of the back step, where she bent over, hands on knees, trying to quiet herself enough to enter without making any more noise.
She let herself in and went up the stairs. She passed the door to Charlotte’s room, which was still open. Bed empty.
In her room, Knox first took off her father’s coat and wadded it under the bed. It smelled of dirt, of the outside. Then she remembered the bracelet. She took the coat out and shook the bracelet from its pocket, put the coat back. She got into bed with the bracelet and held its cool, small weight against her face for a while. She thought as fast as she breathed:
Oh my God.
God.
After a few minutes, her breath slowed and her hot sense of her own absurdity distilled into something else: the realization that she lay unscathed at the moment, with a story to tell if she chose to tell it. This felt close to relief and caused her to stretch out her limbs under the covers and try to forget that Gary might say something to her father, or that Charlotte still wasn’t home, or that she never wanted her own Cash because it wasn’t safe, and she would have to work hard, well into the future, not to let the wrong people know that this is what she preferred to the rest of night’s possibilities: this clean, white bed, its canopy arcing over her like a cupped hand.
• I •
KNOX
THE SUMMER that everything happened was the hottest summer Knox could remember. Heat pooled around them all, a soft, wet heat that nobody talked about. It was just what was.
Her students didn’t talk about it, but stumbled out the side doors of the center when it was time for their breaks and stood mutely in twos and threes that didn’t correspond to any friendships or alliances that Knox knew of but seemed the result of an uncharacteristic economy of movement. Stood with whomever they happened to find themselves next to, blinking, kicking occasionally at pieces of gravel, until they were called inside. On the farm, the foals stood the same way in the fields, unless they had shade or water to retreat into, in which case they drew together with their mothers into a mass of shifting rumps and bobbing necks, sometimes lowering themselves onto their sides, one by one, until the ground was piled with shapes that panted so slowly that Knox would fret about death, respiratory failure, pulmonary arrest if she watched too long, and so turn from the kitchen window of her cabin, or walk on.
Dumbstruck. Struck dumb. Knox could describe almost anything this way, on the hot days. The town and the farms that spread around it were quieter now that the July sales were over and the buyers had flown away. The land seemed to buzz like the insects did, with vibration rather than sound. Felt, not heard, its tongue thick in its mouth.
“He calls you Ugly?” Marlene said. Her mouth was half full of sandwich, so calls came out callfz. They were sitting in the lunchroom, watching the students through the large window that faced onto the courtyard of the learning center. Nine more minutes until break was over, according to the wall clock above Marlene’s head.
“Well,” Knox said, eyeing Brad Toffey as he stepped onto a picnic bench and seemed to ponder whether or not to jump off it, then stepped down and sat heavily on the ground, staring into the middle distance, “yeah. But it’s just a nickname. I think it’s funny, actually. He’s always called me that.”
Marlene chewed, her eyes fixed on Knox’s face. Knox looked back at her and smiled, knowing that it would be long seconds before Marlene could swallow her bite and respond, that the delay was killing her. Marlene, forty-six and well into her second marriage, liked nothing more than to discuss Knox’s lack of savvy when it came to “relationships”—or, more accurately, the one relationship she’d ever had. Marlene’s hair was frosted and faded into overlapping patches of white, russet, and dark brown and shook a little as her mouth worked.
“Take your time,” Knox said. “Wouldn’t want you to choke, Mar.”
“Screw you,” Marlene mumbled. A fleck of mayonnaise dropped onto her chin, and she scratched it away with a manicured nail. “I don’t understand it. You’re not ugly. At least, not most of the time.”