What did you say?

Please, says the voice.

He looks into the black sky and fills his lungs and wails. Th ere’s no other word for it. Th e sound tears away into the night and stops the small hearts of whatever small things hear it.

He walks straddle-legged over her and drops to his knees, his weight landing squarely on her hips and sinking her more deeply into the snow. He takes glovetips in his teeth and pulls one glove off and tugs off the other and seizes the zipper-pull at her throat and jerks it down, opening her chest to the cold.

Kiddo, he says. Don’t you understand you are home?

His hands are up inside her jacket. Th ey find the water bottle and slip it into his own jacket, then they pull up her flannel shirt and push the dingy sports bra roughly from her breasts. Steam lifts palely from her pale skin, rising and moving off like some banished layer of herself. He is talking but she isn’t hearing him, she is deep in the snow and within the snow is the gymnasium, and Allison Chow is on her left and Colby Wilson is on her right, and they are sitting in the wooden bleachers listening to the girl who’s come to speak to them, to tell them this story, and their eyes are wide as they listen, and their hearts are beating. But although they know that what the girl is saying is something that could happen to them, it hasn’t, not yet. It has happened to her, to this girl standing before them. To her, not them. And for that they love her, as fiercely as they love each other.

Part III

39

When Sean appeared suddenly from the back of the station, emerging without escort through a steel door, his hair in oily disarray and a blond whiskering on his jaw—an older boy by far looking out from his blue eyes—Grant stood and rubbed his own jaw in an effort to keep the surging of his heart from reaching his own face. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them from reaching out and taking the boy into his arms.

Sean came to him, and they stood looking at each other.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Do you think I could not have come?”

Sean sat on the hard bench and reached into the plastic bag he was carrying. After a moment Grant sat down too and watched his son feed the laces back into his boots, his belt back into the loops of his jeans.

They were driven to the impound lot in the backseat of a cruiser, retracing the route the boy had taken to the station the night before, down the same frontage road where the Paradise Lounge still sat, squat and ugly and meaningless in the gray cold morning. Though the snow had stopped only hours before, already a layer of grit seemed to have settled over everything. The officer dropped them at the lot another mile down the road and wished them a good one and then drove off with his radio squawking.

They reclaimed the key and crossed the lot toward the blue Chevy Grant had not set eyes on, like the boy, in more than a year.

“I changed the oil every three thousand,” the boy said. “Rotated the tires.”

Grant stripped a garish orange decal from the windshield and then reached into the truckbed and put his hand on the damaged tire. Finding the silver head of the nail with his thumb, he stood a moment touching it, as if he might divine from it all that had happened because of it.

Behind him, the boy looked at the flat and wanted only to sleep and to sleep.

They drove to a motel near the highway and Grant checked them into a single room with two large beds. He thought Sean would want to shower, he suggested as much, but instead the boy sat on the nearest bed, pulled off his boots, fell into the pillows, and was asleep. Grant drew the curtains and peeled the duvet from the other bed and settled it over his son, then sat down on the mattress across from the boy. He sat in the dimmed room studying the shape of the boy under the blanket. Eighteen now, he was. The age she had been.

After a while he wrote a note and placed it close to Sean, then retrieved it and went out the door to stand on the narrow concrete balcony. He seemed very far away from the mountains and the ranch and the people he had come to know: Emmet and his sons, Maria and her daughter. Farther yet from Wisconsin and Angela and the house where they’d raised their children; his onetime life.

He inhaled the cold air with its highway tang of diesel, and lit a cigarette. He looked west into the wind until his vision blurred, and then he turned to the east, to the city’s low industrial horizon under the low pewter sky. Semi after semi droning down the highway toward the sky.

WHEN HE RETURNED, THE sun was low in the west behind the clouds and the room was nearly dark. The duvet had been thrown aside, and at the sight of the empty bed his heart dropped for a disbelieving instant before he saw that the bathroom door was shut, before he saw the seam of light at the floor and heard the exhaust fan groaning away on the other side.

He set down the grocery bag and opened the curtains and stood looking out at the highway in the gray dusk until the bathroom door opened and his son switched off the fan and stepped out. He wore a blue T-shirt and the same weary pair of jeans. The room filled with the scents of soap and shaving cream.

“I didn’t think you’d wake up till tomorrow,” Grant said.

The boy looked at him but saw only his dark shape before the window. He picked up his duffel and set it on the bed. “I don’t like motel rooms,” he said, fitting his things back into the duffel.

“I gather that from the inside of that truck. Have you been sleeping in there this whole time?”

“No. I slept out sometimes. Sometimes people put me up.”

“If you’d asked, I would’ve sent you money. Or a credit card.”

The boy zipped up his duffel, then stood and raked his damp bangs back with his fingers.

“I bought some orange juice,” Grant said. “Cokes. A couple of sandwiches.”

The boy got into his jacket. “Can we just go?”

The Chevy was still warm and Grant fit the key in the ignition but did not turn it, and they both got a cigarette lit and sat with the windows half down, saying nothing, until the boy said without looking: “You want me to drive?”

“No, I’ll drive.”

The boy flicked his ash. “You were gone a while.”

Grant looked over but the boy would not meet his glance.

“I was looking for a place to get that tire fixed,” he said. “But it’s Sunday. Everything’s closed.” He took hold of the key, then let it go again.

“Sean.”

“What.”

“Talk to me. We have to talk.”

“What about?”

“Sean.”

The boy inhaled, blew sharply at the window. “What am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either.”

They both looked to the west, where the dropping sun flared suddenly between the clouds and the horizon like the eye of a great bird cracking open, round and blazing.

“I only tried to help her.”

“I know you did, Sean.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know you. Because you’re my son.”

“Those aren’t the same thing.”

“They are to me.”

The boy sat without moving. Grant crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. After a while Sean did the same.

“So now what?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going back to the airport, or what?”

“I don’t know. Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer.

“Where were you going?” Grant said. “Were you going home?”

“What home?”

“Wisconsin.”

The boy was silent.

Grant said: “She’s home from the hospital, did you know that? She’s back at Grace’s.”

“I know. I talked to her.”

“When?”

“Just after she got out.”

“It wasn’t prison, Sean. She was there voluntarily.”