The Round House

Chapter Six. Datalore

The wind passed over us in a rolling mass of clouds that just kept moving until the sky went clear. Just like that, as if nothing had happened between us, my father and I began to talk. He told me he’d had an interesting conversation with Father Travis, and I froze up. But it was all about Texas and the military; Father Travis hadn’t ratted on us. Whatever suspicions my father had expressed that night to Edward were gone, or submerged. I asked my father if he’d talked to Soren Bjerke.

The gas can? I asked.

Pertinent.

Now that Father Travis was off the list, I’d been thinking about the cases and bench notes my father and I had pulled. I asked my father if Bjerke had questioned the Larks, brother and sister.

He’s talked to Linda.

My father tensely frowned. He had promised himself not to involve me, or confide in me, or collaborate with me. He knew where it went, what I might get into, but he didn’t know the half of it. And here was the thing I didn’t understand then but do now—the loneliness. I was right, in that there was just the three of us. Or the two of us. Nobody else, not Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before. So he had no choice, not really. Eventually, he had to talk to me.

I should visit Linda Wishkob, he said. She stonewalled Bjerke. But maybe ... you want to come?

Linda Wishkob was magnetically ugly. Her pasty wedge of a face just cleared the post office counter. She regarded us with mooncalf, bulging eyes; her wet red lips were curls of flesh. Her hair, a cap of straight brown floss, quivered as she pulled out commemoratives. She displayed them for my father. She reminded me of a pop-eyed porcupine, even down to her fat little long-nailed paws. My father chose a set of fifty states of the union and asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee.

There’s coffee in back here, said Linda. I can drink it free. She regarded my father warily, although she knew my mother. Everyone knew what had happened but nobody knew what to say or what not to say.

Never mind about the coffee, said my father. I’d like to have a word with you. Why don’t you get someone to cover for you? You aren’t busy.

Linda opened her wet lips to protest but could not think of a good excuse. In a few moments she had cleared things with her supervisor and came from around the counter. We walked out of the post office and across the street to Mighty Al’s, which was a little soup can of a place. I couldn’t believe my father was going to question someone in the close quarters of Mighty’s, which had six scrounged tables crammed together. And I was right. My father asked no questions of Linda but proceeded to have a useless conversation about the weather.

My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done with, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I’d even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife. Dad and Linda Wishkob talked about the weather for quite a while and then she got up and left.

You really put her through the wringer, Dad.

The blackboard menu today advertised Hamburger Soup, all U could eat. We started on our second bowls of steaming hot soup: ground meat, commodity macaroni, canned tomatoes, celery, onion, salt, and pepper. It was especially good that day. Dad had also ordered Mighty’s coffee, which he called the stoic’s choice. It was always burnt. He kept drinking it expressionlessly after we’d finished the soup.

I wanted to get a feel for how she was doing, said my father. She’s been through the wringer enough, for real.

I wasn’t sure what coming down to talk with Linda Wishkob was about, but apparently some exchange I didn’t understand took place.

Dad had finally allowed Cappy to come over that day. It was a grueling hot afternoon so we were inside playing Bionic Commando, quietly as we could, with the fan on. As always, my mother was sleeping. There was a soft tap. I answered the door, and there was Linda Wishkob, her bulging eyes, her tight blue uniform, her sweaty, dull, makeup-less face. Those long fingernails on the stubby fingers suddenly struck me as sinister, though they were painted an innocent pink.

I’ll just wait for her to wake up, said Linda.

She surprised me by stepping past me into the living room. She nodded at Cappy and sat down behind us. Cappy shrugged, and as we hadn’t played our game for a while and were not going to quit for any small reason, we continued: For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving. We taste the nearness of defeat. But deep in the bowels of our community our scientists have perfected an unprecedented fighting weapon. Our bionic arm reaches, crushes, flexes, feints, folds. It pierces armor and its heat-seeking sensors can detect the most well-defended foe. The bionic arm combines the power of an entire army in itself and must be operated by one and only one soldier who can meet the test. I am that soldier. Or Cappy is that soldier. The Bionic Commando. Our mission takes us through the land of a thousand eyes, where death awaits us around every corner and through every window. Our destination: enemy headquarters. The heart of our hated foe’s impregnable fortress. The challenge: impossible. Our resolve: unflagging. Our courage: quitless. Our audience: Linda Wishkob.

She watched us in such utter silence that we forgot about her. She hardly breathed or moved a muscle. When my mother left her room and went to the upstairs bathroom I didn’t hear that either, but Linda did. She padded to the foot of the stairs and before I could say or do anything, she called my mother’s name. Then she started walking up the stairs. I quit playing and jumped up, but already Linda’s soft round body was at the top of the stairs and she was greeting my mother as if my mother weren’t skinnily tottering away from her, disoriented, discovered, and invaded. Linda Wishkob did not seem to notice my mother’s agitation. With a kind of oblivious simplicity she just followed her into her room. The door remained open. I heard the bed creak. The scrape of Linda’s chair. And then their voices, as they started to talk.

A few days later there was finally a steady downpour of rain and I stayed inside for the second time that summer, playing my games, drawing cartoons. Angus had been working on his second portrait of Worf, but Star had called up and told him to borrow a plumber’s snake from Cappy’s place. They were over at Angus’s now, probably, drinking Elwin’s Blatz and pulling goop out of a stinking drain. My pictures bored me. I thought of sneaking the Cohen handbook, but reading my father’s cases and notes had set up a despair in me. On a day like this I might have gone upstairs, locked myself in my room, and paged through my hidden HOMEWORK folder. My mother’s presence upstairs had killed that habit off. I was thinking of slogging over to Angus’s or even of taking out the third and fourth Tolkien books my father had got me for Christmas, but I wasn’t sure I was desperate enough to do either thing. The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother’s spirit isn’t dying right upstairs. I thought it might wash all of the plants out of the garden, but of course that wouldn’t worry my mother. I took her a sandwich, but she was asleep. I took out the Tolkien set. I had just started reading as the rain came down and down, when out of the drumming pour, like a drenched hobbit, Linda Wishkob arrived again to visit.

Upstairs she went, with hardly a look at me. She had a little package in her hands, probably some of her banana bread—she bought black bananas and was known for her bread. A whole lot of murmuring went on upstairs—so mysterious to me. Why my mother chose to speak to Linda Wishkob might have bothered me or set me on alert or at least made me wonder. I didn’t. But my father did. When he came home and learned that Linda was upstairs, he said to me in a soft voice, Let’s trap her.

What?

You be the bait.

Oh, thanks.

She’ll talk to you, Joe. She likes you. She likes your mother. Me, she’s wary of. Listen to them upstairs.

Why do you want her to talk?

We need every piece of information—we need to know what she can tell us about the Larks.

But she’s a Wishkob.

Adopted, remember. Remember the case, Joe, the case we pulled.

I don’t think it’s relevant.

Nice word.

But finally, I agreed to do it and Dad had fortunately bought some ice cream. It was Linda’s favorite food.

Even on a rainy day?

He smiled. She’s cold-blooded.

So when Linda came down the stairs I asked if she wanted a bowl of ice cream. She asked what flavor. I told her we had the striped stuff. Neapolitan, she said, and accepted a bowl. We sat down in the kitchen and Dad casually closed the door, saying that Mom needed her rest and how good it was of Linda to visit and how much everyone had enjoyed her banana bread.

The spice is excellent, I said.

I only use cinnamon, said Linda, and her pop eyes swelled with pleasure. Real cinnamon I buy in jars, not cans. From a foreign food section down in Hornbacher’s, Fargo. Not the stuff you get here. Sometimes I use a little lemon zest or orange peel.

She was so happy we liked the banana bread that I thought maybe Dad wouldn’t need me to get her to talk, but he said, Wasn’t it good, Joe? And then I said how I’d eaten it for breakfast and how I’d even stolen a piece because Mom and Dad were hogging it all.

I’ll bring two loaves next time, Linda said lovingly.

I spooned ice cream into my mouth and tried to let my father draw her out, but he raised his eyebrows at me.

Linda, I said, I heard. You know I wonder. I guess I’m asking a personal question.

Go right ahead, she said, and her pale features went rosy. Maybe nobody asked her personal questions. I thought quickly and let my tongue fly.

I have friends, you know, whose parents or cousins were adopted out. Adopted out of the tribe, and that is hard, well I’ve heard that. But I guess nobody ever talks about getting ...

Adopted in?

Linda showed her little rat teeth in such a simple, encouraging smile that I was reassured now, and suddenly found I really wanted to know. I wanted to know her story. I ate more ice cream. I said I really did like the banana bread, and that I was surprised I had, because the truth was usually I hated banana bread. What I mean is suddenly I forgot my father and really started talking to Linda. I went past pop eyes and sinister porcupine hands and wispy hair and just saw Linda, and wanted to know about her, which is probably why she told me.

I was born in the winter, she started, but then stopped to finish her ice cream. Once she’d pushed away the bowl, she started for real. My brother was born two minutes before me. The nurse had just wrapped him in a blue flannel warming blanket when the mother said, Oh god, there’s another one, and out I slid, half dead. I then proceeded to die in earnest. I went from slightly pink to dull gray-blue, at which point the nurse tried to scoop me into a bed warmed by lights. The nurse was stopped by the doctor, who pointed out my crumpled head, arm, and leg. Stepping in front of the nurse and me, the doctor addressed the mother, telling her that the second baby had a congenital deformity, and asking if he should use extraordinary means to salvage it.

The answer was no.

No, let it die. But while the doctor’s back was turned, the nurse cleared my mouth with her finger, shook me upside down, and swaddled me tight in another blanket, pink. I took a blazing breath.

Nurse, said the doctor.

Too late, she answered.

I was left in the nursery with a bottle strapped onto my face while the county decided how I would be transported to some sort of transitional situation. I was still too young to be admitted to any state-run institution, and Mr. and Mrs. George Lark refused to have me in their house. The night janitor at the hospital, a reservation woman named Betty Wishkob, asked for permission to hold me on her break. While cradling me, with her back turned to the observation window, Betty—Mom—nursed me. As she fed me, Mom molded and rounded my head in her powerful hand. Nobody in the hospital knew that she was nursing me at night, or that she was doctoring me and had decided to keep me.

This was five decades ago. I’m fifty now. When Mom asked if she could take me home, there was relief and not a lot of paperwork involved, at least in the beginning. So I was saved and grew up with the Wishkobs. I lived on the reservation and went to school as an Indian person would—first at the mission and later at the government school. But before then, around the age of three, I was taken away for the first time. I still remember the smell of disinfectant, and what I call white despair, into which there came a presence, someone or something who grieved with me and held my hand. That presence stayed with me. The next time a welfare officer decided to find a more suitable home for me, I was four. I stood beside Mom holding her skirt—green cotton. I hid my face in the scent of heated cloth. Then I was in the backseat of a car that sped soundlessly in some infinite direction. I woke alone in another white room. My bed was narrow and the sheets were tucked tightly down, so I had to struggle to get out. I sat on the edge of the bed for what seemed like a long time, waiting.

When you are little, you do not know that you are screaming or crying—your feelings and the sound that comes out of you is all one thing. I remember that I opened my mouth, that is all, and that I did not shut it until I was back with Mom.

Every morning, until I was about eleven years old, Mom and my dad, Albert, tried to round my head and work my arms and legs. They made me lift a little bag filled with sand that Mom sewed into a weight. They woke me first and brought me into the kitchen. The woodstove was going and I drank a glass of thin, blue milk. Then Mom sat in one kitchen chair and put me in her lap. She rubbed my head, then cupped her powerful fingers and pulled my skull into shape.

You’re gonna see things sometimes, Mom told me once. Your soft spot stayed open longer than most babies. That’s how spirits get in.

Dad sat across from us in another chair, ready to stretch me from head to toe.

Put your feet out, Tuffy, he said. That was my nickname. I put my feet in Dad’s hands and he pulled me one way while Mom held tight around my ears and pulled the other.

My brother Cedric had given me the name Tuffy because he knew once I went to school I would get a nickname anyway. He didn’t want it to refer to my arm or head. But my head—so misshapen when I was born that the doctor had diagnosed me for an idiot—was changed by Mom’s squeezing and kneading. By the time I was old enough to look in a mirror, I thought I looked beautiful.

Neither Mom nor Dad ever told me I was wrong. It was Sheryl who gave me the news, saying, You are so ugly you’re cute.

I looked in the mirror the next chance I got and noticed that Sheryl was telling the truth.

The house we lived in still has a faint smell of rotted wood, onions, fried coot, the salty smell of unwashed children. Mom was always trying to keep us clean, and Dad was getting us dirty. He took us into the woods and showed us how to spot a rabbit run and set a snare. We yanked gophers from their holes with loops of string and picked pail after pail of berries. We rode a mean little bucking pony, fished perch from a nearby lake, dug potatoes every year for school money. Mom’s job had not lasted. Dad sold firewood, corn, squash. But we never went hungry, and there was affection in our house. I knew I was loved because it was complicated for Mom and Dad to get me from the welfare system, though I’d helped out their efforts with my endless scream. All of which is not to say they were perfect. Dad drank from time to time and passed out on the floor. Mom’s temper was explosive. She never hit, but she yelled and raved. Worse, she could say awful things. Once, Sheryl was twirling around in the house. There was a shelf set snugly in the corner. It held a cut-glass vase that was very precious to Mom. When we brought her wildflower bouquets, she would put them in that vase. I had seen her washing the vase with soap and polishing it with an old pillowcase. Then Sheryl’s arm knocked the vase off the shelf and it struck the floor with a bright sound and shattered into splinters.

Mom had been working at the stove. She whirled around, threw her hands out.

Damn you, Sheryl, she said. That was the only beautiful thing I ever had.

Tuffy broke it! said Sheryl, bolting out the door.

Mom began to cry, harshly, and put her forearm to her face and cheek. I moved to sweep up the pieces for her, but she said to leave them, in such a heartsick voice that I went to find Sheryl, who was hiding in her usual place on the far side of the henhouse. When I asked why she’d blamed me, Sheryl gave a hateful look, and said, Because you’re white. I didn’t hold anything Sheryl did then against her, and we became close later on. I was very glad for that, as I have never married, and needed to confide in someone when, five years ago, I was contacted by my birth mother.

I lived in an addition tacked on to the tiny house until my parents died. They went one right after the other, as the long married sometimes do. It happened in a few months. By then, my brothers and sister had either moved off reservation or built new houses closer to town. I stayed on, in the quiet. One difference was I let the dog, a descendant of one that growled at the welfare lady, live inside with me. Mom and Dad had stationed the television in the kitchen. They had watched it after dinner, bolt upright on their kitchen chairs, hands folded on the table’s surface. But I prefer my couch. I’ve had a fireplace installed with a glass front and fans that throw the heat off into a cozy circle, and there I sit every winter night, with the dog at my feet, reading or crocheting while I listen to the TV muttering for company.

One night the telephone rang.

I answered it with a simple hello. There was a pause. A woman asked if this was Linda Wishkob speaking.

It is, I said. I experienced a strange skip of apprehension. I knew that something was about to happen.

This is your mother, Grace Lark. The voice was tight and nervous.

I set the phone back down in the cradle. Later, that moment struck me as very funny. I had instinctively rejected my mother, left her in the cradle the way she’d left me in mine.

As you know, I am a government employee. At any time, I could have found out the address of my birth parents. I could have called them up, or hey, I could have gotten drunk and stood in their yard raving! But I didn’t want to know anything about them. Why would I? Everything I did know hurt and I have always avoided pain—which is maybe why I’ve never married or had children. I don’t mind being alone, except for, well ... That night, after I’d hung up the phone, I made a cup of tea and busied myself with solving word puzzles. One stumped me. The clue was double-goer, twelve spaces, and it took me the longest time and a dictionary to come up with the word doppelganger.

I had always identified the visitations of my presence as one of those spirits Betty’s doctoring let into my head. It first came when I was taken from Betty for that brief time, and put into the white room. At other times, I had the sensation that there was someone walking beside me, or sitting behind me, always just beyond the periphery of my vision. One of the reasons I let the dog live inside was that it kept away this presence, which over the years had grown to seem anxious, needy, helpless in some way I could not define. I had never before thought of the presence in relation to my twin, who’d grown up not an hour’s drive away, but that night the combination of the call out of the blue and the twelve-letter word in my puzzle set my thoughts flowing.

Betty told me she had no idea what the Larks had named the baby boy, though she probably knew. Of course, as we were different genders, we were fraternal twins and supposedly no more alike than any brother and sister. The night my birth mother called, I decided to hate and resent my twin. I’d heard her voice for the first time, shaky on the phone. He’d heard it all of his life.

I had always thought I hated my birth mother, too. But the woman had called herself, simply, mother. My brain had perfectly taped the words she said. All that night and the next morning, too, they played on a loop. By the end of the second day, however, the intonation grew fainter. I was relieved that on the third day they stopped. Then, on the fourth day, the woman called again.

She began by apologizing.

I am sorry to bother you! She went on to say that she had always wanted to meet me and been afraid to find out where I was. She said that George, my father, was dead and she lived alone and that my twin brother was a former postal worker who had moved down to Pierre, South Dakota. I asked his name.

Linden. It was an old family name.

Was mine an old family name as well? I asked.

No, said Grace Lark, it just matched your brother’s name.

She told me that George had quickly written my name down on the birth certificate and that they had never seen me. She went on talking about how George had died of a heart attack and she had nearly moved down to Pierre to be near Linden but she couldn’t sell her home. She told me she hadn’t known that I lived so close or she would have called me long before.

The light, conversational chatter must have caused a dreamlike amnesia to come over my mind, because when Grace Lark asked if we could meet, if she could take me out to dinner at Vert’s Supper Club, I said yes and agreed on a day.

When I finally hung up the telephone, I stared for a long time at the little log fire set going in the fireplace. Before the call, I’d laid the fire and looked forward to popping some corn. I would throw kernels high in the air and the dog would catch them. Perhaps I’d sit in the kitchen and watch a movie at the table. Or maybe I’d stay by the fire and read my novel from the library. The dog would snore and twitch in his dreams. Those had been my choices. Now I was gripped by something else—a dreadful array of feelings yawned. Which should I elect to overcome me first? I could not decide. The dog came and put his head in my lap and we sat there until I realized that one of the reactions I could have was numbness. Relieved, feeling nothing, I put the dog out, let him in, and went to bed.

So we met. She was so ordinary. I was sure that I had seen her in the street, or at the grocery, or the bank perhaps. It would have been hard to have missed seeing anyone, sometime, in a person’s life around here. But she would not have registered as my mother because I could detect nothing familiar, or like myself, about her.

We did not touch hands or certainly hug. We sat down across from each other in a leatherette booth.

My birth mother stared at me. You aren’t ... her voice fell off.

Retarded?

She composed herself. You got your coloring from your father, she said. George had dark hair.

Grace Lark had red-rimmed blue eyes behind pale eyeglasses, a sharp nose, a tiny, lipless bow of a mouth. Her hair was typical for a woman of seventy-seven—tightly permed, gray-white. She wore stained dentures, big earrings made of cultured pearls, a pale blue pants suit, and square-toed lace-up therapy shoes.

There wasn’t anything about her that called to me. She was just any other little old lady you wouldn’t want to approach. I’ve noticed people on the reservation don’t go toward women of her sort—I can’t say why. A mutual instinct for avoidance, I guess.

Would you like to order? Grace Lark asked, touching the menu. Have anything you like, it’s all on me.

No, thank you, we will split the check, I answered.

I had thought about this in advance and concluded that if my birth mother wanted to assuage her guilt in some way, taking me out to dinner was far too cheap. So we ordered, and drank our glasses of sour white wine.

We got through the dinner of walleye and pilaf. Tears came into Grace Lark’s eyes over a bowl of maple ice cream.

I wish I’d known you were going to be so normal. I wish I hadn’t ever given you up, she wept.

I was alarmed at the effect that these words had on her, and quickly asked, How’s Linden?

Her tears dried up.

He’s very sick, she said. Her face became sharp and direct. He’s got kidney failure and is on dialysis. He’s waiting for a kidney. I’d give him one of mine but I’m a bad match and my kidney is old. George is dead. You are your brother’s only hope.

I put my napkin to my lips and felt myself floating up, off the chair, almost into space. Someone floated with me, just barely perceptible, and I could feel its anxious breathing.

Now is the time to call Sheryl, I thought. I should have called her before. I had a twenty-dollar bill with me and when I landed I put that money on the table and walked out the door. I got to my car but before I could get in, I had to run to the scarp of grass and weed that surrounded the parking lot. I was throwing up, heaving and crying, when I felt Grace Lark’s hand stroking my back.

It was the first time my birth mother had ever touched me, and although I quieted beneath her hand, I could detect a stupid triumph in her murmuring voice. She’d known where I lived all along, of course. I pushed her away, repelled with hate like an animal sprung from a trap.

Sheryl was all business.

I’m calling Cedric down in South Dakota. Listen here, Tuffy. I’ll get Cedric to pull the plug on this Linden and you can forget this crap.

That’s Sheryl. Who else could make me laugh under the circumstances? I was still in bed the next morning. I’d called in sick for the first time in two years.

You’re not seriously even considering it, Sheryl said. Then, after I didn’t answer, Are you?

I don’t know.

Then I really am calling Cedric up. Those people ditched you, they turned their backs on you, they would have left you in the street to die. You’re my sister. I don’t want you to share your kidneys. Hey, what if I need one of your kidneys some day? Did you ever think of that? Save your damn kidney for me!

I love you, Sheryl said, and I said it back.

Tuffy, don’t you do it, Sheryl warned, but her voice was worried.

After we hung up, I called the numbers on the card Grace Lark had put in my pocket, and made hospital appointments for all the tests.

While down in South Dakota, I stayed with Cedric, who was a veteran, and his wife, whose name is Cheryl with a C. She put out little towels for me that she had appliquéd with the figures of cute animals. And tiny motel soaps she’d swiped. She made my bed. She tried to show me that she approved of what I was doing, although the others in the family did not. Cheryl was very Christian, so it made sense.

But this was not a do-unto-others sort of thing with me. I already said that I do not seek pain and I would not have contemplated going through with it unless I couldn’t bear the alternative.

All my life, knowing without knowing, I had waited for this thing to happen. My twin was the one just out of sight, right beside me. He did not know he had been there, I was sure. When the welfare stole me from Betty and I was alone in the whiteness, he held my hand, sat with me, and grieved. And now that I’d met his mother, I understood something more. In a small town people knew, after all, what she had done in abandoning me. She would have to have turned her fury at herself, her shame, on someone else—the child she’d chosen. She’d have blamed Linden, transferred her warped hatreds to him. I had felt the contempt and triumph in her touch. I was thankful for the way things had turned out. Before we were born, my twin had the compassion to crush against me, to perfect me by deforming me, so that I would be the one who was spared.

I’ll tell you what, said the doctor, an Iranian woman, who gave me the results of the tests and conducted the interview, you are a match, but I know your story. And so I think it only fair that you know Linden Lark’s kidney failure is his own fault. He’s had not one but two restraining orders taken out against him. He also tried to suicide with a massive dose of acetaminophen, aspirin, and alcohol. That’s why he is on dialysis. I think you should take that into account when making your decision.

Later that day, I sat with my twin brother, who said, You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be a Jesus.

I know what you did, I told him. I’m not religious.

Interesting, said Linden. He stared at me and said, We sure don’t look alike.

I understood this was not a compliment, because he was nice-looking. I thought he’d got the best of his mother’s features, but the deceitful eyes and sharky mouth, too. His eyes shifted around the room. He kept biting his lip, whistling, rolling his blanket between his fingers.

Are you a mail carrier? he asked.

I work behind the counter, mostly.

I had a good route, he said, yawning, a regular route. I could do it in my sleep. Every Christmas my people left me cards, money, cookies, that sort of thing. I knew their lives so well. Their habits. Every detail. I could have committed the perfect murder, you know?

That took me aback. I did not answer.

Lark pursed his lips and looked down.

Are you married? I asked.

Nooooh ... but maybe a girlfriend.

He said this like, poor me, self-pity. He said, My girlfriend’s been avoiding me lately, because a certain highly placed government official has started paying her to be with him. Offering compensation for her favors. You get my drift?

I went speechless again. Linden told me that the girl he liked was young, working with the governor, that she got good grades and stood out, a model high-school sweetheart picked to intern. An Indian intern making the administration look good, he said, and I even helped her get the job. She’s really too young for me. I was waiting for her to grow up. But this highly placed official grew her up while I was stuck in the hospital. He’s been growing her up ever since.

I was uncomfortable and blurted out something to change the subject.

Did you ever think, I said, there was someone walking your route just beside you or just behind you? Someone there when you closed your eyes, gone when you opened them?

No, he said. Are you crazy?

That was me.

I picked up his hand and he let it go limp. We sat there together, silent. After a while, he pulled his hand out of mine and massaged it as though my grip had hurt him.

Nothing against you, he said. This was my mother’s idea. I don’t want your kidney. I have an aversion to ugly people. I don’t want a piece of you inside me. I’d rather get on a list. Frankly, you’re kind of a disgusting woman. I mean, I’m sorry, but you’ve probably heard this before.

I might not be a raving beauty queen, I said. But nobody’s ever told me I’m disgusting.

You probably have a cat, he said. Cats pretend to love whoever feeds them. I doubt you could get a husband, or whatever, unless you put a bag on your head. And even then it would have to come off at night. Oh dear, I’m sorry.

He put his fingers on his mouth and looked slyly guilty. He gave his face a mock slap. Why do I say these things? Did I hurt your feelings?

Did you say those things to drive me away? I asked. I had begun to float around again, the way I had in the restaurant. Maybe you want to die. You don’t want to be saved, right? I’m not saving you for any reason. You won’t owe me anything.

Owe you?

He seemed genuinely surprised. His teeth were so straight that I was sure he’d had orthodontic work done when he was young. He started laughing, showing all of those beautiful teeth. He shook his head, wagged his finger at me, laughing so hard he seemed overcome. When I bent down awkwardly to pick up my purse, he laughed so hard he nearly choked. I tried to get away from him, to get to the door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

My father sat silently at the table, hands folded and head lowered. I couldn’t think of what to say at first, but then the silence went on so long I said the first thing that came into my head.

Lots of pretty women own cats. Sonja? I mean, the cats live out in the barn, but she feeds them. You don’t even have a cat. You have a dog. They are picky. Look at Pearl.

Linda beamed at my father and said that he had raised a gentleman. He thanked her and then said he had a question for her.

Why did you do it? he asked.

She wanted it, said Linda. Mrs. Lark. The mother. By the time the whole procedure was settled, I abhorred Linden—that’s the word. Abhorred! But he cozied up to me. Plus, it was ridiculous because now I felt guilty about hating him. I mean, on the surface he was not all bad. He gave to charity cases, and sometimes he decided on a whim, I guess, that I needed his charity. Then he gave me presents, flowers, fancy scarves, soaps, sentimental cards. He told me how sorry he was when he was mean, temporarily charmed me, made me laugh. Also, I can’t explain the hold that Mrs. Lark could exert. Linden was sullen to her and insulting behind her back. Yet he’d do anything she said. He consented because she forced him. And after that, as you know, I became very ill.

Yes, said my father, I remember. You contracted a bacterial infection from the hospital and were sent to Fargo.

I contracted an infection of the spirit, said Linda precisely, in a correcting tone. I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My real family came to my rescue, got me on my feet again, she went on. And Geraldine too, of course. Also, Doe Lafournais put me through their sweat lodge. That ceremony was so powerful. Her voice was wistful. And so hot! Randall gave me a feast. His aunts dressed me in a new ribbon dress they made. I started healing and felt even better when Mrs. Lark died. I suppose I shouldn’t say that but it’s the truth. After his mother was gone, Linden moved back to South Dakota and soon he cracked again, or so I heard.

Cracked? I asked. What do you mean by that?

He did things, said Linda.

What things? I asked.

Behind me, I could feel the force of my father’s attention.

Things he should have got caught for, she whispered, and closed her eyes.