hexafu

Her fingers touched an urchin’s stiff bristles and I watched inert plant spines move, animate, and reach for my mother, feeling for her shape and intent.

She wanted me to touch it too, but I was afraid. It amazed me to see the white flesh and purple spines communicating across a gap no less enormous than deep space, a miracle in six inches of water. She touched me that way, my cheeks, my arms, and I too reached out to her.

El cielo es azul. We were on Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women. I was a little girl in a faded dress, sunburned, barefoot, hair white as dandelion floss. The streets were crushed shell where we stood in line at the tortilla shop every morning with the Mexican women. ¿Cuál es su nombre? Su hija es más guapa, they said, Your daughter is too pretty, and touched my hair.

My mother’s skin peeling like paint. Her eyes bluer than the sky, azul claro.

In a big hotel colored pink and orange, a man with a dark mustache smelled like crushed flowers. There were taxis and music, and my mother went out in embroidered dresses pulled low off the shoulders. But then he was gone, and we moved on to the Island of Women.

Some fishermen caught a hammerhead shark and dragged it up onto the beach. It was twice the size of the little boats the fishermen used, and everyone came to the beach to look at it, to pose alongside its monstrous head, as wide as I was tall. Battalions of teeth showed in its hu-morless grin. I was afraid when my mother left me on the beach to swim out on the soft blue. What happened if the shark came, and the water turned red and the bones came through?

WHENEVER I WOKE, there was Demerol. Doctors in masks, nurses with soft hands. Flowers. Their smiles like nectar. There were IVs and other children, dressings and Tom and Jerry on the TV, balloons and strangers.

ON A FULL MOON NIGHT, something moved her, and we left with only our passports and money in a belt under her dress. I threw up on the ferry.

We slept on a new beach, far to the south.

We were happy in Playa del Carmen, driving with Eduardo around town in his black Volare, feeling very rich, ¡qué rico!, though the town only had two paved roads and a Michoacán ice-cream stand. Painted pictures of snowcapped volcanoes. The tourist boat stopped at Playa del Carmen twice a week, bobbing five stories high like an offshore wedding cake. My mother read tarot cards in the café perfumed with the fat smoke of grilled pollo and carnitas. I watched the man shave the stacks of meat onto tortillas with a machete. We ate well there.

At night Eduardo played guitar and sang gypsy songs with the guests at his hotel, as I rocked in my hammock like a bat folded into leathery wings.

At night the air was full of bats. The fruit, my mother said, mangos and plátanos and papayas. Fairy circles of ringworm came out all over my body.

A doctor in a block concrete clinic gave me medicine. Can’t we ever go home? I asked my mother. We have no home, she told me. I am your home.

How beautiful she was barefoot in a bathing suit and a tablecloth wrapped around her hips. My mother loved me. Even now, I could feel myself rocking in that hammock while Eduardo and my mother danced.

You were my home.

But the weather turned and Eduardo closed the hotel for the season, went back to Mexico City, where his parents lived. He said we could stay on if we liked. It was sad and scary. We closed the shutters and the wind began to blow, the gentle sea rose and ate the beach, running into the grape hyacinth. There were no tourists now. We ate from cans, frijoles refritos, evaporated milk. Cats poured into the hotel, skinny, feral, or just abandoned for the season. My mother let them all in and the sky was a yellow-tinged bruise.

The rain when it came arrived sideways, bleeding in through the shutters and under the doors. The cats hid in the shadows. Occasionally we felt the brush of their bodies or tails as we sat at the table, my mother writing by the light of a kerosene lantern. The cats were hungry but my mother ignored their mewing as we ate.

If I were Starr, maybe I would have shot me too. Maybe I would have painted the doorknobs with oleander like my mother, if Ray had said he didn’t love me anymore.

LETTERS CAME from my mother. A girl my age, a hospital volunteer, with fluffy brown hair and pale green eye shadow, tried to read them to me, but it was way too surreal, my mother’s words in her high ignorant voice, I made her stop.

Dear Astrid,

They say they don’t know if you will last until morning. I pace the cell’s three steps, back and forth, all night. A chaplain just came by, I told him I’d rip out his liver if he bothered me again. I love you so much, Astrid. I can’t bear it. There is no one else in the world but you and me, don’t you know that? Please don’t leave me alone here. By all the powers of light and darkness, please, please don’t leave.

I read that paragraph over and over again, savoring each word, the way Starr would read her Bible. I drifted off to sleep hearing it in my head. You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you.

Freude! Beethoven’s ninth, Ode to Joy, the Solti version, Chicago Symphony. To think that I almost lost you! I live for you, the thought that you’re alive gives me the strength to go on. I wish I could hold you now, I want to touch you, hold you, feel your heartbeat. I’m writing a poem for you, I’m calling it “For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.”

News travels fast in prison, and women I’ve never spoken to inquire after your condition. I feel akin to each one of them. I could kneel down and kiss the stale earth in gratitude. I will try for a compassionate visit, but I have no illusions about the extent of compassion here.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live

Be strong.

Mother.

And she never once said I told you so.

A MAGICIAN CAME to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely. Like Ray, molding me in his fingers like soft wax.

Ray. I tried not to think of him, what had made him run when I lay bleeding on my bedroom floor, shot by his lover. I knew why he wasn’t there when the ambulance came. It was how I felt when I thought of Davey, that I had ruined his life for him. Ray couldn’t face it. He hadn’t wanted us to happen in the first place, I was the one who created it, out of nothing but my own desire. It was like Ray knew it was going to happen from the very first time we touched. Every time he looked at me his eyes pleaded with me to leave him alone. I wished I could see him, just once, and tell him I didn’t blame him.

But now I knew it was Davey. That he had refused to go and leave me to bleed to death on the bedroom floor. He had refused to go. He had given up his mother to keep me alive for the ambulance. Knowing Davey, that was it. And I was deluged by fresh waves of shame and regret. He never knew when he met me that first day, when the little boys sat on the porch, that I would be the one to ruin his life the way Starr crushed his model in the living room. I stepped on it running to meet Ray.

MY MOTHER sent me her poem “For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.” There were a couple of lines I couldn’t get out of my head:

After all the fears, the warnings

After all

A woman’s mistakes are different from a girl’s

They are written by fire on stone

They are a trait and not an error…

It was worse than I told you so. I didn’t want to believe it. I was still a girl, only fourteen. I could still be saved, couldn’t I? Redeemed. I could live a different life, I would go and sin no more.

Then I was given a new placement, sent off with a thirty-day prescription for Percodan and my mother’s letters and books, the wooden box, and a lost boy’s poster of animal turds.

81 of 411

The glider squeaked as I rocked myself, thinking of my father, Klaus Anders, no middle name. I’d found a Polaroid picture of him stuck in a book of my mother’s, Windward Avenue. They were sitting together in a beachside café with a bunch of other people who looked like they’d all just come in off the beach – tanned, long-haired people wearing beads, the table covered with beer bottles. Klaus had his arm across the back of her chair, careless and proprietary. They looked like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them. They could have been brother and sister. A leonine blond with sensual lips, he smiled all the way and his eyes turned up at the corners. Neither my mother nor I smiled like that.

The picture and the birth certificate were all I had of him, that and the question mark in my genetic code, all that I didn’t know about myself.

“He probably thinks you’re still two. That’s how I think of Seth. When the boys are down by the river, I imagine he’s down there with them. I have to remind myself he’s too big for frogs now.”

Klaus thought of me as two. My hair like white feathers, my diaper full of sand. He never imagined that I was grown. I could walk right past him, he might even look at me the way Ray did, and never know it was his own daughter.

My mother once told me she chose him because he looked like her, so it was as if she were having her own child. But there was a different story in the red Tibetan notebook with the orange binding dated Venice Beach,

1972.

July 12. Ran into K. at Small World this afternoon. Saw him before he saw me. Thrill at the sight of him, the slight slouch of broad shoulders, paint in his hair. That threadbare shirt, so ancient it is more an idea than a shirt. I wanted him to discover me the same way, so I turned away, browsed an Illuminati chapbook. Knowing how I looked against the light through the window, my hair on fire, my dress barely there. Waiting to stop his heart.

Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid’s room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window.

“You’re having a good time here, aren’t you,” she said, peering into the drawer of the bedside table, rummaging inside. “Making yourself at home? Getting comfortable?” I traced the flower pattern on her sheets, it was a poppy. My fingers followed the aureole, and then the feelers in the middle. Poppy, the shape of my mother’s undoing.

“A little too darn comfortable, I’d say.” She straightened out a cigarette butt from the plaid beanbag ashtray on the nightstand and lit it.

“Always hanging around, handling his ‘tools’ — ‘What’s this for, Uncle Ray?’ Playing with his guns? I’ve seen the two of you. Everybody asleep except the two of you, cuddling up, just as sweet as you please.”

“He’s old,” I said. “We’re not doing anything.”

“He’s a man, missy. He sees what he sees and he does what he can. I’ve got to talk fast before he gets back, but I got to tell you, I decided I’m calling Children’s Services, so whatever you were thinking, it’s all over now, Baby Blue. You’re history.”

“Don’t try to argue me out of it. I got a nice thing going here now. Ray’s the best man I ever had, treats me nice. Maybe you haven’t been trying, but I smell S-E-X, missy, and I’m not taking any chances. I lived too long and come too far to blow it now.”

I was slipping, falling. I had trusted Starr and I’d never given her a reason to doubt me. It wasn’t fair. She was a Christian, but she wasn’t acting on faith, on goodness. “What about charity?” I said, like a falling man reaching for a branch. “Jesus would give me a chance.” She stood up. “I’m not Jesus,” she said. “Not even close.”

The only answer was rain. Silence and tears. Nothing. I thought of my mother. What she would do if she were me. She would not hesitate. She would spare nothing to have what she wanted. And thinking of her, I felt something flow into my emptiness like a flexible rod of rebar climbing up

my spine. I knew it was evil, what I was feeling, self-will, but if it was, then it was. I suddenly saw us on a giant chessboard, and saw my move.

“He might be mad,” I said. “You thought of that? If he knew you sent me away, because you were jealous.”

Starr had been halfway to the door, but she stopped and turned around.

She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

“Men don’t like jealous women. You’re trying to make him a prisoner. He’s going to hate you. He might even break up with you.”

And I liked the way she flinched, knowing I had caused the lines in her forehead. There was power in me now, where there had been none.

“What do you know about men. You baby.”

“I know that men don’t like women who try to own them. They dump them.”

“Especially when there’s nothing going on. I like you, I like him, I like the kids, I would never do anything to screw it up. Don’t you know that?” The more I said it, the less true it was. The angel on her bureau looked down, ashamed, afraid to see me. The rain drummed on the roof.

“Swear you’re not interested in him?” she said finally, squinting against the vile smoke. She grabbed the Bible off the bedside table, a white leather Bible with red ribbons and a gilded edge. “Swear on the Bible?”

I put my hand on it. It could have been the phone book for all I cared now. “I swear to God,” I said.

I could hear the mud sucking at his boots as he shifted his weight. I was glad it was dark, that he couldn’t see the flush of pleasure on my face as he drew closer, looking up at the sky, as if he cared about the Quadrantids, as if that’s why he’d come out.

“There!” Owen said. “Did you see it, Uncle Ray? Did you?”

“Yeah, I saw it buddy. I saw it.”

He was standing right next to me. If I shifted just an inch to my left, I could brush him with my sleeve. I felt the radiant heat of him across the narrow gap between us in the darkness. We had never stood so close.

“You and Starr having a beef?” he asked me softly.

I exhaled vapor, imagined I was smoking, like Dietrich in The Blue Angel. “What did she say?”

“Nothing. She’s just been acting funny lately.”

Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty places, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole.

Ray toked too hard, coughed, spat. “Must be hard on her, getting older, pretty girls coming up in the same house.”

I gazed up as if I hadn’t heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it.

“She still looks good,” I said, thinking that it wouldn’t be so hard on her if he didn’t follow me out into the star-filled night, if he didn’t watch me the way he did, touching his mouth with his fingertips.

But I didn’t want him to stop. I was sorry for Starr, but not enough. I had the sin virus. I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.

Dear Astrid,

Do not tell me how much you admire this man, how he cares for you! I don’t know which is worse, your Jesus phase or the advent of a middle-aged suitor. You must find a boy your own age, someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered, someone whose fingers are a poem. Never lie down for the father. I forbid it, do you understand?

Mother.

You couldn’t stop it, Mother. I didn’t have to listen to you anymore.

I could smell his sweat, sharp and strong, a man’s smell, and it was hot in the room with the new windows, heady with the fragrance of raw wood. I put my hands around his waist, pressed my face into the scratchy wool between his shoulder blades, something I’d wanted to do since he held me that first Sunday when I’d ditched church and stayed behind in the trailer. I closed my eyes and breathed in his scent, dope and sweat and new wood.

He didn’t move, just gave a shuddering sigh.

“You’re a kid,” he said.

“I’m a fish swimming by, Ray,” I whispered into his neck. “Catch me if you want me.”

For a moment he stood still as a suspect, his hands open on the window frame. Then he caught my hands, turned them over and kissed the palms, pressed them to his face. And I was the one who was trembling, it was me and my marguerite.

He turned and held me. It was precisely how I had wanted to be held, all my life — by strong arms and a broad, wool-shirted chest smelling of tobacco and pot. I threw my head back and it was my first kiss, I opened my mouth for him to taste me, my lips, my tongue. I couldn’t stop shaking unless he held me very tight.

I didn’t care what was right anymore. I had a condom from Carolee’s drawer in my pocket, and the man I’d always wanted for once in a place we could be alone.

I took off my plaid shirt, tossed it onto the floor. I took off my T-shirt. I took off my bra and let him see me, small and very pale, not Starr, but me, all I had. I untied my hiking boots, kicked them off. I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall.

Ray looked sad right then, like someone was dying, his back pressed against the smudged window. “I never wanted this to happen,” he said.

“You’re a liar, Ray,” I said.

Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I’d thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

He covered my hand with his and held it to his groin. I felt him growing hard again. “I don’t talk about one woman to another. That’s plain bad manners.”

He ran his finger between my legs, into the wet like silk, then put his finger in his mouth. I never imagined it would be like this, to be desired.

Everything was possible. He pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf, my forehead against his chest, riding through a spray of sparks. If my mother were free, would this be one of her lovers, filling me up with his stars? And would my mother watch me the way Starr did, realizing I was no longer transparent as an encyclopedia overlay?

No. If she were free, I wouldn’t be here. She would never have allowed me to have this. She kept everything good for herself.

“I love you, Ray,” I said.

“Shhh,” he said, holding my hips. His eyelids fluttered. “Don’t say anything.”

So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.

But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn’t like her. She usually called them rats with fur.

“Well, the artiste. Come talk to me, missy, I’m so bored I’m talking to cats.”

She never wanted to talk to me, and there was something about her mouth that seemed slower than the words she was saying.

“So talk to me,” she said, taking an exaggerated drag from her cigarette and blowing it out in a long stream.

That’s when I realized Starr was drunk. She’d been sober eighteen months, kept the AA chips on her key ring, red, yellow, blue, purple. It was such a big deal to her, too. I never quite understood it. Ray drank. My mother drank. Michael drank from the moment he finished reading his Books on Tape at noon until he passed out at midnight. It didn’t seem to hurt him any. If anything, Starr looked happier now. I wondered why she’d tried so hard to be some kind of saint, when it wasn’t really her nature.

“He’s crazy about me, you know,” she said. “That Ray. There’s a man that needs a real woman.” She rolled her hips in their tight cutoffs as if she were sitting on him right now. “His wife wouldn’t do shit for him.” She took another hit on her cigarette, lowering her mascaraed eyelashes, remembering. “That man was starving for a piece. I saw her once, you know. The wife.” She drank from her coffee cup, and now I could smell it.

“Sailor’s delight. Sensible shoes, you know what I’m saying. Wouldn’t give head or anything. He’d come to the Trop and just sit and watch us girls with those sad eyes, like a starving man in a supermarket.” She squared her shoulders, rolled them forward, so I’d get an idea of what Ray had been watching, the cross caught in her cleavage, Jesus drowning in flesh. She laughed, dropped cigarette ash on the white-patched kitten. “I just had to fall in love with him.”

“I must have been crazy to think you and him…,” she said into her coffee cup, drained it and put it on the mosaic-topped table with a thud. “I mean, look at you, you’re just a baby. You didn’t even wear a bra until I got you that one.”

She was convincing herself there was nothing between Ray and me, that nothing could possibly be going on, because she was a woman and I was nothing. But I could still feel how he knelt in front of me on the unfinished floor, how he held me around the thighs, kissed my bare belly. I could smell the odor of the raw wood, feel the clutch of his fingers, and we burst into flame like oilfat chaparral in oleander time.

“And where you think you’re goin’, missy?” Starr’s voice came from out of the darkness.

“Since when did you care,” I could hear Carolee reply.

I went to the window. I couldn’t see Starr, only Carolee’s hip jutting out in her white skirt, hands on her hips, her elbows defiant.

“Goin’ out to spread ’em for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” Starr must have had a few on the porch, in the lawn chair over by the living room.

Carolee put on her high heels, one at a time, and walked out into the yard, which was full-moon lit, bright as a stage. “So what if I am.” I wished I could draw the way her broad-shouldered body threw a shadow on the moonpale dust. How brave she looked just then.

Starr wouldn’t let it go at that. “You know what they say. ‘Call Carolee, she does it for free.’ Whores are supposed to get paid, don’t you know anything?”

“You should know better than me.” Carolee turned and started walking to the road.

Starr lurched across my field of vision, staggering down the stairs in a shortie nightgown, and smacked Carolee in the face. The sound of the blow reverberated in the still night, irrevocable.

Carolee’s arm drew back and struck. Starr’s head jerked to one side. It was ugly, but fascinating, like a movie, like I didn’t even know them. Starr grabbed her by the hair and dragged her around as Carolee screamed and tried to hit her, but she couldn’t straighten up far enough to reach her. So she took off a high heel and hit her with that, and Starr let her go.

I saw Ray come down the steps wearing just a pair of jeans. I knew he had nothing on underneath, that body I loved so much, as Carolee grabbed Starr by the front of her nightgown and shoved her down hard in the dirt.

She stood above Starr so she had to look up at Carolee ‘s legs in their nylons, her high-heeled shoes. How bad could this get, could a daughter kick a mother in the face? I could see that she wanted to.

I was relieved when Ray got between them and helped Starr to her feet.

“Let’s go back to bed, baby.”

“You lousy drunk,” Carolee yelled after them. “I hate you.”

“Get lost then,” Starr said, staggering unsteadily on Ray’s arm. “Bug off. Who needs you.”

“You don’t mean that,” Ray said. “Let’s just sleep it off, okay?”

“I’ll leave,” Carolee said. “You bet I will.”

“You leave, you are never coming back, missy.”

“Who’d the fuck want to?” Carolee said.

She slammed into our room, opening drawers, pulling stuff onto the bed, cramming what would fit into a flowered suitcase. “Bye, Astrid. It’s been real.”

Davey and the little boys were waiting in the hall, scared, blinking from sleep. “Don’t go,” Davey said.

“I can’t stay. Not in this nuthouse.” Carolee gave him a quick one-armed hug and went out, banging her suitcase against her knee. She walked right past Ray and Starr, never turning her head, strode out of the yard on her high heels and walked down the road, smaller and smaller.

I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren’t crying, that it wasn’t the worst day of their lives. That they didn’t want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn’t have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay.

WHEN CAROLEE LEFT, Starr lost something essential, something she needed, like a gyroscope that kept the plane from flipping over or a depth gauge that told you whether you were going deeper or coming up. She might suddenly want to go out dancing, or stay home and drink and complain, or get all sweet and sloppy and want to be a family and play games and cook brownies that burned, and you never knew which it would be. Peter didn’t eat her casserole one night and she took his plate and turned it over on his head. And I knew it was my defiance, my sin. I took it all, never said a word.

If only I hadn’t started with Ray. I made her go off her program. I was

the snake in the garden.

But knowing it wasn’t enough to make me stop. I had the virus. Ray and I made love in the new houses, we made love in his woodshop behind the garage, sometimes even in the wash among the boulders. We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.

THEN ONE DAY Starr was yelling at the boys for their mess in the living room, some plastic lizards and Legos and an exhibit Davey was working on. It was a painstakingly accurate model of Vasquez Rocks and the fossils he’d found there on a field trip with his class, turritella shells and trilobites from the Cambrian era. Starr threw toys and puzzles and then marched over to Davey, lifted her foot and crushed his project in two fast stomps. “I told you to clean this crap up!”

The other boys ran out the screen door, but Davey knelt by his ruined exhibit, touching the crushed shells. He looked up, and I didn’t have to see his eyes behind his glasses to know he was crying. “I hate you!” Davey yelled. “You ruin everything! You can’t even comprehend -“

Starr grabbed him, started hitting him, holding him by one arm so he couldn’t get away, screaming, “Who do you think I am? Don’t you call me stupid! I’m your mother! I’m a person! I can’t do all this by myself! Have some respect!”

It started as a spanking, but it turned into just a beating. The little boys

had run away, but I couldn’t. This was because of me.

“Starr,” I said, trying to pull her off. “Don’t.”

“You shut up!” she screeched, and threw me off. Her hair was in her face, her eyes white all the way around the pupil. “You have nothing to say, you hear me?”

Finally she stumbled away, crying into her hands. Davey just sat by the devastation of his project, and I could see the tears rolling down his face. I crouched next to him, seeing if there was anything that could be salvaged.

Starr opened the Jim Beam she’d started keeping in the cabinet with the breakfast cereal, poured herself a glass, threw in a few ice cubes. She was drinking right in front of us now. “You just can’t talk to people like that,” she said, wiping her eyes, her mouth. “Little shit.”

Davey’s arm hung at a funny angle. “Does your arm hurt?” I asked softly.

softly.

He nodded, but he wouldn’t look at me. Did he know, could he guess?

Starr sat on a molded kitchen chair, slumped with exhaustion after the beating. Sullen, drinking her booze. She took a cigarette from the gold package and lit it.

“I think it’s dislocated,” Davey said.

“Whine, whine, whine. Why don’t you go somewhere and whine.” I filled a bag with ice, put it against Davey’s shoulder. It looked bad. His

mouth was all puckery. He never whined.

“He needs to go to the hospital,” I said, afraid, trying not to sound

accusing.

“Well I can’t drive him. You drive him.” She fumbled in her purse for the keys and threw them at me. She had forgotten I was only fourteen.

“Call Uncle Ray.”

“No.”

“Mom?” Davey was sobbing now. “Help me.”

She looked at him, and now she saw the angle of his arm, the way he held it out by the elbow in front of him. “Oh Lord.” She ran over to Davey, knocking her shin into the coffee table, crouched by her son where he sat on the couch, holding his arm. “Oh, mister, I’m sorry. Mommy’s sorry, baby.” The more she thought about it, the more upset she got, running at the nose, trying to comb his hair back with her awkward hands, making jerky, meaningless gestures. He turned his head away.

She crossed her arms across her chest, but low, more toward the belly, and huddled next to the couch on the floor, rocking herself, hitting her forehead with her fist. “What do I do, Lord, what do I do?”

“I’m calling Uncle Ray,” I said.

Davey knew the number, recited it while I called him at the new houses.

Half an hour later, he was home, his mouth set in a thin line.

“I didn’t mean it,” Starr said, her hands in front of her like an opera

singer. “It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me.”

Nobody said anything. We left Starr crying in monotonous sobs, took Davey to the emergency hospital, where they popped his shoulder back in, taped it down. We concocted a story about how we were playing on the river. He jumped off a rock and fell. It sounded stupid even to me, but Davey made us promise not to say it was Starr. He still loved her, after everything.

At home, the trailer smelled of ham. Starr served up lunch, creamed corn, canned pineapple rings, brown-and-serve rolls. Ray and I couldn’t look at each other, or it would all start again. We looked at the little kids, we played with our food, congratulated Starr on her cooking. Ray said Reverend Thomas wasn’t half bad. We had to put our eyes anywhere but on the other one’s face. I studied the little bowl of pink peppermint ice cream with jelly beans sprinkled over, and the Easter lily in the middle of the table

in its foil-wrapped pot. We hadn’t been together since we took Davey to the emergency room. We hadn’t talked about it, how it had all gone too far.

All afternoon, we watched Easter shows on TV. Pink-skinned evangelists and choirs in matching sateen gowns. Congregations the size of rock ‘n’ roll concerts. Hands waved in the air like sunflowers. He is risen, Christ the Lord. I wished I believed in Him again.

“We should be there,” Starr said. “Next year, we’ll do the Crystal

Cathedral, Ray, let’s.”

“Sure,” Ray said. He had changed out of his church clothes, back into his regular T-shirt and jeans. We played Chinese checkers with the boys and avoided each other’s glances, but it was work, being in the same room without touching, especially with Starr sitting next to him, one hand up high on his soft-washed jeans. I couldn’t stand it. After Davey won, I went outside and walked around down in the wash. All I could think of was her hand on his jeans.

I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn’t want to stop.

I smelled him first, the smell of dope wafting on the twilight air. He was in the yard, sunlight striking his face and warming it like a stone. The sight of him caught in my throat. Now I knew I’d been waiting for him. I climbed onto a rise so he could see me, to the east, on the blind side of the trailer, then descended into a bowl of sand between the boulders.

A minute later, I heard him walking up the riverbed, dry already though it was only April. I knew Davey would read all this tomorrow in our tracks.

But the moment I touched Ray, I knew we could never be apart, no matter how much we wanted to, no matter who we hurt. His lips on my neck, his hands under my shirt, pulling my pants open, peeling them down. My thighs craved the naked touch of his hips, we fit together like magnets as we sank into the sand. I didn’t care about scorpions or the western diamondback. I didn’t care about rocks or who might see us.

“Baby, what are you doing to me,” he whispered into my hair.

THE LAST TIME I had heard two adults fight was the night my mother stabbed Barry in the hand. Smashing, crashing. I covered my head with the pillow, but I could still hear every word through the thin walls, Starr’s drunken screeching, Ray’s murmuring rebuttals.

“You used to get it up fine, before you started fucking that lit-tle bitch. Admit it, you bastard, you’ve been fucking her!”

I crouched deeper into my sleeping bag, sweating, pretending it wasn’t me, it was some other girl, I was just a kid, I had nothing to do with this.

“Fuck my sponsor! God, I should have got rid of her when I had the chance!”

I imagined Ray sitting on the edge of the bed, his back slouched, hands dangling between his thighs, not interrupting her, just letting her blow it off, warding off her drunken slaps, wishing she would pass out. I could hear his voice, still calm, soothing, reasonable. “Starr, you’re shitfaced.”

“You perv. You like fucking kids? What’s next, dogs? You really like that skinny twat better than me? That no-tit baby?”

The shame, knowing that the boys were listening, now they knew everything.

“She got a tighter pussy than me? She suck you off like me? Does she take it up the ass? No, really, I want to know what kid fuckers do.”

How long did I think I was going to get away with it? I wished I’d never come here, I wished I’d never been born. Yet I had to admit there was a part of me that was proud, even excited, that Ray couldn’t get it up for Starr. He couldn’t fuck her, no matter how big her tits were, no matter if she let him put it up her ass. It was me he wanted.

“Fuck my sponsor, you call my fucking sponsor. I’m going in there and I’m going to cash her check.”

I heard more crashing, yelling, and then suddenly the door to my room flew open. Starr in her Victoria’s Secret rose negligee all twisted around, both huge tits exposed, was waving the .38. I would see that sight for years in my dreams. She fired without aiming, one arm extended. I rolled onto the floor and the room was full of the smell of gunfire and flying chipboard. I tried to wedge myself under the bed.

“You crazy.” Ray and Starr struggled. I moved out where I could see them. He twisted her arm behind her back and took the gun away. He was naked, and bent her backwards by her arm, so that his cock pressed into her buttocks, her tits pointing at the ceiling, shivering like small scared animals as he pushed her with his hips toward the door.

“Fuck you, Ray, fuck you!”

“Anytime,” he said as he shoved her out.

Maybe they would do it now and forget all about me. There was a hole in the closet wall. I started to get dressed. I wasn’t going to stick around anymore, not with that crazy drunk and a houseful of guns. I was going to call my caseworker tonight. I’d let Ray know where I was, but I couldn’t stay here.

Then I heard fighting in their room, and Starr was back, firing at me as I was struggling into my clothes. Pain bloomed in my shoulder, raced fire across my ribs. I staggered for the dresser, to climb up and out the window, but then she fired again, and my hip exploded. I fell onto the floor. I could see her coral painted toenails. “I told you to leave him alone.” The ceiling, no air, the metallic smell of static and gunpowder and my own blood.

LIGHT IN MY EYES. Hands moving me. Someone was screaming. God

– uniforms, questions. Bearded man, woman, shirt buttoned wrong.

Flashlight in my eyes. “Where’s Ray?” I asked, turning my head from the light.

“Astrid?” Davey, the light in his glasses. Holding me together. “She’s coming to.”

Another face. Blond, doll-like. False eyelashes. Black shirt.

Schutzstaffel. “Astrid, who did this? Who shot you?” Just tell us, tell us who.

Davey shoved his glasses up his nose. Stared into my eyes. He shook his head, imperceptibly, but I saw.

In the doorway, the two little boys huddled. Jackets over their pajamas.

Owen with his broken-necked giraffe, head sagging over his arm. Peter with the jar of lizards. The foster kids. They knew what came next.

“Astrid, what happened. Who did this to you?” I closed my eyes. Where could I begin to answer such a question anyway.

Beard Man swabbed my arm, stuck the needle in, IV.

“She going to be okay?” Davey asked.

“Great job, son. Without you she’d have already bled to death.” Hands under me. Firestorms of pain as they lifted me onto the stretcher.

Screaming. Fire. Fire. Beard Man held up the IV bag.

“That’s it,” he said. “Just relax.”

I stared into Davey’s eyes, knowing that who felt worse was a toss-up.

He held my hand, and I held his, as hard as I could though the painkillers were knocking me out. “My stuff.”

“We’ll get it later.” Caseworker. Couldn’t even button her shirt right.

Davey started grabbing things, my mother’s books, my sketchbook, some paintings, the animal scat poster. But Ray… “Davey, my box.”

Davey’s face darkened. He’d read the tracks. My brain fading into blue-greens and yellows, a coruscating flicker of Tiffany glass. “Please,” I whispered.

“Let go now, sweetheart. You need to come with us.”

He grabbed the wooden jewelry box, his face twisted like when his shoulder was dislocated. He stayed with me as they wheeled me out to the ambulance, shrugging off the blackshirt doll woman as she tried to lead him away. Overhead, the cradle moon shone like a silver hoop. Beard Man talking to me as he loaded me in the back of the ambulance. “Relax, you’ve got to relax now. We’ve got your stuff.” Then the rear doors closed, Davey went away, the night swallowed him, swallowed them all.