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  When she goes outside to retrieve him, he’s gone again. Overhead, the cloud cover has dropped so low that Kate can feel its pressure. She thinks of the dead woman—Sonia Lowery Senn—and of the wounded family. What must their extra night be like?

  A light comes on above her, in Hartley’s bedroom window, and Glennis appears, her body divided into pieces behind the lead grillwork in the glass. She looks doubtfully out at the darkening world. Then the light goes out.

  //

  In the morning, Neelish cooks eggs and bacon for them before excusing himself to the shower. Kate can only stomach the toast. In certain moments she feels like she’s sitting across the table from her younger self. In others, she can’t stand Glennis’s chewing sounds, or the way the girl’s necklace—a silver chain with either a cross or some kind of pagan rune on it—keeps slipping out of and back into the scooped neck of her sweater every time she dips to her plate.

  “So did you find God?” Kate asks. “When you got sober?”

  Glennis lifts her orange juice to her mouth.

  “The last time I visited Hartley,” Kate continues, “I asked if he’d found God, you know, in prison, and do you know what he said?”

  Glennis puts her glass down, shakes her head.

  Kate breaks off a wedge of toast and chews it carefully. Her teeth ache from grinding all night. “Hartley told me that the church services are run by a man who murdered all his children.”

  Glennis pushes her plate away, wipes her mouth. “The baby is Hartley’s.”

  “Okay.”

  “It couldn’t be anyone else’s.”

  “I believe you.”

  Glennis looks at the chair where Neelish sat with her the day before. Kate looks at it too. All night she told herself it might be best if Neelish stays at home for this. Glennis too. The fewer people the better, for Hartley’s sake. Months ago, she envisioned a grand welcoming party with refreshments and catered food. A criminal’s cotillion. She even tracked down Hartley’s father. But that notion has eroded, so much so that she actually spent time last night talking herself out of hiding Glennis’s car keys and sneaking away on her own.

  Kate clears her throat. “Neelish said Hartley doesn’t know about the child?”

  Glennis nods.

  “I don’t feel good about keeping such a thing from my son.”

  “I don’t either,” Glennis says. “But I don’t want to overwhelm him.”

  //

  As Kate puts the key into the ignition, it seems certain not to start. This will be the thing that keeps her from seeing her boy for yet another day. And when the engine does turn over, she assumes it’ll be the next thing—a sudden highway closure, a blown tire, an accident. With each passing moment in which calamity does not strike, the remaining miles become all the more precarious.

  They take the tollway around the outer edge of the city, south then west, eventually onto a rural two-lane highway where the wind jostles the trucks. Neelish has assigned himself the backseat, and so Glennis buttons her way up and down the radio dial to find calm, inspiring beats. Occasionally a tune ends and a voice breaks in with report of bad weather, but after the first few warnings of evening storms Glennis clips the intrusions to a syllable or less.

  They approach the exit for Wicklow. The blue Gas/Food/Lodging sign has spaces for six placards, but there’s only a single marker for an off-brand gas station. As they pass the turnoff, Glennis sighs.

  Several miles after Wicklow, they exit the highway and drive through Triton, then onto a stretch of country blacktop whose singular destination, as far as Kate knows, is Grassland State Prison. DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS signs float by. They pass through rings of barbed fencing, fields of yellowing prairie.

  “Did you ever notice,” Neelish says, “there isn’t a single pothole on this road?”

  They stop at the final ring of fencing, where a guard sits inside a glass booth. Beyond this is a fifty-foot corridor of chain-link leading to the building from which Hartley will soon emerge. Checking her watch, Kate sees that there are only minutes to go. He must already be out of his cell and through stages of processing. She imagines him walking down cinder-block hallways flanked by lawmen, guards who protected him because they knew he didn’t belong among the murderers and rapists. He’s left the relics of incarceration behind in the cell, his clothes and soap and books. As he walks toward freedom he must feel those dormant abilities that once served him so well returning at long last—his cordial speech, his boyish composure, the way he puts others at ease when money is at stake.

  Neelish gets out to retrieve the sandwiches from the trunk. In the rearview, she watches him stretch his back, a bank of gnarled thunderheads on the horizon behind him. Nearby, a family of women and children sit on the tailgate of a pickup truck. In the space next to them, an old man talks to himself in the cab of a gray compact.

  Glennis looks at her watch. But then there’s a buzzing sound and movement behind the crisscrossing steel link. Doors swing open. Colors and shapes. Blue jeans. The inflated khaki torsos of guards. A tall inmate with a shaved head comes to the gate, staring out as a guard works with his keys. Behind him, Hartley shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The women and children rush across the foreground, but Kate hesitates, staying in her seat. It feels risky somehow. She doesn’t want to clog her boy’s release with an overexcited approach. The fenced corridor is so narrow that the guard can barely open the gate with this family in the way. When the door finally swings outward the scene crystallizes. Two men are being let out today, Hartley and this well-loved other.

  Kate turns to look at Glennis, who has her hand on the door handle but doesn’t open it. Let him come on his own. He’ll recognize the Camry, years beyond its prime, retained for this day’s purpose.

  The door of the gray compact beside them opens and the old man steps out, unsteady on his feet. He surveys the scene at the gate, a grievous look bunching his face. The joyous family moves aside and Hartley comes through, a clear plastic bag hanging from his fist. The old man takes a few tentative steps out into the space between Kate’s car and the gate. His hands jam around in his pants pockets. He squints. His shoulders droop. Kate wants to get out now, to tell the poor fellow that she understands the problem, that sometimes the one you’re waiting for gets held an extra day.

  Hartley walks by the old man, nodding as he passes, always such a polite boy. Kate rescans the lot for Hartley’s father, relieved now that Billy hasn’t made it. This boy is hers, and she takes all the credit for his humanity and good sense. This episode of manslaughter and whatever horrors the last four years have brought upon him are past him now, locked away for good behind the closing gate.

  Glennis’s door bucks open and she runs out to her husband. They hug without kissing. At first it seems odd to Kate that they don’t kiss, but as their clutch carries on and on she understands that a careful connection of lips would be impossible in this moment of pure embrace. They learned to kiss each other as nineteen-year-old kids, in a different life entirely. These are adults Kate watches, hardened by time and trouble. She now desperately wants them to come home with her, together, for as long as they please. They can live in his bedroom. Perhaps it’s exactly what they need, to be teenagers again, to be cooked for and to sleep away afternoons on her couch.

  Finally a sliver of air opens between their bodies, and Kate focuses on Glennis’s belly, still small but not entirely flat. And beyond Glennis, watching the scene with peculiar intensity, the old man lingers restlessly.

  Glennis leads Hartley to Kate, and as she hugs her boy the anger breaks off inside her and dissolves. Neelish’s arms close around them both.

  When they’re all in the car—Hartley and Glennis together in back, Neelish now in the passenger seat—Kate offers her son a sandwich.

  “What kind?” he asks.

  But Kate has made every possible kind.

  “Actually,” the boy says. “What I really need is to pee.”

  A simple re
quest. But as Kate puts the Camry into gear she finds the old man standing in front of her, just a few feet off the bumper, staring into the car, his hands still in his pockets. She moves the shifter into gear, goes hand over hand on the wheel.

  “It’s okay,” she calls to him through the open window. “This happened to us yesterday. They sometimes keep them one day longer. I don’t know why. It’s terrible.”

  The old man says nothing. He looks sick in the stomach. Far beyond him, green thunderheads stir the horizon. He opens his mouth to speak. His hand comes out of his pocket, a glint of metal, keys perhaps. He looks into the backseat of the Camry, crouching to see inside. Kate releases the brake and they’re moving again, down the smooth blacktop. In the rearview, she sees the old man hobble to his car.

  She pauses at the gate. The guard waves cheerfully as if this has only been an extended social visit. Unexpectedly, Hartley waves back. These are his friends now. Armed guards and cellmates. At some point he’ll begin talking about his time in Grassland and this waving brute with the shotgun will be a character in one of his stories. The past will follow. It must. And the old man follows too, taking a right and then a left, holding firm two lengths back, his knuckles as white as open bone. And there’s a look on his face, as if he’s crying. He’s gone insane with disappointment, made to wait an extra day for his own son. As Kate tries to lose him—left against the red arrow, an aggressive merge, a sudden exit—she imagines the old fool will take anyone’s child, anything not to have to wait the extra day.

  “Why are we heading to Wicklow?” Glennis asks.

  “I really do have to pee,” says Hartley.

  Kate puts more weight on the accelerator. The old man keeps up. He holds himself tight to the wheel. He’s right on their bumper as they brake for a stoplight.

  “Is that guy following us?” Glennis asks.

  Kate’s afraid to turn and look directly. Neelish does turn. The old man is unfazed by the attention. She wants to call Hartley’s father now to tell him it’s okay he didn’t make it to the release, and to ask him what to do about a distraught old man on their bumper.

  “Don’t,” says Hartley. “Mom, you can’t call the cops. I’m on parole. I can’t deal with more badges already. I just can’t.”

  Kate lowers her cell phone at the stoplight. She turns around to see the fear on her boy’s face, to look directly into the eyes of the brazen pursuer. Glennis turns too, twisting in the seat, the belt drawing firm against her rounded belly, and Kate understands about the unborn child’s own past, already mounting against it—conceived in prison, a convict for a father, an umbilical connection to a mother one weak moment away from bingeing on poison.

  Kate looks forward. The light turns green.

  PATIENT HISTORY

  The last time her father traveled to Asia for business, Glennis threw a party at the house. A final stab at popularity in the waning months of high school. A dining room chair got broken and a boy threw up in the potted fern. Worst of all, the football whore, Astrid Sallingham, had sex with Tad Bucknell on Glennis’s bed. This tryst left an invisible stain on the wall, which the full moon’s light would uncover as a reminder that yet another month had passed without Glennis shedding her own virginity.

  Her father, who wasn’t due home until the end of the week, had promised to bring back a soapstone carving he said would dress up a dorm room perfectly. He’d filled out her application to the University of Illinois himself, even writing the personal essay—four hundred words on how having a mother murdered by a serial killer had defined Glennis’s character. Or how it had not defined her character. She couldn’t remember which, only that he’d used the phrase “for all intensive purposes.” Her father was a lanky, forgivable man, eternally sunburned, with only three Korean phrases with which to negotiate the streets of Seoul—Good morning; I’m honored by your presence; I’d rather not go to another sex club.

  Staring at the stain on the wall, she wondered how it might really be, her first time, how it might’ve been with Tad, if only. And then, instead, her thoughts moved on to the man who sold trailers, of his stone-washed jeans and his chipped-tooth smile, of the way he’d roll up his T-shirt sleeve while watching football and rub the meaty blade of his throwing shoulder. The man who sold trailers was from Wicklow, where Glennis had lived as a small child, before her mother died. She couldn’t remember much about the town, and whenever she tried to conjure it, her mind replayed the time when, still in the early throes of grief, her father had pulled over to steal a puppy from someone’s front yard on their way out of town. “Here,” he’d said to Glennis, dumping the animal through the car window onto her lap, tears wobbling in his eyes. “You need to take something decent away from this place.”

  Downstairs, Kidnap gazed out the window. The disheveled gray mutt looked desperate to be gone, but when Glennis opened the sliding glass door he ranged only a few feet out onto the patio to lie down and mope from there.

  There wasn’t anything to do in the suburbs in June with a geriatric dog to feed, so Glennis had taken up drinking, but with an eye toward recovery. She looked forward to becoming benevolently culted by the AA crowd or the born-again Christians, as it would be an opportunity to disavow old lives and maybe even recapture her virginity, assuming it would have gone astray by then. Her mother had been a drinker too, she’d heard, and judging by the incredible good time the woman appeared to be having in old photographs—always toasting the camera, always surrounded by boys near a keg, always smiling, smiling, smiling—it seemed to have brought her a level of popularity and happiness that Glennis still aspired to.

  After a bowl of cereal and a juice glass of Beefeater, she put Kidnap in the Lumina and drove to the King Midas Mall. With the gin warming her cheeks and the dog smiling into the wind, Glennis made brave calculations for both their futures. “We’ll be free and unattached,” she told the dog. “We’ll see the world!” In the mall parking lot, she made a sign reading, FREE DOG, JUST TAKE, taped it to Kidnap’s collar, and let him out.

  “You first, boy!”

  //

  The mall was the best place to spend the money her father left her because it promised chunks of time passing—long lines at the register, a three-hour movie, a giant wheatgrass smoothie. As she strolled past a store full of reeking candles and psychedelic tapestries, Glennis spotted a Lava lamp in the window and decided it should be hers. The icy blue blobs floating in the darker blue liquid would perfectly illuminate the aqua tones of the U.S. Navy poster on her bedroom wall.

  “Good for a dorm room,” said the stoned register clerk. He wrapped his hands in Grateful Dead T-shirts and lowered the hot glass tube into the Styrofoam packaging.

  She always stopped by the Navy recruitment kiosk, which had been moved from its spot by the food court to a new place near the Twin Cinema. Her favorite guy wasn’t working. Instead, Petty Officer Fontana stood in the vestibule peddling brochures.

  “Don’t need one,” she said. “I’m already thinking of signing up. I turn eighteen later this week.”

  “You know,” said Fontana, “you can sign up early with a parent’s consent.”

  “I want to do it myself,” Glennis said. “It’ll be more official that way.” Over the officer’s shoulder, she noticed the recruitment kiosk was now sharing space with a press-on nail booth. “Why’d they move you to this end of the mall?”

  “Vandals.” Fontana’s stern gaze tracked a stream of shoppers down the escalator. “We kept finding Taco Bell in the cabinets.”

  Glennis spun away, constructing an image of herself on a ship deck somewhere bright and exotic, a glittering port city on the horizon beneath the steel buttresses of America’s long guns.

  Across the vestibule, the football whore Astrid Sallingham stepped off the escalator and waved, boutique bags sliding up her arm. Glennis’s naval reverie dissolved.

  “Is it obvious, Glen?” Astrid turned to show her profile.

  Glennis wondered if perhaps there’d been a nose jo
b, a tuck of some kind. “What the hell are you talking about, Astrid?”

  Fontana pressed closer to their conversation. His stomach whinnied.

  “I’m pregnant.” Astrid pushed her belly out. “I’m not sure it was worth it, Glen.” She pursed her mouth, opened it at one end, and blew air into her bangs, looking like the exhausted mother of twelve she’d probably someday be. “Just one night of fun, huh. Oh well, in the end it will have been something great, I bet.” She looked down at the bulge under her shirt, frowned, then marched off toward the Maternal Flame.

  “Do you believe that?” Glennis asked.

  Fontana tracked Astrid until she’d disappeared behind a display of maternity bikinis. “Yep,” he finally said, “I believe I’d have done her as well.”

  //

  In the parking lot, Kidnap lay in the shade of the Lumina’s bumper, wagging his tail at Glennis’s approach. Scraps of the Free Dog sign hung from his maw. She gave him a good petting and poured the last of her water bottle into his mouth, then got in the car and sped away. In the mirror, Kidnap didn’t chase. He only reared back and sat down, angling his head curiously at the sound the tires were making.

  She considered this a preview of what it might be like to get on a ship for the first time and watch her father grow smaller and smaller on the shore. At this, Astrid came back to mind, the child in her belly growing bigger and bigger, then the memory of how Glennis’s bed had looked after Astrid and Tad Bucknell had been screwing on it, the scrunched white sheets, the stuffed animals piled into a cairn-like sex perch. What had at the time seemed merely gross now struck Glennis as more cruelly ironic—that her virgin’s mattress had facilitated a conception.

  //

  When she got home, Glennis called the man who sold trailers and said, “This is it, Rick. This is your chance. I’m saying I’d like to see you.”

  Rick LaForge was a high school friend of her father’s, an old football pal whose name came last on the emergency contacts list.