"I'm so sorry," I said weakly.

"Michael would be twenty-one now."

I fumbled for something to say. Nothing was working, but I tried anyway. "That was a long time ago," I said. "You were just a kid."

"Don't try to rationalize, Will."

"I'm not. I just mean" I had no idea how to put it "if I had a child, I'd ask you to be the godfather. I'd make you the guardian if anything happened to me. I wouldn't do that out of friendship or loyalty. I'd do that to be selfish. For the sake of my kid."

He kept driving. "There are some things you can never forgive."

"You didn't kill him, Squares."

"Sure, right, I'm totally blameless."

We hit a red light. He flipped on the radio. Talk station. One of those radio infomercials selling a miracle diet drug. He snapped it off. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the top of the steering wheel.

"I see the kids out here. I try to rescue them. I keep thinking that if I save enough, I don't know, maybe it will change things for Michael. Maybe I can somehow save him." The sunglasses came off. His voice grew harder. "But what I know is what I've always known is that no matter what I do, I'm not worth saving."

I shook my head. I tried to think of something comforting or enlightening or at least distracting, but nothing broke through the filter. Every line I came up with sounded hackneyed and canned. Like most tragedies, it explained so much and yet told you nothing about the man.

In the end, all I said was "You're wrong."

He put the sunglasses back on and faced the road. I could see him shutting down.

I decided to push it. "You talk about going to this funeral because we owe Sheila something. But what about Wanda?"

"Will?"

"Yeah."

"I don't think I want to talk about this anymore."

48

The early morning flight to Boise was uneventful. We took off from La Guardia which could be a lousier airport but not without a serious act of God. I got my customary seat in economy class, the one behind a tiny old lady who insists on reclining her seat against my knees for the duration of the flight. Studying her gray follicles and pallid scalp her head was practically in my lap helped distract me.

Squares sat on my right. He was reading an article on himself in Yoga Journal. Every once in a while he would nod at something he read about himself and say, "True, too true, I am that." He did that to annoy me. That was why he was my best friend.

I was able to keep the block up until we saw the WELCOME TO MASON, IDAHO sign. Squares had rented a Buick Skylark. We got lost twice on the trip. Even here, out in the supposed sticks, the strip malls dominated. There were all the customary mega-stores the Chef Central, the Home Depot, the Old Navy the country uniting in bloated monotony.

The chapel was small and white and totally unspectacular. I spotted Edna Rogers. She stood outside by herself, smoking a cigarette. Squares pulled to a stop. I felt my stomach tighten. I stepped out of the car. The grass was burnt brown. Edna Rogers looked our way. With her eyes still on me, she let loose a long breath of smoke.

I started toward her. Squares stayed by my side. I felt hollow, far away. Sheila's funeral. We were here to bury Sheila. The thought spun like the horizontal on an old TV set.

Edna Rogers kept puffing on the cigarette, her eyes hard and dry. "I didn't know if you'd make it," she said to me.

"I'm here."

"Have you learned anything about Carly?"

"No," I said, which was not really true. "How about you?"

She shook her head. "The police aren't looking too hard. They say there is no record of Sheila having a child. I don't even think they believe she exists."

The rest was a fast-forward blur. Squares interrupted and offered his condolences. Other mourners approached. They were mostly men in business suits. Listening in, I realized that most worked with Sheila's father at a plant that made garage-door openers. That struck me as odd, but at the time I didn't know why. I shook more hands and forgot every name. Sheila's father was a tall, handsome man. He greeted me with a bear hug and moved toward his co-workers. Sheila had a brother and a sister, both younger, both surly and distracted.

We all stayed outside, almost as though we were afraid to begin the ceremony. People broke down into groups. The younger folks stayed with Sheila's brother and sister. Sheila's father stood in a semi-circle with the suited men, all nodding, with fat ties and hands in their pockets. The women clustered nearest the door.

Squares drew stares, but he was used to that. He still had on the dust-ridden jeans, but he also wore a blue blazer and gray tie. He would have worn a suit, he said with a smile, but then Sheila would have never recognized him.

Eventually the mourners started to filter into the small chapel. I was surprised by the large turnout, but everyone I'd met was there for the family, not Sheila. She had left them a long time ago. Edna Rogers slid next to me and put her arm through mine. She looked up and forced a brave smile. I still did not know what to make of her.

We entered the chapel last. There were whispers about how "good" Sheila looked, how "lifelike," a comment I always found creepy in the extreme. I am not a religious fellow, but I like the way we of the Hebrew faith handle our dead that is, we get them in the ground fast. We do not have open caskets.

I don't like open caskets.

I don't like them for all the obvious reasons. Looking at a dead body, one that has been drained of both life force and fluids, embalmed, dressed nicely, painted up, looking either like something from Madame Tussaud's wax museum or worse, so "lifelike" you almost expect it to breathe or suddenly sit up, yeah, you bet that gives me the creeps. But more than that, what kind of lasting image did a corpse laid out like a lox leave on the bereaved? Did I want my final memory of Sheila to be here, lying with her eyes closed in a well-cushioned why were caskets always so well-cushioned? hermetically sealed box of fine mahogany? As I got on at the end of the line with Edna Rogers we actually stood on line to view this hollow vessel these thoughts became heavy, weighing me down.

But there was no way out either. Edna gripped my arm a little too tightly. As we got closer, her knees buckled. I helped her stay upright. She smiled at me again, and this time, there seemed to be genuine sweetness in it.

"I loved her," she whispered. "A mother never stops loving her child."

I nodded, afraid to speak. We took another step, the process not so different from boarding that damn airplane. I almost expected a voice-over to say "Mourners in rows twenty-five and higher may now view the body." Stupid thought, but I let my mind dodge and veer. Anything to get away from this.

Squares stood behind us, last in line. I kept my eyes diverted, but as we moved forward, there was that unreasonable hope again knocking at my chest. I don't think this is unusual. It happened even at my mother's funeral, the idea that it was all somehow a mistake, a cosmic blunder, that I would look down at the casket and it would be empty or it wouldn't be Sheila. Maybe that was why some people liked open caskets. Finality. You see, you accept. I was with my mother when she died. I watched her last breath. Yet I was still tempted to check the casket that day, just to make sure, just in case maybe God changed his mind.

Many bereaved, I think, go through something like that. Denial is part of the process. So you hope against hope. I was doing that now. I was making deals with an entity I don't really believe in, praying for a miracle that somehow the fingerprints and the FBI and Mr. and Mrs. Rogers's ID and all these friends and family members, that somehow they were all wrong, that Sheila was alive, that she had not been murdered and dumped on the side of the road.