White Bird in a Blizzard

Of course, by morning I’m afraid to wear anything at all, and it takes hours to get ready for school. By the time I’m done, there’s a stripped heap of clothing on the bedroom or bathroom floors, as if the girls who’d been wearing those outfits had dissolved, sweaters and skirts dropping out of the air where they’d been.

A lot of trouble. For what?

But in the morning, at our lockers, outside the vinegar glare of the gym, Beth says, “You look great, Kat. I like your sweater.” Of course, it wouldn’t matter what I was wearing, or how I looked in it, Beth would say that: It is Beth’s role. Like an usher in an auditorium, handing out programs, saying, “Enjoy the show,” Beth is there for me. Even when I am bitter, or premenstrual—cramped, depressed, snapping at Beth—she will tell me I look good, smell good, did the right thing.

Still, I can tell when she really means it, and lately she really means it. Lately, everything I wear looks right. The janitor calls me, “Hey, kitty-cat,” purring as he moves his mop around and around on the floor.

“He’s got the hots for you,” Beth says, gesturing at the janitor, who has a limp, who has the name, or the word, “Dick,” embroidered above his heart.

I’ve known Beth since third grade, since she and I were fat girls together standing in the snow at recess, watching the other girls jump rope. We were both too fat to be invited to join them, so after a while we had to talk to each other. Those girls would jump faster and faster in a blur of limbs and clothesline while we waited in our big rubber boots for the bell to ring and call us back into the warmth of Mrs. Mulder’s classroom.

Finally, out of sheer boredom, we invented a game of our own, which had to do with the teeter-totter. We’d go up and down, up and down, chatting amiably, but then one of us, the one who was down, would casually slip off the end and let the other one, the one who was up, crash back to earth.

The object of this game was to slide off your end of the teeter-totter when the other least expected you to—perhaps in midsentence, smiling—in order to heighten the terror and thrill of suddenly plummeting through air, pure gravity, a fat girl with wings shot out of the sky.

The first time Phil and I had sex, I remembered that game with Beth. The jovial anticipation of danger and pain, looking all the time into her inscrutable face as she looked into mine.

Although I’ve lost thirty pounds, Beth stubbornly remains sixty pounds overweight. She has become a bit of a celebrity at school—admired, but not liked: an object of envious pity. Beth’s claim to fame is the steel trap of her brain. She’s won every math award the state of Ohio has to offer, and her bedroom walls are papered with certificates and plaques and letters of congratulation signed by one of the governor’s aides. Even when she’s simply eating a fruit pie in the cafeteria, that brain is chewing up the computable world and its reams of ticker tape.

“Kat,” she said to me once when I told her how many pounds I’d lost, “that’s 489 ounces. 32.7 milligrams. 457 liters of fat,” or something like that.

“Jesus Christ, Beth,” I said, “shut up. I don’t want to know that. What makes you think people want to know stuff like that?”

I sounded like my mother as I said it.

Beth looked sad, with her bland face, her light brown hair. It is the same face she wore long ago, back on the teeter-totter. Little girl pudginess. A bit desperate, painfully clever, and stuffed up with secret rage.

The third of us is Mickey.

“The weird sisters,” my mother used to call us, or “the three blind mice.”

Like me, Mickey’s lost weight, left the fat-faced girl we met in seventh grade behind her like a bad date, ditched. She’s a cheerleader now, having snagged one of those coveted positions with all its myth and pomp and prestige despite being unpopular and acne-scarred.

Though they must not have wanted to give it to a girl like Mickey, the selection committee simply could not have denied her a place on that squad. Even Miss Beck, the cheerleading coach, with her perky smile and high cheekbones, all cream and peaches, must have had to admit that Mickey is cheer, pep, the fighting spirit of pride—the personification of it.

“The Savages” our teams are called. Mickey’s job is to urge them on.

But, according to Mickey, the other girls on the squad won’t even sit next to her on the bus as it lurches and wallows its way across Ohio for our team’s away games. That bus, Mickey says, smells like panties.

FDS. Scent: Spring Rain.

As if a cool May afternoon were clamped between those cheerleaders’ legs, its sweet mist rising from their crotches, condensing on the windows of the bus.

Those pretty things will not, apparently, accept Mickey as one of them. Instead, they huddle together, swapping a hairbrush that grows more and more beautiful with silk and gold as it passes.

But, as I’ve said, Mickey could inject team spirit into the heart of a dead man—cartwheeling, scissoring, frantic zeal. Dancing to the flat music of the pep band, she is a morale machine. Arms and legs and voice, the tilt of her head, the sway of her hips, synchronized. More than once, Beth and I have sat together in the brisk wind of a football game and watched our friend go wild with blood lust on the field, leaping, backlit by the pure glare of stadium light and scoreboard neon —“Ho ho, hey hey, we are going to make you pay”—and shaken our heads in admiring disbelief. After a close game, Mickey might be hoarse, or even voiceless, for days.

But the acne scars along her jawline and on her chin sometimes burn purple beneath the skin—angry, permanent scars, seething, rising to the surface on damp days, especially in the harsh light of late winter or early spring. I never knew Mickey when she had acne, though I’ve know Mickey for what seems like forever, and she’s always had those scars. Perhaps she was born scarred.

“Make new friends,” my mother used to say when Mickey and Beth left our house together, cutting out the back door like a pair of dull knives. She refused to learn their names. She called them Becky and Mindy right to their faces. “Those two are morbid. What’s the matter with them?” But I’ve never wanted other friends. I like what’s wrong with the friends I have.

“You’re beautiful now that you’re thin,” Beth said one afternoon before Christmas. Maybe she was drunk. We were sitting on the old vinyl couch, while, upstairs, my father could be heard in the kitchen, pacing, or marching in place. Mickey had poured a bit of filched gin into each of our diet Coke cans, and I was smoking without inhaling, just letting the smoke smear aimlessly across my mouth and face, roll off my tongue like a bitter cloud, or a big gray comma indicating a very long pause. The basement was cold, oozing with underground life, a clammy womb. There were only two windows in the finished section, and they let in just a little bit of cold prison light that, as soon as it crept in, was soaked up by the paneling and the gray carpet remnant.

“But you still act fat,” Beth said.

I thought about that, looking down at my short corduroy skirt, black tights, soft white sweater. I knew I dressed, now, like a person who was thin. I looked good in the clothes I wore. I’d started to wear lipstick, shave my legs, blow my hair dry so that wisps of it flew around my face, flattering and framing it like the bright plastic face of a doll, but I still felt fat.

“It’s my mother,” I said. “She’s inside me, with a balloon, waiting to blow me up.” And I remembered going to the mall with her before Christmas one year when I was a child. She wanted me to sit in Santa’s lap. I remembered how she handed me over to him, and how his arms felt warm, his lap was soft, and how the eyes lost in all that false beard were glassy, but very friendly. There were carols being sung somewhere above us, and the sound was fragile and full of light, like a glass straw held gently to a soprano’s lips.

“Can I take this little girl home?” he asked my mother, and she snatched me back.

“He liked you because you’re fat,” my mother said.

“She liked me fat,” I said.

“So did Phil,” Beth said.

We are intimate. Beth and Mickey and I talk about only the most personal things—our periods, our parents, our dreams. By now, we’ve snooped into the darkest corners of each other’s homes. Found each other’s mother’s diaphragms under the bathroom sink together—like flimsy UFO’s, or Playtex sand dollars, hinting vaguely of the sea, looking internal, but no more sexual than the plastic scrubbers with which those same mothers washed the dishes. And we were less impressed by the fact that our mothers might actually have sex with our fathers than by the possibility that something might still be generated from it. The possibility that fertility, for our mothers or for us, could go on for that long—little chickadees pecking nests in our uteruses forever.

We’ve seen each other’s fathers in their underwear stumbling to the toilet late at night, half awake—gray specters of manliness in middle age, shameful and concave.

“I can’t eat meatballs anymore,” Mickey said one evening in the basement, “since I saw your father without his shorts on, Beth. Your father’s balls look just like my mother’s.” And she waved her hand in the air as if to wave Mr. Warnke’s awful balls away.

“You’ll be sorry,” my mother said. “These are the happiest days of your life, and you’re not going to have anyone but those two Unsightlies to remember them by.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and turned my back, as blank as a lost memory, to her.

And, I think, What does it matter that I’ll never look back at my high school yearbook and recall, fondly, the dime-size faces of my classmates, the camaraderie of those days, the kegs thrown through plate-glass windows on Saturday nights when someone’s trusting parents were out of town, or my name spray-painted red on the east wall of the high school, where those popular kids traditionally immortalize themselves and one another in big, goofy letters in the last months of their senior years: hearts and stars and exclamation points, until the janitor comes and whitewashes another year of popular kids off the cinder blocks with his bucket and brush?

It would be like being a rabbit, being one of those popular high school girls—trembling, ephemeral, just a vaporous urge full of hindsight, hopping. An essence, all bubble, whim, and vim slipped quickly in and out of a sock of bright, pretty far, about to be ripped limb from limb by Time’s stray dog.

Why even assume I’d want to be one of them? Besides, my life in this place is swiftly ending. Already my college applications are in the mail. Four of them. Each with a carefully worded personal essay that begins, “I wish to attain the finest education I can, which, for me, means attending——.”

In truth, college has always been the last place I wanted to go. It looms in my imagination as a kind of Emerald City full of sunglass-wearing rich kids with bandannas around their necks in the ice-green light of their Heineken bottles. At the center, an awful little man runs the show. Not a professor: an administrator, like my father. If you saw him, you would gasp in disappointment and sudden understanding.

Mickey and Beth can’t wait to go. Phil doesn’t plan to apply.

I HEAR MY FATHER PICK UP THE PHONE, WHICH HASN’T RUNG this early since the morning after my mother left, the morning she called to tell my father she was never coming back. I never actually heard it ring that time, and, I realize now, it’s been months since the phone seemed like a likely way for my mother to contact us. I imagine, instead, skywriting, or telepathy, or a flock of birds in the bathtub as her method, at this point, of sending a message. I smudge the lid of my eye with mascara when I hear the phone ring, and have to wet a tissue to get it off.

Two years ago, when my father first filed the Missing Persons Report, the cops told us to stick close to the phone for a few weeks, told us we might get a call at any time, day or night, that it might be an emergency.

So, we got an answering machine, just in case we were out when the Big Call came, and my father recorded it with the only message we could think of, “No one’s home right now. Please leave a message after the beep.”

But no messages came from or about my mother, except the shh-shh-shh of no news.

The smudge on my eyelid looks like a bruise, and the harder I try to rub it off, the darker it gets, so I dot the other lid with mascara, too, and decide to make a determined action of it: black eye shadow. I hear my father say something into the phone downstairs in a throaty morning voice, and he hangs up quickly.

Later, in the car, headed toward the high school, my father identifies the mystery caller. He flexes and bends his gloved fingers around the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. January is turning to water all around us. When it freezes again, it will be dangerously slick. I remember seeing the parking lot of the Rite Aid rush into my face last year, and the sting of it on my palms. “The person who called,” my father says, “was a woman.”

There’s a silence from him then that seems to suck the air in the car into it. I look at the side of his face. My father’s hair is silver now—the color of dirty money. He’s handsome. He does not look weak. When did he stop looking weak?

“Yeah?” I ask, and I know I sound surly. I’m a teenager. I’m not sure where my little-girl sweetness went. Like the weakness of my father, it simply vanished. I woke up one morning and it was gone.

He swallows. “Well. She is a textbook saleswoman I met at the office. She wants me to go to dinner with her.”

I laugh out loud, then cover my mouth with my glove.

“Does that upset you?” my father asks, still looking fixedly into the firing squad in front of him.

“Hell no,” I say. “Why shouldn’t you go out with women, Dad? I’m thrilled you scored a date.” I even touch his hand on the steering wheel: that’s how much of an open-minded and supportive eighties kind of kid I am.

My father laughs a little to himself then, and it sounds like the laugh of a panicked man on a packed elevator, the needle dropping too fast, but not fast enough to scream yet: He still has to keep his cool.

“Good,” he says, lightening up. He’s wearing a tan coat over his blue suit and a red wool scarf around his neck.

“She’s nice,” he offers, tossing one hand in the air in my direction, as if throwing confetti, and I recognize my moment—this intimate space we’re in and its potential for personal profit. Don’t all teenage girls come equipped with radar for this?

“But, Dad,” I say, “if I don’t like her, do I get to give you as much shit about it as you give me about Phil?”

He checks the rearview mirror, puts the car into park in front of the high school, and sighs. Then he looks at me and says in a docile voice, thick with tongue, “I guess I should quit giving you what-for about Phil,”—making quotation marks in the air around “what-for”—“is that what you’re saying?”

I raise my eyebrows and hum, “Mmm-hmm,” and try to sparkle at him as I give him a quick kiss good-bye and bound out of the car.

I realize now that I’m playing the part of a vivacious daughter with a stern, worried, widowed father—although my quite-alive mother could very well be waiting for us right now back at the deserted ranch.

Would she care if, when she came back, my father had a girlfriend?

Was my mother a jealous wife?

Had she ever been? Had my mother ever had that feeling I used to have when I’d see Phil leaning up against his locker, some other girl—maybe Bonnie Pinter, who never wore a bra, whose lips were always wet and parted in a kind of permanent blow-job invitation—giggling into his face?

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he’d say when I accused him of flirting with her. “She’s a hose bag.”

But I’d feel as if someone had stuffed my throat with cotton. I couldn’t stand to think of him thinking of someone else. I could turn a corner in the hallway of that high school and see him standing in the glare, talking to Mickey, just Mickey, my best friend, and find myself riding that downward slope in my stomach, like a child on a tricycle, out of control, rolling down a hillside while something inaudible screamed inside me.

Had my mother ever felt like that?

When my father takes off his glove to wave good-bye, I see he’s taken off his wedding ring. Just yesterday, at the dinner table, it was there.

I FEEL SURE THAT MY MOTHER WAS NEVER JEALOUS, SURE SHE did not think for one moment that another woman could take an interest in my father. To her, he must have seemed like the last man on the face of the earth any woman would want. Isn’t it why she left in such a hurry, didn’t even bother to take her purse?

Getting stuck with him wasn’t even worth money, or credit cards, or lipsticks to her.

But he had been a jealous husband.

Once, at his golf league’s end of summer picnic, my father drank three beers too fast before the hot dogs were done and, flushed, sweaty, longing to brag to his buddies about something—all of them richer men and better golfers—he’d blurted out, apropos of nothing, “My Evie hasn’t gained a pound since we got married.”

The other wives at this picnic gasped, feigning admiration, hyped-up envy, when all they really felt was dull loathing for my father, his boorish bragging, his drunken flush, and for his wife’s slender body, sighing at her, “Oh, you make me sick,” as if it were a compliment as their horny husbands looked her over slowly, and the hot dogs sizzled in their skins, and a mirage of fertilized heat hovered above the green. My father’s cleats glinted in the sun, which set itself like a big red face in the west. Annoyed, my mother chewed a sour ice cube out of her vodka tonic and shot a look in my father’s direction like a spray of silver thumbtacks in the air.

But what my father noticed was the looks the other men sent her, not the one she sent him. He wanted to brag, but he didn’t want them to covet. He didn’t understand why they would. Didn’t they know she was his? He wasn’t a religious man, but he knew all about Thou shalt not stare at thy neighbor’s wife, and wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be polite.

And what were women to my father anyway? Hadn’t he always been the kind of man who sees a rolling pasture, forty acres of wildflowers and red-winged blackbirds flitting from cattail to cattail in their brilliant epaulets, and thinks what a nice golf course it would make, where he would lay the sandtraps, what it would be like to ride those mowed, green hillocks in a cart?

So, on the drive home from the picnic, he sulked.

My mother looked out at the passing landscape, all blurred edges in the twilight and August fog, and refused to ask him what was wrong—a little woozy with vodka, waiting for him to talk the way you wait for the dentist to stuff a piece of cotton between your lip and gums.

“I don’t like those guys looking at my wife,” he finally blurted out.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t point me out, then, and encourage them to look,” she said.

Silence.

He was thinking about golf courses—

Blackbirds and cattails and loosestrife once grew wild in the hills all over Ohio.

But what my father wanted was a smooth ride in a small motorized vehicle over domesticated pastures, plastic golf flags snapping in the breeze as they led you cheerfully from fairway to fairway, hole to hole.

THE GRANDMOTHERS MADE A BIG FUSS OVER MY FATHER AND me for Christmas. They stuffed our stockings with athletic socks. They made rice pudding. They played carols on the stereo all day, as if to drown out the white noise of a winter afternoon with shouting.

“HARK the herald angels sing . . .”

All day, a standing rib roast hissed and spit in the oven. The smell of scorched flesh, the domestic torture of a burning cow made our mouths water for hours before we ate it.

Phil came over with Mrs. Hillman just before the grandmothers piled the table with meat and relishes and pudding and bread, and they pretended that Mrs. Hillman was not blind, and that my father did not treat Phil like a mortal enemy—staring when Phil wasn’t looking, then looking away when Phil looked back.

“Merry, merry Christmas,” Marilyn said, raising a crystal glass of champagne above her head. We raised our glasses, too—my parents’ wedding crystal—and they caught the light from the ceiling and flashed it around the table as small, sharp pieces of air and water in our faces. When a bit of champagne spilled over the rim of Mrs. Hillman’s glass into my father’s mashed potatoes, Phil rolled his eyes.

“Brock, you eat some more roast,” Marilyn said to my father, her son. But, next to me, my father looked pale before the mounds of food, which were hidden under pot lids and plastic wrap. He looked like a man at a feast for the dead—afraid of the food, surrounded by the ghosts of Christmas past: hazy females shaking fists at him, or a host of Virgin Marys in their blue robes, tapping their toes impatiently, visibly annoyed to be waiting in a manger, somewhere else to go.

There’s always been a bit of the scrooge in my father anyway—the miser, the worrier. He’s always been the kind of man who’d try to haggle the price of a Christmas tree down from twenty dollars to ten, standing outside the trailer that was set up in the supermarket parking lot, puffing at the tree salesman, who was unshaven in a flannel work shirt, shaking his head no, no, no in the piney cold, the smell of sap, as my mother and I waited for my father back in the car, windows rolled up, heat blower stuffing our throats with dried-up air.

My father would come back to the car red-faced, without a tree, and say, “Let’s go somewhere else.” My mother would look down at her leather gloves then, the muscle in her jaw pulsing.

“But, Daddy,” I might have said, “that one was perfect.’”

And it had been: full-branched, smelling green and genial.

It didn’t matter.

We’d come home with a ten-dollar tree. The sickly twin of the one my father refused to buy.

Of course, someone being generous might have called my father practical. After all, we weren’t rich, really. He made a fine salary, but my mother didn’t work. And the mortgage on our house in Garden Heights was no small price to pay for a quiet suburb and a big garage. We paid a price to be surrounded by quiet, as if it were a jagged wall of diamonds.

So, someone generous might have pointed out that my father was looking out for us—socking it away for my college education, making sure we had nice clothes and sturdy furniture. He was a man who knew what waste was—how it accumulated in the emptiness you made for it: heaps of gnawed bones, empty tin cans, used paper plates, overpriced trees you only kept around for two weeks before hauling them to the dump—and he hated waste.

But my mother never saw him, never described him, in a flattering light. She used to call my father her wet blanket—

“How much did the new curtains cost?” my father would ask, standing open-mouthed before them after she’d spent the whole day hanging blinds, ruffles, rods.

As he left the room, she’d watch his back. “My wet blanket,” she’d say, and I pictured my father flattened by a steamroller, like a cartoon character—a drenched square of pale flesh with just his face still sticking up.

My father the bearskin rug.

At the dinner table this year, my father wore his familiar Christmas grimace, as if the expense of it had whittled his teeth down to painful nubs.

He’d given his mother and mother-in-law matching clock radios, and I’d gotten one, too, along with a little change purse with some cash crammed into it. “Buy yourself something you want,” he said while the tree blinked in his eyes. I didn’t count the bills.

“Have more, more,” one of the grandmothers said, pushing the roast toward him.

My father fished around the platter of beef with a fork, but took only one gray knuckle of hard fat, and then he cut it into two gelatinous halves, which he put in his mouth, sucking on each one for a while before he swallowed.

“SO,” MICKEY SAYS, “IF YOU FIND THE DETECTIVE THAT attractive, why don’t you go to his office and seduce him?”

We’re smoking menthol cigarettes in my mother’s station wagon in the high school parking lot. A minty scarf of smoke floats above us like something my mother might have worn home from her dentist’s office on a spring day.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. “He’s at least forty years old. Even if I could seduce him, couldn’t he go to jail for making it with a high school girl?”

“No,” Mickey says, considering this seriously. She looks like an accountant going over some numbers in the distance of the windshield. She’s wearing her cheerleading outfit, and her legs are bare and mottled with cold under the green-and-gold pleated skirt. Her short white socks are regulation, just above the ankle, and her leather coat is zipped up over a big green R. It’s basketball season again, those long months of muggy gyms, the smell of sweaty jockstraps, the rumbling thunder of bleachers and screaming muffled by cinder blocks.

Because Mickey is a cheerleader, if I wanted to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, she’d urge me on, she’d convince me I could do it without a problem: Am I seriously considering her advice?

She advises, “I don’t think so. I think the age of consent in Ohio is sixteen. Besides, Kat, he’s a fucking detective. Surely he could figure out some way to avoid getting caught.”

“What about Phil?” I ask her.

“What about Phil?” she asks me back, and we both start to laugh.

Laughing, she says, “Give Phil the old heave-ho, like the one your mother gave your father.”

I stop laughing. I think about my mother.

“Kat,” Mickey says. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t I have said that?”

“WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR MOTHER IS?” ZEENA ASKED me as we cleared the Christmas feast from the table and slipped the greasy dishes into gray sink water.

“Grandma,” I said, sounding impatient, “I have no idea.”

“Your father looks awful,” she said, licking a little gravy from the ladle before rinsing it off. “I left two husbands, God knows, but never like this. I told them where I was going.”

Marilyn appeared behind us then. She said, “But that wouldn’t be Evie’s style.” She shook her head sadly. “Evie would want to just disappear, to just poof”—and she made a starburst with her fingers, as if she were sprinkling the air with magic dust—“be gone.”

Zeena took a dishcloth out of a drawer, and smelled it, then looked at me. She said, “Wager a guess, Kat,” holding the checkered rag in one hand, wagging it cheerfully, “about your mother. Just a guess—where could she be?”

Always the gambler, Zeena.

Okay, I thought. Okay. Why not?

Wager a guess—

I was game to try.

I narrowed my eyes and thought hard for a while as my grandmothers looked at me, but the only thing that came to mind was the message on a billboard we used to pass on the highway on the way to the mall. It said, in stern black letters, THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.

I just shook my head. I said, “Sorry, Grandma, I can’t even guess.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

The next day, their planes left for opposite ends of the country at the exact same time, the grandmothers 40,000 feet above the earth in identical tin cans with wings, unzipping the clouds and the precipitation and the gray Midwestern sky between them.

Phil and I drove them to the airport through a miniature blizzard on a Tuesday afternoon. He and I sat in front, Phil driving, while the grandmothers held each other’s hands in the backseat. Zeena was wearing a denim dress and boots. Marilyn had her rabbit jacket zipped up, hood over her red hair, and, in it, she looked like a pet, which, when you brought it home from the pet store, you hadn’t expected to grow. You’d gone and bought something small and cuddly for your kid, but it kept getting bigger. And wilder. Maybe even a little mean. The highway scrolled its sooty cold ahead of us.

“Maybe your flights will be canceled,” I said over my shoulder, “because of the weather.”

“No way,” Zeena said, and Marilyn also shook her head. “No flight I’ve ever been booked on has ever been canceled.”

“Me either,” said Marilyn.

In the backseat of Phil’s father’s car, the grandmothers looked radiant, as if old age had embraced them with light, like two filaments in two lightbulbs—that kind of bright incarceration, each one in her loose cage of glass.

Where was my mother? I wondered.

I tried to think. But the possibilities seemed as uncountable as the stars, and to try to consider them all at once was like trying to decide where the universe might end or who invented God if God invented the world, like trying to see something white on white.

“What is infinity?” Mrs. Valentine asked us one day in Geometry as she drew a perfect chalk circle on the blackboard with a compass. No one raised a hand. And when I tried to think of an answer in the silence of that classroom, I found myself suspended and dizzy above my own brain, which did not seem to be contained by my skull any longer, but which drifted above me, invisible and uncontainable, without questions, let alone answers, only hinting at its possibilities through dreams and half glimpses of things I thought, briefly, I might have seen.

These thoughts of infinity exhausted me, as it did to look up at that perfectly empty circle on the blackboard, Mrs. Valentine waiting for an answer as I considered where my mother might be.

That circle was like the 0 on the cover of my mother’s book, Achieving Orgasm.

Or the O in Ohio—the big one, separated forever from the small one by a perfunctory salutation. Hi.

Hello.

As I stared into that circle, singular flakes of snow seemed to blow through my imagination, tossed around in the wind of it, some of it settling, some of it lifting and falling like a veil in front of my face, or a ribbon of breath I was chasing—trying to catch it, trying to keep it, in a flimsy Dixie cup.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” DR. PHALER ASKS. “DO YOU THINK your mother might have been having an affair?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I think about my mother.”

But what I think is this:

She was a housewife, his housewife.

For twenty years she served his dinner at six o’clock. Afterward, she washed the dinner dishes in Palmolive, to keep her hands soft. One Christmas when he offered to buy her a dishwasher she insisted she would never use it, that washing her husband’s dinner dishes by hand was one of the greatest pleasures a woman could have. And he had no idea she was being sarcastic.

This is what I know about my father:

When they were first engaged, he would have wanted his mother and brothers to see her dressed up and wearing his ring—an unimaginative diamond solitaire, quarter carat, the kind of engagement ring jewelers keep in a velvet-lined drawer labeled Tightwads. He liked the way it looked on her finger. A bit of smudged light he’d given her for agreeing to be his wife.

Simple, it made a simple statement about him on her hand.

Sometimes, he’d write my mother’s new name under his on a scrap of paper:

Brock Connors

Evie Connors

Then, Mr. and Mrs. Brock Connors.

Then, the one that hurt her teeth to see, Mrs. Brock Connors—as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her.

Newly engaged, waiting for the Big Day the way you wait for a pleasant dentist jangling his tray of silver instruments your way—all that necessary pain—perhaps my mother imagined herself in a white apron in the suburbs, wearing a pleated poodle skirt, hair pulled back in a glistening bun, plugging a vacuum cleaner in and being sucked up.

“So, why did she marry him?” Dr. Phaler asks.

“Because,” I say, “he was there. And he wanted to marry her.”

She was twenty-seven, a receptionist at Waterhouse Steel, and lived with her father, who built model airplanes in his study all day. At night, he would fly a radiocontrolled helicopter around the house—sweating as he did, manning the operations nervously, knocking over lamps, breaking things.

When she was hired at Waterhouse Steel, the company president assured her she’d have a long and promising future there, but five years later she still spent every day at the reception desk, answering the phone, listening to the other secretaries behind her whisper about layoffs and pay cuts, voices full of asthma and nervous itching.

“Waterhouse Steel. How may I direct your call?” she asked hundreds of times a day.

She even said it in her sleep. But in her dreams, there was no one on the other end of the line when she answered, just the sound of blood pumping in her own ear. Her own blood. Pale and pumping. A little wind, too. A bit of static—as if, far away, a small brown bird with dry and wiry feet was hopping across a waxy sheet of sandwich wrap on its way to her.

And she began to think the sound of that emptiness might be the music of her future—

Weather, nasty birds, and nothing.

She’d gone to college, and she’d done well. She’d received some modest attention. For English 472, her senior year, she wrote a paper about Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience entitled “Sacrificial Lamb,” which was prefaced by a quote from “The Tyger”:

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The paper considered the dual nature of human existence as it was depicted in the songs. And Professor Norman Owen, who was a minor poet in his spare time—gray-bearded but with a rippling chest of muscles he must have spent a fair portion of his working life developing—read my mother’s paper out loud on the last day of class and even asked her to stand afterward as her classmates clapped. Through most of the semester she’d sat in the back, taking notes, and he hadn’t spoken a word to her, nor had he any reason to until that day.

“Eve,” he said, handing the paper back to her, “splendid work!”

It was what he’d written on the bottom of it, too:

Eve, Splendid work! A+

And that was that.

After class, he left the auditorium where he lectured, dogged by three or four young men—all of them bespectacled, white shirts tucked sloppily into their pencil-legged pants, huffing seriously about “The Waste Land” all the way back to Professor Owen’s office with him.

This was 1962.

The next day, her father came to pick her up in Columbus, happy to see her, happy to be carrying her clothes and books in flimsy cardboard boxes out of her little dorm room with its peeling walls, bringing her home with her A+ paper and a degree on a piece of parchment that smelled like stale cake.

When they got back to their old farmhouse outside Toledo, when they’d hauled her things back to her childhood bedroom, my mother’s father collapsed on their sagging couch and said, “Thank God that’s over!”

Meaning college.

How had it come and gone so fast?

She’d barely blinked, and she was back.

So, my mother’d had an education. She’d wandered through one of the largest libraries in Ohio for four years: all those yellow pages eaten up by worms and doubts, and that musty air in her hair when she went back to the dorm to sleep.

She’d never gotten into a sorority. For four years she’d studied English and worked in a cafeteria, cutting squares of Jell-O and spice cake with a flat knife, then placing them carefully under the chilled cafeteria glass.

Why the idea of a real career never came to her in those years between college and my father, I do not know.

Why she didn’t do something later with her good education is a puzzle. It must have been a puzzle even to her. Those four years in college, perhaps they turned, after five years at Waterhouse Steel, into a cool and trembling cube in her mind. Perhaps she was afraid, after all that time, to turn it over in her memory, afraid to lay it out again on the plain, white, cafeteria plate of her life.

Her job was dull.

Her father was not a talker.

She’d started to look for excitement in Toledo bars at night, looking for a man, looking for a future. She was beautiful, and smart. A sexy, witty, desperate woman.

Once, in a magazine I picked up in a dentist’s waiting room—perhaps Dr. Heine’s office, waiting for my mother, perhaps Woman’s Day—I read a statistic that surprised me: The most likely place for an American woman in her midtwenties to die is in the passenger seat of a car.

I tried to imagine it. All across America, young women in passenger seats, watching the continent roll past them from those car windows, counting crows, and cows, and rest stops, crossing and uncrossing their legs, flipping the mirrored sun visor down to get a look at themselves—pretty, lipsticked, hair tucked neatly behind their ears—while some man drives them somewhere they may or may not want to go. To a bar, to a movie, to bed.

For a while, my mother was one of them.

She was single, twenty-seven, a receptionist at Waterhouse Steel. She lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Toledo with her father, who was turning into an old man. She needed to get married, but what she wanted was excitement, and there she was, trying to find it, night after night in the passenger seat of some bass player’s, or pilot’s, or Marine on leave’s car.

I could easily imagine my mother as a young woman in the passenger seat of that car. There it was. All that trust in nothing, like faith in God, letting this guy decide when to change lanes, letting this guy (and maybe he’s been drinking beer all night, maybe he’s stoned out of his mind—which, even sober, was never razor sharp) roll through the intersection under a blinking light.

Like faith in God—only he’s no god. He’s wearing plaid pants. He flunked out of high school, or he studied marketing in college. Maybe he fails to see the semi, bearing down, or he flips the car he’s driving, with that young woman beside him, into a ditch. Perhaps, before they come to rescue her with the Jaws of Life (she’s pinned in the wreckage while he smokes a cigarette at the side of the road, feeling bad about what happened, telling the cops it was an accident) she sees it all flash before her eyes. She thinks, This was bound to happen. There’s blood, and something worse—something soft and squidlike—on her tongue, and then it’s done.

“Is this Eve?” my father asked when he called one week after they’d met in the lounge of the Franklin Hotel. He’d been there for a conference. She’d been there to watch a bass player she’d been dating.

“Do you like to dance?” she asked him on their first date. They sat in the red vinyl booth of a restaurant downtown. My father chased a rack of ribs, bloody with barbecue sauce, around on his plate with a knife. His hands were slick.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

My mother pushed her plate away and put her hands in her lap. She imagined herself with a diamond on her hand saying, “I quit,” to the president of Waterhouse Steel. But she couldn’t look across the table at my father, who had a red gash of sauce stretching from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Phaler says, “our time is up.”

I’M WEARING A NIGHTGOWN MADE OF FOG, AND I’M INVISIBLE in it. My mother dusts my bedroom with a huge fan of feathers, and the motion, the wind she’s lifting, billows around me.

“Mom,” I say, “stop. I’m going to blow away.”

But she doesn’t hear or see me.

She’s dusting the top of my dresser, and the windowsills, and the comers of the floor. A cyclone of dust is kicked up by her feathers, and somehow I know that, really, it’s my father she’s trying to dust out. I can tell by the angry trembling of those feathers, the way she shakes them like a soft fist all around her all at once, making a storm of the calm. But I’m only fog—

I feel my feet lift off the ground.

She opens the window, and I feel myself sifted into a million little wisps, drifting out the screen.

Slipping past her I say, “I was there, too, but you didn’t see me.”

“I KNOW SHE DIDN’T HAVE ORGASMS,” I TELL DR. PHALER.

Though there is only the slightest change in her professional expression (What is it? A minute widening of the eyes? A barely registered raising of the eyebrows?) I can see she’s interested. “How do you know?” she asks in a tone of total composure, as if her voice is coated with wax.

“There’s a book, in her dresser, in a shoe box, Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide.”

“What made you look in her dresser?”

“Oh.” I shrug. “I looked in it years ago. I was curious.”

“Have you looked there since? Is the book still there?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Do you think there’s something significant about this?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I guess it’s just more evidence of her dissatisfaction. Her frustration, I guess. I guess her sex life with my father must have been pretty dull.”

“What does this mean to you?”

I think for a long time. I think of my mother reading that book in the afternoon while my father was at work, while I was at school. She spilled coffee on it, broke the spine, then shoved it back in her drawer, in that shoe box, to hide it—but she couldn’t have learned anything she didn’t already know:

You need to relax, it urged.

You need to learn to let go.

You need to believe you deserve pleasure, then go off in search of it.

The book was full of silly, New Age suggestions:

When no one is at home, take a long, naked look at yourself in a full-length mirror, and tell yourself you love what you see. Say it out loud. Say, “I love my body,” to yourself. Say, “I love you,——,” to your mirror.

I couldn’t imagine my mother doing that. I couldn’t stand to imagine my mother doing that.

“She was getting older,” I say to Dr. Phaler, but my voice sounds far away. “She didn’t want to die like that.”

“Like what?” Dr. Phaler asks. I see her through a scrim of cold ash, as if we are in one of those plastic globes of snow, shaken.

“She was tired of baking Christmas cookies”—and, up on Dr. Phaler’s ceiling tiles, I see all those sheets and tins and ovens full of cookies, all that frozen dough in the freezer. I remember Hansel and Gretel’s witch in the woods. How her house was made of candy and cake, and how she was crippled with rage.

And I remember how, when Phil and I had been dating for only a few months, my mother came downstairs one night while we were making out on the couch.

Back then, our bodies were like two plants growing everywhere at once, getting closer and closer, twining and choking and groping—writhing in the night, unfurling enormous leaves in the dark, thorns and flowers and birds’ nests—swiftly, but in slow motion. I suppose she could smell us from her bed above us, the panting and rustling, the sound of pores expanding, oozing hormones, drooling into each other’s hair.

When we noticed she was standing on the stairs, looking down on us, we panicked, and sat up fast. I pulled my sweater back down around me. Phil zipped up his pants. But my lips were engorged, obscene, a sexual organ.

“Mom,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “C’est moi.”

She wasn’t wearing a robe, just a nightgown, and she came downstairs slowly and stood before us. The only light that was on was behind her, and her body was outlined—a solid, dark silhouette of hips and breasts—under the thin silk. I noticed Phil look up, then look away, too fast.

“Listen,” she said. “Do what you have to do down here, kids, but don’t spot my couch, okay?”

I looked down.

Phil flinched.

Maybe, back in bed above us, she lay awake and listened to the dark.

The whole house was breathing hard. The furnace, snoring dust. That freezer in the basement—like agitation, frozen stiff. Water slowly rising in the toilet tank. The humming of the fuse box. The tight, silent whine of the telephone line stretching into the night.

My father slept restlessly beside her, and she could hear his toes rustle under the covers.

She hated those toes.

Then, the darkness under her seemed to expand:

She could tell we were at it again. Clawing, clutching—

Maybe she remembered seeing Phil that first time, the day she went to introduce herself to his mother. How he’d descended the stairs shirtless, just a feather ridge of hair along his breastbone. Naturally muscled. The muscles of a boy, not a bodybuilder. Maybe she saw herself wearing a long-lost and forgotten dress—gauzy, embroidered with pale glue pearls. Now where did I wear that? she thought, and then it all came back: the Kleenex and lotion in her purse, the sentimental music, some boy’s big hands moving over her like the flu. She had been sick with kisses.

And the darkness below her seemed to rise like dough—flour and yeast and water mixed up with night.

We were down there in that darkness, that darkness that might rise and rise, and push everything out of its way as it rose, as it pushed its way out of the living room, swelling up the stairs. It might smother her in her sleep with its sprawling, domestic flesh. Maybe she was thinking about that, and couldn’t possibly sleep with us below her, doing that.

When we heard her descending the stairs again, we pulled our clothes together, and Phil fled.

“Go to bed,” she hissed at me between her teeth as I passed her on the stairs.

“It’s why she left,” I say to Dr. Phaler just as my time runs out.

“I BOUGHT A BIRD,” MY MOTHER TOLD MY FATHER WHEN she got home one Saturday from the mall. “It’s in the car.”

“What?” he asked, then asked again, “What?”

“I said,” she said, pronouncing each world carefully, “I bought a bird.”

Phil and I came down the stairs then. Perhaps we looked tousled, mutually pawed. At that point, my father was still naive, and he let us stay up there all day with the door closed. He must have thought we were playing an intensive game of chess, one that left us sweaty and short of breath.

“Go get it for me, would you?” my mother said to Phil, who was used to taking orders from women. His blind mother issued them from her armchair all day, and that was why he spent so much time at our house—nosing through our kitchen for cheese and cold meat.

And every night, he stayed for dinner, and liked to eat—complimenting my mother’s cooking with every bite he took, mmm-ing and nodding. She liked that, and started making dishes she’d never made for my father and me—mignon Alfonse, beef medallions l’orange, chicken in wine, letting the chicken stew a long time in a whole bottle of burgundy until the soaked meat shed like wet feathers from the bones—slippery, tinged with purple—and the kitchen smelled like a shelter for drunks, humid with booze, warm and debauched.

Phil’s mother was a terrible cook—couldn’t measure, couldn’t see the color or the texture of the food she made, so that, even with Phil’s help in the kitchen, her tuna casserole might turn out as green and soupy as a meal made of swamp, her chicken breasts burnt black in a pan—and Phil ate everything my mother made as if he’d never eaten.

My father, of course, couldn’t tell Hamburger Helper from mignon Alfonse, and I had gotten so used to dieting, back when I was fat, that what I saw when I looked at a plate of food was a graph of calories, a calculation of ounces and grams, how many laps around the neighborhood such a meal would cost.

We were never the eaters she wanted us to be. Too stupid, too selfish, or too afraid. So my mother finally had in Phil the audience she’d always wanted. At these last suppers, which were clearly prepared in Phil’s honor, my father would look down at his plate, confused, fork poised over an inebriated wing, as if he’d just been deported to a foreign country. But Phil would shovel it in, leaning over intently, as if he were washing his face in my mother’s meal.

Once, my mother told me to invite Phil’s mother over, too. But when I did, Mrs. Hillman just shook her head and made the comers of her mouth into little, irritable pyramids. “No,” she said, “I don’t like your mother.”

“The bird’s in a cage in the backseat,” my mother said to Phil. “Be careful carrying it in.”

Phil shrugged and said, “Sure.”

He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. His hair was bright, and little slivers of blond shimmered on his chin and upper lip. He hadn’t shaved for a day or two.

“What kind of bird?” I asked.

She said, “You’ll see.”

The bird was a canary. Simple and white. It had quivered in my mother’s palm at the pet store in the mall like a mouse, like a milkweed pod splitting with silk, or a feathered change purse full of blood and hollow bones. Its eyes were black beads, and they darted around the pet store while that bird sat scratch-scratching its wire feet in my mother’s hand, scanning the place for cats, or planning its escape, thinking, Now’s my big chance.

But it couldn’t fly away. The pet store girl had shown my mother how to hold it. “Here,” she said, “like this,” placing my mother’s palm over its wings, “so you can’t cut off his breath.”

The girl was young, wearing a tight dress. Her hair was black, and she had a little, clipped nose.

My mother held the bird the way the pet store girl had shown her, and she could feel its heart against her lifeline, quivering like a little finger in its sleek chest. She popped it back into the cage and said to the pet store girl, “I’ll take it.”

That canary snapped its head mechanically, like a wind-up toy, taking this new information in.

“And a cage?” the girl asked. “Do you have a cage?”

“No. I need a cage, and food, a bird-care book, all that.”

My mother took her credit card out of her purse, and the girl started pulling things off the shelves for her. Rape seed. Millet. Bath dish. Perching stick. It made my mother happy. She gave the girl her credit card with a smile as she rang up the purchases. And as the bird chirped nervously near the cash register in its cage, my mother wandered into the back of the store and watched an aquarium full of small silver fish dart in and out of the ceramic mouth of a shark. She’d let the girl pick out the cage, and it was the most expensive one—the size and shape of a hatbox, a high one, a hatbox made for a hat with feathers and fruit and lilacs on top.

“This is your guarantee that,” the girl said, showing my mother a piece of paper, “the bird is a male. If it doesn’t sing within fourteen days, you can bring it back for an exchange. But,” she said, “if you think you’ll want to do that, we have to mark the bird, so we know it’s the same bird you bought.”

My mother considered it for a moment—the guarantee, the marking.

“No,” she said, looking at her new bird’s pure white wing. It had its head tucked under there. She didn’t know how they marked birds, and didn’t ask. “I won’t be bringing it back.”

The girl threw the guarantee with its gold seal away, and said, “Enjoy your canary, ma’am.”

My mother carried the canary out of the mall like a lantern held in front of her. A hurricane lamp. Perhaps she looked like a Victorian ghost come back to haunt the mall in her wool coat, a thin and mysterious smile on her lips, headed somewhere with her bright urge in a cage. Children stumbled at the ends of their parents’ arms, pointing at the bird, wanting her to stop, but she kept walking.

It was only early November, but Muzak Christmas carols were piping down from the ceiling—high up, near the fluorescent lights—saccharine, slippery, frivolous, sounding lubricated and faraway, as if a choir of angels had been shipped to Ohio from heaven in aluminum cans: exhausted containers of angels, like poultry, chicken feathered, passionless, disoriented. They’d been brought here against their wills, forced to spend their days warbling about God from some crawl space above the mall—

With feeling, my mother imagined the maestro of Corporate Christmas Carols screaming, stomping his foot, waving his baton madly over them in the air.

But that languid music, that spiritless serenade, oozed from the ceiling.

And when she left the mall for the parking lot, my mother passed Santa near the entrance. He was smoking a cigarette. His eyes were big, as if he were medicated, or insane. “Good-looking bird,” he said, and wiped his nose on the back of his black glove.

She’d bought a miniskirt, too, before the bird—suede, taupe. It was in a bag with the bird book and bird food, slung over her other arm. She hadn’t even tried it on. She’d just seen it waiting there, and bought it. She pictured herself wearing it, sitting in that fat man’s lap.

She was happy.

She hadn’t had a pet since I’d grown up.

After Phil brought it in, my mother set the bird up handsomely, royally, next to my father’s La-Z-Boy in the den—its little water dish, its lettuce bowl, its perching stick. All day that canary kept its head tucked under its wing. It didn’t sing, but my mother was perfectly willing to wait those fourteen days. She was in no hurry to hear it sing. She had waited longer for more important things.

“YOU LIKE?” SHE ASKED, PRESENTING HER MINISKIRT TO THE den. It was a Sunday. My father and Phil were watching football. I was doodling into a math book with a pencil, legs tucked up under me on the couch. I’d thrown a piece of pale lettuce fringe to the canary, who pecked apathetically at it. That canary had no appetite at all.

She was wearing sheer black panty hose. Black heels. A black turtleneck. And that miniskirt.

“Well?” she said.

My father looked up from the football game like a man who’d been slapped on the ass with a towel. Phil looked sheepishly at my mother’s shoes. I was stunned, looking from her good legs up to her bright face. She was flushed. Her hair was all done up, and she had a dark smear of lipstick on her lips. On the television there was a close-up of a girl with a shredded burst of pom-pom in her fist. Cheering. She must have been shaking it into the cameraman’s face.

“Pretty sexy for forty-six, don’t you think?” my mother asked.

I crossed my arms and looked away.

My father’s mouth was open.

Phil was nodding yes.

“HAVE A SEAT,” DETECTIVE SCIEZIESCIEZ SAYS, HANGING MY coat on a hook near his door, which he’s already shut. He’s wearing a starched white shirt, maroon tie, loosened, and his sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are thick. He has a tattoo on the left one, “USMC.”

The detective’s office is warm, and smells like leather, musky. The office of a man. His desk is cluttered with papers, piles of envelopes torn open, pens, street maps, and a metal box of Band-Aids. He’s wearing a Band-Aid across the knuckles of his right hand. His oak desk chair rocks as he leans backward, and I sit across from him in a plastic chair.

It’s six o’clock in the evening, and I can see the sky behind him through a window, which is open just a crack. That sky is spatulate and turning blue-black but sparked with small, hard, flakes of snow. We are on the seventeenth floor of his office building in downtown Toledo, and I think I can actually hear the place where the wind starts. We are that close.

Detective Scieziesciez takes out a notepad and a pen, leans forward on his desk, and writes something at the top of a page. The Band-Aid on his knuckles ripples as he writes. “I’m so glad you got in touch and could come down here,” he says. “You don’t mind if I take notes while we talk?”

“No,” I say, and look down at the buttons on my blouse. They are flat and gold, and I can see my face reflected in them. Seven buttons, seven faces. I am wearing the taupe miniskirt my mother bought when she bought her canary.

“Okay,” he says happily, leaning forward, looking at me. “Where should we start?”

“Well,” I say, trying to sound serious, and intelligent, and worried, but my voice sounds weightless to me. I feel so far up in the sky. As I rode the elevator here, I felt lightheaded, and tired, as if I were flying for the first time. Now, my voice sounds like tissue caught in my mouth. “I called because I thought maybe I had some information. About my mother.”

“Of course.” He nods professionally. His jaw is dark with the stubble of the beard he must have shaved this morning, growing back already, just like the first time I saw him. A strong jaw. His eyes are also dark, and his eyebrows are raised. I can smell him. Salt and sweat and deodorant soap. And it makes my heart pump as hard as a shark swimming fast in my blood.

I watch the detective’s pen move over his pad of paper as I speak. I say, “I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking my mother might have been having an affair when she left. I’ve remembered some things.”

The detective writes this down. I look at his arms. From the elbows down, they are bare, resting on his desk. He looks up at me, pleased, and says, “Tell me more, sweetheart.”

“I DON’T LIKE THAT CANARY,” MY FATHER SAID. IT WAS perched on my mother’s little finger, feet curled up tightly, and it made nervous pecking motions in my father’s direction, as if it were sewing something invisible between them in the air.

“You don’t like that canary,” my mother sang to the tune of “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “and I don’t care.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, seeming sincerely perplexed.

The canary shivered in her hand, as if a smaller, colder bird had darted across its grave. It looked frail, and my mother laughed out loud at my father in a sudden, cackling snicker.

“And what were you doing wearing that miniskirt?” he asked.

“You didn’t like it?” The canary crept up her blouse, making its way to her dark hair, tiny eye traveling over her enormous blue eye, taking it in, trying to imagine exactly what my mother was:

Not a bird.

Not a plane.

“Get that thing out of here,” my father said, grabbing at it.

The bird began to flap its white wings.

“Get your goddamn paws off my canary,” she said, slapping his hands away. “I’ll wear whatever the hell I want.”

On my father’s face, there was a puzzled expression, cheeks pulled in, a puffy pucker, as if he’d eaten a spoonful of something, and now it was moving around, still alive, in his mouth.

“ARE YOU FUCKING HIM?” SHE ASKED, STANDING IN THE doorway. I was on my back in bed, under the covers, in the dark.

“Jesus Christ,” I hissed in a low whisper, and rolled onto my side, turning my back to her. “Get out of here.”

“No,” she said, stepping into my bedroom and shutting the door behind her. It became pitch black in the room. I closed my eyes. From all the way in the basement, I could hear that canary screeching. Two days earlier, it had learned to warble, then the warbling had turned to horrible shrieking all day and night. We’d put the bird’s cage in the basement to escape it. “Well?” she said. “Is Phil good in bed?”

I said nothing, pulled the covers a little higher. I was naked and cool in my sheets. As a baby, I’d worn zip-up sleepers with feet. As a little girl, she’d dressed me in Victorian nightgowns. Now, whatever I was wearing when I got in bed, I took it off and threw it on the floor. I liked the feeling of nothing but my skin between the sheets and me.

“Well?” she said again. “Is Phil a good fuck?”

“What do you know about fucking?” I said. I could hear her inhale when I said it, as if the words had shocked her, though to me they’d sounded flat, rehearsed, as if I’d read them from a piece of paper someone offstage had just handed me. I didn’t even really know what I meant. For a split second I’d considered saying something about that book in her drawer, the one about achieving orgasms, but I had no idea what to say.

Suddenly, my mother flipped the light switch, and the whole room was exposed. She came to the edge of my bed, yanking the sheets and blankets off. I rolled onto my back, and grabbed them, struggling to pull them up again, but she kept them in her fists.

“What is this?” My mother was screaming. “What is this?” She tore the covers off completely, and they fell at the foot of my bed in a pile. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

I put my arms across my breasts, sat up, pulled my legs up to my chest, scrambling away from her. Her face was as white as a window shade. My heart was beating hard, and I was crying, shaking. “I was hot.” I said. “What do you care? What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to me that my daughter has become a slut.” She spat at me. Hands scratching in my direction, but missing me.

I was gasping. I couldn’t catch my breath.

“Mom.” I sobbed it. “Stop it. Stop.”

But she pummeled my shoulders with her fists—softly. Her fists felt soft. I tried to grab her wrists. Finally, she stopped, but she was panting hard with a dry and hollow sound.

“I know about fucking,” she said—faraway, defeated—before she backed away from my bed.

“What is the matter with you?” I screamed at her back as she left.

WE ATE IN HUMMING SILENCE. MY FATHER MASTICATING, Phil nodding and mmm-ing at my mother as I slid a piece of parsley around and around on my plate.

She’d made crabmeat thermidor over toasted Holland rusk, and the garnish of blanched almonds looked like fingernails burnt to a crisp.

Afterward, I went upstairs to change clothes. Phil and I were going to a movie. My father was on the toilet—his first stop every night right after he ate. He’d get up from the dining room table, say, “Excuse me,” and go directly to the bathroom to eliminate: The king upon his throne, my mother called it.

Phil was helping her clear the table.

He’d taken his sweatshirt off for dinner, as if dinner were a relay race or a basketball scrimmage, as if there were a trophy to win, and eating so much so fast made him sweat. The T-shirt he wore was tight, and his muscles were under it, right there, impossible not to notice. There was blond hair on his arms. You could even see his stomach muscles, how they rode all the way down into his pants.

My mother was wearing jeans, a wine-red sweater, and lipstick to match. She could hear water rush in the toilet, dragging my father’s waste away.

He was pulling up his pants, all done.

She could hear me bump around upstairs.

Phil had a stack of plates and greasy knives.

She blocked his path in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, and said, “Either I made too much, or you didn’t eat enough.”

He laughed, but he was nervous.

“Half of this is going to end up in Tupperware,” she said, taking the plate of crabmeat thermidor out of his hands.

When I came downstairs, they looked at me. I saw a napkin in my mother’s hand with her lipstick on it. My mother’s smile smeared off and crumpled up.

A ruined fist of it between them. Phil cleared his throat.

“What are you staring at?” she asked.

Many years before, my mother had been invited to a neighborhood Tupperware party, where she’d bought a whole set of it. The hostess of the party was the wife of one of my father’s golf buddies—a jowly, middle-aged man with the high shine of an alcoholic: rosy nose, buffed cheeks. He was away on business when his wife invited the other wives over to buy stackable plastic, but the smell of the man was all over the house—Listerine and whiskey and cigars. The hostess greeted her guests at the door of her Garden Heights home wearing a black dress and pearls—though she looked exhausted, worried. Her face was as unlined as a mask, skin pulled tight over her skull—the result of too much plastic surgery. As the wives filed in, the hostess ushered them one by one into the kitchen and opened the counters over her sink.

“I guess it’s pretty obvious I love Tupperware,” she said, grinning, painfully it seemed, showing off her perfect teeth along with five shelves of labeled containers brimming with Quaker Oats, white chocolate chips, sugar. “There’s not much I don’t have,” she said.

The guests sat on her floral divan, side by side, as the hostess wheeled out a demonstration for them. She pushed the lid of a clear plastic bowl down, then pulled up the side and let her audience listen to the burp. “Completely airtight,” she said.

At one end of the living room, she’d set out a silver tray of Brie, strawberries, grapes, and water biscuits. On the other, there was a basket filled with crudites, including three colors of bell pepper. But no one touched the food. Indeed, it was never offered. Instead, she gave each of the women a huge brandy snifter, then filled it again and again with white wine.

By the end of the evening, they were sloshed, throwing their arms around each other on the couch, flushed, snorting with laughter. The hostess stayed sober, but led the guests in a few songs. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “Old Man River,” and a round of “Row Row Row Your Boat.” Then, they took out their checkbooks and bought Tupperware, carrying it out into the snow to their cars, stumbling and giggling.

My mother came home from that Tupperware party—the only one she was ever invited to, as far as I know—happier than she had ever been.

“You’re drunk!” my father said, and my mother put a white plastic bowl on her head. She danced barefoot on the living room carpet for him.

He seemed pleased, too.

He liked the plastic items she’d picked out, and didn’t ask how much they cost.

Then, my mother wore the plastic bowl on her head upstairs, and came into my bedroom.

I might have been three or four years old, dreaming in an airtight container of sleep. What could I have dreamed back then—milk, snow, sugar? What could I have known?

She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily.

The hall light shone in my eyes.

There was a halo in her hair.

It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.

THE DAY BEFORE MY MOTHER VANISHED, HER CANARY DIED.

“You have to take it back to the pet shop,” I’d said that night. We could hear its stifled weeping from the basement all the way upstairs. “Something’s wrong with that bird.”

But my mother just stood in the doorway of the bathroom, a toothbrush poised near her mouth, wearing a silvery nightgown, and looked at me.

She said, “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“They offered me a guarantee, and I didn’t take it. They said they’d have to mark the bird if I might want to bring it back. I didn’t want them to mark the bird.”

Her hair was pulled up. I could see creases around her eyes like that canary’s feet, as if it had left its footprints behind on her face. She seemed more nervous than usual, and started to brush her teeth hard, running water, foaming at the mouth. From the bedroom, I could hear my father fart—loud, abandoned, like a man with nothing to lose. When she heard that, my mother threw her toothbrush down, put a hand on each side of the sink, and shook her head. “Jesus H. Christ,” she said, leaning into it, as if something were finally about to snap.

The next morning I got out the canary care book my mother had bought with the bird, but never read. It was full of startling facts—

I didn’t know, for instance, that canaries have no teeth. That the gizzard of a canary is full of gravel, which, instead of teeth, grinds the seed it eats.

Reading that, I tried to imagine my guts full of gravel—the terrible sound of my own gizzard grinding every night in the dark while I tried to sleep. Perhaps I’d tuck my head under my wing, too, not to hear it. Or maybe I’d sing, horribly, louder and louder every day. Maybe I’d look down at my own gray shit like a splattered skirt around me, and want to fly away.

Then I read the part that explained how disreputable bird dealers will try to sell you a female canary instead of a male. The female never sings, the book said. She’ll tuck her head under her wing all day. Be sure to get a guarantee. A bird who does not sing, who keeps her head tucked under her wing all day, is not a well-bred bird and will only bring you grief.

Of course, my mother’s bird sang, but its song was grief.

The next afternoon, when I went to the basement to feed it, the bird was dead at the bottom of her cage, wings wrapped around the silky change purse of her body, facedown—a terrible cherub, or a diseased angel’s handkerchief fallen out of heaven, full of coughed-up blood and phlegm. Something an angel had sobbed into for weeks.

My mother put it carefully in a shoe box and threw it into the trash.

“It wasn’t a male,” I said when she came back from the garage without the box. “They ripped you off.”

My mother had a look on her face I didn’t recognize, and she fixed me with it.

The next day, she was gone.

THE DETECTIVE’S CONDOMINIUM IS ONLY TEN MILES FROM his office. Freedom Crest is the name of the complex it belongs to, a coil of apartments and condominiums with a small black pond in the middle—the heart of freedom, unbeating, iced over, and deep.

Detective Scieziesciez opens his garage from far away with the automatic opener on his sun visor. “That’s my unit,” he says, pointing to the one with cedar shingles and no lights on, except in the garage, the door rising to expose it.

It’s the home of a bachelor. Leather sofa, coffee cup in the sink, the smell of carpet and charcoal. There’s a wallet-size photo of a little girl magneted to the refrigerator, and a crude painting of an orchid with “To Daddy” scrawled in pencil under it. The little girl is a tiny, feminine version of Detective Scieziesciez. Dark hair. Sharp features. Her expression seems canny for a child.

“I’d offer you a beer, sweetheart, but I guess you’re not of age.”

He’s taken his coat off and hung it in the closet, and now he’s draping his tie across the back of a chair at the kitchen table. Just as I imagined, he’s wearing a shoulder holster, which he slips down his arm. Out of it, he takes a stubby gun. It looks heavy, professional, and the deep blue steel of the barrel is dazzling. I feel a little queasy, thrilled, light-headed seeing it in his hand. The only thing like it I’ve ever seen is the hunting rifle my father keeps locked up in the basement, and this is nothing like that, nothing like that at all. This is something a man hides next to his ribs, something he’d use to kill a person, not a jackrabbit, with.

Detective Scieziesciez empties bullets into his hands, and they’re thick and gold. A handful of very big and dangerous bees.

“I’d take one anyway,” I say.

He smiles out of one corner of his mouth, and says, “That’s my girl,” complimenting my spunkiness as if it’s a quality he’s grown familiar with, although we have met only once, for perhaps five minutes, before today. He opens the refrigerator and takes out two bottles of Heineken and flips the caps off them with an opener, hands me mine.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, you still have your coat on. Let me take it for you.” The detective comes around behind me and slips my coat down my shoulders.

I feel his hand graze my upper arm. The hand with the Band-Aid.

“Have a seat.” He motions me toward the leather sofa. For a moment I worry that he’ll put a record on the stereo—some kind of throaty jazz—and that I’ll be embarrassed by it, by the television drama of it, but he doesn’t. He sits down in an armchair across from the sofa, and leans back in it.

We don’t say anything.

I look around his living room, which has only a few framed prints on the wall. Something with big red stripes in the middle, a black-and-white photograph of a mountain shrouded in clouds, and an orange and two apples on a cutting board with a wood-handled paring knife. There’s a magazine called The Ohio Sportsman on his coffee table. The sportsman on the cover is posing beside a buck with dead eyes. Both of them are grinning at the camera. There’s a bit of steam coming out of the sportsman’s mouth, and snow on a hillside behind them.

“You seem nervous,” the detective says.

I cross my legs and pull my mother’s miniskirt a bit farther down my thighs, look at the green bottle in my hand, then glance back up at him. There’s only one lamp on in the room, and the detective looks even darker in this light. I can see he’s smiling—teasingly, maybe. His eyes are narrower than I remembered them being. I can smell him, too. On the drive here, in his black sedan, I thought I could smell his hair. It smelled like meat.

I say, “I am, I guess,” and a nervous laugh catches like an airy hook inside me, somewhere between my throat and my nose.

“Now, sweetheart,” he says, “you can leave any time you want. You wanted to seduce me, right?”

I nod, not looking at him.

“Well, I’m seduced. Are you sure that’s what you want? I’m a big boy, you know. I don’t think we’re just going to second base tonight, if you know what I mean.”

I look up. I say, “I know what you mean.”

“You’re not a virgin are you?” He’s still smiling, looking at me now out of the corner of his eye.

I shake my head.

“That’s good, sweetheart. So you know what’s gonna happen here, then, don’t you? And that’s what you want to have happen?”

I say, “Yes.” I can feel a weak blue vein throbbing in my neck.

“Good,” he says. “I’m not in the habit of ruining little girls. You’re not a little girl, are you?”

“No.” My voice is very low, as though it’s come out of my stomach, or out of that dead pond at the center of Freedom Crest.

“Well, you’re lovely to look at, sweetheart,” he says, and I cannot help but think of a sign I saw in a china shop, Fun to hold, but if you break it, Consider it sold, and, scrawled under that, as if it might be too poetic for customers to explicate on their own: “You break, you pay.”

When I look up he’s looking at me, head cocked. “I like your little haircut there. Is that what they call a page boy?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper, “but thanks,” and push my bangs out of my eyes.

“And I like your little titties, too,” he says in a different voice, a voice that fills me up with blood. He leans forward and looks hard at me. Where his shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, I see dark hair on his chest. He says, “I want to taste your little titties,” and I look down at my blouse, where my face is repeated over and over again in my gold buttons—hot coins of myself. Not even for a moment does it seem wrong to be here, or do I wonder why I am.

“Maybe I should come and sit over there,” the detective says, and I move over an inch to make room for him on the leather couch, which makes a naked, human sound against my suede skirt. He puts his Heineken bottle down on the coffee table. Before he kisses me, he pushes my blouse a little farther open, looks at my white bra, and says, “Yummy.”

He reaches in and feels my left breast, which is small and light in his palm. He even growls a little, pressing his face into mine.

“IT WAS EASY,” I TELL MICKEY. SHE’S WASHING HER HANDS at the sink in the girls’ bathroom at school. On the mirror above her face, in red lipstick, someone has written “Anne Platt is fucking Mr. Fogarty.” Every morning, the janitor washes it off, but by afternoon it’s always back, and has been since September, scrawled in hard, loopy cursive—

I have no idea who Anne Platt is, but I’ve heard she’s a freshman with enormous breasts. Mr. Fogarty is the assistant principal. His eyes are Aqua Velva blue, and he likes girls. Once, when I got caught smoking in the parking lot before school, I had to go to Mr. Fogarty’s office, where he gave me a pamphlet about lung cancer and winked at me. “Don’t get caught again,” he said.

Now, whenever I pass him in the hallway, he smiles at me and lifts an invisible cigarette to his lips.

It’s never seemed like much of a revelation that some freshman girl, Anne Platt, with big boobs, might be fucking Mr. Fogarty. The real mystery is the other girl, the one who must be sneaking into the girl’s bathroom every single day, writing that sentence in lipstick on the mirror again and again. All that loopy, feminine fury over what? Who could sustain a passion like that for so long? She must have had to skip classes to do it: Between classes, there were too many girls at the sinks to get away with that. Was it jealousy, or outrage, or something else?

Sometimes I wondered if the writer might not be Anne Platt herself.

Mickey hands me a stick of gum in a light green wrapper. “What was easy?” she asks, bending down to tie the lace of one of her shoes. The pleats of her skirt settle around her, and she looks like a pom-pom, dropped.

“The detective,” I say.

She looks up at me. The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It’s like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh.

“Oh my God,” Mickey says, standing up.

I nod. I look at myself in the mirror. My face is lost inside fucking, as if the word is written in lipstick on my forehead. I fluff up my hair, then look back at Mickey and smile.

“You’re kidding,” she says.

I say, “I’m not.”

“Wow, Kat.” Mickey shakes her head. “I’m truly, truly impressed.”

FOUR

January 1989

FOR A FEW DAYS NOW, THE WEATHER HAS BEEN WARMER, turned the snow to damp rags—ruined, dirty, christening gowns. Phil is slopping through it on the way to our house in his muddy boots, taking big, slow steps, like a cartoon character stuck in tar—exaggerated, as if the thawed ground is sucking him down. His coat looks old, plaid, and scratchy. It was probably his father’s.

Since graduation last June, since he’s started working at Sears full time, Phil has begun to look more and more like a boy who could be his own father. His gangliness has turned, almost imperceptibly, almost overnight, into an old man’s stoop. Now, when he comes to visit me at college, driving his father’s Dodge four hours north, smoking Marlboros all the way, listening to the frenzy of WKLL, then WKSS, then WZZZ—all those stations playing music that sounds like flimsy, brilliant sheets of tin being drilled together in factories all across the Midwest at once—there are ashes on his collar, and that coat smells like exhaust, pollution, a rest stop.

By the time he gets to Ann Arbor, Phil has passed through some of the dirtiest places on earth—gray weather hanging over the highway, heavy with grime, and it’s settled on him, in his hair, which is too long now. The flip at his collar, too blond, the yellow-blond of a school bus. As Phil and I pass by the girls on the hall in my dormitory, they look at him sideways, as if he is a spy from another world, the world we’ve exited, at least for a while—the world of the suburb, the parent, the mall—or as if he might shed that dull world, walking, as if the stagnation of the place he’s driven up from were a virus in his tears, in his blood.

All weekend, Phil will drink beer in my room, play heavy metal too loud on the stereo next to my bed. He’ll look uncomfortable in the cafeteria with his guest ticket and a white plate of Swiss steak on a tray. He’ll go to the library with me while I study, sitting slumped in a reading chair, looking at a magazine, then looking up, scanning the students with no expression on his face.

My roommate doesn’t like him.

He doesn’t look like a college boy.

“What does he plan to do with his life?” Cindy asks.

Cindy’s from Oak Park, Michigan. Her father is an ophthalmologist. Her hair is red—deep, autumn red—and she’s decorated our room with posters of Baryshnikov, arty black-and-white photographs of the dancer in tight tights, arms outstretched like a masculine bird. You can see the bulge that is his balls and penis stuffed into those tights—that stilled masculinity, that muscular dancing.

Sometimes, studying, I look up at Cindy’s posters and feel a flush of blood spread across my chest.

When he came to visit the first time, Phil looked closely at those posters and said, “Gross.”

“He’s got to take care of his mother,” I tell her.

“So?” she says, chomping gum.

Cindy plans to be a genetics counselor and wastes no time on excuses. To her, everyone’s destiny can be plotted out on a graph of X’s and Fs. Some of us should never have been born. She dates a graduate student from the school of natural resources, who believes our natural resources will soon run out, and twice she’s tried to fix me up with his friend, Aaron, who wears hiking boots and bandannas and spends his summers on a research boat off the northern shore of Lake Michigan, looking at muddy weeds under a microscope.

At first, we didn’t hit it off, but on our second date, just before I left for Christmas break, we drank a lot of warm, imported beer, and when Aaron kissed me good night, our tongues flitted wet and silky into each other like the coincidence of fish in a large, murky lake, accidentally touching.

I know he is the kind of date I should have. Not Theo Scieziesciez. Not Phil. Someone to make plans for the future with.

But the future bores me.

I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.

I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.

“Someone called for you,” she says from her bed in the dark one night when I get back to the room with Phil.

“Who was it?” I ask.

Phil stands in the doorway, waiting: We try to wait until Cindy’s gone to sleep before coming back to the room to sleep. Phil takes the edge of the bed near the wall, farthest from Cindy. In the mornings, when we wake up, she’s usually gone.

“It was Shh-shh-shh,” she says, sounding groggy but annoyed. I’ve told Cindy about the detective, about my relationship with him, and also told her that I don’t want Phil to know. Later, he and I will have a small, dry argument about it. She’s aware of this.

“He sure calls a lot for someone who hasn’t managed to do one thing about your mother’s case in two and a half years, don’t you think?” Phil will say, but he’ll drop it as soon as I get defensive, as if he knows there’s more to this than he wants to know.

The day after the night Aaron and I kissed, Phil came to pick me up and bring me home.

As soon as I got home, I called the detective. “I’ve got a cold beer waiting for you in the fridge Saturday night, sweetheart,” he said, as he always says.

What was I doing, I wondered, with all these men? I thought how, if you removed their hearts from their bodies and set all three out on a table, you couldn’t tell one from the other. So what was I doing, suddenly, with all three of them at once?

Now, Phil’s crossing the shallow daffodil ditch between us: Nothing even close to blooming there. Maybe this year it won’t. Maybe Phil’s finally trudged through them so much, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s bulbs have given up, gotten the word, heard the ruthless boots above them, and decided to stay underground.

My breath on the bedroom window makes a humid, quickly evaporating kiss out of Phil, just a circle on the glass where the imprint of my lips has kissed away his face.

MY FATHER SEEMED PROUD AND RELIEVED THE DAY HE AND his girlfriend, May, drove me up to college.

“Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved from the front seat of his new car—a black Cadillac with leather seats. Riding to Ann Arbor in it had felt like hanging in the air from long elastic bands. Sixty miles an hour’s worth of world rushed by, and it was nothing but a liquid blur.

I imagine my father bought the Cadillac to impress May, who is exactly like her name—a petite container of spring that could explode any moment in a frenzy of petals and baby birds, screaming. She might have giggled uncontrollably on her first ride in my father’s new Cadillac.

May’s a good girlfriend for my father, I like her—who could not like May?—but being in her presence for more than an hour makes me feel ditzy, agitated, a bit slaphappy, and very tired. As we converse pleasantly, I feel my voice rise higher and higher in pitch to match hers, as if we’ve both been breathing helium, gasping at weightless white balloons as my father sits in slim-lipped silence between us, seeming pleased.

At one time, May was married to a textbook salesperson like herself. “But he was always depressed,” she said. “He never wanted to do anything.” Her hair is ash-blonde and bobbed above her ears. Permed tightly, it stands up all over her head, as if, at the beauty parlor, she got zapped with a cattle prod and it made her perkier, but nervous.

She’s a lot younger than my father—only thirty-four—but seems maternal, in a childlike way, and eager to pick up where my mother left off. The day they left me at the University of Michigan, she had a lot of advice about college, about boys, about life. After we’d hauled my boxes to the room I would be living in (Cindy wasn’t there yet, and it was blank faced—all linoleum, just two thin mattresses on metal frames, two battered desks, and a sink that echoed boing boing as it dripped), May said, “Don’t take drugs. But if you do, make sure you know what you’re taking. Someone slipped me some angel dust in college, and I’ve never been the same.”

It explained a lot.

I imagined May in college—studious, sober, and unsentimental—before the angel dust incident, during which she’d sprouted wings, burst into frenetic flapping, been launched into the sky like a divine bottle rocket, and glimpsed the face of God—pure sweetness and sparkling light, like a lungful of air freshener on a cool spring day—before settling back to earth, altered forever.

“Good-bye!” my father said and waved. In his new Cadillac, they buoyed away.

The first few weeks at college, I thought things had changed—that, leaving Garden Heights, leaving my frilly bedroom and my mother’s stiff armchairs, her lipsticks still lined up on the bathroom counter where she’d left them, that I’d finally left my mother, rather than the other way around.

But then the dreams began again—my mother in a white coffin, my mother in a snowstorm at the morgue. Or I’d dream I was walking with Phil across the icy Rite Aid parking lot, watching my feet, then see her face float up under my boot. In one dream, May came to me in my bedroom back in Ohio and said she’d found my mother in the cardboard container of a TV dinner. In another, Detective Scieziesciez looked up from between my legs, where he was giving me a dream orgasm—the kind you never reach, the kind you wake up still wanting—and said, “By the way, your mother called my office. She’s in a bank-deposit box in another town.”

In the middle of every dream, I’d wake up screaming, and Cindy would be standing over me in her boyfriend’s SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt, biting her nails. “Jesus, Katrina”—she likes to call me that because it’s more ethnic, more interesting than Kat—“What’s wrong with you?” she’d ask. In the morning, she’d look at me carefully, as if I might crack right down the middle like a plaster statue, badly cast, and step out of my body.

It touched me when she said, “I’m worried about you.”

We’d only shared a room for a few weeks, but we were friends.

She said, “Does your therapist know about these dreams?”

I HAVEN’T SEEN DR. PHALER SINCE AUGUST, WHEN SHE wished me well at college, shook my hand, told me to call her when I came home for Christmas break if I wanted an appointment, if I felt I needed help. I never told her about Detective Scieziesciez because there never seemed to be a way to bring it up, and I stopped telling her about my dreams long ago, when she made it clear she didn’t think they had anything to offer. “Dreams don’t necessarily mean anything, Kat. We all have very strange dreams.”

And I wondered then, why? Why do we all have strange dreams? Why doesn’t sleep just switch off our brains like a light?

Instead, all over Garden Heights at night, bankers and lawyers and housewives are attending orgies, talking to the dead, flying over their own houses naked, wearing wings, and then it’s forgotten, everything is normal, and the plumber calls to say he’ll be a little late.

How is it we manage to get out of bed in the morning, face each other, organize our ordinary days, knowing where we’ve come from, and where we’ll be going again?

A few days after my father and May dropped me off in Ann Arbor, Detective Scieziesciez called and asked me if he could come up, meet me at a Sheraton Inn, spend the night—he had some business in Lansing, and I was in between—and I said yes, although my first classes were the next day, and I was nervous. I wanted to appear brighteyed and eager to my professors, my fellow students, but I also wanted to spend the night with Detective Scieziesciez, never actually having slept a whole night with a man. A few times, Phil and I had fallen asleep on the couch together, and I’d stayed at the detective’s condo once until five o’clock in the morning, but I wanted a whole night, dusk to dawn, in bed with a man, like a boat ride from one end of a black pond to the other.

“Hi,” he said when he answered the door to his hotel room.

I’d taken a cab to the Sheraton after he called me in my dorm room and said he’d just checked in. The cabdriver was a young woman with a long blonde ponytail. She had two armloads of silver bracelets, and as she steered they made wiry music. “Ann Arbor’s great,” she said. “You’ll like it here.” The cab smelled faintly of marijuana. “A guy tried to cut my throat last week”—she turned to show me a wound on her neck, just below her ear.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Detective Scieziesciez said. He was wearing a blue-striped shirt, button-down, with the sleeves, as always, rolled up, USMC on his forearm, and a pair of neatly pressed green slacks. His hair was combed—but all that thick, dark hair never really looked under control, just as the beard he tried to shave never looked shaved. In the last six months, I’d learned about his body hair, too. How it became damp and matted with sweat while we had sex. There were a few gray hairs mixed in with the black ones on his chest, but other than that he had the body of a very young man. Muscled arms and stomach. His legs were as solid as wood. He ran seven miles a day, and lilted weights for hours every night. “Got to keep myself fit for the young girls,” he said, teasing me.

I knew he had other girlfriends—one even younger than I—and two ex-wives who lived nearby, one of whom brought their daughter over to his condo to visit him every Sunday, but who also came by alone occasionally on Friday nights, to have sex.

I wasn’t jealous. I had Phil, after all, myself. And what I’d wanted from the detective all along was this undaunted virility. Sometimes, when he crawled on top of my body in bed, I closed my eyes and saw a corral full of bulls tearing up the grass, snorting, glistening black in the bright sun.

It was Labor Day weekend, and I was wearing a white sundress with spaghetti straps, white sandals. I wore pink blush, and only a little lipstick. “I like it that you’re so tiny,” he said once, his big hands on my naked rib cage. “I feel like I could snap you in half,” and he squeezed my torso hard, “but I won’t,” and then he laughed.

That night, beside the detective in his hotel room double bed, I couldn’t sleep. I was hungry, and uncomfortable. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of the bed, and I had just enough room to lie beside him with his arm thrown informally over my bare chest, oppressively heavy, as though a log had rolled onto my body and was pinning me down with its casual weight.

I could hear other rooms under and above us. The squeaking of bedsprings. Water running. A telephone rang, sounding hysterical, but far away. The light-blocking curtains on the window did not block out the light from the parking lot outside, and there were shadows draped across the detective in thick ropes. His sleep seemed to get deeper and deeper, like a train gaining momentum as it cut through a landscape of long grass. His hair sparkled darkly. During sex, he’d sweat a lot, and it seemed he also did this in his sleep.

Then he started to snore. Quietly at first. But, like his sleep, it deepened. It sounded like a dictionary being violently paged in his chest. A through Z. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I thought of sheep wandering slowly around in fields, and tried to count a few of them before I slipped from the thought into a dream. But then I saw a butcher, holding, in one of his white gloves, a piece of meat across the glass counter. He was showing the piece of meat to my mother.

“Lamb chop,” he said.

Was I dreaming, or just thinking?

And then Detective Scieziesciez began to groan.

Low, difficult groaning.

He didn’t move, stayed heavy where he’d fallen asleep, but the groans began to stretch out longer and longer, and grow louder. My heart started to beat harder, and I wished I had my clothes on. I felt cold, naked, afraid, wide awake. When he began to shout—words, though the words were unintelligible, the rise and fall of sentence structure, muffled—I shook him by the shoulder. “Theo,” I said, “Wake up. You’re dreaming.”

But when he didn’t wake, and did not stop shouting, I reached up and turned the bedside light on, and shouted, “Theo! Theo! Theo!” I could see that his face was twisted, a look of torment, or sexual pleasure. Then his eyes popped open, and he looked up at me.

I was standing now at the side of the bed with my arms crossed over my bare breasts.

“What’s up?” he asked, rolling onto his back, rubbing his eyes.

“You were having a nightmare,” I said, and I realized there was a note of panic in it. “You were shouting and groaning and . . .”

“Well, come back to bed, sweetheart. I’m sorry I woke you.” He was smiling. He scooted over to make room for me, and he patted the spot beside him in the bed. It was damp.

The sheets felt too warm and tangled when I pulled them over me again. I was shaking. “What were you dreaming?” I asked in a whisper. I wanted to talk. I did not want to turn the light back off.

“I don’t know,” he said, propping himself up on his elbow to look at me. He pushed my bangs away from my face and traced my cheekbone with his finger. “I have bad dreams. Violence.”

“Always?”

“A lot.”

“What are they about?”

“Mmmm.” He thought. “Things I saw. When I was a regular cop, I saw a lot of things.”

“Like what?” I wanted to know.

“Mmmm.” This time he thought longer. “I saw a man shoot his own kid in the head.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You want to hear this?”

I nodded, but didn’t look at him.

“I saw a guy bleed to death real slow in the back of a truck. He’d gotten his throat cut.”

I tried to imagine it.

I imagined that slash across the man’s throat like an opening in the earth. I pictured the detective looking into it. There were beetles and frogs down there. I tried to imagine whether or not Detective Scieziesciez, in this scene, would be frantically trying to help the man, or whether he just watched.

“And some much worse things. I’ve dug up some pretty unhappy bodies.”

I thought of my mother.

I thought of her lying next to my father in the morning, listening to him snore.

“One thing I know for certain, sweetheart, from being a cop, is that the safer you think this world is, the less safe it gets.”

“YOU MEAN YOUR MOTHER JUST DISAPPEARED?” CINDY SAID, her mouth open in big surprise. We were drinking Riunite Royal Raspberry wine in our dorm room. She was crosslegged on her bed. I was sitting on the floor, leaning up against mine, legs tucked tightly to my chest. Exams were over. We were wearing nightgowns, like a little girls’ party, except that we were getting plastered.

“Yeah.” I nodded, and took another slug of the wine, which was the color of blood when they’ve just taken it from your arm—the deep velvet red that fills the vial. It was lush, warm, and gory in a clear plastic cup, tasting like a late harvest—the fruit overripe and juicy, sloshing on the vines, sloppy and heavy in the trees: I imagined the palms of the fruit pickers’ hands stained permanently red. The wine was going to my head.

Our dorm room seemed slippery around us, and Cindy’s face, under her crimson hair, was huge and pale in the bright overhead light. Her expression was fixed with surprise. I said, “Poof! Here today, gone tomorrow,” and heard myself slur.

“Wow,” Cindy said, and paused a long time. She was thinking with her plastic glass raised in one hand. It was the color of her hair, and I remembered seeing, once, a mosquito drowned in a glass of my mother’s burgundy at a picnic, an end-of-season party for my father’s losing golf league. My mother had reached into the glass, fished the limp, winged thing out with her fingernails, and flicked it in my father’s direction when he wasn’t looking.

I imagined, in all that liquid red, that the mosquito had died of joy, thinking it had finally found the heart of God itself, and stung it.

“Where is she?” Cindy asked.

“Who knows?” I said. “I don’t.”

“She has to be somewhere,” Cindy said.

“Does she?” I said, spilling wine on my flannel nightgown. “Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s nowhere.” I smiled.

But Cindy looked serious, and sad.

THIS YEAR THE GRANDMOTHERS DIDN’T COME FOR Christmas. Zeena hadn’t called for months, and when she called on Christmas Eve, she didn’t bother to ask about my mother. When I told her my father had a girlfriend, she sighed and said, “Life goes on, Kat. You can be sure your mother has gone on with hers,” and there was an edge of prejudice in it like the blunter side of a knife—the kind of knife you’d use to pare an apple, nothing too sharp, but a knife nonetheless.

She said the weather in Las Vegas was bright and dry.

Marilyn sent a basket of fruit that must have weighed fifty pounds. The UPS man left it on the front steps—oranges and grapefruit and a fan of green bananas wrapped in red cellophane. When I opened the front door and saw it waiting, I thought some woman’s elaborate hat must have blown off and landed there.

That basket was exactly the kind of hat one of my grandmothers might have worn—ferocious but feminine, shimmering fruit and rubies—a hat like a minor explosion, maybe an IRA bomb left in a trash can at the train station, no one killed, just a warning, just one innocent man, a bystander, left standing near it, waving his bloody hands. A slightly violent, semi-edible hat.

In the center, there was a coconut, as hard and hairy as a shrunken head. “I LOVE YOU!!!!! LOVE, MARILYN!!!!” the gift card said in an unfamiliar, feminine, florist’s hand.

I weighed the coconut in my palm. When I shook it, the watery milk inside it sloshed.

May and I made Christmas dinner for my father, Phil, and Mrs. Hillman—the usual seared hunk of rare roast beef surrounded by carrots and potatoes. Rice pudding. Flour-dusted rolls that left everyone’s upper lip smudged with chalk. May even molded green Jell-O into the shape of a cornucopia with little squares of canned peach and pear floating eerily in the green, like goldfish in suspended animation in a scummed and weedy bowl—dormant and adrift at the same time.

I felt bored.

I missed Cindy, and our dorm room, and the happy routine of class, study, cafeteria—all of it washed with strong coffee and diet Coke. Phil cut Mrs. Hillman’s beef for her, and she chased the pieces with her fork around and around her plate, where they’d suddenly become animated as soon as she tried to catch one. My father complimented May profusely on everything she’d made before he ate it, and she batted her eyes at him like a cartoon Tweetie bird. A few times, I tried to catch Phil’s gaze, but it was locked on his greasy knife.

“Merry Christmas!” May ejaculated, and we all raised my parents’ wedding crystal into thin air to toast.

Toasting, I imagined us smashing that crystal so hard between us that it would explode in a shrapnel of champagne and flying glass, opening little eyes all over our faces and hands.

After dinner, Phil and his mother went home, and May and I cleared the table. She was wearing a sweater with a Christmas tree on it. There was so much yarn involved in that sweater, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if it snagged. Would she be spun around like a spool, some kind of battery-operated ornament, as that sweater unraveled around her? Would her spinning make a sort of wind-up music—play a version of “Jingle Bells,” or “Onward, Christian Soldiers?”

“Kat,” May said shyly, her arms loaded down with dirty dishes. “Thank you so much for including me in your family gathering.”

“Sure,” I said, too fast, and shrugged.

She put the dishes down on the kitchen counter, looking serious—as serious as a woman with a corkscrew perm and dimples, wearing a Christmas tree on her chest, can look. She said, “I want to ask you a question,” lowering her voice—though my father, by now, in his post-dinner ritual, had moved from the toilet upstairs to the bed, where he was dead asleep and couldn’t hear us.

“Go ahead,” I said. I picked up a sponge just to have something in my hand.

“Well, Kat.” May cleared her throat. “You and I have never talked about your mother.”

I squeezed the sponge. It felt like the sea creature it used to be—animal, and rank, dyed plastic orange to disguise it. “Not much to talk about there, I guess,” I said.

May thought about that, then she said, “Your father doesn’t say much either, but I can’t help but have questions. Kat, do you have, you know, any theories at all about what happened?”

I pretended to think, sucking in the side of my cheek and chewing on that. “Midlife crisis,” I said. “Or a boyfriend.”

May nodded slowly, pensively, then asked, “But where is she?”

I said, “I do not know,” pronouncing the words carefully, emphatically, as if May had already asked me this a hundred times.

“WHERE DID SHE GO?” MAY WANTS TO KNOW. SHE’S balanced a stack of white plates precariously at the edge of the kitchen counter. Outside, the wind howls. The windows rattle in their frames like loose teeth.

“I don’t know,” I say, watching those dishes, waiting for them to fall. I have my hands in the kitchen sink, which is filled with soapy water, and I can see something eel-like swimming in it, near the tips of my fingers. Suddenly, its tail licks out of the suds, orange and twitching, and then it’s in my hands—a live thing, tentacled. I hold on to it as tightly as I can, and push it back under the soapy water, press it down to the bottom of the sink. I don’t want May to see it, but she’s watching me closely with a worried look on her face.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, I WAKE UP DRENCHED—THE salty heat beneath my sheets and blankets like a fire that’s been doused with sweat. Physical. Sexual. Oceanic. My legs are tangled in those sheets and in my flannel nightgown. Everything is wet.

I get out of bed, rocking, as if I’ve just stepped off a ship, and I feel my way in the dark to the bathroom for aspirin. From his bedroom, I can hear my father snoring, a human foghorn, a warning snoring across an ocean. I remember how my mother hated that snoring. How, over breakfast nearly every morning, she’d complain. How once she’d even said, a serious look on her face, as if she’d been thinking about it a long, long time, for two decades maybe, “I just want to put the pillow over your father’s mouth some nights, and let him suffocate.”

I flip the light switch, and the row of bright round bulbs above the medicine chest glows all at once, blinding me. My eyes ache with fever, too wide and dry for their sockets, as if they might bulge right out of my head like those small bulbs themselves.

The bathroom still smells like my mother, disinfected. Her perfume, too.

But, for the first time, I notice that the little mirrored tray where she kept her bottles and lipsticks and wands of this or that—mascara, shadow, concealer—is no longer on the counter beside the sink. The guest towel with her initials, EC, embossed in blue, no longer lies beside the other, the one with his, BC.

I open the medicine chest to look for the Bayer, and in it I see a prescription bottle that wasn’t there when I left for college. I take it down and read the label:

“Elavil. Refills (3). TAKE 1 EACH A.M. FOR MIGRAINE.”

The prescription is in May’s real name: Maybel M. Engberg.

I put the bottle of pills back on the shelf and laugh a little to myself, thinking of May sleeping, regularly, with my father, keeping her A.M. prescription here because she’s here in the A.M.—trying to sweep the evidence of my mother away, the perfume bottles, the monogrammed towel. Why? Is she jealous? Does she think, perhaps, my mother might come back? And what if she does? Had May thought about what she’d do then? What if my mother comes home some night, turns her key in the lock, and climbs the stairs to her bedroom, where May snores beside my father—tight curls arrayed on my mother’s pillow, bony feet poking out beneath the lace of a white nightgown, maybe touching with affection the cold, hairy ankle of my father?

May’s sweet mouth would be gaping open in the dark. Asbestos, lunar ash, and whatever leftover dust of my mother still floated over that side of the bed would film May’s pink tongue. I imagine my mother hooting at that, and I laugh a little, too—a hushed, painful laugh—imagining May and my father trying to hide the evidence of their nights together before I came home for vacation. I imagine my father hurrying around the house, packing up May’s things, which would have begun to accumulate, as these things do—her women’s magazines and earrings, her extra pair of reading glasses—stuffing them under the bed, maybe. Checking the house one last time for the details that might give them away.

And here, plain as day: May’s Elavil, waiting.

Sneaky, I think, and picture my father in a bathrobe, wearing slippers, tiptoeing through a garden of white tulips, lopping their heads off with a golf club. Whop is the noise they make as he lops them.

I sleep like someone thrown into the river with weights chained around her when I go back to bed.

But I wake up sicker. Pure fever. The bedroom is humid with it—sweat diffused with furnace dust. My sickness smells like a jungle: close, and overgrown. My head and limbs ache with the kind of dull physical pain that seems to come from far away. Not stabbing or stinging pain. Radiating pain. As dull as longing.

My father sits on the edge of my bed, and, with the thermometer in my mouth, I can’t talk, and he says nothing. The silence embarrasses me. It’s embarrassing to be his grown daughter, home on vacation from college, with a child’s fever. And I think he can probably smell me—bodily, intimate, the smell of something private, swabbed. I remember the look on his face when he found me with Phil in my bed. It was as if someone had thrown a cup of milk in his face, that chalky look of surprise. I saw my father over Phil’s shoulder. My legs were spread. Phil had a hand on one of my breasts—

Seeing that look on my father’s face, the word copulation came to mind.

Something clinical and as humorless as botany, as cauliflower.

I can’t remember my father attending to any of the minor illnesses of my childhood. Croup. Flu. Strep.

It had always been my mother who’d held the glass thermometer up to the light, reading its flimsy red vein of rising blood. When my temperature was normal, she always seemed delighted, as though she’d caught me in a lie. “Get ready for school,” she’d say, slipping the thermometer back into its vinyl sleeve.

But when it was high, she’d ministrate—cool compresses, clean sheets, ginger ale, tepid tea. She’d bring me a cup of chicken broth to sip, and it would have a waxy half heart of fat floating on the top.

That pale yellow of a chicken was like forbearance, boiled down to oily water.

After a minute, my father takes the thermometer out of my mouth. “A hundred and three,” he says, and his eyes get wide. He’s wearing a suit, ready for the office, and each one of his silver hairs is combed into place. He thinks, and then he says, “I’ll stay home from work, but I think we should call May.”

I laugh, but stop short. My throat hurts—little beestings all around my tonsils, and the epiglottis feels swollen, like a fleshy fishhook in my throat. I say, “Dad, it’s okay with me if May sleeps over while I’m home. I’m old enough to deal with that, you know.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, and his impression of an innocent, accused, is good. His black eyebrows are raised in a startled line.

“I saw her prescription in the medicine cabinet. ‘Take one each A.M.’ So I assume it’s here because she’s here each A.M. And that’s okay with me.”

“Oh, that,” he says. “Oh, well, yes, sometimes she spends the night. But . . .”

“Dad, it’s really okay.” I try to sit up. He hurries to fluff the pillows behind me.

“Let me get you some juice,” he says, “and then I’ll call May to see what you do about a fever like this.”

I SPEND THE NEXT MORNING AND AFTERNOON IN BED, sipping orange juice, which stings bitterly going down. But my father brings me glass after glass and, after it’s swallowed, it feels good. It cools me.

I fall asleep for a few hours, and the fever drags me in and out of a dream in which I’m trapped in a burning building, standing outside an elevator under a sign that reads IN CASE OF FIRE USE STAIRS.

But somehow I know there are no stairs, so I stand there, flames inching down the hallway toward me as I try to decide whether to take the elevator up or down—not knowing which button to push to get there because they’re side by side, and marked in Braille. Since I can’t read Braille, I’m afraid to make a mistake, afraid I’ll make the right decision, the one that will save my life—whether to go up or down—but push the wrong button. As the flames move inexorably toward me in a bright parade—a wall of vivid oxygen melting everything as they come—finally, out of desperation, I close my eyes and feel the raised bumps.

Amazingly, I can read them with my fingers.

One of the buttons is marked Now, and one is marked Later.

I pause for a moment, then press Now, and the doors open immediately, but the elevator is filled with smoke. In the center of it is my mother. She steps out of the elevator calmly, not particularly surprised to see me, and says, “You’re getting warmer,” with an amused look on her face.

MAY’S ALREADY LEAVING WHEN I WAKE UP. SHE MUST HAVE come over while I was asleep. I hear them at the front door. “No,” my father says, “I just don’t think it’s right with her here.”

“But if Kat says it’s okay, I don’t see—”

“I don’t care what Kat says.” He whispers loudly, sounding irritated.

I sit up—rubber-limbed and warm, like a baby who’s been left by accident all afternoon in a very warm bath. “Dad,” I yell from the top of the stairs when I get there. “I insist that May stay over. May,” I shout, though my voice scrapes my throat, “I want you to stay.”

“I—” my father says. I can see his face at the foot of the stairs, turned up to me, a big dog about to beg.

“Dad,” I say, teasing him, “be good. May stays. I’m going back to bed.”

May giggles. “Well, Brock, that settles that, I guess.”

TODAY SHE’S WEARING GREEN. DEEP, CHRISTMAS GREEN. Evergreen. She smiles as she ushers me into her office.

“So,” Dr. Phaler says. “How are you? How have things been?”

“Fine,” I say. “College has gone well. I got three A’s and a B. It was a good semester. I’ve been sick since Christmas, though. Fever. Chills.”

She nods. “The flu,” she diagnoses. “Everyone’s got it.” Dr. Phaler smiles then with her lips closed. “I assume,” she says, opening her mouth in a tiny bullet hole before going on, “that you haven’t heard from your mother, or you’d have mentioned it when you called for the appointment.”

“No,” I say, and it hangs in the air. My own lips are pursed now like hers, as if my face is a reflection of Dr. Phaler’s. “Detective Shh-shh-shh called a few days ago to say they’d closed the case, for whatever it’s worth.”

It wasn’t exactly true, but also wasn’t a lie. Detective Scieziesciez had told me they were closing my mother’s case, but he told me about it in the water bed in his condominium. The water in the mattress was warm, and when I moved I felt embraced by its formlessness, its bodiless fluid.

We were talking about dreams again, because again he’d dozed off beside me after sex, and again I’d had to wake him out of his shouting.

So I told him about mine:

The dreams of my mother calling to me from the coat closet in our living room, and when I opened the door, there she was, lace veil over her pale face, maybe two great wings wrapped around her body. Shivering. And then she’d disappear.

He seemed to think about that for a long time.

“Why didn’t you tell me about these dreams before?”

“When?” I asked. “Why?”

“Sometimes dreams make a difference,” he said seriously. “Sometimes people know something they don’t know they know.”

“What do you mean?”

He thought. He said, “I had a case once where a two-year-old had been missing for days, had just wandered away from a picnic at a park. It was assumed to be a kidnapping, but the mother kept dreaming the baby was in the back of a truck being driven away while she watched. Sometimes she’d even get a glimpse of the license plate, and finally she woke up one morning and was able to write the state and number of the license plate down.

“We tracked the U-Haul down in Minnesota—it had been rented by a college student, he’d driven through Ohio on his way to California—and the kid was in the back. He’d crawled into it at the park while the student was changing a flat tire and eating a sandwich—crawled way far in the back. The guy threw the flat in the back, slammed it shut, and didn’t have any reason to open it again until we got there.”

I felt nauseated.

The water bed.

I could smell it—salty and old in the plastic mattress. Chlorine. Swamp. Small and soggy sweaters.

I sat up and swung my legs off the bed, and looked at my bony, cold feet on the beige of the detective’s bedroom rug. I thought of that little boy turned to milk and rags in the bed of a truck. All because Detective Scieziesciez wasn’t smart enough to find him before he’d sobbed and gasped and sucked himself to death.

But, I thought, the point of this story, as the detective told it, was how smart he was. What a good detective.

I kept staring, hard, at my feet, and I thought of the letters we used to get from his office, the ones with my mother’s name misspelled. I remembered him knocking so hard and efficiently on our front door that first time, months already since my mother had disappeared, and how he’d stumbled, bumbling, when I opened it. I remembered, suddenly, Officer McCarthy, that cop who’d visited our fifth-grade class to scare us about drugs, and pictured him wearing a dunce’s cap, sitting in the comer of a classroom as a lot of little children snickered.

Another big, dumb, muscled man with a gun.

I will never come here again, I thought, and curled my toes into the carpet, and my feet became as blunt as clubs. “How could she have known that?” I asked, “How could she have dreamt that?”

My voice was brittle. Maybe I was shouting. The detective sounded defensive when he answered, and he got out of bed, pulling his boxer shorts up. The water bed gulped.

“Obviously, she saw that truck at the park and some part of her registered that the kid had crawled in there. She was too hysterical to consciously understand that, so it came to her in dreams.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then what’s up with my dreams, Detective? Where’s my mother?”

Detective Scieziesciez zipped up his jeans, and looked down at me. He looked a bit confused. He began to flex the bicep of one arm and feel it, knead it with his fingers, as if to remind himself that he was strong. Then he sighed. “Well, do you really want my opinion?”

I pulled the sheet around me, hiding my nakedness. “Of course I said. “Since the very beginning we’ve been asking for your professional opinion.” I raised one of my eyebrows ironically as I said professional.

He began to look angry and worried, a man having to defend himself for the first time in his life. “Well,” he said, “in that case, in my opinion, your mother is dead.”

There was whining in my lungs, but it had nothing to do with me. It sounded like knives being sharpened on ice. I knew he was going to say this. I could tell he would want to hurt me. “Why?” I was interrogating him now.

“Because an extensive and very well-handled search for her has been taking place for the last three years, and she has not been found.”

I could see blood rising up his neck, and I knew suddenly, clearly, that there had been no search at all, that he was lying, or incompetent, or both.

“‘Extensive’ and well-handled’?” I asked. “You never even spelled my mother’s name right in your letters. That photo you used on the flyers was so blurry, she could have been anyone. You never looked anywhere for my mother. You never even looked in our house!”

He pulled his leather belt quickly through the belt loops around his waist, and it made a windy sigh.

“First of all,” he said, “my secretary types up the letters. The spelling errors are hers. Second, your father provided the photo we used, and he said it was the best he could do. And third, we can’t search a house without a search warrant, and we can’t get a search warrant without some reason to conduct a search. I had to assume that if your mother was in the house, you’d have been able to find her yourself. She wouldn’t exactly be missing if she was in the house.”

“Okay, Detective. Where is she?”

“Well, you yourself indicated that she was probably having an affair, which was confirmed by that woman, that Mrs. Blindman, next door—”

“Mrs. Hillman.”

“Whatever. The blind lady. She said your mother had a boyfriend.”

“What would Mrs. Hillman know? How would Mrs. Hillman know anything about my mother?”

“She lives next door.” He smirked when he said this.

“But she can’t see.” I felt afraid that I might cry. I took a deep, painful breath. “Besides, wouldn’t that just make it even more likely that she was off somewhere with this boyfriend”—the sarcasm caught like a sob in my throat—“not dead?”—and so did dead.

“Well,” he said, pausing, staring at the bedroom wall, narrowing his eyes. It looked as if he were reading his lines off a cue card he couldn’t quite see. “Well,” he said again, “several people interviewed told us that your father is a jealous and impulsive man.”

The detective’s stomach looked like stone covered with skin. He was buttoning up his white shirt.

“Who? Who was interviewed? Who said my father was ‘jealous’and ‘impulsive?’ My father, if you couldn’t tell this for yourself when you interviewed him, is one of the dullest men on the planet. Obviously, whoever was interviewed never met him.”

I imagined my father then, wearing a clown suit, having a pie thrown in his face by Detective Scieziesciez. There was pie in my father’s eyes, and he was wiping it out, and the image made me grimace with protective rage.

“That’s not what their former neighbors at the Ramblewood apartment complex had to say. Bob and Mattie Freelander. They said your father suspected your mother had a thing for Bob Freelander, and that your father set a trash can on fire and tossed it onto their patio.”

“What? What?” I gasped. I was standing now, fastening my bra behind me as quickly as I could. “Who are these people? My parents lived in that apartment two decades ago.”

The detective shrugged. “So? A man’s nature doesn’t change in two decades.”

“A ‘man’s nature.’” I started to laugh, but it sounded like an animal heaving something up. “My father hasn’t got a ‘nature.’”

Detective Scieziesciez regained his composure as I lost mine. He sat on the edge of his water bed looking at me, distant and concerned, though there were already dark rings of sweat under his arms, and he’d just put on his shirt. I couldn’t find my panties. I had to get on my knees.

“Kat,” he said to me at his feet, “any man is capable of anything. Trust me. I know. Any man could kill his wife if he caught her with another man—a younger man, a richer man. Men kill. I know.”

“Oh,” I huffed at him. My panties were under his nightstand. I sat on the floor to pull them on. “You don’t know shit,” I said “If my father’s such a dangerous character, why the hell didn’t you arrest him, Detective?”

“You can’t arrest someone just because he’s capable of murder.” He stared blankly at my panties. They were lacy and white. “There wasn’t any evidence. And he passed a lie detector test. Your father’s a cool guy, if my suspicions are correct. He knew what he was doing when he got rid of her. In my professional opinion, your father caught your mother in the act, killed her, and dumped her. Maybe the Chagrin River. It was January. She’d have slipped right under the ice. By spring, she’d have washed to Lake Erie. We won’t be finding your mother. Hence,” he shrugged, “this case is closed.”

“But,” I tell Dr. Phaler, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I don’t really expect to hear from my mother, ever again. I’ve accepted that.”

“Still,” Dr. Phaler says, shaking her head, “that must be a fairly hard thing to accept.”

“Yes,” I say, waving it away with my hand, feeling annoyed. She’s leading me, like a horse. I will not drink. “But my problem right now is Phil. I want to break up with him. I don’t know how.”

Dr. Phaler runs her tongue over her top teeth. I notice that her glasses aren’t hanging from the usual chain around her neck and that her eyes, like her outfit, are green. Didn’t they used to be blue? She’s gotten contacts, I guess. “Tell me more.”

“Well, he’s been so good to me. But we’ve changed. Or, I have. I want to date another guy. I met this other guy.” An image of Aaron flashes, then, across the ceiling tiles when I look up—red bandanna around his neck, playing a guitar. I’m not sure, but I imagine Aaron plays the guitar, and badly. I imagine one day he’ll own a big, smelly dog—a black Labrador, and he’ll take it with him in his truck when he moves to Oregon.

Then I imagine Detective Scieziesciez holding a gun to Aaron’s head, forcing him to open the back of that truck.

“Do you have to break up with Phil to date someone else?”

I think about that. “Well. It doesn’t seem fair—”

“Has Phil treated you fairly?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. Have you and Phil started kissing again? Or having sex? Is he making any plans for his future?”

“His mother—” I start to say.

Dr. Phaler waves now, and now she looks impatient, dismissive. “With or without his mother.”

“No.” I look at my hands.

“And has he ever come up with any satisfactory explanations for why that is?”

“Why what?” I ask. “You mean, kissing? I told you before, he says he doesn’t see any reason to kiss.”

“Any reason to kiss?” Dr. Phaler laughs out loud. “Who needs a reason to kiss?”

“You’re right,” I say, nodding. “But he’s been so good. You know. He was there for me when my mother disappeared.” She’s looking at my neck. Maybe she’s biting her tongue. The silence feels, when I swallow, like the white of an egg, or sperm, on the back of my throat.

Then she says, carefully, “Kat, have you ever considered that he might have been there for you when your mother disappeared because he felt guilty?”

“About what?” I’ve shouted it. I touch my throat. I’m surprised at how loud my voice has become, and I lower it. “What would Phil have to feel guilty about?”

“What do you think?” She says it calmly, without accusation. “Don’t you have any clues?” There’s an empty look on her face. A ceiling tile. It’s as if the Dr. Phaler I said good-bye to last August has been replaced by a fresh, more determined Dr. Phaler—a Dr. Phaler committed to scraping the ice off her windshield with an ink pen. All business. Ready to go. Chip, chip, chip. Jaw set in some direction I’m not sure I want to go.

“No,” I say. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“I know,” she says. “But I think it’s something you need to consider. You need to consider why Phil might have stuck around all this time, despite the fact that he doesn’t even love you enough to kiss you.”

I see my hands in my lap as if from far away, and they are the hands of a stranger, shaking. Perhaps I sound angry when I say, “Maybe you should tell me what you think. Obviously, you think something.”

“Well, Kat, you’ve told me quite a lot about your mother’s behavior just before she left. Don’t you think Phil might have had something to do with that?”

“What do you mean? What did I tell you? All I said was that I thought they were flirting—that she was flirting with him. Why should he feel guilty about that?”

But I can tell Dr. Phaler’s done. Her arms have settled on her armrests, roosting, and her mouth is closed again. She nods. My hour’s up.

Where did it go?

I’m not done.

“Do you think there’s something I don’t know? Are you saying you think there was something between my mother and Phil? Why didn’t you say anything until now?”

Am I hysterical?

Is this what hysteria is? I picture a can of trash with wings landing on my shoulder in flames, and hear my voice coming out of a narrow hole, a rabbit hole.

I’ve shrunk, I think, looking at Dr. Phaler, who is too far away, now, to see.

I am a pinprick, a little piece of who I was. My whole face could fit on a postage stamp.

Dr. Phaler stops nodding. She seems to be thinking. I can tell by her voice that she hasn’t noticed how tiny I’ve become—a miniature of myself in her new, green eyes. She says, “I don’t know. But if you want my opinion, there’s no reason to feel guilty about breaking up with Phil.”

When I get back out to the car—my mother’s station wagon—I realize I’m holding a handkerchief with the initials MP in my fist—in cursive, black, in a corner of the white square trimmed with bric-a-brac. I have no idea how it got in my hand.

I take it back and leave it draped like a veil over the doorknob of Maya Phaler’s office.

PHIL STOOPS TO TAKE OFF HIS BOOTS. IT’S THE FIRST WEEK of January, but the neighbors across the street still have their electric nativity set plugged in. They leave it on all day and night and, in the afternoon, there’s a weak and artificial light rising from baby Jesus, as if he’s swaddled in glare, and the Virgin Mary sheds dreary bandages of blue into the cold fog. I shut the door behind him.

“Hi,” he says, a little surly, a little shy. He has thin white lines around his eyes—I’ve never noticed those before—where the sun must not shine. The rest of his face has a winter tan, a wind tan, a reddish bum just under the skin. It makes his hair look even blonder, oddly blond.

“Hi,” I say.

“You sound stuffed up,” he says.

“I’ve been sick,” I say.

I haven’t seen Phil for a few days, not since I went to visit him at Sears, where we had an argument in the break room in front of another salesman. It was Saturday, and Phil had been “working the floor” as he calls it, which means sneaking up on unshaven husbands as they look at the prices on power saws, lawn tractors, dehumidifiers.

The department Phil works in is metal gray. The shelves shine with buffed light and, from floor to ceiling, are filled with the kind of items you might find in a junkyard, or dumped at the side of the road, left in the woods. Wrench sets, claw hammers, hoses, rubber mats to throw on the floor of your car, levelers, flashlights, dolly straps, fireproof safety boxes. You could imagine a grown man in bed beside his wife, a stocking cap on his head—and, above him, in the cartoon bubble that reveals his dreams, a floating menagerie of those items from Sears.

In the bubble above his wife’s sleeping head, there would just be z’s.

I had been standing behind a shelf, among the hand appliances—the planers, strippers, sprayers, drills—when I heard Phil, on the other side, say to someone, “This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy,” and I’d laughed out loud.

Phil sold it to the man, who was wearing an orange hunter’s vest and jeans that sagged down over his hips so that, when he leaned over the counter to sign his credit card receipt, I could see the two mounds of the man’s buttocks, and the sad crack between them.

I felt sorry for that man, who kept looking at his palm-grip sander over and over again as Phil rang it up, as though he knew, somewhere in his heart, having done this so many times before in his forty-nine years as a consumer, that he was making a terrible mistake. The palm-grip sander with its random orbit would not turn out to be what he’d wanted, or needed, but he would own it now for the rest of his life. It would hang above his workbench in the basement as another painful reminder of his gullibility, poor judgment, while the waste around him accumulated like rain in old tires, or rusty lengths of pipe in the countryside.

Where would it finally go, I wondered, looking at the overstocked shelves at Sears—all this junk?

Where does it go?

For instance, those tires that are always wearing away, going bald on the highway—where is that rubber when it’s no longer on those tires? Does it fade into the atmosphere—gaseous, a breath of rubbery air inhaled, exhaled? Or does it wrap the road in snakeskin like a jacket? Weren’t we driving, every day, over and over our own shed rubber?

Still, Ohio is crammed with rubber factories—Goodrich, Diamond, Industrial Rubber Inc.—making more and more. Where does it go? Those eraser shavings—ten tons of that must be worn away every year in elementary schools all over America. Those children in their rubber-soled shoes should be knee-deep in that pink ash by now. We all should be—

But we aren’t.

All this stuff, I thought, looking at it, rubbed away, worn away—friction turning our things to weather and air. Where does it go?

It has to go somewhere.

The man left with his palm-grip sander in a gray plastic sack that said SEARS in maroon letters, and Phil, who had been smiling and standing up straight in his striped tie and white shirt, sagged, then glared at me. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

I stopped smiling. “Well, Phil. Doesn’t it strike you as just a little silly: ‘This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy?’” I imitated him, a slow baritone. “Just a bit melodramatic, or something?”

“Sorry to be so ridiculous,” he said and turned his back to me. “I can take a break now, if you want to have lunch. If you’re not too clever to have lunch with an asshole like me.”

“Phil,” I said, following him into the break room. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot that you don’t have a sense of humor anymore.”

He turned around fast.

Behind him, a canteen vending machine whirred, warm, its miniature cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs waiting. I hadn’t meant to sound so mean. He looked like he’d been slapped.

“Just get out of here,” he said, and a salesman at the break room table looked up from his Sports Illustrated with a noodle hanging off his lower lip. Phil made a shooing motion with his hand. “Just go.”

I left.

The automatic doors that led from Sears back to the parking lot hesitated before they opened, and when I walked through them, they tried to close on me, then stopped themselves short before jarring all the way open to let me pass.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I say to Phil now.

“No,” he says. “Let’s just sit in the living room if your dad’s not home.” His feet in their wool socks move nervously over the carpet—nervous, toothless animals. He sits in my father’s armchair in the living room, and I sit across from him on the couch.

“Look,” I say. “We both know this isn’t working out.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “It’s not. You’re too smart for me now, college girl.”

I sigh. This will be harder than I’d hoped it would be, harder than Dr. Phaler would have had me believe. “That’s not it,” I say. “There’s been something wrong a lot longer than that.”

Phil looks like a lifeguard out of work for the winter—wind-tanned, but his hair is turning darker around the roots. For the first time I notice he must be trying to grow a mustache, and I imagine Phil with his bristling, hardware-salesman mustache. The knees of his jeans have begun to wear away, and I try to feel the compassion I used to feel. “Poor little boy with a blind mother,” I remember my mother whispering as she watched him load Mrs. Hillman into a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment, folding her into the passenger seat in her big winter coat, stuffing her in.

But Phil seems weak to me. I used to imagine a little satin heart with his name embroidered on it in my chest. A pincushion. A souvenir. The kind of thing you might buy in a gift shop, something that says “Las Vegas” or “Be Mine.” But now, there’s a cold, white stone in there instead—as if, during an apathetic kiss, something dead from inside him had slipped into my mouth, and I’d swallowed it whole.

It didn’t used to be like this.

I could still remember dancing with him in the gym: How young we’d been! A sudsy bloodbath of energy. Fat, in my pink dress, I was a sad valentine made by a child, made out of cotton balls, dime-store doilies, and paste—sentimental, pathetic, a little desperate, but sincere. And Phil was stooped but not yet bent, jerking to the music in his blue tux. Whatever burdens he already had, they did not seem permanent.

And all those sweaty nights on the couch, his kisses like blurred stars all up and down my neck. I was still fat. Together we were wading into a tepid lake. Carefully. The mud was soft and as loose as flesh.

But that was a long time ago.

“It’s over,” I say. “You’d better leave.”

“Okay,” he says, standing up. He doesn’t seem surprised in the least. “But there’s something you should know.”

“What?” I ask. Whatever it is, I think, I won’t care. Phil looks dilapidated, shrugging on his plaid coat.

“Your father knows perfectly well where your mother is,” he says.

“Excuse me?” Sarcastic.

“You heard me.” He’s putting his boots on. Reptilian. They’re army green, prehistoric-looking. The slick boots of a swamp dinosaur. Waterproof. Fireproof. “He’s keeping her up his sleeve.”

I sigh and roll my eyes. Typical Phil, I think—mangling his clichйs up to the bitter end. I picture my father with my mother slipped into his shirt on a stage in a kind of vaudeville show—aping in a top hat, the whole audience guffawing at the absurdity of this joke.

“What do you mean?” I ask, impatient.

“Ask him,” Phil says, opening the front door, stepping through it. “Don’t ask me.”

I SIT IN THE LIVING ROOM IN ONE OF THE GREEN-WINGED chairs for a long time. My father has gone to work. Outside, a plow scrapes through the streets, throwing snow to the side of the road, and the snow sounds soft, physical, a solid wave lapping at the curb, tossed out of the way. I picture a cow standing on railroad tracks, the huge machine of a train on the way, and the muffled, vulnerable sound of that cow in its path.

And then I remember the sound of her voice, which was as much a part of my mother as her body, but disconnected from her, hovering around and above her, as voices do. She had a soft voice, though it was often edged with sarcasm, judgment, displeasure. I picture vowels, wrapped in light, rising from her in clouds, as if something tangible could be made out of sound. I think, If the phone rang now, if I picked it up, and my mother spoke to me through the receiver, would it mean she existed any more physically than she does already, living in my memory, in her silence?

“Have fun,” she’d said, here, in the living room, as I left through the front door with Phil on the night of the Winter Formal four years ago.

“Have fun.” I’d handed her the corsage box he’d brought with him when he’d come to pick me up. The rose that was in it, surrounded by its baby’s breath, was pinned above my breast, and the box was empty. When my mother took it out of my hands, I could see it was lighter than she’d thought it would be, and cold. Phil must have kept it in his refrigerator at home. As I left for my first date, in the living room my mother was still holding that cold emptiness in her hand.

Fun was the last thing she wanted me to have.

I go to the kitchen, and take a carton of milk out of the refrigerator.

MISSING, it says on the back, and there’s a grainy photo of a fat little girl right under the box where the calories are counted. On the side, there’s a boy in a striped shirt. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? he’s asking with a big lost smile on his face.

I pour myself a glass of milk and take a long sip of it before I again remember that two-year-old in the back of some college boy’s truck, his skin softened, turned to liquid.

The milk is cool and vaguely sour when I swallow it, gag, spit it into the sink.

When I look up, my father’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He hasn’t taken his boots off. There’s snow falling in soggy fractions onto the floor, and a trail of it melts behind him.

MICKEY’S ALREADY DRUNK WHEN SHE COMES OVER WITH two bottles of champagne in a brown grocery sack. My father lets her in, and I hear him upstairs introducing May—the sound of May’s singsong sweetness, and my father’s formal discomfort. Beth and I are in the basement, waiting, sitting on the floor, leaning up against the vinyl sofa. My mother’s birdcage hangs over Beth’s head. We’ve never taken it down—shining, brightly empty.

“The bird has flown,” Beth says, looking up at it.

When I called Mickey and Beth that afternoon to tell them I’d finally broken up with Phil, they both insisted on coming over to celebrate. Over the phone, Beth said, “God rest his soul.”

Mickey’s wearing a leather jacket, and when I hug her, I smell smoke and animal skin. She kisses Beth’s cheek as she slips her jacket off—casual, magnanimous, European. I haven’t seen her since August. Since then, her hair has grown longer, been styled into wisps around her jaw. She’s wearing a black turtleneck, and makeup—burgundy lipstick, black eye shadow, a pale-beige base. With the turtleneck, the makeup, and the hair, she looks less scarred than I’ve ever seen her, and no longer a cheerleader. Mickey looks like a painter now, or a poet. The energy that once secured her spot on the varsity squad despite her unloveliness—that energy has turned overnight into a kind of serious intensity that is, finally, darkly beautiful.

She smokes clove cigarettes.

She’s dating a music major—bassoon.

It sounds like a swan, she says. A very sexual instrument. Once, in his dorm room, she let him tie her to the bed. She’s asked him for a pair of handcuffs for her birthday. They might even move to New York. All this she told me when I called to tell her that Phil and I were a dead issue.

Tomorrow, Mickey goes back to Madison. The day after that, Beth leaves for Bloomington. And the next day, my dad and May will drive me to Ann Arbor. We’ve decided to spend tonight like old times, getting drunk in the basement and smoking and talking together in our old cocoon, while, above us, my father stomps around in slippers.

“Jesus,” Mickey says. “I don’t know about you two, but I can’t stand to be back here. It’s like purgatory. Purgatory, Ohio. Haven’t we done enough time here? I can’t fucking wait to get back to school.” She sits across from us on the basement floor, at the edge of the carpet remnant, lights up a clove cigarette, and the smell of the smoke as it fills the basement and our noses is like a garden fire. A burning bush. The smell of a flower arrangement, torched, or the Christmas lights, shorted, igniting the whole tree in a smoldering moment. Mickey’s not wearing a bra under her black turtleneck, and her breasts look autonomous and big.

Beth is wearing old jeans and a flannel shirt. She’s gained more weight since she went away. She likes to study, she says, but she hasn’t made any friends. A few times, on weekend nights, alone in her dorm room with her roommate gone, she’d thought about what it would be like to be dead, how easy it would be to buy a gun—a small one, with a mother-of-pearl handle. There were pawnshops all over town. She’d considered how hard or easy it might be to hold that gun to your temple, count to ten, just as an experiment, to see how close you were willing to get to death, what ten felt like when you said it: a teaspoon of lead on your tongue, or a brass key to the door you were ready to step through into the colored light, the jagged surprise of a geode when you smashed it, all crystal and amethyst and pretty points inside.

But she wasn’t sure she wanted to die, at least not yet.

“Get me the fuck out of here,” Mickey says.

“I know what you mean,” Beth says. “My mother told me to clean my room this morning, and I wanted to bludgeon her with a feather duster.”

Mickey pops the plastic cork on the first bottle of cheap champagne, and there’s the wind of foam and pressure and the seething of trapped, effervescent space unleashed. Then she pours a little for each of us into my parents’ wedding glasses.

“So, congrats, Kat.” Mickey raises the glass. “Phil’s out of the picture at last.”

“At last,” I say. “God.” I shake my head, feigning sadness. “What a mess that ended up being.”

“Or,” Beth says, “as Phil would say, ‘What a vicious triangle.’”

The champagne chokes me with tartness and bubbles.

“God,” Beth says, swallowing. “What a dolt he was.”

“What I liked,” Mickey says, “was the look he got on his face when he was rubbing a couple Big Ideas together,” and she makes the look—a stern, fatherly frown.

“Not a guy with a fancy interior, that’s for sure.” Beth smirks.

“Here’s to Phil,” Mickey toasts. “May he never again loaf in vain.”

“May he never love in Spain.” Beth raises her glass, too.

My palm is flat against my chest, gasping with laughter, eyes watering, thinking of Phil—how he wore his sleeve on his heart. I remember reaching under him, between his legs, while we fucked, touching his balls. In my hands, they felt loose, and invertebrate, and at my mercy, and I’d thought of a marble Madonna I’d seen once at the Toledo Art Museum. She was holding the world in the palm of her hand, and seemed pleased. There was a thin, mysterious smile on her lips, as if she knew how much power she had.

But then I remember the look on Phil’s face as he shrugged his father’s coat on, how much taller than me he seemed, how that expression was smug, as though we’d just finished playing a game—a dangerous game, a game played with pieces of broken glass and aluminum bats—and he’d won.

I drink. I say, “But there was a parting shot.”

“I hope it wasn’t a shock in the dark,” Beth says.

“Or a shark in the pot,” Mickey says.

I’m laughing again. I feel better. Finally, I say, “He told me he thinks my father is keeping my mother up his sleeve.”

Mickey nods at Beth, then at me, in mock reflection. “Sounds reasonable,” she says.

“A bird up the sleeve is worth two bushes at least,” Beth says. “Or so they say.”

We laugh harder, and for a long time. Then, when the laughter’s faded, I lower my voice. I say, “No, really, you guys, he says my father knows where my mother is.”

“Hmmm.” Mickey strikes a match and lights another cigarette, and her tone changes. “Does that surprise you?” she asks, looking at the tip of her cigarette to see if it’s lit. She drags on it, then says, “Personally, I’ve always wondered about that.”

Beth nods, looking at me seriously.

“Really?” I stand up quickly with the unopened bottle of champagne in my hand. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”

Beth looks at Mickey, who looks at Beth, and then at me. She says, “I think I did. Once. Right after she left, Kat. But you didn’t seem to want to hear it.” She continues, “I remember asking you if you thought maybe your dad had something to hide, if maybe he knew something you didn’t and wasn’t saying, and you just blew it off. You said he was too transparent to hide anything. You said he’d taken a lie detector test, and they’d decided your father lacked the ability to lie.”

I stand there with the bottle, and they look up at me uneasily in the silence. Finally, Mickey pours herself some more champagne. She says, “I’ve been drinking all week. I just hate Garden Heights.”

“Maybe I should put this bottle in the freezer,” I say.

I feel groggy, and confused, as if I’ve just hit my head hard on something soft. I hold the champagne bottle like a skinned chicken, by the neck, and go into the unfinished part of the basement, and flip the light switch.

One bare bulb blazes from the ceiling, a terrible brightness.

I feel tired, blinded by it, as if I’ve been sleepwalking and have just woken up with a searchlight in my face. I can hear Mickey and Beth laughing in the other room, my father and May talking in a muffled singsong upstairs, but I can also hear myself breathing, and the breath sounds as palpable as wings, or water, in my lungs.

I head for the back of the basement, past the washer and dryer, across the drain hole, into the shadows, to the freezer. I can hear it purring, a contented vibration that hums through the whole white length of it, humming into the cement floor, into the earth under that. My father’s piles of old newspapers, bundled, are tied up tightly, efficiently, with twine on top of them. Years’ and years’ worth of old news. He must have planned to take them to the Board of Education’s annual paper drive one of these years, and forgot, and keeps forgetting, as the piles grow higher.

I set the bottle of champagne on the floor.

The bundles are heavy, and yellowed, and the twine cuts into my fingers when I start heaving them off of the freezer. They make a lifeless whoomf as they hit the cement, and the headlines seem strange, hopelessly innocent and outdated, even a little insane, staring up at me.

U.S. DOWNS TWO LIBYAN FIGHTERS. SURROGATE MOTHER MARY BETH WHITEHEAD SOBS IN COURT. Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer. George Bush looking weary, jogging in Kennebunkport in the rain. And, at the very bottom, a bundle that must have been there since the year my mother disappeared. A photograph of the Challenger making its last, crazy zigzag through the sky as it loses its challenge with space.

When all the bundles are off, I put the palm of my hand on top of the freezer, and feel the warm motor of it running. It must get hot, working so hard to keep the things inside it cold. I haven’t opened it since before my mother left, and when I try to lift the lid, I can’t. It’s as though something’s holding it closed from inside, or as if a huge, invisible weight is resting on it.

I try harder, my fingers under the white rubber lip, straining. I can feel the frost on my knuckles, but I can’t lift it, and I quit trying. I pick the bottle of champagne up, start back to the other room, turn the light off as I leave.

“The freezer won’t open,” I say, still holding the bottle by the neck.

“Forget it,” Mickey says. She lifts her empty glass for more champagne. “Let’s just crack it now.”

I sit back down on the floor, handing it over to Mickey, who struggles with the cork as Beth and I look on, holding our breath, waiting for the bright, foaming shot that doesn’t come. Instead, I hear my father at the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?” he shouts down to us. “What are you doing down there?”

Mickey puts the bottle between her knees and grinds out her clove cigarette in the ashtray, looking surprised.

“Drinking champagne, Dad. We’re just talking and drinking champagne,” I call up to him. “Why?”

“I want those girls to go home,” he says. His voice sounds strained. “Right now.”

Beth frowns at me, puzzled. I shrug. I stand up and head toward the stairs to ask him what’s wrong, but when I get to the foot of them, he’s already gone. I hear him stomp across the kitchen, through the living room, where I hear him say something in an angry tone to May, and she replies, also unintelligibly, in a high, apologetic whine. Then I hear them head together up the stairs.

“Jeez,” Mickey says, slipping her leather coat back on. “What do you suppose that was all about?”

LYING IN BED, I THINK OF MRS. HILLMAN WANDERING through her house in the perpetual dark, arms outstretched, feeling her way to the bathroom, the sink, the sofa, the refrigerator.

Born blind, what if, one morning, she opened her eyes and could see?

I imagine Phil finding Mrs. Hillman in her bed that morning when she doesn’t get up, doesn’t shuffle down to the kitchen for breakfast. Phil finding his mother lying on her back in her own bed, eyes bulged out of her head, mouth a gaping hole of surprise—

She’d seen it all too fast, for the first time, and had died.

Maybe, I think, when you’ve waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

A tatter of color.

A sharp triangle.

A glimpse of smudged light shining off the coffee table on a summer afternoon.

A leaf, a wing, a swaying branch, a fragment of black trunk, a brushstroke of bird’s nest before the whole tree’s illuminated—shrill, and undisguised, filling your empty eye with its dazzling razors and knives, an explosion of edges and circles and straight lines shivering.

Green.

Brief.

Movement.

Screaming.

You’d have to be ready for that.

THE SNOW HAS MELTED, AND THE MUD HAS COME TO LIFE: Trees and tulips, muskrats and possum are sucking up out of it with a sluggish sound, like some beast giving birth to a whole world—the sound of lactation, phlegm, and swimming, while in the muck something swampy and furred licks its blind young with a long sloppy tongue.

In the garden, there are hundreds—thousands—of baby snakes, sexual and twisting, stickling at wet nests of broken eggs and the fresh shoots of new leaves in the branches over my head, still damp and curled into fetal fists. I’m barefoot, looking up at the sky, which has begun to shed a fleshy, gray rain, then down at those snakes, eating their own tails now, when suddenly I notice my mother.

She’s under me, clawing herself slowly out of the thawing ground. Naked, writhing, she’s being born, sitting up, and it’s her hair I notice first, strung with the sludge of January, melting. Then she wipes the mud from her eyes, looks up at me, and says, “I’m glad to be alive.”

When I wake up, May, wearing a white nightgown, is standing in the dark of my bedroom doorway. I realize I’m drenched in sweat, and naked. In my sleep, I’ve pulled my flannel nightgown up over my head and thrown it to the floor. The sheets and blankets have been stomped down to the end of the bed—shed. May’s mouth is open wide, looking at me, and I am screaming and screaming and screaming.

IN THE MORNING I HEAR MAY TALKING TO MY FATHER IN the kitchen. She says, “Something’s terribly wrong.”

My father grumbles, guffaws. “She has a nightmare,” he says sarcastically, “and there’s ‘something terribly wrong.’ Haven’t you ever had a nightmare before?”

“Not like that,” May says, hushed and serious. “Not like that.”

“Well, I have,” he says, dismissing her. “Plenty.”

I hear something slam. Maybe he’s pounded his fist on the kitchen table. “I told you not to sleep over with Kat here. I told you.”

May starts to whine. “I don’t see why you’re so upset. I’m just expressing concern about your daughter.”

He’s shouting now. “My daughter does not need your concern. You are not Kat’s mother.”

“You’re right,” May says, resigned. I hear hangers in the coat closet. She’s getting her coat. She says, “I have to go to work. Call me tonight if you still want me to drive Kat to Ann Arbor with you tomorrow. Otherwise, I won’t bother you.”

“Good,” my father grunts.

“Oh,” May says.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says, and I hear the front door slam behind her.

“DID YOU ASK YOUR DAD WHAT THE FREAK-OUT WAS all about the other night?” Beth asks over the phone. She’s leaving for Bloomington this afternoon. Mickey left for Madison yesterday without calling to say goodbye.

“This morning he said, I kid you not, ‘I won’t have girls smoking in my basement,’” I tell her.

“What?” Beth laughs. “We’ve been smoking in that basement for five fucking years, and he knows it.”

“I know,” I say. “I told him that, but he just walked out the front door, got in the car, and drove off to work.”

“Weird,” Beth says, drawing the word out.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. I can smoke myself into a stupor if I want to. I can smoke my way to oblivion and back.”

“Yeah,” Beth says. “But not with me and Mickey. Not in your very own basement. Not in Garden Heights, Ohio.” She sounds sad, like someone who doesn’t want to be where she is, but knows she’ll never be back.

“Well, all third-rate things must come to an end.”

“Or,” she says, sounding cheerful again, “as Phil would say, ‘All’s swell that ends swell.’”

When she hangs up, I keep the receiver at my ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone until the recorded voice of the operator comes on and says, “Please hang up and try your call again.”

That voice sounds far away, echoing across the miles, like a woman who has been living at the end of a tunnel for a long time.

Then there’s silence.

“Beth?” I say into the phone, but she’s gone.

I PACK MY CLOTHES AND SHOES AND BOOKS. IT’S AFTERNOON. I leave for Ann Arbor in the morning.

This time, I’m taking more things back with me than I brought home. I’m taking things I thought I’d leave: my photo albums, my jewelry box, my summer shorts, a straw hat I bought long ago with a big plastic sunflower on the brim—a hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in now.

I’m taking the pink dress, three sizes too large, that I wore to the winter formal with Phil. I’ve been saving it for years, like a memory, and I don’t want to leave it here.

When the suitcase is full, I get another out of the guest room, then I go to my parents’ room and open my mother’s closet.

It is entirely empty.

I look at the emptiness a long time, and try to see into it. I try to see past it. The way Mrs. Hillman looks into the vast whiteness in front of her all day, stepping carefully into the snow on the other side of herself, sniffing the air as she goes.

But the longer I stare, the more empty the emptiness becomes, and brighter. It’s as if I’ve opened a closet into pure space—flat, but cavernous, and shiny—as if, if I stepped into it, I could fall into the future forever. I stare, and don’t breathe, and step closer, looking harder, until I think I recognize a face in there. A woman emerging. A grown woman with her mouth open, wearing a white scarf, a halo of light in her hair.

I gasp, leaning in. “Mom?” I say before I realize she is only my reflection. There’s a mirror in the back of my mother’s closet, and nothing else.

When I hear my father behind me, I turn around—

I had no idea he was home. He’s wearing a suit. His eyes are dark and narrow. Why isn’t he at work?

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Well,” he says, “you found it.”

He goes back down the stairs, and the door closes behind him with a dry, sucking sound.

WHEN MY FATHER COMES HOME AGAIN, IT’S FIVE P.M. HE doesn’t say hello. I stay upstairs. We don’t have dinner together. May doesn’t come over. My father falls asleep in one of the green chairs in the living room, and I come downstairs to find him in it. He looks as stiff as a crossing guard, snoring. I go back upstairs.

It was a gray afternoon, but as the sun goes down tonight it lights up the horizon, dipping below the sky’s steel wool in an angry frown. From my bedroom window I watch it sink into the earth, making a black silhouette of Phil and Mrs. Hillman’s house. I think of them inside it, seeing and unseeing, sitting down to dinner.

A boyfriend. I remember. She told Detective Scieziesciez that my mother had a boyfriend.

And I remember calling them the Saturday after my mother disappeared, how Mrs. Hillman said, “I’m sorry to hear your mother left, but, no, I didn’t see anything unusual at your house yesterday.”

She’d been gone only one day. I said to Mrs. Hillman, “I’m sure she’ll be back soon, but we’re going to the police station this afternoon to make a report.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

Then Mrs. Hillman said, “Did you get the cookies I sent to school yesterday with Phil?”

I thought: Cookies? There was a paper plate of fuzzy yellow stars covered with plastic wrap on the kitchen counter. I thought they were left over from Christmas. But they did have the look of cookies made by the blind, I realized then. How could Mrs. Hillman know what a star looked like, or what color one was?

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you. Yes.”

“Here’s Phil,” Mrs. Hillman said, handing over the phone.

“Hello?” He sounded strange, and farther away than next door.

I said, “Why weren’t you in school yesterday?” before I remembered Mrs. Hillman saying she’d sent him to school with the cookies that were in our kitchen now. Apparently, she didn’t know he wasn’t there.

“I went to the mall,” he said. “I bought you a present.” He was whispering, and he sounded fatigued, maybe a little resentful. “It’s our anniversary,” he said. “Didn’t you remember?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure.” But it threw me. Phil and I hadn’t been romantic for quite a while, and I hadn’t remembered our anniversary or bought him a present, and I couldn’t imagine what he could have bought me. A Barbie doll wearing a pink dress like the one I’d worn to the Winter Formal on our first date came to mind. She had synthetic hair and pins stuck into her chest.

“That’s nice,” I said, trying to sound grateful. “I’d have called sooner, but we were trying not to tie up the phone. My mother’s gone.”

“She’ll be back,” Phil said flatly, but he was still whispering.

“How did these cookies get here?” I was looking at them. I’d wandered into the kitchen with the phone receiver at my ear. The cookies were smudged under the plastic wrap. Blurred. Stars. They did not look edible. The one in the center was cracked in half.

“I brought them over to your mother,” he said. “Yesterday. I brought them over and dropped them off,” he said. “Then I went to the mall to buy your present.”

I heard my father coming down the stairs. “Kat,” he said, “get off the phone right now. We have to keep the line open.”

I watch their house from my bedroom window until the sun sets, seeming to breathe fire for a while in the bare January trees before it settles its flaming sword into the west edge of Garden Heights.

And I remember the present he gave me, the one he said he’d gone to the mall that day to buy. It was a tape. The Top 15 Dance Hits of 1985. At the time, I’d thought it was either the most or least thoughtful present he could have come up with. Either he’d considered long and hard what to buy me, spent all day wandering through the mall, worrying, and then he’d remembered our first date, all that dancing, the disc jockey hired by the high school to play the theme from Miami Vice over and over in the dark—or, it had been the quickest and easiest thing to reach, hundreds of them on display near the cash register, waiting.

“I hope you like that,” Phil said as I turned it over in my hand. He hadn’t wrapped it. When I looked up at him, he shrugged.

But I didn’t like it. I started to listen to it one day on the tape player in my mother’s station wagon, but I’d seen the MTV videos for every one of the songs, and those videos were what I saw—models dancing in bikinis, slippery images of thin women moving their hips in nervous splices on the television set in our living room—not Phil. Not me. And the music seemed slippery, celluloid, as well. All the instruments electronic, all the voices filtered through a computer. It made me feel nostalgic already for 1985, which had only been over for a few weeks, listening to Glenn Frey sing “The Heat Is On,” and it made me wonder how simple, how naive, how faded and unrecognizable we’d seem to ourselves in fifty years, looking back at those videos, considering the songs we’d listened to and liked. Our lost, bad taste in clothes and music betraying our innocence. Our celebrities dead in accidents we had no idea they’d have. Our current events turned into trivia questions: What was “New Wave”? What British rock band was “Walking on Sunshine” in the summer of 1985?

We’d keep looking back at ourselves in those shoes with that hair and shake our heads at how goofy we were, how sure we were of something that turned out to be nothing.

Then, the sky turns black, but clear, and now the stars blink on, one by one by one, as if God is moving through the halls of heaven flipping the light switches as he goes.

I stand at the window a long time in a white nightgown, and the night gets blacker, until I can no longer see outside, until the window is just a reflection of my bedroom, of my white gown. The furnace blows warm air into the room, and there is the smell of crayons melting, or the smell of my mother’s perfume in early summer, sun shining on her bare arms as she drove me home from school.

The smell of hummingbirds and butterflies baking in a dish at a low temperature for a long time.

Eau-de-Vie.

The numbers on my clock radio flip themselves forward without hesitation, with the determination of mechanical things.

When 11:59 flips into 12:00, it’s a new day.

1:00 A.M.

2:00 A.M.

3:00 A.M.

4:00 A.M.

5:00 A.M.

6:00 A.M.

When I hear the first winter birds of morning start to sing, I start down the stairs again.

“KAT.”

I hear her.

I can’t see the sun coming up—my eyes are closed—but I feel it breaking out of the ground, tearing the east edge of the earth to pieces, rising under the suburb, rocking our house—big fists breaking through the basement floor, shuddering through the concrete, a great volcanic eruption through the drain hole, lava and sparks spewing, something giving birth, or being born.

“Kat.”

She’s there. I finally know where. I start down the stairs, toward the sound of my name called, called in that familiar voice that has been muffled for so long—as if I’d been hearing it through a wall of flesh and blood, a body separating us, from which I’ve just emerged.

Now, it’s like radiance calling my name, everywhere at once.

I follow it through the hallway to the living room, where my father’s still asleep in the green-winged chair. There’s something he’s stayed here all night to guard, but his eyes are shut, head fallen backward, blankly facing heaven, or the ceiling, or the loosening dark above Garden Heights. His face is a mask softened by sleep. Still, out of his mouth there is a roaring, human sound, threatening and deep, as if he’s kept a furnace hidden in his chest for years. I pause there, and the snoring expands.

It thunders through the living room. It shakes the walls. A hundred hooves. A hundred doves. It’s kettledrums, and chariots, and war, and it blows the curtains open, and through them I can see the way the lawn rolls with whiteness away from the house, rolls toward the street, snow curling back into the sky, the present rushing into the past, and I imagine Phil, barefoot, running across it, running home, running away from my father shouting, “Go. You coward. You boy.”

And his mother, waiting there for him. She must have known—

Soft stars exploding behind her eyes.

She must have called my father at his office.

“Mr. Connors. This is Mrs. Hillman.”

“Yes? Mrs. Hillman? What—”

“Your wife has company this afternoon. I think you should go home, that you should see.”

It was a Friday. He had nothing else to do.

I go to the top of the basement stairs, and stand, and listen for a long time. I listen until I hear the whole world down there. The howling dogs, and wings, and the whirring of machines, and wind, and screaming, blunt objects, the buzzing of bees, rifle shots, and a million mothers calling their children with music like rivers on fire.

I listen to it until my whole body becomes an ear. My hair. My breath. My teeth. And then I follow her voice—her voice, which rises out of all the other noise, the voice that named me, the first voice I ever heard, the voice that called me out of her skin into this world.

Down the stairs to the basement. Past the pool table. The vinyl couch. The finished part. The canary’s empty cage—just a tuft of pale molt leftover, a fistful of echo, or weather.

“Kat.”

And then she’s screaming me past the mute witnesses of washer and dryer, water and fire, past those appliances of silence, of politeness, and convenience, saved time—farther into the unfinished part.

Open this.

Open this.

“What?” I ask her. “What? The freezer’s locked.”

“But you know the combination,” she says. “You’ve always known.”

I find my way to the Coldspot and stand barefoot before it. A trunk of infinity. Stuffed with sparks and talismans and dreams. A mind made out of nothing but love, fear, space, saying my name, creating creation.

Atoms, radio noise, God, and the matter of stars, all waiting to be bathed in brilliance, to reveal their secrets in sudden, stunning light.

I try to open it. I grip the top of the freezer, lock my knees, hold my breath and strain, but it won’t open.

So I get down on my knees and feel the half-inch of frost and space where I can slip my fingers into it, until I find what’s holding it closed. There’s a lock snapped through a hole that’s been drilled in the handle, and the lock has been slipped into the freezer.

I pull it around and out, examine it in my hand—though I don’t need to see it to know it’s the combination lock my father used to keep on his file cabinet, the one in which he kept his magazines. 36–24–35.

It opens simply in my hand—a needle dropping into a stack of hay.

I don’t move. I listen.

And then the gray matter of January begins to melt all around me. “Here’s Mama,” she says, and the vowels rise in two frozen zeroes above the freezer, swallow each other in midair.

How? For the rest of my life, I’ll be asked how, and this is what I’ll say:

Like any other daughter, I simply came to this darkness barefoot, and mortal, and just like her, when I heard her call my name to the silence, which wasn’t silent any longer. And then—

I lifted its lid, looked inside myself, and there my mother was.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

About the Author