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Excerpt

Excerpt

How I Came to Sparkle Again

Prologue

It was fair to say Jill Anthony’s first day back at work had been a disaster— so much so, in fact, that her supervisor had sent her home early. She just wasn’t ready to be back. Enough time had not passed.

She was still crying when, just four blocks from her house, her car died. Perfect, she thought. Just perfect. She shook her head in disbelief and then got out of the car. Usually she changed into street clothes before leaving work, but because she had left quickly today, she now found herself walking down the street in stork scrubs that looked a lot like pajamas. The combination of the scrubs and the crying left her feeling like quite a spectacle, exposed and vulnerable as she made her way home on foot through her affluent neighborhood.

She approached her big, beautiful Bavarian- style brick and- timber house with relief, despite the fact that it recently had held so much grief and sadness. It was still her sanctuary.

She crossed the street and paused where the path to her house met the sidewalk. There, she opened her mailbox and pulled out a handful of envelopes. At the top of the stack was an envelope with handwriting on it— an actual personal letter! It was from her old best friend, Lisa, and postmarked Sparkle, Colorado.

Sparkle—it was home to her mother’s brother, Howard, who had taken her in during a difficult time in her teen years. How long had it been since she’d been back for a visit? She tried to figure it out, but could figure out only that it had been well over a de cade.

As Jill walked from the mailbox up the path toward the door, she counted down the eighteen steps she knew it took to get there. The embarrassing weepy walk in scrubs would be over in five steps, four steps, three, two, and one. She put her key in the lock, eager to get inside, turned it, and opened the door. She stepped in, shut the door behind her, and exhaled. It was over. She was home safe.

Then she heard them. Noises. It sounded as though two people had broken into her home and were having sex. Jill reached in her purse for her phone to call the police, but then she heard David’s distinctive moans.

It couldn’t be, she thought. It couldn’t be David— her David, who had held her hand in the hospital during her complicated miscarriage just six weeks before. It couldn’t be her David, who had said wedding vows to her and bought this house for the family they would have. It couldn’t be.

A terrible doubt propelled her. She had to see. She had to see it for herself.

Creeping up the stairs with her phone, she rested her hand on her abdomen, still tender and loose even after six weeks. At the top of the stairs, she walked slowly and silently in her soft nurse’s shoes past the closed door of the baby’s room. They had found it easier to keep the door closed until they were ready to decide whether to adopt or change it back into a guest bedroom.

She walked a little farther, stopping right outside the bedroom door, then peeked around the corner of the open door and saw long dark hair falling down the back of a voluptuous woman who was straddling her husband in their bed. Jill pulled back in horror. It was true. How could it be true? Even as that new level of shock began to wash over her, disbelief still reigned. She noticed the cell phone still in her hand and knew that she would need a picture of this to help her through future moments of disbelief and denial. She peeked around the corner again. At least one of her husband’s hands groped the woman’s breasts as she bounced wildly on him.

“Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah!” he cried out.

Jill couldn’t see his eyes, but she saw the very top of his head, his curly brown hair cut short and the places at his temples where his hairline had begun to recede dramatically.

She reached out with her phone and pressed a button, then pulled back to her place around the corner and looked at the picture she just took. It was undeniably real.

Slowly she began to absorb the parameters of her new reality. It stung her eyes and pierced her heart to its core. She tried to decide what to do, whether to confront him in the act, but she couldn’t think over the loud voice in her head repeating over and over: Run.

As she clambered back down the stairs and opened the door, she made no effort to be quiet.

She walked the four blocks back to the Lexus, called a wrecker, and waited for it under a tree in a nearby yard.

When the wrecker finally arrived, the driver misinterpreted the horrified expression on her blotchy face and said, “It’s going to be okay, ma’am. It’s probably just your alternator. We can fi x that. We can fi x anything. So the real question remains whether every problem is worth fixing. That answer to that I no.” Jill thought he bore a striking resemblance to Willie Nelson and contemplated how what he said applied to her marriage. Just as she was coming close to reaching a conclusion, the driver said, “The Lexus is a nice car. It’s still worth a lot. When a car has that much value, it’s always worth fixing.”

She contemplated that too as he pulled into the shop. But maybe her marriage wasn’t a Lexus. Maybe it was a Pinto— one of those cars famous for blowing up when rear- ended. As she waited for the mechanics to fi x her car, she walked out the back door to the wrecking yard and through the aisles of totaled cars and pickups, vehicles that other people had decided weren’t worth fixing. She felt just like them. She felt like that Buick with the driver’s-side door so crushed that the driver was undoubtedly hurt, but from the look of the other side, the passenger likely skated through unscathed. She felt like the Saturn with the shattered windshield through which no one could see what lay ahead. It looked as if it had been sandwiched in a multicar pileup. Jill knew exactly how it felt to crash into one thing and then get smashed from behind. She studied the Saturn and wondered whether it would have been salvageable if it had only been rear- ended instead of sandwiched, and she wondered if the same was true about her marriage.

The late afternoon air turned a little cold around the edges, so Jill walked back to the waiting area. She sat in a vinyl chair, stared straight ahead, and waited. She thought ridiculous thoughts, like wondering whether all the food she bought for Thanksgiving would go to waste or whether David would try to make something out of it, and if so, whether he knew when to put the turkey in the refrigerator to defrost. She pictured herself running away from David with her frozen turkey, pecans, and cranberries.

Still, over the din of all these thoughts, one thought dominated: Run.

Run.

“Ma’am?” the man at the counter asked.

Jill looked up.

He was Hispanic, with soulful eyes, and he wore a crucifix around his neck. Jill noticed his wedding ring and wondered if he had ever cheated on his wife. Sure, he looked like an unlikely candidate, but she’d thought David was an unlikely candidate, too. How could anyone tell?

“You need a new alternator and I can’t get one today. I’ll have to do it first thing tomorrow morning. Can you call someone to pick you up?”

Run, she thought, run. But she just nodded and walked out.

So that is the verdict, she thought— salvageable, but not immediately.

When she reached the road, she looked both ways and wondered what to do. She was not going to call David, so she decided to walk west because it was late in the day and that’s where the sun was. But she had no idea where she was going.

A quarter mile down the road, she walked by a used- car lot. A Mitsubishi Montero for two thousand dollars caught her eye. She could sleep in that car. She could drive away from here. She could just put it on her credit card. Do it, the voice inside her said. Run.

Figuring that she had twenty- four hours before David could report her as a missing person, she thought about where she could go. She could drive from Austin to the Gulf. She could go to Mexico. She ruled out visiting family right away. Even if her parents weren’t on a Mormon mission in Africa, their home in Midland, Texas, would be the last place she would want to go.

Oh, her parents. Their response to her miscarriage had been an e-mail that read:

Dear Jill,

Your father and I are so sorry for your loss. Our hearts go out to you. The pain of losing a child is unbearable. We know, because it’s what we felt when you told us you were leaving the Church. We lost you to the world, lost you from our eternal family, and that is a spiritual death. We hope you see this as an opportunity to return to the Lord’s fold, and that you find comfort and hope in God’s Plan of Salvation that will so graciously allow you to re unite with your child in the afterlife if only you live the Gospel principles. We pray for you to find your way back now that you know the pain of being separated from your child, now that you know the pain we feel being spiritually separated from you, much like the pain of damnation. Please don’t inflict this pain on us or on yourself. We want to be with you and your child as a complete family for all eternity in the Celestial Kingdom. I cry myself to sleep every night just thinking about the possibility that your choices will prevent that when faith could have saved you. I know with every fiber of my being that the teachings of Joseph Smith are true. Please read the Book of Mormon again and meditate on it. You too will know it in your heart to be true.

Please soften your heart and return to Heavenly Father.

Love, Mom

They meant well. They did. But they never failed to make a bad situation worse.

Jill glanced down at her Chanel bag, a gift from David last Christmas, at the envelope from Lisa sticking out of it. She took it out and read it.

Hey Girl—

How goes it? I had a supremely delightful summer doing the Ranger thing at Glacier N.P. Made some nice turns on my birthday. Gotta figure any August first I’m making turns is pretty much better than any other August first. I met a tasty little morsel I call Ranger Mark. Of course it’s doomed but it was a fun ride— literally. Great to be back in my own house— that is, if you can call it that with this crazy neverending renovation going on and all the riff raff coming and going all the time. So what’s the deal with you staying away so long? I miss you! Come back and visit! My guest room has no walls, but I’ve got a couch and a steady supply of carpenters that don’t work on powder days. Level five eye candy. Just sayin’. I still can’t believe that you, regional skiing medalist, moved back to freakin’ Texas. What in the blue flaming hell? And by hell, of course I do mean Texas. Put down the butterbased foods and the hairspray and come home, girl. Sparkle misses you. You’ve got to miss it too. I mean, seriously, I know those hospital elevators are fast and everything, and sure, that might be fun for a while, but come on, it’s no Southback or Horse shoe Bowl. You know you want to make some sweet turns with your old friend Lisa. You know you do. I know it’s hard for you to get time off , and I know your husband hates the cold and snow (how does anyone hate snow?), but ditch your job and your husband and just come home.

Love, Lisa

If there were signs, surely this was one.

Sparkle, Colorado

Cassie Jones sat up in bed to flip her pillow. Her tears had drenched the side she’d been lying on. The end of one of her long blond braids stuck to her cheek. She didn’t cry during the day, but her tears often slipped out during sad dreams. Between her brows, worry lines furrowed much too deep for a ten- year old’s face. Instead of lying back down, she petted Socks, her gray cat, and then reached for her mom’s fuzzy white bathrobe at the foot of her bed. She had given it to her mom for Christmas the year before. She wrapped it around herself and walked to her windowsill. The robe was much too large and dragged on the floor behind her.

On the windowsill sat a couple dozen heart- shaped rocks that she and her mother had found together throughout the years. She picked up the big blue one and held it close to her heart and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she exchanged the blue one for a white one with shiny black flecks. She turned it around and around, looking for the side that had looked like a heart when one of them had spotted it. It was the last one they found together. They had been sitting next to the river last spring, watching the high water rush by.

“Look at that,” her mother had said. “Look at how bright the sparkles are today.”

They’d watched the sunlight glisten on the tumbling water. Her mother was right. The sparkles did seem brighter than usual. Cassie had watched for a moment longer and then asked the question that she hadn’t been able to get out of her head since March: “Mom, are you going to die?”

Her mother had taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh, Cassie, everyone dies.”

Cassie had swallowed hard and blinked a few times when she’d looked in her mother’s eyes and seen something that looked like an apology. Maybe this is the answer mothers give when they simply don’t know, she had thought.

“Look,” her mother had said, and leaned forward to pick up the white heart- shaped rock with the shiny black flecks. Cassie had smiled and put it in her pocket.

Now, back in her dark bedroom, Cassie put the rock on the windowsill. She returned to her bedside table and picked up her small flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it to three more heartshaped rocks on her bureau. Each one she had found along the river as she’d walked near the low and lazy water of summer, talking to her mother as if she’d been right next to her, telling her how she missed her and trying to think of something to say that would make her mother feel okay about being in heaven. She didn’t want her mother to worry in heaven.

In her own mind, Cassie had heard her mother say, Look down, each time. She was unsure if she was simply remembering her mother say it. But each time, she had squatted down, surprised and then not so surprised to find a heart shape among so many rocks. Each time, she’d closed her eyes and said, “Thanks, Mom.”

She put down the flashlight, scooped up all three rocks just to feel their weight in her hands, and then decided to take them back to bed with her. Outside, snow fell, covering up all the heart- shaped rocks until at least April or May. She took off the robe and spread it with the outside facing up over her bottom sheet and pillow. Then, with the rocks still cupped in her hands, she crawled into bed on top of the robe, where she could almost imagine she was snuggled up on her mother’s lap.

“Sometimes you just endure,” she had heard her father say on the phone a couple of months ago. She guessed he was talking to her grandmother, his mother. It had become Cassie’s mantra. Sometimes you just wait for the night to be over and endure.

 

*****

 

Heartbreak settled in Jill’s chest. It felt like so many things. Panic. Heaviness. A giant hole. Constriction. It felt like all of these things at once. It felt like being shot, like lying on the ground while life leaked out of her. She could hardly breathe.

Her wheels hummed on the highway. The heater cranked full blast, but still her car seemed cold. A dusting of powder snow blew across the pavement in waves.

Above her, the stars shone much more brightly than they did in the lower elevations. The heavens seemed so much vaster.

She tried breathing in for four counts, breathing in all the stars, all the expansiveness, all the possibilities, and then breathing out for four counts. In and out, in and out, mile after mile. It took all her concentration just to breathe.

Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she was simply in shock.

She wanted to pull over, lie down in the frigid prairie, and die.

In the hospital, every day she saw people whose lives seemed to have taken an irreparable turn. Some, against all odds, bounced back, slowly rebuilding. And she saw others whose prognosis was hopeless, who somehow kept fighting anyway. What was it, she wondered, that made some people give up and others fight harder? Where was her fight? She was out. She was out of will.

Still, she had the good sense to stall a little longer before deciding to lie in a cold field and wait for her ruined life to be over. She turned her thoughts to Uncle Howard and Lisa, instead, and kept on driving. They loved her, and they had saved her before. Surely they could again— as long as she could get herself to Sparkle. She kept telling herself that— that if she could only get to Sparkle before this heartbreak killed her, she would be okay. Uncle Howard and Lisa would make sure she was okay.

 

*****

 

chapter one

 

SNOW REPORT FOR NOVEMBER 17

Current temperature: 29F, high of 33F at 3 p.m., low of 22F at 4 a.m.

Clear skies, winds out of the southwest at 10 mph.

35" at the base, 51" at the summit. 1" new in the last 24 hours. 6" of new in the last 48.

 

Cassie and her babysitter, Nancy, sat silently at the table eating Lean Cuisine cheese cannelloni frozen dinners. Nancy’s breathing bothered Cassie, even though she knew Nancy couldn’t help having sinus problems. Cassie just didn’t want to listen to it. It reminded her of her mother’s last two weeks, when her breathing had become so difficult. To make it worse, Nancy was sitting at her mother’s place at the table.

Cassie looked up at Nancy, wishing she weren’t there— not in her mother’s place at the table or in her mother’s place as her caregiver.

“Do you need something, Cassie?” Nancy asked.

“Don’t sit there anymore,” Cassie said.

Nancy looked startled and slowly stood. “Where would you like me to sit?” she asked gently.

Cassie looked at her father’s place at the table. “There,” she said. “He’s the one you’re replacing.”

She looked back down at her cheese cannelloni while Nancy moved. The mere smell of it made her stomach turn. Of all the frozen dinners, it was the least offensive, but it was offensive nonetheless. She’d never eaten out of cardboard during the ten years of her life that her mother was alive, and she feared that if she kept eating Lean Cuisine, she would become as weak and fat as Nancy. She stared at her food and wondered if any of it really mattered.

All of her Olympic dreams were going down the tubes anyway. She hadn’t even joined ski team this year. When she skied, she felt sad now, so deeply sad that she just wanted lie down in the snow and fall asleep.

She looked down at From her room, Cassie could hear the sound of Nancy’s regular evening routine— the lid of the stainless- steel garbage can opening and closing as she threw away the cardboard trays, the spring in the dishwasher door creaking as she opened it to put in the forks, the sound of running water and the microwave beeping two and a half minutes later. Finally, Cassie heard the questions and buzzers on Jeopardy! and occasionally Nancy’s voice when she shouted out the few answers that she knew. As usual, the TV stayed on for the duration of the night, and the noise, combined with Nancy’s snoring, drowned out the sound of Cassie’s sobs during or after her nightmares. Mike Jones wanted to believe that Kate’s soul was eternal, but he wasn’t sure if a person could believe in that without believing in God. Believing in God wasn’t so easy. Five hours ago, he was on a call for a woman who drove off a steep embankment and miraculously was okay. She gave full credit to God. And now he was here, at this accident, a head- on collision between a semitruck and a family in a minivan. Both parents and one child were dead. The other child appeared to have a punctured lung and probably internal bleeding. She was barely hanging on. With a dying little girl in the back of his aid car who would wake up without her family if she made it at all, he couldn’t help wondering where God was this time.

It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn’t. There were those who had told him that we could not know the intention behind God’s plan for us— that we had to trust that we were in good hands and that maybe as our lives unfolded, we would see how something was for the best. And then there were the others who believed everything was a test, that God tried to protect us from the bad things, but sometimes Satan won and that Satan tried to do things to diminish our faith in God. Mike glanced back as he drove on and listened to John and Ben continuing to work to stabilize the girl. He did not see how the outcome of this accident would ever be for the best. And he did not see Satan, either. He saw only misfortune— human error and misfortune. It brought him the most peace to simply believe that people were imperfect, and life was imperfect, and sometimes bad things just happened. And if you were lucky, emergency services would show up in time to give you a second chance at life.

He thought about all the times he’d saved someone’s life and the person had attributed this miracle to God. Part of him was always tempted to make a joke of it, something like No, that was my hand stopping the bleeding or No, God didn’t send me; the trucker with the cell phone did. Why, he wondered, was it so hard to see humankind as capable of creating miracles? Miracles were just second chances if you really thought about it— second chances when all hope was lost.

But maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe there was more to it than that.

Eight months ago, the day before he’d found out about Kate’s cancer, he went on a call that he thought about from time to time. A man had lost control of his car on the ice going down a long hill and plowed right into the back of another car. The front of his car was crushed, and his foot was caught on the gas pedal somehow. He said he saw flames creep out of the hood of the car and thought he was a goner. Then he noticed two identical tall, Nordic- looking men, one on the side of the road to his right and the other walking over to his door. Flames were now licking into the car around the edges of the fi re wall. The twin on the side of the road disappeared, while the other opened his door, freed his foot, lifted him out of the car, and set him down on the side of the road. When a state patrol officer arrived shortly after, the man told him about the twins, wanting to thank the one who saved his life. The officer told him there was no one else at the scene besides the people in the car in front of him, and no one in the car in front had seen anybody. As Mike had driven him to the hospital to be checked, the man tried to understand how no one else could have seen them. He wondered out loud if they were angels.

The next day when Kate’s doctor told Mike and her about the cancer, he wondered whether the man in the car accident and his angel story were sent to him to give him faith, faith that something would protect and strengthen his wife throughout her battle, that something would lovingly take her home when she died. He wanted to believe it. He did. But as time had gone on and he and his daughter, Cassie, witnessed unbearable and seemingly unending suffering, he couldn’t help wondering about the God that would not grant a miracle then. He saw no divinity in all that suffering. He saw no divinity in God taking his daughter’s mother. He saw no divinity in any of it. But he did see divinity in the outpouring of support for his family from the community.

So at the end of the day, here was what Mike was able to believe in: people. It was people and their kindness that made him feel blessed. It was people who were the heroes, and people who were generous, and people who comforted one another.

And he believed in nature, in survival instincts, in the way living things will cling to every last shred of life and fight for it. He believed in a cell’s ability to multiply and repair even the most heinous injuries. He believed in life.

And just as he thought that, the girl in the back of the aid car flatlined despite all their efforts. And while he was glad she wouldn’t be waking up in severe pain in the hospital without her parents and her brother, he was not glad she was dead. He wondered again where God was now, but truly he did not want to hear anyone make up a story to try to explain. He did not want to hear any more explanations, anyone else grasping to make sense of things that didn’t make sense. He wished more people would just admit they didn’t know.

He was glad that it wouldn’t be up to him to notify the family’s relatives. It had been only four months since Kate died, and he found it extremely difficult to deal with other people’s grief while he dealt with his own. And even though he did not believe in God, he hoped the mourners did. He hoped they had some story they told themselves that would comfort them and would get them through such a huge loss, a story that would help them get out of bed in the morning when the weight of their loss would pin them down. 

John and Ben were quiet in the back. What they all knew well was this: Life was fragile. And sometimes it was unspeakably sad.

 

*****

 

Two blocks down the street from Mike and Cassie’s house, Lisa Carlucci pretended to be asleep as Cody quietly dressed next to the bed. She didn’t take it personally that he was sneaking out. She understood. She’d done it herself. And truthfully, she was relieved. She didn’t want to have to look at him in the light of day and see how much this hadn’t meant to him. It was bad enough to have seen it in the dark. She wasn’t mad at him, though. She had chosen this situation knowing full well what it was and what it wasn’t.

She felt discomfort in her core, a feeling that was hard to name, but something like anger and something like emptiness. She waited to hear Cody descend the stairs, no doubt bristling with fear that he would wake her every time a stair squeaked. She actually smiled just thinking of his inner terror. She listened to the front door open and then close. Only then did she open her eyes. She was thankful that he shut the door quietly because she didn’t want any of the guys next door to look out and see him leave. For that same reason, she was also thankful he had arrived on foot and left the same way.

A shaft of light fell through a crack in the curtains and landed on a bronze crucifix near her door. It had been her greatgrandfather’s.

She hadn’t gone to confession in years, but suddenly she believed it might feel good. She thought about what she would say and realized it wasn’t the actual sex she felt was the great sin. It was the fact that she had lost faith. She had lost faith that God had a better plan for her when it came to love, and as a result, she had settled. She needed to repent for treating her body as if it were a cheap motel instead of a temple.

She crawled out of bed, paused near the door, made the sign of the cross, kissed her hand and gently touched the crucifix, and said a prayer pledging a faith forgotten, pledging change. She walked to the bathroom and paused to look at herself in the full- length mirror. She wrapped her arms around herself and said aloud, “What am I doing? This isn’t a Holiday Inn.” Although she was sleepy and wanted to return to her warm bed, she didn’t like smelling like Cody and sex. So instead of going back to bed, she took a hot shower.

She emerged from the shower wondering what God’s better plan might look like, because truthfully, she didn’t want to get married. Women who got married got screwed. She saw it all the time. It wasn’t just that she wanted the freedom to pull the cord when it got bad without having to go through an expensive divorce and possibly losing her house. She never wanted to be that dependent in the first place. And if she had to wait for marriage to have sex with integrity, she would never have sex again. That wasn’t going to work, either. There had to be a way to have a healthy sex life, integrity, and maybe even love and remain a sovereign person.

Lisa returned to her bed and contemplated her musky sheets but decided it was too big a task to change them in the middle of the night. Instead, she put on flannel pajamas to protect her clean body. But before she crawled back in, she sat for a moment on the edge of her bed and peeked out the window at the trailer next door, hoping to verify that all of her buddies had been asleep and hadn’t seen Cody leave.

The Kennel was their name for this trailer and all its crazy additions built on. It got its name from its one- to- one human-to- dog ratio. Hans had a candle lit in his window. So did Tom, which was how they let one another and any other potential visitors know that they were “entertaining.”

When she was in seventh grade and Tom was in eighth, his friend had approached her between classes and said, “Tom wants to know if you want to go with him.”

“Go with him where?” she’d asked.

“You know, just go with him. Be his girlfriend,” his friend had explained.

Lisa had shrugged. “I guess that would be all right,” she’d said, somewhat indifferent.

But later that night, she imagined him holding her hand, imagined slow dancing with him at the next school dance, and even kissed her pillow, imagining it was him. By the next morning, she was downright mad for him. She took extra time doing her hair. She picked out her clothes carefully. And, pleased with the fruits of her efforts, she went to school feeling excited. She had attracted an older boyfriend— a really cool older boyfriend.

She casually walked to her locker, keeping her eye out for him, a little disappointed that he hadn’t waited for her somewhere nearby. She thought he would hold her hand as he walked her to homeroom. That, near as she could figure, was what going together involved. Finally she gave up, took her books for her first two classes and her folder out of her locker, and started walking. When she had almost reached her class, she saw Tom holding Deanna Smith’s hand. He even gave her a little peck on the lips before they parted. Deanna went into the classroom next to Lisa’s. Tom looked up and for a split second noticed Lisa. She saw fear and shame wash over him as he quickly walked in the other direction, avoiding her.

He avoided her for the next three years, until he was a junior and she was a sophomore. He asked her to watch him in the basketball game and then go to the dance with him afterward. And she told him to suck it. Of course that, not what happened in junior high, was what Tom told people when asked how long he and Lisa had been friends. When Tom told the story, it was funny, and he always ended it by saying, “And that was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship, my only real friendship with a woman, because it was the only one I was powerless to screw up.” Lisa, however, didn’t tell either story. She pretended she didn’t remember.

On Lisa’s nightstand sat two photographs in frames, facedown. One was of her parents, and the other was of her grandparents. She always turned them over when she had a guy over. Now she reached over and carefully set them back up. As she looked into her mother’s eyes, she wondered whether being a wife had been worth it overall. She wondered what her mother might have given up to take that path, what other dreams she might have had, wondered how she reconciled staying with a man who had been unfaithful, wondered whether he still was. And then she wondered how her mother might have fared from a life like hers, from a lifetime of being unloved in that particular way, a lifetime of agreeing to be disrespected by men with intimacy issues who would never ask her to sacrifice her freedom, a lifetime of bad choices and freedom. Was it really freedom? On one hand, yes. If she felt like going somewhere, she went somewhere. If she felt like eating ice cream for dinner, she ate ice cream for dinner. If she felt like buying new ski boots, she bought new ski boots. She didn’t have to run anything by anyone. She loved that. But there was another way in which it didn’t feel so free.

She looked at her grandmother’s face and wondered how sad it would make her to know that not only was she no one’s wife, she dated men who wouldn’t even call her their girlfriend, men she didn’t want to call her boyfriend. Maybe friends with benefits. But did they even qualify as friends? Not really. Fuck buddies. She nodded slightly. Yep, that’s what she was. That was her title. Fuck buddy. Free— overall, yes. But respectable? No, not really. She felt shame looking at her grandparents’ faces knowing they had wanted more than this for her. They had wanted her to be valued and to think enough of herself to demand that.

“It was the price of freedom,” she whispered to the photograph. “Don’t judge me,” knowing full well it wasn’t her grandparents who were judging her. The scent of Cody haunted her and inflamed her shame. She got out of bed, stripped off the sheets, and walked down the hall to the linen closet for new ones.

Prologue

It was fair to say Jill Anthony’s first day back at work had been a disaster— so much so, in fact, that her supervisor had sent her home early. She just wasn’t ready to be back. Enough time had not passed.

She was still crying when, just four blocks from her house, her car died. Perfect, she thought. Just perfect. She shook her head in disbelief and then got out of the car. Usually she changed into street clothes before leaving work, but because she had left quickly today, she now found herself walking down the street in stork scrubs that looked a lot like pajamas. The combination of the scrubs and the crying left her feeling like quite a spectacle, exposed and vulnerable as she made her way home on foot through her affluent neighborhood.

She approached her big, beautiful Bavarian- style brick and- timber house with relief, despite the fact that it recently had held so much grief and sadness. It was still her sanctuary.

She crossed the street and paused where the path to her house met the sidewalk. There, she opened her mailbox and pulled out a handful of envelopes. At the top of the stack was an envelope with handwriting on it— an actual personal letter! It was from her old best friend, Lisa, and postmarked Sparkle, Colorado.

Sparkle—it was home to her mother’s brother, Howard, who had taken her in during a difficult time in her teen years. How long had it been since she’d been back for a visit? She tried to figure it out, but could figure out only that it had been well over a de cade.

As Jill walked from the mailbox up the path toward the door, she counted down the eighteen steps she knew it took to get there. The embarrassing weepy walk in scrubs would be over in five steps, four steps, three, two, and one. She put her key in the lock, eager to get inside, turned it, and opened the door. She stepped in, shut the door behind her, and exhaled. It was over. She was home safe.

Then she heard them. Noises. It sounded as though two people had broken into her home and were having sex. Jill reached in her purse for her phone to call the police, but then she heard David’s distinctive moans.

It couldn’t be, she thought. It couldn’t be David— her David, who had held her hand in the hospital during her complicated miscarriage just six weeks before. It couldn’t be her David, who had said wedding vows to her and bought this house for the family they would have. It couldn’t be.

A terrible doubt propelled her. She had to see. She had to see it for herself.

Creeping up the stairs with her phone, she rested her hand on her abdomen, still tender and loose even after six weeks. At the top of the stairs, she walked slowly and silently in her soft nurse’s shoes past the closed door of the baby’s room. They had found it easier to keep the door closed until they were ready to decide whether to adopt or change it back into a guest bedroom.

She walked a little farther, stopping right outside the bedroom door, then peeked around the corner of the open door and saw long dark hair falling down the back of a voluptuous woman who was straddling her husband in their bed. Jill pulled back in horror. It was true. How could it be true? Even as that new level of shock began to wash over her, disbelief still reigned. She noticed the cell phone still in her hand and knew that she would need a picture of this to help her through future moments of disbelief and denial. She peeked around the corner again. At least one of her husband’s hands groped the woman’s breasts as she bounced wildly on him.

“Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah!” he cried out.

Jill couldn’t see his eyes, but she saw the very top of his head, his curly brown hair cut short and the places at his temples where his hairline had begun to recede dramatically.

She reached out with her phone and pressed a button, then pulled back to her place around the corner and looked at the picture she just took. It was undeniably real.

Slowly she began to absorb the parameters of her new reality. It stung her eyes and pierced her heart to its core. She tried to decide what to do, whether to confront him in the act, but she couldn’t think over the loud voice in her head repeating over and over: Run.

As she clambered back down the stairs and opened the door, she made no effort to be quiet.

She walked the four blocks back to the Lexus, called a wrecker, and waited for it under a tree in a nearby yard.

When the wrecker finally arrived, the driver misinterpreted the horrified expression on her blotchy face and said, “It’s going to be okay, ma’am. It’s probably just your alternator. We can fi x that. We can fi x anything. So the real question remains whether every problem is worth fixing. That answer to that I no.” Jill thought he bore a striking resemblance to Willie Nelson and contemplated how what he said applied to her marriage. Just as she was coming close to reaching a conclusion, the driver said, “The Lexus is a nice car. It’s still worth a lot. When a car has that much value, it’s always worth fixing.”

She contemplated that too as he pulled into the shop. But maybe her marriage wasn’t a Lexus. Maybe it was a Pinto— one of those cars famous for blowing up when rear- ended. As she waited for the mechanics to fi x her car, she walked out the back door to the wrecking yard and through the aisles of totaled cars and pickups, vehicles that other people had decided weren’t worth fixing. She felt just like them. She felt like that Buick with the driver’s-side door so crushed that the driver was undoubtedly hurt, but from the look of the other side, the passenger likely skated through unscathed. She felt like the Saturn with the shattered windshield through which no one could see what lay ahead. It looked as if it had been sandwiched in a multicar pileup. Jill knew exactly how it felt to crash into one thing and then get smashed from behind. She studied the Saturn and wondered whether it would have been salvageable if it had only been rear- ended instead of sandwiched, and she wondered if the same was true about her marriage.

The late afternoon air turned a little cold around the edges, so Jill walked back to the waiting area. She sat in a vinyl chair, stared straight ahead, and waited. She thought ridiculous thoughts, like wondering whether all the food she bought for Thanksgiving would go to waste or whether David would try to make something out of it, and if so, whether he knew when to put the turkey in the refrigerator to defrost. She pictured herself running away from David with her frozen turkey, pecans, and cranberries.

Still, over the din of all these thoughts, one thought dominated: Run.

Run.

“Ma’am?” the man at the counter asked.

Jill looked up.

He was Hispanic, with soulful eyes, and he wore a crucifix around his neck. Jill noticed his wedding ring and wondered if he had ever cheated on his wife. Sure, he looked like an unlikely candidate, but she’d thought David was an unlikely candidate, too. How could anyone tell?

“You need a new alternator and I can’t get one today. I’ll have to do it first thing tomorrow morning. Can you call someone to pick you up?”

Run, she thought, run. But she just nodded and walked out.

So that is the verdict, she thought— salvageable, but not immediately.

When she reached the road, she looked both ways and wondered what to do. She was not going to call David, so she decided to walk west because it was late in the day and that’s where the sun was. But she had no idea where she was going.

A quarter mile down the road, she walked by a used- car lot. A Mitsubishi Montero for two thousand dollars caught her eye. She could sleep in that car. She could drive away from here. She could just put it on her credit card. Do it, the voice inside her said. Run.

Figuring that she had twenty- four hours before David could report her as a missing person, she thought about where she could go. She could drive from Austin to the Gulf. She could go to Mexico. She ruled out visiting family right away. Even if her parents weren’t on a Mormon mission in Africa, their home in Midland, Texas, would be the last place she would want to go.

Oh, her parents. Their response to her miscarriage had been an e-mail that read:

Dear Jill,

Your father and I are so sorry for your loss. Our hearts go out to you. The pain of losing a child is unbearable. We know, because it’s what we felt when you told us you were leaving the Church. We lost you to the world, lost you from our eternal family, and that is a spiritual death. We hope you see this as an opportunity to return to the Lord’s fold, and that you find comfort and hope in God’s Plan of Salvation that will so graciously allow you to re unite with your child in the afterlife if only you live the Gospel principles. We pray for you to find your way back now that you know the pain of being separated from your child, now that you know the pain we feel being spiritually separated from you, much like the pain of damnation. Please don’t inflict this pain on us or on yourself. We want to be with you and your child as a complete family for all eternity in the Celestial Kingdom. I cry myself to sleep every night just thinking about the possibility that your choices will prevent that when faith could have saved you. I know with every fiber of my being that the teachings of Joseph Smith are true. Please read the Book of Mormon again and meditate on it. You too will know it in your heart to be true.

Please soften your heart and return to Heavenly Father.

Love, Mom

They meant well. They did. But they never failed to make a bad situation worse.

Jill glanced down at her Chanel bag, a gift from David last Christmas, at the envelope from Lisa sticking out of it. She took it out and read it.

Hey Girl—

How goes it? I had a supremely delightful summer doing the Ranger thing at Glacier N.P. Made some nice turns on my birthday. Gotta figure any August first I’m making turns is pretty much better than any other August first. I met a tasty little morsel I call Ranger Mark. Of course it’s doomed but it was a fun ride— literally. Great to be back in my own house— that is, if you can call it that with this crazy neverending renovation going on and all the riff raff coming and going all the time. So what’s the deal with you staying away so long? I miss you! Come back and visit! My guest room has no walls, but I’ve got a couch and a steady supply of carpenters that don’t work on powder days. Level five eye candy. Just sayin’. I still can’t believe that you, regional skiing medalist, moved back to freakin’ Texas. What in the blue flaming hell? And by hell, of course I do mean Texas. Put down the butterbased foods and the hairspray and come home, girl. Sparkle misses you. You’ve got to miss it too. I mean, seriously, I know those hospital elevators are fast and everything, and sure, that might be fun for a while, but come on, it’s no Southback or Horse shoe Bowl. You know you want to make some sweet turns with your old friend Lisa. You know you do. I know it’s hard for you to get time off , and I know your husband hates the cold and snow (how does anyone hate snow?), but ditch your job and your husband and just come home.

Love, Lisa

If there were signs, surely this was one.

Sparkle, Colorado

Cassie Jones sat up in bed to flip her pillow. Her tears had drenched the side she’d been lying on. The end of one of her long blond braids stuck to her cheek. She didn’t cry during the day, but her tears often slipped out during sad dreams. Between her brows, worry lines furrowed much too deep for a ten- year old’s face. Instead of lying back down, she petted Socks, her gray cat, and then reached for her mom’s fuzzy white bathrobe at the foot of her bed. She had given it to her mom for Christmas the year before. She wrapped it around herself and walked to her windowsill. The robe was much too large and dragged on the floor behind her.

On the windowsill sat a couple dozen heart- shaped rocks that she and her mother had found together throughout the years. She picked up the big blue one and held it close to her heart and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she exchanged the blue one for a white one with shiny black flecks. She turned it around and around, looking for the side that had looked like a heart when one of them had spotted it. It was the last one they found together. They had been sitting next to the river last spring, watching the high water rush by.

“Look at that,” her mother had said. “Look at how bright the sparkles are today.”

They’d watched the sunlight glisten on the tumbling water. Her mother was right. The sparkles did seem brighter than usual. Cassie had watched for a moment longer and then asked the question that she hadn’t been able to get out of her head since March: “Mom, are you going to die?”

Her mother had taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh, Cassie, everyone dies.”

Cassie had swallowed hard and blinked a few times when she’d looked in her mother’s eyes and seen something that looked like an apology. Maybe this is the answer mothers give when they simply don’t know, she had thought.

“Look,” her mother had said, and leaned forward to pick up the white heart- shaped rock with the shiny black flecks. Cassie had smiled and put it in her pocket.

Now, back in her dark bedroom, Cassie put the rock on the windowsill. She returned to her bedside table and picked up her small flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it to three more heartshaped rocks on her bureau. Each one she had found along the river as she’d walked near the low and lazy water of summer, talking to her mother as if she’d been right next to her, telling her how she missed her and trying to think of something to say that would make her mother feel okay about being in heaven. She didn’t want her mother to worry in heaven.

In her own mind, Cassie had heard her mother say, Look down, each time. She was unsure if she was simply remembering her mother say it. But each time, she had squatted down, surprised and then not so surprised to find a heart shape among so many rocks. Each time, she’d closed her eyes and said, “Thanks, Mom.”

She put down the flashlight, scooped up all three rocks just to feel their weight in her hands, and then decided to take them back to bed with her. Outside, snow fell, covering up all the heart- shaped rocks until at least April or May. She took off the robe and spread it with the outside facing up over her bottom sheet and pillow. Then, with the rocks still cupped in her hands, she crawled into bed on top of the robe, where she could almost imagine she was snuggled up on her mother’s lap.

“Sometimes you just endure,” she had heard her father say on the phone a couple of months ago. She guessed he was talking to her grandmother, his mother. It had become Cassie’s mantra. Sometimes you just wait for the night to be over and endure.

 

*****

 

Heartbreak settled in Jill’s chest. It felt like so many things. Panic. Heaviness. A giant hole. Constriction. It felt like all of these things at once. It felt like being shot, like lying on the ground while life leaked out of her. She could hardly breathe.

Her wheels hummed on the highway. The heater cranked full blast, but still her car seemed cold. A dusting of powder snow blew across the pavement in waves.

Above her, the stars shone much more brightly than they did in the lower elevations. The heavens seemed so much vaster.

She tried breathing in for four counts, breathing in all the stars, all the expansiveness, all the possibilities, and then breathing out for four counts. In and out, in and out, mile after mile. It took all her concentration just to breathe.

Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she was simply in shock.

She wanted to pull over, lie down in the frigid prairie, and die.

In the hospital, every day she saw people whose lives seemed to have taken an irreparable turn. Some, against all odds, bounced back, slowly rebuilding. And she saw others whose prognosis was hopeless, who somehow kept fighting anyway. What was it, she wondered, that made some people give up and others fight harder? Where was her fight? She was out. She was out of will.

Still, she had the good sense to stall a little longer before deciding to lie in a cold field and wait for her ruined life to be over. She turned her thoughts to Uncle Howard and Lisa, instead, and kept on driving. They loved her, and they had saved her before. Surely they could again— as long as she could get herself to Sparkle. She kept telling herself that— that if she could only get to Sparkle before this heartbreak killed her, she would be okay. Uncle Howard and Lisa would make sure she was okay.

 

*****

 

chapter one

 

SNOW REPORT FOR NOVEMBER 17

Current temperature: 29F, high of 33F at 3 p.m., low of 22F at 4 a.m.

Clear skies, winds out of the southwest at 10 mph.

35" at the base, 51" at the summit. 1" new in the last 24 hours. 6" of new in the last 48.

 

Cassie and her babysitter, Nancy, sat silently at the table eating Lean Cuisine cheese cannelloni frozen dinners. Nancy’s breathing bothered Cassie, even though she knew Nancy couldn’t help having sinus problems. Cassie just didn’t want to listen to it. It reminded her of her mother’s last two weeks, when her breathing had become so difficult. To make it worse, Nancy was sitting at her mother’s place at the table.

Cassie looked up at Nancy, wishing she weren’t there— not in her mother’s place at the table or in her mother’s place as her caregiver.

“Do you need something, Cassie?” Nancy asked.

“Don’t sit there anymore,” Cassie said.

Nancy looked startled and slowly stood. “Where would you like me to sit?” she asked gently.

Cassie looked at her father’s place at the table. “There,” she said. “He’s the one you’re replacing.”

She looked back down at her cheese cannelloni while Nancy moved. The mere smell of it made her stomach turn. Of all the frozen dinners, it was the least offensive, but it was offensive nonetheless. She’d never eaten out of cardboard during the ten years of her life that her mother was alive, and she feared that if she kept eating Lean Cuisine, she would become as weak and fat as Nancy. She stared at her food and wondered if any of it really mattered.

All of her Olympic dreams were going down the tubes anyway. She hadn’t even joined ski team this year. When she skied, she felt sad now, so deeply sad that she just wanted lie down in the snow and fall asleep.

She looked down at From her room, Cassie could hear the sound of Nancy’s regular evening routine— the lid of the stainless- steel garbage can opening and closing as she threw away the cardboard trays, the spring in the dishwasher door creaking as she opened it to put in the forks, the sound of running water and the microwave beeping two and a half minutes later. Finally, Cassie heard the questions and buzzers on Jeopardy! and occasionally Nancy’s voice when she shouted out the few answers that she knew. As usual, the TV stayed on for the duration of the night, and the noise, combined with Nancy’s snoring, drowned out the sound of Cassie’s sobs during or after her nightmares. Mike Jones wanted to believe that Kate’s soul was eternal, but he wasn’t sure if a person could believe in that without believing in God. Believing in God wasn’t so easy. Five hours ago, he was on a call for a woman who drove off a steep embankment and miraculously was okay. She gave full credit to God. And now he was here, at this accident, a head- on collision between a semitruck and a family in a minivan. Both parents and one child were dead. The other child appeared to have a punctured lung and probably internal bleeding. She was barely hanging on. With a dying little girl in the back of his aid car who would wake up without her family if she made it at all, he couldn’t help wondering where God was this time.

It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn’t. There were those who had told him that we could not know the intention behind God’s plan for us— that we had to trust that we were in good hands and that maybe as our lives unfolded, we would see how something was for the best. And then there were the others who believed everything was a test, that God tried to protect us from the bad things, but sometimes Satan won and that Satan tried to do things to diminish our faith in God. Mike glanced back as he drove on and listened to John and Ben continuing to work to stabilize the girl. He did not see how the outcome of this accident would ever be for the best. And he did not see Satan, either. He saw only misfortune— human error and misfortune. It brought him the most peace to simply believe that people were imperfect, and life was imperfect, and sometimes bad things just happened. And if you were lucky, emergency services would show up in time to give you a second chance at life.

He thought about all the times he’d saved someone’s life and the person had attributed this miracle to God. Part of him was always tempted to make a joke of it, something like No, that was my hand stopping the bleeding or No, God didn’t send me; the trucker with the cell phone did. Why, he wondered, was it so hard to see humankind as capable of creating miracles? Miracles were just second chances if you really thought about it— second chances when all hope was lost.

But maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe there was more to it than that.

Eight months ago, the day before he’d found out about Kate’s cancer, he went on a call that he thought about from time to time. A man had lost control of his car on the ice going down a long hill and plowed right into the back of another car. The front of his car was crushed, and his foot was caught on the gas pedal somehow. He said he saw flames creep out of the hood of the car and thought he was a goner. Then he noticed two identical tall, Nordic- looking men, one on the side of the road to his right and the other walking over to his door. Flames were now licking into the car around the edges of the fi re wall. The twin on the side of the road disappeared, while the other opened his door, freed his foot, lifted him out of the car, and set him down on the side of the road. When a state patrol officer arrived shortly after, the man told him about the twins, wanting to thank the one who saved his life. The officer told him there was no one else at the scene besides the people in the car in front of him, and no one in the car in front had seen anybody. As Mike had driven him to the hospital to be checked, the man tried to understand how no one else could have seen them. He wondered out loud if they were angels.

The next day when Kate’s doctor told Mike and her about the cancer, he wondered whether the man in the car accident and his angel story were sent to him to give him faith, faith that something would protect and strengthen his wife throughout her battle, that something would lovingly take her home when she died. He wanted to believe it. He did. But as time had gone on and he and his daughter, Cassie, witnessed unbearable and seemingly unending suffering, he couldn’t help wondering about the God that would not grant a miracle then. He saw no divinity in all that suffering. He saw no divinity in God taking his daughter’s mother. He saw no divinity in any of it. But he did see divinity in the outpouring of support for his family from the community.

So at the end of the day, here was what Mike was able to believe in: people. It was people and their kindness that made him feel blessed. It was people who were the heroes, and people who were generous, and people who comforted one another.

And he believed in nature, in survival instincts, in the way living things will cling to every last shred of life and fight for it. He believed in a cell’s ability to multiply and repair even the most heinous injuries. He believed in life.

And just as he thought that, the girl in the back of the aid car flatlined despite all their efforts. And while he was glad she wouldn’t be waking up in severe pain in the hospital without her parents and her brother, he was not glad she was dead. He wondered again where God was now, but truly he did not want to hear anyone make up a story to try to explain. He did not want to hear any more explanations, anyone else grasping to make sense of things that didn’t make sense. He wished more people would just admit they didn’t know.

He was glad that it wouldn’t be up to him to notify the family’s relatives. It had been only four months since Kate died, and he found it extremely difficult to deal with other people’s grief while he dealt with his own. And even though he did not believe in God, he hoped the mourners did. He hoped they had some story they told themselves that would comfort them and would get them through such a huge loss, a story that would help them get out of bed in the morning when the weight of their loss would pin them down. 

John and Ben were quiet in the back. What they all knew well was this: Life was fragile. And sometimes it was unspeakably sad.

 

*****

 

Two blocks down the street from Mike and Cassie’s house, Lisa Carlucci pretended to be asleep as Cody quietly dressed next to the bed. She didn’t take it personally that he was sneaking out. She understood. She’d done it herself. And truthfully, she was relieved. She didn’t want to have to look at him in the light of day and see how much this hadn’t meant to him. It was bad enough to have seen it in the dark. She wasn’t mad at him, though. She had chosen this situation knowing full well what it was and what it wasn’t.

She felt discomfort in her core, a feeling that was hard to name, but something like anger and something like emptiness. She waited to hear Cody descend the stairs, no doubt bristling with fear that he would wake her every time a stair squeaked. She actually smiled just thinking of his inner terror. She listened to the front door open and then close. Only then did she open her eyes. She was thankful that he shut the door quietly because she didn’t want any of the guys next door to look out and see him leave. For that same reason, she was also thankful he had arrived on foot and left the same way.

A shaft of light fell through a crack in the curtains and landed on a bronze crucifix near her door. It had been her greatgrandfather’s.

She hadn’t gone to confession in years, but suddenly she believed it might feel good. She thought about what she would say and realized it wasn’t the actual sex she felt was the great sin. It was the fact that she had lost faith. She had lost faith that God had a better plan for her when it came to love, and as a result, she had settled. She needed to repent for treating her body as if it were a cheap motel instead of a temple.

She crawled out of bed, paused near the door, made the sign of the cross, kissed her hand and gently touched the crucifix, and said a prayer pledging a faith forgotten, pledging change. She walked to the bathroom and paused to look at herself in the full- length mirror. She wrapped her arms around herself and said aloud, “What am I doing? This isn’t a Holiday Inn.” Although she was sleepy and wanted to return to her warm bed, she didn’t like smelling like Cody and sex. So instead of going back to bed, she took a hot shower.

She emerged from the shower wondering what God’s better plan might look like, because truthfully, she didn’t want to get married. Women who got married got screwed. She saw it all the time. It wasn’t just that she wanted the freedom to pull the cord when it got bad without having to go through an expensive divorce and possibly losing her house. She never wanted to be that dependent in the first place. And if she had to wait for marriage to have sex with integrity, she would never have sex again. That wasn’t going to work, either. There had to be a way to have a healthy sex life, integrity, and maybe even love and remain a sovereign person.

Lisa returned to her bed and contemplated her musky sheets but decided it was too big a task to change them in the middle of the night. Instead, she put on flannel pajamas to protect her clean body. But before she crawled back in, she sat for a moment on the edge of her bed and peeked out the window at the trailer next door, hoping to verify that all of her buddies had been asleep and hadn’t seen Cody leave.

The Kennel was their name for this trailer and all its crazy additions built on. It got its name from its one- to- one human-to- dog ratio. Hans had a candle lit in his window. So did Tom, which was how they let one another and any other potential visitors know that they were “entertaining.”

When she was in seventh grade and Tom was in eighth, his friend had approached her between classes and said, “Tom wants to know if you want to go with him.”

“Go with him where?” she’d asked.

“You know, just go with him. Be his girlfriend,” his friend had explained.

Lisa had shrugged. “I guess that would be all right,” she’d said, somewhat indifferent.

But later that night, she imagined him holding her hand, imagined slow dancing with him at the next school dance, and even kissed her pillow, imagining it was him. By the next morning, she was downright mad for him. She took extra time doing her hair. She picked out her clothes carefully. And, pleased with the fruits of her efforts, she went to school feeling excited. She had attracted an older boyfriend— a really cool older boyfriend.

She casually walked to her locker, keeping her eye out for him, a little disappointed that he hadn’t waited for her somewhere nearby. She thought he would hold her hand as he walked her to homeroom. That, near as she could figure, was what going together involved. Finally she gave up, took her books for her first two classes and her folder out of her locker, and started walking. When she had almost reached her class, she saw Tom holding Deanna Smith’s hand. He even gave her a little peck on the lips before they parted. Deanna went into the classroom next to Lisa’s. Tom looked up and for a split second noticed Lisa. She saw fear and shame wash over him as he quickly walked in the other direction, avoiding her.

He avoided her for the next three years, until he was a junior and she was a sophomore. He asked her to watch him in the basketball game and then go to the dance with him afterward. And she told him to suck it. Of course that, not what happened in junior high, was what Tom told people when asked how long he and Lisa had been friends. When Tom told the story, it was funny, and he always ended it by saying, “And that was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship, my only real friendship with a woman, because it was the only one I was powerless to screw up.” Lisa, however, didn’t tell either story. She pretended she didn’t remember.

On Lisa’s nightstand sat two photographs in frames, facedown. One was of her parents, and the other was of her grandparents. She always turned them over when she had a guy over. Now she reached over and carefully set them back up. As she looked into her mother’s eyes, she wondered whether being a wife had been worth it overall. She wondered what her mother might have given up to take that path, what other dreams she might have had, wondered how she reconciled staying with a man who had been unfaithful, wondered whether he still was. And then she wondered how her mother might have fared from a life like hers, from a lifetime of being unloved in that particular way, a lifetime of agreeing to be disrespected by men with intimacy issues who would never ask her to sacrifice her freedom, a lifetime of bad choices and freedom. Was it really freedom? On one hand, yes. If she felt like going somewhere, she went somewhere. If she felt like eating ice cream for dinner, she ate ice cream for dinner. If she felt like buying new ski boots, she bought new ski boots. She didn’t have to run anything by anyone. She loved that. But there was another way in which it didn’t feel so free.

She looked at her grandmother’s face and wondered how sad it would make her to know that not only was she no one’s wife, she dated men who wouldn’t even call her their girlfriend, men she didn’t want to call her boyfriend. Maybe friends with benefits. But did they even qualify as friends? Not really. Fuck buddies. She nodded slightly. Yep, that’s what she was. That was her title. Fuck buddy. Free— overall, yes. But respectable? No, not really. She felt shame looking at her grandparents’ faces knowing they had wanted more than this for her. They had wanted her to be valued and to think enough of herself to demand that.

“It was the price of freedom,” she whispered to the photograph. “Don’t judge me,” knowing full well it wasn’t her grandparents who were judging her. The scent of Cody haunted her and inflamed her shame. She got out of bed, stripped off the sheets, and walked down the hall to the linen closet for new ones.

Prologue

It was fair to say Jill Anthony’s first day back at work had been a disaster— so much so, in fact, that her supervisor had sent her home early. She just wasn’t ready to be back. Enough time had not passed.

She was still crying when, just four blocks from her house, her car died. Perfect, she thought. Just perfect. She shook her head in disbelief and then got out of the car. Usually she changed into street clothes before leaving work, but because she had left quickly today, she now found herself walking down the street in stork scrubs that looked a lot like pajamas. The combination of the scrubs and the crying left her feeling like quite a spectacle, exposed and vulnerable as she made her way home on foot through her affluent neighborhood.

She approached her big, beautiful Bavarian- style brick and- timber house with relief, despite the fact that it recently had held so much grief and sadness. It was still her sanctuary.

She crossed the street and paused where the path to her house met the sidewalk. There, she opened her mailbox and pulled out a handful of envelopes. At the top of the stack was an envelope with handwriting on it— an actual personal letter! It was from her old best friend, Lisa, and postmarked Sparkle, Colorado.

Sparkle—it was home to her mother’s brother, Howard, who had taken her in during a difficult time in her teen years. How long had it been since she’d been back for a visit? She tried to figure it out, but could figure out only that it had been well over a de cade.

As Jill walked from the mailbox up the path toward the door, she counted down the eighteen steps she knew it took to get there. The embarrassing weepy walk in scrubs would be over in five steps, four steps, three, two, and one. She put her key in the lock, eager to get inside, turned it, and opened the door. She stepped in, shut the door behind her, and exhaled. It was over. She was home safe.

Then she heard them. Noises. It sounded as though two people had broken into her home and were having sex. Jill reached in her purse for her phone to call the police, but then she heard David’s distinctive moans.

It couldn’t be, she thought. It couldn’t be David— her David, who had held her hand in the hospital during her complicated miscarriage just six weeks before. It couldn’t be her David, who had said wedding vows to her and bought this house for the family they would have. It couldn’t be.

A terrible doubt propelled her. She had to see. She had to see it for herself.

Creeping up the stairs with her phone, she rested her hand on her abdomen, still tender and loose even after six weeks. At the top of the stairs, she walked slowly and silently in her soft nurse’s shoes past the closed door of the baby’s room. They had found it easier to keep the door closed until they were ready to decide whether to adopt or change it back into a guest bedroom.

She walked a little farther, stopping right outside the bedroom door, then peeked around the corner of the open door and saw long dark hair falling down the back of a voluptuous woman who was straddling her husband in their bed. Jill pulled back in horror. It was true. How could it be true? Even as that new level of shock began to wash over her, disbelief still reigned. She noticed the cell phone still in her hand and knew that she would need a picture of this to help her through future moments of disbelief and denial. She peeked around the corner again. At least one of her husband’s hands groped the woman’s breasts as she bounced wildly on him.

“Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah!” he cried out.

Jill couldn’t see his eyes, but she saw the very top of his head, his curly brown hair cut short and the places at his temples where his hairline had begun to recede dramatically.

She reached out with her phone and pressed a button, then pulled back to her place around the corner and looked at the picture she just took. It was undeniably real.

Slowly she began to absorb the parameters of her new reality. It stung her eyes and pierced her heart to its core. She tried to decide what to do, whether to confront him in the act, but she couldn’t think over the loud voice in her head repeating over and over: Run.

As she clambered back down the stairs and opened the door, she made no effort to be quiet.

She walked the four blocks back to the Lexus, called a wrecker, and waited for it under a tree in a nearby yard.

When the wrecker finally arrived, the driver misinterpreted the horrified expression on her blotchy face and said, “It’s going to be okay, ma’am. It’s probably just your alternator. We can fi x that. We can fi x anything. So the real question remains whether every problem is worth fixing. That answer to that I no.” Jill thought he bore a striking resemblance to Willie Nelson and contemplated how what he said applied to her marriage. Just as she was coming close to reaching a conclusion, the driver said, “The Lexus is a nice car. It’s still worth a lot. When a car has that much value, it’s always worth fixing.”

She contemplated that too as he pulled into the shop. But maybe her marriage wasn’t a Lexus. Maybe it was a Pinto— one of those cars famous for blowing up when rear- ended. As she waited for the mechanics to fi x her car, she walked out the back door to the wrecking yard and through the aisles of totaled cars and pickups, vehicles that other people had decided weren’t worth fixing. She felt just like them. She felt like that Buick with the driver’s-side door so crushed that the driver was undoubtedly hurt, but from the look of the other side, the passenger likely skated through unscathed. She felt like the Saturn with the shattered windshield through which no one could see what lay ahead. It looked as if it had been sandwiched in a multicar pileup. Jill knew exactly how it felt to crash into one thing and then get smashed from behind. She studied the Saturn and wondered whether it would have been salvageable if it had only been rear- ended instead of sandwiched, and she wondered if the same was true about her marriage.

The late afternoon air turned a little cold around the edges, so Jill walked back to the waiting area. She sat in a vinyl chair, stared straight ahead, and waited. She thought ridiculous thoughts, like wondering whether all the food she bought for Thanksgiving would go to waste or whether David would try to make something out of it, and if so, whether he knew when to put the turkey in the refrigerator to defrost. She pictured herself running away from David with her frozen turkey, pecans, and cranberries.

Still, over the din of all these thoughts, one thought dominated: Run.

Run.

“Ma’am?” the man at the counter asked.

Jill looked up.

He was Hispanic, with soulful eyes, and he wore a crucifix around his neck. Jill noticed his wedding ring and wondered if he had ever cheated on his wife. Sure, he looked like an unlikely candidate, but she’d thought David was an unlikely candidate, too. How could anyone tell?

“You need a new alternator and I can’t get one today. I’ll have to do it first thing tomorrow morning. Can you call someone to pick you up?”

Run, she thought, run. But she just nodded and walked out.

So that is the verdict, she thought— salvageable, but not immediately.

When she reached the road, she looked both ways and wondered what to do. She was not going to call David, so she decided to walk west because it was late in the day and that’s where the sun was. But she had no idea where she was going.

A quarter mile down the road, she walked by a used- car lot. A Mitsubishi Montero for two thousand dollars caught her eye. She could sleep in that car. She could drive away from here. She could just put it on her credit card. Do it, the voice inside her said. Run.

Figuring that she had twenty- four hours before David could report her as a missing person, she thought about where she could go. She could drive from Austin to the Gulf. She could go to Mexico. She ruled out visiting family right away. Even if her parents weren’t on a Mormon mission in Africa, their home in Midland, Texas, would be the last place she would want to go.

Oh, her parents. Their response to her miscarriage had been an e-mail that read:

Dear Jill,

Your father and I are so sorry for your loss. Our hearts go out to you. The pain of losing a child is unbearable. We know, because it’s what we felt when you told us you were leaving the Church. We lost you to the world, lost you from our eternal family, and that is a spiritual death. We hope you see this as an opportunity to return to the Lord’s fold, and that you find comfort and hope in God’s Plan of Salvation that will so graciously allow you to re unite with your child in the afterlife if only you live the Gospel principles. We pray for you to find your way back now that you know the pain of being separated from your child, now that you know the pain we feel being spiritually separated from you, much like the pain of damnation. Please don’t inflict this pain on us or on yourself. We want to be with you and your child as a complete family for all eternity in the Celestial Kingdom. I cry myself to sleep every night just thinking about the possibility that your choices will prevent that when faith could have saved you. I know with every fiber of my being that the teachings of Joseph Smith are true. Please read the Book of Mormon again and meditate on it. You too will know it in your heart to be true.

Please soften your heart and return to Heavenly Father.

Love, Mom

They meant well. They did. But they never failed to make a bad situation worse.

Jill glanced down at her Chanel bag, a gift from David last Christmas, at the envelope from Lisa sticking out of it. She took it out and read it.

Hey Girl—

How goes it? I had a supremely delightful summer doing the Ranger thing at Glacier N.P. Made some nice turns on my birthday. Gotta figure any August first I’m making turns is pretty much better than any other August first. I met a tasty little morsel I call Ranger Mark. Of course it’s doomed but it was a fun ride— literally. Great to be back in my own house— that is, if you can call it that with this crazy neverending renovation going on and all the riff raff coming and going all the time. So what’s the deal with you staying away so long? I miss you! Come back and visit! My guest room has no walls, but I’ve got a couch and a steady supply of carpenters that don’t work on powder days. Level five eye candy. Just sayin’. I still can’t believe that you, regional skiing medalist, moved back to freakin’ Texas. What in the blue flaming hell? And by hell, of course I do mean Texas. Put down the butterbased foods and the hairspray and come home, girl. Sparkle misses you. You’ve got to miss it too. I mean, seriously, I know those hospital elevators are fast and everything, and sure, that might be fun for a while, but come on, it’s no Southback or Horse shoe Bowl. You know you want to make some sweet turns with your old friend Lisa. You know you do. I know it’s hard for you to get time off , and I know your husband hates the cold and snow (how does anyone hate snow?), but ditch your job and your husband and just come home.

Love, Lisa

If there were signs, surely this was one.

Sparkle, Colorado

Cassie Jones sat up in bed to flip her pillow. Her tears had drenched the side she’d been lying on. The end of one of her long blond braids stuck to her cheek. She didn’t cry during the day, but her tears often slipped out during sad dreams. Between her brows, worry lines furrowed much too deep for a ten- year old’s face. Instead of lying back down, she petted Socks, her gray cat, and then reached for her mom’s fuzzy white bathrobe at the foot of her bed. She had given it to her mom for Christmas the year before. She wrapped it around herself and walked to her windowsill. The robe was much too large and dragged on the floor behind her.

On the windowsill sat a couple dozen heart- shaped rocks that she and her mother had found together throughout the years. She picked up the big blue one and held it close to her heart and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she exchanged the blue one for a white one with shiny black flecks. She turned it around and around, looking for the side that had looked like a heart when one of them had spotted it. It was the last one they found together. They had been sitting next to the river last spring, watching the high water rush by.

“Look at that,” her mother had said. “Look at how bright the sparkles are today.”

They’d watched the sunlight glisten on the tumbling water. Her mother was right. The sparkles did seem brighter than usual. Cassie had watched for a moment longer and then asked the question that she hadn’t been able to get out of her head since March: “Mom, are you going to die?”

Her mother had taken a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh, Cassie, everyone dies.”

Cassie had swallowed hard and blinked a few times when she’d looked in her mother’s eyes and seen something that looked like an apology. Maybe this is the answer mothers give when they simply don’t know, she had thought.

“Look,” her mother had said, and leaned forward to pick up the white heart- shaped rock with the shiny black flecks. Cassie had smiled and put it in her pocket.

Now, back in her dark bedroom, Cassie put the rock on the windowsill. She returned to her bedside table and picked up her small flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it to three more heartshaped rocks on her bureau. Each one she had found along the river as she’d walked near the low and lazy water of summer, talking to her mother as if she’d been right next to her, telling her how she missed her and trying to think of something to say that would make her mother feel okay about being in heaven. She didn’t want her mother to worry in heaven.

In her own mind, Cassie had heard her mother say, Look down, each time. She was unsure if she was simply remembering her mother say it. But each time, she had squatted down, surprised and then not so surprised to find a heart shape among so many rocks. Each time, she’d closed her eyes and said, “Thanks, Mom.”

She put down the flashlight, scooped up all three rocks just to feel their weight in her hands, and then decided to take them back to bed with her. Outside, snow fell, covering up all the heart- shaped rocks until at least April or May. She took off the robe and spread it with the outside facing up over her bottom sheet and pillow. Then, with the rocks still cupped in her hands, she crawled into bed on top of the robe, where she could almost imagine she was snuggled up on her mother’s lap.

“Sometimes you just endure,” she had heard her father say on the phone a couple of months ago. She guessed he was talking to her grandmother, his mother. It had become Cassie’s mantra. Sometimes you just wait for the night to be over and endure.

 

*****

 

Heartbreak settled in Jill’s chest. It felt like so many things. Panic. Heaviness. A giant hole. Constriction. It felt like all of these things at once. It felt like being shot, like lying on the ground while life leaked out of her. She could hardly breathe.

Her wheels hummed on the highway. The heater cranked full blast, but still her car seemed cold. A dusting of powder snow blew across the pavement in waves.

Above her, the stars shone much more brightly than they did in the lower elevations. The heavens seemed so much vaster.

She tried breathing in for four counts, breathing in all the stars, all the expansiveness, all the possibilities, and then breathing out for four counts. In and out, in and out, mile after mile. It took all her concentration just to breathe.

Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she was simply in shock.

She wanted to pull over, lie down in the frigid prairie, and die.

In the hospital, every day she saw people whose lives seemed to have taken an irreparable turn. Some, against all odds, bounced back, slowly rebuilding. And she saw others whose prognosis was hopeless, who somehow kept fighting anyway. What was it, she wondered, that made some people give up and others fight harder? Where was her fight? She was out. She was out of will.

Still, she had the good sense to stall a little longer before deciding to lie in a cold field and wait for her ruined life to be over. She turned her thoughts to Uncle Howard and Lisa, instead, and kept on driving. They loved her, and they had saved her before. Surely they could again— as long as she could get herself to Sparkle. She kept telling herself that— that if she could only get to Sparkle before this heartbreak killed her, she would be okay. Uncle Howard and Lisa would make sure she was okay.

 

*****

 

chapter one

 

SNOW REPORT FOR NOVEMBER 17

Current temperature: 29F, high of 33F at 3 p.m., low of 22F at 4 a.m.

Clear skies, winds out of the southwest at 10 mph.

35" at the base, 51" at the summit. 1" new in the last 24 hours. 6" of new in the last 48.

 

Cassie and her babysitter, Nancy, sat silently at the table eating Lean Cuisine cheese cannelloni frozen dinners. Nancy’s breathing bothered Cassie, even though she knew Nancy couldn’t help having sinus problems. Cassie just didn’t want to listen to it. It reminded her of her mother’s last two weeks, when her breathing had become so difficult. To make it worse, Nancy was sitting at her mother’s place at the table.

Cassie looked up at Nancy, wishing she weren’t there— not in her mother’s place at the table or in her mother’s place as her caregiver.

“Do you need something, Cassie?” Nancy asked.

“Don’t sit there anymore,” Cassie said.

Nancy looked startled and slowly stood. “Where would you like me to sit?” she asked gently.

Cassie looked at her father’s place at the table. “There,” she said. “He’s the one you’re replacing.”

She looked back down at her cheese cannelloni while Nancy moved. The mere smell of it made her stomach turn. Of all the frozen dinners, it was the least offensive, but it was offensive nonetheless. She’d never eaten out of cardboard during the ten years of her life that her mother was alive, and she feared that if she kept eating Lean Cuisine, she would become as weak and fat as Nancy. She stared at her food and wondered if any of it really mattered.

All of her Olympic dreams were going down the tubes anyway. She hadn’t even joined ski team this year. When she skied, she felt sad now, so deeply sad that she just wanted lie down in the snow and fall asleep.

She looked down at From her room, Cassie could hear the sound of Nancy’s regular evening routine— the lid of the stainless- steel garbage can opening and closing as she threw away the cardboard trays, the spring in the dishwasher door creaking as she opened it to put in the forks, the sound of running water and the microwave beeping two and a half minutes later. Finally, Cassie heard the questions and buzzers on Jeopardy! and occasionally Nancy’s voice when she shouted out the few answers that she knew. As usual, the TV stayed on for the duration of the night, and the noise, combined with Nancy’s snoring, drowned out the sound of Cassie’s sobs during or after her nightmares. Mike Jones wanted to believe that Kate’s soul was eternal, but he wasn’t sure if a person could believe in that without believing in God. Believing in God wasn’t so easy. Five hours ago, he was on a call for a woman who drove off a steep embankment and miraculously was okay. She gave full credit to God. And now he was here, at this accident, a head- on collision between a semitruck and a family in a minivan. Both parents and one child were dead. The other child appeared to have a punctured lung and probably internal bleeding. She was barely hanging on. With a dying little girl in the back of his aid car who would wake up without her family if she made it at all, he couldn’t help wondering where God was this time.

It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn’t. There were those who had told him that we could not know the intention behind God’s plan for us— that we had to trust that we were in good hands and that maybe as our lives unfolded, we would see how something was for the best. And then there were the others who believed everything was a test, that God tried to protect us from the bad things, but sometimes Satan won and that Satan tried to do things to diminish our faith in God. Mike glanced back as he drove on and listened to John and Ben continuing to work to stabilize the girl. He did not see how the outcome of this accident would ever be for the best. And he did not see Satan, either. He saw only misfortune— human error and misfortune. It brought him the most peace to simply believe that people were imperfect, and life was imperfect, and sometimes bad things just happened. And if you were lucky, emergency services would show up in time to give you a second chance at life.

He thought about all the times he’d saved someone’s life and the person had attributed this miracle to God. Part of him was always tempted to make a joke of it, something like No, that was my hand stopping the bleeding or No, God didn’t send me; the trucker with the cell phone did. Why, he wondered, was it so hard to see humankind as capable of creating miracles? Miracles were just second chances if you really thought about it— second chances when all hope was lost.

But maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe there was more to it than that.

Eight months ago, the day before he’d found out about Kate’s cancer, he went on a call that he thought about from time to time. A man had lost control of his car on the ice going down a long hill and plowed right into the back of another car. The front of his car was crushed, and his foot was caught on the gas pedal somehow. He said he saw flames creep out of the hood of the car and thought he was a goner. Then he noticed two identical tall, Nordic- looking men, one on the side of the road to his right and the other walking over to his door. Flames were now licking into the car around the edges of the fi re wall. The twin on the side of the road disappeared, while the other opened his door, freed his foot, lifted him out of the car, and set him down on the side of the road. When a state patrol officer arrived shortly after, the man told him about the twins, wanting to thank the one who saved his life. The officer told him there was no one else at the scene besides the people in the car in front of him, and no one in the car in front had seen anybody. As Mike had driven him to the hospital to be checked, the man tried to understand how no one else could have seen them. He wondered out loud if they were angels.

The next day when Kate’s doctor told Mike and her about the cancer, he wondered whether the man in the car accident and his angel story were sent to him to give him faith, faith that something would protect and strengthen his wife throughout her battle, that something would lovingly take her home when she died. He wanted to believe it. He did. But as time had gone on and he and his daughter, Cassie, witnessed unbearable and seemingly unending suffering, he couldn’t help wondering about the God that would not grant a miracle then. He saw no divinity in all that suffering. He saw no divinity in God taking his daughter’s mother. He saw no divinity in any of it. But he did see divinity in the outpouring of support for his family from the community.

So at the end of the day, here was what Mike was able to believe in: people. It was people and their kindness that made him feel blessed. It was people who were the heroes, and people who were generous, and people who comforted one another.

And he believed in nature, in survival instincts, in the way living things will cling to every last shred of life and fight for it. He believed in a cell’s ability to multiply and repair even the most heinous injuries. He believed in life.

And just as he thought that, the girl in the back of the aid car flatlined despite all their efforts. And while he was glad she wouldn’t be waking up in severe pain in the hospital without her parents and her brother, he was not glad she was dead. He wondered again where God was now, but truly he did not want to hear anyone make up a story to try to explain. He did not want to hear any more explanations, anyone else grasping to make sense of things that didn’t make sense. He wished more people would just admit they didn’t know.

He was glad that it wouldn’t be up to him to notify the family’s relatives. It had been only four months since Kate died, and he found it extremely difficult to deal with other people’s grief while he dealt with his own. And even though he did not believe in God, he hoped the mourners did. He hoped they had some story they told themselves that would comfort them and would get them through such a huge loss, a story that would help them get out of bed in the morning when the weight of their loss would pin them down. 

John and Ben were quiet in the back. What they all knew well was this: Life was fragile. And sometimes it was unspeakably sad.

 

*****

 

Two blocks down the street from Mike and Cassie’s house, Lisa Carlucci pretended to be asleep as Cody quietly dressed next to the bed. She didn’t take it personally that he was sneaking out. She understood. She’d done it herself. And truthfully, she was relieved. She didn’t want to have to look at him in the light of day and see how much this hadn’t meant to him. It was bad enough to have seen it in the dark. She wasn’t mad at him, though. She had chosen this situation knowing full well what it was and what it wasn’t.

She felt discomfort in her core, a feeling that was hard to name, but something like anger and something like emptiness. She waited to hear Cody descend the stairs, no doubt bristling with fear that he would wake her every time a stair squeaked. She actually smiled just thinking of his inner terror. She listened to the front door open and then close. Only then did she open her eyes. She was thankful that he shut the door quietly because she didn’t want any of the guys next door to look out and see him leave. For that same reason, she was also thankful he had arrived on foot and left the same way.

A shaft of light fell through a crack in the curtains and landed on a bronze crucifix near her door. It had been her greatgrandfather’s.

She hadn’t gone to confession in years, but suddenly she believed it might feel good. She thought about what she would say and realized it wasn’t the actual sex she felt was the great sin. It was the fact that she had lost faith. She had lost faith that God had a better plan for her when it came to love, and as a result, she had settled. She needed to repent for treating her body as if it were a cheap motel instead of a temple.

She crawled out of bed, paused near the door, made the sign of the cross, kissed her hand and gently touched the crucifix, and said a prayer pledging a faith forgotten, pledging change. She walked to the bathroom and paused to look at herself in the full- length mirror. She wrapped her arms around herself and said aloud, “What am I doing? This isn’t a Holiday Inn.” Although she was sleepy and wanted to return to her warm bed, she didn’t like smelling like Cody and sex. So instead of going back to bed, she took a hot shower.

She emerged from the shower wondering what God’s better plan might look like, because truthfully, she didn’t want to get married. Women who got married got screwed. She saw it all the time. It wasn’t just that she wanted the freedom to pull the cord when it got bad without having to go through an expensive divorce and possibly losing her house. She never wanted to be that dependent in the first place. And if she had to wait for marriage to have sex with integrity, she would never have sex again. That wasn’t going to work, either. There had to be a way to have a healthy sex life, integrity, and maybe even love and remain a sovereign person.

Lisa returned to her bed and contemplated her musky sheets but decided it was too big a task to change them in the middle of the night. Instead, she put on flannel pajamas to protect her clean body. But before she crawled back in, she sat for a moment on the edge of her bed and peeked out the window at the trailer next door, hoping to verify that all of her buddies had been asleep and hadn’t seen Cody leave.

The Kennel was their name for this trailer and all its crazy additions built on. It got its name from its one- to- one human-to- dog ratio. Hans had a candle lit in his window. So did Tom, which was how they let one another and any other potential visitors know that they were “entertaining.”

When she was in seventh grade and Tom was in eighth, his friend had approached her between classes and said, “Tom wants to know if you want to go with him.”

“Go with him where?” she’d asked.

“You know, just go with him. Be his girlfriend,” his friend had explained.

Lisa had shrugged. “I guess that would be all right,” she’d said, somewhat indifferent.

But later that night, she imagined him holding her hand, imagined slow dancing with him at the next school dance, and even kissed her pillow, imagining it was him. By the next morning, she was downright mad for him. She took extra time doing her hair. She picked out her clothes carefully. And, pleased with the fruits of her efforts, she went to school feeling excited. She had attracted an older boyfriend— a really cool older boyfriend.

She casually walked to her locker, keeping her eye out for him, a little disappointed that he hadn’t waited for her somewhere nearby. She thought he would hold her hand as he walked her to homeroom. That, near as she could figure, was what going together involved. Finally she gave up, took her books for her first two classes and her folder out of her locker, and started walking. When she had almost reached her class, she saw Tom holding Deanna Smith’s hand. He even gave her a little peck on the lips before they parted. Deanna went into the classroom next to Lisa’s. Tom looked up and for a split second noticed Lisa. She saw fear and shame wash over him as he quickly walked in the other direction, avoiding her.

He avoided her for the next three years, until he was a junior and she was a sophomore. He asked her to watch him in the basketball game and then go to the dance with him afterward. And she told him to suck it. Of course that, not what happened in junior high, was what Tom told people when asked how long he and Lisa had been friends. When Tom told the story, it was funny, and he always ended it by saying, “And that was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship, my only real friendship with a woman, because it was the only one I was powerless to screw up.” Lisa, however, didn’t tell either story. She pretended she didn’t remember.

On Lisa’s nightstand sat two photographs in frames, facedown. One was of her parents, and the other was of her grandparents. She always turned them over when she had a guy over. Now she reached over and carefully set them back up. As she looked into her mother’s eyes, she wondered whether being a wife had been worth it overall. She wondered what her mother might have given up to take that path, what other dreams she might have had, wondered how she reconciled staying with a man who had been unfaithful, wondered whether he still was. And then she wondered how her mother might have fared from a life like hers, from a lifetime of being unloved in that particular way, a lifetime of agreeing to be disrespected by men with intimacy issues who would never ask her to sacrifice her freedom, a lifetime of bad choices and freedom. Was it really freedom? On one hand, yes. If she felt like going somewhere, she went somewhere. If she felt like eating ice cream for dinner, she ate ice cream for dinner. If she felt like buying new ski boots, she bought new ski boots. She didn’t have to run anything by anyone. She loved that. But there was another way in which it didn’t feel so free.

She looked at her grandmother’s face and wondered how sad it would make her to know that not only was she no one’s wife, she dated men who wouldn’t even call her their girlfriend, men she didn’t want to call her boyfriend. Maybe friends with benefits. But did they even qualify as friends? Not really. Fuck buddies. She nodded slightly. Yep, that’s what she was. That was her title. Fuck buddy. Free— overall, yes. But respectable? No, not really. She felt shame looking at her grandparents’ faces knowing they had wanted more than this for her. They had wanted her to be valued and to think enough of herself to demand that.

“It was the price of freedom,” she whispered to the photograph. “Don’t judge me,” knowing full well it wasn’t her grandparents who were judging her. The scent of Cody haunted her and inflamed her shame. She got out of bed, stripped off the sheets, and walked down the hall to the linen closet for new ones.

How I Came to Sparkle Again
by by Kaya McLaren

  • Genres: Fiction
  • paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
  • ISBN-10: 1250000742
  • ISBN-13: 9781250000743