THE SCHEME of THINGS
by CHARLES D'AMBROSIO

LANCE VANISHED behind the white door of the men's room, and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers and buttoned up to his throat. He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist. He bowed to Kirsten with a stagy sweep of his hand and entered the station. All business, anxious over yet another delay, he returned immediately with the attendant in tow, a kid of sixteen, seventeen.
"This here's my wife, Kirsten," Lance said.
Kirsten smiled.
"Pleased," the kid said. He crawled under the chassis of the car and inspected the tailpipe.
"Your whole underside's rusted to hell," he said, standing up, wiping his hands clean of red dust. "I'm surprised you haven't fallen through."
"I don't know much about cars," Lance said.
"Well," the kid said, his face bright with expertise, "you should replace everything, right up to the manifold. It's a big job. It'll take a day and it'll cost you."
"You can do it?" Kirsten asked.
"Sure," the kid said. "No problem."
Lance squinted at the oval patch above the boy's shirt pocket. "Randy," he said, "what's the least we can do?"
"My name's Bill," the kid said. "Randy's a guy used to work here."
"So Bill, what's the least we can get away with?"
"Strap it up, I suppose. It'll probably hold until you get where you're going. Loud as hell, though."
The kid looked at Kirsten. His clear blue eyes lingered on her chest.
"Let's get it fixed," she said, feeling transparent.
"We'll have to make do," Lance said. He ran his tongue into the gap between his teeth. "We represent a charity." Lance handed the kid one of the printed pamphlets, watching his eyes skim back and forth as he took in the information. "Outside of immediate and necessary expenses, we don't have much money."
"Things are sure going to hell," the kid said. He shook his head, returning the pamphlet to Lance.
"Seems that way," Lance said.
The kid hurried into the station and brought back a coil of pipe strap. While he was under the car, Lance sat on the warm hood, listening to the wind rustle in the corn. Brown clouds of soil rose from the fields and gave the air a sepia tint. Harvest dust settled over the leaves of a few dying elms, over the windows of a cinder-block building, over the trailers in the courtyard across the street. One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps.
"You got a phone?" Lance asked.
"Inside," the kid said.
Lance looked down and saw the soles of the kid's work boots beneath the car, a patch of dirty sock visible through the hole widening in one of them. He walked away, into the station.

The kid hadn't charged them a cent and they now sat at an intersection, trying to decide on a direction. The idle was rough. The car detonated like a bomb.
"Here's your gum," Lance said.
He emptied his front and back pockets and pulled the cuff of his pants up his leg and reached under the elastic band of his gym socks. Pink and green and blue and red packages of gum piled up in Kirsten's lap. He pulled a candy bar from his shirt pocket and began sucking away at the chocolate coating.
"One pack would've been fine," Kirsten said. "A gumball would have been fine."
"Land of plenty, sweetheart," he said.
Kirsten softened up a piece of pink gum and blew a large round bubble until it burst and the gum hung like flesh from her nose.
"Without money, we're just trying to open a can of beans with a cucumber," Lance said. "It doesn't matter how hungry we are, how desirous of those beans we are—without the right tools, those beans might as well be on the moon." Lance laughed to himself. "Moon beans," he said.
Kirsten got out of the car. The day was turning cold, turning to night. She leaned through the open window, smelling the warm air, wafting unpleasantly with the mixed scent of chocolate and diesel. "What's your gut feel?" Lance asked. "I don't know anymore, Lance."
She walked toward the intersection. Ghosts and witches crossed from house to house, holding paper sacks and pillowcases. The streetlights sputtered nervously in the fading twilight. With the cold wind cutting through her T-shirt, Kirsten felt her nipples harden. She was small-breasted and sensitive and the clasp on her only bra had broken. She untucked the shirt and hunched her shoulders forward so the nipples wouldn't show but still the dark circles pressed against the white cotton. The casual clothes Lance had bought her in
Key Biscayne, Florida, had come to seem a costume and were now especially flimsy and idle and ridiculous in Tiffin, Iowa.
A young girl crossed the road, and Kirsten followed her. She thought she might befriend the girl and bring her home, a gambit, playing on the gratitude of the worried parents Kirsten always imagined when she saw a child alone, parents whose concern she conjured out of a lifetime of indifference and neglect. The pavement gave way to gravel and the gravel to dirt and finally a narrow dusty path in the weeds dipped through a dragline ditch and vanished into a cornfield. The girl was gone. Kirsten waited at the edge of the field, listening to the wind, until she caught a glimpse of the little girl again, far down one of the rows, sitting and secretly eating candy from her sack.
"You'll spoil your dinner," Kirsten said.
The girl clutched the neck of her sack and shook her head. Entering the field felt to Kirsten like wading from shore and finding herself, with one fatal step, out to sea, each row was so identical, angling away to infinity. She sat in the dirt, facing the girl. The corn rose over their heads and blew in waves, bending with the wind, giving off a swollen sigh.
"Aren't you cold?" Kirsten said. "I'm cold."
"Are you a stranger?" the girl asked.
"What's a stranger?"
"Somebody that kills you."
"No, then, I'm not a stranger."
Kirsten picked a strand of silk tassel that hung in the little girl's hair.
"I'm your friend," she said. "Why are you hiding?"
"I'm not hiding. I'm going home."
"Through this field?" Kirsten said.
"I know my way," the little girl said.
The girl was dressed in bibbed overalls and dirty pink thongs but Kirsten wasn't quite sure it was a costume. A rim of red lipstick distorted the girl's mouth grotesquely, and blue moons of mascara gave her eyes an unseeing vagueness.
"What are you supposed to be?" Kirsten asked.
The girl squeezed a caramel from its cellophane wrapper, and said, "A grown-up."
"It's getting dark," Kirsten said. "You aren't scared?"
The little girl shrugged and chewed the caramel slowly. Juice dribbled down her chin.
"Let me take you back home."
"No," the girl said.
"You can't stay out here all by yourself."
The girl recoiled when Kirsten grabbed her hand, fighting back in a tantrum of kicking feet and twisting arms, her thin body jolting away in fear. "Let me go," she screamed. "Let me go!" The fury in her voice shocked Kirsten into letting go of the hand. The girl ran off through the corn. Kirsten chased after her, but again very quickly the girl was gone, the sound of the wind swallowing the last of her screams. Kirsten stared down the long dark rows but in every direction the stalks swayed and the dry leaves turned as if the little girl, passing by, had just brushed against them.
When Kirsten finally found her way out of the field she was in another part of town. She walked the length of the street, looking for signs, deciding at last on a two-story house in the middle of the block. A trike lay tipped over in the rutted grass and a plastic pool of water held a scum of dead leaves and twigs. Clay pots with dead marigolds—wooly brown swabs on bent, withered stalks—lined the steps. A family of carved pumpkins sat on the porch rail, smiling toothy candlelit grins that flickered to black, guttering in laughter with every gust of wind. On the porch, wet newspapers curled beside a milk crate. Warm yellow light lit the downstairs, and a woman's shadow flitted across a steam-clouded kitchen window. The upper story was dark.
Kirsten heard a radio playing. She knocked on the door.
A haggard woman in her mid-forties answered. Her hair was knotted up on her head with a blue rubber band, a few fugitive strands dangling down over her ears, one graying wisp curling around her eye. A smudge of flour dusted the side of her nose.
"Yes?" the woman said.
"Evening, ma'am." Kirsten handed the woman a flyer. "I'm with B.A.D," she said. "Babies Addicted to Drugs. Are you busy?" The woman switched on the porch light and held the printed flyer close to her face. Closing one eye, she studied the bold red statistics on the front of the flyer and then flipped it over and looked into the face of the dark shriveled baby on back. "Doesn't hardly look human, does it?" Kirsten said.
"No, I can't say it does," the woman said. 
"That's what's happening out there, ma'am. That, and worse." Kirsten looked off down the road, east to where the pavement went from black to gray and the town ended abruptly and the world opened up to cornfields and darkening sky. She thought of the little girl. About a mile distant a lighted combine moved slowly over a knoll.
"Smells nice inside," Kirsten said. 
"Cookies," the woman said. 
"You mind if I come in?"
The woman looked quickly down the road and, seeing nothing there, said, "Sure. For a minute."
Kirsten sat in a Naugahyde recliner that had been angled to face the television. Across from her was a couch covered with a clear plastic sheet. The woman returned with a plate of cookies. She set them in front of Kirsten and slipped a coaster under a coffee cup full of milk.
"I work for B.A.D.," Kirsten said. "My partner and me have been assigned to the Midwest territory. I got into this when I was living in New Jersey and saw all this with my own eyes and couldn't stand by and do nothing. Those babies were just calling out to me for help."
"I've got three children myself," the woman said.
"That's what the cookies are for," Kirsten said. She bit into one of the cookies; the warm chocolate melted over her tongue.
"Homemade," the woman said. "But the kids like store-bought. They're embarrassed."
"Homemade is better."
"Well, all they want is Wing-Dings and what have you." 
"They'll appreciate it later, ma'am. I know they will. They'll remember it and love you."
In the low light, Kirsten again saw the spectral smudge of flour on the woman's cheek—she had reached to touch herself in a still, private moment as she thought of something she couldn't quite recall, a doubt too weak to claim a place in the clamor of her busy day.
"That baby on the flyer isn't getting any homemade cookies. That baby was born addicted to drugs. There's women I've personally met who would do anything to get their drugs and don't care what all happens to their kids. There's babies getting pitched out windows and dumped in trash cans and born in public lavatories."
"Things are terrible, I'm sure, but I can't give you any money. I worked all day making the kids Halloween costumes—they want store-bought, of course, but they can't have them, not this year."
"What're they going to be?"
"Janie's a farmer, Randall's a ghost. Kenny's costume was the hardest. He's a devil with a cape and hood and a tail."
If she could coax five dollars out of this woman, Kirsten thought, she could buy a cheap bra out of a bin at the dimestore. Her breasts ached with swelling. When she'd seen the trikes tipped over on the lawn out front she'd assumed this woman would reach immediately for her pocketbook.
"With a ten-dollar donation, you get your choice of two magazine subscriptions, free of charge for a year."
Kirsten showed the woman the list of magazines. "Cosmo," she said. "Vogue, Redbook, all them."
"I'm sorry," the woman said.
The front window washed with white light.
"You had better go." The woman stood up. "I don't have any use for your magazines."
On the porch they met a man, his face darkened with the same brown dirt and dust that had rolled through and clouded the sky and eclipsed the sun that day. Golden spikes of straw stabbed his hair and the pale gray molt of a barn swallow clung to his plaid shirt. A silent look passed between the man and the woman, and Kirsten hurried away without a word, down the steps.
"I thought she was trick-or-treating," the woman said as she shut the door.

"Nothing?" Lance said. "Nothing?
Kirsten tore the wrapping from another piece of gum. They had driven to the outskirts of town, where the light ended and the pavement gave way to gravel and the road, rutted like a washboard, snaked off toward a defile choked with cottonwoods. Every street out of town seemed to dead-end in farmland, and now a combine swept back and forth over the field, rising and falling like a ship rolling over high seas. A wake of dust rose behind it, swirling in the gold light of the floodlamps. The engine roared as the combine moved passed them, crushing a path through the dry corn.
"A man came home," Kirsten said.
"So?"
"So the lady got all nervous and said I had to go."
"Should've worked the man," Lance said. He ran his finger along the outline of her breasts, as if he were drawing a cartoon bust. "We've talked about that. A man'll give money just to be a man about things."
"I'm too skinny," Kirsten said.
"You're filling out, I've noticed. You're getting some shape to you."
Lance smiled his smile, a wide, white grin with a hole in the middle of it. Two of his teeth had fallen out, owing to his weakness for sweets. He worried his tongue in the empty space, slithering it in and out along the bare gum.
"I wish I had a fix right now," Kirsten said. She hugged herself to stop a chill radiating from her spine. The ghost of her habit trailed after her.
Again the voracious growling of the combine came near, mowing down cornstalks, cutting a swath through the field. Kirsten watched the golden kernels spray into the holding bin. A man sat up front in a glass booth, smoking a pipe, a yellow cap tilted back on his head.
"My cowboy brain's about dead," Lance said. "What do you think?"
Kirsten had died once, and made the mistake, before she understood how superstitious he was, of telling Lance. Her heart had stopped and she had drifted toward a white light that rose away like a windblown sheet, hovering over what she recognized as her cluttered living room. She was placid and smiling into the faces of people she had never seen before, people she realized instantly were relatives, aunts and uncles, cousins, the mother she had never known. Kirsten was adopted, but now this mother reached toward her from within the source of light. Her pale pink hands were fluttering like the wings of a bird. A calm told Kirsten that this was the afterlife, where brand-new rules obtained. She woke in a Key Biscayne hospital, her foster mother in a metal chair beside the bed, two uniformed cops standing at the door, ready to read Kirsten her rights.
"Don't always ask me," Kirsten said.
"Just close your eyes, honey. Close 'em and tell me the first thing you see."
With her eyes closed, she saw a child, alone, running, lost in the corn.
"Let's get out of here," she said.
"That's what you saw?"
"Start the car, okay? I can't explain everything I see."
She had met him in Florida, in her second year of detention. Her special problem was heroin; his was methamphetamine. They lived in a compound of low pink cinder-block buildings situated maddeningly close to a thoroughfare with a strip of shops, out beyond the chain-link fence, out beyond a greenbelt. At night, neon lights lit up the swaying palm fronds and banana plants, fringing the tangled jungle with exotic highlights of pink and blue. They'd climbed the fence together, running through the greenbelt, vanishing into the fantastic jungle. A year passed in a blur of stupid jobs, stints driving a cab, delivering flowers, and, for Kirsten, tearing movie tickets in half as a stream of happy dreamers clicked through the turnstiles, afterward sweeping debris from the floors in the dead-still hours when the decent world slept. Lance worked a second job deep-frying doughnuts in blackened vats of oil, dressed in a white suit.
But this, Lance had said, this would allow them to turn their backs on that year, on everything they'd done for living and survival. A regular at the doughnut shop set them up with their kit— the picture ID, the magazine subscriptions, the pamphlets. Although the deal worked like a pyramid scheme, it wasn't entirely a scam; a thin layer of legality existed, and 10 percent of the money collected actually went to the babies. Another 10 percent was skimmed by collectors in the field, and the remainder was mailed to a P.O. box in Key Biscayne. Of that the recruiters took a percentage, and the recruiters of the recruiters took an even bigger cut. That's the way it was supposed to work, but upon leaving Florida the tenuous sense of obligation weakened and finally vanished, and Lance was no longer sending any money to the P.O. box. They were renegade now; they kept everything.

The trail of dust caught up to them and enveloped the car and settled back to the ground. Lance got out of the car. He tried to break the dragging tailpipe free, but it wouldn't budge. He wiped his hands. He looked at Kirsten.
"I don't know," she said. Down the road the yellow lights of a farmhouse glowed like portals. A dog barked and the wind soughing through the corn called hoarsely. "I'm cold," Kirsten said.
"The worst they can do is say no," Lance said.
"They won't," Kirsten said.
Lance grabbed his ledger and a sheaf of pamphlets and his ID. They left the car and walked down the road in the milky light of a gibbous moon that lit the feathery edges of a high, isolated cloud. The house was white, and seemed illuminated, as did the ghostly white fence and the silver silo. When they opened the gate, the dog barked wildly and charged them, quickly using up its length of chain; its neck snapped and the barking stopped and when it regained its feet the dog followed them in a semicircle, as if tracing a path drawn by a compass.
On the porch was a pumpkin, not carved. The white door was coated with dust, and the handprints of an impatient, pounding child were pressed into it, faintly, down low. Before they could knock, an old woman answered with a bowl of candy. Her hair was thin and white, more the memory or suggestion of hair than the thing itself. Her eyes were blue and the lines of her creased face were topographic, holding the image of the land around her, worn and furrowed, dry, finished. She was a small woman, slight in build, like Kirsten. Her housedress drifted vaguely around her body like a fog.
"Evening, ma'am," Lance said.
When Lance was done delivering his introduction, he turned to Kirsten for her part, but she said nothing, letting the silence become a burden. The whole of the night—the last crickets chirring in the cold, the brown moths beating against the yellow light, the moon shadows and the quiet that came, faintly humming, from the land itself—pressed in close, weighing on the woman.
Finally Kirsten said, "If you could give us a place to stay for the night, we'd be grateful."
Lance had only meant to use a phone. He said, "Now, honey, we can't impose."
"I'm tired and I'm cold," Kirsten said.
Again the silence accumulated around them like a world filling with water, and now the only sound that would break it would be an echo of the old woman's doubt or guilt.
"My husband's gone up to bed. I hate to wake Effie."
"No need," Kirsten said, "If we could just sleep tonight in your girl's room, we'll be gone in the morning."
"My girl?"
"That's a lovely picture she drew," Kirsten said, "and it's wonderful that you hang it in the living room. You must have loved her very much."
A quelling hand went to the woman's lips, keeping quiet the quiet within the house. She backed away from the door—not so much a welcome as a surrender, a ceding of the space—and Kirsten and Lance entered. Years of sunlight had slowly paled the wallpaper in the living room and drained the red from the plastic roses on the sill. A familiar path was padded into the carpet, and a pair of suede leather slippers waited at their place by the sofa. The air in the house was warm, warm and still and faintly stale like a held breath.

Kirsten woke feeling queasy and sat up on the cramped child's mattress. She massaged her breasts and pulled aside the curtain. The old couple were in the backyard. The wife was hanging a load of wash on a line, socks, a bra, underwear, linens that unfurled like flags in the wind. The husband hoed weeds from a thinning garden of gaunt cornstalks, black-stemmed tomato plants and a few last, lopsided pumpkins that sat sad-faced on the ground, saved from rot by a bedding of straw. A cane swung from a belt loop in his dungarees.
"Any dreams?" Lance said. He reached for Kirsten, squeezing her thigh.
"Who needs dreams," Kirsten said, letting the curtain fall back.
"Bitter, bitter," Lance said. "Don't be bitter."
"I'm not bitter."
"You sound bitter."
He picked his slacks off the floor and shook out the pockets, unfolding the crumpled bills and arranging the coins in separate stacks on his stomach.
"Let's see where we're at," he said.
Lance grabbed his notebook from the floor and thumbed the foxed, dirty pages in which he kept a meticulous tally of their finances.
"You don't need a pencil and paper," Kirsten said.
"Discipline is important," he said. "When we strike it rich we don't want to be all overwhelmed and clueless. Can you see them old folks out there?"
"They're out there."
"It must be something to live in a place like this," Lance said. He put down the notebook and peered out the window. "Just go out and get yourself some corn when you're hungry." He pressed his hand flat against the glass. The fields to the east had been harvested and were brown and stubbled, heaving in waves to the horizon, where a combine crawled over a hill like a giant green bug. "It looks weird out there."
Kirsten had noticed it also. "It looks too late," she said.
"That's the whole problem with the seventies."
"It's 1989, Lance."
"High time we do something about it then." He pulled the curtain closed. "I'm sick and tired of washing my crotch in sinks."
"I'll go out and talk to them," Kirsten said.
"Where'd you go last night?" Lance said.
She didn't want to say, and said, "Nowhere."
"Get a look at yourself in that mirror there," he said.
Kirsten sat in a small child's chair, looking at herself in the mirror of a vanity that had also, apparently, served as a desk at one time—beside the perfume bottles and a hairbrush and a box of costume jewelry were cups of crayons and pens and pencils and a yellowed writing tablet. Kirsten leaned her head to the side and began to brush her hair, combing the leaves and dirt out of it.
"Lance," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Don't take anything from these people."
"You can't hide anything from me," he said, with an assured, tolerant smile.
Kirsten set down the brush and walked out into the yard, where the old woman was stretched on her toes, struggling to hang a last billowing sheet.
"Lend me a hand here," she said. "The wind's blowing so—" Kirsten held an end and helped fasten the sheet. Wind combing through the standing corn raised a hollow rattle, a dry burr that encircled the yard and carried with it a cloud of dust and chaff that blew and clung to the wet cotton.
"I probably shouldn't even bother hanging out the wash this time of year," the old woman said. She pronounced it "warsh."
The combine's swallowing mouth opened a path along the fence. The old woman shuddered and turned away. Soon the hills would be completely harvested and laid bare.
"You have a beautiful place," she said. "All this land yours?" 
"We got two sections. Daddy's too old to work it now, so we lease everything to a commercial outfit in Kalona." 
"You must eat a lot of corn."
"Oh, hon, that's not sweet corn. That corn's for hogs. It's feed." 
"Oh," she said.
"That blue Rabbit up the road yours?" The old man walked with an injured stoop, punting himself forward with the cane. He introduced himself—Effie Bowen, Effie and his wife, Gen Bowen. He was short of breath and gritted his teeth as if biting the difficult air. A rime of salt stained the brim of his red cap. "That's us, I'm sorry to say."
He tipped the hat back, bringing his eyes out of the shade. "Momma thinks I can tow you with the tractor," he said. "I say she's right. I went and looked at it this morning."
"I'm not sure we can afford any major repairs," Kirsten said. "You work for a children's charity," the old woman said. "That's right."
"We'll get you going," Mr. Bowen said. "Up to the Mennon-ites, right, Momma?"
The old woman—Gen—nodded. "I put towels out. You kids help yourselves to a hot shower, and meanwhile Daddy and me'll tow your car up to the plain people and then we'll just see." 
"We'd like to go into town," Kirsten said, "if that's okay."
"Sure," the old woman said. She looked at her husband. "Yeah?" 
"Of course, yes. Yes."

Fresh oil shone like obsidian at their feet, the blackened road like a liquid flowing over the fields until, turning to gravel, it sank down into a dusty basin that held town. Main Street was wide and empty, the storefronts colorless in the flat light. A traffic signal swaying over the only intersection ticked like a clock in the quiet. Feeling faint, her stomach cramping, Kirsten sat on the curb. A hand-lettered sign on a sheet of unpainted plywood leaned against a low stucco building, advertising: FRESH EGGS, MILK, BROCCOLI, CHERRIES, BREAD, POTATOES, WATERMELON, STRAWBERRIES, ROOT BEER, ANTIQUES.
"No corn," Lance observed, pitching a rock at the sign. "You gonna tell me?"
She shook her head. "I just went for a walk, Lance. Nowhere," she said, pressing a print of her hand in the dust. She was wary of Lance, knowing that if she let him, he would tap her every mood, make of a bad morning a change in the map, turn the car south if she so much as frowned. He treated her like an oracle or divine, believing a rich and deserved life ran parallel to theirs, a life she alone could see, and so he would probe her dreams for directions and tease her premonitions for meanings, as if her nightmares and moods gave her access to a world of utter certainty, when in fact Kirsten knew the truth, that every dream was a reservoir of doubt. She had spent most of her life revolving through institutions— foster care, detox, hospitals, detention. Even the woman she called Mother was an institution, a fumbling scheme. Her brothers were boys with pallors like warm cheese, sweating and impotent as they sat out another day, pinching at the knees of their pajamas; and her sisters were girls like herself who'd passed through some door in back of love where they were beaten or whored or drugged and left yearning and clueless; her mothers had come to nothing but the bafflement of hospital life in a bathrobe, and her fathers were stripped of strength and dressed like dolls in paper gowns, their hairless legs faintly embarrassing even in frank life inside institutions. This improvised family of shifting faces sat together in common rooms furnished with donated sofas and burned and torn lampshades and ashtrays of cut green glass, in lounges that were more home to her than home ever was, the inmates more family than she'd ever known.
It was in those lounges, in mornings that never began, in afternoons that lasted forever, in nights that wouldn't end, charged with the vast assignment of swallowing all the horror of those idled hours, that Kirsten elaborated her sense of the other world. She stripped her diet of the staples of institutional life—the starches, the endless urns of coffee and the sugar cubes and creamers, the cigarettes. She cropped her hair short. She stopped wearing jewlery, and one afternoon, while the janitor mopped the hallway, she slipped the watch from her wrist and dumped it into his dingy bucket of water. She cleaned her room and kept it spare, and was considered a model inmate, neat and quiet and nearly invisible. By experimenting she discovered that the only deeply quiet time on the ward was in the dark hour before dawn, and so she began to wake at four A. M., first with an alarm clock, then automatically, easing from sleep into a stillness that was spacious and as close to freedom as anything inside detention could be, when she would pull a candle from her dresser drawer, melt it to her bedpost, sit in her chair, and stare at the mirror bolted to her wall. For days she waited for something to appear in the clear depth, looking into the glass as if into a great distance, and saw nothing. An instinct told her she was trying too hard, but giving up was a conscious effort too, and she saw only herself, day after day, week after week, until one one morning her arms lost life and went leaden, her fingers curled, and the mirror turned cloudy, her face fading as if it had sunk below the surface of the glass. The next morning she learned again that guiding the images made them go away and she spent another disconsolate hour staring at herself. Eventually she was able to sit without panic as her image sank and vanished into the murky gray of the mirror.
She worked on the mirror gazing and she believed and word got around. Lance's fascination was fast, and it frightened and attracted her. Early in her detention, a social worker had advised Kirsten that the only thing better than heroin was a future, and that was Lance's gift, a restlessness that seemed about tomorrow, a desire that made the days seem available. She'd snorted once, banged once, and that was it; she'd found her answer—heroin had given her love, acceptance, security, and so had death, and now crying too—a feeling would come over her—a perfection better than the absence of pain—and she would see the pink fluttering hands—never anything more—just the hands reaching out, pressed flat against the glass. Often she emerged from her trances with her hand stretched to meet the hand in the mirror. In league with Lance, she felt her visions might stay, might last beyond the morning, but he was impatient, and his sense of her gift was profane and depleting, with every half thought and reverie expected to strike pay dirt.
"Okay, fine," Lance said. "Let's hit the trailer court. " 
"I'm tired of those smelly trailers. "
"We've talked about this I don't know how many times. " 
"I want the nice houses. Those people have the money. " 
"They have the money," he said, "because they don't fall for bullshit like ours."
Kirsten started up the steps of the biggest and nicest house on the street. With its wide and deep veranda it seemed to have been built with a different prospect in mind, a more expansive view. She knocked and wiped her feet on the welcome mat and shuffled through her pamphlets and forms. Dressed in overalls and stuffed with straw, a scarecrow slumped on a porch swing, its head a forlorn sack knotted at the neck with a red kerchief. Kirsten knocked again, and then once more, but no one answered. 
"See," Lance said.
"See nothing," Kirsten said. She marched across the lawn to the neighbor's door. Lance remained sitting on the curb, picking apart a leaf. No one answered her knock. She shuffled through her materials, stalling.
"Time to hit the trailer trash," Lance said. Kirsten ran to the next house. A ghost hung from the awning, and the family name, Strand, was engraved on a wood plaque above the door. She drew a deep breath and knocked. For some time now she'd done things Lance's way. She would only solicit homes where she found signs of a shoddy slide—a car on blocks, a windowpane repaired with tape, some vague loss of contour in the slouching house itself—fissures in somebody else's hope where she and Lance could crawl through. But what had happened? They'd become sad little children, they were petty thieves and liars, swiping things no one would miss—five dollars here, ten dollars there—and laying siege to it with large plans, intricate calculations. Lance had his theories but lately it occurred to Kirsten that he was conducting his life with folklore. He had a knack for discovering the reverse of everything—the good were bad, the rich were poor, the great were low and mean—and it was no surprise they were now living lives that were upside down.
A little girl pulled the door open a crack, peering shyly up at Kirsten.
"Is your momma home?"
"Momma!"
The woman who came to the door, wiping her hands on a dish-towel, was a fuller version of the little girl, with the same blond hair and blue eyes. Kirsten told the woman she was from B. A. D. and offered her one of the brochures.
The little girl clung to her mother's leg. She wore one yellow sock, one green, orange dance tights, a purple skirt, a red turtleneck.
Kirsten said, "Did you get dressed all by yourself this morning?"
The little girl nodded and buried her face in the folds of her mother's skirt.
The mother smiled. "Cuts down on the fighting, right, April? We have a deal. She dresses herself; then she has to eat all her breakfast. " She handed Kirsten the pamphlet. "I just made some coffee," she said. "Do you like Pop-Tarts?"
Kirsten leaned forward in a faded green chair by the window and watched Lance aimlessly tossing rocks and sticks in the street.
The woman brought two cups of coffee and a plate with Pop-Tarts, toasted and cut in thirds, fanned around the edges.
"You'd be surprised how many around here get into drugs," she said.
"I'm not sure it would surprise me, ma'am," Kirsten said. "Everywhere I go I hear stories from people who have been touched by this thing. " She sipped her coffee. "This tragedy."
"I worry about this little one," the woman said.
Kirsten bit a corner of a Pop-Tart, feeling the hot cinnamon glaze melt on the roof of her mouth. On the mantel above the fireplace was a collection of ceramic owls. They stared steadily into the room with eyes so wide-open and unblinking they looked blind.
"My owls," the woman said. "I don't know how it is you start collecting. It just happens innocently; you think one is cute, then all of a sudden"—she waved her hand in the air—"you've got dumb owls all over the place."
"Keep them busy," Kirsten said.
"What's that?"
"April here—and all kids—if they have something to do they won't have time for drugs."
"That makes sense."
"People think of addicts as these lazy do-nothing sort of people, but really it's a full-time job. Most of them work at it harder than these farmers I seen in these cornfields. It takes their entire life."
The woman cupped her hands over her knees, then clasped them together. Her wedding band was either on the sill above the kitchen sink, left there after some chore, or she was divorced. Kirsten felt a rush of new words rise in her throat.
"You know what it's like to be pregnant, so I don't have to tell you what it means to have that life in you—and then just imagine feeding your baby poison all day. A baby like that one on the pamphlet, if they're born at all, they just cry all the time. You can't get them quiet."
It was a chaotic purse, and the woman had to burrow down through wadded Kleenex, key rings and doll clothes before she pulled out a checkbook.
"I never knew my own mother."
The woman's pen was poised above the check, but she set it down to look at Kirsten. Then she filled in an amount and signed her name.

"I myself was put out for adoption," she told a young couple next door, carrying forward the same conversation. They nodded and offered in unison looks that were sympathetic and uncomprehending. It was a look she'd lived with all her life and felt vaguely ashamed of, seeing something so small and frail and helpless at the heart of other people's understanding. They meant well and it meant nothing. Sympathy exposed a blank that had confused her as a child before she learned to keep quiet and go without.
"And I never really get away from this feeling. Sadness, you could call it. My mother, my real mother, I mean, is out there, but I'll never know her. I sometimes get a feeling like she's watching me in the dark, but that's about it. You know that spooky sense you get, where you think something's there and you turn around and, you know, there's nothing there?"
They did, they did with nods of encouragement.
"When I think about it, though, I'm better off than these babies. Just look at that little one's dark face, his shrunken head. He looks drowned."
The couple leaned together and examined the pamphlet. The picture was still ghoulish, no matter how many times Kirsten showed it to people. Its eyes were crimped shut and its mouth was open in a violent wail so that when you stared at the black oval the baby's purple flesh was like a loose envelope of skin closed over nothing. There was nothing inside that child.
"Mostly they just want their mothers for the methadone or what have you in the milk. That's what they're crying about. They want their fix."
Although the couple studied the picture, lingering to show their concern, Kirsten knew she hadn't convinced them of the horror. Sitting on the sofa with their knees angled in and their heads nearly touching, she saw how closely they resembled each other in quiet, subtle ways. They had the same color lips, they shared a clear line in the jaw and an identical wideness in the forehead. Meeting each other for the first time, they must have felt mysteriously moved, as if they'd discovered a profound secret. A weight must have gone out of their lives. Looking at them, Kirsten knew what would happen, and then that's what happened: they rejected the dark malformed baby on the pamphlet by giving her fifteen dollars.

She shook off a slight doubt as she waited at the next house. For now the words that came out of her were the right ones. She believed what she was saying. A man answered, and immediately Kirsten smelled the sour odor of settledness through the screen door. A television played in the cramped, cluttered front room. A spider plant sat on a stereo speaker, still in its plastic pot, the soil dry and hard yet with a pale shoot thriving, growing down to the shag, as if it might find a way to root in the fibers. Pans in the sink he scrubbed as needed, coffee grinds and macaroni on the floor, pennies and dimes caught in clots of dog hair. A somber, unmoving light in rooms where the windows were never opened, the curtains always closed. 
"Some got to be addicted," the man said, after Kirsten explained herself. "They never go away. "
"That may be so," Kirsten admitted. "I've thought the same myself."
He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.
"You want a beer?"
"No, thanks."
The blue air around the television was its own atmosphere, and when the man sank back in his chair it was like he'd gone there to breathe. He looked at Kirsten's breasts, then down at her feet, and finally at his own hands, which were clumsy and large, curling tightly around the bottle.
"Where you staying?"
"About a mile out of town," she said. She handed the man a pamphlet. "I've had that same despair you're talking about. Nothing's going to change enough to wipe out all the problem. "
"Bunch of niggers, mostly."
"Did you look at the one there?"
"Tar baby."
"That kid's white," Kirsten said. She had no idea if this was true.
He didn't say anything.
Kirsten nodded at the television. "Who's winning?"
"Who's playing?" the man said, shrugging indifferently. He was using a coat hanger for an aerial. "The blue ones, I guess."
"But a little—isn't that enough? If you can save one baby from this life of hell, isn't that okay?"
"Doesn't matter much," he said. "In the scheme of things."
"It would mean everything," Kirsten said, "if it was you. "
"But," he said, "it's not me."
The vague blur of the television interested him more. "Where?"
"Where what?"
"Where'd you say you were staying?"
"With Effie Bowen, Effie and his wife, Gen."
She wanted to tell him more about the baby but he dropped the pamphlet on the floor.
"It's a small place," he said. "Everybody knows everybody. Everybody's related to everybody else."
He pushed himself out of the chair. He swayed and stared dumbly into a wallet full of receipts.
"Well, tonight, you say hi to them for me. You tell Effie and Gen Johnny says hi. " When he looked at Kirsten, his eyes had gone neutral. "You tell them I'm sorry, and you give them this," he said, leaning toward Kirsten. Then his lips were gone from her mouth, and he was handing her the last five from his billfold.

"I wish I was invisible," Lance said, palming his thin hair back in place. "I'd just walk into these houses and they wouldn't even know. "
"And do what?"
"Right now I'd make some toast. "
"Hungry?"
"A little. "
"Wouldn't they see the bread floating around?"
"Invisible bread. "
"You get that idea from your cowboy brain?"
"Don't make fun of the cowboy brain," Lance said. "It got us out of that goddamn detention. It got us over that fence. "
"We are ghosts to these people, Lance. They already don't see us. "
"I'd like to kill someone. That'd make them see. They'd believe then. "
Kirsten cupped her left breast and lifted it, relieving the dull ache. "I think I'm getting my period," she said.
"Great," Lance said. "All we need. "
"Fuck you," Kirsten said. "I haven't had a period in two years. "
She turned over one of the pamphlets. Seeing the dark, inconsolable face reminded Kirsten of a song her mother would sing, but while the melody remained the lyrics died inside the memory, because the mere thought of this mother was collaborating in a lie and everything in it was somehow corrupted. Words to songs never returned to her readily—she had to think so hard just to recall a Christmas carol, trying to join in, once a year. It was like Mother—never in her life had she said or thought or read or heard the word without a twinge. Saying it aloud she felt like a mimic, an imitator in a world of authentic things. The word came to her with an echo, rising from a hollow she tried to fill with adjectives that would absorb and dampen the sound. Her real or true or birth or actual or genuine or biological mother... but in the end Mother was just something she felt in the dark sometimes.
"A little baby like that one," she said, "he'll scream all the time. Their little hands are jittery. They have terrible fits where they keep grabbing. They keep squeezing their hands real tight and grabbing the air. They can't stop shaking, but when you try to hold them they turn stiff as a board."
"To be perfectly honest," Lance said, "I don't really give a fuck about those babies."
"I know."
"I just don't care."
"I know."

When they returned to the farmhouse, the car was sitting in the drive and dinner was cooking. The kitchen windows were steamed, and the moist air, warm and fragrant, settled like a perfume on Kirsten's skin. She ran hot water and lathered her hands. The bar of soap was as smooth and worn as an old bone, a mosaic assembled from remnants, small pieces thriftily saved and then softened and clumped together. Everything in the house seemed to have that same thing, softened by the touch of hands—hands that had rubbed the brass plating from the doorknobs, hands that had worn the painted handles of spoons and ladles down to bare wood. Kirsten rinsed the soap away, and Gen offered her a towel.
"You don't have any other clothes, do you?" the old woman asked.
"No, ma'am," she said.
"Let's go pull some stuff out of the attic," Gen said. She drew a level line from the top of her head to the top of Kirsten's. "We're about the same size, I figure. You won't win any fashion awards— it's just old funny things, some wool pants, a jacket, a couple cardigan sweaters. But you aren't dressed for Iowa." She pronounced it "Ioway. "
"I'd appreciate that, ma'am."
"Doing the kind of work you do I don't imagine you can afford the extras," she said as they climbed a set of steps off the upstairs hallway. "But in this country we don't consider a coat extra."
The old woman tugged a string, and a bare bulb lit the attic. In the sudden glare the room seemed at first to house nothing but a jumble of shadows. "I've held on to everything," she said.
"I met a man in town today," Kirsten said. "He said he knew you and Effie."
"Johnny?" the old woman said. She slit the tape on a box with her thumbnail and handed Kirsten a sweater that smelled faintly of dust and camphor.
Kirsten held the woman still and kissed her on the lips. "He said to give you that. "
"What happens?" Gen asked, flatly, as if the years had worn wonder out of the question.
"It was a combine," Kirsten said.
Gen nodded.
"Your little girl doesn't know she's dead. She's still out there."
"How do I know you know all this?"
"I saw her," Kirsten said. "And when me and Lance come to the door last night, we never knocked."
From a rack against the wall, the old woman took down a heavy wool overcoat and handed it to Kirsten.
"You were waiting for her. You wait for her every year."
On the same rack was a wedding dress, draped in plastic, the veil floating loosely inside a pillowcase. Gen stepped in front of a cheval mirror and held the dress against her body, modeling it for a moment.
"You made this," Kirsten said, holding the silk to her skin.
"Every stitch except the veil. That belonged to my mother."
"It wasn't your husband's fault."
"He feels the guilt all the same," the old woman said.
"He had to," Kirsten said.
"Had to what?"
"Live," she said. "He had to live his life, just the same as me and you. Just the same as your little girl."

They set four places with the good plates and silver and flowery napkins in the dining room. There was a ham pricked with cloves and ringed around with pineapple and black olives and green beans and salad and bread. Effie fussed over his wife as if he'd never had dinner with her, passing dishes and offering extra helpings, which she refused each time, saying help yourself; Kirsten eventually caught on, seeing that this solicitude was the old man's sly way of offering a compliment and serving himself a little more at the same time. The food was good, and Kirsten would remember that it all glistened, the juices from the ham, the butter running off the beans, the oil on the salad. Gen's part of the dinner was chorelike—she spent most of the meal up on her feet, offering, spooning, heating, filling.
Effie's conversation made a wide, wandering tour of the land. Jesse James used to hide out in this country, he said. Then he was talking about no-till planting, soil that wasn't disked or plowed.
"You got corn in just about everything," he said. "In gasoline, spark plugs, crayons, toothpaste, disposable diapers—"
"No, really?' said Lance.
"You bet," the old man went on, "and paint, beer, whiskey. You name it."
He said one out of four hogs produced in this country came from Iowa—which he too pronounced "Ioway. " Hogs till hell wouldn't have it, he said, thundering the words. The topic of hogs led to a story he'd read about Fidel Castro roasting a pig in a hotel room in New York, and then he told about their travels, a trip to Ireland and another to Hawaii, which he pronounced "Hoy."
After dinner, there was pumpkin pie—prizewinning, Effie announced, as the tin took center stage on the cleared table.
It was delicious, the filling warm with a buttery vanishing feel on Kirsten's tongue. "What's in it?" she asked.
"Oh," Gen said. "Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla— but real pumpkin's the key." Gen, satisfied with the satisfaction at her table, smiled at her husband, who gravely put down his fork.
"When you come," Effie said, "Momma said you mentioned our little girl."
"Our little girl," Gen said, looking at her husband. They didn't speak directly, but checked, checked each other's eyes or the turn of the mouth, checked for subtle signs, looked for agreement. It was like they found what they needed somewhere in the space between them, and spoke aloud only to verify that it was there, that they'd both seen it.
"You knew about our girl," Effie started again. The old man wouldn't say the word because it was a broken word. 
"Your daughter," Kirsten said.
"I guess," he said, then changed directions. "I wondered if you were an old friend. Maybe from school. Most of them have grown and gone away. I used to see—it would have been so long ago but... " He trailed off, his pale blue eyes wetly sparkling in the weak, splintered light of the chandelier.
Lance said, "Kirsten's been to the other side. She's seen it." 
"I would believe you," Effie said. "Some around here don't credit dowsers but we always have. We never had reason not to. We always had plenty water. " He cleared his throat. "I would pay you if you could tell us—where is she at?"
Kirsten was about to speak when she felt a hand slide over her knee, the fingers feeling their way until they rested warmly in her hand, holding it tight. She glanced at the old woman.
"It was only that picture on your wall," she said to Effie. The picture was the one every child draws, the house, the leafy tree, the sun in one corner, the birds overhead, the winding walkway widening like a river flowing out from the front door, the family standing on the green grass, a mother with her triangle dress, the father twice as big as everybody, the stick fingers overlapped and linking.
It was the picture every child drew a hundred times and no one ever saved.
"It was just that picture," Kirsten said. "I wish I could say it was more, but it wasn't."
Effie pressed his fork against the crumbs of pie crust still on his plate, gathering them.
"She just drawn it at school," he said. "She put me and Gen in, her and her brother."
"Stephanie," Kirsten said, "and Johnny."
The old man glanced at his wife.
"She spelled all the names on the picture," Kirsten said.
Gen whispered yes but it was Effie who had to speak up. "I never breathed right or walked right after," he said. "Never farmed, neither. "
In Kirsten's mind her mother was always the dark, a pressure inside a great sleeping volume. And now, tonight, at this table, the old woman wanted her daughter to be the picture. It was something she could give her husband.
"That was the best pie I ever had," Kirsten said.
"Show your ribbons, Momma," Effie said.
"Oh, no," Gen said, waving her hand, shooing away the approach, the temptation of something immodest.
"Well, that's right," Effie said. "The pie's right here, huh?" He looked around the table. "The pie's right here."

Kirsten hovered above the field and could hear the engine of the combine and the crushed stalks snapping under the header, a crackling noise that spread and came from everywhere at once, like fire. The stalks flailed and broke and dust and chaff flew up and then, ahead, she saw the little girl running down the rows, lost in the maze, unable to search out a safe direction. Suddenly the girl sat on the ground, her stillness an instinct, looking up through the dry dead leaves, waiting for the noise to pass. Kirsten saw her there—a little girl being good, quiet, obedient—but when the sound came closer, she flattened herself against the dirt, as if the moment might pass her by. When it was too late, she kicked her feet, trying to escape, and was swallowed up, and the noise faded, leaving a denuded strip behind, a scroll of dirt and stover that curved over the fields like handwriting. Then Kirsten saw her own reflection floating in the vague gray haze of the vanity. 
"Lance," she said. 
"What the fuck?" 
"We're leaving," she said. 
"Why, what?"
Kirsten gathered the old woman's clothes in a garbage sack and had Lance carry them to the car. She made the bed and fluffed the thin pillows. The house was quiet.
She sat again at the small painted vanity. She took a blue crayon from the cup and wrote a thank-you note. She wrote to the old woman that one second of love is all the love in the world, that one moment is all of them; she wrote that she really liked the pumpkin pie, and meant it when she said it was the best she'd ever had, adding that she never expected better taste and would remember it always; she thanked her for the hospitality and for fixing the car; and then she copied down the words to the song the woman she called Mother sang:

Where are you going, my little one, little one?
Where are you going, my baby, my own?
Turn around and you're two, turn around and you're four.
Turn around and you're a young girl going out of the door.

Lance was gone for a long time, and Kirsten, looking over the note, considered tearing it up each time she read it. As she sat and waited she felt a sudden release and reached under the elastic of her underpants. When Lance finally returned he was covered in dry leaves and strings of silk and tassel, as if he'd been out working in the fields. They went outside and pushed the car down the gravel drive, out to the road. It started up, beautifully quiet.
"Wait here," Kirsten said.
She walked back to the yard. It was cool and the damp night air released a rich smell of dung and soil and dust and straw, a smell Kirsten was sure belonged only to Iowa, and only at certain hours. She pulled her T-shirt over her head. She was reaching for the clothespin that held the old woman's bra when something made her look up. The old woman was standing at the upstairs window, her hand pressed flat against the glass. Kirsten took the bra from the line and slipped the straps over her shoulders. She fastened the clasp and leaned forward, settling her breasts in the small white cups. The women looked at each other for what seemed like an eternity, and then Kirsten pulled on her shirt and ran back to Lance.
Under the moonlight they drove down mazy roads cut through the fields.
"Goddamn, the Lord sure hath provideth the corn around here," Lance said. He imitated the old man compulsively, "I'll be plenty glad to get out of this Ioway. Ioway! And Hawaii—d'you hear the way that old guy said Hawaii? Hoy, it sounded like. Hoy, Christ Almighty. I'm sorry, but those people were corny. And yes, that's a pun, purely intended. And going on about Castro's fucking pigs in the bathtub. What'd he say, they cooked a hog in that hotel room? What the hell. " Lance was taking charge again, his mind hard, forging iron connections. He was feeling good; he was feeling certain. "And goddamn, I hate ham! Smells like piss!" He rolled down the window and yelled, "Good-bye, fucking Ioway!" He brushed corn silk from his sleeve and shook bits of leaves from his hair.
"Here's something for you. " He reached in his pocket and handed her a long heavy chain.
"Looks to me like gold and emeralds, with a couple rubies mixed in," he said.
"That's costume jewelry, Lance. "
"It's real," he said, bullying the truth, hating its disadvantages, its need for verification, "and they won't miss it, Kirsten. They're old, honey. They're gonna die and they got no heirs, so don't you worry." He grinned widely and said, "I got something out of the deal too." He waited. Kirsten just stared at the cheap, gaudy chain, pouring it like water from one hand to the other.
Lance said, "Look in back. "
When she turned around, all she saw was dark countryside through the rear window, a trail of dust turning red in the tail-lights.
"See?"
"What?"
"Under the blanket," Lance said.
She turned around again and pulled away the blanket. The rear seat was overflowing with ears of corn. Lance had turned the whole back of the car into a crib.
"I picked a bunch of corn for the road."
"I got my period."
"Ioway corn," Lance said. "Makes me hungry just thinking about it. "