[ebooktalk] Sisterland

• From: "David Russell" <david.russell8@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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• Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 16:21:51 +0100

The book is attached.

Sisterland
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
Also by Curtis Sittenfeld

American Wife

The Man of My Dreams

Prep
For more information on Curtis Sittenfeld and her books,

see her website at www.curtissittenfeld.com

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For my aunts,
Ellen Battistelli and Dede Alexander,
who are Missouri natives
Sisterland
Prologue

December 1811

New Madrid, Louisiana Territory

The first carthquake wasn t the strongestgould
come
later, in February 1812--but it must have been the most astonishing.
It occurred shortly after two in the morning, and I imagine it awakening
the people of New Madrid: the farmers and fur traders, the French Creoles
and Indians and American pioneers. More men than women lived in the
river town, and few families; the population was probably less than a
thousand. The people were lying in their beds on this cold and ordinary
night when without warning a tremendous cracking sound interrupted
the quiet, a growing thunder, followed by the impossible fact of the quake
itself: the rocking not just of their beds or floors or houses but of the land
beneath them. Whether they stayed inside or hurried out, they'd have
heard their animals crying, heard trees snapping, the Mississippi roaring up; 
so much fog and smoke filled the darkness that they would have felt the roll of 
the earth before they realized they could see it, too, undulating like the 
ocean. In some places, the ground split apart and flung up water, sand, and 
rocks, entire trees it had swallowed shortly before, and in turn it
devoured horses and cows. Rising out of the cracks and holes was the
smell of sulfur, like the wicked breath of the devil emanating from deep
underground.
For hours, the convulsions didn't stop, and when eventually their bewildering
rhythm changed, it was not to decrease but to intensify: rl'wice
more, at seven in the morning and again at eleven, the earth exploded
anew. And daybreak had not brought light. Still there was the chaos of
vapors, the bleats and squawks of domesticated and wild animals, the collapsing
trees and spewing land and mercilessly teeming river.
Only around noon did the earth settle, and only gradually. But what
was left? The people's homes--one-story log or frame structures--were
leveled, as were the town's stores and churches. The land was broken, the
river roiling. The banks of the Mississippi had simply plunged into the
water below, carrying with them houses, graveyards, and forests; canoes
and keelboats had vanished under thirty-lot waves, reappeared, and vanished
again.
Though it must have seemed, on the afternoon of December 16, 1811, that the 
world was ending, more destruction would tbllow. In this same
remote area, another powerful quake occurred on January 23, 1812, and
two weeks later, on February 7, the last and biggest. In just months, whole
towns disappeared not only from the Louisiana Territory--soon to
become the Territory of Missouri--but also from the Mississippi Territory
and Tennessee. People claimed that the Mississippi River ran backward
and that the effects of the quakes were felt hundreds of miles away:
that clocks stopped in Natchez, chimneys collapsed in Louisville, and
church bells rang in Boston.

But perhaps these myths were merely that, embellishments more irresistible
than accurate. Magnitude scales wouldn't exist for another century,
so calculations of the New Madrid quakes came long afterward,
and though the highest estimates placed them above 8.0--stronger than
the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the strongest of any continental
earthquake in United States history--other guesses were closer to a magnitude 
7. Which would have made them frightening, certainly, but not
unprecedented.

My husband would say that such distinctions matter, that there are
ways of conducting research and establishing hypotheses based on credible
evidence. My sister would disagree. She would say that we create our
own reality--that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.
Chapter ii

September 2009
St. Louis, Missouri

The shaking shirred aliouniii three in the morning and it happened that I was 
already awake because I'd nursed Owen at two and then, instead of going back to 
sleep, I'd lain there brooding about the fight I'd had at lunch with my sister, 
Vi. I'd driven with Owen and Rosie in the backseat to pick up Vi, and the four 
of us had gone to Hacienda. We'd finished eating and I was collecting Rosie's 
stray food from the tabletop--once I had imagined I wouldn't be the kind of 
mother who ordered chicken tenders for her child off the menu at a Mexican
restaurant--when Vi said, "So I have a date tomorrow."

"That's great," I said. "Who is it?"
Casually, after running the tip of her tongue over her top teeth to check for 
food, Vi said, "She's an IT consultant, which sounds boring, but she's traveled 
a lot in South and Central America, so she couldn't be a total
snooze, right?"
I was being baited, but I tried to match Vi's casual tone as I said, "Did you 
meet online?" Rosie, who was two and a half, had gotten up from the table, 
wandered over to a ficus plant in the corner, and was smelling the leaves. 
Beside me in the booth, buckled into his car seat, Owen, who was six months, 
grabbed at a little plush giraffe that hung from the car seat's handle.

Vi nodded. "There's pretty slim pickings for dykes in St. Louis."
"So that's what you consider yourself these days?" I leaned in and said
in a lowered tone, "A lesbian?"

Looking amused, Vi imitated my inclined posture and quiet voice.
"What if the manager hears you?" she said. "And gets a boner?" She
grinned. "At this point, I'm bi-celibate. Or should I say Vi-sexual? But I
figure it's all a numbers game--I keep putting myself out there and, eventually,
I cross paths with Ms. or Mr. Right."
"Meaning you're on straight dating sites, too?"
"Not at the moment, but in the future, maybe." Our waitress approached
and left the bill at the edge of the table. I reached for it as soon as
she'd walked away--when Vi and I ate together, I always paid without
discussion--and Vi said, "Don't leave a big tip. She was giving us attit
ude."

"I didn't notice."

"And my fajita was mostly peppers."
"You of all people should realize that's not the waitress's fault." For
years, all through our twenties, Vi had worked at restaurants. But she was
still regarding me skeptically as I set down my credit card, and I added,
"It's rude not to tip extra when you bring little kids." We were at a 
conversational
crossroads. Either we could stand, I could gather the mess of
belongings that accompanied me wherever I went--once I had been so
organized that I kept my spice rack alphabetized, and now I left hats and
bibs and sippy cups in my wake, baggies of Cheerios, my own wallet and
sunglasses--and the four of us could head out to the parking lot and then
go on to drop Vi at her house, all amicably. Or I could express a sentiment
that wasn't Vi, in her way, asking me to share?
"I believe in tipping well for great service," Vi was saying. "This girl was
phoning it in."
I said, "If you feel equally attracted to men and women, why not date
men? Isn't it just easier? I mean, I wish it weren't true, but--" I glanced at
my daughter right as she pulled a ficus leaf off the plant and extended her
tongue toward it. I had assumed the plant was fake and, therefore, durable,
and I called out, "No mouth, Rosie. Come over here." When I looked back at Vi, 
I couldn't remember what I'd wanted to say next. Hadn't I had an
other point? And Vi was sneering in a way that made me wish, already,
that I'd simply let the moment pass.
"Easier?" Her voice was filled with contempt. "It's just easier to be
straight? As in, what, less embarrassing to my uptight sister?"
"That's not what I said."

"Don't you think it would be easier if black people hadn't demanded to
ride in the front of the bus like white people? Or go to the same schools?
That was so awkward when that happened!" This seemed to be an indirect
reference to my friend Hank, but I ignored it.
"I don't have a problem with gay people," I said, and my cheeks were
aflame, which I'd have known, even if I hadn't been able to feel their heat,
by the fact that Vi's were, too. We would always be identical twins, even
though we were no longer, in most ways, identical.
"Where's Rosie's baloney?" Rosie said. She had returned from the ficus
plant--thank goodness--and was standing next to me.
"It's at home," I said. "We didn't bring it." The baloney was a piece from
a lunch-themed puzzle, a life-sized pink wooden circle on a yellow wooden
square, that Rosie had recently become inexplicably attached to. I said to
Vi, "Don't make me out to be homophobic. It's a statement of fact that life
is simpler--it is, Vi--don't look at me like that. It's not like two women
can get married in Missouri, and there's a lot of financial stuff that goes
along with that, or visiting each other in the hospital. Or having kids--for
gay couples, that's complicated and it's expensive, too."
"Having kids period is complicated!" Vi's anger had taken on an explosive
quality, and I felt people at nearby tables looking toward us. "And this
whole making-life-simpler bullshit?" she continued. While I flinched at
the swear word in front of Rosie, it didn't seem intentional--there was no
question that Vi sometimes liked to provoke me, but it appeared she was
swept up in the moment. "Children are nothing but a problem people create
and then congratulate themselves on solving. Look at you and Jeremy,
for Christ's sake. 'Oh, we can't leave the house because it's Rosie's naptime,
we can't be out past five forty-five P.M.' or whenever the fuck it is--" I was
pretty sure Rosie had only a vague notion of what these obscenities, or
anything else Vi was saying, meant, but I could sense her watching rapt
from beside me, no doubt even more enthralled because she'd heard her

own name. "Or, `She can't wear that sunscreen because it has parabens in
mean, seriously, can you even tell me what a paraben is?--and 'She
can't eat raw carrots because she might choke,' and on and on and on. But
who asked you to have children? Do you think you're providing some service
to the world? You got pregnant because you wanted to--which, okay,
that's your right, but then other people can't do what they want to because
it's too complicated?"
"Fine," I said. "Forget I said anything."
"Don't be a pussy."

I glared at her. "Don't call me names."
"Well, it seems awfully convenient that you get to speak your mind and
then close down the discussion."

"I need to go home for their naps," I said, and there was a split second
in which Vi and I looked at each other and almost laughed. Instead, sourly,
she said, "Of course you do."
In the car, she was silent, and after a couple minutes, Rosie said from
the backseat, "Mama wants to sing the Bingo song."
"I'll sing it later," I said.
"Mama wants to sing the Bingo song now," Rosie said, and when I didn't respond, 
she added in a cheerful tone, "When you take off your
diaper, it makes Mama very sad."
Vi snorted unpleasantly. "Why don't you just toilet train her?"
"We're going to soon."
Vi said nothing, and loathing for her flared up in me, which was probably
just what she wanted. It was one thing for my sister to fail to appreciate
the energy I put into our lunches, the sheer choreography of getting
a six-month-old and a two-year-old out of the house, into the car, into a
restaurant, and back home with no major meltdowns (never in my children's
presence could have ordered a meal as intricately, messily hands
on as a fajita), but it was another thing entirely for Vi to mock me. And yet,
in one final attempt at diplomacy, as I stopped the car on the street outside
the small single-story gray house where Vi lived, I said, "For Dad's birthday,
I was thinking--"
"Let's talk about it later."

"Fine." If she thought I was going to plead for forgiveness, she was mistaken,
and it wasn't just because we really did need to get home for Rosie
and Owen's naps. She climbed from the car, and before she shut the door,
I said, "By the way?"
A nasty satisfaction rose in me as she turned. She was prepared for me
to say, I didn't mean to be such a jerk in the restaurant. Instead, I said,
"Parabens are preservatives."
Fourteen hours later, at three in the morning, our squabble was what I
was stewing over; specifically, I was thinking that the reason I'd made my
points so clumsily was that what I really believed was even more offensive
than that being straight was easier than being gay. I believed Vi was dating
women because she was at her heaviest ever--she'd quit smoking in the
spring, and now she had to be sixty pounds overweight--and most lesbians
seemed to be more forgiving about appearances than most straight
men. I didn't think I'd object to Vi being gay if I believed she actually was,
but something about this development felt false, akin to the way she'd
wished, since our adolescence, that she'd been born Jewish, or the way she
kept a dream catcher above her kitchen sink. Lying there in the dark next
to Jeremy, I wondered what would happen if I were to suggest that she and
I do Weight Watchers together; I myself was still carrying ten extra pounds
from being pregnant with Owen. Then I thought about how most nights
Jeremy and I split a pint of ice cream in front of the TV, how it was pretty
much the best part of the day--the whole ritual of relaxation after both
children were asleep and before Owen woke up for his ten P.M. nursing--
and how it seemed unlikely that half a pint of fudge ripple was part of any
diet plan. This was when the bed in which Jeremy and I slept began to
shake.

I assumed at first that Jeremy was causing the mattress to move by
turning over, except that he wasn't turning. The rocking continued for
perhaps ten seconds, at which point Jeremy abruptly sat up and said, "It's
an earthquake." But already the rocking seemed to be subsiding.
I sat up, too. "Are you sure?"
"You get Owen and I'll get Rosie." Jeremy had turned on the light on his
nightstand and was walking out of the room, and as I hurried from bed,
adrenaline coursed through me; my heart was beating faster and I felt 
simultaneously
unsteady and purposeful. In his crib, illuminated by a
starfish-shaped night-light, Owen was lying on his back as I'd left him
an hour earlier, his arms raised palms up on either side of his head, his
cheeks big and smooth, his nose tiny. I hesitated just a second before lifting
him, and I grabbed one of the eight pacifiers scattered in the crib. As
I'd guessed he would, he blinked awake, seeming confused, but made
only one mournful cry as I stuck in the pacifier. In the small central hallway
that connected the house's three bedrooms, we almost collided with
Jeremy and Rosie, Rosie's legs wrapped around Jeremy's torso, her arms
dangling limply over his shoulders, her face half-obscured by tangled hair.
Her eyes were open, I saw, but barely.
"Do we go to the basement?" I said to Jeremy. The shaking had definitely
stopped.

"That's tornadoes."

"What is it for earthquakes?" In retrospect, it's hard to believe I needed
to ask, hard to believe I had reached the age of thirty-four and given birth
to two children without bothering to learn such basic information.
Jeremy said, "In theory, you get under a table, but staying in bed is okay,
too."

"Really?" We looked at each other, my husband sweet and serious in his
gray T-shirt and blue-striped boxer shorts, our daughter draped across
him.

"You want me to check?" He meant by looking online from his phone,
which he kept beside the bed at night.
"We shouldn't call Courtney, should we?" I said. "They must have felt
it if we did." Courtney Wheeling was Jeremy's colleague at Washington
University--his area of study was aquatic chemistry, hers was seismology
and plate tectonics--and she and her husband, Hank, lived down the
street and were our best friends.

"It doesn't seem necessary," Jeremy said. "I'll look at FEMA's website,
but I think the best thing is for all of us to go back to bed."
I nodded my chin toward Rosie. "Keeping them with us or in their own
rooms?"

Rosie's head popped up. "Rosie sleeps with Mama!" A rule of thumb
with Rosie was that whether I did or didn't think she was following the
conversation, I was always wrong.
"Keeping them," Jeremy said. "In case of aftershocks."
In our room, I climbed into bed holding Owen, shifting him so he was
nestled in my right arm while Jeremy helped Rosie settle on my other side.
I wasn't sure whether to be alarmed or pleasantly surprised that Jeremy
was all right with having the kids sleep with us. In general, he was the one
who resisted bringing them into our bed; he'd read the same books in
Rosie's infancy that I had, half of which argued that sharing a bed with
your kids was the most nurturing thing you could do and the other half of
which warned that doing so would result in your smothering them either
figuratively or literally. But I liked when they were close by--whether or
not it really was safer, at some primitive level it felt like it had to be--and
the thought of them sleeping alone in their cribs sometimes pinched at my
heart. Besides, I could never resist their miniature limbs and soft skin.

Rosie curled toward me then, tapping my arm, and I turned--
awkwardly, because of how I was holding Owen--to look at her. She said,
"Rosie wants a banana."

"In the morning, sweetheart."
Jeremy had gone to the window that faced the street, and he parted the
curtains. "Everyone's lights are on," he said.
"A monkey eats a banana peel," Rosie declared. "But not people."
"That's true," I said. "It would make us sick."

Jeremy was typing on his phone. After a minute, he said, "There's nothing
about it online yet." He looked up. "How's he doing?"
"He's more asleep than awake, but will you get an extra binky just in
case?" Surely this was evidence of the insularity of our lives: that unless
otherwise specified, whenever Jeremy or I said he, we meant our son, and
whenever we said she, we meant our daughter. On a regular basis, we sent
each other texts consisting in their entirety of one letter and one punctua
tion mark: R? for How's Rosie doing? and 0? for How's Owen? And surely
it was this insularity that so irritated Vi, whereas to me, the fact that my
life was suburban and conventional was a victory.

Jeremy returned from Owen's room with a second pacifier, handed it to
me, and lay down before turning off the light on his nightstand. Then--
I whispered, because whispering seemed more appropriate in the dark--
I said, "So if there are aftershocks, we just stay put?"
"And keep away from windows. That's pretty much all I could find on
the FEMA site."

"Thanks for checking." Over Owen's head, I reached out to rub Jeremy's
shoulder.

I felt them falling asleep one by one then, my son, my daughter, and
my husband. Awake alone, I experienced a gratitude for my life and our
family, the four of us together, accounted for and okay. In contrast to the
agitation I'd been gripped by before the earthquake, I was filled with
calmness, a sense that we'd passed safely through a minor scare--like
when you speed up too fast in slow highway traffic and almost hit the car
in front of you but then you don't. The argument with Vi, inflated prior to
the quake, shrank to its true size; it was insignificant. My sister and I had
spent three decades bickering and making up.

But now that several years have passed, it pains me to remember this
night because I was wrong. Although we were safe in that moment, we
hadn't passed through anything. Nothing was concluding, nothing was
finished; everything was just beginning. And though my powers weren't
what they once had been, though I no longer considered myself truly psychic,
I still should have been able to anticipate what would happen next.
Chapter 2

()lir rout

around six-fifteen either to Owen's squeaks on the monitor on my night
stand or to Rosie chatting with herself on the monitor on Jeremy's
nightstand. I'd go nurse Owen while Jeremy showered, then he'd take
both children downstairs to eat while I showered. When I joined them,
they'd have moved into the living room, which was also our playroom,
and I'd be only halfway down the steps before Rosie began making excited
announcements about my appearance--"Mama has a blue shirt!"--or
describing her own activities. As I reached the bottom step, she'd fling
herself into my arms, as if we were reuniting after many years apart. (How
flattering motherhood was, when they weren't smearing food on my
clothes or sneezing into my mouth.)
On this morning, Rosie squatted by the bookshelf and shouted, "Rosie's
driving a school bus!"
Jeremy, who was holding his phone and Owen, said, "The earthquake
had a magnitude of 4.9, and the epicenter was in Terre Haute, Indiana."
"Have you talked to Courtney yet?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I'll wait until I see her at school. I'm guessing she's
already fielding calls from the media."

As soon as I sat on the couch, Owen began kicking his legs and reaching
for me. I lifted my arms, and as Jeremy passed him over, he said, "By the way, 
your dad just called. He wants to know if you can take him
grocery shopping tomorrow instead of today."
"Is everything all right?"
"Well, he said he felt the earthquake, but he didn't seem worked up
about it."

"Since when does my dad call at seven A.m.?"
"Go call him now if you're worried."

I held Owen back toward Jeremy. He began to cry, and as I walked to
the kitchen, I heard Jeremy say, "Really, Owen? Am I really that bad?"
From our cordless phone, I called my father's apartment. After he answered,
I said, "So you felt the earthquake, too?"
"Just enough to know what it was," my father said. "I'm afraid I have to
postpone our trip to the store this afternoon. Will tomorrow work for
you?"
"Tomorrow's your birthday dinner, Dad." My father still drove--he
wasn't supposed to at night but was fine during the day--but even so,
since my mother's death ten years before, I'd taken him grocery shopping
once a week. We'd get deli meat and sliced cheese for his lunches and plan
out his dinners, for which he'd buy himself only the cheapest cuts of beef
and pork.
"I hope you're not planning anything fancy," my father said.
"I promise it'll be very low-key. What do you have to do this afternoon?"
"I'll be giving a lift to your sister. I'm sure you know she has a date."
Though my father didn't sound like he was complaining, irritation gathered
in me. About a year before, around the time my father's doctor had
told him he could no longer drive at night, Vi had stopped driving period.
She said she'd had enough of all the jackasses jabbering on their cellphones
while going eighty miles an hour; also, not driving was greener. But Vi
rarely recycled an aluminum can of Diet Coke, even when a bin was two
feet away, and it was obvious that the real explanation was that she'd developed
a phobia. I'd meant to get online and do some research, but many
months had passed without my doing so. I did get online on a daily basis,
usually in the afternoon when Rosie and Owen were both asleep, but once
in front of the computer, I'd forget everything I'd meant to do and end up
either on Facebook or reading about pregnant celebrities. Meanwhile, Vi
showed no inclination to start driving again, and socializing with her and
my father, especially during the evening, continued to require elaborate
planning.

"Dad, she can take a taxi to her date," I said. "She's not destitute." Vi
was always thousands of dollars in credit card debt, as I had once been,
too, but surely she could scrape together cab fare.
"I don't mind," my father said. "She doesn't think they'll be more than
an hour."

"They're meeting in the afternoon, not at night?"
"At three o'clock, at a Starbucks in Creve Coeur. Not too far off 270, I
believe. Vi said I'm welcome to come in and sit at another table, but I'll just
bring the paper and make myself comfortable in the car."
"That doesn't sound like much fun for you." My father had also said
nothing to suggest that Vi had revealed the gender of her date to him. It
was so like my sister to have our almost-seventy-four-year-old father drive
her, even to be okay with him following her inside, yet not to bother
explaining to him either online dating or her nascent lesbianism. (The
first I'd ever heard of Vi being involved with a woman was two summers
before, when she'd met someone named Cindy at a spirituality conference in 
Illinois. Cindy was our age but wore a long gray-and-green batik skirt
with a matching flowing shirt and the kind of sandals you'd go river rafting
in, and thirty seconds after meeting me, she said in a faux-sympathetic
tone, "You give off a very, very tired energy, and you need to make more
time for yourself." When of course I was tired--I had a six-month-old
baby! Vi hadn't introduced Cindy to our father, and a few weeks later,
Vi had told me she and Cindy were no longer on speaking terms. Since
then, Vi hadn't, to my knowledge, dated anyone.)
I said to my father, "I have a question for you about tomorrow. It's just
as easy for Jeremy to grill salmon or steak, and since it's your birthday, you
should decide."

"Oh, heavens, I'm not picky." He was quiet before adding, "Vi seems
well these days, doesn't she? She's come into her own."

My father tended to speak in code, which had to do, I believed, with his
midwestern decorum, a discretion so extreme that it precluded direct
mention of a wide range of topics. Perhaps the worst thing Jeremy had ever
said to me, when we'd been together about six months, was that my father
was cold. Jeremy had made this remark after we'd invited my father to
hear the symphony and he'd declined without giving any reason, and the
way Jeremy had said it had been as if this view was a shared understanding
we had instead of a scathing observation on his part. "Well, I've never
heard him say 'I love you," Jeremy had added. "I've never heard him give
you a compliment." When I began to cry, I think Jeremy was shocked. But
to me, my father had always been the kind, warm parent. He was reticent,
yes, but he wasn't cold.
In this moment, however, I truly had no idea what my father was talking
about when he said Vi was doing well: Her job, which I had long assumed
was as much a source of discomfort for him as it was for me? The
fact that she had a date?
I said, "I guess she does seem good." That she and I had had a fight
wasn't worth burdening my father with. "All right," I added. "So Jeremy
will get you tomorrow at five o'clock."
Back in the living room, I said, "My dad is driving Vi to her date, but I
don't even think Vi's told him it's a woman." The night before, I had recounted
to Jeremy my disagreement with Vi at Hacienda, including the
part where she'd declared that children were a problem people created
then congratulated themselves for solving, at which point Jeremy had
laughed and said, "She's right."
I said, "I assumed the woman was picking her up, but they're meeting
this afternoon at a Starbucks in Creve Coeur."

"How romantic," Jeremy said.
"I know, right?" Even though I wasn't exactly rooting for a thriving
lesbian romance for my sister, she'd be better off meeting the IT consultant
at night for a drink. How could you possibly fall in love off Interstate
270, on a Thursday afternoon? As I dropped to my knees and began
picking up blocks that were strewn across the rug, I said, "So I think for
his birthday dinner, my dad wants steak."
444
A few iiif mites after twelve, Rosie pounded on the Wheelings' door
while I unfastened the various harnesses keeping Owen strapped into his
half of the double stroller. From the porch, I could hear the television in
their living room, which was never on in the middle of the day. Hank had
an odd expression--both perplexed and amused--as he held open the
door. "So do you know or do you not know that your sister was just on
Channel 5?"

"What are you talking about?"
"Do you ever feel like there are only six people in St. Louis?" Hank said.
"And we're either married or related to half of them?"

"If you think that, try having grown up here. Why was Vi on TV?" Although
Hank didn't seem perturbed, my pulse had quickened. Please let it
just be a man-on-the-street interview, I thought. Something about the Cardinals
or the Highway 40 construction. I followed Rosie inside with Owen
in my arms.
"Hey, Rosie the Riveter," Hank said, and Amelia, who was Hank and
Courtney's three-year-old daughter and who was standing on the couch,
called out, "My mom is on TV!"
I turned back to Hank. "What's going on?"

"Courtney and Vi were in the same news segment about the earthquake."
"Why
would Vi be--" I started to ask, and Hank said, "I think it's better
if you just watch. I DVR'd it for Courtney."
"Is it good or bad?"
On the wall in one corner of their living room was a large flat-screen
TV, and Hank held the remote control toward it. "It's not that it's bad," he
said. "But you'll think it is."
I tried not to grip Owen too tightly as I faced the screen. The segment
began with a young brunette reporter describing the earthquake that had
occurred during the night and providing an overview of the region's geology.
"San Francisco gets more attention," she said, "but heartland dwellers
know that one of the strongest continental earthquakes ever recorded in
the U.S. had its epicenter in the Missouri Bootheel, just a few hours south
of St. Louis." Courtney then appeared on-screen, Courtney as in I lank's
wife and Jeremy's colleague, sitting behind the desk in her office. "In

fact, it was a series of between three and five seismic events, the first of

which was in December 1811 and the last in February 1812," she said, and

she sounded calm and authoritative. COURTNEY WHEELING, WASHINGTON

UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF GEOPHYSICS, it said in black letters at the bot

tom
of the screen. "At this point, we don't know if the second and third
events on December 16, 1811, were quakes or aftershocks. As for the question
of whether we're living in an active seismic zone right now--"
Before Courtney could finish, the reporter said, "According to one area
woman, the answer is very much so." Hank laughed, presumably because
it seemed obvious that Courtney had been about to say the opposite, and
then Vi filled the screen. Seeing her, I flinched. The big, loose purple tunic
she wore had seemed unnoteworthy at Hacienda but now appeared garish,
and even if she hadn't been in the same clothes, I'd have guessed she hadn't 
slept the night before: There were shadows under her eyes, her face was
puffy, and she didn't have on makeup. I had never been on television myself,
but I knew you at least needed foundation.
"Another earthquake is coming soon. A powerful, powerful earthquake."
In voice-over, as footage showed Vi giving a tour of her living
room--the iron candelabra set on the windowsill and the Tibetan prayer
flags strung across one wall and the little fountain in the corner, with
water bubbling over a pile of stones--the reporter said, "Violet Shramm,
a self-described psychic medium living in Rock Hill, claims that the tremors 
St. Louis residents felt earlier today were a prelude to a much bigger
earthquake. No, she doesn't have proof, but in 2004 she helped Florissant
police find nine-year-old kidnapping victim Brady Ogden, she publicly
predicted Michael Jackson's death in June--and she says she had a hunch
about the quake that happened early this morning."
"I did a reading for a group last night," Vi told the camera, "and the last
thing I said to them was, 'Be careful, because Mother Earth is very restless
right now."
I glanced at Hank. "I thought you said it wasn't that bad."
"Well, I wish they weren't pitted against each other. I'm sure Courtney had no 
idea."
"She looks deranged," I said, and added, as if it were necessary, "Not
Courtney."
"Shramm knows she'll have her skeptics," the reporter was saying, "but
she believes that staying quiet could do i-ihore harm than good."
"If I can save just one life," Vi said, "that's what's important."
The shot shifted to an image of a map with a pulsing red circle over the
border between Missouri and Arkansas on one side and Kentucky and
Tennessee on the other. "No doubt about it, we're in a hot zone," the reporter
said. "But according to Washington University's Wheeling, the Big
One could come tomorrow--or never."

"It's no likelier to happen next week than fifty years from now," Courtney
explained, and she looked, I noticed this time around, impeccably
tasteful in a gray blouse, a black suit jacket, small silver earrings, and well
applied foundation; her short blond hair was neatly brushed. "Does it hurt
to keep emergency supplies in the basement? Not at all. But in terms of
daily threats for St. Louisans, I'd say something like obesity far outranks
earthquakes."

"Oh, God," I said, and Hank said, "Yeah, she could have chosen a different
example."
"Every year, GPS instruments record hundreds of instances of seismic
activity on and around the New Madrid fault line, yet we feel virtually
none of it because it's not that strong," Courtney was saying on-screen,
and she sounded serene and wise and not sleep-deprived. "The reality is
that if you're using seismometers, you'll see earthquakes occurring." She
smiled. "The earth is always busy."
The brunette reporter reappeared in front of Vi's house, though blessedly
without Vi herself anywhere in view. "For St. Louisans rattled first by
recent events and now by future predictions, let's hope not too busy," the
reporter said. "Back to you, Denise."
Hank paused the screen, and I turned to him and said, "That was
awful."

"So Vi's eccentric," Hank said. "It's not illegal."
"Kate, Owen spit out his binky." Amelia was pulling on my hand. "He
spit it on the floor." She held the pacifier up toward me, and I rubbed it
against my shirt and stuck it back in Owen's mouth. I glanced at Rosie,
who was setting a blanket over a row of Amelia's stuffed animals, and I
wondered if she realized her aunt had just been on television.
"Vi must have called the station herself, right?" I said. "I mean, how else
would they have found her? It's not like she's an expert on earthquakes."
No, the earthquake expert--that was Courtney. The feeling that gripped
me in this moment was similar to what I imagined the relatives of an alcoholic
must experience when they learn that their parent or child or sibling
has gone on another bender: that mix of anger and disappointment and
lack of surprise, a blend so exquisite, so familiar, it's almost like 
satisfaction.
Of course. Of course Vi had had a premonition about something big,
and of course, instead of taking the time to think it through, she'd called
a television station, and of course she'd let herself be interviewed while
wearing no makeup. Why did she always get in her own way? I was embarrassed,
yes, but my embarrassment was mostly for her, not me. After all,
we no longer had the same last name, no longer looked identical. People I
was close to knew I had a twin sister, but acquaintances--my former
co-workers, or our neighbors other than the Wheelings--wouldn't connect
me to this strange woman in her purple shirt, with her weird prediction.
I said, "I'll never understand why she likes drawing attention to
herself." After a beat, I added, "And the reason you think Vi is delightfully
eccentric is that you're not from here." Hank, Courtney, and my husband
had all grown up on the East Coast: Courtney outside Philadelphia, Hank
in Boston, and Jeremy in northern Virginia.
"Oh, I'm not arguing that there aren't some small-minded yokels in the
Lou," Hank said, and I realized with self-consciousness that a black man
married to a white woman probably didn't need to be reminded by me of
how conservative a place St. Louis could be. "But--" Hank paused and
mouthed, Fuck 'em. "Seriously," he said aloud.
"What about Courtney, though?" I said. "She must have been appalled
by Vi just now."
"She hasn't seen it yet." Hank checked his watch. "She teaches until 
one-fifteen. But I'm sure she'll be okay being the yin to Vi's yang."
You mean the rational to Vi's crazy, I thought, but even in my head it
sounded too mean to say. Besides, I didn't believe Vi was crazy. I believed
she sometimes seemed crazy, and that on a regular basis she exercised bad
judgment, but I didn't believe she was crazy; I never had. "Should we get
going?" I said.
Amelia attended preschool in the morning three days a week, at a place
where I was planning to put in an application for Rosie for the following fall, 
so on those days, we met up post-lunch and pre-nap. Our default plan
was to walk first to Kaldi's, where Hank and I would get coffee and the
girls would split a scone, and then to backtrack to the park--officially
known as DeMun Park, though Hank had been greatly amused when Vi told us that 
everyone who'd ever worked in the row of restaurants along
DeMun Avenue referred to it as MILF Park.

As we left the Wheelings' house, it occurred to me that I should call my 
father, to check if he'd watched the news, but after his comment that
morning about Vi coming into her own, I couldn't bring myself to do it; in case 
he hadn't seen her, I wanted to give him a few more hours of not
knowing.
Outside, Amelia and Rosie skipped in front of us, and Hank walked
beside me as I pushed Owen in the stroller. Amelia slapped her palm
against a lamppost, and when Rosie mimicked the gesture exactly, I
thought, as I often did, that Amelia and Hank were like mentors to Rosie and 
me: Amelia was always beckoning Rosie toward the next developmental
stage, while Hank was the person who'd most influenced me as a parent.
It was from Hank that I'd learned to give Rosie her own spoon when
I'd fed her jar food, so that she wasn't constantly grabbing the one I was
using. Hank had told me to put Triple Paste on her when her diaper rash
got bad ("Way more than you think you need, like you're spreading cream
cheese on a bagel," he'd said), and to buy a Britax car seat after she outgrew
her infant seat, and to go to the Buder library for the best story hour.
The way Hank was with Amelia--affectionate and relaxed, unconcerned
with getting mud or food on his clothes--was the way I aspired to be with
Rosie, and the way Hank answered the questions Amelia asked, which was
succinctly but accurately (and definitely not cutely, not in a winking manner
for the benefit of another adult), was the way I tried to answer Rosie's
when she began asking them.
As we turned onto DeMun Avenue, I said, "Courtney looked good on
TV. How's she feeling?"
"Not too bad. She wants to get the results of her CVS, just for peace of
mind, but she hasn't been nauseous for a while."
Courtney was eleven weeks pregnant, expecting in April. When we'd
gotten to know the Wheelings, they'd been in agreement that they were
having only one child, and in fact, Rosie had been the beneficiary of
Amelia's pricey hand-me-downs, which Courtney had told me with such
certainty they'd never want back that I hadn't worried when Rosie ripped
or stained them. And then, the summer after she got tenure, Courtney
decided she wanted another child. Not only wasn't it difficult for her to
persuade Hank, it was so easy that I suspected he'd have preferred two
kids all along. Courtney was then thirty-seven, and when they hadn't conceived
within six months, she began taking Clomid; after another six
months, she decided to have IVF but hadn't yet started the first cycle when
she discovered she was pregnant.
I'd had Owen during the time Courtney and Hank had been trying for
a second baby, and I had never spoken to Courtney about their fertility
troubles; Courtney herself still hadn't told me she was pregnant, and
everything I knew had made its way to me via Hank. Courtney also hadn't
broached the subject with Jeremy, though they were closer than Courtney
and I were. Once it had seemed slightly strange to me that our friendships
with the Wheelings broke down not along gender lines but along professional
ones--like me, Hank was the stay-at-home parent--but these days
I rarely thought about it.
"So this morning Amelia wakes up at five-fifteen," Hank said. "Not like
wakes up crying in the night, but wakes up wakes up, in a great mood,
wanting to eat breakfast. And she'd slept through the earthquake, but
Courtney and I had been up then, too, so I was so tired I felt hungover. It was 
like all the downside of a hangover without any of the fun. I started
thinking about getting up in the night with a newborn, and I seriously
don't know if I have it in me again."
I laughed. "I think that train has left the station."

"It's been a while for us," Hank said. "And we aren't spring chickens
anymore."
"Oh, please." Hank and Courtney were only four years older than I was,
and they were in great shape. Every Wednesday afternoon and Saturday
morning, they saw a trainer together, and they had met because they'd
both played varsity squash as Harvard undergrads, a fact I was glad I
hadn't known until my friendship with Hank was established--not the
squash part, though it was a sport with which I was totally unfamiliar, but
the Harvard part, which made Hank not quite the same breed of stay-at
home parent I was.
"Call me when you turn thirty-five," Hank said. "I swear something
changes."
"All right, geezer."
"I will say this: Your son is an excellent advertisement for babykind."
Hank stepped around the stroller, so he was facing Owen, and started
walking backward. "We want to order one just as easygoing as you, 0," he said.

"Not to confirm your fears, but you know he's not sleeping through the night 
yet, right?" I said. "He still nurses every three or four hours."
"For real?" Hank looked incredulous. "You've got to let him cry it out." Hank 
was still walking backward in front of the stroller, and he said to
Owen, "You don't want your mom to get a good night's sleep, huh? Kate, you 
should see the shit-eating grin your son has on his face right now."
I laughed, though beneath the levity of the moment, I felt a sudden Uneasiness 
that wasn't related to our conversation. It was the realization I hadn't 
allowed myself to have earlier, choosing instead to be distracted by how 
disheveled Vi had looked on the local news: My sister had received a warning 
that something bad was going to happen. I wasn't yet entirely convinced that 
there would be another earthquake, though I wasn't convinced
there wouldn't. Either way, she'd sensed something.
I said to Hank, "Do you and Courtney keep emergency supplies?"
"Not a one. Do you guys?"
I shook my head.
"You planning to go buy a generator now?"
A generator, no, but maybe a crank radio, and definitely water and
canned food. Aloud, as if the possibility amused me, I said, "I might."
"I have a confession," Hank said, and I felt a kind of tingle, a nervous
anticipation. I was both surprised and unsurprised when he said, "I know
how you feel about Vi's whole gig, but there's a part of me that believes in
that stuff. ESP, psychic predictions--the world's a pretty weird and cool
place, so why is it impossible?"
Again trying to sound lighthearted, I said, "Don't let Courtney hear
you say that."
"Ehh--" He shrugged. "She cuts me slack for being artsy." Before
Amelia's birth, Hank had worked as an art teacher at a private high school,
and he made oil paintings, or at least he intended to even if he didn't have
much time these days. The attic of their house, where I'd never been, was
his studio. He added, "My only point is that it's hubris to claim there aren't
unexplained phenomena out there."
Hank and I had been friends for just over two years, which wasn't
that long, but we'd seen each other almost every day during this time,
and there were ways in which he knew more about my daily life than
Jeremy did. Yet every time Hank and I had headed in a direction that
could have opened onto the topic of psychicness, of my psychicnessconversations 
about our families or our childhoods or about secrets,
even conversations once or twice about the paranormal--I'd always let
the opportunity to tell him pass. I'd imagined that I'd immediately wish I
could take the admission back. The last person I'd revealed the truth to
was Jeremy, because I'd thought I owed it to him. But if I wasn't marrying
Hank, was it unreasonable that I wanted to seem to him like a regular
person? Growing up, from adolescence on, I had assumed that I couldn't
live in St. Louis as an adult because my past would always follow and define
me. I'd been pleasantly surprised to discover that I might be wrong.
'lb have set tled in my hometown with a husband from elsewhere, to have
friends from elsewhere--this was a version of life I hadn't been able to
envision as a teenager. Why would I disrupt this fragile balance just for the
sake of self-disclosure? Hank and I knew each other well; we didn't need
to know each other completely.
And yet my withholding of information, which had previously felt only
like discretion, abruptly seemed to be verging on dishonesty. We'd arrived
at Kaldi's, and I pulled the brake on the stroller. Amelia, who was standing
with Rosie by the café's front door, called, "Daddy, can we have a raspberry
scone?"
"Hang on, sweetheart," Hank said.

"I'm sure Vi will be glad to have you in her corner," I said.
"But does she have you?" Though Hank's tone was casual, he was looking
at me so intently that I wondered what he suspected. Surely this was
the moment to say, Of course she does, because we're exactly the same. Or
we had been, until I'd deliberately destroyed my abilities.
Instead, like a coward, I said, "Of course she does. She's my sister."

Chapter 3

tn. AuQust I 97S I.eSS than. a mon.1 before our parents' first wedding 
anniversary. At thirty-seven weeks, we
were considered full-term, which was and still is unusual for twins, but
the truly notable fact of our arrival was that our mother didn't know until
the day of her delivery that there were two of us. Twenty-three years old
and slim, she had gained seventy pounds during her pregnancy; by her
second trimester, her hands and feet were so swollen every morning that
the doctor told her to remove her wedding ring or risk needing to have it
cut off.
Apart from her dramatic weight gain, our mother had experienced
what she understood to be a normal pregnancy. It was at a routine appointment
on a hot morning in mid-August that our mother's obstetrician
ordered an X ray because he was considering revising her due date
based on her size. (Sonograms existed then, but they were still uncommon.)
During the X ray, the technician saw right away that there were two
babies, announced the news to our mother, then pleaded with her to act
surprised when the obstetrician told her. But she didn't have to act--she
was stunned. How would she take care of twins? She had moved to St.
Louis a year and a half earlier from the tiny town of Risco, Missouri, and
she knew no one who could help her. She'd grown apart from the girl
she'd lived with before marrying our father, she was estranged from her
family in Risco, and she no longer had co-workers.
The doctor, who didn't want our mother carrying twins beyond thirty
seven
weeks, told her to call our father and have him pack a bag and meet
them at the hospital. Once there, the doctor broke our mother's water--
she said he used a hook that resembled a crochet needle, a detail that as
children, Vi found fascinating and I was disturbed by. After several hours,
the doctor decided that our mother's labor had progressed enough, and he
had an anesthetist administer an epidural. As soon as it took effect, our
mother realized only half her body was numb. She needed another dose,
she told the nurse, but the nurse explained that the anesthesia just hadn't
kicked in yet and our mother should wait. An hour passed, and our
mother, with increasing desperation, told the nurse she still was numb on
only one side of her body. After the doctor examined her, he said she was
too close to delivering to receive additional medication. This meant that
while the left side of her body remained desensitized and immobile, the
right side was wild with pain; one arm and leg writhed as the other lay
inert. She was trapped, and she also was alone; our father sat in the waiting
room.

When Vi emerged, our mother felt as if she'd been turned inside out. A
nurse whisked the baby away, and as the contractions continued, another
nurse told our mother to keep pushing, which our mother thought she
already was doing. I emerged eight minutes later and was similarly whisked
away. Our mother had neither held nor even really seen us; she was 
hyperventilating,
and though she soon stopped, she felt flattened, overwhelmed
by what she had just been through. She lay motionless in the hospital bed
and swore that she would never have another baby.
As for Vi and me, after our Apgar scores confirmed that we were
healthy, we were weighed (Vi was six pounds, nine ounces, and I was five
pounds, eleven ounces), then cleaned, wrapped in blankets, deposited
in bassinets, and taken to the nursery, where we were introduced to our
father. Vi was asleep, he said, and I was awake, and he went about memorizing
our faces. Vi had been named, but I hadn't. For the next five days,
though the nurses and our father repeatedly inquired about our mother's
preferences, she declined to answer. Having expected only one baby, she
had planned on Violet for a girl and Victor for a boy. What about Violet
and Victoria, our father suggested, but our mother shook her head. She
had spoken very little since our birth; she did not breast-feed us. Violet
and Margaret? (Margaret was the name of our father's mother.) Our
mother shook her head again. Violet and Daisy? our father asked, and our
mother shrugged. He took this as assent, and we became Violet Kimberly
and Daisy Kathleen. Our mother later claimed that Kimberly and Kathleen
had been maternity ward nurses, but our father denied it, saying the
nurses had merely helped him select our middle names.
As little girls, Vi and I loved hearing about our arrival in spite of the fact
that we didn't have a mother who concluded this narrative with lavish
expressions of affection. In retrospect, I'm not sure why we were so enthralled
by this story, aside from the fact that we possessed the guileless
self-absorption of most children. But it took having babies myself for me
to understand just how lacking, how depressing even, the story of our
births was, with its absence of any hint of joy on our mother's part. She
had looked forward to having one child, was my interpretation of events
when I became an adult, but having two did not double her excitement;
rather, it extinguished it. Our mother was neither a happy mother nor a
happy person. It's impossible for me to know if she was unhappy before
she had us, but I suspect she previously must have been able to enjoy herself
at least a little or I doubt that my father would have married her. And
not only married her but been so smitten that, as a thirty-nine-year-old
bachelor, he'd proposed to her within three months of their meeting and
left behind a life in Nebraska to move to St. Louis for this beautiful woman
seventeen years his junior.
It also took having babies of my own for me to truly imagine what that
experience in the hospital must have been like for my mother, how difficult:
At twenty-three, she was almost a decade younger than I was when I
delivered my first child; her husband wasn't in the delivery room to support
her; and the combination of the ineffective epidural and the still surprising
fact of there being two babies to push out must have been, in the
clinical sense, traumatizing. And things did not improve much, particularly
with regard to her isolation, when the hospital discharged the three

of us.
That morning, our mother had changed, for the first time since our arrival
five days earlier, from a hospital gown to a dress, and she was shocked
when she looked in the mirror. Between giving birth and shedding the
water weight that had made her swollen, she had lost at least thirty pounds;
her legs were so skinny that she reminded herself of Minnie Mouse. And
this, in a way, was the happy ending of our birth story, a happiness Vi and
I surely intuited, and celebrated, even if it had little to do with either of
us--that in spite of everything she'd been through, on the day she left the
hospital, our mother once again looked pretty.

Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb twelve miles southwest of
the St. Louis Arch. The blue shingled house on Gilbert Street that my parents
had bought when they married was the one they stayed in until after
I'd graduated from college, and for all that time my mother complained
about it. She said that the house was drafty in the winter, that the street
smelled of exhaust from trains on the nearby tracks, and that the neighbors
were nosy and low-class. The real problem, however, wasn't the
house; it was a simple and terrible fact that none of us ever discussed because
we didn't need to, which was that our mother didn't like our father.
In her crossed arms, the exhalations of her nostrils, the pinch of her lips,
she showed us every day that she didn't enjoy his company, didn't find him
interesting, and didn't respect him. Part of it seemed to be that she held
him accountable for the disappointments life had dealt her, though it was
always easier to see that she was disappointed than to understand exactly
why. (Not that my father was alone in having let her down. Almost everyone
my mother encountered fell into one of two categories: low-class or snobby. 
Only very occasionally would she bestow her most prized compliment,
reserved for a rich person who had pleasantly surprised her: He
didn't put on airs, she'd say. He acted the same as you and me.)
Our parents had met when our father, who lived in Omaha, traveled to
St. Louis on business--he was then a salesman for a commercial carpet
manufacturer--and my mother was working at the front desk of the Clayton
hotel where his employer put him up. He stayed in the hotel for two
nights, and on the second, he invited her to go with him to a French restaurant.
Our mother never suggested that he outright lied during these
initial interactions, but she conveyed that he'd led her to believe he occupied
a more senior position in the company than he did, and that he was
more worldly than he turned out to be. (Of course, I thought later; he was
trying to impress her.) Once a month for the next three months, my father
returned to St. Louis to woo my mother--she was living with a roommate
on Wydown Boulevard, and he stayed at the hotel--and on these trips
they attended a Cardinals game, strolled in the Missouri Botanical Garden,
and toured the Anheuser-Busch Brewery, where my mother purchased
a tiny beer stein for her charm bracelet, an accessory that in
elementary school Vi and I would fight to try on. On his third visit, my
father arranged a ride in a hot-air balloon, an outing that so frightened my
mother that they asked the pilot to land after just a few minutes. Back on
earth, my father proposed, and my mother accepted. In Omaha, my father
gave notice to his boss, moved to St. Louis, found a job as a salesman for a
lighting fixture company, and married my mother in the late morning of
September 5, 1974, at the St. Louis County Courts Building on Carondelet
Avenue in Clayton. She wore a sleeveless twill dress with a pattern of 
interlocking
green and black hexagons, and he wore a carnation boutonniere;
they went out for a steak lunch afterward, and then they both returned to

work.
Why did my mother make things unnecessarily hard? That's the main
question I ask myself in retrospect. Our lives weren't glamorous, but they
weren't so bad; they were ordinary, and there are many worse ways to be.
Though looking back, I see my father's complicity, too. If I were to fault
him for falling for my mother, I'd be wishing away my own existence. But
I was fairly sure he proposed to my mother, perhaps without really knowing
her, for a foolish if time-honored reason, which was that she was beautiful.
In photographs from around the time they married, her straight
blond hair is parted in the center and falls past her shoulders; her lips are
thin but flirtatiously upturned; her cheekbones are high, her eyes big and
blue, her lashes accentuated with mascara. She was five-five, the same
height Vi and I eventually grew to, but outside of pregnancy, I don't think
she ever weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. She favored
snug blouses, dresses that cinched her small waist, jumpsuits with flared
pants. In a photo Vi and I especially liked, our mother stands in front of
the Arch holding our father's hand. She wears a belted orange wool jacket
with an oversized collar and a matching orange beret; he has dark sideburns.
Both of our parents are beaming.
That my mother turned out to be difficult as well as beautiful was likely
a result of her upbringing. In Risco, she had grown up poor on a small
farm, the third daughter in an extremely religious Baptist family, and after
graduating from high school, she'd remained at home and gotten a job at
a newly opened rice-processing facility twenty minutes away. For three
years, she secretly saved money, and as soon as she could afford to, she and
her friend Jeanine bought bus tickets to St. Louis; my mother carried with
her a single suitcase containing her clothes, toothbrush, and Christmas
records. Although St. Louis was just three hours north of Risco, neither of
them had ever been, and most of what they knew, or thought they knew,
about the city was that they shouldn't go north of the Delmar Loop because
that was where the black people lived.
Given that both the civil rights and the women's rights movements
seemed to have entirely bypassed my parents, I never understood why it
was my father who joined my mother in St. Louis rather than my mother
moving to Omaha; perhaps this decision reflected the more invested party
in the relationship. My mother quit her job the day after they married, and
they soon bought the house that would evolve from a source of pride to
one of disappointment.
I was four years old the night I woke up screaming. Vi and I shared a
room, and by the time our mother came to me, Vi was sitting up in her
bed. In a dream, I had seen a house on fire, flames soaring and billowing
from all the windows; the house was orange with light and terrifyingly
alive.

Even after our mother's arrival, I remained inconsolable. There was an
impatience to the way our mother dealt with Vi and me that was surprisingly
effective, implying as it did that whatever had upset us wasn't important.
But in this case, anything she could have said, any tone she used--it
wouldn't have mattered, because the house would still have been consumed
by fire. I am sorry to say I remember this feeling well not only be
cause the image of the house was so vivid but also because that dread has
returned regularly throughout my life, almost always when I awaken during
the night: an anxious kind of certainty, an awareness of the world's
menaces that feels like a recognition of the truth, and an awareness of my
own vulnerability--of everyone's vulnerability.
As I continued shrieking, my father joined us, and I heard my mother
tell him I'd had a nightmare. He sat on Vi's bed; light from the hallway cut
into our room. My mother, who had taken several minutes to decipher
what I was trying to tell her, kept saying, "But if there was a fire, we'd smell

smoke."
"Should we sing a song?" my father asked. He began to hum, then to
sing the words to "I See the Moon," and Vi joined him. Our vulnerability
continued to clutch at me; hearing their voices, it clutched at me in a 
different
way. How could our parents protect Vi and me from anything? For
the first time, I realized that there was no guarantee that they could protect
themselves. But then, as my father and Vi sang, the familiarity of the
lyrics was comforting. My mother pulled my covers up before she left, and
my father stayed in the room; he continued singing until Vi and I were

both asleep.
The next night, a house halfway down our block burned to the ground.
My parents, Vi, and I were awakened by the sirens, and the flashing lights
from the fire trucks and the police cars reflected on our walls. Though our
parents didn't let us go outside, our father went to confer with neighbors.
Vi and I couldn't see the fire because the house was on the same side of the
street as ours, but I already knew what it looked like. The people who lived
in the house were an older couple.
A few months later, we were eating a family dinner when Vi said, "Why
does Aunt Erma's heart hurt?" She asked this in a neutral tone rather than
a distressed one, but our parents exchanged an alarmed look. Aunt Erma
was actually our great-aunt, our paternal grandmother's sister, and lived
in Grand Island, Nebraska; we had met her perhaps three times in our

lives.
"What do you mean, Vi?" my father asked.
"She fell down," Vi said without emotion, and took another bite of pork
roast.

That time, more than a week passed before my father's mother called
on a Sunday morning to say that her sister had died of a heart attack. I
didn't overhear my father on the phone, but he repeated the information
to our mother when he came into the kitchen. Vi and I were playing Candy
Land at the table while our mother washed the breakfast dishes.

It was Vi's turn, and I was watching our father as he said, "It's not just
Daisy, then. It's Violet who has the senses, too."
Our mother's expression when she turned to look at our father was
sour. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves, cleaning a pan in which she'd
cooked bacon, and she didn't turn off the faucet. She said, "What do you
suggest I do about it?"

Chapter 4


R

and I nursed him sitting on our living room couch. As I burped him

afterward, the phone rang, and I knew without seeing the caller ID panel

that it was Vi.
I set Owen on the floor with a little wooden car--he was just beginning
to sit on his own--and when I answered, Vi said, "Courtney Wheeling is
finally preggers, isn't she? Which is a miracle because she's so fucking
skinny I can't even believe she was getting her period." This was generally
the way it went when my sister and I fought. After a day or two, I'd call her
and say, "I never realized until right now that coriander and cilantro are
the same thing. Did you?" or she'd call me and say, "I'm looking out my
window and there's a totally perfect cobweb in the railing on my front
steps. It's like the platonic ideal of a cobweb." Neither of us would formally

apologize.
"Hank and Courtney haven't told people yet, so don't bring it up with
them. She's only eleven weeks along." I hesitated before adding, "Do you
really think there'll be a huge earthquake?"
"No, but you know how I love attention. Yes, Daze, I do. I mean, sorry."
She sounded more serious. "But that's what came through, loud and clear."
"And how soon is soon? Tomorrow? Six months from now?"
She exhaled. "That part I'm not sure of."
"But you're confident it's an earthquake and not something else, like a
tornado? Or, I don't know, a building being imploded?"
"No, it's an earthquake. Especially after the one last night--it all feels
connected. Anyway, I didn't have a visualization. I just got the message."
I could tell that we were perilously close to her mentioning the spiritual
guide she believed was the source of such messages, whom she called
Guardian. Vi usually didn't bring up Guardian around me because she
knew the topic made me uncomfortable, but surely if I was the one peppering
Vi with questions, he was fair game.
I said, "If you get a sense about a specific date, will you tell me? Just
with the kids, you know, I'd rather be prepared--"
"Of course." Not only did Vi not gloat over her power, but she sounded
kind, protective even, as if she'd never have considered anything else.
Then she said, "Was it just me or did Courtney come off as completely
uptight?" Adopting a British accent that sounded like neither Courtney
nor an actual British person, Vi said, "'Let me tell you about the statistics
that my extensive research has uncovered. Did I mention I have two degrees
from Haaarvard? And that I hate fat people?'"
"How did you end up getting interviewed?" I asked. "Did you call the
station?"

"I thought they'd blow me off, but I was put right through to a producer.
I probably should have brushed my hair this morning, huh?" Vi
laughed. "But it all happened so quickly. One minute I was on the phone
with the producer, and the next they had that girl standing in front of my
house with a microphone. Did you notice her double D's, by the way? I'm
surprised those things fit inside the newsmobile."
"Have you talked to Dad?"
"Not yet, so I assume he didn't see it. Although doesn't he usually watch
Channel 5?"

That she hadn't heard from him didn't, in my opinion, mean he hadn't
seen it. "Wait," I said. "Shouldn't Dad be there to take you on your date?"
"Not till three."

"Vi, what time do you think it is now?" My own watch said two fifty
two. "Have you taken a shower?"
"Shit, I didn't realize how late it'd gotten."
"Hold on," I said quickly, and I heard Vi on the other end of the phone,
pausing. "Wear your dark jeans and your black beaded V-neck shirt," I
said. "And those patent leather flats. Don't wear Birkenstocks."

!tcr wAd ctic Owen and Rosie down to sleep, Jeremy and I
made a stir-fry for dinner; because we'd become accustomed to eating at
five forty-five, dinner at eight o'clock felt almost European.
I poured sesame oil into a pan and used a knife to sweep onion pieces
from the cutting board into the oil as Jeremy removed two beers from the
refrigerator. He opened them both and passed a bottle to me--while nursing,
I allowed myself one cup of coffee during the day and one beer per
night--and he tapped his bottle against mine. "Cheers," he said. "We survived
another day."
Thinking of Vi on television, I said, "Barely." But it was nice to be in our
bright kitchen together, nice to have Jeremy home from work and Rosie
and Owen asleep, and I added, "No, you're right." I knew he'd watched the
Channel 5 news segment online at his office, and I said, "So what'd you
think of Vi and Courtney?"
"Your description was accurate. Probably not the finest hour for either

of them."
"Are you embarrassed to be married to me?" I'd thought I was making
a joke, but aloud it didn't sound like one.
"Of course not." Jeremy leaned in and kissed my forehead. "I know you
think Courtney came off well, but she was fuming because they edited her
to look like she believes the New Madrid Seismic Zone is an active threat,
and she doesn't. She thinks it's basically dead. Besides the fact that the
New Madrid isn't even where last night's earthquake was--it was in the
Wabash Valley."
"Do you think Courtney will tell other people in your department that
the psychic weirdo is your sister-in-law?"
"No, but who cares if she does? It was a three-minute piece in the middle
of the day on the local news, and no offense to Vi or Courtney, but who
even watches that?" He reached out and took a slice of bell pepper. Then,
because for him the topic was finished, he said, "How was Vi's date?"
I rolled my eyes. "I haven't heard yet."
"Let's say for the sake of argument that you're right. She's in no way attracted
to women and is just dating them because it's easier for her to find
a girlfriend than a boyfriend. Here's my question for you: So what?"
I was quiet for a few seconds--Jeremy had a point--then, rather lamely,
I said, "I just think it'd be confusing to our dad. For someone from his
generation, if she says, 'I'm dating a woman. Oh, no, I'm not'--that's a big
deal. It's kind of unfair to make him accept that and then to change her
mind again."

Jeremy took a sip of beer, watching me, and said, "Unfair to him or to
you?" I didn't answer, and he said, "Even if your identical twin turns out
to be a lesbian, it doesn't mean you're secretly one, too." He smiled. "Let's
hope. So I got asked to give a talk at Cornell."
"When?" Quickly, I added, "That's great." It wasn't at all great
logistically--Jeremy hadn't been out of town since Owen's birth, and the
idea of it didn't thrill me--but because Cornell was where Jeremy had
earned his PhD, I knew he'd be pleased by the invitation.
"Lukovich said this semester, and I might as well go sooner rather than
later and avoid getting stuck in a snowstorm." George Lukovich, head
of Cornell's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, had been
Jeremy's adviser, and he and his wife had attended our wedding.
I added the pepper to the pan of onions, along with broccoli Jeremy had
already chopped, then wiped my hands on a paper towel. "You couldn't do
it in the spring? Or at least wait until November?"
"You don't mean because of Vi's prediction, do you?"
"She did say the earthquake would be soon."
We looked at each other, and neither of us spoke. Then Jeremy said,
"You remember that my AEPS conference is in October, right?"
It wasn't just that I hadn't remembered that the conference was in October;
after five years of being married to Jeremy, I still couldn't even
remember what AEPS stood for. "When is it again?" I asked.
Jeremy walked to the calendar on the wall and lifted the month of September;
in the grid for October, he had indeed made note of his conference.
I squinted to see that it was in Denver and would run from Thursday,
October 15, to Sunday, October 18.
"And you're presenting?" I said.
"On Sunday morning, when everyone is hungover, probably to a crowd
in the single digits."
"So it's a really worthwhile use of your time, and I'm sure it'll be a piece of 
cake to take care of Owen and Rosie by myself. It's a win-win."
"Sweetheart ..." Jeremy paused, and I could tell that he was proceeding
carefully. "The fact that Vi predicted another earthquake--it could happen.
Of course it could. And I could be run over in the Schnucks parking
lot this weekend."
"That's reassuring. Thanks."
"Or I could buy a lottery ticket and win a million dollars. But we have
to live our lives with the information available to us. We can't make decisions
based on remote possibilities."
"What makes you so sure Vi's prediction is remote?" I said. "She isn't
usually wrong."
Jeremy swallowed, and I knew he was trying to seem respectful, not
sarcastic, as he said, "Is it her spirit guide who told her there'd be an 
earthquake?"
"I
didn't get into that with her, but I assume so."
"And you believe her? You believe that this ghost or whatever told Vi
about an upcoming geological event, and therefore it's true?"
To be asked to defend a situation that I more than anyone wished
weren't part of my life--it felt not quite fair. Furthermore, in acting as if
Vi's psychicness was unconnected to me, weren't we failing to acknowledge
certain facts? I said, "So you feel like you can completely dismiss her
premonition?"
Jeremy was still standing by the calendar and I was at the stove and
because he was short for a man, just two inches taller than I was, and I had
on clogs, we were the same height as we faced each other. While the silence
between us grew, I had the troubling thought that maybe I'd married him
because he didn't entirely believe in something about myself that I hated;
that maybe he'd married me because he wasn't worried about, wasn't deterred
by, what he didn't entirely believe in; and that both of us had mis
taken
our marriage for consensus. But compatibility and agreement, it
struck me suddenly, were not the same.

I said, "I'm not claiming that she's definitely right. But if the weather
man
says there'll be rain, why not take an umbrella? And if he's wrong,
better safe than sorry."

"But what's the umbrella in this scenario? Saying no to Cornell? Can
celing
my plans for AEPS?" Jeremy was still calm, as if the idea that we
were having a disagreement hadn't occurred to him.
"What if you go to the conference but postpone Cornell?" I forced a
smile. "And then neither of us gets our way and we can both feel resentful."

He
smiled, too. "Has anyone ever told you that you're a world-class negotiator?"

"Lukovich
isn't trying to recruit you, is he?" I said. It was well
established
between us that I didn't want to leave St. Louis as long as my
father was alive.

"They do have a job opening this year, but Lukovich knows where we
stand on moving. This would just be a colloquium, not a job talk."
"Will they pay you?"

"Let me put it this way: Yes, but it probably won't be enough to cover a trip 
to Target."

After a minute, I said, "If Vi's right, then I guess her prediction's not
embarrassing, but I'd rather be embarrassed and safe."
"I know you would," Jeremy said.

Awc cleaning up after dinner, there was a knock on the back
door--this wasn't the one we, or anyone else, usually used--and when I

looked over, Courtney Wheeling was making a blowfish face against the
windowpane. I opened the door, and she said, "I saw the light on back
here. Late-night dining, huh?"
"Come on in," I said, though I wasn't entirely sure why she was at
our house. We hung out with the Wheelings all the time, but we generally
called or texted each other first. In spite of the fact that Courtney
was wearing shorts, running shoes, a T-shirt, and an unzipped hooded
sweatshirt, the force of her personality--her intelligence and confidence
and will--emanated from her. Although Courtney was pretty, her prettiness
was never the main thing I noticed about her. Her hair was blond,
like mine, but very short--she'd once told me she got it cut every three
weeks--and even in her haircut her confidence was obvious; the same was
true of her glasses, which had aggressively nerdy thick black frames. I liked
Courtney, and I was impressed by her, but I didn't always find myself able

to relax in her presence.
"I'm sure you're feeling weird about the Channel 5 thing today, but you
shouldn't," she said. "That's what I came over to say. It's not your fault if
you have a wackadoodle sister."
Was I supposed to thank her? I glanced at Jeremy, who was wringing
out the sponge, and his expression was impassive. I said, "What a weird
coincidence, huh?"
"That poor newscaster wouldn't know seismic energy if it bit her in the
ass," Courtney said. "Which tends to be the norm with the media. Did
Jeremy tell you he got invited to give a talk at Cornell?"
"I did indeed," Jeremy said.
Courtney took a seat at our kitchen table. "Cool, right?" she said to me.
Then, to Jeremy: "Did you read Leland's email yet?"
"I skimmed it," Jeremy said. We made eye contact, and he said, "Noth
ing
interesting. Department politics."
"So Amelia is agitating to eat meat," Courtney said. "Which I knew
would happen eventually, but I didn't think it'd be this soon." Both Court
ney
and Hank were vegetarians.
"I was wondering about that," I said. "At the park today, she was pre
tending
to cook ham."
Courtney wrinkled her nose. "Gross." As if I were a pig farmer, she
added, "No offense."
"None taken," I said.
kill
She said, "There's just something extra-revolting about ham. It's so
fleshy. But we've always said if Amelia wanted to try meat, we'd let her,
so I'm thinking we should all go out for dinner and you carnivores can
show her how it's done."

Jeremy looked amused. "I'm guessing if she's got molars, she's good
to go."

"Okay, then you can provide moral support to her parents." "You mean molar 
support?" Jeremy said, and Courtney and I rolled
our eyes at each other.

Courtney said, "Kate, did you hear that Justin Timberlake and Rihanna
are hooking up?"

"I saw that online, but I'm not sure I believe it."
"I want it to be true. They'd make beautiful babies." Early in our friendship,
I had wondered if I should feel patronized by Courtney's tendency to
bring up celebrity gossip with me, but I had soon realized that her interest
in the topic was unabashedly sincere; in fact, her knowledge far eclipsed
mine, though I still wasn't sure when she had time to study up. Courtney
stood then. "I'm thinking Saturday for meat night. You guys free then?"
Jeremy and I looked at each other, and I said, "I'm pretty sure."
"You can tell Hank tomorrow," Courtney said to me. "And we're cool
on the whole TV news showdown? No hard feelings?" When I nodded,
she said, "Tell your sister nice prayer flags."
When Courtney had left, I let a minute pass, which probably was long
enough for her to be halfway home, before saying, "I kind of feel like she
was trying to trick me into being on her side."
Jeremy shook his head. "Courtney's just being Courtney."
We both were quiet, and I said, "I can understand her being bummed
out about Amelia wanting to try meat."

"Why? Meat's delicious." Jeremy was grinning.
"But doesn't it make it seem like all our children are growing up so
quickly?"
"Am I allowed to remind you of that when Owen wakes up at two in the
morning?" Then he said, "What if you go do your thing in the living room
and I bring out some ice cream for us? Will that make you feel better?"
What Jeremy meant by doing my thing was that every night after the
children were asleep, I took a few minutes to set the diaper bag by the front
door, checking that inside it were not only diapers and extra clothes but
my wallet with my health insurance card; I also charged my cellphone in

the closest outlet.
"I'm leaning toward a chocolate-pistachio blend tonight," Jeremy said,
and I thought, as I did at least once a day, how lucky I was that he was my

husband; it hadn't been a foregone conclusion that I'd marry someone
kind, because I hadn't understood how much it mattered.
I said, "You really think I'm a person of simple wants, don't you?"
Jeremy grinned again. "Isn't that why you settled for me?"
Chapter 5

1

grade, I got invited to a slumber party at Marisa Mazarelli's house and Vi
didn't. While I wish I could say that I considered declining out of sisterly
loyalty, the truth is that when Marisa called our house, I raced to ask my
mother, and when she granted permission, I accepted with an excitement
that I tried to conceal more from Marisa than from Vi. I was surprised
and flattered to have made it onto Marisa's guest list--Marisa of the long,
dark, curly hair, Marisa of the large, newly constructed house with a hot
tub, Marisa of the scary power over most of the girls at Nipher Middle
School. Marisa was the daughter of the owner of an eponymous pizza
chain in eastern Missouri and western Illinois. She had started wearing lip
gloss in fifth grade. And at a dance the previous fall, she had, during the
last song of the night--Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"--brazenly
made out on the dance floor with a boy named Chip Simmons. I'd already
heard about the Mazarellis' hot tub, even though I'd never been to Marisa's
house, and when she told me over the phone to bring a bathing suit to the
party, I felt the thrill of confirmation.
It wasn't until a few hours after Marisa's call, when Vi and I were getting
ready for bed, that the first wave of uneasiness struck me. We had just
emerged from the bathroom and were headed toward the bedroom we
shared. (The third bedroom in our house was kept as a guest room, its
double bed pristinely covered by a white spread with cream-colored satin
borders, unslept in and unsullied by actual guests from one year to the
next.) Our room, which was usually a mess, had a sign on the door that Vi
had posted when we were in fourth grade and neither of us had taken
down since:

SISTERLAND

POPULATION 2

DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION!

"I could ask Marisa to invite you, too," I said.
"I saw her cheating on the math quiz yesterday," Vi said. "She was copy
ing
off Dave Stutz, and he didn't even know it."
I said nothing, and Vi added, "Marisa is a rich bitch."
Coming on top of the cheating comment, this was too much. "It's not
my fault if you're jealous," I said.

4 1 k t4.1zig elementary and middle school, I would never have
claimed that Vi was my best friend. I might not even have said I liked her
that much. For one thing, I was unsentimental as a child, and for another,
I had no frame of comparison. Did I like living in Missouri? Did I enjoy

having ears?
In any twenty-four-hour period, it would not have been uncommon for
us to be apart only during a few classes at school. Otherwise, we were
almost always in the same room, side by side on chairs in the school cafeteria
or at our kitchen table, watching television in the living room with
our heads on the cushion we'd moved from the couch to the floor, taking
turns hanging upside down from the mulberry tree in our yard, the backs
of our knees hooked on the lowest branch and our shirts flying over our
faces. We participated in no organized sports or other extracurricular
activities--our mother's general suspicion of the world extended to doubts
about the value, financial or otherwise, of music or dance lessons--and
we were often unsupervised.
We made up many of the games we played. One that irritated our
mother involved, in its entirety, lying with our heads on opposite arms of
the living room couch, the soles °lour feet meeting up in the middle, and
pumping our legs back and forth as if riding a bicycle while singing, over
and over and over, "There's a place in France Where the naked ladies
dance And the men don't care 'Cause they wear their underwear."
Around fifth grade, Vi and I invented Commercial, which we played
only outdoors, in the backyard, and which entailed assigning each other
imaginary products that we then pretended to advertise; for the most part,
these products were related to sex or farting. (Vi once made me come up
with a commercial for what she called a vagina wig, and it was one of the
great shocks of my life, years later, to learn in a college history course of
the existence of merkins; I almost stood up in the middle of the professor's
lecture and walked out to call my sister.) Vi and I also played Person,
which was the name we gave to a game much like Twenty Questions, except
without the questions: One of us would think of either a celebrity or
someone we knew--our music teacher, Mrs. Kebach, for instance--and
the other of us would get three guesses to figure out who it was, though we
usually got it on the first or second try. Our mother disliked this game
even more than she disliked our singing, "There's a place in France." The
first time she ever heard us playing, when Vi and I were in the backseat
while she drove us home from the dentist's office, she turned around and
said, "Stop it! Stop it right now! That's a bad game!" We still did play, but
not in front of her.

None of us attended church, and my mother, despite her own upbring,
ing, didn't seem to be religious, but she was superstitious; if we spilled 
salt, she made us throw some over our left shoulders, and if the sun came out
while it was raining, she'd say it meant the devil was getting married. My
mother's one great happiness was her Christmas records, the ones she'd
brought up on the bus from Risco: Perry Como singing "0 Holy Night,"
Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. We listened to them from 
mid-November to mid-January.
On the weekends, our father would drive Vi and me to P.S. Video on
Jefferson Avenue, where we each got to select one movie to rent. We could spend 
easily half an hour considering our options, picking up and returning
various empty cardboard cases to the shelves--the actual cassettes
were stored behind the cash register--and there are movies from this time
period that I never saw but still feel a kinship for just from holding their
cases in my hands: Good Morning, Vietnam and Mannequin and Rumble
Fish. Often, the movies we picked were ones we'd already seen: The Secret
of My Success, which featured a young and handsome Michael J. Fox, or Class, 
which featured a young Rob Lowe, who was so far beyond handsome,
so perfect in every possible way, that it hurt to watch him. In a scene
in which he bit into an apple, the juice clung to his lips in a way Vi and I
found devastatingly sexy; we'd rewind the video several times per viewing

just to torment ourselves.
During the week, after school, Vi and I watched vast quantities of television.
By middle school, our two favorite shows were Divorce Court and
the soap opera Santa Barbara, both of which we viewed while eating either
Cool Ranch Doritos, Wonder bread toast topped with butter and cinnamon
sugar, or tiny pieces of American cheese melted in the microwave
onto Triscuits. We shared a radiocassette player on which we listened to
Y98, and there were certain songs we'd become obsessed with--"Take My
Breath Away" and "Walk Like an Egyptian"--and try to tape, though we
rarely succeeded in pressing the Record button until several seconds into
the songs. Soon after getting our ears pierced in sixth grade, we began
pleading to get our right ears double-pierced, which our parents let us do
as a twelfth-birthday present just before the start of seventh grade, and
around this time, Vi also wanted an asymmetrical haircut--it would be
chin-length on the left side of her face but cropped above her ear on the
right--which our mother said she was allowed to do only if she lost ten
pounds. Toward this end, Vi intermittently did sit-ups in front of the 
television,
which I'd join her for because it felt more festive that way, though
what's notable to me about the bargain in retrospect, when I look at old
photos, is that Vi wasn't heavy then. She weighed ten pounds more than I

did, but I was skinny.
It was also in seventh grade that one night at dinner, Vi said, "Want to
hear a clean joke? Bob took a bath with bubbles. Want to hear a dirty
joke?" Without waiting for anyone to respond, she said, "Bubbles was the
lady next door." There was a long silence, and then my mother leaned
forward and slapped V i's face.
"That didn't hurt," Vi said, and my mother said, "Go to your room, you
spoiled brat."

I got up with Vi, and neither of our parents objected.
In late October, Vi gave herself an asymmetrical haircut, and the first
thing I thought when I saw her was that our mother would forbid her to
attend the Halloween dance and I'd have to go alone, but Vi wasn't punished.
Instead, my mother just pursed her lips before saying, almost with
pleasure, "No boy will want to dance with you like that."
Vi and I had only one real friend, a girl named Janie Spriggs, who lived
a block away and regularly joined us to play Commercial; in turn, Vi and
I would go to Janie's house to ride her mother's stationary bike and try on
her mother's fur coat, sometimes doing both simultaneously. Janie had an
older brother named Pete who had Down's syndrome--Vi and I referred
to him as retarded, as did our parents--and every time he saw us, by way
of greeting, Pete would say in a singsong, "You're twins because there's
two of you." Interestingly, though, Pete could always tell us apart, long
before the asymmetrical haircut and the weight difference, back when
many of our teachers and the other students couldn't.
Vi and I were included in classmates' parties only when everyone was
invited, but I didn't feel the sting of rejection; after all, I wasn't staying
home alone. I think our classmates considered us a benign oddity. Twins
Weren't nearly as common then as now--this was prior to widespread fertility
treatments--yet we'd been going to school with many of the same
people since kindergarten, which meant that we were both familiar and strange. 
Until Marisa, we also were viewed, I'm pretty sure, as a package deal; if 
another girl were to have one of us over, she'd have to have both of us, and we 
weren't beloved enough to be worth two guest slots.
But it wasn't as if we invited anyone to our house besides Janie. Our
irthday usually fell during the week in August when we drove to visit our
her's relatives in Omaha, so we had cake there and never held a celebra n
back at home. When Vi and I were younger, I suppose it was our
other who didn't initiate social activities on our behalf, and when we
re older, we didn't initiate them because we had realized, without ever
speaking of it, that we were colluding to conceal a certain fact about our
family. This was not the fact of our "having senses," as Vi and I called it
from a young age. Rather, it was that, from the time we arrived home after
school until a few minutes before our father arrived home after work almost
three hours later, our mother remained in bed with the door closed,
the shades drawn, and the lights off. Vi and I referred to what our mother
did in our parents' darkened bedroom as napping, though we understood
that she wasn't asleep--often the TV was on, sometimes set to the same
program Vi and I were watching in the living room--and in rare instances,
we'd knock on the door to ask her a question.
The first time we came home from school to find our mother in bed, Vi
and I were eleven, and this turn of events made us decidedly nervous; we
inquired as to whether she was sick and when she ignored the question, we
heated a can of chicken noodle soup and carried the steaming bowl into
her room on a tray. Our father returned every evening from work at five
forty-five, and that evening, when it got to be five o'clock and our mother
showed no sign of emerging, we took matters into our own hands. Using
a recipe from one of the index cards our mother kept in a white tin box on
top of the refrigerator--she herself had copied the recipe by hand from the 
Post-Dispatch in 1977 and made it frequently--we prepared broiled
chicken breasts, as well as buttered rice and an iceberg salad with Kraft
ranch dressing. Optimistically, we set the kitchen table with four places
but were surprised when, at five-thirty, our mother appeared before us,
fully dressed, seeming like an only slightly more preoccupied version of
her usual self. "Oh," she said when she saw that dinner was almost ready.
"Well, I hope the chicken's done all the way through." When our father
arrived home, we ate as if it were a normal night. At the end of the meal,
he wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, "That was good, Rita." This
was what he said at the end of every dinner, and none of us corrected him.
Astonishingly, this pattern continued every weeknight for the next six
years, until we left for college, by which point we'd long ago forgotten how
odd it was that our mother spent each afternoon in bed and that Vi and I
pretended--to ourselves, I think, as much as to our father--that she'd
cooked dinner when she hadn't. Vi and I rotated among three dishes: the broiled 
chicken breasts of the first night, creamed chicken breasts, and
orange juice pork chops. These other two recipes were also ones that had
been our mother's staples and were located in her tin box. Our sides were
always--and I truly mean always, 100 percent of the time--the iceberg
salad with ranch dressing and either the rice or baked potatoes. On Friday
nights, we ordered pizza; on Saturday nights, our father grilled steak; and
on Sundays, our father took us without our mother--ironically enough,
so that she could rest--to either Hacienda for Mexican food or King Doh
for pot stickers and General Tso's chicken. (Our mother didn't care for
what she referred to as un-American food.) At some point when Vi and I
were at school, usually on Monday or Tuesday, our mother went to the
grocery store, an act that, in retrospect, seems to me to deepen her complicity
in the unspoken pact to deceive our father. In high school, after Vi
joined the tech crew for school plays our freshman year, I'd cook dinner
alone for weeks at a time while she was at rehearsal.

Once, shortly after Jeremy and I moved in together, I decided to make
him the orange juice pork chops. As they baked, I opened the oven door,
and the hot, meaty, orangey smell assaulted me, the smell of my adolescence,
of my parents' house, of my mother's depression that we never
called depression. I wanted to turn off the heat and dump the chops in the
trash, but to do so would have been melodramatic. Instead, I let them finish
cooking and served them on beige plates. When Jeremy and I were
seated at the high little table we used before we had children, I cut a small 
piece with my knife and fork, speared it, put it in my mouth, and began to
cry. "Sweetheart?" he said. It took me a while to explain, and after I had, he 
picked up both our plates and set them in the sink, saying, "We'll never eat 
pork chops again."
"It's not all pork chops," I said. "Just this recipe."
"Life's too short." He reached into the pocket of his pants and jingled his 
keys. "Come on," he said. "Let's go get sushi."

Sufisms i h invitation to Marisa Mazarelli's slumber party was,
I did understand its genesis, and that genesis was fraudulent. Two weeks

earlier, in a performance conceived of, choreographed, and directed by Vi,
she and I had lip-synched and danced to Billy Joel's "You May Be Right"
in the Nipher Middle School talent show. Because I had so little to do with
the act's creation, I feel that I can say without bragging that we brought
down the house. The song started with the sound of glass breaking,
then the ramping up of the electric guitar, then Billy, as Vi and I called
him, singing in his bravado-filled way about crashing a party. Per Vi's vision,
she was dressed as a fifties greaser, in penny loafers and white socks,
jeans rolled at the cuff, and a white T-shirt; her hair was slicked back, and
she wore mirrored aviator sunglasses. I, meanwhile, was supposed to
channel Marilyn-Monroe-over-the-grate, except that instead of relying
on a subway, I was responsible for swishing my own skirt; I wore a white
halter dress of our mother's from the seventies, and fake-leather white
high heels, also our mother's, with socks stuffed in the toes, and I'd ap
plied
heavy makeup and used a curling iron to create ringlets. The real
coup of our performance was that Vi had convinced our science teacher,
Mr. Dummerston, to let us use his motorcycle as a prop; he himself was
waiting in the wings with us before we went onstage so he could help
wheel it out, and as soon as the lights went up and the students saw the
motorcycle--he was the only teacher who drove one, and it was immedi
ately
recognizable because of its yellow frame--they began to scream.
Then there was that thrilling sound of breaking glass and Vi strutting
around the stage, fearlessly inhabiting her greaser persona: getting down
on her knees and gesticulating forcefully with her arms, pleading with me
to give her a chance; being wounded by my rejection, stalking away, then
returning to plead some more. All I had to do was dance in place, shake
my head dismissively, wag my index finger, and bat my eyelashes like I was
conceited, which, of course, the more I could feel the enthusiasm of our
audience, the more I really was. Every time the chorus came on, Vi and I
would seek each other out and dance together, waving our arms, nodding
our heads from side to side, linking hands and stepping forward then
backward, in exactly the way we'd practiced night after night for the last

two months.
A feedback loop occurred wherein I was aware of the audience's perception
of us shifting front I never really noticed the Stratums before to They
sure look like they're having fun to Oh, I wish I were a twin! And it was
true--we were having fun, being a twin was a great thing--and having an
audience for the greatness only made it truer. To receive adulation just for
being ourselves, albeit our costumed and choreographed selves, was both
disorienting and miraculous.
When the song was over, we got the only standing ovation of the night.
The next person to go on was a seventh-grade boy performing a magic act,
and a minute in, as he was fumbling with playing cards, a good-looking
soccer player named Jason Trachsel yelled, "Bring back the twins!"
After the talent show's conclusion, there were cookies and juice and
mayhem as the teachers chaperoning tried to get the students to fold chairs
before all the kids dispersed to their own or one another's houses. Vi and
I were going home; our father would be waiting outside in his Buick to
pick us up. I'd put on a sweatshirt over my mother's halter dress but was
still wearing my heavy makeup, which made me feel glamorous as Vi and
I were mobbed by classmates and even teachers wanting to congratulate
us. And the fraudulence first dawned on me as I accepted these congratulations:
It wasn't just that Vi and I got equal credit for a performance that
had been in almost every way her idea. Rather, I received more credit for
the sole reason that I had played the girl and she'd played the guy.
Marisa Mazarelli, whom I hardly ever talked to, shoved aside two
seventh-grade girls who'd approached to examine my curled hair and
high heels. "That was awesome," she said.

I smiled. "Thanks."

She gestured toward Vi, who was standing a few feet away talking to
Janie Spriggs, and said, "I never realized before tonight that you're the
pretty twin."
There were, I see now, insults for both Vi and me embedded in this
comment, but I was so caught off guard that all I could say, in genuine
confusion, was "But we're identical."

Marisa shook her head. "Barely." Twelve days later, she called to invite me to 
her birthday party.

a hot tub was the least of the Mazarelli family's trea
sures.
A vast, lushly carpeted basement rec room also contained an enormous
television set opposite a three-sided brown leather sectional sofa,
ping-pong and pool tables, a player piano, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a
gumball machine, and a dartboard whose bull's-eye was the tomato icon
of Mazarelli's Pizza. Fourteen guests including me were in attendance, and the 
slumber party started with a pre-dinner staking out of sleeping
bag locations (I hadn't expected to land the prime real estate near Marisa
herself and therefore wasn't troubled that I didn't) and proceeded with
Mazarelli's pizza for dinner, the boxes carried out with a kind of showy
fake humility by Marisa's father; a sundae bar set up along the Mazarellis'
dining room table; the ceremonial unwrapping of presents; a ten-p.m. dip
in the hot tub, which entailed much shrieking and the revelation that
Marisa wore a yellow string bikini; a post-hot-tub viewing of The Exorcist
(I spent large chunks of it with my eyes closed, reconstructing in my mind
the plot of the first Back to the Future); and finally the time at which some
girls started falling asleep just as others caught their second wind. There
was talk of prank-calling boys, but instead Marisa brought down from the
living room the Ouija board she'd been given a few hours before by Abby
I was on my way to my sleeping bag after using the bathroom adjacent
Balmer.
to Marisa's bedroom--of course Marisa had her own bathroom--when I
paused by a handful of girls who'd clustered around the Ouija board. They
sat on the floor next to the pool table, and soon I found myself sitting, too,
Marisa was cross-legged on one side of the board and Abby was on the
other, their fingertips not quite meeting on the planchette, which was mad
of plastic and shaped like an upside-down heart with a circular window
near the top. I didn't know what question they'd asked before my arrival,
but I watched as the planchette slid over the letters O-N, followed by a Liln.
rus of squeals. Although I'd heard of Ouija boards, I'd never seen one. lid
I knew immediately that they were using it wrong--they were forcing I
letters, picking them, instead of allowing the letters to be picked.
"Ask it lason I )av is or Jason Trachsel," said a girl named Beth WIieatt
and Marisa gave her a withering look.
"Obviously, it's Jason Trachser she said. Who likes me? That must have
been the question Marisa had asked the board. Jason Trachsel was the
agreed-upon best-looking boy in our class--his mom was Korean and his
dad was white, which meant he was the only Asian person in the eighth
grade, and he was already expected to make the varsity soccer team the
following year as a freshman at Kirkwood High School--while Jason
Davis was a quiet boy with a center part. "Does he want to kiss me?" ,Marisa 
asked.
r. At the top of the board, flanked by a menacing sun and a gloomy moon,
,d separated from each other by a skeleton head with wings and devil
us, were the words yes and no. As we waited, yes appeared beneath the
nchette's window in Gothic script.
"Does he want to go all the way with me?" Marisa asked.

es.

e glanced around at us and said merrily, Not that I would."
'es he have wet dreams about Marisa?" cried out Debby Geegan. er of my parents 
had ever initiated a birds-and-bees conversation Vi and me, and Debby was the 
person who in fourth grade had exd
to us the meaning of the line They keep their boyfriends warm at
from the song "California Girls."

the board told us, and all the girls exclaimed with disgust and dent I wasn't 
caught up in the excitement. I felt distracted by whatever the energy--that had 
been summoned by the Ouija board; the
invited the energy in and their invitation had been accepted.
4

n will he try to kiss me?" Marisa asked.
P -R-Y, the board spelled out As Marisa and Abby's hands kept Beth Wheatley 
said, "Does that mean Wednesday?"
Marisa said.

N.

th said "It just misspelled it
Marisa had lifted her head to look at Beth directly. "Shut up." I felt Beth 
flinch.
anyone likes me," said Debby.
y cares if anyone likes you," Marisa said. She smiled. Who
id. She smiled. "Who

11'11111 1 ,
1111111

1111
1111
1111



54Curtis Sittenfeld

here tonight will be the first person to die?" As the other girls gasped, I did
it without deciding--my hand shot out, stilling the planchette.
"No," I said. "Don't."
"Because you think it's you?" Marisa said.
It wasn't me. It was Brynn Zansmyer, who at that moment lay on the far
side of the rec room in her sleeping bag. She wouldn't die immediately, but
it wouldn't be in such a long time either. The energy, the presence, told me
this without using words.
"Because it's sad," I said. Marisa and Abby wouldn't have come up with
Brynn's name except by coincidence. That was the irony, that they believed
they wanted to know the answers to their questions, but they weren't

listening.
"Fine," Marisa said. "Then how about this: Is it true that Violet Shramm
gave Mike Dornheiss a blow job behind the cafeteria?"
Right away, and not because of the presence, I knew. But a blow job? I
thought. An actual blow job? And Mike Dornheiss? Mike was pale and red
haired and freckly and on the seventh-grade field trip to the Daniel Boone
Home in Defiance, Missouri, on the bus ride out, he had been sitting
across the aisle from Vi and me and had lifted his backpack from the floor
by his feet, unzipped it, vomited inside, then zipped it up. And besides all
that, why hadn't Vi told me? I was myself completely sexually inexperienced,
which had the effect of causing me to withhold judgment--a blow
job wasn't much more foreign or hypothetical than a kiss.

"I'm going to bed," I said.
"Me, too." Beth stood as I did, and Marisa said, "You guys are lame."
I had made a mistake in sitting down by the Ouija board, but my bigger
mistake had been attending the slumber party in the first place. Marisa
was, as Vi had warned me, a rich bitch, though mostly just a bitch. Standing
in the rec room, at what had somehow become almost four in the
morning, I wished I were at home and that I'd spent the evening lying on
our living room floor with Vi, watching Rob Lowe bite into an apple. Gesturing 
toward the board, I said, "You should be careful with that."
"You're scared of it, aren't you?" Marisa said.
"Ask if I should quit violin,"I )ebby said.
Marisa looked at me. "You are scared. Your sister is a penis licker and
you're a scaredy-cat."
"Here's a question," I said. "Is Marisa's dad having an affair?" As in the
moment when I'd set my hand on the planchette, it didn't feel like I'd decided
to blurt this out before doing so.
Very quickly, Marisa overturned the entire board. "Fuck you, Daisy,"
she said. She seemed to be biting back tears, which I had never seen her do
and which made me feel panicked rather than triumphant. Then she said,
"Fuck all of you." She stood, whirled around, and stomped up the basement
stairs, leaving us hostessless.

Beth Ahhy Debhyand I hardly spoke after Marisa's departure; we
retreated to our sleeping bags, but none of us had shut off the rec room
lights, and I could feel their brightness when I closed my eyes. I lay there
for more than an hour, listening to the breathing of the girls around me,
wanting to undo this last section of time--why had I stopped on my way
back from the bathroom?--and then I climbed out of my sleeping bag
and went upstairs. Marisa's room was at the front of the second floor. Her
bedroom door was closed, and I opened it quietly. She was asleep in a
double bed, lying on her back with her mouth open, and I saw how even
Marisa Mazarelli was vulnerable. This was what I knew but sometimes
forgot: the vulnerability everyone shared.
I tapped her foot, and she startled.
"I'm sorry for the question I asked," I said. It didn't occur to me that she
might apologize in return, and she didn't. I had ruined her birthday party,
whereas she had merely been her usual self. I added, "I really liked the
sundaes."

"I'm sleeping," she said.
"I don't think you guys were using the board right anyway," I said.
That means the questions don't count." Not that the final question, my
uestion, had even been answered.

"Get out, Daisy," she said.
"Vi and I have ESP," I said into the dark room, and it would be impos

56Curtis Sittenfeld

sible to overstate how desperate this disclosure was. Though our parents
had never explicitly cautioned us against discussing our senses, they
hadn't needed to. But I was thirteen years old, it was getting light outside,
I still hadn't slept, and Marisa terrified me. The worst part was that my
announcement worked. Right away, I could tell that Marisa became alert.
"If you want to know stuff, about Jason or whatever, I could help you,"
I said. "Usually I just know things because I dream them, but I could try
using the Ouija board. We could use it together."
When Marisa finally spoke, she sounded neither mean nor excited but
only curious. "Is the ESP because you're twins?"
"I guess so," I said.
"And that's how you knew about my dad?"
"We don't have to talk about it." I had felt his affair when Mr. Mazarelli
came downstairs carrying the pizza boxes while Mrs. Mazarelli hovered
nearby with a camera and they didn't interact. The skin on Mr. Mazarelli's
face was ruddy, and he had a smug, unself-conscious grin, and he wore a
gold pinkie ring. The affair was inside his grin.
"Does Jason like me?" Marisa asked.
I tried to feel the answer, to let it float toward me like seaweed in a calm
incoming tide. But the information wasn't as close as it had been when we
were sitting around the Ouija board; the presence wasn't in Marisa's room.
Nevertheless, I heard myself say, "I'm sure he likes you. Doesn't every guy

in our class?"
It seemed I'd responded wisely. She shifted a little with pleasure. Then,
in a darker tone, she said, "Are my parents getting a divorce?"
Foamily, the tide slid in and out. "That's hard to say."
She had started to doubt me, I could tell, and I wasn't surprised when
she asked, "What's something about me that no one else knows?"
This was too easy. "You cheated on the math quiz last week," I said.
"You copied the answers off Dave Stutz."
She laughed. Then she patted the mattress. "You can sleep up here if you
want," she said, and gratefully, I climbed over her, into the empty space.

4 4 4
For a b Fie f time, I became Marisa Mazarelli's best friend. It was five
weeks total, from the middle of April to the end of May. Before, I had walked
home from school each day with Vi; now I would trot alongside Marisa as
she rode a blue ten-speed with white handlebars to her house. Instead of
eating melted cheese on Triscuits, we'd drink Diet Coke, which we carried
to the rec room for our Ouija sessions. Usually but not always, the presence
from before was there when we used the board, and it guided our hands.
When the presence wasn't there, I was just guessing, though sometimes
Marisa was clearly pushing the planchette, and I never stopped her. At almost
five each afternoon, I would depart from her house, which left me just
enough time to make dinner with Vi before our father arrived home.
Marisa's family wasn't around in the afternoons. Her father was working,
her mother played tennis, and her older brother, Todd, was away at
the University of Kansas. Based on what I could discern from photos and
passing remarks, Todd appeared to be merely normal, even a glasses
wearer, and not a member of the superspecies to which Marisa belonged.
I had figured out on my own, by watching him during an assembly, that
Jason Trachsel was not actively interested in Marisa. But he was persuadable,
and Marisa and I spent many hours consulting the Ouija board about
his preferences. Perfume, yes. Smoothly shaved legs, yes. Tank tops and
big boobs, which meant Marisa had more going for her in the former cat
,
egory than the latter; she looked good in her string bikini, but she wasn't
spilling out of it. Another of Jason's likes was when girls had sweat above
their upper lips, which surprised us. He thought girls' periods were disgusting
and that girls who played video games were cool, and this was how
Marisa eventually lured him and Brad Wennerle over one afternoon. We
kept the Ouija board hidden, and the four of us played Super Mario Bros., and 
after an hour Marisa and Jason went up to her bedroom. She had
shaved her legs that morning and was wearing perfume and a tank top. Brad and I 
switched from Super Mario Bros. to pool. I felt mildly hopeful and mostly 
fearful that he would try to kiss me, but he seemed more interested
in poking the stucco ceiling with his pool cue and causing tiny particles of 
paint to rain down on us. The longer this activity went on, the less
I experienced of either hope or fear. Putting a stop to the ceiling poking
11




11



'11


58Curtis Sittenfeld

felt like my responsibility, as if I were babysitting, but I wasn't sure what to
say to Brad. He went home before Marisa and Jason reappeared, and then
it got to be five o'clock, six after five, ten after five, and I climbed the two
staircases to the second floor and stood outside the closed door of Marisa's
bedroom. I was considering knocking when I heard Jason say, "What if I
only use one finger?" I turned and fled.
This was three weeks into my best-friendship with Marisa, and she had,
as was to be expected, less time for me once she and Jason became a couple.
On the days Jason didn't show up, we still used the Ouija board; on
the days he and Brad or someone else came over, we didn't speak of it. The
second time a boy named Alex Cooke accompanied Jason to Marisa's, he
kissed me during a commercial for a local car dealership, while we sat together
on the sectional sofa. Then we continued watching Divorce Court, then he kissed 
me again during the next commercial. Alex was decently
cute, and I couldn't wait to tell Marisa about this development--I was
thinking about telling her even while I was kissing Alex--but once again,
it got to be five and she and Jason were still in her room and I had to leave.
That night at nine forty-five, after Vi and I were in bed with the light
out, the phone rang, and I leapt for it. Unlike some of our classmates, Vi
and I didn't have our own line.
"Does Jason love me yet?" I heard Marisa ask.
In the dark, Vi was watching me from her bed. "I'm not supposed to be
on the phone right now," I said, which wasn't true. Our parents weren't
strict; strictness would have required more energy than our mother could
or would exert, and our father deferred to her. To Marisa, I said, "But let's

ask the board tomorrow."
She Wa S push ing the planchette toward yes, and I let her. But Jason
hadn't come over that day, and Marisa was clearly in a bad mood. There
had been only one Diet Coke left in the refrigerator, and she'd said, sighing,
"You can have it," and I'd said, "Oh, that's okay," and she'd said,
iood," popped the tab off, and taken a long swallow. She could have offered to 
split it, I thought. (I drank 1iet Coke--way too much of it--for
the next eighteen years. I quit only when I got pregnant with Rosie, which
is to say that perhaps all that aspartame was Marisa Mazarelli's true legacy
in my life.)
As we sat with the Ouija board between us, Marisa asked, "Does Jason
think Abby is hot?"

Yes, appeared beneath the planchette, but again, Marisa was pushing it.
"I knew it," she said. We both were quiet. Really, she'd already asked so
many questions about Jason that there was little left to discover. Meanwhile,
I rarely posed questions and I never posed ones about myself. This
was only partly because I recognized that my role was to assist Marisa; it
was also because I didn't feel the urgent curiosity she did, except on her
behalf. If anything, the future seemed overly knowable to me, pressing up
against the present.
Then Marisa found inspiration. "If he wasn't going out with me, who
would he go out with?"

The planchette dipped downward and stopped on GOOD BYE.
Marisa lifted the planchette, held it in front of her face, and said,
"What's wrong with you today?"
"Do you love Jason?" I asked.

She opened her mouth and released a huge, prolonged belch--a belch
worthy of a smelly old man and therefore all the more delightful for its
emergence from the mouth of a pretty fourteen-year-old girl. She said,
"That's what I think of love," and we both laughed. "Let's put on fake tanner,"
she said.

st it ate lunch with Vi, Janie Spriggs, and a few other girls we'd known
since elementary school, and at our table the next day, Vi was talking
about how cockroaches can survive decapitation--she claimed they died
not from their heads being severed but from starving--and I thought of
asking her to stop, but I was barely listening anyway. I was trying to figure
out how to intercept Marisa in order to deliver the information that had
waited for me as I'd awoken that morning.
When Marisa stood from her table and dumped t he remains of her
lunch in the trash bin, I stood, too, hurrying. By the time I caught up with
her, she was outside, walking with Debby Geegan and two other girls.
"Marisa, I need to talk to you," I said. "It's important."
She turned to the other girls. "Wait here."
We walked toward the chain-link fence. "Jason is cheating on you." I
was so overwrought that I was on the verge of either smiling inappropriately
or bursting into tears; presumably, Marisa's reaction would help

guide my own.
Her eyes narrowed. Her voice was firm as she said, "No, he's not."
I'd imagined that she might be upset or angry or perhaps even grateful
to me. But I hadn't anticipated that she'd simply deny what I was telling
her. "Maybe you should ask him," I said.
"Maybe you should shut the fuck up," she said, and she walked away.

ht the h t time in more than four weeks, I didn't go home with
Marisa. At my own house, I was surprised to discover that Vi wasn't there.
Walking up Gilbert Street, I'd almost been able to taste the melted cheese
on Triscuits, but when I found the kitchen empty, I lost interest. I poured
ginger ale from a two-liter bottle into a glass, but the soda was flat and in
any case a poor substitute for the dark magic of Diet Coke. I could hear
my mother's television, and I went into the living room and turned the TV
set there to the same channel--the end of Santa Barbara. I hadn't been
watching for more than a few minutes when I was seized by the blazing
obviousness of the situation. It did not require any extrasensory powers;
in fact, it seemed that only willful blindness had prevented me from
knowing until then.
For twenty minutes, I peered out the living room window that faced the
street, waiting for Vi, and when she walked into view, I hurried outside to
meet her. "You have to stop," I said.
She grinned.
"Vi, I'm serious."
"Why? It's a free country." This was a favorite expression of hers then.
I looked at her and she did, 1 realized in that moment, fulfill all the
criteria: She wore tank tops and perfume (the brand she liked was Primo!,
which was supposed to smell like Giorgio but you could buy it at Walgreens
for $7.50), and she shaved her legs and she had big boobs and her
upper lip got sweaty. But the legs in question were pale white, not nearly as
shapely as Marisa's, and clad in pea green cargo shorts from the army
navy surplus store in Webster Groves; below the shorts she wore black Doc
Martens without socks. And the big boobs were because, as if to justify
our mother's criticism, Vi was getting big overall. By that point, she
weighed perhaps eighteen pounds more than I did, weight that seemed
concentrated primarily in bras that were two cup sizes bigger than mine,
and in her belly, the soft flesh of which was discernible beneath her shirt.
I said, "If Marisa finds out, she'll kill me. Or you."
"Oooh!" Vi clapped her palms against both her cheeks and made her
eyes big. "I'm terrified!"
"You don't know Marisa."

Vi looked at me. "What is it she has over you?"
"And you don't even like Jason," I said. "Do you?"
Vi shrugged. "He's not my type, but he's cute."
Vi had a type? We were only thirteen! Who had my sister become, and
when? Lowering my voice, I said, "Did you give a blow job to Mike Dornheiss?"

Vi
laughed. "Did Marisa tell you that? Because it would explain things.
Listen, Daisy. Jason came to me."
"So yes or no about Mike?"

"No." She looked indignant, and then she smiled. "I gave him a hand job."
For the second time that day, the first having been when I'd told Marisa that 
Jason was cheating on her, I felt as if I might cry. I said, "You're going to 
get a reputation," which was surely something I'd heard one person say to 
another in a movie.

"Who cares?" Vi said. "Unlike you, I'm not trying to join Marisa's little 
club." All this time, we'd been standing on the sidewalk, and she turned toward 
the walkway that led to our front door. "Did you start dinner?"
I shook my head and followed her inside.
We made creamed chicken, and just after she'd set the pan in the oven,
Vi turned to me. "Don't flip out," she said. "You promise?" Then she
whispered, "I did give a blow job to Jason." Her expression was half bashful
and half proud. "We sixty-nined."
"Oh, Vi," I said.

,e(1rtaUiymight have believed I'd made up my abilities,
that all along I'd been in cahoots with my sister. This was what I'd have
preferred for Marisa to believe, but I already knew, even then, that my own
preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events.
I avoided her for the rest of that week, but apparently Jason did, too. On
Monday afternoon, she marched to his house, entered via the unlocked
front door, walked up to the second floor, found his room--she had never
been to the Trachsels' before--and discovered him straddling my sister in
his bed, leaning in to lick her ample boobs. "We had our shorts on," Vi
told me later, as if this fact restored all dignity to the encounter.
On Tuesday, as Marisa and I and a few dozen other girls were changing
before PE, she yelled, "Hey, Daisy!" When I looked over my shoulder, I
saw that she already had on her PE clothes and was standing by the sinks,
about fifteen feet away. All the conversations that had been occurring
ceased at once, and I could feel, before she said anything else, that it was
going to be bad. And Vi wasn't in school that day; she was faking sick, and
I was alone. I forced myself to turn in Marisa's direction.
"How's your ESP today?" she called out.
My heart slammed against my rib cage. The presence from the Ouija
sessions--it was here, too, in the locker room. It was egging Marisa on,
even if she wasn't aware of it. And then I understood, as I never had before,
that it was a malevolent presence. Did we think we could simply ask it
question after question and give nothing back? No. It wanted something

from us in return.
"Did you guys know that Daisy is psychic?" Marisa's tone as she looked
around the locker room was tilled with a brutal cheer. "And Violet, too,"
she continued. "Although I wonder if Violet's so busy being a slut that she
doesn't have time to predict the future."
There was a shift in the air, a dawning comprehension on the part of
the other girls. This was a takedown. Which was probably what they'd
suspected, but the way Marisa had started had been confusing to them.
"They talk to the devil," Marisa said. Except for a dripping faucet, the
locker room was silent. "That's who tells them things."
Later, it felt like I should have offered an explanation, stating facts to
our audience: We've been using a Ouija board Marisa got for her birthday,
but now she's mad because she found out she and Vi both have been hooking
up with Jason Trachsel. But I said nothing, and Marisa added, "Daisy
and Violet are devil-worshipping witches, and if you don't watch out, they'll 
put a spell on you."
From out in the gym, I heard the sound of Ms. McKee's whistle summoning
us. In the locker room, the girls remained quiet. What was it that
the presence wanted? And then I thought that maybe Marisa was right;
maybe it was the devil. If I never asked it anything else, would it leave me
alone? "We're not witches," I finally said, and my voice was small.
Marisa walked toward me, and I braced myself, as if for a punch. Instead,
she leaned in close to my face, brought her hands up, clenched them,
and popped them open as she shouted, "Abracadabra! Ooga booga!"
Laughter erupted as she kept walking.
I turned back to my locker, and I remained facing its metal door for
more than a minute. The other girls began murmuring, then they began
talking at a normal volume, and then they, too, walked into the gym.
When I turned around again, only a handful were left, conversing as if
I weren't there.

hat '14. cekcriL. mymother dropped Vi and me off to spend the afmoon
at the West County mall. In the food court, Vi went to buy a
eeseburger from McDonald's while I got in line at Sbarro. I felt a tap on y 
shoulder, and a girl I had never seen, a girl who didn't go to our school,
said, "Are you one of the witches?" Her voice was mostly bright, almost
friendly, but with a filigree of cruelty probably attributable to the fact that
she was accompanied by three other girls. Variations on this interaction
played out for Vi and me for the rest of eighth grade and all through high

school.
On the last day of middle school, the eighth graders went to Six Flags,
and that evening there was a pool party at Mandy Jurenka's house that I
didn't go to; all that summer, I hid at home. One day in July, a letter arrived
for me in the mail, my name in all caps on the envelope, as if to disguise
the handwriting--as if I wouldn't know immediately who it was
from. Inside was an unlined piece of paper with ten words on it: You are a
FREAK and you are going to HELL!
When Vi returned before dinner from watching a movie at Janie

Spriggs's house, I was lying on my bed looking at the paper. I immediately
set it to one side, and she grabbed for it, held it up, and snorted. "I should 
put a spell on her," she said. Whatever had been going on between Vi and
Jason was long finished, and when we'd run into Beth Wheatley one Sunday
at King Doh--she was with her family, and Vi and I were with our
father--she'd mentioned that Jason was going out with Marisa again. I
later heard that Jason told people that when Vi had lain on top of him,
he'd felt like he was being smashed, but this may have been a rumor circulated
by Marisa because it didn't sound to me like what a boy would say.
I doubted our parents had any inkling of what had transpired that
spring--they were even more socially isolated than Vi and I were--but
one evening shortly after I received the freak letter, on another night when
Vi was at Janie's, my father knocked on the open door of our bedroom. He
said, "I thought I'd get an ice-cream cone. Would you like to come?"
My mother was watching TV in the living room as we left the house.
Neither my father nor I said a word during the eight-minute walk downtown,
and we spoke little as we waited in line at Velvet Freeze, then placed
our orders; he asked for chocolate and I asked for peppermint with rainbow
sprinkles. When we had our cones, we went back outside, and after
we'd found an empty bench, my father said, in a mild way, "I didn't much
care for junior high. I hadn't had my growth spurt yet, and kids that age
can be cruel."

I kept licking my ice cream and said nothing, and my father didn't
speak again, either. He finished his cone first, then I finished mine, then
he said, "Shall we?" and we walked back home, also in silence.

month of ninth grade, at Kirkwood High, a senior boy
named Dan Edwards approached me in the hall and said, "You're Daisy,
right?"
I tensed, waiting for the inevitable.

He said, "Some of us are going bowling on Friday, and you should
come."

I blinked.

"I can pick you up at your house," he added.
He was medium height and skinny, with a narrow head and moderately
bad skin. He was on the fringes of the popular crowd in the senior class,
which was how I knew his name--he was thought by guys to be very
funny, though his was a Monty Python and Blues Brothers brand of humor
that I never exactly got. Dan did, however, turn out to possess a private
kindness not commonly associated with allegedly funny high school boys.
Standing by the lockers that afternoon, I said, "I live on Gilbert Street
near the train tracks," and I experienced an unexpected surge of optimism,
as if I were a trapeze artist letting go of one swing and lunging
hopefully toward the next. Might it be possible for me to transform myself
from an unacceptable high school type--a freak--into an acceptable
type: a freshman girl dating a senior boy? And surely this was no colder a
calculation than the one made by Dan. Not being all that attractive, his
best bet for landing a girlfriend was the well-established method of using
his senior status to pursue somebody younger.
In late December of my freshman year, after Dan and I had been going
out for three months, we lost our virginity to each other in his single bed,
Under tan-and-white-striped sheets, while his parents were driving his
grandmother back to Rolla after Christmas. If the sex didn't hurt as much
as I'd feared, I also wouldn't characterize it as pleasurable, possibly because
we were using not one but two condoms. But Dan's gratitude and
nervousness made me feel very tender toward him. The next day, he gave
me a thin gold necklace with a pendant of peridot--mY birthstone, though
I'd never known it--and a card that read, Dear Daisy, I care about you a
lot. Love, Dan. The sweetness of these words was almost--almosta counterbalance 
to You are a FREAK and you are going to HELL! Also,
the fact that Dan couldn't bring himself to write I love you, even though
clearly he wanted to, was a relief because I didn't think I loved him back.
Dan and I kept going out after he left for Grinnell, until the spring of
my sophomore year, when I was wooed by a classmate named Tom Muel
ler.
Tom was better-looking than Dan, and a proud Republican; once after
he used the term "welfare queen," he and Vi got in a fight that culminated
in her throwing a Lucite salt shaker from our kitchen table at his head.
Although I had, unbeknownst to myself, become a serial monogamist--

for almost a decade, until after my mother died, I wasn't without a boyfriend
for more than a couple weeks at a time--I hadn't totally succeeded,
back in high school, in going from Witch to Girlfriend. In our junior year
Vi, Marisa, and I all ended up in the same English class. The teacher was
Mr. Caldwell, who was in his mid-thirties and had blond hair, a blond
beard, and flushed cheeks that became even pinker when he spoke about
the genius of Melville and Faulkner. He had a PhD from Yale, which made
it a feather in the cap of Kirkwood High that he was there; after earning
his doctorate, he'd moved to St. Louis because his wife was a native who
wanted to come home. Everyone loved Mr. Caldwell, and many girls had
crushes on him, though I found his unusually rounded hips and buttocks
womanly. But I did think he was a great teacher, and the force of his 
personality,
his enthusiasm for American and British literature, made his the
one class I was in with Marisa during high school that was tolerable; Mr.

Caldwell made Marisa irrelevant.
And then, in January of our junior year, Mr. Caldwell came down with
the Ilti and a substitute teacher showed up. She took attendance by calling
out our last names, and when she got to Shramm, I raised my hand and
said, "Here."

She looked again at the list. "There are two Shramms. You're which
one?"

"No," Marisa said immediately. "She's Witch Two."
The class broke into laughter; Vi gave Marisa the finger; I sat in my
chair facing forward, not turning my head. There was then, for weeks, a
resurgence of our identity as the witches, and once when I got excused
from chemistry to use the bathroom, I passed a popular freshman boy
named Kevin Chansky in the otherwise empty hallway. He smirked and
said, "Hey, Two," and I whirled around. Perhaps this was the last straw
because Kevin was younger than I was or because he was sure enough of
himself to taunt me with no one watching. In any case, I grabbed the back
of his sweater, pulling him toward me, and said, "Don't ever talk to me
again, you piece of shit." He looked terrified, which was gratifying, but I
was shaking as I continued down the hall. I wasn't so sure I'd done the
right thing--in Kevin's retelling, I might seem weirder than I was already
thought to be--but when I described the incident to Vi, she gave me a
high five.

I wondered sometimes what my boyfriends made of the rumors surrounding
Vi and me. To Dan, I think they seemed like freshman silliness.
He once said, "You're not really psychic, are you?" and I said, "No," and he
said, "Too bad, because I was hoping you could tell me if I'll get into
Northwestern." (In fact, I did know--he wouldn't.) I always felt that my
reputation preceded me, that every time I talked to someone I hadn't
talked to before, every time I drew any attention to myself, which I did
only when I couldn't avoid it--I would participate in class if it was required
but under no circumstances would I have made an announcement at assembly--I was 
proving one thing: Look how normal I am. Look how not creepy.
I earned B's in high school, was accepted in the spring of my senior year by 
four colleges, including the University of Missouri--Mizzou--and introduced
myself as Kate when I arrived on campus in the fall of 1993.
Daisy had always seemed like someone else, someone fanciful and lighthearted.
But, as with my decision to date Dan Edwards, my reasoning
also reflected calculation. Other people from my high school attended
Mizzou, and though I could, with a student body of over thirty thousand,
mostly avoid them, I didn't want to take chances. If someone I knew from
St. Louis told someone else at the university, "Did you know Daisy
Shramm is a witch?" I wanted the other person to say not "She is?" but
"Who?" For no particular reason, I majored in political science. I also
joined a sorority and spent forty minutes a day climbing to nowhere on a

StairMaster in the gym.
Vi had gone out to Reed College, in Portland, Oregon; she and my fa
ther
had flown west the same day my mother and I made the two-hour
drive from our house in Kirkwood to Columbia, Missouri. But Vi did not
last long at Reed, and I've wondered if her departure from the school was
the first in the series of events that propelled her not toward a degree, not
toward the kind of steady career she was certainly smart enough for, but
instead onto the fringes of society. Or maybe she was already headed that

way all along.
Marisa Mazarelli stayed in town for college, going to Saint Louis Uni
versity,
which was a Jesuit school downtown. I didn't attend high school
reunions or informal get-togethers held by our classmates, so I didn't see
her for more than fifteen years following our graduation. I heard that her
father had moved out a few months after we finished high school; for
years, he'd been having an affair with a waitress at one of his restaurants.
After college, Janie Spriggs told me that Marisa was engaged, and then
that the wedding had been called off, but I didn't know if the decision had
been made by her or her fiancé, or even who her fiancé was.
Brynn Zansmyer, the girl whose name had come to me that night at the
slumber party when Marisa asked the Ouija board which of us would be
the first to die, was killed in a hiking accident in California in August
1998, when she was twenty-four; she tripped on a narrow path on a dill' and 
fell a hundred and twenty feet into a ravine. I didn't go to Bryn it's
funeral, but she was the first person I knew to die young, and 1 felt1
shouldn't have, but I did--shocked by her death. So consumed had I
been by the other events of that slumber party and their aftermath that I
had never again considered the information I'd received about Brynn
until nine years later. I wondered then: Should I have warned her? Would
she have thought me insane, or would the rumors of my demonic powers
have made my claims plausible? Even if she'd believed me, though, what
would I have said? Vi and I hadn't been raised in any church, and my 
understanding
of concepts such as fate and destiny was decidedly murky,
influenced by Back to the Future as much as anything else. But what was
clear, what had always been clear, was that I was not powerful. Thus I
could feel guilty, and deeply sad for Brynn, without the conviction that
I could have changed the outcome of her life.
Brynn had had large brown eyes and very long hair that in elementary
school she'd worn with bangs and a middle part. On either side of her part
she wore what we called friendship barrettes--little metal clips into which
we wove two colors of skinny ribbon. We all made these, but Brynn's collection
was the most extensive. She also had a pet rabbit, Marshmallow,
whom we had the opportunity to hold at her eighth-birthday party, in
second grade. In middle school, she turned suddenly pretty, which I suppose
was why Marisa had tapped her to be in her coterie. About a month
after my showdown with Marisa, following a PE class in which Ms. McKee
had had us do push-ups on the pavement outside--this was one of the last
days of eighth grade--we were changing clothes in the locker room, and
Brynn said with concern, "Daisy, your leg is bleeding." I looked down to
see a two-inch cut below my left knee. "I have a Band-Aid," Brynn said.
ut instead of passing it to me, she ripped the wrapper herself, pulled off
e tabs, and knelt to apply the Band-Aid to my skin; the gesture was both
eet and weirdly intimate. As she stood, she said, "When you get home,
u should have your mom put Neosporin on it." This was something I
ought of after Brynn died: We were, after all, in eighth grade and cer only
old enough to apply our own antibiotic, but apparently she lived in
ouse where her mother still did such things. Later I was glad for this-- r all 
the indications that poor pretty Brynn, with her barrettes and her
bbit and the little pink zippered vinyl case in which she'd kept Band- ids, had 
during her short life been well-loved.




Chapter 6

For--econd riA21-0- in A onw.ii U troublc
back to sleep after Owen's two A.M. nursing; I was determined not to think
about Vi's earthquake prediction, which was soon indistinguishable from
thinking about it. The real question was whether I'd be cheating, breaking
the pact I'd made with myself when Rosie was a baby, if I tried to figure out
if Vi was right. Was I even capable of figuring it out at this point? And if
I did, if I invited senses to come back in this way, then what? Hadn't I
learned that I couldn't just glean one useful tidbit, then slam the door on

everything else?
So no. No, I would not attempt to find out whether there would be an
earthquake. But what was permissible--because wouldn't any other
mother do the same?--was to think through a strategy for if an earthquake
happened. I imagined being in the yard with Owen and Rosie, the
blue sky and sharp sun and the dry, curled leaves blowing off the trees.
And then, from nowhere, would come the shaking, the power of the land
asserting itself. I would press my children to the ground and cover them
with my body. Inside our house, dishes would slip from cabinets and
lamps would tip over; I didn't want this, of course, but to sweep up broken
glass would be manageable. Or maybe it would be worse: Trees would fall
and roads would buckle. Or in the most terrible version, if the earthquake
was as strong as the New Madrid ones centuries earlier, houses would
crumble, cars fly skyward. If Rosie and Owen and I were in the house, on
the first floor, we'd climb under the dining room table, and on the second
floor, we'd--I wasn't sure. Get in the tub, or the closet Jeremy and I

shared? Lie down in our bed again? I needed to look up online what was
safest.

Or, I wondered, should we just leave St. Louis altogether? But for how
long and where would we go and what would happen to Vi and my father?
Jeremy would never agree to canceling his classes. If staying meant certain
death, then of course I wanted to leave, but if staying merely meant being
temporarily inconvenienced, then I wanted to stay. Unlike a hurricane, an
earthquake, even a bad one, wouldn't last long.
And after it was over, we'd pick ourselves up. Maybe we'd be completely
unscathed, or maybe there'd be several days of inconvenience and atypical
neighborly chumminess while the electricity was out and tree trunks
blocked the street, or maybe it would be the beginning of real, sustained
chaos, society as we knew it breaking down. But wasn't this ludicrous to
consider? An earthquake in St. Louis, even a devastating one, would be
significant for only a tiny portion of the American population; it wasn't
going to render the dollar worthless or lead to pillaging.

I just had to keep Owen and Rosie safe during the shaking, I thought; if
I could do that, we'd all be fine. With this resolved, I fell asleep.

revelation this morning in the parking lot of Schnucks," I told
Hank as we stood together at the edge of the Oak Knoll playground later
that day. Amelia and Rosie were running back and forth across the bridge
that connected the towers on the larger of the two play structures, and
Owen perched in a baby carrier on my chest. He was facing out and I
could feel him watching the girls as raptly as if they were finalists in a 
tennis
tournament. "I want a minivan," I said.
Hank snorted, but not meanly.
"Will you go with me to a dealership to do reconnaissance?" I said.
"Not right away, but maybe after all the earthquake stuff? I feel like I need
to have the facts in order to make my case to Jeremy."
"Jeremy's too cool for a minivan?"
"What would you do if Courtney said she wanted one?"
Hank grinned. "As if I haven't been emasculated enough with our his

and-hers
Priuses."
I said, "When we were at the grocery store, I'd just put Owen and Rosie
into their car seats and Rosie was screaming her head off because I hadn't
let her get a cookie--I mean, it wasn't even nine A.M.--and I was cramming
the groceries into the trunk, but they didn't all fit because the double
stroller was back there." Another reason they hadn't all fit in my sedan was
that I'd bought six gallons of water, along with batteries and extra diapers,
which I planned to store in the basement; in addition, I'd withdrawn three
hundred dollars from the ATM, not that it was clear to me what I'd do, in
an emergency, with the money. I said, "I had to put bags in the front seat
next to me, and then that sensor thing on the dashboard thought a person
was sitting there who wasn't wearing a seat belt and kept dinging. And as
I pull out of the parking lot, I pass this woman loading up her minivan all
placidly, and there's room for everything, and she has two children in car
seats, too, but they're both very calm."
"You know a minivan doesn't guarantee that Rosie won't scream for

cookies, right?"
"Also, we could all go places in one car," I said. "Like if you and I wanted
to take the girls to Grant's Farm, we wouldn't need to drive separately."
Before Owen's birth, Hank and I would drive together, but neither Hank's
car nor mine could fit three car seats. I said, "Is the dealership you guys
used last time the one out in Hazelwood?"
"Yeah, but what if they're so persuasive that I come away with a mini
van,
too?" Hank said. "Then what? You'll have a lot to explain to Courtney.
Here's what I really want to know, though. When the seat-belt sensor
was going off, did you buckle up your bag of bread and milk?"
"If we'd been driving more than half a mile, I would have, because it
was so annoying. But no." Amelia had moved to the center of the bridge,
its lowest point, and she began jumping in a way that made the bridge
shake; Rosie clung to the metal railing and shrieked with joy. I said, "I let
the bread and milk live dangerously."
s )( A c Owen and Rosie were down for their naps on Friday afternoon,
I began making my father's birthday cake, and I'd just set the pan
inside the oven when the phone rang. Seeing that it was Vi, I said, "Did
you figure out when the earthquake will be?"
"Daze, you'll be the first to know if I do. But Jesus, you need to relax."
"You're the one who went on TV warning people about a life-threatening
natural disaster."

"Well, I don't think your time is up. Do you?"
"I hope not."

"I was calling to ask if you got Dad a present yet, and can I go in on it?"

"You can, but it won't seem like it's from you. We got him a Wash U

sweatshirt and a picture of Rosie and Owen in a frame that says WE LOVE
GRANDPA."

"You always have to make me look bad."

"Give him an IOU for a fun activity, like you'll take him out for brunch."
"That's what you give your dad when you're twelve."
"Then do what you want." But do not, I thought, ask me to pick you up
right now and drive you to the mall.
"Jeremy's coming to get me at five-fifteen, right?" Vi said. "You think
we could swing by the Galleria and I'll run into Brookstone for literally
three minutes?"

Which is the same amount of time it would have taken you to order
something online two weeks ago, I thought. Aloud, I said, "That won't work
because Jeremy's picking up Dad, too. I'm sure Dad doesn't care if you give
him a present. He probably won't even notice."
"So says the good daughter with multiple gifts."
"You can put your name on our card," I said.

"Yeah, and maybe I can Photoshop my face into the picture of Owen and Rosie."

"So did Dad have fun on your date?"
"Very funny. He didn't come inside. The woman was okay but kind of Intense."
"So are you."
"Yeah, but I hadn't even finished my coffee when she's like, 'I'd like to
see you again. How about dinner on Saturday?' I said I needed to check
my calendar, but don't you think that's weird not to wait until the end of
the date? Or she could have sent an email after."
"It's flattering," I said. "She must like you."
"Well, I am irresistible." Vi sighed. "You really don't think an IOU for

Dad is lame?"
"You could make it for something he'd never do on his own, like get
ting
massages together at a spa."
"Dad would hate a massage," Vi said, which was probably true. I'd set Owen and 
Rosie's monitors side by side on the kitchen table, and
just then, from Owen's, there was an unhappy yell.
"Wow," Vi said. "I guess the pleasure of your teats has been requested."

again as I was changing Owen's diaper, and I answered
it without looking at the caller ID panel; I assumed it was Vi.
Instead, Hank said in a tight voice, "So Courtney just got a call from
her doctor about the CVS, and it looks like the baby has Down's."
"Oh my God," I said. "I'm so sorry." Was I'm so sorry even an appropriate
response? "Is there anything we can do?"
"Courtney's coming home from work now, and she's pretty upset."
"They think the baby has Down's or they know?"
"Well, we meet with a genetics counselor next week, but if there's an
extra chromosome 21, that's Down's. I guess the question then is how

severe."
I thought of Janie Spriggs's brother--You're twins because there's two of
you--and I wanted to say something to Hank about how sweet Pete had
been, but again, I wasn't sure of the protocol of this moment; maybe mentioning
that I'd known a nice retarded person was akin to announcing
that some of my best friends were black. "How about if we drop off dinner
tonight?" I said.
"Nab, I'm sure you've got your hands full with your dad's thing." I lank
sounded miserable as he said, "Tell him happy birthday from the Wheelings."

up,
I called Jeremy.
"Wow," he said. "Poor Hank and Courtney."
"You don't want to come home early, do you?"
He hesitated. I was asking because Hank's call had made my heart
clench--it was a particular kind of nervousness I thought of as anxious
heart--and because Jeremy's presence in the house calmed me, even if he
was upstairs reading or grading and I was downstairs with the children,
and these were facts that both of us understood without discussion. When
Rosie had been five months old, she'd gotten very sick--she'd been in the
hospital for three days--and sometimes, even though more than two
years had passed, the panic I'd felt then abruptly came back to me, the
nauseous fear that something terrible was happening or about to happen;
if anything, now that we had Owen, when the panic surged, it was worse
because there were two of them and (Pete Spriggs's proclamations 
notwithstanding)
only one of me. What Jeremy and I also didn't need to discuss
right then was his belief that he ought not to accommodate my every
flare-up of anxiety, a belief I mostly agreed with, though more in theory
than at specific times such as this one. Nevertheless, knowing he'd be
home in a few hours and that in fact nothing about Rosie or Owen's wellbeing
had changed since Hank's phone call, or for that matter since Vi's
earthquake prediction, I made myself say, "It's fine if you can't."
"I'm supposed to meet with a couple students."
"No, it's fine."

"You got the steaks for tonight, right? I don't need to stop by Schnucks?"
"I have everything. The cake's baking as we speak." I could feel Jeremy's
attention turning, and I blurted out, "You know how I didn't want biological
children?"
"Was that you?"
"Seriously," I said. "If this had happened to us, I'd have felt really guilty."
"They're not responsible. It's a matter of genetics."
"The chances of Down's increase the older you are."
"Sure, but the great majority of women over thirty-five still have healthy

babies."
"No, I know." I paused. "I wonder if they're considering--" I couldn't

bring myself to say the word abortion in front of Owen, though apparently
I didn't mind announcing to him that I once hadn't wanted biological

children.
"I'm sure they're in shock right now," Jeremy said. "But will you do me
a favor? Will you take a deep breath?"

Rosa a'va kce and started talking nine minutes before the timer
for the cake was set to go off--over the monitor, I distinctly heard her say,
"The baloney has a pee-pee in she's diaper"--and my heart was still
clenching. Before taking Owen upstairs to get Rosie, I called Vi back.
When she answered, I said, "If you're ready right now, we'll come over and
take you to the mall."

alkci a was crowded pretty much all the time, and on a Friday
afternoon it was mobbed; we had to park at the far north entrance beyond
Dillard's. Rosie didn't want to ride in the double stroller, and I ended up
mashing her down into the seat and snapping the buckles around her
waist as she writhed up. "Mommy is a bad Mommy," she howled. "Rosie
does not like Mommy."
"Tell us what you really think, Rosie," Vi said. "Don't hold back."
Inside Dillard's, I let Rosie out and said to Vi, "Feel free to go ahead and
we'll meet you."
"But I need your advice."
"I thought you had something specific in mind from Brookstone."
Quickly, Vi said, "There's a few possibilities."
By the time we'd made it across the mall, up the elevator, and into the
store, and Vi had dawdled in the way of the childless as she considered
whether our father would prefer a shower radio or velour slippers, it was
after four. The double stroller was too wide to push inside the store, so I'd
left it near the front, carrying Owen while I chased Rosie around, righting
the picture frames and alarm clocks she knocked over, returning the wine
openers and noise-canceling headphones she'd grabbed to their rightful
shelves.

The cashier who rang up the slippers Vi decided on was a short, sandy
haired man who took Vi's credit card then glanced back and forth between
us. I was so sure that he was going to say Are you twins? that I was
already half-nodding (She is. By eight minutes. Yes, identical), but what he
said instead, looking only at Vi, was "You're the psychic, aren't you? I saw
you on Channel 5."
"Oh," Vi said, and the energy of the encounter shifted; she became the
most important of the three adults present. "Yeah, that was me."
"You predicted a big earthquake?"
Vi's brow furrowed; the excitement of being recognized was suddenly
imbued with the seriousness of what she'd predicted. "I hope I'm wrong,"
she said. "I really do." This was such a perfect response that I silently
begged her to say nothing else; when she plucked a business card from her
wallet and passed it to the cashier, it was impossible to know whether
e'd chosen to ignore my plea or been unaware of it. "If you'd like to talk
bout your own path, this is how to reach me," she said to the man. "Issues ith 
loved ones, romantic and career guidance, what your true purpose
--really, anything you're confused about, I'd be happy to help." I wasn't
aring her spiel for the first time, but still, the irony was so rich, and she
s so oblivious to it. She added, "I do private consultations for seventy e
dollars and group sessions for thirty per person."
The man set the card on top of a clipboard next to the cash register--
wasn't obviously disgusted--and I averted my eyes so I wouldn't see
card's background, which featured a peach-tinted sunset and, on left side, a 
mountain; next to the mountain it said VIOLET SHRAMM,
PESSIONAL PSYCHIC MEDIUM and had not just her phone number and
il but her home address, which was where she conducted her sessions.
Outside the store, as I wrangled Owen and Rosie back into the stroller,
Vi said, "I just want to get a Diet Coke in the food court and then I'm
done."
"I need to make the icing for Dad's cake."
"Homemade icing, huh? Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart." But Vi
was already walking away, and she called over her shoulder, "I'll hurry."
"Meet us at the car!" I yelled. Three teenage girls passing by looked

at me.
A solid twenty minutes later, beaming and entirely unapologetic, Vi
opened the front passenger-side door. Owen and Rosie were both in their
car seats and the stroller was put away; I was in the driver's seat with
my own seat belt fastened and the car's motor on. As Vi climbed in, a
twenty-ounce cup in her hand, she said, "You'll never believe who just
called me."
I said nothing as I backed out of the parking space, and Vi said, "You
can't give me the silent treatment right now. This is way too exciting."
"I'm not giving you the silent treatment. I'm trying to get us out of the 
parking lot."
"Fine. I won't tell you if you don't want to know."
The truth was that I wasn't that curious, and certainly not enough
to beg her. I suspected her allegedly juicy tidbit would be along the lines
of the cousin or mother-in-law of some Rams player requesting a reading.
From
behind me, Rosie said, "Rosie wants a straw."
"You can use your cup with the straw at home."
"Rosie wants that straw."
"It's Aunt Vi's."
"Does she want a sip?" Vi asked, and I gave her a look and shook my
head; Rosie had never had soda. We were driving east on Clayton Road,
passing Hanley, when Vi said, "You really don't want to know who called
me? It's major."
"Tell me if you want to."
"Not if you're not interested."
I ignored the bait. "When we get home, will you set the table on the
patio while I frost the cake?"

"Rosie wants a sip!" Rosie yelled, and she kicked my seat as I made a
left off Clayton Road, onto DeMun. When we turned onto San Bonita,
Jeremy's car was parked on the street in front of our house, and he and my
father were walking across the yard toward the door.

A i Or krcrn set the steaks on the grill, he closed the lid and said,
"Kate, we're probably T minus fifteen minutes if you want to take Owen
up." We were all outside on the patio. My father sat in a chair, drinking
beer from a clear glass mug, and accepting Rosie's offerings of twigs and
leaves. Vi was also drinking a beer except out of the bottle and sitting in
the recliner with her legs extended, and I was standing next to the table,
holding Owen on my hip.
The temperature had been in the mid-seventies during the day and was
now in the high sixties, the light softening, and the loveliness of the evening
made me wish I hadn't let things turn even slightly ugly in the car
with Vi. Then I thought, But hadn't the whole outing, squabbling included,
served its purpose? It had distracted me from Courtney and Hank's test
results.

Owen's little face was right next to mine, and when I turned my head
toward his, we touched noses, which delighted him. "Are you ready for
night-night?" I said.
My father held up one finger. "Might I get a picture of the whole family
first?"

"Of course," I said. My father still used a standard camera he'd acquired
when Vi and I were in high school, and I had no idea where in the year
2009 he went to buy film or have it developed.
I called to Rosie, who was lying on her stomach in the grass, and she
looked up at me brightly and said, "Rosie's swimming."
"Grandpa's about to take our picture. Can you come over here?" Because
Jeremy had gone inside to wash his hands, I said to Vi, "Will you
watch Owen?" Without waiting for an answer, I set him on Vi's lap and
walked toward Rosie.
When I scooped her into my arms, she patted my cheek and said, "It's

nice to meet you, Mama."
"It's nice to see you. We already know each other."
Vi and Owen were still nestled on the recliner, and--I hadn't planned
this--I said, "That's a cute shot right there. Dad, want to get Auntie Vi
with her nephew?" This was, I was fairly sure, my apology to Vi. Or perhaps,
if what I was apologizing for was driving her to the mall and waiting
in the parking lot while she bought a Diet Coke, it was my affirmation that

I was a doormat.
I set Rosie down on the bricks and stood next to Jeremy, who had come
back outside. "You doing okay?" he murmured.
"I keep thinking of Courtney and Hank," I murmured back, at which
point I became aware that my father had taken our picture. "I don't think

I was smiling," I said.
"It's a candid," my father said. "Now, the umbrella casts a bit of a
shadow, so for the group shot, if you all want to stand to the right of it--"
I took Owen from Vi, and as we arranged ourselves, Vi somehow ended
up between Jeremy and me; Rosie formed the front row by herself. "Jeremy,
I feel like your sister wife," Vi said, and Jeremy said, "I should be so
lucky," and I loved him a little bit extra. Then my father clicked the camera
several times, until without warning Rosie shrugged off the hand I'd set
on her shoulder and raced back across the yard. "I hope you got one with

all our eyes open," I said.
Upstairs, Owen fell asleep while nursing, and he sighed a little as I set
him down in the crib, what sounded like a sigh of contentment. His eyes
remained closed, and I watched him, feeling that sprawling, bottomless
love.

to.I outside, Rosie was sitting in a booster seat on top of a patio chair, 
eating macaroni with her fingers, while everyone else cut
their steaks.
"This is delish, Jeremy," Vi said. "You've outdone yourself"
"You can thank Kate for picking the meat," Jeremy said.
I set Owen's monitor on the recliner and took a seat in the vacant chair
at the table, but I hadn't even unfolded my napkin when Vi tapped her
fork against the neck of her beer bottle. "So I have an announcement," she
said. "Not to steal your birthday thunder, Dad." She wasn't going to tell
our father about the woman she was dating, was she? Over dinner, in our
backyard, with Rosie sitting next to her? But no, Vi looked too pleased, too
unambivalent, to be coming out of the closet. And then she said, "Guess
who got invited to be a guest on the Today show next week? "She grinned
and pointed both her thumbs up toward her own face.
"Seriously?" I could hear how my voice sounded accusatory rather than excited. 
"Because of the earthquake stuff?"

Vi nodded. "One of their producers heard I was on the news here, and
now they want to interview me, too. Not in New York, they'll do it by satellite,
but still--not too shabby, huh?" She looked directly at me and said,
"And you didn't even want to know who'd called me at the mall."
"My word, Vi," said my father.
"What day?" said Jeremy.
"They think Wednesday." Vi made a fake-nervous expression, setting
her top teeth against her bottom teeth and inhaling while raising her eyebrows,
and I understood that she was beyond thrilled; this was very likely
the greatest thing that had ever happened to her, her reward for persisting on 
her authentic life journey while the assholes we knew from high school ad all 
paired off and become accountants. She added, "And they're doing
at my house, so I guess I better vacuum!"
"Well, hey, Vi," Jeremy said. "The Today show is the big time."
Who was most horrified, I wondered? My father, in his distant way, or e with my 
dread of exposure and my complete lack of confidence in Vi's
ility to act in her own best interest? Or maybe it was Jeremy, who had to
ow that ultimately he'd be the one to bear the brunt of my agitation.
"I hope Ann Curry interviews me, because I know she'll keep it classy," I was 
saying.
"Is that the black lady?" my father asked.
"Is she black?" I said. "I thought she was something else." My steak,
which I hadn't yet touched, had become inedible. The Today show was
viewed by how many millions of people with whom Vi would share her
insane-sounding, panic-inducing, wholly sincere vision? What I wanted
to tell her was that being on the news in St. Louis was bad enough, but
surely there would be consequences of a different order if she repeated her
prediction on national television. And yet--it had to do with our father's
presence--I couldn't say this at all. The bargain my father and I had struck
at some point in the last five years was that we would withstand our discomfort
at Vi's having become a professional psychic, and preserve our
relationship with her, by simply not talking about her job except in terms
of logistics. I know Vi has to work this Thursday night--that was an ac
ceptable
thing to say. However, if I said, But you'll become a national
laughingstock it would be a violation of our agreement; I'd be explicitly
acknowledging who Vi was, who in some ways I was, too. Plus, given Vi's
palpable excitement, I'd be acting like a killjoy. And yet, because I couldn't
bring myself to say This is wonderful! what I finally said, in a tone that I
strove to keep free of judgment, was "What do you think you'll wear?"
Vi laughed. "Of course that's what you want to know."
Chapter 7

I ea.n.t TVCa 1thepo,
graduation, but what I do remember from the ceremony is that our robes
were red, that Vi won a prize for a poem she had written about the expedition
of Lewis and Clark from the point of view of Sacagawea (senior year,
Vi had taken creative writing with our beloved junior-year English teacher
Mr. Caldwell), and that the name of the girl who tripped walking across
the stage to receive her diploma--I'm pretty sure there's always a girl who
trips--was Gabrielle Rhoads. I felt bad for Gabrielle, but I also was glad
that it hadn't been me or Vi.

Following the ceremony, which was in Queeny Park, a bunch of parents
were hosting a casino-themed party at the Town and Country Racquet
Club. After the party, around three A.M., the seniors would drive back to
campus for a big breakfast set up outside. Before we left Queeny Park, in
the fading evening light, our father took pictures of Vi and me in our caps and 
gowns, and our mother, in what was her version of a compliment, said to Vi, "I 
didn't know they gave prizes for writing a poem." The prize itself was a small 
square glass box with KIRKWOOD HIGH SCHOOL engraved on
e lid.

My father was still taking pictures when we were joined by Vi's friend trick, a 
scrawny but good-looking blond guy whom my parents seemed
assume Vi was romantically involved with--they'd gone to prom tother,
at least until they skipped out after the first hour--although I felt
etty sure Patrick didn't like girls. If! was right, then despite her precoously
slutty leanings in middle school, Vi had had 110 real boyfriend du r
ing high school. I wasn't even sure she'd had sex. In any case, for the last
four years, Vi and Patrick had both been on the tech crew of school plays;
dressed in black, they emerged between acts in Guys and Dolls and The
Pajama Game and moved sofas.
My own boyfriend, Tom, briefly came over to greet my parents, but
when I said he should bring his mother and father over, too, he hesitated.
I had thought our agreed-upon plan was that we'd introduce our parents
at graduation; they'd never met, though Tom had spent the last twenty-six
months at our house on Gilbert Street, having sex with me on an old single
cot in our basement before my father got home from work on weekdays
and on weekends after my parents had gone to bed. Tom was a big,
genial, not intensely smart basketball player whose father was a pulmonologist
and whose mother--the first person I ever met who'd had a facelift--ran Kirkwood
High School's Mothers' Club and didn't like me.
A few weeks after Tom and I had gotten together, on an evening on
which we'd stopped at his house to do shots of his dad's bourbon before
going to a party hosted by a kid who lived in Glendale, I emerged from
the downstairs bathroom and found Mrs. Mueller standing right outside
it; I hadn't realized she was home. "I hope you know you're just a fling,
Daisy," she said. "Tom would never be serious about a girl who doesn't go
to church."
I had believed that when Mrs. Mueller finally met my parents, she'd
understand that I wasn't a Satan worshipper or whatever it was she'd heard
but that I came from a respectable middle-class family. However, after the
graduation ceremony, when I pressed Tom to get his parents, he said, "My
morn's really busy with stuff for the party. She might have left already for
the Racquet Club."
"I see her right there." I gestured ten yards away, toward where Dr. and
Mrs. Mueller and Tom's brother Laird were all talking warmly to our prin
cipal.
"Well, she's about to leave," Tom said.
I scowled at him, and he said, "What?" and then he said, "Don't gel

mad, but she doesn't want to meet your parents. I'm sorry. I swear I tried."

Mv parents were at this point just a few feet from Tom and me, my la
ther taking pictures of Vi and Patrick as they pressed their heads side by
side and held the tassels from their caps above their mouths like mustaches;
my mother was observing them and frowning. And in this moment
I felt a welling combination of shame and fury on my family's behalf,
a fear that my parents, while innocent of Mrs. Mueller's suspicions, were
still too odd and socially inept to convince anyone otherwise.
I was close to crying, but I tried to conceal it as I said to Tom, "Your
mom's a snob." Really, I was about a second from tears. "And you're a
wimp."
"Daisy--" He seemed less offended than concerned, and before my
face collapsed, I turned and ran in the other direction. But I had no plan,
I realized when I found myself on the outskirts of the throng of graduates
and their families; my plan had been for Tom to chase and soothe me, but
he wasn't cooperating. I was at least five miles from home, wearing heels
and a dress under my ridiculous red gown, but I couldn't come up with a
better idea, so I began walking. Mason Road ran along the east side of the
park, and I knew it intersected with Manchester, which would eventually
lead me back toward Kirkwood.
I'd been walking for twenty minutes, it was completely dark out, and
I'd developed blisters on both heels when I heard frantic honking that I
briefly felt sure was coming from Tom's Jeep before I saw Vi driving our
father's Buick and gesturing wildly. She pulled over, and I ran across Manhester
Road. "What the fuck are you doing?" she called out her open
indow.

"I got in a fight with Tom." I had thought Patrick would be with her, but e was 
alone. I said, "Did Mom and Dad wonder where I went?"
"We assumed you'd left with Tom, but then I ran into him, and he ked me where 
you were."
"I hate his mom." When I saw that Vi was looking over her shoulder,
paring to make a U-turn, I said, "Can you take me home?"
She glanced at me. "What did Tom do?" Just about everyone--even Vi d 
Patrick--planned to attend the after-graduation party. It was the nd where you 
couldn't go back in if you left early, but almost no one left ly, either.
"I'm not in a party mood," I said. "My feet hurt."
Vi laughed, but she kept driving east. We rode in silence, except for the
radio, but first Vi didn't make a left on North Geyer, then she didn't make
one on Kirkwood Road, either.
"Where are you going?" I said.
"I'm seeing where the wind takes us."
"Seriously," I said.
"If you're not going to the party, I'm not, either."
"You don't have to skip it."
"Well, I'm so crushed," she said. "I'll probably regret it for the rest of my

life."
We were quiet again, and at Hampton Avenue, she got on the highway.
"Don't take us to East St. Louis," I said.
Vi grinned. "Relax."
By the time we were downtown--which wasn't reputed to be quite as
dangerous as East St. Louis but also wasn't known as a hangout for suburban
white girls, especially at night--my agitation about Tom and his
mother had been replaced with wariness of whatever it was Vi and I were
doing. Vi parallel-parked on Fourth Street and reached in the backseat for
her bunched-up graduation gown and mortarboard cap. She climbed
from the car, donned them both, then ducked her head back in to look at
where I still sat in the passenger seat. "Come on," she said. "And put your

hat on."
I'd almost thrown it in the trash on my way out of Queeny Park, but
instead I'd carried it with me, and even though I wasn't sure why I was
doing so, I obeyed Vi. We walked north on Fourth, then cut right on Market,
and all at once, the Arch was before us, huge and luminous and impossibly
curved. We crossed the street and entered the grounds of what was
officially known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. "Aren't
there park hours?" I said.
Vi scoffed, holding up her gown. "These are our immunity. Because it's
our special, special night."
There were no people nearby, though I could see in one direction two
men standing beside an overloaded grocery cart and in the other direct ioii
a figure of indeterminate gender squatting by the curb. We followed the
inclined sidewalk, then turned onto the grass, and then we could no longer
see the Arch because we were standing under it; beyond the grass,
down the steps and across the street, lay the dark mass of the Mississippi
River. Vi looked up and said, "Okay. This is the place." Soon she was lying
flat on her back. Her mortarboard cap fell off, and she tugged it back on;
when it fell off a second time, she adjusted it so her head rested on it like it
was a pillow.
Under her gown, Vi was wearing a navy blue rayon dress printed with
large brown flowers; it was knee-length, and as the gown parted and the
dress rode up, I saw that beneath it, like a girdle, she was wearing spandex
bike shorts. It had been years since I'd seen her either wear a dress or ride
a bike.

She patted the grass and said, "Make yourself at home." As I lay down
next to her, she withdrew a pack of Camel cigarettes and a plastic lighter
from a side pocket in her dress; she tapped out two cigarettes, held them
in her mouth as she lit them, and passed one to me. "It's a little-known
fact," she said, "that if you make a pilgrimage to the Arch on the night of
your high school graduation, and if you lie down under its highest point,
then any wish you make will come true."
"What about picking up homeless-man germs?" I said. "Is that part of
the tradition?"

"You know what they say. Until you've had gonorrhea, you haven't
really lived." In fact, as we lay there and smoked--I smoked only at parties
and had gotten through high school never purchasing a pack--there was
omething pleasant about being stretched out on the grass in the warm
ight. Above us, the underbelly of the Arch glowed, and past the Arch was he 
infinite sky; it did not seem so hard to believe, in this moment, that a
ish you made here could come true.
"That's cool about your poetry prize," I said. "You didn't know, right?"
"You mean didn't know didn't know or didn't have a sense?"
"Either."

"Well, I'm pretty sure Mr. Caldwell decided single-handedly, so it esn't 
exactly count."
I turned to look at her; I could have asked what she meant, but I didn't.
After a minute, Vi said, "You think Mom will start cooking dinner
again when we're at college?"
"I've wondered that."
Vi inhaled on her cigarette. "I have a present for you."
"Really?" It hadn't occurred to me to buy one for her.
"Don't worry. I didn't pay for it. It's a story Patrick told me, and I've
been saving it to tell you because it's awesome. You know his cousin Mary
in Kansas City?"

I nodded.
"She works at a coffeehouse that sells biscotti. The pieces aren't
wrapped, they're just in a jar with a lid next to the cash register. And every
night when the employees close up, they play a game called Naughty
Biscotti. They each take a piece, put it in their butt crack, and see how far
they can walk before it falls out. Whoever walks the farthest wins. Then
they put the pieces back in the jar."
"That is not true," I said.
"Mary swears."
"Bullshit," I said. "Maybe she swears, but it's still not true."
"But will you ever eat unwrapped biscotti again?" Vi laughed. "See?
You believe it. Okay, want to hear my first wish?"
"That the cafeteria at Reed sells butt-crack-flavored biscotti?"
"Oh, I already know they do. That's why I decided to go there. My second wish 
is that Mrs. Mueller's face-lift starts melting. And my third wish
is that after college, I get into the Peace Corps and I fall in love with a
dashing African tribesman and become his wife."
"Why don't you just fall in love with another Peace Corps volunteer?"
After consideration, Vi said, "Okay. And then I'll go to law school at
Berkeley. But who will you marry? Don't say Tom."
In fact, despite Tom's mother, he and I were planning to stay together
after I'd left for Mizzou and he was at DePauw in Indiana. And yet I swear
that in this moment--a breeze rose, and I could hear it passing through
the ash trees--I saw Jeremy; truly, I saw him. Not up close but at a dis
tance, in profile, as if across a parking lot. This wasn't how I'd see him

when we would actually meet, but I think it's how I recognized him. And

though I could, on the night of graduation, feel his kindness, the image of
him made me nervous. I was seventeen, and he was a strange, grown-up
man.

I said to Vi, "Compared to most of the guys in our class, Tom has a lot
going for him."

"Well, sure--in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Okay,
how about this? At Mizzou, you'll meet a nice country boy named Fred
who'll sweep you off your feet and take you back to his family farm. You'll
have eight children. Every night you'll cook meat loaf, put the kids to bed,
and you and Fred will make passionate yet gentle love."
"What, while he chews on a piece of hay?" Then--I had never said this
aloud, I hadn't even realized I'd decided it--I said, "I don't want to have
children. I want to adopt so they don't have senses."
"Really?" Vi looked genuinely interested. "That's the only reason I would want 
kids. But why do you even think senses are hereditary? I've
never met anyone more clueless than Mom and Dad, so they sure as shit
don't have them."

"But we know nothing about Mom's family. Obviously, something
weird happened between her and them." Vi was quiet--I could feel her
Skepticism--and I said, "I'll be like the Garretts." These were neighbors I
babysat for, a white father who worked at Monsanto and a white mother
who ran a catering company and their two Chinese daughters, Lucy and
Anna, who were four and five.
Vi wrinkled her nose. "Those girls are annoying." She never babysat; in
the summers, she worked at a frozen yogurt place that would be closed by
he mid-nineties.

I said, "The reason Mrs. Mueller doesn't like me is because of senses.
nd all the stuff with Marisa Mazarelli--I'd never want to put my
ildren through that."
' "Marisa's an ignoramus," Vi said. "And you still haven't wished for
ything."
"Have you?"
"The Peace Corps and law school. Oh, and my cool husband. I think
he'll be named Theo. That's a cool name, right?"
What I wanted sounded so pathetically unambitious that I almost
didn't say it, but then I did. I said, "I wish to live anywhere besides St.
Louis."

car, we were headed west on 40 until Vi got off on Grand.
"Where are you going now?" I asked.
"There are still four hours before the breakfast," she said. "We can't go

home."
And so instead, we drove. We drove up and down the streets around
the water tower, past the old mansions built in a neighborhood where rich
people no longer wanted to live, and we drove by the brick houses on Magnolia,
past the Botanical Garden, south on Kingshighway, then north on
Kingshighway, then west on Lindell, along the stately homes that had been
built facing Forest Park for diplomats visiting the 1904 World's Fair--Tom
had once told me that Chuck Berry lived in one of these houses, which I
didn't learn until adulthood wasn't true--and then we drove by Wash U,
where I didn't know my one-day husband would work, up toward the
Loop, down Delmar and past the Tivoli Theatre--we considered getting
something to eat in the Loop, but then we'd driven by without stopping--
and then we were on 170, up near the airport, out in St. Charles and
O'Fallon and Chesterfield, places that we never went, that would explode
with housing subdivisions and schools and strip malls in the years to
come. And then we were somehow all the way back on Kingshighway and
this time, a little south of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, something blew across
the dark pavement in front of our headlights, and Vi and I looked at each
other with incredulity and delight. It was close to one A.M. by then, and we
hadn't spoken for easily twenty minutes.
"Was that a Burger King crown?" I said, and Vi said, "It's a miracle! A
Burger King crown on Kingshighway? We should go back and get it!"
"We don't need to get it," I said "We both saw it."
Our windows were open, and the radio had been playing continuously--
not one but two Billy Joel songs had come on during our drive--and the
air was dense with the humidity of a midwestern summer, weather that
even then made me homesick, though it was hard to say for what. Maybe
my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's
the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the
experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us
seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly;
that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures
would unfold the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just be
ginning.

"Now all our wishes will definitely come true," Vi said. "You can't beat
a crown for a good omen."

I: 11on an overcast Tuesday morning six weeks into
my freshman year at Mizzou, I awoke with a strong feeling that I needed
to call Vi. It had been the dream I'd been having before my alarm clock
went off, I realized, a dream of sitting in a lecture hall with my view of the
stage blocked by a girl who had a pixie haircut. Then the girl turned
around, and I saw that she was Vi. The expression on her face was unsmiling,
as if she didn't know who I was.
Though it still sometimes surprised me not to find Vi next to me at a
meal, or to return to my dorm room and realize that it wasn't Vi but a girl
named Heather from Davenport, Iowa, reading in the other bed, the truth
was that Vi and I hadn't been in close contact; we'd spoken on the phone
infrequently since starting college. The two-hour time difference between
Columbia, Missouri, and Portland, Oregon, made it always seem like not
quite the right moment to talk, plus the busyness of college could consume
me for days at a time: the cycle of classes and assignments and my
work-study job (it was at an adult day-care center, but to my surprise, I
kind of liked it), plus exercise and parties and post-party debriefings with
girls I already felt closer to than the friends I'd had in high school.
All of this meant that Vi and I communicated primarily by email,
which was new to both of us, and which we used to write four- or five
paragraph, correctly capitalized and punctuated missives every other day.
Sitting in my dorm's computer lab, I'd start out Dear Vi, and I'd sign off 
Love, Daisy. I'd feel like I was starring in a wholesome movie about a well
adjusted coed as I wrote, I just went with a bunch of people on my hall to a
lecture by a man who's climbed the highest mountain on every continent.
As it happened, I didn't get around to calling Vi that day. After returning
from the adult day-care center, I met up with Lauren, a girl from
Tampa who had during rush become my new best friend, and we went to
the gym, climbed for forty minutes on adjacent StairMasters while listening
to music on headphones, then stood outside the gym entrance for the
same amount of time, drinking bottled water and discussing whether I
should go for a freshman named Ben Murphy with whom I'd played pingpong
at a Delta Upsilon party the previous Saturday. (The second week of
school, during one of our increasingly empty, stuttering phone conversa
tions,
I had worked up the nerve to say to Tom Mueller, "I've been think
ing
maybe we should see other people," and in a tone of great relief, he'd
said, "I've been thinking that, too." We hadn't spoken since.)
Lauren and I lived on different floors of the same dorm, Schurz Hall,
and after we parted ways, I showered, read two chapters from Book IV of The 
Wealth of Nations, then met up again with Lauren and our friend
Meredith to walk to dinner. In the cafeteria, some guys we knew invited
us back to their room to watch Animal House, and it was after ten by the
time I returned to my own room to make flash cards for an upcoming

biology test.
My roommate and I got along but hadn't become friends. During the first week of 
school, our peer adviser had bought a birthday cake for a guy
on the hall, and that night when I'd said to Heather, "Are you going to
Rick's room?" she'd said, "I'm a Witness, and we don't celebrate birth

days."
A witness to what? I'd thought before realizing she meant Jehovah's. I knew 
little about the religion, but after that, worried that she, too, would
strongly disapprove if she ever caught wind of my senses, I kept a polite 
distance. It wasn't hard because she left every weekend. She either had
family nearby or--I was never clear on which--was staying with people
from her church whom she considered family.

On that night in October, I was at my desk copying phrases from my
biology textbook onto index cards, and Heather was sitting on her bed,
her legs tented and a notebook open across her thighs, when there was a
knock on our door. Before either of us had a chance to stand or even to call
"Come in," the door swung open and my sister appeared in the threshold.
Vi wore a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, jeans, and Birkenstocks without socks,
and over one shoulder she carried a green duffel bag. Unlike in my dream,
her hair wasn't short; she'd parted it in the center and pulled it back into a
low ponytail at the base of her neck, with the strands that weren't long
enough to fit in the rubber band tucked behind her ears. She grinned and
said, "Look what the cat dragged in."

In spite of the recent sense of her I'd had, I was stunned. "What are
you doing here?" I said. When I went to embrace her, I could smell her
Vi-ishness--she had long ago stopped wearing cheap perfume in favor of
patchouli oil, under which she always smelled in a good way like toast and
over which, in this moment, she smelled like body odor.
"I was in the neighborhood," she said. "Also, Reed sucks."
"Wait, did you just leave? You're not on a break?"
"I am on a break. A self-imposed one." She entered the room, set her duf
fel
on the floor, and sat on my bed. Then she said, "You're Heather, right? I'm
Vi, Daisy's original roommate."

Heather looked between us, seeming confused, and I said, "This is my
sister." Daisy wasn't how anyone at college knew me, and I felt a flare of
annoyance. It wasn't that I didn't want to see Vi, but there were preparations
I'd have made if I'd known she was coming.

"Do you have any food?" Vi asked.

Though Heather and I were co-renting a mini-refrigerator, it contained
only yogurt, which belonged to her, and vodka, which belonged to me and
which Lauren and I mixed with raspberry Crystal Light and drank before

parties; I'd considered asking Heather if the vodka bothered her, but I was
afraid of the answer. Looking down at my watch, I saw that it was just after 
eleven. "We could go get pizza," I said.
Vi set her palms against my mattress and pushed herself off. "Sounds 
magnifique." She walked over to a closet, the one that wasn't mine, and

opened it.
"Here," I said. From my own closet, I pulled out a fleece jacket and

passed it to her. It was impossible not to notice that Vi's weight, which had
stabilized in high school, had climbed again since we'd started college,
and her face and body contained a new puffiness. Vi and I weren't
beautiful--we had our father's long, narrow nose--but we could certainly
be pretty, because we also had our mother's large blue eyes and light hair.
And yet, with her dumpy ponytail and clothes, it almost seemed as if Vi
were trying to look unattractive. It would have been mean to see her as a
cautionary example, a warning of what would happen if I stopped climbing
the StairMaster every day, but after our time apart, both our similarities
and differences appeared more starkly to me than they ever had before.
Her hand reaching for the doorknob as we left the room, cuffed by the red
fleece of my jacket--it could have been my hand, there was a way in which

it was my hand.
Outside, as we turned onto College Avenue, I said, "What's going on?"
"I came here on the Greyhound, which did you know that's called riding
the dog? A guy who got on in Salt Lake City asked if he could put his
head on my shoulder to sleep, and a guy who got on in Denver asked if I'd
pierce his ear."
"You said no, right?"
"He even had a cup of ice. But yes--I said no."
"You should have sat next to a woman."
"For some of the time, I did. I've been on the bus since Sunday night."
Which meant forty-eight hours before. I said, "I still don't understand--"
"My roommate, Lisa, is totally anorexic. She goes running twice a day,
for like six miles each time, and she talks about food constantly and hoards
candy--Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers--but she doesn't eat it. And the
other roommate, Wendy, she's supposedly some kind of engineering ge
nius,
but she has no sense of humor and uses this disgusting deodorant
that she sprays on for so long every inorning, I can taste it in my mouth.
There's a lot of weirdos at Reed, but not cool weirdos. That's what I thought
it would be."

"But you're planning to go back, right? Did you tell your professors
you'd be missing class?"

"The professors aren't friendly, either. It's just not my kind of place."
"Vi, you've barely been there a month."
"I want to take a gap year and travel, like everyone does in England."
Vi also had a work-study job--hers was in food service--but I knew
without asking that she had no more money saved than I did, nor were our
parents the kind to fund such activities.

As we passed Rosemary Lane, she said, "So you're happy as a clam here,
huh? Mizzou is a dream come true?"

Carefully, I said, "I like it overall." I decided then to come clean on the
other piece of information I'd concealed in my emails, besides my name
change. I said, "I joined a sorority. I'm a Theta."
To my surprise, she said, "I thought I wanted to go somewhere without

a Greek system, but now I can see the point of it, just for meeting people."

Was it possible Vi hadn't made any friends at Reed? Perhaps her emails
had been as selectively revealing as mine. I went to an anti-apartheid rally, 
she'd mentioned recently, which I'd interpreted as Vi having fun.
"So who's your boyfriend now that you and Tom are done?" she asked.
I thought of Ben Murphy, with whom I'd made out after our ping-pong
match, but I said, "Nobody."

"Wait a second." Vi actually stopped walking. "You don't have a boyfriend?"

"It's
not that weird."
"I feel like there should be dogs falling from the sky and statues crying
blood. Are you still talking to Tom?"

"Not for a while." We had reached University Avenue, and as we turned,
I said, "How long are you planning to stay? No offense."
Vi laughed. "No offense, but I've never liked you. No offense, but your
personality sucks."
"That's not what I meant."
"I'm psyched to explore Columbia," she said. "I probably should have
come here to begin with."
Really? I thought. It was good to see Vi, but in the close quarters of col
lege
life, I wasn't sure I'd be able to contain her, or prevent her familiarity
with my old self from spilling into my new life. But because it was the way
I wished I felt, I said, "Mi dorm room es su dorm room."

c o rdc red a twelve-inch pizza with sausage and green peppers, and
while we waited for it, Vi said, "I knew as soon as I got out there that I'd
made a mistake. I should never have gone to Reed without visiting. The
whole vibe was just off. But I was like, okay, I'll get through the semester,
maybe even the first year, and then I'll transfer. And at first I tried to be a
good little student. Really. I was all diligent. But in classes, everyone just
loved hearing themselves talk. The place is overrun with pretentious
windbags. And the bathrooms in my dorm were coed, did I tell you that?
I was like, wait, I'm really expected to take a shit with some dude's hairy
legs right next to me? I started walking over to this administrative building
to poop."
"I bet you'll get used to it," I said.
She shook her head. "That's not the point. This is the part I have to tell
you. I'm in the library a few nights ago, sitting in this carrel, and all of a
sudden, there's this crazy yellow light, this energy, and I'm inside it, and
a voice is saying to me, 'You're not meant to suffer.' Over and over: 'You're
not meant to suffer, you're not meant to suffer, you're not meant to suf

fer.'
"
No, Vi, I thought. No, no, no. More than four years had passed since I'd
felt the presence summoned by Marisa Mazarelli's Ouija board. I said,

"Had you done acid?"
Vi looked annoyed. "This had nothing to do with drugs. It was a really
beautiful experience. It was peaceful. I was inside the light, it was like

being in a swimming pool except with light instead of water, and the voice
says, 'I am your guardian. You're not meant to suffer.' And I'm like, okay,

well, what am I meant to do? And the voice says, 'You're on a journey ol
discovery.' Then the light goes away, and I'm still sitting in the chair in the
library, but I hadn't imagined it. It was definitely real."
Across the booth, we looked at each other, and Vi's expression was
eager. I said, "Okay." What I wouldn't have given to be someone who
could dismiss her story as utter nonsense.

"I got on the bus the next day," she said.
"That seems like a really literal interpretation of a journey."
Seeming hurt, Vi said, "I don't know why you can't be supportive. It
wasn't scary at all, if that's what you're thinking. It was profound."
"Reed is a great school," I said. "You were so excited to go there. Have
you joined any groups?"

"I'm telling you I had a transcendent experience and you're saying I
should try out for debate? I thought you would understand." Of course I 
understood; even at her most impossible, Vi had never said
or done anything I could not imagine saying or doing myself, if I had less
self-control and respect for convention. But her tone was rubbing me the
wrong way, and I said, "Sorry to disappoint you."

That night,started out on the carpet, but by two o'clock, which
was half an hour after we'd turned out the light, she'd climbed into bed
beside me; she said the floor was hard. By two-thirty, I'd insisted that she
flip so her head was by my feet, though once she'd done so, it became clear
that this setup was no better than being side by side. Around three-ten,
she began scratching behind her knee, her nails scraping over the skin just
a few inches from my face.

I pressed my hand to her leg and whispered, so as not to awaken
Heather, "Quit it."

"I think I might have picked up something on the bus," Vi whispered
back.

"Great." Before climbing into bed, she'd taken a shower, padding to and
from the communal girls' bathroom in my white terry-cloth robe and
flip-flops, though I wasn't sure if that meant Vi was clean or that my robe
was now dirty.
"Not like an STD," Vi said. "Like a rash."
"Then you'll only make it worse by scratching."
Vi sighed loudly--was Heather really sleeping through all of this?--
and I turned onto my side, away from my sister. I knew the exact second
she fell asleep; I could hear the change in her breathing. Almost right away,
our conversation at the pizza place asserted itself in my brain. Would the
yellow light overtake me, too, in this moment or later? I didn't want it to. I
wanted nothing to do with it. Vi had said the experience wasn't scary, but
what if it was the same energy that had been there when Marisa and I had
used the Ouija board? It wasn't that I necessarily believed in Satan, but I
believed in the existence of darkness, which was perhaps the same thing.
And back then, I also hadn't immediately recognized that presence as bad.

when I returned from my economics lecture,
Heather was away from the room and Vi was lying on my bed reading the 
Missourian, Mizzou's student newspaper. "Someone named Ben Murphy
called for someone named Kate." Vi looked amused. "Isn't Kate kind of

bland?"
"It is my middle name." This was what I'd planned to say if someone
from high school asked about the change, though so far I hadn't ended up
in a class with anybody from Kirkwood. That Vi was the first person for
whom I needed to break out the excuse was deeply irritating.
"First of all, your middle name is Kathleen," Vi said. "But I just don't
see you as a Kate. What about Maya? That's pretty."
"Then you be Maya."
"You don't have to get all grouchy." She set down the newspaper. "What

do Mom and Dad think?"
"I haven't told them." In fact, it surprised me that she assumed I had.
Though St. Louis was only two hours from Columbia, and many of my
classmates who were from the area went home on weekends, it seemed
understood that I wouldn't return to our house until Thanksgiving. "Call
after five on Sundays because the rates are cheaper," my mother had said
on the drive to Mizzou, and when I did call collect each Sunday, I spoke to
her for five minutes, at which point, as precisely as if she'd set an egg 
timer,
she passed off the phone to my father. After I'd spoken to him for five
minutes, I'd hear her in the background, saying, "Earl, that's enough.
She'll call again next week." During our conversations, my mother never
asked questions. Instead, she told what might generously be called stories,
many of which I already knew--that our neighbors the Pockneys had had
to cut down the dogwood tree in their front yard because of a fungus,
which would prompt her to recall the time their Jack Russell terrier, 
Eisenhower,
had run away for three days, which would prompt her to say, as she
often had in the past, that she didn't think it was right to give a dog the
name of a president. When I spoke to my father, he did ask about my life
at Mizzou, but in a general way, as if I were the daughter of a friend. How
were my classes? Was I enjoying the bustle of campus life? From week to
week, he had no follow-up questions about the outcome of a particular
paper I'd written or the craft project I'd planned at the adult day-care
center; instead, in every conversation, we started anew with generalities.
After my mother had given him notice, he'd always conclude by saying, in
a rueful tone, "It's awfully quiet here without you girls," and I'd try to 
resist
the downward pull of everything contained within the remark, the
gravity of sadness in our house. Lightly, I'd say, "Well, it's good to talk to
you, Dad." Often, when I placed the phone's receiver back in its cradle, I'd
have to blink away tears.

But what I had said to Vi was true: While I'd been actively hiding my
name change from her, it hadn't occurred to me to mention it to our parents.
They were so confined to one particular part of my life that it didn't
seem like it mattered if they knew. Maybe this was callous to think, but it
just wasn't of much consequence what they called me.
Vi stretched her arms above her head. "So, Kate--is Ben Murphy the
guy who's not your boyfriend?"

"Did he leave a message?"
She shook her head. "Just his number. Let's go get Chinese food. I'm
starving."
"I'm meeting my friend Ann for dinner at six so we can do problem
sets."
"Then eat two dinners. It's not even five yet."
The truth was that I wasn't so sure I wanted Vi to accompany me to the
cafeteria again anyway. That morning, when I'd taken her to breakfast,
we'd sat with my friend Lauren and a couple other Theta girls I didn't
know well, and after I got up to find an orange, I returned to discover
everyone at the table with stricken expressions, listening to Vi deliver a
speech about how women's armpit hair contained powerful sex pheromones.
It could have been worse, though; she could have been talking
about the yellow light. I said, "I'll go with you to get Chinese food, and
then I really do have to meet Ann."

frozen yogurt for my second dinner, and as Ann and
I were leaving the cafeteria, we passed a group of guys, one of whom said,
"Kate?" When I looked over, Ben Murphy said, "Hey, I don't know if you
got my message."
"Yeah, sorry . . ." I trailed off. In the not particularly flattering light of
the cafeteria's entry hall, I noticed that Ben's wide nose turned up at the
end, displaying his nostrils in a piglike way. He wore khaki pants and a
tucked-in royal blue polo shirt, and he was okay-looking, but the fact that
we'd made out at the frat party was clearly revealed in this moment to have
been a result of drunkenness rather than any particular attraction be

tween
us.
He said, "We're having a barbecue tomorrow at the DU house, and you
should come if you can." There was the smallest strain in his delivery, the
effort he was making to sound casual.
"Oh. Well, I have a biology test, but I'll try to make it."
"Yo, Murph, quit flirting," said one of the guys he'd entered the cafeteria
with--they were lingering a few feet away--and Ben looked embarrassed.
"Come
over anytime after five," he said.
the room but Vi wasn't when I returned from the
adult day-care center the following afternoon. I changed into shorts and a
T-shirt and walked to the gym to use the StairMaster. When I got back to

Schurz Hall, Vi was sitting on the floor outside my room, which meant
that Heather must have departed in my absence, locking the door behind
her.

Vi had a book open on her lap, and as I approached, she held it up, cover
out--it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston--and
said, "Have you read this?"
I shook my head.
"I just went to an amazing African-American Lit class taught by this
guy who's a major Hurston expert. Don't shorts that short give you a
wedgie?"

I squinted at her. "You went to a class?"
"When in Rome. . ."

"Vi, you're not a student here."
"They weren't checking IDs at the door."
"That's not the point."
"What's it to you if I sit in on a class?"
I hadn't yet unlocked the door, nor had she stood. I folded my arms in
front of my chest. "You need to go back to Reed," I said.

"Funny you should say that." As if this were her ace in the hole, a triumph
for her to lord over me, she said, "Because actually I'm not enrolled.
I stopped going to classes weeks ago, and the dean said I had to withdraw
for the semester."
I stared at her. "What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing now that I'm gone from there."
"Do you think you can just stay here forever? Because you can't. It's
rude to Heather."

"Oh, really?" Vi smirked. "To Heather?"
"If you're not going back to Reed, then you need to go home."
Vi did stand then, the book tucked under her arm. "See, I can't do that,
either," she said, and again I could have sworn her tone contained a brag
ging note. "Because if I'm in St. Louis, I'll just keep fucking Mr. Caldwell."
We looked at each other--I suppose I should have felt compassion, but I
wanted to slap the smugness off her face--and she added, "Don't even
pretend you didn't know, because you knew."
Had I known? People had said Vi was Mr. Caldwell's favorite; junior
year, she sat at the desk closest to his, and once my boyfriend, Tom, had
jokingly told her that she'd sit on Mr. Caldwell's lap if she could. But there
was an enormous difference between teasing Vi that she and Mr. Caldwell
were in love and her having real, actual sex with him. He was at least
thirty-five, I was pretty sure, and he was handsome for a teacher, but the
idea of him as someone you touched entirely changed the criteria for judgment.
His womanly hips and butt, the paunch of his belly, his blond beard
and flushed cheeks--recalling them actively repelled me.
Finally, I said, "Where? If you were hooking up with him, where'd
you go?"
"It was mostly in his office during my free periods. I'd meet him about
'a paper' "--Vi made air quotes --"and he'd shut the door. And I'd be able
to hear people in the hallway outside talking about the football game or
whatever."
"Weren't you scared of getting caught?"
"What, by a teacher?" She scoffed. "I think he got off on the danger.
Oh, he did once take me to a restaurant in Illinois, when his wife was out
of town, but that actually stressed him out way more than banging me on
school property."
"Did you lose your virginity to him?"
"God, no." Vi laughed. "Patrick and I did it in ninth grade, and it's how
he figured out for sure he's into dudes. Caldwell's not a pedophile, by the
way. Pedophiles like children who haven't gone through puberty. Anyway,
we were in touch when I was at Reed, but his wife just had a baby, and I'm
thinking we should end it. It's a little gross now that he's a dad."
"But it wasn't gross when he was your teacher?"

Vi shrugged.
1 ler nonchalance--it was infuriating. "It's like you're trying as hard as
you can to make a mess of your life," I said. "And you know what? I bet
eventually, you'll succeed."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"Why can't you just be a normal person? Why do you have to have sex
with teachers and talk to spirits and drop out of college?"
"Why do you have to be so narrow-minded and judgmental?"
"Judgmental?" My voice was raised in a way I'd regret later, not because
I cared about offending Vi but because other people on the hall might
have heard. Almost in a shout, I said, "Judgmental is what you call letting
you stay here after you show up with no warning? You're wearing my
clothes, you're using my toothpaste, you're sleeping in my bed, for Christ's
sake. So if that's judgmental, then I'd hate to see how you'd be treated by
someone who doesn't feel as sorry for you as I do."
As I stalked away, it wasn't that I forgot I was holding the room key--
taking off with the room key accounted for the only satisfaction I felt.
What I had forgotten was that I was wearing a sweaty T-shirt and shorts
and that, as with my abrupt departure from my own high school graduation,
I had no particular place to go. I'd find Lauren, I decided, but when I knocked 
on the door of her room, two floors below mine, her roommate
said, "I think she's at a barbecue."
Ben's fraternity barbecue--I'd forgotten that, too. If I'd still been 
interested in Ben, I wouldn't then have decided to go; I wouldn't have wanted
to appear before him unshowered. But my wish to tell Lauren what a terrible
person my sister was exceeded my concern over Ben's opinion, and I
walked down Rollins Street to the DU house. I had just turned onto Maryland
Avenue when Ben himself appeared with another guy. Seeing me,
Ben smiled so broadly that it was like I really had shown up for his benefit.
"We forgot the ketchup and mustard," he said. "Want to go on a Hy-Vee run?"

"Sure," I said. (Sometimes when I look back, it feels as if what he said
wasn't Want to go on a Hy-Vee run? but, rather, Want to be my girlfriend for 
the next six years? and with just as little thought, I still said sure.)
He drove a black BMW, which made me understand that he probably
came from a rich family. The other guy, Nate, let me sit in front. Even on
the ride, I could feel Ben's solicitousness, how his attention had shifted
from his frat brother to me, a girl he barely knew.
By the time we got back to the DU house, my outrage at Vi had subsided;
besides, it wasn't as if I'd have told Lauren or anyone else the whole
story. Lauren was the one who approached me, saying, "Why are you
wearing workout clothes?" She had on a striped knee-length skirt and a

cardigan sweater.
"My sister is driving me crazy," I said. "I look terrible, right?"
"You look cute," Lauren said. "Sporty."
Ben had gotten me a plastic cup of beer and, when I finished the first,
another; I ate a hot dog and some potato chips, and I joined a badminton
game occurring on the lawn. U2 was playing on speakers set in windows
on the second floor, and it was a nice autumn evening that grew cool as
darkness fell. "Are you cold?" Ben asked. "I could get you a jacket."
Had Heather let Vi into the room, or was she out roaming the campus?
I wasn't still furious, but I also wasn't ready to see her again. This barbecue,
this was what I had come to Mizzou for. Not to be weighed down by
Vi's weirdness, her bad choices and creepy spirituality. "Maybe I will bor

row
a jacket," I said.
What Ben had meant, of course, was from his own dorm room, which
wasn't in the DU house and was in fact as far from it as my dorm, but I
walked with him there, solidly buzzed, and when we got to his room--it
was on the first floor of Hatch, a double he shared with a roommate who
conveniently was elsewhere--he turned on the overhead light and we'd
been inside no more than thirty seconds before he kissed me. Then he
nudged me toward his bed, and he was on top of me, nibbling my left ear
in a way that seemed ridiculous. He pushed up my T-shirt and stuck his
hand under my sports bra, the base of which was still slightly damp from
my time on the StairMaster hours before, but Ben seemed either not to
notice or not to care. I kept tuning in and out of the moment--it was hard
to decide if it was more alarming that Vi had slept with Mr. Caldwell or
been forced to withdraw from Reed--and I was half-aware of when lien
eased my shirt over my head. (Presumably Vi had done with Mr. Caldwell
the very things I was in the midst of doing with Ben.) I was the one who
removed my bra, because it wasn't the kind that hooked in back, and then
my shorts and underwear were off, too, but Ben was still dressed. At some
point, he'd unfastened the dark brown leather belt he was wearing, then
unbuttoned and unzipped his khaki pants, pulling them and his boxers
down below his butt, but he didn't remove them, and the two sides of the
unbuckled belt, the buckle and the leather tip, kept slapping my thighs as
he thrust against me. No penetration had occurred when, without warning,
he came. He froze immediately, and I said, "Oh--okay" I didn't want
to offer reassurance if that would only embarrass him. But the fact that the
hook-up had apparently concluded, that he didn't understand there was a
way to make it up to me--it made me suspect he'd never had a girlfriend.
Finally, I said, "Do you have some Kleenex?"
What he handed me was a full-sized maroon bath towel, and I mopped
up between my legs. He was standing by the bed, and he said in an almost
mean tone, as if I were the one who'd done something I shouldn't have,
"Are you going to tell Lauren?"
"No." I slid on my underwear and shorts and reached for my sports bra.
Again, accusingly, he said, "I've had sex before."
"Okay," I said, and I pulled on my shirt. Remarkably, or not, I'd never
removed my socks and running shoes. It seemed agreed upon that I would
leave, and I stood and stepped toward the door.
In a voice that was only incrementally less hostile, he said, "We should
hang out again."

Back in chur Hall, Heather was sitting at her desk eating yogurt, and there was 
no sign of Vi. "Have you seen my sister?" I asked.
Heather shook her head. "Not since this afternoon."

"I hope it's okay that she's still here," I said.
"Oh, she's not bothering me." Heather took a bite of yogurt. "She can stay as 
long as she wants." After a pause, she said, "I apologize if this is
weird to ask, but are you guys identical twins?"
Growing up, Vi and I had gotten the question endlessly, sometimes on
a daily basis, but this was the first time it had come from someone who
seemed to think the answer would be no rather than yes.
"Yeah, we are," I said.
"Really?" I could tell she was surprised. "I was wondering, but I
didn't--" She smiled. "I'm so jealous of you."

the morning, I became aware of someone lightly
shaking my arms, saying my name. The room was still more dark than
light because the shades were drawn, and I had two groggy realizations at
the same time. The first was that the person waking me was Vi--the name
she was saying was Daisy--and the second was that she had never returned
to the room the night before and I'd had my best night's sleep since

Monday.
I propped myself up on my elbows, and Vi whispered, "I need to talk to
you in the hall."
I climbed from bed and followed her out. Facing me, Vi looked wild
and agitated: messy-haired and baggy-eyed and jittery, smelling like cigarettes.
"I
got in trouble," she said.
A window in the hall overlooked an oak tree, and even though the win
dow
wasn't open, I could feel what a pleasant fall morning it was; something
about the sunny weather, the turning leaves, made me less alarmed
by Vi's summoning than I should have been. It took her perhaps five minutes
to explain what had happened: The night before, she'd had dinner in
town and wandered around for a while before making her way back to
Schurz Hall. Then she'd parked herself on a couch in the empty common
room on the third floor and watched television for seven hours. Some students
had come in and out during this time, but she hadn't spoken to
them. Just before six in the morning, while Vi was watching the old movie The 
Philadelphia Story, a group of three girls had shown up in spandex
shorts and tank tops, one of them toting a Buns of Steel tape. (Rising at the
crack of dawn to exercise--I couldn't imagine.) The girl carrying the tape
had told Vi that they worked out together at this time, in this place, every
morning, and that it was their turn to use the TV and VCR. The movie
was almost finished, Vi said. There were only a few minutes left, and then
they could have the common room. But they'd reserved it starting at five
thirty, the girl said, and she retrieved a clipboard hanging from a hook
outside the room to show Vi where she'd written her name in the time
slot. Fine, Vi replied, but she just wanted to watch the end of the movie;
surely the girls' buns could wait? No, the group's leader said. The room
was theirs.

I had a hunch and said, "Had you been smoking?"
"Just cigarettes," Vi said, and I thought that this violation must have
particularly galled the early-morning exercisers.

The girl stood in front of the television screen, blocking Vi's view, and
said again that it was their turn to use the common room, fair and square,
and because the movie ended then and the credits started and the girl had
made her miss the last part, Vi said, "Are you happy now, you selfish
cunt?" At that point she either tossed the remote control to the girl (Vi's
version) or threw it at her head (the girl's version); in any case, the corner
of the remote hit the girl in the jaw.
"And she started bleeding, but like, the tiniest, tiniest bit," Vi said.
"From inside her mouth. She spit, and seriously, it was the amount of
blood when you're flossing."
As I listened, the leaves outside the window seemed considerably less
cheerful, the day less promising. Really, what had Vi been thinking?
The girl freaked out, Vi said, claiming Vi had attacked her, and Vi insisted
that it had been an accident, and the next thing she knew, two officers
from campus security had appeared--one of the other girls had
slipped away and called them--and Vi had been handcuffed.
"Are you kidding?" I said.
"Well, the handcuffs were plastic," she said. "Kind of like garbage ties."

One officer had escorted her on foot to the university police station,

which was on Virginia Avenue, and though she hadn't seen them while

walking over, once there, Vi spotted the three Buns of Steel girls across the

room. She was interviewed--not in an interrogation room, just sitting in

a chair while the officer behind the desk took notes, and he'd already re
moved the cuffs during the walk from the dorm. He consulted with other
officers, including the one who'd interviewed the girls, and after about
forty-five minutes, by which point the girls had left, Vi's officer told her
she was free to go but he was turning the matter over to the Office of Student
Conduct, and she should expect to receive a letter from them shortly.
"Wait," I said. "You never told him you don't go here?"
"I know I fucked up," Vi said. "I know, okay? And I'm sorry, but I didn't
know what else to do." Then she said, "They don't think I'm me. They
think I'm you."

apparently, quite efficient, and I received the
letter from the Office of Student Conduct in my mailbox in the entry of
Schurz Hall by noon that very day. It listed which of the Collected Rules
and Regulations of the University of Missouri System might have been
violated by Daisy Kathleen Shramm--"Physical abuse," which was further
defined as "conduct which threatens or endangers the health or safety
of any person"--as well as the date and time of the incident of concern;
the letter also provided instructions on scheduling my meeting with a
Student Conduct officer and warned that if I failed to do so, a hold would
be placed on my student account. I called the number and made an appointment
for the following morning at eleven. Then I called campus
information to get the number for Ben Murphy because I had no idea
where the slip of paper was on which Vi had written it several days before.
Vi was in the shower, after having slept for most of the morning.
When I identified myself, Ben sounded surprised as he said, "Oh, hi."
"I'm wondering if you can drive my sister and me to St. Louis," I said.
"She'll stay there, and I'll come back with you. I'll pay for gas."

"When?"
"Now," I said. "It's sort of an emergency."
"A medical emergency?"
"No, she just needs to go home, but if she gets on a bus, I'm afraid she'll
go somewhere else."
"I didn't know you have a sister who goes here."
"I don't. She's been visiting. Can you take us?"
"I have class at two-fifteen, but I don't know--I guess I could skip it."
"Come here at two-fifteen," I said. "I'm in Schurz, so you can pull up
right in front."

It wasn't that I'd changed my mind about dating him; it wasn't that I
trusted him; it wasn't even that I felt he owed me after our botched hookup.
It was that he was the only person I knew at Mizzou who had a car.

after she returned from the shower, wearing my bathrobe,
carrying my plastic bucket of shampoo and conditioner. Her hair was a
wet rope that she'd twisted over her left shoulder--she'd squeezed it out
after turning off the water, I knew the exact gesture--and it was then,
observing her hair, that it first occurred to me to cut my own.
She looked at me with a wounded expression. "You're kicking me out?"
"If you stay here, I'll probably get kicked out. There are rules against
people who aren't students living in the dorm, and now I can't take any
chances." I hadn't gotten angry when she'd told me what she'd done in the
common room; if she had proven that my wariness of her was warranted,
she had simultaneously given me the reason I needed to send her away.
"Just let me have a few more days," she said.
"What difference will that make?"

"I'm thinking I'll start taking classes in January. And don't worry, I
won't stay with you until then. I walked by a house on Bouchelle Avenue
with a sign saying they have a room for rent."
"Do you have any money?"
"I'm planning to get a job." She was quiet. "You could spot me."
"Vi, I barely have money. Anyway, why do you want to live somewhere
that you don't know anyone?"
In a quiet, defeated voice, she said, "I know you."
Oh, Vi, I think now. Oh, Vi, forgive me. I have no idea which house on
Bouchelle she meant, but in my mind it's a co-op where they'd all smoke
pot together while making tofu and kale for dinner; I never entered such a
place, hut Columbia was crawling with them. And in this alternate version
of events, in the help wanted section of the Missourian, we find Vi a waitress
position, and she remains in my dorm room until she's made enough
for first and last month's rent, if the co-op hippies would even have required
that much. She does indeed start taking classes at Mizzou in January,
my second semester. She and I meet for coffee a couple times a week.
She doesn't crowd or embarrass me; I don't exile her. We both have our
own lives, and they overlap, but not excessively. After she catches up with
a few summer classes, we graduate together in 1997. She enters the Peace
Corps, or she enters law school, or she goes to work for a nonprofit, or she
becomes a physical therapist or a vet.
Or maybe she never earns her degree in this version of events, either,
but at least I don't force her out. I let her stay a little longer, until she 
leaves
on her own. What I did--making her go--was justified more than it was
necessary; it was defensible more than it was right.
In the version of events that did occur, the real version, I didn't want the 
Buns of Steel girls to connect us, didn't want to risk them seeing us together,
and so as Vi stood there in my bathrobe, her hair dripping, I said,

"I really think it's better if you leave."

'. I sat in the front seat and Vi sat in back, and Ben, looking
at Vi in the rearview mirror, said, "I talked to you on the phone, didn't
I? You guys sound alike," and Vi said, "I assure you the similarity ends
there." And then she continued, embarking on a kind of monologue: "But
really, I only have myself to blame. No one knows Kate here better than I do, 
and that's why I should have realized she's not the person you turn to
when you need a helping hand. If you behave yourself, if you're dressed up
in your pretty clothes and acting all happy, then sure, Daisy will give you
the time of day, but at the first sign of trouble, she's out of there. She 
doesn't
like conflict, she doesn't like weirdness. And watch out, because according
to her, I'm just getting weirder. I had this amazing spiritual experience,
probably the most amazing experience of my life, and Daisy's like, 'Yep,
ignore it, pretend it didn't happen.'"
In equal measures, I wanted to silence Vi and I felt hypnotized by the
drone of her voice, the inappropriateness of her disclosures--the way that
if I could have scripted her dialogue in this moment, everything she was
saying was the opposite of what I'd have chosen. It was hard to gauge how
much sense she was making to Ben, especially given that she'd switched
back to calling me Daisy, but it seemed safe to assume that neither of us
was coming off well.
"You know what, Daisy?" Vi said, but even then, when she was ostensibly
addressing me, her words still had a distant, performative quality--they
were more for Ben than for me, and more for some invisible, sympathetic
audience than for either one of us. "Just because that stuff in eighth grade
with Marisa sucked for you, that doesn't mean all spiritual communication
is bad. You can choose to cut yourself off, and hey, it's a free country,
that's your choice. But that's not how I want to be. I want to open myself
up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don't want to be bound by the
rules of this world. Does that make me a freak? So be it. Now, what's your
name again? Ben? Ben, don't worry that Daisy is like me. She's not weird. Yes, 
she has the senses. I cannot tell a lie. But she's going to hide them or
die trying, so you're good to go with your vanilla romance. And you seem
like a typical preppy guy, which I'm not saying to insult you, I'd assume
most typical preppy guys are glad to be called typical and preppy. To each
his or her own. What I'm trying to say is that I wish you and my sister a
long and happy life together."
The car was quiet--it was hard to believe Vi had truly stopped talking--
and Ben said, "Who's Marisa?"
"Nobody." I turned around again, making eye contact with Vi, and
said, "Just stop, okay? He's doing us a favor by driving us."
"He's doing you a favor." But surprisingly, she didn't say anything else, and 
after a few minutes, Ben turned on the stereo; a Spin Doctors CD
played, the one with "Two Princes" and "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong."
Even now, if I'm in a store and either of those songs comes on, I'll walk
out.

An hour and a half passed, and dread collected in my stomach as I gave Ben 
directions for getting off 270. When we arrived at our strange familiar
house on Gilbert Street, sitting there the same as always in our absence,
Ben said, "I'll go hang out in that McDonald's we just passed if you tell me
how long you need."
"No, I'm only going in for a second," I said. "Wait for me here."
"Are you sure?" He looked perplexed, but I nodded and climbed from
the car.
It was four-thirty P.M., and we had to ring the doorbell repeatedly because
neither Vi nor I had a house key. After a minute, I could tell our
mother was peering through the peephole, and then she opened the door
and said in an alarmed voice, "Why are you two here?" She was wearing a
robe over her brown nylon nightgown, and white slippers.
I said, "Vi wants to come home. Reed didn't work out."
Our mother scowled. "That was a waste of money. Does your father

know?"
"Not yet." I leaned in to kiss my mother's cheek; she and Vi didn't
touch. I was carrying Vi's duffel bag, and I said to my sister, "I'll put this
upstairs, okay?"
Getting out of the car, Vi had seemed a little stunned, and she didn't
reply to me. Then she said to our mother, in a normal voice, "What's the
difference between a screw and a staple?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," our mother said.
"I don't know," Vi said. "I've never been stapled."
As I climbed the steps, I heard my mother say to her, "You're just as
snotty as you always were."
The door to our old bedroom was closed, and the Sisterland sign that
Vi had taped to it eight years before was still there; it had been there all
along, but when I'd lived at home, I'd stopped seeing it. Surely, there was
a kind of irony to it--the room had either a population of one or zero now,
but definitely not of two--but there was nothing to be gained from pondering
this incongruity. I pushed open the door, set down Vi's duffel, then
walked out and used the bathroom before returning to the first floor. Vi
and my mother had moved into the kitchen, Vi sitting at the table eating
potato chips and drinking orange juice and my mother standing and
watching her suspiciously. "I have to go because the guy who gave us a ride
is waiting," I said. le:11 I )ad I'm sorry I missed him."
"You're leaving?" My mother's expression was confused.
"This guy I know gave us a ride, but he has to get back."
Vi wouldn't look at me; she got up, carried her glass of juice and bag of
potato chips into the living room, and turned on the television. I leaned
into my mother, and she was so insubstantial that it was like embracing a
phantom. "I'll be home at Thanksgiving," I said. "Which is only a month
away."

I stepped back, and my mother looked me up and down and said--
really, her voice sounded more concerned than cruel--"You should be
careful, Daisy. You're starting to put on weight, too."

ckni the car, I said to Ben, "If you want to go to McDonald's, let's
get on the highway first because the one here is really slow."
As Ben started the engine, I felt an absurd fear that Vi would run out of
the house, pull open my car door, yank me to the ground, and force me to
stay while Ben drove away. Neither he nor I spoke as he navigated through
downtown Kirkwood. Only when we were back on 40, headed west, did he
say in a sincere tone, "Does she have, like, a diagnosis?"
"A what?"

"Like if she's mentally ill, or--"
Icily, I said, "She just has a lot going on right now."
At the McDonald's where we did stop for an early dinner, we didn't talk
much, but I didn't like Ben enough to find the silences awkward. If I felt
grateful toward him, it was a resentful kind of gratitude; he seemed to be
such a blandly ordinary person that I doubted he had a framework for
understanding someone like Vi. Ben and I also spoke little once we were
back in the car. But the next day, when he emailed and asked if I'd like to
go to a movie on Saturday night, saying no would have been a rudeness
more brazen than I had the courage for. We saw The Fugitive at the Hollywood
Stadium, and afterward we had actual sex, in his dorm bed, with
a condom. He didn't tell me until two months later that it had been his
first time, but he didn't need to. It was just for a few weeks that I still saw
his nose as piglike, and after that it only struck me when we were with his
family, because his father and two older sisters had similar noses. Ben and
I remained a couple all through college, and after graduation, we moved
together to Chicago.

t I 1( 1( trt gcr had an email account, or not one she had access to, but
certainly I could have called her during the day, when our mother was in
bed and our father was at work. I didn't. I heard, that Sunday, during the
five minutes I spent talking to my father, that she'd been hired at a Lion's
Choice, a roast beef sandwich restaurant with franchises all over St. Louis;
the next week, my father said she'd moved into an apartment in Dogtown
with Patrick, who was taking classes at Forest Park Community College.
My father never seemed offended that I'd been home without staying long
enough to see him, though he wouldn't have told me if he was. I assume
that my parents asked Vi nothing about her return, that the questions they

didn't pose were infinite.
On the night before Thanksgiving, after taking the bus from Columbia
to St. Louis and eating dinner at home, I borrowed my father's Buick and
drove to Vi and Patrick's apartment. It was nine P.M., and they were having
spaghetti with marinara sauce and watching TV with the volume
turned way up while a haze of pot smoke hung in the air. Vi seemed
heavier than ever and wholly upbeat. When she went to the bathroom, I
said to Patrick, "Are she and Mr. Caldwell--"
"Unh-unh-uh." Patrick wagged an index finger back and forth while
shaking his head. "In this abode, we do not speak that name." Which
wasn't a real answer, and one I gladly accepted. I learned later--three
years later, after Mr. Caldwell had been fired from Kirkwood High when
four girls, none of whom were Vi, came forward to report their own sexual
relationships with him--that he and Vi had continued to have sporadic

contact that fall.
The following spring, Vi asked a patron at Lion's Choice how her french
fries were, and the woman said, "Them is disgusting." This single grammatical
desecration prompted Vi to enroll at Webster University, which
was just a few minutes from the house where we'd grown up. Though Vi
eventually took classes from nearly every academic institution in St. Louis,
she never earned a bachelor's degree. In the almost two decades since I arranged
for Ben to whisk us away from the campus of Mizzou, I've had
ample time to consider my culpability in this fact.
The Student Conduct officer I met with in the fall of my freshman year
was a warm, heavyset Latino man of about thirty. I'm not sure if it was
because I expressed contrition (it never occurred to me that telling the
truth might have solved more problems than it would have created) that I
received a warning and one year of probation but no more severe sanctions.
Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, my
parents weren't notified; they would have been contacted only for an infraction
involving drugs or alcohol. The conduct violation would remain
on my record for five years, which was part of why I waited until a year and
a half after graduation to apply to social work school. I wanted to be able
to answer no to the question of whether I'd ever been subject to disciplinary
action. I revealed to no one, not even Lauren or Ben, what Vi had done.
Right after my meeting in the Office of Student Conduct and before I
was due at the adult day-care center, I hurried to a hair salon in town and
asked the stylist to take off eight inches. This pixie was the most drastic
haircut I'd ever had, and wrong for my face, but I didn't regret it because
it was meant to prevent the Buns of Steel girls from recognizing me; it
made me feel I'd taken every precaution. It wasn't until the stylist was
finished and had removed the nylon smock that the dream I'd had the
morning before Vi had arrived at Mizzou came back to me, that moment
when she'd turned around in the lecture hall. But it had never been Vi I'd
seen in the dream, I realized as I faced the mirror. Instead, I'd seen myself.
Chapter 8

r dinn
Wheelings--Amelia's first "meat night"--would still happen, in light of
the news Hank and Courtney had received the day before about Courtney's
pregnancy, but on Saturday afternoon, Hank texted me: 5:30 for
pizza yeah? I texted back: Sure if that works for u guys.
The place our families liked had windows through which kids could
watch a kitchen crew rolling the dough and topping it. Even though it was
early, there were people waiting when we arrived, mostly other families,
and I was glad to see that the Wheelings had already secured a table. As we
approached, Courtney waved, and she and Hank looked like themselves,
only more subdued.
In a voice of forced cheer, Courtney said, "Rosie, Amelia and I have
been waiting for you to go watch the pizza makers."
"You want me to take her?" Jeremy said to me, and I said, "Sure."
Hank said to Courtney, "You think pepperoni for Amelia or ham?"
Courtney rolled her eyes at me. "Our bloodthirsty daughter." To Hank,
she said, "You decide."
When she and Amelia and Jeremy and Rosie were gone, I said to Hank,
"How are you doing?" at the same time he said, his voice low, "Courtney
still doesn't know I told you she's pregnant, so don't say anything about

the whole--"
"No, of course not," I said quickly.
"You didn't tell Jeremy, did you?" I'd been unbuckling Owen from the
car seat, not exactly making eye contact with I lank, and when I looked
h
across the table, Hank had a particular kind of uneasy expression on his

face, an expression that I was pretty sure was a request for me to lie to him.
Which I did. "No, no," I said as I lifted Owen out. I wasn't even sure if
Hank was asking if I'd told Jeremy about the pregnancy or the CVS results,
but since I'd told Jeremy both, the distinction was moot.
"She's just private about stuff like this," Hank said, and I thought that
he had to know I'd told Jeremy. In that case, Hank was really asking if I'd
make sure Jeremy didn't mention anything to Courtney. Without much
conviction, Hank added, "I should have kept my big mouth shut."
"You didn't know." I dug around in the diaper bag at my feet for a toy
for Owen and came up with a translucent rattle that had little orange stars
inside. The truth was that Owen's presence seemed almost in bad taste, as
if I were gloating over my healthy baby.
Hank said, "Remember that stuff I was saying about not wanting to get
up early with a newborn? I feel like such an asshole now." He seemed to be
on the cusp of tears, and if he was crying when our spouses and daughters
returned to the table, surely it would, among other things, reveal to Courtney
that I knew exactly what was going on. The only previous time I'd
seen Hank cry had been the night Barack Obama was elected.
"Hank, don't beat yourself up," I said. "You can't. No matter what, you
guys will figure things out."

Hank was silent, blinking a few times. "In Courtney's mind, she already
has."

"You mean--"

He sniffed once--the moment of almost tears seemed to have passed--
and when he spoke again, he sounded more sarcastic than weepy. "I mean,
the winner of the Macelwane Medal can't have a retarded kid."
A college-aged waiter appeared then, and I said, "Sorry, but we need
another minute." Yet by the time Jeremy and Courtney had returned with
the girls, Hank and I still had neither ordered nor even discussed what we
were ordering, a fact that clearly annoyed Courtney. She turned to Jeremy.
"You guys like pepperoni, right?"
"We do."

"Okay then, a thirteen-inch pepperoni for your family that Amelia can
sample, and the mushroom one for us. Which one is our waiter?" She was
scanning the restaurant.
"If Amelia's eating their pizza, they should get a seventeen-inch," Hank
said, which I'd also been thinking, but Courtney scowled and said,
"Amelia will have one piece." She stood, menu in hand, and strode toward
the bar to place our order, even though this wasn't a restaurant where you
placed your order at the bar. When she returned, she was carrying four
pints of beer, and not for the first time, I understood why Courtney
Wheeling was a tenured professor and I wasn't. I hadn't seen Courtney
drink for a while, and I felt Hank take note of it, too, as she distributed the
glasses. She sat down and lifted hers. "To efficiency," she said.
Briefly, for about thirty seconds, I thought that harmony had been restored
to the table; Courtney's bad mood, which I couldn't exactly fault
her for, even if I'd also witnessed this same mood under ordinary circumstances,
seemed to have subsided. Then she looked at me--I was sitting
directly across the table from her--and said, "Kate, has your sister spent
much time in Central Asia?"
"Central Asia?" I wasn't certain I'd heard her correctly.
"I was wondering because of the prayer flags."
"Oh," I said. "No. No, she hasn't been there." I had a strong suspicion of
what the answer would be as I asked, "Have you?"
"I have." Courtney took a sip of beer.
"For your research?" I knew Courtney had spent time collecting data in
Chile and Indonesia.
She shook her head. "Just for fun. Hiking in Nepal after college. So I
was thinking today, how does someone become a psychic? Do you get certified?
Is there a test you have to pass?"
I looked at her, and for a few seconds we held each other's gaze--I'm sorry 
your baby has Down's, I thought, and I'm sorry Channel 5 interviewed
Vi, but neither of those things is my fault--and I said, "Not that I'm

aware of."
"What'd Vi major in in college?"
Did she already know? But I didn't see how she could. "Vi started at
Reed, but she left bcfbre she finished," I said.
"She doesn't have a college degree?"
Hank said, "Courtney, if you're trying to prove Vi's not a scientist, I
don't think anyone at this table will dispute that."

Courtney turned to face him, smiling an enormous smile that I could
tell, even from the side, was false. "What?" she said. "Kate would tell me if
my questions bothered her." She turned back to me. "Are my questions
bothering you?"

I shook my head, and under the table, on my leg Owen wasn't balanced
on, Jeremy patted my knee.

Courtney said, "You don't actually believe your sister's prediction, do
you?"

It wasn't realistic to expect Hank to say, as he had during our walk to
Kaldi's, that he didn't see why being psychic was impossible. Still, I felt
myself waiting hopefully. When he said nothing, I said, "It's kind of 
complicated."

In
a genial voice, Jeremy said, "Show me one family that isn't. Hey,
Amelia, I hear you'll be trying meat for the first time tonight."
Courtney gave Jeremy an unimpressed look. "Are we really not allowed
to have an adult conversation? If we're just hiding behind our children and
making boring small talk, I could grab any random mom off the playground
for that."

Still genially, Jeremy said, "We can talk about whatever you want to talk
about, but for you to hold Kate accountable for her sister's actions is silly,
as you pointed out the other night."

Courtney glanced first at Hank then back at Jeremy before saying, "Both of you 
are acting like Kate is a delicate flower who can't stand up for
herself. Are you a delicate flower, Kate? Am I making you"--she switched
to a tone of faux sympathy--"uncomfortable?"
I was pretty sure I was flushed as I said, "Actually, there is something you
should know about Vi. She's been invited to be on the Today show next
week." I already knew Jeremy would ask later what had made me tell Courtney.
Because she'd find out anyway, I'd say, though if Jeremy had been the
one to divulge the information, I'd have wondered why he had. I added,
"So I guess they don't have a problem with her not having a college degree."
Courtney's expression was contemptuous. "People go on Today because
they've had hiccups for two weeks, or because a shark bit their leg
off. It's not like it means you've achieved anything."
"Courtney, come on," Hank said. "Vi's her sister."
"Vi's a public-health threat," Courtney said, and the conversation might
have escalated from there, but our waiter appeared with the pizza, and as
we dealt with the logistics of the food, it seemed that Jeremy, Hank, and I
mutually decided to pretend we hadn't heard Courtney's last remark.
"I don't want this," Amelia said then. She was pointing to the pepperoni
on the pizza slice Hank had just set on her plate.
"That's the pepperoni," Courtney said.
"I don't want it. It's brown."
"Pepperoni is brown," Courtney said.
"I don't like brown pepperoni."
"You don't even want to try it?"
As Amelia shook her head, Courtney exchanged a look with Hank. "I
don't like brown pepperoni," Amelia said again.
Courtney picked off the pieces, and when she was finished, Amelia
lifted her slice and bit the tip. With her mouth full, she said, "This is

yummy!"
Maybe Amelia's change of heart about trying meat would be enough of
a victory for Courtney, I thought; maybe she wouldn't need to be victorious
over me, too. And we did, tentatively, begin talking about other
things--another pizza place in the Loop we wanted to try, a new restaurant
downtown by Citygarden--but when we finished and were standing
and gathering our jackets and bags, Courtney approached me as I was
buckling Owen back into his car seat. She said, "Your sister is really for
real going to be on Today? You weren't just saying that to depress me?"
Surprisingly, I felt less cowed by Courtney one-on-one than I had with
our husbands listening, even if they'd been on my side. I said, "Courtney,
whether or not you believe it, and whether or not I believe it, Vi believes
what she's saying. She's not just pretending she thinks there'll be an earth

quake."
"Have you considered having Jeremy explain basic geology to her?"
We were standing only a foot apart, and the restaurant around us was
loud. I could see Courtney's pores, the tiniest clump of mascara on her
lower right eyelashes, and I felt, beneath her toughness, her essential vul
nerability;
hers was no different from anyone else's. I said, "What do you
want me to say?"

She was looking at me appraisingly but also dispassionately. She said,
"There's always been something so evasive about you."

I said, "I know Courtney's really stressed out, but I was kind
of shocked by how aggressive she was."

Mildly, Jeremy said, "Yeah, we probably should have rescheduled din
ner.
I don't think it was personal--you just happened to be caught in her
crosshairs."

"It's not that I don't feel bad for her."
"I know it's not. There's a lot going on in both your lives." As Jeremy
turned onto Forsyth Boulevard, he said, "I won't defend her behavior tonight,
but I'd cut her a lot of slack if I were you."
"Do you think I'm being too hard on her?"

Jeremy wasn't looking at me as he said, "I think no matter what, she's
already grieving."

5 ,Rosie down for bed, my phone dinged with a text from
Hank: Don't give up on us yet. Still friends?
Of course, I texted back.
In studio not painting, Hank texted. Have a beer, I wrote.

after Owen's two A.M. nursing but awakened well before
the next one. I thought it was almost morning, but when I pressed the
little glow button on my watch, it wasn't yet four. I closed my eyes, and as
soon as I did, I opened them again. October 16, I thought. That would be
the day of Vi's earthquake.

ten A.M. on Sunday to call my sister and tell her. "You
think that sounds right?" I asked.
She was quiet before saying, "It doesn't sound wrong."
"But it doesn't sound right?"
"I haven't gotten anything that specific, but sure. It could be the six
teenth.
Why not? Speaking of you not being wrong, it pains me to admit

this, but I have nothing to wear on the Today show. I should have bought

something at the Galleria when we were there for Dad's birthday present."

Subtle, I thought.
"If you could take me, I promise I'm not just using you as a taxi ser
vice,"
she said. "I need your fashion advice."

"Then you must really be desperate."
"Oh, come on--you're stylish."
In fact, I had spent so much of the last three years in a forest green fleece
vest that first Jeremy had started calling the vest Greenie, then he'd started
calling me Greenie, then, at Christmas a month before Rosie's first birthday,
he'd given me two more, both in the same shade of green, so that I
wouldn't have to either be apart from the vest during the time it took to
wash or, as was more often the case, continue wearing it after it was cov
ered
with a crust of spit-up and food.
"Well, you're stylish compared to me," Vi was saying, and I could sense
then her impulse to say, In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, 
which was an expression she hadn't used around me ever since we'd gotten in a 
fight about it a few years before.
"Just say it," I said.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm over it," I said.
"Flow about if I put it like this? In this scenario, you're royalty. That's
flattering, right?"
I said, "I can't go now, but I might be able to take you to the mall this
afternoon."

"Are you going to bring Owen?" By which, of course, she meant, Don't
bring him. "You have the kids all week," she added. "Make Jeremy pull his 
weight."
"Let's talk again in a few hours," I said.

tried on an orange peasant smock (her choice), a tan
scoop-neck jersey (my choice), and a lavender V-neck, also picked out by
me, though as soon as she was wearing it, I saw that the neckline didn't do
her any favors. Standing in front of the three-way mirror in the dressing
room, she said, "When did my tits get so saggy?"
"You just need a better bra," I said. "Don't be offended, but what if we
go look for clothes in Lane Bryant?"

"The big-girl store?"

"I think they'll have a wider selection."
Vi grinned. "No pun intended?"

I'd left Owen home, which did make it easier to get around. Inside Lane
Bryant, I pulled a bunch of tops off various racks and passed the hangers
to Vi. "Start with these, and I'll meet you in the dressing room."
I ended up finding five more possible shirts--none that were white or
patterned because my brief online research had advised against those for
TV--and on my way to join Vi, I saw a pale pink blouse I liked for myself.
I took it in the smallest size.

When I opened Vi's door, she was wearing a black tunic, her underwear,
and nothing else, even though I hadn't given her any pants to try on.
"You know that's not a dress, right?" I said.
"I'm not retarded." She said it good-naturedly, and I tried not to wince.
"My pants were making it bunch up."

"Will they be filming you from the waist up or full-body?"
She shrugged.
"Then we should assume full-body. Do you have black dress pants?"
She furrowed her brow. "Possibly."
"Let's get a pair just in case. They're useful in general."
"Today's woman can never have too many pairs of black dress pants."
She was using her pseudo-British accent. "They're so posh and versatile."
I'd hung the new batch of shirts on a hook, and she pointed to the pink
one in front. "I don't like that."
"It's for me." I took off my vest, then crossed my arms, pulling my
T-shirt over my head and tossing it in the corner of the bench. When I
removed the pink blouse from its hanger, I saw that it had easily two dozen
tiny buttons up the back, and as I stood there in my nursing bra--a beige,
pilly item from Rosie's infancy that was just as unsupportive as the bra Vi
had on--I knew already that the quantity of buttons meant I wouldn't buy
the shirt. "Keep trying stuff," I said to Vi. I gave her a navy short-sleeved

sweater. "This is my new favorite."
I was still unfastening buttons by the time she had it on. Our eyes met
in the mirror, and I said, "I like that."
She shook her head. "This is so not me."
"You actually look very elegant."
"I look like a lesbian running for president."
"At least one of those things is true, huh?"
She smirked. "You think I have any chance of getting elected?"
I passed her a maroon top with three-quarter-length sleeves. "This
could work." Then I looked down at the half-unbuttoned shirt in my own
hands and decided just to try it on; at the rate I was going, Vi would be
ready to leave before I was.
"By the way," Vi said when my head was inside the shirt, "I might start
driving again."
I was glad that my face was hidden so my surprise didn't show; I made
an effort to sound low-key as I said, "Oh, yeah?"
"The woman I'm seeing--Stephanie--I haven't told her about not
driving, and I don't know if she'd understand. I think she might be one of
those really normal people. Like Jeremy."
"Did you guys go out again?"
"We went to a movie last night."
If Stephanie were a man, surely I'd have asked if they kissed. And co
tainly I was in favor of Vi finding her Jeremy, even if her Jeremy was female.
But the idea of Vi making out with another woman--it was just
weird. After a beat, still from inside the shirt, I said, "And you had fun?"
"It was okay. I mean, it wasn't the greatest night of my life or anything."
"Well, it was a second date. You might want to keep your expectations
in check." I added, "If you want to drive back to your house from here,
you're welcome to."

"Oh, God, no," she said. "It's been so long, I need to practice first, like
in an empty parking lot."

"We could go out to the country next weekend." The shirt was still over
my face, my right arm raised straight above my head because the right
sleeve was caught around my elbow; when I used my left hand to try to
pull down the neck, I heard the delicate splitting of seams. I froze. "Vi," I
said, "I think I'm stuck."

"For real?" Her voice was already thick with amusement.
"Can you help me?"
"How can you be stuck in a Lane Bryant shirt? You're not that fat."
"Will you undo the buttons?"

"I wish my phone had a camera. Wait, yours does, doesn't it?" She was
laughing, and though I was starting to feel overheated, and though I had
an increasingly urgent wish not to be trapped inside this prison of pink
satin, I began laughing, too.

"If you take a picture of me," I said, "I'll kill you. Just unbutton the
buttons."

She was behind me then, fiddling, and I could tell she was shaking with
silent mirth.

"I hate you," I said.
"Hold still." I tried to, and she said, "Your hair--" but she couldn't get
the sentence out. She gave it a second try. "Your hair is tangled in the 
buttons.
I think we need the Jaws of Life."
In equal measures, I found the situation funny and unendurable; I
moved my right arm, and there was another sound of ripping fabric.
"Oh my God," Vi said. "What a cheap piece of crap. Okay, it's all unbuttoned."
I raised my left arm so it was parallel to my still-raised right one. "Pull
it off," I said. "But be careful."
When the shirt was finally above my head, I felt as if I were emerging
from a cave; in the mirror, I saw that my cheeks were flushed. As we looked

at our semi-matching reflections, Vi snorted with laughter. "Sorry." She

set the back of her hand against her nose. "But you should have seen your

self."
"Thanks for saying I'm not that fat."
"Well, you're not the thinnest you've ever been." She was holding the
pink blouse, which was inside out, and she reversed it. "But you're a baby
making
machine. It's not your fault."
I pulled on my T-shirt, which was roomy and forgiving and cotton,
then my green fleece vest, and then I held out my hand so Vi could give me

the pink blouse. "I'm not a baby-making machine anymore," I said. "We're

done."
"So you say now." Vi was still in the maroon top, which had ruffly cuffs
that were, I thought, reminiscent of a clown at a child's birthday party.
"I totally just realized what you should wear," I said. "I have a silver
shirt from a wedding a few years ago."
"Nothing of yours will fit me."
"No, it will. It's a maternity shirt."
"And you give me shit for saying you're not thin."
"I was only about five months pregnant when I wore it. It's sheer and
you wear a camisole under, which I also have. Are they sending someone
to do your hair and makeup?"
"They didn't say."
"Then I'll come do it. What time are the camera people coming over?"

"Five-thirty."

"Jesus."
"I know, but that's six-thirty in New York, and they think my interview
will air in the seven o'clock hour."

"Live?" I asked.
"Live on the East Coast and delayed an hour here."
"I'll come at five." We hadn't previously discussed whether I'd be present
for the taping, and I'd have imagined that I couldn't stand to be,
whether Vi wanted me there or not, but now I felt relief; I'd be able to help
create a positive outcome. Later, I wondered when I'd decided not to try
dissuading Vi from appearing on the show at all. When had I decided it
was too late? It wasn't too late until the cameras started rolling.
I said, "Take a shower before I get there. And if they do send a makeup
person, they'll just improve what I've done."
"Don't make me look like a hooker." She was changing out of the maroon
shirt, and I was returning the others, including the pink one, to their
hangers; I briefly wondered if I ought to confess the damage I'd wrought
to a saleswoman, but the pink shirt wasn't visibly altered.
"Vi," I said, and she looked at me. "I know it's a big thing to go on TV,
but you definitely still think there's going to be an earthquake, right?"
She didn't hesitate. "Yes," she said. "I definitely do."

and cool when I stepped outside and pulled the front door
shut behind me at four forty-five on Wednesday morning. From the car,
I texted Vi--You're up?--and she texted back: Haven't gone to bed yet. Great, I 
thought.
Between Big Bend and Manchester, there were few cars on the road.
When Rihanna's "Umbrella" came on the radio, I turned it up in a way I
never did when Rosie and Owen were in the car, even with kids' music.
As early as it was, and as squeamish as I felt about the reason Vi would be
appearing on national television, the morning contained an undeniable
charge of excitement. Because, hell, Vi would be appearing on national
television!

Was my mood driving in the dark what Jeremy experienced on the days
he flew to a conference in another city or to give a talk at a different 
university?
He could have us--a family--and he could have another life, too,
whereas I had figured out only how to have us.
All the lights were on in Vi's house, and all the curtains were open, and
she was standing on the front stoop smoking a cigarette. I hadn't yet set
foot on the walkway when she called, "I haven't had one for three months,
but this is just way too stressful. I'm canceling."
There was a shift in my chest--my ambivalence, stretching like a cat.
I'd be thrilled for her to back out of the interview, because she'd be sparing
both of us humiliation, but if she backed out, our glamorous morning
would cease to exist. The momentum of my drive through the dark would
sputter; I'd have gotten up at four-fifteen and pumped a bottle for Owen
for no reason. "Do you want to cancel?" I said.
"Nab." With unnecessary vigor, Vi smashed out the cigarette in a red
porcelain bowl that contained at least twenty other butts. "Honestly, business
hasn't been great lately, and if nothing else, this ought to get me some
new clients. People just don't value their spiritual life. When it's time to
start cutting back, they still spend five bucks on a latte but not a penny
nourishing their own energy."
I hated this kind of talk, which Vi knew, which had to mean, since she
didn't seem to be trying to irritate me, that she was already practicing for
television--that when she'd suggested she might not go through with the
interview, she was bluffing. Or this was what I subsequently told myself
when I didn't want to believe I could have stopped her. But I am almost
sure that I could have. The more vehemence I'd shown, the likelier she'd
have been to defy me; of this I am certain. But couldn't I have gently
swayed her, letting her reach her own conclusion? My sister was the kind
of person who'd enjoy giving the finger to the Today show. I didn't nudge
her toward this outcome, though, because what if her prediction was

right?
I did her makeup in the living room while she held a round two-sided
mirror that had once been mine. Vi smelled like an ashtray, but at least no
one watching her on TV would have any idea. Through the large living
room window, as I was applying eyeliner, we could see the van with its
satellite pole pull up on the dark street, and I felt my heartbeat quicken.
This was actually going to happen. She went to change into the silver shirt,
which she'd tried on previously and which did look good, while I opened

I he front door.
"Violet Shramm?" said a guy in a baseball cap. "Bill Sichko, producer."
He stuck out his hand and gave mine a forceful shake.
"I'm Violet's sister," I said. "But she'll be right out."
"You got a name, Violet's sister?"

"Kate," I said.

He pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward two other men holding
equipment. "This is Tim with the camera, and Sully's our sound guy. We
gonna do this thing?"
"I guess so," I said, and I'm pretty sure that it was because I sounded so
hesitant that he laughed.

By the time Vi emerged from her bedroom, Bill Sichko had walked
around the house, decided to film the interview in the living room, and
was conferring with the cameraman.
"You look great," I said to Vi. "Really."
She smirked. "Maternity clothes suit me."
They wanted her to sit not in the lounger where she held court during
her sessions but in one of the cheap folding chairs her clients sat on. "No
one will notice," Bill said.
"Do you guys work full-time for Today?" I asked.
He shook his head. "We're based up in St. Charles."
The sound guy wanted the fountain in the corner of the living room
moved, and Vi, who was by then perched on the folding chair, having the
cord of a microphone snaked inside her--my--shirt, said to me, "Put it in
the tub." While I was in the bathroom, the doorbell rang, and when I answered
it, a woman wearing a black pantsuit was standing there, holding
a cardboard tray containing three coffees. "You must be Kate," she said.
"I'm Stephanie. I'd shake your hand, but I'd probably spill on you."
In the instant of seeing her, I'd decided she was a local NBC liaison, and
I had to correct my misimpression even as I was saying aloud how nice it
was to meet her. She appeared to be about five years older than Vi and me,
with gray threaded through her otherwise brown bob, and she was attractive
and (perhaps this was unfair to note) not at all overweight. She said,
"Not sure how you take yours, but I'm trusting Vi's got some milk and
sugar."
What I thought then--besides that if I used up my one allotted coffee
so early in the morning, which of course I was about to, it was going to be
an awfully long day--was that instead of being wary of Stephanie on my
sister's behalf, I was wondering precisely what Stephanie saw in Vi. Stephanie
seemed like someone who had her act together; she seemed like a
grown-up. The coffee smelled warmly nutty as I lifted off the plastic lid
and took a sip. "Black is perfect," I said. "Thanks."
Stephanie followed me into the living room, where Vi was sitting with
atypically erect posture on the folding chair and the sound guy was inserting
an earpiece into her left ear. I could feel Vi and Stephanie's confusion
over how to greet each other, which surely had as much to do with the
newness of their relationship as with the presence of the television crew.
Then, decisively, Stephanie leaned in, kissed the top of Vi's head--much
as I had kissed Jeremy before leaving the house that morning, and the
right choice given Vi's makeup, I thought--and stepped back. "I got you a
coffee," Stephanie said. "Don't worry, it's not cinnamon-flavored. But I'll
just hold on to it for now."
"Vi, you don't want to smudge your lipstick," I said.
"Smudged lipstick is the least of it," Vi said. "I'm about to have a heart
attack." She gave me an accusatory look and said, "Matt Lauer is interviewing
me, but did you know I won't be able to see him? I'm supposed to
be looking at that thing"--she gestured toward the video camera, set on a
tripod--"and I'll just hear his voice."
"Take deep breaths," Stephanie said. "In through the nose, out through
the mouth. You're going to do awesome."
"Violet, you're on in thirty seconds," Bill said, and my own heart began
hammering.
Then Bill was saying, "Five, four, three, two"--so they really did that--
and even though I was standing still, next to Stephanie in the doorway of
the living room, I was breathless. Without a doubt, Vi looked the prettiest
she had in years. Was it too much to hope this wouldn't be a trainwreck?
And soon I heard Matt Lauer, his voice weirdly familiar, saying, "We turn
now to St. Louis, Missouri, where a local psychic has made a prediction
that has, no pun intended, unsettled many residents. l,ast week, Violet
Shramm went public with her belief that a major earthquake will rock the

region in the near future. Critics say she's a fearmonger, but Shramm
claims she just wants to save lives. Violet Shramm, welcome to the program."

There
was a slight delay, and Vi said, "Thanks for having me."
"You've put a lot of people on edge with your prediction," Matt Lauer
said, and the first thing I thought was That's not a question. The second
thing was Why didn't I offer to practice with Vi? I could have acted like the
interviewer.

But in a tone of chummy assurance, Vi said, "Matt, it absolutely wasn't
my intention to scare people," and I knew then that she'd be okay. Using
his name like that--I loved her presumptuousness. "But a piece of infor
mation
was available to me," she said, "and I thought it was important to
make it available to other people."

"What's your response to the scientists who say that predicting an
earthquake is impossible?"

"We're all entitled to our opinion." There was still the delay after Matt
Lauer's questions, but it was obviously due to something technological
and not hesitation on Vi's part, because she was smiling warmly. Good for
her for not being defensive, I thought. "I received a message, though, and
frankly, it was an urgent message. Now, Matt, your viewers might not
know that one of the biggest earthquakes ever in this country happened in
Missouri back in the nineteenth century."

"Right, the New Madrid earthquake. Still, some might argue that what
you've done is a bit like yelling fire in a crowded theater."
"I'm yelling fire because I think there's about to be one."
"When you said a quake would happen soon, can you be more specific?"

The
expression on Vi's face was still calm and open as she said, nodding,
"The date I'm getting is October sixteenth."
"Wow, that is specific," Matt Lauer said. "And just a little more than
two weeks away. Now, when you say you received a message, can you ex
plain
what you mean? Do you hear voices? Do you commune with the
dead?"
"Those are all good questions, Matt. It's different for different people in
my line of work, and for me it's always been a combination of things--
sometimes dreams, sometimes a conscious visualization, other times just
a gut feeling. I'm privileged to have a spiritual guide I call Guardian, and
in this case, he's the one who warned me."
"Interesting." Though of course I couldn't see Matt Lauer's face, his
voice was both disbelieving and respectful--not an easy feat but perhaps

the explanation for why he'd succeeded in his field. "And how are you

personally preparing for an earthquake? Where will you be on October

sixteenth?"
"I'm not fleeing the state, if that's what you're asking. I'll probably pick
up some bottled water and that kind of thing." Vi would never pick up
emergency supplies; the only way she'd acquire them was if I carried them
into her house, which I made a mental note to do. She said, "You know
how if you live in Florida, there's hurricane season, or here in the Midwest,
the spring is tornado season? Well, the advice I'm giving people is to consider
this earthquake season. Just be smart about it. But the biggest point
I want to convey to your viewers is that I don't stand to benefit from this. I 
don't sell earthquake insurance. What I always say to my clients is, okay,
here's what I'm getting from Guardian. Make of this information what

you will. I'm just the vessel."
"All food for thought," Matt Lauer said. "Very provocative food for
thought. That's Violet Shramm, a St. Louis psychic warning people in the
area that a major earthquake is going to hit just over two weeks from now.
Thanks for being on the program, Violet."
"Thank you, Matt."
Then I heard Matt Lauer say, "Coming up: A mouse who lives up to the
name of 'mighty,' and a controversial new trend in tattoos. That's after the
break," and then there was music, and Bill was walking out from behind
the camera, and Vi was saying, "Oh my God, I completely just sweated
through my shirt. My pits are literally waterfalls right now."
"She's off-mike, right?" I said.
"You're still miked, but you're not being broadcast."
"Vi, you were cool as a cucumber," Stephanie said. "You were fabulous."

"You
were great," I said. "You really were."
"I wish we could have heard the questions," Stephanie said. "I can't wait
to watch the whole thing online."
I squinted at her in confusion. She wished we could have heard the
questions? And then I had the queasy realization that Matt Lauer's part of
the interview had, presumably, not been audible except in Vi's earpiece.
Which meant--I didn't even want to think about it--that I had somehow
been in her head. If I'd done so on purpose, it would have been a violation
of the pact I'd made with myself, but given that it had been involuntary,
was I responsible? It was like breaking a diet while sleepwalking.
As the sound guy unhooked Vi's mike, he said, "You really believe we're
gonna get a big one?" He sounded skeptical but affably so.
"Sorry," Vi said. "But yes."
The three men packed up their equipment and moved the furniture
back to how it had been before, and by the time they left, it still wasn't yet
six-thirty. Vi gestured toward her face. "I'm going to scrub off my makeup.
If I'm not out in an hour, send reinforcements."
When she was gone, Stephanie chuckled. "I have to say that your sister
might be the most fascinating person I've ever met."
"I take it you haven't spent a lot of time around New Age types?" I
didn't know if she'd be able to tell that I considered this a point in her
favor.

She laughed again. "I guess it doesn't take much to seem interesting
compared to us folks in IT. Speaking of which, I have a meeting in the
Central West End at nine, but I thought we could take Violet out to breakfast.
Are you free awhile longer?"
The way she seemed to see Vi's profession--it was as low-key, as
unfraught, as if Vi conducted research in Antarctica or was the personal
assistant to a movie star. Vi's psychicness was intriguing to Stephanie but
not repellent, not laughable.
I felt an impulse to decline the breakfast invitation--away from both
children, I was always on borrowed time--but surely Vi's appearance on
national television granted me an exemption from our household's morning
routine. "Where were you thinking?" I asked.
"The restaurant at the Four Seasons has quite a view. Or if you know
somewhere else Violet would prefer--"
"That sounds great." I'd envisioned a place like Denny's, and a chance
to go to the Four Seasons, child-free, sounded like a delightful novelty.
The hotel had opened next to the river a few years earlier, and I'd never set
foot in it; in fact, I couldn't remember when I'd last been downtown. I
said, "I won't be a third wheel, will I?"
"Kate, if anyone's a third wheel, it's not you. But how can I really get to
know Violet unless I know her twin?"
No man I'd dated, including Jeremy, had ever expressed a comparable

sentiment.
Then she said, as if catching herself, "Not that you're the same person, I
realize. But that's why I want to get to know you, too."
"Just to warn you, compared to Vi, I'm very boring."
"Ah, but Kate," Stephanie said, "aren't we all?"

logistical indecision occurred just before we departed
for downtown, when we were standing on the sidewalk outside Vi's house
and it became apparent that Stephanie thought we should take three separate
cars, which was a sensible enough idea if we were each headed in a
different direction after breakfast and if we were each in the habit of driving.
But Vi was looking at me beseechingly, and I said, "Stephanie, if you
want to take Vi, I can drop her off back here, and that way, we both get to
ride with the celebrity." If Stephanie had no problem with Vi being a 
professional
psychic, I doubted Vi's not driving would be a deterrent, either,
but the announcement wasn't mine to make.
And of course, if I dropped Vi back at her house after breakfast, I'd be
even later getting home, but as she climbed into the passenger seat of
Stephanie's Volvo, Vi widened her eyes and raised her eyebrows; she was
thanking me.
As I arrived downtown, Jeremy called my cellphone, and when I answered
I said, "Is it airing here?"
"It just finished. She was good."
I could hear a withholding in his voice. "What did you really think?"
"She looked great. You may have missed your calling as a makeup artist.
Rosie said, 'That lady looks like Aunt Vi." I wasn't thrilled to hear that he'd
let Rosie see the segment, which Jeremy must have guessed, because a second
later he said, "Don't worry--she didn't understand it. She was barely paying
attention." Then he said, "Vi set herself up for even more of a media storm by
saying it'll be on the sixteenth. Now it's like an end-of-the-world prediction."
"You think?" I needed to tell him, didn't I, about my complicity in this
date?

He continued, "But maybe it's for the best, because then the sixteenth
comes and goes, and it's over instead of the prediction lingering indefinitely."
Then he said, "We can talk more about this when you get home,
but you remember that October sixteenth is the weekend of my conference
in Denver, right? It's that Friday."
"Is it really?" Now I couldn't tell him; if I did, it would look like I'd
picked the sixteenth on purpose.
"Don't answer this now, but what if you guys come with me?" Jeremy
said. "I checked, and the hotel has an indoor pool. We could have a little
Colorado vacation."

It was, in some ways, a tempting idea. But the one plane trip we'd taken
so far with both Rosie and Owen, to visit Jeremy's family in Virginia,
hadn't gone smoothly, and the prospect of getting through the flight to
Denver, convincing the children to sleep in unfamiliar cribs, all of us in
the same hotel room, and looking out for them by myself for three days
while Jeremy attended panels--it actually would be the opposite of a vacation.
In fact, I wouldn't even be able to take Rosie swimming without Jeremy
because I couldn't watch her and Owen in the water at the same time.
Plus, I'd be worried about leaving my father and Vi behind in St. Louis; I
was sure that neither of them would consider leaving town.
"Just think on it," Jeremy said. "So I've already gotten emails from people
who saw Vi."
"Let's see--from Sally, from Cockroach's wife, and from Xiaojian
Marcus." These people were, respectively, the wife of Jeremy's cousin, the
wife of his best friend from college, and the wife of Jeremy's department
head, a professor herself at Wash U's medical school, who had no children
and who had told me when Jeremy and I were engaged that being a good
mother and a good employee were mutually exclusive. That Xiaojian had
emailed Jeremy meant, presumably, that she'd told her husband--that
Jeremy's boss now knew for sure that the earthquake psychic was his
sister-in-law. But if Jeremy wasn't going to point out this fact, neither was I.
"Do only women watch the Today show?" he was asking. "By the way,
Owen had a blowout."

"Which pants?"
"The gray ones."
"Put them in a plastic bag and leave it at the top of the basement stairs."
"Done and done."
"I'm actually not on my way home yet," I said. "Stephanie--Vi's
girlfriend--or whatever--she also came for the taping and she wants us
to take Vi out for breakfast at the Four Seasons. Is that okay? You don't
teach until eleven today, right?"
"The Four Seasons? This woman must really like your sister."
"So what did the email say from Xiaojian? Something snotty?"
"It was one line. I think all it said was 'I just saw your sister-in-law on

television.'"

I said, "'And P.S. I'm still gloating that I turned out to be right about
your wife not being able to handle motherhood and a job.' "
"I guarantee you've spent more time thinking about that conversation
than she has." I could tell Jeremy had turned his mouth away from the
phone receiver as he said, "Let him play with it, too, Rosie." To me, he said,
"Go have fun at your fancy lesbian breakfast."
;it 1.tbig and heavy and the tablecloths were thick
and while and there were fresh roses in a vase. The person who approached
us as we were finishing our food was someone I had never seen before: a
woman in her fifties wearing running shorts and a red mesh T-shirt that
seemed so inappropriate for the restaurant that she had to be someone
who found herself in elegant settings frequently enough to have become
indifferent to them. Looking right at Vi, she said in a scolding tone,
"Didn't I just see you on TV?"
"Oh--" This was probably the last time being recognized surprised Vi.
"Yeah, I guess you did."

"I don't usually watch those morning programs, but I was on the treadmill
upstairs." The woman pointed vaguely above her head, then said,
"I'm so glad I don't live in St. Louis! I'm here for a meeting, and thank God
I'm flying out this afternoon."
Stephanie said to the woman, "Do you want Vi's autograph?" Was
Stephanie being sarcastic? It appeared not.

The woman made an expression of distaste. "No," she said. "I need to
go shower." She looked again at Vi and said with self-satisfaction, "I knew
I recognized you."

After she was gone, Vi said, "That was kind of weird." She didn't seem
entirely displeased, but I could feel the way she didn't yet have a framework
for thinking about such encounters.
"Get used to it, sweetie," Stephanie said, and the surprise wasn't the
`sweetie"; it was that Stephanie sounded proud. At what point had Vi revealed
her occupation--at the same time as or prior to mentioning her
upcoming appearance on the Today show? How did a conversation like
that unfold? I recalled telling Jeremy about having senses in the car on a
drive back from an overnight trip we'd taken to see a concert in Kansas
City, but we'd been together for six weeks at that point, not a few days, and
even that amount of time had later seemed to me inadequate to have supported
the weight of the disclosure. And besides, when I'd told Jeremy, I'd
presented the senses as involuntary and private--not as my calling or vocation,
certainly not as anything I'd be chatting about on TV.
When the bill came, Stephanie picked it up immediately, and I said
to her, "Let's split it."
Stephanie was sticking her credit card in the leather l'older. She shook
her head. "Definitely my treat. It's not every day I get to have breakfast
with a gorgeous set of twins."
"Although you did once date the winner of a beauty pageant," Vi said.
Nodding toward me, she said to Stephanie, "Tell her."
Stephanie laughed. "This was in another lifetime, and I'm not sure dating is 
the right word. I grew up in the sticks, in a tiny town in Arkansas
called Cave City, and back in high school, I had a fling with our town's
Miss Watermelon."

"Whose official title was Queen Melon." Vi was beaming.
"She now has three children," Stephanie said. "And a plumber husband."

"She's
become Mrs. Melon," Vi said.
"I guess we all have our claim to fame," Stephanie said.

I were inside my car, I said, "I like her."

"We'll see."
"What's the problem? I thought that was a totally fun breakfast."
"What's the problem besides that she's female?" From the passenger
seat, Vi smirked at me. Then she said, "Have you ever heard the joke about
how a lesbian takes a U-Haul on a second date? Well, I think she's ready
for us to move in together."
"Literally?"
Vi leaned forward and changed the radio station from pop to classic
rock. "When you went to the bathroom, she mentioned getting together
tonight. For like the sixth time in less than a week!"
By my own calculation, it would be the fourth time. I said, "She's into
you."
"Do you think she's pretty?" Vi's voice was surprisingly vulnerable, and
I thought how I had forgotten this part--how when you got together with
someone new, you had to adjust to the ways in which they implicitly represented
you. First you had to figure out what those ways were; then you
had to determine whether you could put up with them.
"Yes," I said. "I do.''
"She looks kind of like Mrs. Kebach," Vi said, and I began laughing.
Mrs. Kebach had been our elementary school music teacher, a woman
who led us in rounds of "Row, row, row your boat" and group sessions on
the xylophones.

"She does!" I said. "But Mrs. Kebach was pretty, too. I mean--" I
paused. "I never imagined you'd end up going out with her, but she was
pretty. So what did you tell Stephanie about tonight?"
"I said I'd look at my schedule."

"Don't game her, Vi." I switched into the left lane, passing a van, and
glanced over at my sister. "She seems like a straightforward person."
"You know what a wise woman once told me?" Vi said. "She told me
the homosexual lifestyle is complicated, and all things being equal, I
should date a man."

I said, "But all things are never equal."

Hank and Courtney were meeting with the genetics
counselor that day, but I wasn't sure what time; I waited until Rosie and
Owen were up from their naps and texted Hank, keeping it vague in case
he was in Courtney's presence: U guys around? Hope things going well. . . . 
Thirty seconds later, Hank texted back, Come on over, in yard.
Rosie helped me push Owen in the double stroller down the sidewalk
and up the Wheelings' driveway to the backyard, where Hank and Amelia
were kicking a soccer ball back and forth; to my relief, I didn't see Courtney.
As we approached, I heard Hank saying, "Only the goalie uses hands."
He turned toward us, and though his appearance and demeanor were entirely
normal, I knew.
"Rosie, want to play soccer with Amelia?" I said.
"Rosie wants chalk," Rosie said.

"Don't feel obligated," I said, but Hank was already opening the plastic
bin where they stored their outdoor toys. (That even the Prius-driving,
organic-cotton-wearing, non-meat-consuming Wheelings owned things
made of plastic--it made me feel better.)
"Draw a octopus, I >addy!" Amelia shouted as I set Owen on a blanket
in the grass and placed toys around him. Hank was squatting in the driveway,
the chalk scraping across the pavement, and the girls were hunched
beside him. I walked over and watched as he finished the octopus--I often
forgot about his artistic abilities--and then he began the outline of a cat.
When he was finished with the whiskers, he passed his piece of chalk to
Amelia and said, "Now you color the octopus, and Rosie, you color the
cat." He dusted off his palms and came to stand next to me. "Courtney
definitely wants to terminate."
"Hank, I'm so sorry."
"Daddy, she's messing it up!" Amelia cried as Rosie scribbled over the
cat's face.

"Chill out, Amelia," Hank said. "Let her do it her own way." To me, he
said, "I once went to a pro-choice march in college. You know, up on Beacon
Hill in Boston, holding my sign, sporting my dreads. I definitely think
it should be legal. But somehow the idea of it and then, like, my own
wife--" He stopped talking, and I wondered again if he was about to cry.
After a minute, in a relatively composed voice, he added, "She says she
doesn't want to try again, that the pregnancy was all a big mistake. We
knew we only wanted one kid, we changed our mind, and ever since then,
things have sucked--the infertility, the morning sickness when she finally
did get pregnant, and now this. Her attitude is, put it behind us and enjoy
life again."
"I'm sure that everything is overwhelming right now."
"Sure, but Courtney rarely changes her mind."
Owen had backed into a sitting position from his knees, and I said,
"Good job, 0. Good sitting up." He flashed me a proud, gummy smile.
"I usually admire her stubbornness," Hank said. "Whether it's not accepting
excuses from an undergrad who tries to turn a paper in late or
standing up to some crusty-old-man scientist who's condescending to her. But 
being stubborn doesn't work for this. You can't just erase a pregnancy."
"Do you not want her to terminate?" I felt conscious of using the same
language he did, not saying abortion.
"I want us to consider our options."
"Maybe she'll kel di Ikrent in a kw days."
Hank shook his head. "The procedure is scheduled for next Tuesday.
She'd have had them do it today if they were willing."
My cellphone, which was in the pocket of my fleece vest, rang then, and
I said, "Sorry. Let me just see if it's Jeremy."
It was. "Are you at the Wheelings'?" he asked, and his voice contained
a weird ridge of hardness that put me on alert.
"Yeah, why?"

"I just tried you at home, and the voice mail is full. So I listened to it,
and it's all calls about Vi's prediction. Have you checked your email
today?"

"Not yet. Are the phone messages from strangers or people we
know? How would a stranger find me?" Especially when my name was
completely different from Vi's. And in this moment, I arrived at a belated
understanding that this was what I'd been preparing for. For more than
half my life, I'd been laying the groundwork for my own invisibility--for
far longer, in fact, than Vi had been laying the groundwork for her exposure.
But as a fluttery sensation passed through my stomach, I thought
how unsurprising it would be if her preparation, her power, trumped
mine.

"St. Louis isn't that big," Jeremy said. "In the age of the Internet, the
world isn't that big."

"So who called?"

"For starters, my mom, my dad, my brother, and your Mizzou friend
Meredith. Also someone from the Riverfront Times, a reporter who says
her editor went to high school with you." The Riverfront Times was the
free alternative weekly that cheekily covered bands and restaurants and
local political scandals and featured advertisements for transsexual escorts;
I had read it when I'd first moved back to St. Louis but not since I'd
had children. "And there was a message from Janet," Jeremy was saying,
"and someone named Elise, who said she's Travis's mom--"
Janet was my old friend and co-worker, and dimly, I had a recollection
of a boy named Travis from Rosie's music class, but how would his mother
know I was Vi's twin--how could she connect Violet Shramm to Kate
Tucker?
"She wanted to know if you're planning to leave town. And one from
the mom in that family you babysat for growing up. Melissa Barrett?"
"Melissa Garrett," I said.

"And also there were some--I don't want to upset you. I don't see this
as a big deal."
Again, my stomach fluttered. "What?" I said.
"Some anonymous calls. Just two. One was a person saying, 'Tell your
sister she's irresponsible,' and the other was someone who yelled, 'Fire!'
and hung up. I think as in--"
"Yeah." I swallowed. "I get it."
"The person who yelled fire just sounded like they were playing a prank.
Is your refrigerator running, that kind of thing. And the other one sounded
kind of schoolmarmy, like a self-righteous little old lady. I deleted them,
but now I wish I hadn't, because describing them makes them sound
weirder than just hearing them." And yet there was that hardness in Jeremy's
voice; he didn't like this, either.
I said, "So what are we supposed to do?"
"Have you checked on your dad today? I bet reporters are calling him,
too. But tonight let's get takeout and just relax. Maybe Thai?"
That was all Jeremy had to offer? Thai food?

"We can't let this be about us, Kate," he said. "It's about Vi."

But that morning I had done her makeup for the Today show; from the
end of sixth grade through to our high school graduation, we had cooked
dinner together so as to pretend our mother hadn't failed us; and thirty
four years earlier, we'd been one person. Of course it was about me.
As I hung up, Hank was regarding me with unabashed curiosity. I said,
"Apparently, our phone is ringing off the hook because of Vi being on the Today 
show this morning."
"Wait, that was today? And you waited until now to tell me?" He
seemed not just interested but downright titillated; for the first time since
we'd arrived in their backyard, there was about him no haze of grimness.
"They interviewed her from here, not in New York. At her house. Matt
Lauer did it."

"Let's go watch it right now. You think just because my life is in sham
bles I wouldn't want to see Vi shooting the breeze with Matt Lauer? You
know what your sister needs?"

"A muzzle?" I said.

"A publicist."
"Vi doesn't need a publicist."
"It's not like only drug-addled starlets have them. It's someone who
knows how to handle the media, and if Vi's been on Today, she'll get more
requests. Courtney and I went to college with a woman who does PR in
L.A. Why don't I shoot her an email?"
The offer seemed very Harvard-like to me, that Hank not only understood
what a publicist did but happened to know one. I said, "Won't
Courtney be annoyed if the woman helps Vi? And wouldn't someone like
that charge an arm and a leg?"
"A good publicist ought to be able to make some money for Vi out of all
this. I think some TV shows pay not for the interview exactly, but they pay
a licensing fee for personal photos or whatever, which amounts to the
same thing. Or Vi could get a book deal. Or her own TV show."
"Oh, Jesus."

Hank smiled. "Not what you were hoping for? Look, why don't I email
Emma, and if she can't help, I'm sure she knows lots of other people. She
could at least get us a ballpark estimate of how expensive it is."
"Thank you," I said. He had not, I noticed, answered my question about Courtney.
"Hey." Hank made a sheepish expression. "Glad I'm good for something
right now."
Chapter 9

nciunIq2. my ii n imvvan
my father answered the phone and there came a point when I was pretty
sure we'd been talking for more than our allotted five minutes; I looked at
my watch and saw that it had, astonishingly, been twelve. Then my father
said, "Your mother's gone to bed. The doctor has her on a new medicine
for the fibromyalgia, and it's making her tired." He said this matter-of
factly, as if we'd discussed a diagnosis of fibromyalgia before--at the time,
I had never heard of it, and I woefully misspelled it when I looked it up
online--but out of some combination of surprise, politeness, and cowardice,
I asked him nothing. A few days later, I emailed Vi and wrote, Have
you heard Mom or Dad talk about her having fibromyalgia? Vi wrote back, What 
the fuck is that?
Since starting Mizzou, I'd gone home infrequently. To be alone in the
house on Gilbert Street with my parents, without Vi, was almost unbearable,
and though she'd drop by, it was never for long. I'd suggest that we
see a movie or meet up in the afternoon to have lunch, but she worked
most nights at one restaurant or another and slept half the day. Was this, I
wondered, what it had felt like for her when she'd stayed with me in the
dorm and I'd barely had time for her in my schedule?
I'd learned that taking Ben with me, seeing my parents' house through his eyes, 
was worse than going home by myself. This mausoleum of unhappiness
was where I'd grown up? I'd try to explain that it hadn't been as
bad when I was younger, that the plates in the kitchen and the television
set in the living room and the hand towels in the bathroom hadn't looked
as old and outdated because they hadn't been as old and outdated.
Ben would sleep in the ludicrous guest room, the expectation that he
would do so conveyed by the folded towels on the bed, though I never
knew if it was my mother or father who'd set them there. Initially, I assumed
that from visit to visit he was the last person to have used the bed,
until I realized the guest room was where my father now slept; I discovered
an empty bottle of his blood pressure medication under the night
stand. But even before I knew this, I'd have Ben sneak into my room
instead of joining him in the bigger guest bed, and he would try to initiate
sex, and I would start crying. Not because of the sex--that had gotten better
for us after our first dismal hook-up--but because of everything else,
the grip of family and the past.
If I hadn't previously thought of my mother as making much effort,
after the fibromyalgia diagnosis she either stopped trying entirely or
didn't have the ability. Where once she'd run errands, she now remained
in bed until five P.M. Prior to five, she was up only for doctors' appointments,
which my father left work to drive her to. If I arrived home in the
middle of the day, the single indication that I was expected would be a key
beneath the mat outside the front door. My father ate frozen dinners every
night--I did the same during my visits--and my mother subsisted on
orange juice, Triscuits, and spreadable cheddar cheese. She didn't have the
energy to attend my college graduation, and my father didn't want to leave
her by herself, so neither of them came. At the last minute, Vi and Patrick
drove out, surprising me, and though I'd probably have told them not to if
they'd offered in advance, I was glad to see them. Ben's parents took all of
us, plus Ben's two sisters and grandfather, out for dinner at the fanciest
restaurant in Columbia; Vi ordered lobster, and she and Patrick drank
four cocktails each.

Vi had vacated our parents' house in a way I never had. She had cleared
her belongings out of our childhood bedroom--even the Sisterland sign
was gone--while my old clothes still hung in the closet, my Nipher and
Kirkwood High yearbooks rested on the shelf, and a googly-eyed turtle
sticker I'd arbitrarily stuck on my desk lamp in 1986 was still there eleven
years later.
In the summers during college, I stayed in Columbia and worked full
time at the adult day-care center; after graduation Ben and I rented a one
bedroom apartment in Lincoln Park. Our first year out of college, we
hosted Thanksgiving in Chicago for our friends, who were mostly other
Mizzou graduates, and I felt a particular kind of twenty-two-year-old's
pride in the fact that, unlike at Thanksgivings of my youth, we used fresh
rather than frozen spinach for the casserole and real whipped cream instead
of cans of Reddi-wip. (Also around this time, one ordinary weeknight
after making dinner, I heard myself say to Ben, "I'm going to
compost the rest of the bok choy"--there was a little yard with a compost
bin behind our building--and pretty much everything I was smug about
then was encapsulated in that single sentence. I thought--foolishly,
obnoxiously--that I'd left my former self behind.) At Christmas, Ben and
I went to see his family in Indianapolis, and these patterns held the following
year, too: Thanksgiving in Chicago, Christmas in Indianapolis. "I
don't suppose you'd be able to come home just for a day or two," my father
said in early December, and I said I couldn't. Ben and I had recently gone
to look at engagement rings, and I definitely didn't want his proposal to
occur in St. Louis.
Vi was working Christmas Eve but was supposed to go over to the
house on Christmas Day, when my father would make steak for dinner.
On Christmas Eve, my mother went to bed without eating, which wasn't
unusual; her door, the door to the room she no longer shared with my father,
was closed by eight P.M. Because she regularly awakened so late in the
day, twenty hours passed before my father knocked on the door shortly
before Vi's arrival to see if my mother needed help getting up. When she
didn't answer, he knocked again, then a third time. After he entered the
room and found her unresponsive in bed, he called 911; the EMTs who
came to the house declared her dead. Vi pulled up outside my parents'
house to find not just an ambulance but a fire truck and a squad car, all
their lights flashing.
For a full day, I didn't know. I hadn't been home for seven months, and
that afternoon--this is only one of my regrets--I'd called to wish my
parents a Merry Christmas when I knew my mother would still be asleep.
This was after the big meal at Ben's family's house in Indianapolis; I'd
been using the phone in the kitchen, and when I'd hung up I'd experienced
a gut-wrenching sadness that I had mistaken for run-of-the-mill
holiday sorrow. On the other side of the kitchen's swinging door was Ben's
extended family: little kids hopped up on sweets playing with new toys
while the adults watched football and lamented having overeaten.
I sat by myself in the kitchen for perhaps ten minutes, scanning the
photographs on the refrigerator door, waiting to be interrupted by someone
and to have to rearrange my features so I wouldn't seem like I was in
an unfestive mood. Ben's family was sporty and boisterous, his parents
much younger-seeming than mine, and among the refrigerator photos
was one of them looking at each other and smiling, his father in a tuxedo
and his mother in a strapless red dress, at their thirtieth-anniversary party.
There were also photos of one of Ben's sisters grinning broadly, wrapped
in a foil sheet, having just completed a marathon; of both sisters in hiking
boots and shorts and fleece sweatshirts, standing on a mountain, the older
one holding her fingers in a V behind the head of the younger one; of the
whole family on a beach somewhere. Looking at this display, I knew suddenly
that I couldn't marry Ben, or anyone whose family was this normal
and happy. Ben's mother, whom I actually liked a lot, had once said to me
that her goal in life was for each of her children to find someone who loved
them as much as she and Ben's dad did, and I had felt at the time like I was 
auditioning for a part I was very close to getting, but in this moment
I realized I didn't want it. The differences between our families would
always be too painful.
And so when at last I returned to the living room, I murmured to Ben
that I had a headache and was going to bed early. The dismay on his
face confirmed to me that he had planned to propose that night. Maybe
we'd have taken a walk down the cold, dark street of brick houses, or it
would have been by the fireplace, after the cousins had left and his sisters
and parents had gone to sleep. I felt a churning in my stomach as I brushed
my teeth and climbed into the double bed that Ben's parents didn't care if
we shared. (In contrast to the mother of my high school boyfriend Tom
Mueller, Ben's mother adored me--she would send fruit-scented soaps
and packets of fancy powdered hot chocolate to our apartment in Chicago
and sign the cards "Mom Sylvia." I think she had never quite gotten over
the fact that my parents hadn't attended my college graduation.)
I would still have to stave off a proposal for the two days before Ben and
I returned to Chicago, I thought, and then I'd have to stave off whatever
new plan he came up with after proposing at his parents' house hadn't
worked, and it all made me feel tired. It wasn't that I wanted to break up
with him, just that I wanted to halt further progress--I wanted to enter a
holding pattern. These were the thoughts I went to sleep thinking the
night after my mother died. Then I dreamed not of her but of Vi yelling
my name from across a grassy field; in the dream, I pretended I couldn't
hear her.
I didn't have a cellphone then, and because Ben's last name was Murphy
and neither Vi nor my father knew the first name of Ben's father, it was
useless for them to call information in Indianapolis; they had no way of
reaching me. Vi sent an email--Call me ASAP--which I got while sitting
in front of a computer at the desk in Ben's father's home office on the evening
of December 26. Immediately, my pulse began to race. Normally, I'd
have gone to find Ben's mother and asked if I could make a long-distance
call, but instead I simply lifted the receiver of the office phone and dialed
Vi's apartment. Patrick answered on the fifth ring, and when he realized it
was me, he said, "I'm so sorry, Daze."
"What happened?" I said.
"Oh, shit, I thought Vi reached you," he said. "Your mom died." I almost
thought he was kidding, but then he began to sob.
I swallowed and said, "But how?"
"The EMT told your dad he thought it was a reaction to her medications. It was 
in her sleep."
I had known my mother took several prescription medicines, I'd seen
the forest of bottles on her nightstand, but I couldn't have said exactly
what they were for.

"Vi's at your parents' house now," Patrick said.

Ben drove me to St. Louis that night; it took us four hours, and there
was the threat of a snowstorm, but the flakes didn't start to fall until we'd
arrived. My father greeted us at the door and said, "I'm glad you've come
home," and his voice cracked. Behind him, I caught sight of Vi in an old
University of Nebraska sweatshirt with the hood up, her eyes puffy and
rimmed with red.

the first funeral I'd ever attended. There was a service
at the funeral home, a large white house on Manchester Road that I'd
passed many times without taking note of it, then the burial at Oak Hill
Cemetery. My Mizzou friend Lauren had wanted to come, but she was a
paralegal in her hometown of Tampa and had to work over the holidays.
My father's brother and his wife flew in from Omaha, and Patrick and his
mother were there, along with a handful of Vi's restaurant co-workers,
some of my father's colleagues, a few of our neighbors, and all four members
of the Spriggs family. I didn't realize I'd been waiting for Pete Spriggs,
who'd become a rotund man in his late twenties, to announce to Vi and
me, "You're twins because there's two of you" until the burial was finished,
everyone had dispersed, and he hadn't said it.
During the service, I'd had trouble remembering what my mother had
looked like. I could remember certain photos of her but not her moving
around, talking to me. What came to mind instead was something Vi had
once said when we'd studied the civil rights movement in high school,
which was that if our mother had lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, during
desegregation, she was the kind of person who'd have spit at the black
students as they tried to get inside the high school. I attempted to chase
the comment from my brain.
Patrick, his mother, and our aunt and uncle came back to our house for
lunch, which was a tray of cold cuts Ben had picked up that morning from
Schnucks. From the moment Patrick had told me my mother had died, I'd
felt both clingy and jumpy around Ben--glad that he hadn't given me the
opportunity to turn down his proposal, that I hadn't made things officially
bad between us and he was willing to drive with me to St. Louis and
stand next to me at the funeral, but aware that I still couldn't marry him,
even though my mother had died. I just couldn't.
There had been, as Ben and I had talked increasingly seriously about
marriage, two points of tension between us, and we'd looked at engagement
rings without resolving either one. The first was that he didn't want to
adopt Chinese girls. After several conversations about it, he'd finally said,
"I know how this sounds, but I can't picture having squinty-eyed kids."
If the statement was shocking, it would have been disingenuous for me
to act shocked by it. I said, "What if we adopted from another country, like
in South America?"
"It's all kind of the same." Then he said, "I like my family. I think the
Murphy genes are worth passing on."
The second point of tension between Ben and me, which we never discussed,
was Vi. He at least had the wisdom not to say so, and maybe I
shouldn't have held it against him, given the way they'd met, but he didn't
like her. And Vi either could tell, and amped up her Vi-ishness with him,
or else I was just more aware of her Vi-ishness when Ben was around to
disapprove of it: She'd bring up the old story of Patrick's cousin and the
Naughty Biscotti, or she'd talk about how her friend Nancy had bought a
huge purple dildo with lifelike veins in it, or she'd fart loudly, look at Ben,
and say, "Pardon my French."
The afternoon of my mother's funeral, my father drove his brother and
sister-in-law to the hotel where they were staying and returned home for
a nap; he took it, I noticed, in the guest room. In the living room, Vi lit a
joint and passed it to Patrick, who passed it to Ben, who shook his head. I
had seen Ben smoke pot countless times in college, if not much since, and
his demurral irritated me. It was mostly for this reason that I took a hit
myself.
When the joint reached her again, Vi inhaled before saying, "The EMTs
took Mom's body to tl
le medical examiner's office to do an autopsy."
"What are you talking about?" I said. Ben sat in an armchair watching
bowling on TV, and though neither his head nor his eyes moved, I could
tell his attention had shifted to Vi.

"Because of how young she was," Vi said. "I had a sense before she died,
you know. Jocelyn was doing my tarot cards, and the Ten of Swords kept
coming up."
In the last five years, I had never mentioned senses to Ben. Whatever it
was that Vi had divulged during the ride in his car from Mizzou--I hadn't
expanded on or tried to explain that.
"Now I think, well, why didn't I just ask Guardian who the card was
for?" Vi said. Guardian was how she'd begun referring to the entity who
had spoken to her in the library at Reed, whom she'd continued to communicate
with. "But maybe it was her time."
"She was forty-six," I said. If I didn't acknowledge Vi's reference to
Guardian, perhaps Ben wouldn't notice it, I thought; it didn't seem to occur
to Vi that Ben wouldn't be well-acquainted with our senses.
"What a tragedy," Patrick said. "Poor Rita." He and Vi were both on the
couch, her feet on his lap.
As Vi passed the joint to him again, she said, "I wonder if Mom will
contact us from the other side."

"Ben." I stood. "Let's go for a walk."

, on a Sunday evening after he returned to our apartment
from playing touch football, I told Ben that I was moving back to
St. Louis. "Is this because of what I said about squinty eyes?" he asked.
For a few seconds, I was genuinely confused, and then I said, "It has
nothing to do with that."
"I'm not an asshole," he said.

"I didn't say you are." After my mother's death, I'd been unable to reenter
the once-enchanted-seeming life Ben and I led together in Chicago,
shopping at the farmers' market on weekends and seeing independent
movies at the Music Box. (The truth was, because we were only twenty
three, neither of us was in a hurry to have or adopt children anyway, and
even in our disagreements, there was a self-congratulatory note about how
responsible we were to discuss these important issues in advance.) It had
been the acceptance letter I'd received from the social work school at the
University of Illinois at Chicago that had made me decide for certain: I
wasn't enrolling. And not only that, I was leaving Chicago. I'd been working
for a year and a half as the activities director at a nursing home, and I'd
given notice there before I told Ben, partly so that I couldn't back out.
He said then, "And I'm supposed to just be cool with a long-distance
relationship?"
I said nothing, and an expression of dawning comprehension formed
on his face. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he said. "This is how you
tell me you want to break up?" I wondered if he was wishing he could
undo all our time together, starting with that game of ping-pong in the
basement of the Delta Upsilon house in 1993, if he thought I'd turned out
to be someone other than the person I'd presented myself as. He said, "I'm
sorry your mom committed suicide. I really am. But that's no reason to
destroy your own life."
In a small, tight voice, I said, "My mother didn't commit suicide."
He blinked in surprise, and his lips parted, as if he was about to speak.
But he was quiet for more than thirty seconds before saying, "Wow. Okay.
Okay then, Kate."

car to drive myself home; there wasn't much I wanted to take
from the apartment in Lincoln Park, but there was more than I could
carry on the bus. Because I wasn't yet twenty-five, the rental company
imposed a surcharge, in addition to the exorbitant fee for dropping off the
car in a different city from the one where I'd picked it up, but I wasn't going 
to ask my father or Vi to come get me. And so on February 12,
1999--it seemed like a good idea to leave town before Valentine's Day--in
a maroon Chevy Malibu, I drove south on Interstate 55, through Bloomington
and Springfield, and as I crossed the Pine Street Bridge, the Arch
on my right, I thought how strange it was that my belief that I'd never
again live in St. Louis had not only been wrong but had been wrong so
quickly.

I hadn't told my father to expect me, but he didn't appear particularly
surprised. In fact, I was the one in for a surprise: As I pulled up in front of
the house on Gilbert Street, I saw a FOR SALE sign in the yard and, beneath
the name and number of the real estate agency, a rectangular metal attachment
that read UNDER CONTRACT. I knew right away, with a gasping
kind of fury, that my father had already gotten rid of the only things I'd
have wanted from the house, which were my mother's Christmas records.
And though I quickly confirmed this suspicion, there was no point in
confronting my father; the records would still be gone. He'd be moving
into a rental apartment in Des Peres, my father told me, then said, "Ben's
not with you?"
I shook my head. "But I'm here for good."
I suppose I'd expected him to express pleasure or even gratitude, but he
looked stern as he said, "Are you? I hope that's what you want."
My father was sixty-three then, and what I had thought in the days after
my mother's death was that if he--or, for that matter, she--had lived in
the nursing home where I worked in Chicago, I would have been attentive
to them in a way I'd never been as their own daughter. I wasn't under the
illusion that I could solve all the problems of the nursing home residents,
or even any of their problems, but I could lead them through chair exercises
and bingo, I could hold spa sessions in which I painted the women's
toenails and applied face masks. The previous summer, we'd planted a
vegetable garden and had succeeded in deterring squirrels from the tomato
plants with a mixture of hot pepper juice and water that two of the
men and I made in the kitchen. I liked these old people, even when they
were disagreeable--to cajole them into participating in activities was a
satisfying challenge--yet it hadn't occurred to me to demonstrate to my
mother or father the patience I reserved for my job. Now it was too late to
do so for my mother.
As it happened, however, it wasn't clear that my father wanted me
around. He was cordial in those early days following my return home, but
in the way of one tenant of a boardinghouse to another; he didn't change
his habits on my behalf. He read the newspaper as he ate toast in the morning,
though I was at the table, and he watched television at night. When
the weather rose to fifty degrees, he declined my invitation to go for
a walk, and he didn't want to see a movie or try a tapas restaurant. After a
week, I was unable to suppress the suspicion that I'd made a huge mistake.
But having returned the rental car, I was trapped in the house with
no way of getting anywhere other than downtown Kirkwood when my
father was at work; I had to wait until after dinner to go to Kinko's to print
résumés and cover letters. One morning, I tried to go running, but it had
gotten cold again, and my chest hurt. I took to reading the Post-Dispatch cover 
to cover, which made me paranoid about all the crime occurring in
the city and county; besides that, I mostly watched TV.
Another two weeks passed before I called Ben. It was late at night,
around the time he'd be going to bed, and after we'd exchanged greetings,
his none too warm, he said, "Why are you calling?"
I was startled. "I guess because I miss you."
"I should probably tell you that Lauren and I are seeing each other."
"Lauren who?"

"Lauren Lauren. Lauren Mitchell."

"But she's in Florida." Though I had never consciously thought that Ben
and my friend Lauren might be attracted to each other--wasn't this
shockingly disloyal on both their parts?--I immediately remembered the
very first night he and I had hooked up, when he'd ejaculated all over
me. He hadn't said, Are you going to tell your friends? He'd said, "Are you
going to tell Lauren?" On the phone, I said, "I thought you were opposed
to long-distance relationships."
"There's such a thing as airplanes," Ben said. "Kate, you broke up with
me. Unless I'm mistaken."

"What would happen if I wanted to get back together?" I said.
"Do you?"

"I don't know."

"Then quit fucking with me," he said.


to get married. Not right away, but eventually, Ben
would become Lauren's husband, not mine, and I sensed this. Nevertheless,
the next day, I called him at work and said, "What if I take the bus up
there this weekend?"

After a pause, he said, "Lauren's coming here on Friday." Lauren, who
hadn't been able to get away from her paralegal job to attend my mother's
funeral? I had last seen her when she'd visited Ben and me in the late summer,
when we'd gotten along the way we always had, but now it was impossible
not to second-guess our entire friendship.
"You could tell her not to come," I said.

"I could." Ben was quiet, and I heard some of his co-workers talking in
the background. "But I don't think I want to."

St. Louis for five weeks when I got hired, through an
agency, as a home health aide for a rich old woman who lived in a huge
house in Clayton. As soon as I shared the news with my father, he managed
to convey his preference that I not move into his apartment by saying,
"I bet you'll be glad to live on your own again."

By chance, Patrick was moving in then with his boyfriend, a lawyer
who was ten years older than us and owned a condo in the Central West
End, and Vi suggested that I take Patrick's room.
"I'll think about it," I said, and she looked at me with amusement.
"You have a better plan?"

Twenty-four hours later, I told her, "I'll live with you if you don't 
communicate
with Guardian in the apartment." I had no idea if she talked to
him out loud, but I didn't want to ask.
Vi seemed more baffled than offended. "It bothers you that much?"
"Even when I'm not there, you can't," I said. "Not at all."
"Guardian is a totally peaceful entity," Vi said, and I said, "Maybe we
shouldn't live together. We'll probably just fight."
Vi held up One hand. "No, no, I can meditate at the bookstore." She
meant at the New Age one in Maplewood where she went a few nights a
week, when she wasn't working. "And we can do a sage cleansing in the
apartment if you're worried about spiritual detritus." Then she said, "You
know what? Let's find a different place. It's not like this one is that great."
The day that Vi and I were to take occupancy of the second floor of a
duplex in Richmond Heights, I ate toast for breakfast at the kitchen table
while my father read the Post-Dispatch. All my things were packedrepacked--into 
suitcases and boxes waiting by the front door, and Vi and
her friend Seth, who owned a van, were coming over to help me move
them. The closing for the house on Gilbert Street would happen in less
than a week. This breakfast was, presumably, the last meal I'd eat in the
house where I'd grown up, but it didn't feel momentous. My father set
down the business section of the paper and said, "I wonder if you might
show me sometime how you do your grocery shopping."
While home, I hadn't reverted to making my mother's old recipes,
but, not wanting to live on frozen dinners, I did borrow my father's credit
card and drive to Schnucks a few nights a week. That purchasing bananas
and cottage cheese and deli ham was a skill had never occurred to me, nor
had it occurred to me that it was one my father didn't possess. I even wondered
if he might be humoring me, trying to make me feel useful in the
way I'd persuaded myself I would be before I'd left Chicago, but it appeared
his request was sincere. This was how it happened that I began
taking him grocery shopping. Certainly after a time or two, he knew what
he was doing--a little ridiculously, I'd drawn a chart on a sheet of paper
with each day of the week and a space beside it, so he could plan his dinners
in advance--but we kept going to the store together. Back then, we
did it on Sundays, after I moved in with Jeremy we went on Thursday
nights, and when my father was retired and I had children, we switched to
weekdays.
Part of the reason Vi and I had chosen to live in the neighborhood we
did was its proximity to the job I'd gotten. I could walk there in fifteen
minutes, and because I didn't need a car to drive to work, Vi said I could
use hers for errands if I chipped in on insurance and gas. That I hated
the home health
aide job pretty much from the moment I took it should,
perhaps, have made me question the wisdom of letting it determine where
I lived.

The woman was named Mrs. Abbott, and she was a ninety-six-year-old
widow who was mostly lucid, though also mostly asleep during the hours
I was there. Every Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, I arrived at her house at
seven P.M. and left at seven A.M., when my replacement showed up. Mrs.
Abbott's son, who was himself in his seventies and lived out in Ladue, had
hired attendants to be with her twenty-four hours a day, and there were
five other versions of me, though I never met all of them and some didn't
last more than a few weeks.

At seven-thirty P.M., I gave Mrs. Abbott a bath, rubbed Vaseline on her
skin, helped her into an adult diaper and a nightgown, and got her settled
in bed. (I didn't realize at the time what good training this would be for
motherhood.) I'd line up three Ritz crackers and a plastic cup of milk with
a straw so she could take her medications, then I'd check off the meds I'd
administered on a clipboard kept on the mantel above the bedroom's fireplace.
Then I'd turn out the light but remain in the room until I left in the
morning, which was sometimes before Mrs. Abbott woke. Occasionally, she needed 
to be changed during the night or would just wake up disoriented,
but mostly she slept, snoring gently.
In spite of there being plenty of space in her bedroom for a twin bed or
cot for the aides, there wasn't one; I sat in a large armchair upholstered
with a blue-and-white pattern of fox-hunting aristocrats. Yet because no
one at the agency had told me I couldn't sleep, I assumed it was understood
that I would. Though there was a small television set I was allowed
to watch propped on a nearby bureau, I never did--first, because Mrs.
Abbott listened to the radio when she slept, and I didn't like the competing
sounds; and second, because I feared that if I did have the TV on, she'd
die and I'd fail to notice. I was warned never to use Mrs. Abbott's phone
to make long-distance calls, never to help her with anything financial--
managing her checkbook, for instance--and never to allow my family
members into her house. On my own, I don't think it would have occurred
to me to do any of these things.
It wasn't because of Mrs. Abbott that I hated the job; if I'd worked for
her during the day, I might even have liked it. I hated it because the first
week I was there, an idea lodged itself in my head, an idea that was somewhat
ludicrous during daylight hours, even to me, but less so at night,
when Mrs. Abbott and I were alone in her vast, dark house. The idea,
which occurred to me during my second night on the job, was that the
Ouija presence from all those years earlier with Marisa was going to find
me. It was going to find me in Mrs. Abbott's bedroom, perhaps appearing
before me physically, and then--well, I didn't have a clear idea of what it
would do, but surely it would mock me for thinking that by telling Vi not
to communicate with Guardian in our duplex, I could prevent my own
contact with the spirit world.
Every night after Mrs. Abbott was asleep, I'd pull out a book or magazine
and wait to feel tired enough to fall asleep myself. I'd have drunk
as little as possible in the hours prior to my arrival at Mrs. Abbott's because
I didn't like using the master bathroom--it had a raised toilet seat
with arms--but I also didn't want to leave her room to use the one down
the hall. When I did manage to fall asleep, I'd often startle awake.
I'd been stunned to learn that Mrs. Abbott had no security alarm. She
lived on one of those semiprivate streets St. Louis is full of, a loop without
sidewalks, and though there was a wrought-iron gate at the loop's entrance,
it was open day and night and served the purpose of merely seeming unwelcoming
rather than preventing access. A few years later, I told Jeremy
that Mrs. Abbott's house had been at least ten thousand square feet and he was 
skeptical, so we went online--by then, such information was easy to
find--and it turned out it was twelve thousand.
On the first floor were large, shadowy rooms and an enormous front
hall with nothing in it but the stairs and a two-story mullioned window.
The kitchen, which I found particularly creepy, had a black-and-red
checkerboard floor and, except for the dishwasher, appliances that were
decades old.
I worked for Mrs. Abbott for fourteen months, a period that in retrospect
is vague, though I also feel, because my unhappiness and anxiety made time pass 
slowly, that I spent more like ten years as her employee.
Though I could have stayed with the same agency but asked to be trans
ferred so I was working with a different client or with multiple clients, and
working during the day--it's clear now that I should have done exactly
this--I didn't because then I'd have needed to buy a car.
It's also clear, of course, that the presence I feared was less the Ouija one
than my mother's. The medical examiner's report that had come in the
mail to Gilbert Street shortly before I moved out had stated that her death
was a result of combined drug intoxication; she'd been taking nine medications,
including (this mystified me) sleeping pills. On the evening I
found the envelope open on the kitchen counter, I read the enclosure, replaced
it, and discussed none of its contents with my father.
I myself was perpetually sleep-deprived, and on the nights I didn't work
at Mrs. Abbott's house, if Vi wasn't around, I'd drink a smoothie for dinner
and go to bed as early as seven P.M. Due to our schedules, Vi and I saw
each other erratically. She spent four nights a week, including either a Friday
or Saturday, as a hostess at an Italian restaurant on the Hill. Her shifts
ran from four to midnight, meaning we were rarely both home for dinner,
and unlike me, she was good at sleeping during the day. On Sundays, we
had lunch with our father, and afterward, Vi drove off alone, and my father
and I went to the Schnucks on Manchester Road.

Because Vi had lived in St. Louis since dropping out of Reed--it was
strange to realize that she'd only ever been away for six weeks--she had an
extended group of friends who weren't people we'd known growing up.
There were the ones she meditated with at the bookstore, an activity I
never asked about. There was also a group with whom she played bar trivia
on Mondays, an event I did attend once, only to discover that I could answer
almost no questions and that the few I could answer could also be
answered by several other people on our team; I left reeking of cigarette
smoke, much of it directed at me by my sister.
Vi's friends Patrick and Nancy regularly came over to get stoned and
make catty comments about the contestants on reality television shows;
Nancy was a frizzy-haired yoga devotee who'd been at our mother's funeral
and who was the owner of the purple dildo with lifelike veins. Sometimes
I'd join them in the living room, but I couldn't summon the energy
to contribute to their commentary.
One afternoon in November, by which point Vi and I had been living
together for eight months, she entered the apartment just after five P.M. to
find me sitting in the living room with the TV on and the lights off; I was
watching an old Star Trek, wearing my bathrobe from college with a
sweater that had belonged to Ben's father over it, drinking red wine from
a coffee mug and eating Doritos from a family-sized bag. I'd been under
the impression that Vi would be working that night, but apparently, when
she'd shown up at the restaurant, the other woman who hostessed was
there already, and the manager sent Vi home.
"Wow," she said as she threw her keys into the basket where we kept
mail. She walked into the living room, flipping the switch that turned on
the ceiling light, and I blinked. I could have feigned confusion and said, Wow 
what?, but there didn't seem to be a point. Vi said, "You know you're
depressed, right?"
"I didn't realize Doritos were against the law."
"Don't be defensive. I'm not criticizing you. But you should see a
shrink."
I didn't have health insurance--for that matter, neither did Vi--but I
just said, "That's not going to happen."
She settled into the papasan chair and yawned, not covering her mouth.
"I've always wanted to be in therapy. Like the old-school kind where you
lie on a couch not looking at the person."
I took another chip from the bag.
"So this is your plan?" She set one foot on the coffee table and crossed
the other over it. "Star Trek and jammies on by five o'clock every night?"
"Excuse me if I haven't taken St. Louis by storm."
"I think it's because you don't have a boyfriend right now." Vi's tone was 
musing. "It's like you aren't yourself without one."
I said, "Have you ever considered having a thought but not expressing
it?"
"I come in peace, Daze." This was what Vi called me long after almost
everybody else except our parents called me Kate--Daze, short for Daisy.
Patrick was the one other person who called me Daze, and I let him be
cause he'd cried when he'd told me my mother had died. Vi said, "You're
in a bad place, and I want to help."

I stood and dropped the Doritos bag on the table. Before I stalked off to
my bedroom, I said, "If I wanted your help, I'd ask for it."

as I was returning home from a night at Mrs. Abbott's,
I had just crossed Clayton Road when I became aware of a person
behind me. I turned and made quick, unfriendly eye contact with a black
man wearing navy blue scrubs under an open winter coat. He was less
than ten feet back--the sun had just risen, and we were the only ones
outside--and when I made a left onto Brookline Terrace, I thought he'd
go straight. But he went left, too. As we passed Edward Terrace and then
Ralph Terrace, I waited for him to turn, but he still was behind me. Those
weren't scrubs he was wearing, I suddenly realized. I myself had on scrubs,
so I had foolishly assumed he did, too, but it occurred to me then that he
was an escaped convict wearing a prison uniform and that he was planning
to rob, rape, or kill me. (If it is tempting, after the fact, to try to defend
or excuse my thinking in this moment, it also would be dishonest.
And it wasn't even that no black people lived in the neighborhood, but not
many did.)
The duplex Vi and I rented was on the next street, Moorlands Drive,
and my mind raced: Instead of turning right, in the direction of our apartment,
would it be smarter to turn left and go back to Clayton Road, where
I could wave down a passing car? Or should I start running toward the
duplex with the idea of unlocking the door and hurling myself inside as
quickly as possible or, if I couldn't manage that before the man grabbed
me, just start screaming for Vi?
But when we reached Moorlands, I didn't turn left, and I didn't start
running. I went right, still walking, and so did the man, and then I crossed
the street, and so did the man, and there were only two houses remaining
before our duplex, one house remaining, and then I turned onto the walkway,
and when I was no more than ten feet from our front door, I couldn't
stop myself from glancing back, and he'd turned onto the walkway, too.
This was when two things happened very quickly: I knew, with a sickening
kind of terror, that I was really and truly about to be assaulted; and as I
stood there frozen, he passed me, went left toward the door of the duplex
that wasn't ours, pulled a key from his pocket, opened the door, and
walked inside. Which meant, it appeared, that he was the new tenant
who'd just moved into the rental unit below Vi's and mine. And while this
didn't exclude his being a murderer or rapist, it indicated that being a
murderer or rapist wasn't the reason he'd followed me from Clayton Road.
I waited until I was inside our apartment and had locked the door
before I started crying, and though the tears were the result of my humiliating,
offensive fear, they soon came to feel, as all tears I cried then did,
like a lament for what a mess I'd made of my life by breaking up with Ben
and leaving Chicago. Still bawling, I went and woke up Vi, and after I'd
described to her what had just happened, she laughed, which actually did
make me feel better; also, she didn't say that if I'd lived in Little Rock 
during
desegregation, I was the kind of person who'd have spit at the black
students as they tried to enter the high school.

The next we cit. while I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror
blow-drying my hair, Vi pushed open the door and sat on the edge of
the tub. She'd hostessed the night before, and she usually went out with
her co-workers after the restaurant closed. Even this late, around noon,
her face retained the pale, doughy look of having just awakened, and I
could smell smoke coming off her.
"I decided what we should do," she said. "We should take belly danc

ing."
I had turned off the blow-dryer when she entered the bathroom, but I

turned it back on.
"There's this place in the Loop that has classes." She was yelling cheerfully
over the roar of air. "We'll get out of the apartment, and I heard it
burns a lot of calories. Which is counterintuitive, isn't it, because what if
your belly goes away?" I bent my head forward and turned it to the side,
still blow-drying, and she said, "Just promise you'll think about it."
She walked away, but when I'd finished and was putting the blow-dryer
in the drawer under the sink, she returned and stood in the threshold of
the door. "By the way," she said, and she was smirking, "I met your scary
black man. He's a resident in radiology at Barnes."

ncverc)i< belly-dancing lessons, but that New Year's Eve, Vi
convinced me to go with her to a dinner party Nancy was hosting to welcome
the new millennium, or to welcome it prematurely, depending on
your viewpoint--Vi and Patrick bickered over this, and I found the debate
too boring to form an opinion. I was more interested in whether the Y2K
problem would make utilities fail and planes crash, but when I was reading
an article about it one evening, Vi said, "That Y2K stuff is bullshit. My
meditation group was talking about it, and we've all gotten messages that
the transition will be peaceful."
On Christmas Eve, the day before the anniversary of my mother's
death, I had worked at Mrs. Abbott's, and for Christmas, my father had
come over to our apartment. I'd bought a precooked ham from Schnucks
that I served with mashed potatoes, green beans, and crescent rolls--Vi
had said she'd help me make the sides, then hadn't--and for dessert we ate
pumpkin pie, also from Schnucks. My father gave us Starbucks gift cards
for twenty-five dollars each, and the modesty of the present--it was what
you'd give your mailman, I thought--made me feel embarrassed for him,
even though there was nothing else I'd hoped for. Then, thank God,
Christmas was finished.

Nancy lived in Tower Grove, and on New Year's Eve, there were about
fifteen of us at two tables set up in her dining room and living room. She
turned out to be a great cook, and it was the best meal I'd had since moving
back to St. Louis: figs wrapped in bacon, and olives with blue cheese,
rosemary garlic lamb, warm spinach salad, popovers, and a chocolate torte.
Nancy had set out place cards, and Vi and I were at different tables; I was
next to a guy named Maxwell who looked to be in his late thirties. He was
pudgy, with a dark, full mustache and beard, and he wore a burgundy
guayabera shirt embroidered with white birds, which I heard myself compliment
him on when I took my seat, less because I actually liked the shirt
than because I'd noticed it. Also, I'd already had three glasses of wine.
After we finished the main course, by which time I'd had a fourth glass, he
reached out, pressed his fingertips to my cheeks, and said, "You have an
amazingly symmetrical face." I was drunk enough that this didn't entirely
put me off. I said, "You should see my sister." He laughed and said, "I
have."
This was when Nancy tapped a fork against her wineglass and said, "Attention,
everyone. It's time for the Burning Bowl Ceremony." On small
pieces of paper that were being passed around, Nancy explained, we would
all write something negative in our life that we wanted to leave behind in
the old millennium. Then we'd put the pieces of paper in a large tan ceramic
bowl, which she held up, and we'd light them on fire. The spirit of
the universe would receive our requests, release us from the forces that
had been holding us back, and allow us to have new beginnings. As Nancy
spoke, I tried to catch Vi's eye, but my sister wouldn't look at me.
I waited for a slip of paper to make its way to me; then, because there
were fewer pens than guests, I waited for Maxwell to finish using his. I saw
him write SEXUALLY INSATIABLE in all caps, and I couldn't help wondering
if this was for my benefit.
And yet, after he'd given me the pen, I felt what I'd felt almost seven
years before, making wishes under the Arch with Vi on our high school
graduation night: that to be sincere in this moment was a bit silly, but to
be insincere was to waste an opportunity. For a full minute, I wrote nothing. 
When Nancy came by, collecting everyone's scraps, I scribbled, in tiny
letters, Mom guilt. Then I folded the paper in half and handed it off.
A discussion started about whether to burn the paper inside, where it
might set off the smoke alarm, or outside, where it was ten degrees. I went
to stand with Vi, Patrick, and Patrick's lawyer boyfriend and murmured
to Vi, "I thought Nancy was one of your restaurant friends, not one of
your mcd iiation friends."
"She's both." Vi was reading my face, trying to gauge my mood, and she
said, "They're not going to howl at the moon. After this, Nancy wants
people to play Charades."
"I wrote something," I said.
"Good. You get a gold star."
"Is Nancy trying to set me up with that guy Maxwell?"
Vi grinned. "No comment."

"Are you trying to set me up with him?"
"Supposedly, he has a Prince Albert. You know what that is?" When I
shook my head, she said, "Of course you don't. It means his dick is pierced."
"Who told you that?"
She shrugged, and I said, "Maybe you should hook up with him."
"I'm having a drink tonight with Scary Black Man."
"Our neighbor?"

"We've hung out a few times."

"When?"

"You don't know everything about me." Then she added, "When you
were at Mrs. Abbott's." Another guest, a guy, wolf-whistled so we'd quiet
down and listen to Nancy again. It had been decided that we'd go outside
for the ceremony, she said. In the small square of frozen grass between
Nancy's apartment building and the sidewalk, we all gathered in a circle,
and she held the bowl, in the center of which stood a fat white lit candle.
"Energies of this and other universes, we are grateful for everything
you've provided to us," she said. "As we continue on our journey, we ask
that you receive our humble prayers and help clear our hearts of that which
has been holding us back. Enlighten us on our path into the future." She
looked around the circle. "Let's be quiet for this part so it'll be easier for
the energies to hear our prayers."
A woman named Jocelyn was standing to Nancy's right, holding a
smaller bowl, and she lifted the little folded pieces of paper out of it and
passed them one by one to Nancy; one by one, Nancy held them to the
flame and let them burn. I was standing across the circle, but I could tell,
I could sense, when she got to mine. In spite of the fact that it was by then
after eleven on New Year's Lye, there was little noise outside except for the
sound of cars on Grand Boulevard. It was very cold, and I felt my heart
bulging a little, perhaps with hope.
That night, somewhat to my own surprise, I did end up sleeping with
Maxwell; he lived a block from Nancy, and I'm not sure I'd have gone
home with him if I'd had to get into a car, but as it was, not much effort
was required. And he did have a Prince Albert--he wore a curved silver
barbell, which I encountered first with my fingers but truthfully couldn't
feel when we were having sex, perhaps because he had on a condom. Afterward,
he slept spooning me the entire night, his arms crossed in front of
my chest in a way that was both sweet and a little entrapping. Early in the
morning, he got up to pee, then released a fart so thunderous that I started
laughing; when he returned to bed, I faked still being asleep and he
spooned me again. A few hours later, after I really had fallen back to sleep,
then awakened, and he had, too, he suggested we get brunch and I declined
in what I hoped was a friendly way; when he called our apartment
a few times in the next week, having procured the number from Nancy, I
didn't call him back.
Vi didn't actually hook up with our neighbor on New Year's Eve, but
she did two nights later, and it went on for a few weeks before fizzling. The
part I wish I could undo is that we kept calling him Scary Black Man. Not
to his face, obviously, but whenever we discussed him. His real name was
Jeff Parker, but all this time later, if Vi told me she'd run into Jeff Parker
on the street, I don't think I'd know who she was talking about. If she said
Scary Black Man, I'd know immediately.
In February, I started looking for jobs again and quit working for Mrs.
Abbott when I was offered a position at an elder-care services agency;
although no apparition of any sort had ever appeared to me at Mrs.
Abbott's, on my final night at her house, Mrs. Abbott greatly unsettled me
by calling me by my mother's name. "Rita, dear," she said as I tucked her
in, "be sure to take sixty dollars from my pocketbook." Briefly, I was
speechless, but then I concluded it was just a coincidence; for all I knew,
another of the aides was named Rita. "I'm not supposed to do that," I said.
"But thank you."
In my new job, I helped clients figure out if they qualified 1-or Medicaid
or meal deliveries at home, and I served as a liaison between their families
or doctors. Even then, when I did have health insurance, I didn't see a
shrink, but I bought a Jetta with forty thousand miles on it, which I suspect
did more for my sense of well-being than years of therapy could
have. In the fall, a woman in my office named Janet asked if I wanted to do
a 5K run with her, a fund-raising race, and I said yes. We started running
together in Forest Park before or after work, and at a brunch held by Janet 
after the race, I met a guy named David Frankel who was a manager at a
big rental-car company headquartered in St. Louis. Almost immediately,
we were dating seriously. If it never felt as if David and I were infatuated
with each other (he frequently corrected my driving, and he told me that
I talked too loudly when I was on the phone with Vi), he was someone to
go to movies and restaurants with on the weekend, and Vi had not been
entirely wrong when she'd said that I was more myself when I had a boyfriend.
I might have disagreed with her about the reason why--I'd always
felt that boyfriends were a distraction from the existential abyss Vi chose
to hover closer to than I did--but the sentiment did have some basis. The
night before I went out with David for the second time, while I was applying
makeup, Vi burst into the bathroom and said, "You can't marry him!
You can have a roll in the hay, but you're not supposed to marry him!"
"I think you're getting ahead of yourself," I said.
"No." Vi's face was serious. "You're supposed to marry someone else."
Two years later, the day Vi and I turned twenty-seven, we had dinner at
Hacienda with our father, Patrick, and David, and afterward our father
went home to his apartment, and Vi and I drove to a bar in the Loop with
the guys. While they played pool, I said to Vi, "I just want to tell you that
David and I are getting engaged soon, and I hope you'll be happy for us."
Vi looked unimpressed.

"He's up for adopting from China, which not all guys are," I said. "And
he can afford it, too, and it's expensive."
"Why don't you adopt on your own?" Vi said. "I'll help you raise your
wee little lotus flowers."

"Did you not hear what I just said? The adoption alone costs like twenty
thousand dollars." Vi and I ha
d both been in debt for years.
She said, "You know what you should do is, you should secretly get
knocked up by him and then break up. That'd be free, and you'd still
get to be a mom."
"That's a terrible idea. I don't want to be a single mother, and I don't

want biological children."
"The Chinese adoption thing is noble, but it's not who you are." After
taking a sip of beer, Vi wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She
said, "Your destiny is to breed."
"Luckily, it's not up to you."
"How about this?" Vi said. "Just promise me you won't get engaged

before Christmas."
Christmas was four months away. "What difference does it make?" I

said.
Vi's smile was ludicrously confident. "Because by then you'll have met
the guy you should marry."

On that Naw Year's Eve of the new millennium, after all the pieces of

paper were burned, Nancy said in a somber tone, "Thank you, energies,

for letting us make this offering to you." Then she looked around the circle
and said, "Who needs another drink before midnight?"
Inside, Vi and I ended up squeezed together on Nancy's low couch. I
said, "Should I ask what you wrote on your paper or will that make it not

come true?"
"What do you think I wrote?" I looked at her, and she added, "I'm sure
it was the same thing you did."
I looked away then, toward the TV, which had at some point been
turned on. It was so pleasant to be drunk in a warm, crowded apartment,
to have eaten a delicious meal, to know that there was a guy hovering
nearby who wanted to have sex with me (even a guy who was odd and, by
his own admission, insatiable) that I was reluctant to let my mother into
the night, or to let her in any more than I already had by invoking her on
my own scrap of paper. Vi patted my knee, and I felt--this had to do with
being drunk, though it also wasn't untrue--that no other person would
ever understand me as my sister did.
And then everyone was moving, we had arrived at the last ten seconds
before midnight, and Vi stood, then stuck out her hand to pull me to my
feet. "Ten, nine, eight," people shouted, "seven, six, five, four"--and Vi,
who was bellowing, nodded her chin once at me, meaning, You do it, too! and so 
I joined in--"three, two, one!" and everyone was cheering and
blowing noisemakers, and from somewhere "Auld Lang Syne" was audible.
"Happy 2000," I said, and Vi stepped forward--to this day, it's the only
time in our lives she has done this--and kissed me on the mouth.

Chapter io

rtortq

in local and national publications in the weeks after Vi's prediction:
A bride whose wedding was scheduled for Saturday, October 17, at the
Chase Park Plaza heard from several out-of-town guests who'd changed
their minds about attending.
For the Blues' first home game of the season, which was supposed to be
on October 16 against the Buffalo Sabres, there was a glut of tickets.
Religious groups in the area were condemning the prediction, and a
large evangelical church in Arnold had raised money to pay for a billboard
along 1-55 featuring a quote from Leviticus: DO NOT TURN TO mediums or
seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD YOUR

GOD.
Local frozen-custard shops were selling so-called quake shakes, and a
sports bar was selling a quake burger, and two community college stu
dents
were selling bumpers stickers that said I BRAKE FOR QUAKES.
Across St. Louis, Targets and Walmarts kept selling out of bottled water

and batteries.
The city and county superintendents had agreed that school would not
be canceled on October 16, though emergency drills were being staged so
students would know what to do if an earthquake occurred.
Professors at both the Saint Louis University Earthquake Center and
Washington University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences--
that is, Jeremy's department--were adamant in stating that no one could

predict earthquakes; that anyone who claimed otherwise was a fraud; and
that it was irresponsible of the media to devote so much attention to such
an outlandish story. In the Post-Dispatch, Leland Marcus, the chair ofJeremy's
department, was quoted as saying, "I would stake my career on it.
There's absolutely no such thing as earthquake season."

right: By the afternoon following her appearance on
the Today show, Vi, whose phone number was listed, had been called by
dozens and dozens of reporters and producers throughout the United
States and even by a columnist at a tabloid in Sydney, Australia, where it
was already the next morning; by the next morning in St. Louis, she'd
received requests for interviews from a producer of a radio show in Amsterdam
and from reporters at Haaretz, in Israel, and the Sun, in England.
After I'd dropped her off following our breakfast at the Four Seasons,
she'd gone to sleep, and while she'd slept, her phone had rung and rung,
her prediction spreading across the Internet. Also while she'd slept, reporters
from the St. Louis Beacon and the Riverfront Times had slipped
notes and business cards through the mail slot in her front door, a reporter
from the Post-Dispatch had set up a camping chair on the sidewalk outside
her house, simply waiting for her, and a dog had taken an enormous shit
on her lawn, though she said she wasn't sure if the shit was connected to
the prediction, and when she asked the Post-Dispatch reporter, he said he
hadn't seen it happen. (Of course it was connected, I thought.) But until
Vi woke, just after five that afternoon, she was unaware of the building
frenzy; everyone else knew about it before she did. And when I reached
her, around six, she sounded stunned as she said, "You won't believe what's
happening."

"No," I said. "I think I will."

"So I get off the phone with some dude at a newspaper in Longview,
Washington, and I'm thinking, how weird is it that someone from the
state of Washington even cares about an earthquake in St. Louis? And
then I check my messages, and the state of Washington is the least of it.
And while I'm listening to all these voice mails, I hear a knock on my door,
and it's a guy from the Post-Dispatch, and while I'm talking to him, a van
shows up from Fox. I already can't remember what I said to which person."
"Maybe
you shouldn't talk to any more reporters." I didn't tell her there
had been one at our house, too, also from the Post-Dispatch, a girl lurking
by the driveway when we returned from the Wheelings' whom I didn't
recognize as a reporter because she looked about sixteen. After she introduced
herself, when I did understand, I pushed past her and brusquely
said, "No comment." I'd been surprised, though, when I peeked outside a
few minutes later, that she was gone.
"It's not like I'm hawking salad choppers," Vi was saying. "I'm trying to
warn people so they can protect themselves."
"What if you come over here tonight?" I didn't want her in my house; I
didn't want her to infect my children with the germs of public exposure,
the antipathy of strangers. And it wasn't entirely true that she wasn't selling
anything--as she'd mentioned to me before her Today interview,
she'd be happy to generate new business. But nothing good could come of
Vi hanging out by herself at home, accessible to anyone. I said, "Hank
knows a publicist he thinks could help you, a woman he went to college
with. How about if we get in touch with her before you talk to anyone else

in the media?"
"And I just don't call back the Washington Post or the L.A. Times?" "Yeah," I 
said. "For now."
"A publicist probably charges a million bucks."
"Hank said there might be ways for you to make money off this." I
couldn't bring myself to specify what the ways were. I said, "If Jeremy
drives over right now, will you just promise me you won't talk to more
reporters before he gets there? I'm not saying you shouldn't at all, but we
need to come up with a plan. I'll call Hank and get the publicist's number.
She's in L.A., so she might still be at work."
"Hold on," Vi said. "My doorbell is ringing."

"Don't answer it!"
She laughed. "What are you so scared of?"
Besides the potential for mass hysteria? The professional humiliation
for Jeremy? The official destruction of our friendship with the Wheelings?
"What's to be gained by doing all these interviews?" I said. "Your prediction
is out there. It's all over the Internet, too, in case you don't know. But
you've said what you have to say, and aren't you just repeating yourself
now?"

She was silent for a few seconds, long enough that it didn't seem unreasonable
to hope I'd persuaded her, but when she spoke, she sounded peevish.
"Guardian told me to warn people."
I said nothing--wasn't the deal we had that if she invoked Guardian

around me very infrequently, I would be respectful when she did?--and

she added, "I know you think I want attention. And maybe compared to

you, I do. It's not my goal to be invisible. But that isn't what this is about."

"Just stay where you are," I said. "Jeremy will be there in ten minutes."

Wh i e I d been on the phone, Jeremy had begun giving dinner to
Rosie and Owen, and as I returned the receiver to its cradle in the kitchen,
I said, "How about if we switch and you go get Vi and bring her back
here?"

He looked less than thrilled.
"Otherwise, she'll keep talking to reporters," I said. "They're knocking
on her door and calling nonstop."
"Are you thinking she'd spend the night here?"
"Maybe." Our eyes met.

"I'll go get her," Jeremy said. "But it's not your job to save her from herself.
She's her own person."
Not really, I thought. Not entirely.
And he could tell this was what I was thinking, evidently, because he
said, "I'm not talking about when you were embryos. I'm talking about
now." He passed me the spoon he was using to feed Owen sweet potatoes,
and as he walked out of the kitchen, I called, "Thank you."

then, to ask if he'd had a chance to contact the publicist,
and he called and said, "I'm forwarding her email to you right now,
and she said she's happy to help however she can."
"Did she say how much she charges?"
"You can read her email, but it would be about fifteen thousand to have
her on retainer for the next few weeks."
"Fifteen thousand?" I knew I sounded like a rube, but it was hard to

conceal my shock.
"She's good, Kate. I trust her completely. And I think that's the going
rate for people at her level."
I had two thoughts then, and the first was that one or both of the
Wheelings had to have family money. Because they never seemed worried
about it, but even when he'd been an art teacher, before Amelia was born,
Hank couldn't have made much more than I had at the elder-care agency.
My second thought was that I wished Hank would come over to our house
because I was pretty sure he'd be better than I would at persuading both
Vi and Jeremy that Emma would be worth the expense. But even if things
weren't tense between Courtney and me, this would be an inappropriate
favor to ask in light of her pregnancy. I needed to let Hank stay home.
When Jeremy returned with Vi, it emerged that in addition to the various
reporters I already knew she'd granted post-nap interviews to, she'd
spoken to people at newspapers in Naples, Florida; Richmond, Virginia;
and Wellington, New Zealand. She mentioned this with what I felt was
increasingly disingenuous surprise that all these journalists were interested
in her, and she did not acknowledge the request I'd made for her to
stop; it was possible, however, that she'd talked to the reporters before our
conversation. "Oh, and good news." She grinned. "Patrick says he'll be my
publicist for free." Given that Patrick was a manager at Crate & Barrel, this
was not encouraging. "Can I have a beer?" Vi asked. As she headed toward
the kitchen, she called over her shoulder, "Either of you want one?"
In the living room, Rosie had just yanked a dump truck out of Owen's
hands. I whispered to Jeremy, "We're about to call this publicist Hank gave
me the name of, but she costs fifteen thousand dollars. Can we pay for it?"

Jeremy
looked faintly amused, as if I were joking.
"I know it's a lot," I said, "but things are getting out of control."
His expression changed--he was registering my desperation, which
was not the same as agreeing to my request--and then Vi was back in the
living room. "Let's call the publicist," I said. "Her name's Emma, and
Hank said she's really great. And"--my face was burning even before I
said it; surely this was the worst act of manipulation I'd committed in my
marriage--"she's kind of expensive, you were right about that, but Jeremy
and I want to pay for her because it just seems worth it." Feeling Jeremy's
angry surprise (it did not billow from him, as with smoke, but rather was
laserlike in its precise focus on me), I added, "After you're flooded with
new clients, you can pay us back." She would never pay us back, I knew,
and I would never try to get her to, but perhaps the suggestion would assuage
Jeremy.

I didn't dare make eye contact with him as I retrieved the phone from
the kitchen and pressed the number from Hank's email. "Emma Hall PR,"
said a female voice, and I said, "It's Kate Tucker, Hank Wheeling's friend.
I think he told you my sister and I--?"
"Emma's out of the office, but let me check if I can find her," the voice 
said--of course she wasn't Emma Hall; of course a publicist in L.A. had
an assistant--and after a silence, she said, "Putting you through to Emma
Hall."

Emma Hall was driving, possibly with her windows down, and she was
also British, which Hank hadn't mentioned, and the combination of the
rushing air, the fact that I'd put her on speakerphone, and her accent made
her hard to understand; I needed to hear an entire sentence before I could
decipher it. Also, one of the first things she said was "Isn't Hank the best?
And Courtney, too, I love them both. I've always fancied the idea of a trip
out to Kansas City to see them." But I liked everything else about her: She
was friendly and confident and not condescending, she had already
watched the clip of Vi on Today, she complimented the shirt Vi had worn,
meaning she complimented my shirt, and when I said, "We just want to
make sure we know what it is a publicist does," Emma laughed and said,
"Right, what a great question."
All media queries would go through her, she said; if journalists con
tacted Vi directly, Vi would forward their number or their email to Emma,
and Emma would be the one to respond. She said she'd decline most
requests, which alone made me want to hire her. "Once you've done the Today 
show, there's no reason to talk to the Bumblefuck Gazette," she said,
and as I confirmed to myself that yes, in her elegant voice, she had indeed
just said Bumblefuck, she was already moving on. "And we can think
about what your goals are, Violet, what image you want to project, so
you're not simply being reactive."
"I want to get the word out so people can take precautions."
"Absolutely, absolutely," Emma said, and I had the distinct impression
that she'd encountered people like Vi before--sincerely altruistic, but not

completely so.
"And I don't want to seem like a nut job," Vi added. "I want people to

know I don't stand to gain from this."
Emma asked if Vi had a website, and when Vi said no, Emma said,
"Then that's the first order of business. I'll have my assistant get cracking
on this the minute we hang up, on securing the URL and setting up something
rudimentary for now. What I'd like you to do, tonight even, is write
a personal statement. Something brief, one paragraph or so, about who
you are and how your prediction came to you. Just very plain language.
Nothing fancy."
"Would you come to St. Louis or handle things from there?" I asked,
and Emma said, "Well, that depends." Then she said laughingly, "And I

said Kansas City before, didn't I, when you don't live in Kansas City at all?
And you were too polite to correct me. Shame on me!"
There was never a moment when we officially agreed to work together;
by the time I told her that I'd be handling payment and that I was taking
her off speakerphone so she and I could square it away, it seemed we'd all
already decided. Vi was still right next to me, and because I didn't want
her to hear me say the number, I said to Emma, "The fee you mentioned

in your email to Hank--"
"Fifteen thousand for thirty days." Emma did not seem at all embar
rassed.
"Plus travel expenses and accommodations in the event of my
visiting St. Louis."
I felt a swirl of nausea in my stomach. "And we'd pay that up front or
in installments?"

"Half now and the second half after two weeks."

"So for the first part, I'd wire it to you, or write a check--?"
"As you prefer," she said. "I trust you, of course, Kate. Any friend of
Hank and Courtney's. ."

I was aware that at some point, Jeremy had collected Rosie and Owen
and taken them upstairs, though until I hung up the phone, I didn't entirely
attend to this fact
"I thought you were just trying to censor me, but she sounds awesome,"
Vi said. "You really won't tell me how much she costs?"
"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth." Was Jeremy merely annoyed or
outright furious? Either way, it wouldn't improve matters if Vi knew that
I hadn't gotten his blessing.
"More or less than a thousand?"

"We're finished talking about this," I said.
"More, huh?" Vi raised her eyebrows. "Thanks, Daze. What does
Courtney Wheeling think of their friend helping me spread my witchy
message?"
As if I hadn't wondered the same thing, I said, "She's preoccupied with
other stuff right now."
Vi looked at me intently. "She didn't miscarry, did she?"
If Courtney planned to terminate, it probably was better for my sister
to believe Courtney had miscarried. But it also felt wrong to say she had
while she was still pregnant. "Don't ask me that," I said.
"Yikes," Vi said. "You think it was because she wasn't eating enough?"
"Courtney eats. She's just thin."
"You know, I still haven't watched myself on Today," Vi said. "Have
you?"

Didn't I need to go upstairs and nurse Owen before he went to sleep?
And I always put him down for bed, too. But maybe I'd let Jeremy handle
tonight, I thought. Owen had polished off an unprecedented two jars of
sweet potatoes at dinner, and anyway, it wasn't like he wouldn't wake up
to eat again in th rec hours. "I've watched it, but I'll watch aga In," I said. 
'lb
my surprise, it had calmed me to watch online with Hank; the knowledge
of Vi having been on Today was the opposite of calming, but seeing the
segment itself, I'd been reminded of how well she'd come off.
Vi and I sat next to each other on the couch, Jeremy's laptop resting half
on my left thigh and half on Vi's right one. "My hair looks awesome," Vi
said. "Good job. But holy shit, do I really have three chins?"
"You don't have three chins."
After the segment finished, she said, "That wasn't bad."
"Didn't you believe me?" Then I said, "You haven't changed your mind
about October sixteenth?"
Vi was looking into the distance, in the direction of our dining room
but not at the dining room itself, and simultaneously I didn't want her to
visualize a natural disaster from inside my house and I felt her separateness
from me, her mysteriousness, in a way that was almost impressive.
She did have an ability, one I'd never been impressed by back when I'd
shared it; but now mine was mostly gone and hers was sharper than ever.
"No," she said. "I haven't changed my mind."

hi said she was welcome to stay over--although this prospect had
seemed unappealing a few hours earlier, it had proven pleasant to spend
the evening with Vi--but her cellphone had rung a few times, and around
nine, her friend Nancy, hostess of the millennium New Year's Eve party,
had picked her up to go meet people for drinks. Though Vi and Nancy
remained close, Vi had grown apart from some of her other meditation
friends; she'd told me they were jealous that after the Brady Ogden case,
she'd been able to make a living as a psychic while they still had to hold

down day jobs.
Nancy didn't come inside, and I waved to her from our porch as Vi
headed out. "If there are any reporters, or just any weirdos, waiting at your
house, come back over here," I said. "When Nancy drops you off, don't let
her leave until you're inside."
"You're being paranoid." Vi grinned. "It's kind of flattering."
As she reached Nancy's car, I called, "Don't forget about writing the
statement for your website."

"Aye, aye," she replied.

I locked the front door, organized the diaper bag, went around turning
off the lights on the first floor, and set the security alarm; normally Jeremy
closed up the house while I was nursing Owen. Had Jeremy eaten dinner?
I hadn't, except for some stale pretzels I'd brought out to the living room
after we'd watched Vi's interview.
It was definitely unusual that he hadn't returned downstairs, though it
was also clear why. And I'd never before dreaded walking up to bed, but
on this night I did; the door to our bedroom was closed. I went into the
bathroom, and when I was finished, I paused in front of our bedroom--
I wondered if I should knock, but that would be downright bizarre--and
when I pushed the door open, I saw that the light on Jeremy's nightstand
was on, and he was sitting up in bed, wearing his glasses and an old Wesleyan
T-shirt, the sheet and comforter pulled to the middle of his chest. He
held his phone in front of him with one hand, the glow from the screen
reflected in the lenses of his glasses, and I heard what sounded like a bus
driving and then a man saying, "That's for sure," from which I inferred
that Jeremy was watching a TV show or movie, and for some reason the
smallness of the screen and him up here alone, in his college T-shirt, made
me sad.

"Hi," I said, and in a tone that was tight but not gratuitously mean--he
wasn't trying to show that he was pissed, he just was pissed--he said "Hi"
back.

I took a step forward. "Are you mad because I said we'd pay for the
publicist or because I said it without you agreeing to it?"
"Both." There was no humor in his voice, despite a joke's easy proximity,
and it was only then that he paused whatever he was watching and
really looked at me. He said, "I'm curious how much you think we have in
the savings account."
I swallowed. "Twenty thousand?"
"Well, I got paid today, and that put us just over eleven."
"Eleven thousand?"
"Yes," Jeremy said. "Eleven thousand."
Would Emma accept payment by credit card? "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm
sorry we didn't have a conversation about it, but I really want Vi to work
with this woman, and I was afraid that if she knew how much it costs,
she'd say no. She wouldn't even listen. And instead she really liked her,
and she said--Vi, I mean--she said she wouldn't talk to more reporters
without having them go through Emma. That's exactly, exactly what I was

hoping."
"You need to realize that you can't control Vi's behavior. I'm serious,
Kate. She's a grown woman, a willful grown woman. And even if you've
temporarily got a leash on her, this idea that you can keep her in line is
going to end badly in the long run."
I folded my arms. "Okay."
"I'm not saying this to be a jerk. I'm saying it because I'm worried that
you're setting yourself up for something really ugly."
"I get your larger point," I said. "And I'm sure you're right. But to have
a professional handling the media--I don't see how that can be bad. Vi is
in over her head. You're the one who listened to those messages on our
voice mail. Well, multiply that by a hundred and that's what she's going
through. Every time she turns around, another reporter wants to talk to
her, and she can't say no. She loves the spotlight, and she believes she's

helping people."
"So let her talk to the reporters. They'll go away eventually."
This was such a radical notion, so contrary to the frantic way I was expending
my energy, that there was in it something enticing, something
liberating. What if I simply stepped back and did nothing at all? But I
couldn't. I said, "Let's just give Emma a chance."
"And our savings."
Would our disagreement have had a different tenor if I were still gener
ating
an income? But then he said, "If you were going to impulsively spend

fifteen grand that we don't have, I wish it had been on a really awesome
flat-screen TV."
So he was going to forgive me; I was lucky.
I gestured toward his phone. "What are you watching?"
"A comedy that's completely not funny, which is a feat."
I took another step forward. "You feel like doing something else?"
For the first time since I'd entered the room, he smiled, or at least he
half-smiled. "It depends what you have in mind."
I climbed onto the bed, over him, so that my knees were on either side
of his waist. "I have a few ideas," I said. I took his phone out of his hand
and set it on the nightstand, and when I leaned in and kissed his mouth,
he kissed me back right away. Jeremy and I were like everyone else with
young children--we went weeks without having sex. We were always too
tired, or a baby was crying. We joked about not having it, while listening
to our children on the monitors. "We could schedule it," I'd once said, and
he'd said, "I never wanted to become those people," and I said, "But you
can see why it happens, right?"
As he pulled his shirt over his head, then raised my arms to pull off
mine--I kept my bra on during sex, so I wouldn't leak milk--I thought
that maybe this was what we ought to do every night: forgo ice cream and
TV downstairs and just come up to bed. I could've done without the fight,
though as we kept kissing, as he rubbed his hands over me, I thought that
what people said about make-up sex was true.
I was still on top, and he had been inside me maybe four minutes when
I felt that surge, my body shuddering against his. I was usually first, though
he didn't take much longer; we were compatible in this way. (And maybe,
given our efficiency, there was no reason we didn't do it far more often.)
As he was coming, Jeremy said in a kind of heaving whisper, "I love you so
much, Katie," and I kissed his neck. I don't know if he realized that the
only time he called me Katie was when we were having sex.

with the light on, and were both still naked except
for my bra, when Owen started crying. I scrambled out of bed and
gathered my clothes from the floor on Jeremy's side, hastily pulling them
on as I walked.

Owen's room was dark except for the starfish night-light. As soon as he
saw me, he stopped crying, and I scooped him up and sat us both in the
glider, him sideways on my lap.
Earlier, with Vi, as we'd talked to Emma and watched the Today inter
view,
a scheming sort of air had developed between us, a mood like the
one twenty years earlier on all those afternoons when we'd practiced our
dance routine for "You May Be Right." Other people receded until it was
only us and our project. Or so it had felt, but as I nursed Owen, it no longer
felt this way at all. Vi's prediction wasn't fun; it was scary. And the
people I'd allowed to recede were my children, who were so small, who
needed me so completely. Owen weighed sixteen pounds; he could do
nothing for himself, couldn't speak, couldn't even reliably sit up; he slept
in pale blue pajamas and a sleep sack with a brown teddy bear on the front.
There was nothing that mattered besides protecting him and Rosie. Maybe
we should leave town, I thought. Or, at the least, I needed to convince
Jeremy not to go to Denver.
Owen was mostly asleep as I changed his diaper and brought him back
to the glider to burp him. He breathed deeply, curled into me with his left
cheek pressed over my heart, and for a long time I kept on patting his back,
holding him in my arms.

Vi hd writcr s block, she explained when we spoke around ten
o'clock the next morning, which was why she hadn't yet finished the statement
for her new website. I was pretty sure that writer's block was code
for being hungover, but scolding her wouldn't help. "Emma wants this as
soon as possible," I said. "I'll hammer something out and call you back."
I'd just put Owen down for his first nap, and I set Rosie up in front of
an episode of Dora the Explorer and opened Jeremy's laptop on the dining
room table. I probably had about ten minutes before Rosie started wandering
around, and so in seven, I finished a paragraph, which was all
Emma had requested.
Hello, my name is Violet Shramm, I wrote. Thank you for visiting my
website. Since childhood, I have experienced premonitions, also known as

extrasensory perceptions. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I
enjoy cooking, watching reality TV (my guilty pleasure), and spending time
with my family. As you may have heard, I recently had a premonition that
an earthquake will happen in the St. Louis area. It was not my intent to
scare people. Instead, I wanted to help them make preparations to stay safe. We 
could link here to FEMA's recommendations, I thought. I concluded
with a variation on what Vi had said to the Brookstone cashier when she'd
bought the slippers for our father: I sincerely hope that my prediction turns
out to be wrong. I am not a scientist, and I'm capable of making mistakes
like anyone else, but it is only in good faith that I share my views and ideas.
When I called to read Vi what I'd written, she wanted me to insert references
to her having helped the police find Brady Ogden, as well as to her
having publicly predicted Michael Jackson's death, both of which had
been mentioned on Channel 5. (The latter had occurred during a session
with clients at her house, which I wasn't sure counted as public--in June,
two days before Michael Jackson died, she'd told clients she was worried
about his health.) After I'd reluctantly taken her suggestions, she also
wanted me to cut the last line; I convinced her to keep it, and she convinced
me, even though it made me cringe, to add To anyone reading this,
I wish you a day full of positive energy. Emma subsequently excised the
first two sentences; the rest of the paragraph appeared on Vi's website,
which was up later that afternoon. Next to the statement was a picture
of Vi I'd taken the previous Thanksgiving; she was wearing a red cape, but
it looked like a normal sweater if you didn't know, and she was smiling
prettily. In the original photo, Rosie had been sitting next to Vi, so I'd
emailed the photo to Jeremy, had him cut Rosie out--I didn't want Rosie
on Vi's website but didn't have the technological skills, modest though I
knew they were, to remove her myself--and then emailed the photo to
Emma.

While sending this email, I saw dozens of notifications of Facebook
messages from people I hadn't been in touch with in years, and I realized
that I couldn't go back on Facebook itself until after October 16, or perhaps
I could never go on again. I closed my email and found the website of
a large national sporting goods chain, from which I ordered a crank radio,
a first-aid kit, three LEI) waterproof flashlights (we currently owned one
flashlight that wasn't waterproof), and a propane stove. If Jeremy asked, I
wasn't going to lie about what I'd bought. Still, I couldn't help hoping that
the packages would arrive while he was at work.

days following Vi's appearance on the Today show, I
would read the comments that appeared online after articles about the
prediction. This woman is an idiot and anyone who trusts her is an idiot,
too. Or: She should quit trying to scare people, take a good look in the mirror,
and go on a diet!! And of course: If she can predict the future, why
doesn't she win the lottery and buy a nicer house? Hers looks like a shithole
from what I saw on TV. There was always, always that lottery one.
Vi was reading the comments, too; she'd call me when Rosie and I were
building a tower out of blocks or I was changing Owen's diaper, and I'd
answer because what if it was urgent? In the past, I'd sometimes not pick
up if I was in the middle of something, but this was one of the ways of
quantifying her celebrity, that now I didn't dare. "Okay, listen to this,"
she'd say, and begin reading: "Like other end-of-the-world prophets,
Ms. Shramm obviously has not only delusions of grandeur but outright
delusions.' But I never said the end of the world is coming! When did I say

that?"
"Ignore it," I'd say. "Quit reading." It was in advising Vi not to read the
comments that I was able to convince myself, which is to say that I per

suaded
one of us.
"I never realized how mean people are," she said another time, after an
article in an online magazine--not even the comments but the article
itself--compared her to an agent of Satan.
"Really?" I said. "You didn't?"
During one of our calls with Emma--again, Vi was at my house, Jer
emy
was watching the children upstairs, Emma was on speakerphone--Vi
said, "How do we get websites to take down the stuff people are writing
about me? Because it's not true, and they don't even have to put their real
names."
"Oh, you mustn't read that rubbish," Emma said, as if she were sur
prised to learn Vi had been; it seemed this was another of our novice mistakes.
"It's absolutely awful what people write, isn't it? But trust me--the
sort of person posting comments, it's a forty-year-old man who lives in his
parents' basement and works at some shit job and he's furious, just furious
at the world, and you mustn't let him get under your skin, but instead you
should feel pity for him."

During this same conversation, Emma reiterated her earlier instructions
to Vi not to grant additional interviews to the reporters loitering
outside her house, which was now normal; there'd be one or two on the sidewalk 
almost all the time during the day, and some would wait into the
evening. And they were no longer just from local publications. One had
come from a Japanese newspaper, a trim man in khaki pants and a white
short-sleeved button-down shirt. So incredible was this fact to me that I
yearned to ask him: Had he really boarded a sixteen-hour flight just to talk
to Vi? Of course, I didn't say a word to him, and after picking Vi up that
day around noon, with Rosie and Owen in the backseat, I decided that I
wouldn't return to her house again with them in the car. Ideally, I wouldn't
return to her house, period, until this was all over.
Reporters were occasionally outside our house, too--I always checked
to make sure the street was empty before going somewhere with Owen
and Rosie in the stroller or putting them in the car, though once a guy had
tricked me by waiting across the street--and for several days, a reporter
from the Post-Dispatch had rung the bell in the late morning and again at
six o'clock. It wasn't the girl from before but a middle-aged man who left
notes and business cards--his name was Phil Krech, and he was the one
Vi had spoken to the afternoon following her Today appearance--but
when I told Emma about Phil Krech, he stopped coming by; I think he
stopped because Emma had Vi agree to another interview with him. That
Vi was a twin had been mentioned in an article in the Post-Dispatch and
repeated elsewhere, and photos of Vi and me from our Kirkwood High
senior yearbook had run in the Riverfront Times and also, rather shockingly,
in People magazine. In both these articles, I'd been referred to as
Daisy Tucker--I'd never legally changed my first name--and Jeremy's
name and job had also been disclosed. And we'd gotten plenty of phone
calls from journalists; I no longer checked messages, and we agreed that
Jeremy would delete them without my listening to them. I wondered if, as
October 16 drew closer, Vi's house would turn into one of those circuses
of cameras and lights and satellites, as when the media staked out the
home of a woman who'd had sex with a famous politician, or the campus
of a school where a shooting had just occurred.
On the phone, Emma was telling Vi, "You say, 'I'm so sorry, but all
requests have to go through my publicist.' You make me the villain." Hearing
Emma say this, I again felt an immense gratitude, until she said,
"Meanwhile, my negotiations with Today continue, and I should have
more information in the next day or so." She pronounced the t's in negotiations 
like soft c's.
"Wait, is Vi going back on the Today show?" I asked.
"Did I not tell you?" Vi said.
Was Vi talking to Emma without me? Apparently so. "Why would they
want you again?" I asked Vi.
"They feel that they own the story," Emma said. "They have a relationship
with Vi now, having introduced her to the country. Obviously, if
they want her a second time, it would be only appropriate for them to pay
licensing fees for family photos and such."
"Family photos?" I repeated.
"Chillax," Vi said. "Nothing is definite."
I said, "Emma, I really appreciate everything you're doing and I know
this isn't about me, but I don't want to be in any photos on Today."
"Duly noted," Emma said. "On a different topic, how would the two of
you feel about an interloper from Los Angeles popping in for a visit?"
"We'd feel fabulous," Vi said.

Emma Fic out for twenty-four hours. She stayed at the Ritz-Carlton
in Clayton, at our expense, though she spent most of the time on a tour of
what she referred to as "Vi's St. Louis," as in "What I really yearn to do is
see Vi's St. Louis." In a town car also subsidized by us (and truly, I had
never heard of anyone in St. Louis hiring a town car), Vi and Emma and
Patrick, who'd invited himself along, drove by Nipher Middle School and
Kirkwood High School and the house on Gilbert Street; they had lunch on
the Hill, at the restaurant where Vi had worked the longest.
"You should come on the tour," Vi had said the day before Emma's arrival.
"Hire your babysitter."

She meant Kendra, a Wash U undergrad who helped me one morning
a week. "I doubt she can do it on such late notice," I said.
Vi said, "Well, Emma definitely wants to meet you."
After an absurdly long discussion, we agreed that Emma and Vi would
come to our house for a pizza dinner to which we'd also invite the Wheelings,
since they were the reason we knew Emma. Having Courtney in my
home wasn't my first choice at this point, but trying to avoid doing so
would only draw more attention to the awkwardness between us; besides,
I didn't want to give Vi the satisfaction of knowing that Courtney and I
weren't getting along. "And you're welcome to bring Stephanie," I said.
"She can drive over in her U-Haul," Vi replied.
Stephanie didn't end up coming for dinner, though Patrick did. And
Emma turned out to be stunning, with pale skin, a dark bob, and four
inch heels. Upon meeting, she kissed me on both cheeks and remarked on
how darling Rosie and Owen were. She'd brought to our house a bottle of
red wine and an enormous bouquet of Stargazer lilies--I couldn't help
wondering if we had paid for these as well--and there was a sort of amusement
accompanying her good manners that made me suspect she found
it a great lark to eat dinner at six P.M. in the suburbs. It wasn't that I
didn't like her, but rather that I wasn't sure I trusted this version of 
herin-person, high-heeled, gorgeous Emma--quite as much as I trusted her
voice on the phone. Also, she flirted with Hank.

Hank and Amelia came without Courtney--"She's laid up with a sinus
infection," he announced as they walked in--and as I went to the kitchen
to get drinks for people, I heard Emma saying, "Hank, how is it that I've
become an old crone and you're just as young and handsome as the day we
graduated?"
Jeremy returned then from picking up the pizza and salad, and I passed
him glasses of wine to distribute. I was still in the kitchen, dumping the
salad into a wooden bowl, when Hank came to get a beer, and I said in a
low voice, "Courtney's not mad that you're here, is she?"
From the drawer next to the oven, he pulled out our dinosaur-shaped
bottle opener. "Honestly," he said, "she just wants to lie low before tomor

row."
"Oh." He meant before her abortion, and I felt clumsy. "How is she?"
Hank shrugged, and at that moment Rosie clattered into the kitchen
wearing pink pants, no shirt, and my clogs on the wrong feet.
"You ever feel like something's missing, Rosie?" Hank said.
"Pumpkin, I think you'll be more comfortable with your shirt back

on," I said.
The Wheelings left first, a little after eight--I'd already put Owen and
Rosie to bed--and when Owen woke to nurse at ten, Emma, Patrick, and
Vi were still there; and then, to my surprise, when I returned downstairs,
they had just opened a new bottle of wine, though at least they appeared
to be making quick work of it. Given that the town car had disappeared
after dropping them off hours earlier, it was unclear to me how they'd be
departing from our house. Jeremy shot me a look that I understood to
mean Make them leave.
I turned to Emma. "Are you worn out, or are Vi and Patrick going to
show you the St. Louis nightlife?"
"There are some decent bars a few blocks from here," Jeremy said.
"Within walking distance, in fact."
"No, no, no." Vi shook her head. "Those are boring yuppie bars. I'm
thinking Arsenal Street."
"Want me to call you a cab?" I asked.
"Or downtown," Vi said. "Because we never ended up seeing the Arch

today."
"Which almost means I haven't really been to St. Louis, doesn't it?"

Emma said. "Not officially."
I was so tired that I had to raise my eyebrows so my eyes would stay
open. I tried to make my voice festive as I said, "You should definitely go
downtown, in that case."
"You won't be joining us, Daze?" Patrick curled his lower lip toward his
chin.

"I wish."

When they finally, finally were gone--Emma kissed me again on both
cheeks before they took off--I walked into the kitchen, where Jeremy was
washing dishes. I patted his butt. "Sorry."
"I was about to get my sleeping bag and unroll it on the living room
floor."

"They just don't have children." I passed him a plate from the table and
said, "Besides that, what did you think of Emma?"
"She was fine." Had I expected that he'd say she seemed worth all our
money? Jeremy wouldn't have thought this of anyone. He added, "Patrick
seemed wasted."

"He told me the salad dressing was divine. I said I couldn't take credit."

Jeremy forced a smile. The truth was that there was a certain fizzy ex
-
citement they'd taken with them, the luster of California, and in their
absence, there were only our dirty dishes, our tiredness, and the fear I felt
for all of us.

at the office of her obgyn, Courtney terminated
her pregnancy. Amelia was at school, but I didn't--I couldn't--offer
to take her for the afternoon (they hired a sitter), or to drop off food for
them, because Courtney still didn't know that Jeremy and I knew. I waited
to get a text from Hank afterward, but I didn't, not that day or the next.
"I hope there weren't complications," I said to Jeremy, and he said, "I'm
sure they're just resting."

Hank called on Thursday morning. "So she's back at work."
"That's a good sign, right? It sounds like a good sign."
"I should have tried harder to talk her out of going through with it. I
didn't try very hard."
"You can't beat yourself up." Rosie and Owen and I were in our living
room; Rosie was balancing the baloney on Owen's head like a cap, and he
looked over at me in a tearful way, as if surprised and disappointed that I
wasn't intervening. "Don't do that, Rosie," I said. "Leave him alone."
"Don't do that, Rosie," Rosie repeated, then tossed the baloney toward
the ceiling and said, "The baloney wants to fly."
"You're a great husband and a great father," I said to Hank. "I hope you
know that." And I thought then, though I hadn't clearly thought it before

this moment, that if I learned I was pregnant with a baby who had Down's,

I wouldn't have an abortion; I wouldn't have made the choice Courtney

had.
"So I took Amelia to Oak Knoll yesterday, just to get her out of the
house," Hank was saying. "And she's on that bird toy, you know the thing
that rocks? And a girl who's maybe five comes up to us, she points to Amelia,
and she says to me, 'Where's her sister?' "
"Oh, God."
"I almost lost it. I did lose it, truthfully, but not till we got home."
As I watched Rosie and Owen--Rosie was sending the baloney airborne
again, and Owen was trying to rip an ad for antacids out of an issue
of Time magazine that was three months old--my heart clenched. "I'm so

sorry," I said.
I heard Hank swallow. "I always thought it was a girl," he said.
Chapter II

)cto

Halloween, that Jeremy and I almost collided in the pasta aisle of Schnucks.
He was holding a grocery basket, and I was pushing a cart, which came
within an inch or two of him as I rounded the corner before I abruptly
pulled it back. "I'm so sorry!" I said, and he said, "No, no, it's my fault,"
and then he looked at me and exclaimed, "You're the smoothie girl!"
I said, "I am?"

Jeremy felt very silly for having blurted this out, he told me later, and at
the time I knew he was embarrassed, but I thought he was cute. He was
shorter than any guy I'd dated, and he had close-cut dark hair and small
glasses with metal frames, and though he seemed solemn, his cheeks were
flushed in a way that was endearingly boyish. I knew then, before he'd
asked me out, before he'd even said his name, that we would get married.
Next to the boxes of spaghetti and rigatoni, I had just met my husband.
He said, "I think I've seen you at that place--" He gestured toward the
western side of Schnucks, beyond which was a row of smaller stores and
restaurants, including a wrap and smoothie take-out place, and I said,
"Oh, I go there all the time," and he said, "I've always thought it's weird
that they're so organic and natural, but they're next door to a tanning salon," 
and I said, "I always think the same thing!" There was a silence,
and I added, "And they sell those diodes to protect you from your cellphone,
but you have to wonder about the ultraviolet rays beaming onto
their food from the other side of the wall." Then I said, "I don't even know
what a diode is."
He smiled. "They must be powerful."
Another silence arose; surely this was the turning point of the interac
tion,
when we'd either extend our conversation in a way that would be
explicitly unnecessary or we'd head off in opposite directions. But I wasn't
anxious. If we didn't extend our conversation, we'd have another one later.
We needed to, in order to get married. Also, I was at this time still going

out with David.
Then Jeremy said, "I'm guessing you live in the neighborhood?"
I nodded. "On the other side of Big Bend."
"I'm off DeMun."
"Are you a grad student at Wash U?" I asked.
The flush of his cheeks deepened. "A professor in Earth and Planetary

Sciences."
"You don't look old enough to be a professor," I said--I said it
teasingly--and he said, "Believe me, that's why I always wear a tie on the
days I teach." In the ensuing lull, he added, "Well, maybe I'll see you when
we're next getting smoothies," and I said, "Yeah, definitely," and he said,
"We could even meet there on purpose," and I said, "That'd be fun," and
he said, "Or we could, you know, go somewhere and have a real drink,"
and I said, "Why don't I give you my email?" The guilt I felt as I wrote it
on a scrap of paper from my grocery list was overridden by my sense of
optimism, the chemical shift I experienced in Jeremy's presence. I said,

"I'm Kate, by the way."
"Jeremy." There was a moment in which we both tried to discern if the other 
person wanted to shake hands, and then it didn't happen--it would

have seemed too formal or dorky, I thought, to shake the hand of the man

I was going to marry--and instead I lifted my right arm and waved. "See
you soon," I said.
He emailed the next day and asked if I'd like to get dinner at a restau
rant
in South City the following week. And though I'd planned to break
up with David well in advance of my date with Jeremy, I didn't do it until
an hour before Jeremy was to pick me up. We were at David's apartment,
and after I said I felt like we had grown apart, he said, "I guess you don't
care that everyone we know a Still Illeti we're getting married.
"I just think we both might be happier with other people."
Sarcastically, he said, "Isn't that what people say when they've met
someone else?"

I hesitated then said, "I'm saying it because it's true."
He squinted at me. "So you are or aren't planning to go with me to my
nephew's bar mitzvah?"

"Why don't I email you?"
As I drove home, took a shower, and waited for Jeremy, I felt growing
awareness that I'd handled this sequence very badly. When I opened the
door and saw Jeremy standing outside the duplex, his dark hair and metal
glasses, the distance between not really knowing him and marrying him
seemed unbridgeable; it seemed to require an effort I suddenly doubted I
had in me. I suspect now that I wouldn't have had these doubts if I hadn't
already felt sure Jeremy would become my husband.
As I learned in the car, he'd been born in 1970--five years before I
had--and had grown up in Arlington, Virginia. He had an older brother
who was married and had children. He'd attended Wesleyan University in
Connecticut for his undergraduate degree and Cornell for his master's
and PhD. He'd been at Wash U for just two months, having never visited
St. Louis before his job interview on campus; prior to this position, he'd
done a postdoc at Berkeley. But these were mere facts. There remained
the accretion of our respective pasts, the tiny and numerous experiences
that didn't exactly matter individually but in the aggregate defined us.
At the restaurant, there were many silences, presumably because I was
trying less than I had at Schnucks and making him work more, and then
because he could tell that I was trying less and was wondering why. My
plan was that after we finished eating, I would tell him I had enjoyed getting
to know him but that it wasn't the right time for me to be dating.
Then I thought, was it necessary to say anything at all? If it was, maybe it
ought to be just before he dropped me off for the night, or maybe not even in 
person. An email could suffice and would be far less awkward.
He was so nice, though. I pictured his calm disappointment on opening
this email, his confusion, and I thought that I didn't want to hurt his
feelings. On the drive hack, as he pulled onto the ranip for 40, he said
tentatively, "There's a bar around the corner from my apartment if you'd be 
interested in getting a drink." I could tell he thought I was going to say
no. He didn't know why, but he knew the date had gone badly. I imagined
he'd decided ahead of time to suggest the bar after dinner and he'd still
suggested it even though the evening hadn't been much fun.

I said, "Okay."
He glanced across the front seat. "Okay?"
With more enthusiasm, I said, "Sure."
After he parallel parked on Southwood Avenue, we emerged from the
car, and when we met up on the sidewalk, he briefly set his hand on my

back; there seemed to be something generous in the gesture, a willingness
to forgive my bad behavior.
We had split a bottle of wine over dinner, and at the bar--it was a nice
bar, one I'd been to a few times--he ordered whiskey on the rocks and I
ordered a vodka tonic. As we talked about nothing in particular, I felt a
relaxed warmth spreading through my body; this warmth increased as we
downed two more cocktails each. At some point he made a fleeting reference
to his parents' divorce, and I was drunk enough that I didn't conceal
my surprise.
"Your parents are divorced?"
He blinked, as if surprised that I was surprised, then nodded. He had
mentioned both his parents before but not in ways that I'd guessed this

fact.
"How old were you?" I asked.
"Seven," he said. "In second grade. My brother was nine."
"Which I would think is the worst possible time because you'd be old
enough to understand that things have changed but too young to really get
why."
Again, he regarded me seriously. "That's about accurate."
"Were you traumatized?" My tone didn't sound quite right, I could tell;
it sounded eager.
"My parents made an effort to be civil to each other," he said. "But,
yeah, it was hard."
So he hadn't, like all my previous boyfriends, led an improbably pain
less existence; perhaps we could get married after all. Had I really had the
foolish intent, just hours before, to tell him I didn't want to see him anymore?
He had such intelligent eyes, and he had hands that were quietly
beautiful, straight fingers with clean, short nails, and I could imagine
them on me. At close to midnight, he said, "You want to get out of here?"
and I nodded, and we stumbled up the block to his apartment, which
turned out to be exactly the apartment I would have wanted him to have:
a tidy, comfortable one-bedroom with furniture that was grown-up--
a tan living room couch, a teak bed frame that I saw as I walked past the
open bedroom door--but not macho or glitzy. Plus, as I peed at length,
the sound was concealed by a fan in the bathroom. What more could I
hope for on a first hook-up?

He'd put on music--Van Morrison--while I was in the bathroom, and
pretty much immediately we were making out on his tan couch, and then
we moved with little discussion to the bedroom, and we never even got
under the covers; within ten minutes, we were both completely naked,
and he was pulling out a condom from a drawer in a table beside the bed,
and though I had had enough boyfriends that I'd learned how to be a girlfriend
who conveyed what felt good, I had never before encountered a guy
who, the very first time, just seemed to know. He was alert to every way I
moved, every sound I made--and it wasn't that I was particularly noisy--
and he adjusted the way he touched me accordingly, doing more or less of
whatever it was he'd already been doing. I was very drunk, of course, and
delirious with lust, but I had a fleeting moment in which I thought, with
total clarity, I cannot believe I found this guy. Then I felt, in the happiest
possible way, like I was exploding.
Afterward, he shifted off me, holding me from the side, and we were
quiet, and finally he said, "Do you want a blanket or some water?" There
was something plainly courteous or decent about him that I found far
preferable, in such a moment, to excessive emotion.
I said, "We could get under the covers."
So we did; we'd never turned on any lights in his bedroom, but a wide
yellow bar came in from the hall. Again, he slipped his arm behind my
neck and clasped my shoulder, curl lug into me.
I said, "About earlier tonight, I'm sorry if I--"

"It's okay."
"But you don't know what I was about to say." I wondered if he thought
that I was going to apologize for my intrusiveness about his parents' divorce;
in fact, I had been planning to apologize for being withdrawn at

dinner.
He said, "Whatever it is, it's okay. There's nothing you need to be sorry

for."
Surely this wasn't true. But it was so generous, so unsentimentally kind,
that it silenced me.
After that night, I didn't question whether we ought to be a couple,
whether getting to know him was worth the effort (and it really wasn't an
effort anyway). Sometimes, of course, I questioned why he wanted to be
my boyfriend or my husband. But even that night at his apartment, and
certainly as time passed, the feeling that being with Jeremy gave me was
like the one I'd had listening to my mother's old Christmas records during
childhood. Especially with the lyrics that went "Oh the weather outside is
frightful, but the fire is so delightful. . . ," I'd wish I could climb inside 
the
song, that I could be festive and protected among sleighs and snow. With
Jeremy, it was as if I had actually succeeded in breaching the song; to my
own astonishment, I had gotten what I wanted.
On the first anniversary of our first date, I said to him--I was conveying
this information humorously, to illustrate my own earlier stupidity--
"I was planning to tell you that night that I couldn't go out with you again."
He was serious as he said, "I know."

"You do?"
"Of course," he said, and he didn't seem to find the memory at all

amusing.
Already, long before then, I'd told him about having premonitions; I'd
told him after we'd been together just six or eight weeks, which seems
shocking in retrospect, especially since I'd never told Ben or David at all,
but once Jeremy and I were on stable ground as a couple, there wasn't
much that changed between us. We'd gone to a Wilco concert in Kansas
City--as much for the novelty of traveling somewhere together, staying a
11
night in a hotel, as for the concert itself--and it was halfway through the
four-hour return drive that I said, "There's something I want to tell you."
Jeremy glanced across the front seat of his car and said, "As long as it's
not that you're married."
"I'm not married. Or pregnant."
"Good." Then he said, "I mean, if you were pregnant--" and he reached
for my hand. What he meant, clearly, was we'd figure it out; it'd be fine.
I said, "I'm kind of psychic."

We looked at each other, and he was smiling, but when he saw my expression,
he tried to bite back the smile. "I'm sorry, but that's not what I
thought you were about to say. Keep going."
"I know how it sounds. And especially with you being a scientist. But I
just--I feel like I should tell you." Was this what it was like to disclose to a
romantic partner that you had an STD? Though presumably you had to
do that even sooner.
"So did you know we'd meet before we did?" Jeremy asked.
I thought of the glimpse I'd gotten of him the night Vi and I had graduated
from high school, but if I tried to describe it, it would sound like a
bigger deal than it had been. I said, "I've never been that good with stuff in
my own life." I looked at the license plate of a truck in front of 
usTennessee--just before Jeremy pulled into the left lane to pass it. I said,
"It's like with an instrument. If I'd learned to play the violin early on, and
if I'd also had some innate ability, maybe eventually I'd have gotten really
good. But if I never took lessons, or I took lessons for a few years and then
quit, the ability would barely be part of my life." I was quiet before adding,
"My sister has kept up with it. She sees it as a positive thing."
"But you don't?" Jeremy's tone had become serious, matching mine.
When I'd told Vi that I'd met a guy named Jeremy Tucker, she'd chortled
and said, "That sounds like the name of a boy explorer." But I was pretty
sure she liked him, because when we'd all gone out for Mexican food, he'd
ordered a strawberry margarita after we both did--I think she'd found
this endearingly unmasculine--and following dinner, he'd accepted her
invitation to join her for bar trivia. And then at the bar, he'd known so
many answers that Vi's team came in first, unseating the usual winners,
whom Vi and her friends loathed. Patrick leaned over and whispered,
"Where did he learn all this random shit about European history?" The
next evening, when I returned to our apartment after work, Vi grinned
and said, "He even looks like a boy explorer. He's perfect for you to marry."
In the car returning from Kansas City, I said to Jeremy, "It's a long
story, but in middle school, I started using a Ouija board a lot with another
girl. The girl turned against me and exposed me and Vi for having
this creepy ability, but the girl was right--it was creepy."
"So your premonitions now are like what? Who'll win the Super Bowl?
Where you left your wallet?"
I hesitated. "Neither, exactly. With a wallet, that would be remembering
more than sensing. With the Super Bowl, if I was at a party, it's possible
that I'd have a feeling about which team would win. But the senses are
usually darker than a football game. Back in middle school, I had a premonition
about a girl in my class dying. It didn't happen until years later,
but it did happen--she fell while she was hiking. Or I can tell when I meet
a woman if she has an eating disorder, or other things that are messed up
about a person. In college, I signed up for a sociology class, and the first
day, I got a gross feeling from the professor. I dropped the class, but later
that semester he was arrested for having a huge collection of child 
pornography."
"But
you didn't have a hunch about him being into child porn specifically,
did you? So maybe he just seemed generally off. Or with the eating
disorder stuff, you'd never know if you were wrong, would you?"
I was quiet. I had thought in advance that I wouldn't try to convince
Jeremy.
"It's not that I think you're making this up," he added.
When our eyes met, I said, "I'm not."
"Just bear with me," Jeremy said. "No one's ever told me something like
this."
"I've never gotten a speeding ticket," I said. "That might be a less depressing
example. And I've definitely sped. But at certain times, I'll just
know I should slow down, and right after I do, I'll pass a cop car."
"So why am I the one driving right now?"
"Or another time in college, I was on the steering committee for a big
Greek Week party, and at the last minute, I had a really strong feeling I
shouldn't go. It was very weird for me to skip it, but I pretended to have the
flu. I was worried something bad would happen to everyone at the party,
like the roof collapsing, but what did happen was that the police came and
arrested a bunch of people for drinking." If I had been among them, I
might have been expelled, given the infraction already on my record at
Mizzou, but I thought I'd hold off on sharing that saga for another time;
there was no need to inundate Jeremy.

"So basically being psychic allows you to get away with a life of crime."
He glanced at me. "You know I'm teasing, right?" Then he said, "I have a
premonition about us."

Immediately, I knew where this was headed, and it wasn't because I was
psychic. But I tried to form a good-natured expression.
"I think we're a great couple," he said. "And we'll make each other really
happy."

If he was underestimating what I was trying to convey, he was also
being sweet. It was time to let the conversation end.

After a silence, he said, "That's not the kind of premonition you mean,
is it?"

It was true that he had disappointed me, possibly for the first time. But
the fact that he knew it had the strange effect of negating the disappointment.
I said, "I realize this is really weird."

"Well, I probably wouldn't use the word psychic, but I'm sure we all
subconsciously pick up on cues about situations."
"Right," I said. "But that's not what I'm talking about. I have dreams
about things, and a lot of the time I don't understand what they mean, but
then the things I dreamed about happen. It's like I saw a scene from a
movie, and only later do I watch the movie from start to finish."
"I'm still confused about how ongoing this is for you."
"It's as much in the past as I can put it," I said.
"Because of middle school?"
"Having senses just isn't necessary," I said. "It's not even practical." I
was looking out the window at the farmland on our right. "It's okay if you

don't believe that people can be psychic."
"Whether I believe it is immaterial," Jeremy said. "What you're telling
me is part of who you are, and I believe you." The distinction he was making
in this moment--it didn't seem like it would come to matter as much
as it did. "Anyway," he continued, "as personal confessions go, you have to
admit this is of a different order than 'I'm not a natural blonde.--

"I am a natural blonde."
"Phew." Jeremy grinned. "Because that might really have been a shock
to my system." Then he said, "So the stuff that happened in middle
school--when you said it's a long story, did you mean one you do or don't
want to tell? Because no pressure, but we are on a long drive:'
For several seconds, I considered the question. From the vantage point
of Jeremy's passenger seat, beside this man who had grown up in a different
state from me, who was five years older and a science professor and
absurdly kind, middle school finally seemed like a long time ago. I said, "I
could tell you."

11,4 the time of the trip to Kansas City that we started talking
about marriage--fleeting references at first. Once, as I flipped channels
on his TV while he made dinner, he came into the living room when
I was stopped on a program about animals on the islands of Fiji. "Look
how pretty that is," I said, and he said, "Should we go there on our honey

moon?"
On an evening during which we'd eaten next to a large family at a pizza
restaurant and were in the car driving back to Jeremy's, I asked, "Can you
picture adopting kids from another country?"
"Sure," he said.
"Can you picture adopting them from China?"
Again, as easily as if I'd asked if he could turn up the radio, he said,
"Sure."
In a rush, I said, "In high school, I used to babysit for these people who
lived on my street, and they had really cute daughters from China, and
ever since then, I've wanted to do that. And that way, they wouldn't be
psychic, because I think it comes from my mom's family."
"Wow." But Jeremy said it calmly. "I do want biological kids, but I don't
see why we couldn't do both. You're sure having senses is hereditary?" It
was weirdly endearing to hear the phrase "having senses" come out of
Jeremy's mouth--it had been such an intrafamily reference that it was as
if he'd prepared Wonder bread toast with cinnamon sugar for me while we
watched Rob Lowe in Class.
I said, "I've always thought so. Do you feel like in order to be happy in
life, you have to have biological children?"

"I don't know," Jeremy said.

The subject came up again from time to time--if we were out somewhere
and saw white parents with a little Asian girl, I'd nudge him and
murmur, "Look." One Sunday morning after we'd slept in and then had
sex, he said, "Here's the thing. I just think you and I would have really
great kids. They'd be part Kate-ish and part Jeremy-ish and part just
themselves, and it'd be fun to watch them grow up."
This was not so different from the argument Ben had once made, minus
the part about squinty eyes. I said, "But what if they have senses?"
"What if they're nearsighted? What if they can't carry a tune?"
"Those aren't the same."
"What if we adopt kids with serious behavioral problems?"
"That's more common in children from Eastern European countries
than China. Anyway, even if we're imperfect parents and our kids are
messed up, their lives will still be better with us than if they were in an
orphanage. But if we have kids and they're messed up, it's our fault."
"Of course we'll be imperfect parents. But do you really believe if we
provide biological children with anything less than ideal lives, then it's
better for them not to exist?"

"Sort of."

"Do you wish you didn't exist?"
"At times."
Jeremy laughed. "You usually do a good job of hiding your bleak world

view."

"Thanks."
"Can I just make one point? I know having senses has been a burden to
you. But from my perspective, it doesn't define who you are. If I were 
describing
you to someone, it wouldn't be in the top ten of your personality

traits. It might not even make the top fifty."
The following week, Jeremy flew to Vancouver to present a paper on
biogeochemical iron cycling, and while he was gone, I spent the nights at
the apartment I still, technically, shared with Vi. On the third morning of
Jeremy's absence, I woke up and thought, I'll have two white babies.
It was still true that I didn't see how having children was anything other
than a roll of the dice; what was different was that being with Jeremy made
me feel like perhaps luck was on my side.
I waited until it was seven A.M. in British Columbia, called his
cellphone--I had no idea if the call would cost either or both of us a small
fortune--and when he answered, I said, "I'll have two white babies."
He laughed. "With anyone in particular?"
"I'm serious. But we shouldn't wait too long, because I don't want to be
trying to get pregnant when I'm, like, thirty-nine."
At the time of this conversation, I was twenty-seven, and Jeremy
laughed again. He said, "Is that an invitation to leave Vancouver early and
come knock you up?"
"You don't seem very surprised. Did you think all along I'd give in?"
"I'm happy," he said. "This is exciting news. It's just that I woke up
about three seconds before you called."

As it turned out, Rosie was born when I was thirty-one, and Owen
when I was thirty-three. And really, it wasn't that Jeremy had convinced
me. It was that he'd been smart enough to let me convince myself.
Chapter 12
01,,iCOi1 S
predicted earthquake, a man in O'Fallon waited until his wife and children
were sleeping, shot them in their beds, then turned his gun on himself.
He'd done it because he'd wanted to save them from the impending
destruction, according to the initial news reports, and I thought, No, no,
no, no, no. It wasn't in the morning paper, but there was an article on the 
Post-Dispatch's website that I read on the small screen of Jeremy's phone
as soon as I came downstairs in the morning, while my stomach churned.
My impression was that Vi's prediction was mostly considered ridiculous
and not credible; certainly it was seen as such by people outside
St. Louis. Within St. Louis, as far as I could tell, people who'd admit to
being nervous would then express embarrassment at their nervousness.
St. Louisans weren't evacuating the city. And yet, as with the warnings of
doomsday cults, even if you didn't buy the claims, you'd still breathe a
sigh of relief when the day in question passed without event.
I took Owen for a walk in the stroller, and when we returned home,
Jeremy waved his phone at me. "There's all this stuff coming out about
how the guy had lost his job months ago, he was mentally unbalanced, et
cetera, et cetera."

"Obviously, he was mentally unbalanced," I said.
When Vi called that afternoon, she said, "People are so fucking nuts," and I 
could feel her refusal of culpability.
"And you still think the earthquake will happen?"
She sounded impatient as she said, "If I get word to the contrary, you'll
be the first to know."

Jeremy and I were sitting on the couch in our living room, watching the episode 
of Saturday Night Live we hadn't stayed
up for the night before, when we heard a whimper from one of the two
monitors set on the coffee table. I said, "Is that him or her?" Jeremy paused
the TV, and there was a silence and then another whimper--a whimper of
bereftness, it seemed to me, of desolation even--and I said, "It's her.
Should I go up?"
"She's probably not even awake." Jeremy hit the Play button on the remote
control, and I set my hand on his arm.

"Hold on."
"You'll hear her." But he'd frozen the screen again; he was indulg

ing
me.
We were quiet for a minute--Jeremy pulled his phone from his pocket,
presumably to check either his email or football scores--and I sat there
listening. After another minute, I said, "I might go sit upstairs in the hall."
He looked up from his phone. "Seriously? For how long?"
I gestured toward the television. "You can keep watching."
"If she needs us, she'll let us know."
"I won't go in her room unless she makes more noise," I said. "But I just
want to be up there if she does." It wasn't that I thought I was being rational;
it was that something about hearing that whimper had triggered anxious
heart, and I knew I couldn't sit and chortle at sketches featuring men
dressed as women. This was a difference between Jeremy and me, that he
probably thought men dressed as women were the perfect cure for what
ailed me.
Upstairs, I took a seat on the bare wooden hall floor; I could have gotten
a magazine, but I didn't. It would in my life then have been impossible
for me to feel bored by doing nothing. To do nothing was a rare treat, almost 
like taking a nap.
Rosie didn't make more noise, and after live mimites, contrary to what
I'd promised Jeremy, I opened her door and crept into her room. She was
lying on her stomach, her palms and knees beneath her and her little butt
bunched up in the air. Her face was turned away from me, toward the wall,
but I could hear her rhythmic breathing. This wasn't, I was fairly sure, a
night on which she'd get a fever, though I knew those nights well: After we
gave her medicine, as she rolled around and mumbled, I'd keep getting up
to check on her, and at some point, I'd just give in and lie down on the
floor next to her crib.

But no, I had to remind myself. Not tonight. Just because I knew how
to slip into these nervous patterns, just because the idea of her having a
fever was in my head, it didn't mean she had a fever. I was barely psychic
anymore, and moments like this were the reason why.
When I went downstairs, the television was still paused at the same
sketch, and Jeremy was reading an issue of Journal of Geophysical Re
search.
As I reentered the living room, I said, "Sorry. You could have kept
watching."

"I was waiting for you."
"I want to try getting the stain out of Rosie's pink sweatshirt. I'm not in
the mood for TV anymore." What I really wanted to do--I kept meaning
to do it while Jeremy was at work--was to remove everything hanging on
our walls. But I didn't have the nerve to do it in front of him.
He nodded in the direction of Rosie's monitor. "She's been totally
quiet." Had he heard me go into her room?

We looked at each other, and I said, "I think everything will be better
when we're on the other side of Vi's prediction."

"When Kendra comes this week, you should go get a manicure and try
to relax. Call tomorrow and schedule one."
"Maybe," I said. Apart from the fact that I no longer had manicures
from one year to the next, there was a secret I kept from Jeremy, a stupid
secret, which was that when Kendra babysat, I left only Rosie with her.
Running errands was far easier with just Owen than they'd have been
with both children, which meant that Kendra's hours were in fact a break
for me, if not exactly the one Jeremy believed I was getting. But so greatly
did Rosie relish Kendra's company, and so rare was it these days lin. Rosie
to receive the undivided attention of any adult, that it didn't seem like
such a sacrifice on my part to permit her this treat. I didn't tell Jeremy
because, in the abstract, I always planned to leave both Owen and Rosie
with Kendra the following week, and it was only when Kendra showed up
and Rosie went berserk with excitement that I reconsidered.
Jeremy was still watching me, and he said, "I know we haven't talked
about this for a while, but you remember I'm leaving Thursday for the
conference, right?"
Did I remember he was leaving Thursday for his conference? I remembered
that that had once been the plan, but I had convinced myself that he
would stay--that he'd canceled his reservation already, because surely
he wouldn't get on a plane to Denver with everything that was going on.
"I realize this conference is big for you," I said. "But since it's annual, if
you miss one in your whole career, it probably doesn't make a difference."
"I thought our deal was that if I postponed my Cornell talk, you were
okay with me going to Denver. Does that ring a bell?"
"A lot has happened since then," I said. "Anyway, now that you have
tenure, don't you not have to do as much stuff like this?"
"Kate, I'm delivering a paper on Sunday morning. And I have meals
and coffee scheduled with literally twelve different people."
"Other professors have families, too. If you say an emergency came up,
I'm sure they'll understand."
Jeremy sighed. "Let me put this in perspective. Courtney is still going
to the conference, even after last week." He meant after her abortion, but
if he thought this was a persuasive point, he was mistaken.
I said, "What Courtney does has nothing to do with us."
"Have you given more thought to going out there with me? I'm sure the
tickets are insanely expensive now, but at least we don't have to pay for
Owen's. And hey, we're big spenders."
The remark was clearly a reference to Emma Hall, and I didn't acknowledge
it. I said, "Meaning we'd just ditch Vi and my dad? Besides that Owen
and Rosie are hell to travel with."
"For the sake of discussion," Jeremy said, "if! skipped the conference, what do 
you picture me doing here? I've already canceled my classes."
This was when I felt the first flare of true anger. "Really?" I said. "Be
cause
if you're not teaching, there's no other reason for you to be here?"
"You want the moral support. I understand that. But I question the
point of staying in town for something that won't happen."
I snorted--an unintentionally Vi-like snort. "It must be nice to be so
certain."

"I want to float an idea," Jeremy said. "I'm not saying it's right. But I
want you to consider it. What if neither you nor Vi is psychic?"
I glared at him. "What if you're not really American? Maybe you're
French--has that ever occurred to you? Or maybe you're not even a
human being. What if you're a giraffe? I'm not saying you are, but I just
want you to consider the idea."
"Come here." He patted the couch next to him, and I didn't move. "Or
don't," he said. "Suit yourself. For one thing, I'm not that tall." I didn't
laugh, and he said, "That's how I know I'm not a giraffe."
"I got it," I said.

"We have these articles of faith about ourselves, but sometimes they're
wrong. And for you, the senses--it doesn't bring you pleasure anyway, so
why not just let it go?"

I sometimes forgot this, that not leaving Owen with the babysitter
wasn't the only secret I kept from Jeremy; there was the much larger secret
of how two years earlier I'd discarded my own ESP. Which made Jeremy at
least partly right. And his rightness, his unearned knowledge of me--it
was infuriating. Looking at his boyishly handsome face, his intelligent
countenance, his easygoing confidence that I was a solid wife and a good
mother and that he knew more than I did about every subject in the world,
including the subject of psychicness and the subject of myself, I felt 
indignant.

"It's
not just Vi who has a proven track record," I said, and at some level I was 
conscious of the peculiar relief of my concern about Rosie having
been replaced with anger. "Have you forgotten that I was involved with
finding Brady Ogden's kidnapper, too? And at her Today show taping, I
could hear the questions Matt Lauer was asking even though no one else
in the room could besides Vi. I don't want to be like this. I just am. And
for you to be so sure you're right and everyone else is wrong, especially
when her prediction affects the safety of our children--it's arrogant, and
it's really fucking insulting."
He still wasn't mad; Jeremy was never mad. He said, "I was just thinking
about Brady Ogden. Remember how you wanted to call off our wedding
so you could devote yourself to worrying about him full-time? That
seemed like a good idea to you."
"Why is it bad to have compassion for other people? Besides, Vi and I
were totally right."
"All I'm saying is you let your worry get the best of you. You were doing
it at our wedding, you were doing it a few minutes ago when Rosie made a
noise, and you're doing it now. I know the last few weeks have been hard,
but the solution isn't to put your life on hold."
"There's never going to be a situation like this in our lives again!" I said.
"This is huge, and it's directly connected to us. And let's say Vi is right,
there's a big earthquake, and we lose power on our street, people all over
the city lose it. Or what if, I don't know, a shelf falls on me and I break my
leg and have to go to the hospital and can't take care of Owen and Rosie? I
would need you. Or what if Vi is wrong and you're right, and nothing at all
happens? This Friday is the same as any other day. In that case, Vi is 
humiliated
and who knows what she'll decide to do, or who will be hounding
her from the media? And then she'll need me. And if she needs me, I also
need you. I can't take care of Owen and Rosie and her all at the same--"
He held up his hand, palm toward me. "You're imagining worst-case
scenarios. Those things could happen, sure. But I just don't think they're
likely." He was quiet, and then he said, "If you're psychic, why don't you
answer the question yourself and we can plan accordingly. Is there going
to be an earthquake?"
How strange it was to be put on the spot by my own husband. And
clearly this was the moment to tell Jeremy that I had destroyed my senses.
But was it possible that all I had to do to get him to skip his conference
was to agree with Vi, even if I wasn't sure? The truth was that in recent
weeks I had sometimes felt the dread of certainty and sometimes felt the
opposite--the shame of Vi being laughably wrong. But being unsure
wouldn't keep Jeremy in St. Louis, and I heard myself say, "Yes. Yes, I do
think there'll be an earthquake on October sixteenth. I think Vi's right."
The expression that crossed Jeremy's face then--it was as if I'd said
something sweet but ridiculous, like that I'd seen a unicorn.
"And you think there's no chance," I said.
"Not no chance. There's always a chance. But it's infinitesimal."
I said, "So all along, for the last seven years, you've thought having
senses is bullshit?"

"There are these probability experiments," Jeremy said. "In a room full
of people, statisticians figured out how many had the same birthday. The
number was always much higher than non-mathematicians would guess.
But the telling part was that the people who thought the coincidence was
the most meaningful were the ones who actually shared birthdays. They
thought it meant something because it was personal to them."
"In other words, all the times I've dreamed of something that's come
true, it's just been a coincidence?"

"It's called confirmation bias--attributing greater meaning to so
called evidence that supports your existing belief while ignoring information
that contradicts it."
I wanted to be calm as I spoke next, as calm as Jeremy. "Why do you get
to decide what's true about me and what isn't? And why have you acted all
this time like you were open-minded when you weren't? Remember when
you told me about that exploding church?" A few weeks after I'd disclosed
to Jeremy that I was psychic, he'd referred in passing to the 1950 church
choir practice in Beatrice, Nebraska, which was supposed to be a famous
example of group ESP, and I'd had no idea what he was talking about. Apparently,
it was when a gas leak caused a Baptist church to explode during
what should have been a weekly choir practice, but nobody was injured
because--the chances of this were something like one in a million--not a
single one of the choir members had shown up on time. I didn't know
about this incident because I didn't know about psychicness from the outside,
as a topic I'd researched, but I had found it strangely touching to
learn that Jeremy had checked out a book on paranormal phenomena
from the Wash U library. I said, "Was all of that just to humor me? You
pretended to take it seriously while you were laughing behind my back?"
"I was never laughing behind your back." After a pause, he said, "In
grad school, there was this woman in my program who had blue hair. I
don't know what her real hair color was, and she didn't have a particularly
unusual personality. When I first met her, I assumed she was a punk,
whatever that means, but she was a regular person. She just had blue hair.
And that's how I've seen your senses. They're your blue hair, but they're
not that big a deal."
Perhaps there had been a time when the analogy he was drawing would
have seemed sweet. But having called his bluff, having forced my loving,
thoughtful husband to admit that he'd always believed I was full of shit--
harmlessly full of shit, but full of shit nonetheless--it was apparent that
the accord in our marriage was overly reliant on a fundamental lack of
specificity or resolution. We didn't fight because we usually stopped short
of acknowledging any reason to.
There was a wail then, a high wail, from one of the monitors, but this
time I recognized it immediately as Owen, wanting to nurse. I turned to
go back upstairs--Saturday Night Live still unwatched, Rosie's sweatshirt
still unclean, the question of Jeremy's trip still undecided. Or perhaps just
not decided to my satisfaction. Because in a conciliatory tone, when I was
halfway up the steps, Jeremy said, "A shelf won't fall on you. I'll secure
them all with brackets before I leave."

Amelia Wheeling was in preschool, I took Rosie
and Owen either to story hour at the Richmond Heights library or for a
long walk to a park on Wydown, but not to our usual parks on DeMun or
at Oak Knoll. So Rosie wouldn't be bored without Amelia, I told myself,
though maybe it was so I wouldn't be bored without Hank.
On Monday, October 12, which was sunny and cool, we skipped the
library because I couldn't face hearing the other mothers discuss Vi's 
prediction.
We had just arrived at Wydown Park--Rosie and I called it the
acorn park because it had a huge stone acorn statue set in a little garden
above a low brick wall--when my cellphone rang. I saw that it was Vi.
"I'm at your house." She sounded cheerful. "But where are you?"
"Why are you at our house? Wait--did you drive?"
"I took a taxi. I have a question for you."
"That you have to ask in person?"
"It's nothing bad," she said. "Don't start freaking out."
"We're at a park, the one on Wydown across from the deli."
"That's kind of far." I said nothing, and she added, "But I'll be there as
fast as my little feet can carry me."
After I hung up, I sprang Rosie from the stroller, and she took off
toward the acorn statue. There were only four other people in the park on this 
morning, two of whom were an old man and a boy, a little younger
than Rosie, who I assumed was his grandson; we'd seen them here before,
and Rosie and the boy usually sniffed each other out without exactly playing
together, while the grandfather and I nodded in greeting (I was pretty
sure he didn't speak English). Also, at a table near the fence between the
park and the street, a man and a woman dressed in business clothes drank
from paper coffee cups; she was skinny, wearing a pin-striped silk suit and
stylish, uncomfortable-looking black heels.
I pulled Owen from his stroller seat and inserted him into the baby carrier
I'd put on before leaving the house (it had long ago stopped seeming
strange to me to walk around wearing an empty baby carrier). When he
was secure, I squatted to get a ball from the undercarriage of the stroller
and followed Rosie across the grass. As I got close, she looked over her
shoulder, smiled mischievously, and took off running again, this time
toward the man and woman at the table. Owen and I stayed close behind.
Rosie slowed down a few feet from the couple and said loudly, "That man's
not Daddy."
The man and woman both laughed, but an unhappy energy hovered
around them, as if Rosie had interrupted a serious conversation. And
then, with a start, I realized that the woman was Marisa Mazarelli. I hadn't
seen her for nearly seventeen years, since our high school graduation, and
she looked simultaneously the same and much older. Patrick had run into
her a few years earlier and had described her to Vi and me as "hagged out,"
and while this was definitely an overstatement and she was still pretty, she
did appear diminished. She was brown-eyed and brown-haired and pert
nosed, but there was nothing exceptional about her beauty, about her
presence. Was that only because middle school and high school, the era of
her power, was long past? Or was it that her power had always hinged on
an audience and here in this park, on this sunny October morning, she
no longer had one? Surely she knew about Vi's prediction, and probably
found it risible. But even if she chose at this moment to make a ruthless
comment about my sister and me, who'd witness it except the grandfather
and grandson and Marisa's boyfriend, or whoever he was? Then I thought
he had to be her boyfriend, because once you were married, you didn't
hang out in parks on weekday mornings without kids.
Warmly, the boyfriend said to Rosie, "How old are you?"
I was reluctant to speak; I suspected my voice would give me away, if
Marisa didn't already know who I was. But after a few seconds of silence, it
felt weird for me not to prompt Rosie. "Do you know how old you are,
sweetheart?" I said. "How many years old?" I avoided Marisa's gaze and
looked instead at the back of my daughter's head, her wavy dark brown hair.
"Seven!" Rosie shouted.

"You're two and a half," I said. "You're not seven."

"You're seven!" Rosie yelled, and she started running away from them.
I turned, too, saying in a tone of light regret, as if I'd hoped to stay and
visit, "Onward."

I could feel Marisa's eyes on my back. She definitely knew who I was,
and she probably knew that I knew who she was, but we'd silently decided
not to acknowledge each other. And as I chased Rosie, I was fairly sure that
I'd come out ahead in our exchange, or nonexchange. Because here I was
with my two cute children, and I'd noticed that the ring finger of Marisa's
left hand was bare. This was the nastiest, most elemental math, made no
less ugly for its undeniability: I ended up with a husband and you didn't. Or 
at least she hadn't so far, or if she had, she'd gotten divorced.
Rosie made her way to the little boy and his grandfather, who were
standing near a bench on which the boy had set a bunch of plastic action
figures. The grandfather and I smiled at each other. By the time Vi arrived,
Rosie was busy repeatedly burying a plastic soldier under mulch, then
yanking him up and flinging mulch everywhere.
"That was at least two miles," Vi said from a few yards away. Her cheeks
were flushed, her forehead sweaty. She waved at the grandfather. "Hi
there," she said. "Violet. Kate's sister."
With a thick accent, he said, "A pleasure to meet you." So he did speak
English. In any case, it felt as if Vi had violated park etiquette by 
introducing
herself. Then she said to me, "See that woman over there? I swear it's
Marisa Mazarelli."

I hesitated before saying, "It is."
"What, and you weren't planning to tell me? Are you afraid I'll go
punch her?"

It was within the realm of possibility. But all I said was "What's the
question you want to ask?" Was it weird to be having this conversation in
front of the grandfather, knowing now that he did speak English?
Vi was still gazing across the grass. "You think Marisa's having an affair
with that guy?"

I'd had the same thought, that he could be married--I hadn't taken
note of his ring finger, only hers--but I shrugged. Owen had started fussing,
and I reached into my pocket for a pacifier. I stuck it into his mouth
and he immediately spit it onto the grass. When I retrieved it, I had to
bend at the knees and hold my palm against his chest so he didn't topple
out of the carrier.

"Should I ask if Marisa caught me on the Today show?" Vi's voice had
turned proud, and I thought of what Courtney Wheeling had said about
people appearing on Today because they had extended cases of the hiccups
or had been attacked by a shark--that it didn't mean you'd succeeded
in life.

And then the grandfather said, with the same thick accent as before,
"You are on the television program for earthquakes. You are famous lady!"
He was smiling broadly.
Vi seemed pleased and not particularly surprised. "Oh, did you see
it?" she said. "Yeah, that was me."
"I come from Turkey, where there is terrible earthquake in Izmir.
Buildings there not strong like here."
"Right," Vi said. "No retrofitting."
"Here the buildings are strong."
"Let's hope," Vi said.

"It is honor to meet such a famous lady." The grandfather was looking
at me as he spoke, as if I would verify that he was having this encounter.
Owen spit his pacifier onto the grass again, and I glanced at my watch
and realized that it was time for him to eat and that--I could see it in my
mind--instead of packing the jar of squash, the little spoon, and the bib
for him in the diaper bag, I'd left them all on the kitchen table. Which
meant that unless I wanted him to become frantic, even though I preferred
to nurse only at home, I had to do it here.
"Vi," I said. "I'm going over to that bench to feed Owen. Will you make
sure Rosie doesn't put mulch in her mouth?"
Vi rolled her eyes at me.

I went two benches away, where I'd left our stroller. As I eased Owen
from the carrier, I thought maybe I could get away with feeding him on
only one side. Back across the grass, I saw that the boy and his grandfather
were leaving, and I hoped Rosie wouldn't have a fit when they took the
action figures. Then I saw Vi get on all fours and let Rosie climb onto
her back, which made Rosie squeal with happiness. Vi crawled forward,
her hair flopping into her face, and then she flung her head backward and
let loose with an enormous neigh. "The horsey likes to eat carrots," I heard
Rosie say. Maybe I'd underestimated my sister, I thought; maybe I was
always underestimating her. At some point, Rosie slid off Vi, and Vi remained
on her hands and knees while Rosie frolicked around her. "The
horsey takes a nap!" she shouted, and Vi rolled onto her side.
And then I heard Vi say, "Oh, Rosie, watch out! Oh, no. Oh, yuck." But
she was laughing as she said, "Your mom will not be happy."
"What is it?" I called.

"She stepped in dog poop. Whoops." Vi was still laughing.
"Weren't you watching her?"
"I didn't think there'd he poop in the middle of the grass." I hadn't ei ther, 
or else I wouldn't have kept popping Owen's pacifier back into his
mouth after it fell out. Still, it felt like it wasn't a coincidence that this 
had
happened under Vi's supervision.

Rosie was wearing pink sneakers, and as she and Vi walked toward us,
I saw that the poop was of the fresh, moistly glistening variety; it clung to
the upper part of her left sneaker. "Can you take her shoe off?" I said.
"I'm not touching it," Vi said.

"Vi, my hands are kind of tied right now." The clock was ticking; I was
sure of it. "Come on," I said. "There are wipes in the diaper bag."
"Sorry," Vi said, and she didn't sound sorry at all. "But there's a reason
I don't have kids."

And then, exactly as I'd known she would, Rosie reached down, swiped
her hand against her left shoe, raised her brown-streaked palm victori
ously,
and said, "Rosie makes a mess." She sprinted away from us, back
toward the acorn statue.

"Rosie, stop!" I yelled. I pulled Owen off my boob--he wailed, of
course--and passed him to Vi so I could run after Rosie. When Rosie
sensed me behind her, she shrieked with joy. I was only a few feet from
her--I probably could have reached out and grabbed the back of her
jacket--and then, just as she got to the sidewalk in front of the low wall,
she tripped and fell face-first onto the pavement. Immediately, she was
hysterical, and as I lifted her from behind, I felt that dread, not yet knowing
how bloody she'd be. The answer was very: The blood was surging
from her nose and lips, and her upper lip was already swelling. My heart
pounded against my chest.

"It's all right, Rosie," I said. "You're okay."
She was screaming so loudly that I don't think she could hear me; tears
cascaded down her face. Carefully, I carried her in my arms--it seemed
safe to assume that by this point there was shit on both of us--and we
walked toward Vi and Owen. He was still crying, too; both my children
were sobbing desperately.
Vi's brow was furrowed, and in a tone of concern, as if it hadn't been
mostly her fault, she said, "Is she okay?" Then Rosie turned her face
toward Vi and Vi said, "Oh my God."
"I need to wash off the blood," I said. "Put Owen in the stroller, and get
the wipes out of the diaper bag, and I'll clean her hands and face the best
I can now and do the rest at home."

Vi did as I said, and her obedience was disturbing. I kept Rosie on my
lap while I wiped my own hands, then her hands, then brought a wipe
toward her mouth, at which point she howled and backed her head away
from me. "I'll be very careful," I said. "I know it hurts. I know."
"Daisy," someone said--not Vi, but someone whose voice was simultaneously
familiar and unfamiliar. I looked up, and Marisa Mazarelli was
standing in front of the bench in her pin-striped suit, dangling car keys
from her fingers. "Does she need to go to the hospital?" Marisa said. "I'm
not sure how far away you guys live, but it looks like you walked--" She
sounded tentative in a way that was utterly unlike the Marisa from before,
as if she were not offering a favor but requesting one.
I hesitated for less than a second before saying, "We'll take a ride to our
house. Vi, can you push Owen home in the stroller?" Marisa and Vi said
nothing to each other.
She drove an enormous white SUV, and I sat in front, holding Rosie on
my lap, not bothering with the seat belt; I was simultaneously breaking
about three different laws. Also--did Marisa realize this?--Rosie smelled
like dog shit. Maybe I did, too.
As Marisa pulled out of the space where she was parked, she said, "I saw
her fall, and I thought, Poor thing!"
"She'll be okay," I said. "Right, Rosie? We'll make you feel better." I
didn't think the cuts were that deep, though it was hard to tell with all the
blood.

Sorrowfully, Rosie said, "Rosie fell."
I was almost but not quite too distracted to take note of the clutter piled
on the floor under my feet--running shoes and home furnishings catalogs
and half-full bottles of water and more than one Steak 'n Shake bag
(surely, as skinny as she was, there was nothing Marisa could get from
Steak 'n Shake besides Diet Coke). When Marisa had started the car, a
loud Kenny Chesney song had burst out of her stereo speakers, which she
lowered in volume without turning off. (Marisa listened to country
music?) But mostly I just wanted us to get home. I said, "We live on San
Bonita Avenue, which is off DeMun, but you should take Big Bend to
Clayton because you can't cut through from this side."
There was minimal traffic, and we drove without speaking, listening to
a very faint Kenny Chesney. Rosie was insubstantial in my arms; given
how much bigger she was than Owen, I often forgot how little she herself
still was.

In front of our house, I opened the car door before Marisa had-turned
off the engine. "Thanks," I said.
"I hope she's okay," Marisa said.
I started up the walk, Rosie in my arms, and behind me, I heard the
passenger side window opening and Marisa calling, "Daisy--"
I turned.

"There's something I want to ask you," she said. "Can I call you?"
"Yeah, fine," I said, and I turned again.

got Rosie to hold still while I cleaned her wounds was by
parking her in front of the TV and letting her watch Curious George. I
dabbed at her lips and nose with a soapy washcloth, then with a wet washcloth,
then with Neosporin (which made me think, as I suppose it always
will, of Brynn Zansmyer); every time I made contact, Rosie whimpered
and her eyes welled. Both her upper lip and her right nostril had been
scraped and were oozing pink fluid--also, her upper lip was twice as big
as normal--but she was no longer crying, and the cut was soon clean. To
reduce the swelling, I gave her a Popsicle. I considered taking a picture
with my phone and sending it to Jeremy, but it seemed like that would be
alarming without serving a purpose; I'd call him later. Through the living
room window, I saw Vi and Owen approach, then Vi heaved the stroller
up the four steps leading to our front porch, Owen still strapped in. I 
wondered,
did I appear as unsteady as she did when I carried the stroller? I
opened the front door, and Owen smiled at me and said, "Da-da."
"Ha," Vi said. "Almost. How's the patient?" Looking at Rosie, she said,
"What's that snot-looking stuff?"
"I think just drainage."
"First dog poop, now facial leaking. What a morning, huh?" She sat
down in the armchair, eased off her clogs, and propped her socked feet on
the coffee table. "I could go for one of those Popsicles."
Holding Owen, I sat on the couch next to Rosie, pulled up my shirt--
I had, apparently, never refastened the front of my bra after nursing Owen
in the park--and let him latch on again. To Vi, I said, "Help yourself."
When she returned from the kitchen, Vi said, "Did the Bitch of Christmas
Past say anything interesting in the car?"
"We didn't talk. I was pretty focused on getting home."
"Did she mention my prediction?"
"I'm telling you we barely talked," I said. "You have to admit it was nice
of her to give us a ride."
Vi snorted. "I don't have to admit jack shit." Then she said, "Aren't you
curious what I want to ask you?"
I had forgotten she wanted to ask me anything.
She said, "I'm going back on the Today show on Friday morning, and
this time, the producer wants you to come on with me."
"Why?"
She laughed. "You should see your face right now. It looks like you
licked a lemon."
"I just don't know why they'd be interested in me when I have nothing
to do with your prediction."
"You know how people are about twins, though. They want us all to
have ESP, and here we are, the ones who really do."
"You didn't tell the producer I'm psychic, did you?"
"I described you like you are--total suburban mom, white picket
fence--and the guy was like, 'Even better!' Because as Emma put it--
you'll love this--you give me credibility. You're a stand-in for Mrs. Normal
American Viewer who's skeptical about"--here, inexplicably, Vi
adopted her awful British accent, which I thought she might have put to
rest during her contact with the authentically British Emma--"these very,
very strange predictions."
"So you did tell the producer I'm psychic," I said. Like Jeremy, Vi was
unaware that I'd done my best to kill my senses.
"It's time to get over your hang-ups," Vi said. "Because guess what? The
thing you always thought was so embarrassing turns out to be the thing
that makes us cool. Plus, when will you next get invited on the Today show?"

"I'm definitely not going on TV with you," I said. "There's no possible
way."

"What if no one says anything about you having senses? Then will
you?"

"There's no possible way," I repeated.
"Even if you could help save lives--even then, you won't?"
"Vi, what man, woman, or child in America doesn't know about your
prediction at this point?" Owen finished nursing, and I lifted him into a
sitting position.

"Emma said Matt Lauer, or whoever interviews us, will be more respectful
this time because they realize we have plenty of other options for
Friday. I'm a 'get' now." Vi made air quotes, and it looked like the remaining
chunk of Popsicle was about to fall off the stick.
Owen burped as I patted his back, and I said, "Good boy."
Vi took a last, oversized bite of Popsicle and said, with her mouth full,
"If you don't do it, I bet in a few years, you'll regret it."
"Then that'll be my problem," I said.
"You're being really selfish."
It was not news to me that Vi was, on a regular basis, hypocritical and
irrational and contradictory. Still--still, there was a line I just couldn't let
her cross. I said, "You won't wipe poop off Rosie's shoe, but I'm the selfish
one?"

"Oh, so if I had, then you would have done this for me?"
"If you knew I wouldn't do it, why did you even ask?"
When she spoke next, I could tell she was being sincere, not glib, which
only made what she said more insulting. She said, "I thought maybe for
once your loyalty to me would trump your fear of what other people think."
"Just because I'm not an exhibitionist doesn't mean I'm afraid."

She removed her feet from the table, leaned forward, and set her Popsicle
stick on the wood where her feet had been, with nothing underneath
it. "When you decided to tell everyone about us having senses, I stood by
you," she said. "Did you ask me first? No. But did I say, 'Oh, I'd rather not
be exposed'?"
"You mean in eighth grade?"
"You can't deny that you're the one who first spilled the beans."
"That was twenty years ago," I said. "We were thirteen."
Vi shrugged. "So?"
"That's completely--" For a few seconds, I couldn't speak because I
couldn't decide which of her ludicrous accusations to address first. Finally,
I said, "First of all, you love attention. You always have. You like being a big
fucking weirdo--" Had I really just said fucking in front of Rosie and
Owen? Yes. I had. "There's nothing I could ever do to embarrass you that
compares to how you choose to embarrass yourself on a daily basis. I'm
sure the last few weeks have been the highlight of your life, and you don't
even care how much your prediction scares people, or whether it's wrong.
You're just excited that you get to be on TV. And the reason you stood by
me, as you put it, in eighth grade, is that you didn't give a shit. It made no
difference to you, so don't pretend it was about loyalty. I've been plenty
loyal to you, Vi, and plenty generous, too--"
"Like when you pay for my eight-dollar fajitas with the income you earn
from your exhausting job?" she interrupted. "Is that what you're talking
about?" And really, Vi and I argued often, but what I felt at this moment
was an anger whose purity and heat were unlike any I'd previously experienced.

"Fajitas
are the least of it, you sociopath! You want to know how much
Emma's charging? You really want to know? Fifteen thousand dollars.
Now get out of my house!"
"With pleasure." Vi was standing, shoving her feet into her clogs, picking
up her bag, and it was gratifying to see that she herself was shaking
with rage. Maybe if she'd been a little more efficient, I wouldn't have had
the chalice to say what I said next.
But she still hadn't reached the front door when I said, "You know
nothing about being an adult--nothing about marriage or having kids or
holding a real job. So the way that you constantly pass judgment on me is
absurd. That's why I bite my tongue when you do it, because it's laughable
that you have the nerve. It's like having my manners corrected by a cave
man."

"Maybe if you keep telling yourself how perfect your life is, eventually
you'll believe it."

"I never said--"

But she was talking over me. "You just can't imagine that not everyone
wants to spend their days changing diapers. Some of us think the world
has more to offer. Can you believe it? And it's hilarious that you see yourself
as such a great mother because from my perspective, you're turning
your children into clingy little wimps. You cut Rosie's blueberries in half,
for Christ's sake! Yeah, Mom was fucked up, but at least she gave us room
to breathe." With her hand on the front door, Vi glared at me. "So I guess
you haven't been the only one biting your tongue."
called me at work and said, "There's something I need to talk to you
about."
She was going to announce that she wasn't coming to the wedding, I
thought immediately, or that she was coming but was no longer willing to be
the maid of honor, or that she was willing to be the maid of honor but didn't
want to wear the dress we'd picked out together. I had prepared myself for
all these possibilities and decided that I wouldn't fight her--that I couldn't
let her spoil the celebration. Then she said, "It's not about your wedding."

"So what is it?"
"Can we meet up tonight? Without Jeremy?"
"His department head is taking us out for dinner, but you can come
over before. I should be home by five-thirty. Is it something serious?"
"Yes," Vi said, "but it doesn't have to do with us."

Jeremy ark, I had decided on a destination wedding in Mendocino,
California, a plan that had once seemed perfect. The ceremony would
occur at the same bed-and-breakfast where he'd proposed a year earlier;
he'd had a conference in San Francisco, I'd flown to join him afterward,
and we'd driven up the coast to stay at an inn. Holding the wedding in
Mendocino would, we thought, make it fun even though it would be
small, with the inconvenient location a justification for not inviting our
distant relatives or any co-workers except my friend Janet.
The deeper we got into the planning, however, the more obvious it became
that even a small wedding in Mendocino would be prohibitively expensive.
In fact, I had the impression that it was our very attempts at being
understated that would cost so much. Shortly before Jeremy and I had
moved in together, we had been mutually discomfited to learn opposite
pieces of information about each other: He'd been surprised to find out
that I had debt, and I'd been surprised that he didn't. At that point, I owed
nine thousand dollars in student loans and four thousand in credit card
bills, neither of which seemed to me disgraceful--I had a decent credit
rating, especially compared to Vi--but I could tell that Jeremy didn't like
these facts about me. He didn't say so, but he might even have considered
my debt low-class, to borrow a term from my mother. Meanwhile, it hadn't
occurred to me that he wouldn't still be paying off student loans; I didn't
understand until meeting Jeremy that most people with doctoral degrees
received funding during their years of graduate work. And his parents had
paid for the entirety of his undergraduate education, which at a private
university had cost far more than mine.
The week I was to stop being Vi's roommate, Jeremy said that he'd been
thinking about it and suggested the following: that as a gift, he wanted to
pay off my student loans; that after I moved in with him, I didn't need to
pay rent at first but should instead put what would have been rent money
toward paying off my credit card bills; that when I had, we'd both pay rent
proportional to our salaries (he earned twice what I did); and that we'd
take turns covering daily living expenses such as dinners out. Growing up,
I'd regularly had the feeling that my mother hadn't taught Vi and me the
things a mother was supposed to teach you--to put toilet paper on the
seat in public bathrooms or to straighten my leg when shaving my knee--
and there were lessons I'd had to glean from observation or just from the
hunch that I'd done something wrong. The evening when Jeremy laid out
his financial proposition was the first time it occurred to me that perhaps
my father had failed to impart certain lessons, too. I was also, of course,
dumbstruck by Jeremy's generosity.
And yet, as the wedding expenses added up--deposits for the inn
where t he rehearsal d inner, ceremony, and reception would take place; the
invitations; the photographer and the cake and the flowers--Jeremy was
the one who was prepared to splurge, and I was the one who balked. "You
only get married once," he'd say with a smile. "Hopefully." (As it happened,
even though Jeremy's parents were long divorced, they were that
civilized brand of divorced people who, with their respective second
spouses, would all good-naturedly socialize; his father and stepmother
had attended the engagement party that Jeremy's mother and stepfather
had held for us the previous winter in Virginia.)
Eventually, I convinced Jeremy that we needed neither a band nor a
DJ--Patrick said he'd download songs for us on his iPod--and I bought
two used dresses online for a hundred and fifty dollars each, kept the one
that fit better and resold the other. My friend Janet would do my hair and
makeup, we'd have no wedding attendants except Jeremy's brother and
my sister, and we'd cap the guest list at twenty-six people, including us.
The two areas where Jeremy was inflexible were that he wouldn't consider
a cash bar--it wasn't that I was hell-bent on it, but this was another instance
in which he might have considered me low-class for even floating
the idea--and he also for some reason really wanted to give out matchbooks
with our names and the date on them, though these turned out to
be relatively cheap, as wedding favors went. Even so, when all was said and
done, the weekend would cost over twenty thousand dollars, which meant,
after his parents told us they'd cover the rehearsal dinner, we'd still deplete
Jeremy's savings. (He'd have to sell off stocks, though to me the notable
fact was that he owned stocks--really, unlike me, Jeremy was a bona ride 
grown-up before we met.) I had wondered if my father might pay for
at least some of the wedding, but no offer had been forthcoming. My father
had retired the previous summer, and I had little idea of the state of
his finances, though his rental apartment was a modest one.
If I was being honest, the cost wasn't the only reason for my ambivalence
about my own wedding. The closer the date drew, and the more I
found myself fielding friendly questions about it from co-workers and 
acquaintances,
the more self-conscious I grew about the fact that it would be
in northern California. It seemed the choice of a woman who fancied her self 
free-spirited--who wore a toe ring, say, and who baked bread from
scratch and whose name was Daisy.
On a hot Sunday morning in August about a month before the wedding
was supposed to happen, Jeremy and I went for a walk in Forest Park. "I
want to marry you," I said. "But I wish we were just doing it at the 
courthouse."

"That's
so dreary." A second later, when Jeremy apparently remembered
that my parents had done exactly that, he added, "Sorry. Listen--
I don't care what we're wearing. I don't care if we have a first dance or place
cards or any of that shit. But weddings are one of the only times in life that
people come together for happy reasons, and I want that--I want to be in
a nice setting, surrounded by people who love us. Anyway, if we cancel, we
won't get the deposit money back."
"And you think I'm unromantic. Did you find out if Cockroach is
bringing his new girlfriend?" Cockroach, whose real name was Nick
Chandler, was Jeremy's Wesleyan roommate.
"I'll email him today."

"Try to be a little discouraging. Subtly discouraging."
"I know you're into her, but are you hundreds of dollars' worth of our
money into her?' That kind of thing?" We were passing the boathouse,
and Jeremy took my hand. He said, "Have a little faith, okay? Not everything
can be quantified."

hon I d moved into Jeremy's apartment, Vi had found a stranger
named Sheila to take my room in the duplex on Moorlands Drive. Within
two months, Jeremy and I were engaged while Vi and Sheila had had a
series of explosive arguments, broken the lease, and gone their separate
ways. Vi, who'd recently been promoted from hostess to assistant manager
at Trattoria Marcella, found a place in Rock Hill, where she lived
alone for the first time. When she enthusiastically recommended it, I said,
"It's not that I don't believe you, but it's kind of too late for me."
As I let Vi in the evening of her unsettling phone call, she immediately
spotted an unlit pale green candle on the table just inside the front door,
lifted it, and sniffed. "Cedar?"

"Pine."

"Where's it from?"
"Some store at the Galleria. Want it?" Offering Vi my possessions was
a slightly weird impulse I'd developed during my relationship with Jeremy.
It was hard to say if it arose from my proximity to Jeremy's money, or from
vague guilt over the fact that Vi was still, eternally, single, or perhaps from
something less insidious, something as simple as affection.
"Really? Thanks." She tossed the candle into the oversized straw bag
she was carrying and walked into the living room, where she took a seat
on the couch, set down her bag, kicked off her Birkenstocks, and put her
bare feet on the coffee table. She was wearing a thin-strapped sundress
that exposed her back, shoulders, and ample cleavage; her chest and cheeks
were flushed, and her hairline was sweaty. "It's hotter than fucking bananas
out there," she said.
I'd gone to the refrigerator to get us both Diet Cokes, and from the
kitchen I asked, "Are you working tonight?"
"No, thank God."
Back in the living room, I said, "What's going on?"
"You know Brady Ogden?"
"The kidnapped boy?"
"I had a sense about him."

"Oh God, Vi."
"I think it's a postal worker who did it. That's what they're called, right?
Postal workers?"

"Like a mailman?"
"Maybe. Or just someone who works at a branch office. A male."
"And Brady's--" I almost couldn't bring myself to say it. "Is he alive?"
Brady Ogden was a nine-year-old who'd lived fifteen miles away, in Florissant.
On a warm May night three months earlier, when he'd heard the
music of the ice cream truck, he'd asked his parents if he could go buy a
I3omb Pop and had never returned home. After police questioning, the ice
cream truck's driver--a recent high school dropout--had been cleared of
suspicion. He'd been stoned, apparently, but he hadn't kidnapped anyone.
The disappearance of Brady Ogden had repeatedly appeared on the front
page of the Post-Dispatch, as well as being a frequent topic of discussion
on all the local news programs; more briefly, it had made national news.
Vi's expression was one I knew well, as if she were trying hard to remember
something, though remembering wasn't what she was doing. "He
is alive," she said. "I'm pretty sure. But I think the guy might be--you
know--"

"Torturing him?" I could barely stand to have this conversation.
"Well, molesting. If there's a difference between that and torture--
I don't know, I guess there is. But what I wanted to ask you is, I think I'd
recognize where the guy lives if I saw it, so what if we drive around together?"
Because
this was years before Vi stopped driving, the request seemed
particularly odd. I said, "You think we should just get in the car and go up
and down every street in Florissant?"
"I don't think he's still in Florissant. He's in one of those suburbs that
people barely lived in when we were growing up. Maybe Chesterfield?"
"Maybe?"

Vi seemed preoccupied, and also uneasy. After a pause, she said, "Yeah.
Maybe."

"You should go to the police."
"You think?" She looked at me with surprise.
"Let's say you and I are driving around Chesterfield. In a best-case scenario,
we pass some house and you're really having a sense, and then what?
I'm sure as hell not getting out to knock on the door."
"It's not a house," she said, and her voice was more confident. "It's an
apartment building." Then she said, "I didn't think you would tell me to
contact the police because what if I'm wrong and I seem like a big nut
job?"
"But if this kid is being--" We looked at each other, and I said, "If I was
having a sense, I'd go to the police."
On her face was an expression of great skepticism.
"I'm sure they have a system for dealing with this," I said. "There's a tip
line just for Brady Ogden, right? And I bet a lot of the tips are wrong, and
they're not fazed by that. And who knows--if you go to them and say, 'I'm
having this hunch he's been kidnapped by a mailman who lives in an
apartment building in Chesterfield,' maybe they have a list of suspects and
one of them fits that description and they can go back and investigate that

person more."
Vi bit at a hangnail on her thumb. "With your wedding, I thought you'd
tell me to forget it."
"Because heaven forbid that a kidnapped boy take attention from me?
Thank you." I took a sip of Diet Coke and steeled myself. "Have you been
getting messages from Guardian?"
She pulled her thumb away from her mouth. "Not about this. I've been
waking up in the morning with visuals." Unexpectedly, she grinned. "And
men think it's bad when they wake up with boners."
"I'm not sure most men think it's bad," I said.
She leered. "That's more than I need to know about you and Jeremy."
I started to protest, and she said, "You aren't planning to take his name,
are you?"
When I hesitated, she said, "Really, Daze?"
"I think it's nice when a couple has the same last name."
She removed her bare feet from the coffee table and sat up straighter.
"So putting aside the patriarchal brainwashing, do you realize your name
will now be a hundred percent different from the name you were given at
birth? Daisy Shramm to Kate Tucker?"
Of course I realized this. "So?"
"Kate Tucker is the name of a pilgrim. You'll be a pilgrim married to a

boy explorer."
"Thank you for sharing your opinion. Have you gotten shoes for the

wedding?"
Vi and I had found her maid of honor dress at T. J. Maxx, a deep pink
cowl-neck sheath that looked great on her. My only reservations were that,
because it was unusual for Vi to wear something so fitted, she'd have a
change of heart after it was too late to get anything else or that she'd decide
it was humorously subversive to wear, say, Doc Martens on her feet.
"I bought some flats that will totally pass your smell test," Vi said. "And
they were on sale for nine dollars. You have nothing to worry about."
"What color?"

"Black."

I definitely wanted to see them before the ceremony. I said, "Tomorrow
after work I'll drive you around."
We ended up leaving the apartment together, and when we were outside,
before we turned in opposite directions to walk to our cars--I was
about to go pick up Jeremy for dinner--I said, "Call the police and just see
what they say."

ci It head, Leland Marcus, had said he
and his wife, Xiaojian, who was an oncology professor at Wash U's medical
school, wanted to take us out to celebrate our engagement, it had felt
awkward given that we hadn't invited them to the wedding; we hadn't
considered it. They were both about fifty and didn't have children, and I
hardly knew either of them. Xiaojian had been born in Shanghai and had
recently led a high-profile study on hormone therapy and breast cancer;
Leland had started his career at NASA. The previous winter, at a department
holiday party, I'd had a twenty-five-minute conversation with Leland
about fishing in Minnesota's Boundary Waters that was basically a
monologue on his part, and on the car ride home, Jeremy said, "That's the
longest any human being has ever spent talking to Leland." (Later, it was
odd to think that this party was where I'd met Hank and Courtney, speaking
to them first by the buffet table and later when we happened to leave at
the same time, heading out into the cold night and exchanging pleasantly
distant farewells, with no idea of the friendship that would eventually develop
among us.)
At the restaurant with Leland and Xiaojian, we somehow got through
the selection of wine and food, our appetizers and entrées--I could hear
myself prattling on about the view from the grassy cliff where Jeremy and
I would exchange our vows, and I was conscious, though less than I once
would have been, of being the only person present without a PhD--and
then the waiter brought out cappuccinos for Xiaojian and me and a raspberry
tart for Leland.
Xiaojian turned to me. "After the wedding, you will have babies." It was
hard to tell if it was a question or a comment.

"Probably," I said.
"It is babies or job. You know this, yes? Women pretend they can do it
all, but it is a lie. Babies or job. Never both. You work with elderly?"
I nodded, unsure if it was more surprising that she knew what field I
was in or that she was, without apparent hesitation, delivering this dia
tribe.
She said, "If you have babies, say bye-bye to elderly."
"A lot of the women I work with have children."

"Small children?"

"Some of them."
"Then they are bad mothers or bad workers. On this, trust me."
Was Jeremy listening? I hoped so, because I doubted I'd be able to do
justice later to Xiaojian's remarks.
"I guess everyone has to figure out their own path," I said, and Xiaojian
replied, with a mirthful expression, "I see you do not believe me, but you
will soon find out."
And then someone had approached our table and was standing at the
corner between Xiaojian and me. At first, I thought it was the waiter, but
the person leaned in and touched my elbow. "Daisy Shramm?"
Even before I looked up, my body tensed. It wasn't that this never happened.
I lived in St. Louis, after all, where your next-door neighbor would
turn out to be your co-worker's cousin, where you'd run into your bank
teller at the gym and your gynecologist at the farmers' market. The suburbs
were crawling with people with whom I'd gone to elementary school,
middle school, high school, and college. But out in public I often noticed
these people before they noticed me; the truth was, I could usually sense
them. And then I could lower my head or walk away or, in particularly
dire cases, hide in a bathroom stall. Once, in the parking lot of Ted Drewes,
Jeremy and I had been sitting on the hood of his car, eating our concretes,
when I'd said to him, "Give me the keys." And I'd hit the Unlock button,
jumped into the front passenger seat, and slumped there with my frozen
custard until Alex Cooke--the first guy I'd ever kissed, while watching
TV at Marisa Mazarelli's house, who now appeared to be a father of four--
had walked by with his large family. Afterward, when I tried to explain,
Jeremy said, "For a minute there, I wondered if you're in the Witness Protection
Program."

In the restaurant, this person from my past had come upon me without
my noticing; I had been distracted by Xiaojian Marcus's rant. The person
was male, about my age, and I knew that I knew him, but I didn't know
who he was. He had a cheerful face, and he held one hand to his chest and
said, "It's Laird. Laird Mueller. Tom's brother."
"How are you?" I said. I didn't stand because it seemed like if I did, we
might have to hug. The last time I'd seen Laird, which was when his
brother had been my high school boyfriend, he hadn't yet entered puberty.
"So the weirdest thing is, your name came up last week," Laird said,
and I was aware that Leland and Jeremy had gone quiet and were, like
Xiaojian, observing this interaction. "What are the chances, right? I'm at
the Cards game with a couple buddies from work--I'm at Selvin and Associates
in Clayton--and one of my co-workers is another fellow from
Kirkwood, Kevin Chansky. Don't know if you'd remember him, but
he was my year. He says to me, 'Didn't your brother go out with Daisy
Shramm?' and I say, 'Did he ever!' " Laird cupped one hand around the
side of his mouth, as if he were conveying confidential information rather
than performing for a table of four. "Between you and I, I had a mondo
crush on you back in the day. Anyway, Chansky says, 'Daisy was a witch.'
And I'm like, 'Huh? No way!' And he's like, 'Yep, her and her twin sister
both. They had crazy psychic powers.' And I'm like, okay, so that's why
Mom always hated Daisy. Good old ultraconservative Peg Mueller." Laird
laughed then with warmth and sincerity, and the moment was so unendurable
that a part of me couldn't believe we were all still in the middle of it.
"So, Laird," Jeremy said. "It's Laird, right?" Jeremy's tone was mild; it
might even have seemed friendly, if you didn't know him. "We're just
finishing up dinner here. But thanks for coming over."
There was a little delay while Laird absorbed Jeremy's diplomatic snub,
and then with great enthusiasm, Laird said, "Likewise! Awesome to see
you, Daisy, and nice to meet the rest of you." As he wandered off, returning
to a stool at the bar near the front of the restaurant, it was hard to feel
true relief; it was like when you find yourself on a street where a menacing
dog comes toward you, then walks away but without your having any assurance
that he won't turn back with renewed, unwholesome interest.
And lest I should have comforted myself by imagining that Laird's babbling
had been too convoluted for my fiancé, his boss, and his boss's wife
to follow, Xiaojian said brightly, "So you are a--" Truly, I thought she was
about to say witch, but instead she finished with "twin." Again, it was unclear
whether she was asking or observing; however, the follow-up was
definitely a question. She said, "You are the good twin or bad twin?"
If Xiaojian hadn't rubbed me the wrong way before Laird's appearance,
I would have offered her my twin boilerplate (identical, really fun, didn't
try to trick people much growing up, still close, almost everyday); I'd have
felt that it was only polite. Instead, without smiling, I said, "I'm the bad

one."

`. I said to Jeremy, "I'm so sorry."

"For what?"
"We don't have to pretend that wasn't excruciating when Laird came

over."
"Do you seriously think I hold you accountable for what some doofus
you went to school with twenty years ago does?"
I was quiet and then I said, "Are you nervous about marrying a witch?" Jeremy 
laughed, which I hadn't expected. "I'm just hoping you'll twitch
your nose and get me tenure."
"I )o you think it's weird that I don't want to leave St. Louis even though
I hate running into people?"
"You don't want to leave because of your dad and Vi." Jeremy was driving
my car, and he made a left onto the ramp for 40 East.
I could have told him then about Vi and Brady Ogden, but instead I
said, "I'm afraid Vi's going to wear Doc Martens to our wedding."
"Whatever floats her boat," Jeremy said.

I picked Vi up, and we got on the highway at
McKnight; normally, it would have taken about twenty minutes to drive
to Chesterfield, but because it was rush hour, it was more like forty.
We passed the hospitals, several big new office parks, and as we closed
in on Chesterfield, I said, "Which exit?"

"Oh, God. Your guess is as good as mine."
"Clarkson Road? Chesterfield Parkway?" Later, I would go to the Chesterfield
Babies "R" Us on a regular basis, but on this late afternoon in
September 2004, I had an idea of where I was going only from having
looked at a map I kept on my backseat.
"Either one," Vi said, and I wondered how long she envisioned us driving.
I'd told Jeremy only that I was meeting up with Vi about her wedding
outfit and that if he got hungry, he should go ahead and eat dinner without
me.

Vi and I circled Chesterfield Parkway and then I went north, somewhat
arbitrarily, on Olive Boulevard, past the Butterfly House--another place I
never went until I had children--before pulling off in the parking lot of a
gas station and reversing direction. I could feel Vi's alertness, her head
angled toward the window, but she was quiet. "Anything seeming familiar?"
I said, and she didn't answer. Because there wasn't much reason not
to, I turned onto a residential street, but it was lined with new-looking,
nice houses, and I knew it wasn't right even before Vi said, "It's an apartment
building."
We ended up in Ellisville, then Ballwin--St. Louis County was divided
into dozens of towns and cities with no centers, some with only houses
and populations of just a few hundred--and I said, "You know we've left
Chesterfield, don't you?" and Vi said, "Maybe we should go back. Sorry."
I turned, and we found ourselves back on Clarkson Road, which led us
to Baxter Road, Wild Horse Creek Road, Eatherton Road, Olive Street--
we were passing the small Chesterfield airport--and near the mall again,
there were a few clusters of townhouses, but Vi repeated that we were looking
for an apartment, and then there was a cluster of apartment buildings,
but they weren't the right ones. We'd been in the car for an hour and a half,
and the sun was setting. Without consulting Vi, I got back on the highway
and began driving toward St. Louis. Twenty-five yards from the exit for
Woods Mill Road, she said, "Get off here."
I wasn't even in the right-hand lane; I glanced in the side mirror, swerved
over, and got on the exit ramp. "Go right," Vi said. Though I still wasn't
expecting much--we'd already passed Woods Mill Road on our way
west--we'd been driving for no more than two minutes when she said,
"Turn into that parking lot," and she was gesturing just up ahead, where a
wooden sign said TERRACE VIEW APARTMENTS, and beyond it was a paved
driveway that dipped down then rose up. In the parking lot proper, where
I pulled into a space but didn't turn off the engine, Vi and I both craned
our necks back. In front of us were three enormous, identical buildings
covered in cream-colored stucco; they were five stories high and contained
perhaps fifty units each. Though it was a fuzzily golden late summer evening,
I felt their ominousness right away, their containment of something
bad. I wanted to leave, even as I believed Vi with a new certainty.
"It'd be like finding a needle in a haystack," Vi said. "Jesus."
"Why don't you sleep on it?" I still hadn't turned off the car or even set
the gearshift in Park, and I added, "You don't want to get out, do you?"
Vi looked up through the windshield at each building, one after the
other, but to my relief she said, "No." On the ride back, neither of us
spoke, and in front of the four-unit brick building where she lived--it
seemed so little after the Terrace View Apartments--I didn't have the
energy to ask if I could see her wedding shoes.
At home, Jeremy said, "Did she feed you?" It was almost eight, and he
was scrambling eggs.
"Actually, no," I said. "Did you make enough for both of us?"
"I'm about to,'' he said.


awakened just before twelve o'clock, which was less than
an hour after Jeremy and I had gone to bed; I felt that old sense of menace
from my childhood, and I wondered at first if there'd been a noise in the
apartment, an intruder even, but as I continued to listen, I heard nothing
irregular. Jeremy was next to me, sleeping on his side, and I considered
waking him but resisted; usually, it was enough just to know I could. I
smoothed out my T-shirt, which had ridden up, and tucked my hair behind
my ears, and I thought to myself, Everything is fine, and in the next
instant, I thought, He doesn't work in a post office, he works in a copy shop
on New Ballas Road. Though I could see why Vi had been confused, because
his uniform, his button-down shirt, was pale blue. He was a clean
shaven guy in his forties, with a blond, almost military crew cut, and the
name tag over the left pocket of his shirt said DEREK.
I got up and went into the living room; I dialed Vi's cell number and sat
down on the couch. (I sometimes had to stop and think, when I called Vi,
which was her phone number and which was mine. Once, shortly after
moving in with Jeremy, I'd meant to call Vi from my cellphone but called
my own home phone, had heard but not really paid attention to my voice
on the outgoing greeting, and had proceeded to leave a message for Vi.
Later, I was briefly bewildered listening to it.)
"What are you doing up?" Vi said when she answered. In the background,
I could hear music and the rise and fall of multiple voices.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"A few of us are at this guy Maxwell's house, but I'm leaving in a sec."
Then she laughed. "Wait, you know Maxwell." She lowered her voice to a
whisper and said, "Should I tell him you're about to get married, or you
think that'd break his big, bearded heart?"
"Vi, I saw the kidnapper," I said. "In a dream, I mean. I think he works
at a copy shop."
"A coffee shop?"
"Copy. Like Kinko's but not a chain. I think you're right, though--
I think he lives in one of those buildings. So what do we do now?"
"I le has really short hair, right? And he's almost handsome in this
cheesy way, like he should be on a reality show except that he's so
creepy?"
"His name is Derek. I could see it on his badge."
She was quiet for so long that I might have thought, if I hadn't still been
able to hear the background noise, that we'd been disconnected. At last,
she said, "I'll make you a deal. If you call the police, then you can say

you're me."

on the Internet to find the number for the Florissant
Police Department, surely I'd have seen that the tip line was anonymous,
but I didn't look on the Internet. Instead, I pulled down the White Pages
that Jeremy and I still kept, back in 2004, on top of our refrigerator, and
I called the main number, and the person who answered connected me to the tip 
line, and I said the following: "I hope this doesn't sound too weird, but I'm a 
person who sometimes has premonitions or I guess you
could say ESP, and I've had one about Brady Ogden and what I think is
maybe the person who kidnapped him--well, who was involved in kidnapping
him, or could have been--I think it's a man named Derek--that's
his first name--and he works in a copy shop, like a Kinko's but not
Kinko's, and he lives in a complex called Terrace View Apartments, which
is on Woods Mill Road. I don't know any of this for sure, but I think
maybe. And my name is Violet Shramm, Violet like the flower and
Shramm is S-H-R-A-M-M." I left Vi's cellphone number; she didn't have
a home phone. Then, as ordinarily as if I'd called to cancel a dentist's 
appointment,
I said, "Okay. That's all. Thanks so much."
When I returned to bed, Jeremy said, "Who were you talking to?" But
he seemed barely awake.
"I was watching TV," I said. "I couldn't sleep."
department, and the only woman who participated was Courtney
Wheeling--and I took my father to the grocery store. We still returned to
the Schnucks on the corner of Manchester and Woodlawn; from year to
year, it was the closest I got to our old house on Gilbert Street. In the cereal
aisle, my father said, "Your sister has liked living on her own."
"I'm trying not to take that too personally." I had last spoken to Vi the
night before, about forty-eight hours after I'd left the message on the tip
line, and she hadn't heard from the Florissant police, which made me unsure
whether to be relieved or disappointed. Either way, I couldn't imagine
she'd have mentioned the Brady Ogden business to our father.
Then he said, "I know the bride's family usually pays for the wedding,"
and for about a second, I felt a surge of hope--I hadn't even been sure that
he was aware that this convention existed--but my hope began to wither
when he said, "My dilemma is that I question if Vi will ever marry."
Though I questioned the same thing, it was still a bit shocking to hear
him state it so baldly. "We're barely twenty-nine, Dad. People get married
later now."

"Well, don't forget I was a good deal older than you girls when I married
your mother. But I'm referring less to your sister's age than what you
might call her temperament. I don't know that she's the marrying kind."
Again, I felt a little shocked, even a little defensive on Vi's behalf, while
essentially agreeing.
"I'd like her to have some stability like you have with Jeremy," my father
said. "Just something to fall back on over the long term, after I'm not
around, and I wonder if you wouldn't be disappointed if instead of helping
out with your wedding, I made a down payment on a house for your sister.
I'm awfully sorry I can't do both. As your mother knew all too well, I've
never been a financial whiz kid."

I blinked and said, "That's fine." My voice was uneven, but not so hideously
that it required his acknowledgment.
"I know it isn't fair to you--"
"Dad." I held up my hand. "It's fine. We don't need to talk about it."
But he wasn't finished. "I'm sure they must pay the professors hand somely at 
Wash U," he said. "If you weren't marrying someone responsible,
I wouldn't--"
"It's completely fine," I said. "Really."
"There is something I want you to have." He was the one pushing the
grocery cart, and he looked at me then, my tall, thin, old, sad father, wearing
a short-sleeved poly-blend plaid shirt and gray slacks. "It's in the car."
We finished shopping and loaded the plastic bags into my trunk. I
wasn't planning to remind him of whatever it was he intended to give
me--I feared another twenty-five-dollar Starbucks gift card--but when
we were seated, he passed me a small royal blue velvet pouch cinched at the
neck. I knew immediately what was in it; to open it would be like opening
the past. But he was waiting, and I had no choice. I was then holding my
mother's charm bracelet, the charms dangling like false promises: the
little gold baseball bat and the malachite shamrock, the windmill, the
poodle with eyes of tiny turquoise, the miniature beer stein. "How does
the saying go?" my father said. "Something old, something new . . I
thought this could be your something old."
There had been certain things I'd wanted badly in my childhood, and
instead of getting them, I'd grown up; I did not want them any longer. But
I said, "Thank you, Dad."
"Would you like me to put it on you?"
I forced a smile. "I think it'll be more special if I save it."

all out until after eleven on poker nights, and back
in our apartment, I turned on the TV. I would have called Vi to tell her
about the bracelet, but I thought she was working, which was why I was
surprised when my cellphone rang shortly before nine and her name came
up. "I just got back from meeting with a police detective," she said. "I
think they believe us."
"You're not at the restaurant tonight?"
"I called in sick. The detective was a woman, but her name is Tyler."
"When did you hear from them?"
"lust this afternoon. Come over and I'll tell you about it."
"I'm in my pajamas already."
"So?"

After a second, I said, "Okay. I'll come over."

Tyler McGillivary--had called Vi that afternoon,
she'd wanted to see Vi as soon as possible; twenty minutes later, she
was in Vi's living room. Detective McGillivary had asked her questions for
close to an hour: about Vi's life and her job, about her previous premonitions,
about the specific senses Vi was having with regard to Brady Ogden.
Detective McGillivary wanted to know how closely Vi had followed the
case, which wasn't all that closely, or if she'd ever had contact with the
Ogden family. "Did you know Brady has two brothers?" Vi said, and I
said, "Did you not know that?"
Detective McGillivary used Vi's bathroom--Vi wondered if she was
snooping--and when she emerged, she asked if Vi had time to come in to
the station. Detective McGillivary gave her a ride (it wasn't a police car she
drove, and it didn't even look like an unmarked police car; it seemed like
it was her personal car, partly because Vi saw the stub to a movie ticket on
the dashboard), and at the station, Detective McGillivary took her to a
private room. The detective went to get them coffee and returned accompanied
by two other people, both men, who obviously were also on the
police force, though Vi forgot their names and titles immediately upon
being introduced. With these men present, Detective McGillivary asked
many of the same questions she'd asked at Vi's apartment, especially the
ones about the guy Vi thought was the kidnapper and the ones about
being psychic. "You didn't say anything about me, did you?" I said.
"It came up that I have a twin."

"Did they ask if! have senses, too?" They had; I knew they had.
"I said you don't like talking about it. Which, I know, Daze, I promised
you and everything, but what would you have done? And I swear I didn't
say you were the one who came up with the name Derek. They really
weren't that interested in you."
They all were respectful toward her, Vi continued, much more than
she'd expected. The way they talked to her, it was as if she'd been a witness
to a crime and they appreciated her help. Even when she described how
Guardian had first spoken to her at Reed--here she looked at me
meaningfully--they didn't seem to be rolling their eyes.
Detective McGillivary suggested they go for a drive, and one of the men
went, too; Detective McGillivary drove, the guy sat in front, and Vi sat in
back. This time, on the backseat, Vi saw a pair of swimming goggles.
They took her past the Ogden family's house and around their neighborhood,
past the elementary school Brady Ogden had attended, and then
they drove to the apartment complex where I hadn't turned my car off,
and they sat there for a long time, maybe forty-five minutes, and talked
about different things. They were relaxed with her, Vi said; it was like they
were just hanging out, but as they were leaving, Vi abruptly felt short of
breath and heard Guardian say, "He needs your help."
"Did the detective say she'd be in touch?" I asked.
"Yeah, or that I should call her if more stuff comes to me."
"Will they tell you if they find him?"
Vi gave me a peculiar look. "They won't have to," she said. "It'll be na
tional
news."

Again. a when I'd called and left the message on the tip line, I
thought something would or should happen immediately; Brady Ogden
should be found, and the man who had abducted him should be arrested.
But the weekend passed; the last weekend before my wedding, and Vi had
neither called nor been called by Detective McGillivary. I had had no further
senses about Brady Ogden, though I'd had plenty of thoughts about
him during the hours I couldn't sleep at night--a nine-year-old boy inside
an apartment in one of those big awful buildings, with a predatory, blond
haired
man.
Jeremy and I were to leave for Mendocino on Wednesday. On Monday,
I called Vi and said, "Will you ask the detective if there's any news?"
"You ask her. Just say you're me again."
"()ur deal was that you'd talk to the police."
"But I have nothing to say to her." Didn't Vi always have something to
say? She added, "You just want this to be resolved before your wedding."
But she didn't sound mean or judgmental as she said, "Daze, there's nothing
you can do right now for Brady Ogden."

had just dumped spaghetti into a pot of boiling
water when I said, "I want us to still get married, but I think we should
cancel our wedding. I'm sorry."
He looked at me with an unfriendly expression. "Didn't we already
have this conversation?"

"Vi's been having senses about Brady Ogden, and I drove around with
her last week and she thinks she knows which building his kidnapper lives
in, which means it could be where Brady Ogden is, too, if he's still alive,
and I had a dream that the kidnapper's name is Derek, and then Vi met
with the police."
"And that changes our wedding plans how?" If I'd thought Jeremy's jaw
would drop in astonishment, it would have meant I didn't know my fiancé.
I hadn't thought this, but it still surprised me just how unruffled he was.
And his question was, in a way, a good one. But in another way, its answer
seemed self-evident. I said, "You don't think it's gross for us to have a
fancy party celebrating ourselves when a little nine-year-old boy is still
missing?"
I could see Jeremy's irritation around his mouth. We virtually never
fought, which Vi had once told me meant we weren't honest with each
other, so my familiarity with his displeasure was as its observer rather
than its inciter. Every few months, someone would royally piss him off--
a drunk guy at a Cards game who threw a cup that hit Jeremy in the head
or a mechanic at a garage who he felt had overcharged me--and in a
clipped way Jeremy would make two or three comments about what
a bottom-dwelling waste of humanity the person was, and then his ill
humor would pass.
But this was different; this time, Jeremy's displeasure was directed at
me. I le said, "Brady Ogden has been missing fOr, what, two months?"
"Almost four."
"Okay. Almost four. He's been missing for almost four months, and
during that time, we've been debating steak versus chicken, and stuffed
mushrooms versus spanakopita, and what color flowers. . . . So help me
out here in understanding--"
"I said that I'm sorry. I know how annoying this must be."
"Annoying?" Again, those almost pursed, almost amused lips, and the
strangeness of his not being my ally. "Kate, the world is a big place, and
there are always good and bad things happening at the same time. Should
we cancel our wedding because of the Iraq War? Or violence in Kosovo?"
"My sister's not directly involved in that." Then I said, "Remember
when J.F.K. Jr.'s plane went down? He was on his way to his cousin's wedding,
and the cousin called it off, but she and the guy still got married
later. They just knew that weekend wasn't the right time." The plane accident
had preoccupied me the summer it happened not only because of
how young and good-looking Kennedy had been but also because the
other passengers on his little plane had been his wife and the wife's older
sister, who was a twin. For months--even still sometimes--I'd wonder,
what was the other twin, the living twin, supposed to do after the accident?
She'd had two sisters and lost them both at the same time.
"Don't take this the wrong way," Jeremy said, "but you're not a Kennedy.
And Brady Ogden isn't your cousin. Would you know him if you
saw him on the street?"

"I definitely would."
"Maybe I'm a jerk, but I wouldn't." Jeremy folded his arms. "Here's the
thing. If we don't get married in Mendocino, I don't want to get married."
Without a doubt, this was the most shocking thing Jeremy had ever
said to me. I hadn't imagined that he'd be pleased about my decision, but
I had thought he'd let me persuade him. He'd be disappointed but he'd
understand, and perhaps even be touched by my sensitivity.
I said, "So you're willing to call off the wedding?"

"I don't want to."
"Are you afraid that people will be mad about having to cancel their
plane tickets? Even if they're not refundable, they can put the amount
toward a different ticket."

Jeremy was shaking his head. "That's not what this is about. It's about a
precedent for our life together that I don't want to set."
"Meaning what?"

"This idea you have that you'll be punished for enjoying yourself--it's
a huge bummer, Kate. You're allowed to experience ordinary pleasures,
even if you didn't get to when you were younger. You're even allowed to
have children."

"Having children and not getting married in California have nothing
to do with each other." But I felt two opposing emotions: flattery that Jeremy
had observed me so closely and betrayal that he had observed me so
closely.
"I'm just afraid that if we get married"--he paused, possibly having
jarred himself, as he'd jarred me, with that if--"that when anything bad
happens, you'll let yourself be consumed by it. You'll shelve the rest of
your life."

Was this what he believed I'd done in the past? During the witches episode
in eighth grade or after my mother's death? I said, "If you think that,
I'm not sure why you'd want to marry me in the first place."
"Besides that I love you?" We watched each other over the kitchen's
high wooden table, and he said, "The wedding is all planned. There's
hardly anything left for us to do but get on the plane."
"What if my feeling that we shouldn't get married out there isn't just
about Brady Ogden? What if we get in a car accident driving up the coast?"
Prior to this, Jeremy's anger had been dimming; it flared up again as I
spoke. He was almost clenching his teeth as he said, "Do you think that
will happen?"
"It could."

He took a step backward. "I can't let you drag us both to crazyville,
Kate. Okay? I just can't."
In a small voice, I said, "I don't think our car will crash. I just--
Sometimes its like my mind is this echo chamber."
He stepped toward me again, around the table, and set his hand on my
shoulder. "We're going to have a really nice, fun, relaxed wedding. That's
not something you need to feel guilty about."

cab to the airport because we'd be gone long enough that it
was cheaper than paying to park. Sitting together in the backseat, passing
the Dr Pepper syrup plant and the billboards for radio stations and car
dealerships, Jeremy and I didn't speak; an observer could have been forgiven
for imagining we were on our way to a funeral rather than a wedding,
and certainly it wouldn't have seemed that the wedding we were on
the way to was our own. In the airport, after we'd made it through security,
we bought lunch at separate places and ate together at our gate, still
barely talking. As the plane lifted off, I closed my eyes, and Jeremy took
my hand.
I felt a strange weightlessness, a kind of absolution. I had tried to cancel
the wedding; Jeremy had countered by saying he wouldn't marry me; not
marrying Jeremy would, clearly, be an enormous mistake. This sequence
felt neat in the way of a syllogism--it seemed to mean there was no alternative
and I was not responsible for whatever had befallen Brady Ogden,
whatever was befalling him still.
And so if I could put one foot in front of the other, if I could merely not
deviate from the path I was on, that would be enough. Though if I managed
to fake a little bridal joy, that wouldn't hurt. With my eyes still closed,
I wondered if I ought to let Jeremy off the hook, if it was unfair to go
through with marrying him. But surely I had given him an out, and he

hadn't taken it.
Now, when I look back on that plane flight, besides remembering the pall over 
what should have been a festive time, what I'm most struck
by is how unencumbered we were--physically unencumbered, I mean.
We were two adults sitting in our seats, dozing, reading, sipping soda. Did
we have any idea how soon there would be little bodies squirming against
our chests, grabbing our hands, bleating and whining, wanting to eat or
be entertained? I'd thought back then that I needed to be vigilant, but
what was my vigilance for? It was only practice.
Or maybe I am being disingenuous--if I borrowed problems then,
maybe I am borrowing them still. Maybe I have always been, as Vi would
subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself then
looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.

in California: the change of scenery and the fact that the
scenery was so pretty, the deep blue sky and green hills, the glittering
water and crashing waves. We arrived in Mendocino around dinnertime
and walked to town from the inn, ate at a restaurant that seated us on a
patio with little white lights woven into the trellis beside our table, and
split a bottle of wine. We spoke more, but still solemnly--mostly about
the logistics of the next few days. Jeremy ordered an after-dinner cognac,
and we were both already buzzed as we returned to the room, where we
found champagne in an ice bucket and two flutes awaiting us, compliments
of the inn's staff. Without consulting me, Jeremy opened the
champagne--the cork hit the ceiling, the liquid foamed out in a way he
did nothing to stop, instead letting it spill onto the carpet--and poured us
both a glass. He passed one to me and said, "To us," and we clinked.
"This is good," I said, and he said, "It's amazing what they throw in
when you spend a mere twenty thousand."

We got halfway through the bottle, sitting up side by side on the thick
white comforter of the king-sized bed with our backs against the pillows,
and then he took my glass out of my hand, set it on the floor, and rolled
onto me. His mouth was over mine, and he was pulling at my clothes, and
when I was naked, his teeth were on my nipples, his fingers inside me, and
after a few minutes, he withdrew his fingers and slid into me, rocking his
hips against mine; I gripped his arms above the elbows. We finished at the
same time, and instead of pulling out, he just lay there, still inside me, and
I could feel the trickle of liquid between us. After a minute, I said, "I'm
glad you're making me marry you."


d the following day--Jeremy's two sets of par
ents,
his brother and brother's wife and their two children, plus Vi and my
father and Patrick. "I seriously almost puked on the drive in," Vi said as we
stood outside the main entrance of the inn in the cooling late afternoon.
"You didn't tell me the roads were so twisty."
"Have you heard from the detective?"
She shook her head.
Jeremy had made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant, which seated us
at a big round table with a lazy Susan in the middle, and it was seeing
people interact from such separate parts of my life, of the life Jeremy and I
now had together, that made me understand for the first time that a wedding
was more than a party where you got married--that I had indeed
been too literal in gauging whether it was worth the expense. Jeremy's
sister-in-law, Meg, was laughing uproariously with Patrick, and Vi and
Jeremy's mother were talking intently about something, and my father
was very earnestly drawing a picture of a tractor for Eddie, Jeremy's 
threeyear-old
nephew.
This feeling of enlargement, of random and merry reconstitutions of
our friends and family, continued as people kept arriving the next day:
Meg and my friend Janet in the pool together with their children, Jeremy's
friend Cockroach tossing a Frisbee with Patrick and Jeremy's grad school
adviser on the lawn in front of the inn. All the guests, which was still only
twenty people because a handful wouldn't arrive until Saturday, were invited
to the rehearsal dinner on a terrace behind the inn. Jeremy's divorced
mother and father gave a joint toast about how wonderful Jeremy was and
how thrilled they were that he was marrying me, and after they sat down,
my father rose, and embarrassment clutched me; was it some breach of
protocol for him to speak when he wasn't paying for any of the wedding?
But no one besides Jeremy and me knew, I reminded myself. "I've never
been terrific at expressing my feelings," my father said. "But Daisy and her
sister used to like to sing and dance, and this is a song I want to sing in
their honor." It was "The Way You Look Tonight," and he sang without
musical accompaniment, and for several seconds I was horrified. Plus,
he'd just called me Daisy. But his voice, which had been a little thin to
start, thickened--my father had always had a good voice--and at some
point the song transformed from unbearable to charming. For the rest of
the weekend and long after, my father's toast was often mentioned by our
guests as the wedding's highlight.
Following dinner, the older generation and the parents of young children
returned to their rooms and the rest of us sat around on big outdoor
couches--Vi and Patrick were intertwined in a nearby hammock in a way
that I was glad my father wasn't awake to see, because it could only have
confused him--and someone from the inn turned on two patio heaters,
and I had that feeling, with the cool, sweet-smelling night air and the
warmth of the heaters, of being inside a Christmas carol. This was the moment
when I decided that instead of giving my father an excuse later on, I
would wear my mother's charm bracelet after all. I had packed it at the last
minute, and really, there was no reason not to.

It was one o'clock when Jeremy and I returned to our room; we weren't
avoiding each other the night before our wedding, and he'd already seen
my dress, hanging in a clear plastic bag in our coat closet in St. Louis for
the last five months. He was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, and I was
already in bed, when there was a knock on the door. I startled--after
wanting so badly for Brady Ogden to be found, I now just wanted not to
think of him, for his existence to be suspended until we got through the
ceremony the next afternoon--and when I looked through the peephole,
my fears were not allayed; it was Vi in the hall.
But when I opened the door, she was grinning. "I'm here to kidnap
you." An expression of alarm crossed my face, I knew, because she said,
"Sorry, bad word choice. I'm here to squire you away."
"Why?"

"It's a surprise."

"That can't wait until tomorrow?"
"If you must know, I'm throwing you a bachelorette party. It's only
going to last five minutes, but it'll be the best bachelorette party ever. You
thought I didn't know the maid of honor's supposed to do that, didn't you?" She 
was clearly pleased with herself.
I called, "Jeremy, I'm going with Vi for a second."
He opened the bathroom door, his toothbrush in his mouth. "Now?"
"Hi, Jeremy," Vi said. "She'll be back before you know it, so don't worry
your pretty little head."
I let her lead me down the hall and around the corner to her own room,
and she did the shave-and-a-haircut knock on the door, then followed it
herself with the two bits. Then she turned the knob, and when we walked
in, a gaggle of women whisper-shouted, "Surprise!" I saw that they were
my almost-sister-in-law, Meg; my almost-mother-in-law, Carol; my friend
Janet; and Patrick, who apparently was an honorary woman, or maybe he
was just there because he and Vi were sharing the room. Along the dresser,
Vi had lined up six shot glasses of something pink, and she began passing
them out as Patrick set a plastic tiara on my head; I was still, of course,
wearing pajamas. "What is this?" asked Carol, and Vi said, "Bridal ambrosia.
Everyone on the count of three?" She counted down, and, somewhat
to my astonishment, all six of us threw back the liquid. It was vodka,
I was pretty sure, mixed with lemonade. "That wasn't nearly as disgusting

as I anticipated," Carol said.
Vi was holding an ice bucket against her hip, and she said, "So I have an
announcement. I couldn't find a male stripper to come to the hotel, which
I know will really disappoint Kate."
Meg said, "You're telling me I woke up in the middle of the night for no
stripper? I feel cheated!"
"Here's the good news." Vi dug one hand into the ice bucket. "Look
what I did find--penis confetti!" She flung a fistful at me, she began flinging
it at the other women, and sure enough, when I glanced down at a
piece that had landed on my upper arm, I saw that it was a tiny, glittering
yellow penis. At one end was the rounded tip, and at the other end were
heart-shaped balls; the other penises were pink and blue and green, and
they all glittered, too. "Kate, on behalf of the female species, congratulations
on getting married. May Jeremy's penis always appear as sparkly to
you in the years to come as it does right now." She looked around, grinning
lewdly. "Okay, everyone, the party's over. Go back to your rooms."
d a half before the ceremony, Janet was doing my
makeup--I was sitting in a chair we'd pulled into the bathroom, facing
the sink, and she was standing--when Vi burst in and shouted, "They
found him! This morning, they found him, and the dude who took him is
in police custody."
I was barefoot but already wearing my wedding dress, with an old
T-shirt over it. (When my makeup and hair were finished, Janet would cut
the shirt off me with scissors, which was a trick the professional makeup
artist she'd hired for her own wedding had taught her.) I leapt up, and Vi
and I embraced, and I said, "I can't believe it," and Vi said, "I know! Holy
shit, right?"
"Found who?" Janet said.

Vi and I both were quiet--Vi was deferring to me, if only because it was
my wedding day--and then I said, "Brady Ogden."
Janet appeared confused. "Do you guys know him?"
After a pause, I said, "No, but we've followed the case really closely."
"I couldn't." Janet was shaking her head. "Too depressing."
I sat back down in the chair, and Vi hoisted herself onto the marble
counter by the sink. I could feel the energy coming off her, the excitement,
and I desperately wanted to ask what else the detective had told her. I settled
on saying, "Do they know how he is?"
"Well, alive," Vi said. "So that's a start. The guy, the kidnapper"--she
was speaking slowly, choosing carefully what to say and eyeing me--"he
works in a copy store. It's on New Ballas Road."
"Ew, a grown man kidnapped him?" Janet said. "That's so sick. The
poor kid will be messed up forever."

"No," Vi said quickly. "People recover."
Before Vi had entered the bathroom, Janet had been applying foundation
to my face with a triangular white sponge, and she resumed rubbing it
across my cheeks. I could tell she was offended, that she believed she'd been
scolded by Vi. I said, "Vi, you remember the photographer is expecting
family members outside by the flagpole at four o'clock, don't you? Maybe
you should go take a shower." But then--because Janet was only my friend while 
Vi was my sister--I added, "But I agree. People do recover."

was to imagine, that afternoon in the bathroom, that if I
could conceal Vi's involvement in the discovery of Brady Ogden, I could
conceal her senses altogether; how naive to merely imagine I could conceal
her involvement. It wasn't Detective McGillivary who had called Vi
the day of my wedding to tell her Brady had been found. It was Vi's friend
Jocelyn, with whom Vi was in the meditation group, and the news was
apparently all over St. Louis. When she spoke to reporters, Detective
McGillivary never said the break in the case was a tip from a local psychic.
But Vi told her New Age friends about having talked to the police, and
they told their friends, and soon she began to get calls from people she
didn't know who wanted her to perform readings. The first few times, she
did it for free, and Jeremy was the one who told her she ought to charge,
which is to say perhaps he's complicit, too, in everything that eventually
happened.
Intermittently--when Derek Smith was indicted, then went on trial,
then was convicted of kidnapping and child molestation and began serving
a life sentence--there would be flare-ups, recapitulations of the story
of what Brady Ogden had been through, and Vi would complain that
she'd missed her due. Yet within less than a year after Brady had been
found, Vi was able to support herself just by holding readings. Increasingly,
she held group sessions; there was, it turned out, more of a market
for the lower-priced ones and, on occasion, she hosted them for bachelorette
parties. What really surprised me was that she had a few corporate
clients, including a regional burger chain and a real estate firm; she had to
sign confidentiality agreements before she started working with them, but
of course she told me anyway.
She once said to me, "So it never bothers you at all that the cops gave us
no credit for finding Brady?"
This is one of the most confusing parts of life: that even when con fronted 
with an amplitude of evidence, we find it impossible to believe
that others want what we don't or don't want what we do. The expression
on my face must have been one of incredulity, because Vi said, "Right,
right. I forgot who I was talking to."

my wedding that well, which I think isn't particularly
unusual; all I really recall is the sensation of time unspooling more
happily and also more quickly than ever before or since. I hadn't put much
stock in the idea of a wedding being the best day of one's life, but I would
say that for me, it was. The days on which my children were born have
been more consequential and, certainly, joyous in their ways, but delivering
a baby hurts, whereas a wedding can just be fun.
During the brief ceremony, the ocean sparkled below the cliff; exchanging
our vows, with their familiar cadences, was like joining the club of
adulthood. For the reception, the inn had decorated the tables with pale
blue cloths and dark blue napkins and shiny wineglasses, with vases of
delphiniums and cornflowers, and after a first dance with Jeremy and a
second dance with my father, I danced third with Vi. We danced to "You
May Be Right," and I could feel the guests being reminded of, being tickled
by, our twinness. There was a moment when Billy Joel, via Patrick's
iPod, was singing, and Vi and I found our faces close together, both of us
flushed, me in my white strapless dress and her in her pink sheath (she was
already barefoot, though she had indeed worn flats for the ceremony), and
she said, "Did you know Dad wants to give me the down payment to buy
a house? He must feel guilty for spending so much on your wedding." And
then we'd danced apart, so maybe she didn't hear what I said next, though
I actually meant it. I said, "That's great."

11 1part of my wedding I remember clearly: that after the pho
tographer
took family pictures before the ceremony, Jeremy and his

brother went to stand beside the cliff where the justice of the peace had
taken his place; that Vi walked down the short aisle formed between white
folding chairs; and that then, on my father's arm, accompanied by no
music except the wind, wearing no jewelry except my mother's charm
bracelet, I followed her. And there Jeremy was with the sky behind him, in
khaki pants and a navy blazer and a green tie, and I thought with amazement
that he was a surprise again, though I'd seen him less than five minutes
before: the man who was about to become my husband, waiting for
me to become his wife.
,11c1", ;211.!If
hanging in their rooms--Owen's featured the alphabet with animals
clinging to various letters, and Rosie's was a drawing of a little girl walking
on a beach--and I had removed them and stored them in their closets the
day after Vi made her prediction. It wasn't until the morning of Tuesday,
October 13, that I waited until Jeremy had left for work, inserted Owen
into the baby carrier, started Dora the Explorer for Rosie to watch in the
living room, and walked around the house taking everything else down
from the walls: the large black-and-white photo of mountains over the
fireplace, and the mirror close to the front door; the painting in the dining
room that we'd bought at an art fair; the three pictures from our wedding
hung in a row by the staircase.
After I'd carried the wall hangings to the basement, I took the standing
lamp next to the living room couch down there, too, and the smaller lamp
on the end table. I didn't touch the chandelier in the dining room or the
track lighting in the kitchen, not because they didn't pose a threat but
because they were too much trouble; also it seemed a little extreme, even
for me, to sit around in darkness for the next three days. As if preparing to
move, I pulled the glasses and dishes from the kitchen cabinets, wrapped
them in newspaper, and stacked them in cardboard boxes. Our TV wasn't
flat-screen, so my plan was to just lift it off the table and set it on the 
floor
on the night of the fifteenth.
When Kendra arrived to babysit, I was making a list for Target. Rosie
jumped into Kendra's arms and said with great excitement, "Kendra wants
to play with Play-Doh."
"I would love to play with Play-Doh," Kendra said as she carried Rosie
from the front door into the living room.
I'd considered texting Kendra to warn her about Rosie's split lip but
neglected to do it. Jeremy, upon arriving home from work the previous

afternoon, had looked at Rosie and said, "Yeesh." Then he'd lifted her up,

spun her around, and said, "I hope you showed the other guy what's what."
He'd glanced at me. "Don't beat yourself up. This stuff happens."
In the morning, the once-bloody area between Rosie's upper lip and
nose was a dark yellow gooey patch, and I murmured to Jeremy, "She has

a Hitler mustache."
Jeremy murmured back, "I think the comparison you want is Charlie
Chaplin."
Yet again, in advance of Kendra's arrival, I'd pretended to myself that
I'd leave both Rosie and Owen with her, and yet again, seeing Rosie's delight
in Kendra's presence, I decided to let my daughter have the sitter all
to herself. This was how I ended up driving to Target with Owen, and at
the checkout I realized I'd forgotten our reusable bags in the trunk of the
car, which was what I usually did. The cashier was a middle-aged black
woman who said to Owen, "Hi there, Mr. Man. You're a good-looking Mr.

Man, aren't you?"
As I laid our purchases on the conveyor belt, she said to me, "I bet you
were looking for the bottled water, but soon as we get a new shipment, we
sell out again."
"I got some before today," I said, though in fact I had planned to buy
more and had uneasily taken note of the empty shelves. But I'd been most

intent on stocking up on paper plates and cups, now that all of ours were
boxed, and I'd succeeded in finding these.
"You know what?" The woman leaned toward me, as if confiding. "I
figure when my time is up, my time is up. It's not for me to question the
good Lord's plan. Now, I live alone, so I've got no one but myself to worry
about. My youngest baby is twenty-eight years old. If! had a little one
under my roof, sure, I'd buy some bottled water. Sure I would."
I had to pass her my credit card after I'd run it through the machine,
and she looked at the front of it, then at me; this might have been the first
time she was really taking in my face. And then she made that whistling
noise people make when they're impressed, though not necessarily by
something good. She said, "Girl, if you aren't the spitting image of that
psychic!"

A t-g,u, w stopped by the Galleria, where I bought sneakers--
even if the earthquake didn't occur, and I didn't need to walk across a
broken city while pushing a stroller, my old pair had gotten worn out--
and the fountain on the Galleria's first floor delighted Owen. By the time
we left, it was a few minutes after noon and I was craving a hamburger. In
the parking lot, I looked at Owen in the rearview mirror; he'd pulled a
sock-clad foot up to his mouth and was sucking away. I leaned into the
backseat and removed his sock--if he was going to suck his toes, he might
as well enjoy them without a barrier--and I said, "Should we go out for a
lunch date, then home for a nap? Is that a good plan for Mommy and
Owen?"

I decided we'd head to Blueberry Hill, a St. Louis landmark where an
eighty-something-year-old Chuck Berry still performed regularly, though
I'd never been to see him until Jeremy bought tickets for us shortly after
we started dating. I carried Owen inside in his car seat; he still wasn't
quite big enough for a restaurant high chair. "Seat yourself," a bartender in 
the front told me, and I turned right, into a large room with booths,
tables and chairs, arcade video games, a pinball machine, and lots of music
paraphernalia--framed concert posters and albums and covers of Rolling
Stone--plus random knickknacks like Simpsons figurines and lava lamps.
I slid Owen's car seat across the bench in an empty booth and sat down next to 
him. When the waiter brought water, I said, "I already know what
I want: a hamburger cooked medium." I paused. "And fries." After a second
pause, I said, "And what kind of beer do you have on tap?"
"We've got an Oktoberfest that's kind of malty and--"
"Perfect," I said.
"Lettuce, tomato, or onions?"
"Yes," I said. "All of them."
When the waiter was gone, I groped under the table, where I'd set the
diaper bag, and found Owen's orange star rattle. I had just given it to him
when I felt a hand on my back, and I turned and discovered that Jeremy
was standing next to the booth and that Courtney Wheeling was standing

beside him.
"Kate?" Jeremy seemed surprised but genuinely pleased to see me. He
leaned in to kiss my forehead, then kissed Owen's as well. "When we
walked in, I thought, Wow, that baby looks like Owen," he said. "And then
I was like, And that woman is wearing Kate's vest." Jeremy and Courtney
were dressed professionally: Jeremy in a jacket and tie and Courtney in a
pantsuit. "Can we join you?" He gestured to the bench opposite Owen and
me, and then, just before Jeremy slid in, he exchanged a look with Courtney
in which I could have sworn he was apologizing to her. Are you fucking
kidding me? I thought. Was the apology because I was Vi's sister or because
of the tension during our pizza dinner? Or was it because now, with
me present, they wouldn't be able to talk about, say, lunar radar altimetry
and instead would have to discuss potty training?
"Don't tell me Hank's about to walk in with Rosie and Amelia," Courtney
said. Her tone was warm, as if this possibility would delight her, but I
didn't trust her. In fact, although this wasn't fair of me, just a week after
her abortion, I found her normalness, even cheerfulness, jarring.
I said, "Not that I know of. Rosie's actually with a sitter."
Jeremy nodded toward Owen. "Why isn't he?"
A lie presented itself, and I seized it. "He was fussing when I was about
to leave, but I knew he'd calm down in the car."
"You decided not to get a manicure?" Jeremy seemed disappointed.
"I needed to run errands," I said.
Jeremy made a mock-scolding face at Owen, waving his index finger.
"This is supposed to be Mama's downtime, 0. This isn't your time with
her." With the handle of the rattle jammed in his mouth, Owen beamed.
"Pass him over here," Jeremy said. Though I'd been considering saying
that I was finished eating --it' I'd thought I could get away with changing
my order to takeout and secretly waiting for it up at the bar, I would
have--I went ahead and unbuckled Owen, pulled him from the car seat,
and handed him across the table.

This was when the waiter materialized, carrying my rather large glass
of beer. An expression of alarm flashed across Jeremy's face, an expression
he took care to eliminate before saying in a neutral tone, "What kind is
that?"

I hadn't yet taken a sip, but I nudged the glass toward him. "An Oktoberfest
special. Want to try it?"

As Jeremy took a sip, Courtney said, "God, that looks good," and he
passed it on to her, an act that somehow contained the intimacy of their
sharing a glass rather than her drinking from mine. After she'd swallowed,
she said to the waiter, "I'll take one, too."
"Then make it three," Jeremy said. "I can't be outdrunk by two girls,
can I?"

The waiter took their food order--a chicken sandwich for Jeremy and
red beans and rice for Courtney, the virtuous vegetarian--and after he
had left again, Courtney said good-naturedly to Jeremy, "Did you really
just call Kate and me girls? I think that was the most sexist thing I've ever
heard you say."

Jeremy laughed, and I felt a strong desire for him not to apologize to
Courtney. Not that he necessarily was going to, but before he could, I said,
"So do you guys come here a lot?"

They both laughed before looking at each other--I then felt an antipathy
for Courtney so intense that it was hard not to believe it hadn't been
there all along--and Jeremy said, "That sounded like the classic pick-up
line. You come here often? I guess I've been a couple times with Schwartz
and Marcus, but we've never been together, have we?" He glanced at
Courtney, lowering his eyebrows as if trying to recall information, and I
thought, Stop looking at each other!
My plea worked, or at least Jeremy turned back toward me. He said, "So
what errands were you running?"
I'd once read an article about a study showing that the stereotype of men
not liking to date or marry smart women was false; men were line dating
and marrying smart women, just as long as the men were smarter. She can
have her master's, the article had said, as long as he has his PhD. And maybe
I was flattering myself that I was, by anyone's definition, smart--after all,
I'd never earned a master's--but the article had made me uncomfortable.
Because was this what I was in Jeremy's eyes: his sweet, tedious wife, with
whom he had conversations about what had been on sale at Target? And
then I wondered, was part of the reason Jeremy was insisting on going to
Denver so that he could spend time there with Courtney?
I had never been gripped by such insecurity. I said, "Well, we just came
from the mall, but I'll spare you the boring details. Owen was really into

the fountain."
"I hope not literally," Jeremy said.
"Wait, you think it was irresponsible of me to let him go swimming?"
Jeremy laughed politely, and Courtney said, "Speaking of which, I
think I've convinced Hank that we should go to Hawaii for Thanksgiving."
Looking at me, she said, "To a resort where Julia Roberts supposedly
stayed with her family. Ooh la la."
The salient piece of information here seemed to be that the Wheelings
wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving at our house, though they had for
the last two years. And it wasn't that I'd have hoped they would, if I'd
thought about it, but there was a kind of double snub from Courtney in
not acknowledging that we'd shared the holiday in the past.
"You get your own cottage with a kitchen, so you don't have to eat every
meal out," she was saying. "And they give surf lessons right on the hotel

beach. Fun, right?"
"I guess if you go for that kind of thing," Jeremy said. "We prefer the
glamour of November in Missouri, right, Kate?" At that moment, my exciting
and embarrassing burger and fries arrived.
"Go ahead and start," Jeremy said. "I'll give 0 back to you when mine

comes."
The waiter brought their meals a few minutes later, but Jeremy kept
holding Owen, even when I offered to put him in the car seat; Jeremy took
me up on the offer only after I'd finished. Somehow, the food made things
normal, or normal-ish, among us. Yes, I no longer liked Courtney, and
yes, she and Jeremy were sitting on the same side of the booth together,
even though I was married to Jeremy and Courtney wasn't, but our conversation
stopped seeming quite as fraught and off-kilter. By unspoken
agreement, none of us mentioned Vi or her prediction--not that I was in
the mood to defend Vi anyway, given how she'd stormed out of our house
the day before.

Eventually, Owen, bless his heart, really did begin to fuss, and I was
able to leave without it seeming weird. I didn't pay first, because Jeremy
would cover my portion. "Tell Hank I say hi," Courtney called as I carried
Owen's car seat out.
At home, I took Owen right up to his room, nursed him, and put him
down, then returned to the living room to pay Kendra before she left.
Rosie walked with us to the front door and grabbed at Kendra's hand.
"Kendra wants to stay," she said.

"Kendra does want to stay," Kendra said. "But I have to go to class, and
I think it's time for you to take a nap. Will you let me come back next
week?"

By which point an earthquake would or wouldn't have happened, I
thought. By which point was it unrealistic to hope that regular life
might have returned? As a child, when Christmas or my birthday--our
birthday--was approaching, I'd note the expiration dates on cottage
cheese containers or cartons of orange juice and feel excitement if the
date fell after the one I was anticipating. I experienced a darker version of
this urgency as I closed the door behind Kendra: Let these days pass
quickly. Please, please, just let them pass.

A ItRosie into letting me apply Neosporin, then put
her down for her nap, our home phone rang, and when I saw that it was
Jeremy, I simultaneously felt relief and a gamey, adolescent temptation not
to pick up. But then what? I'd want to talk to him in an hour, and he'd be
teaching.
"I know that was weird," he said when I answered. "But it wasn't weird
for the reason you think it was."
"What's the reason I think?"
"Well, Courtney and I aren't having an affair," he said, and honestly,
tears pooled in my eyes--idiotic tears, because Jeremy was so nice and I
was so ridiculous--and he added, "Kate, if I ever cheat on you, I won't be
sneaking away to Blueberry Hill for my adulterous lunches." In a more
serious tone, he said, "When we ran into you, Courtney had just told me
about her abortion. As in, about a second before I saw you. She even asked
me if I knew, if Hank had told you, and I lied and said no, which felt really
fucked up. And then we see you and Owen and--well, you know the rest.
It was awkward all around, but it had nothing to do with you."
I did feel assuaged; in fact, I felt humiliated by my lack of trust in Jer
emy.
"How did she seem about the whole thing?" I asked.
"We barely ended up talking about it. She brought it up a little after you
left, just saying it's been a rough few weeks, but she didn't say much."
"I'm starting to think Courtney's more like a man than a woman," I
said. "The way she keeps her feelings to herself."
Jeremy didn't reply immediately, and I wondered if he was checking his
email, but when he spoke again, I knew he wasn't. He said, "I don't like it

that she doesn't know Hank told you. If he eventually does tell her, she'll

realize I was lying today. But more than that, what's he doing confiding in
you and withholding information from his own wife?"
Was Jeremy subject to the same spasms of jealousy about my friendship
with Hank that I was to his friendship with Courtney? This dynamic had
always seemed so obvious and expected--so retro, even--that I think
we'd all imagined it was beneath us. But now that it turned out it wasn't,
was it pathetic that I found Jeremy's jealousy, if that's what it was, reassur
ing
and flattering?
"Maybe he's scared of her," I said.
"Of Courtney?" Jeremy's tone implied that the suggestion was silly.
"I'm kind of scared of her," I said, and he laughed.
"No, you're not. How's Rosie?"
"They're both sleeping."
There was a pause, and I knew Jeremy was about to turn back to his
work. Beyond the general sense I had of him teaching, meeting with stu dents 
and colleagues, and dipping into his own research when he could,
his days were mysterious to me, though in some ways my own days were
mysterious to me, too; in the late afternoon or evening, I often struggled
to recall how it was I'd spent the time. I said, "In case you're wondering, I
don't usually drink beer for lunch."
"I was a little surprised." His voice was mild; he wouldn't have asked if
I hadn't brought it up.

"It was an impulse order. I think the last time I had beer before five P.M. was 
tailgating in college."

"Kate, the hard-partying sorority sister--it kills me I never got to meet
her."

"I wasn't that hard-partying," I said. "You didn't miss much." Then I
said, "See you when you get home."

"I love you, Greenie," Jeremy said, and I said, "I love you, too."

rRn ck kit) the door came around eight forty-five, when Jeremy
and I were finished with our ice cream but still watching TV. We looked at
each other quizzically, and I said, "If it's a reporter, maybe we should call
the police." I'd have preferred for Jeremy not even to check who it was, but
we were right there in the living room, with the lights and television on.
He got up, opened the door just a little, and said, "Can I help you?" I
could tell that he didn't know who it was but also didn't consider the person
threatening.

"Sorry to bother you," a female voice said. "I'm here to see Daisy. I
didn't know-- I know you have kids, so I thought maybe after they went
to bed was a better time--"

"Does my wife know you?" Jeremy asked. This--my wife--was his way
of handling the Daisy-Kate confusion. He never called me Daisy.
I went to the door myself and said, "Hi, Marisa."
"Sorry," she said. "I just--I couldn't find your phone number, and I
didn't know when you'd be around, and who knows what will happen
Friday, so I thought it would be better if I came before. How's your little
girl?"
"She's fine." I was incapable of sounding as distant, as coolly neutral, as
Jeremy, though of course Marisa was a stranger to him. She'd never held
power over him, not in middle school or at any other time. And it was so
clear that Marisa wanted to enter our house, that she wanted something, which 
gave her an air of neediness. "Would you like to come in?" I heard
myself say. To Jeremy, I said, "This is Marisa Mazarelli. We went to school
together." To Marisa, I said, "My husband, Jeremy."
She sat in the armchair, and Jeremy and I returned to sitting side by side
on the couch. She was wearing another professional outfit: shiny brown
pants, a sheer white blouse, and a brown jacket. She took the jacket off,
folding it in her lap, and I saw that her blouse was sleeveless and her upper
arms were very skinny. She gestured toward our frozen TV screen and
said, "I won't keep you. It's just, yesterday, seeing you in the park, it was
like fate. Because you know that guy I was with?"

I nodded.
"That's Ryan. And it's on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again--it's
been seven years. We've been this close to getting engaged--" She held her
thumb and index finger a few centimeters apart. "I mean, he has the ring.
He keeps it in his sock drawer, which is basically an invitation for me to
find it. Hello, I'm not an idiot! And there was this time we'd more or less
decided to get engaged, we were going on vacation to Miami, but we got in
a big fight there, and the whole trip was a disaster. And that was two years

ago."
Was she waiting for me to speak, or was there more? Next to me, I could

feel in Jeremy a vague amusement.
"We don't live together," Marisa added. "Our places are around the corner
from each other, but a long time ago, I was like, I'm not taking it to the
next level unless there's a ring on my finger. Why would he pay for the cow
and all that, but look where it's gotten me."
This time, she was obviously expecting me to speak. I said, "That

sounds hard."
"I'm just wondering, is he going to propose? Ever? Or is he stringing me

along?"
I 14:It lOolish that it had taken me until this moment to understand
where she was headed. "Oh, I don't do that anymore," I said. "I can't. I
haven't been able to for--a while." The quality of Jeremy's attention was
shifting; he was watching me with an interest he'd been unable to muster
for Marisa, and he must have assumed I was lying.
"I'm not saying, like, how many children will we have or will they be
boys or girls." Marisa laughed in a bitter way. "Just, do I stick it out with
him or do I give up? Because after seven years--I was twenty-eight when
we started going out, and I'll be thirty-five in April. And for a woman,
thirty-five's a major cutoff."
"It's not that I don't want to help you," I said. "I really can't. Vi is the one
who still does this, but I don't." Would it be karmic justice for Marisa to
have to pay Vi for her insights, or was it unfair to inflict Marisa on Vi even
when I was mad at my sister? It was possible, I thought, that Vi would find
it more gratifying than I did to encounter this pleading, needy version of
Marisa. I added, "But if you get in touch with her, you should wait until
after this Friday."

"Are you kidding?" Marisa said. "We're getting the hell out of town
tomorrow. Aren't you?"

She was actually the first person I knew who was leaving St. Louis because
of Vi's prediction, and although it felt like her plans ought to have been 
proof of something to Jeremy, he wouldn't see it that way. "No," I
said. "I don't think we are."
"But what if you and your kids get trapped under rubble? Aren't you
scared?"

"We're taking precautions," I said.
"Why don't you ask Ryan about getting married?" Jeremy said then.
"Ask him what you're asking us." Even if he was only trying to change the
subject, there was something decidedly surreal about my kind, sensible,
good-looking husband giving romantic advice to my adolescent nemesis.
Jeremy added, "Be clear about what you want, and if Ryan doesn't want
the same thing, dump him. Plenty of people get married after the age of
thirty-five." He patted my thigh. "I was thirty-four, and look how lucky I
got.
Marisa squinted at Jeremy. Was she noticing that my husband was
good-looking, or was she too mired in her own self-absorption? She said,
"I bet you're not from St. Louis."
"Northern Virginia," Jeremy said.
"Yeah, see, if you're from somewhere else, that's why you think thirty
five isn't old. But for here, it is. Trust me." She turned back to me. "I don't
understand how you can just not be psychic anymore. Isn't that like losing

your sense of smell?"
I shook my head. "Yeah, I'm not sure why." If she thought I was going
to explain, let alone apologize, she was mistaken.
She glanced around the living room, and I could feel her energy adjusting
itself. She hadn't gotten what she wanted, and we weren't being solicitous
enough that she'd feel welcome just to settle in and chat, or at least I
hoped she wouldn't. "You took stuff off your walls, huh?" she said. "I'm
really surprised that you're not leaving town." And it was only then, after
it became apparent that it wouldn't happen, that I realized I'd been expecting
an apology from her. I would have accepted it graciously, unfussily;
I wouldn't have made her grovel. I'm sorry I was such an awful person
when we were growing up, she'd have said, and I'd have said, Don't worry.
It was a long time ago.
"We'll be fine," Jeremy said.
Marisa was standing, pulling on her jacket over her skinny arms, lifting
her hair around the jacket's collar. She looked at me. "You should move
back to Kirkwood. It's such a good place to raise kids." Then she withdrew
a phone from her black leather purse and said, "Tell me your number
and I'll text you mine, so if anything pops into your head, you can

reach me."
She was loathsome; she was just as unrepentant, just as much of a user,
as she'd always been. And of course I gave her my number--the number
for my cellphone, which somehow seemed like it would limit her ability to
infiltrate my family's life more than giving her our home number would.
I never wanted her to come back. If she did, I would think of a way to prevent
her from walking inside.
After closed the door behind her, Jeremy said, "Wow."
"Wow that she's leaving town or wow about the boyfriend?"
"The smartest thing poor Ryan can do is run really far and really fast in
the other direction."

So Jeremy preferred not to discuss the fact that Marisa was heeding Vi's
warning; he would have if I'd forced the subject, but I wasn't going to. I
wasn't leaving it alone because it didn't bother me, however. I was leaving
it alone because hearing about what a rotten couple Marisa and Ryan
were, I wanted us to be better. At the least, I wanted us not to be experiencing
discord currently. And so I said, "In her defense, two years of the
ring in the sock drawer has to be a mindfuck."
"That's what she gets for being a snoop," Jeremy said. I had walked
from the door back to the couch, where he was still sitting, and he pulled
me onto his lap. "You know what her punishment is for tormenting you
way back when?" he said.

I looked at him.

He said, "Her punishment is being her."

Rut thuunraveled between Jeremy and me; they unraveled
the next morning. Rosie refused to eat the oatmeal Jeremy had fixed, and
she was still at the table when I came downstairs. When I entered the
kitchen, she said, "Rosie gets up with Mama."
"She's had about two bites," Jeremy said. Owen was on the kitchen floor
banging a spatula against the linoleum squares.
I took a seat beside Rosie and, after much wheedling, got her to eat half
the bowl; I was the one holding the spoon, which I was fairly sure I
shouldn't still have been doing for an almost-three-year-old. Then I wolfed
down a banana, washed my hands, and when I reached for the Neosporin,
which I'd been keeping on top of the refrigerator, Rosie screamed, "No
medicine! No Rosie medicine!"
"It helps keep your boo-boo clean. Mama will just put on a little."
"No medicine!"
She was twisting away, pushing at me when I tried to get closer, and I
said to Jeremy, "Can you hold her arms?" This was how we'd done it the night 
before.
He did, and I gripped her chin with one hand and dabbed on the antibiotic
while she continued to flail her head. When I finished, she was sobbing.
I lifted her from her booster seat, and she clung to me as I carried her
into the living room. Jeremy followed us with Owen, and after he'd set
Owen on the floor by the shelf, Jeremy said, "Okay if I go pack?"
"Hold on." I hadn't planned to say it; I just did. "I don't want you to go

to Denver."
Jeremy's expression was sympathetic. "I know you don't."
"No," I said. "I mean, please don't go. Fine if you never believed I'm
psychic, but"--here my words turned into sobs--"but I need you to stay.

I need you here."
"What's Mama saying?" Rosie said, and I sniffed and blinked, trying to
straighten out my crumpled face.
"We're talking about Daddy's job," I said.
Jeremy perched on the arm of the chair and said, "Let's break this down.
What are your specific concerns? Because I think we can work around

them."
"My concern is that we have two young children, and I'm worried about

their safety."
"No, I know you are. And let's face it, it's challenging enough to take
care of them on a good day with both of us here. But what if we get your
dad to come in for a couple hours each morning, Kendra comes in a couple
hours at night--or you could have your dad sleep here, give him our bed,
and you sleep downstairs, if you just want another adult in the house."
"Jeremy, I want you here! You're my husband." I was probably terrifying
Rosie, and possibly Owen, too. I said, "My dad would be a burden as much
as a help, and you know it. He'll give Owen pennies to play with."
Jeremy looked genuinely pained. "This whole situation sucks," he said.
"Don't think that I don't realize how hard it's been for you." At some point
in graduate school or as a new professor, had Jeremy been required to take
a seminar on negotiating? Because that's what it felt like, like he was very
diplomatically preparing me not to get what I wanted from him. And sure
enough, he added, "But I can't skip this conference just because we have young 
kids."
"I don't see why not," I said. "I did quit my job to take care of them."
His expression became incrementally less sympathetic. "Voluntarily,"
he said.

"Because I thought it was in the best interest of our family."
"Well, I guarantee that putting my job at risk isn't in our family's best
interest."

"Give me a break, Jeremy. Even if you didn't have tenure, skipping one
conference would not be putting your job at risk. And everyone knows
conferences are mostly schmoozing in the hotel bar."
Jeremy's jaw had tightened. "Which can have a direct effect on things
like what journals you get published in. It's all interconnected."
At this moment, I became aware of the smell of shit--actual shit, not
conversational bullshit--and I said to Rosie, whom I was still holding, "Is
that you?" I pulled back the waistbands of her pants and diaper, and it was
her. I said to Jeremy, "I know you think I don't understand the intricacies
of academia, but either you'll fly to Denver today or you won't. What I'm
telling you is that I really, really, really don't want you to."
"Will the locks be changed when I come back?" He smiled a little.
"I'm glad you find this funny." And yet I was starkly aware that I had
nothing with which to threaten him. How and when had I arrived at this
point of powerlessness in my marriage? Short of invoking divorce, which
even in my current mood I recognized as insane, what leverage did I have?
There was my anger, yes, but Jeremy was making it clear that he could
tolerate that just fine.
Rosie and I were halfway up the stairs when he said, in a voice that contained
no humor at all, "You know what, Kate? A part of me doesn't want to go, either. 
And you know what else? If I cancel at the last minute, and if there's any hint 
that I did it because of your sister's prediction, then I might as well leave 
Wash U. I'll lose all credibility in the scientific community."
I stopped on a step, shifting Rosie against my hip. "Is that what this is
about? Your professional pride?" Wasn't part of Jeremy being Jeremy that petty 
gossip didn't bother him? It bothered me, but not him.
He said, "Remember when you asked if people know that Vi is my
sister-in-law? Well, they do. And I've tried to protect you from this, but,
yeah, it is awkward. Because as much as the media treats this as a complex
issue with two viewpoints--maybe it's possible to predict earthquakes,
maybe it's not--there's nobody, nobody, who's a scientist who thinks anything
other than that Vi's premonition is a total sham. If I don't go to
Denver, everyone I know will be talking about me. I need to show that I'm
still myself, nothing has changed, and the coincidence of me being related

to Vi is just that--a coincidence."
So I did, in the end, embarrass Jeremy; instead of him lifting me toward
a happier, more financially secure, less freakish existence, I'd pulled him
down with me. This was heartbreaking; it elicited my sympathy in a way
no other argument he'd made for traveling to Denver had. But I still didn't

want him to go.
"So how about this?" he said. "I'll have my phone on me all the time,
and when I see that it's you, I'll stop whatever I'm doing to answer, even if
I'm in the middle of delivering my own paper."
"Jeremy, it doesn't matter if you take your phone with you," I said.
"What will you be able to do from a thousand miles away?"

I L' did n I dP to campus that day but left for the airport when the children
went down for their afternoon naps; as if to rub salt in my wounds,
he gave a ride to Courtney, who was on the same flight out he was, though
she was returning to St. Louis a day earlier than Jeremy. I'd been sorting
laundry on the dining room table when he came to say goodbye after setting
his wheeled suitcase by the front door. (A suitcase filled with only the
belongings of an adult; because I'd never, since their births, traveled without
our children, such a prospect was unthinkable. No diapers or tubes of
Desitin, no tiny shirts with butterflies or trucks on them, no copies of
Goodnight Moon.)
Jeremy stood next to me, and I couldn't look at him.
"I'm sorry that everything is so screwed up right now," he said.
I folded a pair of Rosie's polka-dotted pants and said nothing.
"Sweetheart," Jeremy said.
I finally looked up.
"It'll all be fine," he said. "Call whenever you want, I'll be home Sunday,
and we'll put this behind us. Think of what we have to look forward to,
like Owen dressed as a carrot." This was what Rosie had decreed Owen
should be for Halloween, though we didn't yet have costumes for either of
them.

Jeremy hugged me, and I put my arms around him in return, but
loosely. Maybe this wasn't really the reason why, but it seemed like if I held
him tight, it would just make it harder to let him go.

Chapter 15

-,itttts't-t-ttlitt- to the ht-tspt.trtoht-tx hi-tort after .itPOSIC
was born, and the first thing Vi said was "She doesn't look very Chinese."
Then she grinned. "No, she's adorable. She's perfect. Did you poop on the

table?"
Jeremy had gone downstairs to the cafeteria, and I was sitting up in bed
in a gown, holding Rosie, who was wearing a diaper, a little cap, and a
duck-covered blanket that kept slipping off her. At seven pounds even, she
was unimaginably tiny--her nose was tiny and her ears were tiny and her
arms and legs were tiny and her fingers were tiny and her fingernails were
shockingly tiny; her butt had been tiny when I'd watched Jeremy change
her diaper as she lay in the plastic bassinette. She had intermittent swirls
of hair that was dark like Jeremy's, and dark blue eyes with creases under
them, as if emerging into the world had exhausted her, and there was some
sort of womb crust on her forehead that the nurses hadn't cleaned completely.
And also--Vi was right--she was perfect.
"I pooped, but it's true what everyone says. I was too out of my mind to

care.
"I totally knew you were having a baby last night. I was playing pool
with Patrick and all of a sudden, I was like, yep, it's started. I almost 
called,
but I didn't want to interrupt a contraction."
"Well, my water broke at midnight," I said. "And we came to the hospital
around three A.M., and she was born right before eleven."
"Wow, you had an easy delivery. Jack's wife was in labor for thirty-three
hours." Jack was the manager at the Italian restaurant where Vi no longer
worked. "Can I hold her?"

"Will you wash your hands?" I said. "Or use that dispenser on the
wall?"

Vi squirted out some antibacterial gel, rubbed her hands together--for
a not entirely satisfying length of time--and extended her arms. "Come
to Auntie Vi," she said.

"Be careful of her neck," I said as I eased Rosie toward her.
"You think I've never held a baby before?" Vi scrunched up her nose.
"Wait. Have I ever held a baby?" She stood there with Rosie's head against
the inside of her elbow and swayed. "I have the touch," Vi said. "She just
closed her eyes. So did you get an epidural?"
I shook my head.

Vi held up her free hand. "High five, girlfriend. I was sure you'd cave
and ask for drugs."

"You know those golf shoes with spikes on them? I felt like someone
was wearing those and jumping on top of my vagina."
She laughed. "At least you only had one baby, huh?"
Her "easy delivery" remark had rubbed me the wrong way, and then the
high five had mollified me slightly, and then her remark about expecting
me to cave had rubbed me the wrong way again, and then the opportunity to say 
how painful the delivery had been had mollified me again. The allusion
to our own birth was neutral--on the one hand, Vi was minimizing
what I'd just been through, but on the other hand, I, too, had been
thinking about our mother. Her experience giving birth to us had been a
major factor in my wish not to have an epidural.
I said, "Is it weird we're giving the baby a flower name? She was going to
be Sophie, but I was holding her right after she was born, and I had a
change of heart." Jeremy had been surprised but amenable; he'd actually
suggested the name Rosie months earlier and I'd nixed it because it was a 
flower name.

Vi looked down at Rosie. "It fits her. And Rosie isn't as--whatever it is
you thought Daisy was. As hippie chickish."

272Curtis Sittenfeld

"You don't think we should name her Rita, do you?"
"Because all it would take to undo everything that was messed up about
Mom would be to name your child after her? No. You shouldn't." Vi was
still looking at Rosie as she said, "How weird is it that you have a kid? I
always knew you would, but--"
"I know. It's surreal."
"She didn't even used to exist and someday she'll have a favorite color.
She'll eat pancakes. Did Jeremy cut the cord?"
"He decided to leave it to the professionals."
"But he's a doctor." Vi said this in the mocking way she sometimes invoked
Jeremy's PhD, though he never identified himself as Dr. Tucker; he
had his students call him Professor Tucker. She'd say, Jeremy, feel my
pulse. Take my temperature. Oh, wait.
"I have to show you something," I said. "Give me Rosie, and go in the
bathroom and look in that plastic bag by the sink."
After my daughter (my daughter!) was back in my arms, I heard Vi
whoop with delight from the bathroom. She reentered my room holding
up with both hands a pair of the white mesh underwear a nurse had given
me a pack of after the delivery; they were so enormous that they resembled
shorts. "These are awesome," Vi said.
"I knew you'd appreciate them."
"Are you wearing some right now?"
"And a maxi pad that's about a foot long."
"Can I keep this pair?" Vi was dangling the underwear off the tip of her
index finger and twirling them. "Patrick will fucking freak when he sees

these."
There was a knock on the door, and the nurse who'd started at three
o'clock walked into the room. "Baby last nursed at two-thirty, right?" she
said to me. "So let's give it another go. You need any ibuprofen?"
"Not right now." They had me breast-feeding every hour, even though
my milk hadn't yet come in and even though no matter what position I
maneuvered myself or Rosie into, it didn't seem like the right one.
"Will you wait in the hall?" I said to Vi.
"Wow," Vi said. "Still a prude, even after childbirth." She gathered up
dill her purse and the cape she now wore instead of a coat, a fashion choice
that had coincided with the ascent of her new career. "I'm going to go find
Jeremy so we can smoke cigars. Oh, I almost forgot Rosie's present." From
the purse, Vi withdrew a small cardboard box. Rosie was nestled against
my chest, and I said, "You open it."

After Vi had pulled off the tape, she lifted out a layer of white tissue
paper and then a small pale blue pear-shaped bottle with a clear crystal
stopper. Holding it up, she said proudly, "It's an antique perfume holder."
Of course it was an antique perfume holder; I had to bite my lip to keep
from smiling. Two months before, my friend Janet had thrown me a baby
shower, for which Jeremy's mother and sister-in-law had flown to St. Louis
and at which I'd had bestowed on me onesies and bibs and stuffed animals,
a baby carrier and a mobile and a special trash can just for diapers.
Vi had forgotten to show up. It had crossed my mind that she either consciously
or subconsciously wasn't pleased that I was pregnant, but I was
fairly sure the shower had just slipped her mind; it was on a Saturday at
eleven in the morning, when she wasn't necessarily awake. Afterward,
she'd been determined to make it up to me. A few nights later, Jeremy
worked late and she brought over pickles and ice cream, neither of which I
was craving, as well as a DVD about natural childbirth that a friend had
loaned her. After the first birth, Vi said, "I'm sorry, but that's the grossest
thing I've ever seen. Can we watch Project Runway?"
In the hospital room, the perfume holder caught the dim January light
coming in the window.

"It's really pretty," I said. "Thank you."
"But wait for the best part." She turned the bottle around, and I saw
that across its widest surface was painted a white-and-pink rose. To the
nurse, Vi said, "And I didn't even know what my sister was naming her
baby."
"How about that?" said the nurse. "You're psychic."
less cycle of nursing her and burping her and changing her, of all three of
us slipping into a desperate kind of sleep before resuming the cycle. But
slowly, a kind of schedule asserted itself; the exhausted confusion cleared.
Rosie ate every three hours. Each morning, an hour after nursing her, I sat
at the dining room table and pumped milk that I'd then transfer into
freezer bags in preparation for when I'd return to my job at the elder-care
agency and Rosie would enter day care. I hated the pump, the whirring
nipple-yanking tugs that made me not simply feel like a cow but gave
me new sympathy for cows themselves, and I forbade Jeremy to enter the

room while I used it.
Rosie began to look back at us when we looked at her, began to smile,
began to sleep for longer stretches; she developed a particular affinity for
a little stuffed cat and would suck joyfully on its left ear. At twelve weeks,
we moved her from a bassinet in our room to her own room, which made
me uneasy, but Jeremy reminded me that all the books said moving her
would only get harder as she grew older. "For me or for her?" I said, and he
said, "Aren't you guys still kind of the same?" Which he meant as a joke,
but it was how I felt--that once Vi and I had been a single person split
apart, and now my daughter and I were. With her in the stroller, Rosie and
I took long walks north on DeMun and west on Wydown, up and down
the fancy streets with the old, big houses and tall trees, and though I 
purposely
didn't go onto the street where Mrs. Abbott had lived, passing the
entrance to it always filled me with gratitude that I was no longer in my
twenties and miserable. (In the summer of 2001, I had awakened one
morning and known Mrs. Abbott was dead; I waited a week, then found
her obituary online. She had been born in Bristol, Connecticut, I learned,
and her maiden name had been Spaeth.)
When Rosie and I drove to Schnucks, in the parking lot I carefully
lifted her from her car seat and inserted her into the baby carrier, her chest
facing mine because she was still so little. Inside, she'd turn her head to see
the apples or cereal boxes. When the other customers or the checkout
woman would remark on her cuteness, I'd smile modestly, as if I didn't
secretly consider their compliments insufficient. If she fell asleep on the 
ride home. I would sit in our driveway with the car in Park and the engine

on and the air conditioner running, the ozone layer be damned--this was
in April or May--and as I waited for her to awaken, I'd do absolutely
nothing because I didn't yet have a cellphone with Internet access, didn't
want to disturb her by talking on the phone, and usually wouldn't have
remembered to bring along a book in her diaper bag. I'd look in the rearview
mirror at the street behind me, the green leaves on a ginkgo tree and
the cars passing, and I'd feel not bored or impatient but rather, as I observed
her (her car seat faced backward, with her own mirror reflecting
her closed eyes and tilted head into my mirror), as if, in watching her sleep,
I was making a deposit in the bank account of her well-being. This was
how I felt when she nursed, too, when I also wasn't bored despite the fact
that, unlike other mothers I knew, I never read or watched television while
doing it. But perhaps it was not the magic of motherhood that I was experiencing
in these moments; perhaps I just had a greater capacity for inertia
than I'd ever realized.

I had prepared myself for the tedium of life with a baby, warned about
it by co-workers and friends and countless movies and sitcoms, but I'd
experienced much in my adult life that was more tedious: office meetings
and office paperwork and wedding toasts and the wait at the mechanic's
while my oil was changed. Rosie was not tedious to me; rather, she was my
own tiny and charming companion. It wasn't that I endlessly tried to
amuse or edify her. I just brought her along when I did things, in and out
of the house, and her skin was very soft and her expressions were sweet
and she was a real person, a miniature person who clearly adored me, and
I adored her in return.

And then she was sixteen weeks old, and it was time for me to return to
work at the elder-care agency and for Rosie to go to the day care Jeremy
and I had picked out when I was still pregnant. Rosie would be entering
the Zucchini Room of a medium-sized place on Hanley Road, and I accompanied her 
for a half day on the Friday before she started. This time, I
noticed things I hadn't when Jeremy and I had visited months before: how
runny the other babies' noses were and how chewed-on the toys looked,
plus could two teachers really look after eight babies when it took all my
energy and attention to look after one? But the kids seemed mostly happy,
and the adults were warm. Jeremy would take Rosie on Monday, we de
cided,
so that I wouldn't bawl.
After going to sleep on Sunday night, I awoke around three from a
dream in which Rosie was in a prison cell; she was crying, reaching for me,
from behind bars. I got out of bed and hurried to her room, where I found
her asleep on her back, breathing evenly. My heartbeat slowed as I watched
her in the dark. Eventually, I went back to bed.
In the morning, when I tried to describe the dream to Jeremy, he
smiled. I was changing Rosie's diaper while Jeremy stood nearby. "Are you
a baby bandit, Rosie?" he said. He touched my shoulder. "It's natural that

you're feeling nervous."
But in some ways, it was easier being back at work than I'd expected:
The schedule and the rooms were familiar; talking to other adults, having
conversations, consumed my attention. There was a routine I could slip
into, that could carry me along, and there was the shocking weightlessness
of being responsible only for myself. Except when I closed the door of my
office and taped paper over the rectangular window to pump, my body
belonged to me. But when Rosie came into my mind, I'd feel a lurching
worry. What if one of the teachers dropped her?
Meeting with a diabetic eighty-six-year-old and his sixty-five-year-old
daughter, I kept looking at the clock above my bulletin board, waiting for

the minutes to pass until I could walk out to the parking lot, get into my
car, and drive to pick up Rosie.
As the weeks passed, my uneasiness waxed and waned. "She had a good
day," Miss Helen would often say when I picked Rosie up. Rosie's clothes
smelled like the teachers, which wasn't to say the teachers smelled bad--
just that there was no denying Rosie had been elsewhere.
I started putting her in leather booties with a smiling teddy bear over
the toes. She didn't need shoes, in that she was many months away from
walking. But her socks always fell off, and then she was barefoot, and how
could I endure my tiny daughter being out in the world without me, barefoot?
Every morning, I'd pull the shoes over her feet before securing her in
the car seat so Jeremy could carry her away.


01Rosie wasn't the first grandchild, and while Jere
my's
parents and stepparents were pleased for us, they weren't that brand
of grandparent who can't get enough of the new baby or who while visiting

does laundry and cleans the kitchen; even if they hadn't lived several states

away, I don't think they'd have been that kind of grandparent. They were
happy to come see us, to hold Rosie and eat a few meals, and then to fly out
again.

Carol and Ned, Jeremy's mother and stepfather, visited the week after
Rosie's birth, and when Rosie was five months old, Carol had a meeting in
Chicago and decided to add an overnight trip to St. Louis. My mother-in
law was a petite woman with salt-and-pepper hair; when dressed formally,
as for her job as an attorney, she wore black and beige and maroon, classically
tailored slacks and jackets and turtleneck sweaters that, I'd realized
over time, were quite expensive. When dressed informally, she wore jeans
and suede driving shoes. Every morning, she swam two miles at a gym,
and once a year, she and Jeremy's stepfather, who was also a lawyer, took a
ten-day vacation to somewhere sporty and international: Australia, say, or
Kenya. I liked Carol, and I knew I could do much worse in the mother-in
law department. At the same time, we weren't close. She had a brisk, sometimes
preoccupied energy--she was always checking her smartphone years
before everyone was always checking their smartphone--and she was
fond of games I wasn't good at, like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. Also, she
had asked me four separate times if I ever regretted not getting my master's
in social work.

Carol arrived on a Friday afternoon about a month after Rosie had
started day care. Jeremy met her at the airport, I picked up Rosie an hour
early, and we converged at home, sitting in the living room, Jeremy and his
mother drinking red wine while I drank a beer and we all made faces
at Rosie. Rosie had had a cold earlier in the week and was still fussier
than usual but sat happily on Carol's lap, turning the pages of a board
book.
Around seven, I took Rosie up for bed. It was while changing her diaper
that I noticed that her left eye seemed watery. "Are you okay, little pumpkin?"
I said. "Are you sad?"
She looked at me somberly, but she wasn't crying. I zipped the pajamas
up the front. In the glider, Rosie nursed for perhaps a minute before pulling
off, and then she did begin to cry.
"What's wrong?" I said. "Should we try again later?" I held her against
me, rocking, and she calmed down, but twice in a row, when I set her in
her crib, she howled. Only on the third try, after I'd held her for over ten
minutes following her descent into sleep, was I able to successfully deposit
her in the crib and creep away.
Jeremy and Carol had gone to pick up a pizza, and I'd been upstairs so
long that they were back and already eating in the kitchen when I returned
to the first floor. "Everything okay?" Jeremy asked.
"Forgive our bad manners in starting without you," Carol said, "but I
have exciting plans tonight that I can't be late for."
"Plans here?" Jeremy said. "In St. Louis?"
Carol beamed as if about to divulge a juicy piece of gossip. "I'm going
to a séance."
I understood immediately, but I could tell Jeremy didn't.
"Violet invited me, and she said her house isn't far from yours," Carol
said. "So, Jer, if I can borrow your car--"
I tried to sound undistressed as I asked, "When did you and Vi sched
ule
this?"
"You never even told me what your sister does, Kate!" Carol wagged her
finger at me in a mock scolding. "And truly, my entire life, I've wanted to
see a psychic. When I walk by one of those places with the neon hand in
the window, I'm always dying to go in."
Jeremy said, "You're going to one of Vi's sessions?" Sessions was what Vi
herself called them; she would never have said séance.
"I told her I absolutely want to pay the full amount, no family discounts."
Carol looked at me. "So she doesn't undercharge me, what's her
usual fee?"
"I think thirty," I said.
"She doesn't make you pay?" Carol winked, and in the wink, I under stood that 
she saw Vi's psychicness as unconnected to me--that she didn't

assume I shared Vi's abilities, or her pretense of them. Whether Carol be
-
lieved that Vi was genuinely psychic was a separate matter from whether
Carol was titillated by the idea of it; for many people, I knew, the titillation
lay in the unlikeliness.

Carol said, "When I was here after Rosie was born, I said, 'Violet, how's
the restaurant?' Well, she told me she's been doing this for the last two
years, and my jaw about dropped to the floor. I said, 'Next time I'm in St.
Louis, you must let me come.' She offered to do a private seance, but I
think the group sounds like much more fun."

After a silence, Jeremy said, "I hadn't pegged you as a fan of the supernatural,
Mom."

Carol laughed lightly, catching my eye. She said, "Our children never
give us credit for being interesting, do they?"

A Cteri gone to use the bathroom, Jeremy whispered,
"Sorry." In a non-whisper that was still quiet, he added, "I think she just
sees it as a lark."

"I'm going with her."

He squinted at me. "Why?" When I didn't answer, he said, "They'll be
fine. They're both grown-ups."

"Think how easily Vi could say, 'Yeah, Kate's psychic, too. Oh, she
hasn't told you?' It'll change the way your mother sees me forever."
"But not necessarily for the worse. Little did I know that my mom was
so fascinated by this stuff."

"She thinks she's fascinated, until it weirds her out."
"So call Vi and ask her not to mention you."
"Then she definitely will. She'll pretend it was a mistake, but I'm sure
she's getting off on having been in contact with your mom without us
knowing." I heard Carol open the bathroom door, and then she was enter
ing
the kitchen, saying, "Now, don't wait up for me because I have no idea
how late I'll be."
"Carol, if you don't mind, I'd love to go with you," I said.
Without hesitating, Carol said, "Fabulous. Do you think it's all right if
I'm wearing jeans?"
"I'm sure it's fine."
I went upstairs to check on Rosie, and inside her darkened room, listening
to her baby snores, I thought maybe I should skip Vi's. The session was
called for eight, and it was already a quarter to; I could feel Carol's 
antsiness
emanating from the first floor. There was no way Vi would start on
time, but Carol, who was herself unfailingly punctual, didn't know this. I
really didn't want to go, I thought. I wanted to stay at home, to be in the
same place as my daughter. But after a few more seconds of standing over

Rosie's crib, I tiptoed out.

a 1c, Carol was talkative, asking how many people would be at
Vi's and who they were, and I tried to answer her questions in a way that
didn't reveal that I had never attended one of the sessions. As I parked on
the street, I could see, past Vi's small yard and through the lit-up front
window, the living room of the house she'd bought with the down payment
from our father. Beyond the candelabra on her windowsill, a dozen
people stood in clusters of two or three, and hanging on the wall behind
them were Vi's Tibetan prayer flags.
As Carol and I entered, the volume of voices was high, and I felt a jolting
reminder of how the rest of the world carried on in the evenings while
Jeremy and I were cocooned away with Rosie. (Apparently, people still left
their houses.) The folding chairs were set up in a circle in the living room,
with Vi's lounger at the top of the circle, beneath the prayer flags.
Vi was uncorking a bottle of wine when she caught sight of me. She
made a theatrical expression of astonishment, opening her mouth wide
and holding her fingers in front of it. Approaching us, still holding the
wine bottle with the opener embedded in the cork--I'd wondered if she'd
be outfitted in flowing robes, but she wore denim shorts and a Mizzou
T-shirt--she said, "I feel like I'm being visited by the queen of England."
"Oh, I wouldn't have missed this for the world," Carol said, and neither
Vi nor I corrected her misunderstanding.
There was no one else there that I knew, which was weirdly impressive:
Total strangers paid my sister to attend her sessions. Vi had gone to get
plastic cups from the kitchen, and Carol was helping, when someone
tapped me on the arm, and when I turned, a woman my age or a little
younger stood a few inches from me, beaming. She was very pretty, with
long red hair that she wore in two braids, and she seemed kind and warm and 
open in a way that put me on edge. "You're Violet's twin, aren't you?"
she said. "I've heard amazing things about you."
I summoned a smile. "Thanks."

"You two must have an incredible connection. I've always wished I had a
twin." She leaned in, though we already were standing close together. "I
even wonder if I did have a twin who, you know--" She waved one hand in a 
circle, by which I understood that she meant died in the womb. This wasn't
the first time someone had made a comment like this to me. As I took a step
back, she said, "Or maybe it was in a previous life." A man was passing us,
and the woman reached out and pulled him toward her--he was one of
only two men present, and he looked about sixty, with a silver beard and
small gold-rimmed glasses--and said, "Bob, this is Violet's twin sister."
Bob brought his hands together in a yoga pose, bowing his head. "A
privilege."

I held up one of my own hands and waved.
Vi and Carol reappeared in the living room, distributing wine, and
after one more trip to the kitchen and back, Vi called out, "Does everyone
who wants a drink have one?" She scanned the living room. "Then let's
get cracking."

We all took seats, and she said, "Some of us here are old friends, but for
those who are new, let's everyone go around and say our names. And I
Want to mention two special guests tonight--my twin sister, Kate, and her
mother-in-law, Carol."

There was applause, and I smiled sheepishly. Vi's clients--they weren't
my kind of people, but it was undeniable that they were nice. When we
introduced ourselves, Carol said she was a séance virgin, and I cringed,
wondering if in anticipating that Vi would embarrass me in front of Carol, I'd 
had it backward.
Following introductions, Vi delivered a kind of prayer, invoking our
sacred energy and our open hearts and our gratitude for the gifts around
us. Then she began a monologue--perhaps it was a sermon--about how
she'd been out for a walk in Tilles Park the other night and had seen a toddler
and a puppy playing hide-and-seek, approaching and retreating from
each other, and it had reminded her that even in our hectic, twenty-four
seven world, we need to take the time to be playful, and while I was wondering
whether Vi had really taken this walk and whether the toddler and
puppy actually existed, I realized that everyone else was nodding their
heads. Even though what she was saying seemed neither interesting nor
original, she spoke with an authority I hadn't previously observed in her.
She expected the group to buy what she said, and they did. I probably
would have, too, if she weren't my sister.
"Is someone here tonight having conflict with a co-worker?" she asked
then, and a woman in a purple tank top raised her hand.
Vi said, "I'm picking up on that, Penny. Tell me a little more."
"My supervisor never gives me credit," Penny said. "I busted my ass to
get this project done, and at a department meeting yesterday, she kept say
ing,
'We did this, we did that.' We' nothing!"
"That's hard, isn't it?" Vi said. "She's not being honest."
"It's just really frustrating," Penny said.
"You know what?" Vi said. "She's not being honest with you and your
colleagues, but the part that'll come back to bite her is she's not being honest
with herself. And when you get to the point where you can't face your
own reflection in the mirror"--Vi chortled but not unsympathetically; it
was a we've-all-been-there chortle--"well, that's a place none of us want to
be. Penny, this woman is struggling. She's having a rough ride, and I want
you to meet her with compassion. I want you to dialogue with her, but I
want you to remember that she wouldn't be acting this way if she wasn't in
a dark place." Vi looked around the circle. "Someone's worried about
health. Don't be shy. You're safe here."
Silver-bearded Bob said, "As most of you know, I lost a hundred pounds
two years ago. My wife and I started out dieting together, but she had trouble 
sticking with it. She's still very heavy, and I want to support her,

but it's hard when I'm trying to eat celery and carrots and go for runs and
she's ripping open another bag of chips in front of the TV"
Bob's quandary seemed to me only loosely health-related, but Vi didn't
hesitate. "Bob, first, I want to acknowledge your incredible courage and
tenacity." My sister brought a hand to her forehead in a military salute.
"From someone who knows how hard dieting is, really, hats off. You're an
inspiration to all of us. Now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to be
totally and completely on your wife's team. Not like, 'Honey, quit pigging
out on chips,' but like, 'I am there for you. One hundred percent, I am
there for you, and together we're going to beat this.' Start small. You're
running, yeah, but how about going for a walk around the block with her?
Let me ask you this: Who makes dinner?"
"Usually, she does."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh. How did I know that?" There was group laughter.
"Bob, I want you to take over the cooking a couple nights a week. Make
salad, grill some fish. No discussion of calories, just a healthy, delicious
meal prepared with love. Can you do that?"
"You're right," Bob said. "I know you're right." He and the woman with
red braids, whose name I couldn't remember, were sleeping together, I
thought suddenly. Or about to, or hoping to. And I doubted grilled fish
would stop it.

A middle-aged woman whom I guessed to be of East Indian descent
talked about her daughter's divorce (ultimately, it would be for the best, Vi 
said), and a white woman with short black hair and bushy black eyebrows
wanted to know whether she should take a job in Seattle (absolutely, Vi said, 
though the group would miss her), and the other man, who was
maybe forty and balding, said that his wife wanted to put an addition on the 
back of their house even though they already had plenty of space and
never used their living room and also he had begun to wonder if she was a
compulsive shopper. Vi was quiet for longer after he spoke than she had been 
after anyone else's disclosure. She even shut her eyes, and queasily, I
Understood that she was communicating with Guardian--that this would represent 
the first time in the evening she'd acted as a medium rather than
relying on some combination of presu mpt uousness a nd coin nion sense.
When she opened her eyes, she said, "It's Tiffany, right? That's your wife's
name?"
The man nodded.
"I hate to tell you this, but I'm wondering if Tiffany has a problem with
prescription drugs. Is that possible?"
He grimaced, and in the grimace was recognition. He said, "She's been
having back pain again, so I thought--"
"I'm sorry, Jay," Vi said. "We can talk more after if you'd like."
Carol wanted to know if she ought to let a case she was working on go
to trial. She said, "I can't go into the specifics, but my co-counsel thinks
we'd be making a mistake, whereas I just have this feeling that we'll win."
What I'd been thinking was that surely, the more Carol had listened,
the more unimpressive Vi must have seemed to her. I wouldn't have
disputed that this gathering served a purpose for its participants; that it
illustrated my sister's psychic talents would have been a harder proposition
for me to defend. And yet Carol seemed as earnest and believing as
anyone else present. Was I exceptionally cynical? Well, yes, I thought,
compared to the group assembled, because the group had attended voluntarily,
whereas I had come along only to prevent my sister from telling my
mother-in-law embarrassing secrets about me.
Vi looked around. "What do I always say?" No one responded, though
the room was filled with a communal affability; allowing Vi to answer her
own question was, I guessed, part of the ritual.
"Trust yourself," Vi said. "Trust yourself, trust yourself, trust yourself.
Carol, I can't emphasize this enough. If you think you should take the case
to trial, then I want you to listen to that inner voice. Our intuition is the
most powerful tool we have in our kit."
The formal part of the session had lasted for close to an hour, and it
went on for another fifteen minutes, but I could feel that the emotional
high point had occurred with the revelation about Jay's wife and the segue
into Vi's more general exhortation. When it was clear that the discussion
was winding down, Vi said, "Any final concerns?" She was looking at me,
and I looked back, widening my eyes, which I intended to mean, There's no way. 
She had not, thus far, embarrassed me; she hadn't even explicitly
mentioned Guardian. I had felt squirmy and skeptical, but it hadn't been

nearly as bad as I'd feared. "All right then," Vi said. "Shall we join hands?"
On my left, my mother-in-law's hand was small and cool; on my right,
Jay's was warm and limp, and I felt that Vi was right about his wife and
prescription drugs. "May the energies offer us their guidance and wisdom,"
Vi said, "and may we take time amid the hustle and bustle to listen
to them, and to inhabit the refuge they offer."
Three or four people said amen, and then everyone was standing and
talking, checking their cellphones, throwing away their plastic cups.
While Vi collected money and asked who'd be bringing the wine next
time, I went to use the bathroom; unlike Carol, I had no problem accepting
a family discount. During the session, I had been away from Rosie, but
when I looked in the mirror above the sink, she came back to me. I missed
her, and I wanted to get home.

Vi was waiting for me outside the bathroom door. "It was a little lame
tonight," she whispered, making a face. "It's usually juicier."
"You were good," I said.

"You expected me to be wearing a turban and speaking in a Jamaican
accent, didn't you?"

"Just say thank you," I said. "I gave you a compliment."

()n the uri-v2 home, Carol was as talkative as she'd been on the way
over, eager to discuss the other clients--"Wasn't that girl with the braids
darling?" she said--and I waited for her to remark on how the event had
more closely resembled group therapy than legitimate clairvoyance. Instead
she said, "What a gift your sister has."
Really? I thought. That's really what you think?
"But the thing I kept wondering," Carol added, "is who she's communing
with. If she can access information that the rest of us can't, who's telling
it to her?"

"Well, I don't think it's ghosts in white sheets." I'd been trying for a
joke, but Carol didn't laugh. I said, "I mean, I guess she's just attuned to
the energy of the world. What's all around us." Carol still didn't respond.
We were on Manchester, about to hit the light for Big Bend, and
tentatively--it was somehow unsurprising to me that I was about to reveal
what Vi herself hadn't, it made me feel that all along my defeat had been
inevitable--I said, "There's, like, an entity she talks to. Like someone in
the spirit world, and she calls him Guardian, and she thinks he first visited
her maybe fifteen years ago. He's the one who tells her things." Still Carol
said nothing--was her silence some lawyerly technique designed to make
people blurt out things they hadn't intended to?--and I continued, "I
think, technically, that makes Vi a medium, but sometimes she picks up
on stuff in other ways. And not everyone who's psychic is a medium. You
could get information that came to you in a dream, or you could be walk
ing
down the street, or sitting in a room, and all of a sudden you have a
sense." It seemed I'd just revealed more about myself to Carol in the last
minute than in all the years since I'd met her, that now only by ignoring
the most obvious signals could she not know that Vi and I were the same.
But she accused me of nothing. "At least I think you could," I said.

soon as Carol had excused herself to go to bed--she had
an early flight out in the morning and had insisted on calling a cab--
Jeremy said, "I finally got Rosie to sleep again, but she wasn't a happy
camper tonight."
I frowned. "You should have called me."
"I wanted you to have a night out." He sighed. "Anyway, she's asleep

now."
"How much was she up?"
"A lot. It sounds like my mom had a ball, though." We looked at each
other, and he said, "Don't go into Rosie's room. You'll wake her up."
But around three, it was Rosie who awakened us, and she felt hot. When I took 
her temperature--it said 101.6--Jeremy and I then held a whispered
conference in Rosie's room about whether or not to give her acetaminophen.
She was just five months old, and we hadn't yet given her
medicine of any kind. "Let's wait and call the doctor in the morning," Jeremy 
said. "I ler lever's not that high."
But after I'd nursed Rosie, I couldn't bring myself to put her back in
bed. I sat in the glider holding her, and she fussed at first until eventually
she settled down and fell asleep.

It wasn't yet six when the sun rose, white light showing in around the
sides of Rosie's curtains, and for the first time since I'd put her to bed the
night before, I had a clear view of her face. This was when I saw that her
left eye was extremely swollen. Both the eyelid and the area beneath the
eye were puffy and pink, two discrete half-moons. I ran my fingertip over
the pouch below her eye, and she woke and looked at me with an agitated
expression. Her left eye opened only about a third as much as usual.
Trying to sound calm, I said, "Hi, little pumpkin. How are you?"
She began to cry, and my heart clenched like a fist; this was the first
time I experienced anxious heart, when it came into existence for me. Had
a spider bitten her, or had she had an allergic reaction to something that
had passed through my milk, or was it connected to her cold from a few
days before? I tried to think of what the next sequence of events should be.
I hoped Carol had left for the airport but was pretty sure she hadn't. I
stood and carried Rosie into our bedroom and said, "Jeremy, her eye looks
horrible. I don't know why, but it's almost swollen shut."
There was a stern expression on Jeremy's face as he sat up, reaching for
the wire glasses on his nightstand, and then he looked at Rosie and said,
"Whoa." I began to cry, and Rosie, who had stopped crying, did, too. "No, no," 
Jeremy said. "Let's not panic. Let's figure out what to do. What time is it?"

"Six." I sniffed. "I think your mom's in the shower. Do we take Rosie to the ER 
now or wait till the doctor's office opens?"
"Have you taken her temperature again?"
I shook my head.
"I'll get the thermometer." He pushed back the sheet.
This time, her temperature was 103.2. "Here's what I think we should do," 
Jeremy said. "Give her medicine now, and call the pediatrician the
minute the office opens. If we go to the ER, we could end up waiting so long 
that it wouldn't be any faster. Have you nursed her?"
"Not yet."
"Nurse her," he said. "I'll see my mom off."
It was good, it was reassuring, to have a plan. After I heard the front
door close, Jeremy came back upstairs, checked on us, then showered; I lay
in our bed cradling Rosie, wanting to stay on the same floor as Jeremy.
When he went downstairs for breakfast, we followed him, though my own
stomach was churning and I was afraid to consume anything other than a
glass of water. Simultaneously, I was getting used to Rosie's swollen eye
and it still retained its power to shock me. When, I kept wondering, had
this happened? And if I hadn't gone to Vi's with Carol, would I have no
ticed
it before it got so bad?
Jeremy called the pediatrician's office, and when they said someone could
see us immediately, I passed him Rosie and raced upstairs to change out of
my pajamas. In the car, Jeremy drove and I sat in the back, next to Rosie.
The nurse who opened the waiting room door to usher us back looked
at Rosie and said, "Oh my goodness!" Which I didn't like, though being at
the doctor's office did decrease my fear slightly.
It wasn't our regular pediatrician we saw but another doctor, who kept
trying to figure out if Rosie's eye was moving, but she couldn't tell because
the eye was now open only a sliver. She said that she thought Rosie had
cellulitis--a bacterial skin infection--which was probably from having
had a cold, and that while normally she'd have given us a prescription for
antibiotics and sent us home, because she couldn't tell if Rosie's eye was
moving, she wanted us to take Rosie to the ER after all.
Rosie was still on the exam table at this point, with me propping her up,
and she was so subdued that I wondered if she was about to fall asleep.
When the doctor said we needed to go to the ER, there was a moment of
Jeremy and me not making eye contact, of him knowing I was surprised
and telling me--he wasn't speaking, of course--There's no reason to
panic. She's just being careful.
So we drove from the pediatrician's office to Children's Hospital--this
time, on seeing Rosie, the woman we checked in with said, "Yikes!"--and
after we'd waited forty-five minutes, we were admitted to a little room,
where a nurse took Rosie's vitals and then a man named Dr. Mittra came
in and examined her. 1 ler eye was by this point swollen shut. He, too, said
kit
he thought she had cellulitis but that he couldn't confirm the diagnosis

without seeing if the eye was moving--he couldn't know if the infection
was preseptal, which meant in front of the eye's septum, or orbital, which
meant within it.

"If the infection's in the eye, then what?" I asked.
Dr. Mittra was calm but not warm; he was not reassuring. He said,
"Because the optic nerve leads to the brain, there are risks of meningitis
and cavernous sinus thrombosis." When I asked what cavernous sinus
thrombosis was, he said, "A blood clot."

Again, I could feel Jeremy telling me, He's not saying the infection is
orbital. He's saying he thinks it isn't.

After Dr. Mittra was gone, two nurses inserted an IV into Rosie's hand, and 
over the hollow needle, they attached a plastic shield, like half a cup,
so that Rosie wouldn't pull the IV out. (Later, a doctor told me that when you 
asked children what they'd been in the hospital for, those old enough to talk 
would say it was because they'd hurt their hand.) The nurses started Rosie's 
antibiotics immediately, while I sat with her on my lap, and she fell
asleep. With the administration of the antibiotics, I thought, her recovery had 
officially begun; we had reversed directions. Hadn't we?
Jeremy said, "How are you doing?"
I shrugged.

"This is a really great hospital," he said. "You know that, right?"
I wanted him to tell me that Rosie wouldn't get meningitis or a blood t in her 
brain, but I also didn't want to speak the words meningitis or t aloud. And 
really, anxious heart had made the rest of my body into a
rge, vacant, silent house; my limbs, even my head, were rooms that had n closed 
off for the winter.

After a minute, Jeremy said, "Will you say something? I can't tell what u're 
thinking."

It was hard to use my tongue to form words, but finally I said, "I just nt her 
to be okay."
We looked at each other, and Jeremy said, "She will."
.1 different one from Dr. Mittra, said they were
keeping us overnight. This was after we'd been in the little exam room for
six or seven hours. The room they took us to then--they pushed me in a
wheelchair with Rosie on my lap, because they didn't want to let me carry
her on foot--had a crib with a mattress more than four feet off the floor
and a double set of stainless-steel bars covering both the top and bottom
halves. I rocked Rosie to sleep and deposited her gently on the mattress.
Jeremy then went to close the two sets of bars, and they met with a great
clanging lock that awakened Rosie, and all at once, she was crying, reaching
for me, and I heard myself shrilly saying, "Jeremy, open it! Open them!
Get her out!" Because it was my dream: My dream of Rosie in a prison cell
had come true, except that it wasn't a prison cell, it was a hospital crib.
Very quickly, he had unlocked the bars and I'd grabbed her, though she
continued to scream, and Jeremy said, not accusingly but with concern,

"You scared her."
"It was my dream!" I said. "The baby bandit!" I was on the verge of
hysteria myself.
"Okay," Jeremy said. "That's fine. She doesn't have to sleep in there."
"But it means I knew this was going to happen!"
"Kate, you have to calm down. Want me to take her?"
I shook my head.
"You didn't know this would happen," he said. "Whatever you dreamed
of, you couldn't have prevented it."
Rosie slept that night in my arms, and I lay on a foldout chair. It was all
reminiscent, in a gloomily inverted way, of Rosie's birth just five months
earlier: the three of us together in a hospital room, but instead of feeling
like Jeremy and I had pulled off the miracle of making a new person, this
time everything just felt sad and scary. It was quieter at night, though
there were still frequent visits from nurses and less frequent visits from
doctors; the worst part was when they appeared together and tried, with a
kind of oversized wooden Q-tip, to pry Rosie's eye open.
Rosie wouldn't nurse, and early in the morning on the second day,
someone brought me a pump because my breasts were engorged. Around
us, we could hear the intermittent cries of other sick children. Jeremy went
home to shower and get us new clothes, though I didn't bother to change,
and he also brought back a sandwich and a box of granola bars, which I
didn't eat. We spent a second night in the hospital, and everything that
wasn't Rosie was still suspended. Her eye remained swollen, she continued to 
have a temperature when the acetaminophen wore off, and she was uninterested
in the little stuffed cat that usually delighted her. Vi called my
cellphone, and I didn't check the message. Jeremy and I had told no one,
neither of our families, because what could they do? We were alone in this,
I thought. No one loved Rosie as much as we did.

The second night, around eight P.M., when she was asleep on the foldout
chair between my body and the wall, I looked down at her--she was
wearing miniature hospital scrubs with turtles on them--and as her chest
rose and fell, her swollen eye appeared to be a mistake, a thing that needed
to be undone, though it also was hard to imagine her without it; it seemed
that the prior months of her life had been a period in which we'd been
naïve, even careless. We had worried, it turned out, insufficiently. Jeremy
was in his own foldout chair, which faced ours, reading, and I said without
looking up, "If she doesn't get better, I think I'll kill myself"
"The antibiotics will start working," he said. "By the morning, I bet." Then he 
said, "Look at me, Kate. This wasn't your fault."
Had my own mother killed herself? Usually I believed she hadn't. But n the 
hospital, I thought the only reason I'd commit suicide was if some
mg happened to my daughter, and what kind of person had my mother en if she'd 
done it even though she hadn't had to? The great concerns of r life--they 
weren't us.
Jeremy was wrong, and in the morning, Rosie wasn't better; she was
rse, the most lethargic she'd been yet. Dr. Mittra returned and told us
a somber voice that her lack of progress concerned him and he was or- ring a CT 
scan. He left and came back with another doctor, and they
culated about whether Rosie was dehydrated, and instructed a nurse to
her dextrose solution through her IV, and it was perhaps an hour
r--forty-eight hours after we'd entered the hospital--that at last she me 
around; she did, for the first time, start to improve. She wanted to
II my hair, and she wanted to look at the pictures in her book about
jungle animals, and she wanted to nurse. It was hard to say exactly when
the swelling went down, but her eye became visible, just a crack and then
more, and Dr. Mittra saw her eye move. "This is very good news, Mom,"
he said in his serious voice, and he patted my shoulder.

ht i:1,took a shower in the bathroom adjacent to Rosie's
room, and when I emerged in clean clothes, with wet hair, Jeremy was
holding Rosie and talking to Vi, who sat on my foldout chair. "Hey there,
hot stuff," Vi said. "Sorry about everything."
"She's doing much better now."
"That's what Jeremy said. You should have called. I knew something
was going on."
"How' d you figure out we were here?" I asked.
"I called him." Vi gestured at Jeremy.
"If you two want to walk around the block and get some air, Rosie and
I will be fine," Jeremy said.
"That's okay." I extended my arms, and he passed Rosie to me.
"That's some eye," Vi said. "Will she have any scarring?"
This thought hadn't occurred to me. "I don't know why she would,"
Jeremy said.
"It's not contagious, is it?"
"Not unless you have an open cut that you rub against her eye," I said.
"Maybe I won't hold her anyway, just to be safe." Vi gestured to the box
of granola bars. "Can I have one?" As Jeremy nodded, Vi said to him,
"Was your mom wowed by me?"
"It sounds like she had a great time," Jeremy said.
"You should come some night." Vi glanced at me. "It wasn't nearly as
woo-woo as you imagined, right, Daze?"
I didn't, of course, hold Vi responsible for Rosie's infection, but I definitely
wished I hadn't attended the session. I said, "That stuff's not Jere
my's
cup of tea."
"Wow." Vi laughed. "Don't censor yourself." She pointed at Rosie.
"I )oes Dad know?"
1
1111
II1
4
"I haven't had a chance to call him."

"We never went to the ER when we were kids, did we?"
What was she implying? "Not that I remember," I said.
Vi said, "Every time I look at her, you know what I think of? I think of In the 
land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
If Rosie hadn't shown signs of improvement, I wouldn't have had the
courage to fight with my sister; I wouldn't have wanted to release bad will
into the world when I needed the world's beneficence. So perhaps it was a
reflection of my confidence in Rosie's restored health that I said, "Vi, if
you're under the impression that you're making things better by being
here, you know what? You're not."

We stayed In the hospital one more night, and the strange part was that when 
they finally discharged us, I felt the return of anxious heart; it had gone 
away when Dr. Mittra patted my shoulder, but it came back. Having a child in 
the hospital was, in most ways, awful, and yet I believed in the competence of 
the nurses and doctors more than I believed in my own; it was like turbulence 
on an airplane, how it could be both terrifying ind out of your hands.
This was the time when, each night at home, I began putting the diaper
bag by the front door, making sure that my wallet with my health insurce
card was in it, when I'd charge my cellphone in the outlet closest to e diaper 
bag, and when I switched from sleeping in pajamas with silly
tterns of monkeys or gnomes to sleeping in black yoga pants and plain
-shirts. I also kept wearing a nursing bra at night long after I'd stopped
king milk, and in this way, I always knew that if I had to leave for the ER
the middle of the night, I could do so quickly.
Rosie didn't return to day care. We'd already paid the month's tuition, but 
4cept her home, and I quit my job effective immediately; I went back only to an 
out my office. I'd thought my supervisor would be disappointed in
--she was a forty-eight-year-old divorced mother of three named Suet when I 
told her I was leaving the agency, she said without rancor, "It's rd, isn't it? 
I envy you that you have the option of staying home."
294Curtis Sittenfeld
Which I did, but barely. The day Rosie was discharged from the hospital,
when I told Jeremy I wanted to quit my job, he said, "I ran the numbers
and we'll be okay on just my salary, but we need to be more careful. For
instance, no more ordering Rosie fifty-dollar Norwegian organic pajamas."
"They're
thirty dollars," I said. "And Swedish."
"Her clothes fit her for a month," he said. "Just buy her stuff at Target."

and months after Rosie was in the hospital, I worried all
the time: When she sneezed, I worried that she was getting a cold that
would turn into cellulitis again, or perhaps pneumonia. I worried when I
heard reports about resurgences in whooping cough, and when she started
eating solids, I worried about her choking, and when I cut her pinkie while
trimming her fingernails, I worried that she'd develop a staph infection.
One afternoon while Jeremy was teaching, when she threw up five times
in an hour for no obvious reason, I was so frantic that I had to make myself
breathe in the way recommended by the teacher in the birthing class

we'd taken.
It wasn't that I no longer took pleasure in Rosie's company; it was just
that the joy of, say, watching her lie on her back and kick at the parrot
hanging above her play mat was accompanied by a thrumming undercurrent
of dread so constant and all-encompassing that it seemed hard to
believe I'd lived without it for as long as I had. I had thought that I'd become
a parent when Rosie was born, but now it seemed my true initiation
had occurred during her return to the hospital.
When panic seized me--as when she threw up or I held a thermometer
under her armpit and watched the digital numbers jump--I'd tell myself, Be 
calm. It's completely normal for children to get sick. But all during that
first summer of Rosie's life, my heart would clench and clench.
I knew my anxiety was hard for Jeremy, too, less for what I said than the
jittery waves I emanated, my reluctance to participate in activities without
Rosie--to go to a movie, for instance. Even after I agreed to hire Kendra
to babysit one morning a week, instead of leaving the house, I lurked,
under the pretense of doing laundry and straightening up.

It was the double aspect of my anxiety, I think, that made it bad: First I
worried that terrible things would befall Rosie, then I worried that I was
right to worry because I was psychic. Like all new mothers, I'd been told
repeatedly, by doctors and nurses and friends and strangers and advice
books, to trust my instincts. But my instincts had betrayed me; they'd
gone haywire.

The week before Rosie was eight months old, on a warm afternoon in
late September while she was napping, I wrote Having senses on a piece of
paper I'd torn from a notebook we kept by the phone. I folded the paper and 
dropped it into our clear salad bowl, along with a box of kitchen
matches; I tucked Rosie's monitor under my arm and carried the bowl into the 
backyard.
I was too embarrassed to speak aloud before I struck a match against the strip 
on the box, but inside my head, I thought, Please. Please, please let this 
work. Then I lit the paper on fire. I felt ridiculous standing there in the sun 
as the paper burned; surely this brief rite would not be enough to eliminate a 
lifetime of premonitions. And in many ways, of course, it wasn't: I still 
sometimes dreamed of the future, and I still had hunches about people (the new 
dental hygienist at the practice Jeremy and I went to--she was being beaten up 
by her boyfriend, and I knew it the minute
she called me back to the exam room). But burning that piece of paper did ive 
me something, something that it's possible no one else had ever aspired
to, which was grounds for doubting my own intuition. It gave me, nside the 
confines of my brain, plausible deniability. When a frightening ought about 
Rosie lodged itself in my head, I could say, Maybe. But
aybe not. Perhaps I was still psychic, and perhaps I wasn't.
And soon there was evidence that both my senses and my anxiety were fling. A 
week after I burned the paper, I was driving on Delmar been
Hanley and 170, Rosie in the back, when a cop pulled up behind me d turned on 
his lights and siren; once I realized what was under way, I s thrilled, which 
surely was a reaction the cop hadn't previously en 11

296Curtis Sittenfeld

countered. He was my age, a white guy who, when he saw Rosie, seemed
almost apologetic. Nevertheless, because I'd been going forty-two miles
an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone, he proceeded to issue me a speeding

ticket.
That same week, when Kendra came, I left the house; I went to the Gal
leria
and bought a new pair of jeans and a macadamia nut cookie. I also
signed up to take a music class with Rosie, though surely such a class, with
a dozen other babies and toddlers in it, would mean the exchange of many
germs.
For a while after Rosie's eye infection, I thought I'd never have another
child, because who would take care of the second one if the first was 
hospitalized?
But over time, I became less preoccupied with this scenario; I
almost forgot it. And really, this was the ultimate sign that my anxiety, in
its severest form, had passed: that eight months after I burned my senses,
I was pregnant with Owen.
,



the azcli,i)cr
for the airport, his absence didn't, at first, feel abnormal; after all, he was
always gone on weekdays. I'd calculated that the time between when he
departed for Denver and when Vi's earthquake prediction expired, assuming
it expired at midnight, was thirty-three and a half hours.
Rosie and Owen both woke not long after Jeremy left, and following
their snacks, I texted Hank: Park?

Coffee first, he texted back.
I still felt self-conscious about Rosie's banged-up lip, but after three
days, it looked much better. And getting our coffee from Kaldi's, hanging
Out in the park--it was a regular afternoon. Perhaps Jeremy had been right.

Around five, as I was pushing Owen in a bucket swing and the girls Were chasing 
each other, I said to Hank, "Do you guys want to come over for dinner? We could 
order Chinese."

"I told a mom at Amelia's school we'd go to the thing in Forest Park tonight."

"The earthquake thing?" I'd received an email about this event through a 
playgroup Rosie and I hadn't attended in a year, and without fully reading it, 
I'd managed to absorb that the Science Center was sponsoring an
fling for kids called "EducationQuake!" If Vi Shramm weren't my sis r,
it was conceivable that we'd have gone.
"I might as well tell you now," Hank said. "We also got invited to an 
earthquake party tomorrow night."
"What's an earthquake party?"
"I'm guessing it's an excuse for parents of young children to drink
cocktails. You've heard of hurricane parties?"
"Are you staying overnight at their house?"
"God, no." He paused then. "Let me put it this way: Maybe some people
are. We're not." I gave Owen a push with the heel of my hand, and Hank
said, "Are you and Vi still in your Today show fight?"
"It looks that way."
"I wonder if she's going on TV by herself." I shrugged, and he looked
amused. "Don't try to tell me you're not planning to watch."
"Honestly, I've seen enough of Vi on television."
Hank grinned. "Touché." For the last several days, he had seemed to be
in a good mood; he hadn't mentioned the abortion, so neither had I. We'd
talked about my having run into Courtney and Jeremy at Blueberry Hill--
Courtney had told him about it--and he'd treated it as a pleasant coincidence,
an impression I hadn't corrected. He'd said, "So you finally got
busted for not leaving Owen with the sitter, huh?" and I'd said, "No, I
pretended it was a one-time thing."
Rosie wandered over to the swing set. "Rosie wants toast."
"If we can't lure you with Chinese food, we should probably start heading
back so I can get her dinner ready," I said to Hank.
"You want to meet up with us later at Forest Park?"
"I don't think I have it in me." I felt a dinginess then, a wish not to
separate from Hank, as if nothing bad could happen to any of us in his
presence. But this was childish, and I needed to be a grown-up.
"Hang in there." Hank flicked my cheek with his thumb and middle
finger. "Okay?" There was something both odd and pleasing in the flicking
gesture, though it wasn't until I was at home, waiting for the water to
boil for the macaroni and cheese Rosie and I would eat, that I was able to
pinpoint what the oddness was: It had been flirtatious. And Hank and I

didn't, I was pretty sure, flirt.
After I drained the noodles, I heard my phone ding inside my vest
pocket, and when I pulled it out, thinking it would be Jeremy, I saw that

the text was from I lank: Found out what yr famous sister is doing tmrw,
he'd written, and he'd pasted a link I couldn't resist clicking on. It was an
article from the Post-Dispatch, with the headline EARTHQUAKE PSYCHIC
TO ATTENDiRIVATE VIGIL. The vigil would be at the Mind & Spirit Bookstore,
I discovered as I continued reading, and it was closed to the public.
So she'd be on the Today show in the morning, and then she'd embrace
privacy and discretion? She was ridiculous.

applied Rosie's Neosporin, put Owen to bed
while Rosie danced and shouted around us in her nightly frenzy, and then
put Rosie herself down, and the night ahead felt almost unsettlingly free.
All my earthquake preparations--removing the wall hangings and storing
the china; organizing the emergency supplies in the basement; even
consolidating our important family documents, like birth certificates and
Social Security cards, into a Ziploc bag--were complete. I wondered if I
ought to organize the junk drawer in the kitchen, which barely closed, or
if this was the moment to catch up on the last two and a half years' worth
of emails, at least the non-earthquake-related emails, or if perhaps I
should finish reading the novel I'd started over the summer. What usually
happened when an unanticipated chunk of time presented itself was that I
spent ten minutes pondering the possibilities available to me, at which
point either Owen or Rosie woke up or else I realized that something demanded
my immediate attention--poop-stained pants, milk pooling on
the kitchen floor. And it was almost a relief to remember what it was I
needed to attend to; otherwise the choices were bewildering.
Sure enough, as I descended the stairs, I realized that I ought to call my
father. Jeremy's suggestion to the contrary, my father wouldn't help me
with Owen and Rosie, but for his own sake, I wanted to offer him the option
of staying at our house the following night. Because what else would he do with 
himself on this strange day, a day that could be momentous or
ordinary? Did he believe that Vi's prediction would come to pass? It was
such a basic question, yet it was unthinkable that I'd ask him. And even if
I could have, he wouldn't have answered.
When I reached hini and told him he was welcome to come over any time the next 
day, from the morning on--"We're up around six," I said--
he said, "Maybe I could stop by in the afternoon."
Something in his tone told me that he meant he'd be willing to do us a
favor, not that he thought we'd be doing him one.
"Just if you want company," I said. "If you'd rather stay put in your own

house, I don't blame you."
"Well, Vi's event doesn't start until five, if I'm not mistaken."
My father was attending Vi's bookstore vigil? "Did she ask you to drive
her?" I said.
"I don't mind. I'll sit out back and listen to the radio in the car."
"Dad, she can get a ride with a friend who's going anyway. I'm sure it'll
run really late."
"I truly don't mind."
You might not, I thought, but how about the other people sharing the

road with you when you can't see at night?
"Let's touch base in the morning," my father said.

hadtalking to my father, been dimly aware of a rattling in the
kitchen; I'd even walked in there from the living room, carrying the
phone, but the kitchen was silent until I walked back out, at which point
the rattling resumed. It wasn't an earthquake--it was much too small,
and it kept starting and stopping.
I returned to the kitchen, and this time the rattling continued. I took a
step toward the oven, which seemed to be its source, and it stopped, but

when I waited a minute, it started again. I reached for my cellphone and
texted Jeremy: I think we have a mouse.
As he had promised, no more than thirty seconds passed before our

home phone rang.
"Where' d you see it?" he said. In the background, I could hear the buzz
of many voices--the hotel bar, presumably, where he was busy placing

articles in journals.
"I didn't see it yet, I only heard it under the stove. Isn't that where we

had one last year?"
"Sorry this had to happen tonight. We have some traps in the base
ment,
on that shelf where you keep the Christmas decorations."
"LovelyQ said.

"The traps are in a plastic bag."

"Do I have to put cheese in it? Is that something people do in real life?"

Jeremy laughed. "Has my princess never set a mousetrap? No, you don't

need to put any food in. Just be careful with the spring, and you might

want to put out more than one, but make sure you move them before

Rosie's up in the morning. If you do catch a mouse, what I always do is just
roll it up in newspaper and take the whole thing out to the trash bin."
"It won't still be alive, will it?"

"No, but don't feel too guilty. Mice spread diseases. How'd things go
tonight?"

To reveal that they hadn't gone badly would be to concede in a way I
wasn't yet ready for. I said, "About how you'd imagine."
"The baloney's holding up in my absence?"
"You'll have to ask Rosie."

"All right, then." He wasn't going to let himself be pulled toward ran
cor.
"Call back if you have trouble with the trap, and call either way before
you go to bed."

Setting a mousetrap, it turned out, wasn't harder than applying antibiotic
ointment to a squirming two-year-old. In fact, it was easier. I set three,
washed my hands, and was opening the refrigerator door to reward myself
with a beer when my cellphone rang.

"We're in the car leaving the park," Hank said. "I have a confession, and
I need you to absolve me."

"Is it Mommy?" I heard Amelia say, and Hank said, "It's Kate." Then he
said, "The family that had us over for dinner served lasagna with M-E-A-T
in it, and I ate it."

"Should I call the cops?" I asked.
"Probably, because there's more. It was delicious. It was like an old
friend giving me a big warm hug."
I laughed. "Did Amelia have any?"
"Maybe a bite. Not really."
302Curtis Sittenfeld
"Speaking of killing animals, I think we have a mouse. I just set my first
traps."
"Congrats."
"Do vegetarians set mousetraps?"
"You'd have to ask one."
"Ha," I said. "Where are you guys, by the way? You're welcome to come
over." Hank was quiet, and I said, "Amelia probably needs to go to bed."
Already, it seemed a little weird that I'd invited them.
"We're on Skinker right now." His voice sounded completely normal.
"Yeah, we'll come and say hi."
"Rosie and Owen are asleep," I said, which felt like a retraction of my
invitation, but all Hank said was "We'll be quiet."
I waited for them in the living room and opened the front door before
they knocked or rang the bell. "Where's Rosie?" Amelia said. "I want to
see Rosie."
"Owen and Rosie are sleeping," I said.
"I want to wake them up."
As they entered the living room, Hank said, "At the rate you're going,
you will."
"Kate, can I have some milk?" Amelia asked.
I looked at Hank, who said, "Sure. Why not?"
Because they needed to get home so Amelia could go to bed was why
not, though it occurred to me that maybe Hank didn't want to leave any
more than I wanted them to. This, I supposed, was the reason people had
earthquake parties. "You need a beer?" I asked, and Hank said, "Nah, I'm
good."
Rosie still used a sippy cup, but Amelia had graduated to a regular glass,
which I filled halfway and carried out to the living room. Hank and Amelia
were side by side on the couch, and Amelia was turning the pages of Frog and 
Toad All Year. I set her milk on the table, and as I sat in the armchair,
I said to Hank, "So how long had it been since you last ate you
know-what?"
I le looked up toward the ceiling, calculating. "A really long time. Ten

yea rs?"
"And you never even had a bite?"

"Once at Courtney's parents' house, her mother was all proud for having
made vigetable soup. If you know her mom, she was really stretching
herself--first her daughter marries a black dude, then she stops eating
meat. We're all at their dining room table, and Courtney says, 'This is
delicious,' and her mom says, 'It's so easy. I just cut up some carrots and
celery and zucchini, added a little chicken stock-- Hank smiled, shaking
his head. "So it was a cheat, but not even a satisfying one. And her
mom was trying so hard."

"Someday I might join the vegetarian club," I said. "When you least
expect it."

"We'll be honored to have you as a member." He made a self-mocking
expression. "If I haven't been kicked out by then."

They stayed for only about fifteen minutes, by which point Amelia's
eyes were fluttering. Hank lifted her into his arms, and as I opened the
front door for them, I said, "You're sending Amelia to school tomorrow,
aren't you?"

"Kate, if I kept Amelia home because of Vi's prediction, Courtney
would file for divorce."

I was glad then that Rosie wasn't in school yet, that this was an argument
I didn't have to have with Jeremy. I said, "Well, here's to things being
uneventful," and as I spoke, I again had that wish for Hank to stay, that
sense of us as safe in his presence.

"You're okay, right?" Hank was looking at me with unusual seriousness.

What
would he say, what could he do, if I told him no? He was holding
a half-asleep child; we both were married to other people. Really, there
was no room for me to not be okay. "I'm fine," I said.
Hank nodded his chin toward the staircase. "Tell 0 to let you get some sleep 
tonight."
I '11cue; X went down to the basement after they were gone was to get Jeremy's 
sleeping bag, but I paused to survey the supplies I'd amassed:
the gallons of water, the diapers and wipes, the crank radio and propane
stove and first-aid kit. There was a peculiar pride I took in this collection,
which might have been a sign that I had more in common than I'd ever
realized with members of the survivalist movement.
I shoved a flashlight into my back pocket before pulling Jeremy's sleeping
pad and sleeping bag from the closet; taking these items wasn't a spontaneous
decision. Upstairs, I unrolled them both on the hardwood floor
in the hall, right outside Rosie and Owen's rooms, and I pulled the pillow
I normally used from our bedroom. I still needed to brush my teeth, but
when I lay down, my head would be next to Owen's door and my feet next

to Rosie's.
On a typical night, I slept approximately twenty-five feet from my chil
dren;
on this night, I'd sleep, or not sleep, five feet from them. Which was
perhaps ridiculous--Jeremy would have thought so--but I didn't see the
harm. If shaking started, my plan was to grab Owen first, take him with
me into Rosie's room, get her out of her crib, and sit on the floor holding
them both, my back against the interior wall of Rosie's room. I'd sleep
with the flashlight and my cellphone next to me. I was ready, insofar as it
was possible to be ready for something completely amorphous.
And whether or not my behavior was ridiculous, Jeremy wasn't home to
witness it. He had gone to Denver and left us behind.

It was ra liii ag when I awakened in the morning, and I thought, Vi's
wrong. There wasn't going to be an earthquake. I knew because I'd never
heard Vi mention rain, because it had never occurred to me that October
16 would be rainy, and yet the rain had that murmuring, all-day quality,
as if it were pacing itself. But even as I felt relief, even as I thought about
how removing the wall hangings and putting away the china had been a
waste of time, I still wanted the day to be over.
It was five after six when I climbed out of Jeremy's sleeping bag and
went downstairs to check the mousetraps, all of which were empty. When I 
returned upstairs, I could hear Owen and Rosie making noise in their separate 
rooms, neither of them sounding displeased, so I took a three .1

minute shower, then nursed Owen, changed him into clothes, and carried
him with me to get Rosie. By the time we'd made it through breakfast and
post-breakfasi cleanup and settled to play in the living room, it was seven
twenty. Which was, of course, still punishingly early; there was still so
much day to get through. But Rosie was in an excellent mood--she kept
tapping my face with her index finger, saying, "Mama's nose is friends
with Mama's mouth"--and not one but two dogs walked past our house
with their owners, making Owen squawk with delight when I held him up
to the window.

Jeremy called as Cinnamon the schnauzer was disappearing from view.
"My cousin Joe in Minneapolis just texted to ask if Matt Lauer is really in
Vi's living room right now."

I grabbed the remote control. And sure enough, there they were, sitting
on chairs about two feet from each other. With Jeremy still on the line--it
was an hour earlier in Denver, meaning Vi wasn't on there yet--I turned
up the volume on the TV and put him on speaker so he could hear it, too.
So distracting was the fact of Matt Lauer in Vi's house that it took me a few
seconds to focus on Vi herself; she looked exhausted. She was wearing, I
noted, the navy blue short-sleeved sweater I'd picked out for her to try on
at Lane Bryant, which fit well, though she'd paired it with a somewhat
tacky necklace of interlocking silver circles. "I wonder who did her makeup
this time," I said.

"Will you be embarrassed if you're wrong?" Matt Lauer was asking. "I'll be 
thrilled," Vi said. "That's what I've been telling people all along."
She knew, I thought. She, too, knew already that an earthquake wasn't going to 
happen.

"But your credibility will be undermined," Matt Lauer said.
"Do you think I'd put thousands of people's lives at risk just so I don't look 
bad?" Vi said. "Shame on you, Matt."
Jeremy laughed. "You gotta love her self-righteousness."
"I want to ask you a question a lot of our viewers have asked since you and I 
last spoke," Matt Lauer said. "If you have the ability to see the
future, why don't you take advantage of it by, for example, playing the ottery?"
"I wasn't given this gift to use for my own gain," Vi said. "I'm sure some
mediums do that, but I've always wanted to help others."
"One last question: What are your plans for today and tonight?"
"I'll be attending a low-key vigil with old friends," Vi said. "This is the
kind of day you want to spend with people you're close to."
"Wow," Jeremy said. "The irony."
"She's roped my dad into driving her to the bookstore tonight."
"He could have said no." We were both quiet--it seemed we'd missed
Vi and Matt Lauer's final exchange, and the interview had wrapped up--
and I muted the TV and said, "You think Matt Lauer used her bathroom?
I hope she cleaned it."
"If he did, she should install a plaque. Did you get Mickey Mouse, by

the way?"
"Not yet." I could have told Jeremy that in spite of Vi's latest appearance
on TV, I felt the calmest I had since she'd made her prediction--that the
day felt ordinary and not like the occasion of something terrible. But
again, to reveal my own calmness would have been a kind of olive branch
I still wasn't ready to offer. Yes, Jeremy had been right about the earthquake,
but that didn't mean he should have gone to the conference. He hadn't known he 
was right. Instead, I said, "I wonder if our family should
stop eating meat."
"But mice are so delicious! They're so tender."
"Seriously," I said.
"We can talk about it when I get home," he said. "I'd be up for cutting
it out at least a couple days a week. You think Rosie would deign to say hi
to me?"
I held the receiver toward her. "Want to say hi to Daddy?"
Rosie took the phone and said, "Hi, Rosie."
"Hi, Daddy," I said.
"Mama cleaned pee-pee on Rosie's pajamas," Rosie said.
"Say, 'I miss you." Then I realized that without deciding to, I'd acquiesced,
because surely Jeremy could hear me coaching her. "Say, 'Rosie
misses you:"
"There's no more pee-pee On Rosie's pajamas," Rosie shouted.
"Rosie misses you," I repeated.
"Mommy misses you," Rosie said.

wrong, then I was wrong, too--after all, I'd thought the
earthquake would occur on October 16 before she had. And yet hadn't I
been wrong before, over and over? Wrong in believing that Scary Black
Man would attack me; wrong that I would adopt Chinese girls; wrong that
I would marry Ben Murphy or David Frankel and, on our first date, that I
wouldn't marry Jeremy. Confirmation bias was what Jeremy had called
the tendency to pay greater attention to the times I was right, so what was
its opposite? Because considering the many errors of my past was oddly
comforting. Though I wouldn't have believed that anything other than an
emergency could have induced me to take Rosie and Owen on an outing
on what I'd imagined to be the most anxiety-provoking day of my life, it
felt increasingly ridiculous to stay cooped up. As the rain continued, as
seven forty-five became eight-twenty and eight-twenty became nine
twenty, as Owen went down for a nap, woke, ate, and it wasn't yet eleven,
it just seemed silly for us to stay inside. And perhaps all I'd ever wanted
was this--not the assurance of permanent, unbreachable safety for my
children, because that was impossible, but the ability to distinguish between
anything less than extreme caution and tempting fate. Because I didn't think I 
was tempting fate as I said, "Hey, Rosie, want to go look for
a Halloween costume?" I felt that I was doing what a normal parent, a
normal person, would do.

Besides, I meant at Target, which would not be, by most people's standards,
a bold journey. The store was two miles away, and though we'd
drive, I'd have the stroller in the trunk so we could walk home if
necessary--if the highway cracked open, say.
Before we left, I called Hank and said, "I did end up watching Vi on TV
this morning, and I can tell she doesn't believe her prediction anymore." If! 
couldn't offer this gift to Jeremy, at least I could share it with Hank. I
added, "And I'm feeling so brave that we're going to Target to look for 
Halloween
cost Limes. You need anything?"
In a surprisingly serious tone, Hank said, "There were so many kids out
at Amelia's school this morning that I had a moment of wondering if I
shouldn't leave her."
"I really don't think so."
"Now I keep watching the clock till it's time to go back."
"You're welcome to come with us to Target if you want a distraction."
"Mmm--" I could tell he was considering it, but then he said, "I was
about to fix the leak in our tub. I promised Courtney I'd do it while she's

gone."
Rosie, Owen, and I were in the car but still in the driveway when my
phone rang: Dad cell, the screen said. Which was an identification that
had never shown up; Jeremy had entered a few numbers into my father's
cellphone, but my father called me only at home. When I answered, it
wasn't my father's voice on the other end. It was a woman.
"Your dad fainted, but he doesn't want to go to the hospital," she said.
"You need to come get him."
"Who is this?"
"He's at Relax Massage. Can you come get him? He says he's fine, but
he's still out of it."
"My father was getting a massage and he fainted?" Since when had my
father gotten massages? My heart was tightening the way I'd thought,
when I'd awakened to rain, that it wouldn't.
"Can you come get him?" the woman said.
"Is he conscious?" I asked.
"Yeah, yeah, he's drinking a pop. He didn't want us to call you, but it's
like, 'We're calling an ambulance or your family. Take your pick.--

"Can I talk to him?"
I heard her say, "Your daughter wants to talk to you," and after a few
seconds, there was a beep that I was pretty sure was my father inadvertently
pressing the keypad of his phone, and then he was saying, "Kate, I'm

perfectly fine."
"What happened? Do you need to go to the hospital?"
"I stood up too quickly, but I'm fine."
"And you're getting a--" I almost couldn't say it; it seemed intimate in
an unsavory way. "You were having a massage?"
"When she4was finished, I stood up too quickly," my father said. "That's
all."

"Your daughter come get you," said a female voice in the background, a
different voice--this one was accented, perhaps Eastern European or
Russian, and more forceful. "She get you or we call ambulance."
"Will you pass me back to the person I was talking to before?" I
said.

"Truly, I'm fine," my father said, and it seemed that the second woman
grabbed the phone because she said, "You come get father now. We are on
Olive Boulevard. Relax Massage." Then she hung up.
I glanced in the rearview mirror at Rosie and Owen before calling
Hank. "I just got a really weird call. This woman who doesn't identify
herself says my dad was having a massage, he stood up and fainted, and I
need to come get him."

"Has he come to?"

"Yeah, I actually talked to him. He sounded normal, I guess." I paused.
"I should go out there, right?" Without waiting, I said, "Yeah, of course I
should. You don't think they, like, kidnapped him, do you?"
"Did they say anything about money?"

"You want me to go with you?"
The air of embarrassment around whatever was happening--I knew
that for my father, it would be bad enough to have me witness it without
Hank present, too.

"At least let me come over and watch the kids," Hank was saying. "But if you're 
worried it's unsafe, call the police."

In fact, as I thought about it, it was like the opposite of a kidnapping-- 
these women seemed intent on getting rid of my father.
I said, "The whole massage thing--isn't that code for prostitution?"
"Not always."
"No, I know there are legit places, but I just got this feeling--"

310Curtis Sittenfeld

Hank laughed, before saying, "Sorry. But if at his age, he's still--well,
more power to him."
"Yeah, if he's not your dad." I looked once more at the backseat and
made a decision. "If you really don't mind, maybe I'll leave Rosie with you

and keep Owen. Hopefully, I'll be back by the time Amelia's school lets

out."
"Come on over," Hank said.

in retrospect, to assign a starting point to the sequence
of events that unfolded on this day--tempting as well as futile--and when
I do so, this is the obvious moment. Because surely, if I had decided to
keep Rosie with me instead of handing her over to Hank, everything
would have gone a different way. And I did feel a fleeting uneasiness about
separating myself from my daughter, rain or no rain, but this was Hank,
who was practically a third parent to Rosie, whom I trusted far more than
Vi or my father as a caretaker. Plus, dealing with whatever situation I was
about to enter at the massage place would be considerably easier without
Rosie running around, grabbing things, and shrieking.
I pulled into the Wheelings' driveway, where Hank was waiting, and as
he opened the back door, I said, "You swear this is okay?"
"Don't even think about it."
"I'll fix your tub later," I said, and he grinned.
"Yeah, right."
"Rosie, you get to stay with Hank while I run an errand," I said. "Maybe
you can play with Amelia's grocery cart."
She was looking at me with suspicion in the rearview mirror, and as
Hank unbuckled her car seat, she yelled, "Rosie wants a costume!"
"We'll get the costumes this afternoon," I said.
"Rosie wants a costume now!"
Hank and I made eye contact in the mirror, and he said, "If you trust
me to help her pick something, I don't mind going to Target."
I low I wish that I'd said no and just let Rosie whine. Instead, I said,
"That would be awesome, if you're up for it. lust nothing S-1,-U-T-T-Y." I
ALI unfastened my own seat belt and climbed out of the car, taking Hank's
place in extricating Rosie, and as I did, I said, "You get to go with Hank to
look for your caistume. Isn't that nice of him? So please be his helper in the
store and do what he tells you."

When Rosie was standing in the driveway in the rain, the little green
hood of her raincoat pulled up, Hank extended his hand, and somberly,
Rosie took it. I could tell that she was confused in ways she couldn't express.
I bent to kiss her forehead. "I love you, little pumpkin," I said.

ReiNN NI,', g4, Vt'd 'k in a strip mall, and after I'd inserted Owen into
the carrier and crossed the small parking lot, I almost collided with a man
as I stepped from between two parked cars onto the sidewalk in front of
the stores. He stopped, gesturing for me to go first; I did, smiling 
apologetically,
and as I walked the remaining few feet to the door of Relax Massage,
I could feel him walking in after me.

The waiting room couldn't have been more than fifty square feet, a
dimly lit space with tan walls and an opaque sliding window that was
open onto an interior hall. A bell waited on the window ledge. None of
which was that suspicious, but there was a musky smell in the air that
wasn't at all like the minty scents of the spas I'd been to.
As I was wondering whether I ought to ring the bell or let the guy behind
me ring it, a door next to the window opened and a middle-aged
Woman with dyed red hair emerged. She said, "You are the daughter of
Mr. Earl?" When I nodded, she said, "You come with me." Looking at the man, she 
said, "You sit down, Mr. Nathan, and Alina, she is ready for you
One minute."

She led me to a room about the size of the waiting room, also dimly
t, where a tape player emitted classical music and my father sat with his
s hanging off what looked like a doctor's exam table except longer, and vered 
by a sheet rather than paper. He was--thank goodness--fully
ressed, and drinking 7UP from a can; he wasn't visibly injured. "Daisy, I ldn't 
mean to trouble you," he said. Leaning against a wall, her arms
ded in front of her, was a young woman I assumed to be Alina, an un smiling 
figure with light brown hair that fell almost to her hips, wearing

black leggings, a black tank top, and dark red lipstick. She had large breasts

beneath the tank top, and I tried to suppress the question of whether she'd
recently given my father a hand job.
In a voice that was accent-free and neither friendly nor unfriendly, she
said, "Don't forget his raincoat." She pulled it from a hook and passed it to
me, even though my father had made no motion toward standing. When
she spoke, I saw that behind the lipstick, she had a dead front tooth.
"Dad, you're well enough to walk to the car? Because I can call an ambulance."

"I'm
fine."
As if my father were not present, the older woman said, "You take him
to doctor. Could be problem of--" First she tapped her chest, over her
heart; then she said, "Or here," and tapped her head.
"Dad, why don't you lean on me to get up?" Even as I positioned myself
beside him, Owen attached to me in the carrier, I thought my father would
decline my assistance. When he didn't, I thought one of the women would
offer to help, which also didn't occur. And so with one arm set around my
shoulders, my father slid off the table into a standing position, and he
continued to lean on me heavily as we made our slow progress out of the
room. From the carrier, Owen turned his head to look at my father with
curiosity. "Say, 'Hi, Grandpa,' " I said as we retraced our route through the
little hall and back into the waiting room, where I intentionally didn't
make eye contact with the next man waiting for Alina. Just before I reached
for the handle of the door leading outside, the middle-aged woman said,
"Your father, he not pay."
With my left hand, I pulled my wallet from the right pocket of my vest
and shimmied out a credit card.
"No," the woman said. "Is cash only."
Right, I thought. Because you're prostitutes. Aloud, I asked, "How much?"
"I wouldn't think of having you pay." My father passed his entire wallet
to the woman. I watched her take what I thought was eighty dollars before

passing it back.
"You go to doctor, Mr. Earl," she said.


lot, there was no discussion of my father driving his
own car; aft4r I'd helped him into the front seat of mine, I said, "Want me
to fasten the seat belt?"

"No," he said.
When all three of us were finally settled in, I said, "Did you eat breakfast
this morning?"

"I did. I had a boiled egg."
"Dad, I want to take you to the hospital. I'm sure you're fine, but I just
want to hear it from a doctor."

"That won't be necessary."
"I'd rather be safe than--"

"Take me home, Daisy," my father said. "I'm liable to pick up an infection
at the hospital when all I'd like to do right now is rest. And you can
bet they'd keep us waiting for hours."
I backed out of the parking space and pulled onto Olive, and when we
were stopped at a red light, I said, "How about if you come to our house? I'll
take you home to pack a bag, and you can spend the night with us." Which
was pretty much what I'd suggested before, under different circumstances.
"I'd like to go home, and I'd like you to be on your way," my father said.
"Don't treat me like a child."

Again, I was silent, this time for several minutes, until at last I said, "I
still want to call Dr. Gilmore and make an appointment." When my father
didn't respond, I said, "I'll call and see what he has open."
At his apartment, I escorted my father to the living room couch and,
with Owen back in the carrier, rummaged around in the refrigerator, tossing
a bag of deli turkey with a sell-by date from ten days earlier and setting a 
frozen chicken pot pie in the microwave.
I shouldn't have left Rosie with Hank, I thought. I should have brought
her with me and we could have stayed with my father for the afternoon.
Would it be too much to ask Hank to drive her out? I glanced at my watch
and saw that there were fewer than forty minutes before he was due to
pick up Amelia, which meant he couldn't drive Rosie here. Besides, Rosie
would never nap at my fat her's.
314Curtis Sittenfeld

"We'll come eat dinner with you," I said. "A really early dinner. How
does that sound?"
But saying it, I felt afraid of the earthquake for the first time that day.
The unexpectedness of the rain had pushed away the earthquake's likelihood,
but the unexpectedness of my father's fainting had canceled out
the unexpectedness of the rain.
"Let's see how the afternoon goes," my father said.
I set Owen on the floor in the living room and gave him the star rattle
to play with while I used my cellphone to call my father's internist's office.
I was standing between the kitchen and the living room, still on hold--
Owen was saying, "Ba-ba-ba-ba," and my father was saying nothing in
return--when I saw that Hank was calling. Worried that the internist's
office would pick up while I was on the other line, I didn't answer. After a
minute, Hank called again, and this time, I answered immediately. "Is
everything okay?" If the earthquake had occurred, it seemed impossible

that I wouldn't have felt it.
"Rosie's fine," he said, but as he spoke, I could hear a crying child.

"Is that her?"
"She's not hurt, nothing like that, but I need you to come meet us.
We're still at Target and we've been"--he paused, and when he spoke
again his voice contained a fraught acidity I'd never heard--"detained.
The security guard here is concerned about Rosie."
"I thought you said no one was hurt--"
"No. Kate. Rosie's fine. He's concerned about--about me. Because
Rosie isn't my daughter." Hank seemed to be selecting each word carefully,
perhaps even speaking in code--obviously, he was being listened
to--and all at once, I understood. Still in that weird, clipped way, he said,
"He's worried that you don't know Rosie's with me."
"This is insane," I said. "Put me on the phone with the guard."
"Rosie's mother is glad to talk to you," I heard Hank say, leaning away

from the receiver.
A male voice said, "Sir, we'd like the child's mother to come here in

person?'
"Should I call a lawyer?" I asked.
"Not yet, but can you come now? Is your dad--"
"Yeah, I'll leave in a second. Jesus. I'm so sorry."
"We're inihe office, which is after you pass the pharmacy." To the security
guard, he said, "Should she come in the main entrance or a different
one?" Then, to me, he said, "Come in the main entrance and go right."

I a rimy friendship with Hank, we'd taken the girls for a walk in
their strollers on one of the semi-gated loops off Wydown, a neighborhood
of enormous houses looming over enormous lawns--not the loop
Mrs. Abbott, my former employer, had lived on but the one just east of it. I'd 
suggested walking back there because there was little traffic, which
meant it was safe to be in the street instead of jamming our two strollers
together on the sidewalk. At some point, a golden retriever approached us, and 
Amelia, who was about eighteen months, waved at the dog while
Hank petted its head. The dog stayed with us as we continued around the bend, 
and I said to Hank, "See that thing on her collar? I wonder if she got out of 
her electric fence. I'm almost positive I've seen her before in the yard of 
that brick house back there."
Hank turned toward the dog. "You making a break for it?"
"Does her collar have a name on it?"

Hank bent over, peering into the dog's neck. "No name or address," he
Id.

"I feel like we should take her back and ask if she's theirs. I don't want r to 
get hit by a car." I glanced at Hank. "Do you mind?"
He seemed hesitant, and it crossed my mind that he was deciding I was
annoying to be friends with. But then he said, "Sure, sure."
When we reversed directions, the dog did, too. At the bottom of a long veway 
leading up a massive lawn to a house with four two-story Ionic umns in front, 
Hank stopped. "You're planning to go knock?"
nodded.
"You should go by yourself. Or you and Rosie."
"Oo you think I'm being really weird?"
On I lank's face was an expression
of what I initially thought was
amusement. He said, "The people who live in these houses--if they see a
black man coming up their driveway, they'll call the police. Unless I'm
here to do yard work, they don't want me on their property." Then he
smiled a little and said, "Just a guess."
I was mortified. The whole walk had probably been a mistake, I realized;
I must have seemed to Hank like an insensitive moron.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't--"
"Don't sweat it." He still was looking up the sloped lawn. "You and
Lassie go do reconnaissance, and I'll wait here."
As it turned out, the person who opened the door was a woman who I
felt sure was a housekeeper even though she wasn't wearing a uniform,
and who said, without much conviction, "Ginger, you're a very bad puppy."
She didn't seem like she'd have called the cops if she'd seen Hank approaching,
though I understood his point.
From that day on, we rarely spoke of race, but I tried to be careful. Once
in the fall of 2008, when we were walking to Kaldi's with the girls, we
passed a house with lots of Halloween decorations--oversized inflatable
ghosts and witches, cottony cobwebs spread over the bushes--as well as a 
MCCAIN-PALIN yard sign, and Hank pointed to the sign and said, "All the
effort they went to, and that's the scariest thing of all." The night Barack
Obama won, we were watching TV at Hank and Courtney's--R05 was
asleep in a portable crib in their bedroom, I was pregnant with Owen--
and when the networks called the election around ten o'clock central time,
Hank got choked up, but so did I; even Courtney seemed the tiniest bit

misty.
There were plenty of moments when I forgot, though. I was, after all, a
white woman who'd grown up in St. Louis, now shepherding around my
white children, seeming harried and harmless, reminding people of themselves.
I forgot in a way that Hank, presumably, never could.

I'd received a ticket while Rosie was in the backseat
I'd been careful not to speed, but heading east--I had to take Manchester
Road because of the ongoing highway construction --I drove ten miles
over the limit. Owen had begun to cry as soon as we'd turned out of the
parking lot of my father's building, and I had no idea where any of his
pacifiers we. My father had seemed relieved by our departure; if he'd
overheard my conversation with Hank, he didn't ask about it.
"I know," I said as Owen wailed. "You're ready to eat, aren't you?" I
turned on the radio, hoping it might distract him, and after a Christina
Aguilera song ended, the DJ said, "No sign of an earthquake, but just got a 
report of an accident on Hanley south of Litzsinger Road." Which wasn't
far from Target, though I was pretty sure if I came in on Brentwood Boulevard,
I'd be okay.

I'd learned from experience not to be too ambitious in the Target parking
lot, but I had my pick of spaces; apparently, there was a way to keep people 
away from Target, and Vi had discovered it. I parked at an angle
sufficiently awkward that I'd have reparked under different circum
stances,
turned off the engine, ran around to get Owen, and hurried with him toward the 
entrance.

The first set of automatic doors parted as we approached, then the second
set, and inside the store, we walked quickly by the holding area of large red 
carts, turned right, passed the intra-Target Starbucks and the
pharmacy, and then I spotted red double doors I'd never noticed, with a
ypad by their handles and a small red rectangle that said the word PRIATE. 
Through the narrow windows in the doors, I could see a hallway ith a white 
linoleum floor and several rooms off it. I knocked loudly.
A trim white man in a black uniform came to let me in; on his right rm was a 
badge that said Target Asset Protection, and on his left an merican flag. I 
followed him to a small room, and as I entered, I could
Hank's back, his close-shaved haircut from behind. He sat in a chair at faced a 
desk, and the guard took the seat on the desk's far side. From
chair next to Hank's, Rosie popped up on her knees and said, "Rosie
ts Mama!"

My sweet, pathetic daughter--she wasn't actively crying, but tears were led 
below her eyes, and snot clung to the cut above her mouth. Still lding Owen, I 
scooped her up so that each of my children was balanced one hip, which was a 
position that wasn't sustainable Ibr long. I looked
at the security guard and said, "I don't understand what's going on here,
but this man"-- I nodded toward Hank--" is a very close friend and I
asked him to look after my daughter."
The man appeared unruffled. "Ma'am, our foremost goal is safety."
"Hi, Kate," Hank said glumly.
"And you think you can decide better than me who my daughter is safe
with?" I sounded shrill, I knew, but who did this security guard think he
was? Already, my anxiety had shifted to anger.
"Another customer heard her say, 'This man is not my father," the security
guard said. "You can see why we were concerned."
That man's not Daddy. That's what Rosie would have said, as she had
about Marisa Mazarelli's boyfriend at the acorn park and as she said every
day about other men we passed. She wouldn't have said, This man is not
my father. And I already knew, too, what Hank said next. He said, "But she
wasn't talking about me anyway. She was saying it about an old man."
Perched on my left hip, Rosie reached up and twirled my hair. "Rosie
wants to eat."
"We're about to leave." I turned my gaze back to the security guard. "Is
there anything else you need?"
The man pointed to Rosie. "She's your daughter?"
"Obviously!" As I snapped at him, I felt an awareness of howl could be
outraged in a way Hank couldn't. Did that mean that being outraged was
my duty? Or that it was humiliating to Hank?
Calmly, the security guard said, "Can I see some ID?"
I glared. "What will that prove? You don't even know my daughter's last

name."
"If I'm not mistaken, it's Tucker." The guard was matter-of-fact, not

gloating.
"Just show him your ID, Kate," Hank said, and his voice was still tightly
controlled, which seemed evidence that I was probably humiliating him.
I hadn't previously realized that I didn't have my driver's license on me;
I'd been protesting on principle. But as I tried to think how I'd reach for
my wallet with a child in each arm, it occurred to me that its saggy weight was 
absent from the pocket of my vest, which must have meant--I

hoped--that the wallet had fallen out while I was driving. Aloud, I said,
"My license is in my car." I made my voice polite, which probably just
sounded likvarcasm, as I said to the guard, "Would you like to walk out
with us and I'll show you?" There was no way I was letting Rosie or Owen
out of my sight.

The man curled his lower lip in and chewed on it. "What's your home
address?"

I recited it, thinking, This is bullshit. This is bullshit, and we should sue. 
"Date of birth?" he asked.

I gave that as well.

"And the child's date of birth?"

Was this anything other than a face-saving exercise for him, the pretense
that he'd release us because we'd provided the information he requested
rather than because he'd screwed up by bringing Hank and Rosie back here in the 
first place? But I told him Rosie's date of birth, and I was not surprised when 
he said, "All right then. I'm going to let you folks go. In the future, you 
need to watch that your children don't make statements that raise concerns."

He led the four of us to the door that opened onto the store proper, and

he stayed behind as we walked out. Immediately, the store's humming
,

formality enveloped us: the rows of cosmetics and soaps and lotions, the
te
norance of the other customers. "Rosie, you can walk," I said, and I slid r 
down my side. "But hold my hand." None of us spoke again until we Were outside, 
when Hank said "I need to get Amelia." There was a dis rw
ce to his tone, as if we scarcely knew each other better than either of us
the security guard.
"That guy was nuts," I said. "He had no grounds--"
, Hank shook his head. "Let's forget about it."
' 1( )titthad fed Rosie and Owen and gotten them down for their
la when my cellphone rang. Was Hank prepared now to talk about the
Illness of what had just happened? Had my father changed his mind
lut going to the hospital? But no, neither--it was Jeremy.
"I saw on CNN about the day care, and I don't know," he said. "Maybe
you were right and I was wrong." He sounded rattled, and unlike himself.
"What are you talking about?"
"Have you not heard?"
"Today has been crazy. But heard what?"
"An eighteen-wheeler crashed into Rosie's old day care. You remember
that playroom in the front with the huge windows? It went right through
there. There's pictures online, although you probably shouldn't--" Hastily,
he added, "Sorry, I should have said this already: No one was injured
besides the driver. There was hardly anyone there today, because so many
people kept their kids home." Jeremy was quiet in an odd way, and when
he spoke again, I was shocked to realize he was crying. He said, "I just
keep thinking, what if we hadn't pulled Rosie out of there, what if Vi
hadn't made her prediction? I know I've been dismissive, but if Rosie had
been--" Then he had to stop.
"Jeremy," I said. "Sweetheart. It's fine. We're fine. Those are really big
ifs." He said nothing, and I added, "Rosie and Owen are asleep right now.
Honestly, I don't think there's going to be an earthquake anymore. I'm not
worried, and if I'm not worried, you definitely shouldn't be."
He sniffed loudly (Jeremy had not cried at our wedding or at his aunt's
funeral--in fact, the only time I'd ever seen him cry was watching the
movie Brian's Song, and even that had been more like watery eyes than
tears) before saying, "I'm thinking I should come home today."
"We're fine," I said. "Forget everything I said before. You need to stay
and deliver your paper and schmooze with people." How had we arrived
at this point, with him lobbying to return early and me trying to convince
him not to? But it was, in a way, unsurprising; wasn't our marriage a series
of flip-flops in which we alternated the stances either of us took? And,
even if he didn't realize it, wasn't the reason he was suggesting coming
home that he knew I'd talk him out of it?
Jeremy sniffed again. "What did you mean about it being a crazy day?"

After I'd filled him in on my father's fainting and what I mistakenly

referred to as I lank's arrest--no, no, I had to quickly say, not arrested, just
detained--Jeremy said, "Jesus Christ. Has Hank never had Rosie without
you before?"

"I guess Ale," I said.
"I wonder if Courtney knows yet. Her panel was this morning."
"I assume Hank called her."

"And you did or didn't make a doctor's appointment for your dad?"
"I didn't. I was on the phone with the office when I heard from Hank."
"Your dad should definitely be checked out. It could be a head rush or it could 
be something serious."
"I realize that," I said. "Believe me."

"I'm not trying to stress you out." He himself sounded more normal,
not shaky like before. He said, "Part of me wants you to see the pictures of 
the day care and part of me thinks you definitely shouldn't."
"I'm not planning to look at them." As if I needed a reminder that scary
things could happen. On the contrary: I yearned to be a person stunned
by misfortune.

"I checked the times for if I try to change my flight, and they're all bad," 
eremy said.

Of course they were. And of course I'd told him not to bother, meaning at by 
staying in Denver, he was merely obliging me.
"Don't worry about it," I said.

)sic had t t awakened from her nap by four--apparently, the ma of Target had 
worn her out--at which point I knew we wouldn't be urning to my father's 
apartment for dinner unless he outright asked us Which he wouldn't, though when 
I called him, he showed none of the rning's irritability. When I mentioned that 
I'd made a doctor's apntment
for him for the following Monday, he even thanked me, and --this was my true 
victory--I managed to extract a promise that he
Idn't drive Vi to the vigil. "I've tried calling her a few times today, but ya 
her phone is full," he said.
I'll text her for you."
I I


II
1I

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322Curtis Sittenfeld
"Will you tell her I'm sorry not to help?"
"I'm sure she'll understand."
"I hope being wrong about the earthquake isn't a terrible blow." He
seemed to be in a musing sort of mood, as if he were talking to himself as
much as to me, and he added, "I suppose it still could happen, but when I
woke this morning and it was raining, I thought it was awfully unlikely.
Violet's picking up on something, there's no doubt about that, but I don't
think it's an earthquake."
So the weather had convinced him, too; this was amusing, coming
from my not-exactly-intuitive father.
And then he said, "I didn't have a sense one way or the other in ad
vance.
I certainly couldn't rule it out. But the rain made me think, Not
today."
There was no one except Owen to see it, and he was busy with a toy car
on the living room floor, but my jaw literally dropped. I didn't have a sense
one way or the other? Since when had my father--my fat had senses?
And he was as casual as if this was not only an established fact between us
but one we'd agreed was no big deal.
Trying to sound equally casual, I said, "Yeah, the rain made me have
doubts, too."
I waited for him to reveal more, but instead he said, "I hope it didn't
disrupt your day to come get me this morning."
"I'm just glad you're feeling better. Why don't I pick you up tomorrow
morning and we'll get your car?"
"That's not an inconvenience?"
"Not at all. What if we come around eleven?" Then I said, "Will you
promise that you'll call if you feel faint again? I really mean it, Dad. Even
if it's the middle of the night."
After I hung up, I texted Vi: Dad asked me to tell u he can't drive u tonight. 
It wasn't that I was surprised when she didn't text back, but still, it
was hard not to feel like I was waiting for a response. Because Vi and I
weren't speaking, and because the topic of senses had gone sour between
Jeremy and me, there was no one I could talk to about my father's revela tion. 
To distract myself, I took a picture of Owen and his car with my
phone and sent it off to Jeremy.

4
A round vu, i texted Hank: Have fun at eq party! Though I still
hadn't heard from Vi, Hank replied immediately: Decided to skip. Want us
to bring over chinese?

Twist my arm, I wrote.

At our house, as Hank unloaded white cartons from a brown paper
bag and set them on the kitchen table, he seemed subdued, the way he'd
been in the days before and after Courtney's abortion. He didn't mention
Target, and neither did I.
The children were seated, Owen in his high chair, and Amelia was
chanting, "I want noodles! I want noodles!" Rosie pointed at the pile of
chopsticks still in their paper sleeves and said, "Mama gives Rosie that."
"Those are for grown-ups," I said.

I set beers out for Hank and me and spooned rice onto a paper plate so that it 
would cool; the fact that we were eating takeout seemed to conceal the 
weirdness of my having put away our china. After Hank had opened the flaps of 
all the cartons--he'd ordered vegetable pot stickers, vegetable
lo mein with tofu, broccoli with garlic sauce, and Szechuan eggplant-- I 
thought of making a joke about how he'd become a vegetarian again, but I didn't 
want to risk offending him.

' He prepared a plate for Amelia, and I made one for Rosie. Owen was
ba .
ving a jar of pears.

ktilly

As Hank and I served ourselves, he said, "I know you said Vi's wrong,
t I'm still waiting for the ground to start rumbling." "Well, there's been so 
much hype." I "You never had premonitions?" His question had a 
making-conversation quality to it, or even a post- quality, as if we'd 
quarreled but were now trying to get along. How Id he know what a loaded topic 
he'd stumbled onto? It wasn't imposthat
I'd have told him the truth under different circumstances, but it



;11


1

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III
h

11
324Curtis Sittenfeld
seemed unfair to dump my life-defining secret on him when he was just
filling the silence. So I said, "Not like Vi." Then I said, "Did you hear about
the day-care place on Hanley?"I
"Wow, I didn't even realize until right now--that's where Rosie went,
"Only for about five weeks. But Jeremy told me not to look at the pichuh?"
"They
were saying on the radio the driver fell asleep after being on the
tures."
"What's Mommy and Hank talking about?" Rosie said.

road for fifteen hours."
"A man who was driving a truck:' Glancing at her plate, I said, "You're
doing a great job eating broccoli."
"How's your dad?" Hank asked.
"If you ask him, fine." I sighed. "He has a doctor's appointment for
Monday."
"Did you tell Vi he fainted?"
"That would involve speaking to her." This wasn't even true--it could
merely involve texting her--but presumably the day was chaotic enough
for Vi without the addition of my father's health problems. Anyway, the
thing I really wanted to talk to her about, even more than the fainting
episode,- was his astonishing mention of having senses. I
"If you're interested in going to that vigil, I'll stay here," Hank said.
"Amelia can go to sleep in your bed."
"Honestly, the vigil sounds awful. Would you want to go?"
"She's not my sister."
"You think I'm being unsupportive?"
"I think however things play out, this has to be an insanely weird night
I hadn't seriously considered attending the vigil, and for about thirty
for her."
seconds, I thought, Okay, if I put Owen and Rosie down first, and if Hank
stays here with Amelia, and then I thought, But it's closed to the public. And 
my name won't be on any list. And there'll be media camped outside. And Vi said 
I'm turning my children into clingy little wimps. So no. She

I said to Hank, "You and Atelia are welcome to hang out here as long
as you want, but I'm not going to the vigil."
"Mama." Rosie tugged on my shirt. "This broccoli is tasty and wonderful."

Hank
and I both laughed, and as I said, "I think so, too," I felt that the
awkwardness from Target had dissipated; things were normal again. After
we finished eating, Hank distracted Rosie by singing "Bingo" while I applied
Neosporin to her cut, and then he watched all three children in the
living room and I cleaned up the food and set out the mousetraps. When
I rejoined them, I called Jeremy so Rosie could say good night, and when
I carried Owen upstairs, Rosie and Amelia were taking turns holding
Hank's hands, walking up his legs, and doing backward somersaults. If no
one ended up puking, I thought, I just might have to conclude that the
evening had been a success. Vi and I had indeed been wrong about what
would happen on October 16.
Hank did put Amelia down to sleep in our bed, after I'd taken Rosie
up to her room, and finally there was that moment, familiar to me from
nights with Jeremy, when Hank and I could both relax. I'd turned the
television to CNN, which was the only channel with live coverage of St.
Louis, though even on CNN it wasn't continuous. Anderson Cooper, who
was in the studio in New York, was interviewing the surgeon general about
subjects that had nothing to do with earthquakes, and then he'd get periodic
updates from the ground in St. Louis, where the correspondent was
tanding with the Arch behind him. "You want another beer?" I said.
"Are you having one?" Hank asked.
?, He knew about my one-beer-and-one-coffee-per-day policy. "I will if
u will," I said. "But only because it's earthquake season."
I sat in the armchair and he sat on the couch, and we flipped among
rious stations. On MSNBC, the host of the show was talking to a FEMA
gineer, and Hank said, "I thought all geologists were in Denver right
." Later, when they showed a clip of Vi's first interview with Matt
tier, i lank said, "I low weird is this for you?" and I said, "Very." Event ti 
I,
I1

11
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11,111



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1I




326Curtis Sittenfeld
ally, during a commercial break on CNN, we ended up watching a competitive
cooking show and didn't change it.
Sitting there, I became conscious of a strange--an inappropriate
--
tension between Hank and me. The longer the stretches lasted when neither
of us spoke, the more I felt like we were in a romantic comedy about
two single parents trying, after years off the dating market, to get up the
nerve for a first kiss. Except that, obviously, having a first kiss was the
worst thing Hank and I could do.
just before ten, as the head chef berated a contestant, Owen let out a cry,
and I said, "I've been summoned" and went up to feed him. Usually after
his ten o'clock nursing, I didn't go back downstairs--I went to bed, where
Jeremy joined me after he'd closed down the house--but sitting in the
glider in Owens darkened room, I was completely awake. And what I was
thinking about wasn't the countdown to the end of this bizarre day, this
whole bizarre period; I wasn't thinking of Owen, even as I burped him,
changed his diaper, and set him back in his crib. I was thinking of Hank,
and what I realized was at once shocking and unsurprising: I wanted to
have sex with him. I had never felt this way before. Had I? I was pretty sure
I hadn't. Clearly, I needed to get him out of the house as quickly as possible.
(I wanted to take off my clothes and I wanted him to take off his
clothes, and when we were both naked, I wanted --well, any number of
scenarios would work. I could get on top of him, or he could get on top of
me, or he could enter me from behind, with me pressed against the couch
cushions. I didn't generally love that position, but in this case, I'd take it.
As I descended the stairs, my heart pounded, and this was not anxious
I'd take any of it.)
heart; it was something else entirely, something familiar, though I hadn't
experienced it for years. There was a pressure in the roof of my mouth, and
even my saliva had thickened. Surely when I saw Hank sitting there, regular
Hank, the friend with whom I discussed diaper rash and preschool
admissions, surely this anticipatory alertness in my body would correct
I le turned his head as I entered the living room, and nothing was corit
self. Surely.
I felt deranged with lust. How had I managed, for the last two
years, to ignore how good-looking he was, his eyes and his smile and his
smooth, dark forearms? He patted the couch next to him and said, "Come
on over," and still, we both might have pretended this was all just
friendliness--maybe on his part it was--as I foolishly, foolishly sat beside
him. Not as close as I'd have sat to Jeremy, not touching, but not far enough
away.
The local news had come on--the anchor was describing a bank robbery
in Fenton--and I said, "Did they mention Vi yet?" My voice sounded
oddly normal.
"Are you kidding? She was the top story." His tone was normal, too.
"Of course she was." I reached for the beer I'd left on the table and took
a sip. (I wasn't drunk; I can't use that as an excuse.) I tried to make myself
think of Jeremy, but he seemed like an idea and not a person; instead of
being a body next to me, his name was just a word, and the body next to
mine was someone else's.

The local news turned into The Tonight Show. It had been fifteen minutes
since either of us had spoken, and I was afraid that if I did speak, it
would be to beg Hank to touch me. Then, at the same time, we both
started to talk. Hank motioned for me to go ahead, and I said, "I was just
going to say we should go to the zoo tomorrow. I'm driving out to my
dad's at some point, but we're free besides that." (Really, I was the dullest
person on the planet. No wonder I irritated Vi.)
"Sure. We'd be up for the zoo." There was another full minute of silence,
then Hank said, "See, I've gotten used to people seeing me out with
Amelia during the day and assuming I'm her deadbeat dad--that she's one of the 
seven children I have with my five different baby mamas, and she's just the one 
who's with me while her mom is off, you know, collecting welfare."

"Hank," I said. "No one would ever think that."
"Trust me," he said. "They would and they do. That's not even my point. I'm 
used to it. It's just that, the idea that I'd kidnap this little white hi--it's 
like, okay, assume I'm a deadbeat, but seeing me as a child
molester--that's where I draw the line."

"Hank, I'm not just saying this to make you feel better. I swear to iod



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11

328Curtis Sittenfeld
I can't imagine anyone ever in a million years thinking you're a child 
molester."
"Besides
the security guard who thought exactly that? And the respon
sible Target shopper who turned us in?" He was quiet before saying, "You
want to feel like you're above all these prejudices and stereotypes. Like,
hey, it's 2009! We can chart our own path! But me being the stay-at-home
parent it's not just other people who still don't get it. With Courtney, our
deal was that this setup would give me more time to paint and she's like,
'I don't see any paintings.' Not even from the perspective of generating
income--she just wonders how I can have any self-resPect doing nothing
besides hanging out with a three-year-old all day."
Of course Courtney would wonder this. "I think anyone who's ever
stayed home with a child knows how hard it is," I said.
"She's right, though," Hank said. "I mean, what the fuck am I doing
with my life? You wouldn't think it to look at us now, but there was a time
when Courtney and I were considered equally promising. In our separate
fields, we were both going to light the world on fire. Do you even know
that I have a master's in painting?" Before I could respond, he said, "Not
to mention the whole ttaitor-to-the-race thing. First I squander my Harvard
education studying art, then I marry a white girl, then I let her support
me. When I could be a hedge fund manager in Manhattan, making
big donations to my church, grooming my daughter for Jack and Jill."
"I think you're being way too hard on yourself."
Hank half-smiled. "I'm sure you do." He took a sip of beer. "When
Courtney was interviewing at Wash U, a friend of ours who'd done his
postdoc at Mizzou told us Missouri is the northernmost southern state."
"And the southernmost northern state," I said. "And the easternmost
western state, and the westernmost eastern state."
"But it was the southern part that got my attention' was picturing
good old boys waving Confederate flags."
I said nothing; I did sometimes see Confederate flags, mostly in the
Hank said, "What happened after Wash U offered Courtney the job
form of bumper stickers.
onoosite People were overly excited to find out I'm black.



I'd been teaching at a prep school in Boston, but when Courtney put out
feelers about whether Wash U could help me find a job here, the two
schools I was interested in said they didn't need an art teacher. They'd
meet with me for an informational interview, but they weren't hiring. So
Courtney and I make a trip out anyway, I go to the schools, and from the minute 
I introduce myself, they're falling all over themselves, and what do
you know? It turns out they do need another art teacher. Both schools! It
was like they'd never met a black man who knew how to hold a paintbrush."

"But
you took one of the jobs, didn't you?"
"I did, and my co-workers were nice, for the most part. There wasn't an
admissions tour in my three years there that didn't stop in my classroom,
but they were nice."
"For what this is worth," I said, "that Target security guard doesn't represent
everyone in St. Louis."
"Granted. But no matter how many liberal professors we know, there
are certain realities. And then I think about Amelia, and were we selfish to
have her? Like, 'Yeah, the world is a fucked-up, racist place, but let's make
our little half-black, half-white baby anyway because we're in love and she'll 
be so cute!" "

"I think every parent wonders some version of that," I said. "I definitely
wonder what I've saddled Owen and Rosie with."

"Maybe Courtney was right," Hank said. "Maybe being biracial and
tarded would have been too much for one kid."

"That wasn't her reasoning, was it?"
Hank shrugged.
"You know how earlier you asked if I'd ever had premonitions?" I said. Well, I 
lied. Vi and I started out exactly the same, when we were little, but we got 
older, I decided being psychic was creepy and embarrassing. Be
1
met Jeremy, I was sure I wouldn't have biological children because I
afraid they'd be psychic, too. I wanted to be a mother, but I was plann$
to adopt."
"Holy shit," Hank said.
"I'm hardy psychic anymore:' I said. "Although today, when it was
raining in the morning, I knew Vi was wrong about the earthquake. I just
knew."
"And have your kids shown signs of ESP? I guess Owen wouldn't yet,
but has Rosie?"
I shook my head. "And now I can't imagine my life without them. But
sometimes I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop."
"I can't believe you've been holding out on me all this time." Hank gave
me a mischievous look.
"I'm telling you that I'm fourth-rate now. At best. Please don't put your
hand behind your back and ask how many fingers you're holding up."
"Oh, I'm planning to exploit you for far bigger gain. Investments I
should make on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and that kind of thing." Then
he said, "I know you feel really burned by Vi right now, but she completely
looks up to you. You realize that, don't you?"
"Vi thinks I'm a shallow, boring housewife." I laughed. "And she's

right."
"We all need someone in our lives to keep us honest." Then he said,
"That's not really how you see yourself, is it? Because you have everything
going for you: your happy marriage and your cute kids, and you're all nice
and pretty--" There was a weird way his voice caught on nice and again on 
pretty, like he was preemptively making fun of his own sincerity. Even so,
these were by far the most generous things anyone had said to me in a long
time. Jeremy and I were too tired to give each other compliments.
Simultaneously, I felt the impulse to point out the reasons Hank was
wrong--and really, he of all people knew how messy our lives were, how
narrow and repetitive our days--and the impulse to bask in this version
of myself, to pretend that everything he said was true.
"You forgot organized," I said. "How well-organized I am and what a
tidy housekeeper and that's why there are never any mice in our kitchen."
We looked at each other, and he said, "If I kissed you right now, it would
probably be a really bad idea, huh?"
This was the final opportunity to avoid the evening's outcome. Deflecting
his overture would be awkward, but surmountably so. We wouldn't
in any explicit way.
And so I did the opposite of deflecting: I lunged forward, I pressed my
mouth against his, and we were kissing in a way Jeremy and I hardly kissed
anymore--it was like Hank and I were trying to consume each other.
Again I wondered, had we been waiting all along to do this? The idea that
because he was a straight man and I was a straight woman, there would
therefore be sexual tension between us seemed so cliched that it had never
been difficult for me to dismiss.

And then I wasn't wondering anything; his hands were all over me and
my hands were all over him, and there was that good smell Hank had, like
cloves and soap, a smell that I'd always been faintly aware of and now felt
drugged by. Jeremy did not, of course, exist in this moment (if he existed,
how could I have done what I was doing?), yet even so I was conscious of
Hank as Not Jeremy: Hank's torso was bigger, his shoulders were broader,
his biceps harder. I had not held a man other than Jeremy for seven years; to 
me, sex meant sex with Jeremy. But here was a reminder that the narrowness
of my life, the repetition of my habits, were choices I made.
We'd shifted so his back was against the arm of the couch, his legs out in 
front of him, and I was on his lap, and without much difficulty Hank
managed to get his hand past the waistband of my jeans, into my underwear,
and to touch me in a way that made me twist and moan above him, a way that made 
it seem extremely urgent that I unfasten his pants and pull them off, past his 
knees, that I then pull off his briefs--so Hank wore briefs; they were gray 
Calvin Klein--and I held his erection (again, in a
fleeting not-thinking way, I did note that, consistent with the racial stereo 
pe,
his penis was larger than Jeremy's, though not dramatically so) and

ith my thumb I rubbed the exposed underside of the tip, this rubbing
otion being something my husband who didn't exist liked, and some mg
Hank apparently did, too, and then I guided Hank into me; I was
k and he glided right in.
He stayed inside me as he moved into an upright sitting position with back to 
the couch cushions, as if he were watching television. And in t the television 
was still on, but instead of following The Tonight Show, were naked from the 
waist down, grinding against each other, both of
breathing quickly, and he was pushing up my shirt, pulling down the
cups of my bra without bothering to unfasten them, and rubbing his face
between my breasts, sucking my nipples, which was something I hadn't let
Jeremy do since I'd given birth to Rosie, because it was too confusing to
have my nipples in the mouth of more than one person. But with Hank--
and I was wearing one of my usual threadbare nursing bras, and it was
possible that I'd start leaking milk--I didn't care. Hank's tongue on my
nipples was the least confusing part of what was happening, but I didn't
care about any of it. I just needed him to keep jamming up into me, I
needed to feel his warm skin under my hands, his solid body, which of
fered
a comfort I had been unable to find elsewhere for the last several
weeks. And then the good feeling tipped over and spread, I was shuddering
with it, and when I moaned, he bounced me against him faster, gripping
my hips, and a minute passed, and another minute, another minute
after that, and he was still going. First, enough time elapsed for the woozy
glow inside me to dissipate. Then I began to wonder how long it would be
until he finished--was this intentional on his part, or was there a problem.
Or neither; was he just not efficient but didn't see a need to be? And
then I was officially waiting for him to be done, and then, perhaps seven
minutes after I'd come, I heard from the other room a clacking sound, a
single snap, and I knew immediately that the mouse had been caught.
This was the moment when Jeremy reentered my consciousness, and I
understood that I had betrayed him in an irreversible way.
Because if a mousetrap had snapped while Jeremy and I were going at
it, we'd have started laughing. Or at least we'd have acknowledged it,
whereas with Hank, as well as I knew him in other contexts, he was sexually
a stranger to me. Had he even heard the mousetrap? If he hadn't, I
wasn't about to bring it to his attention and thereby risk prolonging the
conclusion of this act. (Later, there would be opportunity to wonder why
I hadn't done exactly this. Or not prolonged the conclusion but prevented
it. But in the moment, the idea of not allowing Hank as much time as he
needed would have struck me as bad manners, like clearing the plates at a
dinner party while your guests were in the middle of their meal.)
After an endless stretch in which I had traveled across continents of
disbelief and regret, over forests and fields and rivers, and he was still 
thrusting away under me, finally, finally, he sighed deeply--his eyes were
closed--and stopped moving. He tilted his head back against the cushions,
and his hands remained at my hips, though it seemed to be because
he hadn't gotten around to moving them rather than because he was actively
placing them there. My head was above his, and I felt an uncertainty
about what to do next that was as complete as the comfort I'd derived
from him such a short time before. What words would either of us now
say? In what way was Ito extricate my body from his? And surely I was the
one who had to start the extrication, wasn't I, since I was on top? The mo
ment
when he'd open his eyes would be terrifying, I thought; if there were
a way to permanently avoid it, I would.

And then he did open them. He opened his eyes and raised his head
and smiled wryly, and it was the same smile he'd exchanged with me the week 
before at the Oak Knoll playground when Amelia had thrown
not one but two apples into a muddy puddle, as if he were saying, What
can you do? He patted my side in a friendly way that also, clearly, meant Get 
up.

I swung my left leg over his lap and turned until I was also sitting on the 
couch--I was bare-assed on the couch where Rosie and I read about the
adventures of Frog and Toad--and I leaned forward to retrieve my underwear
and jeans from the floor. In my peripheral vision, I could see that he, too, 
was pulling his clothes back on, and I heard him zip his pants.
He tapped me on the arm, and I turned my head.
"Hi," he said. Again, his expression--it wasn't one of intense amuse
ment,
but it wasn't unamused, either. It wasn't horrified. He said, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said.
I felt another way I hadn't for years, which was that I didn't want to be the 
girl who was lame after sex. Who took it, for whatever reason, too seriously.
This seems odd in retrospect, given that I might have just wrecked
my marriage and that surely wrecking one's marriage was grounds for seriousness.
Hank stood. "I'm gonna pee," he said.
This time, I just nodded.
I could hear him in our downstairs bathroom, and I had no idea what
to do with myself. Go to the upstairs bathroom and wipe away the semen

leaking into my underwear? Throw away the dead mouse in the kitchen?

Check on my children?
The toilet flushed, the faucet ran, and he came back into the living

room and said, "So I should get Amelia home to sleep in her own bed."
Yes, this was exactly what needed to happen--they needed to leave.
Which did not preclude me from feeling a sting of rejection at the hastiness
of his departure. How was it possible to know already that this had
been a mistake and still to be as sensitive to his every inflection as if we

were dating?
As I stood, I said, "Let me get the leftover Chinese for you."
"Nah, you keep it. Rosie was going to town on the broccoli, huh?" We
were both quiet for a second, and he said, "I'll say goodbye to you now,
because who knows what state Amelia will be in when! bring her down." He
stepped forward and set his palms against both sides of my jaw and kissed
me on the lips, quickly but fully. In a strange way, this moment brought me
back to him. My jangled, seething brain was busy thinking, I would never
leave Jeremy for Hank; I could never even have an affair with Hank, because
he takes so long to come. But when he kissed me, it was so much the
gesture of a husband that! could, however briefly and misguidedly, imag
ine
being his wife. Also, this time, the taste of his mouth was familiar.

While he was getting Amelia, I gathered their jackets and Amelia's pink

backpack. He carried her down the stairs, and as far as I could tell, she was

still asleep. As I let them out the door, he whispered--he said it not the
way a single guy does to a single woman but the regular way he'd said it to
me hundreds of times before, for playdate-scheduling purposes--"I'll
give you a call tomorrow."

what--had I done? What had I been thinking? How could such a ruinous
act be so easy? Its nonoccurrence up to this point hadn't required restraint,
so it seemed as if, conversely, there ought to have been more effort involved
in its occurrence. And what now? Should I tell Jeremy? If so, while
he was still in Denver? No, not while he was away. Definitely not. But
whatever had happened between Hank and me was finished, I thought. It
had to be. And then, having resolved something, I was able to pee. When
I wiped, Hank's semen coated the toilet paper.
After I'd washed my hands, I dried them on an orange hand towel,
which was one of two Halloween-themed towels Rosie and I had picked
out the year before at Target; the orange one was embroidered with a little
spider, and the other was purple with an orange pumpkin on it. As I dried
my hands, I experienced the first bout of nostalgia--there would be
many--for the person I had been before this evening, the person who'd
bought these silly towels, who hadn't cheated on her husband. The person
who had felt guilty when she hid The Berenstain Bears Go to Camp because
she was sick of reading it to Rosie or when she forgot to put sunscreen
on Rosie and Owen before leaving for the playground. In the past,
those had been the kinds of sins I committed against my family.
In the kitchen, while averting my eyes as much as possible, I slid the
poor dead mouse in the trap into a plastic bag; I walked out the back door,
deposited the bag in the garbage bin, and washed my hands again at the
kitchen sink. Then I filled a glass with tap water and gulped it down. It was
somehow reassuring that I'd already cleaned up from dinner; it was one
less way that my life was squalid.
Back in the living room, I changed the channel from NBC to CNN. It
was eleven twenty-three. Was there any point in watching the final half
hour of a nonevent? I'd shower before bed, I decided, then return downstairs
to hear them officially say on TV that nothing had happened.
I carried both monitors up to the bathroom and had just pulled back
the shower curtain when the doorbell rang. I looked at my own face in the
mirror, as if for guidance, and the bell rang again. Who would it be at almost
midnight? Had Jeremy decided to come home after all? And Jesus,
what if he'd arrived an hour earlier? But no, Jeremy would have a key. My
father? It seemed doubtful. Marisa Mazarelli, attempting once more to
pry her romantic future out of me? But she was traveling, too. The likeliest
possibilities had to be Hank or some reporter who wanted to interview me
in the moment of my sister's prediction not coming to pass. Either way, to
ignore the doorbell would keep me from getting in the shower out of
worry that whoever had rung was still lurking.
I had failed to consider one person, and when I peered through the
window at the top of the door, even though the glass was beveled and the
porch light was off, I recognized her immediately. I opened the door and
said, "Hi, Vi."
She held up both hands, as if in surrender. "Just me--no paparazzi.
Although I swear I understand now how Jennifer Aniston feels." I let her
in, and as she shrugged off her cape and tossed it toward the living room
couch, she said, "Is Jeremy asleep?"
"He's out of town."
"He left you here to hold down the homestead while he fled for higher
ground?"
"He's at a conference in Denver that was planned way before all this."
"That makes more sense. I mean, I couldn't imagine he ever believed
me." She sounded nonchalant, not bitter, as she added, "Which means
that now he gets to say I told you so. I just wish Courtney Wheeling the
self-righteous prune didn't get to say it, too."
Courtney. So focused on my betrayal of Jeremy had I been that I hadn't
yet considered her. And though she wasn't my favorite person, she was--
she had been--a friend. Really, what had I done? What was my justification?
That the past few weeks had been stressful or that Jeremy had let me
down by going to Denver? These were not adequate, as justifications went.
I pointed to the TV and said, "Aren't you supposed to be at the vigil?"
"The whole vibe was bugging me, so I said I had to go to the bathroom
and snuck out the back. I could tell that when midnight came, they were
going to offer me condolences like someone had died while secretly gloating."
She added, "I thought I'd feel humiliated, I know I'm supposed to feel
hti miliated, but I really and truly feel relieved. I had a nightmare this week
of, like, this falling-clown church with dead bodies in front of it, and it was

so gruesome. And maybe it was just some slum in Nigeria or somewhere

like that. Maybe it was the country I was supposed to go to for the Peace
Corps, and not even an earthquake but normal life. Matt Lauer interviewed
me again this morning---"
"I saw."

"I think he thought I was lying when I said I wanted my prediction to
be wrong--that I was putting on a good front. But it's true. Sometimes it's
good to be wrong." She paused. "Do you think I should feel humiliated?"
I didn't answer right away, and then I said, "I don't know what to think
anymore."
"Ha," she said, but she still didn't seem offended. "Nice dodge."
"Dad fainted today," I said. "That was the reason he couldn't drive you.
He--well, he was getting a massage, and he stood up afterward and passed
out."

"Dad was getting a massage? Like a massage massage or a happy-ending
massage?" Already, I felt the relief of sharing this information with the one
person in the world who'd feel exactly the way I did about it: just as concerned
and just as squeamish. "Is he okay?" she said.
"I think he's fine. He was super prickly when I went to get him. I wanted to 
take him to the hospital, and he insisted I take him home, although I
did make a doctor's appointment for him for Monday. But here's the really
bizarre part: Later, on the phone, he basically confessed that he has senses."
"Dad? Our dad?"

"I know. He said he hadn't known before today if there would be an
earthquake, then he woke up this morning and saw the rain and knew
here wouldn't. And he said it very matter-of-factly, like he wasn't drop
ping
a bombshell. I kind of wonder if he'd taken pain medication and was
opy."

Vi's expression was one of uncertain and excited interest, as if she were
ing to remember the details of a very odd but pleasant dream. At last, e said, 
"Wow. I mean, holy crap, Dad, what else have you been hiding
from us, you mild-mannered lighting salesman from Omaha, Nebraska?
sides your massages with hookers, that is."
"I always thought senses were hereditary," I said. "I just didn't think
they were from his side. Anyway, don't ask him about it. Or about the
massage."
"Why not?"
"Because it's none of our business."
"Was the masseuse Asian?"
I shook my head. "Maybe Polish."
"It wasn't a tranny, was it?" It was hard to guess whether Vi wanted the
answer to be yes or no.
"There was an older woman and a younger one, maybe a mother and
daughter, and I think the daughter was the one who'd given him the massage.
I mean, she looked over eighteen. And they were both real females. It
was at a place in Olivette."
"But it obviously skeeved you out, so what aren't you telling me?"
"I'm just not sure if it was a sexual thing." Though, really, who was I to
pass judgment? "Let's not talk about it anymore."
"Remember when you thought I should give Dad a gift certificate for a
massage for his birthday and I said he'd hate it?" Vi laughed. "Well, I stand

corrected."
And then on the television screen, there appeared footage of the truck
smashed into the day care, an aerial shot followed by a close-up of brightly
colored plastic balls and a flattened teddy bear and shattered glass, and
I could understand why Jeremy had warned me against looking at the

images.
I said, "Do you know this is where Rosie went?"
"Really?" Vi seemed more interested than I'd have expected, though I
myself was preoccupied by trying to figure out why, in the last minutes
before the clock ran out on Vi's prediction, CNN was showing this accident.
I didn't yet understand that the accident at the day care would become
a central part of the earthquake narrative--it would become the
part that redeemed Vi, at least in the eyes of St. Louisans. The logic was
similar to Jeremy's when he'd told me about the accident: If not for Vi's
prediction, then the front room of the building would have been filled
with children when the truck crashed into it; ergo, Vi had saved the children's
lives. And maybe the reason Vi wasn't humiliated when there was
no earthquake on October 16 was that at some level, she already knew--
she had a sense--of this public redemption.

Personally, I never bought into this version, and my view, it turns out,
is shared by people outside St. Louis, which I know because I no longer
live in St. Louis myself. It was only in the city of Vi's prediction that the
prediction justified itself. The proximity of the accident made people nervous,
left them feeling grateful for what hadn't happened, and their gratitude
needed a recipient. That recipient became my sister. So she was wrong
about the earthquake; she was right about something else, and her rightness
allowed her to be forgiven.

In that moment when Vi and I were still watching TV, when it still
wasn't quite midnight--we were standing just inside the front door because
we'd never sat down--Vi said, "You haven't asked how I got over
here."

"I thought you snuck out the back of the bookstore."
"I did," Vi said. "But after that."
"How'd you get over here?"
Vi beamed. "I drove," she said.
Clayton, and what I first noticed--this embarrasses me now--was that
the parent in one of the other parent-child duos was a black man. Then I
noticed that he was a fit black man wearing a Wash U T-shirt. Then I noticed
that he was Hank Wheeling, the husband of Jeremy's colleague
Courtney. Across the circle of children and moms--all the other parents
were white mothers, and there were twelve adults total--I made eye contact
with him, patted my chest, and mouthed, Kate Tucker. He nodded
and smiled. We were waiting for the first class to start, and in my arms,
Rosie squirmed in her flowered onesie. Amelia, who was then almost one
and a half, though I knew neither her name nor her age, stood in front of
Hank, clapping and yelling, "Bubbles! Bubbles! Bubbles!" She was exceptionally
cute--so cute, in fact, that she could have been a model for the
Swedish organic cotton baby clothes I had told Jeremy I'd stop ordering.
Her skin was light brown and her eyes were dark brown and she had ludi
crously
long eyelashes and curly, wiry hair that was pulled into a fluffy
ponytail on top of her head. I happened to know that her striped T-shirt
and pink skirt were from the Swedish organic clothing company because I
recognized the outfit from the most recent catalog.
When the teacher arrived, toting little drums and bells, she had us introduce
our children but not ourselves, after which we sang and danced
for the next forty minutes. The class culminated with a conga line that
snaked around the room as the adults shouted the lyrics to "I've Been Working 
on the Railroad." A few weeks later, when I convinced Jeremy to
come with me to a class so he could see how adorable Rosie looked while
pounding a drum, I asked him afterward what he thought, and he said, "It
was fine." "You didn't like it?" I said. "No, it was cute," he said. "It was 
just
kind of tedious." Which made it clear, given that the class was a weekly
high-water mark in entertainment for Rosie and me, that Jeremy could
never have been a stay-at-home parent.

During that first class, as we moved around the room, reconfiguring
ourselves, Hank and I exchanged general pleasantries of the sort I was also
exchanging with the mothers--as Rosie reached for a bell, he'd say, "Almost
got it!" and I'd say, "So close and yet so far," and we'd chuckle
warmly. It seemed to me there was a slight charge in the classroom, the
surprise of the other mothers at Hank's presence. After all, at a parent
child music class in Clayton, a man was rare enough and a black man was
basically astonishing. And then there was the fact of his defined biceps
and flat abdomen--I'd seen it when he'd lifted Amelia onto his shoulders
and his shirt had risen--while most of the mothers, even the skinny ones,
were still lumpily post-pregnant.

And then, while everyone sang "Goodbye to Rosie, we'll see you next
time," I patted my daughter's bottom and realized, touching wetness, that
she'd had a blowout. The next thing I realized, after I'd quickly gathered
up my diaper bag and carried her to the bathroom, was that I had no clean
diapers with me.

I looked down at Rosie lying on the changing table totally naked, smiling
impishly, and I considered pulling the dirty diaper out of the trash and
putting her back in it, but the thought of rewrapping her in that warm
mustard-colored sludge was just too disgusting. So I sat her up, guiding her 
arms into a clean onesie, snapping it over her chest, while the onesie's
legs hung behind her bottom like the tails of a tuxedo. I lifted her and
opened the door of the bathroom, and in the hall, walking by, were Hank nd 
Amelia.

"Sorry to bother you, Hank, but do you have a spare diaper?"
"Sure," Hank said. "Threes okay?"
Rosie was still in size 2, but I said, "Perfect. I feel so dumb."
"It happens to all of us."
As he passed me the diaper, I thought of asking if he and Amelia wanted
to go to the smoothie place where I was planning to get lunch, but it felt a
little weird to issue this invitation to a man instead of another mom.
Then he said, "Hey, you guys want to come with us to the Bread Company?
Amelia is very into their mac and cheese right now."
"We'd love to," I said.

iVwould have been enough to make me like Hank,
but it was about ten minutes after we'd sat down with our food that I knew
I could be true friends with him. First the name of Jeremy and Courtney's
department head, Leland Marcus, came up, and with no hesitation--and
this was before either of our spouses had tenure--Hank said, "I don't
think he's a bad guy, but the one I can't stand is his wife."
"I know!" I said. "She's so rude."
"I swear, at the potluck at the Vogts' I saw her spit a bite of food on the
floor. Intentionally, I mean. And we weren't outside."
"Before Jeremy and I got married, she basically told me that no woman
can be a good worker and a good mother."
Hank laughed. "Classic."
After we'd moved on to talking about what solids Rosie was eating and
how old Amelia had been when she'd learned to walk, a John Mayer song
began playing over the speaker system, and Hank gestured toward the
ceiling and said, "Can I just say that I knew from the start this guy was all
wrong for Jessica Simpson? It was so obvious he was going to leave her
heartbroken." My surprise must have registered on my face, because Hank

said, "You disagree?"
"I just can't believe you know that Jessica Simpson and John Mayer
dated." I was pretty sure Jeremy didn't know who either Jessica Simpson
or John Mayer was.
"Courtney leaves copies of Us Weekly lying around the house," Hank
said. "What can I say? Resistance is futile."

"Really, Courtney reads Us Weekly?"
"Are you kidding? She subscribes."
"And do you open them up or just look at the covers?"
In a good-natured voice, Hank said, "Kate, that's a very personal question."
"Didn't
Courtney just win some major science prize?"
Hank grinned. "I know, right?"

I said, "So are you a full-time stay-at-home dad?"
"Funny you should ask. That's a topic of debate in the Wheeling household.
I used to be a high school art teacher, and after Amelia was born, we
decided, okay, I'll hang out with her during the day, and I'll work on my
painting during her naps." He rolled his eyes. "Which has mostly resulted
in me not setting foot in my studio from one month to the next, but I do
know all the words to Hop on Pop."
"Up pup'?" I said. "'Pup is up'?"

Hank smiled. "The truth is that Courtney comes home at four, so I could go to 
my studio then, which is just in our attic, but at that point in the day, all I 
want to do is drink a beer and chill out."
"I hear you." Then I said, "Wait, Courtney comes home at four?"
"Am I getting Jeremy in trouble?"

"He comes home at five-fifteen, which isn't terrible. But he's pretty strict 
about not keeping different hours from nonacademics. He leaves the
house every day at eight forty-five."
"Well, there you go. Courtney leaves at seven."
My motherly judgmentalness--different from but overlapping with other kinds of 
judgmentalness I'd harbored during my life--snapped on. Courtney had a 
five-minute commute but was away from Amelia for nine
ours every weekday? Then I thought, Don't be like Xiaojian Marcus. "Did you 
guys consider sending Amelia to day care?" I asked.

"We checked some out, and Courtney was okay with them, but I was e one who 
resisted. So Courtney said, 'Then why don't you stay home

th her?' She was half-kidding, but the more we talked about it, the more
actually made sense."
"We sent Rosie to that place on Hanley for about a month," I said.
"Then she got an eye infection and ended up in the hospital, and I quit my

job after that. Not that the infection was the day care's fault, but I just
didn't know I'd worry about her so much."
Hank and I looked at each other, and he said, "You love them more
than you ever imagined, right? And it's terrifying."

AIMtwo families became friends, then good friends, and even
tually
best friends. The next week, following music class, Hank and Amelia
and Rosie and I returned to the Bread Company, and as we were
heading back to our cars after lunch--Amelia was going home to nap, and
Rosie had already fallen asleep in her car seat--Hank said, "Hey, you guys
should come for dinner this weekend." Which we did, walking the half
block from our house to theirs, and we sat in their backyard and they
grilled; they made vegetarian shish kebabs, a bean salad, and a loaf of
bread with black olives in it. For dessert, I'd baked brownies from a mix,
which I hadn't thought twice about beforehand but by the end of dinner
had the impression the Wheelings wouldn't have done. Bake brownies,
sure. Just not from a mix.
We left at seven-thirty, before either of the girls could have a meltdown,
and as we were leaving, Courtney called out, "Come back tomorrow
morning, and I'll dig up some of Amelia's old clothes for Rosie." This was
what I would come to most appreciate about our friendship with the
Wheelings--that our interactions had a frequency and logistical casualness
I hadn't experienced since college with anyone besides Vi. Because of
how close the Wheelings lived to us and because our families were similarly
structured, we didn't have to plan in advance the way I'd learned you
did in adulthood; I could avoid those multiday email exchanges with the
wife in the other couple over which restaurant or whose house, kids or no
kids, what time, what could we bring? Then I'd look for a sitter, whom
we'd pay twelve dollars an hour, or, if our friends were coming to our
house, I'd spend two days cleaning and grocery shopping and cooking, all
the while questioning whether getting together with these people was
more enjoyable than Jeremy and me just ordering takeout and watching
TV. When I expressed my doubts aloud, Jeremy would say, "Is this one of
those situations where I'll get in trouble for not disagreeing with you?"
But with Courtney and Hank, one family could call the other at five
fifteen and say, "Do you guys want to come here for pizza?" Or sometimes,
that fall, the three of them would walk over after we'd eaten our
separate dinners and I'd put Rosie to bed and the rest of us would watch 
American Idol. Soon Hank and the girls and I were meeting up nearly
every weekday. We'd walk across Skinker Boulevard to Forest Park and
push the strollers around the zoo, or just unfold a blanket above Art Hill
and let the girls play in the grass; this was where Rosie took a step for the
first time. At Thanksgiving, the Wheelings came to our house along with
Vi and my father.

Meanwhile, Jeremy and Courtney started getting coffee in the afternoons,
though apparently they only went to buy it together before return
ing
to their separate offices. "You're allowed to drink your coffee with
her," I said. "I won't think you're on a date."
"It's not that," he said. "It's that neither of us has time."
Before getting to know her, I'd been intimidated by Courtney--the
night I'd met her, at the Marcuses' long-ago department holiday party, I'd
heard her explain her research using about seven words I didn't know in
just two sentences--and my intimidation didn't disappear. But that first
time we had dinner at their house, there was a moment when she and I had
carried plates into the kitchen and we could see in the backyard that Jeremy
and Hank were trying to get Rosie and Amelia to give each other five, and 
Courtney said, "Look at those daddies' girls." I felt then that she and
I were sharing the double luckiness of not only having good husbands but 
knowing we had good husbands.

A few minutes later, when we were back on the deck eating brownies-- the 
Wheelings were polite enough to pretend they were delicious as
Opposed to merely adequate--Courtney said, "Do you run, Kate? I'm looking for a 
running partner."

"Not for a while."
"But that means you have run in the past. What was your pace?" "I don't even 
remember. It wasn't impressive."
"I go to Forest Park at five Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings,
so if you change your mind--"
Jeremy laughed. "I don't think Kate would get up at five if our house
was on fire."
"Thanks," I said. To Courtney, I said, "How far do you go?"
"Around the park, which is what, six miles and change?" She wasn't
bragging; she said it so matter-of-factly that it was as if she didn't realize 
it
was worth bragging about. She added, "It can be a little sketchy down by
Kingshighway, so that's why I was thinking, safety in numbers."
"I'll think about it," I said, which was a lie that I wished were the truth.
I was slightly surprised to hear Courtney refer to the sketchiness of the
Central West End; the comment seemed racially fraught, or at least easily
enough interpreted as such that I myself wouldn't have made it in front of

Hank.
The next morning, when I went back to their house to collect Amelia's
hand-me-downs, Courtney had three canvas bags from science conferences
waiting by the front door. She said, "I promise there are no tank tops
that say Princess in sparkly letters. Don't you hate that shit? As if the kid is
even literate."
I saw that she'd separated the bags into shirts, pants, and dresses; I also
saw that all the visible clothes were the same brand of organic Swedish
cotton. "Is Amelia's name in them?" I asked. "Or I can just write down
what everything is so we remember to--"
Courtney waved a hand through the air, cutting me off. "It's all yours
to keep. We're done."
"Are you sure?"
She nodded. "My uterus is closed for business."
When icceiny and I had walked home from the Wheelings' after

shish kebabs and brownies, I'd waited until we were two houses past theirs
and said, "I really like them."
Jeremy said, "Someone has a friend crush."
"On him or her?"
He laughed. "Either way. They're an attractive couple."
"The whole interracial thing is interesting," I said. "Don't you think? I
wonder how much they're aware of it on a daily basis."
"If you mean does Hank know he's black and does Courtney know
she's white, I suspect the answer is yes."

"Ha-ha."

"I'm sure they get comments from time to time. I mean, we're not living
in Brooklyn. But they've been together since college."
"Where'd they go?"

"Harvard." Jeremy hadn't said it in a particularly meaningful tone--
his best friend from high school had gone to Harvard--but it was a
reminder of some of the differences between us. "Hank paints, I think,"
Jeremy said. "Has he mentioned that?"
"A little." Then I said, "How about this? I promise not to fall in love
with Hank if you promise not to fall in love with Courtney."
We were one house away from ours, and I was pushing Rosie in the
stroller; she had just gotten a second wind and was making high-pitched
squeals. Jeremy was walking slightly behind me, and he patted my rear end. He 
said, "How could I ever fall in love with Courtney when I'm married
to this?"
We W .31C.I' until
twelve o'clock, at which point the world didn't end and my sister announced
that she was hungry. In the kitchen, she went for the leftover lo
mein first, eating it from the carton, still cold. After she'd polished it off,
she moved on to the eggplant, which she heated in the microwave. She
tilted the plate toward me and said, "You really don't want any?"
"I ate dinner about six hours ago."

"Exactly."
"I'm okay. Oh, what the hell." I pulled a pint of caramel ice cream from

the freezer.

"Now we're talking," Vi said.
"It's fine if you want to spend the night," I said as I scooped ice cream
into a mug. "You can sleep upstairs with me." The invitation wasn't entirely
unselfish--as long as Vi remained in our house, the night was about
her. If she left, what would distract me from what I'd done?
"Driving tonight was weird," Vi said. "Or weird in how not weird it was.
It was like when you want to put someone out of your mind and you're
like, I haven't thought of the person in two whole days, but right then you are 
thinking of them. I was driving on Big Bend, thinking, I'm not freaking
out! And then I'd wonder, Or am I?" After she'd swallowed a bite of
eggplant, she said, "The roads were really empty, though. Some lunatic
predicted a huge earthquake, and everyone was staying home."
"It's midnight in St. Louis," I said. "Everyone is home anyway."
She scoffed. "You just think that because you're always home. Don't
forget it's a Friday."

"Well, it's great you drove. Whose car did you use?"
"Patrick's. Which, to give credit where credit is due, Patrick can be a
pain in the ass about his Audi, but he didn't blink when I asked if I could
borrow it."

"Do you want any before I put it back in the freezer?" I held up the
pint of ice cream, and Vi leaned forward, dipped her index finger in, and
licked it.

"I meant in a mug," I said.
She smirked. "You offered."

Upstairs, Vi used the bathroom while I checked on the children, and
she was already under the covers when I climbed into bed. I turned off the
light on my nightstand, and as I did, Vi bolted upright, frantically waving
one hand in front of her face. "Oh. My. God. You reek of sex."
"What are you talking about?" I tried not to panic; at least in the dark,
Vi couldn't see my face.

"Are you having an affair? Who'd you have sex with if Jeremy is out
of town?"

Wasn't the answer to this question obvious? Presumably, a person
could not be psychic at all and still get it on the first guess. But I wasn't
admitting to anything; even if I wanted to, and a part of me did, doing so
would be a further betrayal of Jeremy. I said, "If you think I smell bad, feel
free to sleep on the couch downstairs."

"You don't need to be defensive just because you had sex." Vi had laid
back down, and she pulled up the sheet and bedspread. "I forgot how
nasty semen smells. There's a reason to be a dyke, huh? Remember when
you were saying there's no good reason?"
"That was never what I said. You have to let that go, Vi." But she had
given me an opportunity to change the subject, and I said, "So how's
Stephanie?"
"I don't know. You'd have to ask her."
"You're not an item anymore?"
"If you really want to know, this South African radio station interviewed
me, and when they asked if I was single or married, I said I was in
a relationship, and a few minutes later, the interviewer said, 'So how does
your beau feel about this prediction?' and I said, 'It's not a big deal with
us.' Stephanie was listening online, which I had no idea she could even do,
and she freaked out that I hadn't corrected him. And I was like, how was I
supposed to know beau can only refer to a dude? I'm not fluent in French."
Vi turned her head toward me in the dark. "Oh, come on. You're not going
to gloat over the irony?"
"I bet if you apologize to Stephanie, she'll give you another chance," I
said. "She seemed super into you."
"I did apologize."
"You said you were sorry?"
"I said excuse me if I haven't been out and proud since I was a fresh
man
in college, but not all of us arrived at the lesbian party as early as

she did."
"That's not an apology." Then I said, "Not that this is any of your busi
ness,
but Jeremy and I had sex before he left town yesterday, and I haven't
had a chance to take a shower. It's kind of hard with Rosie and Owen."
"Wow, two young kids and you guys are still at it like rabbits."
Oh, to have been telling the truth! To just be able to undo the act, to

rewind the evening.
"By the way," Vi said, "I can't believe you shelled out fifteen grand for
Emma Hall. I'd have guessed three thousand, five thousand tops, but fifteen
thousand--too bad we can't all be publicists."
"Is she still helping you?" I said. "I assume she arranged the Today in
terview
this morning."
"She's good at what she does, don't get me wrong. But fifteen thousand
is a lot of bones."
"Did you end up getting any licensing-fee payments?"
"Today wanted to show family pictures, and I knew you wouldn't like
it, so I said no. Aren't you impressed by my integrity?"
Not that she was wrong--I'd have hated for images of me or our par ents to 
appear on television--but it seemed so frustratingly fitting that my
sister alone among insta-celebrities was managing not to make money off
her newfound fame.

"Do you really think I should call Stephanie?" she asked.
"Yes." I turned onto my stomach. "Just so you know, Owen will wake
up in two hours, and I'll have to go feed him."
"He doesn't sleep through the night yet?"
"Vi, if you're going to start--"
"Don't get your panties in a wad. Your disgusting-smelling panties,
that is."

We both were quiet for a long time, and I felt myself falling toward sleep
when I heard Vi say, "Now that I was wrong about the earthquake, do I
have to move to a different city? Should I change my name?"
"No," I said.

"Or dye my hair?"
"You don't need to dye your hair."
"I could henna it." She sounded chipper. "I've always wanted to try that.
Are you still awake?"

"Barely."

"You could do it, too," she said. "Henna doesn't have chemicals like
regular hair dye." I didn't respond, and she said, "I did know that beau means 
boyfriend. I pretended like I didn't, but I did."
"Call her tomorrow," I mumbled.

And then Vi didn't say anything more, and I didn't either, and the silence
of the night stretched and stretched until it swallowed us; it pulled us
down together, and my sister and I slept, as we had not done for many
years, in the same bed.

i aw )1,c ti five-fifty and decided to shower. By the time I was dressed, Owen 
was stirring, and by the time I'd gotten both children downstairs, I'd received 
a text from Hank, adding to the two texts and two voice mails from Jeremy I 
hadn't responded to the night before, all of them saying
variations on the same thing. You ok? Going to bed, connect in a.m. Hank's
text said, C coming home at noon. We should talk.
Vi slept through the chaos of breakfast, and I left a note for her at the
bottom of the stairs: Taking kids for a walk. Help yourself in kitchen.
When we joined Hank and Amelia in their backyard, Hank was sitting
on the step between the deck and the grass, drinking coffee from a
stainless-steel thermos, looking tired. As we approached, Amelia called
out, "I'm making porridge!"
I set my hand on Rosie's shoulder and said, "Want to help Amelia?"
At breakfast, Rosie had held up a Cheerio and said, "It looks like the
baby's belly button," and Owen had played peekaboo by setting his palms
on his forehead and peering out from under them, as if we couldn't see
him that way. What if Jeremy wanted a divorce and we had to split custody?
No, I could never tell him. After breakfast I'd texted, Things fine
here. Call u soon.
The weather was nice again--it was a windy, sunny morning in the
high fifties--and the day might, under different circumstances, have
seemed like the coda to Vi's prediction. "So no earthquake," Hank said.
"No earthquake," I repeated.
"And still no word from Vi?"
"Actually, she came by last night. She ended up staying over."
He raised his eyebrows inquiringly, and while there were several possible
questions he might have been asking--you made peace? how's she
doing?--the one I answered was the one I suspected he felt most curious
about. I said, "I didn't tell her anything."
Hank was still Hank, though--that was the confusing part. He still
looked like the person I'd been friends with these last two years, he wore
jeans and a long-sleeved orange T-shirt I recognized, but now I also knew
about his gray Calvin Klein briefs, I knew the sigh he made when he came.
The grass was too wet with dew to set Owen in, and I hadn't brought a
blanket, so I left him in the stroller, wheeling it around so that he'd be 
facing
me when I joined Hank on the deck--when I joined him at a distance
of several feet. I had a hunch we wouldn't be staying long and that Owen
would be our excuse, because he'd recently started to get impatient if I left
him in the unmoving stroller.

Hank was quiet for a full minute, and then, his tone lowered so that
Amelia and Rosie wouldn't hear, he said, "I'm assuming you know that I
think you're great. I'd be lying if I claimed I can't imagine a parallel life of
us together. But in this life, it'll explode in our faces."
I wondered if he was waiting for me to persuade him otherwise, though
at the same time I felt a little like he was breaking up with me. This idea
seemed darkly funny; it seemed funny because I didn't understand how
literal it was.

"I agree with you," I said.

"I hope Courtney and I make it, that this is a rough patch and we come
out stronger, or whatever the bullshit is people say about their marriages.
But I need to keep trying. And I think you and Jeremy have a good thing
going. I don't want to be involved in fucking it up."
This morning, you don't, I thought, but Hank was no more accountable
for what had happened the night before than I was. Though again, I wasn't
sure if he expected me to disagree, to announce that Jeremy and I were
secretly miserable.

Hank continued, "So our options are tell Courtney and Jeremy or don't
tell them. I know which one I vote for, but you and I have to be on the
same page. It's too messy otherwise, if one knows and one doesn't, or if
one tells the other."

"I'm guessing you think we shouldn't tell them."
"It might seem like confessing is honorable, but ultimately, who's the
confession for? We unburden ourselves, and they both have to second
guess
their whole lives. And I can see Courtney wanting a D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
Just being furious at me, and going scorched earth."
Would Jeremy leave me if he knew? I wasn't sure. The biggest reason he
wouldn't, of course, was that he wouldn't want to live apart, even half the 
time, from Rosie and Owen; he wouldn't want them to be children of divorce
like he'd been. If our days often felt relentless, how devastating to have them 
free--to inhabit an uncluttered apartment in which he could

354Curtis Sittenfeld

spend a Saturday afternoon reading a dense academic journal without 
interruption,
in which he could set a glass of water on a table and not assume
it would immediately be knocked over. How could he go back to such
order after the shrieking exuberance of Rosie in bright pink pants and a
yellow shirt, jumping on the sofa, shouting, "Daddy likes to eat crocodile
cheese!" No, I didn't think Jeremy would initiate a divorce; he was likelier
to remain unhappily in the marriage I had poisoned. But again, I wasn't
sure. And was there a way to explain to him, to convince him of, the 
insignificance
of what I'd done--the impulsivity of it--and to thereby earn his
absolution? Could I make him understand that having sex with Hank
hadn't been the result of a mutual attraction simmering for years but,
rather, a mistake born of loneliness and stupidity?
"Okay," I said. Hank looked at me, and because of how we were positioned,
he had to hold a hand up to his eyes to block the sun. "Okay, we

don't tell."
What would our other selves, our before-last-night selves, have done at
this moment? Pinkie-sworn, maybe, or some other joking kind of physical
contact. Had an attraction between us been simmering for years? Not really,
not exactly. We liked each other, sure, but only because something
had happened had the attraction retroactively taken on the air of inevitability.
I wanted to ask Hank if he'd ever cheated on Courtney before, but I
couldn't. I could have if he hadn't cheated with me, but I couldn't now.
He said, "Let's keep the conversation open, in case one of us changes

our mind."
"I won't change my mind," I said. "But okay."
When Owen began to fuss, I explained that we ought to get going, that
I wanted to check on Vi anyway, and Rosie climbed willingly into the
stroller, though we'd barely been there fifteen minutes. As I pushed my
children out of the Wheelings' backyard, I had no idea that I was walking
away from the last moments of my friendship with Hank.

Vi was frying eggs. "I was thinking about it, and now I
get why October sixteenth was looming so large to you she said. "I mean,
if that day-care place is where Rosie went, then no shit you'd be tuned in.
But here's what I still can't figure out: Where's my earthquake? Because I
just can't see Guardian misleading me."

"You thought October sixteenth, too," I said.
"Well, I trusted you."
"Wait, you didn't think October sixteenth?"
"I never got a firm date. But two heads are better than one, right? That's
how we figured out Brady Ogden, with teamwork."
I was the one--I alone--who had determined that the earthquake
would be on October 16? Which meant--well, the implications were
almost too awful to consider. That I, not Vi, had set the hysteria in motion.
That I had agitated an entire city because I'd had a sense of something
big happening on a certain date, but that, in the ultimate act of
narcissism, I had failed to understand that the something big had only to
do with me. And the event I'd sensed was not--I wished it had been--the
accident at the day care. I said, "But if I said when the earthquake would
be, who said where? Did Guardian? Did you? Did you get a vibe about
St. Louis, or was it just that Channel 5 newscaster with the huge boobs
who assumed it?"

Vi looked stricken. "You think?"

I wanted to tell her that she and I should never speak of this again, that
we should permanently hide the enormous error we'd made together, but
surely such a suggestion would result in Vi leaving my house and calling a
press conference. She might call one anyway, to warn the world that her
earthquake was still at large.

On the stove, I could see that the yolks of Vi's eggs had turned solid and
pale, the way she didn't like them, and I said, "You might want to take
those off"

A nd cn un Sunday, Jeremy was home; his time away had been both
endless and the blink of an eye, excessively eventful but without real meaning.

I met him at the door--how would I possibly be able to keep my secret
from him?--and I said, "They're both asleep," and he said, "Awesome.
Let's go upstairs."
"Really?" I said.
"Why not?"
I had thought he'd be emotional, as when he'd learned of the accident
at the day care, but he was cheerful again; I was the emotional one. And
indeed, after we'd gone up to our room, after we'd stood on opposite sides
of the bed pulling off our clothes (for my part, I was less overwhelmed
with desire than desperate to accommodate him), after I was lying on my
back and he was on top of me, after we both came within roughly three
minutes--after that was when I burst into tears, a profusion of them
falling from my eyes, making me shake beneath Jeremy. He kissed where
the saltwater ran down my face. He said, "Sweetheart. Oh, Katie. I know."
What had I done, what had I done, what had I done? And still he was
kissing me, the kindest man in the world, and still I was crying uncon
trollably.
"I know," he kept saying. "I know. I know." But of course he didn't.
When Kndra karrw mer io baib. sit i he nc%
left both Owen and Rosie at home, picked up my father, and drove with
him to Hacienda to meet Vi; after lunch, my father and I would go to the
grocery store. Vi had suggested inviting our father, and she was--this still
seemed remarkable--driving herself to the restaurant.
It turned out there was a reason she wanted our father there. She was
already waiting when we arrived, seated at a table for four with Stephanie
next to her. As we approached, she said, "Dad, this is my girlfriend, Stephanie.
I've been wanting to introduce you."
Stephanie smiled broadly. Without batting an eye--also, presumably,
without understanding that Vi meant girlfriend girlfriend--my father
shook her hand and said, "How nice to meet you."
I leaned in and hugged Stephanie. "Good to see you again," I said, and
she said, "Likewise." As if the world hadn't gone topsy-turvy since we'd
last crossed paths, as if this were just an ordinary Wednesday in October.
Which, if I hadn't known better, I might have believed it was: Already,
there seemed to be few references to the non-earthquake on the radio and in the 
Post-Dispatch, and certainly the national media had left the story
behind. Hank and I hadn't communicated since Rosie, Owen, and I had left his 
backyard four days earlier, which felt deeply strange--I'd have the urge in my 
fingers to text him before remembering why I couldn't--and I
hadn't told Jeremy what I'd done. This meant that I was buzzing with a constant 
guilt, which, like cicadas on a summer evening, would some times surge in 
volume until I was able to hear nothing else. But apparently
the sound was inaudible to others. If anything, Jeremy was more doting
than usual, repeatedly offering to watch both children if I wanted to take
a nap or run errands alone, as if he were the one who needed to atone.
Two days before, my father had told me over the phone that he'd received
a clean bill of health from the doctor. At the restaurant, Vi said
she'd drink to that and ordered a Corona, then Stephanie said she'd
have one, too, then my father said he thought he'd join them. Before I requested
one as well, I had a fleeting, unpleasant recollection of my lunch
at Blueberry Hill with Jeremy and Courtney.
My father asked where Stephanie was from, and it turned out he'd been
to Cave City, Arkansas, more than once back when he'd sold carpet. "If
you were ever there in the summer, I hope you tasted our famous watermelon,"
Stephanie said, and after that, the conversation never really
lagged; she was as warm and patient with our father as Jeremy was.
When we'd finished eating, Vi followed me to the bathroom, and from
the next stall she said, "Are you impressed that I listened to you about

Stephanie?"
"I knew she'd take you back."
Vi was peeing. "Did you hear I was mentioned on Letterman? Patrick
said Letterman didn't say my name, but the joke was about how Congress
should get economic advice from the psychic in St. Louis."
So references to Vi's prediction hadn't gone away entirely; that was too
much to hope for. And undoubtedly Letterman had been mocking her,
though Vi seemed pleased rather than offended. The dismantling of her
prediction, its erasure, was more gradual than I wanted. I wanted it to be
immediate and complete, but there were lingering reminders, like scraps
of trash after a festival. And surely I wanted it all done away with as soon
as possible because the faster and further we moved from her prediction,
the faster and further we'd also be moving from my complicity in it and
from my betrayal of Jeremy. But later, when I looked back, those weeks
immediately after the earthquake hadn't happened still seemed to be such
a raw time, so close to the day itself. It had been unrealistic of me to be 
impatient.
When we'd left the restaurant and my father and I were in the dairy
section of Schnucks, I said, "Dad, I think Stephanie is Vi's girlfriend as in
they're dating."

"Is she?" My father's tone was as mild as it would have been if I'd said, I 
think Stephanie is a Cardinals fan.
Had he still not understood? How could he not have, unless it was intentional?
And even if it was, it seemed that the time had arrived to get this
over with; I had the impression that Stephanie could be around for a while.
"I'm pretty sure Vi's gay now," I said. "And Stephanie is her partner."
My father was lifting a tub of cream cheese from the shelf, and he
looked over at me briefly and nodded. His tone remained mild as he said,
"Stephanie seems like a nice woman. And what a coincidence that she's
from Cave City."

And then--for assuming my father harbored the same prejudices I did,
for imagining he was several steps behind me when the reverse was true--
I felt humiliated. There was nothing for me to do but point down the shelf
and say, "You need eggs, right?"
Perhaps it was because I'd already dispensed with my dignity for the
day that I asked the question I did as we were in the car waiting to turn out
of the grocery store parking lot. I said, "Dad, do you have senses?" It's
none of our business--that was what I'd told Vi.
"Oh," my father said. "Well, sometimes, sure. Sure I do." He motioned
left and said, "Be careful, because some of the drivers come around there
awfully quick."
Had this been part of what frustrated my mother, his indirection? But
no, if anything, she'd shared the tendency.

As I pulled onto Manchester Road, I said, "You're psychic--you have
psychic abilities?"

"Don't tell your sister, but I've never been fond of that word. It's cheap
sounding."

"What kinds of things do you have senses about?"
"Oh, the same as you girls--this and that." He laughed in a small way.
"Some things I want to know, some I'd prefer not to. I was sharper when I
was a younger man, as with everything."
How bizarre it was to be on the other side of this conversation, to hear
another person say he had this ability and for the admission to prompt in

me curiosity and disbelief.
My father's tone was still casual as he said, "But I was always more like
you than Violet, not encouraging it. It can be quite a double-edged sword."
"And Mom knew?"
"She didn't care for it. She thought it was voodoo."
All of this--simultaneously, it was astonishing and it explained so
much. Vi and I had probably frightened our mother: her unexpected
twins, with our creepy powers.
"Did you tell Mom before you were married or after?"
"Now, that's hard to recall. It's been so long, hasn't it?" And I thought, You 
told her after. Our poor, ignorant twenty-three-year-old mother,
abruptly surrounded on all sides by freaks of nature.
I said, "When Mom was pregnant, did you know we'd be twins?"
What a strange expression there was on my father's face. It was as if he'd
at last been caught for a petty crime committed decades earlier but also as
if he'd wanted to be caught; the energy it took to outrun the past had be
come
greater than the punishment he'd receive.
He said, "I did bring it up. Wouldn't it be something if there were two
babies? But she was firm about only wanting one. She was already worried
about the delivery." When there had been two of us, had that been when
she realized he was prescient? And after he'd played along as she'd decorated
a nursery for a single baby--she must have felt deceived by him,
manipulated. But maybe he'd doubted his own foreknowledge.
"You were wonderful girls," my father said. "So lively and happy."
Yeah, right, I thought, though after a few seconds, it occurred to me
that his statement wasn't necessarily untrue. I'd let the onset of my mother's
gloom cast itself backward over the years prior to my awareness of it,
I'd let the shades she drew when we were eleven be drawn over everything
before. But there was all that time when Vi and I had danced and sung,
the afternoons we'd spent hanging from the mulberry tree in the yard, the
games we'd invented. "The first time I saw your mother," my father said,
"when she was standing behind the front desk at the hotel, I had a sense
about you and Violet. I could see you at three or four, in your red bathing
suits. You probably don't remember those."
I didn't remember, but there was a photo of Vi and me in matching bikinis,
and the familiarity of the photo was almost like a memory.
"I had been a bachelor for such a long time," my father was saying, "and
suddenly I understood that it wasn't my fate to live alone after all."
Did he mean to imply that he'd married my mother so we could exist?
That it hadn't simply been my mother's beauty that attracted my father to
her but the life he'd envisioned with all of us?
"I always believed things would get better for Rita," he said. "I knew it
would be hard in the beginning, when you were babies, but I thought as
you got older, she'd enjoy being a mother."
The implication that she hadn't--it was nothing I didn't know, but it
still stung.

"She just couldn't forgive herself, though," my father said. "If she had, I
imagine things wouldn't have been as tough."
"Forgive herself for what?"
This time, instead of looking caught, my father looked so lost in the
past that it was as if I wasn't in the car. "She took some money from her
parents," he said. "Before she left home. Not a great deal, maybe forty or
fifty dollars. And she repaid it after she was on her feet in St. Louis, but
when she sent it home, her mother wrote back saying Rita was no longer
their daughter. They didn't approve of her moving away, living in a city."
Sixty dollars--she had taken sixty, and I knew this because of my last
night at Mrs. Abbott's house, when she had called me Rita and told me
to take that amount from her pocketbook. Which surely meant the universe
had absolved her, even if her family hadn't. And my poor mother,
estranged from her parents and sisters until she died over such a pittance. Or 
maybe the money hadn't been the real reason, just the excuse to punish her for 
other choices they disapproved of.
My father still seemed preoccupied when he spoke next, so much so that at the 
time, I wasn't even sure he was talking to me. He said, "We all
make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be
an exile in your own life."

just before Owen's second nap and Rosie's first one.
As I paid Kendra, I said, "Did they torment each other?"
"They did great," she said. "Right, guys?"
Kendra and I were standing by the staircase, and we both turned
toward the living room, where Owen sat on the floor and Rosie knelt in
front of him. "Hi, Owen." She was gripping his left hand with her right

one. "Hi, baby. It's nice to meet you."

days after Hank and I had slept together, I'd avoided our
usual parks anytime I knew Amelia wasn't in school, but when Rosie burst
into tears as I turned the stroller into the acorn park for the fourth afternoon
in a row--besides being the site of her split lip, since healed, the
acorn park had no climbing toy--I turned around and walked to Oak
Knoll; the next morning, we went to DeMun. (That its nickname was
MILF Park now seemed, even ifjust in my own head, more cringe-inducing
than funny.) Surprisingly, though, and despite Rosie's many queries about
them, we never ran into Hank and Amelia. Either they themselves were
avoiding these parks or they were going when Hank knew Rosie and Owen
would be napping. As the days passed, I stopped anxiously scouting for

them.
On Thanksgiving morning, I woke wondering if the Wheelings had
really ended up going to Hawaii. After Jeremy had set our turkey in the
oven, I realized we had less than a cup of sugar left and I hadn't yet made
the cranberry relish or the pumpkin pie. I took Owen with me to Schnucks,
and I hadn't decided ahead of time to buy a pregnancy test--I still hadn't
gotten my period since Owen's birth, and I hadn't consciously thought
about it--but as I passed the pharmacy, I abruptly turned the grocery cart down 
the aisle where the tests were and grabbed one. In the checkout line,
after I'd paid, 1 jammed the box into the inside pocket of my coat.
At home, in the upstairs bathroom, I sat on the toilet and stuck the
wand between my legs, peeing onto its tip. Then, so as to keep the wand
horizontal--I no longer needed to read the instructions for a pregnancy
test--I set toilet paper on the tile floor and placed the wand on top of the
toilet paper. We had begun potty training Rosie in the beginning of November,
and the only reading material in the bathroom for the three minutes
I had to wait to get the results was a copy of Everyone Poops, which I
had memorized weeks ago. ("Some stop to poop. Others do it on the
move. . . .")

I sat on the floor against the tub, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes.
From downstairs, I could smell the turkey cooking and hear Jeremy building
a fort with the children.
Please, no, I thought. And I'll never tempt fate again. I'll always be good,
for the rest of my life. Because if I was pregnant yet again and Jeremy was
the father, it would be bad enough; I doubted I had more to give, additional
reservoirs of patience or attention beyond what Rosie and Owen
depleted every day. But if I was pregnant again and Hank was the father, it
would be unimaginable; it would be cataclysmic.
It's impossible, of course, to remember every moment of every day, impossible
sometimes to remember any moment of a particular day. Certain
instants come to stand in for whole swaths of time, and these three minutes,
sitting on the bathroom floor on Thanksgiving, my back to the tub,
Rosie laughing downstairs, is what I now remember when I think of being
pregnant with Gabe. These moments were the last ones in which I didn't
yet know that I was pregnant, or didn't know for sure, when I still felt
a terrified wishfulness. It was when my third pregnancy seemed like an
extremely unpleasant hypothetical condition rather than the start of a
new life.

When I leaned forward to check the window on the wand, it said PREGNANT. I 
swallowed, and I didn't cry; who did I have to blame but myself?
To be pregnant and not to know who the father was, for his identity to be
revealed when I delivered either a white baby or a black one--this was a
situation from a soap opera.
Before I went downstairs, I peed on the second wand in the package,
and the word PREGNANT also appeared in its window. Then I returned
both wands and their caps to the box, put the box inside an empty diaper
package I found in Owen's room, put the diaper package inside a plastic
bag from Target, tied the handles of the Target bag, and carried it downstairs
to the kitchen, where I inserted it in the only trash can in the house
that had a lid. I mashed down the Target bag with my hand, letting other
garbage rise over it--potato peels and wadded paper towels and a soggy
piece of toast--and then I joined my husband and children in the living

room.
Would this be our last Thanksgiving as a family? I felt as if I were watching
Jeremy and Rosie and Owen underwater. Though already, the suspense
of my secret had shifted, the belief that being pregnant was the worst
possible outcome. Now the worst possible outcome was that Hank was the
father. Jeremy and I could deal with a third child that was ours; it would
be hard, but plenty of people had three children, and we'd figure it out. If
Hank was the father, however, it was not at all clear that Jeremy and I
could figure it out, at least not together.
Making the cranberry relish, I vacillated between considering the logistics
of our impending meal and wondering if I'd wrecked my life. If I set
the table ahead of time, would Rosie grab the utensils? Was it possible to
find out who the father was before you gave birth? I'd put out everything
except the silverware, I decided.
I set Owen on the dining room rug and pulled the place mats and cloth
napkins from the sideboard. Rosie was in the living room watching an
episode of Olivia, and Jeremy was in the kitchen checking the turkey.
"Maybe you should carve it before my dad gets here," I called to Jeremy. "I
feel like he's been shaky lately."
Jeremy came to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining
room. "Sure, if you think that's better. I can do that." He didn't move right 
away--he hadn't guessed that I was pregnant, had he?--and then he
said, "I understand why you threw in the towel on Courtney. And I'm not
saying you should change your mind. But I kind of miss hanging out with
the Wheelings."
still pregnant, learn the identity of the father by
two means, depending on how far along the pregnancy was: chorionic
villus sampling, or CVS, if you were between your tenth and twelfth
weeks--this was, coincidentally, the same procedure that had revealed
that Courtney was carrying a baby with Down's--or amniocentesis after.
Both procedures carried a small risk of miscarriage, with the risk being
slightly higher with CVS. To confirm paternity, you needed a DNA
sample--a swab from inside the mouth, a hair with the follicle still
attached--from one of the candidates or their first-degree relatives. In
other words, I could root around on Jeremy's pillow or I could take Rosie
or Owen to a lab, options that all seemed treacherous and sordid.
I discovered this information on the Internet at the Richmond Heights
library, where I'd gone during Kendra's babysitting hours the week after
Thanksgiving. I could have found out sooner, I could have looked it up on
my phone the minute my pregnancy test came back positive, but I didn't
want Jeremy stumbling across my search history. Not that he used my
phone, but I didn't want to worry that this would be the one time he did.
Anyway, to not take action on my pregnancy was like not telling Jeremy
I'd cheated in the first place: if it meant I had to bear the burden of guilt
alone, it also meant my pregnancy wasn't real to anyone besides me.
From the parking lot of the library, I called Vi, and it was obvious that
I'd awakened her. "I have a favor to ask," I said. "Can I come over?"
When Vi opened her front door, wearing plaid flannel pajama bottoms
and a red T-shirt under which she had on no bra, I said, "I'm in a hurry,
but I need you to do a reading for me. I'm pregnant again--"
"Good Lord, Fertile Myrtle!"
I shook my head; I wasn't sharing good news. "Remember the night of
your prediction, when you told me I smelled like sex? Well, I'd had it with
Hank. And I'm not sure if the baby is his or Jeremy's, and that's what I
need you to tell me."

For a full ten seconds, Vi gawked at me, speechless. Then she said,
"Holy crap." After thirty-four years, I had completely shocked my sister,
but there was no satisfaction in the achievement. "I mean--" She blinked
several times. "Just--wow. Wow."
"I know." Because I couldn't help myself, I said, "It was only that once.
I've never cheated on Jeremy besides that, with Hank or anyone else."
"Does Jeremy know?"
"I've gone back and forth about whether to tell him, and it just seems
selfish. Or more selfish than not telling."
"He'll know if a black baby pops out of your cooter."
"Well--" I paused. "That's why I'm here."
As I followed her into the living room, she said over her shoulder, "If
you and Jeremy split up, my faith in heterosexuality will be destroyed."
Unexpectedly, my eyes filled with tears, but I willed them away. "Maybe

it should be."
Before she sat in her lounger, she said, "I'll help you, but why don't you
just do a reading for yourself?"
"I'm not psychic anymore. You know Nancy's New Year's Eve party
when we wrote down things we wanted to get rid of and burned them? I
did that with my senses."
Vi looked skeptical but not hostile. "When?"
"After Rosie was in the hospital with her eye thing. Every time a thought
came into my head, I didn't know if it was a normal new mom anxiety or
a premonition. I couldn't live like that."
"And it worked?" Vi said. "You don't have senses anymore?"
"For the most part. I mean, apparently, I was wrong about October

sixteenth."
"Well, yes and no. There may not have been an earthquake, but it turns
out something huge happened in your own life that night."
"Yeah, because I made something happen."
"But if you hadn't sensed you'd cheat, think of how things could have
gone with the day-care accident."
I had groped for this justification in my own mind, but I remained un
convinced.
Because really, wasn't the opposite just as likely? After all, the

roads had been less crowded on October 16, which meant the driver of the

eighteen-wheeler reached 1 lanley Road earlier than he otherwise would
have, which was why, when he fell asleep, he crashed into the front room
of the day-care center. Under normal circumstances, he'd have been
twenty miles back, or ten, or seven; he'd have crashed into a field of grazing
cows, or an empty office space for rent, or a sandwich restaurant.
I said, "I think if I want to put the senses to rest, I have to put them to
rest. If information comes to me, I can't exactly stop it, but I shouldn't try
to be psychic."
"I can't believe you didn't tell me."
"I thought you'd disapprove."
"I do." She looked admiring, though, as she added, "I had no idea you
were so good at keeping secrets."
She settled herself in her lounger, and I sat in the folding chair just to
her right. She closed her eyes, and they'd been closed for thirty seconds
when she opened them and said, "This'll be easier if--I know you don't
like this, but is it okay if I ask Guardian?"
I nodded, and she closed her eyes again. This time only two or three
seconds passed before she opened them. "How can you be pregnant when
you're still breast-feeding all the time?"
"This is you talking, right? Not Guardian."
"Yes, this is me."

"You can ovulate before you get your period. And Owen doesn't always
nurse for that long. He's eating more and more solid food."
"Okay, sorry." She closed her eyes again, then opened them a third
time. "Have you told Hank?"

I shook my head. "He and I don't hang out now."
"And here I thought they weren't at Thanksgiving because of me. You
think Hank told Courtney you guys did it?"
"I hope not."

Vi cackled a little. "Oh, you'd know if he had. She'd come to your front
door and shoot you."

"Thank you," I said.

Vi leaned forward and swatted my arm. "Lighten up, Daze. I'm kidding."
peace overtaking her features. She didn't speak aloud--I had wondered if
she would, and she didn't--but I still knew when she'd made contact with
Guardian. I felt the presence in the room, and Vi was right, it was a presence
entirely different from the one that had been there when Marisa
Mazarelli and I had used the Ouija board. This was a compassionate presence,
a protective one--it was wise and calm, like an older relative or a
boss who has great affection for you while recognizing that the calamities
in your life aren't as significant as you believe them to be. I had never
imagined I'd think so, but abruptly I was glad that Vi had had this 
companionship
all these years; it meant that even when we'd grown apart
while I was at Mizzou, even during our fights, even when I'd married Jeremy
and she hadn't yet met Stephanie, she had never, I understood now,

been alone.
When she finally looked at me again, her expression was so carefully
composed, so sympathetic, that I knew immediately.
Gently, she said, "If you got pregnant on October sixteenth, you're not
that far along."
"I can't get an abortion," I said. "I just can't."
"I could go with you. I once went with Nancy."
"Nancy had an abortion?" Then I shook my head. "I can't."
"Jeremy is as supportive as they come, but if you say to him--"

"I know."
We both were quiet, and she said, "Some mixed-race people have really
light skin. Remember that guy Kent I used to work with at Trattoria Mar
cella?"
"Believe me, I've been telling myself that."
She squinted. "Are you pro-life?"
"You know how Courtney Wheeling miscarried? Well, she didn't mis
carry.
They found out the baby had Down's, and she had an abortion. And

at the time, I thought that I wouldn't have done it if I were her, so how can

I live with myself aborting a healthy baby?" After a few seconds, I said, "Is
this a healthy baby?"
"Guardian didn't give any indications to the contrary. But, Daze, it's
totally normal to disapprove of what other people do until you're in the
same situation." Vi grinned. "It's one of my hobbies. And it's not like you
rented a billboard and publicly declared that Courtney is a bad person."
"I just can't."

"But will you share custody with the Wheelings? Half the week at your
house, half at theirs?"

"I don't know." I stood up. I hadn't even removed my coat. "I should go.
Thanks for this."

"Hold on." Vi was still sitting. "Want to know the sex?"
This seemed such a peripheral piece of information at that moment, so
inconsequential, but when she told me, it started to make the baby real.
She said, "It's another boy. Hey, it's not too late to finish that blanket I
started for Owen."

Rosie before bed, and she sat on my lap. When I was turning
a page, she pointed to my left hand and said, "What's those on Mama?"
"They're my knuckles." I held up my right hand, making a fist. "I have
them on my other hand, and you have them, too."
Her plump little toddler hands--they would soon vanish. They'd vanish
along with her fixation on the baloney puzzle piece, her pronunciation
of lion as "nion" and bathing suit as "babing suit," her fondness for
holding up individual strands of spaghetti at dinner and making them
dance. Rosie wasn't yet three, and already her babyhood was forever 
irretrievable.

She
wiggled her fingers. "Rosie have knuckles."
"That's right."
"And Mama have knuckles."

"I do."

"Mama and Rosie are having knuckles together."
I kissed the top of her head. "We're very lucky."
sitting on the couch, the TV turned to
ESPN. He was eating ice cream from a mug, and a second mug waited for
me on the table. He said, "We ran out of chocolate chip, so I supplemented

with lemon sorbet."
What would I have said on a night on which I wasn't planning to an
nounce
that I was pregnant with another man's child? I might have said God forbid. Or 
I think I can manage. Without touching the mug, I sat in
the armchair. "What are you doing all the way over there?" Jeremy said.
"I have to tell you something." My heart was beating rapidly.
"Something bad?" His eyes were warm and crinkly, his tone light.
"Yes," I said.

"Really?"
"Yes, really."
He started to speak again, and I held up one hand and said, "Let me just

say it."
His expression changed--he was beginning to understand that I wasn't
kidding, that what I would tell him would not be that I'd been in a fender

bender in the parking lot of Schnucks, or that I'd gone online and ordered

four-hundred-dollar organic mattresses for our children. Regarding me
seriously, Jeremy said, "Okay."
After I said it, I would never be able to take it back. Even if we stayed
married--please, I thought, please let us stay married--the information

would always exist between us. But what was the alternative? The alterna
-
tive was to have an abortion and shut the fuck up for the rest of my life,
and these prospects, especially in tandem, felt impossible.
I said, "No matter how mad you are, please remember this: I love you
so much, Jeremy. You're the best thing--" My voice cracked, but it would
be unfair to make him comfort me. I swallowed. "You're the best thing
that ever happened to me. Our life together--I think we have a really good
life. And I don't know why I did what I did. I mean, I can come up with
reasons, but they're stupid."
He had to know, I thought; at this point, surely he could guess. But he
simply watched me in an unfamiliar, unsmiling way, and there was noth ing left 
to do but tell him. I said, "When you were in Denver, I had sex with

Hank, and now I'm pregnant and it's his." I had decided ahead of time that

both parts had to be in the same sentence, a one-two punch, because it
would be too terrible if he thought I had finished delivering the bad news
when I was only halfway through it.

I'd let my gaze wander toward the fireplace as I spoke, but I made
myself look at him, and he was blinking rapidly behind his wire glasses.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I can't explain how sorry."
A minute passed without him saying a word, and finally, in a tone I had
never heard--it was so cold yet also so small, much too intimate for him
to use with a stranger--he said, "You're sure you're pregnant?"
"Yes," I said. "I'm sure."

"How do you know it's Hank's?"

"Well, you can do a procedure called CVS or else if you're past twelve
weeks you can have an amnio, but you still need a DNA sample from--"
I hesitated. "From the guy. So instead I had Vi do a reading for me."
This was the first moment since I'd told him that Jeremy's face revealed
any real emotion, and the emotion it revealed was scorn. "Seriously?" he
said.

"I know you think it's all nonsense, but this is the kind of thing Vi is
really good at." Of course I had considered that she could be wrong, but at
the moment when she'd opened her eyes, it had felt like she was confirming
what I already knew.

"You need to get tested," he said. "Have you told Hank?"
"No." We were both quiet and I said, "I hope you believe that I've
never--I've never done anything like this. I've never considered it. I realize
I've messed up really badly."
He was silent, and I thought how in the past there wouldn't have been a
conversation between us in which he didn't protest when I said, I've messed up 
really badly Finally, because I couldn't stand it, I said, "You're surprised,
right? I hope you don't think--it wasn't something--" Fair or not,
was asking him to comfort me after all; seeking his comfort was such a habit 
between us that I didn't know how not to.
He still was blinking. "Yes, I'm surprised."
"You're just not--the way you're reacting--I can't tell what your reac
tion
is. You can yell at me if you want to."
Again, there was an incredibly long silence before he said, "You're tell
ing
me that you fucked Hank once?" I had never, I was pretty sure, heard
Jeremy use fuck to mean have sex with.
"It was definitely only once."
"But you got pregnant?"
Did he think I was lying? "I haven't gotten my period since having
Owen, but I guess I was ovulating already--I don't--Jeremy, I'm sorry.
I'm so, so sorry."
He said, "And then you fucked me when I got home from Denver, right?
So Vi's reading notwithstanding, there should be a fifty-fifty chance it's
mine." That fucked again--I didn't like it, though certainly I had no
grounds for objecting. "And you're what, nine weeks along?"
I said, "Even if it's Hank's, which I'm sorry, Jeremy, but I think it is--
even if it is, I would rather not have an abortion, but if you want me to, I
will. If I'm choosing between staying married to you and having the baby,
I'd choose you."
"But you want both?" Again, in his otherwise impassive face, there
crossed that scorn. He made my wish to keep the baby seem greedy, not
humane. But he didn't need to convince me of my own venality. If in fact
I was willing to terminate the pregnancy, why hadn't I done so without
telling him anything? Did I hope to make the termination his decision, his
responsibility? Either to absolve myself of guilt or to use it as currency,
expressing my aversion so that when I went through with it, he'd understand
I was making a sacrifice and be likelier to forgive me? So thoroughly
did I distrust myself that it was hard to remember that my desire not to
have an abortion was sincere.
I said, "Courtney's abortion--I just--I found it really sad. And then to
turn around. . ." I trailed off.
"After Courtney and I ran into you at Blueberry Hill and I told you I
wasn't having an affair with her, did you not believe me?" A confused and
tentative hope flickered across Jeremy's face. I le was broaching a possible
explanation, and he was a person who liked explanations. He said, "Do
you think I've been cheating on you?"
Maybe it would have been wiser or kinder to lie, but it felt like the time
for lying had passed. "No," I said. "I don't think you've cheated."
The clouds collected in his face again; what he'd been offering, he rescinded.
He said, "If you don't want to have an abortion, what happens
when you give birth to a biracial baby? People aren't idiots."
I'd had time to consider the question since Vi had asked it earlier that
day, and I said, "I think we do nothing. We don't try to explain it. We have
a son with dark skin--Vi said the baby is a boy--and so what? Family
members can have different complexions."
"We have a son with dark skin?" His tone of coiled but unconcealed
anger made me understand how completely I had, prior to this conversation,
stayed within Jeremy's good graces; from the time we'd met, even
when we'd quarreled, he'd never directed real hostility at me, and I had
assumed it was because such hostility didn't exist within his personality.
But I had been wrong.
I said, "Jeremy, I already told you that I'll do whatever you want." I
looked down at my lap--my knuckles--and he said, "I need some air. I'm
going out."
I looked up. "Are you coming back tonight?"
"Maybe."
"If you don't, will you just text and let me know you're fine? You don't
have to say where you are." Had I surrendered all my rights as a wife this
abruptly? It appeared I had.
His voice was sarcastic as he said, "I appreciate your concern." And
then he'd stood and was putting on his coat, and my back was to him, and
I didn't turn; neither of us said anything as he let himself out the front
door, and I heard him locking it from the other side. A minute later, his
car started. I leaned forward then, held my palms up to my forehead, and
sobbed and sobbed.

Was he driving to a bar? His office? A hotel? Was he about to kill himself,
or sleep with an undergrad, or go tell Courtney Wheeling? No, he
probably wasn't telling Courtney-1hr that, he coukl have gone on loot.
But we had no script, and I couldn't imagine where he was; I couldn't fol
low
him in my mind.
I cried for a while, and then I started to get that itchy feeling, even given
the circumstances, of wasting time, so I put the ice cream mugs in the
sink, picked up toys from the living room floor, and replaced books Owen
had pulled off the shelf. It was while setting the lunch puzzle pieces back
in their slots--sans baloney, because that was upstairs in Rosie's crib--
that I had an awful thought: Jeremy could remarry. He could re-create our
life, a second version of it, with someone else. It would be easy for him to
find another wife--he was cute and nice and had a good job--and that
wife would probably be younger than I was. She'd like Rosie and Owen
but want children of her own. Would I be able to find another husband?
Depending on whom I'd settle for, maybe, but I wouldn't have my pick--
a single man with two young kids was sympathetic and endearing, while a
single woman with three was needy and baggage-laden. And no matter
what, I'd never find a husband like Jeremy, as easy to be around, as kind
and calm and unpretentiously smart. All of which raised the question--
but, no, I'd just start crying again if I went down that path. I had long 
believed
that my own mother had made our lives unnecessarily hard when I
was growing up, but it now seemed I'd done the same to my family. And
then I thought, was my notion of Jeremy remarrying a fear, or was it a

sense?
If he left me, I'd definitely need to return to work. Should I, I wondered,
send an email to my former boss at this very moment? Would they take
me back, in light of the economy, and even if they would, would they
take me back pregnant? I'd have to put this baby in day care when he was
three or four months old, though with three children, wouldn't a nanny be
cheaper? But it made no sense to return to work only to pay another
woman to take care of my own children in my own house. Did any divorced
mothers who didn't get huge settlements from rich ex-husbands
not have jobs? Oh, to be able to undo that moment when I'd sat too close
to Hank on the couch, to have just said yes when he'd asked if it would be
a bad idea if he kissed me. Yes, it had been a bad idea, it had been a terrible
idea, and I had recognized it as such at the time; that had been part of its
irresistibility.

Jeremy hadn't returned home, nor had he texted me, by the time I
nursed Owen at ten. I brushed my teeth and got into bed without setting
the security alarm. I didn't think I'd be able to fall asleep, and first I was
right, but eventually I was wrong; I realized I was wrong because it was
after midnight, and I was waking up as Jeremy climbed into bed. There
was something bad between us, I remembered, before I remembered what
the bad thing was. Normally, he'd have rolled toward me or I'd have
reached out and patted his thigh, but we didn't touch each other or speak.
He lay on his side, facing away from me.

n 1 tin morn in, our routine was the same as usual except under
girded by our mutual awareness of my betrayal, and Jeremy's distance; he
barely met my eyes and spoke to me only when necessary. When I came
downstairs after showering and said, "What did Owen eat?" Jeremy said,
"Oatmeal and pears," and he didn't say anything else to me for more than
twenty minutes. Was it always going to be like this, from here on out?
Because life with young children--it was hard enough without him hating
me. Maybe divorce would be preferable to this punitive domesticity.
But no, I needed to be patient, to let him absorb what I'd known for
weeks.
Rosie was drawing on construction paper, and she passed Jeremy a
green crayon and said, "Daddy wants to draw Mama making a happy
face."

"I'll draw a turtle," Jeremy said.
Before he left for work, I asked, "Are you coming home for dinner?"
After a pause, he said, "I guess." Then, not in a mean way, just in a busi
nesslike
way that was, in its dispassion, almost worse than meanness, he said, "Call 
today and schedule a CVS."
dinner, while I fed Owen a jar of squash and Jeremy,
Rosie, and I ate pizza that Jeremy had told me via text he'd pick up, Rosie
said, "Rosie's birthday is coming up."
"That's true," I said. "In January. How old will you be?"
"Is Mama coming to my birthday party?"
"Of course," I said. "You'll be three."
"Is Daddy coming to my birthday party?"
Jeremy said nothing, and I said, "Of course he is."
"Is the baby coming to my birthday party?"
"Owen would love to come to your birthday party," I said.
"Is a purple cake coming to my birthday party?"
"We can make a purple cake."
Jeremy set the slice of pizza he'd been eating on his plate, stood, and
walked into the dining room. Rosie said, "Is a balloon coming to my
birthday party?"
I stood, too; when I looked into the dining room, I saw Jeremy by the
windows, his back to me, his shoulders heaving. There was a noise coming
from him, an almost imperceptible squeaking. "Is a balloon coming to my
birthday party?" Rosie asked again. I had no idea whether Jeremy would
want me to comfort him or leave him alone. Since I was the source of his
unhappiness, it seemed safer to assume the latter.
"Is a balloon coming to my birthday party?" Rosie asked for the third
time, and as I returned to the kitchen table, I said, "Yes, a balloon is com
ing."
A few minutes later, I heard Jeremy leave the house. Again, he didn't get
home until I was asleep.

C S )C.-1 S nine days later, performed not by my obstetrician but
by a red-bearded maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, and Jeremy wasn't
there. Though I'd mentioned when the appointment was, it had seemed
wrong to ask him to accompany me, and he hadn't offered. A technician
did an ultrasound first, to confirm that I was right about being ten weeks
along, and the technician stayed, the view of my inhabited womb in blurry
black and white remaining on the computer screen, while the doctor used
a needle to extract the tissue sample. On the screen, I could see a shrimp
shape with little limb buds, and just before the doctor inserted the needle,
fear gripped me that the CVS would cause a miscarriage. If this happened,
it would simplify everything, but still--I wanted the baby to be okay.
The procedure was more uncomfortable than truly painful, and when
the doctor was finished, they observed the baby's heartbeat for several
minutes; then he left and the technician helped me stand. "Do you have
someone to drive you home?" she asked, and I nodded, which was a lie.
But I'd hired Kendra until five-fifteen, when Jeremy would return from
work. I walked slowly to the parking garage, climbed into my car in the
semidarkness of the winter afternoon, then put the key in the ignition. At
home, I texted Kendra from the driveway to tell her to take Rosie and
Owen to the kitchen. Just before I opened the front door, I noticed outside
it a brown paper lunch bag. My name was on it in Vi's handwriting.
Inside was a thumbnail-sized shiny red gemstone flecked with black, and
a scrap of paper on which Vi had written, Jasper--for balancing emotional
energystress--wear in your auric field (i.e., on you or carry)--can't hurt! I 
slipped the stone and note into the pocket of my coat and went up to bed.

The c VS didn t cause me to miscarry; I was still pregnant in the
days after. I could tell because, besides not cramping or spotting, I was
usually either queasy or ravenously hungry, and sometimes I was both at
once.

I didn't know exactly when Jeremy had his DNA sample drawn, or how
he directed the information to my obstetrician's office, but eight days after
the CVS, while the children were having their afternoon naps, I received a
call on my cellphone from my obstetrician, a tall, merry, middle-aged
Jewish woman who had delivered Rosie and Owen and whom I adored.
"So I've got your results in front of me, and Jeremy's DNA doesn't match
baby's," she said. Shame surged through me, and after a few seconds, she
said, "Is that a surprise for you?"
"No," I said.
"I hope you're taking care of yourself.," she said. "Eating well and getting
plenty of rest."
"I am. Thank you for calling."
"Kate, if you'd like to talk to someone, I know a fabulous therapist in
Clayton."
So Dr. Rosenstein, cheerful, frank Dr. Rosenstein with her dark, curly
hair and her bright, unfashionable, vaguely ethnic wardrobe--I'd once
seen her wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt under her white coat--Dr. Rosenstein
now knew I was a slut who'd cheated on my husband.
"That's okay," I said. "But thanks."
After I'd hung up, I texted Jeremy: CVS test results back. Your DNA
does not match baby. I had no idea if sending this information in a text was
an act of cowardice or mercy. At home, for the past few weeks, we'd been
sleepwalking. After Owen and Rosie were down at night, Jeremy would
read or grade in the living room, with the television turned to sports and
muted. Once I said, "Do you want to watch Saturday Night Live?" and he
said, "No, but if you do, I can go to the kitchen."
After that, I began getting into bed myself as soon as Rosie was asleep,
even though it was seven-thirty. I ended up finishing the novel I'd started
in June, and then I started and finished a memoir by Michael J. Fox. Jeremy
never came to bed until after I'd nursed Owen at ten and gone to
sleep. It occurred to me to try to get him to have sex, either to stay awake
upstairs or just throw myself at him downstairs, but would I throw myself
at him on the same couch where I'd thrown myself at Hank? Did Jeremy
suspect that the couch was where Hank and I had had sex? Anyway, if
Jeremy rebuffed me, it would be mortifying; it would be unbearable. What
was it I'd thought that night with Hank about Jeremy not giving me
compliments--that we were too tired for it? Which was true enough, but
what I'd overlooked was how Jeremy's daily kindnesses, the way he pulled
me onto his lap, the way he washed the dinner dishes, were their own
compliments, their own reassurance. In their absence, I could feel the cor
ners
of furniture more sharply, the drafty windows and cold floors.
A minute after I'd sent him the text with the CVS results, Jeremy texted

me back: 1,et's talk tonight.
to c tot ti tt.tt tcream this time around; because Jeremy and I no
longer ate it at night together in front of the TV, I'd taken to consuming
ice cream alone, in the afternoon, when Rosie and Owen were napping.
Sometimes I ate it while crafting the email to my former boss, though I
still hadn't sent her anything.
As during our last real conversation, I sat in the armchair and Jeremy
sat on the couch. This time he was the one who spoke first. He cleared his
throat. "When you told me we should just raise the baby and not explain
to anyone why he has dark skin, I thought that was ridiculous, but I haven't
been able to come up with a better solution."
"You don't want a divorce?" The words had leapt from my mouth; although
they probably sounded pathetic, I didn't care.
Matter-of-factly, he said, "It's not that I haven't considered it. But the
way you feel about an abortion is how I feel about a divorce. Everyone
pretends like if it's in the parents' best interest, then it's in the kids', 
too.
Or, you know, kids are resilient, they get over it. But plenty of kids don't get
over it." He made a wry expression, an almost smile--oh, how I missed
Jeremy's smile--and said, "Plus, you'd marry Hank."
"Is that what you think?" The suggestion was weirdly flattering, the
implication that marrying Hank was an option available to me, but even
more so, the implication that Jeremy could still feel jealous--that he didn't
loathe me completely.
He shrugged. "Except I don't know how you'd support yourselves."
"I'm not going to marry Hank," I said. "I promise."
"Anyway." Jeremy pressed his index finger to the bridge of his glasses,
pushing them up. "For about a minute, I was thinking we could tell the
baby he's adopted, but it's too fucked up for him to believe his real mom
gave him up. And then he's sixteen or eighteen and wants to find her
and--it's just not fair to him. Plus, Rosie's probably old enough that she'd
understand you'd been pregnant. So then I thought that we say we went to
a fertility clinic and they mixed up the sperm, but that's way too much
detail, and who'd believe we were going to a fertility clinic when we had a
six-month-old? So I thought, okay, we tell people the truth. 'Ibo had if it
embarrasses Kate. But you'll be relieved to hear that I decided telling the
truth would create its own set of problems. If anyone ever gets to learn the
truth, it's him--the child, when he's older. But we don't tell anyone else
anything. People are so rude that I'm sure they'll ask, and we'll just say
there's Greek blood on my side."

"Is there?"
"No. But Greek blood, Italian, whatever--we pick an ethnicity and

stick with it."
"Not black blood?"
Jeremy shook his head. "It's too close to the truth."
"What do we tell your family?"
"That there's Greek blood on your side."
My heart was thudding. "Thank you, Jeremy."
"There's more," he said. "We leave St. Louis. We move away. Because if
you think you can hide this baby, you're crazy. The minute Hank sees him,
he'll know. And the idea of getting into some custody battle with the
Wheelings--" Jeremy made an expression of distaste.
"I doubt Courtney would want anything to do with the baby."
"Sure," Jeremy said. "Courtney wouldn't."
We both were quiet, and finally I said, "Not that I want to tell Hank, but
is it legal not to?"
"I have no idea."
We were quiet again. "Where would we go?" I asked.
"I emailed Lukovich, and the deadline for that Cornell job was December first, 
but he's willing to slip my application in. And it's not guaranteed,
obviously, but I have as good a shot as anyone." Jeremy looked at me, and
it wasn't a warm look--he was telling, not asking. He said, "If we can, we'll
go to Ithaca."
So this was to be my punishment: Not divorce. Not abortion. Just a
move. A move of almost a thousand miles, to a part of the country where
I'd never spent time, in a state where I knew no one, where I'd be looking
after three young children. We'd need to find a new house, new parks, a
new pediatrician. And what of my father and Vi? Could I train them to
look out for each other? Vi would have to learn which brands our father
liked to buy at the grocery store, and she'd have to be patient when he
passed his coupons to the checkout person.
No, a move wasn't ideal. It was what I'd thought I could count on not
happening as long as my father was alive. But still, comparatively, I'd be
getting off easy. I swallowed and said, "Okay."
Many times, starting as soon as later that night, I have recalled this
conversation and marveled at our naiveté, all the possibilities we failed to
consider. Would we never again send out a Christmas card? Even if we
didn't, did we think we could prevent a friend from taking a picture of
our son at a birthday party and posting it on Facebook? And whether
or not Jeremy worked in the same department as Courtney Wheeling,
he'd see her regularly at conferences; they'd always know countless people
in common. Two and a half years have passed since our decision, and Jeremy
and I have not yet been caught, or at least we have not been confronted;
most important, we have not been confronted by the Wheelings.
What others might suspect, I can only guess. But surely--like an impending
earthquake--our unmasking awaits us. And maybe we knew at the
time we were being unrealistic; maybe it was a situation in which being
unrealistic was the only way to proceed.
"This is the last thing," Jeremy said in the living room. "For all intents
and purposes, I'm the baby's father. It's my name on the birth certificate.
There's no asterisk. He's my son."
"Okay," I said again. "Okay for all of it." Then I said, "I know it won't be
now, but I hope that someday you'll be able to forgive me."
He didn't stand to hug me; he didn't motion for me to join him on the
couch. We weren't about to watch TV together, apparently, or to have sex.
He merely said, "I hope so, too," and then he leaned forward and lifted a
stack of papers from the table.

But then we did have sex; later that night, we did. He got into bed
while I was nursing Owen at ten (now that I was definitely having this
baby, definitely not terminating, I would have to wean Owen before he
turned one, I thought; even if it was biologically possible, I couldn't see
nursing him atop my pregnant belly). When I reentered our room, Jeremy
was sitting up, shirtless, the covers pulled to his waist. He wasn't using his
phone. I'd already changed into my pajamas and had been reading before
I nursed Owen, and I'd left the book open and facedown on my night
stand. I hadn't yet closed the door behind me when Jeremy said, "Come

here."
I approached his side of the bed instead of mine and stood a couple feet

from him.
"Take off your pajamas," he said. I hesitated only briefly before pulling
my T-shirt and then my nursing bra over my head; I hooked my thumbs
into the sides of my underwear and pants and pushed them both down at
the same time. The light on Jeremy's nightstand was off, and the light on
mine was on. He appraised my body. I was already gaining pregnancy
weight again around my midsection, having never completely lost it since
delivering Owen, and I couldn't remember when I'd last shaved my bikini
line, but some rite of penance was occurring, I understood, and debasing
myself was part of it.
Jeremy said, "When you were fucking Hank, did you think about me?"
I bit my lip. "I was upset with you for leaving town. But, Jeremy, I only
love you."
"Did you enjoy fucking him?"
I wanted to defend myself, to explain, but I needed to answer his ques
tions
succinctly and carefully; after all, we were constructing the narrative
we'd live with. I said, "The way you touch me--nobody else knows how to
touch me like you." Jeremy could say Hank's name, but I couldn't; I was
pretty sure that was one of the rules of this exchange.
"Did you come?"
"You know what to do to make me come." I stepped toward him,
reached for his hand, and brought it down between my legs, where it
was already wet. "See?" I said. And then I climbed onto the bed, onto
him, my naked body on his, and I pushed down the covers, and he
gripped my ass. I'm not sure it was a decision on his part so much as habit
or reflex.
When he was inside me, I said it again: "I only love you, Jeremy. I only
love you. I only love you." Even when his breath broke against my ear, he
didn't say anything back.

[A iiin the morning--not completely, but a little,
and I understood that this was the most I could hope for. After breakfast,
playing in the living room, Rosie said in an excited tone, "There's chocolate
in Mama's diaper!"
"I don't wear diapers," I said. "I use the potty."
"But if she did wear diapers," Jeremy said, and though he was ostensibly
speaking to Rosie, there was something in his voice for me, too, "she
would definitely have chocolate in them."

CST nsAi leb we hosted--Jeremy's father and stepmother
flew out for three days, and my father, Vi, and Stephanie joined us for
Christmas dinner--Vi dried serving dishes as I washed them after the
meal, and she said, "I dreamed last night of the earthquake again. Did I
ever tell you that in my dreams, it's all black people?"
No, Vi, I thought. No more of this. I passed her the bowl that had held
the sweet potatoes and said, "Yes, you've mentioned that." After a few seconds,
I said, "Dad is really quiet tonight."
"Dad's always quiet."

Surely my recent nervousness about my father was nervousness about
the prospect of moving. But I hadn't yet brought up the job at Cornell with
Vi because Jeremy had asked me not to, in case he didn't get it. Even
though I was certain that he would, I'd complied with his request. "I
wonder if Dad's been driving at night again," I said.
"Well, you don't have to worry about that tonight." Vi and Stephanie
had picked him up. Then Vi said, "I just wish I knew where my earthquake
is."
Was this never going to be fully behind us? No, it wasn't. Even then, as
I was washing dishes at the sink, my belly was swelling again; it wouldn't
be long before people other than Jeremy and Vi knew I was pregnant.
"Maybe your earthquake was never an earthquake," I said.

kttec. on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, as the children
and I were driving home from the shoe store after buying Rosie a pair
of purple sequined sneakers, I received a text from Jeremy: So sad about
Haiti. I turned on the car radio and learned that a magnitude 7 earthquake
had struck just west of Port-au-Prince, killing and injuring countless
people, blocking the roads with rubble, and cutting off electricity and

phone service.
As I was turning into our driveway, my cellphone rang, and when I
answered, Vi was sobbing. "It's awful," she said. "It's awful."
In the backseat, Rosie reached out, plucked Owen's pacifier from his
mouth--her arms were getting long--and stuck it in her own. To Vi, I said,
"Do you want to come over?"
"Maybe." Vi sniffed. "Isn't Haiti already really fucked up without this?"
"I'm sorry," I said.
Jeremy and I didn't watch any news until the children were in bed, and
even then, I couldn't take much at a time. I'd get up to put laundry in the
dryer or to carry a water glass from the living room mantel to the kitchen
sink, and I was sorting the mail that had accumulated recently when Vi

called.
"I'm going down there to volunteer," she said.
I had already heard someone on CNN say that you'd be better off just
sending money, but there were so many steps between Vi expressing her
plan and boarding a plane to Port-au-Prince that it didn't seem like I
needed to dissuade her.
"Come over," I said. "Seriously."
"Stephanie will be here soon."
"She's welcome, too."
"I'm not talking to reporters, if that's what you're worried about."
"Are reporters calling you?"

"Well, I heard from Emma about ten seconds after the quake. The
ground might still have been shaking. But I'm done with the media."
"Really?" I tried to conceal my relief.
"When I was doing all those interviews, it seemed fun, but the thought
of talking to some newspaper columnist now--I mean, they all ask you
the same questions over and over, the questions are dumb to begin with,
and then they either take what you say out of context or just straight-up
misquote you."
May you always feel exactly as you do now, I thought. Aloud, I said, "I
can see that."

After I hung up, there was footage on-screen of a collapsed hospital,
and a weeping woman outside it was being interviewed, a translator speaking
over her in French-accented English. I gestured toward the TV "I
guess this explains why Vi was so insistent about her prediction, if that's
what she was picking up on."

Jeremy gave me a dubious look. "You're really convinced her ghost
guide mixed up Haiti and St. Louis? The poorest country in the Northern
Hemisphere and a declining midwestern city?"
"I don't think Vi would lie. She doesn't have much to gain at this point."
Jeremy was silent, and then he said, "I hope those godforsaken people
down there get a fraction of the attention your sister did."

I hadn't vet embarked on my plan, with regard to my father, to train
Vi as my replacement--the first step would be to have Vi come along to
the grocery store--but it turned out that I never needed to. Two days after
the earthquake in Haiti, my father was having lunch at home when an
aneurysm in his brain ruptured, causing him to double over with a searing
headache. Though he was able to call an ambulance, he wasn't conscious
when the medics arrived, and they had to break down his locked
front door. Early that evening, when Jeremy went to my father's apartment
so that neither Vi nor I had to, he found the door hanging from the hinges,
a splattering of vomit on the dining room rug, and the uneaten remains of
a turkey sandwich at the table. My father had died five hours earlier, in the
ambulance en route to the hospital.
It's hard to say what would have been a preferable way for him to go, but
the lunch alone, the vomit, the fact that he called his own ambulance, then
died in pain and among strangers--if I had been choosing for him, certainly
I'd have chosen something else. We used the same funeral home
he'd used for our mother, and though I initially didn't want a graveside
service--I feared no one would come--Jeremy and Vi persuaded me.
Fourteen people showed up, including Jeremy's mother; we hired Kendra
to watch Rosie and Owen. Vi had said she'd write a poem about our father,
but as Jeremy and I turned in through the gates of the cemetery, she called
my cellphone and said, "I started something, but it seemed really cheesy,
so I'm reading the poem Jackie O's boyfriend read at her funeral."

"That's fine."
"You'll like it," Vi said. "It's classy."
More irritably than I meant to, I said, "I already told you it's fine."
The service lasted ten minutes, during which I thought about how my
father had been lonely before meeting my mother, then lonely in a different
way after marrying her. But wasn't I filled with sorrow less for the quiet
futility of my father's life than out of fear that my own children would
judge me as harshly as I judged my parents? Was I enough different from
my mother and father? I tried to be, but hadn't I just messed up in other

ways?
We hadn't arranged to have a reception afterward, which felt inhospitable
but not inhospitable enough to spontaneously invite everyone back
to our house. Instead, we made small talk by the casket, then drove home
with Jeremy's mother, followed by Vi and Stephanie. Jeremy's mother had
come to the cemetery in a taxi from the airport and was flying out the next

morning.
No one at the grave site had said anything about Vi's prediction. Or at
least no one had said anything to me.
ilkVi and I cleared out our father's apart
ment.
He wasn't someone who'd held on to much, which was part of why
it was a surprise to find, in the drawer in his bedside table, a letter from a
neurosurgeon I'd never heard of dated August 24, 2009, confirming that
he had been diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm and that against the doctor's
advice and in spite of the risks of rupture, including but not limited
to subarachnoid hemorrhage or intracranial hematoma, he did not at this
time wish to seek further treatment.
I took the letter into the kitchen, where Vi was emptying cabinets. She
pointed to a large flat cardboard box on the table. "That's a really nice
skillet, and he never even opened it."
"Jeremy and I gave it to him."
"Does that mean you have dibs on it?"
"Keep it. Look at this." I passed the letter to her and waited while she
read it. "Why wouldn't he have wanted treatment?"
"He was seventy-four, Daze. Maybe he didn't want to use his remaining
time being poked and prodded by doctors."
"But to not even try--you don't think he was, like, depressed--"
In a skeptical voice, Vi said, "Do you think he was depressed?"
"Not that I noticed, but--"
She shook her head. "Dad was fine. He had all those sexy massages to
live for."

"You never said anything about that, did you?"
Vi rolled her eyes. "No, I didn't say anything." She set the letter on top
of the skillet box. "Although now I wish I hadn't let you talk me out of asking
him about having senses. You know how he hardly asked us questions
about our lives? Do you think it's because he didn't need to? Like, he just
knew?"

I thought, for the first time in years, of that evening the summer after
Vi and I had been in eighth grade, when my father had taken me to get ice
cream and told me how he hadn't enjoyed junior high. "You know what?"
I said. "I think he did. Did he know we were the ones cooking dinner all
that time? He must have."
"Did he know I'd grow up to be a big fat dyke?"
"Believe it or not, I think he knew that, too. Did he know Mom would
die so young? Or what an unhappy marriage they'd have?"
"They had good times together, Daze. You don't believe it, but they did.
Did I ever tell you that a couple months before she died, I went to Steak 'n
Shake one day for lunch and saw them? I walk in, and there the two of
them are. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but they were definitely
talking."
"Mom was up that early? And eating?" I tried to picture them, my father
in a short-sleeved plaid polyester shirt, my excessively skinny, once
pretty mother.
"I decided not to say hi. They looked like they were having a nice lunch,
and why disturb them? So I left."
"Do you think it's not true that Mom didn't like Dad?"
Vi puffed out her cheeks, considering the question, then exhaled. "I
think Mom didn't like Mom." Then she said, "But she didn't kill herself.
Despite what that douchey boyfriend of yours claimed. Wow, I can't even
remember his name."
"Ben," I said, and at the same time, Vi said, "Don't tell me. He doesn't
deserve the space in my brain." Vi reached for the letter from our father's
doctor and, as I watched, folded it into a paper airplane. When she
launched it, it hit the refrigerator before bouncing to the floor. She said,
"The fact that he wasn't jumping for joy all the time doesn't mean he was
miserable. It's not one or the other. Mom had problems, yeah, but I really
don't think Dad was depressed. He was just a grown-up."

Alt hough Vi dido t end up traveling to Haiti, there was a child, a
ten-year-old girl named Ginette who was written about in an Associated
Press article that ran in the Post-Dispatch, whom Vi became preoccupied
with. After losing her mother in the earthquake, Ginette was living in a
donated tent with five other children, the youngest of whom was eleven
months and the oldest of whom was fifteen. They were sleeping on carpet
scraps and foraging for food, and they had intestinal parasites. A pastor
checked on them erratically; the baby lay in filth, covered in flies, and
when he fussed, Ginette sang him lullabies.

For a few days, Vi wanted to adopt Ginette; then she wanted to make a
donation to the pastor so that he could buy the children uncontaminated
food. One afternoon while Rosie and Owen were napping, Vi and I looked online 
together, trying to figure out how to find the pastor, or at least the
reporter who'd written about Ginette and the pastor, but when Jeremy got
home, he said what I already knew, what Vi probably knew, too--that it was
better to give money to an aid organization. This was what he and I did.
Vi kept tracking Ginette, she told me--she meant through either visualization
or communicating with Guardian, not through the newspaper,
because no other articles about Ginette ran--and she thought that a distant
family member had come to collect her, then sold her as a servant.
After that, Vi couldn't locate Ginette anymore. She said, "What do I do
now?"

It was an unusually warm February day, and we were in our yard; I was
blowing bubbles, which Rosie was chasing, and Owen, who had begun
walking the week before, took halting steps across the grass. I dipped the
plastic wand back into the jar of soap. "I don't know," I said.

Six weeks after the earthquake in Haiti, there was an even stronger
one--magnitude 8.8--in Chile, and though it caused serious damage,
there were far fewer fatalities and much less destruction because the
quake's epicenter was in a small town. Later in the year, major earthquakes
occurred in Indonesia, China, and Turkey. In March 2011, a magnitude 9
earthquake killed more than fifteen thousand people in Japan. Did this
mean that in fact there had been a kind of earthquake season that started
in September 2009? A geophysicist--Courtney Wheeling--would say no.
On average, an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater happens somewhere
in the world every three days. Mostly, they happen underwater, and we
hardly take notice. It is only when the earthquakes come to us, upending
the streets and houses and trees we think of as ours, that they command
our attention. But the earth, as Courtney once told a local TV reporter, is
always busy.

offered and accepted the Cornell job at the end of
January. During his spring break, we flew out with the children to look at
houses, and I met with the obstetrician whose name Jeremy's adviser's
wife had passed along. My due date was July 3, and we'd move in May, as
soon as Jeremy finished teaching. What we didn't say, what we didn't need
to, was that it seemed wiser for me to have the baby outside St. Louis.
Jeremy's accepting the job--our shared understanding of the move as
my punishment--was another thing that eased the lingering tension between
us. Though we didn't acknowledge such distasteful facts, the earthquake
in Haiti had also made things better between us, as had my father's
death. These global and personal tragedies made us glad not to be alone,
glad to still be moving forward together as a family. Even so, I sometimes
thought of what Jeremy had said to me the night we first slept together-- 
There's nothing you need to be sorry for--and of how it was no longer true.
It would never be true again.
We saw Vi and Stephanie frequently that spring. In their presence, it
could almost seem as if I hadn't fucked up as colossally as I had. The irony
was that the two of them--I assumed Vi had told Stephanie--were the
only people other than Jeremy and me who knew that the baby I was carrying
was Hank's. But maybe we nevertheless found them comforting because
Stephanie hadn't been part of our lives before Vi's prediction and
was therefore a change for us, but not a bad change; enjoying her company
didn't represent pretense or loss.
Stephanie moved in with Vi in March, and when Vi told me she was
about to, she said, "Don't even make the joke."
In April, at Owen's first-birthday celebration, for which we invited over
only Vi and Stephanie, Vi declined both cake and ice cream, and I was
incredulous. "If you must know," Vi said, "I'm doing Weight Watchers.
And no offense, but that cake doesn't look good enough to be worth the
points."
"You know, I was thinking you were thinner," I said.
"Really?" Vi looked unabashedly thrilled. "I've lost six pounds."
The next weekend, when they came over on Sunday so Stephanie and
Jeremy could watch the Cards play the Cubs, I said, "Do you guys want to
stay for dinner? It's vegetable stir-fry, so it's healthy."
"Thanks, but Vi has promised to make me her famous herb-encrusted
salmon tonight," Stephanie said.

"Herb-encrusted salmon?" Jeremy turned to my sister and said, "She
has you by the balls, Vi."

There was a silence, and I wondered if Jeremy's remark, which he'd
meant as a teasing compliment to Stephanie, had come across as equating
lesbians and men. And then, with complete aplomb, Stephanie said, "Jeremy,
my hands aren't that big."

This wasn't the only time I thought it, but it was the first time: that it
was all right for me to leave St. Louis, because now there was someone
there who loved Vi as much as I did. Before they went home that day, I said
to her, "I think you'll be okay after we're in New York."
"No shit I will." Vi looked amused. "Please don't tell me you're getting
sentimental about moving. Don't you remember what you wished under
the Arch? It's finally coming true."
"Well, not quite like I pictured."
"Of course not." Vi shrugged. "Not for me, either. No Peace Corps and
no"--she held up her fingers--" 'husband." Then she patted my hand.
"But don't worry, Daze. It's not like you can escape me. Whatever happens,
wherever you go, you'll always still be living in Sisterland."

011C Saturday morning when Jeremy had taken the children to the
zoo and I was running errands alone, I stopped at the Schnucks on Manchester,
which I hadn't been to since my father's death. The store was
crowded, and I didn't realize until I was loading my food onto the conveyor
belt that the cashier was an older woman with heavy makeup who'd
helped us many times before.
She gest tired towa rd my belly. "I I oney, you've been busy!"
I smiled sheepishly. There was an embarrassment I now felt when Owen
and Rosie were with me, which was most of the time, as if people were
thinking, Why doesn't that woman stop having children? Perhaps they assumed
I was a member of a religious sect determined to build its population.
"Your
dad's not with you today?" the woman said.
I shook my head.
The woman smiled. "What a nice man he is."

a N4onday in mid-April, in the middle of story hour at the Richmond
Heights library, I received a text from Hank: Heard you're expecting
again. Congrats! I was by then in the beginning of my third trimester, and
I was huge. I was standing behind the group of children at the librarian's
feet, following Owen as he toddled among the shelves.
Just as jarring as this unexpected contact with Hank was the realization,
as evidenced by the time stamp on the screen of my phone, that six
months had passed since his previous text. He'd sent that one the morning
after we'd had sex: C coming home at noon. We should talk. And to
think that there had been a time I'd felt impatient on the mornings Amelia
attended preschool; those few hours had seemed too long to wait before
reconnecting with Hank. All this time later, Hank as a notion, an idea,
made me feel a reflexive queasiness, as I might if thinking of Marisa Mazarelli,
but when I actually recalled the hours we'd spent together at parks
and in each other's yards, it was hard not to miss him.
In the library, I was preoccupied enough, caught off guard enough, not
to be gripped by nostalgia. I texted back, Thanks. He could ask, but I
wouldn't initiate the topic.
His next text didn't arrive for several minutes: Just want to confirm
there's nothing we should discuss.
Thank God for texting, I thought. Because how capacious that single
line in its invitation to lie without officially lying.
Nope, I wrote, nothing to discuss.
Wow three kids, he wrote back.
I know! I wrote. Hope you guys are well. Which was as bland, as innocuous,
as what I might have told a former co-worker or a person I'd
known distantly in college. Five weeks later, on the day we left St. Louis, I
still hadn't seen Hank again.

part, the movers packed us. I insisted on transporting
only our most fragile items: the antique perfume holder Vi had brought to
the hospital when Rosie was born, a platter Jeremy's brother and sister-in
law had given us that was painted with our names and the date and place
of our wedding. The week before departing from St. Louis, after Jeremy
did due diligence with Consumer Reports, we traded in both our cars and
bought a minivan, a purchase Jeremy had mentioned first. We'd use it to
drive to Ithaca, where it would become mine, and Jeremy would buy a
sedan with snow tires.

Gabriel--Gabe--was born four days before his due date, on June 30,
and we gave him the middle name Earl, after my father. Gabe's skin at
birth was only the slightest bit darker than Rosie's and Owen's had been,
though he definitely had more hair, and even a few curls, to the delight of
the nurses. He's over two now, and he does have a different complexion
than the rest of us; perhaps I think this only because I'm his mother, but
I'd describe it as a golden glow. I can honestly say that he reminds me less
of Hank than of Owen and Rosie when they were toddlers--Owen is now
three, and Rosie is five--though sometimes Gabe makes an expression
that causes me to gasp with recognition. At such moments, I wonder about
my obligation not just to Hank but to Amelia as well. But I still believe
that, at least for the time being, it's best to do nothing. It would be foolish
for me not to realize that the older Gabe gets, and the further he ventures
into the world without us, the more likely he is to be perceived, accurately,
as half black. I think, of course, of Dr. Jeff Parker--Scary Black Man--
and I worry for Gabe; there are so many large and small uglinesses around
race, and how can I realistically expect other people to be better than I
myself have managed to be?
But for now, Gabe is just a toddler. He loves singing "The Itsy-Bilsy
Spider." Outside, he passes me leaves and says, "Thank you." In one of his
books, there's an illustration of a scarecrow, and he always points at it and
says, "It's Mama."
Around Jeremy, I've always been more careful with Gabe than I was
with Rosie or Owen--careful not to complain, mostly. Sometimes when
Rosie and Owen were really tiny and waking up eight times a night, if I
couldn't take it anymore, I'd pass them off to Jeremy, telling him to go
downstairs with them, or anywhere--I just needed to sleep. I never did
that with Gabe, even when he and I were both in tears. When he was a
newborn, I slept with him in my arms--not between Jeremy and me but
between my body and the mini-crib we'd pushed up against our bed. I
knew Jeremy didn't consider this safe, so I did it without mentioning it to
him, though surely he must have noticed. But Gabe was soon a better
sleeper than Owen had been, and when Gabe was six months old, we
moved him into his brother's room. Jeremy is warm with Gabe, he is patient
and silly and boisterous, and perhaps the fact that I detect the slightest
withholding on Jeremy's part, the absence of a reflexive rather than a
decided love, is only my imagination; perhaps I am seeing what I've primed
myself to see.
I wondered if Jeremy would want us to have another child, if he'd decide
it could be a further means of chipping away at my infidelity, reinforcing
the balance of our family as our family. I didn't think I could
stand it, but what could I say if he insisted? And so at my six-week postpartum
appointment, I requested an IUD. But Gabe was only four months
old on the autumn evening when Jeremy said he'd been thinking that over
Christmas break, he should get a vasectomy.
This past spring, while I was changing Gabe's diaper, he looked up at
me, smiled, and said, "Mama's other name is Daisy." Vi and Stephanie
have visited us a few times, so it's not impossible that he'd heard Vi call me
Daisy, but I don't believe this is how he knew; when he spoke, my heart
clenched. "Mama's other name is Kate," I said firmly. "It used to be Daisy,
but now it's Kate." And then, a few weeks later, while the children and I
were in the playroom off the kitchen, he turned to me and said, "Daddy is
Rosic's daddy."
"That's true," I said.

"And Daddy is Owen's daddy."
"That's true, too," I said.

He said, "Who's my daddy?"
I swallowed. "Daddy is your daddy. Daddy is all of your daddy." I didn't
say anything to Jeremy about this specific comment or its larger
implications--time will tell if I'm overreacting, though again, I don't
think I am. If it were to be only one of them, I'd have guessed Rosie, maybe
because she's a girl like me. But I have guessed wrong about many things.
My father had left no will, and after his estate went through probate, Vi
and I received nineteen thousand dollars each. I had indeed ended up paying
Emma Hall with a credit card--two credit cards, actually--and I used
the money from my father to pay off the balances. I suspect Vi would have
chipped in if I'd asked her to, but it felt like another kind of penance, given
my complicity in everything, not to ask.
When people here in Ithaca learn where we moved from, they often
mention Vi's prediction, not knowing that Vi is my sister. They don't remember
her name, but they say something friendly and derisive, like "Ah,
St. Louis, where the earth didn't shake." And though it feels slightly cowardly
or dishonest, I merely nod and change the subject. I feel that Vi's
prediction is past and has concluded; I don't want to mock or defend or
explain it, not to anyone, not ever again.

morning we pulled out of our driveway on San
Bonita Avenue for the last time, to think that Rosie and Owen wouldn't
remember living in this city, this house; if Rosie did remember, it would
be only vaguely. There are, I have learned, so many gifts of motherhood,
and so many sadnesses, and one of the sadnesses is the asymmetry of the
family experience: that in spite of all the daily nuisances, and in spite of
the unforgivable way I transgressed, these years of the children being little
are the sweetest time in my life. And yet, for Rosie and Owen and Gabe,
these won't be their best years. They'll grow up and go away, they'll find
Spouses and have sons or daughters, and 110 matter how much we loved
them, they'll probably recall their childhoods as strange and confusing, as
all childhoods are. The happiest time in their lives, if they're lucky, will be
when they're raising their own families.
Shortly before we left St. Louis, the day Jeremy cleaned out his office at
Wash U, he came home from campus and passed me an envelope, saying,
"I took this from your dad's apartment that day." He meant the day my
father had died, and I must have made an alarmed expression because
Jeremy added, "It's nothing bad--just pictures."
My father had put my name on the front of the envelope, spindly letters
in blue ballpoint, and I felt a little ache seeing his handwriting. The envelope
wasn't sealed, and inside were three photographs, all taken by my father
on the evening of his birthday the previous September: one of Rosie,
blurrily running across the grass; one of Vi sitting in a not particularly
ladylike way in our recliner, Owen on her lap; and one of just Jeremy and
me, standing side by side. It had been a while--longer than Rosie had been
alive, I was pretty sure--since I'd seen a picture of Jeremy and me together
and no one else. Usually, one of us was the photographer.
As I held the edges of the picture, I had an intimation--perhaps I mean
a sense--of our children looking at it years in the future, when they themselves
were adults: Rosie at thirty, say, and Owen at twenty-eight and Gabe
at twenty-seven. Who would Jeremy and I be by then? Would we still be
married, would we even still both be alive? I hoped so, I hoped it desperately,
but the future (this is true for all of us) is opaque.
Our children, our grown-up children, who might or might not know
the secrets of their parents but who'd surely possess secrets of their own--
would they regard us with affection or resentment? The answer, presumably,
is both, but still, it is hard not to wonder in what proportions, hard
not to yearn, as I did at my father's burial, for those proportions to be 
favorable.
As little girls, Vi and I studied an image of our parents at the
Arch, our mother in her belted orange wool jacket and matching beret,
our father with his dark sideburns. And surely the clothes Jeremy and I
wore in this picture, the haircuts we had, would seem as amusingly outdated
to our children as the Arch photo had seemed to Vi and me, the year 2009 as 
faraway to them as 1974 had been to us.
And then one of my adult children speaks; I imagine it being Rosie. She
and her brothers are clustered around the picture of Jeremy and me, examining
it with the combination of disdain and curiosity we all feel when
confronted with evidence of a world that dared to exist before our consciousness
of it. "I can't believe how young they were," Rosie says.
Jennifer Hershey, I am endlessly grateful for your calmness, sharp 
intelligence,
and good humor. At Random House, I also have benefited from the
wide-ranging talents of Gina Centrello, Theresa Zoro, Maria Braeckel (my
best and most constant e--pen pal!), Sally Marvin, Susan Kamil, Tom
Perry, Sanyu Dillon, Avideh Bashirrad, Erika Greber, Joey McGarvey,
Janet Wygal, Bonnie Thompson, Kelle Ruden, Virginia Norey, Robbin
Schiff, Beck Stvan, and Paolo Pepe.
Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, you are my fierce advocate, and your wit and
wisdom sparkle. I'm lucky to have the support of many other people at
William Morris Endeavor, including Suzanne Gluck, Alicia Gordon,
Cathryn Summerhayes, Claudia Ballard, Tracy Fisher, Raffaella DeAngelis,
Margaret Riley, Michelle Feehan, Kathleen Nishimoto, and Caitlin
Moore.

At Transworld, I get to work with, among others, Marianne Velmans
(who is not only smart and charming but an identical twin to boot), Suzanne
Bridson, and Patsy Irwin.
Jynne Martin, you have forever earned your own category.
My wise early readers and fellow writers, thank you for saving me from
myself: Shauna Seliy, Emily Miller, Susanna Daniel, Lewis Robinson,
Anton DiSclafani, and Katie Brandi.
Several friends and friendly strangers were very generous in helping me
answer particular questions about a variety of topics: Michael Wysession,
Edward J. Moret, Aimee Moore, Kelly Judge, Mariah North, Rebecca
Hollander-Blumoff, Susan Appleton, Rhoda Brooks, Andrea Denny, and
Patrick Randoll)11.
I
I also want to recognize the public radio show St. Louis on the Air, hosted by 
Don Marsh, a particular episode of which influenced my
understanding of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. That show aired in February
2011 and featured as guests Michael Wysession and Seth Stein.
Among my other sources of information about the aftermath of earthquakes
were New York Times articles by Deborah Sontag. Any mistakes
that appear in Sisterland are, of course, my own.
To my sisters (who read an early draft) and to my parents and brother
(whom I wouldn't allow to), thank you for still putting up with me after
four novels.

And to Matt and our little St. Louisans, there's no one I'd rather miss
deadlines with than the three of you.
Curtis Sittenfeld is the author the word-of-mouth bestseller American
Wife. Her first novel, Prep, was a New York Times bestseller and
was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. It was followed by The Man
of My Dreams. Her books are translated into twenty-five languages.
She is married, with two young children. Visit her website, 
www.curtissittenfeld.com



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