College. The word rang through Dylan, reverberating like the morning bell at Drummond. Guys in Drummond didn’t go to college; guys bound for the pen at eighteen didn’t think about it any more than they thought about flying out the window on a magic carpet.

The one true, clean, linear joy he’d had in Drummond was Phil and math class.

Phil hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. He’d never even written.

For Dylan the peaceful order of planes, dimensions, numbers doing precisely what they should eventually returned. Phil Maris never did. Until now, Dylan figured he’d forgotten about him.

“College?” He said it so softly Mr. Leonard, in the backseat, didn’t hear him.

“Why not?” Rich said. “I can afford it.”

“They let guys like me do that?”

Mr. Leonard caught up with the flow of ideas. “It could be done,” he said slowly.

“Not in Rochester. Not in Minnesota,” Dylan insisted.

Richard laughed. It wasn’t the bitter laugh he often had; it was a good, fat laugh, like he’d thought of some grand scheme, something cool to do.

“Hey, the winters are too damned cold up here anyway,” he said.

Andrea Yates. Drowns five kids. I can’t condemn the woman. I can’t even get up a good steam of outrage. How can anybody blame her? She’s young, alone, depressed; her husband is off at his job but micromanages her life. She can’t send the kids to school. There’s no money for help. She’s supposed to be teaching them lessons. The whole religion thing is coming down on her.

Then a voice tells her there’s a way out.

You’ve got to hand it to Andrea. She fought the voice. Tried to get help. Told her husband she had thoughts of killing her kids. That must have taken courage. Jesus, is there any worse thing that a woman can admit? Nobody helped her, or not enough, and she landed back with that killing pressure.

And the voice, telling her there’s a way out.

Poor woman must have been so desperate by that point, I doubt she could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Her reality was insane, so insanity looked logical.

The voice gets pushier. The kids get wilder. She thinks she’s a lousy mother, and anything’s got to be better for the kids than a lousy mother.

Then, one day, the voice wins. She drowns them because there is no other choice left.

I admire Andrea Yates. Not for the killings, but for the heroism and strength she showed in fighting insanity in an attempt to save them. Had anyone stepped in and helped her with this battle the kids would have survived. And so would Ms. Yates’s mind.

Married. Standing on the cathedral steps at twilight, watching the lights come on around the square, Polly resisted the urge to look at the rings on her left hand. A breeze filtered through the cooling bodies of the tourists ruffling her hair. Letting the magic take her as she always did when she came for a reading, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The French Quarter smelled like a traveling carnival: cotton candy with a whiff of naughty sex, stale beer, and urine dressed up with French perfume, and running through it like a current of unstoppable life, a mother on a rampage, a teenaged girl on a tear, the smell of the river.

On such a fine evening the tarot card readers were out in force, lined up umbrella to umbrella in a postpsychedelic mushroom patch, facing off against the gleaming white stone of St. Louis, the forces of the old magic in tawdry defiance of the Christian interloper. While debating which reader to patronize, Polly wondered what the cards would say. For years they’d hinted at a mystery man waiting in her future to sweep her off her feet. There’d been men and there’d been mystery but only with Marshall had she been swept away. Surely the Lovers would be in her reading, and the World, and the Moon. Polly smiled. Love had made her such a fool.

Two girls-children in Polly’s eyes but of the age she’d been the first time she’d come to Jackson Square-rose from a table tucked between the benches opposite the cathedral doors. They were tricked out in the unfortunate fashion that decreed female children dress as prostitutes in a world full of predators.

The girls looked around like actors searching for an audience, then, catching her eye, the bolder of the two-at least that was what Polly surmised from the acreage of skin exposed-called, “If you’re going to get a reading, you should go to the Woman in Red.”

“The fat-fat one,” the second girl said rudely, but at least quietly.

“The Woman in Red,” the first girl repeated insistently, “is truly awe-some.” Stretching out an arm displaying half a dozen bracelets, she pointed to the table they had just vacated. There a voluminous woman-the very air around her swelling and rippling along with her layers of scarves-beckoned. Palms up, her screaming scarlet nails waggled as if she tickled a trout from midair.

“The Woman in Red it shall be,” Polly said and smiled as ghosts of her past walked away giggling. She’d noticed the reader on previous pilgrimages to the square in search of her future. It was hard not to. Shades of shrieking sunset, roses, and hearts of fire, cherries, apples, blood, and wine were thrown together. If one shade of red was loud, this woman’s ensemble was cacophonous.

Before time and sunlight had taken its toll, her khaki-colored setup had evidently been as red as the rest of her. As she shifted her considerable weight, her chair’s wooden frame moved and flashed thin ribbons of the canvas’s original color, that of freshly butchered meat. Polly descended the cathedral steps and the fortune-teller leaned forward, reaching out with a beggar’s aspect-or that of a drowning woman bent on pulling her rescuer down. “For zee lady, zee reading eez free,” she said in a voice both ruined and childlike, the worn-out voice tape of a Chatty Cathy doll with a fake French accent.

Hucksters and harlots never honestly meant anything was free. Having been a little of both in her time, Polly knew “free” just opened the bargaining. She settled into a rickety captain’s chair.

Crimson fluttered, cheap jewelry jangled, and the woman shuffled the oversized cards with the ease of long practice. Grubby things, told through her fingers many times, the corners were dog-eared and the edges worn soft. Polly cut the deck. With a theatrical flourish, the reader began dealing.

Tarot cards depicted hanged men, hearts pierced by swords, priestesses, forts, golden goblets, astrological signs, wands, Jungian archetypes, numbers, and a thousand other symbols cobbled together in a mishmash of the world’s myths and religions, a dim sum of the spiritual, psychic, and psychological worlds.

Candle flames igniting the colors, the cards kaleidoscoped down with hypnotic speed. Fabric, paper, dye, paint, and uncertain light confused the eye. The familiar pattern of staff and cross seemed to rise up from the designs on the tablecloth.

“The Celtic Cross,” the reader said. Her voice was no longer accented. France had been replaced by the echo of someplace cold, the northern Midwest or upstate New York. Fingers flying over the filthy bits of cardboard, long acrylic nails creating colorful exclamation points, words began to pour out flat and fast. Like a third grader terrified of forgetting her lines, Polly thought.

But these weren’t the words of a child. Repelled and fascinated, Polly moved closer to hear the hushed rapid-fire monologue. An errant thought sparked: in his sleep, had Hamlet’s father leaned just so, anxious to receive the poison in his ear?