Robert Devereaux

Walking Wounded

***

THE GIFT

Her hands can sense it within your body: the ticking time bomb of disease, the cry of inner hurt, the coming of something as simple as a cold. And her hands can heal it, if she chooses, or they can leave you with your pain-and your fate…

THE OBSESSION

Now Katt must make a choice, between curing a husband who had been unfaithful or letting him die, between taking his extraordinary lover for herself, or letting her go…

THE TOUCH

For Katt it will be a journey through discovery, sensuality, and death. But in the shadows of her life, at a restaurant and on the street, a serial killer has begun to stalk her and her lover. And he will take them both into a darkness where hands must heal, or hands must kill…

WALKING WOUNDED

The power to heal. The power to kill. The power to choose…

***

From Publishers Weekly

In his second erotic thriller, Devereaux (Deadweight) carves deep into the psyche of Katt, a disillusioned wife who must choose between using her miraculous powers to cure her terminally ill and cheating husband, or letting him die and taking his lover for herself. Caught in the middle of this wild love triangle is Conner, Katt's 13-year-old son, who has inherited his father's disease. A drill-wielding serial killer, introduced early, further complicates the plot and plays a vital role in the novel's climax. Beautiful and sensual one page, frighteningly repulsive and twisted the next, Walking Wounded is well-suited to an era of alternative lifestyles, New Age mysticism and senseless violence.

***

'Devereaux is horror's hottest new star.'

-Fangoria

'Devereaux delivers, with a super-heated mix of murder, dark eroticism, and… online sex.'

-Lucy Taylor, author of The Safety of Unknown Cities

'A rare treat… At the heart of all Devereaux's writing are the twin embryos of love and pain. In Walking Wounded he has explored their perverse dependency with an expert's tender touch. This book is both a challenge and a rare treat!'

-Poppy Z. Brite, author of Exquisite Corpse

***

Scaning & primary formating: pagesofdeath.

Secondary formating & proofing: pua.

***

This book is dedicated personally to

Christine Cary Leilani Hall and Carla Renee Plambeck

wise kind loving voices on the net

and organizationally to

Frighten the Horses Straight But Not Narrow and Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics

It is dangerous to dream of wine, it is worse

To speak of wailing or blood:

For the images that the mind makes

Find a way out, they work into life.

-EURIPIDES, Medea (trans. Jeffers)

Where is the ebullient infinite woman who… hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives, hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?

-HELENE CIXOUS, Surrealism & Women

The definition of good and evil was difficult, but those two eternal entities did not always coincide with the community’s loose and mutable moral dichotomy. In other words, what was right was not necessarily good, and evil and wrong did not have to be the same thing.

-ANTHONY BURGESS, You’ve Had, Your Time

Life breaks in on philosophy like morning.

-HERMAN MELVILLE, Pierre

PROLOGUE

A LAYING-ON OF HANDS

The day Katt Galloway decided to kill her husband did not begin unusually. No revelations hung in the air as it coaxed morning from dawn and turned it into afternoon.

Fridays were Fridays. Folks’ minds were on plans for the weekend. Katt’s too, somewhat. But mostly she mulled the coming end to her separation from Marcus and their son Conner. She’d be thrilled to see Conner. But her husband meant freedom gone, a chokehold, a strangulation.

The job at Hewlett-Packard had opened up in February. These days you compromised. Katt had come out on her own, rented a room north of Colorado State, flown the family in to find a house during Easter week, and made the place her own, a refuge for the spirit, a breathing space.

Four months without Marcus. She’d savored them.

But her freedom was approaching its end.

Ten days and they’d be back, coming off the road from Iowa. And the hidden longing she never spoke about, never dared speak about, the need to be unshackled, would return in spades. She’d had years of that. She faced a lifetime more, invisible bars holding her in for good.

She sighed, raised her eye to the cubicle walls, and spotted the digital readout. The time had slipped by. Grace Kantor was due for her massage at four thirty. Katt just had time enough to log off, catch Timberline north to Prospect and Riverside, and pull into the Healing Pathways parking lot. And if Grace was her usual ten minutes late, Katt would have time to change and compose herself.

She poked her head out of her cubicle, wished Schreck and Darwin a superb weekend, and hit the exit doors to the second-floor stairwell. The June sun was made bearable by a patchy cloudcover, and the traffic was mercifully sparse and the lights in her favor as she cut across Fort Collins to Old Town Square.

Healing Pathways was a simple two-story building next to the food co-op. Good energy, said Lyra and Joseph, the founders of the place. A building whose design and layout caressed the soul, Katt translated, thinking kindly of her friends but not buying into their New Age jargon.

Other masseuses and their resident acupuncturist were at work behind closed doors on the second floor. Katt did this for extra money, yes-but primarily to ground herself after hours in front of moving electrons. Grace Kantor, a retiree in her seventies, creaked the stairs when she took them. Katt heard the stairs creak now.

“Hello, Grace.” Katt met her in the hallway.

“Katt,” the old woman said, a tiny wave, a crinkle of her eyes. She was big-boned. Her flesh sagged. This was her third session, and she looked healthier with each one. Little wonder. The massage Lyra and Joseph had given Katt in their cabin west of town had had its effect-had gifted her, those two nights, with a power that grew so gradually it felt not miraculous but inevitable. That she’d come to accept it with such nonchalance, such surety, astounded her. And tonight they’d massage her a third time, under a full moon. Full moon or not, Katt expected yet another surge in what she’d come to call the power of healing.

Ratt left the room so Grace could disrobe in private. When she came back, the old woman was almost asleep again, lying supine under the sheet on the massage table. It had been convenient, her dozing. It made working deeper magic on her easier. Katt could leave off massage and place her hands on Grace's ribcage, checking the pleural fluid about the lungs, the infection-empyema, they called it-she had healed the last time Grace had come in. Her rasp had been audible without a stethoscope; now it was gone.

A puffy pink mole, looking like crushed fungus, stood on the woman’s neck just below baggy rolls of chin.

Marcus had a much smaller one, and nubbier, where his dark chest hairs began. As she shut her eyes and tried to press her vision down toward the linings of Grace’s lungs, Marcus refused to leave her thoughts.

They’d been married fourteen years before, had Conner twelve months later-and drop by drop, their marriage had lost its vitality since then. Though they wouldn’t hit the road for another week yet, it felt almost as if Marcus and Conner had already arrived in Colorado.

She tried to shut them out, tried to focus on massage and healing, the potency she’d gained from the cabin, from her friends’ hands moving upon her and from the atmosphere of the place. She did her best to check Grace’s pleurisy.

But it proved impossible.

Marcus and Conner came too vividly to mind.

She could see them now, beading along the thin black wire of I-80, leaving Iowa City behind at last. Conner’s sweet smile had made her marriage bearable, that wreckage that she’d never let on to Marcus was a wreckage. To see her son again would be her sole comfort. It’d be good to hold him, to gauge his self-conscious discomfort at being mommied, at once amusing and offputting, poised as he was on the uneasy cusp of adulthood. Despite the untriggered genetic death he and Marcus most likely held inside-Huntington’s disease had caused the lingering death of Conner’s grandfather-her son had borne bravely the news that he might be the victim some day of a fatal brain disorder.

As for Marcus, slowly growing away, it had been easy to lie by omission, a habit she’d clung to for years now. If he’d ever asked her point blank, she wondered if she’d have been courageous enough to say, No, I’m not happy; in fact I’m miserable. Doubtful. That would have led them, as inevitable as day, to divorce. And divorce was not to be considered, an option unthinkable among Hunt women-so her mother had hammered into her from birth.

Not even when she snooped onto his PC and discovered his ineptly hidden file of correspondence with Love Bunny (the alias his lover hid behind), the real reason for his step down the academic ladder to Colorado State-not even then did she consider confronting him. His whole push to move westward had been fueled by lust, something Katt had not learned until she’d accepted the job with HP and made plans to move out early, while Conner finished up seventh grade and Marcus sold the house and brought to completion his spring semester’s classes. Newly moved, Katt fiddled with her PC’s modem, checking out a handful of electronic bulletin boards available locally. She’d found this Love Bunny logged on to the same BBS as she, and had gone into chat mode with her, typing private realtime messages back and forth. The woman had been strangely flirtatious, and Katt-memories of a brief college fling resurfacing-had, to her surprise, responded in kind. A weird mix of anger and arousal held her during the first encounter and those that followed. People took aliases (hers was Newcummer), let their sensuality bloom under anonymity, even attended adult BBS parties to allow it fleshly expression. A week from tomorrow, in fact, she had agreed to drive to Denver, meet Love Bunny at a BBS party, and attend her first such gathering in the company of her husband’s lover.

The old woman on the table grunted in her sleep.

Katt opened her eyes. There was that mole again, its blurt of flesh pink and puffy.

No danger that Grace would awaken.

Katt flowed her hands from the cottage-cheese ribcage up the sides of the torso to the shoulders and neck. Rubs there, gentle, closer. Then she touched the mole, knowing enough to barely rest her fingertips on it, nearly cupping it beneath the curve of three fingers.

She probed the mole, keeping her eyes open this time. Her brow furrowed.

The thing was benign.

Katt began to wonder if she could undo the mole, make smooth the skin where it bloomed. She trained her healing power on the pink excrescence. Under her intense scrutiny something began to happen, a loosening in the cells.

Then, a dark curiosity arose. She thought of Marcus. Somehow, with no great deliberation, she turned her intent around. Into the puff-pink burl, she willed a malignancy. Completely under control; nothing reckless. It frightened her how completely under control it was.

What was she doing? How could she be willing harm to anyone? And yet she was. It felt dreadful to be doing it but the urge to press on overwhelmed her.

The mole darkened.

A curl of blood sliced along its base.

Grace winced.

Katt broke out into a sweat, almost sobbing. But she held her sobs in check, reversing her power again, calming the cellular agitation, restoring the mole to its inactive state. In all that time, she couldn’t remember breathing.

Now she began again.

“That feels good, Katt.” The woman’s voice was lazy. She was still half asleep. Her mouth in motion looked like a cathedral made of weathered soap, pocked and slubbery.

“I’m glad, Grace,” she managed.

Inside, she shivered; outside, she was cool and calm.

She would look like this woman on her deathbed, years of Marcus ravaging her face, her body. Suddenly she hated Grace. It made no sense. It wasn’t charitable. But it was all she could do to keep from terminating the appointment. And when, at last, the old woman softly lumbered out the door, the stairway creaking as she descended, Katt vowed never to be available to her ever again.

***

Gone home, she blendered up an Ultimate Meal smoothie and augmented it with popcorn and vitamins. Living single made it pointless most days to spend a lot of time on meals.

She took in the clock over the sink. Ten past seven. She was expected at the cabin about eight.

Time enough to turn on her PC, check for e-mail and postings on CFRnet-a message repository for BBSs along Colorado’s Front Range-and log off.

As she headed toward the front door and up the stairs to the bedroom, in her mind’s eye Grace Kan-tor lay beneath her hands, bearing that squat mole and reminding her oddly enough of Marcus. Handsome brute. Dark, charming, tight-bellied embracer. Katt had loved him once. Had loved him fiercely. What love remained for him was a pilot light on a dormant furnace, present, yes, but feeble and dim.

Still bright in the room. No need for a lightswitch. She uncovered the PC, booted it up. When it had completed its initial gyrations and the DOS prompt appeared, she ran QuickLink II, hit Okay, then alt-P, arrowing down the menu to The Symposium BBS’s subscriber line and pressing Enter. The modem dialed, beeping along a muted scale of notes. A connection was made, she typed Newcummer and her password, and there was The Symposium’s Main Menu.

Not five seconds later, as she was preparing to check out CFRnet, a message blipped across her screen:

“Love Bunny here,” it said. “Meet me in Chat?”

Elation seized her. And confusion. And quiet anger. And a whole array of other emotions. She’d never met this woman, but Love Bunny had turned into a tantalizing nub of torment, all in one intriguing month.

Katt hotkeyed back to the Main Menu and selected Chat Mode. C’mon, she thought, c’mon. It always took so long, getting through the preliminary screens. But at last, she was in. “Here I be!” she typed. She knew the program had identified her to Love Bunny as **Newcummer**.

“Well hey hey, succulent one. What’s shakin’?” This woman’s typing was atrocious, backspacing, mind-changes, a torturous treat watching her thoughts slowly formulate.

“Can’t chat long,” Katt typed. “Gonna be massaged.”

“Mmmmmmm! Sounds peachy! Who’s the lucky guy or gal who gets to fondle you?”

“Both. Friends of mine. A married couple.”

“Ooooh. Sizzle sizzle, burn burn. You *are* the hot one, Newcummer. Can I come watch? Or join in? I promise not to eat much.”

Hot chat, they called it. Love Bunny was good at it. But Katt’s reaction was ever a mishmash of lust and anger. Love Bunny’s words teased. But for all Katt knew, Marcus had been the recipient of the same phrases. “It’s nothing like that. No sex. These are pros. Good buds.”

“How boring.:'(:'(”

“Have to go,” Katt typed, wishing she didn’t.

“Okay, lover. Don’t forget the twelfth.”

Saturday, June twelfth, the BBS party in Denver.

“I won’t. Leave me directions, okay?”

“Okay. Here’s a big fat smoocheroo on yer lips. You get to-pick which pair!”

Outrageous.

“Bye for now, hon,” Katt typed.

“See ya.”

Out of chat mode. She logged out, then turned the PC off so that the monitor darkened and the fan stopped.

Seven thirty. Time to hit the road.

The phone rang.

Katt hesitated. Lyra and Joseph calling it off? Her husband? But he never phoned unless it had to do with the move. Friday night. Marcus would be out boffing a senior or a secretary, or on the make for one, circumspect as all hell but with his fuck-me antennae out and his radar honed in on female flesh.

She picked up the receiver.

“Katt. Hi. It’s your mom.”

Instantly the bedroom darkened. Katt felt the parlor rise up around her, that place of dark woods and antiques, of hunched tea-quiet clinks of china on china-and gossip between Mom and Granny Hunt, that place where Katt’s early identity had been forged.

“Hi, Mom,” she said. “How are you?”

“How is the marriage doing?” Her first question each time she called. Katt pictured her mother’s thin red lips moving. As a little girl, Katt’s mom had somehow survived her own mother’s madness, the slaughter of husband and son and the sparing of her only daughter. But over the years, and who knew when it had begun, Mom had taken on a madness of her own, grown old and pinched before her time, a spill of common concerns ever escaping her mouth, both in Katt’s childhood and afterward over the phone.

“Fine, fine, just fine, Mom.” A rote reply. Lie and lie and lie again. Feel the lie settle in, bone deep.

“That’s good, Katt. Your separation’s rough, I know. I was against it from the beginning. But it’s almost over and soon you’ll be a family again. What’s it now? Just a week more?”

“Ten days. They arrive on the fourteenth.”

“Yes. Just a week more and they’ll be in your bosom, where they belong. You’ve got to stay together, like Bill and me have. We were brought up together. He doesn’t say much but he doesn’t have to. When you find the right man, Katt, if you’re smart you cleave to him.”

Mom was into her drone. Katt uh-huh’d automatically, a habit she’d developed over decades.

A hatred of divorce had forged a solemn bond between Katt’s mother and the woman who had adopted her back when Grandma Jasper’d gone mad. Mom had been bad enough. But when Granny Hunt dropped by, the pair of them hunched and cowled in the parlor like slit-eyed vultures, cups of tea clinked through their day-long recitals of that obsessive theme. Hunts never do the D-thing, oh no we stick by our men. We see it through, we compromise like good folks’re supposed to. The D-thing’s for the morally lax. Life is no picnic even if, on your wedding day, the basket’s made up and the blanket’s folded and it seems like that’s your destination. Cuz you gotta work at it. You ’re two. Not one. And you’re sure to fly apart unless you struggle to stay together. Nonsense, Katt thought; natural marriages didn’t need work. But it played deep in her head, played from as far back as she could recall, so that it withered her will whenever the urge to talk about separation came. She just let the sadness grow, took long walks, and slept it off.

“You hear me, Katt?” her mother droned.

“Uh-huh,” Katt said.

“Because the D-thing’ll haul up and bite you, yes it will, if you let your vigilance drop for an instant.”

Katt’s head told her her mother’s ravings were absurd and even comical. But her heart spoke differently. She’d been cribbed in that parlor, heard the dark mahogany clink of teacup on saucer in her bones, imbibed their mutterings with her formula. Though she could remember no specifics, the D-thing had been ever on their lips back then.

“Granny Hunt pointed with pride to her family line, a hardy stock who believed in working on their problems, not running from them. Work produces grit; running away makes for mush-brained ninnies. And you’re no ninny, Katt, but a true Hunt woman. I know you are.”

“You’re right, Mom.”

They’d drawn her into their mumblings, addressing her first in the crib, like one might talk to a pet. And when she started babbling, they brought her in in earnest, that topic rooting her solidly in their love. When she went to school, she soon learned to put away her D-thing talk; but at home, for years, it won her way into her mother’s heart like nothing else could. As for her father-as for Bill-he came home from work, and sat in his study, and suffered her sitting on his lap, until she caught on that he didn’t want her there. Dad seldom spoke. He looked at Katt even less often. He seemed in remembrance blasted, like a tree trunk scored by lightning.

She couldn’t divorce Marcus. It would kill her mom’s love for her. It would drive her over the edge. She’d be the first Hunt woman to do it. Whenever she got near that notion in her head, it threatened to shred her soul.

“Mom, I have to go.”

“-and they, I don’t know if you remember them, they lived five houses down… oh, I’m sorry, was this a bad time to call, Katt?”

Katt said it wasn’t, although it was.

Then she lied about the massage-something her mother would never understand-making it a late-night dinner date with a girlfriend at work.

“No problem, Katt. I’ll call again soon. You go and have a good time.” Her calls were sporadic, unpredictable as the wind. They invariably threw Katt off balance.

“Okay, Mom. We’ll talk later.”

Her mother said goodbye and Katt hung up.

Relief, the dropping of lead weights from her spirit. No more psychic drain from that quarter for at least a few days.

The clock on her nightstand said 7:45. Christ! Time to run. Fortunately, Lyra and Joseph were lax about clock time. But Katt liked to honor her commitments-one minute to gather her things and she was pummeling down the stairs and heading for the garage.

***

Their cabin was warm and cozy, and they were working her over, Lyra and Joseph, as she lay on her back, gazing through a clear curved skylight at the glowing round moon above. She’d been up here a few times before, but always in daylight, when pure blue broken by slow scuds of cloud or chance glides of Canadian geese blessed her eyes. But Lyra, odd duck, had gently averred that the energy vortex was at its strongest under a full moon and Katt had given in finally to her repeated invitation.

Energy vortex. Sure, why not? Massage was for Katt an avocation, a supplement to the software work that paid the bills. But Lyra, co-founder of Healing Pathways, had sunk her soul into ortho-bionomy, a massage technique that focused on trauma. Over the years, Lyra’d gathered about her practitioners in aromatherapy, in psychic counseling, in bodywork of all sorts. Small wonder, then, that a few odd ideas developed, that they were reinforced and formed a web of mutually supportive harmlessness in that lighdy incestuous family near Old Town Square. If it worked for Lyra, fine. As she lay supine on the sheepskin rug under a cone of moonlight, Katt mused that anything but prudent silence about the existence of energy vortexes would have been in bad taste.

Especially so given the downright magical power this same energy vortex had clearly given her, over the course of her visits to this cabin. Did she believe the New Age trappings, the crystals and candles and all the rest, had any effect? No.

But something clearly had.

And now Lyra and her laconic spouse were helping her body find itself, feel its way into places it most wanted to be, detect resistance and explore its borders. Marcus would not leave her mind, not even in the peace of Lyra’s cabin.

“Relax,” said Lyra. “Don’t try to resist.” Joseph, between her legs, had them elevated, bent at the knee and cradled in his muscular arms. Lyra’s hands supported her neck and head, gentling them this way and that.

Here they used no table, preferring proximity to the earth. Massage tables were fine in their place, Lyra had said, but the Earth Mother worked better without them. A decided intentness gripped them as they bent over her and sculpted her flesh with their hands.

“Let it all go,” Lyra soothed in Katt’s ear.

“Mmm,” she replied, sighing it. Massage, especially here, always triggered strong thoughts and tonight’s were the strongest yet; but she’d mastered the art of relaxing her body, even as visions raced brilliant and razor-sharp through her mind.

Still, tonight it was difficult.

Katt felt Marcus’s hold on her tighten.

“Let the tension go.” Lyra’s words fluted, streamed crystal over rock. The cabin rose again to view, a piney smell, the rich glow of the fireplace blocked by a couch, her friends’ hands warm and suggestive upon her, floating her, gently rocking her into goodness.

“Sorry,” Katt said.

“You’re perfect,” countered Lyra, “just as you are.”

Candlelight played over Joseph at her legs, his huge' muscled arms emerging from an all-cotton shirt that vee’d at the neck. Above, Lyra’s dark pageboy swayed about her babyface in the same rhythm as her stroking hands. Their shirts matched; same catalog, the one selling Deva pants, drawstring, loose-fitting, environmentally proper.

Such sure hands, both of them. Katt had never asked them but Lyra and Joseph seemed to have been together for lifetimes. They’d found this land, built their cabin at (they claimed) the center of the vortex, planted an earth flag ineptly into the soft soil just outside the doorway, its thin pole oddly angled and waggly-but they’d made up their minds that karma so dictated, that spearing it into the ground uncemented seemed somehow more “natural.” The ground, at a radius of a hundred yards, was dotted with a series of dug and refilled holes, some strange way they’d devised to commune with the Earth Mother.

Still, for all their quirkiness, Katt loved them.

And it could not be denied that, in her three visits to this cabin, something new had been introduced into her own massage techniques. Not just the novelty, to her, of orthobionomy, a gentler osteopathy that put one’s body in touch with its own right ways of being; but some peculiar other thing, the deep healing, the surety-or was it mere hallucination-that she could see and sense and influence the health of what lay beneath her touch, even unto nerve and muscle and bone. Odd fancy. And yet when she’d gone along, not resisting, her strokes deepening downward, her clients had risen and dressed with the most amazing looks on their faces and the most grateful compliments on their lips as their sessions ended. Here, in Lyra’s cabin, the bizarre notion that she could heal-and more so with each visit and exercise of these new ways-seemed a certainty. Power of suggestion perhaps. Power of place. A harmless delusion, a sure sign (Katt chuckled to herself) that she was going off the deep end.

Crystals hung everywhere here. Katt knew Joseph kept worry dolls under his pillow; Lyra was big on soulcatchers and the writings of James Redfield and Mario Morgan. Her friends dabbled in all the blithering mindfads of the New Age. Katt wondered if their influence, subtle as it was, had damaged her in some way. She rejected all that stuff as intellectual pablum; and when she was removed from the massage table, when her hands weren’t locating discomfort deep in the body and easing it, she wondered if she might be losing her mind.

Losing her mind? Tell that to Lana Phelps, a driven woman who’d mentioned ulcers before Katt began to massage her a week before. Above her navel, Katt had paused, had directed energy to the inflamed lesion that came so clear to her inner vision, had seen it diminish and the stomach lining soften and heal. That night, Katt felt she’d been party to a miracle. Afterward she doubted. But now, as the earth cradled her and the moonlight drifted down upon her, she knew clearly that it had indeed happened.

Grace Kantor came to mind. The mole. Marcus.

Katt’s mood darkened.

Beneath the sheepskin rug Katt lay upon, the palm of a goddess flexed. A subtle thing, a chthonic shift.

When the urge arose, the urge that startled her with its audacity, it did so slowly. Mingled in the sweetness of almond oil, a base blent with oil of musk, sandalwood, and dark amber, there came first to Katt the image of her Grandma Jasper. Not the horrific mental image her mother had once conjured and which with the twitch of one eyelid she could recall: the way the police found them, toddler and mother, embraced and crying amid the stench of gore and cordite. No, this was a photo, black-cornered into a fat photo album in the attic, of Grandma at age four on a trike in the living room. Blocked pedals, streamers, two childish hands, and a squinched, bit-lipped look Katt had seen often in the mirror. When her mother found her with the album, Katt suffered a spanking right there, the most violent ever inflicted upon her. Why, she wondered-as a quartet of trained warm hands moved upon her-were images of her insane grandma springing so vividly to mind?

“Some resistance here,” Lyra said quietly, and there was Katt’s friend, a dark fiery glow upon her soft shirt, bent intently to massage her. Katt’s head floated in her maternal grasp. “I wonder what it means.”

“Don’t know,” said Katt. Still, even with the cabin about her and the stars above, the images of her mother’s real mother (the trike, hugging her blood-caked daughter) and her adopted mother (hunched over her teacup, nodding, more rings on her fingers than was natural) persisted and grew. A low voice, under the unhurried crackle of flame, seemed to whisper something-a female voice, lips moving, a black-on-black silhouette of neck and chin. Katt tried to hear it. Tried to see what couldn’t be seen. Skilled at her legs, Joseph moved them am-niotically, his muscular chest brushed with puffs of golden hair where his shirt’s vee plumped them out.

Then the atmosphere in the cabin shifted.

Katt tried to forestall it. I’ll tell him, came the thought, I’ll end it. She could do that. The new powers the cabin had bestowed, the powers she’d drawn to herself from Lyra’s energy vortex-surely they would give her the strength to call it quits. Marcus, we’ve lived apart for four months; let’s remain so, all right? But even as she thought those words, they choked in her. She knew they’d never be said. Hunts never do the D-thing. The terrible phrase spoke with all the force of divine law.

Suddenly she saw herself in the Iowa Medical library, looking over a book of clinical essays about Huntington’s disease. She’d been curious about what Marcus and Conner might be faced with. The words were impenetrable but the images burned into memory, they were so horrendous. Dead rotted brain matter, browned, shriveled; curved vacancies where healthy tissue had once plumped out. Why, she wondered, had those images chosen this moment to return so vividly?

Muffled through wood, an owl hooted in the distance, a swift surge and halt that thrilled her bone-ward. There was a message in that sound, a message that resonated and spread like the bloom of a bell. She couldn’t hear it or she refused. But uprising from the earth, the palm-press she’d felt earlier closed on that sound in a precise mesh. Righteous intent rose in her. Kill Marcus, came its soft cry, sharp as polished bronze, voiced without sound. The dark silhouette, elusive, lay beneath shadow, long enough to mouth it again and drift off into blackness. But howl Her reply, shocking in its swiftness and coldbloodedness, shared the voice’s casual inevitability, which astonished her. Just as swiftly, an answer came: You know how. No words. A soundless sound that sculpted her conviction in utter darkness, holding it up for approval and purchase.

And she saw it all: meeting him coming in from a two-day trek from Iowa, reuniting and pretending more joy than she felt (but no, there would be joy mingled there), being the loving wife and mother even as he went off to prick up his Love Bunny. And then laying on her hands. Her spouse adored the way she massaged him, particularly as she moved into sensual touch. In ten days, on June fourteenth, they would arrive. Katt’s hands itched as she enjoyed the soft mauling of her friends. That day, she would bathe her man and fluff him dry and lie him down and thoroughly massage, to begin with, his face, his brow, his scalp.

Beneath it, the brain.

But no, she tried to throw the temptation off. There in her mind’s eye, Marcus lay naked upon the bed, an ebony nest of curls rising and falling on his chest, still manly and muscular despite his forty-nine years. Below, a plane of flesh led to a riot of dark bestial hair (Mediterranean somehow), where his limp penis lay like a dead eel-carcass waiting to stir. How could she harm him, even being aware of his lies? He had secrets. He’d cored out the heart of their marriage with his lust bunny, yes. But the paradox, and it startled her, was that they were still deep friends despite it all. And they’d continue so even if his trysts came to light.

His death is for you! came the voiceless voice.

A positive good, thought Katt, riding the suggestion as her friends’ hands worked upon her. A way out. A way which not taken would surely mean the death of her spirit. That was what killing her husband (the idea both horrified and excited her) signified.

It could be done. The fancy was strong, and that was often a good indicator that the reality might be achieved.

Ten days and they’d arrive. Ten days to toy with the dark notion, to turn it over again and again in her head.

“You’re unusually tense tonight,” Lyra said, her soft voice as unobtrusive as ever. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” said Katt. “Everything is fine.”

And to her amazement, it was.

1

HAMPERINGS AND PERTURBATIONS

The drive to Denver would take an hour. The sun was touching the mountain peaks to the west. By the time the skyline grew jagged with the city’s downtown, night would be upon them.

Katt studied the profile of the woman driving. Love Bunny. She thought of her that way, even though she knew her name was Sherry Feit-BBS information could be easily cross-checked, real names to aliases, if you wanted badly enough to ferret but someone’s identity.

The passage I-25 followed, straight south, was known as Colorado’s Front Range. As Love Bunny drove, the talk kept to safe topics-the explosive growth in Fort Collins and outlying areas, the Front Range’s changeable weather, how the Old Town Square refurbishment was finally firming up as a new city center. Her husband’s lover, Katt knew, was being careful to shield her identity until she gained a clearer notion of who Newcummer (Katt’s computer alias) was. Trust was a precious commodity, not to be doled out too eagerly. Love Bunny was being sensibly cautious.

But she didn’t hold back when it came to filling in, in delicious detail, her precious BBS descriptions of the Denver parties, the couplings she’d seen and participated in these past many months. The host, not without reason, had adopted the alias Twisted Man and his guests likewise went by their BBS names during the festivities.

“Things start normal,” she said, her deep red hair a straight tug of bloodlit filaments in the gathering dusk. “But once his rug rats go beddy-bye, the stuff everyone’s been waiting for finds its way out.” Love Bunny had huge Sarandon breasts, a tight waist, a tasty flair of thighs, and sleek legs. No wonder Marcus lusted after her. Katt had planned to drive down to Denver on her own. But last night, in chat mode on their favorite BBS, Love Bunny had wheedled her into being picked up, at any place of Katt’s choosing, so they could get acquainted on the drive down, after months of BBS conversation, and invade the party in force rather than as singletons.

“Tell me about that Rhino guy again,” said Katt.

Love Bunny sniffed in laughter, a quick impish glance as her eyes came back to the dusk-dimming road. “You have this thing for Rhino, don’t you?”

Katt supposed she had returned again and again to him in their exchanges. “It’s kinda sad and repulsive and-”

“-and your mind has the hots for him, admit it, girl, someone who sits there on the couch and unzips himself and pulls it out to play with, as easy as if he were twiddling his thumbs. It’s gotta fascinate.”

“Doesn’t he, you know, dribble on the fabric?” Love Bunny sniff-laughed again. “Newcummer, I swear, you are truly a perv of the first water. Told you so lots of times.”

Katt smiled. “Admiring me all the while.”

“Of course admiring you-takes one to know one.” The Longmont exit rushed past on the right. “You’ll just have to ask Twisted Man’s wife. I forget her alias, PestleMaid or something goofy like that. Make a fascinating study on Sixty Minutes, house-cleaning after BBS parties, how to get the nastiest stains out of couch and carpet.”

Katt wanted to hate this woman but she couldn’t. Her good looks, her personality, were the reasons for Marcus’s job change, for the whole family’s uprooting. Funny, what moved people to act one way or another. If this redheaded lovely hadn’t been seeing a colleague in American Studies, if he hadn’t invited her to last year’s MLA conference, if she hadn’t gone to Marcus’s lecture on the dramatic use of family relationships in English Renaissance tragedy (these things she had pried out of his PC last fall), Katt and her mate would still be in Iowa, sowing their backyard garden, having friends over, driving to the Amanas for an abundant German-style dinner.

But here she was instead, breathing distance from her husband’s lover-knowing her identity but unknown to her-on her way to an odd, openly sexual party for computer sex fiends, down Denver way. No one she knew, not her project team at HP, not the friends she’d left in Iowa, would have believed her capable of such a thing. Truth to tell, Katt had a difficult time believing it herself.

She held the paragraph of directions and the unwieldy map of Denver in her lap. I-25 onto I-70 and south on 225 into Aurora, an east-hugging suburb. A few wrong turns, a few curses at eyesight and streetsigns in poor light (Love Bunny had memory for locale like a sieve), and they pulled up three houses past their destination. Corner house, two-story, typical as could be. Love Bunny, in her button-up-the-front, break-above-the-knees dress, didn’t knock. She turned the knob and marched right in. To Katt’s surprise, the door was unlocked. Ten feet ahead of them, a stairway rose to a landing, breaking left into the living areas and right toward bed and bath. A cushion of blond hair bobbed on the pleasing head of a thirtyish man. “All-right-it’s-Love-Bunny!” his pauseless words hurtled forth.

“Hello, twisted one,” said Love Bunny, ascending the stairs in her best slink. “This is Newcummer, who lights up Fort Collins with her lust.”

Twisted Man appraised her. “I’ll bet she does,” came the response, but Katt knew he harbored doubts and that he spoke more from form than substance. “Come on up!” With a gleam of gold at one lobe and a subtle musky scent, he was a sturdy man, warm and engaging, detached by choice from day-to-day routine, as were they all. Ushering them into the kitchen area, he played the game of remembering everybody’s alias, and Katt nodded and let the intros he spoke slide past her ears. A few couples. A surprising number of hefty single women seated around the table. One scrawny young guy with specs bowed low and kissed her hand, Love Bunny’s too (but his leer spoke volumes about past exchanges), when Twisted Man introduced them.

Odd. In one corner of the living room, though it was mid-June, stood a Christmas tree, a couple of little girls in pajamas tossing dice on a board. When Katt asked their host about it, he grinned. “Special goings-on around that tree last New Year’s Eve. Me and PestleMaid keep it up to remind us of certain, um, lace and latex ornaments some of our guests adorned its branches with.” Ah, she said. She knelt, attempted to say hi to the girls but they glared at her and continued their game. Bing-bong went the chimes. A tap on her shoulder. “It’s Rhino,” Love Bunny said, and this beached-whale walrussy sort of mustachioed guy ambled up into view, glad-handing Twisted Man and waving at other folks like faded royalty recalling past parades. He found a drink- or rather, PestleMaid, knowing his tastes, had it handy for him in advance. Tugging at his knee creases, he settled into one end of the long couch, adjusting, nodding at Katt and Love Bunny, righting his butterscotch eyeglass frames with the fingers not clutching his drink.

“Stay with me,” Katt murmured to her companion.

“Don’t worry,” came the reply. “He observes, he does himself favors, but he only rises-gets up, I mean-for an occasional potty break. It’s a sight to see.” Love Bunny smiled and Katt noticed that, pretty as she was, her teeth stalactited out of high pink gums.

A couple arrived, cute off-kilter folks, with a sweet shy girlfriend in tow. Nope. Correction, they’d happened to arrive simultaneously-but Bashful broke off from them, and sat in an armchair near Katt’s folding chair. In soft thoughtful tones, from behind a Veronica Lake waterfall of auburn hair, she ventured upon a verbal volley full of the oddest and most brilliant wordplay Katt had ever heard. A young man, owner of Phantom Zone, a Denver BBS, rolled out a passable Steve Martin imitation on Bashful’s other side. He was clearly drawn to the shy young girl, puzzled, awed, and bowled over by her. But Katt watched him run his eyes over Love Bunny too, when she swayed by to check on Katt’s state of mind before returning to the hard knot of raucous partiers crowded around the kitchen table, running through rounds of beer and jokes. A belcher showed, a six-pack on his shoulder, some jock boozer seeming out of place though he appeared less so as time went on.

Strange. Two days more, Monday midafternoon, Marcus and Conner would pull in off the road, movers following by a day’s lag or so. It seemed, here in this night-darkened house, an eternity away. Protesting ritually, the pajama-girls reboxed their Risk! game and dawdled off toward some hidden recess of the upstairs. Katt wondered if they were locked in, or if they’d contrived to place hidden mikes or cameras where Mom and Dad would never find them. Already, the walrus man’s hand was busy at his lap. He brought his iced tumbler there, an odd gesture, she thought, until she realized he was anchoring the zipper so his free hand made a smooth ripping glide downward without snag. Single-hand to unbelt, unsnap at the top. There bloomed a sudden limp V of trouser, a weary gull’s wingspan, an unconfined bloat of white belly outward. And what had been private was now public, the pull of his hand as casual as an idle scratch. He drank as his fingers moved, then righted the glass, ice cubes knocking about like clattered miniblinds. His eyes roved over women in the kitchen, less so here in the front room.

She’d been listening to Bashful spin incomprehensible biochemical puns around her bewildered prey, content to be an outsider to what went on. Then the stroked cock across the way appeared, so matter-of-fact it did nothing to heat her up, and yet it was the first distant trumpeting of the theme of exposed flesh, a theme now threatening variations at the other end of the couch. A plump henna-rinsed woman verging on fat had started playful banter with Twisted Man about the U-swooped top she wore over a busteous bosom-as to whether she dared reveal any more. Katt looked at Love Bunny on her left, who smiled and shrugged and clinked her glass of ice held in a down-clawed grip, hunched over like a pretty young vulture, legs crossed. Twisted Man’s hands sculpted the air, a hefty squeeze of cantaloupes his point of comparison.

“Softer and warmer. And bigger, dammit,” she said, a grab of hands bunched at her sweeping neckline. The young man she’d arrived with, midcouch, had an arm stretched on the cushion behind her.

“The proof is in the viewing,” her host teased. At once, she tugged the tight cling out and down over her breasts, so that their huge unsagging bulk, pinked and ruddied with awesome sprawls of areole and nipple, for the moment captivated every eye.

“Ah,” said Twisted Man, “you are right, dear one, and I am wrong. Forgive me. Might a taste, for atonement’s sake, be granted?”

“Yes,” she said. “This one. For a moment.”

And then Katt’s host, who lived in a normal house and had normal kids and most likely worked in a normal office, laughed and asked Love Bunny to save his seat and rose and went to his knees before the couch and started licking the big-bosomed lady’s right nipple. Her boyfriend said, “May I lick the other one?” She said okay and he did, as Rhino watched and worked on himself, and Katt marveled in silent shock at the sight. One minute tops, the two men rose and returned to their places, the licked breasts half-vanished again behind the cloth, and conversations picked up at the point they’d been suspended.

Katt leaned toward her husband’s lover, who beamed at her with an impish glow in her eyes. “Is that it?” Death hung inside her now, same way she’d felt being picked up a few blocks from home: a stunning indifference to what she witnessed, a sense that she was outside it all.

Love Bunny murmured low, “Things usually begin with a tease.” She touched Katt’s neck, first touch, a tingle to her spine. “Watch me liven things up.”

“No, don’t,” said Katt, but Love Bunny got up and set her Anchor Steam beer on the hearth and sirened toward the pair on the sofa. Katt didn’t quite know when the feeling began, whether the tingle at her neck set it off, or if it started when Love Bunny bent to kiss the smiling boyfriend slow and sensual on the lips; but surely by then, her rage had clearly defined itself. Her husband’s mouth must have sampled, in precisely this way, her provocative kiss. His hands must have risen, just so, to stroke her breasts, the dress she wore then the same as she wore now. Seductress. She laughed as she broke the kiss, straightened, pulling a man’s hands to her chest, this man’s hands Marcus’s hands, rousing them with slow rotation, with lynx-eyed lust. Her husband had bit upon the very lure Katt now witnessed, had been reeled in cross-country, family and all, to savor the slink and sleeve of this odd brazen bimbo, this university professor, who now fondled the busty lady on the couch and lipped her, then coyly tossed her shiny red hair and began to unbutton her top. The duo on the couch gazed greedily.

“Lovely, lovely,” announced the walrus man but Love Bunny, swaying as the couple stroked her silky thighs, flung him the offshoots of a keep-your-distance smile and continued unbuttoning.

Katt swore she’d kill this woman as well-kill Marcus and then kill his lover. But even as the impulse took its way through her, Katt knew the difference between one urge and the other. This one arose from head and heart, quick, angry, primal, territorial; the other lay deep in the gut, a needful thing, a quiet imperative.

And then something happened that washed her anger away or at least diluted it with sorrow. Love Bunny, undressed to the navel, displayed her naked torso for the inspection and admiration of all. But what held Katt’s eyes were the stunning shouldters and the white back and-branded in bold crude letters, slantwise left to right across her backribs-the single word MINE, her scars dead-pink and flat, like strips of thin clay, upraised, a hot roar of cruelty still vivid in them despite the passage of what she guessed must had been years.

When the fat woman’s fumbling hand reached ’round and scrabbled along the M, Katt quick-inhaled, close-jawed, in sympathy. No wince over there. Just hands moving, mouths meeting, a slow loosening writhe of fabric.

Momentary community had begun. Sherry had felt these four hands upon her before, belonging once before to these two bodies, other times other bodies. Didn’t much matter, long as a thread of connection existed first and the cocks looked healthy and wore condoms come penetration time. In this case, Feelers had good hands and Boobs tongued like a pro; both gave a convincing semblance of caring, hot words and nasty and nice, no strings, no hassles, just good sex, the kind where she could go off afterward and be alone yet not feel lonely.

Newcummer was an odd duck. In her e-mail and in chat mode on The Symposium, she unleashed a powerful libido, an out-front sensuality that seemed to be amplified on CFRnet and on Kinknet, a nationwide hookup for sexual persuasions of all sorts. But in person she was reserved and calm and quiet-solidly herself to be sure, but there was a sadness there and an aura of persistent beauty, despite what would have to be called her so-so looks. Sherry wondered if she might be moved to join in, but a glance thereward caught a rapt look on a face content merely to observe.

She knelt, naked now but for black lace bikini briefs patterned below, where stubby fingers roved. Scar-stretch on her back tightened as she bent in service, but that was so familiar a part of herself that she scarcely took note. Derek, her insane spouse, the first and last one she vowed ever to take-thankfully removed now to Austin with a girl mired in submission-had shared with her an itch for ropes and bedposts, spankings and light floggings, the drawn-out teasing that led at last into the intensest of orgasms for them both. He’d suspected infidelity. He’d been correct, though he had the gender wrong. No matter. Sherry had no chance to explain or extenuate. Derek had jumped her, put a gag in her mouth and beaten her savagely, hand and fist, belt and buckle, all over her body. Then he’d brought out his crude brand, passed it over a bucket of fire, back and forth before her eyes in a ripple of blinding heat, and at last straddled her and set it on her lashed flesh and bore down as Sherry cried, going out of her mind with the agony and begging deaf gods to bring her death in any form. She heard the hiss, saw downcurlings of steamflow, smelt burnt pork. But finally his poundage was somehow lifted, and he sliced the ropes that bound her ankles and wrists, spat in her eyes, and slammed away. Never saw him again. For six months in her head, she did all sorts of violent acts upon Derek as payback. But when she healed, the thought of one unnecessary moment in his presence-whether in a courtroom or captive and at her mercy in solitude-determined her to put him out of her mind and get on with living. MINE said the brand, and mine I am, she thought, no one else’s. She found pride in that scar, milked it, mined it.

Boobs and Feelers raised her to her languid feet, the half-clothing they wore discarded now where her dark dress lay like pooled ink on the coffee table. A stray touch of hands, continuous, suggestive; she eased them off her, the gentle face of Newcummer moving into focus for a moment as Sherry turned. “Sure you don’t want to join us?”

“I’m fine.” She was and wasn’t. “Really.”

Sherry nodded, turning back into the hands which made to drift her down onto the thick carpet, blue pillow under her head, an eager grin moving on her warm thighs, lip and tongue pretending prolongation of suspense, but leading to a quick and clear destination. Tickle more than turn-on at first, then an obsessive practiced turn-on indeed.

She wondered if ridiculous old Marcus Galloway’s wife was anything like Newcummer. Had to be frum-pier from what Marcus said. Never catch her at a party like this, likely a knockoff of Sherry’s mom, plain bitch, chisel nose, chin dimpled like peachpit. In a moment of pure rage, Sherry’d defiantly proclaimed her bisexuality, which had gotten her disowned, written out of the will, and barred from setting foot ever again in her parents’ home, the place she’d been so fiercely raised. Boobs brushed a rubbery nipple across Sherry’s lips, watching her husband’s mouth encunted. The shape of a young woman appeared, kneeling close, dark eyes wanting a part of this: the cute couple, young, taut, her man’s face wrinkled in a knowing grin. Sherry reached out to him, took his hand-cold, sweaty, gripping. Beyond the sweet young thing’s right shoulder, there was Newcummer in steadfast gaze and something more. And she realized, most bizarre indeed, that she felt somehow closer to this quiet woman than to any of the accommodating people now engaged, or preparing to be, in acts of intimacies with her.

***

Conner sat slumped in the passenger seat, sucking the dead straw of a strawberry milk shake. Dad, as he had for mile upon mile, stared at the road, the landscape, humming tuneless tunes. But Conner could tell, from the upratchet of tone if nothing else, that Dad was growing excited. To end the endless travel, to reach Mom, to see once more the neat house they’d bought, Easter week, on Wallenberg Drive overlooking a duck pond, and to realize that it was home-these thoughts brightened both their spirits.

He glanced at the odometer. Wyoming was behind them; before that, numbing stretches of Iowa and Nebraska. They were thundering down I-25, closing the final gap. “Twenty miles left. Two zero point, um, eight, to be exact.”

Dad lifted a palm, glanced through the wheel. “Won’t be long now. Look, Scenic Vista ahead. Want to stop?” A broad smile, road glance, smile, back to the road.

“In a pig’s eye, Dad.” They shared a laugh. “In one of them Iowa pigs’ puffy eyes.” An emphatic straw suck.

“Don’t knock Iowa, Conner-you were born there, which makes it, in my judgment, the best state there is. You’ll miss your friends-”

“A couple.” More than a couple.

“-but there’ll be new ones.”

Yeah. Mom and Dad always said that. As if he didn’t know, as if he’d never make another friend in his life. A scary thought-and one he’d had, truth to tell, many times since their visit Easter week to several junior highs, the kids he saw then bouncing his own wary looks back into his eyes.

Clear day. The Rockies comfortably off to the right. Flat plain on his left. He loved the confused skyscape, a fitful jumble of clear and cloudy, rainy and sunny; that’d given him a kick the week they flew out. Still, something not right had hovered between his parents. Dad seemed not to have missed Mom much, or he hadn’t shown it anyway, and Mom’s calls had been sporadic at best. Imaginings. There was nothing wrong, not anywhere but in his mind-where his Huntington’s disease bided its time.

Conner looked over at his dad, humming there; snapped a brain-photo of him and pretended to look out at blurs of grass as he processed it: a strange-looking man, but your dad maybe always seemed that way, an archaic everthereness to him. Glasses, smooth face, a V of partially ruddy skin at the neck where his shirt flared. Upbeatness, a hint of the nerd, but he was cool if quirky, hung out with younger faculty and grad students despite his forty-nine years and mostly didn’t seem out of place. Conner took another suck of chalk-warm pseudo-milk, a bare half-drip on his tongue, and wondered if he’d ever feel half so confident. Boyhood hadn’t been too awful, but this teenage crap was the pits. He was glad to have seventh grade over, smelly baboon kids on top of the heap razzing him about pimples and coming to school dressed up the first day and hanging out with loser kids and-when Mom got her job in Colorado-being too good for them, too good to stick it out the entire three years. Yeah. Like his new school in Fort Collins was going to be any better.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

He felt the frown, relaxed it. “I was thinking about the new house, how I was maybe gonna tack posters up in my room, velociraptors and you know.” Easy lie.

“A fearsome flick,” Dad said. “I’m glad we got to go see it before we left. Sam Neill has lizardy eyes, that’s why I bet Spielberg hired him.”

“I guess.” Conner saw the actor’s craggy eyebrows, a turn of the head like the pair of raptors in the stainless steel kitchen. Not a bit like Dad’s soft looks. He moved like liquid and his mind was precise and engaging. Conner tried often to imagine jerky movements, or strange strings of words indicating mind rot. That’s how it had been with Woody Guthrie, the folksinger, when Huntington’s had taken him over. But the imaginings just wouldn’t come, not with the way Dad was, the way he’d always been.

And yet, despite his dad’s cheery nature, Conner knew that deeper stuff lay beneath. Two years ago, a day after his eleventh birthday, he’d told Conner about the disease, about Grampa’s slow sad decline and the possibility of its eventually attacking them too. More out of shock than any sort of bravery, Conner had responded calmly, soberly, far beyond his years. But inside, he’d obsessed about HD. He got hold of a Guthrie biography, skimmed medical texts way too far over his head, and began to pester his father with quesdon after question. One moment, calm. The next, Dad blistered with rage and yelled at him-more than a typical parental yell, something much deeper, scarring him like no momentary anger-telling Conner to shut up, he didn’t know and he didn’t care, that Grampa had died quicker than most but not quick enough for him, his house a mindless hell at age ten and the news of Grampa’s death, as he came in from a walk around an abandoned playground, a relief.

Conner shuddered, remembering Dad’s upset.

That’d been one of the creepy things about the sex ed class they’d had, all the focus on AIDS and how once you’d contracted it and it started to grab you, there was no way to stop it, you just got worse and scarecrowlike and began to look and act like someone else. Just like Huntington’s disease. All the kids wore weird worried looks as Mr. Pym carried on, but Conner felt twice as spooked. The teacher seemed to be describing, at least in the outward symptoms, the Woody Guthrie he’d read about and probably the way his Grampa Galloway had acted long before he was born. It had been spooky sitting in the back row, trying to control his shivering, afraid that by clamping down on it, he might be somehow activating the disease.

Now maybe that was stupid. But he wasn’t really sure of that. Nobody had a clue. They didn’t know how to tell if it lay sleeping inside you. They couldn’t predict when if ever it would decide to wake up, though grown-ups mostly drew the short straw. And they had no idea how to stop it or reverse its course. A mystery disease, just like AIDS. Mr. Pym just kept yammering on about all that creepy stuff and giving Conner the willies real bad.

And he mixed it all in with teaching about crap that made him sweat and blush, all that between-the-legs stuff, spoiling anything romantic between him and Melissa Darren, who sat there with her new bosom and her long curly auburn hair, seeming to blame him for the outrage of it all.

“Here’s the turnoff.” Dad hit the blinker.

Motel 6 off to the side. Thunder-highway with skewed roads at lights and a slash of railroad tracks bumbling at the tires and then it became Mulberry Street, looking more like a town-trees, houses, a left onto College Avenue and south along the campus. Lights, lights, obliging ones and just the right number of cars and bikes and people, and he felt light and happy inside. “Look! Prospect!”

“Prospects are bright, my lad,” Dad joked, arcing the wheel about, more tracks jouncing beneath, the multistory Holiday Inn going by on the left; then a long patient wait at the light, a left onto Whitcomb and down all the way to Wallenberg, and Mom happened to be out weeding, looking up at the sound of their car and rising and waving with her hat tied beneath the chin-and Conner couldn’t wait to yank at the door and suffer her hug and feel his smile hurting the high wide corners of his mouth.

***

It was good to see his wife again, good to be held by her, good to hold her. Not bad for thirty-nine, and Marcus wondered for a moment if she’d had offers, taken lovers in the time they’d been apart. He dismissed it. Faith meant something to Katt, and he let her think it meant something to him, monster that he was. Funny how you could feel not at all guilty, even good about yourself, and yet do things that from the outside seemed like betrayal.

“You smell good,” he murmured after the kiss, and she did. A soft breeze brushed by them. The street was as he remembered it from Easter time when he’d flown out to help Katt find and buy this house-quiet, traffic-free, a green haven rich with new homes. The start of a bikepath lay at the street’s west end, where a bridge crossed a brook.

“You smell good too,” she said.

“Yeah, like three hundred miles of bad road.”

Katt demurred at the joke, but a shower was his first priority after unpacking the car and after watching Conner unwrap his welcome-home present from Mom (a CD of Branford Marsalis) and give theirs to her. During the shower, warm steam behind clear glass off their bedroom, Marcus thought of Sherry and got hard. His final flings in Iowa City had been fine, a nice grope in City Park with a brilliant grad student and a leisurely motel evening with a lovely, wide-lipped, big-nosed secretary in the Art Department. But in his head, when he replayed past loves, it was Sherry Feit, redhead in abandon, he most often turned to. She’d lit up that hotel suite, blazing it brilliant in his mind forever after; and their e-mail, as hot and steamy as this shower, had been the core of many days since. Early mornings, his wife asleep, he had composed messages to Sherry, carefully copied them to disk, hidden them on the PC with the handy-dandy attrib command, brought them in to put into his Unix account and e-mail to his lover, first thing that morning. She’d bat back electrons of her own and again usually once more before the day was done.

They had plans to lunch together tomorrow, give him a chance to settle in today, teach his first class, hang out with the family, knock the road dust from his ears.

He was still semitumescent as he opened the door and wrapped a towel about his waist. Katt, hangering laundry, caught a glimpse. “My, my, what have we here?”

“All for you, dear, but not right now.”

“Tonight?”

“Early to bed, hon. Early to rise.”

“Never seen a healthier man in my life.”

He kissed her warm lips, felt her hand on him through the towel, smiled away to pick out clothing. He liked the house anew: plush off-white carpets, opulent but tasteful fixtures, pleasing wood cabinets and closets, a feeling of brightness and space everywhere. His mate was maybe a bit too spread out, a little in need of reining in. But she’d adjust soon enough. The lunch she prepared, omelettes and hash browns in the breakfast nook, brought a perfect unity to the family, the three of them laughing again as if four months of separation hadn’t happened.

Then it was time to gather his notes, his handouts on Shakespeare, his well-worn Riverside, and walk through the warm afternoon sun to campus. Three quiet blocks north to Prospect, crossing there and sauntering one more street to Lake and he had arrived at the edge of campus, a mere five minutes away from the Eddy Building, south of the library, where his class was scheduled to meet. He put the family, his staid domestic scene, behind him. CSU was all Sherry. He felt her spirit here, the paths across grass at science buildings, the possibility that he might turn a corner and there she’d be, that cruel branding her insane husband had given her hidden under killer clothes, just as she hid her lovely dark passion from those not privy to its incredible strength and beauty.

Katt had had some of that fire when they met. But in the intervening years she’d somehow gone bland. Initially they’d lived together, tried an open relationship-no love but between them, sex with congenial friends only. Seemed to be working, his trysts anyway. But her first time gone had driven him mad. Toss and turn, had to negotiate anew, could taste the fucker on her for weeks. Yes, she’d said, they’d try for something more traditional. And what could be more traditional than so-called cheating, he thought-a roll in the hay for the roving-eyed hubby, guys were built that way, women nested, men hunted. Worked out fine. And as long as he was careful with his condoms (which he was), he’d bring home nothing harmful to Katt.

The first class meeting was surreal. Disorientation, road spinning under him, made the classroom too confining. He traced through his notes, marveling at how it all swung together from his mouth, how he smiled so glibly, and made easy eye contact, and picked out the winners and losers in the space of five minutes, his smarts-detector unerring as usual. And yet he was on autopilot, head still full of a monotonous road-pound. By the hour’s end, he’d cohesed an odd assemblage of students into generalized novices on the Elizabethan milieu and on the realities of the Globe, bent on tackling the doubled twins of A Comedy of Errors at the next meeting. His eyes were drawn to a young woman in the front row, Belinda Lymon according to the seating chart he had them fill in. Wide eyes, full breasts, a perfect turn of thigh. She was surely too young to be a probable. But he’d be sizing her up, alert for signs, hints dropped. As long as she lay grade-wise in his power, he’d try nothing; there was fair and there was foolish. Besides, the allure of sexual uncertainty, the coy flirtation with a forbidden student-teacher affair slowly gathering in each mind, were part of a very potent package by the time the semester was at its end. Explosive orgasm, whether repeated or not- to cap and fulfill the expectation that had built for weeks-invariably ensued.

After class, he found his office, tested the key, did a quick survey of shelf space and filing cabinets. Movers ought to deliver his boxes by Thursday afternoon. A minor diminution in what he’d been used to at Iowa, but the view from his window was pleasing and it felt nice and intimate for whatever, intellectual or sexual, arose. New blotter, cool tight pseudo-leather desktop, dustless surfaces, fresh in cleanliness; there was even a vased bouquet of six pink sweetheart roses, a gesture he guessed from the department secretary, far too risky for Sherry to have dared.

Katt smiled from the kitchen when he came in. “First impressions?” she said after their hug.

“Are the best,” he completed. They laughed together, a good feeling, then he said, “Basically I took the stage, set The Bard on automatic, and wowed the audience. I kept all the road weariness inside, in a secret place, and they were none the wiser, fresh-faced dewy-eyed innocents all.”

She hugged him. “Sounds like you’ve got it made.”

“Yep, I feel on top of things, all right.” If Conner hadn’t come in at that point, back from a walk, Katt would have given him a nice close horizontal inspection of their bedsheets. But as it was, they had to wait for their son to fill his mom in on every mile’s doings between here and Iowa, a special dinner centerpieced by candles and flowers (he withheld mention of the office roses), and a blessedly brief after-dinner sit-about.

When Conner, dead tired, dragged himself to his room, Ratt coyly cleared her throat, bent to embrace Marcus, and murmured, “Don’t you think it’s time we got reacquainted?”

I sure do, he’d said, and they went upstairs and shut the door and eased away clothing and sampled secret flesh, as if the whole ritual were new again-which it was oh yes it was-her hands her mouth so incomparably good there, an intoxicating taste to her as she parted and lowered, knees denting mattress to either side of his head. And then she turned about, woozy after orgasm, and sank her heat around him, the incredible satin clutch claiming him, coaxing him heavenward, drawing him up little by little and out, throb of head and loins, the buck and weave. After a time, warm embrace and goodness of enclosure, she slid up and off and started to massage him, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, deep and drifty.

“I’ll fall asleep,” he warned in a soft slur.

“That’s okay,” she said. “You’ve had a long day.”

She was right. She understood. He felt the soothing hands lull him, moving from neck to jaw to facial muscles, on up to brow and scalp, so good there, so easing. Sherry swam up as he drifted off, sweet harp-hipped Sherry, naked and bending for him and gazing back, begging for it, there beneath the soothe of Katt’s loving touch.

Sometimes Katt had massage customers who fell asleep. Rare but not surprising. Grace Kantor, the woman with the mole from yesterday, had been one. There were others, the stressed-out businessmen who carried the twist of commerce in their necks, people who’d been stroked to sleep as kids and who fell naturally into their old pattern under Katt’s maternal touch.

Now here was Marcus asleep on their bed, and here she was with her fingers resting upon his head. And the night was coming on behind windows and Katt had time and to spare to do what she would. Here lay a naked human being, entrusted to her care, the man she’d once loved and loved still. He looked so serene, so close and so distant to her, and without even trying, he was circumscribing her life, stifling her. They shared nothing, save for Conner. Marcus had his secrets, and she hers, but the freedom that she’d tasted for four months was suddenly shriveled, gone, familied and killed in the sudden mundanity of her brood’s arrival and settling ineternal visitors who’d never ever leave, a pillow pressed over her nose and mouth.

Divorce him. What was so difficult about it? People split up all the time. Write a note, no, take him to some nearby park, cry wordlessly until he himself got the hint, brought it up, then move on from there. But all her ideas lay straitened and immured behind brick, immovable, inert, unactable on, as her mother’s soft rant rose in her mind’s ear, Hunts never do the D-thing. No they don't. Katt, and don’t you forget it.

Outside where unseen a duck pond lay, a slash of bird sound tore down across the evening sky. As the geese came in, a far-beached splash flared up and subsided. Katt was kneeling beside Marcus’s body on the bed, low to him as he lay there. Her fingers were entangled in his hair and the tips touched scalp, thumbs upon his brow, octopod of eight digits settled in to harm him. She shrank at the thought. Tension drained from her fingers, but she kept them there. Foolish notion, she told herself; she could never hurt her husband. But she could find the spot inside him that kept his disease wound tight, cure him, put his worries forever to rest. Then she’d tell him what she’d done, do likewise for Conner; and at last draw upon her newfound strength to find the courage to… ah but she could never do the D-thing, Hunts never do the D-thing. That’s right, Katt, as right as rain and as certain as raindrops. The D-thing is something we Hunt women never do.

Find it, at least. No harm in that. Maybe even some good. That quelled her misgivings, though she knew it was a trick. Still, she shut out the clocktick, the moonglow, the distant ache of a train passing through the night, and focused on bone beneath her fingers. Her awareness passed beneath it, his skullbone a dumb thudding numbness quickly noted as healthy and sunk through, meninges next, followed by a brunt of brain, deepened through layer on layer until she arrived (remembering now a drawing in the medical book on HD) at the caudate nucleus, and slowed to probe. There was something not right here-not a softness in the actual tissue, but that’s how it presented itself, a readiness to crumble, to dry up, to desiccate.

She realized she was shaking, almost as if she needed to urinate, though her bladder was empty. Warring visions held sway: Marcus the man, whom she had no right to harm; and this place in a coolly detached brain, this place that held the key to her

freedom, that wanted only the smallest twist of intent to activate. They’d shared so much, these many years. How could someone be your best friend and yet no longer be any friend at all? How could so convincing a closeness exist and yet be all lies, the distance so great and unspeakable and unspoken of? She didn’t know, but her hands tensed upon him and his sleeping fatality lay inches below them, so easy to tip into imbalance. Katt’d rightly be called a murderer, unprovable but she would always know it had been so, and there would be Conner to remind her in case she forgot. But there surged now her secret strength and she knew what so often she’d told herself, that in the planning of them, some actions that resonated deep in your soul took on an inevitability. This wrenching was her one escape route-now was the time and here was the place, and she inflected her will to urge it forward.

A thought-ripple.

Had it happened? She knew and didn’t know. Like the trick of the eye upon a trickle of tapwater, did the twist shift or not as you watched? Her fingers eased. A flurry of wings below taunted her ears. She trembled, indeed had been shuddering for some time, she now realized. When Katt looked at her hands, they would not hold still. A passage from a library book came to mind. A silly feel-good book. But one notion had made her cry: Picture your worst fear, it said, as a wailing baby. Lift it up. Hold it. Soothe it. Talk to it. Katt’s throat tensed and her eyes teared up. Then she was crying, tamping it down, but her breaths inward were audible and there was Marcus, sixteen years of mostly good times and real connection, lying there, and she had done something horrendous to him. But if she had, and he showed signs, she could go back in and reverse it or at least halt it, surely. Her sobbing would not stop, became less easy to conceal there in that confining room.

“Katt?” A soft sleepy voice.

It starded her. She eased back upright, drew an arm across her eyes. With her fingers she squeezed the bridge of her nose.

“Are you all right?” He was scarcely awake.

Calm. “Yes.” Came out a whisper. “Yes,” louder and the panic rose again. “It’s just that… we’ve been so far apart and… and I’ve missed you.”

Marcus drew her down. She let herself stretch out at his side, feeling his embracing arms encircle her. Bursts of sob escaped, but not as violent now. “There there,” he said sleepily. He gave a yawn. “We’re here now.” Rustle of sheet as he raised it up over their shoulders. “Cry it out, rest now, we’re back together again.” He drifted off almost as he spoke, and she lay there, wide awake, for the longest time, feeling alien and elated and displaced, time ticking softly on the nightstand and pond sounds rising as geese touched down to ease her gradually into sleep.

***

April had been easy. Kinda sloshed. Or maybe just a little lax in the head. He’d picked her up leaving a frat house alone, walked her across Laurel and between the tall trees and toward Lory Student Center and the dorms beyond. Trusting bitch. A little charm, a little sweet talk, easy flirting-like he’d practiced a thousand times in front of the mirror.

She’d been swayable.

He’d clomped her once at the beginning, soon as she’d climbed into his truck. Going dancing? Sure we are. She turned to lock her door at his request and Clomp! Then he didn’t want to, but he clomped her again when she resisted at the tree. He carried her from his truck. She tried to knee him on the way, then again when he pounded the stakes into the tree, unbound her hands, and attempted to tie the ropes to the stakes. She’d been fury and hellfire to deal with. Quiet sex-eyed April Downing had a fearsome will to live. So he’d clomped her a good one, propping her up and securing her hands. Her thin pale arms he stretched tight as a crossbar against the killing tree, which was thick as a century’s growth and took its time curving about.

Wasn’t much moon but there was plenty of solitude, so if April decided to take to screaming, there’d be no cause for worrying about it but simply for celebrating the power of the human voice to thrill. Just like when the kids had held him down, kicking and screaming, and poured red Kool-Aid down his throat and into his nose and over his eyes, a choking then but they didn’t care-that sweet shit griming his face and the flies buzzing after him and that fake red odor in the air, pretend strawberry. April was wearing an orange frilly halter top and jeans and flats. Grazing his knuckles with tree bark, he reached around her to undo the three large buttons at her back. Then he needed the hedge clippers to scissor up her front and snip the two dangling halves from her shoulders. They fell apart. She was fuck awesome. April had the softest yum-miest whitest creamiest eye-achers he’d ever seen on an angel baby’s torso.

He hoped society was proud. What was about to happen to this pretty bitch was all its fault. For years on end, he’d been good, though he’d had the urges and come close a few times. Then the fucking fed-erales had danced the Waco rat-a-tat-tat, all that cult shit urping up again, the Jim Jones tie-ins, week after week in the papers and on TV and it tore him up fierce. He’d manage somehow to get himself together enough to go in and simper at the eaters and take their orders and even clap his way through the jivey empty Happy Happy Birthday song for the yup folk and their kids. Same damn wipes that had forced Kool-Aid down his gizzard, only older. He’d never been Jimmy Jones; no, his mom much preferred just plain Jim, Jim the infant, Jim the toddler, Jim the gangly kid, Jim Jones in nineteen-seventy-fucking-eight when he was in seventh grade and the sporadic tweaks and torments suddenly found focus, day in day out. Hey if it ain’t wacko Jim Jones! Who brought the jug of Kool-Aid today and how shall we pounce and trounce our little four-eyed wacko freak? The bastardly ratfucks, Jenkin and Bart and Sarno, they were the ringleaders, the ones that barked orders to hold him down, the ones that slugged him when he squealed, that kicked him and poured that sweet sticky red shit all over his face, into his nose and mouth so he felt he’d drown in it, his neck and scalp dripping with it, the pitcher’s brutal lip knocking at his teeth. And the busty girl-fucks, the behind-handers who hid their laughs behind their cupped fingers, stood to one side, with their moundy pair of eye-achers harnessed up to torment the kickers and pourers and their tight little curvy butts hugged tight by their jeans, such a taunting swiveling packet of do-it-to-me in the face of his humiliation. They could’ve called a halt to it. The girl-fucks had that power. They could’ve said something, they could’ve purred some sympathy and had the pussycravers lay off; instead they’d held back and put a palm to their broad smiles and stood just so, so that no one could miss the little wiggle of their boobies-n-butts. He hadn’t missed it, not through his teary screaming, the choking and sputtering as the cold red liquid splashed in his face and trickled down his neck and drenched his shirt. The behind-handers chose to let his torment go on, day after day, watching, getting off on it, his first inkling of what they were truly about on this planet.

And his mother, that fat jowly bitch who insisted her boy go to school come hell or high water, had been part of the whole charade. He hadn’t seen it then, but he’d known in his gut all along and it came clear over the years. He saw her fucking Toon-erville-Trolley body blundering about, coming at him again and again. You will go to school, you will go to school No wonder Dad had skedaddled. She was the powerhouse behind his torment, had been all along; and when finally that fat chowderhound croaked, all the hatred she’d spewed over him, all that squinty-eyed loathing that made his mom the

linchpin of the behind-handers-every bit of it went out of her body into theirs, into the whole sad insidious race of them, with their boobies-n-butts, with their eye-achers, with their baby-holes, with their smiles covered up behind their hands while all the while they did their pretend stuff about being caring and kind.

April, filthy-mouthed but redundant April, had strong horsey legs. When she revived and saw her state, she gave him a stinging wallop across his cheek with one knee. Her flats he’d removed and was caressing her feet when she did it. He scuttled back, felt his nose. No break, no blood. Just puffy warmth, trauma in the middle of his face. It’d recede. She was working up steam, spewing a limited store of venom, alternating wild kicks his way with pretty torso twists to test the ropes. They held, of course. Into the jeaned flurry of flesh he stepped, arm in tight around her butt to keep some control, close up to bridle and love the power of her thighs. Her nips were near. Jugs jiggled in resistance. Where his right hand bobbled to catch zipper, struggle it down, her womanheat lay. Slit-fuzz in service to new baby-birthings, let a fucker in, poot a fucker out, deceptively cute, would turn out inevitably to be a kicker or pourer or a grinning wiggling do-nothing cuntcubator.

She’d be the one. They were all in cahoots, the girl gigglers. A secret network, planetwide. This April would help him tap into it, would screech his message into their conniving skulls with such force that they’d stop giggling and sober up and weld their thighs together forever. Born no more. Clear the pipeline. Let ’em age and dwindle and die, the earth purified at last.

When he yanked the jeans and red-lace briefs down and away, she tried a volley of kicks. But he fended her bare legs off, feeling the power in them, her desperation going straight to her sole defense. He stepped back, out of leg range. He looked at her, saw her for what she was. There was still makeup on her face, but except for that, all her shopped deception was gone, her cover blown. Wan writhing slugflesh in the moonlight, curves and tucks and slit-fuzz to tempt cockrise and burrowing and seedshoot in those not as wary as he. The leaf cover below her feet made crackly sounds, twig and bark and overlapped interleavings rustled by her struggles. Beneath the truck tarp, he found mallet and ropes and twin stakes that had rattled like loose jack handles against iron. He sank one, barely out of range of her kicks, only tamped in a little but enough to know that it wouldn’t do. Then he got wise, pictured her legspread, added a foot more around the base of the tree, pounded the suckers in at an angle, like bigtop stakes. First he tied a length of rope to each one. Then he caught at an ankle, held it so that her left leg flailed ineffectually against the tree, so limited was her movement. He secured a tight knot about her ankle, snagged the other, did the same, her body pinned against the tree, butterfly on cardboard.

He stepped back to admire his handiwork.

Beautiful.

If you ignored the girl’s head, with its unflattering spew of tears and vitriol, April was all come-on. But his dick was not duped. Securing her excited him, a dim head-glow only. He lifted a finger (One moment!) and went back to the truck. Under the tarp, lying on a gritty towel, he found the Makita cordless drill, hefted it. Green finish, a sixteenth of an inch drillbit tight in its chuck, tip to clutch just, over two inches long. Wasn’t much heft to it, other than the hidden weight of its motor, but as he moved toward the naked spread-eagled woman, the drill hung heavy in his hand. It would be meaningless if he and his victim didn’t connect, if he didn’t stop shutting her out.

April was his conduit to the whole sex, all of ’em.

“Come on, please? Let me go.” Her eyes flitted away from the drill. Her voice was harsh and raw.

“Look,” he said, feeling foolish, “it’s not personal. You just wound up in the wrong body is all.” She looked a little like a nude chanteuse, with her legs parted and her arms spread wide-and-out in a starburst of climactic song. Love me, it said, a sick Judy Garland gesture. And though he saw now that she was not in the slightest interested in sex, her torso could not help but radiate a steady message of fuck-me, no matter what: Saint Sebastian, arrows, pale flesh aerated in sensuous oils.

“You’re a nice man.” April was lying, and it was not a pretty sight. It made him sad, her pouty lips passing a lie so glibly. “We can undo this,” she continued. “It’ll just be between me and you.” He watched a glimmer of hope die in her wide eyes as he made no reply.

“You’re pretty,” he said at last.

She looked away. “Ah.” She thought she knew what he meant. Stupid girl. But her nature dictated filth.

“People like the white skin, of course. Some people, anyway. This,” he touched her, “or this, these things-no don’t struggle.”

“I don’t like that.” Her voice had a girl’s whine in it, the sound of a victim. “Please don’t.”

“But they really drool over the hidden bits, the bits where blood darkens it or swells it up. These nip things, for one,” he said, pulling one forward, taffy-stretch, and giving it a slight nose tweak. He held the drill up, took in the tip of the bit, then dropped it to his side and let April’s nipple worm away from his fingers. “But it’s this baby-thing that’s the real biggie.”

“No!” Sudden tension at her inner thighs.

He fingered the dry-lipped spread-open gash, the vile place where every damned planet-fuck dropped from.

April was holding very still and the look in her eyes saddened him. She didn’t understand. Here it comes, that was what she was thinking, her face tense. Here comes his seeder. Still, she glanced at the drill, then away.

“Baby-thing, red drool.” Emerging fuzzhead. Snipped slit to gush blood. He’d once suffered through a movie in school, watching gloved hands coax more damaged goods into the world where less, much less, was called for. Pinching her outer labia, not painfully, simply curious at the pink hidden idolized damned thing with its hooded clit, he said to her, “This has power, you know. This snail-thing could stop boys from kicking each other, if only you girls would learn how to use it. Disarming little pouch.” They would all shut up tight forever, assuming his attempt worked.

“Okay, okay,” edging on tears but impressively brave. “You can teach me on the way back to town.”

He idled a fingertip up through her private hair, her tummy taut and tympanic, stiff breastbone between her eye-achers, a smooth neck. Raising the drill, he rested it at an angle across his chest like a salute. Her face despite her tears was deeply beautiful-just how deep he was about to find out. A face from some filmbook came to him, Black Sunday, Barbara Steele, deep black bloodless pits, glaring woman-eyes, long black hair. Akin to what he’d plant upon April’s blond-tressed, fair-skinned face. But blood would well up here, well up and spill, from the teeny baby-holes he’d gently press into this unblemished canvas. The pocks he sank would drool blood downward, jagging to suggest the next new place to create one. Teeny tiny holes, miniature temptations being opened in her. They’d only birth blood, and maybe he’d push a pinkie into one of them, but nothing bigger, and sure as heck nothing with seeds in it.

“Power to save put-upon boys, power to stop wars,” he said, as he stretched the cheek-skin flat under her left eye. “Convey that to your kind in the next hour.” She pretended not to know how to relay messages to her kin. “Don’t waste it on fear and hate, okay?” He raised the drill, quick trigger-test, then silent, pointing it, divining the perfect place between thumb and forefinger.

“God please no.” She knew it was coming.

“Hold still now.”

The whine began, her skin accepted the hole as easily as wine-veined cheese; it was only when they hit bone that April really began to lose her composure.

2

LOVE SWEETENED, LOVE SOURED

Ratt found Love Bunny at an outside table, spry wrens hopping about by the redwood screens. At this restaurant, The Rainbow, she’d enjoyed months of calm and refuge, just a short jaunt north of her new house, a perfect atmosphere for a season’s contemplation.

But this morning, she felt restive.

“You made it,” her husband’s lover said.

“Five minutes by car, twenty at a brisk walk.” Round white table. Sherry wore a tight peach blouse. A thin strand of microbeads fell with coy abandon upon her bosom. Her skirt broke just above the knees, and her legs were smooth and curvy and tantalizing. Katt’s heart sank. This woman grew on you. Katt had felt a surprisingly mild interest in her at the BBS party, but that interest seemed to have grown since then. Moreover, Sherry’s whole manner today, the way she was dressed, the way she sat, touched a remembrance of Katt’s brief fling at Oberlin with a former roommate. She dragged out a white plastic chair draped in umbrella shade and sat.

“Relax, it’s a beautiful day. Have an omelette.”

Katt smiled. “Sorry.” She accepted a menu and half-heard their waitress recite the day’s special.

Sherry said, “I liked our chat.” Her hand rested for an instant on Katt’s arm, then away.

“Oh yes, it was lovely,” Katt said, her voice steeped in lust. Sherry mmmm’d in return. Their exchange had had an extra tinge to it; the anxiety of Marcus’s being in the study and quite possibly walking in on her while the steam rose from her PC-private erotica on parade-made her keep a finger by the Page Down key. But he didn’t disturb her. Most likely, stealing time from his new book on Massinger, he’d been composing one of his letters to Sherry, the kind he “hid” with the attrib command, the kind she unhid, when alone, easily with XTreeGold on a floppy, and read.

The waitress returned, Katt ordered, and watched Love Bunny’s lips move as she ordered. Odd, how complex Katt’s emotions were. Those same lips had loved her mate not two days before, a quick tryst after class, prompting also one outrageous outpouring of prose in praise of them. And yet her anger toward the redhead seemed not at all to diminish her attraction to her; it was as if Love Bunny, pure mind, were indeed distinct from Sherry Feit, The Other Woman, an easy split between them. One began these silent, in-depth friendships on BBSs or via e-mail, and it was inevitably a surprise, and no surprise at all, when you finally met. A connection formed, a deep fancy of thought and desire.

“What’d you tell your husband?” Eggs Benedict lay on her fork, held before the hint of a smirk.

“That I’d follow my usual Sunday routine, The Rainbow and a walk to Old Town Square,” Katt said. “He’s…” She stopped herself from revealing anything. “He has some about-the-house sorts of things to do.”

“It’s so easy to fool them.”

“I suppose.”

“The trusting ones, anyway.”

“Yes.” A certain unflattering lack of compassion had its hold on Sherry, but Katt went with it. Her friend had had, after all, a mean-streaked sadist in her past whom it must have felt good to deceive. Marcus, by contrast, held a special place in her heart despite his betrayal, despite hers, despite the terrible nudge she’d given his potential Huntington’s disease six days before. She hadn’t dared to probe him since. But under her sunny exterior, she’d kept watch on him, attempting to detect aberration in movement, a falter of purpose, a hint of self-doubt. Maddening, her not knowing, not daring to ask; she’d carried on normally, insatiable curiosity furying within.

Her shared space with Love Bunny soon became an oasis of calm. Katt relaxed into it, trading impressions of her job and Sherry’s, both of them keeping things vague-yes I teach at CSU (department omitted), I do software at HP (no need to narrow it, even though Marcus had said very little about his family in the time Katt had monitored him).

Over hazelnut coffee and cheesecake, there in the sun of a beautiful day, Sherry said, “Would you feel all right about using first names?”

It came out casual, just before a two-handed sip, her lips at the rim; but it felt crucial. In the messages she had spied upon, Marcus had always called her “my mate,” he so hated the word “wife”-but never had he named her. Still there was no way of knowing if he’d let it slip during his four months in Iowa. Katherine? Katt? If he’d mentioned it at all, it had been the latter.

She thought of offering Katherine, a more common name and more likely to be written off as coincidence. But she could not lie to this woman, her electronic friend and her soon-to-be fleshly lover. And Katherine, a name nobody at all had ever used on her, not even angrily toward her as a child, would be a lie. “Mine’s Katt,” she said, detecting no spike of panic across the table.

She breathed freer.

“Sherry,” said Sherry, “but no fair combing through a university directory for more.”

She agreed not to. It was a trivial thing, this name exchange, but some sort of watershed had passed. Although Katt still held back a major secret from Sherry, their BBS masks had been compromised. “I like your name,” Katt told her, meaning it.

“So did you walk or drive?”

“Walked.” Perhaps not the wisest idea given the news reports about the coed discovered Thursday on the banks of the Poudre, her body mutilated in ways only hinted at.

“Maybe you’d accept a ride. I’d drop you wherever.”

Nice game. Sherry was smiling. Katt said, “Sure.”

“And maybe… you’d like to see my place first?”

Butterflies within. All those messages exchanged, an uninhibited expression of pure psychic fantasy, lusts safe behind anonymity. Then they’d met. Katt had come to know her, observed her in a casual orgy, a rich mix of emotions drifting in from this woman, nexus ever on her mind. “Why not?” tossed off with a look across the table nowhere near as casual.

Together they rose.

***

Sherry had no sooner closed the door than they flowed together, not even the pretense of a tour. Solid alluring Katt (the name fit), sweet and unhurried in embrace, not a hint of freakage when fantasy became reality. Odd perhaps her reluctance to abandon anonymity. But Sherry had given her name, her place of residence, had made no attempt-and would make none-to hide mailings addressed to her. There must surely soon and inevitably be full disclosure between them.

Whenever.

In its own time.

Fortunately she’d thought to bank the blinds when she left, just in case. Random angles gave neighboring condos glimpses into her privacy, and she certainly wanted no one with a mouth to blab watching this. Katt’s face was soft, aromatic, her hands knowing and unhesitant.

Still, as in the glowlight of her living room she and Katt slowly undressed one another and the odd vacancy that pervaded her sexual being eased in, Sherry decided to keep her drawerful of toys out of it. The joys of dental dams, of strap-ons and Magic Wands, could wait. She was content simply to unclothe and explore a new lover, the transition from BBS abstraction to physical incarnation now coming to completion. Between kisses, Katt said words of some sort, soft distances gone, but Sherry ignored them and they soon fell away. No. She liked the look and touch and taste of uninterrupted skin, red band marks obligingly disappearing at waist and wrap of thigh as she caressed and kissed them into forgetfulness. Words only distracted.

Katt’s fingers touched her scar tentatively at first, then relaxed upon and about the letters, turning MINE into one more part of her, as it was. Through hazes of vacancy and fleshly fascination, an inflected word floated down to her ear, taking time to resolve: Bedroom? Umm, yes, both rising, hand to hand, then arms about waists and slow hips sliding down the hall. She closed the miniblinds tighter so that sharp thin slits of sunlight struggled against the slats, lit an oil lamp, went to Katt watching her from the bed. Embracing warmth, moving along open arms, thoroughly there and not there, standing apart and observing even as, sensually engaged, she slithered into the wonderfulness of their lovemak-ing. Since Derek’s branding of her, numbness in sex had been safer, her passions engaged but empty.

Now all was Katt. Friday it had been Marcus, posture somewhat similar to this woman’s now, but with thick riots of hair, his middle-aged angularity, and the hot stiffness that drove him across country and made him groan when part of her, any part, paid it attention. Marcus was good, his need for her pure and gratifyingly obsessive, though maybe because of that laser-beamed love, she felt even more gone and apart from him (though he hadn’t a clue) the closer he drew to her in nakedness and desire. Katt turned her over and softly attacked her arousal, and it felt right to urge her elusive friend’s hips about, easing them down, causing a diagonal reorientation above the blanket for more spread and length, no toes bumped against headboard. An obedient body, hers, spry and ardent and responsive to the slap and tickle of love. But she felt dead inside. The same death pervaded her at the head of the class, professor prized by students and colleagues alike, a nice little niche, expert in the ins and outs of Graphical User Interfaces, the ways of constructors and destructors in C++ code, and the whole panoply of software and hardware arcana-but inside, where she hid herself, it meant no more than a big fat NULL.

Sherry relaxed into rich orgasm, mouthing an increase of ardency upward but not at all frantic as her whole body responded like nightwind rising on ocean. She felt dreamy and whole here, tasted and loved, her hands on soft curves and indefinable good will. One could usually tell by this point if giving sensuality its head had been a good or bad idea, if durability or dread were in the air-and Sherry’s Mmmm detector had nothing but Oh Yes writ large across its face. They’d right themselves, snuggle, laugh, maybe dive right back into it; but there was no rush, just union deep and complete, and for now, she was content to hold and hug and feel the glow seep inward, attempting to reach her.

***

“So how was it downtown?” Marcus was in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on celery stalks, when Katt walked in on him.

“Peaceful,” she said, patching together a pastiche of downtown traipses, worrying as he kissed her whether she’d washed sufficient trace of Sherry from her mouth. Pulling away, no waver in his eyes; Katt felt relieved. “The same as always,” she said. “A lunchtime crowd outside at Pasta Jay’s and Coop-ersmith’s. Water splashing off the boulders they put up at the dedication of the square what maybe six years ago? A couple of raindrops through the sunshine.”

“Any kids creamed?”

“By skateboarders and rollerbladers? None I saw.”

Katt asked about his notetaking and pretended to hear his reply. She was scanning his face, his gestures, a hum of anxiety low but underlying in her, wanting and dreading a first sign. The word “headache” slipstreaming by caught her ears. Marcus brushed at his brow.

“Working too hard?”

“I guess,” he said. “I don’t suppose I could have an afternoon taste of your Magic Fingers?”

“Sure you could,” her words spilled out, “you give me enough money! Sit down.” Automatic response, but inside, a rise in anxiety. She didn’t want to touch him. But she was moving around behind him where he sat in the breakfast nook, a smile still fixed on her face. One hand slid over his left shoulder and its partner found his right, squeeze there and thumbs dug in to find her balance at his back.

“Mmmm,” he said, bending his neck forward and resting his arms on the fakewood tabletop like numb lobster claws, then pulling them back until he gripped the table edge and righted his head again. “Feels good.” Katt parenthesized his neck, fingers under jawline. Good solid man; fragile, she thought, as anyone. Her probes, taught by experience, spoke his health, skimming messages as she concentrated on massage. She rotated her fingers upward until they rested on his temples, thumbs under ears, the flat of her hand on hair and skin, warmth and faint throb there. For some odd reason, a vision of the beach came to the fore as she shut her eyes, the fresh Caribbean sands and surf smells of the last vacation she and Marcus had taken, could it have been five years ago? Conner off to her mom in Florida, private beachfront, a simple hut with just enough amenities, sweet lovemaking under moonlight and time simply gone away. How delightful it had been.

“That’s getting it,” he said.

“Is the mean and nasty going away?”

“Mmmm.”

Her fingers found their rhythm. She watched the tips move, black sweeps of hair thatched above them and back as they rotated and pressed. Again, shutting out the kitchen and Marcus’s murmurs of pleasure, Katt skulled and brained inward. Easier this time, terrain once traversed. Layers passed and there it was, that same tentative tissue, ready to dry up. Disappointed, relieved. She hadn’t done it at all, couldn’t do it apparently. Stuck. Then the vacancy, tiny as a pea, happened-so quick she blipped by it, found it again, thrilled, its edges drawn, dry, for the thinnest space. Warring tendencies, suddenly. The will to halt it and the will to urge it forward. She had no right to turn Marcus’s life which way she would; he’d been kind, loving, given her a child, loved them both, laughed and joked with them at the dinner table. Past, all past. Now he stifled her, drained her life drab, just by continuing to be. She turned away from her healing power and embraced the other, applying it precisely, like a salve, upon the surface and deep throughout. Inside she felt keyed up and torn. She marveled her husband didn’t notice.

Hand grab.

She opened her eyes. Marcus was turned to look up at her. Flat dead eyes. He knew. He knew. His moist hands gripped hers.

“Are you okay?” he said. “What is it?”

She felt sweat then at her brow and knew the moisture of his hands was really hers. “I’m okay…” Her voice husky, a need to tack about; she felt exposed. “It’s just that”-I want a divorce-“I think I felt… a tremor in you. Or maybe I’m just imagining it, it could be nothing. You seem not quite as steady as usual.” Throat tightened. “Marcus I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No it’s okay.” His understanding tone, the kindness of it, was breaking her heart. “I’m fine. Don’t cry now, Katt. Come on. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Katt allowed his arms to embrace her, laying her head on his shoulder, accepting pats and solace until the grief and guilt abated. She took the pastel Kleenex he offered, dried her tears, blew her nose.

“Everything all right?”

Katt nodded. She felt embarrassed and frightened and just a tiny bit superior, pulling the wool undetected-and that deepened her fear about what she was becoming.

Conner came in then, back from a bike ride, cutting a swath of excitement through the moment, spilling news of a found friend, another biker, anonymous but Conner was sure they’d meet up again. Katt smiled as his father countered with pleased questions. When the recounting had worn down or nearly so, she excused herself to the bedroom, shutting the door so she could be alone.

***

Her tummy was tight. She blew her nose again, stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. The image shocked her, as always, with how familiar and how baffling it was. She leaned close, the pores, the lines framing those eyes, that mouth, the backdraw of skin toward her ears. “Katt,” she whispered. “What the fuck are you doing?” The puzzle hung eternally in her head. And yet its solution lay side by side, making it no less a puzzle but speaking its piece as well. “Never you mind about that,” she said, almost as if it made sense. “I’m doing what needs doing.” Her eyes became unbearable then and she turned away.

Undraping the PC, she switched it and the monitor on. As the memory check numbered by, she stewed in rage at her husband and at her son. Four months of freedom, of a mind open to whims in the wind-closed down in a day, the house shrunk about her, when they came to stay. Mom had phoned, delaying her visit to The Rainbow this morning, that voice a hypnotic hammer, a child-berater. Hovering at the edges had been Katt’s dark and crazy gramma, never mentioned but skirted near, killer of son and husband. How she’d craved that walk to The Rainbow, those moments with Love Bunny, a calm wholeness capped by an intriguing denouement.

On her monitor, the DOS prompt appeared at last. She ran QuickLink and dialed one of three BBSs she frequented. Symposium. Three phone lines and a sysop who knew what he was doing. FI entered her alias, F2 her password, and she was in, keying past the opening screens. No messages were in her mailbox. Today’s Users listed their aliases, times of log in and out: Swizzler, Gourami, Hunk-fuck, a few new ones Katt didn’t recognize, and good old Darter, on off on off throughout the day. No Love Bunny. She tried CFRnet. The only new message entered since last night was a feeble flirt from The Geek addressed to The Goddess. Safe e-mail minisex. Poised to log off and modem into another BBS, on impulse she hotkeyed to Main and hit Who’s Active.

Newcummer on line one. On line two? Love Bunny!

Jeez, get into chat mode before she logged off. This was like a special gift, bumping fortuitously into someone like this. The adrenalin was high. She was probably just about to leave, or inaccessible. Katt found Chat Mode and entered it, typing a hasty fumble: “Hi, it’s me!”

Pause. Gone. Or Katt’s friend was exiting whatever, finding her way into the chat. Then **Love Bunny** sprang up and, under it, her reply: “Well hello there.”

“Been on long?”

“Mwwwah. Mwwwah. Mwwwah.”

“Huh?”

“Oh come on,” Love Bunny typed, her spelling skills a scandal, backspace, retype, backspace, retype, like a slow thinker. “Them’s *kisses*!”

“Ah. Well, a mwwwah to you too!” Katt pictured fire on flesh, the rumpled sheets, fingerswirls and the moaning they’d prompted. How normal it had all been; not anything in the least naughty or perverse, as she’d hoped! Another stereotype blasted, woman-love unique and to be cherished.

“So what are you up to, Little Miss Hot Thighs??” An eon again of backspace and correction. The pedant in her. Typing in real time, the laggardliness of it all made each word monumentally important, even as it pressed impatience buttons inside Katt to hell and gone.

“Zip. Puttering,” she typed. “Hubby massage.”

“From one bed to another? You *are* a slut!”

“No no no. Headache, soothed brow, working out kinks in his shoulders.”

“Kinks:)?”

“You heard me!”

“Is he a handsome brute? Think he could handle two?”

That pained her. Deep sting. Sudden welling of rage toward them both. He’d had this woman, concealed it, used it to manipulate her and Conner. “So-so. I doubt he’s up to your exacting standards. He’s pretty straitlaced.”

“I almost had an ongoing threesome once.”

“Somebody flinch?”

“Yeah, me. The guy took serious sick, she had to get a nurse, full time, nothing contagious. I bailed. Life’s too fucking short. I liked the man. Even loved him. But not enough to saddle myself. His problem, not mine. It’s like people trapped behind wheelchairs. Sacrificing their happiness. All I see is burden, years of waste, a pitiful time sink.”

Carriage return. Sherry was waiting. Katt disagreed with her, saw such love as ennobling and only proper, then realized her own acts spoke otherwise. “Luck of the draw, I guess. Doing what befalls. What feels right.”

Pauses in chat were often pregnant. She’d paused and now Love Bunny paused, wondering, Katt supposed, how or if to respond to Newcummer’s implied disapproval. What she’d typed didn’t exactly argue against Love Bunny, but it hung in the air, and her friend’s reply confirmed her defensive stance: “Hey maybe I’m selfish or something, but it ain’t for me, ya know?”

“This was in Fort Collins?” asked Katt.

“Nope. Years ago. Anyway, gotta be off now, sweets. Friggin’ prep for classes.”

“Ah. Think I’ll go garden or sumpin’.” Lie down for a nap, more likely.

“Sounds groovy. Hey, tell you what, whyncha leave me a steamy message, tell me what you liked, turn me on again with them seductivoracious-yow, do you like that? I just made it up!!!-words of yours?”

“ ’Kay. Maybe tonight. You do likewise?” In memory, she was fondling Sherry, hands at her pubis, finding there the bare beginnings of cervical oddities. She’d passed by that decision point, neither healing nor hurting. Instead she’d resumed her caress, Sherry’s warm body mirroring the ardency of the rhythm Katt took up. Then the monitor came back, its disk drive fan muffled below like the muted roar of jet engines.

“It’s a promise, love,” came Sherry’s message. “Good. I liked what we did.”

“Mwwwah, sweets. Smooch at you later.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Chat Mode off.

***

Four days later. Thursday afternoon. Conner, having quickly learned to avoid College with his bike, sped along the tree-lined, far-less-traveled Remington Street, picked up the bikepath at Johnson Drive, and headed home. Jounce of wrapped gift in his back basket. A warm day. He hoped they wouldn’t melt.

Fort Collins was a neat place. Water fountained over boulders in Old Town Square, a bookstuffed Stone Lion just at its south edge, and refurbished brick buildings cozying it in. And that was just one block, but a block that kept calling him back. The chocolates had been waiting for him a few stores south of Walrus Ice Cream down College. Then he’d found his bike and sped off, Mom’s surprise prompting notions of secrecy as he rode. Sure Dad had bought a gift for both of them to give her, as usual; but other than his heartfelt amateurish kid-art, painted or penciled at Dad’s request, this was the first time he’d planned and bought a gift of his own without Dad’s help or conniving. A sweaty jogger, bare-chested, passed by with a perfunctory wave on the other side of the bikepath. Conner grinned at him but the grin was broader for sweet anticipation: He’d get off the bike early, prop it against the side of the garage, no kickstand, eggwalk to the sliding door into the den, glide through a minimal unscreened crack, close it, creep around like in the movies, find Mom and Dad together by the sound of their voices, and visit heart attacks of happiness upon them. It was past four. Mom would’ve just come home from work and Dad would be back from school by now.

A rollerblading couple went by, the woman tailing the man and neither one of them giving him any acknowledgment. On his right, a trio of ducks waddled nonchalantly down an embankment into the pond. Beyond it, his house went past, odd view of it from the back, Mom and Dad’s bedroom window above but he doubted they were watching. She was going to be so excited and he’d be too, but he wouldn’t show it cuz that was uncool; okay, a little and he’d endure her hug so she wouldn’t feel bad. Dad’d be proud. Up over the arced bridge, around the bend, and straight away along a trickle of creek-there was the path’s end, through a wide gate to Wallenberg Drive. No traffic or rare. Rich houses. Past them he coasted, ramping up onto the sidewalk, slowing and dismounting. There was Mom’s car in the driveway. A riot of flowerbeds edged the walkway to the front door. Conner felt like a thief, cutting a corner, taking the walk along the garage. He propped his bike along the side and worked the package loose, wrapping paper crinkling out his guilt. Skulking about was super fun.

Good, the screen was unlatched. He slid it, zvrig-gled it really, along a stubborn track, then backward once he’d got inside. Voices through the vent. They were upstairs. His tennies squeaked. He slipped them off, padded on soft socks across the kitchen floor, through the dining room to the vestibule, and up the stairs.

He was gonna make it undetected. Above, the straight edge of white wall was poised to yield up a parent or two, his surprise blown. Nope, nope; thick-carpeted stairs, no telltale creak to them, one hand angling on the bannister, the other clutching Mom’s chocolates. Voices again louder above. Bedroom, he guessed. Parent stuff. Who knew what they found to say after so many years?

Hallway now. He hung near the baseboard, stifling an almost irresistible urge to laugh. Door ajar. The voices came clearer. “I decided to keep it from you one more day what with your birthday and all. I thought-”

“C’mon, Marcus, forget that, my birthday is nothing.” Her voice was raw. Conner stopped feeling so impish.

“I’m sorry. I think it’s really finally-”

“We’ll get it looked at first thing tomorrow morning. We can go now if you want, Poudre Valley’s emergency room. I can leave Conner a note, he-’’

“No, it’ll wait.” Dad too harsh. He lowered his tone and Conner felt thickness in his throat: “It’ll wait. We can set it aside for the evening, no sense in spoiling the festivities.”

“Shall I call the hospital?” Her voice was quavering, and on the hallway wall opposite their door, a pool of sun high up vibrated like disturbed water, reflections of some unknown something inside. The disease had hit at last and Conner fancied he felt a sleeping caterpillar curled tight in his own head, just now beginning to wake.

“Yes, better prep them so we see the right man, so he shows up and raises the right hoops.”

“C’mon, Marcus, it might be something else.” But her voice betrayed her.

“Sure,” Dad said, knowing better.

And Conner stood in the hallway, package tight to his chest, trying not to breathe as a nightstand drawer opened and phonebook pages flipped by and Mom lifted the receiver and punched in a number and, after a pause, spoke into it. Her words were low, lower than their conversation, but she said it, said what he knew she would-and when she did, he wanted nothing so much as to get away, to be by himself in the outdoors and let free whatever this churning, woozying stuff was inside him. But some of it spilled out, and his grip on the package loosened and made fumbles of noise, so that first Dad came out and Mom soon after and he couldn’t help it, he was weeping like a baby in their arms.

***

Marcus had had a weekend to absorb it. Sherry’d gone to Cheyenne on some vague last-minute thing, their planned Sunday afternoon tryst up in smoke. Wasn’t working out in any event, months of fantasy more intense, more reciprocal than the reality; and he much doubted he’d’ve been able to pretend to no problem if they had bedded down. So here he was, before his students-but his thoughts were on a quiet time spent alone by the overcast lake in City Park, Conner on his mind. And Katt. And a father and his effervescent daughter come down to feed the ducks and geese that honked such frenzied giggles out of the little girl.

What had the doctor said? The Huntington’s was there all right-he’d always known as much despite the odds they invariably cited-and it was active. Last spring, word of the HD gene’s discovery had been published; but that was a far cry from curing it, nothing Marcus would benefit from, though his son had a chance if the disease waited a decade or two before striking. He and Conner had had a heart-to-heart, late in October in his study, on just this subject, himself sober, somber even, hearing his own father’s voice in the words he spoke and yelling at himself ineffectually inside to break free of that mold, not to make light of it surely, but not to funerealize it either. He had decades, a nice slow descent, a nice long time to burden his family with his incapacity, if you trusted the averages. But Dad had fallen apart much faster than that, and already Marcus could feel the place in his head-fancy, surely-where his mind was seeping out. Nothing betraying yet in the way he moved, but every fumble now posed a question.

“Let us speak, dear friends,” he said, putting on for their amusement his haughtiest John Housman, “of the death of Falstaff.” Then his own voice, the fair Belinda giving him a tantalizing eye amid the laughter: “Fat earthy man, in an odd way the counterpart to Dromio’s offstage kitchen wench in A Comedy of Errors, this expansive girthful rogue was perhaps Shakespeare’s most memorable character.” More damned automatic pilot, this lecture, but it was what they paid him for, and it didn’t get in the way of or betray to public knowledge the grief he felt for himself and for his son. “All the world, pure appetite fulfilled, generous in falsehood and in being caught out, in love with all manner of fleshly delights-such was Falstaff.”

He spoke of sex and erections and the pastoral in the reporting of Falstaff’s death, what might have been gained or lost in seeing him die instead of hearing about it; but all the while he was glancing at Belinda perfectly formed, and watching his son’s face gain a quick maturity there in the study as he recounted for him for his grandfather’s death; and feeling, always feeling, the nugget of nothing growing inside his brain. Little packing-snail, slowly expanding, taking over territory, desiccating gray matter as it grew. His movements would become as random as his father’s, mind as loose-limbed and imbalanced as his body, out of control and a burden to Katt and Conner. Neuroleptic agents would counter the effects for a while, but they offered no cure. When would it kick in, when? Surely not for another dozen years at the earliest; surely he was feeding his fear into imagination’s boundless hopper, and once the shock abated, he’d settle, resigned, into inevitability.

That was how these things worked.

A kid in the back, chair-drape and ankle-cross of the radically bored, raised a slow arc-swung hand. “I’m still PO’d at Prince Hal for dumping his fat pal in the previous play. I mean I get why and all, but he was dead wrong.”

Little smart-ass, thought Marcus. Would make an okay Hal, this Bentley Frink.

“I can guess where you’re taking us, but please expound, expand, explain, or expostulate as you will.”

He’d shown them Orson Welles’s brilliant The Chimes at Midnight, a pastiche of Falstaff scenes with Welles acting the role of the fat man himself. Frink had looked puzzled then, uncharacteristically reserved. Marcus knew that his puzzlement would inevitably turn to bravado in class.

Frink smiled like the junior tottering on senior that he was. “Seems to me old Will meant the demoting of Orson Welles to reflect badly on politics, even given the clean-up-his-act of prince-become-king. But today, he has other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to bring the counterweight onstage to remind us of the bad taste of banishment. Good Prince Hal, acting unkingly, has put down his impish side, so the allure, the sheer charm, of that impishness is left backstage.” Translation: Frink calls Shakespeare to task for casting Prince Hal in too good a light, the banishment of Falstaff swept under the rug in 2 Henry IV.

What a stupid pointless game this academic rumination became after a while, even as it exercised minds. Here he stood, propped at the edge of his desk, his brain losing a cell with each beat of his heart, and they spoke of story. “Good point,” he said, thinking how puerile it was really, “and it saves the bother of decking the player out for one measly scene, when he was most likely busy with one or the other hefty part.” And that’s when Marcus began to feel a rise of something wrong, an inner upsurge. The classroom, caught in a whirlpool of Cartesian collapse, melded window and desk, floor and ceiling, a rush of students closing in as he clung to his fall, deskwood sliding by. A dizziness wrapped in his voice’s high piping seized him, sheer panic in his sustained repetitive cry. He was going to die. He was going, absurdly, to lose all respect from his students with this incessant yelping. Hands moved upon him, sounds leaping from concerned faces. The floor felt too solid at his back, the sunlight too harsh and intrusive.

Someone cushioned his head on a coat, some angel, her breasts going by-and it was Belinda. Concern hung in her eyes, and a sheen of dismissal. Wasn’t fair. The process was supposed to be slow, years of lassitude. The front of his face sheeted in fever and tears and the classroom kept spinning spinning spinning through the animal howls coming up elemental from his depths, confusion without end.

3

A LIFE IN WARPS AND TATTERS

Tuesday, July twenty-ninth. After Marcus’s collapse the previous afternoon, Katt’s life had become awash with tumult; summoned from a meeting at HP, white-faced Kristy rushing her to a phone, the emergency room intern clearly clueless about the problem, then leaving Conner a message and speeding west on Harmony and up LeMay to the hospital where Doctor Bein, finally matched up with Marcus, peered curiously into his eyes. “Ever had any heart problems?” he’d asked. She’d said no. “Could be a first,” his medicinal odor, a hint of arrogance; “I’ll run some tests.” But he suspected (so much was clear from his stunned puzzlement) and she knew that it was the Huntington’s kicking in much sooner than anyone could expect. Such was the conclusion the doctor quickly came to, but Katt refused, over Bein’s protest, to let the hospital keep him from his family one moment longer in its pointless probative thrall.

Now, with Marcus bedridden upstairs and Conner doing his best to mope alone, avoiding them both, Katt felt the house, airy and expansive before they arrived, close hard and tight around her like a throbbing fist. She couldn’t believe, hunched over coffee in the breakfast nook beside a triptych of rain-swept windows, how superior she felt-nor how depraved. All the house sounds, tall fridge just beyond the butcherblock centerpiece, the dull boom of new wood settling, the whole proprioceptive feel of the walls flowing in every direction toward her, meeting up, homing in-these appeared, to her ears, to trumpet her guilt, to make it as obvious as the sheeted rain itself.

Yet no one had called her bluff.

No one had said word one.

She brought the mug to her lips for a quick sip, hot roil of mist there, too sharp an angle, scald and a spill as she set it down. French vanilla scented the air, pain so slight at her lipburn that the touch of her tongue sent it fleeting. Katt’d begun in the past week to feel apart from her colleagues at work, from her fellow bodyworkers, from the BBS crowd. Her thoughts were ever with her mate and with Conner, pure love toward her son, a morbid blend of love and fixated waiting toward Marcus. What had Lyra said? Caring leads to healing. Her caring had gone off.

Protective insulation, perhaps; closing down her openness to keep away the pain of what she was about. Conner, his face an open wound, served as her lifeline. Even keeping to himself, her son felt close by, someone to cling to in their grim vigil over his father.

Katt looked up sharply. Rain spattered like a sweep of pellets against the glass. She thought there’d come a summons, his voice seeping down through wood and plaster. She rose. The garish air pressed her back, but she moved against it. More candles, she needed more candles, light that soothed, that didn’t demand so much. Everything was so harshly defined, the oak grain of her cabinets hurting her eyes with its sharp swirl, the edges of doorways like honed razors daring her to pass.

Every step seemed a reproach, here in this new world of Marcus’s collapse. Up the off-white stairs she pulled herself, feeling off-balance at every step, thick railing sturdy and yet absurdly balsa-frail at the least pressure she applied. The air above, gloomed in hallway darkness, pushed against her like fog puree. But she drove through it as part of what felt like an unending penance. Marcus called to her again. His door, edged in lamplight, stood slightly ajar. Katt gripped it, pushed feebly in, found him resting upon pillows, one forearm fulcrumed at his sweaty brow.

His eyes were closed. The man she was killing, sweet Marcus, she’d met years ago on the Pentacrest one breezy spring day, each the other’s destiny. Married in the tiny white chapel down by the student union, a child, a settling in. And now she was con-eluding his life, which stunned her at how wrong and how right it was. “Marcus?” Softly, she’d no idea if he’d heard her approach: “You need anything?”

As he turned to her, his forearm curved down so that his hands hugged the covers to his chest. “Oh hi, Katt.” The center had been punched out of his voice.

“Can I get you something?”

Marcus shook his head, rolling it on the pillow like an empty gourd.

“I thought I heard you call me.” There was that smug superiority again, not in what she’d said, but in how she felt. Her frame filled the doorway, as strong and sturdy as the jamb she leaned against. For all her man’s stocky Mediterranean muscularity, he shrank under the sheets, no strength apparent in his diminutive mien. They’d been so close in so many ways, yet she’d kept her discontent from him until it took on a separate life of its own. Now she was crushing him like a bug. And no one knew. It wasn’t any gloat or ego revelry she felt. It had no tone to it, no boasting, no villainy triumphant, though of its wicked nature she had no doubt. A soft distanced pride. That’s what she felt. Appalling, but she was not appalled. The turning of a pot gave a potter as much satisfaction.

“Oh. Oh yeah, I guess I did. Maybe some juice?”

“Sure, what kind?”

“Anything but V8.”

“Okay,” she said. She felt the impulse to close the gap between them, sit beside him, touch his cheek in love and sympathy, lean forward to embrace him. If she’d done so, she knew in her heart that it would feel, and be, both monstrous and true. This must be, she thought, what they mean by depravity. She held in her hands the power to be his healing angel; and yet the thought of using her power that way, of doing anything other than urging his illness on, moved her not in the slightest. He smiled. His face had aged some, but it was the same smile she’d first seen on that sunny July fourth on the Pentacrest, bicentennial of the nation’s independence and the beginning of her sad slide into the soul-prison their marriage finally became. She could do it. She ought to do it. Go to him, lay her hands on his head, confess her misdeeds, heal him-ah but then he’d want to know why, and the D-thing would come up and she’d spin right back into lying-No, she didn’t want a divorce, everything was fine with her-because women in the Hunt family didn’t do the D-thing, no way, no how.

“What?” he asked, wondering at her hesitation.

“Hmm? Oh nothing. Just lost in thought.”

“A penny for them.”

Grim smile. “Maybe another time,” she said.

More likely never.

***

Conner became aware, sitting in the rec room in the basement staring at the rain-washed silver of the window well, that his left hand was idling upon his head, doing monkey-preening things. Stuff that’d begun so long ago, it was now unconscious, stuff that just happened when he sat alone and let his mind meander. There was the nose-picking, of course, fingertip in and then down to taste. But his restless fingers also wandered through his hair, freeing loose minute scales of skin, catching them under the nail, bringing them also to his lips where teeth and tonguetip experdy retrieved them. And they’d begun now to move in warm caress over his cheeks and chin, pausing to glide about the beginnings of acne. He knew he ought to keep his hand away from all that, free himself of bad habits-but they felt so good, almost as if they were an integral part of him, and he doubted he could.

He glanced about.

Rec room.

Right.

There was nothing to rec with even if he’d felt the urge. Just boxes of unpacked stuff. Dad had promised a Ping-Pong table right there, near where the furnace stood idle. Conner bet that would never happen now.

The door to the upstairs stood open. Funny how you could paint a mind-map of the first floor, use the sound of people’s footsteps to track them from kitchen to hall to living room, up the stairs or out the front door. He heard her move from over yonder-the breakfast nook he’d seen her at-to the foot of the stairs; and then he felt her take them, soft slow animal pads. Time to snag some chips from the pantry, bring ’em down here and stuff his face.

He bounded up from the slung-back folding chair and crossed the cement floor. Off-white carpet coaxed him a step at a time up into the great room. He heard them up there talking. Whenever his mom stopped, he felt things in his brain throbbing in tandem with the sounds his dad made in reply. He wanted to shut himself in his bedroom but it was real close to theirs and didn’t allow him any privacy at all. No, just keeping clear of them-outside seemed wrong too-was best; no school, no friends, walks and biking felt like too much work, and what if Dad died while he was out? Absurd. He’d be like this, maybe not bedridden but confined, for years and years. That’s how Woody Guthrie had been. But then the disease hadn’t hit the folksinger as hard or as fast as it’d hit Dad.

He opened the pantry, cereals below, healthy snacks mixed in with the junk food above. Ranch chips! Hidden behind some open stuff. Rustling of clipped bags. Then he’d snagged them, was pulling the bag through the noisy blockade, holding them back from bursting forth like dam water spilling onto the floor. Success.

“Hi, Conner.”

He gave a start. “Oh, hi, Mom.” Not even looking. He swung the pantry door shut.

“Wait-give-me-a-hug-before-you-go,” it came rushing out of her, and he turned slightly away and she was upon him, crushing his body to her. He raised his arms along her back, the bag clutched in one hand. He wanted to be gone, not in this strange hug. Felt weird. She sniffed in a breath and he realized she was crying. Or at least her eyes had tears in them.

“You okay, Mom?” His chin dimpled the green blouse she wore, just below her shoulder. Up past her ear, the ceiling fan hung motionless.

“Yeah,” she said, lots of pressure softly released. “It’s just that… it’s hard dealing with it now that it’s finally happened.” She had her hand on the back of his head, cupping his neck through long dark hair. “You may never get it, you know. Fifty-fifty, they say.”

He nodded, released an mmm. Yeah, he knew. HD was not always passed on. His head might be okay, his fears might be unfounded. But he didn’t think so. No, a coil of illness, a sleeping bug, lay tucked snug inside. All in good time. Grisly notion: If it weren’t there, he’d be betraying his dad. That was bull pucky, he knew, but the thought nagged at him anyway.

“I won’t keep you any longer, I had to get Dad some juice.” Still clutching him in that overdone way. Cold mixed with her usual warmth, and he felt in some strange way more distant from Mom in her arms than he had in the basement. “Just know that I love you very much, Conner. And that I’ll always be here for you.”

“Okay, Mom. Thanks.” Her words were good, if icky as all heck, but they felt like husks, hollow and tossed by the wind. He wriggled out of her embrace, gave her a tight smile, and turned back to the basement steps. “He likes pear juice,” he said, looking back at his mother’s upset, but glancing away from her distraught eyes to fix momentarily on the microwave. Then he waved and turned, thundering down the stairs and taking the abrupt turn as smooth as a glider on a windless day.

***

The following Saturday, Katt woke from a nightmare. She’d been on a Christmas tree farm, in the proprietor’s office. Mr. Kemmelman, her bow-tied principal in second grade, stood rooted to the floor, which was bare ground. “I’m afraid you can’t use that axe,” he said, “but maybe if you kiss me.” He puckered up. Wooden dummy lips, an ill-made suit one size too small, rough-barked shins and ankles thrust into the mossy earth. Behind her, through walls that were mere outline, came the mallet-upon-stake sounds of chopping, mingled with happy family murmurings as on a tape loop. The axe hung heavy in her hands, not the long-handled kind, but a short one that felt as if a legion of dead men were invisibly pulling it down. Katt hefted it, saw it rise, felt it jar into the black bark, peel away a white-lined bird-wing of wood, angled rudely out from his shin. He shivered. “Mmm, that feels good. Another, please.” She obliged, each blow an effort, and yet she was removed from her sweat, from the draw on her muscles, from the deep womb-tingle the thwunk of the axe elicited each time it connected. White flying flinders, like glints of sunlight, filled the air. Behind her, an impossible treefall began, the cracking sounds like huge sequoias giving way, not like six-foot spruces. And now her principal’s crudely whittled base held no longer and he fell, stiff, smiling, arms open wide, directly toward her. Katt stood paralyzed, with joy, with fear. And he fell through a chorus of delighted family squeals, sight of all else blotted out, as he came on in endless angled threat, closer, closer, endlessly falling…

Katt woke with a start, thinking she had cried out, then realizing she hadn’t. Marcus lay beside her, still dozing. What am I doing? she thought, peeled raw for an instant, a moist pulp of panic exposed. The dream clung to her. She drew from the bed, dazed and awake, failing to shake it off. The faint pink walls throbbed like raw wounds as she went by.

In the shower, moving mindlessly through her ritual of shampooing and soaping and washing off, Katt vowed to end the madness. She’d dry off, wrap her bathrobe about her, brew coffee, scramble some eggs, split and warm and cream-cheese a bagel, there in the kitchen solitude, her mind strengthening its resolve. Then she’d go upstairs, taking her man’s head firmly between her hands, ignoring his questions, reverse what she’d let begin, undo it and disarm it forever, heal him, for the love of God, as her hands were meant to do. She’d confess. She’d plead for forgiveness. And then they’d discuss… divorce, she said it and she meant it and by God she would say it and mean it then too.

One last turn of the handle toward Hot-she loved a final blast of punishing hot water at her nape-then she shut it off, opened the opaque door a crack, and reached for the peach towel. She fancied him breathing suddenly right there, grabbing her hand, her cover somehow blown, wrenching her past the loud shudder of glass, a smack to her arm, misstep stubbing her toe and hurling her, still dripping water, to her knees before him-but her fingers found soft warm thickness and she drew it in and blotted herself and quick-tousled her hair.

In the bedroom, she negotiated the walls to keep as far away from Marcus as she could. He was sleeping. No need to pretend to normalcy, no need to cross diagonally if no one was watching. The house lay quiet. She crept down the stairs, sunlight knifing in through the kitchen windows. It laid bare her lovelessness. But no, Conner had to be kept in mind, her son, still in his bed, maybe up there staring at patterns in the ceiling. Surely she loved him. If she couldn’t feel that love, if it seemed horrendously distant, that was because of what she’d put upon Marcus, the toll it had taken and was taking. Even Sherry had been shut out. Messages left for Katt on the BBS had been read, she’d gotten ready to reply, and then simply froze on any words, exited, and turned the damned computer off.

She stared at her plate, vaguely remembering taking in the food-and before that, preparing it. She brought the dishes to the sink, reaching for the Ivory, her mind again on automatic pilot. Time was ticking by. For her husband it was running out. She’d opened the taut nexus of his hourglass, set the sand to seeping downward, made the narrow channel broader and swifter with the probe of her fingertip. One more fork, one more dish, it felt so satisfying to rack them in the drainer, watch the sheets of rinse water run off and drip to the mat beneath.

Katt dried her hands.

The phone rang.

Let it ring, let it fall silent. But no. Even now it was waking Marcus. Answer it, dismiss the annoyance, halt the empty greeting and the contrived shoehorn sales pitch in their tracks-and be on her way upstairs.

“Katt. Hi. It’s your mom.”

They were like an identifying logo, those words, an unwavering intro to newness and a lure into Katt’s past. The parlor, with its dark-stained angular antiques, rose to envelope her. “Mom, hi, can I call-”

“Listen, I just can’t get over the awful news about Marcus. Your father agrees.” Her father always agreed. “Are you holding it together? Is the marriage doing all right?”

Sure, except for the fucking strain impending death brings with it, wet blanket that way. “It’s fine, Mom.” Sounded odd. “That is, under the circumstances.”

“Katt, I don’t like the sound of that. Not meaning to be a busybody now, you understand?”

“Yes.” A prelude to rampant busybodyness. But her voice was bringing back the closeness and the woody air, Granny Hunt and her mother colluding over tea, gossiping about this or that man or woman cheating on a mate while Katt gazed over her playpen or played with dolls, taking it all in. They spoke deep truth, their moods bedrocked her childhood, gave it close confiding comfort. It felt so soothing to slide into it. She slid into it now.

“But the vows say in sickness and they’re good vows you two took when you hooked up so many years ago. They keep you in mind of the whole person, not just the hunky-dory times, but the ugly times too. You gotta, like the song says, stand by your man. Relationships take plenty of work, and never more so than when he’s felled and you nurse him and soothe him and baby him through it, giving your all, nursing him like Clara Barton in the Civil War or whatever war she was in. You gotta wipe his brow and rush for the bedpan and just be like a shiny beacon; and then when he’s all better… oh, Katt, I’m sorry, I’m so bad at remembering and it’s so awful about Marcus.”

“Yes, Mom.” Anyone else, she would have felt anger toward. But her mother crept inside into places she had long thought vacated, eased in and sank down roots along old rootways, every word coated with baby oil. Although Granny Hunt had died years ago, Katt always imagined her standing near her mother, that look that was not quite a smile glowing through her wrinkles.

“It’s just so precarious out there-people slipping their vows like dogs out of loose collars. Granny Hunt, she stayed with the same man for sixty-four years, loved him fiercely. Then he died and she started visiting her son and me lots. Maybe you recall that. They were good folks. Adopted me out of my horrendous lot, raised Bill and me, didn’t flinch a muscle when him and me realized, as one, that we were a seamless match. Your father, you surely know, is a magical man. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t have to. But what he tells me is pure love that comes right back, that redounds on me. All you gotta do is give Marcus your love and take his in return and work work work to stave off the D-thing. Especially now when Marcus needs you most. Are you hearing me, Katt?”

“Yes, I am.” She wanted to hang up but the hood of the cobra was hypnotic. It lulled. And wove. Gave its slow dance to the words. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m giving Marcus all I have. Conner’s helping too.”

“That’s good, Katt,” said her mom. “Us Hunt women, every last one I know about, are a loyal bunch. We take our vows and we mean them-faithful one hundred percent, like Hortense.” There was more, much more, the drumming of thousands of tiny raindrops on a soft roof. As usual Katt asked her to fly out, and as usual Mom had the same penurious No out of her mouth before the offer was made. Airplane flights were too damned expensive. Phone calls got the job done. Kept her plugged in but out of Katt’s hair. On and on and on, as Katt felt the sunlight-swath dye down with a gray pour of cloud, heard the house tick and close about her once more.

By the time she hung up, her murderous resolve, not partaking of the least wicked or villainous feeling, had returned. She had to end this-in for a penny, in for a pound, all the way out to peace. The thought of undoing Marcus’s illness was madness, no less insane than having second thoughts, filling in the whittled tunnel, tossing out the knifeblade, and resigning yourself to a lifetime of bars. Belly full, she ascended the stairs, flappings of bathrobe whipping at her calves. She wanted her son, brooding in his room, to brood at least a half hour more before emerging. That would give her enough time to dig deep into her husband’s skull, under the pretext of once more massaging his scalp, and give his Huntington’s that one final push it needed.

***

The phone had awakened him. Two rings, then Katt had picked up downstairs. Sunlight pressed against the blinds and basked a soft glow across the walls, a glow that moved in steady scour like distant surf, though it ought to have simply rested on the painted surfaces. He couldn’t recall exactly when this light-scouring had begun, but constantly now it was with him, so subtle he hadn’t bothered to bring it up with his wife.

The disorientation that had struck him down at school had finally dissipated, at least in sufficient measure for him to feel good about leaving his bed and going about the house, his energy shelled out but intact. But now, waking to a new Saturday morning, he was content to reconstitute, his body-sense highly acute since Monday’s attack. Hadn’t lost body control yet, thank God. That’d surely be years, maybe a dozen or more, in coming. Meanwhile, and soon, he and Katt would have to start talking finances. He’d given up-or had taken from him-the Shakespeare class, emeritus professor Elihu Bremmer picking up his dropped reins. The department, though he couldn’t rely on their understanding and kindness past the summer, had agreed to pay his salary in spite of his incapacity. He harbored hopes, but surely they were vain, that he’d be able to pick up a full course load in September. How difficult could it be, after all, to adjust, to adapt- the mental equivalent of a wheelchair or crutches, all his careful cogitations on Shakespeare still there and fully tappable?

Footsteps outside. Gentle turn of the knob. Katt in her fuzzy blue bathrobe came in, gave a start when she saw he was awake. It was hard on her. He’d never seen her so upset before. “Oh hi, Marcus. Good morning.”

“Morning, sweets.”

She ambled toward him, her legs scissoring in and out of the whipped flap of terrycloth. “You want breakfast in bed this morning? I can fix some eggs.”

“No thanks. I’ll get up in a little while, come down and have something.” Her expression as she approached was a terrible contradiction, the horror she could not hope to hide and the beauty of the planes of her face, casting the same rhythm of light as the walls. She led with her knees onto the bed. “Come here,” he said, unnecessary as always but with a lust as puffed and empty as a popover.

“I’m here,” she replied. Her hand lay hot and loving against his cheek. Her bathrobe, as she bent, sagged down and he caught a glimpse of her breasts. Light-scour moved over them too in the brevity of his glance.

He stroked her thigh, made to tug her robe open.

Katt put her hand on his. “No,” she said, the weight in that quiet word crushing. You’re too sick, it said; we don’t want to strain you; you’re an invalid, now and until you die; we will never make love again. That was the bald subtext. He felt the urge to call her on it, but as usual he let it go. Their pattern: If she felt rage, she fumed and went off until it blew over; and he was used to hiding his thoughts and feelings from her, having in fact a whole inner life Katt never suspected-not to mention the lovers he’d enjoyed behind her back these many years.

“I think I’ll take a shower,” he said.

One hand lay upon his brow, a tension there. “Let me massage your scalp first.” Didn’t have to wait for him to give the go-ahead. She moved up into his thicket of hair, her fingers pressed in like ice cream scoops skimming thin wide curls of French vanilla from a solid freeze. He felt so magical in her hands, and never more so than now as she molded his weak head like so much clay. It was easy to go with her, to give in to the move and pause of her fingers, her deep concentration clear on her closed eyes. They had had, despite his sleeping around in recent years, a pretty decent marriage. Beautiful boy now coming into thoughtful adolescence. Years of health and love and laughter, grown less since his cheating had begun; but still there, indeed solidly there, as far as he could tell, and most obviously apparent on their twice-yearly escape to the pamperings of Bed and Breakfast inns.

So vigorous were Katt’s strokes that he felt as if he wore a tight skullcap humming with a low charge. Tufts of hair moved up and about her fingers, sticking straight out of his head, all angles like Dagwood upshoots. Never felt so good as now, almost as if she could touch the inside of his head and soothe the Huntington’s away. If this wasn’t sex-and of that he wasn’t sure-it was intimacy of a high order indeed. He felt close to her, his Pentacrest angel, his helpmate of so many years. She seemed to coax so many beautiful memories from him: their first year together in Iowa City, the tiny perfect home on Grant Street, marathon moviego-ing at the Bijou, Conner’s worldsplitting emergence from Katt’s stretched love there in the birthing room, the miracle of their son’s growth and unfolding. Somewhere in time, they’d diverged. Communication had foundered. He’d neglected-a shy boy from a silent indrawn family-to tell her how sweet she was. She’d kept all physical expression of endearment to the bedroom, where their couplings became increasingly rare and routine. The Saturday night special, he’d begun to call it.

Now, with her fingers pausing and wriggling like slow worms (such rapt attention he’d never seen on her face), a benign appreciation welled up in him. He would make it up to her in the time they had left, all those years of gross neglect, the way he’d taken her for granted, his pursuings and beddings of other women, his hidden life of resentment and regret. The luck of the draw had felled him, but he’d turn this final life crisis to good use-to redemption, if that was the word for it.

“You’re beautiful, Katt,” he said.

Too quiet. She hadn’t heard. But she knew he’d said something. “Hmmm?” she said, lips closed, eyes still shut and fingers still probing so precisely. Her reply rose up like bubbles from the depths of a deep-sea dive.

“I said you’re beautiful, and I love you.” Felt like an alien tongue. He wondered if he’d ever once used those words with Katt before.

Her fingers paused on his scalp, lifting, withdrawing to come down behind his ears as her warm palms touched his cheeks and her eyes, painfully moist, opened. She brought her face to his, kissed close to his lips, held there, her body taut, afraid to show her agitation. “I love you too, Marcus,” she said, a soft strained whisper. Then her arms came tight around him and she was shaking and sobbing, the floodgates letting go.

His head glowed from her massage, a warm open feeling of goodness and care. She had him in a body-vise, rocking him, frenzied in her grip as if she would melt their flesh into one. He gave her his best, an enervated bear hug. A logjam, it seemed, had finally broken up, and he felt that his waning days, however long they lasted, might fill with love-the ache of a slow ocean liner, the blasts of a long low loudly raucous horn, as two lovers, one aboard, one on shore, wave and look and linger, fastened to one vanishing face longer than anyone else might think reasonable, as it shrinks from petal to pebble to point, then gone.

***

Katt watched Marcus shut the door to their halfbath, heard the muffled clangor of the shower door moving on its track. The abrupt splash of shower water allowed her body to relax at last. Marcus would be taking his shower for a good ten minutes.

Time alone.

She stood naked before the sink, still shaking. Felt an urgent need to hurry. Picked up her toothbrush, and it clattered into the sink. Calm down, she told herself. He had said he loved her, a thing he’d never done, relying on looks and touch but never words. And she’d been hastening his disease along, probing his desiccating caudate nucleus like ultrasound in a womb, nearly able to see her flows of energy hurtling the process on. She spat out the splat of blue paste, water on bristles, sucked it in, again, again, washing the bubbly residue away with one hand. Craning at the faucet, she gazed up into her eyes, not two feet away. Murderer. So this was what a killer looked like. Normal, dead normal-always the shock of how much older she looked than, day by day, she imagined herself to be, yes; but the persistent facade of normalcy beneath her agitation was an outrage to the truth. Katt bit her lip. Saw the photo of her Grandma Jasper as a child. Stopped.

The Coed Killer came to mind. That’s the name they’d given him in The Coloradoan. Somewhere in Fort Collins or Loveland or Greeley, there walked a sick man, crazy in the head, holding down a normal job, smiled at by unsuspecting friends and neighbors; and twice now, by all reports, he’d kidnapped college girls and tortured them to death in ways only hinted at in the news. Was what she was doing to her husband any less heinous? She wanted to think so, but she knew better. And yet. Ah, that was the kicker. And yet, even knowing that taking his life, that hurrying nature on her way after jumpstarting the process, was wrong-even in knowing this, she did not feel evil. It seemed still like the right thing to do, her only choice.

She was a good person. She didn’t think she deceived herself in believing so. Morality as touted in public was always so black and white. But in the privacy of the lone soul, gray shaded between them in infinite gradation. She needed her freedom from Marcus or she would die in spirit. It was that simple. No one looking in upon her life might support that belief. But from the inside, from her secure and certain vantage point, its truth was undeniable.

He’d said he loved her, he’d opened a glimmer of what might have been. It touched her heart. But his words had come too late. Katt wasn’t about to gamble on last-minute conversions, not when the goal she had resolved upon-with trepidation at first, then more decisively-lay so near at hand. Not after the torment she’d endured, nor after what she’d put Marcus and Conner through. Sounded selfish, the torment she had endured. She flashed upon a lawyer pacing before a jury, calling out her arrogance. But who rlly, outside of the entrenched arrogance of the law itself, had the right to judge her suffering? Or its severity? Or to seek to diminish it or her, simply because she was killing an innocent man, heartlessly, ruthlessly?

Her throat felt hard. Swallowing around a golf ball, she turned away from the mirror, dried her hands, and slid back the closet door. Jeans, a tank top, a flannel shirt. Katt whipped them off their hangers. Dresser drawer then. Stuck. Hard knob-yank, Katt kept it from spilling when it gave. Panties, bra, out into the clutch of her hand. She had to dress and be out of there before the water juddered to a halt, before Marcus’s towel-wrapped figure emerged to once more engage her in unbearable conversation.

A race that was no race. She knew it in her mind but that didn’t lessen her discomfort. She struggled with her clothing at every turn. But in the end, Katt triumphed, a Pyrrhic victory, and gripped the doorknob even as the rush of hot water continued its muffled, full-on hurtle.

4

HARD YOKE, HEAVY BURDEN

Sherry had heard about Marcus’s collapse, of course; a rumor not having far to travel on campus and corroboration ever close behind. Given the gravity of the reports she’d overheard, it surprised her to receive his phone call less than a week after he’d been stricken. Small talk at first in newly enfeebled tones, then quickly to brass tacks-how he felt, his prognosis, and an invitation to drop by, meet his wife and child, say goodbye.

Now here she was at their front door, beautiful house on a rich street. A dare to herself mostly. Add a morbid curiosity into the mix and her presence, still setting her atingle with uncertainty, made some sort of sense.

Footsteps. The door eased back. And there stood the woman she’d seduced two weeks before! Katt seemed flooded with emotions but surprise was not among them. “Come in,” she said. “Marcus is upstairs.”

Absurd! Katt didn’t belong here!

“But you’re…” The words wouldn’t come.

“Yes. I’m his wife.”

Sherry faltered over the doorstep, following. Things in the hallway went by in a haze and she could hardly feel the steps pass beneath her feet as they rose. Rage seized her first, rage at being tricked. But the house seemed so powerfully sad around Katt’s fullness of feeling, that the emotion that settled upon Sherry-and this surprised her- was shame. Here she was, flowers in hand, rising to stare lightly at a dying man, contemplating death. This man had cheated with her; and his wife, who had deceived them both but showed no animosity, now led her to his side. Through an armor of numbness, shame pierced and stuck.

He looked terrible. The rich swarthiness of his face now lay drained and gray, its skin wrinkled like a parched gully. Three pillows angled his head, but except for that elevation, he looked for all his wanness as if he might be stretched upon a bier already. His eyes, erradc in their attempts to focus, shone dull and unsettling.

“Hello, Sherry.” The voice was surprisingly loud and steady, not what she’d expected after his phone call.

“Hi, Marcus,” she said. “I brought you these.” Katt lifted the bouquet from her, as though relieving her of a final secret, and set them on the nightstand. It struck Sherry odd that Katt kept her distance from the bed.

He thanked her for the carnations, then, “Do you have any problems if I… I mean, I want to…" From his tone, he clearly wanted to confess their affair.

She nodded. What difference could it make? His wife already knew, may well have known from the outset of their BBS conversations.

His head shifted a fraction. “I’m sorry, Katt. I’ve had other women in my life. Behind your back.”

“Yes,” said Katt, “and Sherry was among them, the one that brought us to Colorado. I’ve known for some time but it all seems pretty inconsequential to me now.”

“You knew.”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me?” asked Marcus.

Sherry’s plaintive “I’m sorry” overlapped, soft, almost gasped.

“Nothing to forgive.” Katt’s face made it impossible to gauge the truth of her words, it was so full of warring emotions. “You’re dying, Marcus. I want-"

She stopped.

Her eyes glistened.

“I want,” she said, “to put the past behind us.” Sherry felt an impulse to hug her, but she was frozen to her spot of rug, there in a hush of sunlight. Half her mind told her to escape to the safe solitude of her condo. The other half, however, found a haven here, in the stream of emotions that flowed from these two. It opened her up. It made her feel penitent, forgiven, ready to grapple with buried feeling, to conquer it and begin anew.

***

Marcus minimized all movement when other people were about. By himself, he’d raise an arm, watch it strobe by in marionette-like jerkiness. His thoughts, as his voice, held steady. But he could feel the disease sculpting his brain-and he could sense control slipping away, silently enraged by it, whenever he moved or tried to walk. Quick beyond all documented speed the Huntington’s had befallen him. His doctors had been amazed. But Katt had insisted his care be under her control, at home. They’d get their chance, when he was dead, to poke and probe, to pore over the secrets of his brain and body.

Peached light scoured across his mate and his lover. They were gorgeous, both of them, and though his cock lay inert beneath the covers, lust flared plumheaded and hard in his mind, then subsided. But it’d be back. Twice now he’d spewed uncontrollable desire over Katt, listening in horror as his mouth spilled unbridled nastiness into her, his limbs writhing with need.

“You shame me with your goodness,” he told Katt, and he could feel his guilt, as batted with cotton haze as it was, dissipate before her generosity.

Her agitation increased. “It all seems so petty now and it’s pointless to waste time with blaming. Look, let me go put these in water.” She tried for the flowers but her hands shook and she needed a second grab. Hot animal lust tickled him at the sight of her drawing near, at her buttock-rolling departure across the room.

The door clicked shut.

Just him and Sherry here now.

It bubbled up out of him, urgent need, a quick crazy seizure of desire. He issued the sweet sex animal before him a command, low, raw, guttural.

“What?” Sherry’s strong eyes, which had fawned soft since she’d entered the room, flicked hard and sharp.

“You heard me.” His words spewed forth, not loud so much as heavy with heat and need. “Take me in your mouth and suck me. I want to feel your pussy, I want to see it and taste it and plug it up.” Even as the sounds spilled from him, they began to warp and weaken.

“C’mon, Marcus. Are you crazy?” Sherry looked like a mix of turned on and cornered.

His longings had issued like steam and now the valve closed again. “Oh jeez, Sherry, I’m sorry. But I’m okay now. The thoughts come and go, all kinds of crazy things all the time, and sometimes I can stop them and sometimes I can’t.”

“I understand.” She didn’t. The light played wildly over her straight red hair, down across the welling up of her perfect sweatered breasts, the jut of them as he tore at her blouse and bra, freeing the stiff-nippled lovelies to suck and lick and pull upon. She stood planted on the carpet, unmoved. But th& wowing light seemed to draw her toward him-that tasty mouth, those lickable thighs.

“It’s just that… your fuck-lovely body is so close, I can smell you from here, I want it, I need it, I want to shove my cock into you.” He raised a hand and it rippled like cubism through the air. Katt came in. “And Katt too, I can smell her too. I want you both together, here right now, riding me, feeding my face, giving me one last chance to taste your juices.”

It was shooting out of him like sperm riding impulse unstoppable.

Through the room’s angled air, he cried.

His tears, his lust, kept flowing, kept swelling and surging as though they’d never stop.

“What’s going on?” he heard Katt say. The blue vase hung in her hands like a stretched dick and balls.

“You tell me," Sherry said. But how could it be her if she was riding him? And yet there she was in the same place as when she’d come in.

“-yes, ride me, don’t leave me, I miss you, I can’t live without you, I love you, fuck me, fuck me, don’t let me do it alone-” on and on it went, his hips bucking hot and wild beneath the covers.

And then it let up. Blew over. Except for the fact that ceiling plaster slabbed above him, Marcus felt as if he were kneeling beside a toilet, a frenzy of vomiting at last subsiding.

“I’m sorry,” he said, gasping, bathed in cold sweat. Again and again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And the lovers he’d once loved stood there, watching him. He understood how poorly he’d treated Katt, without ever really meaning to. How much of Sherry he’d missed by concentrating-how many others had done the same-on her body alone. And he thought of Conner, holed away in the house, terrified, as he surely must be, at the prospect of his life and health slipping at any time so swiftly down the rathole of their shared illness.

Weeping seized him. The women were saying something but he couldn’t hear them through his tears and apologies and his thoughts of Conner. Didn’t matter a fucking damn anyway. He had days before he died, either of brain rot, or more likely from catching something he couldn’t resist in his weakened state. The light-scour had rhythmed into his head, caressing, caressing, governing his desiccation as surely as a potter lorded it over clay. He wanted the end to be swift but he was greedy for life too. His sobs caught at his throat, felt like a tape loop, the women in some bizarre repeated loop of their own, toward him, away from him, lights flickering over their bodies and cutting their words into long thin strips of gibberish.

***

I ought to go to him, she thought. I ought to sit by him on the bed and hold his hand and stroke his brow until he stops crying. That’s what a wife ought to do. Sherry, remembering this moment, will tell someone.

Or she’ll ask me why I didn’t.

And I’ll break down.

“It’s all right, Marcus,” Sherry said.

“He gets like this,” Katt told her. “Try to be calm, Marcus. There’s nothing to apologize for.” So bizarre it was to see the two of them together and to hear the insane talk fly from him, the sex talk, directed yes at Katt, but its scatter tying him and the redhead together, suggesting in a twisted way their past trysts. Katt’d never realized how territorial she was. She wanted the disease to spring from the bed, like Marcus’s words, to leap forth and cover Sherry, overwhelm her unease with terminal jitters.

She wanted it to claim them both.

And she could make it happen. Assuming Sherry wanted anything more to do with her, she could close in on her, a hand probing, caressing, revisiting that cervix, honing in on the hints of cancer she’d found, setting it loose.

No! One was enough. Katt felt animosity toward her, yes. But in the grand scheme of things, she was innocent, strange as that sounded-caught between the imperfect mesh of the broken gears of a failed marriage. She stifled the urge to grin through her pain. She was no murderer. This one killing felt right, its end in sight-relief, freedom, and no sin at all. But Sherry was a different matter, and acting out of jealousy would have made Katt a criminal.

“I… I think I’m okay now.” Marcus seemed to be cried out. “I just wanted… I wanted to say goodbye to you. I’ve made some mistakes. It wasn’t a mistake to know you, Sherry. Not at all. But it was wrong to break my promise to Katt. I hurt my… my wife. I’m sorrier about that than I know how to say. It’s been a privilege to know you and to love you; I wish it could have been under different circumstances. You have a good life, now, you hear? Full, rich, and blessed in every way.”

Katt watched Sherry squirm under this, unable to look her way. “Thanks, Marcus,” Sherry said. “You were a good friend. You deserve better than this.”

“Maybe we should be going,” Katt said, unwrapping the flowers and placing them in the vase. Its flared base was cold with new tap water.

Sherry seemed relieved. “Yes,” she said.

Katt pulled open the door.

Sherry paused there. “Goodbye, Marcus,” she said.

“Goodbye,” he said, and Katt eased the door shut after her sobered guest.

The hallway felt cooler, less intense, than the room.

They started for the stairs but Sherry stopped. “I’m sorry, Katt.” It felt genuine coming from her, a softness there Katt had never seen before. Usually so tightly clad in cool armor as Sherry was, this warm directness made her more beautiful by far than her fashion-magazine looks ever could.

“I understand,” Katt said. “And I forgive you.”

Then Conner’s bedroom door, two doors down, flew open and he came out. He stopped when he saw the two women. A look passed over his face, a wry twist of the neck. She’d seen this before. On TV perhaps? A gawky teenage gesture over a laugh-track? It was maddeningly vague. There began in her belly some new feeling, a spot, then a swirl, as he stood there looking worn and sad and in need of love. And then the feeling swept up and seized her and she knew, the sure knowing that she wanted to deny, and she had to break away in sudden panic and make for the hall bathroom.

***

Conner watched his mom go. All day he’d felt numb, a witness as the disease filled his house. The pretty lady, someone he’d not seen before, had her eyes on him.

“Hi,” he said.

“You’re Conner,” she said. “I’m Sherry.” Then as if remembering, she raised her hand, shook his. “I’m friends with your mom and dad. On the CSU faculty.”

“You want some food?”

“No. Well maybe. I don’t know.” He could tell that she felt out of place. Like him.

“C’mon then.” He thundered down the stairs, pounding at them like his mother yelled at him for. She’d be okay. She’d cry in there or whatever. She’d given him some more vacant hugs just about every time she saw him. Gripped so tight around him, he felt like one of those squeeze dolls, the kind whose pink head puffs up like a lightbulb.

He waited at the landing for this Sherry person, legs real pretty in tights where they stuck out of her skirt.

“Kitchen’s this way,” he said, bounding down the turn of three steps and heading along the thin hallway. Didn’t wait for her to catch up. He liked that she followed him. That’s how his girlfriend would be if he ever had one, but he probably never would. “Over there’s the sink, a window or two, dishwasher, cookbooks, we got it all.” He essayed a smile, and from her look it seemed she caught it but had no idea how to handle it.

He flung the pantry door back, catching it with his other hand before it gouged the wall. A crumpled bag of Oreos. Conner fingered in past the wrapping and pulled out a stack of six or seven.

“Your pleasure,” he said.

“What?”

“Do you want some?”

She said no and he gestured to the pantry so she’d be sure to take what she liked.

“I’ll be down here,” into the great room and down the carpeted stairs. But she was right behind him, nothing in her hands, no food, no drink. She couldn’t eat any of his Oreos. Not even if she begged. He led her through a door into the unfinished basement, flicking a lightswitch as he went.

“Nice place you have here.”

“It’s my hovel,” he said, assuming the folding chair. “You can hear everything going on, but at a remove. Makes you feel like royalty. King of the underworld.”

There was a footrest, the same silver tubing and pale cloth that made the chair. She claimed it, sat with those pretty legs together and her knuckles gripping the canvas. She had shiny red hair, almost like thin wire filament, at her brow and falling splash upon her shoulders. “You seem to be taking this pretty well,” she said.

He shrugged. He took an Oreo from the stack but held it at eye level like a thick coin, no hurry. “What my dad has? I’ve got it too. Did they tell you?”

“I know it’s inherited. And that there’s a chance it won’t happen to you, a good chance.” She was lying. That last second-thought of a phrase. Grownups always added a phrase like that and hoped you were dumb enough not to see the lies spilling out of it.

“So, Sherry.” He popped an Oreo in whole and munched it, watching her. When his mouth was mostly free, he went on. “How long do you think you’re going to live?”

“How long?” She wasn’t prepared, like all the others he could think of. She hadn’t given it a thought.

“Yes, how long?”

“I don’t know. Until I’m ninety or a hundred. Maybe more, if I’m lucky.”

“And how old are you now?”

He’d hit a cliche. She was grinning. People liked a cliche, cuz it took them onto familiar ground for a little while. “Now I don’t think that’s any… Then she saw his face and dropped the game. “I’m thirty-two.”

“So you’re maybe one-third done, if you’re lucky.”

“I guess so.”

He leaned forward, taking another Oreo from the tower and tapping it at his temple. “I can feel something here. Now I know I might be imagining it but I don’t think I am. I think it’s here and it could start up any dme. I’d say I’m about ninety-nine percent done.” It felt rough to say that, much rougher than it had been to think it.

“That’s not true.” She was getting solemn. “It hits people in their forties, doesn’t it?”

“Mostly. But sometimes kids get it too.”

“Maybe so, but-”

“I’ll tell you something else.” He leaned in to her, taking the Oreo into his mouth and forcing her to wait. A moist glint in her large right eye caught his attention, a reflection of the silver window well.

She was a nice lady with only a little makeup, which he could forgive. He bet she didn’t need any at all, but women got suckered all the time by TV and those glossy magazines. “I think my…” His throat caught. “My mom? She doesn’t…”

He closed his eyes, squeezed out a tear, thought that the only one-then he had to do it again, his face taut in grimace. He held in the sobbing. That was for girls. He had broken down in front of Mom and Dad that one time, but no more. Crying was for in bed with your pillow. “She no longer… likes me.” He whispered it out and there was a choking, a clench and then gone, where the Oreo had been gulped down. His nose was watery.

“Oh now that’s enough of that.” He could tell she’d gone into big sister mode, but it didn’t bother him. “My mother, listen now, she treated me bad. But there was no question that she didn’t love me. I know Katt. She’s an ideal mom, kind, caring. She’s under a lot of stress now with what’s going on upstairs. But I know she loves you. You can tell by the way she talks about you.”

“No, there’s something else.”

“There’s nothing else.”

Grown-ups were always so quick to contradict you.

“I can feel-”

She put a hand on his knee. Felt weird. “Listen to me. She’s my friend. She loves you very much.” Yeah as if Sherry knew-as if anyone really knew- what love was.

“I suppose.”

“There’s no supposing necessary,” she said. “I know she loves you. Don’t go worrying over that. Your father is dying. She needs you near by and as strong as you can be. Not weirding out on her, okay?”

Nice lady, but she didn’t understand; she had no room for understanding. “I guess,” he said.

“That’s good.”

Sure it was. She went on like that some more, pretty and hunched toward him. He let her words roll through him like low thunder, just feeling the comfort and gentle calm her rich voice was wrapped in. After a while, she’d be on her way. But he felt no particular rush to see her go.

***

Katt couldn’t look at herself in the mirror. Sitting on the cold pastel lid of the commode, a shower curtain to her left and the sink unit to her right, she stared at the baby-blue throw rug, picking at her sleeves and trying not to let the thought through, not to let it cohere. But its insistence slithered past every barrier, every distraction she raised against it.

That look, that twist of the neck-it had been picked up from Marcus. She remembered it now as far back as that first day on the Pentacrest. Funny how glints of a moment rushed up after years of forgetting, him in longer hair on the grass, taking in something new about her, there in all their freshness, a head-turn as if his mind were a machine and some new fact clicked into an empty chamber. It was a positive gesture, one he’d lost-now that she focused upon it-when their marriage had gone flat. But Conner adopted a slew of his father’s mannerisms, the walk, the chinpull, this and that, around age five, most of them dropped after a month of toying with them, but some recurring since then at random moments.

People at HP, stopping into her cubicle, if they gave her photos a glance, more often than not told her (and she let their telling fall away like an unnoticed breeze) that Conner looked so much like his dad. You got close to your family, stayed close, and missed things that outsiders saw as obvious. He had that same dark hair, those same ocean-gray eyes, the start of Marcus’s stocky body type. Ah but the face, that face, as she now brought the two of them in her mind together and compared them, feature for feature-the flat fresh plane of Conner’s face would grow uncannily into a young Marcus, and then an older Marcus, taking upon itself surely her son’s life experience uniquely, but ever melded with the torment of her husband’s face, peering out at her at unexpected moments, piercing her to the soul and reminding her of what she’d done.

She turned the thought aside. No, not yet. Not ever in this life. The stress had been unrelenting and growing with each claustrophobic day, each sleepless night. Eight days had passed, little more than a week, since he’d taken ill, but it seemed like an eternity of waiting. She hated stress, had ordered her life to minimize it, buffered from customers at work, all domestic decisions anticipated well in advance, rehearsed, researched, and settled so that all went smoothly and without stress. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t feel her feelings, she didn’t know where she was, under intense pressure of any kind.

Marcus had repented.

He was sorry. He’d said so. He’d confessed, begging her forgiveness.

She could abandon this depraved course now, cure him, give him back his health. His brush with death had surely changed him. He’d be a new man. He’d give up his bimbos, fix his love entirely on her as he had at the start.

But no, it was too late. The other women weren’t the problem. They were a symptom of a rift that cut soul-deep and could never be healed. She had to kill him; there was no other way.

She had to, she had to.

The tufts of the bathroom throw rug stranded in wild frenzy, a riotous blue profusion that seemed as disarrayed as her life, destroying even at the fringes any attempt at order. What she had started had to be finished. But she realized now-yes, it was sneaking through this way-that the death of her husband wouldn’t finish it.

Please, no. It escaped from her lips, a weak plea to absent gods. She’d begun on Marcus because she knew for a fact that his death would free her, that his sacrifice was perhaps not a proud thing but that it was necessary and in her own mind at least justified, beyond all doubt. But if Conner survived…

She whimpered softly, again, again, tears not coming, not even close to coming. A soft clattering noise. She’d begun to rock herself, backward, forward, the toilet lid’s steel hinges shifting in rhythm behind her. There’d be no freedom, no complete easing of the stress, perhaps for all she knew no relenting of the stress at all. He’d be there beside her at the funeral, in the house, watching her, his Mar-cus-eyes on her in that judgmental adolescent way, ever his unexpected questions, that directness in him she loved put to whatever use his mind dictated. For five years, he would abide here, that beautiful baby boy she’d pushed out of herself, vemixed and bloody, in Iowa City, his infancy and toddlerhood so bright, his preteen years in their joy and goodness her sole consolation in her marriage. Conner looked at her with such a deceptive air of wisdom, it gave her pause-child, teen, adult, all confusedly mingled.

Obliquely in the mirror the top of Katt’s head arced. She couldn’t do that. Not in a million years could she do that. Did she excuse herself for Marcus’s undoing? If an idea, in pursuit, felt right-no matter how evil it seemed in the abstract-you went ahead and pursued it to its end, conventional mores be hanged. But there was no way anyone could ever justify the killing… yes, admit it, that’s what was seething in her mind and gripping tight the tense muscles of her stomach and making her shake all over as if fever had seized her.

He had it inside his brain too. She didn’t know that for sure. She’d never really gone in and checked. But if she did-why yes, she didn’t know how, feel for a fever or something and keep her hand there a little longer-then if he had it, lying there dormant, she could undo it, it’d be like curing it in Marcus almost, it’d get her past it. No no no! Liar! She was lying to herself, she was monstrous and out of her mind.

Kill Marcus. Kill his offspring.

It had been hers to give him life; it belonged to her to take it back. A knot twisted inside her, near to where he’d gestated for nine months.

She went on rocking, rocking-turning over like a hot stone, then dropping, then retrieving again, the idea that fixed in her mind. Its surface was smooth and sensual and inviting, vile and soiled and infested. And by God it fit her hand, coming to rest there again and again, that plug-ugly stone, worry bead grown big. And her eyes fixed upon it and examined it and lived with it, as she hefted it and held it, tight, loose, in an unsteady grip.

***

Two nights later, Marcus awoke.

He’d grown used to drifting in and out of sleep. But suddenly he was entirely awake, the house so quiet he knew Katt and Conner must be asleep. He turned his head on the pillow. Flip-book. That’s how it had become. As if when his eyes moved, someone were thumbing too slowly through a kid’s magazine, line drawings breezing by in a slow-motion attempt at real-time animation.

He made to grab the bedcovers. His fingers closed on air, firefly flits where they pinched nothing, here, here, here. Damned body felt like it belonged to somebody else.

By a miracle, they found the fold of blanketed sheet, angled it back. Everything constantly multiplied. Rising sheet was a billow of sheets, arrayed one behind the next, blowing in windless nightwind, long endless ranks of them. His bare torso fell away like hangings of slaughtered pig, serried on hooks, back, back, back into an elusive channel with seemingly no end, lest it be the mattress that nearly but never quite held still.

A fan of windows drew him. The room kaleido-scoped as he rose. Did he rise? Did it rise? He had to trust each move, yet no move could be trusted. Nighttime, locked in a department store: the carpet swept past in an arc, like rug samples chained through a punched hole. The wall, dim with paint, likewise angled and rainbowed-inviting him to choose and buy. The side of their dresser, another hidden cardsharp, fanned open wide veneers. Everywhere his eyes tried to light, another flurry of stuff blocked him, thick with toomuchness, jittering, jerkily flowing, never coming to rest.

To his amazement, his hands gripped the sashes of the window, the night scene manifold but, in its distance, not cloying. Air felt good. Cool. Not cold. He took a deep breath. Spicules of darkness spangled in. Like shavings of ice or snowflakes so thin they melt on the skin without leaving moisture, they touched his lungs.

The moon arced like white footballs down the black of the sky. Again, again. A switching yard of bikepaths lay below, almost inundated by a surround of duck ponds. Were it not for the screen, Marcus thought he might fall. Into the night he was drawn: Trees sparse in number and fields without end stretched into infinity, a wide oblivion where soon enough he’d blend and melt and dissolve.

His son was a comfort.

His wife-yes, he’d called her “wife”-was a comfort.

But they were easier comforts when they were here, in their is-ness a blessing repeatedly bestowed. In thought, they scattered, bloomed incomplete, like Escher’s ribboned man. He was empty here. Then he wondered where his royal subjects were. They wriggled up from water, from earth, a multitude of the penitent, in the thousands, the millions. Peasant garb. But he couldn’t fix on faces, couldn’t hear individual voices or even the crowd’s one voipe. Yet they came to praise and worship, ceaselessly waving, of that he had no doubt. And then their hands lowered, and they sank into the shifting landmass.

Again, he was empty here.

No peasantry. He wasn’t a king. It was one of those Huntington’s delusions he’d read of, collapsing now into a soft sad empty glimpse of reality.

Then his bent perceptions raddled in a new direction.

Behind him the room sundered. He swiveled carefully, his spine finding the sill. A carousel of beds jangled by in silent calliope music. Swoops of hall light knifed in. On them, she rode in, clone upon clone. The light folded, thin blades thinner, gold batons twirling into toothpicks, then gone. She filled his vision. Sounds. Touch. Guide of her hands.

Marcus said something. He knew it came out nonsense, knew she made sense. What that sense was he couldn’t say. She enclosed him like an exoskeleton, made mad meaning out of the swirling room. Cover-hug, a warmth he hadn’t known he needed. Katt was her name, a sharp array of names held by a circus performer in sequins.

Katt.

Katt.

Katt.

He’d always craved many lovers. She was many lovers, all good, pure goodness. She touched his senses, gave him heaven here on this bed. It was enough to bless his eyes, to hear that voice soothing him, to feel her hands resdng on his face, touching his brow.

He wanted more, a universe of love from her forever.

When she left-knives of light retwirling, growing to planes, then knives, then nothing-he felt like nothing so much as a flurry of aches and emptiness.

5

RELEASE AND A SHORT-LIVED RELIEF

The bedroom smelled sick to her. Sleeping beside him had become unbearable and she’d taken to the daybed in the guest room upstairs.

Four days had passed since Sherry’s first visit, once more dropping by on Thursday to deliver a casserole, speak with Conner downstairs in the rec room, and go. It seemed to Katt, however, like an eternity in hell. There he lay, her victim, emaciated, jittery with brain disease whenever he made the slightest move, or feint at one, and on top of that, shivering sporadically, violently from the pneumonia he’d contracted and could no longer fight off. He ate and drank when she brought mugs or small portions to his lips, but it was impossible to tell if he did so with awareness. She spoke with him, soothed him, shutting out that she had herself been the cause of his steep decline, speaking from the love she felt for him still. Let others scoff-if all this ever came out-at the contradiction; logically, there was a disjointure between love and taking his life, but no such problem could she find emotionally. It was seamless, an inevitability, inside her. And so it had been from the outset, from that initial impulse in Lyra’s cabin.

Sitting here now beside him on the bed, observing the unceasing ripples of motion pass over him like stray winds on water, she recalled her first two years out of college, a time spent testing herself, testing her limits, free and on her own at last, learning about life firsthand without the confines of family or school. She’d moved to New York City, just to be there, to see what a huge city felt like, to know that the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations, even though she never visited either, were right nearby if she ever decided to take them in. One winter’s day, alone and newly split from a fiery boyfriend who’d dumped her on (to her) bewildering grounds, she’d cut a large patch from a lemon blouse and sewn it inside the right flap of a fur-lined winter coat. Went to a stuffed, funky bookstore she was fond of rummaging through. She’d practiced at home, a kneeling to scan the lower shelves, palming two paperbacks and smoothly slipping one of them inside the cobbled pouch she had made, then pretending casual interest in the other and putting it back. But when it came time to actually do it, to steal a book, even though she knew they’d never see it, even though she knew she’d glide right past the sullen clerk who never looked up from his desk for anything but a purchase, she simply couldn’t. Stealing was not something she could manage.

But now here she sat, having brought her mate to this pass, not proud of it, not even idly proud- but not shamed by it either. She could have blamed his deceptions, could have called him a philanderer deserving of death, but that she knew would have been a lie. He didn’t deserve this in the least, and yet it felt right-as right as anything she had ever done. For all the suffering they’d endured, this short concentrated decline had a closure to it that needed to happen. He was pale, his skin blanched nearly from the color of almond rind to the white nutmeat inside. A sheen of sweat bathed his face, dark wet drops having fallen and blotched the pillowcase that cradled his head.

Conner was again ensconced in the rec room. He’d not disturb them. Since his talks with Sherry, he had started hanging around more, being there for his mother. He’d eased into her hugs. She could tell he was making a conscious effort to support her, and it was touching. Her agitation toward him, while still active, had lessened a little since she’d committed to the course she had to take.

And now “It’s time,” she said. She eased back folds of blanket and bedclothes. His hands tried to grab after them but she brushed his attempts aside. He wore no top, his hairy chest matted with moisture above where his ribs fell prominently outlined in gaunt flesh. She placed her palms to either side, slick on the scumbles of sweat that coated him. She closed her eyes and felt deep inside his blocked lungs, the alveoli walls swollen or destroyed, an ingress of plasma and blood cells inside the air sacs. A slow pass all about revealed where the healthy ones were, and one by one she burst the walls, let blood through, an idle making of wine, invisible invasive footstomp through her husband’s chest cavity, making solid and useless more and more of his lungs until, beneath her hands, all wrack of motion lost its tension and arced up and ceased, death thick on the air at his last caught gasp of breath. Then came surcease, relaxation, his life lifting free.

Katt opened her eyes. A thrill coursed through her, so slight it seemed like static uncertainly felt. Moving one hand down from his chest to recapture the fallen fold of sheet and blanket, Katt rested the other lightly above his stopped heart, feeling the fire go out. His head was angled back, his neck seeming suddenly too thick and bold where his chin abruptly rose and his mouth fell open.

She covered him. Thought to pull the cover over his head, felt foolish about it, then felt it was ritualistic and right.

She’d have to tell Conner.

Then there’d be a phone call or two to make.

She yawned deeply, drawing away from the bed to suck in air. She felt spent, tired, emotionally drained. She would need, somewhere in here, to lie down and take a nap if she could. There was no great sorrow, nor any triumph, but only a vacancy and the dull throb of a distant wound. She supposed that more emotion, perhaps a punishment, was waiting in the wings. But for now, nothing but a feeling of finality occurred to her.

And it felt precisely right.

***

Sherry had picked up a bag of cookies and muffins at Jon’s Natural Bread on Laurel near The Rainbow. So clear and sunny a day it was, that she decided to leave her car on Howes and walk through campus to Katt’s house. Only a handful of students passed her down the tall march of oak trees and along the walkways near Lory Student Center and the library. She’d begun a few days ago in morbidity but now, getting to know Conner and giving his mom some badly needed companionship, a gentle love for them both infused her, woke her anew to the beauty of the campus she walked through. The Coed Killer, she couldn’t help it, occurred to her at the passage of every lone male-but the thought was always fleeting in this sunshine and soon she crossed Prospect and walked the remaining four blocks, glad to be alive on this glorious morning.

Conner was sitting on the single step in front, beds of petunias and carnations to his right. Impassively, he watched her approach, a gawky handwave substituting for a voiced greeting.

“Hello yourself," Sherry said. “Where’s your mom?”

“Upstairs with my father, I think.”

“Want a cookie?” She held the bag out.

“Sure.” He took a fat one, poked with raisins. “Is this one of those healthy kinds?”

She laughed. “Afraid so.”

“Always looking out for my welfare, eh?” Conner had a wicked sense of humor.

“That’s my way, I guess.” And indeed it was. She’d told a few BBS contacts with her home phone number to, in so many words, fuck off this morning. They suddenly-all the stunted weirdos on the BBSs-seemed to be diminished, puerile, sexually obsessed out of all proportion. It was intriguing that such folks existed and mildly interesting that computers had brought them together, but she felt no connection to them any longer. She suddenly wanted roots in real relationship, and she thought she knew where they lay. She sat next to Conner. More serious: “So how are you doing?”

He tore off an arc of cookie, held it out. “Here.”

“Thanks.” It was thick and sweet with molasses, the oven aromas still lifting from the dough.

“I’m okay, I guess.” She let his pause linger. “My mom, she, well it’s kinda hard to tell with her. I think she’s pretty torqued.” He stared at the sidewalk. “Umm, like yesterday? She was sitting in the living room, this was last night, all the lights out and just her fat peach candle lit and flickering on the coffee table and I think she was talking to it. I went by, I mean I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and I said are you okay and she said yes and brought me in for a hug. Then I went upstairs to my room, but I think she was sitting there a long time.”

“It’s normal what she’s going through,” Sherry said quiedy. An image of crazy Brad came to her, gold-rimmed glasses, a pouch of magic pebbles about his neck. “I was a romantic when I was younger. I had a few dates in high school with nobody special. But I knew that somewhere in the world, the perfect guy waited for me.”

“And did you find him?” Lovely Conner. Already the skepticism was there that’d anchor him later in life.

“Yes. A guy named Brad, two years older than me and living off-campus in an all-wood, sunlit loft. I saw him at a concert, placed an ad identifying him, and he called me. He was in the process of ditching another girlfriend and he took me in and loved me and said so. I went nutso over him. And I surrendered myself to him-because after all this was the perfect guy, and there was nothing worth rocking that particular boat for.”

“Sounds like you wimped out over him.”

“You got it. I emptied myself out and filled my life with Brad. So the upshot is I became boring and I suppose dishonest to him, and he dumped me like a shot after a few weeks of heaven. Let me tell you something. It took me a year to get over him, and in some ways, I’m still not over him even now. Your mom’s begun her grieving process early is all. She’s losing a dear man, and she’s feeling a void inside her as he goes.”

Conner glanced at her. He still held half his cookie in a pouched upturned hand, Saran Wrap bunched down around his palm. His eyes were opaque, unreadable.

“You sure you’re all right?” she said.

His glance passed lighdy over her face, almost as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know how I am. This stuff just keeps rolling in and I watch it roll in and change everything all the time, and I don’t feel much like a kid anymore, ya know?”

“It’s hard, isn’t it?”

His words overlapped hers. “It’s almost like he died a week ago and what’s upstairs isn’t him. But it is, it’s him all right, so I don’t want to be there but I sometimes drift by anyway and open the door a crack and look in. My mind goes away when I do that. It’s just too much.”

“Yes, I see what you’re saying.” She could picture it as he spoke, the look on his face, the sorrow of his voice transporting her into that hallway, peering in at the thin shell of a man on the bed. Somewhere behind the house but hidden from view, a small squadron of Canadian geese moved honking by in the sky.

And then the front doorknob clicked and the door came open like a soft vacuum equalizing, and there stood Katt, a look on her face whose message was unmistakable.

The world shuddered down around him.

***

Conner would not allow himself to be touched all week long. Sherry came by a few times and sat with him, mostly talking about all the bad things in her life, more of that ugly-mother stuff and lots about the crazy husband she had once had. She wouldn’t let him see her brand or even feel it through her clothes. And all that time, he sat much of the time with his mouth shut, lots of thoughts flying past but not a one of them feeling like it was worth the energy to put into words.

His mom he had to push away. That didn’t feel so hot but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Whenever some well-meaning person, anyone, not even necessarily his mom, reached for him, it felt like torch-flame and he’d cry out and yank away from them-real brief, not some stupid scene but just enough that they knew not to try it again. Uncle Henry at the funeral, for example, his dad’s brother. God knows why he’d come. Some dumb family duty thing or other was Conner’s best guess. Flew in from Minneapolis, stayed at the Marriott. No one liked him but there he was at the funeral home and the cemetery and dropping by this or that gift at the house, expecting to be invited in, but Mom was too smart for that. At the funeral, early on, he’d sidled up to Conner to make somber small talk, trying to hug him, then flinching back at Conner’s reaction. At the ceremony around Dad’s grave, he stood way apart from the family, an odd shadow on his face, an averting, and it felt to Conner as if he wanted to check his watch all that time to see if it was time to catch his return flight.

But on the Saturday of the funeral, Dad’s department head and some of Mom’s work friends filling out the party, Conner’s numbness gradually lifted. It was like the final letting go of Novocain unpuffing your jaw, the tingle-fizz of flesh regaining sensation. The gravesite ceremony went on for days, a droning of words reduced to nonsense in his ears. All he could see was the spit-polished sheen of the coffin. All he could sense was the comforting presence of his mom on his left and Sherry on his right.

And the emotions coming out from under, the unmasking of his pain: He could feel that too.

There was the grief, of course. His mind floated back over a lifetime of doing things with his father, the homework help, hearing his low loving voice read bedtime stories to him and sometimes set aside the books and make one up right then, the humming in the car, letting him help set up a surprise party for Mom. But mixed in with the joy of those times was an unbearable ache, a he’s-gone, but how could he be gone? He’d been at their sides just an eyeblink before. It was unnatural, an unacceptable disappearance, and Conner understood that the clash of memory with he’s-gone and, worse, those-were-all-the-moments-I've'll-ever-have, produced grief. Whatever lay in that coffin, a stretch of sky reflected in its metallic brown lid-curve, embodied nothing more than that. Not his father’s spirit nor even his body, though that was crudely there. Just grief, solid as blocks of bitter chocolate.

There was one other mass of emotions Conner felt, but he doubted he’d ever share it with anyone. Nobody seemed, in his recollection, ever to talk about feeling good about the death of a loved one. But he did feel an odd sense of relief and even happiness and on the whole-although guilt cropped up a little along the sides-they seemed like okay things to be feeling. Sherry had helped. Her talking him out of his obsession with an early death, there beside his chair, steady, steady, really pushing it, had, he now saw, planted the seed of relief. Robin Williams had chosen his house in that Garp movie cuz a plane crashed into it. His father in one sense had shown Conner a possible future but he had been the one to die. He’d intercepted the blow and blocked it from hitting his son. That surely bought time. It was absurd, childish even, to worry about HD developing in him anydme soon. If it developed at all, chances were he’d have a good thirty years of normal life before then.

So, mingled in with grief, he also felt relief and an unholy joy, standing there not hearing the drone of somber words and obliquely taking in his uncle not-looking at his watch. Once, he felt a grin rise. He had to stifle it by biting down hard on the inside of his cheeks, both to keep his lip muscles from stretching upward and to give himself enough pain to dilute the impulse. The droner, an old guy in robes, had wisps of thin gray hair that lifted slighdy at the least breeze. His face was a squeezed oval. While watching him blather on, Conner became aware of his mother brushing against his coat sleeve, staying there, warm next to him. But he didn’t flinch away from her. In fact, she had not, he discovered on closer inspection, moved at all. He had leaned toward her. The distance between Sherry and himself had widened ever so slighdy. Now he felt his mom respond, and lay a hand lighdy on his right shoulder, and pat him reassuringly, then leave it there.

He let her do it.

It felt good, like the first drop of water after huge thirst.

Savoring it, he leaned closer for support.

Later, that afternoon, fresh sheets on the bed but an ache and aroma of Marcus still in the room, Katt had taken a nap, or at least rested there on the spot where she had, stifle the thought, where her Marcus had died. She’d been sleeping in the guest room, but she was determined tonight to reclaim this bedroom. She’d alter the feel of it, fill its vacancy with her own presence as the days wore on.

Strangely calm, she rose and refreshed herself. How, she wondered, could she be planning this? She knew beyond doubt that her love for her son had not diminished, not in the slightest. And yet, at this moment, she could feel no love nor hate nor any emotion at all, but just the going forward of perverse desire.

***

Downstairs, Conner sat on the great room couch, still dressed in his suit. He had one arm on the right armrest. He was staring out the picture window, a slant of sunlight falling across his chest and two-toning the cushion beside him. He half-glanced at her as she approached, peripheral to him, but his unfixed gaze remained forward.

Katt sank onto the cushion next to him and put an arm around him. He melted into her, his whole torso and head turning as a unit, his body a sawdust body, listless, heavy. Kissing his brow, she brought her left hand to his temple, her fingertips touching the expanse of forehead at his right eye. “There, there,” she said. “We’ll be fine. We’ll be okay.” Conner wasn’t crying. He was simply sack heavy, not resisting, not responding at all.

She gently rocked him. As she rocked, she closed her eyes and probed her son’s brain. I should feel more guilt or hesitancy or something, she thought. This should be an impossible thing to do. But the flat opaque funereal mood that had come over her

at the gravesite had stayed to dull her, to cast an inevitability over her desires. They laid the track, mile by mile, of her future and she swung along blithely clacking away, no one at the throttle, no choices as to path, just a steady forward motion.

When she deepened to the caudate nucleus, the shape a slighdy different one but the morphology the same, it was almost a replay of her first probe of Marcus. A readiness to crumble, right there under her virtual fingertips. She could shore it up, or she could set it off.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?” She lost it, found it again.

“Do you think it’ll be like that for me?”

“Not at all,” Katt said. She idled over it, felt how it could be set right, how a slight urging in the opposite direction would activate it. “You’re going to live a long healthy life and die of old age when you’re a hundred plus years old. Same as me.” She was starting to feel a hold, a restraint. The old bookstore feeling. Now was the time to do it, now when he lay passive in her arms and her hand rested on his brow. The paralysis held her, finger on the button, no downward pressure, no upward.

“You think so?”

“Yes.” That same warring struggle she’d felt so many years before was suddenly present in her. What a delicate mechanism the human body was. A dull dead tranquility one moment, an unbearable upsurge of tension the next. All in the service of one slender choice and the indecision which kept it from being made. Decide. Decide. “We’ll live in this house.” Eyes still closed, her insight held the spot in view. The tightening in her belly had returned but she tried to kept it out of her voice. “And then you’ll go to college, maybe grad school, get a job.” She had that nub, she owned it, feeling a mother’s intimacy with it. Inside her, Conner’s body had formed, cell by cell, this dreadful malformation known as Huntington’s, and the brain in which it waited, and the body she now lightly cradled. “Meet an amazingly wonderful girl, have kids.” She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t! But she had to. The moment would pass, and she would wimp out, and he’d be there for five unendurable years. Maybe she’d try again. Tomorrow, or the next day. Or the next. “Make me proud. Even prouder than I already am, which is saying quite a lot.”

He made to ease away. Not saying anything, but maybe getting ready to, once he righted himself. She moved with his body in gradual tandem. But any moment now she’d have to release him, let him fall away and not have done it. A fraction of a second’s choice lay before her. And just as her hold readied to slip from him, she made that choice or it was made for her, almost without willing it-but no, it was a cop-out to remove herself from it. The impulse came to her, and however hesitantly after much struggle and the suffering of great uncertainty, she seized it.

The instant it was out, she wanted to recall it.

There was a dry ache inside her, an oh-no, the puffed damned diminution of her soul. This was her son, this was Conner. She had to reverse it. She had to.

“Thanks, Mom.” He relaxed back into the couch, eased his right arm onto the armrest, wrist-bend where the cuff, white as rice, stuck out of his coat sleeve.

“Together we’ll get through this,” she said. “I know it.” Her hand hung in the air. A reach forward now after his departing form would never do. She flexed her fingers and brought the hand down upon her lap. Maybe it wouldn’t take. Each body was different. Maybe her talents weren’t sufficiently developed, at least in her son’s case. She’d monitor him, watch him closely, take the next opportunity, delve inside and right things.

Her heart pounded. Do it now, she told herself; heal him now.

But part of her eased back, even beneath her anxiety, looking on, detached, sure, the cold fixed gaze of a snake waiting for its struck victim to die.

And that evil impulse chilled her heart.

***

The next afternoon, Sherry called and convinced Katt to meet her for lunch at the Student Center. It would be a chance to get out of the house and to allow Conner time alone. To her relief, Katt agreed.

It being Sunday, she found easy parking north of the building and climbed the umpteen steps to the plaza. The sunlight seemed more brilliant for the breezes that blew. She knew Katt would walk from home, and she anticipated a sense of healing from this lovely weather, something Katt desperately needed, given how she’d looked Saturday.

The small eatery, near the yogurt shop on the ground floor, was sparsely crowded. Scatters of students, books open beside cheeseburgers, sat randomly, ones and twos, a table too of fratboys who gave her the usual once over as she came in. Fortunately Katt, having arrived early, had chosen a table almost as far from them as possible. Katt hadn’t ordered anything, but sat with folded hands, hunched over the table.

“Weight of the world, eh?” Sherry said.

Her friend, startled, looked up. “Oh, hi. What?”

Sherry placed her hand on Katt’s shoulder, felt the tension there. “Nothing. It’s good to see you.” Three tall girls came idling in, striking young things, headed for the counter with short stacks of books and notebooks hugged to their breasts. “I’m going to have a BLT. How about you?”

“Nothing I guess. Just a Coke.”

“Oh, come on.”

Katt looked distracted. “Uh, the same I guess.”

“Good, I’ll get ’em. You stay right here.” Sherry threaded through the tables, pushing in chairs that were shoved out. A grad student type, good-looking guy, trim and nicely muscled, wandered in holding a thick textbook crammed with folds of paper. Some spark passed between them, but she turned her attention to placing the order. Bold men sooner or later rusded up the courage to hit on her with no need for her to do a thing, and the shy ones she had no use for.

When she returned to the table, the grad guy in his soft green Lands’ End shirt, had seated himself with his back to Katt at the next table. She knew all the ploys. He’d obviously seen her through the glass talking to her friend. Now he’d sit there with his book and his bag of potato chips, giving her a profile on occasion by seeing some fake something over yonder, pretending to read. On another day, after lunch she’d have told Katt she wanted to stay behind, then let him turn about to make his move and see where (she knew where) it led. But today, there were more important things on the table than lust. Katt needed her, and by God, Katt would get her full attention.

“Thanks,” Katt said when Sherry placed the sandwich before her, but she made no move to touch it.

Sherry slid into place across from her. “So, how’s our brave boy doing?”

A flit of startlement, then nothing. “Fine. Still numb from how fast it happened. I don’t think the grief has fully hit him yet. Me neither, for that matter.”

“He’s a great kid. A survivor. I can tell.” Wilt of lettuce around the edges and the bacon was burnt, but it passed for food.

“Thanks for hanging out with him, by the way.” She took a tentative sip at her soft drink. “It helped him, it’s helping me, cope.”

Even in the early throes of grieving, Katt, with her short brown cut of hair, was lovely. Sherry wanted to be in bed with her, holding her, body-to-body intimacy, just a closeness and no thought of sex. Katt would speak of a lost love and maybe she would break with sobs at the word “love,” a mourning tide rippling through her, Sherry with an embrace and words of comfort. Instead she reached out and took her friend’s hand, gripped it, then relaxed back again. “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s a great day lor the lake. How about, after we’re done here, we grab some loaves of day-old white bread, hustle Conner into my car, and go feed the ducks at City Park?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Katt, you don’t know anything today, but there’s no reason you ought to know anything, given what you’ve been through. So let me do the deciding for you, okay?”

“I suppose.” You’d think senility had set in. “That’s clearly the best I can hope for today. So I say So be it, and know that I’m here for you. And try to eat a little of that sandwich, all right?”

And Katt said she would, and she did. And the grad, flaunting his profile as she knew he would, couldn’t even find the courage, when they got up and left, to glance at her his disappointment at the turn of events, no trace of humor there, a hunk who carried himself not quite lightly enough for her tastes, someone with clearly a little more growing to do before she’d even consider bedding him.

***

He’d seen the redhead sashaying around campus before, the air of “faculty” surrounding her. Killer bitch of the sort that drove men crazy with heat. He bet-nope he knew for a fact-that she was the type to snag some poor idiot, fuck him until he was stupid in the groin and raving about love and shacking up with her, then dump him and leave him blubbering in the dust with grief and bewilderment. Today was the first time he’d seen her up close, heard that sexy voice. The drill would sound lovely harmonizing with her, urging those low tones ever higher. Through the many tiny holes he’d spiral into her-residues of steel in punctures of blood forming antennae in her-her pain would broadcast out to the others of her sex planetwide, would dwindle the bitches, make them lose their appetite for breeding.

Her friend, the sad old fat one, was new to him. Not ugly exactly. In fact, what little he saw of her face made him think of some pretty waterlogged corpse. Sitting back to back with her, wooden benches at these outer tables, he could feel the bodyheat radiating off her curved buttocks, steamy fevered swamp of anal odor mixed with the breeder’s smell nearby. He could hear every word. The butt-one had bred once before, and he bet the other one had too, or did the world a favor and bagged its little fist-sized remains a few months along. But even so, she’d let cocks into her pooty puss, sucked seed inside, got eggs going with vermin aching to swell and drop and skitter across the planet.

He wasn’t watching them, but he had a good memory for faces. As they spoke, he could see their cheeks and jaws, like two wraps of flesh flapping at each other, eye-achers poked up and pointing at eye-achers across the way. Holes pitted their cheeks as they spoke. Spills of blood seeped down like warpaint, and where the spills angled, a new one appeared, like a cooperative dot-to-dot puzzle. Could he, he wondered, take on two? Two sets of restraints, twinned truss of two naked women, two Makitas crossed at his chest like flintlock pistols, and fleshed holes doubled as close to mirror exactness as he could drill them? The idea made bloodlust surge and pulse within him. Two of them drilled in tandem would surely broadcast his message where one had failed before. The antennae would join signals, reinforce one another, the blipped impulses of pain bubbling up into the air to exceed by far a simple doubling of the signal.

They’d be tough to subdue. Set him a challenge. But with enough clomping, he bet he could improvise. He heard the sheened red breeder mention City Park, buying bread on the way. So he could beat them there, be feeding the damn ducks some stray shit from his truck, get friendly; ah but the redhead would recognize him from the eatery, hey, this isn’t a coincidence, is it, she’d ask. Then he’d be stuck and there would be the sun blazing down in a highly public place and there’d be nothing to do but back off and not be sinking his drill into these two be-hind-handers after all.

He let them go. It galled him to do it, and for five or ten minutes afterward, he thought of pursuit, rummaging for a plausible line to use when he approached them at the lake. Then he crumpled his bag of chips. Felt disgusted. Past the information stand, the maps and brochures, stacks of student newspapers, and out the door, he headed for the library straight south, one building down.

But as he neared the corner of the Student Center, he heard raised voices, male, female, an argument. He paused and listened, pretending to prop up the building and check his textbook for some arcane fact. Hey, I did not, he was saying. Did too, you liar, she countered, cuz why was her earring sitting right there on your dresser. Yeah? Yeah? So what if I did, but I’m not saying I did, but so what if I did, it’s a free country, and we’re not fucking married, and I got the right. She was sobbing, poor thing, and had a plaintive whinny going about how he could take his right way-the-heck out of her life and stay there forever. Fine with me, he said, fuck-all fine with me! Tall scuzzy stud came bursting out of the corner, bright red T-shirt, jeans and buckle and boots, heading east, not seeing him leaning there with his book.

The sobbing kept up.

No one was in sight.

He waited a beat of six, then came ’round the corner. Short skirt, plaid. Flat blouse of almost a white blue, a long scraggly fall of mouse-brown hair down on either side where the faintest hint of eye-achers poofed out. She had a hand to her face, hiding her mouth.

“ ’Scuse me, but I heard the end of that.”

She registered him, made to stop, began to stumble on her way.

“I don’t usually butt in,” he said, “but that guy was way out of line. Nobody should treat a lady like that.”

“You,” she said and he thought she might say “You get lost,” but instead, she said, “You’re nice,” implying with a tearful look her ex-boyfriend’s way, and he’s not.

No makeup. That was good, she was open and honest in her dealings with the world. For all her slight build-or that’d maybe amplify the signals- she’d be an open channel back to her kind when he planted his first birth-hole deep in her face. His head and his whole body were spinning in a maelstrom of agitation, but on the surface all they ever saw was calm. “Let’s walk, okay? It’ll help. It doesn’t matter where. Back to your dorm, or wherever. You can be as free or as reserved with me as you want. Tell me about it or clam up. I’ll just be here for you, okay?”

A confused nod. “I guess.” She started off. Sturdy little bitch. She’d scream loud and clear, and the planet would abandon baby-making forever after.

“Or I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m parked in the lot over there. We can sip some latte at Deja Vu or Paris on the Poudre. Maybe try some cheesecake.”

“That sounds good.” Already she was calming down.

“By the way, I’m Jim.” He offered his hand.

She shook it. “Amy.”

He loved the feel of her skin, the weakness, bones as fragile as a bird’s. She’d last a long time and her heady screams would pierce the woods like thin silver wires shot from her mouth at odd angles. The redhead and her sad old friend could go hang, he thought, as he and the bird-boned bitch moved toward the parking lot.

Today was Amy’s day.

6

A SMALL CONSTRAINED LIFE

Ratt should have gone back to work that week, even if all she managed was to sit in her cube, accept co-workers’ condolences, and stare blankly at her workstation. If she liked, she still could. But the house, as confining as it was, felt like the protective shell she needed.

Even their time at the lake on Sunday had passed like a dream, neither she nor Conner fully there. Sherry’d finally given up on them, at least for the day, and driven them home. She was a good heart, had shown them both much kindness.

But their grief required more incubation.

Marcus saturated the house, saturated her mind.

He’d be there at every turn of thought. She replayed her every attack, watching it at the sink, trying to imagine herself kneeling on the bed, that bed, driving bad energy into him as he lay helpless. It was monstrous. But it hadn’t felt monstrous, or even wicked, as she’d done it. Circumstance had molded the banks of the river, and she had flowed with its every twist and turn.

In the night, she’d wake, grab for him, find only the nullity she had created. And then she’d lie there hour on hour, replaying, replaying, the choices not taken and idle speculation about paths long closed off. Stop thinking so much about him, she’d mutter.

To no avail.

Since late Sunday, it had been overcast and drizzling without break. Sherry called late afternoons, giving Katt a chance to open her emotional baggage and unload what she could upon her, apologizing all the while. Then she’d put her son on and listen to his uh-huhs and soft brief feints at conversation. But she kept fending Sherry off when she tried to invite herself for dinner, or ask them out. “You are one stubborn woman, Katt Galloway,” Sherry’d say, “but I’ll keep at it until you’re ready to emerge. You’re sure Conner couldn’t do with some time off?”

Ask him, she would reply, knowing that Conner too was tied somehow to the house. The Marcus memories swirled in all corners, down the halls and in every room. It made no sense, given the short time he’d been here, but there they were anyway, Iowa in-dwellings easily transplanted to this new venue. And then she’d turn a corner, and come face to face with Marcus-in-Conner, the man sunk into the boy just as her mother (thought and gesture entwined) had sunk into and been reflected in Katt.

They’d reverted to passing by chance, not touching-a weird if mutual standoff. She cooked meals and called him to them, their conversation as laconic as his responses to Sherry on the phone. She wondered about his head, wanting to touch him again. He seemed all right, and she hoped he was- but the part of her that couldn’t endure the hints of Marcus in him hoped, monstrously, that he wasn’t.

***

Wednesday night, as he toyed with the mix of peas and mashed potatoes and ground sirloin he’d made on his plate, his head down and propped up on his free hand, she decided to pull her fever ploy. She rose, came ’round behind him, rested a hand on his forehead. She felt divorced from her movements, a fist taut in her belly.

“You look a little feverish,” she said.

“Mom,” protesting, pulling away, a hint of annoyance.

“Now, now,” she said, and drew him back. The look he gave her had been pure Marcus. Her hand trembled. Again, his forehead. Katt knew the way now, and his head swiftly opened to her. There was the place, but it had changed in four days. Her hand felt its power. Cold and clinical, a detached knowing to it, it wanted to press forward the nub she’d found. But her heart protested, as she held her son even this tentatively. She’d wanted a girl, they both had in those early days of pregnancy; but he’d been good boy with gentle winning ways. And he is now, she thought. He is right now and on into the future. Ah, but thirteen was such a crux, the start of the ugliness that was adulthood. Six to twelve, those were life’s rich ages. Intelligence, growth, delight, without much real responsibility. He had lived his best years already.

No! She beat back such thoughts. Her obsession with Marcus would pass. She could endure the accidental quirks Conner had gleaned from his father, appreciate him for his uniqueness, grow through this crisis with him. If she did to Conner what she’d done to Marcus, the guilt and remorse would rise up to engulf her, turn her as insane as Grandma Jasper had been when she killed her husband and son.

“Are you done yet, Mom?” Tight lips. A light finger tapped at the side of his plate, a Marcus gesture. Insane thought: What if Marcus were still about, what if he knew what she’d done, and what if, little by little, he were to take over Conner’s body, until, one day a year from now or sooner, he looked straight at her and grinned a completely Marcus-like grin, and said, “Honey, you and me’ve got some talking to do.”

And the impulse rose and her anxiety rose with it, an attempt to shout it down, to hold her fears back if not to reserve them and heal what she had set off. But the touch went forth, the raw troubled nub goaded onward, a lift-off as she unclamped his forehead.

Her hand trembled.

“Anything?” Softer. The disease had occurred to him and now he wondered.

Absurd.

A fever indicated nothing.

“I think you may be coming down with something.” She heard alienation in her voice. “Nothing serious. Maybe a slight cold, maybe nothing.” Her heart pounded. Her head flushed hot and cold, guilt warring with cool assurance.

“It’s the HD, isn’t it? You can feel it, can’t you?”

She embraced him from behind, hunched over his chair. “Don’t be silly,” she said. The rich oak cabinets gleamed oddly in the nighttime kitchen. “Nobody could detect such a thing, even if it were there. Which it’s not.”

“Psychics can.”

“So-called psychics, the honest ones anyway, are full of good wishes and hot air.”

“I’ll bet your friend Lyra would know. Or one of the people she works with.”

“Conner.” She hunched down beside his chair and gave him her best stare of reassurance. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Period. End of story.”

“But-”

“We’re grieving. We’re both grieving. Just like any wound, it’s a healing process and it takes time. But both of us are going to come out of this stronger. Trust me, I know.”

She knew nothing, and that was the truth. But the pladtudes were in place, a steady stream of them babbling out, calm mom calming her son-while inside, her soul felt as if it would burst from all the agitation that welled up in her, heal him, stop the madness, reverse it, cure it, partial atonement for what she’d done to Marcus. But her hands remained on his chair, and the bromides flowed from her lips, and he nodded, nodded, trusting her, drawing assurance from her lies, painting the kitchen with all the unspeakably dark colors of hell.

***

The next day brought fresh sunshine, a break at last from days of unrelieved gloom. Conner saw it through his window slats as he lay in bed and felt like something had lifted inside him as well. Wanting more light, he raised the blinds, hopped back into bed, but then couldn’t stand to be there one second more. He hit the rug with a thud, heel-pound he’d probably catch hell for, and raced to the window again. The lake below and the bikepath beyond and the open fields beyond that thrilled him. Biking. Could use the fresh air. He’d throw on some clothes, grab some juice, maybe a granola bar, and be on his way.

No sound from Mom’s room. He hit the hall bathroom, standing there, holding his penis, watching endless urine stream out, c’mon, c’mon, damned stuff was taking forever to finish. He shook it, shoved it back into his jockeys, didn’t even stop to wash his hands. Heck, none of it had splashed on him.

In the kitchen, he ate half a breakfast bar, drank half the OJ he had poured, and put the glass in the fridge. He had to get out of here. Too confining, too much like a sickroom suddenly outgrown. Hall closet, a thin jacket he doubted he would need, then past the washing machine and dryer to the garage. He walked his bike out the side door, almost forgetting to shut it before swinging onto the saddle.

Down Wallenberg he raced, feeling great to be moving again. Nobody about, not a soul. The neighbors had been slow to get acquainted anyway; but you knew, when you saw one on the street, that they had no idea how to look at a kid whose dad had died. Conner understood that some were at work, and some were maybe dropping kids off at soccer, but he imagined them all inside their houses, tiny people averting their eyes. Inconsequential. He was beyond all that, beyond caring what they thought.

Left onto the concrete ramp across a dried-up creek, and he was on the bikepath, pedaling back along the rocky bed and up over a small bridge until he passed behind his own house. Mom’d be up there, maybe sleeping, maybe not. It was so wonderful, despite all that had happened, to be with her again after four months of separation. Took her longer, he guessed, to come out of grief, her being older and all. As he pedaled, he felt like he’d shaken free of it, his wiry body tossing it off like an illness.

Under College Avenue he swooped, narrowly missing an early morning jogger. Have to watch out for that. Along Spring Creek, another mile, beneath Timberline, and then, just a tad farther, a turn along the Poudre River, grand, gorgeous in the sunlight. He stopped, catching bike-fall with one foot, to take in the scene.

Not a soul in sight. A line of Canadian geese arced overhead, a slow purposeful procession heading east. Off behind him, a train, probably the one running parallel to Timberline, mourned its own passing. Between the honking and the sad whistle, something caught up with him, almost as if he’d been fleeing it. He sat on the riverbank, his bike lying beside him, and felt the grief return, grander and more terrible than ever. Did it never end, never let go of you? The feelings wracked him, brought on weeping, and he found himself talking aloud to the river, but also to his dad. Anger, resentment, which surprised him. Why did you leave us? You were always so there for us. What kind of love did you feel for us, really feel, that could let you, do this? You didn’t love us; you never loved us. Pretended to, is all. Lying bastard, in it for yourself, all those years.

The words went on, sometimes stopped by sobbing, but then coming up again. Good thing he’d shoved some folded tissues into his back jeans pocket. A little fragile but unblown upon, they did the trick.

He heard a sound, real distant, like a deflated ball being bounced against a basketball court. When he looked up, she was there. White-haired old lady in a bright red jogging suit, marking time on the path. She wore a smile but it softened when she saw his face. Gesturing at him, she stopped jogging and joined him on the grass. “Hello, my friend,” she said.

“I want to be alone, please.”

“No, you don’t. You want to be with me.’’

Wacko lady. “Suit yourself,” he said, looking away, hoping she’d take the hint and buzz off. Her white Nikes showed upbrushings of grass stain along the sides.

“So what’s the problem?”

He ignored her.

“There’s always a problem. What’s yours?”

“Being bugged by strangers.”

“Oh, I got me a live one! No, now seriously. We’ve got little enough time on this planet to be wasting it on sarcasm and putdowns.” Her voice, though small, was full and resonant. “I usta be shy. Can you believe it?”

“Not hardly.”

“I was. I’d see people I wanted to meet, and say hi or nothing at all. Just let them walk away forever. But all it takes is one major upset to teach you a big lesson fast, and I had three of them.” She shut up. He bit. “Yeah, so what were they?”

“I had a coronary, my nothing lunk of a husband died on me, and my dog got run over. Sure, you can smile like most folks do about Tavish, but I don’t hide my sentiment anymore. We were close and it was worse losing him than the cold fish I’d clung to for decades.”

“I wasn’t smiling.” Well, maybe a little inside for just a second. She was funny, all right, but not in that impossible way you just want to shut out; she seemed with that gleam in her eye to be amused by herself as well, in on the game.

“I don’t hide anything anymore. I don’t sugarcoat, I don’t whitewash. And I have no patience for those that do. So stop hiding the problem, young man. Out with it, and let your granny of the moment deal with it.”

He told her. He watched her face as he told her and saw not a ripple there. Almost like a wise Indian woman, unreadable wrinkles, except that this woman was all-white and her eyes shone a deep blue.

When he was done, she nodded. “Losing a parent’s an eye-opener, all right. I lost both of them when I was ten and then I got adopted and lost both of them a year later in a car wreck. Double whammy.”

“That must’ve hurt.”

“It did. I walked on eggs around my last set of ’em for a good year or two, didn’t smile, didn’t say much. I had this wound inside and it needed to heal, was all. So I can’t know what you’re feeling precisely, but I know of a kind what it must be like.” She looked away, almost as if drawing something from the sky, then back, jabbing the air with her index finger. “You’re a strong young man, I can tell. You’ve got plenty of brainpower upstairs”-she tapped her head-“and your heart is good. So I say this: Love your mom and tell her you love her, not just with an eye or a hug, but with words. Life is too damn short not to tell your loved ones you love them and to mean it more each time you say it. Sit with your grief, let it simmer like a tea bag in boiled water, then sip it down, slowly, small conscious sips, so you can savor its bitterness, so you can taste every lesson it has to offer.” She nodded, seeming satisfied with those words. Then she rose. “You hear what I’m saying? You’ll do it?”

“Sure.”

“We have a deal?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t just guess. Swear to it.”

A laugh escaped him. “Okay, okay, I swear it.” She looked askance. “There are swears and there are swears. But sometimes the light ones turn into the other kind, so I’ll be on my way.”

“You can stay longer.”

“Nope. I’ve had my time.” Her feet had started the jogging again, even though she was still on grass. “Your turn now. Bear the torch, bear it high, then pass it on. So long.” She gave a little salute, which he returned as best he could, and angled off, her little red butt moving above the flapping legs of her jogging suit.

He put a hand to his head. Slight headache. Funny. He hadn’t felt stressed with her. But there-as her form shrank along the bikepath, gray sole alternating with red leg-it persisted, the kind that needed lying down and an aspirin to shake off. Conner righted his bike, glanced a backward glance at the river, and headed home.

***

August second. Full moon. Lyra’d been all huggy to see her, Joseph holding off in his T-shirt and drawstring pants in the kitchen. To Katt’s relief, they had no plan to visit the cabin tonight but yes she was welcome to the key, in fact, here was an extra and anytime she wanted to use it, she should just go ahead. Felt odd, just sailing in after long absence, asking this favor, then taking off again-Lyra thrust a flyer at her on the way out, she was giving a lecture at Healing Pathways, a week from Friday. Yet her friends were accommodating, if weird. No mention of Marcus at all, though they surely knew. Death was, to them, one more aspect of nature. And nature was good.

Now here she was, alone, stripped of all clothing, a fire raging in the fireplace, and that beautiful aroma of pine in the air. She sat crosslegged on a sheepskin rug, right beneath the skylightand facing the fire-the couch having been pulled aside to allow her that view-watching it twist and sway and seethe over the sculpted lengths of wood. Her mind had been like that these past ten days, a glance eternal at Conner, hugging him, not probing as his headache complaints persisted, receding, returning, never growing stronger. Like curls of flame over stubborn wood, her awareness had danced upon him.

The cabin, as always (whether energy vortex or not), sharpened her thoughts. They’d been fuzzy, confused, all in a mangle since Marcus’s death. But out here, far from all noise and unnatural light, just moonglow overhead and the radiance of firelight warming her, her thoughts began to clarify along simple lines.

There was Marcus. Dead now, buried, but still alive in her mind. No guilt, none at all, and she wondered how that could be. Her mind and her spirit-though it hadn’t occurred to her in the house-were lighter, breathing far freer in his absence. This, despite the aghast recall of what she’d done. In her body, when she let the ingrained dictates of conventional morality go, it felt natural and right to have guided him toward and into death. Yet here was an autonomous being, a man she had loved and promised to care for-and she had done a horrendous thing to him.

It didn’t scan.

Were others so disjointed, so inconsistent, in their inner lives as she? Or did they follow a script, simple, dependable, reliable, thoroughly by the book? Keep it on him, she thought. Keep the focus on Marcus. It mattered not at all what others did. The notion had first come to her right on this very spot, and from that moment, it had felt right to initiate it and to persevere to the end. A law, any law, always had exceptions, and Marcus, in a way impossible to explain, had fallen through a loophole into his death. Every relationship revealed unique pockets of peculiarity: This, their most peculiar, had perhaps always been hidden, waiting, inevitable.

But Conner. A log popped, and Katt trained her gaze upon the supple flame. Though the moon shone full above, she knew she only fancied a cone of light encircling her. But it was strong in fancy and met an upsurge of chthonic power, sure solid impacted firmness radiating through her buttocks and body. Delusion, scoffed Katt. There was no Earth Goddess. The crystals hanging everywhere were mere baubles. And yet the power of suggestion was strong here, and from her inmost depths to the crown of her head, she received messages. No voice sounded, nothing that crude. But she became aware of her uterus, resonating as soft as a low distant bell. She felt him inside her there, those long months nearly forgotten, drawing life from her, flat belly bowed and bulging taut as a drumhead, his gestation mutually transforming and then the painful

bond stretched agonizingly out of her and broken. Laid upon her breast, bloody eyes closed, lips working to milk her. The strong shell of protective love had enveloped them, stayed about them through his infancy. Had it attenuated? Or had it, like so many precious things lost, gone invisible through force of habit, through a taking-for-granted, followed by a forgetting? Sad how often the marvelous became mundane in the midst of a bustling world.

But here, in this place of refuge-here where Joseph and Lyra, for their own odd reasons, methodically circled the cabin a hundred yards out, loosening the earth deeply in one spot, then moving on-she felt the bond to her son as strong as it had ever been. Whatever had entrusted to her the power to heal now filled her anew, slipped bursts of new energy into her hands through the arms, as if they were limp gloves being stiffened with ethereal flesh. In her eyes appeared tears of strength, her lungs working at their crying and keeping up with the influx of power from below. The hearthfire rose and danced to the rhythms she felt course through her.

Conner’s face came to her. She’d allowed their bond to loosen. His face had had an easy confidence about it, the light brashness of a young boy secure in his place in the world, in his family. But now the skin had loosened, had become wavery and uncertain. It was monstrous, being his destroyer. How could she have done such a thing? An agitation seized her, ate at her, tormented her.

She had to heal him. No two ways. Yes, he looked a little like Marcus, but he was uniquely Conner.

The sins of the father stopped with the father, as the sins of the mother stopped with her. She’d rise soon now, dress, and drive out of the foothills into Fort Collins. Don’t ask, she’d say. Just let me touch your head. And for as long as it took, she would enfold his brow from behind in both hands, and bend all her will to undoing the awfulness she had let loose.

***

He heard his question repeated: “How does she seem?”

“Yep, that’s what I asked.” He was on the hall phone but Mom was downstairs doing laundry, out of earshot.

“Um, okay, I guess.”

“You’re holding out,” he accused.

Sherry paused. “You don’t miss a trick, do you? I’d say she sounds… disembodied. You know that word?”

“Sure. I’m not stupid.” Only plagued with migraine.

“Sorry. Like she’s withdrawn from the world, holding it off somehow.”

“Yeah, she’s been like that for oh a week and a half, ever since she went to Lyra’s cabin.”

“She told me about that place.”

“Yeah so she comes back and I’m in bed, just finished reading, just turned out the light, but she knocks and she waits a bit-so’s you can get your finger out of your nose or whatever-and then she’s inside and I switch on my lamp for her. She looks in a hurry about something and sort of out of breath without being out of breath. So I tell her, as she’s zipping across the room and sitting beside me and raising her hands to feel my frigging headache-” Concerned: “You still got that?”

“Comes and goes, but yep, I do. Won’t go away.”

“Jeez, it’s been a while. So yeah you told her, what did you tell her?”

Ugh, this felt icky.

“Well, this ancient old jogging lady, she said to say I loved her-”

“To say you loved the jogging lady? That is weird.”

“No, no, to say I loved Mom.” He heard Sherry laugh. “Oh I get it. You’re joking, you’re razzing me, having me on.”

“Just a little tease among friends,” she said. “Okay so you told Katt you loved her. That’s great!”

“Yeah, but it did something to her. She looked at me real funny, well it was just a flash really but it doesn’t take much with your mom-”

“Right.”

“-and she felt my forehead but real lightly like one of those limp-wristed handshakers who come on as if they’d like to crush your hand but have no energy in them when it comes to the grip.”

“Hey, listen, Conner,” she said, almost as if she were reining in a horse, “telling someone you love them doesn’t do stuff like that. It’s gotta be a coincidence.”

“Yeah but I vowed a vow to my old lady jogger, and it feels good to keep saying it, gets easier and less icky to say. Ever noticed that?”

Sherry said she hadn’t, and Conner could tell, by the way she said it, that maybe she’d never said it to anyone. That was too bad if it was true.

“So anyway I’ve seen that weird thing fire off in her a few times, when she comes home from work and I hug her a little and tell her you-know. She even says it to me, but I can hear something else there.”

“It’s good that you’re telling your mom you love her. I think your jogging lady must be very wise. As to what’s up with your mom, I just don’t know. Listen. Why don’t I come over and hang out with you guys?”

It’d been ages since Conner had seen her. Funny, how some faces got lost in memory when they weren’t there, but sprang up in an oh-yeah when they were. Sherry’s was like that. “Okay, great. I’ll tell Mom.”

“No, don’t. Let’s surprise her. I’ll bring flowers. You be ready to answer the door.”

“I dunno.”

“Come on. Let’s try it. Maybe it’ll draw her out of her grief. The worst she can do is send me away like that weird uncle of yours from Minneapolis.”

So he agreed, and he sat in the great room, massaging his head, waiting. What’re you doing, his mom asked in an idle way. Nothing, he said, just looking at the sun. And I love you, Mom. I love you too, Conner, she said, a daze in her eyes. She passed by, carrying a basket of clothing to be folded and put away.

***

Sherry’s car pulled up, a white sporty thing with odd crap on the back, some nonfunctional upraised bar over the trunk. Looked stupid to him, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. She carried a green wrap of Uny red roses and he could hear her heels, tap tap tap, on the sidewalk. A sound from upstairs, his mom descending. “Someone there? You expecting someone?” But he had already bounded up to open the door before she rang the bell, and he pulled the door open. And the red was bright red, and the green was an impossibly bright green, and Sherry stood behind them, colors sweeping her face like alarmed searchlights.

Then, without moving, she came forward. Her opening face broke apart in beauty and there were hands coming to him and falling flowers and something warm behind him, at his back. He fell, helpless, back into the warm thing, a zone of comfort and support, and knew no more.

***

In the two days since, Katt had relived his collapse, almost as if it were an image burnt on her retina: Sherry on the doorstep, inching forward as if held back by a wall of water. The heaviness of Conner’s fall coming down like lead weights as his fade suddenly shifted into unconscious collapse. And there she’d been, maternal embrace ready to support him, nearly knocked off-balance. Heal him, said a voice of strength and urgency; heal him now, right in this doorway with Sherry looking on. But the cloud of inaction that had held her back for day upon day, a suspended state of dither and do-nothing brought on and sustained by his I love you in just those shy coy Marcus tones-that terrible paralysis of will persisted, even with her son unconscious in her arms, even knowing in that rush to the hospital the diagnosis Doctor Bein would give.

Swimming up into consciousness, seeing her there, her and Sherry, I love you Mom had been the first thing out of his mouth, brave boy, caught and held by the tight band of sheets across his chest. She wanted to come forward, heal him, hold him. But her hands wouldn’t obey her, the awful cloud about her still. Instead she took a lifeless chair, clutching his fingers, then grasping his right hand in her hand, an inept squeeze. I’m so sorry, she’d said, and she had been in so many ways. And monstrous and self-berating and amazed at her inability to act.

For two days, a frenzy lived and grew inside her. No sleep at night-or, if a little, then light and deceptive. Sherry kept coming back, a deep warm concern in those eyes that had been so cool and dead when they’d first met. The car, the hospital room, Sherry’s hello on the doorstep and her solicitous hugs when just needed, when the demons were about to overwhelm her-these cycled in over and over, the clock a meaningless toy, the sun rising or setting without point. When her friend picked up the folded pink paper on the kitchen table and said something, Katt, in a new build of agitation, couldn’t fix on it until she repeated it. A lecture, Lyra’s lecture. Sacred Abortion its title.

***

Sherry asked her a question.

“Excuse me?” Ratt said.

“I said,” said Sherry, “is this the same Lyra who lias the cabin with the weird energies?”

“Yes.”

“The one who loosens the earth around her property to let the Goddess breathe more freely?”

“She has a good heart.”

“Hey, this is tonight. Let’s see. Artemis, the role of the church in baby-killing, and women’s sacred right to end pregnancy. Sounds like something I want to hear.”

“No, really, I-”

“Come on, this is your friend. She a good speaker?”

“She’s okay. Lots of passion. Pretty articulate. A book grabs her, she embraces it, chews on its ideas, spits them out. But I’m not really in the mood for-”

“Well, I am,” said Sherry. And against Katt’s better judgment, she let Sherry steamroller her into going. Door locked and out to her friend’s car.

The air was warm, the sky dimming toward dusk. Knots of uncertainty tightened her body, the agitation causing a wave of small shivers to pass through her. Her son lay in a hospital bed, worsening moment by moment, while she rode passively in Sherry’s Accord. She wanted to act. And she didn’t want to act. Her friend Lyra was a doer, a driver, a woman whose body took charge and whose mind was a simple thing indeed. She’d once berated Katt for being a waffler on some trivial matter, a wimp, a wishy-washy can’t-decide sort. And that was true. The mind was a complex thing to her. It was the body’s working out of puzzles which, when closely considered, had multivariate and persuasive sides, some of which couldn’t be reconciled. Ever. The Lyras of the world thought they had everything figured out. But it was they, to her way of thinking, who, for all their talk about being centered in the body, failed to honor the mind in its centeredness, failed to be patient with it, to give it forbearance, to question, to entertain doubts. Instead they forged ahead-did meditation teach them nothing?-the blind embrace of passion translating into little more than a tyranny of feeling over thought.

***

Katt scarcely noticed the familiar stretch of College Avenue storefronts going by. South of Old Town Square, in the lot behind the Aggie, they parked. A few blocks north of that, near the food co-op, was Healing Pathways, an old home turned now to alternative use. Clusters of women and men, but far fewer of those, stood on the sidewalk. Their crossing Mountain seemed-a trick of timing-to prompt the scattered crowd to coalesce and siphon in.

Tired couches and folding chairs had been pulled into arcs in the carpeted reception area, a lectern pinned into one corner by their scrutiny. Lyra was there, clutching a thin paperback and listening to a short blond woman. Wave at Lyra; wave back and a smile.

This was unsupportable. The churning babbling people about her seemed pasted on the air, not all there. In the babble, she heard tantalizing echoes-mere cuts of sound-of her son’s voice. Conner needed her. He was dying, and she could stop it. She had to stop it.

Katt’s arms hurt, and her jaw. Her shiver escalated, then calmed again.

“You all right?” Sherry said.

She nodded, though she wasn’t. The crowd blurred for her. It felt wrong to be here, a room in some alien space unattached to anything human. But she followed her friend to a folding chair, sat there, hands clasped, the odd buzz of conversation dwindling as Lyra moved to the lectern and people found seats. Breathe deeply, she told herself, blit her breaths, thinking about her son dying in that hospital bed, came quick, furtive, shallow, clenched.

Lyra held up the book. “Ginette Paris,” she said, “a brilliant woman. Her book, The Sacrament of Abortion. We in the alternate community too often ignore politics in an ardent quest for inner peace at the personal level. In so doing, we feed power to our unnatural foes.” Lyra went on in this vein for several minutes, attuning the room to fix on her and setting the stage for the heart of her talk.

Katt yawned, tightening her facial muscles so that it didn’t show. Her frenzy persisted, the soft lamp-lighting here reminding her of her son’s subdued hospital lights at night. Her left knee pumped. She ought to go to him, but she felt trapped by falsely radiant souls, a choir waiting to be preached to. Right after, though, as soon as it was over, she’d urge Sherry out the door, rush them to the car and burst into the hospital. But what if it was too late? What if she’d let it go too long? And if she hadn’t, what if her healing proved no match for her power to destroy?

“Artemis,” said Lyra, a one-word sentence. “Artemis, protectress of women, children, and animals. But also she who brings them death. Through her, we can honor woman as the natural bearer of life, love, and death. Through this so-called pagan figure, we can end-run around the idiocies of fundamentalist Christianity and understand why abortion is not a sin but a sacrament, a power to be lovingly given by women attuned to the natural cycles of the earth.”

Sherry, leaning, whispered, “I like her.”

Katt nodded, a cold sweat banded on her brow. To her frenzy was suddenly added a new anxiety. Lyra knew. Lyra somehow knew. As she spoke, her eyes found Katt’s, locked in, mischief dancing there, then moving on. Strange as it sounded, she’d surely picked up cabin vibes, she knew what Katt had felt and planned there, what even now she carried out. This whole lecture was a ruse, Sherry in on it, Lyra ready to sledge the talk down upon Katt’s head, to come in with her righteous wrath on a fingertip and open up Katt’s secrets to the community in this public forum. Sherry had said something about baby-killing and the church; no great leap from there to son-killing, reeling about, drawing the moral line, condemning her for hurting Conner.

As if anticipating her fears, Lyra blasted the Church for its hypocrisy: “Contraception of any kind was banned, a sin condemned as fornication. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the poor would abandon babies on church doorsteps, they’d be sent to wet-nurses, the Church would close its coffers after a time, and the babies died, three out of four at the height of this practice. You can throw that at the know-nothing, care-nothing antichoicers next time they gather to deny your rights!”

Katt couldn’t tell if Lyra was for or against this baby-killing. But it didn’t much matter. The air hung close and confining, and Katt’s heart was racing. She felt faint, a sudden wash of dull effervescence in her head, wrapped frontward from ear to ear. Lyra was speaking, but the sounds wouldn’t cohere into meaning. And then a knifepoint caught and wedged in, rising up sharply in her chest. She looked at Sherry, who bore that same oh-no expression in her eyes. The room did an abrupt flip, hands snatching at her, someone straddling her and pushing palms sharply downward against the pain in her heart and pressing cold nervous lips against hers, odd except that she’d forgotten to exhale so it made a kind of sense. Pretty Sherry, pain on her face, held Katt’s hand.

Two young angels arrived in a wail of sirens. Strong and assured they were, taping her onto a stretcher, saying soothing ununderstandable words, lifting her weightlessly, easing her into the oddsmelling vehicle, and rambling her closer to her son and his salvation.

7

STOPPING A RUNAWAY TRAIN

The wooziness stayed with Katt through the ambulance ride, the ER entry (Sherry coming in soon after), a quick battery of preliminary tests. When they were assured she wasn’t in any immediate danger, a thick-lidded man decked out in greens wheeled her to a night room and settled her into a bed by the window, a roommate snoring behind drawn curtains. He and another younger man with a smile and an anchor tattooed on one muscular arm took her temperature, her blood pressure, a sample of arterial blood (“This one is gonna hurt,” and it did), and prepped her left arm for an IV. The ER interns had already taped an array of thin monitoring nodes to her torso, and these were now plugged into a flat weighty transmitter pocketed in her gown.

Sherry stood by the window, watching them.

“What floor are we on?” Katt managed.

They told her. It was the same floor Conner was on, but she had no idea how far away he was. “Conner?” This to Sherry.

“I’ll figure out where he is,” her friend said.

The lidded man spoke up. “Don’t be thinking about a walk now. You’re in no condition to go anywhere.”

Then Doctor Bein came in. “Hello there,” he said as if he’d been expecting her. She introduced him to Sherry, whom he acknowledged with a nod. But his hands had begun already to move upon her, the stethoscope settling in and pressing down into circle after circle of skin. She gave him, as he worked, a description of what had happened. A quick look at her retina, the little light blinding. She wondered why he did that and he told her it indicated the health of her arterioles, the tiny branches that fed into the larger arteries.

“You’ve stabilized,” he told Katt. “Coronaries come in all sizes. Yours was small. But even a small one can be serious, or it can be prelude to a larger one. In the morning, I’ll ask Doctor Gestner to look in on you. He’s a heart specialist. He’ll wheel you over for a scan, see what’s happening in there. Fair enough?”

“Yes,” she said.

Katt mapped out hospital corridors in her head. Her boy could be a distant maze away or half a minute’s walk. Either way, she felt an urgency to reach him. Right this second-or this-he could be breathing his last.

If Doctor Bein had examined her heart now, he’d have heard an upswing in its tempo. Katt couldn’t afford that most likely, but she couldn’t help it either.

“How is Conner?” she asked.

“About the same.” He squeezed her hand, a semblance of bedside manner but coolly professional. “The best you can do for him now is to get a good night’s rest. You’ll be given a stabilizer for your heart rhythms, a few pills four times a day. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she lied.

“Good,” the doctor said. “You’re weak, you’ve had a lot taken out of you. Try not to exert yourself. Call a nurse when you have to relieve yourself. She’ll help you to the bathroom.”

“All right, Doctor.”

“Tomorrow, we’ll wheel you in to see Conner.”

Tomorrow might be too late. She felt the tears come and couldn’t stop them. They emerged weak and whiny in a sound she hated but couldn’t halt.

He held her hand. “The nurse will give you something to help you sleep.”

She nodded. She’d be damned if she’d take it. There had to be some way to get to her son. If she died trying, she swore she would do it.

Doctor Bein, his middle-aged face somehow puckish and bright, said good night to her, joked with Sherry about no marathon runs around the corridors, and left.

“Cute guy,” said Sherry. “No rings.”

“He wants you,” Katt said.

“They all do. I’m being more selective these days.”

As Sherry came forward, Katt raised her right hand to accept her handclasp. Sherry glanced around, then lowered her lips to Katt’s, gently kissed her. She tasted like an oven redolent with bread. The kiss broken, Sherry settled a palm upon Katt’s cheek and smiled. “You’ll be okay.”

“You’ve been a good friend,” Katt said. “Better than good.”

“C’mon now. You say that as if you’re going to die.”

“Sorry,” she said. Speech was an effort. Everything was an effort. She didn’t know if she had the strength to carry out her plan, but she must. It had to be there, her summons the one thing needed to prime the pump. “Find out where he is. And bring a magazine, will you?”

“Which one?”

“Utne Reader, Rolling Stone, whatever.”

“You got it. I’ll be back in a flash.”

“Don’t hurry.” She meant it. She’d need time. Just as Sherry left and she’d reached inside the folds to touch her left breast, a nurse came in. Katt replaced her hands on the blanket beneath her chin.

“Hi, I’m Brenda. I’m your night nurse. Open up-you know the drill, under the tongue. This white pill is your get-some-sleep one. These tiny yellow ones’ll steady your heart rhythms, prevent arrhythmia.” The thermometer beeped at her. “Looking good. You’ll do fine.” She held Katt’s wrist in her skilled grip. “Pulse is strong. Do you want anything? Need to get up? No? Okay. Here’s some water. Down the hatch.”

Katt took the yellow pills, gulped them down, palming the other, pretending to swallow it.

“You know how to work the bed?”

“Yes.” Leave now, she thought. Go away.

“Most patients never get the rundown.” She proceeded to be sure that Katt was not one of them, going over every button, demonstrating their every nuance of movement, then painstakingly restoring the bed to its initial position.

“Fine, yes fine,” said Katt. And then, miraculously, Nurse Brenda was gone, drawing the ceiling-tracked curtain three-quarters of the way shut.

***

Katt slid a feeble hand inside her gown, wrapping her fingers about the monitor wires and the nodes taped to her chest. She closed her eyes. The power was weak, barely a dip below the surface. But she stopped trying to push it, calming her breath instead, refusing to entertain thoughts or anxieties, just letting them go and concentrating on an easy inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale, the warm hand around her breast her sole bodily focus. And the energy came, slowly at first, then with more confidence. 1 ler vision deepened. And suddenly, the heart came into view, at once this moist meaty thing and a sacredness akin to self. Her fingers in ghostly touch lightly soothed the moving muscle, following paths into and out of it, bloodflow she’d seen before only in encyclopedias or cartoons. Katt remembered what Doctor Bein had said about the arteries. She lound the pulmonary artery, the big one coming up and over into the heart from the lungs, and concentrated on relaxing and dilating it, a tonal soothe, and doing likewise to the smaller arterioles that fed into it. She brushed them with light, a salve of light, and it was as if into a gloomy forest thin probings of sunlight took their green and mossy way, illuminating a wide path of freshness and forgiveness. Where she sensed, as she moved, the habit of constriction, she massaged that hardness, that tautness, away, and it was almost as if the arterial walls audibly sighed at their newfound freedom of movement and flow.

On the periphery, Katt gradually became aware of more energy feeding into her, pouring in, it seemed, from close locations about her, from hidden vortexes akin to those in Lyra’s cabin. She fed this new energy back into her right hand, her healing of the arteries she soothed growing more supple and sure with each passing moment. Physician, heal thyself, came the phrase. In all her dealings with trying her power on her massage clients, it had never occurred to her to turn it inward; now she did and it felt exceedingly good. An image of Baron Munchausen, by mere will, pulling himself and his horse up out of a lake, came to her. Then it vanished, before she could even smile, and she saw, not more than a few corridors away surely, Conner lying in bed and deteriorating cell by cell, her the cause, her the way to his cure.

In her mind’s eye, he looked at her with reproach-no hatred even though he knew, but just a mild resignation in those tired young eyes. He knew. And yet he forgave her, even as he died. It was unbearable. If her boy died as a result of her insane actions, she’d never forgive herself. Grief, Katt knew, like sudden water in a flashflood, would sweep her under; and she, unlike Grandma Jasper, would end by killing herself as well as her husband and son.

Her eyes opened. Her roommate was snoring loudly. A wave of despair came over her. Though her heart felt like new, the warmth of healing full upon it, her body remained enfeebled by the attack. She felt enervated, drained, and spent, but there was no time to give that the attention it needed. She had to reach Conner now. Sherry could help. But if Sherry was not back in five minutes, she’d find him on her own. She grappled her watch from the table unit by her bed, gripped it, held it close, urged it, urged it, an urgent mind-summons to her friend to hurry back.

***

Sherry, having found the way to Conner’s room (a long corridor and two short turns away from Katt), descended to the lobby, where a gift shop full of unspeakable gewgaws and a slight rack of magazines and paperbacks greeted her. An old man on a cane licked his lips at her. Or maybe he was just adjusting his dentures-hard to tell with his type.

Newsweek was the best she could do. As she bought it from the raptor-clawed, puffed-faced, smiling woman behind the counter, it struck her how lovely in her grotesqueness that woman was, how beautiful.md complete the old man and his cane. These were people she would scarcely have given a glance at a month before.

Now they seemed perfect.

“Here’s your change,” not counting it out like a real cashier, not abrupt either. Those gnarled fingers brushed Sherry’s palm, and that was all right too.

She recalled her comment to Katt over the phone about not getting involved with inconvenient people, not finding herself stuck behind a wheelchair. That had been ages ago and now here she was, entangled for over a month with Katt and Conner. A more inconvenient, more unfortunate pair of people she could hardly imagine. And yet Sherry had borne the inconvenience lightly, had welcomed it, had hardly had time for a second thought about it. They needed her. She loved them. So she provided and nurtured, a second nature emerging she had never suspected. Simple as that.

Sherry thanked the woman and left, headed back toward the elevators past the information desk. A bouffant lady, pudgy with her fat right leg straight out in a white cast, was wheeled in by a slight woman, pinched-faced, her brown hair bobbing about her head like lamp fringe. She guessed they were lovers. Maybe, maybe not.

Pressed for the up elevator. The red arrow lit. Had her friends been an inconvenience? Sure. And bid fair to be so for months to come. Conner, she was afraid, had not long to live. It would hurt to le him. And then if she guessed right, Katt would find herself having to process a double grief, something that couldn’t be rushed, something that Sherry, if she truly loved her, would have to see her through with patience and forbearance.

Bing! The doors opened. Two interns got out and one held the door for her and the wheelchair ladies. He waved at her as the doors closed, lust-sparks lighting his eyes. They would have left her cold, unmoved a month ago; or she would have boldly sauntered up to him and taken him aside, asking him straight out-her eyes fixed on his, taking his measure-what he’d like to do and where he wanted to do it and just what he was waiting for. But now those sparks of lust were like bursts of blue flower, waving in a field, a temptation easily acknowledged and as easily passed by.

At home, taking a break from class preparation, habit would draw her to the BBSs. But she posted nothing, heard the occasional BBSer wonder, along CFRnet, what had become of Love Bunny, watched the interplay of puerile lust among the regulars, the Denverites, the rare Boulderite, news of parties and gatherings of swingers. Dependable Zipper and Zap-per, a sad chunky couple from Longmont, touted the joys of multisex, as usual, to clueless newcomers.

And speaking of Newcummer, she hadn’t logged onto any of the BBSs for more than a month. Checking userlists for Newcummer showed her last on 7-3 everywhere. Ratt’d given it up soon after Marcus had been stricken. Funny. In all the weeks since, the subject of BBSing hadn’t once arisen. A playpen for the simple folk. That’s mostly what it was. Personals on the net were the same way, sporadic grains of wheat lost among truckloads of chaff.

The wheelchair ladies were holding back. Not talking nor touching. She could feel their restraint. Definitely lovers. The uptightness was closing her up too. The hell with that, she thought. “Nice cast,” she said. “A little dull though.”

The one behind the chair smiled. “We’re going to see about that. Some friends are coming over tonight, bearing gifts, I hope, and Magic Markers.” Her friend beamed, her lipsdck mouth bending upward. “Sally’s idea. I kinda like the white, though. Makes the leg look sorta prehistoric.”

Sherry raised a finger, mock lecture. “White’s good. Magic Markers are better.” The elevator dinged, as though agreeing-a punctuadon mark. Its doors opened. Sherry’s floor. “See you guys later.”

“Bye,” Sally said.

“Ciao,” said her seated friend.

A simple bond. Would have been unforged a month ago, the stiffness growing, then her floor. She amazed herself at the change that had eased into her. Smiles. The doors closed. Sherry wished them well.

The corridors, indirecdy lit, had that night-feel to them-a trick, surely, since there were no windows to tell her what she knew. The doors to the rooms were closed, no visitors, and strictly speaking she guessed that her being here was in violation, but she wasn’t about to voluntarily leave. Three doors down on the left, Katt’s room. Sherry drew down the handle and slipped in. Dim light but mostly darkness, instruments outlined in shadow against the walls and a large TV set dormant above-a fully curtained snorer kept up her now-familiar rhythm, and beyond that, somebody had drawn Katt’s curtain. Sherry rounded the hidden bed, black windows lined up and moving as she walked. A shock. Katt was sitting, her legs over the side, IV in her arm, wires coming out of the folds of her hospital gown.

“Help me,” Katt said, a hand to her temple.

Sherry came around to her, dropping the magazine on a chair. “Jesus,” she said, folding back the bedclothes and urging her down. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Katt, though feeble, shook her off. The sudden surge of power surprised Sherry. “Listen to me.” In her voice, in her eyes, a stone sobriety asserted itself. “I haven’t told you something about Lyra’s cabin. Something that was in the air two nights ago when I was there. I’ll tell you now, but you’ve got to believe me.”

And Sherry listened. All about healing powers moving into her, trusting in their veracity then, but not at home when she had the chance to use them, about how she’d fixed her heart and now had to find Conner, quickly, without any of the hospital staff catching on. It seemed like madness to Sherry, and yet she’d never felt such affirmation, such truth, from Katt before. Would she help? Her mind wanted to say no, but her heart said yes, and the instinct was as strong as instinct ever got.

Sherry removed the IV from Katt’s arm first, a simple uncoupling and hanging up and rolling aside. Then she put slippers on Katt’s feet and offered her arm. She wondered about the heart monitor, the transmitter, how sensitive it was to motion, how observant the attendant nurses might be as they lound the door and ventured into the corridor.

“Hurry,” Katt whispered.

Her roommate snored on.

***

The world was one great surge. Daddy shouted at him. Nighttime, the years ripping backward. Daddy was big and angry and ugly, gripping his arms and shoving him backward into his bedroom. The door slammed forever, air buffeting him with a soft harsh blow. Dark light. This light.

Loneliness in an empty nighttime room.

He wanted Mommy. Or the blank-faced lady, the friend of the family. She’d be a comfort too.

He shouted for Mommy, or imagined he did: Things did and didn’t happen. The room swirled with a sweep of light and then it closed up into darkness again. His dny space refused to hold steady. Out of it came peeling the peach-faced nurse, saying something, moving in shadow, her mouth in flow, her face dissolving, returning, as she went about her business. Sticking metal into him. Putting her hands on him, cool, clammy, not wandng to be with him. Ripples of hair, stabbed by a starched cap-and under it, no eyes, no nose, no lips, just peach skin with pretend stuff stuck on it to seem like features. She was somewhere else. Her words, sweeps of nonsense, slurred and lied.

And then she was gone, the roomswirl again swallowing her and bringing back loneliness.

Daddy shouted at him, shoved him into his room. Door slam. Dark light. This light.

Alone.

Night gnarled in to torment him, digging at his pores like blunt barbs, hurting his head. Daddy sat in darkness, out of reach; he was shouted-out, except for the shouts in his head. They could hear each other’s shouts; they could feel each other’s hurts. A whip-snap of thread, like tin-can phones, connected them, head to head, hurt to hurt.

The radiator dcked; it plucked diy rubber bands that snapped as they broke. The darkness jittered with dryness and razor lines, like drizzle defying gravity.

The roomswirl came again, a wider sweep of light this time, feelings that made moist the dryness, that shattered the drizzle-lines and filled the room with sniffs of rose.

Bobbles of shapes and whispers followed the return of darkness. Delight approached him. A double woman in soft whispers came staggering out of the dark. The blank-faced lady had recovered her face, where volcanoes of burst fire burned. And Mommy, things not right with her, melted down onto his bed, Mommy-smells heavy on her, hands filling the air, taking the rhythms of the surging room and working to slow them, tame them, offering warmth and comfort.

***

The walk down the long corridor took an eternity. If Sherry hadn’t come back, and Katt had tried it on her own, she’d never have made it. The corridor stretched too long and her legs were too unsteady. She would have collapsed, been found by interns or nurses, returned to her bed. But Sherry steadied her and, without being too obvious, helped her forward, a normal stroll to passing eyes.

As they approached Conner’s room, Katt saw two nurses down a T’d hallway, distant but walking their way. A face registered. Nurse Brenda. Katt looked away as Sherry put a hand on Conner’s door and pushed on it. The eye contact had been fleeting. Katt hoped, merging with the darkness, that the woman’s mind had been elsewhere, or that her eyes were none too sharp, or that Sherry had provided the cover she needed.

Equipment lights against the wall helped her adapt to the dimness. Sherry guided her. “Take it easy,” said her friend. “Don’t bump anything. He’s not going anywhere.”

“I know.” Excitement. The air impeded her. His bed grew bigger, but so slowly, and Katt could see, or thought she did, his body there under the covers, his head turning to acknowledge her. She was so weak. She dreaded finding herself powerless when at last her hands found his head, a fear that the best she’d manage was to feel his dying take him away, able only to detect his sickness and not to stop it. That would devastate her.

Sherry brought her around to the window side, lowered her to the bed, where she lay down and found her son’s head with her hands. It felt so good to lie down. The air was cool on her legs, but that didn’t matter. She could smell the sweat of her exertion, feel the beaded sweat on Conner where she touched him. He made a sound. Incomprehensible but welcoming. She wanted to cry, but damped it down, her focus now upon his scalp, probing swifdy, deep inside his brain. She touched it, felt the extent of the ravage, its spread so rapid these last three days. Guilt almost froze her but she forced it away.

No time for that now. If she allowed herself the awful luxury of guilt, he might expire during that indulgence.

She shut her eyes, willed the healing into her hands. Nothing but enfeeblement there. Come on, come on, but she again calmed her breath, trying not to push the river, and it began at last, the healing power, to rise in her hands. Rich and gleaming, it rose like gold.

Voices behind her. A hand slapped the wall and light bled through her eyelids. She opened her eyes, turned her head, saw the nurse and the tattooed muscled intern ignore Sherry’s attempts to put them off, spouting stock cautious catch-phrases as they moved toward her-there there, we’re going to take you back now, Mrs. Galloway, you can see him tomorrow, you can’t go wandering off like this, it’s not a good thing for you or for him. But all the while, beneath all that talk, there was fear and firmness and a readiness to grapple her down, force her to their will.

The intern touched her, a tight grip on her arm.

She shook him off, stunned at her strength. “Get out of here!” she said, vicious, protective. He drew back his hand as from a hot stove, then came on more forcefully, an ache in his face but a determination there too. In sudden light, Conner’s face was slack, his eyes fixed but jittery upon her. The intern’s hands gripped her arms high up and began pulling her off the bed. She struggled, her legs in motion, her hands ineffectually reaching for her son. “No please, you can’t do this,” she pleaded, but his right arm curled about her waist and his left

shot across her, below the neck, grappling firmly her right shoulder, drawing her back against his chest, up from the bed, away from Conner.

“Let her go,” a male voice commanded sharply.

The intern stopped, holding her. Katt swung her head about, saw Doctor Bein in the doorway. Sherry was looking at him. Nurse Brenda seemed stunned.

“Should I?” The intern held on.

“She’s resisting,” the nurse protested.

“Her son is dying,” the doctor said, looking straight into Katt’s eyes. “I’ll take full responsibility. I want her to have thirty minutes alone with him.” He glanced at the clock. “At eight forty-five, no sooner, you can wheel Mrs. Galloway back to her room. Make that nine.”

The intern relaxed his grip, helping her back down to the bed and releasing her. Her hands found Conner’s scalp again. Elsewhere in the room, voices whispered, there was movement and the snapping off of the light and then a void where before had been disturbance. But already, all of it was fading from her awareness, as she felt the heat of her son’s head and ventured inside it, praying for her healing gift to return more completely than ever, bringing to bear upon his illness all the love and undoing she could muster from her healed heart.

Bein invited Sherry to the physician’s lounge for coffee and she demurred at first, wondering if she shouldn’t stay outside Conner’s door, but he coaxed again and she agreed. The place was furnished like an old classy living room, an Oriental rug, lamps, couches with pillows and dark-stained curved arms.

He set a steaming mug of filtered coffee-in paisleyshaped swirls at its rim as he moved-on the table before her. Honey, a silver pitcher of cream, and packets of unprocessed sugar waited on an ornate tray.

“Thanks,” she said, smacking a tan packet on the edge of the coffee table and tearing it open.

“My pleasure.” Yes, and his lust.

“So why’d you do it?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Rules are made to be broken. Life’s a bore if you don’t take risks. I like to shake up my staff every now and then. It was a private room. She wanted so fiercely to be there. Who knows?” He paused, lifdng his mug to his lips, momentarily indrawn. Then he set the mug down. “But the real reason, I guess, is that they kept me from seeing my mother die. Eight years old. Protect him, they thought. Good thoughts, but misguided. I’ve seen my share of deaths since then-but I didn’t see that one.”

“Conner… he’s dying?” It was hard to say.

“Yes.” He took another slow sip. “I’ve never seen a more thorough disintegration of the brain than his. If he lasts the night, I’ll be surprised. In fact-please don’t tell her this-”

“I won’t.”

“-my guess is that her being there, holding him, may well allow him to give up whatever resistance he’s feeling and slip away in peace. He’s probably 'dying as we speak.”

“Sad,” she said. It wasn’t right. Conner was such a sweet kid, so easy to talk to. He’d helped her as much as she had helped him. And now all of those basement tete-a-tetes, open, frank, loving, would become mere memory, gone forever.

“Some families, some people, live for years without a hitch. Then a series of blows fall. Most of the time the only support is institudonal and that too often is little more, can be little more, than impersonal. From what your unfortunate friend has said, your staying power has been a godsend, per,haps their only comfort in weeks.”

She was going to brush aside his compliment, downplay or deny it. But it was true, and they weren’t playing any games here. “Thanks,” she said. “I love them both. It’s been the right thing to do, something I needed to do.”

The intercom, subdued here but clear as a bell, spoke like a close friend in the air: “Doctor Bein to the third floor nurses’ station, please.” And again.

He rose and sighed, patting his pockets, taking a pad from one and a pen. “Listen, I like you lots. If I don’t ask you for your number, I’m gonna kick myself later.”

He had that easy brashness of the professional man, a turn-on when modulated with humility. And he was cute, if a bit older than she preferred. She was tempted.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said, pen poised, a humor in his voice that she liked.

“I’m sorry,” Sherry said. “I’m involved with someone else. Pretty seriously.” She put a soft edge of kindness to it, hoping to let him down easily. No matter how old a person got, from her experience, rejection always hurt.

He covered his disappointment well. Pocketed the pad as he said: “He’s one lucky guy, whoever he is. You tell him that, next time you see him, okay?” A warm right hand rested on her neck momentarily, his thumb against her jaw, then away, its perfect touch lingering there.

“I will,” she said, and watched him leave.

***

Mommy breathing, ragged but normal, her lungs a bolt of cloth scored by fingernails. Smell of her sweat, eyes closed and hands wrapping his head in skull-warmth. Felt soothing. Trickles of light seeping in.

Hurt to move his eyes. Did so anyway, following the wires bending out of her body and back into a pocket on her chest. She was saying nothing. No matter. Being there. Being here was enough. That and her perfect hands. Surrendering to them. She sat close. Warm weight beside him.

Beyond her, Daddy shouting at him. The blankfaced, no she had a face, the pretty lady (had she just left the room?) murmuring something. Wavy lips losing waver. The sounds a babble, no longer breaking up.

Streams of light from Mommy’s hands. Like taut skin on his face at a beach, diamond wetness lifted by the sun and light penetrating to diy and tighten. Beach? Flight to Florida, staying with Gramma, relieved to fly home.

Roomswirl slowing. Carousel turned off and drifting unhurriedly to a stop. The red light yonder, circles and smears against an unsteady dark, growing hard, unmelting, steadying. Something out of his mouth, almost meaning to it. Shhh, she said, not

opening her eyes, inslipping the light to his brain, scour of a vacuum cleaner as she made her scan and sweep. More something out of his mouth, but she ignored it and it went away.

He closed his eyes.

Mommy aroma. Comfort. Daddy by his bed, reading or weeping, head bent. He reached out to him, to his daddy. Reached a hand. Nothing. He touched his mom. Gave soft pats to her shoulderblade. Shhh, she said, though he had said nothing. She meant don’t break her concentration is all.

He patted her.

She gave him light.

When he opened his eyes, the pretty lady was holding off in the darkness, invisible. But when he closed them, there she was in his head. Her red lips made their sound and in his imagining it unrolled into I love you. Throat rumbles. He was saying it also, same shape, same sounds.

Shhh, his mother said.

He patted her.

She gave him light.

***

At first what Katt found daunted her. How could she hope to undo it? She thought of dried fruit, shrivel and pucker and unplump, small ugly gaps where before had been ripe brain. The book she’d examined in Iowa came back to her, the cumulative horror of the drawings and photos she saw-healthy brains, ravaged brains, like so much decayed cauliflower. Now here it lay before her, an outrage Katt had set free, the advancing ruin at the core of her son’s mind.

She felt paralyzed. Her emotions threatened to stop her, to choke off all action. Shock at what she found, a renewed assault of guilt, fear that she’d be unable to do anything to heal him-these conspired to cripple her.

But she acknowledged them, honored them, and invited them in another time. Not now. Weak though she was, she had healed her heart. Now, if she could only stay in the moment, focus on Conner, focus on her hands and on moving over his wounds, mending, soothing, meeting the onslaught of decay with the counter-energy that intuition dictated, she had a chance to rescue him.

Again not pushing the river, but acquainting herself with the terrain, finding the edges at which the sickness advanced, and directing energy in and about them, she saw at last, after innumerable passes, evidence of healing-a halt, a moving backward, a replacement of collapsed cells with healthy ones. Or rather, the dying matter must have revived, found again its function, resumed living as Katt passed by, drawing strength from her and inspiration from its neighbors newly revived. Go easy, she thought. Baby steps, one by one, her goal clear but unhurried. There’d be time enough. She shooed away worries that there might not be. For now- everything shut out but this moment and this bed- there was only giving, the sure giving that had come to her hands, that had taught itself how to give and that gave now in abundance.

Conner murmured something, a blurred “I love you.”

Shhh, she said. No time to process that, or what it said about his progress. It was sufficient to feel it as a reflection of her giving, itself love, and to cycle new strength from it back into the task at hand.

How would she explain this? A future worry, a drain on her present doing. She let it fall away, keeping only the clear image of Conner’s brain-scan before her. Heels in the hall. Some imperious nurse going by. She relaxed and widened the scope of her energy, picking up the sense of healthy areas, neurons and dendrites properly working, and sharing that sense with the areas in need of healing. To Katt’s joy, they responded. The pace of their revival quickened.

She felt a touch on her shoulder. His hand, patting her. Shhh, she said, but it pleased her. It fed back an abundance of energy to her heart, and the strength in her hands increased as well. In some ways, it felt like what went on about the massage table, the body taking on tone, natural sighs telling her what soothed a client-but much deeper with Conner, more intimate, more loving. Just his presence completed some loop in her, and sensing his slow rise to health, her fingers kneading his scalp, made this moment the closest she’d felt to him since delivering him into the world and caring for him in infancy.

Guilt battered at her again but she refused to yield to it. She had to end this, had to let the healing energy have its moment, complete and unhampered.

Like a potter bent over clay, she worked him, under her hands, coaxing out a perfection little by little with all the patience she could summon. The spread of disease reversed itself, desiccadon en-moistured, drawing back to the caudate center, tiny there, shrinking until, like the last dark patch of night under the onslaught of sunlight, it winked out and was gone.

***

When at last she opened her eyes, he was beaming at her, his gaze steady, fatigue there but whole joy and the sense that she’d rescued him from a lion’s den. His eyes glowed as if he were in the presence of an angel.

Katt grimaced. She didn’t feel at all angelic.

“Hi,” she said, tousling his hair sis she lifted her hands from his head. Something rumbled in her, something preparing to pounce.

“Hi back.” A weak smile. “I love you, Mom.”

Katt leaned forward in a rush, scooping him up into her arms. “I love you too,” she said, and then-the door opening to the soft ratchet of a wheelchair being wheeled in-the guilt Katt had managed to hold off began to sweep through her, coming on full force.

8

A HEALING AND A FORGIVENESS

The doctors had been amazed. They’d kept Conner for a few more days but fewer than they preferred, giving his body time to recuperate and, not coincidentally, allowing them to run their tests again. Katt had acquiesced, only interested for a time in regaining her own strength where she lay, a minor hospital celebrity, and in being wheeled to her son’s room. But by the time she insisted on their discharge and Sherry drove them home, the pressing weight of what she’d done to him had darkened her mind, had hung depression on her soul. Where before, Conner had avoided her, she now avoided him.

He’d hug her in the morning, they’d exchange I-love-yous, and then he’d bike away as she drove to work. Busy in her cube, she stopped typing every so often to examine her hands. Tears welled up, but the parddons were high and she sdfled her sobs. Someday, she thought, he’ll be staring at me, and he’ll ask me the quesdon-the one I’m thinking of or, worse, one that catches me offguard. And I’ll lie to him, spot on, as I’ve lied to him already, an incessant litany of this-is-the-truth circling in my head as long as I’m looking at him. I’ll dig myself deeper, a pocket of deception that will come between us for as long as we live. I’ll love him and lie to him, and I’ll be as distant from him-though I’ll pretend otherwise, and that quite convincingly-as I was from Marcus.

She could see no other course.

Monday, August twenty-third, on impulse, Katt called Lyra at Healing Pathways. Could Katt stop by after work for an hour’s massage? She could and welcome! She fixed another few memory leaks, and at four thirty, she gathered her papers together and zipped down the stairs, barreling west on Horsetooth up Timberline to Prospect to Riverside and onto Mountain and the tiny parking lot beside Healing Pathways. Lyra saw her car pull in and came out to greet her, a long wordless hug and a beatific smile, pure chitchat on the way in that she could barely remember even as it rolled out.

“Look, I’m sorry for upstaging your talk.”

Lyra waved it away. “No problem,” she said. “We’re just glad you and Conner are all right.” Neither she nor Joseph had called or visited, but that was fine. All was forgiven always with them.

The upstairs massage room was redolent with jasmine. Quiet, bright, airy. She kept her oils and her papers in a tall oak hutch beside the door. Katt undressed as they spoke, not the usual practice at Healing Pathways but she and Lyra were comfortable with it.

Lyra asked her what she wanted today.

“Coconut oil,” Katt said. “Ten minutes on the back, ten on the front, and the remainder on my hands and arms. They feel drained.”

“Too much time in front of the monitor?”

“Maybe,” she said. That wasn’t it. Pervasive guilt had slumped like a lead cloak on her back. Her hands had hung like weights at the ends of her arms, a slight shift really, but she felt stooped like an orangutan. Her body had responded, the night of Lyra’s lecture, to emergency, like a mother lifting a car off her child. Since then it had foundered in shock.

Katt rested her head downward on the face cradle, as Lyra pulled along her back and drew sighs and sorrow from her. She felt like nothing, lying there. Unworthy to be touched. It seemed absurd now that she had suspected her friend of knowing her secret. And yet she marveled that, unclothed as she was on the massage table, Lyra could not divine what was inside her.

Talk was minimal until Katt turned over. Then, in a state of repose, she knew that her face, preoccupied with guilt as it was, spoke volumes. “You’re tense today, all over.” No accusation. Just observing.

“Yes, I guess I am.”

Seconds drifted by. Lyra worked her legs and thighs with strong sure hands. “This is a good time to let your worries go,” she said. “You can invite them back later.”

“You’re helping,” Katt said. Barely helping, a skim of misery off the top. “It’s just that…” Her pause went on, melded with the silence. Lyra didn’t pursue it, but oiled Katt’s right arm and began vigorous deep tissue massage from elbow to shoulder.

“Joseph and I pour our troubles deep into the earth. Sure, the holes we dig around the cabin let Gaia breathe. But lately we go deeper and deeper.” Lyra pressed firmly into Katt’s flesh, striking sorrow. “Four feet deep. We do it naked except for our ten-nies. We watch one another dig, good honest sensual work. Then we kneel at the hole and allow all of our negativity to settle into it. Feels so good to shovel the dirt lightly back in, spreading the excess around. The Mother is there for us. You ought to try it next time you’re up there.”

Katt felt her friend’s firm nurturing touch upon her right hand and fingers: Innocence strengthening a murder weapon. The sense memory of harming her son revived, and tears came. How could she have done it? Marcus had been heavy upon her mind, and Conner had been caught up in the stress of those days. Katt could see herself then, could feel dim echoes of what moved her-but it seemed so alien now, so remote from anything she’d ever do. And yet, who could say that she wouldn’t again feel the pressure? Was she without morals? Was she unnatural? A monster?

“What is it, sweetheart? What’s bothering you?” The gentle caring in Lyra’s tone brought more tears. Lyra leaned over and hugged her. “I feel,” Katt said, “I feel like I caused it, Conner’s illness.” How to say it, and yet not say it? “Almost as if I set it off.”

“You didn’t set anything off,” Lyra said. “You made him well. You’ve got the touch. You know it, and I know it. The energy vortex helps us, but you more than me and Joseph. Until we buried envy in the ground, we envied it in you.” She reached down and seized the hand she’d been working on. “You’re a good person, Katt. A kind, caring sweetheart.”

An urge to confess all welled up. Lyra would surely understand, the complexities of mood, how life was really lived beneath society’s simple vision. “But what I did,” she began. Then she saw Lyra’s face, the locked-in look, her eyes fixed fiercely on her own New Age notions, light and airy, denying or shunting aside all meanness, denying the inner darkness. “What I did… was I guess not to really be there for him when Marcus… slipped away.”

“You think that set him off?”

“Yes.” And in that vein she continued, spinning the yarn she had to spin, lies, all lies, pulling away like a slow train from her friend. Her tears were real, but her words shied around the truth, did not tell it, refused to set it down unvarnished. And Lyra’s comfort, directed at the wrong target-a mask hung askew over a bare face-did Katt good, but of course missed its true mark. After she had helped Lyra finish an exchange of plaint and comfort, she lay there, washed spottily clean. Her left arm eased under Lyra’s touch, the guilt again there, mingled with a get-ting-away-with-lies. Would she ever dare tell anyone? Or (and this she fervently hoped) might the guilt dwindle away and leave her in peace, no more than a distant ache?

***

Something was wrong with Mom. She returned his hugs, told him she loved him. But it always felt as if she were going somewhere else. That night in the hospital had been amazing. He’d been drowning, his lungs full of water, his body ready to give up. Then she’d reached down and lifted him up up up through the glittering surface into sunlight, draining his lungs, coaxing breath back into them, holding him close and warm, giving new life to him. But since her return home, it was almost as if she’d sacrificed too much for him. His energy felt boundless. He was determined to right the balance.

He’d been back many times to the Poudre, hoping for a glimpse of his jogging friend again. No luck. He pedaled west through glorious sunlight, eager to find Mom while he felt so invigorated. She was in the breakfast nook, a mug of coffee untouched in front of her, when he came in.

Instead of a Hi! in passing, her returning it without looking at him, he slid in across from her. “Hi, Mom,” he said, a friendly opening, almost a challenge.

Her glance toward him happened in stages. A flare of alarm passed over her face, then a sickly softening. “How was your biking?” Her hands curved protectively about her coffee mug.

“Super,” he said. “Can I ask you something?” It was urgent in him, the need to get this out. It’d hammered at him for days.

“Sure.” She wasn’t sure at all. He knew that by her tone and by her sideways shift in the chair.

“It’s great that you cured me and all. I mean really great-”

“It was a miracle.”

“-assuming it lasts and everything-”

“It’ll last. Don’t worry about that.”

He was faltering. “But what I want to know is, could you have cured Dad? I mean why didn’t you?” She squirmed a little. “I bet I know why. You had no idea-”

“It’s okay,” she said. “You can wonder those things. I want to know what’s bothering you, whenever anything is. I wish I’d had the power then. But I didn’t. I’m sure of that. It was… it grew over time.” She had him fixed in a soft laser beam, the look she used when she wanted to stress how serious she was. “I doubted it. I realize now that I could have come to you much sooner, and that’s part of what’s been eating at me-”

“But the point is, you came.”

“-yes and I know that in my head. But my body feels bad about it. Sometimes it’s hard to get them in synch.”

That was true. God, or whoever, had made people like Slinky toys, where the tail end always lagged behind. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m just happy to have my life back.”

She smiled wanly. “I’ll get there. Don’t worry. As for your father, I know without question that I didn’t yet have anywhere near the ability I needed. I wish it’d been otherwise. But it wasn’t.”

Conner thought of the drive out west, him next to his dad, not realizing how little time they had. He tapped an index finger lightly on the table. ‘‘I miss him, Mom.”

“Me too.” She didn’t. She didn’t miss him. But she caught that glibness, and countered it. “Yes, I really do miss him. It’s just that I’m trying to adjust to his loss and so I’m shutting him out sometimes- does that sound too terrible?-but it feels too early to do that, and at night in my bed, all alone, he’s still there, nearby and yet not within reach. I wonder someumes if I’ll ever get over it at all.”

“Me and Sherry are here for you,” he said. Funny how he included Sherry in the picture. But she seemed family, not at all a stranger.

Mom nodded. “I’m so grateful for you both.”

“Oh and about Sherry?” He felt bold, rushing into it on a breath.

“Yes?”

“It’s okay with me, it’s all okay.” His sex ed class in Iowa had brushed by it. But the kids on the playground had had a field day. The talk had concentrated on how ugh it was to think of guys together like that. And there was some sniggering about girls. But they’d all been thinking about Miss Mitchell, the Spanish teacher, how nice she was and how nice Miss Nugent the admin assistant in the office was, and how perfect and normal they seemed, how clear and right it was that they were together-something not stated ever, but refreshingly obvious. So Conner didn’t have any problem with girls together. None at all.

“What’s okay?” his mother asked.

“You know,” he said. “All of it.”

Mom paused. “Sherry’s a good friend.”

“I think she’s the greatest. I love her.”

“I do too.” She looked astounded and admiring all at once. “I love her too.” It was the first faint sign of a smile he’d seen in days. “And I love you, Conner. I love you very much.”

“Ditto, Mom.” He felt suddenly embarrassed. He slid out of his chair. “So you can do…” Thoughts flitted by: Sherry living here, breakfast in bathrobes, beginning the school year, finding friends, testing them by how they took it. He’d nearly died. He couldn’t waste his time on small-minded bigots. “… you know… whatever.”

“Got you, Conner. I think!”

“Good. Good.” No need to say any of that. And next time, he’d shake loose of the embarrassment-just like how I love you became easier to say once you broke the barrier-and there they’d be. “Well, I guess I’ll go find things to do, read a book or something.”

“You do that.”

“I will.” He grabbed a stack of Oreos and closed the cupboard door. “See ya.”

***

Sherry fled from the dream, the edge of protest still in her voice. Waking had rushed into her, as swift as the brand came searing into her face, MINE glowing in hot wire that lay somehow flat as the base of an ingot. It flamed. Orange heat wrapped about the letters, and it was close no it flared open her face! and the man holding it was Derek, her husband, yes, but his face shifted through Doctor Bein and the intern at the elevator and Twisted Man and the guy on the couch yanking at himself and Marcus-and flickering scores of others like a snapped deck of cards. It pressed against her cheeks, mashed her nose, the hot metal sinking in deeper and deeper. MINE, all MINE, burning up and into her every thought. And then the bedroom, dim and warm and quiet, rose up to awaken her, sheets in gripped bunches at her chest.

Wide awake, she swore. Her heart was pounding. Took in the clock. An hour earlier than her normal rising time but there was no sleep left in her. She got up, showered, dressed, microwaved some Quaker Instant in milk-Maple and Brown Sugar. She thought she’d processed all that crap in the year following Derek’s departure. Must have buried it and paved it over, too much to handle after a while. Now, allowing herself to open up again, her unfinished business had returned, clamoring for completion.

Most of the day, stacks of ungraded exams kept her in the office. Bernie Hedges came by for a conference on his master’s thesis-the dreamy-eyed Mr. Hedges, who needed no conferring at all, but only a reliable barrage of boffing. Not from her, never that, but from some girlfriend who was taking her time materializing. Bernie, she told him, your thesis is fine. Let’s discontinue the weekly conferences. You don’t need them. He had mumbled an okay and gone away crestfallen, one more minor complication pared away.

Then she called Katt. Just checking in, Sherry said. Her friend sounded down but reasonable. Katt told her the things Conner had said that morning, among them an oblique but clear okay to their relationship. That’s the word she used. Relationship. It heartened Sherry.

“Listen,” she said. “Why don’t I come over in say an hour or two? I’ll stop at Alfalfa’s, gather some fixings, make you two some nice polenta for dinner.”

“I don’t know if tonight would be good.” Same damned deferral she’d been hearing for days.

“Katt, c’mon. I like you. Dammit, I love you. It’s been this way for a week.” It was closer to two weeks but why quibble? “I call, you put me off, Conner talks to me, invites me over, and we end up having a nice quiet healing time together. And the healing works both ways. I’ve got stuff in me you’re doing wonders for, even without trying. But look, it comes down to this.” Did she want to deliver an ultimatum? A challenge? No, but sometimes such things were required. “I have to know where I stand with you. I don’t want to rush things, and I think you know that-”

“I do.”

“-but you need to invite me into your life. Any way other than that feels like I’m horning in and I don’t want to hang around where I’m not wanted.”

There was confusion in the pause that fell. But Katt said, weakly at first, then stronger, “You’re light. I've been just the way you said. Things feel so small and dead and closed up when I’m here alone. But I’m always so glad when you drop by. Please do it. Please come by and we’ll make dinner together, the three of us.”

Then Sherry popped it, Conner’s approval on her mind: “I’d like to bring a change of clothes.”

“You mean…” Katt said.

Sherry hung fire.

“Don’t you teach classes tomorrow morning?”

“Not a problem. I’ll leave at dawn, get home, shower up, be there in plenty of time.”

“Well okay. Yes. Do. Just cuddling though. I need to be held, that’s all.”

“I understand,” Sherry told Katt. She’d be damned if she’d settle for that. No. She amended her thinking. If Katt truly only wanted hugs, then so be it. But sex had a healing power all its own, the body rising to an emotional peak, joy and tears and heartache coming to the surface in an outsurge of salvation. She’d tempt Katt that way, coax her with gentle hands and soothing words, test the waters. “We’ll hold each other all night long,” she told her.

***

The hour dragged, her mind no longer able to fix on C code and its intricacies. At last, she slapped her pen on the blotter before her. Enough for today. Outside in the waning sunlight, students walked by in idle chat. Couples in miniature, far too young to know what love was, slanted arm in arm across her third-story window.

She drove home, packed her overnight bag, stopped for tomatoes and spices and flour, then up College to Prospect and past the Holiday Inn. All that time, thoughts of what she’d witnessed at the hospital came to her. Religion was not in her repertoire, hadn’t been since childhood. But a miracle had happened. Of that there could be no question. She’d heard, always with skepticism, of people who managed to heal themselves with vision therapy, imaging the light, defying the odds, making cancerous growths vanish by sheer dint of will. It was quite something else to witness such a thing. Elation, disbelief, immediate acceptance, a smug unspoken satisfaction that medicine had been fooled-these had gone through her mind in those first moments. It gave her the hope, washed her in fact through with hope, that a comparable store of power lay buried inside herself. That hope surprised her. What, she wondered, did she have that needed healing? Then her nightmare came rushing back, and she knew.

Katt met her in the driveway-a first, her coming out of the house. Conner bobbled behind. “Hi!” he announced, happiness splitting his face.

“Hi back,” she said, as she handed him the bag of groceries. She traded discreet hugs with Katt, then retrieved her overnight bag.

Katt looked less haggard, less spent, than Sherry had seen her in weeks. It wasn’t a trick of the daylight. It carried on inside-not so much that she was more animated, but rather as if a thin stream of light had broken through the unrelieved gloom. She was still subdued, but some odd adjustment appeared to be in process. Sherry became the hub of dinner preparation. The boy held back at first, but she easily coaxed him into helping out. Some talk, light joking, humming from Conner that he tried to stop but kept coming back to-and in no time, the pan slipped into the oven. Over dinner, they traded brief summaries of the day, Sherry going into poor Bernie Hedges and his moon-eyes and how she’d finally dashed his hopes.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Conner said.

“Conner?” his mother warned.

“You’re right, it wasn’t,” Sherry said, “but I' should have done it long ago. Frees him up to look elsewhere, so in the long run, it’s a kindness.”

He hadn’t been convinced. She could tell. But there were some things that took mulling before they settled in. And that was all right. Other matters engaged them before long, and then out came the Ben & Jerry’s, a deep and rich double chocolate delight. Conner had brought home a video and Sherry sat beside Katt on the couch, paying no heed to the mayhem on the tube, but holding Katt’s hand and gazing over at Conner getting off on the movie, but mostly at the simple sadness of her friend’s profile. She felt warm and good, wrapped in comfort there beside her.

When Conner announced he was going to bed, kissed his mom, gave Sherry a hug, and dashed upstairs, the two women blended together on the couch. “Come here,” Sherry said, fighting a resistance in Katt, a knotted muscle softening under her touch. “I’ve missed you,” she told her as they embraced.

“I’ve missed you too.” Soft lamentation.

She kissed the warm smooth stretch of Katt’s neck as her right hand curved along Katt’s jawline, fingertips at and under shortfalls of brown hair. “How are you holding out?”

“Fine,” her friend said.

“Liar,” Sherry teased, and there was a little laugh. Still, they shared the gravity of things. No hurry. She would coax it out of her in time. Felt good here. Solid and comfordng. Her condo served its function, but there was a starkness, a linearity there that had insulated her from the world. Here, Katt’s warmth, even cloaked in her grief and sadness, enveloped them both, opened Sherry up, made her vulnerable. It felt as if her whole past became visible and available, the deep shaft of things buried or forgotten now open to come forth and tease or torment her again. Deep down, there was fear and hurt and anger; but closer to the surface now, and overwhelming in its warmth and goodness, was love. Sherry loved this woman. It was a simple natural fact, nothing forced, nothing delusional about it. “Come upstairs?” she suggested.

Katt’s voice held injury. “Isn’t it a little-”

“No, it’s time.” And it was. Time for whatever was in store for them, a night spent in the same bed, embrace or beyond, the accretive healing of two souls sharing the same night-space, breath to breath, skin to skin.

As one, they rose.

Ordinarily, when Conner went to bed, Katt would light a candle and sit in the living room, blinds shut, going in deep to her guilt. Sometimes she tried to kill the flurry of scripting that went on in her head, but more often than not she let the regret take hold, replaying these last few months, making different choices that veered her away from being a killer and an abusive mother and a liar. How, she wondered (but found no answer), could she feel such depths of love for her son and yet have done what she did? Chalk it up to stress, residues of Marcus. An easy answer, even in many ways the right answer. But it didn’t wash. There was no justification for it. It had happened, and she had chosen to do it, and all that existed at her center was an unshaped consciousness surrounded by snippets of musts and oughts and shoulds, scripts and stories that vied with one another and left her foundering in confusion.

Tonight, though, buoyed up into light sorrow by having Sherry in the house-and the prospect of lying next to her all night brought even more comfort-Katt felt the fretful round of recrimination lift, content with simply being and not peppering herself with the buckshot of morality.

They walked easily in tandem up the stairs, Sherry an angel of warmth and aroma. In the bedroom, its door being drawn soundlessly closed, almost as if she didn’t want her son to know they were there, she felt Sherry’s hand at her waist, suggesting her about and into an embrace. Too much haste. Too tight and clingy. She accepted the kiss, felt herself melt below. Not yet. She broke off. “Hey, hey,” she said softly. “Let’s just hold one another. Under the covers, okay? I’d like that.”

Sherry nodded. “All right.” She kissed Katt’s hands and Katt broke away. Sherry’s disappointment, small as it was, edged her kindness. But Katt felt that sex was still far off, that cuddling was as intimate as she wanted to be tonight. She undressed at her closet, tossing her clothes into the brown laundry basket. Beside Katt’s more prosaic dress suits, Sherry’s silken green robe hung like a daring notion. Katt watched her remove her dress, her bra, the red lace bikini briefs hugging her hips. Sherry smiled, sauntered over in an easy flow, cocked her head in sympathy with the sorrow she rightly read in Katt’s eyes, took her hands, brushed their knuckles against her nipples, then wrapped her arms around Katt as she moved in for a full body embrace. She felt as comforting as a blanket of sun, breasts touching, softening inward as Katt returned her hug.

They lay down then, cool sheets quickly warming about them. It felt as if their bodies had blended to the full, a comfort akin to a mother’s hug. But Sherry somehow came closer, kissed her gently, then more ardently, sliding her left leg up over Katt’s right. Her private hair teased at Katt’s, barely there, brilliant red curls twining into her brown ones. “I love you,” she whispered at Katt’s ear and it made her weep. “It’s all right,” she said, kissing her earlobe, the soft skin at the hinge of her jaw.

“You’re so good to me,” Katt protested, feeling as if she deserved condemnation, not love.

“Everything’s all right,” Sherry said. She comforted her, unhurriedly, even as she pressed and rhythmed herself against Katt’s clitoral hood. It felt good and Katt could feel the heat rising and sense the dampness and the breath changing in her bed-mate-so that when Sherry seized up and came, it was no surprise at all, but a giving and a taking all in one. What surprised her was the sudden love-clutch below, the orgasm that crept up inside her when she hadn’t been paying heed. It flared at her clitoris, fiery, quick as a flicked match head, then spread deep and down and out through her entire body, shaking her, shaking tears out of her, her cheeks damp, kissing Sherry, making herface damp too. Her lover, all turned on, was gasping endearments in her ear. But she couldn’t process them, couldn’t focus to hear them, and that was all right. It was only the soothe that mattered, the clear loving intent, the rhythms of her words, the low ragged harshness of her voice.

Katt wiped her tears on the pillowcase, then laughed, hugging Sherry anew. She touched her toasty thigh, softer than babyskin. Sherry lay back, easing open. Katt’s hand moved in to touch the moistness, to further moisten it-an index finger, then the next finger, together a penile heft sliding deep, probing, caressing. She remembered what she had found, what her jealousy had tempted her to set loose. Incredibly, that temptation still existed-but attenuated, deflated, a faint echo of what it had been.

She uncurved her hand between Sherry’s thighs so that her fingers sank in another inch, touched the os, entrance to the cervix. Her lover mmm’ed in pleasure, squirming on the bed. Katt placed her left palm on Sherry’s tummy, her fingertips easing into the thick soft forest of pubic hair and deepening downward, the flesh-bottle of the uterus now clarifying in her mind’s eye. She gave it light, she gave it love. Static interfered. Thoughts of her husband came between her will and the cure, his penis once tracking the same lovepath she now fingered. Jealousy, territoriality, a remaining twinge of revenge-these welled up to blur her focus.

Katt closed her eyes, raising her level of intent and trying for a bead on the tiny growth she’d found. But her Marcus-thoughts amplified, her guilt over Conner coming in to join them. She’d hurt her son. No measure of kindness toward him in the years ahead, no amount of motherly love, would ever counterbalance the enormity of what she’d done. Fine, fine, she told herself. Get past it, go through it, it’s a tired drone. Conner vanished and there popped into her head again good old Marcus. She sent out love through her fingertips, moving the right ones through Sherry’s wet warmth, palpating with the left. Marcus stood impassively beside the bed in a room that was and was not this room, a recrimination that this time failed. It was right to have sent him over. That stunned her. Now before her, despite her current bout of suffering, lay an opening out to fresh air and sunlight; with Marcus there had been only a sealed coffin, lightless, airless, confining, eternal.

Did he deserve to die? No. But she deserved to live, and if that was selfish, then so be it. As parallel as one contrived to align one’s life with a spouse, that illusion merely covered the essential fact of aloneness. Our birth brought separation-and in that separation, ever after, we lived and we died. How convenient, she thought. How nice a justification. She gave it credence and she didn’t. He was dead-and that was right and it was wrong, right wrong right wrong, like a punchdrunk fighter being drubbed in an unending loop of pain and punishment.

Outside her window, the geese fluttered up and honked by. Sherry’s moans grew more intense as her fumbling hand found Katt’s left breast, thumbing the nipple hard, making more difficult the concentration Katt needed. Too dark in here… She ought to have lit a candle. Babble babble, her mind, her body. She loved her lover’s cervix, but it fell short of being sufficient, the healing somehow elusive.

Another time she’d be stronger, she’d get the growth and rein in its stampede, tame the renegade cells or sheer them away. How she might do that occurred to her later at the lip of sleep, not to return to remembrance until fresh coffee steamed Sherry’s love-aroma from her upper lip into her nostrils the next afternoon. For n, she gave up the attempt and merged into complete sensuality, slick fingers finding and come-hithering Sherry’s G-spot, her other hand snaking down through the thick red thatch, furrowing labia apart, rhythming the moist nub she found there, bending at last to taste its elemental goodness. Love was good. She hadn’t known such love in a long time: healing, delivered from the heart, its ebb and flow moon-whole. The sadness, though it hung about, softened in the blessing of Sherry’s unconditional acceptance of Katt, just as she was, even if Katt’s just-as-she-was remained in essence unknown. Guilt eased back into her when she wasn’t looking, taking up its steady vigil over her; but it remained in abeyance, a deep yet mild ache that granted her some respite from its goad.

Katt fingered and kissed scar tissue, tracing letters across her lover’s back.

Mine, she thought. All mine.

9

BLEEDING UNDER MOONLIGHT

Tuesday, August thirty-first. A full moon tonight at Lyra’s cabin. Katt caught Sherry at her office, two rings and she answered, her voice softening as soon as Katt said hello. “I’m taking you somewhere special tonight.”

“Where?” asked Sherry.

“You’ll find out.”

“Oh, c’mon, c’mon, I want to know.”

“Nope,” Katt said. “My lips are sealed.”

And they went on in that vein like schoolgirls for an amused few minutes. Katt told Sherry to meet her for soup and salad at Alfalfa’s, six o’clock sharp, and hung up. A call to Healing Pathways (Lyra overjoyed to hear happiness in Katt’s voice) had confirmed that the cabin was free and that they would not be disturbed. Although Katt was still bothered by the secrets she held inside, the communion she and her lover had shared all night-sleeping, waking, half awake and then nicely roused into a new tussle-had turned a corner on sorrow, had left guilt foundering in the dust. Five took forever to arrive. But when it did, Katt logged out of her workstation, gathered her papers, and bounded down the stairs to the parking lot.

She had no idea how such an unlikely phenomenon as an energy vortex could grant her such powers-could, with the help of the full moon’s rays, redouble them. Thank God no faith, naive or otherwise, had been required. It had gone on its subtle way inside her in the face of manifest doubt and skepticism. And soon, with her new love naked beneath the skylight, a fire raging in the fireplace, she would be able at last to confront the cancerous threat, reverse it, undo it, restore the body’s true harmony-giving Sherry no clue as to what she was about, but couching it in intimacy and eventually turning it into that. Indeed, it was that. Her power as she delivered it was-had always been-a gift of love; reversing it had run counter to love.

***

By five twenty she was home. Conner had made himself a bowl of popcorn, looking a little guilty at being caught snacking so near dinnertime. “Hi,” Katt said, leaning to kiss her son’s cheek. “How’s every little thing?”

Conner’s eyes widened. His munching slowed. “Fine,” he said, putting a spin on it that asked, And what sort of yuckiness is this bizarre behavior the prelude to?

“Sherry and I are going out for dinner and then up to Lyra’s cabin for a few hours. I’ll fix you a Le Menu, the chopped sirloin, mushroom, and green bean kind.”

He cocked his head in a Marcus gesture, and Katt felt' a surge of anxiety which she managed to hide.

“No problem,” Conner said. “I’ll do it.”

Katt haggled, but she was pleased to see him take the initiative, and she quickly gave in. The house felt large again and brighter, as she showered and dried and dressed, a simple jeans and blouse combo. Tennis shoes over socks. Three small beaded necklaces, colorful, casual, that broke at the third button completed the picture. They’d look so nice and sexy, they’d feel that way, when she wore nothing else and bent to massage her friend, beaded stones lightly clicking at her breasts.

Downstairs she grabbed her son from behind, snatching him out of his hypnotic reverie. “Mo-om!” he protested, a hand tugging at her arm.

“Have a good ’un,” she said, releasing him. Although she feigned closeness, there was distance, a barrier. She wondered if it might always exist between them. She hoped with all her heart it would eventually disappear.

“When’ll you be back?” he asked.

“Late’s my guess. Elevenish. Don’t wait up.”

“Will Sherry be staying over?”

“Dunno,” said Katt. “My guess is she’ll sleep at her own place tonight.” God knew they could use the rest.

“ ’Kay. Have fun.” The tube claimed his eyes, sucked up the whole of his attendon.

***

Six on the dot, Katt arrived at Alfalfa’s, a down-to-earth health-food supermarket located just off College on Horsetooth. Wasn’t as large as the one in Boulder-which, along with Pearl Street Mall, she’d made a point of visiting soon after her arrival in Colorado-but the people who worked there were wonderful and it invariably buoyed her spirits to stop in, even if a browse was all she had in mind.

She scoped the aisles, the tables in front, the juice bar. Took all of two minutes. No Sherry.

Somebody came up to her, her mouth wide around Katt’s name in a small screech of recognition. Skeleton eyes big in a radiant face. Judy Gerrard, her first massage client in Fort Collins, though she’d discontinued after the third session. A young man over by the chips, handsome, vaguely familiar, looked up at Judy’s exclamation. Katt nodded at Judy’s words, exchanged pleasantries. Then she could feel the woman drawing away from the babble she’d created. She promised to call, set up another massage session. One day next week. They both knew she was lying. Judy clamped an affectionate squeeze on Katt’s arm, then held her hand and moved past her with a wave and a blessed-be.

The aisle was empty.

More scoping. A cluster of people had carts and kids over by the dried fruits and grain bins, bagging what they found, marking weight and price per pound on white tags.

Still no Sherry.

Katt checked her watch. Five minutes past. What the heck. Let Sherry find her. She snaked over to the island of salad bar items, snagged a wide black bowl, started her scavenge of the exotica-a spoonful of spud salad, seaweed something, trail mix, sunflower seeds, a perfect eggplant-tomato-squash casserole.

“Starting without me, I see.” Sherry, wearing a low-cut blouse with eyeholes and laced leather thongs at the U of her bodice, smiled broadly.

“That’s right,” Katt replied. “You’re gonna stand me up, you’re on your own.”

“So what looks good?”

“Everything.”

“And where are we headed?”

Katt looked at her. Deadpanned: “I thought we’d sit at the tables in front.”

“Tease.”

Katt was pleased with herself. She asked if Sherry’d go for a salad too.

“I think I’ll have them make a smoked turkey on whole wheat. Grab us a table. I’ll join you in a sec.” Funny how good hearing Sherry’s voice, seeing the control in her lovely face as her lips moved, made Katt feel. Here was a woman who’d gone through her personal hell and come out on the other side- whole, content, complete.

“Okay,” Katt said, heading for the front of the store and catching a glimpse of the handsome guy studying canned soup near the salad bar. His hands were empty and no cart stood beside him.

She drew a cappuccino, paid for it and her salad, sat at a table near the dusky window. The small din-ing area’s dozen or more tables were sparsely occupied, a few student types reading textbooks, friends and couples in quiet talk over tea. Maneuvering among the closely packed tables was hard but not impossible.

When Sherry arrived, hips swaying to avoid bumping an empty chair, she commented, “Crowded tonight.”

“It’s just a small space is all,” said Katt.

The trio behind Sherry rose from their table, cleared it, and left. Sherry settled in, her eyes boring into her friend’s, coming at her again with the question. Refusing to let her gaze be caught that way, Katt equivocated, fork at her salad, teasing, eyes roaming the room. The guy was skirting tables over yonder, coffee cup in hand. He fixed on the next table over and slid in behind Sherry, the back of his chair nearly touching hers.

Maddening, being unable to place him.

Sherry snapped her fingers face-high. “Hey Galloway, I’m talking to you.”

“And I’m listening. Barely.” A sly smile.

“I’m gonna ask one more time. Then if I don’t get an answer, I just may withhold my affections.” Sherry teased like a pro. “Where-other than to bed of course-were you planning to take me?” She bit on her pickle spear, daring Katt with a glare to put her off one more time.

“Hey, not so loud,” Katt said. “This isn’t Boulder.”

“ You’re the one with the loud voice,” Sherry said, “a voice that so far hasn’t said a whole heck of a lot.”

Katt smiled, finding a forkful of trail mix. “Lyra’s cabin.” Looking superior, she closed her mouth around the tines. Behind Sherry, the guy had unfolded paper from his shirt pocket, uncapped a pen, hunched to sip coffee.

“Crazy Lyra’s place?”

“Be nice.”

“She having a party?”

“Nope. Just the two of us.”

Sherry smirked. “How cozy.” Then she softened, took Katt’s hand momentarily. “Really, that sounds wonderful.”

“There’s a skylight,” Katt said. “Full moon. Raging fire in the fireplace. Turns toasty warm real quick.”

“So I get to sample the amazing energy vortex?”

“Oh ye of little faith.” Katt laughed. “I haven’t a clue, really. But it’s there. Or something’s there. You tell me-when we get there and settle in-whether you feel anything or not.”

Sherry looked at Katt. “I’m feeling something pretty intense right now, to tell the truth.”

“Time enough for truth later.”

“And I intend to give you plenty of it.”

“Likewise,” Katt said. “Hours on end.”

Over by the silverware, a young family rose and left, a slumbering moist-haired infant Snuggli’d on its father’s chest. The salad was good, every bite, and that much more delicious for Sherry’s company.

“So how,” her friend asked, “do I find this place?”

“Just follow my car.”

“I can handle that. But what if we’re separated?”

“It’s easy to find,” Katt said. “You have a piece of paper? I’ll draw you a map.”

Sherry rummaged in her purse, found a wrinkled scrap, a Razor Point pen. “This do?”

“Yep. We’re gonna continue west on Horsetooth toward the reservoir.” She talked it out as she drew, left here, right here, so many traffic lights. Wasn’t very involved. For the remoteness of Lyra’s cabin, getting there was easy and the route pretty straightforward. As she drew the box that represented the cabin, she imagined being able to see down into it, to see herself and Sherry caught in coziness and love, there on the sheepskin rug by the fire. She put a finger on it, brushed it lighdy, so lighdy that no one but herself noticed.

***

Thank God for glass. He’d had a clear smoky shot at both of them, a slight twist of the head, made it seem as if he were gazing out into the dimly lit parking lot, but there they were, etched in onyx, all the details dark and shiny, their movements maddeningly suggestive. The glass also slighdy amplified their voices, especially the less appealing one-not that he needed the boost, she spoke so clearly. Gave superb direcuons too.

He’d had his eye on the flower girl, past the recipe board by the entrance-cool spiritual type, long yankable brown hair down past the shoulderblades. She’d be savage when aerated. Spiritual meant spirited, a sweadng filly all steamed up, tugging at her reins, trying to rouse him by the natural movements of her flesh. Then the once-sad breeder had come in, looking tighter than he’d remembered her. Prettier, bouncier. He’d idled along, checking her out. When the redhead with the devastating curves joined her, a drillable splash of dream-flesh swooping below her neck, his heart leapt up. Her glance had skewered him in the Student Center, highly observant; here he didn’t want her noticing him. And fortunately, unnatural sex acts on her mind, her eyes and ears were fixed on her short-haired friend. A cabin, up yonder in the foothills. Isolation. He wouldn’t have to coax anybody. Just surprise the shit out of them, clonk ’em, fasten their fascinating slicked-with-sin bodies to a tree, and wait for them to revive.

He paused. He pondered. This situation could use a little thinking about: These two were lezzies, that much was clear. They weren’t about to drop any babies, and if he killed them, maybe the papers would get it wrong, warp his message maybe. Ah, but it wasn’t the newspapers that mattered; what mattered were the antennas he drilled into the be-hind-handers; what mattered were the backstage ties they had to one another worldwide. And as for being safe if sorry little lezzies, these days even dykes went ahead and puffed up-artificial insemination had done its worst with them or they let some gay buddy poke his seeder into their parts and shoot his shit-laden seed up inside them. Besides, maybe they were bi. That was all the rage these days and they didn’t seem like manhaters. Not these two.

No, they’d be prime victims, of that he was sure.

His coffee grew cold. He pretended to sip it, paper before him, doodling air-spirals along the edges.

In the center, the map was taking form. He’d driven up that way before, knew vaguely the locale, blessed Katt-the sexier one had dropped her name-for being so helpful. At their rising, he turned inward to the window, propping his face on his left palm, concealing it, watching walking shadows, clear the eadng area, then glide past the chocolates and onward through an empty checkout line. He folded the map and jammed it into a jeans pocket, leaving the coffee cup where it was.

***

Sherry’d been expecting something rustic, tiny little back-to-the-earth place, a wood-burning stove, an unevenly carpented oak floor that caught at stool legs. The cabin, brighdy bathed in moonlight, asserted itself smardy when Katt’s assured driving at last brought it into view. None of that rustic crap for me, it proclaimed.

“I like it,” Sherry said into the warmth of the night air, twin pings echoing in her head from their doorslams.

“It’s likable,” Katt joked, key in hand.

The inside was spodess, a clever blend of rich woods in the cabinetry and furniture, with the steel and tile of modern fixtures. A single room, but what a room! It felt spacious yet cozy, uncluttered but with the correct number of chairs and couches casually contrivedly scattered about here and there. Chopped cords of wood were stacked by the fireplace. As Katt tended to them, Sherry walked about in awe of the place, trying to sense the fabled energy vortex but just feeling good about the quiet and the solitude and being here with Katt. The cabin air, starting to glow now with the first feeble flames, was lightly redolent with an ineffable hint of woodbased incense. Katt snapped out the light by the door and Sherry focused for the first time on the skylight, a tepee of moonshine aslant upon the flocked off-white carpet.

“Someone lucked out,” she said.

“Lyra and Joseph are pretty special.”

“Must be. I’m impressed.”

Crackles from the fire and a reaching out of heat and light. Katt approached her, merged with her. Her embrace was so gentle, so firm, so right.

Sherry asked, “So is this place supercharging you?”

“Something is,” Katt joked. Then more seriously: “I think so. But there’s only one way to find out. You need to take off your clothes and lie down over here.”

“So serious,” she said. “And in such a hurry. Like most of the men I’ve met and bedded.”

“No hurry. It’s just that being naked here feels so good, and I think it’ll feel even better tonight.” There was more to it than that, Sherry sensed, but let it go.

“Oh dear,” she said. “There’s one small problem.”

“What problem?” asked Katt.

“I seem to have forgotten how to take my clothes off. I’m afraid you’re going to have to do it for me.”

Katt smiled. “With pleasure,” she said.

***

There’d been no need, really, to keep them in view.

In fact, he’d lost them at once, traffic on Horsetooth being what it was outside of Alfalfa’s. Anxiety tightened his stomach. Absurd. The map lay beside him in the truck, and Katt’s words had burned the route into memory. Female guidance, in a voice he’d later drill up to the top of its scale, coated the night highway. A mommy’s coaxings. The easy byplay of their conversation had been mere prelude to the duet they’d weave under his blandishments, taut, thick with agony, skirling up into the moonlit sky. Surely, the race of tempters would hear the message in their bones and end, as one, the hipsnakings, the coy flashings of exposed flesh, the endless upthrusting and implanting and adorning of eye-achers, all intended to lure out seed and baby-make unendingly. True shame would hold sway at last. Cosmetic lies gone, they’d show their ugliness. Pussycravers would droop their seeders down. No more brats, ever. Clear the pipeline. Watch the last brood of kickers and pourers age and die. Give the planet a big long rest.

Three miles on, with the traffic thinning, he saw two cars he guessed were theirs-like a tailgated slowpoke but without the anxiety and rage he usually felt from watching such a duo form. He held back, pleased to see them follow the directions in his brain. Cars were few enough and the nightroad unlit so that he could track them about the dips and curves by mere residues of backlight. When, up ahead, they turned off onto a dirt road, his anxiety revived. He drove past the dirt road, glimpsing receding pairs of red glowlights dancing on the road’s uneven surface. Then he swung out and U-turned, taking his time. She’d said the cabin was exactly a mile off the highway. He’d need to stop a quarter mile in; kill his engine before they killed theirs, so they wouldn’t hear anything behind them; grab a wrench, the drill, his bag of tricks, and set out on foot.

He eased onto the dirt road, the slow crush of gravel tight and grunting beneath his tire wheels. Switching off his headlights, he trusted the moon to light his way.

***

Katt felt the power as soon as she and Sherry crossed the threshold. The place welled with assurance, rising up through the floorboards. She walked in its embrace, a dim cool calm about her as she built and lit the fire. People would call her crazy-Katt herself would have thought so a few weeks ago-if she spoke of the energies she felt here. Let them. Or rather, let the power’s intensity, at least, be a secret. Even from Sherry.

Anyway, the energy vortex, the influence of the moon, all of it could be seen in two ways: as real, which still struck her as flaky; or as an externalization of the state of her being in this place, her body, her mind, her spirit focused for some reason as sharp and blazing as the flames in the fireplace. She could relate to it as goddess power or whatever and yet think of it as psychological shorthand for her inner truth. No problem, no contradiction, and no craziness, not really; just a wisdom that defied logic.

About the rising blaze, Katt tepee’d thick branches.

Tonight she didn’t need to be under the skylight. It felt right to move the sheepskin rug before the hearth and lead her lover there where the quick heat of the fire made her clothing cling like hot wool. Sherry’s dark tinsel of red hair caught the fire’s antics, her pupils dancing with the flicker and crackle of it. Katt embraced her. In her ear she whispered, “I love you,” and heard its echo return in low tones, Sherry’s soft lips at her lobe. Their hands roved, unbuttoning, sighing down zippers, pausing to thumb up tight nipples under bras and then nipples without bras.

Must keep my mind on the task at hand, she thought, a temptation just to surrender to the pleasure. But Sherry, all unawares, needed healing; and Katt needed to heal her. Although the vortex made no accusation against her-indeed it asserted the rightness of her actions-she felt as if a measure of atonement would be hers if she healed her lover first thing. It would convey closure. A renewed sense of integrity almost. Then, that done, she could revel in her friend’s flesh, as her friend reveled in Katt’s.

Shuddering with delight, she broke from Sherry’s lips and knelt to unbutton and wiggle down and remove her jeans and her lace briefs, burying a kiss into the smooth pillow of pubic hair, sniffing the glistening nub and lips.

“Lie down,” she said, doffing the remainder of her own clothing as Sherry did so-took an instant, tossing backward behind her. Then she knelt to share with her sweet friend a kiss and the heady aroma of her juices. Sherry’s hands rose to caress her. Katt gently removed them. “Lie back for now. Just let me touch you.” And she turned her attention then to Sherry’s mound, her fingers again easing their slow way inside her, deep as they could go, her left hand resdng a moment on her tummy, then moving into her private hair and beginning to scan inward toward the uterus.

Katt’s back, though not uncomfortable, felt less warm than her toasty front. This place spoke of security. The power held her in its warm palm, the rich air buoyant as a soft blanket and replete with what felt, since Lyra’s talk a few weeks before, like the assurance of a goddess. What name had Lyra used? Artemis. Felt right. Felt like just thinking that name summoned out of the firelapped darkness an approval lying almost within hearing. And mingled with that approval was a stern, if muted, reproach about Conner and what she’d nearly done to him; her attack upon her son had been a wrongful act, prompted by the needs of ego, not by spiritual necessity. But in that upbraiding, there lay a sooth of forgiveness.

Sherry moaned, a pattern of brief delighted surprise. It was her learned way to signal approaching orgasm, mouth teased open, eyes closed, back arched, breasts thrust like mounded heaven wantonly upward. The saddle of Katt’s palm rhythmed against her lover’s moist nub. She slowed it, an effort to focus away from sex and toward the troubled area within. She closed her own eyes. She found it, a wayward expansion of cells, and bathed it in twin flows of energy, one from the hand that lay above, one from the tips of her inthrust fingers that nearly touched the place. Her lover squirmed beneath her attentions, and Katt rode the motions like flotsam over rolling ocean. Awareness and trust were all she needed. Her hands held assurance, became conduits for the chthonic power that taught her body as it streamed through to its cure. Love. This, too, the healing she put forth, was love. It and the silent rhythm of palm against moistened pearl were but two facets of the same generosity of spirit.

The badness dwindled, increasingly banished as Sherry gave in to her rising abandon. Katt midwifed the birth of inner harmony, the coming into correct focus of previously troubled flesh and the unstoppable release of deep orgasm. They melded, the two healings. And they held there, clung tight together, the air filled with joy and the sweet high terror of Sherry’s voice pushing beyond the power of lungs to express. Katt wept with happiness. For one insane and certain moment, she knew she would tell her. Here in this cabin, here where the goddess enfolded them, what Katt had done to Marcus-even what she’d nearly done to their son-would make perfect sense. Sherry would understand. She’d commiserate and forgive. They would share the pain, share the grief, their common womanhood speaking below the level of everyday law and logic, conspiring over deeper truths.

Katt withdrew her fingers and Sherry fumbling brought them to her lips, kissing the moistness. Then, still weak from lost breath, she gasped, “Come here,” drawing Katt to her, downward, torso to torso, the hot sweat, the touch of mouth to mouth, Katt’s arms resting upon fleece (hot here, cool there), the grapple at comfort, animation below where skin glowed, new arousal eager for its twin.

Gunshot! She let out an unformed sound. Scatters of impression. The thoughts wouldn’t cohere, not fast enough for her fear. Not a gunshot. Even as she turned her head and saw the door jittering from the crash, the shape moved like a wraith through the room, the night coolness touched her calves, upraised arm on the thing hurtling toward her, silver gleam, a held silver bone that arced down like dull pewter sweeping through burnished air.

Sherry deafened her right ear with a scream.

A No! almost made it to Katt’s lips.

Then the world thundered out.

***

Well-behaved earth. No twigs snapped underfoot, moon giving sufficient outline to things, the three steps up to the door by the canted flagpole nice and firm, no telltale creak to betray his coming. So when he took a deep breath and burst in, charging at the flames and trusting that his victims would be there, surprise was on his side. Seconds of surprise would be crucial. Two combatants were one too many. He had a clear shot across the carpet, lumpy shapes he processed as clothing only later, chairs and couches at the periphery-and, good fortune, resolving like photos in a tray, their clasped unclothed bodies, helpless, stunned, ready for capture.

His rush was seamless. Get one! was his only thought and all else was action. He clonked the top one, a brutal stroke to the skull. She went out, falling on the redhead where notions of rising had been falling so heavily that he heard a quiver in the redhead’s scream. She flailed at the body above her, trying to escape. Inert buttocky mass blocked his way, too. He shoved at it with his wrench hand and grabbed a fist of red hair, wanting too many things at once, opening himself up. In the next instant, as the old one rolled off, he was tensed to yank the other’s skull to the floor, hard and fast enough to stun her at least, then follow through with the wrench. But her knee she abruptly wedged in his belly, air gone. She was water. He toppled beside the liquid squirm that was the redhead getting away and grabbed her ankle, his remaining strength concentrated in his grab, so that she fell forward. Breath returned in sufficient quantity to leap at her, cover her kicking legs with his body, his wrench hand at her right thigh as if to measure a new silver thighbone. Cold metal on flesh. She struggled to rise, her bare back a curved porcelain ripple below a fury of red hair.

Absurd word above, like odd tan lines: MINE.

He grabbed upward at her left shoulder, felt tension, felt her try to shake him off. But he had her pinned, and he was stronger, and his breath was back in full. Sped-up turde-tug forward. He’d gained a foot upward, leg flails now from chest to thigh. The first blow of his wrench had little power. The second one fell solid and her struggles abruptly ceased.

Out.

His face was burning up. Chest heaving at the exertion but soon okay. He had the urge to pulp her head with blow after blow, silken red hair flying up amid the bloodspray, matted then in stickiness. But there were drillings to be attended to, a pump-priming on the body of this temptress, followed by a weave of screams that would get through loud and clear to their accursed sex across the globe.

He whipped two lengths of rope from his jeans pocket, binding the plain one’s hands behind her with one of them. Enough. Weren’t going anywhere, that one. She’d probably be lying here on the rug, still out, when he came back.

The other rope he used on the sexy one, flopped hands at the small of her back above her sleek butt, that absurd word MINE moving her shoulderblades. He hefted her hot bag of bones and sand, a fireman’s carry, neck canted left to make room for her warm curve of thigh. Behind him, the fire crackled, and the room he passed through reminded him of his den growing up. But he was already thinking of the huge oak where he’d left his things, beside a recently dug and filled-in hole, spade handle poking up from the earth. He hoped the found hole was deep enough to bury them both. If not, he’d have time-their hoarse torment still ringing in his ears-to dig deeper.

He unlatched the door and slipped out, careful not to bump Miss Pretty’s head on the jamb.

***

Skull shiv. Coarse twists of hair tickling her lips. Sheepskin. Wisped fleece. Then it rushed to her knowing. Katt forced her eyes open, expecting them to be there, the man from Alfalfa’s, Sherry bound and gagged.

No one.

The fire crackled behind her. When she tried to push up, she discovered the numb tingle of restraint, wrists in proximity, maybe an inch of give between them. Face down. She brought a knee up, shifted, winced at the agony in her head. Continued. Got her knees under her and aching rose to them, scrape of one elbow against the cold stone of the hearth. She yanked at the rope, arms still feeble and not much strength there. Except for one dangled end, bristles like unshaved stubble, it eluded her grasp. Yanked again. Again. The cabin was oddly calm. She felt like she ought to feel panic, urgency, but she didn’t. Anything might’ve happened to Sherry. They’d been attacked. Now her friend was gone, surely overcome by the maniac who had rushed in. He could be raping her, killing her, far off in the woods. But the stillness of the cabin spoke otherwise. Lethargy, inevitability, kept her quiescent. She felt like a docile farm animal, roped, drugged, stunned. The snap of burning logs throbbed inside her skull where he’d hit her.

Then a muffled scream shattered the stillness.

It knifed into her. In an instant, lethargy was gone and her attendon was riveted on the door. Katt yanked at the rope, over and over. More power behind her movements. Nothing gained. The bastard was hurting Sherry. Hurting her deeply. Katt’s skin felt like it would burst outward, so great was her need to break free and stop him.

She struggled to her feet. Sea of fleece below. She was naked, her hands useless. The thing was absurd. Even if she succeeded in opening the door, there was nothing to be done. Had to get this rope off. Sherry’s scream died. Then a whimper rose into hearing and ratcheted sharply up, a new unbearable scream that topped the first and rode its spiral of agony to new heights.

Katt looked around wildly for something sharp. Thigh backs burned with the nearness of the fire. She could see nothing that wouldn’t take an eternity to do the job-move into position, secure the jag somehow, then rub against it as Sherry endured unspeakable torment outside.

Knives! Katt glanced over at the kitchen and saw the knife handles angling up from a block of cedar shoved back on the counter. Her heart sank. With her hands tied, she had no chance of reaching them, and time was running out.

Then it came to her.

Burn the sucker off. The rope was thin. Felt old as well, from the dangle hanging down. Get it going and snap it free. She’d burn herself too, but that was curable and fast. So swift was the thought, so certain the plan, that Katt fancied the goddess herself was speaking it. She sat on the hearth, sauna stone, and clasped her hands together behind her, willing a protective envelope of healing there as she thrust them backward into the fire.

Curved roar of heat. Image of her hands as torch, an orange wrap of flame about them. She yanked them out, not half a second in there. It was okay, she assured herself. Okay. No pain, no singe, her mind sustaining a protecdve field around them, the twin clasp of hand to wrist drawing healing power from inside and seemingly from the air about her. Trust in it. Sherry’s voice skirled in torment. An instant later, no thought of hesitation, she again plunged her hands deep into the flame. Wrist hair crisped like an army of ants moving with steady purpose, but her skin bore up as though it were covered in water. She felt as if she wore oven mitts, smoldering, browning, threatening to give in to the tremendous heat surrounding them.

Felt right. She drew them out, unclasped, kept alive the protecdon as she yanked. The rope was burning, licks of flame at her wrists. Yanked again. The sucker snapped and her hands' swung around wildly forward, almost throwing her off balance. Arcs of fire. Had to douse them. Hands out before her, still resisung burns, she ran to the sink and twisted a faucet and soaked the frayed ends. And then she let lapse the envelope of protection, her skin glowing hot as if she’d just evaded a burn and it hadn’t yet quite decided to blister.

Katt considered the knives. Took one. But knife use called for close-in work. She wouldn’t get near enough to be effective and she was a terrible throw. No, she needed something larger, more like a bludgeon.

She scanned the cabin for a weapon. Bastard had used a wrench on them, nowhere to be seen. Cords of wood, thin branches and thick, were stacked near the hearth. One had her focus at once, more than an inch thick, just under two feet long, black bark with a good solid heft to it. Swift as their attacker had been, she went as swiftly toward the door, pulled it soundlessly open, ventured out into a full moon’s light.

***

Sherry was on a 747, aisle seat, dozing off, her head caught in that half-sleep, creeping forward, brought back, the steady hum of… but there was no engine hum. Just the sound of an exhausted train doing a slow chuff, pause, chuff again, a monumental hill besting it. And she wasn’t sitting at all but somehow on her feet, the seatback rough and gnarled at her spine. She would ask the steward for a pillow, and why the engines were silent. Were they out of fuel? Saving it? The locomotive gave up. Rustle of leaf cover in the carpeted aisle, the steward coming closer, as her eyelids slitted open.

Moonlit building a hundred yards off. A clearing, no plane at all. Her focus was fuzzy, her mind slow to grasp what lay before it. The steward moved into view, knelt at her feet to retrieve something, then he rose. His fingers touched her naked thigh, grubby, earthen. That touch woke her completely, her struggle in the cabin coming back, the rush of die intruder, cold metal against her thigh, a thud of oblivion at her skull. “She returns to the land of the living,” he said. The guy from the Student Center a while back-a soft green Lands’ End shirt, textbook stuffed with papers then-stood before her.

What, she tried to say-but only an mmph emerged. No clothing, warm darkness, her feet planted apart in a Peter Pan stance. She made to move, was surprised at restraint, only a little give below, her arms fixed to a tree lofting high above, her breasts thrust boldly outward.

“I’m getting good at this,” he said. “Wouldn’t do lo have the canvas move under the brush.”

Then she saw the hole, a spade lying to one side, one of the Lyra-holes Katt had mentioned, but dug out again and with the dirt mounded beside it.

“Where’s Katt?” Absurd, her fear that Katt had been buried. The guy wouldn’t know who she was talking about, who she meant by Katt.

“Inside. Trussed up. We’ll get you going, prime the pump, then bring your friend out.”

She could smell damp earth. It amazed her how matter of fact the fucker was, like he owned her, like it was his right to intrude on her life. Derek all over again. That same belligerence, the swagger, the ownership in his eyes. Anger simmered deep down. She’d take none of it, no more, not even naked and open to this bastard’s worst. He would rape them and she very much feared he would kill them, but she would never give up in spirit and she vowed right here and now to maim her captor the first chance she got.

Then the moonlight hit his hand, the one he raised.

Hackles. She said, “Hey now what-”

He whirred it. It fell silent. “You understand,” he said. “Don’t pretend you don’t.”

Oh shit. The stories in the Coloradoan-details left vague to spare the reader-came back to her. Coed Killer. Her voice shook through the scheming that instantly welled up and out: “Hey listen, I’ve read about you-”

He rolled over her, not heeding her words, continuing his train of thought. “The twisted metal leaves a residue inside, a tiny antenna. Bloodspill links all you breeders together, community of be-hind-handers.” He pawed the skin of Sherry’s cheek, pinched it like a Sharpei owner yanking at loose rolls of dogflesh.

“Keep your hands off me!” The anger ran deep. She’d be damned if she’d make it easy on him. She shook but not from fear. Through the rage, returning to her scheme, she struggled to sound reasonable. “No, now listen, you and I can talk this out, I can help you reach your goal.”

At her anger he’d yanked his hand away. Now his eyes fell and he touched her right breast, not a man perversely fondling a woman but a carpenter caressing unspoiled wood. “Two of you under the drill will do the trick-”

“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, it isn’t-”

“-double the antennas, twin screams, two blood-spills for every one before, mirror images if I can manage it-”

The unspeakable thing was whirring again, a sound she had once regarded as innocuous but which now contained all the madness humankind was capable of. The curved L of his thumb and index finger taunted her breastflesh just above the right nipple. He raised the drill, angled it.

“-the physics isn’t right, there are better ways and I can help you find them if you’ll just-” Whenever anyone brought a needle close to give her an injecdon, Sherry looked away. But she couldn’t look away for this. Surely he wouldn’t do it. He looked so normal, even now, ignoring her words. He’d stop short, there’d be no violation of her body, she’d get through to him. Drill whinings, smooth silver blur coming on.

“-if you’ll just shut that off, we do have a network and I can tell you the real way to tap into it, I'll help, we’ll get your message across-”

The tip raised a hint of whirlwind where it closed on her skin. She stood paralyzed, in disbelief and rage, all her wiles spilling from her mouth as she watched.

“-but you’ve got to, I can’t if you, shut it off now it has to stop now, no don’t, you can’t, it has to-”

The thing stung. It bit. A wasp sting that sank and sank, getting worse as it went. Dark fluid whipped out to blacken his hand, to spatter her breast in outflingings of blood. It was her. It wasn’t her. The pain kicked over, the unbearable height still unbearable but topped and then topped again. The silver blur grew shorter. Kept coming, kept sinking in, worse than any shot, tearing at her, deaf as machinery to all protest.

Her words crumbled.

But in their place, the sounds that filled her mouth, that howled past her tormentor, were the same sounds Derek had seered out of her so many years ago. Crazy fucker was him all over again, different face, same brutal bastard on a rampage.

And the pain reared up and tore at her, savaging her, attacking her oneness. Helpless again in the face of that outrage, with all the trapped frustration of her will, she screamed to deny it, to shut it out, to reverse the damage he did, the damage Derek did, the damage they all managed, sooner or later, to visit upon her.

The drill bit grew shorter and shorter.

***

Katt steeled herself. Sherry’s screams, purer now in the unmuffled air, increased Katt’s sense of urgency. But she couldn’t afford shock or paralysis, whatever the night was about to reveal. She skirted the cabin facade, mosses soft and cool under her feet. Drainspout at the corner, a moon-angle on the ground. Then she turned it, saw the two of them against the tree, near where Lyra had dug last, an urge to stop and take it in, interpret it, but Katt rushed on, clothed man bent so intently, Sherry spreadeagled upon the tree before him, was he raping her, no, his right hand was swollen, elongated, pressing at her breast, a sculptor in flesh, maniac, they loomed larger, rocky ground hard at the soles of her feet but it didn’t matter, zigs of blood, Sherry’s screams covering Katt’s approach, her eyes locked so intently on the mayhem that she, too, saw nothing of Katt racing toward them.

Bastard looked up, sensed something. Pulled a bloody plug out of Sherry’s breast as if he were a tree-corer and Sherry a tree nymph who’d got in the way. Her eyes caught at Katt, large, terror-stricken. Katt concentrated on the turning man, not near enough to best him through surprise. His instincts were sharp. He rallied, took her in, raised the drill before him, surged to meet her.

But for all his seeming advantage, muscular, clothed, weapon more daundng than Katt’s, this was her ground, the place where she drew herself together in strength and will and the power of wholeness. She swung low, her eye on the bulky green drill, broke the fucker’s hand and watched his drill fly up, whirr abrupdy dead like a smacked mosquito, thudding as it fell to earth. He let the pain falter him. That gave her enough time, his attention diverted, to lift the branch and bring it down full force upon his head.

He fell, moaning, eyes agog. Katt smacked him again, so hard the branch broke with a snap and a backspring, and Sherry’s attacker collapsed ungraciously to the ground.

“Kill him,” Sherry urged. “Kill him.”

“Nope,” she said, spying spills of rope out of a bag, taking up one of them, the same sort she’d burned through, “but I’ll truss the fucker up.” She did so, wrenching his hands behind his back so hard his face slammed against the ground. A keychain jangled out of one pocket, fell to the earth. Katt tied his wrists as tight as she could, hoping to cut off his circulation. She left him damaged and out, and went to Sherry.

“Kill him,” Sherry repeated, her eyes burning on the inert sprawl before her. “Kill the bastard.” Twin rivulets of blood coursed down her breasts, eyes weeping red past the nipples. Katt cupped the wounds with her palms, focused in, shut out all else-the damaged milk glands, the lung tissue he’d bit into. Willing it healed, she felt the energy course through her arms, her hands, in its surround of traumatized flesh, fighting off infection, doing in seconds what would have taken weeks.

“Kill him,” she heard, Sherry’s voice transfigured. When she was done and all inside was whole, her palms peeled from the sticky breasts like a wet swimsuit from skin. Sherry’s eyes were still fixed on the Coed Killer, but the pain of her ordeal was gone at least from her face. Still she was too crazed even to acknowledge it-and who could blame her?

Katt worked to unbind her, snipping through the ropes at her ankles (poor abraded skin would need some attention later this evening) and at her wrists. Sherry limped from the trussing, but she grabbed up half of Katt’s branch and knelt to whack the unconscious man up and down his body so hard that it shuddered with each blow. Katt imagined ribs cracking. Probably so. But they’d be heroes and a little self-defense would be excused, even delighted in, by those who learned of it.

Sherry seemed possessed. A string of expletives flew from her lips as she hurt her attacker. She turned him on his back and yanked his legs apart. Then the branch arced down vicious upon his crotch. That woke him up, and blows two and three confirmed the agony of his reawakening.

Katt weltered in feelings. She shared Sherry’s wrath and outrage. And yet their attacker was nothing more than a sick man, now subdued and becoming surely more repentant with every blow of the branch. Her friend was maiming the monster, perhaps permanently.

Then Katt realized that she truly meant to kill him.

And that gave her pause.

“That’s probably enough,” Katt said. But Sherry just looked about wildly. She saw the drill. Katt reached it, grabbed it, flung it off into the woods, bush rusde and a skip of thuds as it fell. Sherry stopped before her, eyes wide, grimaced, and slapped her hard. A moment later, she had bolted for the cabin, her mind on something useful she could grab there. Katt choked up, not at Sherry’s frenzy, but at having tried to rein it in. Sherry needed this and the law be damned, she thought. She herself felt excited, elated, at having triumphed over their attacker; but then, and this she had to remind herself of, she hadn’t suffered the violation of his drill, nor had she ever been with any man who’d scarred her, as Sherry’s husband had.

Still, this was murder they were about. Under a full moon, she laughed bitterly. Who was she to talk? Life in all its richness was one complex phenomenon, never wanting to hold still and neatly resolve itself as it did in films and books. At her feet, the wretched Coed Killer groaned, rocked, incapable of much movement after his drubbing.

Sherry returned, her blood-draped body mottled in the moonlight, Lyra’s flag flapping at the end of its aluminum flagpole. Looked like a crazed pole-vaulter, some demented Olympian practicing naked under the moon. Should she stop her? Not on your life. She glanced about as Sherry raced on. The Lyra-hole he’d apparently dug up, meant for their corpses no doubt, would do quite nicely for his.

Jesus, what was she thinking? He was an excrescence, an earthly abomination; he deserved to die. It would be a matter of justice, as right as could be. And yet it would be wrong. Staring down at the grave, Katt’s mind teetered in uncertainty, her friend’s needs battling her weak sense of what the moment required.

She could hear the balls of Sherry’s feet hitting the earth. When she turned back, it was in time to see silver metal angling down, puncturing denim with a pincushion nit sound, then slamming home, on target. Sherry’s hair flung forward like an Apache warrior’s. “Take that, you fucker! Send it to your race!” Bearing down, she twisted it about as the maimed psycho howled helpless before her. An earth image, a marble in darkness, fluttered on the flag.

She yanked it out at last and flung it aside, sobbing suddenly into her hands. She looked like a soiled urchin.

Katt went to her, held her. It was startling that so violent an act could seem so right. Love demanded that it be honored and seen through to the end. “It’s okay,” Katt assured her. “We’ll bury him. No one will ever know.”

Through his pain, he heard that and started howling a series of No’s. But they each grabbed a shoulder, hands in dght armpits, and dragged him across the ground. For all his muscles, he was a rag doll. His butt skidded across a patch of moss, his legs as lifeless as any paralytic’s; in his face-now gone completely rubbery from the steel sheen of his moments of triumph-shone loss and confusion and an anger enervated by defeat.

His body hit the bottom of the grave like a hard swat to the back that stole his breath away.

Soil flurried down upon him, spaded in by Katt, flung in fistfuls by Sherry. His head remained barely above the surface, spewing out mouthfuls of dirt as they covered him, protesting all the way in his incoherent rage.

Spade upon spade of dirt, Katt penned him in. Aromas of loam and rich dark groundcover rose from their efforts. He was trapped, confined, his maimed bloody limbs embraced by the weight and cover of earth. He seemed, in his face, at once vividly there and receding rapidly, his eyes fixed on her, then on Sherry, disbelief mingled with an impotent fury that distorted his features.

“Just a minute,” Katt said.

Sherry stopped, sensing something in Katt’s voice. A coating of soil, like dark batter, climbed her arms.

“Oh god,” their buried nemesis moaned, “oh god oh god oh god.” Beneath his chin, the fresh-tossed earth grained out in lightly packed clumps. Later, they’d tamp it down, make it look as it had before.

Katt set the spade on the ground.

Above his head, she knelt.

She placed her hands on his forehead, where soil held him in curled embrace above the hairline.

***

He awakened to groin-pain, head hurting, bruises when he breathed. On the ground. As he’d been back then, back when his slab of a mother had insisted he go to school and Jenkin, Bart, and Sarno had led day after day of noontime torment, kicking and pouring while the behind-handers made palm cups in front of their mouths and did nothing to stop them. But no kickers and pourers tormented him now. Just the naked duo he’d clonked in the cabin, busty girl-fucks, no longer behind-hand, no longer giggling and watching and doing nothing, but now doing everything. The sexy one was pummeling him below, doing mayhem to his seeder and to the balls that fed it. Her fury, so great he could feel their whole race behind it, brought home the agony he had always known lay at the heart of the universe. Before this, that agony had trickled out, an idle drib and drab around the illusion of content; now, it no longer hid, but blasted full and punishing as unleashed firehose water, breathing nearly impossible in the face of its rage. His crotch screamed in a scandal of ravage, far beyond recoverable pain.

Then she left off.

She was gone but not done, leaving him writhing in an agony of moans. The moon-man, up above through his tears, had his O mouth open in commiserative woes. He lit up the black sky, still black, and the tall tops of trees, sweeps of rusde way high up. Foreboding. The fat one impassive stood near. She’d smashed his hand, then brought night in to claim him. Sly bitch under her mommy facade. She made no move, but awaited the return of the other. Then he saw her eyes perk up, felt the earth pound with running, and-punch and puncture below, oh god the impaling, some lethal something thrust through his seeder and beyond, in where a coil of shit lay like a thick dark snake, viscera torn and befouled. He’d die, he’d die-and it couldn’t happen soon enough for him.

But when he heard them talk of burial, there was life enough left in him to protest. He needed doctors. An end to this nightmare, wash him, patch him, make it all better again. But they dragged him, every movement an agony, and dropped him and packed him in dirt, the stuff getting into his mouth and nearly choking him. He craned his neck back and prayed they’d let him breathe, the next gasp, the next after that, even though the pain was so pervasive he ached for oblivion.

He throbbed immobile in the earth, a packing crate of hurts. His face lay at the bottom of a shallow bowl, rise of dirt gradual to its rim. “Just a minute,” the ugly one said, and he could see her eye-achers spill over where she knelt, unflattering bladder things. Her hands banded wide ribbons of warmth across his forehead.

“Oh god oh god,” he was saying, but the litany slowed at her soothe. Insane. She was looking for something. A presence joined him in his head. It was her, somehow. He felt her assess him, review his life, find his failings in swift survey, his kindnesses. She homed in-he could feel how encompassing she was-on his goal, on the raw thoughts that had obsessed him so magnificently since Waco, even on memories of his failures, with April and Amy and his other misattempts at planetwide undoing of their sex.

She was planning to hoodwink him, disable him, unbend his resolve. He couldn’t have that. The bitch was trying to “cure” him, to normalize him, was his guess. With what small give his earth restraint allowed, he neck-wiggled to squirm free of her touch. But it was hopeless. Something was happening in his head, some transformation he couldn’t resist. “Don’t, please,” he managed, but she was deaf and her eyes remained shut and the blood-smeared redhead stood sleek as a goddess in the moonlight, watching.

But no.

It wasn’t curing him she was about.

She affirmed the truth of his suspicions, found them, unfolded conclusions he’d not yet reached. They formed an earthspanning network, all right. But he’d misjudged them as to intent. Not merely to populate the planet by luring men inside them, but to replace them en masse, spawns only of girl-babies-that was their goal. He’d been sending the wrong message entirely. Lay off the seeders, he’d thought as he drilled; keep them out of your baby-holes. But they despised seeders completely, lusted for women exclusively.

And as he watched through his earth-packed pain, they tantalized more and more. Tremors roared in his bones and bruised flesh. The redhead radiated desire; his shameless need for her bounced back as if it were hers for him. Her two burled points tipped up, below where he’d drilled her. Tight milk-givers, tit-suck, soft damned stereo nipples at work on him, turning him crazy. He was spewing words, had been for some time. They spilled out too fast to register any meaning, and all he could see were the behind-hander’s damned eye-achers and the tufts and curls of her baby-hole tormenting with its allure. Even the fat ugly dugs of the bitch stroking his forehead tempted his flesh, and he felt the confined squirm of his body and the ruined rise of his seeder pressing in pain against the earth. The power they wielded shot into him with such savagery that even through the trauma of mutilation he felt a raw stiffening, a pain-column of ravaged erection. Amidst the ruins of his groin jagged the Mercurochrome sting of a ripped wound.

His words came faster, scarcely time to breathe. The redhead was clearly stirred. Her mouth moved. Rumble too above him. But he babbled over it. The limbs of the sexy bitch shifted, rubs of labia like a frenzied invitation as she walked. They were going to enjoy him together, but he sizzled with far too much excitement to wait, his body was not able to stop itself long enough to be dug out, for the twin bitches to grope him in the grave-and he felt soiled seed arc out through unspeakable pain, a kind of love, and of hatred, his eyes on them, on the redhead slinking forth to kneel down and touch his face, her palms approaching as jags of sexfire again razored up the ruins of his flesh.

***

Touching him to drop him into the ground was as close as Sherry could manage for a while. Her anger, though the planting of the earth flag had defused some of it, rippled still in her. It had felt so good to scurry dirt over him and hear him whine. By god, she should have brought Derek to trial, made him pay, gouged him good right smack in the groin of his bank account, his time, made it so he’d never hurt anyone again.

But then she paused. The bastard’s head lay ear-deep in the earth. His body angled down, and all she could see were his neck and head, emerging from the solid earth like a baby struggling to be born. They were going to kill him as surely as anyone had ever been killed. She felt a high hot radiance coursing through her bones. There was also a hint of ought-not creeping in. They could still choose to exhume him, turn him in. Ah, but then he’d exist, and she would know he existed, stuck in some loony bin somewhere, thinking about her and thinking about Katt. That couldn’t be. That would eat at her. She deserved peace. And this warped bastard deserved to die. Would doubts come back to haunt her? It didn’t matter. Not now. All that mattered was that his life end here.

She watched her lover lean forward, setting her hands on his forehead. She thought at first that Katt would try to unwarp him, to show him the insanity of his ways before they laid him low. But then his moaning turned to babble, and it was clear that Katt, perhaps recalling news reports about what he’d done, was coaxing his insanity on its way.

It disgusted and excited, this turn of events. Dirt-smeared face rumbled and pooled with all the loathsomeness the earth had ever spewed forth. His moving lips (Derek’s lips, Derek’s mouth) painted the night sky with a perverse rant against women, against humanity itself. The sputters of sound flew by too quickly, too incoherently, even to be parsed and understood, fricatives riding over flows of hot laval invective. But scattered phrases dug deep into her, and his driving tone-unstoppable, an insane blend of lust and hatred-pushed her anger to new heights of frenzy.

Sherry moved toward him now unhurriedly, but with one steady purpose. Katt withdrew her fingers and eased back, resting on her knees; she knew, without Sherry’s having to tell her, what had to happen. The bastard’s eyes tracked Sherry as he spat forth his venom, spurts of glossolalia, the incomprehensible babble of the possessed. Those eyes invaded her privacy, claimed her, a male prerogative she’d felt countless times before. She knelt over him, arching her body to torment him. She’d swear, if she didn’t know better, that the fucker was coming.

Katt had tamped down the dirt over his body, but even so, Sherry’s knees sank wide frowns in the soft mound that covered him. She felt as though she were gazing down into a coffin, its head-lid open and off. Scoop after scoop of earth would wipe out that vile face, which lay in its deep earth-tureen like a stone caught in the ground.

Eyes that raped: She covered them first, palm pats of soil caked thick on the lowered lids, not touching him but feeling his brow move under an inch of earth and imagining his foul breath touching her skin, invading her lungs with each inhalation. Then she reached out away from him, left and right, cupped hillocks of dirt, large ones, bulldozing them down into the depression. The first scoops he fought like a madman, spitting and spewing as best he could. But she kept on. She reached out, grabbed more soil again and again, brought her hands together, shut out the sound, the sight, pressing down, overwhelming him with the weight and volume of her offerings. These were alien hands; and they were her hands. Patch by patch, pat by pat, his face went under, stayed under.

In the moonlight Sherry rose, feeling taller than she had ever felt. Terror and joy coexisted in her.

She placed one foot on the soil over the left side of his face, the other over the right. The dirt packed down. She felt tremors through the soles of her feet, like seeds preparing to sprout into the night air. They had a hearty need for life, those seeds. The tremors lasted far longer than seemed possible. Then the earth quieted beneath her. It grew calm, resigned. Katt, sitting alert on the ground nearby, watched Sherry intently, a question in her eyes.

“He’s gone,” Sherry said. She was standing on death. She’d driven death into the man who’d drilled her body-no measure the law would have allowed, but it felt right even as it felt wrong. She’d never felt more alive. It amazed her how rightness could so blend with wrongness at one and the same time.

“Yes,” Katt said, “gone and buried.” She didn’t seem at all triumphant, simply affirming.

They were both sober and stunned.

“Help me off him.” It was absurd. All it took was a step. But she felt as though she were balanced on a small piece of driftwood in a sea alive with sharks. If she had no help, she would slip off and be torn to pieces.

Rising, Katt held out a hand.

Sherry took it, still standing there. “We must never tell anyone,” she said. “Some secrets are best kept close to the heart. This is one of them.”

“Yes, I know,” Katt agreed, her hand reassuring where it gripped Sherry’s.

Sherry felt relieved. She stepped off the corpse and moved into her lover’s arms, earth and blood on them both, a gritty surface between them. Where rage had festered in her, a replacing calm now held sway.

On high, the trees rustled, this time with assurance. Holding Katt, she stood in the moonlight, again amazed how vibrant and full of contradictory emotion everything felt. How could one be contrite and triumphant at the same time?

And yet she was.

She sensed Katt was too.

“We’ll clean ourselves as much as we can.” Katt, her face lightly frenzied, had lapsed into mommy mode already. “Let’s keep the grit off the carpet. We’ll shower up, get dressed. Whatever he drove’s probably nearby. We’ll lose it somewhere. Along with the spikes and the drill. It’ll be okay. You’ll see. It’ll be okay.”

Sherry couldn’t tell if Katt really meant that. Okay seemed remotely possible, but she had a feeling they might have a long way to go before they reached it.

She watched Katt snatch up the killer’s keychain from where it had fallen.

“I love you, Katt,” she said, feeling suddenly a need for assurance of some kind.

“I love you too.”

“And this will be our secret forever?”

“I’ll never tell anyone.” Truth spoke in her. “It’s true. Some secrets are meant to be kept. And this is one of them, just like you said.” A tremor seized her and she stilled it against Sherry in a tight embrace. “Oh, dear,” she said. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“But we’ll get through it?” asked Katt. “You’ll help me find my way through it?”

She nodded. “I will, if you’ll do the same.”

Sherry’d been worried that Katt would feel obliged to bring in the law. Now relief flooded her. A bond of love had begun to form between them. This turn of events, that might have sundered it, only strengthened it.

Katt kissed Sherry lightly on the cheek. Sherry felt the warmth of her lover’s tears where their faces touched. “Let’s go,” Katt said. “We have lots to do.”

She was right. They did.

Hand in hand, they moved off toward the cabin, a full ripe moon lighdng their way from the killer’s grave.

EPILOGUE

WHAT GRAMMA DID

Sherry stood with an arm around Conner, some distance from the grave where Katt knelt. It was Saturday. A mere five days since they’d killed a man. In the soft wafts of a sunny September day, mother and son had shared a time at Marcus’s burial plot.

Now it was Katt’s turn alone.

Sherry observed her lover kneeling at the grave.

She looked beautiful there. It wasn’t fair, that she had lost so good a man. He’d cheated, sure. But many men did, and still made reasonable husbands. And it was clear that she and Conner loved him and grieved deeply.

Another side of Sherry, however, knew that had

Marcus lived, she and Katt would likely never have come together. But that, too, that selfishness, was okay. All of Sherry’s feelings-once concealed, now coursing through her as they needed to-were necessary and fine.

Conner’s small voice: “I won’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Sherry assured him. “It’s enough just to be there. You’ll see.”

He started to say something else, then just looked at his mother kneeling beside his father’s burial plot in the distance and tightened his grip about Sherry’s waist.

A good boy, creeping up on manhood.

Dots of other graveside visitors stippled the plush green lawn. A quiet place like the woods outside Lyra’s cabin only more massive in its quietude-that was how the graveyard struck her. The resignation of the interred was astounding. Had they all struggled against their dying as the monster buried near Lyra’s cabin had? They must have. And yet they’d every one of them surrendered at last and allowed peace to claim them.

She knew death now. She’d delivered it to the maniac who would have delivered it to her. That night-even as a more mundane overlay of event, leaf by leaf, replaced it-stayed with her with all the starkness of a dream. And it bedrocked her; it shaped her life. She’d come out on top. She’d tapped into something deep within her, a strength, a right way of being. Nothing could shake that surety.

Their secret bonded her to Katt.

Their secret.

And their love.

***

Her loved ones waited some distance behind her.

Her loved one lay buried beneath these new grasses, a sparseness still to their six weeks’ growth.

Marcus. Though nowhere near as deep and troubling as her guilt over what she’d done to her son, a dull throb of guilt had finally kicked in concerning Marcus. It planted an ache deep in her spirit, one she could never share with anyone, not Sherry, not Conner, no one. She hadn’t a clue how long it would last, nor if it would increase.

If she were lucky, it would eventually fade.

But Katt doubted she’d be lucky.

Still, her low level of remorse continued to astonish her. That would damn her in most people’s eyes. But she imagined with ease on this sunny breezy all-forgiving day that Marcus lay just under her gaze, awake, content, happy to be where she’d put him, happy that she was heart-whole again. She whispered words, so light the sounds came out sporadically: “Am I deluding myself? Probably. I guess you’d have wanted to live. But I wanted to live too. I needed to live.”

Divorce. Tired litany, societal yammering. Followed by But Hunt women never do the D-thing. But even that old injunction now faded, thin embroidery from Colonial times. How could that be? It had informed her life from the very beginning. It had hammered at her for the last five years of her marriage. But Katt sensed she’d never marry again. And this summer’s events had caused a fundamental shift in her soul, a loosening of her mother’s grip on her.

Divorce.

She smiled. “It seems after all I have divorced you, Marcus, in the most irreversible way I could figure out.” Katt recalled moments from their first years, their life together in cramped apartments, Marcus crying as his son emerged from the tight throb of her loins.

“I’m sorry, Marcus,” she said.

That was wrong. Too easy. Too glib.

“What I mean is…” Katt paused. She had no idea what she meant. But sometimes meaning only emerged in the attempt to speak it. “What I mean is that doing away with our friend in the woods was just and right.” Her eyes met no one near, and the sounds would probably mean nothing to anyone who might hear them even close by, so in and out of audibility did they drift. “Your dying was not just. I’m not going to pretend it was. It was unjust, an unfairness to you. But somehow it was right.”

She fancied Marcus giving her that look through green transparent groundcover, a slight twist of his head.

The dull ache inside her let out a twinge.

“Not right for you. Right for me.” Thin fingertips, idly dipped forward, caressed a tickle of grassblades. “I know it sounds selfish-but some selfish acts are ones you can’t help, ones tied to your survival.”

She thought back to those unsetded days after he and Conner had arrived. Even through the strain of that time, her instincts had been unerring. She’d strayed, for a bad time, into hurting her son; but she’d had the chance to do the right thing, to reverse it before it was irreversible, and for that she was glad. If Conner had died, the guilt, she now knew, would have rooted in her, would have put out shoots and rhizomes and hot black blooms, would eventually have consumed her entirely.

“A new life is starting for us,” she said. “It feels like-no, I know it is-a good one. For Conner and me and for Sherry too.” Unconfined. Enriching. All possibility in play. “I hope you’re at peace, Marcus. You feel as if you’re at peace. I’m pretty much there myself.”

That was a lie. But she’d gotten good at lying; they both had. That’s what happened in relationships gone bad. The lies became so ingrained, you were hard-pressed to see them after a while-even if you were the liar.

The earth held her lightly. Soft air warmed in curls about her face where the sun touched her.

“Guess that’s it. I love you. I’m sorry. And truth to tell, I’m not sorry. But you already knew that, didn’t you?” Sounded flip. “Thank you.” Sounded insincere. “I mean…”

She stared into the hard gleam of the sunlit granite. His chiseled name stared back, the dates, the words of the inscription: beloved husband and father. Was he beloved? He was. You could kill a loved one, and feel remorse, and also feel that it had been right and proper.

There ought to have been a contradiction there.

But she felt none.

Katt set her fingertips on the warm rugged stone.

“I don’t know what to say, except that I’ll be back.” Marcus in her mind’s eye gave a faint smile. “Blessings on you.”

Then she rose. Turning away from the grave, she went to join her new family.

***

Conner had given up on his jogger friend. She’d been a once-only thing, an angel dropped into his life. School would begin in a few days, friends at last. Always seemed like life starting over again, a new school year. And all the changes he’d seen since June would make eighth grade a turning point of special significance-he sensed that that was so. If he chanced on the old lady jogger in Steele’s, pawing at the grapefruit, she’d be friendly but different, and that would be too bad but all right too.

He sat now with Mom at the dining room table. They’d been looking at magic squares, her showing him the secret, how to fill them in so that the numbers added up the same, whatever decdon you went. But now they were stealing a peek at Sherry in the kitchen, happily absorbed in slicing vegetables on the cutdng board. The visit to Dad’s grave felt like eons, not hours, in the past.

Mom touched his hand. “Isn’t she neat?”

Hmmm. Mom’s growing-up jargon. It crept in when she wasn’t looking. Quaint shit, the weird foul-mouthed creep at school last year would’ve called it. He thought to put a cynical backtwist on it, then went nope. “She is, Mom,” he said. “I like her. She’s smart and pretty and kind, a set of qualities neither of us possesses.”

“My jokester!”

Sherry’s face had the perfect profile, not like model magazine ladies, more like, well, just Sherry-perfect, fit right in the space she filled. “And you get to keep her.”

“We both do,” Mom said, playing along with his stupid little possession rave. “And she gets to keep us. It has an air of, um, longevity about it. But we’ll see.”

Uh-oh. A shift in her tone.

“So have you thought about school?”

The Amendment 2 knotheads question, kooks in Colorado Springs harassing nonheteros. The courts had pretty much struck down the bigoted amendment, but there were bound to be unthinking kids parroting their parents. “Yes,” Conner said, “I can take it. And I’ll blow off those who can’t.”

Mom said, “Just don’t go looking for trouble.” Worry lines. “I won’t.” Just exactly anyway how did one go looking for trouble? Wear a T-shirt that said Yeah so my mom’s a lezzie, what of it, so’s your old man?

“There are secrets,” she said, “it’s okay to keep.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“I’m not asking you-”

“I’m proud of you, Mom.”

“It’s not hiding exactly, it’s-”

“What is it?” he asked her.

“It’s just not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Be what you are, be okay with me and Sherry, but don’t be the first one to bring it up. It’s called tact. Cool. Being the mature young man I know you can be.”

People hid things. They were always doing that.

Him too. Like the time he’d hid his ingrown toenail, tried to treat it himself, let it go too long, got it infected. “I promise to do what feels right,” he said.

Mom smiled. “You’ll do fine. There’s bound to be an ugly time or two, I wish I could promise there won’t. But you’ll weather it. And you’ll learn a thing or two in the process about how people really are.”

Didn’t sound too cool. But she was right. His brush with death had left him strong. He loved the chop-chop of the large knife Sherry wielded. He loved her and the warm rich blend of happiness the two of them gave off when they were together.

He missed his dad. Him and Mom’d been okay together, he guessed, roving around the house. There’d been a sense of completeness between them. But he liked Mom and Sherry together too. They were warmer somehow, more in tune with each other than Mom and Dad had been.

It made his home feel right and good, supportive as a wren’s nest. “I’m ready, Mom.” Not Ninja-belligerent but calm and matter of fact.

“Good,” she said. “Good.”

She quick-kissed his hand. Didn’t feel hokey. But he took it back as if it did, gave her a mock-wince, made her laugh.

***

It tickled her, sitting with Conner and talking about how wonderful Sherry was (and indeed she was!), while into memory flashed her naked dirt-and-blood-besmeared lover as she shoved earth onto her tormentor’s face and stood on it as he died. Two starkly contrasting images, that one then and the one standing near the sink now.

Both of them true.

Made her wonder what other secret lives people lived. Was Lyra somehow debauched behind that saintly facade? In the seemingly normal lives of her co-workers, what stories of abuse or drunkenness or orgiastic excess would never be told? More intriguing, more upsetting still, what lay yet hidden, perhaps forever so, in Sherry’s life, in Conner’s? What might Conner become as, on his own at last, he tested his own limits, explored his own warps? And what might he be even now, unbeknownst to her?

People lied.

Even to their dearest loved ones, they lied.

It might be about small things, secret masturbations, a regretted unkindness uncharacteristic but forever there, a petty theft from a close friend. But it dwelt in hidden places, made truth ever tainted, walled everyone away from truly intimate contact with anyone else.

She rose, hand brushing by her boy as she walked into the kitchen. Sherry glowed there. She left off chopping, said, “Hello, there,” smiled as Katt held her from behind, purred at Katt’s neck nuzzle.

“Hello, my lethal little Amazon.”

Sherry’s look clouded.

“Sorry,” Katt said.

Her lover softened. “It’s okay,” she said.

The phone rang.

Katt held up a finger, broke from her, went to answer it as Conner appeared in the doorway.

She lifted the receiver, said hello.

“Katt. Hi. It’s your mom.”

Out of the blue, not her normal time to call.

Didn’t close things down, to her surprise. Felt like an opening, a new light on her past. A strange question suddenly rose in her mind, a private question.

“Just a minute, Mom. Here’s Conner.” She covered it as Conner started to protest. “Two minutes. Nod and grin and say yes’m a lot. She’ll love it. I’ll take over from the upstairs phone as soon as I can, promise.”

His eyes were steel. He held out his hand. “Hello, Grandma?” Already she was on her way, Sherry amused by Conner as Katt breezed by her past the breakfast nook, into the hall leading to the front door, upstairs at a fast clip-the question, how best to ask it, formulating in her head. Hall phone. No one ever had hall phones any more but she’d wanted one and they’d put one in. A little table with a note pad, a vase of bluebells, cream phone in its cradle. She lifted it, squelched her anxiety.

She’d be bold. She would be bold. Astounding. Conner’s voice, something about bike riding-but when he heard his mom click on, he shifted into a hasty goodbye and was gone.

“But wait I… well there he goes, I guess! A man of few words. Like my Bill.”

“How’s it going, Mom?” she said. Her mother gave her the short answer, but before she launched into a litany of woes, Katt slipped in again. “Mom, I need to talk to you, I need to ask you something about Grandma Jasper.”

Katt could almost see her mother’s eyelid twitch. “I don’t see the profit in bringing-”

“You so rarely talk about her,” she said. “All I see is an image of her hugging you as the police break in. In fact I can’t ever recall your saying directly that she was the one who… who killed your father and your brother. She did, didn’t she?” It was coming out wrong, too inept, too fast, a bumbling.

“Yes, of course she did.” Her affect was flat. This was a cruelty, but it had to be inflicted.

“What I need to know is, Why do you think she did it? And why did she let you live?”

“Katt, you’re causing me discomfort.”

She wouldn’t, couldn’t back down. “I need to know at least how you see it, how you’ve come to understand it.”

There was a pause. Katt feared her mother might hang up. When she started speaking again, her words were thick and slow and true. “As a young child, an uncle visited me once, her brother. He’d spoken to her in the institution. He said she wanted their love inside her and that she also wanted mine inside her but she didn’t have time. I cried. I think that was all he said… all I remember he said.

“Much later, talking to a… talking under… I think that’s enough, I-”

“Mom, please. I have to know.”

Did she really? Was it important enough to dredge up her mother’s trauma after an eternity of forgetting? She wasn’t sure, but the power she felt now-as opposed to the meekness that overcame her in so many of these calls before-was invigorating. Cruel and kind and necessary, then, her insistence.

“Her mouth was bloody, her chin too. Her dress where she held me on her lap and hugged my head to her was cold and wet and sticky. My younger memory had erased all that and made up this tidy little scene. But I got it back. I got back how I screamed at the gunshots and then…”

“Then what?”

“Then seeing her with the knife. I just stood there. My head was full of light. They were wax dummies. It was no easy chore she was about. But she worked at it and she was weeping a little and then she put her hands inside the big dummy first and then the little one.”

The hallway felt cathedral-still. “What was she-”

“She was too full. That’s why I was spared. She had no room. No room for my love. But she would’ve, if she’d had more time, if they’d found us too late.”

“Why did she do it?”

“The eternal mystery.” Safer ground. “I’d guess she got closed up, kept something boxed in. People do that at times. But I think it was severe in her.” Funny. Katt’s view of her own mother was precisely the same. “Who knows what it was? Some secret that tightened in upon itself, a thing my father refused to let her talk about.”

“They can do that, can’t they?”

“Don’t let it happen to you, Katt. Open up and let a ray of sunshine in. That’s what I always say.” She’d not said it once in Katt’s hearing. “You can tell me anything at all. You have friends?”

“Good ones.” Good one.

“Pick one to tell everything to. Don’t hold anything back. Do you have one you can unburden yourself to?”

“Yes.” Mostly.

“Tell her the whole shooting match. It’s a woman, I’d guess. Usually is.”

“Yes, my friend Sherry. She may move in with us.”

“You’ll find another husband soon enough, no rush but when you’re ready-or he’ll find you. But until that time you tell this friend, this Sherry, everything.”

“Okay, Mom.” Almost everything.

“Open up to her.”

“I will.” Marcus’s sweaty forehead, the wastage he’d become, loomed before her.

“Let a ray of sunshine in.”

“Yes, I will.” Except in certain corners that had to remain eternally dark. She vowed no light would ever find those corners.

“That’s my girl,” her mother said. “That’s my girl.”

There were footsteps on the stairs. Sherry appeared. A stranger, a lover. Miming food hand to mouth, beckoning to dinner, standing there.

An open invitation from a heart-whole woman.

Or was she?

“Are you there, Katt? Are you there?”