CB Anderson

Often when I write a story it grows from a visual image. For "China Falls" that image came from my childhood—a vast pulp canal the school bus passed every morning. Add a few years and some experience, and the story began to take form. I layered in characters gradually and let them sort themselves out on the page. - CB Anderson

The spring Lorraine Poulin turned thirty-four, in the mill town of China Falls, Maine, a flock of geese halted their northward migration to settle inexplicably in the pulp pond of the vast industrial yard at Katahdin Paper. Lorraine's ex-husband Owen was the first to see the geese skid to a stop on the noxious little pool, and he switched off his coat sprayer to report the sighting to a foreman. At the end of the 7-3 shift the geese were still there, as were state wildlife agents, amassed on the banks in waders, collecting water samples and discussing tactics of evacuation.

By noon on the second day the Number Three machine had been temporarily shut down. No pulp, no paper. The workers were sent home, including Owen, who walked back over the suspension bridge to his new wife and baby daughter.

That evening, when the geese should have been quieting for the night, as the agents were readying their nets and wire coops for a commando-style rescue, the surface of the pond rippled and the birds rose into the darkening sky. They left town the way they had come, all two hundred of them, honking and hissing in a rush of wings.

During the week that followed, piles of guano-fouled logs had to be burned. The pond was drained and refilled with the chemical soup that readied wood for the digester. The Number Three itself was down until June, and the China Falls Sentinel reported a lost-time cost of a million dollars. Payroll was delayed, and Lorraine Poulin got her child support check from Owen ten days late.

There were theories, of course, for why the geese had descended on China Falls, theories expounded upon in the aisles of the IGA and the parking lot of the Wee Care child center. In Lorraine's own place of work, the Fiddlehead, men and women along the polished bar immersed themselves in speculation: The flock had lost its bearings in the mill haze. The geese had been drawn by the pond's unnaturally warm water. They had been electronically programmed by one of Katahdin's competitors.

Behind the bar, Lorraine poured tequila and scotch. Most of the talk sounded foolish, and she looked forward to when it would stop. The geese had come, the geese had gone. Lorraine chalked it up to chance, not to fate so much as to a general cosmic disarray. Didn't the inexplicable always happen in China Falls?

*

By three, when the rocks are so sun-baked Lorraine's Pepsi steams as she pours it out, she is more than ready to leave, with her shoulders starting to hurt. No one else is. Her daughter and a friend are climbing the bank to jump from the bridge. Even Joey, sitting nearby in shallow water, seems content to pile small stones on the rock beside him.

The river here is deep, with a run of standing waves, quickening as it nears the falls and mill a half-mile downstream. Lorraine doesn't feel like swimming but she wants to escape the sun. Wading in, she keeps on until her feet lift from the bottom. The water relieves her burned skin, entering her ears and between her legs. She opens her eyes and lets the current carry her over its lumpy bed.

Halfway to the bridge she surfaces. A group of teenage boys is gathered on the opposite bank. One of them, skinny with a buzz cut, says something. The others laugh. An old Impala is parked beside them, Metallica blasting from the radio.

Overhead the girls are preparing to leap. Lorraine treads, glancing upstream at Joey, still working stone by stone, then turns to the girls. “Into the middle, Amanda,” she shouts, even though Lorraine herself has jumped from the bridge a thousand times.

“Look,” cries Amanda, free-falling into the water. Then both girls surface, shake water from their faces. “I touched bottom. I felt it with my toes!”

Lorraine breast-strokes to them. “We should go. I have to work at five.”

Amanda groans. “Come on, Mom. Can me and Starr stay? Her dad could pick us up.”

“You know you can't swim alone.” Lorraine heads upstream, pulling against the current. The boys are gone, except for the one with the buzz cut. He arcs his cigarette toward the water, where it hits with a hiss. Amanda and Starr swim after her, catching up easily. They are buoyant and strong, bobbing in the waves like otters. The boy watches them, then stands and brushes off his jeans. He climbs into the Impala, backs up in a spray of gravel.

When Lorraine reaches Joey, he is placing the last stone in a grid, eight by eight, as perfectly spaced as checkers on a board. How does he do this, a 12-year-old who cannot speak or tie his shoes? “That's great, J,” she tells him, touching his muscular shoulder. Joey stares out across the river, begins to rock back and forth. Lorraine loosens her hold and he stops rocking, instead lifts both hands to his face. Starting with his index finger, he lowers the others consecutively. Then up, in reverse order, and down again. “Walah wah,” he says, continuing as Lorraine drips behind him.

“OK, big guy. Time to go,” she says. Joey picks up a stone and drops it into the water. He lets it settle before selecting from the remaining sixty-three.

The sun feels hotter than it did at noon. China Falls has not had rain since the geese left, though the towns around them have. Several times storms have moved in and the sky has opened up a mile away. But never over China Falls. Forty-five dry days, according to the guy on WKAT, the mill-sponsored radio station. When Lorraine wakes to another perfect morning, she feels like staying in bed.

“Mom!” Amanda yells from her spot in the river. “You're not gonna let him drop all those, are you? You said we had to go.” She dives under and swims toward where the boys had been. Starr follows.

The burned feeling spreads down Lorraine's back. She fishes around in the lunch bag for another Pepsi—warm. Amanda and Starr swim back and splash their way out of the river in dramatic displeasure. Water sheets down their thighs, streams from their hair. When Amanda presses down beside her on the blanket, the girl's chilled flesh gives Lorraine goose bumps. Amanda holds out an arm. “I'm tan, you're red.”

“So I see.” Amanda has her father's Quebecois looks. Joey takes after Lorraine, blond and light-eyed. Today Joey is protected with sun block. Lorraine is not.

*

The car smells of river water and damp, overheated bodies. Lorraine checks her watch—4 p.m., still time to make dinner though she doesn't want to, requiring as it will a stop at the IGA and a series of small decisions she doesn't feel up to.

Once, Lorraine thinks in the McDonald's drive-thru, they had been a different kind of family, not the kids and her, but Owen, she, a younger happier Amanda and a toddling Joey. On a day like this one, they would have been barbecuing outside the house on Franklin Street rather than digging their food from greasy sacks. These days, convenience wins out over style. Lorraine glances at her freckled belly, the roll above her bikini bottom. Her body is changing, the flesh losing density like over-proofed dough.

A car pulls in behind theirs. Lorraine hears electronic chords and amped-up bass. In the back Amanda and Starr turn, giggling. Lorraine squints into the rearview. The guy from the river? But it's a Lincoln, and the driver is bearded. She reaches for a towel and spreads it in her lap.

At the window she passes fish sandwiches and shakes to the girls, extracts a cheeseburger for herself. Joey is kicking the back of her seat with his high tops—whump, whump, whump, whump. She opens a box of chicken nuggets and hands him a couple. He crams them into his mouth then grunts for more.

“Revolting,” says Amanda. “Stop that, Joey. Someone make him stop. He's grossing out Starr.”

Starr looks outside, embarrassed. “It's OK.”

Lorraine thrusts napkins at Amanda. “Help us out here, will you?” She steps down on the gas and pulls into a parking spot.

Amanda rolls her eyes at Starr, but sets her shake in the cup holder. She tucks one napkin into the top of Joey's T-shirt and swipes at his mouth with another. Joey rubs the side of his face against hers. “Hee, heeeeee.”

“Stick with the eating,” Amanda tells him.

The gesture reminds Lorraine of the months after Owen left them, when Amanda was six and Joey was five, just after Joey had been diagnosed. Lorraine would go into Joey's room at night and Amanda would be there too, sleeping beside him. She had been the first to sense something was wrong. “Joey won't play. He doesn't like me anymore,” Amanda would tell her. That was before the rocking started, before Lorraine woke up one morning and found Joey banging his head against the floor.

A loud crack interrupts the sound of chewing. “Jesus, what's that?” Lorraine twists around in her seat. Joey's mouth hangs open.

“I didn't do anything.” Amanda slides away from him. “Nothing! He's got something in there.”

Lorraine puts her fingers in Joey's mouth and fishes around. “Spit,” she commands. Bits of chicken and saliva slide into her hand. Then a gray pebble and something white—a tooth, half of one of Joey's molars. Lorraine holds the tooth and the stone, one from the grid. She forgot to check. How could she forget to check?

She cradles the damaged tooth, cups Joey's chin in her hand. “Does it hurt? Does your tooth hurt?” His mouth is still open. He kicks her seat, whump, whump, whump—

“Stop that,” Lorraine says. “God damn it, Joey. Stop it now!” Her voice is too loud. Joey stops kicking but his mouth opens wider. He howls, a cry that grips the car and holds them.

This is the way they drive home on the eve of the forty-sixth day without rain: Lorraine hunched over the wheel, tires screeching on the corners. In the back, Joey wailing and the girls squeezed together, their fish sandwiches and shakes untouched.

*

Work is the one place where life is predictable. The Fiddlehead, Lorraine thinks as she flips on the blender, is the only place where things happen as they should, where she feels part of a smooth, working unit rather than an emblem of misfortune. Today was awful. The sun, the tooth. When her mother showed up to baby-sit she pointed out the uncut grass and the stain on Lorraine's blouse. Still, backing down the driveway Lorraine felt herself lightening.

It's crowded for a Sunday, with Stevie Nicks barely audible on the sound system. Both pool tables are occupied. People are here to escape the heat, maybe to celebrate the Number Three being back up. Even Lorraine, when she parked her car and crossed the lot, was reassured by the distant mechanical roar of the mill, a million parts moving one against the other. Today's smell was a cross between egg salad and ammonia.

She carries the daiquiris halfway down the bar to the Ouellette twins, Tish and Tiny, who own the Nail Shack downtown. They're done up tonight, perfumed and spandexed, their faces shining with expectation.

“That looks fabulous,” says Tish. She reaches for her drink with a perfect hand. Lorraine curls her own ragged fingers behind her back.

Tish pushes a ten across the bar, “Thanks, doll. You're the best.” She tosses her hair, Tiny echoing the motion. A couple of stools down, a guy with red hair bends over his beer, seemingly oblivious. When he lifts his head, Lorraine thinks for a second he's the mechanic at the Texaco. But he's smaller and older—fortyish, with a lean serious face. Not the Ouellettes' type, but cute in a bookish way. Probably a temp at the mill. She stops in front of him, aware of her stained blouse. “Another one?”

He peers inside his half-filled glass and shrugs. “Guess I'll hold off. Thanks though.” He grins, great teeth. Lorraine revises her guess. Passing through China Falls on his way to someplace else.

She wipes down the bar, then picks up the courtesy phone they installed last winter after Pete Labonte drove out of the Fiddlehead parking lot and into the river. They found the car beneath the ice, but they never recovered Pete's body. The idea is that people will use the phone when they're too drunk to drive, though no one ever does.

Amanda picks up on the first ring. “Hi,” says Lorraine. “Everything OK?”

“I don't know, Mom. Fine, I guess.” Her voice is flat. “No breaking glass or blood at the moment.”

Lorraine pauses. Stevie Nicks is replaced by the Eagles. “Did you have something to eat?”

“Ice cream. Nana brought it. I have to go, Starr's on the other line.”

After she hangs up, Lorraine feels all the ways she is failing Amanda—assuming that Amanda is fine, that Joey is the only one who needs her. Amanda, who is pretty and popular. Who is thirteen.

She tops off a Guinness, carries it with a Singapore Sling to a couple at the end of the bar. The guy gets the beer. The woman, a regular named Roxanne Constantino, whose daughter Missy graduated from high school the same year Lorraine did, gets the Sling.

Roxanne gathers her hair, pulling it from her face as if she's entering an athletic event. She leans in, drains a third of the drink then takes a deep breath. A crucifix shines at her neck. “How you doin', honey?”

Her sympathetic tone makes Lorraine uneasy. She doesn't want to be understood by Roxanne, a different kind of single mother, one who had her baby out of wedlock, a woman who always talked too fast and too much, as if that would keep people from thinking what they thought. Lorraine remembers Missy, a small girl with shadows under her eyes. She remembers how Roxanne was always in front of the school at 3 p.m. in her beat-up Pinto, and the slow way Missy would walk to the idling car.

Lorraine forces her face to relax. “I'm OK, I guess, Roxanne. Wish it would rain. How 'bout you?”

Roxanne tells her about Missy: She's moved to Lewiston to be closer to her fiance and is keeping books for Androscoggin Dowel. “I miss her, you know?” She draws on her straw.

“Buy you another?” Roxanne's companion asks, his own beer untouched. Lorraine knows him as the clerk at the Aubuchon, around sixty, with a kind face.

Roxanne nods dreamily. “Just the thing for a night like tonight.”

Lorraine turns away, thinking again of Amanda. While Joey's in school tomorrow, maybe the two of them could do something. The Nail Shack? Lorraine hasn't been since it started doing hair. They could get manicures and trims. The plan fills Lorraine with resolve. She will find a way back to her daughter.

An hour before last call, Lorraine spots a figure by the taps—a tall man with his arms folded at his chest. Like the giant Paul Bunyan outside Hebert Lumber. Owen.

He waves her towards him. As she nears she sees that he doesn't look good, which soothes some of her distress. She likes it when he looks bad, as if looking otherwise is an indictment of her and Amanda and Joey, an affirmation that he chose right by pushing them out of his life. Ordinarily when Owen shows up at the Fiddlehead, Diane is with him. Sometimes he even brings their baby in a backpack. On those nights Lorraine gets someone else to wait on them. Even so, she broods. What do Owen and Diane have that he and Lorraine hadn't? And the house—is it cleaner, cozier now that it's Diane's?

But this evening Owen is alone. Maybe he's having trouble at home. That pleases Lorraine too, gives her a sick feeling of comfort to think of Diane waiting for him the way she always did.

“We have to talk.” He presses his lips together, the skin around them whitening. “I got a call Friday, Joey's school.”

Lorraine nods. She got it too, from the director, about Joey biting another child, his “burgeoning aggression.” She didn't know they'd called Owen too, feels it as a kind of betrayal. He never even goes to teacher conferences.

“I know,” she says. “So? That kid was asking for it, sticking his hands in Joey's face like that. Anyway, Joey had a great weekend. He'll be fine tomorrow.” She will not tell Owen about the tooth or Joey's rage in the car. She will not tell him what she feels: that Joey is getting harder to control. Or that she is tired.

Owen's face tightens. “Send him to that place they told you about. Before something happens.”

“I'm working, can't you see? Call me at home tomorrow.”

“Damn it, Lorraine, you can't fix him. He's ruined.”

Blood rushes to her face at his disloyalty—towards Joey, towards her. “No!” she says, banging her hand on the bar. She lowers her voice. “Get out, Owen. Go home to your wife.”

He heads for the door, his spot at the bar still animated with the energy of his anger. Halfway there he turns. When he comes back, his fists are clenched. He leans over. “Bitch,” he hisses. “Everything your way.”

My way, Lorraine thinks—an angry daughter, autistic son, life in a pre-fab while you get the house your mother left for us. A life more like Roxanne's every day. “You're the one who wanted out.” Tears scorch her eyes. The anger in Owen's face is replaced by something else. Pity? She hates him.

He walks away, his back stiff with indignation. Lorraine watches him leave, this time for real.

*

The Nail Shack has been transformed into the China Falls Day Spa, its rattan furniture and hanging plants replaced by chrome and mirrors. Everywhere Lorraine turns she is in triplicate.

When she and Amanda arrived they were handed silver pencils and a clipboard with a form—a service requisition, the white-blonde receptionist called it—which Lorraine holds in her lap. She glances around for the twins, spots Tiny in the next room fitting goggles onto a bald, bathing-suited man—Is it Wally Driscomb, the high school band director?—and sliding him into a tanning booth. The scent of sunscreen mingles with those of perm solution and nail polish.

No one can explain the resurgence in China Falls' downtown, especially since downtowns all over Kent County are boarded-up and dying, though many point to the pride with which it was laid out in the first place. The carefully dug pulp canal, branching from the river just below the falls and rejoining it a half-mile downstream. The resulting oval-shaped island filled with red brick buildings. A statue of Charles Decker, founder of Katahdin Paper, keeping watch from the center of Main Street. The Fire of '96 did its part too, sweeping through downtown in the early morning hours from its origins in the men's room of the VFW. Most businesses did not survive, but those that did, like the Nail Shack, flourished—reborn phoenix-like inside their old facades. New stores opened where old ones had closed. The hugeness of the catastrophe was vitalizing.

Whatever the reason, circumstance or something to do with the spirit of the place itself, the people of China Falls take pride in the downtown renaissance. If a tube of toothpaste costs fifty cents more at Liggett's than it does at the CVS outside town, then the price of redemption is worth it.

All the same, so much change makes Lorraine uneasy. She pats the clipboard. “Well. Check off what you want,” she tells Amanda, sprawled beside her on the leopard-print couch.

Amanda hands the board to her. “You do it.”

Lorraine scans the list, ticks off haircut and conditioning on both. The morning is not off to a good start. “OK, manicure. Which do you want, Amanda—pearl, flat, French, tips, wrap or jeweled. What's `jeweled?'”

“Glued on gems and stuff. I'll take that.”

Whenever the door opens, Lorraine sees yellowish steam pluming from the mill stacks. This close, the ubiquitous Katahdin roar is reduced to its components: metallic slams and squeals, a heavy whirring.

Tish appears, dressed in leggings and tank top, both black. “Lorraine! Amanda! Great to see you both! Do you like our new place!” She taps one heel against the tiled floor.

Lorraine doesn't recall her talking like this, in short bursts of exclamation. “Very nice,” she says, “Modern!” aware of Amanda's glance.

Later, as Lorraine is having her hair washed, she thinks that in spite of the brightness Tish seems different, not subdued exactly but careworn, as if all this newness has come at a price. “How's Joey!” Tish asks, massaging Lorraine's scalp. “Do you really like our new look!” Joey is fine, Lorraine tells her, the shop perfect. In truth, Lorraine misses the old Nail Shack, with its stale coffee and rolling bins of polish.

Still, when Lorraine sits up, she feels better. Her shampooed head tingles. At the station across the room Tiny is cutting Amanda's hair into layers, while Amanda watches in the mirror. She catches Lorraine's eye. “Hey, Mom.”

“Amanda has gotten so pretty,” Tish says in a different tone. “Like a woman. You must be proud.” Lorraine nods, realizing she is seeing Amanda, only Amanda, for the first time in months.

After her own trim—she hasn't had a real cut in years—Lorraine is under the dryer, her nails still wet, when the receptionist taps her shoulder. “Phone call,” she mouths. Fear washes through Lorraine as she makes her way to the desk. It can only be bad. She sees Joey as he was this morning when she dropped him off, fresh-faced, in a new yellow T-shirt.

She takes the phone. “Joey's OK now,” says her mother's voice, and Lorraine feels a rush of relief. “They called me because you weren't home.” Her tone is serious, maybe accusatory. She tells Lorraine the boy Joey bit Friday came after him at the sand table, pulling him onto the floor. “There was some blood, but they say he's all right. They gave him ice for his nose.” She pauses. “I thought I should call.”

When Lorraine hangs up, Amanda is leaning forward, the dryer lolling behind her. “What happened?” she asks as Lorraine approaches.

“Nothing,” Lorraine says, not wanting to mar their morning. “Joey bumped his nose. But he's fine now.”

Amanda views her suspiciously. “That's all?” Her face is pinched. Lorraine's heart constricts. Amanda is too young to be like her, so attuned to crisis.

Lorraine plunks down beside her. “Nana thought I should know. That's all.” She studies Amanda's glitter-studded nails. “You have nice hands, like Auntie Lou's. How do you like your manicure?”

“Good, I guess. I'm not used to being so done up.”

After the conditioner has been rinsed from her hair, Lorraine declines Tish's offer to dry it. Instead she watches Tiny blow out Amanda's new cut until it's smooth and shining.

Amanda tosses her head as she comes to stand by Lorraine. “I like my nails. I love my hair. Thanks.”

Lorraine takes Amanda by the elbow, steers her through the door. Onto the hot sidewalk, under the benevolent gaze of Charles Decker, to lunch.

*

Two days later on the Fourth of July, Lorraine is showering for work when an image comes to her. A cabin by a lake, Oquossoc. She was there once as a girl, remembers deep clean water, the fact that no matter how hot the day got it cooled at night. She and Amanda could go there for a weekend. They could paddle a canoe or swim, and at night Amanda could go to fires on the beach with other kids her age.

The idea pleases Lorraine. She's sure her mother will keep Joey for a couple of days. Reaching for shaving cream she lathers her legs, picks up the razor and draws it down her calf. Amanda has been different since the Nail Shack, helpful around the house and nicer to Joey. This morning Lorraine saw both of them outside on their knees by the garden. Amanda was showing Joey how to weed.

Downstairs she hears thumps and laughter—Joey's irregular chortle and Amanda's giggle. They must be wrestling. She pictures them circling, hands locked and heads down. Joey has seemed happier too, as if the new good feeling envelops him as well. Yesterday, when Owen showed up unexpectedly to take both kids out for ice cream, Joey went easily.

She hears a bump, more laughter. She props her leg on the shower wall, pulls the blade down the inside of her left thigh. How much will a weekend at Oquossoc cost? She rinses the blade and starts on the right, sweeping a clean line to her pubis.

Lorraine is facing the wall with water sluicing down her side when she hears a metallic rip and feels the shower curtain torn aside. She wheels, the razor slicing her before she drops it. Yanking the curtain, she pulls it back across the rod to cover herself. Through the opaque sheet she sees something move—a man. She imagines a knife, hands at her throat, but cannot cry out. She raises her leg and kicks, her foot connecting with something solid. There is a whooshing sound, like air from a tire, then a thud. Finally she screams, the sound echoing as she opens the curtain.

Joey lies unmoving on the tiled floor, his legs splayed. Lorraine stands over him, dripping blood and water, certain she has killed him. For that moment, she is without sorrow or repentance. She is free.

*

Remorse comes later, in the corridor of the China Falls Community Hospital. In a nearby cubicle a team finishes examining Joey, awake now and thrashing as they prod. “Aaiii, aaaiiih,” he shouts.

“Easy, big guy,” a familiar-sounding voice says. “It's all right.”

The hospital's astringent smells are a perfect complement to the sharp internal feel of Lorraine's guilt. Did some part of her know who it was before she kicked? She tries to bring the minutes back, the hot water on her shoulders, the razor sliding over her skin. Another image comes: of Joey a week ago, hunched over the computer as images scrolled across the screen, rocking back and forth. At least, from the stove this is what Lorraine had thought he was doing, though when she came closer she saw his hand inside his shorts. He's touching himself, she realized. Shocked, she retreated to the kitchen. When she checked again, he had stopped. Lorraine had tried to dissuade herself. It wasn't what it looked like.

She hears the sounds of the distant fireworks, a series of pops followed by a shudder. Where is Amanda? At the football field, Lorraine supposes, watching the show from beneath the bleachers with other teenagers. Lorraine remembers being there too, taking her first-ever sip of beer while overhead the sky lit up with magenta and red. Was she as young then as Amanda seems now?

Someone exits the cubicle, comes to where she sits. “Mrs. Poulin?”

It takes her a moment. The red-headed guy from the bar. Lee Fraser, RN, says his nameplate. A nurse?

“Your son's films.” He holds out a sheet with a shadowy orb, Joey's skull and brain. “The radiologist didn't see any fractures. We're lucky.” In the silence that follows Lorraine looks at his feet. Deck shoes tied with rawhide. Does he know her?

“Joey slipped on the floor,” Lorraine says. “I don't know how. I feel so bad.” To her, her voice carries the cool tone of a liar, but Lee nods.

“He took a pretty hard hit. He'll have a shiner by tomorrow.” Despite the background of her anxiety, Lorraine notices his big hands wrapped around the clipboard, and the way the top of his scrubs tucks into the bottoms.

“Can I see him?”

Lee leads her to where Joey lies, quiet now in the enclosure. Lorraine is struck by how long he is, by the way he fills the stretcher. When did this happen?

“Honey,” she says, and he turns. She reaches for him cautiously. He is big but fragile too. They both are.

Joey rolls his head from side to side, his eyes open, his usually furrowed brow smooth. Lorraine always thinks of sky when she looks into his eyes—blue and empty.

“He's a handsome kid.”

She feels Lee behind her. A witness. Her throat closes. “I'm not sure he sees me.”

“Of course he does.” Lorraine feels his breath. The hairs on her neck rise, in recognition.

*

The next afternoon before work Lorraine asks her mother to come early. She is outside on the steps when the car pulls up. Her mother emerges, toting two IGA bags—icecream and pretzels, Lorraine figures—and picks her way through the grass. Why does she insist on heels?

“This lawn still needs mowing,” her mother says when she's close enough. “And those windows. We'll have to get after them.” She stops beside Lorraine. “Oh-oh, what are you up to? Your face looks funny.”

“Nothing.” Lorraine frowns, irritated at being so easily read. Even now, at thirty-four. “The kids are watching TV. I'll call from work, OK?” She heads for the Buick.

When she turns onto Franklin and pulls up in front of Owen's, there's no car in the driveway. With luck, that means Diane's out and he's home. Good. She has to talk with him. In the rearview mirror she straightens her hair. Maybe Owen's right that Joey's getting too big for her to manage. Maybe he is too damaged to live at home any longer.

From the street the house looks the same as when she lived there. Geraniums wilting by the steps, the bushes cut in boxy shapes. Lorraine walks to the side door and knocks. When no one answers she turns the handle and steps inside.

“Hello?” she calls, “hello.” The kitchen smells different from how Lorraine remembered, fruity and milky, a little sour. There is an air of recent inhabitation—a damp dishtowel by the sink, something cooling on the counter. She crosses to it. A pie, oozing and perfect. She touches the still-warm crust, presses until it cracks then lifts a fragment to her mouth. Cherry.

From deeper in the house a clock begins to chime. Lorraine holds her breath, counts five strikes, exhales. Being here is like poking at a sore tooth, painful but imperative. On the refrigerator, the one she chose for its oversized freezer, is an assortment of photographs. Mostly of the baby. Lorraine realizes with a pang that Megan looks almost exactly like Amanda at that age. The same intense gaze, both of them, like Owen. She considers taking one of the pictures, but can't decide which. Instead she scoops a bar of soap from the sink, slips it into her pocket.

Upstairs, the bed is in a different place, alongside the windows now. When Lorraine sits the groan of the springs is familiar. On the pillow is a long brown hair, Diane's. Lorraine picks the strand up and studies it—no split end—then drops it. Being here is wrong, she knows, but she feels it as her right. She has to know what the house is like without her. She imagines Diane making the bed, smoothing the sheets as Owen calls to her from the bathroom. Do they have sex at night or in the morning?

She moves on to the baby's room with its border of elephants tail-to-trunk around the ceiling. The room is warm, the carpet thick underfoot. In the closet the clothes are tiny and pressed. They smell of talcum when Lorraine holds them to her nose. Her heart fills. It's been so long since Amanda and Joey were babies.

It occurs to her in a way it has not before: Owen has a new life, one without her. She has Joey and Amanda.

Lorraine has to get out of the house then, more than she needed to see it in the first place. She takes the stairs two at a time. Running through the kitchen she bangs into Megan's wind-up swing, which keeps rocking as the door slams shut.

*

Behind the bar at the Fiddlehead, Lorraine practices what she'll say when Owen shows up. You walked out on us because we weren't perfect. You have to live with that. She imagines uncrossing his arms and telling him without caring who among her customers is listening.

By last call Owen still hasn't appeared. Lorraine realizes he will not. Why would he? He's said what he wanted to say. Maybe they both have. She pulls stemware from the dishwasher. The glasses clink as they slide onto the racks.

She doesn't hear the door or see Lee come in and take a seat in the middle of the bar. When she turns, he's there. Is it Lee she's been waiting for? Suddenly she is nervous. He spoke to Joey softly. He stood close to her. Does he feel sorry for them?

“Got a Rolling Rock?” he asks, putting his big hands on the bar. “Hi.” He wears jeans and an Aerosmith T-shirt.

She slides him a beer. “On the house. For what you did for Joey.” Her fingers touch the soap in her pocket.

“How is he?”

“Fine,” she says, pausing. “OK.”

He is keeping her in the same level gaze he did in the hospital. Lorraine watches him back.

Roxanne Constantino claps her hands from the end of the bar. “Do I have to dance in my panties to get myself a drink?”

Lee laughs. Lorraine reaches for the grenadine. Amanda and Joey are home asleep, safe for tonight.

When she finishes mixing the Sling, a big one, she drops in a pair of cherries, a slice of orange, one of lime. Roxanne stares when Lorraine sets it down.

“What the hell is this, fruit cocktail?”

“Missy loves you,” Lorraine tells her. “She does, Roxanne. I always knew it.”

*

On the rocks by the river it is humid and dark. Lorraine sits with Lee on an outcropping, feels the water beneath them. He lights a cigarette, the smoke settling around them like a screen. The place is almost unrecognizable—the grass blackened, the bridge an unseen presence. Only the topography was familiar as Lorraine led Lee to the place where they are now.

Her watch says 3 a.m. I might be late, she had told her mother, who sounded tired and cross. “I never do this,” she says to Lee now. “I mean, I've got two kids. One of them's thirteen. I'm old.”

“No, you're not. You're young.”

Young. Lorraine doesn't feel young. She remembers it though, a lightness, a belief that things would go right. They are quiet, listening to the sound of the water and the occasional cry of a hawk. Lee's arm is beside hers, their knees bent at identical angles. She smells his scent, a mix of cigarettes and Clorox.

“I did it on purpose,” Lorraine says. “Pushed him. He came in while I was showering. He scared me.”

Lee reaches over and touches her leg. Lorraine feels the heat of his hand through her pantyhose. “You didn't mean to. You didn't know who it was.”

“I don't know. Maybe I did.”

He moves his hand up her leg, across her belly and onto her breast. Lorraine leans into him. Something shifts inside her. His mouth tastes salty, like the ocean. She wraps her legs around his, feels him hard against her as she loosens his shirt from his pants.

Wind moves through the valley, over Lorraine and Lee by the river. Across town at the mill where men are working, the surface of the pulp pond ripples, and in a kind of benediction, the Number Three puts out another roll of paper.

At first light Lorraine wakens to the sound of cars thunking over the bridge. First-shifters headed early to the mill. She leaves Lee sleeping, his arm stretched into the space where she had been. Her sandals dangling from her hand, she starts for home the wooded way, upstream along the river.

Sparrows dart in the bushes overhead. Lorraine reaches into her pocket, past the balled-up pantyhose. She takes out the soap and tosses it into the water, where it hits with a plop and floats downstream.

The wind has shifted west, bringing with it the stench of the mill, strong this morning, like overcooked cabbage. Lorraine walks steadily in the semi-darkness, her pulse strong at her throat. She feels different. Lee is unlike the men she's known in China Falls, formed in a way they are not. Owen would not like him, and somehow that seems right.

She leaves the river and heads down Ridpath Road. When she reaches her driveway, she sees figures in the thin light. By the garden, Amanda and Joey, who is holding something, marigolds, Lorraine realizes as she comes closer­—whole plants pulled from the ground. He crosses the yard, the flowers bunched in his hand. His eyes are fixed somewhere over her shoulder.

Amanda follows him, her mouth pursed in complaint. “He woke me up. He's pulling flowers and I can't stop him. Nana's asleep on the couch.” She stops. “God, Mom, where were you?”

The wind picks up, bending the uppermost branches of the maple. A discarded coffee cup skitters down the road. Lorraine puts an arm around Amanda, feels her shiver through her T-shirt.

“Flowers,” Lorraine says. “Are they for Amanda, Joey?” She takes them, shakes soil from the roots. “We'll put them on the table.”

A few drops are falling then. Lorraine feels them on her face and neck, a suggestion of relief. Joey opens his arms palms up and begins to slowly rotate.

Amanda sighs. “I'm exhausted,” she says. “I'm going back to bed.”

Instead she sits beside Lorraine on the cement steps. Overhead clouds break and re-form. Day comes as Joey spins in the grass and Lorraine and Amanda watch.