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Eigen sat in his gliding rocker near the big bay window of the farm. If it weren’t for the denuded trees, the light would make you think it was summer. He had told himself when he first moved here that he’d do something with the fields. Some beans and cabbage maybe. But leading the congregation combined with the piano lessons had proven too much. Fallow fields. The furrows where the plow had once turned up and divotted the earth were indistinct, shambolic clay without apparent form. Straight lines become a diaspora of muck.

He read a new verse translation of The Book of Job by Stephen Mitchell. He had been using Job’s story more and more in his sermons the last couple years, and he supposed this made sense in light of his divorce. “Man born of woman, few of years and full of trouble,” and so on. It was his job to warn them. This congregation especially with their two-car garage, two-income households. It is important to live within this mystery. Are the blessings of this world blessing us? If the creature comforts leave us, if love flees us, will we maintain faith? Will we curse God? Is untested faith faith? He would ask them.

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  Chapter IV

Alex’s pregnancy had been an accident. As with the few other missteps she’d ever made, her first reaction was to hide it, in this case by having an abortion. She couldn’t imagine that Drew would welcome the news any more than she did. He was in the fourth year of his residency and working around the clock; she was putting in just as many hours in hopes of being promoted to principal. They often went for days without seeing each other, and hurried phone calls and scribbled notes were the closest they came to conversation. On the rare occasions when they were home together, they were too exhausted to do more than open a bottle of wine, order takeout, swap condensed versions of complicated work lives they didn’t have the energy to explain to each other, and fall asleep. They rarely had sex, which was why Alex had gotten careless with her birth control pills, which was why she immediately knew when the baby had been conceived. It was Valentine’s Day, two months earlier.

Drew had told her he’d be at the hospital that night, that they’d celebrate over the weekend. She’d thought she was okay with the idea. But when the day came and her alarm clock went off at five, and the only traces of Drew in the cold dark of their West Village walkup were an empty cereal bowl and a banana peel, all she’d wanted to do was go back to bed. Shivering in the blue-and-green plaid of his bathrobe, she’d looked at the counter, its black granite bare except for the coffee pot. The knife block and the cutting board, the pots and pans and the spice rack, all were still hidden in the moving boxes that, after three months, they’d yet to open. Drew’s guitar case lay on top, a silent reminder of the music he never played anymore.

Once she got to work, Alex didn’t have time to think about Drew. It was 1989, and financial crises were the norm. The ’86 collapse of the mortgage markets, the ’87 stock market crash, the unfolding junk bond scandal, all had played out against the debilitating backdrop of the savings-and-loan crisis. More than one successful trader had blown up along the way, and Alex lived in fear that she would be next. But just as great a danger as blowing up was the danger of being laid off. The issuance of mortgage debt had slowed to a trickle, and the ranks of its traders had thinned accordingly. She knew the only way to survive was to keep making money, and the only way to do that in a shrinking market was to take risk. So even while all her inner alarms flashed red, Alex forced herself out on limbs that she hoped could hold her weight.

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The man was large and startling. Not old, maybe thirty-five. He carried four hundred pounds, mostly around his stomach and hips, and wore oversized t-shirts and sweats that must’ve been tailored or imported from the West. His neck jutted from the doughy lump of his shoulders, nearly straight out. It made it seem he was always peeking around corners.

His head, the shape of it, reminded you of a boxer’s. He’d lived through some kind of damage. If you asked his mother or anybody around town, or if you knew the story from the driver himself, you’d know that pearly scar wormed around the place where surgeons had inserted a wedge of titanium. People knew he couldn’t think the way they did. Whereas everyone was aware of everyday commonplaces, one hand firmly reading vibrations on the social train tracks, he walked along a precise, prescribed route, seeming to have no thoughts to spare on anything except the turns he needed to take, the paths he needed to follow.

He couldn’t say himself what happened to make him this way. He didn’t know a snowstorm had distracted a driver last year on the highway. Zero visibility, the police had said, and the driver had pled guilty to a minor charge, paid the right people, and since laws barred walkers on the highway to begin with, the case closed.

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 Sunday May 23, 1999

Everything has a price, but few things are valued.

The morning after Cheryl’s funeral JD awoke at six-thirty with one of his wife’s aphorisms roosting in his mind. He thought at first Ciela had whispered it to him, but she was still asleep. She’d kicked off the covers and was lying on her side, facing him, one arm draped across her knee, the other tucked underneath her head. In that position the curve of Ciela’s neck seemed not only normal but alluring, and JD scooted over in the bed. He saw that Ciela’s eyelids and nose twitched in R.E.M. reverie. Judging from the up-curve of her lips it was a good dream, and he decided to let her enjoy it.

It was JD’s second morning wakeup, only slightly less pleasurable than the first one, hours earlier, when he’d been stirred from a dark, fitful sleep by Ciela. Her warm feet massaged the backs of his knees and moved down to his calves, her long, slender toes intertwining with his. She’d spooned her torso around his back and nibbled his shoulder blades, softly, then insistently.

I can’t reach your neck, she whisper-laughed.

They’d made love for the first time since The Incident that had left Ciela with her neck stuck in permanent tilt-mode. Their lack of post-Incident sexual intimacy was something they hadn’t discussed, not even once, JD realized, as he rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom. Pulling on his socks, underwear and sweatpants, he enumerated the episodes of the past six weeks: a blur of tests, doctor’s visits and now what?s…and Cheryl’s death. The blur seemed manageable if not under control – what choice did they have, other than to live through what needed to be lived through? – even as it obscured his awareness that he and Ciela had seemingly lost the desire for desire.

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In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning down.

-Amadou Hampâté Bâ

After her daughter died, Amy made the hospital her home. She returned to her village to wash her k’sa, a traditional African dress, a few days a month, but those days were less frequent. No need to return, no need to worry about her k’sa. She wears hospital scrubs instead of dresses.

She wakes on a traditional mat, where people normally sleep during the hotter seasons, in the emergency unit. She sleeps there deliberately, in expectation of the next casualty. Some days the sun over the Sahara rises with the shuffle of footsteps, the wails of family members, to which she awakens. Immediately she swings into motion to help those around her. She knows she is safe thanks to the British soldier who guards the hospital.

“Someone would like to see you,” a nurse says. Amy, face still unwashed, rubs the fatigue out of her eyes.

“Has another person died?”

The nurse pauses. “He is waiting outside.”

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CHAPTER 1

Suddenly they were alone on an island of forbidden bliss.

Beatrice Darby did a double-take at the salacious caption on the cover of the novel she knew right away she shouldn’t be looking at. Odd Girl Out was its title, and she felt a strange tingle as she absorbed the image of the half-naked blonde perched under it, her naughty parts barely hidden in a pile of plush pillows. She glanced around DeLuca’s drugstore to make sure no one she knew noticed her ogling its cover art on the rack in the back corner.

This discovery raised the stakes in her presence at DeLuca’s that afternoon in 1957 as she was supposed to come straight home from her summer job to prepare supper—a week-long penitence for skipping Sunday mass the day before to enjoy a sunny morning at Lighthouse Point Park. She and her older brother, Quentin, rarely agreed on anything except that when their mother had one of her nervous spells and couldn’t accompany them to church, they would act as each other’s alibi as they pursued separate adventures in religious hooky. Her caper would’ve been a success, too, had their gossipy neighbor, the heathen Mrs. Pritchett, and her brood of five not been struck with that same notion.

Her heart raced as she snatched the paperback from the cluster of other tawdry romance novels on the bottom shelf. She pivoted toward the wall on the heel of her saddle shoes and began fanning through the pages.

A wash of heat flooded Laura’s face. She bent over Beth again, perfectly helpless to stop herself, and began to kiss her like a wild…

“What do you think you’re doing?” a woman hollered.

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