Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Copyright © Scott Blackwood 2015

Scott Blackwood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover photograph © Martin Wimmer/Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Source ISBN: 9780007580934

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007580941

Version: 2015-09-16

Dedication

For Ava, Ellie & Tommi

Epigraphs

The first time I heard the voice I was terrified. It was noon, in summer, in my father’s garden…. I seldom heard the voice when it was not accompanied by a light. Usually it was very bright.

— JOAN OF ARC, FROM THE TRANSCRIPT OF HER TRIAL

Thomas Aquinas invented a third order of duration distinct from time and eternity, which he called aevum…. It coexists with temporal events, at the moment of occurrence, being, as was said, like a stick in a river. Aevum, you might say, is the time order of novels.

— FRANK KERMODE, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom.

— NICK BOTTOM, IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraphs

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part II

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part III

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part IV

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Part V

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

I

1

WE HAVE ALWAYS lived here, though we pretend we’ve just arrived. That’s the trick, to make forgetful shapes with your mouth so everything feels new and unremembered. But after a while we slip up. A careless word, an uninvited smell, a tip-of-the-tongue taste of something sweet, makes the room suddenly familiar — and we have to begin again. Like startled infants, we look to your face to tell us what comes next. You came into the fire.

Take off your clothes, the men with guns said.

Please, we said.

Now, they said.

Please let us go, we said. We won’t tell anyone.

Not anyone? They smiled with their guns.

Not anyone, we said. Please.

Our jeans and boots and jackets and shirts were piled high in the middle of the floor, like a breaking wave.

The tile was cold under our feet.

Across the room, the stainless-steel ice cream case gleamed. On the floor beside it, the cash register drawer sprawled on its side.

What a shame, our mothers said from somewhere, no time to tidy up.

Before the men with guns bound and gagged us with our own bras and panties right after closing time, a few things happened: one of us hid inside her mouth the opal class ring her boyfriend had given her and remembered her mother singing “Sweet Baby James” and stroking her forehead when she had her migraines. The youngest of us, who always threw up before gym class because she was afraid of being naked, realized that this time she wouldn’t. Another remembered the pride she’d felt the day before, riding a horse no one in her family could ride, a horse that had thrown her older sister. He knows your true heart, her father had said. The horse’s shoulders were lathered with sweat. He had a salty, earthy smell she’d thought of as love.

The men with guns did things to us.

Afterward, our cheeks against the tile, we could smell something in the air like our own blood. Then lighter fluid. Burning plastic. Flames climbed the walls, flashed over the ceiling. Eventually the pipes above us burst.

Our mothers wore disappointed faces.

We waited for a voice.

We waited for a light.

Near the dumped-over register drawer, a bed-wetting nine-year-old boy we’d all babysat one time or another appeared. Nicholas. He smelled like sandalwood soap and pee. He would lie to us about brushing his teeth. He would walk in on us in the bathroom, where there wasn’t a lock. What are you doing here? we demanded. His stealthy blue eyes gazed back. You must be cold, he said to us on the floor. Where are your clothes? He pretended not to know they were burning. Nicholas. Some things never change.

It grew hot, dark, and wet like first things.

But then you came into the fire. Found us. In all that dark and smoke and water: a bright, bare foot. The hopeful turn of an ankle. You clothed us in light. Washed our hair.

Instead of nothing, we have you.

2

KATE’S TWO DAUGHTERS are working behind the counter of the ice cream shop Kate and her ex-husband once owned. The girls wear robin’s-egg-blue polo shirts with sandra’s — Kate’s mother’s name — stitched in gold across their chests, their name tags just above. The girls are bird-breasted, Kate thinks, but not wispy, not fragile. Their hair — Elizabeth’s dark, Zadie’s coffee and milk — pulled back in ponytails, which makes the freckled slope of their foreheads and noses more pronounced, like Kate’s. The girls are talking to customers — wide-eyed, polite attentiveness for the adults; rolled-eyed smirking for the languid, horse-faced boys from their high school, shambling in line. Elizabeth, Kate’s younger daughter, at the front register, her face roiled with the first joys of being noticed and confusion over change amounts. Zadie, distant-eyed and aloof, at the drive-through window, leaning out into the shadowy late afternoon. Half swallowed up, Kate thinks, like an offering.

The ice cream shop smells of waffle cones. After their late shifts, the girls bring home this smell pleated in their clothes and hair — how they hate it, this baked-in dark sweetness. Conefication, they call it. Before bed, the girls will try scrubbing it from their skin. But to Kate — lying fitfully in the dark alongside her sleeping then-husband Ray — it’s the smell of gratefulness. All day, she’s fasted on the girls’ absence. And now the thick, sugary smell of them is everywhere. Slowly, slowly, she cautions herself. The starved can only take in so much at once.

Some of Kate’s friends think the girls are standoffish, too much in their own heads, troubled. Those Ulrich girls, they say. Kate knows this. There are whispers about her permissiveness, about drive-through window bartering of wine coolers and rum for sundaes and shakes. Grass-fire rumors about older boys and mushrooms in Zilker Park (conjured up, she suspects, by Sarah Haven, whose son was hauled off to alternative school and whose husband sleeps with men). The girls have tested Kate, it’s true. There was the time Zadie was caught shoplifting cosmetics. Pink coral lipstick. Or was it condoms? Kate decides it was both for continuity’s sake.

Now out in the ice cream shop parking lot, the last of the sun flares off car hoods. A chill is settling in. Some of the dropouts and hangers-on clown and take photos in front of Hollis Finger’s beat-up art car, its roof and hood tattooed with a mosaic of seashells, buttons, beads, metal army men, and hairless dolls. Hollis Finger, who because of a wartime head injury can’t find the mental thread on which to string the everyday beads of his life, looks out with indigestion at the scene from one of the shop’s cramped tables.

Meredith — Mare, the girls call her, because of her horse riding and sometimes, it’s true, because of her incisors, which jut at odd angles — walks in through the front door fifteen minutes late. Zadie looks over from the drive-through. Elizabeth smirks. Meredith — her mind in full gallop — has forgotten her sandra’s shirt. She makes wide eyes at the girls, meaning, of course, that she has a secret. Maneuvers through the line, then around the end of the counter, ties an apron around her waist. Zadie says, I hope it was worth it, and slams the drive-through register drawer closed as if Meredith’s finger is inside.

Then, for some reason, most likely because Kate Ulrich is embellishing, revising even as she reimagines it, the parking lot goes dark. Days are shorter now, Kate thinks. Winter closing in. The girls’ summery arms and sunshine feet growing paler. Soon everyone in line will rush off to day-care pickup, soccer practice, dinner, or dates. Kate knows many of them, knows they weren’t really gathered here on this day, at this early-evening hour, but it seems right somehow. Meredith’s father, who owns a horse ranch west of town and a real estate agency that Kate will later work for, waves at Meredith from the front. He holds up the sandra’s shirt she left behind on the kitchen table at home. Beside him, Rosa Heller, a newspaper reporter, hunches her shoulders to hide her six-foot height. Nearby, twirling her hair with her fingers, Margo Farbrother, who has discovered — against all odds — a child hidden in the folds of her fibroid-filled uterus. Jack Dewey, a firefighter who lives in Kate’s neighborhood, whose daughter, Sam, has gone missing. Jack will soon be tethered to Kate by an invisible cord and anchored to this very spot.

There is a young man in line Kate doesn’t know. Smooth-shaven, his face pale and round, hands jammed in the pockets of an elegant gray wool overcoat. Something vintage. Later, he’ll be described as secretive and nervous, but this won’t be right. The young man insists that others go ahead of him, says that he’s undecided. The wool overcoat is too big in the shoulders, oversize in the cuffs, so the young man seems smaller than he is. Maybe even younger than he is. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have an age. His skin is creaseless but you can see the adult in his eyes. Who’s in there? Kate wonders. I’m undecided, he says again, and gestures toward the counter as if he were an usher showing them to seats at a performance. There is something gallant about the coat and gesture, Kate thinks. Something ageless and chivalrous that pleases her, but also leaves her cold. Maybe his eyes.

I’m undecided.

Aren’t we all, she thinks.

Then waffle cone batter is burning on the griddle. Black smoke billows where the vegetable oil has spilled. The customer in the wool overcoat, now sipping a shake, asks in his gallant, undecided way if something is burning. Jack Dewey, our firefighter, leaps over the counter and grabs wet rags, smothers the smoldering acrid sweetness. The girls use spatulas to toss the blackened mass into the sink, but burn their fingertips anyway. Zadie, who’s worked here the longest, has several small crescent-shaped burn scars on the heel of her palm and wrist.

Now, because of the smoke, it’s dark inside and out. The young man in the wool overcoat throws open the receiving doors in back; another customer props open the front. Smoke dissipates. Everyone laughs nervously. Someone claps Jack on the back. The girls fidget behind the counter, as if they’ve been caught at a failed imitation of adults, as if they’d gotten drunk on the fumes, being so close. They imagine being spoken about in the crowd. Shame washes over them momentarily. Something surges in Kate. She longs for the girls to steal kisses, to drink just a little to quiet their nerves, to seize whatever they can of this life, to feel they are bound for something bigger, something beyond what everyone imagines they’re bound for.

Then the girls reenter their bodies, those unpredictable inventions, and with still-summery arms they wipe down the front counters and ask who is next.

3

WHAT IS JACK Dewey thinking before he goes into the fire?

1. Of his nylon search rope, which is five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and two hundred feet long and attached to a snap hook on his belt. How Neftali Rodriguez and Henry Soto will expect him to deploy it, given the ice cream shop’s mazelike conditions and intense smoke.

2. That they will not need the rope because he knows this is likely an arson fire to collect the insurance money — like so many others lately — and there will be no one in the building to search for.

3. That he’s forgotten to tie the knots in the nylon search rope at fifteen-foot intervals, which tell you how far you have to go to exit the building. How much shit he will catch for this will depend on Neftali’s and Henry’s moods. But there will be significant shit to catch.

4. He thinks — even as he and Henry Soto pull open the blackened double front doors of the ice cream shop and the smoke and heat hit them like a blow to the chest and then coils upward — of his failure as a father. Thinks of his sixteen-year-old daughter, Sam, running away three weeks ago and how he hasn’t been able to find her, despite the missing persons report, despite his several friends on the police force. He sees Sam barefoot in her capris in some strange kitchen, frying catfish in a pan, like they sometimes did on Fridays. One of the traditions he’d carried on after his wife died. He tries not to think of the prick of a boyfriend she’s likely with, who smells pungently moist like bong smoke and carries around a little metal tackle box of harmonicas in different keys and can’t play a lick.

5. Heading into the fire, the safety rope trailing behind, he thinks instead: Friday night. If Sam were back, she might even have come by here for an ice cream cone, then out with friends to a movie or the improv comedy club downtown. She’d call him from the lobby and say in a deflated voice that plans had changed, that she really needed a ride home. Please? He’d know that she was near tears. A tightness would rise up in his chest and he’d say, without exasperation or fear, I’m on my way.

4

HOLLIS FINGER, SITTING at a back table in the ice cream shop, can tell before he looks up from his crossword that the man is hideous.

But that’s a little later.

At the moment, Hollis is watching one of the dropout boys out in the parking lot pry loose a medium-size conch shell — a Strombus gigas he prizes for its depth of color — from the hood of his art car. Hollis wants to twist off a table leg and beat the boy. Around him, at the other tables, heads swivel. He suspects he’s yelled an obscenity, maybe even a threat. He removes his hand from the table leg. Tries to smile to put everyone at ease, but he can taste the bile at the back of his throat. He focuses on his chocolate-dipped cone. Licks it tentatively. The whole shop smells of his anxiety. He closes his eyes a moment to calm himself. Sees the boy’s limp body on the pavement, his splayed, upturned palm. The conch. Its rosy insides like last light. But one of its horns is broken off. There’s a roaring in Hollis’s ears.

Sir? Someone touches his shoulder. He flinches, fumbles his dipped cone to the floor. It’s a hideous ruin on the tile. Separated into three parts. Incompatible. A fringed spatter of chocolate outlines the body.

Sir? It’s one of the counter girls. He’s noticed her before. She wears a flesh-colored hearing aid in her right ear, though you can barely see it. He wonders if she hears the same roaring he does. She has a large nose. Healthy nostrils. Elastic skin. She smells of high school hallways.

Are you okay? She asks this softly. She looks him over. Some of the people around him are still glancing his way, interested. Maybe protective.

He looks down at the ruin of his cone. Out to the parking lot, his car, the boy, the conch. Shadows falling. I’m just dandy, he says, near tears.

The girl, after some discussions with her associates, replaces his cone with a double. When she comes by and presents it to him — Voila, monsieur, she says — he notices a series of curved shapes, raised hieroglyphics along the inside of her wrist. He gently touches her there, the smooth elasticity of her skin. I will not forget you, he thinks. I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand.

She smiles at him as if she knows Isaiah by heart.

What did this hideous man look like? the detectives ask him later (how much later Hollis can’t say). He tries to describe him to the well-groomed sketch artist they’ve brought in, just the basics, the feel of the hideous man’s presence. He thinks of the disquieting sheen of the black buttons on the man’s coat. The man’s older companion tapping out a song on a table with a plastic spoon.

The light in the little room gives everything a greenish tint, like the air before a storm. Hollis can’t get it right. The detectives sigh and bully him. One throws a pencil at the wall and it makes a ka-tic sound. They send the sketch artist away. Finally, Hollis says something — not about the hideous man, but about the boy and the conch in the parking lot, the grievous injury to his car — and the detectives’ eyes grow bright. They ask him to concentrate. Can you draw the man in the long coat, the one who stood in line? Can you do that for us, Mr. Finger?

The hideous man, Hollis says.

Yes, the hideous man.

Hollis can hear yelling in another small room somewhere. A silverfish flits at the edge of his vision. He shuffles the drawing paper. One of the detectives picks up the pencil off the floor. When Hollis has finished the drawing, the detectives lean over him, block the light with their bodies. Finally they say, Look, Mr. Finger, what you’ve drawn here is a nostril, and here you’ve depicted in detail the skin flap of an eyelid.

There’s no pleasing some people, Hollis thinks.

5

MICHAEL GREER IS seventeen. He’s sitting in an idling Volvo wagon behind the ice cream shop with the headlights off. He’s the lookout and driver. The car is stolen and they’ve switched the plates. It’s cold out, but the windows are down because he’s sweating. His mouth is dry. He popped two tabs of Vicodin a little while ago to calm his nerves. The night presses close but drifts away at the edges. A pecan tree looms above the car. Every time the wind picks up, a few pecans plunk loudly off the roof.

The two men inside the shop are calmly purposeful. Michael hates the older one already for his cracks about Michael’s clothes and hygiene. The two men will torch the place. Someone somewhere gets the insurance payout. Michael gets a small cut. Nothing too complicated. No one gets hurt. His job earlier was to watch from across the street: the shop girls turning up chairs on tabletops, the shop girls counting the register drawers, the shop girls mopping the floor. Then the lights went down; a little later, the front door opened and he thought he could hear their singsong voices. Much later, it will occur to Michael that he should have seen in the two men’s measured strides, in their coiled energy, even in their acceptance of him, something else.

He doesn’t know the two men’s names. They don’t know his. That’s one of the rules. He knows he’s on the bottom rung of this thing. But he senses that for the first time he’s working with real adults who mean something in the world, who know what risk is and how to manage it. So can we count on you? the younger man in the gray wool overcoat asked over dinner at Fran’s Hamburgers the night before. He said it as if it was hardly worth the asking. A formality. He was kind and attentive, even if the clothes he wore were out of date. A funny slender tie, a wool overcoat in a style Michael had seen in old movies. The younger man’s face was smooth and pale, and Michael thought he’d probably never had acne but could understand the trials of those who had. He’d asked if Michael was working on his GED and Michael lied. The older man, whose hair was thinning, laughed ruefully and said, Sure, that’s you. Overachiever. The younger man tilted his head in a disappointed way as if a favorite uncle said something racist at the dinner table. Then the younger man had asked the girl bussing tables about the photographs of local celebrities on the wall as if it meant the world to him to know all about them. The girl had a nice smile and Michael realized that it was the young man’s guileless face that drew the smile out of her. His undivided attention. His voice, a gentle plumbing of her depths.

The two men told him they’d be inside the ice cream shop ten minutes tops, but they are edging into twenty already. A wave of nausea breaks over him and passes. He hadn’t eaten before taking the pills. He feels in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and finds the conch shell. He’d broken it off the art car earlier when they were casing the shop and the art car man had tried to tackle him in the parking lot. Knocked him back against a car hood. The man had blubbered and sobbed, making no sense. Michael punched him. Busted his lip. Chipped a tooth. One of the ice cream shop girls, tall, freckled, had come out to calm down the art car man. A Mexican-looking girl passed a bag of ice through the drive-through window for his mouth. A few random people from the parking lot bunched around them, not knowing what to do. The art car man blubbered to Michael about returning the shell to its legal and rightful owner. His teeth were flecked with blood. “Shame on you,” the freckled girl said, turning to Michael. “Shame.” Michael stammered out something about self-defense. The girl said, “Just look at what you did.” Michael shrugged. “He started it,” Michael said, feeling small. He glanced around at unfamiliar faces, felt his own flush with hatred and embarrassment. The parking lot seemed to stretch out in the twilight. The girl’s eyes burned. Standing on the curb, holding the ice pack to the art car man’s mouth, she had a kind of self-righteous grace that made Michael want to kiss her and hit her all at once.

Above the Volvo, pecan branches lace low, silvered clouds. A billboard for a radio station with a large lipstick kiss rises over the florist shop next door. Michael lights a cigarette, examines the conch shell under the lighter flame. He decides that it looks like a vagina. Its undulating pink folds. He tries to put it out of his mind, tries to concentrate on the back roads he’s memorized, the drop-off street for the car. A job well done, he hears the younger man tell him. He claps Michael on the shoulder, hands him a beer. Even the older man Michael hates is impressed. Never flinched, he says. I was dead wrong about you. The younger man gives him a look that bridges the gap between them until it hardly seems there at all. You are not a child, the look says. And then — and the change is only noticeable at the drifting edges of things — it’s not the young man at all but Michael’s dead brother, Andrew. He’s sitting on top of a picnic table near the pecan tree, a hand pressed to his face where his jaw used to be before he was shot. It’s a tender moment, Michael thinks, Andrew thinking of him while he thinks of Andrew. Blood summoning blood. Concern flickers over Andrew’s half face. Then he smiles with what he has left, smooths out the edges. Well, look at you, he says. He walks to the car, bums a cigarette from Michael. Andrew fumbles a bit to find the corner of his mouth, lights his own cigarette from Michael’s. Steps back in a kind of appraisal. Michael still remembers him like this, shambling and slouchy, in a movie antihero kind of way.

You are one doomed motherfucker, Andrew says matter-of-factly.

In the dim glow of the shop’s back door light, his fleshy opening looks like the raw insides of the conch shell. Michael is thinking of the implications of this, Andrew’s return, his own seething hatred and love for his brother’s absence, when he hears the first muffled gunshots inside the ice cream shop.

6

AT THE FRONT door, one of the officers tells Kate that there’s been a fire. Their breath streams in the porch light. Kate thinks of the small fire at the ice cream shop earlier, the acrid burnt sweetness. Smoke. How it is hardly worth the drive over to tell her this.

“Where are my girls?” she asks.

“Can we come inside, Ms. Ulrich?” the second officer asks, his body hunched against the cold, but also against something imminent. Something that hasn’t happened yet, she thinks, but will when it leaves his smoking mouth. She resolves not to listen.

“Who’s at the door, Kate?” her husband, Ray, the girls’ stepfather, yells from the bedroom. She can hear the jangle of Ray’s belt buckle as he lifts his pants from the foot of the bed and pulls them on. In his pockets, the keys to the ice cream shop, where he’d stopped by just after closing to pick up the night deposit. A movie, he’d said when he got back home late and crawled into bed. The girls were headed to a midnight movie after locking up at eleven. “Didn’t you ask them which movie?” Kate had said, because you always ask which one, always. Good old feckless Ray. She lay there beside him, blood drumming in her head, listening to his raspy breathing, thinking, I will go away. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too. Then, a little later, after she’d tried their cell phones and gotten their chirpy voice mail greetings, Kate woke startled from a dream in which her dead mother was combing her hair with an ear of corn. She couldn’t smell the girls in the house.

At the front door, the first police officer tells her something brutally quiet and small about her daughters. Something so dense that it makes everything — the cold, smoking air, the officers’ ashen faces, Ray’s raspy breathing — constrict to a singular point.

Past the officers framed in the doorway she can see the squad car outside, its headlights illuminating the cedar tree beside the driveway. In the fogged back windows, she thinks she can make out Elizabeth and Zadie, their bare feet propped on the metal grill between the seats. Cocksure, dismissive. Playing the parts assigned to them. Certain they can talk their way out of anything.

7

AFTER FINDING THE dead girls in the fire, Jack Dewey didn’t know what to think. At first, he seemed mostly fine, having gone to see a department-provided therapist for a few months. Bad dreams and cold sweats were nothing unusual, the therapist told him. It was a process he’d need to work through. The firefighters at his station seemed to understand his woodenness at work and offered encouragement — a few of them had been on tours in Iraq and seen bad things happen. Whole families burned. Children’s arms, legs, heads, blown off. But to Jack, this all happened in vast, incomprehensible cities and deserts, places with guttural-sounding names he’d never visit. Still, several of the firefighters made sure, on his four days off a week, to check in or invite him to play softball with some city league team that needed a sub, or to grab a beer in the evening. They had done this too after his wife died ten years before, in his second year with the department. They’d made an effort to fix him up with blind dates — usually nervous, mid-thirties friends of their wives or girlfriends, who had decided they were too old for the music clubs or didn’t like online dating sites.

But things had not gotten better after the fire — if better meant getting along with his girlfriend, Carla, and his daughter, Sam, or having a few moments of stillness in his mind. He often drank at Deep Eddy Bar until he couldn’t feel his face, and would wobble home on his bike down the expressway shoulder. This was after the DUI, when he’d fallen asleep in the car while idling in line at Mrs. Johnson’s Donuts. Now he’d occasionally glimpse himself in the bar mirror, his hands adjusting his helmet for the ride home. His head gargantuan and grotesque. Whose head and face were these? He often thought now, nearly five years later, how the firefighters at his station, or even the detectives on the case who’d questioned him, thought he was drinking to forget the girls. But the truth was, the more he drank, the more stove-in he became on the outside, the more inwardly alive he felt. He doesn’t see the images of the girls’ naked burned bodies anymore, as he once did, stacked upon one another, their open opaque eyes staring at nothing. He doesn’t wake up on fire and thrash in the bed, frantically trying to rip off his burning helmet and airpack. Once he’d flung his arms so violently that he’d broken Carla’s nose. Carla, out of sheer terror, had begun to toss a quilt over him and pretend to smother the fire, and sometimes that would break the spell. He’d gone to see a therapist again after the broken nose, trying to restore some trust between them. Over the past five years, though, the dreams had become more vivid, sharper around the edges, and, to his great shame, even more real to him than memories of his dead wife. To his astonishment and confusion, in these dreams he sees, and even speaks to, the girls from the fire, as they would be now, five years later, in their early twenties, near the same age as his daughter.

“What kind of dad are you?” Jack’s daughter, Sam, said into the phone in a voice that seemed to understand exactly the kind of dad he was. He’d said some things, accused her of some things he shouldn’t have. This was four months after she’d come back home, a year and a half after the fire. She was calling him from Brackenridge Hospital to tell him she and her boyfriend had had a wreck. Sam was a little banged up — some cuts from the glass. The new boyfriend had a concussion. But when the cops and EMS crew found his pickup in the culvert, they also discovered some cellophane-wrapped hashish stuffed into the fingers of a single leather glove in the console. Now the boyfriend needed an attorney and some bail money.

“I guess I’m the kind of dad who comes when you need me,” he said on the phone, trying on a kind of casual bluster because, as she often pointed out, he was afraid of her.

Later, in the emergency room, he sat near a large tinted window and could feel the day’s heat through the glass. Another man sat nearby, cupping his limp arm at the elbow as if cradling an infant’s head. He signed in at the desk and a pregnant Hispanic nurse wearing slippers helped him navigate the maze of cubicle rooms.

Sam was born in this hospital. She’d developed an infection from breathing meconium during a long, difficult delivery, so they’d put her in the neonatal ICU for two weeks to treat it, strapped a tangle of wires to her chest and head to monitor her vitals. She was stout compared with the other babies there. Premies not any bigger than potatoes — they were even swaddled in aluminum foil to keep their heat in. It scared him to think something so tiny could still be a human being. Some of them had been there for months because of heart ailments, kidney problems, or congenital defects that wouldn’t allow them to breathe on their own. The terrible, contingent life of these infants, the wires, the constant beeping and buzzing alarms, warning of some impending failure, made him constantly on edge. Everything in the neonatal ICU — a room festooned with the false cheer of newborn blues and pinks — seemed to partially negate the future. The thought of Sam forever dependent on machines and nurses and catheters made his throat constrict at night. He heard her raw-throat crying in his dreams. His wife, recovering in a nearby room from a torn cervix, would ask him for a report after the midnight feeding. “How’s our sweet baby girl?” she’d ask from beneath the tide of sedatives. “Dreaming of her momma,” he’d say.

A number of the premies wouldn’t survive. An intern had told him this while eating a sandwich at the nurses’ station. There was a point at which the parents — often sleep deprived, living in a fog — had to make a decision. Jack also remembered the hospital chaplain, a chain-smoker, telling him that one of the premies — his heart malformed and too weak for surgery — had completely baffled the neonatologists. Miraculously, the chaplain said, his body had “learned” to reroute his oxygenated blood to his brain through a system of collateral arteries. But to Jack this seemed only a reprieve, a story of deferred grief that made the later one even harder to bear. He remembered his grandfather’s stories of families during the 1918 flu pandemic waiting to name their children until it was clear they’d make it to their first birthday. When Jack would take bottles of his wife’s breast milk into the ICU to feed Sam, he’d see the parents of the critical premies coming and going in their ill-fitting visitor scrubs, their bright, haggard faces. They seemed like castaways who didn’t know they’d been abandoned. And seven years later, in the weeks leading up to his wife’s death from a brain aneurysm, he knew he’d worn that same expression on his pilgrimages. He’d made any bargain, buoyed any false hope, explained away, even at the end, the inevitable signs of his wife’s body shutting down.

Jack knew now that luck was unearned — arbitrary, even. But in the ICU with his daughter those early weeks, surrounded by premies swaddled in aluminum foil, he’d studied the tiny maps of capillaries on Sam’s eyelids and considered himself a fortunate man.

In the emergency room, Jack found Sam tucked away in one of the cubicles, sitting on the lip of the bed. He hugged her before she could get up, and she stiffened, then gave in. She was shaking.

“It’s just the adrenaline after the accident,” he said. “It goes on awhile.” She held up a trembling hand and laughed. Shiny flecks of glass were embedded in the reddened skin below her knuckles.

Jack’s heart rattled in his chest to see her scared.

She looked at him. “The deer just leaped out in the road.”

“How fast were you going?”

“Not fast. No faster than normal.”

“Were you smoking hash?”

“Jesus. Dad. No.”

“I have to ask that.”

“You don’t have to ask.”

“Where did the stuff in the console come from?”

“Who knows — one of Adrian’s friends, probably.”

“The one-handed man.”

“I have broken glass in my hand.” She waved it in front of him.

“It should be a reminder,” he said, and thought of her plunging headfirst through the windshield, hair and blood. His legs weakened.

“Is that what you tell burned people? This should be a reminder?”

“If they’re the ones who started the fire, sure.”

She was suddenly silent, and he knew she was thinking of the ice cream shop. He leaned forward and kissed the top of Sam’s head. She’d always been lucky. Always favored. Which made him worry all the more.

8

THIS IS WHAT Rosa Heller, a reporter covering the murders for the Chronicle, remembers: She’s seven years old, walking hand in hand with her dad toward the Lab School on the South Side of Chicago. She’s tall for her age, and in fifth grade she’ll begin to slouch to hide it. It’s early morning, still, and a fog off Lake Michigan clings to the yards and stoops. They stop at a corner grocery that sells the Wacky Packages stickers that she’s obsessed with, and her father gives her money to buy some because she loves him so much. When they turn the corner they walk alongside a vacant lot with a billboard for NuGrape soda and beneath it there’s a large blackened oval in the grass where someone set a fire. She wonders who would do something like that and decides that boys would, just to see what happened. She sees something shiny in the grass that she thinks is a bottle cap for her collection, and so pulls away from her dad and scuffs the dirt and grass with her shoe. She finds a half-dollar-size hoop earring. In the weeds near a metal fence, not twenty feet away, she sees a mustard-colored jacket. Then a brown leather purse, a string of toiletries, a pair of panties, a hair pick, and a compact mirror. Near the compact mirror, a brown hand that once held it. At first Rosa thinks the face staring back from a clump of weeds is a Halloween mask. She looks at her dad to be in on the joke, but he just stares. She can feel her skin prickle, but it takes a while for her to realize that it’s a woman’s face, missing nose and ears.

Rosa’s dad, Peter, was a politics reporter for the Chicago Tribune. They lived with her mother in a partly rehabbed two-flat surrounded by run-down rentals, used car lots, and liquor stores. The area was segregated, but a number of liberal white families, like hers, had moved into it in the late sixties, even given all the turbulence. Even partly because of it. Her parents had participated in freedom marches and seen violence up close. Her dad had had his nose broken. Someone had hit her mother in the head with a D-cell battery. On her dad’s desk at the Tribune she remembered a photo of him between the writer Alex Haley and the actor and activist Ossie Davis, smiling broadly.

Occasionally in their neighborhood someone would overturn a car and set it on fire, which secretly thrilled Rosa — she could often see the glow from her upstairs bedroom window. Her dad took great pains to explain to her that this was a symptom of an illness. Like the chicken pox or a rash? she asked. That’s right, her dad said, a warning on the surface about what was going on inside. There was so much anger that maybe it couldn’t be contained. Better a car than a passerby, he said. Better things than a person.

She doesn’t think it happened that way. Her dad wouldn’t have allowed her to get so close to the dead woman. She would have heard about the nose and ears most likely from someone at school, or maybe her dad talking to one of the local politicos on the phone. Or possibly she’d imagined it. She’d even looked in the Tribune archives to find the story, but couldn’t find any mention of mutilation. She wondered if this was like her memory of her dad one day cutting the TV power cord with a pair of gleaming shears while she was watching it, or the time she was forced to leave for summer camp while her Labrador, Ali, was dying on the living room floor — memories she suspected she made up to confirm what she already believed about her dad. Some lack in him. What had she believed? That he was high-principled but cruel. A gifted journalist who abused his talent. A secret racist who helped black people so that he could feel better about bitter feelings he harbored against them. He was guileless to a fault. He’d eventually driven off Rosa’s mother with his various lost causes and under-the-table funding of his younger brother, Bill, who was constantly strung out on back pain medicine and running from creditors. Much of what she’d accepted about her dad when she was younger she was unsure about now, which had both helped and hurt their relationship, she suspected. She can see her dad’s hands, their neatly trimmed, milky nails, the lump on the outside of his left hand where a benign tumor made the bone brittle and caused him to break the hand half a dozen times. How could the tumor be benign, she wondered, if it ate away the bone? On a recent visit to Chicago, she’d asked him if he’d had his checkup, his scheduled colonoscopy and PSA blood work. He said to be honest, he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a doctor. He smiled a little boy’s smile that pretended not to know. On the table in front of her, his left hand seemed frail, the lump more pronounced. She loved his guileless eyes, the way they took in everything and denied it all.

It would have happened this way: Her dad takes her hand, leads her away from the vacant lot and the dead woman. Rosa never sees what she thinks she did — holes where the woman’s nose and ears should be. Voids. The woman’s skirt hiked up, the greenish glass of the Coke bottle stuck between her legs. When Rosa begins pointing near the fence, her dad makes light of what they see there, someone asleep in the weeds. Siesta time, he’d say, then make a snoring sound and pull Rosa away. The woman’s body sprawled languidly on the ground as if she were in her own bed and not a vacant lot. Her compact mirror open beside her, a quick powder touch-up when she wakes. Lazy bones, Rosa’s dad would say. Get up and get on your way. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t tarry.

He would have protected her.

9

HOLLIS OFTEN CONFUSES what’s already happened with what’s to come. He knows this. Still, they feel the same.

The light was like a sudden blow to the head. It filled the interior of Hollis’s art car, made night into day. He could make out the titles of his books stacked between the seats, the three-legged metal horse with its Civil War rider and the shellacked horned frog perched on the front dash. Along the ceiling of the car, his pale green topographic maps of Austin with their concentric patterns. Blown-up photos of the three murdered girls, their faces so exaggerated in scale and singularly focused on one element — the convolutions of an ear, a forest of lash reflected in a green iris, a knuckle against the sly corner of a mouth — that they might be mistaken for abstract paintings.

His dazed first thought was that his mother had come for one of her rare visits, her headlights leaping against the back wall of their father’s den, and he felt alone and spiteful. He would not go with her, he decided. He would punish her. Every other Saturday, Hollis and his brother, Blake, would call their mother in Corpus Christi on the free long-distance line in his father’s downtown feed and grain brokerage firm, their father sitting in his swivel desk chair near the window, looking out at the tops of buildings along Congress Avenue, his face plowing a dark field. Blake, who would always talk first, told their mother how he’d gone over his handlebars on a bike ramp and knocked out a front tooth, and that Peter Parker knew he wasn’t a clone because he still loved Gwen Stacy even though she was dead and clones could never feel that kind of love, now, could they? Blake’s face shone with a need that made Hollis want to punch him. Their father handed Hollis the phone, and Hollis let the receiver drop and dangle by its cord at his feet. His father’s face crumbled like a dirt clod. He could hear their mother’s tinny voice down there calling his name. When he finally lifted the receiver to his ear, their mother asked if he’d forgotten about her visit. She exhaled and smoke rose into the ocean-blue sky of an open window somewhere. In his imaginings their mother looked like Gwen Stacy and he dressed her in Gwen Stacy’s black hair band, dark top, and purple skirt. The sun was unbearably bright against her bare legs. She pinned the phone between her chin and shoulder and painted her toenails pink, like seashells. Gwen Stacy had their mother’s crooked pinkie toes. Her body glistened and made him wince. On the phone, his mother told Hollis she was taking them to Six Flags on Saturday. His mother said, “You remember that crooked house?” She waited for Hollis to remember. “Casa Magnetica,” he said, grudgingly. A whole house tilted crazily so that water flowed backwards and oranges rolled uphill. She mentioned a few other exhibits and rides and got the names wrong and he corrected her. She said, “You were always better than me with names.” He was quiet. “We’ll have ourselves a time,” she said. Then that Saturday, their mother, who was so, so very late, stood in the driveway eclipsed in the Monte Carlo’s headlights, afraid to turn off the engine because it had died on her so many times on the way. Smoke rose above her head and at first Hollis thought her hair was on fire but then he could smell burnt oil and plastic and their father said, Carole, we better have a look at that, but when he opened the hood, fire rose up and burned the hair off his father’s forearm. His mother made a low, animal sound deep in her throat and held Hollis and his brother against her, and Hollis wanted to pull away because she smelled different and her breasts were larger and she had colored her hair ( frosted, she’d said) and he hated his brother, who touched strands of it with a kind of reverence. And the fire melted all the engine wires and blackened the hood, and their mother had to stay two extra days at a motel, where he and Blake swam in the pool and got sunburned and Hollis prayed for the Monte Carlo never to be fixed.

There was a banging on the driver’s window. “Mr. Finger?” a man’s voice said. Hollis didn’t say anything, lying very still under a blanket in the backseat, his body intensely aware of the coarseness of the weave, hoping the voice would just go away. He thought of the boy who’d busted his lip and committed the egregious theft of the conch. And he thought of Truck pulling his brother Trailer alongside Barton Springs Road, and the ways people were linked to one another in time and space by something just outside it, hidden from them always but intuited like the stars in the daytime. Or made into a likeness so that you saw differently. How could he string the everyday beads of his life from this? He didn’t know. But the voice outside wanted him to. “I don’t have anything you want!” he screamed, and realized it was true but also that he’d never be able to convince them of it. And a terrible light shone down and revealed his nakedness and shame.

10

A YEAR AFTER THE murders, Kate puts the house up for sale. Friends nod sympathetically, say they understand, all those memories. The girls. The marriage to Ray. A few mention different neighborhoods she might consider, a deal on a condo downtown. A new beginning, they say. But, of course, they don’t understand. How do you start over with the future gouged out? Margo Farbrother, her friend from the book group, had come by with food all that first week. Margo, with her dark skin like polished wood, high cheekbones. Unlike the others, she didn’t veer away from mentioning the girls, asking what the police knew, what they didn’t. One night, on the couch, Margo held Kate’s head in her lap and stroked her hair with her long fingers. Margo had her own problems. Her stepson, Michael, was in trouble. He’d dropped out of school, gotten arrested for several DWIs, was fucked up on drugs half the time. He and his father, Darnell, fighting constantly. On top of it all, Margo, with endometriosis, suddenly inexplicably pregnant for the first time. She will lose the baby within a month, though nobody knows that now.

On the couch, Kate shook as if she had a fever. Her teeth chattered. Margo seemed to know there was nothing to say. She bent over Kate like a bough, her cheek pressed to Kate’s ear. Kate could feel the rise of Margo’s belly against her back.

Some mornings Kate stands in front of the bathroom mirror and takes a measure of her body as if for the first time. Her areolas have grown darker with age and remind her of when she was pregnant with the girls. Faint stretch marks still pearl her hips and breasts. The pale fault line of a C-section scar just above her pubic bone, which divides her into before and after.

The Realtor, a squatty salt-and-pepper-haired woman from the suburbs — Kate’s consciously avoided the city ones friends recommend; she can’t stand the sympathetic stares — comes by the house and, among other things, wants Kate to remove the growing collage of framed photos of the girls from the living room wall. “Everyone wants to imagine their own brood up there,” the Realtor says, smiling in a disapproving, hands-on-hips way that reminds Kate of her mother. Kate still expects the Realtor to know their story — as if life didn’t go on elsewhere, as if people didn’t continue to show up for work, squabble with teenage children, slog through mediocre marriages. For a few seconds they stand in silence in front of the photos. Zadie and Elizabeth in their bikinis at the beach on Galveston Island; Zadie with her first boyfriend, Marcus, at the prom. An empty space next to it where a photo once hung of the girls and Ray, looking sheepish and gangly in his shorts, waving from the deck of his houseboat. Kate removed the photo after she’d found out the detectives had questioned him. He’d grown paler and paler in her mind until he’d become a space on the wall.

“A couple of head-turners,” the Realtor says, looking at the photos of the girls. “Who’d want to compete with that?” The Realtor smiles, fiddles with a wall dimmer switch. The Realtor looks out at the living room, says that Kate might want to remove the bead board paneling, go with a neutral color on the walls instead of the sea green, mentions a range of hours they might have showings, dates to host an open house. The ceiling fan makes a ticka ticka ticka sound.

Kate readjusts one of the larger studio portraits of the girls from the year before. Cheesy, they’d called it. Staged. Both their heads tilted awkwardly to one side as if listening to an invisible radio.

The detectives surprised Ray on his houseboat. This was three weeks after the murders, two weeks after Kate had told him to leave. Ray didn’t have a phone.

This is how Kate imagines it: Ray, shirtless and barefoot, hobbles to the cabin door on his bad ankles, both of which he shattered falling off the ice cream shop roof while repairing the rain gutters three years before. They ache in the mornings and he has to do exercises to keep them from stiffening up. Because of his ankles, Ray has had to give up his one-weekend-a-month Army Reserve stints in San Antonio. He has a ragged look. Needs a haircut, his beard trimmed, which Kate has done for him for years. Before he opens the door, the urge to talk to Kate seizes him. He wants her there to explain, in her controlled, adult way, to the detectives — one of whom clearly thinks Ray’s hiding something by the way he says “discrepancies” — that Ray loved the girls as his own, that he couldn’t have ever harmed them, that he wants to kill the men who did, even though he isn’t capable of violence, except for the one instance after a friend’s wedding reception when he’d drunkenly struck one of the groomsmen after an insult, bloodying his lip.

They take him to the station, put him in a little room with a table and cold plastic chairs. Can you tell us what happened that night? the detectives ask again. When you went by to get the deposit? There are forty-seven minutes he can’t explain. The money was never picked up, the deposit never made. He feels his blood quicken as if he’d risen up out of bed too fast. He’s dizzy. His ankles throb. He can still feel the houseboat rocking unsteadily on the water beneath him. He grabs the table leg for ballast. Oh my sweet Lord, he says, and puts his hands to his face as if they hold water. There are two things he eventually confesses: first, months before, without Kate’s knowledge, he’d raised the value of the fire insurance policies on the ice cream shop. A terrible coincidence, he admits. Terrible. But the building had old wiring, he says; he needed to protect them all from ruin. And two: from time to time — including that night — he’d been fucking Sarah Haven, the insurance agent who sold him the policy.

The Ray in Kate’s head will not stop talking. All his words the shapes of things he would have done.

I will go away, Kate thinks. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too.

11

MICHAEL SOMETIMES REIMAGINES his brother Andrew’s last conscious minutes. He conjures up a single, wavering moment among many now inevitable ones that gives Andrew pause. Saves him from bad luck. Instead of coming through the house’s side door, where he’ll be surprised by the owner, Andrew works his way through the gate and around to the back of the house and hears, through an open window, the murmuring of a baseball game on the radio. The veteran announcer’s soothing voice is one Andrew has heard for years. Never impatient or hurried. Even on bad days — a blown save or key dropped ball — there is always some possibility of redemption in it. Andrew, standing there in front of the den window with his duffel bag of tools that says simpatico appliance repair, can see a fish tank in the corner of the den, its bluish light undulating on the ceiling above. Though there aren’t any other lights on in the house and the radio announcer seems to be talking to himself, Andrew thinks: Not today. This one doesn’t feel quite right. And he makes his way back to his car parked down the street, drives on home, his face intact.

But sometimes it seemed to Michael that it wasn’t chance or luck. That there were no decisive moments that could have tipped things one way or another. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible cord threaded through them all, pulling them along. When he was eleven, his dad showed him a glossy magazine photo of a group of Hindu men on a religious pilgrimage. A dozen hooks pierced the skin of their chests and attached to the hooks were taut colorful ropes being pulled by someone outside the photo. “Whenever you think someone has you by the short hairs, remember this,” his dad had said, tapping the photo and laughing. But as a kid, the photo had fascinated and terrified Michael. The men’s faces knotted in pain that was also a kind of ecstasy. Their bodies leaning forward, as if into a strong wind.

“But where are they going?” he’d asked his dad.

“Up the mountain,” his dad said, leaving it at that.

Later, he’d taken the photo from his dad’s dresser and tried to duplicate the hooks and ropes in the bathroom with some safety pins and kite string. But when his chest started bleeding he’d passed out and hit his head on the toilet seat.

Michael was living in an apartment on the east side when the detectives found him, five years after the murders. First, there were the bad portents: the series of odd phone calls with nothing but buzzing on the line, two strange men asking about him at his daughter’s preschool, then the carefully handwritten note in green ink under his car wiper blade: Are you the do-right man?

He hadn’t been hard to find, he supposed, considering the detectives had talked to his wife, Lucinda, who’d abandoned them two months before. For the first month of their trial separation — as Michael still called it — Lucinda would call in the evening and they’d plod through Alice’s bedtime routine with exaggerated goodwill. He’d bribed Alice with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and sodas so she’d speak to Lucinda. Sometimes there would be long silences on the other end and he suspected Lucinda of falling asleep with her mouth open like she did after too much wine. Then something changed. Lucinda’s calls took on a manic edge — she phoned at all hours, sometimes claiming he’d stolen Alice from her and threatening to get her back. She said he’d better be careful. She said she had him figured out. Michael began to worry about her abducting Alice from school at recess or lunch, and so he sometimes made impromptu visits to the school office around these times — claiming he needed to drop off a jacket or Alice’s left-behind chocolate milk — to quiet his anxiety.

A few times on the phone Lucinda had prompted him with people’s names, places in Austin where they used to live or hang out years before. She even mentioned the murders, saying she’d seen one of the girls’ parents on the news leading up to the fifth anniversary. Something about a memorial fund. “Can you imagine?” Lucinda had said. He asked her why the fuck was she bringing all this up now? Often during these conversations, Alice, as if on cue, would begin calling him from her room: Could he turn the closet light on? Flip her pillow over? Brush her teeth again because she didn’t want a gold tooth like his? On the phone, Lucinda would pivot suddenly, confess that she made a mistake, that she missed the old days. She needed Alice back in her life. She was sorry for accusing him of stealing Alice. Sorry for the way she’d acted. She had a sponsor at AA now, she said. He should go too. Then he’d hear her inhale softly — almost mournfully — on her cigarette and could see her lying in some stranger’s bed (her sponsor’s, probably), the ashtray balanced on her bare belly, the shadowed curve of her breast. He’d say it all would be okay, they’d come through this, if they just learned to trust each other. This was their job now, he said, rebuilding that trust. Part of him actually believed it.

For the past few months, Michael had worked at straddling the gaping hole Lucinda had left in their heads. Sometimes he did this by taking Alice to a kid matinee at the Paramount Theater. Sometimes by picking up Lucinda’s slack at the YMCA Preschool parents’ day or taking on extra hours working at the men’s residence while Alice was there. Sometimes he and Alice would make space ships and submarines from duct tape and discarded boxes they found in the alley behind the apartment. But most of the time Michael spanned Lucinda’s absence by levitating on vodka tonics and her left-behind anxiety pills. They’d watch too much bad TV and laugh too loudly and long at his downstairs Korean neighbor’s jokes, which Alice didn’t understand but laughed at anyway, like the one about a Korean restaurant manager and the missing neighborhood dog.

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