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muscles slid a couple of waist-high stacks of newspapers out of the way. I removed my trumpet case from my pack so that the clothes inside could function as a pillow. I put a jacket over my legs, a hooded sweatshirt over my torso. I lay back and crooked an elbow over my eyes, the popping of the firewood the only sound. I began to pray, as my mom had taught me to when I was little, but the sentences scattered and I forgot to whom I was speaking—God, Jesus, or her.
    Sleep came pulling, but one thought would not let me go.
I killed her
, he had said. It was a horrific statement. It was an invitation for me to loathe him. I couldn’t resist. I did. It was arrogance, his certainty that despite not having spoken to my mother in sixteen years, he still mattered enough to have figured some way in her passing.
You fucking bastard
, I thought.
You don’t get to be a part of her death, no matter how bad you want it
.
    In semiconsciousness I saw the wedge-shaped nicks in my mother’s left ear and heard my father ask me about the direction she was walking versus the direction of the oncoming bus. She had never heard very well out of her left ear—why had it taken me this long to remember that? She had not mentioned it in years, that was true, but it had been evident every night in the cocking of her head when she watched TV, and in the way she had held the phone to her right ear, never her left. She had not heard the bus because it had come up on her left—her left ear, the one her ex-husband, my father, had somehow maimed. This direct line drawn between my parents, the first I’d ever witnessed, was startling. Their lives
did
connect, and violently; her death was along that line, too, and somewhere along the line was an intersection that was me.

6.
     
    W HEN I AWOKE IT was morning. The taste of charred wood burned my throat. I stood with the aid of the closest block of newsprint. I needed to pee and hobbled across the floor, stubbing my toes on any number of objects and sending one towerof papers wobbling. I urinated into the shallow yellow basin of the toilet and blinked around the dank bathroom, wondering at what seemed missing. It took my splashing cold, sulfurous water over my face before I realized. There was no mirror.
    I poked my head outside. The trees were bright green and lined with gold from the rising sun. The lush forest scent temporarily rinsed my body of the cloying odor of the cabin. My father’s truck was still missing.
    The first day of school—it was today. The realization crashed upon me. I had counted on an evening full of discussions with my father about my classes, my textbooks, my teachers, my schedule, what time I needed to get to school and how I would be getting there. Nothing of the sort had happened and it was Monday morning in Bloughton, Iowa, and I had no books, no ride, no instructions, nothing.
    I checked my watch. It was just after seven. In Chicago, classes had begun at eight. Based on yesterday’s trek, I figured the school would be a thirty- or forty-minute walk. I could make it if I hurried. I ripped off my clothes and dove into the shower. The dribbles fell ineffectually about my hair. There was a nugget of soap on a shower ledge and I glided it through my pits and across my neck, and seconds later I was drying with the dingy towel that had sat wadded atop the toilet. The shorts I had worn yesterday smelled of smoke, but there was no time to find an alternative. I unzipped a bag and put on the first shirt I saw, some atrocity printed on both sides with a cartoon duck in sunglasses. Textbooks—Claire had assured me that my father would have them. My eyes spun across the room: a million books, none of them likely to be mine. I tied my shoes and stepped outside, opting not to lock the door behind me, and stood on the grass feeling naked andunprotected without the usual first-day arsenal of notebooks and folders and pencils.
    I wove through the twists of Hewn Oak Road. By the time I made it