1976

MONDAY CAME and Cricket fell into its arms. There was a time by which all three must be dressed and human, having eaten bread and butter, having cleaned the tribe-paint from their faces so they looked like nice little white children. She watched the colors run from her brothers’ wet cheeks like blood and silt. They were giving up their orphaned selves and acting like all the other parented boys with alive dogs and selves that had not recently come up bruised.

Cricket made sure shoes were tightly tied. She brushed her hair and styled it in the youngest way she knew how—two braids tied with navy blue ribbons—wanting not to be grown today. If she could look like a child maybe someone would take care of her. These were small illusions—the three little orphans would go unnoticed. The decision had to be made about whether to go inside again and get fresh clothes or if they should wear last week’s uniforms. It was hard to be near the old version of life because it made it obvious how far away they had drifted. Once, their mother had worried for a week over a decision about the upholstery for the new sofa and whether red sent the wrong message. Once, their father had paged the many subscribed-to but rarely read magazines while drinking weak coffee in the rocker by the window. Maggie had slept there, and there and there. The house was full of ghosts. Cricket went in alone and fast, gathered what she needed and ran back out to the safety of the yard.

This morning, they did not bother to light a fire in order to warm their bread. The need for ritual had not quieted, but it had thickened. It was the only medicine and they were worried about using it up. Cricket held the hose while her brothers drank. They looked at the fawn’s hill, the now wilted petals, the demonstration of their love looking smaller the next day. There would be no one here to keep watch. No one to befriend the mother if she came.

When it was time, the boys waited at the gate in their blue-and-whites, little ties hanging around their necks, and Cricket checked their cheeks and hair to make sure they would pass. She slipped the latch and out they went onto the sidewalk with their bookbags and their finished homework as if they were the same as all the other kids, alarm-clock grumpy, cheeks pillow-creased. Cricket still stepped over the cracks like she had always done, and she still noticed the difference between smells as they passed houses—bacon, woodfire, cold brick. The boys were slack. Their bags seemed too heavy, but as they came closer, as other children appeared like wild game on the horizon, the boys stood taller. Cricket could see them get their boyness back, remember that there were balls to kick and sticks to swing and girls to tease. She could see the blood return. They would be scratched up and happy by the end of the day, beaten back into their bodies by wind and the speed of their own legs, running towards base.

Cricket herself doubted that she would be so easily restored. Her head felt heavy, her brain. But it was a good sight, the flapping red and white of the flag and the gathered mass of young bodies, supervised. She knew her brothers would shuck her off when they got there, assert their independence, so before it was too late, she grabbed their hands, one in each of hers, and she squeezed tight. She wanted to cause enough pain to last them.

—

The classroom smelled like melted crayons. The fourth graders yowled and bittered at being back, stuffed their backpacks into cubbies, found their seats. No one except Cricket noticed that there was no Miss Nolan at the front of the room. They did sense a lack of balance: the room was a boat on which all the passengers were astern. The chatter continued, weekends were remembered, the near-loss of a softball team against the dreaded Somerville Pirates was recounted. Some kids had been taken back to the beach for the weekend, which was almost cruel, giving them summer in such a tiny sliver. They started to sense that someone, by now, ought to be forcing them into quiet. Someone ought to be civilizing them. Ladies and gentlemen, they were always being called when they were at their scrappiest, as if the name alone could cure them.

“Where is Miss Nolan?” the girls asked.

“This is excellent!” the boys yelled. “No teacher! Guys! No teacher!”

“Is she all right?” the girls asked.

The room hummed. Cricket wanted not to cry in front of friends and enemies, but she had already been abandoned enough this week. It was her. She was repellent to grown-ups. Wherever she went, the person taking care of her evaporated. She got up and went, as calmly as she could fake it, out the door and down the hall. In the other classrooms the children were quiet at their desks, following instructions from an adult with a lesson plan.

Someone else was standing in the stall next to Cricket, someone with big feet. Someone who was crying too. Cricket knew the shoes. They were the shoes of her beloved. She said, “Can I come over?” and wriggled under the wall. Miss Nolan looked at her like Cricket was a puppy and she sat down on the lidded toilet and Cricket crawled up into her teacher’s lap. Miss Nolan received Cricket like she had been expecting her, like this had always been the plan. They held on tight. They soaked each other’s shoulders.

“My mother died,” Miss Nolan said. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Cricket thought of an early snow on the Great Plains, a small woman out gathering berries, lost in the whiteout. She thought of a gathered flock of mourners in the teepee, a good fire, food available but uneaten, the wind through the seams. “How?” she asked. “What happened?”

“A car accident on the expressway.”

“The expressway?” Cricket tried to add the long strip of pavement, the rushing cars, toll plazas, to her idea of the plains. “I didn’t know they had those.”

Miss Nolan looked the girl over, swiped a tear away from each of their cheeks. “In New Jersey? Of course they do.”

New Jersey was a brick and it hit Cricket hard. She said, “You aren’t an Indian.” She felt terribly stupid and terribly small. No one was from Montana, no one was from Oklahoma. They were all city kids. They were all part of the same tidy, boring tribe.

Miss Nolan kissed Cricket on the forehead. “You are sweet and good,” she said.

Cricket wanted to ask about the lip-kiss last week, but she could not risk another loss. “Of course I knew that,” she said, reinhabiting maturity. “I’m sorry about your mother. I actually kind of understand because my parents are gone too. They’ve been gone since Wednesday. We’re orphans now.”

Miss Nolan tried to conceal her panic. The girl looked clean and fed but probably in shock. Cricket did not see the effort it took for her teacher to keep a steady voice as she asked a lot of practical questions. Hospitals: not called due to fear of orphanage. Police: not called due to fear of orphanage. Relatives: not called due to fear of orphanage. Food: eaten. Sleep: slept. Safety: managed.

“You’ll be so disappointed in me but a fawn died in our yard, and I tried to skin it but I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I really tried. We buried her,” Cricket said, wanting to prove that they were good survivors, that they could take care of something else even when they themselves were broken.

“I didn’t expect you to know how to skin a deer. You poor ducklings,” the good teacher said, and Cricket had never felt so grateful or stupid in her life. “You should have told me what was going on. We’ll find them. I’m sure they’re all right.” Miss Nolan was relieved to have a situation to manage, to turn, for a moment, away from the inkbloom of her mother’s death.

“They could be not all right,” Cricket said. She had allowed the possibility that her parents had left on purpose for a trip or to start a new life and the possibility that they had gotten lost or hurt, but to say out loud the fact that they could be dead carved her out.

“I’m going to help you,” Miss Nolan said. “You are being taken care of.” The woman took Cricket close and hugged her and it was this touch that Cricket understood she needed, not a hot-mouth kiss, not the kind of close that she would look for later but the kind she needed now, had always needed: her small head against someone’s chest, a heartbeat dull but steady beneath the bones.

*   *   *

THEY WERE STILL A LONG DAY’S DRIVE from Mac’s son. Neither of them knew what to say about what they had done together. Fern had not realized that the desert was so big. Cows in the distance, horses sometimes, once a herd of elk, their wide racks up against the sky. “They look fake,” Fern said. “They look too much like elk to be elk.”

“You make no sense,” Mac told her. The animals lowered their necks towards the ground.

“There’s nothing to eat here,” Fern said. The ground was brittle with sage.

“They spend their lives looking for food,” Mac said. “They have to search all the time to get enough.”

Even the sky was greenish and dry. Low mountains were a stripe between pale and pale.

Sex had been a mistake, of course, but Mac had also meant to make it. He had never expected Fern to love him in a realer world. He had taken advantage of her distance, of her strained marriage. He knew that escape, at this point, was starting to wear at Fern like a blister. The generous thing would have been to brush her off, to hold her hand and talk about the river, go for ice cream, keep things safe. He was not sorry, though. He too deserved to be touched. He wanted it, even if it would cost them both. And anyway, he told himself, her husband had surely slept with the other woman by now, and it would be fairer for Fern to come home with her own secret.

Fern, on her side of the car, was afraid of the wreckage a body could cause. Edgar’s body, her body, Glory’s, the giant’s. She was afraid that she would never be able to stop causing damage, now that she had started.

They drove through mesquite and red dust. The sky was bluer at the edges and then purpled with rainclouds. They watched for an hour as the storm came towards them. The diagonal lines of rain, darkening the ground beneath. It was dry, dry, dry until the smell of the air changed and the windshield turned milky with rain. Fern looked at her companion, the bigness of his face and chest. They had come all this way together, and the rain and the butterflies and all that new air in her bloodstream. She did not know if she should hold his hand and pretend to love him. They stopped and got out this time, and the rainwater was warm and the air was warm and it all smelled plant-bitter and grateful.

In all this space it felt safe to admit that a marriage, her marriage, could end. She imagined it this way: her on the sidewalk in front of the big house, mounds of belongings beside her. She would have chosen things to bring with her into the next life. The huge Swedish desk, a blond dresser. The headboard, which she knew was the very thing you were meant to get rid of in a divorce—keep the silver, but relieve yourself of the bed on which your marriage succeeded and failed. The past years belonged to her, even if the future did not.

Her parents, though dead, would be nonetheless ashamed.

She told Mac about going to the institution after Ben died. How in his room she had found children’s books, the same ones they had read in the nooks by the fireplace when they were small. In the bottom corners there were grease stains from fingers, turning. It was a sour-smelling room, and the walls were soft blue, the color a sane person would choose for a crazy one. There was a small television, and a box of letters from Fern, which she took but did not read, not ever. She remembered writing them about the hugeness of motherhood, what it was like to live after your heart had been born out into the world and was at risk every second of every day. How Cricket liked to ride her bike too fast and play with animals, sharp-toothed dogs, possibly rabid, their mouths foaming while the child petted them and loved them and curled up against them. Little lion-tamer, ready to put her head into the mouths of beasts.

“I should have stopped them from performing the lobotomy,” Fern said.

“It wasn’t your job.”

“That’s why I always stood to the side. But my mother should not have been in charge and my father was too sick to be. Ben should never even have gone to basic training. I wish Edgar and I had brought him with us.” She looked out at the desert, swooshing past. “I thought when you fell in love with someone you had to give your whole self over to them. I wish I had known that there was enough of me to share. I wish I hadn’t left my brother behind.” A vulture stood over the remains of something unrecognizable. “This might be a weird thing to say considering what happened last night, but when I first saw you I thought you were Ben.”

Mac was glad that he could think of his big form at the end of the aisle as a gift. Not a gift for himself, but nice all the same.

Fern reached out and put her hand on Mac’s leg.

He knew she wanted him to be an ax, swung against the wall to see if the house would stand. It wouldn’t, he thought, if she was lucky. Not the house. But what was inside might.

“I’m not what you’re looking for,” he said, without turning towards her.

“What am I looking for?” Fern thought about the day with Ben after they had begun to cook his brain with electricity and drugs when he had shown her her own reflected face in her patent leather shoe. The answer was too easy. Love, home, herself—what else did people go searching for?

A herd of cows stood in the middle of the road ahead of them. Some of the cows had lain down. Some were looking, slack-eyed, at the cars. All were chewing. Mac slowed and stopped. The earth was pale, bleached by the sun. The plants were spiny and unwelcoming and the horizon was a long way off. The pickup truck in front of them veered off the road through the cactus and scrub until it had passed the herd. It would take an hour for the air to clear of its dust. Fern got out. She walked over to the cows and could smell them as she approached. Hay and urine and mud and shit. From the car they seemed stupid, from up close they seemed big. “Cows!” she said. “Shoo!” Flies, like a thick black aura, rose off the animals and resettled.

From the other direction came an old red van. It stopped and out stepped two young women with lots of eyeliner and shaggy hair and big sunglasses. They smelled of smoke and one of them was holding a kitten. They looked to Fern like they had just woken up after a long decade in California.

“Cows in the road,” Fern said. The girls looked bored. “They don’t seem to want to move.”

“Have you been to Houston?” one of the girls asked. “Her brother lives there. He’s cool. We’re going to become airline stewardesses. In the sky you don’t have to deal with this kind of shit.”

One cow let the weight of her body fall back with a deep groan—Fern knew it was a she because her teats rested in front of her, engorged.

Mac got out but stayed close to the car. It’s what her brother would have done too. How afraid a person could be, how big and how afraid. She stood close to him as she would have with Ben.

Thunder clapped. From where?—the sky was clean. The cows stood and ran awkwardly into the desert. Hooves rang hard against the dirt. Dust rose out and up, and it glinted.

“Mica,” Mac said, without Fern asking. They were standing in a glittering fog.

—

Mac went into a restaurant and Fern stood at the payphone in the shade, leaned against the stucco wall. She would ask the question even if there was no answer. She wanted to make noise occur in her own home, to create the specific sound of the phones in the big living room and the kitchen, like a pair of birds calling to each other. She dialed collect and held the phone away from her ear so that she could imagine that she was hearing the real ringing in the real house, the real life. Not this faraway tone in the hotel telephone.

And then: “Hello?” It was Edgar’s voice.

*   *   *

THE TAXI DROVE to Edgar’s house the same way he would have gone, the way his hands knew and his feet knew, drawing back at the reds and pressing down at the greens. Stop signs and straightaways all mapped in Edgar’s reflexes.

He had had the keys in his pocket all this time. The house smelled its old smell. It was empty, was all. He thought of the agreement made all those long agos, sickness and health. He had not considered that Fern might be anywhere but in this house when he returned. Edgar walked around, looking. Though his vision was weak he could tell that the house was a mess, especially the kitchen, and something was in the backyard, that, upon closer examination turned out to be the boys’ teepee with bean cans strewn all around. Edgar had never known Fern to live with a mess like this, even for a day. Upstairs, he found her note on his dresser. He had to hold it two inches from his face to see it. “No,” he said to himself. His hands began to shake. He imagined his children kidnapped, jailed, dead.

He called the school. “Are my children there?” he asked, finding no way to sound like anything but a horrible father.

“You don’t know if your children are in school?” the secretary asked.

“I’ve been away. Can you just tell me please?” She took the names.

She put the phone down and he heard her clomp across the room and yell to someone. Moments passed before she came back on the line. “All present,” she said. He cried when he hung up and thought about going to get them early just to have their little bodies in his arms, but he was half blind and dirty and he did not want to fumble into the school and try to explain.

He called the eye doctor to ask for new glasses. He was nervous, apologetic. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Keating. We’ll have a brand-new pair for you tomorrow afternoon,” the singsong receptionist said. Two lenses cut to the right thickness and Edgar would get the world back.

His hands would not still. He needed to move around.

Edgar took out the almost forty watches in the case on the dresser beneath which Fern’s note had been tucked. They were gifts from his father. Time had always felt as if it was collecting against him, but now it seemed like the only true treasure.

He looked at the jewelry his parents had sent Fern. Some of the pieces had never been worn: a diamond brooch in the shape of a stag, a pair of emerald earrings that would have dusted her shoulders.

Edgar leaned into his wife’s closet and remembered only a few of the clothes. He should have paid closer attention. He found the blue dress she had worn when they first danced and again on the night he had tried to give Fern away to John Jefferson. He put his face into it. The silk was stiff and almost cold. He remembered the feel of her body inside and the promise of it. That was a day to keep, exactly as it had been lived then.

He looked for the red dress he had bought for her and when he could not find it he guessed that Fern had already thrown it away, which was what he wanted to do too.

Here was the accumulation of years and things. The needlepoint cover his grandmother had made for the rocking chair with a picture of a sailboat and his name. The good table linens he and Fern never ever used because they were too nice.

Edgar, his fingers shaking, picked up the phone beside the bed and dialed his parents. No one answered. What he needed to say was not meant to be left on a machine, but he was half grateful for the gift of a blank tape instead of a person and he told himself that he had no idea where they were or how long it would be before they came home. “Mom,” he said, “Dad.” The air was static. “I’m ready to take over the business. I don’t know if you’ll still want me. Thank you for everything.” He waited for an answer he knew was not coming. “I hope you’re having fun wherever you are.” There was more to say: that he still wanted his children to be seen for who they were instead of what they had, that he wanted them to know what it felt like to earn their own way, that he was glad he had written the novel he had, that he was sorry it would go unread. But Edgar could say those things later. He had time now. The click of the phone in the cradle marked the end of years of waiting to make this decision. It was not the ending he had imagined it would be.

The telephone rang, the exact ring it had always rung. It would be his father full of congratulations.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hello?”

“Fern?”

She had the same question he did.

“Ferny,” he said. “Where are you? I love you. I miss you and I love you. I think the children have been living in the backyard.” He sounded relieved. He sounded like another version of himself.

“Did you say the children have been living in the backyard?”

“I’m sorry I left,” he said. “I wish I had never left.”

“But you didn’t leave. I left.” There was no answer. “You left too. Oh my God.”

“I called the school and they’re all there. There’s a teepee in the backyard and a lot of bean cans. I think they are all right. I went sailing. I was sailing to Bermuda but now I’m home. I lost my glasses. You were right about everything.”

Too many things required an explanation. “I’m in California with a man, but I don’t love him and I never did.”

“Are you leaving me?”

She imagined their life disassembled. No wealth, the remaining family disowning them when the novel was published. Again, she imagined standing on the curb surrounded by belongings, but this time Edgar was with her and the children. They would get an apartment or a small house. They would have less of everything, but they would need less too.

“I’m ready to take over the company,” he said.

“What about your book?” she asked.

“It’s my job to support you.”

“It’s your job to love me.”

When she hung up the phone, Fern thought of her mother’s decision to give half the pills to her father. Fern had always assumed this was done because her mother did not think Paul could make it alone. But maybe it had simply been impossible to imagine crossing whatever it was she was about to cross without her person.

—

When Fern met Mac, he had eaten his eggs and bacon and ordered a second round of toast. He said, “I got you a muffin, and look.” A piece of cream pie was sitting on the table, leaning slightly to one side. “No charge,” he said. He was smiling.

Five days ago already felt ancient. The miles they had covered made the days seem bigger. At home, a loop between the house, school and the grocery store took a whole day. Fern and the giant had crossed mountain ranges, threaded mesas, traced a river bend for bend.

“I need to go home. Edgar tried to sail to Bermuda. My children were orphaned.”

The vinyl of the seat was red, and it stuck to Fern’s thighs. She peeled a leg up and sat on her hand. The waitress freshened Mac’s coffee cup, and recommended the ham to Fern. She was wearing a white jumpsuit under her apron and she had redrawn her eyebrows with black pencil. The pot of black coffee was the same shape as her hair. “It’s good today. Sometimes it isn’t, but today it’s good ham.” Fern did not want to be hungry. She hated to need anything on a day like this, hated to be reminded of her mortal skin and bones, the nonnegotiables.

“Just some cereal with milk,” she said.

“I don’t recommend that today,” the waitress said. “It’s not what I’m recommending.” She patted the puff of hair on her forehead that she probably thought of as bangs.

“Then I guess I’ll have the ham. And toast, if you think the toast today is all right.”

There was brewing disaster in the grey of the waitress’s eyes. A bad storm, high winds. There was a crease in her fake eyebrows. “Toast is toast.”

Mac said, “Are the kids okay?”

“They must have been terrified. Their family splintered and they were all that was left.”

The ham arrived, a fat pink slap. Fern asked the waitress for an ashtray. She buttered the toast, which was already soaked in the stuff, and she spread strawberry jam on it. She cut the ham into the shape of a heart, putting the scraps on the table. It was foamy under her knife, lost water as she cut. And this was a good ham day.

Fern had stood below maple trees while James climbed the branches, waiting to catch him; she had held Cricket’s cold-puckered body in the ocean and tried not to imagine her going under and being lost to a wave; she had watched Will sled down a street and hit the tree at the bottom, had run to him sure that she would find a pool of blood. Every tenth word out of her mouth for nine years had been one of caution. It was as if she had not completely let her breath out since Cricket was born. And yet they had survived on their own for five days. They had gotten themselves to school. They had eaten. Cricket, amazing and brave Cricket, Fern thought. Maybe she did not need to be so afraid. Maybe none of them did.

Mac carved the last imperfection from her ham heart. “There,” he said, trying to cheer her. “A masterpiece.”

—

A few hours away waited a valley of palms up against a mountain range, where it was warm all year and everyone wore white shorts and stayed outside and let their skin turn brown. Even in old age people moved to this valley to get too much sun. The giant’s son was there and so was the airport from which Fern could fly home.

Mac worried that his boy would be leather-skinned and reptilian, no good for snow. He was worried that the boy would become pallid and malnourished if he could not eat citrus picked directly from trees in the yard, fragrant and intoxicating with their blossoms.

Fern and Mac drove, and the desert was drier and drier still. The earth felt like a bone, brittle, tired out. What grew was scrabble and cactus. Even the mountains were brown.

“It’s not a smart plan,” Mac said. There must have been bugs in the air because there were yellow splashes on the windshield.

“What’s not?”

“I’m nobody’s father.”

Fern knew this feeling. The disbelonging, the nonmatch. Except that she was sure the giant would be ever tender and patient. He and the boy would talk the whole drive home, those long black stripes through the country, and all the pie. They would swim in the hotel pools and sit outside after, their skin chlorinated and warming back up. They would stop to see the snakepits and dinosaur skeletons, admire the neon signs, the roadside of their great country. The hours would be enough to become familiar to one another. What they each liked to eat. What they did to get ready for bed. Behaviors while dreaming.

Fern was sure that by the time they hit colder weather, they would be related. Maybe not father and son yet, but family.

She said, “There is every kind of father.”

There were actual tumbleweeds, tumbling. As if the West had been ordered up and delivered.

They passed the Wigwam Motel, six concrete teepees scattered along the highway. There was a neon sign in the shape of a woman in a bathing cap, diving.

“We should stop for gas,” Mac said. Fern knew he was stalling, but she also understood why. On every day after this one, he would have to reconquer a small heart. He would have to persuade him that algebra was important, that the essay deserved writing. Friends would need to be made, played with, dropped back off at their better houses.

With sudden breathlessness, Mac said, “Do you think she warned him?”

Fern knew what he was asking, but she pretended she did not.

“Does he know what I look like?”

She wanted to tell him that it would not matter. That the boy would not notice, used to being smaller than everyone, anyway. It could be true. But she remembered her children once. “Mother, we saw a midget. Not just a small man but a real midget.” They crouched low to demonstrate the size. Children knew how to do certain things without having been taught. Climbing. Meanness.

“He was absolutely tiny,” the one had said.

“Tinier than tiny,” added the other.

“And his voice was strange.”

In the car Fern said to Mac, “Your son is going to think you are marvelous.”

—

They stopped at the service station and Fern went inside to pay. There was a thin old woman at the register, her hair long and black with grey strands. Maybe she was Indian. Maybe not. Fern only knew what cartoon Indians looked like. On the rack next to the counter was a tray of arrowheads carved from obsidian. They looked like the one Cricket had found on their dig on the island. Fern thought of her children in the teepee in the backyard of their Cambridge house. Resourceful little creatures. She did not know the story yet, but she was proud of them. She bought three arrowheads and put them in her pocket.

“You seen the dinosaur bones?” the woman with the long hair asked.

“No,” said Fern.

“They’re real old. You ought to go. White people always like to see real living Indians and real dead dinosaur bones.”

Fern reported the detour to Mac and they took the dirt roads like the woman told them to. Dust kicked up. It looked like they were headed into nowhere and they were. Then, a hand-painted sign on plywood: Dinosaur Fossil, 1.2 Miles.

In the bush-scrub, there was a hill and as they approached they saw a near-perfect skeleton. As if the great animal had only recently lain down there for a rest. Fern had seen them in museums, these bones, and understood that such creatures had existed, but it was different to see it here in the dirt and bush, unmined. She knelt down at the skull and carefully brushed sand off the snout. The wide openness, the amount of space, made more sense when populated with huge animals.

“Plesiosaur,” Mac said. “You can tell because of the little fin bones.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was a five-year-old boy and a giant. All I thought about for years was dinosaurs.”

“Did you say fins?” She looked at the endless dry land. They both pictured water covering the desert, land as ocean floor, mountains as islands. The entire world, utterly changed.

There were flies and ants and a stink bug. A crow landed, pecked, took off. “It’s nice to feel small for once,” the giant said.

For Fern it was good to kneel in the dirt, her hands uncovering something.

She said, “Can I tell you a secret? I took a figure drawing class last year. I didn’t tell anyone because Edgar had been nagging me to go back to school and it felt like he was as disappointed in me as my mother had been. I didn’t want him to win.”

“What was it like?”

“The first day of figure drawing the teacher said, ‘Leave if you are afraid of nudity.’ No one had left. At the second meeting there had been four fewer people in the room. The teacher had said, ‘Good, I’m glad they left. There’s no room in art for fear.’”

One day, Fern said, the students had walked into the room and there was a black man on the platform. He was tall and muscular and very dark, his hair short and neat. Fern had been taken aback by her own discomfort. Most of the women kept their eyes locked on their papers. “At one point the man looked right at me and we just stared at each other for maybe three seconds. A hundred years ago there were plenty of times when a black man stood naked in front of a room of dressed whites because he was for sale. People in my family were in those rooms. I didn’t deserve to look at this man, but he did deserve to be seen.”

“There are some things that can’t be righted,” Mac said. “It’s good to name them.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m sort of relieved that that money is gone. We’ll find a better way to earn our living.” There were so many questions for her at home—money, love, lies, three children who had been abandoned for nearly a week. She looked out at the desert where there was so much room in which to get lost. She wanted something to press up against. She wanted her own confines.

“What about the steel company?”

“No.” It had been hanging in the back of her mind, the image of Edgar calling his editor to say that he had to retract the book. The image of him at a huge oval table in the teetering tip of a skyscraper and a dozen investors who wanted to know how he had cut production costs. “I think I’d rather live with nothing.” She could have used another shirt and pants, but otherwise what she had in her suitcase was sufficient. She wanted her people and she wanted water and wind. Enough—just enough.

Fern took the giant’s hand.

“I like you,” she said.

He did not squeeze her hand, but he let it sit there in his big palm, salt-wet on this hot day. He said, “We came a long way.”

“I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

He smiled his big smile. “I knew you were trouble from the moment I married you.” He looked down at her. “I like you too, Fern. I think you’re going to have a really good life. You are not only a rich housewife.”

“Not anymore. I’ll need to get a job.” She was joking but she was also serious.

“Life is effortful,” said Mac. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s good to have work to do.”

Fern thought of hiding in the tall grass outside her mother’s prairie studio to watch her work. Evelyn was a different woman with clay than she was with people—it was as if the rest of her body was only there to support the existence of her hands. She thought of Edgar, up late all those years at the typewriter, his fingers banging out a reason for his being. She thought of Ben in the earth, the misunderstood parts long since rotted away. So many bones in the ground.

This dinosaur skeleton was a body plus time. They all were. The question was what they wanted to do and who they wanted to love in the years when muscle and skin still covered them.

—

Fern walked with Mac up to the house where the boy lived because it was a nice thing to do and she could not think of the giant standing at the door alone, his too-big finger finding the bell. She could not think of him waiting alone for someone to let him in.

The house was split-level, brown on the outside, gravel instead of grass. A group of tall green-brown cacti kept watch. There were bird holes—even in those spiny stalks, a home.

A woman opened the door, short and blond and overtan. She said, “It’s my old man,” and laughed hard. She punched him in the stomach, which was nearly eye-level and Fern thought of them as husband and wife, trying to consummate. She would have been lost in it all. Those rigid, manic little arms, looking for purchase on his hills. Poor girl. Poor boy.

“Lovely home,” Fern said. It was not. There was almost no furniture and the windows were covered in heavy curtains. The organ-pink carpet could not possibly have been an intentional color. This was the kind of house you holed up in after the murder, the body buried in some dry wash nearby.

“I have cold coffee or I have gin,” the lady said.

“Just some water for me,” Fern said.

“No water. Sorry.”

The air conditioner was on so high Fern could feel her pores closing to keep the heat in. Mac rubbed his arms.

“Nothing then?” Claire asked.

They sat on the couch and Mac asked after her months and years. She answered him like a daughter swatting away her father’s concerns. “Doing great! I love living here! It’s warm all year! We have a pool! Desert people are nicer than city people! My guy’s name is Dale and he’s a real sweetheart!”

“And the boy?” he asked finally, after he had waited long enough for her to bring him up.

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s lost some of the weight.”

From a cracked door down the hall, Fern caught sight of a pair of eyes high off the ground.

“I’m parched,” Claire said. “Neither of you wants any coffee at all? It’s nice and cold. I made it up this morning.”

Fern wanted to ask for a blanket or a scarf instead. Claire left the room and she nudged Mac, motioned to the hallway and the cracked door.

Mac, without a pause, knelt on the floor like someone trying to befriend a cat. He put his hands out towards the eyes, peering. He scooted closer, his palms up. “Hey there,” he loud-whispered. “Hello, hello.”

Fern wanted to kneel too, to beckon, but she was no one’s mother here. She was no one’s aunt or step-. It did not seem right to promise friendship this close to the end. So she sat there in the freezing dark room and watched the giant try to make himself small, watched him shuffle across the dirty floor towards his son, his hands empty but open. She had to pace to survive the thirst for her own children.

The boy came through the door. The mother tinked ice into a glass in the kitchen and said something about golf. The boy, seeing his father, knelt down too and, on the pink carpet, under a painting of a Jesus so pale he was nearly translucent, the two looked each other over. They did not say a word. They did not shake hands. They just looked.

—

The boy was hungry, frantically hungry. Sitting on the hotel bed, he ate a whole chicken and a loaf of white bread and a bag of individually wrapped chocolates. He seemed more dog, more stray, than boy. But he said his pleases and thank-yous, and his fingers were delicate, carefully working the meat off a bone without getting dirty.

Fern and Mac sat in the pink paisley chairs by the window watching. “More?” they asked, handing him bread.

Before they’d left, his mother had given him a packed suitcase and an extra pair of sneakers. “You can’t imagine how fast he goes through these things,” she had said. “How he does it, that’s beyond me.” She had stood on her tip-toes and flicked him on the nose with her thumb. “Honey pot,” she had said. “Don’t get any bigger.” She had opened her wallet and taken out a scroll of paper on which was written several columns of numbers. “If you want to measure him, you can,” she said to the giant. “But I guess you don’t care one way or the other. He’s not getting any smaller, so he’s yours now.” The boy had bent down low and given his mother a hug. She had been lost in his frame. “How did I raise up something like you?” she had asked. “Something so sweet.” The twang in her voice was unconvincing. She wore it like heels she did not know how to walk in.

The boy brushed his teeth for fifteen minutes, making tiny circles over each tooth, studying himself in the mirror. From behind he looked like a man. Fern wanted him to be all right. She wanted to hug him. She wanted the son of him, and her the pretend mother. She had not meant to actually do it. She had meant to admire from the other end of the room. There she was, next thing, squeezing him hard, her head on his wingbone, no stopping now. He was softly sweated in the day’s shirt, and all the heat she had hoped for. Fern could hear the boy’s breath inside his body, inside the papery folds of his lungs, inside the rattle of bones. She could hear his heart too, gathering and sending back. It seemed fast to her.

The boy, gentle or afraid, did not move. They stayed there, and Fern did not know how to let go.

Mac, on the other side of the room, also waited. Everyone needed everything. The woman needed to hug the boy and imagine her brother, her sons, her daughter; the boy needed to be hugged but then to be freed. Mac would have liked someone to come up from behind and wrap her arms around him, and to mean it, beyond the dare she had made for herself, beyond the attempt at revenge. If only he could meet a huge woman, he thought. In a huge house, with a huge car, and so much land for them to drive on, and herds of only the largest animals: elephants and giraffes, the stamp of rhinoceros feet in the mud after a rain. They would put off going to town for supplies, put off relativity. You can’t be too big unless someone else is small. Mac looked at his son. He looked like he still had growing to do. He would get bigger every day with chicken and bread and pie and steak and all the things for sale in restaurants and grocery stores across the great land. They would order four meals for two people, and Mac would watch his boy eating. A match, finally. More and more a match by the day.

There was Fern, at his son’s back, and neither one his.

Mac said, “There’s dessert. There could be. Does anyone want pie?”

Outside: wind, sirens.

—

That night, the boy slept hard in one bed and Fern and Mac, fully clothed, shared the other. They passed a cigarette back and forth. The room echoed with Matthew’s rattling breath. He hardly even shifted in his young sleep. The giant hugged Fern. There is such a thing as love in this room, he wanted to say. We are capable. Even though we feel too tired or too big or too old or too young or too quiet or too loud or too formed or too unformed.

“What do you think will happen when you get home?” Mac whispered.

“I don’t know. It has never been easy to be a wife or a mother or a woman or a man or a child,” she said. “But we are each other’s family.” He understood this. In the bed nearby was a stranger, but it was also a son.

Things could go all different ways and this was one of them: two drivers, on the other side of the country about to head home. The next day, a father and son would get into the car to begin another kind of family. A wife would get on a plane and go home to the family that she belonged to.

*   *   *

MISS NOLAN TOOK CRICKET DOWN to the office where the secretary said, “Your father just called to see if you were in school. Are you getting into trouble, young lady?”

“Is he home? Did he say if he was home?”

“He said he had been away.”

Cricket did not wait for more information or to explain herself or to ask for permission. She ran to the boys’ classroom and grabbed their hands and together they sprinted the ten blocks to their house. Miss Nolan did not chase them and she did not allow the secretary to call the principal. “They’re all right,” she said. “Let them go.”

The air hurt the children’s lungs and they did not slow down.

They found Edgar standing in the light of the refrigerator. The house was clean. It looked the way it used to before the children were alone. They fell on him like prey. He sat down on the floor and they crawled onto him and they smelled like the outdoors. He kissed them five thousand times, it felt like, and it was not nearly enough. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you all okay?”

They said, “We buried a fawn and lived in the yard and we didn’t know if you were ever coming back and where is Mother and we’re hungry for something other than beans and we’re sorry if we did something to make you go away and is Maggie here too and we don’t want to be orphans and where have you been and please stay.”

“I’m staying,” Edgar said. “I’m staying, I’m staying. Mother is coming home too. And the vet called and Maggie is there. Weren’t you answering the phone?”

“We were afraid of orphanages,” Cricket said.

“What if it had been Mother or me?”

“Take us to get Maggie,” the boys shouted.

“I can’t drive right now. I lost my glasses and I can’t really see.” Edgar looked at Cricket hard, and in the blur, she was herself. “Do you remember once when I sent your mother flowers and they came in a vase full of marbles that you thought were treasure and for months you always had a marble in your hand, even when you went to bed?”

Cricket did not remember but that did not matter because someone else did. She was not the only one carrying the story of her life. That’s what she needed her parents to be, more than caregivers: keepers of the selves she had grown out of.

“I missed you so much,” he said. “I’m sorry if it sounds stupid to say.”

“Not stupid,” she told him.

“We could walk to the vet if you want.”

“We want,” the boys said.

The children would be angry later, but now it was too good to be home and not alone. For the rest of the afternoon and evening they all moved as a clump. Edgar needed Cricket to read the labels on everything and the children needed to be close to the person whose job it was to care for them. Together they went down into the basement and found pork chops in the big freezer and together they cooked them in the pan with onion and white wine and together they steamed frozen peas and together they buttered them and together they walked to pick up the dog who licked and jumped and yelped with the fevered joy they all felt and together, children, father and dog all went to sleep on Fern and Edgar’s bed, legs over legs, arms over arms, faces pressed into the soft pillows. The burden of Edgar’s family was beautiful. Heavy and beautiful.