Leena went to the party with Josie because it was the first night she was to be totally alone. Pearl had been picked up that afternoon by her grandmother and would be staying at her house in Dallas for the next four and a half days. No Trevor, no Pearl. Trevor’s mother had a way of inviting Pearl, staking her loving claims on her granddaughter, while tactfully excluding Leena.

“And now you get some me time for Mom,” Trevor’s mother had said, with fake glee, on the driveway in front of Leena and Trevor’s home. She said it in the manner of a woman who understood other women’s needs for “me time” (but did not herself need it). Leena knelt in front of Pearl to tell her goodbye. Trevor’s mother stood back politely, looking away. She was a small, immaculately dressed, red-haired woman who looked younger than her sixty years; her face was cold and tiny, and her eyes were unnaturally blue. Her paleness seemed almost a statement of some kind next to Leena’s natural tanness. Pearl, who was a mostly quiet three-year-old, stared at the older woman holding a hand out to her and then took the older woman’s hand, as if she had intuited whose will was stronger. Her own mother, Leena, was not a fortress, could not even decide most things for her. Pearl seemed already to know that. Leena felt stripped around Trevor’s mother—an unwanted stepsister next to her own daughter.

After they had driven away, Leena went inside and took a pill. Anxiety was normal, she reminded herself. She had been having the anxiety spells ever since they’d moved to Texas, and recently Trevor had made her go see a psychiatrist who had told her that, given her circumstances, it was probably normal. The incident that had marked March and April of that year (those confused months, in Leena’s memory) was not talked about, not explicitly. It was treated, rather, as a side effect of the prevailing circumstances: her displacement, and the not-unusual isolation of young mothers whose husbands were often away on business.

Medication, Leena had been assured, was a normal way for some women to cope, especially when one could not immediately change their circumstances. And Leena knew what that meant. She was going to have to get used to things as they were.

About her uneasiness with his mother, Leena never said anything to Trevor. Once at a family dinner, Trevor had pushed back his chair and stood suddenly to call his younger brother Davis aside after some disparaging remark Davis had made. About the steak their mother had prepared, Davis had said, “Is this cooked all the way through?” but he had said it with disgust, shaking his head, as if the situation were somehow representative of a greater, deeper disappointment. The stern manner with which Trevor pushed back his chair and stood only intensified this sense of things. Leena did not hear what Trevor said to his brother. Meanwhile, their mother sat looking ahead and eating as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “I don’t care. I’ll do it myself,” Leena heard Davis say, as Trevor came back to the table. Leena at the time had admired Trevor’s loyalty to his mother and thought Davis was ungrateful. Eventually, though, she had come to see how the dynamics between the brothers and their mother were more complex than this and how there were things maybe both men did not see about their mother.

But women saw these things, thought Leena.

_______

The party was a pre-Christmas gathering in a part of the city Leena sometimes drove through and wondered about, but she had never been inside any of the houses. They reminded her of French colonial-style buildings back in Vietnam—two-story, rectangular structures with adobe walls and small, ornate balconies, glass-paned balcony doors, porticos framing front patios. The neighborhood was called French Place (Leena had read the name on a street sign and then recalled having seen or heard it before as the name of a part of the city). Many of the houses even seemed to be in the same dilapidated condition as buildings like these would be in Vietnam, with peeling paint and visible cracks in the outer walls. But some of the houses looked neat and well-kept, newly repainted, yards overflowing with plants and toddler toys. A few were painted absurdly, playfully—one was electric blue with sloppy-looking planets floating across its walls. Leena was mystified by the neighborhood. Her friend Josie explained that the area used to be military housing but was now mostly occupied by college students. She said the area was “still sketchy in a way.” Leena wasn’t familiar with the term but didn’t bother to ask what Josie meant because she felt she understood just by looking.

“Some people are buying and fixing up here, though, I guess,” said Josie, as they were parking the car.

The guests at the party (they went into one of the more neutral-looking houses on the street—it was not too neglected, but neither was it very clean) appeared to be about Leena’s age or younger. They struck Leena as independent and probably intelligent but also immature and a little self-satisfied. There were no toddler toys in the yard of this house. The young women were well-groomed and attractive, but Leena still felt older and sexier.

She lost Josie somewhere in the crowded kitchen. She decided to get a drink for herself and then go look for Josie.

“There’s Woodchuck cider. I recommend the cider,” said a man standing next to the refrigerator.

“Excuse me?” said Leena.

“You’re remarkable looking.” He was the same height as Leena, a short, slightly balding man in his late twenties. “Where are you from?”

“Vietnam.” She let him open the refrigerator for her, even though she knew that meant entitling him to more conversation.

“Pisces,” he said, handing her a bottle, twisting off the cap. “Your sun or moon or rising, or all of it. I detect a lot of Pisces in you. Beautiful, just beautiful.” He fixed his gaze on her, and Leena read his type: the kind who justified lust, baseness, by having a dignified manner.

Leena took the compliment as a warning of sorts. Men were noticing her again; she was inspiring them to say these kinds of things. “I have to go find my friend. Excuse me,” she said. Then she left the bottle of cider on a table in the hallway, once she was out of the kitchen.

Leena found Josie out on the balcony.

“North Korea in the house,” said Josie, gesturing to the young man who appeared to be the center of dialogue out there under the blue Christmas lights. It was cold out here, making Leena realize how warm it had been inside. The Korean man was wearing black slacks and a long black coat, and he sat with his legs crossed in a professional, comfortably nonmasculine manner. He wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses. He and Josie and Leena were the only people of color at that party, as far as Leena had seen. Still, he did not pause to acknowledge her when Leena said, “You are from North Korea?”

Leena wasn’t sure if he had ignored her or just not heard her. She did not try to repeat herself. Josie made room on her seat, and Leena sat down. She noticed, as she did this, that both she and Josie were wearing tight pants that made creases above their thighs when they sat.

Besides Josie and the young man from Korea, there were two boys crowded on the small balcony. These two looked more like boys than men to Leena.

“You’ve got to hybridize,” said one of the boys. He was in his late twenties and was not, in fact, wearing an Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt, though Leena had initially thought he was. The logo on his shirt said “Pimpercrombie and Bitch” and in every other way resembled a perfectly ordinary, navy blue, Abercrombie and Fitch crewneck T-shirt with long sleeves. It took Leena some time to realize the boy’s shirt was a joke, because he didn’t look to her like an especially joking type of person; he had an innocent, clean-cut appearance, not bad-looking but young for her tastes, with short hair, babyish cheeks, sincere eyes. She didn’t understand this kind of joke, really, either. Abercrombie and Fitch was a brand of clothing she liked—her husband bought from there often. “We know a free market economy is the way it is, but we’re talking about the way it should be. We’re saying a free market economy is what is at the root of the problem.” His way of speaking, too, was slightly hesitant like a boy’s.

“But that’s a pointless exercise in speculation,” said the one from North Korea. “It solves nothing. If you understand anything about military history and U.S. foreign policy, you know there is no way the powers that be will build ‘one bomb less’”—he made quotation mark gestures with his fingers—“and then apply that one billion dollars of funding to healthcare or something more needed, as you say. It’s a clichéd and futile argument for us to be having, frankly.”

“I’m not saying that it will happen, just that it should.”

At this last statement, the second boy chimed in with the Pimpercrombie one—they said “it should” in unison. The second one was Joel, a sardonic-looking blond boy, also with eyeglasses. Leena had met him before as a friend of Josie’s, and he was the one who had told Josie about the party. He, too, had babyish white cheeks, though there was something sharper to his face: his lips were sensuous in shape and didn’t come all the way together. This, paired with the watchful, amused light in his eyes, made his face uninviting to Leena. She thought Joel and Pimpercrombie seemed to be ganging up on the Korean man.

“Okay, sure, it should, it should, but it’s not going to,” said the one from Korea. “Take the Vietnam War. The real tragedy of that war was not our misunderstanding of what we were getting ourselves into. The real tragedy of that war was the debunking of the intellectuals, who were all along stridently and repeatedly informing the U.S. government that they were making the same mistakes France had made in 1954. But does the U.S. government listen? No. And it’s impossible to expect that they will or can—it’s a machine with too many cogs, and to expect one gear to stop turning just because an action seems morally wrong is a ludicrous presumption. America just can’t do it. So we lost a war, technically, but what did we really lose? In the end who is thriving? What is thriving? Vietnam has her piddly independence, and we threw away a whole lot of money, sure, but a free market economy is still thriving—throughout all the better parts of the world, in fact. So something about it must be working.”

Josie was looking at the Korean man, aghast. “But what are you saying?”

This was Josie: she was pretty in the same slight, feminine way as Leena, yet there was an entirely more modern and savvy demeanor about her once she started talking. Leena sat with her knees pressed together, while Josie sat with her knees apart, boyishly, carelessly. The two were sometimes mistaken for sisters, but Josie was a type of woman Leena knew she could never be. Josie had grown up in the States; Leena had been here six years. Josie could still speak some rudimentary Vietnamese, however, and that was a big part of the connection between them.

The others, too, looked restless and appalled at this latest statement from the Korean man.

“You can’t just say something like that,” said Joel. “You’re disregarding so much when you say something like that. Economics can’t be the sole determining factor of what’s justifiable as successful, can it? We’re dropping bombs on Afghanistan now for reasons everyone knows are false, but you’re going to say that’s okay because economic dominance is inevitable?”

“You’re a liberal, but I’m a historian, all right?” said the Korean, a little defensively. “I understand your point of view, but I’m speaking about facts, not moral issues. The democratic free market economy has basically survived all the challenges that’ve been made to it in the last two hundred years. What does that mean? How else can that possibly be interpreted? It means we are headed into a future of no further economic opposition, no two warring factions. The ideals of socialism were not sustainable, and neither will be dictatorships or anarchy or monarchies. There can be a bright side to this, you know. With capitalism—and I know this sounds extremist—but with capitalism at least there is an objective means of determining who will be granted inclusion. I mean, in a pure capitalist circumstance, that is,” the Korean finished in a clipped, superior tone.

“Huh?” said Joel, and it made Leena think (despite the fact that she was hardly following the conversation herself) maybe Joel was not that smart after all.

The other boy seemed to be following it, though. He said, “He’s saying anyone who has money can purchase entry into, say, a certain society, while in, say, a vegan society, it’s ideology that determines your right to enter—you have to be a vegan or you’ll be kicked out. He’s saying it’s better that something objective like money, that’s theoretically attainable by anybody, according to merit, be the medium of exchange and not ideology, basically. But I think you’re wrong,” to the Korean man now, “because the pursuit of wealth then becomes its own corrupt ideology that indulges in inhumane acts in order to keep its certain small exclusive club of people in power.”

“In a pure capitalist circumstance, I said,” argued the Korean man, “and again, I’m talking about facts, not morality.”

Leena was accustomed to not always comprehending the conversations around her. That was often the case, especially when she witnessed discussions among men (it was always groups of men, here as well as in Vietnam, more than groups of women who sat around discussing such matters, it seemed to her). Like these boys, her husband and his friends would discuss world politics and economics, but their take on things—it was evident even to Leena—was different. They were businessmen. They laughed when they dropped the names of famous corporations; they had more bravado and verve than these college boys. Trevor’s friends’ conversations took place in well-furnished living rooms in large houses and in elegant bars, with food and drink flowing, music in the background, and an undercurrent of appreciation, of unabashed satisfaction, she thought, buoying everything. Her husband’s friends—she hadn’t been around them in a while now, but she remembered how it usually was—would nod and smile at her and say “Thank you, Leena” in low, pleasing tones when she handed one of them a fresh drink or passed them a napkin.

“But of course we’re discussing morality,” the Pimpercrombie T-shirt boy was saying, “and a free market economy has no moral concerns, that’s the whole problem.” He turned abruptly toward Leena. His eyes, it occurred to her, were afraid-looking even though his speech was confident. “You’re from Vietnam somewhat recently, aren’t you? Let’s ask her about what has been done to her country in the name of capitalism.”

Leena was startled. It took a moment for it to dawn on her that he actually expected her to answer. She replied unsteadily. “Under capitalism it’s much better now, though you get in very much trouble still, I think, if you say so there.”

The young man from Korea laughed, tossing his head back sharply. He uncrossed his legs and sat forward with his hands on his thighs. He was not at all her type, but at that moment Leena thought he was the most impressive of the males there. Her interest in any of them, she assured herself, was not personal.

_______

Leena first met Josie one day in the park by the kiddie pool. Leena was there with Pearl, and Josie was a part-time nanny for a family in Westlake. Josie was three years younger than Leena, who had just turned thirty. Josie was the only other person of Vietnamese background Leena had met in her time in Texas.

Before Texas, Leena had lived in a loft apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City with her husband—new husband at the time. Leena had loved the glamour of New York and had learned the ropes quickly, she’d thought. She knew how to dress to go to certain restaurants, what drinks to order, what magazines to read, which celebrities to pay attention to, what brand names to trust. In New York her new American life had a wonderful gloss to it. She felt sophisticated, as if her beauty was an undeniable tool. People regarded her with fascination when she told them where she was from. Salesgirls—themselves as glamorous as the fashion models in magazines—would cater to Leena when she walked into certain upscale boutiques. But then, after the baby was born, her husband had decided they should move back to Texas, where he was from.

Leena did not feel the same in Texas as she had in New York. The salesladies were plainer looking here and regarded her with dull coolness when she came into a store pushing her stroller. The wives of her husband’s Texas colleagues lived by rules of etiquette Leena couldn’t yet grasp. She felt their eyes on her back, saw the insincerity in their smiles. They were well-groomed women who were not naturally pretty; they had to work at their beauty and thus wished to discount any woman who didn’t have to do the same. Leena recognized that from experience—there were women like them everywhere—as being their chief motivation for disliking her. She would never say it out loud, though, of course. But she found herself more comfortable around Americans like Josie, who was slightly younger than these women, a little on the bohemian side, and confidently pretty in her own right. Josie was mixed (some Hawaiian, some Irish, along with her Vietnamese) and originally from Los Angeles: that also helped to explain why she was not like the Texas wives. Josie cared more about politics and other subjects, like movies and books, than she did shopping or clothes. She dressed rather sloppily, actually, in Leena’s opinion.

For this reason, Leena also never worried about Trevor’s attention straying too far if she brought Josie around to their home.

It was something one had to think about, as a woman, in regard to men. Leena believed in that, simply and without much angst about it. To her it was just a fact. Trevor was a man, after all, and it was an issue every woman should be aware of in regard to her man, even if she was the kind of woman who said she didn’t care, she didn’t worry, and even if she felt she could claim her man was not like other men. All men, Leena believed, were like other men, at least in this one way, when you really got down to it. And, in her experience, it was knowledge a woman shouldn’t lose her awareness of, not if she wanted to stay safe.

_______

Leena didn’t like being alone in the big house, so Josie had promised to come back with her that night. Joel and the boy in the Pimpercrombie and Bitch shirt came too.

Leena didn’t like her house much at all. It was too large and old and somber for her tastes, and the land around it far too quiet. The house had been built in 1901; Trevor had told her that was noteworthy, but for Leena it just emphasized that the house was old. She had always lived in cities and coveted new things, modern things. The idea of country living having a kind of charm to it mystified her, although by now she’d seen enough depictions of this idea in American movies and on TV to understand that it did have value to some people. It had value to Josie, for instance, who often said about the old house, “Leena, you’re lucky. It’s beautiful out here.” Still, Leena couldn’t shake the feeling of it being less of a life than she’d bargained for (had spent years conjuring, in fact) upon marrying a man who would bring her to the States.

New York had met with her expectations, she would say.

Josie and Joel stumbled around the kitchen, laughing, as they got out tumblers and mixed drinks for themselves. The other boy (whose name, Leena had learned by this time, was Kasey) went out to the porch and stood looking at the front yard for some time. Leena walked down the hall to her bedroom.

The house rested on several acres of land, the most accessible amount of that land being the front yard, a large rectangle of semi-rocky, sparsely grassy ground with no trees and no shrubs. A long, straight gravel driveway led directly up to the front of the house; two smaller country roads connected their driveway to the highway. To one side of their lot was what looked to Leena like a forest: thick-trunked cypress elms with sagging canopies of branches and foliage only at the very tops of their trunks, all leaning together in a staggered array. A creek wound beneath those trees. She knew that only because Trevor had taken her on walks over there and had shown it to her. After rainstorms the creek swelled far beyond its own banks and you could hear the sound of its waters running; in the summer the creek shrank down to mere puddles.

On the other side of their lot was a fenced-in field that held a couple horses and grubby-looking sheep and another house, much smaller than theirs, with walls that looked as if they’d been made out of old stones cemented sloppily together. This house was shaded by a smattering of clumpy oaks and a partial fence with ivy vines growing over it. At night Leena saw the lit windows of the house, so she knew people lived in it. There were also two rusted trailers on the property. Several older-looking cars were always parked to the side and in front of the stone house. Leena had the idea that the people who lived there (she had only ever seen them from a distance or passing by in one of their old cars) must be like everything else on the property—old, unkempt, somewhat grizzly. Sometimes Leena heard voices carrying across the field—men’s voices, hooting, laughter, a woman’s laughter; sometimes music too; sometimes occasional popping or thunking sounds, like something being thrown against a barn wall. Once, at dusk, she saw fireworks exploding in the sky above the neighboring house, and it was nowhere near the Fourth of July.

There had been an offer recently from a development company for the land on which Trevor and Leena’s house stood. Within the past year, just down the road, a new neighborhood had sprouted. The houses were small, almost artificial-looking in their newness, set on immaculate little lawns, with a community park at the center. Leena had thought the development looked charming but quickly learned better than to say so, for her husband had been one of the people signing petitions and going to meetings to protest the developers moving in. Davis could have cared less and would have liked for Trevor to sell, for the money, of course. But Trevor was stubborn. He liked old things. One could say he made his living from the rescuing—the revaluing—of old things. He, along with two partners, ran a business that involved the searching for and reselling (at exorbitant prices) of old furniture and novelty items from remote corners of Asia.

The house had been in Trevor’s family for some time, though no one had lived in it since Trevor and Davis’s grandparents. Trevor and Davis used to visit the house when they were boys, on holidays and in the summers, and Trevor had always been fonder of the house than Davis was. Years ago, when he was still single, Trevor had begun fixing it up, bringing in his designer and architect friends, filling it with the artifacts of his travels. On the walls he mounted elephant tusks, masks from South America, and Buddhist-themed artwork he had bought in India and Nepal. He was a collector of baskets and blankets and pottery made by indigenous women in Third World countries—the designs and colors from Vietnam being among his favorites, he would claim. All this he had mixed with Eames chairs and coffee tables, Frank Lloyd Wright design–influenced window seats, and a well-stocked bar. He had had the kitchen renovated with retro-modern appliances. He had had the original pine floors refurbished until they shone like honey-blond wood. Entering the house for the first time, Leena felt oddly unnerved. It was then it dawned on her that all the places she had thus far lived with Trevor, in Vietnam and New York—places she had considered ports of arrival for herself—had been for him nothing more than way stations. He had always been meaning to come back here, to the house in Texas. She realized then that she did not truly know him.

And maybe, too (she sometimes thought), he had always intended to bring someone back here with him. He had never lived in the house with his first wife, who’d had her own career as a TV producer in California, where that marriage had both begun and ended.

Leena lay on the bed in her bedroom. It was a metal-framed canopy bed, imported from India, and it was positioned diagonally out from one corner of the room. Draped over the frame of its canopy were some long strips of sheer fabric she and Trevor had brought from Vietnam. These details were mostly Trevor’s doing; he cared about such things—about what the view out the windows would be from their bed, about the room’s color scheme being cool and dusky and earthy. The concrete floors were stained a slightly glossy umber. A wall of windows looked out over the backyard, which was not a yard so much as it was the underside of a cliff. A natural wall of limestone rose up very close behind their house, with plant growth and roots nosing through cracks in the rock, and the feeling created was of the house seeming to be braced against this backdrop: the mountain might collapse were it not for their house, marking the line between rock and grass. Everything back here was very gray-brown and sometimes made Leena feel as if she were in a cave. Sometimes she liked this feeling; sometimes it unsettled her, and she tended to spend more time at the front of the house.

Leena did not really understand the attraction to big houses that many Americans seemed to have. A clean, new city apartment with a good view seemed far more glamorous and adequate to her. But, especially in Texas, size seemed to mean something—it confirmed a sense of entitlement, of belonging. Big houses, big cars. Upon first arriving in Texas, Trevor had traded in their BMW convertible for a Toyota Land Cruiser, and he then required Leena to learn how to drive a stick shift. After that point she began noticing these big, boxy vehicles with women driving and children in carseats gazing benignly out the back windows. Leena felt like an impostor, but of what she wasn’t even sure. From where they lived, she had to drive at least twenty minutes to get into the city proper or even to the nearest shopping center.

On some days she dreaded leaving the house, having to brave the highways. Many days she went no farther than the front porch and sat there on the swing while Pearl played on the steps. They never ventured far into the front yard, especially if it was just the two of them at home, which it was more often than not. Leena might walk across the grass to the side of the house to turn on the water spigot and fill Pearl’s kiddie pool with water, placing it close to the bottom of the steps, but she never walked out as far as the wooden playhouse and sandbox that stood (and had ever since Trevor and Davis’s childhood) in the blazing, treeless middle of the yard. It was a place only the wildest and loneliest of children would ever want to play, thought Leena. She did not, in fact, like it at all when Pearl wanted to play outside. The sun baked down mercilessly, especially in the summer months, and the vastness and stillness of the surrounding land felt ominous and depressing to Leena. These feelings honestly scared her; she had never felt anything like them before.

Trevor would claim this was not actually the countryside, that they were still, in fact, within Austin city limits. Go shopping, make friends, take walks in the evening, were his first suggestions, before the medication. I will not take a walk, Leena had said, and that was as close to impertinent as she could ever get with him.

So, as much as she could, she kept her daughter inside the house, where her clothes stayed clean and where she, Leena, could busy herself with her own activities while her daughter played with her toys or watched videos. When Trevor was out of town and Pearl woke in the middle of the night, sometimes Leena would let her watch cartoons until four in the morning, just to calm her down. Leena made sure, however, to put the videos away, back up on the high shelf in Pearl’s closet, before Trevor returned.

Tonight the moon was almost full. Leena could see it coming into view, rising beyond the rock bank behind the house, which meant, too, that the hour was late. She did not usually see the moon from her bedroom window unless she awoke in the middle of the night. Leena sighed, staring at the canopy poles above her. She was glad, at that moment, for the sounds of Josie and Joel’s muffled conversation and their intermittent laughter, their uneven footsteps on the stairs. They were heading up to the guest bedroom. At least somebody was making use of the extra beds in this house, thought Leena, and she found herself easily imagining what Josie must be feeling just then. Sex, in Leena’s experience, had always had an element of foreboding to it, especially when it was with someone new. The imminence of it, even when it didn’t involve her, she could feel like a current in the air. Some aspects of it were almost always the same, she remembered. The way each occurrence offered up a new sense of possibility, even if just slightly, and how the feeling afterward would always be one of either uplift or letdown. She had always tended to feel one way or the other, even when the act had seemed routine. These things seemed far from her now, though. All those nights of men coming to her rescue or she to theirs, or so it had often seemed, and the washed-out mornings of feeble hysteria or heightened inexplicable emotion that followed some encounters—well, it all had to be over for her now; she understood that much. And something else had replaced it, something that took longer to get through and that Leena couldn’t yet fathom the pattern of.

“You’re quiet in here.” Joel’s friend, Kasey, was leaning in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest.

Leena startled, rising to her elbows. Seeing who it was, she laughed. “Oh, you,” she said, “I forgot you were still here.”

He glanced around the room in a resigned, remotely curious manner. The room was lit only by an indirect glow coming through the windows; the moon had risen beyond the window frame now. “So you have a daughter,” he said. “Where is she tonight again?”

“Her grandparents in Dallas. It’s not too far.” Leena made her tone bright and appropriate. She sat up at the edge of the bed with her legs crossed.

“And your husband—he goes away on business a lot, is what Josie said.” It was not completely a question or a statement. He was hovering in the doorway with his shoulders hunched upward, his neck sticking forward. He looked like a little boy, thought Leena. She recalled her impression of him at the party during the balcony conversation: a hesitant but opinionated boy-man, sincerely indignant at the injustices of the world.

She replied, “Yes,” with a polite smile.

Again his eyes swept briefly over the room. “Looks like y’all are doing all right, I’d guess.”

Leena never knew how to handle comments of this sort from Americans. She shrugged, still smiling. She said, “Are you from here, from Texas?”

“Born and raised right here in Austin.” He lifted his eyebrows briefly, and Leena didn’t know how to read that. The facial expressions of American boys—it was as if they were leaving out key pieces of information. Kasey unfolded his arms and stuck his hands in his pockets, shifting his body against the door frame. As he looked at her, an expression crossed his face: it was both dismissive and wanting, she realized. And it made her aware that she had not, in some time, interacted one-on-one with a man who was not her husband—not since April, in fact. Perhaps the strangeness of that radiated off of her, for suddenly he straightened up as if to leave. “But I should probably let you sleep,” he said. “I’m just standing here bugging you and it’s late.”

Leena shook her head quickly. “No, no, not at all. You’re not bugging me. I’m not tired.” Impulsively, she patted the spot next to herself on the bed. She would invite him in, she thought; it was nothing. Just a holiday sense of liberty—or loneliness—in the air, and she should not shut it out. “Come, sit; we’ll drink some wine. I’ll get it from the kitchen. We can talk. I will like the company,” she offered. “I’m not used to being so alone, you know. With my daughter away, I mean.”

His eyebrows moved. “Okay.” He said this rather remotely and benignly, as he started across the dark shining floor.

Leena got up from the bed as he approached it, and they crossed paths in the middle of the bedroom like strangers, she ducking her head and smiling as he met her eyes blankly, enigmatically. Leena continued down the hall to the kitchen. She found two green-tinted Mexican glass tumblers and an already open bottle of wine that she’d known would be there. She came back to the bedroom, smiling. She climbed onto the bed and sat cross-legged on the comforter. Her hair fell forward around her shoulders with this movement—she was aware of it, and of him noticing it, as she handed him a tumbler. He was sitting on the edge with his feet on the floor. He twisted his torso slightly to face her as she uncorked the wine.

“So tell me what you do for a living,” she said. It was a question she had asked hundreds of times.

He rolled his eyes, turning his profile to her for a second. “I work at Dell,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “I work with Joel—you know, Josie’s friend.”

“But it’s a good company, no?” said Leena, not understanding his chagrin.

He shrugged. “It’s a job, not the rest of my life, hopefully.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-seven,” he said, and his gaze dropped.

“I am one year older than you,” declared Leena, energetically, because she thought it might make him feel more comfortable, though the truth was she was three years older than he was.

She poured wine into his tumbler and then into hers. At the back of his head a dull crest of moonlight appeared, shining in through the large window behind him, framing him. She saw the tips of his dark hair—cut close to his scalp—glowing pale blue, almost like frost. She kept smiling at him.

“So,” he said, his brow wrinkling slightly, “how did you meet your husband? I mean, to end up in Texas, of all places.”

“Texas is my husband’s home state,” replied Leena carefully. “Meanwhile, I was working in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City,” as she reached to place the wine bottle on the bedside table, “and my husband was working for some foreign companies throughout Asia, like he still do now. First time he came to Ho Chi Minh City, he came into the hotel where I worked and we talked at the bar that night. He was very polite and nice-looking, I thought so. He said he is going to Hong Kong, but he be back. Many men who travel and stay at our hotel, they say to the girls they will come back and then they don’t. It is not surprise after a while. But my husband he came back, a couple weeks later. So that is how it began.” She added, “But I am not what you think, what many traveling men think when first they come into that hotel, I know. We are just girls to dance with and talk to.”

That was not the clear-cut truth about her experiences working in hotels and nightclubs, but she had long been in the habit of presenting herself as innocent. She had figured out, years ago, even before she’d met Trevor, that it was what most people preferred and were willing to believe (whether they were propositioning her or just trying to befriend her) when she first met them. Leena went on, rather lightly and proudly, “Then, after about four months, he ask me to marry him and I say yes. Not the first time I am asked, but the first time I say yes, that’s with my husband.”

“Oh,” said Kasey, and he looked a little bit shocked. By what, she wondered, but she couldn’t tell for sure. She thought, he is just a nice boy. Like a reflex, her hand reached out and placed itself on his leg.

But then she removed it. In her mind she counted the months since March: nine.

_______

Trevor was not the first foreign boyfriend Leena had had, and she initially treated him as she had all the others, with equal parts remove and submission and occasional fits of passion. She had been doing this act for so long, in fact, that she believed in it each time just as wholeheartedly as she relied on its passing and on her resilience: she would always be ready to fall anew.

What she did back then was not an official form of prostitution, more like seduction, or role-playing, as she thought of it. She showed interest, she feigned ignorance; she received gifts and special allowances; in short, she got to enjoy herself. For a period of time, she had ensured her exemption from government harassment by sleeping with certain policemen and municipal leaders under the pretext that she was to find out things about them for certain other men in leadership positions—some of whom she also slept with. Then there were the businessmen from Korea and Japan, and then came the travelers from Europe and eventually the States. She counted on the transience and loneliness of these men and found the ones from the West especially receptive to her and often quite kind in a way that was new to her. She met her first Western foreigner in 1990; Trevor came along in 1995. By that time she had changed her name and had mastered just the right combination of Orient (she had gleaned this to be a romantic but inaccurate, and somewhat generalized, vision of Asian cultures) and sophistication. The name Leena she had taken from one of her earlier Western boyfriends, a Swede, who had told her she looked like a Vietnamese Paulina Porizkova. That was in 1991, before she had ever seen a fashion magazine from the West. He was the one who had left her a British Vogue, and she had found it—for many months—to be very instructive.

The truth was Leena loved men. She always felt sympathy for them. She saw their lust and even their violence in a vulnerable light, for she had seen how they would forsake much in the pursuit of a little bit of pleasure; how even the strongest could be swayed by characteristics that to her were just a given: an appearance of softness, simple prettiness, the willingness to surrender. Men liked to be surrendered to. That was, she believed, another unignorable fact of nature. This need (she could spot it in most men who had it) could prompt them to give her things and to give things up to her. And no matter what they did in the rest of their lives, no matter what significant positions they held in the outside world, no matter what they claimed, she went away with the knowledge that she had known them in their starkness, in the beauty or ugliness or pitifulness of their surrender to a moment totally sensual and senseless. Her surrender was not a big deal: she did it every day, and never, truly, lost anything by it. She did not think about all this explicitly but felt it, in a way, to be a justification of her particular talents in the world. But she was sincere, too, and she made a point of treating all she received and witnessed with care. She had an emotional conscience. It required her to be present for whomever she was with.

After she and Trevor met, she traveled several times with him to other parts of Vietnam, and every now and then they would pick up other travelers, inviting them back to their hotel. Always, before getting married, they took separate rooms at hotels, with Leena claiming to be his interpreter or travel guide. They picked up men and women, usually foreigners, young adventure-seeking types. The first time it occurred, Leena had not been fully aware of what was happening. They had been talking with a young Chinese-American woman at a café, and Trevor was showing her a lot of interest, but not in any manner that seemed licentious to Leena. He was insisting she come see the view from the rooftop of their hotel (a hotel in Hue, overlooking the Perfume River), and Leena had thought nothing of it, because it seemed to her that Trevor was kind and polite to everyone, had in him this streak of helpfulness and genuine concern—not about rescuing people from tragedy so much as wishing to ensure they have a good time. Like a bartender, Leena thought. They walked back to their hotel, the three of them, and it was only by the way the hotel clerks glared at them across the lobby that Leena became aware of there being another kind of energy in the air. She saw then what they saw: two Asian women going up the stairs with one well-dressed, slightly older American man—the type of man who could afford to pay for two rooms. That was new to her.

Trevor monitored pleasure like someone dealing cards, as if there was an unspoken etiquette to it that he wanted to be sure to respect. He was clearly the one in charge but was not forceful, not overexcited or even passionate; he asked if certain actions would be okay before he performed them. Leena relinquished herself to him totally, as if it were a competition between her and the other woman as to who could abandon herself more completely. She felt it to be a dark and tender act, whereas with other men tenderness was not something she had associated with submission. At moments Trevor sat back and just watched, everything in him seeming to be already sated. She understood then that he understood the nature of his own lust and inherent power, as a man and as a man with money, looks, and poise, and from this knowledge he had derived an attitude of seeming benevolence, of luxury even: he was confident that whatever he desired he could acquire.

Another time, on a boat in Ha Long Bay, with a group of other foreign businessmen and a few hired girls like herself, after much drinking and imbibing of other substances, Leena found herself at one point in a narrow passageway in the boat’s hold, being fondled and pressed upon by two men. Trevor came down the ladder and looked at them. He said, “Not you,” to one, and, with some prying, got him away from Leena. To the other one he said, as the man’s hands went groping up her legs, “You let her touch you first.” Leena felt strangely endeared to him at moments like these—for his being older than her, for his peculiar way of caring: how he would send her out into the thick of things yet still keep a firm hold on her, still give direction. She felt he protected her. And that loving him meant she must follow, looking only at the trail he made for them as they went, and not at anything else.

They married in Vietnam and then had to wait a year for Leena’s paperwork to be processed. Trevor traveled frequently between Southeast Asia and the States during that time, and that impressed everyone Leena knew—family and friends. A man who could move so freely about the world was surely a prize. Leena believed it, too.

_______

Leena did not meet Trevor’s mother until nearly three years into the marriage, upon her and Trevor’s announcement of their pregnancy. It was Leena’s first visit to Dallas. When they arrived, Trevor’s mother immediately offered to take Leena shopping.

She took her to an upscale boutique in Dallas and looked on encouragingly as Leena selected the simplest-looking gaudy top she could find, which still cost a hundred and fifty dollars. This seemed like a lot to Leena, even after her time in New York, and she didn’t really like the top that much, but had felt obliged to choose something because she was afraid Trevor’s mother might be offended if she didn’t. At the cash register, however, Trevor’s mother did not take out her wallet, as Leena had thought she was going to do. She stood by smiling instead, and Leena ended up having to apologize and say to the clerk that she didn’t want the shirt after all. Trevor’s mother’s smile was the insipid but impenetrable smile of a well-mannered woman thinking thoughts she cannot verbalize—very much like what Leena was soon to encounter from the wives of Trevor’s colleagues. It made Leena feel ashamed. After this shop they went to a department store in the mall, where suddenly Trevor’s mother became less grim, more buoyant and flippant. She would look at a price tag and wave her wrist at it, saying, “It’s a steal. Put it in the cart. Don’t worry about it,” as if it were a pleasure they were sharing. Leena thought things between them were on a better footing, until Trevor’s mother ran into a woman she knew. The two women chatted, and Trevor’s mother never introduced Leena, who waited behind her (Leena was well aware of this) looking little, dark, inexplicable, and pregnant.

In the midst of Trevor’s divorce from his first wife, Trevor’s father had died of a heart attack. That was about a year before Leena had met Trevor, who had decided after those bruising events that he needed to travel for a while. Trevor was his mother’s favorite, she told Leena herself. His brother, Davis, was not so thoughtful a boy. You know what I mean by thoughtful, don’t you? she said, looking at Leena piquedly. Leena did not know and just smiled politely and said again how wonderful she thought Trevor was. His mother patted Leena’s knee with her cool, papery hand. Good, she said, well of course he is.

Trevor’s mother had a big, prototypically Texan boyfriend whom Leena could not help being awed by at first. He was a businessman in cowboy boots and a white suit, with a large, solid belly and that manner of obvious entitlement that white men his size often seemed to possess. His attitude toward Leena was not much better than Trevor’s mother’s, though his veneer was one of inquisitiveness. He asked her questions, but as he listened to her replies his eyes took on a glassy quality. Beneath his jovial nodding and smiling was something hard and flat and mean, it occurred to Leena. She couldn’t trust these people, could not even begin to comprehend them. The men were heavy and false, the women dangerously well-mannered and well-adorned. The women turned their men into bulwarks and raised their boys to be go-getters; they used the popular myth of their own softness and incapability to cultivate both lust and guilt in men, so that they would never be left high and dry. Leena was not blameless of such devices herself. Still, she disliked these tactics as she saw them put into play by Trevor’s mother. Her own actions, in the case of Trevor at least, had always been heartfelt; her need always real, she thought.

Later, alone with Trevor, after that first shopping excursion, Leena was careful not to express her discomfort with his mother too vehemently. Instead, she stuck to expressing her bewilderment. “Did I misunderstand? I didn’t even like the clothes in that store.”

Trevor said, “She changed her mind at the last minute, she does that sometimes. She used to do it to my brother and me when we were kids. It just means she thought you wouldn’t notice.” This was a rare moment of plain honest analysis from him; he was usually close-mouthed about his family.

“She thinks I am a child?”

“It has more to do with what she thinks of me, really,” said Trevor. He looked at Leena. “She was always hoping I wouldn’t marry again and now it’s even worse for her that it’s you I married. You shouldn’t take it to heart, though. She just doesn’t understand you yet.” He worked his mouth into a smile. “But I know she thinks you’re beautiful, she said so.”

_______

The boys left sometime in the night (more like early morning, right before dawn), and Josie and Leena stayed up, drinking coffee as the sun rose and filled the large windows of the house with orange. They sat in Leena’s kitchen, on barstools pulled up to the center island.

They did not speak at all about the boys.

Josie had found a utensil in one of the kitchen drawers, and neither of them knew what it was for. Josie was making Leena laugh, as she banged the metal implement around.

“I think it’s a spoon for eggs. Can this really be just a spoon for eggs?” Finally, she put it down. “Do you ever use this? Does Trevor ever use it?”

“I haven’t seen him use it, no.”

Josie said, as if to the room in general, “God, people have weird stuff. But I love your house. This house is amazing.”

Leena poured them more coffee.

After a lull of silence: “Do you ever think maybe Trevor cheats on you, like when he’s out of the country for a long time?” Josie turned to Leena and looked at her with a cool, almost calculating, honesty.

Leena met Josie’s gaze simply and said, “Yes.” Had it been normal daylight and had they not been up all night already, her reply, she knew, might’ve been more properly appalled, more demure.

After Josie had gone, Leena fell asleep on the couch. She was awakened sometime before noon by the phone ringing. She sat up in a flood of worry—that she had left Pearl unattended and then, remembering that Pearl wasn’t there, that the phone call might be to tell her something had happened. But it was Patrice, Trevor’s ex-wife. Leena sat at the edge of the couch, blinking, as she pressed the receiver to her ear. The light in the house was bright and ordinary now.

In the first couple of years with Trevor, when most of their time was spent in Vietnam, Leena had not given much thought to the ex-wife Trevor had told her he had or to whatever life he’d quit and left behind in America. Now, however, she was seeing the other side of things: the way it must’ve been for Patrice. She was seeing what had become, finally, unacceptable.

Some men would always need to be absent from somewhere. And, it seemed apparent, Leena was a part of Trevor’s somewhere now, more than his somewhere else.

In a way she understood it. And she was willing to let him have it—that out-in-the-cold feeling, that devotion to courting peril. She was willing to let Trevor have it because she had been out there herself already and she knew well enough what it was like. Patrice, Leena suspected, had never known this kind of living. She had always been secure and determined. She was older than Trevor and had her own career; she was one of those women who prided herself on being strong. Women like that believed in sharing everything, thought Leena. They were hard to please.

Leena ran her hand through her hair, pulling it clear of her receiver ear, as she listened to Patrice. “I didn’t know Trevor was out of the country again. You poor thing! But I know how it is, Lord do I know.” Not more than a year ago, if Leena was the one who answered the phone, Patrice would hang up. Now at least she was civil and, if Trevor was away, would try to commiserate with Leena.

Leena didn’t want to be friends with Patrice, though. No matter how hard she tried to feel all right about her, she never did. “I am not poor, I don’t think. I understand he must work, and this is usually his busiest time of year.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do understand. By now you’ve lived with him nearly as long as I did,” said Patrice. “But, look, the real reason I called is to tell him some sad news. Larry died. It was a heart attack. I mean, I guess we all knew it was coming sooner rather than later. After all, he was at least eighty, in dog years.” Larry was one of the dogs that stayed with Patrice after the divorce. They had had two large dogs, part Great Dane, brother and sister. Larry and Elise. Trevor and Patrice also had a son, Dominic, now eleven, who lived in California with Patrice. Dominic generally saw Trevor two or three times a year. “But Dominic is just devastated, of course.”

Devastated, thought Leena. It was never quite as literal for Americans, she had come to understand, as her idea of it was. For most Americans, devastation occurred intangibly and was usually emotional and petty, rather than physical or large.

“Dominic is on vacation now, I mean for Christmas?” asked Leena. She had a slight headache. The wine, she reminded herself. Her memories of the night before had a bluish cast, like that of the blue Christmas lights on the balcony at the party they had gone to. She got up slowly and wandered toward the kitchen to get a glass of water, the cordless phone pressed to her ear.

“He’s home for Christmas, yes. Our tree’s theme this year is ‘How would a pirate have decorated his tree?’ and Dominic has been very imaginative about it. We’re having fun. Except for this whole thing with Larry, of course. I woke up in the middle of the night yesterday and found him, just lying in the middle of the living room floor, gone already.”

“How sad,” said Leena. “If Trevor was here I’m sure he be very sorry to hear this news too.” Glancing out the kitchen window as she picked a glass up from the drain board, Leena noticed someone coming down the driveway. It looked like a woman. For a few moments, with Patrice still talking in her ear, Leena watched this woman coming toward the house. “I have to go now, Patrice,” she said finally. “I think someone is at the door.”

“You tell Trevor,” were Patrice’s parting words.

“I’ll tell Trevor,” said Leena, and then hung up the phone.

_______

The woman outside was not approaching in a straight line, Leena saw. She seemed to be looking, drifting from side to side as she walked, and her mouth was opening and closing: she was calling out something. To whom, it was not clear. Leena crossed the kitchen floor and pushed open the nearest window. She heard, “Neigh-bor . . .” The woman was calling this out in singsong, stretching the word into two long syllables, “Neigh-bor . . .” Leena was not certain she was hearing this right. The woman was on their lawn now and seemed to be headed around the side of the house, was not coming to the front door after all. Quickly, Leena walked to the side door just off the kitchen. She opened it and stepped out onto the porch.

“Yes? I’m here?” she said, uncertainly but loudly enough to catch the woman’s attention.

The woman looked to be in her forties and had about her a quality that was both youthful and haggard. Her hair was brown with playful streaks of platinum-gray, cut in a shaggy, energetic fashion. The woman’s skin was very white, her face lined and angular, her eyes large. She showed her teeth when she looked at Leena, and it took Leena a moment to realize it was a smile. It was as if she were trying, though not very hard, to disguise a constant quiet state of laughter.

Now the woman took one startled step backward and doubled over slightly, bringing her hands to her mouth. She looked around, as if expecting there to be someone to laugh with her. “Oh—” she said, “Neighbor, it’s, it’s my dog. My dog’s name. I’m looking for my dog. His name is Neighbor. And you thought—” Here, she bent over again, dissolving into soundless laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Leena, standing on the porch, folded her arms loosely, hands cupping her elbows. She didn’t know what to make of this woman’s laughter. The woman, from where she stood on the lawn below, had to look up in order to look at Leena, and it made Leena feel inappropriately and awkwardly elevated. She stared back at the woman and found herself noticing the woman’s sweater. It was bright white and made of a soft, silky, woolen fabric with one red rose embroidered down the left side. The white of the sweater made it seem to glow, and that made the red of the rose all the more red. The way the woman wore her clothes made Leena think she must’ve been quite attractive in her younger years.

“Are you from next door?” Leena asked finally.

“Am I from next door,” said the woman, slowly. Her tone seemed to suggest that Leena thought next door was another country. “I am from next door, but I don’t live in the house. I don’t have anything to do with the house. That’s all Pennyroyal and Terry’s business, not mine. I live in the trailer behind the house. Neighbor and I do.” She put her hand out to indicate the dog’s height. “Has he been by here? Big white dog? You wouldn’t have missed him if he was.”

Leena mutely shook her head no. For a moment, in her mind, she found herself confusing this woman’s dog with the news of Patrice’s dog, Larry, that she had just heard over the phone. She had a flash of worry that this woman’s dog was dead, too.

The woman smiled suddenly. “Don’t you have a little girl? I think I’ve seen you out here with her before.”

“Yes,” said Leena, and felt an abrupt pang of missing Pearl, and guilt, and the uncanny sense that this woman was somehow aware of it all. “But she’s visiting with her grandmother in Dallas right now.”

The woman shifted her weight from one hip to the other and struck a semi-seductive pose, raising her arms and lifting her hair away from the back of her neck. She nodded knowingly, with her arms still up. When she moved, the furry tips of her sweater’s woolly fabric seem to move too, almost as if its fibers still contained some of the life of the animal from whose body they’d been taken: she had this quality of something wild about her. “Oh, I see. Vacation time for Mom, too, huh?” Here, the woman grinned—a grin that scrunched up the skin on the bridge of her nose—and looked Leena right in the eye. Her expression struck Leena as being similar to what she sometimes saw pass between the wives of her husband’s colleagues, only it was being directed at Leena now. “We saw those extra cars in your driveway last night,” said the woman, sweetly, her grin unfaltering. “Not that we’re keeping tabs on you or anything. Me and Pennyroyal are generally outside at night at some point or other; we like to stand out in the field and smoke, y’know?” Here she paused, as if what she’d said was actually meant to be a question. “So we couldn’t help but notice last night when three cars drove up your driveway and you and your friends all got out. We were almost tempted to come over and crash the party, actually. Being neighbors and all, I guess we see you come and go quite often.” She let her hands fall to her sides. “I guess you probably hear plenty of us, too. The way sound carries around here and all.”

To all this, Leena could only offer her most honest reply. “I don’t so much like to stay alone in the house when my husband and daughter are both away. It’s so large, you know.”

“I know exactly what you mean about large houses,” said the woman. “I’m not a fan of them myself. Seems like so many people in this country take up so much more space than they really need to, you know? Me, what would I do with a big house? I always say that when people ask don’t I want a regular house of my own. I don’t need any more space than my little trailer.” Then she added, “But your friends are all gone now,” lightly, cheerfully.

Leena shrugged. “They are more friends of Josie, who is my friend. She comes to stay with me sometime when my husband is away.”

A slight silence followed, with the woman continuing to gaze and smile at Leena in her particular manner. Leena felt obliged to match the woman’s solicitude. She thought it might be rude of her not to. She said, “I like your sweater. That rose is very pretty.”

“Oh, thank you.” The woman looked surprised. “Pennyroyal found it for me. In his grandmother’s attic after she passed away last year. He thought it would suit me, he said.” It was true that the white of the sweater set off the white streaks in the woman’s hair.

“Who is Pennyroyal?” asked Leena.

“Oh,” said the woman, and her “oh” was loaded with layered meaning and feeling, “just one of the people who lives in Terry’s house. He’s a sweetheart. We call him Pennyroyal ’cause that’s his mother’s maiden name. His real name is Jason. We won’t talk about Jason’s father, though.” The woman rolled her eyes, her smile deepening again. “We all know everything about each other over there. I guess you could call it kind of a commune we’ve got going.” Leena’s incomprehension must’ve been apparent. “Don’t you know what a commune is?”

Leena shook her head no.

“Well, it’s where a group of people share a living situation even if they’re not all related family members. Like us all there—it’s Terry’s house and Terry’s property—Terry and I are just old, old friends. And the boys are friends of friends or friends’ sons, that sort of thing. It’s a good place over there, lots of years of friendship between us all, y’know? Sometimes people come to Terry’s place because they have nowhere else to turn. That’s how come I came there initially, and I’ve stayed for, five, six years now? And there’s one more trailer besides mine on the property right now, where Clara and Renny live.” She had stopped smiling, though the amused light in her eyes remained. She went on, “People think it’s just a throwback thing from the sixties, but the truth is the concept of the commune goes all the way back to Europe in the Middle Ages. Not to mention here on this very land with the Native Americans and their concept of tribal living. I mean, living in small communities has been done for ages. It’s the nuclear family that’s the new, strange development now, I think. But I’m not so much the historian as those boys are.” Each time she uttered the word “boys,” Leena noticed, it came out floated on an extra pop of air, and hung in the space between them longer than any of her other words did.

“Terry and I call Calvin ‘The Student,’ in fact. Calvin is Pennyroyal’s best friend and he just returned from studying in Egypt.” She smiled again. “You really should come over and meet everyone sometime.”

Leena realized she still didn’t know the woman’s name. “My name is Leena, by the way,” she said, pointing to herself.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, how rude of me! I’m Dalva. Which isn’t the name I was born with, but it’s the name I’ve given myself. It’s my most rightful name,” said the woman, firmly and pleasantly. “It’s so nice to meet you, Leena. You really should stop by sometime. Bring your little girl. We’re a nice bunch, really. And we love kids.”

Leena returned the woman’s smile. “Yes, I will,” she said, meaning it but not seeing a plausible way it was actually going to happen.

“Well, I really have lost my dog,” said the woman. “I bet he went down the street to those new houses maybe.” She crinkled her nose. “Those houses are so ugly. I can’t believe it, can you?” She began taking steps backward across the lawn. “But come by, okay? It was really nice talking to you, honey.” Then she turned and walked off back up the driveway.

_______

Leena hated more than anything how it felt when the house filled with the particular silence of Pearl being gone. Like a cloud it moved through rooms and snaked down hallways, spiraled up to the high ceilings, drew invisible shades down over the windows.

For the remainder of that day and into the next, she worked to keep herself busy. She turned on the TV, made food in the kitchen, did laundry, vacuumed and cleaned. It felt like a pretend life, though, to do these routine household tasks, especially to pick up Pearl’s toys and straighten her room, when Pearl was not around. Leena sometimes felt as if the quiet were attacking her. Medicated or not, she could be struck by it. A panic would rise inside her, and her mind would race with thoughts both worrisome and desirous. Desiring anything, it made Leena realize, always led to the worry that you wouldn’t get it or that you would lose it. Sometimes in the midst of these panics, she felt as if the moment at hand was, in truth, everything, and that the rest of her life as she thought she knew it (life with her child, her husband, any state of domestic happiness or safety she had ever dared to enjoy) were lost already. Meanwhile, everything on the outside stayed utterly ordinary. She did not know why she should feel this way. She had to stop herself from picking up the phone to call to check on Pearl: she had learned from previous experience that Trevor’s mother didn’t like Leena to call too often. She had also learned to wait for Trevor’s overseas calls to her.

Sometime in the midafternoon of her second day without Pearl, Leena got up from the couch and made herself switch off the television.

She went into the bedroom and lay on the bed, pulling a magazine off the nightstand and opening it at random. A truly beautiful woman will look stunning in either all black or all white, said the caption under a full-page spread of an exquisite-looking African woman in a flowing white gown. Her skin was a gleaming chocolate brown hue, her large eyes ringed soulfully with black eye makeup. She stood on the marble-columned veranda of what looked like a villa beside the ocean. The next picture was of the same model, at dusk, on the same veranda, now in a sleek black gown. Leena decided she would go to the mall and look for a white dress (she had plenty of black ones already), even though it was still the middle of winter. Winters here were mild anyhow.

_______

It was amazing how well it worked. Trying on new clothes with expensive price tags, and the diffused, warm lighting of those stores, their neutral, cool colors, those shining floors—these settings always gave Leena a restored sense of self. She felt womanly and refined; she felt like somebody with money and a place in society. These were important, lucky things to be able to do and buy. Not everyone was as lucky as she was, she reminded herself.

She saw other women walking around the mall, too. In fact, it appeared to be mostly women, wandering alone from store to store. Leena wondered, how many of them had come here, like her, to escape quiet houses? How many had come looking for brightness or levity or some form of assurance? When she compared herself to these other women, Leena placed herself in a league with the ones she thought were the classiest-looking. They were the apparently attractive ones, the ones she thought looked like they belonged in shops like Ann Taylor and Banana Republic. They sifted through racks of dresses and sweaters and shirts with reserved, peaceful expressions on their faces that did not change even if they saw an item they liked. Leena understood that. Meanwhile, inside each woman’s head visions were surely churning, were rapidly, constantly coalescing and dissolving, and they did not reveal excitement or hope over such things (the hope that a piece of clothing, once donned, might change you) because, too, most women were familiar with the fact that hope was fragile, also possibly foolish, and that visions often didn’t match up with realities. But still, one had to hope.

_______

When she returned from the mall in the evening, Davis’s pickup truck was in the driveway. Davis himself was sitting on the porch steps.

“Trevor said he was afraid those developer guys might be trying to survey the land again. He wanted me to drop by and check on things,” said Davis, standing as Leena got out of her car.

Things, thought Leena. She looked back at Davis carefully, not wanting to reply right away.

Davis and Trevor might’ve been the light and dark versions of the same person, respectively. Davis was blond, his hair shorn to his scalp; he always wore old clothes; and he had a restless look about him that contrasted with Trevor’s dark-haired, stately demeanor. Davis, like Trevor, also traveled frequently for his work, though his jobs came on an expedition-by-expedition basis—he was an adventure travel guide who sometimes didn’t work for months at a time.

Leena reached into the backseat of the Land Cruiser, and emerged again with a shopping bag from Banana Republic on her arm. She gave each car door a firm push shut. The doors made a blunt, reverberating sound in the still evening air. She walked across the driveway toward the porch steps.

“I haven’t seen anyone,” she said. She didn’t believe Trevor had sent him, she realized. It had to have been their mother. Some luridly voiced skepticism at Leena being left alone and to her own devices.

But her being left alone was not, in Leena’s mind, what had caused what had happened in March to happen. Leena felt a flash of disgust.

She would not blame Davis, though, she told herself.

He seemed aware of all this—she felt it from him more than saw it in anything he said or did. This was the other thing about Davis; he seemed able to read her, though she couldn’t decide if the way he looked at her was sympathetic or dutiful or, even, hateful. “Yeah, I told Trevor he was probably just being paranoid. I don’t think they’re going to be around all that much, seeing as how it’s the holidays and all,” said Davis. He had one hand in his pocket. He knocked the other fist gently, distractedly, against his leg.

Leena had reached the bottom of the porch, where she paused on the step below where Davis was standing.

He nodded at her bag. “What’d you get?”

“Just a dress.”

There was a pause as Davis glanced aside then back at her, more firmly now. “You hanging in here all right without the baby to keep you company and all?” The way he asked this made something inside Leena quickly narrow itself, like a camera’s aperture being closed down to let in less light. It was as if he expected her not to be doing all right, as if in his mind it was a simple fact of nature: women were not, and should not be, okay away from their children.

“Doing all right,” said Leena, with a shrug. She and Davis were looking at each other, she realized. To break the strain of this, she smiled abruptly, then rolled her eyes, declaring, “Boy, I’m tired. All the traffic, the mall was so packed. I better go inside now.” She was not, she had already decided, going to invite him in.

Davis shifted his feet about in their scuffed work boots, and then he hopped lightly off the porch steps to the gravel, easily clearing the step where Leena stood. She twisted slightly to follow the motion of his body, his clothes, brushing by her. He nodded over his shoulder at Leena. “Well, nice seeing you, Leena. Merry Christmas. Be careful,” he said, as he turned away.

Be careful and Be good—Leena had noticed these were phrases Texan men used when telling a woman goodbye. Trevor had been away from Texas long enough to not have such phrases in his vocabulary anymore, so it had surprised Leena when she first encountered men who used them. The closest Trevor ever got was Take care—which to her always sounded as if the person was genuinely concerned about your ability to take care of yourself, yet could still be lenient. Be careful, meanwhile, left you no room for slipups.

_______

When Trevor was gone last March and April, it was Josie to whom Leena had turned. Josie helped her find where to go, though it was Davis she had to ask for the money. She had done this because initially, after much consideration, she had planned to keep it all secret from Trevor, which meant it also had to be kept from the other person involved—as this person knew Trevor (was one of his business friends, in fact) and might have felt in some way the need to inform Trevor of it himself. Leena and Josie talked at length about it and at last decided that Davis was the best bet.

As it turned out, it all came apart anyhow. Leena was far more emotional about the matter than she had thought she would be, and when Trevor returned in May, he seemed already to know there was some news she was waiting to tell him. On his first night back, after Pearl had gone to bed, they stayed up late, and Leena, sitting on their bed and staring at her hands in her lap as he stood a few feet from her in the bathroom doorway, had said, “I don’t know how to tell you this,” and then told him everything. Who it was, and that Davis had helped her, and how much it had cost, and that Jerry—undeniably the name of a weak man, Leena could not help but think this of him now—still did not know but was still calling her despite her wishes to the contrary, which she’d expressed to him. The whole incident could so easily have not happened, she told Trevor this too. It had been only one night. (It had been normal, at that time, for Trevor’s colleagues to check in on Leena on occasion when Trevor was gone and to invite her places, too, sometimes with their wives or girlfriends, sometimes not; Leena was younger than most of them, so it had seemed watchful, obligatory, even.) Technically, if you wanted to get detailed about it, her finding out three weeks later that she was pregnant should not have happened—was a complete fluke, really.

Trevor stayed standing in the doorway, shoulder against the door frame, the whole time she talked. Every few moments he took his hands out of his pockets and pinched his fingers together in front of him, slowly, methodically. But he did not look away from her for a second.

“Leena,” he said finally when she had finished, “Oh, Leena, Leena.”

And so they had gotten through it. Though it did not stay a secret, in the end, from anybody. The truth about Leena was out, was how it seemed. At one point, there was even a meeting—Jerry came over to confront Trevor and write him a check, which Trevor would give to Davis, and Leena stood in the corner watching Jerry cry because he was forty-six and had become suddenly confused about his life. Trevor was amazing in his tolerance; she experienced the vision, then, of his being made of something like gold encased in a thick layer of ice. No one, she realized, would ever be able to take her from him, or him from her. They belonged together; or she belonged to him. Leena met Jerry’s gaze only once during this meeting, and it was so pitiful that she made a point not to look at him again. He was still crying in the kitchen when she left the room because Pearl was calling to her from upstairs.

_______

The white dress was simple, the hem resting just above her knees, with no sleeves and no collar, a thin silver chain belt slung loosely around the waist. She wore it with no bra. The thin, soft fabric of the dress pressed against her small breasts, but still they shifted about, giving her a sensual feeling.

She had put the dress on after eating some leftovers for dinner, and poured herself some wine.

She was still wearing the dress, walking about the house barefoot with the stereo turned up loud, when the doorbell rang. It was nearly 10 p.m.

Leena peeked through the keyhole. Davis, coming back for some reason? No, it was the woman from the neighbors’ property. Leena opened the door.

“Hi there,” said Dalva, not acknowledging either the late hour or the unexpectedness of her visit. “We’re having a little get-together, I wanted to come tell you. I know you said your daughter’s away, and I thought you might be a little bit lonely. It’s just kind of a spontaneous get-together, some friends of the boys are bringing their instruments over. And Calvin has just made the most incredible curry soup. We’re celebrating New Year’s, we’ve decided. I know it’s not really the New Year yet, but we like to celebrate things when we feel like it, y’know? And we’d love to have you join us.”

It occurred to Leena as she stood facing the woman, who was wearing her same white sweater with the embroidered rose, that her own dress was also of a slightly furry white material. She must’ve had this woman’s sweater in mind, without knowing it, while she was shopping that afternoon.

“Oh,” said Leena, feeling put on the spot, “how nice of you.”

“Or were you already on your way out somewhere?” Leena became aware that she looked like she was, probably. “You look good.” Dalva said this with a clear appreciation in her voice. It was not the tone of a woman older than Leena giving her a compliment, but more like that of one woman making a concession to another whom she considered her equal. And she was not just meaning Leena’s new dress, it seemed, but the whole of her at that moment. Dalva leaned in slightly. “Those earrings are such a great shade of green on you.”

“They’re onyx,” said Leena, simply.

“I’ve never seen green onyx before. I guess I thought they were jade. Are you going out somewhere special?” She smiled—that sheepish but secretive grin.

Leena blushed when she had to admit she’d been just trying on the dress for fun. She shrugged, throwing her hands up in an uncalculated gesture. “I have nothing else much to do, and I just bought it today,” she said.

“Well, you’re dressed for a party, you should come over to ours then,” said Dalva, warmly.

Leena weighed her options. If she closed the door, if she went back inside and said “no, thank you” to the night and all of its possible promises, she would be left to deal with the house’s ghosts and its cloud of quiet and with herself by herself, for the remaining hours of the night. While from across the grass would come the sounds of laughing and talking, and their music, all of it rising into the big sky like one small, slightly visible dome of celebration and community, against the encroaching dark heavens above.

“All right,” replied Leena, “Maybe I will go for a little while.”

_______

She thought of Trevor as she went to get her coat from her bedroom closet. She saw him plainly, like a video feed broadcast into her brain. He was sitting in a bar, placing money on a dirty table, and all around him, dimly, were the sounds of ice cubes clinking seductively in glasses, and low music, and the town he was passing through waiting just beyond the bar’s perimeters. He was thinking of her, she thought, and of Pearl; she felt the subtle pressure of these thoughts landing inside her, knowingly and subtly, ordering that they be protected.

Sometimes, she felt, they communicated in this manner.

And that you could, with your mind, feel a person in their absence and gauge whether they were keeping their place with you or not. She sent her own message back to Trevor now—that she was here, as she should be.

Then she chose an old coat (a thrift store find, yellow) and turned off the music and went out to the porch where Dalva was waiting.

_______

Leena followed Dalva across the grass, over the split-rail fence dividing their two properties, and down a gentle slope toward the little stone house. She was conscious of the night air blowing coolly against her face as she took long strides to keep up with Dalva. There was a fire in the fire pit off to the side of the house, and music and voices and laughter rose with the flames. A big white dog bounded toward them, not barking, its tongue flying out the side of its mouth. Dalva said, “Down, Neighbor! Down!” when she saw Leena flinch, the dog jumping up and down around them.

An old man turned away from the fire and greeted them first. He held a beer bottle and a cigarette in the same hand, and his fingers were long and knuckly. He looked quite old, thought Leena. He was dressed in a powder blue suit with a sprig of holly pinned to his lapel, and he had tufty white hair and a snow-white moustache. His appearance was both comical and angelic.

“Jeremiah is my ex-husband. He lives here sometimes, too,” said Dalva.

“Just sometimes,” said Jeremiah, gruffly, but chuckling.

“Oh,” said Leena.

“Jeremiah and I are old soul mates. We’ve stayed good friends over the years, even after we couldn’t be married to each other anymore. We were very young when we met, you see, and we just got it wrong initially. We’d been married in past lifetimes, but it wasn’t the right kind of relationship for us to have in this one, is all,” explained Dalva, in a gracious, measured tone, as Jeremiah, nodding and patting Leena on the shoulder, moved past them and went on up the steps into the stone house. He looked back only to say, “Come on, Neighbor, come on, boy,” and the dog panted and made some jumping motions in Dalva’s direction and then turned and ran after Jeremiah.

Next, one of the people laughing and playing music broke from the circle around the fire and came over to them, first setting his instrument down on a log. He was extremely tall, lanky but not too thin, and awkwardly handsome. He had a schoolboy’s haircut, parted on one side, neatly combed, a simple shade of brown. He wrapped his arm around Dalva’s shoulders and kissed her forehead in greeting, and Leena knew immediately that this had to be the one who’d given her the sweater, the one she called Pennyroyal. It occurred to Leena that she was being given a quick history: Dalva’s loves—old and new. Pennyroyal had to be at least twenty years younger than Dalva.

“This is Pennyroyal, one of my guardian angels if I have any,” said Dalva, and she was glowing, smiling, by the light of the bonfire.

Pennyroyal held his hand out to Leena. “Don’t believe anything she tells you about us. Most certainly not about me, especially if she tells you I’ve done anything worth anything at all in my, what, twenty-four years of life.” He shook Leena’s hand with a loose gentle grip, as if he feared her hand might break.

Dalva took Leena by the arm. “Come inside the house with me,” she said.

The stone house, though small on the outside, revealed high ceilings and more rooms than Leena had expected. The house was not very clean. It had a mossy, cluttered feeling. There seemed to be as much dust inside as there was on the ground outside. The floors were of hardwood, worn absolutely smooth in spots, water-stained in others. The wallpaper, too, was water-stained and peeling in places, and all the furniture looked very old and dull. Even the brighter-colored items—a maroon armchair, a floral-patterned couch—had an ancient, muted appearance.

Dalva leading, they walked down a dim hallway. Many of the rooms Leena glanced into did not have windows. Something about them struck her as being places where animals might feel safe.

She recalled the exterior of the house, mismatched stones cemented together, like colors dug up out of the earth, coated haphazardly in vines.

Leena and Dalva eventually settled in the kitchen, where they came upon Jeremiah seated in the corner by the kitchen table, nodding off over his beer bottle, already drunk. Neighbor lay at his feet, lethargically lapping soup out of a bowl set between his paws. The kitchen was filled with the smell of curry and spices.

“Sometimes he’s belligerent. It’s better when he’s sleepy,” said Dalva, nodding in Jeremiah’s direction. “Let’s have some wine.”

They sat on stools pulled up to a makeshift plywood counter and drank their wine from coffee mugs.

“He sleepwalks through his life,” said Dalva. “You can’t stay married to someone like that for too long. You think they’re going to come alive and that you might help them, but then they just don’t, you know? Have you ever been married before? Before now, I mean?”

“No,” replied Leena.

“I’ve been married twice. The second time was even worse. Like I said, they’re better sleepy than belligerent.” Dalva got down from her stool abruptly. She leaned forward and began clapping her hands excitedly against her legs. “Neighbor, c’mere, boy, c’mere!” She did this until the dog finally, begrudgingly, got up from his soup bowl and came over to her, tail and tongue wagging, as if relenting to the fact of affection as his duty.

“My ex-husband—not Jeremiah, the other one—sometimes he still comes around here.” She laid her face on Neighbor’s neck as she spoke. “He thinks I’m sleeping with every man on this piece of property. He hides in the bushes, and the boys have to come out and chase him away. That’s a laugh. Not so much when it’s happening, of course, but later it is, when you think about it, y’know?”

_______

They talked politics at this party, too, but not in quite the same way as had been going on at the party with Josie’s friends. Here, everyone—Dalva’s friends—seemed to be of like mind and quite cheerful, even in their disparaging comments.

“Just so long as this campaign is as successful as the war on poverty was. Oops, we won; the poor lost!” A man about Trevor’s age, with eyeglasses and a goatee, made his entrance into the stone house kitchen exclaiming this to another, younger man with him. Both were laughing. Pennyroyal came in just behind them.

Spotting Leena, the man with the goatee stepped forward and held out his hand. Leena was still seated on her stool; Dalva was nearby at the stove now, stirring the pot of soup. When Leena offered her hand, the man with the goatee bent forward and kissed it instead of shaking it.

“You must be Leena from next door,” he said. “I’m Terry.” He looked her up and down, admiringly. “I admit we’ve all been rather curious about you. Especially since Dalva’s report the other day.”

The second man, the younger one, hung back. He wore an old black suit and was very thin and a little pale, with dark brown hair that hung in straggly curls around his cheekbones. He was about the same age as Pennyroyal—early twenties. His face was angular and effeminate, and he looked at Leena with a reserved curiosity.

“Calvin,” declared Dalva, with satisfaction, as she reached over and laid her hands on his arms, pulling him across the kitchen floor. “Here’s our traveling scholar. We call him ‘The Student.’ He knows everything you’d ever want to know about ancient Mesopotamian culture—”

“What kind of Indian are you?” asked Calvin, leaning in to shake Leena’s hand with the same tentative grip Pennyroyal had used.

“Indian?” said Leena. “No, I’m not Indian.”

“Oh, we’re all Indian,” he said, and smiled judiciously.

Leena didn’t know what he meant by that. No one else in the room seemed puzzled by it, though. Terry nodded and said, “True, true,” and Dalva kept smiling.

Pennyroyal crossed to the dining nook and dropped himself into the chair across from Jeremiah, who was still dozing with his chin against his chest, his hand curled around his beer bottle. Pennyroyal stretched out his long legs and held his cigarette away from the table, down near the floor. He looked relaxed, lucid.

Calvin spoke, as if picking up a thread from a previous conversation. “But really, what I want to know is what’s going to happen to the private sphere then, if we are moving toward an age where women enter the public sphere more and more.”

“The private sphere, the public sphere. For a philosopher you talk a lot like a politician,” said Terry. His manner of challenge had a teasing element to it, though.

Calvin said, “Well, I think we have to imagine that the public sphere, what rules it has and whatever we consider normal and predominant now, is going to change—especially with women coming more into positions of influence. I think we can’t imagine how it’s going to change, though. I think it might be beyond our present imagining capabilities. Because it means a new paradigm is coming into existence. I hope.”

Dalva spoke in a confidential tone to Leena, coming over and resting her hand on Leena’s shoulder: “See what I mean? See how lucky I am—you, too? These are the kinds of men who truly care about the plight of women, you know? They will work by our sides. Do you know what I mean?”

Leena didn’t exactly. But she felt something precious and careful in the atmosphere in general, so she smiled and nodded. “Everyone is very nice here,” she said softly.

“But the raising of children. How can that possibly ever change? How can it not require what it requires of women?” Someone—it was Terry—was remarking this with animated bewilderment.

“But of course it can change. How can you say that?” said Calvin. “Women live in such a state of alienation these days. They are fed such stultifying crap by the media, by men, even by other women—they think there’s only this one way of going about being women, but they don’t need to be like this. They don’t. They have just been socially conditioned to worry, and caretake, and preen, really. But they don’t have to do those things. They can do other things, if they would just decide to.”

Pennyroyal gestured languidly toward Dalva and Leena’s corner of the kitchen. “Here we are talking. Why don’t we ask the women who are actually present how their days are spent? Well, we know what Dalva does with her days; she does Dalva things.” He smiled, catching Dalva’s eye.

“I gathered a lot of your firewood today. Neighbor and I did,” said Dalva.

Pennyroyal looked toward Leena now. “And what did you do today, Leena?”

Here, as in her first conversation with Dalva, Leena had only honesty to fall back on. Even in her incomprehension of their conversation, she still knew this answer would somehow not do. “Today? I went to the mall.”

“The mall?” said Pennyroyal, her response warranting him to sit forward.

And Terry said, “No, not the mall.”

Calvin’s look was pained and sympathetic, as if it had just been announced that Leena had lost something valuable. “You see?” he said, somewhat meekly, though.

“Jeremiah prefers the unlocked doors down the road over the mall,” said Pennyroyal, and they all looked in Jeremiah’s direction and laughed then, for Jeremiah had heard nothing, was still snoring softly into his own chest.

Dalva said, in way of explanation, “Jeremiah has been caught wandering into people’s houses on occasion. Namely those new houses down the road. He said he was just curious and he thought they weren’t being lived in yet. He walked into one of them and used the bathroom. A woman called the police on him and ran after him down the street with a bottle of aerosol hairspray.”

“Speaking of police,” said Pennyroyal, and he raised his eyebrows at Terry.

Terry’s hands came up. “Nope, no more restraining order; that’s all over now. She saw the light.”

“So we can go back to business?”

“We can go back to business soon.” And Terry nodded.

Listening to this exchange, Leena suddenly recalled something—one of the rooms they’d passed when they first entered the house. A room that looked like a little girl’s room, but from some past era: a narrow, frilly, lavender bed, child-sized wooden furniture, a few doe-eyed toy dolls, walls covered in wallpaper of an intricate and prudish, antiquated floral design. When Leena asked, Dalva had said that was Terry’s daughter’s bedroom, and that Terry’s daughter was eleven.

Leena fixed her attention on Terry. She was genuinely curious now. “What is your business?” she asked.

Hesitant laughter went through the room. This group—they seemed to think so many things were funny, thought Leena. Were they ever serious about anything? Then Terry said, “I guess you could say I’m a historian of sorts. If you believe in my sort of history, that is.”

_______

Outside, five or six boys were playing instruments and singing around the fire. Pennyroyal had rejoined them. He played the fiddle. When he paused his fiddling to sing, he lowered his bow to his side and tapped it against his leg. Leena did not think he sounded like a good singer, because his voice seemed to crack and warble a lot, but she recognized that he sang as if he really meant it. All of them, in fact, seemed to play their instruments furiously but with much joy—sometimes they looked round at each other and laughed right in the middle of their playing. Leena thought the whole scene had the flavor of a circus to it. Something decadent and celebratory, yet also innocent and simply playful. It was like a children’s party for adults; it was like no gathering she would’ve ever arrived at in Trevor’s company.

She sat on a stump before the fire, holding her coffee mug of wine with both hands, and watched the festivities. Dalva and Calvin sat on a log to one side of Leena’s stump.

Dalva was saying, “I don’t want to kill the ants, you understand. I just want them to leave.”

“It’s the grass around your trailer. You just need one of us to come over and mow it, like a moat,” said Calvin.

“But they’re dropping in from the trees above, I think.”

“Burdock, no, pennyroyal!” declared Calvin, snapping his fingers. “The herb, I mean. It’ll keep the ants away. You sprinkle it around the perimeter of all the doors and windows. Native Americans used pennyroyal, god, for so many things. It’s very potent. They used it when women wanted abortions.”

When Leena looked toward Calvin as she heard him say this, she suddenly felt as if she were seeing him and Dalva through a telescope. They seemed close, but Leena was far away, slipping further away even as she sat a couple feet from them. It was as if his words were an echo of words already existing in her mind, but of which she’d not been aware until she heard them spoken externally, by him.

There was something women in Vietnam took to induce abortion, too, she remembered, though she did not know the word for it in English. Maybe it was the same thing here as there. Thinking this had an effect on her. She felt an invisible weight in her gut. Back in Vietnam, she had seen—or heard, rather—the occasional session involving a girl in her line of work writhing and moaning in a dark backroom. Because, if you chose this method, it took a while. The older women who attended these girls were aggressive and pragmatic in their caretaking and could sometimes be heard belittling the girls, saying things like “Crying does not help your hurting.” Leena, too, had been more repulsed by the crudeness of their suffering than she had ever been sympathetic.

But, too, there had been births. Leena remembered the hallways of a hospital when she was a young girl, a place she had been brought to with her mother, who was pregnant at the time. It was all women in this place, some very young, some older, like Leena’s mother. The women sat big-stomached in courtyards, waiting, fighting, laughing, chatting. Leena would see the same women being helped down the tiled corridors of the hospital, bent over, gasping, some days or weeks later. She remembered playing in the hallways to the sounds of their laboring and nurses rushing in and out of rooms. The nurses were discernible from the women in this place only by their uniforms; even some of the nurses, too, were pregnant. The only men in the place had been the occasional doctors.

And what would someone like this boy, Calvin, do in the presence of such suffering? Leena saw him plainly: his stricken, gentle eyes; his trembling, pale fingers—had she seen fingers like these somewhere or somehow before? She could picture them trying to hold on to something but fumbling; she could imagine a feeling of panicked helplessness pouring off him. But, no. Maybe that wouldn’t be the case at all. Looking at him now, she could also picture him as kindly effectual and unflinching, a quiet nurse, a healer of sorts. Leena experienced a sorrowful sensation along with these images. She did not understand it. Her own abortion—she had never thought it worth self-pity, and she did not believe in God or unborn children’s souls, she had told herself. Yes, she had felt sad and unmoored in the weeks following the abortion, largely due to the consequences that had followed the event, but that had all been dealt with by now, hadn’t it?

To distract herself, she decided to get up and dance. She wanted to look sexy and feel revived.

She stood up and began to sway and shift her hips. She kicked off her shoes and let her feet settle in their full flatness against the warm, dry dirt around the fire. She held up her cup and raised her other arm too and began to swing her hair about in front of her face, the way she’d seen girls in the audience at rock concerts on television do. The others laughed and cheered her on appreciatively.

Then someone brought out a bag with fireworks in it, and, one by one, the musicians put down their instruments. A couple of the boys lit sparklers and began chasing one another with them, running off beyond the circle of light cast by the bonfire so that sometimes all that was visible were the thin shoots of light sizzling and moving erratically through the dark. There were the shadowy shapes of animals out in the dark, too, Leena saw—four or five sheep, the old horse, and Neighbor, like a blur of dim white bounding after the sparklers. The larger fireworks, when they began setting them off, made long whooshes as they went up, echoing clapboard pops as they splintered into neon sprays of light in the sky. The way the firework explosions echoed gave Leena the impression that the sky was not just open space after all but was instead strangely tiered and solid, a thousand invisible planes of some kind of substance, haphazardly arranged up there, like the crooked walls of a maze.

Somewhere in the midst of these antics, Jeremiah stumbled away from the fire and did not return. Leena soon forgot about him. Terry got up and stood close to the fire with his arms raised. What was he doing? He looked like a priest, the way the wide sleeves of his loose linen shirt hung down below his arms, or like a bat, thought Leena, a white bat.

Then, Dalva came over and put her arm around Leena and said, “Let’s trade your coat for my sweater,” in her conspiratorial manner. Fireworks were going off all around them, and everyone was happy, and it was almost midnight—their prearranged New Year’s moment—besides. So Leena could not refuse. Dalva put on Leena’s yellow coat and it suited her. Leena slipped her arms into the soft white sleeves of the furry, embroidered-rose sweater and smiled, trying to match Dalva’s quality of intimate exuberance.

_______

They had taken her into a room off the kitchen a little earlier, before they all moved outside to the fire. It was a small, cluttered room, with high ceilings like the rest of the house, and one long, narrow, filthy window surrounded by tall bookcases. There was an old green couch, a low coffee table, and two red-cushioned armchairs with beautiful, carved wooden armrests. Piles of books and newspapers and dried candle wax covered the coffee table. Terry opened one of these books and began flipping through pages until he found what he was looking for.

“There,” he said, pushing the book over to Leena, who sat across from him on the couch.

He had stopped on a page of old black-and-white photographs that appeared to be from the Old West era. Leena saw grainy, brown-tinted images of busty, hard-eyed white women, hair piled severely on top of their heads. They wore stiff-waisted dresses with full skirts and high lacy collars, standing in front of falling-down wooden storefronts and slanting porches. In the photograph Terry had indicated, there was a brown-skinned woman with rather austere facial features, dressed in the same manner as the white women, seated, holding an open umbrella over her shoulder even though she appeared to be indoors. The woman gazed at the camera expressionlessly.

“Something like that, I’d say, is the situation I think we’ve known you in before,” said Terry. “That’s my feeling about it.”

Leena looked at him, and waited quietly for him to explain.

“I work intuitively, you see—some people use hypnosis; I’m more for sense impressions, really. Then I tell what I see, and the others act it out, like a play. We’re like a spiritual improv group, you could say. We travel around the country doing this—that’s our business. It sounds far-fetched, but it can actually serve as quite a healing process for many people. When they see the actors acting out some past life event they may’ve already repeated in this life or are on the verge of repeating, then they become aware of the circumstances of their karma. It can be a quite wrenching experience. Because in becoming aware of karma, you also become aware of choice, I believe. Now that you know, you don’t have to repeat the same circumstances again. Destiny is not inevitable, you see.” His gaze held hers as if, through this, he meant to pass his information into her. Leena found she could not look away from him.

“Many things were taken from you in that lifetime before, I think—your land, your culture, even loved ones dear to you. You were forced to leave, I believe, and to live under obligation to people like us. Well, some of us, anyway. Some of us were Indian like you, too. Calvin was, and Pennyroyal was. Dalva and I have always been more like interlopers. But now you’ve come back.”

Leena looked at the picture again and thought that the woman in it looked very sad and somewhat ugly. How could these people think she was beautiful if they thought she looked like this woman? She saw a different vision of herself then, in her new white dress, walking through a house that was not this house and was not her own house, either. The carpet was very thick and white and new; she was walking barefoot, coming to stand at a window. White sunlight cascaded through the windows. It was one of those new development homes down the street—it dawned on Leena—that she saw herself wandering through.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Leena. “Many people do, where I come from, but I never do.”

Terry smiled at her. “Interesting,” he said then, and sat back slightly.

_______

She hadn’t meant to fall asleep at the neighbors’ house, but when she woke she was lying on the lavender bed in the room that looked like a little girl’s.

Through her disorientation, she recalled having come into the room just to sit; something had drawn her in. She could still hear their voices and the festivities from outside. She could hear the whoosh and pop of the fireworks. The wall lamps in the little room cast indefinite shadows across the walls and bedspread. Leena had felt the strangest sensation then, as if the beginning of the day in her own house, and yesterday, too, were years in the past. Time had stretched out in this way since she’d come to the neighbors’ party: her previous reality had escaped, somehow. And she felt as if it would be a long road back, that nothing would ever be the same again as it had been yesterday.

But what a silly, unfounded thought; she had just had too much to drink, and she was disoriented and lonely, she tried to tell herself. It was just that she missed her daughter and she missed Trevor. Still, she saw herself taking in the details of this room acutely, as if these motions—her sitting down on the bed, moving her hands across the bedspread, noting the brass knobs of the dresser beside the bed—were motions overlaying motions she had already performed in some distant, inexact past, in this exact same pattern. Yes, there seemed to be a pattern to it, these movements. Though Leena did not believe in it, Terry’s theory of past lives and parallel histories was still adrift in her thoughts, confusing her. Maybe different races’ histories followed similar patterns, and it might explain why people could think a Vietnamese woman living in a house in Texas had some quality in common with a converted Native American woman. Or maybe all brown-skinned people were in some way the same, she thought. Then, like a dream, or like the dimly remembered plot of a movie she’d once seen, an imagined sense of being separated from her daughter for a long period of time, by circumstances not of Leena’s own choosing, came to her. This had never happened to her with Pearl, but still she could imagine it. And when they found one another again, they would be totally different people, their ties to one another irrevocably changed.

But no, she told herself. This was just overdramatic worry, a mother’s worries. When would this night end? She laid her head on the pillow, not meaning to close her eyes, but then—it seemed—she must have.

There was something happening, now. She realized it suddenly. Silence was all around her but it was not a complete silence; a clawing sense of activity was still out there somewhere. She got up quickly.

The glow hit the sky, like a grounded sun struggling to get free from where it had fallen. The light wanted to go back up to the sky, and the sky wanted to stay dark. It was still nighttime, though a little colder than earlier.

Leena realized then that the glow was not from the fire in the fire pit. That fire was here, as she stumbled down the stone house steps, and it was smoldering now, just embers. This other glow was larger and came from farther away. Now she heard voices, too, carrying across the grass, not laughing, shouting. She stayed frozen for a second, watching the light hit the sky, watching it seem to tremble and jump, as if it, too, were shouting up to the heavens and stars above (in its own language, though, the one they—people—could not hear). She began to run. She headed up the slope, toward the fence between the properties. A shape loomed at her from the side, from the dark side of the stone house, and she leaped away from it but did not scream. There was not time or space inside her for panic anymore. She landed like a cat, still on her feet. It was the old man, Jeremiah, who had come lumbering out of the dark, headed in the same direction she was. He looked wildly about, like a caricature of stealth, with his arms held out from his sides. Finally his eyes met hers.

“My house is on fire,” said Leena. She had never before called it my house, she realized.

Jeremiah took a deep slow breath, then let it out. Behind him, soundlessly, the dim shape of a sheep plodded by, glancing mildly in their direction. “I was sleeping,” said Jeremiah. “I was sleeping over there in the leaves. I woke up and I thought something was wrong. It felt like maybe an earthquake, I thought. Or maybe a storm coming.” He rolled his eyes, looking befuddled, an old man with grass in his hair and dirt on his suit, a ridiculous and outdated suit, stinking of alcohol. And then Leena saw him—she saw all of them—for what they really were. They were people who had chosen to live like fools and paupers in the world. And they actually preferred that, and their insights were in some ways true and useful, but they were still just people with strange ideas that most other people wouldn’t ever believe.

Without replying, Leena turned from Jeremiah and continued hurriedly across the field, knowing he was following right behind her. They reached the fence, where Leena saw it was not her house that was on fire after all. At first she couldn’t place it—what was on fire? There was a blaze in her front yard, yes, and the silhouettes of people standing around, moving about, up and down, in slight frenzies. There was shouting, and there was also some stifled laughter. It was the playhouse that was on fire, she soon realized. It was just the playhouse.

Her own house, hulking at the back of this scene, was all lit up; she had left all the downstairs lights on. The windows of the top floor appeared like eyes, darkened though, to what was going on in the yard below.

Dalva came over to Leena. She looked wild-eyed, aghast, but she was also holding back her laughter. “Oh my god,” she said this a number of times. “Oh my god, sweetheart. Oh my god, we’re so sorry. Your poor little girl, her playhouse. Oh, it’s so sad, I can’t believe this.”

Someone was shouting, “Where’s the hose?” and then someone else was running toward the house, running back with the hose, but tripping along the way, making the others laugh again.

Their laughter. It made it so Leena did not feel like telling them Pearl never played in that playhouse anyhow. She would not ruin their fun, nor give them the satisfaction, she thought.

That was when the old man said, “Do you know if you dream your house is on fire it means you’re in love?”

Leena said, “My house isn’t on fire.”