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Contents

Winter 2017 | VOLUME 66. 2

FICTION RYAN BURRUSS Subway Passenger #12 14 INGRID KEENAN A Perfect Night 30 DENNIS MCFADDEN Dancing O’Hanlon 80

POETRY GILLIAN CUMMINGS Palette Unpainted in Her Thick Bark 9

Beech, Birch, Buckthorn 10 ARDEN LEVINE Today I will clean out his damn car 12 SCOT T T. HUTCHISON

One-Leg Crow 13

ALEXIS ORGERA TOPSY 40

A VERSION OF CONCAVITY 42 WHERE ONCE A SATURNALIA FLOODED IN ME 43 EMILY NASON Poem for Boy at Reenactment at the Battle of Darbyton

Road, 60 First Night of the Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill 62 JOHN A . NIEVES Failsafe 102

Runoff 104 WILLIAM BREWER

THE MESSENGER OF OXYANA 106

TO THE MAN I MUGGED IN OXYANA, WE ARE 108 RELAPSE AS MENAGERIE AND SONG 110 BRIT TNEY SCOT T A Jungian View 124 CHELSEA DINGMAN

Clan of Fatherless Children 125

Hands, I’ve Had 126 JACOB GRIFFIN HALL

Considering the Steps Between 128

NONFICTION JACQUELINE KOLOSOV Enclosures, London’s Gardens 44 ABIGAIL JOHNSON What Mary Learned 112

ART AIMEE BUNGARD

Artist’s Statement 62 Nut 63 Anne 64 Uncle 65 New Growth 66 Brushing 67 Bunbun 68 Whisper 69 Seed 70 This Succulents 71 Unfurl 72 She 73 Pod 74 Sprite 75

REVIEWS ANNEKE SCHWOB Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane

Williams 130 DOREEN THIERAUF Square Wave by Mark de Silva 132

in person.” Her apprehension over the four-day adventure ahead was relieved by a sudden surge of anticipation. It would be all right. Perhaps, be!er than all right. He was polite and clean. The two stuck to small talk as the porter carried Garre!’s luggage to Leona’s car. “I’d be happy to drive, if you prefer,” Garre! said. “That’s quite all right.” He was thoughtful to ask, but she wanted to be in the driver’s seat. This was her adventure. Once in the car, he turned to her and put a hand on her knee. “I’m so glad you agreed to come.” “So am I. Did your meeting go well?” “It did. I hate to do this right off the bat, but I need to make a couple of quick phone calls. Then I’m all yours. Do you mind?” “Not at all.” They had a three hour drive ahead, she thought, and plenty of time for talk. Leona drove toward the interstate. She glanced at Garre!, already concentrating on his phone. She liked his clean-shaven face and, as she sped up on the entrance ramp and pulled into traffic, she imagined the feel of his skin against her fingertips. She was navigating between two tractor trailers when it occurred to her—condoms! Last month, in a copy of Senior News, she’d read an article about the rising number of people in their sixties with STDs. She hadn’t thought to bring any. Leona gripped the steering wheel tighter. Would they need those? Would this even go in that direction? Wasn’t that where she hoped it would go? A tractor trailer was pushing closer from behind. Garre! discussed line items and tax credits with someone. She pulled into the passing lane to get ahead of the trucks and stole another glimpse of Garret’s profile. She was happy to see several age spots on his cheek and a deep crease on the front of his neck. Her own wrinkles felt less important. She put the cruise on seventy and relaxed as she le$ the bo!leneck of traffic around the trucks. She enjoyed the presence of a man in her car. Leona had expected dating would be difficult, but it had proved even more trying than she had imagined. She had dated only for a very short period in her early twenties, and at twenty-four, met and A M A N D A PAU L E Y

married Roger. They’d had two children, both boys. Not long a$er the youngest moved out, Roger was diagnosed with lung cancer. Five heartbreaking years later, he passed away. It was another five years before she allowed herself to have dinner with another man, and she’d found the process of dating – she was in her fi$ies then – so awkward that she a!ached herself quickly to Fred. They married, which had seemed preferable to being alone, but it wasn’t long before she realized her mistake. Fred drank – even early in the morning – and disappeared o$en. A year later, they divorced. Both of her sons lived in other states and visited only a couple of times a year. A$er a decade of being on her own, she hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. “Do you have arthritis?” Garre! was in between phone calls, and he pointed toward her slightly crooked finger as she adjusted the air conditioner control. That set Leona back. She knew they were of an age where this might be a subject for conversation, but she felt defensive. She wanted to point out the crease in his neck, or the fact that—as she had noticed when they had walked to her car—he had almost no bu!. They were, neither of them, young. “Are you through with your calls?” she asked, leaving the subject altogether. “One more. I need to call my dog walker.” Leona nodded. She had seen a photo of his Golden Retriever on his dating profile. “Hello, Tonya. I just wanted to check in and see if everything is okay at the house. And Roy? Did he eat? Good. No. No reason he shouldn’t. Certainly. Help yourself to anything you want. There’s wine in the cellar. One bo!le I really think you’d like. Are you in there now? All the way to the right. Yes, a 1972. Just for you. And please don’t sleep in that silly guest room. Sleep in my bed. Absolutely. Call me if you have any problems. I’ll talk to you soon.” Leona felt her brow furrow. She made an eﬀort to relax her face and to imagine acceptable reasons that his dog walker would be welcome in his bed. Garre! put his phone away.

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“There. All done. Now it’s you and me and Myrtle Beach, my dear.” Garre! reached over and touched her knee again. “It’s really good of you to drive. I wish you had let me buy a plane ticket for you.” “Oh, no need. So you have someone staying in your house?” “Tonya’s helpful. A lovely woman. A li!le flaky, but very a!ractive.” Leona cringed slightly at this description. Garret didn’t seem to notice. “Now, tell me about yourself. We’ve only had conversations on the phone, and I’m delighted that you agreed to meet me for a weekend at the beach.” He paused. “I confess I was surprised, though.” Leona smiled. “I wanted to try something new.” In truth, she was not a person comfortable with spontaneity, but she couldn’t stand the thought of one more quiet night at home on the couch watching TV or calling her friend Celia, who was nice, but boring. Celia was a dear, but she seemed satisfied with the aﬀection of her three cats. “So tell me more about your job. And why you haven’t retired yet,” Garret said. “I like making money and lots of it, so I can do things like this, but surely you’re ready to stop working.” Leona wanted to say that she was afraid to quit her job. More time alone? She knew of things to do, volunteer, learn to paint, garden, but somehow these activities made her feel like she was filling time rather than spending it. And she couldn’t bear the looks she sometimes received when she showed up alone at fundraising dinners or senior socials. “I like what I do. I work for a bank—as I told you—in commercial insurance. I make sure the loan collateral is covered—” “Oh! Leona!” Garre! was staring at the floor mat at his feet. “Your car,” he said. “There’s dirt along the crack.” “I cleaned the car. Just before I came.” She glanced at him. Was he joking? “I didn’t mean your car wasn’t clean,” he said, “but I could show you how to get all the way down in the cracks. I’ve got a trick. I can show you once we get to the beach. A vacuum will never do it.” She listened as he talked about pipe cleaners and cans of air, and tried to feel appreciative of the conversation. A M A N D A PAU L E Y

“I’ll give that a try some time,” she said. “I checked on the weather just before I le$. It looks promising. I think early June is the best time for going to the beach.” “I’ve got a trick for really making your dashboard shine, too,” he said. It took several more a!empts, but Leona finally steered his mind toward the upcoming days. She was going on an adventure, no ma!er what. No ma!er with whom. She was going to wade in the ocean and breathe the air and eat fresh crab legs and not be alone. “Do you like popcorn?” Garre! asked. “I suppose I do,” Leona said. “I’ve got my heart set on fresh seafood, though.” “I brought plenty of popcorn. It’s one of my favorite late night snacks.” Leona looked at her watch.

Once again, Helen saw blue lights in her rearview mirror, and she imagined what her daughter, Leona, would have to say about this. The first time, she was in her eighties and had failed to yield to oncoming traffic, though managing to avoid a collision. The second time had been four years ago, just a$er her ninetieth birthday, for not having a license plate on the rear bumper. She’d had no idea that it was missing. With only three traffic stops in her ninety-four years, Helen felt she deserved a commendation. She turned on her signal and took her foot off the gas. Her shoe caught for a second, as it o$en did when she tried to switch between the accelerator and the brake. The car slowed, surged, and slowed again as she worked her shoe free. She wore thick-soled, custom made, orthopedic shoes prescribed for her a$er falling off the porch and permanently damaging one foot. She pulled off the highway and slowed to a stop on the shoulder. How long had the police car been following her? She didn’t hear well, and she had not looked in the mirror for several minutes. She was fairly confident of the route to the Stop-N-Shop. It was one of the few places where she still drove, including the Veteran’s Hospital, the gas station, the laundromat, and the YMCA for her water therapy class.

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She had agreed, though against her will, to ask her children if she needed to go anywhere else, and never to drive at night. She watched in the mirror as the officer approached. She saw the change in his face when he saw her up close. He thinks I’m old, she thought. “Good a$ernoon, ma’am,” he said. “Do you know how fast you were going?” “Well, I hadn’t set my cruise yet, but I was aiming for the speed limit, of course. Did I hit it?” “Hit it? Ma’am, you were doing fi$y-five.” “Oh, good,” she said. “That’s right on it.” She studied his face. Did she remind him of his mother? More likely his grandmother. Just keep playing dumb. They like that. “Ma’am, it’s thirty-five through here.” “Oh, Lord! I thought I was already in the fi$y-five zone.” “May I see your license and registration, ma’am?” He didn’t think she’d have a license, she thought. Or he thought that she’d pull out an old one and act surprised to find it expired. “Certainly, Officer.” She paused for a moment to consider her next dilemma. “I just need to unbuckle. I can’t turn to my purse otherwise.” She moved slowly, in part because that was all her body allowed, but also because she didn’t want the officer to see that she had only tucked the seatbelt around her as she could no longer fasten and unfasten it on her own. Down by her side in the folds of her blouse, she dug the buckle out and touched the opposing parts together to produce a clicking noise as she pretended to work it free. Finally, a$er digging through her purse, Helen handed over her driver’s license that she’d managed to renew four months ago. The DMV only took her vision into account, and her eyes could still pass the test. Her license was good for another four years. It took several more minutes of rummaging in the glove box to find the registration, but Helen produced that, as well. “Would you like to see my insurance card? Would you like some gum? I have Freedent. It doesn’t stick to your dentures. Not that you have dentures. But I do. See?” She grinned for him. A M A N D A PAU L E Y

Thirty minutes later, Helen pulled into her neighbor’s driveway, parked the car, honked the horn, and waited for Ms. Tatum to come outside. Helen’s face reddened as she remembered the officer asking her to buckle her seatbelt. She couldn’t, and he knew it. She made several a!empts anyway before she gave up and let him lean in to buckle it for her. “Hi, Helen. Are you okay?” Ms. Tatum was in her bathrobe. “I’m fine. Could you unbuckle my seatbelt so I can get out of this car?” “Sure, hon. Sure!” Ms. Tatum laughed before she caught the look on Helen’s face. She leaned in and clicked the buckle free. “You be careful now.” Helen backed out into the street and pulled into her own driveway, two houses down and across the street. She turned off the engine, and picked up the yellow summons. She read the instructions over several times, but she was still unclear about what to do with it, though the officer had explained it twice. She wondered what Leona would say. Leona had gone on a weekend trip to see an old friend. Helen couldn’t remember which friend, but she did remember that something had seemed strange about Leona when she mentioned the trip. “A mother knows,” Helen said aloud as she struggled with the car door. She walked around to the other side of the car with the help of a cane and picked up her single bag of groceries with much effort. She put the summons into the grocery bag and looked in the back seat, her dirty laundry still in its basket. She’d forgo!en to stop by the laundromat. “Shit,” she said. “Shit and molasses. Next trip, next trip.” Once inside, she placed the grocery bag on the kitchen table, pushed play on her answering machine, and sat down at the table to rest. The first message was from Joe, asking if she needed anything. The second was from Leona, checking to see if she was okay. Helen listened closely. She’d been able to tell more about Leona by her tone than her words ever since childhood. She sounded well, but halfway through the message, Helen was sure she heard a male voice say, “Popcorn’s ready!”

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Leona sat on the hotel bed in a silk, two-piece pajama set, watching Garre! as he pu!ered around the room. He was in his briefs and looking through his suitcase for a second time. One side of his underwear rode higher than the other. There was no bu! in there at all. Nor had there been any sex. Yet. “I’d really like some popcorn just now,” he said. “I’m sure we le$ it at the beach hotel. That’s the last time I saw it,” Leona said. “It would be perfect just now.” “But we don’t have any popcorn.” Leona was no longer curious about his obsessions, only perplexed. “Would you look in your suitcase again?” he asked. “I’ve checked twice. There is no popcorn.” Leona had insisted on separate rooms for their last night. They’d had a single room with a king-sized bed at the beach the first night. Two hours into Garre!’s heavy snoring, she knew she’d never sleep, so she had piled some blankets from the closet in the bathtub and curled up in the tub with co!on balls in her ears. It was then, lying in the hotel bathtub, wrapped in an unfamiliar sheet, that she thought about condoms again. She’d said no, so far, but she did want to try it. She wasn’t in love with him. Not at all. But she couldn’t live with the thought that that would never happen again. She was still considering it. Garre! hadn’t mentioned having to take pills. At least not those pills. That morning she’d woken to find Garret admiring her in the tub. He said something about her small frame having its benefits. The second night at the beach she’d insisted on a separate room if she were to sleep. Now, back at the Ritz in Raleigh, she’d asked for her own room again, though she’d spent much of the evening with him in his room. “There’s no popcorn, but there is a woman in the same hotel room with you.” “I thought you said we couldn’t yet.” He didn’t turn around, but kept digging through a travel bag, pulling out maps, gum, cologne. “You don’t want to get in bed and rest with me?” Leona pulled the cover back to welcome him and, perhaps, entertain the possibility without fully commi!ing just yet. A M A N D A PAU L E Y

Garre! finally stopped and looked her way. Leona wondered again how he saw her. He was full of compliments, but he had just as many criticisms. When he kissed her yesterday at the beach, the fog had been thick. She remembered how it had so$ened his features. She had felt thankful that it probably had done the same for her. Now, Garre! smiled at her. Leona felt victorious, having won his interest away from the popcorn. “Okay,” he said. “Give me one second to call Tonya.” Leona closed her eyes. Her car was in the hotel garage. She could just pack up and leave while he was on the phone. “And then I need to check on my flight,” Garre! said. “A$er that, I’m ge!ing in that bed.” Sure you are, Leona thought. Garre! sat down at the foot of the bed to call Tonya. “It’s me,” he said. “How is everything?” Leona exhaled slowly. During the four days of this trip, Garre! had called Tonya three times a day. Each time he’d mentioned to Leona how a!ractive she was. The dog walker? Really? Leona wasn’t jealous exactly. She didn’t like him that much. The trip hadn’t been all bad though. He’d brought her a gi$, a dress that was stylish, fla!ering, and it had fit. They’d eaten at seafood buﬀets and walked on the beach in good weather and in fog so dense it had curled Leona’s hair. But he was a worrier. He worried about his clothes, his dog, his ex-wife. His cholesterol. He obsessed about Tonya, the best dog-walker ever. When Leona woke up in the morning, she was alone. She could hear Garre!’s muﬄed snoring coming through the door to her room. She must have fallen asleep in his bed by the time he had finished his phone call, and he, then, in her bed. When they parted, he kissed her slowly. He did have kissing down, she thought. They held each other for several minutes. “I hope to see you again, Leona,” Garre! said. “You just let me know where you’d like to go, and I’ll take you.” “I’ve had a nice time. Thank you.” But Leona had decided that she’d

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had enough of him. She was proud of herself, though. She’d gone on the trip. With a stranger from out west. “Goodbye, Oklahoma.” She’d taken to calling him that on the trip.

On Tuesday, Helen was in the locker room of the YMCA when an employee brought a prospective member in for a tour. Helen stood, naked, with one hand on the rim of the sink to support her weight, about to put on her swimsuit. The sinks were the perfect height for her to hold onto, so she changed in the open instead of the cramped stalls. Helen’s reflection in the mirrors—shoulders stooped, moles and spots polka-do!ing her aging skin, one breast lost to a mastectomy, yellow toenails, and gray pubic hair—was trifold. The employee tried to turn and stop the entrance of the visitor at the last second, but the lady peered around the corner anyway. “Hello,” Helen said. “Welcome to the YMCA.” The two hurriedly departed. Helen looked at herself in the mirror and laughed. “I should have asked for some help ge!ing this thing on,” she told her reflection. The skirt of her swimsuit had two layers, blue on top and white below. Leona had picked it out for her, and she had even sown the so$, prosthetic breast into the le$ cup, so that Helen didn’t have to insert it every time. Fi$een minutes later Helen le$ the locker room in her suit and swim shoes as others arrived to change. She liked to be ready before the others so she didn’t have to hurry. There were only four women in the water therapy class. It had been Leona’s idea for Helen to join. Helen thought it was silly, but still she had come to enjoy the group of twenty army vets, mostly men. They called her honey, darling, and sweetie. She wasn’t the oldest one in the class, either. Randolph was ninety-eight; he got on everyone’s nerves. A$er the teacher instructed them, Randolph would repeat the call from his place on the front row. He’d bellow, “Thumb circles!” or “Shoulder rolls!” So far, no one had asked him to stop. In the hall, a lady passed Helen, touched her arm, and asked how A M A N D A PAU L E Y

she was doing. The woman’s tone suggested familiarity, but Helen didn’t recognize her. Helen walked toward the snack machine at the far end of the hall to see if it held oatmeal cakes today. Halfway down the hall she stopped to read the flyers on the bulletin board listing volunteer positions available, an announcement for a gala, a notice of a lost dog. The dog looked like one she had seen before. Helen sat down on a bench. Where had she been going? She looked back down the hall where women filed out of the locker room and went through another door. An employee came by with a dollar bill in her hand. “Excuse me,” Helen said. “Where’s the pool?”

Leona had requested an extra day oﬀ from work a$er her trip, just in case she’d needed to recover. Now, she sat at her computer viewing profiles of men who had sent her messages. She wondered what her sons would think about her escapade with Garre!. They would only worry about her. Leona knew her mother would be horrified at the thought of her having agreed to meet a stranger and go to a hotel with him. Her mother had been with one man in her life, Leona’s father, and he had died from heart problems when he was fi$y-six. Leona had grieved for her father, but she had just married and had her first child when her father passed, so the sadness was eased somewhat with the comfort of her first husband and the overwhelming nature of caring for a newborn. As far as she could tell, her mother had never looked at another man with any kind of interest. Leona supposed she could understand the loyalty in that, and her mother seemed well enough, but the thought of spending the rest of her life on her own terrified Leona. Leona pulled up the profile of a man who had sent her a request. He had a large round face and a sneaky smile. His body type was listed as “rounded.” A real porker, Leona thought. His age was listed as: I’ll tell you later. The phone rang. It was her mother. “I’ve locked my keys in the car,” she said. “Are you at the YMCA?” Leona asked.

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Pod

Evieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Last

C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

Sprite

AIMEE BUNGARD

ABBY ROSENTHAL

Stall I’ve been driving for over an hour. We’re close now. Three quarters of a mile east of Tandy – where the sheriff saw the car. My father in the passenger seat next to me has already seen the sign for Tandy and stiffened. “Slow down, Steven,” he says. I slow down, I’ve been pushing 65 between towns on this twolane state road, but the county out here is notorious for speed traps, and Tandy, so far as I can see up ahead, may not exist for any other purpose. It doesn’t even merit a major intersection. It’s just somewhere east of Memphis on Tennessee 44A, lying quiet and supine under a light morning haze. It’s already close to ten. We roll through. A shed of a building, graveled in front. Two bare tables and a rocking chair si!ing in the gravel. A board hand-painted with the word ANTIQUES propped sidewise next to an open door. Further on, a cinderblock cube with one small window. Across the highway a convenience store with an OPEN sign above a padlocked door. Then the town’s behind us. Not the kind of place my mother would be antiquing, but I don’t say anything. Dad knows. He’s ramrod-erect to the right of me, staring ahead, a tall man, still slim, who carries his head high, conscious of his commanding profile. He’s wearing the V-necked sweater, open-collared shirt, and corduroy slacks he fell asleep in the night before. We’re back in West Tennessee countryside, mostly pasture, an occasional field sprouting sorghum or corn or bare and neatly harrowed, but this time I stay slow because now we’re looking to spot the car. The land li$s a li!le and we follow our ribbon of asphalt over a mild hill, and there on the hill’s other side, I see the orchard and the small humped shape of an automobile pulled off on the shoulder between orchard and road. Except for telling me to slow down, Dad hasn’t said a word the last half hour. Now I slow down even further and make a wide U

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turn across the empty highway, pulling up on the opposite shoulder behind my mother’s dusty white Toyota. My dad and I open our doors in unison, swing our legs out, and stand for a moment flanking the vehicle, blinking up at a bright, cloudless morning sky. Here the haze is gone. And my mother as well. My father and I have been up most of the previous night going through my mother’s desk, drawers, closets, and eventually her computer. He was still talking then, aggrieved and suspicious, but for all his agitation insisting we proceed either respectfully or stealthily, I’m not sure which. We folded her collection of silk scarves back into squares and replaced them in their nests of tissue paper, nervous because we know how precisely she arranges and organizes her belongings. She’s never been fooled by the shortcuts we take making beds or loading the dishwasher. Lynn understood I wouldn’t be home that night. She’s been aware of my father’s rising tide of anxiety and my mother’s change of affect, her wordless, bland disaffection and lack of concern, her incremental peeling away. One evening maybe a month ago, alone and without notice, Dad showed up at the house and sat with us. It was late March, unusually cold in the house, and I fired up the gas logs in the den fireplace. “Does Billie know you’re here?” Lynn asked. She’d just put Maddie, our three-year-old, to bed, and my father hadn’t even asked to see her. I could feel Lynn straining back toward the bedroom wing of the house, listening for a small cry or disturbance. “No,” my father said. “Because she’s not home. She told me she needed to get out of the house, maybe work at Perks. We never even had dinner.” My parents, it’s no secret, irritate Lynn, and she can be impatient with them, sometimes unfairly. Maybe from the beginning they’ve seemed a li!le too effortlessly put together. Her own family is more flexible. They can tolerate arguments, ruptures, messy reunions, even divorces with a certain degree of openness. Family mishaps, from her ABBY ROSENTHAL

point of view, are at least open to comment. But that approach doesn’t work with either my dignified father or my beautiful, reticent mother. Not that Lynn doesn’t try. “So you’re wondering where she went…” But that’s not my father’s style. “No, Lynn, I’m not wondering. I assume she’s driving around or working somewhere. She wouldn’t lie to me. But something’s not right.” And he se!led himself on the couch, leaning over his long knees to sip the cup of coffee Lynn offered him and describe how my mother’s behavior had changed. Lynn told me later, “He won’t admit it, but he’s scared. Maybe she’s having an affair. It’s a reasonable suspicion. Why can’t he come out and say so? He had one … why not her?” “Come on, Lynn,” I said. “Give him a break. That was years ago. She’s not a young woman anymore, either.” “She’s beautiful enough,” Lynn said. Lynn plays fair, even when she’s not sympathetic. “And she doesn’t come around here as o$en as she used to.” My mother isn’t young any more— pushing sixty— but yes, beautiful, with a lean, even face, firm neck, and strong jaw. Her color has faded, the auburn hair and blue eyes no longer startling, but everything about her is still delicate, straight, and long-limbed. Younger men – my own friends – are invariably courtly with her. And in other respects, she’s even more impressive. For years my mother taught English at our most prestigious private school. Her reputation there was secure, and she was prepared to teach until she retired. Then my grandfather passed away, leaving her more money than she’d expected. She resigned from St. Edward’s and began writing fiction. She segued seamlessly from one calling to the next. I was already out of college and more or less out of the house. My sister was finishing high school. With characteristic self-discipline, my mother rearranged her study, cleared out her teaching materials, and set about producing manuscript. She wrote daily, with confidence and aplomb. She didn’t pester us for editorial advice or moral support – she was almost secretive about her work – but within two years she’d begun to publish in reputable magazines. In another three years she’d had two stories

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accepted by the New Yorker, a first novel completed, and agents vying for her favor. The novel was sold to a major publisher, brought out with some fanfare, and well reviewed. It never made her much money, but it secured a readership and a reputation for her as a literary figure. It was an unusual and unlikely late-life success. A few more stories followed and then she began a second novel, which she’d been at now for two plus years and which she’d intimated was going to be much longer than her first. “The material,” she told us, not daunted but in a kind of wonderment, “keeps opening out ahead of me. I just go in a$er it.” We learned from reading her published work what kind of writer she was. Always there was a narrator like herself, a woman who could not help being beautiful and responsive, a refined yet fully sensual presence, spacious, gracious, and just impersonal enough to accommodate the fantasies projected on her by admirers. Her protagonist was sometimes this young woman in the grip of impulse, sometimes an older woman looking back on herself. My father was proud of my mother’s success and maybe relieved by it too. Now they were equally successful. I believe he felt she deserved it, and he was glad to see her get what she deserved. It made things right again. We breathe in the green, springy smell of apple blossom and survey the scene. Across the highway, open pasture stretches back towards a final range of wooded hills. On our side, rows of orchard widen toward us. I can see how my mother might feel invited in. The trees are mature, their dark trunks twist into the white canopy overhead. Someone has mown the new grass between the rows. A small wind plays in the treetops, and we can hear the hum of bees. At the horizon, though, the individual trees disappear. Their rows come together in a white distance that looks like snow. I wait for my father to make the first move. He approaches my mother’s car. He’s brought an extra set of keys, but the car’s unlocked. The windows on both the driver and passenger side are open more than a crack, as if to create a cross-breeze. The glove compartment, also ABBY ROSENTHAL

unlocked, contains nothing but a driver’s manual. Maybe my mother sat here a while. Maybe she was thinking what to do next. Maybe she was waiting for someone. Maybe someone was si!ing with her. “Why wouldn’t she leave a note?” my father asks in a strangled voice. “I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “I just don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

The call from the sheriff came early this morning. We already knew she’d gone off somewhere. Dad had taught an a$ernoon seminar the day before and returned home from campus for dinner. He and Mom might have a glass of wine together beforehand. It was their usual pa!ern. If my mother felt restless, as she o$en did now, she’d either leave the house while he was at work, returning when he returned, or at least wait until a$er dinner. But when my father arrived home yesterday, she wasn’t at work in her study or in the kitchen. She wasn’t back by dinnertime either. Her cell phone went to messages. That was when Dad called and asked me to come over. We looked for a note le$ in an unexpected place, contacted a few family friends to see if she’d stopped by, and then waited together until almost midnight. We began to talk about her deepening incommunicativeness and ina!ention. We continued to try her phone. My father finally u!ered the word affair— for my ears only, of course, because we were trying not to alarm anyone or jump to unwarranted conclusions. At eleven I called Lynn and told her my mother hadn’t returned and that I’d be staying the night with Dad. By midnight, though, my father’s demeanor changed. He seemed flushed, as if he’d been exerting himself. And he did exert himself. He began looking actively through my mother’s belongings and desk drawers full of papers. He found nothing. At about three I managed to persuade him to get a few hours sleep. “I can go into her laptop,” I told him as he sat himself down on his den sofa. “That’s where people keep secrets nowadays.” His head was in his hands, elbows propped on his bent knees. “If there is

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a secret,” I added. “Is that what you want me to do?” “Go ahead,” he mu!ered into his palms, then raised his head and said more clearly, “Go ahead. I didn’t ask to have to do this.” “I know, Dad,” I told him. “It could be a ma!er of safety.” “I doubt it,” he said, almost angrily, but then relented. “I suppose so.” He dozed off in his clothes on the sofa. I was on my mother’s computer until close to dawn. Then I lay down on the cramped couch in my mother’s study and tried to sleep. I was awakened a li!le a$er eight by the house phone ringing. My father picked up. I shuffled into the den as my dad replaced the receiver on his landline. His pallor had returned; he looked defeated, even old. “They’ve found her car,” he told me, “out in Harpeth County. That was the sheriff’s office. It’s on the side of the road three quarters of a mile past Tandy by an apple orchard. Abandoned. Been there since yesterday a$ernoon. They want us to get it the hell out of there.” He looked at me, he didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to do either. “Did you tell them we don’t know where she is?” “No,” he said. “Maybe I should have. I just said the car was missing.” He turned his head, scanning the room, and it seemed to me as if he were hoping something in it, something le$ behind with my mother’s imprint on it – a charm bracelet dropped on the coffee table or the toe of a shoe peeking out from under the skirt of her armchair – might help him make a be!er decision. Then I saw how his gaze was drawn inwards. “We have to get the car,” he mu!ered, “ASAP.” “Jesus, Dad,” I said. And I told him about the computer. That there was nothing locked up on it, nothing secreted or coded, no evidence of mysterious credit cards or accounts or expenditures, no unusual content. Just mundane email correspondence, mostly regarding disputed bills, lost packages, cancelled dental appointments, and almost all of it predating the last nine or ten months. Some family photographs, though that was mostly my father’s provenance; a fat file of articles on breast-feeding, many of which I recognized because my mother had shared them with Lynn around the time Maddie was ABBY ROSENTHAL

born; an almost completely inactive Facebook page. It occurred to me as I opened these documents and files, including one listing all her passwords, not only that she was hiding nothing, but also that she had surprisingly li!le to hide. Surprisingly li!le going on. Without my noticing and, it’s fair to say, without my father noticing, her world had been shrinking in scope in spite of her many successes. Had Lynn noticed? She’d never said anything. I knew of two of my mother’s close friends who’d le$ town a couple of years back. And my mother was very self-contained, very self-sufficient. It wasn’t hard to see how her writing and family life might have gradually consumed most of her time and a!ention. But had she been unhappy? I was easing my father towards the greatest point of interest. The file containing the manuscript of her novel-in-progress consisted of only twenty pages: the entirety of a first chapter and a fragment of a second. Nothing more had been added. My guess was that she’d abandoned the novel at least a year ago, and since then hadn’t been working on anything at all. Simply hadn’t been writing. I opened every file she had. Nothing. There was nothing to show for the last two years of presumed activity other than those twenty pages and, inserted into the document where the manuscript le$ off, nine photographs of various young men and boys, all good-looking. Several of the photos had been li$ed from Internet collections of college and high school yearbooks, their captions intact. My father took this in quietly, steadily. “We have to get the car, we need to leave,” he repeated, but then asked to see the photographs. We went back into my mother’s study where he looked at the photos, leaning in on the screen from behind me and reading the captions. “Characters,” he pronounced finally. “Models for characters. I don’t know any of these people.” He straightened, drawing himself up to his full height. “And I don’t think she does either. ” Reaffirmed somehow, he le$ my mother’s study and reentered the den. I followed him and saw him reaching for the emergency keys he and my mother kept in a Persian vase on the den mantle. “We need to get moving now,” my father said, over his back. “I’m going to ask you to drive.”

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Keys in hand, he turned for a moment to face me. “I would have thought she’d forgiven me by now.” It’s occurring to us that my mother, out here in the middle of nowhere – if indeed she is out here – could be in serious trouble. But what would have brought her here in the first place? Had she arranged to meet someone, then abandoned the car and le$ with him? And why here? This is no likely place for an assignation. My father and I are trying to make sense of what li!le we’ve found and know. “We need to look for her here,” my father says vaguely, raising his head and gaze. “Before we do anything else.” “One thing first,” I say. “I want to see if the engine starts. Whether she stopped here on purpose or stalled out.” He considers this, then hands me the key. I slide into my mother’s car and insert the key. The engine catches and turns over, but only weakly, then a struggling second time, then dies. I check the dash; she hasn’t le$ any lights on. In all probability she stalled out, dri$ed to a stop oﬀ road and then started out somewhere on foot. To find help, she’d have headed back to Tandy. She could easily have walked the distance, a simple straight line of a distance, the weather good enough. A host of dark scenarios pile on. My father must be thinking the same thing. “She wasn’t seen in Tandy?” I ask him. He stares at me. “They didn’t say. They don’t know anything about her. They just want me to get the car out of here. It’s the car that’s the problem for them.” He squints down the highway towards Tandy. “I didn’t ask,” he adds. “We’ve got to bring them into this,” I say. “ She’s a missing person, Dad. We can’t make any more assumptions.” “I know,” he says. But I can see how li!le he wants to take this forward. He’s frightened now— not just for my mother. “We should just look in the orchard first … you know … m-make a kind of sweep. In case she fainted there, in case she’s still nearby…” He trails oﬀ. ABBY ROSENTHAL

The stammer isn’t something I’ve heard before. Not once, not even then, all those years back, in the hard time he brought down on us. I was in high school. My sister was a li!le kid, it really knocked her for a loop. And my mother … I have photographs to remind me how beautiful she still was, by which I mean youthful as well as handsome, her refinement even more striking because we tend to think of refinement as something conferred by age. “You people need to get over yourselves,” Lynn says to me whenever I bring it up. “Aﬀairs happen.” Lynn in her dismissive mode. “Come on,” she’ll add, a li!le more conciliatory, “relax. It’s not like I’m in favor of aﬀairs. He screwed up, that’s all. He’s not alone. At least he stopped. He’s sorry. He hasn’t done it again. Not that I know of, anyway.” Lynn always gives with one hand and takes back with the other. “That’s got to be worth something.” I’m not appeased. “He says he’s sorry, he behaves himself, but look at him. He still thinks so goddamn highly of himself. He still thinks he’s … I don’t know … impeccable. How can you be sure he’s sorry?” That’s when Lynn shrugs. “Have it your way then. I don’t see your mother complaining.” “She doesn’t complain. She rides on by.” “Lady Godiva,” says Lynn. “On her big white horse. With her long hair wound around her and her head held high.” That’s when I leave the room. But my father, he cuts with a sharper blade. He doesn’t dwell on, mull over or stew in what’s done and past. He has a conscience, he’s not in denial exactly, God knows he’s been as scrupulous in the a$ermath as he was beforehand. But he doesn’t believe in public expiation. His expiations are private and implicit, consistent with his notion of dignity. And his notion of private is very private. As in confined to an audience of one, namely himself. My father, a fully tenured, widely published and locally renowned Civil War historian, a specialist in the history of the four Border States, seduced a student almost two decades his junior and nearly married her. He orchestrated the event so carefully that only those

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whom it devastated knew about it: the girl, her mother, my mother, and my sister and me. He didn’t check himself until a$er my sister and I were told he was leaving the family. I remember him si!ing there explaining. My mother sat at his side, strangely calm and supportive though at the same time we could sense how distraught she was. Then he changed his mind, I’ll never be sure why. Full disclosure, as I’ve pointed out, is not his forte. All he’s ever said is that he came to his senses. Which could mean many things, or even several of many things. A waning infatuation. A sudden reassertion of his a!achment to my mother and to his children. A desire not to jeopardize what had been up till then an irreproachable career in academia. It’s hard for me, even now, knowing how diﬃcult marriage can be and what the temptations are and how chimerically they present themselves, to forgive him. But that, as I’ve learned, is because it’s not the aﬀair I’m having trouble forgiving. It’s his force of ego, intact, unreduced, even in error – his fierce a!achment to the dignity of his persona. To be the son of man like that isn’t an easy thing. Nor to be the wife. But my mother does her job be!er than I do mine. I agree to it, to look around, I’m figuring it makes a certain kind of sense, though later I’ll think I was maybe losing my bearings and, like my father, snatching at straws. We descend into the long grass in the ditch, the ditch deeper than we expect, and clamber back up into the orchard proper. We can hear the flower-encrusted branches of the apple trees rustling against each other, the drone of insects, maybe a squirrel’s unseen scrabbling from inside the canopy’s white dri$. The rest, though, is deep country silence. Petals float everywhere. My father and I separate from one another so as to cover more territory. I can see him advancing parallel to me five or six rows of trees to my le$, in the methodical way that people search for someone missing or beat up game during a hunt. She’s not far from the road. We spot her almost at the same moment, my father a split second before me. His cry— “Billie!”— rings ABBY ROSENTHAL

out. She’s closer to my father, but I’m faster, and we get to her simultaneously. I see, with enormous relief, her head turn in his direction. She’s si!ing with her legs outstretched, her back propped against a tree. Her shoes, girlish black flats, have been removed and placed neatly by her side, the le$ shoe to the le$ of its mate. Her shoulder bag is on her lap. She faces away from the road, effectively concealed behind the tree. She seems to be looking beyond the most remote part of the orchard and over the horizon. It’s as if, in all deliberation, in a snit or huff, she’s turned her back on us. Her skirt and blouse are rumpled, but not torn, there are no wounds on her, she hasn’t been dragged or beaten, she’s alive and conscious. I fall to my knees at her side and throw my arms around her, on the verge of tears, while she continues si!ing stiffly, not resisting really, but as if I were a young child disturbing her with my histrionics. My father stands over us, frozen. “Billie?” he says. Billy raises her face to him, blue eyes widening. I draw away from her. “Billie,” he says again and takes a step forward. “No” she says, shaking her head. “What are you doing here?” “Billie!” he says. “We didn’t know where you were. We’ve looked all over for you.” He’s kneeling now, drawing closer. “Thank God you’re all right.” He reaches out to lay his palm against the side of her face, but she moves her head away. “No,” she says. Then she adds, “I’m meeting someone.” My father catches my eye. “Who are you meeting, Billie?” he asks her very so$ly. “Tell me who you’re meeting. Tell me what’s happening to you.” “But— you don’t know him!” she says earnestly. “You’ve never met him. I’m sorry. Really I am. I can’t expect you to understand.” She reaches for her shoes. “Wet!” she exclaims, holding them up for us to see. She repositions them on the ground, grips her bag, and with my father’s assistance, stands. Her feet, still narrow and shapely, slide into the shoes. She shoulders the bag and turns to face my father. “I have to go,” she informs him. As if to get her bearings, she surveys

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the orchard. Then she steps in close to him. She looks at him tenderly and on tiptoes kisses his cheek. “I know you love me,” she says. For the briefest moment it seems to me she’s play-acting. She bites her under-lip as if to avoid saying something hurtful, then allows the blocked words to escape. “— But it’s spoiled!” My mother moves oﬀ now, stiﬄy. She takes small, careful steps down the mown aisle deeper into the orchard. My father stands there drained of color, his hair white, the trees around him white, but his expression is already renewing itself. Intent and intelligent, he’s recalculating. The back of her skirt and blouse are damp. She’s been leaning on that tree all night. My father turns to me for a moment. “Jumper cables?” I nod. “We’ll start the car, I’ll get her home. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know what’s she’s doing, for Christ’s sake.” Then he lopes, surprisingly loose-limbed, almost like a young man again, a$er her. I see him touch her shoulder, take her arm, turn her back in my direction. She looks up at him. He’s speaking too so$ly for me to hear what he’s saying to her. They come back towards me, a stately, solicitous pair. My father says, “Your mother needs to meet someone, it’s important to her, and I’m going to drive her there. Why don’t you help us?” I take my mother’s free arm. I’m reminded of a wedding, my mother the radiant bride, my father and I escorting her down the aisle. I know people who have had weddings in orchards. My father is perfect in this role. My mother holds herself erect, a bride for whom everything is playing itself out beautifully. A few stray petals are caught in her hair. They’re white with a blush of pink, pinker at their margins. My mother’s hair is mostly white too, just a touch of auburn remaining.

ABBY ROSENTHAL