Hannah’s death was doubly final. Lizzie burned her, then took the whole urn with her when she left for Indiana—you don’t get any part of her, Lizzie told me.

And then Lizzie buried her.

Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory, the preacher said.

But I keep her toenails around my neck, in a locket strung on a silver chain.

Hosanna in the highest, the preacher said.

Holy shit.

*

On Sunday, after the week’s workshops, Lucy offered to drop me off at my motel on Cerrillos, but only if I agreed to brunch. “I know a great place on St. Michaels,” she added.

I shrugged, whatever, as long as I was at my hotel for check-in.

“Your excitement’s contagious,” Lucy said.

The restaurant was loud and hip. Fussy babies were trussed to their strapping dads sporting handlebar stashes, while their mimosa-sipping mothers gossiped in their glued-on yoga pants. I ordered coffee and huevos yucatecos with a side of potatoes. Lucy got a granola bowl and a big glass of milk. We made small talk for a while, but then she asked personal questions—What’s it like being divorced? How did you deal with Hannah’s death? I asked her if she was planning on putting me in her next story.

She took a spoonful of yogurt. “Don’t get a big head,” she said. “You’re not that interesting.” I poked my rubbery eggs, then she put her hand on mine and smiled. “Nothing sexier than a man sitting with his feelings.”

I reminded her of what she had told me in the cafeteria earlier that week, how you can never know what someone is going through, so why not cut him some grace?

“Pretty sure I didn’t say that,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure you did.”

She shrugged and ordered a slice of blackberry pie, which I ended up eating on the way to my motel on Cerrillos. After we parked, Lucy turned off her car and leaned back into her seat. I asked her if she was all right.

“Exhausted,” she said.

“You okay to drive?”

“Mind if I borrow your bed before my drive to Denver?” she said, eying the hotel entrance. “I only need an hour.”

I looked at my watch; it was still a little early for check-in, but sure, why not. And when we got to the lobby, the clerk gave us the key—take the elevator to the third floor, turn right, four rooms down—and there we were. It was a nice room, spacious and clean, and the pillow on the king bed cradled a Gideon Bible. I pulled open the shades and tried to open the windows, but they didn’t budge. I adjusted the temp on the air conditioner, then emptied my backpack onto the dresser.

Lucy took off her shoes and stretched her legs across the blue bedspread. She picked up the Bible and flipped through it. Its spine cracked, and she tossed it aside. “These places are so anonymous,” she said, rolling onto her side. “The stuff of fiction.”

I stacked the Ferrante novels on the desk next to my journal.

“Oh my god, I love those books!” she said, twisting out of her sweater. It caught on her earring, and I had to help her untangle it. She wore a black tank underneath, and her armpits were unshaven. “Which one are you on?”

“The first one,” I said, “but haven’t read too far.”

She threw her sweater on the floor. “Hand it to me?”

I tossed My Brilliant Friend on the bed and went out for ice, and when I returned, she had slipped under the covers. I made her an ice water, then put it on the paper coaster, positioning it so she could easily reach it on the bedside table next to her.

“Here,” she said, handing me the book. “Read the dog-eared pages.” Her eyelids were heavy, and she told me to wake her in an hour before rolling over. I looked down at her stack of clothes—shirt, jeans, bra—neatly folded on the floor. Her bra was black, and there was a velvet pouch of stones in one cup. The broccoli rubber band she used as a hair tie was in the other.

I took the book, poured out a lukewarm cup of coffee from the lobby, and went to read by the pool. But, shit, I was turned on. Who wouldn’t be? A beautiful woman in your hotel room?

But I couldn’t let myself think about that. Not now.

It wouldn’t be good at all.

We’d both be better off.

But breasts!

I dipped my toe into the water, and just as I suspected, it was warm as pee. I half expected to see Anna lounging around in the deep end, her body mocking biological laws, her figure shrouded and blurred, but the water was too cloudy. I couldn’t even see the drain. I tossed the rest of my coffee into the pool, then sat in a lounge chair and read for a bit. The vinyl straps stuck to my sweaty back.

Lucy was sleeping when I returned to my room. I shut the bathroom door, turned on the shower, and rubbed a wafer of soap all over my pale body. Where had my paunch come from? I couldn’t even see my penis, not until I sucked in my gut and there it was, a fledgling stuck in its coarse little nest. I wrapped a towel around my waist, then put the lid down on the toilet and reread the pages Lucy had dog-eared. Water from my hair dripped onto the words, sank deep into the paper. The passage had to do with Elena describing her friend Lila’s experience with what she, Lila, called dissolving margins. I read the passage a third time, then Lucy burst into the cramped bathroom wrapped in a sheet like a mummy, right hand pressed against her crotch.

“Got to piss!”

I squeezed by and shut the door, then fumbled through my suitcase looking for my shorts, humming a Coldplay song so I wouldn’t hear her pee. But that was useless—she pissed like a racehorse—and was, anyway, soon sitting naked on the bed in front of me. I thumbed through the Ferrante, glancing at the pages she’d marked, hoping she wouldn’t notice my trembling fingers. She asked me what I thought, and I told her that the passage would make a lot more sense once I reread it, dissolving margins are an interesting metaphor, I’d say.

“No, this,” she said, spreading her arms and introducing her body to me: Broad shoulders and alert breasts; taut abs that cinched her navel to her belly; wide hips and loose lips. Her whole body glistened, yielding to its lines, and I had to imagine Grandma Stolzfus’s black stockings flapping on the clothesline to clip that fledgling’s wings. Christ.

“Well?”

There was a red stain in the carpeting. Wine, perhaps. I told her that she was lovely.

“I have an understanding with my husband,” she added.

I looked up. “You’re married?”

“Rings trap me.”

The stain resembled a pine cone. Or maybe a teardrop. “I can’t do it,” I said finally.

Lucy rubbed her hand across her right breast, plucking her nipple until it perked, then slipped her arms through the tangled straps of her bra. She was holstered in seconds. “And to think I was looking forward to this.” She stepped into her levis, shimmying her hips until the jeans were at her waist, then slipped her shirt over her head. And after she opened the door, she shoved the little bag of stones into my hand.

“What are these for?”

She smiled and stepped into the hallway. “Don’t be a stranger,” she said, flipping me off before disappearing round the corner.

The ice machine clanked and dropped its load. Water trickled down its drain. I shut the door and flopped onto the bed. Lucy lingered there, but as her scent dissipated, my limerence dulled, and I was, soon enough, asleep.

Family. When it’s stolen from you, memory is puissance, whitewashing one’s pain till only contentment lies in bas-relief. We spent Sunday evenings by the sea, the days lovely, the beaches empty. We often walked south, past the Della Walker House, then scrambled across the rocks below Tor House, Robinson Jeffer’s stone homage to the frailty of humanity, and onto the Carmel River State Beach. On this particular Sunday, the tide was out, the sweeping beach open to the escalating California sky. I took off my backpack and spread out a towel. I offered Lizzie wine, but she was on a cleanse, so I poured myself a double and sipped it while Hannah ran carefree through the surf. Yes, she was still my little girl, years from womanhood, no breasts, no hips, all legs and arms. I mentioned this to Lizzie.

“She’s on the cusp,” Lizzie said, screwing the lid onto her Nalgene. “And may the good Lord help us all when that moment arrives.”

“Still, there’s a sweetness.”

Lizzie closed her book and watched Hannah. “Believe what you will,” she said. “She likes you well enough.”

I ran my hands through the sand, still warm from the sinking sun. “Mothers and daughters grow to be best friends.”

She shoved her book into her backpack and glanced at me. “And how would you know?”

“I read it somewhere,” I said. But—Christ!—if I hadn’t been such a fucking dolt, I would have taken into account that Lizzie and her mother still didn’t get along. And not for a lack of trying, at least on Lizzie’s mother’s part, who always sent us postcards of Amish buggies and cornfields—Greetings from Shipshewana, Indiana! they read. Lizzie tossed the postcards, but I pulled them from the kitchen trash when she was distracted, storing them in a shoebox under my side of the bed.

We watched Hannah run beneath sun’s orange trailings. The sky grew dark. The tide came in. Hannah was taking long strides through the water.

“She’s got her grandma’s legs,” Lizzie said. “At least she has that going for her.”

Hannah waded out a ways, then suddenly stopped and stared into the water. “Mom, come!” she shouted. “You won’t believe this!”

Lizzie ran out, did a shallow dive, and came up next to Hannah moments later.

Hannah jumped up and down. “It’s magic!”

I went to the water’s edge. “What is it?”

“It’s everywhere,” Lizzie said.

And then I saw it, too, the breaking waves lighting up from the inside, the sand crackling to life. Even my footprints glowed.

“Join us,” Hannah called out.

“But you should see it from the sand,” I hollered back.

Hannah called me a loser. Lizzie high-fived her. They dove under, and in that moment, gliding just below the surface, my girls were one, a rare water creature shrouded in blue fire, its slipstream luminous, its lines blurred. And then they were standing next to me, dripping wet. Lizzie pressed her body close and kissed me, her breath warm, her skin cold. The lights dripped from Hannah’s nose and onto her lips. But, in the end, it was just sea water.

Later that evening, Hannah wondered how I could even possibly be happy never getting wet, you’re missing out, you know.

“My feet were wet.”

I was sitting on the edge of her bed, and she slapped my leg, then pulled the covers over her head. “Doesn’t count.” Her voice was muffled. “You have to be all the way in.”

“Maybe one day.”

“Here’s an idea!” Hannah popped up from under the sheet. “I’ll teach you how to float, then move to freestyle once you’re not scared.”

“Okay.”

She patted my belly. “Might do you some good.”

“Goodnight.”

“Can we paint bioluminescence on my ceiling?”

“No.”

“I like the water close.”

“Just walk to the shore,” I said.

“Please?”

I looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe.”

“We can use glow-in-the-dark paint.”

“Maybe.” I leaned in to kiss her forehead, but she pushed me away.

“Your breath stinks,” she said.

It was Mom’s plan to immerse me in music. She led worship at our church, Cowlick Creek Mennonite, and God forbid her only child lack musical talent. There had been a summer of piano lessons, but I refused to practice, and Dad told Mom that he wasn’t going to waste his money just to hear me complain when I could do that for free. Mom relented, but I still can find middle C.

The following summer, when I was seven, Mom heard that a concert featuring Fauré’s Requiem would be performed in Valpo by a choir and orchestra out of Chicago. She thought it would be perfect for me, a cultural experience I couldn’t get in our small town. Dad didn’t go because he had to cut the grass, so we left him shirtless on the mower with a bottle of pop in his hand, waving as we pulled onto the gravel road in front of our house. I turned and watched the dust rise up behind the car and drift across the fields, turning my uncle’s knee-high corn bone  white.

The concert was in the Chapel of the Resurrection at Valparaiso University. Mom parked, and I looked up at the chancel, an enormous, circular building with ground-to-roof windows. Three of the windows were stained glass, and its roof a nine-point star, something Mom might use to decorate our Christmas tree. The chapel glowed. Inside, we gave the usher our tickets, then followed him down the middle aisle toward the altar. The sanctuary was full of people wearing nice clothes. Mom wore her denim skirt, but she had dressed me in my yellow shorts and the matching zippered shirt she’d sewn from Grandma’s old kitchen curtains. I clung to her hand and looked straight ahead, trying not to belie the shame I felt wearing Mom’s handmade clothes. Behind the altar was an effigy of the dying Christ. His feet were nailed, but his arms were outstretched and free. The usher seated us near the front, just a few rows from the orchestra, and we waited for the concert to begin. I thumbed through the program and tried to sound out the words. Mom shushed me. I pointed at the program—Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis—and asked what it meant.

Mom covered my mouth. “Use your manners.” Her hand smelled like the meatloaf we’d eaten at supper.

“But what does it mean?”

Mom grabbed the program from my hands. “We’ll talk about it later.” She usually wasn’t so hasty with me.

The musicians filed into their seats and the choir took its position. And when the conductor came out, everyone clapped, even though nothing had happened. I flipped through the program. There were seven parts, plus some additional songs at the end—it was going to be a long evening. I slumped into the pew but jumped when the music started; strings and voices seemed to be coming from everywhere. I grabbed Mom’s skirt. The music was like nothing I’d heard, not like the praise songs at church, not like the music on WLS or WMAQ. This music scared the daylights out of me. The world was suddenly big, maybe even bigger than Jesus himself.

I glanced at Mom. Tears streaked down her cheeks, and I felt sad for her: this wasn’t what she had intended; all she wanted was for me to learn an instrument. I should have tried harder. I flushed in shame, then lay my head on her lap. She rubbed the skin behind my ears—God had nothing on Mom’s soft hands. I was glad she was with me. I could see the stained glass from where I rested, and as the sun set, the glass darkened until there was nothing left. I drifted in and out of sleep until the final movement, when the sopranos woke me up for good. I sat up. Mom patted down my hair, and I asked if the show was almost done. She put her finger over her lips and nodded, yes, it’s almost over.

And then it was.

After the concert we stopped at Dairy Queen. I ordered a cone, and Mom tried to explain the music, though she wasn’t quite sure of all the details, only that a requiem was a service for the dead.

“Who died?” I said. Ice cream ran through my fist.

Mom handed me a napkin. “No one died,” she said. “Sometimes composers—men who wrote symphonies like we just heard—put the requiem service to music.”

I asked her why anyone would want to do that.

“For fun.”

“Will I get a requiem?”

“We don’t believe in them,” Mom said. “Now finish your ice cream.”

The lightning bugs were over the fields on the drive home. Every now and then Mom plowed through a swarm of them—tup, put, thup—and they’d glow intensely on the windshield before their quick fade. Mom tried to clean them off with the windshield wipers, but they left glowing embers rainbowed across the glass. I put my face into the wind and tears streaked across my cheeks. But over the whine of the tires, I heard insects in the fields. The air was cool, the night moonless, and the lightning bugs blinked and blurred in my watery eyes until they became a singular, dazzling light.

Dad was eating popcorn and watching TV when we got home. His face was sunburned. Mom rushed me to bed, and I heard their whispers outside my door: It wasn’t like I thought, she was saying, and he said that it was fine, a good experience, but Mom interrupted, sounding on the brink of tears, and told him it was all Latin, we didn’t understand a thing. They were quiet for a bit, then my door cracked open, and the foot of my bed was flooded in sudden light. Dad’s silhouette loomed, and then he shut the door. There are no walls when your room is black, but I knew the lightning bugs were still out there.

We painted a large, glow-in-the-dark dinoflagellate on her ceiling. It had long tentacles that, according to Hannah, used flashing bioluminescence to freak out its attackers, cool, right? I lay on her bed, and we watched the creature glow.

Hannah yawned. “Have you noticed that lines can’t hold light?”

 I hadn’t, but maybe it was true.

“Like a Sharpie seeping through a shirt pocket.” She yawned again, then rolled onto her side.

I looked up at our handiwork—the dinoflagellate had completely dimmed—and after I was sure she was asleep, I rolled out of her bed and leaned against the door. I studied her shadowy shape, watched its measured rise and fall, listened to the cadence of her breath. She was a million miles away.

In the morning, Hannah was in my face holding a pair of scissors, grinning. “Good morning, Father.”

I jerked my head, banging it against the headboard. Christ! I sat up. “What are you doing?”

“I was getting ready to trim your ear hairs,” she said. “They’re very prominent now that I’ve cut your hair.” She held up Lizzie’s mirror, and I gazed at a mullet. “I thought you might like reliving your high school days.”

“What the fuck!”

“Cussing does not become you, Father.”

I glanced around the sheets; my hair was everywhere. I grabbed the scissors and threw them on the floor. “What were you thinking?”

“You seemed unhappy,” she said, brushing her fingernails up my arm, “a little too stuck in your lines.”

“And you thought a mullet would help?”

“Did it?”

“Not at all.” I wiped my neck and looked at the blood in my hand. “Plus, you cut me.”

Hannah giggled. “Bleeding like a Sharpie through a shirt.”

“And now we’ve got to visit Sandra.” I rolled out of bed and pulled on my jeans.

“I hate Sandra.”

“You should have thought of that before you cut my hair,” I said. “Now strip the sheets.”

She hopped off the bed and pulled the sheets. “Sandra’s such a fake.”

I slipped into a Pink Floyd T-shirt and eyed the mirror above the dresser. “Eleven-year-olds ought to know better.” I ran my fingers through my hair.

Hannah slapped my arm, and an imprint of her hand blossomed there, an errant red poppy. “Forty-six-year olds ought to know better,” she said. “Your routine needs a reshuffling.”

Hannah was her chipper self on our walk to Sandra’s, until she saw the pack of boys across the street. She dropped my hand when the tall one wearing Ralph Lauren coordinates waved. He pulled the white buds from his ears and lifted his chin, his neck muscles straining, like his big head was the heaviest thing in the world and shouldn’t we all be amazed that he’d completed this feat successfully and without injury?

What a little fucker.

“Yo, Em! That your dad?” His lips barely moved when he spoke. The rest of the boys pulled their earbuds from their left ears but didn’t look up from their phones.

Hannah looked at me, then at the tall boy. The vein in her left temple bulged. She gazed at the road, and in that moment I was not her father, just a man with a shitty haircut wearing a pilly T-shirt from Target. But she nodded softly. “Yes, Alejandro,” she said, “he is.”

Alejandro scanned Hannah’s body, then looked at me. “Nice hair, bruh,” he said, nudging the pimply boy next to him.

“Fucking mullet,” Pimple said.

Hannah flushed, and Pimple nudged the boy next to him, and one by one, the domino boys looked up at me with their dopey eyes.

Alejandro turned his hazy gaze back to Hannah. “You’re sick, girl,” he said, and the rest of the boys nodded in agreement, plugged their earholes, and tramped down the sidewalk behind Alejandro.

After the boys turned the corner, Hannah said, “They’re just boys from school.” Her hands were deep in her sweatshirt pockets.

“In your grade?”

“Alejandro is 13,” she said, “so no.”

“Em?”

“They like Em.”

“But you’re Hannah.”

She was defensive. “Emma’s what’s on my birth certificate.”

 And in a flash I saw her as the boys did: Smart and athletic. Strong sense of self. Friendly. Attractive. No, it was all wrong! I froze, but she continued walking for a few yards until she realized I had stopped.

“Sandra’s scissors are waiting for you,” she said.

Later, after Hannah was in bed, I asked Lizzie if she knew about Alejandro. She glanced at me over the top of her Kindle. “Hannah’s boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

Lizzie tossed her Kindle onto the coffee table. “Come on, Daddy,” she said. “Surely you’ve heard of the great Alejandro?”

“Cut the crap.”

Lizzie leaned back into the love seat. “She talks about him all the time.”

“I have never heard his name uttered in this house.”

Lizzie laughed and told me to relax, it’s just a crush. She poured herself another glass of wine. “This, too, shall pass.”

“He’s thirteen and acts like he’s in a gang.”

“We’re not in LA,” she said, “and you’re kinda being racist.”

I dropped into the chair opposite her. “He calls her Em.”

“Emma’s on her birth certificate.”

I took a pretzel from the bag on the coffee table. “That’s exactly what she told me.”

Lizzie sipped her pinot. “It’s just a stage,” she said, “nothing permanent.”

I picked at the salt on my pretzel, flicked it across the room. “But when she saw the boys, it was like she didn’t even know me, like she wasn’t even my daughter.”

Lizzie wedged her wine glass between her thighs. “Welcome to my world,” she said.

The Lamy station was desolate. I sat on a bench and shut my eyes. Hot air washed over me, and somewhere wooden chimes clinked in the wind. And what is perfection? Only this: Dry air and hot sun. I could bathe in this dust, if I wished, wash myself until I was only a leather sack of bones. I clutched Hannah’s toenails, but no tears came, a dry mercy.

After the conductor showed me to my roomette, I looked out the window and saw Anna tapping her brass-handled cane across the concrete platform. Her mossy cape flapped in the wind, and she stared straight ahead. The conductor assisted her onto the train, and I leaned back into my seat and opened a bottle of wine. The train moved slow enough to see details in the landscape that would have escaped me from a car: The cottonwoods, say, growing along the banks of a stream, the way their roots clutched the rocks. Or the carefree sunflowers sprouting along the rails, oblivious to the tons of steel barreling just inches from their tender stalks. The train climbed. The clacking syncopation lulled me. Flat green land and immense blue sky. I thought of Dad and his habit of quoting Ecclesiastes: Nothing is worthwhile, he’d say, and what does a man get for all his hard work? And here it was, all visible: Whiplashed dogs lunging from their trees, slipping through mud and shit; decrepit swing sets with crippled slides and rheumatic chains; deflated blue swimming pools, used and tossed aside like condoms in a gravel lot; stacks of two-by-fours, green with moss; piles of cinder blocks and rusting coils of barbed wire, miles and miles of it. The train cut through it all, exposing the tiresome reek of humanity.

At the La Junta station, the train stopped, and we disembarked for a bit. The platform was filled with vendors, and a wrinkled woman sitting behind her long table of wares motioned me near. She stared at my necklace, then jabbed at Hannah’s fragment with an arthritic finger and whispered, “You shouldn’t keep it on your neck.”

I clutched my necklace, asked what she suggested.

She handed me a little cedar box full of cotton batten. “Put her in here.”

I handed her a ten, but she pushed it away. “I don’t trade in death,” she said, tapping my hand with her cold finger. “Now you’ll both sleep better.”

I jerked awake when I heard someone knocking on the door to my roomette. I slid it open, and the attendant, a young woman with long, red hair and green eyes, asked me if I was comfortable, did I need anything? I wiped my mouth—there was drool; I was humiliated—and told her I was fine, thanks for checking in.

“There’s a woman in the viewing car waiting to see you,” she said, glancing at my hair. “She’s wearing swim goggles.”

I touched my head, felt the pillow side of my hair sticking out. I tried to flatten it against my scalp, but it sprang out, stubborn as morning wood. I excused myself and walked to the restroom at the end of my car. I splashed some water in my hands and wet my hair down, then washed my face, and when I opened the door, the attendant was holding a paper cup of coffee.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said, holding out the coffee. “It’s fresh.”

I took the cup and thanked her, trying not to touch her fingers, but she shifted her hand slightly and made contact with my knuckles. Her skin was soft, like Mom’s, and I apologized awkwardly, joked at the spilled coffee burning my fingers, told her that she hadn’t woken me at all. And then we were both quiet until I thanked her again for the coffee and made my way to the lounge car, being sure to nod at the chief steward who was absentmindedly folding napkins in the dining car.

Anna was sitting in a booth with a notebook and pencil in front of her. “You came,” she said.

I slid onto the bench across from her and leaned against the cold window. I stretched out my legs. Anna’s cape was heaped on the table. She was in her mermaid T-shirt. “You seem surprised.” She reached into her cape and pulled out a beer. “I tend to repel a lot of people.”

I sipped my coffee. “Like who?”

“People in trouble.” She popped the tab on her PBR.

“Like me?”

She drank long and hard, then crushed the empty can between her hands. “If you say so,” she said, flicking the can across the table like a hockey puck. “So, Lucy.”

“What about her?”

“You seem fond of her.”

I drained my coffee and crumpled the cup. “I was,” I said, dropping my feet to the floor. The horizon gleamed, and there were shafts of rain rushing toward a brown mesa. The lounge car glowed pink and orange, then quickly darkened. I thought I’d see a rainbow, but there wasn’t even a hint of one. The lights flickered on, and all I could see was my own face.

“But?” Anna said.

“I don’t know.” A man in cowboy boots and a red bandanna tuned his guitar while his girlfriend put her hand on his knee and rested her head on his shoulder. He set his jaw and looked out over us all and, after a moment, began to play a samba. It was fantastic. People stopped talking and took videos with their phones.

Anna touched my hand. I avoided her eyes, which bulged behind her clear goggles, and told her that Lucy seemed to be someone else in private, not the person I imagined, thoughtful for sure, and a great writer, but somehow those qualities lessened when I was alone with her. “I wished you could have been there.”

Anna opened her notebook and began to sketch a tree. “I thought about showing up.”

“You can do that?”

She glanced at me. “Show up where I please?”

“No,” I said, “read thoughts.”

She returned to her sketch. “Instinct,” she said. “I had a feeling you might want me.”

I asked her why she didn’t come, there was even a pool there, but she told me that she was busy.

“Doing what?”

“Getting the fallen into the water,” she said.

“Only to drown them?”

Anna snorted and put her pencil down. “That’s one way to put it.”

The man with the guitar played another tune, “Ventura Highway,” and a few people around him sang along.

“So, you’re some sort of water creature, then?” I said.

Anna laughed. “I prefer Lady of the Water, but you can call me whatever the hell you want,” she said. “I’ve been called worse.”

“Like?”

“Before they tied me up and tossed me in the Lech, I was a Jezebel and a whore. Before that, they called me aufrührer and verführer. Before that, Anabaptist.” She paused. “Just like you.”

I stared at her unblinking eyes. “What do you know of me?”

Anna pushed her notebook in front of me. “What do you think?”

 It was a tree.

“What kind?”

I studied the trunk. It was old and gnarled, and she had drawn a gaping hole near its base. But the canopy was full, the leaves almost heart-shaped. I slipped the notebook across the table and told her I didn’t have a clue.

“It’s a linden,” she said, sliding the notebook back. “Look in the hole.”

Cradled there was a bundle of cloth. “Is that a blanket?”

“It’s Anika,” Anna said, “my dead daughter.”

I shoved the notebook away and tried to stand, but Anna grabbed my hand and told me to sit, don’t be an ass. Her fingers were ice, and she stared at my necklace. I wrapped my hand around it, wishing I had packed it in the cedar box. My throat tightened, and I could barely swallow. “So, we have something in common,” I whispered.

“We have a lot in common,” she said, opening another beer.

“How did she die?”

“Bad heart, probably,” Anna said. “She was only a few weeks old.”

I asked her why she put the body in a tree, and she said it was her only choice, the baby was illegitimate, so no funeral rites for Anika.

“What about the baby’s father?” I asked.

“His name was Ludolph Bung,” she said between swallows, “and some babies aren’t conceived in love.”

The man with the guitar stopped playing, and the train pulled onto a siding. A freight train rumbled by. I told Anna that I was sorry.

Anna told me that she meet Ludolph when he came to Augsburg to preach. I knew he was a somewhat prominent Anabaptist, she said, I’d read the pamphlets printed by Margarethe Prüss, but I didn’t expect the fiery eyes and the sharp wit; most radicals I’d heard preach were stupid men with thin theologies and loose tongues. But Agnes—my girlfriend, you could say—thought Ludolph was sexy, something about his full lips and thick brow, a bright star on a dark night, but I knew she preferred me, even if she hadn’t yet quite realized it. But we both agreed that what Ludolph preached made sense, Anna said. He sold love, above all else, telling us that love, through Christ, calls out and desires to be united with everyone. He also believed in the divine spark, a spark clearly visible if only we opened our eyes, and do you know the best method for opening your eyes? I did not, I said. Baptism, Anna said, so I kneeled in the Lech and Ludolph Bung pressed his body close and baptized me, his fingers lingering on my chest.

The freight train passed, and we jerked back to life.

But Papa, Anna continued, that pigheaded father of mine! If they’d caught me, he would have been my executioner, so I hid my faith and wondered how a father could kill his daughter. But this was how: Papa thought all vocations should be brought under God, because that’s what Luther taught. Anna finished her beer, opened another, and told me that her father let her practice with his sword when she was a girl. Mother didn’t approve—she had a good head on her shoulders, of course—because presiding over a death wasn’t a thing a young engle should do, amusing oneself with God’s instruments of justice. But Papa would blink his watery eyes and take me out to the shed, lay a gourd on the chopping block and say, Here, see the neck and see the head, now set him free, Mausi, put the fear of God in the village, and I’d lift the heavy steel over my head and swing low and hard, and if the hit was right, the pimply gourd head flew against the wall and into a pail. Anna told me that when she was older, she and Papa took lives together: stray dogs, pigs, rabbits Papa had trapped in the garden, and feral cats, though I loved cats and couldn’t bear to chop or skin them, things Papa made me do after I’d lopped off their heads. One cat, Anna said, a real Schnucki with big paws and a slight smile, nuzzled my chin and pressed my chest for milk. It felt good to be loved, but Papa snatched the creature from my lap and in a flash, its head was on my foot. Papa told me to dry my eyes, it would have died soon enough, Mausi, I did it a favor. Papa tickled my neck, but I pushed his whiskers away. The fire faded from the cat’s eyes, and its lids slackened like the vestments over Pastor Franzi’s sloped shoulders.

Anna stopped speaking, leaned forward, and tapped her fingers on the table. I don’t think Papa liked killing all that much, she said finally, he was lonely; after all, who’d want to befriend the executioner? It was a thankless job. Mother always told Papa that he should farm, it was in his blood—that dirt, those seeds, that life—but Papa always told her that it wasn’t a matter of personal choice: If it were God’s will for him to dispense justice, then shit, he had to do his work faithfully and carefully, had to be the best executioner he could be. Anna leaned back into the bench, and I asked her whether she still believed this. Look, Anna told me, crops failed, and folks died in plagues. Rogue landsknechts roamed the countryside extorting villagers and killing them when they didn’t comply, and Papa executed one of them, Konrad the Wolf. And real wolves roamed freely, too, plucking village children from gardens. Else with the braids never returned from visiting her cousin. The men found her head two days later. There were bite marks on her face; they never found the body. Those were dangerous times, Anna said, and though Papa’s administration was welcomed control, it was never easy for him to execute those who stole for food. On those days, he’d come home and wash his hands, tell Mother to give him his soup and bread—if there was any—and stare out into the yellow light. On those days, he’d brush me aside and look around me, not wanting me to see death, even though our home was soaked in it. I think that’s why he taught me to read in the barn after we’d lopped our gourds, something good had to come from him, something that breathed. Papa had a copy of Mentelin’s Bible, which he’d acquired at great cost and kept hidden in a wooden box in the straw, and on his foul days, we’d read Holy Scripture together. He loved Jesus, especially St. Luke’s, the earthier Jesus, Papa called him, the Jesus who didn’t mind getting dirty, the Jesus with die Hoden and not the high-minded mystic who blessed the poor in spirit or the meek; no, Luke’s Jesus said that the poor were blessed, the hungry too, and woe to you rich, well-fed fuckers! Anna laughed, relishing her profanity. “And maybe that explains why I haven’t seen Ludolph on this side of life,” she added. “Not that I’m looking for the bastard.”

The train stopped at a station and a few people disembarked. We were probably somewhere in Kansas, but night trains are disorienting.

A few months after my baptism, Anna continued, Ludolph returned to Augsburg. I heard him preach by the river one evening, watched him baptize a handful of converts. But there was a dimness about him, as if his shaded eyes were primed to only see my lines. He spotted me in the small crowd, and after they dispersed, he told me to walk with him, and—guess what?—he treated me as if I had a brain, expecting that I understood the scriptures, which I did, thanks to Papa, though Papa never thought highly of Song of Solomon, Ludolph’s favorite book.

The train groaned and picked up speed.

Had I ever experienced the true love of Christ and did I want to, Ludolph asked me, and I told him, Anna said, that I felt the love of God when I was baptized, making the conscious choice to follow Christ, even unto death, and Ludolph told me that we could relive that moment right now, here under the stars, here next to the river, and I told him it wasn’t necessary.

“Oh, but it is,” Ludolph said, and he pulled the velvet band from my head and twisted it around my neck, forcing me onto the stones. I couldn’t breathe, but it was over in an instant.

I sat in front of Anna, unsure what to say, feeling like an idiot. I took her cold hand in mine.

“Papa was dead six weeks later,” Anna said.

“Christ,” I said.

“An infection, buboes,” Anna said. “All fathers die broken.”

“Fuck,” I said.

But I was still his Mausi, Anna continued. I kept a panel back then, an image of Jesus and John the Baptist that I hid from even the Anabaptists, and whenever I was scared, I studied that panel. The Jesus on it comforted me, Anna said, his eyes warm with understanding, like Papa’s, but the John was fierce, his mouth turned down, as if the responsibility of baptizing Jesus were some joyless event he was duty-bound to complete. John’s image reminded me of Zwingli, the asshole who didn’t approve of our direct experience with Christ, Anna said, but those men couldn’t control what the spirit gave, so in the early days, an Anabaptist woman’s authority was raised, and we became a little less disparate. And after I laid Anika to rest, God’s power fell on me and, through Ursula Jost, I became a prophet, along with many other women. The state didn’t like that arrangement, of course, and those men told us that our subversive activities would lead to the breakup of the home, upsetting the moral order that God had ordained. Luther even said that it suited women much better to stammer or to speak badly. But it was Papa who taught me letters and grammar, Papa who said that we all should be able to read the holy scriptures, so how could he follow such nonsense? But firm control returned to Anabaptist homes, and the state threatened some women with death. Some Anabaptist husbands even betrayed their vows and turned their wives in.

The train lurched to a stop and Anna stood, dumping four beers from her cape onto the table. They were cold, as if she’d just pulled them from a freezer.

“And then?”

“And then I went into hiding with Agnes,” she said. “She loved all of me.”