Receive it for those souls

I used to be an oak tree. Or maybe it was a maple. Regardless, there was a nest in my branches, a twiggy little thing woven with scraps of yarn, strands of dental floss, and kiss-curls of hair. I gave it to the sky, but it was always empty.

I thought of that nest when I saw the cottonwoods growing along a grassy stream bank behind the grocery store. We were on our way to Yosemite, and before the road began to rise and twist to Mariposa Grove, Lizzie parked and went into a store to pick up snacks for our hike. I wandered down to the stream with Hannah, who watched me rest my hands on a cottonwood’s gnarled trunk. Hannah mimicked me, then asked why I always touch trees.

I pushed my hands deep into my pocket, embarrassed. “I’ve seen you do it, too.”

She tossed a stick in the water. “You like trees more than I do.” The twig wheeled counterclockwise and floated away.

“It’s because I was once a tree.” I said it with no forethought whatsoever, and I named all the trees I’d loved, the oaks, cottonwoods, and hickories.

She looked at me for a moment. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.”

I laughed.

“And you’ve said a lot of dumb things.” She took my hand. “I won’t tell Mom.”

She was an astute eight-year-old.

Hannah pointed out every large tree the rest of the drive. “How about that one, Daddy?” she said. “It’s bigger than the cottonwood.”

Lizzie tried to tune in a station on the radio but turned it off in disgust. “I can’t stand static,” she said.

Hannah leaned forward and stuck her head between our seats. “Do you like trees, Mom?”

Lizzie glanced at me. “Of course I do,” she said. “Are you buckled in?”

“You like them as much as Daddy?”

“They’re important because they clean the air,” Lizzie said, “now buckle up.”

Hannah flopped against the backseat and pulled the seatbelt across her chest. “I hate these things.”

“They keep you alive.”

“Why wear them if you always drive five or ten under the speed limit?”

I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

Lizzie adjusted the mirror so she could see Hannah. “Not everyone is a safe driver,” Lizzie said. She looked at me, but I didn’t feel like arguing.

I went to Santa Fe to write, but I had no clue I’d meet Anna there.

I discovered the workshop one evening on the Internet. Learn from the greats, the site read. Hone your craft and flame your passion. I had been messing around with an idea, jotting sentences here and there, throwing together paragraphs, though I wouldn’t have called my ramblings a story—my writing felt way too incomplete. But wasn’t that why I needed a workshop? A critique facilitated by the best American Letters has to offer? The workshop was hosted at St. John’s College, and I signed up. It wasn’t cheap. I cashed in some of my retirement account (thank you Elizabeth Hostetler Stolzfus, Esquire) and purchased a one-way ticket to Albuquerque ($400), a ride on the Rail Runner to Santa Fe ($10), a taxi to St. John’s ($10), and my conference fee ($1300 for room, meals, and workshop). I also purchased a first-class ticket on Amtrak from Santa Fe to Elkhart, to visit Mom and Dad. From there I wasn’t sure where I’d go.

But I had work to do before I left. The workshop leader sent us a list of stories and essays to read—Cheever, O’Connor, Woolf, and Dillard—along with some lit crit by James Wood and Edmund Wilson. Lots of gringos, Carmen said, clicking her tongue. I also had to read my classmates’ manuscripts and leave comments on them. Our workshop leader, a woman who had published widely (and that made her good, apparently), emailed us specific guidelines on what to say and what not to say. Don’t be an asshole, she wrote in conclusion. Be kind and generous, because a word is deadly.

I was sitting at my table in Seaside Coffee, probably on my fifth cup and about a third of the way through my manuscripts, when I realized that I hadn’t adhered to any of the workshop leader’s philosophy. I glanced at her guidelines again, ending with her views on specificity: In all cases, she wrote, read carefully and write comments that are actually helpful. Yes, every writer likes to be told that her work is great, that she is inspiring, that she should win a McArthur Award, but, ultimately, such broad generalizing is just not helpful. Rather, the work demands specificity, why a particular phrase is good, why the point of view is weak, why the significant details are pushing the story forward or not.

I glanced back through the comments I’d left in the margins of my classmates’ papers: Nice work! I like this! I wish I wrote as well as you! I like your character development here! Why so many exclamation points? And I had written all my comments in pen, my idiocy eternally etched. For a moment, I thought about scrapping the marked-up manuscripts and starting over, but time was short. I went back to the first story I read and tried to turn one comment’s exclamation point into a question mark, since some of my exclamations had slight twig-like curves in them: Good POV? Jesus Christ, I looked stupid. None of my comments were very specific, just envious general observations.

Fuck.

Thrift shop retail had been much easier.

Blake refilled my coffee, asked me what I was working on. Reading manuscripts, I told her, thirteen of them. She glanced at the stack and asked what they were for, and I explained the workshop at St. John’s College.

She put the coffee pot on the table and cocked her hip, her apron wrinkled across her thigh. “I had a friend who went there,” she said. “Didn’t realize you wrote.”

“I’m trying.”

Blake smiled with her perfect teeth. “So cool!” she said. “Plus, it will probably be nice for you to get out of here.”

What was that supposed to mean?

She picked up the coffee pot. “I mean, since, you know, the accident? Divorce?”

I’d become the lazy dad who let his daughter die. The guy whose future prospects were nil. The douche with no friends. That was the narrative Lizzie had started before she left. It still lingered.

I smiled. “Well, I leave on Saturday.”

“Part of me will miss seeing you around,” Blake said.

Lucy Callawader submitted the best story. I’m not sure what it was that pulled me in—maybe its simplicity? Its weirdness?—but the story took root, and I was disappointed that she hadn’t sent more than the twenty-five page limit. Her story made me ashamed that I had offered thirty-one pages, even though I had made it clear to my poor readers that I sent my whole story not in the expectation of having the whole thing critiqued, but rather for the denouement; after all, I reasoned, it’s hard to critique a story when you don’t know the ending.

Lucy’s story was about two siblings, Will and Mary, who were chosen by village leaders to carry death far from their community. It was a Shirley Jackson type of story. They had to cross a wild stream and crawl through dense brambles carrying a small, leather pouch of stones, which, of course, represented death. I’d switched from coffee to gin and tonics by the time I read Lucy’s story, so my judgment may have been somewhat impaired, but I couldn’t think of any particular comments to write on her manuscript. None. Her writing was exquisite. I was excited to meet this Lucy from Indianapolis.

Santa Fe was cloudless and radiant, the arid air infused with piñon and sage. The sun sucked every drop of moisture from my pores, and I was giddy. Someone said it was just the altitude, don’t worry you’ll adjust. But I didn’t want to. That evening, after plenary remarks about the greatness of Western art, the director of the workshop hosted a cocktail reception on the balconies overlooking the western sky. The sun had set, and the sky was flung with stars, but a strip of dark orange lingered above the horizon. I stabbed some cheese cubes with a toothpick and took an IPA from the server, slipping a dollar into his tip glass. He thanked me, and I wandered through the crowd glancing at lanyards, hoping to see Lucy’s name. No one said a word to me. I felt like a fraud, not an artist.

On my way back to my room, I stopped at the small pond landscaped into the brick plaza near the student center. Tall grasses sprouted from the shallow water, and a waterfall splashed down a slope of rocks at the far end. There were koi in the pond, and when they noticed me, they swam over, curious. I had a serving of saltines wrapped in crinkly plastic—thank you Delta Airlines—so I crushed the crackers and flung the crumbs across the surface. The fish, however, were clearly epicurean creatures, miffed with my offering. I climbed onto the damp boulders above the waterfall. The stars were bright, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open; it had been a long day, and I was second-guessing this whole workshop business. I heard a sudden splash, and after I climbed down the boulders, I noticed wet footprints trailing across the bricks. I followed them to a bench, where I found the stack of Ferrante novels. I looked around, but I was alone.

I emailed Carmen when I got back to my room, telling her I’d just found the novels, did she know anything about this? There was even a twenty-dollar bill behind the cover of My Brilliant Friend.

I thumbed through the books while I waited for her reply. They were damp, a little bent here and there, but they still had the By-the-Sea Thrift pricing inside the front covers. I was at least hoping for a note. Carmen’s response was nonchalant: Oh yeah caped lady found me soon after you left for your writing thing and she asked about you, bought my books. I’d only read the first one, kind of boring, but sold her all of them. Because cash. Because no job. Because Wentworth big dick and didn’t really shut the store, hired a set of fake tits instead. Place complete trash now. Books alphabetical. Mossy cape’s name is Anna by the way. And she can see when there’s water in her goggles. When you gonna learn to text? I immediately emailed Carmen with more questions, but after an hour of no response, I went to bed, shivering to the coyote yelps echoing in the arroyo outside my window.

The next morning, I downed some Advil, then made my way to the cafeteria for coffee. I drank it on the bench by the pond. I wanted a cigarette. The fish were clustered at the edge of the water waiting for food, but when they realized it was just me, they scurried under the lily pads. The water was muddy, and a groundskeeper with a skimming net was cleaning muck from the the pond.

“Looks like something stirred the water,” he said.

Lucy was a no-show for workshop. Laura, our workshop leader, checked her class list—yes, Lucy was on it, but no one knew who she was. And no one talked about her fantastic story, even later, after I brought it up in private conversations; everyone wanted to talk about their own stories. Go figure that the best writer of the lot of us hadn’t shown up. That first day we critiqued two good stories, and I was comforted that lots of participants had left responses as stupid as mine. Our collective ineptness, however, didn’t seem to faze Laura: she plowed ahead and asked questions that got us all thinking about our own writing, quieting the asshole writers among us. Why had I offered up a single page beyond the maximum? I wanted to disappear.

At Mariposa Grove, Hannah clambered across the Fallen Monarch. “It’s huge,” she said, jumping up and down.

“Get down,” Lizzie said.

“Let her have some fun,” I said. “She’s just exploring.”

Lizzie pointed to the No Climbing sign and raised her left eyebrow.

“I don’t see any park rangers,” I said.

Lizzie walked toward Hannah. “You’re not supposed to be on there, Sweetie.”

“Don’t be a dud,” Hannah said, nesting her body into the tangle of roots at the base of the tree. She fit perfectly, my little bird.

“Off!”

“Daddy thinks it’s fine,” Hannah said.

Lizzie looked at me. “She’s probably fine.”

“I don’t care what your father thinks,” Lizzie said, “you need to get down off that tree.”

“Fine.” Hannah jumped off and ran up the trail.

We were quiet for a bit, then Lizzie said, “She calls you Daddy.”

“So?”

“Mom is the most she can ever stomach, never Mommy or Mama, usually just Mother, cold and unpalatable as a three-bean salad.”

I heard a woodpecker, its call echoing across the grove. It thumped its beak against a tree, then called again, okay with the world and happy to be alive. I told Lizzie that Hannah loved her.

“She loves you more.”

I wanted to deny it, but Hannah and Lizzie were too much alike. “She loves us both,” I finally said. The trail was full of soft needles.

“Your pauses say more than your words.”

We caught up with Hannah at the Faithful Couple, two massive redwoods fused at the base but separate near their tops. Hannah read the information sign in front of the redwood. “It’s you and Mom,” she said.

I put my arm around Lizzie’s waist, and she didn’t refuse it, probably for Hannah’s sake. “Sure is,” I said, “a millennium of true love.”

Hannah ran around the tree, hair streaming behind her, wild delight on her face. Lizzie wriggled from my arm and chased Hannah, laughing like a kook. I had never seen Lizzie act so foolishly. Hannah glanced behind her shoulder and screamed, then sidled up behind me and grabbed my shirt.

“What’s the matter, little girl?” Lizzie said, trying to grab Hannah. “You scared of me?”

I told Lizzie to knock it off, you’re freaking her out, but Lizzie, in her rage, couldn’t hear me, her pupils black specks. “She’s mine now,” Lizzie growled.

“Stop it,” I said. “Be a parent, not a middle schooler.”

Lizzie lunged for Hannah, but I put my hand out and she rammed into it, falling backward. And suddenly it was quiet. There was the woodpecker. Another answered it. They were above us, oblivious, in the Faithful Couple.

Lizzie wiped her bloody nose. “You hit me.”

“You ran into my hand.”

“That’s assault and battery.”

“You were scaring the daylights out of Hannah.”

Lizzie looked at Hannah. “It was fun and games,” she said. “We were playing?”

Hannah gazed at her mother, then softly said, “You scared me, Mommy.”

“Mommy,” Lizzie said, weeping, reaching for Hannah but grabbing air instead.

And then two ravens with particularly shitty timing called out: Mom, Mom. I scanned the sky until I found them on some nearby branches. They stared straight through me.

On the morning of our first workshop, I downed some Advil, then made my way to the cafeteria for coffee. I drank it on the bench by the pond. I wanted a cigarette. The fish were clustered at the edge of the water waiting for food, but when they realized it was just me, they scurried under the lily pads. The water was muddy, and a groundskeeper with a skimming net was cleaning muck from the pond.

“Looks like something stirred the water,” he was saying.

Lucy strode right into the classroom like she owned it, as if we were her students and this space her classroom. She sat next to me and swept her lanyard from her neck, wrapping the blue nylon strap around her name tag. She dropped it next to her leather bag. A spastic strand of hair quivered from the lanyard clasp. I was smitten.

Laura requested that Lucy read a few of her paragraphs aloud so we could hear the writer’s voice, and after she finished, the room quieted. Only Johan, whose large, pale thighs were squeezed between his chair’s hand rests, pointed out a minor inconsistency. What an ass. Laura thanked Lucy for her marvelous contribution.

Lucy’s wispy hair was pulled into a haphazard bun and held in place with a thick rubber band that once bound broccoli crowns; I could see a PLU code and ORGANIC BROCCOLI printed on it. She had an Elvish chin and lips (Arwen’s, not Galadriel’s), and her green eyes reminded me of the seawater in Carmel. Her left eyebrow strayed to the side of her face, not grotesquely, but with a charm that complemented her good looks. Lucy wasn’t as tall as I had imagined, but she wasn’t short either, maybe my height, five-eight, give or take. Her biceps, though, were definitely bigger than mine, and her muscular legs looked fantastic in her loose cut-offs. But her knees were Hannah’s: they jutted when she sat. I loved those smooth knees.

Laura straightened the papers in front of her. “Well,” she said, “what’s working here?”

Eleanor, an older woman with bobbed hair, said that everything was working and that she ought to know given her age (sixty-six) and the number of workshops she’d attended around the country (twenty-seven). It was, in fact, one of the top five drafts she’d ever read, she told us, way to knock it out of the park, Miss Lucy. She paused, allowing us to politely concur. But Lucy only stared at her notebook in which she had written in big, boxy letters, THINGS TO FIX. She didn’t have a things-that-are-awesome column.

Johan cleared his throat and said that he liked the character of Will.

“And why is that?” Laura said, tucking a black strand of hair behind her ear.

“Will reminds me of myself,” Johan said.

Laura forced a thin smile. “Is that a reason to like a character?”

Johan slipped his pencil behind his left ear, an habitual movement, like putting on his briefs (never boxers) and then his socks (always navy, always Gold Toe), before pouring his corn flakes and opening the morning papers. Then tea (Bigelow’s Constant Comment), then pants (Dockers), then off to work. Insurance, auto and life. A lackey but now a manager, twenty-seven years same desk, same mug of coffee (Freudian Sips, the mug reads, When you say one thing but mean your mother.) Thursday’s call girl. Friday’s mass. Saturday’s golf. Sunday’s hangover.

Johan sniffed. “He’s related to me.”

Laura raised her brows. “How so?”

“Well, for one, he’s got to watch over his sister,” Johan said. “I have a sister, and I had to watch over her. She was retarded, that’s what the doctor said, and mother told me she was my responsibility.”

I glanced at Lucy, but she was placid.

“And why did you mother say that?” Laura said.

“I don’t know,” Johan said. “She left when I was twelve and I never saw her again.” He took his pencil from behind his ear and bit into it, trying to hold back tears.

Christ Almighty. An ass trying to jerk-off our emotions.

Eleanor patted his arm. “Let it all out, Johan,” she said, “you’ll feel better soon enough.” But Johan didn’t let it all out, thank God, and Eleanor didn’t push him. Poor Laura, stuck here with striving fools.

I kept my mouth shut during Lucy’s critique, partly because I didn’t want to look like an idiot, but mostly because I didn’t know what to say. My classmates’ criticisms seemed eloquent; most of them held MFAs. Lucy, however, wasn’t formally educated in writing; she worked in community health and social activism, and writing was merely a hobby, she’d told us. But hidden in their kind and generous compliments were jealous barbs that, I realized, would later sour in the writer’s stomach like a bad burrito: I can really picture this as a movie! or Before I read this, I didn’t believe fantasy could be literary! or My eighth-grade daughter would love this! or My friend self-published a story like this! Bombs with delayed fuses, designed to detonate at the writer’s most vulnerable moment: alone with a first draft and too many questions, maybe a bit drunk, a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, and the latest New Yorker lying dog-eared and ripped on the kitchen table. But pulsing in Lucy’s confidence was a good bullshit detector, and she’d shrug off anything she didn’t like.

She told me this during lunch after her critique. She was sitting alone with a bowl of posole, a salad, and an old issue of Poetry at an outdoor table. After I noticed her, I stopped at the door and considered finding another place to sit, but I couldn’t be afraid of her. She looked over and smiled.

“Mind if I sit here?”

She closed her magazine. “Not at all.”

I set my tray on the table and wiped off the seat with a handful of napkins.

“The soup is excellent,” she said, resting her folded hands on the table.

I stirred my posole and watched the steam swirl around my spoon. She wasn’t married.

“I liked your story,” she said. “I wonder what the others will think of it.”

I dipped corn bread into my soup, but it crumbled apart, and I had no choice but to stir it in. “I submitted too much.”

Lucy forked a tomato into her mouth. “That certainly took some nerve.”

“Who’d want to read beyond what was required?”

“I’m glad you did.”

 I apologized for leaving such lame comments on her draft. She put her fork down and laughed. “I don’t read the comments anyway.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended; I’d spent a lot of time trying to sound helpful. I asked her why she didn’t read the comments.

“I get more from critique when I simply listen.”

“And how do you handle jerks like Johan?”

“He’s a broken human, like the rest of us,” she said. “I actually found some of his comments helpful.”

I laughed. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”

I asked her what comments she liked. She dug through her backpack and pulled out her notebook, a cheap spiral-bound thing that made me feel like an ass sitting there with my Moleskine. She scanned her notes with her finger. No shadow of a wedding band. “Here it is,” she said. “Johan said that, and these are his words, Will lacks depth. I want to be able to relate to him, but there’s something keeping me from knowing him all the way.”

I wished my corn bread hadn’t crumbled into my soup. “You find that helpful?”

“Of course,” Lucy said. “Wouldn’t you?”

I had to be careful. On the one hand, I didn’t want to offend Lucy—she was a great writer and I liked her and wanted to learn from her. But I also didn’t want to seem like a pushover, which I actually am. I finally told her that I thought Johan was trying to focus the conversation on himself, he’s a classic narcissist, and didn’t she hear him talk about his lost mother and his special-needs sister? “He even called her the r-word,” I said.

Lucy contemplated me. “You can’t know what Johan has been through, you just don’t know,” she said. “None of us know. So, I have to write as if he matters.”

Oooh! I flushed with shame. Of course she was right. How could she be so generous?

She touched my hand. “I don’t mean to make you feel bad.”

“It’s okay.”

She took her hand from mine and closed her notebook. “But if I lose a reader, it’s my fault. Even critiques from people like Johan should be considered.”

“I hadn’t thought it all through.”

She stood. “Well, I’m off to digest my notes. See you in the morning?”

“I’m on the chopping block,” I said.

I had titled my submission “Skin of Electric Fish.” It was a story, narrated by a guy named Peter, about a band of Christians, led by a certain Brother Paul, who hunted down and killed apostatical Christians. The whole story was set in a vast forest, and of course the “apostatical” Christians were the true Christians, while those who thought themselves in the right were not actually right with God at all. They raped and pillaged like Vikings, all in the name of Jesus. When I wrote the story, I liked it—I had even submitted it for publication to some no-name journals—but now, my butt plastered to the wicker-bottomed chair and the wood armrests gnawing at my arms and the amazing Lucy Callawader sitting next to me smelling like a bowl of fresh fruit, I considered my story a humiliation. I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.

“Let’s hear a little bit in the author’s voice,” Laura said.

Sure, I can do that, I told them, flipping through the text. Do I read the beginning? The end? What sounds the most like me? Oh, holy hell. I read a few paragraphs from the beginning, and after I finished, I flopped back into my chair. Laura thanked me, then opened up the floor for comments. I tapped my pencil on my notepad. I had tried, like Lucy, to make a list of things to fix, but my hand was shaking so much I could hardly write.

“Well, I liked it,” Johan said.

“What did you like about it?” Lucy said before Laura had the chance.

Johan wiped his forehead. “It’s relevant.” He was sweating profusely, though it wasn’t too hot.

“In what ways?”

“Well, given the political divisions we live in,” Johan said.

“Such as?”

“You know,” he said. “Black Lives Matter? All Lives Matter? It’s all so confusing.”

Laura leaned back in her chair and smiled weakly. I couldn’t tell whether she liked that Lucy was doing her dirty work or was annoyed that Lucy had taken control of the class.

“I think the author is trying pull out a moral,” Eleanor said. “The story reads like a fairy tale.”

 I looked at her; I hadn’t meant to write a fairy tale.

“But that’s a good thing,” she added.

Laura leaned forward and put her hands on the gouged table. “Why is it a good thing?”

“The author has a purpose in writing.”

“And that makes a story good?”

I cringed. Writing a story with a moral purpose was exactly what I didn’t want to do. It was an amateur mistake, and everyone knew it. One of the readings Laura had sent us was a lecture given by Flannery O’Connor who said, essentially, that if you write with a moral purpose in mind, your resulting story will be mess because you’re inhibiting the good of the thing made. Or something like that.

Eleanor shifted in her chair and told us that for her, a purpose makes a story good. “Our tastes are so subjective, anyway,” she added. “Why write if you don’t have anything to say?”

Johan pushed his chair back, screeching it across the tiled floor. I thought he was going to stand, but he stretched out his leg and popped his knee. “I don’t know,” he said, “I want to like it, but if it’s written for a purpose, then maybe I shouldn’t.” He popped his knee again. The watery sound made me queasy.

“But what’s great about this story is the details,” Lucy said. “They’re evocative, they make the place real.”

“And what does that do for the story?” Laura asked.

“It makes the story generative, gives it life.” Lucy glanced at me. “If you want to talk about purpose, well, I don’t think Jake would say that he set out trying to write about a particular thing. Yes, the story is subjective, but that’s precisely what makes it strong, because it’s grounded in its own world and not in the author.”

“There’s no one interpretation of it,” Laura said.

“Precisely, and the author is invisible,” Lucy added. “That’s important, too.”

Lucy and Laura did most of the talking with Johan and others occasionally jumping in with a comment or two. No one said a thing about my having submitted too many pages, though no one really discussed the ending either.

After critique, Lucy invited me to lunch at Maria’s on Cordova Road, a Santa Fe institution not to be missed, she told me as she pulled in to park. We sat in the lot for a moment, watching distant thunderheads build near Mount Atalya, and I wondered if it would storm.

“Mountain’s just being showy,” she said.

On the way in, Lucy stepped in a pile of dog shit but didn’t notice, even when the shit crested over her sandal’s footbed and was centimeters from violating her lovely red toenails. I should have said something, but it happened so quickly, and the longer I waited, the more embarrassed I was to say something. We were quickly seated and given menus. I scanned the options and asked what was good, and Lucy said everything, and when the waitress came, Lucy ordered vegetarian tamales and I ordered chili rellenos, and we both ordered the house margaritas, which were fantastic, as was the food, over which we talked quite easily, and after we ate, she ordered a flight of tequilas for both of us, a blanco, a reposado, and an añejo, which was a lovely shade of bronze. But I could still smell the shit. How could she not?

She asked me if I was happy with my critique, and I told her that I was but surprised with how well the morning went.

“Your writing is good.”

I cupped the shot of blanco in my hand. My cheeks flushed. “It still needs work.”

“No shit, Sherlock! I didn’t say it was perfect.”

I sipped my tequila, then downed it quickly. “No, you didn’t.”

Lucy picked up her reposado, sniffed it—was that what you were supposed to do?—then quickly set it down and told me that what I had written was actually an essay. I was skeptical, but she explained her belief that an essay was putting an idea on trial, exploring that idea to its fullest, whether in fiction or nonfiction. She downed her reposado. “So, your story was a failure,” she said. “You tried to write about death, but your essay was really about life.”

I drank my reposado. “Funny theory.”

“Tell me where your story came from,” she said, “and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.” She took a tortilla chip from the basket and popped it in her mouth.

I thought for a moment, then said that it came from an idea.

Lucy swirled her añejo. The tequila sloshed over the rim. “No, where in your body does it come from?”

I pointed to my head. “It comes from here.”

She grabbed my hand, then slowly moved it to my chest. “It came from here,” she said, jabbing my sternum. “It makes a difference.” She squeezed my hand and let it drop, then downed her last shot.

After we paid, we walked to Trader Joe’s. The sky was clear, and it hadn’t rained at all. I bought some wine and cheese and a bag of apples. We sobered up a bit, then trudged back to Lucy’s Volvo. She grinned, then pushed me against the passenger door and kissed me. She tasted like tamales. “Thanks for lunch,” she said.

“You bought.”

She winked and pushed me away. “You owe me then.”

I could still smell the shit on her sandal.

Anna was smoking in my room when I got back. I followed a trail of watery footprints from the pond up to my dorm, and there she was, sitting on my bed with a cigarette between her fingers. She hadn’t locked the door.

“Well, it’s about time we officially meet,” she said extending her hand. “Anna.”

I put my bag down and sat at my desk. “So, I hear.”

“Right, from your lady friend,” she said, tapping ash onto the floor.

“Carmen,” I said. “And she’s not my lady.”

She took a long drag and exhaled. “Want a smoke?”

“You shouldn’t smoke in here.”

“Rule follower?”

I opened a window and turned on my fan. “No.”

Anna took off her cape and crossed her legs. Her toenails were painted green, though she hadn’t done a very good job: the nail polish was all over her cuticles. She wore jeans, ripped at the knees and loose around her waist, but her red tee shirt clung to her chest. There were mermaids printed on her tee shirt, one perched on each breast like a seal on a rock. Her wet goggles, mirrored Speedo Vanquishers, the kind Hannah used to wear, were on the desk next to my laptop. She smelled like a bog. The door had been locked, so I asked her how she got in.

She chucked her cigarette out the window. “Just walked on through,” she said. “How about those novels?”

“Haven’t started them.”

“I’m surprised,” Anna said, patting herself down, looking for another cigarette. “You were so insistent.”

“You really shouldn’t smoke inside.”

She shrugged and looked at me. “Suit yourself, Saint Jacob.”

I wasn’t convinced that she was blind, not the way her eyes seemed to follow my movements. Maybe she could see shapes. Movements perhaps. I waved my hand in front of her face.

She waved back. “Old midwestern custom?”

“Can you see?”

“Blind as a bat,” she said.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“I felt the air from your hand,” she said. “My skin is one big-ass organ.”

“You have a habit of stalking?”

“I wouldn’t call it stalking,” Anna said. “Saving you from yourself is more like it.”

“How do you know I need saving?”

“Just a feeling,” she said, tapping her chest. “Like the heartburn that comes following eggs in mustard sauce.”

“And the point?”

She rolled her eyes. “You are your own worst enemy, you know.”

“So, you come up out of the water when it’s convenient, say some things, then leave?” I said. “And I’m supposed to be in awe?”

“Are you?”

“The underwater smoking was impressive,” I said, peeling off my shoes and socks.

“Well, that’s a start.”

“And what’s the end?”

“To get you into the water.”

“I like things dried out.”

Anna found her cigarettes. “Dried out,” she said. “Funny words coming from an Anabaptist.”

And it struck me that she used that strange word, anabaptist. Rebaptizer. I hadn’t heard it since my undergraduate days at Blaurock University, where that word was tossed around with prideful ease. I took the cigarette she offered and told her that I’d already been baptized.

“It’s going to take a lot of baptisms for you.”

The nicotine buzzed my head with pleasure. “Water scares the hell out of me.”

“And isn’t that the point?” she said.

“You need lotion, Daddy.”

“You think?”

Hannah dropped my hand in disgust. “Your skin is rougher than the tree’s.”

We were leaving Mariposa Grove, and the ground beneath us crackled while we walked, a sound that made me feel good. The meteorologists were saying it was bad—we need rain, pray for rain! But I loved my flaking skin.

Hannah asked me how trees survive drought.

“Roots,” I said.

“But what if they run out of water?”

I told her that there’s a lot of water under the mountains, though I was pretty sure that was a lie, at least according to experts who said the water table was dropping fast. But maybe mountain water tables were different?

“I just don’t want the trees to die,” Hannah said.

I assured her that they wouldn’t.

“Did you have plenty of water when you were a tree?”

I told her that I probably had.

“That’s good,” she said, squeezing my hand. “And I bet those tree roots of yours found caves with underground lakes, and then your roots dipped their toes into the lake and said, ‘Hey! The water’s great! Come on in!’”

I looked up at the sky to drain the tears back into my ducts, but they ran into my ears instead. The sun spilled light.

“It was like one big pool party,” she was saying.