After Prosser, with roughly forty minutes left to Kennewick, it became my turn to talk again. We pulled back onto I-82 and sucked down caffeine from the huge Cokes we’d bought from the fountain at the Tesoro station.

I don’t know why I started talking about Carrie Fraser, but I did.

She was my first girlfriend. We’d known each other since the third grade, and we started becoming close right around the time of my parents’ divorce. Carrie Fraser was the real reason I refused to leave Ferndale, even after my mother married D.B. and entombed herself in mahogany and marble.

For the first few months of their relationship, my mother was content to stay with me at the old place in Ferndale. After they got married, though, she got the idea that we’d all move in with D.B. and live happily ever after in his pretentious castle in Lynden.

I sat in the living room of our old house in the country, three miles northwest of Ferndale, with my dog Wallis sitting next to me. The big lab had pale hair the same color as mine, and he stared at my mother and D.B. with the same accusatory expression that I was wearing.

I told them there was no way I would leave this house. They would have to kill me to make me leave.

My mother had developed a crease between her eyes, one brought on as much by guilt as by age. It stood out then on her forehead like a slash, and it announced the waning of her beauty to anyone who saw it. D.B. stood behind her, smiling knowingly. Everyone in the room, my mother included, knew that she would eventually give in to whatever “compromise” D.B. cooked up. This time was no different. This time, D.B. managed to convince her that having his daughter Eliza move in and babysit me full-time would be just as good as having a mother around the house. He knew that I’d switched houses far too many times already. He knew that I needed to be grounded somewhere, and if I’d chosen my place, who were they to take it away?

My mother protested, but D.B. had already decided, and so had I. She threw up her hands, literally, and stormed out to the greenhouse with something halfway between a snarl and a sob.



“Wait,” Erin said, interrupting me for the first time. “Why would he kick his own daughter out? Why would he let the two of you live alone? What kind of weirdo was this guy?”

I shook my head. “D.B. knew what he wanted – he wanted my mother, and he wanted her all to himself. Eliza had already ‘killed’ his first wife in childbirth. And she hated my mother. I don’t mean she just bad-mouthed her; Eliza actually came after my mother with a kitchen knife when my mother tried to tell her to finish her homework.”

“Damn,” Erin whispered. “So he sacrificed his daughter’s happiness for his own?”

“He sacrificed everybody’s happiness for his own. That was the kind of person he was. He’d act concerned and ‘involved’ as long as you amused him, but once he got bored with you, you were on your own. That included me, his daughter, and eventually, my mother.”

I stared out the window and watched the dark nothingness of the desert sweep past. “Anyway, we weren’t completely alone, at least until Eliza turned sixteen. Those first four years, we had a live-in maid. She was an old Dutch lady who spent most of the day drunk on vanilla extract, and she either didn’t know English or didn’t care to speak it to us. Just to get under her skin, I picked up Dutch and started cussing her out. I think she died just to teach us a lesson.”

“What happened after your mother left that first day?” Erin asked.



D.B. leaned in close to me when he heard the sliding glass door slam shut outside. “Will,” he said, “I’m glad you’re able to make such grown-up decisions at your age. Why, when I was ten, I could barely tie my own shoes. You’re going to make something of yourself, boy, and I’m going to help you. You’re going to be a success. You know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because you’ve got something no one else in this world has got.”

D.B. never quite got around to telling me what that was, that day or any other day. He chomped his cigar between carefully arranged teeth, winked, and left me alone with Wallis. The dog whimpered sadly. It was almost as though he knew what was coming.

Eliza was not at all happy about being exiled from the halls of privilege she’d grown up in. D.B. had sent her away from a velvet and silk trapped bedroom that had been the size of my house. He stood in the door of that bedroom and told his daughter she’d lose her maids, and her pool, and she would move fifteen miles south to Ferndale and a grubby home in the middle of the country that smelled of wet dog and wild onions. She told him that she hated him, and that she’d never speak to him again as long as “that whore” was with him. She was true to her word – she never did speak to D.B. again after that.

The Adairs from next door thought the whole situation was abominable, but they were Mormons. Their opinion on child rearing didn’t make a dent on D.B.’s countenance, and the $50,000 he donated to their church shut them up quickly. They brought us groceries every Saturday. The mother, Teresa, cleaned our house on Wednesday afternoons, and the oldest son, Robert, rode a tractor over our grass every other Saturday. Emmanuel, the father, never once set foot on our property, and he made it clear that none of us were welcome on his. All told, the Adairs were eerily similar to the family in the Family Circus comics, if those comics had been shellacked with self-righteousness.

Eliza had a chauffeur who drove from the mansion in Lynden and took her to her private school in Bellingham three days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays she spent taking horseback riding lessons in Mount Vernon.

As much as she hated my mother, she took an interest in me that even at her twelve years of age bordered on salacious. Even at ten, I knew the difference between games and “games,” and I wasn’t interested in playing any “games” with her. I was still fixated on Carrie Fraser.

Carrie sat next to me in class, sat on the swing next to me at recess, and held my hand when the teachers weren’t looking. Carrie invited me to her parents’ home, and she showed me her room, and she kissed me on my eleventh birthday, and my twelfth, and my thirteenth.

She did not kiss me on my fourteenth birthday. That, and more, fell to Eliza.

Between thirteen and fourteen, testosterone suddenly started flooding through my body. I can trace the exact moment this happened.

D.B. took me hunting with him in early January of ’91, right before the Gulf War. We sat in the reeds lining the south side of Lake Whatcom and waited for Wallis to flush some deer from the woods beyond.

I don’t know why D.B. took me out that day, but there we sat, silently, for hours, as the crickets went insane all around us.

I had come to hate D.B. by this point, not because he took my mother away from me, but because he was a well-known philanderer. Even in the wilderness of northwestern Washington State, there was a “society” of sorts to satisfy, and D.B. had married a no-name divorcée waitress with no saving social graces, a sharp tongue, and a sharper liver. It was almost incumbent upon him to stray from one mistress to another, and he did so openly and without fear of retribution. My mother knew the score; it was a number eight digits long against her zero.

I hardly ever saw D.B. anymore, much less spoke to him. For some reason, on this January morning, he had rousted me out of my bed, packed me into his Land Rover, and taken me out to the woods to find a deer and kill it.

Fog rose from the lake behind us, and antlers appeared from the trees in front of us. Wallis barked madly, and those antlers twitched.

“There!” D.B. whispered hoarsely as the deer ran out into the clearing. “Here,” he said, thrusting the rifle into my hands.

If this was someone else’s story, I suppose it would begin with them hesitating at killing something as beautiful as a deer. The climax would be that moment of pained decision where the protagonist would hem and haw over whether killing in the name of anything was right or wrong. And if this was someone else’s story, it would end with a laying aside of arms, and a downcast gaze, and a humiliated admission: “I can’t. I just can’t.” And the deer, safe and haughty, would sniff the air and prance away.

If this was someone else’s story.

In my case, I took aim, pictured D.B.’s face pasted on the deer’s antlers, and fired without hesitation.

I’d never fired anything bigger than a pellet gun in my life. My aim was off, but not enough to matter to the deer. I hit it in the heart instead of the head. It ran five steps and collapsed in a heap.

Wallis bounded from the woods, tail wagging and drool flying. D.B. slapped me across the shoulders and told me, with great conviction, that I was a man now.

I clenched the rifle in my hands and watched the blood soak into the frozen ground. I felt a surge of raw power rush through me. That deer had been alive seconds ago, but now it wasn’t, and I had made it so. D.B. was right. I was a man now, and I felt primal urges roar through me. I had taken care of one of them: I had killed. Now, I had to fuck. I had to fuck.

Two days later, I tried to coax Carrie into having sex with me. We were both thirteen, which I realize now was bad enough, but she had a very strict Baptist family who took the term “fundamentalist” to heights unheard of in even in Ferndale. Carrie flat out refused to go beyond our occasional, friendly, and perfectly innocent closed-mouth kisses and hand holding.

D.B. and the deer ruined everything. Because now I wanted more.

Eliza wanted more, too. She was creeping up on sixteen, and she went to an all-girls’ private school. She had been drawn to me almost from the beginning, and when I started spending almost every waking hour walking around with a hard on, and when Carrie’s refusals of my advances grew more and more strident, it became more and more difficult to ward Eliza off.

Eliza was never one for subtlety. Half an hour after my mother finished her last piece of cake and choked back a tear-edged “Happy birthday” on her way to the greenhouse, the Mercedes, and her tapestry-lined prison in Lynden, Eliza came out of her room wearing nothing except a red ribbon and a bow.

There was no way I could stand against that.



The Volvo staggered up the small mountains just past West Richland. The temperature had finally dropped enough for us to roll the windows back up.

Erin didn’t say anything. I expected her to react with disgust; after all, while what Eliza and I had done wasn’t technically incest, it was close enough in most people’s eyes.

We turned around a bend on I-82, and the vast flatness of the Tri-Cities spread before us. There wasn’t much to see at night, because the entire area only had a handful of buildings taller than three stories. We’d be at Kennewick in minutes.

“My first time was in college, a month after my parents died,” she said. “I don’t even remember his name.”

The turnoff for Kennewick came up, and she angled the Volvo toward it. “What happened to Carrie after that?”



I walked four miles in the rain the day after my fourteenth birthday to go to Carrie’s house and apologize to her in person. When I opened the gate to her front yard, I heard a scrabbling of claws against wood and an eager, terrifying woof. Then everything dissolved into fur and teeth.

Carrie’s dog knew me. It was a huge German Shepherd, and I’d thrown tennis balls across her yard for him to fetch, then pulled those same tennis balls from between his drooling jaws. He’d never once even acted like he was going to attack me.

I think he knew.

Carrie and her brother pulled the dog off of me and took me inside. My arms were bleeding in a dozen places, red rivers mixing in with the rivulets of rain running down to my wrists and dripping onto their kitchen floor.

The cops came, and that made it impossible for me to do what I came to do- confess to Carrie. Things only got worse when a Jaguar pulled up outside to pick me up, and the person who got out and came in through the back door was not my mother, not D.B., not a butler or maid or chauffeur or anyone remotely appropriate. It was Eliza who got out, Eliza who fussed over my wounds, Eliza who cried and hugged me, Eliza who cursed Carrie’s family and their devil dog for what had happened to me.

Carrie’s eyes told the story: she knew. I think everyone in that room knew before I left through the back door. The dog was still going insane in the front yard, hunting for me.

I got a phone call later that night, after a haze of a hospital visit. I was sitting on my dad’s old recliner carefully aiming leftover birthday cake toward my mouth with my one good hand, and the phone rang, and it was Carrie, and all she said was “Will, I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” before she hung up.

The real bitch of it was that she started seeing someone else two weeks later, and apparently he was more persuasive than I was, because Carrie, Baptist Carrie, closed-mouth kisses and held hands only Carrie, started our freshman year of high school with a fetus inside her.

Matt Larsen was the father, a bastard kid that no respectable people in Ferndale really liked. He was an instigator, the kind of kid who couldn’t fight his own battles because he was too small and frail, but who started all kinds of shit anyway because he had huge Neanderthals for friends who would destroy anyone he asked them to.

My first and last day of high school, Matt Larsen thought he’d be funny and started barking at me, mocking my ill-fated encounter with Carrie’s dog.

My response was inspired and instantaneous: I turned to him and imitated an infant’s cry.

The look on his face was ten times worth the beating I got from his friends.

I left high school the next day and surrendered my education to D.B.’s tutors, and I surrendered my body to Eliza until two years later when she left for Paris. After she left, I found myself alone in the trailer, rattling against its walls like the ball in a can of spray paint. For one long year, I absorbed myself in learning everything about languages and literature that I could and ignored everything else.

Then two months before I turned eighteen I got a call from my mother.

“Dwayne died,” she sobbed.

“Oh.”

“It was a heart attack.”

“Hmm.” That was about all the reaction she got out of me. I hadn’t even seen D.B. in over six months, and the last time I’d seen him I’d known he was on the express lane to Hell. He’d looked as gray as the April sky. He was careening toward 65, and he must have known that he wouldn’t see 66, because he’d wanted to talk to me about religion, of all things.

Hundreds of people showed up for D.B.’s rain-soaked funeral in Lynden, and all of them stayed for the will reading. All of them left in disgust when only one beneficiary was named.

Two months later, I found a note taped to the door in my mother’s spidery cursive. It was disjointed and insane. She wrote that she’d never stopped thinking about Scott, the tow truck driver she’d left for D.B. She’d never stopped loving Scott, but Scott had died in a drunk driving incident two years after she left him, and now that D.B. was gone all she was left with was a fortune that an entire town hated her for having.



“We’re here,” Erin said.

I recognized Joel Childers’ house right away. Every line of it screamed Frank Lloyd Wright; a house like that in Kennewick was like putting the Sears Tower in Wichita. All the lights were out.

“I thought you said Joel was having a party tonight,” I said.

Erin smiled and opened her door. “I lied.”

I got out and slammed my door. “What?”

She was heading toward Joel’s front door and fumbling with her keys. “Joel’s at a convention in Las Vegas. He asked me to look after his house for him while he’s down there.”

I felt sick. “Why did you bring me over here, then? What’s going on?”

Erin opened the thick, oak door and looked back at me with a raised eyebrow. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“No.”

She sighed. “Well, come in. I’ll make you a drink, and I’ll tell you a story. It’s at least as entertaining as the one you just told me.”

As with so many things, she turned out to be completely right.



Joel’s floor was end-to-end marble, and his bar was a vision to behold, all mirrors and brass. I had vague memories of draining a significant portion of that bar away the last time I’d been here, but that was about all I remembered.

“Glenfiddich?” Erin asked.

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Here.” She handed me a glass of scotch. “I guess with as much as you drank last time, it’s understandable that you don’t remember what happened, but…”

“Wait a minute. You’re not going to tell me that we-”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Although considering what you did for me, I would have, if you hadn’t been so out of it.”

“What did I do?” I asked.



This is the part I remember:

Joel and his live-in girlfriend were serious boozehounds. Joel at least had an excuse; he was a writer like me. His girlfriend, Tammy, was an ardent believer in astrology, so much so that she refused to date people born in certain months. Fortunately for Joel, he was a Scorpio; they were Tammy’s favorite.

I knew Joel because we had the same agent, and my agent had told him I had a talent with linguistics. He wrote science fiction novels and made a living at it that was good enough for him to own the most expensive house in the Tri-Cities. He was developing a new series, and he called me up a few months after my mother took her header off I-82 and asked me if I’d help him develop the language for an alien race.

It took me all of an afternoon to develop a basic syntax, grammar, and a few hundred words of vocabulary for Joel to start with. He thanked me profusely over e-mail, and invited me to come down to his house when the first novel of the series was done.

Despite being a boozer, Joel’s work ethic as a writer was unmatched. He finished the first 700-page novel three months later and got his agent to forward it to a publisher within two weeks of finishing it. It took me two years to write my first novel, and it was half as long as his.

Joel told me over the phone that he was throwing a party at his mansion, and since I had been instrumental in developing his novel, he insisted I come.

I hadn’t left Whatcom County since my mother’s death. The Adairs had been the only people that I’d seen since after her funeral. I’d spoken to Eliza over the phone and told her that the mansion in Lynden was hers, that I didn’t want it, but other than her and Joel, I’d hardly even spoken to anyone.

I was reluctant to go, but my new Camaro wasn’t doing me any good sitting in the driveway, and I felt like I needed to see something other than my monitor.

I sighed with something approaching relief when Ferndale disappeared in my rearview mirror. Seattle appeared roughly ninety minutes later, and it seemed a world removed from the one I’d known for most of my life. It was raining, of course, even though it wasn’t raining anywhere else in the state that day. Every time I saw the buildings rising up out of downtown, it was hard to believe that Ferndale was less than a hundred miles from here. With almost a million people buzzing around inside its borders, Seattle seemed like it was a million times more alive than Ferndale could ever hope to be. The idea of so many people living so close together terrified me at the time. I couldn’t picture setting foot in a place like that by myself, so I slammed down on the accelerator and did about 105 until I reached the junction with I-90. Once I got over Lake Washington and Seattle disappeared behind me, I started to feel better.

The drive to Joel’s was enlightening. Like most people on the west side of Washington, I didn’t even realize that the eastern half of the state existed, beyond an abstract area on the map. The desert that waited for me on the other side of the Cascades shocked me more than almost anything in my life ever had.

I passed the site of my mother’s high dive into nothing without even realizing it until almost an hour later. The realization hit me as I was driving through Yakima, and it sent a pulse of turmoil through my mind. I found myself thinking about her more in the hour between Yakima and Kennewick than I had in the past month – until I reached Joel’s house.

The first time I saw his mansion, I thought it looked ridiculously out of place. Joel, too, looked ridiculously out of place – a tanned, muscular man with almost artificially white teeth and a vague New Zealand accent inherited from his mother, he looked more like a surfer than a writer.

Despite the success he enjoyed, only about a dozen people were at his party that afternoon. Joel explained to me over a Jack and Coke that all the people here were his true friends, people who had helped him out in one way or another over the years, and not the hangers-on that latch onto successful people like lampreys. He introduced me to a very drunk Tammy, who offered to do a tarot card reading for me. Normally I would have flatly refused, but I was already halfway through a fifth of Jägermeister, so I said yes.

She sat me down across from her at the bar. “Now close your eyes,” she said, placing the tarot deck in my hand. “Focus on something important to you while you shuffle these. It can be anything at all. The cards will tell you all you need to know.”

I closed my eyes and tried to keep from laughing. The whole thing was ridiculous, but I went along with it anyway. I felt my head swimming from the Jäger, so I concentrated on that and thought, Let’s see what the cards make of me being drunk right now. I nearly sent the deck flying three times with my clumsy, drunken shuffling.

“Open your eyes,” Tammy said. “Are you ready?”

I nodded and handed her the deck.

“This is you,” she said, flipping over a card. “The hermit. Shut away from the world.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

She drew another card and placed it on the first one, then flipped it over. “Death.”

Despite myself, I felt a chill go up my spine.

“This doesn’t mean a literal death,” Tammy reassured me. “It means an end to a way of life, a path to a new beginning.”

She drew a third card and placed it to the right of the first two. “The High Priestess,” she said. “The catalyst for your new beginning. She is the understanding, the deep wisdom that you have yet to find.”

Another card. “The Tower,” she said, placing it in front of her. “A crisis, brought on by the Priestess. It leads to a revelation.”

She placed a fifth card in front of me. “The Magician,” she said. “Your true self that you have yet to find, but that you will find through the Tower. Focused, creative, powerful.”

Doesn’t sound like anyone I know, I scoffed.

She drew three cards in quick succession, placing the first two upside down and holding the third in her hand. “The Emperor and the Empress,” she said, pointing to the upside down cards. “The paternal and maternal.”

The third card went sideways over the first two. “The Devil,” Tammy sighed. “The materialist. The destroyer.”

When she drew the next card, she nodded and returned The Emperor, the Empress, and The Devil to her deck. In their place: “The Hanged Man. Letting go. Inner harmony.”

Another card. “Strength,” she said. “Compassion, kindness.” She placed it between The High Priestess and The Hermit, but she did not say why.

“The Lovers,” she said, placing this card between the High Priestess and the Magician, again without explanation.

“The World,” she said, drawing her final card. She placed it over The Lovers. “Completion. Contentment. Wholeness.”

She stared at me for a moment.

“Okay,” I slurred. “What does all that mean?”

“What does it mean to you?” Tammy asked.

I laughed. “Hey, Tam, you’re supposed to be the psychic here, not me.”

A few people had gathered around us, and they laughed. Tammy’s face reddened, and I told her to go get another beer.

Other than Tammy and Joel, I don’t remember another face from that party. They all blended together. Many of them were amazed when I started drunkenly reeling out Shakespeare’s sonnets in Japanese, and everyone, including Joel, was concerned at how much I was drinking. I countered by saying that the only drinking problem I had was an empty glass, and I started grabbing every drink in sight and downing them all.



This is the part that I don’t remember:

Two hours after Tammy and her tarot deck told me that I’d meet someone new, I did. Joel’s cousin Erin stumbled into his mansion wearing a tank top and plaid pajamas, drunk herself, but not nearly as bad off as I was. She hadn’t blacked out yet, whereas I was already an hour into what would ever after be a twelve hour no-man’s land of amnesia.

The party was winding down, mostly because many of the partygoers were paranoid about being found with two underage drinkers tearing ass through Joel’s mansion. I was lurching around and yelling out random curses in ten different languages, and Erin was absentmindedly gyrating to the techno thumping from Joel’s state-of-the-art stereo system.

At some point, I’d noticed Erin dancing by herself, an oasis of chaos in what had by now become a very lame party. I probably didn’t even realize what I was doing when I lurched over toward her and started flailing around next to her in a hideous pantomime of dancing. She must not have been thoroughly disgusted, because she simply smiled and danced with me.

We were like that for a long time, just dancing together on Joel’s marble floor while the few people left watched on in staid disbelief. We didn’t even know each other’s names, but there we were.

Eventually, sweat-soaked and exhausted, we collapsed together onto Joel’s leather couch. I started nuzzling her neck, but she giggled and said, “That’s probably not a good idea.” I stopped and just stared straight ahead for a few minutes, nodding in and out of consciousness.

Tammy and Joel started screaming at one another at that point; Tammy wanted to know where Joel got off allowing us to get as shitfaced as we were. Joel pointed out that Erin was drunk when she got here, and as for me, what did it matter? It’s not like I was going anywhere. Tammy said that wasn’t the point, and she stormed off. Their shouts echoed through the house and sent Erin scrambling into the back yard.

Curious, I followed her when my brain finally clicked into gear moments later. I found her lying in the dewy grass fifty yards behind Joel’s house, staring up at the moon and shivering in the chill of the desert night.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Never mind. Go back inside.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m the reason they’re fighting. I don’t deserve to be in there. I’ll just sleep out here.”

I crouched down next to her. “That doesn’t even make sense. You’ll freeze out here.”

“Maybe I should.”

“No,” I said, lying down next to her. “I don’t think so.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m keeping you warm. You’ll freeze to death.”

“Go inside.”

I’d started to shiver. “No.”

“Please go inside.”

I shook my head. “I’ll go inside if you do. Not until then.” My teeth started to chatter.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know. Somebody has to.”

“All right, let’s go inside then.”

We did. She set me down on the sofa and put a blanket over me, then disappeared. Once I stopped shivering, I started searching for her again.

I found her in an upstairs bathroom with a razor pressed against her stomach.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted, grabbing her by the wrist and twisting the blade out of her hand.

“Stop, please, let me!” she cried, falling to the floor and reaching for the razor. “I have to!”

I kicked the blade away and into the hall and slammed the door behind me.

“No,” I said.

She crouched next to the toilet, arms wrapped around her knees, sobbing while she rocked back and forth. Her pajama pants legs had ridden up almost to her knees, and that’s when I saw the scars.

Straight lines, like thin, angry stripes, ran up both ankles. On her left leg, they went up the back of her calf almost up to her knee.

Fascinated, I ran my fingers over them. “How many of these do you have?”

Her tears ran freely, but she showed me. Behind her ear, on her left shoulder, her rib cage, her hip, her legs. Dozens of small, neat scars.

“You do this to yourself?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

She couldn’t answer me.

“You need to stop this.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“But you have to. You’re so beautiful. Why would you want to ruin that?”

“What did you say?” she asked.

I hadn’t realized I’d been speaking French. I tried to repeat it in English, but it came out hopelessly slurred.

She must have gotten the gist, though, because she was struck speechless. As impossible as it seems to me now, no one had ever told her that she was beautiful before.



“I tried to keep talking to you, but you kind of lost it after that. Then Joel found us and said the cops were on their way and we had to get out of there.”

“I’m surprised I stayed coherent as long as I did.”

She nodded. “Me, too.”

I drained my scotch and walked toward the island in Joel’s kitchen. “So.”

“So. Now you know.”

I nodded. I had no idea I could do anything or say anything as altruistic as I had that night, drunk or not. I thought that the past nine years had burned all of that out of me. But the blue-haired, blue-eyed, flawed and fragile girl sitting on Joel’s extravagant couch had just told me differently.

“I wish I remembered any of that.”

“So do I. It would make things easier.”

“What things?” I asked.

She took in a breath, as though she was getting ready to dive into the pool outside. “This isn’t easy for me, so just…”

“Take all the time you need,” I said.

Her eyes were glassy with tears. “I lost my parents almost two years ago. They were pretty much all I had. I don’t have any family, other than Joel, and I’ve only seen him a couple of times since the funeral. All of my friends went away to college on the East Coast. So I don’t really have anybody, and I definitely don’t have anybody who knows about… loss. But you do. You’ve lost even more than I have, but you were still able to reach out and help me, whether you remember it or not. I can’t honestly say if I’d have been able to do the same thing. I’d like to think I would, but I don’t know.”

“I don’t even know that I would, either,” I said. “I was drunk.”

“You were. You were very drunk. But when you get drunk, all your inhibitions are gone, right? All the barriers you throw up to everything and everyone, they come down, don’t they?”

I nodded. “I never thought of it like that, but yeah.”

“Did you ever think that maybe that’s why you drink so much? That you’re trying to find a way, any way, to open up a little?”

It didn’t seem that way to me; I usually drank alone. “I didn’t have to get drunk to tell you all the things I told you tonight. And I’ve never told anyone else most of them.”

“Why do you think you were able to tell me those things?” she asked.

I sat down. “I don’t really know.”



She didn’t know either, or at least she wouldn’t admit to knowing. We danced around the issue for the remainder of the night, getting progressively drunker as the hours went by.

I felt myself starting to unwind and actually enjoy her company. Until now, she’d been a strange combination of sounding board and conscience, a ghost from my past that had come to remind me of a misdeed that was not a misdeed at all, but rather the only unselfish act I’d committed in longer than I cared to remember.

We sat down on the couch together and sipped the rum and Cokes I’d made, which turned out to be more rum than Coke. She took a sip of hers, then set it down. She settled her head onto my shoulder, laid one hand on my chest, and sighed. When she did that, it hit me like a newspaper across the nose that she was in love with me. I felt like the world’s champion idiot for not realizing it about six hours sooner, but there it was, and now that I knew, I had no idea what to do about it.

“You know what I really want to do?” she slurred.

“No,” I said, simultaneously giddy and nauseous with the knowledge of what she had yet to come out and tell me.

“I want to just get in my car and go busking.”

“What’s busking?”

“It’s when you go traveling around and earn all your money playing music on street corners. Like those guys in Seattle who play the trumpet on Broadway.”

I nodded like I knew what she was talking about, but even though I’d lived less than two hours away from Seattle for most of my life, I could count the number of times I’d actually been there on one hand.

“I’d like to just drive from state to state, see all the places they talk about on T.V. The Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, New York City. I’ve never been out of the Pacific Northwest since I moved to this country.”

“There’s a lot I haven’t seen yet, either. I haven’t even been out of Washington in almost ten years.”

“Do you know how to play anything? An instrument, I mean,” she asked.

“I can kind of play guitar. I got one for my twelfth birthday.”

“I can’t play anything, but I can sing my ass off.”

“Really? That’d be something to see. Or hear.”

She laughed. “Wanna hear? I’ll prove it to you.”

“Sure,” I said. How bad could she be, I thought.

She stood and walked to the center of the living room. I sat on the couch and watched her gather herself. She was motionless for what seemed like a long time, standing with her eyes closed and breathing in and out so slowly I started to suspect that she’d passed out standing up.

Then she started singing, and the whole world caught on fire. Erin seemed transfigured somehow the instant she opened her mouth, as though she had become something more than human through the power of her voice alone. Her eyes shone a shade of blue that belonged to the sky, not to a woman’s eyes.

It was no language that I recognized; I thought it might be Maori, but I couldn’t be sure. The words weren’t important anyway; her voice hypnotized me. Not many things in the year 1996 could be accurately described as bewitching, but her voice was one of them. She began moving in time to her song, a graceful, flowing dance that was every bit as hypnotic as her voice.

Her song seemed to weave its way into my soul. I felt part of myself rise up to ward off that feeling, to keep me safe and alone even then, but her voice prodded at that silent guardian until it surrendered at last. I felt a series of locks inside my mind being unbolted, and feelings that I’d been holding in for years started pouring out from forgotten reservoirs.

I remembered that I loved my mother. Her face hovered over me, and I recognized the ceiling behind her. Dust poured down onto my face as the earth rumbled underneath us. It was 1982, it was California, and she was protecting me in case the earthquake caved the house in on top of us. I remembered then that she loved me, too, and I remembered the heartbroken sound she’d made the day D.B. drove us apart. The pain of her loss slammed into me with all the grace of a freight train.

I remembered that I loved my father. We stood on the balcony in Ferndale with the telescope I got for my ninth birthday and watched Halley’s Comet streak across the sky. He looked up in wonder, and he told me he was glad he got to see this with me, because he was pretty sure he wouldn’t still be around the next time the comet came in 2061. He made me promise that I’d do this with my own son someday. Then I remembered the sight of the stain he left of himself on the driveway in Lynden, a stain that screamed louder than words how wrong life was.

Erin sang.

I remembered that I loved Carrie. We went into the woods behind her house in the middle of the fourth grade, and beneath the pines we’d promised one another that we’d be friends forever, no matter what happened. Two weeks after that, she went with my parents and me to Mount Baker for an afternoon sled ride. On the way back down the mountain she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and I felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the heat coming from the slots in the truck’s dashboard. Then I remembered the last time I’d seen her, still just a child, but swollen with a child of her own on the way, and I realized that the destruction and disgrace of her life were at least as much my fault as they were hers.

I remembered that I hated D.B. I saw him standing behind my mother, smiling smugly as her heart snapped in two when I told her I would never live with them. I saw him standing in his driveway, frowning deeply, with a hose in his hand, spraying away all that was left of my father. I heard his voice, trembling with the knowledge of his own impending death, asking me if Eliza had ever spoken highly of him even once. I realized that I was dangerously close to becoming every bit as selfish and self-involved as he had been, if not more.

Erin danced.

I watched her move through the room, and I heard her voice echoing off the walls and into me. The scars she’d left on herself had been her way of dealing with her own pain; she’d made it real, she’d brought it to the surface, and unhealthy as it was, it had helped her keep enough of herself together that she was still able to believe in something, in someone, beyond herself. And I knew that because of what I’d done for her that night two months ago, that someone was me. It was plain in her voice, and I swore I could see that purity of soul, that love, radiating from her as she danced.

I might never remember what I’d done for her, but it wasn’t important. She did. She remembered, and it had healed her.

And now I knew what all of this, all of today, had been about. She was returning the favor.

Erin finished her song and stood in Joel’s living room with closed eyes, face tilted toward the ceiling, looking almost beatific. Then she opened her eyes and faced me. “Well, what do you think?”

I didn’t know what to say. There were no words that would do justice to what I had just experienced, or what I was experiencing at that moment.

So I didn’t say anything. I took her in my arms, hugged her fiercely, and let that do the talking. And at the moment we came together, the moment I felt the warmth of our bodies and our selves becoming one, I knew that Tammy and her stupid tarot deck had been right all along.



On the road, she is with me. Whether flying down the dismally straight highways of the Plains States or crawling up the Rocky Mountains, she is with me. In the Nevada deserts and the forests of Maine, she is with me.

Across seven continents and six oceans, she is with me.

In the space I once kept carefully hidden, she is with me.

I was the hermit, shut away from the world.

But not anymore. The world is ours now, because she is with me.