“My mom’s third husband started coming into my room when I was twelve,” Gwen said. “She was sixteen when she had me. His name was Gary.”

Patty from Chapel Care put fingers to her lips. She sighed and came closer to the bed. “Oh, honey.”

“Know what my mom did when I finally told her?”

“What did she do?”

Gwen smiled. “She looked at me the same way you looked at me just now.”

Patty from Chapel Care closed her mouth.

“Then she said it was my fault for walking around with my tail in the air.”

“Oh, my word.” Patty took a step back. “Honey, I didn’t…”

“Thanks for the talk.”

The woman hadn’t deserved any of that. She was only trying to do her job. Gwen shifted positions and looked away.

The hospital bed hummed, shifting beneath her, stopping the moment it had her all figured out.

12

In the dream, everybody stood around in the kitchen of the little house on Martha Street. His grandparents were still alive. Mom was still alive. Kelly was alive, but nobody could find him.

Red light seeped in through the windows, tinting everything. Worth peeked around the edge of a curtain, squinting his eyes, and saw that somebody had built a SaveMore out back on the spot where the garage had been. The glow from the big sign flooded the yard.

For some reason, he knew Kelly was out there. He tried to speak up but couldn’t.

Nobody noticed when he slipped away. He hurried across the lawn, ground soft under his feet, a thick damp carpet of grass that ended at the front entrance to the store.

The doors slid open for him. He went in.

The store was an empty echo inside. Bright hard light; soaring space. Up front, every check stand stood dark except one.

Gwen worked her way through a pile of groceries that rose to the rafters in crooked joints, scanner beeping like a pulse in the towering silence. She saw him come in and gave him one of her smiles. For a minute Worth forgot what he was doing there.

Then she pointed toward the back and returned to work.

Somehow, he already knew his destination, but he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to go any farther into the store.

Somehow, he hadn’t noticed that Gwen was almost absurdly pregnant; her belly was enormous, ten sizes too big for her body. Every time she scanned an item, she seemed to teeter in place like a grazed bowling pin.

He wanted to stay back and help her. Gwen no longer seemed to notice him.

Worth stood aside and watched himself from a distance. He watched himself follow the wide middle aisle, all the way to the meat department at the back of the store. He watched himself stop at the heavy door to the walk-in cooler. He watched himself grasp the handle and pull.

The door made a sucking sound. There came a rush of cold air, then a reeling sensation, and he returned to his body again.

Cloudy fluorescent tubes flickered on overhead as he pushed into the cooler, through the heavy plastic strips hanging beyond the door.

Shelves. Stacks of boxes. Piles of meat vaccuumed in blood-cushioned plastic.

A dark human shape occupied a grubby mattress in the far corner.

As Worth approached, Kelly propped himself up on an elbow, his face rising into the light.

Matty. He cracked a grin. Hey.

Cold as it was in there, Kelly wore only boxers and his summer duty shirt. His bare feet were caked with dried mud. The fluorescent light tinged his face blue.

Been hoping I’d see you.

Worth wanted to say something. He wanted to ask Kelly what the hell he was doing out here; he wanted to tell him everybody was worried. He just stood there, trying to find his voice.

A tube above his head sizzled, popped, went dark.

Kelly winked. Can I show you something?

Before Worth could stop him, Kelly rolled to the edge of the mattress and stood to his feet, moving strangely. His badge flopped facedown against his ribs, hanging from a torn flap of fabric by the pin.

He turned his back and began unbuttoning his shirt. He let the shirt fall.

Worth’s heart sagged.

His brother’s back was a boiling thunderhead. The worst of the bruises practically seeped blood. Matthew wanted to ask what had happened. He still couldn’t make himself talk.

That was when Kelly looked back over his shoulder, eyes dull and milky, and Worth realized he wasn’t looking at bruises.

It was livor mortis. Kelly was dead, and he’d been out here long enough for lividity to set in. All his blood had settled.

Kelly shook his head, still grinning. Isn’t that fucked up?

Worth sat bolt upright in bed, disoriented, swimming in panic and relief, jolted from the dream by a roar and a crash and the sound of breaking glass.

2.

BAD GOAT

13

At some point Sunday morning, the local weather guys had all agreed to stop saying “blizzard” and start saying “hundred-year storm.”

Tony Briggs hadn’t lived a hundred years, so he had no opinion on that front. But it was a shitload of snow, no question.

Fifteen inches in midtown overnight. It had come down wet and heavy, settling like a soggy quilt over layers of sleet and ice. According to the weather guys, the teeth of the system had already reached Lake Michigan by the time it dragged its tail out of town a little before dawn, leaving splintered trees and half the city dark in its path.

From his apartment balcony, Tony could hear the buzz of chain saws up and down the street. Below, the pool area was a snow field.

The cold sun came off the white like a klieg light. Orange city snowplows had appeared, crawling around.

Tony went back inside. He stomped his cross-trainers on the edge of the carpet and dialed Ray’s apartment one floor up.

“You ready?”

Ray said, “Gimme ten.”

Tony changed out of the warm-ups he’d worn down to the treadmill in the exercise room. He showered, then put on a pair of old jeans, dry wool socks, Eastlands, a Henley, and a heavy flannel shirt.

When Ray knocked, Tony opened up, looked his partner over, and shook his head.

“Jesus,” he said. “You kill me.”

“What’d I do?”

Slick shoes, pressed khakis, and a turtleneck sweater under a brown leather coat Tony hadn’t seen before. Lambskin gloves.

“Nice scarf,” Tony said.

“Thanks.” Ray zipped up the coat. “Didn’t I see you on a bottle of pancake syrup?”

“Man, all I’m gonna say is, we get stuck in a snowbank, I ain’t the only one getting out to dig.”

They rolled out in Ray’s Expedition, following a plow all the way to 60th Street. They picked their way along after that, taking plowed streets where they could, avoiding the deep drifts where they couldn’t.

“Christ,” Tony said, surveying the damage all around.

Ray nodded up ahead. “Check that out.”

A guy in a toboggan hat stood thigh-deep in snow. He was looking at his house, which sat half buried beneath an avalanche of jagged, leafy limbs. The big tree in the front yard looked like a fat wrist with broken fingers, nothing but a broad gap of blue where its canopy had been.

“That right there,” Tony said. “See that? That right there is why you rent.”

It was the same all over the place. Broken branches everywhere: sticking out of roofs, blockading streets. They’d had a dry summer, the news guy had said, and most of the trees still hadn’t lost their leaves; the added weight of the ice and snow had snapped limbs big around as Tony’s waist like they were pencils. The remains of stately old trees jutted up from the snow like compound fractures, splintered ends poking at the sky.