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they walked down the street. Helen wanted to lean into Lizzie and cry and never stop crying. She wanted to learn to let everything out like Elizabeth—all of Lizzie’s words were beautiful balloons floating up into the air, higher and higher. But not hers—she felt too heavy and too self-conscious about the life she’d constructed out of nothing more than words that had no reference to truth. Every word had to be the right word. She was no longer able to enjoy her own speech. She felt obese and ugly and awkward. She wanted to be light, full of grace. It’s this pregnancy, she thought. I’m falling apart. As they turned on Emerson to walk toward her house, Helen hesitated. “Wait,” she said as she turned around, “I want to buy a book.”
    Helen rushed into the bookstore, and a few minutes later she held a book in her hands.
    “I didn’t know you read poetry.”
    “I don’t, but, well, I just, I don’t know. I just got this urge to buy this book. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Cravings. Pregnant women get cravings.”
    “For poetry?”
    “It beats the hell out of anchovies.”

6
    O FTEN, DIEGO WONDERED what it would be like to be dead. Probably, he thought, it couldn’t be very much different from Vicky’s kitchen. He had decided a long time ago that he didn’t like the idea of being alive. When he was twenty, he had begun a suicide note. He was serious about it, and he meant to kill himself as soon as he finished the letter. He worked on his letter almost every day. He told himself he’d end his life when the letter was perfect.
    During the week he woke up at three-thirty. He shook—he always shook. It was as if his blood was too heavy for his veins to carry, tco heavy because it had picked up the litany of loneliness that made up the hours of his life. So he shook. And after the shaking stopped, he made coffee. Waking up in his room was like waking up in Vicky’s kitchen. He sat at the window looking at the outlines of the downtown buildings and the soundless freeway that was almost empty of traffic. The cars moved so quickly when he saw them pass and he wondered about the sound of moving tires on the pavement.
    He had constructed a desk out of a few wooden boards and some bricks he’d stolen from a torn-down building. That was all downtown seemed to be: torn-down buildings replaced by new buildings that would also be torn down. He drank coffee and read the newspapeperfrom the day before, the newspaper his boss gave him as he went home every day. He enjoyed reading the news a day late.
    He put down the newspaper and took out his suicide note, which he kept displayed on the corner of the desk next to a stack of books he’d checked out from the public library. He looked it over carefully, trying to think of changes he might make. It went that way every morning. He added, changed sentences around, scratched out entire paragraphs, and sometimes reinserted them in different places. He scratched his head and drank his coffee, lost in his thoughts. Somehow, he felt there had to be a way of saying everything he had ever wanted to say—everything he had ever thought. He had read a book on how to write, but it did not seem to have helped him very much. He read the letter slowly to himself:
    “To whom it may concern …” That part bothered him, but he couldn’t think of what else to say. If it was addressed to someone other than the person who found his body, then there was the real chance they would not even bother reading it. He hoped the landlord wouldn’t be the person to find his body. He hated the thought of Mr. Arteago standing over his dead body like an unholy angel sneering down at him—and worse—he hated to think that he would read his letter. He wanted to write “To whom it may concern (except Mr. Arteago)” but he knew his landlord was just the kind of man to read it anyway, so it was a useless addition. He shook his head knowing there was no way out of his dilemma and continued