A bow and arrow?
It was worth considering.
IV.
I leaned back against my antique four-poster bed, which had belonged to my great-grandmother. She died when I was a baby, but I thought plenty about her and this curlicued bed. The wood squeaked and brayed every time I scratched my leg or fluffed my pillow, and I wondered about my great-grandparents trying to get romantic in a farmhouse full of kids. Had they gone ahead and had sex knowing that their kids could hear every bounce? Did they slip off to the outhouse or something?
I centered my lap desk on my legs, and even that small shift made the bed whine underneath me. I chewed my pen and reread what I had written so far:
Dear Ms. Powers:
I share your interest in protecting African wildlife. I read a story about how you liked to help wounded animals when you were a child, and I used to do the same thing. I found a ring-necked dove once that had flown into our window, and I fed it bits of bread and water from a medicine dropper. I would love to help in any way possible on your preserve in Kenya. Do you have an internship program? If so, do you let high school students apply? I am available for the summer of 1982.
I have an A average and have only one B so far in my high school career, which was in Algebra II. (I don’t expect you need an Algebra expert with lions and elephants.) I know this might seem like a strange request, so let me sweeten the pot. I will do absolutely anything that would be helpful—I will shovel pens or wash llamas. If you don’t need help in Kenya, I’d be happy to do any sort of personal assistant work for you in California. I will answer your fan mail or walk your dogs or make your coffee.
I could see the weak spots. My algebra joke was forced. And “sweeten the pot”? But here was the big question: would these few paragraphs make Stefanie Powers think, ah, this is a girl I would like to meet?
Probably not.
I had already mailed letters to Carol Burnett (who I’d read responded to all her fan mail) and Frank Inn (he trained Benji, and I had made a strong case for how I had once tried to teach Aunt Molly’s Scottish terrier to dial a telephone, based on a scene in Oh! Heavenly Dog).
“Rachel,” Mom called from the other side of the bedroom door.
“Yeah?”
“Have you tidied your room?”
“I will.”
“By the time we leave for Molly’s,” she said. “I mean it. Dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Clean clothes in the drawers.”
“All right.”
“I want the drawers to actually close, Rachel. No wadded-up clothes sticking out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Or maybe I didn’t want to go to Kenya. Maybe I wanted to stay in my bedroom, which I had no interest in tidying. Clothes, dirty and clean, covered the floor. College brochures—Duke and Vanderbilt and UNC and Amherst and Colgate—covered my vanity. I did need to put those away because Mom huffed when she saw them, and she said it was because of money, but it wasn’t. I had a plate with dried ketchup on my bedside table, plus a cup of half-drunk hot chocolate that had been congealing for days. I had stationery and envelopes and books scattered across my sheets. I needed The Complete Encyclopedia of Celebrity Addresses for obvious logistical reasons, but I felt a deeper craving for At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar and Land of Terror, where the bare-chested hero barreled from bear attack to ice cliffs to kidnapping, spending more time considering the thickness of ice than the possibility of death or failure. The hero in those books did not seem to consider much of anything, really, and that would not be a bad way to live.
You’ll get scholarship money, my English teacher had told me. Just fill out the applications, and, I promise, you’ll have options.
I kicked at my flowered bedspread until it slid to the floor. I mostly wanted the option of a deep hole that took me to the center of the earth, the kind of place where you could show up and kill a few raging beasts, fall in love, and get yourself declared emperor. I wanted to disappear into a cave and turn myself into someone else.
The best I could do was to keep my door closed.
Lucia
I.
The oven timer would not stop buzzing. Lucia considered the frozen hands on the dial. It was a cheap panel. The whole mechanism was likely only a few wheels and gears underneath the console.
When the phone rang, at first she thought the timer had reached a new level of malfunction. That only lasted through the first ring, though, and then she yanked the receiver from the cradle.
“Hello?” she said, trying to move away from the buzzing.
“Lucia,” said a man’s voice. “You haven’t returned my calls. It’s Chris Sanderson.”
“Hey, Chris,” she said. “Should I be calling you ‘lieutenant’?”
“Please don’t.”
“In fairness, I’ve only ignored one call, and it was from this morning. I was going to call you back. I assumed you wanted to give me an update.”
It occurred to her that she should buy Chris Sanderson lunch. When she’d caught him at his desk on the evening of the shooting, he’d been matter of fact and efficient, no time wasted on shock or horror. Not only had he kept the shooting out of the newspaper, he’d called her every month with an update on the case, which she assumed was far below a police lieutenant’s pay grade. It wasn’t his
