The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

3

Walking up the stairs, Lily heard scraping noises from Mabel’s apartment. She should be at Ed’s now, Lily thought. Something’s gone wrong. Mabel was sweating when she came to the door, and Lily realized that she had never seen the woman perspire even in the worst heat, but now drops of sweat stood out on her upper lip, and her forehead shone with moisture. She was wearing a big white shirt rolled to the elbows, and her thin white arms were trembling.

“Mabel,” Lily said. “What’s going on?”

“I moved it back.” She gestured at the room with a limp hand and sighed. “The whole room.… I didn’t know where I was anymore. It was so stupid of me. I thought it was time for a revolution, you know, a new order, but I found it awful, just awful.… I was so unhappy with the sofa over there.” She pointed. “It was like trying to learn Russian at fifty-seven. I did try that. My brain had calcified by then, and I simply couldn’t do the cases, much less those sounds. It should have been a lesson to me, but oh, no, I had to be clever and bold and disrupt it all. My nerves simply couldn’t take it, and pushing all that heavy furniture around…”

“You moved the furniture? When did you move the furniture? Are you crazy? You should have asked me to help you.” Lily looked at Mabel’s hands. The knuckles were red and swollen. She studied Mabel’s face. “Dolores says thank you for the food, and she said that I was supposed to tell you she’s glad you told her what you did, that you’d know what she meant.”

“You’ve been to see her, too, have you?” Mabel looked closely at Lily.

“No. I ran into her at Frank and Dick Bodler’s.”

Mabel looked puzzled. “You don’t mean those men with the bags who look like they just crawled out of a mine?”

“Yup,” Lily said and folded her arms. Then she said softly, “Why did you go to see Dolores?”

“I wanted to ask her about Ed and, and the portrait.”

“Why didn’t you ask him?”

“I wanted the other side. And I wanted to know about the ghosts.” Mabel wiped her upper lip. “I have to sit down.” She sank into the sofa and sighed, her legs straight out on the floor in front of her.

Lily sat down beside her. “What did she say?”

“Not a thing. I talked. I guess she heard me. I wasn’t sure.”

“She’s fresh as a daisy now,” Lily said.

“The portrait’s bothering me, Lily.” Mabel rubbed her cheek gently, as if it were another person’s skin. “I don’t know what to do. You should see it now. We worked today. It’s, it’s, oh, I don’t know, when I look at it, I feel upset. I’m well aware that no one’s going to care one way or the other about the identity of the old lady in Edward Shapiro’s painting, and yet I feel that I’m being pulled into a crisis a part of me willed and another part resists. I’m not sure Ed fully understands it. I’m not sure he even knows what he’s doing, but there’s something in him that’s aggressive, not his manner, you understand, but the work — he strikes the heart.” Mabel swallowed. “He painted his wife. Did you know that?”

Lily shook her head.

“It ended the marriage.”

Lily didn’t say anything.

“I guess it started out all right, and then something went wrong. He didn’t go into it in detail, but you know what he said?”

“No.”

“He said he saw her, really saw her.” Mabel looked into Lily’s eyes.

Lily moved her eyes away from Mabel to the window. She wondered what Ed had seen, and why she found it upsetting, but she said, “It’s just a painting, Mabel. You’re all worked up over nothing.”

Lily stared into Mabel’s white face and she spoke to her softly. “Is it the story in the boxes?”

Mabel turned away. She didn’t nod or speak.

“Partly,” she said in a soft voice.

Then a suspicion took sudden hold of Lily. “I’d be careful what you tell Dolores. You shouldn’t trust her, Mabel. She could easily blab anything you say to the girl who does her nails down at Miriam’s, to Willy at the shoe repair, to anybody!”

“I’m not sure that’s who she is, Lily.” Mabel smiled with her mouth closed. Her eyes looked shiny as she pushed away a wisp of hair from her forehead.

The two women sat on the sofa beside each other without talking for a long time. Lily thought about being fired and about rehearsal and that Martin would be at the Arts Guild, and then she told Mabel about Martin. It was a partial confession because she omitted details that had become part of the story, even though they weren’t really a part of it — Helen Underdahl Bodler and the shoes she had stolen and burned and buried, Dolores in the grass, and Dick and Frank in that house. But Lily told her about Martin’s note and the map, about Becky Runevold and the rocking chair. She told her about leaving work and snooping in Martin’s house and finding the T-shirt. Mabel listened intently. She listened so hard her small body tensed all over, and when Lily finished, Mabel lifted her chin, stared at a blue wooden egg that lay in a bowl on the coffee table and said, “There are any number of explanations for that shirt,” she said. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

Mabel’s words echoed in Lily’s head after she had said them. She remembered touching the blue fabric, remembered feeling it was tainted, the sign of an unspeakable thing. Why had she been so sure that it had belonged to the girl people were seeing? Why hadn’t it entered her mind that it might belong to somebody else: Martin’s sister or a friend? Lily looked into Mabel’s face. “Yes,” she said. “But I feel there’s something…”

The woman folded her hands in her lap and said, “Yes, there is something. A mind burning holes in the world.”

Lily didn’t answer this, and yet she didn’t deny that the enigmatic sentence made a kind of sense to her.

“Would it be okay if I sat in on rehearsal tonight?” Mabel said. “I would like to watch anyway, but perhaps if I saw him…” She didn’t finish.

“I think that’s a good idea.” Lily needed an ally, and she didn’t want to face Martin alone. “He acts like he’s got something on me,” she continued, “like a blackmailer or something.” Lily stopped talking. It was you, she said to herself and stared at the floor. The possibility, mad as it was, that she might have lost time and consciousness, that she might have remembered wrong or forgotten a crucial event played like a little tune in the back of her mind. It wasn’t that she accepted what Martin had said as the truth, but she acknowledged uncertainty for the first time, and she felt it as an annoying melody of doubt, like a stupid chorus from a television commercial or pop song that you hum almost without knowing it, and every time you try to get it out of your head, you can’t.

* * *

Martin’s cuts must have been healing well, because he used the hand freely both onstage and off-. Mabel sat in a folding chair in the second row throughout, and Lily worried that there was nothing for the woman to see — in Martin, at least. Watching him herself, Lily saw an unobtrusive, cooperative young man who made a good Cobweb. He stared a little too much and blinked too little, but so what? Everybody was used to that. Lily began to wish he would do or say something to reveal himself. She hoped he would send her another note she could show to Mabel or that he would make a scene in front of the cast. While she was pretending to sleep at the rear of the stage and had opened her right eye just enough to see Martin patting Bottom’s Ass head, Lily heard Mabel laugh loudly, and she daydreamed that Martin suddenly broke out of his role as Cobweb, turned to the audience and confessed. She didn’t invent the exact content of the confession, but in the fantasy he shocked the audience. She saw him red-faced and stuttering, his arms flailing. By the time the fairies left the stage, the story had progressed to a point where the cast had jumped him and was hauling him off to the police station. After that, Lily decided to push her luck.

She took her chance once rehearsal ended and Martin walked past her carrying three costumes over his arm. He was headed for the stairs, and despite the fact that they were not alone — Jim, Denise and Oren were talking just beyond the doors — Lily moved close to Martin and said in a strained but quiet voice, “I know what you’ve done.”

Martin stopped and faced her. He stared, but his face didn’t move.

“I’m telling you I know,” she repeated.

Martin nodded at her but didn’t speak.

Behind Martin, she saw Mabel. Her eyes met Lily’s, and in that instant Lily understood what she had done. She wasn’t only lying. She was pretending to know what she didn’t know, and it occurred to her that this ruse could put her in jeopardy. Martin appeared to be looking through her as he prepared to speak. His mouth moved, and his bandaged hand clutched at the blue material of the costumes. He motioned with his head for her to step aside with him and began to talk, stuttering badly over the first syllable, but the words were clear enough, and after hearing them Lily felt as if she had been kicked hard in the stomach: “So you’ve been to the cave and seen her.” He paused. “I mean, it.” Martin moved his head to one side. “D-d-did you expect me to deny it?” Then he looked down at his shoes. “You didn’t move her, did you?”

Lily shook her head, but not in response to Martin’s question. She couldn’t accept what she had heard. Has he said what I think he’s said? Martin’s words had come and gone so quickly, and nobody else seemed to have heard them. Denise was giggling into Jim’s face, and Lily saw Martin turn and walk down the stairs with the costumes as Mrs. Wright announced dress rehearsal for Thursday. “We’re close, people, very close. You have two days of rest, so rest well and get ready for a big weekend. There’ll be no stopping Thursday. If you make mistakes, it’s like a real performance, just make the best of it.”

Mrs. Wright’s voice sounded remote. Lily didn’t move. She heard chatter and footsteps and then someone hitting the triangle that was used when the fairies came onstage.

It was Mabel who decided to follow Martin. Lily reported the conversation in a voice she barely recognized as her own. She didn’t know how she managed to repeat those words at all, but she did, and then she wondered if she fully believed them. The two women sat together in Mabel’s old Saab and waited for Martin to walk through the doors, which he did in a matter of minutes. They watched him say good-bye to Mrs. Baker and saw the woman pat his shoulder affectionately. He walked slowly to his truck with his head down, his wrapped hand looking very pale in the darkness. He climbed into the cab of his truck and drove away. Mabel allowed the truck to move ahead of them for a block and then pulled the Saab onto the avenue and began to follow Martin out of town.

“He never touched Bottom or anyone else onstage,” Mabel said.

Lily couldn’t understand how Mabel could talk about the play now, but she didn’t stop her.

“Have you noticed that?” Mabel’s voice was a little hoarse. “He clearly made a conscious decision to play it that way, and it’s very clever, because his gestures look like magic. He would get close, but there was never any real contact. His movements made me think of a mime.” Mabel paused. “It was as if he were tracing the lines of things in his own invisible world, as if he had forgotten the boundaries of real people and real things. I suppose the actor who plays Bottom doesn’t even know, because he’s wearing that head.”

Lily folded her hands and pressed them into her lap. She was thinking of the kiss she gave Martin when he left the stage the first day he rehearsed and the way his face had looked. The moon was almost full, and it seemed to sail along with them as they drove two cars behind Martin’s truck. Lily remembered the latch on the box that Martin had drawn on his map. It was a handle, wasn’t it? Too large for a chest. It wasn’t a chest. Martin’s left-turn signal blinked red ahead of them, and the truck veered onto Old Dutch Road. Mabel slowed the car and waited for the pickup to disappear behind the hill about a hundred yards ahead and turned. When the Saab arrived at the crest of the hill, Lily looked down and saw no lights and no truck.

“Where did he go?” Lily could smell the creek through her open window and manure and hay from the farm across the road. “There it is.” The truck was parked on a slant — two wheels in the grass, two on the narrow shoulder. “We’ll park on the other side,” Lily said. “The old Dundas Road is straight ahead. It’s all grown over now, or mostly, but you can park there. My house, my old house is right up the road, see, around that bend and past the fire-call sign.” Lily took a breath. “I know every rock, bush and stump around here.”

Mabel followed Lily’s instructions and parked the car on the old Dundas Road. When the motor stilled and Mabel had turned off the headlights, Lily said, “What are we doing?”

Resting her hands on the wheel, Mabel said, “I don’t know. Are we near the caves?”

Lily nodded. “It must be where he’s gone. But it’s dark, Mabel. We don’t have a flashlight, and even if we did, the caves aren’t easy to get into.”

“You’re right. Let’s go home. Let the police take care of it. If there’s something to find in that cave, they’ll find it.”

“I want to look in the truck, anyway.”

Mabel was muttering to herself or to Lily, “It’s not uncommon for people who stutter to lose it when, well, when they’re not themselves.” She opened the car door and stepped into the grass. Lily followed, and standing in the night air, she looked across the field lit by the moon.

In Martin’s truck, they found a coil of nylon rope, a wrench, a hammer and a large tarp. Lily knew these discoveries meant nothing. A handyman was bound to haul tools around with him, and yet when she reached for the tarp, her fingers touched something cold and wet, and she withdrew her hand as if it had been bitten.

Mabel was standing with her back to Lily, staring down the embankment that led to the creek. Under the road was a culvert, and Lily listened to the water resounding inside its metal walls. A train whistled in the distance, and cars hummed on the highway, but there was no sound of a person moving in the brush. Had Martin been close, Lily felt sure they would have heard him. Every cough, every stick that broke underfoot would sound in the relative stillness. Lily stood beside Mabel and looked down at the creek, where moonlight shone in hundreds of broken pieces on the moving water. It was light enough to see the fallen tree that crossed the creek like a bridge. That was where the water curved, and the bank was steep enough to make climbing difficult. The entrance to the caves lay a hundred feet beyond the fallen tree, and if you walked along the bank another quarter of a mile, you would wind your way to the Bodlers’, to where Lily had buried the shoes. It all seems so remote now, like I dreamed the whole thing, Lily said to herself, and looked down at Mabel whose sober face was lifted to the sky. “Orion,” she said and pointed.

Lily nodded and turned her head in the direction of her old house. She hadn’t been to look at it since the new people moved in. The man worked at 3M and the wife was a secretary at Grundhoffer and Lundqvist. They had three kids.

“Lily.” Mabel’s voice had an awed inflection. “What’s that?” She was pointing toward the creek bank, and when Lily looked, she saw that about a hundred yards away, not far from the fallen tree, a white form was floating slowly toward them. Exactly where it began and ended was hard to tell, because it trailed gauzy appendages that made no human sense. “What is it?” Mabel whispered.

Lily stared and shook her head. “It’s too far away.” But the impossible thing continued to come toward them, and in the seconds that followed, Lily shuttled between belief and disbelief. She saw an angel, and she saw a ghost, and she saw some mad version of the Holy Spirit floating in the woods, but as soon as she had named each one, she dismissed it and told herself it must be something else. She wanted to look at it, and she wanted to run from it, but when the thing emerged from the black shadows of the trees and stopped beside the creek in a place where the moon shone down on it, and Lily saw wings, huge transparent wings like an insect’s, she grabbed Mabel’s hand and pulled her across the road and down the bank to the other side of the culvert. She felt she would be safe inside the big metal tube and still be able to look at the creature. Lily dropped Mabel’s hand, grabbed the metal ribs of the culvert and sought a toehold with her boots on the large metal screws just above the waterline.

“I’m going in. You stay here,” Lily said to Mabel. Inside the culvert, the noise of the moving water echoed terribly. Her cowboy boots slipped twice and Lily could feel water seeping through the leather soles.

Mabel spoke behind her, and her voice bounced off the walls. “It’s Martin, Lily. He’s carrying something.” The echo came as a series of three repetitions, each fainter than the one before — but Lily knew even without seeing it clearly for herself that Mabel had to be right. Leaning forward to peer through the round opening of the culvert, Lily identified Martin’s pale hair and oval face in a cloud of white netting. Because he was much closer now, Lily could see that the four wings must have been part of Cobweb’s costume. They were so thin that they shook slightly in the wind. Then Lily understood that what had looked like an interruption in his body was a long, dark bundle he was carrying in his arms. She heard Mabel breathing behind her and turned her head. The woman had slid into the culvert herself and was half standing, half sitting against its curved wall. She held herself there with shaking arms and legs, and because she didn’t dare to let go, she motioned violently with her head toward the outside bank where they had come in. But Lily ignored the signal and turned back to Martin. He stepped into the water, and as he crossed the creek with his burden, his features took on an eerie definition in the light — his eyes stood out and his lips seemed unnaturally red. And then through the tarp or blanket Lily recognized the limp form of a person, the shape of knees over Martin’s arm, sagging buttocks and a covered head falling backward over his other arm. She choked back a cry and heard herself grunt instead, and that gagging sound echoed. Martin stopped. He looked straight into the culvert. He sees us, Lily thought. He must see us. Her hands slipped then, but she caught herself and saw Martin wiggle his shoulders to adjust the body in his arms, and the blanket slipped. In that second, no more than a second, Lily saw the girl’s head uncovered, her small, beautiful face and her long, dark hair falling over Martin’s arm. The stillness of that body was absolute, and Lily screamed. The echo was terrible, and while it was still reverberating off the walls, Mabel fell. When she heard the splash, Lily lost her footing and slid down the ribbed wall of the culvert into the cold creek water. She stood up, slipped again on the wet metal bottom and screamed again. The sound bouncing inside the walls was like a third person in there with her, a shrieking lunatic, and then Mabel was shrieking, too. Lily lunged toward her. She could see Mabel’s head above water moving downstream. Lily planted her feet on the culvert floor and braced herself. The water was only thigh deep, but the current pushed her forward, and she struggled to keep her balance. There was no question of swimming. Mabel had been dragged outside the culvert now, and Lily was forced to walk toward her at a maddenly slow pace, but once she found herself out of that tunnel, she threw herself toward Mabel. Her knee hit a stone on the creek bed and she cried out as she grabbed what must have been Mabel’s elbow, reached for the woman under her arms and pulled her up. “Lily,” Mabel said. Lily pulled the woman onto the bank, and with Mabel’s small, heavy head against her chest, Lily listened to the sound of Martin driving away in his truck.

Lily gasped for air. The wind felt cold on her wet clothes and the tall grass made her arms itch. She heard the high noise of mosquitoes in the grass.

“My ankle,” Mabel said. She bent over and pulled up her pant’s leg. Lily noticed that Mabel was wearing little ballet flats with no socks. The sky had darkened, and even when she bent close to Mabel’s leg, she couldn’t see enough to figure out what had happened to it.

Every movement Lily made after that seemed to occur in another kind of time. Seconds, minutes, hours went haywire. She couldn’t begin to guess how long it took to get from one place to another. But she helped Mabel to the car, settled her into the passenger seat and examined the ankle with the door open for light. A bloody gash ran from the ankle bone up the shin, and the joint had already begun to swell and discolor. Mabel’s face had turned gray-white, and her lips were tinged with blue. Lily had never seen Mabel with wet hair plastered against her head, and the absence of the familiar light wisps of hair that softened the old face gave her the appearance of another person. Shivering uncontrollably, Mabel said, “There’s a blanket in the trunk.” Her teeth chattered audibly. Then she said, “This is ridiculous,” and laughed. “Absolutely ridiculous.” When Lily looked at the woman’s glassy green eyes, she wondered if Mabel was about to go into shock.

Lily helped Mabel take off her wet clothes. They stuck to her skin, and after Lily had pulled off the shirt and brassiere, she removed a couple of dead leaves from her friend’s white abdomen, which had a long ragged scar across it. It was strange to see Mabel naked — to look at her thinning wet pubic hair and her shrunken breasts on either side of a bony rib cage — but the little old body touched her, and when she wrapped the blanket securely around her, Mabel said nothing. Then Lily moved the palm of her hand along the woman’s cheek, and while she was doing it, she recognized the gesture as her mother’s.

Lily stared at the road ahead of her and drove slowly.

“Something isn’t right,” Mabel said. She was leaning her head against the window, and Lily heard that her teeth were now quiet.

“What are you saying?” Lily let a car pass her.

“Did you notice the way he carried her?”

Lily remembered the form in Martin’s arms, the face and hair.

“She was so light, Lily. Not even a child…” Mabel croaked with hoarseness. “And why did he cross the creek? He was on the opposite bank. He could have gone up that way to get to his truck. Why get wet? Why wade through that water, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“He knew we were there, and he wanted us to see him from the beginning.”

Lily found it hard to speak, to say what she had seen without sobbing. “I saw her face.”

“Yes,” Mabel said. She cleared her throat as if she were going to speak again, but stopped. Then she said, “Lily, there was a resemblance.” She paused. “A strong resemblance, didn’t you think?”

Lily watched the white line on the road, appearing and disappearing under the right car wheel. “A resemblance?”

“To you.”

Lily didn’t speak. No, she thought. No.

“You didn’t see it?” Mabel said.

Lily shook her head, but her stomach seemed to rise inside her, and the chill she felt under her wet sleeves had gone into her bones.

* * *

Lily held the phone with her shoulder as she tied Mabel’s terry cloth robe around her body. She dialed the police station and glanced at Mabel, who sat with her leg up in a pair of navy blue pajamas holding a little makeup mirror in one hand and a towel in the other. She fluffed her hair and Lily marveled at the woman’s vanity. It’s one o’clock in the morning, she just saw a dead body, and now she’s fixing herself up. The next thing I know she’ll get out her lipstick. No lipstick appeared, but when Hank answered the phone at the police station, Mabel was pinching her cheeks to restore some color to her ashen complexion. He recognized her voice and said, “Lily!” The happiness in his tone bruised her.

“It’s not about us, Hank. I wouldn’t call you at work to talk about us. I have to report something.”

Hank didn’t answer this. He listened to Lily tell her story about Martin at the creek. She mentioned Dick and Dolores and the photo of the dead girl. He was so silent, she asked him once if he was still on the line. He said, “Yes,” but that was all.

When she had finished, Hank said, “Is that it?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

Hank took a breath. “Martin Petersen’s running around town in his fairy costume or his cowboy suit, depending on who’s doing the looking, with a dead girl — well, for at least a week now, maybe more. Must be a smelly corpse. And nobody’s missing, Lily, no men, women, girls or boys. A couple of dogs and a load of cats, but no person in the whole county.”

“Well, Dakota County isn’t the world, Hank.”

“That’s right, it’s not the world, is it? Maybe Martin’s knocked off one of your boyfriend’s whores come all the way from New York City. Nobody keeps track of who’s missing there.”

“Mabel saw it, too, Hank.”

“Well, she’s off her rocker, too.”

“That’s not fair, Hank, and you know it. You’re mad at me, so whatever I say now is bullshit.”

Hank didn’t reply to this.

“Tell me one thing,” Lily said. “Who called about a man carrying a woman near the city limits? I read it in the log.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Lily.” Hank sounded terribly angry.

“I’m not.”

“You called. You made that call.”

“What?” Lily looked out the window. In a small voice she said. “No, Hank, I didn’t. I swear to you I didn’t. Did you take the call?”

“No. Pete did.”

“But where were you? It was your shift, wasn’t it?”

“I was taking a piss. That all right with you?”

“Hank,” Lily said. “I didn’t call. Why would someone call and pretend to me? And with you as dispatcher?”

“Maybe you forgot.”

“Oh, Hank,” Lily said. “Please…”

“Good-bye, Lily.”

Hank hung up before she could say good-bye. Lily stared into the room. It was lit by a single lamp on a small table next to Mabel’s chair, and the bulb glowed yellow through the old shade. Mabel clasped the mirror in her limp right hand, her eyelids partly closed.

“Are you asleep, Mabel?” Lily said in a whisper as she stood over the chair.

“No, Lily, just tired.

“It was Hank. He doesn’t believe me.”

Mabel nodded. “I can’t get to the bottom of it myself, but they’ll check it out, believe me, they will.”

Lily washed Mabel’s ankle, wrapped it and made an ice pack. She helped Mabel hobble to her bed and pulled the sheet over her. Mabel’s face was pale as eggshell, and her hair had dried to its familiar whiteness. Lily pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. Had the girl’s face looked like her own? Wouldn’t she have seen it? Dolores had been seeing herself all over the place.… Had Martin killed her? Maybe he had found her already dead after somebody else killed her — the cowboy, maybe Tex? Could Dolores, drunk on her ass, have seen the murder? No, it’s all wrong, Lily thought. The timing is wrong. Dick’s story. Professor Vegan’s story. But for some reason the muddled theory of Martin’s innocence gave Lily hope. She hoped Tex had done it, or some nameless stranger. Maybe Martin had tried to save that girl. Maybe he couldn’t, and now, distraught and crazy, he had taken to carrying the body around in a tarp dressed as Cobweb.

She sat down beside Mabel on the bed and looked at her. Her placid, exhausted face was suddenly a burden, an annoyance. She didn’t look upset. She looked at ease. She wasn’t taking this seriously. Lily grit her teeth.

“Whatever has happened, Lily,” Mabel said in a low wise voice, “you’re not involved or to blame, except possibly in that boy’s imagination.” Mabel whispered this with her eyes half open.

“Imagination?” Lily repeated. “What does imagination have to do with it? Why are you so calm?” Lily stepped back from the bed. “What’s wrong with you? You were there. You saw exactly what I saw, and yet you don’t care very much, do you?”

Mabel studied Lily intently, but with a quiet in her eyes that Lily read as condescension.

“Well, I care!” she said in a loud voice.

“Lily, don’t you see? He wanted us to look at him. It was a, a performance of some kind, something staged. We called the police. What more can we do now?”

Lily narrowed her eyes. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t even know who you are…” She didn’t finish. Mabel’s face turned whiter. Lily ran out of Mabel’s apartment and slammed the door. She heard Mabel calling her name, but she ignored the voice and fled to her own room.

Through the wall Lily thought she heard Mabel crying. She wasn’t sure, but there were low noises coming from next door. Nevertheless, she did not go back to Mabel that night. She listened to the last of the sniffling sounds and walked to her mirror. There she removed the robe she had borrowed from Mabel and looked at her naked reflection. She examined her body sharply and coldly and then, lifting her right hand, she slapped herself hard in the face. After the slap, she moved closer to the mirror to study the mark on her cheek. And then, before she crawled into bed, she slapped herself again — for good measure.

* * *

Lily slept more soundly than she would have thought possible and woke at her usual hour for work. Her head ached and her limbs felt heavy, but her mind was empty. She walked to the window first thing, without turning on any lights, and knelt beside the curtain, the way she used to before she knew Ed. Then she pulled it back to see if he was awake and painting. Through his window, she saw him in his underwear holding a brush near the hidden canvas. She was glad she couldn’t see the picture. It was only then that she remembered Martin in his costume with the girl in his arms. Looking at Ed, she thought, it’s already gone, now, this moment. There isn’t really a “now” at all. Even saying the word “now” is too slow for it. Now slips into then so fast, it’s nothing at all. And as ordinary as this observation was, Lily felt she was living it, and its truth hit her hard. Time was inexpressible. She turned away from Ed, headed for the shower and remembered that she had been fired. There was no Ideal Cafe for her, no job, but Lily decided to go and beg Vince to take her back. She had never begged for anything in her life, and because Vince knew her, she figured a display of humility might overwhelm him. But what if he had already hired somebody else?

When Lily opened the back door to the cafe and peered cautiously through it, she saw no new girl. She saw Bert shaking her head at her. “If you knew the trouble you’ve caused around here, you’d regret it,” she said. “Ever since you left, Vince has been on the warpath, and you know what that does to Boom — he gets all shaky and whiny. What were you thinking of, girl?” Bert leaned close to Lily and turned her head to one side. “You don’t look good, you know that? For once in your life, you look like a wreck.”

Lily looked at Bert, and as she looked, she realized her eyes felt very dry, as though there weren’t enough liquid in them. She grabbed Bert’s arm and said, “I saw her last night.”

“Saw who?”

“The dead girl. I told you, remember? Martin was dressed up in his costume for the play, and he, he was carrying her body — at the creek. Mabel saw it, too, only I don’t think she believed her own eyes.”

Bert took Lily by the shoulders with both hands. “I’ve seen it coming. You haven’t been yourself. You haven’t called me for days. That’s not normal, and I’ve been calling you, but you’re never home. She’s in love, I said, out of her mind in love, but it’s not just that. There’s something in your eyes, too.” Bert withdrew her hands. “Like you’re not right. Like you’re possessed with this, this idea.”

“What?” Lily said. “You don’t believe me? You think I would make this up? Somebody’s dead, murdered, and you think I’m kidding? Possessed? What are you talking about? You think I’m lying?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did.”

Vince walked through the door. “You!” he bellowed at her, pointing a fat index finger in her direction. “Get out! I fired you!”

Lily shuddered at the big voice, but she didn’t move. “I came to apologize,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Her voice broke, and she tried desperately to recover an even tone. “Lately…” she said.

Vince strode toward her. Lily could see real anger in his face. Sometimes Vince played at anger, roared for his own amusement to stir things up in the cafe, but now he meant it, and withstanding the pitch of his emotion was hard, terribly hard. Lily was shaking. “Lately, my life,” she said, “has been…” She searched for a word. What was the word? Finally she said, “Going to pieces because, because…” Lily began to wave her hands at her sides, then near her face. When she felt the tears coming, she clutched either side of her face and started sobbing. “Oh, Vince!” she said. “Oh, Vince!”

The man’s expression changed. He looked at Bert with his mouth open and said, “What the hell is this?”

Bert gave Vince a sour look and took Lily into her arms. When she felt Bert’s embrace, Lily squeezed her friend hard. After several seconds she felt Vince’s large, tentative hand touch her back.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said. “Where’s that crusty, hard-assed cookie that I’ve come to know and love? I mean, holy shit, Lily, you’ve got more fiber in you than this.”

Bert said, “Give the kid a break, Vince. Everybody’s got their limits. I mean, you’d scare the living daylights out of a sumo wrestler with the look you gave her.”

Vince removed his hand.

Lily felt her sobs subside, and she pulled away from Bert to look at Vince. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll never walk out on you again. I’m not myself, it’s true, but I’m going to be myself again, I promise.” She sniffed loudly. She looked up at Vince.

“Hey there,” he said. “Your mascara’s running. Now get your butts back to work. I got Bert to cover for you,” he said to Lily. “So I’ve got two waitresses from five to eight when I only need one, and I’m going to pay you both. So I never want to hear another word out of either of you about me being a cheapskate. You got that?”

Bert and Lily nodded.

Bert heard almost the whole story from Lily that morning during the shift — told in bits and pieces between tables and on runs to the kitchen. Lily could see that Bert was troubled by what she heard, but it wasn’t clear what she actually thought of it. She shook her head and asked Lily about forty times if she was absolutely sure she’d seen a face in the tarp. “Couldn’t it have been something else? A dog, maybe, or some animal Martin pulled out of the creek?” The other part of the story Bert couldn’t get over was Lily’s visits to the Bodlers. “Why would you go there? Don’t you get enough of them here?” Lily responded to these questions with shrugs. The shoes were inexplicable. To talk about them would only confirm Bert’s worry that Lily was having some kind of breakdown. “They know Martin,” she said. “They’re his great-uncles or something like that.”

Before Lily left, Bert said, “Maybe you should talk to someone, Lily.”

“I’ve talked to you, Bert.”

“No, I mean like a minister or counselor or something.”

“You think I’m out of my gourd.”

“Would you stop telling me what I think. I’m not saying that.”

“You think Pastor Carlsen’s going to fix this? Can’t you just see him?” Lily lowered her voice and gave herself a sincere expression. She nodded gravely. “Let us turn to the Lord in his infinite wisdom.”

“He’d be more practical than that,” Bert said.

“The man wouldn’t have a clue,” Lily said.

“I’m calling you today,” Bert said.

Lily nodded and walked through the back door and up to her apartment. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She had two stops that afternoon. The first was the Stuart Hotel. For the second, she needed her flashlight.

* * *

When Ed answered the door, he didn’t look like himself. It wasn’t only that he seemed worn out and the skin under his eyes had turned blue-black or that he hadn’t shaved in days. Lily had seen him exhausted and unkempt before. She had a sense that some familiar quality in his appearance had disappeared overnight, and the man who began speaking to her was a stranger. Before she could say hello, he told her that Mabel had called and told him about last night.

Lily looked behind him at the portrait of Mabel with the blank boxes above her head. She didn’t feel like crying anymore. She felt empty.

“Lily”—Ed leaned toward her and brushed her cheek gently with the backs of his fingers—“I have something to tell you. After I hung up with Mabel, I starting thinking, and I’m pretty sure that that kid was here, Martin Petersen. But he gave me another name, said his name was Hal Dilly.”

“Hal Dilly,” she repeated. “There’s a Dilly family in Webster, but no Hal. They run the old people’s home. Did he stutter?”

“No, but one morning around ten last week, Wednesday, I think, this kid knocked on my door and asked me if I would show him the paintings, said his name was Hal Dilly, that he wanted to study art.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much, but he studied all the paintings very carefully, and then afterward, he kept looking around the room like he was expecting to find something else.” Ed rubbed his forehead. “He asked me if there weren’t more. I said no, and he left.” Ed paused. “Mabel isn’t sure about what she saw. She said it was so fast, just a couple of seconds, that she couldn’t be sure…”

“I saw her,” Lily whispered.

“I know.” He frowned. “While he was here, I didn’t think about it very much, but after he was gone, I had a funny feeling that something wasn’t right, that he was making fun of me, laughing up his sleeve, but then I told myself I was being paranoid.” Ed sat down and looked at his painting. His large eyes were wide open and still. “Don’t go near him,” Ed said, without looking at her. Then he looked up at her, reached out, clutched her arm and kissed it.

A few minutes later, Lily walked out the door and did exactly what Ed had warned her not to do. She headed out of town on her bicycle.

* * *

Heath Creek changed in daylight. As Lily walked along the bank through the brush where Martin had walked only hours before, she found it odd that she could see what was around her. Her eyes felt sore, and the steadily darkening sky caused a turbid gloom over the trees and water, muting their colors to grays and browns. Somewhere above her on the other side of the creek she heard children playing, and Lily wondered why children always sound the same when they play, that it didn’t seem to matter who they were or where they lived. She walked on, stepping quickly through the underbrush along the curve in the creek. As she neared the cave, she stumbled over an old sign from the Sheriff’s Department, its warning rusted into illegibility, and as she looked down at it, she heard the children above her chanting. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their rhyming verses were ridiculing somebody, and she listened to their cruelty with a mysterious pang of guilt. Lily crouched in front of the boarded, nailed entrance to the cave.

She saw the little door right away. Someone had cut it out of the boards. It had real hinges and was standing ajar, as if the dwarf who lived inside was expecting visitors. She opened the door further and was met by the moist, cool air of the cave. Before she crawled inside, she shone her flashlight into the first low, wide room near the entrance. She remembered it. There was no sign that anyone had been in here for a long time. From that first room, you could crawl through a passageway to another. Nobody she knew had ever ventured beyond the second one, but that room was larger — an adult could stand up in it. She shone her light toward it, then turned it off. Another light shone from the second room. After stuffing the flashlight into her back pocket, Lily began to crawl through the passage. She heard the steady trickle of water coming from somewhere nearby. The damp cave floor made her knees raw, and her shoulders grazed the sides of the tunnel. When she had almost reached the turn where the passage opened onto the second room, she heard someone begin to whistle the only song from the only opera Lily had ever been able to name, and that melody was so strongly identified with Ed, meant Ed and no one else, that for several seconds Lily didn’t accept that she was hearing it. The cave walls distorted the sound. Its origin could have been anywhere. She froze and held her breath. The noise was like the door — sensual information she resisted. But Lily knew that she was going to lurch headlong into whatever was waiting for her, and an instant later she pushed herself around the turn in the passage and saw Martin sitting there beside a small kerosene lamp that was flickering in some inexplicable draft. The room was filled with objects, piles of material, cardboard boxes, spools of thread, paints, but Lily didn’t examine them closely. Martin had stopped whistling, but he didn’t seem to see her. He wasn’t moving, but his huge shadow on the cave wall trembled and leapt. He kept his eyes on the ground for a couple of seconds, then looked up at her and said, “I knew you’d come, Lily.”

“What have you done with her?” Lily whispered at him.

Martin narrowed his eyes and turned his head. Lily inched forward into the room to see what Martin was looking at. Against the far wall of the cave, slumped in a wheelchair was the girl Lily had seen the night before.

Lily cried out and clapped her hands over her mouth. She started crawling for the passageway, but she felt Martin’s hands on her shoulders. He pulled her toward him, his grip much stronger than she had expected. She fought him hard, but Martin dragged her across the floor of the cave toward the body. Lily closed her eyes. She hit and wept, and then she felt Martin stop suddenly. He was behind her, holding her arms tightly. She kicked him. “L-l-look,” he said. “L-look.”

“No!”

“Look!” Martin let go of Lily. She opened her eyes and looked at the girl in the wheelchair. She recognized the chair as the one Martin had bought from Frank and Dick. Martin had his hands on either side of the girl’s face, and Lily saw that this was the face of a doll, a beautifully made life-size doll whose proportions, unlike most dolls, were accurately human. And that it was a girl, not a woman, with a small only half-developed body.

“It’s a doll,” Lily said.

Martin nodded. “B-but you knew.”

“It’s a doll.” Lily stared at the modeled face with its painted eyes and parted lips, its long, dark hair that fell over its shoulders. My costume, she thought. It’s wearing Hermia’s dress. And while she looked, she saw — all at once — that the thing looked like her or maybe like her a few years ago. Nobody’s dead, she thought. Nobody’s dead, and she felt a vibration in her jaw and in her temples. She didn’t speak. Neither did Martin. She looked at the doll. There was something wrong with it, but she couldn’t say what it was. It’s cold in here, she said to herself. My mouth is dry. She moved her tongue back and forth in her mouth and then she said, “Where did you get it?”

“I–I-I,” he said, “m-m-made y-you. It t-t-took a long time — a y-y-ear.”

“What?” Lily said. She looked at Martin. Why is he stuttering now? she wondered. I’m dizzy. She took a step backward. Then she tried to focus on Martin. “I thought you had killed somebody, Martin. You showed me that picture. You said she wasn’t alive. Last night…” Lily felt confused. The moving light didn’t help. There’s something wrong with my eyes, she thought. “What have you done?” Lily looked at the doll again. “What is it?”

“H-her face, arms and legs are made from Sculpey — i-it’s pretty new stuff…”

Lily hadn’t meant for him to explain how he’d made it. “No,” she said, but he continued his explanation.

“I-it’s like clay, but you can f-fire it at home in the oven.”

Lily imagined Martin removing the doll’s head from his oven, then an arm. She put her hand to her forehead. “You didn’t ask me. You, you’ve done this behind my back. You were whistling.… That’s Ed’s song.” Lily shook her head and showed Martin her palms, as if they could ward him off. “You’ve been spying on me for, for a long time. I’ve, I’ve heard you sneaking around.” She looked up at him. He seemed taller in the cave. “Why?” Lily stepped backward and heard plastic rustle under her feet. The air inside the cave was hurting her lungs.

But Martin did not answer the questions. He walked toward her and said, “You spy, too. You spied on him.”

Lily watched Martin’s face. He was the whitest of all white men, and he was everywhere at once, seeing, knowing. “Who are you?” she asked again. “What do you mean by this? What is it for?” She took a step toward the doll. The thought that it might have some purpose seemed terrible.

The doll was resting on the back of the chair, its face turned upward toward the cave’s moist, dripping ceiling, and Lily looked down at the long hair that fell over the chair’s cane back. The wig, she said to herself. The grotesque possibility that Frank and Dick had known all along raced through her. “Do the twins know about this?”

Martin shook his head. “O-only you. L–Lily, you must listen to me.”

“Tell me, then,” she whispered and lifted her face to his. “Tell me.”

Martin seemed to find this command funny. He laughed — a short, bitter burst of humor, and then it vanished. He lifted the doll out of the chair and held it in his arms. Mabel had been right — the body was lighter than a child’s. “Sit down,” he said smoothly.

Lily shook her head. She didn’t want to sit in the wheelchair, didn’t want any part of it. “I’ll stand.”

Martin’s face registered disappointment, but only for a second. He placed the doll gently back in the chair, arranged its hands in its lap and then let the head droop on its chest as though it were asleep. He talked to her in that rhythmical intonation she had become accustomed to, rubbing his hands and fixing his eyes on her as he spoke. He stepped toward her, but Lily backed away. “She’s the one between, Lily.”

“Between?” Lily said. She dug her feet into the cave floor.

“Between you and me, between Becky and you, between Dahl and Doll, between the word and the flesh, between you and you.”

Lily looked at her fingers, which were oddly yellow in the kerosene glow. “What are you saying?”

Martin rubbed his mouth. He seemed disappointed and began to explain slowly as he stepped toward her.

“Stay back. Don’t come near me.”

Martin looked hurt, but he didn’t approach her. “I, I,” he stuttered and winced. “I made you, so she, you, is between us. And between you and Becky — older than Becky, younger than you, the way you were, the way Becky would’ve been.” He rocked his shoulders to his own voice, turning his speech into an incantation. “She is the in-car-na-tion,” he said, giving each syllable the same weight, “of your name into its thing…”

Lily shook her head. “That’s the oldest joke in the world, Martin — a stupid pun. That’s all I ever heard on the playground. It’s stupid—”

He interrupted her. “N-n-n-no! It’s very important.” Martin worked to control himself. “The word becoming flesh, Lily — the in-between moment, before—”

“No. It’s not flesh! It’s not real! It’s a doll!” The words came back to her, high, crazy. Lily felt a tear rolling heavily down her cheek.

Martin seemed to grow calm with her anger. “It’s doll flesh,” he said. Lily thought he looked smug.

“And, Lily, it’s you before—”

“Before what?” She spat at him. She didn’t mean to, but she saw saliva fly.

“Before you changed.”

“Changed?” Lily took another step backward. “How do you mean changed?” She whispered the last sentence. I’m cramped in here, she thought. It’s too small. I can’t see.

Martin wrinkled his forehead and stared at her. “It’s you in another form.”

Lily didn’t answer him.

“You’re a woman now,” he said softly. “But you didn’t used to be,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “D-d-d-d,” he sputtered. “D-A-H-L,” he spelled. “I’m Dahl, too. Underdahl. Don’t you see? It’s all part of it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“H-E,” Martin spelled. “It’s in Hermia; it’s in Helen; it’s in Underdahl.” Martin motioned with his hands. He turned to the doll.

“The letters?” Lily said. “You think ‘H’ and ‘E’ mean something?”

“There are lots of ‘H-E’s’—they keep moving, from one to the other, depending — Hermia’s father. Helen’s husband … Becky’s father … Hal Dilly.” Martin smiled.

Lily breathed out several times. “That name,” she said, “who does it belong to?”

“I went between you and me. You were my disguise.”

“What?”

But Martin kept talking. “They would’ve killed him, you know.”

“Who?”

“He’s a Jew, Lily. The Nazis would’ve killed him.”

“Ed wasn’t even born yet.” Martin hadn’t moved, but Lily said, “Stay away from me.”

“I–If he’d been there, they would have killed him.” Martin was whispering at her now, his face gold in the lamplight.

“Don’t say that, Martin.” Lily felt like crying.

Martin held himself and rocked back and forth a couple of times. He chanted again to keep his stuttering in check, and he said, “She’s the under-doll, Lily, you.” The singsong intonation of his voice had become unbearable, and Lily shook her head back and forth at him.

Martin took a step toward Lily. “You never forgave me for the refrigerator.”

“The refrigerator?” Lily said. She put a hand to her forehead.

“At the Overlands’. The refrigerator in the garage.”

“What?” she said.

“Snow White.” Martin said. He walked toward her.

“Get back,” she said.

Martin stepped back.

But Lily stood very still. “The drawing,” she said slowly, “is a refrigerator?” Did she remember a refrigerator? Had something happened at the Overlands’? Snow White, she thought. I was Snow White in the third-grade play. She remembered Andrew Wilkens only pretending to kiss her, because he didn’t want to get girl cooties. But Martin?

“In the garage,” he said. “I tied you up and shut you in the old refrigerator. It was lying on its back.”

Lily stared at him. “Was it a game?” she said. She was trying to remember. She didn’t speak or move. Do I remember playing with Martin? Snow White? Wasn’t it my cousin George who I played that game with? Hadn’t it been George who slobbered her face with kisses behind the grapevines? Lily remembered a pinched sensation between her legs as if she’d had to pee. Had she been in the darkness of a shut refrigerator, closed in, unable to breathe? Was that it? Or was she remembering George? She had played girl to his boy, and the funny thing about it was that there was as much pretending in playing that girl as if she hadn’t really been a girl to begin with. There was something, though, some vague sensation of being shut in. Or was it her grandparents’ outhouse? George had closed the door and left her there, and she’d heard him laughing about the poop and the stink. “It wasn’t you,” she said.

Martin didn’t blink. “Y-you never forgave me. At first you wanted to get in. I dared you. I dared you, and I stuck you down and closed the door. I-it was s-so heavy.”

Lily shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she whispered at him. “Why were you at the Overlands’?”

“To be with you, Lily.”

Lily leaned toward him. “Have you made this up, Martin? Are you lying to me now?”

Martin started to shake his head back and forth quickly. “You, you died, Lily.”

“What?” Lily turned her head and looked at the opening in the cave wall that would take her out.

“I–I-I suffocated you. Th-there wasn’t air for you to breathe in the refrigerator. I sat on it.”

“But I’m here, now, Martin. Don’t be stupid. Even if it did happen, we were kids, right, playing a game?” Lily examined Martin’s face. Stubborn, inward, his expression blocked her words and their meaning.

“I tied you up.”

“No,” Lily said. It made her uneasy. Had he tied her up? Had she ever been tied up in her life? Why did she feel as if she had? Why did she know the sensation of rope chafing her ankles and wrists? Had it happened?

Lily looked into Martin’s eyes. They were wide open. “Th-th-then after a long t-time, I looked inside, and, and it was over.”

“No, Martin,” Lily said. “No.”

“Y-you were d-d-dead. I killed you.” He paused. “A-and then I kissed you, and y-you stood up in your white dress—”

“No,” Lily said.

Martin nodded. He whispered, “Like Hermia.”

“I didn’t even own a white dress when I was a kid, Martin. My mother hated white. It got too dirty, and out there…” Lily shook her head.

“Y-y-you did,” he said forcefully. “And so did Becky. She wore it in her coffin.”

“Stop it, Martin,” Lily said. “Stop it!”

Lily felt tears running down her cheeks. “It isn’t true. You’re saying it to”—she paused—“to…” She couldn’t finish. Why would he say it?

Martin bent over the wheelchair and lifted the doll into his arms again. Lily could see that its body was stuffed with some kind of cotton fill. When she stared at the face, she saw that the color of its eyes was wrong. The kerosene lamp flickered in the draft and Lily took a deep breath. “The eyes are blue,” she whispered at Martin. “They’re blue.”

“I–I gave her my color,” he said. Martin held the doll up toward Lily. She moved backward and stopped. He was offering it to her, and for a moment Lily thought it looked like some poor princess being sacrificed to the giants. Martin’s chin trembled and his white eyelashes fluttered. “I–I want you to have her.”

Before she could stop him, Martin had rushed forward and thrust the doll at her. She grabbed it and felt its hair brush her arm. It’s just a doll, she said as she looked down at it. It’s a thing. Lily fought the dread that welled up inside her.

“I can’t, Martin. Take it back.” Lily tried to return the doll to Martin, but he lifted his hands in the air and stepped away from her, the white gauze of his bandaged hand waving before her.

“I, I want you to take her!” he said in a loud voice that reverberated inside the cave. “It won’t work otherwise.”

Lily stared at him. “What? What won’t work?” The doll couldn’t have weighed much more than fifteen pounds, but its arms and legs were awkward to hold and its head rested heavily on her right arm. She looked down at its placid face and noticed that its red lips were slightly parted and drawn together, and this expression, whatever it was, revolted her.

Lily dropped the doll.

Martin screamed. He screamed like a woman, and the noise broke something inside her. She turned around and was about to run, when she heard Martin scream again. He grabbed her ankle and tripped her. Lily clawed the cave floor, but Martin had thrown himself on top of her, and pulled her around by the shoulders. He still had the doll, and he pressed it into her while he held her down, its hard head between them, pressing against Lily’s throat until she gasped for breath, but Martin didn’t release her. “I c-c-can’t breathe,” she choked out. His embrace was powerful, and Lily could see the muscles in his arm bulging as he squeezed her. She fought him, jerking her head back hard and fast to free her throat, and once her head was away from his grip, she slapped at his hands and hit the doll several times. Then Martin started crying. In the shifting light of the lamp, she saw him shaking and heard his sobs.

Lily threw herself toward the passageway. She scraped her knee but didn’t stop. She crawled through the tunnel across the first room and out the little door. She didn’t shut it. The light astonished her. No noise came from the cave, and walking to her bicycle she had a sense that her legs wouldn’t hold her, that they had gone bad all of a sudden, and she asked herself how she could ride home. She sobbed as she trudged up the embankment to the road, and that was when the dog appeared. A Border collie came trotting along the road toward her. She didn’t know him, but she bent down to pet his neck, and as she looked into his face, she suddenly found it curious that he couldn’t speak. The dog cocked his head to one side in a gesture of confusion or sympathy, and Lily pulled the animal toward her. She pressed her face into his neck and cried. The dog stood very still and whined a little until she let him go.

* * *

Lily went straight to Mabel’s apartment. She didn’t knock but threw open the door and said in a loud voice, “It’s a doll.” She saw Ed first, and then Mabel, whose earnest, drawn expression made Lily wonder if she hadn’t interrupted an intimate conversation. Mabel’s hand had been on the manuscript, and when she saw Lily, she had withdrawn her fingers quickly. But Lily didn’t speculate on what had been happening between them. She had a story to tell, and she told it. Lily didn’t know when she began talking that she would omit the part about the refrigerator, but she did. Had she been sure that Martin was lying about locking her up, she would have told it, but she had doubts. Martin thought she had died and come back to life. Could she have lost consciousness and then woken up while he watched? If it never happened, why did the story awaken in her a sense of having been bound and locked in? Why did she recall the panic of losing air and yet not remember any of the details? Kids lock other kids in cellars and chests and closets and even old refrigerators all the time. Hadn’t she heard a story about a girl who died in one? When she had finished, Mabel said, “Should we call the police?”

“Is it against the law to make dolls?” Lily said. Mabel didn’t answer this.

“You could charge him with assault,” Ed said. His voice had more emotion in it than Lily had ever heard. He clenched his fists and leaned toward her.

Lily looked at her watch. Hank was at the police station. She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, really. Nobody’s dead. That’s the important thing.”

“What did it look like?” Ed said. “The doll?”

Lily tried to describe the doll, but it didn’t translate easily into words, and she couldn’t remember the name of the material Martin had used and baked in his oven. She sensed that she had disappointed Ed a little.

“Was it well done?” he said.

“Yes,” Lily said. She looked into Ed’s face, pressed her lips together and then said, “It was very well done. He said that it took him a year.”

Before Ed and Lily left Mabel, they checked her ankle. Lily squatted in front of the woman’s naked foot. It was better, but still swollen and blue. It was an old foot with protruding veins and corns on the bent toes. Lily made an ice pack and when she placed it under the ankle, she looked up into Mabel’s face, and for the first time asked herself how long the old woman would live.

* * *

Lily told Ed she wanted to sleep in her own bed that night. She said it was to be close to Mabel, in case she needed anything, but this wasn’t true. Her neck was still sore from her struggle with Martin in the cave, and Lily felt vulnerable. She wanted to lie in her own bed with Ed, and she wanted to hear Mabel through the wall, wanted to know that she was there.

Ed smiled briefly at the poster of Marilyn when he walked into her room. He had seen it before, but he appeared to take note of it for the first time, and there may have been irony in the smile, but Lily wasn’t sure. Then, without a word, he picked her up, carried her to the bed and made love to her. His touch was different that night. He paid more attention to her face than he had ever done before, stroking her cheeks and eyebrows and mouth with his fingers and then tracing the line of her neck. He reminded Lily of a blind person sealing a face in memory through its contours. And Lily was glad he didn’t hold her too hard. Her skin felt sore and raw, and every muscle in her body seemed to have been strained. Even her bones hurt her, although she didn’t know how that was possible.

And then later, when he stood naked in front of the window with a cigar between two of his fingers, and Lily lay on the bed watching the smoke move toward the ceiling, he told her he was going back to New York the next morning to see Elizabeth.

Lily didn’t want to look at him, so she stared at the ceiling and said, “For good?”

“I have to come back. My things, my work…”

“You’re going back to her?”

“She wants to try again.”

Lily heard him inhale smoke, then blow it out.

“Aren’t you going to look at me?” he said.

“No.”

He moved to the bed and sat down. The only light in the room came from the streetlamps outside, and Lily turned her head away from him and studied the shadows on the rumpled sheets near her thigh. “Those things you said about her,” Lily said.

“It’s all true.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I owe it to her,” he said in a soft voice.

“Because you’re guilty?”

“Something like that.”

Lily couldn’t say what came over her at that moment or why she acted the way she did, but she refused to cry or fuss, and that refusal freed her from herself. It had something to do with Martin and the doll and the cave, but she didn’t know why. Maybe she was tired of drama. It wasn’t only pride that kept her from throwing herself at him and begging him not to leave her, it was that she could imagine the scene beforehand: every stupid, sordid moment of it, just like a soap opera on TV, and Lily knew that if she acted desperate, she would never see him again, and that her only hope was her toughness. Whether that toughness was real or not didn’t seem to make much difference. She said, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Ed said.

“Yes, okay.”

“Don’t you have anything else to say?”

Lily shook her head.

Ed opened his mouth to speak, but Lily sat up and put her finger over it. “No,” she said. “That’s what you owe me. The last word.”

Lily slept deeply. The rain came during the night, and she woke to a light spray on her face from the window. Ed was gone. He had left a note on her night table, and Lily switched on the light to read it: “Couldn’t sleep. Went home to pack. I love you. Ed.”

* * *

Before Martin Petersen walked into the Ideal Cafe at seven-fifteen the next morning, Lily’s shift was uneventful. Vince was in a particularly good mood, as was Boomer, whose spirits rose and fell with his boss’s. Boom gave Lily tidbits of gossip — the Hell’s Angels were in town and rumor had it they would crash the dance at Rick’s that night. Linda Waller was reportedly having an affair with Mr. Biddle, the high school basketball coach, and Lily’s ex-boyfriend Hank Farmer was “sticking it to” Denise Stickle. Lily did not respond to this last bit of gossip but stared blankly at the image of Elvis on the boy’s chest smudged with sausage grease and thought that Denise was the perfect choice for Hank’s revenge, if it was revenge and not “true love,” and it did occur to Lily that knowing that Hank and Denise were an item might give more punch to Hermia’s fight with Helena onstage.

When Lily saw Martin through the screen door with a large grocery bag in one hand, she turned cold. She walked quickly into the kitchen, and standing behind the door, she put a hand on her chest to quiet her racing heart. Vince watched her critically but didn’t say anything. She took a deep breath. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Boomer imitate her gestures. She ignored him and left the kitchen. Martin was sitting in his booth. He had placed the bag close to him on the seat. Lily imagined the doll’s head inside it, then remembered Martin’s arms around her neck and she touched the spot on her throat to feel for soreness, but it was gone. He can’t do anything here, she thought. Lily walked over to his booth.

She waited for him to tap or speak or do something, but he didn’t. Finally he looked up at her, and Lily took a short breath. The face Martin had lifted to hers looked waxy. His lips were red, too red, and it took her a moment before she understood that he was wearing makeup, not the drugstore variety, but stage makeup — a light-colored, heavy pancake — and that his mouth was touched with lipstick. She stared at him, and taking her pad from her pocket, she asked him what he wanted.

Martin did not tap. He did not stutter, and there was no music in his voice. “I want what I always want, Lily.”

The ease of Martin’s speech alarmed her, and she thought, Something’s terribly wrong.

In the kitchen, Lily said to Vince, “Martin Petersen’s wearing makeup.”

Vince peeked over the kitchen doors and said, “Well, I guess he’s come out of the closet. I knew there was something of the fruitcake about that guy.”

“That not it,” Lily said. “He’s not stuttering either.”

Vince shrugged. “Well, there’s no law against weirdos, Lil’. This is America. We grow ’em fast and furious.”

Lily nodded. Ed’s gone, she said to herself. And then she felt it, the grief she hadn’t felt last night. She had a sudden urge to run to the bathroom and start bawling in there, but she stopped herself and walked out of the kitchen.

The truth was that Martin had attracted very little attention in the cafe. If Mike Fox, Harold Lundgren or the others had noticed Martin’s peculiar face, they weren’t showing any signs of curiosity, and Lily thought this was a good sign. She served Martin his poached eggs, refilled his coffee and waited on Mr. Berman, who was in early with his Minneapolis Tribune and what looked like a sheaf of order slips. Mr. Berman was the only one who bothered to give Martin a second glance. He raised his eyebrows to register mild surprise for Lily’s benefit, but then he settled into his reading material and didn’t look up.

Lily cleared Martin’s plate. He had eaten all his food. There were lines of smeared egg yolk on the plate, but that was all. She spoke to him in a whisper, the plate shaking in her hand. “It isn’t true, is it, Martin, that you locked me up? It’s just a story, right? Please tell me.”

He looked at her but didn’t speak.

“I want you to understand,” she continued, still in a whisper, “I want you to leave me alone from now on.”

“I know what I know,” Martin said. His voice had no stutter and no inflection to it. When she walked off with Martin’s plate to the kitchen, she noticed Harold Lundgren watching her for a couple of seconds before he brought his coffee cup to his lips. On her way back from the kitchen, she breathed in Mike Fox’s eighth Kent as she passed the counter and saw that Martin had the paper bag on his lap and was unrolling the top. By the time she reached the end of the counter, he had his arm inside the bag and was pulling out what looked like a ratty pink towel. Lily stopped and said, “Martin.” She didn’t say it loudly, and she said it more to herself than to him.

But Martin had carefully set down the paper bag and was now engrossed in unrolling the towel. Lily watched him work with both hands. His bandaged left hand didn’t hamper his movements. Lily started walking toward him. When she reached his booth, she gasped, and the cafe went dead quiet.

Martin had unrolled a gun, an enormous gun she guessed was a forty-five, bigger than the ones at the police station and heavier. It lay on the towel for only seconds before Martin took it in both hands. Lily started speaking silently to herself, stating facts as if what she was seeing had to be affirmed. It’s a gun, but it can’t be loaded. Why does he have a gun? “It’s not loaded?” she said to Martin aloud. Behind her, she heard shouts. Vince was yelling, “Lily! Move! Get down!” But Lily thought, I’m too close to it. I can’t. I can’t move.

Martin was pointing the gun at the ceiling now. His white face had no expression at all, and behind Lily Mr. Berman was saying, “Put it down, Martin. You don’t want to hurt anybody.” And then Lily thought she heard Boomer crying, but it might have been somebody else. Martin moved the gun down and turned it on Lily. He blinked, and she saw his head wobble for an instant. I’m going to die right now, she thought. He’s going to kill me in the Ideal Cafe. Right now, these are my last seconds. Lily felt her face convulse. The glare of hazy sunlight from the window hurt her eyes. This is my death, she said to herself, and looking into Martin’s placid face, she started to sob, “No! No!” but he held the gun on her, and she choked and cried and listened to the screaming behind her and the sound of someone dialing a phone. Urine ran down her leg inside her jeans. She hadn’t felt her bladder give way. She felt only the warm stream that seemed to run on and on. “No!” Lily yelled through the blur of her tears. “Please!”

Martin did not speak, but she saw him look around the cafe for several seconds, and then he turned the revolver toward himself and pushed the barrel into his mouth. Lily watched him. She saw his red lips stretch over the steel and saw his pale blue eyes looking at her. She noticed the awkward position of his hands and elbows as he held the gun. She saw the dirt in the creases of his knuckles, and she heard the blast. Lily saw Martin lose his face, saw skin and bone and blood fly. She saw his ruined head thrown back against the sunlit window. She saw his body stop moving, and she saw the blood continue to run. There’s so much blood, she said to herself. Then the nausea came and Lily grabbed her stomach. I’m dizzy, she thought. I’m so dizzy.

* * *

It was Vince who carried Lily upstairs to Mabel’s apartment, but by the time she regained consciousness, he had gone back downstairs. She saw Mabel, and for a moment didn’t remember what had happened in the cafe, but when she looked down at herself, she saw that her chest was covered with blood and began pulling off her T-shirt. She examined her bra and noticed that a spot of blood had seeped through the shirt, so she yanked off her bra, too. Lily took off all her clothes. Without saying a word, Mabel stuffed every garment into a plastic bag, tied it, and put it into her garbage can. Then Lily took a long shower and scrubbed herself with a cloth. Standing under the water, she rubbed every part of herself methodically, looking closely at her skin as she moved the washcloth over it. Twice she thought she saw blood on her feet, but the stains turned out to be shadows. Then she dressed herself in clean clothes that belonged to Mabel and noticed how pretty the blouse was, but when she emerged from the bathroom, Lily discovered she didn’t want the garbage bag in the same room with her and insisted on carrying it down to the bins in the alley. “Let someone else do it, Lily,” Mabel said. “I would, but my ankle.”

Lily did it herself. When she passed the back door of the cafe, she saw that it was open and heard voices, one of them Lewis Van Son’s, but she did not look in. Every sensual detail of the walk outside into the alley — the light, the warm air, the shine of the silver garbage cans, the muscles in her arms straining as she pushed the bag firmly into the bin — was oddly distinct and measured. Then she turned and walked back up to Mabel’s. The sight of her legs on the stairs moving through space, the pain in her elbows and knees, the stiffness in her neck when she turned her head were present to her, but also absent. She felt her body, saw it, but didn’t believe in it.

She telephoned her parents in Florida from Mabel’s apartment. She heard her voice telling them what had happened, heard her mother gasp, heard her father’s horrified exclamation in the background. She did not tell them Martin had held the gun on her. She said she wanted them to hear it from her before anybody else. “I’m not hurt. Nothing happened to me.” Her mother said they would fly back to be with her, but Lily said no.

Lily and Mabel didn’t talk much after the call, except about what to eat. They listened to the hubbub downstairs, to the police cars coming and going and the noise of other cars, to official voices that barked orders and the exclamations of people who had stumbled onto the aftermath of a spectacular suicide and were getting the dope.

Lily knew what she had seen. She knew that Martin Petersen had shot himself to death while she looked on. This was a fact. She remembered the pink towel, the gun aimed at her and then at himself. She remembered his lips around it, but after the gun went off, she found no image of him in her mind. She couldn’t see Martin dead. She knew there had been a lot of blood, because she remembered telling herself about the blood, and she had seen it on her clothes. Now that she had rid herself of the clothes, only the words remained. The picture had disappeared. Other than that, there was nothing in her. She didn’t feel sorry or sad or even shocked. She did know she didn’t want to say anything to anybody, and Mabel didn’t demand conversation, so Lily kept silent. She sat on Mabel’s sofa and looked at her legs and wiggled her toes. She watched herself move. There was an urgency about this that captivated her full attention. At about five o’clock she suddenly asked Mabel what day it was.

“Thursday, June twentieth.” Mabel was reading with her glasses on, and she pulled them down to look at Lily.

“It’s dress rehearsal!” Lily said. “I’ve got to get ready.”

“No, Lily. You’re in no shape to go.”

It was Mabel’s tone that decided for Lily. It was incontrovertible. Lily was silent.

Mabel phoned Mrs. Wright and kept her voice very low throughout the conversation.

After dinner they heard the band at Rick’s, not the music so much as the bass, a steady pounding beat that went on and on. Motorcycles roared on Division Street, and Lily remembered the Hell’s Angels. It thundered, and then it rained.

At about nine o’clock, Hank knocked at Mabel’s door.

Lily was sitting on the sofa looking at her knees under Mabel’s pajama pants. Hank sat down beside her. She looked up but Hank didn’t speak. A piece of hair had fallen across his moist forehead and stuck to his skin. It thundered again. She had nothing to tell him. Yesterday she had wanted to explain to Hank about the doll, but now she didn’t.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said.

“Is he at Swensen’s?” Lily said. “Martin, is he at Swensen’s?”

Lily saw Hank glance at Mabel. “Yes. The funeral’s Saturday.”

“The funeral,” Lily repeated. She had forgotten about a funeral. Of course, there would be a funeral.

Hank hugged her, but Lily didn’t hug him back. She stiffened at his touch and turned her head away. He was trying to be nice, but she didn’t care.

That night, the next night, and for many nights after that, Lily slept with Mabel in the woman’s big bed, surrounded by bookcases on all sides.

* * *

Mickey Berner played Cobweb. He wore the clean and pressed costume Mrs. Baker found hanging in the wardrobe room Wednesday night. Mickey was bad, but then nobody expected him to be good. Martin Petersen had been the best fairy in the play, and everybody knew it. Lily was surprised when Mabel asked her if she wanted to go on after what had happened. Of course she did. She rode her bicycle to the Arts Guild and pretended nobody was staring at her when she walked through the doors. She had expected the cast to be upset, to be amazed by Martin’s death, and they were. But more than that, the suicide seemed to have enlivened the cast like a stimulant. Oren pledged his performance to Martin. Gordon declared loudly that the play would “keep Martin’s memory alive,” and Denise cried in the dressing room. Lily didn’t cry. She had been too close, and her closeness to Martin’s death made the others circumspect and distant. Mrs. Wright had told her how sorry she was, but the awkward expression on her face looked a lot like shame to Lily. Only Mrs. Baker hugged her, and when the woman’s arms came around her, Lily felt a quaking inside her and the threat of real sobs, but she did not give in to them and couldn’t return the embrace. “I’m all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

When Lily put on her costume Friday night for the first performance and looked in the mirror, she lost Hermia and forgot her lines. She had often dreamed of such a moment, going onstage without a word in her head. But it didn’t last. When she heard her cues, the lines came back to her and so did Hermia, who seemed to have changed again, to have become a little fiercer and more passionate, and when she fought Helena, the audience was very, very quiet. Mabel sat in the front row, and once when Lily looked down at her while she was speaking, she saw the old woman’s lips moving without sound. And after that first performance was over, and Lily was cheered and congratulated, she kept Hermia inside her a little longer, and she and Jim held hands offstage.

* * *

Saturday, the weather was perfect. Winds from the Dakotas swept in a cloudless sky and low humidity, and walking up the church steps Lily thought to herself that her father would have seen it coming if he had been there. The church wasn’t full, but it was almost full. Lily seated herself beside Mabel in a pew toward the back and noticed several people turning their heads to get a glimpse of the waitress who had served Martin Petersen his last meal. Ida came wearing a silver bow in her high hairdo. Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Wright came with their husbands. Jim, Denise, Oren and Gordon arrived together. Bert brought Boomer, but Vince stayed home. Lily recognized Martin’s sister, Eileen, and his older brother, whose name she couldn’t remember. Lily waited for them, but Frank and Dick never shuffled into the church. Dolores came. She wore a blue suit that hugged her figure and had put her hair up. The effect tamed her, Lily thought.

Pastor Carlsen avoided the word “suicide.” She guessed she would have heard if he had said it, but the truth was that Lily didn’t listen very closely. Martin’s coffin was standing in the front of the church, and she looked at it very hard to focus herself. She imagined Martin inside the coffin, and then she tried to remember the doll. She had been worrying about that doll. She didn’t want anyone to find it and recognize her in its face and body. Martin could have left it anywhere, and as she thought about the doll, she tugged repeatedly at the material of the black blouse she was wearing, the one Mabel had given her. She did this without thinking and didn’t stop until she felt Mabel’s hand close over hers. She lowered her hand and looked at Mabel’s cane. It had a taupe rubber grip. If someone finds it, they’ll know it’s me, she said to herself.

Martin’s sister was talking, and Lily tried to find Martin’s face in hers, but she couldn’t. Eileen had just finished saying, “My brother was a kind person,” when she looked up, opened her mouth wide and emitted an odd, little noise. It wasn’t loud, but it expressed amazement, and the congregation turned as one to look toward the back of the church and saw Tex charging down the aisle dressed like an outlaw from the old West, complete with black hat, six-shooters at his hips and spurs that jingled as he flew past Lily and Mabel’s pew toward the coffin. Had it not been church, Lily knew that several people would have leapt to their feet immediately, but it was church and for a couple of seconds a horrified pause fell over the sanctuary. Then from the back a child started crying, and Lily saw Martin’s brother leap to his feet and saw Pastor Carlsen with his hands raised and his mouth open. He was speaking, but Lily heard nothing through the din that had now broken out among the people in the pews.

Lily didn’t move. Tex had mounted the coffin and was straddling it awkwardly. Big as he was, the coffin was too wide for playing horse, and the next thing she knew Tex was pounding on the lid, yelling, “Marty! Marty!” Four or five men near the pulpit, including Pastor Carlsen, threw themselves at Tex and dragged him off the coffin, but the huge man turned and heaved himself back toward the box, and for a second or so, no more, Lily thought she saw the lid of the coffin opening. Her face vibrated with what felt like electricity. She shut her eyes and imagined Martin sitting up in his coffin and climbing out. In her mind, he was wearing his costume but then she wondered how they had dressed him. In Webster, every male corpse she had ever seen had worn a navy blue suit — her grandfather, her uncle, Mr. Deerhoeven. When she opened her eyes, she saw Pastor Carlsen untangling his vestments from Tex’s spurs. The coffin was closed.

After Lewis Van Son and Dick Shockley hauled off Howard Gubber to jail, everybody stayed for the end of the service. Lily could feel the collective determination in the room to finish what they had started. Eileen was shaking, but she continued her speech. She said Martin loved carpentry and books and animals. Lily didn’t know about the animals, but she took his sister’s word for it. It’s all true, she thought, and it’s all a lie. Eileen wanted to remember him, to say what was right, but Lily had a feeling you could dig and dig and talk and talk until doomsday and no “real” Martin would be found, that whatever had been there, you couldn’t say it. When the pallbearers carried the hidden body out of the church, Lily fumbled for Mabel’s hand without looking at her, and she held on to it through the benediction: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee and give thee peace.”

* * *

The Ideal Cafe reopened the following Monday, and Lily started working her usual shift. For about a week the only people who sat at the booth by the window were from out of town. After that, nobody seemed to care where they sat, but Martin’s death remained a hot topic. People were less interested in why Martin had killed himself than Lily would have thought. They said he was crazy or in despair, but that’s all. As far as she could tell, they took it, as her aunt Irma used to say, “philosophically.” It interested her, too, that Martin’s pointing the gun at Lily wasn’t included in the story. People in the cafe that day must have seen it, Lily thought, but nobody talked about it. Nevertheless, Lily sensed that there was talk about her and Martin, and that even if nobody blamed her for Martin’s death, they knew she had been somehow involved in it. When people stared and whispered, she felt as if she had become an object to point at and say, “She was right there when he did it — only inches away. There was blood all over her.”

For several days Boomer Wee gave tours of the “suicide booth,” mostly to boys under twelve. Then Vince got wind of it and told him to stop. But while it lasted, Boomer charged a quarter for the “reenactment”: “Had the weapon in a bag. Big sucker. Stuck it ’tween his teeth.” That was Boomer’s cue to bite down on his finger and throw himself backward toward the window while he continued his description, which came straight from the pages of a comic book: “Pow! Bang! Blew his head off!” Boomer had been in the kitchen when Martin shot himself. He had seen him die through the door. Apparently only seconds after the shot, Mike Fox had come barreling into the kitchen, and Boomer had thrown up all over both of them. Something about Boomer’s performance fascinated Lily. She didn’t mind seeing it, just as she didn’t mind the abbreviated version of the story that was told again and again. “Martin Petersen walked into the Ideal Cafe and ordered his breakfast as usual. He ate it, every last bite, and then he took out a gun and blew his brains out.” Neither Boomer’s theatrics nor the little story misrepresented what had happened, and yet when Lily watched Boomer gyrating in the booth or listened to someone telling about the suicide, she experienced the gestures and words as evasions. She had forgotten Martin’s corpse, but somehow that blank spot in her mind where his body should have been came closer to the truth than anything anyone could do or say.

A rumor began to circulate that had purportedly started at the funeral home. It was said that when Martin’s body was being prepared for embalming, the bandage on his left hand was removed and that Lily’s name had been carved into the skin of his hand below the knuckles. Bert told Lily one morning in the cafe to stop Boomer from spilling the beans first.

Lily said nothing. She looked at Bert for a moment, then turned away and stared at Division Street through the window.

Bert touched Lily’s arm from behind. “He’s dead, Lily. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Since Martin’s death, Bert had left groceries for Mabel and Lily, had baked pies and cooked casseroles and delivered them without waiting for thanks. She had called Lily every day to “shoot the breeze” and had pretended that Lily was holding up her end of the conversation.

“It will blow over, Lil’,” she said.

Lily looked down at her apron. “There’s something wrong with me, Bert. I can do everything — work, eat, sleep, talk — but I don’t want to do any of it.” Lily didn’t look at Bert’s face, but she grabbed her friend’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s like they smell the corpse on me, Bert. Sometimes, I think I smell it.”

Bert looked down at her own hand.

Lily felt a shudder go through Bert’s fingers, and she let go.

Later that day, the day she heard about Martin’s hand, Lily covered the mirror in her room. She didn’t explain this act to herself, but she draped her bathrobe over the mirror and left the medicine cabinet open in the bathroom so she didn’t have to see herself there. She didn’t spend a lot of time in her own apartment anyway except to change her clothes. She lived with Mabel now, although neither of them had said this in so many words, and she avoided Mabel’s two mirrors rather easily. They were both small.

One evening, Mabel lifted her manuscript off her desk and told Lily it was time she read it to somebody, and that was how their nightly reading began. Mabel’s book was much simpler than Lily had imagined. It began: “My first memory is of my mother. She is squatting on the floor with her arms open and I am walking toward her.” Mabel’s first memories were isolated fragments that she told in high detail — a tablecloth with green glasses on it, her brother naked in the outhouse and a dead cat. At about seven, her memories became more continuous, and she began to tell the story of her childhood in South Dakota and to recount early dreams she could remember. Lily liked the dream Mabel read to her about flying over a city and rescuing her brother from a witch who lived in a shack that was covered with newspapers.

Lily discovered that the reading was her favorite part of the day. Sometimes they read in bed. Mabel would sit up with pillows behind her, and Lily would lie with her head down and listen to the years go by slowly or quickly, depending on the events recorded. In the book Mabel often poked fun at her younger self, and she and Lily laughed together. Lily thought it odd that she could laugh at what was written in the book but found nothing in her own life funny anymore. When Mabel arrived at the page that told of her mother’s death, Lily cried for the first time since the day she had found Martin in the cave.

The two women had gotten used to the business of sleeping together. At first Lily had held herself tightly against the edge of the bed, conscious even in her sleep of the old woman’s body, but that awareness disappeared, and often they would wake up entangled in each other — an arm or a leg thrown over the other — and after the first few times, they didn’t bother with apologies.

As it turned out, Mabel had been keeping a secret. The woman read the passage that revealed it in the same voice she had read every other page. In Chicago, when Mabel was eighteen years old, she had found herself pregnant, poor and alone after she had left Owen Hartwig at the courthouse. She gave the baby away — a little girl — and she had never been able to find her. She didn’t know whether her daughter had lived or died or what her name was. “It’s such an old story,” Mabel read to Lily, “an old, familiar story, told over and over again, but that doesn’t make the grief of it any less. I never gave away the things I salvaged from that room — the table, the keys and the bird’s nest. That was where the woman from the adoption agency gave the speech that persuaded me to give up my daughter. It was a bad speech, full of clichés and tired rebukes. Even then, I knew how stupid it was, but I memorized it and have never forgotten it. As she talked, I fixed the words onto the various objects in the room and burnt them into my mind. It wasn’t a long speech.”

Lily turned over in bed and looked at Mabel. “What did you name her, Mabel?”

“Anna,” said Mabel. “Anna Wasley.”

“Isn’t Wasley your married name?”

“I was a bluestocking, Lily,” Mabel said. “I never changed my name.”

* * *

By the second week of July, Lily realized that she hadn’t menstruated. Ed had not written or called. His disappearance was so absolute that he no longer seemed real to her. Mabel told her that he had paid the July rent at the Stuart Hotel and that she expected him, but Lily did not. Still, there had been days when she had wanted to call him, when she believed he wanted to hear from her, days when she hoped. She had his telephone number and address on a little piece of paper that she kept on her night table, and once she had gone so far as to dial the number. But after listening to a single ring, she had hung up. Lily had been afraid Elizabeth would answer. She had started a letter to him as well, but when she had read it over, she hated every word she had written and threw it into the wastebasket. She felt her belly often, examined it for signs of some change, some indication of fetal life, but she couldn’t tell. Although she stayed away from mirrors, she looked at her arms and legs and feet often and felt them with her fingers. Sometimes when Mabel read to her, Lily stroked her arm over and over or rocked herself in the bed. Mabel brushed Lily’s hair before work and laid out her clothes. Once she put out lipstick and a small mirror on the table. Lily knew it was a hint, but she ignored it. She didn’t go to the doctor. If she was pregnant, she wouldn’t change it anyway. That was for other people.

Lily read the police log twice a week as soon as the Chronicle came out. She was waiting for someone to find the doll, but nobody did. There were three unusual sightings during the month of July, however: a UFO over Dundas, a ghostly cowboy running in the direction of the public pool and another angel. The angel was spotted in the Klatschwetter field, maybe by Mrs. Klatschwetter herself, although no name was mentioned, and it caused a rash of angel jokes in the cafe for about a week. Lily didn’t believe a word of these reports, but it seemed to her that somebody out there was making fun of her. When Lily mentioned the angel to Mabel, she paused for a moment and said, “I think you should go to the cemetery and see Martin Petersen’s grave, Lily.”

“What?”

“Just as I said. I’ll go with you if you like.”

Lily didn’t answer Mabel, but she started thinking about Martin’s grave. Did it have a stone yet? Would there be writing on his headstone or just his dates? Had they put him beside his mother? Lily hugged herself and shut her eyes on Mabel’s sofa. She remembered Martin talking about the doll as a thing “between.” Why did she feel that his grave was between, too, that it was between her and Martin.

“They’re casting for My Fair Lady at the Arts Guild, Lily. Auditions are in two weeks.” Mabel’s sharp voice cut Lily off from her thoughts. She looked at her.

“You should try out for Eliza Doolittle.”

Lily eyed Mabel but said nothing. The woman seemed to age a little every day: her wrinkles looked deeper, her face more skeletal. She even seemed to have less hair.

* * *

The morning following that conversation, Ed walked into the cafe. Mike Fox paused from his Kents. Pete Lund looked up from his coffee, and Vince and Boomer stood watching behind the kitchen door. But Lily hadn’t known he was there until she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around and saw Ed standing beside the cash register. She remembered him with a sudden, violent rush of familiarity. He looked the same. But Lily had an urge to scream, the way people do in movies when they think someone is dead and it turns out they’re alive.

He started talking to her in a low voice and tried to take her hand, but she held it back from him.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know until just now when I ran into Stanley and he told me what happened. You should have called me, Lily. You should have written me. I would have dropped everything and come…”

It’s too much for me, she thought. Seeing him now. I’ll crack. What does he want?

Lily heard Vince clearing his throat behind her. She felt her face moving uncontrollably. She opened her mouth and shut it. She blinked and felt a gob of mucus in her throat.

Then Vince was behind the counter, Vince, who had been unnaturally nice to her since Martin’s death. He was waving an accusatory finger at Ed, and Lily heard him say that maybe Ed should have bothered to check in with her, that she’d been through hell, and where the hell had he been all that time? Lily backed away from both of them until Vince threatened to “deck” Ed. She staggered forward and stood between them, looking from one to the other. “Stop it,” she said, and as she looked up into Ed’s face, she asked herself who he was, this man who had come and gone and then come back again, and why he thought he could pop in and out of her life like a jack-in-the-box. I’m really mad at you, she thought all of a sudden. Lily didn’t look Ed in the face. “You never called me,” she said. “You never called me once.” She clenched her fists at her sides and grit her teeth. It seemed to her that if she strained every muscle in her body, she could hold herself together. “I’ll come and talk to you after my shift,” she whispered, addressing Ed’s hands.

Vince, who had stepped back several feet, said to Lily that he’d get Bert to cover for her if she wanted, but Lily turned to him and in the calm, loud voice she had used for Hermia told him that she had promised she would never walk out on him again, and by God she was going to stick to it.

Vince, looking very red in the face, retreated, and after he had disappeared into the kitchen, Lily heard Boomer give a long, loud whistle.

* * *

Before she walked across the street to the Stuart Hotel, Lily went into the toilet and looked at herself in the mirror. The face she saw was younger, prettier and paler than she remembered, and she was glad she had looked at herself, because she wanted to know what Ed was going to see.

At Ed’s, Lily saw a suitcase lying open on the floor, and she recognized his T-shirts and jeans spilling out of it. She had worn some of those clothes. The room smelled of paint, smoke and other nameless but familiar things, and when she sat down in the canvas chair, Lily felt afraid of those smells. They had come to mean Ed’s body and sex with him in the little iron bed, and she wondered if she would dare to let him touch her again.

Ed sat across from her, but Lily found it hard to look at him, so she studied her hands.

“Stanley didn’t say it in so many words,” Ed said. “But he basically told me I’d been a shit when I ran into him downstairs. He stood there shaking his head and avoiding my eyes. ‘You should have been in touch with that girl.’ He said that several times. I’m sorry, Lily. I’m terribly sorry…”

“Why did you come back?” she said.

“Look at me, Lily,”

“I don’t want to.”

“Okay,” he said. “Don’t look at me. What you’ve been through is terrible. I wish I had known…”

“Why did you come back?”

“It’s over with Elizabeth. She didn’t really want me. She found out about you, and that’s when she started pushing me to try again, but it didn’t take me long to realize that nothing had changed. It felt like a sham.”

Lily looked at the painting of Mabel, which was still standing in the center of the room with its empty story boxes, and asked herself why Elizabeth seemed so unimportant now. The word “sham” seemed to leave a trace in her ear. She repeated it aloud—“Sham.”

“I’m sorry.”

She knew he was. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. It wasn’t an apology. It was more like a comment on the world in general, the way things happen or don’t happen.

Ed seemed to understand this, because he didn’t say anything. She looked at him and noticed that although his body remained still, his face looked grim and set. He stood up, walked to the suitcase, and after riffling through some of the clothes, pulled out a sketchbook and brought it to her. “I drew Martin,” he said. “I started drawing him after he left that day, and I’ve been doing sketches for a while. I want you to have them. You can do whatever you want with them — burn them, throw them away. I don’t care.”

She could hear the decision in his voice — the stubborn will that she remembered. He opened the book and handed it to her.

Lily looked down at Martin. There was no background, no floor, no place in which he was standing in the picture. His body seemed to float on the page, and in his right hand he was holding a cowboy hat. He looked very young — like a boy. She closed her eyes. “You wanted to paint him,” she said, understanding all at once what the sketches meant. “He was going to be the fifth one.” She was whispering to keep away the tears.

“I thought about it,” Ed said. “But I had decided not to. That’s the truth.” Lily noticed that Ed was jiggling his knee.

“Martin was afraid you were going to paint me, but you wanted to paint him. It’s funny.” Lily made a sound, half laugh, half sob, and handed the sketchbook back to Ed. “He … he…” She put her hand over her mouth so Ed wouldn’t see her lips trembling.

He leaned forward. “I love you,” he said. “I’m not sure that makes any difference now, but I want us to be together.”

Lily sat back in the chair and waved him off. After he had pulled away from her, she met his eyes but didn’t answer him. What are you saying? she said to herself. What do you mean? And then as she continued looking at him, she thought, I used to watch you early in the morning before the sun came up. I used to go to the window just to look at you, because I wanted to see you, no, because I had to see you. Why? she thought. Aren’t you saying now what I dreamed you would say to me from the very beginning? It’s strange, Lily thought. Everything is strange in the world. And she looked toward the window and without knowing why she remembered Oberon’s speech near the end of the play: “I then did ask of her her changeling child; / Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent / To bear him to my bower in fairyland. / And now I have the boy, / I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.” And Lily felt her chin begin to shake, then her neck and shoulders. She didn’t try to stop the shuddering. It seemed all right now, like a seizure that had been a long time in coming. It wasn’t just that Ed was telling her that he wanted her or that she realized how terribly she had missed him. It was also that Vince had been ready to punch him and that Stanley had yelled at him, and it was the afternoon light coming through the window, and the happiness in Mabel’s face on the painting. It was her own brown legs in Ed’s chair and the warm tears falling on them. And it must have been Martin, too.

“I want you to come to New York with me,” he said. “I want you to live with me.”

Lily shook her head. She wasn’t saying no. She just felt overwhelmed.

“If you don’t want to live with me, I’ll help you find an apartment. You can take acting classes there, and we can see each other every day. If not every day, as much as you want to. I’m not going to give you up, Lily.”

Still she couldn’t say anything. She looked at the floor and went on crying.

But she let him kiss her then, and she cried off and on through the hours they spent in bed together. Later, when he sat up and started reaching for his clothes, she stopped him.

“I want you to go to the window,” she said, “and just stand there looking at me.”

Without asking any questions, Ed walked quickly across the room. And then Lily lay on the bed and looked at him standing naked in front of the window and several long minutes passed before she told him it was all right to move.

* * *

Mabel told Ed about her lost daughter by describing the pictures he had to draw in the narrative boxes. In the first was a pregnant girl and the adoption agency woman in the room in Chicago. Mabel remembered the room in such detail that Lily found it uncanny. In the second, the girl sat in the same room alone staring out a window. In the third an old woman sat in the same position in Mabel’s living room across the street. In this last room, the window was on the other side. She gave him these drawing instructions in the evening, and when she had finished telling him what she wanted, Lily felt that the room was drained of everything except stillness and twilight and Mabel’s unseen grief.

During the days that followed, however, Mabel exhausted Ed with those boxes. She criticized his drawings ferociously. This thing and that were all wrong. She insisted he change the chair’s seat and the table’s legs until they satisfied her. “It’s not naturalism,” he told her. “I’m not drawing from life, don’t you see? It’s the story that counts.”

“You’re drawing from my life, damn it,” she said, “and you’ll listen.”

Mabel won every point, and then Mabel and Tex and Stanley and Dolores were packed up, crated and shipped.

“Maybe someone will buy them when you show the paintings in September,” Lily said as she sat with Ed and his suitcases in the empty room.

“I hope so,” he said. “People are buying all kinds of shit in New York these days. I might get lucky.”

“Some rich person will hang Mabel or Tex on their wall, and they won’t even know who they are. They’ll say, I like that old lady or that naked cowboy, and they’ll tell their friends they bought ‘a Shapiro.’”

“And their friends will wrinkle their noses and say, ‘Who’s that?’”

“It’s just funny, that’s all.” Lily looked at him. She hadn’t told Ed that she might be pregnant. She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t want to say anything until she was.

Ed rubbed his face and lit his last cigar in Webster. “I know that you haven’t promised me anything, but I’ve decided to be patient.”

Lily looked at him and smiled.

“I’m going to call you every day.”

She kissed him. And then he was gone.

* * *

About a week later, Mabel and Lily were lying beside each other in bed when Mabel sat up and said in a low voice. “Are you going to move to New York, Lily?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?” Lily sat up and hugged her knees in the dark.

“I think you should leave here,” Mabel said. “You shouldn’t stay in Webster. I’ve come to like this town, and it’s fine for an old lady who’s coming to an end.” Mabel grinned as if this were a good joke. “But you’ve got too much for this place, and after a while it will beat you down. And New York…” Mabel shook her head. “New York is the best city in the world and the worst city.”

“You want me to go,” Lily said.

“Yes.” Mabel paused. “But I want you to go for yourself.”

“Not for Ed.”

“Not for Ed,” Mabel repeated.

Through the window Lily could see the bricks of the Stuart Hotel. “I can’t live with him,” she said. “I can’t live with anybody.” She smiled when she realized what she had said. “Except you, I guess. I’m in love with Ed, but there’s a lot I don’t understand about him…”

“I was married to Evan for fifteen years, and I never knew him completely. I’ve been thinking about him ever since he died all those years ago, and I still can’t explain him. But I adored him.”

“Didn’t you ever fight?”

“Of course we fought. I was a hellcat in those days — an impossible woman.”

“If I go to New York, you’ll lose your roommate.”

Mabel turned her head away from Lily and looked at the wall. From outside in the street she heard the bus for Des Moines stop in front of the Stuart Hotel and then the hydraulic whoosh of the bus door as it opened to let in a passenger. Looking at the back of Mabel’s head, Lily heard the woman say, “I think about her every day, about my Anna. If she’s still alive, she’s much older than you. She could be a grandmother. I could be a great-grandmother. Isn’t that something?”

And suddenly Lily felt Mabel’s child as someone very real, as a person who was living now or had lived, and in the same moment, she wondered if Anna wasn’t turning her into a ghost, if she hadn’t become in some funny way a substitute for the baby Mabel had lost.

Mabel turned her face toward Lily, and her voice cracked as she spoke. “I’d never ask you to stay here, you know, to hold my hand at the Dilly Home when I’m hooked up to some goddamned breathing machine. It’s not my style.”

Lily looked at the woman’s face and touched her cheek. “I know,” she said. “But sometimes people do things because they want to — things like holding a person’s hand.” Lily lay back on the pillow. “Now,” she said, “read to me.”

And Mabel did.

* * *

The first Saturday in August, Lily rode her bicycle to the graveyard after work. It was a hot, dry day and the grass had begun to scorch yellow-brown from too much sun. When she arrived at the cemetery, she didn’t know where to look for Martin’s grave, except to walk beyond the old graves toward the new. “He probably doesn’t have a stone yet. I won’t know which is his. Old Mrs. Knutsen was buried last week. She’ll have flowers, and Martin won’t, probably.” Lily muttered these observations as she walked past one marker after another toward the treeless place at the edge of the cemetery that looked over the wide farmland flats of corn and alfalfa. There were three nameless graves, and Lily stopped beside one that had new sod over the earth and guessed it was Martin’s. It occurred to her that it was expensive to die, expensive for your relatives. She wondered if the sod came with the deal or if you paid extra. She stood on the new grass, put her feet squarely on it and tried to feel something important like an ending. But the truth was she didn’t feel anything. There was a hot wind, and in it the smell of a distant fire mixed with dry alfalfa and car exhaust. The wind blew onto her face as she stared at the line of the horizon.

Then she thought about the shoes and the stone she had marked them with. She thought about Dolores, too, her face in the car when she had driven Lily home, and her heavy thighs on the sheets of her bed. Lily lay down on top of the grave. The sod, after all, was man-size, and she fit inside the rectangle. She lay her cheek on the grass and opened an eye to look out for ants. She saw one on a fat blade of grass. Where there was one, there were more. Lily worked at feeling the dead Martin, because she couldn’t see him in her mind, not dead. Then she dug her hands into the grass and, grabbing hold of some of it, yanked it up by the roots and cast it on either side of her. The hot sun baked the back of her legs and arms and neck. She could smell her own hair as it brushed her nose. When she sat up, she looked down at her thighs and saw that grass had made indentations in her skin and a few blades had stuck to her. She traced a faint red mark and spoke to the ground.

“Martin,” she said. “I’m still alive.”

Then Lily heard steps in the grass behind her and turned around. She didn’t move off the grave. She saw that Dick and Frank were walking toward her, and she was glad to see them. In the sunlight she noticed how dirty the two men were all over again. Neither one made any sign that they saw her, but she supposed they did, and she watched as they slumped toward her and stopped.

Frank looked down at her from under the brim of his hat, his eyes the color of wet sand. “Guess you knew ’bout him all along,” he said.

Dick stood behind his brother. He was looking at her with an expression Lily couldn’t make sense of — a fixed but bright stare. She looked at Frank. “How do you mean?”

“That he’d hurt somebody — hurt himself in the end. That’s bad enough.”

Lily looked down at the grave and shook her head.

When she looked up, Dick’s eyes were still fastened on her face, and he was nodding vigorously. Frank wasn’t looking at Dick, but he seemed to feel the nods at his shoulder, and he spoke again.

“Dick wants me to tell you we took care of it.”

Lily looked from one brother to the other. “Took care of it?”

Frank nodded. Both men were nodding at the same time. Dick’s eyes didn’t leave her face. “What Marty left behind.”

Lily crossed her arms on her chest and rubbed the skin above her elbows. “You found it?”

Frank shook his head. “Nope, Marty came with it that morning. Said to burn it.”

“And you did?” Lily had an abrupt, vivid fantasy of the doll burning in the trash bin outside the house and Dick watching it.

Again Frank shook his head. “Dick wouldn’t allow it. Put her in a big long box, lucky we had it, had to fold her up a bit. Then he buried it back of the house. Dick took a shine to it — little slip of a thing, wasn’t she?”

Lily looked at her feet on the grass. One of her shoelaces had come untied and lay on the browning sod. “He told you about the cave?”

Frank nodded but just barely — a single motion of his chin. “Knew we couldn’t keep it round the house, not with Marty gone and his last wish bein’ to burn it, but Dick said he wasn’t gonna burn nothing’ that looked like a girl.”

Lily nodded. She bit her lip.

“Better to lay it down in peace on the property. Don’t s’pose Marty’d really mind that. An’ this way there’s no talk, Miss Dahl, ’bout you and him”—Frank was mumbling now and his eyes had lost focus—“on account of the likeness.”

The three of them didn’t speak for several minutes. Dick moved away from his brother and stood over her. He folded his hands in front of him and looked down into Lily’s face like a man who didn’t fully believe what he was seeing. Their silence wasn’t an awkward social pause in which all the parties are at a loss about what to say. It was the intimate silence of a shared secret, and Lily realized that the doll was merely the form the secret had taken at that moment. It wasn’t the secret itself. The secret was somewhere else, always somewhere else, and as Lily said this to herself, she heard her own breathing and heard Dick’s and Frank’s and it made her feel happy.

Dick was staring at the ground now. Then very slowly, he began to bend, then to squat. Lily couldn’t understand what he was doing. Once he had arrived at a squatting position, he let himself fall heavily forward on his knees, and then he grabbed Lily’s shoelace.

“Oh, Mr. Bodler,” Lily said. “I can do that.” She bent down and reached for her shoe, but Dick batted her hand away and began to tie the lace very slowly. He made a good, tight bow and looked up at her before he righted himself.

“Thank you,” Lily said.

Once he was on his feet, Dick took Lily’s hand. She could feel the calluses on his palm and the oiliness of his skin. He pulled her away from Martin’s grave and walked back through the stones with her as Frank followed them. Dick dragged his feet but moved with stiff determination, his fingers tightly around her own.

He took Lily to his mother’s grave. The headstone was small and gray-white. It looked older than it should have and was stained green by moss near the bottom, but there were trees in this part of the graveyard, and the shade cooled Lily as she stared at the inscription: “Helen Bodler, born December 6, 1899, died June 21, 1932. Beloved mother of Ethan, Frank and Richard Bodler.” Ethan Bodler was buried beside his mother — born January 5, 1926, died February 11, 1926. Looking at the grave, Lily squeezed Dick’s hand. She turned to read Dick’s face. He had continued to hold her hand and was sweating into her palm, his grip so slippery she felt her fingers might slide out of his at any moment. Dick opened his mouth and laughed his noiseless laugh and moved his feet ever so slightly on the ground. Frank didn’t interfere with him this time. Then he stopped and the three of them walked to the road together. When she pointed to her bicycle, Dick released her hand.

Lily didn’t refuse their offer of a ride. She climbed into the cab beside Dick as Frank drove slowly into town and asked that they drop her in front of the Arts Guild. Dick leaned on Lily rather heavily, and the weight of his shoulder was uncomfortable. Why feeling him so close to her should have made her think that Dick had seen his mother killed many years ago, she didn’t know. But Lily did think it. He might not remember, she thought, but I think he was there.

After Lily had hauled her bicycle from the back of the truck, and just before he started the motor, Frank looked out the window and spoke to her. Lily saw and heard him speak but didn’t understand what he was saying until moments later, as though her brain lagged behind her ears. When the truck was pulling away and she saw only Frank’s elbow sticking out the window, she realized he had said, “Dick wants ya to visit.”

Auditions in the Arts Guild had already started. Lily heard a piano from the stage beyond the vestibule doors, but she saw no other rivals for the role of Eliza Doolittle. Mrs. Carter squinted at Lily. “Any later and you’d have missed the whole thing,” she said.

She explained to Mrs. Carter that she’d be right back, raced down the stairs and into the little room at the end of the hallway. She dropped her jeans and sat down on the toilet. While she listened to the rush of urine, she noticed a spot of blood on her underpants. So, Lily thought, there it is, and then she felt tears warm the corners of her eyes. She drew out a long piece of toilet paper. She folded it, placed it on her underpants and hiked up her jeans. As she walked down the hallway, the coarse paper scratched the inside of her thighs, and Lily stopped, hastily sticking her hand into her pants to adjust the wad. She found herself outside the closed door to the costume room. Only weeks ago, Martin had been sitting in there on the floor scribbling down her measurements, quoting the play, asking her to go home with him. Lily imagined the inside of the room now, and saw Cobweb’s costume hanging from a wardrobe rack labeled “DREAM.”

Then from somewhere above her, she heard a woman calling her name in a high voice just like the one her mother had used to call her up from the creek for dinner. “Lil — y! Lily Dahl!”

“I’m here!” she called. “I’m coming.”

The street Lily imagined in her mind as she leapt up the stairs was real, and the fog was real, too. She was singing loudly on a London corner in filthy clothes with a basket of flowers in her arms. I can be her, she thought suddenly. Then Lily straightened her back, lifted her chin and walked quickly through the double doors toward the stage.