This Glittering World E-Book

T. Greenwood

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 378

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

T. Greenwood, acclaimed author of Two Rivers and The Hungry Season, crafts a moving story of loss and atonement. One November morning, Ben Bailey walks out of his home to retrieve the paper. Instead, he finds Ricky Begay, a young man, beaten and dying in the newly fallen snow. Reeling from the incident, he meets Ricky's sister, Shadi, and begins to question everything, from his job to his fiancée. Ben decides to discover the truth about Ricky's death, both for Shadi's sake and in hopes of mending the cracks in his own life. Yet the answers leave him torn - between responsibility and happiness, between his once-certain future and the choices that could liberate him from a delicate web of lies.

Leseprobe

Outstanding Praise for the Novels of T. Greenwood

This Glittering World

“This Glittering World is swift, stark, calamitous. Her characters, their backs against the wall, confront those difficult moments that will define them and Greenwood paints these troubled lives with attention, compassion and hope. As this novel about family, friendship, and allegiance swirls towards its tumultuous climax, This Glittering World asks us how it is that people sometimes choose to turn toward redemption, and sometimes choose its opposite—how it is, finally, that we become the people we become.”

—Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy and winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

Undressing the Moon

“This beautiful story, eloquently told, demands attention.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Greenwood has skillfully managed to create a novel with unforgettable characters, finely honed descriptions, and beautiful imagery.”

—Book Street USA

“A lyrical, delicately affecting tale.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rarely has a writer rendered such highly charged topics . . . to so wrenching, yet so beautifully understated, an effect. . . . T. Greenwood takes on risky subject matter, handling her volatile topics with admirable restraint. . . . Ultimately more about life than death, Undressing the Moon beautifully elucidates the human capacity to maintain grace under unrelenting fire.”

—The Los Angeles Times

The Hungry Season

“This compelling study of a family in need of rescue is very effective, owing to Greenwood’s eloquent, exquisite word artistry and her knack for developing subtle, suspenseful scenes. . . . Greenwood’s sensitive and gripping examination of a family in crisis is real, complex, and anything but formulaic.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“A deeply psychological read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Can there be life after tragedy? How do you live with the loss of a child, let alone the separation emotionally from all your loved ones? T. Greenwood with beautiful prose poses this question while delving into the psyches of a successful man, his wife, and his son. . . . This is a wonderful story, engaging from the beginning that gets better with every chapter.”

—The Washington Times

Turn the page for more outstanding praise for the novels of T. Greenwood.

Two Rivers

“From the moment the train derails in the town of Two Rivers, I was hooked. Who is this mysterious young stranger named Maggie, and what is she running from? In Two Rivers, T. Greenwood weaves a haunting story in which the sins of the past threaten to destroy the fragile equilibrium of the present. Ripe with surprising twists and heart-breakingly real characters, Two Rivers is a remarkable and complex look at race and forgiveness in small-town America.”

—Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog and No One You Know

“Two Rivers is a convergence of tales, a reminder that the past never washes away, and yet, in T. Greenwood’s delicate handling of time gone and time to come, love and forgiveness wait on the other side of what life does to us and what we do to it. This novel is a sensitive and suspenseful portrayal of family and the ties that bind.”

—Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and River of Heaven

“The premise of Two Rivers is alluring: the very morning a deadly train derailment upsets the balance of a sleepy Vermont town, a mysterious girl shows up on Harper Montgomery’s doorstep, forcing him to dredge up a lifetime of memories—from his blissful, indelible childhood to his lonely, contemporary existence. Most of all, he must look long and hard at that terrible night twelve years ago, when everything he held dear was taken from him, and he, in turn, took back. T. Greenwood’s novel is full of love, betrayal, lost hopes, and a burning question: is it ever too late to find redemption?”

—Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, author of The Effects of Light and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize-winning Set Me Free

“Greenwood is a writer of subtle strength, evoking small-town life beautifully while spreading out the map of Harper’s life, finding light in the darkest of stories.”

—Publishers Weekly

“T. Greenwood’s writing shimmers and sings as she braids together past, present, and the events of one desperate day. I ached for Harper in all of his longing, guilt, grief, and vast, abiding love, and I rejoiced at his final, hard-won shot at redemption.”

—Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of Belong to Me and Love Walked In

“Two Rivers is a stark, haunting story of redemption and salvation. T. Greenwood portrays a world of beauty and peace that, once disturbed, reverberates with searing pain and inescapable consequences; this is a story of a man who struggles with the deepest, darkest parts of his soul, and is able to fight his way to the surface to breathe again. But also—maybe more so—it is the story of a man who learns the true meaning of family: When I am with you, I am home. A memorable, powerful work.”

—Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

“A complex tale of guilt, remorse, revenge, and forgiveness . . . Convincing . . . Interesting . . .”

—Library Journal

“In the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, T. Greenwood’s Two Rivers is a wonderfully distinctive American novel, abounding with memorable characters, unusual lore and history, dark family secrets, and love of life. Two Rivers is the story that people want to read: the one they have never read before.”

—Howard Frank Mosher, author of Walking to Gatlinburg

“Two Rivers is a dark and lovely elegy, filled with heartbreak that turns itself into hope and forgiveness. I felt so moved by this luminous novel.”

—Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author

“Two Rivers is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder, with its quiet New England town shadowed by tragedy, and of Sherwood Anderson, with its sense of desperate loneliness and regret. . . . It’s to Greenwood’s credit that she answers her novel’s mysteries in ways that are believable, that make you feel the sadness that informs her characters’ lives.”

—Bookpage

Books by T. Greenwood

This Glittering World

The Hungry Season

Two Rivers

Undressing the Moon

Nearer Than the Sky

Breathing Water

First published in the United States in 2011 by Kensington Books, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp., New York.

First published in e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Corvus.

Copyright © T. Greenwood, 2011

The moral right of T. Greenwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 097 1

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For my sisters— Ceilidh Greenwood and in memory of Jillian and Miranda Greenwood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With thanks to my parents, Paul and Cyndy Greenwood, for their tremendous help in researching this novel. To Derek M. Begay, Milford L. Belin, and Eric M. James, who, besides keeping my dad humble at the poker table, generously offered their insight into Navajo culture. To Duncan Thayer for giving me the spark that lit this story on fire. To my lovely student, Nada Shawish, whose early morning writing sessions got me from start to finish. To Henry Dunow, the best, best agent. To Peter Senftleben, my incomparable editor, who always knows exactly how to make my work better—and to the rest of my Kensington family for their tireless support. To my brilliant girls, Mikaela and Esmee, for making every day better than the one before it. And to the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, where long ago I found both a home and my amazing husband, Patrick.

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

—Malcolm, Act IV, scene iii Shakespeare’s Macbeth

RED WORLD

Winter came early to Flagstaff that year.

Ben hadn’t split the firewood that lay in a cluttered heap in the driveway. He hadn’t cleaned out the chimney or bought salt to melt the snow from the sidewalk in front of the house. Sara hadn’t gotten the winter coats out of storage, hadn’t taken down the artificial spiderwebs and plastic decals she’d hung in the windows for Halloween. The harvest dummy sat ill-prepared and coatless on the porch. The jack-o’-lanterns hadn’t even started to bruise and rot when the first storm brought twelve inches of snow.

They weren’t prepared.

It came while they were sleeping, as Sara dreamed of something that made her scowl and Ben dreamed of something that softened his features into a face he might not recognize in the mirror. This dreaming face was the face of his boyhood. Only in sleep did the hardness of the last twenty years subside. At thirty, his face already bore the quiet evidence of things gone wrong. It was etched in the fine lines in the corners of his eyes, in his clenched jaw, and in his worried brow. But in sleep, when he did sleep, the road map tracking the journey from possibility and promise to anger and ennui and disappointment almost disappeared.

The house was cold, though neither of them knew it. Sara insisted on sleeping with a heavy down comforter year-round. Usually, Ben slept on top of it while she lay nestled like a small bird underneath its feathers. But tonight, maybe sensing the coming storm, he too had hunkered down, his dog, Maude, at his feet. The one window in their room, the one that would have revealed the falling snow, was veiled in the heavy curtains Sara had bought to keep out the morning sun and prying eyes. She was worried about the neighbor, Mr. Lionel, who she claimed looked to her like he might be dangerous, a pedophile or worse. The one who spent hours rubbing Turtle Wax into his old blue Ford Falcon. The one Ben made sure to wave and nod to each time they both happened to be outside in their yards at the same time, as if this would make up for Sara’s paranoia.

The furnace was set to OFF. The woodstove was bone cold.

Sometime during the night, as they slept, it began to snow. And when it snows in Flagstaff, it doesn’t stop until the entire world is sheathed in white. Ben had lived here long enough to have experienced this, to have gone to sleep at night and awoken to a world obscured.

Ben moved to Flagstaff eight years ago because of the snow. He’d just graduated from Georgetown and was done with the city, done with its grit and grime and heat. He planned to get his Master’s, and maybe even his PhD, in history, and he wanted to go somewhere clean and quiet for grad school. Somewhere without steaming streets and honking horns and subways always rumbling under his feet. Then he cracked a tooth on a chicken bone on a Friday afternoon and wound up in the dentist’s office, where an issue of Arizona Highways lay buried beneath a pile of other magazines. If the dentist hadn’t been running so late, Ben might have simply finished the article in Newsweek about the missing girl in Utah and not even seen the picture of the San Francisco Peaks. He might never have seen the turquoise sky with the ocean of clean white snow beneath. He might never have felt that strange tug in his chest, amplified by the ache in his jaw, and decided then and there that this is exactly where he belonged.

Here, snow was no different from air or breath. It was simply part of the landscape, part of how one lived. And he loved everything about it: the cold pristine white of it, the soft sharpness of it. The crunch and glisten. He was never as happy as he was when it snowed, each storm like a small baptism. He knew, even after he had finished his dissertation, he wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave. And so here he was eight years later, an underpaid adjunct and part-time bartender. Though all of it (the financial worries, the late hours, the work overload) was softened by the presence of snow. But still, he wasn’t expecting this. Winter, while a welcome guest, had shown up early to the party.

There had been no sign of a storm when they went to bed, Sara angry and Ben too drunk to care. They’d gone to a Halloween party at Sara’s best friend Melanie’s A-frame in Kachina Village the night before. He’d had too much to drink. Spent most of the party listening to a girl playing Jane’s Addiction songs on an acoustic guitar. Sara was furious, but she didn’t say so; she’d simply grabbed her coat and stood there waiting for him. They’d driven home in silence, gone to bed without saying good night.

And while they slept, Sara fitful and Ben oblivious, icy fingers curled around their ankles and hips. Winter crept in.

It wasn’t the cold that woke him. The shiver through the old window. The icy breath that skipped across his exposed cheek. It was Maude, his seventy-pound golden retriever, nudging, prodding. He ignored her for a moment, feeling shaky and too hungover to open his eyes. But she persisted, whimpering in his ear.

“Hush,” he said, and quietly got out of bed so as not to wake Sara, whose face had softened by now, the dream apparently having passed. He hoped that her anger also might fade by the time she woke.

The floors were icy. He grabbed the pair of socks he’d worn the night before, some long underwear, and a sweater that was crumpled up on the floor. But it wasn’t until he went into the dark living room and pulled back the curtains that he saw the obliterated sky. His head pounded, but his heart trilled. Maude knew too and raced to the door, anxious to go out and piss and play in the snow.

“Hold on, girl,” he said, his voice crackling like a fire. “Let me get the coffee on first.”

While the coffee bubbled and hissed and Maude romped in the backyard, sinking into the wadding of snow, Ben backtracked through his fuzzy recollections of the party, tripping and stumbling over the conversations until he remembered the girl, the guitar, and Sara standing over him, pissed. He remembered that the girl was very pretty, dressed up like Dorothy with sparkly red shoes, and that she had one slightly lazy eye which, for some reason, captivated him. He also remembered wanting only to curl up inside the hollow mahogany body of the instrument and listen to the music from the inside out, and he recalled whispering this to the girl. This is what Sara must have seen. Shit. It was Sunday, a day that should be easy, and already he knew he’d have to spend the day tiptoeing, making amends for this transgression and all the others she was sure to bring up.

He knew the Sunday paper wouldn’t be there yet. Theirs was the last house on the delivery route, he was convinced, because the paper almost never arrived before seven. He looked at the clock on the stove: 6:52. Maybe just this once it would be early, maybe today would be his day.

The thermometer hanging on a tree outside the kitchen window read twenty-five degrees. He found his winter coat in the back of the coat closet and his Sorels buried deep inside as well. He yanked them on and opened up the front door to the blizzard.

From the doorway, he contemplated the journey to the sidewalk for a newspaper that was likely not even there, and almost turned around to go back inside. But then the blue sliver of something in the distance caught his eye, and he imagined his newspaper lying swaddled in plastic. So he pulled his hat down over his ears, shoved his hands in his pockets, and trudged through the snow, squinting against the icy shards that seemed to be falling sideways.

But it was not his paper.

It took a minute before what he saw registered, before his brain, thick with the hangover and disbelief, could make sense of the image before his eyes. The absurdity of it was what hit him first, and he almost laughed; this would later make him wonder if it was evidence that he was, as Sara would suggest time and time again, incapable of empathy and capable of the most frightening cruelties.

At first he just thought the man was sleeping. He was curled on his side, facing the street, hands tucked quietly between his knees. But he wasn’t dressed for the cold: just a flannel shirt tucked into a pair of jeans held up by a concho belt. No coat, no hat, no gloves. Only a pair of Nike basketball sneakers on his feet. His black hair in a braid, curling like a snake into the snow.

There was a half inch of fresh powder covering his entire body.

Ben squatted down next to him and touched his shoulder, as if he could simply wake him up. “Hey,” he said.

The wind admonished Ben, and then hit him hard in the chest, like an angry fist. It was twenty-five degrees outside.

The man didn’t move, not even with a second nudge, so Ben started to roll him over, pulling his shoulder until his body yielded. He was big, maybe six foot two, a couple hundred pounds. And then the man was on his back and Ben stood up, stumbling backward.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. “Shit.”

Both eyes were sealed shut, crusty with blood and circled in blue-black. His nose was crooked, bent at an impossible angle, with dried blood in two lines running from each nostril to his lip. His bottom lip was blue and swollen, split in the center. And slowly, a fresh stream of blood began to pour from his ear, the crimson blooming like some horrific flower blossoming in the snow.

He should have run back into the house then, gotten Sara. She was a nurse, for Christ’s sake. But he was suddenly paralyzed, quite literally frozen in place as he realized: He knew this guy.

Of course, he couldn’t remember his name. . . . Jesus, why couldn’t he ever remember a goddamned name? But he knew him. He was the kid who came into the bar almost every single night to shoot pool. Ben knew he couldn’t be old enough to drink, but he never carded him, because all he ever ordered were Cokes. And because Jack’s served food, minors were allowed in as long as they didn’t sit at the bar. The kid always sat alone in a booth, eating cheese fries, waiting for someone to show up at the tables. He was a good pool player. Didn’t talk shit like some of the idiots that came into the bar. A gracious winner and loser. Jesus fucking Christ.

Ben dropped back down to the ground, feeling the cold wet seeping through the knees of his jeans. He pressed his hand hard against the kid’s chest, waiting. When he felt nothing but the resistance of bone, he leaned over and pressed his ear against his chest, listening. He didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t the silence that was suddenly as loud as drums. And the harder he pressed his ear against him, the louder the blood in his own ears got.

When it snows like this, the sun never rises. The air simply turns lighter and lighter until things come into focus. Until there is clarity.

Ben stood up again and shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, looking for his cell phone. Shit, where the hell did he put his phone last night? He was afraid to leave the kid there in the snow, as if something worse than what had already happened could happen to him now if Ben left him alone.

He thought of Sara, sleeping angrily in the bedroom, and knew that he had to wake her. She would know what to do. He needed to call 9-1-1. And so as the sky filled with hazy white light, he backed away from the kid whose head was surrounded now by a bloody halo, back through the blizzard, back to the house.

Even before the ambulance arrived, he knew what the newspapers would say about this. Young Native American man found dead in Cheshire neighborhood. Alcohol-related death suspected. He knew because this was how too many Indians die here. They come from the reservation to Flagstaff, looking for jobs, for a way to change their lives. And when they get here and find nothing but disappointment, they find places like Jack’s or the Mad I or Granny’s Closet. Ben had worked at Jack’s long enough to know that this was one of many, many sad truths. He’d seen men drink until they couldn’t see, and then watched as they stumbled out into the snow. And at least once a winter, one of them would wind up on the train tracks, where he would fall asleep and not wake up. Ben wasn’t sure how many people had died since he got here, but it seemed as if there was always some story—buried deep in the paper, mentioned in passing on the news, whispered about at the bars. This, like the snow, was a fact of life here.

Still, you don’t expect to walk out of your front door on a Sunday morning looking to retrieve your newspaper from a snowbank and find someone dead on the sidewalk.

After he woke Sara and called 9-1-1, watching as Sara made her way through the snow to the man, he started to think that maybe he wasn’t dead after all. Maybe Ben had been mistaken. He’d had a roommate in college who’d drunk almost an entire bottle of vodka by himself one night. They’d found him passed out in the bathroom at a party and called 9-1-1. The EMTs had revived him, and at the hospital they pumped his stomach and sent him back to the dorms with a crisp plastic bracelet to remind him how close he’d come. But this kid didn’t drink. At least not at Jack’s. He knew this. And besides, you don’t bleed from your ears when you’re drunk, and your face certainly doesn’t look like you ran into a brick wall headfirst from drinking either. Somebody did this to him, and when Ben had listened for his heart, all he’d heard was his own.

After the ambulance pulled away, he and Sara stood on the sidewalk, watching the twirling red lights disappear down the road.

“You okay?” Ben asked.

Sara nodded without looking at him.

“Do you think he’ll make it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t look good. He had no pulse. No blood pressure. He was bleeding out.”

Ben stared at the place where the kid’s head had been, at the violent bloom slowly turning pink as the snow kept falling.

Their neighbors were watching from the windows, their faces pressed to the glass. A few had come out onto their porches, clutching their robes around their waists. Sheila, from next door, had ushered her two sons back inside when she realized what was happening. Mr. Lionel stood on his porch, nodding grimly. Now the ambulance was gone, and Ben could hear the plow coming. In a few minutes it would barrel down this street too, pushing away any evidence that a man had just begun to die there.

The police were quick. They sent only one car, and they took Ben and Sara’s statements without even coming inside the house. Ben was surprised by how soon he and Sara were alone again. By the time the paper boy finally threw the newspaper into the yard, it felt almost as though they had just woken from the same terrible dream.

They sat at the small oak table that used to belong to Sara’s grandmother, sipping coffee, staring at the pages of the paper. Sara said, “I wonder if he has family here.”

Ben looked up, grateful for her breaking the silence, for her willingness to set aside whatever it was that had transpired between them the night before. “I don’t know,” he said. “He had ID on him, so they should be able to find out pretty quickly.”

“What was his name?” she asked. Her eyes were soft with tears.

He thought about the kid sitting at the booth at Jack’s. Always alone. Ben had a problem with names. He blamed his job. Both of his jobs. So many people in and out of his life. At the bar, he had a talent for remembering the names of every single patron for exactly the amount of time they spent bellied up, drinking, tipping. But the moment they were gone, the second they’d slapped down a five or a ten and walked out the door, any recollection of what they called themselves was gone. It was like this at school too. He had anywhere between forty and eighty students a semester. He knew the first and last names of each and every one of them until the final exam. Then he’d run into one of them on campus (Hey, Professor Bailey!) and there was nothing but that white-hot shame of forgetting. Though maybe Ben hadn’t ever known the kid’s name. It was possible that he hadn’t forgotten at all, but rather that the guy had always been anonymous.

He should tell Sara that he recognized him, he thought. That he was a regular at work. But for some reason, he didn’t. Sometimes it was easier to keep things from her. To lie. And so he said, “I think they said it was Begay? His last name. I don’t remember his first name.”

“He was just a kid. Who could have done that to him?”

This was the Sara he loved. Old Sara, he thought of her. She emerged sometimes from New Sara’s body and face, like a slippery ghost. This was the true Sara, the sweet Sara, the Sara who wasn’t sarcastic and always rolling her eyes as if she were always, always disappointed. Sara without her guard up. Vulnerable Sara. Her hair was messy, in a pale puff of a ponytail. Her makeup from her witch costume last night was smudged under her wide green eyes. She was wearing the robe he’d bought her five years ago for Christmas. He’d filled the pockets with green- and red-foil-covered Hershey’s Kisses. It was pilly now, frayed at the cuffs.

“God, Ben. What the hell?”

He reached across the table for her hand. Her hands were small, like a child’s, with short fingers and tiny palms. He studied the ring on her finger, the one that had been resting there, waiting there, for almost two years. He could barely remember most of the time now what it was that had gripped him, what emotion it was that had assailed him two summers ago. He remembered buying the ring; he’d found it at an antique shop on Route 66. He remembered her happy yes. But ever since that initial moment of elation, sitting in the alley courtyard at Pasto, dizzy with too much wine, he remembered feeling almost nothing but regret.

He’d somehow managed to convince Sara that they should wait to set a wedding date. His reasons, at first, were good ones: They needed to save money if they were going to have the kind of wedding she wanted. Then his mother passed away, and he just needed time. Later, he suggested that he really wanted them to own their own house first, wanted them to be more stable. When her father put the down payment on the place in Cheshire, he couldn’t help but feel he was being bribed. Angry now, he became even more reluctant. Let’s wait until summer. Fall. No, winter. A winter wedding. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? And finally, they stopped talking about it altogether. By now, the ring had become a constant reminder of his biggest broken promise.

He hadn’t realized that he was playing with the ring, until she yanked her hand away and grabbed her coffee mug. “What time do you have to go in to work?” she asked.

“I might check at the hospital first, to see what happened,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Maybe he didn’t die,” he said.

She shook her head. “I really don’t think he made it. Couldn’t you just call? That way you won’t miss your shift tonight.”

“So that’s what this is about?” Ben said. “The fifty bucks I’ll make at work tonight?”

New Sara raised her chin, hard and sharp, and stood up, disappearing into the kitchen. “Do what you need to do, Ben.”

But he wasn’t dead. At least not right away.

If he’d died right away, if not for the body’s stubborn insistence upon living, then it might have ended here: the snow plow carrying away the crimson snow, Ben and Sara sipping coffee at the kitchen table. They would have gone on with their lives, and this man-boy, body frozen, breath stolen by winter, would just be a sad memory shared between them. They might talk about it sometimes, about the tragedy of this life cut short. Another casualty of winter. Just another sad disaster.

But when Ben closed his eyes, he could almost see time slipping backward, events unraveling . . . a woven Navajo blanket made by the boy’s ancestors, the pattern slowly coming undone, each thread revealed, the intricate design disassembled. He saw him riding a rusty tricycle in the dirt, a hungry rez dog nipping at his ankles as he pedaled furiously away, his face flushed with heat and joyful. Ben imagined him at his grandmother’s feet as she braided his hair. His soft moccasins. His small feet. He could hear the sound of her voice as she sang the boy to sleep. He watched his eyes close and then watched as he packed a duffel bag, as he hitched a ride to Flagstaff. Ben wanted to tell him not to come. To stay home. He wanted him to see the finished picture, this picture of himself, lifeless in the snow.

Sara might be able to let this go, to will herself to forget, but Ben couldn’t let it end like this, with the uncertainty of whether or not the boy had survived. He couldn’t just pretend it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t let everything just disappear into the new snow.

Sunday night was a shit shift. Hippo could handle the kitchen and the bar by himself until Ben got there later. He grabbed his coat and said good-bye to Sara through the bathroom door. Melanie was on her way up from Kachina with a bottle of wine and a movie. He knew that by the time he got home, Sara would be asleep; she had to work tomorrow. There were children with strep throat, kids with chicken pox, babies waiting to be immunized. And so he walked out the door and drove to the hospital.

Ben hated hospitals. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d been inside a hospital, and each recollection was still sharp and nauseating. The first time was when he fell out of a tree, snapping his elbow like a twig. The second time was when he was five and his sister, Dusty, was born, one month early, her head as small as a tiny peach. He’d been terrified of the wires and tubes and the blue veins running and pulsing under the transparent skin of her chest. The third time was when Dusty died. He was eleven years old then, and he remembered the hallways smelled like chlorine, cold chicken soup, and bleach. He could still recall something bitter in his throat and the swell of something awful in his chest. And so years later, when he was away at grad school and his mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he’d only gone back east to see her in the hospital a couple of times. Each time he’d felt his pulse racing, felt his knees and spine melting into liquid bone. He’d been almost relieved when she was sent home, when she stopped the chemo treatments and opted to acquiesce rather than fight anymore. Hospitals made him sick, made his skin prickle. He didn’t know if it was ironic or masochistic or simply sad that he’d wound up engaged to a nurse.

Until now, he’d managed to avoid the hospital in Flagstaff as well. Even the time Hippo had nearly sliced off his thumb at work, he’d just dropped him off at the emergency room entrance. But now, here he was again.

He went to the visitors’ information desk and told the receptionist the story about the kid, asked if he had been admitted. He told her he only wanted to find out if the guy had survived, that he thought his last name was Begay.

She clicked and tapped at the computer without looking at Ben and said, “ICU. But you’ll need special permission to go in to see him. Down that hallway, then take a right.”

He hadn’t planned to actually go see him, but he found himself muttering, “Thank you,” and following her directions anyway. He tried to concentrate on his own breaths rather than the smell, the silence, the loamy green walls. By the time he got to the ICU waiting room, he wondered what he was doing there. He knew the kid was alive. Wasn’t that enough? He could go to work now. He could leave. But what then? Did he just go on as though nothing had happened? When you find someone beaten nearly to death in your front yard, what is expected of you? Are you tied to them, inextricably bound in some intimate way forever?

There was one old man in the waiting room. He was reading the Daily Sun but had fallen asleep. His chin rested on his chest, and he was snoring. Ben approached the nurses’ station and spoke softly so as not to wake the man, repeating the story he’d told the lady at the information desk.

“I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Begay is in grave condition, and only immediate family is being allowed in at this point.”

“Does he have family in town?” Ben asked.

“His sister,” she said. “She just went to get a cup of coffee.”

Ben felt his chest heave with relief. The kid wasn’t alone. Perhaps this was all Ben really needed. To know that if the guy were to die tonight, he wouldn’t be here, in this hospital, by himself.

“You can wait for her if you’d like. I’m sure she’d appreciate your being here.”

“Okay,” he said.

He sat down next to the old man and picked up a magazine to busy his hands. It was quiet here, just the ticking of the clock and the distant beeping and humming and buzzing of the machines.

He looked up when he sensed someone coming into the room.

The girl was blowing into the top of a Styrofoam cup. She was tall, thin, and her thick black hair ran down her back to her waist. She was wearing overalls splattered with paint and red high-top sneakers. She spoke to the nurse, who gestured toward Ben, and the girl turned to look at him. She scowled and then came over.

Ben stood up. He felt shaky, unsteady on his feet.

“Hi. I’m Ben Bailey. I’m the one who . . .” he stumbled. “I found him. This morning.”

She looked at him, skeptical, and sat down in one of the chairs and took a sip of her coffee. She gestured for him to sit as well.

“How is he?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He won’t live through the night.”

It felt like someone had punched Ben in the chest. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “We could keep him here, hooked up to these machines, and he would keep breathing. But his brain is dead. It’s too late.”

Ben took a deep breath.

“Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. Her voice was crackly, like timber just catching fire.

He shook his head. “No, I just . . . he was just out there. In the snow.”

She rubbed her temples. Her long fingers were stacked with thick silver rings. Her nails were clipped short, clean.

“Somebody knows something,” she said, looking up at him. Questioning him. “Somebody must have seen something.”

“I don’t,” he said, shaking his head, “know anything.”

His eyes were stinging, and his throat was thick. He hadn’t felt this sensation in so long, he barely recognized it anymore. A relic of childhood. This sorrow so big it fills your entire chest—he hadn’t felt that way since he was eleven years old. Not since Dusty died. It was déjà vu of the worst kind, like redreaming a terrible dream. Somebody knows something. Somebody must have seen something.

This was not what he had expected. He just came here to make sure the kid had lived. That was all. He would check in and then make his way back to work. That had been his plan.

“Hey, are you okay?” she asked, her furrowed brow softening.

He nodded and looked at her. Her face was striking, with high cheekbones, amber skin, and eyes a confusion of brown and gold. She wore a thin leather choker around her long neck, a rough nugget of turquoise dipping into the deep hollow below her throat. There was a streak of white paint across her collarbone.

“You want me to get you some water or something?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine,” he said, laughing awkwardly. He stood up. His mind was reeling. “I should be going. Will you be okay?”

She nodded and stood as well.

As he turned to leave, she said, “If he does die tonight, the funeral will be in the next couple of days. If you give me your e-mail address or phone number I can get you the details.”

He turned to look at her. She was smiling sadly.

“Sure,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a slip of paper to write on. He found a grocery receipt and asked the nurse for a pen. “And I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t get your name?”

“Shadi,” she said. “Shadi Begay.”

He nodded and scratched his e-mail address on the slip. “That’s an unusual name,” he said, looking back up at her. “I mean, it’s a beautiful name. . . . Is it . . .?”

“It’s my nickname. It’s Navajo for older sister.”

Ben looked back down at the receipt, felt his throat swell.

“You’d really come?” she asked, taking the paper from him. Her eyes were warm and still. Something about her face made him feel calm.

“Of course,” he said, nodding.

A long time ago, everything was whole. Ben remembers those times as if they belonged to some other Ben. A distant smiling happy Ben. A flickering black-and-white Super 8 life projected on a sheet suspended in a basement rec room. This was when he had a father and a mother and a sister. When he and Dusty made forts underneath the dining room table and chased fireflies while their parents drank wine out of fragile glasses in the backyard. It was a time of poison ivy and climbing trees. Everything smelled of cut grass and barbeque. Even the bee stings were good then. Even the cuts and bruises and humpbacked crickets and screeching cicadas.

Then he was eleven and Dusty was six, and in one moment, one sliver of a moment, everything changed. It was October, cold and sunny. The trees were alight in the bright autumn sun. They’d gotten off the bus after school and were walking home, and Ben wasn’t paying attention. He was cracking gum and cracking jokes with Charlie, the only other kid who got off at their stop, and Dusty lagged behind, dragging her ladybug backpack behind her, humming a song she’d learned that day at school. He and Charlie gave each other high fives before Charlie disappeared into his little brick house, and then Ben kept walking with Dusty following behind. Ben was thinking about basketball tryouts. About how to ask for new sneakers. About his math test. About what there might be to eat in the cupboard at home.

He imagines now that something beautiful caught her eye: a silvery dragonfly, a monarch with painted wings. Maybe just a falling acorn from one of the giant oak trees that lined the street. But that day, he wasn’t paying attention. And so when she darted out into the road and the car sped past them, into her, picking her up and then setting her down like just another autumn leaf on the pavement, he didn’t see anything except a blur disappearing in the distance. It happened so quickly, it was as though it hadn’t happened at all.

Later, when his father demanded, “You had to have seen something, Ben. Try to remember!” he hadn’t been able to remember anything. Not the color of the car, not the face of the driver, not even the song that Dusty had been singing.

For a while they tried to believe that someone would be caught. That there would be some sort of explanation, even if it was one they didn’t want to hear. They waited for the driver to come forward, for his conscience to kick in, for the guilt to overwhelm him. They waited for Ben to remember. But Ben hadn’t been paying attention. And Ben couldn’t remember anything. And so hope slowly turned into desperation and desperation into sad resignation.

That winter, when the trees were stripped of their leaves and their branches looked like blanched and arthritic bones against the sky, they cleaned out her room, and soon it was as if she’d never existed at all. It was also when his mother stopped making them go to church and stopped making pancakes on Saturday mornings and stopped playing her old records on the stereo. Eventually, she stopped speaking to his father. And so his dad left, moved into the city when Ben was fourteen. And then Ben graduated, left home, and his mother got sick. Since then, instead of feeling whole, Ben had felt slivered. His life fractured into before and after. And the chasm between was Dusty.

He never talked about her. Not even with Sara. There was no way to share that sort of grief with someone who had never known sadness. It would be like trying to explain the color red to a blind man. Trying to describe snow to someone who has never felt cold.

And so he held on to this secret, kept it folded into tiny squares inside his pocket. Sometimes he could forget it was there, on good days. But when he spoke to Shadi that night at the hospital, it was as though she had found it, unfolded it and smoothed the worn, soft creases. As though she were asking him to share this ragged grief.

He didn’t know how to tell Sara, how to explain this sudden urgent need to console a stranger. He could never have articulated the feeling that this was somehow serendipitous, that there might be a reason he was the one who found the kid. He knew Sara would never understand, was incapable of comprehending the new sense of purpose that swelled in his chest like a storm.

And so when Shadi Begay sent an e-mail with the details about the services, Ben lied. He said he was going down to Phoenix with Hippo to look at camper shells for Hippo’s truck, and instead drove two hundred desolate miles to Chinle for the funeral.

Ben bought his truck as a gift for himself the day he graduated from Georgetown. Little did he know then that the PhD he planned to get would likely never make him enough money to pay the truck off. It was a 1952 Chevy pickup, completely restored, the color of a candy apple. The guy who sold it to him had tears in his eyes as Ben drove away. He and Maude had driven all the way from DC to Flagstaff in this truck, windows rolled down, both of their noses to the wind. Since then, it had seen eight Flagstaff winters, and thousands of miles. He figured he might drive this truck to his grave. If he could, he’d take it with him.