News & Updates

Jen has a bit of a glow on and is letting the cooling air dry the moisture from her neck while she rocks slowly in the wide swing bench at the back of Rosemary’s garden. The grass is wet with dew, and her toes feel numb. Numb. That’s it. That’s what’s wrong with her, she thinks. Suddenly there is a roaring in her ears, loud, fuzzy, a million conchs buzzing, whizzing as the blood throbs through her eardrums. She feels a vacuum in the core. She tries to raise her hand to cover it, but her hand won’t move. She feels like she is swimming up through thick liquid trying to open her eyes, but she keeps sliding back down into the darkness. Just as suddenly, she is tugged free, floating at first, then swirling into a vortex. She hears a voice, faint, then louder and louder, piercing. As we discover on the train man, it’s all the same fucking day and nothing really matters man. Joplin. Ball and Chain. Joplin’s voice flies apart, becomes many, chorale, and Jen thinks fuck this is it; this is eternity. God, what has she done? She knows she’s gotta get back but all she can hear is ole Janis harping away in her gritty Southern Comfort voice and then she’s really scared because she feels the flesh in her throat closing over, squeezing, closing, no air…

“Jen, whatcha doin’ out here?”

“Just getting some air,” Jen says, startled from the reverie. Her childhood bff, Janet, is standing in front of her, sporting a slight halo from the patio lights illuminating her already light bottle-blonde mane. As usual, her makeup is flawless; her shirt a crisp linen freshly laundered, and in her hand is her trademark giant goblet of Malbec. Concern rolls across her porcelain-doll features like a cloud.

Janet sits down beside Jen on the swing. They rock away for a moment, like when they were kids in Janet’s back yard, listening to her parents fight. Jen looks through the patio door, can see the girls kneeling around Rosemary’s squat ceramic table. Alby is reading the Tarot for someone.

“Your friends are neat people,” Janet says.

“Yeah, they’re great.” Jen smiles a little, watching through the glass as Lou leaps to her feet, imitating someone, telling some kind of story.

“What’s wrong, Jen.  I mean, tonight.  You don’t seem quite with it,” Janet says lightly. 

“Where do I start?” Jen laughs mirthlessly.

“Is it Jace? I mean, don’t be mad, but Rosemary told me about that Pete guy. She just needed someone to talk to about it, she feels really weird. I know you didn’t want anyone to know.”  Janet takes a long pull of her wine and looks away, as if she’s giving Jen space to think about her answer.

“Ah, shit, Janet. I don’t care about that. It was just a mistake. It’s done. I was going to tell you, but you and Mark are so close to Jace, I just didn’t want to burden you with it, you know?”  Jen says, looking down at her feet as they trail through the dark dewy grass.

“I’d never tell Mark, he’d go wild. Don’t worry. We’ve been together too long now to share secrets,” Janet laughs, sounding a bit resigned.

“I know. Hey, I guess Saint and Gary split, eh?” Jen says.

“How’d you know about that?” Janet raises her eyebrows.

“I ran into Gary tonight, literally,” Jen says, and then recounts her ordeal with the moving truck.

“Wow. Saint called me the other day and told me. Just like, yeah, I don’t love him anymore, he’s history. I thought it was all talk. I guess I was wrong,” Janet says. “Then again, you never know what’s really up with her, or how much she’s holding back. We were never really that close, kind of opposite ends of the gang anyway. It just kind of petered out over the years, I guess. I just don’t have time to keep up.”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Jen says, aware that her own strife with Saint makes it weird for Janet, who still sees Saint regularly.

“Hell, I always try not to talk about either of you around each other, I mean, it’s between you two. But I admit I’m getting sick of it. In a way I didn’t want to know what went on. But lately, I’ve been wondering. It’s almost long enough ago. I wish I had of been around back then, I missed it all. So wrapped up in my little lala land o’ love and whatnot,” Janet says.

Jen finds it funny to hear Janet say this. Janet is such a sharp woman, trapped—often happily—in the kind of Rockwell stay-at-home-mom life even their own mothers didn’t enjoy.  Nobody would have guessed it back when they were teenagers, raising hell. But then again, nobody would have guessed Jen’s life either.

“I guess that whole era where Saint and I imploded, where I landed in the hospital, is a subject we all avoid, isn’t it?” Jen says, eager to get some things off her chest.

“Sweetie, I can see why you don’t like to talk about it,” Janet says, and puts her free hand over Jen’s. Jen feels the tears welling up. Nothing gets her started like pity and kindness.

“Truth is, I just roared right out of it, back in the saddle and all that. I didn’t really stop to work it all out. I thought I had, I used to think about it a lot. But I don’t think very well on my own, I need to say it out loud to really figure it out…kind of laziness,” Jen says in a rush.

“But everything’s been so good for you since those days. I love Mark, but I’d kill for the years you’ve had out there before settling down with Jace,” Janet says.

“Yeah, I had a double helping of adventure. It ruins you a little for the quiet life. But I had a good time, and managed to keep things under control more or less. With a little help from my friends,” Jen nods toward the patio door. “But they have a different perspective than you do, because they weren’t there back then. They don’t know Saint, don’t want to. I think they think it’s all her fault, I’ve probably led them to that.”  

“I can see why a person would think that.”

“In fairness, I wasn’t exactly stable,” Jen says.

“Well, you were both nuts, and we all knew it. We just never thought you’d try to destroy each other,” Janet says.

In the moonlight, Jen can still see Janet’s jaw tighten. She is beginning to regret bringing it up, but can’t seem to help herself.

“Yeah, well, I wish I were done with it,” Jen sighs.

“So then be done with it woman! You have a family now, great friends, things are coming together for you and Jace. Sure, you fell off the fidelity wagon for a few months, but you can make things work. I know you can. Why is this all coming up now? It was so long ago. Just forget about it,” Janet says.

“Maybe I’m bored,” Jen admits. Janet understands boredom very well. Janet finds most folks boring.

Janet laughs, but there’s an exasperated edge.

“Seriously,” Jen tries again. “I don’t know. I just have a weird feeling. Like screen memories.”

“Screen memories? What do you mean?” Janet says, her face clouding over again.

“Trauma. You remember something to a point, and then your subconscious takes over and changes part of it, the bad part. So you go along thinking you knew what happened, then one day the real memory bubbles up and hits you between the eyes,” Jen says. Part of her knows that Janet already knows what it means; the truth is, she suspects Janet doesn’t hold with the theory.

“You mean, like people who remember they were molested thirty years ago?” Janet says.

“Exactly. Only with me, I have a screen version of a few years of my life, I think,” Jen says.

“Don’t be silly,” Janet says.

“I think I just thought up something I could accept, some rationale, and then wandered blissfully into the future,” Jen says, feeling a new surge of panic form. This is feeling too real to her, as if she’s about to stumble upon something that she probably shouldn’t see.

“Reality check, Jen. I wasn’t around but I have an idea. I don’t think you’ve forgotten part of your life. There’s nothing unhealthy about not dwelling on it all the time,” Janet says. Her tone is increasingly impatient, Jen notices.

“Unless you need to,” Jen says, nursing her new conviction protectively.

“Why bother? Why do you need to?”  Janet asks.

“I don’t know. Just a gut feeling. Maybe it’s having Chris. How can I help him grow into the world if I don’t have a clue about who I was or where I’ve been?” Jen says.

“But you DO know, you’re one of the most introspective people I know!” Janet says.

“Sure, when it suits. Know what? You know what came to me when I was sitting here rocking? My death.”

“Jen, what death?”

“That night. In the hotel. My fucking death.”

“Helloooo—Memo to Jen: you don’t look like a dead person.”

“I was.”

“So how’d you manage to call for help?”

“Willpower.”

“That’s insane.”

“You know my doctor told Saint and Gary I was pregnant?” Jen says, refusing to quit the topic.

“What?”  Janet seems genuinely surprised. She begins biting her lip, as if there’s more to say, but she remains quiet.

“They did. I thought I remembered the doctor asking why I hadn’t talked to him, that he could have ‘taken care’ of it, but the memory was really vague. But now I know for sure, Gary told me.”

“God.”  Janet rocks quietly.

“Once I remembered that, know what else came?”

“What?”  Janet asks, crossing her arms as if to keep out the cold.

“What they said, when I woke up in the hospital. I couldn’t move the left side of my body. They said they didn’t think I’d be able to use it again, that I’d really done myself in.”

“Who said that?”

“The nurse. She hated me. I could tell. There was a guy dying beside me and she wouldn’t close the curtain.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s been seven years since all that, Janet, and only now am I remembering things.”

“How do you know it’s real?”

“I just know. I can recall it clearly now. Like the fog has lifted.”

The crickets are panting away; Jen can picture them rubbing their little wings together, hiding in the lavender shrubs, under the fuzzy lambs ears. She wishes she had a garden like Rosemary. Children, gardens, she says it’s the same thing, if you don’t have one, then the other. A strange idea. The air is heavy with all the herbs, the moonlight juts off the granite circles around the beds and the little path she laid by hand. It looks like a long magic field. The patio door slides open, and the girls wander out, sloshing and giggling, beaming and backlit by the yellow glow from the light inside. Alby swishes her shiny black hair over her shoulder and pulls it around to one side.

“What are you ladies doing, communing with the wood sprites?” Alby teases.

“Just taking it all in,” Jen says, realizing this is her Jace cop-out line, and feeling a little funny saying it to a friend.

“Alby’s going to make a smudge!” Lou slurs, raising her glass to the sky. “A special smudge for Rosemary.”

Rosemary looks at her shoes and fidgets with the little basket she has in her hand.

“Oh no. Not a love smudge,” Jen says, grinning. 

“Just a little one,” says Rosemary, miming an inch between her fingers.

“Yeah!” says Lou, standing behind Rosemary, “A little one!” She flings her arms open wide, spilling her wine on the ground. Slowly, she looks down and says, “Oooops.”

Rosemary leads the way down the path, consulting with Alby about which herbs to pick. Elaine hangs back behind them, looking a little skeptical, arms crossed. She isn’t into this Wiccan thing, though she’d be the first to be offended if she were left out of the festivities. Lou is twirling in circles on the patio, losing the last of her wine on the way. She’s going to start singing any moment, Jen suspects. Lou’s fun until her second bottle of wine, then she never shuts up. Which would be fine if she could sing. But her little girl voice stays with her, smashing sharps and flats all over the place. Janet and Jen look at each other and grin. Jen wipes drops of Lou’s wine off her face when Lou kicks into Jesus Christ Superstar. Silently, Jen and Janet rise and steal away to join the smudge selection party.

“Jen?” says Janet as they approach the back of the garden.

“Yeah?” 

“What’s a smudge?”

The way she says it is funny, and Jen giggles. Then she can’t stop. It’s suddenly a funny word.

“Gee, hon. let’s see, what’d we do,” Janet whispers, mocking an explanation to her husband. “Well, we went smudge picking. Just went right out to that garden and pulled up all those little smudge things growing in their smudgy little clumps … it was a riot, hon … oh, just a few glasses of wine, not much really, what, you’ve never seen a smudge before? My god, where have you been man? I can’t believe you’ve never seen a smudge before. There’s love smudges and happy smudges and cuddly smudges …”

Jen tries to suppress her giggles as they get closer. “Really, it’s just a bunch of herbs that you set on fire, Janet.”

“I see. What you do, hon, is you go out to the garden and you set it on fire … “

Alby hears them and starts giggling. “No, no, silly, you pick them and mix them with things and cast a spell and then you burn it!”

“Oh, silly me,” says Janet. Janet can say things like this without anyone taking offence. There’s no edge, just fun to it.

“How do they burn when they’re fresh-picked 1ike that?” asks Elaine.

“You have to microwave them first,” says Alby.

Janet bursts out laughing. “Recipes for-modern-day witches. Place herbs in microwave and set on high for- two minutes!”

We all laugh. Then Elaine says, “Really, you don’t think there’s anything to it, do you?”  We’re not sure who she’s asking, but Alby answers. 

“Not if you don’t think there is.”

“So it’s like a placebo effect,” says Elaine.

“No. It smells better,” says Rosemary. We laugh again, and Elaine drops the subject. Jen, however, picks it back up. Elaine’s so right-wing sometimes.

“Elaine, why would it work any less than anything else? It’s all mind over matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, in the old days, there weren’t any doctors. Women looked after sick people with herbs, tinctures, essential oils. Everything modern comes from something natural, to a point, and it turns out there’s some science to it,” Jen says.

“Then why were people dropping dead by forty?” Elaine wants to know.

“How do we know they all dropped dead by forty? In the bible they talk about men who lived hundreds of years,” Jen says.

“Yeah, Jen, the bible. What’s wrong with this picture?” Elaine fires back.

“Look at that yellow flower over there, the glowing one, know what that is?” Alby whispers.

Everyone is quiet for a minute, and stares at the glowing ring of flowers. It’s beautiful. It looks like they’re trying to reach their tiny arms up to the moon and dance. The crickets and humming tree frogs suddenly seem louder.

“Looks like flowers to me,” says Elaine, breaking the spell.

“It’s a ring of evening primroses,” says Rosemary, lifting an amazing flower. “Biennial, it only opens at night early in the season.”

“You’re kidding. That’s bizarre,” says Elaine.

“It is bizarre,” says Alby, “You won’t believe what scientists have found in its seeds!”

“What,” says Elaine, in a tone that suggests her bullshit detector is on high alert.

“Gamma-linoleic acid!” says Alby, clearly excited. “It treats all kinds of stuff, like arthritis, breast tumors. hyperactivity, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, and infertility. Not to mention PMS. And now they think it lowers cholesterol and blood pressure too. All in that little seed,” says Alby.

“And nobody grows it like Rosemary,” Jen adds. It’s true, she has a whole staggered bed of it, so each year there’s a glowing ring around her lavender bushes.

“That’s amazing if it’s true. I guess it makes sense,” Elaine muses.

“Sure it does,” Jen says. “What’s weird when you think about it is that hundreds of years ago, women would go out to the garden and eat the seed for ‘women problems’. It took our brilliant medical society centuries to figure out what our great-great-great-grandmothers knew all along.”

“Well … maybe there’s something to old wives’ tales. But Alby’s talking about a love potion here,” Elaine points out.

“Not a potion, a smudge. It relaxes you,” says Rosemary.

“If you think it does,” says Elaine.

“Whatever,” says Alby, who doesn’t want to talk about it. Her and Elaine don’t always click so well. Tonight, Elaine isn’t clicking with anyone, Jen notices. Maybe because it’s Alby’s night. Maybe because Alby’s pregnant. That’s likely it, because Elaine can’t have kids. She was weird when Jen was pregnant too, she hardly saw her at all. She seems to keep getting worse and worse, more and more uptight the more money her husband makes. And he’s on the fast track lately. Her mother’s like that. Maybe we really do become our mothers, Jen thinks.

At any rate, the mood is kind of spoiled, and the group starts wandering back along the path when they see Lou running towards them. She looks gangly, out of control. She reaches them and grabs her chest, breathing hard. 

“Rosemary! Phone, emergency…” is all Lou manages to get out before she starts gagging. She’s a little high-strung, and has had far too much to drink.

“Fuck.” Rosemary says, and marches toward the house. She is angry. “Fuck.”

Jen knows why. Jen knows who it must be, because Rosemary always knows when bad things are going to happen. She’s always dead on the money.

The yellow industrial paint is lifted away from the concrete walls in spots, and the fluorescent lights make Jen’s eyes glaze over. Rosemary is hunched over, head in hands, staring at her shoes, quiet now. Alby is sitting on the other side of her, and via some unspoken sisterhood law, they take turns rubbing her back, periodically exchanging glances that telegraph the equivalent of “Holy shit!” Janet is over in the corner talking on her cell phone, telling Mark in very hushed tones that she’s staying in town tonight, issuing what must seem to him to be cryptic explanations. The hard edges of what’s happened somehow cannot be vocalized in this dome of petrified comforting.  Time stretches and bubbles while they wait for the morgue staff to clean up Rosemary’s little chef.

The awfulness of the night, the event, has filled Jen’s mind and is somehow leaking beyond the outer edges of her comprehension, triggering a numb, other-worldly daze where she feels both useless and guilty. Guilty for all the jokes about the little chef. Guilty for blowing off Rosemary’s concern, voiced earlier in the evening.

Distraught from Rosemary’s latest rebuff, the foxy-faced kid drove his car through the plate glass window of Pete’s house in a suicide mission as deliberate as it was dramatic. His car was a 1989 Mustang convertible he’d rebuilt and hand-painted for rallying. There were no air bags, nor did the seat weld hold in the high impact delivered by 350 horsepower unleashed at the house that contained his antagonist. He left Rosemary a last love letter in his jacket pocket. And if the crash hadn’t killed him – which it did – the overdose of Adderall would have surely arrested his heart. His desire to die was much more methodical than Jen’s own desire to live, she thought.

The sliding doors open with a whoosh and Jen’s morbid thoughts are interrupted. She turns at the sound of footsteps in the hall. It’s Pete and Paul. Pete has his arm in a sling, and Paul has a bandage over the right side of his face. At first, no one says a word. Pete leans against the coffee machine, and Paul walks over to Rosemary. Only after he’s stood there a moment does she look up, and slowly decides to rise. Paul bends down to meet her halfway and hugs her.

“It’s not your fault, Rosemary. I don’t hold this against you,” he says, cradling her head against him.

She doesn’t say a word, though tears are easing down her face.

“Why are you doing this? You’re not his next of kin,” Paul continues, a little too sharply, still in an exaggerated whisper, though everyone can’t help but to hear.

“They’re in Florida. He wanted me to see. He said so in the note they found written on the front of an envelope in his pocket. Said his teacher, alias me, would identify him,” Rosemary says, pulling back and wiping her face on her sleeve.

Jen notes the slight alteration about the contents of the envelope. Yes, it instructed them to notify Rosemary. What was inside was far more damming. Jen gets up and moves across the room to get the box of Kleenex in deference to Rosemary and Paul’s quiet exchange.

Paul tilts Rosemary’s head upward so he can look her firmly in the eye, holding her face as if she’ll look away. “You don’t have to do it! You heard them! The cops said you didn’t have to; they’re going to find his parents in Florida. What a fucking bastard,” Paul says, breaking the eye contact, voice rising, body tensing and pulling back from the embrace.

“Never mind, Paul. He wasn’t a bastard. And I’m going to do it so his mother doesn’t have to. It’s going to be bad enough for her; she’s had a hard time lately. Besides, it’ll be hours before they get home,” Rosemary says in a low, controlled voice.

“Guy drives smack through my front window to hurt you, and me, and he’s not a bastard? And you’re sitting here worried about his mom? How do you even know his mom?” Paul takes another step back from Rosemary, and crosses his arms.

“She calls me for advice about him. I met her at parent-teachers. And I do not plan to discuss this further,” Rosemary says and sits back down beside Alby.

Pete clearly doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he fidgets with the button on the coffee machine in the corner.

“Do you want a coffee?” he asks no one in particular. Paul walks away and joins Pete. He’s mad as hell, and Jen can’t blame the guy. What a night.

“Why don’t you guys go home. There’s no point in waiting here, it’s probably still going to be a while. We just thought it’d be easier than coming back in the morning,” Jen says to them.

Pete gives a bitter laugh. “Always trying to get rid of us, eh Jen?”

“Look, I just don’t see the point,” she glares at him.

Rosemary stands up suddenly, and yells, “Would you just fucking leave? I don’t want you here! It’s bad enough. For the love of God, just GO.”

Paul looks over at her like he wants to yell back, but he just swallows, turns and walks away, giving the coffee machine a shove for good measure. Pete shoots Jen a dirty look over his shoulder and follows Paul down the sterile hall.

Jen watches them recede and feels a pang of pity. From what she could gather at the scene amidst the flashing lights and blood and smoking wreck, Peter and Paul had been sitting on the couch watching a movie when they heard the tires squealing, heard the front maple tree snap. Then the car crashed right through the picture window, sending the couch and the guys flying. Paul had had no idea who it was when he called Rosemary, but when Alby pulled up to the scene with Jen and Rosemary in the car, Rosemary knew immediately it was the little chef in the body bag on the stretcher, and started swearing hysterically. It was his car, though all you could see was Coexist bumper sticker on the tailgate sticking out of the house. Eventually, she had calmed down enough to explain to police how she knew the kid. And that was how Paul heard about it. So his slow retreat down the long hall feels somehow like the heavy, sad drift of someone without a friend in the world, a shuffle away from a place where he has no place. The piece de resistance in an evening fraught with danger and humiliation.

Rosemary isn’t watching him, and interrupts Jen’s reverie.

“Jen, you better call Jace. It’s three a.m. He’ll be worried sick about you,” she says.

“Yeah, maybe I’d better.” Jen says, getting up to find a private corner. Jen doesn’t feel right talking on the phone right beside Rosemary. Janet is kind of pacing around and wanders over to Jen in the corner.

“Is Mark cool with you staying?” Jen asks her.

“Yeah, he’s a little freaked out. I woke him up, so it took a while to explain. Are you going to call Jace?” Janet says, biting her lip in perhaps prescient dread.

“Yeah, I guess I’d better. I don’t want him to worry.”

“Want a coffee? I’m going to get one.”

“Sure. I’ll be over in a sec,” Jen says. She dials the home number, assuming Jace’s cell will be powered down. She’s a little nervous since they left things on bad terms. She’s not sure he’ll believe her. It sounds pretty far-fetched.

Four rings, he usually wakes up easier than this. Five.

“Hello?” A woman answers. A sleepy woman.

“Jace?” Jen say automatically, then realizes how stupid it sounds.

“Mrs. Jones?”

With a mixture of relief and confusion, Jen recognizes the voice: it’s their babysitter, Sherry.

“Sherry, what are you doing there?”

“Mr. Cunningham isn’t home yet. He said he figured you’d be home fairly early.”

“God, I’m sorry, this terrible thing happened. This guy who likes my friend drove through her boyfriend’s front window and killed himself …we’re at the morgue now because she’s got to identify him. . .”

“Oh my God, you’re kidding…”

“No, really. I want to stay with her, it’s going to be a late night, but where the hell’s Jace?”

“He said he had a meeting and that he was going out after.”

“Fuck. Oh, I’m sorry. I mean, I really can’t come home. You’re done school right?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about me, I’ll just call mom and tell her I’m staying over, that way Jace won’t have to drive me home when he gets here. I’ll leave Mr. Cunningham a note for you and go to sleep in the spare room, okay Mrs. Jones?”

“That’d be great. Look, I really appreciate this. Tell Jace I’ll be home for breakfast, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

Jen can’t believe he did this, tonight of all nights. He never stays out this late, at least, not anymore. She’s starting to feel really shaky. Janet comes over with the coffee.

“What’s going on, Jen?”

“I guess Jace decided to go out and get laid tonight or something,” Jen says, shaking her head.

“Oh come on, Jen. He’s probably out crying in his beer at his buddy’s because you hurt his feelings.”

“He doesn’t have any buddies.”

“Come off it, Jen. I’ll bet you any money he’s over at that Kevin guy’s house woman-bashing. Jace is the last person on the planet you have to worry about screwing around on you,” Janet says, putting her arm around Jen.

“Yeah, you’re right. He could be at Kevin’s. I never thought of that.”

Rosemary comes up to where they’re standing. Her face has a pasty look to it, and her eyes are bloodshot but black and harsh. She seems pretty controlled, maybe because the anger is hitting her.

“Look, ladies. I appreciate you being here, but I’ll understand if you want to go home. You have little families to look after…”

“Rosemary, my little family is fine. Jace is out and the babysitter is staying. I’d rather stick around than rage around the house all night about where he is,” Jen says. It’s the truth. Jen knows if she goes home she’ll feel like throwing things.

“I’d like to stay too, if you don’t mind.” Janet says. “I never get out.”

Rosemary laughs.

“Aren’t you glad?” she says to Janet.

“Yes. Hey. I didn’t mean to be a smartass…”

“It’s okay,” Rosemary says, leaning closer to whisper, “It’s better than the solemn-stoic-righteous-approach.” She looks wistfully down the now-empty hallway and excuses herself to head to the washroom.

Alby is still sitting on the opposite side of the room, in a lotus position now. Jen is certain she’s putting a lot of white light around Rosemary. Jen isn’t sure if they should go near her or not.

“She glows, doesn’t she,” Janet says, reading Jen’s mind.

“Yeah, but she always glows when she concentrates. I don’t think it’s just being pregnant,” Jen says.

“You glowed when you were pregnant.”

“Everyone said that. I never had so many men hit on me in my life,” Jen says.

“I know. Can you believe it? Like, hello, see this bulge in my belly, guys? I just might be otherwise committed.” Janet says.

“Yeah, but maybe that’s the attraction.”

Janet laughs. “I’m sure Saint won’t have any trouble getting dates.”

“Dates? What do you mean, Janet?”

Janet bites her lip and rolls her eyes. “Of course you don’t know, because he doesn’t know!  She’s pregnant. Nine weeks. That’s part of the reason she decided to kick him out.”

“Why would she do that?” Jen’s stunned, but then she remembers it’s Saint they’re talking about here.

“Hey, you know her better than I. You put it together. It makes no sense to me.”

“It’s insane,” Jen says, but there she goes, lying again, the way she would to people who don’t know Saint. Of course Saint wouldn’t want to share her pregnancy with a man she essentially didn’t respect. That’s all she wanted from him anyway: babies. She said it once, though Jen had assumed that the failure to produce offspring for seven years suggested perhaps they weren’t able to. The fact that Saint just carried on with it until she finally became pregnant just blows Jen away. Poor Gary. She suspects Saint will never tell him if she can avoid it.

Janet and Jen walk over to the bench. Jen sits down and closes her eyes. Saint is pregnant, is all she can think. Her husband is out god-knows-where doing god-knows-what, and all she can picture is Saint finding out she’s pregnant. The shift from “I” to the primordial “We.” These moments are what the bonds of the sisterhood are made of. The stories about delivery, giving hand-me-downs and parenting-related marital advice, commiserating. Welcome to the brood, the fresh, mystifying hell unleashed on the unsuspecting vessels, the bloated bellies, sore backs and a civil war raging in their bowels.

A tired man in a lab coat calls Rosemary in just as she’s coming back to the waiting room. Jen stands up and grabs onto her arm.

‘I want to come too,” Jen says. Rosemary just looks at Jen, a little puzzled, still stern.

“Why, Jen?”

“I don’t know. Please.” is all she can say.

Rosemary looks down, and nods. Jen follows her into the steel womb, full of all those late abortions. Jen feels a sick wave of prickly heat rippling through her. What she suspects a hot flash is like. The man fidgets with the drawer handle and slides out the long tray. Like a file cabinet. The idea is humbling. We’re filed when we’re done. But Jen knows this. It’s in the movies all the time. Somehow it’s different when you’re standing in the middle of death.

He pulls back the sheet and Jen’s ready, holding on hard to Rosemary. Numb enough. Jen stares right at him, cut, bruised and battered but that same long-haired kid with the foxy face and freckles who always came up to Rosemary in public places with love in his glinting hazel eyes.  Rosemary nods, and takes a clipboard from the man to sign something. She pulls her arm away from Jen’s hand, which is still clutching her like a lifeline. Jen’s not sure who is supporting who. Feeling foolish, she lets go.

Somebody’s little boy. A pain shudders through her womb, some kind of sympathy pang for the little chef’s mom. God, it’s awful, awful to have happened. How could he have been so stupid, impulsive? In a way, she can see it. That black rage, that what the fuck and put the pedal to the floor. The ringing of shattered glass, crunching bones. She’s felt it; she’s done it, in a way. Did he even brake? Or just aim, hard, decisive about death. Life or the end thereof on his terms, and his terms only. But still, somebody’s little boy, once standing for a first time in a crib. And this is what Jen nearly did to her own mom seven years ago.

Rosemary is pulling Jen out of the room.  Jen realizes she’s crying, a little too loud maybe. Fuck. She tries to pull it all back in, before she gets Rosemary started. Maybe she’s too mad. Through the blur Jen sees tears have started down her cheeks, but silent ones. Alby and Janet meet them in the hall and usher them out the door into the street. Nobody protests. Alby gets the car and everybody piles in, eager to put the morgue far from view.

“Want to go out to the beach and sit a while?” Jen asks.

Everyone waits to see what Rosemary says, but she doesn’t say anything at all, so Alby just keeps going along the Lake. Finally, she pulls into a quiet little cul de sac that leads to what was once Saint and Jen’s favorite beach. Single file, they walk down the sandy path to the shore. The sky is starting to get lighter, more an indigo than the dark velvet of night. The moon is full and sends silver shimmers across the water. The waves thrash the shore like a heartbeat inside a huge, universal womb. The warm wind carries a slightly fishy smell, the kind that’s nice, like the sweat of someone you love. Jen digs her toes into the cool sand, and starts tracing circles through the grains with her fingers.

“There’s nothing you could have done, Rosemary,” Jen says. Someone’s got to say something. Or maybe that’s Jen’s problem, she thinks. Not knowing when to be still.

“Is that what you really think, Jen? Miss I’ll-own-it, cause-and-effect-Jones? You’re pretty good at double standards, aren’t you?” Rosemary spits.

“What do you mean?” Jen’s stunned, hurt, has that grade-school feeling of impending social doom.

“Well, you’re always forgiving everyone their little human frailties, but you’re not so generous with yourself. Which boils down to the fact that you don’t think we’re capable or worthy of your true standards. Air’s too thin up there for us.”

‘I can’t believe you’re saying this …”

‘I’m sorry. I’m angry, and maybe I’m taking it out on you. I just can’t stand this bullshit right now. You know fucking well it is my fault. I led the kid on. I was too vain, too flattered to shut it down. I perpetuated it, and now a sweet little guy who was the victim of temporary hormonal insanity is dead, Jen…”

”But you can’t…”

“Shut up. I’m not finished. If you dare tell me that I can’t blame myself, that it won’t bring him back and all that other wizened woman self-help shit, I’ll fucking strangle you.” Rosemary leaps to her feet and brushes the sand off her gauzy skirt.

“Now if you ladies will excuse me, I have to go think about my life a little. Thanks for everything, really.”

“Wait, Rosemary…” Jen gets up to follow her, but she won’t stop, so Jen starts to run. She catches her and Rosemary tries to push her away, but she just hugs her and won’t let go. Rosemary breaks and cries hard, and for what seems like a long time. Jen doesn’t dare say a word. Jen feels a little awkward, and helpless. Finally, Rosemary pulls back a little.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I get contrary about pity, I guess.”

“I can relate. You want to go back and watch the sunrise?”

“Okay.” A hesitant, cynical chuckle. They walk back down the trail to Alby and Janet. They sit and talk about everything and nothing, comfort words drop like starchy foods while the sun rolls over to their side of the earth.

Dear Jen,

I haven’t a damned clue when you’re coming back, if ever, but I hope to see you soon. I miss being understood. Hell, it’s more than that. I miss everything, and feel incredibly alone right now.

I went to our beach the other night all by myself. Jen, I haven’t been that exhilarated in a long time; so alone, so beautiful, so inhibited, so turned on, so fucked up.

That half-hour was a little slice of how I used to feel, I guess, on our wild nights out where anything was possible. Maybe it’s because I’m not in college. I keep thinking about you all, your new lives, and here I sit in my naked apartment with bills and shifts to work and nothing else to sustain me. No one else. No food for the soul.

You know those rocks over by the sandbar? It was kind of hard to swim because there were these huge, wild waves. So I dug my legs into the stones as far as I could and laid up against the slab of stone and let the waves crash against me. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the pounding, pulling, even when the waves would knock me against the stone. The suction of the force was pulling my legs out of the sand and pebbles. I felt overcome.

Overcome. Jen, I guess there’s no point trying to describe the sensation. What are words? I felt like a virgin sacrifice. It was sensual, but a hundred other things too. I didn’t want to leave, wanted to write to you, but I was soaking wet and still too detached to pick up a pen. So I went to find some American cigarettes, then talked myself into going to the movies instead. But I wish I would have stayed at the beach. I need that place. I don’t know if I’ll feel the same when I’m with somebody. There’s something in me that’s too private. Something that may cost me happiness.

Sometimes I need to be alone, detached, and yes, fucked up so much I ache. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to hear. I just want to feel, absorb the carefully hidden perceptions of myself. What happens when you commit yourself for good? Do you lose this? It’s like a poem I wrote that didn’t come off right. I was waiting for the horizon to let me go, and Jen, I think that’s one of my greatest fears. I’ll never be satisfied. I’ll always be searching for something more. This recognition alone keeps me from committing. Keeps me from love. So where does that leave me? Some selfish bitch left alone to her pain and her incapabilities? Some life. So where do I get off fucking up your relationships with my distorted images, right? What do I know about love?

Maybe I got a little carried away but I can’t help but feel that part of you is exactly like this. Like I am. That you have the fear. Maybe it’s present in anyone free-thinking, abstract and intelligent. Or maybe it’s just my imagination again, coloring everyone’s world for them. There’s always that, isn’t there?

I’m sorry about Roly. Really, I am. I’m sorry I behaved badly: I know you’d say otherwise, but I know in my heart I did. I didn’t want to be the only one who felt this way, and I’d lost you to something I perceived to be a thinly veiled game. But I see you now, shelled up in Toronto, cutting everything and everyone off, and I have to wonder why. I mean, that’s not your thing, Jen. Solitude. Be careful. Men love a woman in trouble.

I’m tired. Write me soon, please.

• Anne.

Jen had never seen this letter before. Not once. She’s sure she’d remember. Positive. It was waiting for her with the bills when she came home. There’s no postmark on the letter. It has to be Gary who put it in the mailbox. She’d never, not now. But it was only yesterday Jen saw him. It seems like a year ago. It doesn’t sit right, but she’s been up all night and feels burnt out and in a glaze. She doesn’t have the energy to put it all together right now.

There’s an early summer morning feel about the house… the light from the river. Everything looks alien to Jen. The pine cottage couch with its marine tweed seat-covers, the little clay pots on the bare wooden shelves, the tile table she worked so hard on, glazing each block, so it’d look like a big happy sun in a bed of bronze and blue.

This does not look like a room built for comfort. Or children. Chris’s toys are hiding in a tall rattan basket, beside the peacock chair. The plants are wilting. Jen’s Turkish wall-hanging looks, well, it looks like it belongs in a single-woman’s eclectic flat. Not a family home.

Jen folds the letter and puts it in her purse. She hears footsteps upstairs, and cannot decide whether to go up and get Chris, or wait for Jace to come down. She decides she’ll make coffee first. She steals into the kitchen, another alien room. Colored tins and pans, a strange little bookcase, and hand-painted wood table with two press back chairs, a plastic highchair. The highchair is completely out of place. Its vinyl hearts clash with the feel of the room. What has she been doing here? Why doesn’t it all fit in?

She makes coffee in the old metal pot. It’s not that they can’t afford a modern one, she just likes the metal pots they used when they first invented automatic coffee. Garage sale treasures. She feels very nervous, her stomach is coiled tight. She’s not sure whether she’s dreading a fight or deadly silence, but she feels awful. She wants to hold Chris, to play with him. She missed him, and feels sad about walking out yesterday. But she doesn’t want to have to face Jace before she gets him. If Chris is with her, it won’t be so bad. So she decides to wait until Jace brings him down.

She goes to the porch to enjoy her coffee, to think about this letter, this new glimpse of Saint. There’s a light breeze on the water today. She opens one of the windows. It sticks, so she has to pull hard on the lever. Everything smells fresh. Maybe it will all be okay. She sits down at her desk and sees it’s only 7:00 a.m. It feels much later. She’s surprised that Jace is up this early if he was out so late. He doesn’t work ti1 9, and it only takes him a few minutes to get ready.  She sees a tanker ship coming into view from the bay. She watches it growing larger, until it passes on the other side of the island and disappears from view.

She and Janet used to love going to the island when they were teenagers. A ferry goes over twice a day, and the ferry-driver used to get them high. Then they’d sit a1l day by the muddy channels and talk. It’s hard to put today’s Janet together with the scruffy, mischievous hippy of Jen’s childhood. It’s strange how they still find themselves on the same wavelength now. It’s not something she usually thinks about a lot. She just takes it for granted. Jen often wonders what Rosemary was like when she was younger. It’s strange, so hard to picture her less than fully-formed. Smart, shy, maybe a little bit awkward back then. Jen doesn’t know how she’ll manage all this now. The guilt. She’s going to be hard on herself, Jen suspects. Jen feels a little helpless, a little cut out. She realizes that Rosemary shares everything except her own pain. But maybe this is why they’ve been friends, so close, for so long now. Because Rosemary has that reserve, Jen doesn’t get sick of a steady barrage of emotions, like she does with Lou. She’s not sure how this works. Everything feels different today. Maybe it was what Rosemary said, even if she didn’t mean it. It hurts, but Jen has to ask herself if it’s true. Saint said it. Now Rosemary. Only those closest to Jen have to tools to hurt her. The map: strike here.

“Mrs. Jones?”

Jen turns and sees Sherry holding Chris in her arms. They startle her.

“Hey there. I almost forgot you were here. Was that you walking around upstairs?”

“Um, yeah.” Sherry looks a little sleepy, has that ‘vampire girl’ look about her with her dark hair and eyes and revived 60’s ornament. The friendship bracelets, silver rings, smudges of black eyeliner and straight, greasy bob.

“Come here sweetie,” Jen says to Chris, who’s reaching out for her. She kisses him and holds him tight for a minute, but he squirms. Now that he’s sure she’s really there, he wants down to play.

“Jace still sleeping?”

“I guess. I didn’t hear him come in,” Sherry says with a yawn.

“The car’s out front, so he must be home.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Anyway, sorry about last night. Let me make you some breakfast,” Jen offers.

“Naw, it’s okay. I think I’11 just go home and sleep some more. But thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Her arms are crossed against her chest. She’s not a morning person, Jen thinks.

“Okay. I’11 have to go upstairs to get your money, I don’t have any left on me.”

“Sure,” she says, and sits down on the wicker loveseat, where Chris is pulling himself up. She begins talking to him. This is why Jen likes her. As strange and hip as she looks, underneath she’s a good-hearted girl who loves kids. Jen goes upstairs quietly; she doesn’t want to wake Jace just yet. The door to their room creaks when she opens it. The bed is perfectly smooth. Stunned, Jen looks out the window. The car really is there. She feels a sense of panic.

She checks the bathroom, Chris’s room, the guest room, nothing. He’s not here. She tells herself maybe he went for a walk, maybe he’s in the garage. She runs downstairs and onto the back porch. Sherry gives her funny look, there must be something wild in her eyes. Fear.

“He’s not upstairs. He took the car last night, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Sherry looks puzzled.

“Okay, maybe he just went for a walk. I’ll have to go look while you stay with Chris. I’m sorry…”

“No problem Mrs. Jones.”

Jen slips on her bike boots and goes out to the garage. Empty. So she walks down by the river, crossing the neighbor’s yard toward the small wooded lot on the other side. She can see everything inside their house, right through to the front window and down the lane. She feels a little guilty, but can’t help noticing. She can see the corner of the TV, two small blond bodies in pajamas sitting on the floor, a woman holding her head looking down at what Jen suspects is a magazine or a tablet. Jen prays she doesn’t notice her cutting through the yard.

Jen’s almost at the woodlot when she sees car keys. She picks them up. They’re his. She cannot begin to understand what has happened. She feels horror closing in her throat as she enters the cool shade of the trees. A little further, she finds a shirt. His. Three trees later, a belt and a faded pair of Levis. Then she sees a sock in a fern bush. Another. She comes out in a clearing by a sandy part of the river bank. Jace is lying curled up on his side with his face inches from the water. He’s white, cold. There’s a bottle of Jack Daniels upside-down in the sand. His legs are muddy. His underwear are in the river, caught on a branch, fighting the current.

Jen can’t seem to breathe as she rushes over and tilts his face up out of the muck. He opens his eyes slowly; they seem cloudy, veiled. He closes them again. She steps over him to the water’s edge and crouches down to face him.

“Jace, wake up! What are you doing here, God you…”

“Fuck off,” he slurs. He doesn’t bother opening his eyes again.

“I need money for the sitter.”

“Fuck you,” he says.

“Jace! What’s going on here…”

“You tell me, Jen.” He’s clearly awake now, just won’t open his eyes. His words are clearer though.

“Didn’t you get my message? About Rosemary?”

He smiles and laughs to himself.

“Come on, Jace, Sherry’s back at the house. I’ve got to pay her.”

“Then go to the bank.”

He still won’t move a muscle, it’s a point of honor, Jen thinks. She stands up to relieve the strain and crosses her arms.

“You have to go to work.”

“Nope.”

“What am I supposed to tell them, you’re lying naked by the riverside and don’t feel like going in? Come on!” She pokes him a little with her boot. 

“Leave me alone, Jen.” 

“No.”

“Go away. You’re good at that. Just take off.”

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you’d better get it together fast. I’m going into town to get money for Sherry, then I’m taking Chris to Mom’s. When I get back here, you’d better be cleaned up and ready to talk,” Jen says.

“Or else?”

“Just do it.”

“Or else what Jen, will you leave me?” He opens his eyes to show me his bitterness.

“Fuck off!”

“No, you fuck off, you whore.”

“Don’t do this, Jace…”

“Don’t Jace me, just go, get away.”

“You’ll be sorry if I do.”

“Good riddance to bad trash,” he spits.

He’s a child, curled up, closing his eyes again to make the world go away. But Jen doesn’t feel any pity, none at all. She wants to kick him and scream and tear his hair out to make him move, the bastard. She stands there for a minute, and realizes she could kill. She’s shaking with rage. There’s no justice.

“Go on, what’s the matter, you little cunt. Afraid no one would look after all the shit for you if you left. Pay the bills. Be a parent?”

She lands the boot hard into his stomach, making her toes numb. He grabs her ankle with his left hand and pulls her down. Jen topples sidelong into the shallow water and her wrist burns but she crawls forward and jams her left fist under his jaw. He leaps on top of her and clutches her throat with one hand. She thrusts her knee up and he goes limp, rolls off but doesn’t let go of her throat. She knows she has to reason to get him to stop but the rage keeps surging even as she chokes. She feels the cool water lapping against her hair.

She grabs his hair and tries to grind his face into the wet sand to get him to let go but his neck is too strong so she pulls back instead and this throws him off a little. She uses this chance to push forward again, and presses with all her might. Her veins are exploding. He’s sobbing, muffled in the sand, but neither of them lets go. He doesn’t squeeze any tighter, though; she can still gasp air. She keeps her pressure firm. It seems like an eternity passes, but finally his hand relaxes and slides off her neck. She struggles to sit up and lift his head up out of the sand. His eyes open to saucers, like a rabbit caught in a headlight. She pulls her right arm back, and slaps him across the face with every ounce of force she can muster. He just lies there, facing the bush now, and slowly draws his knees up to his chest, staring, tears swimming around the clumps of sand stuck to his face. Jen sits breathing hard, looking at him, hoping he’ll meet her gaze. But he can’t, so she rises, and tries to brush the sand off her wet clothes.

She walks away into the brush, enjoying the whipping branches that slap against her goosepimpled flesh. She’s not numb anymore, and at least the pain feels alive.

She comes out into the sun of her neighbor’s back yard. The woman is clutching the collar of her robe, looking out the window at Jen. Jen marches forward, lost, craving the comfort of a hot shower. She swings open the door to the back porch, and Sherry looks up at her.

“Jace was asleep by the water. I tried to wake him up, so he tripped me and I fell in the river,” she says. She smiles. Her face might crack, but Sherry understands how she’s supposed to respond.

“Oh my god!” she laughs.

“I’m going to go for a quick shower, and then we’ll have to go to an ATM before I take you home.”

“It’s okay, you can pay me later.”

“No, I’d rather do it now. Just let me shower first.”

“Sure thing, Mrs. Jones.”

In the shower the burning spray makes Jen’s flesh pink and overtakes the pain throbbing in her wrist. She wants the steam, the tears, to dissolve the last two days, the images flashing in her head. She wants to be an empty vessel, so she can begin again and collect joy, beauty, all the things hidden from her for so long.

She wants to be innocent, and know it is hopeless.

When Jen pulls up, she sees her mom bent over a saw-horse she’s set up in the driveway. Her mom looks up and smiles, stretches her arms wide as Jen walks up the drive with Chris in her arms. The sun flashes off the waving saw in her right hand, Jen thinks she looks like a Magi waving her wand.

“What are you doing now?” Jen says.

“I’m building a gazebo! I got the kit down at Linty’s. Just wait ‘ti1 your Dad sees…he was going to buy one, the silly ass. You wouldn’t believe what they cost. Hey, big guy, kisses for Gramma? Come see me sweetie, God you’re a heavy little bugger…” She hands Jen the saw in an awkward exchange. She makes Jen a little nervous sometimes.

“Guess it’s a bad day for babysitting, eh?” Jen says while her mom turns with Chris in tow and head for the back yard.

“Naw, I bought this little bouncy walker thing at a garage sale yesterday. Chris can play in it while I finish up this section. It’ll be fine. Where’re you off to today?” she calls over her shoulder.

“Jace and I need some time alone,” Jen says, trying to make it sound lighter than it feels.

“He’s off today? Hey, what’s the matter, Jen?”

There’s something about her mom that starts her crying. She’s the one person Jen can’t fool. She doesn’t pry, but she sniffs everything out and before Jen knows it she’s blubbering away. All it takes is a look. The tears are coursing down her face, and she doesn’t know where to begin. She knows her mom likes to keep things simple, is uncomfortable beyond her salty physical world, awkward in Jen’s cerebral Pandora’s box.

“Come look in the garage,” her mom says.

Jen follows her.

“Chris, look what Gramma got you, oooh, this is going to be fun.” She pushes down on the empty jumper a couple of times; it wheezes and pops back up.

“And it has brakes, so you can make it stationary, Jen. Five bucks. Not bad, eh?”

Jen nods.

“Let’s go to the back yard and try it. Can you carry it, Jen?”

“Sure,” she chokes out. She knows Jen can’t talk, is letting her collect herself. Jen’s grateful.

Jen walks beside her, and notices her hair for the first time. She’s had it cut. It falls straight to her neck now ­– salt and pepper – she still refuses to dye it. But it’s a young cut, and frames her face nicely. Her face is ageless, a few lines, but nothing telling. Round and soft. They’ve been mistaken for sisters, because they have the same eyes. She’s wearing one of her oversized cotton shirts, plain but beautifully flowing, and Jen’s dad’s jeans. He hates it when she wears them, because he never has any clean jeans. But she says it makes her feel close to her hon.

Then he says “Aw, Alison, you’re always close to your hon.” Then they hug and kiss. They never get tired of the bit, it seems to Jen.

Jen sets the walker-jumper on the patio and her mom puts Chris into it. She faces her chair toward him and cranks the umbrella on the table to shade him. Jen sits down and tries to pull herself together.

“Want some ice tea?” she asks.

Jen nods. Her mom gets up to go fix it, and Jen lights a cigarette. She’s shaking, and the breeze is flickering the flame, burning her thumb. It’s so peaceful here. She regrets tipping her hand. She doesn’t want to talk and spoil everything around her. The little cement statues, the hammock wavering in the breeze, the roses, perennials, the tall elm trees…she loves it here, and hates it. It always seemed so boring to her before, but now she can see its comfort, and wants that comfort to hold her.

Her mom returns with iced tea and toys for Chris. She is showing him how to open a Velcro patch on a doll to reveal a mirror. She gasps and laughs as he lights up. The jumper wheezes. Chris has figured out how to make it bounce. In a minute, he moves it forward, leaping off his little legs like a frog.

“Mom, maybe we should put the brakes on. He might get it over to the edge of the patio and onto the lawn,” Jen says.

“If you want, but I’ll watch him to make sure. I don’t think it will topple anyway, it’s only an inch difference from the cement to the lawn.”

“Okay then,” Jen says. “I guess it’s good exercise for him.”

“That’s how you learned to walk.”

“Mmmm.”

“What do you think, do you like where I have the gazebo?” she asks.

Jen looks over between the two elm trees and see the octagonal floor that in her mom’s mind must seem like a gazebo already.

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, those elms are a dirty tree, there’d be crap on the roof all fall and winter.”

“So put it out in the open then.”

“But then it’s not sheltered from the rain.”

“The rain? You’re going to put a roof on it, aren’t you?”

“Of course, don’t be foolish.”

“So who cares about the rain?”

“It will weather more quickly,” she muses.

“Better than being hit by lightening under a tree,” Jen points out.

“Really no…” she says, but Jen can see this troubles her. She’s thinking about it.

Jen has this sudden, sad vision of her sitting alone at night in this weathered old gazebo with the rain pelting down and flashes of summer sheet lightning lighting her weathered face. Her hair is completely grey, and long, past her waist like she used to have it. In the picture, Jen knows her step dad is dead. She sees her mom all crumpled up with her garden gone to seed. Jen wants to cry and hold her like a child waking from a bad dream. She sees the shadow again, but as she moves closer to the face, it’s her own face, not her mom’s.

“What is it, Jen?”

“Just being morbid, mom.”

“What – tell me.”

“Where was Dad going to put it? When he was talking about buying one?” Jen says, hoping to change the subject without answering the question.

“Oh, you know him. He never thinks these things out. But what were you thinking about?”

“I guess we’re all going to die someday,” Jen admits, thinking to herself that the whole “menopausal-mental-fog” is really hit and miss with her mom. Usually, miss.

“Well of course, what would be the point otherwise?” Her mom says matter-of-factly.

“The point?”

“Who the hell would want to live forever, Jen? I just hope you have the sense to burn me when I’m done. Your dad doesn’t believe in it. You’ll have to fight him on it if I go first.”

“Sure, I promise.”

“Which reminds me, I moved some of my money into a new mutual fund, one with just your name and mine on it, in case anything happens. I wouldn’t want his kids to get at it.”

Jen’s step dad had been married before, and suffice it to say the blended family was like oil and water.

“Oh, God, how can I keep track, mom? You’re always shifting this and that. I mean, don’t worry. I don’t care about the money anyway.” Jen looked away, uncomfortable at the topic.

“It’s not the money. It’s just that I know they’ll try to get everything they can. God, they’re so far into him now, he’ll have nothing left of his own soon.”

“Can’t you say anything?”

“It’s his money. That’s the deal. We weren’t kids this time ‘round, you know.”

“Yeah, well, he’s pretty free with your money.”

“That doesn’t bother me. It’s just those two, they’re so spoiled. It’s not his fault; he’s got a big heart.”

“Well, he’s not doing them any good by it. My god, shoot me if I’m coming around for handouts in ten years. At their age they should be putting something back in.”

“You’re too proud, I know. But why should they have it so easy and you and Jace be struggling like you do to make ends meet. It’s not fair. They’ve all got good jobs.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not bad for us. The raise helped. I think we can get through a few more months before I have to get serious about finding a job again.”

“And if you go back to work, when are you going to start sculpting again?”

“When you go back to school and learn the violin,” Jen teases her.

“Hey, I might just do that. This retirement business is alright in the summer, but the winters are killers.”

“Dad’ll be off soon though when he retires, then it will be better.”

“Or maybe worse,” says her mom, raising her eyebrows. Jen sees her point and laughs.

For all their romance, she likes her time alone. Jen realizes they’ve never had much time aside from weekends together, working different shifts like they did.

“Anyway, I can’t sculpt with this guy around,” Jen says, pointing at Chris, who’s leaping around the patio gleefully, apparently oblivious to the fact that his household is in meltdown.

“I don’t know, Jen. You only go round once. You should try to do what you want.”

“Boy, you’ve really changed your tune over the years.”

“Age does that to you. Look at this house. Sure, it’s great. I never dreamed I’d have all this. But look what I had to do for it – all those missed years.”

“What’d you miss?” Jen asks. This is new. She’s a little surprised.

“You, for one. Me, for another. They just slipped by on me.”

“I came here to get cheered up, mom,” Jen says truthfully.

She chuckles. “If you want milk, go to a cow.”

“Mom, come off it. This isn’t like you.”

“I know. I just have so much time on my hands lately. That’s never good for the soul. Mind you, I spent my whole life looking forward to this.”

“Maybe that’s my problem too.”

“Too much time? Could be. I mean, you’ve never really had a break like this. Even when you were sculpting you always were rushing around trying to make rent.”

“Yea, I miss that.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Maybe things have been going too well for us, so I just have to shit all over everything to get some drama happening, to feel alive.”

“You were like that in your teens. Why, have you been picking fights with Jace?”

“No, mom, it’s worse than that. We’re completely out of touch. I can’t really remember how I felt about him. We had a fight this morning, the worst yet, and I didn’t feel anything but sick rage. Usually all this sentimentality washes over me afterwards, but there’s nothing except the dread of facing him again.”

Jen can’t stop the tears this time, huge sobs breaking free, cracking her open.

“Oh, Jen, you’re just mad. Give it time,” she reaches over to rub Jen’s back, but Jen is still sobbing violently. “Hey, come on, there’s gotta be more to it than that. Is there someone else, is that it?” her mom asks.

Jen nods.

“God, Jen, I don’t know. You just get distracted so easily. Jace is a sweet man, maybe not wild enough for your liking, but probably better for you. And for Chris.”

“No mom, you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t even like the guy, it’s not like I’m in love with someone else. It’s over. But that was what started this feeling, this disconnect…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! And Jace found out?”

“No, he doesn’t even know anything about that. At least I don’t think he does. But things are way out of control with us.”

“Then it’s your own guilt stopping you up. It’s probably driving him nuts. Don’t kid yourself, deep down I’m sure he knows. He’s just the type to never admit it.” Jen knows her mom is trying not to sound angry, but she can hear it, and it makes her feel worse. She remembers that her birth father was a philanderer bar none. Of course her mom’s sympathies would lie with Jace in a way.

“I guess I better tell him, and if he wants out, fine. Otherwise, we start over…” Jen says, trying to catch her breath and fish a tissue out of her purse.

“Don’t be a fool! If you tell him, you’re done and you know it. You couldn’t live with him, he’d be so hurt. Is that what you want? An excuse to leave?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“Then sit tight. Go home and patch things up, try to have a good day together and give yourself some time. Give yourself a deadline. Say, next summer, if you feel the same way in a year then you know it’s time to fix it or get out. But don’t be impulsive about it. There’s more to it with Chris in the picture.”

“I know that. But a year? I think it’s better to lay it on the line and whatever happens, happens.”

“That’s just like you too. That works in business, when you can take a deal or leave it. This isn’t business, Jen. The heart changes from day to day, nothing’s ever definite. The kind of moods you go through, shit, you’d be a fool to throw it all away on a whim. Wait it out, girl.”

“You don’t think I should tell him?” Jen’s eyes feel achy and swollen. She is exhausted and wants only to sleep now.

“No. Probably not ever. That’s too much for him. There are other ways. I don’t know, I can’t imagine it. I’ve never done it. But I know that nothing’s the same after. Look at your real father. That was what really did us in.”

“What? Come on, mom, you knew it for years. I was there, remember. All the little things, the women’s gloves you found in the car, the strange shoes, perfume. Your year theory – is that how you survived dad so long?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“And look what you went through. You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

“No, it’s good the way it went. Because when I left I was free and I never had second thoughts. Sure it took me a long time. Sure it was stupid to stay in it so long. But I haven’t looked back once and I’ve got it pretty damned good now.”

“Sounds pretty fatalistic.”

“Hell, what else is there?”

“I don’t know, mom. I just want today to never have happened. Shit, I didn’t even tell you about last night.”

“Why don’t you tell me another time and go home now to Jace.”

“I’d like to stay a while…”

“You’re just putting it off.”

“Yup, I am,” Jen admits.

“Don’t, Jen. You do what you want to do, but don’t avoid it.”

“You’re right. I’ll go face the music. What time should I get Chris?” Jen asks.

“Pick him up tomorrow morning. That way you’ll have lots of time, okay?”

“I don’t know, mom, I didn’t bring overnight stuff…”

“I’d like the company, and I’ve got everything I need. I just stocked up.”

“Okay, I guess.” Jen gets up and goes over to the jumper to pick Chris up for a goodbye cuddle. She can’t believe how heavy he feels. She’s so drained and her wrist still hurts. She thinks she mustn’t have any bruises, though, or her mom would have noticed by now. No point in getting her even more worried. She savors Chris’s warmth, the sense of connection, the smell of innocence. She’s going to start sobbing again if she doesn’t put him down.

“Hey, pumpkin,” she croons, “Want to stay with Gramma tonight and have a pajama party?”

He coos at Jen and winds his chubby fingers in her hair. He’s strong.

“Don’t hurt mommy. Let go mommy’s hair…”

Her mom’s laughing at him. He can do no wrong in her eyes. It’s good there’s someone to spoil him though. The poor guy probably needs a break from us too, Jen thinks.

“You know Jen, maybe you should start working again for a while. I could babysit for you.” She comes over to take him Chris from Jen’s arms.

“Every day? Are you nuts?”

“I’d love it. We’ll talk about it later. You better get going.”

“Okay, thanks mom,” Jen says, giving her and Chris and awkward group hug and walking gravely to the car. She would like to find some place quiet to curl up and sleep for a hundred years.

Jen opens the door, though her stomach is squirming. The worn metal taps on her biking boots clack against the ceramic tile. The air seems deathly still, no rustling, no water running, no music wafting from the clock radio. His shoes are gone. Fuck. He either hasn’t hauled himself off the riverbank yet or he’s called a cab and gone to work anyway. Jen wanders through the house, just to be sure, then stretches out on the lounge in the sunroom to nurse a coffee and let the shafts of light bathe her in relief. What can she say, what’s the point now anyway? They’ve crossed some kind of line and even if they could get back to the other side, the sane side, she’s not sure that’s where she wants to be. This other life is numbing, a sort of cool comfort. It feels kind of good to be detached, nothing can touch her here. But she feels a tug of sorts, that maudlin shit that filled her childhood head with Disney love and happy endings.

See, they’d thought it was love at first sight. It just feels right was all she had to say to stunned friends and family. It’s a gut-thing. And it was right—the way a jigsaw piece fits. She just doesn’t like the picture anymore. Because from up here, in this cool tower of hers, it looks like a sprawled tangle of neurotic need bound by fear. It’s ugly, and she painted it. She didn’t know that when she started, because she was in the thick of it, splashing some color around. The naked dancing, the German wine, the ‘what the hell we were going to have children someday anyway’. The moves, always boxing and unboxing, excited when she’d sell another piece, get another commission. They were going somewhere, the good life.

It was herself she was fighting before he came. She’d spent so long wrestling with it, when she looked up there he was with his beautiful blue eyes and his simplicity, his willingness to hold her and make her think for a moment or two that the good life was meant for her too. That she could bury her cynicism and buy it. That she could take off all her clothes and dance all night across that cold concrete floor of his basement apartment. They would be like that. They wouldn’t fall into the traps that snared others in domestic boredom. They would laugh at people who bowled, made love on Wednesdays and went to parent-teacher night. And there was no reason on earth she couldn’t sculpt. He believed in her. Love wouldn’t change her.

Deep down, Jen always knew what that comfort would cost her, how she would bury that instinct, that open tentacle that clasped the world to feed the clay monster. She knew it would cost her everything in the end. Now he plans to make her pay, but her pockets are empty. Pete must have called here; she doesn’t know how else he could know. It figures he’d find out about it after the fact, after it was done with. The side door rattles and she’s frozen with sick terror.

“Jen, I’m sorry.” Jace kneels, wedged in between the screen door and its frame, tear-streaked and muddied. He found his underwear, but that’s all. Water has dripped down his leg and smeared the mud, leaving a black swirl on the tile. Jen looks at him for an eternal moment, can’t get her jaw to move. He is so pathetic, and she feels so unreal.

“Jen, what’s happening, Jen, you gotta talk to me. I can’t take it, can’t live like this. Please …”

He crawls toward her, either for effect or because she kicked him harder than she thought. Maybe both; he has a flair for melodrama. He lays his wet, muddy head in her lap and her hand automatically sweeps the hair off his forehead. She notices how silky his forehead feels under the grit. How soft the hair is in the few spots not caked with mud. His head feels heavy, large, like a pumpkin without the ridges. It feels strange on her lap, awkward. This is a play, she thinks. Nothing real here. He’s just scared.

“Please forgive me. Please, Jen.”

“Takes two Jace. I started it,” she says, meaning it.

He looks up, surprised. That wasn’t her line, she guesses. An alarm is going off in her head: this might get real.

“But I hurt you … God, 1 didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Deep down, you’d like to have killed me, Jace. Stop bullshitting or I won’t talk,” she says, convinced it’s time to get real.

He pushes himself off her lap and sits holding his knees together.

“If I meant to kill you, I would have killed you,” he says, voice deep and controlled again. “I knew what I was doing. I had to stop you. You lost control,” he adds.

“Yeah, I did. So now what,” Jen says calmly, unwilling to abandon her decision to play this one straight.

“Aren’t you sorry?”

“I see. You crawl up here all apologetic so you can extract apology from me, then we kiss, make up, pretend it never happened, right? Then the neighbors won’t talk nasty about us and you won’t have to hang your head around town, or worse yet, even admit that egad you’re human too and you have a temper,” she says. She can tell by his tightening jaw that she’s pissing him off. Part of her doesn’t want to piss him off, but another part is fighting to fling off the bullshit and emerge somehow equipped to move forward. She will drown in the bullshit if she keeps living this way, of this she is certain. Jace rises to his feet, unaware of the pathetic figure he cuts in the clarity of Jen’s mind.

“Just tell me something, Jen. Tell me this. Are we going to sit here and talk about my black-white problem all day? About how just because I’m not fucked up and indecisive all the time, because I live by my convictions, that I’m somehow inferior and, let’s see, not as spiritually developed as you? Cause if we are, I want to know now so I can get the hell out of here,” he says, flushing, puffed up. Jen can almost see his face swelling.

“We can talk about anything you like, Jace. We can talk about the fucking weather for all I care. Fact is there’s nothing worth saying. You said it all. I’m a slut, I’m a cunt, and as usual, I’m fucked up. It’s ME who’s fucked up, right? Isn’t that the point? What does the naked man lying drunk on the riverbank say? What does he think about who’s fucked up around here? Or do you even know who that was, wresting his little demon in the muck,” Jen spits.

Jace shakes his head and looks at his toes. Stalling tactic.

“1 don’t believe you. I came to you to tell you I’m sorry, to try to work this out, and this is what I get,” Jace glares.

“You get what you put out there, Jace. I haven’t listened to my gut for a long time, but it’s coming back because I’m far enough away from you now to hear it. And it tells me this is just another play for pity or sympathy or, god forbid, love so that you can feel good about yourself instead of facing yourself. You want me to say it’s all okay. It’s not. End of subject.”

Jace is tense like an animal about to leap forward on his prey. For a moment Jen feels fear again, eyes darting for a letter-opener, a large ashtray. Then she sees he’s composed himself, he’ll be constrained by his need to prove he’s not violent.

“That’s it? End of subject?” He hunches over her, directing the venomous words into her face. “You little bitch, you’ll get yours.” His face is red, huge, far too close but she can make it go away. She can control it.

“I got mine, sweetie. It’s hissing in my face. It thinks it can nag and bully me away till all that’s left is the parts it wants. Let me help it understand something: That’s not going to happen. Because if it does, there won’t be anything left to love it with. Not that that matters now.”

He wants to slap her, Jen can tell, but he won’t. He’s too proud to let her win what to him is a point. He puts both hands on her shoulders and shoves her back against the lounge. Then he whispers, shaking.

“I used to love you, Jen. You’ve killed us. How can I ever make you see.” Then he kisses her forehead, and before she realizes what is happening they’re a tangle of sobs and limbs and comfort.

The body is a funny thing, she thinks, a homing pigeon that never reads its message. It drives on to the place it’s supposed to go, bringing life, death, reprieves, no matter. It knows only its conditioning. Which is why affairs aren’t fruitful, aren’t realty worth the time. When it comes right down to it, Pete never had a chance. Being with Jace now feels final enough to be new, but better than new. Jen is amazed, but wondering the whole time if that’s how fear and habit work. We can’t get our brains in sync, let’s try the body-thing.

When Jen left MacDonald in her freshman year of college, that body imprint nearly changed her mind. He’d thrown her house keys at her, and hit her in the eye. She felt nothing for him anymore, she knew it was final, but that didn’t stop them that night. Lying with her head on his chest, feeling alien, she marveled at how easy it was to be inside the internal logic of love at one moment, then out. It made her sad because she couldn’t remember ever wanting him and now knows she never did.  She’d just sold herself, bought it, paid, laid it to waste. She understands his hatred now. She used him up, rather, let him spoil. It’s why he too put his hands around her neck. Only unlike Jace, he wasn’t going to stop. Luckily, her college don had called the cops, and a 6’4” testament to bro science pried him off and cuffed him. Jen had blue bruises where his fingers had been for two weeks. But the mark that never healed was the knowledge of what a person could be driven to when starved of love.

Jen wonders if that’s what she’s done to Jace too, but it’s not as final, and when their flesh meets she remembers all the things she loves about him. The ugly shit melts away, and she wants to say everything’s okay. She wants everything to be okay. Then moments later, it’s not, and that tiny white-jelly underside, her vulnerability, slips through their fingers and he’s left with the shell. Today, they are frightened, and she senses change in the pit of her stomach. A thin, fragile wish to believe snakes through her, and for a moment while they take a bath together, and once while drying each other’s hair, she thinks maybe they can make it if they can just learn to be kind.      

Later that night in bed, Jen dreams of a tidal wave. The wall of slug-grey churned-up water is almost upon her; she can feel the damp spit against her burning, frozen face. Just when the wave is about to crash, she hears a far off ring and feels herself swim up against the heavy black of her eyelids.  She opens her eyes and realizes the phone is ringing somewhere in the darkness. She reaches out to her bed stand to feel for it.

“Hello?”

“Jen? Sorry to wake you. It’s Alby.”

“Oh …. um, hi,” she says, mouth like cotton and mind still adrift.

“You need a minute to wake up?

“No, this dream, yeah, just give me a sec. Okay, I’m awake now.” As soon as she says it, Jace raise himself up on his elbow and reaches over to turn on a bedside lamp.

“It’s about Rosemary,” Alby begins.

“Oh no, what now,” Jen mutters, sitting upright against the headboard.

“She’s having a hard time. I didn’t want to call you, but I think youbetter come. They suspended her.”

“What? Who did?” Jen is having trouble making sense of the information.

“The school.”

“Why? She didn’t do anything wrong. God, that was just last night, how’d they even know about it?”

“It’s all over the news. His parents got back andfound this letter … Ican’t explain right now, she’s coming downstairs, just come over if youcan,” Alby says.

“Okay, right away.”

“Gotta go. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Jace is sitting up, listening intently.

“That was Alby. The school suspended Rosemary,” Jen says. “She wants me to go over to Rosemary’s right away. She said it was all over the news. Why the hell would they report on a suicide?”

“If the parents will talk, they’ll do it,” Jace says.

“Even so, Rosemary didn’t do anything,” Jen says as she rises, slides her jeans up over her hips and grabs a t-shirt from the sloppy pile on the dresser.

“Jen, just tell me the truth. Was she having an affair with the kid?” Jace asks.

“Yeah, right Jace. An 18-year-old kid. Come off it.”

“Maybe the parents think she did. Maybe they talked to the school, and the school’s covering its ass until there’s an investigation.”

“An investigation? Who said anything about an investigation?” Jen notices Jace is flushing, and begins to wonder what he knows that she doesn’t.

“I called into work when you went out to pick up the pizza. Rob mentioned it,” he admits

“Why didn’t you tell me?’

“Because I knew you’d think 1 was checking up on you about last night.”

“Were you?”

‘I guess.”

“Fuck Jace, I don’t believe you.”

“What would you do if you were me? I mean, it’s a nutty story. I knew Rob’d have something on it even if they weren’t going to run it because the fool listens to the scanner all night.”

“How convenient for you. So next you’re going to tell me they’re planning to put you on the story, so you can get a nice little interview with the naughty teacher.”

“Come on, Jen. It’s better if I’m on it so I can protect her a little.”

Protect her a little? Jen thinks. She feels whatever temporary peace they’d brokered earlier pull away from the shore like high tide, leaving crud in its absence. She sees this artifice of his–this rationalizing mediaphile cra–as vanity, and like a mother bear protecting her cub, wants to slash at him.

“Are you on the story or not,” she says, voice flat but blood rising.

“I don’t know yet. Rich knows I know her, and he’s on my shift tomorrow. I think he wants me to at least cover the funeral.” Jace avoids meeting her eyes.

“Great. Well Jace, it doesn’t matter how you write it. You’re about to destroy my best friend, and you know it. If your fucking job is that important to you…”

“Christ, Jen, don’t start! You forget that my job you’re so quick to bitch about puts food in your mouth … and Chris’s. Maybe if you’d sell a few sculptures we could go live in a loft somewhere and do that bread wine and thou thing, eh?”

“That’s not the point. It’s just that you don’t even care about the real story, you’ll just box it all up and leave stuff out and get it all screwed up, and then you’ll go and say it’s the public’s fault for having the attention span of a flea. And normally that’s okay, but it’s Rosemary you’ll be doing it to this time because the board will be on a witch-hunt and all her little visits with him will look bad.”

“Little visits? What do you mean, little visits?” Jace perks up.

“Never mind,” Jen says, raking a brush through her hair. She grabs the keys from the dresser. In the mirror, she sees Jace rise from the bed and stumble toward her. She tightens her grip on the keys, lacing them between her fingers. He reaches forward and grabs her elbow, pressing his fingers into the joint.

“What little visits,” he spits, as if it were her, not Rosemary, accused of some life-altering impropriety.

“Jace, please. Let’s not,” she breathes. She could jam him with her elbow, scrape his face with the keys. She realizes she can be that kind animal, but she struggles to rise above it. She is stock still, so still she can feel the throbbing in his fingertips from the pressure on her elbow.

“Let’s not? Yeah, let’s not,” he releases her elbow after a quick shove, just enough for her to tip forward. With her free hand she grabs the edge of the dresser. Pain shoots through her wrist. She turns and faces him.

“I’m going to Rosemary’s. I’ll be home in the morning. If you agree to do the story, don’t come home tomorrow.”

She rushes out of the bedroom, down the stairs. She feels the blood throbbing in her head and her eyes feel blurry. Waves of nausea make her want to stop, lie down. She hears him shouting, swearing. It’s a good thing Chris is at her mom’s. She slides on her boots, flies into the garage and jams the garage door opener. She mounts the scooter and it roars to life, spraying gravel down the lane. The tiny wheels try to grab the ground but slip sideways. She has to calm down and straighten the scooter up or it’ll slide out from under her. She stops at the river road and collects herself before turning left and heading to town.

The headlight dapples the trees along the parkway, a tiny pinprick against the dark mass as she swoops around the curves. The warm wind pushes her tears back to her ears. So many nights crying on this road. Now for Rosemary. For herself. For Jace and Chris. For the ideas she once held about herself. The big story.

She doesn’t know who she’s become, or how to reinvent herself as someone capable of a life worth living. She doesn’t know how to help Rosemary weather this storm she feels collecting on the horizon, the choking, claustrophobic wave she feels suspended just above them all.

The lights are burning in the bungalow when she pulls up. Alby’s car parked in front of the house, her headlight catches the “Save the Earth” bumper sticker.

Never mind the earth, she thinks. Save us all. She takes her time getting off the scooter, slowly releases her helmet strap. She is in no hurry to enter the house; her awkwardness and dread cause her to tremble. She stands by the curb for a moment, lights a cigarette…Just one, she thinks, to fortify herself. She had quit when she had Chris, but seems to be a furtive, backslider smoker again. As the smoke drifts up into the night she sees Alby walk into the living room from the kitchen entrance, carrying a tray of tea. She sets it down on the coffee table and bends over. Rosemary must be on the couch, obscured from Jen’s view. What’s wrong with Jen, standing out here, safe from Rosemary’s sorrow, smoking like an idiot. She feels small, selfish. She grinds out her cigarette, walks up the stone path to the door, and taps lightly, as if she hopes no one will hear. Alby straightens and walks toward the door, opening it gingerly.

“Thank God you’re here,” she whispers, casting a glance over to the couch. “Rosemary wants to go to the hospital.”

Jen squints, puzzled. Alby shrugs and shakes her head.

Jen peels off her boots and enters the living room, padding across the gleaming pine. Rosemary is balled up on the couch, fists clenched tight, eyes swollen when she tilts her head up to look at Jen. She’s rocking gently. Jen slides down beside her and puts her arm around her. Rosemary begins to lean into her, Jen can feel her relaxing slightly.

“Hey,” Jen says.

Rosemary starts to cry again. Jen just sits and let her. It’s hard for her to shut up; she wants to say soothing things, but there’s really nothing to say. Not a word that could console.  Alby sits down on the other side of her and joins the embrace. They sit like that for quite a while, rocking, crying.

At some point, Rosemary pulls away and sits up straight.

“Okay,” she says. “Jen, I need you to take me to 3East.”

Jen chews on her lip, trying to formulate an argument that can cut through all this grief. “I don’t think going there will help you. I think you’re better here, in your home, with us.”

“I wasn’t asking, Jen.”

“Do you feel like harming yourself?” Jen asks, hiding behind the clinical.

“No. That’s not why. You know. I need to be away. Protected. From everything that’s coming.”

“What’s coming, Rosemary. What are they going to do? Arrest you for accepting chewy carob treats from a student? If you do this, it will affect your career forever. You’ll have a psych history. It won’t look right to the school board either. As if you’re guilty of something,” Jen says.

“Maybe I am,” she says.

Holy shit, Jen thinks, but says nothing, wondering if it’s just Rosemary’s ample but comparatively innocent sense of guilt or some kind of actual admission. She is choked with silence.

Rosemary swallows, and says, “They’ve found his journal. That’s why I was suspended; so they could investigate. There’s pages and pages about me, about our every exchange. However you read it, it can’t look good. His family is going public with it. They’ve already sent copies of entries to the police and the press.”

“How do you know this,” Jen asks?

“Because Joe told me when he explained the suspension. They’re suspending me with pay for the moment, pending a review of the journal and interviews with me. If I check into 3East, they may wait to do the interviews. It could buy me some time. Medical leave would take over. They won’t let reporters into the psych ward. I can’t expect you guys to guard me every minute of the day. It’s the best way to give me the space I need,” she said.

Clearly, Rosemary had given this plan some thought. If she’s fired without pay, she’ll lose her house. The union can’t protect her. But if she’s on medical leave, it leaves her more options. And maybe treatment would help. It sounds as though there are secrets to untangle, Jen thinks. But she twinges at the thought of 3East, its fluorescent glare; its hopeless roamers and cruel helpers. Rosemary really doesn’t belong there, and Jen is in a position to know this given her own stay seven years ago. Jen doesn’t know if she can bring herself to go there. Too much history for one night.

“Please, Jen. You’ve been there before. You know the ropes. Please take me.”

“If you commit yourself, you may not get a bed. You’re better off getting the doctor to commit you. Even so, it might only give you 72 hours under the Mental Health Act. Sometimes to stay, you have to convince them you may harm yourself,” Jen says.

“I may harm myself, Jen.”

“Really?” Jen looks deeply into her eyes, then wishes she hadn’t. She’s not lying. Crazy like a fox, but also truthful.

“Okay,” Jen says. “Let’s pack. There are things you will want to make sure you take. It’s very spare up there,” she sighs, queasy with the flood of memory washing over her like glue.

Later, they pull into the parking lot of the blond brick box that is the hospital. This is a far better arrival, Jen thinks, than her last trip.

“Are you sure you want to do this,” Jen asks, afraid Rosemary is just too sane for what she will encounter. Fearing there is something to lose here.

“I’m sure,” Rosemary says, sighs. “I’m sure I’m sure.”

With that, they lock the car and make the slow walk to recovery.

It was an October night seven years ago when Jen sat alone in the den, listening to Leonard Cohen’s mournful dirges, watching the smoke curl up to the stucco ceiling. Saint was fast asleep, Gary presumably beside her. She’d heard them come in a few hours ago – some shouting, a door slam, conciliatory wafts of lovemaking – while she lay in her room, unable to sleep, unable to get up. Breathing quietly so they’d forget she was there. It hadn’t turned out to be required. After another hour and an urge to smoke in bed, she dragged herself to the refuge of the den, dim lights, and tired pages of thoughts she once found unique. She slopped an inch of Grand Marnier into her favorite cut crystal snifter, imagining that she was a ‘40s glamour queen. She wanted to scream and smash things, and yet this deadly emptiness was crawling throughout her.

She began a letter they will find taped to the mirror of a hotel room a few hours later, after she sought refuge in the Best Western in the sky. She started the with Saint’s immortal words to her:

I cry for all the things I’ve touched, sucked life from, breathed life into. It is my right to meet my dark stranger on the shore tonight. Do not concern yourself with your altruism, it is but an illusion designed for self-comfort. I alone can throw the chips on the floor and say the party is over.

The longer she wrote, the more convinced she became the party was over. She crawled into her car and laid rubber all the way down Lakeshore. But it was empty. No cruisers, no pedestrians, no one to kill or be killed by. She sat under the bridge by the river and watched the 11s dance, just like that birthday her Dad said he’d lit them for her. She pulled her ID from her wallet and methodically began slicing little ribbons off and tossing them into the dark water. Erasure. Several times she nicked herself with the Swiss Army knife. Plastic was harder to cut. But she enjoyed the smears of blood on her hands. Suitably dramatic. She was upping the ante.

When she finished, she felt a little freer. She staggered over to the trunk and opened it, rooting around for a screwdriver. She removed the license plate from her car. The river, now hungry, received this last remnant of her identity. She watched the current suck the plate down with an almost audible slurp. What else can she sacrifice to this dark sluice?

The contents of her bag that she did not throw into the river were as follows: 12 black beauties; 1 phial of rat poison; 3 pouches of neo-citron; 1 bottle of prescription of codeine; 2 packs of diet pills; half a bottle of aspirin; 1 mickey of Southern Comfort.

For a moment, she stared into the mist. She could sacrifice these implements of her demise to the magic river. She could get on a plane and drift away to a new city, a new identity, a new life. This thought invigorated her. No one would know the difference.

Then she realized there’s no way to board a plane without an identity. She could hitchhike, she’d thought. Suddenly, she grew bored, exhausted with the details. She clutched the wad of bills she stole from the bank deposit and marched to the Best Western a few hundred yards away. She checked in, not without suspicious glances from the desk boy. Little wonder; she was drunk; had no luggage; no credit card to give him. Maybe he recognized her pseudonym: S. Plath.

She was past caring about the desk boy and his unpressed white shirt. She stumbled down the hall to room 104. It was like every other Best Western in which she’d spent far too much time thanks to a dead-end job as an area manager for a direct marketing firm. Slim pickings for a debt-ridden  grad.

She contemplated the character of sex she’d had in this motel chain. The carefree, exciting, but deeply unsatisfying dramatic acts. The mornings when they became strangers once again. The glory of traveling a territory to teach welfare mothers and high school drop outs how to work harder for less. She was not proud of her job. She was not proud of herself. She didn’t know how she got this far astray.

When Janet had first seen Jen on her return from Toronto, her flight from the vibrant mother city of the arts, from the notion of an all-encompassing love Jen would never obtain, she began to cry. “Your eyes are black squares,” she said.

Lights out.

But no, it wasn’t drugs or derring-do that had extinguished that light. It was the awesome realization that she was wholly alone, whomever she was with. That her mind was not designed to share a life. Like a fetus whacked in an accident, there was something misshapen and pathologic in her emotional life, and it would not stop bleeding all over those who came near. Hard to keep a secret like that.

Jen stripped off all of her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. She pulled the remaining tube of lipstick from her now anonymous purse and scrawled these words across the mirror: And now to the Best Western in the Sky.

She tried to think of a way not to do this. She came up empty. All roads lead her to this hotel room, this night, this state. She climbed into the crisp white sheets and began her misadventure. Soon she was gagging, choking, on the volume of pills. No one ever mentioned how your throat starts to swell, close up, how after a while you can’t swallow. The Southern Comfort wasn’t helping. She staggered to the bathroom to fill the ice bucket with water. She attempted to drink it, sloshing water down her shivering naked self. She floated back to the bed, her final bed, and shut off the bedside lamp. She had not swallowed the rat poison. She did not have the nerve. But she figured, in the haze, that the pills should be enough. A coward, even in exercising her only right.

Things began to swim in the dark. She was somehow still conscious, hyper-conscious. There was a whirling vortex above her, black velvet, sucking her up. She could not hear her heart, could not hear her breath, could feel the thickness in her throat. She heard Janice Joplin and if she were able to move she would have laughed:

As we discover on the train, man, it’s all the same fucking day, and nothing really matters.

Suddenly, a knowing hit. A knowing of an eternal, centrifugal trip. Horror. It is not her right after all. With all the power she could muster, she gasped, her body unwilling to execute her intent. Another part of her reared itself up and grasped at the phone. But her throat. She couldn’t speak. Help, she whispered to the boy in the crumpled white shirt, Help Me.

The police, ambulance, soon found Ms. S. Plath in room 104. There are slivers, snatches of a dream, lights, a hospital table, her doctor asking what the hell. Tubes down her throat, charcoal. Waking up in ICU with no feeling in the right side of her body.

“You’ll be lucky if you walk again,” spat a nurse, clearly disgusted with her. She was crying. The man next to her was dying. How did they find her doctor? How did they know who she was?

Now everyone will know, she’d thought. Now she’ll have to explain that which she can’t explain to herself.

The pill bottle, it turns out. The evil pill bottle betrayed her.

The part Jen couldn’t believe, could NOT believe, was the part about being three months pregnant. Three months. She’d had no recollection of sex. Hadn’t even missed a period, though they’d been light. Immaculate conception, un-divine interruption of life. She bled forever, and checked into 3 East, voluntarily. The ole real world held nothing for her..

That’s where she met Duncan. In the beginning, he’d seemed charming. A shy smile, glittery eyes. Reminiscent of Roly. They met in group.

He never did say what brought him there that night, several nights after her unceremonious arrival in the land of walking wannabe deads. They pumped his stomach out and delivered him to the ward next to her, into the squalor and stench of three other men.

Jen’s room was a private. She still had coverage.

The first time, he’d stayed three days and then left, full of promises about the new life he and AA would together fashion.

A week later, she lay in the quiet semi darkness unique to hospitals, listening to his shouting fury as they dragged him down the hall to isolation. The next day, bandaged arm and stitches contouring his temple, he’d smiled shyly at her in the line for breakfast.

“You’ll do anything to see me again, won’t you,” Jen joked. “You coulda just called.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head, not in the negative, but in an apparent recollection of the events that brought him back. Events that culminated in his walking – or charging, no one is sure which – through a plate glass window at Comfy’s. Even he was unclear how he’d managed it. One of those “what the hell” moments in a fight gone terribly wrong. Jen was no stranger to these urges.  She wasn’t one to judge. He stayed another three days, then off he went into the world again.

Six weeks later, a shaft of light was hammering Jen’s eyelids. She pulled the comforter over her head. She could smell metabolized whisky and pungent man. Through the fog, she began to understand where she was. What she had done.

That next-day-smell was making her gag, reminiscent of all the drunks who’ve tried to use her. To grasp. Clutch. Hands that feel like paws. Gaping black eyes like wells begging echoes.

This one is no different, except, of course, he’s also crazy.

Not crazy enough to warrant a continued bed at 3East. Just crazy enough to smash lives, including his own. Unrecoverable, they’d said, when they explained to Jen why he couldn’t stay that day, why without a cop or doctor’s order he could not return a mere few hours and shots of tequila later, why they were leaving this suicidal wreck of a human on the streets, now calling Jen for help. 72 hours and out. By this time, Jen had been in the psych ward six weeks. No one asked for her bed.

Give him my bed, she’d said. I don’t need it.

No, they said. He’s here all the time. Don’t get involved.

Is that what gets you through the night? she’d asked. To “not get involved.” To not help. To tell yourself that some humans are more disposable than others? That this human is not worthy. I may be nuts, but I’d rather be nuts than be an inhumane cunt with an inflated sense of the value of my judgments.

Puffed up, as close to alive as Jen had seen her, the head nurse began a flurry of activity while Jen packed her clothes and rolled up her comforter, an object as highly coveted at 3East as her apparent power to sass staff.

The police will stop you from leaving, she sputtered. I’m calling the doctor. You have to be discharged. You can’t leave, she squealed.

Jen reminded the woman she’d checked herself in. Her car was in the parking lot. Watch her discharge herself. It was past midnight. Nurse Ratchet would never find the doctor in time.

Jen grabbed her belongings and rushed to the elevator. Duncan didn’t need 3East. He just needed her.

Now she shook herself awake in the dank boarding room, dim light peeping through the tattered drapes salvaged from a 1950s Better Homes and Garden auction. Her comforter is the only bright spot in the dingy room. Duncan was absorbed in the fitful, deep sleep of the stone drunk, sweating and tossing, twitching like a dreaming animal. His mouth is open slightly, revealing his broken teeth. Jen is flooded with a sick wave of disgust. Save yourself, she thought.

He didn’t wake when she rolled up the comforter, leaving him only the matted, threadbare bedspread you’d find in an hourly motel. She cast one more glance at the room, his torn jeans on the floor, the institutional water picture clearly pilfered from 3East, the few coins on the cluttered desk that held the hot plate, instant coffee, a kettle. 

I will be well, she’d thought. After all, our lives are scripts we write, then live. Duncan chose drama and pathos. Jen’s own dark path was littered with hairpin turns and suspenseful moments. What had the hospital told her parents, she wondered. Whatever it was, she’d put it right. 3East was no place for recovery. Jen needed a clean, quiet place to gather herself ‘round, to rock, to soothe, to find the slivers of festering destruction and coax them out.  The conviction of it flooded her. She didn’t belong in places like this.

So she drove herself along the river road, eyes burning in the light of day, tears and sick foreboding flooding her, home to a family terrified by greatly exaggerated police reports that she was on the lam with a violent and psychotic drunk.

Home to where she could start over, a wet clump of clay ripe for reinvention.

Jen spent the first three months of the New Year in her mother’s basement. They’d furnished it with a daybed, a table, a kitchen counter and row of cupboards. The other half they converted into a studio. She wanted only her kiln, her wheel, and her tools from the Lakeshore house. She didn’t want to speak to Saint. Her mother was the reluctant go-between.

Jen didn’t take calls at all until March. Like the ground around her, she felt she needed to thaw. So she stayed in the basement and mashed her fists into vats of clay while the phone issued its futile invitation to rejoin the world. Jen cannot recall a simpler, more peaceful time in her life.

She’d get up at dawn each morning and put the coffee on. She’d begin her day on the wheel, centering, centering until she’d regained her light touch. She’d pull bowls and vases and plates, satisfaction flooding her every time the balance was deemed perfect and she’d tighten the wire in her two hands, ready to garrote the new form from the wheel. She’d stack the morning’s work with other green ware in various stages of hardening. Then she’d fire up the kiln for the first round of bisque. While that lot fired, she’d move over to her glazing center, where the previous day’s work sat on the cooling rack. She’d hold the fired pieces in her hands and search herself for the images to emerge. Gestures, suggestions of stroke. She experimented with crackle, with distressed finishes. Next, this lot would be ready to fire. By 2 p.m., she’d be finished her “work” for the day. Pottery will always sell. Sculpture is a less utilitarian art.

Sculpture, for Jen, was time to play. Play with ideas, forms. Major pieces. Pulling life from the lifeless. The maquettes were so large, she’d have to fire them in sections and move them to the garage for assembly en miniature. Soon, she’d invested in an acetylene torch and began to regularly haunt junkyards, looking for parts. The world she was creating broke out of the confines of a kiln. Soon, the only clay parts were those that represented the organic, mixed with iron and salvage objects. Futuristic forms would morph from the mixtures. Sometimes even she was surprised by what they had to say: A human head in a salvaged television box, computer chips and tubes flowing from the orifices. A child trapped in a giant computer, pneumatic tubes from the 50s wheezing while minute lasers arced together to create movement. Soon, she’d picked up a 4-channel recording deck and breathed ambient sounds into her sculpture installations. The garage reached its limit when she created the hospital bed that cradled the short circuiting robot and babies in tubes. Finally, she’d outgrown her mother’s home.

Jen’s wordless work kept her occupied each day until midnight. By sleeping only when tired, she packed years of artistic expression into a few months. It became obsession-like in quality. She did not question the urge. She honored it. She was traveling down a vast tunnel, hurtling toward some kind of light she knew would save her, catapult her from the dark dreary sameness of life. Slowly, she could feel the excitement build. There was something just around the corner, she was sure.

Then it was spring. The smell of new life mesmerized her, warming earth, pushing chutes impatient for sun. One day when the phone rang, she answered it, surprised by the impulse to do so. Usually, she just let it ring, and turned down the ringer.

“Is this Jen?” the timorous Tinkerbelle voice asked.

“Yes, it is,” she said, bemused by her inability to place the voice.

“This is Lou. Lou Bitman. We met at, ah, you know, up at 3East.”

“Lou! It’s great to hear from you. How are you doing?” Jen asked, genuinely glad to hear from another survivor. It was a club, of sorts.

Lou was charming, if fragile, somehow eliciting protection from people, but she was also smart, wry, devoid of innocence despite her youthful looks and mannerisms. She’d attempted suicide in her home while her children slept. Her husband’s response was to leave her and take the kids. She was only allowed supervised visitation as a result of her desperate act. Turned out he’d been having an affair. His mistress was only too happy to play house. Now they were a happy revisionist family, without her. It made recovery especially tough for Lou.

“You know, um, not great, but better here than up there,” Lou said, laughing nervously.

“I hear you,” Jen said. “When did you come home?”

“I’ve been home for a while. But I didn’t know where you lived. In fact, I only found out because I saw your mom at the post office. She said I should come over some time, but I thought I should see if you felt like company.”

“I haven’t till now, but I’d love to have you over. When do you go back to work?” Jen asked.

“Well, that depends. Right now, my med benefits run until at least August without having to claim permanent disability. Some days I’d like to go back, other times I don’t feel ready.”

“I know what you mean. I’m not going back to my job at all. I’m quitting when the benefits are up. I’ve been potting and sculpting again, and I love it. In fact, I’m going to find a way to do it all the time,” Jen said, realizing this was the first time she’d voiced her emerging plans to anyone. Her usual friends attempted strained visits and were driven off the by paucity of responses, the nebulous nature of Jen’s interpretation of what would come next.

“That’s great. I’d love to see your stuff. How’s tomorrow for coffee?”

“That’d be great – how about 2 p.m. – that’s when I usually finish,” Jen said, and gave her the address.

Friendships are born in the strangest places, and sometimes at the strangest times. Lou became Jen’s closest confidant that year as they slowly trudged the distance from the shame and stigma of the psych ward. Jen could talk to her about things that her other friends just didn’t understand. They’d watch each other’s backs, especially around men. In Lou’s case, pretty as she was, there was no shortage of dominant men looking for someone just like her to orbit. But that was her downfall. Her husband had been that way – immaculate, particular, controlling. Then he left her with nothing, contaminated her children, scorned the very weakness in her of which he’d been the master crafter. They’d go out to bars, but were careful not to drink too much. In Lou’s case, it was the meds. In Jen’s, it was the fear. So they danced a lot and drank coffee and talked. It was a soothing friendship.

Lou’s husband had let her keep their home. When she asked Jen to move in, Jen hesitated. Living with Saint hadn’t been so great; she was reluctant to live with a friend again. But the idea of moving out of her mom’s was appealing. By that time, the Haven Art Gallery was selling Jen’s pottery faster than she could make it. It seemed she could pot full time and make more than enough to survive. She began to envision a warehouse loft and studio, where there’d be plenty of room for her sculptures and shipping doors to accommodate their size.

By June, Jen had found the perfect space – a recovering blond brick warehouse bordering the river district that featured steel beamed 14’ ceilings and endless light. The space was raw but the zoning was mixed, so she could install ventilation and create a fabrication center at one end of the unit, while framing in the opposite end and finishing it to urban loft standards. To make it cozy, she dropped a wireframe from the beams and wove fabric through for a textured ceiling. She scoured second hand shops and garage sales and outfitted her loft with an eclectic mix of hand-me-downs. By autumn, Jen had a truly beautiful space.

One day she was hauling a new batch of vases to the Haven when a woman with dark hair and a flowing skirt walked up to her, gently taking an oversized vase from her hand.

“You must be Jen Jones,” the woman said.

“How did you know,” Jen said, taken aback.

“Because you’re carrying your trademark beautifully-glazed vases that we sell like hotcakes,” she said.

Jen was puzzled, because she’d thought Sandy was the owner of the gallery, and thought she knew all of the employees.

“I’m Alby Winters,” she said, reaching out her hand to shake Jen’s newly free one.

“Hi. Nice to meet you,” she said.

“I’m the “silent” partner,” she whispered.

“Ohhh. Why silent?” Jen asked.

“Because I’m an art therapist. If my clients knew I co-owned the gallery, they’d bug me to sell their work all the time. Then I’d have to give them a brutal market assessment that would depress them. And they come see me because they’re depressed in the first place,” she explained.

“But that sounds like an excellent evil plan for your therapy business! Besides, why are you telling me your secret,” Jen grinned. “I’m depressed too. I started all this after a little sojourn at L’Hotel de 3East.” Jen was surprised at herself that she’d just came out and said it. She supposed she was just sick of pussyfooting around.

“Because even if you’re crazy, you sell. And I want more,” Alby said, shifting the vase to pull keys from her bag for the side entrance to the gallery storeroom.

As the door swung open, Jen was surprised to see long pallet racks laden with three times the pottery and artwork you might ever actually see present in the gallery. Each area was segmented off with uprights that created multiple miniature bays on the pallet rack shelves with a name and ID number. Each artist crib was almost full to the brim with objects and paintings, except Jen’s which was suspiciously spare.

“Wow, you should just open THIS space to the public – it’s huge,” Jen marveled.

Alby laughed. “Do you think your work would sell as well if I put out five similar vases instead of one at a time? Scarcity is what gives handmade work its cache! Although in your case, I will note your section is empty! We’ve gotten a ton of online orders for your mug and bowl and plate sets, and it’s as if it’s gone viral. I shipped six sets to New York last week. That’s kind of unheard of. What can we do about that, m’am?”

“I’m pumping it out as fast as I can till 2 p.m. every day. I really can’t make any more,” Jen said.

“What happens at 2 p.m. Do you turn into a pumpkin,” Alby grinned.

“No, I turn into a sculptress,” Jen quipped, still trying to drink in the cacophony of colors, textures and shapes on the long walls of the storeroom.

“Really? Can I see your stuff?” Alby asked.

Jen turned to Alby and saw she was serious. Suddenly, she felt shy. Not worthy of this generous, smart woman’s confidence.

“Um, it’s not ready yet.”

“Artists ALWAYS say that. Come on, let me see it. I know a lot of people in the art world, you know. I might be able to broker for you,” Alby said.

“When the time’s right,” Jen replied, baffled by her sudden fear gripping her stomach. She felt as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath, as if her heart skipped a beat. It was crazy. This was what she’d told herself she wanted so badly. Much of the work was finished to the point where she risked reworking it to death if she touched it again. But there was something so private, so personal about it, that she just couldn’t bare the thought of sharing it yet.

“You drive a hard bargain. Let’s have dinner tonight,” Alby said. “I’d like to get to know you.”

And with that, Jen had found her second friend since her Saint-induced suicide attempt and social relegation. Little did she know that there was a career in the offing and a distant husband on the horizon who was even then preparing to destroy it.

Two years later, Jen was standing in the foyer of her stunning and now gentrified warehouse loft, trembling with a sick rage. Everything had gone beautifully. This was supposed to be her night. The opening, the interviews, the response from guests and savants alike. It was her homecoming.

“Jones’ work captures the restless angst of post-modern pastiche yet delivers a carefully controlled message about our dark future in a consumerist and tech-mongering society. Her installation leaves the viewer wondering where we draw the line between the organic and mechanical, what is real, what is human, what is machine. It puts one in mind of our Brave New World, where people “come love their oppression.” She is coy in her delivery, as the titles belie: Room 104, Brave New WUrld, Poetry in Science…”

In the elegant powder room of the gallery, Jen stared hard at the mirror. Was that really her, resplendent in black velvet, wearing a Contessa necklace, hair coiled in a professionally lacquered and decidedly Slavic updo. She looked for all the world someone comfortable with status, with power.  Why not, she thought. I am just me but just me can be anybody I please.

Jen had spent the past year touring her collection across North America, with the dubious distinction of being the first Canadian sculptress under the age of 30 who had a national catalog.  She’d just landed a major public commission in Detroit after a grueling competition, and it offered the chance to be back home. Finally, her hometown public gallery would also exhibit her work.

It must have been on the 11 o’clock news. Something must have triggered Saint’s poison pen. So here she stood, alone in her riverfront loft, while the vile words of Saint’s letter, apparently hand-delivered, erased her meager accomplishments, left her feeling small and bereft. A poser.

Saint was unrelenting and righteous. There was the trip about abandoning their home. Then the trip about her father having to help so she could stay. The overtime that meant on the assembly line at the factory. Then the ugly suggestion that Jen’s suicide attempt had been just another dramatic moment contrived to refocus the attention of her friends onto her insatiable self. There was a lot of talk about betrayal, but Jen wasn’t sure how she’d betrayed her. It was mostly unclear.

What was clear was her hatred of Jen’s creative works, of whatever it was she thought they said, shared.

“I hate it when you’re telling the world to fuck off. Do you think we’re so stupid you can manipulate us with your cultural studies mumbo jumbo and your socially just platitudes about society? I’m glad I never went to university, if that’s the kind of useless shit you learned getting a BFA, which should stand for Big Fucking Asshole…”

Suddenly, Saint seemed far less literary than a mere few years back. Suddenly she seemed like a working class stiff jealous of anything that might suggest working in a factory all day and buying leather sofas wasn’t really la dolce via. One of them had changed. Or one of them had stopped changing. Jen wasn’t sure.

All she knew was that it hurt, and that she held no intention of allowing Saint that privilege.

Jen stands in the battleship green hallway, mesmerized by the flood of recollection swarming around her from years past, from times she’d buried like a shameful turd in a kitty litter box…a box that still stank.

“Jen. Earth to Jen,” Rosemary says.

Suddenly, Jen’s vision focuses and reveals her surroundings, quivering with the pulse of poor fluorescent light.

“Show some sign of life, kiddo, or they’ll keep you here with me,” Rosemary says, sotto.

Jen opens her mouth to speak but a sudden wave of grief takes over and she racked with sobs, years-old tears coursing down her face.

“Alby,” Rosemary says. “Take Jen outside for some fresh air.”

Like a child, Jen is led down the dismal hallway, into the elevator greasy with fingerprints, past the café-styled hospital foyer that betrays the dinginess beyond and out into the last shades of night. Dawn approaches, her second one witnessed this week. She is just so tired.

“Jen, just let it go,” Alby says, rubbing the spot between her shoulder blades that puts her in mind of childhood comfort, warm towels after rain, safety in touch.

“It all just hit me,” she sputters. “The full force of it. When I was here, I didn’t have nearly the excuse that Rosemary does. What a pathetic excuse for a human I was,” Jen says, meaning every word.

“Jen, I didn’t know you then, but I know that if you hadn’t crashed, your art would never have emerged. You’d never have sat still long enough in the wreckage to allow those creative forces to come to life. We might not like the way things go, but events are an inevitable part of becoming who we are. I truly believe there’s a part of us directing the play, agreeing in advance to let the story unfold a particular way…” Alby says, pulling Jen closer.

“But for what? For a brief moment touring my sculptures that seems like ancient history now? What was all that suffering for? I’ve become a suburban housewife with nothing to look forward to except a Dr. Spock milestone and a soiree with my girlfriends,” Jen sobs. “I barely have any money left in the bank from selling those pieces, and now they’re gone.”

“So make some more,” Alby sighs.

“Are you kidding? With Jace hovering over me like a mosquito – What are you doing? What’s that? What’s it going to be?– Then if I say anything, like, I need to be alone to try to work, he takes it personally. As if I’ve chosen clay over him.”

The moment she says it, Jen realizes she’s nailed it, nailed the whole Jace dynamic in a single mournful wail. He really does resent her art. He really doesn’t want her to be who she was, because he cannot see himself fitting into that life. He’s just as scared as she is. She takes a deep breath of the night air and tries to absorb what this means for them. Alby leads her to a bench and they sit down together while Jen wipes away her tears.

“That’s not your problem, really. Let him sulk. You are the only person you have to answer to over your work. I think the real problem is that you’re using motherhood and wifedom as a form of creative resistance. As an excuse to avoid going to that place inside you that produces the work. And you’re the only person who can do anything about that. Freedom isn’t something that’s given, Jen. It’s something you take,” Alby sighs.

Jen lights a cigarette and ponders the wisdom Alby has shared. She’s knows that on a whole other level, Alby is right. She feels so muddled and emotionally exhausted she can barely speak. And here she is, once again the self-absorbed drama queen crying over spilled milk while Rosemary is upstairs alone waiting for her doctor to arrive and while Alby, freshly pregnant, is sleep deprived yet again. The thought makes her feel even shittier, and makes her wonder if she’s learned a damned thing in her life.

“Okay. Thanks. Let’s go back upstairs to be with Rosemary. I can handle it,” Jen says finally, grinding out her cigarette on the pavement and resolving to be a better friend, human.

Rosemary is in a private room now, with a large, suicide-proof window overlooking the copse of trees beside the parking lot. It’s a great view considering, Jen thinks, but it sucks that the window won’t open. That’s because it feels like it’s 100 degrees and so dry she feels her sinuses collapsing. Hospital heat. Jen forgot how miserable, how like its inhabitants, this place is. She guesses it’d be worse if it were cold. The warmth at least makes you want to sleep, if your mind will let you.

They’re making a list of things Rosemary would like to cheer up this drab stay – books and movies and other things to shield her from thought. Fortunately, she agreed to bring her own comforter and pillows, so the tiny room would allow the imagination to pretend this was a shabby hotel or a boarding house, a kind of haven for wandering souls.

There’s a lot Jen wants to tell her about the people up here, but it was years ago and it may have changed. Jen doesn’t want her to worry too much either, so she is careful choosing her words.

“Rosemary, I don’t know if Dr. Manus is still the director here, but if he is, just ignore whatever he says to you and give him hell if he puts his hand on your leg. And don’t agree to take the medication. If they have to, they’ll give you shots of B12 instead and it really does improve your mood without all the other crap, side effects and spaciness,” Jen says matter-of-factly.

“What do you mean if he puts his hand on my leg?” Rosemary asks, brow wrinkling.

“I found him to be a bit of a pervert,” Jen says. “If I wore makeup and dressed for our sessions, he’d report that I was much improved. If I didn’t, he’d say I was depressed. He told me not to read so much literature because “readers are the highest number of suicides.” And he got ugly with me when I told him he was not respecting my boundaries every time he touched me. Made out like I was paranoid. So I talked to my group leader about it and filed a complaint. So just don’t take the meds and stay away from him,” Jen says.

She looks up to find Rosemary staring hard at her, in some kind of disbelief.

“Are you serious?” she asks.

“Very,” Jen says. “But Mitch Porter, now he’s a great guy, he’s a MSW. He’ll be a good guy for you to talk to. He’s funny too. He’s a little abrasive in some ways, kind of “So what are you going to do about it” type. But it’s pretty effective. You’ll be in good hands with him,” Jen says, realizing that there is something almost perverse about giving advice about navigating a psych ward. But she can’t stop herself. They’re the kinds of things she wished someone would have told her all those years ago.

“I also want to say that you probably won’t enjoy group, but they’ll make you go. Just stay away from most of them, on balance, they’re really nuts and will stir up all kind of shit and want anything nice that you have. That’s why I had you bring the lockbox. And just don’t get into it with the nurses and how they treat people. Just stay in your room instead. I made the mistake thinking I could make a difference around here. It messed me up a bit,” Jen says. She was going to continue but suddenly she can see Rosemary’s had enough.

“So that was then. It might be different now. Just forget about it,” Jen says.

“Okay,” Rosemary sighs, reaching out to take Jen’s hand. “Thanks. I’m just going to hunker down and consider this a temporary refuge. I’m going to read and do some writing and just catch my breath,” she says.

A nurse comes in the doorway and glances at the three of them, sitting on the bed together like teenagers.  Jen’s heart catches in her throat. It’s “Ratchett” by God. Her icy blue eyes bore into Rosemary and her head cocks to one side, ready to utter a sing-song, iron-fisted command, Jen suspects.

“Rosemary, we allowed your guests to stay to get you settled, but it’s almost time for breakfast and you’ll need to have a nap. It’s likely best if they go now. We don’t allow visitors to stay for meals.”

Jen holds her breath, waiting for the evil “Ratchett” to recognize her, but if she does, she isn’t letting on.

“I’ll just have breakfast in my room then,” says Rosemary in her own forceful sweet school marm way. “That way I can visit a little longer.”

Jen feels like she’s watching two lionesses about to slash each other to death while pretending to serve each other tea and cookies. Both of these women are made of steel.

“Actually, no, you can’t. All meals have to be in the dining hall under our supervision. Our program here is structured, and there are only certain times you can have visitors. It interferes with your schedule,” Ratchett smiles. “So we’ll see you in the dining lounge in 15 minutes,” she says, and briskly walks away.

Jen puts up her hand before Rosemary manages to protest.

“What the hell,” she says.

“It’s true. Just go along for now. Give yourself a few days. I’ll be back tonight after dinner. If you hate it here, I’ll take you home with me,” Jen says.

“Jen, I love you, but you do realize Jace would be one of the people I’m avoiding right now,” Rosemary points out, looking mildly ashamed. Jen puts her arm around Rosemary’s shoulders and leans in.

“Well if Jace is on this story, he won’t be allowed in our house tonight, so don’t worry about Jace. Just call me if you change your mind. Otherwise I’ll see you tonight,” Jen says.

Jen gives her one more squeeze and gets ready to leave. Alby says her goodbyes and joins Jen in the hallway. It is now 7:15 a.m. and Jen is a little concerned about getting home before Jace to goes to work. But she also feels in desperate need of company.

“Alby, do you want to come over for breakfast?” she asks.

“Would you like me to?”

“Yes, very much so. But are you feeling okay?” Jen says, remembering that Alby is newly pregnant and has been up all night. Again. She likely hasn’t seen George in two days, but maybe that’s a good thing.

“A little queasy, a little tired, but I’ll take a nap at your place. I’m not going in today, I’ll get Sandy to take my clients,” Alby says.

“Okay, we’ll have a girls-breakfast-napping party. Chris is at mom’s right now. I’ll give her a quick call and see if I can pick him up tonight instead of this morning.”

“Why don’t you leave the scooter at Rosemary’s until tonight; I’ll take you back there to get it. It’s probably not a great idea to drive it after being up most of the night yet again.”

“Yeah,” Jen agrees.

As she climbs into Alby’s sedan, Jen is happy she will be bringing home proof of her whereabouts and protection from protracted Jace-fighting. She doesn’t want to think about that mess at the moment. As she watches the river glide by, tears slide down her cheeks. She is wondering what life would have been like for that baby that died the night she tried to take her own life. Whether all those sculptures were some perverted form of birth-giving. She thinks of Chris, and can’t imaging pumping his little body full of black beauties and valium and codeine and poison, but that is in fact what she unwittingly did to what would have been his older sister.

She is glad to have Alby with her today. For the company, the sense of safety. She’s not sure what would come of her if she hit the file cabinets alone, began recreating the story in her mind from snatches of Saint’s wicked letters. It is amazing to her how in a moment the mind can shift focus, like a depth of field shot on a long camera lens. One second the image in the foreground is crisp and the background a soft hazy blur. The next, everything shifts, and the close vision is completely blurred while the distant horizon is crisp and clear. That is how she is feeling about her life right now, and she is stunned by the picture she sees looking back.

Once they’re home, Jace is docile in Alby’s presence, just as Jen expected he would be. He’s playing his “sympathetic and supportive” persona. For some reason, she doesn’t believe it, but realizes her perspective is skewed, cynical, and that she is no longer sure what is real and what is not. She is no longer sure because she can now see clearly that backward horizon, can see the unreality she fabricated like some kind of black widow to obscure the harsh fact from view through the sticky gauze of web.

“Jen, I’ll do my best by Rosemary. I’ll take it up chain if Rob insists it has to be me. Just bear with me; it’s hard to be new in the newsroom and draw a line like that,” he says, while getting ready to leave.

Jen is so tired and emotionally raw he has caught her off guard. She looks deep into his eyes and sees the human there, scared to be reprimanded by his boss, wanting so badly to be valued, to win approval. Not just with her. With the newsroom, the world. She also sees concern and the same sinking anxiety she feels. Rosemary is about to become part of the public discourse. There is no way to bury a story that hints of a spinster high school English teacher and her suicidal star pupil. This town will tear her apart.

Suddenly, Jen lurches forward and wraps her arms around Jace’s torso, burying her head in his chest. He’s right here, he’s been right here all along. She is terrified of the stories she tells herself, of the fiction she’s become.

Jen feels like a child skipping school as she pads around the kitchen, fussing with the coffee maker and gazing out the window at the river. The early summer day is slipping away, sun full and high and kissing the gentle waves smoothed by the gathering wind. She feels strange without Chris. She hopes the coffee will lift the soft cotton that swaddles her senses in groggy comfort. She feels like there’s something she should be doing.

Alby is still asleep in the guest room, and Jen debates whether to wake her. It’s 1 o’clock now, six hours since they arrived home from their trip to 3East with Rosemary.

The gurgling stops with a last long hiss and Jen pours herself a tall cup, excited by the promise of caffeine. She wanders out to the back sunroom and curls up in her oversized, circular rattan chaise. She is still for a while, musing over her recent immersion in so many memories she’d held down for so long. She feels like she’s lived out the last few years a stranger to herself. Glossed over so much, just operated over top of it. It’s little wonder she’s shut down with Jace. Jace, she realizes, has not been real to her, any more real than a subject in a sculpture. Something happened to that emotional connection, cauterized it. Did she start out running from herself, but in the end, running from him? Did he remind her too much of where she’s been, or was he the place she hid herself, exhausted from the sheer effort of being, and ready to melt into a reinvented life. She rises and moves toward the file cabinet. Slowly, she sinks to the ground, with her back to the exterior wall. She pulls open the bottom drawer and roots through the rainbow of colored files until she finds the one she’s looking for. Their love letters, emails, poems to one another. Their wedding vows and silly stag party flyers. As she scans these dog-eared documents, this evidence of emotion, she is overwhelmed by his gentle, dreamy love. Where did that go?

“Oh my, Jen, tell me you’re not in the file cabinet,” teases Alby, her voice still ragged with sleep.

Jen turns toward the doorway, caught in the act, and beams a stiff grin.

“Caught me,” Jen says. Her lip starts to tremble.

Alby walks up to Jen and lowers herself to the ground. She seems able to tell Jen’s about to cry.

“You wanna talk about it?” she asks.

Jen nods, the tears now betraying her, hot and salty. Alby waits patiently, was trained to do this. Jen remembers.

“It’s just, it’s just everything,” Jen manages to say, between sobs.

“It’s Jace, who’s like a Martian to me, a mean Martian. It’s Rosemary, I mean, what the hell really went on there? And it’s Gary, well not so much Gary as the specter of Saint. I just feel like I’ve disappeared. And taking Rosemary to the hospital seems to have unleashed this flood of memory that, well, it’s like I was emotionally detached from it. It was just a story I read somewhere. But now I feel it,” Jen says, rushing the words, lest she lose her nerve for candor.

“It’s a lot,” says Alby, soothing. She takes the folder from Jen’s hand, glances quickly at the poem vows from Jace and Jen’s wedding program. She smiles to herself.

“You know, your vows were beautiful,” she says. “I’m sure the problems you’ve been having with Jace are part of what has you feeling so vulnerable. What’s flooding back now is maybe a sign that you never really worked through it. I mean, released it completely. We tell ourselves we’re over things, but they bubble up like an infection at every moment of life stress if we really haven’t made peace with them. It means that you’re now strong enough to put it to bed. God knows, I’m going through that with George now, because of the baby. Because of our history. So if you had to pick, what’s your strongest feeling about it all?”

“Shame,” Jen blurts.

“You mean embarrassment?” she asks, “About the suicide attempt?”

“No, the shame of what led me to it.”

Alby is silent for a moment. She sets the folder aside. Her brow, normally high and clear, furrows slightly. Alby only knows part of the story from their early conversations. Jen can tell she’s wondering now if there’s more. After a few long beats, Alby decides to dig in.

“Okay. What exactly lead you to it?” she asks. “If you want to say.”

Jen takes a deep breath, as if she’s about to plunge into cold water. “Everything I said before is part of it, was true in its own way. And I did not know I was pregnant. But what I did know is that I’d slept with Gary behind Saint’s back. Most of that night is still foggy, and at the time. I was drunk, there’d been a party. Saint had gone to bed early and had been a miserable bitch that night…”

“Holy shit, Jen. That makes so much more sense than anything you’ve shared before. So it’s simple, really. You hated yourself for doing it. For betraying her,” Alby said.

“Wow, yeah. So much so I couldn’t even face up to it. I mean, here she was, sacrificing herself for this “prole” as I’d called him, asshole that I was, for love or something. A love she thought she could control. Then one night I accuse him of using her for her money and you know what he said?”

“What,” says Alby, wrapping her arms around her knees and forming a human rocking chair.

“He said that for a guy like him who’d had a hard go, it didn’t hurt that she made good money, had nice things.”

“So then you slept with him?”

“Yeah. But I think what was in my mind was that then I’d have something over him, or be able to prove to her that he wasn’t worthy. The problem was it just kinda happened, and after it was over, I felt so sad, so guilty, I could never tell her. I started to notice how happy he made her, and yet I knew – or I thought I knew – it was all a lie. It was just so shitty, and I was part of that shitty.”

Jen reaches for a Kleenex from the box on the desk and begins to wipe her streaked face. She feels a million times better already. To have allowed that conscious passage, admission, confession. It didn’t seem so smothering now, that faint memory. She now could see clearly how real it all was.

“Okay, so riddle me this, bat girl. Why didn’t you ever tell her and apologize. I mean, you were in therapy with Mitch for six months, and you talked to me a lot that first year after. You must have realized there was a way to free yourself of it, to heal. Instead you carried it, and it festered,” Alby says, cocking her head, but smiling gently.

“Yeah, and burden her with it. I mean, she’d married him by then. What was I going to do? Turn up and say, hey, by the way, your loving husband loves your lifestyle more than he loves you and I know because I fucked him? I think that’s why I avoided her, cut off all contact. I couldn’t tell her and I couldn’t not tell her. But seriously, what’s weird is I haven’t even thought about it all consciously for a good few years. When things started coming back to me at Rosemary’s the other night it was like a movie I’d watched or something. And I seriously didn’t even connect that that was how I’d come to be pregnant. I mean I shoved it so far down I thought I’d had an immaculate conception or something. Even now, I’m unclear whether we actually had intercourse. I know I woke up naked.”

“Wow. Okay. So now it’s time to let it go. You see what this story is costing you with Jace, right?”

“What do you mean,” Jen asks. She does not see a Jace connection here.

“Well, our unconscious minds are childlike and straightforward. If that was how a husband was, her husband, then yours could be that way too. Deceitful. Unfaithful. In it for different reasons. “Wrong” reasons. I mean, I’ve heard you speak the words, suggest that Jace only wanted you because he perceived you as “going somewhere” – then he put up the road blocks, just to make sure you never went far enough to leave his orbit…”

Jen saw she was right. She’d said and felt that a million times. And she could see how Gary shattered her ability to trust. In her mind’s eye, Gary wasn’t so different from Jace.

Jen and Alby are making a very late brunch of cinnamon French toast when the phone rings. Jen turns down the gas and searches for the errant cordless while the spitting grease crackles. The phone fills her with dread, likely because it has heralded nothing but bad news of late. Just as she finds it laying innocently in the magazine rack and answers it breathlessly, the line is dead. She checks the call display. It is a private number. She sets the phone it on the kitchen table and resumes cooking. Then it starts to ring again.

Jen sighs, and this time Alby reaches for it and answers.

Jen steals a glance at her while flipping the browning pieces of egg-soaked bread.

“Hello? Hellooooo. Hellooooo there,” Alby says. She shrugs. “A hangup.”

“Shit, I told him to stop.”

“You think it’s Pete?”

“Who else,” Jen asks.

Alby groans. Jen realizes this is not the time to deal with Pete.

After brunch, they decide to go visit Jen’s mom and pick up Chris. As they open the front door, they hear a spray of gravel from a car accelerating. Before Jen can register what’s happening and look out to the street, the car is gone. She’s certain it’s Pete, and feels sick about it. They get into Alby’s car and Jen asks her to stop so she can reach into the mailbox.  There is a large manila envelope with no postage and no return address. She opens it, setting the other mail down on the console while Alby carefully pulls out onto the road.

“Holy fuck,” Jen gasps.

“What is it,” Alby says. She seems uneasy, but she does not take her eyes off the winding road to look at Jen. She never looks natural driving a car.

“That wasn’t Pete,” Jen says. The book is a leather-bound pre-fab type of journal, the expensive blank ones you buy in a stationary store. Jen recognizes Saint’s handwriting, and marvels at the dates. The journal starts the summer before her suicide attempt, when Saint and Gary were first dating.

Jen’s vision blurs, the scrawling words swim.

“Who was it, then,” Alby wants to know, braking slightly as if speech and following a curve don’t go together.

“Had to be Gary…I think,” Jen says.

“I thought Gary left for the east coast.”

“So did I, but it couldn’t be Saint. I can’t imagine her parting with a journal,” Jen says, a sour realization dawning in her mind.

She flips through the pages, date by date, to the weekend of her indiscretion, suspiciously blank, then the entries that followed. She scans the pages, flushing. So she knew. Saint knew all along. “Holy fuck…” Jen mutters.

“Tell me,” says Alby, knowing but waiting confirmation.

“She knew, that’s all. She knew what happened. Heard us,” Jen says.And she married him a year later. In her mind, Jen was the traitor, not Gary. Which was likely true, Jen thinks. “This changes everything.”

“How so?” Alby wants to know.

“She could have told me she knew.”

“You could have told her too,” Alby reminds her.

“I don’t like this,” Jen says, snapping the book shut. She will read it another time. She is not in the right frame of mind to work out the meaning of this, although she’s dying to see it, to see the situation from an impossible vantage. Her own curiosity is in some ways macabre. She leans her head against the window and watches the budding trees glide by. She clutches the leather book under her arm, afraid to let it go, set it down, forget it. She feels certain that there is a full understanding inside. An answer she has been searching for, and hiding from.