“Split them already,” says Birdbrain, rolling his eyes. All he wants is the house, its basement brewery and taxidermy workshop, and the cedar trunks filled with dad’s old stuffed deer heads, petrified birds and slick, glassy-eyed fish.

“Ha!” I say. “Yes! Split them. Birdbrain, you’re a genius.”

“My name is Brian.” He holds a giant three-point rack from some old buck dad got years ago, points it at me like he’s about to charge or something. Penis envy? he mouths.

I roll my eyes. Turn to Glinda. “Let’s throw ‘em all on her bed and go at it with scissors.”

“Yeah. Halvsies.”

When we were kids, Mom insisted on halvsies all the time, to be fair. One M&M left and she’d somehow find a jeweler’s knife and cut it down the middle.

Glinda and I giggle, not just any laugh. Our eyes lock, and we start in on that wheezy, nasal cackle we cultivated as witch sisters to freak little Birdbrain out. I’d stand before Glinda, about a foot shorter until that growth spurt in high school, so it worked for years, her head hovering just above mine. We’d lock arms and torment him like a two-headed witch-monster. “Be good witches!” our mother’d scold. I’m named Samantha, after the domesticated, twitchy nosed version on Bewitched. Yet we were both pretty bad to Birdbrain.

Birdbrain stares at us, his face alarmingly pale. We stop, simultaneously realize that old laugh sounds like our mother’s final wheezes. Birdbrain’s looking at us not like annoying sisters, but two separate yet freakishly connected incarnations of our mother.

Mom was a witch too. Born with a sixth finger, she was named after Anne Boleyn, killed for being a witch because of that finger—and because she didn’t produce a male heir. Mom hated her name until she was ten and saw Good Witch Glinda glittering kind and beautiful as a fairy, not a freak. Needed to prove she was good, beautiful — and fertile. At eighteen went to beauty school. At nineteen married young, got pregnant fast, and kept at it until she squeezed out a male heir. Kid number three. That’s Birdbrain — proof she needn’t be beheaded. Dad was finally happy. Though eventually he wanted to choke her to death for being so “good obsessed” she’d get ugly about it. Always on such a high horse.

Trying not to laugh, we both say, “Oh Birdbrain.” He raises his eyebrows, suddenly detached like dad would get, as if looking at us not as people but specimens: genus woman, species sister. I imagine our two heads stuffed like totems on Birdbrain’s wall after we die, rambling on, tormenting him from the walls, picking on what’s not good enough. Pretty witchy, really.

He clenches his jaw and taps at his pocket, his Swiss army knife. He likes to take it out and whittle at things, make figurines. Or just stab at pieces of wood, cut things up.

I swallow. He’ll now have dad’s much larger knives. This gets me thinking of Anne Boleyn and guillotines.

Our Anne died in her sleep, but not very peacefully. We all sat around her at the hospital when it happened. She seemed asleep, tossing fitfully. Then suddenly started dying in the middle of her nightmare. Wheezing and choking for a minute, then nothing.

Maybe even choked on something the doctors never found. Mouth twisted into a final grimace, she did look like a witch—just not the good kind.

I go from laughing to crying.

“It’s easier to choose,” the housewife explained, braiding her fingers over her crossed legs. America stared at her legs. She’d begun a new career as a yoga instructor. “I’ve lost fifty pounds.” As she spoke, her wide-set eyes seemed to expand further toward her ears.

Did she ever allow herself a bite of sautéed mushrooms? Walters wondered. Didn’t she miss Thai chicken, or warm oatmeal and honey?

“No way,” said the woman, giving her elbows a flap. “Now I don’t have to worry about food, ever again!”

Many of our friends were only just beginning to sample personalized eating habits adopted by their mothers and more precious than low-carb or gluten-free diet varieties: calorie journals, apples-and-gum-only lunches, homemade exotic juice cleanses—and that’s when the pills went on the market. The pill boxes promised filling, well-balanced meals in thirty tiny baggies of five capsules each: dairy, veggie, starch, meat, fruit. The pills, unlike the notorious Everlasting Gobstopper, did not expand and transform into various gastronomical taste sensations inside the mouth. The pills provided all the nutrition and satiety of food without the taste, smell, and texture. The pills incorporated multivitamins. Naturally, the pills became a sensation.

“Food Free” t-shirts and bumper stickers zoomed into view on mopeds and Volkswagens. Doctors on hire as sales representatives made the talk show rounds, and women in America loved both the pills and the doctors. American women were the target demographic, single women in particular. Glamour and Cosmo articles rallied: No more extra trips to the grocery store! No more hours sorting coupons! No more washing dishes, wiping counters, storing leftovers! A single woman insisting on healthful but expensive pills such as salmon and blueberry would pay the same price for food. Grocery stores built pill buffets. As the pills grew in popularity, prices dropped. In six months, newly-svelte anchors reported American women losing weight in record numbers. At the same time, a rising resistance from men, husbands and boyfriends in particular, demanded double-blind peer-reviewed medical studies showing the effects of long-term supplemental diets.

In response, the pill manufacturer published studies completed over three generations.

In turn, husbands and boyfriends, some Congressmen, now under the non-profit status PRO-FOOD, took a Quality of Life position. What about the joy of eating? they asked, having long lost the Joy of Cooking argument. Eating is an intense pleasure, they argued, and eating palatable food one of the most blissful sensations. Why be deprived of this routine enjoyment? What was next? Taking pills to have babies?

In the media, the husbands and boyfriends were being accused of insensitivity if not misogyny, even though by then restaurants were complaining that none of their female customers ate. Still, the US economy had been stimulated, in part because women were buying new clothes, and even though Home Economics teachers everywhere were becoming obsolete and the Food Network went bust, home decorating enjoyed its biggest boom ever as even brides skipped kitchen incidentals in favor of duvet covers and bathmats.

When the Walters interview cut to commercials, half of America popped bags of microwave popcorn. The other half of us drank diet soda or decaf. Our boyfriends complained, but a new wave of boyfriends more tolerant of pills was climbing the ranks. At lunchtime in the cafeteria, though, tables were divided into Pill Girls and Food Girls, and the cool kids changed camps constantly. Half the time kids took a pill, missed food, and later ate that too. And since we used all our allowance on pills, we weren’t buying any more songs online and taking a chunk of our parents’ monthly income for the newest techno gadget, so tech companies got pissed and before we knew it, songs were coming out about food, food, eating and food. Teen and tween movies featured lots of food or took place in restaurants. MTV anchors were always eating. But in interviews, singers and models and actresses all bragged about pills.

Feminine resistance started in the zines.

Would you go blind to be pretty? Would you let someone remove your taste buds? None of the senses should be thrown aside for a medieval form of keeping women thin. Enough!!! Reclaim all five of your senses for the full life you deserve! FIVE FOR FULL!

One of our friends had “5 4 full” tattooed on her lower back and swore off pills. Of course, she had no worries—except for possibly a future misunderstanding in the bedroom—she was pretty. What about the rest of us?

Staring at our fashion magazines, the dashboards of our first cars with their oil lights blinking on, our extracurricular club projects and homework assignments and college applications, with everything we had to learn—we wondered, eyeing recipes, how this, too? We could see our moms sigh and fiddle through online taxes and new cookbooks. How had they done it when we’d been in diapers? And yet, the salty sweet of popcorn when we melted caramel on it and baked it in the oven, fifteen minutes, tops. We knew those smallest-sized clothes wouldn’t fit. But we didn’t have to overdo it, either. We wanted to care about how it felt. Inner-tubing, is what we mean. Sneaking somewhere late at night. Watching the stars in a falling sky.

Nate clapped his hands to shoo them away, but instead of tottering off, as they usually did, they lowered their heads and stood their ground. Mmmmm, they went, one by one, picking up the complaint from each other and shuffling their hooves in place. They were spotted black and white.

Nate clapped again and shouted at them.

Mooo. They stared at the threesome passively with opaque eyes. Long ropes of slobber hung from their flabby lips.

Dusty barked and ran up to one of them, stopping short of its legs. Moo-oo-oo. The cow tossed its head and blew through its nose, at the same time clopping its foot, and Dusty backed off.

“What’s wrong with them? Why are they acting this way?” said Kelly nervously.

“I don’t know.”

Nate decided to plunge ahead, clapping and shouting, into their midst, and at the last minute the cows stepped aside one by one. Dusty, barking furiously, followed at Nate’s heels.

“Come on,” Nate called to Kelly.

She walked cautiously as if balancing on a log. The cows followed her with their blank stares, but didn’t move back to the trail. “I don’t like this,” she said.

As they proceeded on up the trail, the cows trudged alongside, lumbering, stumping. Mooo, mooo, mooo.

“Stupid cows!” said Kelly. “I hate these stupid cows.”

One broke off into a trot and crested the hill ahead of them. Reaching the top, Nate and Kelly saw more cows on the other side and three little half-year calves.

“That must be it. They’re trying to protect their calves,” said Nate.

“That’s cute. I can relate to that. Maybe I don’t hate cows after all.”

They’d been talking about whether to start a family. Nate was a third grade teacher and Kelly taught gymnastics, and they didn’t make a lot of money. But they’d moved from the city, even though it meant a cut in income, to a small rural town tucked away in a valley among these hills, because it was quaint and neighborly, and you didn’t have to lock your doors at night: the right environment for children. Nate, especially, wanted a simple, all-American life that would be as far as possible from his own difficult upbringing.

At another fence with a gate they left the cows behind and headed into a copse of oak and madrone. A pungent, moldy smell like old books rose from the ground. Speckled shafts of sunlight fell softly through ragged holes in the canopy, and the air sighed. Nate, smiling at Kelly, took her hand.

“Let’s start as soon as we get home,” he said.

She squeezed his hand and giggled. “Oh Nate.”

On Monday one of the kids in Nate’s class crayoned a picture of a house with all the windows colored over in black. It disturbed him. This was the kind of town where children could be expected to draw blue skies and yellow suns with smiles, green trees like cotton candy, houses with peaked roofs and chimneys with puffs of smoke, and in the foreground, stick figures playing with balls and bicycles—which mostly they did. Once one kid depicted a dog biting a little boy, but then, the boy who drew it was the son of a policeman.

What was behind those blacked-out windows? The child, a boy, had always seemed normal in all ways, and was a good student, though a little quiet.

The picture conjured an unpleasant memory. Nate was about the same age as this little boy. “See that out there?” His mother took him to the window and pointed at a dark blue Buick parked across the street. In the driver’s seat a man sat as motionless as a cardboard cut-out. He was Anglo, unlike their neighbors who were all Latino, with short square hair. The cardboard man suddenly came to life, glanced over, his mother waved, the man turned his head back and stared straight ahead again.

“That’s the F.B.I. They’re watching us,” she said.

“Why?”

“They don’t like what we stand for, our politics.”

Nate stared at the car and didn’t feel afraid.

“If that man ever comes to the door, or any policeman does, or any stranger, and asks questions, and your dad and I aren’t here for some reason, you mustn’t say anything. Give them your name but that’s all. Don’t tell them anything about us. Don’t let them in the house.”

Then he was afraid.

Looking at the picture, he remembered that fear and even felt a surge of it again.

He came home to find Kelly rolled into a pretzel-shaped yoga pose, Dusty stretched out on the mat beside her. He told her about the picture of the blacked-out windows. What reason did little Freddy Burger have to be afraid?

“Hmm,” she said, starting to think about it, but she was still so twisted up it came out like a grunt.

Nate assumed she wasn’t interested.

He whistled for the dog. “Come on, Dusty, I’ll take you for a walk.”

Three blocks away was a park where dog owners gathered in the shade of tulip trees and maples to throw balls, and children played on swings and climbing towers in a fenced-off area nearby. Kelly took Dusty in the morning, Nate in the late afternoon. As he approached he saw that DeeAnne, the kindergarten teacher, and Dan, who owned the Willow Creek Cafe, were there with their dogs Godfrey and Fu Manchu. The autumn leaves spattered the grass in swirls of red, orange, and yellow, the sun cast a copper glow. Nate loved these few minutes at the park in the afternoons: the rituals of dog care and the neighborly coming together with fellow citizens. He even enjoyed the bland conversations about weather. He’d grown up listening to too many contentious arguments among adults and endless rants against whatever misguided policy the government was embarking on at the time.

DeeAnne was kneeling on the grass in front of Godfrey, holding him by the collar and earnestly entreating him. “Now Godfrey, the street is dangerous, understand? You don’t want to rush out onto the street now and get hurt, do you?” Godfrey hung his head and looked ashamed.

Dan said howdy. DeeAnne stood up. “Nate, Dan here just told me that Mary Burger was kicked to death by one of her Guernseys while she was trying to hook it up to the milking machine.”

“Oh my God!”

“For some reason the cow went berserk. Isn’t that little Freddy Burger in your class?”

“Yeah, he is. And today he drew a creepy picture of a house with all the windows blacked out. No wonder!”

DeeAnne looked aghast. “You mean he came to school this morning even though his mother had just been killed?”

“But I don’t think it happened till late this morning,” said Dan.

“Oh, I see,” said DeeAnne.

Nate was puzzled. “So I guess it wasn’t connected after all.”

“Cows are frightfully dumb,” DeeAnne remarked offhandedly, and threw a ball for Godfrey.

Dan and Nate threw their balls too, and the dogs went scampering off in all directions. The dogs knew whose ball was whose and didn’t fight over them. When he returned home, Kelly was in the kitchen, with the radio on, starting dinner preparations. Just then the news came on, and she switched it off.

“Oh no, keep it on,” said Nate. “I want to hear the news.”

He wanted to see if there was any mention of the incident at the Burger’s farm on the local report.

“Nuh uh, it’s always the same, bad news, the times are terrible. We know that already,” replied Kelly.

Nate loved teaching. When he’d started in at the school, parents, as well as students, were unsure about him at first, even poking fun of him because he was so odd looking with shoulder length, wavy orange-red hair and a small, pug-nosed, freckled, gnomish face. A hippy, they said, but he proved himself in the classroom and soon he was known about town as good people.

Like all teachers, however, he sometimes had bad days, when no matter what he did his lessons failed. The next day was like that. It began with one of the kids acting out, Simon Miller, the veterinarian’s son, who kept knocking words off the magnetic board on which his small group was trying to construct a poem. Each time a word went up, he bumped the board and went into peals of laughter. Nate tried to calm him by laying a hand on his shoulder and speaking to him softly. Under his palm he could feel the boy’s anguish squirming like a tiny furry mole, but he failed to subdue it. The whole class then turned skittish. Nate had brought a beautiful poster picture of a mandala to class to use for both an arithmatic lesson on the concept of zero, or changelessness, and a writing lesson. But it did not spark the kids’ interest and they wrote things like, “I want to smash that round plate,” or “Mr. Goodwin is a big zero. Ha, ha.” This was not at all the way these kids usually behaved. He realized the children, with their keen senses, had tuned into waves of Simon’s disturbance and telegraphed it to each other. Nothing he did pulled them out of their distress. At the end of the day he felt flattened by defeat.

Kelly was off at a community center in another town teaching gymnastics. Nate was aware how their move had obligated her to drive all over the county to teach in various places—she hadn’t had to do that before—while he only had to walk five blocks to work. She’d never complained, never made anything of it; still, he felt he owed her.

He went to the park with Dusty and found the group of doggy ball throwers arguing about mad cow disease. Kevin Miceli, of Miceli’s Auto Repair, said it wasn’t a problem in the U.S., and Dan said, “I’ll bet you there’s more than you think. They don’t test for it adequately.”

DeeAnne sidled over to Nate. “Kevin’s just told us John Miller went to look over the Burgers’ dairy cows to see if any of them had mastitis, or some kind of bovine virus, because of that one cow, and you know what? A couple of them went wild and he got kicked too, only he’s not badly hurt, thank god, and he had to shoot them with a tranquilizer gun. Well, they don’t have mastitis but he’s drawing blood samples to look for a virus. He’s still over there.”

“How did you find out about this, Kevin?” Nate asked.

“He called me from the Burgers. He had an appointment at my shop today he had to cancel.”

While he waited for Kelly to get home, Nate cooked the dinner. He was still upset by his day at school. Black and white cows kept trotting through his fretful mind. As soon as they sat down to eat, he told Kelly about John Miller and then about little Simon Miller and the magnetic board.

“It’s scaring me,” he said.

“Oh, it must be a coincidence.”

“No, I don’t think it was.”

She sighed. “Don’t be such a worrywart, Nate. It’s your parents acting up again.”

He fell easily into gloom. A therapist he’d seen for a while attributed it to the way his parents had seen fascism around every corner, and were always in despair.

A day later one of his most well-behaved kids took a pen knife out of his pocket at recess time and started jabbing it at the other children, and Nate had to wrestle him from behind. In the afternoon he hurried as soon as he could to the park, foreseeing some kind of new cow incident.

Nearing the group, he called out anxiously, “Any news of cows today?”

Dan laughed. When Nate drew close, DeeAnne looked at him closely. “Why Nate, you’re pale. You look positively scared. You’re taking it all too seriously!”

He was ashamed, the way he used to be when he was a little boy and said something that caused a moment of splintering disconnection. Once he’d told his classmates that the Boy Scouts was a right-wing organization, and not only was he left standing alone at the bus stop every Wednesday afternoon, they jeered at him for months
about it.

Stanley Hale, a musician, said, “Cheer up. Hey, why does a cow wear a bell around its neck?”

“Why?”

“Because its horn doesn’t work.”

“Oh Stanley,” said DeeAnne, rolling her eyes. Turning to Nate, she said. “Today MY kids were acting out. You’re not the only one!”

Then Billy Avila drew a picture of soldiers marching with guns. Nate’s math lesson was interrupted by flying spitballs. At the park Nate learned that, the day before, on the Warner ranch, one of the workers had noticed cows from all over the grazing lands massing in one field, mooing and pacing cloddishly along with seeming purpose. When the worker investigated, the whole herd had shuffled towards him, not stompeding exactly, but plodding implacably forwards, until in the end he turned and ran. In the evening he’d regaled the local bar crowd with his adventure, and now the story had made its way to the park.

The park became the center of cow news. The concerned, with or without dogs, started to gather there in the afternoons to discuss the latest event. They were still a minority overall. Most people in town agreed with John Miller, who declared the cow behavior within normal bounds.

The dogs became skittish; a number of fights had to be broken up. Everyone agreed that this was probably due to the fact there were more of them together than usual, as well as newcomers.

Irma Simpson, not a dog owner, came over to report that over the weekend friends of friends of hers had been trapped all day on a log that jutted into the stream that ran through the county park. Facing a large bunch of cows balking on the trail, some of them clumping towards them, the couple backed off instead of shouting and advancing, and the cows pursued them. Fifty sluggish, shambling cows tailed them down the trail until, nearing a stream, the couple turned and plunged down its shrubby banks thinking they would find shelter in the riparian thicket. But at least half the cows followed, relentlessly trampling the willow and alder. The couple spied the log and sought refuge on it. Still the cows closed in on them, butting up into the shallow water at the stream’s edge, so that the couple inched themselves out to the very end of the log, where they sat all day while the obdurate cows switched their tails and stared vacantly. Not until nightfall did the cows file slowly back to pasture, and the couple snuck out. In the dark they could hear the herd’s huffing, sighing breath.

At the park they argued about the cause of all this unaccustomed and rather aggressive behavior. Kevin thought it might be a new disease, something that had crossed over from squirrels or groundhogs.

“I have seen some pretty peculiar squirrels,” remarked Stanley.

“There’s also the possibility of airborne germs let loose by terrorists,” said DeeAnne.

“Or by our own government,” Nate added. “They’ve done it before, you know, over the San Francisco area in nineteen-fifty. And who knows how many other times.”

“Oh come on Nate. Let’s not carry this too far.”

By now Nate’s students had become routinely disruptive and were drawing pictures of airplanes raining dashes of bombs onto peak-roofed houses, armies like ants marching over rolling hills, streams of fire coming out of their guns, and dead bodies on the ground.

He listened for reports on the local radio station but heard only music and cheery advertisements, no mention of anything out of the ordinary. They discussed this at the park. The group was now certain that something was terribly wrong, something was going on. The behavioral problems Nate had experienced among his students were noticed in all the classes of the school.

“KFOW? That’s owned by Clear Channel,” said Jason Nakahara, one of the newcomers to the park.

“Why don’t we call them?” suggested Irma.

“No use,” said Jason. “There won’t be anyone there. They laid everyone off in that station a year ago and now it’s all pre-recorded and run from Oklahoma.”

Parents started to phone Nate and other teachers and accuse them of frightening their children with stories about terrorists or monsters. Nate was certain that for his part he’d been extra-careful never to let on to the kids any of his anxiety, and he always did his best to soothe them when they came to school all jittery and worked up. However, some of the parents threatened to take him, among others, before the School Board. Here was yet another worry for him to stew about. It became harder to perform in his teaching. At home, he was dejected and morose.

“Oh come on,” said Kelly. “They can’t touch you. Last year you won Teacher of the Year Award. You know you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“They don’t care. They turn against you, just like that. Someone makes an accusation and the next thing, others go along with it without asking for any proof. What do you hear at the park in the morning?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No accusations, no worries about cows or anything else. We just talk about the weather if we talk at all. Everyone’s in a hurry to get to work.”

“Well it’s a smaller crowd there. It’s not a real sample.”

Instead of preparing lessons or making love to Kelly, he surfed the Internet for news long into the night, while Dusty, roused by his wakefulness, ran whimpering to the window at every small night noise, a car passing on a distant road or the wind stirring the leaves of the front yard tree. Kelly lay alone in bed.

Stories on the Web abounded, of cows that ate the clothes off the clothesline at a Swiss girls’ school, cows in Australia stampeding from a barrel-shaped furry monster. Stray voltage in a field in Kansas caused strange behavior in the cows and failure to produce the expected quantities of milk. A cow in New Zealand exploded from excessive internal gas. But nothing about cows in his county. No one else in the group found any news either.

Kelly was spending more and more time contorting herself on her yoga mat.

“Have you heard about anything strange in other parts of the county?” Nate asked her one afternoon.

“No,” she replied, smiling.

“And still nothing at the park?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know what happened today? Frankie Spector ran at me and butted me with his head. Out of the blue. For no reason. And then started screaming. So tomorrow I’ll probably find out about a cow attack.”

“Mmmm.” She shook her head and rolled into a new position.

“Is that all you can say?”

She sat up and shouted, “Oh jeesus, Nate, all you think about is cows, cows, cows. I’m just trying to have a life for myself! And what happened to making a baby? Never mind, I don’t want a baby with a crazy father.”

Dusty, unused to their fighting, cringed in the corner of the room with his tail between his legs.

Seeing that, Nate repented. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He sincerely meant it. He kissed her and helped make dinner, washed the dishes afterwards, and snuggled with her on the couch to watch a reality show on TV. Yet when she got up, stretching and yawning in a significant way, and announced “Bedtime,” he said, “I’ll be there in just a minute.” He reasoned to himself that he had to make just one quick check on the Web news. But he couldn’t stop. He stayed up most of the night, finally sacking out on the couch for a few hours in the early morning.

A month from the day of Kelly’s and Nate’s encounter with the cows, the news passed through town that a herd of Guernseys at a ranch a ways off had trudged across their pasture and bunched together at the barbwire fence beside the road. In their lumpish, unyielding way they pushed and bumped against each other until, quite accidently, the fence gave way at one of the junctures and those cows directly behind the new opening were able to escape. These plodded down the road, while the rest of them, at other parts of the fence, shuffled and mooed, too obtuse to find their way to the gap.

The Monday following, a large herd of black Angus massed and lumbered down from the amber hillside fields where they’d been grazing, tottering and swaying forward in an inexorable roll, burst right through the fence and moved down the road: a wall of hebetude on the hoof.

Then in all directions cows started to converge, trampling the ground into dust. They mooed, slobbered, farted, and spread their dung. On numerous roads traffic was brought to a standstill.

In town, the dogs howled as they sensed the movement of the cows. The school was temporarily closed after a gun was found on one of the sixth graders, and the state threatened to put it in receivership.

Still—and this Nate could not for the life of him understand—few people acknowledged that anything was wrong. A small article about the cows did finally appear in the tri-county newspaper, and it made light of the strange behavior. Except for the afternoon group at the park, people in town went about their business as usual, driving to and fro, honking at the herds on the roads and sitting patiently in their cars waiting for them to move on. Pedestrians circumvented cow pies as if they were only a minor inconvenience. They made cow jokes. Cows, in their boobishness, their opacity and relentless immutability, became an endless source of mirth.

It took Kelly twice as long to get to her jobs, she spent half the day in the car, but she insisted she didn’t mind.

“I know how to relax and be patient,” she said to Nate. “That’s what you need to learn, Nate. You get so hysterical about everything. It’s such a shame. If there’s anything I’m getting impatient with it’s you.”

“But look!” Nate said. “Look out there! See all those cows!”

And she shrugged. “So what?”

People were concerned about the state of the schools but, except for the afternoon group at the park, attributed the violence to teacher incompetence, “lack of discipline.”

Arguments even began to occur at the park as some suggested a mass slaughter would be appropriate and others vehemently disagreed.

“Obviously we can’t kill all the cows, and where would the slaughter stop?” Nate pointed out.

“All right then, but what can we do?” asked Kevin, and no one had an answer.

Dan said he was going to stop serving beef at the cafe.

“That’s silly,” said DeeAnne. “I refuse to give up steak.”

Nate was no vegetarian, but he could not bring himself to eat the beef stew that Kelly served him one night. It would have been like eating cockroaches or worms, something disgusting and proliferating. He pushed it to the side of his plate, Kelly glaring at him.

Then members of the group started defecting. They grew uncertain of their own perceptions, or they could no longer withstand being laughed at. First Kevin Miceli stopped coming. When Nate saw him in the grocery store and asked where he’d been and had he heard anything recently, Kevin looked abashed and replied, “Oh, I think we were working up a lot of hot air over nothing.” Day by day fewer people showed up to discuss the situation.

One day Dan suggested they go with the flow. “We can’t fight it. We can’t do anything about it. We might as well live with it and get on with our lives,” he said.

DeeAnne agreed. “Nate, you’ve got to consider it. Maybe the parents are right. Maybe we’ve stirred the kids up with our fears. Maybe we’re the problem.”

Irma Simpson announced that she and her husband were getting a divorce and she was too tied up with it to come any more.

Nate felt himself alone and betrayed. He took a leave of absence from his teaching. He spent all day as well as all night on the Web and found a few other serious cow watchers. It was beginning to happen in other parts of the country, he discovered. A listserve was formed and all up-to-date news as well as theories about cows were posted daily.

Kelly bought a used Stairmaster and exercised an hour a day on top of her yoga. Sweat glistened like jewels on her sleek body.

“Feel these muscles, Nate,” she said.

“Oh, very nice.”

But he had no desire.

In one of his lowest moments a word came back from his childhood: “organize.” “Organize!” his parents were always saying. “We’ve got to organize against the war!” When a school bully beat him up, they told him, “Organize!” But how do you organize against the force of dumb animals moving in a herd? His parents hadn’t prepared him for this!

He ground his teeth when he saw Kelly bouncing along on her Stairmaster, a Walkman in her ears so she wouldn’t have to listen to his fretting. She stopped talking to him.

He felt the cows drawing near. Their hot breath poisoned the air. When he wasn’t looking for news or support on the Internet, he watched out the window.

In the afternoons the commuter ferry’s cargo was predominantly tourist. Between five and seven PM the boat swarmed with commuters returning home. The last ferry docked at 1:30 AM, long after the commuters had gone to bed. This boat was less predictable; its most pronounced characteristic being that it was almost always nearly empty. The few that did board mostly stayed in their cars, discretely smoking cigarettes and casting sidelong glances at their neighbors. There was a disconnected sense of unreality that haunted the ferry at this hour. Some of the passengers had been in bars over town, majestically skirting the legal limits. There were the stay-late workaholics as well and those with unprofessed mistresses, and one night there was a woman in a midnight blue Camaro who was leaving Castle Island forever with a suitcase full of money. Later it was discovered that the woman’s name was Ailo Svenson, a stranger to the island.

Ruth Dorset was forty years old and had been a ferry hand for the last seven. She had seen every type of commuter imaginable and was the only one who saw that Ailo Svenson hadn’t been alone when the car boarded the ferry.

Years ago Ruth had worked inside the ferry ticket booths but soon she’d learned that a woman of her build, tall and strong as a man, could make more in the laborious and only slightly dangerous job of deckhand. She waited a month before telling anyone of her intentions, sat in her booth between arrivals with two lengths of rope and learned her clove hitch, bowline and figure of eight. She became adept at making all of the knots necessary to moor and secure a ship. In early winter she applied to the ferry commissioner for a change of position. Ruth entered his office with trepidation over what might be seen as ingratitude toward her current placement and what it would mean should she be denied a new one. Contemplating a new, professional-type outfit for her interview Ruth became anxious. Her closet was a sea of worn jeans and flannel shirts from the “Island Thrift and Goodwill.” At the last minute threw on a short sleeve button down shirt and a pair of jeans from the dryer. She sat down in the orange plastic chair beside the desk, sensible of its puniness under her long arms and legs, spilling over their allotted space. She steadied her hand and placed her resume before the commissioner. He took notice of the short, earnest statement of purpose and of her well-muscled arms. She was in luck; they were always looking for new recruits this time of year, when the bitter winter weeded out the summer’s weakest hires.

Ruth studied her signals for directing the cars, making her hands work with unmistakable authority while her face remained impassive even when the desperadoes, denied entrance at the last second, mouthed profanities and slammed their hands against their steering wheels. She learned to operate the gate, raise the ramp; she manned the aprons and bridges and handled the lines. She urged back the restless herd of day tourists with the conviction of her dispassionate stare. Ruth was the only woman who worked the deck and for the first couple years felt it necessary to make herself indistinguishable from her fellow deckhands and when she found this impossible, to at least staunch the rise of any resentment. She carried a paint chipper on her belt and during lunch breaks while the men sat in conversation; she ate quickly then walked the car decks chipping at the rusted rails and stanchions. In this way she took hours off the work her crew would otherwise be obliged to do at the end of the week. Slowly they began to take notice and finally to feel gratitude.

***

Ruth’s Friday night shift had ended an hour ago. She’d agreed to babysit her sister’s children but something had come up with Denny, as it usually did, and she was late. Denny had called her for a ride home. He was fresh from the bars and weepily apologetic on the phone. By the time she reached him he’d grown petulant and refused to walk. She watched him slide off the bus shelter bench twice before she walked him to her truck, his full weight across her shoulder. Sweat beaded on his brow and there were red blotches creeping across his neck. Denny’s drinking was more frequent these days but less spirited. The activity seemed almost to have deteriorated into a labor of love performed without reward. Inside his studio apartment she took off his shoes and pants and put a bucket beside his bed before switching off the light.

Ruth looked at her plain leather men’s watch as she pulled into her sister’s driveway. Sarah lived in a planned development that had been constructed the previous spring. Half the houses remained empty. There were yards where the grass, rolled out in broad swaths of green carpet, had never been stepped on.

“I’m here,” she called to the ceiling and dropped her keys into a bowl of oranges on the hall table. There was abrupt commotion as her sister Sarah ran down the steps already holding her purse and coat. She’d been watching the headlights approach from the bedroom window. Sarah was three years younger and delicate in all the areas that Ruth was long and rangy. It was possible they had different fathers though even now, in her last years, their mother wouldn’t confirm or deny this. Sarah had put her hair up in the French braid that had always struck Ruth as elaborate and mystifying. All the way down she talked through the din of her high heels on the wooden stair.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. We’ll just miss the previews is all. Thanks again, really, we need this.”

Pierre appeared from a side room and busied himself with his shirt cuffs. He was a handsome man but in a way Ruth thought of as delicate, like the porcelain figurine of a stockinged prince that sat on Sarah’s mantelpiece amid Siamese cats of various size. They swept past her, shut the door and Ruth heard the lock turn over from the outside. Ruth stared hard at the gold knob. She knew that Sarah was helpless under her compulsions and that she herself may have forgotten to lock the door but she couldn’t shake the strange feeling of being locked inside her sister’s house like a pet.

The hall was quiet now and smelled of the roast chicken they’d had for dinner. From the den the TV made formless sounds that Ruth followed downstairs into a large, windowless room. She paused on the last stair as the TV blinked off. Knowing she was the only adult in the house the two boys would likely be flipping purposefully to find their father’s Playboy channels. She stood behind the couch with a hand on each of their silky heads.

“I’ll be upstairs if you boys need me,” she said. Once in the hall she could hear the TV turn on again. Ruth settled herself at the kitchen table and opened a can of beer. There was a picture on the refrigerator of Sarah, Pierre and the boys taken last Christmas by a mall photographer with a painted backdrop that led to a far off candy cane house. They were folded in neat origami poses around each other, their arms and legs linked variously. The youngest, Sean was eight and had not seemed to have grown into a personality yet other than one of mawkish sentimentality that Sarah seemed to encourage. She kept his hair in long curls that fell over his shoulders and he was often mistaken for a little girl. Nicholas, eleven, had an insidious overconfidence Ruth was wary of. His ears were always open for the gruesome details hinted at in adult dinner conversation, anything omitted out of deference to propriety or embarrassment. He could sense a dark underbelly and with a million barbed questions split their resistance like a squirrel scrabbling at a nut with its little claws. His choice in movies leaned toward the twisted and horrific. It seemed to Ruth that he sought to exist in a constant state of alarm. She attributed this to his sheltered upbringing, as simple as the circle of the cul de sac on which he lived. She wondered how much little Nicholas had divined about her through his parents’ conversations, his father’s end particularly.

A hissing in the darkness roused Ruth from her half sleep at the table. Sprinklers had begun to switch on across the neighborhood. She moved through the house quietly in her socks. It was past ten and the boys had fallen asleep in front of the TV. On the screen a naked woman threw her hair back and forth in counterfeit ecstasy. She took the remote drooping from Nicholas’ hand and changed the channel before turning off the TV. On the coffee table was a book about the Panama Canal. Pierre, who had grudgingly inherited his family’s motel, had wanted to be an architect and there were framed blueprints on the walls. Ruth opened the book and looked at the skeletal illustrations of the canal’s locks. The steel gates were spidery and insubstantial on the page. They made her think of Denny’s gaunt body and the conversation they’d had the day before at the Smiling Dog, a small, dark bar built on the pier beside the ferry dock. He wore his usual black sweatshirt, painted with the head of a howling wolf that she remembered had once been a snug fit but now hung loosely around his shoulders. His pale beard was beginning to grow wild. She knew he grew the beard to look older but his boyishness was a quality communicated mostly by his wide eyes, which held an expression of youthful sweetness. His dejected slouch was a young man’s as well. From the taciturn way he scuffed the bottom rung of the stool with his sneakers she could tell he was under the spell of a solemn intoxication. He grinned at her with a wrecked smile.

“Have I told you about my expiration date?”

Cirrhosis of the liver the doctor had said, the most advanced case he’d seen for someone in their twenties. His hands lay palms up on either side of his drink and he stared into it defiantly.

“I wouldn’t even care,” he said “If my bones didn’t hurt all the time now.”

“Your bones?” she’d asked obediently.

“Just the long ones,” Denny said. He was shelling peanuts and dropping them into his empty glass. They were the only thing he could eat he said because he could do it without thinking. He paused the activity, leaning back in wonderment.

“But it’s like they’re on fire, burning up inside my arms and legs.”

“Maybe we should get out of here,” Ruth said uncertainly. This bar had been their place for longer than she could remember.

“Nah,” said Denny. “No point in quitting now. What I need is a new liver. This one’s shot.”

She had an overbearing desire to get away, be alone and sort herself out, escape from the person who had always facilitated her happiness and easy mind.

Ruth wondered what kind of bill Denny, with no medical insurance, had incurred to hear the cheery news. She turned her attention to the window. A line of cars was beginning to board the five PM to the island. It was time for the commuters to go home in packs of one hundred and fifty. They stretched back up the hill as far as she could see and the people inside sat blinking, unaccustomed to the bright, natural light. A fly landed on the rim of Denny’s glass, it cleaned its front legs, rubbing them against each other and then buzzed away.

This had also been the day that Denny had first spoken of Ailo Svenson. He came upon the topic in a meandering way, talking generally and then more specifically.

“There was a girl I used to know,” he began.

At forty Ruth was old enough to have been Denny’s underage mother but even though she found herself routinely taking care of him in a hundred small ways, she couldn’t deny that she thought of herself as his match. She was a match in temperament, in height and strength. She could carry him to his bed with ease after a night of heavy drinking. Long ago, when she was twenty-five and her age would have been a match for Denny’s she’d have been afraid of him or anyone that reminded her she was female. Her twenties had been spent in near seclusion accustoming herself to her permanent frame that had leveled out at six feet, two inches. She would have been afraid to come to the Smiling Dog after work and sit alone on a bar stool, which was how, seven years ago, she’d met Denny.

He was telling her now about a foster home where he and Ailo had lived when they were children. Ailo’s mother had taken her from Norway the year before but possibly unable to fend for herself in a new country, had left her with a friend and disappeared.

“She asked if she could stay with me awhile. She’s just come down from Canada.”

Ruth took the first sip of beer from her eggy smelling cup. She was aware that part of the health of their long friendship was that no judgment in regard to the other had ever passed their lips. The role of critic was not natural to Ruth and it would never have occurred to Denny with his easy nature to question anything that she did. Ruth didn’t chance looking at him, afraid he might see some glint of recrimination in her eyes. She picked up her beer and took a deeper drink. She felt something akin to vertigo. Neither had ever displayed any desire to nose around in the other’s distant past. They were like the smooth furred otters that could sometimes be seen on the dock past the bar, Ruth thought. There was no importance in who had arrived first or where they’d been before. It was enough
that they were drying on a sun-drenched dock, inhabiting the present moment.

For Ruth, listening to Denny un-labor himself all at once of the entire unsaid past felt like a horrible breach, not because she was uninterested but because she couldn’t picture his world before they’d met or embrace its reality. He might as well have been talking about a dream he’d had. Casting her eyes around nervously, Ruth inadvertently caught a few details. For both Denny and Ailo there had been an orphanage followed by a foster home, that with twelve children had been very much like the orphanage. He was quiet by nature and she only spoke Norwegian so they were lost in the fray. Stealing bits of kitchenware and pillows, they had made themselves a home in the front yard hedge. He taught her to speak English, starting with all the curse words. It was clear that Denny had seen himself as the protector of young Ailo, a role he hadn’t been able to play since. His chivalrous career had peaked at age eight.

This confessional style of conversation wasn’t something Ruth would have thought Denny capable of, but he seemed, for once, completely unselfconscious of his words as though they were water pouring through him and not peanuts that had to be unshelled one by one. As Ruth accustomed herself to his stream of consciousness her bewilderment shrank and crystalized into a tiny sharp bead of jealousy.

* * *

Precisely because Ruth was not the type to celebrate her birthdays, Sarah had threatened, half jokingly to throw her sister a party. Ruth’s stony resistance had only made her more determined.

“It’s your big four-oh!” she said. “You can’t just let it pass by without some kind of recognition. You’re not an old lady yet.”

Ruth wasn’t worried about getting older, her calloused hands were surer than ever and she had reached an agreeable level of seniority at work that she knew had more to do with age than all the extra work she’d put in her first few years. Her concern lay only with the idea of Sarah’s party. She saw herself cornered in Sarah and Pierre’s small living room with a table full of their cul-de sac neighbors that she had met only in passing and poor Sarah with a list of childish activities, fretting and smiling over her failed party, its failure predetermined by Sarah herself who would take her role as hostess more seriously than was comfortable.

Sarah had lost an easy quality that she’d had years ago when she’d first met Pierre. She’d once had a knack for taking life as it came. As the wife of the owner of a struggling motel she was undaunted. Ruth remembered that in the early days of their marriage Sarah had cleaned the rooms, her long brown hair in a high ponytail while Pierre stood behind the quiet reservations desk absorbed in a basketball game on the small TV that was hidden behind the counter. Before the boys were born Ruth and Sarah would make occasional plans, a few beers or dinner, something without Pierre. In the lobby of autumnal colors and dated fabrics, Ruth would wait for her sister to finish cleaning while Pierre watched his game and absentmindedly sketched what looked to Ruth like abstract houses from a Dr. Seuss book. Once, reluctant to touch the perfectly fanned magazines on the coffee table in front of her, Ruth stared purposefully out the window, trying to clear her mind from all sounds and sensations until it was completely blank. Pierre must have sensed some subtle reproach in her pose because he turned down the volume of the TV and coughed lightly.

“This is just how it was when my parents owned the Inn,” he said.

Ruth looked at the orange vinyl chairs and shag carpeting and nodded seriously.

“I mean this was the way it worked. My father here, behind the counter while my mother took care of the rooms. They made it work for fifteen years and at the end of the day they went home happy.”

Ruth supposed that he confided in her because she seldom responded, just absorbed without comment.

“When I got out of school I would come here and do my homework on the rug, right there and when I was done I’d work on drawings, blueprints really. They were additions to the motel, a second half story and a lounge. I was young but they were very technical. I think my father would have used them if the motel had been generating more money.”

When Ruth first met Pierre he’d been an architecture major at the local college but a few months later Sarah was pregnant and he’d dropped out to become the motel’s full time manager, a job for which he was already well trained. Ruth recalled that his attitude then had not been one of self-sacrifice but of interminable adult-ness, as though at twenty-one he’d surpassed them all in maturity, and this was the manner he’d kept.

The upshot of Sarah’s insistence on a party was a compromise that still left Ruth vaguely uneasy. Ruth would have the party but it would be at her house and she would be in charge of guests as well. She decided to grill some burgers outside and invite Denny like a regular Saturday. The only difficulty was the girl, Ailo, but Ruth resolved to take it in stride.

It had rained all Saturday morning but the sun had come out with enough time for Ruth to dry off the plastic deck chairs with a towel and put some coal in the grill. She could smell the sidewalks heating up in the sun, the water warming and dissipating. A car door slammed. As she stood in the doorway Sarah came up the path holding in one hand a giant plastic wrapped bowl and with the other guiding her older son by the shoulder as if he might sprint away at any moment.

“I only had time to do pasta salad,” she said setting the bowl in the refrigerator. There were tired half moons under her eyes. The younger boy was opening and shutting the kitchen drawers. Ruth noted he was becoming rather pudgy.

“There’s pasta salad or nothing until everyone gets here,” Sarah told him. She sighed and massaged the sides of her head until there was a halo of mussed hair sticking up from her braid.

“So where is everybody then?” She asked. Ruth hadn’t mentioned that the only other guests would be the stranger Ailo and Denny, whose existence, after one terse meeting had always gone politely unacknowledged by Sarah.

“Where’s Pierre?” Ruth countered.

“He’s still in the car.”

“Is he afraid to come in?” Ruth asked. She meant it half sincerely since she couldn’t remember Pierre ever stepping past the safety of her threshold.

“I guess he needs a minute, I don’t know.” Sarah walked halfway to the sliding deck door before she seemed to remember she’d quit smoking ten years earlier and landed impotently on the couch.

“The ride over here was just lovely. The boys in the back punching each other in the ears and Pierre has just—checked out. Meanwhile I keep trying to explain to him that we just can’t afford the luxury of his mid life crisis at this particular moment.” As she spoke she shut her eyes and her voice grew simultaneously softer and higher in pitch.

Ruth remembered their teenage years. Though she was younger Sarah was always the one with the boyfriends and the boyfriend related spats. Ruth could still hear the enraged soprano whispers coming from her sister’s bedroom.

By the time Denny and Ailo arrived Pierre had already joined them without word of explanation. He seemed preoccupied but resigned. Ruth’s small house had a spare functionality that reminded her pleasingly of a boat’s cabin but entertaining here was out of the question. There was however, a large fenced yard with a thick-limbed elm and a deck she had stripped and refinished earlier in the season. This was where she would sit and barbecue with Denny on the weekend, escaping the closeness of her house, which they passed through like a hallway between front and back doors to reach the palatial yard.

Stepping out onto the deck, Denny gave a casual, self-conscious wave then stationed himself at the grill. A slight, pale haired girl dragged a folding chair to the table where they sat.

“I am Ailo,” she said.

Ailo had a round childish face and long, reedy limbs. Ruth had the quick impression of disparate shapes converging as something fixed. Her sheet of silver blond hair looked as though it had been ironed. She wore a lacy mini dress as complex and organic as a piece of milkweed fluff. It was clear that of the group she had taken the most care in dressing for Ruth’s party and without understanding why, this depressed Ruth more than anything else that day, that this beautiful girl had been duped into attending what she thought would be a festive event where well dressed strangers were celebrating. Even the perpetually shined and pressed Pierre wore a moth eaten state college tee shirt instead of his usual button down. There were crumbs in the corner of his mouth and he looked older than Ruth had ever seen him. She forced herself to stay at the table for fifteen minutes before going to Denny. Knowing it was a futile and selfish question, she wanted to ask how he was feeling but he was thinking of other things and she resolved not to remind him.

“I’m going to adopt a dog from the pound,” he said, scooting a toasted bun across the grill with his spatula. “I’ve never had a dog. Ailo had a couple in Canada but she had to leave them. I don’t know, I guess they weren’t technically her dogs. You should hear her go on about these dogs though, she really misses them.”

At the table there was laughter and the sound of Sarah’s happy exclamations.

Ailo was taking little red Jell-O cakes out of a basket and smearing them with white sauce.

“She made you those as a present,” Denny said. “It’s a Norwegian birthday tradition. Ailo’s become more interested in her heritage. I think she’s trying to contact her birth mother. She hasn’t said so but I think it’s the reason she’s come back.”

When the burgers were ready Ruth brought out plates and the bowl of pasta salad in one trip, balancing them easily in her large hands. Later, as dusk settled around them they ate the little Jell-O cakes with vanilla frosting.

“Okay, you’re released,” Sarah said to the boys who earlier had been pleading to go inside and watch TV but they had become enamored with Ailo and pretended not to hear. The younger performed somersaults on the patchy grass for Ailo’s applause. Ruth was surprised at the older boy’s silence as he sat at the picnic table. She couldn’t think of a time he hadn’t railroaded a dinner conversation with meanspirited, adolescent asides but now he sat in reverence of Ailo. Ruth was conscious that her own contribution to her party’s atmosphere was dismal and for once she was grateful for Sarah’s way of buzzing from one topic to the next without allowing a moment’s silence.

“Are you settled in at Denny’s place?” she was asking Ailo.

“I haven’t really unpacked yet,” Ailo said. “It’s the perfect size for just Denny but I’m afraid I may be in the way.”

Denny, his mouth full of Jell-O, was vehemently shaking his head. Sarah turned to Pierre. “She should stay at the Inn- you should stay at the Inn!” She reached across the table and grasped Ailo’s arm. Ruth now recognized Sarah’s liveliness as the result of two glasses of wine to which she was unaccustomed.

“We’ll give you the family rate. It’s a very good deal- and you’ll have the whole bed to yourself.” This last part Sarah whispered loudly, giggling at her own audacity.

“Early day tomorrow,” said Pierre standing up. In what Ruth recognized as a too-casual afterthought Pierre took a business card from his wallet.

“Our motel,” he said as Ailo reached out and took the card.

Sarah who had suddenly become sleepy and docile ducked under the table to look for her shoes. They said goodbye at the door and Denny and Ailo followed behind them, he holding her coat. As Ruth stood in the kitchen, wrapping up the uneaten cake, she could see them through the window, two couples following each other into the night to their waiting cars.

The end of August had held on, refusing to give way to fall. Ruth perspired in the heavy workman’s gloves that made her hands look like giant starfish. The ferries were full of children, defiant in their last days of freedom. It had been a week since she’d talked to Denny. His stool at the Smiling Dog remained empty and Ruth had one beer after her shifts then returned home to eat dinner in front of the TV. If he’d owned a phone she could have called him to ask about his health and then divine from his voice what turn his relationship with Ailo had taken.

“Ruth!”

A blonde head was weaving through the crowd of walk-on passengers. It was Ailo. She wore a long skirt embroidered with shells and a crochet halter-top. At the end of a woven hemp leash a sheepdog mix sat panting on the tarmac. Ruth took off her gloves and ran a damp hand through her short hair.

“Hello boy,” she said softly, crouching.

“That’s Cotton,” said Ailo, “Denny’s dog.”

Denny’s dog. Ruth felt far away from the unclouded pier and the familiar drone of the ferry’s engine.

“His landlord wouldn’t let him keep it though. Cotton’s staying at the motel with me, for now.”

Ruth stood up. She wanted to ask how long Ailo had been there. Instead she said, “Well don’t let Pierre catch you with him. Not a dog person that one”

“It’s a funny thing with dogs,” said Ailo, “the way they can change hands. I guess it’s the same with everything in life. In Canada Rick and I had Irish Setters and a cabin by the lake and a wonderful little kitchen with a wood burning stove, but I don’t have any of that now.”

Sensing that Ailo had begun to cry, Ruth examined the skyline even more intensely.

“Well… life’s shit and then you die,” Ruth said lightly. It was something she’d hear the other deckhands say when they would complain to each other, in their blustering way about their wives or boss. Ruth wondered if what Denny had seen as an intense pining over a couple of dogs was more about the man Ailo had left behind. “You could always go back,” she said hopefully.

Ailo’s tears had turned her eyes a bright blue. Ruth could see that one eye was almost imperceptibly crossed. Her face was wet and squinched and she was breathing thorough her slightly opened mouth. To Ruth she looked like a helpless Persian kitten, useless and easily drowned.

“I overstayed my visa,” said Ailo. “I was deported because he wouldn’t marry me. Too much pressure or something.”

Ruth sensed the anger underneath her numb delivery. “Would you like to come to my house for dinner?” she asked.

Ailo wiped her face with the hem of her long skirt. “Thank you. That would be a nice change of pace for me actually. Ok if I bring Cotton?”

Ruth nodded.

On the phone with her sister that night, Sarah confirmed that Ailo had moved into the motel almost immediately after the invitation had been extended.

“I kind of regret it,” Sarah said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. You shouldn’t let me drink. It’s not like we can afford to give the family rate to family right now, much less people we barely know. Pierre was furious with me.”

Ruth had asked Ailo to dinner in part to suspend the uncomfortable conversation and in part to continue it later. She thought she should learn more about her adversary although she had to admit she was genuinely curious as well.

“It was all so thrilling for about two minutes– the change of scenery and being on the lam.” Ailo had taken the plate Ruth handed her in the kitchen and gone to sit on the floor beside the coffee table. She seemed comfortable there with her long skirt spread over her crossed knees.

“And then I realized I was all alone.” She fell into a deep silence of the kind that always baits the listener into prodding for the thinker’s thoughts. Ruth abstained. Waif-like Ailo fit well in Ruth’s small living room and this made Ruth relax. She looked around her house as she imagined a visitor would, trying to see it for the first time. She had never found occasion to hang pictures on the walls but on each windowsill was a collection of stones, driftwood, feathers and fragile bird skulls, things she had found along the beach. She saw that her carpet could use vacuuming and there were crumbs on the kitchen counter but she didn’t think these were things Ailo would notice. As Ruth watched her stare into the profound depths of the coffee table she could see how easy it would be to love Ailo. Ailo was lovely. Her fresh, unformed nature and her openness to the world would have been appealing to anyone but a lifeline to someone whose own life had fallen short of the mark or who needed their new life to begin. She wondered if Denny was one of these.

“So you called Denny,” Ruth said.

Slowly clarity came back to her eyes. “This whole thing has made me realize how much he’s always meant to me,” said Ailo. “Even when we were living in that overcrowded foster house it was really just the two of us.”

It occurred to Ruth that Ailo hadn’t mentioned anything about Denny’s sickness. “It’s too bad he wasn’t in better health for your visit,” she said carefully.

Ailo nodded sagely. “We’ve talked about that, had some very real conversations. I’d always planned that we would take the road back North but when Denny told me he was sick I knew that we’d have to drive to Colorado. There’s a Sufi camp there where I lived for awhile. They have healers that can help Denny. It’s a beautiful community.”

“Denny wants to leave?” Ruth asked.

“At first no, but he had to agree that my coming back for him at this very moment –the moment that he needs help the most, must mean something.”

After that Ruth asked no more questions. She listened with half an ear as Ailo unfurled what she called her “life journey” and then as she tried to make some kind
of cosmic sense of it, grasping at vague connections. That night Ruth might have told her that it was not necessarily life’s prerogative to make sense.

* * *

The following day Ruth sat in her pickup in the parking lot of Denny’s apartment complex. She knew she couldn’t bring him the six-pack of beer that usually preceded her through his apartment door but she felt the need to be carrying something, as protection almost, something to fill her hands. In the refrigerated aisle of a 7-11 she found herself picking up a three-foot long sandwich. Now it sat ridiculously on her dashboard as she contemplated Denny’s door in her rearview mirror. The sudden fact that what was once the most natural thing in the world had become so unnatural made her angrier the more she thought about it. She had not felt such self doubt since her twenties when she’d realized after everyone else in the world that she would always be a lonely giantess, her looks a novelty at best. It occurred to her now that if she’d looked more like other women she might have been able to think like them and would have realized that the seven years she’d spent as Denny’s sole confidante wasn’t leading to anything other than what people saw when they sat side by side on their stools at the Smiling Dog; a very odd friendship.

In high school there had been a boy who lived down the road from her and Sarah. From their front porch Ruth could see him ride his bike through the quiet neighborhood streets and was always so surprised when he waved to her that she could barely bring herself to wave back in time before he rode past. The three of them waited at the bus stop in the cold, gray mornings and Ruth studied the geometric patterns on the knit hat he wore pulled down over his wet, red hair.

Standing at the bus stop was a quiet ritual. He was older, a senior and his silence was expected and somehow affable. Sarah’s silence towards Ruth through high school was more complicated. Her shunning was almost apologetic but absolute, beginning and ending at the door of their house. One morning the neighborhood boy stopped coming to the bus stop and after a week Ruth’s curiosity got the better of her and she broke Sarah’s unspoken rule.

“What happened to the boy that used to ride with us?” she asked.

“Mike Winston? He got his license.” Sarah’s tone was full of the incredulity Ruth knew she should feel over probably being the only person in school that didn’t know this.

“Why?” Sarah had asked, turning to stare at her “Do you like him?” her sudden attention was like a drug. Ruth’s brain performed a naïve series of thoughts; he had been nice to her, she did like him.

“Yes,” she said.

Sarah hadn’t spoken again until they were on the bus where Ruth could hear her telling her friends, “My sister is in love with Mike Winston. She wants to have his little redheaded babies.”

After that, any time Ruth thought of Mike Winston she could hear peals of girlish laughter and the shame quickly banished him from her mind. When one morning she saw Sarah pass the bus stop in a car driven by Mike Winston she had, by this time, banished him so effectively that she barely felt a thing.

Ruth hadn’t bothered to turn the truck off and she threw it in reverse but stalled it as her foot recoiled from the gas at the surprise of seeing Denny standing by her window.

“Do you want to go down to the pier?” he asked.

For the sake of his liver, Ruth was happy to see that he did actually mean the pier and not the bar, which they sometimes referred to interchangeably. The ocean smelled strong even though the tide was high. They sat at the edge with their feet dangling above the dark water. Their arrival had startled some otters that had hunched crazily off the pier into the water where their movements were transformed into those of lithe ballerinas. Ruth had carried the sandwich like a baby in the crook of her arm. She tore it in half and handed part to Denny.

“I hear you’re leaving soon,” she said. Out here in the sea smelling air, with the hump of familiar islands in the distance she found she could ask this in an almost impersonal tone.

“Ailo won’t stay here,” he said. Ruth thought she could hear a sadness in his voice. “And there’s supposed to be some tent city commune in Colorado where they have doctors that can help me.”

“Healers,” Ruth said before she could stop herself. “Healers is what she told me. You can’t be sure it’s the same thing.”

“That’s true,” said Denny, in his contrition ready to agree with any of the finer points. His skeletal fingers tore off bits of bread from the sandwich, rolled them into balls and dropped them into the water below where the shadows of fish sucked them from the surface without materializing.

“You don’t have to leave to get well,” Ruth said. Denny paused the destruction of his sandwich. She wondered if he was considering her words, if maybe he intuited the meaning behind them, that she wanted to take care of him with nothing in return.

They sat for a long time, speaking only of what was around them, familiar subjects. When Ruth pulled up to Denny’s apartment it was nearly dark and the rain outside had fogged up the truck windows. Denny leaned across the gear shift and enveloped Ruth in a long hug that she couldn’t enjoy because its mood of somber ceremony seemed to indicate she might not see him again. Her cold nose was pressed against his neck and she felt its warm pulsing.

“Okay then,” she said, extricating herself. Denny pulled his tee shirt over his head like a hood and stepped into the rain. Alone, holding the keys in the ignition, Ruth sat in the parking lot, the site of her indecision earlier in the day. It had become a purgatory between being with Denny and away from him. The hard rain made the purpling sky seem closer. She wouldn’t pray for Denny to stay and love her. It was too preposterous, after all she had never been religious and her pride would not let her do it. Instead she prayed for things to stay the same, a small prayer for nothing to happen.

* * *

Ruth wasn’t scheduled to work that night. The seven PM to one AM shifts were the unlucky lot of the rookies but the thought of her snug, warm house wasn’t comforting. She figured that the first bad weather of the season coupled with the inconvenience of a Friday night shift might have been enough to scare off one of the new hires. She was right. When she walked up the apron in her foul weather gear the first mate looked relieved. For half a shift Ruth worked the upper deck but as the eleven PM ferry pulled into the mainland she took pity on a shivering rookie at the bow. Here the lashing rain was driven sideways drenching the first fifty feet of the vessel. The deck became slick as the water ran across the layers of dried oil and Ruth tread carefully as she directed the steaming cars aboard the boat.

By one o clock a welcome numbness had seeped into her body. Her arms were stiff and moved automatically like the hands of a clock. A metallic blue Camaro appeared before her. The pale head in the rain-blurred windshield belonged unmistakably to Ailo. Ruth beckoned Ailo’s car toward her and made it stop with a gesture of her hand. She knew she was safe in her obscurity, clad head to toe in orange rubber with a muffler that concealed all but her eyes. Her height and build could have been that of any man on the crew. In the boarding lights, not yet dimmed for the crossing, Ruth saw movement in the backseat of the car. A man in a hat was trying to hide himself under a gray blanket. At first Ruth didn’t recognize Pierre although she saw him full well. His presence there was so incongruous it took a moment for her to fully believe in it.

Inside the car, Ailo had turned around in her seat and was trying to uncover his feet with little teasing movements. For a moment Pierre seemed to forget his cause. Sitting up he grabbed her face and kissed it before she pushed him back down and laughing, covered his head with the blanket. Through the windshield and rain Ruth could see something excited and visceral in their twin expressions.

* * *

Ruth sat under the buzzing lights of the ferry’s break room waiting for her turn with the old detective. She wondered how far two days and nights could have carried Ailo and Pierre.

Ruth imagined it had started with Ailo. Pierre, though he was a handsome man, was too much of a stick to attempt an outright seduction. He wouldn’t have had the imagination to envision a new life with Ailo all on his own. It was Ailo, untethered and changeable, that must have seduced him with her blatant freedom.

When the detective arrived, casually dressed in an anorak over a fisherman’s sweater, he spoke briefly with the members of the crew that had been working the Friday that Pierre had disappeared. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence. With only one way off the island any police matter involving kidnapping or flight brought a detective to the Island County ferry. Maybe it was because of the flask being passed around that Friday night but most of the crew did not remember the blue Camaro boarding the one o clock ferry. The two that did recalled a fair-haired woman driver with a pretty smile and no passenger. The only consensus among them was that if someone had gotten a proper look inside the car it would have been the someone at the bow where the cars with no headlights filed onto the well-lit ferry.

The old detective had a large face with round, gin blossomed cheeks.

He beamed at her. “I didn’t know when I woke up this morning that I’d get to talk to such a striking young woman.”

Ruth regarded him warily. He asked her pointed questions about her work at the ferry but they seemed more in the spirit of genuine curiosity than anything relating to a possible crime. After a pause of consideration Ruth answered each question in detail until eventually the questions became so unconnected (where did she hale from? Had she tried the restaurant that just opened at the top of the hill?)that Ruth politely told him they might be needing her down below. Working all day with men who wore identical uniforms, performed the same duties and treated her indistinguishably, it felt strange to her to be an object of flirtatious attention here on the ferry of all places. She sat up awkwardly, pulled her waders down over her thick socks and gave the detective a bemused smile. As she tucked his card into her billfold she could not help but see it as a sign that he hadn’t ever gotten around to asking her if she’d seen Pierre on the ferry that night.

* * *

“It serves me right I guess,” Sarah said on the phone, her voice venomous with sarcasm. “If I hadn’t been spending every second of the day taking care of the boys and running the household I might have had more time for midday sex romps at the family motel. And maybe, just maybe I might have noticed him clearing out our bank accounts.”

“If you want to save up for awhile you and the boys could stay with me, maybe rent your place,” said Ruth. With her bare foot she rubbed the belly of the sheepdog sprawled under the table.

“Thanks but that’s the absolute last thing my self esteem needs at the moment- no offense.”

From the rustle of cellophane Ruth could tell that she’d taken up smoking again.

“Bastard,” Sarah said meditatively, sounding instantly calmer. “If we could prove that they left together then the police would have some idea of what car they were looking for but they say it’s all conjecture no matter what I tell them- like I’m the some hysterical housewife. I must sound to them like somebody you’d want to run away from.”

“No,” said Ruth gently. She was prepared as her unspoken penance to listen to a hundred years of her sister’s grievance if necessary. As she looked out her window at the first leaves turning brown and red she thought of Denny in the fourteenth floor hospital bed that her insurance had paid for. Their quickie courthouse marriage had been attended by no one. They’d celebrated with a last beer at the Smiling Dog and then Ruth had gone to work her shift while Denny packed his bag for the hospital.

“It’s going to be strange to sleep here, “ Denny said. They had wanted him in bed in his thin hospital gown even though it was still light outside.

“I’ve never been in a hospital before much less slept in one.” Tomorrow he would have the surgery and now that he was encased in the tight sheets of the all white room Ruth could tell that his relief had given way to worry. They had shaved his beard and his chin had a waxy shine as though polished. She saw now that it was not just his eyes, but his tremulous mouth that made him look like an overgrown boy.

“I wish I’d been a religious man,” he said.

“Pray for something small,” said Ruth. “Pray to be able to sleep.”

Denny closed his eyes. All around the delicate pieces of machinery hummed softly.

He opened the utility drawer next to the sink and peered in. He pushed aside the pumpkin knife, the Santa-shaped cookie cutters, the half-full box of birthday candles. He bent down and reached way back and his fingers found what his head had imagined – his old Swiss army knife. He felt the weight of it in his hand and slipped it into his back jeans pocket. Always good to have a backup, to be prepared. No, that was the Cub Scouts, Troop 348. He was seven and loved the uniform, wore it around the house until Mother made him take it off to wash it. He’d sulked and wouldn’t get out of bed the next day to go to school, made her dry it and press it so he could wear it again.

He laughed as he backed down his driveway, bumping over the curb. He’d never been a Cub Scout. Davey was in the Scouts. Davey slept in his uniform and made Ruth press it before he’d go to school again. Skip had never been in the Scouts at all. Well, that was a slip. This whole thing had his head spinning. Ruth never used to go out during the week either.

Skip stood in the doorway of the Piggy Tail Tavern, his first stop. If Ruth wasn’t here, he’d know fast enough. He had a whole list of places to check. He knew her too well, knew her habits, her likes and dislikes. He tried the Piggy Tail first because it was only three blocks from home. He walked into the bar with his hands in his pockets, one warmed by the wool, one cradling gun metal.

“Out of the way, buddy.” A group of young men in jeans and T-shirts pushed past Skip. He hugged the wall and watched them. They were loud and joking. They stopped at the pool table, picked up cue sticks and staged a mock duel. The bartender yelled at them to order up or get out and they quieted down.

Skip huddled in the corner by the front door. He could see down the length of the bar but he couldn’t see into the booths at the dark back end of the place. He heard a woman’s voice somewhere, and it sounded familiar. It would be just like Ruth to stop at the first place she found. No matter, her car wasn’t out in the parking lot. Maybe she took a taxi or got a ride from a friend, from one of her many little friends.

Slowly, Skip walked deeper into the bar. The smoke in the place surrounded him. It was hard to see clearly. He ignored the bartender and pretended to be looking for the john. His wingtips slid a little on the slick floor, squished down just-spent cigarettes. He focused on one booth by the back door. Her voice was clear to him now and he could see through the muted light a head of blonde hair, short and teased-up, just the way Ruth wore her hair.

“Sorry, guy, this one’s bought and paid for.” The big guy in the booth turned his fleshy mouth toward Skip. He laughed so hard he bent over into a coughing fit, dumping cigar ash on the table.

Skip took one hand out of his jacket and leaned across the table to get a better look at the blonde.

“Honey, you’re just going to have to wait your turn, OK?” She ran her tongue over her teeth, smiling at him.

Brown eyes. Skip looked into her brown eyes and big red lips. It wasn’t Ruth. He backed away from the table.

“Sorry, I thought.” He put his hand back into his jacket and leaned against the booth, hard.

“I’d invite you in, guy, but this is a private party. Get it?” This time the man’s voice was firm and Skip straightened up.

“I’m looking for my wife,” he mumbled and tried a smile, hoping to win sympathy. Maybe they’d seen her.

“Well, if this is her, you’re going to have to come back in a hour or so.” The man turned his back on Skip, said something to the blonde and she laughed.

That wasn’t Ruth at all. She didn’t laugh like that. He knew it when he saw her brown eyes. Ruth has blue eyes. Even through the smoke, he knew it wasn’t her. Before he’d gotten up to the booth, he could tell it wasn’t. Ruth didn’t take up that much space. He should have realized it wasn’t her before he even spoke. Back at the door, he could feel she wasn’t in this place. He was going to have to trust his instincts more.

He drove downtown, further from home. Ruth’s old Galaxie 500 wasn’t in the garage, wasn’t in the parking lot of the Piggy Tail Tavern either. He should be able to find her just by cruising the parking lots, wouldn’t need to actually go inside the bars at all. He’d look for her car; turquoise with a white top, four-door, molding missing on the right rear panel. Then he wouldn’t have to go in and do battle. He’d just wait for her outside. He’d explain that he understood her need to get out of the house. He felt that way too sometimes. Sometimes it was all he could do to pull his old white Ford into the driveway and up into the garage. If he pulled into the garage, he’d have to get out of the car and if he got out of the car he’d have to go unlock the back door and if he unlocked the back door he’d have to go into the house and if he went into the house through the back door he’d have to walk past Davey’s room and if he walked past Davey’s room he’d have to wonder why the door was still closed and if he wondered that, he’d have to remember it all and then he’d be in no better shape than Ruth.

Skip put on the emergency brake and got out of his car. He’d pulled into the parking lot of the Tip Toe Inn, circled the lot, hadn’t seen the Galaxie but decided since Ruth wasn’t here that he’d go in and get a drink. This time he didn’t hesitate. He knew Ruth wasn’t here so he walked right into the place, right up to the bar, laid down a five dollar bill, waved at the bartender and ordered a scotch. He didn’t even sit down. He didn’t look at the men sitting at the bar, he didn’t hear the women’s laughter behind him, he didn’t think about the fight erupting over at the pool table. Just picked up his drink, looked into it once and smiled, closed his eyes and threw it back.

Davey looked just like Ruth from the moment he was born. Not just blond hair and blue eyes, but the delicately boned nose, thin lips and tiny earlobes too. As soon as he could walk he climbed into Ruth’s lap and stayed there as long as she let him. They had their big chair they’d sit in together and Davey never got too big for it. He loved uniforms. When he started T-ball he wouldn’t wear anything else to bed for a week and Ruth allowed it. The same thing happened when he started Cub Scouts. Skip learned to stay out of the way. Davey called Ruth Mommy. He called Skip Father. Maybe if he’d insisted on being called Dad.

“God, that wouldn’t have mattered,” he said through his scotch. He put the glass down and the bartender raised his eyebrows at him expectantly.

Skip nodded and sat down on a barstool. The noise of the place swirled back into his head and he looked up into the mirror behind the bar and watched two plaid-shirted muscle guys go at it next to the pool table. A couple of people sitting at the bar wandered over to watch the fight. The bartender brought him his drink.

“Some guys just need to settle things with their fists,” he told Skip.

Skip looked again into the mirror, not turning around and watched as one of the two guys hit the floor.

“Always over some woman too.” The bartender headed over to the guy on the floor. Skip turned around.

The woman at the pool table was tall and thin and blonde. Her hair was short and teased up in the front. Her features were delicate. Her makeup was light. Even from this distance Skip could tell she didn’t regularly frequent places like this or guys like that. She seemed unable to move. The guy he imagined she’d come with was being escorted out and guy number two was in no shape to be romantic. The woman looked around her. The people who had left their seats to watch the fight were milling back to their seats. The show was over. Skip watched the woman.

Slowly, she sat back down in her chair against the wall. She picked up her purse and pulled out lipstick and a little comb, the same comb she used to use on Davey’s hair.

Skip froze. In the soft light around the pool table he could just make out the little comb with the stars on it. Ruth used to run it through Davey’s straight hair every morning and say she was combing the stardust out.

God, was it her? He didn’t trust his eyes after two drinks. So many women had the same haircut, the same purse, the same natural look that Ruth had. Without going over, getting closer, he couldn’t be sure.

The woman’s movements were slow, as if she was moving through water. She sat stiffly in the wooden chair moving the little comb in and out of her hair without thinking. She was looking out the door as if trying to make up her mind whether to follow her date or stay put.

Skip finished his drink. The bartender had a fresh one in front of him before he could ask for it. He turned back toward the mirror and picked up the drink, watching the woman in the mirror. He watched as two men from the back of the bar approached her. She straightened her back immediately and put on a huge smile. Skip watched her tuck the little comb back in her purse, get up on unsteady feet and take the arm of one of the guys. The second guy took her other arm. She stumbled a little bit and they all laughed. The three of them walked out the door arm in arm.

Skip finished his drink and laid a ten on the bar.

“You know her?” He nodded out the door in the direction the woman had gone.

“Sure, she comes in here once in awhile.”

“With anyone special?” Skip asked.

“Usually comes in alone,” the bartender told him. “Never leaves alone though.”

Skip walked out to the parking lot. He realized how tough this had all been on Ruth. He’d been giving her space. She said she liked to take drives, would end up spending the night at a girlfriend’s house if she stayed out too late. Said she didn’t want to drive home alone. He accepted it. He understood.

The two guys had the blonde up against the side of a pickup truck. Skip could see her fluffing her hair, laughing, leaning into one of them, the other with his arm around her. Skip moved in between a Camero and a Honda, keeping his head down but his eyes always on the trio. He could hear what they were saying now. He moved closer. He could see one guy had his arm around her back and was pulling her back and forth between the truck and his hip. She was giggling, telling him to stop, pushing him away. The other guy had his hand in her hair and was leaning down whispering something to her.

“I do not like having men fight over me, don’t be silly.”

Skip moved into position where he could see and hear everything.

“I think I know what you’d like,” the pushing guy said to her.

Skip couldn’t hear the whispering guy at all but he could see his hands now. He’d undone the back of her dress and slipped one strap off her shoulder. Skip leaned forward, felt the gun in his pocket. Then he heard Ruth say “You boys better mind your manners or I’ll have to get rough with you.” And she giggled. She pulled down her dress and leaned her head back. The whisperer pulled her completely out of her top, mashing her breast with his big hand, moving his face from her hair to her neck. Skip pulled the gun out of his pocket and let it hang at his side. It felt heavy in his hand and slippery. He wiped his hand over his eyes and his mouth and through his hair and thought he might get sick. He watched the pushing guy pull her dress up then pull her panties down and reach in deep. She moaned and bent down to take his hand in deeper. The pusher covered her mouth with his.

Skip couldn’t see her face any more. All he saw was the blue dress she’d worn at parent night crumpled up around her waist. He watched the pusher finger her until she brought her legs up around him, watched him unzip, pushing her hard up against the truck, the whisperer bending down to her breast now, taking it into his mouth. Ruth’s mouth open, her eyes closed, jerking up against the truck, grabbing onto the sides, maybe not even breathing, and when he was done, turning around, spreading her legs and taking in the whisperer.

Skip leaned his face against the side of the car he was hiding behind. He took two big gulps of air, pointed the gun at an old caddie in the back of the lot, fired three shots and let the gun drop. It clattered onto the pavement. He heard the two guys swear, the truck’s doors creaked open and slammed shut. The engine rumbled on and the truck pulled out of the lot fast.

He watched the blonde pull her panties back on, pull her dress back down and into place and zip it up the back. She picked her purse off the ground and tucked it under her arm. Slowly, unsteadily, she walked across the lot. Skip watched her get into a drab green Toyota, start the engine and pull away. He dropped down to the pavement, sat cross-legged, his head against the car door.

Maybe it’s better this way.

He picked himself up, walked away from the gun and got into his car. He drove home the back way, avoiding the 2 a.m. traffic and the drunks. He pulled the car up onto the front lawn and walked in the front door. He set his keys on top of the old brown Samsonite he hadn’t unpacked yet. He didn’t turn on the lights. In the dark, he slipped out of his jacket, rolled it up into a ball, laid down in the middle of the empty living room, putting both hands under his pillow just like Davey used to, and closed his eyes.

The bank descended at forty-five degrees and she was afraid to go down the slope to the box elder tree, where she thought she had heard the bracelet as it fell, trisk-tlop. Joe was already home from work, and she called him from her office and asked him to wear shoes that wouldn’t slip on the muddy bank, to bring a flashlight and a broom to lean on as a staff.

“I’m not going anywhere I need to use that,” he said.

“And bring my cell phone, which I left in my other purse.”

“Why?”

“In case I need to call 9-1-1.”

“Geez.”

“It’ll be all right. I just want a quick search. Just five minutes. You probably won’t find it.”

“I’ll be there.”

He arrived wearing his favorite khaki shorts. She pointed in the general direction of the box elder tree.

His eyes took in the river, the sun, the edge of the steep bank. He dragged his hand through his hair. She was afraid, too. He stared at the ground and winced. “I don’t want to walk into a patch of poison ivy.”

She let her breath out in relief. “Oh, is that all.”

He bent a waist-high stalk of green. “Look at the thorns on this. My father called this bull thistle.”

“What’s that?”

“See, it’s got thorns all along the stalk.” The hooks of the thorns grew out of the stalk at one-inch intervals.

A panic seized her. “It’s not worth it.”

“Let me try.” He moved easily down the sloping fifteen feet toward the box elder tree. “I’m a monkey,” he boasted. He shone the flashlight, sweeping the ground systematically back and forth as if he were reading the weeds and fallen leaves.

“I think it’s more toward the right, toward the tree.”

“Yeah, but this is where the light is.” He referred to the old joke about searching under the street lamp for lost keys when the keys had fallen to the side and into the dark. “Honestly, over there, the ground drops abruptly, goes down a whole new level.” He shook his head. He continued surveying the ground nearer the tree, carefully.

She remembered a boy from her childhood who climbed the roof and fell. He died, after lingering in a coma for a few days. All the schoolchildren were surprised because they expected Danny–reckless, loud, always running–to recover. Danny wore shorts to the baseball game when her parents took a group of kids. He was calm as a grownup that time. “Enough,” she said. “Okay. It’s not important.” She swallowed her hot breath. What if Joe slipped? She should not have phoned him. She was wrong, this was stupid, this was dangerous, he was the universe to her.

“A little longer.” Joe looked up at her from under the shadow of the tree. His face was dappled by the shadows. In the near distance, insects wove in and out of the glittering, striped air. Farther away, the traffic whined along on the streets. “If it fell over there. . . .” He turned toward the edge of the ridge.

“It probably rolled off the ledge. You’ve looked long enough.” She was herself dizzy, as if on the verge of falling, and her heart pounded. She wanted him to stop searching, she wanted him to climb up, so they could resume their watching Sherlock Homes movies on television, their bickering about money and their daughter’s grades and whether it had been five years or seven since their friends in Alaska adopted a child from Peru. The daily scrapes of life. “It’s okay.”

“Yeah.” He turned up to her. Birds chirped loudly at their invasion. “The trick is going to be climbing back up. I’m looking for handholds.” He grabbed at a tall stalk, tested if it would hold, pulled at it with one hand and took a step; then he pulled at another stalk. He did this again and again.

She crouched down and extended her hand to him and pulled him up for the last step. His hand felt warm and dry. She stood in front of him and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Thanks for looking.” She pointed toward the cement platform and they strolled toward it. The warmth of the late afternoon sun seeped into her shoulders. She leaned her elbows on the railing and steepled her hands, sighing in satisfaction. “Isn’t this pretty?” On the platform, in this clearing, they could see the river flowing straight, its surface flashing and skittering over all the lost things at the bottom. She gazed to the right, but could not see to where the dam controlled its flow. She looked to the left and toward the downtown where the fireworks celebrated the Fourth of July. In a couple hours the sun would set and the darkness would be complete. The river went on forever, no end in sight. Joe’s face was lit by the slanting sun as it declined, dazzling at this moment.

2.
According to CNN,
the president is launching
underwater missiles—filled
with deli meats—at Somali
pirate ships off the coast
of Mumbai.

3.
According to CNN, car insurance rates
have dropped by nearly three points.

4.
In 40 years, cirrhosis of the liver will be cured
with the adrenal gland of a house cat. Sources say:
“each kitten could save three to four human lives.”
Sources say: “PETA has begun firebombing the UN
with confetti explosives.”

CNN correspondent & revered
soothsayer, on the mass feline-
slaughter: Purr softly, baby
tiger—America’s ailing
will ring your neck & swipe
the posture from your spine.

A magical louse.

Who cares that it’s magical, it itches and does worse things than you’d probably guess, worse even than bad operatic singing.

I’m infested by it. It explained it had infested me the day it appeared, out of the blue.

“Hey, up here, on your shoulder.”

“Huh?”

“It’s me, a louse. Giant-size. And I can speak, but I don’t need to tell you.”

“What is that?”

“Singular of lice. Some people are surprised I can talk.”

“Louse’s the singular of lice?”

“Yep.”

“And you’re one?”

“Yep.”

“Great.”

“Anyway, you’re infested with me, by me. However you want to say it.”

“But there’s just the one of you?”

“Yessir.”

“I’ll deal.”

“Good luck, I’m a real nuisance. Plus with the talking. I also sing, which I love, but my singing is not for everybody. I’m kind of magical in that I can sing and talk, and dance on occasion, when the mood strikes.”

“I said I’ll deal.”

But I haven’t dealt with it very well at all. It’s bigger than it seemed at first, physically. Hideous as you’d think, maybe more than you’d think.

Gets in the way of my love life.

I’m combing my hair and there he is, louse. Just there on the sink’s counter-top in my bathroom, criticizing that I part my hair down the middle.

“You look old-timey, dapper, with your hair like that.”

“Which is what I’m going for.”

“Then you shouldn’t wear a gray sweatsuit.”

“I like to be comfortable!”

If he just kept quiet I might be able to ignore him. Sure my dates wouldn’t be able to, but I’m working on reasonable excuses for its being there, on me.

“I like to think of him as more a pet than a parasitic infestation,” I tell her, my date.

“You do see how he sabotages things, don’t you?” Louse chimes in, talking to my date. “This man is not a glutton, not nearly as boorish as he allows himself to seem. It’s all part of a probably unconscious plan to keep himself without a mate.” The only previous sounds were my eager slurps and loud open-mouthed chewings of approval. My date has been staring at me in mock (or real) horror for quite a while, somewhat to my dismay. It’s made for an awkward dining experience. But it feels tolerable enough, good enough. My expectations are minimal, very low. I’d come in just wanting my date to pay her half of the bill, then we’d call it a night.

But no.

My louse can’t stand idly by.

“What, are you trying to sabotage my date? This lovely lady didn’t ask for your two cents. Geez, Louse. I wouldn’t try to sabotage your lice sex, if that’s even what you do.”

Then my date says, “You’ve considered having the thing removed, right? By a professional?” She says it like she’s been thinking of nothing else throughout dinner, despite all the interesting things my louse and I have said.

“Yeah, but this is easier. Status quo and suchlike. Plus, remember I said by now it’s almost like he’s a pet?”

“That’s not the real reason he keeps me. He says it’s because he’s lazy, and he directs your attention to a really seriously malignant-looking birthmark he should have had frozen off a long time ago but won’t do it, as though this example of possibly fatal apathy is proof that he is lazy. The birthmark was proven benign a long time ago, by a reputable dermatologist,” says my louse, who will not stop. He directly addresses my date. “The real reason is, he’s wrapped up in this love affair with a woman who doesn’t even love, ever. He’s obsessed with her and he’s letting his obsession dictate his reality. So he pushes you away, and he pushes every other woman away.”

“I don’t do that. If you’re talking about Stephanie, let’s just say I know sweet Stephanie Kingsley is the only woman for me. I’d never eaten sushi before I saw Stephanie eat it. Turns out I like it, too.”

Next, my date decides she’d rather leave than stay, so she leaves. My louse sticks around near my clavicle but mostly on my left shoulder. Weighing me down, again.

“Why do you do it to yourself?” my louse asks.

“I do it because I know what love is, ok? Love is pursuing a woman despite the obstacles. Despite that she may be with another man — whom she treats badly, I might add, by keeping up her romance with me.”

“She also treats you badly in that scenario.”

“But not as bad, which is an important distinction.”

“Most people would say worse.”

“How do you figure?”

My louse relates to me how everything hitherto this time had come to pass. Stephanie and I had dated. I once peed in her bed after a long night of debauch. She was mad at first but eventually decided it didn’t matter. Then, after days and weeks had passed, she returned to the issue of my peeing in her bed, suggested I had serious issues with incontinence and subsequently threw it in my face when she knew it would gain her the advantage. Then she started sleeping with my friend, Steve, who became her boyfriend until he died in a freak motorist-pedestrian accident in which he was the motorist and the pedestrian was a seventy-year-old man. The senior was propelled through Steve’s windshield, after Steve collided with him, speeding because he was late for work at the local Kroger. The man became a missile, impaled Steve, went right through his sternum. Some weeks after the funeral, Stephanie took up with this other guy who writes bad poetry and is always trying to outwit me lyrically. We’ve engaged in several heated exchanges over the internet that I feel I’ve won.

“So what’s your point, Louse?” I say, tired of him laboring over every detail, especially because it’s boring to hear things critical of your past and present behavior.

“My point is, why are we parked in front of Stephanie’s apartment again?”

“I want to introduce the two of you,” I say.

“Look, I’m not trying to be the physical embodiment of your agonized conscience. I was trying to be a prickly burden like the rest of my kind. The only difference is I’m magically large and can speak and sing. Otherwise I’m like every other louse out there. I eat your blood and dead skin and crap like that. What I’m trying to say is, though I don’t have a stake in any of this, I really think you should climb back down the fire escape, ditch the meat cleaver you’re wielding, and drive away from Stephanie’s apartment and, metaphorically, her life, forever.”

“And that’s why you’re not me,” I say, but when I turn to see Louse on my shoulder, he’s not there. He’s not anywhere. There’s a note taped on my shoulder.
It says I never listen, do I? It says, because of that I’ll never learn.

I drop my cleaver and it makes a clanking sound all the way down to the alley pavement.

I get back in my car. I bite my fist so hard it bleeds.

To the locals, the unicorns were common as white-tailed deer. To me, a girl fresh from planet Earth, they were the stuff of fairy tales come true. I’d recently graduated with a Journalism degree and two internships under my belt, but job offers were scarce with the economic recession. Better job opportunities were off-planet, which was how I ended up in Shiraz. There weren’t a lot of Earthlings here, and fewer still that were my age, which is why I noticed Amanda.

I first met Amanda at my friend Toke’s party. (I’d met Toke when he was an exchange student at UNC.) We were drinking with three of his friends, and I said that I was dying to meet someone who could relate to my craving for a Vietnamese iced coffee.

“Is that what you made me at your barbecue last summer?” Toke asked.

“No, you’re thinking of sweet tea. Vietnamese coffee’s a SoCal thing. It’s this special coffee mixed with condensed milk. It’s kind of magic.”

“The girl who went to school in California, she’s here at the party.”

“Someone who can relate! Where is she?”

We wandered through the crowd and Toke pointed out a girl with sandy hair clutching a Longchamps tote to her side, standing at the edge of a conversation. “Hey Amanda!” he called.

She looked in our direction and Toke waved. She broke away to approach us.

“Hi.” She smiled tentatively and looked between Toke and me.

“Amanda, this is Nina. Nina, Amanda.”

I held out my hand. “I hear you’re from Chapel Hill.”

She nodded. “And you’re from San Diego.”

“Born and raised. Love it there. Loved UNC, but it was so crazy-humid. You went to UCSD, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Must have been awesome, right by La Jolla.”

Toke bumped my shoulder. I looked at him and smiled, handed him my empty cup. “Refill?”

He grinned. “I’ll let you two Earthings mingle. See you later.”

I turned to Amanda. “How’d you like California?”

“It was nice.”

When she didn’t elaborate, I said, “I was telling Toke and some guys how I really miss home food. I mean, I love southern food—total guilty pleasure—but I had such crazy cravings for Vietnamese and real Mexican. You must have been in food heaven.”

“I never had Vietnamese.”

The way she said it, like it would never even occur to her to try, took me back. “So how do you like Shiraz? What are you doing here?”

“I’m a supply chain analyst for DNM.”

“Neat,” I said. “I’ve heard good things about DNM.” She didn’t ask what I did, and we stared at each other. “Well, it was cool to meet you. I heard there was another San Diego/Chapel Hiller, so I was curious. I’ll see you around.”

She didn’t even smile, just nodded as I walked off, annoyed. I found Toke at another section of the party. “Hey,” he said when he saw me. “How was it to meet your doppelganger?”

“Disappointing. She gave me a stone-faced stare the entire time. It was super awkward.”

I travelled a lot the next few months in Shiraz. Toke wasn’t starting work at his family’s company until the New Year, so he had time to show me around. He took me up to a village a day’s hike above Shiraz. The village was renowned for the tiny stone shrines that were supposed to house the forest spirits the Shirazans used to pray to.

“They are adorable!” I played around with the macro lens of my camera so I could get some good close-ups.

Toke plucked the petals off a wildflower as he watched me take pictures. “Only you, Nina Martinez, would reduce our ancestral cultural relics to ‘adorable.’”

“Toke, you know I don’t mean it that way. I want to be a spirit just so I can live in one of these. They’re so intricate. I mean look, there are tiny carvings in the inside. How hard is that? Look at the tiny stairs!”

We spent the afternoon looking at all the different shrines, and then I couldn’t resist the incense offering tourist trap. Afterwards, we went to a local restaurant to eat a dinner of noodles and delicate shoots, served with bowls of a spicy vegetable broth.

It was too dark to trek back to Shiraz, so we rode the train home. The effects of the day-long hike were catching up to me. I lay against Toke’s shoulder, thankful for soft-cushioned seats, looking out at the blur of dark mountain and trees.

“Guess who I saw buying groceries the other day?” Toke asked.

“Who?” I yawned.

“Your good friend, Amanda.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call her my friend.” I had seen Amanda around at other parties, and she’d never really warmed up to me. Yet I had seen her smiling and laughing with guys, which had irritated me in a weird, competitive way.

It was one of those alpha-female things, where if she wasn’t my friend, I had to at least establish I was above her on the power hierarchy. Petty and ridiculous, I know, especially considering I wasn’t even into guys. But vain little me, I needed to know I could have them even if I didn’t actually want them.

“You should get to know her. She’s a cool girl.”

I sat up to frown at Toke. “So she got you too.”

“Come on, Nina, it’s like you have a fixation with her.”

“I’m not fixated! Just annoyed because I extended an olive branch of friendship, and she meanly swatted it away. And girls like her annoy me, the kind that can’t make female friends.”

“She’s not you, this happy social butterfly. And we all have different kinds of people we have an easier time warming up to, right?”

“Sure, whatever.” I settled back against the seat, ready to take a brief shuteye, when I saw a blur of white. I peered out the window. “Toke, did you see that?” I saw several blurs of white, like deer, except they had single horns extending from their foreheads. “Toke, there’re unicorns out there!”

“We have a lot of unicorns here.”

“But I haven’t seen any yet.”

“What about when we were down at Lake Lone?”

“There weren’t any that night. Trust me, I was standing away from you all and looking.” The train was moving too fast for me to get a clear look, but I saw six or seven unicorns in a group. Two of them approached the train and ran alongside. I tapped Toke’s shoulder excitedly.

“Yeah, I see them,” he said. “They get a kick out of proving they’re faster than the train.”

I kept my face glued against the glass, hoping one of the unicorns would run past us. They were leanly muscled, more delicately built than the horses back home. Their coats were a sleek, pearly-white. One of the unicorns eventually ran alongside us, less than a foot away. Its long hair rippled, and it turned its head to look at me. This close, I could see it had blue-green eyes. It must have once been in a fight; it had a scar that ran along part of its chest. Its long horn was iridescent—not pure white as I would have expected—like mother-of-pearl.

Then its companion came up behind it, nipping at its back. The unicorn’s nostrils flared. It tossed its head, seemingly in reply to its friend. The two unicorns veered away from the train, and it was then I saw their tails. They weren’t like that of a horse, nor the oft-depicted lion’s tail. Instead, they were like that of a white-tailed deer. And like the deer I’d often seen back when I drove at night in North Carolina, they were momentarily visible—delicate and ghost-like—before disappearing back into the forest.

I lost my closest friend in Shiraz after Toke started work at his family’s company. I also received disappointing news from home. I’d applied to several grad schools and hadn’t gotten into any of them, which meant I would have to spend another year working or figuring out something else to do. To ease the burn, I spent a lot of time going out and partying.

I went to one party where I ended up not knowing anyone. (The two friends I was supposed to meet went to some random bar and failed to inform me.) I made some new
friends and left with them to go to a club. There I danced for several hours and had one too many shots to quench my thirst after all the dancing. Then in a burst of clarity, I decided I was sleepy and that my bed back home was calling me.

It was starting to rain when I arrived in what I thought was my neighborhood. It was cold and I was wearing a skimpy sundress and sandals. I clambered to the door of what I thought was my apartment and started rooting through my purse for my keys. I swore when I pulled out my sunglasses and some pens with them. Ungracefully
gathering everything back together, I tried to insert my key into the lock. It wouldn’t fit.

“What the-,” I shouted.

“Nina?”

I turned to see Amanda huddled under an umbrella, holding a bag of groceries.

“Oh hey, I didn’t know you lived around here,” I said.

“You okay?”

“My key seems to be broken.”

Amanda came closer to me. “Is this your apartment?”

I stepped back to check. Then I realized. My own apartment involved a long flight of stairs; I’d confused it with my old place back in Chapel Hill. “Lovely, I got off at the wrong stop.” I looked around and realized I didn’t have a clue where I was. “What is this place?”

“This isn’t the best neighborhood to wander around in alone.” Amanda grabbed my arm when I stumbled. “Do you need help getting home?”

Amanda must have decided I needed the help, because the next thing I knew I was back at my apartment, puking. Once I’d regained a bit of my dignity, I told Amanda: “You better stay here.” It was pouring and thundering, and almost three in the morning now.

I got her some dry clothes, and Amanda went into the bathroom to change. I rooted through the refrigerator to assuage my post-drinking munchies. I found leftover Soonmoon, super spicy tubers with a consistency and taste reminiscent of squid. It was a Shirazan specialty I indulged too often in.

“Want some?” I asked Amanda when she came out.

“No thanks. I’m not very good with spicy food.”

“I also have…” I gave an inventory of my fridge and pantry.

She settled for Sun Chips, an American import that was popular here.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m not very adventurous when it comes to food,” she admitted.

I made us some tea and we settled onto the couch, which was a hollowed out log lined with dark silk and embroidered pillows. “Thanks for rescuing me,” I said. “I might have been sliced and diced by a mugger or been the victim of rain-induced hypothermia if you weren’t my knight in shining armor.”

Amanda gave me a small smile over her mug. She looked around my apartment, which had stone floors lined with rivulets, and a bed raised up on tree logs and surrounded all around by water. “You have a really nice place here.”

“Compliments of Toke. He’s a rich boy and a good friend.”

“He always mentions you when I see him. You two knew each other at UNC?”

“Yeah, junior year.”

“Are you…”

“Oh no, just friends.”

“It must be nice, the way you guys are so close,” Amanda said, and she sounded wistful.

We sipped our tea, listening to the rain outside. Watching Amanda, my previous irritations melted, expanding into something warm. I realized there was more than one way to interpret her reserve toward me, and that Toke was right. That just because she didn’t react to my advances in the same way I would have reacted to hers didn’t mean that she didn’t like me. That my own tendency to be socially aggressive could be oftputting in its own way, to someone like her.

“Let’s hang out together soon. Earthings only. No Shirazans,” I said.

“I would like that.”

“We can have a picnic,” I suggested.

“Okay,” she said.

“By the lake? I’ll bring the wine.”

She brought pecan pie, which didn’t quite go with the bottle of Shiraz, but we consumed liberally of both over the course of the night. It was a gorgeous night and I thought Lake Lone would be stuffed with picnickers, but it was just Amanda and me.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said after three-quarters of the pie and wine were gone.

“It’s a big lake.”

“We’re big girls. Plus we need the exercise.”

So we walked, carrying the food and drink with us. It felt great with the lake enormous and black beside us, the whistle of the wind over the grass. There was the silhouette of the trees, and then the night sky with all its bright stars above it. It made me wish I could morph into a bird and fly.

“Are you staying in Shiraz another year? Or are you going back home?” Amanda asked.

“I don’t know yet. I applied to some jobs, but it’s still hard, even with a year’s work experience. What about you?”

“Same here. I’m thinking of maybe doing Teach for America.”

It put a damper on my mood, being reminded of the uncertain future. “I think the novelty of Shiraz is wearing off,” I said.

Amanda looked at me. “You seem to have adjusted really well here.”

“Yeah, well it’s not home. Toke was the only person I knew before I came here. I miss my family and friends.”

“It’s hard.”

I glanced at Amanda, who was looking pensively ahead. I couldn’t help asking: “What made you decide to come all the way out here? You didn’t know anyone in Shiraz or Oysitar, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.” She hesitated. “When I graduated, I was at a point where I felt if I went back to North Carolina, I would never leave. I had a hard time adjusting in San Diego, and I needed to give moving to a new place another try.”

We were quiet as we walked around the lake. There was something surreal about this night, having Lake Lone to ourselves. Then: “Hey! Unicorns!” Amanda pointed.

There was a herd of them across the lake. We were at the part of the lake where it narrowed, so we had a good view of them. There had to be twenty of them, of varying sizes. The smaller ones were teenagers, not small enough to be babies. They were furrier and their coats were gray, like cygnets.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over how cool it is to see them,” I said.

“I know.”

We stood there watching them. And then I saw something strange. At first I thought it was the alcohol. In the herd of unicorns I saw a single deer. “Amanda, look.”

She saw it too. It stood out with its brown fur, narrow face, and slim build. “Are there deer here? Or did one somehow stowaway from home?”

“I don’t know. But it’s cool, how it’s hanging out with them.” I watched the deer as it fed with the unicorns. It seemed more delicate in comparison to them. “It’s so pretty. I always thought deer were so pretty when I saw them in North Carolina.”

We smiled at each other, and I was glad to share this moment where something that would have been common back home was here something novel. I sat down in the grass so we could watch them feed.

Amanda settled down next to me. She lay back and sighed. “I am so full.”

“Nu uh, we’re finishing the bottle.” Uncorking the top, I poured the remaining dregs between us.

She put her hand to her forehead. “I don’t usually drink wine. Is it always this strong?”

My head was spinning too, now that we were no longer walking. “I think it’s been amplified by whatever you put into the pie. Geez, Amanda, some delicate and refined southern lady you are.”

Amanda laughed, sitting up to take her cup. “I’m going to have to teach you how to make pecan pie. They’re really easy.”

“I have some weird block to desserts. Even the quick-mix brownies.”

We sat in the grass, tossed some pie crumbs into the lake to see if we could tempt the fish. Two of the teenage unicorns across the lake started wrestling with each other. When it got too rough an older unicorn broke them up. In the water, I heard the plop of a fish mouth that evidenced one had found the pie tempting enough to taste.

“This picnic was fun. Let’s do it again,” I said.

“We’ll coordinate our food next time.”

“Cheers to that.”

We tapped our cups together. The mountain air swirled sweetly around us, and I thought how if Amanda and I had met back home, we couldn’t have been more different, but here, she was the closest thing I had to familiar. It felt good having her close to me. Especially tonight, the night we saw a deer amongst the unicorns.

I am writing to apologize on behalf of my friends and me for ruining your son’s recent trip to Water World. In honesty, we were intentionally trying to be overheard by strangers, but did not anticipate that your child would be directly affected by our extravagant lie.

Believe me, this was not the first time we have done something like this, though, so we were by no means targeting your son. We’ve been telling Jeff, as he continues to recover from the assault, that it was all a misunderstanding, a case of wrong place, wrong time.

We started with more personal lies like, “my friend John was mauled by a bear, but his family wants an open casket, so they asked me to help figure out how we can lay out some of his pieces to somewhat resemble a person”. We realized if we stood close enough to people in malls and spoke loud enough, most would show noticeable reactions to our seemingly true and casual conversations about inane situations.

And then we realized that if we incorporated celebrities into our lies, people would show no remorse for eavesdropping. They’d turn around and start asking questions as if they’d been in the conversation the whole time. So we’d say things like, “Can you believe they found Larry Bird [the retired Boston Celtics basketball player] dead in the woods behind his house yesterday? They said he was covered in leaves, except for his Reebok Pump shoes, and the police suspect foul play.”

And we found this all quite entertaining, so it became a game we’d play in public.

Now that I’ve given you some background, you can see that this was not, as you said to us at the water park, “a grossly negligent attack on a teenage boy’s feelings”.

Furthermore, it is quite preposterous to assume that we knew that your brother is in fact Will Smith, and it was a completely lucky guess that he happens to be dually filming Men In Black 4 and 5 this summer. So you can understand our own shock when you pulled my friend from the Wild Wave Pool and started demanding answers.

I can’t imagine the shock your son must have felt when he overheard us talking about how his (Uncle) Will had fallen to his death while filming a scene atop the Statue of Liberty. For this, we are truly sorry. But teenage boys these days, they have to be resilient.

Sincerely,

Jason Joyce

Katie’s only connection to the outside world was her Columbia House music club membership. When she got off the bus after school, the first thing Katie did was check the mail to see if the CD of the month had arrived. Would it be Mariah Carey’s new album? Or Genesis’s greatest hits?

One day an envelope addressed to Katie came from an organization called Save the Children. The letter inside stated that there were thousands of poor, sick children who needed Katie’s help and would she sponsor one of them for just $20 a month—less than 75 cents a day? Katie could select a child from any country she wanted and even choose the gender too.

Katie filled out the form and checked “Philippines,” “girl” and “bill me.” A few weeks later, she received a thicker envelope from Save the Children. Inside, there was a photo of a little girl printed on real Kodak paper. It reminded Katie of old pictures she’d seen of her mother as a child back in the Philippines. The girl had dark brown ringlets framing her face, golden eyes, round cheeks and a mischievous smile. Her name was Ampong.

“I’m going to take care of you,” Katie said.
Katie taped the photo up inside her locker at school.

“Who’s that?” asked the popular girl whose locker was next to Katie’s.

“My daughter,” Katie said.

“You’re too young to have a daughter,” the popular girl said.

“I adopted her,” Katie explained.

“Whatever,” the popular girl said, rolling her eyes.

At lunch, Katie purchased only an apple and pocketed the rest of her lunch money. She nibbled it slowly as the other girls at her table inhaled pizza, chips and cookies.

“Aren’t you going to eat more than that?” the chubby redhead asked.

“I’m on a budget now,” Katie said. “I have a mouth to feed.”

Her stomach undulated. It seemed to be folding in on itself. This is probably how Ampong feels, Katie thought.

* * * * *

After school, Katie wrote Ampong a letter.

Dear Ampong,

Love,
“Your American Mom” Katie

She addressed the envelope to Ampong c/o Save the Children and put it in the mailbox.

At dinner, Katie hardly touched her chicken parmesan.

“Aren’t you gonna eat that?” her dad asked.

“I’m not hungry,” Katie said.

“Well, clean up the table at least,” he said, wiping his mouth and getting up from the table. He then disappeared into the cellar to work on one of his many projects.

* * * * *

Over the next couple of weeks, Katie checked the mail every day, hoping to find a letter from Ampong, but nothing came. When Katie opened her locker at school and saw Ampong grinning crookedly, it made her feel important. She passed the test on fractions without even studying and didn’t need to be reminded to do her chores on Saturday. Katie’s dad peeled a $10 bill off the mound of cash he’d gotten from his Friday night bartending gig. “Here’s a little extra for keeping up those A’s and helping around the house,” he said. Katie put the money in the tiny bamboo box that her mom had given her for her sixth birthday. She only had five more dollars to go before she had the first month’s Save the Children payment.

Katie wished she had two photos of Ampong—one to keep at school and one for home. She remembered her old My Child doll, which she’d put away two years ago when she decided she was too old to play with dolls. The doll actually looked a lot like Ampong, except she had curly hair. Katie planned to give the doll to her future daughter, and now she had one.

Every morning, Katie dressed the doll in a new outfit and set her up with toys and paper and crayons. When she got home from school, Katie cradled the doll in her arms and watched her favorite TV show, “Small Wonder.” At dinner, Katie propped the doll up in the chair next to hers and pretended to feed her. Then Katie read a chapter from the current “Babysitter’s Club” book aloud before putting the doll to bed.

* * * * *

Another week went by, and Katie still hadn’t received a reply from Ampong. Maybe her letter got lost. Or what if Ampong was sick? Katie’s skin prickled with a clammy sweat. She picked up the phone and dialed the 1-800 number from the Save the Children package. Katie navigated the recorded voices and automated options, but she couldn’t get through to an actual person. She hung up the phone and pressed played on her Sony boom box. As her favorite old country tune, “Filipino Baby,” trickled out of the speakers, Katie curled up on her bed and clutched the My Child doll to her chest. Its felt face darkened with Katie’s tears.

The next day something finally arrived in the mail for Katie. It was from Columbia House. Disappointed, Katie opened the box and pulled out the CD of the month: Guns N’ Roses’ “Use Your Illusion I.” Katie loved the video for the song “November Rain” and couldn’t wait to listen to it. She ran to her room to get the money out of her little bamboo box and asked her dad to write her a check payable to Columbia House. Katie listened to the new CD while doing her homework and went to bed that night without paying any attention to the My Child doll, which lay on the floor where it had fallen from her bed the night before.

At school the next morning, Katie opened her locker and saw Ampong gazing sadly back at her from the picture. She pulled the photo off the door, slid it through the metal crack in the back of the locker and slammed the door shut.