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  By a tub of geraniums, the boy’s clothes formed a neatly folded pile in the sun, and that’s when Rusty had felt the rage at his temples, like a drum. It was the boy’s brazenness that got him, the thought of the boy languorously disrobing, then stopping to fold each article of clothing with calculated ease. Who would think to do such a thing—to carry out such an act so completely, down to the ball of socks, the perfectly aligned sneakers with tucked laces?

  Rusty, fresh from a church finance meeting, had taken off his blazer and let it drop to the floor. Immediately, he’d removed his belt. He dragged the boy into the house, threw him over one arm of the recliner, and—the memory stopped there. The scene faded, leaving Rusty with a white screen, his mind reeling at the end of memory, a filmstrip spinning the tail of a broken reel. He had no recollection of whether his son had put up a fight or gone down quietly, fearless and tearless below the strap.

  What came to mind, filling that void, was his old kitchen in Philly, the way Rusty had watched the sun come through the window over the sink that morning, the way he’d sat at the table, staring at the long dark strands of a man’s hair wrapped around his fingers. He had just gotten engaged to Judy, who was still back at home in Skokie living with her parents. She had given him a small gold band with a sapphire, had placed it gently on his pinkie so that he might think of her. At his kitchen table, he sat trying to disengage the hair from the ring’s small gold prongs that had held the stone in place. In his fury, the sapphire had popped out, leaving him with a ring that held a clump of hair in place of a birthstone, the sapphire glinting somewhere on his kitchen floor, a watchful eye.

  He shuddered to think of it, even now, as Donald’s car bounced along the dark road. He shuddered to think of how he hadn’t changed.

  “It was a different time,” Donald was saying. Rusty turned and looked at Donald, the way he spoke with his hands, the way his hands came down on the steering wheel, neatly aligned as if he were holding a loaf of bread, as if all the world’s rage might be contained there in the distance between his flat, broad palms.

  Rusty looked down at his own fingers. The cigar, which he’d set in the ashtray of the car door, made a smoky trail to them. His hands were large and wide, with squared-off fingers and faint lines—a traceless map, an expanse of yellowish skin with blue veins pulsing beneath it. The veins, which he could only vaguely see when he brought his palms to his face, seemed more plentiful than those of other hands he’d seen—they were serpentine, a muted dark blue, like faded tattoos from another life.

  “I should get back. Celeste will be wondering,” Donald said.

  “Yes.” Rusty nodded.

  “What’s past is in the past,” Donald offered, his voice espousing confidence.

  “Right.”

  “You can’t look back.” Donald rounded a curve.

  “No.”

  “What good does it do?”

  Rusty tucked his hands under his thighs, pressing his palms flat against the pleather seat. “Exactly.” Through the windshield, all was a dark blur, black beyond black.

  Chapter 4

  VISITING HAEL

  Toward the end of August, after Judy had recovered from the baby shower, she dialed the operator and asked for a Mrs. Hael Vanhorn of Chicago, Illinois. Judy had carried the name around in her head for weeks, holding it on her tongue like a lozenge. She’d seen the name on a seed catalog lying on a table in the foyer of Gretchen’s apartment. Hael Vanhorn—it sounded vaguely Jewish, she thought. Was Gretchen part of a religious sect? Judy had scoured lists of cults, even contacted a cult help line she had once made use of when Carson left with the Krishnas, but nobody seemed to know of a group raising gender-free babies. No one had heard of a Hael Vanhorn. Could Judy get them the group’s name? a man at the cult help desk had asked her. All the groups were listed alphabetically in files, and there was nothing under gender-free or babies. He needed more details, a group name. Judy said she would do her best to find out.

  There was no Hael, the operator informed her, but there was a Leah Vanhorn who lived at the same address. Judy guessed she should try it and was pleasantly surprised when the woman who answered the phone turned out to be Gretchen’s upstairs neighbor after all, the woman with the dark coat she had seen toting two small children in a wagon.

  “Sure, I remember you,” Hael said warmly. “You had on something blue that afternoon. So, you’re Gretchen’s mother?”

  Judy felt a little put off by the last question. Hadn’t Gretchen mentioned a mother? Didn’t she perhaps keep a picture out? Over the years, Judy had given Gretchen so many. But Judy put her pride aside and explained that relations were strained and that she very much wanted to understand what Gretchen’s neighbors were all about. “Do you have any pamphlets?” she inquired brightly. “Is there any literature on your particular group?”

  “We’re not a cult,” Hael said firmly, as if she could intuit the reason behind Judy’s call. “What we do is a practice and a growing philosophy. We’re breaking the boundaries of gender saturation.”

  Gender saturation. Judy turned the phrase over in her mind as she made the drive down to Chicago on a windy Thursday she’d taken off from work. The term seemed so technical, almost chemical. It reminded her of her days teaching home ec, when she had stood among clusters of students around stoves, discussing boiling points, explaining the methodology of yeast—what made a loaf light and fluffy as opposed to dense and gummy. She passed out mimeographed sheets on kitchen chemistry, full of charts and definitions and equations.

  There were no such equations for raising children, or so it seemed. She had never really thought about it until recently. Having her own brood had seemed so methodical; she had just let things happen. In retrospect, she realized she had not been willful or even active in their conception. She had participated, surely, but it was more like living in a dream, and by watching her belly grow large, first with Henry, then Carson, then Gretchen, she had felt as if she was fulfilling a prophesy, something that was integral to being on Earth.

  She had raised her children as she had been raised, creating a wide circumference around them, reeling them in when they hit the outer circle, a sort of invisible force field she sensed on instinct—not from reading child psychologists or being part of a play group. Parenting, she thought, was like driving: focus on the mile markers and swerve around the obstacles. Rusty would like that.

  Until recently, Judy hadn’t given much thought to her own children’s upbringing, though she was keenly aware that all three had built moats around themselves, isolating themselves from one another and their parents. This often left her feeling vaguely despondent, especially when she observed how her friends and neighbors continued to interact with their children. There were tensions, yes, but somehow fewer complications. It seemed funny to her that people concerned themselves with complications during childbirth, when, really, it was much later in life that issues of suffocation or positioning became most critical.

  Although she did not like to admit it, she attributed greater family harmony to material success. Donald and Celeste, for example, had four children, all of whom were successful—two of them Realtors, another a lawyer, the eldest a gynecologist. But they had been different children, different almost from birth. These were genetic things. Donald and Celeste’s twin daughters, both Realtors now in Fort Cloud, had always expressed a natural curiosity about other people’s houses. They had delighted in estate sales and trinkets, had once run an antique booth as a 4-H project. The lawyer had been a sullen type, thorough and logical. He read books during dinner and, at the age of eight, drew up wills for everyone in his family. The gynecologist had been less of a sure thing. A high school quarterback and something of a playboy, he’d threatened to become a ski bum in Vail, until he got involved with a young nurse, surprising everyone when he went premed.

  Judy’s children had all been surprises. She often felt that they moved through the house like trick-or-treaters, all jokes and costumes. She pus
hed candy at them and pulled a certain door inside herself closed. She was never quite sure who they were, what words might come out of their mouths. Even when they had crawled in bed with her, though she might put her arm around one, she could not guess with her eyes closed whose breath she felt on her face. They held a kind of interchangeable place within her mind—not three children but a single, multiarmed god. Didn’t all children come from the same place? Weren’t they sort of one soul? Didn’t they sprout from birth with their own curious goals? Giving them three square meals and plenty of clean bedding was all they really needed to grow. Children, she felt, developed on their own.

  Of course, Judy had harbored dreams for all of them—she had hoped Henry would become an inventor; she had imagined that Carson, who was big-eyed from birth, might be an actor. She had tried at length to get Carson, with his golden curls, into commercials, but whenever she left his side, he turned whiny and sullen. And Gretchen—she had wished Gretchen might be an explorer, with her natural curiosity about planets and birds. Anything she could touch with her hands amazed her.

  That none of her children had followed the dreams she nursed for them did not disappoint Judy, except very slightly. Mostly she was concerned that they did not keep in touch, that they did not hold her dear or need her near them. In part, she blamed Rusty for being too severe, and of course, she blamed herself for needing them too much and for harboring secrets.

  She was a private woman, an only child with no remaining family, and she had lived much of her life in quiet observation. She cherished secrets, even little ones—the shoes she kept under the sink in their tissue, for example. These small things, she felt, lent her life mystery, which was, in its own way, a kind of freedom.

  A few years back, her book group had taken up archery together after reading The Last of the Mohicans. They began meeting across town on their lunch breaks, practicing in secret. More recently, they’d started going to a rifle range—forming a clandestine women’s league that none of them told her husband about. The thrill of this was, for Judy, more in keeping the secret than in actually scoring well, though she had excellent aim and was, among her small group (mostly secretaries and teachers aides), referred to as “Bull’s-eye.” Judy took Rusty’s rifle and stored it in her cello case. The rifle range was in Milwaukee.

  When Judy arrived at Hael Vanhorn’s, she circled the block and parked on a side street. She had arranged to meet Hael during the day, when Gretchen and Ray would be out. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see them, she’d explained to Hael, just that she was sure they needed their space. She wasn’t one to barge in and make waves. “I’d like to come in secret,” she’d said. “Would you mind?”

  “Actually,” Hael told her, “I’m a licensed therapist. If you’d like to consider this an introductory session, your visit will be in strict confidence.”

  Still, Judy felt a surge of guilt as she stepped out of her car, and for a moment she considered turning back around, returning to Fort Cloud. She could still make the eighth-period health class to which she had recently been assigned because of a teacher shortage. There, among the freckled, broken-out faces of her seventh-grade students, she could lose herself in the kids’ youthful conversions. Even amid catcalls and spitballs, she could tune it all out and find a frequency of solace. She felt a sort of motherliness, too, in telling them to sit down, to keep quiet, as she stalked between the aisles of desks in her high-heeled shoes. Watching their heads bowed over workbooks and homework, it reminded her of the quiet watch she had taken over her own children.

  Upstairs, Judy stood before Hael’s door, where a small embossed notecard read: We know what we are, but know not what we may be. —Shakespeare. Judy wondered, as she rapped softly, if it had been taped there for her benefit. Hael Vanhorn came to the door with a dish of peas she was wrapping in saran.

  “Come on in,” she said, her voice welcoming. “The kids just went down for their naps. I’m just putting away lunch.”

  Inside, the apartment was spare. A long black leather couch with chrome feet was anchored at one end, in front of it: a black lacquer coffee table with an expensive-looking handblown glass bowl. Near the windows, there was telescope on a tripod.

  This does not seem like a home where there are children, Judy thought. What parents in their right minds would leave out a telescope, a beautiful glass bowl? She ran a hand along the bowl’s smooth lip, where flecks of color made Judy think of a kaleidoscope.

  Judy caught sight of a black-and-white photo on a bookshelf and crossed the room on tiptoe so that Hael would not think she was snooping. Judy recognized the faces of the two children squeezed between Hael and a man she presumed to be Hael’s husband, a balding professorial sort with a gaseous grin and big, woolly caterpillar eyebrows.

  “What are the names of your children?” Judy asked when Hael entered the room on bare feet, carrying a tea tray.

  Hael smiled. “I’ll get to that in a moment.” She set down the tray and paused with her hands clasped. She wore a long black caftan and swooshing crushed-velvet pants, similar to the ones Judy had seen on her school’s art teacher, a woman of dramatic bead necklaces and richly toned head scarves. Judy often admired her wardrobe from afar.

  “Honey? Soy milk?” Hael asked. “I think I might even have some sugar in the raw.” Hael’s face was long and smooth as a bar of soap. Her hands, Judy noticed, were free of any jewelry.

  “Honey is fine,” Judy said. She studied the spines of the books lining the shelves. Amid Our Bodies, Ourselves and What to Expect When You’re Expecting, there was the fourth edition of The Bright Star Catalogue and The First Dictionary of the Nomenclature of Celestial Objects, along with titles by H. G. Wells and Robert Heinlein. Judy had hoped to come across some mysteries so that she and Hael would have something in common to talk about.

  “You’re into the stars?” Judy asked when Hael reappeared.

  “Oh, yes, you noticed. Glyn, that’s my partner, is an astronomer at the U.”

  “Interesting,” Judy said, moving to the couch. She sat back, her hands clasped around a rugged-looking mug. This was so pleasant, so normal, she thought to herself. Why had she felt so keyed up on the way down? She felt the tension drain from her neck into tributaries along her shoulders.

  “Our children”—Hael moved across the room toward some blurry-looking photographs on the opposite wall—“were named after these two galaxies.”

  “Oh,” Judy said, standing again. She set down her mug and straightened her skirt.

  “Well, actually”—Hael giggled—“this one is technically not a galaxy, but you probably know that. It’s an open star cluster.” She pointed to a great red blur, which, to Judy’s eye, looked like a sort of fluffy pelvis.

  “It makes me think of a bird,” Judy offered politely.

  “Oh, that’s so amazing you said that.” Hael nodded her head fiercely so that her chin-length reddish hair swung against her long neck in great flaps. “Wow, you can see it then—it’s the eagle nebula.”

  Judy blushed. “It was just a guess.”

  “No, no, you’re very intuitive.” Hael waved her hands excitedly. “I’ve had some people say really creepy stuff about this picture. I mean, it’s very exciting to people—all this high-energy radiation from so many massive, hot young stars.” Hael made it sound as if she were talking about a rock concert. She leaned into the picture frame, bouncing happily on her toes. “I mean, it’s so fabulous, so luminous—I can’t look at it for long without feeling almost sucked in.” She laughed, stepping back as she pressed a sleeve to her mouth. “Whew,” she said, turning to Judy, “it’s just like our eldest—all action enmeshed in itself.”

  “So your eldest is named after this? Eagle?”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Hael looked a little disappointed. “Glyn would die if our kid was named something like Eagle. No, the names we’ve given our children are pretty technical-sounding, especially if you don’t hang around star freaks. Our eldest is M16.” Hael smiled sweetl
y, then paused to pick her tea up off the table and blow on it. “Our youngest is M64—you’ve probably heard of that because it’s a pretty famous galaxy.” Hael stepped over to a second photograph mounted on the wall, this one dark black with a single blurry oval off to the side, like a frosted Danish floating in outer space. Judy felt suddenly hungry.

  Hael sighed wistfully. “M64 was the first galaxy I ever really felt a passion for. There are so many out there, but you glimpse this one through regular binoculars—it feels almost within reach. I think it’s the bright core.” She nodded at the photo. “Yeah, I love M64. It’s so”—she rubbed her neck, searching for the word —“mythical,” she said, turning to Judy. “When I look at it, I’m just transported. It’s definitely at the top of my list.”

  Judy was beginning to feel a little breathless. There was a sour taste rising from the back of her mouth. What did Hael mean when she said a particular galaxy was on the top of her list? Did she actually think she might go there—on a trip? Was she one of those people who dreamed of intergalactic vacations, hanging out on Mars? Maybe she was trying to get a colony started. She seemed a little brainwashed, or maybe she was on drugs.

  “So, tell me more about the children here,” Judy said slowly, touching her brow with the corner of a tissue. “Are they all named like battleships?”

  Hael giggled, then sighed. “You’ve got a great sense of humor, just like Gretchen.” She moved to the couch and sat down, drawing her knees to her chest. A ring glimmered on one of her toes. “Mrs. Glide,” she said, her tone suddenly adult-sounding and serious, “I know what you’re thinking. I know it sounds like we’re a bunch of freaks, but I promise you we all come with the best intentions.”