Chapter Three

three

Anna Grey Graf—Mrs. G. to her fifth-grade students—was driving to work at Solomon Public, smoking a cigarette from the pack she kept hidden in her glove compartment and wondering what to do about Gabriel Carpenter. She’d been fighting her gut dislike of the boy from the moment Principal Johns first led him into her classroom. The poor child’s face was shaped like a pie, and he had skin the color of raw pie dough. His eyes looked bleary behind his glasses, as if he had a cold, which, in fact, he did most of the time. At recess, he walked by himself along the chain-link fence that bordered the highway, and if other kids shouted Hey! to him, he wouldn’t look up, no matter how many times they tried. Instead he’d bow his head and pray, the way he did in the cafeteria before lunch, the way he did in the middle of class, lips moving silently as if he were reading.

For a while, the other kids were nice to him, partly because his aunt was the afternoon crossing guard, but mostly because of rumors that his father had left behind an envelope of money with Gabriel’s name written across the seal. Nobody knew exactly how much money the envelope had contained. Kids speculated that it was at least a million dollars and that Gabriel was so rich he could buy a house with a swimming pool. But Bethany Carpenter had told Anna Grey that it hadn’t been very much money at all and that old Pops Carpenter had gotten to it first and used it to pay his electric bill. She said that, at home, the boy was silent, distant. Her own boys teased him, and he often slipped away to the river, where he walked along the banks for hours. Or he went next door to his grandfather’s house to rummage through Shawn’s old boyhood things. Sometimes he’d explore the derelict barn, where Pops kept the tractor he drove to town as if it were a car. Sometimes he simply disappeared, and did not return until well after dark. Bethany said, “There’s something about him, I don’t know. Something not quite right—” She didn’t finish her thought, but Anna Grey knew exactly what she meant.

There were children one simply disliked on sight. It didn’t happen often, thank goodness. The only other time it had happened to Anna Grey had been twenty-odd years earlier, in a suburb of Indianapolis where she’d lived before she married Bill and moved to Ambient, Wisconsin. How she’d loved that little school! The teachers had done everything from serving lunches to cleaning lavatories to minding the infirmary, but the workload hadn’t bothered her. She’d been young, and she’d liked the people she’d worked with, and there was something about walking down the tiled hallways and hearing the warble of the children’s voices as they lined up outside, eager for the bell—even now she couldn’t explain it, but it made her happy in a way she’d never felt since. Euphoric, even. She was so excited to be living up north, over five hundred miles from her hometown of Skylark, Georgia. She believed she was doing something important. She believed these children would take the knowledge she gave them and carry it with them to the sixth grade and the seventh, on to high school and maybe college, to places in the world she’d never see, and this somehow made her bigger than she was, better than she was, a good person. And then, in the fall of 1968, she walked into her classroom and saw Sandy Shore—her parents had really named her that—poking her cheek with the eraser end of a pencil, not hard or anything, just an absentminded gesture, and all of Anna Grey’s warm feeling was snuffed out as if a cloud had passed between her body and the sun.

Sandy Shore was a twitchy-looking girl, with pale-yellow hair so fine that it had clumped to her sweater with static. One sock drooped around her ankle; the other was stretched as high as it could go. Already she had her hand in the air, and when Anna Grey got to her desk, it took every ounce of self-control she had to keep her voice level as she said, “Yes?”

What the girl wanted to know was, could she write in pen? Her teacher last year had insisted on pencil. “I’m sure I don’t care what you write with,” Anna Grey said with such venom that the child blushed and the restless rustlings of the other children dried right up. Silence, at least ten beats, before Anna Grey found the presence of mind to begin taking role. At the end of the day, she went home to her efficiency apartment above the hardware store. She’d fixed it up to look bright and cheery—red and white checkered curtains she sewed herself, a matching oilcloth for the table, a framed Sears print on the wall. Suddenly she saw it for what it was: the linoleum faded around the kitchen sink, the couch with its shameful cigarette burns—she’d lied to the landlady, told her she’d quit smoking—the odor of mildew seeping out past the rose-scented air freshener Anna Grey favored back then. Outside her small window, the Indianapolis sky was getting dark. Three weeks from now, there’d be frost on the ground, and then the long winter would slap everything flat beneath its palm. People were starting to hurry along the sidewalks, heads down, hands jammed in pockets, hard faces set against the growing chill. It was all Anna Grey could do to heat a can of soup, open her lesson planner, prepare for the next day. She knew Sandy Shore would be waiting, that dirty eraser pressed to her cheek. Anna Grey tried to reason with herself. Sandy Shore was no different than a hundred other little girls, anxious, eager to do things right—a student who needed the sort of reassurance Anna Grey’s supervisor claimed she had a knack for. But it had been no use. An irrational feeling can’t be remedied with reason. If it were that easy, the world would be a different place.

She crushed out her cigarette, checked her watch. It was only ten minutes till the first bell. At the Fair Mile Crossroads, she rolled through the four-way stop, and as she turned onto County O, she saw a hitchhiker waiting on the shoulder. A Styrofoam cup of coffee from the McDonald’s steamed in his gloved hand. At first, she thought he was smiling at her, a wide, ragged smile. Then she realized he had a harelip. His stare was blank, unyielding. She wanted to stop, to offer assistance or, at least, a dollar and a friendly word. But she was late already, and besides, who in this day and age would stop to help a stranger? Anna Grey accelerated onto County O, her mouth flat with regret.

She thought about the story she’d heard a few weeks earlier from Maya Paluski, the art teacher, who’d heard it from Ruthie Mader at a meeting of the Circle of Faith. It went like this: An older couple west of the Killsnake Dam were moved to pick up a hitchhiker, something they’d never done before. The hitchhiker was a young man, long-haired, unshaven; it was downpouring rain, and he was soaked to the bone. The couple offered him what they had: a blanket, lukewarm coffee in a Styrofoam cup, a fruitcake they’d planned to give to a friend—no, take it, they said, take the whole thing. They were goodhearted people and they told the hitchhiker how they could see he was goodhearted too, and they hoped he would get wherever he was going and find the happiness he was due. They wrote their names down for him on a scrap of paper, and their address, and they gave him twenty dollars, which was everything the woman had in her purse.

Two weeks later, they got a letter postmarked California. The hitchhiker thanked them for their kindness. He told them he’d had a semiautomatic and planned to kill the first person who stopped to offer him a ride. “I pushed it under the seat,” he wrote. “I had a change of heart. I know Jesus has forgiven me and I hope you’ll forgive me too.” They found the gun where he’d said it would be, and for those who don’t believe, there is the cold steel fact that the couple wrested from underneath their seat. A person can see it, reach out his or her hand, slip a doubtful finger into its small round mouth.

Anna Grey liked to think of herself as a caring person, a compassionate person. She admired the couple from Killsnake, but she also thought they’d taken a terrible risk. The world wasn’t what it used to be. Even people in small towns like Ambient had started to lock their doors at night, post Neighborhood Watch signs in their windows, keep handguns in the clutter of nightstand drawers—and still one heard reports of vandalism, break-ins, even sexual assault. Lawn mowers and snowblowers and power tools disappeared from garages. Windows and streetlights got shot out in the fancy neighborhoods around the millpond, and every now and then somebody’s tires were slashed. Recently, there’d been two drug-related arrests at the high school, and last year’s senior prom, which was held at the Knights of Columbus hall, had resulted in so much property damage the Catholics voted not to rent out the facility again—it was said that this year’s prom would have to take place outside, beneath a canvas tent. And how many times had Anna Grey walked to the foot of her driveway to get the morning paper and discovered her mailbox lying in the ditch, the post snapped like a spine? Then, for days, she’d wonder if it was the work of some former student, now grown and avenging a long-ago slight. Or if it was a lunatic, or worse. Or if it was just a random thing, like what had happened to Ruthie Mader’s husband. Tom Mader had worked for the post office, farmed sheep on the side. Even then, Cherish Mader had been a lovely girl, obedient and hardworking, with a talent for art—a pencil sketch she’d done of Saint Fridolin’s still hung above Maya Paluski’s desk. Cherish had been in Anna Grey’s fifth grade the year somebody broadsided Tom’s little green Bobcat in front of the Neumillers’ mailbox. The impact knocked him into the ditch; he died right there on County O as letters fluttered like doves across the wet spring fields. Even now no one knew who had done it. It could have been anybody, perhaps someone everybody knew. You simply couldn’t be sure of anyone anymore.

Still, at night, as Anna Grey lay beside Bill’s silent, sweating body, she sometimes imagined slowing, stopping, opening her heart to a man like the one she’d just seen, except that this man was good-looking, educated, someone who was just a little down on his luck. He’d climb into her Taurus, balance his backpack across his knees, and the slow burn of his smell—cigarettes, dampness, wind—would fill her throat. “If you hadn’t stopped,” he’d tell Anna Grey, “I guess I don’t know what I would have done,” and his voice would be gentle, apologetic, warm with the same Georgia lilt that still softened her own words. Such a man would agree that even well-meaning Northerners had a way of talking that made them sound impatient, superior. His teeth would be as white and square as buttermints. His eyes would hold a complicated mix of brown and gold and yearning.

But where were these thoughts coming from? What was all this nonsense about a stranger’s eyes and yearnings? She slowed behind the line of cars piling up at the entrance to the school. Enrollment had swollen to an average of thirty-five kids per class, and class sizes continued to increase, despite periodic additions of “mobile classrooms”—trailers that circled the original structure like settlers’ wagons under Indian attack. The trailers were painted in lively colors—lime green, cobalt blue, pink—and as Anna Grey turned into the parking lot, the ugliness of the whole place struck her afresh. The asphalt playground. The bare wallows beneath the swings, where the snow and ice had been worn away. The faint, sour tang of the fertilizer plant that was always present, regardless of which way the wind blew. The children, bundled like cumbersome dolls into snow pants and heavy coats. Half of them were catching the same coughs and colds the other half still hadn’t quite gotten over. And there, pacing the fence, was Gabriel Carpenter. His arms were wrapped around his books, mashing them to his chest. His hands were bare—Bethany said he kept losing his mittens—and as Anna Grey walked from the parking lot to the Main Building, she tried not to think about the way he picked and picked at his chapped knuckles. For weeks, he’d had a sore at the corner of his mouth; every now and then, he’d moisten it with his tongue. Yesterday, during social studies, Anna Grey couldn’t help but excuse herself to the teachers’ lavatory, where she checked her own lip in the mirror. Of course, there was nothing there. Of course, it was only her imagination making her taste a swelling against her gum. She’d stared into the mirror, her face jaundiced by the overhead lights. Her eyes were wide apart, her eyebrows plucked in high, surprised arcs, each one as thin as a torn fingernail. Deep lines creased either side of her mouth, but it was a kind mouth, an easygoing mouth, a mouth that wanted to smile. Surely all the crow’s-feet narrowing her eyes were evidence of that. It was just that the child brought out the worst in her, the same as Sandy Shore. He made her realize all her limitations. He made her realize she should be doing more.

The hallways of Main were empty, quiet, though she could hear laughter coming from the teachers’ lounge. Cigarette smoke listed from the open door. Inside, multicolored couches were arranged around a low, square coffee table. There were some magazine racks, a wobbly coat stand nobody used, a sink that had been dry ever since the pipes froze up last year. A few valentines were already posted on the bulletin board, covering the New Year’s decorations no one had bothered to take down. A small group of teachers had gathered around Marty Klepner, the guidance counselor, who was telling jokes so bad he must have learned them from the kids. Anna Grey filled her coffee cup with bitter decaf and tucked her sack lunch (fat-free-cheese sandwich, celery sticks, an overripe pear) into the fridge. She longed for another cigarette, but everybody thought she’d quit.

“What’s Wisconsin’s state flower?” Marty asked.

“The satellite dish,” Anna Grey said, half under her breath but still loud enough for him to hear. It was an old joke, a stupid joke. Her daughter, Milly, had told it to her last year.

Marty smiled at Anna Grey across the heads of the others, a friendly, apologetic smile that made her long to haul off and slap him as hard as she could. She turned away without a word, imagining the reddening imprint of her hand against his chalk-pale skin, and then how she’d kiss each fingertip. His forehead was freckled and beautiful; the shape of his skull showed beneath his thinning hair. She noticed he seemed bulkier through the chest, less hunched—had he been lifting weights? It wouldn’t have surprised her. She’d heard he’d found a steady girlfriend, younger, a single mother with a six-month-old baby girl. Why should it matter to Anna Grey? It didn’t. She’d married Bill for better or worse, and of course there was Milly to think of. A couple of long kisses one day before Christmas, a loose-limbed walk down the hall to his office, half an hour on the counseling couch beneath the field of construction-paper sunflowers kids had stapled to the ceiling—these things meant nothing when you held them up against the light of a husband and child. A home. A stable, sensible life. When she and Bill went to sleep without so much as a peck on the cheek, she told herself they were both just tired, that they’d been married too long for foolishness. When Bill sat silent at the table, night after night, she kept up the conversation for them both.

The first bell sounded. She picked up her coffee cup, walked down the hall to her classroom. Seniority had earned her a permanent room in Main. Of course, she felt sorry for the younger teachers, who had to pick their way out to the trailers, hopping frozen puddles, high heels sinking into brown patches of snow, but she herself had spent several years assigned to North Trailer, the worst of them all, known unofficially as the North Pole. Her permanent room was a palace by comparison: well heated and spacious, with two chalkboards, windows she could open when the weather turned warm. Yet it was all she could do to hang her coat behind the door, to set her coffee cup on the corner of her desk already stained by dozens of overlapping rings. Maya Paluski said that she used to feel that way before she’d joined the Circle of Faith. She said that the Faith meetings had given her a new lease on life.

“We hold open meetings on the first of each month,” she often reminded Anna Grey. “You ought to come, Anna. It would do you a world of good.” When she spoke, she played with the plain gold cross all Faith members wore around their necks. “We’re a family. We don’t always agree, but we look out for each other.”

The Circle of Faith put Anna Grey in mind of the Skylark Bible Circle, a Baptist organization her mother had belonged to and enjoyed. Faith members did charity work, scheduled afternoon picnics and winter cider parties. They sponsored guest speakers and visited each other’s churches, went on nondenominational retreats, explored faith healing and women’s spirituality, and helped each other with everything from child care to tax preparation. But Anna Grey didn’t want to air her troubles in front of Ruthie Mader, who lived on an idyllic hundred-acre farm overlooking the river, whose husband had been, by all accounts, a truly wonderful man, whose daughter had gone on to become so popular and pretty she’d been crowned Festival Queen last Fourth of July at Cradle Park. Cherish Mader wasn’t sitting home every weekend like Anna Grey’s Milly, rereading her collection of science fiction novels. Besides, Anna Grey had her own church home, Christ the King Lutheran—she’d converted when she married Bill. She could always make an appointment with Pastor Floyd if she wanted someone to talk to. Pastor Floyd spoke against the Circle of Faith, which he said was a feel-good kind of thing with no spiritual basis. People taking God into their own hands, he’d said. Well, God isn’t like Play-Doh you can shape into anything you want. Man is the Play-Doh. God is God. And tradition teaches what he expects from us.

Anna Grey sighed, checked her lipstick in the compact mirror she kept inside her desk. It was probably just the weather. She hadn’t gotten used to Northern winters, the chill that never left her hands and feet. The children thundered in, and she smiled at them vaguely, but she did not come around from behind her desk. In September, it had been announced that teachers shouldn’t touch the children anymore, because of liability. Some of the teachers were outraged, but Anna Grey herself hadn’t touched a child in years. Strange, because she remembered hugging the children at her school in Indianapolis: the surprising cold of their cheeks after recess, the various shampoo smells of their hair. Gabriel’s hair was uncombed and oily. That awful sore glistened—would it ever heal? He sat down at his desk as if he had no idea where he was; his expression was the same one the hitchhiker had worn as he stood beside the highway, watching or not watching Anna Grey drive by, untouchable, untouched. It was the same one Bill wore at night as he sat at the supper table, the flat line of his mouth rippling as he worked his roast like a cud.

The principal’s voice came over the intercom, and Gabriel rose with the other children, pressed his hand over his heart. I pledge allegiance—to the flag—of the United States of America—

Anna Grey had neglected to rise, to put her hand over her own heart, and when they finished the pledge of allegiance, the children looked at her curiously. “You may be seated,” she said. “Open your math books to Chapter Fourteen.”

When Gabriel opened his book, Anna Grey could tell he was in the wrong place. His reading and writing skills were far behind the other children’s. “Chapter Four-teen,” she said, but Gabriel wasn’t listening. His hand was in his desk cubby, and Anna Grey thought she heard the irritable crackle of his lunch bag. Bethany packed him plenty of food, but the child was always hungry. All morning, he’d sneak bits of crushed Ding-Dong, a corn chip, a peanut butter cracker—that slow hand moving from his cubby to his mouth. By lunchtime, most of it would be gone; still, he prayed before he ate, seemingly oblivious to the mimicking gestures of the kids all around him. Looking for attention, Anna Grey knew, like the second-grade boy who always fell down or the girl—thank heavens she’d moved away—who kept taking off her underwear. Poor child, the other teachers said, and inevitably they’d ask, Why isn’t he in Living and Learning? Living and Learning was Marty’s pet project, a special class for special kids that met three mornings a week. But Anna Grey couldn’t admit she was failing with Gabriel, especially not to Marty, especially not now. She wasn’t the same green teacher who’d encountered Sandy Shore. She planned to surprise everyone, discover a special talent in Gabriel—art or, perhaps, music—and encourage him until he grew to trust her, blossomed like a flower. She imagined how he’d start making friends, play kickball and softball at recess, look boldly out at the world—but the fact was that, nearly a month into the term, Gabriel still was staring at the ground.

What made it worse was that Marty himself had approached Anna Grey about Gabriel just last week, surprising her as she sneaked a cigarette in the teachers’ lounge after the first bell had already rung. “I think he needs more than you can give him,” he said matter-of-factly.

“My recommendation is to keep him mainstreamed,” Anna Grey said firmly. “You know how the Living and Learning kids get ostracized.”

“Gabriel is already ostracized,” Marty said. “Tortured might be a better word. Let me help the kid, Anna.”

“I’m late,” Anna Grey said, crushing out her half-smoked cigarette.

“Can we schedule a meeting to discuss this?” Marty said. “It would be, I mean, strictly professional.”

He blushed with the sincerity of those words, and Anna Grey blushed too, but angrily, because even as he spoke she was imagining the scrape of his beard against her cheeks, the edge of his teeth against her tongue. Strictly professional—of course, that December afternoon had been a mistake, a weak moment after his separation, her only infidelity, ever. Until that day, affairs had been something that happened only to other people, and even now, after the fact, it was unthinkable that she had fallen into such a thing herself. She almost wished she were a Catholic so that she could confess, receive her punishment, leave her sin in the care of someone bound by God’s law not to repeat it. Maya assured her that the Circle of Faith meetings worked the same way—members took a vow of silence so that whatever was said between Faith walls was sure to stay there. “I know something’s on your mind, Anna,” she’d said more than once. “You just don’t seem yourself lately.” But Anna Grey could not imagine admitting something like this to anyone, though the fact was that she longed to tell Bill, to make a clean breast of everything. Her fear wasn’t that he’d be angry, or hurt, or even that he’d leave her. Her fear was that he wouldn’t care one way or the other.

She’d first met Bill on the IU campus during the terrible fall of Sandy Shore, when it seemed to Anna Grey that her life had changed, that nothing was satisfying anymore. She and another teacher were there to see a football game. Bill was sitting next to them, and they all got talking during the halftime show. As the cheerleaders kicked their pretty legs, Bill told Anna Grey how his father owned a funeral home in Ambient, Wisconsin (Where? Anna Grey had said), and how he’d offered Bill a junior partnership when he’d graduated from high school. But Bill was worried about the draft, and he had an idea about becoming a veterinarian, so Bill senior gave his blessing, even paid Bill’s tuition on the condition he spend his summers at the morgue. Now, three years into his undergraduate degree, Bill was failing all his science classes. The army had stopped drafting people, and Bill wished he had the guts to drop out and go home. If he’d taken his father’s offer, he said, he’d be out in the real world, making money, instead of studying abstract ideas that meant nothing. As he talked, Anna Grey kept looking at the curious gray streak in his hair. (Later, his mother would tell Anna Grey he’d been born with it. The devil’s kiss, she said.) She wrote her phone number on a corn dog wrapper, and the other teacher giggled about it all the way home. “Imagine all the dead people he’s touched,” she said. “Imagine him combing some dead person’s hair.” In spring, when he bought the ring with his fall tuition money, the other teachers teased Anna Grey that he’d taken it off a dead woman’s finger. They said that on her wedding night, he’d ask her to hold her breath, tell her not to move.

Opposites attract: That was what people always said about Bill and Anna Grey. She was short, fair, talkative, while he was the quiet type, tall and dark. Back in those days, she was interested in politics. She supported environmental causes, hunger drives, and women’s rights. It was true that Bill seemed to have no opinions whatsoever on any of these subjects. But she’d grown bone weary of her life in Indianapolis, and she was still young enough to believe that change could only mean something good. Bill had a solid future; he loved her, he wanted a family. At the time, it had all seemed simple enough.

Math period ended; science began. Anna Grey divided the students into task groups, ignoring the groans of the three girls who got stuck with Gabriel. Their assignment was to design an ecosystem. All parts of the food chain were to be represented. If they didn’t finish their ecosystems today, they could work on them again during science period tomorrow. She gave each group a poster board, tracing paper, and a stack of National Geographics; they already had glue and scissors and markers in their desks. “Plan the whole thing out in pencil first,” she warned, and then she went back to her desk, where she took three Tylenol caplets with the gritty dregs of her decaf. She thought about Bill undressing for bed, his spare tire spangled with varicose veins. How last night, again, she’d laid a warm hand on the small of his back and he’d twisted to look at her curiously. “What?” he’d said. “What?” She thought about Marty, how he’d fumbled with the front of her bra until she guided his hands to the back. How she looked away, shy, when he kicked off his trousers and how then—too quickly—he’d slid up inside her so that she never actually saw him, and this left her even more unsatisfied than his odd, staccato rocking. He’d looked at her, afterward, spreading her with his fingers to blow cool air on the place that didn’t want cooling, and yet she had held his head between her hands until. he had blown the last of her desire out.

The lunch bell rang. Half the day down. At noon recess, a group of boys led by Bethany Carpenter’s own Robert John—a troublemaker if Anna Grey had ever seen one—pinned Gabriel down and made him eat chunks of dirty slush that shot through the fence from the highway. The teacher on recess duty was Maya Paluski; she called Bethany at home, but Bethany had to clean house for someone in Killsnake and couldn’t come in before her crossing guard shift started at three. “Call my husband at Jeep’s,” she said, but Fred was unloading stock and couldn’t leave. “Handle it however you see fit,” he said. “I’ll talk to Robert John again when I get home.” So Maya brought Gabriel back to Anna Grey’s classroom, interrupting her half-hour planning period, the only break she would get all day. Gabriel’s face was raw and wet, streaked black around the mouth. He didn’t look at Anna Grey, but he didn’t not look at her, either. Gabriel just looked. That was what always got to Anna Grey. “Maybe you should keep him here,” Maya said. “I mean, instead of sending him outside with the others. They’re worse than wolves.”

Anna Grey imagined spending the rest of the term’s planning periods under Gabriel’s absent stare. “He has to learn to stick up for himself,” she said, perhaps a little more crossly than she meant to. “He won’t always have teachers to look out for him.”

“Well, OK,” Maya said. “But if I can help, Anna, let me know.”

After Maya was gone, Anna Grey wiped Gabriel’s mouth with a Kleenex from her desk drawer, careful not to let her fingers touch his sore. “You’re bigger than those boys,” she said. “It’s silly to let them do this to you.” She poked the Kleenex into his hand. “Here. You can wipe your own mouth, don’t you think?” Suddenly he leaned over and spat into the wastebasket, a dark stream that made Anna Grey’s stomach turn.

“Gabriel!” she said.

“It tasted bad,” he whined. “It still tastes bad.”

“Then don’t let them bully you next time.”

He stared at the floor, unresponsive. It was as if she were talking to the air.

“Do you hear me?” she said. “Do you?” Then abruptly, cruelly, she knocked on his head with her knuckles. “Hello? Anybody home?”

He lifted his head to look at her, eyes brimming, an innocent child. Appalled by what she’d just done, Anna Grey turned and walked away, down the hall and out the school’s back entrance, where she inhaled deep, burning gulps of cold air. On the asphalt, a group of boys chased a red rubber kickball, slipping and sliding over the ice. Younger girls jumped rope, while the older ones floated in groups. Maya was right. She wasn’t herself lately. The truth was that she wanted to go home—not home to Ambient, but to Skylark, where her sister still lived. She wanted to hear people speak her full name—Anna Grey—instead of shortening it to just plain Anna, the way Northerners automatically did. She wanted true heat that lasted more than a week or two in August, and she wanted humidity that left a person not knowing where her own skin ended and the air began. She wanted country music on the radio instead of rock ’n’ roll, and she wanted to order a glass of tea in a restaurant without having to say iced tea. She wanted to open her mouth without somebody telling her, “You’re not from here, are you?” And she wanted to walk down a street where people looked you in the face; but the thing was, Anna Grey’s sister said that Skylark had changed. People who worked in Atlanta lived there now; it was more like a suburb than a town. It had been seven years since Anna Grey had gone back, though her sister had come twice to Ambient. “You don’t want to see it, really,” her sister said. “It’s one big parking lot.”

But the same sort of thing was happening to Ambient. Once, Solomon Public had stood alone on Country O, the only building north of the D road. To the south was the school bus parking lot and repair shed; farther down the road, well out of sight, was an International Harvester dealership. Now the IH stood empty, but new homes were sprouting up haphazardly as mushrooms, and the D road, which continued out past the Badger State Mall toward the interstate, had been transformed into what was now called the Solomon strip: outdoor malls and fast-food restaurants, gas stations and minimarts, video stores, electronic shops, outlets. The couples building homes in the developments around it weren’t rich weekenders like the millpond people: They had to commute to Milwaukee, or even Chicago, five days a week, morning and night. If you asked if the drive didn’t bother them, if the smell of the fertilizer plant didn’t get into their hair and clothes on days the wind was wrong, they said it was worth it to own their own house, to live where the money went further, to have their kids grow up in the country, away from guns and drugs.

The bell rang. Anna Grey blew her nose into the tissue she kept tucked inside her sleeve. The truth of the matter was that what she really wanted, more than anything, was a cigarette. She could see that pack of Salem Lights tucked between her car registration and an emergency box of Kotex. But there simply wasn’t time to walk to her car. Besides, somebody might catch her smoking.

Inside, Gabriel was sitting at his desk. His hands were folded; his eyes were closed. The child was praying, and this time, the image twisted like a hook in Anna Grey’s heart. Hating herself all over again, she got her purse from her desk, dug through it until she found a half-eaten roll of cherry Life Savers.

“Here,” she said. She meant to let her fingers touch his hand—an apology—but instead she dropped the roll on his desk. It landed with a hard, metallic sound. “That’ll get the taste out of your mouth.” Kids were coming in from recess now, bringing with them the mildewed odor of wet wool. Anna Grey swallowed three more Tylenol before calling them to order; still, by the end of the afternoon, her headache clutched her skull like a heavy knit cap. And perhaps the headache could have been blamed for the peculiar thought that bobbed to the surface of her consciousness as she drove home from work: Why not just keep on driving? Why not just?

Milly, a responsible voice replied, but Anna Grey ignored it and lit a cigarette. She had her checkbook, credit cards, a map if she chose to look at it. Maybe she’d just drive until she got good and hungry; then she’d stop at an all-night diner, where she’d buy more cigarettes from a machine and order steak and eggs. If she wanted pie, she’d damn well have that too; the hell with her spreading thighs. In her mind’s kind eye, a man—the hitchhiker with the buttermint smile—took the stool beside hers. “Coffee,” he told the waitress. “Just coffee.” And then, seeing the concern in Anna Grey’s face, he revealed to her that he had nothing in the world but what he carried with him on his back. “I’ll help you,” she told him. “I’ll take you wherever you need to go,” and his windburned face flushed darker as he realized his good fortune. Together they discussed the possibilities—Atlanta, Florida, Mexico, Baton Rouge—but even as they tried to choose, Anna Grey was startled by the sight of Bill’s car parked in its usual spot in the driveway, the Graf Funeral Parlor logo stamped on the driver’s-side door. Habit had brought her home.

Inside, Bill was watching TV. He did not turn around as Anna Grey hung her coat in the hallway closet. President Bush was being interviewed by reporters about the effects of environmental terrorism; he looked ten years older than he had when he’d given his speech in Cradle Park. Anna Grey stared helplessly as images of the Persian Gulf flashed on the screen, the terrible black smoke of the oil wells rising, unchecked, into the sky. Experts said it would affect the level of air pollution worldwide, and some even predicted increased incidents of cancer, birth defects, and infertility. There was nothing anybody could do about all the civilians who were dying in the aftermath of the bombings with no drinking water, no medical care. But if Anna Grey said anything, Bill would say, “OK, OK, can’t a fella watch the news?” He liked things quiet when he came home. He was tired. He wanted some peace.

“Look at ’em burn” was all he said now. The fine hairs tangling above his balding head were haloed with light.

Anna Grey went into the kitchen, where Milly already had the table set and was now chopping tomatoes for a salad. She was tall and plain, painfully shy, the sort of girl the Cherish Maders of the world never gave a second thought. It broke Anna Grey’s heart to think about it. Suddenly she lifted her daughter’s ponytail and kissed the soft, sweet skin beneath it.

“Ma.”

“You’re a good kid, you know that?” Anna Grey said. She started browning the ground beef while Milly emptied the dishwasher. “Anything new?” she asked, expecting Milly’s usual shrug. But when Milly spun around and beamed, Anna Grey realized she’d been waiting for the question.

“I tried out for the summer play.”

“You did?” Anna Grey was shocked. Every summer, the Ambient Community Center put on a musical, but Anna Grey could no more imagine Milly climbing onto a stage than she could imagine her skydiving. Still, Anna Grey had surprised Milly singing around the house, and what a beautiful voice she had! Anna Grey quickly learned not to mention it, though. If she did, Milly got embarrassed and was careful not to sing for a while.

Milly nodded. “Actually, I tried out last week.”

“How did it go?”

“Pretty well.” She was trying to be nonchalant. “I got one of the leads.”

“Congratulations!” Anna Grey said. Her voice rose with emotion, the way Milly and Bill both hated. “Why didn’t you tell me? Mercy, Milly, I can’t believe it!”

“Don’t have a heart attack, Ma,” Milly said, but she was smiling. “I can’t believe it, either, OK?”

The ground beef sizzled and popped. Too late, Anna Grey pulled it off the burner. A cloud of smoke enveloped them both before she could turn on the fan. “It’s all right,” Anna Grey said, turning her head so she wouldn’t cough into the meat. “It’s just a little singed. Tell me about your play.”

The musical was The Music Man, and Milly told Anna Grey all about it as they spooned the burned bits out of the ground beef. “Rehearsals start this Saturday,” she said. “We’re just going to do a read-through first: That means everybody sits in a circle and says their lines so we all get a sense of the characters. I’m the young teacher the music man falls in love with, and—”

The kitchen was open to the living room, and suddenly Bill appeared in the doorway.

“Could you keep it down in here?” he said. He fanned his hand through the air. “Good grief, what’s going on?”

Before Anna Grey could say anything, Milly jumped up as if she’d been slapped. “We were talking—what’s so bad about talking?” she screamed. “All—we—were—doing—was—talking!” Then she ran down the hall to her room and slammed the door. Anna Grey stared at the familiar lines of Bill’s face: the soft chin with its velvet stubble, the shaving scar on his left cheek, the eyes that could be green or gray or blue, depending on what he was wearing, held in place by crow’s-feet neat as fancy-sewn pleats. She stared at his sloping shoulders, the way his worn jeans hung low on his hips beneath the bulk of his belly. His hair, which was still full and curly in the front. That streak of gray. The devil’s kiss. His feet were long and slender, graceful; as always, they pointed slightly out. She removed his shirt, his undershirt, his jeans and socks and Jockeys. She removed the silver four-leaf clover that had hung from his neck since he’d turned sixteen, a gift from his mother. She turned him around, spun him over and over like a piece of meat on a giant spit, and still—the thought came to her with the rush of a sparrow fluttering in through a window accidentally left ajar—she knew nothing about this man. And she wondered if it was truly possible to know anyone in the world.

“What?” Bill said to her, clearly bewildered. “All I did was ask a question.” And then he sniffed at the air near her forehead. “You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?” he said.

That night, she went to bed early, and when she lay down in the double bed that had once belonged to her grandmother, she imagined having all that space to herself for the rest of her life. She opened her arms, spread her legs, until her hands and heels hung over the edges. As a child, she’d always worried that something might come up out of the darkness and sink its teeth into her dangling limbs. She’d slept with her arms at her sides, her legs tucked against her stomach, and even as she dreamed, some part of her stayed alert, watching with a parent’s eye, keeping her aligned in the center of the bed. Now, try as she might, Anna Grey could not close her eyes until she’d pulled her arms and legs back in and turned on her right side, facing the place where Bill should have been. She dreamed she was walking along an unfamiliar highway. In the distance, she could see the figure of a man; it was the hitchhiker, the real hitchhiker, the one with the harelip. “What do you want?” she asked, and he said, “One small act of kindness will appease me.” But she knew one kindness would lead to another, and then another, and it would never, ever be enough. And then she saw he held the semiautomatic in his hand.

The alarm woke her. She felt confused, cotton-headed, as if she hadn’t slept. Bill had already come and gone, and when she went downstairs to fix breakfast, she saw he hadn’t even bothered to close the cover of the cereal box, let alone clear his dirty bowl and coffee cup from the table. She fixed two more bowls of cereal, buttered toast, poured orange juice, hoping routine would salvage the day. When Milly came into the kitchen, she gave her a cheery “Good morning!” But Milly had retreated into her usual silent shell.

“How late will your rehearsal run on Saturday?” Anna Grey asked.

Milly shrugged, sipped her juice.

“Are you nervous?”

Another shrug.

“Maybe I could come watch you rehearse sometime,” Anna Grey said, and Milly said, softly, angrily, “Ma, it’s no big deal, OK? It’s just a stupid play.”

Still, when the bus came, Anna Grey waved from the doorway as if nothing whatsoever were wrong. Then she threw Bill’s coffee cup across the kitchen and into the sink, enjoying the splash of broken china, the crisp, charred, ringing sound.

At school, the children sensed her mood, stayed on their best behavior. Midmorning, she set them back to work on their ecosystems and stepped out to reserve a movie to carry them through the afternoon. So far so good, she thought. I can handle this day. But at lunchtime she remembered she’d been scheduled for recess duty weeks earlier, and no sooner did she get outside than she saw Robert John and his gang backing Gabriel up against the school wall. How she hated Gabriel for his weakness, that passive acceptance of all that befell him, so much like her own. She hated him fully and purely, in a way she would not have dreamed possible. She blew her whistle and marched over to where the boys had assumed postures of fearful defiance, gloved hands wedged into their pockets. Gabriel stood with his head down, waiting for whatever was going to happen next to happen. He didn’t even seem to notice when Anna Grey grabbed the shoulder of his coat.

“I don’t have the patience for this,” she screamed at the boys. “If you’re still here in three seconds, I’ll slap your goddamn little punk faces bloody, do you understand English?”

They did. After they’d dispersed, she spun Gabriel around and slammed him hard against the wall. He didn’t even blink. “What’s wrong with you,” she shouted, “that you don’t stand up for yourself? Do you want to live this way all your life? Is that what you want?”

Gabriel didn’t answer. What child could answer stupid questions like that?

She kept her hand on his shoulder, took a few deep breaths. She could feel the bones in his shoulder all the way through his coat, through his fat: the V of his clavicle, the flat patch of scapula. For all his bulk, he was a very small boy. If she squeezed hard enough, she could crush everything in her fist like a handful of potato chips.

“Trouble?” someone said. It was Marty Klepner. Without saying anything, Anna Grey let go of Gabriel and walked back to her classroom, leaving her section of playground unattended. She opened the coat closet, and her red eyes fixed on the mess of toys and games and random supplies that were always threatening to spill out onto the floor. By the time the kids came in from recess, she had everything stacked in piles along the wall and was wiping down the shelves.

“Spring cleaning!” she announced. “Everybody empty out your desks!”

It was barely February, but what else could they do? Even Gabriel lifted the lid of his desk and began scooping the contents onto his seat. They scoured every surface with Comet. They washed every window, soaped every blackboard, organized the bulletin boards. They finished just as the librarian arrived with the antiquated film projector, and Anna Grey let The World of Volcanoes carry them right up to the three o’clock bell, when the kids—Gabriel included—flew out of there like buckshot.

She didn’t know how much time passed before she heard a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said. Of course it was Marty, the last person in the world she wanted to see. She started packing up the projector so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“What’s going on?” Marty said.

Anna Grey tucked the film into its box, held it out to Marty. “The World of Volcanoes,” she told him.

“Can I help with anything?”

“Oh, you could return this to the library, if you’re headed that way,” she said airily.

“That’s not what I meant,” Marty said. “I mean, we’re still friends, aren’t we, Anna? Is there anything I can do?”

“Anna Grey,” Anna Grey said. “My name is Anna Grey.” And then she grabbed her purse from her desk, lifted her coat from its hook, and ran down the hallway toward the parking lot, hating the hard, frantic sound of her heels on the tiled floors. Outside, the air was thick with the odor of the fertilizer plant, but it smelled worse than usual: oilier, sharper. She thought of the smoke boiling up from the fires in the Gulf, the pale sky opening to receive it, and at that moment she felt the bump forming at the edge of her lower lip. In the car, she flipped down the vanity mirror, stared at her reflection. Nothing. Yet she could feel something with her tongue. The most terrifying things were the ones you couldn’t see, the ones you harbored inside yourself. She remembered how, after Chernobyl, she’d listened to reports that said the cloud of radiation would reach America in four days, then two days, then one. That day, nothing had seemed different on the surface, but in the middle of the afternoon, a faint shadow passed over the sun and she felt the radiation settling into her bones, sparkling like diamonds, waiting for a chance to make the right cell blossom.