"The police came and did their stupid little tests and said that it was due to a heart attack.

"As soon as the funeral was over, Father came to get me and I came home to live with him. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't care about anything. I sat in my room and read heavy tomes – The Trial and Heart of Darkness, Raskolnikov…." She laughed and squeezed my shoulder. "I was so very existential in those days. I read The Stranger ten times. Poor Father. He was just recuperating from his breakdown, and I came home with my own in hand.

"But he was an angel. Father was always an angel when it came to things like that."

"What did he do?"

"What didn't he do? All of the cooking and cleaning, listening to me while I endlessly whined about how cruel and unfair life was. He even gave me the money to buy a wardrobe of black dresses. Do you know Edward Gorey's work?"

"The Unstrung Harp?"

"Yes. Well, I was like one of Gorey's dark women who stand out in the middle of a field at dusk and look off toward the horizon. I was quite a case, believe me.

"Nothing really worked to bring me out of it, so Father started The Night Races, out of desperation. It was going to be a complete departure from anything he had ever done. I was the main character, but it was going to be a mixture of truth and fantasy. He told me that when I was a little girl he would tell me stories when I woke up howling from a nightmare. He thought that maybe if he wrote a story for me now it would somehow have the same effect. He was such a wonderful man.

"That ass David Louis had been harping on him to get something new done. When he heard that Father had started this book, he wrote and told him that he wanted to come out to Galen and read what he had written.

"It just so happened that he arrived two days after Dorothy Lee died. You can imagine what it was like having him around here then!"

"Anna, these are all incredible things. You're telling me that your father was God! Or Dr. Frankenstein!"

"Do you believe me?"

"Come on, what am I supposed to say to that, huh?"

"I don't know, Thomas. I don't know what I would say if I were you. It's quite a story, isn't it?"

"Uh, yeah. Yeah. I guess you'd say that."

"Do you want more proof? Wait a minute. Petals! Petals, come in here."

5

When I left the France house that night, I was convinced. I had seen books, papers, journal entries. Petals even came in and talked about her "former life" as the human being Wilma Inkler.

Can you imagine that? You're sitting there in a chair and a dog is at your feet staring you right in the eye. It starts talking about being a dog in this high gravelly voice that sounds like something out of Munchkinland. And you're sitting there nodding your head like it happens to you all the time.

Dr. Dolittle in Galen. Dr. Dolittle in Cloud-Cuckooland. It was the same goddamned thing.

I taught a creative-writing course once at my school. The kids were mad for writing brutal, horrible stories about beheadings and rapes and drug overdoses. At the end of them, the only way the "authors" could get out of the blood-soaked morasses they'd created was to say, "Keith rolled over in bed and touched Diana's silky blond hair. Thank God it had all just been a dream."

Talking dogs, a modern Prometheus who used an orange fountain pen instead of clay, a sexy daughter who gave you a hard-on just brushing her teeth, who slept with you and Elmer Fudds in baseball caps, and who may or may not have given past boyfriends heart attacks. "Thomas rolled over in bed and touched the bull terrier. 'You were only having a dream, dear,' it said."

But what was I supposed to do? Go on with the research for the book? Go on writing it? I got halfway home in the car before all of it started to drive me out of my mind.

"What the hell am I going to do now?" I slammed the still cold black steering wheel with the flat of my hand and pulled over at a gas station that had a public telephone out front.

"Anna?"

"Thomas? Hi."

I wondered if Richard was there. That would have been perfect. "Anna, what am I supposed to do now? Now that I know everything. What do you want me to do?"

"Why, write the book, of course!"

"But why? You don't want anyone to know about this. Look, even if my book turns out to be good enough to publish, the whole world will freak out when they read about it. Your Galen will become like… I don't know… Like some kind of mecca for weirdos. Your father will be a joke, because no one is ever going to believe any of it. And those who do will be the scum of the earth."

"Thomas?" Her voice floated into the telephone booth from another planet. The heat from my body started to fog the windows around me, and the illuminated face of the Pepsi-Cola clock in the gas station office had stopped at ten after four.

"Yes?"

"Thomas, there is much more that I have got to tell you about this."

I put my hand on my temple. "More? What more could there be, Anna?"

"There is. The most important part. I will tell you about it tomorrow. You're very late now, so go home and we'll talk about it then. Have a good night, my friend. And, Thomas? Everything will be all right. You know the most shocking parts now. The other things are just P.S.'s. I'll see you tomorrow morning."

The fog was just creeping up the windows. A carload of kids went by just as I was hanging up. One of them held a bottle out the window and waved at me with it. A ribbon of foamy liquid came out and hung in the air like a frozen pennant before it fell and broke on the ground.

"Thomas, I know what's going on with you and Anna."

I was working on a mouthful of acorn squash that had been topped with brown sugar and burned black in the oven. Saxony and Julia Child. I pretended to chew until I remembered that you don't really chew acorn squash – you gum it once or twice and then swallow it. I put my fork down on the edge of the yellow plate, careful to make as little noise as possible.

Sax took a roll from the bread basket and tore it in half. She picked up her knife and daintily buttered one puffy piece. The silence held. You wanted to squint your eyes and stick your fingers deep into your ears. It was coming. Something loud and explosive. She picked up the other half of her roll and wiped it around her plate, very cool.

"Did you think I didn't know?"

My heart pounded.

"No, I don't know, Saxony. I'm not good at being a secret agent."

"I'm not good either, but you know, I think I knew what was going on almost as soon as it happened. Really. Do you believe that? I'm not just saying it."

"No, I know that. I can believe you. My mother always knew when my father was… up to something. I guess when you get to know a person well, then it's not hard to see when they're acting oddly."

"Exactly." She took a short sip of 7-Up. I was able to look at her for the first time since she dropped the bomb. Her face was slightly flushed, but perhaps it was just the stuffy room. I'm sure my face looked like Chief Thunderthud's.

"Do you love her?" She kept her glass in her hand. She put it against one of her cheeks and I saw the bubbles fizzing up the side.

"Oh, Sax, I don't know. Everything is so crazy now. I'm not saying that as an excuse, please understand. Sometimes I feel like I've just been born and am having menopause at the same time."

She put the glass down and pushed it away from her. "Is that why you went to her?"

"No, no, I went with her because I wanted her. I'm not blaming that on anybody but me."

"That's very nice of you." A little venom spilled over into her voice, and I was damned glad of it. Until then she had been deadly calm and objective. I listened to the last fight my parents had before my mother walked out and took me back to Connecticut. Everything there too was so cool and calm… they could just as easily have been discussing the stock market.