlich household in years and years.

“Wait,” I said, “let me get the wishbone for you,” and I pried it from the carcass while Gillian watched.

“You take one side and I’ll take the other,” Annie said. “Then we pull. Whoever gets the bigger piece will have their wish come true.” They pulled. Gillian won.

“I wished that everything will come out right in the end,” she said.

Still, this way of life couldn’t last. We all knew that. It was going to be winter, and the beginning of a new season meant Gillian would have to get ready to go to school in the spring, which seemed impossible given her current state, but what else could we do? After Thanksgiving, Annie made a call to social services and told them as much as she could bear to tell them, including a mix of truths and half-truths: a narrative about her biological daughter being unregistered and an informal adoption and a whole slew of deaths both recent and not recent, leaving the unregistered daughter without family, except for herself, the anonymous woman, and what should she do? Well. There would have to be records of the dead family members. There would have to be evidence of the anonymous woman being the unregistered girl’s mother. There would have to be an investigation of the anonymous woman’s home, to see if it was fit for a child. That was all Annie could remember; she hung up, overwhelmed, without finishing the conversation.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked Leo and me. We were camping out in my room, whispering, while Gillian made tuna salad in the kitchen. She had an obsession with canned tuna.

“You have to do these things,” Leo said. “You — both of you — have to face reality.”

But there was no phone number. No way to reach the mother and the brother. The number had been disconnected forever ago. The phone call to social services had been anonymous, and nothing had been said about abuse, so it could be said that it wasn’t a completely urgent situation. The urgency was the urgency of people, both strangers and non-strangers, who felt they knew best about what Gillian needed, and Gillian could sense it — I knew she could. It frightened Gillian. How could it not? Anything we mentioned that had to do with authority figures scared the shit out of her.

Annie and I told each other that we had time to think about the future, which meant that our concept of the future was of something that would never come. In this state of denied temporality Annie decided that she wanted to introduce Gillian, gently, to the world outside of our home. I agreed that this was a good idea. The two of us could bring Gillian somewhere fun. Perhaps, we said to each other, she wouldn’t be so afraid of the life to come, whatever that life was to be, if we took her somewhere benign. It had been a bad idea to suggest the capitol, for example, because the capitol implied government and authoritarian forces; we might as well have suggested a visit to Alcatraz for all of our foolishness.

“Somewhere whimsical,” Annie said. “Somewhere fun.”

It was her idea to bring Gillian to the Natural History Museum. “She’s mentioned David practicing taxidermy,” she said. “The Natural History Museum is essentially one giant taxidermy exhibit.”

We mulled over this possibility for half a day. The museum was perhaps not the best choice because of the crowds; still, there would be people no matter where we went, and part of the reasoning behind this excursion was to give Gillian the experience of crowds, and of acclimation to aimless groups of other humans. We would go to the museum on a weekday morning, when children would be at school. We reasoned that we could stay and have a gander for a few hours and maybe longer, if Gillian was having a good time, and then we would go home, having expanded her tiny world that much more.

I did wonder whether she’d be frightened to see the animals. It seemed impossible that she’d ever been to a zoo, and even though the museum’s animals were dead and stuffed, their corresponding size and realism might scare her. I had no idea what she’d make of an elephant. I tried to imagine the context of the situation, attempting to come to a conclusion about possible reactions, and found it impossible. Small children went to the Natural History Museum. They, too, were unaccustomed to enormous beasts and sharp-eyed birds, and were in fact delighted by them. Small children experienced such things with wonder. Was Gillian capable of wonder?

But Annie was so excited by the idea that I didn’t ask my pointless questions, and we piled into the car — I took the backseat — one Tuesday morning so that we could go to the museum.

“You’ll like the museum,” Annie said for the umpteenth time. I knew from the brittle sound of her voice that she was nervous. I could practically hear the words splintering as she said them, no matter how she tried to infuse the line with enthusiasm. “It’s simply remarkable how they’ve managed to make things so lifelike.”

I asked, “Is there any animal in particular that you’d like to see?”

Gillian fidgeted with the ceiling of the car with her fingertips, plucking at the fabric with her nails. I was afraid that she would begin to tear a gaping constellation of holes. “I would like to see a whale,” she said.

“Yes!” said Annie. “They do have a whale. I think they acquired a whale skeleton just last year.”

“What do you know about whales?” I asked.

“They’re like enormous fish,” Gillian said. “And Jonah was swallowed by one.”

“Yes,” Annie said.

We parked at the museum and entered the building, which was, as we had predicted, almost empty at that early weekday hour. The double doors opened into an alcove where an elderly woman with mottled skin and a clearly practiced smile sat and sold us tickets while Gillian played with the pen people used to sign checks, which was attached to the counter with a rope of metal beads. She pulled the pen tight on its leash and then dropped it, watching it dangle, and then she put it back on the counter and rolled it off so that it dangled again.

The Natural History Museum in Sacramento was small. Marianne and I had grown up visiting the one in New York City, which is the most famous of such museums, and I’d come to Sacramento’s version only once because I found it so paltry. I saw what Marianne meant when she said that it might be a good destination because of the taxidermy: the opening rooms were entirely composed of dioramas organized by climate and geographical location. North America came first. I followed Annie and Gillian as they walked to the first diorama, which depicted a pair of deer against a two-dimensional, painted background of hills and flat blue sky. I noticed the presence of an air duct disrupting a cloud, and Gillian said nothing, but she stared and stared. I thought that she must have seen deer where she lived; it was impossible to live in an even remotely rural area in Northern California without seeing deer, or even wild pigs. Mountain lions.

She did startle at one exhibit. It was the violence, I guessed, that bothered her in that diorama of wolves and a felled deer. The wolves’ mouths were painted a sticky red. The deer bore gaping wounds of the same color. I watched Gillian grab Annie’s arm even as she didn’t look away from the scene.

“Remember, it’s not real,” Annie soothed. She put one hand on Gillian’s.

“I know it’s not real.” But Gillian didn’t move from the diorama. She reached out over the waist-high wall, over the sign that detailed an explanation of the scene, and lowered her fingers to one of the wolves’ backs, at which I said sharply, “Gillian, no.” I tried to be gentle about it, but Gillian turned to me with a colorless face. I hadn’t intended to sound so harsh, or to scare her.

Annie said, “You can’t touch them. It’s not allowed,” and gave me a dirty look.

We saw beavers and sea lions and birds dangling from the ceiling on wires. We moved into the next room and saw lions. I worried about the lions because they, too, were shown attacking an antelope, but Gillian seemed less bothered by this faux violence. She barely looked at the lions, her eyes casting about to find something to snag upon. I had no idea what she was thinking as she saw these things, because she said nothing as she looked at the stuffed animals and the maps on the walls and read the placards by each diorama.

At some point she and Annie wandered over to an exhibit on pea plants. I assumed that it was something about Mendel; having no interest in feeling like a high school biology student, I stood a few feet away and examined a warthog. Leo would have a good time here, I thought. He and I would have a good laugh at these bizarre dioramas that tried to resemble real life, but were art forms in themselves, and not very good ones.

“Marty,” Annie hissed.

She was still standing by the pea plant display with Gillian. By the time I reunited with the two, Gillian was staring at the floor, unmoving. I had no idea what was happening. “Gillian?” I asked, and tilted her face up to mine.

“What’s wrong?” Her eyes wouldn’t focus. I looked at Annie. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “We were reading about Mendel. Darwin. Finches.” She waved at the air.

“Let’s sit down,” I said, because I have always been good in a crisis, and I was afraid Gillian would faint. I found a bench and we sat with Gillian at the left, Annie in the middle, and myself at the right.

“Put your head between your knees,” I said to Gillian.

When she didn’t do anything, Annie repeated what I’d said, and Gillian folded neatly forward. Before long, she was crying. Her head dangled between her knees, which were bony and stuck out from beneath a plaid skirt Annie had dug up from somewhere, and Gillian was making an ugly sound like a baying dog in the quiet museum.

“Christ,” I said.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Annie put her hand on Gillian’s back.

I figured it out before Annie did. At least, I had the hunch. They’d been looking at an exhibit about genetics, and Gillian was clever enough. If she hadn’t been educated in genetics at home, she could still likely figure out from a cursory explanation of dominant and recessive genes that her mother and father, the mother and father that she knew, could not be her biological parents; on the other hand, this blond woman, her former piano teacher, a woman with sunshine hair like hers and the same thin mouth, could be her mother and probably was. But neither is Annie stupid, and I suspected her of being willfully ignorant about what had upset Gillian; perhaps she feared this revelation and was pretending not to recognize its arrival — perpetuating the confusion, buying time.

Soon Gillian began to make the sharp inhalations and exhalations of a toddler who’s just had a crying jag, and Annie said, softly, “Is it something about your parents?” I could barely hear her. I could see only the back of her head, which was turned toward me. When Gillian nodded, Annie said, in that same small voice, “I’m your mother, Gillian. I’m sorry it was a secret.”

Gillian said, “I don’t understand how it happened.”

So Annie told her, surrounded by scientific exhibits and glass cases full of bones. She told her daughter about knowing David as a child and then being separated from David as an adolescent; about her brief affair with David when he was married to Daisy and living in Polk Valley with baby William; about making the choice to let David and Daisy raise her. At this point her voice became halting, and the words came more slowly. I thought she wouldn’t be able to finish the story, but she did, including the tale of becoming Mrs. Kucharski, the piano teacher. She even told Gillian her real name, and Gillian repeated it, the echo cementing them both in place.

“Let’s go home,” I said. It seemed fitting after such emotional outbursts. No one objected, and we went back the way we’d come, through Africa and North America, to the double doors. I thought briefly of the whale that Gillian still hadn’t seen. I wondered whether she’d ever see it now. Annie kept her hand on Gillian’s shoulder until we got to the car, where we resumed our positions. The car pulled into the light, and then we were moving steadily into something I could not name.

Ten minutes into the ride back, Gillian said, “William is still at home.”

I almost said, Christ, but held my tongue. She admitted to lying about the car accident, which Annie couldn’t bring herself to be angry about given her own fresh revelations, and we couldn’t get Gillian to explain the context for her lies. Annie did ask if she’d known all along that Mrs. Kucharski — if she—was her mother. Was that the reason she’d run away from home, leaving William behind, to seek out the long-lost piano teacher’s husband? Why, in the end, did she come to Sacramento? But after her initial confession about William, Gillian deflated. All she would say, over and over again, was that Ma and David were dead and that William was alone. “We have to go get William,” she said.

“All right,” Annie said, and if I were the type of man who would throw up my hands in extremis, I would have.

I was losing what little patience with Gillian I had, but Annie had an infinite supply of patience for her. It was at this point — halfway during the car ride from the Natural History Museum to our little home — that Annie stopped consulting with me. I was no longer part of the little club in charge of making decisions about Gillian, nor was I made privy to Annie’s thought process as she decided that the two of them would find out on their own how William was. They would make their own way.

Leo and I did what men do: we performed the physical labor of loading them up in the Ford with snacks and suitcases. I watched Annie grow more agitated, her body twitching at loud noises and sudden movements; at the same time Gillian grew increasingly enigmatic. To me she was but a faint echo of her mother, after all, and as they prepared to leave that echo rang out and faded until it was almost nothing.

“Keep me updated,” I said to Annie, and pressed my lips to her palm. Gillian turned her face away. I asked my sister to at least give me the address of the Polk Valley house. “I don’t like the idea of you just heading out there, the two of you by yourselves.”

Now Leo and I are on the sofa, alone in the apartment without the women. Our faces are men’s faces in an apartment of lace and green glass bottles. He slouches in his seat, which he never does; his posture is always impeccable.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“Tired?”

He looks sideways at me and smiles. “Yeah. Sure.”

I say, “Let’s go to the ocean.”

We take a cab to his apartment — his wife isn’t home, is at a doctor’s appointment with the children — and we drive his car for hours, through valleys, to Stinson Beach, riding the skinny rope of road until we reach the shore. He parks. I get out and the wind is whipping the hems of our clothes. Barely anyone is around. We are, as always, careful not to touch, not even by accident. I don’t believe in God, but this is the closest that I’ve ever felt to him — in this place, always the same shore, where everything is the same dull shade of gray and holding the earth together with one gluey hue.

A young couple sits on a blanket on the sand, surrounded by twists of kelp and, nearby, one imperious gull. A man walks his black Labrador. I stand with my hands in my pockets next to Leo, who also has his hands in his pockets, and I say what I’ve been thinking during the entire drive, which is “We should go after them.”

“I have to get home,” Leo says, “but you should.” Then he turns and is on my mouth, is kissing me in front of no one and possibly everyone despite legalities, despite what’s proper, despite comfort. His lips are cold and chapped; his hands are on my arms, his firmly pressing fingers against my ribs as if we were dying.

AFFLICTIONS (1972)

In the car to Polk Valley both mother and daughter are afflicted, with Gillian exhibiting paroxysms of guilt: biting the middle joints of her fingers, leaving deep grooves. Her arms itch. When she looks at them she sees that hives have sprung up from wrist to elbow. She scratches the perimeter of one island and says, apropos of nothing, “I had to leave him.” At this, Marianne’s head tilts.

Gillian says, “If I didn’t leave him, I couldn’t have found you. I never would have found out that I had a different mother all along. It makes so much sense, though. You were the only outsider we saw for so many years.”

Marianne wants to ask, Why couldn’t William come with you? but to speak this would be accusatory. She has one eye on the road and one eye on Gillian, whose ad hoc pixie haircut is beginning to grow out in uneven patches. Again her beauty is coming through, a light through a crack. Marianne tries not to dwell on how this beauty reminds her of her own beauty, steadily fading since she moved to Sacramento, or maybe lost in the convent or during the pregnancy. Gillian fidgets with the window crank and rolls it down, rolls it up, then rolls it down again. She has changed back into her own green dress. She has her tote with her — her clothes, her undergarments, a bottle of barbiturates and another of opiates and tranquilizers that she found in the bathroom among other partially full bottles, her knife, a garnet ring that she took from Marianne’s jewelry box, her half of the wishbone, her Bible. Objects of safety, is what she tells herself. Talismans.

She had taken the pills in the middle of the night because she recognized them from the Physicians Desk Reference, which Ma referred to every so often for reasons of health, and Gillian knows those pills could kill her if only she took them all. Already she has been preparing herself for arriving at the house, their “home sweet home,” and finding William dead by suicide or other tragedy; and should this happen, she would want the escape hatch by which to end her own life; she would want to follow her brother and her mother and her father. A lineage of Nowaks, gone hand in hand from the valley to the shadow of Death, where she would likely go soon enough anyway — beyond what she’d already known from Ma about murder and muggings and unpreventable accidents, she’d found a newspaper on the train that spoke of a man who had killed people (“serially” was the term, he was called a “serial killer”); the serial killer apparently killed for no reason, which was a fresh horror that Gillian could barely contemplate. And this particular escape hatch of suicide is more of an idea than intent. She hasn’t thought it through.

Out of Sacramento already, the environs quickly change from small city to suburbs. There are fast-food chains in orange and yellow — colors meant to stimulate the appetite — and homes exactly identical, or mirror images, of one another. Gillian is thinking about William sliding his hands up her legs, pinching the inside of her thigh until it burned pink; and her telling him that she didn’t like it, and him saying he was sorry. Always he was so sorry, so easily sorry, so easily made to feel guilty, and what difference did it make? She knows that Marianne Orlich loves her in particular, but was always kind to both children, and Marianne would feel generously even toward a boy she only remembers as somewhat of a piano prodigy and a lover of Beethoven sonatas. Maybe she will remember his thick, thick hair. She will be wondering, Gillian knows, why Gillian abandoned her brother. Gillian will have to have a good answer for this. She is stuck fast to the word abandon, not realizing that she is not, in fact, the older and therefore allegedly more independent one; that an outsider may see the situation as the following: William may have decided to stay at the house for his own reasons, or that he may be, in fact, doing fantastically by himself.

She’s been reading Randy’s notebook. Most of it is about Cassie, whom he calls “C.” In the notebook he details her body and behavior with what seems like astounding precision, to the point where Gillian feels she knows Cassie herself — has been inside C’s body (both sexually and spiritually), has possessed C’s thoughts. This privilege unnerves as much as it excites her. What, then, does it mean that Randy and C are no longer lovers? How many of these sorts of obsessive connections is Randy supposed to make before he dies? Exhausting.

“I have to pee,” she tells Marianne.

They find a gas station with an accompanying convenience store. While Marianne sits in the car, Gillian goes inside. Marianne can see Gillian walk to the back of the store with stiff and anxious limbs. She can see Gillian trying the knob to the door inside.

In the gas station, Gillian can’t help but think about the K & Bee, which felt significantly more dignified than this place — this place with its rows of unintelligent snack foods and candies. Staring openly at her like a stock boy, the presentation of cheap snacks in bright colors is as tempting as that kid with the blotchy face and long limbs, and licks a similar excitement up her belly. While she waits for the door to open she takes a box of Lots-a-Fun Candies and turns it over in her hive-covered hands, looking at the purple box and the oblong shapes. The typography makes her think of someone shouting. These things Gillian finds charming, and she falls into the old reverie. She smiles, unable to help herself.

“Hey, girly. You need a key for the bathroom.” It is the man behind the counter with long hair like Jesus.

Gillian comes back to the car, tapping on the window. The passenger door opens.

“You didn’t use the bathroom?” Marianne asks.

She slides in, slams the door. “It needed a key.”

“No one was there to give you the key?”

“I don’t know.” Gillian is picking at her cuticles. “Forget it.”

“Honey, you need to go. I’ll come with you, okay?”

Gillian hesitates. Eventually, they enter the convenience store together. The convenience store clerk — stoned — looks at the two of them, a woman and what he presumes is her daughter. The daughter will grow up to look like the mom. Already he can see it. The daughter’s beauty will turn handsome, with lines around the eyes and cheekbones sticking out of her now-soft face.

“The key to the restroom,” Marianne says.

The clerk has both elbows on the counter and is leaning forward as if settling in for a long conversation. He looks behind him at the key on a hook beside a sign for cigarettes. “You gonna buy something?”

“Sure.”

He hands over the key — a single small key on a thin ring, the entirety of which could easily be flushed down a toilet, and has already almost landed in the bowl several times.

Marianne gives Gillian the key. “Go ahead,” she says.

Gillian takes the key and goes back to the restroom. TOILETS, the door says in marker. She slides the key into the opening and turns it before yanking on the knob. She turns the knob the other way. It clicks without gratification. Her panic intensifies; she is unaccustomed to locks and keys. She looks back and sees that Marianne is talking to the clerk, pointing at something behind the counter on the wall, inattentive to her needs.

“Help!” she yells, her panic surprising even herself.

By the time Marianne comes to the back of the store, Gillian is shaking. Marianne hugs her. “Oh, honey,” she says. She takes the key and opens the door, hurrying her daughter in. The bathroom expels odiousness; there is toilet paper everywhere, and Marianne sees a shit smear on the floor and maybe on the wall. Gillian looks around, absorbing it all, and Marianne directs her to the toilet, which Gillian sits directly on after yanking down her panties without arranging any tissue on the seat — Marianne doesn’t say anything about it, but she thinks about it. If she’d had more time, she would have. The sound of Gillian’s pee is remarkably animalistic, and Marianne tries to think of the last time she was with someone like this, them openly urinating in front of her. This is my daughter, she thinks. Things like this happen with a daughter. She waits to feel a burst of love for this, but no such burst comes.

After Gillian rinses her hands in the sink, which provides no soap, above which there is no mirror, the two of them exit the bathroom.

“I just need to finish buying something before we go, okay?” Marianne says.

Gillian says, “I want to leave right now.”

“One minute.” She goes to buy cigarettes; Gillian’s eyes flick back and forth. She scratches her arms with both hands and suddenly sprints to the back of the store, grabs her candies, and hands them to Marianne. After Marianne takes them Gillian turns away, ignoring the transaction. Do you like candy? Marianne wants to ask. Tell me something true.

They return to the car. Gillian’s hives are intensifying, with a patch on her face growing hot, and then she says, “I said I wanted to get out of there. Why didn’t you listen?”

Marianne pulls out of the gas station parking lot and they are on the road again, the sun blurring their eyes. Both are so tall as to almost touch the top of the car — Gillian with her short hair, Marianne with her twisted and lazy updo. “I had to buy something,” she says, “because you used the bathroom. When you go to a store and use their bathroom, you need to spend money on something.”

“Why?”

“Because — bathrooms in stores are only for customers, honey. People who buy things.”

“Why?”

“That’s how they make money.” She looks over at Gillian. “I’m sorry. Try to take a nap. You can recline the seat and take a nap, okay?” Again, a lump like ice stuck too hard to swallow, making it hard to feel anything but fear. She is in over her head, she is sure of it, and yet she still reaches over and pats Gillian on the knee the way she would pat a strange dog. “Pull the lever on the side and lean it back.”

“I don’t want to stop again.”

“We don’t have to stop again.”

“I’ll hold it. I’ll go in the grass.”

“Okay.”

Gillian looks out the window. “There are no people like me, are there?” she says, thinking of William and the state he must be in now. Has he even left the house? How much food did she leave him? Why did she have to be the maternal one, the one who cared about their fate? She cranks down the window and out go the candies, ricocheting down the road. “I’m a monster,” she says.

“You’re not a monster. You—”

“No.”

And Marianne thinks, My poor baby, my poor baby who almost stabbed someone, probably for putting his hand on your shoulder, you poor, inconsolable child.

“Why weren’t you there?” Gillian finally asks, and starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Marianne says, wiping at her own face, “forgive me, forgive me.” She squeezes Gillian’s shoulder as she drives.

The roads turn to highway and they are moving quickly again with the valley all around them, hills the color of awakening grass, Gillian’s head turned with a wet face, pretending to sleep but really looking and thinking, There is so much of the world. Again one of the Nowak books, the world atlas, comes to mind; Eden was a place, and so, too, were Greece and Rome; so, too, were Africa and South America. And here she is seeing the spaces in between the only places she knows. How much more of the world can there be? The possibilities feel unfathomable, infinite. She pictures herself playing her familiar piano and peering over the top to see William, his head bobbing, his ecstatic fingers leaping, and she remembers him pressing his face against the warmth of her back in the sun in the endless long meadow, and she remembers her father and mother and William and herself sitting around the dinner table with golonka and a broiled fish and mustard greens. In her memory William pelts an insult at her for being grumpy: “The crabbiest crustacean of them all.”

Mother and daughter left at 12:43 P.M. and it’s now 1:22 P.M., with Gillian having just woken from a nap she didn’t mean to take. Her hives have faded but aren’t entirely gone. While she was asleep, Marianne quietly sang Carpenters songs to herself and smoked one-fourth of the pack of cigarettes she purchased from the Jesus-man’s machine; the Camels gave only borrowed calm. On the left and later on the right is a steep drop-off, with only stunted guardrails to keep them safe. When Gillian turns to her, her face light pink, Marianne asks, “How did you sleep?”

“I closed my eyes. It just happened,” Gillian says. She sits up straight. “Where are we?”

“Still on the highway.”

“I dreamed about my house,” she says. “William is going to give up if we don’t find him. He’s not strong — you don’t know him like I do. No one does. You’re not a tongyangxi—I know without you telling me.”

“No,” Marianne says. “I don’t think I am.”

“I’m William’s tongyangxi. I mean, his Eve. I was supposed to be. I was, for a while. I…” She props her glasses up her nose. “Then I ended it… It was about love, but I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t keep letting him…It was making me crazy how foolish it made him, but I knew I was the fool because I couldn’t. Now I’m thinking, maybe my parents were the crazy ones. I don’t know.”

Christ, Marianne thinks, and she tries to say something normal. The two of them. The brother and the sister. What did I do? They ruined her. I ruined her. She entertains the thought of driving off the road, but catches herself, knowing what a melodramatic and stupid gesture that is. She’s not David. She will not commit suicide under any circumstances. She will fix this. No, she won’t cry anymore, but waits for her throat to relax and the pain to relent. She nods instead, gritting her teeth behind her lips.

“William, though, I made him so sad. It’s not okay, what I did to him. He called me his fish, when he felt like being sweet. Can you go faster?”

Marianne still can’t talk and won’t shake her head, so she nods again and drives with all of her muscles stiffening.

“What a beautiful day,” Marianne says finally. “I don’t remember this route being quite so beautiful.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“We’re going to get William, all right, and then we’re going to go back to Sacramento, and then we’ll get things sorted. You don’t have to be afraid of anything bad ever again, because you have me, and you will always have me from now on, all right?”

“Yes.”

“You will always have me. I haven’t always been in your life, I know. And you have been through so many things that I can’t even begin to understand. But I am your mother, and I will make things right for you. I promise.”

But William, Gillian thinks, will always want me.

Soon there is a sign: WELCOME TO POLK VALLEY, POP. 2100. The rest of the sign is barely visible beneath a sheet of brush. To Gillian, the words are mystical. She needs to get home and see William, but knows that it’s likely William has no food and probably didn’t even cast an eye toward the map she’d drawn him; he’ll need something to eat, she says to Marianne, so they stop at the K & Bee to pick up sandwich fixings and juice. At the cash register, the woman behind the counter looks at Gillian and says, “Your family still sick?”

Gillian nods. She reaches into her tote and hands the woman a crumple of bills. “They’re very sick,” she says.

Gillian directs Marianne to Laurier and Sycamore, and then to the dirt roads that to Marianne look like nothing. She can’t imagine that she can bring a car up these roads, as though Gillian has invented them. But like seeing a doe among doe-colored trees, Marianne soon learns the casual edges of where cars have been. Several times she thinks she will kill them on the foothill drive — not because it’s worse than the mountainous roads, but because the roads, if that is what they will be called, are so much less demarcated. They pass the mailboxes, the trailer park, and the place where Gillian was nearly dragged to her death, which Gillian notices and says nothing about in a small allegiance to Ma.

And here is the house, which seems so small to Marianne now as opposed to how large it was in her memory, but to Gillian it remains enormous, a castle rising out of the fog. The dead grass stands sturdy and yellow. The plants in their pots on the steps. The welcoming arrangement of boulders. Marianne parks behind the Buick, which is encased in a sheer layer of dust, and Gillian jumps out of the car, her tote flapping on her shoulder. She runs up the steps to the door; Marianne has never seen a girl grow so long-legged in her stride. Gillian bangs on the door and calls for her brother. Marianne hefts the groceries in her arms. She was a girl when she last climbed up these steps. She tries to picture herself as that girl as she watches Gillian.

Gillian bangs and calls, “William!” as though she intends to break the door down. She even hops a little on both feet.

The door opens and Gillian sees William. She thinks, He is bird-boned and sallow, with hair unattended to and like my father’s when he was unwell, wearing pajamas, smelling of unwashed hair and body. I am hesitant to believe that I am here, and that he is still desiring me, but that this desire is now beyond lust or love but something that is pretty much killing him. Marianne thinks, This is a malnourished boy with no substance to him and reeking of, what else, canned tuna — how could Gillian have left this boy behind, this vulnerable, desperate creature?

“Gillian,” he says, and falls into her, wrapping his arms around her neck, not noticing the alleged Mrs. Kucharski in his passion or exhaustion.

“Hey there. Hey, you.” Gillian kisses the top of his head over and over. “It’s okay. I came back. It’s okay.” She says something in their language.

They stand there for what, to Marianne, is an awkwardly long time, until Gillian says, “Let’s go inside.”

Marianne had never gone to as many estate sales as David had, but she recognizes the smell of a death house when she enters one. The staleness of the air, as if nothing has moved or breathed or spoken for months, is a gas that fills the hall and then the living room where they sit. Where she sat before. The extravagance of two pianos, she thinks. William is still leaning on Gillian. She is someone new now. She holds her brother to her breast, her hand at his shoulder. Marianne stares openly at them — why not stare openly? The word incest, which she won’t allow herself to think, plays at the borders of her mind. What have they done? What have they done with each other? His face is too close to her chest for Marianne’s comfort. There are rotting food smells, too, she realizes. Gillian was right to ask for food. They’ll have a brief snack, and then she will bring them both back to Sacramento with her. They’ll deal with the Nowak house and this terrible brainwashing later. The paint is peeling and nothing has been cleaned in what looks like months or even years. Even the sofa is washed in gray now. She remembers that peach sofa as having a brighter shade.

“Do you remember me, William?” she asks, setting the bag on the floor.

“Yes.”

“I’m Mrs. Kucharski.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to help you.” She wants to have something better to say, but leaves it at that. She doesn’t know what William will comprehend as “help” or “helpful.”

“What?” William says, with more force than Marianne could have imagined coming out of his diminished frame. His hands are still on his sister. He looks at Gillian. “We don’t need help. Is that why you left?” he asks her.

“Not exactly,” Gillian says.

“We don’t need help. Not from you or anyone else. I’m glad that you brought Gillian back, but you should leave now. We’re fine.”

Marianne’s gaze travels down the hall. “Where’s your mother?”

“Dead,” Gillian says. “I told you.”

William says, “She’s right, she’s dead.”

“You are two children who have no parents,” Marianne says. “That’s why you need help.”

“You’ll live with us?” William asks.

“No — I have a home in Sacramento. Do you remember the home in Sacramento? Where you played piano with your sister? You’ll come and live with me.”

“I doubt that.” William grabs Gillian’s arm still more tightly.

She had a plan, Marianne reminds herself. Come to the house. Retrieve William. Allow them to grab a few possessions, and then drive them back to Sacramento. She had, to some degree, counted on Gillian to convince her brother to leave; presently Gillian will not make eye contact with her. But what am I going to do in the face of refusal, Marianne wonders, carry them out of here by force? Call the police? She wonders if this is what Gillian had planned all along: bringing her to this place only to force her to leave — even if Marianne is Gillian’s birth mother, even if the children are alone and without resources and have been abandoned to this rotting home.

“Let me talk to my brother,” Gillian says. “I just want to apologize to him.” Her shoulders, she realizes, are looser now. She’d been clenching them for weeks. I am a fool, she thinks, to consider that we could ever live a different life — I was stupid and a fool to have wished for anything different. It’s not just William, or a dirty bathroom, the men who shouted filth, or Randy on the train. It is one age ending, and having no beginning to hope for.

Marianne stands.

“Please wait out front,” Gillian says.

Marianne says, “I’ll need the key.”

Gillian looks at her brother. He says, “We have a deadbolt that will keep you out regardless.”

“I swear,” Gillian says. “We’ll let you back inside. We really will.”

Reluctantly, Marianne stands, convinced she is losing an important battle in an obliterative war. She is the adult, she reminds herself. Here, she is in charge. She walks to the hallway and puts her hand on the knob. “No shenanigans,” she says. She is tall and imposing in her olive coat.

The word shenanigans is unfamiliar to the children, but they nod, and then Marianne is outside on the stoop. She goes to the car for her cigarettes and matches. Help me, she thinks as she pulls open the door in the damp air. The sky is white and dappled gray. She looks out into the trees at one bird. I’m going to lose everything, she thinks.

Gillian is quiet. She says, brushing William’s hair out of his eyes, “I’m sorry I left. It was stupid.”

“I didn’t know what to do after you were gone. I couldn’t believe that you did that to me.”

“I know.”

“You’re not just changing your own life when you do things, Gillian.”

She nods.

The light is coming in through the curtains and shining on William’s face. His cheekbones are pronounced, but even more so now in the afternoon light, making Gillian feel as though she’s speaking to an exquisitely preserved corpse. She almost shudders to touch him.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“She’s going to bring us to Sacramento. She knows we exist now, and that we’re alone. She feels like she has to do this for us. She wants to do what’s right for us.”

“For you.”

“Yes, for me. But for you, too. I couldn’t live with myself if I left you here.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“We have to be brave.”

“Despite what you may think,” William says, “I am not brave. I don’t even know what that means. I waited for you to come back, but that was no indication of strength. Perhaps stupidity.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Gillian says. “There are other ways to be brave. Smarter ways.”

“What, you suggest suicide? And what if we don’t die? We get shut up in Wellbrook?”

“Look—”

“I don’t want to die,” William interrupts. “I just want to be with you. I’ve been thinking about this — about what I’d do if you came back. I’ve been thinking about…” He gestures a wide arc. “So this woman takes us into the world. Why not let her?”

“Are you listening to me? I saw things.” And she thinks again, just as she has been thinking for the last few hours, of the things she saw in the Natural History Museum: the wolves and the deer, the hungry lions. She thinks of the mural painted on the wall in the front of the museum, which neither Marianne nor Marty had commented on. They had just walked by as if it were nothing, whereas Gillian could tell right away that something was wrong with the illustration, a timeline, with large and vivid images of animals and hairy, stooped humans that looked like animals. The museum had been nothing to them. It had been one more thing that they already knew to their bones.

“I am listening. Are you listening?”

“We can’t change enough. Do you hear me? We can’t change enough to be out there. It’s just like when the fire happened. I understand what Ma was trying to do now. She was just keeping us safe here, in this house, with her. I didn’t understand then, but I think you did. You need to believe me.”

“We could kill her. Run away. Live in the woods.”

“We could walk and walk,” Gillian says, “until we get to Taiwan.”

“We could even walk to Eden,” William says.

“But you want us to try to be in the world.”

He sighs. “Yes. Maybe.”

“She’s my real mother, you know,” Gillian says, and William turns to her uncomprehendingly.

Marianne opens the door, ushered in by a gust of wind. She is holding the groceries. “It’s raining out there,” she says, patting her own wet head. “We should go before the road gets sloppy.”

Gillian pauses. “There are some things I’d like to pack. Just a few things,” she says, looking at her brother, “before we leave.”

Marianne watches her carefully. She had anticipated this, the need for the children to bring things from home with them, but is surprised that Gillian has fallen in step with the idea of leaving; she had expected more of an argument. Without one, she suspects that the siblings are collaborating against her.

“I’ll give you half an hour,” she says. “Pack the most important things, all right? We’ll come to get the rest of your things on another trip.” She smiles at them. There will be another trip, she is trying to communicate—we aren’t abandoning your world for good. For now, she simply needs to get the children away. Once she’s removed them from this place for the first time, she’ll be able to acquaint them with new lives. That acquaintance and acclimation is essential.

At the idea of packing, William nods. So the children, owning no suitcases, fill boxes with no plan and a slothlike deliberation. Gillian sits in her room with a record crate, empties it, and folds clothes to put inside while Marianne watches her. Marianne, no fool, stays close to Gillian as her daughter slowly sifts through her dresser, pulling out an assortment of frocks (inappropriate, Marianne thinks, all of them shapeless and outmoded, she will need new ones for her new life) and more pairs of ethereal panties that are now tinged with perversion. She can’t bear to see the siblings together and is relieved that William is in his own room, packing his own things.

Later William wanders into the room with a crate. It appears that the sedimentary crate has a layer of clothes at the bottom, books in the middle, and papers at the top. Gillian doesn’t know what the papers are, but if she looked more closely she would see that they’re a diary he’s kept while she was away. “Will we drive in this weather?” he asks. The rain is clattering against the windows.

“I suppose not,” Marianne says. “We can wait for the rain to stop.”

“We get horrible storms near winter,” says Gillian.

“Well, at least you two seem to have your packing finished. I say we settle in until it’s time to head out again.”

Gillian says, “The roads will be muddy. Tires slide. We don’t take the Buick for days after a storm.”

“Days,” William says. He sets down his crate for emphasis and sits on it, his knees open.

“I know how to drive in mud.”

“Of course you know how to drive in mud,” Gillian says. She rises to standing. “But it’s getting dark, and I’m sure William hasn’t had dinner. I’m going to make some sandwiches. William,” she says, “we bought some things for sandwiches. I expect you ate everything while I was gone.”

Left alone in the bedroom with William, Marianne says, “I knew your father when we were young.”

William ignores her. Her stomach clenches. You raped my daughter, she thinks. She’s gone through enough, you bastard. She hates herself for hating a child. He is a child, even if he is almost an adult in body — he can’t know any more than Gillian does about the world, and still she loathes him. “You had sex with Gillian,” Marianne says, and William says nothing. He gets up and goes into the kitchen, where Gillian is spreading mayonnaise on sliced bread. She’s wearing his favorite dress, the green one with the elbow-length sleeves and ruffles at the cuffs. Her elbows pink. Her hands and their rough motions.

“Will we kill her?” he says in Mandarin.

Gillian sticks the knife in the jar. “I can’t do that. I told you, she’s my mother. She gave me to our parents.”

“What about Ma?”

“I don’t know.”

“Regardless. You had no qualms about killing her.”

“Fuck,” Gillian says in English, and then, returning to Mandarin, “I didn’t kill her.”

William, in his button-down and linen pants, comes up behind her. She feels his hand on her arm, squeezing, and he feels the softness of his sister’s skin. He kisses her on the shoulder. His breath is unclean.

“I’m sorry,” Gillian says.

“We don’t have to decide now,” William says, but they both know that this isn’t entirely true.

Marianne is in the hallway, listening to them speak in the language she can’t understand. She sees William standing behind his taller sister, his face very close to her neck, and she wants to shout, Stop, please stop touching her. Leave her alone. She turns and walks back to the living room. She had been in that living room once, pregnant and wanting to die, wanting to die and feeling guilty for the desire. She can remember exactly how she and Daisy and David had sat in this room when she came with a fecund belly. She had loved him then, even then, if she had loved anyone. Marty is at home, she reminds herself, Marty is waiting for me to come back, and we will make a new life together, all four of us. It will be a family that she had never intended, but was in the end meant to be: she and Marty will raise David’s children.

Gillian reenters the living room with William at her side, and Gillian hands out ham and cheese sandwiches on napkins.

“It’s really raining very hard, isn’t it?” Marianne says.

“Doesn’t it rain where you live, when it gets to be December? And snow?” asks Gillian.

“Sure.”

William looks at the ceiling, holding his sandwich. They eat in a trance.

“I wanted some tea,” Gillian says. “It’s on the stove.”

Marianne says to William, “You loved Beethoven, when I knew you.”

“Yes.”

“Please,” she says, “play something.”

He has never not played the piano when commanded to. It is ingrained in his marrow. He gets up and goes to the piano bench, where his hands hesitate and then draw through the air to the keys, striking the notes of the bright opening, the collapse into waves of a climb and descent. He plays for a full three minutes before the teakettle shrieks a long note. Gillian leaves the room with her tote dangling from her elbow, swaying as she walks. The music seems to remain in the air, as if it has stained the dust motes and fading light with a sad hue.

“That was beautiful,” Marianne says.

“I don’t have the whole thing yet,” William answers.

Marianne says, “The Hammerklavier. It’s a difficult piece. Perhaps the most difficult. I’m impressed that you know so much of it.”

He plays more Beethoven while Gillian is in the kitchen with all the stolen pills that will fit in the mortar, smashing them with the pestle, and thinking, This is a kindness. She keeps looking at the doorway to see if anyone will appear to stop her, and no one does.

Finally Gillian returns with a tray of cups. They drink their bitter tea, made with the last of the loose-leaf-filled tin that Ma had bought in Sacramento. Marianne wonders if it would be idiotic to try to drive them away from here; maybe they were telling the truth when they said that it would take days before the roads were safe again. Maybe they can spend the night here, and travel tomorrow. Still, she feels the urgency of having to get them away from the poisonous house. The longer they stay here, the more polluted they become.

“With the money you have access to,” she says, attempting to be cheerful, “you’ll be able to find a really nice place to live. How old are you, William? In a year, if you want, you can be independent. You’ll be an adult in the eyes of the law. You’ll be able to do whatever you want.”

William says, “I do whatever I want as it is.”

“This is a small world you’re living in, William. There’s a larger world waiting out there for you. Freedom.”

Gillian echoes, “Freedom,” which arouses Marianne’s hopes.

“Yes, freedom. You’ll be able to learn and do so many things.” She leans her head against a cushion. It’s been a long day, and she is tired.

William and Gillian sit in the middle of the room in silence. Marianne’s eyes are closed. In Mandarin Gillian says, “We could all use a nap.”

“I want to talk to you about her.” He jerks his head. “She doesn’t understand us at all. A kind woman, but… Gillian. .” he says. And he’s blinking slowly now, too, so slowly that his eyes actually remain closed for several long seconds. “Something isn’t right. You hopeless, hopeless — Gillian. No.” He presses his fingers into his eyeballs.

She takes him by the shoulders and gently lifts him to his feet. “Let’s go to bed,” she says.

They stumble to the bedroom they once shared. He’s been spraying clouds of perfume over the smell of fish and apples. She lays him down on the bed and lies down next to him, wrapping her arms around him. She kisses him softly on his sour mouth and he twitches, crying, putting his hand on the small of her back.

“Hey,” she says. “Everything is going to be okay.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I love you.”

“Shh.”

William goes quiet. When he hasn’t moved for as many heartbeats as Gillian can stand, she gets up and drifts from room to room—

— first the living room, where Marianne is slumped onto the couch, her form becoming ever softer, almost melting, as she sinks into the cushions. A spot of light from the lamp beside her comes over her thinly lined face. Here, too, are all the books in their shelves, and all the places they did not go. Gillian looks at her piano, but does not sit at the bench, nor does she play. There have been enough hours of playing. If only I loved it more, or loved anything more, she thinks. She wipes her eyes.

Down the hall, into the dim kitchen. Drawers of tools and errant notes reminding Gillian to do the laundry and telling William to mop the floors. One says, simply, MEAT. There is nothing of David’s left, not even a reminder to buy orange juice — his favorite. Everything of Ma’s left, including her body in the backyard buried not too deep. There are dirty dishes on the table covering years of carved messages. There is a place where an orange plopped onto the floor once and rolled one or two feet, and drawings of mountains scattered on the floor. The record player is silent. The refrigerator is empty.

And out of the kitchen, into the master bedroom. The room still smells like Ma’s jasmine and the faint fog of herbal remedies. It smells like cigarettes. The bed is made for two.

Here is the hatbox.

Here is Gillian, looking through the hatbox. She stares at the picture of Ma and David under the TSINGTAO sign, which she tucks into her pocket.

She goes back to the door to their old room and his body is still curled up tight at the side of the bed, having forgotten how to fill up space without her. Sweet William, make me an omelet; two kids, two omelets. She is not crying. Inside her head things have gotten very quiet.

When she lights the first curtain she’s surprised by how quickly the flame scampers up to the ceiling, a wild thing — her plan being to destroy all of it, her family and her house and, of course, herself, but it happens faster than she imagined, and with far more violence, which startles her. But she moves to the next curtain and lights that one, too, watching in fascination as the fire swallows it near whole. She sets the papers in the wastebasket on fire, and the flames shimmy up in search of something to catch. Her skin is bright with heat as she watches the room burn. Her eyes move to William, who is unmoving in the smoke.

Something in her stirs and then flares. She grabs William and begins to drag him out of the room. She can’t let him die. She can’t let any of them die; there has already been so much death, beginning with David. It all began with him in that motel room with a fatal knife wound and a piece of paper on the desk that read only, maddeningly, I’M SORRY, as if that were enough to make up for his absence. As if life were something that you could just cast aside, a carapace, in favor of something better. And yet she understands this impulse to escape. She is still her father’s daughter.

Marty can see the smoke from down the road. He drives faster in the pelting rain, unheeding of dirt turning to mud beneath the tires. He sees the house burning and panics. The panic freezes him; the car jolts and stops. He can see two dark figures in front of the house and stars falling all around them. One of them is his sister, lying in the cold mud. A young man, presumably William, is next to her and on all fours, staring at the house, pointing—

— and that is when Marty turns and sees it, too. It is something tearing itself away from the house, fleet of foot and fast. The house is a live thing and will continue to live for hours, snarling despite the rain, before it puts itself to sleep; but for now, before anyone can fully comprehend what is happening, something is sprinting into the woods, like a deer, or the ghost of something beautiful.