Editor's Notes

Making Love to the Fruit Shooter - fiction by Heather Fowler

Two Poems - by Nancy Carol Moody

Horses - fiction by Ronald Rindo

Seduction in Cartagena - short fiction by Sandra Irwin

Fourth of July - poetry by Gabe Welsch

The Place of Lost Fathers - short nonfiction by Amy Roper

In Praise of Gray - poetry by Jay Rubin

White Paint - fiction by Sheila Ashdown

Three Poems - by Erin Murphy

The Second Wife - fiction by Becky Adnot Haynes

Contributors' Notes

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 was a sad day in the literary world, as our community experienced the loss of Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review, and personal friend of three of the four members of our staff here at The Summerset Review. She touched the lives of us as well as many others in very endearing ways, and she will be sorely missed.

We honor her here, by noting three pieces in recent issues of her prestigious magazine as our Lit Picks of the Quarter. In the Southern Review's Summer 2010 issue, a story by Karl Taro Greenfeld, entitled "The Gymnast," brings us into the life of a Chinese girl with "childlike adorability and assassin-like execution." We thought the story was unique in that the first half focused on interesting gymnastic competition facts, while the second half moved into the protagonist's predicament and personality, such as when Xiao says to herself, "I was very good, perhaps even a little bit great."

In the Spring 2010 issue is a story by Debbie Urbanski entitled "Taken." This eerie piece involves the disappearance of a girl's friend, apparently taken by boys in the woods who do that sort of thing. There is frequent reference to an uncaring god, and the hint of a relationship between the protagonist's father and the taken girl. The prose, though, is beautifully written, and beautifully odd—as in the case where Ann narrates, "We watched the birds for a while, until one robin flew at the window, then crumpled with a soft thud. I flinched. Jasmine didn't. She fingered the glass soda bottle like it was another thing to break. That obvious smear of bird feathers and moist heat on the glass."

Finally, a nonfiction piece appearing in the Fall 2010 issue, "My Two Weeks as a Fellini Extra," by Jessica Levine, covers the author's experience as a roller-skating extra in the 1980 film, La Città delle Donne (City of Women). It's a candid account of how the appointment came to be, the need for a presenze interessanti. On taking the role, Levine says, "Living in Rome teaches you the merits of spontaneity achieved by relinquishing control, but this particular improvisation, I realized, could lead to a broken leg or two." If you see the film, look for her, as she describes, "...clambering down [stairs] in sneakers. The one with the cropped haircut and taupe satin hot pants."

While this issue was in final review, Heather Fowler, the author of our first story and coincidentally a friend of Jeanne's, made known to us that "Making Love to the Fruit Shooter" was actually inspired by Jeanne's love of archery.

Theme graphics this issue - "Sunspots"
Copyright © The Summerset Review, Inc. 2011.

I made love to the fruit shooter, one could say, because I liked being his constant target. I used the corner of my mouth as his anchor point. He used the same corner of his own lips, and he shot with his fingers, barebow, meaning sightless. There was risk to this, and danger. While visiting his life as his lover, any number of long afternoons were spent in his company on days when the air was chill, the sun fell slowly like a stringed thing from the sky, and I stood, apple on my head, shivering in the tricky dusk, waiting for the sound of his arrow release. He liked to talk about the archer's paradox, the way the arrow bent and flexed around a riser upon release, and he had warned me, early on, about the possibility of brain damage from our dating, the possibility of coma, the possibility this relationship could not only maim but kill me. I was dying for a good thrill. "Nock me," I said. "I fly straight."

We had our first lunch at the local café amid the stares of curious gapers. That time, I was wearing a business suit and he, a kelly green ensemble that made him resemble Robin Hood. I liked this. People stared in horror when they looked upon him, and then, because they saw us together, treated me as the quivering field mouse of his more pouncing cat. "He is no pussy," I wanted to tell them.

An old lady with a flat face, black spectacles, and brown polyester slacks flagged me on the way out of the diner. "Dangerous!" she hissed, clutching my arm and staring pointedly at him, letting out a quick verbalization of, "Bad luck shooter," because he and I were moving quickly from that place like I might be his arm guard, with him my very skin.

"But I am a lucky one," I called back to her as he ushered me out. I'll never know whether she heard. That night, in a mysterious absence, he left me for hours and then made a chain of daisies and arrows pointing the way to our bedroom.

"I'm like cupid," he said.

"You very much are," I said. "Where's my chocolate?"

"I feel a growing tenderness for you," he replied, his fingers tracing the rounded curve of my ass as we lay on the tile floor together, forsaking the bed. "You mean a lot to me, and if I cannot shoot things any given day, please know, I'll tell you. Even if I am the slightest bit sick, which could affect my aim. Even if I feel a tremble in my hands. But things could happen that are out of my control, as I explained. A sort of target panic every once in a long while, when I feel an uncontrollable sense of rejection. And you know these are the risks. I tell you before we begin."

I trusted him completely, trusted the strength and skill of his fingers, noted how they could privately make me cry out, moan and swoon, shriek "Come to Jesus," come rushed in another way, quickly and easily, with his concentrated rubbing. Often, I stared at his hands, how long and fine they were, how neatly tended. How could hands be so good in one place and not be marvelous in another? His hands were perfect at anything he endeavored. I was his apple girl a long time, slick and wet with the split of pale flesh. For a living, he was paid to shoot similar things off the heads of women on the Wild Man Marvels TV series, but at home I was his practice model and he shot what he wanted to shoot. He had done this activity for quite some time, talking often about the various comings and goings of his toxophilite past with tournaments and weekend engagements before the TV gig.

His assistants were all prettier and bustier than me. They kept changing. He'd complain when he got a new one. "All this height flux! Can't they just stick to five-foot-four? Damn actors' unions, fucking agencies, hell's gate producers!"

Before that, he worked in the education industry as a special services librarian who tracked and routed rare books. "When I worked as a slave to the man—" his tirades often began.

"But you are the man," I told him each time. "White. Part of the power dynamic. From a day job, you sat on your ass and that job paid more th—"

"I am not the man!" he replied, with vinegar, but this argument never went anywhere good, so I took to nodding and letting it be; I was, at least, good at that—getting better and better—a nodding welter-weight champion.

I worked as a law firm clerk since we met, but when we started dating, some two years ago, I had a new job, too. When I got home from work, I'd strip off my gray suits, my stockings, my three-inch heels, and my fine jewelry. This was our ritual. Pulling on the red leotard and green ballet slippers, I let him touch and embrace me, his favorite thing to pinch my nipples through the thin leotard fabric, to see my breasts almost but not quite on display—to dip his hand into the neckline to cup them before we walked out into the air, and to suck them while he cupped them, either through or pulled free from the sheer red fabric. This was foreplay.

We went through a bushel of apples some days. Before he nocked the first arrow in his bow, I pulled my hair back and fastened it low on my neck, my part centered clean-split down the middle like the apple would be. Nothing could disrupt the seat of the apple, he admitted, and I looked like an apple, too, he said, so there was unity in my pairing with the fruit, so much so that he felt to hit the red apple atop my head with his arrowhead, to slice it in half, was akin to separating twins.

"You have no seeds," he said, "but not to worry. I shall put my own inside you." I groaned and then I groaned. Sometimes, he fucked me in the field, not stripping me, solely moving the leotard aside as my back pressed against the grass with his hands on either side of my shoulders. When he touched me after release, his hands were hot, from shooting or otherwise. He drank apple juice every day of the apple phase. He suggested we have a daughter and name her Apple. "You know," he said, "like that famous Paltrow girl?"

"We are not married," I said.

"I thought you were more modern," he replied.

"It's about child support," I said. "You know, should we split." I didn't tell him that I didn't want his baby, which was true. I didn't want any baby. The fucking things screamed. I was sure I wanted nothing to do with them. "I'm just saying," I said.

"That is not positive thinking," he said. "Take care of your green shoes. They're muddy."

Apples were only his newest obsession. Before this, I stood in the field with an eggplant on my head, in a purple leotard, with the same green shoes. He had gone on about eggplants, such deep purple luster, such perfect nutty flavor, such resemblances to the classically painted bodies of women. "Eggplants are actually berries!" he had told me then. "Botanically speaking. Big violet berries. And their seeds have nicotine! Did you know that?" I heard a lot about eggplants those days.

But he was done with eggplants now. "Apples," he told me one night, several months into the newest trend, "were a favorite of ancient Greeks and Romans, were introduced to America by early settlers, who brought seeds. We gave the Native Americans apples, maybe like the way they gave us corn. Apples are magnificent fruit. And it's like I'm your teacher. By splitting the apple on top of your head, I accept your gift." When we walked in from the fields each night, we never ate the apples he split, but left them for the birds. "Nature will take its course," he said. He had straight blond hair that fell over his eyes, which he often blew upward to clear his vision.

Things went on this way. Then one day at the law firm we had a new case. The family of Emma Gold versus Claus Belifrade AKA Fruit Shooter, regarding her sudden lapse into a coma after being lacerated in the head with an arrow. I felt sick and flabbergasted. I looked at all the photos from the shoots, at the blood on the ground the day she was pierced in the forehead, at the pictures of her laid up in her hospital bed, head wrapped in white. I had never watched his show, preferring to think of myself as his best, his real muse or his true mistress for his art—but in the film clip they had for court, she was dressed as a kiwi, in an electric green leotard, with green shoes, a thin blond girl with Hollywood ginormous tits standing at attention, her long hair flowing out behind her. And then she was hit. And then she fell. Crumpled, more like. A little round O of a moue on her lips, so surprised! It was good the show had not gone on live that day. I mentioned this lawsuit and footage to Claus at home that day, like one would mention a reel of orphan footage in Somalia, like: Isn't that terribly sad and shocking?

"I know about the lawsuit," he said. "But there are several differences here. Emma did not tie her hair back. This was distracting. She is not the lucky one like you are. Distracting. I work when I'm sick—at work—but never here with you. It was an unhappy accident, really. They'll throw her case right out of court."

"Will they?" I asked. "My firm is fighting it. We could win."

"You should tell your boss to drop the case," he said. "The media owns everything. It's a global tipping point. They call what they can do and waive off the damage. There's no way the family will win. Emma signed many liability waivers before starting with the network. Honey, this is a losing suit. Really. Cases like hers, in this climate, they've been thrown out before. If it weren't so distasteful, they could film agreed-upon teenage rape scenes and get away with it."

"Agreed upon rape?"

"Yeah."

I nodded. That's what I did.

He was right about the lawsuit, even after poor Emma Gold began her life as a shut-in with constant care, which the jury was somewhat swayed by, because the terms of the contract were explicit. They even kept a video log where she calmly answered each question about her willingness to take risks in return for her salary and a spot on network TV with bonus potentials.

From me, each day, the apple fell halved from my head. He got heady with his count. "I have now shot close to triple eight hundred fruits from your head!" he said one evening as the stars sparkled around us. "We should film me shooting you! You must have magic hair, hair that deflects any arrows, calls the arrows into the fruit, whispers to the wind, giving directions."

"I believe in you," I said. "This explains my stillness."

"I believe in you, too, and I love that you believe in me," he said. "It steadies my hands." Then he swung me around in his arms, planting kisses on my face, my shoulders, the neckline hem of my red leotard, the hem of it near my thighs, and higher, and lower.

We stood on the same level field when he finally shot an arrow that went over my head without grazing the apple. I heard it whistle as it passed. "Fuck!" he shouted, trying to track where it landed. "Fuck! Fuck! Shit!"

And then he calmed. He caressed me without taking me, rubbing my arms as if to warm them. "Do you believe in me less today?" he asked grimly, and then said, "No more arrows tonight, okay sweetheart?"

I began to secretly watch his show. I rented old episodes. I watched every bit of the footage I could find. I was so proud. How elegant he looked in the black velvet suit wardrobe picked for him. How debonair he was on those strange fields he shot from, blowing the blond hair from his eyes as he did at home, before shooting various objects, often very small ones, from the heads of some elaborate vixens wearing next to nothing. The videos all seemed quite similar. Except one day, I discovered a stash on his desk that was labeled with the show's title and DRESSING ROOM. They were dark and hard to view. He had some hinky net-cam set up. Maybe the footage was from security cameras. On each tape was what appeared to be motion-activated footage of him and his co-stars standing close together—footage where they spoke quietly. In the first clip, I heard him tell the woman, "I won't hit you. Not to worry. You have arrow-proof hair." To others, he said similar things. He stroked each of those depicted, caressing them like prize produce.

I went to visit Emma at her facility and spent a good while staring at the scar on her face where the arrow had entered her brain, where the hair had just begun to grow again. She could not talk. She slobbered. Every so often, she said something unthinkably close to "Kiwi," but it could have been "Come here," or it could have been "Gimme." I put my face close to her mouth, drawing my ear as close to her lips as possible—but her vocal chords went silent. She just breathed, in and out, as if almost sleeping, and then thrashed her head back and forth for some time. She's a vegetable, I thought, then wondered how close a vegetable was to an apple. Turns out, it didn't matter.

Claus came home that day and announced, with a flourish, "We go next with bananas, my love! Bananas! This will require you to wear a metal headband that holds the fruit upright on your head! But not to worry! I have made this device from a hanger and zip-ties. This way, when the arrow pierces the fruit, it can clearly be seen to do so. I'm not sure if the arrow will get stuck. Did you know banana plants, though very tall, are not trees? Did you know both banana skin and fruit can be eaten? That they have pseudo stems?" He handed me a yellow leotard. This time, he handed me new brown shoes. "The green no longer goes."

I felt the green still went, but later that week, I stood on the field wearing the brown. A cold wind blew. Goose bumps gathered on my bare legs and arms, and I stood erect, with the weird metal headband giving me a near-headache as the banana stood upright within it like a displaced penis, my own tall banana crown. In the distance, wheat waved in the fields. I looked at Claus in his red sweater and pair of jeans.

I remembered the footage I saw that day of a girl in his dressing room as he wore the same outfit, a new girl, thin, brown, svelte—the footage recent—"I won't do bananas," she'd said.

"Why not," he asked, moving his hands slowly from her waist to her breasts to her shoulders, with his usual arrogant punning about prowess. "You do my banana quite well."

She slapped him. "You're an ass," she said. I had never seen her on TV. Her refusal could mean everything. But I had not refused him. I gave him everything he wanted; I began to regret that as I stood in my yellow leotard and brown shoes, trying to be a twin banana to the one on my head, trying to see his face clearly in the distance, trying to make a decision about all this that would feel like a huge letdown or a huge relief—and then he did something that helped.

He lowered his bow and wiped the sleeve of his red sweater across his nose. It could have been an itch, but seeing this happen, watching him as he nocked the arrow, seconds later, I instinctively fell to the ground, hugging the earth, and "Get up! Get up!" he shouted. But I would not. "Please, get up," he begged. "Are you okay?"

I kept nodding, but I wasn't moving. He knew I was not listening then, must have known, because he threw down his bow and arrow in disgust, and then, in full view of me, with red nose running clear and yellow, unchecked, onto his lips and chin, began to sneeze.

Title graphic: "Take Aim" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

One cat has a name. Two
become mere plural.
Ditto for puppies, twins.
Each bright star flares mediocre
in the midst
of brilliant company.

Ditto, yes. Once,
image was born of wax.
Who of that certain
age does not know
the preciousness of wet purple,
the chemical lilt,
each spirit master surrendering
something of itself
in the transformation to multiples?

What is it they say, An heir
and a spare?

You, staking your place
beyond the nacreous gates,
would do well to remember:
All the cells in the nebulae
bear the same number.

Night into night, the house flinches
beneath wind- and rain-fall. Blister
cresting the slurried soil, it is
its own umbrella, overturned tuna can
straining against a gutter eddy,
the last pliosaur's unproven shell.

The atticless house shudders
under hooffall. That dogged ark,
its sodden inhabitants—all upended
without ceremony, the roofskin
a membrane a dispassionate god
would puncture freely with his staff.

Fascia, sill, doorframe: the watered
colors flee, bleeding into tooth
and ground, pencilled guylines
a vanishing tether. The house exists
where the rain does not, a frisket
mere fingertip could rub to crumble.

Grace Thierry disappeared on an early May morning in 1968. She and her mother had overslept, a common occurrence. Grace skipped her shower and breakfast, brushed her teeth but barely put a comb to her hair, which hung straight and wispy, like silk on an ear of corn. She wore no make-up, no nail polish, no perfume, often no bra, and after many fruitless arguments, Lucy had learned to keep her beauty advice to herself. Grace's indifference to beauty and hygiene was, Lucy decided, a small badge of independence, an extension of the anti-authoritarianism the young wore, these days, as a badge of honor. Mothers paid to have their own hair curled, so daughters wore theirs straight. Parents drank gin; their children (though not, she hoped, Grace) smoked grass. Mothers wore skirts that dropped to the knee; daughters, miniskirts that you couldn't even sit down in. Of course, here she didn't need to worry. Grace never wore skirts or dresses anymore. As best Lucy could tell, her daughter had completely stopped shaving her legs as well.

"Goodbye, Mom," Grace said, as she rushed from her bedroom. She wore baggy, bell-bottomed jeans and a peasant blouse, tie-dyed purple, with leather lacing open at the chest. Lucy stood at the hall mirror frantically working on her own hair. Grace breezed past but Lucy caught her arm.

"Hang on," Lucy said. "Let's have a look."

"Mom," Grace protested, slouching, her back against the wall. "I'm late."

Her breasts bulged from the open blouse, exposing crescents of creamy skin.

"Grace," Lucy said, shaking her head. "I can practically see your nipples."

"Mom, come on. I look fine."

"Boys will think you're easy."

"Boys don't even look at me."

"Oh, I doubt that."

"They don't. And I don't care."

"I fail to see why you won't wear a brassiere. It lifts, it separates. You want your breasts bouncing off your knees when you're my age?"

Grace rolled her eyes. "Just let me go," she said.

"Oh, fine," Lucy said. "Dress like a vagabond, what do I care." She turned back to the mirror. "Look at this mess. My hair's a disaster this morning."

Grace grabbed her schoolbooks from the table and hurried out the door.

She was fifteen.

Perhaps three minutes—no more than five, Lucy would eventually tell the police detective—passed between the time Grace left the house and the moment the school bus driver began honking his horn. Annoyed, Lucy looked out the window. The yellow bus stood implacably in the street at the end of her driveway, a hulking yellow box, its red lights flashing eerily in the morning fog. The horn sounded again.

"What in hell is going on?" Lucy said, aloud. She opened the front door and hurried angrily down the driveway. Nearing the bus, she raised her arms at her sides, as if to say, "What?"

The driver opened a small window and leaned toward her. He had a dark, greasy mustache and long hair. He shouted over the hum of the idling engine. "Your daughter coming to school today?"

"What are you talking about? She's on the bus, isn't she?"

"No, she's not."

Lucy shook her head. "She must be. She came out five minutes ago. Lucy looked back at the porch. She glanced into the open garage where her car, a gold Pontiac Tempest with a black vinyl top, sat dripping oil. "Grace!" she shouted. She looked up and noticed the line of tired, forlorn faces in the bus windows. Someone had drawn a peace sign in the mist covering one of the windows. Lucy put her hands on her hips. "I can't believe this."

"Maybe her boyfriend picked her up?" the driver asked.

Lucy shook her head. "She doesn't have a boyfriend."

The bus driver looked up in his mirror, then back down at Lucy. He chewed his gum urgently. A line of cars had crept up the street from both directions. A man in a blue Chevrolet glared at Lucy over his steering wheel. Someone in one of the cars in the other line began honking his horn.

"Gracey!" Lucy shouted again, her voice urgent and desperate. "Get on this goddamned bus! Stop fooling around."

Nothing.

"I can't wait all day," the driver said.

Lucy looked up at him. She let out a deep breath. "All right," she said to the driver, waving her arm.

The bus roared away in a cloud of exhaust, followed by a string of cars ten or twelve deep.

Lucy marched up the driveway and into the garage. She angrily threw open the car door, expecting to find Grace slumped in the front seat, seeking a ride to school, something she used to do occasionally. Lucy returned to the house, checked the bathroom. Nothing. "Grace?" she said. "Are you in here?" She went back down the hall, opened the door to the girl's bedroom, flipped on the light.

The messiest room in their always cluttered house, it was a disaster: clothes all over the floor, record albums left everywhere out of their jackets, dirty socks and underwear lying where they'd been removed, books strewn about—including Lucy's loaned copy of Valley of the Dolls, which Grace had rejected in favor of Ariel, a book by some suicidal poet her English teacher had turned her on to—pads of drawing paper and colored pencils spilled across the card table Grace used as a desk.

Above the headboard of her twin bed, Grace kept a poster of the Beatles—a larger version of the cover of their latest album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Lucy had given it to Grace as a present on her fourteenth birthday, and she'd played it on the record player repeatedly for months. This new music seemed to be everywhere now, along with these young men and their long hair. Even though Paul was the cute one, Grace had persisted in proclaiming Ringo her favorite, he of the crooked eyes, the large nose, the hangdog expression, the least talent. Ever since she was a little girl, Grace had always liked the puppy no one else wanted to bring home.

Covering the other walls were Grace's own drawings on paper torn from sketch pads. A few were penciled images of her friends, cute girls with large eyes and straight hair, sketched from their school pictures. Nearly all of the others were pictures of horses done in colored pencil—pairs of horses running through fields, their tails and manes dancing in the wind, mares and foals grazing peacefully at streamside, or lone horses seemingly floating through the sky.

As a young girl, Grace had begged for a horse each birthday and every Christmas, but there was never money for such an extravagance. Buying food, even, had often been difficult. They ate a lot of rice and potatoes, but Grace never complained. Car payments were beyond their means at first so they always rode the bus, and sometimes, in order to make her rent, Lucy had to beg secret checks from her father, who mailed them without her mother's knowledge. In a moment of weakness, Lucy once promised Grace riding lessons, but those never materialized. In time, Grace resigned herself to drawing pictures of horses, which seemed to give her some solace and satisfaction. Of course, Lucy felt guilty about it. She felt most guilty when her own failings caused Grace to make accommodations for the harsh realities of the world too soon, too permanently, for a girl of her age.

Lucy closed the door to Grace's room, went to the kitchen, and sat at the Formica table, still cluttered with last night's supper dishes. Her skirt stuck to the tape, now peeling, which had been holding the stuffing inside her chair. With quivering fingers, she lit a cigarette and examined her nail polish, which had begun to chip. She decided she'd wait until 8:05, until the start of the school day, and then she would call the school to see if Grace had arrived. Perhaps someone she knew had driven by, offered a ride, and—against rules Lucy thought she'd made clear—Grace had accepted. Or perhaps the bus driver was right. Grace was only a sophomore in high school, not yet sixteen, but maybe she did have a secret boyfriend. If this were true, then Grace had lied to her face that morning. It was certainly possible. Over the past few months, it felt at times as if Grace was drifting away from her, borne on an invisible current to some new, secret land. The thought depressed her.

In the meantime, she called Joan, the assistant manager at the beauty parlor, to ask her to open up the store. Lucy managed the shop and it was her habit to arrive first, open the doors, put on the coffee, reorganize the magazines, before the other stylists began arriving at 8:45. Customer appointments didn't begin until nine. Lucy could have delegated that responsibility—"You're the manager, Mom," Grace always told her. "You can do anything"—but she rarely ever did.

At six minutes after eight, Lucy telephoned the high school, identified herself, and asked if her daughter had arrived. The secretary informed her that attendance reports from homeroom classes would not come in until after morning announcements, which would finish in several minutes, so would she kindly call back? Lucy agreed and hung up the telephone. At 8:15, she telephoned again, asked if homeroom attendance reports had come in. They had.

"Grace Thierry," Lucy said. She spelled the last name.

"Absent," the secretary said.

Lucy felt a heavy weight drop into her chest. "Are you sure?"

"Absent," the woman repeated.

Lucy sighed. "That can't be right. She's a straight A student. She wouldn't skip school."

"I have two teenagers. Nothing they do surprises me anymore."

"But this is so unlike her." Lucy felt her voice breaking. She sniffed in her tears and swallowed. "I'm sorry. I'm going to be late for work, and this is frustrating."

"Maybe she's here. We've found kids smooching in janitors' closets and sleeping in the gym bleachers." She laughed. "If we don't find them here, the truancy officer, her name's Gail, Officer Padgett, will get on their trail. She usually finds them. Most of the time they're off somewhere listening to records."

Lucy paced, winding the telephone cord on and off her left index finger. "But has anyone ever not been found?"

"You mean not ever? You mean, have they run away, or something?"

"Or been taken."

"No," the secretary said. She paused, as if thinking it over. "No. Not ever. If someone is truant several consecutive days, their name is turned over to the police department and it can be a serious matter. But we're talking about kids skipping school. If you think maybe your daughter has run away, then that's something you should discuss with the police. I can give you their telephone number if you'd like."

Lucy sighed. "No," she said. "But thank you. You've been very helpful."

"My advice: don't worry. My guess is your daughter will come home when she usually does, pretending she's been at school. Ask her what she learned in school today. That's what my husband does. He says it's one of the few times it's fun to be a parent of teenagers."

Lucy smiled. "I suppose you're right," she said. "Thank you for your time."

Lucy arrived at work by 9:20, not nearly as late as she'd feared. She endured the silent treatment from her first customer, a 9:15 who wanted her hair dyed the color of Lucille Ball's, a garish orange that did not complement her face or skin tone at all, but she would not be talked out of it. And even though Lucy engaged her subsequent customers in conversation and laughed at their jokes as she gave them permanents and coloring treatments and shag cuts—so many younger women wanted to look like Twiggy—throughout the day, in the back of her mind, always, was the haunting presence of her missing daughter.

Every hour, give or take, Lucy went into the office and called home. She listened as the phone rang and rang, her stomach clenched, urging Grace to pick up. Where could she be? Of course, Lucy worried, sometimes so much her hands started shaking, sometimes almost to distraction. Over the course of the day, her fear was slowly replaced by anger. In the morning, as she watched the clock move toward noon, a small voice inside her kept asking, "Where are you, Grace? Where are you?" But by afternoon, that voice that grown louder and more harsh: "How dare you do something so dishonest, so thoughtless? How dare you, Grace."

It had always been just the two of them, mother and daughter, parent and child. At one time, didn't they share everything with one another? Certainly, they argued, they fought, they cried, but there was always respect. Lucy had done her best. She had always held her head high, pretended not to hear the disapproving whispers when she rushed late into concerts and recitals and other programs without a husband, without having ever been married at all. Her devotion to Grace, she hoped, had always been obvious, to Grace, at least, if not to others. If Grace had wanted to skip school, she needed only to ask and Lucy certainly would have allowed it, would have even provided an alibi. One day of school—what would it hurt? Grace was a marvelous student—smart, creative, responsible. All her teachers said so. It simply didn't make sense that she would sell her relationship with Lucy and her reputation with her teachers so cheaply. To smooch with a boy somewhere or listen to a new record album? It didn't make any sense.

At five-thirty, Lucy left the beauty parlor and headed home, a surge of anxiety bordering on panic growing in her stomach. Nearly everything about being a parent had turned out more difficult than she had imagined, but what she found most difficult was the anxiety. Being a parent meant you spent most of your waking hours worrying. And that had not changed, no matter how old her daughter became. When Grace was a baby, particularly during the most difficult times—when she was sick with a high fever, with croup, with the measles—Lucy sometimes wondered if she should have listened to her parents and allowed Grace to be adopted into a home where should would have had all the advantages. She felt deeply the privations Grace endured living without a father, without enough money, without a steady, stable home. Lucy had devoted her life to Grace, had made nearly every decision since her birth with Grace's welfare in mind, but she often felt overcome by the fear that it hadn't been enough.

Growing up, Grace had never been the kind of girl one would have described as happy. Lucy had few photographs of Grace actually smiling. Even in her school pictures, dating all the way back to kindergarten, the girl had always stared at the camera warily, like one of those starving children in a magazine advertisement to raise money for the poor. If joy came to her at all, it was elusive, tempered by what might have been—something more worthy, or more perfectly imagined. Ice cream tasted delicious, but it melted too fast. Friends—the few she made and kept—were wonderful, until they failed to reciprocate Grace's own fierce loyalty and devotion. Puberty, once longed for, proved to be monumentally overrated.

It wasn't as if Grace were easy company. She could be demanding. Intense was the word preferred by her teachers. Grace was the kind of child who erased writing mistakes with such fury she bore a hole through the paper. She had high expectations, which nearly always left her disappointed. When she entered her teens, she became so taciturn that she wouldn't talk unless the conversation mattered—her word—which made her seem shy on her best days, vain and unapproachable on her worst.

Much of this, Lucy felt, might have been her fault. Because Lucy had to move from one town to the next chasing better paying jobs while working her way through beauticians' correspondence school and trying to be a mother and father all at once, Grace had made few close friends before middle school. Each search for a new apartment came with its own set of horrors. Few landlords would rent to an unmarried woman with a child. Lucy had taken to lying, to saying, "Grace's father is no longer with us," couching their situation in language that could be misconstrued to mean she was a widow. This worked for several years, until Grace was in second grade and she began parroting the phrase herself with teachers and schoolmates, prompting embarrassing, mistaken telephone calls of condolence.

In her favor, Grace seemed unfazed by all the dingy apartments and the new schools. Changes that would have paralyzed other children seemed, if anything, to excite her. Each time she started at a new school, Grace would wander up the sidewalk, clutching her books to her flat chest like a shield, ignoring the chatty girls giggling at the inappropriate length of the knee socks, stretched up clear over her knees, or her ratty thrift-store jumper. Eventually, as she reached the upper grades, Grace turned everything to her advantage by exaggerating her differences, choosing, for example, in fifth grade, to wear socks of two starkly different colors every day, pants instead of skirts, and baseball caps over her uncombed hair. They had squalled over that for weeks—the daughter of a beautician, not even combing her hair!—but Lucy had finally relented.

Grace's teachers, though, uniformly praised her, not only for her intellect, but also, and especially, for her resourcefulness and creativity. "A precocious young lady," one of her art teachers wrote, in fourth grade. "Gifted as no other student I have ever taught." Lucy could no longer remember the assignment, but that year Grace had made a mobile with coat hangers, fishing line, and butterflies cut from recycled greeting cards. What made it particularly noteworthy was that she had arranged the butterflies to hang in the positions of the nine planets in the solar system, matched in size, and a large, yellow flower floating in the center as the sun. When Lucy praised her for this ingenuity, Grace had simply shrugged. "I had to make a mobile for art, and I had to do some sort of project on our solar system for science. I combined them. It was just easier."

Lucy didn't see any lights on when she pulled up the driveway to her house, but that wasn't unusual. She would often find Grace in her bedroom doing homework in the dark, with a record album playing, and a tendril of smoky, sandalwood incense rising from the stand on her dresser.

"Grace!" Lucy said, hopefully, as she burst through the front door. The house was silent. She hurried to the bedroom. Empty.

She paged through the telephone book and found the number of the local police department, reached someone there who put her on the line with a soft-spoken detective named Thompson. He asked a lot of questions, took all of her information, said he would check with Officer Padgett, find out what she knew. He asked if Grace had any friends or boyfriends Lucy could call to ask about her daughter's whereabouts. He seemed to find it unusual that Lucy didn't know of any. Finally, he asked if she'd be home the rest of the evening, and Lucy said she would be.

Detective Thompson said, "She'll come home soon. I've been doing this job a long time, and ninety-nine and nine-tenths of the time in cases like this, the kids are just off somewhere goofing around. But I'll see what I can find out."

"Do you need a picture of her?"

"No." This made Lucy feel relieved. "Let me kick it around a bit. This is a small town. I know all the hiding spots."

Lucy hung up the telephone. She tried not to worry, but she wasn't good at it. Even though it was only beginning to grow dark outside, she turned all the lights on in the house, made it a bright beacon, easily found. She finished her cigarette and lit another, changed out of her work clothes, pulled all the bobby pins out of her hair and let it fall down in a mess around her shoulders. She turned on the television to distract herself, tried to watch the evening news. More violence in Vietnam, young men killed, thousands of pounds of bombs dropping. In Paris, students were rioting about something. Protesters were marching in Chicago. The world was falling apart.

At seven o'clock, tears of fear and worry wetting her face, she dug her address book out of the junk drawer in the kitchen and after several minutes of paralysis, staring at his name, dialed Jean Paul Thierry.

In the summer of 1953, she had gone to France on a three-week program as an American student ambassador. She had met Jean Paul in Paris near the end of her trip. His English was only slightly better than her French then, but somehow they started a conversation among other students in a small, smoky brasserie on the rue Descartes, and later that night she had left with him, shocking her schoolmates and herself. He had driven her around Paris in the smallest car she'd ever been in, pointing at things with a smoking cigarette—the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, smiling at her excitement. Who would not feel enchanted being driven down the Champs Elysees by a beautiful, young Frenchman in a white T-shirt, twenty-two years old, with dark hair and blue eyes, chain-smoking Gitanes? He dropped her at the hotel just before dawn, walked her in, kissed her softly on the lips, promised to return for her late that afternoon, when he got off of work.

And he did. He came the next afternoon, too, and the one after that. He took her to see the Impressionists at the Jeu de Paume, walked with her, hand in hand, through the cavernous halls of the Louvre. He took her to a beautiful mansion filled with sculptures by Rodin, and afterward, on a park bench, as they laughed, he posed with her in imitation of Rodin's "The Kiss." Then on the weekend, three days before her departure for the United States, he drove her out of the city for a night alone together, and she could not resist him.

They left Paris in the morning in a soft rain, and he went West across the countryside, between rows of plane trees, past picturesque country houses, crumbling stone buildings and charred wooden bridges that had been bombed during the war. When Jean Paul placed his hand on her knee, electric charges surged up her legs and exploded in a warm heat in her lower belly, up her arms, into her neck. After four years of high school French, she could pick up only occasional words—he spoke so fast—but what he was saying to her didn't really matter.

When the rain let up, he pulled over into a field near a large oak tree and lowered the fabric roof of his little car. The sun poured in, and the air smelled like rain and freshly mowed grass. Behind the seat he had placed in a woven basket a bottle of wine, two glasses, some Camembert cheese, and a baguette. After letting down the top of the car, Jean Paul opened the wine, a warm, soft red that made Lucy's face flush. He spread the cheese on slices of bread and they ate and drank and laughed. They kissed in the car for a long time, his hands wandering down to her breasts, where his gentleness left him, but only briefly. If it weren't for the dark clouds and the light rain that began again, they might have shed their clothes right then. But Jean Paul held a hand out, shrugged, and then smiled as he pulled the fabric top back up on his car.

They drove the rest of the way to Mont St. Michel and arrived in late afternoon. From the distance, it looked to Lucy like some medieval fortress rising out of the sea grass. A large flock of sheep and a few horses grazed the fields and salt marsh along the roadside. As they approached the island, Lucy could see how the Atlantic encircled it on three sides, could make out the church spires that soared at the very top. It was unlike anything she had ever seen. She had read about Mont St. Michel in her French classes, certainly. Henry Adams had written an entire book about it. But she never expected it to be so beautiful, so otherworldly.

Jean Paul parked the car. They took their small satchels of clothing from the tiny trunk and walked all the way to the top, moving along narrow, cobblestone streets and stone stairways worn smooth by the feet of millions. He held her hand and never let go. Once at the top, they entered a small, elegant hotel with worn limestone floors, wispy antique furniture, and faded tapestries of pasture scenes—grazing sheep, innocent-looking shepherd boys—hanging from the walls. Lucy's stomach churned as Jean Paul spoke with the clerk behind the desk, who took his colorful money, then smiled politely at Lucy as he slid the heavy room key, tied with a small sash of braided gold ribbon, across the counter.

Lucy felt like an actress in the movies. They were in the hotel room only long enough to place their bags on the floor when their mouths came together, their bodies wet and hungry and anxious. They fell on the bed laughing, pulled awkwardly at one another's clothes. Jean Paul kissed her everywhere, even on her feet, and when they made love—for Lucy, the first time—it hurt so much that she cried out, so much that she didn't think she could continue. But Jean Paul grew gentle, dried her tears with his fingertips, slowed down. He rolled over so she was on top of him and could control everything, and the pain went away, became a pleasure unlike anything to which she might compare it.

They made love twice more that evening, and though Lucy grew sore, she did not want it to stop. Can this really be me? Lucy thought, as Jean Paul grunted and sighed, the taste of his cigarettes in her mouth, the rough stubble of his whiskers burning against her cheeks, her shoulders, her stomach, her legs. She could not believe what this man did to her, but she let him do it, closed her eyes and let her body go, felt everything with an intensity that made her teary and breathless. She touched his penis, held it in her hand as if she were gripping a hammer, looked at it closely, even—once—kissed the end softly, smelled the saltiness of his sex. Jean Paul seemed devoid of shyness or insecurity—he walked around the room naked, his uncircumcised penis, in a nest of thick black hair, flopping against his thighs—and somehow that confidence passed to Lucy. She had never been naked with a man before, had never been touched where he touched her, kissed where he kissed her, had never done anything close to this.

Of course it had all ended badly. Two days later, he could not meet for her departing flight, so they had no proper goodbye. Promised daily letters and weekly telephone calls dwindled, then stopped altogether. When Lucy missed her period, when her breasts grew tender and she began waking in the morning with a surge of nausea, she realized she'd made a mistake that would not easily be undone, could not, in 1953, legally be undone at all.

A girl could get swept away. She had been eighteen, three years older than Grace was now. She had been accepted into college, had intended to become a high school French teacher. But things could happen that lead you out beyond the fences, into open fields where you are not safe from anything. Lucy knew that. You could experience something unforgettably beautiful and ruin your life, or change its direction unalterably. She had vowed not to let it happen to her daughter. She had not realized, until now, the naiveté of making such a vow.

Her heart began beating harder as she dialed the telephone, wondered if the international code for France was still the same. It had been so long since she'd spoken to Jean Paul. Years.

The telephone rang, six, seven, eight times. Then it stopped, was interrupted by a soft, sleepy voice: "Allo?" Him?

"Hello? Jean Paul?"

"Allo?" A pause. "Il est deux heures du matin!"

Lucy began crying. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't remember any French. Can you please speak in English?"

"In English?" It sounded like Eeeng—leeeesh. "Who is there, please?"

"Jean Paul, I'm so sorry. This is Lucy."

"Lucy?" A long pause. Her heart fell. He did not recognize her voice. "It is two hours in the morning. Who is there?"

"Lucy," she said, again. "Lucy Fisher. The mother of your daughter, Grace."

"Ah!" he said. "Oh, Lucy! I am sorry. I did not recognize you. Yes. Of course. Are you here at the airport?"

"Oh no," she said. "No. Jean Paul. I'm calling from the United States. From Wisconsin."

He laughed. "We are six hours before you, yes? You forget?"

"Yes," Lucy said. "I forgot. I'm sorry." She covered her mouth, stifled a sob.

"What's wrong?"

"It's Grace," she said, and the details of the day spilled from her mouth. She told him everything. Jean Paul listened patiently.

"Ah," Jean Paul said, finally. "And you think Grace is on her way here, maybe?"

The thought startled Lucy. She had never even considered this. Why would Grace want to see Jean Paul? She had never met him, had only seen pictures. Certainly, he regularly sent her presents on Christmas and her birthdays. He had done that, which was more than Lucy ever expected. But beyond that, he was not part of Grace's life.

"No," Lucy said. "I don't think she's going to France."

"That's good," Jean Paul responded. "Now is not a good time. The students are going crazy. People are burning cars in the street."

"I think maybe someone's taken her," Lucy said.

"Taken her? What do you mean?"

"I don't know." she said. "I have no idea. But Grace has never done anything like this before. It's not like her to just disappear."

"She's a beautiful, young girl." Jean Paul chuckled. "She is at the age of love, yes? She is probably in the movie house right now, kissing so long her lips are sore."

Lucy shook her head. "No," she said. "If you saw her—Grace doesn't even comb her hair. She can't be with a boy."

Jean Paul didn't respond immediately. "How do you know?" he said, at last. "She is not a little girl. She might keep such things to herself now."

Lucy blew up. "How can you presume to know anything about her?" she said. "You're six thousand miles away."

He said, softly, "Lucy. I am sorry. Of course. You are with her every day. I only know what she says in her letters—"

"Her what?" The words burst from Lucy's mouth.

"I'm sorry?"

"What are you talking about? What letters?"

"We are writing each other almost every month. Since she started taking French in the eighth year."

"Eighth grade," Lucy corrected him.

"Yes. Her French is getting better."

"Do you write her back?"

"Of course."

Lucy swallowed back her panic. "Why don't I see any of your letters?"

"I don't know. It is not a secret I am keeping. I tell her to say hello to you. Each time."

The school bus dropped Grace off nearly an hour and a half before Lucy got home from work. Lucy realized how easily Grace could retrieve and hide Jean Paul's letters. Lucy paused to consider this information.

"In her letters," Lucy asked, finally, feeling betrayed, resentful, "does she say anything about a boyfriend?"

Jean Paul sighed. "She made me promise never to tell, but you are so worried about her, I will share it. She is in love. With someone she calls 'A'."

"'A'," Lucy repeated.

"Yes. Just the letter. Someone she adores."

Adores, Lucy thought. She rolled her eyes. The French were so melodramatic.

"She keeps a lock of A's hair under her mattress," Jean Paul added. "Tied in a purple ribbon."

Lucy fell into a chair. She felt dazed. Exhausted. Her fingers quivered against the telephone. She struggled to think of something to say. She wanted to drop the telephone, rush into Grace's bedroom, and flip the mattress.

Jean Paul said, generously, "Lucy. Do not be angry. It is easier for her to tell me such things. I am just words on paper. A stranger, almost. So there is no risk."

Perhaps it was the way he said "reeeesk," or her exhaustion after a long, fearful day, or relief that kidnapping was now unlikely, given this new bit of news, but Lucy began laughing. Her shoulders started shaking, her head fell forward, and she laughed, almost hysterically. All she had to do, she realized now, was check the list of absent students and find the boy whose name started with A—an Andrew or Alex or Allan—and she would find her daughter. Better yet, Lucy thought, just to be safe: round up all the A's, and then line them up along the wall in the gym and shoot them.

She and Jean Paul talked for another ten minutes, and in that time, the sweetness of long ago began to glow again inside of her. He had lived with a woman for nine years, had a child with her, a son, now six years old. But they'd broken it off, and he now lived alone. He still ran a small movie house in Paris, near the Sorbonne, but it was doing poorly. He no longer liked de Gaulle. He loved America, he said, but could never live there. Before they hung up, he invited Lucy to Paris, said to come with Grace for a visit over the holidays. Lucy thanked him for the gesture, said there was no way they could afford the airfare.

She cried when she hung up the telephone. She didn't know why, but she was exhausted, sick with worry, overcome by thoughts of Jean Paul. She wiped her face on a dishtowel, then went into Grace's bedroom, dropped to her knees along the bed, lifted the mattress. Even though she expected it, she was still surprised to find the hair. On the box spring, beneath where Grace's heart would be if she slept on her stomach, was a rope of braided, blonde hair, as thick as her little finger, maybe seven inches long, tied on both ends with a bit of purple ribbon. So, Lucy thought, 'A' has hair like the Beatles. No surprise there. She lowered the mattress, returned the blankets to their previous mess.

The rest of that evening, Lucy felt lost. As she picked at a salad for her supper, she told herself when she finished eating it, Grace would arrive at the door. As she ran the water in the bathtub, she thought, Grace will be home when the tub is full. Twenty-five minutes later, she told herself Grace would walk in the door when all the water had drained from the tub. None of her strategies worked. At nine-thirty, she combed out her hair, turned out the lights, crawled under the covers of her bed. She closed her eyes, but knew she would not sleep. Deep inside her remained the fear she still carried for Grace, a fear which would not dissolve until her daughter walked safely back into her house.

Then at ten minutes past ten, the telephone rang, and Lucy leaped out of bed to answer. Detective Thompson.

"Mrs. Fisher, good news. We've got Grace and her friend here at the station," he said. "You can come down and pick her up."

Tears filled Lucy's eyes. Inside her, she felt as if this simple happiness, the safety of her beloved child, was all she would ever need. "Is she all right?" Lucy asked.

"She's fine," Detective Thompson said.

Lucy felt overwhelmed by the depth, the intensity, of her gratitude. "Thank you." she said, almost shouting into the telephone. "Thank you."

"No problem," the detective answered. "Glad everything worked out. We'll see you in a little while."

Driving back home, with Grace safely in the car beside her, Lucy kept looking over at her daughter. Her heart pounded so furiously inside her chest she could feel her own pulse surging throughout her body. Grace sat with her head against the far window, crying softly, pausing to wipe the tears from her cheeks with the tips of her fingers.

"I just want to understand," Lucy said.

"You couldn't possibly," said Grace.

When Lucy arrived at the police station, she was led to Detective Thompson, a balding man, shorter and older than she'd imagined. He chain-smoked and wore a rumpled blue sport coat that needed a good pressing. He explained that they'd found Grace and her friend near Neshkoro, a small town about ten miles away. They were hiding inside a barn that housed several valuable Arabian horses. The farmer had discovered them there. The police arrested them for trespassing, but the farmer decided not to press charges. The horses had been exquisitely groomed, their manes and tails braided. Grace had brushed them for so many hours that their coats were as smooth as Chinese silk.

The stolen car was another matter. Grace and her friend had pulled the car into the barn to hide it. Apparently they had listened to the radio most of the day, because when they tried to leave, the car wouldn't start. The battery could not turn over the engine.

"Grace stole a car?" Lucy asked, nearly in shock.

The detective shook his head. No, it hadn't been Grace. Her friend had stolen the car. The mother's car. She had reported it missing that morning.

"He stole his mother's car?" Lucy said. "What's this delinquent's name? Alex? Andrew? I know it starts with an A. I'll find out if you can't tell me. Any boy who steals his own mother's car is not going to spend any more time with my daughter."

"Alice," Detective Thompson said. He pursed his lips.

"Alice?" Lucy repeated.

The detective nodded. He leaned toward Lucy and lowered his voice. Grace and Alice had been found asleep, lying on a horse blanket in the straw, with another blanket thrown over them. Moreover, he said, inside the car the police had found several Polaroids. The girls had taken pictures of one another sitting on one of the horses, wearing only underpants. He removed an envelope from inside the jacket pocket, slid it across the desk to Lucy.

Lucy's mouth went dry. She suddenly felt hot and flushed. She concentrated on each breath. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She heard a high-pitched ringing in her ears, felt as if she were under a hot sun in a boat, rocking on open water. She felt for the floor with the bottom of her feet. For the moment, she was afraid of what sound, what words, might come from her mouth if she tried to speak. She was afraid that she might not be able to speak at all. The detective's voice seemed far away, bubbling up from a deep well, from under water.

Lucy felt as if she might faint. She wiped her forehead with the palm of her hand. The room had stopped spinning.

"Is that everything?" Lucy said, standing up suddenly.

"Well. Yes, ma'am," he answered.

Lucy grabbed the envelope of pictures from his desk, tucked them into her purse. "Thank you for finding my daughter."

"You're welcome," he answered. He held out one arm. "They're down here. Right this way." He motioned to a brightly lit hallway with walls painted a pale, institutional gray. After a few steps, Lucy paused. She turned back toward the detective. "Her father's French," Lucy said.

"Ma'am?"

"Grace's father," she smiled. "He's French." It wasn't much, but it felt good to say it.

The detective nodded, waited for more. Lucy turned away.

Now what Lucy remembered most, what she could not get out of her mind, was seeing Grace and Alice say goodbye. Alice was not the rough, gum-chewing, hard-talking delinquent Lucy had expected. Petite and pretty, she seemed not much taller than five feet, Lucy guessed, and flat-chested, with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose. She wore faded blue jeans ripped open at both knees, leather sandals, and a large, baggy T-shirt, perhaps her father's, that reached over her thighs.

Before leaving with her mother, Grace had stood and turned to Alice, and the two of them had pressed their foreheads together, wrapped skinny arms around shoulders, clenched in an awkward embrace. Grace wiped at Alice's tears with her fingertips. They stood looking at each other, crying, until Grace turned to leave with her mother.

Lucy pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition but did not move to get out of the car.

"I'm sorry," Grace said, softly.

"Gracey." Lucy sighed. "I was so goddamn worried. I used up my whole heart today over you. You have no idea."

"I said I'm sorry." Grace repeated.

Lucy leaned across the car. She pulled Grace's head against her mouth, kissed her daughter so hard she bloodied her own lip. She tasted blood on her tongue. A pungent odor drifted from Grace's body, a smell that blended the sweetness of hay with Grace's sweat and the musky scent of horses.

"What did Jean Paul say?" Grace asked. "Did he tell you?"

Lucy opened her mouth to answer, but stopped. She stared at her daughter's beautiful face, barely distinguishable in the darkness. Of course. Grace had known exactly what to do. It made Lucy feel both angry and somewhat pleased to be known so well by her daughter. The revelation that Grace liked another girl had been tempered, smoothed of its sharpest edges, by Lucy's sheer joy at seeing Grace found alive and well.

"You're grounded," Lucy said.

"How long?" Grace said.

"Long enough." Lucy opened her purse, pulled out the envelope of pictures, placed them on her daughter's lap. "You should have these."

Grace leaned into her mother, and Lucy put an arm around her shoulders. She held her daughter as she used to when Grace was young and sad about something, but she knew the days she could provide the kind of comfort Grace needed were growing shorter. The daughter who left the house that morning had disappeared. Someone else had come back, someone beautiful and brave who would demand more of the world than it was ready to give.

Lucy pinched her eyes closed. The life Grace had chosen—the life which had chosen Grace—was not the life Lucy would have picked for her, but Lucy smiled as she realized, with painful recognition and some joy, that she and Grace would always have this in common: in their hearts they would carry the pain of loving something they could not fully have, and the pureness of the memory that first planted it there.

Title graphic: "Fillies" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

Afterward, the walk
to the car, across sheep fields
behind the highway,
over unsettled gravel
through the jostling
crawl of head lights,
the last fireworks
arcing to realize
unspent explosions.

They rock what's left
of the ruddy sky
with flared bursts, music
now gone, the only chorus
accidental birds or a spooked
dog, Sousa's tympanis
long done their resounding
over the valley.

The flicker sprays, the last coughs
over those trying to get home,
out of place, out of time,
incomplete tongues
of earlier conflagrations,
a language at its end.

Headlights now
pull the stars to earth,
sequin the beginning of rain—
that surest way to clean
a sky of smoke.

In this night, washed
of fire, take my hand once
more, step where I step,
know what I know.
Let dark bind us again.

Adjacent to the Old City, a short ride from where the cruise ships were docked, Esperanza strutted across the hotel's polished tile floor to a small sign written in a florid font: "Chez Louis, Club Privée." She shuffled past the guard with a flash of her uncle's card, smirking as his eyes made a lurid sweep of her body. He sees me, she thought, pleased. If only Alejandro would, too. Ten past ten. The crowd was dressed in the elegant European clothes purchased on trips abroad. The dancers were gyrating this way and that to the torrid Cuban music; their faces were wet and shiny. Escapism, Esperanza thought. They have their way, I mine. She ran her hand across her own damp brow, remembering last night. The night before. The one before that. Esperanza hoped her mother wasn't watching from heaven. She had to make it out of Colombia, tonight.

Selecting a stool at the bar, Esperanza stretched herself up tall, practiced adjusting the slit in her mother's taffeta sheath to show more leg. Anxious, she swiveled toward the band and the dancers, assuming what she hoped was a seductive face: one languid, transported. A face ready to transport.

The waiter was slow. Her carefully selected Carmenère arrived only seconds before Alejandro. Her mother's friend was even more handsome than she'd remembered, his suit better tailored, his shirt custom-made in Hong Kong. Still, there was a weariness about him. His black and grey hair dangled in thick, soft curls over a furrowed brow. The night lights of the club shadowed the deep, craggy ridges in his cheeks. Life had run down those ridges, Esperanza thought. Life had carved them out. Her success would lie in reaching their depth, in touching what was healed over, making the man underneath feel something through the numbness of his scars. She'd have to pierce all shields, gain his attention long enough to make herself addictive, cajole him into sheltering her beyond the reach of the men she'd angered, her uncle's customers, the men with machetes in their trunks, poppy dust on their tires, lust in their eyes.

A man down the bar, vaguely familiar, raised his brows at her, touched his wallet. Esperanza froze, felt her armpits prickle. The time was now.

Esperanza lifted her glass toward Alejandro, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. "This is one of my favorites," she told him, naming his best Carmenère. She tried to speak knowledgeably, as if she'd been drinking wine for years, mentioning how rare the wine was, unique to his homeland of Chile, a country that had been spared by its isolation from the phylloxera that killed the Carmenère vines in Europe.

"Your uncle taught you well," he said, his eyes on the dancers, slightly bored, entirely free from lust. Her mother had been right about him. This man wasn't like the rest.

Alejandro had courted her mother years ago, when her father was withering away from cancer. But while he'd won her mother's respect and perhaps even her heart, nothing he could do would bring her to walk out on her ailing husband. Now Esperanza had to make him see her not as what she had been—her mother's little girl—but as a grown woman of eighteen. She had to reach across the decades to him, for all his differences, still a man.

He was standing next to her, his back to the polished bar. She turned on the stool, brushed her breasts ever so briefly against his arm. He stiffened, moved away.

Pretending he hadn't noticed the touch, he said, "Your mother's dress. I remember her in that."

Esperanza shrugged. "She's long dead."

"Your uncle lets you work in his restaurant, takes care of you?"

She said nothing. Now wasn't the time to tell him about the customers, the ones who'd given her uncle money to be with her. She had to open his eyes to her, to make him see her as he'd never seen her before. How?

He was talking of his business trip to San Francisco, a group he'd addressed in the Napa Valley, of delays at customs, of the relief and relaxation of finally being at sea. He still didn't see her.

She thought for a minute, then waggled a painted fingertip at the slow waiter, explained what she wanted next.

"Chilis," he said, repeating her words, "chopped, I assume, with tomatoes—a chili salsa with chips perhaps?"

"No, no, no," she lifted her hands, raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes, winking at Alejandro. "Whole pasilla chilis. Whole jalapeños. Habarneros and serranos, too, if you have them. A plateful." Alejandro's eyes followed her hands as they fluttered, drew pictures of each type of chili in the air. "I don't eat meat," she explained. "And I hate being bored. I want chilis. The hotter the better." She gathered all five fingers to her lips now and flared them outward.

"Si, señorita," the waiter pronounced dutifully.

Suddenly Alejandro rose, checked his watch. "I have to make a call," he said, walking toward the exterior hallway, his cell phone in hand.

Was he thinking of a woman? Esperanza knew she must make him forget her. Otherwise tomorrow night it would be the one with the poppy dust on his shoes, the machete in his trunk. This was her only chance. Now, tonight.

A few minutes later, Alejandro returned, distractedly scrolling through his phone messages. Esperanza's chest was tight, her breath wheezy.

Just then, her plate arrived: multicolored, multi-shaped chilis beautifully arranged in a fan. Perfect, she thought. She and her chilis would stir up those ridges in Alejandro's cheeks, rouse his awareness. He resumed his talk of San Francisco, his eyes still on his phone. Esperanza nudged him, lifted a long pasilla chili high above her face, then lowered it quickly and bit off the bottom. Her mouth flared. So did Alejandro's eyes.

"Chilis," he said, dropping his phone into his pocket.

Esperanza pinched the stem of a squat, orange habarnero. "The English call this a 'scotch bonnet,'" she explained. Two men at a neighboring table turned their chairs to watch, making a scratching noise on the wooden floor. Arching her back and smiling at them, Esperanza dangled the chili over her mouth briefly, then opened and bit. Her eyes watered, but she didn't worry. She wore waterproof mascara.

The waiter, passing with a bread basket in hand, paused and watched. Esperanza took the last of the habarneros between pursed lips and chewed it slowly with nonchalant languor.

"Bravo!" the waiter said.

"Bravo!" the men at the nearby table repeated. One of them stood and clapped. Amusement skipped across Alejandro's face and lighted there. The ridges softened and his jaw relaxed. His eyes focused squarely on Esperanza at last, curious and keen.

She smiled, touched her lips with her tingling tongue. He's all mine, she thought. Now, tonight.

Title graphic: "Carmenère's Charm" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

I first notice them from the crumbling edge of a precarious viewpoint: white-peeling crosses, glinting plaques on the gray stone outcropping, pots of half-dead flowers anchored in gravel, their petals curled toward the tops of 14,000-foot mountain peaks. A bouquet of memorials in the penumbra of the overlook.

I'm driving through Colorado mountains with my husband's family. We press through thick fog and thunderstorms, the four-wheel drive creaking as we wind up the sheer sides of guardrail-less roads. Here at the viewpoint, we pile out to admire the wet, green canyon, the stained glass sparkles of the river three hundred feet below. I'm caught instead by the weathered metal slabs across the bumpy dirt road, memorials as nonchalant as certificates on a wall. "Mike—rest in peace." "Mikkelsen, 1939-82." "We miss you, silly daddy." I wonder at the placement of these markers at a turnout, where a family faces a breath-taking view and togetherness while I turn the other way, lungs stalled over the dead.

Who is this "silly daddy" stamped in metal on the wall? A young father, outdoor enthusiast, lean and bearded, who made his two children laugh with silly songs and stories, who took his family camping and S'mores-making, until this last camping trip when he left his family safe in the house. He was a likeable man, well-respected—a man now in past tense. Or maybe I'm laughably wrong, and the man is nothing like this imagined version. Does it matter to him or his aching survivors if I reinvent his character? Does it matter that, by association, or the spirit of the place, I'm inventing Mike and Mikkelsen as fathers, too? In my anxiousness to pay tribute to them, do I eulogize imaginary versions of the dead?

We construct homes for our dead, in cozy cemeteries, mausoleums, at a riverbank or beneath a beloved tree; places reverenced from the everyday, places visited with the intent to reawaken the departed, places for families. Memorials let us preserve the memory of the deceased in a public place, a place he felt at home, perhaps, rather than the foreign still of a cemetery he had never been. Or maybe, for those who came here for the first and last time, it is a place as unfamiliar as the moment of death. The memorial anchors the dead's presence to the living passage of time.

These markers on the cliff, like crosses along a highway, don't wait for meditative visitors. They haunt the carefree explorer. They intrude, whispering for attention. Do those who remain hope a stranger will take a moment to share the pain? Are these markers a warning—a shiver that life is not as firm and permanent as these immovable peaks? A reminder to hug your dad again, and again, and never say something you'll regret, because you just don't know when—

My husband's father stands a few steps from the unprotected edge. "What a view!" he exclaims enthusiastically, his wife and sons close behind, joking and snapping photos. I want to call them over here, to the memorials, but I'm not sure why. To snatch away their comfort and security? To shout out how close they are, how close we all are, to the gaping edge?

After that first turnout, I notice the markers everywhere we stop; dull smudges crowding the corners of my vision. On a block of marble on the edge of a drop: "Gus—the only thing he couldn't weld was a broken heart." On a bronze memorial, hanging on a cliff face by a rocky picnic spot: "Little Petie, 1988-2010." On a metal plaque in the ground on the side of the road, camouflaged with grass so that my foot hits metal before I notice, before I can jump back, apologetic: "HAW." On a handwritten sheet of paper protected with plastic, stapled to a telephone pole—"Dad please come home, we love you a lot." I am anxious to find them—these markers, these memories, these fathers.

I am staggered by the age of these mountains, each passing year an opportunity for more men to disappear into their depths, from causes left to imagination: fall, exposure, avalanche, lightning strike, starvation, heart attack, stupidity, suicide; the possible accidents: traffic, camping, work, weather. I picture a young man setting off firecrackers with friends in the dark, sprinting from the spitting fuse straight off a one-hundred-foot cliff; a working man driving his cargo down the mountain in a storm, eight tons of marble in the back shifting, sliding the truck off the slimy mud road, the marble blocks scattered among the wreckage like a buffet of headstones—headstones scratched with initials and dates, the bland sum of a life.

In the green dark of these mountains, I picture young men as future fathers, men with children and grandchildren, dead and missing fathers to number the pines that crowd this canyon, a few marked by plaques and memorials, some marked only by a picturesque creek lapping at twisted metal, most whose death signs have been erased by erosion and renewing earth.

I'm an outsider, staring at a memory: I don't know what they left behind or where their lives were headed. I don't know who weeps for them still, recalling memories like a fist to the chest. Maybe I'm wrong to believe the dead were beloved and innocent; maybe they neglected their families, maybe they left for the mountains in anger, or drunkenness, or selfishness, ignoring the child's hopeful look, the wife's plea, to just stay home for one weekend. But their families won't forget them: their absence remains a steady pressure, the weight of earth piled high, the press of mountain. Maybe their children are thinking of them now, and our thoughts combine, both summoning and creating them. They are contained in these mountains: a presence just barely out of grasp, like a wisp of cloud that gathers below a distant peak.

Title graphic, untitled, appears courtesy of Amy Roper.

Gray hair is a crown of splendor
—Proverbs 16:31

O how I wish that my wife, just once
would not slip through that bathroom door
to dye her hair that ungodly brown

O how I wish that my wife, just once
would let her fallacious hair rinse clear
allowing her argent age to shine

If only she would, I'd gather each strand
some threads white as winter rain
others dark as clear champagne

O how I'd rejoice! My old bones would dance
eyes delighted to witness my bride
bare as a prayer in her weary regard

O how I would smile despite her frown
kneeling arthritic
before her crown

By now, I know the drill: I take the elevator to the top floor and wait outside the nurses' station until the clock strikes six for visiting hours. I try not to get there early; he'll stand at the window of the locked ward, looking at me with his endearing, loopy smile, until the nurse buzzes the door.

I hate this. Kiet will pretend it's all okay. He'll offer me a tiny plastic container of apple juice with a foil lid. He'll stand outside the bathroom door, guarding the lockless entrance while I blow my nose.

"Checkers or Uno?" Kiet asks. We're standing in front of a rickety bookshelf in the common room. If it weren't for the faint hospital stench wafting on the undercurrent, you might think we were standing in someone's mid '80s living room: shelves of books and board games and VHS tapes, sagging couches—even wood paneling across one wall.

But we're in the psychiatric ward of Kenton Hospital, and I can't speak yet. Even after thirty-two days here, I need a minute to recalibrate my sense of reality to fit the psych ward, to accept that this medicine-blurred person in front of me is my normally sharp-eyed husband.

I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling the well-worn cotton of his favorite blue hooded sweatshirt. Beneath that, the solid meat of his living, breathing body.

"You okay?" he whispers. He turns to hug me, and I find the crook of his neck and breathe deep. He lets me hold him too tight and too long.

"You're okay, love." He shushes in my ear, filling my head with white noise. You're okay, you're okay, you're okay.

We play checkers back in Kiet's room, a spare white space with a twin bed, a meshed-over security window, no hooks or cords to be found. It's a precarious game; the ancient checkerboard has been ripped down the middle, and the two halves shift on the lumpy bed. It would have been easier to play on a table in the common room, but here we can have a figment of privacy—except for the nurses who pop by at fifteen-minute intervals to ask Kiet if he's having any suicidal thoughts, a routine that unnerves me still.

Alone, Kiet and I achieve a relative normalcy. Playing a board game and trading the day's minutiae, I can forget—for ten or twenty seconds at a time, at least—where we are. We've come miles from those first few days after Kiet was admitted. He wore a hospital gown then and couldn't—or wouldn't—talk. He lay in bed, sluggish with tranquilizers, staring at the careworn picture of his mother that he carries in his wallet: he is a newborn—a tuft of black hair peeking from under a blue stocking cap—and she sits in an armchair, smiling, gazing down at him in her arms.

The last time Kiet saw his mother, he was seven years old and she was dead; his father, drunk, had killed her. In his frightened panic, he'd tucked her into bed before he'd run, and her son found her the next morning, in her deepest sleep.

"You suck at checkers," Kiet says, reveling in the fact that he's won twice in quick succession. "I'm on drugs and I'm still beating you."

I reach over to recover my pieces, and begin to line up for another round. "It's not fair," I say. "I bet you practice while I'm gone."

"Yeah, well, " he says, shrugging, "checkers are pretty much the only thing I have to live for right now."

He must see the stricken look on my face, because he smiles and leans across the bed to peck me on the lips. "Sorry. Bad joke."

A silence pools between us, disrupted only by the scratch of checkers on painted cardboard. Finally, I ask, "How'd it go with your therapist today?"

"She says I should write a book. She thinks it'd be therapeutic." He rolls his eyes at therapeutic.

"About what happened in your family?"

"Yeah, I guess."

I gamely ignore his dismissal, even though it ignites a spark of anger in my heart. Defense mechanism, his therapist would say. Kiet has tried a lot of treatments—medication, meditation, art therapy, letter-writing; there's even been talk of electroconvulsive therapy—but none has been a magic bullet.

"You're a good writer," I say. And I'm not lying. He writes and shoots short films. Goofy stuff just for fun, but they're good. I know it's a point of pride for him. I know he's dabbled with the idea of taking it more seriously.

"Not really, but it'd probably be less painful than shock therapy."

Just then, a nurse pokes her head in the room and raps gently on the door frame. "Excuse me, Kiet," she says—she's Jamaican, her accent like music in the muffled ward—"but are you having any suicidal thoughts right now?"

"No," Kiet says, smiling. "But thank you."

"I didn't think so," she says confidently. "But I have to ask, you know."

She beams at him before turning to go, and I can tell he's seduced her with his diffident charm. I'm not surprised. Kiet wields an easy charisma I've always envied. He's the type of person that people remember. "Oh," she says, turning back to us. "You must be excited about Kiet's news." There is pride in her face.

News.

My voice seizes in my throat, and I can't reply.

"We are," Kiet says, shooting me a sheepish look.

When the nurse leaves, Kiet hesitates. I can practically see them—the words I've been craving and dreading for a month—hovering on the cusp of his bottom lip. Though whether it's because he doesn't want to say them or doesn't think I want to hear them, I don't know.

"I'm coming home tomorrow."

When I get home that evening, the setting sun burns red and orange in the windows of the row house where we live. It looks like fire, and for a second I'm gored with a familiar spike of panic, reminded of the smoke-filled bathroom where I found Kiet a month ago. He had duct-taped the door seams from the inside before swallowing sleeping pills and lighting up a small charcoal grill; I forced the door, heard the pop! of the half-melted tape ripping away from the door frame, and stumbled back from the rush of smoke.

But it's just the sun, I reassure myself.

Inside our third-floor apartment, I close the door behind me and lean against it. I look around our entryway, trying to see it as Kiet will tomorrow. There's the same clutter of shoes and mail, hooks hung with cloth grocery bags and the two dozen hoodie sweatshirts we own between us. Will it be instantly familiar to him? Everything the same but the extra dust?

I've tried to keep up the appearance of sameness, but when you create a home and your husband tries to kill himself in it, there's a definite before and after. Two very different places, invisibly so. Now I live in an after house, trying to pretend it's a before, telling myself the cozy lie that Kiet is just out of earshot in the next room. Tonight, like so many nights this past month, I make his favorite dinner: orange chicken with broccoli and sticky rice. I put on the radio to crowd out my thoughts and I get to work in the land of senses. I don't let myself think past the last shards of ice on defrosted chicken, the tang of citrus, the zippery sound of the microplane grater, the starchy steam that emanates from the special stove-top rice cooker.

Before bed, there is one last, unpleasant thing to take care of. I stand in the doorway of the bathroom, trying not to see it again for the millionth time: him, in the bathtub, curled up with a pillow, barely visible amidst the dirty cloud. I close my eyes tight to obliterate the scene. When I open them, I force myself to see only the damage at hand: the door and the window irrevocably gummed with melted duct tape, the walls a hazy Rorschach pattern of smoke damage. It used to be worse. I threw out the charcoal grill immediately, and the towels and bath mats and the lovely cloth shower curtain my mother got us for a wedding gift. Our toothbrushes.

I don't know why I've waited until the last minute to take care of the rest. Maybe because it's easy to throw things out, and hard to fix them.

I open the window, don the yellow rubber gloves and respiration mask; I fill a pail with water and follow the directions on the bottle of industrial-strength cleanser. I scrub at the wall with a blue sponge that immediately reveals itself unsuited to the enormity of the task. I do my best, swirling the sooty mess until my hand cramps, but I'm going to have to paint the wall anyway.

I have the paint; I bought it and the cleaning supplies the day after Kiet went into the hospital, when I couldn't visit him because the doctors were busy making sure he hadn't given himself brain damage from the smoke inhalation. I was in shock, in that buffer zone between the crisis and the pain. It was like when I broke my arm falling off the monkey bars as a kid. I remember looking down at it, dangling away at the elbow, and thinking It doesn't even hurt. It did later, though.

I pry the lid from the can of Classic White semi-gloss. It pours thick and clean into the paint tray, as unsullied as new life. It reminds me of when we first moved here four years ago, just before we got married. It was the first apartment either of us ever cared enough about to paint. My life until then had been a mismatched cobblestone—adjunct teaching, freelance editing, six months here, six months there, disposable furniture. Same for Kiet, only he strung life together with video freelance work—shooting, editing, sound mixing.

An olfactory memory, then, this new-paint smell. The scent of staying.

Tonight, I feel far from those optimistic first days. But maybe it was inevitable. His mother's death; his father's act—they guided our relationship like an unmentionable rudder. He didn't talk about it, and I didn't know how to ask. After his initial admission—on our third date, already on the cusp of love—we only talked about it in euphemisms. It took me several years to draw my own connections between the traumatized boy and its grown-up manifestations: the fear, the need, the jealousy that lingered like a poltergeist, ready to shake down the chandeliers at a moment's notice. And somehow, as the anniversaries stacked up and we grew more entwined, it all got worse. As if the more we had together, the more there was to lose. And every loss, to him, no matter how small, was an extension of the original.

It's quiet but for the sticky rhythm of paint adhering to the wall in wide stripes, and soon the bathroom is a quarter white, then half white. I stop to look at my handiwork, mesmerized. It's strangely empowering, how doing something reminds you that you can do something. Suddenly this coat of paint becomes more than itself; it becomes a thin new skin growing over the old wounded past.

I stare at the wall, delirious with exhaustion and chemical fumes, until paint drips off the roller and onto my foot, like a wake-up call.

"Kiet should write that book," I say aloud. "That's exactly what he needs." I trace my way back through this evening's conversation. Maybe he really wants to write a book; maybe he wants to be encouraged; maybe that's why he told me about it. I picture it: Kiet installed in our office, writing away his demons. A surge of clarity inflates me with a second wind, and I dip my roller into the paint tray and finish the job with a manic vigor.

The next day, I go to the hospital with a rolling suitcase, and Kiet and I pack up the surprising number of his belongings that I've delivered piecemeal over the past month. It's mid-morning, and it feels illicit to be here outside of visiting hours. But Kiet and I, we're above the law today.

"I can't wait to wear shoelaces again," Kiet says, fitting a stack of books into the bottom of the suitcase. "And shave without supervision. And go to Starbucks."

"Wow," I say. "Sex didn't make the top three?" I bend over to look under the bed for anything that might have gotten kicked under there.

"I didn't know 'crazy' was one of your turn-ons," he says.

"Lucky for you, it is." I stand up too quickly. The head rush raises a fit of blinkered lights in front of my eyes. I put my hand on the headboard to steady myself.

"You okay?" Kiet asks. He looks unduly worried, his concern an exclamation mark etched in the single wrinkle between his eyebrows.

"I'm fine," I assure him quickly. I pull him into a hug, grateful again for his heat, his aliveness, for the few pounds he's put on while he's been in here with not much to do besides therapy and eating.

And in some ways, I am fine. My anxiety is always with me—like tinnitus; a dull roar that can be drowned out but never silenced. But today it's quiet compared to my clanging joy at Kiet's release. There are nooses to tie and guns to shoot and pills to swallow, yes. There are. But I feel hope, too—my plan for Kiet like an amulet, warding away bad spirits.

"Hey," I say, pulling back to look at him. "I was thinking about that book—"

"Excuse me, Kiet." A different nurse this time, one with Mickey Mouse scrubs and a stony demeanor. "Are you having any suicidal thoughts right now?"

"I should hope not," he says, laughing.

"Is that a 'no'?" She doesn't smile.

"No."

She makes a note on her clipboard and walks away.

Kiet rolls his eyes and pulls away from me. "I'm going to run these books back to the common room," he says, pointing to a small stack of dilapidated paperbacks.

Alone, I survey the nearly empty room and wonder for a second whether I'll ever be back here again. It gets that tinnitus ringing, so I force myself to think of home, of sleeping in bed with Kiet tonight, spooned together, his arm encircling my chest, his fingertips coveting the tiny mole on my right breast.

I'm folding the last few T-shirts into the suitcase when my eye is caught by a small notepad, like you'd get in a hotel: cheap paper held together by a glue strip. It's blank but for the first few sheets covered in blue ink.

Seeing his handwriting, I'm confused for the briefest moment—like seeing an old friend out of context and having to remember where you know him from. But there it is, his slanty, left-handed writing, the I's dotted with circles. It feels illicit to have stumbled upon this, but I sit down on the edge of the bed and pore over it, greedy for insight. His thoughts are so often inscrutable, encrypted within his dark sense of humor.

There's not much substance here: to-do lists, short-hand notes, geometric doodles. Nothing that means anything to me. I flip through the unused pages, feeling deflated. And then, suddenly, it occurs to me: Kiet didn't leave me any sort of note before he tried. No explanation, no last "I love you," no going-away solace. Just a blank silence and me to fill it up with my ringing anxiety and guilt and the wondering, wondering, wondering what I could have said or done to divert him. He could have written a note; it's not that much to ask. And, as selfish as it might be, that is what undoes me. I tremble—I can see it in the paper that shivers in my hands—with every shade of anger and helplessness and grief I've ever known. My vision narrows, the world erased except for me and this blank notebook that has unwittingly revealed the story.

I'm camped out in the bathroom, the only spot in the ward where I can entertain a delusion of privacy. The door doesn't lock, so anyone could walk in at a given moment, but at least I can relax my face out of its "everything's going to be okay" expression.

I sit on the toilet lid, holding a bloom of tissue to my nose. The bathroom is hot and vaporous—a patient must have showered recently—and I feel soggy; my T-shirt is limp with sweat, and my bun has come loose, unspooling damp threads of hair down the back of my neck.

Finally, a soft knock at the door.

"Are you in there?" Kiet's tentative voice penetrates the wood.

"Yes." The word is a burr in my throat.

"What's wrong?"

"Everything."

After a few beats, Kiet tries again. "Surely not everything," he chides gently. "Can you narrow it down?"

"No."

"I really want to come in," he says.

"Well I wanted you to write a book," I say, momentarily pulling the wad of tissue away from my face. "But you didn't even write me a note."

"I'm coming in," he says, pushing the door open. And though I know I've never looked more wretched in my life, I don't know the extent of it until I see Kiet's reaction. He covers his mouth with his hand and looks at me for a long moment. And then he starts to cry, his dark lashes blurring like ink in the rain. He comes to me and kneels at my feet and wraps his arms around my legs. We sit there, his tears soaking into my knees, me thinking about the last time we were in a bathroom together, when I was dragging his dead weight out of that smoke cloud.

"I wanted you to write a book, but you won't," I say.

"You want me to write a book, too?" Kiet says, bewildered. "Why does everyone want me to write a book?"

"To expunge your demons," I say. Hearing the words, my plan—which seemed so golden last night—reveals itself as nothing more than the alchemy of self-help: take your worst and magick it into something beautiful, or redemptive.

He's quiet.

"It was stupid," I say.

We sit awhile, listening to the pipes tick. With his fingernail, Kiet frets at the white paint spotting my hands. "What's this?"

"I painted the bathroom."

He rests his head on my lap. It's a heavy cantaloupe of sorrow. "It was a wreck, wasn't it?" "It was."

"You get a lifetime pass on cleaning the bathroom. I swear." He smiles ruefully and squeezes my knee. It tickles, and, despite myself, I emit a thick, clotted laugh.

"Sure," I say. "Until you disappear again."

"I'm not going anywhere," he says, so fiercely I wonder which one of us he's trying to convince.

"I don't believe you," I say.

"You can't really help me, you know," he says gently. "That's hard to hear, but it's true."

I stroke his face, the light haze of stubble, the baby softness of his earlobe, and think of the myriad ways to die a terrible death. A wave of helplessness swells in my throat, as bitter as bile and viscous as pudding. I swallow hard to keep it down. "So all I can do is worry?"

"I worry, too, you know," he says. "What's to stop you from leaving me for someone who didn't try to kill himself in your bathroom?"

"I could never leave you."

"How do I know?"

"Because I'm telling you," I say, running my fingers through his soft hair.

I look at him, his face so familiar I ache to think of it gone. He is my love incarnate. He is my love, walking around in a body that will die someday. I feel it then, the gaping seam between promise and reality. I can't really know that I won't leave him. And he can't foretell the future, whether he'll need to someday seek that violent, definitive relief. All we have is present tense and well-intentioned lies, our words as meager as the string between paper cup telephones.

"I'm sorry," Kiet says. He takes my left hand, spins the silver band. He looks down and a tear drips off the end of his nose.

And what can I do besides forgive him and go on? I bend my head to kiss him, to bow to this moment and pray for the next one. We hold each other tight and press our wet faces together. You're okay, you're okay, you're okay, we say.

Title graphic: "Charred" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

Boys swim like tadpoles in their dreams
Leaves bud on trees like tiny green eggs
Barefoot girls pump legs on swings
Birds trill and flit inside their nests

Leaves bud on trees like tiny green eggs
Passenger plane falls down from the skies
Birds trill and flit inside their nests
Husband gouges out wife's eyes

Passenger plane falls down from the skies
Daffodils nod their heads in the breeze
Husband gouges out wife's eyes
Juicy worms sluice beneath pallets of leaves

Daffodils nod their heads in the breeze
Seven women found dead in a ditch
Juicy worms sluice beneath pallets of leaves
Mother drives sons off of a bridge

Seven women found dead in a ditch
Barefoot girls pump legs on swings
Mother drives sons off of a bridge
Boys swim like tadpoles in their dreams

Their new house,

her new name,

his new wife.

Hearse black

permanent marker

for those who’ve moved

on from this life.

The breaking news...
is there's no breaking news.
No one died. There were no fires
or bribes or lies. No buildings
exploded or imploded. No one
voted. Nothing happened today.
It's a disaster. Let us pray.

The first wife was dead, which called for a reverence of spirit when speaking of her, a lowered voice and furrowed, sympathetic brow, but the problem was that the second wife didn't feel reverent toward the first wife. She felt fascinated, curious—but not reverent. She liked to ask questions about her, questions like, Did she read a lot of non-fiction and did she always cook a vegetable side dish with dinner (the second wife did not) and what were her thoughts on movies in which a man and woman switched bodies? There was a gingerliness embedded in the husband's manner as he answered these questions; she sensed that he felt they were disrespectful of the first wife's memory, but the second wife did not. When I die, she often said, I hope there is someone who wants to know if I liked eating watermelon in the summer and going to amusement parks.

She liked watermelon all right, I guess, the husband would sigh, or We never went to an amusement park together, and the second wife would record these tidbits in her mind, like a court reporter. She also began revealing every preference of her own to the husband, every like and dislike and general opinion on the world. She tried to make these strong, interested opinions, so that in case she died he would have more information to report to the third wife; he could do more than sigh and say I don't know. He would know, rather, that she liked black beans but didn't prefer pinto, would be able to report that she found the idea of eating fish on Fridays appealing, though she hadn't been raised Catholic.

There were still signs of the first wife around the house. Her charcoal sketches of farmhouses and barns hung in the study, and her golfing trophies stood tall and proud on the living room mantle. When the second wife wondered aloud at the first wife's natural athletic prowess, the husband glanced at the trophies and remarked that they should be moved to the basement. The first wife had been in charge of home décor.

There was a small black dog, the first wife's dog, and the second wife often held him on her lap as she watched TV, and as she petted him thought, This is the dog that my husband's dead wife petted, or, I wonder if he likes me as much as he liked her—the dog, not the husband. He (the dog) seemed to like her (the second wife) a good deal, settling in against her thigh when she sat down on the couch. He appeared to enjoy the same reality TV programs that she enjoyed.

At some point the second wife began wearing the first wife's clothes. They hung neatly in the guest room closet; it seemed that the husband had not bothered to get rid of them. The second wife began to feel sorry for them and asked the husband wouldn't he please take them to Goodwill or the Salvation Army so that they might be worn again, these poor clothes, hanging so hopefully. When he refused, she began to wear them—slowly at first, just scarves and socks, until it became clear that the husband wasn't noticing that she was wearing the wife's clothes. It made the clothes happier, she told herself, and anyway the first wife was much more fashionable than the second wife had ever been.

And so it wasn't long until she was going through the first wife's clothes with abandon, reveling in this new sartorial world that had been so quickly and so gloriously opened to her, putting on the first wife's bomber jackets and pencil skirts and ankle boots and admiring herself in the mirror. She would wear these things out to coffee shops, or the grocery store, all the time thinking, This is the cardigan that a dead woman wore, or this hat was on the head of a dead woman. She couldn't get over the novelty of it. It was like knowing a celebrity.

When she discovered the first wife's collection of cookbooks, stashed—after her death, the second wife wondered?—inconveniently in one of the lower cabinets, behind the food processor and other seldom-used small appliances, her heart fluttered. These were well-worn, frequently used cookbooks, with the pages of favorite recipes dog-eared and lovely little notes in the margins, things like good with rice! and less butter okay (1/4 c.)

She sat the husband down and spoke to him with great seriousness. Why was he hiding these from her? The first wife was a part of him and she wanted her—the first wife—to be a part of her, too. Besides, didn't he miss eating his favorite meals?

I didn't know you liked to cook, the husband said. To be frank, I wasn't aware that you knew how to cook. He gestured at the side of the refrigerator, where she had pinned a magnet shaped like a take-out menu, holding five or six actual take-out menus. She had always thought this funny, clever in a silly, playful way, and she wondered if the first wife would have agreed.

She softened a bit. I don't, she said, know how. But I'm going to learn.

That night, she felt it almost a blasphemy that she ruined the eggplant parmesan the first wife had so painstakingly notated. She hadn't let the eggplant weep enough, either that or it had wept too much and too passionately. Whatever it was, it had worked itself into quite a soggy mess.

I'm horrible, she said, flinging down the casserole dish before the husband. I can't even duplicate a simple recipe.

The husband was cutting into the eggplant parmesan with a spatula. It seemed that, in addition to being overly watery, it was also very tough, and he had to stand up to get more leverage.

Did she make this often? the second wife asked.

The husband shrugged. Every now and then. He put a wet, messy serving of eggplant on his plate. It reminded the second wife generally, though not precisely, of brains.

What was it like when she made it? the second wife persisted. Was it like this? Of course it wasn't like this. She was meticulous, right? Wasn't she meticulous?

The husband chewed a piece of eggplant for a long time. Do you want to know what she was like? he said finally. I can tell you what she was like.

Oh, yes. Thank you.

The husband put down his fork. She was confident to the point of arrogance, he said. But she was insecure, too: if she sensed that you were less than overjoyed about eating the dinner she'd planned for that night, she'd refuse to make it, and she'd make you choose something else instead, like pizza. At first you'd refuse and say you wanted to eat the thing that she was going to make but she'd press hard and finally you'd give in and get the pizza—you're hungry, after all, and you do like pizza—and then she'd take this as proof that you really didn't want to eat her food and be pissed at you. And then when you did eat her food, it didn't taste good.

The second wife frowned. Go on, she said.

He went on. She performed complicated moral calculations in order to determine if things were fair, he said. If we saw her parents for three days at Thanksgiving, we saw mine for no more than three at Christmas, even though we both had more days off of work then. And since we had to drive further to see her parents, that mattered too, it meant that we should spend more time there.

She was very... organized, okay. But generous, too. I bet she gave great Christmas gifts.

They were okay. I think last year she got me a gift certificate.

To where?

I don't remember. Does it matter?

If it was for somewhere that you really like, it might have been a great gift.

It wasn't.

So she was frugal, the second wife said. But you were kidding about the food, right? She was a good cook. Better than this. The second wife held up a forkful of eggplant, a string of cheese hanging from fork to plate.

The husband considered this, and then took another bite. No, he said. This is actually an improvement.

Soon after that the second wife began sleeping in, getting out of bed later and later each day until finally she was not getting out of bed at all.Sometimes at night she'd get up, though, to eat ice cream right out of the carton, or to get one of her take-out menus off the fridge, until finally she began keeping the stack of them, plus the cordless phone, on the nightstand.

I think I'm sick, she called one night into the living room, where the husband was using his laptop.

Hmmm? The husband said. Do you want me to get you something? I can go to the drug store.

No, she said. I think it's bad. I think it might be... something very bad.

She heard the husband rise from the couch in the living room, and then she heard the jangle of the dog's collar as he, too, rose. He had taken to sitting next to the husband, not her, as if exasperated by her sleeping habits.

The husband came in and stroked her forehead, pushing back her bangs, which she had purposefully not washed for two or three days—but not longer, because that would be gross.

There's a tea I used to make for her when she got sick, the husband said. I could make you some.

The second wife brightened. Would you?

And so they continued on like this: he made tea for her in the morning before he left for work, a second cup when he returned. He sat on the bed while she drank it, and she used this time to tell him all about herself, in case she died, about how her mother believed that you shouldn't mix too many food groups in the same meal and why she disliked the man her sister had married and how she got the scar on her elbow (a game of Red Rover, age nine). He nodded politely, but she wasn't convinced, and took to keeping a diary, but soon many of the words in the sentences that she wrote down seemed extraneous, and she began just writing lists: All-Time Favorite Songs and Five Dream Vacation Destinations. Sometimes there were short paragraphs, mini-dissertations on specific matters, like Thoughts on Cats Versus Dogs as House Pets, or sometimes, just singularly titled subjects, like Toucans. She kept her notes in a leather-bound journal that she found to be very beautiful. It had belonged to the first wife, though she had never written in it except to record her name on the inner cover, as well as her phone number, in case the book were to become lost. The second wife often stared at these numbers, ran her fingers over them, thought that surely the husband was wrong about the first wife.

A doctor came and went. There's nothing wrong with you, he said, and the second wife thought him most unsympathetic, because she knew he'd been paid extra to make a house call; he could have at least diagnosed her with anxiety, or allergies. She would write a paragraph about him, she decided, in the first wife's leather-bound journal, and when she touched the beautiful soft leather of its cover, she felt that she could not possibly continue on this way, that she would get her own journal, not leather-bound but made of some other fine material, one that was beautiful and unexpected and something that eclipsed leather, like feathers. But as she lifted her tea—the first wife's tea—from the nightstand to take a sip, as she turned to the next blank page and wrote The Doctor, she thought to herself that perhaps she wouldn't get her own journal, that she'd better press forward with this one instead. And though the tea had grown cold, the taste of it on her tongue remained the same, a taste that was rich and sweet, and it nourished her to the core.

Title graphic: "Tea Time" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2011.

Sheila Ashdown hails from Cleveland, Ohio, but currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she publishes a literary magazine called The Ne'er-Do-Well (www.theneerdowell.com) and works as a freelance editor. She holds an MFA in creative writing, and her work has appeared in Monkeybicycle and Eclectic Flash. sheila_ashdown@yahoo.com

Heather Fowler holds a M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. She has taught at UCSD, California State University at Stanislaus, and Modesto Junior College. Her debut story collection, Suspended Heart was published by Aqueous Books in 2010. Her work has been published in the US, England, Australia, and India. Her poetry was recently featured at MiPOesias, The Nervous Breakdown, poeticdiversity, and The Medulla Review, and has been selected for a joint first place in the 2007 Faringdon Online Poetry Competition. www.heatherfowlerwrites.com

Becky Adnot Haynes is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati. She has published short fiction in literary magazines such as Missouri Review and Post Road, and has work forthcoming in CutBank and West Branch. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and their dog and cat. becky.adnot@gmail.com

Sandra Irwin holds an AB in English from Vassar College, a JD from the University of San Diego, and is a 2009 graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she received a full teaching fellowship. Ten of her poems have been published in recent months or are forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, Shot Glass Journal, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, and Indigo Rising Magazine. A flash fiction piece was published in Luna Station Quarterly. sandramirwin@gmail.com

Nancy Carol Moody's poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Natural Bridge, The New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and The MacGuffin. Her book, Photograph With Girls, was published in 2009 by Traprock Books. www.nancycarolmoody.com

Erin Murphy is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Word Problems (Word Press, 2011), and is co-editor of Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (SUNY Press, 2010). Her works have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. She is associate professor of English at Penn State Altoona. This is her second appearance in the journal. www.erin-murphy.net

Ronald Rindo's piece in this issue is one in a story cycle he's working on entitled Still Life, with Animals. Recent work of his has appeared in The Gettysburg Review and Terrain.org, and he has an essay in The Best American Essays, 2010. He is Professor of English Chair at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. rindo@uwosh.edu

Amy Roper is an MFA student at Brigham Young University. This is her first published work in a national magazine. ads.roper@gmail.com

Jay Rubin teaches writing at The College of Alameda in the San Francisco Bay Area, and publishes Alehouse, an all-poetry literary journal, at www.alehousepress.com. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College and lives in San Francisco. zenmanyo@gmail.com

Gabriel Welsch is author of Dirt and All Its Dense Labor and the chapbook, An Eye Fluent in Gray. Recent work appears in West Branch, Southern Review, PANK, Whiskey Island, American Literary Review, and Chautauqua. He is vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, in Huntingdon, PA, where he lives with his family. welschg@juniata.edu

Table of Contents

Editors' Notes

Making Love to the Fruit Shooter

Two Poems

Against Duplicity

Suite: House, Storm

Horses

Fourth of July

Seduction in Cartagena

The Place of Lost Fathers

In Praise of Gray

White Paint

Three Poems

Hard News Pantoum

Address Book Revised

This Just In

The Second Wife

Contributors' Notes