CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1962

When I woke up, the sky was dark and I was still on the living room floor. I could hear my father’s keys in the front door. I sat up suddenly, and looked around at my mother’s note cards scattered over the carpet. Books had been yanked from the shelves, exploding haphazardly onto the floor. Upstairs, my parents’ room was still in shambles, my mother’s clothes ripped from the shelves.

As soon as I saw my father’s face, my face fell too. I felt like a big disappointment to him. “Were there any calls?” he wanted to know, setting his briefcase heavily down on the chair by the door. He didn’t even say hello. He didn’t wipe the snow off his feet. Dark spots of moisture pooled around his galoshes, and he tracked footprints from the door to the coat closet.

Shrugging my shoulders, I stared at my shoes. I kept my distance, leaning back against the banister by the door to the bathroom. But he didn’t go into the living room or notice anything out of order. He knew she wasn’t coming back now. I saw it sinking in.

“Well, were there?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I wasn’t here.”

“Where were you?”

“At a friend’s.”

“What friend? You can’t just come and go without telling me.”

“Daddy,” I said, “don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not like Mother. I’m staying here with you.”

My father looked at me like he might just suddenly go to pieces. I shrank back as he passed me, shaking his head on his way into the study. He slammed the door.

It was over with Mother. Why couldn’t he see? We had never really been a family. She had never really been a wife or a mother. She was just someone who made other people love her, people who weren’t as beautiful or special as she was.

I went into the living room and started straightening the books and stacking the note cards on the letter desk. It was a lost cause, though, and I eventually gave up. Outside, all along Van Dorn Street, snowdrifts were piled high, and I could see the lights in the big old houses where lovely people lived with beautiful things that never left their shelves.

*   *   *

By the time my father discovered mother’s things out of order, I was already in bed. He knocked on the door and stuck his head inside before I could answer. The string at the waist of his pajamas wasn’t tied right, and I caught a glimpse of the tuft of hair between his legs. I turned away, embarrassed. He was coming apart. Everything was breaking up around us, and wherever Mother was she didn’t care. She never wanted me around, and that wasn’t just because she hated Nebraska. When we went to department stores in Chicago, I had tried to keep up with her, had wanted to walk with her as she shopped for all the clothes she would ever wear. But she always just left me by the perfume counter, waiting.

“Puggy.” My father sighed. “I’m too tired to ask. When I get home from work tomorrow night, I expect your mother’s things to be lovingly folded and arranged in their proper order. I want to pretend this never happened.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I said, and then—barely whispering—“Do you think she left because of me?”

But he had already closed the door.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking of my father trying to find peace in the middle of all that mess in their room. I uprooted my sheets with my feet and then had to get out of bed and tuck them back in. Moonlight on the snow washed an electric-blue light over the blankets, and every time I tried to shut my eyes my mind would spin with the horrible possibility of living inside these same walls forever, alone with my father, who would always be waiting for my mother. So much of my life had already been spent waiting for one of them to treat me like their daughter, someone they were in charge of. I didn’t want to wait for anything anymore.

In the middle of the night, I turned on the light and crept into the dark hallway. This old house never slept; even at night it seemed alive. Old books with leather spines spilled out stories, and the past seemed so close. Downstairs, my grandfather was on his hands and knees picking bits of china frog out of the carpet. Behind the closed door of my parents’ bedroom, I imagined my father running his finger up and down the smooth silk of my mother’s stocking. I wanted to protect my father. I put my ear to his bedroom door, but everything was quiet.

Downstairs, I pulled the chair up to the telephone table. I had no idea what time it was, but it didn’t matter. Nils Ivers was certainly a night owl, the kind who spent his evenings in smoke-filled rooms watching showgirls in feather bodices kicking their legs up. Picking up the telephone, I dialed.

After several rings he answered.

“It’s Susan,” I began.

“It’s very late, isn’t it?”

“Well, I have something to tell you.”

“Let me guess. You miss me?”

“She’s back. I thought you should know.”

He paused, and I imagined words caught in his throat. “Well, I was sure I’d never hear from you again,” he said.

“Why?”

“I thought I’d scared you.”

“Nothing scares me.”

“I can see that. What are you doing?”

I took a breath. There wasn’t a sound. It felt like the whole world was listening. “Reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” I said. “I’m in bed with a cigarette. They’re right down the hall.”

“That’s dangerous. Don’t fall asleep.” He laughed. “What are they doing?”

“Who?”

“Mother and Father.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re locked in the bedroom,” I said.

I decided he was probably trying to picture what might be going on behind my parents’ closed door. I hoped he was picturing something intimate. My mother’s cheek against my father’s chest, my father’s fingers tracing the sharp ridges of her feline spine.

“Nils,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“They’re really in love. She’s not going to leave him. She would never—”

“Don’t believe your eyes,” he interrupted. “Don’t believe everything you see. Ann doesn’t like getting what she wants. She’s crazy. She likes to be stepped on and—”

“Don’t say that.” I hated him. I wanted him gone. “Don’t call here.”

“You’re the one calling me, sugar.”

I hung up the phone and went into the living room, where everything was still, a different world. Nothing looked familiar anymore. I picked up one of the cushions, running my finger along the seam. Unzipping the cover, I reached inside, and pulled out a handful of feathers. I kneaded the silky tendrils, feeling the soft crunch of wheatlike spines. Then I opened my fist and blew. The white cloud of feathers fluttered down around my legs in the dark. I strained my ears to hear the new language of our broken order.

*   *   *

Starkweather’s words were broken and jumbled, like everything else around me. I sat on the iced-over bleachers by the track, instead of eating lunch the next day, and read an old issue of Parade that contained an interview with Starkweather on death row. Kids were always passing it around school.

What made you do it?

Things started out right, and then they went bad.

How did things go bad?

I had the hope of any youngster. Those woods behind our house was a whole world where my brothers and me would play. But then I got picked on the first day of school, when I had to stand up and say what I did in the forest.

And what happened when you stood up in front of the class?

There wasn’t any words I could think of to use. Everyone laughed.

And this caused you to go out and kill eleven people?

Well, yup. See, there ain’t no point pointing fingers.

Who else would you blame?

Her. She helped.

Caril Ann Fugate?

She gave me a chance. No one ever gave me a chance.

There was a picture of Starkweather behind bars on his prison cot, leaning back against the wall of his cell, running his tongue over his top lip. He looked sure of himself and well put together. He looked like someone who’d been given every chance in the world.

I thought of my mother, crying on the living room couch while I stood there watching in the hard winter light. No one gives me a chance. What kind of a chance had she ever given me?

Ever since I could remember, she was trying to push me out of the house: camps, archery, music, none of which I was any good at. “I’m giving you a chance to shine,” she’d say. Her last attempt was dancing lessons. She always admired everything graceful.

*   *   *

My mother had found an ad in the classifieds for private dancing instruction with Len Silverman. It was the week after Starkweather’s execution. She drove me to my first lesson in the Studebaker Golden Hawk 400, taking the long way past Wyuka Cemetery. People had come from miles away to stare at the freshly turned earth by Starkweather’s grave. They paid money for autographs his father had collected. People stared at my mother’s car as if she were part of all the excitement. So she had waved and honked, rolling her eyes as we barreled down R Street.

“You’re nervous,” she said. “Why are you nervous? I can tell you’re nervous. You’re shredding your nails.” My mother grabbed my hand and pulled it away from my mouth. “You’re always chewing on something.”

When we pulled up along the curb beside Len Silverman’s, she told me to go ring the bell. I remember her looking clean and neat, unaffected by the heat.

“You’re not coming with me?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly. You’re a big girl,” my mother said. A tall lean man with blond curly hair was suddenly beckoning me forward. My mother waved at Len, blew me a kiss, and drove away.

He closed the door behind me, and the rest of the sunny world slipped away. All the shades in the living room were drawn.

“What’s it so dark for?” I said.

“Fred likes it that way.” Len steered me toward a bright fish tank bubbling in a corner of the darkened living room. One blue fish drifted in circles around a pink ceramic castle.

“That’s Fred Astaire, the Siamese fighting fish. Fred is antisocial. No Ginger Rogers for this guy.”

Touching my finger to the clear glass of the tank, I pretended to study Fred carefully, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Len, his face swimming in the shadows of a magnified aquatic plant. Fred’s flippers hung limp in the water, swaying softly in an invisible current, like the billowy silk sleeve of Len’s electric-blue shirt. When Len sprinkled some flakes into the tank, the fish drifted effortlessly upward and lipped the surface of the water.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we start?”

My heart fluttered as I remembered a story about a little girl with white kid gloves who walked straight into the jaws of a tiger. I felt for the first time as if I were playing a role in something as dramatic as what Starkweather had done. Little girl disappears in the heartland. Last seen dancing her heart out. Irresponsible parent to blame.

As if pulled by a string I followed him out of the darkness, through the bright kitchen, and into the studio. Len put his hands on my shoulders but held me away from him as he tapped one shiny shoe to an imaginary beat. “Come on. Relax,” he said. “You’re all wound up. Have you ever had dancing lessons before?”

I shook my head. I wanted his hands off me. At the same time, I wanted his hands on me so I could feel even worse. I wanted to give up. I wanted to disappear.

Len looked into my eyes. “It’s so important to believe in yourself, honey, not only in dancing but in life.” He took one hand off my shoulder and lifted my chin away from my chest. “Head up. That’s the first step. You have grace inside of you. Believe in that.” Len stepped away from me and started toward the phonograph. Then he came back. “I needed one last look at you.” He paused. “I’m used to teaching ladies with their best years behind them. Has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?”

I had never thought of myself as lovely. Len placed the needle on the record. You don’t remember me, but I remember you, Little Anthony sang mournfully. T’was not so long ago you broke my heart in two. He swooped toward me and tried to grab my hand. I pulled it away.

“You’re just too beautiful.” Len sighed.

I wrinkled my nose at him. I asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”

On my way back to the studio, I stopped at the icebox. Half-finished bottles of wine lined the side shelves. I thought of my mother then, of the way she wandered restlessly through rooms as if she didn’t care about anything or notice anyone. I thought how strange it was that people loved her, because she seemed not to need them. Perhaps it was that easy to be loved. Perhaps not caring was her secret.

Gingerly lifting a bottle of wine from the side shelf, I pulled out the cork and winced at the popping sound. I listened for trouble, but Little Anthony’s voice drifted softly from the studio. I lifted the bottle to my lips and sipped cautiously.

Len was sorting through his record collection. I came up behind him. “Did you find everything OK, Puggy?” he asked.

“I did,” I said, giving him a secret look and batting my eyelashes. “Did you know my parents call me Puggy because of my nose?” I wanted him to tell me something nice about my nose. No one ever had.

“Well, you’re not so shy after all,” said Len. “Want to learn the cha-cha?”

I held my hands behind my back and looked at the floor as Len put on some Latin music and moved his hips. Sidling toward me, he put his hands on my shoulders. I followed Len’s lead, stiffly at first. I stomped my feet. I watched the floor. I stepped on his toes but he seemed not to notice. But then I let myself go. I lifted my chin. It wasn’t so hard to do whatever he did. Before I knew it, the beat was in my blood. It made sense: cha-cha-cha. I wanted a flower to hold in my teeth. I wanted to spin across our living room carpet while my parents watched, shocked into silence by my sudden transformation.

“You’re a natural!” Len cried. “One, two, cha-cha-cha.” Len’s feet guided me like strings. We cha-cha’d from one end of the studio to the other. One step blended into the next until I was moving my feet to my own separate beat.

“One day I’m going to be watching you on American Bandstand.” Len said. “Justine Carelli’s history. You’ll be dancing with Bob Clayton. I’m sure of it. I can’t wait to tell your mother.”

“Don’t tell her,” I whispered. “Don’t tell my mother anything.”

The needle fumbled over the vinyl. The music started again. I stood on my tiptoes and threw my arms around Len’s shoulders. I pressed my lips to his neck.

Len snatched himself away as if I had burned him. He held me at arm’s length. He shook his head and looked into my eyes. “Baby, baby,” he said, “where are you headed?”

The tears streamed down my cheeks and I couldn’t stop them. “When is my mother coming?” I cried.

“Oh, sweetie,” Len said sadly. “Your mother doesn’t have time to pick you up today. I’m driving you home.”

In the car, Len patted my knee. He said, “Darling, don’t be angry. It’s all my fault. I’m not used to working with children.” But I didn’t feel like a child anymore. I huddled against the door, not saying a word, staring out the windshield through my tears, tracing the painted line on the blinding asphalt until we reached the manicured lawns of the south side.

I got my mother in trouble for all this. When my father came home from work, he found me just sitting there, gazing at the rhododendrons. “What’s going on?” He shook me by the shoulders.

“Len left me in the driveway,” I said.

“Who’s Len?”

I didn’t answer.

“Where’s Mother?”

He marched me through the garage and into the kitchen.

“Look what I found,” he said, as my mother came through the door from the hallway, holding a glass of iced tea in her hand.

I remembered wishing she would drop her glass. I wanted her to burst into tears or throw her arms around me, but she just stood there with her nice new haircut curling around her ears, sipping her iced tea. “Where have you been, Puggy?” She placed her palms behind her and clutched the edge of the counter. She shifted her feet in her clean white pumps. “I was worried,” she said. “You were supposed to be back already. Weren’t you?” My mother looked at her watch.

“Back from where, Ann? And who’s Len?” my father demanded.

“Oh, relax. He had an ad in the paper”—my mother rolled her eyes—“for dancing lessons.”

“Where? At his house?” My father crossed his arms.

“Don’t take that tone with me, Thatcher!” my mother snapped. “It’s not civil.” She turned to me. “Why are you crying, baby?”

“I don’t feel well,” I said.

“Are you sick?”

“I swear to God.” My father shook his head. “If you left her with some stranger, Ann, with everything that’s happened, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Stop preaching!” My mother stomped her foot in her high-heeled shoe. “Oh, Thatcher, listen to yourself. I can’t listen to you anymore.”

My father turned me around and looked me in the face. “Did this Len touch you, Susan? Did he hug you too tight?”

I wiped my tears away with my sleeve. “No, Daddy,” I said. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

That night I woke up with a start to the sound of music drifting under my door, got up, and stepped tentatively into the hall. I started down the soft carpeted stairs, sliding my hand along the banister with a mounting sense of dread. It occurred to me my parents might have killed each other because nobody had woken me up for dinner. My heart flipped over at the thought. Crazier things had happened. My grandfather had died in the living room of a heart attack one April evening as he sat quietly reading the paper. Starkweather and Fugate demanded pancakes from Mrs. Bowman while law enforcement was setting up roadblocks at the other end of the state. In Chicago, eighty-seven little girls died on the top floor of Our Lady of the Angels School while fire truck 85 was mistakenly directed to Our Lady of the Angels Church.

Following the slow gentle sound of the music, I peered around the living room doorway. My mother was wearing her white nightgown and my father was in his pajamas. Their hands were clasped, their bodies intertwined. The song drifted out from the old phonograph. My father was turning my mother around slowly. They passed lightly through the shadows and gracefully circled my grandfather’s heavy furniture. My father was looking down at my mother as if he had never seen anything so beautiful. Her cheek was pressed to his shoulder, her eyes closed as if lost in a dream.

I wondered what had awakened my parents, or if they had even gone to sleep. Had they sat up in bed in the middle of the night stricken with love or rocked by the urge to forgive? I couldn’t imagine what had happened to make them feel this way. Standing in my bathrobe, I watched from the darkness with my hand on the edge of the foyer wall. Bitter tears stung my eyes because I didn’t understand. They had each other, and nothing had ever looked so sweet. Every time my parents fought, I’d remember their dance as some kind of truth. They’d always be together. They’d always find a way through. But I wasn’t sure anymore. I really thought it was over.

*   *   *

The bell rang, announcing the end of lunch period, and I left the cold metal bleachers behind and headed for History. I couldn’t pay attention to the lesson on westward expansion. All that moving and charting of new territory made me think too much of everything my mother had so easily left behind.

I couldn’t go back to our empty house alone with all those memories, so I asked Cora to come along. She said she’d help me clean up my mother’s mess of things because we were friends, and friends helped each other out. When we slipped through the front door of my house, I was embarrassed by how old and dark the foyer was, how worn out and tired the carpeting seemed in comparison with the Lessings’ shining wood floors. Even the air felt heavier here.

We started with my parents’ room, tucking Mother’s clothes back into drawers. Cora found her black shoes with the large rhinestones and tried them on. She wrapped a Spanish scarf around her head and pretended to tell my future, which made me laugh. It sounded so hopeful, so full of love. She told me my mother was coming back. For a moment I almost believed her.

When we were straightening up the living room, Cora found a pack of half-finished cigarettes in the side-table drawer. I knew they’d been there for a long time, left over from my grandfather, maybe.

“Have you ever smoked before?” I asked Cora.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “My cousin Simone is a rebel. I’m her rebel-in-training. You?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” Cora said. “You don’t seem like much of a rebel.”

“Well, you’re wrong about that,” I said, wishing she’d heard me on the phone with Nils. “I’m going out to have a smoke.” I’d taken note before of a correlation between slenderness and cigarettes. Audrey Hepburn smoked throughout Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I couldn’t remember her eating a morsel.

Cora followed me out through the French doors into the garden. We traipsed through the snow, sat down on the bench beneath the only elm tree that was still alive, and lit each other’s cigarettes. I closed my eyes and held my grandfather’s smoke in my mouth, trying to develop a taste for it. Then I let it go and watched the gray cloud float up into the light-blue evening sky.

“I’m broken up about my cat,” Cora said. “That’s why I’m smoking. It’s how people cope with grief.” A gray cone of ash fell away from my cigarette and danced on a little wind.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Cora stubbed out her cigarette in the snow and tucked the butt into her coat pocket. I did the same. We sat there for a while in silence, listening to the crisp echo of a neighbor’s shovel digging in snow. Cora’s cheeks were flushed with cold. I dug a hole around the bench leg with the tip of my boot and thought about Starkweather standing up in front of the class with nothing to say. I didn’t want to feel so alone. I wanted to reach out to her.

“I’ve been talking to my mother’s first husband on the phone,” I said.

“What for?”

“I’m trying to figure out where she went.” But I knew it hadn’t been as simple as that.

“I don’t think she left for good. She would have taken those sparkly shoes.”

“She’s crazy,” I said. “She’s always been crazy.”

Cora frowned and kicked the snow with her boot. She burrowed her hands deep in her pockets. “People think Mummy’s crazy,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s only because they don’t know her. She’s crazy with guilt, even though it wasn’t her fault. She thought for a long time she could have stopped it from happening.”

“Stopped what?” I said, trying to hide my eagerness.

Cora rested her neck against the back of the bench and crossed her arms over her chest, staring up into the frost-covered branches. Maybe it was my half confession that made Cora tell me, but I knew it was mostly the snow, because I hadn’t earned that story, not yet anyway, and it’s quite possible I never did.

Mrs. Bowman had visited Cora’s mother on the very day her fate was sealed. It was a week before her death, right around the time that Charles Starkweather lifted his .22 and shot Caril Ann Fugate’s stepfather point-blank in the temple.

Mrs. Bowman hadn’t been in the habit of calling, Cora explained. Society ladies and artists didn’t mix. They had different opinions about the way things should be. For instance, it was strange to the Lessings how the Bowmans sent a fruitcake through the mail every Christmas when they could have easily delivered it themselves. And Mrs. Bowman apparently hadn’t liked the wild way the Lessings left their garden. Occasionally, she’d offer polite suggestions over the fence that began with “You know…” and once she’d gone so far as to recommend her own gardener. But she meant well, it was obvious to anyone. Though hardly beautiful, she had gracious old-fashioned manners, and her crepe suits were well tailored. On that day, however, Cora thought something about her seemed out of place. It was as if the polish on Mrs. Bowman’s smile had worn thin.

“I hope it’s not a bad time,” she said when she arrived, giving Cora a warm look and handing Mrs. Lessing a tray of muffins. It was, in fact, a bad time. Mrs. Lessing had been in the middle of painting; there was gesso under her fingernails and blue paint on her shoes. But she didn’t want to be rude. She welcomed Mrs. Bowman in, took the muffins, and hung her coat in the closet. “Thank you,” Mrs. Lessing said.

“Don’t thank me, thank the housekeeper.” Mrs. Bowman laughed quickly. “I’m a disaster in the kitchen. If it wasn’t for Moira, the boys would have left me long ago.”

Mrs. Lessing led her into the living room, offered her a seat, and then sat down across from her, with the muffin tray resting awkwardly on her knees. Cora lingered in the doorway, running her stocking foot back and forth across the smooth wood floor.

“I didn’t mean to barge in, but it occurred to me how funny it was I’d never paid you a visit in—what, how many years is it now, Corrine?”

“Eleven.”

“Has it been that long? I’m a terrible neighbor.” Mrs. Bowman looked sadly around the room, taking a long glance at Cora and Toby’s old school pictures framed on the wall. “You know, lately everything keeps reminding me of how old I’m getting. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Lessing. She put the muffin tray on the coffee table.

“Suddenly, I have a teenager. He came home from school for the holidays and I could see the change. He wouldn’t talk to me. He was all puffed up like a little man.”

“He’s away at school?”

“At Choate. In Connecticut. He went back last week. It’s just Arthur and me now, and the dog,” said Mrs. Bowman. “And Moira, but she can’t hear and doesn’t speak much, and our house sometimes feels so big and quiet. Some afternoons seem to go on forever with just the sound of the clocks and no one roaring in from school.”

“I forgot to offer you something,” Cora’s mother said.

Mrs. Bowman told her not to bother, she was just happy to talk.

There was something lonely about her neighbor, and Mrs. Lessing found herself sympathizing. She leaned back in her chair, admiring the rings on Mrs. Bowman’s fingers. “They’re beautiful,” she said. Mrs. Bowman handed her one with a large pearl surrounded by diamonds. She tried it on.

Cora came into the room and pried a muffin out of the tray.

“Shall we get you a plate, dear?” Mrs. Bowman said, starting to rise as if she were obligated.

“It’s all right,” Cora’s mother said.

“You’re an artist, so tell me,” Mrs. Bowman said. “Is the ring really beautiful or just gaudy? I’ve always kind of wondered.”

“It has a nice design,” said Cora’s mother, holding her hand out in front of her.

They started talking about art. Mrs. Bowman was well educated in that department, and in several other departments, it seemed. She supported several musicians in the area and was on the board of the University Museum. She’d always dreamed of being artistic. Mrs. Lessing talked about her own work, her painting of the sandhill crane with one foot raised picking at a mound of dirt, and the landscape of grasslands she particularly liked, with the homesteader cabin.

“Can I see them?” Mrs. Bowman asked.

“I don’t show them to anyone,” Mrs. Lessing said. “They’re not ready to be seen.”

“Will something be ready to be seen next week?” she wanted to know. There was going to be an auction to benefit the Historical Society. A painting of the sand hills would be perfect.

Mrs. Lessing agreed to show her neighbor something, Cora said, which was a rarity. So she locked herself in the attic for days, because she felt she didn’t have anything good enough. She painted a picture of a turbulent sky, with thunderstorms casting shadows on rolling hills of sand and a flock of geese tossed in the wind. Outside, the world was up in arms. They’d discovered the bodies of Caril Ann’s family and an old farmer outside Lincoln, but Cora remembered her mother paid little attention. She just kept on working.

The week went by and the painting was done, and Mrs. Lessing made tea, and sat waiting in the living room for Mrs. Bowman to arrive. Around this time, law enforcement unearthed the bodies of two missing teenagers from a storm cellar near Bennet.

Cora’s mother kept walking out onto the porch and looking over at the Bowmans’ house. It seemed to be sleeping peacefully, still as glass behind drawn shades. Perhaps Mrs. Bowman had forgotten. Finally she got up the courage to call. Mrs. Bowman answered and said that, yes, in fact, she had forgotten. But she wasn’t feeling well. A headache, actually, but she’d stop by another time. She did sound strained, or perhaps just busy, like she didn’t have the time. The more Cora’s mother thought about it, the more annoyed she got. After all that work.…

When they found the bodies, Cora’s mother tried to pull out her hair. I’m sorry, I won’t be able to make it. Another time, she scribbled in white across the thunderous sky she’d painted for Jeanette Bowman. “How could you have known from those words? Be reasonable,” Mr. Lessing pleaded at night behind the closed bedroom door. “Please listen.”

But why, that particular time, on that particular day? I should have known something was wrong. Mrs. Lessing stopped painting. She hadn’t painted since. She collected feathers, made halos and wings, and sat in the attic room that Cora’s father had made into a studio, staring out at the snow. Cora said it was like her mother had gone away too. She didn’t know if she’d ever come back.

I stared up at the sky, not knowing what to say. The blue went on and on forever. Starkweather’s trail kept getting wider. I could see how Mrs. Lessing felt. I knew what it was like to feel responsible for something that couldn’t be changed.

It’s OK, I know the story, I’d say to the Bowman boy, taking his hand in mine and looking into his eyes.

“Cora,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I squeezed her mitten-clad hand.

“It’s OK,” she said, and smiled. Small points of color rose on her cheeks. I leaned my head on her shoulder, trying to replace one touch with another.