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children bleed, they rush to help. And though every other time my daughters had bled I'd scurried to fix them, the last thing I could do this evening was hustle. I didn't want my daughters to be anguished because of me, to be angry or confused because of me—but they were. I moved through the hallway back to the living room, wondering if they'd all be bleeding because of what I'd done. Red on the chairs and red on the old sofa and stains on the brown oak floor.
    But when I stood at Tom's seat again I saw that Stephanie's crying had turned into hiccups and the blood on her cheeks was already becoming crusty. The coppery smell no longer rose from her skin. I handed Tom the cloth and he touched it to her neck, though Stephanie buried her face into the side of his shirt so she could avoid looking at me. My husband did look, though; straight at me, his own moist eyes meeting my dry ones. "I don't get it," he said. "I really don't." He shook his head, staring at me. "When did you get so cold?"

    Tom and I had met in college—when I was a sophomore and he was a junior. I considered him a wildly mysterious set of contradictions, not yet realizing that contradiction was actually my own disguise at the time. My name was on the dean's list, and I studied for hours each night in the student union building's smoking section. I was vice president for mental advancement for one of my clubs. I chain-smoked Marlboro cigarettes and loaded myself with ten-cent cups of coffee, eating maple bars for dinner while writing about the sod images in
My Ántonia.
But sometime around eleven, when the student union closed, I'd make my way to a bar where the English majors congregated and where for long stretches I drank too much beer and became overly boisterous and flirty, and we all tried to impress one another with talk of books and writers and by reciting "Thanatopsis" by heart. I drank and drank some more, blushing at attention from boys I believed were too smart, too good, for me, and yet tipping in to press against one or another's shoulder for a few seconds, getting close enough that he could smell the dark hollow of my neck.
    When I heard about Tom, I suddenly wanted his attention too—wanted it a lot—though for reasons I couldn't decipher. I'd been warned about his antics, the bottle of whiskey he often carried in the pocket of his down vest, and the chewing tobacco he'd sometimes squirt through his front teeth, making a liquid brown arc that would land near others' feet. One day, after hearing about how he'd been arrested again, this time for trying to climb the brick and ivy walls of the administration building to break the minute hand off the giant clock—and falling into the bushes below—I decided I had to meet this guy who had such nerve and could demonstrate such badness. I had to find out why he didn't care about disappointing parents or professors or university administrators, how he did only what he wanted anytime he wanted to do it.
    I waited by his baby blue 1960s Ford pickup truck until he came out of the house he lived in, and I started up a conversation with him about nothing. We ended up sitting on the wheel wells in the bed of the pickup for five or six hours, talking. His voice, I remember, was soft. Shy even. He was tall and thin, wore dirty Levi's and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots. His two front teeth were marked with small brown squiggles that I'd later learn were caused by fluoride. That first afternoon, those teeth stains were another sign of his vulnerability, instantly making me want to take care of him and allowing me to form in my mind a defense of what I'd decided that day was his misjudged character.
    After that, I was known as his defender and he was known as my boyfriend. That is, others started calling him that because it was common knowledge that we were sleeping together, and after some months I began calling him my boyfriend too, though it wasn't a label or relationship he wanted. The