White Vespa

Forty



31 June





Myles gingerly arranged his leather pack for a headrest and leaned back in the black, juniper shade. He closed his eyes. “I could sleep,” he said.

Jim sat on a rock nearby, looking uncomfortable. “Weren’t you the one suggested this little hike? Stroll, I think you said. Stroll overland to the sea at Ayios Vassílios. That was a stroll?”

“Bit more strenuous than that, as it turns out,” Myles allowed.

“As it turns out.”

“I could sleep.”

“You said that.”

Myles opened his eyes. “Okay, I’m awake. So entertain me.”

A grey-vested crow, a chough, flew into the next juniper and started in, lowering its head, cawing what sounded like disapproval.

“Pretty good trick,” Myles said. “Can you do it again?”

Two more choughs settled in and soon they were making a real racket.

“Very good!” Myles said approvingly.

Jim twisted up his face and spoke in his professor’s voice:

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

“And you quote! But Wallace Stevens, you surprise me. And those choughs are black birds, sure enough, but they’re not blackbirds.”

“Careful,” Jim said, “or I’ll quote the other twelve ways.”

“When’s Michael getting back?” Myles asked.

“Couple of days. He’s showing Blue around Rhodes.”

“Ródhos.”

“Are we getting snobby about Greek place names?” Jim said.

Myles didn’t answer; he was peering into his pack. “Shouldn’t really carry lunch in with the cameras,” he observed, shaking bread crumbs off his battered Nikon. “So what are they looking at?”

“On Rhodes?”

Myles nodded.

“The regular,” Jim said, “the castle, Valley of the Butterflies, Líndos.”

“God, Líndos, white Líndos, that is a beautiful place in spite of the tourists, all them English!”

“But not a lesser Dodecanese?” Jim asked.

“No,” Myles said. “Where’d Michael’s sister get that name, Blue?”

“Parents big Joni Mitchell fans . . .”

“But Blue Darling?” Myles laughed, “She won’t be needing a stage name.”

“Sweet kid, though, and a stunner.”

“Yup. And real young.”

“Sixteen, just,” Jim said.

“Bit of a problem for you and Michael, I’d say.”

“Big problem.”

They stood, shoes off, with their feet in the water. Myles had left his pack in the shade of a large rock and waded out, slowly, trying to stay clear of the purple urchins until it was deep enough to swim. The water was cold but clear as gin, and he was hot and wanted it. Jim had on a broad straw hat and did not intend to swim, but even wading found the sea wonderfully cool.

“Okay, it was worth the walk out,” he said, “but maybe not the walk back.”

“I’ll buy you dinner when we get back, if you’ll stop mewling,” Myles said, and then he plunged forward, the light all mercury on the surface as he frog-kicked underwater, holding his breath, reaching forward into the cool, liquid light, and then pulling himself through. He wasn’t a swimmer, wouldn’t even get into a pool, but in the Aegean he swam often. He pushed his head through the surface and rolled onto his back, blind because his glasses were with his pack and because the sun dazzled him. But he liked that glittering blindness, and he splashed around for a few minutes before joining Jim in the shade.

“So, how’s it going with Anne?”

“Well, I think,” Myles said.

“You think?”

“There’s a darkness in her, something big and untouchable. It gets in the way.”

“You knew that going in,” Jim said.

“Not that it was untouchable.”

“Come on, Myles, that kind of darkness is always untouchable, beyond help, you knew that. If you were drawn to her, you were drawn to that. Face it.”

“She’s almost told me what it’s made of a couple of times. It was right there. I could feel it pressing on the air between us.”

“What if she did?” Jim said. “What can really be told? She could tell you everything she could tell, and it would still be there, untouchable.”

“Maybe,” Myles said.

“Maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe. Sometimes it seems that the darkness is just there, that our disasters are only occasions, and there are always occasions, that the darkness will find a way in. But sometimes it seems that the darkness is made. That it’s people who make it. And I’d prefer it that way, because that would mean there might be something to do about it. I want there to be something to do.” Myles’ voice had deepened, gotten sad. “If you say the hurt in Anne is untouchable, and I know I said it myself, that means there is nothing to do but take the darkness or let her go.”

They sat in the blue shade of a boulder, suddenly quiet. Myles’ head inclined toward Jim’s, as if he was listening or waiting to listen. The rippling reflections off the restless sea played over them like stage fire.

In the unstill light, Jim looked forlorn. “Probably,” he said, “probably those are your choices.”





Forty-one



4 July





Blue felt the last of her awkwardness ease as her body got fluid, her limbs finding their stride on the treadmill. A half-smile played on her pursed lips. She sank into her body, her fleetness; this must be, she thought, something like yoga or meditation, but moving. Her eyes half-closed, the open door across from her no more than a rectangle of spilled light.

Michael worked quickly, mostly with free weights; he knew gyms and Sými’s gym wasn’t much, but he could do enough here to stay fit. He looked over at Blue between sets. He didn’t know her very well; she was so much younger, the daughter of his father’s second marriage. That she was here, that he was more or less her chaperone for a big chunk of summer, struck him as unlikely. His father’s suggestion that he should look after her had come as a surprise, and he wondered what it meant, if it portended another divorce or if perhaps his father was sick. He hadn’t asked, just said, Sure, and here she was, showing an effortless stride on the treadmill, seemingly carefree.

There weren’t many teenagers on Sými, but she didn’t seem to mind. She liked adults, talking to Michael and to Jim. And reading. She was forever trading in one book for another at the lending library run out of See You Travel, near Vapori, reading on the beach, in bed, probably, Michael thought, even in the shower. And if she wasn’t reading she was writing, pages every day in a journal she guarded carefully. Perhaps she was painfully intelligent, as teenagers can be. She was certainly observant, had already collected quite a hoard of potshards, Byzantine and classical clay. She said quite confidently that before the summer was over she’d make a big find. Michael found Blue no trouble at all, or wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Jim. Sometimes he wanted to be alone with Jim.

The doorway darkened, and Paul stepped in. He glanced at Blue, swung his head around and saw Michael. He nodded. Michael was doing sit-ups, a five kilo plate tucked behind his head. Every time he came up he saw Paul, fussing with a weight machine, for pull downs, but not doing many.

“Need some help?”

“Thanks, no,” Paul said, “just looking for a weight that feels right.” He watched Michael, Michael’s easy way with the weights. “Spend a lot of time in the gym?” he asked.

“What it takes. I enjoy it, no bullshit. Especially after a day that’s had more bullshit in it than I can stand.”

Blue’s eyes, Michael noticed, had come into focus. She was watching Paul.

“Have a lot of days like that?” Paul asked.

“Not so many, but enough.”

“What do you mean, No bullshit?”

“You can’t charm the weights. Know what I mean?” Michael said. “You got to actually lift them or they stay put. Winking don’t help.”

“No wonder I’m having a problem,” Paul said. “Must be why they call them dumbbells,” he added, smiling his best smile.

“Must be.”





“You don’t like him?” Blue said, as they walked back toward their rooms.

“Well, no.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a user. Nobody gets to know him without paying a price,” Michael answered, speaking slowly.

“I like him,” Blue announced.

“You don’t know him.”

“But I want to,” she said.

“I think he’s all tied up just now with Katerina and Alexandra.”

“You think they tie him up?” she teased.

Michael smiled wearily. “Yeah, I think they probably do.”





Forty-two



4 July





Anne woke from a dream, another girlhood dream. She was out by herself in the little outboard, the Puget Sound running against her, trying to bring the boat to shore. She could see the red-barked madroñas on the hillside and a house, the house she’d grown up in, big but getting smaller as the boat was sucked out on the tide. Anne groaned. She felt tired, exhausted by her memories and the way they came back at her uncalled, as dreams. Always the tide too strong, taking her out, away. The familiar world sinking into the horizon beyond the boat’s blue bow.

She rolled onto her side, crossing her arms across her chest. She was awake now and the fear was gone. She let the dream come back, seeing again the house where she and Paul had been children. She remembered her parents coming home late in long, smooth Cadillacs. Two of them, in the double garage, like monstrous twins. Five days a week, sometimes six, they drove to the dock on Bainbridge to take the ferry into Seattle and the offices where they were lawyers, partners. Their world over there in the city had only the palest reality for Anne growing up on the island, where the smell of the Sound was so real, the green woods threaded with trails. Seattle shone by day like a mirage over the water, on days when it was visible at all, and at night it was no more than a lower heaven, a dense cluster of stars dropped into the small hills of the mainland. Sometime after dark her parents would return, the big cars whispering into the drive and the garage doors scrolling up to let them in. They came home half drunk, drank on the ferry over, and drank some more after they arrived home. When they were there, she and Paul were expected to snap to. But the children were very loosely supervised, left to fend for themselves at an age when other families would have employed a sitter. Anne strayed, on horseback or in the boat, her attention going everywhere, to the deer she surprised in pocket meadows, to the jays in the trees. The world, its animals and fishes, its trees and wild orchids, these things spoke to her louder than her parents or her brother. She knew where to find oysters on the flats at low tide, where to dig razor clams or rake steamers. She had knelt at the gunnels to watch the pulsing jellyfish, so luminescent in the green sea water. She’d been the one brave enough to follow the rain-soaked man who occasionally dug an obscene gooey duck.

She hadn’t known to ask if she was happy. She’d been interested, involved in living, and more than anything she felt nostalgia for that, for that previous and intenser life.

Anne touched her feet to the still cool floor. Made contact. Maybe, she thought, it was just childhood she missed, the greater awareness of someone new to the world. No matter who you were, you lost that.





Forty-three



Together, they entered. Not knowing it, they accommodated themselves to the way life was lived on Sými, an island life, a summer world. It was a world that didn’t exist in winter, when Sými closed like a great clamshell. That was a shuttered world, when only Sýmiots walked the cold alleys. In summer, the winter residents were submerged in a tide of visitors. Then Sými seemed a world without history and the things that were old no more than a stage set for the hordes just born as they stepped off the boat. And every new world smells a little like paradise.

But at best the summer crowd was reborn, for they’d been born before and lived elsewhere and arrived on Sými each carrying their own load of history. First in that load was a sense of order, and it was this as much as anything that made the new world take shape. People paired up. Friends were made, gatherings arranged. Newcomers were welcomed and welcomed until, quite suddenly, they were no longer welcomed. Then it was not such a new world, but too much like the old one left behind.

Anne would waken in her bed or in Myles’, hearing the rough purr of his scooter returning from the bakery. She began to eat. Something like happiness flickered at the edge of her consciousness, something she didn’t have faith enough to believe in. A softness stole over her. Myles, with, as he said, heart enough left to break, seemed radiant as morning. He wanted to be forever bearing gifts, simple things, that flesh-hot bread and pats of yellow butter, a spoon of berry jam, a painted pottery shard, a sea-washed pebble, a fist full of spices plucked wild from the rough hills of Sými. And his body, which he wanted to give.

So he, too, turned up at the gym, joined Michael and Jim and fleet Blue and Paul. By the middle of summer sometimes it seemed like the place was theirs. Michael, by then, was not only working out but working as a trainer for all of them, even for Paul. The owner greeted them as regulars and asked their opinions about possible improvements. After the gym, there was often an hour at Vapori, where Kat and Alexandra and sometimes Anne might be waiting for them, ready to praise them if not to join them. They laughed together, they laughed alone.

Picnics were arranged, money pooled and a boat hired to take them to a secluded inlet with just sand enough for a few beach towels. Often Myles took his camera and hiked up a goat trail, looking for photographs. Sometimes Anne went along, but often Myles hired Yórgos to carry his pack or his tripod and hiked a long ways otherwise alone. He talked to the wild-eyed goats while the goatherds eyed him suspiciously from a patch of blue shade. Anne stayed behind, snorkeling, her body casting a slim shadow on the bottom.

Blue slowly warmed to Alexandra; the more they talked the more they talked alike. Blue still sought the company of Michael and Jim or Anne and Myles, or Paul, but sometimes she liked to go off with Alex, and then they spread their towels on a sand spit of their own, whispering a little, side by side, those things they liked to say that would embarrass them if they weren’t alone. They liked to talk about Paul.

Or Jim would reserve a row of tables at To Stenáki, and they would push them all together, order a great feast, eating off the common plates and drinking too much retsina. A little too much made a festival. Then Váso would run back and forth to their table, carrying a plate of fish or squid or Greek salads in big bowls sitting there under a bright slab of féta cheese. Now that the restaurant was busy every night, Váso helped her father often, smiling sweetly as she ran up the aisles back into the kitchen. She was a great favorite. Paniyótis might come out at meal’s end with a bottle of Metaxa and pour a round for free or send slices of watermelon and wave when they looked surprised at the arrival of yet more food.

Sometime before the eating was done Anne would get up quietly, lean over Myles’ shoulder and kiss his cheek, and they would decide if he would meet her later at Two Stories or wait for her at home. Then she would say goodnight and slip into the alleyway, off to work, leaving Myles a little subdued. But often the whole crowd of them, or half of them, would end the evening at Two Stories, where they were familiars of the place and treated well, not only by Anne. The owner would shout his greetings from his stool behind the upstairs bar and wave them down the stairway to the terrace, where Anne or the Aussi bartender would bring them their regular drinks without being asked. And breezes broke over the terrace until the heat of the day was washed away. Sometime, very late, they climbed the stairs up, said kaliníchte, and stepped out onto the green paving stones of the Kalí Stráta.





They sank deeply. The summer world seemed for a time unending, but they carried the end within them, each with their own calendar with a day marked on it The End. Only Myles suffered from the illusion that he was staying, imagined his calendar carried no day marked with an X.





Forty-four



17 Aug.





“I . . . I spent a lot of time on the water as a kid.” Anne said from where she’d stretched out in the bow, her voice throaty and all mixed with the throb of the inboard.

“I know you did.” Myles was sitting with his back up against the housing for the engine, a cap pulled over his eyes.

“The smell, it makes me remember.” Anne smiled, but the smile looked a little desperate.

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes I don’t want to.”

Myles’ eyes came into focus. Anne was trailing a hand in the sea as the boat pushed forward, a bow wake like a great arrowhead.

“You okay?”

She reached down into the water, the tug of it setting up a rushing, white rooster tail. She was looking through, to somewhere down below. “I haven’t been okay for a long time. I can’t even imagine it.”

The light off the broken waves fanned across her pale face, a glittering, flickering light. Her face dissolved under it, shimmered like a mirage about to wink out.

Myles went forward, knelt on the sloshing floorboards to get his head close to Anne’s. “So tell me.”

“No,” she whispered, nodding her head astern to where old Manólis stood stolid at the rudder.

“Come on, Anne, tell me.”

“Not here.” Her eyes flashed angrily.

Myles squeezed her shoulder and retreated, pulled his hat down a little lower over his dark glasses. He sat watching Anne, her face cast down, her eyes open, but she was somewhere else. Gone. Still, the broken light washed over her face in dancing gold. Myles knew he should leave her alone, let her tell him what she wanted and let that be enough. He looked away, to the shoreline on the left that passed before his eyes like a movie projected on a bed sheet. Everything steeped in watery gold. Myles craned his head around and looked back toward Pédhi then ahead, to where the inlet opened to the sea. They’d come most of the way. Once they made it to the mouth it wouldn’t be far on around to Ayía Marína.

Getting in the water often seemed to call Anne back from wherever it was she retreated to when she was feeling bad. Maybe it would turn out that way today, too. Anne had looked low from the moment he’d arrived at her room. Perhaps she’d just looked hung over. He’d squeezed orange juice for them while she slipped out of the long dark T-shirt she’d slept in and pulled on her black one-piece suit. She’d draped her long, thin arms around his neck and kissed him quietly on first one, then the other corner of his mouth. It’d been as if she was reaching from far away, her eyes not confident her arms would get there, her kisses find his warm mouth.

On the Vespa, from Sými town to Pédhi, she’d whispered in his ear, “I’m holding on tight.” When they crested the hill in Horió and started down toward Pédhi, Myles had throttled up, and felt her arms tighten on his ribs. And she’d kissed his neck. “More,” she’d said hoarsely, dreamily, as if they were in bed. But she’d drifted away again as soon as they were off the scooter, as soon as their bodies were parted.

Myles sat watching her from behind his dark glasses, but he was thinking about himself. His heart was the one that had called him to Anne, had called him to Bryn before Anne. His heart swam toward darkness, or flew, a swift dropping down a chimney, a bat turning through the narrow places in a long cave. Toward what? Toward a heart already finally broken.

Myles took off his glasses and rubbed at his stinging eyes. The sun and the wind and the sweat. He poured a little water from a blue liter bottle into the palm of his hand and splashed his face, rubbing at his eyes with the tail of his shirt. All hearts, he thought, are broken, already and finally broken. Was Anne’s heart more broken? Broken is broken and it happens every time and lasts forever. So why didn’t his love go everywhere? He laughed low and bitterly.

Anne’s eyes lifted for a moment but Myles was looking away, staring into the blur of his own myopia. People carry their grief differently, maybe. And maybe, as Jim had said, some people carry more, if only because they can. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t a question of how much, that had nothing to do with what called him to Anne. No, some griefs simply did not speak to him, were mute. And some did speak. Myles shook his head. He knew well enough how distant Anne seemed, even to him, most of the time. And yet, hopeless, Anne yearned. And somehow it is always one voice out of the general bellowing that carries the burden of our living, for us, to us. Myles heard that voice in Anne’s.

Myles grabbed at his cap and reached over the gunnels, plunging it into the rushing sea. He let it soak for a moment and then pulled it out and clapped it on his head; quick streams of cold sea water sent rushing down his neck. He gasped and through his wet sunglasses could see Anne was looking at him quizzically, amused. He smiled back, ready as he could be for a picnic and a swim.

The boat rounded land’s end; the wake bent as they bore left, running now in the passage between Sými proper and the islet of Ayía Marína. Anne spotted a small, deserted beach on the little island, and they throttled down; Manólis stood at the tiller, and their wake ran in on the beach. Anne pulled off her light shirt, stepped out of her sandals, and dove over the side, her pale body in the black suit slipping into a blue wave with barely a ripple. She was lost to Myles under the surface glare but then she showed close in. She stood up, shaking herself, and waved for Manólis to bring the boat. Myles handed out Anne’s straw basket, then he was in, too, pushing the boat back toward deeper water.

Alone, they swam. Sooner or later, they thought, they would have company on the little beach, so they swam alone while they had a chance, floating high in the salt or tumbling in antic games. Underwater, their breath escaped like weightless mercury and sought the surface as if alive. In the bright vibrations of air and sea they forgot the darkness of the morning; they sent their laughter skipping over the glassy water. It was too good to last. Soon enough they saw four walkers coming down the stony track from Pédhi and then Manólis reappeared with two more couples. Myles and Anne exchanged low curses; they decided to swim back to Ayía Marína to have a look before the invasion. A small, whitewashed monastery rose glittering out of the rock behind Anne’s basket, and they swam for that. They pulled out on the rocks and lay there, alone a little longer.

Myles reached over and took her hand, “What water.”

“Mmm.” She was squinting against the sun.

“I hate to think I’ll get used to it.”

“Maybe you won’t.”

“I’d have to leave not to and I don’t want to leave,” Myles said.

Anne laughed, “Or die.”

“That’s a better option?”

“Sometimes it seems like it might be,” Anne said, then fell silent, breathing. When she started talking again, it was tentatively. “I . . . I came here for what? For revenge,” Anne laughed uneasily. She sat on a rock in deep shade, in the mouth of what looked like a cave but was not.

“Paul?” Myles was in the light, looking away, out to sea and Turkey beyond, hung low and brown between sea and air. He wanted to hold her, but he couldn’t.

“That bastard.” She hiccupped. “All my life I’ve been waiting for him to get his.”

Myles wanted to say, For what? but he didn’t.

“When I was little I thought Dad would catch him, beat him black and blue, but I was the one that got beat—for lying—when I tried to make it happen. So I forced myself to wait. I couldn’t imagine my own dad could be so stupid, blind to what Paul made no attempt to hide from me. Back then I don’t think I’d ever even heard the word denial. The old man couldn’t see Paul for what he was, not at all.”

Myles peered at Anne out of the corner of his eye, watched her scrawling something on the sand between her knees. Her mouth seemed shaped for a sob.

“And did your dad catch him?”

“Never. I started thinking it would happen at school, if not the principal then some roughs would grab him in the locker room and beat him shitless. But no—the kids liked him, maybe even liked him mean, liked to watch the other kids get hurt, especially girls. Mostly he hurt girls.

“Then I thought maybe the law would get him. By that time he was at Seattle Prep and into who knows what. I didn’t know what. By then I was more or less beneath his notice. And glad of it, believe me. But I kept thinking he couldn’t live like that, that retribution would find him out sooner or later. Or that he wouldn’t be able to sustain it, that his own heart would at last say no.”

“So you?”

“I decided to do something,” Anne said, her voice flat.

“Aha. What?”

“I didn’t know what. Or maybe I didn’t know how. How to fight him and not become him.” Anne looked up, her wide eyes hard under a furrowed brow. “And for a long time it didn’t matter. I didn’t know how to find him. He just drifts. He has money enough to keep going, to leave the wreckage behind. I decided, when I didn’t know where he was, I swore that if I ever caught up with him I’d kill him.”

“What?” Myles exclaimed.

“And then I found out that he was here, on Sými, and I came, but even before I got here I knew I couldn’t do it.” Anne wiped the sand clear between her knees, her fingers starting a new design, moving with a will of their own.

“No, I couldn’t kill him. Myles,” she looked up again, eyes glittering, “but not because I don’t think he deserves it. I think he does. If I got the news that he was dead I’d rejoice. But I just can’t do it, can’t cast that proverbial first stone. Paul, you know, he could throw that stone and laugh.”

“Are you sure?” Myles said.

“That he could throw it? Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve been sure a long time.”

“As long as you haven’t been okay?”

“Just as long.”

Myles dug his toes in. As he sat there, silence ringing around him, Anne changed; the Anne of the photographs began to appear, like an image in a developing tray, slowly overtaking the blank face that had been there a minute before.

Anne spoke in a whisper, and Myles bent his head close to hear. “It must have been a snow day, winter. There wasn’t any school and we were home, the house empty except for us. There had been snow overnight, two or three inches. It was morning, early, but I’d been out riding already, taken Pie out in the snow and the fog.

“I remember, in the barn, I turned the lights on, that from inside the fog seemed to kill the light. I stabled her and got the saddle off, hoisting it onto my hip and struggling with it into the tack room.

“I measured out some oats and, once she’d got her nose in the feedbag, started to brush her. I loved to brush that girl. I was humming something from the radio, so young and so pleased!” Anne’s voice broke, but just for a moment. When she resumed, her voice was steady, hard.

“Then I heard someone else in the barn. It was Paul. When I looked over the rail of the stall I could see him up in the darkness of the loft, above the light, fiddling with the old block and tackle that hung from a beam up there. I ignored him. The barn was my world; he wasn’t supposed to be there. Pie shone under my hands. I loved the way her pale coat glistened from the brush.

“Suddenly Paul’s head appeared over the door of the stall.

“Still messing with that f*cking horse?

“I don’t know what I said, something like, What of it? or, What’s it to you?

“A regular smart mouth,” he sniggered and dropped out of sight behind the stall wall. Her coat gleamed under my hands in the dusky barn light and she nickered. Pie loved that brush. Nothing else mattered. There was a whole world in that stall, my world.

“Then the door swung open and Paul pushed in, a rope in his hand. Get out! I screamed, but he just laughed, whispered, F*ck off. He threw a loop he’d tied in the end of the rope over Pie’s head and yanked. Pie swung around, still chewing, looking bemused, and then Paul dragged her out of the stall.

“I didn’t understand.

“Paul let go of the rope that was tight on Pie’s neck and ran to the rope dangling from the block and tackle. He started pulling on that rope, hand over fist, and still I didn’t get it. Suddenly, the rope got taut and I understood.

“Pie freaked, reared back on her haunches and just leapt, rushing from one side of the barn to the other, trampling the floor, filling the air with a cloud of dust and yellow straw. She charged at Paul but veered off, rushing into the far corner of the barn, and when she did Paul rose out of the dust, rising up toward the light, dangling from his end of the rope, supernatural, howling. But when Pie charged back, hooves flashing, Paul dropped down, back onto the dim floor.

“Somehow, he got the slack around a post, and the next time Pie ran he held her, and her head jerked up and around, her eyes flaring, furious. Paul jeered at her. He was so small and so mean.

“Then she reared and that was a terrible mistake. Paul stumbled back but while she was still up he got his footing and backed away three or four steps, still pulling around the post. When she tried to get her forelegs down she couldn’t, and she got really frightened, bleating. I, I ran toward her, but she didn’t know me, and I saw a horseshoe right in front of my face, but she was turning, and it missed, and I dropped to the ground, screaming.

“Pie wheezed and spit, and her mouth opened wider and wider. Her tongue wagged madly in her mouth. She started to twirl on the end of the rope, stumbling, awkward. I couldn’t look away. I wanted to, I, but I couldn’t.

“Paul yelled over the din, Come here, come here, and I did, I crawled over to him, choking in the cloud of dust. He was shouting at me, Hold on, you little cunt, hold on. And I did, my white hands on his black belt. Every time Pie reared up higher Paul pulled, and she went on up.”

“Oh no, Jesus no,” Myles whispered.

Anne’s eyes swept across him, a quick glance that said, You asked. Then she started to speak again. “I don’t think I understood that Paul was yelling right in my face, Pull, bitch, pull. But then I did, and I pulled and pulled just wanting an end to it. And then it was quiet and Paul dragged us around the post, kicked me loose, and went on around the post again and tied the rope off.

“Standing over me, hissing, he said, There’s your f*ckin’ horse. My hands were over my eyes and he yanked them away, hissing, Look at your precious little pony now, bitch. We killed her, just you and me. And I did look. She was hanging over me, slowly twisting in the air. Drooling, bug-eyed, piss running down between her legs.

“We did it! He crowed, and then he brought his grinning face close to mine and whispered, And if you ever tell anybody I’m gonna kill you, too. Believe me? I believed him. Now get out of here, he said, and he kicked me, jerked me to my feet and kicked me again. Get! I ran through the barn door out into the snow. What I couldn’t believe was that it was still morning.

“Myles?”

“I’m right here.”

“You know? I ran across the yard in my cowgirl boots, across the road and plunged into the woods. I kept falling down in those hopeless boots. Finally, I just stayed there, face down in the snow. And then it came to me, if I’d only opened the barn door while Pie still had her feet she could have run, and running, Paul would have flown on up, that f*cking evil little wizard, up and up until his hands and arms were all twisted in the pulleys of the block and tackle. God, it would have been so easy to push the door open, and I just stood there, screaming helplessly.”

“Anne, Anne, no kid . . .”

“And then, then I got cold, and I just got up, trudged into the house and took a hot shower. Couldn’t stand the cold. Just as if we hadn’t hung Pie.”

“Anne, Anne, Paul hung Pie.”

“No. We did. Paul didn’t weigh enough to hoist her up. It took my sixty pounds to kill her.”

“Paul somehow convinced Dad Pie had just collapsed in the barn. He must have cut her down and cleaned her up and told some pretty convincing lies. Or maybe Dad just had to believe Paul’s story was true. I was too stunned to wonder. The next day they buried Pie in the pasture with a god damn backhoe. I didn’t say a thing. Not until years later. Then I told my therapist. And after that, my dad, I shouted at him, Your son is a f*cking killer! What that got me was thrown out of the house for good and all. Old Dad never believed a word of it; he blamed the therapist for encouraging me in false memories. He threatened to sue her!” Myles expected Anne to cry then but she didn’t. “Been f*cked up ever since,” she said, her lips stiff in a brittle smile. “You wanted to know.”