CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1962

Not long before Christmas vacation, Cora and I were lying on the floor of her room studying for a test when Mrs. Lessing knocked tentatively, asking if Cora wanted anything from the store. Sitting up quickly, I turned some pages in my history book, trying to look responsible.

I hadn’t ever seen Mrs. Lessing leave the house before, and she seemed uncomfortable, as if the outside world didn’t suit her. Her hair was gathered in a tight bun, but her coat wasn’t buttoned right. It didn’t look nearly warm enough.

Cora didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, and she rattled off a long list of requests: Wheaties, Skippy, Fig Newtons, candy canes, and a special cream she’d read about in Seventeen that was supposed to lighten freckles. My stomach rumbled. I was too hungry to concentrate on studying.

Mrs. Lessing’s lace-up shoes, which had been black and shiny earlier that afternoon, were now splattered with white paint, but she didn’t seem to care. I tried to work up the courage to say something, to show her I was interested in the things she did. “What were you painting, Mrs. Lessing?” I asked, just as she was turning to go.

“Oh,” she said, looking down at her coat and fumbling with the buttons. “Nothing important. Ornaments,” and then she was gone.

If it had just been the two of us, Mrs. Lessing would have opened up to me the way mothers and daughters were supposed to with each other—the way they did in the most recent issue of Life where Jackie Kennedy was holding Caroline so tightly. Mrs. Lessing might have told me about everything she was working on, about the way the past wouldn’t let her go. I would tell her about my mother leaving and how I couldn’t stop wondering what I had done wrong. Nothing, Mrs. Lessing would say. She’d touch my hair and tell me it was all right. She’d tell me I was important.

“Who won the battle of Hastings?” Cora said, opening her notebook.

I flipped over onto my back, tucking my arms under my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Hastings?”

Cora let out a disgusted sigh. “Do you want to fail?”

“No,” I said. I was past caring about grades, especially in history. Who cared about France when people went missing and were murdered right under your nose and innocent people ended up feeling responsible, paying the price? Mrs. Lessing had created her own sort of prison. “You spend too much time in the attic,” I’d heard Mr. Lessing say, to which his wife answered, “But I can’t do anything else.” I wondered if it was easier to be up there, with only her thoughts, if somehow coming down to earth made her think too much about what had happened next door.

When Cora went downstairs to get a snack, I became restless. Trying to stop myself from thinking about food, I wandered into the hall and peered up the attic stairs. The door was open and a shaft of light streamed down, leaving a bright square at my feet. I took it as a sign. Without thinking twice, I went upstairs to turn it off.

Mrs. Lessing’s studio was the most beautiful, sad place I had ever seen. Wings were hung on the rough plank walls, some so large they were almost frightening. I went over and touched the feathers, stiff and brittle with paint. Running my fingers over a wire cage, I peered inside, where a tiny red box dangled from a string. In a corner by the small diamond-shaped window sat a globe on a wooden stand; faint with hunger, I knelt down, letting its ridges and latitudes spin beneath my finger. Wherever it stopped was where my mother had gone … the Arctic Ocean. I imagined her trapped beneath a layer of ice, her gaze lifeless, her fists frozen where she had tried to break through. She had gone there to harm herself. Mrs. Lessing would try to comfort me, to bring me back to the world. And we would hide here in the attic together, sharing stories.

When I found the stack of Christmas presents waiting beneath a folding table, my throat tightened and I began to tear up. I opened a box of beautiful barrettes that Mrs. Lessing must have decorated herself, an illustrated Audubon guide to birds of North America, a store-bought boomerang for Toby, a red wool coat with gold buttons that must have been for Cora. I buried my face in the collar and breathed in the soft scent of department store perfumes. There was that same new smell that still lingered in some of my mother’s unworn garments. I tried on the coat and hugged it around me. The inside was lined with a beautiful, soft ivory satin. I felt it slip around my wrists. Outside, the sun was sinking behind the Bowmans’ roof, and their house was bathed in purple light. Something about dusk made me hungry for a memory I couldn’t quite place. I took off the beautiful red coat and put it back in the box.

I let my hand drift over the feathers and pots of paint on the table, letting my tears fall. There was no one to see. A notebook lay open next to a jar of water where brushes soaked. Mrs. Lessing had drawn a rope down the margin and the frayed end spun into words:

You see, I think of my children, I think of the laundry to stop myself from thinking about you. White shirt after white shirt, and how am I able to press them anymore? This feeling has to grow tired and just give up—

There were footsteps at the top of the stairs, and when I turned around Cora was standing there, staring at me, her pale eyes narrowed, the way they’d when she first saw me outside the Bowmans’. Quickly, I dried my eyes on my sweater.

“You’re not supposed to be up here,” she said. “No one is.”

“Your mother left the light on,” I croaked.

Cora crossed her arms. “What’s wrong?” she asked, but her tone was suspicious.

My eyes were red, my cheeks streaked with tears. “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head, grasping the edge of the table because I felt like I might pass out right there. “Nothing, I guess.”

We went back downstairs and I pretended to study, but it wasn’t the same. Cora didn’t trust me anymore; something had been building up between us.

*   *   *

On the last day of school before vacation, I saw Faye Hallock in the hall slipping Christmas cards into lockers. I didn’t think to check if she’d given one to me. It was unlikely—she never even wanted to sit next to me in class—but when I packed up my books at the end of the day, a white envelope fluttered to the floor, a white envelope with my name written across it in gold. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t show Cora. I kept Faye’s card hidden in a secret pocket of my bag like a stolen jewel. My mother would have liked the idea of Faye. Faye was her type of girl, pretty and talkative with her own special flair.

That afternoon, I sat at my mother’s letter desk tracing the sequin Christmas tree on the card with the tip of my finger. Faye had made all the dots above the I’s into hearts. For a very long time, I sat, trying to copy her perfect, round script in a letter I was writing to Lowell:

Dear Lowell, I would like so much to be your friend. I think there are things we have to say to each other.

But my handwriting was too shaky and strange. I couldn’t get it right. Suddenly, it seemed like nothing was ever going to be right, despite all my attempts to make it on my own.

I took my secret fresh package of cigarettes out of the drawer and went outside. The bitter cold seeped through my buttonholes, scraping my lungs. I didn’t care. I imagined shedding my coat, hat, and mittens in a pile and just walking and walking and walking into the cold night. I’d lie down in a snowdrift by the old train tracks outside of town and stare up until the stars came together in a single bright light at the end of the sky. They’d find my body like that. My mother would probably feel guilty enough to come back to my father, but I would be gone.

During the evenings, now, my father and I kept to ourselves, curled in on the chill. He often walked from room to room, as if he were looking for something, but he had little to say. My mother went unmentioned for days on end. So did everything else. Our lives had dwindled down to silence and cold. At odd moments we’d find ourselves face-to-face, surprised out of thoughts along dark hallways. Maybe we were both dreaming about Mother on the Riviera or somewhere closer, in pursuit of Starkweather’s ghost.

I woke up one morning at the tail end of a dream, sick with dread. Starkweather and Caril Ann had been barreling through the snow in my mother’s gold Studebaker, on their way to kill my father. Everything had stopped. Our house seemed caught inside itself, buried beneath a layer of ice. Rising slowly out of bed, I crept down the hall and pushed open my parents’ bedroom door. By the dim glow of dawn, I could see my father in his striped pajamas tangled in the sheets, his body curled around a pillow. He lay on his side, his hands tucked beneath his cheek, thin hair grazing his brow. His shoulders rose and fell with his heavy breath. He needed a haircut and a good shave. He didn’t look anything like a father. He was a lovesick puppy about to roll over and play dead. I moved through the soft light and knelt down beside the bed, trying to read his dreams. But his face was blank. He shifted away and let out a soft slow snore.

*   *   *

The night I finally saw Lowell felt like the coldest evening I could remember. I stayed around late to help the Lessings decorate their Christmas tree with miniature birds and feather fans tied at the bottom with red ribbon. Mrs. Lessing had collected the feathers for the fans during April and May, when the birds—dark green mallards, mergansers, barn swallows, snow geese, cormorants—migrated from south to north across the wetlands on their way to Canada. If you searched hard at the right time of year, you could find bright feathers hidden in the tall blades of grass, tiny whispers of color that had brushed the sky. Mrs. Lessing had etched some of the feathers with silver or gold, and I could see them shimmering in the light of candles. “They all come at once,” she said, as she told the story of the birds’ approach. “It’s beautiful.” But the way she described the scene was so full of longing that it almost hurt to listen. It seemed like Mrs. Lessing herself might fly away.

Mr. Lessing came down from the ladder, where he’d been adjusting the star on the top of the tree, and stood over her, biting his lip, frowning as if not quite sure what to do. He reached down to touch her shoulder. “Corrine—” he said.

But Mrs. Lessing pulled away. I wanted to stay and tell them all never to give her another piece of laundry. She couldn’t take it. Her head was too crowded with other things. They should have shown more appreciation. She had picked out the most beautiful gifts.

I wanted to see what would happen, but Cora shot me a look, and I followed her into the sunroom, where she got out the checkers as I strained to hear her parents’ voices. But everything had gone quiet. Perhaps they were hugging, or maybe Mr. Lessing was putting his wife to bed with a hot-water bottle and a glass of warm milk to soothe her nerves. Maybe he was rubbing his palm over her back, something I so much wanted someone to do for me.

Outside, the sky was dark. The Bowmans’ house loomed like a forgotten ruin beyond the white picket fence. The only light anywhere I could see was our lantern flickering over the table and Cora’s round face. We were on a ship, riding the dark waves toward a haunted island, with no land anywhere in sight. I thought of the cat still buried in the sepulchre, its eyes gone white as clouds, and Mrs. Bowman wrapped up in a bedsheet. I thought of her swimming through the dark all on her own.

Cora lined up her checker pieces. “You’re the black,” she said. “You go first.”

I organized my checkers on the board and moved one. “Is your mother upset about the murders?”

Cora sighed. “How should I know?” She moved her checker piece slowly across the surface of the board and looked at me. She knew I didn’t want to play. She knew what I wanted to do, but she’d never see why.

I wanted to come to some sort of understanding. The world was so incredibly vast. I got up and went to the window and stared out at the Bowmans’ house as a cloud drifted over the moon. All I could see was the skeleton fence, the rectangles of lifeless windows. “What do you think their last thoughts were?” I said.

“Whose?”

I turned around to face her. “You know.” I was surprised by the insistence in my voice.

“You think too much about it,” she said as if she were an adult who wanted to emphasize the point of what she was saying.

“Everything’s frozen. I can’t help thinking it looks like that day when it happened.”

“You weren’t even here,” she said. “They’d taken the Christmas stuff down by then, and there was only a little snow.”

“What else do you remember? Did they leave footprints?”

“I don’t know. What does it matter? Everyone knew who did it anyhow. They had no use for footprints. Footprints were obsolete.” She sat there looking haughty because she had all the answers. Obsolete had been on our vocabulary test last week. Cora had gotten it right.

Suddenly, I understand the kind of boredom my mother had felt. I was so tired of Cora and the same conversations.

Lowell Bowman was what I needed. I opened my bag, pretended to look for a pack of cigarettes, took out a book and then laid Faye Hallock’s Christmas card on top of it. When I looked up, I could tell I’d made a mistake. Cora’s eyes were so sad. They sparkled in the light from the lantern, like dark bottomless pools. You couldn’t help the way you felt about a person, though. I just didn’t feel sorry for her. If I were Cora, I would have been a better daughter.

She picked up the card. I watched her open it. She studied it for a moment and then slid it back across the table. Her cheeks went red.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

Cora stared at the board and ground two checker pieces back and forth between her fingers. “You’re different,” she said. She chewed on the corner of her thumb, then thrust her hand beneath the table. I wanted to tell her to stop chewing on things, stop fidgeting. “All you think about is my mother. I told you that story because I thought you were my friend.”

“I was only trying to help her.”

“How could you possibly do that? You look in the mirror all the time. When you smoke, you pretend you’re in the movies. But you’re not. You’re like me. You’re one of us.”

I didn’t want there to be any us.

“Cora—” I said, but I did not have the words to continue. I couldn’t give her this one small thing. A shadow moved across her face. A light had gone on in the Bowmans’ living room. It was Lowell. It had to be him, home for the holidays. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, then ran his fingers through his hair. I couldn’t tell the color, only that his shirt was a light shade, a buttondown. I couldn’t see his face. I had to get closer. As I approached the window, he peered out into the darkness, like he knew I was there, like he was waiting, then turned around and disappeared out of view. Perhaps he had seen me standing in the lantern light, a far-off figure from a long lost time. Maybe after we got to know each other, he would always remember me this way.

I could hear Cora putting the checkers away. She snuffed out the lantern. The darkness folded us in. “That’s him,” I whispered.

The air was so still between us. There were all the tiny sounds that made up silence, a whirring, a humming, a pulse.

Then Cora said, “What you really wish is that it had happened to you.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said.

“I think you do. And that makes you almost like a murderer yourself. You probably scared your mother off.” We stood there in the darkness for a moment without moving. I could sense Cora’s round outline beside me, hear her breath. I had nothing left to lose. I packed up my bag, threw it over my shoulder, and unlocked the sunroom door.

“Where are you going?” she whispered.

“Home.”

“I don’t believe you.”

It didn’t make any difference what she believed. I stepped out into the snow. The cold air cut into my skin, but I didn’t care.

“Sue—” Cora said.

I stepped forward through the snow as he passed in front of the window, holding a bottle of something, I couldn’t tell what. I only caught a glimpse. As he bent behind the couch, the Christmas tree lights came on. When he stood back up, the glow was soft around him and I walked right up to the fence. A pine tree hummed in the wind. I heard Cora coming up behind me, her boots cracking the frozen crust of snow. Climbing a rise, I stumbled forward and grabbed the fence posts. Cold filled my boots as my feet slipped through layers, last week’s fall and all the snows before. When Lowell disappeared for a moment, I moved closer, afraid I’d lose him forever. A moment later, he was back in the frame of the window, flopping down on the couch, with his feet on one arm, his neck resting on the other. His hair was a brown color, straight and short, almost a crew cut, which made him look like what magazines called a man’s man. He seemed so close. He opened a book, and I tried to see what it was. I wanted to know what he was reading.

Cora grabbed my shoulder. I lifted myself over the fence. She tugged at my coat. “You can’t.”

But I could. I broke free and fell forward into a bank of snow by the rose garden. The stars spun above me. I put my face in my hands and rubbed my mittens back and forth across my cheeks. But Lowell Bowman hadn’t heard me. He hadn’t moved a muscle. The gentle wind in the pine masked any sound. “Don’t think you can come back,” Cora hissed.

I knew I couldn’t come back. I had broken into another world. I had crossed the line, but I didn’t care. I was a new person. I was a braver person. There was nothing left to hide behind. I had never been so sure of anything. My cheeks stung with crusted snow, but inside the Bowmans’ house the living room light was warm and red, soft as the inside of a heart. My bag hung from my shoulder, heavy and wet. I walked up as close as I dared and hung there, beside the pine, just out of sight. What color were his eyes? What words were inside his head? His feet shifted. Tennis shoes. He tucked up his knees and propped the book on his thighs.

Wet clumps melted around my calves where snow had slipped in. I barely felt it.

Suddenly he threw down the book and stood up. There was impatience. My heart jumped, but I wasn’t scared. He wore a blue oxford tucked into belted jeans. He was skinny. I thought, He must always wear belts. It was one of those things you knew about a person when you knew him well, like that his socks never matched, or about his underwear patterns, whether they had trains and cowboys or checks and stripes.

Lowell went over to the Christmas tree and took something off a branch, staring down at the palm of his hand. I wanted to know what it was. Something treasured from the old Christmases when the three of them were all together; that had to be it. He placed the object in the center of the coffee table. I came closer, right up the window, trying not to make a sound. I peered over the sill, feeling my heart catch. It was an ornament, bright in color, a large bird with wings painted gold. It looked familiar, like something Mrs. Lessing would have made. He sat with his elbows on his knees, staring, as if he were trying to make it move with his eyes. And then, for some reason, I just knew—the way a person knows things—that guilt was eating away at him. He had no reason to feel guilty. He was right there, strange and private, feeling something the boys at college couldn’t possibly understand. But I understood how it was to be on your own.

I was desperate to know his thoughts, if he could feel me near the way I had always been able to feel him. I came closer. I took off my mitten, watched my hand reach out like something in a dream. I imagined that I was touching him, pressing his cheek with the tip of my finger. He might have thought I was the wind, a ghost, a little chill. I touched the windowpane. My breath left a circle on the glass.

As Lowell looked up and came to the window, I flattened myself against the side of the house and glanced back over my shoulder. I could see him furrow his brow, as he braced both his hands on the glass. He touched the circle my breath had left behind and jerked away from the window, as I stumbled back toward the pine tree, falling forward in my footprints, face down in the snow, the contents of my bag spilling like an avalanche. Ice scraped my tongue. My throat felt stuffed with cotton. I scrambled to pick up my books. Everything was real—the ground, the sky, the footprints—but all of a sudden I didn’t want anything to be real.

I heard the patio door open, saw the slit of light in the darkness and the sparkle of snow. There was nothing I could do. My footprints were like craters. I pushed my way along the fence, each step dragging me down, struggling against an impossible undertow. I stopped to catch my breath. I waited for his hands to grab me, to reach out and pull me down into somewhere new. But there was no sound, nothing there. He hadn’t followed. I knew I had to have scared him, given everything. He must have jumped at every sound. Not so long ago his parents’ murderers had stood on this very same ground.

“Who’s there?”

I caught my breath. My feet felt heavy, as if in a nightmare. Forward motion was impossible.

“Who’s there?” He stood by the edge of the house, his outline black against the light from the living room. He turned around in his footprints and peered into the darkness. His heart must have been hammering.

I choked on nothing and made my way quickly along the fence, tumbling out onto South 24th Street. A taste clung to my tongue like rusty metal. I hurried in and out of streetlights, my heart pounding in my chest. To snug families in passing cars, I was no one special: just a girl, late for dinner, skittering along with burrs of snow caught to her coat. But inside I had changed. I was an almost criminal, Starkweather’s girlfriend, letting love make me crazy. I was following in her footprints, walking that same dangerous ground.

I shed my bag, hat, and coat in a pile by the kitchen door and combed the snow out of my hair like nothing had happened. My father came in holding the newspaper, scratching his head. There were slippers on his feet. I had never seen him wear slippers.

“It’s not safe for you to be wandering around after dark.”

“Are you worried?”

“I’m your father.”

“It’s only four blocks.”

“A lot can happen in four blocks,” he said, tapping the newspaper. “Most car accidents occur within a mile of home. And nobody wears seat belts. The human imagination seems incapable of grasping the concept of its own demise.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my feet, afraid he’d sense I’d been up to no good. But the puddle around my shoes looked sad and ordinary, telling nothing of where I’d been.

My father sighed. “The problem is, your mother doesn’t think she’ll ever die. She can leave, come back years later, and nothing will have changed.”

I studied him for a moment, trying to tell if he’d had too many drinks. His body looked smaller, his head drooping as if it were too heavy to keep up. We both had changed.

I went upstairs and emptied the bag on the floor of my room. Everything inside was damp with snow. A pen had leaked, and left a tiny blue stain on the carpet. I wanted to salvage Faye Hallock’s Christmas card, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I checked every pocket twice. My heart lightened, lost gravity completely. I shook books by the spine without feeling their weight.

I had to call Cora. “It’s me,” I said.

“I saw what happened. He almost caught you,” she said. “You’re sick.”

“Did I leave anything at your house?”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” I had never heard her voice sound so hateful. And then the line went dead.

Who’s there? he’d said. Had he really wanted to know? I could see the gold letters of my name shining like a beacon in the snow where I had fallen.

*   *   *

Days passed, without mother or any word from Cora. I stopped eating, and tried to forget about what I’d done. I read the newspaper clipping one last time. The pages had yellowed and become thin with so much handling. I examined Starkweather and Fugate closely before throwing the article away, burying it in the bottom of the kitchen trash. I said a strange sort of goodbye to Carol King and Bob Jensen, Moira Dunphey, and Jeanette and Arthur Bowman. I hadn’t meant to scare their son. I went up to my room and lay down on my side, feeling as if I’d lost someone dear to me. That night I cried myself to sleep.

*   *   *

On Christmas, my father and I drove to Aunt Portia and uncle Freddy’s in Omaha and pretended like everything was all right. But we weren’t fooling anyone. Capital Steel was in the red, I’d heard my father tell someone on the telephone, and everyone thought my mother had left because of this. She was kicking him while he was down. They couldn’t see how much her leaving had to do with me.

At dinner, Uncle Freddy talked about Coach Devaney and the Cornhuskers’ win over Michigan. Claridge, the quarterback, was coming into his own. They were going to be a strong team now, with the rough spots of ’61 ironed out. My father agreed. The Huskers had a promising future.

Aunt Portia cornered me in the kitchen when I brought a stack of dirty dishes in from the table. “Puggy,” she said, holding me away from her, “you flattened the mashed potatoes under your napkin.”

“I wasn’t hungry, Aunt Portia.”

“You’re very thin,” she said.

I felt the twitch of a smile on my lips. I stared at Aunt Portia’s round figure bulging from beneath her apron, trying imagine the beautiful little girl with the long auburn braids standing in the shade of the elm tree. But there didn’t seem to be any likeness to those yellowed photographs. Now her hair was short and gray, her legs thick and stocky as drainpipes. Was it possible for grown women to be jealous of girls? What happened to you? I wanted to say.

“Daddy told me you wrote love notes and dropped them all over the house,” I said.

“Did he?”

I nodded.

“Shame on him. He made so much fun of me. It was just a game,” she said, dismissing the memory with a wave of her hand, but her eyes looked dreamy, far away somehow. “I was such a silly girl with so many grand ideas about the way things would turn out.”

“Because of Hans and Elsa?”

Aunt P put the dishes on the drying rack and turned to me. “You can’t have silly dreams anymore. You have to take care of your father now. Do you understand what it feels like to lose someone like that?”

I wandered through the newly furnished rooms nibbling peanuts out of silver bowls. I could hear Jimmy Stewart in the den where my cousins watched It’s a Wonderful Life. My father and Uncle Freddy were smoking cigars behind the white-frosted Christmas tree, blowing great billowy clouds out the window like two boys sneaking cigarettes. I took their half-full drinks off the coffee table and flushed them down the toilet, then put the glasses back on the coasters where I’d found them. The sooner my father finished his drink, the sooner we could go back home.

*   *   *

Out of nowhere, the new year came, and it was 1963. Cora and I had planned on writing down our resolutions, throwing them into a fire, and sneaking champagne when my father was out. Neither of us had ever had a full drink. But instead, I sat at my bedroom window, staring into the darkness, thinking how strange it was that something so important as an entire year could shift overnight into a great unknown. You woke up, and suddenly it was 1945 and the war was going to end, or it was 1950 and half a century had passed. Or it was 1958 and you would never see your parents again.

Our house was so quiet. Somewhere else, there were sparklers and noisemakers and funny hats. All over Lincoln, people fell down drunk and necked like mad because it was midnight and they wanted to have good luck. They wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. I wondered if Lowell knew who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. I wondered if anyone would ever want to spend time with me or if my parents were only the beginning, only the first of all kinds of people who wouldn’t find me quite special enough to make a difference.

I dreaded the return to school. My mind invented horrible scenarios. Lowell had found the envelope with my name on it and had accused Cora of sneaking around in the dark with her friends. Or, worse, Mrs. Pritchard had found the card and was busy putting two and two together. She had questioned Mrs. Lessing on the subject, having remembered the afternoon a strange awkward girl had wandered into her garden. Yes, it was that day the blizzard began.

I found Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats on my grandfather’s bookshelf and decided to give it to Cora. It must have belonged to my father or Aunt Portia when they were children, but I wrote Cora’s name and Christmas 1962, Love, Susan inside the front cover without a second thought. It was the perfect apology. My heart was swollen with generosity. I only had to admit fault to be forgiven.

I got up early and put on eye makeup before school, outlining my eyes carefully, enhancing the shape, making them bigger and soft. Doe-eyed. As long as I looked put together on the outside, no one would be able to guess how I was feeling. Because the liner was my mother’s, the color was dark and smoky and gave my face a subtle depth, as if there were worlds of mystery, worlds of experience, behind my eyes. I applied the lines discreetly, not wanting to get sent to the principal for being cheap, like some girls who painted their lips fire-engine red and wore their sweaters unbuttoned too far down. Seventeen said the secret to makeup was looking like you weren’t wearing any, which didn’t seem to be true of the Egyptians, or Hollywood stars. I imagined myself an Egyptian princess, my body becoming tall and angular overnight like one of those ancient hieroglyphics in our World Studies textbook.

When I saw Cora in the hall at school, I lifted my hand in greeting, but she looked right through me. My heart sank. I couldn’t get up the courage to talk to her. Who do you think you are? she’d say, and I wouldn’t have an answer. I’d been stupid to think a book would change anything. Or throwing away that article. I was still the same person. Nothing was any different. Faye leaned against her locker holding her books to her chest, laughing with Steve Bunt, who was handsome and straight-edged, not the sort of boy who would ever be caught dead talking to someone crazy, a window peeper, someone like me.

In English class we read a poem about a sick rose.

Cora had her eyes narrowed at me, tapping her eraser on her desk and staring me down as if to say, You are the sickest rose I ever saw.

“What do you think William Blake meant by the sick rose?” Ms. Wimmett asked the class. She had chalk on her nose. Nobody said anything. “Somebody? What is the metaphor?” I pretended to study the poem for the answer, even though I already had one. The sick rose was me.

“Yes, Cora?”

My stomach turned over.

“The rose lost beauty and purity,” she said. “Maybe it was corrupted from sticking its nose where it didn’t belong.”

“Roses don’t have noses,” someone called out.

I could feel everyone looking at me. For the first time in a month Cora and I weren’t sitting together. It was obvious. My cheeks glowed with embarrassment. But she didn’t stop there. When Ms. Wimmett asked her to clarify the central metaphor, she said, “Unholy love. From an impure heart.” Everyone giggled.

Unholy. There was a dark place inside me that had wanted Nils to imagine me naked. There was a strange part of me that pulled me toward windows, that plunged me into places I had no business being, that made me want to do unimaginable things. There was the time I had stolen wine and tried to kiss a dancing teacher, and now my whole body shuddered with fresh embarrassment, as if that very blunder had unfolded only a day before. I was part of the problem, I was part of the deceit, no different from Caril Ann Fugate.

*   *   *

I have no idea where all this darkness comes from. The sun is bright, and the sidewalks sparkle, and I am walking down Calvert Street without my coat. My head is so light, I don’t touch the ground. There is nothing inside me. I can see from above. A tiny blue thing shakes its fist in the pit of my stomach. This is the cold and hunger. But I don’t care. It is the middle of the day. The sun is impossible. Far away, a distant headlight. I don’t know where I’m going.

A tiny dog in a picture window barks and snarls and throws his body against the glass when I pass, over and over, and then I am gone. I don’t know where I’m going. I know what I’ve done, though. I’ve walked out before fourth period. I’ve left everything behind. The trees around the golf course claw black streaks in the sky. The land rolls out in an endless white scroll. The ground crunches under my feet. I lie down where the ninth hole might be. The snow stings my back, my arms. I no longer feel my fingers. I don’t feel my feet. I don’t shut my eyes. The sky is part of another world, blue and spinning like the inside of me.

I turn my head, and someone in a hat is hurrying toward me between the trees. This must be Lowell. Instead, it’s a man with big work boots, and he is holding clippers. What will I say? Let me sleep. I’m tired of feeling so much hunger for so many things. I will never be loved. If a person could see into the future, why would she choose to walk the world alone? I think of killers with girlfriends, and soldiers with letters, and all dead, and I am pretty sure someone must have loved them.

I watch the clippers thump down in the snow. He smiles and bobs his head. “Hi,” he says. He takes off his coat and puts it around me, thick fleece, and it smells like the hide of an animal. The hat is black. The hair underneath pokes out gray. He puts his big gloves over my hands and pulls me up. I am watching this from the outside in; I don’t really feel it. I am too tired to resist.

He tells me I am crazy to be out here, without a stitch, and what am I trying to do, kill myself? Do I feel all right? Do I know my name? Do I think I can walk? I walk, but I don’t speak. He has his arm around me. He rubs his hand up and down. “I was just cuttin’ a loose branch broke from the ice by the thirteenth hole. And then I’m comin’ back to the club, and I see you just layin’ there. Jesus Christ!” he says. “You scared the hell outa me. What if I never came? You just gonna lay there till spring, little darlin’?”

Little darlin’ does not sound like me. It sounds like someone in a song. We walk in silence. The cold hurts. I feel prickles in my fingers because the nerves are waking up. My eyes feel frozen open. My teeth chatter. I am too cold to be embarrassed. My limbs creak. I just want to be warm.

He takes me through the first door we come to, the glass one, in the bar. He tells me rules say he should have brought me around back—he is a groundskeeper—but what the hell? It’s the middle of the day. There is a fire in here. It is more important that I am all right. “You sit tight,” he says. I hear him at the bar telling Rick the story of how he found me. The way he tells it, it sounds funny, like one of those weird ways married people meet. “She won’t give her name.”

“I think that’s Mr. Hurst’s girl,” Rick says.

I stare at the flames. He gets me a pail of water to heat up my hands. Want a cheeseburger? I shake my head. French fries? No. The water is cold. “Ouch,” I say, and try to lift them out.

“Keep them there.” Rick puts his fingers around my wrists and pushes them back down. His wedding band sparkles. There is water in the blond hair on the back of his hands, like dew on grass.

He is a bartender. He knows everyone’s secrets. He tells me about crazy times in people’s lives when the rug gets pulled out from under them and there seems to be nothing left. They just want to lie down and quit. Who doesn’t feel that way from time to time? And when you’re young and pain is new, you feel like your heart has been hollowed out with a razor. But the thing is, it keeps ticking. There was this girl in high school, Deidre Lynch, who made him want to die. He felt like jumping off a bridge, but there weren’t any bridges. He thought about hanging himself from a tree. Lynching himself. Get it? And there were girls after Dee that made him want to do worse. He laughs. The point is, it’s never as bad as you think. We sit in silence. I don’t tell him my secret. He pats me on the shoulder and goes to mop down the bar. I close my eyes.

*   *   *

My father had been called. He knew where to find me. He came in his work suit and red tie, his wool coat buttoned wrong like he’d just run out of a meeting. “What in the world happened?” he wanted to know. “I thought you were at school. Are you all right?”

I nodded my head, but I could feel the tears starting to come. I wanted to grab on to my father’s coat and slide to the floor. I wanted to give up.

“Thank God Boyd was out there.” My father put his arms around me and mashed my face to his chest. His crooked buttons were sharp and cold on my cheek. In the wool folds of his coat, I could smell the wind.

“Everyone hates me,” I said.

“You’re my girl,” my father said. “How could anyone hate you?”

In the parking lot, we stopped to watch the sky turning orange, fading quickly like an extinguished match. He took my hand and kissed my head. “Don’t you go leaving too,” he said.