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  Then O’Sullivan found himself standing outside the rest stop, holding an RC Cola and a Reese’s peanut butter cup, taking in the sharp late-autumn air. His brain felt unusually empty, and when Smokey finally came up behind him, he was standing near the dog-walking area, trying to remember the names of constellations he should’ve been able to recognize, after a full semester of astronomy.

  Sagittarius? Pegasus?

  Centaurus?

  “Jesus Christ,” Smokey said. “I thought you died. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Right here,” O’Sullivan said.

  “Well, let’s go, then! This isn’t some fuzzy-chinned collegeboy yankabout. I’m a working man.”

  “All right,” O’Sullivan said.

  “It’s time to hop,” Smokey said. “I hope you don’t mind if I put the pedal to the metal, as they say in truck-driving parlance.”

  “All right,” O’Sullivan says. “Let’s hop.”

  8

  Smokey comes walking down the berm toward the roadside memorials, where O’Sullivan is standing.

  “What have you found, little brother?” Smokey says, wiping the high beam of his flashlight down O’Sullivan’s face and across his chest. Then he stops.

  He shines his flashlight into the darkness beyond the memorial, and O’Sullivan notices another one, just a few yards farther down. He can only barely make it out in the darkness. Yet another cross with a circle of offerings beneath it.

  He catches his breath. Because just beyond that cross is another one. And another. Five. Six. Seven crosses! Clustered there at the edge of the road.

  And then—O’Sullivan stands frozen in the flashlight beam—he sees the deer, coming slowly toward him. The deer is stepping delicately through the little forest of memorials—clip clip, clip clip, the sound of hooves slowly approaching over asphalt—

  “Well,” Smokey says. “There’s your fuckin’ deer, I see.”

  The deer, the buck, is standing about fifteen yards away. It pauses for what seems like a long while, peering at them alertly, and then bolts abruptly. O’Sullivan has a glimpse of its sudden, jagged startle and leap, and in a moment it is gone, in a moment it is little more than a dark shape, a flicker, vanishing into the trees; there is a shudder of leaves and the shadows in between them.

  “Oh,” O’Sullivan says. It’s funny, because all of a sudden, okay, now he gets that joke. The Russian guy had mixed things up. He’d fucked the bear and then was going to shake hands with the beautiful woman, instead of vice versa.

  He doesn’t know why the memory of that joke should make him shudder. He doesn’t know why the sight of the living deer should fill him with such dread, such a weird sense of

  What now? O’Sullivan thought as he stared out at the unreeling

  Such a weird sense of something missing, something unremembered—a stove burner that you might have left on, an alarm clock that didn’t go off. Instinctively, he puts his hand to his front pocket, to feel for his keys, but he has no keys. No car. No apartment.

  He gazes at the cluster of crosses, the blank face of a stuffed bear, a silver pinwheel revolving slowly, glinting with the red of Smokey’s emergency lights, the shuddering rustle of plastic flower petals, a ragged bit of ribbon flapping, undulating like long hair blown back in a breeze.

  It will come to him in a moment, O’Sullivan thinks, though actually he doesn’t want it to. It’s that awful, inevitable feeling, the sound a bicycle makes when it is on its side, as the wheel’s spinning slows and comes to a stop. The ticking of a roulette wheel as the marble finally settles in place.

  “Oh my God,” O’Sullivan says.

  Shepherdess

  1

  This girl I’ve been seeing falls out of a tree one June evening. She’s a little drunk—I bought a couple of bottles of hopefully decent Chardonnay from Trader Joe’s on my way over to her house—and now she’s a little drunk and a little belligerent. There is something about me that she doesn’t like, and we’ve been arguing obliquely all evening. It’s only our fifth real date, and though we’ve slept together once—it was the week after my mother died; pity sex, so it doesn’t exactly count—we don’t know each other that well.

  For example, I just found out that she has an ex-husband who lives in Japan, who technically isn’t an ex-husband since they haven’t officially divorced.

  For example, I didn’t know that she thought I was a bad kisser: “Your kisses are unpleasantly moist,” she says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Actually, no,” I say. “I’ve always gotten compliments on my kisses.”

  “Well,” she says. “Women very rarely tell the truth.”

  I smile at her. “You’re lying,” I say cleverly. But she doesn’t seem to catch the interesting paradox. She looks at me blankly and downs the last bit of wine in her glass. Then she turns her attention to the tree that rises up alongside the railing of her deck, her eyes following the trunk upward to where it branches out. She locates her cat, Mr. Niffler, about ten feet above us, where he has fled to escape the terror that is me, his claws affixed tightly into the bark, an expression of dyspeptic alarm on his face.

  “Mr. Niffler,” she calls. “Kitty, kitty, kitty. What are you doing up there?” And then she gets up and goes to the base of the tree. She hoists herself up on the two-by-six ledge of the railing and stands there, teetering for a moment.

  “You know,” I say, “that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.”

  2

  My mother appears in the doorway, silhouetted in the morning light. Her dark hair stands up stiff, like a shrub. Smoke from her cigarette curls up. I’m half awake but I can see how bony she is, a skeleton in a nightie, barely ninety pounds. She’s not much heavier than the two Brittany spaniels that hover behind her—Lady and Peaches, my mother’s dogs, watching as she wakes me, alert and so quiveringly shy around men that they sometimes pee a little when I speak to them. I can feel their tension as I stir in my bed.

  “Okay,” I murmur. “I’m up, I’m up.” But my mother and her dogs just stand there. My mother is a few weeks away from her sixtieth birthday and I am nearly forty, but for a moment, here in my old teenage room, we replay our roles from the past. She knows that if she leaves, I will roll over and go back to sleep. Lazybones.

  So after a moment, I sit up. I’m an adult, and I wipe my fingers across my face. “What time is it?” I say, though she can’t hear me.

  She’s been deaf for almost five years now. A freak infection shut her ears down despite various attempts at intervention by various doctors—but the truth is that in half a decade she hasn’t done much to help herself. She stopped going to her lip-reading classes early on, and forget about sign language or anything like that. She refuses to hang out with other deaf people.

  Mostly, to be honest, I don’t know what she does with herself. I don’t know who her friends are or where she goes or what she does with her soundless days. The dogs make little anxious noises as I pull the covers off myself, and I watch as my mother turns, as her bare, crooked feet slide across the carpet toward the kitchen, where she will make me coffee and breakfast. It’s about six in the morning, time for me to drive back from Nebraska to Los Angeles, where my fairly successful grown-up life is waiting for me.

  I am in between my second and third date with Rain at this point, and I’m looking forward to seeing her—things are going well, I think. “I’ve met a girl I really like,” I tell my mother. At the time, I have no idea that she will fall out of a tree. I have no idea that she thinks I am a bad kisser.

  3

  In the emergency room, there is a Plexiglas barrier between me and the receptionist, whose name tag says VALENCIA.

  “I’m here with Rain Welsh,” I tell her, and she asks me how to spell it. I have the purse and the billfold and I put Rain’s driver’s license and insurance card through the little mouth hole at the bottom of the glass wall.

  “Are you the husband?” Valencia asks me, and I shift awkwardly,
looking at the stack of neatly rowed credit cards in Rain’s billfold.

  “I’m the boyfriend,” I say. “I don’t really know that much about her. She fell out of a tree.”

  “Please take a seat in the waiting area,” Valencia says. She gestures toward the couches just beyond. A series of five Mexican children—boys and girls, aged approximately two to nine—are sitting politely together, watching a sitcom on the television mounted on the wall.

  “Do you know how long it’s going to be?” I ask Valencia. But that’s not the right question. “Is she going to be all right?” I say, and our eyes meet for a moment. I am usually pretty good at these kinds of encounters—I have the face of a nice person—but Valencia doesn’t approve. “Take a seat,” Valencia says. “I’ll let the doctor know that you’re waiting.”

  4

  I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. I don’t know what that’s about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.

  Now, as I close in on my fortieth birthday, I find myself doing a lot of the same sort of things. An ant crawls up my leg and I say, “Excuse me? May I help you?” before I slap and crush it. I get up in the morning and narrate my way through the rituals of awakening. “Okay, we’re taking a shower now,” I whisper, and I mumble shampoo into my hair and toothpaste into my mouth and stand mesmerized in front of the coffee machine. At times, the procedure seems heartbreakingly complicated—grinding the beans into dust, separating the filter from the packet (which requires the same kind of fine-motor skills as threading a needle), bringing water from the sink to the reservoir of the automatic coffeemaker. My God, it’s like building a house every morning, just to get a cup of coffee! I stand there at the counter holding my mug, waiting as the water burbles through its cycle and trickles into the pot. “Okay,” I encourage softly. “Okay, go—go!” At times I get very urgent with my coffee, as if I am watching a horse race that I have a lot of money riding on. Now, in the emergency-room parking lot, I am having a very involved talk with the contents of my girlfriend’s purse. “I cannot believe this is happening,” I mutter to the handbag confidentially. “This is ridiculous,” I say, and then I find what I’m looking for. “Well, hello, beautiful,” I say, to a crumpled pack of extra-long, extra-thin, feminine cigarettes: Misty, they are called.

  5

  My mother collapses on the floor of her bedroom. She is perhaps on her way to the bathroom or to let the dogs out. I am sleeping in a motel outside of Provo, headed back to L.A., and she lies there with her face pressed against the carpet, unconscious. The dogs are anxious, pacing from the bedroom to the back door in delicate circles, nosing my mother with their muzzles, whimpering introspectively. They lower themselves down beside her and rest their heads against her side as her breathing slows and she goes into a coma. They lick her salty skin.

  She is still alive when her neighbor friend comes by the next morning. The dogs have relieved themselves in the kitchen, unable to control their bladders any longer, and they hide in shame under the bed as the neighbor friend calls my mother’s name. “Mary Ann! Mary Ann!” the friend, Mrs. Fowler, calls. Even though my mother has been deaf for as long as they’ve known each other, Mrs. Fowler nevertheless continues to speak at her—loudly, steadily determined, oblivious. When she sees my mother on the floor, she screams like a maid in a murder mystery. When I get back to Los Angeles, there is a message waiting for me on my answering machine. “Charles,” Mrs. Fowler will recite in her most declamatory voice. “This Is Mrs. Fowler. Your Mother’s Friend. I Am Sorry To Have To Tell You That She Is In The Hospital, And Very Ill.”

  After I’ve listened to the message a few times, I get on the cellphone and call Rain. “Listen,” I say, “it looks like I’m going to have to cancel our date again. You won’t believe this but I have to fly back to Nebraska. My mom’s in the hospital! It must have happened practically the minute I left!”

  “Oh, my God,” she says. Her voice is soft with concern, actually very warm and—though we’ve only dated briefly—seemingly full of genuine tenderness. I imagine her touching my hand, stroking my forearm. She has beautiful dark-brown eyes, the ineffable sadness of a girl who drinks too much—I’m drawn to that.

  “Actually,” I say, “I think my mom’s going to die. I just have this feeling.”

  “Go,” Rain says, firmly. “Just get on that plane and go to her,” Rain says. “Call me when you get there.”

  6

  I know that she is going to fall, but I’m not sure how to stop her. I stand there, with my hands clasped awkwardly behind my back as she shimmies unsteadily up the tree toward her cat. “You know,” I say, and clear my throat. “Rain, honey, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” She pauses for a moment, as if she’s listening to reason; and then, abruptly, she loses her hold on the branch. I watch as her body plunges down like a piece of fruit, not flailing or screaming or even surprised, but simply an expressionless weight coursing to earth. She hits the edge of the deck’s railing, knocking over a plant, and I say: “Oh, my God!” And then she lands on her back. “Oh, my God,” I say again, and finally have the sense to move toward the flower bed where she has come to rest.

  “Are you hurt?” I say, leaning over her, and for a moment she doesn’t open her eyes. I take her hand and squeeze it and a tear expels itself from beneath her eyelid and runs down her face.

  The wind has been knocked out of her, and at first her voice is hinged and creaky. “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispers, wheezing. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “No, no,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But she begins to cry. “Ow,” she says. “It really hurts!”

  I bend down and kiss her on the mouth, comfortingly. “It’s okay,” I murmur, and run my hand over her hair. But she flinches, and her eyes widen.

  “What are you doing?” she gasps. “I can’t feel my legs.” And then she begins to cry harder, her mouth contorting with a grimace of sorrow like a child’s. “Don’t touch me!” She cries. “I can’t feel my legs! I can’t feel my fucking legs!”

  7

  Another hour passes. The five children and I sit in the waiting area and watch the television together, and I keep my eye on them. These children seem to know what they’re doing, whereas I have never been in a hospital waiting room before. Rain’s purse sits in my lap and the children laugh politely along with the prerecorded laughter on the soundtrack of a comedy show.

  I am not really sure how I am supposed to behave in this situation. I can’t help but think that I should be sitting at Rain’s bedside, pressing her damp hand between my palms. I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators. I sit there for a while longer, imagining this romantic pandemonium, and then finally I go to stand in line at the reception booth again.

  When I sit down in the chair opposite the bulletproof glass, Valencia stares at me grimly. “Yes?” she says, as if she has never seen me before.

  “Hi,” I say. “I was just checking on the status of Rain Welsh. I’ve been sitting here for a while and I hadn’t heard anything so I thought …”

  “And you are …?” Valencia says.

  “I’m the boyfriend. I’m the one that called the ambulance. I’ve been sitting right over there waiting because you said …”

  But she is already looking away, staring at her computer screen, which faces away from me, typing a little burst of fingernail clicks onto her keyboard. Pausing, pursi
ng her lips. Typing again. Pausing to consider. Typing again.

  “She’s in X-Ray right now,” Valencia tells me at last, after several minutes.

  “Well,” I say, “do you have any idea how long it’s going to be? I mean, do you have any idea what the situation is? I’ve been sitting here patiently for a long time now, and I’d just like to know …”

  “That’s all the information I have, sir,” Valencia murmurs firmly, and gives me a look that says: Are you going to give me trouble? Because I know how to handle troublemakers.

  “So I guess I’ll just wait,” I say. “I’ll just wait right over here.”

  8

  NO SMOKING ON HOSPITAL GROUNDS, so I head out to the bus stop on the sidewalk just beyond the parking lot and stand there to smoke one of the nasty Mistys that I found in the purse. It has a kind of perfumey, mentholated flavor, like a cough drop dissolved in Earl Grey tea.

  I had no idea that Rain smoked, and in some ways this makes me like her more. The fact that she was shy about it, that she wanted to hide it from me. That’s kind of sweet.

  I’ve always liked the idea of smoking more than I liked the actual smoke. Watching someone smoke in movies, for example, is a lot more pleasant than waking up after a pack of cigarettes and coughing up a yellow-green slug of phlegm.

  Nevertheless I have a predilection for it. My mother was a fiercely committed smoker, and, growing up, I probably ingested half-a-pack-a-day’s worth of secondhand smoke. I’ve always found cigarettes comforting, a taste of childhood, the way some people feel about Kellogg’s cereal or Jell-O or Vicks VapoRub.

  I’m just about finished with my smoke when I look up and see three women coming toward me. The women are being led out of the emergency room in their gowns and slippers, pushing their wheeled IV stands down the sidewalk. The IV stands look like bare silver coat racks; a clear plastic bag full of clear liquid hangs from each one, and a tube runs from each bag to each woman’s arm. They walk along, single file, followed by an orderly who is talking on a cellphone. When they get close to me, they all stop, take out packs of cigarettes, and light up.