The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

2

Lily could see Ida’s hair but not her face through the glass door of the Stuart Hotel. For almost a minute she had been telling herself to open the door, but every time she reached for the handle, she stopped. It’s now or never, Lily said to herself, and decided to count to ten, but when she got to seven, Ida Bodine looked up from the book she was reading, and Lily opened the door and walked into the lobby.

Ida cocked her head and opened her eyes wide. A spider plant was hanging above her, and its myriad offshoots framed her face like a mad wig.

“Hi, Ida,” Lily said. She heard false friendliness in her voice.

“Isn’t it a little late to come callin’?” Ida’s face stiffened into a mask of vivid makeup.

“Depends on the hours you keep,” Lily said and headed for the stairs.

Lily looked straight ahead. She held the railing as she walked, feeling she needed it for steadiness. Halfway up, she peeked at Ida, who had returned to her book, a story that must have been engrossing if it kept Ida from snooping on Lily. The woman was leaning forward in her chair, the book propped on the edge of the desk. Its pink cover, embossed with gold lettering, showed a swooning woman who had fallen over the arm of a man with a scabbard and sword around his waist. The sleeves of her gown had slipped down over her shoulders to reveal breasts that looked like they’d pop out of the dress any second.

When Lily arrived at the second floor, she stared down the long hallway. She’d never seen it before. All these years I’ve lived in Webster, and I’ve never seen the second floor of the Stuart Hotel. Well, it’s just as dumpy as I thought it’d be. What remained of a brown carpet had buckled away from the walls, and a smell that reminded her of the high school cafeteria filled the air — the smell of pallid green beans and mashed potatoes on a tan plastic tray. A single light illuminated the hall — a peculiar fixture shaped like an elk head with a weak bulb screwed into its scalp. Lily counted doors to orient herself. She stopped in front of the fourth, lifted her fist and prepared to knock, but she didn’t. I can’t, she thought. Lily breathed so loudly, she worried that the man might hear it. Stay calm. You can do it. But Lily lowered her hand to her side. Then, after a couple of seconds, she knocked. When she withdrew her hand, it felt very cold.

The door opened. Edward Shapiro looked out at her and smiled.

Lily tried to smile back but found she couldn’t. Her mouth had stiffened with anxiety.

“Hello,” he said.

Lily could smell him — paint and cigars. His eyes had long, very black lashes, two tiny ones at their inside corners, and she saw that his irises were mixed colors — green, gray and ocher. He was wearing a white T-shirt streaked with paint, and blue jeans.

“Hello,” Lily said. Her voice sounded normal.

“Would you like to come in?” He smiled again.

Lily didn’t try a second smile. Instead she swallowed loudly and stepped inside. The room was smaller than she had thought, and when she looked toward the paintings, she saw that they had been turned to the wall.

“We haven’t met formally,” he said and extended his hand. “I’m Edward Shapiro.”

Lily put her hand in his, and after his warm fingers had closed around hers, she saw a spot of blue paint on his third knuckle. “Lily Dahl.”

“Well, Lily Dahl, would you like a glass of wine?”

She nodded.

He waved at a canvas chair. Lily sat down on it, and staring at her bare legs under her cutoff jeans, she noticed a faint bruise near her kneecap. Her legs were newly shaven, however, and she felt glad that she had repaired her toenail polish that afternoon after deciding to wear sandals. She crossed her legs and watched the man bend over a tiny refrigerator. Quickly, she pinched her cheeks to redden them. He turned around, handed her a glass of white wine and said, “You like your job at the cafe?”

“You saw me there?” Lily said and felt herself blush.

“Of course I saw you.” He looked at her evenly and sat down in a chair opposite her.

Lily looked at the floor. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“It seems like a nice place — the real thing.”

“How do you mean?” She looked up at him.

He smiled and reached for a cigar tin that lay on the floor. “Well, I guess I mean it’s a real small-town cafe — unpretentious.” He lit the cigar.

Lily laughed. “The whole town’s pretty much like that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

He looked at her but didn’t speak. He brought the cigar to his mouth and blew the smoke to his right.

Lily sipped the wine. It had none of the sweetness she expected. She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she said, “Everybody’s talking about you.” She hesitated. “In town, they’re all talking.”

The man leaned back and smiled. “Is that so?”

Lily took a breath. “Well, it’s natural to gossip about a stranger.”

“I’m still a stranger, huh?”

“Well, compared to most people, sure.”

Edward Shapiro lifted his glass and motioned with it toward himself. “To the strange,” he said. Then he tipped his glass toward Lily. “And the not so strange.”

Lily lowered her glass to her knee. She stared at her fingers around the stem. “I didn’t mean strange like that.”

They were silent. Lily didn’t look up. She saw where his jeans ended and examined the tops of his bare feet in a pair of moccasins.

He spoke then, his voice just above a whisper. “I think we should drink to Division Street at night, to its silence and its music, to its darkness and its light.”

Lily lifted her eyes to his, and they clinked glasses. Lily spoke slowly and carefully. “I didn’t mean to say that you were strange, but that people around here are curious about a person they don’t know.”

He nodded. His eyes were attentive.

Lily sipped her wine and spoke more quickly. “You see, in Webster there are folks who yak their heads off all day to anybody who’s bored enough to listen, and they’re not all that concerned about what’s true and what isn’t.” She leaned forward a couple of inches. “Some of them, the worst ones, might even blab to the police.” Lily gave Edward Shapiro a meaningful nod.

The man cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. Lily watched his ash drop to the floor. Then one side of his mouth moved up in an expression of amusement. “Are you referring in your own discreet way to my friend downstairs, Mrs. Bodine?”

Lily nodded.

“And Mrs. Bodine has been so distressed about my music that she’s called the police?”

“Not the music.”

“Not the music,” he repeated with mock gravity. “What then?”

Lily looked at him. “Dolores.”

His eyes wrinkled as he said, “Dolores Wachobski?”

So that’s her last name, Lily thought.

The man made little circles near his ear with his right hand, a signal for her to get on with it. He held the cigar stub between his thumb and index finger, and Lily watched the smoke dance.

“I don’t really know how to say this,” Lily said.

He widened his eyes in encouragement.

“Well, Dolores has kind of a bad reputation.” Lily looked out the window. “She takes money.” She paused. “From men.” Then she turned back to him.

All humor had left the man’s face. “I see,” he said. “I know Dolores. I’m painting her.”

Lily stared at him. She bit her lip as it quivered for an instant under her teeth.

“Let me show you,” he said. “I haven’t finished, but it’s getting there.”

Lily looked away. She heard him stand up and felt his hand on her arm. She had to brace herself against his touch because she felt an urge to collapse into him. She let him guide her toward the wall without looking up at him or speaking, but she felt his hand move to the small of her back, and when they neared the paintings, he reached across her to take hold of the canvas and his thumb grazed the button of her jeans. Lily breathed in through her nose a little too loudly, she thought, and stepped backward. He turned the large painting toward her.

A life-size Dolores Wachobski stared straight out at Lily. The woman straddled a stool, her hands gripping the seat between her parted legs. Dolores leaned forward with a face that was both fierce and sober. She wore a black-and-white polka dot dress, cut low enough in the front to expose at least half of her formidable breasts. Across the top of the canvas was a series of three boxes with drawings inside them that reminded Lily of the funny papers. The figures inside them looked drawn rather than painted, and when compared to the realism of the portrait below, they seemed even more like cartoons. Lily took several steps toward the painting, stood on tiptoe and examined the boxes. In the first box, she saw a little girl crouched behind a small shed or outhouse. It was night, and above the child was a crescent moon, drawn so simply, Lily thought it should have a face. “What’s this part?” Lily asked, pointing at the boxes.

“It’s the story part,” he said. “Everyone I paint chooses a story to tell with pictures inside the portrait. You see, I always collaborate with the person I’m painting. We talk during the sitting, and before it’s all over, he or she decides what story to tell in the narrative series.”

“The little girl is Dolores?”

“Yes.”

Lily peered at the second frame. The child was sleeping behind the shed with her head on her arm. In the third box, a woman had appeared and was grabbing the girl by her shirt with one hand. The other hand was extended as though the woman was about to smack the child. “Who’s that?” Lily pointed at the woman.

“Her mother.”

Lily didn’t say anything for several seconds. “Was she afraid of her mother?”

“I don’t think so. Dolores used to hide from her though. I think she liked being found.” He spoke in a low voice, deliberately pronouncing each word.

Lily searched his face, but she saw no clear emotion in it.

From outside Lily heard a car, hoots, and then the sound of rattling metal. The car screeched and then skidded away down the street, its sound dying slowly. Lily stared at the child in the last frame, huddled against the imminent blow. “She must trust you,” she said. “It’s pretty private.”

She heard the man sigh. The sound aroused her. “And the others?” Lily said, looking at the three remaining canvases.

He walked to the next one and turned it around for her.

Lily gave a long whistle and grinned. “Holy moly,” she said. “It’s Tex.”

The man, all six feet and several inches of him, stood before her — stark naked. The red hair on his head repeated itself in his pubic hair. His bloated white belly was speckled with moles. Lily looked closely at his penis. It looked like any other. Standing on tiptoe, she tried to get a better view of the three boxes above the man’s head. In the first box a man waved his hat from a bucking bronco.

“I didn’t know Tex rode rodeo. I used to go to the local shows, and I never saw him.”

“Actually, I don’t think he does. You see, the stories don’t have to be true. It’s what he wanted, so that’s what he got. I don’t interfere.”

“How come he’s naked and Dolores has her clothes on?”

Shapiro grinned. “He wanted to reveal his ‘true self.’ That’s a quote.”

“You think that being naked is any more your true self than having clothes on?” Lily didn’t turn to look at him but kept her eyes on the boxes. After she had said it, she blushed.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

In the second frame, a male figure stood above a female figure who was kneeling on the ground. The man held a gun to the woman’s head. “Oh,” Lily said. It wasn’t so much a word as a vowel of exclamation. She faced Shapiro.

The man looked at her. “I think it’s another fantasy, more sinister than the first.”

“Is the woman someone special? I mean…”

“He didn’t say.”

“But I thought you said you talked to everybody when they’re posing for you.”

“I do, but he wouldn’t say. He just told me what to draw.”

In the third box a dead man was hanging by his neck from a tree. “Is that him, too?”

“Yes, I think it is, but when he talked to me, he explained every particular in the drawing, but he never used the word ‘I.’ He said ‘he.’ I think we both knew ‘he’ meant ‘I.’ What I admired about him was his certainty. He knew. Howard never wavered.”

“Howard?”

“Howard Gubber.”

Lily smiled. “Wow! That’s a wuss name if I ever heard one. I bet you’re the only guy in Webster who knows his real name, except his mother, and she’s probably pushing up flowers in Urland Cemetery.”

Lily pointed at the third canvas, and Shapiro obediently turned it toward her. It was smaller than Tex’s.

“Why, there’s Stanley,” Lily said. “Stanley Blom. He eats at the Ideal quite a lot. He’s a sweet guy.” Lily moved her head to one side as if she could see him better that way. The little man sat on a chair and looked straight out. His bent body was somewhat disguised in that position, and he was dressed in a suit he must have saved for church. He certainly didn’t eat breakfast in it. His narrow, wrinkled face was unmistakable, however, a mass of brown spots and cysts. Lily looked at Stanley’s boxes. In the first there were two boys running together, one ahead of the other. In the second was a large, long house with lots of windows. “Who lived here?” Lily said.

“It’s a sanatorium,” he answered and stepped close to her. “That boy”—he pointed to the second child in the first frame—“was his brother. He died of tuberculosis in 1925. ‘I’ve only got one big story,’ he told me, and this is it.’ His brother’s name was Henry.”

Lily turned her head to the last picture. It showed a room with a window and an empty bed. The baseboard of another bed could be seen in the frame, but the bed with nobody in it stood at the center.

Lily felt the man’s hand on her shoulder. “Henry died before one of the family’s visits. When Stanley and his parents walked into the room, the boy was gone.”

“You mean they didn’t get to see him?”

“Not that day, not alive. The empty cot was the way he knew his brother was dead, and that’s how he tells the story.”

Very gently, the man turned her toward him. She looked up at his eyebrows and large eyes, the straight nose and small mouth, and she thought, God, it’s a beautiful face. Before he kissed her, she said, “How old was he? Henry, I mean.”

“He was nineteen.”

Lily’s shorts were unsnapped and the man’s shirt was off before she remembered she was menstruating. She knew she had to say it. She clamped her fingers around his wrist and said in a tense voice that embarrassed her, “I have my period. Does it matter?”

He shook his head.

“I’ll be right back.”

Lily watched her nearly bloodless tampon disappear down Edward Shapiro’s rust-stained toilet. Blue, green, yellow and brown paint streaked the sink basin. Before she left the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet. Inside, on a filthy glass shelf, lay a slender black razor — nothing else. Lily checked her face in the mirror. She thought it looked a little red, but otherwise good. When she shut the bathroom door, she consciously acknowledged that she had no doubt. She felt nothing that might make her hesitate.

He wasn’t shaven, and his whiskers rubbed her cheek when he kissed her, and she smelled turpentine from his hands, but what she liked was that he didn’t seem to worry about himself. She could feel the relaxation in his arms and legs. He wasn’t passive, but he wasn’t in a hurry either, and Lily had the sudden thought that both Peter and Hank had watched themselves making love to her, and this man didn’t. She felt the coarse hair on his chest, and she moved her fingers to his navel and touched the skin around it, and then she kissed that spot and felt the muscles in his thighs that she had looked at so closely through the window. She touched his knees and his calves, and he kissed her neck and shoulders and back, and he kissed her behind her knees and he kissed her ankles, and he didn’t touch her genitals for a long time, and Lily thought that if she hadn’t loved him before, she loved him now. Then he surprised her. He gripped her inner thighs with his hands and pulled her toward him, and she thought, It’s like he knows, knows all about me, and she let her head fall back on the mattress. Through the thin sheet she could feel a small hard button pressing into the back of her head as he lowered his body onto hers. He fumbled with a condom for a couple of seconds, but she closed her eyes and listened to him breathe. She clutched his back tightly. They were both sweating on top of the white sheet, and Lily imagined herself in the window as though she were looking at herself with his eyes, and again she saw herself pulling down her shorts, and she bit his neck, not hard, lightly. While they made love she talked to herself silently, telling herself what they were doing, and this aroused her more, and when she felt her orgasm, she yelled out, but she didn’t know how loud she was and didn’t care, and seconds later, she looked up at his face and saw the pupils of his eyes move upward toward his lids and felt the faint tremor of his orgasm and then the weight of his body on top of her. She smelled his hair — shampoo and cigars. In the dim light, she looked at the skin on his shoulders, at the tiny bumps and discolorations. She ran her finger over them and thought that he was like nobody else.

When he asked her how old she was, she lied to him and said, “Twenty-one.” The addition of those two years seemed significant, and she promised herself to tell him the truth later.

They talked for hours that night, and Lily found out that he was born in Newark, New Jersey, and went to art school in New York, but he had studied art history, too, and that before he found a gallery, he had made money copying old masters’ paintings and selling them to rich men, mostly in Texas, who wanted a Caravaggio or a Renoir or a David for their wives and girlfriends. Shapiro was thirty-four years old, and he said that he had only recently “found his real work.” So far, he had sold four “real” paintings, but he was feeling optimistic. And Lily told him about acting and about playing Hermia in a A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He didn’t say it was an impossible business and much too hard to get into, or what made her think she could do that? He listened to her talk and smoked his cigars and asked her questions about why she wanted to be an actress and how she felt when she acted. She told him about Marilyn then. He didn’t even smile. He said he had loved Marilyn in The Misfits, and that what he had liked about her was that she seemed so alive, more alive than a lot of actors, fragile and vigorous at the same time. It made Lily very happy to hear him talk about Marilyn, and when he paused, she kissed him all over his face, and told him he was beautiful, and they made love again.

In the morning Lily woke for work without an alarm. She had slept only two hours, and after she had carefully lifted the man’s arm off her waist, she sat up and put her feet on the floor. Her legs trembled with exhaustion, but when she looked at the sleeping man, she said to herself, I was lying there beside him. She dressed quickly and penned him a note. There were many things she would have liked to have written in that note: “I love you. I adore you. I think you’re the most wonderful person in the whole world,” but these sentences would have been unwise, so she wrote: “Dear Ed”—it was nice to call him Ed—“My telephone number is: 645-1133. Lily.” She studied her handwriting for an instant, fearing it looked childish, but she let it go, and tiptoed down the stairs past Ida. The woman was sleeping with her head on the desk, a jowl mashed by her right arm. Her makeup had faded during the night, and Lily thought her face looked softer and prettier than it had the night before.

Division Street was empty and just beginning to turn gray with the dawn. She walked halfway across it and stopped. She looked past Berman’s and Tiny’s and Willy’s Shoe Repair to the Ben Franklin on the corner and told herself to remember exactly how the street looked on this Friday morning, June seventh, the summer after she turned nineteen years old. Then she headed across the pavement, and the same instant her left foot touched the curb, Lily saw the lights in the Ideal Cafe go on.

* * *

At five twenty-five, Martin Petersen pressed his face against the cafe window. Lily was certain of the time. She had just glanced up at the minute hand on the clock because Vince wanted the cafe doors opened “on the dot.” Martin’s nose was flattened snoutlike on the pane, and Lily would have laughed at him if he had appeared any less suddenly. But no sound had preceded his arrival — no engine in the street or feet slapping the pavement. Part of setting up for breakfast in the cafe was listening to Webster’s early-morning noises, and when she turned her head and saw Martin, dressed in the same clothes he had worn the night before, she jumped.

He motioned to her.

Lily unlocked the door and spoke to him through the screen. “What are you doing here so early?” she said.

Martin walked toward the door and held out a piece of paper. “I–I-I,” he stammered, “brought you a map.”

“What for?”

“To, to get to my house.”

Lily waved her hands at the sides of her face. “Martin Petersen,” she said in the voice of an aggravated schoolteacher. “I know where you live. My parents’ old house is a quarter of a mile away, and I lived in that house for seventeen years.”

Martin walked up the single step and pushed his face into the screen. It made a dull pop as he increased the pressure, pushing his forehead, mouth and chin against the wire netting as if he wanted to burst it.

Looking at Martin, she saw that the tiny crosshatch pattern of the screen was etching itself into the skin of his face, and she also saw that he didn’t care. Stubborn, determined and blind, Martin refused to follow the rules that came automatically to most people, and Lily felt an urge to plow her fist straight into that big, white face that distorted the shape of the screen. Behind Martin she saw Pete Lund stepping out of his blue Ford.

“Cut it out!” she whispered to Martin. “You’ll break it.”

Lily unlatched the screen door, let Martin inside and held the door for Pete, who nodded at her.

After Martin had looked around the cafe suspiciously, like a kid playing Cold War spy, he handed Lily a little square of folded paper. He stuck his now-checkered face close to hers and whispered, “S-s-say it again.”

Lily stepped back and shook her head. She could feel the edge of the folded paper cutting into her palm.

Vince spoke from behind her, his voice commanding but not yet angry. “A customer, Lil’.”

“Coming,” Lily said.

“Say it again,” Martin was whispering.

“Dollface!”

“I’m coming, Vince.” Lily looked behind her. Vince looked redder than usual. She turned back to Martin. His eyes were enormous, blue and desperate. She didn’t want to look at those eyes anymore. She hated that mooning, pleading face and wanted it to vanish. “Mouth,” she said. Then she said it again more loudly, “Mouth.” She leaned toward him and growled, “Mouth! Okay?”

Martin smiled. Lily thought it was the smile of a drunk — loose-lipped and giddy. She turned away from him and walked toward Vince.

“Is that a customer or not?” he barked at her, pointing at Pete Lund.

“Relax, Vince,” Lily said. She glanced at the clock. “It’s five thirty-four.” Pete Lund was quietly reading the Chronicle. “Does he look upset? Is he demanding my attention? You know what he wants to eat. I don’t even have to take his order. Go in the damned kitchen and cook it. I know you. You’re mad about something else. Probably Boom. Is he still living with you? He doesn’t want to go back to his mom, does he?”

The man folded his arms across his chest and stared at her. “How come I hired the only two girls in this little shit-hole town who talk back?”

“Because you hate wimps, Vince, that’s why. And sensitive types quit on you. Remember Cindy? She ran out of here bawling after three days.”

“Aw, get off it, that little broad couldn’t take a joke.”

“Come on, Vince, that wasn’t a joke. It was a filthy, disgusting story, and you told it to shock her.” Lily smiled. “Is Boomer driving you nuts?”

“That kid doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. I’d throw him out if it weren’t for that goddamned woman.”

“What’s her problem?”

“When he’s with her, she doesn’t want him, but when he’s not there, she does.”

“So she doesn’t,” Lily said.

Vince shook his head. “And he can’t stay away. He’s like a lush sneaking a drink. She kicked him out, but he won’t blame her, takes it out on the husband — not that he ain’t a first-class sleazeball.” Vince paused. “What was that all about?” He pointed with his thumb at the door.

Lily looked at Vince. “I don’t know,” she said, and she meant it. “He’s beginning to get on my nerves, but what it’s all about, I couldn’t tell you.”

After serving her first four customers, Lily took a break behind the counter and pulled the map out of her pocket. One glance told her that whatever Martin might have said about “directions” to his house, he had something much more complicated in mind. When she looked more closely, she saw that what Martin had given her wasn’t a map so much as a drawing representing two unfolded maps, complete with creases where the imaginary, not the real, paper had been folded. The maps had been drawn in such a way as to give an illusion of depth, as if one transparent map were floating on top of the other. The uppermost map showed Webster and the area around it and the map below showed Athens and the fairy wood from the play. Division Street was boldly labeled, as were the Ideal Cafe and the Stuart Hotel, but no stores. Beyond the town she saw the Bodler place, Heath Creek, Heath Woods, the Jesse James Caves, and up in the far right-hand corner Martin had drawn an arrow and written “To your Dahl Grandparents.” Not far away from the arrow was the Overland farm marked with a large star and a drawing of an oblong box or chest. Her grandparents were both dead, and there was nothing left of their farm, so the notation struck her as odd. The Overland place was still there, only minutes from where her grandparents had lived, but she hadn’t thought of it for a long time. She had never laid eyes on the children who lived upstairs in that house, and she tried to remember what was wrong with them. They couldn’t speak. Her grandmother had told her the two girls rocked back and forth for hours and hours, each in a corner. But what did that box mean? The drawing irritated her. She sensed Martin was speaking to her again in that roundabout way of his, hinting at things she couldn’t grasp. And then, right before she lifted her eyes from the paper, she noticed that around the edge of both maps, Martin had written the word “Sleep.” Lily puzzled over it for a couple of seconds, looked up at the red booths and then over at Clarence Sogn’s sunburnt head, and wished she hadn’t said the word for Martin. It had been wrong to say it, but why? It was because he had looked so satisfied. When she remembered it, she felt sick.

Around twelve-thirty, just before her shift ended, Lily cut two pieces of lemon meringue pie for the old Moss sisters.

“It’s hives, dear,” Leonora said. “I’ve had them a hundred times. It’s that new detergent you used on the sheets.”

“I’m afraid it’s shingles,” Bessy said.

“Nonsense, dear. I had shingles just after the war, you remember. They don’t look a thing like hives.”

Just after Bessy had leaned forward and hissed the words, “Hives don’t crust!” Edward Shapiro walked into the Ideal Cafe. He gripped the counter, and with his nose an inch from Lily’s, he said in a low but clear voice that Bert must have overheard because she dropped the cover to the pie case on the counter: “I missed you.” Lily forgot Martin Petersen then, and she forgot to say good-bye to Bert and Vince and Boomer, and she forgot to take off her apron. She followed the man out the door and onto Division Street, where he took her in his arms and kissed her in full view of every customer in the cafe as well as half a dozen people on the sidewalk. Then he put his arm around her and walked with her up the steps into the Stuart Hotel.

* * *

That afternoon, Lily asked Ed a question she knew she shouldn’t ask. She hesitated, understood it would be smarter not to give in to her curiosity, but the desire was strong, like wanting to pick at a scab that’s bound to bleed if you touch it.

“What’s she like?” she said to the ceiling as she lay on the bed.

“Who?” Ed turned to look at her. He had been standing in front of his canvas.

“Your wife.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Maybe you should tell me. It seems that my life is an open book.”

“No, I just know you have a wife and she’s not here.”

“No, she’s not here.”

“Okay,” Lily said. “I take it back.”

“No,” he said. “It’s all right.” He walked over to the bed and sat down. “I was married for five years.” He paused. “It fell apart. She’s a painter. Her work is very different from mine. She does these tiny little paintings.” Ed traced a rectangle in the air with his fingers about as big as a postcard. “They’re pretty abstract, but once in a while you can make out a little object in them — a pair of scissors or a hat or a pillbox.” He paused. “I always respected her work, but I don’t think she ever liked mine. She never said it, but I got the feeling she thought my stuff was oversized and vulgar. She always seemed surprised when other people showed interest in it.”

“But what’s she like?”

“I thought I was telling you.” He leaned across the bed and took her hand. “Maybe not.”

“How could you marry someone who didn’t like your paintings?”

Ed pressed his lips together and was silent. “I guess I didn’t know until later. We met when we were eighteen, and I think I found her mysterious. I never understood what she was about really, and I ran after her for years.”

“She must be beautiful, though.”

Ed smiled at Lily. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you said she was mysterious and you chased after her, and I think men see pretty women, and they imagine all kinds of things inside the prettiness before they even know the person, and then they’re stuck running and running.”

“Are you speaking from experience, Lily Dahl?” He looked at her tenderly with his eyes narrowed and then grabbed his T-shirt, which was hanging from the iron rail at the end of the bed.

Lily leaned back and looked at him. “You’re the third.”

Ed gave her a surprised look. “Is that what you thought I asked you?”

“I’m telling you. There were two others. I broke up with the second guy the day before yesterday.”

Ed pulled the T-shirt over his head and reached for his jeans. He forgot his boxer shorts, which were lying beside them, and pulled the jeans up over his naked thighs. “Is this for the record, or are you telling me something else?” he said.

Lily bit her lip and looked at him. She looked for her shirt, the same one she had worn yesterday. I have to change, she thought. Then she said, “I guess I just like things to be clear. Do you know what I mean?”

He walked over to the window and looked out. Lily studied his back and wondered if he was hiding some emotion. She thought that if she were in her own room now, she might be able to see his face.

“It’s rare, isn’t it, for things to be clear?” He didn’t turn around. Lily thought he might have been looking into her window across the street, and thinking this made her sad. They were silent for at least a minute. Lily dressed quickly, grabbed her crumpled apron from the bed and walked to his door.

“I’m going home now,” she said. “Good-bye, Ed.”

He turned then and walked toward her. He kissed her hard on the mouth and said, “I’ll call you later.”

Lily lifted her face to his. He likes me better when he knows I’m leaving, she said to herself.

“What’s that look?”

“What look?” she said.

“That look, that look of irony and smugness.”

“Guess,” she said. Then she turned around and walked out the door.

There were no sounds from Mabel’s apartment, and Lily supposed she was either out or asleep. Mabel often slept better during the day than at night. Lily closed her curtains and thought about Ed. I shouldn’t have asked about her. “Elizabeth.” She said the name aloud to hear it. Not Eliza or Liza or Liz, not Lizzie or Beth or Betsy or Bess. She wondered why anyone would want to paint nothing, and then she decided to straighten her room. She tossed a T-shirt and a pair of dirty jeans into her bathroom hamper, walked back into her room, saw the toe of one of the stolen shoes sticking out from under her bed and leaned down to pick it up. In the filtered light that passed through the curtain, she made out the shadow of a foot inside. She didn’t remember this imprint. She knew it wasn’t her foot because hers had a high instep and whoever had worn these shoes before had flat feet. Somehow she had missed that, and she had a sudden, irrational thought that the shoes were changing on her, that traces of their former owner were slowly beginning to appear on them. The shoes did look worse to her, no question about it, more creased and soiled than she remembered, but then maybe she had seen wrong in that dingy garage. Lily brought the shoes close to her nose and sniffed. The Bodlers’ garage smelled like her grandmother’s root cellar, and the odor brought back a memory of lying beside the open door of the cellar, inhaling that good earthy smell, and she saw the small white house in her mind. Her grandfather had stopped farming during the depression when the bank took back most of the land, and that must have been when the place went quiet. Even the house had made no noise. There was no plumbing, so it had never hummed or gurgled as her own house had, and the cows and pigs and chickens that had once been there, animals Lily knew by name, because her father had told her about them, had never been more than thoughts for her. Lily glanced at the night table and saw the book Mabel had given her. She was planning to read it. Middlemarch. The last time she was inside her grandparents’ house was after the vandals had ruined it. She remembered feeling glad that both her grandparents were dead by then and that nobody lived there anymore. She and her father had walked through the door to find smashed mirrors and windows, broken furniture, crockery in pieces on the floor, and that same uncanny silence in the house.

Through the wall came panting and then a short, breathless cry. Lily sat very still and listened. Was Mabel sick? A nightmare? She heard the woman sigh; then her footsteps sounded on the floor. Not long after that, she heard the typewriter. Lily had grown used to that old typewriter. It had come to mean sleep for her. I’m so tired, she thought. She remembered the chicken coop at the Overland farm. She decided she would look at Martin’s drawing again and fell asleep.

Lily woke up to the sound of the phone ringing.

It was Ed. She heard his voice on the telephone for the first time, and the sound of it seemed to make her body warmer. She suddenly felt conscious of her own voice and spoke softly into the receiver, trying to sound unconcerned, as if she wasn’t all that glad, but when he invited her out to dinner at Rick’s, Lily said yes right away and laughed, which probably undid all the studied nonchalance that had gone before.

They sat at a table in the corner, and he told her more stories about his life. After art school he had worked as a plumber’s assistant for a year and learned the inner workings of sinks and toilets, a job he said he never regretted, and then he took the money he earned and moved to Amsterdam, where he read and painted and worked at odd jobs like designing sets for plays and painting a brick wall and ten windows for an art movie he never saw. Lily liked the way he talked to her. He didn’t presume she knew Amsterdam, but he didn’t presume she knew nothing either. She liked the way he ate his lasagna. He seemed to enjoy it without paying great attention to it. She liked his neck above the rim of his white T-shirt and his thick hair and his eyes that didn’t wander. Lily didn’t eat much. She looked down at the red, white and brown dinner and couldn’t bother with it. She didn’t feel hungry, and besides, she felt reluctant to chew in front of Ed. Rolf looked over at them several times, not unkindly, Lily thought, but she knew he’d tell Hank, and even if he didn’t, someone else would. Hank was bound to find out anyway. After Ed had paid the check, she told him she was really nineteen, not twenty-one, and he raised his eyebrows.

“I didn’t want you to send me away,” she said, “so I added a couple of years.”

“I see,” he said. Ed breathed loudly through his nose, and then after throwing his napkin on the table, he stood up.

They met Denise Stickle on the way out the door. Lily introduced her to Ed very quickly, pretending she didn’t see the startled look in the girl’s eyes, and said, “See you at rehearsal.”

Out on the street, he said, “You don’t like that girl, do you?”

“Denise?” Lily said. “You can tell?”

“Yes.”

“Denise is all right. I’ve known her forever. We both went to Mrs. Lodenmeyer’s dance school when we were kids, and now she’s back from college for the summer and she tried out for Helena and got the part. At least her looks are right for it. She’s one of those girls that always rubbed me the wrong way. You know the type — cheerleader, technical virgin.”

Ed gave Lily a puzzled look.

“Does everything but, at least in high school. I don’t see the difference.”

Ed sighed.

Lily was silent. She stopped walking and looked up at him.

He stopped, too, looked down at her and frowned. “You seduced me,” he said. “You started it.”

“I know,” Lily said. “And I’m proud of it.” The word “seduced” sounded beautiful to her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the air. It smelled good. She opened her eyes and looked up at the half-moon and noticed how perfectly half it was.

Hours later, when Rick’s and the Corner Bar had closed for the night and the bus for Des Moines had come and gone, Lily and Ed were still talking in his room. She told him about Hermia and about Mabel helping her with the role, and she told him about playing Maria in West Side Story in the high school play and how she had loved singing and dancing onstage. Then Ed asked her for a song. At first Lily said no, but when he insisted, she gave in and ended up singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” And because he looked like he was enjoying it, she didn’t hold back but belted out the words as she strutted across the floor. When the song ended, she winked at him.

He clapped. “You’ve got a strong, clear voice.” He looked at her. “Marilyn was wearing a pink dress in the movie when she sang that song. I’d love to see you in that dress.”

“You think I’d look good in pink?”

He nodded.

Lily thought about Marilyn. Then she said, “It’s a funny thing about Marilyn. Nobody would be very happy if she were alive, except maybe me. You know how in the tabloids they’re always finding Elvis and JFK alive and living in South America or something? But they never find Marilyn, even though she’s just as famous. Well, they don’t find her, because they wouldn’t want to find her old.” She climbed onto the bed with him. “Your ears are beautiful, did you know that? They stick out a little bit, but they’re really nice.” Lily sat back and studied his hair near his neck. Then she reached out and touched his cheek. She liked talking to him, liked saying whatever popped into her mind, liked the way he looked when he was listening. “Sometimes I wish my parents hadn’t moved,” she said to him. “My Dad got a rare and bad cancer in his leg. They saved the leg, but it’s no good. He was a great carpenter. Everybody knew it.” Lily stared at the wall. “He could’ve died, could’ve lost his leg. They couldn’t really stay, I guess. The winters, you know.” She looked back at Ed and lowered her voice as though she were telling a secret. “So they sold our house outside town and moved to Florida — Tampa. It’s nothing like here. A lot of the old folks I grew up with are dead now — my grandparents, their friends. It’s been one funeral after another these past five years. I guess the place didn’t hold them. My parents, I mean.”

“Does it hold you?” he said.

Lily looked at him. “I never really thought about it. I’ve always been saying I’m going to leave, and I will, too. I don’t want to be here my whole life. But I feel close to this place anyway. It must be in my bones.”

Ed didn’t speak for several seconds. Then he said, “The series of paintings, the ones you saw. You know what I’m going to call them?”

“No.”

“Webster.”

Lily nodded.

“You think it’s a bad name?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Lily paused. “I think it’s okay because you’ve got those boxes with the stories in them, and that brings in part of the place. It’s not just pictures of the people.”

“Even if the stories aren’t all true, like Howard’s.”

“This place runs on stories that aren’t true. My grandfather used to say, ‘One man’s fool notion is another man’s truth.’”

“A relativist?” Ed said.

Lily was puzzled. “No,” she said. “He was a socialist. Thorstein Veblen was his hero.”

“Really?” he said.

“Don’t you approve?” Lily said and grinned.

“Are you kidding? I’ve got an uncle who’s great claim to fame was that he licked envelopes for Emma Goldman.”

Lily paused. She wondered whether she should ask who that was, but before she could decide, Ed said, “They were all on the same side, Lily. They looked up at the same stars.”

“Did all this start with your ears?”

“No,” he said. “With Marilyn Monroe.”

The man was in the street that night again, watching and waiting. Lily slept through it, but Ed told her the next morning that someone had been outside, pacing back and forth in the alley and muttering to himself.

The next day the wind shifted. The air turned clear, warm, dry. The new weather sharpened the outlines of every building, every tree and bush and fire hydrant and crack in the sidewalk. Lily thought the edges of every person and object she saw had a clarity that almost hurt and that this hard daylight corresponded to her high, aching happiness with Ed. Before she left work she told Bert what she never would have told Ed, that she was terribly in love with him and could barely stand it. Bert had squeezed Lily’s hand and said, “You’re sure, then? And Hank?” Lily had told Bert the truth — that she didn’t think much about Hank. It was awful, she knew it, but that’s how it was. And Bert had looked at her and said, “Well, heaven wouldn’t be heaven if you remembered your friends in hell.”

That same afternoon, Lily walked in on an agitated Mabel. Pale and shivering, she greeted Lily with outstretched arms and said, “You’re here! Thank God! You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had. It was a torment, Lily. I haven’t recovered.” Mabel sat down in a soft chair and looked up at Lily. “Sit,” she said.

Lily sat. “What happened?”

A flush of red appeared on the old woman’s cheeks very suddenly. She leaned forward in her chair and said, “He was here.” Mabel pointed downward with her finger. “In this building last night.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who, but I’m sure it’s the man”—Mabel lowered her voice and motioned with her head toward the window—“who’s been holding vigil outside.”

“How do you know?”

“I felt him, Lily. You weren’t home, were you?”

Lily shook her head.

“I thought it was you at first, returning from, from your revels.”

Lily wondered if this was an indirect accusation. There was a quality in Mabel’s tone that made Lily feel responsible for having left the old woman alone all night.

“I called out your name, but there was no answer.”

“Maybe Vince was in the hallway, checking on the lights or something. He does that, you know.”

“Never at that hour. It wasn’t Vince. He always lets me know, and besides, he sounds like a herd of elephants on those stairs. This was someone with stealth. He was in your room.”

“My room?”

Mabel nodded. Her face flushed deep red and a vein stood out on her forehead. “He was whispering and muttering to himself. I heard him through the wall, but I couldn’t make out a single word, and you know how every sound passes through these walls. I should have been able to understand something.” Mabel rubbed her arms and looked at the ceiling. “Babble. Don’t look at me like that, Lily.”

“I’m just trying to understand it.”

Mabel rubbed her hands and looked at the floor on either side of her. “Every once in a while, not often, I’ve had ‘auditory hallucinations,’ strange term I admit, but that’s what it’s called, and that voice coming from your room was both like it and not like it.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t that?”

Mabel touched her lips for a second. “No,” she said quietly. “When that happens, it’s someone I’ve known, usually Evan. My husband. And what’s said is clear and short. He died many years ago of a brain hemorrhage.” She turned her head and stared at the keys on the pine table. “One morning, he complained of a headache, and two hours later he was dead.” Mabel took a short breath, pursed her lips and said, “Anyway, it happens that I hear him say, ‘Help me.’” Mabel looked back at Lily. “He never said that in life, but it’s as if I carry the imprint of his voice in my brain and sometimes it comes back to me. Sometimes I hear my mother calling my name.” The woman rubbed her thighs. “I don’t mind.”

Lily put her hand on her forehead. She didn’t speak.

Mabel looked straight into Lily’s eyes. She spoke slowly, emphasizing each word. “It wasn’t that last night, you see. But it was almost like that man knew about my experiences, a couple of times I thought he imitated them.”

“That’s impossible,” Lily said.

“Yes,” Mabel said. “And yet I felt it like that. Did you notice any change in your room?”

“I haven’t been home yet.”

“Let’s look,” Mabel said.

Lily walked with Mabel into the hallway. She studied the woman’s face and wondered if she was living next to someone who was slightly deranged. Mabel turned the knob slowly and then pushed open the door fast. It slammed against the wall inside.

There was nothing to see. As far as Lily could tell, her room was exactly as she had left it. With Mabel beside her she felt glad she had pushed the white shoes under her bed.

Lily turned her palms upward and smiled. “It looks just like it did when I left.”

Mabel turned to Lily. “You do believe me, don’t you? You don’t think I’m crazy, hearing things, an old, senile woman who can’t distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t?”

“No,” Lily said slowly. “Ed heard him last night in the street. He even said he was talking.”

Mabel nodded. Her expression made it clear that she knew exactly where Lily had been last night and had no intention of pretending surprise. She also looked relieved. “I’m a highly rational person, Lily. I know that I give a scattered, high-strung impression, and I don’t deny I’m that way, too, but those very qualities that”—she hesitated—“that may annoy you, allow me to feel what many people don’t. It’s like a scent or a strain of music that emanates from another body, and I pick up on it.” Mabel eyed Lily significantly. “That man who’s been lurking under the awning and in the alley … he gives off something high-pitched, almost a scream.” Mabel hesitated. “I think you should lock your door.”

“Jesus, Mabel,” Lily said aloud.

Mabel turned her head from Lily and looked over the bed toward the window.

Lily eyed Mabel’s thin shoulders under her floating blouse. Who could have been in her room? Lily hoped it had been Hank. He’s stayed here enough to feel like it’s part his, she thought. I’ve still got some of his shirts and underwear in the drawers. I wasn’t too nice to him, either. I didn’t even give him a chance to tell me off. But Hank would have been loud and defiant, not quiet and secretive. Lily thought of Martin, but she didn’t mention him. I might be all wrong, she thought. Sunlight shone through the closed curtains, and Lily stared at Mabel’s narrow pants and gold sandals and changed the subject. “You know, I think you’d like Ed. I already told him about you, and I think the two of you have a lot in common. You’d like to see his paintings, wouldn’t you?”

Mabel turned around. She seemed to relax by increments, her expression first, then her neck and shoulders. “Yes,” she said, her voice still tense. “I would like that.”

Lily smiled. “Okay, I’ll talk to him, and we’ll make a date.”

After Mabel left, Lily walked slowly from one end of her room to the other and looked for signs of an intruder. Hank’s shirts were undisturbed. Lily wasn’t fastidious, however. Any number of objects might have been moved without her noticing, and this thought prompted her to look under the bed for the shoes, although why they seemed more vulnerable than any of the other things, she couldn’t explain. But the shoes were there, lying under the bed, and after she had grabbed them, she walked to the mirror and held them up in front of it. Looking at them, it occurred to her that maybe Helen Bodler had had a lover, after all, and then, as if it followed from the first thought, Lily remembered the name of Mabel’s husband: Evan. He was probably the handsome young man in the photo. She laid the shoes on her table and looked at their reflection in the mirror. I wonder how old he was when he died, she thought. A breeze stirred the curtains and blew them up and into the room. Lily watched them flutter aloft for a couple of seconds before they dropped back to the floor. Then she stuffed the shoes into her canvas bag, ran out her door, down the steps and into the alley, where she jumped on her bicycle and began to pedal down Division Street under a sky so blue and cloudless, it made her want to sing, which she did. By the time she was within a quarter of a mile of the Bodler place, she had sung several show tunes and a couple of her favorite hymns.

* * *

The Bodlers’ truck was parked in the driveway. Lily rolled her bicycle into the ditch, climbed the embankment, and at its crest she lay down on her stomach in the tall grass and looked across the field toward the little house, the garage and the mountains of junk. Smoke rose from a rusted metal bin only yards from the garage, black then gray as it caught the wind. She noticed the fender of a second truck and heard voices. The speakers were invisible, and the wind distorted the sound — unintelligible rumblings followed an isolated word or phrase that carried over the field oddly charged and amplified. She heard the word “rope” very clearly, then “burn” or “barn.” A figure emerged from behind the trucks. It was Frank, carrying a large black garbage bag in his arms, and at his heels Lily saw an old cane wheelchair come rolling forward from behind the truck. Dick was pushing someone. At first Lily thought it was a tall girl, but then after two or three seconds she realized it was Martin Petersen. He leapt up out of the chair, said something to Dick, and the two men lifted it into the back of the hidden truck and then began to secure the wheelchair with rope. Martin was standing in the back of the truck, his upper body visible against the sky as he leaned forward to receive the bulky black bag from Frank. Lily edged over in the grass to get a better view of them, but she kept her head low. Martin jumped down from the truck. She wished she could hear what they were saying and crawled forward in the grass. The three men were now standing close together. She saw Dick’s head turn to one side. He seemed to be looking over the field directly at her. Lily hugged the ground, and then she realized he couldn’t have seen her because he turned back to Martin. Frank must have been negotiating a price. He held out five fingers of one hand, and with the index finger of the other he touched each finger once. Martin had his back turned to her now, but Lily saw him dig into his pocket. The wind blew her hair into her face and flattened the grass in front of her. Frank talked, but Lily couldn’t hear the words. She heard Martin’s voice — an initial stutter that he quickly overcame — and then he said, “Private business, Frank.” Martin rubbed his face, and the gesture looked like one of Frank’s. He might not know it, she thought, but he’s imitating Frank. They shook hands and Martin clapped Dick on the shoulder. The touch seemed to rouse Dirty Dick from his stupor — his head bobbed up and down in acknowledgment — and he fumbled for Martin’s hand, which he didn’t shake so much as hold for several seconds. The physical contact among the three suggested an intimacy Lily couldn’t understand. Few people touched the Bodlers. Her father had, hadn’t he? Yes, he would shake hands with Frank at the door. Lily put her head down in the grass and closed her eyes. She imagined Pastor Ingebretzen bolting from the house, his black robe flying as Frank chased him into the road with an ax. Then she changed the image. No, the minister wouldn’t have worn vestments, just a black suit with his collar. She remembered old Pastor Ingebretzen. He had been a serious little man who quoted Scripture on every occasion, even to the Sunday school kids who rarely understood a word. He had been prone to pointing for emphasis during sermons, and once he had pointed his short, white finger at her, Lily Dahl. He had singled her out among all the children in the Sunday school class. “Stand in awe and sin not; commune with thy heart upon thy bed, and be still.” Years had passed before Lily figured out that the man must have pointed at random, that he hadn’t looked into her heart and seen smudges of sin, but had merely picked out a young face that looked particularly bored and punished it. At the time, Lily thought Pastor Ingebretzen had read her soul and knew that in her bed at night she suffered not only from guilt, but from awe. She had dreaded God, Satan, the Holy Ghost, and angels equally and had prayed that she be spared the appearance of each and all of them. She had even used the word “spared,” because it sounded biblical. At the sound of Martin’s truck, Lily picked up her head and watched him back out of the driveway. The wheelchair rolled and jumped once under its constraint as the truck left the gravel and turned right onto the highway — away from town and toward the little road he had drawn for her on the map. As she watched the truck grow smaller, she saw in her mind the delicate lines of the web he had drawn beneath his house, the inexplicable box at the Overland’s and the arrow to her grandparents’ house. It was like pointing at nothing, except maybe heaven.

Filthy Frank and Dirty Dick lingered in the driveway. They didn’t speak to or even look at each other. They stood inert and blank for a long time. Lily had hoped they would climb into the truck and drive away, but she understood that wasn’t going to happen when she saw Dick wander over to the fire. He reached up, picked a soft bundle from the nearest junk mound and dropped it into the bin. Whatever it was, it excited the flames and they rose high. Dick lifted his chin and stepped away from the heat, but when the blaze subsided, he moved close again and repeated what he had done before. This time, when he backed away from the leaping fire, Lily saw that he was laughing or that his expression suggested a laugh, but she heard no noise. It could have been that the crackle of the fire in combination with the wind hid the noise from her, but Lily was surprised that she heard nothing at all. He lifted his shoulders, threw his head back and opened his mouth wide as his head bobbed in silent hilarity. Then he drew something white from his pocket and threw it into the fire. The white thing had little effect on the flames, but Dick laughed the noiseless laugh anyway, as though a burnt bit of cloth were the most uproarious thing he could think of. Lily saw Frank shuffle toward his brother, stop beside him and raise his fist above Dick’s head. She braced herself for a blow, but instead of hitting his brother, Frank let his arm fall slowly in front of Dick’s face. Then Frank turned toward the house, and his brother trailed after him. The screen door slammed and Lily thought to herself that it was now or never.

She made a run for the garage. When her feet hit the driveway, she heard the gravel shift under them and thought, I’m making too much noise, but she didn’t stop until she arrived panting inside the garage, where she backed against the wall to hide herself. She listened for the house door. Nothing. She moved quietly in the direction of the suitcase. She remembered exactly where she had left it and guessed she could open it, return the shoes and shut it in a matter of seconds. Standing in the middle of the garage, she crouched down to reach out for the suitcase, which should have been wedged between two rain barrels, and found that it wasn’t there. She pushed aside cans, boxes and an old rake, expecting to discover it, but the suitcase wasn’t in the garage anymore. Lily paused, clutched the bag with the shoes in it to her chest and wondered what to do. Then she heard the screen door slam and the sound of footsteps. She ducked behind a large wooden crate and squatted on the floor. Through the slats of the crate she saw Dick shuffle past the garage toward the fire and stop beside the bin. Lily looked at the dark, motionless figure, his face blurred by the rising smoke, and waited. Behind him, she could see the Klatschwetter barn and silo. She noticed that the sky had clouded over and that the sun had sunk lower than she would have thought. Suddenly she worried about making rehearsal on time. But Dick was in no hurry. Lily sat down. She removed the shoes from her bag and laid them on her lap. She would have to leave them here in the garage. What choice did she have? The damp earth floor began to seep through her jean shorts and underwear, and she lifted her buttocks off the ground to adjust her position. As she moved, the shoes slipped. Lily turned to grab them, smashed her nose into the edge of a rusted wheelbarrow behind her, and then, reaching for her face, slammed her forehead into the tine of a garden rake. With a short gasp, she put her fingers to the spot, and removing her hand saw that it was covered with blood. “Oh shit,” she whispered to herself. She touched the gash in her forehead; it wasn’t deep. Then looking down she noticed spots of blood on her thighs. It’s my nose, she thought, and pinched it hard, but the blood leaked out anyway. She let go and began to wipe the blood from her legs, but it smeared on her skin and mingled with the dirt from her hands. The bad light made it hard to see, but she knew the blood was coming fast and hard. When she looked down for the shoes, she saw she had bled on them, too — a large red spot on one heel and three drops on the tip of the other. Lily grabbed her canvas bag and began to rub the shoes with the material. She spat on the cloth and rubbed, but as she leaned close to the shoes to clean them, she saw more blood drop onto her legs. Still, she didn’t give up, but held her nose with one hand and tried to clean with the other hand, but she could feel herself beginning to panic. The shoes were getting ruined. The white leather had turned rust-red and filthy with her attempts to clean it, and suddenly she wanted to cry. I can’t leave them here now, she thought. She watched as more blood dropped onto the toes, and covered the laces with her hands. Lily looked up and out through the slats of the crate toward the smoking can and saw that Dick had disappeared. Now, she thought, and carrying the shoes in one hand she made her way to the garage doors and stuck her head cautiously into the light. Without examining her hands very closely, she saw that the blood on them appeared much redder now that she was outside. She looked toward the house and saw nobody. Then she looked in the other direction, but neither Dick nor Frank was anywhere in sight.

Lily looked at the smoke rising from the can and thought, I’ll burn them. There’ll be nothing left of them. It was the perfect solution. She sprinted toward the fire, dropped the shoes into the ashes and then, feeling a surge of relief, fled toward the ditch and threw herself headlong into the grass. For several seconds she didn’t move. Then she turned around to look at the smoking bin. She saw no flames. They’re not burning, she thought. They’ll come out in the morning and find them, and they’ll see that they’re covered in blood. What if they’re hers? What if they took the suitcase inside for safekeeping because it belonged to her? Lily jumped to her feet, ran back to the fire and looked into it. Sure enough, the shoes had been charred and scorched, but not burnt up, and when she bent toward them to pick them up out of the ashes, she smelled something sweet and putrid that made her stand back for a moment. Then she plucked the shoes out of the fire. The hot leather burnt her fingertips, but she held on to the shoes and took off toward the ditch, where she threw herself into the grass for a second time and let the shoes fall to the ground. Then she looked at them and laughed — one short, miserable laugh at her own stupidity. When she picked up the two charred things to put them into her bag, they weren’t hot anymore, just warm. As warm as somebody with a high fever, she thought, and then she pushed her bicycle up the ditch into the road. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but her thumbs and index fingers throbbed as she gripped the handlebars. When she looked up, Lily saw that the sun had disappeared entirely under thick, gray clouds, an ordinary shift in weather that nevertheless caused her some amazement. She pedaled hard with her head down against the traffic and hoped the increasing gloom would hide her.

Halfway home, Lily saw a turquoise-and-white Pontiac come speeding toward her, and when the car was only yards away, she noticed Dolores at the wheel. She was driving with the windows open, a Loretta Lynn song blaring from the radio as the car’s headlights shone on Lily for a second or two. In that brief moment Lily saw Dolores look directly at her, but the woman’s face gave no sign of recognition. Maybe it’s her night with the twins, Lily thought. Rehearsal must have started without me. And thinking of the Arts Guild, Lily understood all of a sudden that she missed Hermia, as if Hermia were a close friend of hers. She felt a drop of rain on her neck as she drove past the Webster city limits sign. Then she felt another, and another.

* * *

When Lily opened the back door and looked up the stairway to the landing, she saw Mabel step out into the hall and look down at her. The bare bulb shone down on Mabel’s gray hair and whitened it. “I’m glad it’s you, Lily,” she said, and then, focusing her eyes, she said with a little cry in her voice, “You’ve had an accident!”

After that, Mabel was all business. Her anxiety of only hours before had vanished, and Lily saw that she moved like a different person. Efficient and brusque, she ordered Lily to come to her apartment to get cleaned up and fed, and after Lily threw the bloody bag with the burnt shoes into her closet and called Mrs. Wright at the Arts Guild, who accepted her lie about falling off her bike, she obeyed.

Lily sat down on Mabel’s sofa and listened to the sound of water running in the bathroom. While she waited for Mabel, she looked for the Japanese couple but didn’t find them. Then Mabel was standing in front of her with a basin of water and a washcloth. She drew a chair close to the sofa, set the bowl on the floor and without another word began to wash Lily’s face. Mabel patted the cut on her forehead gently, lifted Lily’s hair and moved the warm cloth along her neck. Then she wiped Lily’s legs and dried them just as they were beginning to itch from the wetness. Even as it happened, Lily knew the washing marked a change between her and Mabel that could never be undone, and yet she didn’t resist it. The woman’s touch, the way her hand moved with the cloth, was so tender that Lily felt her throat tighten with emotion. When Mabel lowered Lily’s hands into the basin, the warm water aggravated her burns and she gasped. Mabel took both Lily’s hands in her own and turned them over — both thumbs and two of the fingers on each hand had blistered at their tips. Mabel looked up at Lily, her eyes steady, but she said nothing. She left the room and a few moments later returned with a fresh basin of water.

Then Mabel started to talk. She didn’t preface her remarks, didn’t give any reason for her sudden desire to tell Lily what she had never told her before. She just jumped in and said, “My father loved me, but he had no gift for affection. He rarely touched me, and when he did, his body was wood. I pity him now. It was my mother who held me and rocked me, me and my brother, and she had hands, Lily, that when they touched you, you felt the calm of every calm thing in the world, and when she died — I was younger than you, seventeen — it was as if all that was good and light had been snuffed out of my life. I left my father and my brother one day in the spring, after a year of plotting and planning. I ran off with Owen Hartwig, a freethinker from the Aberdeen Weekly, to get married.”

“But I thought your husband’s name was Evan,” Lily said.

“It was. I left Owen Hartwig at the altar, or rather at the courthouse.” Mabel paused. “I couldn’t stand the way he looked close-up, you know, nose to nose. It sounds ridiculous but I don’t believe it was, really. Something about his body repelled me.”

“But you thought you loved him?”

“I liked the idea of him — hard hitting newspaperman with a radical streak. I forgot I’d have to live with those thighs.”

“What did you do then?”

“I became a chambermaid in the Grand Hotel, established residency and eventually went to the university at night.”

“And your father and brother?”

“They stayed on the farm. My brother farmed that place until he died, ten years ago.”

“The farm?” Lily looked at her.

“Outside Aberdeen, South Dakota.”

“South Dakota? I thought you came from out east somewhere.”

“No.”

“But you’ve never even mentioned it. You’re like a city person through and through.” Lily dried her hands on the towel Mabel handed her.

“Books.”

“Books?”

“Yes, I wanted to live a great and passionate life, a life of risk, beauty and pain.” Mabel laughed. “The last part seemed to come naturally.”

“Have you?” Lily looked into Mabel’s eyes. “Has it been like that?”

Mabel smiled. “I think that it’s not what happens in life so much as how you imagine what happens, how you color events. It’s rather like the idea of the changeling when I think about it. Substitution is involved. When I worked in that hotel and made people’s beds and cleaned their toilets and straightened their perfumes and their soaps and emptied their ashtrays into a tub, I felt humiliated every single second because I imagined that I was destined for something else, but the truth is, I had no reason to believe that. I was a poor girl from the South Dakota sticks. But I had read a lot of books, and those stories wrote mine, if you see. You know who gave them to me?”

Lily shook her head.

“My mother.”

“Is that why you’re always giving me books to read?”

Mabel narrowed her eyes at Lily. “Maybe,” she said and stood up abruptly and left the room. She returned with a long, black shirt and tossed it at Lily. “Here put this on. You’ll look good in it, and we’ll put that dirty thing in bleach.” She nodded at Lily’s T-shirt.

“Why did you take this apartment, Mabel?” Lily said and looked at her hard.

Mabel shook her head. Her small face looked suddenly tired. “It reminded me of a place where I once lived — these little rooms.” She took a deep breath. “I wanted to return to it. I suppose…” Mabel shook her head.

Lily stared at the black shirt in her lap. As she pulled off her T-shirt, her blistered fingers throbbed, but she pushed her arms into the sleeves of the new shirt, and when it hung open around her, Lily looked down at the long row of buttons, then back up at Mabel.

Mabel buttoned the shirt. She held the material away from Lily’s breasts so she didn’t brush them with her moving hands, and her fingers left a scent of perfume behind them. When she finished, she looked into Lily’s eyes and said, “Secrecy isn’t always a bad thing, you know.”

“Isn’t it?” Lily thought about the shoes.

“Confession is a problem,” Mabel said. “In friendship, anyway. The listener can’t always bear the weight of it. That’s why I’ve always thought a priest in a box is a beautiful thing — the guilty person whispering through a hole into an ear that can hear anything. Freud understood that, too, with the couch. You didn’t have to look at the analyst. It’s all lost now. People stare straight into the eyes of their psychiatrists.”

Lily watched Mabel’s face. The woman turned her head away from Lily toward the window. “I wonder if he’s on vigil again tonight. Whoever he is, he’s up to something.” Mabel smiled a small thin smile that disturbed Lily. It looked out of place. Then she walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. Her motion was both dramatic and self-conscious, but Lily couldn’t quite tell whether Mabel was making fun of herself or not. “I am that merry wanderer of the night,” she said as she peered out the window. Lily recognized Puck’s line. “No,” Mabel said. “Maybe it’s too early.” She turned around. “He’ll be back though.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I heard it in his footsteps: unfinished business.”

Mabel fed Lily a sandwich and insisted that she keep the shirt, which was silk and probably expensive. Lily protested but then gave in.

Before Lily left for Ed’s, she stood on the landing with Mabel to say good-bye. The woman leaned forward and put her lips to Lily’s cheek. She barely grazed the skin, but the feeling of the kiss lingered as Lily walked down the stairs, out the door and into the street. When she opened the door of the Stuart Hotel, she could still feel it, as though Mabel’s lips had left an impression on her face.

* * *

The story Lily told Ed to explain her cut and burns not only rang true, it sounded more plausible than the truth. She had slipped in the kitchen at work, grabbed the stove to block her fall, but rather than catch her balance, she had burned her fingers and smashed her head on the oven door. As she told it, she saw it happening like a real memory, and to some degree it supplanted the actual story. Dull fiction took the place of ridiculous fact, for the simple reason that it seemed more real than reality. Ed believed Lily, and Lily almost believed herself.

As he lay beside her in the narrow bed that night, he talked to her. It wasn’t a conversation, but a monologue. Ed stared at the ceiling and began to describe her body part by part. He began with her hair, moved to her forehead and included the cut. He described her eyebrows, her eyes, her nose and mouth and chin. Slowly, meticulously, he moved down her body without ever looking at her, providing such detail that she felt her body no longer belonged to her, and even though she wanted him to touch her, she didn’t ask him to because the sound of his voice in the darkened room filled her with such intense pleasure and expectation that she didn’t want it to stop. But when his description reached her toes, he kissed them. Lily wondered how many women he had made desperate with this kind of talk, and yet when he kissed the burns on her fingertips so softly that the slight pain his lips brought only made her happy, she forgot all about the other women. They had no faces and no names, after all, except Elizabeth — and that was only a name.

Lily woke in the night to pee, stood up in the room, and before she opened the door to the bathroom, walked to the window and looked out across the street at her own building. A single light burned in Mabel’s living room. Lily guessed it was the desk lamp and that Mabel was still working on her book far into the night. Then Lily searched the street for signs of the man Mabel said kept watch there, but saw nobody. The instant she turned her head to walk away, however, she heard a noise beneath her, maybe from the steps of the hotel. She pushed open the screen and hung her head over the edge to see who it was, but again she saw no one, only heard him running down the alley beside the hotel. She listened for more, but whoever it was had either stopped moving or had gone too far to be heard.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, Mabel accepted Ed and Lily’s invitation to visit them at the Stuart Hotel, and within half an hour of her arrival, she fainted. The moment Mabel tripped through the door wearing a pale purple shirt, narrow black pants and a cloud of perfume, Lily could feel the woman’s nervous excitement. She talked a blue streak, careening from one subject to another in a high tremulous voice while she gestured with her hands to make her points. The weather had turned hot and humid, and the rain, which hadn’t amounted to more than a drizzle the day before, still threatened. Ed turned the painting of Dolores around to show it to Mabel, then the painting of Stanley. She looked at each one very closely but didn’t stop talking. She was especially attracted to the narrative boxes along the top of the canvases and launched into a discussion of memory that had something to do with walking through a house, room by room. Ed seemed to understand perfectly, but Lily found it hard to follow. Mabel said that she used the “device” herself to remember speeches or texts and that for her the most important thing was “walls.” Ed turned around the portrait of Tex, and Lily watched Mabel look at the painting of Tex and then collapse. She fell so fast that if Ed hadn’t been only inches away, she would have landed on the floor. Ed carried Mabel to his bed, laid her down on it and felt her pulse.

“You don’t think it was the painting, do you?” he said in a whisper. “Maybe the nudity came as a shock. Her pulse is okay.”

“She’s not that kind of old lady, Ed. Anyway, it’s only men who think seeing a penis is some big deal. Women couldn’t care less.”

He smiled at her comment, then turned to Mabel. Only seconds later the woman opened her eyes, but during that intervening moment Ed looked at Mabel with an expression of such intensity that Lily was taken aback. Mabel moved, woke, and her waxen face regained its color quickly.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she groaned.

“It’s hot,” Lily said. “Your nerves.”

Mabel sat up and stared at Ed. “I don’t understand it,” she said slowly. “It’s the painting, of course. It happened once before many years ago when I was a student, with a reproduction, if you can imagine that. The professor passed around that famous Grünewald painting of the dead Christ. I took one look at it and keeled over. At the time, I didn’t know what an impression that same painting had made on poor Dostoyevsky, but it did comfort me a bit when I read about his response.” Mabel looked wildly around the room for a moment, then back at Ed. “Maybe they’ll drop like flies when you exhibit it. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”

“Don’t get too worked up,” Lily said and patted Mabel’s hands.

Ed looked at Mabel closely. “I want to paint you,” he said. He moved his head to the side and stared at Mabel’s neck, then her legs. Lily didn’t like seeing him look at Mabel in this way, but the woman herself seemed pleased. She straightened herself and lifted her chin.

“You do?” she said.

“Yes, very much. It’s a commitment, you understand. I would start drawing right away, and you would have to talk to me for hours and hours. It’s a bit like going into a hole with someone for a week, which, frankly, can be unpleasant, and then there’s the problem of finding a story for the boxes. Sometimes, that’s hard for people. I pay by the hour, of course, not a lot, but—”

Mabel interrupted him. “I agree.”

Ed grabbed both Mabel’s hands and said, “We’ll start tomorrow.”

Lily watched them. She had introduced them to each other, and now within forty minutes of their meeting, they were talking about going into a hole together. If Mabel hadn’t fainted, Lily realized that it probably wouldn’t have happened. She couldn’t explain why she believed this, but she did, and she watched the two of them with a new wariness. She had wanted them to like each other, but not this much, and she resisted their sudden rapport by saying very little. Mabel seemed calmer after fainting, but she talked nevertheless, mostly about the portrait of Tex and what was in it that she hadn’t wanted to see. “It’ll go straight into my book tonight,” she announced. She seemed happy, almost proud of having keeled over after looking at a picture. When Lily said she thought it was the heat, not the painting, both Ed and Mabel turned skeptical eyes in her direction, so she gave up that line of argument. Despite her willingness to discuss the painting, Mabel wouldn’t look at it again. Ed turned it to the wall, hiding the big man and his ugly fantasies. Lily looked at the back of the canvas and, wanting to leave Mabel behind as the main subject of the afternoon, asked Ed what Tex was really like.

“Really like?” he said. “I don’t know. He has a thing about outlaws — Wild West characters. He brought a gun to one of the sittings — a forty-five — big thing, scared the shit out of me, if you want to know the truth. But I had a strong feeling that if he saw my fear, it would go badly, and I did my best to stay cool. As it turned out, the gun wasn’t loaded. He was kind enough to show me the empty chamber, and then he settled down to work. The gun was an ornament really, didn’t need bullets.” Ed paused. “He said they banned him from the reenactment of the Jesse James robbery, and it broke his heart.”

“No,” Lily said. “They said he couldn’t be Jesse James, and that’s the only part he would take.”

Ed nodded. “Jesse James keeps coming up. Just the other day Dolores told me she’d seen him.”

“Dolores of the painting?” Mabel said.

Ed nodded. His eyes looked distant. “She’d been drinking and wasn’t too clear on the details, but she said she’d seen him in the woods, or rather his ghost, coming out of a cave.” He paused. “It’s gruesome, actually, now that I say it. According to Dolores, he was carrying a woman’s head.”

Lily looked at Mabel, who had turned to Ed. “What?”

“That’s what she said. Pink elephants, I guess.”

Mabel wrinkled her forehead.

The absurd story rattled Lily more than she would have liked to admit, and she didn’t say anything. It reminded her of some other story she couldn’t place. She rubbed the blister on her index finger against the blister on her thumb and felt the liquid inside them move back and forth.

Ed looked at Mabel. Lily wished he would look at her. “The fact is, Dolores is an unusual woman. She has a kind of instinctive intelligence.”

“Not everyone would use that adjective in front of that noun,” Mabel said, “but I do understand you.”

Lily cleared her throat. Ed and Mabel looked at her. “I guess the head was a ghost, too, huh?”

“She didn’t say,” Ed smiled.

Lily smiled back at him. She stretched in her chair. “I’m hot,” she said and continued to look into his eyes. She undid three buttons of her shirt, untucked it and tied it under her breasts. She felt both of them watching her, and knowing they were looking made her happy. “There, that’s better,” she said. Lily stretched again slowly, rolling her shoulders backward and then raising her arms above her head so the gap of bare skin beneath her shirt widened. Then she looked at Ed and bit her lip.

He gave her a suspicious look, and as he smiled, he shook his head in gentle reprimand. The expression launched a sudden fantasy — Lily imagined pushing Ed to the floor and climbing on top of him. She smiled, crossed her legs and turned to Mabel, whose face made it clear she hadn’t missed a second of the exchange between Lily and Ed.

Mabel squinted at Lily. She made no attempt to hide her irony. “Lily Dahl,” she said, as though she liked listening to the sound of the name. “Let’s show Mr. Shapiro Hermia.” She paused. “The fight. I know Helena’s lines.”

“Now?” Lily said.

Mabel nodded. “I think this is a very good time. It will be our rehearsal. When we’re done, I’m going to leave. You start: ‘You juggler.’”

Lily and Mabel performed the scene three times for Ed. Mabel was a far better Helena than Denise. The third time Mabel lifted her face to Lily’s and said, “Good Hermia, do not be so bitter with me. / I evermore did love you, Hermia, / Did ever keep your counsels, never wrong’d you.” Lily listened to the words and blushed.

* * *

At ten o’clock the following morning, Bert told Lily that she had just seen Mabel Wasley walk through the door of the Stuart Hotel. Lily turned immediately toward the street, but Mabel had already disappeared inside. She wished she had seen her, if only to catch a glimpse of the woman’s clothes. How had Mabel decided to dress for the “hole”? Then she tried to imagine the conversation between Ed and Mabel. She saw Mabel gesturing dramatically as Ed leaned toward her with that engrossed expression he had had when Mabel fainted. I wonder why he doesn’t want to do a portrait of me, Lily said to herself. It was the first time she had thought about herself as someone Ed could paint, but as soon as she did, she felt bad. Why had he wanted to paint Mabel, but not her? Lily remembered the paintings, saw each person on the canvas: Dolores, Tex, Stanley. They’re all so private, Lily thought. In fact, when she thought about the pictures, she had the feeling that Ed was painting privacy itself — people who looked straight out at you, but who were alone at the same time. He chose people for a reason, didn’t he? Suddenly Lily felt that he would never choose her and that he saved a special kind of intimacy for the people he painted. She tried to see herself as one of them. What would she have to tell in the boxes if he asked her? Lily saw the ground where her grandparents’ house had been. The new owners had razed it to the ground. And now it’s like nothing was ever there. But that’s not my story, she thought. And thinking of Mabel and Ed across the street, Lily felt annoyed that they were together. She imagined Mabel in some drooping silk number and felt a pang of regret about her own clothes. She could almost hear Mabel talking — a stream of sentences filled with the names of people Lily had never heard of. When she left the cafe, she was inventing Ed’s painting of Mabel for herself. She imagined the woman the way she had seen her the day before — a small body on the narrow bed, drained of color and nearly of life: the portrait of a corpse. Lily found the image comforting.

Standing outside Ed’s door, she heard them talking. Ed’s voice was low, confidential, a little hesitant. She couldn’t hear what he said, but she thought he sounded exactly the way she had imagined him. Lily’s neck and jaw hardened at the sound. Then she heard Mabel answer, her voice pitched much higher. “She had one blue eye and one brown. A rare trait, and once you noticed it, utterly arresting. I didn’t see it at first, but when I did, I couldn’t stop looking at those mismatched eyes. I honestly think that if her eyes had been the same color, I wouldn’t have responded in the way I did. She was very beautiful and very quiet. If she had talked, it might all have been different, too. I suppose I fell in love with her without ever saying it to myself or to her or to anyone until twenty years later when I allowed myself to think it. She was like a cat, really, or maybe a cat bewitched. She had no goodness in her, but she wasn’t bad either. She was empty of all moral sense. I used to rub her back for her and her feet, and I remember that touching her troubled me. It wasn’t only a sense of the forbidden. That vacuum in her frightened me. But she knew more about me than I did myself. She teased me like a lover, luxuriated in my devotion the way she did in everyone else’s, just because she had an appetite for it. And then she was gone, ran off. I never saw her again…”

Lily turned around and walked down the hall. She went quietly but quickly, her pulse drumming in her ears, and she ran all the way home to her room. She went straight to her closet, snatched the canvas bag from the floor and threw the filthy thing on her bed. She took out the shoes and looked at them. She turned them over in her hands and picked at the frayed leather with her fingers. The fire had colored them — black, brown, ocher, yellow. Spotted and speckled with burns near the heels, the toes of both shoes had been scorched through. She brought them close to her face and smelled them, breathing in the odor of ashes and then the stink she remembered from the fire. I have to get rid of them, she said to herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to toss them into the garbage. She laid them side by side on the floor and stared at them for a minute. They’re the sorriest excuse for shoes I’ve ever seen, she thought, and then with slow, deliberate motions, she removed her sandals and slipped her feet into them. One tore. The other flapped around her instep. Without understanding why, Lily felt cruel wearing those charred, dilapidated shoes, and right then she decided it was a feeling she wanted. Without taking them off, she set her alarm to wake her for rehearsal, lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Lily was dreaming when the alarm woke her, but whatever it was, it died with the clock’s ringing, and she remembered nothing of it.

* * *

Lily suspected it was her mood, but the play changed for her that night. In the first scene when Mr. Pumper made Egeus’s speech exactly the same way he always did, Lily heard the threat in it for the first time: “I beg the ancient privilege of Athens; / As she is mine, I may dispose of her, / Which shall be either to this gentlemen, / Or to her death according to our law.” And she heard the violence in what Theseus said, too. “To whom you are but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted and within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it.” The metaphor, lost on her before, jumped to life, and Lily saw the image of a young woman, her face and body smashed by a man’s fist. Lily remembered Mabel in front of the window when they had practiced the lines together. “Just one turn,” she had said, moving her fingers as if she held a screw, “and comedy is tragedy.”

All through the play she heard words and phrases she hadn’t remembered hearing before, and behind the familiar people, behind their T-shirts and shorts and clumsy performances and forgotten lines and Mrs. Wright’s instructions to be “airy” and to “step lightly,” and behind the noise of hammering and sawing from the set builders downstairs, and even behind the muggy weather that hung in the room like a weight, she felt the presence of another play that was almost real, or as real as memory is. Even though she couldn’t really smell the trees, the thistles and the honeysuckle, she remembered that she had smelled them, and she remembered the bloodroot blooming in early spring in the shade of the woods, and the buttercups coming up in the meadow, and the tall grass alive with grasshoppers, jumping and quivering as she waded through it, and she remembered stepping out of the creek to find black leeches all over her legs and running home without looking down, and Lily imagined she understood Martin’s map then of the two places, and she longed to go home, back to her house where she had lived with her parents before she grew up, before her father’s cancer, before the Ideal Cafe and before Ed and Mabel, back to what she remembered, to milkweed and cow pies and the creek.

Music accompanied the actors for the first time that night, a string quartet that played well. Without the music, Lily knew that she probably wouldn’t have felt what she did. The music was emotion for her then, not a reflection of feeling so much as feeling itself, and listening to it after her bad day, she fell into a state that resembled a low fever. A little light in her head and achy in her joints, she played the part of Hermia in a sort of trance.

When rehearsal ended and the music stopped, Lily tried to shake herself to full consciousness but found it hard and didn’t listen to anyone or notice the other actors until Ruth Baker walked up to her carrying a large bolt of white fabric in her arms and said, “This is the material for you and Denise. Do you like it?”

Lily stared at the whiteness and blinked.

“I’ll meet you in the costume room and get you measured.”

“Okay,” Lily said.

“Didn’t you hear Barbara’s announcement?”

Lily looked into Mrs. Baker’s round face and down at the woman’s belly which bulged under khaki pants. “I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming.”

When Lily walked through the door into the wardrobe room, she saw Denise standing on a low stool. Mrs. Baker stood on the floor beside her with a measuring tape, and Martin Petersen was sitting on the floor Indian style with a long piece of fabric draped over his knees. He held a small notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. The naked lightbulb on the ceiling enhanced Martin’s whiteness, but Lily nevertheless had the impression that his skin color was fading with each passing day. I’m sure he’s paler than he was a week ago, she thought. What is he doing here, anyway?

“Martin’s helping me out,” Mrs. Baker said as though Lily had asked the question aloud.

Lily nodded and watched Denise step off the stool. It was normal that Martin should help out, wasn’t it? He was a handyman, after all. Then why did she feel his presence was calculated, that it had something to do with her?

Lily stepped up on the stool and watched Denise leave the room. Denise’s walk annoyed Lily. It was stiff and self-conscious. Her roots are getting dark, Lily thought, and felt Mrs. Baker move the tape measure along the length of her leg. She called out the numbers and Martin scribbled them into the notebook. Lily looked down at him for a moment and saw three needles stuck into the fabric of his shirt. He bent toward the page, and the needles shone for an instant in the light.

Mrs. Baker clicked her tongue as she worked. “You girls,” she said. “Such teeny-weeny sizes. Of course fifteen years and four children ago, I had a twenty-six-inch waist myself, hard to believe now, but I’ve got the wedding gown to prove it.” As she felt Mrs. Baker loop the tape around her waist and tighten it, Lily heard Martin breathing, and the sound made her blush. His pencil scratched the pad. She closed her eyes for an instant and then felt dizzy. She swayed on the chair. Mrs. Baker caught her elbow.

“Lily, are you all right?”

She looked into Mrs. Baker’s concerned face. “Yes,” Lily said. “I just lost my balance.”

“We’re done, dear.”

Lily stepped off the stool, and Mrs. Baker left the room, muttering something to herself about Titania and sequins.

Lily looked down at Martin. The cloth lay beside him now, and she saw that the zipper of his jeans was half open. For a moment she imagined his penis, testicles and pubic hair underneath the denim, and his sex seemed real to her for the first time. After rocking back and forth a couple of times before he spoke, he said, “W-why don’t you come to my house now. We can talk for a while. I–I-I have something to show you.” He paused, and when he spoke again, Lily detected barely audible music in his voice. “I think you want to come now. The woods are just behind the house.”

She stared at Martin and then at a purple velvet cape that lay in a heap behind him and said, her eyes still on the velvet, “Why did you say that about the woods?”

Martin quoted Oberon’s lines to Puck when the fairy king sends his squire to find the herb that will enchant Titania. Every time she heard it, she imagined it the same way: Cupid’s arrow flying in a great arc until it hit its mark in an open field. Martin didn’t stutter at all. “It fell upon a little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound: / And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness.’” He looked at her steadily and boldly. He didn’t sound like Martin Petersen at all. The quote was a dare.

“Why not?” she said to him. She shook her hair on her back and looked directly into his eyes.

If he was surprised, Martin didn’t show it. He stood up, stuttered something about his truck, and Lily followed him outside. Walking behind him, she knew she was making a mistake, but it was a mistake she wanted to make. If it weren’t for Ed, she wouldn’t be going home with Martin. If she was at Martin’s, she couldn’t be with Ed, but if she was home, she might not be able to keep herself away from the Stuart Hotel. At the same time, she felt drawn to Martin and curious about the house she had been forbidden to visit.

Sitting beside him in his pickup, Lily watched the road ahead of them as Martin drove in silence past the Dilly Home and Courtland Hill and onto the highway. The seats had a vaguely chemical smell. Lily put her elbow out the window and moved close to the door to be as far away from Martin as possible. She let the wind blow onto her face and looked into the night. For a few seconds she didn’t know Martin was starting to speak, but then she turned to him and heard him sputter, “Do you know what the ‘little western flower’ is?”

“No,” Lily said.

Martin paused.

Lily didn’t look at him, but she felt the effort he was making to say the next word.

“A p-p-pansy.”

“Really?” Lily said, and then she remembered her mother’s pansies lined up in trays before she put them into the ground, some had white petals with deep violet or blue splotches at their centers. “It makes sense,” she said. “I can see it.”

Martin nodded. Lily looked at his profile in the light from the dashboard. He moved the clutch into second. Lily leaned back against the seat and thought that sometimes experience was good for its own sake, that Martin Petersen was at the very least an interesting character, and that this too might be an adventure.

He drove fast, not crazy fast, just fast, and Lily sensed urgency in him. They passed the Bodlers’, and Lily saw a single light burning in the house upstairs, and she looked at the tall junk heaps, black against the wood behind them, and felt a sudden pang of anticipation. Martin turned onto the gravel road that passed beneath an arch of trees and stopped in front of the tiny house. It was completely dark.

When the motor stilled, Lily heard crickets in the grass. She opened her door, and Martin cried, “W-w-wait!” Lily was so startled she waited, watched Martin run around the front of the truck, appear at her door and hold out his hand to help her down. Lily played along.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she said.

Once she was standing on the ground beside him, Martin bowed and made a flourish with his hand.

He flicked on the porch light when they reached the house. Lily looked around her and noticed a dying plant on a small table — its leaves so withered it was unrecognizable. Martin opened the front door, and Lily stopped behind him. The odor she had smelled in the truck was stronger in the house, glue or some chemical. They walked straight into what must have been the main room. Martin turned on the light. A worn sofa, a couple of straight-backed chairs and a table were the only furniture. Martin was telling her to sit down, and Lily walked toward the sofa, asking herself why the room made her feel bad. She remembered that Martin’s father had had lips with almost no flesh to them, and for some reason she had a sudden image of him with a rifle trudging across a field, although she couldn’t remember where it came from. The room had no bookshelves, but there were books in piles everywhere, and after she sat down Lily read some of their titles: Gray’s Anatomy; Stalin: A Biography; The Many Uses of Molds; Drawing the Human Figure; The Third Reich; The Future Eve; The Numberless Planet. She also saw a pile of science fiction and detective paperbacks and at least one romance called Baxter Manor. In the nearest corner she noticed a heap of two-by-fours and a toolbox sitting on the floor beside a pile of old clothes or material, a large pair of scissors, bits and pieces of foam rubber, spools of thread, tubes of paint and several knives laid neatly in a row. The overhead light didn’t illuminate the corner fully, and in its obscurity Lily also saw the vague shapes of things she couldn’t identify. The knives unsettled her, but she told herself that in daylight they would probably look innocent.

She turned away from them to the opposite corner of the room, where she noticed a rocking chair with a large black piece of material draped over its arm. Taped to the wall was some kind of collage pasted onto a world map. The map looked hand drawn and reminded Lily of the map Martin had given her. On and around it were newspaper clippings, color pictures from magazines; some of them looked torn, others neatly cut. Lily stood up from the sofa, walked toward it and heard Martin grunt behind her, but she pretended not to hear. Stopping in front of the collage, Lily noticed that the center of the collage was blank — no pictures, no drawings, nothing, but because it was surrounded by so much stuff, the emptiness seemed significant. Then she looked at a picture of a starving child, most likely taken from an advertisement for an aid organization like Save the Children or CARE. Beside it Martin had taped a photograph of a young model from a fashion magazine in an evening gown. The juxtaposition was obvious and awful, but as she looked more closely she saw that the simpering model and the miserable child had expressions on their faces that were weirdly similar. She looked from one article and picture to another — an old photograph from Vietnam, articles about John Wayne Gacy, Jack the Ripper, June Putkey, the Webster girl who stabbed her mother a couple of years ago, an article with the headline, “Thousands Visit Statue of the Virgin Alleged to Have Healing Powers,” and a grainy photograph of death camp victims in open graves, more ads for clothes, beer, cigarettes, images of gardens with fountains, flowers and trees. She saw a number of clippings from tabloids including, “Man Has Head Transplant and Lives,” “My Baby’s Father Is an Alien” and “Satan’s Burial Ground Discovered in Utah. Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Horned Skulls.” Just beside a magazine ad for toothpaste that showed a young woman with snow-white teeth, Lily saw a star beside Bergen Belsen and beneath the star Martin had drawn a box that looked similar to the box Martin had drawn for her but narrower. Lily closed her eyes for an instant. The muscles in her shoulders tightened. She could feel Martin behind her and turned quickly toward him. “What is this, Martin?”

He regarded her evenly, his lips tightly shut. She saw his head shake slightly, saw his tongue, his teeth. He stuttered unintelligibly.

“How can you stand to have this up, to see these things all the time?” She rested her hand on the back of the rocking chair and felt it sway under her touch. The black material hanging over it brushed her leg. She stepped back.

Martin pointed to an ad for the telephone company that showed a mother embracing a child in a green backyard. “Th-there are nice pictures, too.”

“I know, Martin, but beside the rest, they look like a joke, and all those pretty models and the flowers. I don’t know.”

Martin turned away from her. She heard him sputter through the first consonant and then his words came fluently but with that same lilt in his voice she had heard before. “It’s a mix, this and that. What is. And it’s all got a name. Everything’s called something, even”—he paused and pointed to Auschwitz—“even places that shouldn’t have one. I read about a lot of things. I see stuff on TV.” He moved his head toward an old set with vinyl sides painted to look like wood grain. “Black and white. I don’t want color.”

They were silent for several seconds. Lily didn’t like the smell of the house. She turned her head toward the bedroom door, which was standing open. She could see an unmade bed covered with loose papers, a desk and a few inches of a dresser. “What did you want to show me?” Lily said. “I have to go home soon.”

Martin walked past Lily into the bedroom. She heard a drawer open and close. He returned with a piece of newspaper and asked her to sit down again, which she did. “It’s this.” He gave her the old, yellow piece of newsprint.

Lily looked down at a small photograph of a child, a girl no more than two or three years old with short dark hair. She was smiling broadly. “Who is it?”

“Becky Runevold.”

“I don’t think I know who that is,” Lily said.

“Her father killed her sixteen years ago.” Martin paused. “T-t-today. She would’ve been our age.”

“Today?” Lily said. “Did you know her?”

“No.”

“But it was a long time ago. Where did this picture come from?”

“The Pioneer Press. Mom cut it out.”

“Your mom knew the family?”

Martin shook his head.

“So why do you have it?” Lily’s voice sounded shrill.

Martin took the little square away from Lily and stared down at it. “You see it, don’t you, Lily?”

“See what?”

“It, it looks like you when you were a little girl.”

Lily pulled the picture away from Martin. “No, it doesn’t.”

Martin faced Lily. He nodded slowly. “Yes, it does.”

“I should know better than you,” Lily said.

Martin shook his head. “N-no, usually it’s other people who see it, not the person.” He stretched his lips, nodded and said, “It’s like you grew up for her — in a way.” Martin tugged at the picture in Lily’s hand, and she let go of it.

Lily stared at Martin. “No, it’s not,” she said.

“Didn’t happen in the Cities. Outside Farmington. Drowned her in the bath.”

“Why?” Lily whispered the word.

Martin shrugged. His expression as he moved his shoulders was calm but fixed, his eyes absorbed in a distant thought. Then he said, “It hath no bottom.”

“You really love the play, don’t you?” Lily said.

Martin squinted at her as though she were yards away. “N-no,” he said.

“You’re always quoting from it.”

Martin stumbled over the next words. “It’s easier,” he finally said, “than saying it myself.”

“But you wanted to be in it,” Lily insisted.

Martin nodded.

“And the map, Martin. Why did you want me to have that?” Lily wanted to ask about the box but stopped herself.

Martin turned away from Lily. He looked straight toward the window and chanted like a kid on a playground. “She’s out there right now.”

“Who?” Lily said.

“She’s not alive.”

Lily caught her breath. She had turned several corners since she had agreed to accompany Martin back to his house, and she decided this was the last. “I want to go home,” she said.

Martin stood up immediately and began to walk to the door. For a second, Lily didn’t understand what he was doing. He opened the screen door and moved quickly across the porch without turning off the light. Lily followed him, and when she stepped out onto the porch, she saw him standing beside his truck holding the passenger door open for her.

Without saying anything, Lily climbed in. Martin drove the whole way in silence. Lily couldn’t tell whether his silence meant anger, sullenness or resignation. His face showed nothing. But Lily didn’t want to talk. She sat close to the door and watched the road, paying attention to his every move. While he drove, she imagined sudden skids and collisions, the truck swerving into the wrong lane and speeding into oncoming headlights. When Martin stopped the truck on Division Street in front of the cafe, Lily turned to him. He looked very young to her at that moment, with his soft face and unfashionable short hair. Lily looked through the windshield and said, “Bye.” Martin leaned toward her, but Lily pulled at the door handle and jumped down into the street. Martin moved to the passenger seat and stuck his head out the window. “You won’t let him paint you, will you, Lily?”

She opened her mouth and stared at him. She knew what he was saying, understood he meant Ed, but she said, “What are you talking about?”

“I-i-it’s important that he doesn’t paint you. Not you.” Martin paused. “F-for your sake, Lily.”

She looked away from him. “Good-bye, Martin,” she said. Lily walked up the alley toward the back door that led to her apartment and watched Martin’s truck pull away. Then she looked across the street into Ed’s window. She saw two figures in the light — Ed’s and Mabel’s. They were seated across from each other in the room’s only chairs. Lily saw Mabel lift a hand and gesture toward the ceiling. Still talking, she said to herself. Lily watched the two of them for at least a minute before she closed her eyes and held her breath. Her longing to rush to Ed and throw her arms around him was so great, she shook from the tension of holding herself back. Then, after counting to one hundred to give herself enough time, she pulled on the back door, discovered somebody had locked it, dug out her keys, opened it and went upstairs to bed.

Before she fell asleep, Lily thought she smelled something burning — a distant fire, maybe, its smoke carried into town on a wind. It can’t be the shoes, can it, still stinking from the fire? She remembered the map and the pictures on Martin’s wall, and then the empty space in the middle. Was he going to fill that in? Somehow it was that blankness that stuck in her mind now, more than any of the images or words she had seen all around it. She’s not alive, Lily thought. He must have meant that little girl — Becky. Lily put on a tape to forget about Martin and the dead girl and Ed and Mabel. She listened to The Best of Aretha Franklin twice and while she listened, she imagined herself on stage in a green, sequined dress. She was singing out the words “You make me feel like a natural woman,” and in the fantasy she had a voice like Aretha’s, a voice that seemed to come straight from heaven.

* * *

The moment Lily put her hand on the doorknob to enter the cafe, she heard the jukebox click and a song begin: “Do You Believe in Magic?” Lily opened the door and saw Vince dancing and singing alone in the space between the booths and the counter. His back was to Lily, and she watched his hips sway as he jiggled his fingers like a flapper. She saw the bald spot on the back of his head orbit as he rolled his shoulders, and then he toe-heeled his way over to the coffee machine. Lily smiled. The fat man had grace, lightness. She watched him dip and sing, “… in a young girl’s heart.” He made a pivot, caught sight of Lily, and without missing a beat of the song, held out his hand and said, “Join me, doll.” Lily took the outstretched hand, and they danced — bobbing, bumping butts and wailing out the refrain together.

When the song died, Lily said, “You’re in a good mood this morning.”

Vince was breathing hard and a vein stood out on his forehead. “You, too,” he said. He shook his head. “You look beautiful, positively fresh and dewy. I guess that new guy is treating you right.” Vince paused, wiped his forehead, hesitated, then blurted out, “Isn’t he a little old for you, honey? As an old man myself, I feel I ought to warn you off.” He smiled. “Age doesn’t make you better.”

Lily blushed. “You know, Vince, you don’t really decide. It just kind of happens.”

“Yeah, I know.” Again he hesitated, scratching his upper arm vigorously. “Hank’s been hanging around the cafe lately, and I figured you ought to know.”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“He’s been coming to see me in the afternoons, and early last night I bumped into him outside the Stuart.”

“Hank?” Lily said.

“He’s in a bad way.”

“Hank?” Lily repeated.

Vince moved his head back in false surprise. “Yes, Hank. Remember him? Tall, good-looking guy. You dated him for about a year.”

Lily clicked her tongue. “Vince.” She groaned the name. “Last night?”

“That’s right. I stayed late doing the books, and when I left, there he was sad-sacking around in the alley, mouth drooping to his shoes.”

“That doesn’t sound like Hank,” Lily said.

“He knows about—” Vince moved his head in the direction of the Stuart Hotel. “I took him home with me, gave him the standard talk over a bottle of bourbon — the no-woman’s-worth-it load of crap. He went to work snockered.”

“That was nice of you, Vince.”

“It’s none of my business, Lily, but I think you should talk to him.”

“It won’t change anything.”

Vince took Lily’s right hand and patted it. “I know that, but Hank’s problem is that he can’t believe it. He just can’t believe it.”

Lily looked into the street and sighed. “The funny thing is, Vince, that anything can happen. I mean, breaking up with Hank is ordinary. All kinds of really crazy stuff is going on all the time. You’ve got to expect it.”

“Hank hasn’t learned that yet. He goes by the book. College, graduate school, good job, pretty wife, smart, happy kids.” He looked closely at Lily. “I don’t suppose he ever saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“What I saw right away — the dissatisfied, hungry devil in you that jumps in front of trains and laughs it off.”

“Where’d you hear about that?”

“It’s legend, Lil’.”

“I was just a kid.”

“You were old enough to know better.”

“I don’t do that stuff now, Vince.”

“No,” he said and folded his arms. “You’ve graduated to bigger stuff.”

“Cut it out.”

Vince looked out the window and squinted. “I’ve got lead in my skull. It’s going to rain. It’s going to rain hard and it’s going to blow.”

Lily laughed. “You’ve been out of Philadelphia too long. You sound just like an old farmer.”

“Old farmer, shit,” Vince said. “I’ve had a barometer in my head since I was seven. My grandma used to call me ‘the weather vane.’”

Vince was right. The weather changed. The dawn sky turned a pale green, and not long after that, Division Street was as still as a picture of itself. At six-thirty, Boomer waltzed in, and the three of them served a few early birds who ate fast and hurried home to beat the storm. Black clouds rolled in, a wind came up and it started to howl. At seven, they turned on the radio and listened to a man announce that a thunderstorm warning had been declared for Minneapolis and the surrounding areas, Webster included. Lily called Bert, told her to stay home, and they closed the cafe. Rain pummeled the street. The store awnings cracked in the wind, and it thundered close. For a minute or two it rained so hard they lost sight of the hotel. Boomer pressed his nose against the windowpane and muttered “Yeah” with a moronic regularity that began to annoy Lily.

The three of them sat in a booth and played seven-card stud while eating yesterday’s pie and listening to the screen door rattle on its hook. The gutters flooded, and in the street the fragile new tree, planted only days ago by the Webster Beautification Committee, bent low in the wind. Lily hoped she hadn’t left her window open, and then she thought of Mabel upstairs. For an instant she imagined the little old woman being swept out her window, her body sailing over the rooftops like a handkerchief.

“It’s your turn, Lily,” Boomer said.

She looked at the dishwasher. He never sat still. At that moment he was jiggling his shoulders and head. Lily eyed the Elvis T-shirt he was wearing, “The King” inscribed on it in huge letters. Then she lifted her eyes to Boomer’s face and stared into his eyes behind the thick glasses that had been treated to further home repairs. Aside from the masking tape wrapped around the frames, there was a piece of wire, coiling upward from his right lens like a loose mattress spring. The mad eyewear above the face of the rock-and-roll icon made the boy look like an assimilated extraterrestrial. He whined at her, “You’re holding up the game.”

“Keep your shorts on,” Lily said and studied her hand. She took two cards, and when she saw the straight, she didn’t blink.

Vince meditated for a couple of seconds and pushed a bottle cap into the center of the table. “Did you hear about Dolores?”

“No,” Lily said.

“Arrested.”

“For what?”

“I’ll bet I know.” Boomer grinned.

Lily looked at the boy’s chipped tooth — a little white spike at the front of his mouth.

Vince ignored him and nodded at Lily. “They say she broke into one of the caves outside of town.”

“You’re kidding,” Lily said, staring at her cards.

“Your boyfriend bailed her out,” Boomer said.

Lily held her cards over her mouth and nose and watched Boomer over her hand. “Who told you that?”

Boomer leaned back in the booth and folded his arms. “I got connections in the department.”

“You and everybody else,” Lily said.

“Not anymore, you don’t.” Boomer sang the words in a high, jeering voice.

Lily looked at Boomer’s smug expression. I’d feel sorry for him, she thought, if he weren’t such a little creep.

Vince sighed noisily and scratched his neck.

“Stuff it, Boom,” Lily said. “Are you in or not? I’m raising you three.”

The storm started to quiet around eleven. It stopped raining, but gusts of wind rattled unseen objects in the street, and water continued to rush in the gutters. A thin yellow light leaked through isolated holes in the clouds, and the buildings, sidewalk and parking meters were cast in a shadowless glow that Lily couldn’t remember having seen before. She stood by the window for a minute and looked out. She used to think God was in storms, but she didn’t think that anymore. She stared up at the flat roof of the Stuart Hotel and into the clouds tinged with yellow and gray. She remembered the newsprint photo she had seen the night before, and suddenly the simple fact that people lived and died seemed strange to her, not terrible, just strange. She looked out and remembered her grandfather’s body after he had died in the hospital from the last stroke. He had looked younger. Everybody had noticed it. And then Lily imagined Helen Bodler in her grave. She was clawing at the dirt above her and pushing, pushing up with all her might. And then in Lily’s mind, she managed to dig herself out and sit up. She climbed out of the fresh grave, and Lily imagined her standing beside the long, shallow hole. Clumps of earth hung from her hair, soiled her mouth and nose, filled her lashes and brows. Helen brushed off what she could, turned her back to Lily and began to walk down the driveway and away from the Bodler farm. She didn’t hurry. When miracles happen, nobody hurries. Lazarus couldn’t have run. He stood up, Lily thought, and walked out of the tomb still wearing his shroud.

* * *

The telephone drove Lily out of her room that afternoon. She couldn’t stand looking at the stupid thing any longer. Several times she had lifted the receiver, only to put it back down. “Let him call,” she said to the phone aloud. “He can call me.” Mabel’s apartment was unusally silent — either she was out or had finally fallen asleep after a night of insomnia. When she looked into Ed’s window, she couldn’t see a thing, but she guessed Mabel was there with him, and the thought frustrated her. Lily called Bert instead.

“Let him call,” Bert said.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Lily said.

“Let me put it this way,” Bert said. “You don’t want him if he doesn’t want you, right? It’s better to find out now.”

Lily listened. She didn’t say it, but she thought, Of course I want him. Since when don’t you want people just because they don’t want you? Sometimes you want them more. She said, “Yeah, thanks, Bert.” They talked about the storm for a couple of minutes, and, after a pause, Bert said, “I heard he went to Swenson’s.”

“What?” Lily said.

“Shapiro, he went to the funeral home.” Bert took a breath. “Said he wanted to draw one of the corpses. Well, the only dead guy in there was old Oscar Hansen…”

“Who told you this?”

“Mr. Swenson himself. Said it took him by surprise, you know. Had to ask the family for permission, since Oscar couldn’t say yes or no.”

“Jeez, Bert,” Lily said. “Did they let him?”

“Well, I guess Oscar’s son said, ‘Help yourself,’ more or less, but the daughter isn’t so sure.” Lily heard Bert put down the phone. “If you take one more bite of that pie, Roger, I’ll hog-tie you and send you back to your mother.” Then to Lily she said, “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I just thought you ought to know somehow.”

Lily was silent.

“Lily?”

“I’m here. I’m thinking about it.”

Bert laughed. “It’s not a crime to draw stiffs, you know. I mean, he’s such a nice guy, and, well, you could see how it would be interesting. I’ve always had a hankering to go in there and have a look around myself.”

Bert’s defense of Ed eased Lily’s mind. “Yeah,” Lily said. She hesitated, then added in a soft voice, “You’re a good friend, Bert.”

“Ah, get out of here,” came the voice on the other end of the line. Lily hung up. She wished that just once Bert would say it back.

Knowing it would be the last time, Lily slid her feet into the burnt shoes. She didn’t wear them long, just long enough to mark the occasion. Then she wrapped them in the white cotton fabric she had used for curtains, put the bundle gently inside her canvas bag and left the room. She locked the door.

Lily pedaled her bicycle through the maze of fallen branches that had been ripped from trees during the storm, their leaves still unwilted. It made her feel good to be returning the shoes. They couldn’t go back into the suitcase or even into the garage, but she would put them somewhere secret and quiet, where they could molder into nothingness undisturbed.

The sky showed new holes of clear blue, and the cool air invigorated her. She raced, pedaling so hard she panted. When she neared the Bodlers’, she spotted their truck and stopped well short of the driveway. She wheeled her bicycle into the ditch, laid it on its side and walked up into the field. Then she turned to look toward the Klatschwetter farm. The sky was immense and clearing fast. She smelled cow manure, an odor she liked, mingled as it was with alfalfa and earth warmed by the sun. Her eyes moved across the road to the horizon past a copse of midget trees, a silo and a red barn, then back again to the Guernseys and Holsteins out to pasture. Slow animals, Lily thought as she watched them — a head to the grass, a tail flicks a fly, and then that bovine adjustment of haunches near the fence. The barbed wire was electrified. She could see the silver ribbon along its lower edge. It may have been the familiarity of what she saw that moved Lily, or the bigness of that landscape that dwarfed her in a way she found comfortable, but she gazed out at the scene with no thoughts at all until she heard a sound behind her, and then she started and whirled around to see what it was.

Frank Bodler was standing about three yards away from her. His eyes were hidden under the brim of his cap, but she could see his grimly set mouth and jaw. Lily couldn’t understand where the man had come from. Only seconds ago she had looked across the field and seen no one. He was carrying a large, half-rusted spade, and he tamped the ground with it twice. Lily watched him nod at her, then signal for her to come. For several seconds she didn’t move. She hugged the bag against her side and waited.

Frank grunted the word “Come.”

Lily went. She wasn’t quite sure why she went, but she followed the man across the field and stared at the large oil stain on the back of his filthy trouser leg. He hunched a little as he trudged forward with the spade over his shoulder. They know, she thought. They’re going to confront me, ask me where the shoes are. They must have seen me. Lily began planning her confession. I’ll tell them the truth, she thought. But the truth sounded insane to her. I’ll confess without mentioning their mother. But how can I explain burning them? I panicked out of guilt. I threw them in the fire. When they reached the kitchen door, Lily paused. She remembered falling, remembered the wet floor against her skin. She heard herself swallow and then crossed the threshold. Disoriented, she walked into a roll of flypaper. The sticky yellow substance encrusted with flies brushed her ear, and she gasped before she could squelch it. Frank paid no attention. He moved through the kitchen into the second room, which had a little more light from two small windows. It reeked of mildew. Frank pointed at a ripped sofa, waited for Lily to sit down on it, opened a door that led to a third room and disappeared, closing the door behind him.

Lily placed the bag between her and the arm of the sofa to conceal it with her body. In the rounded olive screen of a very old television set, she looked at her own distorted image and turned away from it toward the window. Through the cloudy pane, she saw the top of a blooming peony bush. She swallowed again loudly. The room was crammed with objects — two toasters near her feet, a box of rags or clothes at the end of the sofa, a heavy, black rubber cord dangling over the back of a wicker chair. To avoid looking at the cord, Lily eyed the ceiling and noted the elaborate water stains, which resembled the map of some imaginary country. She was still studying its ragged coastline when Frank returned to the room with Dick.

They stood together in the open doorway of the third room. Frank stepped forward, thrust his arm violently in her direction and said in a voice so loud that Lily jumped, “Was it her?”

Dick walked toward Lily. She hunched her shoulders and pushed herself tightly against the bag as she watched Dick coming toward her in a half-crouched position. Apparently he wanted to keep his head at the same height as hers. He stopped, rested his hands on his knees and stared at her closely. Lily could see dust in his eyebrows and dirt in the creases of his wrinkled face. She swallowed and felt sure Dick could hear it. The swallowing had become an irritation. Her saliva seemed to build up so fast in her mouth that she couldn’t ignore it. How was it, she wondered, that she had ever swallowed without thinking about it? Dick continued to examine her. Then he moved his head back.

“Yup,” he said. His voice was high. Lily realized she had never heard him speak and that the timbre of his voice had nothing in common with his brother’s. I’m sunk, she thought. She considered her first line. The words “I’m sorry” began to form themselves in her mouth.

The men seated themselves in two of the several miserable chairs that lined the other side of the room.

“Yer Lars Dahl’s girl,” Frank said.

Lily nodded.

“Know yer dad,” he said. “Good man, yer dad. Knew yer granddad, too.” Then he turned to his brother and yelled, “Lars Dahl’s girl!”

Dick was deaf. Lily hadn’t known this. She looked from one man to the other. “I work at the Ideal Cafe,” she said as loudly as she could without screaming.

Frank narrowed his eyes.

“I’ve waited on you lots of times.” Her voice sounded childlike. Was it possible they didn’t recognize her?

Frank scratched his hairline, and Lily saw gray flakes fall onto the front of his shirt. She looked toward the corner where he had left the spade and made a guess at how long it would take for her to leap over and grab it. Cautiously, she began to inch down the sofa, taking the bag with her. She felt a loose coil poke her thigh and stopped.

“Dick’s the one seen you.”

Lily waited for the accusation.

“Yesterday evenin’ in the field.”

Not last night, she thought. Last night I was at rehearsal and then at Martin’s.… She looked at Dick.

“Guess it don’t matter now,” Frank said.

Dick leaned toward her again. He closed one eye as though that would improve his vision.

Frank was silent. The three of them sat without saying a word for at least a minute. Then, not able to take it anymore, she shouted, “I don’t understand.”

Neither man answered. They glanced at each other. Then, apparently responding to the look from his brother, Dick slowly rose from the chair and shuffled into the kitchen. Intermittent clatter sounded from that room for several minutes. Frank reached into his shirt pocket and retrieved a pouch of chewing tobacco, took a pinch of the tiny brown leaves between his thumb and index finger and lodged the tobacco inside his cheek. As far as Lily could tell, he had no consciousness of her presence. Maybe I can just stand up and leave, she thought. She eyed the spade again, considered getting up, then stayed put.

Eventually, Dick emerged from the kitchen carrying a brown plastic tray with a tin coffeepot, three cups and some oblong cookies smeared with white frosting arranged on a plate. His boots never left the floor. He pushed his feet forward like a child on skates for the first time, his eyes fixed on the cups, his hands trembling. The room had no table on which to lower the tray, but Dick clearly had his next move planned. He came to a full stop and began to bend his knees a little at a time. Once he had lowered himself about six inches, he held the position for a couple of seconds as if to confirm that he had gone that far, bent over and abruptly set the tray on the floor. Cups clinked, cookies slid, but the tray was stabilized in a spot beside one of the toasters. Without standing up, Dick started the business of pouring coffee. He handed her a cup, and Lily looked into the black liquid. Grease bubbles floated on its surface, but she brought the dirty cup to her lips and drank. It didn’t taste bad — a little oily, but strong and good.

Dick watched her intently. “Egg,” he said.

“Pardon me?” Lily shouted.

Frank shouted back at her. “There’s an egg in the coffee!”

Dick nodded. He righted himself and poked the cookie plate under her nose. Lily took a cookie.

Once they had settled themselves with the coffee and cookies, Lily roared at Dick, “I don’t understand. You couldn’t have seen me here last night. I wasn’t here.”

Dick nodded, but Lily wasn’t sure what the nod meant, whether he was signaling that he had heard her or that he agreed with her. He spoke in that odd voice of his. “I seen Marty carryin’ you across the field and over the road.”

“What?” Lily said, but not loudly enough. Then she corrected herself and yelled, “Marty?”

“Marty Petersen from down the road,” Frank said.

“Yesterday?” Lily said.

Dick continued, his eyes on the window. Slowly he extended his arms in front of him, his elbows bent. Lily watched the coffee cup in his right hand tip dangerously. “I seen Marty carryin’ you like you was fainted or…” He didn’t finish but lowered his arms without spilling and then rubbed the cup with both hands. “It was you,” he said to the window. “I seen your eyes and face and hair. I called to him.” Dick changed his voice. “‘Mar-ty!’ I says. ‘Who you got there? Come back, Marty,’ but he din’t answer me. He walks on ’cross the road and down by the creek and into the woods. I ain’t got the legs to run no more, so I goes into Frank and tells him what I seen.” Dick glanced at Lily for an instant, then fixed his eyes on the window again. He nodded, squinted, turned back to her and said, “But here you are in the peak of health.”

Lily leaned forward and stared at Dick. “What time was it?”

Dick looked at Frank, his face a question.

Frank said, “I’d say early evenin’. Wasn’t dark yet.”

Both men were silent. Lily looked from one to the other. It was crazy. The whole thing was nuts. She waited for them to speak.

Neither one said a word for at least half a minute. Then Frank took a breath and said, “Well, that’s that.”

Lily stared at Frank and swallowed. He gave a little push and raised himself from the chair, then started for the kitchen. This was her cue to leave, and she didn’t feel she could ignore it. She set her cup carefully on the floor, nodded at Dick, who didn’t respond, and then followed Frank to the door.

She tried again. “It must have been someone else,” she said. “And if it was someone else, it could be, well…” She didn’t finish that sentence but added another. “I don’t think we can just let it drop like this.” Lily hugged the bag with the shoes in it and looked down at the floor. Frank’s boots had left prints on the linoleum, which was already thick with mud.

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he opened the screen door and held it ajar for her.

Lily walked outside, turned on the stone step and looked at him. “Mr. Bodler,” she said. “If you see anything else, will you promise to call me? I can leave you my number.”

He let the screen door slam shut and eyed her through it. “Ain’t got no phone.”

Everybody has a phone, Lily thought. It doesn’t matter how poor you are. Everybody’s got a telephone.

Frank put his nose close to the screen. “It’s Dick,” he said in a confidential tone that surprised her. “Don’t like ’em, don’t like hearin’ those faraway voices without no bodies. Even before he lost his hearin’, he din’t like it.” Frank shook his head at Lily. “Said it was like talkin’ to a spirit, and what’s the sense of aggravatin’ him with that? We had one. Sold it to Pete Lund. He collects them old phones, and we got a good price for it. Don’t miss it neither. Folks come here or we go there, don’t matter.”

Lily nodded at him. “I see,” she said. “Good-bye, then.”

The man did not say good-bye. Neither brother seemed able to punctuate comings and goings in the usual way, and Lily found the absence of these words unnerving. She watched Frank turn, move across the kitchen floor and disappear. Then, instead of walking to her bicycle, she took a right and headed for the woods behind the house.

Lily chose a spot at the foot of a small cliff that followed the creek. The place was deeply familiar to her. As a child, she had roamed up and down Heath Creek, and the landscape had lived inside her ever since. Still, as she stood at the edge of the steep bank overlooking the water, she felt a change. It had been years since she had visited this spot, and it appeared to have shrunk. It took her several seconds before she realized it was she who had grown and that her new height had changed the proportions of everything else. The current of the swollen creek pushed at countless stalks of snake grass that bent over the water. The light through the trees glinted unevenly on the gray water. After she scrambled down the earth wall, she kneeled near the place she had picked out and dug with her hands. The soggy ground loosened easily, and when the hole was finished, she lifted the shoes from her bag, still wrapped in the cloth, and laid them gently inside it. After pressing them firmly into the hole, she pushed the wet dirt over them and fussed for a few minutes with the look of the surface, patting and smoothing until the spot was round and even. She examined her work, then leaned back on the wet ground and closed her eyes. She heard a woodpecker — a distant dull hammering, then a rustle of foliage from above. Lily looked sharply toward the noise, her ears straining to hear more. Leaves moved, a branch snapped. Would Frank have followed me? she thought. She stared at the cliff. It was one thing to get down, another to get up. If someone was there, by the time she crawled to the top, he would be long gone. She stood up, brushed her filthy hands on her shorts, stamped the mud off her sneakers and stared at the spot. Before she left, she found a smooth, oblong stone and put it there to mark the place.

Grabbing roots to steady herself as she dug her toes into the cliff, Lily scrambled to the top. She imagined Dick chasing Martin across the field on his short, stiff legs, and then Martin carrying a young woman in his arms, a woman with long dark hair like her own. There had to be a resemblance for Dick to make that mistake. Once she had scaled the cliff and was standing at the top, she looked beyond the house into the field and asked herself how it was possible that Dick, slow as he was, hadn’t managed to catch up with Martin. Martin had been carrying somebody, hadn’t he, so how fast could he run? Or maybe Dick had hallucinated the whole thing. Lily walked to her bike and pushed it up to the road. “She’s not alive,” Lily remembered Martin’s words and looked up at the sky. The cool wind blew against her face and then she heard a sound in the grass to her right. A brown rabbit darted past her and she watched him until he disappeared behind a hillock.

Lily rode to Martin’s house. She dreaded going, but she felt compelled to see the little house in daylight. Martin and his truck and his house and the map and the pictures all seemed worse in memory than they had when she was there, and now that Dick had told his strange story, she wanted to see the place again. She turned down the dirt road to Martin’s house and pedaled up a shallow hill that she had barely noticed when Martin was driving and stopped at its crest. She could see Martin’s truck in the driveway, and then Martin himself came running from behind the house, head down, and barreled through the door. Her bicycle bumped on the wet gravel and slid a couple of times as she coasted down the hill to the house.

What will he say when I tell him about Dick? she thought as she walked to the steps. Looking up at the door, Lily saw that it was open. Through the screen door she heard a squeaking noise and then the sound of somebody humming. She walked up the steps and looked into the living room straight at Martin. He was sitting in the rocking chair, which had been moved to the center of the room. The black fabric she had seen the night before was draped over his head as he rocked violently back and forth in the chair. And while he rocked, he hummed. Hectic, low and tuneless, the humming sounded more like an accelerated chant than real music. Lily didn’t understand what she was seeing, but she had a powerful sense that Martin’s rocking shouldn’t be interrupted, that whatever he was doing, he was doing it alone. She saw him push his feet off the floor to make the rocker go fast, heard the excited murmur of his voice and looked at the black cloth swing with his motion. Then she turned around, walked down the steps to the driveway and climbed onto her bicycle. All the way into town, Lily saw Martin rocking in that chair. Why would he do that? Did it mean something? He had run like crazy into the house to rock and hum with his head covered. By the time Lily crossed the city limits, she wished she could keep on riding her bicycle all the way to Florida.

* * *

That night Lily watched Mabel and Ed from her window. They were sitting in chairs across from each other in Ed’s room and didn’t budge from their seats for over an hour. Mabel waved her hands as she talked and Ed sketched. Lily saw his arm move in long, broad strokes, and then she saw him change the motion and shake his wrist. When he finished one drawing, he would rip it out of the large book, throw it to the floor and begin again. While he drew he leaned toward Mabel at the edge of his seat. Once he pushed back a lock of Mabel’s hair with his left hand, but Lily wasn’t able to see the woman’s expression because she was too far away. Several minutes later she watched Mabel cock her head to one side and hold her palms up. The gesture sent a small shock through Lily. She recognized it. They had practiced it together for Hermia when she speaks to Lysander early in the play: “Then let us teach our trial patience, / Because it is our customary cross, / As due to love as thoughts, and dreams, and sighs, / Wishes and Tears, poor Fancy’s followers.”

After work the next day, Lily found herself standing outside Ed’s door. She couldn’t keep herself away any longer. She heard Mabel talking, but she shut her ears to the words, knocked and opened the door before either of them answered it. It looked as though neither of them had moved since the night before. It couldn’t have been true, but they were sitting where they had been sitting, heads together, with sheets of paper scattered on the floor around them. Lily shut the door behind her.

Ed turned to her. “Lily?” he said. “Where have you been?”

Mabel looked at her, too. Her sincere expression irritated Lily.

Where have I been? she said to herself and answered, “Around.”

“We’ve called you several times,” Mabel said.

So it’s “we” now, Lily thought, but the fact that they had phoned comforted her.

“I guess I was out.” She took several steps toward them. “How’s it going?”

“Well,” Ed said. “I’ve been listening to Mabel for two days.” He paused, reached out his hand for hers, and Lily gave it to him. He held it tightly in both of his, and looked up at her. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked. Her voice had no irony. She wanted to know.

“Of course I am,” he said. The man stroked her hand, and Lily looked into his eyes. She saw nothing guarded in them, but at the same time she didn’t know what to look for. She thought about Oscar Hansen on a gurney in Swensen’s Funeral Home.

Mabel had turned her eyes away from them, and when Lily looked at her, she saw the woman’s shoulders shake for an instant. Then she moved her hand out of Ed’s grip and looked down at the drawings. In all of them, Mabel was sitting in the canvas chair, her position only slightly different in each one. Her expression, however, was never the same. One fiercely animated face after another looked up at Lily from the floor. Mabel glared in one, squinted and frowned in another, her lips were parted, her lips were closed, her hands were raised from her elbows or splayed at either side of her face. These were images of the intense, shivering Mabel she knew, and despite the fact that they were still, Lily could almost feel them move.

Lily looked at Mabel. “Don’t you get tired of talking? Isn’t it hard?”

Mabel laughed. “I’m exhausted. But I’ve remembered moments in my life I haven’t thought about for years.” She paused. “It’s almost terrifying.”

“And fun, I’ll bet,” Lily said.

Mabel’s face changed, and she stared at Lily. She lifted her hands and went suddenly pale. Lily was afraid the woman would faint again and reached out for her, but Mabel waved her off. “Sometimes,” she said, “when I look in the mirror, I’m shocked that I don’t see that young face anymore, that person I used to be. I know I’m old, near the end of my life, but I’m still surprised.”

Lily closed her eyes. She saw Martin rocking with the black cloth over his head and opened her eyes.

“Did you say something?” Mabel said loudly to Ed.

“No…” His answer came slowly.

With Ed’s “No” still in her ears, Lily heard the door hit the wall and when she looked up, she saw Dolores Wachobski standing in the doorway scowling. She was wearing the same dress she had worn in the portrait — the white one with black polka dots. When nobody spoke, Dolores seemed to grasp the advantage of a surprise entrance, and she waltzed into the room. “Hi, Eddie,” she said. “Long time, no see.”

Ed stood up and walked toward Dolores. “Not that long,” he said.

She’s tanked, Lily thought, but Ed didn’t look angry or nervous. He reached for his pocket, removed a tin of cigars, opened it and stuck one in his mouth. Lily watched the match burn for a second near the cigar. “How are you?” he said to Dolores.

The woman looked from Mabel to Lily with bleary eyes. She lit a cigarette herself and said, “Anybody want a cigarette? Let’s all smoke.” She didn’t offer her cigarettes, however, or wait for a response. She blew the smoke straight at Ed and smiled. He smiled back, but without hostility. Dolores had been in the room only seconds, and already Lily wanted to smack her. Who the hell does she think she is? Lily said to herself, and stood up. Mabel didn’t move.

“I’ve come to get my last pay,” Dolores said and flicked an ash on the floor.

Lily glanced down at the ash and then up at Dolores. She made a face, hoping the woman would see it.

But Dolores was looking at Ed.

“I paid you, remember?” he said.

“I don’t think so, sweetie.” Dolores stretched her neck, then turned suddenly to Lily and barked, “What you laughin’ at, girly?”

Lily knew she hadn’t laughed. “He says he paid you.”

“You his accountant now?” Dolores let one hip loose and laid her hand on it. Ed moved closer to Dolores, but the woman wobbled toward Lily, placing one high-heeled shoe carefully in front of the other. “I’ve got some advice for you, honey. I’d stay away from him. He ain’t what he seems, all nice and sweet.” She shook her head back and forth. One of her ankles buckled for a second, then she straightened it. A flicker of pain passed over her mouth — the first sign of emotion that had shown through the swagger. “Hear?”

Lily smelled the liquor on her breath and moved her head back an inch.

“He ain’t for little girls. He’s got a rough side, you hear me?”

Lily looked at Ed. His forehead was wrinkling, and she saw him put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Dolores,” he said in a quiet voice. “Go easy.”

She whirled around at him and nodded. “Me?”

Lily heard Mabel behind her, but she didn’t turn around. Mabel slipped her hand into Lily’s, and Lily took it.

“Would you like a loan?” Ed said quietly.

Lily stared at him and then at Dolores. She tried to guess the woman’s age. Was she forty yet? The dress showed a lot of cleavage, and the material was thin enough to reveal the roll of flesh around her middle. The skin on her naked arms was white, smooth and only slightly freckled. Dolores adjusted her hip, and the unconscious motion stirred in Lily an awareness of the woman’s body as distinct from her voice or clothes. Lily saw Dolores turn toward Ed and put her arms around his neck. Ed’s hands moved to the woman’s waist, and Lily imagined him pulling the dress down over Dolores’s shoulders. Why isn’t he embarrassed in front of me? She looked at Ed’s face above the back of Dolores’s head, but the man didn’t meet her eyes.

Dolores was whispering now. “Remember, Eddie, I told you about Jesse James. I seen it again.”

Mabel squeezed Lily’s hand, and Lily looked at her. Mabel’s face looked drawn and tired, but her eyes were sharp. Lily felt she would have given anything to listen to Mabel’s thoughts.

Dolores stood on tiptoe and leaned heavily against Ed, whispering uselessly. Lily could hear every word. “I seen Jesse’s ghost with me, Eddie, only it couldn’t be me because I was watching, but there was two of me.” She took a breath. “And when I saw it I hadn’t had a drop. You hear me? I was as clear as a bell and I saw him sitting in the grass outside the cave with the spitting image of me beside him. And Jesse, he was a living ghost, but the ghost of me was dead as a doornail, and I’m telling you now so you don’t forget that I’ve had a sign. My life’s coming to an end.”

She pulled away from Ed, straightened the front of her dress and narrowed her eyes in an expression that seemed both shrewd and distant. “And then,” she said, “I heard music playing right out of the sky.” Dolores moved her head to one side. “What d’ya think of that, Eddie boy?” She took in Mabel and Lily at a glance and spat out the words “Music from heaven!”

She paused a moment, as though waiting for her words to sink in, then swivelled on her heels and walked to the open door, her big black purse swinging from her hand. Ed followed her, and the two of them stopped in the hallway. Lily watched Ed reach into his back pocket, take out his wallet and hand Dolores several bills. Lily couldn’t tell how much money he gave her, but Dolores took it with a smile and brought the purse close to her face. After fumbling with the clasp, she opened the bag and dropped the crumpled paper money inside.

Lily had heard Ed’s offer of a loan to Dolores as proof of his kindness, but when the actual bills appeared, they sickened her. More than seeing the man’s hands around the woman’s waist, the sight of those bills gave Lily a feeling that not only was there intimacy between them, there was some kind of arrangement. He could easily have walked Dolores down the hall. Giving her money would have been a secret then, but he chose not to hide it, and Lily found his openness inscrutable.

She listened to the clatter of Dolores’s high heels in the hallway, heard the sound recede and then vanish. The carpet on the stairs must have muffled their noise.

Mabel excused herself, saying she was “worn to the bone,” and left them. Before Lily could say a single word, Ed lunged at her, lifted her off the ground, carried her to the little kitchen table and laid her down on it. Then he bent over her and started kissing her neck. She had a hundred questions for Ed about Dolores, but she didn’t ask them, not then. I’ve been taken by storm, she thought to herself as she looked up at him. She liked the sound of it: “by storm.” It seemed to suggest that Ed was her own violent weather.

* * *

By the time Lily walked into the Arts Guild, the place was both crowded and noisy. She stared at the cardboard trees with tissue paper foliage strung along their branches and at Debbie Larsen and Genevieve Knecht, whose arms were flapping as they pretended to fly across the stage. She heard the quartet tuning and the cast chattering and suddenly wanted to close her eyes and press her hands to her ears to shut it out. How can anybody get into character with all this racket? she said to herself and sat down on a folding chair to wait for Mrs. Wright to call the cast to order. Lily looked down at her hands. Her blisters had turned into tough bits of red skin. She rubbed them, and then, out of the corner of her eye, saw Bottom’s Ass head emerge from behind the curtain — now painted, with tufts of hair for a forelock and scruffy mane. She looked up and saw Martin holding the head in front of him, his face quiet, a white bandage wrapped around his left hand. Loud “hee-haws” came from the stage, and Lily watched Ronald Lovold dart from behind Martin and grin at the head.

That evening the play showed improvement, and Lily began to think it might not be an embarrassment after all. Even Denise was less flat. The new sets and props excited the cast to better performances, and Lily, too, was glad for the painted backdrops, fake trees and artificial moonlight, but when she moved and spoke, she forgot the scenery. She didn’t hear or see Mabel anymore when she played Hermia. Mabel’s coaching had moved inside Lily, and with each rehearsal Hermia changed, her character gained tightness and shape. In the end, the Athenian girl was a tough little broad, and that’s how Lily played her.

It might have been neater if what was outside the Arts Guild would stay out and what was inside would stay in, but that’s not how it worked. When Lily spoke to Lysander, she looked into Jim’s face and gave him the feeling she had for Ed, and Jim responded with an expressiveness she hadn’t seen in him before. And when she watched Cobweb tiptoe around Bottom, she perceived an ominous presence in Martin’s fairy that made him better than the others. He never abandoned character. Even when the little fairies snickered at the ridiculous head on Oren’s shoulders, Cobweb’s white face never faltered from its distant, nearly unconscious expression. Several times during rehearsal, Lily felt Martin staring at her, felt his eyes on her neck or back, and when she turned around he was always there to meet her glance, and Lily wondered if scientists had discovered how it is that you can actually feel someone’s eyes on your body. She worried about his hand. How had he hurt it? She wished she could remember what his hands had looked like in the rocking chair, but she didn’t have any memory of them.

After rehearsal she put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Martin.” She spoke in a low voice she instantly regretted because it sounded confidential, but he turned, looked at her and smiled. His eager expression felt like a trap. “I have to talk to you,” she said and corrected her tone.

Martin didn’t speak, but he took Lily’s hand. She let him do it, but she found the bandage rubbing against her palm unpleasant. As they walked through the door, Martin gripped her harder. She couldn’t understand why he would do this with an injury. She moved her fingers to signal that she wanted him to release her, but Martin only squeezed more tightly. “Your hand,” Lily said. “It’s hurting me.”

Martin let go, but he didn’t say anything. They seated themselves on the steps, and Lily spoke to the street rather than to Martin, explaining to him what Dick had told her. “You don’t think,” Lily said finally, “that Dick made it up, do you?”

“Dick doesn’t lie,” Martin said.

“Well, I mean that he imagined it?”

“No.”

Lily turned to him. “You mean you were really carrying somebody across their field the day before yesterday?”

Martin’s mouth twitched once. “Y-yes.”

Lily hadn’t expected this response. She hesitated, then said, “Who was it?”

Martin turned his face toward hers. He didn’t stutter. “You,” he said. “It was you.”

Lily studied his face to see if he was joking. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “That’s not funny, Martin.”

He looked at her with blank eyes.

“I wasn’t there. You know that. Who was it? Dick was, well.” Lily sighed. “I think he was scared that, that the girl, was hurt, or…” Lily finally said it, “dead.”

Martin shook his head. “Th-there are lots of things w-we don’t understand, Lily.”

Lily gestured with her hands. “That’s bonkers, Martin. I sure as hell know where I am from one minute to the next. I sure as hell know I wasn’t with you in some alfalfa field outside the Bodlers’.”

Martin stared at her without blinking.

“Why are you doing this?” Lily asked him in an urgent whisper. “What good will this do?”

Martin shook his head violently, then looked down at his knees.

Lily grabbed Martin’s shoulder. “Martin, if Dick saw you, then he didn’t see me.”

Martin didn’t answer. His face looked stony.

Martin turned his head away from Lily. He stuttered something Lily couldn’t hear.

“What?” she asked loudly. Then she heard people behind her talking near the door.

Martin’s shoulders were shaking. He gasped. “Ma-mama,” he stuttered.

Lily reached out for him. “Jesus, Martin,” she said in a whisper. “What is it?”

“Everything okay?” Mrs. Wright said from the door.

Lily didn’t answer.

Martin stood up with his back to Lily. His head was lowered and his back rounded as though someone had hit him in the stomach. He grunted and Lily thought she saw saliva hit the sidewalk. Someone ran down the steps behind her. It was Mrs. Baker. She put her arm around Martin, and Lily watched him quake under the steadying arm. “Ma-ma-ma-ma,” he sputtered.

Mrs. Baker held Martin but turned to Lily. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. We, we were just talking,” Lily said. She stood up. She rubbed her face hard and shook her head. “God,” she said and walked over to Martin, who was leaning on Mrs. Baker now, his head still down. “Do you want me to go, Martin?” she said and then looked up at the doorway. A dozen people stared down at her. She turned back to Mrs. Baker.

“Maybe that’s best,” the woman said.

Lily took a last look at Martin, who remained hunched but had stopped trying to speak. He was puffing hard and then Lily saw him bring his hands to his face and cover it. The streetlamp illuminated Martin’s left hand, and she saw clearly the wrinkled Band-Aids and piece of gauze that had been wrapped around his palm. But these only partially concealed numerous long, sharp cuts that ran in all directions between his knuckles and the top of his hand.

Lily hurried away from the Arts Guild, across the railroad tracks. She paused once to turn around and look at the group of people gathered around Martin under the streetlamp and wondered what he was saying, if anything. Her knees shook as she walked. Lily looked up at the moon and thought, How the hell did all this happen? It’s like I’m involved with him now, like we’re in something together. “It was you.” A mysterious leaden guilt settled in Lily’s chest. What have I done? she thought and watched her white sneakers move forward on the pavement. She heard someone walking toward her and looked up.

A tall man wearing a cowboy hat and a gun belt came striding toward her, and for a moment Lily thought she was seeing things. Like a gunslinger in an old Western, the dark figure approached, his hands held inches from the guns on his hips, and Lily guessed it was Dolores’s ghost, or maybe Tex. The man came closer and Lily recognized Hank. He said her name.

“Hank, what are you doing in that getup?”

“I’m Charlie Younger in the reenactment, remember? Rolf gave me the costume at the meeting. There’s more to it, but I’m on my way to the station, and I thought the guys would get a kick out of my six-shooters.”

Lily looked at the pavement. “You didn’t tell me about it.”

“They thought Allan Fisk was going to do it, but he punked out.”

“Oh.” She looked at his hips. “Are the guns real?”

“Of course not.”

“They look real,” she said.

A train whistle sounded loudly behind them, and Lily heard the guardrail fall across the tracks. Hank’s black sneakers were only inches from her own.

“I miss you,” Hank said.

Lily studied the loose rubber at the front of her shoe. Why don’t I miss him? she thought.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” he said.

“Not really.” Lily rubbed a mosquito bite on the back of her leg with her sneaker. She could feel Hank’s anger, but she didn’t know what to do about it. Martin’s fit had exhausted her. She hung her head and looked down. The fact is, she thought, I’m really stupid with Hank. I’m not so stupid with other people.

Hank waved the back of his hands at her in frustration. “If you think,” he said loudly, “that that guy’s going to stick around here for you, you’re dead wrong.”

“Oh, Hank,” Lily said.

“You know I’m right. What is he, fifteen years older than you? For Christ’s sake, Lily, you’re making a fool of yourself. He’s not even divorced. Everybody in town knows he’s going to leave you high and dry. He’s got women coming out of his ears, for Christ’s sake. He’s a fucking Don Juan. You’re no different from all the others.” Hank rubbed his forehead hard. “Not to him.”

Lily raised her eyes. “I don’t care.” Her intonation was even, stubborn.

“You don’t care!”

“No.”

Hank moved toward her. He bent down and looked in her face. “Who are you?” he shouted. “What are you?”

Lily clenched her jaw shut. She kept her chin down and her mouth shut. Behind Hank she could see the grain elevator in the moonlight.

“Answer me!” His voice broke.

Lily bit her lip. “How can I answer that?” she said. She felt tears in her eyes all of a sudden, and she lifted her face to keep them from running down her cheeks.

Hank held out his arms. “Oh, Lil’,” he said and leaned toward her.

She put her arms around him tentatively. She remembered his smell and his shirt — the one that said “Minnesota Twins” on the back. She stood on tiptoe and whispered to him, “I’m sorry, Hank. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Lily pulled away from him and ran across the bridge and then past the Red Owl Grocery. She was still running when she reached Division Street. She slowed to a walk when she saw Rick’s and glanced at two men standing a few feet away outside the Corner Bar. One of them was wearing gray coveralls from Olaf’s Garage, and as she approached them she read the name tag sewn on his pocket: “Steve.” Lily noticed that his arms were too long for his short body, that he needed a shave and that he had clearly noticed her. When she walked past them, “Steve” started making panting noises, and in her peripheral vision she saw him throwing his hips back and forth. He smirked. For once Lily decided not to ignore the insult. She whirled around and started screaming, “What is it? I’d really like to know. What the hell is it that makes a shrunken little weasel like you think he’s some big stud, huh?”

Steve glared at Lily. She could see he was searching for a retort while making an effort to hold on to his leer. Then his friend started laughing, and Lily saw Steve’s expression change to uncertainty. Laughter followed her down the block, and she heard Steve say, “What’s her problem?” She walked slowly, conscious that their eyes were following her, and she made certain her posture was erect, her gait dignified. When she reached the alley beside the Ideal Cafe, Lily turned, seated herself on the ground beside one of the large garbage cans and cried.

It took her a long time to fall asleep that night. Mabel was typing in the next room. There was no light in Ed’s window, and although she knew he might be lying on his bed at that very minute, exhausted from hours of work, she also knew he might have gone out, and Lily wished she could wave her hand or mutter an incantation and look in on him wherever he was. Instead, she played her tape of Don Giovanni softly so Mabel wouldn’t hear. She remembered Dolores’s ankle buckling in Ed’s room, and it made her think of Mabel’s shaking hands and of Martin’s stutter, that word he had started but never finished outside the Arts Guild. She felt unsteady herself. Everybody’s quivering, she thought. Everybody except Ed. She remembered his hand on Dolores’s hip. And as Lily pictured his quiet face and deliberate movements in her mind, she realized that the calm in him was also something hard and stubborn, that Ed was like a man who, finding himself in a terrible storm on the road, refuses to turn back and instead plants his feet on the ground, leans into the wind and keeps on walking.

Noises from the street, Mabel’s typing, and half-conscious thoughts accompanied her first two hours in bed when she was neither really awake nor really asleep. Moonlight shone too brightly on her eyelids through her thin curtains, and lilliputian voices chattered lines from the play. Her pillow was too hot. She fluffed and patted and turned it over again and again. Just before she felt herself finally dropping into sleep, she heard Howie Bickle’s voice in her head. Howie was Starveling in the play and Moonshine in the play within the play. A slow talker from a farm west of town, he dragged out every vowel: “This lantern doth the horned moon present.” Then, after what seemed to be only minutes of sleep, she heard the alarm ring and sat up in bed. Moonlight was still shining through the window, which didn’t make sense, but Lily stood up, walked toward two rectangles of light that illuminated the floor and saw a young woman lying there with her eyes closed. Lily bent over to examine her. “So you’re here,” she said. The woman didn’t answer, but Lily didn’t expect an answer. She looked down at the body and noticed a long piece of white fabric wrapped tightly around her hips, her shoulders and breasts. The fabric puzzled Lily. Why was her stomach bare? Lily looked at the girl’s navel with interest, and while she looked, a word suddenly came to her that solved the problem of the young woman: “bellclose.” The word elated her. I know, she said to herself. I know. But then as quickly as it had come, the feeling left her, and she thought, She can’t be here. I’ve got to get her out. Lily bent down to lift the young woman off the floor, but the body that looked as soft and white as dough wouldn’t budge, and after tugging hard, she discovered that the young woman’s hands had been attached to the floor with screws. Lily panicked, and in her panic she began to suspect she was dreaming and tried to fight her way out of the dream and away from the moonlight shining on those bloodless palms screwed to the floor, but telling herself to wake up had no immediate effect. She was drowning in the dream and struggled toward its surface, flailing and kicking her way up and out as she told herself to wake up. With her hands above her head, she pressed against something soft and wet, bursting through it to find herself awake and lying in her bed. The moonlight had disappeared. Nobody was on the floor. Had the nightmare taken place outside her room, Lily might have found comfort in waking to those four walls, but the distance between dreaming and waking had been too close. She sat up in bed and tried to recover the word in the dream that had made her so happy. She felt herself reaching back for it, finding it not in her head, but in her mouth. She had said it in the dream: “bellclose.” It’s nonsense, she said to herself. Mabel wasn’t typing anymore, and in the silence of her room, Lily tried to stay awake, but couldn’t. She slept again, dreamed again, and found the young woman on the floor again. I’m dreaming, she said to herself. I have to wake up, and Lily woke in her room and looked out and saw the moonlight shining down on the young woman’s body. And so it went all night. Time after time, she told herself to wake up, and she did, but sometimes she woke from a dream inside the dream and found the body again. After a while the police came into the dream and Hank with them. They broke through the floor, poked their feet through the ceiling and crawled in from the window. They pounded at her door in a rhythm as steady and relentless as a drum machine.

* * *

At work the next day, Lily’s arms and legs felt weak. The caffeine from the five cups of coffee she had drunk to clear her head raced through her body, and she felt suddenly aware of her nerves, which seemed to be vibrating just beneath her skin. Vince was unusually quiet that day, but Boomer yattered on about Graceland and Elvis sightings every time she came into the kitchen. At about nine o’clock she was standing across from Vince, staring at two sunny-side-up eggs for Russell Malecha, when Boomer started waving the doughnut he was holding in her face and said to her in a falsetto voice, “Earth to Lily, Earth to Lily.”

“What is it, Boom?”

“Heard you’re already two-timin’ yer new boyfriend.”

Lily picked up the plate of eggs and started for the door. “Where’d you hear that rot?”

Boomer shoved the doughnut into his mouth. Powdered sugar stuck to his lips as he widened his eyes behind his lenses. “Heard it from a kid who don’t lie. Said he saw you at the quarry, stark naked.” Boomer chewed. “With some cowboy.”

Lily’s back was pressed against the swinging door and she stopped. “Cowboy? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Said you was lyin’ on his lap, sleepin’ or sunbathin’ or somethin’.” Boomer opened his mouth and grinned, revealing half-chewed doughnut coated with saliva bubbles.

“Shut your mouth, Boom.” Lily heard her voice rise. “Whoever you talked to is cracked. You hear me? Cracked. I haven’t even been to the quarry this year, and as for cowboys — what the hell is a cowboy? This town doesn’t have cowboys, not real ones, anyway. This is complete shit.”

Vince stared at Lily, his eyes small, and Boomer went on chewing the doughnut with a surprised look on his face.

Jiggling a frying pan of sausages, Vince said, “You feeling all right? Wrong time of month?”

“No, Vince, it’s not the wrong time of the month. How’d you like it if people were talking that kind of crap about you?”

“Are you kidding? I’d love to be known as the guy hanging around the quarry with naked broads.”

“It’s not the same,” Lily said, and pushed her shoulder into the door behind her. She looked again at the two perfect yellow yolks on the plate and felt suddenly light-headed. “It was you.” That’s what he had said. The cafe looked new to her when she turned around, and for a moment the red booth where Martin usually sat undulated in the sunshine that came through the window, and Lily thought, I’m dizzy again. I have to sit down. She moved the plate into her right hand and reached for the counter with her left. I’m so tired, she thought as an explanation. She took a couple of breaths, delivered the eggs, and when she turned away from Russell, a fragment of the dream came back to her — the white material that bound the woman’s breasts and marked her flesh with a deep red line like a cut.

A week earlier Boomer’s story wouldn’t have touched Lily, and she knew it. It was listening to Boomer after she had listened to Dick, Dolores and Martin that had unnerved her. The stories didn’t match, but they overlapped, and the similarities among them were making her skittish. Either there was a virus on the march in Webster that caused hallucinations or everybody was seeing the same thing and thinking it was something else. When Lily stood in the cafe and watched Bert making lively conversation with Emily Legvold, who had recently left the Moonies and looked like herself again, Lily decided the visions weren’t imaginary. There were too many. Then through the window she saw Mrs. Pointer walking with a group of kids from the Elizabeth Barker School. The children shuffled along in twos and held hands. A chubby boy, who looked about sixteen, broke away from his partner. Turning to the cafe window, he scrunched up his face and then did a little dance for the people inside. He had the distinctive features of Down’s syndrome — small eyes and a flat nose. The silly joy in his face as he wiggled his hips and threw his head back jolted Lily from her meditation, and she laughed. He saw her and bowed. Lily watched the kids laugh and clap. Mrs. Pointer walked calmly through the line and stopped beside him. She took him by both shoulders and started to rub the boy. His face looked frenzied now, and his tongue darted in and out of his mouth. Mrs. Pointer continued to rub his shoulders with strong strokes, and the boy’s expression grew calmer. Then, taking his hand in hers, she drew it toward his partner’s — a girl with two short braids that stuck out on either side of her head — and folded their hands together with a little shake that seemed to mean they shouldn’t let go. She walked back to the head of her class and signaled for them to continue walking, which they did, and soon every child had passed out of view.

Lily saw Bert move away from the cash register holding a copy of the Webster Chronicle. “Have you read the police log, Lil’?”

Lily shook her head. She surveyed the tables to check on her customers. Everybody looked okay. Bert stuck the paper under Lily’s nose and she took it.

“Get a load of the headline,” Bert said.

Lily looked down at the police log on the Records page of the paper. The wits at the Chronicle had given that week’s log the headline “Squealer Apprehended on Division Street.”

“Down here.” Bert’s finger pointed to the entry for Tuesday, June 11.

Lily looked down at the paper. The print seemed out of focus. She had to concentrate on the letters to read.

“Police made a traffic stop.… A fight was reported in Viking Terrace.… A black bag containing insulin equipment was found on Bridge Square.… A man on Albers Avenue reported noises in his basement. Officers discovered a gopher in a window well.… A woman on Dundas Street heard people talking outside her window. Police were unable to locate conversationalists.… A complaint of loud music at the Violetta Trailer Park was received. Officers asked residents to turn it down.… A pig was reported loose on South Division Street. Officers rounded up the critter and returned it to its owner.… A man carrying an injured woman was reported on Highway 19 at the city limits. Police checked the area but found no one.”

Lily stared at the last entry. Then she looked up at Bert.

Bert looked puzzled. “All right, it’s not that funny, I admit it.”

Lily stared at the log again.

“Lil’, hon, you okay?”

Lily looked into Bert’s brown eyes. “Something’s going on, Bert.” She turned to the window. “I don’t know exactly what, but I think somebody’s hurt or even dead. She has dark hair. That’s all I know.” Lily walked toward the window and looked at the inverted neon letters that read “IDEAL CAFE” from the outside, and she felt Bert’s fingers brush her shoulder behind her. At her friend’s touch, Lily felt suddenly pained.

“What are you talking about? Did you see something?” Bert said.

Lily moved her neck and looked at Bert. “I haven’t seen anything,” she said.

“It’s Shapiro,” Bert said. “He’s not good for you.”

Lily made a face. “What does he have to do with it? It’s not him.”

Bert stared at her, her lips slightly parted. Then she said, “What’s going on?”

Lily rustled the newspaper in her right hand. She waved it at Bert. “I’m not sure.”

When Lily wandered into the street after her shift and looked up at the Stuart Hotel for some sign of Ed, she regretted not explaining more carefully what she had meant to Bert. So many strange things happened in the world. All her life she had heard the most unlikely stories that were true. Hadn’t Mrs. Knutsen and Mr. Walacek dropped dead on the same day in houses right next door to each other on Elm Street? How often did that happen? Hadn’t Ernie Applebaum disappeared four years ago without a trace until he turned up last year with the carny people running the Shake ’Em Up ride for Jesse James Days, tattooed from head to toe? And hadn’t June Putkey attacked her mother with a knife in their kitchen on a Sunday afternoon? Had a single person in town known that June (who was known to Lily chiefly for the stickers she plastered all over her purse) had it in her to do such a thing? She snapped, Lily thought. But what had made her snap? Had she really hated her mother, or had she just hated her then? Lily imagined a knife in the girl’s hand and blood in a sink with dirty dishes. And then, Lily thought, there are people who don’t feel anything, people who can do anything, anything at all, like that man in Chicago. Martin had an article about him on his wall. Lily remembered that Gasey had been a clown at children’s birthday parties. Nobody had been able to see what was inside him. But Martin, Lily thought, Martin isn’t like that. And yet when she remembered Martin rocking in that chair as hard and fast as it would go, she wasn’t so sure anymore. Through the glass door of the hotel, she noticed Stanley walking up the stairs with a mop and pail. Just after his feet disappeared, she thought, Martin’s up to something. I can feel it.

* * *

When Lily walked through Ed’s door the next day, Mabel was sitting in front of the window only a few feet away from Ed’s canvas. The figure in the painting was the same size as Mabel herself. Lily looked at the splotches of color and the soft contours of the woman’s body, which were still unfinished. Ed hadn’t flattered Mabel, hadn’t turned her into someone younger or prettier. The woman in the painting was Mabel as Lily knew her, and yet this two-dimensional Mabel had a quality about her that Lily didn’t understand. Standing in front of the picture, Lily felt that Mabel was talking directly to her. The woman leaned forward, holding her thin white hands at either side of her face. Her eyes were narrowed as if to focus better and her mouth was open. He got her, Lily thought — that hot-wired look. But still something in the picture bothered her. She could feel it, and she must have been seeing it, but she couldn’t say what it was. Lily moved very close to the portrait. She sensed that both Ed and Mabel were waiting for her response and that she should have one ready, but she didn’t want to speak before she knew what she was going to say. Then she stepped back three or four feet to examine the painting again. The painting was making her uneasy. It’s her face, Lily thought. She looks wild, almost batty, and then Lily realized that she was looking at someone who was desperately happy, so happy that her expression could easily be mistaken for something else: craziness, pain, even fear. She’s so happy, Lily said to herself, because she’s talking to him. And although Lily had always understood that Mabel was lonely, she had never seen it so naked. “What do you think?” Ed said.

Lily nodded. “It’s the best one,” she said in a flat voice.

She glanced at Mabel, who looked very calm next to the canvas. “But,” she said, “it’s a little scary, too, because,” she stammered, “it’s so personal.” Lily wiped sweat from her upper lip. Her stomach gurgled. Maybe I’m coming down with something, she thought. Looking from Ed to Mabel, she sensed that between them they had made something she couldn’t touch. Not the painting. The painting had come out of it, but that wasn’t what she meant. Lily stepped away from the canvas and turned to Mabel.

“There are lots of things I don’t know about,” she said. “Like painting, but I can tell that Ed painted you as you really are, and I know that takes a lot of talent. You must have told him all about yourself for it to work.” She paused and lowered her voice. “Maybe you even told him things you never told anybody before.” She looked at Ed. “But I wonder if he told you about him. I mean the stuff that really matters.” Lily took a deep breath. “All day long you sit here and listen to people telling you their most private thoughts — Tex and Dolores and Stanley and now Mabel. They’re telling you about their parents and their sweethearts, and even about their secret fantasies, and you take it all in like a big sponge — in the name of art.” Lily heard her voice go shrill on the last word. She tried to calm herself. “You’ve told me about yourself, but it’s nothing compared to what these people have been telling you. I don’t even know who your mother was.” Lily pointed toward the open door. “Right through there, I saw you giving Dolores money like she’s your oldest friend in the world, but you don’t tell me beans about it. And everybody in town’s jabbering about all the girls you’ve had, a goddamned assembly line of tits and ass, and from you, nothing.” Lily’s jaw shook. She hadn’t known she was this upset. Her own words were egging her on. “And then I hear you were over at Swensen’s digging up corpses to draw. Did you mention that to me? No sirree! And”—she stopped and looked at them—“just for the record, I’d like to know where the hell I fit in? The two of you are so tight these days, there’s no goddamned room for anybody else!” Lily looked at the two surprised faces. She waited, but neither one of them said anything.

Lily nodded at Ed. Mabel looked white.

After several seconds, Ed started talking. His voice didn’t sound agitated, but his forehead wrinkled, and Lily was glad to see some sign of distress in his face. “I know that I’m stubborn about my work,” he said, “and I know that while I’m doing it, it’s sometimes hard for me to think about anything else. I feel responsible for the people I paint, because the portraits are not just about borrowing somebody’s body for a while. That’s why I gave Dolores money. I’m not done with her, just because I’m finished painting her. Do you understand?”

Lily saw that Ed was looking for words.

“And I don’t pry,” he said. “Whatever people tell me, they tell me freely. I’m not picking at people’s souls for ugly secrets…” He sighed and rubbed his face. “And as for this red-hot lover business, I honestly don’t know what it’s all about. It’s been overblown to such a degree that I don’t even recognize myself.” He paused and examined Lily as if he were trying to remember something. He smiled. “I guess I was stupid to think that I could slide in and out of the funeral home without causing a stir. For years, I’ve been thinking of doing a series of paintings called ‘The Dead.’ I’ve always had something very quiet in mind, not sensational or ghoulish — no murder victims or anything like that.” He took a breath. “As for Mr. Hansen, the funeral’s tomorrow, and I missed my chance. I did a sketch from memory, but it’s not enough. It’s too bad because I liked his face.”

Mabel was watching Ed very closely, and Lily could see signs of strain around her mouth.

Ed continued to look at Lily. “As for you, I can’t see that my painting interferes in any way with my feelings for you.” He looked down at his hands, turned them over and flexed his fingers. “Being with you has made me very happy.”

Lily knew Ed wasn’t lying, knew that he believed everything he had said, and yet she felt cheated by his answers. It all made sense, and yet there was something wrong with it. She didn’t know why his painting of Mabel changed what was between him and her, but it did. She just couldn’t explain it. She didn’t know whether Ed’s logic was false or whether logic didn’t work in trying to answer what she had said. It was like pointing at a squashed gopher on the road and having it explained to her with an algebraic formula.

After that, the three of them hardly talked for about an hour. Mabel sat in her chair, and Lily found a place on the floor. Ed went back to the portrait, and Lily watched him. Sometimes he closed his eyes as though he were looking at a picture of Mabel inside himself. He paced, and Lily listened to his steps, back and forth, back and forth. Mabel watched Ed intently, and Lily felt sorry for her. She’s so happy to be near him, Lily thought. He painted her happiness, but he doesn’t see it. With the real person, he’s blind.

When Ed asked Mabel to talk to him again, he didn’t ask Lily to leave, and neither did Mabel. Their conspicuous inclusion of her didn’t comfort her much, however. She might be allowed to overhear Mabel’s monologue, but her speech was meant for Ed and nobody else.

“I met Evan only days after my twenty-sixth birthday in a bookstore. I loved him right away. After three days we were married, and we stayed together until he died — fifteen years. And that was short. We had no children. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Of course that was a long time ago. It might have been Evan. We never knew.” Mabel paused. “But it’s funny what you think about later, what you remember…” Mabel wasn’t looking at Ed or at Lily, but out into the room. “I remember how he changed with the seasons, his body, I mean, how he looked in different lights — summer and winter. You know, there’s a time when you feel the seasons moving — when fall becomes winter or winter becomes spring — that ambiguous threshold. He was lit differently, and he smelled different, and I”—Mabel rubbed her hands and looked at the ceiling—“I loved that change, but I also loved remembering that he had been like that before — last winter or last spring.… I’ve often thought about my marriage in terms of seasonal light.” Mabel cocked her head near her shoulder and smiled shyly. Like a girl, Lily thought.

After a silence, Mabel said, “The grief was terrible, but it was ordinary, if I can use that word. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that Evan died. People die. They die suddenly like Evan or slowly like my father, and I wasn’t so stupid as to ask, ‘Why Evan? Why the person I loved most in the world?’ Why not, after all? It’s when you’ve made your own grief, when you’re guilty, that it can’t be borne.”

Lily stared at Mabel’s rigid posture. What Mabel had said about guilt aggravated Lily’s own dread, not of Martin, she realized, but of herself. She heard Ed speak and Mabel answer him, but she didn’t listen to the content of their conversation. Ed moved toward the canvas. He looked at it, his eyes half closed, and spoke to Mabel. “It’s yours as much as mine. In about a week, I’ll want to know what the story is.”

Mabel nodded. Her head seemed very small and her lips pale.

The rest of the afternoon passed slowly. Lily lay on the floor with a pillow while Ed painted, and Mabel sat quietly in her chair. Lily took out a copy of the Star that was in her bag and began to leaf through it. She had bought it because it had a picture of Marilyn on the cover. But when she turned to the article inside, she saw it wasn’t about Marilyn at all, but a housewife in Normal, Illinois, who was gradually turning into Marilyn Monroe. Although it was written in the third person, the article was called “The Spirit of Marilyn Monroe Is Taking Over My Body.” A series of six photographs accompanied the article, showing the slow transformation of Angela Hokenburg, a brown-haired, long-nosed person, into the radiant, platinum Marilyn. Lily studied the pictures. The story was trash, but it made Lily think of the photos she had seen of Norma Jean on a beach somewhere with her brown hair and unplucked eyebrows. They turned her into Marilyn Monroe, too, Lily thought.

She didn’t know she had slept until she woke to the feeling of fingers moving across her forehead. Half awake, she thought it was her mother, and she began to say “Mom,” but didn’t finish the word. She heard Ed’s voice saying, “Don’t do anything crazy. Just stay where you are.”

Lily opened her eyes and saw Mabel withdraw her hand quickly. She was lying on Ed’s bed, and outside it was night. Lily looked at Mabel. “What’s going on?”

Mabel looked tired, and her disheveled hair fell around her face. “You didn’t have rehearsal, so we let you sleep. Ed carried you to the bed. You didn’t stir.”

Lily sat up. “Who’s on the phone?”

“Dolores Wachobski, I believe,” Mabel said, raising her eyebrows and twisting her mouth to one side. “She seems to be having some kind of emergency.”

Lily looked at Ed. He had hung up the telephone and was standing. He rubbed his mouth.

Lily said, “What does she want?”

“She’s had a bad scare, more ghosts and mishegoss.”

Lily puzzled over his last word but didn’t ask him about it. “You’re going over there?”

Ed walked toward her. “There’s no one else, Lily.” He reached into his pocket, feeling for car keys, and she heard them jingle.

“I’m going with you,” Lily said.

Ed looked at her. “I honestly don’t know what to expect. She’s plastered and raving.”

“I don’t care,” Lily said.

“I don’t care either,” Mabel said.

* * *

Ed drove to the trailer park, which lay on the riverbank across from the Dairy Queen with its huge illuminated ice-cream cone. Through her open window, Lily smelled the water and felt the station wagon rock on uneven ground. A turquoise trailer shone for a moment in the headlights before it disappeared with the dying sound of the motor.

Ed pounded on the door of Dolores’s trailer, and when no one answered, he walked inside. The long room Lily saw from behind Ed wasn’t at all what she had expected. In the first place, it was very clean. In the second place, it was fussy. There were knicknacks everywhere: carefully arranged porcelain children, angels, dogs, cats and horses, a large blue-and-white Madonna with child, a big bowl of cat’s-eye marbles, and a number of objects with little sayings or slogans on them: a small stuffed Cupid held up a sign with the word “LUV” on it. “B.S. ARTIST” was written on a miniature license plate that hung over the sink. “Woman of Power” had been stitched into a needlepoint pillow that lay on Dolores’s carefully made bed, and as Ed headed toward the bathroom to check it, Lily noticed yet another sign — a wooden heart with the words “Little Girl’s Room” carved into it.

Just before they left the trailer to search outside, Lily noticed a photograph propped on the dresser. She could feel Ed’s anxiety and saw that Mabel had already gone outside, so she glanced at it for only a moment, but the little girl in the picture, dressed in a fluffy white confirmation dress, was obviously Dolores, and the slender woman beside her had to be her mother. As she headed for the door behind Ed, Lily understood that she had not deduced the identity of Dolores’s mother, but had recognized her, not from life, but from Ed’s cartoon figure in the narrative boxes above Dolores’s painted head.

They each took a different direction. Lily walked toward the river, trudging between rows of trailers as she listened to a disc jockey drawl out the name of a song. Lily felt the gravel road end, heard the music stop abruptly and waded into the tall grass near the riverbank. Ed was calling Dolores’s name, but Lily couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth. A mosquito whined in her ear and she swatted it blindly. The trees and the water ahead darkened suddenly and, looking up, she saw a cloud drift across the moon. The grass made her legs itch, and she bent down to give them a good scratch before she tromped forward and felt a hard object roll under her sneaker. Lily squatted in the grass, reached out for the thing and felt the cool, round glass of a bottle in her hand. Liquid sloshed inside it, and when she raised it to her nose, it smelled of whiskey. As she crouched in the grass holding the half-empty bottle, the moon came out from behind the cloud and lit the tops of the trees along the river. Through them she could see the shine of river water, and then, only feet away to her right, a white hand was curled in a loose fist. She crawled toward it. Dolores was lying sprawled out on the flattened grass, face up. She’s breathing, Lily thought, looking at the woman’s huge breasts move up and down. “Vomit, piss and booze,” Lily thought and held her breath against the stench. The woman’s skirt was hiked up around her waist, and her pale flesh glowed through a big rip in her stocking. Lily leaned over Dolores and whispered, “Get up!” But Dolores didn’t move. Taking the woman by the shoulders, Lily started to shake her. She shook gently at first, waiting for a response, but the woman’s head seemed as heavy as a bowling ball. Lily shook harder. “Wake up!” she whispered. Nothing happened, and looking down at Dolores’s unconscious face, Lily felt a surge of irritation. She shook Dolores violently. The woman’s head thumped against the ground as Lily threw here entire strength into shaking her, and that was when she realized she was enjoying it, that this shaking had an energy, a life all its own, and that it felt so good she didn’t want to stop, and she shook more. Dolores opened one eye, and Lily saw a glimmer of liquid white. The woman’s mouth parted and her lower lip drooped. Lily let go of Dolores’s shoulders, but the flabby, stupid expression on the woman’s face hadn’t gone away. She looked at the hole in the black stocking and slapped it. When Lily withdrew her hand, her palm was stinging, but she lifted her arm to do it again. At the same moment she heard Dolores groan, and the sound startled her. She hadn’t expected her to wake up at all. But that’s what was happening. Dolores had raised herself up on one elbow and was staring at Lily through eyes that looked like illuminated slits in the night.

Lily started to shout for Ed and Mabel. She called out their names until her voice was hoarse, and even after they answered her, she kept yelling their names over and over again, as if she was the one who needed to be saved. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she wiped them away when she saw Ed racing toward her. He puffed hard as he knelt over Dolores, who raised herself to a sitting position, threw her arms around him and began blubbering words Lily couldn’t understand.

Not until Dolores was lying on her bed did Lily see how sick she looked. Her skin was flat white, her eyes red, and the flesh around them a curious shade of violet. Running makeup had turned her cheeks black and green, and partly digested food littered her naked chest and the front of her blouse.

Mabel was the one who wiped Dolores’s face with wet paper towels, who cleaned her chest and arms, who removed her filthy clothes and ruined stockings and managed to get her under the sheets. Throughout her cleanup, Dolores moaned the word “No.” She tossed back and forth on the bed, her movements so meaningless that it took Lily a while to understand that the woman wanted to sit up. Finally, she managed to raise her body by herself and yelled at them, “Look at me! Am I cut?” Her head flopped forward. “Am I cut?” Then she started to cry, and Lily found the crying much worse than the moaning or shouting.

Mabel crawled onto the bed and grabbed hold of Dolores’s shoulders. She looked very small and thin beside Dolores, but her decisive movements compensated for her weakness. She pushed Dolores back down on the bed, grasped the woman’s flailing hands and held them tightly. “You’re not cut,” she said. “Do you hear me? You’re not cut.”

Dolores stopped fighting and lay quietly on the bed. “I saw it,” she said, her voice between a whisper and a groan. “I saw him with a knife.”

“No,” Mabel said. “You’re not cut. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Lily turned away. She saw Ed standing in front of an open cupboard with a bottle in his hand. “We’ll let her sleep now,” he said.

Lily walked over to him and put her cheek on his chest. His shirt smelled vaguely of turpentine, and that smell combined with the arms that came around her and the touch of the whiskey bottle against her back made her want to cry for no reason she could think of anymore. From behind them, Dolores said in a slurred voice either “I’m finished” or “It’s finished,” and Lily heard Mabel say, “No, no, no. Go to sleep.”

The three of them were silent in the car. Ed drove slowly now, and Lily remembered Dolores in the trailer, her belly speckled with moles and the ragged mark left by the elastic around her middle as she lay naked on the bed. Lily cried without making any sound. Shame was choking her. Her lungs were so tight with it, she couldn’t sit still. She wriggled in the seat, looking out one window, then the other. Dolores knows, Lily thought. She knows what I did.

Lily saw Ed glance at her in the rearview mirror. Mabel’s head was motionless. Ed started singing. Lily couldn’t understand it. It seemed so sudden, so silly, but he was singing. In a low, raspy voice, he sang, “Row, row, row your boat.” He sang the whole song and then started over. Mabel joined him and made a round of it, her high, thin voice quavering over the words. Lily listened and wiped her cheeks with her hands, and then she sang, too. They all sang, and they were still singing when Ed parked the station wagon in front of the Stuart Hotel.

* * *

Even before Lily opened her eyes Sunday morning, she knew the sun had been up for hours. The bedsheet and pillowcase smelled of heat and dust, and she felt the moisture under her arms and between her legs as she turned over on the mattress and understood she was in the bed alone. She heard Ed, smelled paint and coffee, and felt the sunlight on her eyelids. For a moment she let them open and saw the fringe of her lashes as a moving shadow. She decided not to open her eyes, not yet. Her mind was empty. There was nothing but the light and the warmth of the day, but as she sank toward sleep again, she remembered a long row of tall windows with sills painted pale green. It must have been the sunlight that brought them back to her. Through one of those windows she saw the orange school bus in the parking lot under enormous elms. Late spring, she thought, the field trip to the state hospital. I was in the fifth grade. She remembered standing in the large, narrow room lined with beds on either side. The boy had been lying in one of them, his image as clear now as when she had first seen him. He must have been twelve or thirteen. He lay in a bed that had sides like a crib and wore nothing but diapers and plastic pants. He didn’t move and he didn’t see her, but his long limbs had a whiteness and softness that fascinated her — the skin of an infant. She remembered a man’s voice saying, “profoundly retarded children,” and that word “profound” had stayed with her. For years afterward it had meant that motionless boy with vacant eyes.

Then Lily remembered last night and her shame returned, an ache of regret coupled with a fear of being found out. What if Dolores confronted her, or worse, told Ed and Mabel? Could she deny it and say Dolores had invented the whole thing? Could it even be mentioned without Lily going to pieces? She could hardly contain it now. Her whole body was racked with shame. She sat up and stared at Ed’s naked back in front of the canvas of Mabel. He held a cup of coffee in one hand, and she could see in his neck and shoulders that he was thinking about the picture, so she didn’t speak to him. She remembered Dolores saying “No!” over and over again and looked past Ed’s head through the window, as though the air outside might relieve her agitation, but it didn’t. She looked down at the tan line below her breasts, at her brown stomach and the pale skin just above her pubic hair. Then she put her feet on the floor, stood up, walked over to Ed and stood beside him. Without putting down his brush, he drew her into him and she laid her head on his chest. She could feel drops of his sweat on her forehead and couldn’t resist moving her cheek against the hairs.

“Good morning,” he said. “Poor, tired girl.”

His kind voice made her feel worse. “Do you think Dolores is okay?” Lily said.

“I called her about an hour ago. She’s alive.”

“Is that all?”

“I think she needs a few more hours to recover complete consciousness.” He smiled.

Lily looked up at him. “Remember when she talked about being cut?”

Ed touched Lily’s cheek. “Dolores told me this morning that she thought she saw herself being murdered.”

Lily pulled away from Ed. “What do you mean? How can anybody see that?”

“She must have been delirious,” Ed said.

“Jesse James?”

He nodded.

Lily looked into his face, and he looked back at her with his still wide eyes. He was looking at her, and he seemed to be paying attention to her, but she had the feeling he really wasn’t. There was something missing in those eyes. She had felt it before and she felt it now, that Ed was both there with her and not there. He acted like he cared about Dolores, but Lily suddenly wondered if he did. Behind him she could see the painting of Tex and the box where the man was strangling the woman. Jesse James, she thought and grabbed Ed’s elbow. “What if it was real?” she said. “What if she saw a real murder? Did you ever think of that? People have been seeing things, Ed, not just Dolores.” Lily started jabbering. She heard herself doing it, but she couldn’t stop. Her voice rose and cracked as she told him about the police log, Boomer’s cowboy, Martin’s cuts, and Becky Runevold. She wanted to make him listen, to startle him. “Her father killed her,” Lily said under her breath. “People will do anything, Ed.” She caught her breath. “Do you hear me?”

“Take it easy,” he said. He looked down at his elbow, and Lily saw she was digging her fingers into his skin. She let go.

Ed rubbed his hands together. “I don’t know about what other people have seen or not seen. But I think that Dolores is unstable and, well, not completely trustworthy.”

“You mean she’s a liar?”

Ed rubbed the flats of his palms together in and up-and-down motion as if this gesture helped him think. “Maybe not an out-and-out liar, but manipulative and prone to exaggeration. She’s melodramatic — the star of her own show. When she called last night, what frightened me wasn’t what she thought she had seen, but that she would kill herself, to, to get back at me.”

“For what?”

Ed’s eyes turned cloudy. He looked past Lily. “For finishing the painting, I suppose.”

“That’s weird,” Lily said, looking straight at him. “And I’m not sure I believe it. I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t think Dolores was going to kill herself. Her house is much too clean.”

Ed returned her look and smiled. “Cleanliness and a desire for death don’t mix, is that it?”

“That’s right,” Lily said. “That house was cleaned for company, and I’ll bet that company was you. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see something. Maybe it’s Tex! Couldn’t Dolores have seen Tex? How would you feel if somebody’s been killed? Wouldn’t you feel guilty for painting him doing that?” She pointed at the canvas.

Ed lifted his hands toward her. Lily knew she was being unreasonable, but she shouted anyway. She liked it. It was as good as screaming or crying onstage. She was inside the emotion and also outside it. She felt anger, and at the same time she was watching herself feel it. “Well, won’t you feel responsible if he’s hurt some woman out there?”

Ed was saying “Enough.” He grabbed her by the wrists and held them firmly. Lily flapped her arms against him, but she didn’t resist with much force. She loved him holding her wrists like that. His secure grip aroused her, and she fell toward him and started kissing his naked shoulder.

“What am I going to do with you?” he said.

Lily kissed his ear. She didn’t know why, but he had said the right thing. It excited her more. Her face felt damp against his neck. Then she let her head fall backward. “Whatever you want,” she said.

He kissed her upper arm and bit it, not hard, but she could feel his teeth and wondered if they would leave a small red mark.

* * *

Monday was quiet. The day brought no more rumors about Lily or anybody else. The Chronicle came out, but there was nothing of interest in the log. Lily waited on Stanley Blom at about six o’clock that morning, and when she told him she liked his portrait, the old man smiled and said, “It ain’t a pretty sight, but then a fella like myself can’t hope for that.” Lily had avoided looking at Stanley’s hunchback then and mumbled something about the picture having “character.” “That’s just a nice word for ugly,” he said. And when Lily blushed, the man laughed so hard that he started coughing. In the afternoon, Ed painted Mabel, and Lily watched. The weather was hot, but not too hot, and when Lily recalled that the storm had roared through town only last Tuesday, it seemed impossible. It feels like months ago, she thought. That was the day I buried the shoes. When she thought about slapping Dolores now, she suffered acute discomfort, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been, and she was beginning to think that she was the only one who knew about it anyway. Dolores had been dead drunk. At rehearsal that night, Lily kept her distance from Martin, and he didn’t speak to her. He had rebandaged his hand, so the cuts were invisible. Jim said he’d heard that Martin cut himself at the Grastvedt farm fixing the fence, and Lily believed it. In fact, during those hours of practice, her suspicions waned. What were they made of anyway? Hearsay, rumor, the stories of drunks and crazy people, and the wacko speeches of Martin Petersen himself.

At nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, it all changed again. Lily heard Professor Vegan’s voice rising above the hum of conversation in the cafe and turned her head to listen. He came in once a month with three other retired professors. The four men called themselves “The Over-the-Hill Gang.” They ate big breakfasts, and once their stomachs were full, they would launch into Kierkegaard. Lily had been told that they’d been chipping away at the philosopher for three years, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, as patient and relentless as the day is long. This year there had been only two books, and they had the grimmest titles Lily had ever seen: Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. But the men joked and ribbed each other, and every once in a while Professor Schwandt laughed until he cried. It was true that weather, sports and politics got mixed in with Kierkegaard from time to time, but the men’s doggedness impressed Lily — and they tipped well. “The creature had wings,” Professor Vegan was saying, and Lily moved toward the table of professors with the coffeepot.

“If Gladys had been alone, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. Gladys, as far as I can tell, is very nearly a Holy Roller — evangelical in the extreme. I can’t remember the name of the sect she belongs to, but they do their fair share of trembling and moaning. Marit, on the other hand, is a hard-headed woman if there ever was one, and I would never doubt her powers of observation. She saw the darn thing, too, in broad daylight, only yards from the house.”

Lily poured Professor Hong coffee even though his cup was nearly full and watched Professor Vegan. He had an ironic smile on his face and lowered his voice for effect. “It came walking along the creek bed from the north very quietly — a translucent being in white with a gigantic pair of wings.” He gulped his coffee and watched the faces of his three colleagues. “And”—he paused—“there’s the matter of the suitcase. After all, who would invent that detail? A supernatural being trudging along with its belongings in a bag.”

Lily looked intently into the coffee and clenched her teeth.

“Send a memo to the religion department,” said Professor Nichols.

“A seraph,” said Professor Hong, “on the loose in Webster.”

The men laughed.

Professor Schwandt shook his head. “It’s the suitcase that bothers me. An angel with luggage. Smells of heresy, doesn’t it?”

Professor Nichols smiled. “Yes, I’ve always assumed that divine messengers travel light.”

“I wonder what it was, really.” Lily interrupted them. “Who it was.”

Professor Vegan shook his head and looked at Lily. “Beats me, but when I came home, both Marit and Gladys were pretty shaken. Whatever they saw, it must have looked not just improbable, but impossible.”

Lily poured more coffee all around and left the table. She watched Frances Herda pat Lynn Strom’s shoulder and say loudly, “Keith Ellingboe just isn’t worth it. If you want my opinion, he’s been acting like a horse’s ass for three weeks.” Lynn picked up her orange juice glass and sniffed into it. Wings, Lily thought, and a suitcase. Frances turned her head, and the tiny gold earring in her right ear gleamed for a second in the light from the window. She moved again, and the glint disappeared. Lily carried the coffeepot toward the door. She wanted to go back and ask Professor Vegan whether his wife had mentioned the size or weight of the suitcase and whether she had thought the “thing” was a man or a woman. Lily had met Marit Vegan. Her oldest daughter, Iris, used to baby-sit for her, and the whole family had always struck Lily as indomitably sane. The Vegan house lay on the land above the creek, only a quarter of a mile from the Bodlers’ on the other side of the highway, and it was close to the caves. Suddenly, she wondered what she had done with Martin’s map. She walked past Bert and stood near the door. The light outside was so bright she couldn’t look into it. She squinted toward the street. They saw something, all right, she thought. The suitcase Lily had found in the garage had disappeared into thin air. A man carrying an injured woman, she said to herself, near the city limits. Warm liquid ran onto Lily’s foot. She opened her eyes and saw that the coffeepot had tipped in her slack wrist and that coffee was running onto her white sneaker.

Behind her she heard Vince yelling, “Watch the pot!” She turned around to look at him and set the coffee near the cash register. “You okay?” he said. Lily didn’t answer him. She was thinking. I can’t just let this go. Somebody has got to do something. I can’t stay here and pretend nothing’s happening. Lily wiped her shoe with a napkin and faced Division Street again. The bright sunshine was hard to look at. Lily reached for the screen door and opened it. I’m going now, she thought. It can’t wait. She walked out into the street, turned right and then right again up the alley to her bicycle.

Lily rode past the Ideal Cafe and saw Vince standing in the doorway in his white apron. He waved a spatula at her and roared, “Where do you think you’re going! Get back here! If you don’t get your ass back here in two seconds, you’re fired!”

She didn’t pay any attention to him. Vince was standing in another dimension, like a person in a movie she could watch without him affecting her directly. He had fired her twice before, but both times he had rehired her within twenty minutes, and both times it had been his fault for being such a hothead. Now she was the one who had walked out on him, and it seemed only fair that he should fire her. There was something oddly pleasant about the uproar she had created: the fat man screaming in the doorway, the startled faces in the cafe. It had been so easy, had taken only a couple of seconds to turn the Ideal Cafe upside down. Lily knew where she was going. She was looking for someone — a nameless girl hidden at Martin’s or at the Bodlers’, in the woods or in the caves. Whoever she was, she must look something like both Lily and Dolores. Whoever she was, Lily felt she had to find her. Just beyond the Webster city limits, Lily imagined the suitcase lying abandoned in the woods, and she imagined her fingers on the lid pulling it open a couple of inches, and then in the fantasy she slammed down the lid to shut out the horrible contents.

* * *

Standing outside Martin’s house, Lily felt excited. Her excitement outweighed her dread, maybe because Martin’s truck was gone and the house looked unoccupied. She walked onto the porch, opened the door and peered into the room. The rocking chair had been moved back to the corner, and she could see the black cloth, the collage of crimes and advertisements with its blank center. She walked inside. This, too, was easy. You put one foot in front of the other, she said to herself, and you’re in. She touched the black cloth for an instant, but dropped it quickly. The chemical smell remained strong in the house, and again she wondered what it was. When she looked for the knives, she saw that they had disappeared. Lily remembered Dolores yelling about being cut, remembered Martin’s hand, and, as she walked through the open door into Martin’s bedroom, she thought that cuts like the ones she had seen on Martin’s hand couldn’t have come from fixing a fence. Stacks of books lay on the floor, and on a table she saw the copy of Gray’s Anatomy that had been in the other room before, a book of photographs called The Nude, and a fat white book entitled Prosthetics. A fly buzzed past her cheek, and Lily listened for cars on the road, but there were none, only highway traffic in the distance. Lily moved to Martin’s desk, pushed away the chair and opened the desk drawer: bank receipts, several index cards, paper clips, a copy of Playboy. Then, looking down, she noticed a dark heap on the floor, bent over and reached for it. Clothes, she thought, just clothes, but when she pulled out a blue T-shirt and looked at it, she noticed it had a tiny bow at the neck and a tag inside that said “Lady Susan, size 7.” Lily stared at the tag, took a deep breath and threw the shirt back under the desk. From somewhere outside she heard a dog barking, and she ran out of the house. Pedaling up the gravel road toward the highway, she suddenly remembered she had forgotten to shut the desk drawer.

Two cars were parked in the Bodlers’ driveway: the twins’ truck and a Pontiac that Lily thought looked familiar. Lily jumped off her bicycle and ran to the door. She rattled the screen and called inside, “Hello! It’s me, Lily. I have to talk to you!” Yelling into that house, Lily felt that she had temporarily given herself permission to act wildly, but could withdraw that permission at any second if she had to.

She yelled again. “Let me in! It’s important!” Heavy footsteps came from the next room. Frank appeared in the kitchen.

“Hold yer horses,” he muttered. As he trudged across the kitchen floor, he pulled at his trousers, and stopped behind the screen. He raised his bloodshot eyes to her and grunted.

“I have to talk to you again, to you and Dick, about what he saw.” Lily hesitated. She looked intently at him to show the urgency of what she was saying and then added, “It could be a matter of life and death.”

She wasn’t at all sure, but Lily thought she saw a hint of amusement in Frank’s eyes. “Easy does it,” he said and stared at her without blinking. He did not open the screen door.

“Mr. Bodler,” Lily said, “let me in.”

Frank scratched his neck. “Dick’s restin’.”

“This won’t take long.”

Frank rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. Then he lifted a finger slowly toward the ceiling like a person testing the wind and said, “Hold on.”

Frank disappeared. Lily heard voices from inside the house while she waited. Listening, she thought she heard a woman’s voice, but Dick’s voice had the timbre of a woman’s, and it could have been him.

Frank returned, motioned for her to follow him, but said nothing. He led Lily through the second room and then kicked open the door to the third. The kick gave her a start, and she braced herself as she followed him into the bedroom. The room was incredibly dark. She saw nothing but a bar of hazy light straight ahead of her. Two or three seconds later, she realized that the light came from a window, its opening obscured by a tall stack of boxes, and that the visible glass was coated with a thick, yellow film. A hulking dresser with a cloudy blackened mirror above it stood against the left wall, and when Lily turned to look at it, she saw the blurred reflection of two people lying on a bed. The mirror’s distortion confused her for a moment, but she turned to her right and saw Dick Bodler and Dolores Wachobski together on a small bed that sagged under their weight. Dolores was sitting, wedged close to Dick, who was lying down, his head propped on an uncovered pillow. Bolt upright near the end of the bed were Dick’s boots. Their long, creased tongues hung out from between knotted laces, giving them a vaguely doglike appearance. Dolores was wearing a thin pink dress that buttoned up the front, and because that dress was the only clear color in that dark room of muddy browns and grays, her body looked separate from everything else around her. The puking, bloated, whiskey-logged woman of three days ago had been replaced by a steady, sober person in pink. The transformation was so complete, Lily found it almost supernatural. This wasn’t the Dolores she had shaken and slapped the other night. Holding a neat fan of playing cards in two hands, Dolores turned her head to Lily and said, “You look a little mussed up, honey. Anything wrong?” Then she lowered her eyes to her cards. Dick hadn’t shown Lily any sign of greeting or recognition. He lifted a hand that had been hidden behind his thigh and brought several badly smudged cards up to his nose. Then he narrowed his eyes. Lily shifted on the floor, felt her foot knock something, heard a sloshing sound and looked down at the floor. Her toe had knocked into a coffee can that was serving as a spittoon. She smelled rancid tobacco juice and felt thankful she hadn’t spilled it.

Lily tried to focus her eyes. The vague light, the dust that floated in the room made it hard to see, and she felt that the momentum of the afternoon had suddenly been lost. The world had slowed down and then collapsed into this funny, filthy room. But she spoke anyway. “I want to ask you about Martin Petersen.” She took a step toward the bed. Nobody moved. Frank stood in front of the tower of boxes and surveyed the three of them with blank eyes. Dolores and Dick looked at their cards. “Martin Petersen,” she said again.

After several seconds, Dolores patted the bed. “Join us for a game of gin?” Her voice was bright and clear.

I’m tired, Lily thought, really tired. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk.”

“Sit down then,” Dolores cooed. She smiled and motioned with her head to a spot on the bed near the boots.

“I’ll stand,” Lily said.

Dolores threw back her head and hooted.

Dick continued to look at his cards. Then he raised his eyebrows as though he were surprised by what he saw.

Dolores laughed again.

The laugh seemed to remain in Lily’s ear even after it was over. She looked straight at Dolores. “On second thought,” she said, “move over.” Lily crawled over Dick’s legs and nudged Dolores forcefully with her elbow. “Make room, honey,” she said, emphasizing the word “honey.” The bed sank further under her weight, and for an instant Lily thought it might go crashing to the floor. She crossed her legs Indian style and beamed at Dolores. “This is comfy,” she said.

“Well, how do you do!” Dolores said. It was not a question. “For a minute there, I thought you was just a teeny-weeny bit scared of me, or maybe Dickie here?” Dolores patted the man’s trousers, and a small cloud of black dust rose from the cloth.

“No way,” Lily said and wiggled her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of getting comfortable. Dolores’s sarcasm relieved Lily’s guilt. She really is a bitch, Lily thought. “I want to know exactly what you saw that day in the field — when you said you saw Martin Petersen,” she shouted at Dick. He didn’t look at her. A bird whistled outside, three distinct notes, each one higher than the one before.

“Why?” Dolores said.

Lily’s leg brushed Dolores’s hip. The contact made her uncomfortable, and she felt her face getting hot. “Dick,” Lily began and corrected herself, “Mr. Bodler says he saw Martin Petersen carrying”—Lily rubbed her face—“me”—she paused—“across the field out here last Thursday night, but I wasn’t there.”

“You?” Dolores squinted at Lily.

“Remind you of anything?” Lily said. “Like Jesse James?”

“No,” Dolores said, but her lips were parted in an expression of confusion.

Dick sat up.

“Well, let’s face it,” Lily said, “it wasn’t Jesse James.”

Frank had turned to Lily, and he stepped forward.

Dolores looked at Lily and spoke between her teeth. “I saw Jesse, and I saw me. I know what I saw, and it scared the bejesus outa me. It wasn’t Martin Petersen, and it sure as hell wasn’t you.”

Lily shouted at Dick. “How did you know it was Martin? Wasn’t it getting dark? I’m not saying you didn’t see anything, but how could you be so sure? In the police log last week there was a report about a man carrying an injured woman just outside of town. It’s the same thing, don’t you see? I’ve got it right here.” Lily dug into her back pocket for the clipping and waved it in front of Dolores. “You didn’t call the police, did you?”

“I never call them clowns,” Dolores said. She took the clipping from Lily, stared at it and sucked the inside of her cheek.

Frank walked over to Dolores and held out his hand for the clipping. She gave it to him, and he read it for at least a minute. Kindergarten speed, Lily said to herself. “Wonder whose pig it was,” he said finally.

“You’re sayin’ Marty Petersen’s walkin’ round town with a dead woman and that’s what I’ve been seeing?” Dolores said, “Wearin’ cowboy duds? That it ain’t visions? Is that what you’re sayin’?”

“Maybe,” Lily said. “I’m not sure.”

“What about the music?” she said. “I heard music.”

Lily ignored her.

Still holding the bit of wrinkled newspaper, Frank sat down on a crate piled with magazines and spat into the coffee can. “That boy was born with thin blood,” he said. “Runs in our family.” He spoke slowly.

“Who’s he talking about?” Lily asked Dolores.

“Must be Marty.”

“You and Martin are related?” Lily said in a loud voice.

Frank nodded. “As I was sayin’, he inherited it, thin blood, female-like, if you know my meaning, a little like Dick here.” He lowered his voice when he mentioned his brother. “Only Dick ain’t clever, and Marty’s wicked clever — not just with his hands neither. He reads a lot a books, comes here and pages through every one we get in to see if he wants it, and takes whatever he likes. He’s got big ideas ’bout things, an’ when he ain’t cursed by stutterin’, he goes on and on till I can’t take it no more, a regular chatterbox he is, once he gets goin’.”

Lily interrupted him. “How are you related?”

Frank looked at her. “Our mother and Martin’s grandmother was sisters.”

“I had no idea.”

Frank nodded. “Norwegians,” he said. “Those girls was born here, but their parents come from a little place in Sogn Valley, name of Underdahl. Took the name from there: Underdahl.” Lily watched the back of Frank’s head in the mirror and saw his bald spot wave in the reflection.

Dolores looked at Lily. “Like you.”

“There are lots of Dahl names,” Lily said, as if an explanation was called for. “It means ‘valley’ in Norwegian — Overdahl, Grondahl, Folkedahl — lots of them.” She heard her voice drop. She knew it was silly, but the coincidental overlapping of her own name with Helen Bodler’s maiden name unsettled her.

“Sure,” Dolores said. “I went to school with a girl called Hallingdahl.”

They were all silent. Helen Underdahl, Lily said to herself, and burped. It was a silent burp, but she tasted vomit in her mouth and swallowed to get rid of it. She looked at Frank and in a loud measured voice said, “Do you think Martin is capable of—” She stopped. “Would Martin hurt anybody?”

Frank leaned forward on the crate. “The truth is, Miss Dahl, you can’t know nothin’ about nobody now, can you? Seems to me you yourself could hurt somebody if the time and place was right. That’s so, ain’t it? Even them that’s closest to you, you can’t really know ’bout them. One day you wake up and find out. Folks say, ‘It ain’t possible, can’t happen.’ You live a little longer, and it happens.” Frank nodded his head. “People are full of surprises. I seen a lot a things that weren’t supposed to happen, Miss Dahl, and it ain’t so easy to say who’s to blame. That’s the nature of things. The day comes when you wake up in the mornin’ and look out the window and you can’t see nothin’ but grasshoppers so thick they black out the sky. And then before you know it, a drought sets in, and your fields burn as sure as if you’d taken a torch to your own crops. That’s just the way of nature, but then the price of eggs goes so low, it ain’t worth sellin’ em. Costs more to raise the chickens. An’ whose fault is that, Miss Dahl? Was it them politicians in Washington, don’t know a heifer from a steer?” Frank shook his head and stuck a pinch of tobacco into his cheek. He narrowed his eyes. “And the day comes when a goddamned inspector from the goddamned Twin Cities drives up in his fat car and tells you you gotta slaughter your animals, every last one of ’em. Hoof-and-mouth, he says. But it turns out, Miss Dahl, they wasn’t sick. Them cows wasn’t sick.” He raised a fist at Lily. “And the day comes when you don’t know your own people, don’t know what they are or what they’re thinkin’, and that’s gotta be the worst. They turn their backs on you and leave you high and dry. It don’t matter that it ain’t you done nothin’. You’re mixed up in it somehow, and that’s all that matters. Pity’s cheap, Miss Dahl, and those that pity don’t like to come too close. They stand at a good distance cluckin’ their tongues and shakin’ their heads, but they won’t get their hands dirty, and that ain’t much when all you’ve got left is a patch of land with the devil’s mark on it.” He nodded. “Folks surprise you. That’s all there is to it. You’re askin’ me if that boy could do somethin’ bad. I’m tellin’ you, you bet he could, but that don’t make him much different from nobody else.”

Lily looked at Frank. The length of his speech had astonished her. In a low voice she said, “Martin’s got pictures and articles of dead people on his wall — murdered people — did you know that?”

“You think that’s different from havin’ the pictures in here?” Frank tapped his temple with a finger.

Lily’s mouth was dry. “I, I don’t know,” she said.

Dick was stirring on the bed, and when Lily turned to look at him, she saw that he was sitting up. He let go of the cards and watched them scatter onto his lap and the bed. Until then, she had felt the man had been absent, absorbed only in the numbers and the faces on the cards in his hand. Lily didn’t know what he had heard or not heard, but his face took on a sudden expression of joy. He threw back his head, opened his mouth and laughed without making any sound, his chin bobbing. He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth on the bed, bumping both women with his shoulders. Lily moved out of his way and knocked Dolores in the shin with her knee.

“He don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Dolores said to Lily. “It’s one of his peculiars.” She smiled. “Peculiarities. Every once in a while it comes over him — just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I think we oughta leave him alone. Frank’s the only one who can get him out of it, if it don’t stop by itself.”

Lily looked at Dick and shouted at him, “I have to go now, Mr. Bodler.”

The man stopped his motion instantly, looked her straight in the face and said, “You’re leavin’?” He looked at his brother. “Miss Underdahl is leavin’?”

“Dahl,” Frank said. “Just Dahl.” He didn’t speak loudly enough for Dick to hear. Lily knew he had made the correction not for his brother, but for her.

She crawled over Dick’s legs and got off the bed. The moment her feet touched the ground, he returned to his rocking and noiseless laughter. Lily saw her image wave in the dark mirror ahead of her, and she turned her head to avoid it. When she looked around, she saw Dolores giving Dick’s leg a friendly pat as she moved to the edge of the bed. Dolores’s dress caught the mattress, slid up her thigh and revealed the top of her stocking and garter. Lily remembered then that Dolores hadn’t been wearing a garter the other night.

Lily shook hands with Frank and resisted a momentary impulse to wipe her palm on her jeans. Then she noticed Dick waving at her, and she understood that he, too, wanted to shake hands. She reached out to him. He took her hand, and Lily felt his warm, oily palm against hers, and when she looked at him, she saw recognition in his eyes. He must be mistaking me for someone else, she thought.

Drained of curiosity and somehow wounded, Lily stared at the Folgers label on the coffee can near her feet. Seeing the brothers and listening to Frank had picked at some old sore inside her, and although she felt the pain of it clearly enough, she didn’t know what had caused it. She left the room behind Dolores, and walking through the second room, she noticed the peonies through the window. One fat, fading blossom was pressing against the dirty glass.

On the stone step outside the door, Lily blinked in the sunlight and noticed a dragonfly hover near her knee, then fly to her right toward a junk heap. When she turned to Dolores, she saw that the woman looked different outside. The wind blew the pink dress against her thighs, and the fine wrinkles in her face were plainly visible.

“You got a car?” Dolores said.

“No, my bike,” Lily said, pointing at it.

“Go and get it. I’ll give you a ride. We’ll stick the bike in the trunk.”

Lily didn’t answer. She felt immobile and stared at a wheel in a pile of junk. Then she lifted her eyes toward the telephone wires strung along the highway and looked at a line of sparrows sitting on the wire: a row of small dark bodies. One turned its head abruptly to the left, alert to some invisible sound or motion, and then, an instant later, every bird spread its wings and flew up into the sky.

“Go on,” Dolores said. “Get the damned bike.”

Dolores drove fast, and Lily heard her bicyle bump in the trunk behind them. She stared out the window and thought about the girl’s shirt under Martin’s desk. It’s hers, she thought. She smelled skunk from the road and turned to Dolores. Every time I lay eyes on her, she’s different. It could be the booze, but you can’t pour personality out of a whiskey bottle, can you? Lily studied the woman’s lap, looking closely at her thigh under the dress. She tested her feelings, but she felt nothing, nothing at all.

“You’re spooked,” Dolores said suddenly. “I can see it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. You’re spooked.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Lily lied to the road.

“I would,” Dolores said. “Only Dickie ain’t quite in his right mind. You can see that, can’t you?”

“He’s a strange person,” Lily said. “But then so are you.”

Dolores opened her mouth and after a moment, she laughed. “Me?”

“Ed said you were unusual or extraordinary or something like that. He doesn’t know quite what to make of you.”

Dolores smiled at the road. “That ain’t the same as strange, honey. He’s an odd duck himself, don’t you think?”

“Ed?”

“Yes, Ed.” Dolores mimicked Lily’s intonation of the man’s name, and this little cruelty put Lily on guard. “Most of the time, that man ain’t here, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Lily said. But she was lying.

“He lives in them pictures of his. You must’ve figured that out by now. Then, once in a while, his pecker drags him away.”

Lily stiffened. “So that’s what you think, is it?”

“I do. Nothing wrong with that.”

“He was pretty worried about you the other night, and I don’t think it had much to do with sex. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d have woken up in your own puke down by the river.” Lily’s voice shook as she spoke.

“I’m on the wagon, case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I noticed. I was there, too.”

“I know.” Dolores said. She smiled at Lily. “All I’m saying is, if I wasn’t in paint, I don’t think he’d give a damn.”

“I’m not ‘in paint’ and he cares about me,” Lily said.

Dolores smiled. “How old are you, honey, eighteen?”

“Nineteen,” Lily said.

Dolores nodded. “And our painter friend, he’s ’bout thirty-five, wouldn’t you say?”

“Thirty-four.”

“That man’s got tricks up his sleeves you ain’t even dreamed of yet.”

Lily sat on her hands and looked out the window. She spoke slowly. “That day in Ed’s room when you said he ‘plays rough,’ what did you mean?”

“If you don’t know, I sure as hell won’t tell you. That’s not my job, for Christ’s sake.”

They drove in silence for a minute or two. Lily studied the fields under the big sky through her window, and then she said, “Why did you hide from your mother when you were a little girl?”

“Guess he told you that,” she said.

Lily nodded. “Was it a kind of game?”

Dolores’s foot pressed the gas pedal and the car moved faster. “Told you ’bout that, too, did he? Guess it was foolhardy of me to think he’d keep that to himself. Game? We played the game, all right. I’d lose myself, and he’d find me. I’d hear him stomping around and get real hot—”

Lily cut her off. “He didn’t say that. He wouldn’t say that.” The pain in her voice was obvious, and Lily regretted it.

Neither of them spoke for about thirty seconds.

“Don’t take it too hard,” Dolores said finally. “There’s a whole lot worse in this world than that kind of game playin’. There’s a lot of men right here in town who’ve got a game no one’ll play with them. I oughta know. It don’t do nobody no harm, an’ it’s a comfort to them. I ain’t ashamed of it.” She paused. “The funny thing ’bout it is even weirdos run in types. There ain’t nothin’ new under the sun. Kinda makes you wonder.” Dolores lifted a hand from the wheel and flapped it.

“But hiding’s your game, Dolores, not Ed’s.”

Dolores slowed the car. “It takes two to play, honey.”

But Lily saw the woman’s face go slack with emotion. She’s better-looking when she’s mean, Lily thought. Dolores drove across the railroad tracks slowly, and Lily pressed her nose to the window. When she turned back to Dolores, the woman’s face looked pink and moist with what may have been tears, although Lily couldn’t see any drops in her eyes.

When they turned onto Division Street, Dolores said, “I didn’t take money, you know. Only for the modeling.”

“Right,” Lily said. The car stopped in front of the Ideal Cafe, and Lily remembered she didn’t have a job. I’d better try to make it up with Vince, she thought, opened the door and slammed it shut. “Thanks,” she said to Dolores, who was slumped over the wheel in a posture as dramatic as it was irritating. “What’s the matter with you?” Lily spoke in a sharp voice.

Dolores lifted her head and looked at Lily with large, sincere eyes. “Tell the old lady thanks for the food and stuff.”

“What?” Lily said.

“The stuff she brought over to me Sunday morning. It was real neighborly of her. I was pretty low at the time, so I didn’t say much, but she’s a good woman, and I’d like you to tell her so. Tell her I’m glad she told me what she did. She’ll know what I mean.” Dolores smiled sweetly. Then she tossed her long hair over one shoulder and said, “See you around,” her voice lilting with false femininity. She tugged her dress down to her knees, wiggled her buttocks into the seat and turned the key. Lily moved back from the window and would have let Dolores drive off with her bicycle if she hadn’t seen it in the partly opened trunk. “Stop!”

Lily’s screaming at Dolores and the subsequent ordeal of untying the rope and lifting the bicycle out of the trunk didn’t go unnoticed. It wasn’t clear whether Dolores felt the customers in the Ideal Cafe staring at them or whether she saw Beulah Bjornson stop dead in her tracks outside Tiny’s Smoke Shop to watch them. If she did, she didn’t show it, and Lily couldn’t help admiring her obliviousness even if it was just an act. She took her bicycle by the handlebars and said, “Thanks, Dolores.” Then she added, “I mean it,” because for some reason she did.

Wheeling her bicycle toward the cafe window, Lily looked inside. Two middle-aged women in Martin’s booth stared back at her, and before Lily had time to squelch the impulse, she had dropped the kickstand on her bike and was making goggle eyes at them. She stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers. It was a silly, childish thing to do, but looking at those two astonished faces through the glass, Lily couldn’t help feeling it was worth it.