Broken story.

1

How she woke in the night with the knowledge on her, crying, 'Something dreadful! Oh God, something dreadful!' Her hand reaching for the phone, listening to the clear and stubborn silence of her daughter's voice, 'I'm not a child, Mother, I am not a child,' the sound slipping away like a fish caught in the hand, the fingers closing on it and the fish shooting out, the way the cell phone shot out of her daughter's hand, arcing through the air in the shape of a sickle, or a waxing moon, or the course of an arrow, or a hound's curved tooth, or a rod bent to the catch.

The mother presses the phone so hard to her ear that the flesh swells and reddens, but now there is only the sound of her breath, which has sharpened and quickened, the sound of her heart, which has quickened, the sound of the dark. 'It is nothing,' she says, 'it is nothing.'

In the morning, blue lights flashing in the drive, neighbors clumped and craning, eyes standing in their heads, and the priest come robed from early Sunday service, she will wrap her arms about herself and rock, like a woman with a child protected in her arms. 'If only,' she will say, 'if only.'

Although there is nothing she could have done to prevent or lessen. A prophet has no power except to see, and perhaps to suffer more because she did see and could do nothing. Because everything has been already done, her daughter's car spun off the road into the woods, her cell phone spun into the lake--its protective flap sprung up like the tail of a startled doe--where it swings, a shining fish tangled in reflections.

What is the shape of a daughter's spirit? Is it a fish, small and silver, glittering below black water, or a doe, doe-eyed and lovely, poised for flight on innocent long legs?

And while the officer, with pity on her tongue, gives facts and times and estimates, the mother, blank-eyed, sees a monster coming toward her daughter through the forest, waiting in the darkness at the roadside to angle out its monster leg, or its arm, the will of a monster, its intention, and hook her in, the way a fisherman, rising early in the morning, pulls on his hat and boots, and slinging the paraphernalia of slaughter on his shoulder, goes out to hook in a fine fish.

So, the mother thinks, my daughter has been hooked, she has been taken by the monster, and as she lifts her head to the priest in her pale green chasuble, it seems to her the monster is not a fisherman at all, but a huntress, a goddess robed in green, hounds at heel, gold quiver at her back, arms held out in welcome to the bow's flex and the arrow's shaft, the sharp twang before the singing in the air, her daughter's spirit leaping through the forest, full into her path.

2

A coffin, a coffin must be chosen, yes, it must be done, the undertaker's salesman sitting with them at the kitchen table, on his face that neutral, tactful, sympathetic look that says, I've seen all this before and will see it all again, but with fear behind it, not a roaring, howling fear, or a silent tight denial, but the muted, nibbling sort, like a bruise pressed by a finger. His eyes are caged and watchful, his mind on running costs and mortgage and the quota he must meet to keep this job. He knows the size of his commission depends on this sad-faced woman's choice, and is the only calm one at the table, except for that nibbling between his belly and his heart.

Although everybody seems completely calm, even the dead girl's sister, with the calm brought on by medication, a calmness of the skin, the flesh beneath ready to jump and jump, the skin holding it in place. The brother also calm, to anyone who does not know him, cannot recognize the way he speaks so evenly, helping his mother go over all the reasonable considerations, ignoring his sister, who already blames him, although she lets it happen, she colludes, lets the words out flat and ordinary, with what later will be horror and regret: 'Okay, then, it's best to take the cheapest, the one you can afford.' And with those words dooms herself to a lifetime--she is certain, she is certain, it is going to be a lifetime, certain she is going to have a lifetime--of that dreadful practical decision haunting, knowing it is right, the only choice, her mother, checkbook in hand, murmuring, 'I'll do this on my own, as I have ever since he left me. After all, what are satin linings and soft pillows to the dead? What are fine, high-polished woods and gleaming silver handles? I hope my children, you that I have left, will make a sensible decision when I'm gone, to keep things simple and pile flowers on me from your gardens.'

For the sake of her dead daughter's friends she does accept the salesman's offer of an elegant white linen pall, kept entirely for this purpose, that can be folded afterwards and taken back, no charge, because by now he knows his commission this time will be modest, not resenting it, not pushing or cajoling, since he understands that love and grief are the twin heads of death's doorkeeper, and both can be transmuted into flowers.

3

The boy is in the trauma room. He is trying to feel his body. Does he have a body any more? It's difficult to tell. And the men in white coats make scratching noises on a clipboard unhooked from the metal rail they hide behind, or lean against two-handed, looking down at him, heavy-eyed and ponderous and wise. 'His mind is wandering,' one says, 'but at least he has a mind.'

The boy feels cunning. It is all a trick. There's nothing to it. He'll cling onto the rail.

The rail is sturdy, a grayish silver color. It gleams dully when the sun is glaring in the room.

Click! The sun is off.

Now a light comes from somewhere down below. It's all around him, a seedy yellow color, as though the world is rotting, slowly, like a compost heap, and the fumes have somehow caught on fire, flickering low and soft across a surface chuckling to itself, the world flambeed, his view of it the metal footrail and the piece of bed in front, solid, reassuring, the bed a dark ship with a good stout rail around its deck.

He's lying on the deck in something, a deckchair or a hammock, strapped in by a prankster who's gone off for another drink and to trade a story with his friends, who don't pay much attention because they're busy laying bets on how long it will be before the latest one to be tied down on deck gives up and hollers uncle. It's a test, a sort of hazing, to see who can drink this many jugs of beer nonstop and then lie strapped down without peeing long enough to break the record.

The boy would like to pee very much. He tries to let it go but nothing happens. Maybe he will win.

The guys have a timer on him. It's behind his head making clicking sounds. The team they're challenging has held the record for too long and he's the odds-on favorite to win it back. It's all about team spirit and never giving in. Then you get a trophy to set with the others in the window where people passing by can see them from the street. 'Quite a boy you have there,' they tell his father when they come to pick their own boy up from soccer camp, and his father, who has taught him everything he knows, says, 'Quite a boy.' Tomorrow, when he's off this ship, champion of whatever this new game he's playing is, there's to be a tournament and he will be assistant coach.

His father sits on a hard bench in the bleachers with his head in his hands. I am the one who weeps.

But now the ship has drifted to the far edge of a plain jostling with people, or he thinks they're people. It's hard to tell from here. Their voices hum and babble. They're telling each other stories, staggering a little, laughing, their eyes blank and shining the way his friends eyes shine when they're partying hard and telling a good story. Although it's never a good story. It's always something else. A report maybe, or a warning, a tale about the monster they've carried about with them from childhood, the one who hides under the bed at night, ready to snap off an unwary arm or leg. Or the monster in the closet, or the one glimpsed through the keyhole in the passageway, the one coming down the chimney, or huffing and puffing to blow the house down, the one lurking in the woods with savagery in mind. They all know these stories well because they've all been followed by one monster or another, or have followed him, been lured by him and trapped.

In one motion, the people on the plain all turn toward the boy as though he might deliver them, but he can't think what to do and their eyes turn vicious. They are calling to him, calling, speaking to his heart. And he takes up his heart and follows them, the men in white coats jerking and jerking him back, the way a disobedient dog is jerked and jerked on a leash until he learns to sit, lie down, roll over and play dead.

His eyes are red, a meat eater, and he barks from his three throats.

Click! Someone has switched on the sun. It's directly overhead and has lost its way. It's trying to make its mind up: east or west?

4

They have all come, the friends of the dead girl and the ruined boy. Even the bus boy from the nightclub has come, his face ashen with responsibility. They have brought flowers with them. They hold them in their hands.

'Ashes to ashes,' says the priest, and, 'dust to dust.'

The flowers surge into the sunlight. They eddy at the surface of the dug red grave, as though the air inside is too dense for them to fall, or perhaps reluctant. Then, like feathers from a broken pillow, they slide sideways down onto the coffin. They are white, these flowers, white lilies--lily of tapestry, lily of ancient kings, I am the lily of the valleys--the coffin burdened and burdened with their whiteness. White for purity, for innocence, for hope, although there is none. It is too late now. The day is hot, the flowers already withering.

The priest cries out to heaven, crying for comfort, crying for mercy, for the soul of the dead, for the soul of the boy still living, but it does no good. This Oh Lord, Oh God, Oh Jesus Our Sweet Christ is a hard-hearted fellow, hot for the sacrifice, lips soft and flexible, ready to draw back above the wolfish snarl, the lion's ripping teeth. Even the dove pecks sharply with no mercy. The god's hunger must be stanched, the bloody gullet filled.

The dark girl. The laughing boy. The stilled voice.

The crows sit in the trees. They are like professional mourners, in their black robes, and their harsh cracked voices and simulated grief. One of the boys goes to stand under a tree, looking about him for a stone, but the graveyard is fastidiously cared for, not a stone in sight that does not bear a name. So he takes off his shoe, with the liturgy behind him, and flings it up into the tree, and the crows rise in a great black clatter, big as dogs, barking and rushing back and forth, as though the casting of the shoe has broken up the tree itself, and it has risen in a rage.

5

But what of the mother, now she sees the father, the estranged one, fallen on his knees beside their daughter's grave, weeping and gasping and regretting, tearing out his heart to offer to the priest--Tell me she will live again, tell me death is not forever--the priest in her pale green chasuble, a broad sweep of brocaded flowers across the breast, and her arms flung wide, offering a comfort that is no comfort. Pale skin, hair pale as marble, eyes visionary with prayer, she is like something ancient, something ripe and heathen, a statue of a goddess in a garden, wreathed in flowers.

The mother thinks of the wreathed white crosses up and down the valley, and of the one she herself set up, she and her mute, sedated, living daughter, and her stunned mute son, and her husband, the estranged one, his face chinked and bleeding from the early razor and his trembling hand so that he seems to be another statue in the garden, one that has been stoned by small boys for nothing but the thrill of destruction, or pecked and pecked at by vindictive birds. A powerful man, broad-shouldered, but collapsed now, a pelt of a man, like the pelt of a proud animal collapsed onto the taxidermist's table while he builds the structure that will hold it up, the glass eyes ready, intricate and gleaming, waiting to look out into a world tricked into believing they are real, while all the time they are fixed to the falsity inside, the taxidermist's clever structure of wire and papier mache that has transformed a dead thing, shot clean through, a sagging sack of skin and fur, a pitiful, depleted thing, into something to be paraded and admired.

As the mother thinks of this, another torment overcomes her, that it is she who must be taxidermist to this man who no longer is her husband, she who must build the structure that will hold him up. And her heart says, Why? Why should I? Wanting to be cruel to him, to blame him, when he is not to blame, as God is not to blame, although perhaps he should be, parading himself as healer and protector while refusing to protect or heal.

But it is too hard to think about such things. Instead, the mother thinks of the new wife, slim and lovely as she once was herself, waiting for her husband in their fine home on the golf course, of how she has no taxidermist's skills, nothing but the sweetly well-intentioned puffery of youth with which to pump him up, how over time it will leak out through his tear ducts and his nostrils, from the dark place in his throat, and the hole in his breast above the heart, or where his heart once was. And it seems to her a voice speaks, slowly, very clearly, There is a bond fixed, so clear she wants to look full into his eyes, although she does not, just stands completely still, looking down into her daughter's grave, knowing that after all she loves him, because he is her daughter's father, and whatever is left of him is what is left of her. It is a simple thing, an old thing, a superstition of a sort, and she feels the rightness of it.

6

She wants to say what it has been about, what is to be made of it. She can feel the shape of it coming in her mind, can almost see it, low down and huddled like a rat in a corner. 'There is meaning in this,' the priest had said, 'a life lesson to be learned.' As if it were some great revelation: Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging.

And the mother, hunched, swaying, on the bed of her dead daughter, explodes with the light of sudden knowledge, the light of anger, of understanding. She leaves the room, huge and black in sorrow, in black angry guilt (there is always the guilt of the mother, the keeper, the one who should know everything and does not) and descends the passage, like an army, like an avenging angel, like a prophet swept up and cursed in her own prophecy, and enters her other daughter's bedroom, the living daughter, the younger, quiet one, the tame one, the one who always smiles, who is out with her friends tonight and will be home on time as she is always on time, obedient, mellow, never wild like her sister.

The mother sets to.

And when all the drawers are turned out, and the closet, and the desk and all the hanging purses, and the out-of-season shoes hauled out of the plastic box beneath the bed, the mother turning and turning in the room, wrecking it the way a thief might, and there are no more little airline bottles to be found, the truth is out, her prophecy once more fulfilled--Something dreadful, one day something dreadful--by the glint of glass, the gleam of light on liquid clear as water, clear as death.

And it seems as though the room is falling, the house is falling, the airy sunlit structure she has built, plank by hard plank, brick by unforgiving brick, cementing it and tamping it and nailing it in place. And blessing it, yes, blessing it, in the name of the father, the estranged one, and of the son, and of the dead daughter, and the one still living.

That is when the mother weeps.

7

Rest, they tell her, rest, but there can be no rest, just this black hill she must continually climb, breath catching in her throat, sharp as hound's teeth. Mist clings to her arms and legs, making them heavy and the way more difficult, and wreathes her head, hiding and revealing things that are not there. Or are they? She cannot be sure. She hears the dog of her throat give tongue, the high insistent keening of the hound on the trail, the pure-bred, long-legged, finely muscled hound--magnificent, cruel beast--fleshless as an Olympic sprinter, as though this hill she climbs might be Olympus, that great crag heaved up against the sky, humped and massive as a whale sounding, its colors changing and changing in the light, silver, gray now, tan, golden in the setting sun.

Here, though, everything is black--black grass, black trees, mist the echo of black. So this hill's name, what is it? Hill of Memory? Hill of Sorrow? Hill of Madness? The moon is flexed in the sky, pearl as the bow of the huntress. It swims on her forehead, and the sky is a lake where she strides with her hounds. She is hunting the doe, who has burst from the bushes and leaped, panic-blind, into the water, where she swims, long neck arched, nostrils twin caverns, searching for ground, but there is no ground, because the lake is not a lake, but a drowned valley, its black water mountain deep.

The mist is on the doe's head. She struggles with it as though with a net swung out and laid over her so gently, almost lovingly, she does not realize it is a net and battles to come out of it, straining her neck toward the clear air above. But the more she strains upward, the more she jerks her head about, searching for the shore, the more entangled she becomes. Stars are down below her, tiny silver fish, their voices crying out, Beware, beware, the sound of fish crying in netted water.

The smell of the doe's fear is like fish drawn out of the water, sliced raw and pickled and set out for a feast. The hounds smell of ripped meat. They are doe-colored. They have sniffed out the doe, they have set their eyes on her. They bay behind her, their bodies looping and unlooping, curved and elegant and speedy, cutting through the water like killer fish, their breath sharp and savage in their throats, the huntress in her pale green gown behind them, striding leg by golden leg across the water's surface. She smells of green fruit, figs and apples dipped in cinnamon, and is reaching for an arrow. She is setting it to the bow, sighting down the shaft.

The doe has reached the bank. She has planted her front hooves on it and is firmly balanced, rising from the water, her sleek haunches running small fish and silver stars, and the cries of fish and stars. The lead hound is behind her, leaping forward, and the doe turns her head to the side, one eye huge and rolling, as though she must see the huntress so she will know her in another life. And in that moment, in a movement fierce and passionate and final, the lead hound rises up behind her, his toothed throat sinking in her thigh.

8

And when strangers hear about it, the way they make their mouths into an O and put their hands across them, to hide them, or to keep something in, as if afraid their substance, too, might spill out and vanish in the earth. The way their eyes drop, flickering, like the eyes of a grey fox backed into a gully where there is no escape because the walls are sheer rock and slippery, or like a doe when the hound is almost on her, and she knows that no matter how she flies above the tall grass like a sleigh across slick ice, she is done for, and her eyes widen and turn in their sockets, because the angel of death is behind her, the angel of pure bad luck.

Or the way they babble, or are silent, or reach to hug her when she does not want their hug, or press her hand when she recoils from the touch of strangers, or offer words of comfort, tenderly, a little warily, as if to a small child or a halfwit, intense foolish words that re-ignite the wound.

Or they tell stories of some friend of theirs who has also lost a child.

And then there was the woman in the supermarket carpark who did none of this. She kept her hands still, and her eyes still, and in her normal voice, said, 'What do you want me to say to that? Why did you tell me? What is it you want?'

The mother knows what she wants. She wants her daughter back. But no, not quite. She wants her daughter, but a daughter who is different. And she thinks of how, when she herself was young, a preacher came to town in a slick-finned car, his face slick and his hair slicked back with oil that smelled of apples fermenting in the sun. He brought with him a box of papers, each one headed in bold proselytizing print, Temperance Pledge, and everybody went one behind the other to the front of the tent in the side yard of the church and wept and swore and signed one.

She thinks of this, and then she thinks of how it was no use, those who would drink, drank, and those who would not have drunk anyway, did not. It did not help, as it would not have helped her daughter. And she thinks about the wildness of her daughter and her friends, their beautiful young wildness, wishing her daughter had not been a beautiful wild creature, but something timid, something tameable, a rabbit maybe, although the kick of a rabbit is ferocious, or a squirrel, although the squirrel's bite is quick and sharp.

So she does not know what sort of animal is suitable, but wishes instead that her wild daughter had been more like her tame daughter, obedient and smiling all the time, but then she thinks of all the tiny bottles hidden in that daughter's room, and about her son, who is an onion, yes, an onion, layered and layered in pain held together by a tight impervious skin. She does not want an onion for a daughter too.

And so the mother spins and spins through her sorrow and her madness, and her, What can be done? What could have been done? while the woman waits with her sacks of groceries hanging from her hands. 'Well?' she says at last. 'What is it you want?'

'Nothing,' the mother says. 'Nothing.'

'Look at it this way,' the woman says. 'At least the boy is still alive.'

9

But the man has been taken away, the boy has taken him away, he has taken the man, he has taken himself, although he was not himself when he took the man, or himself.

Some things the mind must struggle to contain.

But the man has gone as the boy has gone, he has been trapped in the snare he made for himself, and his ankles tied so he cannot walk, or kick a ball, and his wrists so he cannot hold a pen, or a beer can or a shot glass, or a woman--the pity, the pity of it, that he will never love a woman--and he has been hauled off through the forest, leaving behind debris on the way: a broken girl, a broken heart, a broken life, a broken story, which is the worst of all, a story with no end.

Pieces of the story drag behind him, knocked off by a bush or a low branch or the stump of a tree, glinting at first, hopefully it seems, until the leaves fall, and the snow falls, and time falls thick and fast, falling and falling until the pieces of the story glint no more, and sing no more, and give up entirely on a happy ending, or an ending of any sort.

But sometimes, in the spring or summer, an early walker in the woods, or a late walker coming back fast along the trail before the light fades, will catch a glimpse of what has been called Jack-o'-Lantern, Will-o'-the-Wisp, St. Elmo's Fire, and will turn aside, thinking it is something to follow, like a rainbow with a golden treasure at the end, and he will go on deep into the forest, the light fading, or growing, and there will be no end, just a continual going on, a sort of rushing, a sort of breathlessness, a sort of wind, although there is never a wind that deep in the forest, and still he will go on.