Silence followed his announcement. The feeling of guilt spread like poison up Dylan’s esophagus. Maybe he was carsick, but he didn’t think so. The silence stretched. Miles slid by, fields green with summer air so clear and sweet the birds sang with it. Dylan was going to cry if he didn’t watch it. Like a little kid.
“I kept the house like it was,” Rich said finally. “I thought you’d want to come home.”
Why would anybody think he wanted to go home? Home is where the heart is.
Dylan pictured his heart, out of his body, lying in the bloody hallway beside the mutilated corpse of his sister. The vision was as brief as it was toxic. He shoved the picture back into the recesses of his mind. These were things he’d worked at not seeing for years, worked to keep Kowalski from dragging up. He’d gotten good at it.
He said nothing, just kept looking out of the window. Cows were grazing by the road. If he could choose a life, that would be the one he picked, the life of a cow munching grass never knowing one day it would be hamburger.
“I can see why you might not want to go back to Rochester, son,” the man in the backseat said carefully.
The “son” grated on Dylan. He was nobody’s son.
“Reentering life on the outside is hard. Lots of boys don’t acclimatize. Maybe even most boys. They end up back inside. I hope that’s not the case with you, but it could be.”
Dylan thought about that for a while. It wasn’t news. In his seven years in Drummond he’d seen the revolving door spinning, kids in, and out, and in again. Mostly, they came back boasting about the time they’d had outside, like they were sailors back on the ship bragging about their conquests during shore leave. He could do that-boost a car or get in a fist fight and get himself thrown back in jail. The state or federal pen this time. He was eighteen.
“Guaranteed,” Dylan said.
“Why? You’ve got no more family to do in but me,” Rich said. He laughed, but the words were sharp as knives. Dylan had hurt his feelings; he’d not appreciated what his brother had done for him, continued to do for him.
“Fistfights,” he said succinctly. “In Rochester I’ll be fighting all the time. Eventually, I’ll kill somebody.” There was no boast there; it was just fact. Dylan was big and he was strong. Hit somebody wrong, and they were dead.
Nobody argued with that.
After a time Rich said, “I got you enrolled in the junior college where I went. You don’t want to sling hash all your life do you?”
“You have to go to college, son,” said the brown suit from the backseat. “Phil Maris said you were one of the smartest kids he’d ever taught. You don’t want to waste that on fistfights and the like.”
College. The word rang through Dylan, reverberating like the morning bell at Drummond. Guys in Drummond didn’t go to college; guys bound for the pen at eighteen didn’t think about it any more than they thought about flying out the window on a magic carpet.
The one true, clean, linear joy he’d had in Drummond was Phil and math class.
Phil hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. He’d never even written.
For Dylan the peaceful order of planes, dimensions, numbers doing precisely what they should eventually returned. Phil Maris never did. Until now, Dylan figured he’d forgotten about him.
“College?” He said it so softly Mr. Leonard, in the backseat, didn’t hear him.
“Why not?” Rich said. “I can afford it.”
“They let guys like me do that?”
Mr. Leonard caught up with the flow of ideas. “It could be done,” he said slowly.
“Not in Rochester. Not in Minnesota,” Dylan insisted.
Richard laughed. It wasn’t the bitter laugh he often had; it was a good, fat laugh, like he’d thought of some grand scheme, something cool to do.
“Hey, the winters are too damned cold up here anyway,” he said.
LOUISIANA, 2007
Andrea Yates. Drowns five kids. I can’t condemn the woman. I can’t even get up a good steam of outrage. How can anybody blame her? She’s young, alone, depressed; her husband is off at his job but micromanages her life. She can’t send the kids to school. There’s no money for help. She’s supposed to be teaching them lessons. The whole religion thing is coming down on her.
Then a voice tells her there’s a way out.
You’ve got to hand it to Andrea. She fought the voice. Tried to get help. Told her husband she had thoughts of killing her kids. That must have taken courage. Jesus, is there any worse thing that a woman can admit? Nobody helped her, or not enough, and she landed back with that killing pressure.
And the voice, telling her there’s a way out.
Poor woman must have been so desperate by that point, I doubt she could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Her reality was insane, so insanity looked logical.
The voice gets pushier. The kids get wilder. She thinks she’s a lousy mother, and anything’s got to be better for the kids than a lousy mother.
Then, one day, the voice wins. She drowns them because there is no other choice left.
I admire Andrea Yates. Not for the killings, but for the heroism and strength she showed in fighting insanity in an attempt to save them. Had anyone stepped in and helped her with this battle the kids would have survived. And so would Ms. Yates’s mind.
22
Married. Standing on the cathedral steps at twilight, watching the lights come on around the square, Polly resisted the urge to look at the rings on her left hand. A breeze filtered through the cooling bodies of the tourists ruffling her hair. Letting the magic take her as she always did when she came for a reading, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The French Quarter smelled like a traveling carnivaclass="underline" cotton candy with a whiff of naughty sex, stale beer, and urine dressed up with French perfume, and running through it like a current of unstoppable life, a mother on a rampage, a teenaged girl on a tear, the smell of the river.
On such a fine evening the tarot card readers were out in force, lined up umbrella to umbrella in a postpsychedelic mushroom patch, facing off against the gleaming white stone of St. Louis, the forces of the old magic in tawdry defiance of the Christian interloper. While debating which reader to patronize, Polly wondered what the cards would say. For years they’d hinted at a mystery man waiting in her future to sweep her off her feet. There’d been men and there’d been mystery but only with Marshall had she been swept away. Surely the Lovers would be in her reading, and the World, and the Moon. Polly smiled. Love had made her such a fool.
Two girls-children in Polly’s eyes but of the age she’d been the first time she’d come to Jackson Square-rose from a table tucked between the benches opposite the cathedral doors. They were tricked out in the unfortunate fashion that decreed female children dress as prostitutes in a world full of predators.
The girls looked around like actors searching for an audience, then, catching her eye, the bolder of the two-at least that was what Polly surmised from the acreage of skin exposed-called, “If you’re going to get a reading, you should go to the Woman in Red.”
“The fat-fat one,” the second girl said rudely, but at least quietly.
“The Woman in Red,” the first girl repeated insistently, “is truly awe-some.” Stretching out an arm displaying half a dozen bracelets, she pointed to the table they had just vacated. There a voluminous woman-the very air around her swelling and rippling along with her layers of scarves-beckoned. Palms up, her screaming scarlet nails waggled as if she tickled a trout from midair.