Up So Down

1Up So Down A novel by Briane F. Pagel, jr.

September 1. Sarah waited as patiently as she could.. She tapped her foot against her leg, legs crossed right over the left, her skirt businesslike and not very attractive or sexy in any way. She picked up the People magazine from the second week of June and looked at the cover. She looked at her watch. She tapped her foot some more. She stood and examined each of the pictures on the wall. There were five. They each showed the alderman, of course.

She thought about the word,

“alderman,” and about how feminists tried to change the word to “alder” and she thought about how she disliked things like that, how people should just use the name for the position and not read so much into it. She had said largely the same thing, excepting only the feminist parts, on the one sports conversation she’d ever had, with Dylan, the conversation being about teams that were named after Native Americans. Dylan had said that he didn’t see why teams just didn’t change the name, instead of alienating people. When Sarah had said she didn’t think that they should change Dylan had acted surprised, saying that he’d thought she “of all people” would have agreed with him. At that, Sarah had been required to make a brief speech about stupid things like names not being the way to change things and that people who got all up in arms about that kind of thing were useless. To which Dylan had responded by asking, “Then why do you call me Dylan?” She made a circuit of the pictures, looking at each of the five twice in all, each time examining the pictures for a short time, looking for details, trying to kill time and keep her mind off of what she had to talk to the alderman about. 2 2

She knew she sounded crazy. It did not help her that there were at least a few people who did not think she was crazy, because she was not sure she wanted the approval of those people. In her own way, she knew, she was crazy. But notin the way people thought. They thought she was unbalanced because they thought she believed what she told them. She didn’t believe it, maybe, not really. She wasn’t sure anymore if she did or not. She then tried to tell herself, looking at the third picture on the wall, that she was doing this for Peyton. She always had to mentally add that. But it wasn’t true. She knew it wasn’t true because Peyton wasn’t doing anything anymore, let alone making her go on with this. It was while she was looking at the community center/school picture the second time that the receptionist said pleasantly but flatly “Mr. Johnson will see you now.” The young woman stood up and took a few steps to the office door, and while she did not smile she also did not look disapproving, Sarah thought, either. Sarah walked through the door that the receptionist pushed slightly open for her but not open enough. She had to move the door, push it more widely open, to get through it. It was solid and old-fashioned. When a politician meets someone, he gets up and shakes that person’s hand, looking them in the eye. With men, he will put his hand on their shoulder or elbow, pull them in a little, hold the handshake just the right amount of time. (A politician without an innate sense of just how long to hold a handshake does not last very long.) With a woman, the politician will hold her hand a slightly shorter time, and will put both of his hands on her one hand: warm, enveloping, but comforting rather than aggressive or sensual. Sarah did not know that. Mr. Johnson, the alder, was the first politician she had met in person.

3 3

It was just as well she did not know that, because Alder Jeff Johnson did none of these things. He did even stand up or motion her into the room. That was only the latest sign of how she was going to be received and although she did not know about the handshake, she could read the other signs. She had not been offered coffee, and had been left waiting for nearly thirty minutes beyond the time she’d set up as an appointment, an appointment that she’d tried to make three months ago (probably the same time that People magazine in the waiting room had come out, she thought now) and had been forced to settle for September. She had not persisted in trying to make the appointment though, or move it up, and she wondered if her lack of ambition showed through, if that was why they were not very welcoming, why they left her waiting, did not offer her a drink. All of that, combined with the fact that the alderman sat at his desk looking at a manila folder and chewing on a pen, did not look up at her, did not greet her other than to say “Come in, please,” told her how her request would be received. The alderman simply did not care what she thought of him. And in a politician, that spoke volumes, because what one voter thinks could influence other voters, could begin a slow swing away from the cushy job of public service and into the private sector, the ignominy of concession speeches followed by a job as a lobbyist or lawyer. Politicians (again, the successful ones) were careful not to alienate anyone. That Sarah was someone who could be alienated by a politician, without threatening his career, set her aback. But only momentarily.

4 4

She sat down in front of his desk, on the edge of the seat, then composed herself a little better and sat back, trying to relax into the chair but not able to quite do so. They each sat there for a moment. Sarah had decided that she would wait for him to talk. So she sat and looked at him, and watched as he flipped through more papers in the folder. “I’m not sure, Ms. Strathan, what it is you’ve come to see me for.” He put the folder down on his desk and looked at her. From her vantage, she could see it contained articles, clippings from newspapers and printouts from the web, and she knew what they were about. “I’ve come to see you about those.” She said it simply. She nodded, slightly, at the folder. “These.” He tapped them. She nodded. “I’ve seen the op-ed piece your group wrote here,” he said, and took it out. “I’ve read it. Twice.” “And?” She asked. “I disagree with you.” Sarah didn’t say you disagree with the group. I didn’t write it. She didn’t say it, but she thought it. Instead, she said: “Other people do, too.” The alderman sighed. “Look, I’m trying to hear you out, but I don’t know what to tell you. There simply isn’t a serial killer out there.” Now it was out of the bag, and the words hung in the air like the dust swirling after two cars collide in an intersection. Sarah began talking and talked faster than she usually did. 5 5

“Each year for the past five years, there have been exactly four deaths from drowning. Each of the people died by drowning in Lake Mendota. Each of the people was a male, a man. Each of the people was single. Each of the people…” she stopped as she heard herself and tried to think why she was saying people and then went on “Each person was nearing an important event in their, his life. Each person …” But he interrupted her: “Each person had been drinking. And it was not exactly four. One year there were five.” “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Four or five. It was four all the other years.” “It does matter, if you’re going to be relying on a pattern to tell me there’s a serial killer. And it’s not much of a pattern.” “And they each died in the spring.” “You’re using a pretty loose definition of spring,” Alderman Johnson said. “One drowned in early June. One drowned March 1.” Sarah winced.

The

alderman saw it, and said, “Sorry.” “Thanks,” she said, wondering why she thanked him for apologizing to her, and ducked her head for a moment. She looked back up. “Mr. Johnson,” she began, and swallowed. She knew what she was supposed to say. Something like: I can’t do anything to bring Peyton back. But I’ve got to try to do something to keep other people from getting hurt. Something like: That’s why I’ve come to see you. I want you to do something about it. I want you to try to stop it. You’re the only one on the council who will even see me! She knew that was true. She knew that the police wouldn’t talk to the group anymore, and wondered when and how she, or the group, or anyone, would get noticed, would have someone 6 6

take them seriously. She didn’t say any of that. The feeling of her voice saying “Mr. Johnson” faded away. The office was small, and solid, with the desk being one of those massive desks that used to fill offices everywhere, public or private, wooden and worn on the edges so that the corners were rounded. It took up only a little more space than it should have in the room, but made the office seem a little smaller for that. There were mismatched bookshelves lining the walls, some with actual books, most with binders and manuals and folders and files. “Well,” said the alderman, finally. “Well,” he said again. He started to rise a little, but Sarah spoke, finally. She wondered what Jane would have said and knew that Jane would have said what Jane had suggested she say when Jane had suggested Sarah do this. You could go try to talk to him. I’ve tried to talk to him, too, and maybe if enough of us call, he’ll talk to someone, Jane had told her. Jane had sounded resigned, at that point, as if she knew that the only reason Sarah had even asked was because Sarah thought Jane had noticed the fliers. Sarah had not, though, expected that the alderman would actually see her and did not know why he had, and she could not really remember, anymore, what Jane had suggested she say. Maybe it was because she had been on the news; maybe that was why the alderman had returned her phone calls and not Jane’s. But he was standing up now, he was holding out a hand, so she blurted out:

“You could start an

investigation,” she said. “You could hold hearings, I’ve seen other people do it.” “It’s not really the kind of thing I do,” the alderman said. “I tend to focus more on housing, garbage collection, things like that.” “But you could do it,” she insisted. “I just don’t see how it would help.”

7 7

“Because it would help bring out the truth, and would focus attention on the issue,” she said. She thought that she should have emphasized truth more but did not really think she could have. “Then more people might know to watch out, and if you get enough publicity someone might come forward.” She paused. “With some information.” The alderman sat for a moment, and picked up the folder again. He rifled through the papers, took out one slim packet. Sarah had seen that set of papers before, too, knew what he was looking at, knew it by heart. The alderman looked it through and then looked at her. Later, Sarah would think to herself, at least he tried to be kind at the end, there. The alderman did, his voice softening a little, as he looked at her. “Ms. Strathan, it’s true that those people did die. You’re right about that. But you’re forgetting something. Something important.” He looked at the papers again.

“A couple of things, really.”

Sarah knew what he’d say, could have

practically said the words with him, but, again, would be gratified a little at least to think that the man had tried to be nice.

“We live in a college town.

Surrounded by lakes. And the college has dorms right on the lakeshore, dorms that are reached by students in the spring walking along a gravelly path along the lake. Students who have been drinking, some quite a bit. Most times quite a bit. Given all of that, I’m surprised that we don’t have more than four or five drownings a year.” “But why only over the past few years?” Sarah protested, a question that usually at least got the listener to pause a moment, she’d noted from her own reaction to that question and from other’s. 8 8

Alderman Johnson did not pause. “It hasn’t been. People have been drowning before that. But a couple of years ago the renovation of the lake path was completed.” “That doesn’t explain the consistency,” she said. “The lake is frozen in the winter,” Alderman Johnson said. And when he saw Sarah was about to speak again, he held up the paper, and said softly, “The other thing you’re not paying much attention to, Ms. Strathan, is that most of the people who drowned were 20 or 21 or 22. They were not 30, like your fiancé.” Sarah closed her mouth. The room was silent. “Thank you,” she said, and stood up. Alderman Johnson did not stand up with her this time, did not offer to walk her out. He would not be taking his picture with her and hanging it on his wall anytime soon. She did not look back as she went to the door, opened it, and showed herself out. She did not look at the receptionist, either, as she walked out of the office and out of the government building and out to her car. Her heels clicked with a muted tap; they were old and worn down and rounded around the edges. She walked slowly to the parking ramp behind the municipal building, nestled in among the newer construction and large government buildings. She briefly fumbled for her keys, standing by the door. Once she had them, she inserted the key into the lock but then stood there, not turning the key.

She stood there and stared at her hand, clenched around the

key, at the key tensed to twist the lock, at the lock that would turn and pop open the door.

Her eye went to her car, to it’s fake-leather vinyl seats brown and

slightly cracked and clean, almost immaculate for a used car of its age. She did 9 9

not eat or drink in her car. Her eyes flicked over the driver’s seat, where a folded afghan served as a seat cushion and kept her legs from sticking to the vinyl when hot and from being too cold in the winter. Then to the passenger’s seat, where she saw it again. Her car was almost immaculate. In the corner of the passenger’s seat was a small scrap of paper, a tiny corner of flimsy white paper that was hardly noticeable unless you knew where to look. It had to be hardly noticeable she thought, each time she saw it. Or he’d have cleaned it out of there, too. It, the hardly noticeable thing, was the top edge of a straw wrapper, the part that you tear off (with your teeth, sometimes) before pulling the longer bulk of the straw wrapper off from the bottom. Sarah had found it there nearly two months ago, when she’d stopped to vacuum the car. She was using the industrial vacuum at the SelfWash and had moved around to the passenger’s side, was getting the dust and bits of leaves off of the carpet there and ready to replace the floor mat, when she’d seen the paper in the edge of the seat. She had put the vacuum down because she’d recognized the thing, instantly, when she saw it, something inside her had immediately determined what this tiny scrap of white was, and she’d put the vacuum nozzle onto the ground because she had not wanted to accidentally vacuum this thing. She’d squatted outside of her car, the vacuum hoovering away behind her, the hose brushing against her leg. She, as she crouched there, was starting to sweat in the July heat and her scrubs did not absorb the moisture. The beads of sweat trickled down unabated as she stared. Sarah did not eat in her car. Her car had been used by someone other than Sarah only once since it was last cleaned. 10

10

Peyton had driven it to Dylan’s apartment to meet him that night. She’d stared and stared at the straw wrapper. Peyton had driven it to Dylan’s house, but had not driven it home. Dylan had not driven it back to her. She’d had to get a ride over there. Tammy had driven her. She’d had to use her spare keys. The car had been clean when she’d opened it up. She stood there in the July heat that day, and later stood there by her car in the September heat, staring, each time, at the scrap of white. The heat in September was always an echo, a watercolor painting, of the heat of summer in Madison. In July the heat would bake the sidewalk and the grass and the road, and make the air feel still but not heavy, hot like air from the oven is hot. Then by August the humidity would strike and the air became thick and liquid. As the humidity faded away, as the atmosphere in the city started to feel less like someone’s breath on your neck and more like air again, like air but still hot, the calendar turned to September. In September, the air was hot and dry but could never muster the same authenticity that July’s heat had. Standing there in September and remembering crouching there in July, Sarah could picture what must have happened. It must have been: Peyton had been on his way to Dylan’s and had stopped at McDonald’s. He would not have been able to resist; he’d even talked, as he was getting ready, about how hungry he was. So he’d stopped at McDonald’s, and eaten the food on the way. He must have eaten it on the way, because he’d opened the straw in the car (back in July, she’d looked on the seat, on the floor, for specks of bun, grains, of salt, a fleck of mustard or ketchup, in hopes that Peyton had dropped 11 11

something else and had missed it, but he had not and in September she no longer looked anymore because she knew that the scrap of paper was the only thing that had escaped from Peyton’s attention that night, the only thing he’d left behind in her car when he got out.) He must have cleaned out the car, cleaned it out carefully and done so before he’d gone in to Dylan’s apartment because otherwise it would all still be there, right, all the mess or paper or scraps? But he’d missed it, missed that tiny piece of a wrapper. When she saw that wrapper in July and now when she saw it, each time she saw it, she could not bear to disturb it, could not move it, could not clean it. She knew, down inside, that if that wrapper stayed there she would not be able to get rid of this car, and she knew at that same level inside her how crazy that made her sound. She’d told nobody about the wrapper and she’d let nobody ride in her car since she’d found the wrapper. She had used her mother’s car to take her mother to the hospital, driving to her mother’s house in her own car and then switching and taking Mother’s car. Now she did not want to open the door. She did not want to sit in the car with the wrapper.

She didn’t cry, didn’t bite her lip, didn’t do any of the

histrionic, dramatic, melodramatic maneuvers one might expect. She did not stamp her heel and turn around or run away. She just stood there, looking at the scrap of paper, and then pulled her key back out of the door and turned to walk away. If she could not bear to get into her car right now, she would not get into her car right now. A few feet away, she paused, turned around, and walked back to check and make sure that the door was locked, that she had not accidentally unlocked the door while standing there. She hadn’t. Ensuring that her car was locked – 12 12

ridding herself of that tiny insecurity -- she walked away to get a coffee or maybe buy a paper. She had time to not get into her car just yet. She didn’t have to work today, and would not go see her mother for another hour or two, could continue cutting back just a little on those visits these days. The first week, she’d been there visiting Mom almost every minute that she was not working, while trying to balance her need to sleep and to help Peyton’s memory (she could never bring herself to say “find Peyton’s killer” and could not decide if that was because she did not want to admit he really was… gone, dead, there, I thought it she would tell herself at those times, or whether that was a hard thing to say for other reasons she did not want to dwell on right now.) The next few weeks, the second set of weeks, she’d been there a lot, really, more than many people. But her mother’s stay in the hospital was entering its eighth week now and she was not there at all hours. She was still there a lot, to be sure, enough that most people in the hospital admired her (while those who knew her well enough also sometimes remarked, when she was not present, on how Sarah had little else to do) but was not there with Mom all the time, or even a majority of the time, anymore. She did not, then, head to the hospital early. Instead, she walked away from her car. I’ll get a coffee and a paper, pick Mom up some flowers or a magazine, she thought, and those errands took enough time. When she got back to her car again, this time, she turned the key and, keeping her eyes on the straw wrapper the entire time, sat down and closed her door. She also never rolled down her windows anymore. And she kept the vents pointed away so as to not disturb the wrapper.

13 13

14 14

November 21. His head hurt. But it wasn’t the alcohol. Bumpy squinted at the computer screen, his laptop on the coffee table in front of him and just a little too far for his buzzed eyes to pick out detail on the pictures displayed on its screen. They were all just swoopy whorls of neon. “Swoopy whorls of neon,” he said aloud. He liked that. “Swoopy whorls.” He took a sip of the egg nog laced with brandy, the drink getting warmer now, and looked out the window. Thanksgiving and it’s warm enough to wear shorts, he thought. The glow of lights was also startling, even after several months. Warm enough to wear shorts, light enough outside my window to think it might be day. Las Vegas during the day was dusty, and faded, all threadbare carpet and concrete that had been stepped on too much, brass rails that showed the fingerprint smudges of countless gamblers and buffet-goers and now families. But Las Vegas at night glowed. From the end of the strip in old Las Vegas with the Circus Circus and the Sands, to the far end of the strip in “new” Vegas (as Bumpy thought of it) with the Luxor and Excalibur, it shone with a brilliance that should have been visible from space. The neon, the reflections, the fountains, the car headlights and brakelights and spinning slots all added up to more light, more power, more glow than one city could hold, and Bumpy pictured it spilling out over the edges of the city and into the desert, causing the sand to glow perpetually. 15

He’d driven up to Las Vegas in the evening, had in fact timed it that way. He’d wanted to see the glow of the city rise out of the night like a portal opening up, and it had done just that. He’d checked himself into a hotel that was halfway up the Strip, that first night, and had never left the Strip after that. “Why would anyone live in Las Vegas and not be on the Strip as often as possible?” he’d asked Ivy when she’d questioned him as he was moving to yet another hotel room.

Questioned was not exactly right, because Ivy did not

question him like that, really. Questioning would be too challenging, and Bumpy gave off such an air of transience, in part because of the hotel rooms, he reflected at times, that challenging him was not a good idea for someone who tenuously clung to an engagement that never seemed quite real, not to her, anyway. So Ivy had not challenged him. Instead, she’d said: “Do you ever think about moving off the Strip?” And that was when he’d said, “Why would anyone live in Las Vegan and not be on the Strip as often as possible?” That hadn’t happened tonight. That had not been the discussion tonight, although it might as well have been. That discussion had been sometime before tonight. Bumpy couldn’t quite remember and thought maybe he should not have had a drink before leaving. Ivy had looked at him after he’d said that about the Strip, looked at him silently, not wanting to look away and not wanting to say anything right away. Bumpy replayed the conversation now, as he looked at his laptop and sipped at his warm eggnog. That conversation was so close to the one they’d just had, if 16

what they’d just had was a conversation at all, that he could easily recall the earlier exchange and he knew, someday, that he would probably get them mixed up in his head. He wondered if maybe he had been sending the wrong message to her, if he could have cleared things up by saying you can challenge me, I won’t just up and leave. But that’s a lie, he thought suddenly. A half lie. Because he was going to just up and leave. But not because of her challenging him. That was not why, in a few minutes, he was going to fold up his laptop, put it in its case, pick up his camera case and a backpack with a few changes of clothes in it and a sweatshirt (he would not take a jacket. He was not forgetting that it would be cold there, but he did not want to give in to the cold, and a jacket seemed as though it was too accepting and permanent, too, so he would not take a jacket because doing so would make it seem as though he needed a jacket, and people who were not staying long did not need a jacket), in a few minutes he would grab his wallet and iPod, and walk out the door of the hotel room. He would do all those things in a few minutes, he knew, but not because she was challenging him. She had sat and looked at him in a nonthreatening way, or what she hoped was a nonthreatening way. Ivy was, in fact, afraid to challenge Bumpy because she did not want him to leave, did not want to get into the kind of situation where not only did she have to worry that he would leave, but that he would also demand the ring back and tell her he didn’t want to see her anymore, and that she

17

could not work at his store. So she looked at him and did not say anything, not for a long while. Then she had said quietly, “But there’s other parts to Las Vegas. It’s a regular city.” “It’s those parts I don’t like,” Bumpy had said. “Why?” “I lived in a regular city. I don’t want to live in a regular city.” Ivy knew the rest of that speech: I want to live where things are exciting, and different, where everything seems new and bright. He’d said it a few times, in different settings and with different tones. Once, he’d paused at the end of that short statement of values, and added quietly “And I don’t want to live near the water.” She had not followed up on that and did not know, even now, what he meant. “Besides, living near the Strip makes it easier for my photos,” Bumpy had pointed out.

That, too had not been for the first time.

She wondered, sometimes,

whether being near the Strip made it easier for him to write, too, because he never mentioned that. “It just seems…” And Ivy had stopped there. Because what could she add? Weird?

Impermanent?

Like the kind of thing a guy who is serious about

marrying you and settling down and maybe having a kid or two does not do? Living in hotel after hotel on the Strip, spending his days and nights taking pictures of the minutiae of Las Vegas, close-ups of neon lights and poker chips, reflections of people in the sparkling exteriors of casinos, long exposures of cars and people on the strip, ripples in the fountains of the Bellagio reflecting the Eiffel Tower of Paris, all lovingly shot the way a parent takes picture after picture 18

of his first baby and always in the best light. Bumpy did not show the underside of Las Vegas and did not like to talk about that. The current hotel, the Venetian, was not in any way equipped for any kind of in-room cooking or storage of food and Bumpy made no effort to adapt it. He lived on room service and buffets and snack foods and it was a wonder that he only now was looking a little puffy and out-of-shape, a little ill-defined around the edge. “Swoopy whorls,” he mumbled again. He finished his eggnog and looked to the bedroom. Ivy had given up near the end of their conversation and had lain down on the bed and turned away. She had not started crying, not then, and he wondered if she had cried at all. He had sat there, watching her lay there with her back sort of towards him, running her hand up and down the comforter with its silky sheen, and wondered what he should do. He supposed, now, that she’d done that rather gone and left for her apartment because she had not wanted it to seem like they’d had a fight, and because, maybe, she’d not wanted to go away from him in case that gave him permission to go away from her. He stood, now, a little unsteadily, and looked at the bedroom door. Then he looked away from the bedroom door, closed down his computer and put it in its case, grabbed the backpack and the rest, and only then looked towards the bedroom door again. He walked right up to it, put his hand against it, and leaned his head on the frame. He imagined he could hear her in there, lying on the bed. It was so quiet from the next room. He imagined that she was 19

trying to breathe quietly, trying not to snore, so that she would not offend him or keep him awake or do something else that would drive him away. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, and wondered how much of his sadness was the eggnog and brandy, how much was Ivy, and how much was the message he’d gotten just before their talk and just before he’d had the third eggnog. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled a second time. He picked up his backpack again and put his lips right to the wood of the door, almost kissing it. “You didn’t drive me away. You couldn’t.” He knew he should go wake her up. She’d probably come with him. Not even probably. He knew she would. And he knew that if he did not wake her she would not understand why he hadn’t, would not know what he’d done or why. He knew also, that he was not going to leave a note. The thing is, he pictured himself saying in the future, I had to go quick. It was a coping mechanism he employed: When he anticipated trouble, he played the scene in his mind in advance, pictured how it would work out, who would say what, where they would stand, who would point a finger in whose face, which one of the combatants or debaters would pull up something from the past first. He ran through mock conversations in his head over and over until he knew how to handle them. Professional athletes picture, in their mind, their actions as they hit a tee shot or sink a free throw. Bumpy used the same model for arguments and confrontation. He did it now, outside the door, and as he walked across the room to the other door.

20

The thing is, I had to leave quickly. If I didn’t leave right then, if I waited anymore longer I wouldn’t have gone. And I couldn’t not go. “Nobody would just up and leave like that,” Ivy would say. Maybe it wouldn’t be Ivy, though, he pondered. It might be someone else. It might be someone else who would point out to him just how wrong he’d been. I would just up and leave like that, he’d say, and he said it now, and he closed the door behind himself and went downstairs on the elevator, already plugging his iPod earbuds into his ears and putting music on, swaying slightly and licking his lips, sticky from the eggnog mixture and ignoring the tourists on the hotel with him. He went downstairs, and got into a cab, and told it to take him to the airport.

21

NOVEMBER 23: Sarah sat by the bed and waited for her mother to die. Or to wake up. The hospital walls were not white. Not like they used to be, not like in movies. Nothing was white anymore in this hospital, or any of the hospitals or doctor’s offices. Instead, they painted the walls bright colors and the nurses wore bright colors with little patterns (one had sailboats on, and who even sailed around here, let alone in winter?) Sarah sat by the bed and waited for her mother to die. Or to wake up. Either was about the same now, she thought. The nurses who came to the room, the other nursing assistants, the doctors, all tried to tell her differently, but she knew they were lying and they knew it, too. They did not care for her attitude, but she was the daughter with the dying mother and they felt sorry for her having to go forward in life at her age without a mother to rely on to get her through her twenties and thirties. Sarah talked to her mother from time to time in a low, calm voice that showed by this time that she was used to these visits, that she was used to the surroundings, that she was used to even the television set that only got three channels clearly and none of them carried the Food Network, which they’d spent so many days watching at Mom’s home. Sarah talked now, and this is what she said:

22

“I’m not going to let him see you. I’ll never let him do that. I haven’t told him and I’m not going to tell him. I’m not going to call him or write him. He can go wherever it is he’s going to go, do whatever it is he’s going to do. He will never see you.” Her mother did not stir. She was past stirring now, she was only awake a few hours a day at most and not much of a participant in life even then. Sarah continued to talk while she clutched at the remote control, pulling its cord taut from where it hung off the wall unit, a remote control and bed control and nurse call all in one, and God only could hope that the nurse call worked better than the remote, as she pushed her thumb onto the button that changed the channel. She could only change the channel by pushing the one button, which advanced the channel counter by one, in this case from channel 4 to 5. She pressed harder. 5 to 6. 6 to 7. “I wonder,” she said to her mother’s sleeping face visible in silhouette “why it makes you count through the channels it doesn’t even get.” This was a question she’d posed to her mother on other occasions, sometimes while her mother was awake. Sometimes it was an observation: It makes you stop on channels they don’t even get. Sometimes the phrase was more existential: You have to sit and wait on this channel that only exists for that moment that you’re stopped on it. She got to 17 and stopped there, the evening news, the local news show, was just starting up. As she turned her attention to pressing the volume up a little and wondered whether there was anything on it about the group, the book, anything, wondered that even though she had not quit, the nurse came in. 23

“Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you.” Sarah waved her in. “You’re not,” she said. The nurse stood there, thinking that Sarah could be a little more polite, a little more friendly, but, then, who could say how she herself would react at such a time? Sarah looked over at the nurse, waiting there, and tried to smile. “Sorry, Tammy. I didn’t realize it was you. How are you doing?” Tammy now stepped more fully into the room, turning on one of the overhead lights and moving around to the other side of the bed where she fiddled with the pain medication dispenser that Sarah’s mother could activate by pressing a button, keeping her constantly medicated. “Fine. Fine. How are you? Holding up, I mean?” Tammy looked over her shoulder. “Just get off of work?” Sarah nodded. “I guess the commute’s pretty easy, getting here,” Tammy said. Sarah pursed her lips. “Yes,” Sarah said, in a tone that made Tammy realize that Sarah had heard the joke before. “Lucky for me that Mom’s insurance let her stay here, right?” “Did you even go home?” “Not yet. I’ll hang around here for a while, see if she wakes up and eats dinner.” Tammy looked at the chart, made some notes. “Did you read this today?” Sarah nodded, keeping her eyes on the news show. “She hasn’t woken up much.” “Nope.” “You okay?” “Yes.” “Should I get you some food?” 24

Sarah looked away from the TV, at Tammy. “I guess, if it’s no trouble.” “It’s no trouble. That’s what…” Tammy trailed off, but they both knew how that sentence was going to finish up: the assistants are for. Tammy did not want to remind Sarah of the imbalance of power between them. “I’m here for,” she finished up. “Thanks,” Sarah said. They sat there awkwardly for a moment. After a few seconds, Sarah turned her attention from the TV to her mom, and they both watched as the sleeping woman breathed shallowly.

Tammy was humming.

Sarah recognized the song, knew that she recognized the song, but could not tell what it was. She thought about asking her, asking Tammy what it was, but did not feel up to it. Finally, Tammy excused herself and said that the food would be up in a few minutes. Sarah thanked her and closed the door behind her. She paced around the dimly-lit room. She looked at the flowers that had arrived that day. The first week in the hospital, there had been two or three bunches per day delivered, the residue of her mother’s long list of friends and acquaintances and Christmas card recipients. The second week they’d trailed off to 1 per day, on average. Now it was a few here and there. Sarah tried to bring fresh flowers when she could, when the ones in the room got too old or wilted or dry, so that her mother would not have to see things that were so obviously dead. Or dying. Which might be the same thing, at this stage. Sarah would also, each day from here on out, whenever she saw new flowers, go to see who they were from to

25

make sure nothing slipped past her guard. She was not going to let him even send flowers. There were two new sets today and she decided to see what the cards said, to see if he had left them or had them sent. She wasn’t sure he knew how to send flowers or would bother doing that, but he might have picked them up from the gift shop and brought them. He would realize that other people did that, at least, and try to do it himself. She looked at the cards and bouquets. One was simply a mixture of flowers, the kind you can get at any upscale grocery store nowadays, and had been dropped off by the woman at the church Mom went to every other week. The other was a set of daffodils, bright yellow curly heads winking out over a yellow-glass vase. The card had a cheery Get Well SOON! on the outside. She opened it up. Donovan’s, was written inside, and a bunch of illegible signatures. Near one: We’ll keep the elephant ears ready for you. Donovan’s was a bakery near the house. Mom went there almost every day. Mom had gone there, almost every day, she corrected herself. Then she peered momentarily into her future. She pictured herself in a month or two, or less – god, no—telling someone at the service Mom used to go there almost every day. Not everyone gets the chance to practice talking about their mother in the past tense. She hummed the song that Tammy had been humming, and wondered where she’d heard it before.

26

March 3: “I’m serious this time,” Bumpy said. “No, you’re not. You’re always talking about this stuff” Jay said. Bumpy drank the rest of his beer, and leaned back in the booth he and Jay sat in. Jay went on. “You’ve said a million times that you’re leaving, that you’re starting over, that you’re quitting your job. I bet everyone in this bar can quote you.” “When have I ever had a job?” Bumpy said, and stood up, saying. “Come here.” He wasn’t even a bit unsteady as he got up from their booth. He stood there for a second and reflected on that, reflected on how it was probably the first in maybe 298—it was probably 298, that number seemed about right-consecutive weeks on their night hanging out that he’d stood up from that booth that he was not the slightest bit unsteady. But not surprising, tonight, because tonight he’d had only the one beer. “Follow me.” Jay stood up, too. He was a bit unsteady as he grabbed at his pack of Marlboros and lighter. “Where’re we going?” he asked. “Do I need my jacket?” “Nope,” said Bumpy and pulled his own cigarettes out of his own pocket. He looked at them. He thought about them. He tossed them onto the table and dropped the lighter next to them. Jay noticed as he lit a cigarette. “What’s that all about?” he said. “Nothing,” said Bumpy. He thought to himself I don’t need to make everything official, I guess.

27

His face hurt. He wondered if it was puffy. Jay hadn’t said anything, so he doubted it was noticeable. “Does this got something to do with why you were late today?” “Got something? Geez, Jay, we went to college together. How is it you talk like a Teamster? You studied algebra. You were a math major.” The sentences had the feel of statements that should be emphasized, but Bumpy said them flatly, observations. Jay just shrugged. “It’s who I am. Where’re we going?” “Outside,” said Bumpy and led him towards the door. They were forty feet into the long, narrow bar with booths along one wall and the bar-and-grill along the other, and the window was obscured by posters and signs and the pinball and dart machines that stood in front of it. Bumpy thought how odd it was that they should come here tonight, for their regular weekly evening hanging out. Neither he nor Jay had talked about whether they would, or would not, do that. Neither of them had talked about whether they should or should not come here. Bumpy, for his part, had simply headed over here after completing all the arrangements, maybe out of habit, even, and walked in. A little late, as Jay had noticed. But he’d still come here, in spite of everything that had taken place in the last… …could it have been only 48 hours? Less, he realized. Less than two days. They veered to the right, Bumpy leading the way, and he held the inner door open, leaving Jay to push the outer door.

28

Outside, it was cold and damp, slushy brown melting icy snow lining the sidewalks and streets, patches of muddy brown grass peeking through here and there. The sidewalks were wet and slick, caught halfway been ice and water, the temperature hovering here just after dark around 32 degrees and leaving winter and its detritus unsure how to proceed, to melt and slip away into the aquifer or to hang in there and maybe twist an ankle of someone who wasn’t paying attention. By early March in Wisconsin, it was hard not to picture winter as an actual being, one with teeth and claws and strong, cold icy hands that all have been clutching and tearing at you for months and won’t let go. But it was hard, too, not to picture that winter getting a little tired and starting to think that maybe it was time to find a place to lay down for a while. The door clattered shut behind them. Bumpy gestured at the van that stood parked at the curb. Even from the outside, Jay – or anyone – could have seen most of the notable features of this van. It was old, and rusty, and not worth very much. It was that dry, faded white color that initially was either a gleaming white that had lost its shine, like teeth in their twenties, or was a tan that couldn’t quite hold on and was slowly slipping away, eventually to leave just metal color. It had a faded logo on the side: Sweetie Cupcake! Faded, or just painted over badly and hastily. Anyone could also see it was packed for a trip. Or more than a trip. From the side windows, and through the front windshield, Jay could tell that this van was not for transporting a family. It was full of boxes and things. He could see a 29

desk lamp poking up through a box, leaning over the passenger seat that was separated by enough of a gap that Jay knew on the floor would be a large gear shift, probably a three speed. He could see a sock poking from a paper bag. The rest was shadows and boxes that he did not bother to try to make out before he turned to Bumpy. In movies, this is where the guy plays dumb, Bumpy thought, but Jay didn’t. “So you’re not kidding.” Bumpy shook his head. “I take it you’re leaving soon?” “Tonight.” “Why tonight?” “It’s the right time,” Bumpy said. He rubbed at his eye and then wished he hadn’t in case Jay asked. Jay didn’t. “Why haven’t you left yet?” “I wanted to tell you. Besides, I couldn’t miss our night.” “Couldn’t miss a our night.” “It’s the 298th.” “You counted?” “I had some time.” He paused. He wondered if he should tell Jay he’d just picked 298 out of the air. He didn’t: “I thought about trying for 300, but it’s just a number, right? And if I don’t go today, I might never.” “What’re you gonna do?” 30

“Take pictures.” “Pictures of what?” “I’ve got this idea. I’ve had it for a while: Pictures of the neon in and around the city. People will like that. Not just the signs themselves, but closeups, and far away. Double exposures. That kind of thing.” “You think that’ll sell?” “If not, I’ll try something else.” They stood there in the quiet for a while, Jay smoking his cigarette, Bumpy holding his fists clenched in his pockets. “You gonna need money?” Jay asked, finally. “Nope.” “I can lend you some.” “Nope.” “Call it an investment.” “I’ll be fine.” Bumpy paused. “You know that.” Jay considered. “Yeah. I do.” Bumpy thought they were both hearing him a minute or two ago: When have I ever had a job? They stood there again. Cars rolled by, up the street. The bar was down a side street and got very little drive-up traffic. The tires made sloshing sounds on the road, mushy rolling noises that were not the crisp driving sound they would make in the summer.

31

March 1. Peyton had begun the night, in fact, on something of a quarrelsome note. He’d come into Bumpy’s house and brushed by him, throwing out a crumpled paper bag. While waiting for Bumpy to grab his windbreaker – the weather that night being somewhere between I can’t believe we still need a winter jacket and let me just put on a sweatshirt-- Peyton had begun what Bumpy would later remember as his argumentative stage by asking Bumpy how he could afford to just not work. That question always bugged Bumpy, who felt that he did work, although he would occasionally (after a beer or two) admit that it wasn’t really work the way other people worked, if work meant loading things onto boats, or jackhammering the side of the highway, or carrying pails of stuff up ladders outside houses, or even sitting on a riding lawnmower on the University’s intermural sports fields, as the guy he saw almost every day did. Bumpy’s work, his work as others put it, or his “work” as he’d put it (making the air quotes, a habit he’d started when he was a kid, then continued as a sarcastic, ironic commentary on people who did it, and now did as a reflex, not bothering to wonder if it was ironic anymore) did not consist of anything that would be considered physical labor, or approaching physical labor. Bumpy was a writer, he felt, and some agreed with him. And he said that to Peyton tonight: “I’m a writer, you know that.” Peyton then asked him how that could possibly pay enough, and remarked, too, how Bumpy had barely finished high school. 32

Bumpy didn’t mind Peyton being kind of argumentative, and didn’t mind Peyton making those comments. He’d heard them before and heard them a lot, especially from Sarah, and he assumed, now, that Sarah had said them and Peyton was saying them for Sarah’s benefit, so he didn’t hold it against Peyton. Instead, he said, in response to the barely-finished-school comment: “That’s something only Sarah would say, Peyton. Should we get going?” Peyton agreed they should, and they walked outside. “I’ll drive,” Bumpy said, when Peyton asked whose car they should take. He’d watched as Peyton locked up Sarah’s car and they walked around the side of his apartment building to Bumpy’s far less clean, far less new car, and got in.

“I know where we’re

going, for one thing,” he said as he rolled down his window and backed the car up. The first bar they ended up at was Bumpy’s usual, a bar frequented by the older college kids, college kids who were either graduate students or were those kids, not kids any more, but “college kids,” who’d worked their way through college and were therefore a little behind the rest of the group, taking more time to complete the same number of credits, or who were a little older to begin with. Bumpy parked his car and he and Peyton entered the bar, huddling a little against the colder air of the night as the sun now disappeared completely. After dark, even at the beginning of March, Bumpy’s breath was visible, when it hadn’t been during the day. They took seats at the bar, and Peyton initially ordered a beer. Bumpy told the bartender “Bring some shots, too. Tequila.”

33

The beers and shots in front of them, Bumpy turned to Peyton, held up his shot. “To marriage,” he said, “And to you and Sarah.” The two clinked their glasses together and downed the shots. Neither of them reached for the salt or lemon that had been provided. Not reaching for the sale or lemon was something Bumpy had learned from Peyton when they’d first met; Peyton had scorned the use of salt and lemon from his own college days and had instilled, in Bumpy, the same feelings, that not using the salt or lemon was a mark of manhood. They began drinking their beer, and Peyton remarked to Bumpy that it felt weird, planning on being married, planning on sharing your life. Bumpy agreed with him. “I know what you mean. Every time I think about it, I get cold feet. Still, you made it that far. This far. That’s farther than I’ve ever gotten.” Peyton had compared it to that feeling you get when you first spent the night at a woman’s house, falling asleep and then waking up next to her, and for a moment, you’re caught up in wondering how to act and whether you should be familiar or not, friendly or not, grouchy or not. So you felt your way through that muddle until finally you just hit on a neutral sort of action, something that was not entirely you and not entirely not-you. He’d said he was worried that everyday of marriage would be like that. “It’s not like that with Sarah right now, is it?” Bumpy asked him. “You don’t feel like you, what’s the word, moderate yourself right now, right?” Sometimes, Peyton had muttered, sometimes he did, sometimes he’d caught himself doing that. 34

“I’m sure it goes away,” Bumpy said. They sat for a moment, looking at their beers. The song on the jukebox changed. “You know, sometimes I think I could just sit and listen to music for hours. I sometimes do just that,” said Bumpy. Peyton wondered how he could stand the boredom. Bumpy took a sip of beer. He saw Peyton check his watch. “People do things for one of two reasons. For themselves, or for others. I do things for myself.” Peyton had told him that sounded selfish, that it made him seem selfcentered. Peyton also said it didn’t explain how Bumpy could sit there for hours just listening to music. He asked what Bumpy did during those times. “It’s not like that. I’m not talking about helping others or not helping others. It’s like this…” Bumpy said back, but he paused, trying himself to see what it was like, trying to figure out how to explain to Peyton. “When I do something, it’s because I want to do it, not because it’s what others expect me to do. I don’t do things because of how they’ll look to other people. And the things that I do are for me, mostly. Like my writing. I don’t write for other people. I write for me.” Peyton pointed out that others read what he wrote. Bumpy agreed and said “But that’s the point. I didn’t write it for them, I wrote it for me, and they happened to like it. That’s the secret to success.”

35

Peyton asked how writing what he liked related in any way to listening to music for hours. They began a new beer and Bumpy checked his own watch. “I don’t know. I’m trying to explain how I live. I can sit and listen to music for hours because it sinks into my mind, where I live, where I exist, and there I can be alone with my thoughts. The music curls around in there, like water flowing down a backyard rock garden slowly, forms some pools and eddies, little tiny waterfalls, and sometimes it just sits there.

And my thoughts do that, too,

sometimes in time with the music and sometimes in contrast to it. So the music, my sitting, my thinking, all becomes this pastoral scene that refreshes me. And that’s how I live my life,” Bumpy finished. Peyton had looked at him for a few moments and remarked that he could see some of how Bumpy could earn a living as a writer. Bumpy let that pass. Peyton, Sarah, even Jay, always fishing around to find out how much he made as a writer, and where the rest of his money came from. As though “the rest of his money” was a lot. He said: “We had a rock garden, you know, growing up, Sarah and I and Mom. To this day, it sounds a little silly to me – rock garden—because you don’t grow rocks. But we had one. Our backyard was little, too little to play in, so Mom had turned it into a rock garden that sloped away from the house. There was a little sandy, stony path that wound through it to the hedge that separated us from the neighbors. They had rocks of all these different sizes and textures and flowers growing out between them, viney, perennial flowers that Mom had timed so that there was almost always some color there, even late into the fall and 36

early in the spring, like now, when it’s not really spring anywhere except those yards where gardeners know what plants like the melting snow and almost-warm temperatures.” Peyton finished his beer and asked if Bumpy had taken a creative writing course, but was not answered because Bumpy continued, over Peyton’s question “Of course, they had to go to court to get a zoning variance because the neighbor behind us complained that the rocks created too much runoff, so a city engineer came and measured it every spring until we moved.” As he said that, their two other companions for the night showed up, surprising both Peyton and Bumpy because they were expecting only one.

Jay

had arrived. Peyton had met him once or twice before but did not seem to really know him. Bumpy had invited Jay for the night because Jay and Sarah knew each other, and almost were friends, and because he did not know any of Peyton’s friends. When he’d asked Sarah about doing that, Sarah had said to ask Peyton. That was what Sarah had said when he’d first suggested having a bachelor party for Peyton, too, which Bumpy had first brought up because he’d spent some time thinking about it that day while at the Bank, and had decided it was the kind of thing he ought to do. Peyton had been okay with the idea of a bachelor night out as opposed to a party, and when he’d asked Peyton who to invite for the night, Peyton had said it didn’t really matter and that he did not have many close friends in the area. Eventually, Peyton had given him some names, one of whom was a coworker and one, it turned out, a roommate from college. The coworker

37

had said he was busy. The roommate had called back and said he’d try to make it. Then he’d left a message that he couldn’t, after all. So Jay’s invitation became necessary, and livened things up. And more so because Jay had brought a date. “You brought a date?” Bumpy asked as Peyton introduced himself to her and Jay came around to Bumpy’s side. “Yeah. Cute, huh?” “To a bachelor party?” “Sure, why not? You said we aren’t going to any strip clubs.” Peyton hadn’t wanted to. Bumpy suspected Sarah’s hand in that, at first, but then was not so sure. “What’s her name?” Bumpy asked now. Jay motioned the woman over. “Jodi, come on and meet Bumpy.” Jodi brushed her hand on Peyton’s shoulder and looked at Bumpy. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

38

January 5: Sarah did not like eating in gas stations. But she’d been hungry and nothing else was close, and fast, and she had to get into work. The gas station a few blocks from Mom’s house had a sub shop attached to it. In it was more the right description, she thought to herself as she stood in line and watched the college-aged girl behind the counter rummage through a bin of lettuce, grabbing a handful and lazily putting it on the sandwich of the man in front of her. When the man was finished, the girl turned to her. “Can I getcha,” she said, lopping off the first word of the sentence as so many young people did. Sarah was 28. Sarah had not considered herself young since she was able to make a distinction between young and old and young and mature. Sarah considered herself mature.

She felt, though, that most people

considered her old. I’m only about five years older than you are she pondered as she watched the girl putting together the sandwich she ordered.

The girl

obviously felt inferior to Sarah, because she’d done that thing that only people in menial jobs do, making Sarah jump through hurdles of knowledge as if to demonstrate that yes, my job is more complicated than you think and a monkey could not do it. And so the ordering had gone like this: “Turkey Sub.” “What kind of turkey sub?” the girl had asked, to which Sarah had mentally replied the kind with turkey on it but which she’d orally responded to by saying 39

“What kinds do you have?” The girl had come back with two insults: a bored tone of voice as she’d recited: “The turkey club, classic turkey, Two Birds, and turkey wrap,” was the first, and as she’d used that exact inflection that Sarah knew meant that the girl was thinking she, Sarah, was an idiot. The second was that the girl had also flicked a hand towards the menu, a gesture that said, more eloquently than this girl could have imagined, you could always read the menu. Sarah scowled at her and fought back: “A wrap’s not a sub,” she’d said as she looked at the menu, but she could not immediately find the listings there, and the bell on the door of the gas station rang and Sarah began to feel pressured. “Turkey club,” she said, naming the only item she could actually remember the girl saying, while inwardly she thought Why does it have to be so complicated? Just make a sandwich. Then she thought as she looked at the girl, who was reaching for the meat tray, And don’t feel so superior to me. After I leave here, I’m going off to a real job where I help people. In Sarah’s mind, the word “help” was underlined in the comment she wanted to say. She could see it as though typed onto a paper. The girl had turned her back and said over her shoulder, “White or wheat?” and Sarah said, “What?” because she was distracted by the girls’ asymmetrical haircut and what Sarah thought might be a tattoo peering out over the collar of the t-shirt the girl wore. 40

“White or wheat?” the girl said, and Sarah after a second realized she was talking about bread. “White. No. Wheat,” she said, quickly, and watched in dismay as the girl put down the white bread, put it down a little too deliberately, expressing disapproval of me? Excuse me for changing my mind and making your life so difficult Sarah did not say, but thought. The girl turned around and put the bread on the counter, sliced it, layered meat on it and looked up at Sarah again. Sarah was not looking at the girl, she was looking out at her car and wondering if she’d locked the door because there were some teenagers, high schoolers, buying energy drinks and starting out the door. She turned back around after a few seconds, saw the sub-girl’s look. Sarah stared at the girl. They pondered each other. Finally, the girl said “What do you want on it?” Sarah looked at her, then up at the menu, then down at the counter where her sub waited to be topped. Oh, for pete’s sake, she thought how complicated can this possibly be? I just want a sandwich. She vowed to herself never to eat anything from a gas station again. She could not unjumble her thoughts. She asked “What comes on it?” and then when the girl took a deep breath Sarah thought quickly why do you have to act like I’m imposing on you by ordering my lunch? Then thought, too, where is the manager to control her and the girl was just about to list the ingredients you could get on a turkey club when Sarah said “Just put everything on it,” and paused, paused long enough that anyone who had finished high school would 41

know what followed was not anything except a formality that she deigned to bestow on an underling, the way your boss thanks you for turning in the project you have to do to keep your job: after a pause long enough to convey that message, Sarah said “Please.” The girl shrugged, making her asymmetrical hair momentarily in balance with her shoulders, which for some reason made Sarah angry and she thought why would you cut your hair like that, that’s probably why you work here and then Sarah saw that the girl was putting mushrooms on the sandwich and said “No mushrooms, please,” and then the girl paused just long enough, the mushrooms in her hand to let Sarah know that mushrooms are part of ‘everything’ and Sarah was changing her mind again, to let her know that Sarah could not even handle ordering a sandwich, and the mushrooms went back into their bin and Sarah watched and near the end, the girl picked up horseradish, and Sarah could not bear to say anything else but she hated horseradish and she was forced at the last minute to say “Oh, no horseradish, sorry, please, thanks,” so apologetic for asking that girl to do less work, she would ponder later as she drove to the hospital, and, even later, eating her sandwich in the breakroom at the hospital, she would think what are the odds that horseradish even comes on that sandwich ordinarily? Who likes horseradish? Nobody. Nowhere near enough people like horseradish to make it standard on the sandwich and that girl was just trying to get to me. Sarah felt, as she neared the register and the girl wrapped the sandwich, like she was going to cry. 42

When the girl asked if she wanted a drink with that, Sarah just blinked and stared at her. “Drink?” she said finally, her mind giving up. The girl said “We’ve got fountain and bottle soda,” and Sarah said “Just water please, thanks, please,” and then marveled at herself for saying please twice but she’d tried, she’d really tried, and this girl was just trying to get to her with her constant questions and mushrooms and how am I supposed to focus on this anyway, why can’t you just go in and order a sandwich she thought, and paid and numbly walked back out to her car, which she noticed she had not in fact locked. She set the bagged sandwich on the floor of the passenger seat compartment, with the bottle of water carefully pinned between the bag and seat, and she quickly surveyed the contents of the car to make sure that the teenagers had not gone in and taken anything, had not removed her parking-meter change from the divider between the front seats, had not upset the four compact discs Sarah had in her car.

(Sarah

McLachlan Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and a collection of instrumental classic music excerpts.) She finished that and started up the car. Then she began crying. It was not flashy crying, not sobs and shaking shoulders and gasps. It was not excited crying, or even very emotional. She just cried, her eyes just opened up and she could not stop, she just cried and cried and the tears flowed out of her eyes and down her cheeks in such profuse volume that she could feel them pooling in the hollow of her collar bone just below her scrubs collar, inside the long-sleeve t-shirt she wore underneath her scrubs. Her cheeks were wet and 43

shiny and now she was starting to sniffle, not because she wanted to or was making a show of it, but because her tears were also making her nose run, and she opened the glove compartment and reached out the small box of travel tissues and took one, began dabbing at her nose, and was startled by what sounded like a loud rapping but was actually a soft tapping on the window next to her. She wiped her nose and turned to her left and saw, through the tears that still flooded her eyes and streamed down her cheeks, tears that were actually making her shirt collar damp now, saw a blurry outline of the sub-shop girl. “Are you all right?” The girl asked, her words muffled and indistinct through the window. She was outside in her t-shirt and jeans and her visor holding back her asymmetrical hair, which Sarah could not help but notice with irritation yet again, but she seemed not affected yet by the cold as she looked in the window at Sarah, who stared at her for a second, then looked into the plateglass windows of the gas station, tears still flowing, and tried, bewildered, to make out how this girl had seen her crying through the rows of bagged chips and beef jerky and two liter bottles of soda, and wondered just how obviously she was crying that the girl had seen her from the back of the store and come out to check on her. “Ma’am?” the girl asked, and she would not have been surprised to learn that Sarah had, since she was 18 years old, been called “ma’am” by strangers, as opposed to “Miss” or something younger-sounding.

The girl peered in the

window as she said it.

44

Sarah was both mortified that she was crying and could not stop, crying so much that she could be seen from yards, maybe a couple dozen yards, away through a business, both mortified by that and comforted by the fact that even though this horrible girl had spent their few moments of interaction trying to one-up Sarah, to prove she was better than Sarah even though she obviously was not, had spent that time trying to belittle Sarah even though she has no idea what’s going on in my mind and my life, this girl had done that but had been so touched by Sarah’s plight that she’d come out to make sure everything was all right. Mortified, but comforted, too, and Sarah then bravely waved a hand in the girl’s direction, still not rolling down the window, now looking bravely away, bravely trying to compose herself while this girl looked on. There’s at least something to be happy about, she thought, people, even if they are stupid girls with pierced noses, can still maybe care about strangers. The girl did not have a pierced nose, but she looked to Sarah like she should, or probably would soon have one. As Sarah tried to push that pierced-nose thought out of her mind, tried to focus on the kernel of goodness that had led this sandwich girl to come out and brave the cold and the snow, to help her in her time of need, the girl tapped on the window again and said “You forgot your change.” Sarah stopped crying and turned to look at the girl through the window. They stared at each other for a moment, Sarah still feeling her tears on her face, tears with no backup coming, the girl beginning to shiver, snow now collecting on her hair. 45

“If you open your window I can slide it in,” the girl said. “Shut up,” Sarah told her and started the car. The girl knocked on the window and Sarah turned towards her and pressed the button that rolled the window down. “Ma’am, you left…” the girl began, and Sarah could not imagine, later, when she’d think about this, what had possessed the girl to keep trying even then. (It never occurred to Sarah, later on, or then, or ever, that the girl had kept trying even then, even after shut up, trying because she was concerned about this lady crying in her car with her sub from a gas station, and did not know what to do in that situation, so giving her change back to her seemed the best way to be comforting. That would not occur to Sarah. It might have occurred to Sarah if someone else had told her to think about that possibility, but nobody would because nobody would hear this story. It’s likely that even if she had ever told someone this story, and that someone listening had pointed out to Sarah that it was possible the girl meant to try, in her own small sandwich-shop way, to comfort Sarah through the correct change, Sarah would have scoffed and ridiculed the girl. Sarah did not scoff, or ridicule the girl at that moment. The girl said ma’am you left and Sarah interrupted her, meaning to say it calmly but screaming it: “Just keep it!” And she screamed it loud enough that the girl stood stock still and Sarah rolled up the window, put the car in gear, and backed out of the spot. She pulled 46

around the girl, who stood motionless and did not even turn her head to watch Sarah go (Sarah watched her in the mirror) and Sarah drove away. Her throat was already sore from that brief scream. She drove in silence. She did not put in one of the five CDs, she did not turn on the radio to the talk radio station that covered local issues (one of the three presets she had, out of 10 the car could take. She did not care much for radio.) She did not mumble or talk to herself. As silent as a modern car ride can be, this one was. The sound of tires crunching through freezing slush and over salt chunks. The hum of the engine, the breathy wind of the heater, pointing to her face and drying the last of her tears. Those were Sarah’s soundtrack for the drive to work, where she pulled her car into her customary parking spot. She had driven, parked, and now got out of her car, numbly, slowly, mechanically. She did not let her mind dwell much on what had just happened, or on what had happened that day. Like a cavity, she knew if she poked it she could not stop. It was there, she knew it was there, and she would deal with it in due course but for now she was on automatic pilot and she got her sandwich out of the car and closed the door, locked it, leaned against it and looked through the window, making one last check to see that there was no garbage there (she would do the same thing before getting in, too, seeing the car from a bird’s eye view) and then, still operating from that area of the brain located just above the spine, still working her body through simple nerve impulses without involving the higher part of the brain, she walked into the hospital where she worked. It was the second time that day she’d walked into this building. 47

She made her way up to the employee breakroom on the fourth floor, and sat down at the small booth-like table that had been taken from the old lunchroom when the old lunchroom had been converted into a coffeeshop. Hospitals used to have a lunchroom for employees, and vending machines for nonemployees. Now they have coffeeshops and the food is the same as it was in the lunchrooms, but the employees have to mingle with the patients and visitors who come in there. Mingle unless they sit in the breakroom on the fourth floor or on one of the other floors. Nurses, including Sarah, roamed enough to know where they all were; any old hospital had enough unused or seldom-used rooms converted to break rooms of varying quality, some with microwaves or refrigerators, some just empty rooms or mostly filing-cabinet filled, and eat their sandwich from a gas station. Then they would not have to mingle with anyone unless, and until, Tammy came in and sat down across from her and oh, why would she do that took Sarah’s hand. We’re not even that close of friends, Sarah would later say to Peyton. I can’t imagine why she’d think it’d make me feel better to hold my hand and say that, if she was all bound and determined to say it. Tammy said it, and she meant it, although Sarah would give her little credit for it. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said. “I heard the news.” “I just dropped her off not long ago,” said Sarah. They did not say anything else for a long time. Tammy wanted to say something to Sarah, thought about telling her that if she wanted to start crying again, she could. Sarah had not cried at the hospital that morning, but Tammy 48

could see that since then there had been tears. But she did not know how to say that. Sarah ended the chance of conversation by folding her sandwich back into its bag. “This tastes awful,” she said. “I’d better get going on my shift.”

49

July 4: Bumpy leaned against the stone railing watching the fountains as Ivy’s hand slipped into his back pocket and squeezed him. When he first arrived in Vegas, he had come every night to see the fountains. Had stood by the stone railing watching them the first three nights, then stood further back, across the street, watching the fountains with the crowd in front of them, enjoying the first three nights the sight of the fountains themselves, then enjoying the next few nights the way the fountains made the people silhouettes, made the shadows in the road play and dance, made the cars into bright smears of headlights and brakelights and drivers smoking in them. Then he had begun to take pictures of them. He had begun photographing the fountains in every way that he could. He had thought that perhaps he’d begin by taking photos of the fountains. They seemed to him spectacular, the highlight of Las Vegas, something so bright and glamorous and almost lifelike, so unusual and unheard of anywhere else. So over-the-top. Then he’d stopped taking photos of them the first night he’d gone on a sort-of date with Ivy. He’d bumped into her in the street, and she’d looked at him, taking pictures, and said something. He hadn’t heard her. She’d not seen the earbud headphones from his iPod. He’d been listening to a Queen song, loudly, too loudly, but Queen is operatic and he’d grown tired of listening to the soundtrack for the fountains, so he’d made his own playlist for it. And he’d seen her say something, but hadn’t heard what she’d said. 50

“Queen,” he said, pulling an earbud out of one ear. He tried, holding his camera in the other hand, to indicate the player in his shorts pocket. “What?” she’d said. “I thought you said something to me,” he’d answered. “I did,” she said. “I asked if you wanted to do something.” She had seemed, almost, before she’d spoken, to seem as if she’d wanted to say something else. There had been a pause there. He had laughed, though, and they’d decided to go get a cup of coffee, and spent their first sort-of date drinking coffee and looking at the Bellagio’s fountains, and walking around a little, and Bumpy had thought about holding her hand but it seemed awkward, that night. For their second date, he’d brought her back to the fountains after dinner. It was not just that he was staying in the Bellagio that night, although that was in the back of his head. He had not planned much to do between dinner and the movie they were going to see, and the movie didn’t start until 7:45, while dinner had ended by 6:30 p.m. He’d expected, even after living here for four months, to have to wait to get a table at one of the hotel restaurants. He didn’t know then, didn’t know when he left, that a large part of the ethos of Las Vegas was not to have people waiting, not to have them sitting around hoping for a table at a restaurant when they could be sitting around hoping for a red or black or a six on the come-out. Bumpy

had

unknowingly

managed

to

cross,

to

combine,

the

midwesterner’s natural hesitation, the waiting that is ingrained in anyone who 51

has ever had to sit through a winter that does not pay attention to the calendar or astronomical deadlines, that gets there sometimes in September and sometimes will not go until May, with the speed and urgency of Las Vegas, where a drink will materialize in your hand so you don’t have to leave the slots, where the hotels have laundries and restaurants and souvenir shops and shows all so that you don’t have to leave them to go somewhere for something to do. Bumpy had combined those two into one unwieldy personality, a personality that had offered Ivy a job the very day he’d met her but not asked her out until months later, when Ivy had nearly given up on the idea. Ivy would have given up on the idea of dating Bumpy, had nearly done so, but besides liking him, she needed the job and worried that Bumpy did like her but had some reason for not going out with her and that he would be angry if she dated someone else, would be angry and would fire her. So she’d bided her time and now found herself on her second date with Bumpy, with Bumpy picking her up in his van. “Sweetie Cupcake?” she’d asked. It was the first time she’d seen the van. Bumpy shrugged. “I bought it cheap. I didn’t do the paint job.” “How do you like the Bellagio?” she’d asked when she’d gotten inside. Bumpy had told her two days before that he was leaving Treasure Island, going to the Bellagio. She’d wondered about the price of the rooms there. Bumpy had waved a hand when she’d asked that. She had thought at the time, as she had before, that he was the son of someone wealthy, had inherited money or had a

52

trust fund, which explained why he could spend money and almost never make any. She’d briefly wondered if Bumpy was a lottery winner. She’d googled lottery winners, googled him, too, to see what she could find out. She’d waited to look him up until she’d gotten his full name, his real name, but even then there wasn’t anything that she could see on him. Of course, when she’d googled his name, she’d gotten 173,000 pages making reference to it. Even using quotes. She was not a private eye, and she’d looked through enough pages to determine that she was not finding out anything about him, but finding out a lot about people who had similar names. She’d quit after about 25 pages. But she knew he came from Madison, and had tried specifically to search for combinations of his name and “lottery,” or “Madison” or “Wisconsin.” She’d had to search using his own computer, while he left her in charge, and she’d felt bad about that, like it was worse to snoop using his equipment to snoop. But she had snooped. And she would continue to. Nothing had come up and she’d decided that he was clean. She had also searched for “Bumpy” just to see what turned up. Nothing of use, even when combined with his name. She searched for combinations with photographs, searched for ways to find his pictures elsewhere. So far, in working for him, she’d seen him sell one photograph. He didn’t seem concerned. That was why she’d asked whether he liked the Bellagio. She wanted to ask how he afforded it. “It’s okay,” he said. “Most of the hotels seem about the same inside, really. They’re probably different when you get the suites, but I don’t go for that.” 53

Bumpy turned left and made his way onto the Strip. He drove along slowly in the traffic that was mounting. The Strip was always crowded, but the number of people and cars increased up as dark came. Some of that was because of the heat. It was intolerably hot, blast furnace hot, during the day in Las Vegas in July. The heat would suck moisture out of you and you wouldn’t even know it. The heat, like weather everywhere, was a conversation piece. Ivy used it now. “It was hotter than they thought it would be today.” “They said it hit 103 degrees,” Bumpy agreed. “Felt like it.” “Still like the heat?” Ivy asked. Bumpy had told her in March and April that he was looking forward to the heat, that he was sick of winter and would never complain about the heat. He’d told her in May that it didn’t seem so bad here. She’d said to just wait. In June, he’d said he liked it, it was dry and warm and sunny and he didn’t have to worry about his feet being cold. She’d said to wait again. Now it was July and it had gone over one hundred for the first time since he’d gotten here. Bumpy rolled down the window, put his hand out. “You can feel it baking you, baking your skin,” he said. “You can feel it dry you out, but you can’t feel it. Back home,” he stopped. He thought for a moment. He started again. “Back in Wisconsin, you feel the heat. Heck, you wear the heat. It’s so cold throughout the winter, cold in the spring, cold in the fall, even, where you can feel the cold start to draw itself up and get ready to punch you in the gut even in September, even on nice days in September, that you think you’ll welcome the heat. But then August gets there, and it’s so, so hot. You can’t even imagine. They always say 54

it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity but it’s both. It’s like wearing a wet wool coat that the sun somehow gets through. It’s hard to breathe. “Here,” he went on, “It’s different. It’s hot, yeah, but it’s so light and dry that you don’t notice it right away, or even ever. You notice it when it’s gone; I’ll walk into a convenience store”—Bumpy loved convenience stores – “and feel the AC” – Ivy did not like people who called air conditioning “AC,” and also had an axe to grind with people who said fridge instead of refrigerator and she even tried not to say TV but she didn’t correct Bumpy now – “And then I’ll realize how hot it was outside. The heat’s only there once it’s gone.” Ivy thought of Bumpy as a photographer and was amazed at his language, at the way he could talk when he chose to do so. Sometimes he would just mumble. He was quiet a lot. He seemed to deliberately delight in ungrammatical phrases – he’d told her in all sincerity that Billy Joel sings one line as don’t axe me why in the song, and frequently said that; he also used got whenever he could – and then he’d go and roll out a speech like that and she would realize that he could use language however he wanted to, that the silences and the mumbling and the ungrammatical sayings were done because he liked them. The heat’s only there once it’s gone. She rolled that around, thinking, while Bumpy looked at her. You wear the heat. That speech called for a suitable rejoinder. “I only live in Las Vegas by accident,” she said. Bumpy was stopped at a red light, turned to look at her, a half-smile on his face. She felt she knew the look, after only a few months of employer-employee relationship and a second date: he was waiting, and anticipating a good story. 55

She hoped she’d come through for him. But she doubted she would. She didn’t think she could tell a story that would interest him. She said: “I was put up for adoption as a baby. I looked up the records a couple of years ago.” She took a breath. “My mom left a letter with the adoption agency. She left the names of the three men,” she saw him raise an eyebrow but quickly put it down. Ivy would not have been offended by a questioning of her mother’s morals. “That could have been my father. That’s not the story, though, and it’s not how I ended up here. “The adoption agency placed me with a family, they had a little boy already but they couldn’t have any more and they wanted another kid, I guess. I lived with them until I was two. I don’t think I remember them.” “You don’t think you remember them?” Bumpy interjected. “I’ve heard the stories and read some of the newspaper articles, saw some pictures that I got from someone who would have been my relatives except for what happened.” They were at the restaurant. Bumpy parked the car and opened his door. Ivy was relieved, a little, to see that they were not eating on the Strip, although they were only a block or two away from it. She sometimes felt that Bumpy never actually left the Strip. As they walked across the parking lot, she could feel the remains of the heat, if she concentrated. The heat’s only there once it’s gone, she thought, and he was right. It was too insubstantial, despite its power. You had to focus to realize it while you were in it. How can people die of heat stroke when

56

they can’t even feel it? She wondered, briefly, gathering herself for more of the story, and then answered her own question: That’s exactly how. “Do you want me to go on?” She asked. We don’t really know each other, her question said. Her question said: We work together and we went on a very nice date and you kissed me but we don’t know each other, I know, and I’m not sure how much you want to know me. “I do,” he said, and she believed him. It’s rare to really be able to believe anything the other person says on a second date, or on anything before the second month. Experienced daters know that for the first two months of a relationship the couple are engaged in a drama of sorts: each pretends to be what he or she thinks the other wants him or her to be, while pretending that he or she does not have any particular expectations about the other. So men will watch a new girlfriend’s soap opera, staying up late to do so, without mocking it, while women will listen to boastful stories of racquetball victories and express a desire to learn to play the game themselves, a desire the men will acknowledge by promising to teach them. They will eat new things, and will have a drink before dinner, or not, as each expects the other to expect them to be. After two months, the charade grows too hard. Like actors in a longrunning play, the spirit is gone and those in the front row can see that the makeup is put on sloppily and that some of the lines are not given their full force of expression. Then, the play folds and they break up; or they stop acting and decide to see what’s behind the curtain and move forward.

57

That all requires that a dater not believe anything said in the first two months, while acting as though she believes everything. Ivy knew the dance; but she still believed, in that moment, that Bumpy really wanted to hear the rest of her story. If we were to stay together, he’ll eventually want to know it, right? He might want to actually know it now, too, she thought. Bumpy did actually want to hear the rest of the story. He’d never known anyone who was adopted, although he’d thought for a while he was adopted. He was not. He encouraged Ivy now, showing her he was listening: “What did you mean, would have been your relatives?

Because they

weren’t your blood relatives?” “No. Because the adoption was never completed. That’s how I ended up here.” “How?” The waitress seated them, after Bumpy told her they were two for nonsmoking. They had followed her through the immense smoking dining room, Las Vegas being one of the few cities that did more than tolerate smoking; it seemed to encourage it, and into the smaller nonsmoking dining room that still smelled like smoke, being only a few feet removed from the smoker’s area. “We came here on vacation. If you can believe, they brought me and my would’ve-been-brother here. He was five, I was two, and they came here on vacation. Some of my almost-relatives said that it wasn’t really a vacation, that the dad” Bumpy noticed that she didn’t say my dad “had business here, but there’s no real business here and I don’t even think they had many conventions 58

here, then. That was twenty-five years ago, after all, and Las Vegas was a lot different then. It’s changed a lot.” There were no water glasses on the table. Bumpy didn’t expect them, anymore. But there were straws. He picked one up, took it out, and then twisted the straw wrapper up into a rope, then tied it in a knot repeatedly as he looked at her face. She had small brown spots on her nose, not really freckles, not really dark enough, he noticed. Speckles. “He was somewhere, probably gambling. Me and my would-be-brother and his mom” not my mom or almost mom, Bumpy thought, “were at the pool of the hotel. This is the part I’m not sure how much I remember and how much I was told, because I can picture it but you don’t really know or remember things when you’re only two, right? I don’t, at least, remember anything else from this time but I’ve got this in my mind like it’s my own personal Zapruder film. I mean, what’s the earliest thing you remember?” “Standing on a kitchen chair getting my allowance from my dad on a Friday night,” Bumpy said. “I was five. Maybe six.” “Really? Exactly. So nobody really remembers anything at two, you’re not even a person yet, really, until you’re about six or seven, I figure. But I remember this, so maybe I saw it and then later when I heard about it from others it refreshed or reloaded my memory. They say… I read an article once, anyway,” --Ivy tried not to use they say because an ex-boyfriend had a habit of putting in an annoying interjection:

who’s they and she

had shied away from the

expression from then on-- “that you store everything you’ve ever seen or heard or 59

smelt or felt and it’s just a matter of recalling it, finding it, like all our memories are books in a library and we’re just spending our down time making up our Dewey Decimal systems to be able to find them, so maybe the people telling me about it later made that link and now I can find it whenever I want, it’s in its own display case right in the center of things. “I was playing by the pool. I had a pink swimsuit on, a one-piece suit with a lighter-pink band across the middle, and a row of lacy-type frill around the waist and around each leg. It had a darker pink flower-shape on the butt. So there were three shades of pink. I had ribbon in my hair; it wasn’t very long but I had it in a ponytail sticking straight up. I also had plastic sunglasses on, with the lens holders shaped like ducks. See how I can remember it?” Ivy was trying to give details, to show how she could remember it and why she didn’t know if she really remembered it, at all. “The pool was at one of the smaller hotels, one called Jim and Jessy’s, it wasn’t on the Strip and wasn’t very famous and it’s been torn down a long time ago. It was on the outskirts of the city. The pool was kidney shaped. There was a deeper end with the remnants of a diving board, the handles only but no board. They’d probably taken it down only recently, or maybe it was being repaired. I was sitting by his mom on a lounge chair. She was sunning herself and so I was trying to, also, and I was talking, the kind of babbling that little kids do. I remember one thing I said, the last thing I ever said to her. It was that cloud isn’t as big as the other clouds and I pointed, and she said Aren’t you hot? Why don’t you go sit on the stairs of the pool? I got up and was walking around the pool 60

towards the kid that was going to be my brother and he waved at me and dove into the pool. “He didn’t come up right. He floated to the top of the pool and laid there, his back sticking out of the pool, his arms and legs dangling down. He drifted there. We were the only ones at the pool right then, it was before lunch. He floated there and floated there and I finally giggled. I laughed more and then pointed. I thought he was tricking me. “Then I went and sat on the stairs in the other end, walking all the way around the pool to do that, watching him floating there like that. I sat there and laughed and after a few minutes, his mom sat up straighter and said Andrew? And she stood up, and she rushed towards the pool and screamed to get help, and jumped into the pool, splashing over to him and pulling him out. “He’d drowned. There was a big bump and bruise on his forehead, and they figured he’d hit his head on the bottom of the pool when he’d jumped in, and then had drowned because he was unconscious and floated face down. And the only thing his mom said to me, while they were working on him, paramedics, she came over and picked me up, and she said, not in a mean way, but sad, Why didn’t you say something? I didn’t answer her.” Their food was there; Bumpy had ordered a burger and fries, skipping the onion rings he would have preferred to order, because it was a second date. He was relieved that Ivy had ordered a BLT and fries, a little, at least, because he didn’t like eating when others around him didn’t eat.

61

Ivy picked the bacon out of the sandwich and ate some of it before she went on. “They didn’t let that family adopt me, or that family didn’t want to. I never asked exactly why I wasn’t adopted. But I was taken away, initially, by human services here. I lived with some foster families and was raised mostly by one, a family that lived here in Las Vegas.” Bumpy’s burger was huge, really. He looked at it, considered its hugeness, it’s hugeosity, a word he’d made up and liked to use from time to time. It had probably begun its burgerly existence as a half-pound ball of meat, pounded into a slab by a cook’s hands near the grill. Flipped, only once (good cooks flip the burger once, meddlers keep flipping it over and over) and seared after flipping. Slid onto the bun with a practiced hand, followed by the fried onions. The cheese had to have gone on after the fried onions and likely melted under the heat lamp and in response to the still-hot burger, because it covered the onions, he saw as he lifted the bun and squirted ketchup onto the burger. He swirled the ketchup stream around, coating the orange-yellow cheese, and pondering the lettuce that had slid off to the side. Put it back on? Leave it? If I put it back on, do I use a fork or just pick it up with my hand? I’m going to eat the burger with my hand, so can I just eat the ingredients with my hand, too? He put the top bun down without putting the lettuce back on. He watched a spot of grease drip off the side of the burger. He put the ketchup down on the table, then looked at his curly fries, picked the ketchup back up again, squirted the ketchup on them the way he always did – squirting it at the side of the plate, too, carefully so that only a few of

62

the fries themselves were coated with ketchup but he had a good amount on the plate. Bumpy had once considered trying to figure out how to make plates, or patent plates, or otherwise go into the plate business, designing plates that had a small protrusion or tab on one side. Either round or oval, the plates would have had an extra nook on one side where a diner could squirt ketchup and have a pool of ketchup at the ready without having to cover his fries, so that you could eat French fries without getting ketchup all over your fingers. He’d mentioned the idea one time, at Thanksgiving. Peyton had asked him why he wouldn’t just push the fries over to the side and have that space for his ketchup. “Use a fork,” Sarah had told him. “Then you don’t have to worry about it.” “Who uses a fork for French fries?” Bumpy had asked. “Nobody. But if you’re worried about the mess, use a fork.” Peyton had joked with Sarah that she’d probably be better off getting covered with ketchup than using a fork to eat French fries because of what people would think. Sarah had shot him a look that Peyton had missed, Bumpy thought. Sarah then had gone to check on the pies with Mom, and when they’d come back Sarah seemed to have forgotten, or decided to ignore, Peyton’s comment to her. Bumpy finished now with the ketchup and picked up his diet soda, took a long sip of it and crunched the ice cube that had slipped into his mouth with his drink. Ivy was looking at him. 63

Bumpy looked up at her. Ivy said, “What are you thinking?” Bumpy looked at her a little longer. He looked down at his plate. He looked up at her again. She had sucked in her cheeks slightly. Looking at her, he could tell that she was holding her breath. He also noticed that a piece of her hair from her bangs appeared to actually be touching her eyeball. “I was wondering if it would gross you out if I picked up my lettuce with my hand,” he said finally. They sat there for a second. He watched her. Her cheeks sucked in just a little further. Her eyes blinked twice. She really had amazingly long eyelashes, and he’d only just noticed that. She brushed the hair out of her eye, looked down, then looked back up. Her face was neutral. “Really?” He nodded. He couldn’t look away from her. She wouldn’t look away from him. They sat there like that for at least a minute. Then she laughed, said again, “Really?” He nodded again. As she laughed more, he said “Well, I wasn’t really sure where I should go after your story.” She reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “That is probably the least-likely reaction I would’ve anticipated to that story.” Bumpy smiled, too, aware that he’d defused the situation but not quite sure how. She let go of his hand, patted it once, and picked up another piece of bacon. She put it in her mouth and chewed and smiled at him. “You’re really 64

something,” she said. She glanced to her left as a noisy group of younger people came in, and Bumpy took that moment to grab his lettuce and put it on his burger, was just finishing that when she turned back and saw him. She started laughing again.

65

March 28: Mundanity surrounds us. The phrase ran through Sarah’s head as she walked slowly into the community center. Her walk was not hesitant or cautious; her pace had nothing to do with her mental state or any anxiety she felt about being in the community center but was solely based on her being in unfamiliar territory. Unfamiliar in this context meant simply that she did not know the exact layout of the hallways that would lead her to room 32; she had never been in the community center before and had to find the directory to make sure she knew where she was going. Mundanity surrounds us, Sarah thought, and slowed to view a map of the center, a floor diagram layout. She stopped, saw that room 32 was to her left and then right, and was between rooms 27 and 35, and wondered about the nonconsecutive numbering, whether it meant something. Someone else, seeing that the room numbering went 27-32-35 on that side of the hall, might have lingered or looked to see where rooms 31 and 33 were, might have tried to discern the pattern. Though discerning a pattern was what brought Sarah here that night, she was not someone else and the thought of looking for rooms 31 and 33 never crossed her mind. Instead, she shook her head at the mindlessness of the numbering system, sighed exasperatedly, and walked forward with the mundanity statement in her mind, not even fully aware that she was thinking that because the mundanity of the community center was working on her. Sarah reached room 32. Room 32 was like a classroom but with a ledge or stage near the front, or the side. It was on the left side as she entered, but she supposed that 66

the ledge or stage would be the front of the room if it were used as a classroom. It could have been, maybe, a rehearsal room for the plays that were sometimes put on at the community center by groups that had no other theater. Or for classes in acting that were sometimes hosted here, maybe. But it was a woefully insufficient stage, if that was what it was used for. It could have held maybe 5 people, but put 5 actors on that stage and the blocking had better require that they all just stand there and look at the audience, an audience which in this room would be right at their feet, and which would see little action because the stage was so small. There were, she would count in a few minutes, 17 people in the room and none of them were using the stage. Sarah’s mind, so unwilling to wonder what happened to 31 and 33, would also never wonder why the group had reserved room 32 and its useless stage/ledge, whether that had been on purpose or simply an accident. The 17 people were sitting in chairs, and leftover old school desks, on the floor of the room and the stage was empty space, and all Sarah would wonder about that or the use of the room at all was why nobody was willing to move up to the stage even though the floor was crowded, and why the woman who was going to speak, who did speak, eventually, did not move up to the stage. That woman looked at her now, spoke now, but informally. “Are you here for the meeting?” she asked. She had a clipboard. Sarah nodded. The woman asked her name and held a pen poised. Sarah wondered Do I want my name on that list? Then she thought my name is already on that list, I guess . “Sarah Strathan,” she said. A few near her who heard looked up. 67

“I’m sorry about your fiancé,” said the woman. Sarah was startled at first, until she realized that the woman would have read about Peyton’s death in the paper and likely remembered the name, would have read about it the same way Sarah had read about a drowning two days before this meeting, a man named Donovan Thomas. She had read about it because of the similarities to Peyton’s death, and then at the end of the story, had seen this sentence: Some members of the public have been petitioning the police to open an investigation into what they say is a serial killer responsible for these drownings, and will hold a public meeting to discuss ways to bring about that investigation. It had not said where the meeting was, but Sarah had guessed that it would be at the community center. People who had lost a loved one to a serial killer that nobody believed existed would have no place else to go but here. Room 32, with its tiny stage. Sarah did not have long to not wonder about where rooms 31 and 33 had gone; the woman began speaking just as Sarah had settled in and was about to start. Sarah had just begun surreptitiously examining the people around her, something that had to wait until they had stopped examining her, as always happens when a new person enters a group of people, even a group that was as newly and loosely formed as the group in Room 32. Prior to Sarah’s entry, they were sixteen people in a room, not really a group in their minds, maybe. But upon her walking through the doorway they were to her, and to themselves, instantly, a group. A group which came into existence when she walked in, and 68

now a group to which she wanted to gain entry, so they all examined her in subtle and barely noticeable ways until she’d gotten set in her seat, and she was then free to examine them because they would no longer be pretending not to look at her. Done looking at her, they would actually be not looking at her, so she could have begun looking at them, but did not because the woman began speaking. “We’re all here for the same reasons, and I think it will help us all if we just get that out in the open. We’ve all had a loved one die by drowning in the lake. All in the spring.” There was a long pause, and then a man behind and to Sarah’s left said “They were drowned.” A murmur. Sarah wanted to look over her shoulder at the voice, which she thought belonged to an older and burly looking man but she could not be sure. The man went on “My son didn’t drown, he was drowned. There’s a difference. He had to have been drowned or forced to drown because he was a swimmer, a good swimmer.” That hung in the air. “That’s why we’re here,” said the woman. “I introduced myself to a few of you before we began. To those I didn’t, I’m Jane Tyler. My husband was the first victim of what I believe is a serial killer.

David died five years ago.

He

disappeared a week before our anniversary, disappeared right on March 21, the first day of spring. They found him five days later, floating in the lake. He was about one hundred yards offshore.

The ice had melted already that year, 69

remember, and we didn’t know anybody who had a boat.” She paused for breath, touched a slightly-balled hand to her throat.

Sarah wondered if you could

actually press away that lump that formed in your throat when you talked about the dead, if eventually the lump would just stay away. Jane went on: “The police said that it was likely that he’d slipped in or been drinking and fallen in. When I asked how he’d gotten so far out, how he’d drowned in the first place, they couldn’t explain it. One detective talked about currents, or wind. Drifting, he said.” Another pause. “David was the first. Since then, I saw news stories mount up and now it’s gotten to the point where there have been 20 people, all men, who have drowned in the past five years. All in the spring. And I thought maybe others would see what I see: that it’s not a coincidence, it’s a pattern.” Silence. Sarah looked carefully at those people she could see without turning her head or moving. They were looking away from Jane, away from each other. She did not want them to see her looking at them, either. Nobody wanted to look at anyone while everyone weighed what Jane had just said. Someone to her right, a woman, said “Do you really think so?” You must, Sarah thought, or you would not be here. She mused to herself what she really wants is Jane to say it again because if Jane says it a second time its less crazy. Sarah wanted Jane to say it again. “The police seemed pretty sure,” another woman said, to the right of the last speaker. “Would they just let a serial killer go free?”

70

“It’s not that they’re deliberately letting a killer go free, they just don’t believe that there is one,” said a man in front of Sarah. “If they really thought there was one they’d try to catch him but they don’t think that he exists.” “It is a pretty hard thing to believe,” said the first woman. Sarah turned, now, to look at her but did not speak. The woman paused. “I mean, I didn’t really think, at first, that Tim – he’s my son, he was in his first year of college— would have drowned but there were two other kids that said Tim had been talking about swimming in the lake, and he was drinking a little bit that night… they said he’d been drinking, these other kids.” She looked around, saw Sarah looking at her and turned away. “So I guess…” but her voice trailed off. “Why did you come here?” asked Jane, but nicely. She did not wait for an answer. “You came because you don’t think that’s all it was, right?” The woman just looked at her. “You listened to the police and deep down, you do not believe that Tim would have gotten drunk enough to go away from his group, to go swimming in the dark at night after drinking.” The woman hesitated, then nodded. “It didn’t seem like Tim.” “It didn’t seem like any of our loved ones,” said Jane. “It wasn’t like David, either. And it wasn’t like George Wilson,” she gestured, in a weak way, to a woman and man sitting to Sarah’s left, who, she saw, were holding hands. “It wasn’t like George, was it Emily, to decide to walk home instead of taking a bus, to decide to walk along the lakeshore path instead of down a well-lit street, to slip as he did and fall into the water and drown?”

71

Emily, the woman, shook her head and looked down. Her husband bit his lip and squeezed her hand. “It’s not like any of our loved ones, and it can’t be a coincidence,” said Jane. She warmed up to her topic now. “Twenty men do not just drown at the same time of year in the same lake by coincidence. It’s not mere chance because if it were random chance, if it was just an accident, then these drownings would be spread around the year. Some women would drown. The deaths, the killings would not be all clustered together and then stop for months. “Random chance means that we would not see the pattern that we see now, doesn’t it? I think we can all agree that there is a pattern there and that it means something, something that the police can’t or won’t see.” Nodding heads now, a few people, beginning to feel emboldened by Jane’s strong stance that their loved ones did not die by accident, were not victims of a capricious, coin-flipping universe but were taken by a plan, a scheme, that had a definite place for them, and the feeling that there was a definite place for the deceased was comforting, even if it was a horrible definite place, because at least there was a place, a plan, a purpose to it. Jane believed in that purpose, that place for everything, and believed that David had a place and a purpose, and she was communicating that to the other denizens of Room 32, and the room took on their purpose as its own. More nods, more murmurs, and then Sarah surprised herself. “The police told me before I even asked that there was nothing suspicious about Peyton’s death,” she told the room. She was speaking in Jane’s direction, but her eyes 72

were unfocused and she was not looking at anyone, her voice pitched to carry evenly to each and every person in the room but just barely to carry to them, to force them to make an effort to listen. She did not do that on purpose. Her voice came out that way because she was trying to control it. “I went to meet them at the scene, and before I could even ask anything the detective told me that they’d been looking around and there was nothing suspicious about Peyton’s drowning.” She did not add like they were trying to get me not to notice the footprint because she did not want to share that yet. Instead, she set her jaw to keep her voice steady and said, to her even greater surprise “I want to prove that he was murdered.” Jane nodded at her, and Sarah then finished her thought. “I have to prove that he was murdered.” She told Room 32 that, and she could not have been more the center of their attention then if she had actually chosen to sit on the stage. The other 16 people looked at her now, frankly appraising her, and she grew uncomfortable. She blushed. She bit the end of her tongue to avoid any display of emotion. She had not wanted to step into the spotlight like that and wished that she could unsay what she’d said. But she could not, anymore than she could unsay what she said next: “We all have to prove that.” But it was true. Sarah feared that her words would be misconstrued, that she would be seen as challenging people, that she would become a leader of this group and they would all turn to her to decide what to do next. I don’t even want to be here she thought briefly, but that was not true or only partially true: she did not want to 73

be here because being here meant that Peyton was dead but since Peyton was dead then she did want to be here. She had to be here. But I don’t want to lead you she thought as she looked around at the others looking at her. Old couple with your son Tim, I don’t want to be your voice. She turned her head away and then down, looking at her desk to avoid the possibility that someone would choose her. Her cellphone rustled in her purse, vibrating slightly and jingling her keys next to it. More heads turned to her. She took her purse off her lap, opened it up and looked at the number. “I’m sorry,” she said, and stood up with the phone in her hand, already unfolding it as she wormed her way through the others to the door, sliding past Jane who looked at her as she went with a look that Sarah would have described as mildly concerned except that Sarah did not see the look since she was looking at the phone. She stepped into the hall, closed the door behind her. “Yes?” she said into the phone. Across the hall from her was another door leading to a room that would be almost like Room 32, but with some small difference to make the community center more multipurpose. Maybe it didn’t have a stage but had chalkboards on three walls. Maybe it had windows. Or workbenches.

The room would feel exactly the same as Room 32, though.

Though the door was closed, she could see through the window a stocky man with a moustache smiling and moving his mouth in an exaggerated fashion. She heard mumbling crowd voices repeating something he’d said. “What’s wrong?”

74

Jane, looking into the hall, saw Sarah say “What’s wrong,” and listened to the others talking around her, comparing details: he didn’t really ever drink all that much … it wasn’t even cold out… never went home that way… while watching Sarah. She could only hear Sarah’s end of the conversation and did not want to be seen eavesdropping. “Have you eaten anything? [Pause] You have to eat something, try to eat something. [Pause] Is there blood?” Longer pause. “Well, that’s good.” After another pause. “I’ll be there in a little while, mom. I’m leaving now.” Jane did not look away in time and Sarah as she clicked the phone closed looked back to say goodbye, saw Jane looking at her, and for a moment the two hovered on the brink of confrontation, Sarah almost ready to challenge Jane about listening to her conversation, Jane ready to defend herself, getting angry at the mere thought that Sarah thought she’d done something wrong You were standing only six feet away, how could I not hear she was ready to say when Sarah would make a snide comment about minding her own business, but when they looked at each other they both saw someone who was almost defeated already, someone who’d come to this anonymous room in this anonymous building not to challenge everyone else, but to find out why awful things happened to them. And on that understanding, Sarah nodded and turned and walked away.

75

February 14: Bumpy’s face in the mirror was not something he wanted to look at. But he pondered it anyway. He pondered it and wondered what she was thinking out at the table. He was bloaty. Puffy. Maybe saggy was the word he was looking for. He was 39 years old and his skin no longer clung as tightly to his face as he would like it to. His muscles, too, were losing their grip. His stomach hung over his belt a little even when he sucked it in, which he was doing all the time, now, almost unconsciously. He’d once joked, at a family Thanksgiving dinner, that he’d been sucking in his stomach for, what was it then, twenty-eight years? Something like that. People had laughed but some of them, including Mom, had looked at him knowingly, their laugh merely polite and not laughing at the notion that he might need to suck in his stomach. All men do that, he thought to himself as he scrubbed his hands in the sink, slowly lathering them up and rubbing them together as an excuse to stand in front of the mirror while men came in and out of the bathroom without them thinking him vain (which he was not) or drunk (which he almost was and would be once that last beer hit him, which he hoped would happen before he had to go back out to his date.) “There’s nothing wrong with her,” he’d told Sarah. “Nothing. I just don’t feel like dating anyone, really.” 76

Peyton had said it might do him some good to get out on the dating scene, that he had not been out in a while. “I go out a lot,” he’d told Peyton. “It’s not always me and Jay,” he’d retorted to Peyton, cutting him off. He sighed and began to wash the soap off. He stared at his eyes, one green, one brown. People used to love that, when he was a kid, a teenager. Girls, teachers, people in checkout lines, and once a local news reporter doing a fluff piece on people going to see the new Star Wars movie and interviewing people in line, all had loved his eyes and how they were two different colors. In the movie line, after the cameraman had moved up the line a little and stepped back to shoot the marquee, the reporter, who was probably only eight years older than Bumpy at the time, had looked him right in the eye, and said You’ve got two different color eyes, you know? At least half the people who commented on his eyes asked him if he knew they were different colors. As though he would not, as though he never looked in the mirror like he was now. But when the reporter had said it, she’d looked at him almost sexily, like she was attracted to him. Some girls did that when they commented on his eyes. Some. Tonight’s date had not noticed them. Yet. She probably would. His nose was bent.

That was what he fixated on next as he shook his

hands dry. His nose was bent just a little to the right. He did not know why. His nose was bent and a little too round in the bridge of the nose. It almost, but not quite, reminded him of what Fred Flintstone’s nose would look like if Fred were a real person and had a real, albeit very round and large, nose. Or maybe W.C. 77

Fields’ nose. Hadn’t W. C. Fields had a big nose? As he looked in the mirror, he could only picture a cartoon image of W.C. Fields, and then thought he was wrong, and that he was picturing Mr. Magoo.

Or Wimpy from the Popeye

cartoons. Confused, a little, and buzzed, a little, he looked back in the mirror. Running his hands under the water again, rinsing them. He was starting to get a unibrow. That might be a problem. He wondered if his date had noticed that yet. He leaned in closer as a guy at the urinals left. He stopped for the moment caring if people thought he was vain – he was, if he was peering into a mirror trying to decide how much of a unibrow he had, with the brown hair it was going to be more and more noticeable, but how could it not be noticeable regardless of what color his hair turned, and he reached up to his forehead, rubbed a finger along it and tried to see if it would ruffle, or spike. It was just three little hairs, barely noticeable unless you were standing in a restaurant bathroom and staring at yourself in a mirror but it was, no mistaking it, the start of a unibrow and why would I notice that only into the date but he knew why, because he had not spent that much time or effort getting ready for the date since he had not wanted to go out that much anyway, not with the date. But he’d gone because it beat sitting around. He tried to grasp the almost-unibrow hair between his thumb and forefinger and pull it out but it was too short. The night was doomed. He would spend the rest of the night, he thought, obsessing on the unibrow and worrying that his date, who he had not even wanted to go out with tonight and who was holding his interest only a little bit would notice the unibrow and be turned off by 78

it.

Moments before, he had not really cared one way or the other whether his

date cared about him but now something about the idea that he’d be rejected for a unibrow that he had not known existed, that could be dealt with easily by shaving it or plucking it, that would never ever again be noticeable and would not have been noticeable now if he’d noticed it before the date, that unibrow would be his undoing. It seemed so wrong. And I don’t like the name Teresa. He thought that to himself, too, as he looked in the mirror, stretching his mouth down and to the right, then down and to the left, elongating his face on each side to see what it did to the bags under his eyes. He wasn’t sure that she spelled her name “Teresa,” that was part of what he didn’t like about the name: people spelled it “Theresa” or “Teresa,” and now, these days, with the unusual names being in vogue, probably Tarisa, Tharisa, and Tarica, as well, pronouncing the “c” as it was in circus instead of cut. Someone who introduces himself as Bumpy probably should not make fun of other’s names, he chided himself, but he wasn’t making fun of it, he was just musing on how he disliked the name and on how he disliked unusual spellings of names, as well, and he felt that he was qualified to comment on unusual names, if not unusual spellings. He washed his hands again, dried them, and made his way out of the bathroom. She’d, Teresa had, begun the night that way in fact, as they were seated at the table. She’d begun by saying “So, that’s an unusual name, Bumpy. Where do you get that from?”

79

He’d not even pondered that, not even a moment. In his life, he’d been asked the question so often, he expected it, and he was able to determine before people asked whether he’d answer it or not. “Nowhere, really, just a childhood name, I guess,” he lied to her as he picked up the menu. He’d ordered them drinks to change the subject and distract her.. Coming back from the restroom, he sat back down across from Teresa. “Sorry to be so long,” he said, and she looked at him and said it hadn’t been that long. He took a chance, then. “I was hypnotized by how I looked in the mirror.” She laughed. “That’s a surprisingly egotistical thing to say on a first date.” “I don’t mean it in an egotistical way, really. I meant that I didn’t look like I think I look.” Sarah would tell him he was getting needlessly deep on this date, that he always did that, that he had this streak in him that was determined to bring everyone down and make everything some kind of question about the ultimate meaning of life, and that meaning was always sad, but he went on. There was no point in having her get used to a Bumpy that was not the real Bumpy. “Do you ever look in the mirror and you’re all of a sudden struck by the fact

that

you

no

longer

match

your

own

image

of

yourself?”

Teresa looked, rightly, guarded. “I’m not sure,” she said. “We all have this image of ourselves, right? We picture ourselves in our mind, the mental image of our own self, and we go by that because, really, we don’t all go around seeing ourselves in mirrors everyday.”

80

“I’d say we see ourselves in the mirror every single day,” Teresa said. Bumpy liked that. She’s trying. Is she trying? Or is she clamping down on this? He wondered. He responded: “We don’t really look, though. I don’t. I brush my teeth, I shave, I comb my hair – briefly” he laughed, and she smiled nicely “and I don’t really ever look at myself, or if I do it’s not storing that image, because the image I have of myself is not the image that I saw in the mirror when I went in there.” “What image do you have of yourself?” Teresa asked. Fair enough, Bumpy thought. He felt more comfortable as he talked a little more.

Forgot about the unibrow.

Almost.

“Younger, for one thing.

Probably about 10 years younger. It’s weird. I’m 38. But in my mind, I’m probably just under 30. And I can remember when I was just under 30. I didn’t feel, or think I felt, just under 30 then. I felt just a little over 21, an age I probably settled on because I was able to buy alcohol, so I had to I guess picture myself or feel 21, because it wouldn’t have made very much sense to mentally picture myself as someone who couldn’t order a drink with dinner when I wasn’t even being carded anymore.” He took a sip of his drink now. “You know, I don’t remember exactly what I felt like when I was 21 because it was almost a lifetime ago… was really a lifetime ago when you consider that at 21 I had maybe 14 years of memories stored up in my mind, and most of those are pretty superficial, so at 38 I have 3 more years of memories just since turning 21 than I had when I went out on my 21st birthday.” He paused. He took another sip, worked through the math. It made sense. He looked at Teresa. She was staring just over his left 81

shoulder, and did so with such an intensity that he actually turned and looked, looked back at her because he could not see what she was looking at, and she then broke her stare off and looked down at the table. “Sorry,” she said. “I was doing the math.” He began to laugh, then. The rest of the dinner went better, after that. Went so well, in fact, that when they left the restaurant, she asked where they were going, and Bumpy said “It’s up to you, really. I could make some suggestions.” “I could make a suggestion,” she said, and she put her arm through his and leaned against him. “Will I like it?” “I think you will.” “I’m open to it, then.” “Why don’t we go back to one of our places?” Dinner had gone so well that Bumpy had thought of neither the unibrow nor his hesitancy to go on the date in the first place for some time. He didn’t even think of them now. But he did ask one question: “How do you spell your name?” They were at his car. She let go of his arm and looked up at him. “Do our plans hinge on the answer to that question?” But she smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “T-e-r-e-s-a.”

82

“Good. You do it the right way.” He opened her door, helped her inside. “We’ll go to my place.” He walked around to the driver’s side, got in, continued: “It’s not all that messy.” She turned on the radio as he started the car. “Do you mind?” she asked. “Nope,” he said. “Go ahead. What do you feel like listening to?” Teresa shrugged and, as it turned out, the short drive found her unable to settle into any music or station. She flipped around and they did not talk much. The car had barely started to heat up in the cold by the time they were near Bumpy’s apartment. He pulled up to the curb. “You sure about this?” he asked. She laughed again. “Am I sure? That’s a nice pickup line you have.” “I’ve really had a good time tonight,” he said. It came out like a reluctant concession. He said it, he felt, just like he would say it to Sarah when she called the next day, or the day after, to find out what had happened. He tried to clear it up. “I guess I didn’t expect to, but I didn’t know what to expect, really.” She smiled at him. “You still don’t. Maybe I’m a tease.” “God, I hope not.” He opened up the door and came around to her side. She waited until he got there, waited until he opened the door, waited until he helped her out of it. “Do you want to go up first and pick up all the underwear and Playboy magazines?” she asked.

83

“I would do that,” he said “If my apartment were located in a trite, predictable sitcom that features people who are suspiciously underemployed and overattractive.” They were at the door. She slipped her arm around him. He fumbled with the keys, got the outer door open. They went inside and he said “It’s on the fourth floor. We can take the elevator.” In the elevator, she leaned up against him, and looked into his eyes. He wondered if she was drunk. She didn’t seem drunk.

His wondering that, he

realized later, meant that he had missed her invitation to kiss her as they rode up to his floor. It was half past nine. He had not been home that day since about 11 a.m. He’d spent the day out running errands and had decided not to dress up more than the jeans and sweater he’d been wearing. When he opened the door, he explained the first part of that, telling her that he’d been out all day, because when he opened the door the mail was laying in pile where the mailman had pushed it through the slot. He omitted the second part and did not tell her he’d not bothered to change before going out – that the date had been just another errand on the day, requiring the same uniform. In the small pile of mail on the floor was a larger envelope that bore a return address from the United Kingdom. Teresa noticed it right away as Bumpy picked up the mail and placed it on the small table where he usually also set his keys. He did not, that night, set the

84

keys down next to the mail because he was distracted by the envelope and by trying not to look at the envelope, but Teresa called his attention to it. “Looks like you got something important,” she said. He looked at her, then down at the envelope. “Sorry, I don’t mean to pry,” she said. “Pry?” He asked. They were still standing in the entry hallway. Teresa tried to explain. “Snoop. I didn’t mean to snoop. Get nosy.” Bumpy realized she thinks that I don’t know what pry means. He was about to tell her I know what the word means, I was just questioning who actually uses the word ‘pry’ nowadays but he stopped, a rare time when Bumpy was able to stop himself before he said the exact wrong thing to kill the moment. Although the moment, he feared, had not gotten off the elevator with them, and even if it had, it had not yet come into the apartment because they were still standing in the doorway, the door open to the hall, illuminated only by the small bare overhead bulb that lit the entry hall overhead, the bulb that had originally had

a glass cover over it, but the cover perpetually filled with gnats and

mosquitoes and flies and other bugs that got into the apartment when Bumpy opened the door, got in and made it no further than that light because on most nights, when he got in, he stood in this hallway here and went through the mail before he went any further, so the bugs would have no other light source to seek out, and would hover around the triangular fixture that had previously covered the bare bulb, and would die there. Bumpy was too lazy to continuously take it

85

down, clean it out, and put it back up, but it was too gross to leave the bugs there, so he’d taken the fixture down and it was now in a closet behind him. Bumpy said now, “It’s all right,” meaning that he didn’t mind that Teresa had noticed the large envelope with the garish airmail stamps and return address that in the last lines featured the words “London, UK.”

The first line was

“Rockwall Productions,” and he spoke to Teresa while thinking about that. “It’s not like I’m hiding anything,” he went on. He pointed towards the envelope. “That’s probably my presidential pardon.” She smiled. “From England?” “That’s where they process them,” he told her. “To avoid conflicts of interest. They pardon our guys, we pardon theirs.” I have to remember this, put it into the script, he thought. He knew there would be a second script. Rockwall Productions had hit a chord with him. He did not like to believe in fate but every now and then tried his hand at doing just that anyway, and this had been one of those times:

In

searching for publishers, he’d stumbled onto the website of Rockwall Productions and had thought maybe it was fate. He thought that it was unlikely they’d accept his work, that such a thing was as unlikely as the lottery numbers matching exactly all the birthdays in a given family. But people keep choosing to enter lotteries by picking as numbers all the birthdays in their family, and some of them won. Bumpy had always privately figured doing that had to, simply had to, make it even less likely that one would win, because whatever the odds of winning the lottery in the first place, isn’t it even more unlikely that one would 86

win with numbers that matched up exactly with all the birthdays in his family? He had at times wished he knew a statistician to be able to ask whether that proposition wasn’t true, that it was statistically less likely that you’d win the lottery using numbers that had some personal, private meaning than if you’d used numbers plucked at random with no meaning assigned to them. He felt that people think that because they assign significance to something, the universe assigns the same (or any) significance to that same thing, and privately he’d believed that the universe could not care less about the roles someone assigned to the things, events, numbers and people in a given life.

He’d watched stories

about lottery winners on TV and told himself that the universe had no unique perspective on them, or anyone, anymore than the 55 little ping pong balls know that they represent, in some combinations, all the birthdays in a family. The ping pong balls are just numbers. So are the birthdays. And he’d felt it was less likely that Rockwall Productions would accept his work.

He’d read through their website, seen that they were a production

company, that they were looking for sitcoms to produce. He’d tracked down an address, been surprised to learn that they were located in England. He’d never mailed anything overseas before. He had gone to the post office, gotten the proper postage, mailed the script off. And now there was a large return envelope, one he had not himself addressed. “So, I suppose maybe you should open that,” Teresa said, “So I can see what heinous crimes you were pardoned for.” She had noticed the way his eyes 87

avoided the package, the no-look look that was more telling than just staring. Teresa was an attractive woman who in her life had many times seen the same no-look look that only attractive women and police officers get (and, she mused now, envelopes from England get the no-look look, too.) The no-look look occurs when someone rigidly makes a show of not looking, of deliberately not looking, of so deliberately not looking that it becomes obvious they are not looking at something and it becomes obvious what the target of their not looking is. Police officers get the no-look look, she knew (from dating a police officer) when they pull up next to drivers at a stoplight. Police officers drive around in garishly marked cars, with lights on the top, wearing uniforms and sitting in a car that has bars across the backseat. Everything about a squad car is designed to attract attention. Add to that the normal tendency that compels a driver to look over when a car pulls up alongside them in the next lane, if only because something has entered the field of view, and it is almost irresistible that a squad car get glanced at. So when a cop pulls up next to somebody at a stoplight, they check to see if a person looks over, Teresa’s ex had told her. If that person does look, they’re acting normally. If the person does not, then it’s obvious that they’re not acting normally: if the driver in the next car stares straight ahead, hand on the wheel, not fidgeting, not talking, not smoking, not anything, making a huge show out of how unaffected he or she is by the squad car next to them, then there might as well be a sign hanging out the window saying I am trying not to draw attention to myself. The cops, her date

88

had told her, always follow the no-look drivers because they’re always up to something. She had known, already about the look, although she hadn’t told her date knowing. She’d known because she was attractive enough that men would openly check her out, except for men on dates with girlfriends or wives. Men on dates would not openly look in her direction under any circumstances. She had been in a restaurant one time, and had seen a man at a table glance her way as he and his date – wife? Probably— were seated. They were seated so that both could see her just by turning their heads a little, if they chose, he to his right and her to her left. During that dinner, the man had made an inordinate amount of eye contact with his wife and never looked at Teresa.

Teresa had noticed it, and was not

imagining it because at one point it became obvious what he was doing, because Teresa’s date had bumped her glass of wine and spilled it on her and she let out a little whoop! as the drink hit her, and stood quickly. Everyone within fifty feet had looked at her. Except the man. He made such a point of not looking at her that Teresa would not have blamed his wife for divorcing him on the spot. So she knew, as they stood there and Bumpy looked at her, his keys, the bare bulb, and then the door that he was shutting, and never at the envelope, she knew just how badly he wanted to open the envelope. She gave him credit, though, because he led her into the apartment, turned on the lights, sat her on the couch, and asked her if she wanted a drink or a tour, and had left the envelope on the small table in the hallway that was now out of sight.

She

admired him for not making an excuse and opening the envelope, and also felt a 89

little special because she knew that it was her that was making him not make a big deal about the envelope. The envelope was clearly a big deal, and if not for her, he’d have torn into it. She tried not to smile at that. Bumpy came back and said “I’ve started the coffee brewing. It’ll be a minute.” She was momentarily puzzled until she remembered that she’d said “I’ll take some coffee, if it’s no trouble,” when he’d asked about drinks. He had even had a joke, a mild one: What if it’s just a little bit of trouble? And he’d chuckled and stepped into the kitchen. “Well, maybe a tour, then,” she said. “While we wait.” The tour was supposed to happen. The dinner, the drinks, the ride up in the elevator, the coffee, the tour… and then. She figured he’d get to the tour, he’d offered, but he’d missed the hint in the elevator. Missed it or hadn’t taken it. She wondered if she was reading things wrong. She wondered if he didn’t want to open the envelope, whether he was merely politely going along with her suggestions. She began to doubt, just a little. Bumpy, had he known that she was starting to doubt herself, could have told her then that she would not want to date him. You’ll have to be very selfassured if you’re going to date me, he could have told her, if he’d picked up on the doubts. And if you want us to have a future, you’ll have to be extremely selfassured. Bumpy could have told her those things, except that he did not know she was feeling, now, a little insecure as they walked from the entry way to the living room, and except that he did not know them about himself. He did not know about himself that when he felt doubts, felt the ordinary everyday 90

insecurities and hesitancies people exhibit in all walks of life (most people anyway, maybe not presidential candidates and rock stars who might have doubt as a trait but keep it hidden), when he picked up on the tiny bits of self-doubt that make most people hesitate to raise their hands when the performer on stage says they need a volunteer, Bumpy read the hesitation, the doubt, the insecurity instead as reserved, as disinterested, as cold. And he preferred people who did not show those kinds of traits. So he did not mind when Teresa had suggested coming home. He did not mind, even, when she had seemed in the hallway to want to kiss.

He did not mind, now, when she asked for the tour of his

apartment, the tour he always offered and rarely was taken up on, when on a first date. What would seem forward or aggressive to Sarah would be fine with Bumpy, who was more comfortable with that because there were no gaps for him to fill in. Now he waved an arm around the room they were in. “This is the living room.” “Nice.” Teresa said. “Livable.” “Well, that’s the point of it.” There was not much to point out in the living room. The couch and loveseat, a reclining chair, and the television on a swiveling stand. The reclining chair sat next to a lamp coming up through a round table, and there were several books on the table. To Teresa it looked like a reading spot, although she noted that the TV was swiveled in that direction. “Do you like to read?” she said, taking a step or two towards the table.

91

“Not really,” Bumpy said. “My sister says I should read more. She lends me the books she thinks I’ll like.” “And do you like them?” “Sometimes. Sometimes I’m not sure that she likes them so much as she thinks that they’re good for me.” “Is she your older sister?” “Sarah? Yeah,” he said, as he joined her by the table. She was picking up the books. Who picks up someone else’s pile of books, most people would have thought. Bumpy did not mind. She flipped through them. “A lot of biographies,” she said. There were five books on the table. Two presidential biographies, and then one about a sailor who had something to do with the spice trade. One nonfiction book that had to do with numbers, Bumpy had noted, and not wanted to read because he did not like math, and one fiction book that seemed far more like “chick lit” than he would have expected from Sarah, and he’d not looked much at that one yet because he did not like “BridgetJones-y” things but also suspected that there was more to this one if Sarah had given it to him, all of which added up to something that he thought would likely be described as “Jane Austen for the modern era,” and he wanted nothing to do with that. “Which one are you reading?” She asked. “Any of them?” “No. I looked at the spice one a little but it’s slow moving. I leave them out so that when Sarah comes visiting she thinks I’m reading them or trying to.” Teresa looked at him a minute, waiting to see if he was joking. But he was serious, she thought. “I thought writers liked to read,” she said. 92

“Maybe others. I like to write. Plus it saves a lot of trouble if I don’t read as much.” “How’s that work?” “The more I read, the more I worry that I’ll inadvertently swipe somebody’s idea, that I’ll read something and then years later not remember that I read it but I’ll write something and it’ll be that. You know, like I’ll suddenly come up with characters called “hobbits” and they’ll be attacked by a girl with telekinesis at their prom.” Teresa laughed. Then, as she turned away to look at the pictures on the wall, she looked back at Bumpy for a moment, and wondered if he wasn’t the kind of person who would read The Lord Of The Rings and forget he’d read it. “What are these pictures of?” she asked, pointing at the few framed photos on the wall. “Mostly family, a few friends,” Bumpy said. “This one is me and Sarah and my mom, a few years ago. That one,” gesturing at the other bigger one “Is me and my friend Jay in Las Vegas last year.” He paused. “With an Elvis impersonator,” he added. “Well, really, I suspected,” Teresa said, and trailed off. Bumpy was looking at the picture. Jay and Bumpy and Elvis were standing together in front of a casino, red and yellow and white light framing them and reflecting in their eyes and in Elvis’ sunglasses. She watched him look at it. He lingered a second or two longer on it, and then looked away, towards her, and their eyes met.

93

This time, he did not miss it. She looked straight at him and tried to silence all those little doubts. She knew that she had to, knew somehow that she must keep being assertive, and she leaned forward just the slightest bit, hoping that was enough. It was. Bumpy leaned in, too, and they kissed. They were standing, each facing the wall holding the pictures. Their feet, all parallel, pointed their toes to that wall. Their bodies from the waist up turned more towards each other and leaned in, angling and turning to get to the point where their heads could meet, where their lips could touch. Bumpy leaned over to her, leaned a little further and she moved her head just the slightest bit forward, too, and they kissed, then, only their lips touching and their feet still not pointing at each other, their bodies only half-facing. Their lips touched, at first, and Teresa wondered whether she should take the lead in the kiss, too. She did not do anything, and their lips stayed touching for what seemed a long time. His lips were somewhat dry. To Bumpy, her lips felt soft and a little moist. They gave a little, like a pillow that’s been around a few years but not overly long. After that initial surrender, though, they firmed up and pressed back against his. He kept his lips on hers for a second or two, it felt longer, but he did not move or breathe, just held them there. Then he shifted his upper lip up the tiniest amount, and her lower lip went down as though it had been planned. His lower lip pressed in between hers, and his upper lip cupped hers.

94

Their lips pressing closer and closer together, his lips picking up on her moisture, Teresa allowed her mouth to open a gap. Her breath slipped out and she felt it flow around her lips and teeth and tongue and his upper lip was moving slightly against hers, caressing it, it seemed. She felt his tongue against her lips, gently, and then it was gone. He pulled back and she opened her eyes, not realizing that she had closed them. They stood there. Their feet still pointed at the wall. Their knees still pointed at the wall. Both of their hands were at their sides, but at the top their shoulders almost touched and their heads were only separated by an inch. “Want to see the rest?” Bumpy asked. “Boy, do I,” Teresa said. She heard the coffee percolating as he led her to the bedroom. She could smell the coffee in the air when she woke up. She’d woken because something had shifted. She was lying on her back in the dark. It wasn’t dark, not really, just the middle of the night and her eyes were used to sleeping, not wakefulness, she realized, as she laid there. Her eyes adjusted and she looked around without moving. She was in Bumpy’s bedroom. There was light coming in through the small window, high up. His bedroom, she realized, was set up with such a high, small window that he would not be able to see out of it unless he stood up on something, and even then, and even though he was tall, he would not be able to see down, he would see at best horizontally. Looking up at the window, she realized that it was recessed quite a bit. The outer wall of the apartment building 95

was thick on this side. The bedroom was on the same side as the living room, which had a large picture window that she now recalled, too, had quite a ledge. She wondered why the bedroom did not have a larger window, or one lower down. There was a small cactus up on the window sill. She saw it in silhouette. That was practical, and unlike what she already pictured Bumpy to be. A cactus was exactly the kind of plant a woman would put up in that window, to add a plant to the room without the need to water it very often. Bumpy, she guessed now, was not a plant man at all. She sat up in the bed and looked at the light streaming in from the window, light that began as streetlights and headlights and signs and was reflected off of buildings and clouds until it came through Bumpy’s window indirectly and hazily, softened around the edges and indistinct. The apartment was taller than most buildings immediately around it, so the light had to go up and come back down to get to the floor of the room. Because of that, there was no beam of light, no window-shaped square on the floor where she would see her shoes and underwear lying. The light spread throughout the room, each photon dispersing enough that it had a little room between it and its neighbor, the light gathering in this room like new in-laws gathered at the wedding reception, mingling but with space around the edges. She stood up. She could not, in the light, see her clothes. The bed was empty now with her out of it. The door to the small hallway was almost closed and the crack in the door was poorly lit, barely illuminated, barely different from

96

the light in the room and it was hard for her to get her bearings. She was going off of her memory but her memory was overwhelmed by the kissing and the sex. She paused a moment just to think about Bumpy’s kissing. Bumpy was an amazingly good kisser. He was good enough that she paused, naked there, to think about what a good kisser he was. They’d never had that coffee. She’d known, as he put it on, that they would not. She’d known from the moment he’d kissed her, facing the wall, that they would not drink coffee before she laid down next to him, kissing, arms wrapped around each other, fully clothed but more in contact through the kiss than if they’d been naked and having sex. He was that good, so good that she’d not noticed when her clothes had come off but they had and she was now sweaty and tired in a good way. And she wanted to kiss him again. Years later, she would reflect, having kissed other men before and after Bumpy, on what made him such a good kisser, and she would decide that his kisses were indistinct. That was the word she would always apply to Bumpy. Most men, kissing her, had the kiss going in one direction or another; the kisses had a purpose. Some few were shy or embarrassed or did not like her and were being polite, and their kisses headed away from connection. They were kisses meant to end or stop. Most were attracted to her and their kisses tried to get her to be attracted to them. Bumpy’s kisses did not clearly head in one direction or another. They were forceful enough, but not purposeful.

97

She did not have to wonder, that night, where Bumpy had gone. Almost immediately, after she’d rolled off of him and lay next to him connected by the length of their bodies, touching all the way down, his arm under her back in a slightly uncomfortable way (but she tolerated it because we all tolerate slight discomfort at the start of a relationship, it is several dates or weeks or maybe months at least until we assert our own selves enough to tell our lover that the arm underneath our shoulder blades is uncomfortable), her side up against his all the way down to their feet, which slowly rubbed against each other, almost immediately as she lay there with him she’d felt him become a little distant, and she knew he was and what he was thinking because she, too was thinking the same thing. So now, in the dark, she walked towards the door of the bedroom and did not bother to put on clothes. The apartment was warm, too warm, that was why she was sweaty, a little, in part, and she did not want to put on clothes. She opened the door of the bedroom and looked into the hallway, turned to her right, walked down to the living room. In the light from the window, better lighting than the bedroom because the bigger window let the light in more directly, she saw Bumpy sitting on the couch. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and he had a cup of coffee in his hand, resting lightly on the couch. She saw the envelope, ripped open, sitting on the other side of him. A packet of papers sat on his left leg. One, on the top, had a gray bar of letterhead across the top. He was not reading them. He was looking at the cup of coffee. She couldn’t tell if he’d heard the door to the bedroom open. If he had, he had made no effort to put the papers 98

away or hide them. She thought that might be a good sign. Whatever it is, he’s not hiding it from me. In the dim light, she could not tell what the expression on his face was; it was in shadow. She stood a little behind him, not sure, for the moment, what to do. She suddenly felt awkward in her nudity. He was wearing underwear. She did not know where in his bedroom her underwear was, and the underwear she’d worn was not much of a covering anyway. She also did not know where the bedroom light switch was and did not think she should go back out of the room now. “Do you want some coffee?” he asked. She did, but did not say that right away. Instead, a non sequitur. “Did your sister Sarah get you that cactus?” There was a silence. He looked up at her. “They want to buy my script. And produce it. And make it into a television series. I’m going to be rich.” He did not gesture towards the papers. There was no need to do so. “I would like some coffee,” Teresa decided, and stood there, for a second, until Bumpy stood up and put his cup down carefully, placing the papers on the coffee table. He walked over to her, was about to walk past her into the little kitchenette when she grabbed him and put her hands over his ears and turned his face to face hers. Again, their bodies were not lined up. His faced the kitchen, was turned at a forty-five degree angle to hers. But his face was dead-on to hers. She put her fingertips behind his ears and pulled him to her and said into his mouth “Kiss me like you did before,” and he did and it still was indistinct. 99

The kiss lasted a long time. When she was out of breath, she pulled her head back away from him, gasped a little and caught her breath. Her lips felt weak. “I just wanted to see if it would be different this time,” she said. “Was it?” Bumpy asked. “No,” she said. “Thank God.” He got her the cup of coffee, and then sat down on the couch next to her, in his boxers, which, she saw, had Snoopys on them. She stayed naked. He several times opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. “So, you’re going to be writing a television show,” she said after her cup of coffee was nearly gone. It was getting darker outside the living room window: businesses were closing. The city was small enough that at some point everything, or almost everything, closed. Unlike large cities, unlike Chicago or Los Angeles or New York, Madison occasionally went to bed. “Yep,” he said. “They’ve got the whole contract there. It’s a lot of money.” “And a lot of work, I expect,” she said. “Not really.” “No?” “Writing’s not work,” he said. “It’s like breathing.” She laughed at that. They kissed again. Then she looked into his eyes, and they set their coffee cups down, and stretched out on the couch, not even bothering to go to the bedroom this time.

100

February 14: “I would think at least you could have called to tell me you’d be running late.” Sarah put the phone down. She was not a phone slammer. But her tone of voice said it all. She hoped that Peyton would get the message before he got to her house. She hated being left waiting. She hated not knowing what was going on. She hated that it was Valentine’s Day and she had not heard from Peyton all day and though she knew it was unlike him and knew that her anger would not make the evening any more romantic than it already was not, she could not help being angry and could not help—did not even really try to help – leaving an angry message when she’d called and got his assistant and been told that he was in a meeting with important clients. It did not help, either, that she knew Dylan was out with Teresa at that exact moment. She didn’t like it that Peyton was in favor of Dylan going out with Teresa, even though Sarah was in favor of Dylan going out with Teresa, going out with anyone. She worried that Dylan was congenitally antisocial, that there was something misdeveloped in him, something that had… she left herself think it even though she would never say it aloud… broken in him, or been stunted since he was a small boy. And whenever she worried about that she worried about herself, too, and tried not to be mad at Dylan because he was out on Valentine’s and she was not. Not yet. She waited another twenty minutes. The phone continued to not ring. Peyton continued to not be at the door. She continued to not be out on a date 101

with her fiancé on Valentine’s Day. She paced around her small house, around and around the first floor and then walked halfway up the stairs, ready to go up and take off her makeup and then get into her pajamas and go to bed, so that she could make a point of not being ready to go out when Peyton finally called, so that she could say I’m in my pajamas and don’t have makeup on, something she wanted to say not just to show Peyton just how late she was and just how she would not wait for him even though she was waiting for him. She wanted to say it, too, so that Peyton would tell her she did not need makeup and that he’d be happy to take her out in her pajamas, that she looked cute in them. She would not believe him but she wanted him to say it. She did not go upstairs, though, and instead, walked back to the phone, picked it up, and dialed again. A ring. Two. Three. Then the phone picked up. “Hi, Mom. How are you?” She twirled the cord a little. “No, I’m fine. Peyton’s working late.” Dylan liked to make fun of her about the cord. Peyton said he thought it was quaint. She had the cord because she hated the way cordless phones lost their charge and interfered with the call, all static and crackly and beeping. She suspected that people did it so they would not have to talk on the phone. If you don’t want to talk on the phone, why have one? Why answer it? She never answered her phone unless she wanted to talk, to anyone who called. She did not have caller ID and never deliberately screened her calls. She winced when she was unable to get to the phone quickly enough to pick up and the caller started leaving a message. In a world of call screeners, Sarah wanted it known that she either was talking to everyone, or talking to no one. 102

“So I thought maybe I’d come over. Spend some time with you.” She held her breath. “It’s not pity. And you’re not second choice.” That was not a lie, at that point. Peyton was still expected to come get her and take her out. And when he did, she would have chosen not to be there, because Mom had come first. “I don’t have any plans with him,” she said. Truth again: Peyton had plans with her. She no longer had plans with him. It wasn’t until she was in the car that she regretted, somewhat, what she was doing. Not leaving Peyton without even a phone message or a note. He would have to learn. He should have already learned. He should not even have to learn, she realized. Sarah prided herself on a clearheaded way of thinking, a clearheaded (she liked the word, it sounded fresh and clean and neat) way of looking at things in a new way. She had lived, up until that moment driving her car on a cold and might as well admit it lonely and sad St. Valentine’s Day over to her mother’s house, her sick mother’s house, up until that moment she had lived in a world where women who were left alone without an explanation on St. Valentine’s Day had to either teach their boyfriends or fiancés or husbands a lesson, had to teach them that it was wrong to not call, not write, and most of all not come over and be romantic on February 14th. Or, if the women did not have to do that, the women had to fume that their boyfriends/fiancés/etc. should already have learned that lesson, from them or from some other source somewhere somehow. Now, Sarah realized that was all wrong. With her clarity of thinking her clearheaded way of thinking, she now realized that she, and women, were 103

looking at it the wrong way. Why did men have to learn that? Why didn’t they just know it? If women insisted that men could, for some period of time, behave this way, if women allowed men to be ... louts and do these things without explanation or caring, for a while and then put their foot down and insisted that the men learn the error of their ways, then women were exacerbating the problem. So if she got mad at Peyton and said he better learn that this was not the way to treat her, she was allowing him to have been such a poor human being thus far that he never gathered that you could not treat the woman you said you loved this way, you could not treat your fiancee with such contempt as to leave her inexplicably alone and driving to her sick mother’s house on St. Valentine’s Day. And how could she marry someone who was that poor of a human being, how could she sanction a society that allowed that? No, instead, what she should believe, what she now believed, was that Peyton should not have even had to learn; he should have existed, she should have existed, they both should have existed and been engaged and in love, in a society in which men never believed that it was acceptable to not call their fiancee and tell them they were running late, where men did not have to learn not to abandon their loved ones because men never did it in the first place. Just as men did not have to learn not to stop breathing, they should not have to learn not to treat women poorly. She smiled grimly.

104

She worried that it drove Peyton nuts that she called it Saint Valentine’s Day when everyone else called it, simply, “Valentine’s Day,” but she wanted to be correct. She wanted to not take shortcuts. She turned left to take a shortcut to Mom’s house, did that just as in her mind she told herself that it was okay to say “St. Valentine’s Day” because it was correct and one should not take shortcuts in life. She did not, in her mind, even note the irony of physically taking a shortcut while mentally telling herself not to take shortcuts. Had someone explained it to her she would have simply told them that the two things were entirely unrelated, that of course it was okay to take a shortcut to get to someone’s house. But she did not say that to anyone because nobody was in the car with her and she would not remember the moment to tell someone because the moment went unmarked in her mind. She knew, in her mind, that some people had to learn to not stop breathing. Some people could not get the hang, at birth, of continuing to breath and had to be worked on until they learned to take a breath, then another breath, and then another. To learn to not stop breathing. She knew that but did not dwell on it because she did not like to think about Dylan that way because if she did she would, crazy as it was, momentarily worry that someday he might forget to not stop breathing. The way he kept doing when he was first born. And the more she tried not to dwell on it, the more distracted she got from her moment of clarity about things Peyton should not have to learn, and the more distracted she got the more lost she got until she 105

finally decided that she should not have taken that shortcut after all and she pulled over on the side of the road and unbuckled her seatbelt. She sat there, in the glow of the dashboard lights, and looked at the unfamiliar apartment buildings around her. Dylan had been born early. Premature babies sometimes don’t know how to breathe. They have to learn. She was 10 when Dylan was born and old enough that her mom had explained to her why they couldn’t hold the baby right away in the hospital. She looked at the shadowy apartments, trying to make them seem familiar. She was not sure where she’d ended up but knew it wasn’t anywhere she’d intended to go. She’d randomly driven into some neighborhood. She wanted to curse. Sarah had pictured the nurses trying to teach the baby to breath. She saw them in white, clustered around the baby, wearing the hats that nurses used to wear. Sarah wasn’t sure if she remembered the hats or wanted to remember the hats. If the hats were not there in the first place, her memory had now put them there and the nurses wore hats. As she pictured the nurses, she focused on those details: she pictured the hats. She imagined what kind of hair the nurses had. Businesslike. Short. In buns. They had crisp uniforms. Nurses then used to wear white, crisp, starchy uniforms. The uniforms let you know that you were in a place that was clean, and orderly. Hospitals needed to be clean and orderly because you were not, when you went there. Sick people were not clean and

106

orderly. They were bloody, doubled over in pain, vomiting, achey, crying, hobbling, legs bent at awkward angles, heads bumped… She opened her eyes. To her right was a duplex with a small yard and a chain link fence around the yard, incongruously in this neighborhood. The fence was out of place. She looked at it for a moment. She could not place it. She looked in her rearview mirror at the intersection, trying to see the sign for the street she’d just turned onto. She couldn’t quite make it out, and had to back up a little to bring it into view. Once she had a street name, she put on the overhead compartment light and took the map out of the glove compartment. Her city map was laminated; it had come that way. She’d bought it the day she’d bought the car, stopping on the way home from the dealership to get the map. It had not been unfolded since the day she bought it. She did not want to leave Mom waiting longer than necessary. She fretted over the map, trying to locate the intersection she was at, tracing with her fingers, while in the back of her mind she hoped that Mom was not getting mad at her the way she was mad at Peyton. She pictured the conversation she would have with Peyton when she finally did talk to him, telling him icily – she planned on being icy when she talked to him – that she didn’t care where he’d been, saying it in such a way that she would let him know that she did care and he’d better not do it again. She tried to formulate how that would be done, how she would have to pronounce her vowels, clip them off and make sure she hit the consonants hard, staccato, that was the way she had to talk. 107

She found her location on the map and traced back to Mom’s house, trying to figure out how she’d gotten here and how she was going to get to Mom’s, and planned her route out a little better. She folded up the map, carefully, making sure it got back the way it was. She put it in the glove compartment, reached up and turned the light off and pressed the accelerator, turning the wheel to the left to do a u-turn. Her car promptly lurched back and to the right and in her surprise, she hit the gas harder and the front end of her car swung around and hit the chain link fence, that out-of-place security fence, and tore into it. She stopped and heard air hissing out of the tire. “Oh. Oh. Damn. For…” she stopped. She pressed both hands to her temples and just sat for a moment. In her mind, she saw the second time Bumpy had needed help breathing. A light had gone on in the left-hand side of the duplex. She saw it through her fingers. She sat there for a second more and then got out of the car as the resident of the duplex came out. She instantly thought of him as that, as a resident. She did not call him a “homeowner” because she assumed that he was a renter or guest. Nobody who lived in a duplex was permanent enough to “reside” in it. The man came forward a little. She saw that he was wearing jeans and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt. He was barefoot. He was obviously reluctant to come far outside, and stood switching from foot to foot on his porch. She got out of the car. “I’m okay,” she said before he had a chance to say anything. She looked at the car’s front end, where it had pushed up the fence and knocked one support 108

post to the right, and part of the fence had torn into the car’s right front tire, a tire that was mostly flat, now. The rest of the fence rested on the hood of the car. “How’s your car?” asked the man. “I don’t know. Fine, probably.” “Except the tire.” She looked up at him. He turned around and went inside, and she wondered if that was it; did he care so little about his yard that he had given up on this? Gone back inside to watch TV? Or was he calling the police? Should she? He came back outside, now in work boots that were partially laced and untied, and walked around the driveway until he came outside the fence. They stood there, about four feet apart, looking at the car. Sarah had her cell phone out. She opened it, pointed it, and took a few pictures. “What’re you doing that for?” the man asked. “Because I’ll probably need it for my insurance company.” “This isn’t my fault,” the man said. “I know that. I had the car in reverse and I forgot when I started up again.” “What were you doing? I saw you sitting out here for a while. I thought you were here to see them.” The man gestured towards the dark right side of the duplex. “They aren’t home,” he added. “I’m lost,” Sarah said. “I was lost. I stopped to check my map.” “Where were you going?”

109

Sarah didn’t answer. She flipped open the cell phone again, pressed a speed dial number and waited while it rang. She got an auto club representative and said that she needed a tow truck. She gave them the street name, and paused, looking at the man. He looked back at her. “What’s the address?” she asked. “Oh. 440. 440 Ridge Street.” Sarah repeated that. Then she pressed to end the call, and then dialed a second number from the memory. After a pause, while the man watched her, she said, “This is Sarah Strathan.” She gave them her policy number and said that she’d been in an accident, and left a number they could call her at. Then she flipped the phone closed and put it back into her purse. The man just watched all of this. “You sure are organized,” he said, finally. “Thanks,” she said. She did not want to seem impolite. She also did not want to make small talk. But it seemed she would have to. The man stuck out his hand and said “My name’s Dan.” Sarah kept her hands in her pockets, but gave her name. After a moment, she said: “I’m sorry about your fence.” And she was, a little, at least. The man looked at the fence. “It’s an ugly fence, anyway. I’ve been thinking of getting rid of it. I just never get around to it.” He smiled at her, and she didn’t know why, until he said “Maybe you could just finish it off.”

110

She just stared at him, and he laughed a little, encouragingly. “Just kidding,” he said. She tried what she thought might be a polite smile. “I was only kidding,” Dan said again, uncomfortably. That, in turn, made Sarah feel uncomfortable. She knew he was just trying to be nice, and that it was not his fault that she’d gotten left alone, gotten lost, and run into his fence. He’d been having a quiet night and now was standing out here looking at the torn-up fence in his yard and, likely, thinking how this had now forced him to do something he’d not wanted to very much before. She wished the tow truck would come. She wished very much that it would get there. She wasn’t even sure how she’d get home, then, and realized that she wouldn’t be getting home unless she arranged for it. Dan had turned again and was making a show of checking out the fence. He, too, was not entirely clear on what the etiquette was. He was pretty sure that he should ask her phone number and other information, because he was going to have to have someone pay for this, but also felt that this Sarah would view that as impolite or an imposition. He did not know how she’d made him feel awkward about her running into his fence. He poked around, thinking about whether it would be worse to try to lift the fence and have her back the car out. While he did that, he heard her make a phone call, behind him – another message. “I don’t know where you are, but I need you to call me as soon as you get this. I’ve flattened my tire and I need a ride. Call me!” She folded the phone closed again as Dan turned around again. She just looked at him, and he did not say anything about the calls he’d overheard. 111

“Do you want to wait inside?” he asked, after a moment. She looked up at the house, then back at him. “I can wait in my car,” she said. “It might not be best to run it,” he pointed out. “It doesn’t look like you did anything to the engine, but you never know.” Sarah had not seen him look at the car and wondered if he was trying to convince her to come in the house or merely concerned about her. How are you supposed to know? She wondered. How could you tell if someone’s looking out for you or for them? She looked up at the house, again. “I’m safe,” Dan said. What kind of person tells you they’re safe? Sarah wondered, but she knew, herself, that she was the kind of person that brings out such behavior in people. People were always telling her what kind of people they were. I’m safe. I’m okay. I’m on your side. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m really a nice person if you get to know me. She didn’t know what it was about her that made them do that. They just did. “I… fine. Sure. Thanks,” she said. She tried a joke: “If you’re sure you’re safe.” Dan looked uncomfortable. “Of course I am. Sorry. You can wait out here.” Sarah quickly said, “No, I was just kidding. Just a joke. I guess I just couldn’t pull it off.”

112

Dan walked a little ahead of her up the drive, and held the door open for her. She walked into the small front hall and saw a sitting room or living room off to her left. It appeared almost instantly that no woman lived with Dan. She took a moment to decide why. She looked around the room. There were the usual furniture—a couch, a few chairs, a television (tuned to local news, she saw) and a bookshelf. The bookshelf was equally divided between books and DVDs. She decided it was absence of any decorative touches. There were no pillows, no blankets, not many knickknacks or rugs. The television was on bare stand rather than in an entertainment center. The pictures on the wall, which were photographs of people she thought must be relatives, were not arranged in any esthetic or artistic manner, but instead were evenly spaced around the room so that wherever you looked, you would see a picture, but probably only one at a time. “Come on in,” Dan said, and turned on the tall floor lamp, doubling the illumination in the room. She stood a little longer in the doorway. “You’ll be able to see the tow truck through the front window,” Dan said. “Same as I saw you.” “Sure. Thanks,” she said, and came in. She was not sure where to sit. Finally, she took a chair that sat at an angle to the television. She sat on the edge of it and looked at the TV. “Sorry to do this to you,” she said. “I wasn’t really doing much, anyway. I guess I’d rather not go outside tonight, but it’s not like you were interrupting anything.” He started to take off his work boots and then stopped, and eventually just sat down on the couch. He looked at the TV, at her. He didn’t know where to look. All the situations he’d 113

been through in his life had failed to produce an outline for this. “Can I get you something? Some coffee or something? It’s pretty cold out there.” “No, thanks, I’m fine. I won’t be long.” “Right. I suppose I should get your insurance information.” He sat there. Sarah looked at him, and finally she said: “Tell me when you’re ready.” “Oh. Let me get some paper,” he said. He got up, started to walk out of the room, then turned back to her. “I’ll be right back,” he said. While he was out of the room, she looked at the television, a reporter covering a story of a snowstorm in some state that had shut down airports all across that region. She wanted to look at the pictures, but for some reason felt that might be prying. She chided herself on that, then decided she was right. People put up pictures so that you can see them, but he never intended that you see them, she told herself. If she had not intended to be here today, was it right to look at the pictures? She thought not. And she tried not to look at them. He returned with some paper. It was an envelope. He handed it to her sheepishly. She looked at it. He handed her a pen. “It’s probably faster if you just write it down.” She did and handed it back to him. The front of the envelope was hand written, and the envelope was greeting-card sized. She tried to determine if the handwriting was masculine or feminine. No men she knew anymore sent greeting cards, though. The envelope was white. Had he gotten a valentine? 114

“Thanks… Sarah,” he said, reading what she’d written. She realized at that point that she had not up until right then introduced herself. Dan watched her, perched on the edge of the couch, trying not to look at anything, and wondered if she thought she was pretty. The tow truck arrived just then and he followed her back outside, wondering if he thought she was pretty, and watched as she got into the tow truck. Her eyes scanned over the interior quickly and then settled on the dashboard. The car was pulled free of the fence. He looked at the bent-up portion of it and then back down at the envelope in his hand with her name, address, and phone number on it, and her insurance company and policy number. She had not even had to get out a card to get that number right. He did not doubt that it was right, and already somehow knew that Sarah knew the policy number not because she got into accidents but because she knew all the numbers in her life. Sarah watched in the rearview mirror as Dan receded from view. She dreaded making small talk with the driver now and said, instead, “Do you mind if I make a phone call?” and the driver nodded and told her that was fine. She called Peyton and got his cell phone and left a message to call her. She called her mother and said she would not be coming over after all. “No, Mom. I’ve just… I got lost and got into an accident.” The driver tried not to look like he was listening. “It wasn’t serious. I just drove into a fence in someone’s yard. No, nobody’s hurt.” The driver pulled into the service station. 115

“I’ll just call you tomorrow, Mom. Are you okay? You sure? I could try to find someone to give me a ride, spend the night.” When her mother protested that she had to work in the morning, Sarah agreed wearily that, yes, she did have to work in the morning. The driver busied himself unhooking the car while Sarah waited inside the convenience store for the cab to arrive. He noticed, as did the clerk, that unlike many people who waited for something, Sarah did not divert her attention or kill time by examining the magazines or candy bars or lottery tickets. She stood at the doorway, moving aside for customers to enter or exit, and looked at the road. Every minute or so, she took her cell phone out and looked at it. Then she went back to looking at the road. As it happened, she was looking left and the cab came from the right so she did not see it until it pulled in front of the doorway. The driver and the clerk thought she was very polite when she thanked them.

116

November 21: Airports are exciting places. Everyone is going somewhere or coming from somewhere. Everyone is leaving someone or being reunited with someone, for good or for bad, and everyone is tired, all of which adds up to an overflow of emotions. Airports are designed to dampen emotions: they are steel and glass and fast food restaurants and the same little magazine-and-sweatshirt-and-candy store every 35 feet, with linoleum and tile and ads for in-flight magazines, and they are large and anonymous and now you have to take your shoes off to get very far into them, but for all of that, they cannot compress or eliminate the emotions that overflow from everyone who goes through them, the excitement or fear or nostalgia or love. Pilots who have a day off radiate contentment. Newlyweds heading to and from honeymoons give off love. Families going to Florida or Los Angeles bounce with excitement. Businessmen buzz with tension. Bumpy absorbed it all while he wished he had packed some of the leftover turkey that Ivy had made. He sat on a molded plastic chair at his gate, holding his laptop and listening to music on his iPod. A couple of magazines purchased at one of the ubiquitous stores selling magazines and candy were tucked into his laptop case, along with a can of soda and some candy. He was hungry, though, and hungry for real food. He wondered if one of the ubiquitous stores had sandwiches that would qualify as real. He wondered if “Ubiquitous” would really make a good name for a store or if it seemed that way because he was tired (a little) and hung over (a little) and 117

hungry (a little) and feeling sad about not waking up Ivy before heading out. He waited for his flight that would leave in a half-hour and wondered if he should try to call her. Four times he’d taken out his cellphone and dialed the number for the Venetian to call her, and four times he’d taken it back. He felt terrible about spending time wondering about what would make a good name for a store when he should be talking to her, explaining. She would wonder why he was getting emails from Teresa. Teresa, no doubt, would wonder why she’d never been told about Ivy. Ivy would want to come along. He would not want her to come along. Teresa had emailed: I am not supposed to tell you this but it is driving me crazy and I think you need to know. Your mother is in the hospital and she’s not going to live very long. Bumpy knew why she was not supposed to tell and it had nothing to do with medical ethics. Ivy didn’t know Mom was sick. Ivy didn’t know Mom was dying. Bumpy hadn’t known Mom was dying. He supposed he’d known if he’d bothered to think about it but he could get through most days without really thinking about a lot of things and he kept busy so that he could do just that. It was one of the things he liked about Las Vegas, one of the things he’d miss. Out 118

here, in the desert, the lights never stopped, the music never stopped, the sounds and energy and whirling spinning of life never slowed down, never gave you time to think unless you sought it out. Back home, he knew, it was cold and gray and got dark early and you spent a lot of time in your house and a lot of time staring at bare trees and white and gray snow, and could think too much. Gray snow. He’d almost forgotten about gray snow. Everyone who’d ever asked him but don’t you/won’t you miss snow never mentioned the gray snow, the way snow gets dirty within hours of falling, so it’s not lovely or crisp or clean, it’s like wet cold dirt. He didn’t miss that. He’d never miss that. He missed Ivy. He wasn’t even more than a few miles from her. One of the things about Las Vegas is that it is shockingly small; the whole city is small enough, it seems, to walk across in an afternoon. No matter where he was in Vegas, he was never more than a mile or two from Ivy, and now was no different. But he missed her. He missed Teresa, too, and he supposed that was why he never told Ivy he was getting emails from Teresa, because if he talked about Teresa, which he never did, if he did talk about her, he was pretty sure that the part of him that missed her would be the part that spoke, and Ivy would hear in his voice that he missed her, so that a casual Oh, she’s just a girl I knew back in Madison would come out with an emotional wallop and would sound just exactly like She was a girl who I thought I had already fallen in love with only then all this stuff happened right at the same time and now I’m out here with you and we’re engaged and you

119

can’t be in love with two people at the same time, can you, and I’m in love with you, so I guess I’m not in love with her… As he pictured that he wondered why, in his imaginary dialogue, he had said I guess. On his iPod, he flipped over to ‘Pictures’ and clicked through them until he came to the one he’d taken of Ivy at a burger restaurant not so long ago. He’d taken it on his cellphone and had taken it just after she’d taken a bite of her hamburger and put it down; her mouth was full, one cheek bulged out with her bit, and a bit of lettuce clung to her lip. She was half-glaring, half-smiling at him. He sat there, looking at that picture, and listening to whatever songs came up randomly on his iPod, and felt his phone in his jacket pocket, resting against his chest. Finally, his plane boarded and he got up and showed his ticket to the boarding attendant and went in and sat down. The plane was only one-third full. It was a direct flight and not that many people wanted to go directly from Las Vegas to Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of the night. Bumpy did not want to, either.

120

July 4: Hospitals are as drab as possible, and even more so when one is there on a holiday. No matter how much hospitals try to gussy themselves up, no matter how many pictures they hang in the hall and how many curtains they drape around the windows and how many wooden cabinets they have to hang your coat in, hospitals cannot hide the tubes and syringes and machines and outlets and pumps and gurneys that they must have. And hospitals cannot hide the tile they must be covered in for easy cleaning of all the fluids that our bodies contain, fluids that leak or spew or dribble out of us during the bad times. Tears are the highest of these; when things go wrong, our bodies start to expel fluids. Sarah watched as her mother vomited again, just before the medicine took effect. She looked at the pale skin under the white-blue lights, the weird shadows, the flickering of fluorescence – another thing that makes hospitals drab and dreary, fluorescent lights, which contain not an iota of real light in them – against her hospital gown and her hands and her closing eyes. The orderly dabbed at her and wiped off her mouth. “The anti-nausea drug will help a little,” the nurse told Sarah, and tugged on her arm gently, pulling her out of the little cubicle created by the curtains the nurse had drawn around them when they first arrived. Sarah had been sitting at home, watching fireworks on television, when her mother called. She’d let the machine pick up, had heard a weak, quavery voice – a voice that if it was light would have been a hospital fluorescent light, 121

flickering and artificial—telling her that she’d just thrown up and there was blood and she couldn’t stop the coughing and was dizzy. Sarah had picked up instantly. “I’ll be right there. Did you call 911? Why not? I’ll call them. Where are you? Good. Stay there. Don’t move. Put a towel under your knees so they don’t bruise worse.” She paused. “I’ll call 911 and then I’ll call you on my cell phone. I’m on my way. So hang up now and I’ll call you right back.” Her shoes slipped on and she was running, getting into her car, on the phone to 911 already, giving the information quickly and crisply. On the drive there, she talked to Mom on the cell phone. “Just lie there. Just breathe. Take it easy. I’ll be there in a minute.” When she heard the ambulance driver’s arrive, she said “Keep me on the phone. What do you mean, you’re on the kitchen phone? Why are you in the kitchen? I told you to stay in the bathroom.” A man’s voice came on. “Ma’am? We’re going to move your mother now. I need to hang up.” “Which hospital are you taking her to?” Sarah asked, interrupting him. “St. Mary’s.” That was where she worked. That was fine. “Tell Mom I’ll meet her there.” The phone hung up. She wondered if the EMT would tell Mom that. Then she wondered when she’d begun to question her own authority. A year ago,

122

maybe two, maybe even a few months ago, she would have assumed that the man would do what she told him to do. That was, she supposed, before she’d been confronted with the police’s absolute indifference to her demands. That was how she saw it. Absolute indifference. What else was there to call it, after all? She sat at a red light and fumed. Should she run the red light? The ambulance would. So should she? If she got pulled over and had to explain to a cop – to an absolutely indifferent cop—what she was doing, wouldn’t that take longer than just sitting for a red light? It didn’t matter, maybe, either, because there was too much traffic for her to just pull through the lights and roar away. As much as she might want to, there were all kinds of reasons why she kept her foot off of the gas pedal and on the break, hands clenched on the wheel and mouth a thin line of lips that grew darker, not lighter, when pressed together firmly like this. She felt the inside of her lip between her teeth, knew she was chewing her lip again. Like everything else in her life, she was able to pinpoint when she’d begun that, and it, too, was related to a trip to the hospital. Sitting on the comfortable chair in the emergency room staring at the television as it had played some talk show, some guy with a microphone and chair and other people with chairs, the type of television show that was on in the middle of the day, she’d chewed her lip and tried not to look out of the corner of her eye at her neighbor looking at her, tried not to look as though she was hiding her face behind her hair, because she wasn’t, it just fell that way, tried 123

not to feel her cheeks burning with worry and anger and frustration and shame but she was not ashamed. Even then, she’d felt they did not get to the hospital fast enough. She’d sat in the back seat, with their neighbor in the front seat with Dylan and Mom, and watched as they sat, quietly, at a red light. There is a different silence that people have when they’re worried than when they are content. A content silence is like the quiet that comes over a car on the way home from a drive-in movie in the summer, as the children almost fall asleep and the adults run out of things to talk about and nobody turns on the radio but instead just enjoys the air as it breathes out the heat of the day. A nervous silence is like watching a raccoon waiting to pounce. You want it to keep its friendly look and cute shape. But you fear it won’t. It’s because they’re not going fast enough, that’s why he’s hurt, she’d thought, and begun biting the inside of her lip, just a little, and she’d kept doing that sitting in the chair at the hospital, and she did it now, today, as the traffic finally cleared in the intersection and her light turned green, and she kept chewing on the inside of her lip all the way to the hospital and while she watched the doctors and nurses fuss with Mom and while she’d checked Mom into a room and while Mom had finally been given medicines and gone to sleep. She stopped chewing her lip as she sat in the chair in the room and watched Mom drift off to sleep after vomiting. The television, over her head and behind her, murmured quietly with the 24-hour-news channel she’d put it on for Mom. She did not listen to it. She watched Mom and sipped at the cup of coffee 124

an orderly had given her. She hadn’t known the orderly. She didn’t know everyone in the whole hospital, after all. She certainly didn’t know people on the fifth floor, where they treated Mom’s illness. She had not called Dylan. The nurse – another someone Sarah didn’t know – had patted her on the arm and told her to make herself comfortable and left the room just a minute or two ago. It had not occurred to her until this moment that she had not called Dylan. She was not going to call him. She stared at Mom and the monitor and the little pulse-oxygen meter on her finger and the dials and switches behind the headboard of the bed, and the way the light from the fluorescent bulb flowed down the wall. She looked down where the plastic tubing that fell away from Mom’s hand dipped down to the edge of the bed and saw the way the blanket hung unevenly, higher at the front of the bed and angling down against the gray metal of the frame to the end of the bed. She wanted to straighten it. Why wouldn’t the police at least pretend they were going to do something? She wondered, still, if the EMT had passed the message on to Mom. She sipped her coffee and sat and looked at each individual part of the room, trying to see the room as an assortment of parts rather than a room. Trying to see the trees for the forest.

125

March 2: “How long have you been here?” asked Bumpy, as he walked up to the chairs outside the glass window that was the reception area for the police department. “What do you want?” asked Sarah. “I came to pick you up.” “I don’t want you to pick me up.” “I’m taking you home.” “You’re not taking me home,” she said. “The detective called me and told me that you’ve been sitting here a long time. He already spoke with you. You don’t need to wait here.” “I don’t want to talk to you.” “Let’s go.” She looked up at him. Then she looked back down. Bumpy had almost gulped in surprise when she looked up at him. He’d never seen her look so… dull. So lifeless. She must be exhausted, he told himself. He was hung over. “Let’s go,” he said again. “I’ll take you home.” “I’m not leaving,” she said. The reception clerk, a young man in a blue uniform, watched this all behind his plexiglass window with a small slot for sliding keys and pens and papers back and forth.

126

“Let’s go,” he said again. He didn’t know what else to say. He was not a persuasive person. Without any warning, she stood up and slapped him, as hard as she could. He didn’t have any time to react. She started sobbing and screaming incoherently and before he could even feel the sting of the slap she reared back and punched him in the eye, square on. “You could have saved him, you fucking drunk,” she managed to scream. “You could have stopped him…”

127

January 1: Sarah hoped someone would ask about her ring. She had a slight headache that she attributed more to lack of sleep than to the fact that even she had gotten a little tipsy the night before. She’d practically had to, the way people kept insisting that they toast her and that she have some champagne and that she celebrate Peyton’s proposal, which really had been quite romantic, she had to admit. She hadn’t slept the entire night. She laid in her bed, looking at her ring. She’d put on her reading light on the headboard and laid there on her side looking at the diamond sparkling in the light. It brought tears to her eyes. She kept smiling at it. Like an idiot, she told herself, but she could not convince herself that it was idiotic to smile at the ring. And even if it was, she could not help it. She had lain there all night, smiling at her ring and humming to herself the song that had been playing in the background when the waiter had brought her the plate, near the end of the dinner. There had been ten of them at the dinner. Dylan, Peyton, Mom, and her, along with a married couple consisting of Peyton’s brother and the brother’s wife, and Charlotte from work and Charlotte’s husband, and Peyton’s business partner and the business partner’s girlfriend. Sarah had liked the girlfriend, Teresa, and they had spent a lot of the night chatting. She had not cared much for Charlotte’s husband, who she had not met before, and she had not been fond in the first place of going out on New Year’s Eve.

128

“I haven’t gone out on New Year’s in such a long time,” she’d told Peyton when he first brought up the idea. “It’s always so crowded and people get so drunk and we’ll wait forever for a table. Plus it never works out. It just never does.” When he’d asked what was supposed to work out, Sarah had sighed. “Everyone thinks some days are supposed to be great big events that are lifechanging and fabulous and memorable and like something out of the movies, all filled with endings where John Cusack stands there playing music in the rain or something. But they never are. They just get built up and built up and then you go out and it’s an ordinary night.” She paused to drink her coffee and in response to Peyton’s question, had said “There’s nothing wrong with an ordinary night unless you thought the ordinary night was going to be extraordinary. If that’s the case, then the ordinary night is a huge letdown.” He’d gotten himself some more coffee, then, and offered some suggestions to her on how to not build it up and maybe if they just expected it to be an ordinary night it would be a pretty good ordinary night, and besides, Robert – his business partner’s name was Robert, she was always forgetting that – was expecting him to go; they were celebrating a good year. She’d agreed to go. “You’re not bringing anyone, are you?” she’d asked Dylan on the phone when she invited him. “I don’t know. Why?” His voice on the phone had that distant quality she’d learned to recognize. “Are you watching TV?” 129

He paused before answering. “I was…” he said, and paused a little more, probably just to annoy her. “Writing. I’m trying to write.” She’d tried not to sigh. She wished he’d not spend all that time writing. She’d read one of his scripts for a sitcom and had tried to tell him it was very good but she didn’t think he’d believed her, so she’d thrown in I don’t really like sitcoms but that, she knew, had made it clear that she had not liked it. “I’m sorry to interrupt you.” “No problem.” “So are you bringing someone?” “Am I supposed to?” “Are you seeing anyone?” “Not really.” What does that mean? She wondered, as she wondered a lot about things Dylan said. She found herself picturing his forehead. When they were around each other, she had to try not to look at his forehead, at his temple, the way that men (she supposed) had to try to not look at a woman’s breasts. Instead, she awkwardly looked anywhere but at his forehead. On the phone, though, she could picture it, and when she pictured it, she pictured it in x-ray vision, all bone and skull and gray and milky white. Whenever Dylan didn’t make sense to her she saw his temples in x-ray vision. She realized he was talking. “What?” she asked. “Am I supposed to bring someone?” he asked her. “Are you watching TV?” “You know I’m not.” 130

“So am I supposed to bring something? What does Peyton want me to do? Is this like a business thing or social or what? Will I be some kind of third wheel or sore thumb or something?” “Sore thumb?” “Will I stick out like a sore thumb if I don’t have a date?” “No. I don’t know. Just let me know if you’re bringing a date. They’ve got reservations and we need to make sure they know how many are coming.” “Are you going to drive Mom?” “I suppose I can.” “I suppose I can.” “It’d be nice if you did. It’s kind of a date for Peyton and me.” “Hey,” said Dylan suddenly. “Maybe he’ll propose to you.” “Funny,” she told him. She had stopped picturing Dylan’s temple and instead looked at her bare ring fingers. “Seriously. You’ve been dating for almost a year now, haven’t you? So it’s about time. That’s probably what this whole thing is about.” “You’re not going to start being all pushy about that, are you? You know how you get.” Then she felt bad. She didn’t like to tell Dylan how he got because she attributed all the ways he got to her own faults. “I don’t get any kind of way,” he said. He’d gone distant again. “I’m gonna go. I’ve got three more pages to do today.” “How many do you do per day?” she asked. “Three.” 131

They all had arrived at the restaurant more or less at the same time, and Dylan had indeed driven Mom. Introductions all around and Dylan forgot that he’d met Robert before; Robert handled it well, telling Dylan: “Come work for us - -nobody remembers me there, either.” They’d all laughed and Peyton had teased Robert about only remembering people who bring in money to the company. The seating was at a large almost-square table, three on each of the longer sides and two on each of the shorter sides. Peyton and Sarah made up a shorter side. Dylan and Mom had made up a shorter side, too, at first, until they realized that Charlotte was sitting across from her husband and some switching had been done. “I pre-ordered for everyone,” said Robert. “I checked with Peyton on whether there were any special dietary needs or anything. They’ve got a great menu here and I thought we’d go with the chef’s specialty.” Peyton had shrugged at Sarah, who in the glow of the candelight had brushed it off. Robert had done well; the meal was very good. Mom had not eaten much, she’d noticed, but she thought maybe it was late for Mom, too. Dylan had obviously thought that, as well, because around 10:30 he’d gotten up and said that they would have to excuse him because he was going to drive her home. She had not been sitting near Dylan and had not noticed much of what he’d done that night. “Happy New Year,” she’d told him as he walked by her and helped Mom up. He’d nodded. 132

“Happy New Year, everybody,” he’d said, and as he started off, he turned back. “Nice to meet you, what’s-yer-name,” he’d winked at Robert, and they’d all chuckled, the joke getting a little more of a reaction than it should have, boosted by the general good spirits. Sarah had turned away before seeing Mom wince a little as they walked out. She had not seen Dylan put his arm around her protectively. If she had, she would probably have not spent the night smiling so much. The meal was over, really. The restaurant was quieting down, in fact. It was nearly 11:30. This was not the type of restaurant that people who wanted to party came to; it was a restaurant for quiet celebrations where people have one or two more drinks than usual, where their eyes are bright with happiness and candles, where the dishes are cleared from the table just the very moment you realize you are done, where the coffee after dinner has a spicy, foreign aroma and warms your stomach, the kind of restaurant where the waiter brings you a dessert when you did not order one. “Madam’s dessert,” the waiter said. “We didn’t order…” began Robert, but Peyton spoke up and told Sarah to go ahead and try it. “I’m really full,” she said. Teresa leaned over. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take some,” she joked. Peyton said again that she ought to give it a whirl and she smiled at him and humored him and said okay. The waiter lifted the cover of the dish and sitting on a velvet pillow was the ring she would spend the night smiling at. A violin somewhere was playing the 133

song she didn’t even know that she’d spend the night humming. And Peyton was proposing to her in words that she would absorb and feel but not remember so much as she would make them a part of her. “Yes,” she said. She said it so quietly that even the waiter did not hear her. She bit her lip and nodded and everyone clapped. She hoped, then, on the 1st, as she strode into the hospital, that someone would ask her about her ring.

134

July 31: “Where’d you get the scar?” asked Ivy. Bumpy was stretched out on a deck chair alongside the pool at Caesar’s Palace, and she was sitting up, next to him, wearing sunglasses. Their chairs touched; they were lying almost side by side. Ivy had put down the book she was reading. When Bumpy had asked her, the day before, what book she was reading, she’d shrugged and said “It doesn’t matter. Books are all pretty much the same to me. They’re time-killers.” He’d wondered about that. If she didn’t care for reading, why did she read? People always seemed to think, in Bumpy’s experience, that they need to read books, like there was some merit in reading over other forms of expression. He didn’t get it. He supposed that he should like that attitude, should trumpet it, because he was a writer, or had been a writer, still worked as a writer and thought every now and then about getting back to the novel, his novel, cleverly, he felt, titled “My New,” because, as he hoped people would understand, another meaning of “novel” was “new,” so when he was working on “My New,” he was working on his novel. He worried that the joke would be lost. Plus, he hadn’t worked on the novel, on “My New” for at least 6 months. “If you don’t like it, why are you reading it?” he asked Ivy, now, lying on his stomach and feeling the plastic of the chair press against his body, feeling it slowly warm up until it was his body’s exact temperature, while Ivy considered.

135

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” she said, picking up the book and considering it momentarily. “It’s that, I guess, I don’t like it any more or less than I like other books.” Bumpy propped himself up on his left arm. “So, do you like reading, or don’t you?” “I like reading.” “Because you don’t sound like you do.” “I’m always reading something.” “The question is, why? You say that all books are like all other books, time-killers, so why bother? Why not just, say, watch TV or listen to music or read a newspaper or go for a walk?” “What makes any of those better time-killers than reading? Why should I choose them over reading?” When she had flipped around his own assumption, when she had taken Bumpy’s assumption that everyone thought reading was better than other activities, and flipped it around to ask him why he thought other activities were more worthwhile than reading, Bumpy would later reflect, was the exact point where he had become engaged to her. It did not matter that it would not be for two more months that he actually asked her to marry him, using the ring he’d taken back from Teresa, but not telling her that. It was sitting at the pool outside Caesar’s Palace, sun on his back, sweating, listening to Ivy explain why reading was every bit as good a time-killer as watching TV, and more distracting, in fact, than simply staring at the television, if you were looking for a way to get your 136

mind off something, then reading was it, television wouldn’t do that, it wouldn’t distract you, wouldn’t engage you like reading would, so that even if most books were sort of blah and not very good, it was still a better distracter than television or music or newspaper. She finished: “Besides, books don’t get newsprint on your fingers.” Bumpy let that settle. Then he asked: “What is it you want to get your mind off of?” She looked again at him. “Where’d you get the scar?” “Most people don’t notice it.” “So you’re changing the subject again.” “No.” Ivy did not want to push him too far. She could sense that Bumpy was mobile. That Bumpy was the human example for Newton’s laws that said for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and that a body in motion stays in motion until acted on by an outside force. She did not want to push Bumpy because Bumpy was in motion towards her and she liked that, and she did not want to change his motion to something else, did not want there to be an equal and opposite reaction that had him up and moving away from Las Vegas to New York or Sao Paulo or somewhere, wherever he would decide to go. She wondered if he had enough money to move to Sao Paulo. Bumpy closed his eyes again and talked. “Sarah dropped me,” he said, simply.

137

“Sarah? Your sister? She dropped you?” Ivy did not look at him or reach out to him or touch him. She did not move even her head, just kept looking in the distance, across the pool, barely breathing, lest she disturb whatever it was that had made Bumpy talk. In her line of sight, two young women in strings, literally just strings walked and sat down and laid back, ultrablonde hair falling down to their shoulders, ultratan bodies gleaming in the sun. She looked at her own body, in the t-shirt she’d borrowed from Bumpy this morning. Last night had been the first time they slept together. “I was a baby. Sarah’s a couple years older than me and she loved me. That’s what everyone says when they tell me this story, when they tell me any story involving my childhood.” He paused and opened one eye, rolled onto his back. “They used to tell me this story every now and then when I was a kid, and they always said that. Sarah loved you.” “I don’t know about you but whenever people emphasize things that don’t need to be emphasized or wouldn’t seem to need to be emphasized, it puts me on edge. I had this friend once.” Ivy had already gathered that everyone Bumpy knew in any slight manner, anyone who Bumpy had a drink with or talked with or once saw at a party, was a “friend.” “This friend who was from Turkey, and he was trying to convince me to go there and visit. We could stay with his family, he said, and I could experience the culture and see another country. I’ve never left the country, and it was enticing. Who goes to Turkey, after all? That’s got to be, what, 300th on the list of 138

countries people think of visiting. This guy almost had me ready to go. Family this, sites that, culture the other thing, all this. And then he says, at the end, Don’t worry, I promise you’ll be safe. “So I said, What do you mean, I’ll be safe? Why wouldn’t I be safe? And he says You will be safe. I promise. I asked him, Is there some reason I would feel like I wouldn’t be safe? He looked offended and assured me again that there was nothing to worry about, I would be safe. “That worried me more than if he’d just said it was dangerous. Because when people say things like let’s go visit Kansas, they don’t add don’t worry, you’ll be totally safe. When people say I went to England, they never add and I was safe. So if you’re throwing out there, before anyone says it, you’ll be safe, I have to wonder just how unsafe it is. “That’s why, when people tell me about my childhood, I get edgy because anyone who talks to me about my growing up always emphasizes how much Sarah loved me, how crazy she was about me. Why do they feel they have to add that? They never say oh, and your mother really loved you, or Your dad was crazy about you. But any story about my childhood includes the phrase you know, Sarah loved you so much. “Plus, it’s always past tense.” He paused and rolled over again, facing now off to his left, away from where their chairs touched. Ivy wished she felt like she could reach out and put her hand on his shoulder. She wanted to do that, felt like the moment called for it, but had a fear that if she did, if she patted his shoulder, he’d never finish this 139

story. She had a fear, too, that if she put her hand on his shoulder he might get up, go upstairs, check out of his room, and leave forever. There was splashing in the pool. There was the sound of wet feet on hot concrete; even painted white, the concrete got quite hot. The air was thin and heated, easy to move through but with the feeling that it was baking the skin without even being noticed. Bumpy’s arm made a slurping sound as he rolled over again and laid on his back. He threw his arm over his face. He never wore sunglasses, she’d realized. She’d never seen him wear them. He squinted and put his hands up but he did not wear sunglasses or a hat. “So she dropped me, that’s one thing I know. That and that everyone wants me to know how much Sarah loved me. I believe them about both of those things. I was about 1 year old, maybe 18 months, depending on who talks about it, and most people in our family don’t talk about it much.” He paused. “There’s not that many people left in our family to talk about it.” There were several directions that Ivy wanted to take that conversational gambit. She wanted to ask where is your mother? Where is your father? Were they divorced? Did you have a big family? Why’d you move out here? But she just chewed on her thumbnail to keep from talking or making a sound. Ivy regarded Bumpy as some sort of wild animal who she’d stumbled on in the woods. While she reached slowly for her camera, she wanted to make sure that it neither charged nor left.

140

“She really wanted to hold me or pick me up. I guess hold me wouldn’t be the right word. But that’s what everyone says. I must have been about the age, I guess, where I was learning to walk but was still mostly held by people. “My family was all in the backyard at our house, on the patio. The house we grew up in, the house where my mom still lives, had a walk-out lower level” Ivy had no idea what that was but did not interrupt “and patio that led into a small, steep backyard. It doesn’t look that steep to me now, I’m older, but it’s still pretty steep. Our house, I think, was sort of squeezed into the neighborhood and Mom never had very much money ever, so we were lucky to have any house and any yard, even a backyard that was a steep slope away from the house. “We weren’t the first to live there; the previous owners had made the most of it by building a rock garden, these colorful rocks and boulders and flowers and plants that grew in there, with a winding little staircase down to the edge of the fence where our yard butted up against the neighbors.” Bumpy rolled onto his side and stopped squinting as he looked at her. “You know,” he said. “There’s a home movie of this.” He paused. “What?” she asked, finally, unable to keep silent anymore. “Yep. They were filming it. People think that nowadays we film everything and put it on the internet, that our lives are overdocumented now, but it’s not all that much more than in the past. We have probably a hundred hours of old films, including one of this moment.

141

“I’ve watched it. I’ve had to piece together a little of what people were saying and it’s sort of herky-jerky the way those old films are. But between the film, my own personal Zapruder,” Ivy did not know what he meant by that, either. “and the stories I was occasionally told growing up, it’s almost now like I lived through it.” He laughed, then, and she smiled at him, not getting the joke. He looked at her, saw that she was confused. “It’s okay. I mean, I did live through it. But you haven’t really lived through anything if you don’t remember it, have you?” “I don’t know,” Ivy said. “Just because you don’t remember something doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.” “I know that. I know it still existed even if I don’t remember it. But that doesn’t mean I lived through it. It’s the difference between reading about a war in a history book and having been to war, isn’t it? If you read about a war, if you see a movie about it, if you talk to vets about it, you get an idea what it was like, but it doesn’t change you, doesn’t affect you, doesn’t alter your being the way it would if you were in the jungles of Vietnam or saw the oil fields burning in Iraq as you chased down Republican Guards. So my being dropped is somewhere between those. I experienced it, it changed me, but I didn’t live through it, except that I’ve heard about it and watched that film so much that it’s like I did.” He motioned to a waitress and asked for a beer. Then he changed it to a diet Coke. “Sarah doesn’t know about the movie, I think.” 142

“Were you hurt?” With Bumpy laughing, Ivy felt bolder and able to become part of this tale, a little, help guide it maybe. Like holding her hand out to the animal she’d stumbled on, palm up, encouraging it to see her as a friend, not a threat. “Yeah. A little, or a lot, depending. The way the people told me it is this, and it’s pretty simple: Sarah loved you, they say. She really loved you, and your mom was holding you. We were having a cookout, and Sarah was playing while your mom held you. She loved you so much, see, they’ve said it three times now, that she wanted to hold you. So your mom handed you to her and said to be careful and she was holding you but she stumbled. You fell out and landed on the rock garden. We had to take you to the hospital to check you out. Sarah wanted to ride in the ambulance with you, she loved you so much. “That, or slight variations of that, were always exactly how it was told to me.” Ivy wondered if he knew he was rubbing his scar as he talked. The waitress brought the soda and he sipped it, swirled the ice cubes with the straw. He tipped the waitress five dollars. Some kids ran by wearing snorkel masks and Ivy wondered what they saw underwater in a swimming pool. “But the movie is different. In the movie, I’m walking a little, and Mom and some older people I don’t know are sitting around. There’s a grill in the background, just a little one, with something on it. Sarah’s playing in a dress. The adults are all pretty dressed up for a barbecue. I spend most of my time, in the movie, it’s only about 15 minutes long, standing by my mom, hanging on her leg,

143

and walking a step or two. Once or twice I walk a step or two away and then come back. “Near the very end, about thirty seconds before it stops, I’m a step or two away from Mom and Sarah comes and picks me up. It looks like she’s going to take me to Mom; she’s facing that way, and she picks me up under the arms and hoists me up, but I rock a little, and she steps back. She staggers a little and then tries to regain her balance. In the process, she turns around and tries to shift me to get a grip. “This is all taking place almost out of the frame, way off to the right. It’s not the focus of the film; whoever’s filming it didn’t pay much attention to the kids. I’m never in the center of the frame. Usually you see me off to one edge or at the bottom of the screen. Mom is usually the focal point. Sometimes one of the other people. With no sound, the filmer didn’t focus on who’s talking at any point, so there’s shots of people listening, or smiling, or talking without saying anything. “But you can see, as Sarah tries to shift my grip, I also shift, and she drops me, and I fall. “That’s where the movie ends. Obviously, the filmer shut off the camera and helped me.” Ivy wondered if the person taking the film was Bumpy’s dad. Wouldn’t he know that? Should she ask him? He hadn’t mentioned his father in the story. And he’d said his mom never had much money. “Another thing, though. It was a harder fall than they ever let on.” 144

“Why do you say that?” asked Ivy. “Because as much as they try to downplay it, I remember going to the doctor a lot when I was a kid. I went all the time. I remember that. I remember even the doctor telling me how much Sarah loved me. “And,” he continued, “I know it’s more serious than people let on because when I see Mom or Sarah, they look at the scar whenever they’re worried about me.” Ivy just stared at him. “They think I have brain damage,” Bumpy said. Ivy sat stock still. What do you say to that? “Go ahead, say what you’re thinking,” Bumpy said. Ivy decided to ask it. “Do you?” she asked. “Heck if I know. If my brain is damaged, then it was damaged before I knew what a normal brain was. So all I know is what I’m like.” Then he sat up and looked at her, with a slightly worried expression. “We’re still going to dinner tonight, right?” “Of course,” Ivy said, and now she laughed. He looked a question at her, and she said, boldly, later to be surprised at how reckless this statement might have been: “Bumpy, I’m not sure even you know what you are like.” But he’d laughed.

145

February 28, 2008: “How’d he get that scar?” asked Teresa. The four of them were having dinner at Teresa’s house: she and Peyton, and Dylan and Teresa, a Valentine’s Day celebration that, surprisingly, had been Dylan’s idea. Sarah did not know what had compelled him to invite them to get together as (as he put it) a “couple of couples,” but she also then had been surprised to see Dylan and Teresa interacting. Counting back, she knew it was only two weeks since their first date, but they got along easily together and appeared comfortable, happy, even. “Dylan?” Sarah asked. She knew who Teresa was talking about, of course. She wondered, for a moment, if Teresa knew how the scar had gotten there, if she was baiting Sarah somehow, or trying to see if what Sarah told her matched up with what Dylan had told her. “Hmm? Oh, sorry. Yes, Dylan.” Teresa had already learned that Sarah would not call Bumpy by his nickname. When she’d asked why, she’d been told ask Sarah. So she did. “Why don’t you call him Bumpy?” she asked now, ignoring that she was effectively peppering Sarah with questions as the two of them tidied up the kitchen. The men were sitting in Teresa’s living room, bottles of beer in their hands, talking quietly. “Because I don’t like how he got the nickname,” Sarah said, deciding to match Teresa directness for directness. Teresa picked up a cup of coffee, cradling it in her hands, and looked at Sarah expectantly. “I dropped him,” Sarah 146

said, and looked Teresa right in the eye. “I tried to pick him up and carry him and I dropped him. We had a rock garden in our back yard and he fell down into the rocks. He fell pretty far, and had to be rushed to the hospital to check him out. “When we got there, I was in the ER with him and our mother and the doctor, and the doctor after making sure everything was okay, patted him and said You can just call him Bumpy and our mother laughed and when she told that story to relatives, they did it, and he’s been Bumpy ever since then. “But I don’t like it.” Teresa did not ask because it reminds you of what you did? And also, Sarah noticed, Teresa did not say but you were only a little kid, it was an accident. She just sipped her coffee and then went back to cleaning up and finally, after a few seconds, said. “He was okay, though?” “They were never sure.” Teresa turned around. “What do you mean?” “For a long time our mother had to take him back to the doctor to check him out. They were never sure whether he’d gotten any additional injuries. They didn’t think he had a concussion, but there was something they said about the xray or whatever scans they could do back then… it was probably just x-rays… that they couldn’t tell for sure if there was something more wrong.” Now, Sarah picked up a cup of coffee, too. “I was never sure, either,” she added. 147

Teresa said, after a longer pause, “… about the injury?” “About why we were taking him to the doctor.” Teresa nodded. “You thought there was a different explanation?” “I thought…” Sarah stopped. She looked at Teresa’s hand, where Teresa was putting on a ring, having finished with some dishes. “I thought…” she began again. The ring was a diamond ring. Teresa turned back towards her. “I thought that our mother was taking him to the doctor for something that was wrong anyway, and had only told me that it was because of the fall, was blaming anything that might be wrong with Dylan on the fall instead of blaming it on herself.” “Oh, God.” Sarah thought how terrible she must sound. She thought how she had never said that to anyone, ever before. She thought how she could try to tell Teresa that the fall had not been her fault, that she had accidentally dropped him because Dylan was squirming so much, how he hadn’t really hit his head, she’d been watching. How it didn’t make sense that the doctor could be so laughing and joking and friendly and Dylan came home without even a bandage, and then a couple months later, maybe it wasn’t that long, she wasn’t sure, he was back at the doctor’s for tests and her mother said it was from the fall, just to make sure that nothing’s really wrong with him, but it never made sense. It never made sense. 148

Sarah could not, deep down inside, believe that anything had really happened to Dylan in the fall. But she could not, either, deep down inside, believe that her mother would place the blame, or potential blame, for something going wrong with Dylan, on her, on a child, when it was not in any way her fault. One of those was true, Sarah believed. She said none of that to Teresa. Instead, she said “It was always nothing.” She inhaled at the sight of the diamond ring. You wouldn’t… “There was never anything wrong with him.” Teresa laughed. “Well, that’s good to know.” She leaned in. Don’t say it. “We’re engaged.” She showed Sarah the ring. She held it up. “He surprised me with it.” “Of course he did.” It would have to have been quite a surprise, since you only met him six weeks ago, she thought. He really surprised you with it. “Congratulations,” she said, but a hint of question broke into the phrase, and as a result the word was flat for the first few syllables and then turned upward and doubting at the end. Weren’t you at dinner with another man at the last holiday we all celebrated. “That’s why he wanted you both to come over tonight, Sarah,” said Teresa. Although there was no actual doubt to be heard in her voice, Sarah thought she could detect it just the same and was pleased with herself for having intruded, she

149

thought, a little reality into Teresa’s world. You can’t be engaged after six weeks, Sarah tried to have her face say. That’s ridiculous. Sarah did not know that her face said, instead: I am engaged and you and Dylan should not be taking that away from me. “He wanted to tell you first. He really respects you, Sarah. He told me he was going to ask you if he thought it was a good idea.” “How did he propose?” Sarah imagined some spectacle, some room filled with roses and candles, or perhaps a blimp overhead as they drove along. Something that Bumpy would put into one of those short stories or novels or scripts he was always working on, something he would have learned from the movies he loved to go see as a teenager. “It was very sweet,” Teresa said. “We were at dinner, and he was nervous all night. I didn’t know what was going on. It was just a few days ago, and he’d been fidgeting, plus he wore a tie, which was weird for him, you know what I mean? When they came around for dessert, Bumpy… Dylan… all of a sudden said, oh, wait. “Then he paused and looked at me and reached into his pocket and said I was going to have the waiter bring this on a tray, and ask if you wanted dessert, and when you said no, I’d say you should at least try it, and he’d open the tray and the ring would be there. But I was so nervous I forgot, so I’ll just ask you: Will you marry me, because I love you. I really love you. “The way he said that last part: I really love you. It just melted me.”

150

Sarah just looked from her to the ring and back. Over and over in her mind kept coming the phrase it’s been less than six weeks. Later, driving home with Peyton, he’d remark that Bumpy and Teresa had only been going out since Peyton and Sarah had gotten engaged; Peyton would comment on how Bumpy’s whole relationship was thus the same length as their engagement alone. Peyton would shake his head and just tell her that he was some kind of guy. “What does that mean,” Sarah would ask. “Do you think he’s right to do this?” Peyton would have to ask what she meant by right. “Right. Correct. Not dumb.” Sarah wanted to say he doesn’t have the right to be engaged so soon after me, but did not know how to phrase that to not sound as selfish as she knew it was. They’ve only been going out since we got engaged. Their whole relationship is shorter than the serious part of our relationship, she wanted to tell him, but, then, he’d already said that, and she then had to ask herself what she meant by “the serious part” of our relationship. They almost got into a car accident that night. Driving home, discussing this, Peyton had looked at her when she’d said Right. Correct. Not dumb and continued looking at her as she’d gone on to try to explain how Dylan did these things without thinking, his whole life was just some big experiment, he just gets up and does things without any plan whatsoever, and suddenly Peyton had looked forward again and his eyes widened, and Sarah realized that she was looking at him and neither was looking at the road. 151

The car swung wildly to the right as Peyton steered it back out of the left lane where it had drifted. She heard gravel scudder under them, heard the tires sliding on snow, felt the car just swing and sway over more to the right, and then they came to a stop as Peyton got it under control. The radio played quietly in the background as they sat there and looked around. Peyton had asked if she was okay. “I’m good. I’m fine. Are you okay?” she asked. He’d said he was fine. He rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassedly, and looked over at her to determine, she thought, whether she was mad or upset or understood. She tried to determine what she was but had not yet entirely let go of Dylan and Teresa’s engagement, and Peyton put the car into gear and hit the gas and the tires spun. The car then slid to its right further and further down into the ditch until it came to a rest on an almost forty-five degree angle. She looked to her right and saw snow up to the window of the car. She would not be able to get out that side. She looked over at Peyton and saw him just looking right at her, seriously. “What?” she asked. He told her then, that their love would transcend all other relationships around them. He actually said it just like that. He told her, as she stared and wondered where this was coming from, that no matter how many other people in the world said they were in love, no matter how many other people in the world got engaged, no matter how many other people in the world got married, all of those people would pale in comparison to their own love, which was so rich and

152

so deep and so pure that the other people in the world could only look at it with envy and hope to copy it. Sarah had wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She knew what he was saying was sappy. From him, from Peyton, it sounded almost silly. But his eyes never wavered when he said it, his mouth never quivered, he did not stumble on the words, and he held her hand when he said it, and because of that, she felt what he was saying more than she heard it. They began to kiss, and they kissed some more, and then, car still running and the radio playing softly, they had stripped off most of their clothes and climbed into the backseat and made love, and she never, during the entire time, worried that they would get caught. She didn’t tell that part to Teresa, the next day, when she went to have lunch, something she’d agreed to before the revelation of the engagement. She didn’t mention, even, that they’d had to call a tow truck. She tried not to keep looking at the engagement ring and tried not to compare it to hers (hers was larger, but she didn’t want to make that comparison consciously). “Is Dylan’s accident why you became a nurse?” Teresa asked, and Sarah was startled. She put some cream into her coffee and stirred it and sipped it. “Yes,” she said. She did not elaborate, but she was not surprised when Teresa continued to pursue it. She was just worming her way into everything, Sarah thought. “Did you feel like you were responsible?”

153

You’re not so perceptive as you think, maybe, Sarah thought, and said “No.” Teresa nodded, and Sarah suspected that Teresa was thinking she was lying and that she, Sarah, did feel responsible for Dylan’s accident, and anything that might be wrong with him. Sarah wanted to tell Teresa there’s nothing wrong with him, but she couldn’t be sure. Instead, she said “It’s because I want to make sure people know.” “People know?” “I never knew. I still don’t know why all those trips, what really happened. That’s not fair. People should know the truth, but doctors, families, patients, don’t always tell the full story.” She paused. “They give out bits and pieces of it, their own versions, edited versions of it or spun versions of it. I’ll see a patient’s chart and see that their vital signs are not very good and that they had a rough night, but if I ask the patient, she’ll say Oh, I’m doing great, I’ll be up and out of here in a day or two, and I’m pretty sure she won’t. They tell that to the doctors, too, who pass it on. Family members tell other family members fictional versions. Mom’s doing okay, or something. I didn’t like that.” “So what do you do?” Sarah looked off into the distance. “I do the same thing.” Teresa smiled at her, and Sarah smiled back, and they both chuckled. Sarah went on “I thought I’d become a nurse and tell people the truth, tell them you’re little boy is hurt because you didn’t supervise him” Sarah paused and considered what she’d just said. 154

Teresa, too, considered the example Sarah had chosen. The silence lasted just a little too long. Sarah filled it by saying “But it’s not that easy. There’s all rules of confidentiality, sure, but it’s more than that. There’s reasons why people give certain versions, or no versions. So I do that, too. I nod along with patients, I tell parents kids will be kids, I don’t call sons when their mothers are sick, I do what everyone else does: I stick to the storyline that works for that moment and then feel terrible about it.” Teresa was tearing a sugar packet wrapper into little bits. “What are the other Dylan storylines?” she asked. Sarah looked down. “There aren’t any.” “Seems to me that there might be quite a few,” Teresa said. “You don’t know him that well.” “I know that.” “Do you?” Sarah tried not to put an edge on it, tried not to make that question so sharp. She was not successful. She stood up. “I’d better go,” she said. “I’ve got to take my mother to the doctor.” Teresa did not try to stop her.

155

March 1: Bumpy did not know whether he thought it was “nice to meet” Jodi or not. He supposed it was okay to bring a date to a bachelor party like this, in the end, because it wasn’t really a traditional bachelor party. So he’d bought a drink for Jodi and the four of them had then sat drinking for a while before deciding to move on to a different bar. They walked outside into the cold night air. March 1 is still a winter day in Wisconsin. The calendar, when it turns to March, hints that spring is there or soon to come, but that’s an illusion in the upper Midwest, where ‘spring’ doesn’t really arrive until the end of April, at the earliest, and snowstorms can hit on Mother’s Day in May. Bumpy sucked in his breath in shock at the cold. “Where are we going?” he asked. Peyton said it was up to them. Jay offered to drive to a club where they could dance, and Peyton had asked what fun that would be. Bumpy, too, didn’t want to dance. “There’s a pool hall not far,” he said. “Pool hall?” Asked Jay. “Are we in the 1930s now?” “I’m not sure what the 1930s have to do with pool or pool halls, but this place is pretty all right,” Bumpy responded. “It’s not some dank little smoky pool hall. It’s modern and has live bands sometimes and lots of tables.” Peyton liked the idea of some pool, and Jay and Jodi agreed, so they drove there and got a table. Bumpy was racking up the balls for the first game, and they agreed to play teams. A coin toss left it at Peyton and Jay against him and Jodi.

156

“I haven’t played pool much before,” she told Bumpy, as he chalked up his cue. “It’s easy,” he told her back. He bent down. He placed the cue ball onto the table, a little to left of center. He squinted and stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. He struck the cue ball and watched as the balls scattered across the table. He got progressively more drunk as the game went on, and as the second and third game went on. He would later remember it this way: Peyton trying a trick shot, as he called it, leaning way over the table, as Bumpy and Jay did shots and Jodi was off somewhere. Bumpy dropping his pool cue under the table and knocking his head as he tried to get it. The police would ask about the lump on his head and whether they had all been fighting. Jay leaning over the teach Jodi a shot, and Bumpy telling him that was the worst, lamest move anyone could do, to which Peyton had brought up the “yawn and stretch move.” The four of them leaving after the manager had come over a second time and asked them to keep it down and Jay had loudly insisted that they would not keep it down. They walked out into the parking lot. Bumpy would remember that the cold weather did not in any sense sober any of them up. They had two cars there, he realized later. They took only one to leave. Peyton would drive, but first they all stood around the car, Peyton and Bumpy on the drivers’ side, Jay and Jodi on the passenger’s side. 157

“Where should we go next?” Peyton asked. “There’s Delta,” suggested Jodi. “What’s Delta?” Jay asked that. “You’ve never been there. I’m surprised,” Jodi said. “It’s a hot spot.” “What is it?” Bumpy asked. Peyton said he’d heard of it, Peyton had told them that it was a bar down on the lake, near where the river cut into the lake, and the bar had an outdoor patio you could drink on and watch the boats and the lake. “Isn’t it going to be cold?” asked Bumpy. Peyton opened the car door. “We don’t have to sit outside,” said Jay. Peyton sat down in the driver’s seat and clicked the locks. “I suppose,” said Bumpy. Peyton started the car and Bumpy got into the back seat. “Okay,” said Jay. He opened his door, the passenger’s front seat door, and sat down. Bumpy was surprised to see Jodi sit down next to him. He was even more surprised when they began backing out of the parking lot and Jay said Don’t get up to anything back there, you two. He wondered, months later, if there was a look between Jay and Peyton at that point, or if he’d invented the look because he felt guilty. He wondered, months later, what he should feel guilty about. Peyton backed the car out all the way and they began driving to Delta. Bumpy sat back and watched the lights spin around him. He felt Jodi’s hand 158

touch his. He let her touch his hand. It was his right hand. Her hand slowly enveloped his, in the dark, in the backseat. He did not look at her. He wondered if she was looking at him. He was too drunk, at that point, to have registered whether or not there was a look between Peyton and Jay; it was only in retrospect that he would think there was a look and only in retrospect that he would then imagine that he had imagined the look. It was only a few minutes’ drive to Delta. Wherever you drive in Madison, Bumpy was fond of saying it’s 15 minutes away. If it’s close, traffic will slow you down and it takes 15 minutes. If it’s far, you’ll take the highway and it’ll take 15 minutes. On the radio, Peyton had found some indie music station that was playing a song in French. Bumpy had taken a semester of French in high school. He recognized the song as saying something about pain. That was all. It was seductive, though. The backseat was warmed up by the heater. The car’s rhythm was soothing. Jodi’s hand was on his leg. He finally turned towards her as the car navigated around the lake and the campus. She was looking at him. He leaned over a little. A part of his mind saw Teresa, sitting next to him in his apartment, naked, and looking at the envelope with him. 159

A part of his mind saw Teresa wearing her engagement ring and showing it proudly to Sarah in the kitchen. Most of his mind saw Jodi, who had a small face and puffy lips and a trendy haircut and who did not seem as drunk as she would have to be to lean in and kiss Bumpy in the backseat while her date was in the front seat. He leaned in even more and kissed her back. They kept kissing even after he heard the car door open. He was kissing her and kissing her and his hands were running up and down her sides and he was only vaguely aware of anything else. He knew the car was still running. He could feel the heat and the throb of the engine. He did not know it then because he was not thinking about it. He would just tell the police, not much later, that the car had been still running and he had been in the car. He knew the doors had opened and closed. Two of them. Peyton and Jay had gotten out and when they did so, Bumpy had pulled at Jodi’s shirt and pulled it out of the waistband and put his hand up underneath it. She had stopped rubbing his shoulders and moved down to his legs, caressing them and getting ever closer to his groin, almost in a shy awkward way. He did not know how long they had been doing that when he heard a yell. He heard a splash. He kept kissing Jodi. For a while longer, he kept kissing Jodi. But he wouldn’t tell the police that. Jodi said she’d never heard the splash. He didn’t know if she was lying or not. Jodi told the police that she had not heard a splash; he’d heard her talking and she’d tell the police, not long from now, that I was 160

kissing him and he stopped and said something about a splash. I never heard a splash. He just stopped and got out and then he passed out. That was what Bumpy did, almost. He heard the splash but he continued kissing Jodi while his mind worked it through. Splash. Cold. Drunk. Outdoors. Delta. Those words whirled around in his mind like images themselves while his tongue pressed against Jodi’s tongue and his hands pressed against her breasts and she fumbled with his belt buckle, getting closer and closer and suddenly he stopped and said, or tried to say Oh, shit but it was slurred. He mumbled something about a splash. He didn’t know how long it had been since the splash. He pulled his hand out from under her shirt and sat back and looked around. The car windows were fogged up and he couldn’t see through them. He looked at the radio to see what time it was. The radio said 1022 and he thought it has to be later than 10:22 and only realized after a moment’s thought that the radio said it was set to 102.2 FM. The music still played. He couldn’t place the song. Something Peyton would have liked. He realized then, that he’d been thinking about the splash and looked to his left. The window was still fogged. “What’s wrong?” Jodi asked him. 161

“A splash,” was all he could say, and he tried to get out of the car. His head was spinning. He felt nauseated. He smacked into the door, realized it was locked, and hit the button. He tried again, but it was still locked. Or he’d just relocked it. He finally got the door open, clicking the button repeatedly, and the cold air whooshed in. He stumbled out of the car. Jodi behind him asked where he was going. He looked around. It was nearly pitch-black. The bar, Delta, nearby, did not offer much illumination. They were in a parking lot, he could see that. He heard water. He did not see anyone. He leaned over and threw up, then, and tried to stand up. The world was spinning around him, and he passed out.

162

March 2: Sarah leaned her head back against the wall, the hard cinderblocks worn smooth over the years. She wondered how many other people, how many other sisters, or even wives or mothers or brothers or fathers or friends, had sat in this chair, just to the left of the plexiglass-window with the slot for pushing papers and money back and forth to the clerk, alongside the door that people buzzed out of but not into. There were three doors, actually, one leading back to the room where the clerk stood, and the other directly opposite her. She did not know which one to look at while waiting for one or the other to open and Dylan to come out of them. The third door she did not look at; that was the door from outside into the government building, and she knew that Dylan was inside, not outside. He would be coming from inside. The thought of all those other people sitting in this chair depressed her and made her feel a little queasy; she felt almost as though she could feel them sitting in the chair, too, feel their residual heat the way sometimes, if you sat down in a seat just after someone got up, their body heat remained behind. She did not want to feel any portion of the other people who had been here. She did not want to be one of the people who sit here waiting for the doors to open. There was nothing to look at from her perspective. The doors were blank. The walls were blank. If she stood up she could see inside the plexiglass window but there was nothing to see there, either, since the clerk that had shoved paperwork through and then watched her sign and then taken it back had left, 163

and since there were cubicle dividers standing behind, cubicle dividers that were gray and had nothing pinned on them. She had nothing to catch her eye in this world of brown and tan and gray and brick and door. She took out her cellphone again and looked to see if she had missed calls. She saw that she had not and punched a few buttons. She listened to a ring and then heard Peyton’s voicemail pick up and she pressed the end button and clicked her phone closed. She had already left two messages that day and did not think she needed to leave a third. She checked her watch. She had to be at work in a half-hour. She brushed her skirt smooth. She was not looking at the outside door and could not have seen outside from her perspective. She heard cars drive by occasionally. She heard an engine rumbling and growling, near the door. One of the doors opened. It was the door across from her. A uniformed police officer stepped through, stood with his back against the door while Dylan moved through. Sarah found herself fixated, oddly, on the officer’s gun. She had not been this close to a gun before and found it disturbing. She stared at the gun, in its holster, and realized that the officer must be left-handed because his gun was on his left side. Dylan walked through. “Thanks,” he said to the officer, who handed him a manila envelope. The officer shrugged, with only one shoulder, and stepped back. Dylan stood clear of the door as it slowly swung shut with a whish and a soft click. 164

He looked at the manila envelope and hefted it. He shook it. Sarah heard keys and papers. He looked down at the ground. He looked off to his left, where the door was now closed. Sarah stood up. Her heels clicked on the tile floor as she crossed to him. “Hi,” Dylan said. She didn’t answer but stood in front of him. “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said, finally, and looked at his face. “Sarah,” he said. “Shut up,” she said. “Sarah, listen,” Dylan tried, but he stopped talking. “You’re an embarrassment, you know that?” Dylan didn’t say anything. He rustled the envelope again. Sarah went on: “All my life, I’ve been trying to help you and taking care of you, and Mom’s been trying to help you and take care of you, all our lives we’ve been looking out for you and making sure you’re okay while you just go do all these stupid things and start businesses and drop out of school and then go back to school and drop out again, you hang out with these losers, you drink and smoke and you fritter around with this god-damn writing and these crazy ideas and stupid pronouncements and I just try, we just try, to help you out and make sure that you’re doing okay and hope to God that you’ll get your stupid act together…” The car engine revved outside.

165

Sarah was poking Dylan as she talked, her finger staying pressed against his chest but jabbing in further a little, each time, so that it dimpled in his chest now and was starting to hurt her. A part of her wanted to pull the finger back, but she was mad and left it there, and a part of her also wondered by Dylan just took this, why he stood there and let her rant on and on. He generally did that, she realized. He let her yell and him and lecture him and talk at him and poke him in the chest and never moved aside or stormed off. She was still talking, on automatic pilot: “… and now you’ve been arrested, so there’s that as a real resume-builder; you can add making bail to your list of skills.” Dylan looked past her and said “Oh, shit,” and she stopped and looked over her shoulder, to see Teresa standing in the entryway. Dylan gently put Sarah’s hand down and stepped around her. He looked at Teresa. “Hi,” he said to her, in much the same tone he’d said it to Sarah. She didn’t say anything. She looked at Sarah and then at Dylan again. “What’s she doing here?” asked Sarah. Dylan looked down at Sarah, opened his mouth, and then closed it. Teresa, without saying anything, twisted the ring off her finger, held it up, and then turned around and threw it as far as she could across the parking lot. “What are you…” Dylan started, and Sarah gasped. Teresa turned back around and punched Dylan smack in the eye. “Don’t ever talk to me again,” she said. “Pig.” 166

She stormed out and Sarah looked from her to Dylan to the parking lot again, the snow drifts and puddles and cars that now held an engagement ring. Dylan just stood there, looking at the door. The policeman that Sarah had talked to earlier, when she’d signed the papers to get Dylan out, came up to the window again and looked around. “Everything all right?” he asked. There was a camera in the corner of the lobby area, and he was smiling a little. Sarah was certain he’d seen everything. They heard Teresa’s car pulling out of the parking lot. Sarah nodded. “What’d she throw?” asked the cop, nodding his head towards the door. “A ring,” Dylan said. He spoke in a monotone. “What did you do?” asked Sarah. Dylan sat down on the chair she’d been sitting on earlier. He kept his hand pressed up to his eye, and Sarah could already see bruising. “Haven’t you answered your phone at all today?” “Not since you called.” “Jesus, Sarah. Why do you have that…” He stopped. He took a deep breath. “Peyton’s dead,” he said. Sarah looked at him. She took out her phone and looked at it. There were five calls today. All of them saying “Number blocked.” The first one had come when she was asleep. She hadn’t heard it. 167

The second one, not much later, was when she’d picked up the phone to hear Dylan calling to say he was under arrest for disorderly conduct, that he was at the station and she needed to come and sign some papers to get him out. She hadn’t let him talk. What had he said, she wondered, carefully skirting her mind around the phone call this morning, ignoring the MISSED CALL that had been on her phone when she first got up, and focusing on Dylan’s phone call: I don’t have long. It’s been… there’s been. Look, I got arrested and everything’s messed up. She had interrupted him to berate him over being arrested and for what had he been arrested and this would kill Mom and he’d interrupted, politely, as he always did, and said Disorderly conduct. Just come on down. There’s stuff to sign. I don’t know. I’m at the police station. They’ll be calling you. What? They called you. Call them. She’d gotten dressed and skipped breakfast and come down there, and each of the next three calls that had come up BLOCKED NUMBER she had ignored because she’d assumed it was Dylan. Dylan, who was sitting there staring into space with one eye, hand over the other. It hadn’t been Dylan. It had been the police. “Oh my God,” she said, softly. The police officer in the window stood watching the two of them.

168

November 23: Bumpy stuck his head into the door. “Knock, knock,” he said. Nobody answered. He frowned and opened the door a little wider. He looked at Mom, sleeping on the bed. She seemed to him, very pale. He came into the room and sat down on the only chair in the room, a chair with solid blue cushions that put him in mind of the turquoise jewelry that was for sale everywhere in Las Vegas, everywhere in Nevada. He was exhausted. He felt like he could sleep as deeply as Mom. He’d been traveling for hours, and was tired and hung over and had not slept hardly at all. His iPod ear phones dangled from his shirt front. He kept the cords tucked into his t-shirt so they would not tangle on anything as he traveled. As he sat down in the turquoise Navajo chair and sat back, feeling it give not at all under him, he kept his eyes on Mom. He set the duffle bag down gently next to him. Had he known she was asleep, he would not have spoken when he came in. He looked at the tubes and bags and instruments and the overhead light that shone down onto the bed and directly onto her eyes. He felt like he should get up and turn that off, that it would be bothering her in her sleep, but he was tired and it did not seem to be keeping her awake or hampering Mom’s sleep at all. He looked at his cell phone. 8:15 a.m. 169

That meant it was, what, 7:15 a.m. his time? Or six? He wasn’t sure. Six, it must mean. His phone, he’d learned, automatically adjusted to the time zones, which was more than he did. He was hungry. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure what he should do. He’d had an idea but didn’t now feel like it was appropriate to do that. He’d thought that when he came here, he would talk with Mom and play Mom some of the songs that she loved the best, songs that over the years, when he’d had them on tape and then CD and then on his iPod, Mom had heard them and occasionally said something to the effect of what was that song, she kind of liked that. Each time she’d done that, Bumpy had made a note of it, and kept first a handwritten list, then a list on his computer, of all the songs she’d ever said that about. His laptop was in his duffle bag, with that list, sitting alongside a CD burned of all the songs Mom had ever said she’d kind of liked. He wondered if it would be okay to play that CD. There was a little desktop radio/CD player next to Mom that he could just put the CD into. He sat in the chair and felt his stomach churn a little, hungry and not wanting anything at the same time, as it processed last night’s food and drink and tried to stay awake. It was important, he decided, that Mom know that he’d listened. That was why he’d kept the list, made note of that. He wanted Mom to know that he’d paid attention to something.

170

He reached down and unzipped the duffle bag, doing it excruciatingly slowly so that the zipper would not make any sound, so slowly that it was taking forever, it seemed, and he felt a little dizzy, hanging over the edge of the chair, and his ribs hurt where the arm of the chair pushed into them. Then he realized that trying to be extra-quiet made no sense because he was going to play the CD, wasn’t he? Was he? Or was he just going to leave it here? He unzipped the bag the rest of the way and pulled the CD out, holding it in his hand. The door opened a little. “Hello,” a voice said. Bumpy looked up. A nurse, or assistant, or someone, was coming into the room. She spoke in a normal tone. “Hello,” said Bumpy, quietly. “I didn’t realize she had visitors,” said the nurse. “I was just checking on her.” “Don’t mind me,” Bumpy said, quietly, again. The nurse came into the room, and Bumpy peered to check her nametag as she walked around the end of the bed to the other side, looking at the bags and tubes and Mom and the bed. Tammy, the tag said, just above Nursing Assistant. Tammy paused after looking at the bags, and looked down at Mom. “She looks a little better,” she said, to Bumpy, he guessed. “Does she?” Bumpy continued talking in a low voice. 171

“A little more color,” Tammy said. She saw the CD Bumpy held. “What’s that?” “A CD I made,” he said. He flipped it back and forth in his hand, hearing the little click it made against his skin. He looked at the clock. “For her?” asked Tammy. “Yeah,” said Bumpy. The silence seemed oppressive in between words. So he said again: “Yeah.” They both looked at his Mom, laying in the bed, asleep. The light still shone down, a bright strip across the bed and the bridge of Mom’s nose and the nightstand. “You could play it,” Tammy said. “I don’t want to wake her. I’ve been being quiet,” he added. In anyone, it would have come across as a defensive statement, a pleading argument that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, but in Bumpy’s case, it was a declaration of how he had been existing. He wasn’t trying to convince Tammy, or himself. He was just saying it. Had he said I’ve been sitting in this chair or the blanket is blue, either of those statements would have had the exact same emotional content. “You won’t wake her,” said Tammy. “I’ve been in and out of here a couple of times this morning, and she hasn’t woken up. The painkillers they give her keep her pretty co…” she cut herself off before she could say comatose even though that was probably the word. “Sleepy,” Tammy finished.

172

“Comatose?” Bumpy said. He saw Tammy clench her jaw a little and wondered why she felt bad about nearly saying it. “Yes,” she said, somewhat shortly. She finished up whatever fussing she had to do and came and stood by him. “Do you want me to put it in?” she asked. “Sure,” Bumpy said, and slipped the CD out of the case and handed it to her. Tammy stayed about a half-hour, listening to the music with them. Only once during the time they sat listening did Bumpy’s mom move. She turned her head a little, tilting it slightly to the left. The color drained from her face a little more when she did that. Bumpy watched her do it, watched her chest move a little while she did it. Other than that, he would not have guessed that she was even alive. Tammy excused herself, finally, and said she had other work to do. She explained that she was working a double shift and was almost halfway through it. “A shortage of help these days,” she shrugged. “Good overtime money for me,” and she left. After she went, Bumpy marveled a little that she had never asked who he was. Did she already know him? Or did she guess? He assumed that Sarah must be here frequently; he wondered if she still worked here. Even if she didn’t work in this hospital, and why would she quit? Sarah would never quit and would never be fired, even if she didn’t work here, she must be here all the time. The music continued playing.

173

With each song, Bumpy could clearly recall when he had first been told by Mom that she liked that song. This one, this obscure Buddy Holly song: they’d been on a Fourth of July picnic, and Bumpy had driven up to park next to Sarah’s car, with the song playing on a tape in his cassette deck as Sarah had been helping Mom out of the car. Mom had said it was a nice song. Two songs earlier, one he wouldn’t have thought she’d have liked, a song with a lot of bass and a driving beat. She had been at Sarah’s for dinner and he’d stopped by and hung around with her. While dinner cooked he’d turned the TV to MTV and the video had been on. She’d tapped her foot to the beat and when he noticed, she’d said it was a catchy song. The next song that came on was one Bumpy didn’t care for at all. It was a slow love song, with a singer and a piano and a nice melody but not really his type of music at all. He’d put it on here because when Sarah and Peyton had gotten engaged, Mom had told them at their wedding they should play this song. It was a lovely song, she’d said, a beautiful song that was perfect for weddings. Sarah had said she’d never heard of it. Peyton had said he had and it was nice. Mom told them all that if the song had existed when she was younger, she would have had it played at her wedding. Bumpy had tracked down the song, bought the CD and listened to it because he wanted to hear the song. He didn’t like it himself. But he listened to the song a lot, because Mom had mentioned it in connection with her wedding, which marked maybe the third time in his entire life that she had mentioned 174

something about his father. He listened to the song to try to get clues about him and about what had happened to him and why Mom never ever talked about him, ever. When he would listen to the song, he would wonder, too, why he never asked about his father. Ever. He listened to it now, and tried to picture his mother and father dancing at their wedding. Tried to picture them moving into a house together. Eating dinner and arguing about whether Kennedy would make a good president or not. He couldn’t picture a father, though. He couldn’t picture anyone in that role at all. He could see Mom eating dinner, Mom dancing in a white dress, but could not actually picture anyone there with her doing those things. Mom probably could have argued with herself about whether Kennedy would be a good president, he thought. Sarah, after listening to the song, had told Peyton that they should consider it for their wedding song. “It’s not like we already have a song for ourselves,” she’d pointed out. “And it is a very nice song.” Bumpy sat in the hospital room and thought of all the things that people had in their lives that he did not: Jobs that they went to every day at 8 a.m. and stayed at until 5 p.m. or even later. Cars and credit cards. Land line phones. “Songs” that were theirs as a couple. He wondered whether he was really that out-of-step with society that he did not have those things.

175

Bumpy thought about things like that a lot. He thought about them now. He wondered whether his life was normal, whether what he went through was what everyone went through but just didn’t talk about it. He knew, deep down inside, that much of what he did was not normal, but he didn’t know how much of what he did, what he experienced, what he was, how much of that was normal. It crossed his mind all the time. His foot hurt a lot, lately, ached and got sore, more sore than he thought it should be. He was getting older, he told himself, but then he wondered: does everyone else’s foot ache like that? Or is it just me? Is there something wrong with me, and I should see a doctor about it, or is it just a normal part of life and if I go to a doctor he’ll tell me that and I’ll feel dumb? How, in the end, were you supposed to know what normal was? He listened to the music and watched Mom and wondered that. Whenever he didn’t get a joke, whenever his friends said he had the life because he slept in until 10 a.m. and then would walk around the college campus listening to music before going back to his apartment to write a little, whenever Ivy looked at him like she was going to tell him he was a strange guy, whenever Teresa had told him he was strange guy, he’d wondered how do you know? Maybe everyone is like me and we’re all just not telling each other how normal we all are? Tammy looked back in as the Peyton-and-Sarah song finished up. “That’s a lovely song,” she said. “Do you mind if I play it again?” “Go right ahead,” Bumpy said, and tried to sit up a little straighter in the chair as she did so. 176

“Can I get you anything? I can show you where the cafeteria is,” Sarah said as the song started again. “I suppose. Maybe in a bit,” Bumpy said. “I could use some coffee.” “I’ll get you some,” Tammy offered. “Then you can sit a while.” But she didn’t get up right away; she sat on the other chair, on the edge, and listened to the song, humming along with it. Bumpy’s cell phone buzzed in his duffel bag. He pulled it out. It was Ivy. He put it back in the bag. He wasn’t sure what to say to her yet. He sat in the chair and wondered how long he had to wait to leave the hospital. He wasn’t sure what to say to anyone yet.

177

April 27: Sarah eyed the camera uncertainly and tried to ignore it. She wanted to edge to her left but could not do that in the small group of people that stood outside the police department. She stood there, just to the left of the door that led to where she had picked up Bumpy. She stood there, crunched into the crowd and wondering why she had come here. Support, she supposed. But for her? Or to give it. There were only about 30 people there, which to her seemed at once too low a number and too high a number. Thirty people in the entire city cared whether people were being murdered? Thirty? But when she thought about she, she realized that if it was not for Peyton being one of the victims, she would not be here. She likely would never have paid any attention to the fliers they put around town, would not have read the article in the newspaper that had appeared there three days ago that the group, which did not have a name, planned a rally at the police department to urge them to take the investigation seriously, would not have watched it on the news tonight when the cameraman and reporter took their footage back to the station and aired it at 10 p.m., probably just after the first look at the weather. So she sat near the back of the crowd, pressed in by people on all sides of her, and wondered whether 30 was too many, too few, or just right. Near the front, Jane Tyler stood up on the seat of a folding chair that she had taken from the trunk of her car. Sarah had watched her do it. Sarah had been sitting in her car. She was early because she had gotten off of work and not 178

gone home to change first; she was here in her scrubs, scrubs that couldn’t properly be called scrubs because they were colorful and had little flowers on them. Instead of going home, Sarah had come straight here and had sat in her car, with the vent blowing cool but not cold air onto her forehead while she sat there waiting to see how many people would come. She had looked around the parking lot, watched a few people come in and go out. It was surprising to her, how few people came into or out of the police station. She would have thought, prior to this, that the police were busier, between crime and parking tickets and complaints about things that really were not the police’s business, but where else did you take complaints other than to the police, who would listen politely and then try to give you advice on where you should actually take the complaint, Sarah had always imagined. But nobody was really coming into or out of the police station that day. She saw other cars pull up, other people getting out of their cars. She saw the News 4 van pull up, a reporter and cameraman getting out, walking around the parking lot, looking at light and angles and testing sound. She saw Jane Tyler pull up and talk to a few people, then go back to her car and open the trunk, where there were two folding chairs and a tangled mess of what looked to be an extension cord, the outdoor kind. Jane Tyler took only one folding chair out. Sarah wondered whether the other folding chair had been there for … she couldn’t remember Jane’s husband’s name.

179

She did not, she would later tell Tammy, understand why people felt that they could not change things around after someone died unexpectedly. She would tell Tammy, later – nearly a month later – about watching Jane Tyler take the chair out of the car, and about her wondering if Tammy left the other folding chair in there because it had been David’s - -she would remember Jane’s husband’s name by then – and would tell Tammy that it did not make sense to leave things undisturbed when someone has died. Some, having that conversation, would try to soften the impact by inserting a question somewhere into it; some people, when being dismissive of how others grieve, would want to appear less dismissive and would at some point ask the listener or listeners Do you think I sound cold? Does that make me weird, that I don’t want to keep a bunch of things around and never change the furniture or take down a picture? To which the listeners would be expected to reply: No, not at all or words to that effect. Sarah, in the conversation she would have with Tammy, would not ask that question and would not get that answer; it would not occur to her to care whether Tammy thought she was cold about it. Sarah would have that conversation while her mother slept in the hospital room down the hall, while she and Tammy were taking a coffee break during Sarah’s shift. Today, she merely watched and wondered if one of the chairs was Jane’s husband’s. She wondered why there was an extension cord in the trunk. She sat and let the vent blow cool but not cold air on her forehead and watched the 180

preparations for the rally. She wondered when, and if, she would get out of the car, and when she did, she tried to stick near the back of the rally and tried to not draw attention, greeted people quietly, and then stood in the cluster of people trying to ignore the camera and trying to ignore the woman reporter looking at her. The camera did not ignore her, and the reporter did not, either. As Jane talked, Sarah only half listened and watched as the reporter and the camera man pointed at her a couple of times. “The police don’t want to investigate because they don’t want the people of the city to panic, is what I think,” Jane said. “But if that’s what they’re thinking, that’s just crazy! That doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t they panic more, you think, if they knew that there was a serial killer on the loose the that the police weren’t doing anything about it? I think they should panic.” Jane went on like that for a while. Sarah listened. She thought back to the meeting, not that long before, when Jane had made similar comments. She didn’t know how much of Jane’s reasoning she agreed with. She didn’t, herself, care if the police investigated all the other deaths; she wanted them to investigate Peyton’s death. She knew that was terrible, knew that she was an awful person, at least she felt like an awful person when she thought that, but it was how she felt: If they would investigate Peyton’s death properly, then I could relax a little and I don’t care if they investigate anyone else’s death. That was what she thought, late at night, when she pondered the situation. That was what she felt as she half-listened to Jane today. 181

She also thought, at times, that she wasn’t so different from anyone else here. They all wore shirts and buttons with pictures of their loved ones on them – a son or husband or brother – and some had the details of that man’s death on it, the date or the time or something like that. But the common feature was they all wore pictures of their loved ones – not someone else’s loved ones. Nobody had a shirt or button or poster with the names of everyone who had drowned, or even the names of more than one person who had drowned. Sarah noted that and told herself that deep down inside, they were all the same as her: They all wanted, like her, to have the police investigate the drowning death of the person they had loved because they were sure that their loved one’s death, the drowning of their husband or brother or son was not accidental, was not random. It was what Sarah felt most strongly when she thought about that night, and what she was thinking about as Jane’s speech ended and the crowd all backed up a little. She had never consciously voiced the thought, never put words to it, never framed it as a specific thought in her mind, but it was almost imprinted on her DNA: Peyton’s death could not have been an accident. The reporter tapped her on the shoulder. “Miss?” she said. “Sasha Acker, News 17 at 5. Can I talk to you a minute?” “Well,” Sarah said, and looked around. “It’ll just take a minute.” She should, she thought, defer to Jane. But it was Peyton’s death she wanted investigated. 182

“Okay.” The reporter took her by the elbow and led her off to the side a little. The rest of the group watched. “I’m going to have him turn on the camera, and I’ll make an introductory comment and then ask a few questions, okay?” she said but it wasn’t really a question, because as soon as she said it, the reporter, Sasha, turned to the camera man and wound her hand. The camera was hoisted up to his shoulder quickly, and she put the microphone up and spoke into it. Just before she began talking, she turned to Sarah and whispered “What’s your name?” “Sarah Strathan,” Sarah answered, automatically. “Sasha Acker here. Today at the downtown police department, a citizen’s group demanded action on what they say is a threat the police are not investigating and taking seriously: a possible serial killer in our city preying on young men and drowning them. I took the time to speak with Sarah Strathan.” She turned to Sarah. “Why do you feel that more investigation is warranted?” she asked. The question was so out of the blue – Sarah had expected that she would be introduced, or asked who had died, or something leading into the topic. She swallowed and looked at the reporter, who flicked her eyes towards the camera. Sarah turned her head towards the camera then and the microphone was held in front of her mouth, a square box with “17/5” on it. “Because of the shoe print,” she said. The reporter looked a little surprised. 183

“Explain that,” she said. Sarah gained more certainty as she talked. “There was an unexplained shoe print at the scene where my … fiancé” she stumbled because she had not said the word since learning what had happened to Peyton “… where he. Where they found him. “There were other people there, at the time, and the police interviewed all of them and took shoe prints from them, and there was one shoe print, in some snow, that didn’t match any of the others, any of the shoes anyone was wearing.” She didn’t say that one of the people at the scene had been her own brother. Drunk. Her own brother, drunk at the scene and passed out and cheating on his own fiancée and not helping Peyton at all. “They said that it was likely an old shoe print.” She looked at the reporter, then down, then back at the camera. “They only took prints at all because they weren’t sure, at first, what had happened. They thought there was a fight between… Peyton… and the people he was with. So they treated it like a murder, but then when they found out that everyone there was friends, that there had been no fight, they dropped it all.” Sasha took the microphone back. “How long ago was this?” she asked. “Back in March. He had gone out to celebrate, a bachelor party. He was with a couple of friends and he was drowned. Nobody saw anything because they had been drinking. The police said that Peyton was drinking, too, but there was hardly any alcohol in his system when they did the test, and he was a good swimmer. 184

“They said that he probably fell in because he’d been drinking and that he couldn’t swim because he was drunk.” Sarah looked at the reporter. “But he hadn’t drunk that much. And that footprint.” She stopped because the microphone moved away again, back to the reporter. “Have you had any contact with the police since that day?” asked Sasha. “No, none,” said Sarah, and she felt her eyes well up with tears. She was embarrassed and put her head down. The reporter took this for overwhelming sadness and turned towards the camera, taking Sarah by the elbow. “Family members overcome with grief, not getting any information or assistance from the police department in dealing with the lingering questions surrounding the deaths of their loved ones. We’ll continue to follow this story and keep you informed, Jack.” Sarah wondered for a moment who “Jack” was and then realized that “Jack” was the news anchor. Sasha was talking to the anchor. She brushed at the tears and looked up. “Thank you,” said Sasha, unplugging the microphone from something on her belt and looking at the cameraman. “Why don’t you get a couple shots of the crowd, and we’ll wrap it all up back at the station.” She looked at Sarah again. “Would you like me to call you and let you know when it’s going to run?” Sarah shook her head. “Okay, then,” Sasha turned and walked off. Why didn’t she leave a card? Sarah wondered. Is that the extent of it?

185

Jane was making her way over to her through the others, who had stood and watched. “You handled that well,” Jane said. Is she jealous? Thought Sarah. The reporter had watched Jane, but not talked to her. Sarah would have been jealous, if their places were reversed. She would have been upset that she, not Jane, was supposed to be the center of attention. But she did not want to be the center of this attention. She looked at Jane. “Thanks, I guess.” “Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?” asked Jane. “A few of us are going.” “No, thanks,” Sarah said. “Are you sure? It’s helpful, I think for us to all spend some time together. We can share our experiences, the way others can’t.” I don’t want to share your experience and I don’t want you sharing mine! Sarah wanted to tell her. I don’t care about your experience; I care about Peyton! She still thought of Peyton in the present tense. He had died, but her feelings for him were still present and she would not let herself refer to him, even in her mind, in the past tense. She answered “Maybe some other time.” Many people would have lied, would have said they had to go to work or run an errand; there were no shortages of things that Sarah could have said to excuse herself from going for coffee. She said none of them; she was not going to

186

do anything else and did not even consider telling them anything about that. She did not have to make excuses for not going for coffee. Jane had clearly been expecting some sort of excuse. She hesitated, gave Sarah a chance to add because I’m going grocery shopping or I worked late last night and I’m exhausted or one of the other social lies that grease the wheels of interaction, but Sarah simply turned away and began walking towards her car, her eyes feeling too-dry from the brief bout of crying. Jane stood there a moment longer and said “Okay, some other time,” only to see Sarah wave over her shoulder and open her car door.

187

November 10: The layover lasted so long. Bumpy was groggy and wondered if he should just give in and stretch out on the chairs, the way he saw people do sometime. It was not that he felt awkward about lying on the chairs or about sleeping in public. Neither of those bothered him. It was that he did not want to fall asleep and lose track of the time (and miss his flight) or let thieves get his carry-on, with its electronic equipment and his change of clothes. Bumpy worried about thieves constantly; it was completely at odds with the demeanor he presented to the world, but he secretly suspected everyone around him of being a thief, or at least being moments away from being a thief. He carried his wallet in his front pants pocket, to avoid pickpockets. He locked his car doors even inside the garage. Even now, when he sat on the chair and looked blearily at the TV showing the version of CNN that is only available in airports, as he wondered why they would make a version of CNN that is only available in airports, and then as he wondered whether that was true, that this CNN was only available in airports, and then as he wondered what it was about people in airports that made the people at CNN think they would want a different sort of news, or different news, even as his mind tracked through all of that and he then began to wonder whether there was some news they didn’t tell travelers to keep them from worrying – not telling them about coup attempts or the like so that people would continue to their destinations and not panic—even as he thought all of that, he kept his foot hooked through the strap of his carry-on duffle bag in case his mind drifted and one of the people near him, the 188

businessman in the suit or the tired-looking soccer-mom-ish woman, decided to reach out, grab the bag, and run. He tried to prevent that by visibly keeping his leg hooked through the strap. He wondered why he had to go through both Atlanta and Chicago to get to Madison. He wondered, as he had, periodically throughout the night, why Atlanta was on the way to Chicago at all, for airlines. He wondered if Ivy had read the note he’d left. He sat in the airport and looked at the tv and wondered if Ivy would try to call him before she read the note, or if she would read the note and then call him. He wondered if Ivy would try to call him at all. He took out his cell phone and looked at it. As he did that, it began to vibrate in his hands. He watched it do that. He recognized the number before the caller ID program did. He waited, though, until the picture came up. He remembered programming in Teresa’s number and picture. It was the night they’d met, when he’d gotten her number, gotten it while her date was off at the bathroom. “Do you want my phone number?” Teresa had asked him. He had surprised himself. “I do. Yeah. I really do,” he had answered. She had given it to him. “Don’t forget it,” she told him. “I won’t.” Her date was coming back. Robert, that guy Peyton had worked with or something. 189

“Really,” she said. “Don’t forget it.” He had nothing to write it down with. Robert was about two steps away; he’d stopped to lean over to Peyton and congratulate him again. Peyton had smiled and given him the thumbs up. Bumpy repeated the number quickly. Teresa nodded. Bumpy stood up. “Hope you didn’t lock the door behind you,” he said to Robert as they edged past each other. Robert had laughed and assured him that he hadn’t. Bumpy had gone to the bathroom, silently repeating the numbers over and over to himself, lips moving. Once out of sight, he’d taken out his phone and punched in the numbers, saving it in his phone. On the way back, he’d paused. Teresa was looking at Sarah, who had just said something that had Teresa looking attentive but not especially interested or amused. Robert was talking to Peyton. Bumpy had taken out his phone again, thumbed the camera button, and snapped a picture that had Teresa’s face in profile, the front lit up by the candles on the table and the back, with her dark hair, fading into the dim of the restaurant. The picture, slightly blurry, was what showed on his phone now: Teresa’s face illuminated by candlelight and hooded in shadows and hair. He clicked “ignore” on the phone and felt it stop vibrating. He hooked his foot a little more through the bag and waited.

190

A minute later, the phone buzzed once. He looked down and the screen said he had a voicemail. He held the phone up and dialed into his voice mail. It was Teresa’s voice. “Where are you?” she asked. That was all she said. There was a silence, as though she’d waited for him to answer even on voice mail. He listened to it twice, then a third time, focusing in on the silence each time. What was in the background? Could he hear anything? Was he meant to hear the silence? Then he erased the message. On his iPod, he clicked the songs through until he got to a playlist that Ivy had set up for him. “You need some bouncy music,” she’d told him one day. She’d been looking at his iPod while he dealt with a couple of tourists that had wandered into his shop. “All your music is too dark and depressing and moody. It’s so unlike you,” she ventured, and when he’d looked at her she’d bit her lip and then turned that into a tongue sticking out slightly. He’d smiled at her. “Maybe I am dark and depressed and moody,” he said. “I doubt it. How could you write a sitcom if you were?” “Some of the greatest artists ever were dark and moody. Depression may equal creativity.” “Now you’re just being argumentative,” she’d said. She’d been clicking and moving her fingers and he’d let her set up the playlist, a playlist which she’d called “Bouncy,” and he listened to it now, hoping it would give him a perk up 191

and keep him going. He stood up as he put his earphones in, and picked up the bag, looked at the clock and decided he had time to go get some coffee, and maybe some aspirin, somewhere. Or orange juice, he thought to himself, as the music came on and he walked, slowly, legs unkinking. Orange juice sounds good.

192

October 1: Dan looked at the house he parked in front of and thought well, that’s fitting. The house looked … he thought a moment, and came up with austere, and that seemed fitting as he looked at it. One story tall, a ranch house. A couple of steps up to the front door from a driveway that was uncracked and neatly lined with brick. A small front yard with a tree, almost cleared of leaves, in the center of the yard. The tree blocked a great deal of the front of the house. There was little ornamentation beyond the tree. A few shrubs lined the front of the house, too. There was the front door and a small window to the right of the door, and a larger window to the right. He looked down at the address he’d written down again, despite being certain this was the right address. It was more for something to do, something to kill a few seconds with, before getting out of the car, which he did now. He had parked in the street, thinking that based on what he’d seen of Sarah, she would not appreciate him pulling into the driveway. Or maybe he didn’t feel right about pulling into the driveway. Pulling up into someone’s driveway uninvited felt awkward to him, awkward because it was both too familiar and at the same time not familiar at all. It was in the same category as all those actions that people take or require which make you feel as though you are being brought into a group that you’re not sure you want to join: taking one’s shoes off upon entering a stranger’s house was another such action; it felt too intimate, to wear socks and pad around a stranger’s house – while not being intimate at all. 193

So he did not pull into the driveway and instead parked in the road and then carefully walked up the driveway and sidewalk and up to the door. He wondered if he should have called, first, and decided that he did not want to do so. He rang the bell and looked down. To his right, on the stoop, sat a little package, little but too big, still, for the mailbox. It was about 11 a.m. and he wondered if it had been there since the day before, or if her mail came that early. Intellectually, he knew that mail was delivered in the mornings, but everyplace he had ever lived or worked got the mail in the afternoon and so he did not ever expect mail delivered in the morning. Sarah came to the door, wearing a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her hair was pulled back and she had a dishglove on one hand, she was pulling at it. He thought that seemed out of character for her; he did not know her at all but felt that he did, and felt that Sarah would have ordinarily taken the gloves off and dried her hands before coming to the door. She had only the one glove, now off, so he wondered, too, if she had taken one off and then hurried to the door, or if she was only wearing one. She had dark circles under her eyes. “Yes?” she squinted at him, slightly. “Hello, Sarah,” she said. “You’ve found something,” she said. “What?” He was off balance, suddenly. What did she mean? “Is that why you’re here? You’ve found something?” 194

Dan pieced it together, then, based on why he knew her – she thought he was with the police. He tested the waters. “You don’t recognize me?” “No,” and she sounded irritated now. “Are you from the mayor’s office?” “No. No. I’m not.” He paused. He’d had something ready to say but now it didn’t feel right. “Do you want to come in?” Her voice made it an actual question, not an invitation. People usually said that in such a way as to imply an answer, one way or the other. Sarah did not; she genuinely was wondering if he wanted to come in or not. “I’m Dan.” She looked at him. “You ran into my fence. Last February 14. Valentine’s Day.” She began to recognize him. “What is it? Do I owe you some money or something? I gave you my insurance information.” Dan took a deep breath. “No. That’s all right. That’s not why I’m here.” She looked past him, then, glancing up and down the street and around. She was suspicious, he realized, so he went on quickly. “Ever since I met you I couldn’t get you out of my mind and I couldn’t stop thinking about you. But you called someone that night at my house and I knew that you had someone else in your life. And then I saw you on the news and I realized what had happened and even though I couldn’t stop thinking about you I 195

couldn’t call you, either, not with what had happened, so I just sat and wondered about you and I’ve been sitting and wondering about you for a long time, and I never actually called your insurance company or anything because I didn’t want it to cost you money. I just tore down that fence. I spent most of the summer doing it, and sometimes I thought I was doing it in case you came back, ever, I could joke with you and say that I did it so you wouldn’t have any trouble getting into the driveway or something. But I never called. And then yesterday was the last day of September, which for me seems like the end of one season, summer, and the beginning of another, fall, and I thought to myself how winter and summer had gone by and now it was fall and I still had never called you so I got out the envelope and looked up your address and phone number and I wanted to call, but I thought it was better to come in person. I don’t know, now, why I thought that, but I did. So I don’t know if enough time has gone by but I hope it has. I don’t even know if you want to know me. But I can’t stop thinking about you. So I came here.” While he’d been speaking, he had not taken a breath, and he did that now. He took a deep breath and pulled the envelope out of his pocket, the envelope on which she’d written her insurance information and name and address and phone number so long ago, and showed it to her. “Also,” he said. “You have a package.”

196

September 30: Ivy thought Bumpy looked pale and tired. He looked a little sweaty, too. It was not his most fabulous day, she thought, lookswise. But Bumpy had insisted on going out. He had insisted, on the phone, that he pick her up at 6 p.m. and said they were going out to a nice dinner and that he had some good news and that he wanted to share it with her. Ivy hugged him now, opening the door after he’d knocked on it. She stepped out onto the deck of the apartment building. “A limousine?” she asked, and looked at him, questioningly. “Yep. Yes, indeed.” “Indeed?” Ivy allowed a little questioning of him. She held back most of it, poking fun at the word and not at Bumpy. “What’s the occasion?” “We are going to celebrate,” Bumpy said, and as he said that, Ivy looked at him a little more closely. He was dressed up. He actually had a nice shirt on, and a sport coat, and slacks. She saw him mostly in shorts and polo shirts, or button up shirts of the type that would be considered bowling shirts but they were not wildly patterned or outrageous. They were muted bowling shirts. But today he was dressed up. She noticed that because as he said they were going to “celebrate,” he’d touched his breast pocket, or at least the outside of the coat underneath which part the breast pocket lay inside. She couldn’t discern whether anything was there, but she did immediately think of the word tell. Living in Las Vegas, Ivy had known many a gambler and had absorbed most of the gambling language. 197

She knew what a tell was and was fascinated by the concept, fascinated by the idea that people did something or the other when they lied. She’d wondered whether people had tells when they talked about other things, and she’d always suspected they did. So she immediately thought, that day, when Bumpy appeared a little pale and a little sweaty and dressed up and touching his breast pocket when he said “celebrate,” she immediately thought that he had something in his pocket and she immediately thought that the something that was in his pocket was a ring and then she immediately told herself not to be ridiculous because she had only been dating Bumpy for… … how long had she been dating him for? She didn’t know. She thought about it for a second, as Bumpy took her hand and led her towards the stairwell, telling her the limo was rented for the night, and she decided that it had been only a brief time that she’d been dating Bumpy – but she also realized that on some level she felt like she’d always known Bumpy. She could not remember not knowing Bumpy, not on an emotional level. It was a ridiculous thing to say, intellectually speaking; she could remember her entire life, she could remember everything that she had been able to remember before meeting Bumpy; all the bits and pieces that made up her recollections were still there. But somehow, it seemed like those memories, those pre-Bumpy memories, were part of a movie she’d seen, or memories of someone else’s life, while her own life had been absorbed by Bumpy.

198

It was a ridiculous thing, too, to feel that way, because she had only known him for… how long? And she had not done anything major or spectacular with him, she had not traveled with him, had not met his family, had not gone through any holidays with him, had not done anything but work at his shop and go to dinner and move with him from hotel to hotel and now go to dinner with him again, so how could he have that impact on her life? How could she want him to ask her to marry him? But she did. She wanted him to and as they got into the limo, he handed her in first, and she felt a little silly, dressed down in just a skirt and her light top, she did not feel like she should be getting into a limousine; the people who get into limousines are the people who are in movies or are going to prom, or people who have a particularly-styled kind of wedding that demands that the bride and groom leave from a church as people throw rice and demands that the bride and groom leave from the church in a limousine. She wondered, when she saw that in movies, whether the bride and groom would then go to the reception, and whether their leaving from the reception would then be anticlimactic if they had already had this spectacular scene where they left from the old church down the stone steps lined with well-wishers and bridesmaids and a flower girl and the brother of the bride in a tuxedo and he already had the tie off, and people were throwing rice and blowing bubbles and the bride threw the flowers over her shoulder and then looked back and waved… did they do it all over again, after the reception? Could they skip the reception?

199

She was hardly listening to Bumpy as the limo driver started out. She had to say to him “Excuse me?” “Champagne?” he asked. He leaned forward, and then back a little, and said “Whoa,” and she wondered if he’d been drinking again. He touched his chest again, the breast pocket. “Sure. I’d love some,” she said. Her mind pulled away from wondering about weddings to watching his hands shake as he poured the champagne. Nerves? She tried not to stare at the breast pocket. She took her champagne glass and held it up. Bumpy noticed, after a second, and held his own up. “To us,” he said, and they clinked glasses and each sipped a little. Bumpy barely touched his to his lips, she noticed. He was not drunk, she thought; she’d seen him drunk and when he was drunk, he didn’t stop drinking. “To us,” she said, and her eyes, she couldn’t help it, flicked down to the breast pocket. “And to the Dewey Decimal System,” Bumpy said. Ivy stared at him, blankly, for a moment. “The Dewey Decimal System,” Bumpy said, in a cajoling kind of voice, the type of voice used when you’re trying to remind someone of something but can’t think of a clue to give without giving it away, and you don’t want to give it away. Bumpy used the singsong kind of voice used in that situation, while repeating the only clue he could think of. “You told me about that.” “I did?” 200

“On our second date. You told me that memories are just held together by the Dewey Decimal System we create for retrieving them. You said that we remember everything we’ve ever seen or heard or felt, and that to remember them, we only have to create a Dewey Decimal System for remembering them.” He leaned forward. “I liked that. I liked the idea that in my memories, I know things even if I don’t remember them.” She looked down at her glass of champagne and realized that he’d been listening to her that night. That seemed important to her. She leaned forward towards him. They were sitting on ends of the seat, the seat that faced backwards behind the limo driver. Each was on the edge of the car seat, each leaning in. The driver asked where they were going to. Bumpy told the name of a restaurant. Ivy recognized it as one that had only recently opened, one that was high-priced and getting celebrities to go there and had a waiting list. “Can we get in there?” “We can. We are. We have a table waiting,” Bumpy told her. “We are celebrating.” He hoisted up his glass again. “Where was I?” “The Dewey Decimal System,” Ivy said, holding her glass in both her hands, trying not to stare at his the spot marking the inner breast pocket. Bumpy had sat down with his coat unbuttoned and the jacket had fallen open a little.

201

“I …” Bumpy gathered his thoughts. Ivy could see little beads of sweat on his upper lip now. “I like that I remember things even when I don’t know I remember them,” he told her, picking up where he’d left off. “I like that all the things that ever happened to me, all the things that I experienced, are in my head, there forever, even if I don’t know they’re there.” He shook his head. “There’s a lot that’s happened to me in my life. A lot that I don’t remember but I know happened to me. I always was worried that I should remember it. I was always worried that I didn’t know it and I should because those things affect me, affect how I act. I mean,” he hesitated. “I’m just a compilation, I think.” He looked down into his champagne, suddenly serious. And pale, Ivy thought. “I’m all these things that I’ve ever had happen to me, I know that, and I worried that since I’m everything that’s ever happened to me, and I didn’t know, or remember, what happened to me, I didn’t know me. “Then you said what you said; you said that we have all the memories stored up in there and they’re all there and they’re all just waiting for me to come up with the right way to find them, to organize them, to cull them out, and that made me feel better. Because I realized, they are up there, and even if I can’t consciously find them, well, like books in a library, they’re there and I’ll find them someday.” He looked up then, and smiled. “And, it made me feel better because I don’t have the greatest memory in the world, and all my life I’ve tried to make sure that when nice things happen, when something good happens, I wanted to 202

make sure I could remember it, not lose it, make sure it stayed with me. Then you said what you said, and I realized they’re all with me, still. They’re always there.” “…” Ivy opened her mouth, but had nothing to say. She stopped even trying when Bumpy patted his breast pocket and said “I don’t like to forget things. Not good things. Like today.” “Oh, Bumpy,” she said. I didn’t even mean it to be that significant, she thought to herself. I didn’t intend it to be a life affirmation or anything. She smiled to herself. Chicken Soup for the Forgetful Person’s Soul. She sat there, waiting for Bumpy to go on. “Anyway,” he said, and held up his glass. “To us. And to the Dewey Decimal System that is our minds, making sure that everything we are stays where it should be.” They finally clinked glasses. The limo was on the Strip now, stopped, near the Paris casino. Ivy could see, through the tinted windows, crowds of people milling around. Many many young men in groups. Young women in groups. The occasional middle-aged couple. No kids. She could see the Eiffel Tower that marked the casino. A horn honked. The driver said something. “So why the celebration?” Ivy finally ventured. She sipped, carefully, again, her champagne. Bumpy’s reaction surprised her. He sat back and flung his head against the headrest. He put his arm over his eyes, burying his head in the crook of his elbow.

203

“Oh, man,” he said. He then leaned forward and put his head between his knees. “Are you okay?” Ivy asked. Bumpy nodded, head between his knees. He sat up. His face was flushed. He put the champagne glass into a holder. “I could use some water,” he said. He rubbed his sleeve across his forehead, and looked at her. “We’re celebrating because of this,” and he reached into his jacket pocket. Ivy sucked in her breath and almost cracked her champagne glass, she squeezed it so hard. But Bumpy pulled out a packet of papers, folded and refolded. He undid them. She stared, confused. He opened them up. He pointed to it. “See that? See? Rockwall Productions. They sent it to me today. Look at that number.” Ivy looked where he was pointing and almost cracked her glass again. “What’s that for?” she asked, quietly. “Me.” Ivy just looked at him. “Mundanity,” Bumpy told her. Now Ivy was confused. “They picked it up. The television station picked it up and hired me to be the head screenwriter. The last money they sent me, that was for the rights and a couple of episodes. But now it’s going to be picked up for the whole year and this is how much I’m going to make in that year.”

204

It was more money than Ivy thought someone could earn in a lifetime. It was certainly more than she thought she’d ever be sitting next to. Bumpy was going on. “I signed it. I signed it immediately and I’ve faxed it back and I spent the afternoon on the phone with the producers and I even hired an agent, a guy I got referred to in Los Angeles, he’s a friend of a lawyer Jay knows. He looked it over for me, and he knows show business, I guess. It’s all a little confusing because it’s England, the UK, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to call it.” Ivy could not figure out what to feel first. She was so sure that Bumpy was going to propose, she’d been so sure that was what this was all about, and she wanted to cry because he had not pulled a ring out of his pocket. She wanted to cry because she had gotten her hopes up and why should she have done that because they’d only been dating a little while, but it seemed so much like he was going to. But then, she thought he’s rich, he’s richer than anyone I’ve ever known, he’s the kind of rich that buys houses in more than one city… and he wants to celebrate with me and that was good, too, wasn’t it? So she wanted to be happy because the fact that he had not proposed to her was offset by the fact that the first thing he’d done after he’d gotten rich, well, rich-er because she knew he had made a lot of money when he’d first sold the script that had let him move to Las Vegas and spend his time taking pictures and not, so far as she could tell, selling enough of them to even pay the rent on the store, let alone all these hotels and meals he ate out. But the first thing, she reminded herself, the first thing he’d done after getting rich was come pick her up and take her out to dinner. 205

She looked out the window. The limo had not moved very far. Paris was a block back from them. The same people, or the same kind of people, were walking buy. She bit her lip. She wanted to be happy for Bumpy but she didn’t want to be too happy because there was no promise that she was going to be taking her with him, wherever he went, even if he was here. She turned to him suddenly. “I want to…” she began, but she stopped because he was kneeling on the ground. He was on both knees and fumbling around and he looked up. “Damn,” he said softly, and scrambled up to one knee, bumping his head on the ceiling of the limousine as he did so, and he said “Damn” again. He dropped the box he was holding. He looked up at her and said “Wait a second. Look away.” She got down on her hands, and grabbed both of his as they fumbled for the ring in the dark. She was crying, and smiling. “Yes,” she said.

206

October 10: “I just don’t think I can do this,” Sarah said. She leaned over the counter of her vanity and looked down at the sink. She looked at her ring finger, the one where she could still feel the engagement ring sitting sometimes. The ring finger missing the ring that sat in its box in the top drawer of her dresser in her room. The box she had not opened in three months now. Quitting opening the box had been, she imagined, like quitting smoking. She used to open the box all the time. She would walk into the bedroom, tears in her eyes, sniffling and sad. She did not meander or pretend she was not going to go look at the ring. She would get up and walk in there, and pull out the box. She would stand there for a few seconds, looking at the box, and then would open it up. She would see the ring, in its perch, looking dim and not sparkly at all in the muted bedroom lights. She did not take it out, although sometimes she touched the diamond itself, or ran her fingers along the edge of the ring and felt the smooth platinum band. “Why platinum?” she had asked Peyton, one day. He had said that platinum looked better, and it was more precious than gold. And also that the ring salesman had told him that some people develop allergies to gold but never to platinum. Nobody, according to Peyton quoting the ring salesman, developed an allergy to platinum. He had not wanted Sarah to develop an allergy to her engagement ring. “I love it,” she’d said. She had, at first, under the guise of wondering why it was not gold, secretly wishing it had been gold because platinum did not look 207

like gold and only gold looked like gold. She worried that people looked at it and thought that it was not gold, that Peyton had gotten her an inferior ring. She didn’t know how other people looked at rings, or whether they thought that at all, and she felt terrible for worrying about that, for thinking it at all. But she did not want anything to mar their engagement, did not want anyone to think that there was anything in any way wrong with or inferior about her relationship. After hearing Peyton’s story, she liked the ring better and liked the platinum better because she could tell about it. When she showed the ring to people after that, she made a point of saying it’s platinum, and tracing the ring’s edge with her finger, and telling the viewer Peyton picked out platinum because nobody gets allergic to platinum. He said he didn’t want me to get allergic to the ring. Isn’t that sweet? And generally the person looking at the ring would agree. A good story makes almost anything a good present. She tried to wean herself off looking at the ring. One day she decided that while she could not get rid of the ring, she also should not keep going in to look at it. She should move on or move forward. So she began waiting to go look at it. She would be watching television, or washing the dishes, or scrubbing the banister, and would want to go look at the ring. At first, she would wait five minutes, counting to 300 in her head, slowly, and then would let herself go look at it. Then it was 10 minutes, counting to 600. She began to lose track, counting that high, so after two weeks, she would set a timer. When she wanted to go look at the ring, she would go set the timer 208

on the back of the stove, turning the little knob to the right and looking to see that the little red arrow was on “15” and then she would go back to what she was doing, or appear to go back to what she was doing. She would stare blankly at “Jeopardy,” not answering the questions anymore, not even silently. She would look at the vase of dried flowers and wonder whether she should replace them but get no further than wondering that while she tried to figure out how long it had been. Then it was an hour. She tried to delay an hour before looking at the ring. Then two hours. She had been waiting two hours to look at the ring the day that Dan had come by, the day he had made his speech on the porch, the day she’d decided to hand wash the dishes rather than put them in the dishwasher because handwashing would keep her busy and would keep her back to the stove so that she could not see the timer. It took a similar amount of willpower, at that point, to set the timer, to not look at the timer, and to wait to go look at the ring until the timer went off. She must have appeared distracted, she thought now, as she looked again in the mirror. She must have looked distracted the entire brief time that Dan was here, the entire short time that he’d been sitting in her house, drinking a cup of coffee that she’d made, with her sitting on the chair near the couch and him sitting in the middle of the couch, holding his coffee cup in both hands. She’d put her own cup of coffee on a coaster on the table and given him a coaster, but he held it in his hands the whole time he was here. He never took a sip of it. He just held it. 209

She worried that day, too, that she’d been distracted and appeared to be distracted, but there had been so much going through her mind. She kept picturing the little timer clicking down. There could only have been a half-hour left on it when Dan had come to the door. She had not started washing the dishes until more than an hour into the time, she thought. Still, after Dan had left, when she sat there with the package on her lap, she had felt bad. She felt as though she had been absent-minded and had not presented herself well, a feeling she had not shaken in the intervening two days. She had tried to put it out of her mind, just after he left, and tried to excuse it, too. After all, a man she did not know, someone she’d had just a chance encounter with months earlier, had just shown up on her doorstep and professed his love for her. “This is something that happens only in movies,” Sarah said to herself now, as she picked at her hair and wondered if she should try to style it or just let it be as it was, as it had been all day. And only in the kind of movies that I don’t like to go watch anymore, she thought to herself. She didn’t say that out loud. She had liked those movies only while Peyton and she had been dating and been engaged. She wandered out of the bathroom and sat on the edge of her bed. The timer on the stove, she knew, was counting down. She let it count down. She looked from the dresser drawer, where the ring lay, to the nightstand, where the package lay. She had decided, after Dan left, that she would not open the package. Not yet. 210

It wasn’t even that she had decided that. She did not want to open the package that day. After Dan had left, before going back to finish the dishes, she’d sat and looked at the package, which had been sitting on the coffee table the entire time Dan had been there. As they’d talked both had looked at it periodically, both had wondered whether she was going to open it. Dan, for his part, had thought he should leave or ask to use the bathroom or something to give her a chance to inspect it or open it, since he could see as they talked that her eyes kept drifting towards it, and then drifting, occasionally, to the hallway that led off the living room where he sat and held his coffee. Never once during the fifteen minutes or so he’d been in the house, or after, had he thought that Sarah should have put the package out of sight or away; he’d simply thought that he’d been rude to not let her open the package. He even wondered, on the way back to his house, whether he should have, when he saw the package, simply come back a different day. Sarah, while Dan had been here, had kept looking at the package and wondering whether she should just throw it away. She’d decided against that. But she had not opened it. She had set it on the kitchen table, after moving it into the kitchen while pondering getting rid of it, and then had moved it from the kitchen table to the nightstand where she could see it without having to get up and go look at it. She turned it around though so that she could not see the return address because the return address made her want to throw it away and bothered her.

211

Today, she’d finally decided that she was going to open the package and see what was inside it. She went back into the bathroom. She began to floss. She flossed efficiently and quickly. She brushed her teeth. She picked at her hair, again, temporarily piling it on her head to decide if she should put it up. Why did it feel like she was acting? She stopped with her hair and went into the bedroom again, looking from the ring to the package. She wondered how much time was left on the timer. She changed, quickly from her scrubs pants into a pair of jeans. She had decided on the jeans because they were informal. She took her scrub shirt off and crossed the bedroom. She did not pause as she went by the mirror, did not even look at herself out of the corner of her eye as she went by. She put the scrub top into the hamper and pulled out a t-shirt. She put that on and then pulled out a sweater and put that on. She went back into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked tired. She went back into the bedroom again and then decided not to wait in there. She went into the kitchen and did not even try to tell herself she was doing anything in the kitchen but checking the timer, which read 12:32. She could wait that long. She got a glass of water from the refrigerator dispenser and went back out to the living room. She did not turn on the television. She picked up a magazine, one she’d taken home from the waiting room when a candy striper had come by and said they were going to be thrown away and did any of the nurse’s want them. A story on the cover of this one had caught her eye. My husband went missing and came back was the blurb. It was a women’s magazine and in 212

between the tips for great makeup and the recipes that were quick and easy and still dazzling was that line My husband went missing and came back and she’d wanted to read it. She’d wanted to read about husbands coming back. There had to be only about 10 minutes left now. She sat and looked at the magazine and felt foolish. The story would have nothing to relate to her. She opened it up and looked at the beginning, hoping that the words would turn her off, that she would find it too confessional or too folksy or something else would make her stop reading it, but she got drawn in quickly by the opening sentence When my husband came back I wasn’t sure how to fit him back into my life and she went on reading. The article talked about the husband, who had left one day and disappeared. The author had thought something terrible had happened to him. She had contacted the police, there had been fliers up, there were search parties and bulletins, for the first few days, and then the police came to her and asked her about the state of her husband’s business, he had been a restaurant owner. She didn’t know anything about it, hadn’t worked in the restaurant other than helping out, in years, probably a decade, she thought. Over time, over a few weeks, with further digging, the truth became known: the restaurant was failing. Her husband had left because he felt like a failure. He had not left a note or any other information because, he later told her, he hoped that the insurance companies would decide that he was dead and would pay her the proceeds of the policies they’d taken out, and she would be taken care of. He felt like a failure and could not bring himself to break the bad news to her,

213

but also did not want to end his own life. So he left and hid and assumed a new identity, in Canada, and hoped for the best for her. He hadn’t been able to take it. He’d called her one day, and hung up when she answered. He’d done that a few more times. She had wondered about the calls. Then, one day, in the evening, after dark, a knock on the door. A quiet one. She went up to the door and looked through, and he was standing there in a windbreaker, unshaven, hair mussed up, and he started crying. I didn’t know how to fit him back in, the author wrote. I had come to terms with his disappearance, in a way, had grown used to his absence and to the constant state of my life, the state of looking for him and not looking for him at the same time. Sarah wondered what that would be like. All her life, she had heard of people going missing and had always thought that would be terrible. She had always assumed that it would be awful, to be constantly hoping that the person would turn up, to see someone in a crowd and wonder if it was them, to try to figure out what they would look like at 15, 20, 30. She thought about putting a life on hold and trying to keep it there, wondering what terrible things the person was going through, and, as she thought most people would, she assumed it would be a terrible state of existence. Now, as she read the article, she realized that missing might be better than dead, because when someone was missing, you might see them in a crowd and it might be them and they might show up on your doorstep and knock softly on the door and then start crying about how they’d messed things up. 214

The doorbell rang as she thought that, startling her. She looked up. She was not expecting anyone. She had not heard anyone pull up. She looked over her shoulder, at the kitchen. There couldn’t be more than a minute or two left. The doorbell rang again. She cautiously, still holding the magazine, got up and went to the door, and peered through. It was Sasha Acker, the reporter. She had a cameraman with her. Sarah pulled back, involuntarily, as she looked through the small pane of glass and Sasha gave her a tight-lipped almost smile and a nod. But the camera was pointing down. She was not being filmed yet. She opened the door. “Yes?” she said, warily. She wished she’d put the magazine down. “Ms. Strathan? Sasha Acker. I’m with…” “I know. Come in, won’t you?” Sarah acted out of habit. They came in. The cameraman stood in the hallway near the door, heavy coat on. Sasha moved into the room as though she owned it, scanning the walls and the television and the shelves and taking it all in. She motioned to the cameraman, who, to his credit, looked to Sarah first. She nodded. “Sure, please, come in, sit down. Can I get you something?” “I’m sorry to burst in on you like this. You haven’t been watching the news? Have you seen the news today?” “No. Why?” “They found another drowning victim.” Sarah just looked at her. She held the magazine in both hands. 215

“He was 27 years old. He was found near the place where they found… your fiancé.” Sarah wasn’t sure if Sasha had paused to try to remember Peyton’s name or out of respect. “They did?” she said. “They did,” Sasha confirmed. “The police are down there right now, looking over the scene. The man disappeared yesterday morning.” Disappeared, Sarah thought. “And his family has been looking for him. His friends said that he’d been drinking at the college basketball game and that he’d said he would walk home. They don’t know why he went that way. The police said he probably went for another drink or ran into friends.” Sasha looked around. “I thought we would come to you for comment.” The timer went off in the kitchen. “Are you cooking something?” asked Sasha. “Did we interrupt? I hate doing this…” “No. No. No, it’s fine,” Sarah said. “It’s fine.” Still carrying the magazine, she went into the kitchen and shut off the timer. The package. The ring. She sighed and went back out to the room. “What else can you tell me?” she asked. They went to the spot. Sarah would not talk to them in her house. They only wanted a quote from her, a few lines, and she would not give that to them in her house. They went to the spot and stood outside the police lines. Sasha and her cameraman – Sasha had not introduced him – drove behind her in their van. Sarah drove down to where she’d driven only one time before, the day Bumpy 216

had told her about Peyton, and her mind was jumping between the package and that night and tonight. She stood there, in the early night, looking at the flashing lights and the spotlights they had and the ambulance that was still there and the divers wrapped in blankets and the people the police were interviewing. As she watched them walking around, she scanned the ground in between attempting to catch someone’s eye. She looked at the ground without thinking consciously about it and when she did realize what she was doing, she chided herself. There won’t be any footprints, there’s no snow or mud or anything. But she wanted to ask the police if they’d looked for one nonetheless. She wanted to be one of those women from the TV cop shows, women who barge through the police lines and grab the coat of a detective and cry and demand that the detective do more and had to be carried away. She stood there up against the tape. Sasha, next to her, said “Do you mind if we ask you a few questions now?” Sarah shook her head. “I guess not,” she said. She never looked at Sasha as they set up. She just watched the detectives sipping coffee, the ambulance finally going away. She answered the questions quickly, trying to sound more emotional than she felt. She wondered why she was not more emotional. She still wondered that, later, on the drive back home. She would wake up in the middle of the night, having decided that this was not the night to open the

217

package, and in the middle of the night she would wonder why she had not been more emotional in the interview. Sasha had introduced her and said “You are still working, with your group, to get the police to take more concerted action against what you believe is a serial killer, aren’t you?” Sarah had realized that she was late to meet Dan, realized it just as Sasha asked the question, and she hesitated. Then she said “Yes. Yes we are.” Sasha, off camera and looking at her, frowned slightly and Sarah did not know why. “Do you think this latest death will help you press your case?” Sarah could not believe that she had forgotten to call him, even. “Yes,” she said carefully. “I’m sure it will help.” Sasha glanced at the cameraman and pulled more information from Sarah, one question at a time. Did she think that the drowning here shared any suspicious features in common with her own fiancé’s death or the others? Sarah wasn’t sure about all the details and would have to see but the fact that it was a drowning in the same spot certainly made it seem similar. It took four questions to establish that and Sasha sighed audibly. “I can see that you’re shaken up,” she leaned in and told Sarah. Then she whispered “I can help with attention but you’ve got to give me something, here,” and Sarah automatically said I’m sorry and then just as automatically bristled a little at this reporter telling her what to do. She tried to focus, tried to give better answers. She did want attention. She wanted people to believe, to be worried 218

about what was going on and to remember what had happened to Peyton and she wanted it not to be an accident, as horrible as that was. She did not want more people to die, she told Sasha, which was why she was doing this, and that was true but more true still, a more powerful motivation was Sarah proving that Peyton would not have accidentally walked into a lake and drowned, even after drinking. How could the last memory of him be him drunkenly falling in a lake? She wondered. To Sasha she said “We need to make it safe for people to be out after dark. The police need to make it safe for people to be out after dark.” “And you’re group will continue to push the city and the police to treat this as a criminal investigation?” “We will,” Sarah said. She remembered that Jane was, technically, the organizer and everyone treated her as the leader. “I’m certain we will.” The cameraman put down the camera and Sasha visibly relaxed. “Thanks,” she said, putting her hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah twitched, just a little, and looked out again at the slowly-clearing drowning scene. Crime scene, she told herself. “I know this is hard for you, but we’ll keep some focus on it and maybe that will help,” Sasha finished. “Why me?” asked Sarah, turning towards her. Sasha looked uncomfortable and Sarah realized what the question sounded like. “I don’t mean why me like that… I mean why interview me?”

219

Sasha did not hesitate. “You’re more approachable than your group leader. People like to listen to you. She’s okay, that Jane woman, but most of the people at the station felt that you were someone viewers liked better.” “Plus,” the cameraman said “It was so much like your guy’s.” He motioned towards the scene, and Sasha looked down at the ground. While true, Sarah knew, they were embarrassed at bringing it up and she was embarrassed to have a fiancé who’s death was similar to someone else’s, in a newsworthy way, and mortified that she felt that way. How could someone’s death be embarrassing to me? She wondered, but she could not deny that she was embarrassed, now, as she thanked them and turned away. Of course there were deaths that were both saddening and embarrassing to the relatives and friends left behind. There were deaths that shocked wives and stunned husbands and made the terrible grief of death somehow even worse, she knew, as she got into her car. There were husbands who were murdered by prostitutes. Wives who overdosed on drugs their husbands never knew they took. Parents who killed their children, children who killed their parents. Teenagers drag-racing in stolen cars. People who asphyxiate while masturbating. All deaths that took someone away and at the same time revealed something about them, and in the minds of the people left behind, embarrassed or shocked or stunned them. How terrible to go through life having lost someone you loved, and each time you remember them, to remember that, too, and to have people express their condolences but know that as soon as you are gone they will turn to a coworker or friend and tell that other person the sordid details. 220

Peyton’s death embarrassed her, Sarah realized, as she got in her car and drove. It embarrassed her and that made her feel horrible. It was the first time since his death that she’d allowed herself to admit it, to realize it, and she wondered, now, whether she really believed in the killer or if she just wanted others to believe in the killer because she did not want them, when they told her they were sorry, to mentally add too bad he couldn’t have drunk a little less that night and then pat her hand again and walk away, telling their husbands what really happened. But, she told herself, it had happened in the exact same spot, in the exact same manner. She wasn’t making that up. And could everyone in the group be like her? They did not seem to have the same doubts, the same hesitancies. They did not seem to be carrying what she now recognized as another load of guilt to bear, a load that felt too heavy. She drove aimlessly. The car was silent and she bit her lip and just drove around the city, sitting inside her dark quiet car and looking at the people walking, the other people driving. Some of them were lit up green from their dashboard lights. Some talked on cell phones. Here and there, people walked alone or in pairs. There were no groups. The people walking alone mostly had their heads down. She imagined they had headphones on; nobody walked anywhere alone without headphones on anymore. The ones in the cars smoked or sat and stared ahead. She drove around and saw people standing in convenience stores buying candy bars and gasoline. She saw people going into a restaurant and coming out of bars. She saw houses, most of them with lights 221

ablaze warmly and orangely. She felt the guilt of being embarrassed by Peyton’s death, mingled with the guilt that she was not even calling Dan and she had promised, against her judgment, to meet him for coffee, she felt those guilts mingling with the new guilt of not truly believing in the group she was now the spokesman for, twirling all together with everything else in a brimming froth that now had her biting her lip. She drove aimlessly and watched people and when she grew tired, when she had chewed her lip so that it felt swollen and tender, she pulled into a convenience store, the kind of place that Bumpy still called a gas station and she sat in her car for a moment near the gas pumps. She felt too tired to drive home and too tired not to do so. She was ashamed of herself for thinking that the way someone died could be embarrassing and ashamed of herself for reducing Peyton to a death, to his death, to the way he died and yet, what could she do? What was left for her after he was dead? Memories? She didn’t have memories. Memories faded away and she knew they would fade more and disappear and be warped and be changed and ultimately she could not trust her memories. The ring? The ring tore her apart and she wanted and did not want to look at it. No, she sat at the convenience store between the rows of gas pumps, and thought to herself No, when someone dies, they don’t leave anything behind. They don’t give anything to hold onto and the only thing that’s left, the only tangible thing, is their death. The last thing you remember about someone is the only thing you remember about someone.

222

She knew how slipper memory was. She knew she would not remember Peyton, not really and not for long. She was nearly 40. She could not, as she sat there, remember more than one thing from when she was younger than ten. She could not as she sat there think of a single thing that had happened when she was younger than ten, other than dropping Dylan, and as she sat here and thought about that, now as on other times when she had sat and thought about that, she had to wonder how much of her memory of that was a memory, and how much was simply remembering things she’d been told, how much had been filled in by assumptions, how much had been altered or deleted or colored over or filled in by what people told her, by what she wanted to believe, by what she didn’t want to believe. She tried to think of other things. She tried to picture her room as a child, and imagined a bed, a four-poster bed, but she could not trust it in part because in her memory, the bed appeared to be a photograph, and a black-and-white one at that. Aren’t memories in color? She asked herself and looked around and wondered if she should drive away but she didn’t. She moved on to high school -high school is four years of life, it’s when people come of age and fall in love and form opinions and prepare to be adults and it is memorable, for good or bad, but she couldn’t remember most of her teachers. Even her most beloved teacher, her social studies teacher, sophomore year, the teacher she had loved so much she briefly considered becoming a teacher, even she was fading. Sarah remembered her name: Van De Wahl, but was she a Miss? A Mrs.? What had she looked like? There were glasses, Sarah could picture that. There were glasses, but was 223

she adding that because a Ms. Or Mrs. Or Miss Van De Wahl should have glasses, would wear glasses if she was the teacher in a movie? Or did she really wear glasses. There had been a boy, a senior in a class of seniors, a math class for seniors that Sarah had taken after proving herself phenomenal at math. The class was Introduction to Advanced Statistics, and she’d taken that as the only junior in a class of seniors. The boy, she could picture him right now: Tall, skinny in a cross-country runner’s way – stringy and full of ligaments – and with a nearlyshaved head, his hair was so short. His hair had been red. It looked like his head had been sprinkled with paprika. He had large knuckles, large knuckles to anchor the tendons which he was composed of. He fidgeted because he was too tall for his seat. Sarah could not remember his name. Would she lose Peyton’s name, someday? Ten years from now, fifteen, would she be talking to someone, and mention that she’d had a fiancé that had drowned and would she hesitate a moment, a telltale moment, before saying his name, because she had to search for it? Then a new thought: Would she, fifteen years from now, have anyone to be telling that story too?

224

March 17: Bumpy closed the laptop without deleting or reading the email. He’d hesitated over what to do for at least fifteen minutes. Read it? Delete it? He’d toggled back and forth between those two, staring at the address and subject line, and then had closed the laptop and looked up as the door opened and two people came walking in. “Hello,” he said, still a little unsure of himself in the role of a shopkeeper. It had not taken long, or much, to set up a place where he could work at actually selling photographs and yet spend much of his day doing nothing and writing. It had taken very little, actually: a month-to-month lease signed a few days before. Two days of sweeping and cleaning. Getting his pictures developed by a professional studio; he did not know how to develop his own pictures and did not want to know. He used a digital camera, a good one, and took the pictures to a photographer who printed them in whatever size he asked the man to do, from 4 by 6 to 18 by 30. Those pictures he put on flat matte backing and framed and put on the walls and set up a price. He had only about 35 or so now, not many for a studio, and his shop – a small space with only a small back room and some counters around the edge – was still bare and sparse looking. “Hi,” the couple said, both at the same time. They were middle-aged, rounded people who walked around quickly and looked at the photos and then smiled at him and walked out. Sometimes, he’d noticed, people felt compelled to talk to him, and they usually talked to him about the shop – Just opened? Was a 225

common question he faced, and he wondered if they felt guilty, somehow, for not buying something, and if the guilt they felt was driven, in part, by the fact that the shop had, clearly, just opened. He was staying in Caesar’s Palace, the third casino he’d stayed in since arriving here just over two weeks ago, and each day was largely the same while also marked with differences, in a contrast he liked to think of. It was a phrase he wanted to use in a story, a script: largely the same and always different. Each day, he got up, he went for coffee and a muffin. He enjoyed eating muffins for breakfast because he’d once heard a comedian that joked that muffins were simply like eating cake, that some of the muffins were worse than eating cake, and so he tried to eat muffins for breakfast because in his mind he liked the idea that it was not a healthy breakfast but was accepted by people as such. For the first few days, he’d walked around, and snapped pictures, and looked at people, and wandered, and ate at fast food restaurants and in food courts and in the areas where the people who came to Vegas as families and without a ton of money ate, mingling with the people who could not afford to gamble much and could not afford the big shows, but had come here anyway because they wanted to experience some of the atmosphere of Las Vegas, even if it didn’t quite suit them and even if they couldn’t really experience the Las Vegas they’d seen in movies or TV shows. They sat alongside the people who worked in Vegas, a group which Bumpy believed without any proof as yet would fall into two broad categories: People who worked in Las Vegas because they loved Las Vegas

226

as an image, a feeling, a moment; and people who worked in Las Vegas because they lived here and people work where they lived. Bumpy wanted to be in the first category. On the fourth day here, he’d found his shop, just off the strip and near the end by the Luxor – away from Old Las Vegas and its smell of cigarette smoke and gin and wedding chapels filled with drunkenness and regret, and Bumpy did not like being away from that. But there was nothing down there to rent, nothing down there to open up each day and claim to be a legitimate part of the Las Vegas scene, nothing down there to give him some kind of footing here and make him not an interloper, not a tourist, not a visitor, but someone who lived and worked in Vegas; not Las Vegas, but Vegas. In high school, Bumpy had taken the photography elective and learned something of the art of photography, but had ignored most of it by adopting the philosophy that art could not be taught. Science and math and mechanical things: those could be taught. Drawing and painting and poetry and literature: those had to be experienced. It was a philosophy that appealed to him because it took away the hard work of getting better at being an artist and put the blame of failure on those who did not like what he did because they were too tied up in the technicalities or too hidebound or too unsophisticated and did not understand it. The philosophy had led Bumpy to actually work harder than he’d realized it would, made him work to try to figure out, when he was bored with some artwork (book or painting or sculpture or movie) or not interested in it in the first place, to try to figure out what it was that turned him off or made him bored, 227

because if not liking something artistic was the fault of the viewer or recipient, then if he looked at something or listened to it or felt it and did not like it, then the fault was in him, and many times, he realized after the fact, many times in figuring out why he did not like something, he’d ended up liking it. It never occurred to Bumpy to use that thinking, to use the analysis he went through to figure out why he didn’t like something in order to improve his own photography, his own writing. It never occurred to him because in the end, he liked most forms of creative expression, worked to like them, and liked his own most of all. It also never occurred to him because he never took rejection personally; why should he, when the rejection was the fault of the person not appreciating his skill? He did have an eye for photography, though. While never mastering the technical details of it, he had a unique viewpoint, his teacher had told him, a viewpoint and perspective that would be enhanced if he would apply himself. So far, none of the ten to twelve people who walked through his shop each day had commented on the viewpoint, or the perspective, of his photographs of Las Vegas, and none of them had bought one, either. The woman that walked in next, not more than fifteen minutes after the couple left, did not comment on the viewpoint or perspective, either. Instead, she walked in the door and then said, “Oh, excuse me,” and Bumpy looked up and said “Everything okay?” “Yes,” the woman said. “I just thought…” she stopped and looked around. “This is new.” 228

“Yeah,” said Bumpy. “I just opened about a week ago.” “Oh. I didn’t. .. what happened to the store that used to be here?” “I didn’t know that there was a store here.” “There was. It was… a month ago it was here.” “I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell you.” Bumpy thought she looked cute, and did notice, too, that she was upset about something. But he didn’t know what to say. The woman then looked around at the pictures, and at Bumpy, and at the laptop he’d opened back up and had set to play music softly because he’d been thinking of a part of the script he was working on and wanted to begin writing it. She looked away, then seemed to mentally decide something, but it wasn’t clear what she decided. She started towards the door, then stopped. She made a halfhearted attempt to look at a few of the pictures near the door and then stopped that, too. Finally, she looked at Bumpy again and said “Are you hiring?” Bumpy looked her up and down. He wondered what she had thought was here. Then he decided to just ask her, and said “What store did you think was here?’ The woman looked at him for a long time and he stared back at her. He thought her eyes seemed a little large for her face, for Las Vegas. People around here, people who lived here (and he didn’t know how he knew she lived here) had small eyes, as though they had evolved into people who did not have to squint in the bright sun and heat. He also thought her eyes were no particular color. “I’m Ivy,” she said. “Ivy Lee.”

229

She stuck out her hand. Bumpy stuck out his and said “Nice to meet you. I’m Bumpy.” Ivy realized that her hand was four feet too far away for them to shake. She stepped towards Bumpy and then held up her hand again. Bumpy shook it. Her hand was cold. He wondered how she did that, have a cold hand in Las Vegas at this time of year? “Bumpy?” she said. “It’s a nickname. What makes you think you want to work here?” He hadn’t forgotten about the question he’d asked, but he moved on because he wanted to keep her talking. When she’d let go of his hand, she’d made a hesitant move towards the door as though she was going to leave, and he didn’t want her to leave. In response to his question, Ivy sighed and set down her purse. “I need money, that’s what.” She looked down at the ground as she spoke. “I came in here because this was, a month ago, a pawnshop and I pawned my earrings and I was going to pawn my bracelet, too, and I wanted to see the earrings again, anyway, because I liked them and I don’t have a lot of jewelry.” She looked up at him and held out the bracelet. “It’s down to this, actually. That’s it. But I can’t pay the rent, so I guess it’s gotta go.” She tried to smile and then her left leg actually twitched towards the door and Bumpy spoke quickly. “Do you have any experience?” Ivy looked around the shop. “At what?” 230

Bumpy smiled. “That’s okay. I don’t either.” Ivy didn’t smile, but she looked at him again and turned her left foot back forward, away from the door and towards him. “Are you actually hiring?” she said. “I guess I could be,” Bumpy said. He wanted to see her smile; she had not yet smiled at all or even looked close. He thought that maybe if she smiled, her eyes would not look so big. Bumpy didn’t realize, then, that Ivy’s eyes were big because she was trying not to cry and that she was unlikely to smile. “It’s a trick I learned, when I was a teenager,” she would tell him one night, when he mentioned to her what it was that he’d first noticed about her. She would ask, on the night before Thanksgiving, what it was that had first made him like her, and Bumpy would say that he had liked her the moment he’d seen her, that he wanted her to stay and talk to him that day in the shop. “No, really,” Ivy would say, drawing out the o in No so that it came out Nooo, trailing off in disbelief. But she would smile, a shy smile that made Bumpy think that she didn’t believe him but that she liked him lying to her. “Really,” he would tell her, as he half-thought, on that night in the future, about what they should do for dinner and half-thought about the latest email he’d received. “I really wanted you to stay and talk and it was mainly at first because of your eyes.”

231

“My eyes?” Ivy would ask and she would touch her right eyelid with her right hand and look down and away from him. “My eyes, really?” and she would look back up at him and then away. “They were big,” Bumpy would tell her. “Really big, really round.” Ivy would think about that, that day in the future, and think back to this day, when she first met Bumpy. She would, in the future, blush and not want to talk about this at all because of how she’d come looking for a pawnshop, needing money and she would worry, then, that Bumpy would think that she wanted to be with him only for his money. She would, in the future as she talked, inadvertently look at the watch he’d given her and the engagement ring that he’d given her and she would before she could help herself touch the necklace she would be wearing, a necklace also given her by Bumpy, and she would almost die right there, mentally, because all she would be able to think about is how embarrassing for her that they had met when she was looking for a pawnshop and he had taken pity on her and given her a job and now she was engaged to him. She would, that night before Thanksgiving, look back up at Bumpy and explain her eyes, quietly, “I was trying not to cry.” Bumpy would not say anything. She would lean in against him and say “It’s a trick I learned, when I was a teenager,” and she’d sigh and wonder how much she should tell him about that trick.

232

But he wouldn’t ask and instead he would say “Why were you going to cry that day?” and she would look up at him and realize that he had not gathered the import of the fact that she was there that day to pawn her bracelet, that she was poor and a loser and that she could not even hold a job, not even the easiest kind of jobs, not cashier or waitress. She didn’t know why; she just did not work out at jobs. But Bumpy, she would realize right then and there, did not think that of her, at all. Today, standing in the used-to-be pawnshop with cold hands and only her bracelet left, Ivy thought about her job history, as Bumpy told her he guessed he could be hiring. She listened to him and wondered if maybe the little photo shop was a front for something, since it didn’t look like much of anything. But she really didn’t want to leave and go pawn her bracelet and Bumpy seemed nice… and what kind of drug dealer or criminal has the name “Bumpy?” she reasoned… so she said her name again, telling him “I’m Ivy Lee.” Bumpy was about to say I know you said that already but he didn’t. Instead he stuck his hand out again to shake and said: “I probably should ask when you can start.” Ivy responded to that: “Right now. I can start right now.” She needed money for lunch and for rent that night but she couldn’t tell him that right now. She’d ask him at the end of the day. Bumpy said, “Well, then, Ivy, let me show you around.” 233

He walked her around the store, and told her his ideas of how he would take pictures of the neon and the signs and do double exposures and try to turn Vegas into art, and she didn’t ask many questions. She didn’t even ask, he realized later, how much it paid. He had shown her the little office and was at a loss for what to tell her next when Ivy said “What do you call it?” “Call what?” he asked. “The shop. What is the shop called?” Bumpy had no idea what to call it. He was not ordinarily stumped. “I haven’t actually called it anything,” he realized. “You should have a name for it,” she said. “Do you advertise it at all?” Bumpy shook his head. “I’ve only just opened,” he said, and added “I’ve never run a business before.” Ivy wo ndered again if this was a front and whether she should get herself into this. She walked back behind the counter where they’d began, where Bumpy had been standing when she’d come in. His laptop still sat there, and there was a blank page open on the screen – blank but for a single word typed in bold: Mundanity it said. Ivy tried to act like she hadn’t noticed it, and also like she didn’t want to know what that was all about.

234

“So, what do you want me to do?” she asked. She turned back to him and he actually stepped back from her. She sucked her upper lip into her lower lip and worried that she had said something wrong. “Well, for starters, give some thought to a name. And, I guess, use that,” he indicated the laptop, “to look up what I’m supposed to fill out or do or file or whatever to hire you. There’s an internet search engine on there. Try to find that out, will you?” He walked around the other side of the counter. “Do you like coffee?” he said. “Sure.” “I’m going to get some. What would you like?” Ivy wanted to tell him I’d like breakfast and she unconsciously rubbed her stomach and looked around and then said “Just coffee is fine,” because how could she ask him to buy her breakfast? Bumpy said he would be right back and left. Ivy sat down and looked at the laptop. Mundanity, the word processor program said. She wondered how long he would be gone, and if she could try to figure out what he was doing on the computer or what that word meant. But she didn’t want to get in trouble. She tried to close that window, and clicked around to find the internet program and open it, the screen lighting up on a page with headlines and gossip and pictures. She had used the Internet just a 235

bit at one of her jobs, as a receptionist at a consulting business. She knew more or less how to find things on the Internet but had no idea what to look for in order to be able to do what Bumpy had asked her to do. She was muddling through trying to find a way to search for what needed to be done to hire someone in Las Vegas when the door opened again and she looked up. Bumpy was back, carrying coffee and with two bags clenched into his hands. In the bags, she would find in a moment when he set them down, were bagels and muffins and doughnuts. There were more than would be needed for the two of them, especially since Bumpy did not take any of the food, setting it down and then going and sitting against the other counter with his coffee, which he sipped as he looked out the door. Throughout the day, Ivy would eat three of the doughnuts, both bagels, and when she left, she would take a muffin with her. She wasn’t sure, all day, what she was supposed to be doing. Bumpy talked a little about the weather while he looked at the few pictures he had up and straightened some of them on the wall. He then said that he was going outside for some fresh air. Ivy suspected that he was making phone calls because she had seen him checking his phone before he went outside. She used the opportunity to eat the second and third of the doughnuts, trying to do so quickly, and not thinking until she was done with the third one that it did not matter whether he was here or not when she ate them because they were the only two in the shop and he was not eating any of them, so

236

he would know she had eaten them. Even after she realized that, she still did not want to eat three doughnuts in front of Bumpy. At lunchtime he ordered a pizza and they talked more, just a little, about the weather and then about her wages. They settled on $10 per hour, which was at least $4 per hour more than she had expected. Bumpy had said that he thought she should be paid $10 per hour, and Ivy had tried not to seem surprised, at the same time as she also tried not to look as though she was taking a third slice of pizza. “Are you married?” he asked her as he wiped some sauce off his face. She raised her eyebrows, not able to answer because there was pizza in her mouth. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, looking at the door and away from her. “I’m just making small talk.” There was a pause while she chewed. “Which I’m bad at,” he added. She swallowed her mouthful and took a sip of the pop he’d bought. “No. No, I’m not married,” she answered. They didn’t talk much in the afternoon. He had taken the laptop back from her and gone into the cubicle-sized office; she heard music from the laptop’s small speakers, and heard the keys making that slappy sound that laptop keys made, not true typing-click-clacks, but a padded kind of sound. She wondered if he was working on “Mundanity,” and wondered what that meant, but tried to busy herself.

237

At four o’clock, she finally said to him, “Is there something you need me to be doing?” He leaned his head out of the cubicle and said “Why? Bored?” and she shook her head. “No, but I feel like I should be doing something to help out.” “Well, what do you think would help out?” “I don’t know.” She looked around the store and thought. Then she said “Do you have other pictures that need framing or hanging? I could do that.” “Do you know how to frame pictures?” he asked. “No, not really.” She slumped back. Bumpy came out holding a small piece of plastic. “Here,” he said, and handed it to her. “You can take these to the printer I use and have him print them up. He’ll know what to do.” He gave her the card for the print shop, pulling it out from under the cash register. “Drop them off on your way home.” “Okay,” she said, and sat back, looking at the plastic little chip-thing. He waited a minute and said “They close at five.” “Did you want me to go now?” she said. Bumpy chuckled, and she thought it sounded like the kind of chuckle someone would try to make when they needed to chuckle but didn’t really want 238

to; it seemed a little forced. “I’m not very good at this,” he said. “I’ve never been a boss.” He rubbed his face. “You can go home for now, and take that with you. Drop it off and then pick it up in the morning and bring in the photos. Here.” He took out his wallet and she saw him, as he held it up, look up at the sky and nod his head to the side a little, a few times. She realized he was counting or adding, moving his head as he did so. Then he counted out some money and handed it to her. “Today’s money is in there,” he said. “I forgot what time I hired you so I just paid you for 9 hours.” Ivy looked down at the wad of bills and said “Thanks.” She walked to the door, and turned around. “So, um, what time tomorrow?” “I try to get here by nine,” he said, “because I try to open by nine.” “Nine, then, unless you want me earlier?” Bumpy shook his head, no. Then he held up the bag with the muffin in it. “You can take this,” he said, and then added “I don’t even like muffins.” She took the bag. All that was left of the assortment he’d bought that morning was the muffin, which she’d wanted to take but had not first. She was glad he’d offered and embarrassed, again, that she’d taken him up on the offer. She backed out of the door, holding the bag in one hand and the memory chip in the other and waved, with the bag-hand, and said she would see him the 239

next day. She then left, wondering why Bumpy would trust her. Not that there was a reason not to trust her, but why would he trust her? Why hand… she counted the money … $250 to someone he’d just met that day and trust her to come back the next day? Then she stopped wondering about that and wondered, instead, how much she might have to give her landlord to get him to quit threatening to evict her for a while, and whether after that where she would still have enough money for a real dinner. She hoped that Bumpy would pay her in cash the next day, too.

240

November 22: Dan had to park on the opposite side of the street from Sarah’s house and he sat in his car, the way he had before, pausing for a moment and staring. This time, though, he was not staring in nervousness or hope or waiting, but instead, at the three vans that were parked across the street. One of them had “CNN” on the side of it and a lot of gear on the top. In the grayness of the November day, with the road gray and the grass a brown that failed to add any color -- it might as well have been gray—a day so colorless and cold that the air itself seemed gray and cold, too, making it so frigid that the world seemed wavy, but even in all that the letters “CNN” stood out boldly, as did the vans themselves, and Dan saw a few people, up the street, holding their arms to their sides and trying to keep warm as they looked at the vans and then at Sarah’s house. He opened his door and stood up, looking across the street at her house. He had not been planning on popping in on her, but he had good news for her and wanted to stop by and tell her in person. Now he wondered whether he should have done this at all. Sarah had not exactly ever greeted him warmly when he had just stopped in. Although, he reminded himself, she had not been rude, either and she was nice to him on occasions when he did not surprise her. This would not be the best time to stop by, he knew. But he wanted to see her again. 241

And, now, too, he wanted to see why CNN was here. So he closed his car door and glanced once at the people up the street who were looking at him now, and he decided to act as though he was supposed to be there and walked across the street thinking that he probably did not look as though he had any reason to be there, but then also thinking that they did not know that. He hoped, then, that Sarah would let him in and that he would not have to turn around and leave the house immediately because even if he didn’t know her neighbors he did not want them to see him get turned away. He got to the door and the inner door was open; the screen door was closed and through the storm window he could hear Sarah saying “I’m just not sure about all of this” and he saw a guy holding a camera and microphone in the doorway and blocking most of the door, so Dan could not go in even if he were inclined to just walk in. He stood there, leaning from one foot to another and then before he could change his mind he pressed the doorbell. She’s never told me to stop coming by, he told himself as he pulled his hand back. He could guess why CNN was there and as he realized that he thought that he should have just left and come back another time but having come here, having deliberately driven through this part of town so that he could “be in the neighborhood,” the same sort-of-lie he’d told her before, he did not want to go home now. 242

The cameraman turned around and said “Oh, hey, come on in,” and opened the door for him and Dan was inside, standing behind the cameraman as around the living room a few people stood: three reporters, and two other cameramen, setting up a couple of lights and moving cords. “I don’t know about this, really,” Sarah said, and she seemed, to Dan, flustered. But he didn’t know her that well, either, and maybe she just seemed like she was flustered to him but was not at all flustered in reality, he thought. He wondered if she was someone who became discombobulated like that. As he watched, the other cameraman moved into the room and he was left standing there in the entry way. He wondered if he should say hello to Sarah or introduce himself at all to anyone, let anyone know he was there. What if he did and she said he should leave? He didn’t want to leave and he did want to see this, even though he was sure he knew what it was about. “Jane is really the person you should talk to,” Sarah said again, and added something about not wanting to cause trouble in the group. The reporter looked to the third cameraman and then at the other two reporters. “It’ll be okay,” the reporter said, “We’re planning on talking to others in the group, as well, but you’ve been on TV a few times for this already, and have also been at the forefront of this.”

243

That caused Sarah to hesitate. It also caused her to look around and she saw Dan standing there. Dan shifted his feet and lifted a hand. “He let me in,” he told Sarah, pointing at the cameraman who had just vacated the front hallway, and Sarah looked about to say something but the light clicked on and the reporter began talking, holding the microphone under Sarah’s face and Sarah answered back, looking uncomfortable, and then looking strained, and then once casting a look over her shoulder at Dan again. He watched as she talked for a few minutes and saw her start to look at him again, and he heard the questions, about someone named Frank somethingor-other, writing a book. An ex-FBI agent was writing a book and had been pressing the FBI to investigate the drownings, and had he contacted Sarah? As Dan listened, he realized that he was distracting Sarah and he realized, too, that talking to her, stopping by to see her, during an interview about her dead fiancé, was not the best move he could make. He quietly opened up the door and slipped outside, holding the door behind him so it would not slam, and then he stepped down the sidewalk, past the grass that in the grayness looked crisp and frozen with frost from that morning still, and he saw the few clumps of neighbors still looking. He gave them a wave and got into his car and drove off.

244

February 21: Bumpy walked by the jewelry store twice before he even noticed it, and then walked by it a third time as he had roamed around the mall. His wallet bumped against his leg, carried in his front pocket the way he always did when he had any money in it, protecting it from pickpockets, a habit he’d gotten into long ago on a class trip to Chicago during high school. A kid on the bus, when they’d pulled up in front of the Sears Tower, had switched his wallet to the front of his pants, tucking it into the pocket. “What’re you doing?” Bumpy had asked him. The kid had shrugged and mumbled pickpockets and when Bumpy had pressed him, the kid told him: “In cities, people bump into you and take your wallet. They can do it easy when it’s in your back pocket. It’s harder in the front pocket because they have to bump into you in front. So I carry my wallet in front when I’m in a city.” Bumpy had immediately switched his and carried it that way, thereafter, when he had any amount of money in it; even when he wasn’t around crowds or in a big city, he carried his wallet in front. He carried it in front this day, carrying several thousand dollars cash with him because he could. He hadn’t even cashed the check for 7 days; for seven days, he’d left the check hidden in his apartment, tucked away, where only he could find it, and he moved it each day, to a new location. He wasn’t sure why he moved it to a new location but he felt he should do that. The first night, when he’d gotten up and left Teresa in the bed there sleeping and gone and opened the package, he’d taken the check, and looked at it, and was amazed at how big it was. 245

He’d then tucked it into a large travel mug that he sometimes used when he was going for a drive and wanted coffee with him, but more often was used as a water glass when he tried writing, because it didn’t sweat and wouldn’t wreck his laptop. The next day, the check had been in a folder of short stories he’d written here and there. The third day, it was tucked into a book of poems by Ezra Pound, a book given to him by an ex-girlfriend who thought he liked Ezra Pound because Bumpy made frequent references to the fact that Ezra Pound had once – famously, according to Bumpy when he told the story, Ezra Pound had famously —written a sonnet a day for a year, and then burned them all, in order that he could learn rhyme and rhythm and structure from writing sonnets, and then in order that he could ignore those conventions or subvert them. Bumpy did not like Ezra Pound’s poems, but he did like that story, and he always said that Pound had famously done it, because when he first told the story in a group of friends, Jay had questioned him: “He ‘famously’ did it?” Jay had said. “Yeah, why?” Bumpy had responded. “Doesn’t that mean that a bunch of people knew about it? Or it was widely reported, or well-known at the time? If what he did was famous, then a lot of people had to know about it, I’d say,” Jay had challenged. “I bet they did,” Bumpy said.

246

“I bet they didn’t. I bet nobody knew he did it until he told someone, years later, and how could he famously have done it if he didn’t show the poems to anyone?” “Who said he didn’t show the poems to anyone?” “You said he burned them.” “Yeah.” “So why would he show them to someone and then burn them? It sounds to me like something that people would do in secret, writing these poems they intend to burn.” “He was well known as a poet and people followed what he did,” Bumpy had said, not sure at all that Ezra Pound had been well-known as a poet in his time; weren’t most poets, he had wondered at the time, famous only later on? It seemed to him that poets were rarely famous in their time, except for Maya Angelou, and Bumpy didn’t know anyone who had actually read a Maya Angelou poem. He knew plenty of people who had heard of her, making her famous, but nobody could name a poem by her. He thought, too, that Robert Frost was famous, but he was not sure if Frost was still alive. “Nobody follows what poets do,” Jay had said. “Now they don’t. Then, they did,” said Bumpy, who thought that sounded about right. He added “It was the early 1900s. People paid attention to poets back then. Poets were like rock stars. Or celebrities, kind of.” “I doubt that. Anyway, if Pound famously did it, how come I never heard of that before?” 247

The girls they had been talking with had kept silent throughout most of this exchange, but then one had said that she, too, hadn’t heard that, and added that she was an English major. “Did you study poetry?” Bumpy had asked, not caring if he annoyed her because she was sitting next to Jay and because he really didn’t care if he annoyed her anyway. She said she had not, really, but there had been discussions of poets. “Well, maybe you just didn’t hear about it because you didn’t study poetry,” Bumpy said. “That’s the point,” Jay told him. “What’s the point?” Bumpy had asked. “If it was famous, then everyone heard about it.” “Well, that’s just wrong,” Bumpy told him. “Lots of things are famous without everyone knowing about it.” “You ask me,” Jay said, “Nothing’s famous unless everyone’s heard about it.” Bumpy had conceded the point by default that night because they had gotten bored and moved onto something else, but he had always used the word famously when he told that story thereafter to see if anyone else would pick up on it the way Jay had. Bumpy did not think that Jay was not being a jerk; Jay had been doing exactly what Bumpy liked having Jay around for: to have conversations along the lines of whether a poet was or had been famous, and things like that. Those, to Bumpy, were infinitely more fascinating conversations 248

than whatever else they had talked about that night – as could be proven by the fact that he could no longer remember the names of the girls they’d sat with, and could no longer remember what else they had discussed. But he had never forgotten the conversation about whether Ezra Pound’s year of sonnets was famous, and enjoyed having Jay around to talk to about things like that. Bumpy wondered, too, if it was really true that Pound had done that – he didn’t remember where he’d heard the story and had never really made an effort to verify or disprove it. He didn’t want to disprove it, because he liked the idea. He didn’t want to verify it, either, because he didn’t really know how to do something like that. He supposed, from time to time, that he could look it up on the Internet, but what would that prove? How could he trust a website that was created by anyone, by nobody in particular, and how could he judge how trustworthy the information was? It might be no more credible than his own memory of the idea, and his own memory was suspect because sometimes he thought he’d maybe made the story up long ago and now believed it to be true. The fourth place he’d put the check was in a rolled-up pair of dress socks. The fifth place was in a windbreaker pocket, the sixth was underneath a picture in a frame, between the cardboard backing and the picture. The seventh was the bank, leading to him carrying around more cash than he should and walking by the jewelry store a third time. He was standing and looking at the jewelry store, not wanting to go in, when Teresa called his name.

249

“Hey, it’s you,” she said, walking up to him. He stepped off to the side and she came up and gave him a hug and a quick kiss. “You should have told me you were going to be here.” “I was just killing time. I didn’t think you’d want to come along.” “That’s exactly why I didn’t call you to see if you wanted to come with me to the Mall. Killing time until what?” “Not until anything. Just because I had a lot of it on my hands.” Teresa looked at the jewelry store. “What are you shopping for?” “Nothing in particular.” “Because it looks like you’re shopping for an engagement ring.” “Really?” “It does.” “Why is that?” “Because you’re standing in front of the engagement ring section.” Bumpy hadn’t realized that. He hadn’t realized that there were different kinds of rings, at all. He just thought an engagement ring could be any kind of ring a man bought for a woman, and said so. “Oh, no. Engagement rings are a whole special kind of ring.” “What makes them so special?” A man in the jewelry store was looking at them, but he didn’t come over yet; they had not officially crossed into the store, Bumpy figured, although it was hard to tell. The jewelry stores at this mall (there were three) were laid out in open areas that didn’t look like stores, very much, but instead like collections of 250

display cases creating a maze of gold and diamonds and emeralds (and probably more but those were the only three things he could reliably identify at a jewelry store), all arranged on the corner at the intersection of two wings of the mall, so that they seemed to be an indoor street display, a section that was not so much one unified store as it was a series of small vendors each of whom happened to be selling expensive jewelry instead of, say, meatballs or juice or the things small street vendors, in Bumpy’s mind, sold. He hesitated to move forward because he did not want the salesman to talk to him, but Teresa stepped to the counter and the salesman came down towards her asking if he could help them. His actual words were can I help you but the you was somehow plural. “My… boyfriend… doesn’t know the difference between an engagement ring and plain ordinary rings,” said Teresa, and with the word boyfriend and the salesman’s inclusive you Bumpy was pulled in by the conversational gravity and stepped forward. The salesman began talking, explaining the tradition of engagement rings and how they fit into wedding bands and matched sets and the different kinds of diamond cuts, and he emphasized as he moved into that, the ‘three c’s” of diamonds. Bumpy would later remember that there were three c’s and what they were but not how to rate them. He would remember, too, thinking that the only thing people really cared about when it came to diamonds was the size and not the carats, because the salesman emphasized with some rings the total carats and even Bumpy could see that there were just a bunch of small

251

diamonds on them, while with others there was a large diamond and the salesman said simply carats. It ended with Teresa admiring one the salesman brought out, a large one that shone in the lights the jewelry store had set up around the place probably, Bumpy thought, to specifically highlight the facets of the diamond. The stone was square, and large, and even Bumpy was impressed with how it looked. “Try it on,” said the salesman. “See how you like it.” Teresa looked to Bumpy, who shrugged. So she put the ring on and looked at it and held it up to him. “See?” she said. “This is what I would look like if you had just proposed to me.” Bumpy looked at her and liked the way he could see the diamond reflect in her eyes, liked the way she was teasing him. “Maybe I should just get it for you,” he said. A jumble of thoughts went across her face and he was amazed. He’d never seen anyone’s thoughts run through their mind like that before. Her expression actually changed, once, twice, and then was restored, and he could see it all happen. “You’re teasing,” she said. The salesman stepped back a half-step. “Maybe,” Bumpy told her. “But it sure looks good on you.” He was aware of the money in his wallet now, the cash, sitting there in its 7th spot in as many days. 252

“Maybe you should get it for me, then,” Teresa said, only a little hesitatingly. Bumpy pulled out his wallet. “Cash is okay, right?” he said to the salesman. “You really are serious?” Teresa asked. “It seems like it, doesn’t it?” Bumpy looked at her, realizing that was an ambiguous answer. “Do you like the ring?” “Yes, but, it’s an engagement ring. I can’t just go around wearing an engagement ring.” Teresa expected Bumpy to back off, more or less, at that point. Part of her thought he would put away the wallet and say they would come back. Part of her thought he might be trying to impress her and he would buy the ring and say it was for later. There was no part of her which anticipated he would say what he said next, which was: “Why not?” “Because I’m not engaged.” She had almost started to say we’re not but had changed it at the last second. To say we’re not, to make her and him into a we seemed too forward and she was wondering if she had overdone this already. “Then maybe we should be engaged.” Bumpy smiled at her now and pulled the money out, counting out hundreds and handed them to the salesman. “Maybe we should get you the ring and you should be engaged, to me, and then you can wear the ring.”

253

Teresa looked at the salesman, who had picked up the cash and put the ring’s box on the counter. “Are you asking me to marry you?” she said. “Really?” “If I want to get engaged to you, then I also want to marry you. It makes sense, doesn’t it? So, yes. Teresa, why don’t you say you’ll marry me and then I can finish buying this engagement ring for you and we’ll be engaged and you can wear it?” He had turned towards her and was looking seriously at her and holding the ring out. Teresa had tears in her eyes, tears that conflicted with the smile she was trying to muster and a slightly upset look. “You better not be joking,” she said. “Don’t joke about this.” It had only been a week since their first date, she realized. It had only been 6 weeks since she had first met him. She had spoken to him on the phone three times in between meeting him and their first date. So she said, then: “You had better not be serious. We can’t get engaged. That’s crazy.” “Why?” Bumpy asked. “Because…” But Teresa didn’t want to tell the salesman, who was still listening, that they had only known each other six weeks. Teresa did not want to run over those statistics with the salesman listening. And she remembered standing next to Bumpy, side by side, kissing him. She remembered the moonlight coming in past the small cactus on the high window in his bedroom.

254

“Just say you want to be engaged, to me, and you want to marry me,” Bumpy said to her, now. This whole time, Teresa had been holding her hand out, where it had been at first. Bumpy now put the ring on it, so it looked as though she was displaying the ring. A few people other people in the store were now watching, too, the salesman and a few customers, and an elderly lady who was walking by. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll get married.”

255

August 1: The air conditioner in Donovan’s was a relief to Sarah, who pushed the door open and breathed a sigh of relief as the wave of cold air hit her. She felt the beads of sweat that had formed on her forehead and neck condense as her heels clicked on the tile floor just inside the bakery, and she rubbed her hand over the back of her neck, coming away with damp, salty perspiration that she wiped onto a napkin she took off the counter and then, once it was used, placed carefully into the trash can near the cooler that held the ice cream cakes. Donovan’s was not that crowded. Bakeries, she supposed, were not the most popular destination on a sweltering August day, as people were more likely to seek out swimming pools or ice cream shops. She wondered, briefly, whether anyone called them ice cream parlors anymore. It was a phrase Mom had used when they were talking the other day, Mom telling Sarah that maybe when it cooled off a little they could go to an ice cream parlor, to which Sarah had responded that when it cooled off a little, they would not likely want to go to an ice cream shop. Mom had then said that she would still like some ice cream, anyway, if the doctors would let her have it. And that she would like to go to an ice cream parlor for it. Sarah had privately thought that the doctors would not very likely care much about whether her mother ate ice cream or not. When the doctors spoke to Mom, they made dietary recommendations, but privately told Sarah that it was

256

important that her mother eat something, and not to worry too much about what she ate. Later in the day, when her mother was asleep, Sarah had felt bad about the way that she had discussed the potential of a trip to get ice cream. She had reacted sharply, she knew, because her mother was not going to go to get ice cream, at all. There were too many logistical problems with such a trip, too many tubes and monitors and the wheelchair and the oxygen tank, too much to even contemplate the trip. Just thinking about doing such a thing had Sarah instantly fast-forwarding in her mind to the ice cream shop, to the parlor where Mom would sit in her wheelchair with the attached oxygen tank and IV bag and be slumped over, and other people trying not to appear to look at Mom while trying at the same time to look at her and see what was going on. That, that image, made Sarah want to poke herself in the eye for thinking it, and for thinking that she, and her mother, would both regret being the center of such attention. Sarah did not want to admit to herself that part of her motivation in trying to downplay the ice cream trip was that she did not want to subject either herself or her mother to that. She could not say that to her mother, , could not say Mom, you don’t want people staring at you and wondering what’s wrong and trying not to look like they’re staring at you. But even while Sarah thought that, she tried also to think about the people who would be having a fine day, a summer trip to get ice cream with jimmies on the cone or maybe chocolate dipped, people who were thinking that later on they would relax in the backyard and maybe grill out, and they would be suddenly contemplating their 257

own mortality and feeling terrible because they had not called their mothers in so long, or had not returned a call to their mother once and now she was dead. Sarah tried to tell herself that she was, in not taking Mom for ice cream, helping those people, too. And what if Mom had died while at the shop? Sarah had felt miserable and crabby for two days about the whole thing and now today had decided to make it up to Mother by bringing her here, to Donovan’s, but she wanted to make sure first that everything would be okay, and so she had made this stop, now, on the way to the hospital, before her visit to look around. It was 10 o’clock in the morning and there was a couple at the table sitting and flipping through a book. There was a middle-aged woman in an apron wiping off the counter, and she could hear dishes being done in the back room. “Can I help you?” the woman at the counter asked. Sarah looked again at the couple and exhaled and said to the woman: “How crowded are you expecting to be today, around 11:30?” The woman looked curious, for a moment, and said “It’s kind of slow these days. Maybe 5, maybe 10 people around that time. Picks up a little more around 12, 12:15.” Sarah was looking at the glass counter in front of her, at the rows of cookies shaped like dinosaurs and the letter “W” and baseballs, all colorfully frosted. “Do you have any elephant ears?” she asked.

258

“We’ve got a few here,” the lady said, and pointed to her right, to the halffull doughnut cabinet. There, near the back, were the large pastries that Mom liked so much. There were only three there. “Do I know you?” the woman asked, cocking her head. Sarah shook her head, then nodded. “Maybe. I don’t really know you. I come in here a lot. I get stuff for my mom.” “Who’s your mom?” the lady asked, and when Sarah told her she nodded. “The elephant ears made me think of that. We don’t get a lot of people asking for them. I only make about six a day.” She smiled. “They’re kind of out-of-style these days.” “Mom loves them,” Sarah said. “I know she does. She bought at least one most of the days she used to come in here.” There was a pause and the lady looked over at the couple, who were folding up the book. “How is she doing?” Sarah hesitated, and then told the truth. The woman grimaced and said she was sorry but was interrupted by the couple, who came up to the counter. “Excuse me,” the woman in the couple called over towards where Sarah and the baker stood. That woman was holding the man’s hand. The man set the book down. “Make a decision?” asked the lady. She turned back to Sarah. “Can you excuse me a moment?” Sarah nodded and stepped to the right, looking at the fancier pastries and brownies that were being set up for the lunch crowd. Off further was a deli cabinet with pre-made sandwiches in it and bottles of juice. 259

Sarah stepped a few feet away but still heard bits of the conversation with the couple and the woman. Things like how many layers and number of guests and then some people get more than one flavor and the man said “Carrot cake wouldn’t be very popular, I bet,” and the woman disagreed and said that a lot more people liked it than he would think. Sarah read the labels on the sandwiches. The ingredients were listed even on these sandwiches, and she wondered whether that was required by law. Each label had a small section labeled Ingredients and then said simple things like turkey, lettuce, rye bread. She wondered why “rye bread” could be listed as “rye bread” here, but in the grocery store “rye bread” had to list its own ingredients on the label, had to have all the niacins and riboflavins set out on the label. The couple finally finished with their order and Sarah kept looking at the sandwiches and then felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around to see the woman standing there. “I’m sorry to have interrupted,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I couldn’t help overhearing. I hope your mother gets well.” Sarah thanked her. The woman and the man left and as the door swung slowly shut Sarah felt a bit of the heat seep in, a momentary dip in the coolness of the air conditioning that must be kept extra-cold, she realized, to offset the heat that would be generated by the ovens. The baker came back over, standing behind a section of brownies with bright colored insides and candy on top. “Thanks for letting me help them,” she said. “They’re getting married,” she added. 260

Sarah nodded and looked at the brownies. “So, why’d you want to know if we’re crowded?” “I was thinking of bringing Mom in here for lunch, today, but I didn’t want to make a scene or interrupt your busy time, and it’s a little difficult to get her around sometimes,” Sarah said, keeping her voice neutral. The book of possible wedding cakes was still by the cash register and Sarah could not help but look over at it, not just once but a few times. Each time, she quickly wondered what the options were for wedding cakes in that book, how many could be selected from. She wondered, each time, for just a second or so, how many tiers a cake would have to be for a medium-sized wedding, a wedding that would not have been ostentatious or very expensive, but nonetheless would have been fancy enough to let people know that some thought and feeling had gone into it to make sure that people had a good time and enjoyed themselves and that it was the right level of fanciness. “But maybe I won’t bring her, I guess” Sarah added after a moment. “No, you should. I remember your mom. I’d like to see her again. I can even bake up some elephant ears for her, special, if you want. Make sure they’re fresh.” Sarah forced herself to keep looking at the brownies instead of the book. “If you’re sure it’s no trouble,” she said. “It’s no trouble. Bring her by. We’ll have a table set up for her. What was it she liked to eat for lunch?”

261

“It doesn’t really matter,” Sarah said. “She doesn’t eat much, these days. So it doesn’t really matter.” She started to walk out and stopped, and said, “But the elephant ears would be nice, if that’s not too much trouble.” “No trouble. We’re a bakery. I’ll make a couple up. What time did you say?” “11:30.” Sarah started to walk out again, and she opened the door. She felt a wave of heat hit her, smashing into her, almost, fighting to force in past the colder air rushing out the door past her. She stopped and turned again. “Something else?” the lady said. “How big of a cake, a wedding cake, would you need to order for 95 people or so?” Sarah asked. “Are you getting married? I can show you the book,” the woman told her. “No. I was just wondering.” “Let me look,” the woman said. “I don’t keep that in my head.” She opened the book and began flipping through it. Sarah walked out the door before the woman could find the answer. Outside, in her car, she felt the weight of the heat pressing down on her and looked to her right, only to see the box of fliers (or pamphlets or whatever they were) that Jane had given her and asked her to post. “Staple them around town, on light posts and kiosks and bulletin boards at your hospital,” Jane had told her.

262

Sarah looked at the box now and felt angry and depressed by the stack of papers sitting there, papers made up on Jane’s computer and copied at Jane’s office and brought in to hand out to group members. She felt imposed on by the box sitting there in her car. “Oh, I don’t know,” Sarah had told her, then, as Jane handed her a box of them. “Sarah, you really should. It would help get the word out and get more people to know, and it’s important that … we all… pitch in.” Sarah sat in her car now waiting for the air conditioner to begin conditioning the air, as Dylan had said before (it’s not conditioned yet, he’d said once, a few years back, when she’d asked why he had clicked off the vents as they drove. There’s no point blowing hot air on me. Let it cool down and then start. Sarah did not listen to Dylan, then or now; she always turned the vents on immediately, letting the hot air blow out before it turned cold (or the cold air in the winter, before the engine heated up). Yet, though she didn’t follow his lead or advice, Sarah had secretly and for reasons unclear to her been proud of Dylan that he’d looked at things that way. Maybe it was that she was proud of him showing a practical application of his unlikely thinking – it was something he could look at in his offkey way and make better instead of just… offkey. She didn’t, today, even think of Dylan as she sat and felt the warm air blast her and waited silently for the cooler air, as she sat back in her too-hot car and wondered where she was supposed to staple these … fliers, and also wondered whether Jane had really hesitated when speaking, whether Jane had said: 263

it’s important that … we all… pitch in or simply it’s important that we all pitch in. Sarah also wondered what Jane had meant when Jane had said, moments later “You’ve helped a lot already by talking to the reporters and I can see they like to talk to you. But we need more attention.” Now, in the heat of her car, Sarah questioned if she herself had not gone back and mentally edited the conversation, adding a pause where Jane had said we all because the reporter comment had made Sarah edgy in retrospect, because she felt that Jane was thinking Sarah was trying to hog the spotlight. A few others had been watching the exchange as people left the little room after the meeting and began to walk back out to their lives, each life missing one person in it, all these people meeting together because they were all short a person in their life. Those others were looking back, or looking to the side, as Jane held the box to Sarah, who left her hands at her side for as long as she felt it was polite to do so, finally only then taking the box and saying “Sure.” There was a pause and then Sarah said “Okay,” only later to realize that she’d said sure and okay and they meant the same thing, and that what she should have said was something like I’d be glad to or thanked Jane. But she didn’t want to thank Jane or say she’d be glad to do this, and she looked at the box now and was angry at Jane for giving her a task, for adding to the things she had to do today. She felt like throwing the pamphlets out. She wondered if she could do that, not physically because of course she could 264

physically throw them away. She tried to decide if instead she was… emotionally? capable of throwing out the pamphlets? Was emotionally the right word? The air was cool now and she felt the vents blowing towards her shoulder, hitting her skin there and cooling it down fiercely. She thought maybe she should take a pamphlet inside to the bakery and ask them to put one in the window or maybe leave the stack of them there. Couldn’t people just pick them up and read them? Did she have to go staple them to the lampposts, next to the missing dogs and cats and rummage sales that were being advertised or sought? ARE THE POLICE SERVING YOU AND PROTECTING YOU? The fliers asked, in bold print that Sarah guessed was at least 36 font. There was a photo montage of snapshots of headlines about missing people, newspapers, each framed in a Polaroid-style picture that Sarah thought most people would maybe still recognize as a photo. Nobody took Polaroids anymore, she knew, and she knew, too, that Sarah had not taken Polaroids of the headlines, either; she’d used a photo-imaging program to make the collage. It worked. Despite her annoyance, Sarah thought that the Polaroids made the collage seem both dated and important, like watching a rerun of the news. Underneath the collage were the words BE SAFE. LEARN HOW TO HELP and the phone number for the group that Jane had set up. Sarah had been impressed, just a little bit, that Jane had paid to set up a second phone line to take calls for the group, and also a little apprehensive that this group was going to get bigger, yet. And it was going to include people who had not lost anyone, 265

people who had an entire family, people whose dead loved ones had died explicably, who had passed away in bed or in a car accident or of a heart attack while jogging. She’d read somewhere that nearly 50 people each year died running marathons. Or she thought that she’d read that. She wondered if there was a group for their survivors, people who could not hear about the Boston Marathon without becoming saddened. Sarah tried to keep her mind off of the pamphlets as she finally began backing the car up to pull out of the parking lot. Once on the road, she drove in what she felt was an aimless fashion, turning left and then right and then going straight for a while. When she got to a neighborhood that she did not recognize, she pulled over on a shady street and got out with the box of fliers and closed her car door, locking it first. She got onto the sidewalk and carried her fliers and walked down to the first lamppost she could see. There was one flier on it already, announcing a “SALE – BIG” with an arrow pointing up, the sale being further up the street. She opened the box and took out a flier, and then realized she had no stapler, nothing to fix the fliers to the pole with. “The goal is,” Jane had said “To raise awareness even more.” She’d had the stacks of boxes of fliers there next to her, fifteen boxes of them (and I can make some more, she’d told them) “And to keep the pressure on the police,” she had added. “And the local government officials. Especially now, I think, it’s important to make sure that everyone knows and people who maybe don’t read the paper or watch TV can hear about us, too.” 266

And who is that? Sarah had wanted to say. Who are these people who neither read the paper nor watch the TV, but who will still be helpful to our group, will be willing to listen to us and sympathize with us and will be able to convince their neighbors or friends that there is a killer, that someone is responsible for these deaths? But she had not said that. She had briefly wondered who, besides maybe Dylan, would not read the paper or watch the television news, but had been distracted from that by Jane beginning to talk about an ex-FBI agent who had interviewed her, who had reviewed the police reports. He had been here six months ago and he was coming back soon and she wanted the local papers to talk about it and people to be excited about it and drum up some excitement. “He may write some articles about it, for national magazines. Or maybe a book,” Jane had said. Sarah had thought Jane sounded proud that there might be a book. Or maybe it was that she was excited by an ex-FBI agent investigating. As Jane discussed the phone number that had been set up and then put on the fliers, and the voice mail message people would get, Sarah had spent the time considering whether it was impressive to be an ex-FBI agent. She had decided it was, but only if the reason for being an ex-FBI agent was a good one. Now, today, she sat back down in her car, sweaty again, and set the package of fliers on the seat next to her. After a moment, she leaned over, picked up the box, and put it in the back seat, out of her line of sight. 267

January 6: Bumpy felt like he was going to throw up. He wiped his forehead and his forearm came away damp, more than damp really, wet. He could feel sweat dripping down his neck, and how often did that happen? He was also shivering. It had been getting worse all day. He wondered if maybe he wasn’t allergic to something. This happened from time to time and he never knew what to do. He would get sick like this, and he could always tell it was going to happen, just as it had happened today. He’d woken up about 9 a.m. and had rolled over in bed and his throat hurt and his eyes were burning and dry, and he knew but he tried to tell himself I was just up too late last night and he had been, too. Despite his strict rule on not writing until all hours of the night, he did so anyway last night, and had very nearly finished the script, had gotten near the end and had decided then and there that he had to stop because it was 2 a.m. and he was exhausted and he didn’t want to be writing until all hours convincing himself it was great when maybe it wasn’t. So he had gone to bed and when he’d done so he’d turned his alarm clock off. “You’re so lucky,” Jay had told him once. “You know when I get to turn my alarm clock off? Sundays, sometimes, if I’ve worked especially hard the Saturday before and I decide I don’t need to go into the office on a given Sunday. And that’s rare.”

268

Bumpy had shrugged and put another ice cube into his coffee. Jay liked the fancy coffees that could be bought at the fancy coffee shops that had proliferated around campus, the multitude of shops causing Jay to remark that as much as he liked the coffee he didn’t see how college students could afford it, unless college students were far better off financially than college students should be… “It’s not college,” Jay had said, the first time they’d come down here to have coffee “if you’re not struggling through it. How else will they be grateful to have a job that makes them work only 6 days a week?” That was one of Jay’s frequent mantras, that difficult times in college, having to work and go to classes and do homework and still never having money, made it possible to appreciate just having to work—minus all the homework and financial trouble and classes -once one graduated from college. Bumpy had shrugged and said that Jay should just find a job that doesn’t make him work seven days a week, and Jay had mumbled something about student loans, and then had looked at Bumpy and said: “Why do you even have an alarm clock?” Bumpy shrugged again. “I don’t know. It seems like something I’m supposed to have. At some point, I may need to get up at a certain time in the morning.” Bumpy knew that Jay wondered how he supported himself, knew that because Jay had asked him a couple of times, and Bumpy had put him off, joked that he’d won the lottery, one time, and joked that he was dating several heiresses

269

on another, and then had for a while answered that question by simply saying that he clipped coupons. He did not clip coupons, but he did set his alarm clock every night. Most nights he did not turn it back off after setting it, as he’d done last night because it was so late. He supposed everyone assumed that he stayed up all night watching TV or reading or drinking or whatever single guys with no “real” job did, but why would he want to do that? Who wanted to be up all night? Nighttime television was terrible, worse than daytime by far, and most television shows were not that great. Going out at night was all right, to a point, but he didn’t like to be out all the time by himself and his small circle of friends was filled up with people who lived 9-to-5 lives. It was easier for him to live on the same schedule as most of the world, getting up and doing his living while it was mostly light out. Although, Bumpy had mused from time to time, nine to five wasn’t the case anymore, making him wonder why the phrase stuck; even Jay, who worked from 7:30 a.m. until about 6:30 p.m. most days, including Saturdays and a lot of Sundays, described himself at times as having a “9 to 5” job. In fact, Bumpy found himself many times waiting for people to ask him if he didn’t do that: stay up late and sleep in and go out all the time. Bumpy anticipated the question so that he could say no, I don’t, so he could explain he didn’t live that way. But people never asked him. So, in the absence of the question, Bumpy assumed that they assumed that he lived like that, and that they didn’t ask him about it for some reason, all of which made him feel ill at ease around some people when he began thinking they were looking at him and 270

suspecting him of being out until 5 a.m., of sleeping until 3 in the afternoon, of eating cereal directly from the box for dinner. He didn’t do those things, but he felt as though he presented the image of someone who did. When he’d woken up this morning, he’d felt his eyes burning and knew by the end of the day he’d be sick, knew by the end of the day he would be miserable, but he tried to ignore it. If he’d told Sarah about this feeling, about getting gthis way from time to time, Sarah would have told him to go to a doctor, but he never told Sarah about it. He never told anyone about it; he rarely asked about these things. He rarely discussed his health, rarely discussed the million little things that he suspected he was doing wrong in his life, things that he’d had to figure out on his own because nobody showed him how to do them, things ranging from cutting his toenails to how to pronounce words to whether it was normal to periodically be sick like this with no cause for it apparent. He wondered, on days like this, whether his life was like others’ lives. He would think: How do you ask that? How do you start a conversation about whether they, too, seem to always cut their toenails too short so that their toes hurt for a day or two after they cut their toenails? There was no easy way to work that into the conversation, and he didn’t know who he would talk to about that. Not Sarah; she would not laugh at him but she would not be happy about being asked a question like Am I cutting my toenails right? He had asked Sarah, once, whether he had pronounced a word correctly. He had been talking with her and Peyton and had said that a speaker Peyton was 271

talking about sounded erudite and then had paused, had paused just before and just after the word and said, just after his pause: “Is that the right way to say that?” “The right way to say what?” Sarah said. “Erudite,” Bumpy had answered, pronouncing it air-you-dite. “Or should it be air-oo-dite?” Peyton had said he wasn’t sure. Sarah had said “How can you know the word but not know how to pronounce it?” Bumpy said “I read it. I’ve read the word a lot, but I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it. So I know what it means, but I don’t know how to pronounce it.” “So why use it then?” Sarah asked. “Why not just use a word you know how to pronounce?” When he’d gotten home that night, Bumpy had turned on his laptop and gone onto the Internet and found a pronunciation guide and online dictionary, one that had a feature that let you hear the words out loud. After learning that it was pronounced air-you-dite, he had spent nearly an hour thinking of other words he had read but never used in conversation, and had listened to them pronounced, too. Then he had started clicking on synonyms and nearby words, listening to the voice on the Internet read words to him until finally he got tired and quit to go to bed.

272

He did not thereafter venture questions like that, not to Sarah and not to many other people, but he still spent a great deal of time wondering how other people did things, whether other people went through what he did, whether he was normal. Throughout this day, he’d gotten progressively worse. He was dizzy when he stood up, and felt hungry but he didn’t want to eat because while he was hungry his stomach felt like there was a shot-put in it, and he worried that if he ate he would vomit. He drank water, ice water, all day, not waiting for the cubes to fall from the refrigerator’s automatic ice dispenser but instead opening up the freezer and pulling the cubes from the tub inside, then filling his large souvenir water bottle (gotten from a theme park several years before) with water from the faucet. Through it all, he kept trying to finish the last 10-or-so pages of his script, working to get it done before he actually got sick; this, he knew, was the preliminary stage. He was not sick yet. By noon, he was done with the script and felt that he’d beaten the rush, made it before a deadline that something had imposed on him. And, that he’d finished it up well. He typed the title page, something he’d always done last when he wrote. Every author he’d ever known, every writer he’d ever imagined, loved to start with the title page, loved to start with the title, and he wanted to be different, wanted his writing to have a different feel, so he’d vowed to himself never to have the title until the end, never to come up with any title until he wrote the final page, the final word.

273

He’d been working on the script for four months now, after he had decided to write a script only because he’d wondered if he could, a wondering that began when he’d come across a how-to guide for script writing. The how-to guide had caught his eye at a book store. He’d picked it up and looked at it, read the back cover, and read about the author, and had skimmed through it, there in the bookstore, picking pages at random and reading them. It had looked interesting, the way it laid out the process of writing a script, and so he’d continued flipping through it, wondered as he turned the pages and read bits and pieces of the advice if he could write a script. He’d written short stories, and he’d written a novel, and neither of those types of writing had proved very challenging (although neither had brought much success as yet, or any success, really). It couldn’t hurt to write a script, he’d thought, and he’d bought the book, read it in a few days, and then set out to write his script. Now, he sat and looked at what he was working on and wondered if his sense of humor was such that the kinds of things he found funny would be the kind of things other people would think were funny, whether the madcap—he liked that word and had vowed to use it a lot in selling the script—the madcap adventures of his characters were too strange, too prat-fall-ish, too off-kilter, to catch on. In the world he’d created in the script, everything took left turns. That was how he had conceived it in the first place. He wanted to have nothing progress in a linear fashion, but that sounded too pretentious when he said it, so when he thought about how the stories should go, how the arcs should… arc, he’d decided 274

to focus on everything taking left turns as his organizing principle, everything going off in a direction one would not expect. Whenever he felt, as he was writing it, that the story got predictable, he would try to write something completely unexpected. He wanted to viewer, if there were ever viewers for this script, to be constantly surprised. Plus it was more fun to write it that way. He slumped now at the coffee table he’d moved the laptop to for convenience this morning. After eleven o’clock, after the sun was high enough to not shine into his eyes, he could sit comfortably at the coffee table, sitting on the couch to type. He did not usually sit there to write. He opted to sit at his desk for several reasons. The sun shining through in the morning was only one factor. It could be blinding. Too, he had trouble sitting on the couch and typing because he had to hunch over, as the coffee table was not high enough to sit comfortably in front of and type. That and the windows provided a distraction that was too constant if he faced them. Above all, he felt more writerly sitting at a desk, felt as though it was more of a real occupation when he sat at a desk, felt less defensive about how he spent the bulk of his time when he sat at a real desk with pens and pads of paper and a thesaurus which he never used but which he’d bought at the same bookstore where he’d bought the script-writing book, buying it because he felt writers needed something on their desks as tools of the trade, and a thesaurus seemed like the thing to have.

275

The thesaurus also had as part of its set up inclusion of antonyms for words, and while Bumpy never used it in his writing – if he could not think of a word immediately he did not want to use it in a story, because it would not seem natural – he sometimes took a break and thumbed through the entries, looking at synonyms for words and antonyms for those words and wondering what it was like to work for a company writing a thesaurus, deciding the order of the words that would go in the entry, deciding that some words would be left out, some words would be added. How do you end up with that job? He wondered. It seemed like the kind of job a person “ended up” at instead of seeking out. Bumpy had little experience with any kind of job, but in his mind, jobs fell into two broad classifications, those that were the end results of searches and labor and plans and goals, jobs one tried for, and jobs that were the end result of chance and happenstance. He considered, now, sitting at the table, calling his script, his television series, his show, “Happenstance.” He stood up, steadying himself for a moment, and walked across the room to the desk, getting the thesaurus and standing by the desk a moment, rubbing his sweaty cheek with his right hand while he held the thesaurus in the left. He swayed a little. He went back and sat down heavily on the couch, thesaurus in his hand. On the laptop screen was a blank white page, the cover page for his show. He stared at it for a second, then looked out his window, seeing the edge of a window molding on the next building, a window that was as it turned out perfectly centered in his own window from this angle: Through the right-most 276

window in his living room, when he sat on the couch in the middle of the couch, Bumpy could see the top edge of the window on the top floor of the building next to him. When he sat just so on the couch, as he was now, the edges of that window aligned nearly perfectly, geometrically, with his own window’s edges, forming a pattern he liked to see. He tended to sit in the middle of his own couch whenever he sat here. He had always done that, sat in the middle. When he’d been at Jay’s house one time, he had noticed that the couch was sunken, just a little, on each end, while the middle of the couch looked firm and new-ish. He realized that Jay and Jay’s wife must sit on the ends of the couches, which made sense because they would want room to spread out and because the arms of the couch were there to rest against. Most people, he guessed, would sit on one end of the couch or the other. He didn’t do that, even after the visit to Jay’s. He kept on sitting in the middle of his couch whenever nobody was around, moving over only when other people were there on the couch, too. Looking away from the window, rubbing his forehead a little as it started to ache, he read in the thesaurus that happenchance was a synonym for happenstance and tried to picture how happenchance had lost the battle, why happenchance wasn’t the word that people used. Happenchance seemed more fitting to him than happenstance because the forgotten word more accurately described how, for example, someone might end up working for a thesaurus company as the person in charge of the entry on happenstance, deciding to include happenchance on the list even though nobody really used that word 277

anymore. People got that job and chose that word by happenchance, Bumpy thought and he pictured the thesaurus worker, probably someone like him, sitting at their desk at their job and typing this entry and thinking, even as Bumpy was now, about how the word happenchance was not really used anymore and then wondering why. It sounds a little British, he thought, now, about happenchance. Then he laid down on his side and watched the blank screen on the laptop. He closed the thesaurus. He thought he should title the script Happenchance but if that sounded too British that might then get it rejected just for that reason. Then he realized that Happenchance was somewhat, at least, descriptive of what actually occurred in the script and he should not, under any circumstances, name it that because that would be predictable; the title would tell the viewer, if there were ever viewers (he could not help but add that each time he thought of the hypothetical viewer, adding it as a hedge against overconfidence) would tell the viewer exactly what to expect. He sat up and picked up the laptop, not quite closing it. He walked it back over to the desk and sat down. He was breathing a little heavily and felt tired. And more nauseated. He typed the word: Mundanity on the blank page on the screen and then plugged in the printer and set the whole thing to print. He did not type the word in large print, or unusual font, or anything like that. He just typed it and began printing the script. He sat there for a second listening to the printers make its paper shuffling sound, and then 278

opened up an Internet window and began searching for a publisher to send this to. Not a publisher, he realized, but a producer or production company. He searched for “production companies,” and got a list of them on a website. He didn’t know how reliable the website was or how accurate the addresses might be or even how long the information had been there. He clicked through to some other websites but none of them seemed to have any information. He went back to the first one. It appeared to be a page created by someone who themselves had written a script at some point or another, a page that this person had compiled, the top of the screen said, as a resource for other people to begin with, too. Production Companies it was titled. The book he’d read had talked repeatedly about production companies. Bumpy’s mind felt a little hazy and he began wondering for a moment who goes to all the trouble of putting information onto the Internet for free, information that would help the person’s competitors out, information that would help others get their television show made, something that then may result in that website-person’s own television show not getting made. Bumpy felt pretty sure there was a finite limit of television shows that could be made at a given time. Then he wondered if “Mundanity” was actually the antonym for “happenchance” as he’d supposed it was when he selected it for the title and was tempted to check it out in his thesaurus, or maybe online. He was more and more looking things up online these days because he enjoyed seeing the various 279

ways the information was compiled, the sheer number of people who put information together for others to read and absorb, for free. But he decided not to look it up, anywhere, both because he did not want to change the title (he never deleted anything once he’d written it) and because he wanted to finish this, send it out, before he was well and truly sick. He scanned through the list now, the list of production companies that maybe was suspect or maybe was not. How likely was it that someone, someone who worked in the screenplay writing industry, would go to all the trouble of deliberately misleading others by creating a website with fake addresses or production companies? He wondered. It seemed to him that was as likely as someone working in the industry deciding to put all this information online for free. Either possibility (fake or weirdly helpful) seemed equally probable to him. Down near the end of the page, he saw Rockwall Productions, with an address that looked odd. After a moment, he realized the address was in England. He would have to go to the post office to mail the script to make sure the postage was right. But it seemed to him that the production company was the one he should send his script to.

280

July 15: “I’m sorry, who did you say you were?” Sarah tried to hold the cell phone tighter against her ear as she walked through the warm rain that spattered down around her, hunching over slightly to keep the rain from hitting her in the face or the front of her uniform. It was more acceptable and more comfortable for her back and shoulders to be slightly damp for a while than for her front. On the other end of the phone, faintly and with the hesitations that occurred so often in some cell phone conversations, Sarah heard a man’s voice say “Bill Buckton.” It sounded fake. Sarah did not ask what the man wanted to talk to her about. She did not recognize the name and told him so, adding “How did you get this number?” In Sarah’s mind, cell phone numbers were sacrosanct; they were the last secretthat’s-shared, an in-crowd for adults. They were something only a few people could know about you, those you told. Giving out someone’s cell phone number without telling the number’s owner that you are doing so is not done. “Jane,” the man added. Sarah now realized who the man was and paused outside of the hospital doors, just underneath the overhang where a patient and a friend or relative were sitting, also. The relative was smoking, right next to the sign that said “This is a hospital. There is no smoking on these premises.” Sarah wondered if the visitor had made the patient come outside with him so that the visitor could have a cigarette, and felt that showed a lot of gall. She gave an angry look at the visitor 281

and pointed towards the sign. The visitor, younger than her, pointedly looked the other way. “I thought maybe we could arrange a time to talk,” the man on the other end of her own phone call said, now. He was the ex-FBI agent, the man writing a book. “I’m not sure I want to do that,” Sarah said in a quieter voice that she worried would be unintelligible on the other end of the line. She had a tendency to talk too loudly into cell phones, overcoming weak signals and static and those annoying interruptions, momentary lapses that make you think the person had switched off, by use of loud volume. She tried consciously to speak quietly now, to not be overheard, but worried that she would not be heard. Sarah did not like her cell phone very much. It had always caused her no small amount of annoyance with Peyton, who was a man prone to not always filling in the gaps, and who professed, at times, to not be sure that she was done talking, so he left silences hanging at times. Peyton also did not always respond to sentences if they did not immediately require a response. If Sarah expressed an opinion on a subject and Peyton had no opinion on it, if Sarah said that a restaurant appeared to be going out of business and Peyton had not seen the restaurant, Peyton, at times, simply did not respond until Sarah asked him what he thought. She never believed he did that to irritate her (although it did annoy her much of the time.) She knew that he was a quiet person and knew that he was

282

that rare person that did not mind the gaps in noise that occurred in modern life, as so many others do mind them. Peyton, she had learned, enjoyed the gaps. That caused problems on cell phones and began Sarah’s dislike of them, because Sarah, like everyone else she saw using a cell phone, never believed it really worked. She was always waiting for the call to be dropped or the cell phone to run out of power or static or interference to cause problems. (Peyton had believed, too, that CB radios on semis could interfere with cell phones, and also that traffic lights caused interference with cell phones. He had outlined for her, one time, early on, his theory that radio waves in CB radios, and what he speculated were radio waves controlling the traffic lights, caused interference with the signals used for cell phones. Sarah had asked him if cell phones used radio waves, and Peyton had admitted that he did not know what cell phones used, exactly, to transmit their signals. He’d told her he believed they were mostly digital signals, but was not sure what that meant. Then he’d said, too, that he wasn’t entirely sure that traffic lights, either, were controlled by radio signals, finishing with the statement that something always caused his radio to emit static near traffic lights.) Peyton’s enjoyment of the breaks in noise, the unfilled portions of conversation, though (or if not enjoyment at least not being bothered by them) meant that cell phone conversations were problematic because if there was silence on the other end of the line during a cell phone talk, the person who had just finished talking had to interject something like are you still there? So cell phone conversations with Peyton degenerated, inevitably to this: 283

I have to go see my mother. Are you still there? We should go see a movie this week. I saw an advertisement for that new one about the war and it looks bad. Are you still there? Peyton was particularly quiet when receiving a negative opinion. He was reluctant, maybe, to jump on the bandwagon of bad thoughts when he just didn’t have a true opinion yet. She would have to constantly ask: Are you still there? And, inevitably say: I’ll just tell you when I see you tomorrow or when I get home I’ll finish the story. The only thing Sarah did like about cell phones was that they let Peyton call her sometimes and start their conversation, their evenings together, before he was actually there. The ex-FBI agent Bill Buckton with his fake-sounding name was waiting for her to answer and she stared at the visitor and his patient, trying to get the visitor to put his cigarette out and leave. The ex-FBI agent had just said: “You’re something of a media figure, and I don’t ignore that, ever. Those reporters… even local reporters… have a way of picking out the appealing part of a story. And I’ve been reading up on your fiancé… I’m sorry by the way.” Reading up on? What was there to read up on Peyton? Did he have a file?

284

Sarah was expected, now, to say something, but she wasn’t sure what the ex-FBI agent Bill Buckton’s last sentence required her to say; she felt something like Peyton, now (a feeling that made her feel oddly happy for a moment), as she sat on the phone, silently. Bill Buckton said, then: “Are you still there?” And Sarah almost, almost, smiled, but the patient’s visitor threw his cigarette butt on the ground and left it smoldering there and looked at her as he led the patient back inside and that ended the smile. She still enjoyed the fleeting sensation of being the person who didn’t immediately speak up every time someone else stopped, of recreating the conversations she’d had from the other side. “Yes,” she said, irritated and pleased at once and feeling odd because of that. “I’m still here.” Bill Buckton said “I don’t want to make it uncomfortable for you and I’ll work around your schedule. I could come to your house,” Sarah interrupted “My house?” She was somewhat discomfited by the idea of having an FBI agent, or ex-FBI agent, at her house. She did not want to draw more attention to herself. Police cars had parked in her driveway on two or three occasions, letting even those neighbors who did not actually know Sarah in on the secret that something terrible had happened. When she left her house, when she entered her house, if she saw her neighbors, they were looking at her. She didn’t remember if they’d looked at her before. There were only a few that she knew, a little, and she didn’t know any of them well. The ones she knew looked at her and waved, she felt, sympathetically. The ones she did not know looked at her and 285

some of them waved, too, and she was sure that they’d never waved before. She didn’t know why the appearance of police cars in her driveway would make them wave but she did not want them to wave because of that. She didn’t want them to wave at all. And she didn’t want them to wave because they suspected that she or someone related to her had done something terrible or had something terrible done to them. And she especially didn’t want them to wave because they knew about Peyton, which they almost certainly did because neighbors talk and she had been on the news, she was enough of a known quantity to get a call from an ex-FBI agent. She only then realized that as an ex-FBI agent, he wouldn’t be driving a car or van with the FBI insignia on it. Bill Buckton had already continued: “We don’t have to. I can meet you wherever you’d like. It’ll be brief.” He had reviewed the police reports, he said. He had been to the scene, he said. He knew about the footprint, he said. “What do you think?” Sarah said, now, looking around to see if anyone else was around. She held her breath. “I don’t make any conclusions. I wait until I’ve got everything together and then think about it and then decide what I think.” Sarah was disappointed. She tried not to let the disappointment seep through in her voice as she agreed that after work he could meet her and told him where the coffee shop was that she would meet him at. He offered to simply meet 286

her at the hospital cafeteria but she declined. She did not want to do this at work. She wasn’t sure, as she closed her phone and went inside, past the stillsmoldering cigarette butt, if she would actually meet him. Maybe she would cancel. She had wanted him to have a conclusion, a hypothesis, a theory. Something. The fact that he did not have one upset her. It meant that the evidence, the facts, the things he had looked at, the things she had been living, did not all unambiguously add up to anything much. If you went to a crime scene and a body was laying face down on the floor with a knife sticking out of its back, you assumed murder, didn’t you? You assumed the person was stabbed in the back and murdered, right? She asked Bill Buckton as much when she did meet him, later that night, as he sat down with two coffees and put them alongside a small notebook with a pen clipped to it onto the table. Sarah had been looking at the notebook while he’d been getting the coffees. It was bedraggled, held together by a large black binder clip at the top even though it had a spiral down the side. It was small enough to fit into a pocket and she wondered whether Bill Buckton had, in fact, taken it from his windbreaker pocket when he’d come in, had set it on the table and waited for her, facing the doorway and sitting with his left side to the large pane of glass that fronted on the street and looked out onto nothing much at 8 p.m. She had gone to visit Mom before coming here. That was why she was running late. She had left a message to that effect on Bill Buckton’s cell phone 287

the number of which was already programmed into Sarah’s cell phone. She’d done that during a break earlier that day, programming it in almost surreptitiously, and noting that he was an “Investigator.” She had not elevated him, in the notes one could enter on the cell phone address book, to “ex-FBI agent.” “I can’t stay long,” she told him as he sat down with the coffees now, echoing what she had told her mother as she’d stopped in to visit her not long before, mostly to see how dinner went. She thought that maybe that was why Mom had seemed off tonight, had seemed to forcibly-cheery, almost fake cheery, cheer and jokes amidst tiny little complaints that slipped out: a comment that it was excellent that a particular television show was on followed by a comment that having the television up high in the corner that way certainly made it easier to see when she was lying down, those both sandwiched around a small mention that the day was very long and hot and the air conditioning could be a little stronger if she had to stay in bed with a sheet all day. “You don’t have to wear the sheet,” Sarah had said, feeling bad about announcing at the outset that the visit would be short, but feeling that the announcement had been necessary because otherwise people get the idea that it’s a long visit and then when you cut it short they get upset. Did it matter what she said if Mom would be upset either way? Instead of dulling the whole visit with the upfront fact that it was short, maybe she should not have said anything, and the visit would have been a pleasant, or more pleasant, half-hour, with only

288

trouble at the end when Sarah got up to leave and ended the pleasantness by cutting things unexpectedly short. Maybe she should have done that. Mom had told her that she could not sit in a bed without a sheet over her, that it felt silly. Sarah did not worry that she would upset Bill Buckton by saying that she could not stay long, and she sipped at her coffee as he opened his notebook and ticked down the people he had talked to already about the “Killer Theory” as he called it, and that bothered Sarah, too. Was he going to say it was just a theory in his book? She didn’t ask him. Instead, she said “I don’t know what I can really do to help you. I wasn’t there.” “I know,” he said. “My brother was,” Sarah offered. “I know,” Bill Buckton said again. “I’ve left him some messages, too.” “You have?” “Yes. He’s not real good on calling people back, is he?” Bill Buckton smiled in a way Sarah thought was meant to defuse the slight jab at her relative, and she felt she could, should, tell Bill Buckton no, he’s not. He’s not really very good at anything like that. She asked Bill Buckton if Dylan had called back at all. “No.” Pause. “You don’t call him ‘Bumpy?’” Sarah shook her head and sipped her coffee, looking out the window. “Where is he?” she asked. Bill Buckton sat back. He looked at her. 289

He did not express surprise that she did not know where Dylan was living. He did not express surprise about not calling him by his nickname. But she did think that she had surprised him. He picked up his coffee and she thought now he was stalling. He asked: “Did the fight between the two of you start when your fiancé… drowned?” And she caught the pause between fiancé and drowned. She didn’t like that. “We’re not fighting,” she said. Waiting, then, for but you don’t know where he went when he moved abruptly, or some other accusatory kind of question, a cross-examination or bluff. He didn’t. He said, instead: “He’s in Las Vegas.” Sarah looked up at that, surprised. “Where? Why?” “According to his friend, Jay, he moved there to become a photographer. He got some kind of money coming in and moved there and opened up a shop selling photographs of Las Vegas.” Sarah wondered what other money Dylan could have coming in. Bill Buckton, before she asked because she was not going to, said “He sold a script for a television show. Script or idea. Jay was not very clear on it.” “Did Jay help him do that?” “I doubt it. If he’d worked as a lawyer for … Dylan… he probably could not have talked to me. He made clear to me that he was talking as a friend, not as his lawyer.” 290

“He never told me.” ”So I gathered.” Sarah did not want to stay at all now, but she felt indebted to Bill Buckton and felt she had to stay. He had bought her a cup of coffee and he had given her inside information, investigative details he had dug out and provided to her. She wondered, then, if that was why he’d told her that, to make her feel that she owed him something. “Tell me about Peyton,” Bill Buckton said. “I told you, I wasn’t there,” she protested to him. “I don’t want those kind of details,” Bill Buckton told her. “I’ve got those. I need to fill out the details of the people who were… who died.” “You haven’t made up your mind at all?” “I don’t want to, yet. I have my theories but I want to keep an open mind. Things aren’t always what they seem and circumstantial evidence by its very nature can be suspect. And that’s all I’ve got here is circumstantial evidence. Which is good if I can get enough of it. It’s very good if we get enough of it. But without a lot of circumstantial evidence, I don’t have much.” “I don’t follow that.” “Circumstantial evidence is weak when there’s not much. Because it can add up to more than one thing. A bank is robbed and I go to a suspect’s home. He’s got a new car and no job; that’s circumstantial evidence. Maybe he’s got money, but it could be from any number of sources. Maybe he won the lottery. Maybe someone gave him the money. Maybe he bought the car before the bank 291

robbery. Now add in though that he bought the car the day after the bank robbery. That’s a second circumstance, and it’s now less likely there’s an innocent explanation. Add in the third circumstance: he paid cash. Now, how likely is it that he robbed the bank? Still no direct proof, but those three circumstances alone add up to an almost inescapable conclusion that this guy robbed the bank.” “I see.” “That’s why I like to get as much circumstantial evidence as possible. Put enough together and it’s a foregone conclusion. It points conclusively towards your answer. Not like direct evidence.” Sarah just looked at him, so e went on: “Direct evidence is eyewitness stuff. People see things and tell you stuff. Or they say they saw things and tell you. Or they think they saw things and tell you. I hate that.” “Why?” Sarah asked. “Because people are wrong. People lie. People don’t remember things the way they should. They interpret them in their own way and then parrot back the interpretation that they’ve put on it and you can’t shake them. People remember things the way they want regardless of how much evidence you show them to the contrary and unless you can get to them immediately they will remember it in their own way. Even if you can get to them before they lock it into their minds, you can have a problem because they’ll answer your questions and then reshape it.

292

“People,” Bill Buckton finished, “Are not reliable. Evidence is. Circumstances are.” Sarah sipped her coffee again and looked out the window. She began to tell how she’d met Peyton. She hoped she remembered it right.

293

November 21: Bumpy watched luggage come off the racks. He sat on the edge of the luggage dispenser, or luggage conveyor, whichever it was, and ignored the looks of the people who walked up and stood there. He faced, for a few minutes, the direction from which the luggage was coming, watching dark-shaded purple and red and blue luggage come down the conveyor belt. He wondered, in order, whether he should go get some aspirin, then whether any of the shops in the airport would have Gatorade (as that, he knew, could help with a hangover), then, why luggage was always a muted or dim or dark color. He never saw bright red, light sky blue, blazing orange or yellow. Is most travel a depressing thing, to be accomplished quietly and with shades that don’t draw attention to themselves? He wondered. He rubbed his temples and sat and then turned the opposite direction. Looking at where the luggage was going, he knew, would delay seeing one’s luggage coming down the belt. Facing that way, he would not see luggage coming and so could not go grab it the moment it appeared, an action that that was a possibility since there were only about 15… he counted them now, sixteen… people standing around. The flight from Chicago to Madison had been on a small plane and one that had not been full. Not many people meant he could grab luggage, if he wanted, immediately, if he saw it coming. But still he sat and stared in the opposite direction, watching luggage appear from behind him and slide off into the land beyond the plastic flaps that guarded the baggage area.

294

He did not care if he did not see the luggage the moment it emerged. He was not waiting for luggage. His duffel bag with the laptop and its other few items sat at his feet. He was just waiting until he felt like getting up. Felt like going out into the cold. Felt like getting his feet wet. Felt like beginning to sniffle from the wind chill. Felt like his ears turning red and going numb. The weather report as they had landed said it was twenty-five degrees with a wind chill in the teens. Wind chills, when Bumpy had been younger, were things reported with a certainty, things reported to the exact degree. Weathermen would say with authority It will be 37 degrees, but with the wind chill it will feel like 15 degrees. Back when there was less information available, people had been more certain. Now, everyone had access to everything, it seemed, there were more newspapers and television channels and magazines and books and DVDs and of course the Internet, and the multiplying of that information had made everything, and everyone, less certain so that now weatherman said It’s going to feel colder than that. Maybe like in the teens. They no longer gave definite numbers. The more people knew, the less sure they seemed of what it was they knew, Bumpy thought now, and watched as two brown leather bags moved slowly past him and a man elbowed in picked them up, looking at Bumpy for a moment as he did so and then looking pointedly at the bag on the floor before leaving. Bumpy wondered if he had misread the man, if his emotions sitting here rather than going out into the cold, the emotions that were leading him to sit here rather than go out into the cold, were making him feel badly, making him 295

misinterpret those around him. He had taken the man’s look at him and then his bag to be one of disapproval, a look that said you are blocking my way and it is apparent that you do not need to be doing so. But maybe the man’s look had simply been one of clearance. Maybe his looks had been saying I hope that I don’t accidentally knock into you or step on your bag. It was possible, Bumpy supposed, that the look had even been I hope you do not realize that I am stealing these bags and they’re not mine, and I’m looking at you to gauge the possibility that they are YOUR bags. It might have been that thought being communicated and he had misread it and let a man steal some luggage because he was tired and hungover and feeling guilty and worrying about the cold and dreading confrontations. The call had come in at the same time as he’d seen the news report. On CNN Airport, if that was what it was called, the anchor had come on after a brief commercial and said “Now, we sit down with an investigator who feels there might be an unreported serial killer at large in a midwestern city,” and the camera had pulled back from the anchor to show a man sitting on a couch holding a book and looking at the anchor. Bumpy had looked at the phone and recognized the number and not picked it up. He sat at the luggage rack now and knew that the phone was saying missed call and showing the number. He also knew that it showed one new message and he’d read the message. On the television screen at the airport in Chicago, which Bumpy had moved closer to in order that he could hear better, the FBI agent had thanked the 296

anchor and held up the book and the anchor had said “Tell us what it is the book gets into, Mr. Buckton,” and Mr. Buckton, whoever he was, said: “I spent a few weeks this past summer in Madison, Wisconsin,” and Bumpy, who had guessed right, had hit the Ignore button on his phone so that its buzzing would not continue to interfere with him hearing Mr. Buckton talk on CNN, and then Bumpy had stood up and gone right next to the TV. There was no volume button so he just listened as best he could. Mr. Buckton went on. “I was drawn by reports that there were a series of drownings that were said to be mysterious or suspicious. I first actually noticed it from a newspaper report I just stumbled across.” Mr. Buckton held up a clipped-newspaper article, with fold creases in it and slightly-frayed edges. “This is the original. A reproduction appears in the book, in the center of the book.” The headline of the article read More To Drownings Than Police Admit? Bumpy watched. “When you were in Madison, then, you reviewed the police reports of these drownings? Is that right?” “More than that,” Mr. Buckton said. “I spoke in many cases with the family members who had lost a loved one, a brother or husband or son. That was one of the things that first grabbed my attention, you know, was that it was always men. Twenty-one drownings over 5 years, and all of them men. Not a single woman drowned during that time.” Bumpy heard them calling his flight, boarding group “A”, which he was, but he stood next to the television and listened. He could get a bad seat. There 297

weren’t that many people even getting on the plane. O’Hare was crowded, even at this hour, but not with people going to Madison, Wisconsin. “One of the people I talked to,” the man continued, this Bill Buckton said on the screen, talking quietly since the volume was down but still loudly enough to be heard in this airport and at airports across the country, and loudly enough for Bumpy to hear, “Was Sarah Strathan,” and a picture flashed on the screen of Sarah and there she was sitting in her own living room, where Bumpy himself had sat. It was surprising, almost shocking, to see something that he recognized, a place he had been and had sat in and had eaten a ham sandwich in, on a television set while standing in an airport in Chicago, seeing someplace he had existed being shown on a TV in an unreal world like an airport, where nothing was permanent. It made Sarah’s living room seem somehow fake and made him question it, made him feel skeptical of her couch. She was answering questions, talking about Peyton and the book and the drownings. She seemed more hesitant than Bumpy knew she was. She did speak almost authoritatively (she was trying to, Bumpy guessed) when she mentioned the group and when she talked about their meetings and the support the group’s members gave to each other and how important that was when nobody else was giving them any information or help or belief. The group got mentioned only once by her, though. Now, later, Bumpy sat in the airport in Madison remembering the interview and shaking his head ever so slightly. No new luggage was going by 298

him now and no new people were standing by him looking annoyed, or maybe looking annoyed, or maybe just looking however they looked, at him sitting on the luggage conveyor. He looked at his phone with the missed call designation and the message. The text message said I will pick you up at the airport. He didn’t want to go outside. In O’Hare the stewardess, if that was what they were called when they worked in the terminal and not on the plane, announced that it was last boarding for the flight to Madison, Wisconsin, and he had been required to leave the television, where Sarah’s living room and Sarah were no longer taking up the screen and Bill Buckton was finishing up his tale of how he had spent the summer in Madison, a lovely town, he called it, and Bumpy walked away from the television disliking the man but not sure why. He decided as he walked down the small jetway that he disliked the man for calling Madison a town and for using the word lovely to describe the town. He stood up now, at the luggage area, stood up and put his duffel bag’s strap over his shoulder, put the phone back inside the duffel bag, and looked at the doors to the outside. The Madison airport was small. Very small. It had gates like a real airport, but there was no point to saying there were gates because the entire lobby area was only about a hundred yards long. The luggage claim area was opened to the public, in the way that small airports can be even in this day and age; while the public could not get in to the luggage area because of security, there were glass walls all around and anyone wanting to walk by the 299

luggage claim area and see inside and watch for people who were watching for their luggage could do so. But they would have to park their car and get out of their car to do that, to peer into the luggage claim area, and nobody did that. Not today, anyway, Bumpy saw as he looked around and began walking away from the exit and back towards the airport. He walked past the sliding doors where cars were parked, waiting for people to pick up. The text message that said I will pick you up at the airport had been sent in reply to his own text message that had said: My flight is supposed to get in at about 7:15 a.m. That text message, from him, about his flight, was itself a response to the text message that had said When do you get into town? Which had been sent to him because he had sent the text: Yes, I’m coming back. Which had been elicited by the original text, which read: If you won’t return my phone calls, maybe you will answer a text message. Are you coming to town? Bumpy walked along the concourse of the airport, past the newsstand store, as he thought of it, the store that exists in all airports that sells popular books and local newspapers and local sweatshirts and bags of candy and sodas in 20 ounce bottles. They were even arranged in the same style. He wondered if they were all owned by the same person, or if there was a corporate style guide

300

that suggested how these stores were best laid out, the optimal way to pose sweatshirts and books and Sudoku puzzle guides to lure people in. Here, the sweatshirts in the front of the store were “Wisconsin” and “Badgers.” In Chicago they had said “Chicago” and “Bears” and “Blackhawks.” He noticed, as he veered into the store, that this store had a small, handprinted sign above the “Badgers” sweatshirts that said “Good Xmas Gift” and he shook his head. That was a very small effort put into advertising, he thought. He bought an apple juice and continued on down the small airport, having traveled back to the place where people entered to get onto flights, a large glassy open white space. White tiles, white counters, silver trim, and a large airplane suspended in the air at the far end of the terminal. That, too, was like all other airports. They all had an airplane suspended or standing or posed somehow, an old fashioned airplane. A biplane, a World War II fighter, something like that always greeted fliers. Maybe, he thought, that was designed to make people feel better about flying. A way of reassuring them that flying was safe – look at what people used to fly, and they made it, he thought it might be saying. Now, you’re even safer. He momentarily wondered, as he stood near the exit/entrance across from the long-term parking garage with the high rates – it was maybe $25 a day to park right across from the terminal – he wondered if it was “safer” or “more safe.” He felt like he should know that, if he was a writer. And he was a writer; he had gotten paid to write, so that made him a writer.

301

One of the things that he and Teresa had in common, he realized as he braced himself to walk into the cold, was that they both refused to abbreviate text messages. As cumbersome as it was, on a cell phone, to type a whole sentence and use punctuation marks, they both did it. They’d never even discussed it. They both sent text messages using proper English and punctuation. He pulled out his phone and looked through the messages again. Yes, she’d even used apostrophes. Then he put the phone in his pocket again and turned and walked out of the door, turning left to walk along the road towards the “economy” long-term parking, and the winding little road that led from the airport to the road where he could catch a bus to take him down to the University and the hospital. It was cold. There was snow and water. His feet were going to be freezing and he didn’t have a coat, just a sweatshirt that he’d bought – a Blackhawks sweatshirt – in Chicago, and his jeans. He started walking. His phone buzzed in his pocket.

302

November 15: She suspected that she knew who “Ivy Lee” was, even though the person who had called on the phone had never identified herself. She knew, too, that it “Ivy Lee” had to have some connection with Dylan. Those two things, one suspicion and one piece of knowledge, had made her finally take the package out of the drawer where it had sat next to the engagement ring’s box, and made her put the package on her passenger’s seat, just in front of the scrap of straw wrapper that still lay there, untouched, and she sat in her car for a moment letting it warm up in the unusually cold November day, a day that felt like the temperature was below freezing but was probably in the teens, with a wind that whipped against her face the moment she walked outside the door and made her eyes water. She sat in her car for a moment as the car warmed up and she waited to turn on the heater, the vents pointed up and away from the seat, and the straw wrapper, and she thought about how the package had kept her, for over a month, from opening the drawer to look at the engagement ring. But she’d wanted to this morning. She’d desperately wanted to open up the drawer and look at the engagement ring today and had finally done so, pulling the box out quickly without looking at the package, or trying not to look at it. It was slightly larger, she thought now (in the car, now looking at it), than a compact disc case, and heavier than it should be.

303

She’d pulled the engagement ring box out of the drawer and sat down on her bed, and then looked where her top drawer, the drawer that on most dressers is slimmer than the others, as though the makers had run out of space at the top and decided to put in a drawer for… what? She used it for sundries, as she thought of them: her wallet, with its multiple categories and holding areas and divisions (cash, credit cards, ID cards, shopper’s cards and discount club cards and club membership cards all each in their own section). She was a member of three different grocery store card-clubs, and also carried her mother’s cards with her now, in their own special section: health insurance card, her mother’s discount cards and point cards and credit cards, too. She also kept some other items in that drawer: keys, things she had to mail out, some important papers (like the envelope with Mom’s health care directives and powers of attorney and other papers that Sarah had taken her to have done nearly a year ago, telling her that “yes, it’s probably unnecessary” but it still needed to be done. Mom had protested that she was not very ill and did not need those things, but Sarah had felt the hesitation before Mom had said it, and knew that Mom felt it, too. Mom had not even paused, then, on her way to get her coat to go meet with the lawyer that Tammy had said she should go talk to. Sarah had sat on her bed with the engagement ring and looked at her open drawer, with the package in it, and had then stood up and closed the drawer and then sat back down again. She opened up the engagement ring’s box and looked at the ring, sitting in its holder and sparkling and catching the morning light. She

304

was off of work today and had woken up and showered and dressed and realized that she had not one single thing she needed to do. She would go see Mom, of course, but beyond that there was nothing that needed attending to, no tubs to clean, groceries to shop for, sidewalks to shovel, books to return to the library. She should go talk to Jane, maybe, but not today. She did not let things that could be done intrude on the pleasant blankness of a day with nothing in it. She had taken the ring out. She held it up to the light and turned it back and forth and looked at it. She tilted it and saw brief momentary dazzles of light thrown onto the ceiling above her as the diamond caught the sunlight from her bedroom window and tossed it playfully back out at the room. She had put it on her finger, sliding it slowly on. It was a little too large at this point, her finger slightly smaller than it had been months ago. She did not need to twist or turn or pull or push. The ring slid on smoothly and easily and sat on her finger, her other fingers applying slight pressure to hold it in place. She had stretched out her hand and looked at the ring and watched it on her hand. It should have, she thought, been joined by another ring. She let herself think that and then before she could grow sad, she had gotten angry, instead, angry at the package for lingering in the back of her mind, for sitting in her drawer, for being there.

305

She could put two and two together, she thought angrily, as she got up and put the ring back in its box and then opened the drawer and took out, with her right hand, the package while her left hand carefully put the ring back in the drawer. She took the package out of her room and into the kitchen, where she allowed herself a second cup of coffee while it sat on the counter. Ivy Lee the package said on its return address. She knew that “Ivy Lee” had to be the woman who called. The return address on it she had looked up on the Internet and found that it was on the Las Vegas Strip. She had never been to Las Vegas and certainly was not going to go there now. And she did not want packages from Las Vegas, either. Especially now that she knew that Dylan lived there. “Ivy Lee” sounded in her opinion like a stripper’s name. She had stared at the package sitting on the counter and sipped her second cup of coffee. After she finished her cup of coffee she had taken the package and put on her coat and walked outside and gasped in surprise at the cold. She did not, though, pause to button up her coat, instead getting into her car and starting it up and letting it warm up. She was parking her car on the driveway these days because Mom’s car was in her garage where she’d had Peyton move it. Mom did not have a garage at her house, which Sarah went to every other week to water 306

the plants in and dust and vacuum a little. Mom’s house was like a showcase home from years ago: everything untouched and unruffled, but old and used. She now put the car into gear and backed out. She had nothing she needed to do today. She drove slowly up the street and did not look at the package because she was driving. She didn’t know where she was taking the package, not for a few moments, until she realized that she was driving in the general direction of Dan’s house. The one whose fence I hit: she decided to describe him to herself that way, because when she thought of him as Dan she felt uncomfortable. She drove more or less towards the area of the city where she knew he lived, on the outskirts of the actual city of Madison, near a gas station, she remembered, in what might be a nice section and what might not be a nice section. It had a middling quality to it that she thought she might be able to recognize if she drove there again, even though it had been nearly nine months since that night and even though it had, in fact, been night. She would take the package to Dan’s house. He had, after all, brought it into her house in the first place. It seemed appropriate right now to do that. When she turned a corner just slightly too fast she heard a box slide across her back seat and she bit her lip and thought Damn to herself and realized that she had never actually hung up any of the fliers that Jane had given her to hang up. She also then realized that she had parked next to Jane at the last meeting, 307

the last meeting she had gone to, anyway, which was two meetings ago. Sarah had not gone to the last October meeting and was probably not going to go to the November meeting, either. Jane had left no messages on her cell phone or home phone, either, which was a change for Jane in that she had called Sarah at least one time per month since they’d met. The last time, at the last meeting Sarah had gone to, Jane had wanted to talk to her and Sarah had said she was in a hurry and Jane had talked to her on the way to their cars, thanking Sarah for going to the Mayor’s office, a trip Sarah had been trying to forget, so Sarah had not dwelled on the point and had simply told Jane she was welcome. “You didn’t have to do that,” Jane had told her. They had stood by their cars. Sarah’s car was on Jane’s left, so Jane was standing by her own open door and looking across the top of Sarah’s car at Sarah. Had Jane glanced down, then? Sarah wondered now. Because Jane had said, then, “It was really unexpected. It was nice that you tried.” And had Jane paused before she said “tried?” Had she said it was nice that you tried? Or had she said it was nice that you… tried? She kept driving in the direction she hoped Dan’s house lay. She found it. Without getting lost she managed to get herself into the neighborhood and recognized it as Dan’s neighborhood, and then found, in relatively quick fashion, Dan’s house. She hesitated only a moment before pulling into the driveway and picking up the package and opening up her door and getting out into the cold again. If 308

anything, it was windier than it had been when she’d come outside. Colder. She felt her breath pulled from her mouth by the wind as it whistled past and knew that she would sound breathless when she went up to the porch. She walked around the car, and onto the small cement block that served as the house’s front stoop. There was a lengthy crack between the sidewalk and the stoop, a widening, raw-edged crack in the cement. The sidewalk was pulling away from the stoop. She knocked on the door, then noticed the doorbell to the side and briefly paused to consider whether knocking and then ringing the doorbell would be too much. Before she could ring the bell, she realized that she did not know whether Dan would even be home. She had not stopped to wonder whether he would be off work today or home. It was unlikely that he would be here at all, she thought. She rang the bell, hoping for Dan to open the door and invite her in. It was getting colder and she hugged herself with one arm, the other still holding the package out from her. Then she wondered, if Dan was home, would he be sick? Would he have someone here? She did not ring the doorbell again but stood there in the cold. She was about to turn away and go back to her car, with a feeling of defeat and disappointment mixed, in her chest, with emotions like relief when she heard “I’ll be right there! Hang on!” from inside the house and steps, heavy booted steps. The door opened and Sarah tried to smile. She did not quite achieve the effect and as Dan stepped back a little, surprised, she fumbled for what to say and 309

how to say it, thrown out of any situation she’d ever been in and for a moment, unlike herself. She held out the package. “Hi,” she said. “I’ve got a package.” Dan would later think that she had planned that line, that she must have driven over determining what to say in order to come across as friendly and clever. He would not tell her that was what he thought, that he’d decided that she wanted to impress him and be funny, and that she’d achieved that. But he would think it and he would like thinking that she must have done that to make him like her. “Hi. Um. Hi. God, it’s cold. Come in.” He looked over her shoulder at the car. “Anyone with you?” She shook her head. He was wearing a thick plaid shirt, the kind of shirt that doubled as a jacket for men who go outdoors a lot but don’t want to wear jackets at their job. He had, she could see, a few shirts under that outer shirt, as well, and he was wearing jeans, black denim jeans, that were too large for him but yet somehow did not appear to be hanging loosely. He had on those work boots he’d worn the first time she saw him, this time fully laced up. There was a pair of gloves on the back of the couch, which faced the television, which was tuned to the local news. “Watching the news?” she asked. “What? No. Getting ready for work. Actually. I was getting ready for work and just had it on. As background noise.” He glanced at the clock. 310

“Oh, I’m keeping you. I’ll come back.” “That’s okay. Come on in.” She was fully inside now, but he meant it, she knew, as further invitation, to take off her coat, to sit down. Did he want her to sit down? She felt the oppression of being late pressing on her now, a strange feeling on her day off. His time, his hurry, had transferred to her. Dan seemed unbothered, though, and motioned with his arm. She opened up her coat a little, still carrying the cold from outside with her, waiting for the cold and the house’s temperature, which was not quite warm, to mingle and even out. “What do you do?” she asked. “I’m an excavator,” he said. She did not follow up. She stood behind the couch. The news anchor was describing a cooking segment coming up. Dan stood by her, near the couch, hand on his work gloves. Seeing them made her feel intrusive. The package sat under her hands and she looked down, looking at her hands rather than at the package. The cooking segment was about pasta and how to keep it from sticking together. The anchor mentioned it as helpful for the holidays. Sarah felt that the reference to holidays was loose, anchorless, out of place. “Would you like some coffee?” Dan asked. She shook her head and looked at the house. It was still bare. Dan looked at her. She looked up and saw him looking at her and then looked back down and smiled, embarrassed. 311

Dan thought, later, too, that the smile was pretty and that it boded well for him that she had smiled, that she liked him. He would not tell her that, either. He would tell one of his friends, at work – a man who worked for him but who he got along well with – that the woman, this woman, Sarah, he’d call her, had smiled at him and she probably liked him a little. He would not tell his friend that Sarah had come by with the package. She held it up now. “I’ve never opened it,” she said. She added, unnecessarily: “Obviously.” “Obviously,” Dan said. “I want to, but I don’t know how,” she said, and she did not think that it sounded dumb to say that. Dan took it for what he felt she meant, that it was, for some reason, hard to open in some kind of emotional way. “Who’s it from?” he asked, then winced a little. He probably shouldn’t have asked that, he felt. “I don’t know,” she said, and she felt tears in her eyes a little and willed them not to come, to go away. She hoped it worked. “I read the return address and I think I know but I don’t know for sure and I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to be alone when I open it.” He took the package from her and she let it go, feeling the tears back off for a moment. Dan looked at the address, the handwriting almost childlike, all capitals. “Ivy Lee,” he said. He looked a little closer. “Ivy S Lee? Something’s kind of scratched out here. The S was started but scratched out. You don’t know her?” 312

Sarah shook her head. The weather was on. Continued cold, getting colder. “Do you think it’s something bad?” She did not. She said so. She said “It’s been in my house for a while. If it was dangerous it would have been dangerous before now.” Then she thought about how that sounded. But he seemed to understand that, too. Dan thought she seemed too upset by this package and wondered what he should do. “Well, I’m glad you brought it over,” he said. He walked around to the couch, trying not to let her see him glancing at the clock. They’d be able to get going without him, if he wasn’t too late. But he wasn’t going to leave, and he wasn’t going to stop and go call his employees. He felt like if he were to interrupt this to make a call, to get Jason on the phone and tell him he’d be late or to call in today and have someone else take over, Sarah would leave. He sat down, holding the package. She came around and sat down, too, her coat still on. She glanced at the clock, too, then looked back at the package. “What do you think is in it?” he asked her. She shook her head. “Any guesses?” She shook her head again. She didn’t trust herself to talk, she was trying to keep from crying. She didn’t know why the package upset her so. She just 313

knew she wanted it away from the ring. She didn’t want packages from the woman who’d called her, didn’t want packages with a Las Vegas return address. Dan looked at that, again, reading it. “Who do you know in Las Vegas?” he asked. Sarah hesitated. She looked at the TV. The pasta-cooking segment was ending. The trick was to use some olive oil, apparently. Any kind would do. The noodles wouldn’t get all tacky, the cook on the television said. “Nobody,” she said. Dan looked down again. He put his thumb on the address, rubbed at it as though he was trying to erase it. He squinted. He wanted to ask why it bothered her, this package. He also wanted to ask her to get a cup of coffee, ask her to dinner. But this obviously wasn’t the time to do that. Obviously. How could he say well, let’s open this mysterious package and then how about you and me go to Starbuck’s, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee? The phone rang. Dan looked back at his kitchen. “Hang on a second,” he said, and stood up. He had the package in his hands and he looked at the door and at her and at the kitchen where the phone was ringing a second time and he worried that when he answered the phone she would just leave, so he made a decision and took the package with him, just around the corner, where the phone sat on its holder on the counter. He picked it up.

314

Sarah heard him say “Yeah,” and wondered if he had caller ID or if he just answered the phone that way. She heard him say “I’m running late,” and then “Just go ahead, then, and I’ll get there when I can,” and then “Yeah, I’d do that. Do that, sure.” There was another long pause and Dan said “I don’t know,” and she felt awkward, a rare feeling for her. She was on the edge of the couch, not fully sitting and not standing up but ready to do either if she decided one or the other was necessary. The local news show continued, having exhausted all the headlines and now talking about a charity drive that was underway raising money for a family. She had not caught what it was that had happened to the family that they needed others to raise money for them. Dan came back out. “I’m keeping you from something,” Sarah said, as she was supposed to do. “It’s nothing. That was Jason.” She just looked at him blankly, and then appeared to gather herself, so Dan said more. “A guy at work. They can handle it. I’m not maybe that necessary there right now, and they never get started all that early anyway.” “Won’t your boss mind?” “I’m the boss,” Dan said. Then he got the chance to joke: “So I’ll probably write myself up but I’m pretty easygoing so I won’t make a big deal out of it.” She didn’t chuckle but he noticed a small smile, so she was at least trying. He sat back down and she looked at him, then away from him to the television, but she didn’t want to seem as though she was watching TV, so she

315

looked at the walls again, and Dan saw her looking from one wall to the next, and he said, by way of explanation: “I guess I’m not much for decorating. I know I should hang something on the walls, maybe some pictures or something, but I haven’t owned this place for all that long and I never seem to get around to doing anything about it. I spend most of my time trying to find renters.” “Renters?” “For my old house. I traded up and Jason… that guy at work… said it’d be a good idea to make my old house an investment, that I should rent it out instead of selling it. He said that real estate is the only investment where banks lend you money to invest it, and that I should take advantage of that.” Dan stopped and looked at the walls. “So now I spend a lot of time showing the house and hiring plumbers to go out and fix things, and then trying to decide when enough is enough and people shouldn’t get any more chances to not pay the rent.” “Do you evict them?” Dan shook his head. “I never have, no. Twice I’ve had people not pay and they just move out and go somewhere else before I even know it.” They sat in silence for a second. Sarah felt there was nowhere to go with that story. Finally, she said, “This is silly, I shouldn’t have come here.” “No, no,” Dan assured her. “In fact, I know what to do,” he said, and he stood up again. “Come on.” He wanted to take her by the arm, but he didn’t. He held out his hand and pointed back towards the kitchen where he’d taken the phone call. Sarah walked a little uncertainly towards the kitchen. 316

The kitchen was not much more decorated than the living room. The kitchen table had no centerpiece or decorations on it. It had three chairs around it. One half of the kitchen table had a newspaper (unread, apparently) and some mail (unopened) and a few important-looking papers – they were yellow and pink and orange and had the look of the kinds of copies that are peeled off the back of the originals and given to the person who has made a purchase or invoked a warranty or gotten insurance coverage. On the wall hung a long board with a thermometer, and two other gauges in it. There were containers on the counter, and a coffee pot that had coffee in it. She couldn’t tell what was in the containers. One looked, incongruously, like a cookie jar. Dan motioned her to the left, to a brown door and he opened that up for her. It led into the garage. She looked at him and he said “Sure,” and she stepped into the garage, which was chillingly cold. Dan’s car was in the garage and there with it was a lawnmower, a snowblower, a large toolbox on wheels, and a workbench. There were also two garbage cans, one for garbage and one for recycling. She noted as she saw them that the recycling can was entirely empty while the garbage can was nearly full. “Here’s my thought,” said Dan, holding out the package. Sarah looked at it and then at him as he went on: “Throw it out.” “What?” “Throw it out,” said Dan. Sarah could not imagine throwing out mail. Dan held the package to her. She did not want to take it for fear that she would, actually, throw it out. Or that she would not, that she would take it and she would 317

open it. Or that she would just keep it without ever opening it. “Why not?” Dan asked, when he saw her hesitating. “I. Well…” Sarah was flustered, something that rarely happened. She pushed through. “What if it’s important?” “How important could it be? It’s been sitting in your … house,” Dan guessed bedroom but thought that was too forward to say. He didn’t want her to think that he was imagining her bedroom, “For how long now? And nothing bad has happened to you. Nothing’s missing from your life, nothing’s changed. If you throw it out, your life will be exactly the same as if you’d never received it.” Sarah knew that was not true: she could not unreceive the package. She could not have Dan show up at her house and not tell her she had a package, she could not have the package keep her from looking at the ring, could not have the package have never ridden on the seat next to her next to the straw wrapper on the trip over here. She could not throw it out and not know that she had done so. “What if it’s valuable?” she asked. “Do you want to open it and find out?” Dan asked. Sarah chewed at her lip. “Do you think…” he stopped to read the package again “Ivy –maybe-S-Lee would send you something valuable from Las Vegas?” Sarah shook her head. “It just isn’t right to throw it out, is it?” “Why not?”

318

Sarah couldn’t think of a single reason. She wanted Dan to throw it out but he held it out to her. She didn’t want to do that. She had never not opened a piece of mail. She opened even junk mail. She took the package and held it for a second and then dropped it into the recycle bin next to her. “How’s that feel?” Dan said, trying on what he hoped was a nice kind smile. “Terrible,” Sarah said. Dan looked a little dismayed. He had hoped for a laugh or a response that would let him then ask her to go get a cup of coffee. But it didn’t seem right to ask that now.

319

November 21: Bumpy clicked the little “x” in the box and closed out of his email as Ivy came into the room. “What’re you doing?” she asked him. “Nothing. Writing. Just writing,” he said. She sat down next to him and glanced over his shoulder hoping he didn’t notice that she was doing so because she didn’t know whether he was one of those people who didn’t like others reading over their shoulder. Whenever she thought things like that, she instinctively put her hand on the ring, touched it with her index finger and thumb. She knew she was doing it, was aware that she was doing that, and so she made it look like she was adjusting it. There was just an ellipses: … on the page, although Ivy did not know what it was called. She brushed his hair back from his forehead. “What are we doing tonight?” “Dinner,” he said. “A fancy dinner, for you.” He leaned back and she leaned into him. He looked over at her and said “How was the business today?” She laughed. “Bumpy, there’s never any business. Almost not any, anyway.” “Almost not any?” He smiled at her. He had learned that when he joked around, he had to let her know that he was joking around. He’d learned that almost instantly, the very first time they went out.

320

Not that it had started as a date. Or finished as a date. But she had taken her shirt off. Maybe that had been the start of it. Maybe he had started falling in love with her, then. Or maybe it had been earlier. Maybe it had really been love at first sight, when she walked into his shop that day? Was it love, or rescuing? And, he wondered as they sat on the couch in his suite at the Bellagio and listened to the music playing through his laptop, and was there a difference, for him? He didn’t think too much about that and instead said “So there was nobody?” “I said almost nobody. A couple of people came in. Nobody bought anything. They looked at stuff. They said it was good but then they didn’t buy it. Maybe we should change the prices on things or something. Or add in some more stuff.” Bumpy didn’t answer right away. He had not been going into the shop since getting the show picked up, and had been leaving that to Ivy, and wondering, sometimes, why he bothered leaving it to Ivy except that it felt like he should keep the shop going, felt like he should not just abandon it since that was his whole reason for having come out here. Was it? He wondered. Was it the whole reason he had come out here? Or was it simply the plan that he’d developed after deciding he had to go somewhere? He didn’t like feeling this introspective and wondered if he was tired. When he felt down like this, when he felt thoughtful like this, he would wonder 321

whether he was really sad or down or just tired and a little worn out. He felt Ivy tracing a figure onto his leg, just below the edge of the shorts he wore and just above the knee, and thought to himself: I’m engaged. I could ask her whether she ever feels that way, I could ask her whether she ever just feels a little down and depressed about things, whether she ever looks at life and thinks that even though things are pretty good they don’t seem all that good. He instead said “Where do you want to go eat?” And Ivy sat up and looked at him and had a look on her face and then she didn’t have the look on her face. “You can choose, if you want,” she said, and when he named a restaurant she said “I’m going to have to change and I’d like to shower.” It had been hot that day, Bumpy knew from having gone to get some lunch at McDonald’s, hotter than anyone from Wisconsin would expect it to be in November, even if they were now living in the southwest. She looked a little sweaty. “Hey, you’re wearing the shirt,” he said, as she stood up, just realizing it now. “Yep,” she said. “The first present I ever gave you,” he said. Bumpy didn’t count the job he’d given her, or the food he bought those first few days, the more-than-strictlynecessary food he’d bought those first few days, as presents. Nor did he count the engagement ring as a present. Ivy noticed that he didn’t count the ring as a present. She stood up. She felt sometimes like she counted all those things as presents, especially the

322

engagement ring. She pulled out the shirt a little from her body, unsticking it from the sweat and dirt that had accumulated. “We didn’t get off to a very good start, did we?” she asked. Bumpy rubbed his chin. He thought back to when she came into the store. He felt, now, as though he had been a little startled when she did, a little surprised. He felt as though he had been woken up abruptly by her entry into the store that he’d set up. Or he felt as though he wanted to have felt that way, which was almost the same thing. “I think we got off to a very good start,” he said, and looked up at her. He wanted to ask her what she’d been looking for that day, but didn’t. “That guy, though,” Ivy said, and shook her head. “I mean, here we are, on what I suppose was a date, and then that guy comes up to us.” She chewed on her knuckle for a second, and then said, “I’d better start getting ready. If you want to eat something fancy.” Ivy wanted to cook him a Thanksgiving dinner. She’d been thinking about that and about how she’d never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner, for herself or anyone, thinking about it all day. Bumpy had been set back a little. “That guy?” he asked, but he mumbled it, and Ivy did not hear him. She was near the door to the bathroom and turned around. “Bumpy?” she asked. Bumpy had been clicking around to some music files on his computer. “Yeah?” he asked. 323

“I wanted to cook you Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. She took a breath. “I was thinking about it all day. I want to cook you a Thanksgiving dinner. I was going to do it tonight but I guess it’s too late to do that now. I think a turkey has to cook for a couple of hours. But I want to do it. In my whole life I’ve never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner and I’m thirty-two. I’m thirty-two and I’d like to cook you a Thanksgiving dinner.” Her hand was shaking and she chewed on her knuckle again for a second to stop it. “I know that you like to go out to eat. And I haven’t even been… home… to my apartment… for a couple of days. But I could go there early tomorrow and clean it up and start cooking and we could have a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner. If you wanted.” Ivy felt she’d ended up weakly, so she finished anew: “I’d like that. If we did.” Bumpy was wondering why he was so upset that Ivy considered that night at the fountain to be where they started. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” He asked her. She looked startled by the conversational curveball. She persisted. “I want to cook you dinner,” she said. Then she added. “Yes. I do. I really do believe in love at first sight.” Bumpy sighed. He didn’t even know why, at first. Then he realized she was waiting for an answer. “Yes. That’d be great. We don’t have to go out to eat all the time,” he said. He should have, he thought later, gotten up and given her a hug or something there. She’d looked nervous, even he had caught onto that. But he hadn’t given her a hug or done anything because he’d been distracted by his 324

thoughts. He’d been thinking that they got started, as he said, when she walked into the store. He thought she counted that day, when they first met, as when they started , too, that it was fate… … and how dumb that sounded, he’d thought, immediately, when he let himself think that stuff about fate. So as Ivy said “Well, great. Great. We’ll do that” and as she opened the door to the bathroom and went in and closed it, Bumpy had been thinking about why they didn’t agree when their relationship had started, and how dumb he was to have thought things were fate. He heard the shower start up. He figured he should clean himself up, too. He put on some music, an old Fleetwood Mac song that Mom had once heard playing in the background when she’d called him on the phone. She’d asked him what the song was and he’d told her the name. She’d said that she liked the song. Bumpy liked it, too, liked it because it had sad-sounding chords in it, a way of making the music move downbeat while seeming upbeat somehow. The beat, the feel, the mood of the music was seemingly happy, but the notes moved from higher on the octave to lower, and hit minor keys that left the person feeling sad at the end of the song. He added that song to the playlist he was creating, and checked over the whole list one time before then clicking the button to begin burning the songs to the CD he’d put in before Ivy had come home. He was thinking to himself over and over that it was dumb to believe in fate, to believe that simple chance could have such a huge impact on someone’s life, that two people could simply stumble across each other and from that moment forward they were in love, that 325

somehow everything had led him here. He’d come here on a whim, he knew, but since meeting Ivy had secretly been thinking that there had been maybe some larger reason for him to end up in Las Vegas, that maybe the timing of everything had been just perfect for him to end up here – that things happened the way they had happened so that he would move to Las Vegas and be standing in the little empty-room-that-would-become-a-shop when Ivy walked in. How stupid it felt to him now that he had believed that maybe she, too, felt that way, that she’d lingered there because she liked him (instantly, fate), that she had felt that kind of instant attraction to him that he’d felt to her. How often did that occur, that he looked at someone and felt, right on the spot, that she seemed so… perfect? He could only think of twice, now. He listened to the music and watched as the bar moved slowly to the right on the screen, as each song on the list was checked off by the computer and burned onto the disk, and listened to the shower. The water was louder and then quieter, louder and then quieter. He thought about why it would sound that way, decided that Ivy was moving around, that she was reaching for the soap or reaching for the shampoo or turning around or putting up her hair. Why would she think that the night at the fountain was their start? The CD was finished and he took it out of the computer drive, slipped it into the case he’d made with the list of songs and artists neatly printed. He got up and looked around the hotel room. Somewhere he had a few small things for mailing, some stamps and envelopes and a few mailing packages. The nightstand 326

next to the bed, he remembered, and went into the bedroom. The hotel room, not quite a suite, was still almost as large as his apartment in Madison had been. He had a small stove and refrigerator here – not big enough for Ivy to cook a Thanksgiving dinner here, he knew, and knew that she would not want to do that even if he asked her to, even if he pointed out that his stove and refrigerator were almost as big as hers. She didn’t have a proper kitchen in her apartment, really. It was more of a nook. She insisted on keeping her apartment, paying the rent monthly. She objected, every so often, in a mild way, to living in hotels, to his living in hotels, and he knew that he should not do that, that he should find a more permanent place to live. But when he thought about it, as he did now -- while the shower stopped and the music on the playlist was more audible, an old Frank Sinatra song that his mother had once played on a 45 record for him, played while she had told him that Frank Sinatra was cool, her use of the word cool prompting him to laugh, back then, at a mother who used the word cool-- when he thought about a more permanent place, he would think what makes an apartment more permanent than a hotel room? Neither was permanent in the sense that he thought of permanent. Neither was a house which had your name on the deed, neither was a piece of land that you owned and which you were free to dig up or not dig up, a house that you could paint the walls or tile the floors or put an addition on. But people, including him, felt an apartment was more permanent than a hotel room. An apartment, he thought as he pulled out some magazines and looked through the three drawers in the nightstands for the mailer boxes he had, was no more 327

permanent, really, than a hotel room. Yes, Ivy paid by the month, buying her right to stay there thirty days at a time. He supposed that someone would have to go to court to get her out, maybe, if she refused to pay and refused to leave. He thought he remembered Jay saying something about that. So the hotel could get rid of him sooner than Ivy’s landlord could get rid of her. But the hotel wasn’t a landlord, with arbitrary likes and dislikes and the decision, suddenly, to try to rent to a family or something. The hotel didn’t care how long he stayed as long as he paid. He couldn’t find the mailer. He had nothing to mail the CD with. He took it back out to the main area of the room and set it down next to the computer. He heard the water running in the sink. In the bathroom, Ivy stared into the mirror. She’d run the cold water on her face for a while in the shower after crying, trying to make her eyes less red and less puffy. She worried about what she’d said, about what she’d done. She wanted to cook Bumpy a Thanksgiving dinner, to have them sit down at a table that had a turkey and stuffing and cranberries and mashed potatoes. She didn’t even care that she didn’t know how to mash potatoes. She wanted to do that, to show him that she was a regular person and that they were regular people and to show him that being married to her was going to be good. But he’d been upset by it, she thought. He’d been happy and then not happy. He’d been talking to her and then distant in that way he had, the way he would drift off and not be really paying attention. Sometimes he was like that,

328

she knew by now, when he was thinking. Sometimes he was like that when he was upset. He never really got angry, she knew, she’d never seen him angry enough to yell or even be properly described as “mad.” She wondered, sometimes, how he did that, whether there was a switch in his head that had never been turned on, or had been turned off somehow, the “anger” switch, so that he could be the only human being in the world who never got mad. She’d never seen him yell at someone, never heard him raise his voice or swing his hands up in the air in frustration or stomp a foot or do any of that. But she knew he got angry, and when he did, he got quiet. Like he’d done tonight. Bumpy stayed quiet while they got ready, and stayed quiet, too, as they waited for their table after walking over to the restaurant, not far from the hotel room he’d picked out for this week and the next few weeks, maybe. The heat had not broken yet, had not faded with the slow ending to the day. Days ended slowly, in Las Vegas, prolonged and slowed by the multitude of manmade lights that glowed stronger and brighter even as day pulled back and tried to leave. In the waning real daylight, in the too-bright glow of the fake daylight Las Vegas put up in the evening and all night, Ivy walked alongside Bumpy, holding the last two fingers of his right hand in her left hand, the way she always did, and watched the crowds changing as she walked through them, the families and elderly couples that walked the Strip during the day with cameras and bags of souvenirs and baseball hats becoming the bachelor’s and bachelorette’s parties, the groups of young men trying to emulate Vince Vaughn 329

trying to act like Sinatra, the people, all of them only a few years younger than Ivy, acting carefree and also drunk, or acting drunk. She thought maybe they only seemed carefree because she had things on her mind, so that the whole world would seem as though it had nothing to concern in, the way that it seemed that when she was sad, only she was sad, the way that it seemed that nobody was as happy as her when she was happy. She tended, she thought, to project onto those around her the exact opposite of what she was going through, maybe, but tonight, she thought she maybe wasn’t projecting. Maybe she was just out of synch with the world. She held Bumpy’s fingers and walked slowly so as to not start sweating in the dress she wore, and he walked slowly. He had a dress shirt on and a sportcoat that he carried over his arm, and dress pants. “You know what?” he said now, as a group of three young men in dark pants and polo shirts passed them up, the group splitting around them while continuing to talk about some poker strategy they were going to employ. “What?” she asked. She said it more softly than she had thought she would. Bumpy looked over at her, surprised at the tone of her voice. “Everything okay?” he said, breaking off from the start of his conversation. The sidewalks were becoming more crowded and he had to look away from her in order to watch where they were going. The sun, Ivy thought, might be totally down now, but it would not yet seem to be night for a few minutes, or more. The lights of the strip kept things bright enough, they propped up those last few minutes of sunlight that were flung out by the sun as a farewell before 330

dropping under the horizon. Night seemed to take forever to arrive in Las Vegas, take forever until it was suddenly sprung on her: day day day, night. “Yes. Everything’s fine.” She tried to strengthen her voice, to keep the worry and the concern out of it. If he was upset by her wanting to cook Thanksgiving dinner, he’d be more upset if he knew that she was bothered by it, she thought, and she didn’t want it to become an issue. She was not sure whether she was or was not, at this point, cooking a Thanksgiving dinner but whether or not that happened, they could have a nice night tonight, couldn’t they? “What were you saying?” she prompted. Bumpy looked at her and regretted choosing a fancy dinner. He preferred her in t-shirts and shorts. Summer-y, simple outfits had a way of softening her beauty, bringing some cute-ness into it, and while he did not, of course, mind that she was beautiful, he liked when she was both beautiful and cute. It was, he thought, as he regathered the conversation he was going to start, a dilemma: Meet a girl and think that she is pretty and great the way that she is, and then go on a date with her and she makes herself even more special, putting her hair up and getting dressed up and putting on makeup and jewelry (but he noticed now that Ivy had no jewelry on except the engagement ring and he stored that away to think about later) and sometimes it worked and made the woman all the better, but also, almost every time, for him at least, something was missing when there was so much more, because he liked the girls the way he’d met them. He privately thought of it as the Prom Dress Effect, the way girls in high school had dressed down every day and then looked glamorous and fancy on Prom Night. 331

The pictures he’d seen of the girls he knew on Prom Night, and seeing Sarah go to her prom, had convinced him that in almost every, if not every, case, he liked the girls better dressed down. Jay, he knew, would appreciate discussing the Prom Dress Effect. He wondered if Ivy would, or if it would seem too personal. She seemed like something was bothering her, right now, and he decided against bringing it up, out here on the street, especially, with the twenty-year-olds thronging more and more closely. He thought she might not want to hear a discussion of how he thought that women who dressed up, shouldn’t. Privately, then, he congratulated himself, too, on making that decision. He worried that he never really fit in with others, that he was always saying the wrong thing, and so when he thought he had done something to make himself fit in a little better, he liked to note it. “I can’t wear corduroys here,” he told Ivy, now. She looked at him, nearly bumped into somebody, nearly bumped into somebody else, and said “What?” She hoped she sounded humorous and fun, but the comment was not what she’d been expecting him to say. Then she wondered what she had been expecting him to say, and then they were turning into the restaurant and Bumpy was giving his name for the reservations. “You’ll have to wait in the bar,” the maitre d’ told them. He led them to the bar area and Bumpy and Ivy sat at a small table, a table with two stools around it, each of which was almost larger than the table. The table would maybe hold two 332

drinks, she thought, and those drinks would be crowded by the cylindrical candle in the center of it. It made her feel as though she was not sitting at a table, that she and Bumpy were sitting on stools in the middle of a room, and it led her to feel more awkward. “Can I place a drink order for you?” they were asked. Bumpy looked at Ivy, who took a deep breath and then nodded. “Yes.” She ordered some wine and when he asked if she wanted to see a wine list, she shook her head. “Something nice,” she said. “Not too expensive. Just nice.” “For you, sir?” Bumpy considered. He ordered a seven and seven, and the maitre d’ left. Bumpy put his elbow on the table, looked at it, took his elbow off, and then looked at the table again. He shifted on the stool, looked around at others and saw nobody else putting anything on the tables. Wherever he looked, people at the tall tiny tables were holding their drinks and sitting. Some were standing. One man had his drink in his hand and was standing and his hand was resting on the stool, and Bumpy thought to himself that the stool looked like a less-precarious perch for a drink. He watched as Ivy put her hands, folded together, on the table, and then did the same things. “It’s a small table,” he said. She smiled, and then laughed. “It’s a tiny table.” “What’s the point of it?” he asked her. He laughed. “It’s, I think, smaller than the stool I’m sitting on. What is it even there for? Just to hold up the candle? I’m afraid to sit next to this thing,” and she laughed now. A waiter

333

brought their drinks just then and as they took them Bumpy looked at the table and mimed putting his drink down. She smiled. They each took a sip of their drinks and let the mumble of the crowd pass through and around them. Ivy sat facing the table, her wine glass held in both hands just above her lap. She tried to sit up straight, found it difficult when her hands had to rest in front of her instead of just on the table. Bumpy, as she watched, faced almost to her, just a little off center, and was looking into his drink and then at her and then off to her left. He put his elbows up on the table again, and then off. “What were you saying, about corduroys?” she tried. Bumpy turned towards her. He wanted to ask her what she thought of him when they first met. Whether she’d thought that he was special enough to hang around and keep talking to him and whether that was why she had hung around and kept talking to him. “Nothing,” he said, and took a sip. “It was just a thought. Just that I can’t wear them because it’s never winter, here, and corduroys should only be worn in winter.” He looked at her now. “Have you ever seen winter?” he asked. “It snowed once, here,” Ivy told him. “About ten years ago. Just out of nowhere, it got cold, really cold, like twenty degrees,” she saw him smile and realized that it maybe was not that cold at twenty degrees, not to him, but went on. “And then it started snowing. We got two or three inches. It took down some power lines, it tied up traffic. A lot of people didn’t go into work for a day or two. 334

The casinos were still open, though. Nothing closes them. It made the national news. I saw the city on CNN.” “Two or three inches,” Bumpy said. “Twenty degrees.” “It’s a lot colder in Wisconsin, isn’t it?” “Yeah. A lot.” She wanted to ask him whether he ever was going to move back there or if he was serious about staying here. She sipped her wine instead. She did not really like wine all that much, but it felt like what she should be drinking in a restaurant like this. She didn’t even drink all that much, and when she did drink it tended to be wine-cooler-type drinks, tiny lemonades and other little bottled drinks that did not taste like alcohol at all. She did not feel like she could order something like that in a restaurant like this. Bumpy, she noted, had not ordered a beer. He usually would have had a beer before his dinner. He never drank with dinner. He said he didn’t like the taste of the drink mixed with the taste of food. “Do you want to see winter?” Bumpy asked her, now. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t want to…” she paused and thought what he might mean. If she finished her thought with live in winter would he take that the wrong way? What if he had opened up this conversation as a way of bringing it up? More people came into the restaurant, dressed up, as everyone was at night at least at this restaurant, and laughing and talking. The new group was louder than the rest of the crowd. Ivy watched them. They were a group of about

335

15 and they walked up to the maitre d’, who smiled and nodded and talked with them. Bumpy looked, too. “I bet they get seated before us,” he said. “Why do you say that?” “Look who’s in the group?” She looked but didn’t recognize the person. Bumpy pointed at the shorter man near the edge. “He’s in a band. You maybe don’t know them. But he’s kind of famous and we’re not kind of famous, so he’ll get in first. Restaurants would rather have him sitting in there with his friends than us sitting in there without him and his friends.” Ivy nodded and sipped some more wine. “You were saying?” Bumpy said. Ivy looked up, trying to remember. The group, louder than the rest of everyone in the room, had been taken into the dining room. “About?” Ivy asked. “Snow.” Ivy wondered how to finish it. “I’d like to, I guess. I’d like to see winter. I’ve never felt weather that cold, really. Even when it snowed here, it wasn’t so cold, for so long. It’d be something to see, or feel, I guess. I don’t know…” she finished carefully: “I don’t know how long I’d like it, but I’d like to try it…” her voice trailed off. Bumpy laughed. “You may like it longer than I would. I’m not going back to winter, ever.” 336

“Never?” Bumpy considered. He wondered if she’d seen the e-mail, for one thing. He also wondered whether he would ever go back. “Maybe not never, but I don’t want to go back. And I don’t want to live there. Not in winter. Not ever.” Ivy mentally sighed. She put her wineglass down. She did not like the taste of the wine. Then she had nothing to do with her hands so she picked it back up again and saw Bumpy looking at her and so she sipped it because she didn’t want him wondering why she’d picked it up. “Are you…” she hesitated… “We going to stay living here?” she asked. It was the first time she had put their futures together. She looked at the ring in her hand. Bumpy looked at her as she said that. He saw her look at the ring. He took a sip of his own drink and wondered when they’d get a table. He didn’t like sitting here at this little table. He heard her say you and then we. He remembered when they’d gone for coffee that night, the night he considered their first date, and they’d gone for a walk afterwards, walking along the sidewalk down near the Fremont Street Experience. He hadn’t intended to walk that far, but they’d just started walking and he didn’t want to stop talking to her, so they’d kept walking. They were down near the older part of Las Vegas, by Circus Circus and the other older casinos that had worked their way into pop culture and then had not kept up with the images pop culture wanted them to have. He had been excited, when he’d first driven into town, to see the old 337

casinos, to walk through them and hear the roulette and slots and dice, to see the signs and neon and showgirls and dealers and breath the air and feel the bustle, to be playing blackjack and have a drink brought to him and to tip people with chips and to see the glow that lit up the desert, in his mind. But too quickly he’d noticed at the older, more famous casinos, the carpet was threadbare, the casinos smelled like four or five decades of cigarette smokers, the neon lights were outshone by LCD TV screens, and he had not lingered long in the old Las Vegas, had moved quickly up the strip to the new Las Vegas which was still shiny. But that first night with Ivy, when they’d bumped into each other outside of the Bellagio, a casino he liked to wander through, with its fountains outside marking what people now knew of Las Vegas, across the street from the fake Eiffel Tower that marked what people now knew of Las Vegas, too, that first night they’d had a cup of coffee in the mall that was underneath the Paris casino, or alongside the Paris casino, or in some way occupying some geographical proximity to the Paris casino. All the casinos in the new part of the Strip had malls associated with them, in them or around them, and wandering through the malls confused him because they were not laid out in straight lines the way malls back home were. These malls were enclosed, for some reason, enclosed in a place where in his experience rain was rare and cold was rare and sunshine and heat were common. He thought maybe they were enclosed because it was always so hot, but whatever the reason, they were enclosed and they wandered and curved and had offshoots that curled back, and the malls were filled not just with stores 338

but with attractions: shows and canals and animals displays and singers and demonstrations and more, making wandering through the mall attached to a casino a disorienting experience. Especially that night, when he was new here. He developed a plan, almost immediately, about those malls, that plan being always leave through the same exit he entered. His first trip to a mall had led him to develop that emergency plan: go back out the way you came in. Because he’d gone into the mall near or by or in the Caesar’s Palace casino and wandered through there and bought some lunch and then wandered back out a different exit and had no idea where he was. It took him a few minutes of standing and blinking and sweating to realize he was on the Strip again, now at a location that did not jibe with the mental location his mind was giving him. The twists and turns in the mall, the walking around the aquarium they had in the mall, the locating of information about how to take a tour of the aquarium, watching the show with fire and water effects, then walking back to the souvenir store to pick out a couple of postcards to mail to Jay, had given him the impression that he was somewhere else, and then ending up back on the Strip a few blocks from where he’d entered the mall had given him almost a sense of vertigo, and also a sense that it was inevitable, in Las Vegas, it was foreordained that he would end up on the Strip each time. When he’d gotten equally disoriented while walking through the Venicerecreating mall underneath another casino, he’d developed his exit strategy and thereafter it had become second nature to leave a mall by retracing his steps and going out the door he’d entered through. 339

That was what he’d done after they’d had coffee that night, he and Ivy, he’d led them back through the mall and out the door they came in, and then they walked down the Strip until they were in old, seedy, Las Vegas, and that really drunk guy had come up to them. Bumpy knew the exact moment the really drunk guy had arrived because he’d just taken Ivy’s hand. He’d been thinking about it for a few minutes, but had not done anything about holding her hand as yet, and then they’d crossed through the doorways and back out onto the Strip with the cars in their endless traffic-jammed-crawl, and the people moving in almostchoreographed patterns on the sidewalks, dimly lit with their skin colored muted fantastical shades from the neon signs and taillights of the cars. That was when Bumpy had reached out and taken her left hand in his right hand. She’d let him. She’d looked at him, turning her head to the left, but she had not said anything and had not pulled away. At first, he’d held her hand lightly, hand wrapped around her palm and not gripping too hard, like an awkward handshake. Then he’d rearranged his grip as they’d turned right to walk— he remembered wondering, where should they walk to?—and he’d shifted his hand so that their fingers were interlaced. The drunk guy had then bumped into them, carrying something in a soda bottle that had not been soda. He’d been walking sideways, the drunk guy had, almost, a curiously-aimed gait that Bumpy could not help but pick out of the crowd because it was so out-ofstep with the rest of the people on the sidewalk. It interrupted the flow that the crowd had established. The drunk guy was not one of the fast-movers, not one of the dawdlers. He was not moving in a straight direction and was not standing 340

still. He was a broken gear in the machine that was the people on this side of the sidewalk and when he was almost a half-block away Bumpy saw him, first by seeing his wake, as it were: people moving out of his way, one woman telling the man he should go “sleep it off.” Bumpy then had to break his own plans, stopping Ivy and himself from moving forward and shifting to the side a little, towards the walls of the nearest casino, near the booth where they could, if they chose, get their picture taken with an Elvis impersonator, get their picture taken and then go into the casino to get the picture given to them, for free, free if they could avoid the temptation, in the casino, to gamble and lose some of the money they had not spent on the picture. His shifting them slightly to the right slowed down a group of young men behind them, who protested amongst themselves in voices Bumpy was sure he and Ivy were intended to hear: Come on, who does that? One said. People sure don’t know how to walk around here said another. Bumpy ignored them while the drunk man took a sip from the bottle and walked in his sideways manner towards the casino and then the road. He had on parts of a suit. He was wearing dress pants and a dress shirt, both looking high-quality, and had suspenders on, the kind that would have been favored by stock brokers in movies about the 1980s. His shoes were scuffed and dusty, though, more so than Bumpy would expect from a walk up the street. He had no tie or coat. He did have cufflinks on, but the cuffs were undone.

341

The drunk man was not talking. He was sweating profusely and looked confused. As he neared them, Bumpy could see the red eyes and sweat beaded on his forehead. “Oh, geez, watch out for him,” Ivy said, as the man veered almost into the street. He knelt down for a second and seemed to dry heave. “Let’s just let him pass,” Bumpy suggested. They stood near the Elvis and the Elvis’ photographer and watched as the man did not throw up and stood up. He looked up at the casino and looked across the street. Ivy edged in a little closer to Bumpy. They were holding hands now and his leg was touching the back of her hand, the hand that he held. His own hand rested against the side of her leg. Her skin felt cool and smooth. His hand rested right at the edge of her shorts. The drunk man started to walk towards the street, got knocked into by two men walking quickly and carrying a duffel bag, and stopped. He looked back at them as though he was going to say something, and then turned around and looked at Bumpy and Ivy and Elvis and Elvis’ photographer. “Where’s this,” the man said. If meant as a question, it did not come out that way. A small group of people that now included Ivy and Bumpy and the casino workers and the Elvis looked at him. Nobody said anything. “I’m going in,” the man announced to nobody and then turned to the street. Then he turned back and tripped and fell towards Bumpy and Ivy, tossing his bottle accidentally towards them. It dropped just in front of them and spun around, a trail of soda and what-was-obviously-liquor spewing out of it and onto 342

Ivy, hitting her in the face and running down her shirt and splattering her. It almost entirely missed Bumpy; he got a little on his right arm where he was holding her hand. “I’m going in,” the man said again. He tried to stand up and finally one of the casino workers got out to help him up. The worker was saying something to the man while Bumpy looked at Ivy. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I’m fine. Just sticky and gross. And wet.” “Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said. “There’s a bathroom right inside. Let’s go in there.” They went inside and Bumpy realized that the bathrooms were never right inside the casino door. They wandered through the floor, sticking to the edges, while Ivy clenched at her shirt and tried to pull it away from herself, or picked at her hair periodically, and followed him. He’d had to let go of her hand. It was crowded in here and she was trying to do something about the shirt and the damp, and so he kept looking over his shoulder to make sure she was following him. “Just over here,” he said. They got to the bathrooms, almost halfway through the casino and off to the right, a large hallway near shops and a small coffee shop, a bit of non-gambling normalcy creeping into the side of the casino. He looked at her. “God, I probably look gross. And smell like a bachelor party,” Ivy said. “You don’t. You look… good,” Bumpy said.

343

Ivy had not responded back, but she had looked up at Bumpy. He looked at her and wondered if he should try kissing her right then. He wanted to. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and went into the bathroom. Bumpy stood there for a second, looking at the stores and the coffeeshop, and had a thought. Two stores down was a small booth-like store that sold casino-related items. He looked near the front, and bought a t-shirt, a pink one with a v-neck, with a small logo of the casino on it. He then went back to the bathroom, the whole transaction taking only a moment. He stood outside the bathroom and waited for another minute. Nobody was going in or out. The hallway was almost deserted. He heard the noise from the gambling nearby, just a few dozen feet away, and saw the lights flashing and people walking by and once a showgirl and lots of men in suits. After waiting another minute more, he turned and walked into the ladies’ room where Ivy had gone. She was standing in front of a mirror with water running in the faucet, wetting her hands and trying to rub her hair and her arms clean. “Bumpy!” she said, surprised, but it was not a loud exclamation. Ivy never loudly exclaimed anything. “I got you a shirt,” he said. “What if someone else was in here?” she asked. Bumpy handed her the shirt and said “I didn’t think they’d be naked or anything.”

344

Ivy again had not said anything. Bumpy would have expected her to say what if I was naked or something to that effect. But instead, she took the shirt and held it up. “Thanks,” she said. “Thank you very much.” “No problem,” Bumpy said. They stood there for a second more, and then he realized that she was waiting for him to leave and so he did, going back out of the restroom and waiting in the hallway. At first, he went directly across from the door and stood there, leaning against the wall, but he felt creepy standing across from the ladies’ room with no apparent purpose, and did not know if anyone looking at him would immediately think he’s waiting for someone or if they would think what’s that guy doing there, all creepy? So instead he stood off to the side of the ladies’ room, forcing Ivy to look around for him when she came out. She had the shirt on, and Bumpy thought she looked very cute in it. “Thanks again,” she said. “It looks good on you,” he said, and Ivy pointed down the hall towards the shops and the coffee shop. “Should we go out that way?” Bumpy hesitated. There was an exit sign, but he wasn’t sure where it let out. “Let’s go back out the way we came in,” he said. In the restaurant, looking at the tiny table, on the night before Thanksgiving, Bumpy stopped thinking of that night and said “Let’s get out of here.” “What?” she asked. “Come on. Do you really want to stay here?” 345

“I thought…” but when he said stay here she got confused. “Do you mean… here, in Vegas?” Bumpy had stood up from the table and put his drink down on it. “What?” He paused. “No. What do you mean?” She stood up, too, uncertainly. “You… I thought, I just said something about living here and you then said…I’m confused. Why are we leaving?” “We’re never going to get a table, for one thing, and I’m getting bored sitting here. Do you want to stay and wait?” “Well, not really. But where are we going to go? We got all dressed up.” “Where do you want to go?” he asked her. She had sat back down in her confusion and he was still standing. “Bumpy, are…” Ivy picked up her drink and decided to just ask him. “Are you avoiding my question?” “What question?” She looked at him carefully. Could he really not know? Had he not heard? He seemed genuine. He looked at her as she wondered whether she should ask it again, or assume he had heard it and was trying to avoid it, or whether she should just drop the subject. “You know, as pretty as you look tonight,” Bumpy interrupted her thought, “I was just thinking just now how I prefer you dressed casually.” Ivy didn’t know what to say to that. Instead, she said “Are … you going to stay here?”

346

She inwardly thought she was a coward for not asking it as a we question again. Bumpy sat back down. “Here, like in Vegas?” “Yes.” “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never really thought it through.” “You never thought it through? I thought this was your plan?” “It wasn’t really a plan, though. It was something I’d had in the back of my mind for a while, a thing I wanted to do. Can I tell you something?” Ivy looked at her ring. “You can tell me.” She held her breath. Bumpy said, then, “I’ve been writing for a long time and I’ve not had a lot of success with it, until now, and I’m nervous about that, I suppose, a little, because even though it was just icing on the cake, it’s a lot of icing, and now I’m getting used to having a lot of money when I didn’t have a lot of money before. I mean, I had enough to get by, thanks to… well, I had enough.” He paused and said. “So.” He didn’t seem to know what to say then. Ivy looked up at his hesitation. I thought you were going to tell me something, she thought, and she reached across the little table and put her hand on his elbow. She screwed up her courage. “Enough to get by, thanks to… what?” she said, softly. Even she could barely hear it. Bumpy looked over at her, his eyes a little wide and, she thought, a little watery. He looked a little worried, too. She thought about the night they got engaged. 347

“Are you okay?” she asked, now. She looked down at his drink, trying to remember how many he’d had that night. That was only his second, right? Unless he’d been drinking before she came over to the hotel, before she closed up the restaurant. There were so many things she wanted to ask him! Could she? Could she ask questions and try to get him to give answers? Could she find out why he was here? Ivy kept thinking to herself as Bumpy’s non sequitur and her own question hung around. Bumpy was looking down at his drink, too, and he said, out of the blue, into the silence that somehow had settled on them in the midst of the clinking and laughing and quiet music and people eating, he mumbled, “I wasn’t drunk,” and he looked at her hand, which fell just a tiny space short of his arm. He patted it. “What?” she asked. “I want you to know, I wasn’t drunk the night I proposed to you.” “I didn’t think you were.” “Maybe you did,” Bumpy said, and didn’t look right at her. He looked down again. He felt more comfortable talking to his lap right now. “But I wasn’t. I was just sick. I had a virus or something, maybe a cold, maybe something I ate. I was just sick, was all.” “I read once,” he went on, “About a guy who had an infection of some sort for about 10 years, and it would crop up now and then in different ways, he just had a virus in him or bacteria or something, so he’d get infected cuts for no 348

reason and sometimes he’d get sick and sometimes he’d have a fever and he could never figure it out. “I thought for a while that was maybe me, that I had something like that, because every now and then, like once or twice a year, I just get kind of feverish and upset stomach and sweaty and I don’t feel… good. I just always attributed it to something or other but it was never anything serious enough or long lasting enough to do anything about. After I read that article, thought, I thought maybe I had that infection, like that guy had. And I’d get headaches, too, from time to time, and it began to seem like more than just headaches to me, like it must be something worse because I never heard of other people feeling like that and nobody ever said yeah, I get sick and headaches too or if they did, they’d say they had a headache but that they knew why they had it.” He stopped a moment and looked at her. Her hand made the leap across those last few centimeters and touched his arm, three of the four fingers resting lightly on his bicep, just pressing enough that he could feel them. “Then when I got a computer and could get on the Internet, I could look up symptoms and each time I’d try to figure out what the problem was. I only really thought of it when I was actually feeling… sick, and so I’d look up symptoms, and here’s the thing.” Bumpy took another sip of his drink. His throat was a little dry. He wasn’t used to speaking this long without interruption. “The symptoms of regular non-threatening stuff, like colds and a concussion, are the same symptoms as all the life-threatening terrible uncurable diseases. Which makes 349

sense: how many things can go wrong with a person, after all? Your head can hurt, say, and you can get bloody noses, and that’s a symptom of having dry air in your house and brain diseases – because nosebleeds are common, after all. They happen a lot. “So I’d look up my symptoms: fever, runny nose, upset stomach, and I could choose, on these websites, to see if I had a common cold, or, I don’t know, chronic uncurable rheumatic fever or something. And I was always worried that I did have one of those other things, that it wasn’t just a cold or the flu but was some kind of brain tumor, because the symptoms matched, and because, I suppose, I wanted it to be more important, maybe, more unusual. Who wants to feel like they’re suffering from something common? “I had to stop looking it up because I’d get depressed that I had something weird or fatal or uncurable and then I’d get depressed because I thought I was a hypochondriac, so I stopped. I just stopped worrying about it or tried to and I never told anyone, because I couldn’t figure out how to start that conversation. How do you say Oh, by the way sometimes I just get really sick and don’t know what’s going on, exactly, and so how have you been?” They sat in silence, and then Bumpy added, “Although I guess there are better times to finally bring it up than at a fancy dinner in a fancy restaurant.” Ivy sat there, quietly, wondering at the whole torrent of words that she’d just been treated to. Was this a good time to ask him about his plans? Should she ask what he’d started to say, instead, when he got distracted? Instead, she said, “I didn’t think you were drunk.” 350

“I worry about what you think,” Bumpy said. “I see you looking at your ring a lot. Especially tonight. Like you’re…” but he didn’t finish. Ivy held her breath for a second waiting for him, and then said: “I think…” but she didn’t finish by saying we should find a place to live instead of hotels. She held up her glass to take a sip of her wine, then changed her mind. “We should go,” she finished. It was almost what she’d started out to say. She wondered then, out of the blue, how Bumpy had supported himself before he sold the script. She wondered what it would be like to ask him. “You do?” Bumpy asked, jarring Ivy somewhat. He stood up and she realized he was reacting not to her thoughts but to the last thing she’d said, that they should leave. He helped her up – he was sometimes very old-fashioned that way, taking her elbow to cross streets and go over puddles. They walked outside. Ivy was used to walking outside in November and winter months in Las Vegas, used to the reversal that walking outside causes in warmer areas of the world, but Bumpy was not. Bumpy had grown up in Wisconsin and his body was always prepared for outside to be cooler than inside, especially in winter. His mind knew it was November and his mind associated November with cold, expecting, therefore. as he went through the restaurant doors, that it would be cold outside, or at least cooler outside than inside. It was not. It was warmer and he had braced himself wrongly; a lifetime of reflexes made him suck in his breath and clench his stomach momentarily, only to realize that such defensive matters were not needed and he let his breath out in a sigh.

351

“The maître didn’t even ask us why we were leaving, or say goodbye,” Ivy said. Bumpy wondered if she thought he was sighing because of that. They stood in front of the restaurant and looked around. Ivy glanced down at her ring again, hoping Bumpy didn’t notice. Do I look at it that much? She wondered. She wanted to tell him it’s because I don’t really believe that I have it. It’s because I’m worried it’ll be taken away. She wasn’t sure who would take it away. Maybe Bumpy. “Where to?” Bumpy asked her. “Let’s just walk,” she said, and took his hand and turned and began walking and realized that she’d started them walking back towards his hotel, which was not that far away. When we get there, she thought, I’ll have to find an excuse to keep walking or, she knew, they’d have to go in and the night would end and then tomorrow would be Thanksgiving which all meant that going into the hotel would start up again the discussion of what to do. She didn’t know yet how or whether to do that. She looked at the ring. Wouldn’t it be better, if it was going to be taken away, to just have it done now? Not doing anything, not pushing, had not resulted in things feeling more permanent. Bumpy saw her looking at the ring again. He wondered why she was looking at it now. The only other woman he’d ever known who was engaged was Sarah, and he had never bothered to pay attention to see if she looked at her ring a lot. He tried to remember cultural references, books and movies and TV shows. There were plenty of jewelry commercials in which the women sat at tables or on 352

lounge chairs or at a bar and looked at their engagement rings. Did they sit in bars? he asked himself now, because that did not seem as though it was right: society would frown on an engaged woman sitting in a bar looking at her ring, wouldn’t it? So they wouldn’t put that into a commercial. Numerous references to engagement rings and the size of the ring and the quality that popped into his head. “Let’s go get some groceries,” Ivy said, suddenly. They were near a corner and she pointed up. “We could take a bus, or wait for a taxi, and pick up some groceries, and go over to my apartment.” She thought it through for a moment. “If you don’t mind me cleaning up a little, first. It’s not like it’s terribly messy or terribly dirty. It’s just…” She paused. She paused because she realized that Bumpy had never seen her apartment. She looked up at him. “You’ve never even been there. We can go into your hotel, get you some clothes and stuff, and you can come there and I’ll clean up and cook us a Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll eat dinner and watch TV, like the parade or something, or a football game.” Bumpy, she knew, sometimes watched football games, when they had something about them that interested him. He didn’t watch every game and said he did not really have a favorite team, but looked for interesting parts about the games. “Really?” Bumpy said. “That’s what you really want to do?” He was thinking about the email he’d gotten, and also thinking about New York, and sounded distant. 353

Ivy didn’t know he was thinking about those things. She just knew that he sounded distant and she looked down at her ring and swallowed and said: “Yes. I really do. I want to cook you a regular Thanksgiving dinner and potatoes and have us sit around and eat it and just spend tomorrow relaxing and being full.” Bumpy had been making entirely different plans for the next day. And the next few days after that. He looked up at the street sign that Ivy had pointed at, wondered why she’d been pointing at it, then realized that she’d pointed at the bus stop sign. “We don’t have to take the bus,” he said, while he thought about this. He looked down at Ivy. “Let’s go get my stuff.” She smiled. “Really? Are you serious?” Bumpy worked very hard not to shrug because he knew (for a change, he actually knew how to react), that it would not be the right thing to do, and so for a change, he did the right thing and instead said “Yes. I’m serious,” without shrugging. Ivy leaned in and wrapped her arms around him. “We can get your stuff and there’s a grocery on the way and I’ll pick up all the things,” Ivy was running in her mind through how much money she had in her checking account. She did not want to have to turn around and borrow money from Bumpy at this point and did not even stop to think that it would not be “borrowing,” she just felt it was important that she be able to get the groceries without needing him to help her. She decided she would just get them, even if what she thought she had in her account, an amount she was not entirely sure of anyway, was not enough. She would deal with that Friday. They had walked into 354

the lobby of the hotel and Bumpy had paused them by the concierge where he gave his room number and name and asked them to get a cab in about 10 minutes. Up in the room, Ivy gathered up the few things she had there which she wanted to take back with her. Bumpy went into the bedroom and took a few of his shirts and shorts. He wondered what he was supposed to wear for a Thanksgiving dinner, and decided to just ask. “I don’t know,” Ivy said, having been only a second away from saying “I don’t care” which was true but which she felt sent the wrong message. “Whatever’s comfortable,” she said, and she told him she had to use the bathroom and she would be ready. Bumpy picked up his cellphone and looked at it. It said he had a message waiting. He ducked into the bedroom and pressed the key to dial his voice mail. He listened to the message. He sat down on the bed. He wondered whether he could still put his plan into place. Ivy came into the bedroom and saw him sitting there. “Do you like those cranberries, the kind that come in a can?” she asked. “I’m not real sure what cranberries taste like, but I’ve always seen them in the can and I’ve never seen cranberries not in a can, but it’s not really Thanksgiving without cranberries, is it?” Ivy had not had a Thanksgiving dinner in many years, and had never cooked one. She did not tell Bumpy that. He looked up at her. 355

“Come here,” he said, and patted the bed. Ivy stopped dead in her tracks, dropping the shirt she’d been folding and putting into her purse. “What?” “Don’t worry,” Bumpy said, and Ivy shook her head and her eyes got large, out of nowhere. “I did it,” she mumbled. She sat down next to him. “I did it. Didn’t I? I knew I would.” She put her hand over her engagement ring. She rubbed the ring. “I’m sorry,” she looked up at him. “What?” Bumpy was trying not to look at her looking at the ring, and wondering what she was so upset about. “I drove you away,” she said. “What? No,” Bumpy said, but Ivy pressed her hands onto her legs and took a deep breath and said “Tell me what you were going to say when you told me to sit on the bed.” They sat in silence for a moment. Bumpy saw that her hands were white from the pressure of pushing onto her legs. He lifted up her right hand, the one nearest him. A hand-shaped print in her leg slowly faded from white to leg-colored. “I have to go somewhere,” he said. Ivy just looked at him. “I won’t be gone long,” he said. She stopped staring at him and instead looked down at her hands again. She put her hands together on her lap. “It’s just a couple of days,” Bumpy said. “I drove you away,” Ivy said, softly. Her eyes got wider, still. She looked up at him. “Tell me something,” she asked him. Before he could say anything, 356

before he knew what he might say, she went on: “Tell me what made you first like me.” Bumpy started to say that he was not leaving, not like she thought. But she leaned away and said “Just tell me.” So he said: “It was your eyes.” “My eyes?” she said. “They were big. They were really big. You came into the store that day and said something, I don’t even remember what.” Ivy didn’t react or interrupt. She didn’t lean back towards him. She put her hand onto the silky, puffy comforter on top of the bed. The bed hadn’t been made today. Bumpy had probably told the maid not to bother, she thought. He sometimes did that. She picked it up and pressed it to her face. It was brown, and shiny, a glossy chocolatey shiny brown. She held it against her face and felt each tiny little thread in it shift as she rubbed it against her cheek, transferring the hot sadness from her skin to the fabric. Bumpy was still talking. “All I could think about were your eyes. That’s all I really noticed. I didn’t even pay much attention to what you were saying. I didn’t listen, I don’t think, at all. I just wondered how your eyes could be so big and so shiny.” Ivy looked down at the comforter that she’d dropped. The sheets underneath were creamy-looking, frosting turned into bedding. She turned a little further away from Bumpy. “It’s a trick I learned when I was a teenager,” she told him.

357

November 14: It was nearly 4 a.m. and Sarah had not slept at all. It was unlike here, but still, she had not slept. She had lain in the bed and rolled around, had laid in the bed and put her arms over her eyes, had laid in the bed and tried to calm herself through a technique she had read about in an article on stress relief, a breathing method: Inhale through her mouth while counting slowly to four. Hold her breath while counting slowly to four. Exhale through her mouth while counting slowly to four. Hold her breath while counting slowly to four. Repeat and repeat and repeat. It was supposed to slow the heart down. It was supposed to focus the mind on the breathing and take the mind off of anything stressful. It was supposed to create a pattern that calmed the brain and the heart and the mind. Sarah instead felt a little dizzy and a little suffocated and wondered how long she had been doing the breathing. She stopped and instead laid on her left side, looking to the side of the bed that Peyton would have slept on. Then, for a while, she laid on her right, looking at the bedroom window. She laid there looking at the bedroom window and saw the tree in the front yard framed by both windows, the trunk in the left-most window rising up from below the bottom edge of the window and continuing out the top, branches stretching out briefly in that window and then appearing in the other window to the side, carrying over with a brief interruption by the bulk of the house wall, to themselves disappear 358

beyond the sill. Sarah tried to pretend that the two windows were pictures, paintings of the tree intended to be displayed like that, but she couldn’t, not really, because she knew in her mind that the tree did not stop at the edge of the window the way a painting of the tree would have stopped at the edge of the canvas. That’s the difference between a painting and a photo, she thought to herself as she laid in the dark. In a painting, the artist paints a picture that ends at the borders of the canvas. It’s meant for me – Sarah tried never to think of herself as an “us” and when thinking did not lump herself in with the world; she would never think “the artist meant for us” to do something – for me to think that the picture goes on beyond the edge, but it doesn’t. The world of the picture ends at the edge of the canvas. A photograph, though, captured a square of the whole reality, taking a piece of something that extended beyond the borders of the photo and putting it on paper. A photo went on. Like the tree. Unlike a painting. She sat up then, and turned on her bedroom lamp. She walked into the hallway where the photos were hanging, a double row of photographs that had been hung by Peyton a few months back, when the two of them had spent a day getting the photos enlarged and framed. They were photos of the vacation the two of them had taken, a vacation to San Diego. They were at the zoo, on the beach, at the airport, in their hotel. Nothing spectacular. As she looked at each one, she thought that: nothing spectacular. Just nice. It was just a nice time. They’d gone because San Diego was supposed to be nice in the winter and the tickets had been inexpensive, five days’ worth of trip to celebrate the anniversary 359

of the time they’d met, and as she looked at the pictures, the photographs, she could not shake the feeling that they were no longer photographs but had been transformed, somehow, into paintings. When she looked at the picture she had taken of Peyton leaning over to look further into the polar bear enclosure, with the polar bears in the background, she saw that one of the polar bears had only its upper body in the picture; standing on all fours, it was walking into the frame and only its front half was in the picture. She could not, as she stood there, imagine that the other half of the polar bear existed outside of the frame, had ever existed outside of the frame. She could not remember what was near the polar bear area, what lay to the right or the left of it in the zoo and she looked at the picture and tried to remember, tried to see the fence that Peyton stood in front of as extending outside of the frame but she could not. She traced her finger along it, along the fence underneath the glass of the frame, and traced it to where the matting of the photo began. Her finger followed, over the matting, along the line the fence would have in the photo underneath, and she kept tracing it, pausing when her finger hit the frame. Then she tried to continue, talking to herself: “The fence would continue,” she said, and tried to run her finger onto the wall. “What was over here?” Was it another polar bear? Was it the buffalo enclosure? She didn’t know. It was Jane’s fault she could not sleep. It was Jane’s fault she was so angry. It was someone’s fault, anyway. 360

She wanted to take the picture off the wall, take the frame off of it. Not to harm it, though. Although angry, she did not even for a moment think of smashing the photo or the frame, of breaking the glass. That was not her temperament, and she knew she would just have to clean up the mess anyway, would have to go and reframe it and make sure the frame matched, or if she did not, she would have a gap in the photos and would have to rearrange them or would have to be reminded each time she saw the wall of the mistake she’d made when she smashed the photo. She wanted to take the picture out and see if once it was out of the frame it would make a difference, it that would allow the picture to capture a reality that did not end at the edge, would allow the picture to be a slice of a scene that had actually existed, a portion of the entire world as it had existed at that moment in time, instead of this still visage that lived inside an eight by ten inch world with boundaries, cut off. But she knew it would make no difference. She hung the photo back up and wondered if she should watch TV, or drink a glass of warm milk, or read, or go for a drive. Going for a drive, she knew, could calm down babies and little children and maybe it could calm her down, but she didn’t feel like putting on a coat and did not know where she would drive and it was four o’clock in the morning, and who drives around at that hour? So she walked along the photos and looked at each, noting that each ended at the frame, trying to remember what they had been doing before the photo, during the photo, after the photo. Here they were eating lunch in a park. What 361

had they eaten? She couldn’t remember. What day of the trip had that been? She couldn’t remember. Who had taken that picture of them? They must have asked someone to do it. A man? A woman? Someone passing by? A native? The man who sold them lunch? She tried to look closely enough to see what they were eating and she could not make it out. If Jane had not seen the interview, she might not have been so mad, maybe. Sarah had suspected that was what had upset Jane, although Jane had not admitted being upset by Sarah being interviewed. Sarah had not directly accused Jane of that, of being upset by the CNN interview, and Jane had not admitted it. But Sarah felt that the idea, the accusation, had lain between them across the absurdly tiny table that the coffee shop allowed people to use if they wanted to sit there and drink coffee. Even though she and Jane had been on opposite sides of the table, the table had not made much of a barrier between them and served only to hold their coffee, to let one person (but only one at a time) put her hands on the table at a time. Two sets of hands would have probably overloaded the table. In her mind, Sarah heard the echo of the accusatory phrase that she wished she had said. Upset in the middle of the night, Sarah had the feeling that she had accused Jane of being upset by the interview, and that the accusation had hung between them even though she had not said it and Jane had not admitted that she was upset over the interview. Instead, Jane had said “You just don’t seem as though your heart is in it.”

362

Jane had said that just before she had stood up, stood up so abruptly that she had knocked down the table, making the fight more melodramatic than it had been, more attention-getting than either woman wanted it. It had been a quiet argument up until then, a discussion whose tension and anger could be seen only deep below the surface, the way a lake will sometimes ripple unexpectedly on a calm day and reveal that things are occurring down where they cannot be seen. But Jane had said “You just don’t seem as though your heart is in it,” and Sarah had responded to that by saying: “You’re just upset because I stole your spotlight. That’s what it was always about, wasn’t it? Even from the first moment I came in there you just wanted to be the center of attention, just wanted people to look at you and focus on you and know what you had lost, and you’re mad at me because I’ve taken that from you.” Sarah paused and took a deep breath and she already regretted saying those things to Jane because she only felt they might be true for Jane. She could not be sure that was the truth at all and really had no idea whether it was or not, that Jane was really running the group because she liked the limelight. When Sarah had been younger she’d tried, as a sophomore, to get a position on the school newspaper, a newspaper that was run by a junior editor, as they always were. The junior editor had been in some of Sarah’s classes, because Sarah took classes a year above her grade from time to time. The junior editor had told Sarah that her essay was not good enough for the school newspaper, that she was not getting the job this year and that she could try again next year. Sarah had come home and Mom had been sitting in the kitchen, sipping coffee and 363

looking at a magazine. Sarah had slumped down at the other end of the table and Mom after a moment had looked at her and wondered what was wrong. Sarah told Mom, and finished with “She hates me.” Sarah had said that at the end of her story and gone on: “She doesn’t like me, that’s why. Probably because I’m smarter than her.” Mom had never told Sarah that it was a good thing to be smart, that beauty was short-lived and brains were forever. The advice was something that Sarah believed and something that she had come to believe and pursue on her own, although she was pretty enough. She would be voted, in her junior year, onto the court of the Junior Prom and would tell the vice principal that she had to resign from that because she was not going to go to the Junior Prom. The vice principal, she felt sure, thought that she could not get a date, and she would want to tell the vice principal that three boys had asked her to the Junior Prom but that she did not want to go. But then she would have to answer why she did not want to go and she did not have an answer for that. Before saying that, about the brains, Mom had sat and paged through her magazine for a minute or two after the story, causing Sarah to wonder if this was one of those times Mom would not answer at all, whether she had said something in the story to cause Mom to lose interest or to be at a loss for words, or whatever it was that happened on those times that Mom got quiet. At Mom’s hand, Sarah remembered, had been a large brown envelope. It was addressed to Dylan, care of Mom. It was an unusual envelope, which was why Sarah remembered it, to this day. It was not letter-sized, and not 9 by 11364

sized. It was one of those overtly official 4 by 10 envelopes, envelopes that were just a little too large and brown and called attention to themselves in a soft manner by being just a little bit more of everything that envelopes usually are. But then Mom had answered Sarah’s story, and had also told her that everyone suspects others of doing those things they would do themselves, that a person will cast her motives onto others because that is the most comfortable explanation she can think of for how others are acting. Sarah had understood Mom’s point to be that instead of taking someone at their word or face value, instead of trying to figure out the real reasons for the other person’s actions, people simply assume that the other is doing what she herself would do. Sarah had gotten up from the table and gone up to her room and sat on the chair near her desk and had looked out the window and had watched a robin peck around in the back yard and had turned towards the door and had said to her bedroom door, but quietly: “I don’t do that. And I would not pass someone over simply because they’re smarter than me.” Now she worried that was exactly what she was doing to Jane, as she told Jane, in the coffee shop, across the too-small table, “You just wanted people to focus on you and you wanted to focus on the group because you didn’t want to have to face what the truth of your husband’s death. That’s all this is.” She said it so quietly she wondered herself if she was talking audibly. “That’s all the group is: An excuse for you to not face the truth and instead focus on you.” Unspoken between them was what the truth was supposed to be in Sarah’s comment. Sarah did not need to say it and did not want to say it because she 365

knew as she uttered that last line that she was saying too much, that she was doing what Mom had told her people do, and she also knew that it was too much because there was no way to go back from that, no way to go back from accusing Jane’s husband of not being killed, of simply having been careless, or drunk, or stupid… of having been an accident and a dumb one at that, instead of the victim of malevolent forces or fate, and of accusing Jane of not wanting to face that and of using her husband’s death for her own purposes. She was right there was no way to go back from that, for Jane had stood up and stood up abruptly, bumping the edge of the table, the table whose top was barely larger than its base, and the table had tottered and fallen over, leaving Sarah to sit there, her coffee in her hand, while she looked at Jane, who now stood over her. Jane was not a tall woman, so it did not seem at first as though Jane was standing, because the height differences between them were not so great even though Sarah was sitting. Jane stood but did not tower over Sarah except in a metaphysical sense because everyone who was now looking at them, and that was probably everyone in the coffee shop, could see that Jane was upset. Jane stared at Sarah and opened her mouth. She then turned and walked away. Her last words to Sarah would be you just don’t seem as though your heart is in it, and her leaving seemed, in retrospect (later that night, not sleeping) done less to avoid making a scene and more because in that moment when Jane had opened her mouth to talk, she’d realized that her previous comment was better than anything else she could say to finish the quarrel. Jane left at that

366

moment because it was, probably, the perfect way to make a scene without making one. Jane’s final comment, the one that had prompted Sarah to accuse Jane and Jane to leave had in turn, had been prompted by Sarah asking Jane why she was doing this, why Jane had come here just to insult her, why Jane was asking her to leave the group or step aside. But Jane had not said any of those things. That did not keep Sarah from saying to Jane just before Jane’s last comment: “I don’t know why you are asking me to leave the group. I don’t know why you’d do that. I’ve tried. Didn’t I go meet with that stupid councilman? Didn’t I put up fliers?” and Sarah had mentally, pictured the fliers sitting in her car, the fliers that Jane had seen, the fliers that had no doubt prompted this meeting, the fliers that had set this in motion. She wondered if she should take back the flier part. It had not been a deliberate attempt to mislead Jane. Jane had not directly asked Sarah to leave the group. Jane had instead finished her short statement to Sarah with this phrase: “So it might be better that way.” Her short statement that Sarah had interpreted as wanting her to leave the group had been to say to Sarah: “We’re very serious about this, but sometimes passions come and go. There are a lot of people in the group, now, and a lot of people paying attention to the group, especially with the book and the interview, and the message needs to be focused. It needs to be focused and coherent, and there needs to be more … passion,” and Jane had paused when she said that, because she had used the word passion too much, she thought, but 367

she’d gone on. “And I know that you’ve been trying, but it maybe is getting a little hard for you, it’s maybe too soon for you to be shouldering all of this. I’ve been dealing with it for a long time – longer than anyone—and it’s still hard for me. And I don’t have all the other things… happening to me… that you do.” Sarah had bristled at that. She had gotten upset, angry, at the insinuation that Jane knew what other things might be happening to Sarah and did not for a moment think that Jane had any idea. She tried to remember if she had ever told Jane, or told anyone in the group, about her mom. Or Dylan. She did not think so. If she had it would be sketchy, at best, and how could Jane assume she knew anything about Sarah from some offhand comment? But Jane was continuing: “You haven’t spent a lot of time with the others, and haven’t been a member of the group that long, either, and it’s a support group, most of all, so maybe you should focus, for a while, on that, put that in the forefront: getting support and using the group for that, too. So…” Jane had paused and either regrouped her thoughts or changed directions. “It might be better that you do,” and Sarah had asked why she was being asked to leave the group, a question that left Jane befuddled. Jane’s whole speech had been prompted by Sarah almost asking that question, because Sarah had thought that the reason Jane asked her to meet at the coffeeshop after the interview was to ask her to step down. Which was ridiculous in itself, she thought, as she sat there just before asking the question. Why should she ask me to “step down?” That’s stupid. I never asked to be the one that reporter picked out and I didn’t ask for that writer to call me and I 368

didn’t ask for Peyton to drown and I didn’t ask to do any of this and hidden inside that stream of thoughts were the critical ones, the words and thoughts she did not focus on, I didn’t ask for Peyton to die but instead of focusing on those words and thinking about how that thought propelled her forward – in this conversation, in the last few months, in life, Sarah had thought, instead, why is she asking me this? She had thought that because Jane had just said “I saw the interview, Sarah. I didn’t even know that you had set it up, and you didn’t tell me that you were even going to be doing that interview.” Before Sarah could say I didn’t know that I was supposed to check with you or tell you, and before she could say I didn’t know they’d be coming to interview me Jane had continued on: “And it’s not that you did the interview at all, or that I didn’t know about it. The problem is…” and Sarah thought maybe Jane paused because she wanted to start over because she didn’t want to say that anything was a problem but there was a problem, wasn’t there? That’s why Jane had chosen that word: problem. Jane started her comment again: “The thing is that you didn’t seem very… committed. I watched the interview and you seemed distracted and not focused and it, well, it upset me. It maybe upset others, too. And I know that this time is hard for you, but it’s hard for everyone in the group.” Jane’s comment about the interview, Sarah thought when Jane made it, was an attempt to steer the conversation back to a better area, a more-accessible ground between them because Jane had begun in a more dangerous territory. Jane had started out on the thinner part of the ice and was trying to shuffle her 369

way to better footing, Sarah thought later on. Jane had shifted abruptly to the interview after saying: “I just think maybe you need to talk to someone,” to which Sarah had sat back, leaned back, and stiffened, and said: “Are you saying you think I need help?” Jane had not said Yes, you need help, you’ve suffered a terrible loss and maybe you should go talk to someone about it and Sarah would not have heard it as that, would not have heard it as a friendly or sympathetic comment, anyway, Sarah would not have heard it as you’ve got all this going on in your life, and you’re not talking to anyone, she would have heard it as You need help. And who needs help? The helpless. Those who cannot take care of things for themselves. Not her. Jane had wandered into that conversational area by asking Sarah if she felt well, if she was tired. Just a minute or two after Sarah had sat down at the table, Jane had said “Are you sure you’re feeling well?” Sarah had kept her eyes on her coffee as she answered, “Yes, I’m fine. I’m kind of busy today.” But she was not busy. She had nothing else to do that day. She would go visit Mom, who probably would not wake up much while she was there and wouldn’t be great company anyway if she did. She would talk a bit with Tammy, who was working today and who would stop in. She had nothing else she needed to do at all. Her grocery shopping was done and her house was clean and the package was at home in its drawer next to the ring and she had no idea what to do with it yet. But she did not want to sit here talking with Jane and so she told Jane she was fine, and also said she was kind of busy and then regretted 370

using the words kind of because it was a marker that she did not believe her own statement, hedging her bets. If she’d said she was busy, then Jane might have asked with what and there would be disagreement maybe, about whether what Sarah was going to do that day constituted busy or not, because busy was more absolute, more definite. By saying kind of Sarah had sent a message to Jane that even Sarah did not believe that she was busy, that in her own mind it was debatable whether she was busy or not, which Sarah felt then indicated to Jane that she was not busy, that she was lying. Which she was. Lying. But she didn’t want Jane to know and regretted saying kind of. She looked up at Jane and said “Pretty busy.” Better, not great, she thought to herself. Jane said “Well, I just wanted to talk with you but now that I see you, you look a little…” and trailed off. The door to the coffee shop opened, a little cold air coming in and they both looked in that direction. Jane smiled at Sarah, then, and said “How are you doing, then, otherwise?” She didn’t say what otherwise referred to and before either of them could dwell on that she said “Are you coping okay?” With what? Sarah thought to herself. She did not repeat her thought to Jane. She looked at Jane and said “Yes. I am.” Those words stopped that conversation, she thought. They were firm, they invited no questioning. “It’s hard for all of us,” Jane said, opening a different door. Throwing herself into the mix. 371

Sarah sipped her coffee. She wished that they’d decided to drive, or walk, or do anything but sit. She felt a restless energy flowing through her, and decided that it was her mind telling her not to sit here and talk to Jane. She looked out the window at her car parked in front of the coffee shop. She wondered if Jane would walk out past the car, see the fliers gone, and she wondered if Jane did that, would she know or guess that the fliers had been simply thrown away now? “After… after,” Jane said, repeating the word. Sarah thought Jane was using it, the word after as a substitute when she said it the second time, a substitute for whatever it was that Jane had been going to say. “I didn’t feel like myself for a long time.” Jane gave a small laugh, a forced-sounding laugh. “I suppose I still don’t, really. Feel like myself. I spent a lot of time sorting it out. Did you know I went to see a psychiatrist?” There were more hedging words: Instead of just out and saying I went to a psychiatrist, which might be, Sarah knew, an uncomfortably open revelation to someone Jane hardly knew, Jane pretended, for the sake of conversation, that she might have told Sarah, before, that she had seen a psychiatrist: Oh, while we’re just talking here, maybe I mentioned it before because it’s no big deal, did you know, or remember, that I used to see a psychiatrist? Sarah had never had a conversation with Jane in which that topic had come up. Maybe Jane thought that Sarah had overheard it during one of the meetings she almost never attended anymore. But Sarah doubted it. As she sat there and listened to Jane pretend that Sarah might have known that Jane had

372

seen a psychiatrist, Sarah doubted that Jane really believed that, and also got angrier. “And the meetings helped,” Jane went on, “Helped a lot, once we began them. Just to be able to sit with others and realize that I wasn’t the only one thinking those things.” Jane laughed again, the same kind of little laugh, and Sarah wondered if there would be more did you know revelations. There weren’t. Jane abruptly changed tactics: “Maybe it would help you, if you came to more meetings. Or talked to someone.” “Help… what.” Sarah said. She realized, when she said it, that the words had raised the tension level by a considerable degree. Sarah had read in books about people saying something in a venomous tone, and she felt as she said “Help what,” and as it was not a question, that she had unintentionally hit on a venomous tone. She said “help what,” and looked at Jane, looked straight on, her hand on her coffee mug, the mug lifted an inch off the table but moving no further than that. She sat there while help what hung in the air, just as other comments would in a moment and looked at Jane. Later, Sarah would realize that while she had not intentionally said help what with such a degree of anger, she had in fact intentionally gotten angry. She had sat listening to Jane and had stoked her anger as Jane made her little nervous laughs and used her hedging words to introduce subjects and to pretend that she and Sarah were not ripping something open between them, both sitting at that table tearing into something that had up until that moment lain bound up between them, unspoken and 373

unknowing but tearing at them anyway. Sarah had decided to get angry, and, she realized later, she had decided it at the precise moment when Jane had used the words did you know I went to see a psychiatrist. Before Jane said that, before Jane pretended there was a bond between them, before Jane decided to insinuate that some connection between them entitled her to make a revelation like that, to provide private information, to solicit information from Sarah in return, to develop a connection, before Jane had simply offered that statement and all its implications to Sarah, Sarah had not been one hundred percent sure of what she was going to do at this little meeting that Jane had requested. After Jane had said that… did you know… Sarah had become, in some part of her, sure, and determined to get angry and see what happened after that. So she, in some part of her, had put her plan into effect and said help what and Jane had looked at Sarah and had looked at the coffee cup, frozen in time, and had turned slightly to her left, towards the door, almost unconsciously. She looked like she was getting ready to lave. Then Jane had said “I just think maybe you need to talk to someone.” Sarah got more angry at that. She then realized that she was trying to get angry and allowed herself to do that, allowed herself to move ahead and not to plan beyond just getting more angry and then seeing where her anger took her, not knowing that her anger would continue pushing her around deep into the night that night and into the next day. She just allowed herself to get angry. She did not realize, until help what and the anger started, that she’d wanted to do just that, get mad. As she had entered the coffee shop, the phone 374

call that Jane had made to her still fresh in her mind, her mind still a whirl, she had been upset, yes, but not yet mad. She had, upon entering the coffee shop, not made up her mind how to handle this yet. On the drive over, she had thought through all the possible outcomes, planning them: What if Jane gets mad at me, raises her voice? She wondered. It was good that they were meeting in public, to deal with that. Sarah would sit near the entrance, where people would always be going by. What if she accuses me of… something? Because Sarah wasn’t sure what she would be accused of, exactly, but felt that it was possible Jane would accuse her of actions, or thoughts, or impulses. She felt guilty: the box of fliers had been thrown in the garbage on the way over here. Sarah had driven into a parking lot of a fast food restaurant and gotten out and put the box into the trash can nearest the entrance way and then gotten back into her car and driven away. If she was accused of something, at least there would be no evidence, and she felt relieved and terrible when the fliers were put into the garbage. What if she kicks me out of the group? Sarah thought, and did not know what to think about that. Would the ex-FBI agent hear about it? Would someone else? Would it be reported? For a while, nothing about the group had really been reported at all and she felt as though nobody would ever know if she was kicked out of the group, but then again, CNN, CNN had come to her house, after interviewing the ex-FBI agent Bill Buckton and had talked to her with no notice, really, just a phone call a little before and suddenly there were cameramen in her living room and they were talking to her and telling her it was okay to talk to 375

them, but maybe it hadn’t been, with Jane, and maybe that would get her kicked out of the group and then people would comment on that. What would they think? She took a circuitous, longer way to the coffee shop Jane had suggested meeting at and as she drove she wondered what that man… Dan… had wanted when she had seen him briefly come into her house during the interview. She distracted herself from planning Jane-eventualities, distracted herself, too, from the idea of whether the ex-FBI agent would put a coda in her book about her, Sarah Strathan was only briefly a spokesperson for the group seeking law enforcement help… Sarah pictured that line in the book, but could picture no more, could imagine nothing after that in the book that might be printed, and worried about that, worried about the book reporting that she wasn’t part of the group, and how that would look. She sat at a stoplight, four blocks from the coffee shop, watching the light placidly sit on red, and looked in the rear view mirror at her eyes, which were wider than she was used to, and realized that she was worried how it would look for her if she were kicked out of the group that was trying to prove Peyton’s, and the others, deaths, were not accidents and were not ridiculous and were not the result of drinking problems or stupidity. She was not the type of person who would apologize to someone who was dead. But she did look to her right and see the tiny piece of straw wrapper on the seat and look at that for a moment, still there. And she thought about apologizing. 376

Then, to distract herself, she thought again about what Dan had been doing at her house, and drove the last four blocks to the coffee shop wondering if she should have invited him in or spoken to him, but why should she have? He had come to her house, uninvited, had come over and then come into her house without being invited in, and he was the one who’d brought the package in the first place, or who at least had brought it to her attention. Still thinking about whether she should have invited Dan in, even though he hadn’t called, she got out of her car at the coffee shop and saw Jane through the window, not sitting near the exit, really, at all. Jane waved at her, a little salute-like wave, and Sarah thought about how the wave looked more businesslike than friendly, which was how the phone call had gone. “Sarah?” Jane had asked, but who else would it be? Sarah had thought when she picked up the phone in her kitchen. Jane knew that nobody else lived with her and why would someone who doesn’t live here answer her phone? Later, that night, looking at the pictures, Sarah thought maybe it had been then, that phone call, that she had first thought about possibly just getting angry. “Yes,” Sarah had said. “I’d like to talk to you,” Jane had said. “When?” “Now, if you have time,” Jane had paused and then said “We could meet at Greens and Beans.” The coffeeshop, Sarah knew, served salads made from organic produce at lunch and dinner. They agreed to meet in a half-hour and Sarah had waited 28 minutes to leave because she had realized after Jane had 377

hung up that Jane had never said what they were meeting about and so Sarah decided that she would be late. Now, she walked in late to the meeting with Jane and saw the businesslike half-wave and tried to put Dan out of her mind. She tried to think how to handle this conversation and what she would do. Jane had said “I hope you don’t mind, I went ahead and ordered.” Sarah had wondered if Jane felt like looking at her watch when she said that, to make the point that Sarah was late, and Sarah felt like saying I decided to be late. But Sarah instead said “I’ll go get some coffee,” and walked over to the counter and looked at the menu, not reading any of it, not caring what kinds of gourmet coffees they had, just taking a moment while the boy working behind the counter did not greet her but watched her. She made up her mind. I’m not going to quit. I’m not leaving the group. She ordered a coffee by saying “Just a medium coffee. A regular, black, medium coffee,” and reached into her purse and pulled out a five dollar bill while trying to decide if she should get the exact change out, too. She worked, in her mind, on how much the exact change would be and whether she should get it out because she didn’t want to think about the meeting yet, Jane yet, and mostly because she didn’t want to think about whether she had decided, now, that she was not quitting mostly because she didn’t want anyone to think bad thoughts about her if she were to quit. She put two of the dollar bills that she got back into the “Tip” canister and turned around and went to Jane’s table and sat down where Jane remarked on how it was getting colder out and Sarah agreed that it was and Jane asked if she 378

had plans for the holidays and Sarah said that no, she did not really, not yet, to imply that she would but had not given it any thought, yet, and Sarah had sipped at her coffee. Jane had sipped at hers. There was some silence and Jane looked out the window at Sarah’s car, parked in front of the plate glass window directly in front of the coffee shop. Jane then said “Are you sure you’re feeling well?” It would be, in the end, only about five minutes, total, that Sarah was in the coffee shop at all, five minutes, maybe, from walking in and ordering coffee until she’d stood up, until she left the words taken that from you hanging in the air and left her coffee on the stupidly small table and had walked out, not stormed out, but walked out in such a manner that everyone who saw her would and did know that she was furious. But she had not quit. She told herself that as she walked away from the pictures in her hallway later that night, still furious. I did not quit.

379

July 1: “I would like to see your store,” Teresa told Bumpy. They were standing in the shadow of the entrance to the Luxor casino, the building a glass pyramid that blocked the Las Vegas scorch by filling the interior with enough solid objects to shield them from the sun, but even so, the interior air felt hot and dead. The Luxor was on the end of the Strip, nearly out of town, feeling removed from Las Vegas and the gambling and stripping and money-spending and drinking and falling down and shirttails pulled out of pants and heeled shoes being carried and chips being cashed in. All of those things happen at this end of the Strip, Bumpy thought, but they happen with less frequency because there are fewer casinos here, and the lack of casinos makes it seem as though this is where Las Vegas’ sidewalk ends. He looked to his left, out the door and down towards the rest of the Strip, seeing New York New York and Paris and the new casino being built across from Treasure Island where he was staying. Teresa didn’t know where he was staying, that he was at Treasure Island this week. As he looked down that way, he felt that if he were to turn and look out the doors to his right he would see nothing but desert and scrub and sand. That was how empty it felt out here. He knew that was not true, that it was not merely desert to his right, but it felt that way. “Maybe later,” Bumpy said. Teresa waited for Bumpy to ask how he had found her. She wanted him to need to know that. She rubbed her hand on the back of her wrist, feeling the sweat start on her forehead and shoulders and even the wrist she rubbed, as she 380

studied Bumpy. If he wanted to know how she had found him, he would want to know why she had found him. Even if he didn’t ask why, he would want to know it, Teresa knew, because she knew the why always follows the how. Knowing how something happened lets you delve into why something happened and knowing how something happened makes people ask why something happened. So she knew that if Bumpy asked how he found her he would wonder why she had found him, even if he never voiced that question. She wanted him, too, to ask why because her plan right now was to tell him how she found him but not why. She would leave him guessing about that until he guessed it right. He didn’t ask, though, as they sat there. It was only 10 a.m. but already too hot. She couldn’t imagine that he would like this, that anyone would like this. When she had purchased her ticket the woman on the phone at the airline, after telling her that she could book online and save some money, had proceeded with the telephone purchase. “You could also book this online and then go ticketless and travel without the ticket or need to pick it up,” she said, and Teresa had said “I’ll keep that in mind in the future. I just … am not near my computer right now,” and she’d looked over at her computer as she said it, not really caring if the woman knew she was lying at all, but instead thinking to herself that it was an amazing world she lived in, one in which she had a computer that she could have booked this ticket on, and saved money, and made things easier, but her computer was turned off right now and that made it not worth her while to bother to save the money, to take in the convenience. She had actually used her 381

computer to look up the number for the airline, doing so just after finding out where Bumpy was. After looking up the number online she had decided she was going to go right then and there and so she shut her computer down and called the airline, and while she listened to the woman tell her what she needed to go and gave her credit card number, she simply shook her head at the thought that in her world, turning her computer back on was too much trouble to go to in order to avoid paying a little more money and make things a little easier at the end of the journey. Turn it on, sit through the startup, wait for the programs to load, then log in to the airport site, then wait for confirmation emails… it all made her cringe a little and instead she paid the higher price and was instructed to come to the counter and pick up her tickets, which she’d done, getting out of work and getting home and packing and getting to the airport and leaving her car in the long term parking after checking the rates on that; the parking was expensive, too, like the ticket, and she could have saved some money by taking a cab or getting someone to drive her or simply parking in the long-term lot which would require her to walk a block (Madison, Wisconsin had no airport shuttles) but she didn’t want to stop and didn’t want to backtrack and didn’t want to delay. So she left her car in long-term parking and took her suitcase and carried it with her through the doors and wished, as she looked at her hand pushing the door open, that she had been able to find the ring that day when she’d thrown it. She had not told Bumpy in advance that she was coming here. Waiting in McLaren airport for her luggage, she had taken out her cell phone and only briefly had considered whether to call him or text message him. She knew he 382

rarely answered his cell phone anyway, and she rarely left messages now, for people, a habit she’d picked up from him in their brief time. “I don’t like it when people call me back without listening to the message,” he’d told her when she asked why he never left a message on voice mail. “People look at the caller ID and see it’s me, or whoever, and they call back before checking their messages.” So Teresa had begun doing that, too, explaining to a few people that she did not leave messages, because nobody ever checks them before calling back. Now, if she was calling for a specific reason, when she wanted the person on the other end to know what she was calling about, she sent a text message and asked them to call her back. That was what she’d done for Bumpy that morning at the airport. I’m in Las Vegas and going to stay at the Luxor. Come get me, she’d texted. She then included her number, too. The compromise she’d made with herself when she began sending text messages (not “emails sent from Blackberry” or anything like that; simply text messages) was that she would not abbreviate and would not misspell or use all lower-case letters. That let her roll her eyes when others did things like that, others who were not teenagers and able to spell but just lazy. She was already checked in when her cellphone had buzzed and she’d picked it up, answered it because it was Bumpy. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he’d said. “Why don’t we meet out front?” He’d been polite. He’d spoken quietly and she felt relieved. Three months ago the last thing she’d done to him was slap him and throw his engagement ring 383

away and she shouldn’t have to feel relieved that he wasn’t angry with her, should she? He was the one who’d cheated on her. He was the one who’d been making out with that girl, the one his friend had brought on the bachelor party. She met him inside, in the front of the casino, waiting inside instead of outside because when she’d walked outside, the heat had started pressing on her and she had not wanted to start sweating. She waited until she saw Bumpy come walking up the long front pathway to the set-back pyramid. He wore shorts, khaki shorts like almost every man in America wears now, shorts that did not come down to his knees. His shorts did not come down far enough and looked slightly silly. He wore a plain red t-shirt with a pocket on the left breast, and he wore tennis shoes without socks. He walked with his hand in his pocket and no sunglasses on and he squinted. His hair was limp in the heat, and she knew hers soon would be. His hair wilted right at the scalp, weighed down by heat and perspiration and he brushed it back a little as he shaded his eyes with his hands from the glare of the casino’s reflections and peered at the doors, which he opened when he saw her. He walked in and stood across from her. She stepped a half-step forward and her arms involuntarily, almost, began to lift and widen and then she realized that she should probably not hug him, and she did not know what to do. They only had three greetings between them, three greetings they’d ever used when they met: a polite hello, a hug and kiss, and a slap. None of them seemed quite right, here.

384

“Hi,” he had said. “You look… nice.” Teresa thought that mentally she had added a pause, or had imagined more of a pause in the sentence than actually had been there. Nobody passed around them despite their standing right in the middle of the entrance. Some of the front desk staff watched them obliquely. Bumpy meant it; she did look nice. He stood warily, a quarter-turn off from her, slightly facing more towards the exit than towards her. “Thanks,” she’d said, and then thought she should tell him the same but didn’t; she thought it was a little too late after she’d not done it right away. “What do you want to do?” Bumpy asked, with that odd directness of his. He had a hand in his pocket, the pocket that would have his wallet and cell phone in it. She’d noticed that he carried both in his front pocket and that he habitually put his hand in there, protecting it, maybe. She’d never asked him why that was. “I haven’t eaten breakfast yet,” she’d said. “They probably have a restaurant here.” “Let’s go out. I haven’t been here before.” “When did you get in?” He had been holding the door open for her and she accepted, walking out onto the street. “Not very long ago. I just checked in. I haven’t even unpacked yet.” They were outside. Her hair started its own wilting and it was then that she had decided to be as direct as him, asking to see his shop. “Maybe later,” he said.

385

They walked, down the side of the Strip they were already on, heading towards the nicest part with the newest, biggest casinos and the most people, casinos and attractions that stood in contrast to the small strip malls and old, economy hotels on this end of the strip, dusty small buildings that would be replaced in a year, or two, or three, with bigger and larger casinos as Las Vegas expanded. Bumpy did not ask her how she had found him, and as they walked, silently, hands only a few inches apart, she decided that she would not tell him how if he asked. No. Instead of asking how he found her or why she was here, he said “How long are you staying?” She had three days off from work, and then the weekend. She said “I don’t know. It depends.” He didn’t ask what it depended on. He said that there were some nice restaurants in the New York, New York casino. She said “I was wondering about the Statue of Liberty,” and he asked what she was wondering about. “Why they had it,” she said, and laughed. “It seems kind of, I don’t know, dumb, doesn’t it? They built a Statue of Liberty here, so what, people could skip going to New York and come here and feel like they’d still seen what they would have seen in New York?” Bumpy shrugged. “They have an Eiffel Tower here, too.” After a few more steps he said “And pirates, further down.” Teresa started laughing, for no reason she could think. She laughed hard at that and Bumpy looked at her. Their hands

386

remained only inches apart as they walked side by side, both facing forward. “What’s so funny?” he asked her. “Pirates,” she said, catching her breath. “I don’t know. It just seemed so ridiculous. That you put the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and pirates all in the same category.” Bumpy had wondered if she’d ask about the pirates, and what he would say. That they’re part of the decoration of Treasure Island? Where I stay? But she didn’t ask. He held the door open for her at the New York, New York casino and she went in before him. They walked through the small shops that lined this entranceway, went to the gambling floor and saw all the people there already. It was three-fourths full, before lunch. He wound her through the gamblers and slots and tables and they got to the restaurants at the back – almost everything that one needed in a casino that wasn’t gambling was always on the other side of the gambling – and they picked a restaurant out and sat down at a table, waiting for their server. “So this is what New York would look like if it were enclosed and if it were filled with slots instead of panhandlers and Naked Cowboys,” she said, looking around. She’d chosen a seat that let her watch the casino and the gamblers and kept her back to the restaurant. He faced the restaurant itself. In the background, they could hear the rumble of the roller coaster and muted screams. “Naked Cowboys?” He asked.

387

“Have you ever heard of him? He’s this guy in Times Square, plays guitar all day wearing a diaper and a dumb hat. Dumb songs, too. I heard he makes about a million dollars a year doing it. I didn’t see him, ever.” “When did you go to New York?” Bumpy asked. Teresa looked down as the waitress approached, thinking about that question. Could they really have been engaged and he didn’t know she had lived in New York for sixteen months? The waitress took their orders and she said “1998,” without explaining how long or why she’d been there. “Did you like it?” Bumpy asked her. The waitress poured them coffee as he asked the question. Teresa thought Bumpy looked tired. Waiting for her answer, with the waitress having left menus and saying she’d be right back, Bumpy sipped at his coffee too quickly and regretted it because it was too hot. He looked at the table for a glass of ice water but didn’t see one. He realized, right then and for the first time, that almost none of the restaurants he went to put ice water on the table and wondered why that was. He pressed the edge of his tongue, where the coffee had burnt it, and thought about that. It must be because of the desert, he decided. The heat or something. A drought? But that didn’t seem right, because it was only a drought if water was expected and then didn’t come, he assumed, and water wouldn’t be expected to get here in Las Vegas in the summer, would it? So not a drought. Just not a lot of water.

388

Teresa watched him toy with his coffee and repeated her question: “Are you still writing?” Bumpy nodded his head. “I’ve been working on a couple of episode scripts. I’m supposed to send them off this week for approval.” “I thought they bought the show?” “They bought the rights to it and are making a pilot but they want to see more scripts before they decide if they’ll pick it up.” Teresa thought he sounded as though he was trying not to use show business or writer-business language. He’d complained once, about people who get into a business and begin throwing the slang around almost instantly – she thought maybe he’d said it the night she’d met him, that party at the restaurant, but wasn’t sure. He could have said it during a lunch. He’d been talking about a celebrity who’d joined a sportscaster in an interview, maybe for a college bowl game? That would make it around New Year’s. He’d said it was ridiculous that the sportscasters used nothing but slang nowadays and that the celebrity had instantly picked it up, too, and the two of them had been incomprehensible. “Slang is stupid,” he’d said, and had shaken his head. Someone at the table – could it have been her own date that night? – had said “But if everyone uses it, shouldn’t you just accept it? It’s not slang, it’s an industry term, then.” Bumpy had resisted, insisting that people should just use English and resist slang and not say things like on spec and had paused then, while he tried to remember other slang that he was disapproving of. When he couldn’t think of any, he’d run out of steam and said “I just think it sounds dumb.” 389

She wondered, now, if he stuck to that when he talked to the people who’d bought his show, or part of his show. So she asked him: “Do you remember talking about not using slang?” Bumpy looked up at her from blowing on his coffee. “When?” he asked. “At the dinner, I think, where we met?” He sat up straight and looked off to his right as though something had caught his eye. She realized that he was reacting to her bringing up the night they’d met, misinterpreting it. Or was he? He put his cup of coffee on the table and looked back at it, where a little bit of it had slopped over the edge onto his finger. He took his napkin, wiped at his hand. “I’ve never seen anything that can spill as easily as coffee,” he said. “It’s like the laws of physics of regular drinks don’t apply to it.” He put his hand back on his cup. Teresa pressed on. “You were saying the night we met, I think it was the night we met,” don’t get distracted by details she told herself “That you hated people using slang in an industry. You were talking about a celebrity and a bowl game and sportscasters.” “It was a basketball game.” Bumpy said. “What?” “I was talking about a basketball game. We were talking on the phone. It wasn’t the night we met.” “Are you sure?”

390

Suddenly, the conversation was about this and not about slang. She wasn’t sure that was okay, after all. She’d wanted, she decided, to steer the conversation around to the night they met. That had been after all her goal in bringing that up. “Yeah. I’m sure. We were talking on the phone. I remember it.” He looked up at her. “You don’t remember the conversation?” “I do,” Teresa said, unsure herself. “I remember you talking about the slang.” “The conversation was over the phone,” Bumpy said. “I know that. It was just me and you. And I was talking about a singer. One of those minor singers that have a couple of top 40 hits and then appear everywhere for a while and then they become producers or talk show hosts. He was on at the start of a basketball game and was using a lot of sportscaster slang. “And I said,” he finished up, “That you don’t see me using slang like that, that just because someone is suddenly thrown into a world that uses slang or has its own little quirks doesn’t mean that the person has to instantly adopt it. I said it was one thing for sportscasters who hear it day in and day out and don’t realize how ridiculous it is to call a home run a tater to go on using slang, but it’s completely different thing for a singer to suddenly start throwing around words like field goal when he means basket and in the paint when…” Bumpy paused. He sipped his coffee. “You know, I still don’t know what in the paint means.” Teresa felt something like amazement that he remembered it so well. “Are you positive?” she said. She knew he was; Bumpy was always positive about everything, always certain, she imagined. 391

“Yep. I know.” He didn’t seem pleased. He seemed certain but not pleased and kept his eyes on his coffee. She wanted to change the subject, get back to the original topic. “I was 100% sure that it was on the night we met,” Teresa said. There. The waitress brought their breakfasts. Bumpy had three pancakes and sausage and an egg. Teresa had two eggs and two triangular slices of toast. The waitress asked if they’d like anything else. “Why isn’t there water on the table?” Bumpy asked. The waitress said “Because we try to conserve water, especially in the summer. You can get water if you’d like. I mean, I can get you some water if you’d like. But we don’t put it out on the table because a lot of people don’t even drink it and then we end up dumping it out.” Bumpy couldn’t imagine anyone not drinking the water they put on the table. He had always done that automatically, because it was there. It gave one something to do while waiting for the rest of the dinner. There were certain things that just went with the restaurant experience: water before the dinner, appetizers. Nobody ever eats appetizers at home, but everybody gets them at the restaurant, and he liked that. For that matter, he thought now, nobody ever gets appetizers with a breakfast at a restaurant. Did the restaurant even have appetizers available at breakfast? He wondered. The waitress stood there a moment longer and said, finally “Would you like some water?” “Oh, no, no thanks,” Bumpy said. “I was just curious.” 392

The waitress left them and Bumpy took a pat of butter, unfolded the foil wrapper and struggled with getting it out of the packet, taking his butter knife and trying to scrape it onto the pancakes without touching the butter himself. Teresa watched him as she put salt on her eggs and shivered a little piece off of one. Bumpy looked up at her, and said “Oh, heck with it,” and pushed the butter onto his pancake with his finger, wiping his finger on his napkin as he took the syrup bottle and poured syrup over the pancakes. He swirled the butter around and was grateful that the waitress had come when she did because it had changed the topic from the basketball conversation. Teresa sat quietly, wondering whether she should just start the conversation up where it had left off, the night they’d met. Things seemed to have been driven to a halt by the waitress’ appearance, and she didn’t know how to pick them back up. She sighed, a little, and ate some of her eggs. “What were you going to do today?” Bumpy asked. He’d been working out how to ask that question since he walked up to meet her at her casino, and had finally hit on that formulation. He couldn’t say what do you want to do because that implied they were doing things together and he didn’t know if he wanted to do that. He’d walked by the store on the way, left a note on the door telling Ivy that he’d be in later. He wasn’t sure how much later, but hadn’t put that in the note. Nor could he use Are you busy today? because that made it seem as though he was going to ask her to do something with him. He’d settled on what are your plans before making it slightly less formal. “I’m not sure,” Teresa said. Why wouldn’t he ask her why she was here? 393

“Hmm.” Bumpy said that because he didn’t know what else to say and they ate in silence for a moment. Teresa looked over his shoulder at the people gambling and tried to think how to turn the conversation to why she was here, what she could do to get him to talk about the night they’d met or any of the other nights they’d gone out. She looked at her hand, at her ring finger, and wished again that she’d been able to find the ring. She tried something different. “I saw your mom,” she told him. “When?” “Yesterday.” “Why?” That was not the question she’d expected, although she realized as she considered that it was the question she should have realized was coming. “I remembered that she didn’t feel well, so I went over to visit her.” “Why now?” That, too, she should have known would be asked. But it gave her an opening. An opening she didn’t take exactly as she should have. “You never really went … took… me to visit her, much,” she said. She instantly wanted to say something else. She didn’t know how she’d managed to say something that was so qualified and hedged and yet still somehow was also an attack. “I wanted to see how she was doing,” she said, but realized that this statement was merely an

394

echo or follow-up on the explanation that she’d gone to see his mother in the first place because she was not well. “I wanted to,” she paused. Bumpy looked at her and waited. He picked up his coffee cup, realized it was empty, but held it up for a moment longer. “I wanted to visit her because I didn’t know if I was going to actually visit you,” Teresa told him, finally. Bumpy put the cup back down. “How is she?” “She didn’t know who I was.” Bumpy tried to remember if he’d ever taken Teresa over to meet his mother. It was unlikely. He also tried to remember if not remembering things and not knowing things were parts of the problems (or were the problems?) Sarah had sometimes tried to tell him Mom had. He couldn’t remember her mentioning those particular problems. He knew didn’t mean that she hadn’t. “I introduced myself to her and she seemed confused.” Bumpy just watched her. “I introduced myself as your fiancée,” Teresa said, and her whole body felt like it deflated, lost an entire size, went limp. She realized that she’d been tense up until that moment, realized that the whole time at his mother’s house, the whole time after that, the whole time talking to Jay on the phone and trying to convince him that she had a right to know where Bumpy had gone even though she didn’t really have any such right, the whole time arranging to take the next three days off from work, getting on the plane, the tickets, the ride here, the

395

checking into the hotel room – through all of that she’d been holding seemingly every muscle in her body rigid and waiting. Now she stopped that “What’d she say?” Bumpy asked her now, as she felt her body actually relax into the chair and felt her heart slow down, finally. Teresa now set down her own fork. “That’s funny,” she said. But it wasn’t, really. It was either a mystery or an insult, she thought. “She asked if I knew about the money,” Bumpy put both his hands on his lap. Then one went up involuntarily, almost, casually, maybe, to his head and rubbed the side of his head. His hair was thin there. Teresa did not ask what money, Bumpy? She thought his Mom had been talking about the script and went on now and said “I told her that, yes, I’d been there when you got it.” After a moment, as the waitress came up with a pot of coffee, she said “Your mom sure seemed confused.” Bumpy said, “She’s not.” Teresa looked up at him. He was blowing across his coffee cup. He said “What’d she say? About you being there?” Teresa said, “I told her that we were engaged.” She had, too. She had sat near the old woman, looking around the room where Bumpy had grown up, wondering if she could ask to see the backyard or if that would be rude, and thinking that she would never see the backyard, probably, and had said “We’re engaged, you know.” His mom had simply said that she didn’t know that. “She told me she doesn’t hear much from you.” “That’s true.” 396

Teresa didn’t want to ask why that was. She wished she hadn’t added the part about not hearing from him because that had changed the subject, again. She’d gotten back onto the engagement and then something in her had immediately pulled a switch over to a different track. She thought quickly and said: “That’s why she didn’t know.” “Are we?” Bumpy asked. Teresa knew what he meant. “Are we?” she asked back. The waitress was coming over again. Nobody spoke while she wrote out the check. She told them that they could pay her or at the bar. She didn’t invite them to enjoy their gaming floor. Nobody in Las Vegas actually pushed the gambling, Bumpy had noticed. They didn’t need to. Maybe they made a conscious effort not to do that, to allow gambling to coexist with family entertainment, one of those weird and unmentioned Las Vegas combinations like burlesque shows held below roller coasters or trained tigers standing in hotel lobbies while children ran with water wings and snorkels past them. He picked up the check and said “Let’s head out.” He paid at the bar, swung back to leave a few dollars on the table, almost equal to the cost of breakfast, tipping being awkward when the meal was inexpensive. He left five dollars, and the bill had only been twelve. It felt effusive, but he couldn’t tip less than that, he thought, based on the time they’d been sitting there. Still, five dollars felt like overpraising the waitress.

397

Teresa looked disappointed as they walked back around the slot machines that were more like video games now that old-fashioned slot machines, not simply rolling pictures but flashing images and buttons to push at the right time, set up in varying displays. He noticed the look of disappointment and she noticed him looking at her as they neared the lobby of the casino. “What?” she asked. He looked away. “You seem upset.” “What do you want to do now?” “I don’t know. It’s your vacation.” “Can I see your store?” “Maybe later.” “Why don’t you show me around?” Bumpy didn’t want to do that, either. He didn’t want Teresa to be a part of Las Vegas. He said “Did you rent a car?” “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go see Hoover Dam.” “What?” “It’s not that far away, and I’ve been thinking about doing that. Going out there to see the dam. I haven’t yet since I’ve been here. I don’t have a car here.” She stopped walking, looking off into the distance, thinking something. She finally sighed and said, “Why Hoover Dam?”

398

Bumpy didn’t say because Hoover Dam is not in Las Vegas. He didn’t say because I don’t know what else to do and I don’t know whether I want to just walk away. Instead he said “It’s supposed to be really spectacular.” Teresa considered that. They stood just inside the doorway of the casino. She’d been the one leading them as they walked, and with no idea where to go to get out of the casino or what they were going to do, she’d just led them back to the same door that they’d come in. She leaned against it now. “I’ll have to stop back and grab some stuff from my room,” she said. “Okay,” Bumpy said. The walk back to the Luxor was quiet, and quicker than the walk to breakfast ahd been. Bumpy didn’t talk. The traffic was still light. They got to the hotel and Teresa held the door open as Bumpy followed her through. She noticed that he was sweating. “I’ll wait here,” he said. “Why?” She smiled at him, hoping that it was a friendly smile. “Shy?” “No,” Bumpy said. He wondered if Ivy had gotten the note he’d left, whether she was wondering where he was. He looked at Teresa’s feet, saw that the nails were polished. That was the word he’d apply to Teresa: polished. “No,” he said again. “Just come on up,” Teresa said. “You don’t have to act so…” and she let that trail off. This was turning out to be more awkward than she thought it would be. She’d expected to have trouble getting Bumpy to talk about their relationship. She hadn’t expected to have trouble getting herself to talk about it. She mentally 399

gritted her teeth and said “You know, we were engaged,” and then felt bad because she’d said were, not are and she’d practiced it, practiced saying that, practiced saying what she’d wanted to say, which she now said, not in any way how she’d practiced it: “I mean… are.” Standing there in the hotel lobby, just inside the doors, where most of their visit had taken place so far, she stared at him. “I know… I know what I did.” Almost like she’d practiced it. “But I never called it off. Not officially. And you never called it off. Not officially. I can’t find the ring.” She hadn’t practiced that and didn’t like the sound of it. “But if neither of us said it’s over… it doesn’t have to be.” Bumpy had his hand in his pocket, on his cell phone. He’d been thinking about quickly calling Ivy, just to make sure it was okay. He didn’t want Teresa to know about Ivy. He tried to think what he should say to this, to Teresa’s comments. “You don’t have to answer, say anything. Not right away.” Teresa looked at an elderly couple walking past, both of whom were watching the two of them talking. The man had his hand on the small of the woman’s back. She was looking over her shoulder at them. The man had his head forward but his eyes sideways. He was holding the door open and ushering her through. She had a ridiculously large purse. He had not one, but two fanny packs on, and a baseball hat with an ear of corn on it. They both wore pants. She didn’t want to talk here, and said “Can we go someplace?”

400

“Let’s go to your room,” Bumpy said, and they walked over to the bank of elevators. A few people were waiting to go up, including a mother and a young boy, wearing swim trunks and with his snorkeling mask around his neck. His hair was plastered down around his head, wet. He had a few drops of water still clinging to him. Bumpy stood next to the mother and the swimmer and Teresa stood next to Bumpy. The boy looked up at Bumpy as they waited, until his mother tapped his shoulder and made him look at her. Bumpy saw her shake her head and the boy then looked back at Bumpy. The mother looked away, embarrassed. All four of them got on the elevator and the boy continued to look at Bumpy and Teresa. Teresa leaned forward and hit the 7 button. The mother said “Oh, that’s our floor,” and Bumpy and Teresa smiled at her. “I was swimming,” said the boy. “Shhh,” said the mom. “The water was warm,” said the boy. “That’s nice,” said Teresa, and they then stood in silence. The elevator doors opened and all four got off. The woman and boy turned right. Bumpy waited for Teresa to go first, and she followed the woman and the boy. They were down the same hallway there, but Teresa’s room came up relatively quickly. She opened the door and they went inside. Teresa went over to the window and put her own purse down on the table by it. “I’m glad the water was warm,” Bumpy said, as he looked around. There was a queen bed, and a few chairs and a small couch. He tried to decide where to

401

sit, pondering as quickly as he could the message that each possible location would send. He stood. Teresa looked at him and said “What?” “The kid,” Bumpy explained. “I’m glad the water was warm.” “I never thought that Las Vegas would have so many families here.” Bumpy didn’t respond. Teresa looked out the window and fidgeted with things on the table by the phone. “Go ahead and sit down,” she said. She walked over to the bathroom and Bumpy heard water running. He didn’t sit down right away. From the bathroom, with the door open, Teresa said “Do you really want to go see Hoover Dam?” “Sure,” Bumpy said. “Isn’t it kind of far?” “I think it’s only about an hour away. It’s not that bad.” Bumpy didn’t know how far away it might be. He had heard it was not that far. He had heard some people talking in the hotel restaurant one night, as he’d sat eating his dinner and reading a book and watching people pile food up as they went through the buffet, going out of order: getting salad and then getting some cookies or pudding from the dessert end. Getting meat and pie in the same trip. Going back to get dinner rolls. Near him, a table of four people, three men and a woman, had been talking about going to see Hoover Dam the next day, and one had complained that he didn’t want to spend the entire day looking around “some monument,” and another had said it was not an “all day trip, it’s only like an hour or so. Longer if you take the tour.” 402

Teresa turned off the water. She looked in the mirror. She held her hand out as she dried it off and looked from bare fingers to her brightly-lit reflection. She felt as though she could almost feel the ring on her finger again. She was surprised at how pale she looked. It was July, after all. It was summer, and here she looked as though she never went outside. Bumpy looked tan. She’d realized that almost instantly. He looked like he saw the sun all the time, and he probably did. She turned to face him, standing in the bathroom doorway. “I don’t want to go see Hoover Dam,” she said. He sat down then, on the edge of the bed, awkwardly trying to sit and still face her. The side he’d sat on faced him away from her, put his back to her, so he sat and pushed his right leg up onto the bed and left his other leg on the floor, twisting then a little so that some part of his body faced almost every part of the room. “Why?” he asked, finally situated. Teresa remained standing in the doorway and for that he was grateful. He didn’t want her to sit on the bed, too, had the momentary thought that if she did, he should get up, but what would that do? That would be like leaving, wouldn’t it? He didn’t know what to do if she sat on the bed. So he was glad she didn’t. “Are you going to keep living in Las Vegas?” she asked him. “Sure. I guess. For a while.” “Why here?” Teresa asked him. None of these were the questions she wanted to ask him. 403

“I like it here,” he said, simply. “What’s so great about this city?” Bumpy thought, and what he thought was it’s not Madison, and he was surprised at himself for thinking that. He didn’t have time to ponder that, though. He said “It’s interesting.” That turned out to be true, as he said it. That was one of the reasons why he wanted to come here. It was interesting. He had, as he sat there, the distinct feeling that his life was not interesting at all, that it was typical. Mundane, he thought to himself. “You don’t want to ever come back?” “I don’t know.” Teresa saw what she thought was a crack in the wall, then. And almost as soon as she thought it was an opening, she wondered whether it was, really. And why she was so interested in pursuing Bumpy when she hardly knew him. So she asked him that: “What is it about you, do you think?” Bumpy just looked at her. “What is it about you that makes me be here? That’s what I just thought to myself, you know. I thought for a second there that when you said I don’t know that maybe there was a hope there, a little bit of a chance that you’d come back to Madison and… but then I thought…” Teresa stopped. She looked at him and then sat down in one of the chairs, finally. She leaned forward. “I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to keep censoring and changing. I’m just going to ask you. 404

It’s not like I can make it any worse than hitting you and throwing the ring. So I’ll just ask. Do you still want to be engaged to me?”

405

August 8: Sarah shut the water off and looked for where she’d put the towel. The phone rang a second time. She found the towel, slipped to the floor, and bent down to pick it up, hand dripping a little foam and water that hadn’t rinsed off. The phone rang a third time. She wiped at the drops of soap and stood up, walking over to the phone on the kitchen wall. She peered down at it to try to read the caller ID. It rang a fourth time. She didn’t recognize the number. She picked it up. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was a little quiet. It was the first time she’d spoken that day. As she realized that, she looked at the clock. Eleven a.m. “Is this Sarah… Ms. Strathan? Sarah?” She didn’t recognize the voice, either. “I’m Sarah Strathan,” she said. She knew it wasn’t an official phone call, not bad news, not anyone who would feel they had the right to be calling her. Not with that tone of voice and not with that fumbling. She used her telemarketer voice, cold and clipped. She put the towel onto the counter and watched the suds in the sink slowly shrinking down as the voice on the other end went on: “You don’t know me. I’m sorry to bother you. You don’t know me,” the voice said again, and Sarah started to wonder what this was all about. “But I know your brother. That’s why I’m calling.” “Is he okay?” Sarah looked away from the suds to the phone cradle on the wall, then wondered why she would look at the phone rather than anywhere else. It was a habit of hers that she only noticed once in a while. She did it in person 406

all the time: She liked to look at the person talking to her, if she was trying to concentrate. It made it difficult for her to talk to someone when she drove, and she did not talk much when she was driving. It made it hard for her to have serious conversations on the telephone, too, because she didn’t know where to look. She’d told that to Peyton, once, had said If you’re going to have a serious conversation with me, then you’re going to have to talk to me in person. That was early on in their relationship. He’d been trying to talk to her about something or other. What was it? Maybe moving in together. Maybe children. Had he been trying to talk about children, that early on? Maybe it was children. It bothered Sarah that she couldn’t remember, now, what had been the serious conversation Peyton was trying to have with her on the phone. He wouldn’t have talked about children, not that early on. Would he have? The voice on the phone kept going as her thoughts jumbled around and she looked at the phone cradle and tried to concentrate. “He’s okay. He’s fine. I, actually, I work for him. I don’t know if you knew that. I don’t know if you knew he opened a store.” Dylan had opened a store? She didn’t answer. She tried to remember the order of the conversation she and Peyton had had that day. Peyton had been talking to her. She had called him. No, he had called her. She had been making lunch, putting her sandwich onto a plate and the phone had rang. 407

It had been noon. Her day off. “Anyway,” the woman on the phone continued. “He did, and I work for him. And also I’ve…” but she didn’t finish what she also and seemed to hesitate. “Well, he told me about his sister, you, you’re his sister, right?” Sarah paused, getting pulled back to this conversation. She spoke for the second time that day: “Yes. I’m Dylan’s sister.” “Dylan. Right. Dylan. So I wanted to call you.” “Who are you?” Sarah sat down, then, on a chair at her kitchen table. She sat a little harder than she wanted to. The phone cord was tangled, knotted together in the middle of the long rubber extension cord that she’d bought in order to be able to reach anywhere in the kitchen while on the phone. The knot made the cord tight, made the phone pull out of her hand a little bit, and she pulled back, worried for a moment that she would unplug the phone from the base. The bunched tangled part of the cord gave a little, unraveled, just a bit. She tried to sit back, pulled on the cord a little more, gently, then gave up on that method and stood up, walking towards the knot, watching as it dipped away from her hand to the ground, as she bent over to pick it up the cord going limp. She pressed the phone into her shoulder and picked up the tangle, began pulling it apart. “I called because I found something. I probably shouldn’t have been snooping, I know. But I didn’t think it was snooping and maybe I wasn’t

408

snooping. He’d gone out to get lunch and I was in the room and was looking for a shirt.” Sarah suddenly wondered who this woman was, really. Who had been in Dylan’s room and looking for a shirt. She looked at the notepad next to her phone and saw Teresa’s name and number written down. It had been written down there for almost two months. Since Teresa had called and left a message asking to talk to her. She’d not called her back. Not called back yet, she thought to herself but knew that she never would call Teresa back, especially not now. “So that’s all I was doing. I opened up a drawer and there were envelopes and printer paper and stuff in there. I didn’t even know he had that. And a book about writing screenplays.” Was that what he was doing now? Sarah wondered. Where had this woman said she was calling from? She looked at the notepad again. She wished that she’d written down what Peyton had been calling about that time. She worried that she was losing him, losing memories of him. Losing the context of their lives together. Memories keep fading, every day. Go somewhere, see something, stare at it, and it will be burned into your retinas she’d once heard, and you won’t forget it. She had tried that, gone walking in the forest with Peyton, once, not the forest really, but it was like a forest, a fairly large group of trees in the park. They’d walked and come to a little wooden pathway set over a marshy part, where in the spring the ground would be spongy and damp and sodden and unwalkable, the reason the wooden path 409

existed. She and Peyton had walked along the wooden path and the leaves on the trees in late May had already been full enough to block out most of the sun. Most, but not all of the sun, leaving speckles of faded yellow light over the path where they walked, shafts of pale light in the air, never stretching all the way from the ground to the sky. A bird, a robin, sat on a tree. A few flowers here and there. Nothing spectacular, not a panorama of beauty, at all, but Sarah had found it enchanting. A half-mile later, near the parking lot where they’d left their car, she had trouble remembering what it looked like, exactly. While walking on it, she’d noticed the texture of the boards, here and there a dry leaf from last fall, a stalk of flowers. But in the parking lot that day, she wondered: What color had the flowers been? It had taken her a moment to come up with it, and then she hadn’t been sure. Later that day, she couldn’t remember, at first, what type of bird they’d seen. “What was that bird today?” she’d asked Peyton, who’d looked up from his magazine in surprise. They’d been watching television together, in a way, both with magazines open and the television on to a crime drama that they had both seen before. Peyton liked the background noise and also liked the show. He’d asked what bird she was talking about. “The one that we saw, on the path?” He’d thought for a while and guessed that it was a robin? A week later, she couldn’t remember whether the boardwalk over the marshy area had curved or just been a straight line.

410

Sarah listened to Ivy now, but instead of really hearing her Sarah fretted that she was not developing new memories to replace the old ones. It didn’t matter so much if your old memories were crowded out, got mixed up with newer memories. It didn’t matter if Christmas, 1979 got blurred in with Christmas 1992 and a little of Thanksgiving from two years ago. It didn’t matter because there were always news Christmases being added, new memories to replace the old ones or mix together with them. But she wasn’t getting any new ones, not any new ones that she wanted. She wanted to remember what Peyton had been talking about that day when she’d told him that if he wanted to have a serious conversation with her, he had to be here in person because she couldn’t concentrate if she couldn’t see the person she was talking to. She’d made an effort to listen to the caller now, trying to focus on the voice on the phone relating the other things she’d found in the drawer with the book and the paper, Sarah said: “What did you say your name was, again?” “Um. I’m Ivy.” “Who are you?” “Bumpy told me,” Ivy said, without answering the question, “About you.” “Who are you?” Sarah persisted. “I’m having trouble following you. What’s going on? Is Dylan okay?” “He’s fine. I guess.” “You guess?”

411

“I mean, he’s fine. I’m sure. He’s stepped out. That’s why I wanted to call you. Quick. I got your number off his cell phone yesterday. I found it about a week ago.” “What’s this all about?” “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Bumpy told me about when you and him were kids.” Sarah suddenly was tense. She turned and faced the phone base, looking back at the little corner of the wall where the phone hung. The cord dropped from her hand and bunched up again, curling slowly, almost as if invisible hands were twisting it up. As it turned, it knocked against her knee twice. She ignored it. “What?” she asked. “When you were little.” Sarah didn’t say anything. Ivy had to go on. “The accident?” “What did he say?” “He… I’m sorry.” Ivy’s voice stumbled on the other end. “Did I say something wrong?” “Why isn’t he calling me himself?” Sarah asked. “I don’t know…” “Did he tell you to call me?” “No. I don’t… he doesn’t know I’m calling.” “So he won’t call me?” “I don’t know if he will.” 412

Sarah tried to calm herself down. She realized she was angry, more upset than she’d been in a long time. She didn’t want to talk to this person. She breathed in and out, deliberately. After a few moments of silence, Ivy on the other end said “I’m sorry to have bothered you.” There was more silence, and Sarah wondered if Ivy had hung up. “I just wanted to be sure you were you.” Sarah didn’t understand that. Ivy was still talking: “I found the number and I just wanted to make sure I had the right address.” “Why do you need my address?” “I just… I was going to send you something.” Sarah wondered why Ivy kept changing her mind about what she was going to say. “What is it?” “I’m not sure.” “You’re not sure?” “I mean, I know what it is, I suppose, but that’s all. I haven’t looked at it.” “What is it, then?” “I think you should just look at it. Is it okay if I send it to you?” “Dylan wanted you to send it to me?” “No. I don’t know. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know. I said, I just found it. I wasn’t snooping around, I just stumbled across it and I remembered what he told me and I thought maybe you would want to see it, too.” “What did he tell you?” 413

Ivy suddenly mumbled on the other end of the phone: “He’s coming back. I’ve got to go. I don’t want him… I don’t want him to know I called you.” Somehow, the sound from the phone got even more quiet. There was an absence of sound almost emanating from it. Sarah sat for a second longer before hanging up the phone. She put it on the cradle and looked at the bunched up cord that had re-knotted itself. She picked up the cord and began untangling it again. Her face felt flushed and she felt angry, ready to yell. She did. “Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” she yelled, suddenly, pulling at the cord in her hands, the sound the same one a toddler who has not yet learned to talk might make if she were frustrated and needed to express something. It was not even one fully-formed syllable but the beginning of a sound that nonetheless gathered substantial volume as it tore out of her. When she was done, the house felt more empty and more quiet than it had a moment before. Her throat felt hot. Her breath was a little raspy. She held the knot in the phone cord. She felt good. She liked the feeling. She did it again, making just a guttural sound, making noise without meaning: “AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR” for longer this time. Her throat hurt a little when she was done, even though the groaning yell had only lasted a few seconds. She sat with the bundled cord in her hands, leaning against the counter and felt a bead of sweat on her forehead. She heard the echoes of her pulse in her ears. She heard a house that isn’t doing anything, a 414

house in which nothing stirred. She imagined she could hear the clocks ticking, the electricity humming in the wires in the walls. She looked at her shoes, then at her hands, which were simply rubbing the edges of the cord. She thought about picking up the phone, hitting the numbers to redial the last number that had called. She could never remember how to do that. Which numbers did she hit? Pound? Star? She did not have caller ID so the number would not be recorded. She wondered who would answer if she did redial the number. Could she call the operator and ask for the last number that had called her? Or for the number to call to redial that number? But, of course, if she did call the operator, then the redial feature might not work. It might not call back the woman, Ivy, and instead might call the operator. Was that how it worked? She wondered. She wondered then if there were still telephone operators, if you dialed zero whether you would get a person who would be able to answer phone-related questions for you, or, assuming that you got someone, whether they would simply refer you to another number. With all the reference numbers, with information and 911 and even, in some cities, like Madison, numbers providing calls to other social services, with “ready reference” numbers at the library, and the Internet available, was there still a need for the operator? She had to put down the urge to call the operator, to pick up the phone and dial zero, just to see if there would be an operator there. She did so, stopped the urge to try to find an operator, by telling herself it was the kind of thing that Dylan would do. 415

But she could call the operator, she thought, not to see if there’s an operator there, but to find out how to determine what the number was that called her. The phone rang next to her. Sarah picked it up, quickly, midway through the first ring, realizing how eager she was to talk to the woman again. “Hello,” she said. “Hi, Sarah, it’s Tammy,” she heard. “I’m sorry to bother you at home. Your mom just asked me if I’d call you and ask you to bring a few things from home.”

416

November 23: “Thanks again,” Bumpy said, as he settled into the car. Jay had the heat on and Bumpy felt the warming effects on his shoes almost immediately. He realized that his feet were damp, inside the socks even, and tried to remember how much snow he might have walked through. Not much, he thought. There had been snow here and there on the sidewalk until he’d gotten away from the airport and snow at times across the sidewalk he’d walked along. After a while he had realized he was on a bus route. Then he’d followed the bus route along, walking, slowing down when he was near a bus stop itself, watching the road behind him to see if a bus was coming up, prepared to wait to catch a bus if one was approaching. When no bus had been near, he’d begun walking again to the next stop, speeding up between the stops which were about three or four blocks apart on this route. He wanted to keep walking, keep moving, but didn’t want to miss the bus and walk all the way to the hospital, nearly five miles from the airport, a walk which would require him to go through the University campus. He didn’t want to stand and wait, though, either, because he didn’t remember which bus might be coming and where it might take him or how often the buses on this route might come. So he walked and kept on with his slowing-and-speeding up, until about a mile in a bus had come along and he’d gotten on, and had learned from the driver which transfer to take to get to the hospital. He didn’t remember walking through any snow or water during that process. Or after the hospital. 417

He sat back and relaxed now and tried to remember if his feet had been wet in the room with Mom. Maybe they were just sweaty? It had been warm in there. He looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see anyone to worry about. “Should I ask why I picked you up out here?” Jay said. The hospital was set back from the main road, off in its own part of the world, down a street that would only be driven on if you were coming to or going from the hospital. Bumpy had walked along it while calling Jay on his cell phone. “I’ll meet you at the University Drive intersection,” Bumpy had said, and had walked along the sidewalk up to that road. “I didn’t want to wait around there,” Bumpy said unnecessarily. “This is a real surprise,” Jay said. “Seeing you back here. I didn’t know you were coming to town.” “I heard my mom was pretty bad,” Bumpy said. The second half of the sentence did not need to be spoken. Jay turned the car left, waited for an opening in the traffic and for that part of the conversation to fade away. “So how much time do you have?” Bumpy didn’t even look at his watch. He said “Not real long.” “Want to get something to eat?” “Maybe on the way.” “Okay,” Jay said. He pulled over to the right lane and then turned right. He didn’t ask where they should go. He drove in the stop-and-go traffic that was the hallmark of any portion of the roads around the campus and downtown. The 418

students and office workers and government employees were all out and about throughout the day, making the streets near the University crowded almost any time. “So did you talk to Sarah?” Jay asked. “Yeah,” Bumpy said. “Her, too.” “What’d she say when she saw you?” Jay thought a moment. “Her, too?” “Teresa was here.” “She was?” “Yep.” “Do you ever talk to her anymore?” “Not really. Not at all. I guess. No.” “That’s sounds pretty sketchy.” “She emails me a lot. And sends text messages. She doesn’t call at all, which I guess is lucky. I don’t respond to most of them, the messages. That’s how I found out about Mom, though.” “What does Ivy say?” Bumpy tried to remember how often he’d talked to Jay in the past few months. It wasn’t very often. He’d emailed a few times and talked on the phone once or twice, taking calls from Jay. He’d never called Jay himself, at all. One of the calls had been when Jay had decided to leave his old firm and was partnering up with someone to create a new firm that he would be in charge of. Bumpy had listened to Jay for about a half-hour that time, Jay talking about how they’d found a new office, how he’d gotten tired of the big-firm life, how he was excited and nervous about having to hire people, he’d already hired a secretary and had 419

to get an accountant, how his wife was nervous about “money and things.” Bumpy, hearing that, had tried to picture himself in that life even as he’d sat at a table near the pool in his hotel – he’d been staying at the Venetian then—and had while listening, and imagining, clicked around on his laptop computer, going from website to website, reading comic strips and checking out headlines. It had been a hundred degrees exactly while Jay was talking. Bumpy thought now about whether he’d ever mentioned Ivy to Jay and decided he must have, or how else would Jay know about her? But he couldn’t remember ever doing so. “I don’t really talk about it with Ivy. I don’t know if she knows Teresa calls. Or anything.” “That’s risky,” Jay told him. “Why?” ”Because if you don’t tell her, then she’ll think there’s a reason you don’t tell her.” “There is a reason.” “What’s the reason?” “I didn’t want Ivy to know that I was engaged, before.” He paused. “I didn’t want her to know I was engaged to anyone before I was engaged to her.” “When did you and Ivy get engaged?” So I haven’t talked to him all that much, Bumpy thought. “Not long ago.” “Where is she, then? Couldn’t she come?” 420

Bumpy didn’t want to get into it. He looked out the window at the cold and gray and dim clouds overhead and at the dingy sidewalks that seemed to be permanently rain-colored, or waterlogged. He absently patted his wallet where he had the airline ticket confirmation slips and his IDs and watched as Jay turned into a drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant. “What do you want?” Jay asked him. Bumpy said he’d take just a burger and a soda and then asked how Jay’s firm was doing. He felt like he should have add something to the conversation and that was the only thing he could remember Jay having done recently that could be talked about. Jay waited for the car ahead of them to pull away, and then began talking about how he might hire a fourth lawyer soon, “there’s so much work to do.” Bumpy listened but in his mind saw the listing of fares and connections and airlines he’d looked up last night, saw the confirmation code, saw the itinerary which could be printed. The printer had been in the bedroom, where he had suspected Ivy was still awake and he knew that if he’d woken her he wouldn’t have known what to say. He’d instead gotten out a pen from his laptop case and looked around for something to write on. He’d finally used the edge of a napkin, had written down Las Vegas leave midnight. Madison leave 2 p.m. New York arrive 4 p.m. The clock on Jay’s dashboard said 1:10 p.m. Start here.

421

“I wish you had enough time to come and see the offices,” Jay said. Bumpy wondered why Jay would want that. Jay had never invited him to see his old office. Bumpy had seen it once, when he’d met Jay downtown to go somewhere. He’d arrived a little early and had been waiting in the reception area when Jay had come walking out with a client, walking him to the elevator. Jay had been wearing a coat and tie and had one of those button-up shirts that had the white collars on a different-colored shirt, and Bumpy had realized that he rarely saw Jay wearing a business suit. As Jay had said good-bye to the client, he’d seen Bumpy. “Hey, I’m almost ready to leave,” he’d told him and Bumpy had followed him back to his office without being invited to do so. The office had been unimpressive. It had a window that looked out over a parking garage behind the building, but the lake could be seen beyond that. It was large enough to have two chairs and several filing cabinets and a large desk and computer without feeling cramped. Jay had kept it neat, but the overwhelming abundance of papers had still given it something of a sloppy feel that Bumpy recognized as being caused by the rough edges of papers that could never be perfectly stacked. Put enough paper in a room, he’d thought then, and it will look sloppy even if it’s neat. Now, he didn’t realize that Jay wanted him to see the new office because it was his own, and he said “I’ve got to be on my plane at 2. Sorry,” and Jay said it was all right. Bumpy picked the paper wrapper off his straw and looked over his shoulder at the duffel bag that served as his luggage. “Maybe next time,” Jay said about seeing the office. 422

“I really do appreciate this,” Bumpy said, feeling that he had to make it up to Jay somehow and not having any way to do that, really, other than to thank him again for the ride. “It’s nothing. I just wish you had more time. You’ve got to get back to Las Vegas, though, I guess.” “Actually, I’m going to New York,” Bumpy said. “What’s in New York?” Jay asked him. Bumpy thought Jay was trying to make it sound casual. He realized that Jay probably deserved a little more explanation than Bumpy was giving him, but he wasn’t sure that there was any explanation to give, and what could be done in that situation? The whole conversation to Bumpy felt difficult, felt like he was slogging through it. It felt to him, almost, as though he was the one trying to get information out of Jay, like their roles were reversed. “Lots of stuff,” Bumpy said, and then tried to prompt himself to give more information. “I just… I started thinking about it. I’ve never been there, you know? I’ve never been a lot of places. I lived around here all my life and then I moved to Las Vegas, and I was thinking about it and I’d like to see New York.” “That’s it?” Bumpy ate some of his burger. He rubbed his fingers on his pants and wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist. They were almost at the airport, actually. He’d be early. That was good, he supposed, because he had a stop to make. He blinked and could see his computer screen in the hotel room, showing the itinerary: Las Vegas to Madison. Madison to New York. 423

“People have always told me I should see it,” Bumpy said. Jay looked over at him. “What kind of people?” Bumpy ate some more burger. “Mostly Teresa,” he said. Jay took a sip of the coffee that he’d ordered. It had been sitting in the cupholder with the lid off, dribbling coffee a little at the bumps they went over, while Jay waited for it to cool down. “You ever want to talk, you know, you can,” Jay said, finally. Bumpy seriously doubted that. He knew that Jay would listen to him; he just didn’t know that he could talk about anything. He was tired. His feet were only now warming up from the walk, and they felt damp, still, a dampness that seeped in. He knew Jay was getting the wrong impression of him, but wasn’t quite sure which wrong impression was being given and therefore wasn’t sure how to correct the impression, didn’t know which direction to take. “I know,” he said. Jay turned right. They were a half-mile from the airport. Bumpy tried again: “I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said. “I know that,” Jay said. There was a pause. They sat at a red light and watched as an elderly woman pushed an upright, wire-basket cart across the road. She had started late and they both knew she would not make it across the road before the light changed. When the light went green, she was in front of Jay’s car. He waited, but the car in the left lane did not. It went forward, cutting off the elderly woman. A second car did, too. The third car stopped and the woman continued to the 424

median. Jay and Bumpy both watched her lean over and press the button to get a walk signal for the next leg of the trip. “So what are you doing?” Jay asked. “I’m going to New York,” Bumpy said. “To meet someone.” “To meet someone?” “Hopefully.” “Hopefully,” Jay said, repeating Bumpy’s last word. Bumpy decided he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but he knew that Jay needed some information. As they pulled within sight of the airport terminal, he took his soda, sipped it, then blurted out: “I was supposed to go to New York to meet with these people from my TV show. The one that’s airing overseas. I was supposed to be there today to go over some things with them, talk about upcoming stories and help rewrite scripts and meet with my agent. I’ve never actually met him, which is weird. It was all set up. It was going to be a surprise, that I was going to New York. I was going to take Ivy there and surprise her. She’s never been to New York, either. Then, we got into an argument. I don’t know why. We were supposed to be celebrating and she wanted to have an old-fashioned Thanksgiving, sit down at her house, and cook me a meal and be cozy. I liked that. I really did. I wanted to do that. I’ve never even seen her apartment, which is weird, too, because we’re engaged but she’s never invited me over there. And I wanted to make it okay for her, I wanted to see her apartment and make it all normal or more normal, for her, because I know she worries about that. 425

“So I should have told her right away that I couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t go to her apartment for a Thanksgiving dinner at all, that we had to go to New York and that I was going to surprise her and that we’d have a great Thanksgiving and that we’d have all the time in the world to have Thanksgivings in the future and she could cook them all.” They were at the terminal, in the lane to drop people off curbside. Bumpy opened his door but kept talking. “But I didn’t. I didn’t and I couldn’t, for some reason. I could tell, I could just tell that she was really set on doing this, and I wanted to do it, too, so I decided that I’d try to get the producers to postpone the meeting one day. And I figured I’d tell them that my Mom was really sick and that I had to visit her, and then I’d come out the Friday after Thanksgiving. That was the story I worked out.” Bumpy got out of the car. He picked up his duffel bag and felt his feet getting colder, wetter, instantly. He looked back in. “Then, before I could do that, I got back to the hotel and there were text messages and emails from Teresa. She said Mom really was sick and that she may not make it much longer and that if I was going to see her, I’d better do it soon. And I had to figure out what to do about that and try to make arrangements to actually postpone the trip for real and then Ivy got really really upset with me, she wouldn’t even talk. All she was doing was crying. I didn’t know what to do anymore. So I came here to see Mom, and I had to go through a whole bunch of crap just to get here. So I’m sorry, Jay. I shouldn’t be such a jerk 426

to you. You’ve been really good and you deserved an explanation, and that’s it. I wasn’t trying to hide it from you, but I had that big fight with Sarah, and Teresa showed up, and I’ve just got a lot on my mind. I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he repeated. Jay sat quietly, looking at Bumpy. “That might be the longest speech you’ve ever made that wasn’t about something completely ridiculous,” he said, finally. “I’d expect a ten minute diatribe from you on whether a pizza is really a pizza. But not about real stuff.” Neither said anything for a moment. The car behind Jay’s honked at them. “Well,” Jay said. “Thanks for telling me. Good luck, Bumpy.” He held out his hand and they shook hands. Bumpy closed the door and felt like there should have been something more, more ceremony between them. The emotions that had been trekked with him from Las Vegas had built and built, had been added to by the visit to his mother, by the fight with Sarah, by the conversation with Teresa, and now by this trip and the recounting of the story, and it felt like Jay was the repository of all of that. Stuffed with emotions, bursting with them, Bumpy felt like a handshake did not do enough to defuse them. But that was what he’d gotten. He turned and walked into the airport terminal, wondering if he could buy dry socks somewhere in there. And he went to the ticket counter to buy a second ticket to New York.

427

December 30: Sarah waited in line behind the throngs of shoppers. She wondered why the grocery store was so full. She’d actually thought it would be more empty today, that this might be a good day to get her grocery shopping done. So did everyone else, she thought, as she looked down the rows of people, standing, like her, behind a cart more or less full of food and drink. She looked at the woman next to her, a woman standing behind a cart that had only fifteen items, maybe, in it. The woman stood there with her heel on the cart’s lower rack, holding a magazine that she’d plucked off the rack and was reading. She’d even folded it over, was holding it in one hand while the other absently rested on the handle of the cart. The woman’s cart had vegetables, but they were party vegetables: radishes and baby carrots and broccoli and celery. There was a tub that Sarah assumed was dip but couldn’t tell from several feet away. There were two-liter bottles of white soda. Most of the people around her had carts like that: carts full of last-minute preparations as people tried to get their New Year’s party supplies and beat the snow, too, snow that had started falling at nine a.m. and not stopped. It was not falling quickly but it was falling heavily, the kind of snow that made the flakes themselves seem large, and when she walked through it she could feel the flakes landing on her face and hanging on for a second, almost, before melting. The snow was coating the roads and parking lots and cars and houses. It was not slippery. It was wet and heavy, though. Wet and heavy but curiously not as cold as it should be. It was a warm snow, the kind of distinction that maybe can only 428

be made by people who live in a state like Wisconsin where there is so much snow and cold that it can be differentiated: when Sarah had walked out that morning, she’d realized that it was not as cold as she’d thought. Standing on her porch with her knit hat on and her coat buttoned up, she’d paused and felt the flakes landing on her – landing almost heavily, she could feel them touching her. They were not as cold as snow is when it sits on the ground or on a car windshield. There was no wind so the snow mostly fell straight down. It landed on her face and made her face red and flushed. People coming into the grocery store were flushed and embarrassed-looking. People leaving it were not bothering to zip up their coats or put on hats. Some coming in or leaving had slightly wet hair – they had been in the snow longer and it had dampened their scalp. She edged her cart forward and looked at her own groceries. Bread. Milk. A few frozen dinners to take to work with her. A splurge: she’d bought a pack of gourmet root beer. Some corn chips and salsa. Lettuce. Deli meat and some fish. She looked out the doors of the grocery store at the snow and decided against dropping off the boxes of Mom’s things today, the first donation. She doubted anyone would be accepting donations at the Goodwill today, anyway. She was never sure, anymore, if New Year’s Eve was a real holiday or not, whether people worked it or did not work it, whether there was mail and whether stores were open late, or closed early, or both. Working in a hospital distorted her views of holidays, anyway. For years now, she had worked on holidays, had driven into work on roads that were nearly devoid of other people at eight in the 429

morning because everyone else was just getting up, wearing their sweatpants, turning on the TV to have the parade on while they waited for football games to start and company to arrive. For three years now, she had not cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Two years in a row, Peyton had cooked it while she worked, and they had eaten Thanksgiving dinner after six p.m., which seemed to her normal for dinners, maybe just a little late, but incredibly late for a Thanksgiving dinner, which began in her family usually around one in the afternoon. Peyton had taken it well when she’d told him that first year that she had to work on the holiday. “I work Thanksgiving, almost every year,” she’d said “Because then I can get Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, mostly.” She’d tried, once, explaining the seniority system at the hospital and how it interacted with the complex holiday schedule that was set up, but hadn’t been able to quite get it across. He’d suggested that they go visit his mother and father, in San Diego, for the Thanksgiving weekend. They could stay with his parents, he had offered, or a hotel, because his parents wanted to meet her. In the 13 months they’d been dating, Sarah had talked to Peyton’s parents only once, when they’d called his house while she was there watching a movie with him, about two months before this Thanksgiving planning. Peyton had been in the kitchen, making something, and had asked her if she could pick up the phone and get it. She hadn’t talked long to his parents, and Peyton had gotten on the phone and told his mom that was Sarah and had explained they were eating dinner and watching a movie.

430

When he’d suggested going to San Diego to visit them and have Thanksgiving, it had been September, and unseasonably hot. Sarah had been wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had been sitting on her living room couch listening to him. Sunlight had streamed all around them through her front windows. It was almost impossible to think of Thanksgiving on a day like that, a day that was almost eighty degrees and the sunlight streamed down onto red and yellow and mostly brown leaves that littered the yards already. Sarah had sat there, explaining how the schedule worked and why she would have to work this Thanksgiving, and had wondered what Thanksgiving in San Diego would be like. Would it be bright, and sunny, and hot, like this? All she could picture of southern California was that scene from the beginning of Three’s Company where John Ritter rides his bike on the beach and falls over looking at girls. She’d seen that opening dozens of times, that September: the local station had begun airing re-runs of Three’s Company in two hour blocks in the afternoon and many patients watched the show, so Sarah saw it over and over again as she walked around the hospital caring for them. Having never been any place but Madison, and having never watched the show, she wasn’t sure if it was set in San Diego or if San Diego was like that, but she assumed that there were enough similarities between the show and San Diego. “What’s San Diego like in the winter?” she asked. Peyton had grown up there. He’d come to Wisconsin for school and stayed. He liked winter, something Dylan had always found remarkable, telling Peyton that Peyton was nuts for liking the cold. 431

Peyton had said it was beautiful, that the temperature was in the seventies, it was cloudless, usually, and breezy, and that you could smell the ocean almost anywhere you went in the city. Sarah hadn’t thought that sounded much like Thanksgiving. “Maybe we can go next year,” she offered. “I could sign up to have it off, not work next year,” she said. But Peyton’s parents alternated years, and they would likely visit Peyton’s brother in upstate New York, she learned. Peyton had said he’d see if they could switch. The next year, they hadn’t switched and Peyton and Sarah had Thanksgiving dinner at their house, with just the two of them. She couldn’t remember where Dylan was. Or where Mom had been. She’d had to work again. She’d asked him, in March, when it came time to choose holidays, whether he wanted her to take Thanksgiving off and they could go visit them. He’d told her no, they were going to his brother’s after all, somewhere near Buffalo. Sarah had not met her would-be in-laws until Peyton’s funeral. She looked at her cart again and edged forward. One more shopper between her and the tired-looking cashier, a man about 40 years old with a moustache that was unevenly trimmed. He had a football jersey on. She realized that most of the store employees were wearing football jerseys. She wondered why. “Sarah?” she heard.

432

She turned to her left. About three rows down, she saw him, craning his neck to look at her. “Oh. Um. Hello, Dan,” she said. She watched as he looked at the carts between them, looked behind her, looked again at the carts between them. Then he pulled back a little and maneuvered his cart around, excusing himself and pushing through the lines that blocked them from each other, until he had pulled his cart in behind Sarah’s. She was surprised, and a little embarrassed, that he would do that. A few people looked up from their carts and she wondered what they thought. Would they think it’s just a friend? Would they think it was strange? “Just getting off work?” Dan asked. Sarah nodded. She did so absently, and then realized that she hadn’t been paying much attention, and wanted to tell Dan that, no, she was not working today, that she had been packing up some of Mom’s things and that she’d then decided that this would be a good day to go to the grocery store, not wanting to go on New Year’s Eve itself and thinking that it might be slow today. “Me, too, but we couldn’t do much today. The snow,” Dan said. He pointed towards the exits, unnecessarily. “I tried to stick it out, but that’s the breaks of the business, I guess.” Sarah looked in his cart. He only had a few things in there. Bread. Lunchmeat, which she noted was bologna. Some mayonnaise. It looked as though he’d gone shopping for nothing more than the basic ingredients of

433

sandwiches. She saw him looking down at the cart, too, and realized it was her turn to talk. “Did you want to skip ahead of me?” she asked, trying to explain why she was looking at his cart. It seemed such an invasion of privacy to be caught looking over someone’s groceries, suddenly, and she felt slightly embarrassed about that, too, even though they were all out in the open. Even though the groceries were plainly visible, nobody, she realized, ever openly looked at someone else’s groceries. Groceries and feet, she thought suddenly. Nobody ever stares directly at groceries and feet, for some reason. Then she felt angry because that was the kind of thing Dylan would say. She wondered for a moment if Dylan had said just that, at some point in the past, and got more angry. She clenched her hand on the shopping cart and tried to calm down, tried to listen to Dan. She wondered at the expression on his face. It seemed a little too lost. “Oh. Um. No, thanks, I’m fine. I’m not in a hurry, really, and maybe you are.” He pointed again at the snow outside, and Sarah wondered why until he said “I’ve got my work truck. Four wheel drive. And a plow. So I don’t really worry much about the snow. It’s good for me, actually.” Sarah unclenched her hand. “Why?” she asked. “Um. ‘Cause I get some extra plowing jobs. I do snow plowing, too. Not like on the road or anything. That’s all done by the city or maybe they contract it out but they need those big trucks. I do it for businesses. Like this one. Or other small businesses. Parking lots and things. I plow them out. It’s kind of nice 434

because I don’t get much work done otherwise when it snows and in the winter, so this is a good extra source of income for me.” Sarah’s hand was sore from having gripped the cart so hard. She looked at it and rubbed it. “That’s nice.” “It is. It is,” Dan said. “I do it for some homeowners, too.” “My driveway’s pretty short,” Sarah said. Dan looked a little too blank again, and she wondered at that. She realized, abruptly, that he was dismayed at the conversation. He doesn’t like my answers, she thought, and she felt badly about that. Dan looked down at his own cart again and then looked up. “No, I wasn’t trying to sell you or anything. Just making conversation.” He paused and then looked down again and up and said “But if you wanted, I could plow it out. For free. It wouldn’t take long. Might save you a little trouble.” He looked, again, out at the snow. He gestured, then, a third time towards the exits. “It’s coming down pretty thick.” Sarah pictured the snowblower she had sitting at the back of her garage next to the electric lawnmower, the snowblower that Peyton had bought her in February the year before when it had snowed so much. He had been coming over to shovel her out and then had just one day shown up with a snowblower and begun clearing the driveway that way. “You bought a snowblower?” she’d asked him. He’d said he’d bought one for her. It had stayed in the garage since then, used once or twice. She’d wanted, 435

then, to joke with him that he’d bought it for him since he was clearing the driveway anyway, but she hadn’t. She’d never been able to joke like that and so she’d largely stopped trying. Peyton hadn’t expected her to joke about things anyway. The snowblower was just right for a driveway her size; it could clear it in about ten minutes, easily. It had been on the small side, though, for the kinds of houses she and Peyton had been looking at, planning on moving into after they were married. The houses were in new developments and had longer driveways and were larger than her own, or Peyton’s own, house. Larger houses surrounded by smaller trees, the trees new and young and still held in place, in many cases, by stakes. Small shrubs and bushes recently planted around those houses. Grass so new that one could still make out the rows of sod in some places. They’d driven through those kinds of subdivisions since September, looking at houses and just driving around, sometimes getting fliers, sometimes even going through an open house. Peyton had once said that while the trees were small then, eventually they would loom over the house and when their children came back home to visit, they’d talk about how the trees had gotten so big. Sarah did not mention the snowblower. She tried to say the right thing. “That’d be nice,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.” She wondered if she should offer to pay him, and that made her angry again, because she could hear Dylan in the back of her mind, saying If the woman pays her own way, it’s not a date, and she did not want to think about Dylan. She tried to push the thought aside. She tried to focus on what Dan was saying while also wondering if she should offer to pay

436

him, to make clear that she was only being nice, that she didn’t want him to think it was a date. A snow-plowing date? Dan said “Yeah, sure. I can do that. I’ll just swing on by. Whenever you want. I can do that.” He looked ahead of her. “We should move up.” Sarah looked, then, too, saw that she was now second in line and there was a gap. She pushed her own cart forward, its contents not much more than Dan’s in number but more varied. She wondered if he was looking at her cart. “I guess maybe when the snow ends,” Dan was saying. “Whenever that will be.” “Who knows,” Sarah said, glad to have something noncommittal to say, non-confusing. She looked at the cart ahead of her. It was piled high, with the bulk of the purchases seeming to be paper towels. The woman had four rolls of paper towels, large thick rolls, precariously balanced on top of the cart as the cashier began to take items out. There were also five large cereal boxes. The woman was sorting through coupons and not looking. “So. Plans for New Years’?” Dan asked then, and Sarah looked back at him. “No.” She said it too quickly and hoped he wouldn’t think she was rude. She’d been asked that by a variety of people over the past few days, mostly by people who seemed to ask it out of concern or pity, questions Sarah interpreted (rightly or wrongly?) as some sort of therapeutic questions, designed to see how she was doing and whether she needed someone to talk to. A few of the people, when she said no, which she said more and more quickly, extended invitations to her, but they did so in the way that a doctor, at a party, says you to come see him 437

at his office if asked a second medical question – a formality, something that’s expected to not be accepted and to end that line of conversation. Oh, well, we’re just having a little get-together. Maybe not so many people you know, but you’re welcome to drop by, and Sarah, even if she had felt like dropping by, which she didn’t, wouldn’t have continued to want to do so in the face of all those negative suggestions preceding the invitation: a little get-together equaled too small to really invite more people, and no so many people you know meant you’ll be a stranger and not fit in. The only unequivocal invitation she’d gotten was from Emily Wilson, who’d called and left a message on Sarah’s answering machine, a message that was waiting for her when she’d gotten home from work on December 26. “Sarah,” the message had said “I don’t know if you remember me. It’s Emily. From the group. I’m having people over for New Year’s and I thought you would like to come.” There had been a pause then, and Emily had said “Jane’s not going to be there.” Emily had left her number and added that she’d hoped that Sarah would be able to make it. Sarah had not called her back. “Me, neither, really,” Dan said, now. “I mean, some people invited me over. I suppose I’ll go to that. I never do very much, do you? For New Year’s Eve, I mean. I don’t try to do a whole lot. I think it’s kind of a younger person’s holiday. People who can go out and stay out all night.” He shrugged, then, and looked back up at her. “I never really do anything on New Year’s,” Sarah said. 438

Then she felt bad because that shut it down so quickly. She said “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it… that way. It’s just.” She stopped and looked at the magazine rack, at the recipes and celebrities and celebrity recipes crowded together. “No, I understand,” Dan said. Do you? Sarah thought about asking him. But she didn’t. “It’s not you,” she said, then, looking at him. The paper towel-woman was paying and handing over coupons. “Oh, I didn’t think,” Dan said, back, but didn’t finish up. “I’ve just never done much of anything on New Year’s. And right now. Right now.” She didn’t try to finish that sentence, either. The cashier motioned for her to pull her cart forward and she did so. She looked back at Dan. “It’s just… this year.” “Oh. I know. I understand. I was just making conversation,” Dan said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” The cashier was looking at them both. Sarah bristled because the cashier should not be openly listening to their conversation, should she? Just because we’re talking near you does not give you the right to listen to us, to be obvious about it, she thought, but before she could say anything, the cashier said “Paper or plastic,” and Sarah had to regroup to understand the question. She said she wanted paper bags and the cashier relayed that information to the bagger and began scanning Sarah’s groceries and at the same time said, as she looked down at the register, “So I told him I’m not going with him at all.” 439

Sarah didn’t understand and said “Excuse me?” The cashier looked up. “Sorry,” she said, and smiled uncomfortably. “I was talking to him.” She pointed to the bagger. Sarah was frustratingly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very sorry.” She made a show of looking in her purse for her checkbook, deciding to write a check rather than pay for cash because it would give her something to do. She pulled the checkbook out and kept her head down. She didn’t have a pen and looked around the cash register area for one. The cashier took a pen out of her smock pocket and handed it to her, while still running groceries over the scanner and relaying to the bagger a story about the boy that she would not go with at all. Sarah tried very hard not to listen but couldn’t do so as she wrote in the name of the grocery store and pre-signed her check. She looked up at Dan and said “So are you going to your… party or whatever?” She said it only to prove to the cashier that she wasn’t listening to that conversation anymore. Dan had been leaning on his cart rail and straightened up now. “I might. I suppose I will. I don’t like to sit home alone, either. Even though I don’t make a big deal of it, I always feel like I should do something.” He took a deep breath, then, and said “You want to know what I did last year? For New Year’s?” Sarah didn’t really want to know, but didn’t want to stop the conversation now as she wrote in the price of her groceries on her check. “Yes. What did you do?” She asked. 440

The cashier took the check, looked at Sarah’s driver’s license in its display case in her coin purse, and began writing something. “I read the A through C mysteries from that mystery writer. Sue something-or-other? I don’t know if you’ve seen them.” Sarah shook her head and looked at him. “She’s this writer. She writes mysteries and does them in alphabetical order. Every book is like M is for Murder or something, only she hasn’t gotten to M yet, I don’t think. I was in a bookstore just after Christmas. Someone had given me a gift card for the bookstore and I saw this mystery series, so I bought as many of them as I could with the gift card, starting at A. She’s got a lot of them, and I figured that if they were all the way through, I think, J or maybe later, that they must be pretty good. I bought them and then on New Year’s Eve, I started reading them, with A, and I got all the way through C before I went to bed that night.” He pushed his own cart forward as Sarah pulled hers out of the way and took her receipt. “Pretty lame, huh?” “Do you like mysteries?” Sarah asked. She didn’t know what to say. “I do now.” Dan looked over at her. “I’d never read a mystery before. But I like them a lot, now.” The cashier had not asked him if he wanted paper or plastic at all, Sarah noticed. The bagger was simply putting the bags into paper bags. Dan only required one bag and he was already pulling a twenty out of his wallet when Sarah saw that the cashier had put his bag in her cart. 441

“Oh, sorry,” she said, at the same time as Dan said “I’m sorry, we’re not,” and they both stopped. “It doesn’t matter,” Dan said. He took his change and receipt. He seemed not to know what to do with the receipt and finally stuck it in his pocket. He walked over to the cart where Sarah stood, picked up his bag. “Sorry about that,” he said. The cashier and the bagger were already on to the next customer and said nothing. Sarah shook her head. “It’s not your fault,” she said. She didn’t know what to do, now. Dan stood there with his bag in his arms. She wished he’d walk away. She wanted to go home. “Let me help you with that,” he said, and he leaned over and put his hand on the cart handle. “Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “I’m here, anyway,” Dan said. He smiled at her. She tried to smile back but it came out, she thought, a little thin-lipped. They got to the door and she saw that there was at least an inch of snow on the parking lot. Cars were piled with it, and the snow was coming down more thickly now. The parking lot was rutted with matted, packed snow and wet brown crumbs of driven-on icy drizzled slush. “Where’s you park?” Dan said. He seemed more upbeat than he had, at first. His face seemed more animated. “Um. Not far. Not that far.” Sarah thought about the passenger seat of her car. She didn’t want Dan opening the door. She could open the trunk, 442

though, put the groceries in there. She supposed she’d do that, if he was really going to go all the way to her car. But there were some boxes in there, and she didn’t know if there was enough room in the trunk for the groceries. She only had two bags. There had to be enough room there, right? They were outside. She could feel the snow hitting her head, landing there and pressing down her hair with its wet weight. She knew as it got wetter her hair would look more brown and less blonde. When she looked over at Dan, she saw that he had snow sticking to his eyebrows and his eyelashes, a large flake at the corner of his eye. He licked his lips, which she saw were a little chapped. She walked along with him, listening to the muted sound the cars in the parking lot made. There was a scraping sound from a snowplow, but she couldn’t see it. “It’s right here,” she said. She’d gotten lucky, gotten a spot in the front row. Dan had opted to push the cart, with her two bags, and his own in it, through the snow in the parking lot, and he struggled it over, the wheels coated with snow and slush and not rolling. Sarah pulled her keys out of her coat pocket, her hands red in the cold. Dan edged the cart out of the way of a car that slid slowly past them. “So,” Dan said, and Sarah opened up the trunk, hoping that there was enough room for her two bags. There wasn’t. She looked at the boxes. On the top of one were the words Mom’s coffee cups. That box had been in her own garage. She’d put it there a long time ago, when Mom had moved from the house to the duplex and didn’t have enough room to put everything in there. Sarah had told her she should just throw away some of those old dishes and coffee mugs, 443

but Mom had not wanted to. She’d said that someday Sarah may want them as heirlooms, that some of them were antiques. She’d reminded Sarah that Dylan, too, drinks coffee. Maybe he would want them, she’d pointed out. Dan stopped when he saw the boxes, and then tried to recover. “Hauling a lot,” he said. “My mom’s stuff,” Sarah said, and then dropped her head down, looked at the keys that she held in her hand and clicked them together. “Oh,” Dan said. Another car slid past them. Sarah didn’t want to open her car doors. There was hardly enough room on the driver’s side for her to maneuver in and she didn’t want to open the passenger door. She didn’t want to have to tell Dan not to put the bags on the front seat and didn’t want to let him put them on the front seat. She didn’t know what to do and as she stood there she felt a tear on her cheek. She looked off to her left, away from Dan, hoping that he hadn’t seen. “I’m sorry,” Dan said. Sarah wondered what he thought he was being sorry for. She tried to remember how much she’d told him. “I was going to drop them off. Earlier,” she said. “I was going to take them to the Goodwill store.” Her voice was quiet. The parking lot was full of cars but most of the people were inside and the snow was dampening the sound of the few that were around. Somewhere the snow plow was still scraping against pavement. She kept her voice low and she wondered why she was talking at all. 444

The snow fell thick between them and she looked at her car, the snow piling onto the window and sliding down on the glass, mounding at the base where the trunk was open. She looked at the box marked Mom’s coffee cups. “But I didn’t get around to it. I just. I didn’t want to do it. Not right away. It’s been …” she couldn’t finish any sentences. She looked over to see what Dan was doing. He was looking at her and she felt her eyes fill with tears as he looked instead down at the grocery cart. She looked ahead again at the trunk. “I don’t have room in my trunk for even these few groceries,” she mumbled, and she laughed. Dan looked over at the passenger door. But he didn’t say anything. Sarah felt the snow piling on her head, melting. She could feel little rivulets of water trickling down her neck, cold and tickling. Dan rubbed his nose, his own hand white, pale. “My brother was here,” Sarah said, then. She put her hand up to her mouth. “He was?” Dan said, and looked around. It sunk in, then, not here at the grocery store, and he looked back at Sarah. “He came at Thanksgiving. He was here. I ran into him. I wasn’t even supposed to be at the hospital that day but someone had called in sick. It was Thanksgiving day. I was supposed to have it off. It just worked out that I was supposed to be off on Thanksgiving but then they needed someone and I agreed to come in. I’ve worked a lot of Thanksgivings, so I didn’t mind, and I had been going to stop in and see my Mom anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.” 445

She brushed the snow off of her head and felt her hair with her hand. Her hair was wet. Dan had snow piled on top of his own head. The snow was so thick it obscured part of her view of him. It was mounding, even, in their groceries. Dan had one hand in his jacket pocket and one hand on the cart, protectively. Three cars went by, one after the other, ponderously moving in the snow. “I didn’t know he’d be here. He didn’t call me. He didn’t tell me he was coming here. I saw him before he saw me, too. I walked up to the main entrance of the hospital and he was there, outside the main entrance, holding this crummy duffel bag and…” She stopped. She looked over at Dan. “I should stop. I should let you go. I’m sorry to make you stand out here in the cold.” Dan wondered why she didn’t get in her car. She never made a move towards either side. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t mind.” So Sarah went on: “I walked up and I couldn’t believe it was him. I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard from him, in probably, it must have been…” Dan watched her as she paused, watched her lips moving. She was counting. “Eight months. Almost nine. Eight months. And there he was. And he was talking there to a woman I know, a woman he used to be engaged to. She was hugging him. I walked up and she was hugging him. Sarah put her hand up to her forehead. Her hand was so cold. Her forehead was slick with the residue of melted snow. Her hair was matting down. “The last time I’d seen them together she’d punched him.” Dan wondered if he was supposed to laugh at that. He tried a smile and Sarah looked at him. He stopped the smile and held his face neutral. Sarah did 446

not smile but did not turn away. She looked straight at him and said “She’d come up to him and punched him. Her name is Teresa. They were engaged. Then she punched him and threw the ring. She hit him really hard. And then I saw them there, in front of the hospital. At first, when I’d seen Dylan, I thought he’d come there to visit my mom but then he was hugging Teresa and she was smiling at him. He had this dumb look on his face and, I don’t know, I just got so mad. I got really really mad. I marched up to him and said What are you doing here? “I think Teresa thought I was talking to her because she started to say something but he interrupted her and said something to me, something stupid like he always does. He said: I saw you on TV.” Sarah was crying now. Dan moved a little closer to her. He pulled his hand off of the cart and then held it in the air, as if he was going to shake hands with her, left-handed, before putting it back on the cart, this time on the edge. Sarah put her own hands in her pockets. A clump of snow fell off her head and brushed her cheek before falling to the ground. She lifted her hand and brushed more snow off her head, quickly putting her hand back into her pocket, feeling it chilled and not warming up quickly. “So I didn’t know what to say to that. And then Teresa, she said How are you doing, Sarah? Like she was all concerned, and I didn’t talk to her at all. I just asked Dylan what he was doing there, and he didn’t answer me. He said Why are you doing that?”

447

“What did he mean?” Dan asked. Sarah had paused and he felt he needed to do something to keep the conversation going. He wished they could go inside but didn’t want to risk ending the conversation. “That’s what I asked him, too,” Sarah said, and sniffled a little. She had a tissue in her pocket and took it out, quickly dabbing at her nose. “I asked him that and he said Why are you doing this group thing? What are you hoping to prove?” Dan didn’t know what to do. He lifted his hand again and put it lightly on her shoulder. He felt Sarah lean a little into him and decided he’d done the right thing. Sarah went on: “I was shocked. Who just shows up in town and says something like that? He’s never been… he’s always been just… anyway, I said to him that it was none of his business, and he leaned in and said to me, just real softly, this, he said this: It was just an accident.” Dan kept his hand on her shoulder. Sarah looked up over at him. Her eyes were wide and damp and shiny. Her hair felt stringy in the cold and she was shivering. “I didn’t know what to say, and before I could say anything, he said You’ve got to let some things go. You’re embarrassing yourself with this. You’re making yourself look bad and you’re not doing any favors. I have to tell you that. I watched the interview, Sarah. And I finally said to him, asked him what he was talking about.” Sarah had in fact stood underneath the entranceway of the hospital and yelled at Dylan. She had yelled what do you know about anything like that? And

448

Dylan had said I know a lot about accidents and about people trying to find someone to blame. But she told Dan now: “He gave me one of these smart answers, like he always does, and he shrugged then, and I told him that it was none of his business what I did, and he said that it was his business, that when he sees me on TV being interviewed and making a fool of myself that he wanted to help me and that he didn’t want me to be carrying this around the rest of my life, trying to prove things. I don’t know what all he said.” Bumpy had said more or less exactly that, had told her that she should not be putting all this effort into trying to prove there was a killer and that she was wasting her time, and Sarah had gotten upset, had felt her face turning red because she had already stopped putting in any kind of time, had never put in time, and she’d gotten confused. Confused by the fact that Dylan was here, at her hospital, lecturing her, confused by the fact that he was not the usual apathetic, sarcastic, weird brother she’d been so used to but instead was talking to her forthrightly and with quiet calm, was taking charge of the situation in a way that she’d never seen him do before, and confused by the fact that she was angry at him for telling her to do what she’d already done – what she’d been doing all along. But instead of saying to Dylan, then, that she wasn’t part of the group anymore, she’d said to him: “You don’t know anything about it. You were too drunk to remember. Too drunk to help. And you’d just as soon that I forget about it so that you can forget

449

about it too, except that you don’t remember, so I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Teresa had actually backed up at that. Sarah looked at Dan now, in the parking lot, hand on her shoulder. She could see him shivering, and she was cold, too. She didn’t tell him the details. She said “He just kept talking about how I should quit the group and I got madder at him.” She didn’t tell Dan that she had quit the group, that she’d had nothing to do with the group for a long time. She didn’t know how to explain that, how to explain this all. Dylan had said “I didn’t come to fight with you. I didn’t think I’d see you at all.” Sarah had asked “Why did you come then?” Dylan had looked over at Teresa. Sarah had gone on, then, at the hospital, and yelled “You’re no good, you know that? You’re no good for anything. Nothing. You’re no good for anything.” She kept saying that. Added it two or three times more. In her mind it was the strongest insult she could muster. You’re no good for anything. She piled on him. “You disappear, you’ve never amounted to anything. You’re here, you’re there, you do this, you do that. You don’t help out with Mom. “ Sarah paused and looked at Dylan then. She said to him: “Don’t think I’m going to let you see her.” In the parking lot, with Dan, Sarah said “I told him he couldn’t see Mom.” Dan tightened his hand a little on her shoulder. 450

Dylan had just stared at her when she said that. Teresa had looked from him to her. “I’m going to leave,” Teresa said. She started walking away. Sarah thought for a moment that she should say something to Teresa, too, some parting shot, but she couldn’t break eye contact with Dylan and couldn’t think of anything to say. She felt her head twitch as she stared into Dylan’s eyes. She was in a fighting stance, almost, her left leg a little more forward, her elbows cocked a little. He was standing there with one hand holding up his duffel bag strap, the other hand in his pocket. She never looked away from his eyes. From a little ways away, Teresa said “So maybe I’ll see you there?” Dylan broke eye contact with her and looked up. Then he looked back down. Sarah could not interpret that and never looked away, never wavered her stare and Dylan’s eyes locked onto hers. “Why?” he said. Sarah looked at Dan as she told Dan what Dylan had said when she’d said he couldn’t see Mom. She was cold and the water trickling down in her collar had reached the small of her back. Her toes were numb. More and more cars were crawling past. The cars next to hers, on either side, were still there. Dan kept his hand on her shoulder and the other in his pocket. He brushed his own head off every now and then. He had on work boots and she envied him as she looked down.

451

“You don’t deserve to see her,” Sarah had told Dylan. “I told him he didn’t deserve to see her,” she said. She looked up at Dan. “He didn’t even argue. He just shook his head and walked away. He walked off to the side and started walking down the sidewalk. He picked up his duffel bag and I saw him put a cell phone to his ear. Probably calling Teresa. I thought, at least. I don’t know. He looked back, just once, when he was a hundred yards away.” Sarah looked at Dan now, met his eyes. “But he didn’t say anything. And I didn’t say anything. He waved and I didn’t wave back.” Now she was crying freely. Dan squeezed her shoulder a little. “My mom died the next day,” Sarah said. “I kept him from even seeing her before she died.” They stood in the snow for a while, nobody speaking. Sarah was picturing Dylan, walking down the wet sidewalk, duffel bag on his shoulder and cell phone to his ear. She remembered Mom opening her eyes once before she died. Mom hadn’t said anything. But she’d opened her eyes, for the first time that day, so far as Sarah could tell. Then she’d closed them and died. Dan looked at the groceries. The bags were filled with snow, and the snow had started to melt, causing the bags to become soggy and start shredding a little at the seams. “Do you want me to give you a ride home?” he said. As soon as he said it, he realized how dumb that sounded. They were standing right by her car.

452

Sarah sniffled and took her tissue out and wiped her nose and shook her head. “No.” She looked up. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said. Dan shrugged, and then felt that wasn’t the right thing to do. “It was,” he was going to say my pleasure but that wasn’t right. He said instead “I didn’t mind.” Sarah looked at the cars. “I suppose we ought to get out of the snow.” She edged up alongside her own car, opened the driver’s door. Dan picked up one bag, carefully. Sarah tried to back up to let him in, but he couldn’t squeeze in. He ended up handing her the bags, one at a time, and she set them on the floor of the car behind the driver’s seat. She tried not to look over at the straw wrapper as she did so. The bags inside her car, she straightened up, her left hand inside the car, standing between the open door and her car seat. “Thanks,” she said. “Not just for the groceries, but for listening to me.” Dan wanted to ask her if he could give her a call some time, but it didn’t seem right. He started, too, almost got the words out, but then stopped. He said, instead, “I didn’t mind,” again, and wished he’d had something better to say. “Well,” Sarah said. She smiled, then, feeling like she should. It felt forced to her. “You must think I’m awful.” She said. “No. You’ve just been through some really tough times. It’s just been… bad for you.” “You’re really nice,” Sarah said. 453

The snow was thicker than ever. Dan backed up a little. He wished he could think of a way to ask her to do something, to continue this. The best he could do was “I’ll put the cart back for you.” “Okay,” Sarah said. They stood there a moment longer and Dan finally had to be the one to say “I’d better let you get inside before we both turn into snowmen.” Sarah smiled at that and said “Thanks again. She hesitated a second longer, then brushed at her eye with her hand and sat down in her car. Another hesitation, maybe, and she closed the door. She started the car up and watched in the rear view mirror as Dan waved and began to tug the cart away. She waved back at him, aiming her wave towards the image in the mirror.

454

November 24: Bumpy took the bottled water with him when he left. He’d only drunk about one-third of it, and he kept it in his hand as he walked out past the pleasant receptionist. The receptionist was a male, and very young-seeming, both of them making the office feel a little off, because the boy at the desk looked as though he was only sixteen, and who ever expected a male receptionist? But he was very nice, and said to Bumpy “Keep warm,” as Bumpy nodded his way. “I’ll try,” Bumpy said. He went over to the coat rack and paused, before picking up the brown overcoat that he’d bought just that morning. Donna came out of the room, then, and came over to him. “I’ll walk out with you,” she said. “Okay,” Bumpy said. He put on the overcoat and put the bottle of water into his pocket. “I think that went really well,” Donna said to him. “Do you?” Bumpy had no way of knowing. And he was tired. He hadn’t slept well the night before. He had been up for most of the last couple days and he looked it, even as cleaned up as he could be. The meeting hadn’t been until 1 p.m. today; Donna had called him and let him know that it had been pushed back. He’d gotten that message even before the plane took off. Sitting on the runway, with a magazine in his lap and a bottle of pineapple juice sitting on the seat next to him, Bumpy had been wearily surveying the half-empty plane that was going to take him to New York, watching the few stragglers get on and make their way down the center aisle. As much as he wanted to sit next to the window, 455

he stayed in the aisle seat for now, because the plane was just crowded enough that some of the people had to double up and he didn’t want to be one of those people. So he sat in the aisle seat and set his juice on the seat next to him and opened up his magazine, but didn’t read it because he was too tired and his mind was racing. He hoped she’d come. When the phone vibrated in his pocket, he edged himself forward to reach into his pocket and get it. He hadn’t yet turned it off and knew he should have done that. But don’t they always remind you to do that? He was disappointed. He didn’t recognize the number and so he set the phone on his tray, too, as another person walked by, and watched as it buzzed again and then stopped. Two more people got on, fellow Thanksgiving-day travelers, and the phone buzzed again. Voicemail waiting it said. He checked the message. Was disappointed again: It was Donna, saying that the meeting had been pushed back to one p.m. and that she looked forward to meeting him, and did he still want to meet at 8:30 at her office or would he like to meet later in the day and then go to the meeting together? He decided against calling her back. The stewardess was closing the door and he still had the seat to his right open. He relaxed and waited for the flight to take off. It was only a two-hour flight. He’d call Donna and decide what to do when he got there. He wondered why she was working on Thanksgiving. Technically, I’m working on Thanksgiving, he then thought. He looked at his magazine, at his cell phone. It didn’t feel like working. He turned the cell 456

phone off and put it into his pocket. He picked up the pineapple juice and looked at it a moment before drinking it. He’d had pineapple juice only once before: the day after he’d proposed to Ivy. He’d been lying in the hospital bed, weak and pale and chilly in the airconditioning and looking at the needle in his hand as Ivy handed him the juice. He drank it and looked surprised: “What’s this? Pineapple?” he’d asked. “It was all they had left in the machine,” Ivy said. “How is it?” “Not bad,” Bumpy had told her. “It’s okay. I’ve never had pineapple juice before, though.” Ivy had looked at the label. “It’s pineapple-banana,” she said. Bumpy had taken another sip and leaned back. He’d wondered to himself how they got juice from a banana but didn’t say anything. He’d been exhausted, though, and achey. His whole body hurt. “I’m sorry,” he’d told Ivy, then, taking another sip of the juice. “What for? You don’t have to be sorry,” she’d told him. She’d gotten up and sat on the edge of the bed, then. Her ring glittered on her hand and she had looked at it a moment and smiled. “You didn’t do anything.” “It was supposed to be a special night.” “It was.” “Not the way you’d hoped, I bet.” “Well, no. I was worried,” she’d said, and had a serious look on her face. Then her eyes had gotten shiny. They’d glossed over with tears, one of which fell 457

onto her face. “I didn’t know what was happening. I mean, I thought at first that you were…” “Drunk.” Ivy hadn’t said anything. Bumpy had closed his eyes for a moment. “But then, you just fell over. And you usually don’t drink that much,” Ivy had said, and put her hand on Bumpy’s arm. “So it was… scary. The limo driver called someone on his radio right away. There was a whole crowd of people around and I didn’t know what to do. The driver, he was really helpful. He got down and loosened your collar and he checked your pulse and told me someone was coming.” Bumpy had tried to picture the scene many times since then. He’d thought back, over and over, as he did now, on the plane, while listening to the stewardess go over the safety procedures, the plane slowly rolling towards the runway. He looked out the window and tried to see the crowded, hot streets of Las Vegas, full of young people, girls in tank tops and skirts and shorts, men in shorts and polo shirts and t-shirts with band names on them, people in suits interspersed here and there. Whenever he tried to picture the crowd, for some reason, he imagined a showgirl standing in the crowd. He couldn’t really get the image in his head, and as he watched the runway roll by, the snow piled up along side of it, he could not, he felt, really remember Las Vegas. It seemed distant, or crowded out, maybe, like trying to pick out one person in a crowd shot was difficult. 458

He imagined, though, that Ivy had been kneeling to his side, and the limo driver had been kneeling by his head, that they’d gotten him out of the limousine itself and put him on the sidewalk, that people had stopped and gathered around. He wondered if the driver had told them to clear away. He pictured Ivy crying and holding his sportcoat, the one he’d never gotten back, the ambulance coming, him being put on a gurney, the EMTs telling Ivy she could get in. People standing there a few seconds more and then moving on. He wondered if someone had picked up the sportcoat and taken it, given it to the limo driver or thrown it out or if it had been left there. He’d walked up to that spot, not long after, and looked around, trying to imagine the crowd around him. He tried to picture where the limousine was, where he had been laying, where the coat would have lain. He looked at the garbage can and wondered if his coat was in there. The limo company had called him already and left a message that his paperwork had been in the car and did he want to pick it up? He’d said they’d pick it up. Ivy in the hospital had leaned against him a little and touched his hand. “You just stopped talking. I didn’t know if you’d drunk too much or if you’d hit your head a lot harder than I thought or what happened. You just fell over and stopped talking. They finally when we got here said that it was just heat exhaustion. They asked what you’d been doing and I told them I didn’t know, that you’d only just picked me up that day.”

459

Bumpy shrugged, then. He’d been out walking all day, and told Ivy that. “Down to Fremont Street and back, all the way up to the Luxor. Over, then, off the Strip a ways.” Ivy nodded. “I guess I didn’t have much to drink. Of anything,” he said. “How long were you outside?” “About six hours.” It had snuck up on him. He hadn’t even intended to be gone that long, and hadn’t been doing much of anything, other than walking and listening to music on his iPod. The mailing had arrived that morning, though, and he’d decided that the time was right, that he was going to ask Ivy to marry him, that he’d take her out that night and surprise her and having decided that, he didn’t think he could see her before then, so he’d left a note on the door of the shop and told her he’d be busy that day and would call her later. Then he’d just walked, all energy, just bursting out of him. He’d had his camera, but hadn’t taken a single photo. He’d just been too excited to sit still, to be inside, and wanted to surprise Ivy with the news and the engagement, but wanted to surprise her in a special way. So he’d walked around and around because he knew that he’d be terrible at keeping it a secret if she was around. He’d bought the ring the week before but had been waiting for the right moment, waiting to be sure. On the plane now, in the air, flying towards New York, Bumpy wondered what ever happened to the ring box and to his sport coat. A quick call to Donna 460

to confirm that he’d meet her at about 12:30 the next day if that was all right, after which she’d suggested twelve to make sure they could get to the meeting, and he’d caught a cab to check into his hotel, the hotel the production company had rented for him. Along the cab ride, he’d stared out the window at the streets of New York City, crowded with people even on Thanksgiving. It was too late in the afternoon for this to be the parade crowd, he decided. There was little snow and he wondered about that. New York City got snow, he knew, but he didn’t see that much of it around. Looking out his hotel window at Central Park he saw the snow piled there, the park white with black outlines of trees and dark-green-almost-black pine trees here and there, ponds with snow stretching towards the middle of them, white ice covering the rest. It must just get cleared off the streets really well, he thought. His cell phone sat on the table next to the bed. He picked it up again and wished he’d remembered to bring his charger. The little battery symbol said that he had half-a-battery’s worth of charge. He tried to remember when he’d last charged it up. Wednesday at the latest. So is half-a-battery good for another day? Nobody had called that night and twice he’d looked to see if it was turned on, still had battery power. He wondered if he should turn it off to save the power and then just check it every so often but decided that the power would last long enough.

461

The next morning, he’d had to go out and get some business clothing to wear. He hadn’t been going to, but had gotten up and showered and looked at the clothes he had in his duffel bag. With his laptop open and on the desk playing some music and open to a news site, he’d laid out some jeans and t-shirts and sweatshirts and decided that he was not going to wear those to the meeting. The anchor on the morning news show had said it was 23 degrees outside, and the national weather map had shown Las Vegas at 65 degrees. The desk clerk told him that there were “numerous” shops near the hotel, and what was he looking for specifically. He hadn’t known. He’d said “I just need a sport coat. Or suit. Maybe a winter coat, too.” With the list she’d written out for him in hand, he’d ended up at Macy’s, thronging with shoppers and overly crowded, Christmas music playing overhead and everyone’s faces red and shiny with the cold and excitement. There were almost no children in the crowd and he noticed that, too. The men’s department had been less crowded and he’d felt a little more comfortable there. Avoiding the salespeople, keeping to himself, his iPod turned down just low enough to hear as he’d walked around, he’d picked out three or four pairs of pants and two sportcoats. He had a couple of dress shirts but had to finally break down and talk to a salesperson because the shirts didn’t come in medium or large, and he didn’t know his neck size. With everything bagged up, he’d asked whether they sold winter coats. “Oh, sure, on the third floor,” the salesperson had told him, a man almost Bumpy’s age. The man had pointed out the elevators and said there was an 462

escalator over on the other side. Bumpy opted for the escalator, carrying his bag with the folded shirts and ties and pants, with the sportcoats on a hanger in their own coat-bag. He felt set apart from the other shoppers, who had their own bags, some already with bags from other stores, so they were on their second, or third, maybe, shop of the morning. As he browsed around the winter coats, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket and he set down the bag and pulled the phone out. He kept his bag in between his legs, held the sportcoats with the other hand. It was Donna. “Hello?” he said. He looked around. The coat section was busier, and noisier. Others, too, were talking on cell phones. “Mr. Strathan?” a voice said. “It’s me,” he said. “Sorry to bother you again. I was going to order you in some lunch and didn’t know what you might like. Or if you’d like that.” Bumpy thought about it. “Whatever you’re having is fine.” “I’ll get some sandwiches sent up. Preference?” Bumpy had talked to Donna several times on the phone now and by email and was always amazed at how many words she cut out of her conversations. Since she was the only New Yorker he knew, he’d decided it was a New York thing, this elimination of the subjects and prepositions and adverbs. “Turkey, if you can. But whatever’s fine.” She said she’d see him at noon then and he said okay, and went back to buying a coat. 463

The walk back to his hotel, a few blocks away, was nicer, because he wore the coat. He regretted not getting gloves, though, and ended up pulling his sweatshirt sleeve over his hand to carry the bag and coats, which he had to do wit his elbow crooked to keep them from dragging on the sidewalk. He edged and turned and twisted his way through the crowds on the sidewalk, bumping into people and never sure how the flow would go. As he walked, the traffic never seemed to move, cars just inching forward and stopping, pulling into other lanes now and then. Buses somehow navigated through that. He walked by a subway entrance as a group of people came streaming out of it, and he felt the warmth of the underground tunnels coming up at him. Vendors stood near carts with hot dogs and pretzels and something in paper cones that when he stopped to look at them turned out to be nuts. “Like some?” the man said. Bumpy wondered if he would. He decided he’d try them and bought a cone of nuts that he opened, holding his bag in the same hand he had the nuts. He crunched into them. They were sweet, and warm. “Nice,” he said, as the man looked at him, but the vendor wasn’t really paying attention. Bumpy put the cone of nuts into his pocket and walked the rest of the way to the hotel. Nobody stopped him in the lobby, nobody telling him there’d been a visitor or a message. He looked around the lobby and had been disappointed. In his room, he’d looked at the phone but there were no messages, so far as he could

464

tell. He considered calling the front desk, decided that he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t she call on his cell phone when she got here? If she got here? He checked his email on the laptop. Nothing of any interest. He’d laid out his clothes and decided that he should be getting ready because he didn’t know how to get to Donna’s office or how long it might take, and that was when he’d realized that he didn’t have dress shoes or dress socks. He called down to the desk. “Hello?” someone had said. A woman. “It’s room 1154. Strathan. I was wondering if there were any messages for me?” The woman said she’d check, came back and said there were no messages, she was sorry. “Was there anything else I could do?” “Do you know where I could get some dress shoes and socks?” There had been a pause and the woman said “Macy’s isn’t too far.” So for a second time, he’d gone out, deciding this time to change into his meeting clothes and just wear the tennis shoes and white socks with it until he got the new shoes. His tennis shoes in the bag, then, he’d arrived at Donna’s office a full fifteen minutes early, and had sat in the lobby of Donna’s office estimating that he was about 90% business-like: he was wearing a tie, a sportcoat, had the dress shoes, was early for a business meeting. If not for the shoes in the bag, he’d feel fully prepared.

465

Donna had not been what he expected and he tried to not act surprised. She’d sounded young on the phone, but she was anything but. He’d pictured, whenever she said Donna, a woman, maybe in her 20s, with long straight hair (like most young women had these days) and dressed like a Hollywood producer’s idea of what a literary and television agent looks like. But Donna was a heavyset, large woman, nearly as tall as Bumpy himself, with gray curly hair and thick glasses and a large smile. She’d taken Bumpy’s hand and shook it heartily and led him by it, not letting go, back down the hall towards her office, talking about how strange it was to be in her profession, how she worked with people for months and months and never met them in person. “Probably know how that is,” Donna had said. Bumpy had nodded. “Sure.” “I had a colleague once, at another place I worked, another place. Won’t name them. He worked with an author, lived overseas.” Bumpy tried to follow her talk, filling in subjects and predicates where necessary. Donna stopped and tugged his elbow and pointed her right hand into an office that looked out towards a river. “My office.” He went in and sat down. The desk was cleared but the shelves appeared cluttered with photos and books and three-ring binders. It wasn’t messy; it was just full, he decided. There were sandwiches and bottled water on a coffee table with some chairs around it. “What’s in the bag?” Donna asked, as Bumpy sat down. “Do some shopping?” 466

“Tennis shoes,” Bumpy had said. Donna laughed and pointed towards her desk. “I’ve got mine behind the desk. I wear them in, leave my shoes here. You don’t like dress shoes, either?” Bumpy nodded and picked up a bottle of water. He decided to leave the rest of the story for himself. He put his hand on his cell phone and wondered if it would be rude if he pulled it out to check the charge. Donna was back on her story: “Worked with this guy for 10 years. Never met him. I said isn’t that weird? And he says it’s not so weird. Then you know what he said?” “No,” Bumpy said, feeling like he was required to answer. “He said I only know what he looks like from the book jacket photo.” Donna laughed again and shook her head. She picked up a sandwich, bit into it. “Like New York?” she asked. Bumpy nodded. “It’s busy. Busier than I thought it would be.” “Always is,” Donna said. “Plus, the holidays.” Bumpy picked up his own sandwich and took a bite. It was turkey. There were little bits of something kind of like stringy lettuce on it, crunchier than he thought it would be. He chewed the mouthful and had trouble chewing the leafy stringy things. He wondered what they were. “But Vegas is probably crowded, too, a lot,” Donna said. “I’m sure. Plus it’s always on, isn’t it? A lot like New York.” Bumpy was looking at the skyline out of her window, wondering if there was a vantage from which the skyline of New York City would look like the mock467

skyline on the New York New York casino. “Vegas isn’t busy during the day, much,” he said. “It’s pretty quiet until the sun goes down, most days.” “Not like the city, then,” Donna said. They’d talked on until about 12:30 when she’d said they needed to go. “It’s only a block up, but I like to be early,” she’d said and led him back out. He’d tucked his water bottle into the pocket of his coat. “No gloves?” she asked and Bumpy shook his head. “I forgot them,” he told her. She said: “Probably you’re used to the cold. Where are you from? Wisconsin? Cold, there, right?” He nodded. The meeting had lasted two hours and had mostly bored Bumpy. They’d pored over contracts, Donna had pointed out clauses to him and argued a bit, politely but firmly, with the producers of the show, had paused to explain to Bumpy here and there what they were talking about. She’d gotten excited, a little, about a clause that let them decide whether the show would be picked up for a fourth year, had wanted that to be reciprocal. She’d used the word a few times and finally one of the men had gone out, had come back a few minutes later, and a few minutes after that a new draft was brought in, one Donna read quickly and said “Well, that’s okay.” She’d explained to Bumpy that they’d made it reciprocal for the fifth year and she thought that was okay. He’d told her that if she thought it was okay, he would agree to it.

468

Periodically, he’d taken out his cell phone and looked at it. The battery was down to one-third. He thought that might be a good sign, that it might last a little longer. Every now and then he’d looked away while Donna was talking, to listen to her without seeing her, and when he did, he could picture the Donna he’d pictured all along. He wondered if that was why Donna didn’t have a picture of herself on the agency’s website, as some of the agents did: Did she know that her voice didn’t match her image, and try to cultivate that? Eventually, it was done. He signed where they told him to sign, three or four different places. They all shook hands, the three men that had sat around the table. He’d gotten their names and then not remembered them, but he had a card for each of them in his coat pocket. The tie felt a little bunched around his neck and when he looked down as he straightened up after signing his name his tie had twisted so that the back was showing. The label read Macy’s Men's Department and he turned the tie back over. Donna had said “Why don’t you grab your coat? I have one other little matter to discuss on another client. I’ll be right out.” Bumpy had thanked them all again. “We’ll see you soon,” one of the men said, and Bumpy wondered about that, whether it was just a way of ending the conversation, like some people saying take care, a way of saying good-bye without saying good-bye. On the elevator, on the way down, Donna turned to him. “Well, you’re a writer now.” 469

Bumpy pressed the water bottle in his jacket pocket with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m a paid writer, now,” he said. Donna laughed. “True. Never thought of it that way.” Outside on the street, she pulled on her own hat and looked at him. Bumpy left his jacket hanging open to the cold, the way that only people who have lived with real cold all their lives can do, and looked at her. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve got a little time, if you wanted to talk more, or have other questions.” Donna watched a cab pull up and looked back at Bumpy. “You’re not just being shoved aside.” “No, I’m okay. I think I’ve got it all.” “Hate to make you come all this way and then spend only three hours with you,” Donna said. “Seems silly.” Bumpy chewed on his lip. His cell phone rested against his leg, cooling it through the pocket. “It’s okay. I’m actually probably not staying in the city that long, I think. I may head out tomorrow.” Donna patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you check in with me when you get back. Don’t forget, the first draft of the next episode is due in two weeks. Can you get it to me in one?” Bumpy nodded. “No problem.” He wondered what he’d write about. Donna shook his hand again. “Cab?” she asked. Bumpy said no. “I think I’ll take the subway.” 470

“People always want to, first time in New York,” Donna said. “Know your way?” “Yeah.” “Then go ride your subway, and celebrate a little. Celebrate a lot.” A cab stopped and Donna put down her hand. “Then email me when you get back home. Tell me how hot it is there,” she finished up. Bumpy realized that she was referring to Las Vegas as home, and then realized that would make sense, to her. He’d lived in Las Vegas the whole time she’d known who he was. Donna left. Bumpy walked along the street a little, jostling through the crowds and looking inside store windows. He tried to figure out exactly where he was, but hadn’t been paying attention on the cab ride on the way down. He put his hands into his pockets, but not before taking out his cell phone and looking at it again. He wondered if he should try to call. But he didn’t know what to say. And if he had to call, there would be nothing to say, after all. He carried the bottle of water, still. It felt warm against his hand. He’d had it all afternoon. After walking for about forty-five minutes his feet got cold. He looked around and saw a small storefront that looked like a deli. He ducked into it and wandered back. There were four people in line at the counter. The store was something like a convenience store – a large magazine rack, lots of coolers of drinks and sandwiches and pre-made salads and one shelf full of aspirin and things like that. Behind the counter there was a grill and someone was frying something. There was a lower counter with stools farther back and he went back 471

there. He sat at the stool and ordered some coffee, put his cell phone on the counter. It didn’t ring, or buzz, while he drank a cup of coffee. He eventually got up and cruised along the coolers, looking at the sandwiches, and wondered if he should pick one up to take back to the hotel. He decided against it, but picked up a copy of the New York Post and went to the cash register up front. Handing over a five dollar bill, he said to the young woman working: “Can I ask you a favor?” She looked up at him, eyes wary. Her eyebrows had gone up. “Can you tell me which subway I’d take to get to the Crowne Plaza hotel?” The girl looked out the window, biting her lip. Bumpy wondered for a second if she’d answer him at all. Then she said “Where’s that by?” “Central park,” he said. “Know the street?” He gave her the street. “You don’t need a subway to go to that,” she said. “It’s not far.” She pointed out the window and gave him some directions. There was both a right and a left turn in her directions and he tried to visualize them. “Got it,” he said, and thanked her. He folded his newspaper several times and put it into the pocket with his bottle of water. He walked outside and turned in the direction she’d told him to start. Two blocks, left, three blocks, right. Two blocks, he’d be there, she’d said. He began walking. The streets were still crowded. After a few minutes he stopped and reached inside his jacket pocket,

472

pulled out headphones and turned on his iPod. He walked along the street, trying to stick close to the buildings because it seemed less crowded there. He realized that he’d left his tennis shoes in their bag somewhere. Probably Donna’s office, he thought. He continued walking along, listening to the music, then pulled out his cell phone. Maybe one-fourth of the battery left. He clicked through the listing of calls, got to Donna’s number and hit dial. He got her secretary, explained to her why he was calling. “We can have someone send them over,” the woman said. Out of habit, Bumpy automatically declined, but the secretary said it was no trouble. “We have messengers going all over.” “Okay,” he said. They would messenger them over, the woman told him. He hung the phone up, put it in his jacket pocket, and tucked his earphones back in, started the music again. Piano notes played in his ears and he rejoined the flow of the crowd, walking along, looking at the buildings, and the faces scrunched against the wind (which was at his back) and the lights in the windows, and the packages people carried. He thought about the word messenger being a verb, and realized that he was at the end of the second block. He was supposed to turn left. There was a stairwell down to the subway, and he instead went down the stairs, sticking over to the right and taking his hand out of his pocket to hold onto the icy-cold railing because the stairs were wet and looked slick. He got

473

downstairs and looked around, piecing together how to pay to get on the subway, finding a map, selecting a route. He continued listening to music, hearing only occasionally the dim murmur of the crowd, the buzz of the PA system. When the trains came through they drowned out the sound of his iPod, even, and he eventually got the train he was waiting for. It was packed with people. He moved in and tried to find a place to stand, ended up wedged against a bar with people crowded into him. His hands stayed in his pockets, the New York Post folded in between his arms and body. He felt his wallet against his leg in his front left pocket. Acoustic guitars strummed in his ears. The subway trip took only about ten minutes and he got off, looked around, and saw stairs up. Outside, the air was colder than ever and smelled wet. He saw wooden pilings and heard waves slapping. He walked over across the way and stood near one of clusters of logs that reached down into the water. It was not as crowded here. It was lighter, too, out of the cluster of skyscrapers. He looked across the water at the Statue of Liberty, green and soapy looking in the twilight, not yet lit up for the night. Behind it were cranes that were already lit up. He heard people walking behind him, but just sat and looked for a while, until his legs and feet grew cold again. He walked around the park for a while, wondering why it was called “Battery Park.” He couldn’t see any signs or visitors’ center that might explain it, and it was growing darker. He found the subway stairs when he’d come up and decided maybe he’d head back. Before he went down the stairs, he looked around 474

again. He wished it wasn’t so cold because he’d like to see the Statue lit up at night. He guessed he wouldn’t, not this trip. The subway station was warmer and not crowded at all. People were home for the evening, or out for the evening: they were already where they had been going all day. He stood away from the groups of people, noting that there were very few people standing by themselves. The trains came less frequently, but his arrived, eventually, and he got on. This time, he got to sit. The lights in the car were harsh, but nostalgic seeming. The subway cars were lit like he imagined things in the 1970s to have been lit: brightly and without artifice. The car rocked back and forth and he listened to music and looked at the ads and tried to look at the people around him without them knowing he was looking at them. There was a little girl holding her father’s hand and looking at him. She wore red earmuffs and smiled. He smiled back. When he was back to the station where he’d gotten on in the first place, he got off and went back up to the street again and got his bearings, began following the deli girl’s directions again. Here, too, there were fewer people than there had been, although it was still busier than he expected. When there are ten million people living in one place I guess it’s always busy, he thought, and walked along. He realized at one point that he was walking alongside Central Park, and knew he must be near the hotel. He took out his cell phone again. The battery was a little lower. Only a sliver was left. No voice mails. No messages. No missed calls. He clicked through a few songs and began walking again. 475

The air in the hotel lobby was warm and moist and welcome. His face felt numb by that time, and his lips were chapped. He walked in and warmed himself up, left his headphones in, and paused while he thought again whether he should get himself something to eat. I’ll get room service, he decided. Or maybe order in a pizza. He heard Donna saying celebrate. “Sir?” a hotel employee standing near him tapped him and raised his voice. Bumpy looked over at him, took his headphones out. “I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to keep from being excited. He looked around the lobby but it was nearly empty, a haven of quiet and warmth off the street. He looked back at the employee. Is someone here to see me? He almost asked. “There’s been a delivery for you,” the man said. He gestured over to the desk and Bumpy tried not to look disappointed. His shoes. He followed the man over and sure enough, the woman at the front desk held up a shopping bag. “They dropped it off about an hour ago,” the woman said. “Thanks,” Bumpy said. He tried to joke: “Hard to go running without them.” The woman smiled and Bumpy looked inside the bag, saw his shoes and rolled-up white socks. He put the newspaper and the bottle of water in there, too. “Thanks again,” he said, and sighed. He put his headphones back in and walked across the lobby, looking at the three people sitting in chairs and couches. He looked towards the hotel restaurant, and walked back there. A young girl, maybe twenty, stood near a podium at the front. “Can I get you a table?” she said. 476

“Um. No thanks,” Bumpy said. He looked in and tried to see if anyone was in the restaurant. She wasn’t there. “Is there a bar in the hotel?” he asked. She pointed off to her left. “Back that way.” Bumpy turned and walked down there, putting his music on again. When he got to the hotel bar, he didn’t go in. He just looked inside, didn’t see anyone he knew. She’s not here, and he turned around. He took his cell phone out. Just a sliver of green in the little battery symbol. He clicked to check missed calls, got a warning screen: Battery power low, it told him. He put it back. No missed calls. He walked back through the lobby and over to the elevators. He punched the up button and stood there waiting, looking at then numbers above each of the three elevators, wondering which would come first. He felt a tap on his shoulder, turned around, saw Ivy there. “You didn’t even see me,” she said. “You walked right past me. I’ve been waiting there for two hours.” He dropped the bag and hugged her. “I sat there trying to think of something great to say when you finally came back. But I didn’t come up with anything. And then you walked right by me,” she said. She hugged him back, then.

477

November 16: Dan had not been able to sleep all night. He’d tossed and turned and finally, about five a.m., had gotten up for the day, bleary-eyed and headachey from being tired, already. He made a cup of coffee, put an ice cube in it so he wouldn’t have to wait for it to cool down, and sipped at it. He got up to go to the front door and go get the paper, saw that it had snowed the night before. He looked around for his shoes, or his boots, and didn’t see them. He took his cup of coffee and walked into the garage, where his work boots were. He hit the button to open up the garage door as he slipped his bare feet into the work boots, and set the cup of coffee on the little table just inside the door. He walked out into the garage in his t-shirt and boxer shorts and work boots and ducked under the still-rising garage door. His feet crunched across the light, fluffy snow, and his breath fogged in front of him. He grabbed the paper from the box and walked back up the driveway. When he got to the garage door he hit the button and turned around to watch the garage door come down, to make sure it went all the way down. Sometimes it jammed. While he waited, his eyes flicked to the garbage cans. He remembered Sarah coming over, and wished things had gone better, that he’d known what to say to her. The garage door clunked closed and everything was silent. He dropped the paper on the floor and went over to the garbage can, took out the package Sarah had put in there. Ivy Lee the return address read. The mailing address had

478

Sarah’s name and street and Madison, Wis written on it. Dan noticed that whoever Ivy Lee was, she’d used the old-fashioned state abbreviation. He hefted the package in his hand and then took it inside, set it on the table and took a sip of his coffee. Then he opened the package. Inside it was a mailing envelope, padded and bulky. That had no writing on it. He opened that, too, and pulled out a small cassette or cartridge, which after a moment he realized was an older kind of videotape. He tried to imagine what it could be played on. It wasn’t a VHS tape. It probably needed a special adapter. He turned it over, read the label. It said: Exhibit A. Ins. Claim No: 710508-A. Strathan. Below that, in parentheses, it said “Garden Party Tape.”

479

An Excerpt from “Forget To Remember: Is There A Serial Killer Stalking The Midwest?” by Bill Buckton.

Eventually, in Madison, Wisconsin, I met with Sarah Strathan. Sarah scarcely had time to get together, so busy was she with organizing and running the group of people she worked with, a group of thirty or so people who shared with Sarah the sad common thread of having lost someone to drowning. Sarah lost her fiancé, Peyton, when he drowned in Lake Mendota on March 1, just three months before their wedding. Police reports noted that Peyton had been out with three people the night before, one of them Sarah’s brother, Dylan Strathan.1 The coroner attributed the death to “drowning/hypothermia.” The water temperature was 37 degrees, according to meteorological reports. At the scene, the police took pictures and measurements, including the photo (Appendix C) of a mysterious shoe print that could not be matched to the footwear of any person known to have been there that night. Police investigators in their report explained the shoe print by noting that the site of the drowning was at times a heavily-trafficked area near a college campus and behind a popular bar.

1

Dylan Strathan lives, at the time of publication, in Las Vegas. He declined to be interviewed for this book. He did speak with police about the drowning, and his written statement is included in Appendix B.

480

Sarah felt that it was not only unlikely that Peyton had drowned, but so unlikely as to be impossible. Part of her reasoning for believing that Peyton could not have drowned, even in the cold, even if he had been drinking, was based upon how she and Peyton met. In her own words2: I work in a hospital. I’m a nurse. I usually work on the Critical Care ward. That’s the ward where people coming out of surgery, or who are going into surgery, go. But I was asked to cover for someone one night and so I ended up working third shift in the Emergency Room at the hospital. I remember it was a Tuesday night and I was a little nervous. Everyone has to work a rotation in the ER in nursing school but ever since then I hadn’t done that and I didn’t really know what to expect. You know, it’s not a very big city but sometimes there’s car accidents and sometimes there’s shootings, still. Mostly, though, the ER is pretty quiet and you get a lot of people who really don’t need to be in the ER at all, people who don’t realize that it’s not a heart attack, it’s just indigestion, or people who have a bad cough or something but didn’t go to the doctor during the day and now they can’t stop coughing. There’s not a lot of emergencies the way people think about it. It was almost three a.m. This was February, and it was quiet and cold outside. I remember how cold it was not just because of what happened but because it had been warmer for a few days before. But it was really cold that night. Below zero, I bet.3 2

Interviews with all subjects in this book were recorded with their permission. The night in question was February 22nd. Weather reports show that the air temperature that night was 4 degrees. The wind chill factor was -13 degrees. Water temperature in Lake Monona that night was 33 degrees. 3

481

I’d just come back from a break and was sitting at the front desk, where you register in people if they can be registered, and an ambulance pulled up outside, the sirens going and the lights on. I got up and went around the desk and watched as they brought out a stretcher. It was just piled high with blankets and the oxygen was going into a tiny little opening in there as they brought him through the doors. They were calling things about drowning and hypothermia and such and I helped them get him back while they got the doctor over there and began to warm him up and stabilize him. There were probably three doctors in that room and a bunch of nurses, all regular ER people, and I was near the door of the room. An EMT tapped me on the shoulder. “I think he needs some help, too,” the EMT said. I don’t remember his name. He pointed to a man standing near the entryway, with a blanket around him. His hair was wet and looked stiff. It was thawing out, he later told me. His hair had frozen over, that’s how cold it was. I went over there and asked the man how he was doing. He told me he was okay. I brought him into a little room off to the side and saw the blanket was soaking wet. He was shivering and white and pale and his lips, even were white. I called for an assistant and asked her to get me some blankets. He was freezing cold. I got the blanket off of him and he began shivering harder and harder. I hooked up an IV, ready to get some warmer liquid into him, and we helped him get his wet clothes off and laid him back on the table. We got blankets on him and put his feet up. I didn’t know if he was in 482

shock or just really cold, and I didn’t even know what had happened. I just kept talking to him, trying to keep him alert and asking him questions. I asked him his name, and he told me his name was Peyton. I thought that was kind of an odd name for a man. I’d only ever heard of women being named Peyton. I asked him how he was feeling, whether he knew what day it was, what he’d been doing. He told me he’d been jogging. I said “Jogging?” It was three a.m.., after all. I couldn’t believe he was out jogging at that time. I didn’t believe him at all. I kept warming him up and he was able to talk a little more as he got warmer. There wasn’t that much wrong with him. He had some frostbite but nothing very serious. They thought maybe for a while he would have problems with his foot but it never got that bad. I rubbed his hands and talked to him and we got him some warm drinks and finally he could sit up and he said he wanted to sit up. So he did. By then they’d taken the almost-drowned man away and were working on him elsewhere and it was quiet again. I was sitting in the frontmost room with Peyton and keeping an eye on the door, too. It was about 4:30 in the morning. He asked how the man was doing, and I told him I’d try to check on him. He asked me my name and I said my name was Sarah. He told me that was a pretty name. I asked him if he’d really been jogging, and he said yes. Then I remember, he asked me why I thought that was so strange. I must have shaken

483

my head or something because right after he told me yes, he’d really been jogging, he said to me something like why is that so hard to believe. So I told him: “Who goes jogging at 3 in the morning.” He looked around, surprised, and asked what time it was. I said it was nearly 4:30 in the morning but that he’d been brought in at three. I remember wondering if he’d tell me then what he was doing, how he was out at three a.m. and how he fell into the lake or whatever. I hadn’t asked him yet how he’d gotten so wet. He told me he thought it was only about 9 p.m. I remember, he said it that way, nine p.m. So finally, I asked him what happened. I probably should have asked him that right away but I never thought of it. He told me that he’d gone out jogging, around 8:30 or so, and was jogging by Lake Monona. That’s the smaller lake downtown. He was going to jog around it and then go home and go to bed. As he’d jogged, he said, he’d noticed there was a guy walking off the lake not far from him. He said he remembered thinking the guy was crazy, being out on the lake that late and when it had been so warm recently. He remembered thinking, too, he told me, that maybe the guy thought he was crazy. Then the lake guy had just disappeared. He’d dropped right through the ice, and Peyton said he’d just ran out on the ice to where he’d seen him last, had fallen into the ice himself near the guy, and had managed to pull him out. He said that as he’d run out he’d taken his cell phone and dialed 911 and started 484

telling the woman what had happened but then he’d fallen in the water and lost the phone. He said he got the man out onto the ice and gave him mouth-to-mouth and was trying to drag him off the ice but he’d been dizzy himself and it got so cold and then he’d woken up in the ambulance with blankets around him. You know what he said to me, then? I told him he was a very brave man, that he’d maybe saved that man’s life, and that he was lucky to be alive. And you know what he told me? He said: “I am. I’m very lucky.” The End.

485

A novel by Briane F. Pagel, jr.

Like what you read here? Then Check out: Thinking The Lions: http://www.thinkingthelions.com. Life, only funnier. The Best of Everything: http://www.troublewithroy.com: Pop culture like you’ve never thought of it. AfterDark: http://www.whathappensafterdark.com: Serialized horror stories! Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!: http://lesbianzombies.blogspot.com: In the future, everyone will eat squid jerky, and the fate of the world will rest on the slim, sexy shoulders of Rachel – who may be the queen of the lesbian zombies. Read this pulp serial story as it’s posted!

Other books by Briane F. Pagel, Jr: (Available at Lulu.com)

EclipseEclipse (book) Print: $11.50 Download: $1.25 Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars... and maybe he was. In a stunning psychological horror work, "Eclipse" unfolds slowly, beginning with Claudius drifting through space after something has gone wrong with his mission. As he stares at the only thing he can see, a tiny rock off in space, he mulls the events that led him here, reflecting on his childhood and the missionturned-into-murder. Or did things go bad? As "Eclipse" unfolds, the reader is treated to a twisting, constantly changing landscape created by Claudius' own mind, as version after version of what-might-have-happened pile on. One thing is clear, though: Something has gone wrong, and Claudius may never reach the stars. Or will he? 486

Do Pizza Samples Really Exist?Do Pizza Samples Really Exist? (book) Print: $10.06 Download: $1.25 Why will paying attention to Paris Hilton destroy the universe? How can one number be better than the other? Are saber teeth really necessary for a good movie monster? Would Hollywood as we know it exist if not for Jennifer Aniston's hair? These questions and more are asked, and answered, in the only book that dares to explain how jellybeans are related to the apocalpyse. Essays on pop culture, things that are The Best, and life show a provocative, and hilarious, way of looking at the world.

Thinking The Lions, and 117* Other Ways To Look At Life (Give Or Take)Thinking The Lions, and 117* Other Ways To Look At Life (Give Or Take) (book) Print: $12.98 Life, only funnier: Here's the book you've been waiting for, assuming you've been waiting for a book about a guy who spends his time trying to prove velociraptors didn't exist, who teaches his kids to gamble and helps them with their homework by wondering what would happen if you cut a superhero in half, whose own wife said he would get a crocodile for a babysitter, who finds squid chili romantic, and who generally makes the most -- or the least? - -of his life.

487