12

“Don’t throw that out, please.” Anna, wrapped in wool and Gore-Tex against the damp March cold, has just come in from walking the dog. William’s standing at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, going through the mail, quickly sorting it into Real and Junk. He’s put the latest CC issue on the Junk pile.

“What?” He picks up an envelope, waves it: some zero-interest credit card offer. “You need another card?”

“No, William.” She unclips Bart’s leash; he shakes himself, shedding water, and ambles up to William for a pat. “Comrade Cosmos.”

“Oh, okay.” She’s on the living room side of the breakfast bar. He slides the shrink-wrapped issue across to her. “Somewhere in there it should explain how to cancel the subscription. We should have done it ages ago.”

“I don’t want to cancel it.” She tries to keep her voice mild. She usually gets the mail, so he doesn’t realize she hasn’t been tossing the issues. “I’m reading those.”

William looks at her, eyebrows raised. “Really.”

“Yes, really.”

He frowns now. “Huh. You okay?”

That, she thinks, has to be the stupidest question anyone has ever asked her. “Of course I’m not okay. Neither are you. But that’s beside the point.”

He shakes his head. “Speak for yourself. I’m fine.”

She just looks at him. She doesn’t even know how to respond to this, but his head’s cocked in the attitude that means he’s waiting for an answer. She chooses her words carefully. “You’re functioning. We’re both functioning. You’re back at work. We’re paying the bills. We get up every morning and eat breakfast and do what’s necessary. But we’re not fine. Not individually, not together. Our only son killed himself four months ago after raping and murdering a stranger. If we were fine, something would be very wrong.”

William’s staring at her as if she’s speaking Martian, perhaps because this is the longest set of sentences she’s directed at him since Percy died. Then he frowns, almost imperceptibly. “Percy wasn’t fine. We are, Anna.” Individually, or together? She doesn’t dare ask. “We can’t blame ourselves.”

She feels like she’s juggling ten-ton weights. Her eyes ache. “With or without blame, there’s still grief.” And now she feels like a fortune cookie. Great. “Don’t you miss him?”

He’s frowning again. “Of course I miss him. Dwelling on it won’t do any good. You need to get out of the house more. It really helps.”

I was just out of the house, she thinks. I’m the only one who walks the damn dog anymore. “Maybe I do, William. But joining clubs and committees wouldn’t fix this, even if they’d have me.” He knows Blake kicked her off the board. She hasn’t had the courage to attend her knitting group, since the woman who hosts it is another Blake parent. “I’ll plan Kip’s opening, and I’ll probably enjoy it, but that’s it. When is the opening, anyway? Has he scheduled it yet?”

“He went to another gallery.”

“He what?” Anna’s genuinely shocked. “How could he do that? You gave him his first show when no one else would, and now he pulls out when the stuff’s selling? Oh, Will, I’m so sorry!”

It occurs to her in a dizzy rush that she and William have shared ground again: they’ve both been rejected by their peers, and maybe that will bring them closer together. But William’s staring at her with the baffled expression he wears so often these days. “It’s all right. People move on. I always knew he wouldn’t stay forever.”

Anna blinks away the eerie sense that William’s really talking about Percy. She hopes Kip had the decency to fire William in person, at least, and not to write a letter. “When did you find out? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t important. I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

Anna closes her eyes. She remembers when William told her everything that happened at the gallery, when he sought her advice and used her as a sounding board. How have they arrived here?

She reaches across the breakfast bar to touch William’s hand. It’s a calculated gesture. “Will, I wish you’d told me. If you want me to get more involved with life again, you have to talk to me.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about Percy. You don’t want to talk about anything else, and you won’t talk to anyone else, and I can’t take that weight, Anna.”

She tightens her grip on his hand. “You can’t pretend everything’s normal. You can’t pretend you aren’t sick over this, don’t miss him, don’t wonder why—”

“Stop.” He pulls his hand away. “I told you, I don’t want to hear it. I wish I did. I wish I was able to. But I can’t. Find a therapist, Anna.”

She swallows hysteria, takes a gamble. “If I do, will you come with me? Couples counseling—”

“No.” He turns away from her. He is, she can tell, poised to leave the room. “That won’t change anything.”

“It won’t change what happened to Percy,” she says. It might change the vacuum in the house, the hollow roar where there used to be a marriage, but if she’s going to say that, she wants it to be when they’re both sitting down, facing each other. Not to his back. “It might change what happens to us.” She doesn’t know if this is oblique enough or not; in any case, William’s walked away from her, down the hall to his study. She doesn’t even know if he’s heard her. Bart, following him, turns around to look at her inquiringly. “Go on,” she tells the dog, and he trots happily after William.

Trembling, she picks up the CC issue and turns to walk the other way, to Percy’s room, where she’s been spending more and more time. The boxes the police brought back are all unpacked, the computer on the desk and the clothing laundered and folded and put in drawers and closet. She knows she should donate the clothing, and she will, but not yet.

As she promised herself in January, she’s been going steadily through the CC archives, reading from the beginning. She’s started to allow herself to read the new weekly issues as they arrive, though, even if sometimes she doesn’t quite understand what’s happening. That way, she doesn’t have the suffocating sense of continuously falling farther behind.

That suffocation, she knows, is the Emperor’s work.

She began the series expecting to scoff at it, to be bored and annoyed. Instead, she found herself being pulled deeper into the story, found resonance of it everywhere she turned. Since November, she has been engaged in a struggle with the Emperor of Entropy, with despair and meaninglessness and mortality, with decay. It amazes her that such a huge pop-culture phenomenon can speak so directly to a middle-aged woman.

She wonders how it spoke to Percy. When he first started following the series, he tried to tell her about it a few times, but she could never keep herself from changing the subject out of sheer boredom. Now she aches to go back and redo those conversations.

She wonders, though, what the series has to say to anyone Percy’s age, to all those youngsters obsessed with dating and mating and money and jobs and clothing. At that age, she’d simply have found it odd and unfathomable. When she was twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five, her most serious experiences with entropy were traffic jams and dirty laundry.

Anna closes the door to Percy’s room. She’d leave it open if she were alone in the house, so Bart wouldn’t feel abandoned. She can’t stand his whining when he’s in the house and lonely, which has been happening more often lately. She’s once again begun to entertain fantasies of selling Bart or giving him away or leaving him somewhere or having him put down, but the image of him pulling against his leash as Percy wades into the water always stops her. And, she reminds herself, he’s an old dog now. Eight is ancient, for a Wolfhound. She’ll lose Bart, too, soon enough. In the meantime, since William’s home right now, she can keep the door closed. Bart still prefers William to Anna, which is fine with her.

She really needs to talk to William about the dog-walking issue, even if he won’t discuss anything else. If he doesn’t want to walk the dog, maybe they can hire someone. Maybe that someone will fall in love with Bart and run off with him.

No. Anna glances at Percy’s desk, at the framed photo of him with the puppy. Percy loved this creature. In a way, he’s all of Percy they have left, the best of Percy. Maybe that’s why William now has so little to do with the dog. In any case, it’s why Anna is irrevocably tied to the animal, for better or worse, bad breath and shedding and all, which is more at the moment than she can say for William.

A Stanford 2009–2010 academic calendar hangs over the desk. Percy never wrote on it, but Anna has. She blinks at today’s square. Wednesday, March 10: Melinda Soto’s birthday.

Her throat constricts. That poor woman. Those poor people. Riding a wave of rage at Percy, she forces herself to stare at the photograph, to remember him as the sweet child who played with his dog.

Melinda Soto had a son. She’d have understood, surely.

When the rest of the world hates your child, with reason or without, you cling to your love for him. You’re his mother. Loving him is your job.

Trembling only a little, Anna sits on the bed and opens the plastic wrapping around the issue, taking pains not to tear the cover. Percy was very careful with CC as a physical object, and so she is, too. She has a sudden, vivid memory of Percy telling his father—who was marginally more interested in the topic than Anna, or at least willing to pretend he was—about the Comrade Cosmos Club at Stanford. Anna should write them, find out if any of them knew Percy, see if someone might be willing to speak at the memorial service.

This is the first bit of planning she’s done for the event. Marjorie, ever efficient, booked the local Unitarian church for that day before she and David flew back home. “July 24 is a Saturday, Anna. We need to grab the building before someone books it for a wedding.” No one in the family’s religious, but holding memorial services in a church is What’s Done. Marjorie has an acute sense of such things, which she’s passed down in modified form to William. Anna could care less.

She’s avoided even thinking about the service since Marjorie and David left; it’s some kind of irony that Comrade Cosmos brought her back to it. She starts to ponder a possible guest list, but this quickly becomes painful, another reminder of how isolated they’ve been. She’ll put a notice in the paper, and anyone who wants to be decent can come; surely everyone knows that a funeral isn’t the time for privacy.

Anna and William and Marjorie and David will definitely be there. Anna’s pretty sure that Karen-who-brought-back-Bart would come, too, if she were invited. Bart should be there, too. Anna wonders if the Unitarians will allow a dog in the sanctuary.

Percy’s ashes are currently in a brown cardboard box in Anna’s closet. It would be so much easier just to scatter them in the backyard, but that’s not What’s Done.

Or is it? The memorial service isn’t about the disposition of the ashes. If they want to bury Percy in the backyard, they can. If they want to scatter him somewhere, they can do that, too. Where would he want to be scattered?

This suddenly seems like an urgent question. Anna can’t believe she hasn’t thought of it before. Since William’s in the house, for once, maybe she should consult him. She stands up to go find him, but then remembers how he pulled his hand away from hers, how he walked away from her down the hall. He doesn’t want to talk about Percy.

She sits down again and picks up the new issue.

*   *   *

On March 10, 2009, Melinda takes the day off work, an annual birthday treat. When Jeremy’s in college, she’ll be able to sleep in on her birthday, but since he’s still in high school, she has to get up early to get him up, fed, and out the door.

She puts on a robe and pads downstairs, rapping on Jeremy’s bedroom door on the way. “Jer! Up ’n’ at ’em! Time’s a wasting!” She thinks she hears a groan in response. If he’s not in the kitchen in fifteen minutes, she’ll come back up and roust him more forcefully.

Yawning, she starts the coffee, a peppermint chocolate roast she bought as a treat for today. It smells delicious, and she smiles when the odor starts to fill the kitchen.

“God, Mom. How can you stand that stuff?”

Jeremy, improbably, is awake and downstairs, standing scowling in his own bathrobe, a ratty blue terrycloth thing he refuses to let her replace.

“Good morning. You don’t have to drink it.”

“I have to smell it.”

She decides to change the subject. “You’re up early.”

“Spanish quiz. Michael and I are supposed to study before school.”

“Ah,” Melinda says, swallowing past her disappointment. She’d briefly entertained a fantasy that he’d come down to surprise her with a gift, or even just an offer to cook breakfast. He hasn’t even said “happy birthday” yet. Has he forgotten? How could he?

There’s still a chance that this is an elaborate ruse to surprise her, but the possibility’s fading, and the longer she waits to remind him, the more embarrassed he’ll be. She thinks. She hopes.

“Jer? You know what today is, right?”

He gives her such a blank look that she knows he’s forgotten. Jeremy has no acting ability whatsoever. “Tuesday. It is Tuesday, isn’t it? Yeah, it has to be, because yesterday was Monday, and—”

“March 10,” she says gently, and he blinks at her for a moment before panic blooms across his face.

“Oh, shit. Shit shit shit. Mom, I’m sorry. Happy birthday! I’m sorry.” He’s blushing. “I didn’t—I don’t know how I—”

“It’s okay, honey.” If nothing else, this means he’ll be nice to her for the rest of the day. “It’s okay. Just sit down and have a nice breakfast so you’ll be ready for your Spanish quiz.”

“I’ll cook!” he says, and he does, and it’s good. Jeremy knows his way around an omelette. He throws together cheese, veggies, spices, all of it ordinary enough but in just the right quantities. He even pours Melinda’s coffee, although he makes a great show of wrinkling his nose as he carries the mug to the table. He even tries to make conversation about the library. She appreciates the effort.

After he’s left for school, she goes back upstairs for another part of her birthday ritual. A framed photograph of her parents sits on her dresser. They’re very young in this picture, tan and lean, sitting in a rowboat smiling up at the camera. She doesn’t know who took the shot, but her mother told her once that it was taken just after Melinda was conceived.

She carries the photograph downstairs, puts it on the kitchen table—which Jeremy cleared, mirabile dictu—and digs around in the cabinets until she finds a candle, which she lights. She sits in front of this makeshift altar and takes a deep breath.

“I miss you guys.” This is almost always how she begins these birthday speeches to her dead. Her father died of a heart attack when she was thirty-five, her mother of cancer five years later. Neither of them knew Jeremy, whom Melinda adopted when she was forty-five. “I wish you were here to see your grandson. He’s eighteen now, and of course he thinks he’s all grown up, but I know better, just like you knew better when I was that age. I wish you were here to give me advice.” She swallows. Some years she has a sense of their presence; some years she imagines full conversations with them. This year, they’re mute.

She keeps talking for a while, anyway. When it seems clear that nothing’s going to happen, she stops. Maybe next year.

When Jeremy was in his Charlotte’s Web phase, terrified of death, she told him about this ritual, told him that you never really lose the people you love. You just can’t see them anymore, and that’s hard, but they’re still with you. “It’s like when we water the plants,” she told him. “The water sinks into the soil, and you can’t see it, but it’s still keeping the plants alive. Whenever we love people or they love us, the love sinks into us and helps us keep going, even when the people aren’t here anymore.”

She wondered then if Jeremy understood what she meant. She wonders now if she still believes it.

She blows the candle out and carries the photograph back upstairs. The weather’s crappy, chilly and unusually gray for Reno, but Melinda spends the day rereading several of the Mitford books, and she enjoys her peppermint chocolate coffee, and when Jeremy comes home, he brings her a card and some supermarket flowers. This weekend, she’ll celebrate with Vera, who always drives her out to Gerlach and buys her a gorgeous piece of pottery, and at some point she hopes to celebrate with Rosie, who has her hands full with Walter at the moment. And she’s pretty sure that next year, Jeremy will remember.

*   *   *

Melinda’s birthday, and it has to fall on the Wednesday before spring break. This is the worst time of the semester. The students are exhausted. Veronique’s exhausted. Everyone wants to be on vacation already, although the vacation’s all too brief.

The only saving grace is that she knows at least a quarter of the class won’t show up. Also, there’s a class presentation scheduled for today. Veronique allows students to do these for extra credit; they’re usually weak work, but they’re much easier to grade than papers. And a presentation means that at least one student other than Amy Castillo will say something today.

Women & Violence has bombed. Veronique thought this topic would engage them, but it hasn’t worked very well. They still misread even basic plot points in the books, stare in incomprehension when she tries to introduce anything remotely theoretical, and ignore her efforts to challenge toxic assumptions. Girls who dress slutty deserve to be raped—this from a young woman wearing skintight jeans and a corset—and battered women who don’t just walk away from their abusers don’t deserve any sympathy, and all lesbians hate men, and all feminists are lesbians.

When Veronique tries to challenge these notions, the students just glare at her mutely. Amy’s a delight, but Amy already seems to know everything Veronique’s trying to teach, and the problem with having one bright student in the class is that the others are sure to accuse Veronique of favoritism on the end-of-semester teaching evaluations. Amy doesn’t need this class, and the others aren’t learning anything—except maybe to despise Veronique—and it’s Melinda’s birthday, and all Veronique wants to do is stay home, or get out of town. Flight, flight. Ten times this morning she’s been on the verge of calling in sick, but each time she’s remembered this presentation. The presenter probably wouldn’t mind a cancelation, but if Veronique cancels today, where will it stop? And anyway, she has other committee work piling up: junior faculty files to read for the tenure committee, a report to write on a new hire’s service record. She could write the service report at home, but no one’s allowed to remove the faculty files from the office.

She has to keep making herself go in. It’s her job, and this is the last day before vacation.

So she goes to work, even getting there early so she can read the committee files before class. She speeds through them, reading just carefully enough to know which of the cases will prompt the most discussion—at least no one’s actually up for tenure this year—but hangs on to the files for an extra forty-five minutes so the secretary will think she pored over them.

Then she hauls herself to class. As she expected, only twelve of her twenty students are here today. The presenter, a twitchy and entirely too thin young woman named Samantha, is setting up the electronic equipment at the front of the room. When she sees Veronique, she scowls and says, “It’s not PowerPoint. I’m showing a film clip. And I know the running time doesn’t count towards my ten minutes.”

“Very good,” says Veronique, giving Samantha what she hopes is a sufficiently warm smile. She sits in one of the student seats so she can watch with the rest of them. Evidently this presentation will fill up even more than ten minutes. Excellent.

The one male in the class, a lanky kid named Brent who only wears black and quite clearly has the hots for Samantha, says, “What’s the clip from?”

“Sin City.”

Brent whistles and sits up a little straighter. “Sweet!” He looks like he actually plans to pay attention. Nothing Veronique’s done all semester has gotten him to pay attention. He only stopped texting in class when Veronique threatened to confiscate his phone.

Sin City. Veronique frowns, stabbed by a thin sliver of memory. Melinda. Something about Melinda. A shiver runs over the top of her skull. “When did this movie come out?”

“Four years ago,” Brent says. “It’s awesome.”

Four years ago. Veronique remembers now: Jeremy wanted to see it, and Melinda said she’d go with him, and the film was so violent it made her almost physically ill. “It was disgusting,” she told Veronique. “Women were getting killed and the twenty-something guys sitting in front of me were moaning in pleasure, like they were having orgasms, and afterwards I tried to talk to Jeremy about it and he just rolled his eyes at me. ‘It’s just a movie, Mom. C’mon, weren’t the special effects cool?’ He had no emotional response to the carnage at all. God, Vera! I always thought he was basically a good kid.”

Veronique takes a dizzy breath. “Samantha, you know presentations have to be on work by women. Remind me who made this movie?”

Samantha glares at her. “Well, there are female characters. And there were women in the cast and on the crew and everything. Doesn’t that count?”

Brent snickers. “Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino.” Veronique’s impressed; the child actually knows something.

Samantha’s chin trembles. “It was a collaboration. Are you going to mark me down?”

The presentation checklist couldn’t have been any clearer. All right, never mind: it’s the Wednesday before break, and surely Samantha can’t expect a good grade in the course given her performance to date, anyway. “Let’s see it,” Veronique says, trying not to snap, trying to be kind. “Can you summarize your presentation for us, though, so we know what we’re looking for?”

Samantha shoves a lock of dyed blond hair out of her face, looking slightly relieved. “It’s about how there’s violence to women at the beginning but then in the middle the guys fight the violence against women and at the end it looks like there’s going to be violence again but the movie ends so you don’t know.” She says this in a rush, in one breath. “So maybe something changed. I’m going to show the beginning, and then I’ll talk about the middle, and then I’ll show the end.”

“What,” says Brent, “the first segment? ‘The Customer Is Always Right’? Miller said the woman hired the guy to kill her. She had an affair with somebody dangerous who was going to kill her and she hired the Salesman to do it instead.”

“It’s still violent,” Samantha says. “I’m just going to show it, all right?”

She shows it. Veronique watches in growing nausea: the man joining the woman on the balcony, their kiss, his shooting her. She imagines Melinda watching this four years ago. She feels herself begin to shake and sits trembling through the rest of Samantha’s presentation, which would probably be incoherent even if every other sentence weren’t being blocked out by static: flashes of Melinda’s face, flashes of the pain she must have suffered as she died, flashes of newspaper images of Percy Clark, that smug young bastard.

After the presentation, Samantha asks if anyone has any questions. None of the other students do, although Veronique notes dimly that Amy’s frowning. “I have a question,” Veronique says, and she almost doesn’t recognize her own voice, as hoarse and cracked as a crow’s cry. “That woman who dies. At the beginning. What’s her name?”

Samantha blinks. “Well, she’s just the Customer, like he’s just the Salesman.”

“No,” Veronique says. “She is not just the Customer. If the story means anything at all, she was a person. She had a name. She had a birthday. When was her birthday, Samantha?”

Samantha rolls her eyes. “How should I know?” Some of the other students are laughing. Veronique knows they’re laughing at her. She doesn’t care.

She’s standing now. Somehow she’s gotten to the front of the room. “That woman had a name and a birthday and family and friends, but once she’s a dead body none of that matters, does it? Because the violence is the point. But it does matter. How are her family and friends going to deal with her being murdered? What are they going to do on her next birthday? Do any of you even think about that?”

“Professor Bellamy?” That’s Amy, looking worried. “Are you all right?”

Veronique’s not all right. She’s crying. She’s crying in class, but she’s also telling the truth. A great surge of energy pulses through her. She glares at them and says, voice breaking, “None of you are thinking about the right story, and probably you can’t because you’re too young and not enough has happened to you yet, and I guess I have to hope it never does, but what you saw on that screen isn’t the real story. It’s not even close to the real story. Let me tell you the real story.”

*   *   *

Jeremy’s adding whipped cream to a skinny mocha-caramel soy latte when Amy comes up to the counter. He’s been working at Emerald City for a month now; it’s close to the house, but far enough away from campus that he doesn’t see people he knows very often. That’s both good and bad. He misses his friends, but he doesn’t know what to say to them and they don’t know what to say to him, and he can’t go back to the time when everything was simpler. He’s a different person now than he was at the beginning of November.

The clientele of Emerald City is mostly older people, thirties and forties: parents with little kids, businesspeople on lunch break. Most of the customers tip well, and the café has a decent menu and also does catering. Jeremy’s thinking he might like to get involved in that, at some point, but he’s trying to make his mark as a barista and waiter first.

It’s ironic that he’s here making fancy coffee, since he always made fun of Mom for drinking the stuff. She’d laugh at him, if she were still alive.

He was afraid making coffee would be boring, but he enjoys it: the hiss of the espresso machine, the smell of the grinding beans, the ridiculous complexity of the coffee menu. He likes memorizing the favorite coffees of his regular customers, which leads to larger tips. The work’s involving enough to get his mind off Mom for at least part of each day—especially important today—and simple enough not to task his limited concentration and patience.

Aunt Rosie says the limited concentration and patience are normal. He hopes she’s right.

At any rate, he doesn’t miss school, which made him feel both bored and stupid. He doesn’t even know if he wants to go back, although he supposes he’ll have to, at some point. He can’t be a barista his entire life, can he?

Another thing he likes about being a barista is that it doesn’t leave him too much time for stressing about his future, or beating himself up for leaving school. Seeing Amy, though, snaps him right back into defensive inadequacy mode. She was absolutely the best thing about his first semester at UNR, the only bright spot in VB’s class. She’s smart, pretty, and into CC, and she’s not obnoxious smart, either, not I’m-smarter-than-you’ll-ever-be smart, which is VB’s brand. She’s the kind of smart person who makes everybody around her feel smart, and even though this rather miraculous trick works on Jeremy as well as it does on everybody else, he knows that she’s about twenty times too good for him.

She’s from Tonopah, middle-of-nowheresville Nevada, and the last he knew, she was living in the dorms, all the way across town. What’s she doing here?

“Hey,” she says, eyeing the whipped cream. “That looks good.”

“I’ll make you one, if you want. After this. This one’s for someone else.”

“Huh. You mean you didn’t read my mind while I was walking in the door, and know what I wanted?”

“Nope,” he says. “Back in a sec.” He carries the drink to Lucy, the lawyer in the corner who orders one of these every lunchtime, and has the belly to prove it. If you met her somewhere else, you might think she got that gut from drinking beer, but Jeremy knows better. The whipped cream, which she always requests specifically even though Jeremy’s made this concoction for her a million times, more than cancels out the skinny and the soy.

When he gets back to the counter, Amy’s still there, blushing. “Jeremy, I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

“Huh?” He starts to wipe down the counter with a damp cloth, one of those chores you do whenever you have a free second in a busy place like this. “What was stupid?”

“Making that dumb joke about the coffee.”

“Don’t worry about it. How are you, anyway, and what brings you to this fine establishment?”

“I’m fine. I’m here because–well, a couple of things. I wanted to tell you.”

He blinks. He thinks this means she’s here to see him, which goes beyond slightly miraculous into highly improbable. “How’d you know I even work here?”

“Kevin told me.”

Yeah, that’s right: he ran into Kevin at Raley’s, and they chatted in the checkout line, talked about cars and bands, promised they’d get together sometime, yada yada. Jeremy’d forgotten about it the second he walked out of the store. That was, what, last week, and he was fretting about Mom’s birthday today, wondering how he should handle it, if he should call in sick from work and try to do something special, or have Aunt Rosie and VB over for dinner or something. He can’t believe he forgot it last year. He thought he’d be able to make up for that this year, do something really nice.

In the end, this year, he decided to do almost nothing. He woke up this morning, lit a candle for Mom, and propped her photo up in front of him while he ate his breakfast, talking to her until he felt silly enough to stop. “Hi, Mom. So, well, I wish you were here. I wish you were alive. I wish Percy were alive, too, so I could kill him, or so you could, although I guess you wouldn’t. If you were still alive, you wouldn’t have to.”

When he was little, Mom told him she did that on her own birthday, talking to a picture of her parents. She said it helped, and now that she’s dead, family tradition suddenly seems important instead of stupid. This tradition, though, just seemed empty and awkward, so Jeremy put the picture away. Then he showered, dressed, and came to work as usual, which turned out to be the right thing to do. Today, especially, the job’s the perfect combination of busy and mindless.

“So, uh, did you hear about Professor Bellamy? I mean, I don’t know how you could have, it only happened an hour ago, but I thought maybe—”

“No,” he says, to cut her off. How can girls talk so much? “I haven’t heard anything. What are you talking about?”

Amy slides onto one of the bar stools at the counter. “She kinda had a meltdown in class. Because today’s your Mom’s birthday.”

“Meltdown?” Jeremy squints. “What kind of meltdown?”

“Well, she—she ranted for a while, and then she started crying, and then she started yelling at us for being young and not knowing anything, which is when it really got bad. For us. I mean, it must have been bad for her, before, but that was the part she’ll get into trouble for, I’m guessing.”

Jeremy’s stomach knots. He doesn’t like VB, but he doesn’t want her to get into trouble. She and Mom were real friends. “So somebody reported her?”

“Well, when she started crying, Sandy Askew slipped out and went to get somebody from the English Office, and some other professor—the head of the department, I think—came in right after she started yelling. And he tried to calm her down, and she lost it at him, too, except she kept crying the whole time.” Amy shakes her head. “You know, the kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath, but she was yelling through it, and I don’t think anybody could even understand what she was saying. It was pretty horrible. The other prof wound up calling the campus police.”

“The police? Holy crap! What’d they do, arrest her?”

“I don’t know. At that point, the other prof told all of us that class was over and we should leave now, please, and most people couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I wanted to stay and talk to her, but the cops asked me to leave. I mean, they were nice about it. One of them took my name and number, said he might be calling me to get my account of what happened.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.” Amy draws a shuddering breath—Jeremy realizes she’s on the verge of tears herself—and says, “Anyway, since she was friends with your mom, I thought you’d want to know. And I—it has to be hard for you, too. Your mom’s birthday. And I just wanted you to know that if you need to talk, I—”

“That’s nice, Amy. I mean, thank you. But I’m okay.”

She’s looking down at the counter, tracing the wood grain with an index finger. The other hand’s clenched so tightly that her knuckles are white, which Jeremy always thought was a total cliché. “I kept meaning to call you after your mother died, I did, I even planned to go to the funeral but then I chickened out at the last minute, but I should have written you a card, anyway, and I’m sorry, and—”

“Amy. Stop.” She looks up now; her hand stops moving. “I’m okay. Really. Not all the time, but right now I am. And there were so many people at the funeral I felt like I was suffocating, so just don’t worry about it. It was really nice of you to come tell me about Professor Bellamy.”

She swallows. She sniffles. “You’re welcome.”

“You want a coffee? On the house?”

Amy shakes her head. “I don’t think I need caffeine right now.”

“Herbal tea, then? We’ve got some fancy stuff that comes in funky little cardboard pyramids. Peppermint. Green with lemongrass. Chamomile.” Does green tea have caffeine? Yes. Not as much as coffee, or even black tea, but he shouldn’t have offered it to her.

She doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Sure. Thanks. Mint, please.”

So he makes the tea, which takes about ten seconds, and as he gives it to her she says, “What are you going to do? About Prof Bellamy? Are you going to do anything?”

He doesn’t know what to do, and then he does. “Yeah. I’m going to call my Aunt Rosie. She and Bellamy and my mom go way back.” Even if she and VB don’t exactly get along. “She’ll know what to do.” He laughs, which makes Amy look at him as if maybe he’s having a meltdown, too, and says, “I can’t believe you took another class with Bellamy.”

“I like her. I know most people don’t, but she’s really smart and she cares about this stuff, and so do I, and she just gets frustrated because most of her students could care less. So do I. I get it.”

“You wouldn’t have a meltdown, though.”

Amy shudders. “Well, no. Except I might if my best friend had been murdered and it was her birthday and nobody remembered or cared, which is what she was ranting about.”

Jeremy blinks. Crap. Did VB think nobody else had remembered? How could she have thought that? Did Mom tell her what happened last year? Yeah, she must have. But how could VB have thought he’d forget this year, too?

Should he have planned something after all? But he wouldn’t have known what to do. That’s Aunt Rosie’s territory, all that ritual stuff with Martha Stewart place cards.

He’ll call her. She’ll fix this.

As if on cue, Amy says, “Aren’t you going to call your aunt?”

*   *   *

Rosemary stands in the ER, wearing her badge and maroon volunteer vest—pink pinstripes went out in the 1950s—and staring in disbelief at a sobbing Veronique, who’s being escorted past the nursing station by two policemen.

“Room thirty-eight,” says the charge nurse, and Rosemary shakes her head, almost protests aloud. That’s a psych room. Veronique doesn’t belong there. Veronique may belong in a room for neurotic, prickly people short on tact, but she doesn’t belong in a psych room. Not in the “we won’t let you leave until you’re evaluated by a psychologist” room, the room where the suicidal and homicidal patients go. The room where everything’s taken away from you, all clothing and belongings, and you’re kept under constant observation until someone decides if they can let you go or need to send you to an actual psych hospital for seventy-two hours of observation.

What in God’s green earth is going on?

She hears Veronique howling now, something about insurance. “My insurance won’t work here, I’m only supposed to go to Fortunata, I can’t be here, you have to take me there—”

“Professor,” one of the policemen says, “we called Fortunata. They’re full up. This is where we had to bring you. Your insurance will understand that.”

His voice is calm, soothing. He’s had practice at this. Rosemary sidles closer—Veronique still hasn’t noticed her—and sees that he’s a UNR cop.

The bottom of her stomach drops out. She’s picturing some version of Columbine, Virginia Tech, but Veronique doesn’t seem to be injured, and were there other victims? She hasn’t heard a Code Triage, which alerts hospital staff to a mass casualty, and the nurses at the charge desk seem as bored as always, without the slightly manic energy they display when they’re expecting something really bad, and if Veronique were the victim of a shooting, how could she walk in under her own power, and why would she be taken to a psych room?

Rosemary turns to a nurse at the desk, someone she knows a little bit and who may be willing to answer questions. “What can you tell me about the patient who just came in? Thirty-eight?” She isn’t going to say she knows Vera, because that may send the nurse into I-can’t-tell-you-squat HIPAA paralysis.

“Hmmm?” The nurse looks up, blinks, says, “just a sec,” and performs a complicated tacking maneuver with paper and computer keyboard. “Huh. UNR prof. Had some kind of breakdown in class. They’re bringing her here for evaluation.”

Rosemary’s heart pounds against her ribcage. Oh, God. Did Veronique snap and kill a student? “Was anyone hurt?”

“Don’t think so. Don’t really know. Sorry.”

“Thank you.” She still isn’t going to let on that she knows Veronique. She wonders if Veronique will be willing to talk to her. One of the sacred laws of chaplaincy is that if the patient tells you to go away, you go; chaplains are the only hospital workers patients can dismiss, and patients need all the power they can get. Strictly speaking, Rosemary isn’t even supposed to signal that she recognizes Veronique unless Veronique acknowledges her first, but this is a bit of legalism Rosie’s never been able to maintain. When she runs into acquaintances in the hospital, she always says hi; they always say hi back. They always seem glad to see her.

But none of them have been in psych rooms.

She can still hear Veronique’s voice, tearful, rising and falling. A nurse is in the room now. “Okay now, sweetheart, try to calm down. Just breathe for me. Can you do that?”

“Another nutcase,” a passing tech mutters under his breath, and Rosemary has to force herself not to dress him down. That’s no nutcase: that’s my friend! Most of the ER staff don’t like psych patients, who rarely present clear-cut medical symptoms and all too often offer behavioral challenges. Rosemary sympathizes with the staff’s frustration, but she sympathizes more with the patients, who are usually even less happy about the situation than their caregivers are.

Most of the time, she’s not so crazy about Vera herself. Here, she’s completely on Vera’s side. But she can’t be Vera’s chaplain. You aren’t supposed to minister to people with whom you’re emotionally entangled.

Should she call Hen? But then Hen would feel compelled to come here. But that’s her job, isn’t it?

Rosemary pulls her phone out of her pocket. She has voice mail. From Jeremy.

Oh, God. But no: Jeremy’s not in Veronique’s class this semester. He’s not in any classes this semester. He’s working at the coffeehouse today, isn’t he? He can’t even know about this; he must be calling about something else.

A registration clerk’s in with Veronique now; Rosemary won’t be able to do anything for a few minutes. She ducks out the ER entrance to use her phone, and listens to Jeremy’s message. Evidently a friend gave him a blow-by-blow of the classroom crisis. “Aunt Rosie, I don’t know where she is now. I hope she’s okay. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. Please call me back if you hear anything.”

She calls him. He answers right away. “Jeremy, I’m at the hospital. She’s here. I’m working this afternoon, and two UNR cops just brought her in for psych observation. She doesn’t know I’m here yet.”

“Psych observation? Are they going to lock her up?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. Listen, do you have any idea what triggered this?”

“Yeah. Amy said she was upset because it’s Mom’s birthday. She thought we all forgot about it.”

Rosemary’s hand goes to her mouth. Later, she’ll realize that she’s absorbed Walter’s gesture, made it her own. Of course she knows it’s Melinda’s birthday. She decided to work her shift as usual to distract herself. She’d been planning to call Jeremy and Veronique afterward to see how they were doing, but she should have done it this morning. “Of course I didn’t forget. I just, I didn’t—”

“I know,” Jeremy says. “I didn’t forget either, but I decided not to do anything special. I guess that was stupid.”

“You did what you needed to do,” Rosemary says. She’s facing the double glass ER doors, and she sees the registration clerk walk past them. “I’m going to try to talk to her now, okay? I’ll call you later.”