Alice Gaines drank her soup. John Gaines sat and watched The Bob Newhart Show with her, and then he fetched her sleeping tablets from the bathroom.

As she drifted away, she held his hand. “How was your day, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Same old, same old,” he said.

She reached up and touched his face. “You look tired.”

“I’m okay, Ma.”

“You worry too much about me. You don’t need to have Caroline over here day in and day out. She’s a young woman now. She has things she needs to be doing. She has her own life.”

“She’s happy to come over, Ma, and besides, I give her some money, and if she weren’t here, she’d have to go get a job, and she doesn’t want to do that right now.”

“She should have stayed in school.”

“She can do whatever she pleases, Ma; you know that. Don’t get on her about it, now. Just leave her be.”

“She tells me . . .” Alice Gaines smiled wryly. She knew she was starting something that would never finish.

“Ma—”

“I’ll be gone soon enough,” Alice interjected, “and you’re not getting any younger, and if you want children—”

“Ma—”

She squeezed her son’s hand. “Enough,” she said. “I’ll leave you be. You want to be a bitter and lonely old man, then that’s your business.”

Her eyes started to droop. She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and Gaines knew she was almost asleep.

“Love you, Ma,” he whispered.

“Love you, Edward,” she whispered back, and Gaines knew that in whatever world she inhabited when she slept, his father was there. Edward Gaines, the father that never was.

Maybe Edward was waiting for her. Maybe it would be best to just let her go. Gaines glanced at the morphine tablets in a bottle on the bedside table. He closed his eyes for a moment and then shook his head.

He rose slowly, removed the tray, drew one of the pillows out from behind his mother’s head, and eased her down. She did not stir or murmur.

Gaines left the room, headed back to the kitchen to wash up and make himself a sandwich. He sat in the front room, ate slowly, drank a glass of root beer.

He thought of his father, of his mother, of what she would have to say about Nancy Denton.

One dead body was more disturbing than a hundred. One dead body was you, your friend, someone you loved, someone you just knew. A hundred dead was a featureless mass, an event, a happening, something distant and disconnected.

Gaines thought of the ones who never came home. The ones who never would. Just like Nancy Denton. Families kept looking, kept hoping, kept praying, all of them believing that if they wished hard enough, well, the wish had to come true. Not so. They did not understand that if a wish was destined to be realized, then it needed to be wished only once. Real magic was never hard work. And even if they did return, they would see that the world they’d left behind would never accept them again, would never contain them, would never be big enough or forgiving enough to absorb what they had become.

Here he was—a veteran, a casualty of war—starting a new war here in Whytesburg. A war against hidden truths. If there was one thing he knew, it was the degree of creativity and imagination that could be employed to bring a life to some unnatural end. But this? This was without precedent.

The strength of the heart had been measured—not in emotional terms, not in terms of love or passion or betrayal, for this was not possible. It had been measured in physical terms, in pounds of pressure per square inch, the force with which it could move so many gallons of blood for so many meters at such and such a speed. But the heart, irrespective of its power, was silent until fear crept in. Until panic or trauma or terror assaulted our senses, the heart went quietly about its powerful, secret business. Now Gaines believed his heart was more alive than it had been since leaving Vietnam.

Mayhem and a dark kind of magic had seemed inseparably blended as he’d looked down into the cavity of Nancy Denton’s chest, as he had seen the basket, the snake that had been within it.

When you saw a blond, nineteen-year-old high school football star decapitate a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese kid and then stand there for snapshots, the head dangling from his hand by the hair, its eyes upturned, the rictus grin, the pallid hue of bloodless flesh, you knew something was wrong with the world. You never looked at people the same way again.

This was the same. The same sense of surreal and morbid fascination. The same sense of dark and terrible wonder.

Gaines closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

Seemed that we all made a deal with God. Believe, trust, have faith in His goodness, and it will all be fine. Well, hell, it wasn’t fine. Never had been, never would be. It was all horror and bullshit.

Gaines truly believed—when it came to deals with God—that it sure looked like someone wasn’t holding up their end of the deal.

11

The years will always erase the precise memory of a face, but they cannot erase my recollection of how beautiful Nancy Denton was.

And I was not the only one who thought Nancy Denton was the most beautiful girl in the world.

I know that everyone in Whytesburg thought she was an angel, and I think half the world would have agreed.

I remember her standing there near a turn in the road, and as soon as she saw me, she started running. I ran, too. Didn’t matter whether I’d seen her an hour before or a day or a week; seeing Nancy was always the best thing.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey back.”

“You ready?”

“As ever,” I replied.

She twirled then, and she said, “This is my best dress for dancing. I am going to dance with Michael until the sun goes down, and then I will just keep on dancing.”

I laughed with her. She looked so happy.

This was how it was. This was how it was meant to be. I believed it, but Nancy believed it more.

Before Michael Webster came home from the war, there was just me and Nancy. There was Matthias Wade, of course, and it was so very obvious that Matthias loved Nancy as much as it was possible for one person to love another. If she hadn’t fallen head over heels for Michael, then maybe she would have been Matthias’s girl. But—like my mom said—maybe that never would have happened, the Wades being who they were an’ all. Anyway, Michael Webster did come home from the war, and everything changed.

Michael was famous before he even got off the train. We had seen his picture in the Whytesburg Gazette. He had a Purple Heart and some other medal that I cannot now recall the name of, and there was a party for when he arrived. It was October of 1945, and I was all of five and a half years old, but even I knew who Michael Webster was.

Michael was twenty-two years old, and every girl in Whytesburg wanted to marry him.

Sometimes, a town like this, the most interesting thing going on was the weather, and that didn’t change much more than once a month. But this was a big deal. This was a special day. This was a historic event. Michael Webster came home from the war, the only member of his unit to survive, and he was Whytesburg born and bred.

He was shy and humble, and he said he hadn’t done much to be such a hero, but that made people love him all the more. Seemed the more self-effacing he was, the more they built him up. It went on for weeks, it seemed. He couldn’t do anything for himself. He couldn’t put his hand in his pocket for anything. Everyone took care of him. Everyone wanted to be Michael Webster’s friend.

Nancy was all of seven years old. I was two years behind her. We thought Michael Webster was like a movie star from Hollywood. People said he should wear his uniform all the time. People said that everyone should know what a great hero he had been. I think Michael just wanted to disappear into anonymity. I think he just wanted to be a normal person, but it seemed that no one was going to let him.