The Killing Lessons: A Novel

1

The instant Rowena Cooper stepped out of her warm, cookie-scented kitchen and saw the two men standing in her back hallway, snow melting from the rims of their boots, she knew exactly what this was: her own fault. Years of not locking doors and windows, of leaving the keys in the ignition, of not thinking anything like this was ever going to happen, years of feeling safe—it had all been a lie she’d been dumb enough to tell herself. Worse, a lie she’d been dumb enough to believe. Your whole life could turn out to be nothing but you waiting to meet your own giant stupidity. Because here she was, a mile from the nearest neighbor and three miles from town (Ellinson, Colorado; pop. 697), with a thirteen-year-old son upstairs and a ten-year-old daughter on the front porch and two men standing in her back hallway, one of them holding a shotgun, the other a long blade that even in the sheer drop of this moment made her think machete, though this was the first time she’d ever seen one outside the movies. The open door behind them showed heavy snow still hurrying down in the late afternoon, pretty against the dark curve of the forest. Christmas was five days away.

She had an overwhelming sense of the reality of her children. Josh lying on his unmade bed with his headphones on. Nell in her red North Face jacket standing, watching the snow, dreamily working her way through the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup she’d negotiated not ten minutes ago. It was as if there were an invisible nerve running from each of them to her, to her navel, her womb, her soul. This morning Nell had said: That guy Steven Tyler looks like a baboon. She came out with these pronouncements, apropos of nothing. Later, after breakfast, Rowena had overheard Josh say to Nell: Hey, see that? That’s your brain. That, Rowena had known, would be something like a cornflake or a booger. It was an ongoing competition between the two of them, to find small or unpleasant things and claim they were each other’s brains. She thought what a great gift to her it was that her children not only loved but also cagily liked each other. She thought how full of great gifts her life was—while her body emptied and the space around her rushed her skin like a swarm of flies and she felt her dry mouth open, the scream coming …

don’t scream …

if Josh keeps quiet and Nell stays …

maybe just rape oh God …

whatever they …

the rifle …

The rifle was locked in the cupboard under the stairs and the key was on the bunch in her purse and her purse was on the bedroom floor and the bedroom floor was a long, long way away.

All you have to do is get through this. Whatever it takes to—

But the larger of the men took three paces forward and in what felt to Rowena like slow-motion (she had time to smell stale sweat and wet leather and unwashed hair, to see the small dark eyes and big head, the pores around his nose) raised the butt of the shotgun and smashed it into her face.

*   *   *

Josh Cooper wasn’t lying on his bed, but he did have his headphones on. He was sitting at his desk with the Squier Strat (used, eBay, $225, he’d had to put in the $50 his grandma sent for his birthday three months back to swing it with his mom) plugged into its practice amp, laboring through a YouTube tutorial—How to Play Led Zeppelin’s The Rain Song—while trying not to think about the porno clip he’d seen at Mike Wainwright’s house three days ago, in which two women—an older redhead with green eyeshadow and a young blond girl who looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar—mechanically licked each other’s private parts. Girl-girl sixty-nine, Mike had said crisply. In a minute, they go ass-to-ass. Josh hadn’t a clue what ass-to-ass could possibly mean, but he knew, with thudding shame, that whatever it was, he wanted to see it. Mike Wainwright was a year older and knew everything about sex, and his parents were so vague and flaky, they hadn’t gotten around to putting a parental control on his PC. Unlike Josh’s own mom, who’d set one up as a condition of him even having a PC.

The memory of the two women had made him hard. Which was exactly what the guitar tutorial had been supposed to avoid. He didn’t want to have to jerk off. The feeling he got afterwards depressed him. A heaviness and boredom in his hands and face that put him in a lousy mood and made him snap at Nell and his mom.

He forced himself back to The Rain Song. The track had baffled him, until the Internet told him it wasn’t played in standard tuning. Once he retuned (D-G-C-G-C-D), the whole thing had opened out to him. There were a couple of tricky bastard reaches between chords in the intro, but that was just practice. In another week, he’d have it nailed.

*   *   *

Nell Cooper wasn’t on the porch. She was at the edge of the forest in deep snow, watching a mule deer not twenty feet away. An adult female. Those big black eyes and the long lashes that looked fake. Twenty feet was about as close as you could get. Nell had been feeding this one for a couple of weeks, tossing it saved apple cores and handfuls of nuts and raisins sneaked from her mom’s baking cupboard. It knew her. She hadn’t named it. She didn’t talk to it. She preferred these quiet intense encounters.

She took her gloves off and went into her pocket for a half-eaten apple. Snow light winked on the bracelet her mother had given her when she turned ten in May. A silver chain with a thin golden hare, running, in profile. It had been her great-grandmother’s, then her grandmother’s, then her mother’s, now hers. Rowena’s distant family on her maternal side had come out of Romania. Ancestral lore said there had been a whiff of witchcraft, far back, and that the hare was a charm for safe travel. Nell had always loved it. One of her earliest memories was of turning it on her mother’s wrist, sunlight glinting. The hare had a faraway life of its own, though its eye was nothing more than an almond-shaped hole in the gold. Nell wasn’t expecting it, but on the evening of her birthday, long after the other gifts had been unwrapped, her mom came into her room and fastened it around her left wrist. You’re old enough now, she’d said. I’ve had the chain shortened. Wear it on your left so it won’t get in the way when you’re drawing. And not for school, OK? I don’t want you to lose it. Keep it for weekends and holidays. It had surprised Nell with a stab of love and sadness, her mother saying you’re old enough. It had made her mother seem old. And alone. It had, for both of them, brought Nell’s father’s absence back sharply. The moment had filled Nell with tenderness for her mother, who she realized with a terrible understanding had to do all the ordinary things—drive her and Josh to school, shop, cook dinner—with a sort of lonely bravery, because Nell’s father was gone.

It made her sad now, to think of it. She resolved to be more help around the house. She would try her best to do things without being asked.

The doe took a few dainty steps, nosed the spot where Nell’s apple core had landed—then lifted its head, suddenly alert, the too-big ears (they were called mule deer because of the ears) twitching with a whir like a bird’s wing. Whatever the animal had heard, Nell hadn’t. To her, the forest remained a big, soft, silent presence. (A neutral presence. Some things were on your side, some things were against you, some things were neither. The word is neutral, Josh had told her. And in any case, you’re wrong: things are just things. They don’t have feelings. They don’t even know you exist. Josh had started coming out with this stuff lately, though Nell didn’t for one minute believe he really meant it. Part of him was going away from her. Or rather he was forcing a part of himself to go away from her. Her mom had said: Just be patient with him, honey. It’s a puberty thing. Another few years, you’ll probably be worse than him.) The doe was tense, listening for something. Nell wondered if it was Old Mystery Guy from the cabin across the ravine.

Old Mystery Guy’s name, town gossip had revealed, was Angelo Greer. He’d shown up a week ago and moved into the derelict place over the bridge, a mile east of the Coopers’. There had been an argument with Sheriff Hurley, who said he didn’t care if the cabin was legally Mr. Greer’s (he’d inherited it years ago when his father died), there was no way he was taking a vehicle over the bridge. The bridge wasn’t safe. The bridge had been closed, in fact, for more than two years. Not a priority repair, since the cabin was the only residence for twenty miles on that side of the ravine and had been deserted for so long. Traffic crossing the Loop River used the highway bridge farther south, to connect with US-40. In the end, Mr. Greer had driven his car to the west side of the bridge and lugged his supplies across from there on foot. He shouldn’t be doing that, either, Sheriff Hurley had said, but it went no further. Nell hadn’t seen Mr. Greer. She and Josh were at school when he’d driven out past their house, but it couldn’t be much longer before he’d have to go back into town. According to her mom, there wasn’t even a phone at the cabin. When Sadie Pinker had stopped by last week, Nell had overheard her say: What the hell is he doing out there? To which Rowena had replied: Christ knows. He walks with a stick. I don’t know how he’s going to manage. Maybe he’s out there looking for God.

Nell checked her pockets, but all the nuts and raisins were gone. The doe sprang away.

A gunshot exploded in the house.

2

Nell ran.

Telling herself it wasn’t a gunshot.

Knowing it was.

The ground was a cracked ice floe in a fast current moving against her. Her face was overfull, her hands crammed with blood. There was a busyness to the air, as if it were filled with whispering particles. Details were fresh and urgent: the soft crunch of the snow; the kitchen’s smell of just-baked cookies; a complicated knot in the oak floor’s grain; the deep maroon of Josh’s Converse sneakers by the living room door, light coming through the lace holes.

Her mother lay on her side at the bottom of the stairs. Blood pooled around her, jewelly dark, with a soft sheen. Her skirt was off and her panties were looped around her left ankle. Her hair was wrong. Her eyes were open.

Nell felt herself swollen and floating. This was a dream she could will herself out of. Kicking up from underwater, you held your breath through the heaviness until you hit the thin promise of the surface, then sweet air. But she was kicking and kicking and there was no surface, nothing to wake to. Just the understanding that the world had been planning this her whole life, and everything else had been a trick to distract her. The house, which had always been her friend, was helpless. The house couldn’t do anything but watch, in aching shock.

Her mother’s bare legs bicycled slowly in the blood. Nell wanted to cover them. It was terrible, the pale flesh of her mother’s buttocks and the little scribble of varicose veins on her left thigh uncovered like that, in the front hall. Her mouth went Mommy … Mommy … Mommy…, but no sound came, just rough breath, a solid thing too big for her throat. Her mother blinked. Moved her hand through the blood and raised her finger to her lips. Shshsh. The gesture left a vertical red daub, like a geisha’s lipstick. Nell staggered to her and dropped to her knees.

Mommy!

Run, her mother whispered. They’re still here.

Her mother’s eyes fluttered closed again. It reminded Nell of all the times they’d given each other butterfly kisses, eyelashes against cheek.

Mommy!

Her mother’s eyes opened. Run to Sadie’s. I’m going to be all right, but you have to run.

There was a sound of furniture moving upstairs.

Now! her mother gasped. She sounded furious. Go now! Quick!

Something moved much closer. In the living room.

Her mother gripped her by the wrist and spat: You run right now, Nell. I’m not kidding. Do it or I’m going to be angry. Go. Now!

To Nell, backing away from her mother, it was as if a skin that joined the two of them was tearing. She kept stopping. There was a fierce emptiness in her ankles and knees and wrists. She couldn’t swallow. But the farther away she got, the more vigorously her mother nodded, Yes, yes, keep going, baby, keep going.

She made it all the way to the open back door before the man stepped out of the living room.

3

He had coppery hair in greasy curls that hung all the way down to his thinly bearded jaw. Pale blue eyes that made Nell think of archery targets. His face was moist and his dirty-fingernailed hands looked as if they’d thawed too fast. Dark oily jeans and a black Puffa jacket with a rip in the breast through which the soft gray lining showed. His feet would stink, Nell thought. He looked tense and thrilled.

Hey, cunt, he said to Rowena, smiling. How’re you holding up?

Then he turned and saw Nell.

The moment lasted a long time.

When Nell moved, she thought of the way the doe had sprung away into the forest. Its head had jerked to the right as if it had been yanked on an invisible rein; then it had twisted and flung itself as if the rest of its body was a fraction slower and had to catch up. It was the way she felt, turning and running, as if her will were a little maddening distance ahead of her, straining to haul her body into sync.

The space around her was heavy, something she had to wade through. At the beach once on vacation in Delaware, she’d been standing on tiptoe in the ocean, the bottle green water up to her chin, and Josh said, Oh my God, Nell, shark! Right behind you! Hurry! And though she’d been certain—or almost certain—he was kidding, there was the agony of the water’s weight, soft and sly and fighting her, slowing her, in cahoots with the shark.

Josh.

Mom.

I’m going to be all right, but you have to run.

I’m going to be.

All right.

All right meant later, tomorrow, Christmas, days and weeks and years, breakfast in the untidy kitchen, the smell of toast and coffee, TV in the evening, drives into town, Sadie coming over, the scent of her mother’s hand cream, conversations like the ones they’d been having lately when they talked woman-to-woman, somehow—

Something crashed behind her. She looked back into the house.

The red-haired man was picking himself up from the hallway floor, laughing, saying: What the fuck, bitch? Then shaking his left leg to dislodge Rowena’s hand from his ankle. Something in Nell knew it was the last of her mother’s strength. It was the last of her strength. And yet out of her exhaustion an impulse pushed her and her legs moved, barely touching the packed snow she and Josh had beaten down on their walks to the forest.

She was running.

It seemed impossible, she was so empty. The lightest breeze would lift her into the air like a fall leaf.

But she was running. She had twenty yards on him.

Cunt.

The word was dark and thick with dirt. She’d heard it maybe twice before in her life; she couldn’t remember where.

How’re you holding up? His smile when he’d asked that meant nothing you could say would stop him doing what he was doing. It would just make him do it more.

She wanted to go back to her mother. She could stop, turn, say to the man: I don’t care what happens, just let me cover my mom’s legs and put my arms around her. That’s all I want. Then you can kill me. The longing to stop was so powerful. The way her mother’s eyelids had closed and opened, as if it were a difficult thing she had to concentrate on, very carefully. It meant … It meant …

The swish of his arms against the Puffa jacket, the thud and squeak of his boots in the snow. He was very close behind her. The twenty yards had been eaten up. How stupid to think she could outrun him. The long legs and grown-up strength. For the first time she thought: You’ll never see your mother again. Or Josh. Her own voice repeated this in her head, You’ll never see your mother again, mixed with the man’s Hey, cunt, and her mother saying, Yes but how much do you love me…?

She knew she shouldn’t look back, but she couldn’t help it.

He was almost within touching distance, red hands reaching for her. In the glimpse she saw his mouth open in the coppery beard, small teeth tobacco stained, the pale blue eyes like a goat’s, his sharp nose with long, raw nostrils. He looked as if he were thinking about something else. Not her. He looked worried.

The glance back cost her. She stumbled, felt the ground snag the toe of her left boot, threw her hands out in front of her for the fall.

His fingertips swiped the hood of her jacket.

But he’d overreached.

She stayed—just—on her empty legs, and he went down hard behind her with a grunt and a barked Fuck.

Her mother’s eyes saying, Go on, baby, go on.

Never again. The golden hare’s faraway life suddenly close to her own.

Things are just things. They don’t have feelings. They don’t even know you exist.

Nell could hear herself sobbing. There was a bloom of warmth in her pants and she realized she’d wet herself.

But she was at the tree line, and the afternoon light was almost gone.

4

He was still coming. She could hear the pines’ soft crash as he went past them. The forest wasn’t in shock, as the house had been. It had mattered to the house, but in here, it barely registered. The smell of old wood and undisturbed snow had always made her think of Narnia, and the wardrobe that led to the magical winter kingdom. It made her think of it now, in spite of everything. Her mind was all these useless thoughts, flitting around the image of her mother’s face and the way she’d blinked so slowly, and there was a look in her eyes Nell had never seen before, an admission that there was something she couldn’t do, that there was something she couldn’t fix.

Your jacket’s red, fig brain, she imagined Josh saying. Red. Don’t make it easy for him.

She crouched behind a Douglas fir and took it off. Black woolen sweater underneath. The cold grabbed her with vicious delight. The jacket lining was navy blue. The smart thing—the Josh thing—would be to turn it inside out and wear it that way. She started—but her hands were faint, distant things to which she’d lost her connection. The hare’s heart was hers now, beating into her pulse.

She heard him say, Jesus fucking Christ.

Too close. Get farther away, then put it back on.

She ran again. It had gotten darker. Somewhere under the snow was the off-road trail, but she had no idea if she was on it. The self-absorbed trees gave no clue. And there were her footprints. No matter where she ran, he’d know. At least until the last of the light went. How much longer? Minutes. She told herself she had to keep going for only a few minutes.

Come here, you little shit, his voice said. She couldn’t tell where he was. The firs and the snow packed all the sounds close, like in Megan’s dad’s recording studio. Should she climb up? (She could climb anything. Nell, honey, I wish you’d stop climbing things, her mother had said. Nell had said: I won’t fall. To which her mother replied: I’m not worried you’ll fall. I’m worried you’ve got monkey genes.) Should she climb up? No, the footprints would stop and he’d know: Here I am! Up here! She stumbled forward. Found firmer snow. Her legs buckled. Her palms stung when she hit the ground. She got up again. Ran.

The land sloped suddenly. Here and there, black rock broke the snow. She was forced downhill. The drifts went sometimes above her knees. Her muscles burned. It seemed a long time since she’d heard him. She’d lost all sense of direction. Breathing scored her lungs. She struggled back into her jacket. It was dark enough now for the red not to matter.

A branch snapped. She looked up.

It was him.

Thirty feet above her and to her left. He’d seen her.

Stay there! he spat. Stop fucking running. Jesus, you little—

Something rolled under his foot and he fell. The slope pitched him toward her. He couldn’t stop himself.

It seemed to Nell that she’d only turned and taken three pointless steps when she heard him cry out. But this time she didn’t look back. All she knew was the tearing of her muscles and the burn of every breath. Stones turned her ankles. Branches stung her exposed hands and face. Something scratched her eye, a mean little detail in the blur. The only certainty was that any second his hands would be on her. Any second. Any second.

5

Upstairs in the house Xander King watched the boy on the bedroom floor die, then sat down at the desk’s little swivel chair. The world had come alive, the way it did, but it wasn’t right. This had been a mistake, and it was Paulie’s fault. Paulie was getting on his nerves. Paulie was going to fuck everything up. It was ridiculous, really, that he’d let Paulie stick around so long. Paulie was going to have to go.

It was a relief to Xander to realize this, to know it for certain, despite the inconvenience, the work involved, the distraction. Anything you knew for certain was a relief.

The cool smell of new paint played around him, from the empty room across the hall. (He’d done a dreamy sweep of the upper floor: the woman’s bedroom with its odors of clean linen and cosmetics; another filled with neatly boxed stuff—vinyl records, manila files, a sewing machine; a bathroom with the fading light on its porcelain and tiles—and the half-painted fifth room, small, with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers draped in painters’ tarps. A roller and tray, brushes in a jar of turpentine, a stepladder. It had reminded him of Mama Jean, up her stepladder in the lounge at the old house, wearing her sour-smelling man’s overalls, her face flecked with white emulsion.)

The boy’s TV was on, with the sound down. The Big Bang Theory. Another show like Friends, with too many bright colors. Xander found the remote on the desk and flicked through the channels, hoping to find Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Or Real Housewives of New York. Or Real Housewives of Orange County. There were a lot of shows he was drawn to. The Millionaire Matchmaker. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. America’s Next Top Model. The Apprentice. But no luck. His body was rich. He teased himself a little, looking at the dead kid’s blown-open guts, then looking away, feeling the richness come and go in his limbs, as if it were a dial in himself he could turn up and down at will.

The kid’s guitar had fallen facedown on the rug. The rug was Native American style. Which reminded Xander of a fact he knew: White settlers had given the Indians blankets infected with diseases in the hope that they’d all get sick and die. There were certain facts he was familiar with. Certain facts that made sense in the way that so much else didn’t. So much else not only didn’t make sense but exhausted him as well. He was constantly struggling with exhaustion.

Remembering the disease blankets made his beard itch. A beard. He hadn’t shaved for four days. His routines had been suffering. The battery shaver was dead. The good thing about the battery shaver was that you could do it without a mirror.

He thought about the woman downstairs. He would go down to her soon, but for now it was very good just to sit and enjoy the richness. It was a wonderful thing to know he could go down to her anytime he liked. It was a wonderful thing to know she wasn’t going anywhere. He could go anywhere and do anything, but everything and anything she wanted to do depended on him. His face and hands had the plump warmth that was both impatience and all the time in the world.

But still, it wasn’t right. Too many things, recently, hadn’t been right. There was a way of doing what he needed to do, and lately he’d been losing sight of it. The cunt in Reno, for example. That had been Paulie’s fault, too. Paulie definitely had to go.

6

The world stopped and Nell flew through it. A non-silence like when you put your head underwater in the bath, the loud private quiet of the inside of your own body. She ran through the darkness and with every step knew she couldn’t take another step. It was as if his hands were on her and yet she was still moving. How could she still be moving if he had her? Perhaps he’d lifted her off her feet and she was just pedaling air. Like her mother’s bare legs kicking slowly in the blood. Her mother’s blood. Leaving her. Spreading on the floor. So much blood. When blood came out, it didn’t go back in. Never again. You’ll never see …

The trees ended. A deeper cold from the ravine came up, sheer air and the sound of the rushing river far below. The snow was coming down faster now, at a wind-driven angle. The bridge was fifty feet to her left. Which meant she was half a mile from home, going the wrong way. But she couldn’t turn back on herself. When she thought of turning back on herself the only image she got was of him stepping out from behind a tree and the warm thud of her running straight into his body, his arms coming quick around her. Gotcha. She could hear him saying that.

She ran to the bridge. There was, incredibly, a parked car a few feet away from it.

Whose car? Empty?

She stopped. His car? With someone else in it?

She peered through the falling snow.

There was no one in the car. Could she hide under it? No. Stupid. First place he’d look. People nearby?

She scanned the ravine’s edge. No one.

There was no time. Move.

She ran to the bridgehead.

A red sign with white lettering: BRIDGE CLOSED DANGER DO NOT CROSS.

Rusted metal struts driven into the walls of the ravine. Wooden sleepers she remembered wobbling the few times her mom had driven them across in the Jeep. A mile to the west, she knew, the ravine narrowed to barely twenty feet before flaring out again. Last year an ice storm had brought a Douglas fir down across the gap. Teenagers proved themselves by crawling over to the other side and back. You had to go there and back. That was the thing. Josh and his friend Mike Wainwright had spent a whole morning working up the courage. Daring each other. Double-daring. In the end, neither of them had done it. Two hundred feet. The ravine’s dark air ready. The river waiting.

She edged around the sign. Her wet jeans were icy between her legs. The creases bit her skin. Her feet felt bruised. The snow here was above her knees. How far to the other side? In the Jeep it took seconds. She seemed to be wading forever. There were invisible weights on her thighs.

Halfway across she had to stop and rest. She wanted to lie down. She could barely see an arm’s length in the slanting snow. The distance between her and her mother and Josh hurt her insides. She kept imagining it being morning, the gray daylight and the warmth of the kitchen, her mom turning to her as she walked in and saying, Nell where’ve you been? I’ve been out of my mind …

She forced herself to move. Three steps. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The end of the bridge. The back of a metal sign, identical, she supposed, to the one at the other end. A broken spool of barbed wire hung between the railings and dangled into the emptiness of the ravine.

Goddamn you, the man’s voice said. It sounded as if he were inches behind her. She turned. He was at the BRIDGE CLOSED sign, struggling to squeeze past it. It seemed impossible that she’d be able to get her legs to move.

She staggered forward. Two more steps. Three. She was almost there.

Something made her stop.

Apart from the whisper of the racing snow and the intimate din of her own breathing, there was nothing to hear. But it was as if she’d heard something.

The actual sound, when it came, wiped everything from her mind.

And when the world fell from under her, a small part of herself felt a strange relief.

This part of her—her soul, maybe—flew up out of the fall like a spark with the thought that at least it was over, at least wherever her mom had gone, she would go, too. She believed in heaven, vaguely. Where good people went when they died. Some place where you could walk on the clouds and there were white stairways and gardens and God—although she always imagined she’d rather just know he was around than actually meet him. She’d sometimes wondered if she was a good person, but now that it came to it, she wasn’t afraid.

Far away was the sound of grinding, metal against rock.

All around her, the gloom and the snow somersaulting slowly.

Then something rushed up at deafening speed to strike her face.

7

It was still dark when Nell opened her eyes, though she had no idea how long she’d been out. Her first confused thought was that she was in bed, and that the comforter was wet and freezing. Then her vision cleared. Not the comforter. Snow. Three or four inches on her. It was still snowing.

As if it had been waiting for her to realize this, cold rushed her, seized every molecule, and said: You are freezing. You are freezing to death.

She pushed herself up onto her elbow. Too fast. The world spun. The sky’s soft chasm and the looming wall of the ravine churned like clothes in a tumble dryer. She rolled onto her side and vomited, and for what felt like a long time afterwards just lay there, though her body not only shivered but occasionally jerked, too, as if someone were jabbing her with a cattle prod. Through the cold she was aware of two pains: one in her right foot, one in her skull. They throbbed together, in time with her pulse. They were bad, but she knew they weren’t so bad as they soon would be. It was as if they were telling her this, with glee, that they were just getting started.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I’ll never see my mom again. It brought back the time she was very small and got separated from her mother in a department store. All the unknown adults and intimidating heights, the panic, the full horror of herself in the world alone. The world had been hiding how terrifying it was. It drew back again half a minute later, when Rowena found her, but there was no forgetting it. And now here it was again.

Nell pushed herself back up onto her elbow and looked down. She was lying on a narrow shelf that stuck out from the ravine about fifteen feet from the top. If she’d rolled another eight inches, she’d have gone, two hundred feet down to the dark green river and its scattered rocks. On the opposite side, struts mangled, the bridge hung, ridiculously, from one of its huge rivets.

The golden hare bracelet had snapped its chain. It lay in the snow next to her, in flecks of blood. You’re old enough now. The hare marked the edge of her fall. Another few inches and she’d be dead. She imagined it had a certain number of times it could save you. This was one. She wondered how many. Very carefully, she closed her fingers around it. It seemed to take a long time to work it into her jacket pocket. Safe travel.

She got to her knees. The pain in her foot turned up its volume. She clamped her teeth together. Her head went big and solid and hot, then cold and fragile. Her scalp shrank. She couldn’t stop the shivering. She could feel the sheer drop behind her like a weight pulling at her back.

I wish you’d stop climbing everything. I’m worried you’ve got monkey genes. Nell had thought monkey jeans (chimps in little Levi’s) until Josh, rolling his eyes, explained. She hadn’t really grasped it even then.

The ravine wall was frozen black rock, veined white where the snow held. Not quite vertical. Not quite vertical, but still.

I’m going to be all right, but you have to run.

She reached up for the nearest handhold. Her fingers were numb. Her face flooded with heat. And when she tried to stand, the pain in her foot screamed.

8

Paulie Stokes was in agony. His fall had brought him with the full force of his body’s weight up against what turned out to be a two-foot tree stump half buried in the snow. His bent left knee had hit it hard, and now, back within sight of the house, the pain was so bad he was beginning to think it must be broken.

He’d thought she was dead.

He’d stood there for maybe fifteen minutes. Until her head lifted. He’d watched her body get its bearings. He’d watched the little bitch climb. Climb, Jesus.

Xander couldn’t know.

Xander could not and must not know.

Which Paulie knew was an insane decision to have made—but he’d made it. There were a lot of decisions he made this way, with the sense that the thing they were intended to avoid couldn’t be avoided. He did this with a mix of lightness and terror and fascination. He lived a light, terrified, fascinated life slightly to one side of Xander. But the longer he hung around Xander, the smaller and less reliable that life became. So now in a kind of looped dream he told himself Xander mustn’t know about the girl and Xander would find out and Xander mustn’t know and it was only a matter of time before Xander found out and he wouldn’t tell him and then the dream loop dissolved like a skyrocket’s trail in the night sky and he took a few more excruciating steps with no room for anything but the forked lightning of his shattered knee until in spite of that the dream loop started again and Xander mustn’t know and Xander was guaranteed to find out and he wouldn’t tell him and it would be all right and it wouldn’t.

Where the fuck have you been? Xander said to him as he limped into the living room. What’s wrong with you?

The wooden blinds were down and two table lamps were on. They gave a gentle buttery light. The room had a friendliness to it, from the corduroy couches to the