CHAPTER 12  

. . . Earth

Ninety miles northwest of Great Falls, Montana, ranges the blue-green world of Glacier National Park. Wild bear roam the land, and the lake waters, from spring to fall, stay as potently cold as a high-proof vodka. Just within the park’s eastern gates, clustered around Lake Saint Mary, below Mount Cleveland, stand a phalanx of campsites. They are spare, basic plots, frequented not by lovers of sunshine or Grand Canyon vistas but by those who crave the north, those whose hearts are drawn by ice, by thin atmosphere, by the planet’s poles. If a man and woman stand barefoot in early summer beside Lake Saint Mary, and the man yaks about soccer, or affirmative action, or his bullish, ticker-tape dreams, the woman is within her rights to wander off in the bracing waters. Glacier is, like its name, a massive, appropriate silence, a place where nature, dense and drifting, crushes time and other trivia.

*  *  *

Grace had left her husband’s body with the stripped-down preacher. Before she could be caught or questioned, she’d sprinted, sobbing, from the Hammerspread, and blundered north in the truck, alone. She’d driven without map or purpose, and when the truck ran out of fuel at Lake Saint Mary, Grace ran out of fuel too. She’d steered dizzily off Route 2 into a pine-needle clearing that happened to be a campsite. The truck’s front grille banged smack into a thick ponderosa pine, and as it did, Grace passed out cold, her face on the steering wheel, her arms limp. She slept that way for twenty hours.

When she woke, day had come and gone. It was early night again, and when Grace lifted her head, her vertebrae cracked out loud. She glanced in the rearview mirror. Her face was a lattice of steering-wheel dents, her eyes two gothic craters.

I’m a widow, thought Grace.

She sat in place, weeping. A young girl in a red windbreaker from a nearby campsite rapped on the truck window and waved a steaming ear of corn at Grace, who ignored the child. Later, after midnight, Grace drank water from the cooler, then stumbled to the lake’s edge, where she threw up, falling to her knees on round, flat rocks. She passed out again, facedown on the shore.

This time when she woke it was morning. Someone had covered her with a black, scratchy, wool blanket. Grace was hungry, but remained stubbornly where she was, the rocks aching her thighs. At noon, the red windbreaker girl appeared and tapped her boot on Grace’s buttocks. Grace peeked out.

“Give it back.” The girl pointed at the blanket.

Grace handed it over.

The girl stared at Grace’s matted hair, at the curled-shrimp pose Grace made in the rocks. She shook her head. “You shouldn’t sleep on stones. You’re stupid.”

On the third day, Grace ate sticks of jerky. She dug out Charles Chalk’s license plates and screwed them back on the truck. After this, she took anything that had belonged to Henry, his shirts and pants and Sprite cans, and made a pile beyond the ponderosa pine. She dumped the remaining Little Julia books on the pile and threw in the stolen license plates, the air mattress, her vomit-stained ’Quillity shirt. Then, standing by her work, she lit matches, dropping them until the pile flared. The air mattress popped, writhed, smelled like poison. Grace peeled off her Navajo dress and added it to the carnage. Braless, in her black panties and Timberlands, she watched the flames, felt their heat on her belly. She kicked pine needles away, made sure the pyre didn’t spread. She plucked two long hairs from her scalp and dropped them in the fire.

“You’re stupid.”

Grace turned. It was the red windbreaker girl.

“That pit.” The girl tossed her chin toward a rock circle. “You should’ve built it there. You’ll burn the whole park down. Plus, your fire smells.”

“You smell,” said Grace.

The girl frowned. She was twelve, and she stared at Grace’s breasts. “We have a crazy naked neighbor back in Billings. She waters her petunias in the buff.”

Grace gazed into the flames. I’m a widow. I’m a widow like my mother before me.

“Bye, stupid.” The girl scampered off.

Grace started walking on her fourth day in Glacier. She woke first at dawn, and pulled on her jeans, her Carlson’s Car Wash T-shirt, her boots. She stuffed her pockets with jerky and two oranges and tied two water bottles to a belt she made from rope.

Thus shod, she struck out toward Mount Cleveland, beat through six hours of bogs and thatch and stands of massive trees. She wandered trails, pressed her mouth to cold, purple-lichened mosses. At a river’s waterfall, above iron-colored boulders, she shoved her face in the pounding gravity of the current, daring the pressure to snap her neck, to dash her down on the rocks. All this time, she kept the Earth, the final diamond, wedged tight in her left boot, where it chafed her ankle like a dungeon ball. She couldn’t bring herself to hurl it into the forest, just as she couldn’t bring herself to swan-dive from the cliff promontory she reached. So she ate an orange wearily, turned her back on the mountain, made for the truck. Seven hours later, with Henry’s twice-pierced heart on the slab of her mind, she limped into her darkened campsite.

“Welcome back.”

The red windbreaker girl sat on pine needles, her back to the ponderosa tree. The air smelled imminent with rain, and the girl held a stack of graham crackers. She was eating them carefully, dropping no crumbs. It was nine o’clock.

“I didn’t hear you coming,” said the girl. “You’re supposed to make noise.”

Grace collapsed in a heap. She pulled off a boot, keeping the gem inside hidden from view.

“When you’re hiking around here, you’re supposed to make noise as you go. That way, if there’s a bear up the trail, he knows you’re coming and you won’t surprise him. If you surprise them, they freak.”

Grace inspected her ankle, which was raw and blistered.

“Freak, as in attack you. Wow, that ankle looks horrible.” The girl stood. “Have you got first aid?”

Grace stared at her blisters, recalled Henry’s laughter. She nodded.

“Well, you damn well better use it. Bye.”

In the truck that night, Grace slept in fits. Rain beat a staunch percussion on the roof, and Grace dreamed of Roger’s neck, Floyd’s pulpy brains.

In the morning, she repeated her routine. She stocked her jeans with jerky and oranges, lit out between the trees, swatting aside leaves that spit rain upon her. She’d sprayed her ankle with Bactine, wrapped it with tape, but she’d shoved the Earth right back in her sock, too, so her limp returned. It worsened with each step. Cursing, she doubled back, spent the afternoon in the truck bed. She tried praying, but panicked instead, bolted outside, hugged the giant pine, held it tight, smelled its century-old smells as she wept and wept.

*  *  *

On the fifth day, Grace came upon a baby black bear. She was limping along a trail, the diamond in her boot like a penance, when there the bear was, just off the trail, sniffing a berry bush, nuzzling fruit into its mouth.

Grace stopped, watched. She knew she was experiencing what should have been a tender thing, a moment of animal quietude. She waited dully, wondering if harmony or comfort would flood through her. Instead, nothing happened. The baby bear kept eating. Grace stared at it, resenting its appetite, its concentration and ignorance of her affairs.

A blood-frightening roar rattled the air.

“Jesus!” Grace whipped around, her heart in her throat.

Five feet from her towered a mother black bear. Its mouth was open, charging noise into Grace’s face. Its eyes were malice, and its six hundred pounds of muscle and hairy height blotted out the forest.

“Jesus,” whispered Grace. Urine ran down her legs. She stood motionless, petrified. She was between the bear and its child, but she wasn’t conscious of this logistic. She was conscious only of her bowels, the mortal shaking within them.

Again, the mother bear roared. Her teeth, a rack of long white knives, showed themselves, gleamed. Spitting from the bear’s mouth, along with the next roar, came saliva. It sprayed on Grace’s chin, and one fat drop of it fell on her tongue.

Grace smashed her eyes shut, trembled. Her stomach spun. All in one instant, visions and voices clamored through her mind. She saw her father, Max McGlone, the sloppy-haired hero of her adolescence. She saw her campsite’s giant pine, pictured herself scaling it, climbing higher than gangsters and beasts could reach. The bear’s hateful breath blasted her scalp, smelling like hot, rotten cabbage, and Grace, eyes still clenched, recalled Bertram Block saving her life. Finally, she saw the Planets. They hurtled like comets, burned through the sky of her mind till just one was left.

Grace heard Henry’s voice. Again, said her husband. Do it all again. Then another voice, a brassier one, came clobbering through, pointed itself at Grace like a finger.

You, commanded the voice. You’re supposed to make noise.

Grace clenched her fists. She was shaking. She tasted on her tongue the ancient, forever-ago bite of P&V. Then, eyes still rammed closed, she opened her mouth and screamed. She howled and wailed, brought shrieking up from her guts. She leaned her face forward, roared her own roar at the one coming at her. She keened till her cheekbones ached, till her diaphragm gripped. She pealed and bawled out decibels till she felt herself no longer a daughter, wife, or widow, but merely a noise, a strong, insistent sound.

Then she stopped. She was done. She opened her eyes, panting, and looked around. She was alone on a forest trail. There were no bears, neither baby nor mother. She was the only thing there.

Unclenching her fists, she gazed at her hands, the dirt, the trees, the high blue above her. She wiped her eyes. Her heart took a minute to find its pace, then she sighed, threw back her shoulders. She was done crying, done screaming.

“Good-bye, Henry,” she said softly.

*  *  *

Grace borrowed gasoline from the red windbreaker girl’s father. In exchange—though the father asked for nothing—Grace removed her silver wedding band and passed it to the man, with a note telling him to give it to his daughter.

She left Glacier, steered her truck into southern Montana. There she found Lou Feeper’s Bozeman Truck Stop, the roadhouse famous among tractor-trailer drivers for its two-inch-thick rib-eye steaks and its bordello of a bunkroom. It was here at Lou Feeper’s, Grace knew, that her father had died at the hands of some shadowy foe, some gambler or harpy or creature of the night.

Grace didn’t go inside. She gassed up the Charles Chalk–mobile, paid with her ATM card, then sat on the hood in the sunshine, staring at the roadhouse. She wore a clean pair of jeans, her Carlson’s T-shirt, her Timberlands. Three men in Mack truck caps whistled at her, invited her for a rib eye, their treat, but Grace ignored them till they vanished inside.

She drove east. At Billings, at the split of interstates 94 and 90, she took 94, the more northern, less familiar route. She cruised east, nonstop, with the wind. She moved through Treasure County, Montana, and Stark County, North Dakota. She dropped down through South Dakota, past Fergus Falls, past St. Cloud. At midnight, she ate meat loaf in an Eau Claire diner named Selena’s, in her home state. Then, in Selena’s parking lot, feeling unable to move closer to Janesville, she slept for eight hours in the truck bed, her boots on, her diamond still crammed against her ankle.

The next morning, a knocking woke her. Grace yawned, blinked hard, stared out the windshield at a middle-aged Latin-skinned woman. Grace crawled into the driver’s seat and opened the window.

The handsome, imperious stranger spoke. “I’m Selena. This my diner. My cook tell me, you here all night. Parked. No leaving.”

Grace didn’t reply. Her tongue and whole person were incapable of rapport.

“You police?”

Grace remained silent. Her eyes were a dark limbo that Selena, a widow herself, recognized.

The matron crooked her finger. “You come.”

Limping, Grace followed the woman inside. Selena ushered her into the kitchen, fixed her eggs, left her alone. Grace sat on a chilled industrial refrigerator, ate her eggs, watched waiters and cooks work and bicker. She sat until it was clear to Selena that this girl hadn’t the will to do much else. So, later that afternoon, Selena set a box of tomatoes on the counter. She gave Grace an apron and knife, pointed at the tomatoes.

“You cut,” said Selena.

Grace cut up the tomatoes. When she finished, Selena gave her a box of onions and Grace sliced those up, too, all without speaking. That night, Grace ate the burrito that Selena prepared for her. Then she went out to her truck, crawled in the back, and slept.

The next morning, Selena woke Grace again. She fed her, gave her the knife, set her to labor, left her alone. Day after day, it became a ritual between the two women. Grace worked at Selena’s diner, and wore an apron, and chopped things, and didn’t speak. At night, she lay alone in her truck, the curtains drawn. She thought of Lou Feeper’s Truck Stop, wondered if there was a Selena there, too, a woman who owned and served. She thought of Janesville, just thirty miles away, and felt perhaps she should stay in Eau Claire forever, always orbiting but never returning to her home. She knew that no one would come for the truck, that some Chicago justice that had lived in both Henry and Honey had died with them too. Mostly, though, she slept.

It went on for weeks. Gradually, Grace’s limp disappeared, though she at all times carried the diamond stowed in her boot. Selena never asked the stranger about the lump in her foot. She gave the girl work and food, never advice. She waited for the day when the girl would realize that, no matter what had befallen her, she was herself. On that day, the older woman knew, the silent girl would vanish.

*  *  *

The predawn clouds were rosy fingers across the sky on the early June morning that Grace drove into Janesville. She got to Carlson’s Car Wash at five-thirty. Chubb Gesthoffen wouldn’t arrive till seven, but Grace fetched Paul Carlson’s office key from under the sunrise bench and opened the place. It would be her last time performing these tasks, but she turned on the clack-track tunnel, filled the detergent vats. After pressing the Super Deluxe wash button on the wall, she ran back to the truck and drove it through the tentacles, through the clean-smelling lather. When she eased the steaming truck from the tunnel, she turned the engine off, left the keys in the ignition for whoever might want them, and walked away from the car wash for good.

Main Street Janesville was empty. Dawn hadn’t reached the sidewalks, so streetlamps were still lit. Grace strolled, looked at the town, reorienting. Plastered on telephone poles were posters begging for the safe return of Tom Pfordresher’s lost seeing-eye Doberman, Cassius. The dessert menu at Mackidew’s, taped on the diner’s front door, listed Our Famous and Astounding Homemade Pecan Pie, which Hollis offered only when the Cubs were winning.

A man and woman in matching sweat suits jogged past, but Grace didn’t know them. She studied the vines that gripped the east wall of the Bryson Inn. They looked to her like the tributaries of some great river viewed from outer space. As a girl, she’d decided they were a map of the Nile, or the Yangtze, or some mighty, surging body that she herself would find, name, and navigate.

At the display window of Pyle’s Thrift Emporium, Grace stopped. She gazed through the glass at a few new items—a hibachi grill, two kites—but mostly at totems she recognized. There was the marble chess set that Francis Pyle had been trying to sell since October, and the maritime telescope, and the toaster. Then Grace caught her breath. In the corner stood the clay Taj Mahal statue, the one that cost a dollar forty-five. As ever, it was covered in dust, its price tag dangling like a listless flag, but it had been shifted from its plot. It was a move of only inches, a move perhaps no other Janesviller would detect, but Grace marveled at it. She could see the old space, one band of white exposed wood in the window-casement soot.

“Good morning.”

Grace turned with a start. Beside her, in blue jean overalls, each arm hugging a stuffed grocery bag from Todd’s Supermarket, stood Color Danning-Tate. Grace shouldn’t have been surprised, because Color and her husband lived one block down, beside the Bryson Inn. Also, once a week, Todd Wilcox opened his market at five so Color could shop undisturbed before other patrons came at seven. Children invariably shrieked with fear or wanted to follow and pet her when they saw Color in the aisles, and Todd and countless parents had had enough of both. Color herself became sapped or driven to distraction when thrown among so many souls whose secrets called to her.

“Hello,” rasped Grace. She hadn’t spoken since Glacier.

Gleaming above celery stalks were the famous gray eyes, the strong silver hair.

Grace coughed to jump-start her voice. “So . . . how are you, Color?”

“Pregnant.”

“That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Color sniffed the air. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“You’ve been out prowling, Grace McGlone. Roaming.”

Grace’s heart seized. She looked away. “And do you . . . do you know what happened to me?”

“I have some guesses.”

Grace’s eyes rimmed with wetness.

“Oh, honey.” Color set down her groceries, hugged Grace. Grace let out one bark of a sob. She let herself be held.

“It’s all right, honey. It’s going to be.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“It is.”

Grace wiped her eyes.

“You’re Grace McGlone. Nobody nowhere has got nothing on you.” Color stood back, but held Grace’s hands. The streetlamps clicked off. Dawn was building.

“What will you do now?”

Grace sniffled. “I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking . . . I’ve half a mind to do something fairly wacked.”

Color cocked her head, listened. “Dammit. It’s Cassius Pfordresher.”

Grace glanced around, saw no trace of the dog. “Where?”

“Loomis Forest, sounds like. His leg’s caught in a woodchuck hole or something. I better go find him.”

Color took Grace’s chin, raised it. Her eyes glinting, she nodded toward Morgan Street, which was three blocks away. “Seems like we’ve all got places to be this morning, don’t we, Grace?”

Grace swallowed, looked away. “I . . . I don’t know. Do we?”

“I don’t know,” said Color Danning-Tate. “Do we?”

*  *  *

On Morgan Street, Grace strode to the house of Stewart McFigg. The front door was unlocked, but when Grace peeked in, Stewart was asleep in his clothes on the couch, one bar of sun stealing through the window toward his head. Grace hesitated, thought. She jotted him a note, slipped out the front door.

The walk to the Oval Office took almost an hour. Grace went slowly to accommodate the stone she refused to loose from her boot. When she arrived at Uncle Treemus, she put her hand to the bark, peered up. It had been nine years since she’d touched this tree. She’d never beheld Uncle in honest morning light, and she wondered, gazing skyward, whether she could still climb the giant.

Halfway up, she slipped, caught a blunt branch in the gut. She rested on one of Stewart’s ancient platforms, pulled up her T-shirt, checked her stomach. There was no blood, but she saw a grand bruise in the offing.

At seven-thirty, Grace reached the tree house with the chimney. She sat on the porch, took in the rising sun, wondered exactly what she was doing here. When she finally went inside, she was surprised that the bearskin rug and bookshelf remained, though the rug was tattered almost to crumbling. The room’s startling additions were the arsenal of water bongs, hash pipes, and hookahs. They were everywhere, on the bookshelf, the rug, cluttered in the corners. In the sleeping nook, Grace found crinkled condom wrappers, and a Megadeth poster, and a stuffed animal bunny with a syringe up its ass.

Her deepest shock came when she reemerged in the main chamber and noticed what hung there. It was a piece of clothing nailed to the wall, an item that teenagers had spray-painted purple and black and green over the years. They’d written graffiti notes on it, too, many in red nail polish. One note said Chris “Cannabis” Hackett 95–99. Another said Colonials Soccer. Another said No Iraq War, and another said Sara Aikenfield Goes Down.

Grace petted the cloth memorial. It was her baptismal dress, she knew, but she preferred it this way, with fun and stupidity rubbed into it. She left it hanging, and decided to clean.

In the kitchen nook hung a garbage bag with Ho Ho wrappers in it. Grace moved through the rooms, filling the bag with the condom wrappers, the poster, the violated bunny, every last pipe and bong. In a corner, she found a tiny straw hand-broom and used it to clear the floors of dust and cigarette butts. She swept this detritus into the bag, tied the plastic sides together, dropped the bag off the porch. She watched the bundle crunch and careen off branches down to the ground.

Fetching the bearskin rug, she shook it over the porch edge, freed it of dust. After spreading it out again inside, she sat cross-legged on it, waiting. She spied something caught behind the bookshelf. Moving closer, she grabbed the trapped thing. It was Stewart’s old crucifix.

Grace dusted it off, looked at the body on it. She set the crucifix on the bookshelf. Five minutes later, Stewart poked his head in the door.

“Grace! So it really is you.”

“I guess you got my note.”

“I thought that might be a joke from my crew. People said you skipped town.”

Stewart stepped fully into the chamber. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans and a tool belt, his summer carpentry outfit. His left foot, as always, was shod in a green orthopedic boot. His other boot was a basic brown leather.

Grace stared, as she had each time she’d seen Stewart over the last twelve years, at his swollen biceps and forearms. They were still astonishing, thought Grace, but back in high school they’d seemed almost cartoonish. Now his limbs wore badges of labor. He had a scar above his right elbow, where a circular saw had bitten him. The sun had cooked and weathered his forearms, and hard gravel was trapped in the meat of one palm.

He works, thought Grace. He works. He’s a man.

“I did skip town,” she said. “But I’m back now. Will you sit with me a minute?”

Stewart looked at his watch. “I have to power-sand Pauper Jeckett’s roof at eight o’clock.”

“Just for a minute.”

Stewart looked at her closely. Grace wore Timberlands and blue jeans and her Carlson’s T-shirt, untucked. He thought her skin had seen some sun, but her hair was the same stammer-inducing torch.

“I haven’t been up here in ages.” He joined her on the rug. “Except for that graffiti-thingy, everything looks the same.”

“I cleaned up a bit.”

“Is that why there’s a ripped-open bag of water bongs down in the Oval Office?”

“I guess so. Stewart?”

“Yes, Grace?”

It was a clear-sky Tuesday. Below Uncle Treemus, in the James Madison parking lot, buses were disgorging students who ached for summer.

“Stewart, why would your crewmen play a joke telling you to meet me? Why would they think signing my name would make you show?”

Stewart looked out the window. It was a window he’d fashioned, however crudely.

“Grace, if you left that note, why didn’t you just wake me up? We could’ve talked at my house.”

“I didn’t want to startle you unnaturally from sleep.”

Stewart adjusted his tool belt, moved a wrench that was gouging him. “But meeting in my old tree house, that’s natural.”

“Whatever it is, Stewart, here we are.”

“Yeah.”

She took his hand. Stewart was surprised, but didn’t pull away.

“Stewart.”

“Yes, Grace?”

“Let’s tell the truth.” She breathed in. The air tasted high, thin, slightly insubstantial. “On a morning like this, we should tell each other the truth.”

“Okay. The truth is, I’m late for work.”

Grace picked at the rug. She was frustrated, twenty-six, unsure. “I’m wondering if we should kiss.”

“Yeah, right.”

Grace kept holding his hand. She looked at him quietly. Stewart’s face fell.

“You shouldn’t tease a guy, Grace.”

“I’m not teasing. I’m wondering.”

Stewart waited for a punch line. When one didn’t come, he tugged his hand from Grace’s, set his jaw. He stared at his lap.

“Who do you think you are, Grace?”

Grace opened her mouth. “I—”

“I took you on dates these past few years, and you never even pecked my cheek. Now all of a sudden it’s ‘maybe we should kiss’? What the hell?”

“Not all of a sudden, Stewart. I’ve known you all my life. We’ve known each other.”

Stewart glared at his addled foot. When he was angry, he did this, focused on his deformity, hating that his father had given it to him, hating the extra time and careful footing it demanded. Stewart knew what Janesvillers thought of him. They considered him one of God’s fools, a cripple with a decent heart, a hard worker, a man who knew neither smut nor cynicism. He was the son of McFigg the butcher, the son who joined his father at mass each Sunday in St. Anselm’s.

While some of these were facts—he was maimed, after all, and he did go to church—Stewart marveled at the community’s blindness to his rougher edges, his failings. For years after high school, while Grace and so many others ebbed off to college, Stewart had stayed in Janesville, grappled with life. He’d taught himself carpentry and bought a house, but he’d also drunk himself to sleep countless nights, his heart suffocatingly lonely. He’d driven alone many weekends to Chicago, where he sat on bar stools, sulking down whiskey, waiting till some blowhard mocked his foot. He’d lured men into fights in this way, crumpled their ribs, earned fines and nights in jail, and all of it beyond the borders of home.

He’d had one-night stands, too, most of them during benders, often with women he’d found barely attractive. One summer night, in his early twenties, he’d left the Fracas Pub with none other than a bleary-eyed Periwinkle Danning. They’d driven to Lake Loomis in his truck and screwed in the truck bed, and afterward, Perry had begged him never to speak of it.

“It would ruin me,” she’d sobbed, “if people knew I slept with a— It would ruin me.”

Stewart carried these things in his heart. He carried his foot, his misdemeanors, his flimsy couplings with women. And because he, in spite of his efforts to the contrary, also carried goodness, he sometimes wept. He cried not like Perry had—cried not to public opinion—but to God and himself and, deep down, to Grace McGlone. Those were the persons from whom he wanted company and approval. So for Grace herself to call him out, to coax his care for her up out of its cave, was a lung-tightening fury of a thing.

“I’m not so sure you know me, Grace.”

“Maybe not. But I might surprise you too. If you knew all that’s happened to me, I bet—”

“Your little vanishing act?” Stewart snorted. “You leave town for a month, and you’re a new person? What, you won the lottery?”

Grace looked at her baptismal gown, the mad colors on it.

“I married a man named Henry. I killed another man by shooting him in the head. Then I watched my husband die.”

Stewart studied her. He read her eyes, weighed her words. He’d worked many years with hard-bitten men, and he knew the expression, the glance, the breath of a lie.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ, Grace.”

“He might never have been in danger if he hadn’t met me. I don’t know. . . . I might’ve been what killed him.”

“My God, Grace. God. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime. Not now.” She tossed her head toward the corner. “Stewart. See that guy there? On the bookshelf?”

Stewart looked. “My old crucifix?”

Down at the high school, homeroom bells were ringing.

“I still believe in Him,” said Grace, “but I don’t want to talk about that now, either. I want to give you something.”

She unlaced her boot. Her husband had died, but she was in the physical world, behaving physically. She peeled the boot off. The stone fell on the bearskin.

“It’s a diamond,” she said, pointing. “It’s for you.”

It was warm in the tree house, not hot.

“I just got back, and I haven’t even seen my mother yet, and I have no idea what to do with my life. . . . But this is for you.”

Stewart didn’t look at the diamond. He saw only Grace’s ankle, whose skin had become rough and resistant, like his hands. He brushed the gem aside, touched her heel. “You’re hurt,” he said.

“Just a little.”

Stewart did something then he’d only done for doctors. His fingers shaking, he removed his left boot, showed Grace his atrophied foot.

Grace regarded it with alarm. Then her eyes softened. It was tiny and white but it could move, the ghost of something thought extinct.

“May I . . .”

Stewart looked away, his teeth set. He couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast. He nodded, barely.

Grace touched the little foot. She held it in her palm. “It’s fragile.”

Stewart wouldn’t look at her. Grace began stroking his foot as gently as she could. She didn’t massage it, didn’t kiss it, didn’t move toward seduction. She simply stroked the man’s foot, remembering its story, wondering.

Sun poured in the window. As Grace touched his foot, Stewart sighed. Then, involuntarily, he laughed. The laugh made him blush.

“It’s all right,” said Grace. “We’re supposed to make noise.”

“What the hell is this?” blurted a voice. “What in the freaking freak is this?”

Grace and Stewart turned their heads.

In the doorway were six shocked faces. They belonged to six seniors, six kids who’d cut first period to smoke dope in their lair at the top of the world. Two were girls, one black-haired and one blonde. In the fall, the black-haired girl would attend Emory, where she’d discover and admire Catherine the Great. The blonde would stay in Janesville to land the stoical, much older Jon Fracatto as a husband.

As for the boys, two were brothers who excelled at chess and loved Pink Floyd. The third boy was fearful of nuclear winter, and the fourth boy was Hanson Hackett, the broad-shouldered younger brother of Chris “Cannabis” Hackett, who’d ruled the Uncle Treemus reefer lovers of the previous decade. Hanson had long wheat-colored hair, and he would visit Laos in August with his parents and his stomach would tolerate the trip poorly. For the moment, though, the young master Hackett was dating the future Mrs. Jon Fracatto, and he was standing in the doorway of what he considered his hideout.

Hanson stared at the man and woman on the bearskin. The woman was beautiful, the man enormous. They were dappled in sunlight, and one held the other’s foot. Around them was a clean environment, except for the weird painted dress on the wall, the dress Hanson called the document dress, the dress he planned to sign next week, the morning after graduation, like his brother before him.

“Who are they?” whispered a girl.

Hanson held up his hand for silence. He was the leader, the one who’d first spoken upon seeing the transgressors. He felt it his place to address them.

But before the young man could form a complaint or a credo, the burning-haired woman hopped to her feet. She stood at her full height, and the teens stepped back, for in the woman’s hand was a glittering stone, a ball of light catching sun from the window. She held the light up, held it out like a defense for the children to respect and remember, though she and the man would be keeping it.

“This place is ours,” said Grace.