Marsden would definitely get the baby buried by Friday. Pay day. He would take the toweled bundle out of the freezer and drive the twenty miles to Bluff or further to Blanding if he had to, find a mortuary there or the sheriff who could tell him what he needed to do. Marsden wanted to get it done, he wanted to let Marla know he had taken care of everything so the two of them could get past this and be all right. He could get through two more days whether Marla opened the bedroom door and finally talked to him or not. By then, he hoped, it would all be over, the unraveling, the not talking, the not having cash or credit enough to bury his son. 

The only money he had right now was going to buy gas for the truck and extra minutes and messaging for their cell phones. The way he saw it, those were the necessities right now: gas to get to work and their phones so Marla could get in touch with him there. She hadn’t talked to him from behind the bedroom door for two days now, not since Marsden had come home from his shift on Monday and found the tiny shape on the bathroom floor and their bedroom door wedged shut. She seemed to try at first to answer the questions he asked outside the door each night: Are you all right? Can I come in? What can I do? But the sounds he heard were faint and might have been only her feet brushing the hardwood floor.

On this night, the third he’d slept on the couch, he realized he hadn’t heard the toilet flush or water run in the bathroom on any of the nights he’d slept alone there. All he had heard when he’d awakened and gone to the door to say, “I’m here, Mar,” were sighs or words whispered too low to hear, or just the sonic ring of night silence. Just enough to know she was there and just enough to fear she wasn’t. He stood in the darkened living room to try again, draping the blanket over his shoulders that Marla used to bring along on their drives up Wild Horse Canyon. “Hey, it’s me. I’m still here.” he said, his voice tired, his head tilted against the door frame. In the moments he remained there he silently promised that he would have some money soon to get them the help they needed, whatever that was. He said one more time “I’m here, Mar,” to test the sound of it for himself, check his voice for an element of assurance or even the love he thought she should hear in it.

They had never said “I love you” to each other straight out. They had their own saying, from their time in Tuba City sitting in his truck with a six-pack at the edge of Wild Horse reservoir, Marla tucked in beside him feeding Garth Brooks CDs into the dashboard player. “Je t’adore,” he told her then, something he’d picked up from his brother-in-law, a balding Mormon guy who had learned French in Quebec before marrying his sister back in Phoenix. “Whaddya mean, ‘Shut the door?’” Marla had asked the first time he said it, pushing away from him like he was crazy, and this had become the way they told each other in the beginning, when their bleary eyes landed on each other their first mornings: “Hey, you. Shut the door,” and the answer, “Hey, you shut the door, too.” How could he say that now, Marsden wondered, now that there was a real door, shut for days on him now. It had been two, maybe three years since he had last said it. He’d had money then, he thought, when he worked the road crews from Flagstaff to Tuba City where he met Marla and where things had been easier. Easy as dropping ten bucks at the Navajo Nation Fair on a dream-catcher Marla wanted. It was fun. Marla had let the way he bought things for her in their early days make it easy for her to say, “You shut the door, too,” he knew.

His head pounded when he tried to get back to sleep on the couch, his neck cramped and – if it was close to dawn – all systems aching for the coffee they were out of in the kitchen. He would have to wait to get to the guard house and depend on the coffee machine and packets of coffee that Eureka Mining and Milling provided to him and the other guards. The coffee helped him stay warm and alert on his shift while he watched for Eureka’s trucks arriving at the gates according to the schedule posted for him every day. It took a full hour of coffee-drinking to get warm after a night on the couch with the January cold that came in every crack of the cheap manufactured home that Eureka granted him and Marla rent-free. Marsden pulled the blanket to his chin and focused his gaze out the patio doors, out to the mesa that would be another hour before crowning with light. He listened as the wind blew corn snow mixed with sand against the siding, listened to it gather over the bladed flat housing tract and then splatter the aluminum siding, not even a solitary saltbush grown in yet to slow the blasts.

He had heard men – older men – say how money worries plagued them when they woke in the night. Men who couldn’t sleep six hours at a stretch anymore. Men twenty or more years older than Marsden. But here he was, twenty-four, and in the same spot more or less, and he wondered if this was how it started for those men, situations like his and Marla’s: married young, a baby they couldn’t afford, conceived then lost. If he took too long thinking about it, he sank further into a feeling of lacking something, courage maybe, or common sense. It was ridiculous, he knew, but each night he’d kept his backed turned to the door leading to the garage and the freezer they kept there next to his extra set of truck wheels, an upright with a shelf cleared of frozen pizzas now and holding only the bundle he’d carried from the bathroom. He had chained and padlocked its door closed, added the key to his keyring so Marla wouldn’t have a way to remove the chain and discover the baby while he was at work. He had avoided the bathroom, too, where he’d found the baby, their baby, little Garth he’d thought of calling him. And whenever he needed to in the dark of those nights and at the first twinge of early light, he slid open the patio doors and aimed his stream at the stars struggling to shine in the sky.

The Navajos who had worked on the road crews with Marsden in Arizona would say he was in for bad luck having the baby die in his house. They told him any death in a house meant the spirit would try to come back there to live. And because he thought of these things alone in the dark, his mind wandered to what it could mean for Navajos when a baby dies inside its mother, what did the spirit do then? He sat up on the couch and sat there hunched for a moment. It was enough to feel as haunted as he did, he thought, that haunting weight he could still feel his hands carrying, the tiny clay-like body he’d seen.

If he could get to Marla, then what? What if she needed medical help? What women’s bodies do when this happens, he didn’t know. He wished Marla would talk to a woman, any woman, maybe the nurse at the Feldspar QuickCare who had stitched a gash in his hand once. If they had been Mormons, he thought, Marla would know the other church women in Feldspar by now – three months since they’d left Tuba City – and one or two of them would have already come to the house to help. He had asked Ben Dandy, the Navajo who covered the night shift at Eureka, if he knew what Navajo women do in situations like this, but Ben only pursed his lips and looked off toward the tailing ponds, squinching his eyes like someone who has something to remember.

Marsden watched the morning come on, the outline of the mesa emerging from the dark and then the clouds above it flaring pink. He pulled on his crumpled jeans and looped his arms through the company shirt he’d worn the day before, a shirt the same brown color reservation dogs boil down to after a while, Ben said. Marsden stopped at the bedroom door before leaving for work. “Mar, I’m leaving now.” He patted the door frame. “You call me if you want. On Friday I can take care of everything, okay?”

From the bedroom he heard the nothing he expected by now, but then there was the beep! of Marla’s cell phone, its battery weakening. Marsden let the sound push a needle of despair into his plan, the two days he had left to fix things.

“Just today and tomorrow, Mar. We can get out of here then, if you want.”

He thought that might be Marla crying, the sound he could hear, maybe her crying into a pillow. Or else she’s gone out the window, he thought, and the sound he had heard was the curtain shuffling a mix of sand and ice on the sill that had blown in after her. He stood frozen in place, eyes shut against his unwillingness to try anything else to reach her, his possible willingness to find the bedroom empty.

. . .

Just before lunch on his shift, while Marsden was shaving in the mirror mounted to the guardhouse wall that allowed him to see the ore trucks coming to the gates, he caught sight of a man walking around a bend in the dirt road leading to Eureka’s operation. From the oilskin duster that flapped at the man’s shins, Marsden knew he was no mine official or local. The wind whipped his shoulder-length hair as he came, and his too-fancy cowboy boots turned at the ankle every now and then in the frozen ruts and rubble of the road. At Marsden’s truck, the man stopped and walked around it peering at every rusted-out peephole of steel over the wheel wells, at the sprays of red mud on the grille, on the doors and fenders, nodding like Marsden’s truck was just the thing he had been looking for. Marsden took a look back to the paved one-laner below and saw the parked SUV he had come from, sleek, clean, foreign-made. Two others were nestled there in their tilted-back seats. When Marsden looked back at the man, he was patting the rim of the truck bed with one hand, sending out a grinning confidence that seemed to demand that Marsden agree with him on something unsaid. After a moment the man made a toy gun of his forefinger and thumb and shot Marsden, mouthing “Yours?”

Marsden slid the window of the guard house open, wiping the shaving cream clear of his one unshaven cheek. “You need some help or something?”

“I need this truck,” the man shouted. Then he held up two fingers at Marsden as if sign language was necessary. “Two days.”

“I need it. I’ve got to get to work.”

“Five hundred a day. Then you get it back.”

The number, the thousand dollars, rang inside his head. He couldn’t give up the truck just now. He needed it to get him through today, then to work tomorrow followed by a quick end-of-day run to the bank in Blanding with his paycheck and back to let Marla know there was money now. Marsden shook his head at the man.“Saturday’s the soonest I’d be interested. You need to haul something?”

He was trying to keep his thoughts tracking straight. The amount of money – as much as he pulled in on a single paycheck after medical and taxes – made him want to grin and grin hard. Pulling the guard’s stool closer to the window, Marsden settled onto it and lifted a foot onto a rung. His heel bobbed furiously beneath him while he watched the man stare at his truck. In the silence, Marsden slid his hand beneath his hip on the stool to stanch the itch to hold it out right now, to feel the money counted into his palm.

“That hitch is no good if you’re thinking of towing anything. It’s rusted out under there,” Marsden warned. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to take your money. Just don’t want you thinking you got yourself a truck that’s one of them you see pulling five more just like it straight up one of these cliffs in those commercials they shoot around here.” Marsden waved toward the sandstone pinnacles that needled along the edge of the Eureka Valley as if the whole idea of selling cars that way was ridiculous.

“I’m shooting a film next couple of days,” the man shouted back, “I just need it to get down a dirt road and pull a man out of a mine shaft. Can it do that?”

“It can do that on Saturday.”

The man cocked his head sideways in mock defeat, a white-toothed grin stamped between his ears. He circled the truck again, and when he stopped he pointed dramatically at the back window of the cab. “What’s this here?” he said as he came in long, crossover sidesteps toward the guard house, keeping his arm pointed at the truck Crazy Horse style. “Where it says ‘Willie’ there on the driver side? Then “Faith” on the other? Those are your favorite country stars, yours and your girlfriend’s, I guess.”

Marsden paused before answering, making sure he didn’t seem too eager to keep the talk going. “She’s my wife now.”

The guard house went suddenly cold as a cloud scudded to a stop over the sun and then the wind snaked in the open window of the guard house and over Marsden’s chest, making him shudder and the space heater tick. Marsden slid his free hand up and down his thigh, a little nervous.

The man rocked his head in a nod, signaling okay, okay, your wife, then walked closer to the truck, squinting at the third decal on the truck window. He swiveled on the heels of his boots, “And this ‘Garth’ in the middle, that’s the one you both like. That’s real cute.”

The window decals had been Marla’s idea, something Marsden believed she’d seen on other trucks in Tuba City where he met her and just copied over for the two of them. Or maybe there was even a truck or two still in Tuba City with her “Faith” decal on the passenger side of the rear windows, old boyfriends letting it ride. But if there had been others they didn’t matter now because it was Marsden who had been with Marla long enough for her to come back with the news a month after their weekend in Window Rock that she was pregnant. Which was one of the reasons they’d moved to Feldspar, for the Eureka job with benefits. The other was that Marla’s manager at the Circle K had accused her of pinching a hundred dollars from the register and fired her on the spot, proof or no proof. And even though Marsden was known on the road crews for being a guy who took things slowly, as is, he knee-jerked when Marla told him about that and he took the afternoon off from raking asphalt outside of Teec Nos Pos and drove back to Tuba to pick her up. By four-thirty that afternoon they were signing their marriage certificate in the first town with a City Hall on their way to Cortez to make a short honeymoon out of the next few days. They were speeding north on Highway 160 when Marla showed him the decals she’d stolen on her way out of the Circle K. And with the old truck sneaking up on eighty, tires singing along the asphalt Marsden had worked smooth the week before, it was Marla who showed him who had the balls between them as she stretched halfway out her open window, hair rioting in the wind as she rubbed “Faith” onto the rear window with the heel of her hand.

“Only got today and tomorrow,” said the man. “I can get you a ride home tonight and back in the morning.” He flicked a look at the SUV. “So, do we have a deal, Ray, Roy, Roger?” His hand was out to shake on the deal and Marsden waited for the man to look him in the eye.

“It’s not Ray or Roy or Roger anything.”

“All right, tell me what it is then.”

“If you want this to work, you show me some respect.”

Hands up in surrender, the man backed up a step. Then Marsden told him, “It’s Marsden Hatch you’re talking to.”

“All right Marsden Hatch. If we have a deal, that car down there will be back to take you and the rest of your money home at whatever time you say.”

“Five o’clock is fine. I can go soon as the night man gets here.”

From an inside pocket of his duster the man pulled a wad of bills and counted off five one hundred dollar bills. He held the money out stiff-armed for Marsden and after Marsden had pulled the bills free, the man rolled his palm open in a silent demand for the key to the truck.

Marsden fished them out of his pocket and threaded the truck key off the ring. “That’s my only key. You don’t want to lose that. And you’ll need to put some gas in it to get anywhere. There’s a station in Feldspar if you’re going that way.”

The man strode off to Marsden’s truck, a backwards wave signaling no further talk was needed. At the last minute, as he was about to duck inside the cab, he stopped and hollered back to Marsden, “Your country heroes here,” he waggled a finger in the direction of the decals, “We’ll have to scrape those off before we start shooting.” Then he ducked behind the wheel and turned the key until the engine caught, backed up in rough heaves over the frozen mud ruts in the road, then drove down to the waiting SUV. A taillight out, Marsden noticed, whenever the man braked the truck with the touch of one his thousand dollar cowboy boots.

At the end of Marsden’s shift, the SUV rocked and tilted its way up the road to the guard house. The headlights shot crazy streams of light over the wall of sandstone that loomed up from the road, colorless now in the winter evening. “I have to wait here for the night man before I can leave,” Marsden said to the driver as he stopped where Marsden flagged him down. “Government rules say there has to be a man here.” Marsden checked for interest on the face of the driver, then the man lounging in the back seat – California movie faces, he thought, sunburned and eyes half-lidded shut – checking to see if mention of the government had any effect on them. He had wondered himself if he would ever have to use the red phone in the guard house, a direct alarm to Eureka’s armed security staff warning of strangers on the premises, maybe someone approaching Marsden with an out-of-the-blue offer to buy the next truck full of uranium ore coming through the gates. The training Eureka had required him to sit through included photographs passed around the room, mostly mug shot-like photographs of men who had been arrested for attempting to buy uranium all over the world. None of them with faces like these movie people.

“No problem,” the SUV driver said. “Here’s the rest of what you were promised for that truck of yours.”

Marsden reached for the envelope and checked inside for the five remaining bills he was due. As he counted the money Marsden heard the SUV driver say “It’s all there, man,” as the window of the SUV whirred steadily up between them.

“Just a while now,” Marsden half-shouted and then slid the guard house window closed and stood bouncing on his heels. A moment later, from the direction of the reservation, the headlight beams of Ben Dandy’s Ford shot over the hill and down, seeming to furrow the pavement all the way to the turnoff. At the guard house, Ben nosed his truck in between the building and the SUV, then craned a look over the dash to inspect the plates, the faces turning to look back at him.

Marsden came alongside the door of Ben’s truck, a newer model than Marsden’s that Ben had bought with his rodeo winnings. He stepped onto the chromed tube step to get level with Ben and stood waiting for his relief man to settle his boulder-sized torso back behind the wheel. When Ben finally let the window down, Marsden had to shout over the blowing heater fan, “These guys are taking my truck for a couple of days.” From the passenger side of Ben’s truck, a woman tilted forward and switched off the fan. Marsden nodded to her, and kept talking to mask his surprise, “The driver’s giving me a ride home and bringing me back in the morning.”

Ben shrugged at whatever Marsden had meant to explain by that, then jabbed his thumb at the woman. “I brought Crystal. She’ll take you home and bring you back tomorrow.”

Marsden fended off the offer, “It’s all worked out.”

Ben pulled his lips back over his teeth and gazed out the windshield. Marsden noted a twinkle of saliva glinting in the gap where an incisor had been lost in the rodeo ring.

“Really. It’s all worked out.” Marsden stepped off the truck just as Crystal murmured to Ben in Navajo, a few words, no more than three or four but full of hushing sounds. Ben hushed back and then heaved out of the truck having made a judgment for Marsden.

“Crystal will take you home,” Ben said, chucking his chin toward his truck where Crystal shifted across the seat to take the wheel. “It’s all worked out.” Ben waggled his tongue in the empty space between his teeth and looked straight at Marsden. “She can help your wife,” he said, and ducked his shoulder past Marsden and took his place inside the guard house.

After driving the twenty minutes to Feldspar’s town limit in polite silence, Marsden sat up to point the way to the dust-colored house he and Marla lived in, third of the five identically built employee homes on Eureka Lane. Crystal guided the truck to a stop in front, tires crunching the dirt-flecked snow at the curb. “I need to know two things.” Crystal clutched herself up to the steering wheel, sat looking straight out the windshield, the lights of the dashboard catching in the beaded earrings she wore, long loops swaying. “Her name,” said Crystal. “And what you did with her baby.”

Marsden looked toward the house. “It’s Marla.”

He waited a moment before continuing, unsure of how much detail Crystal wanted exactly. Marsden turned to regard her reflection in the windshield, then his own and recognized himself as being nearly identical to the men whose photographs were part of mine employee orientation: dark-haired men, eyes closely spaced, five o-clock shadows like ink splatter. He caught Crystal’s eyes shifting to look at his reflection. “And the baby’s in there,” he said, as they both watched his eyes widen and shine gray-white in the glass reflecting their faces, “In the freezer, in the garage, until I could get hold of some money.”

Crystal shifted her eyes to the garage, then simply let her breath out in a calm stream. Next, she pulled her jacket tighter over herself and grasped a paper bag on the seat next to her. She opened the truck door and slid off the seat to the ground. She poked her head back in, her shoulders barely clearing the top of the bench seat, “You get the baby and take it away. You can take the truck.” Crystal shut the door and started around the front of the truck. She wiggled her fingers over her head to signal Marsden to come along and let her in.

“Marla, my name is Crystal. Crystal Dandy. I’m Ben’s wife.” Crystal stood talking softly at the bedroom door. “I bet you are hungry. You been in there a long time.” Marsden and Crystal stood still, listening for any sound, Marsden just a few steps behind, ready to take a cue from her if she motioned him near. Crystal shifted the heavy paper bag she held to her other hand and tried again, repeating and repeating, “Marla, my name is Crystal. Crystal Dandy. Ben’s wife.”

For several minutes, Marsden listened to her voice and the softening crinkle of the bag she regularly moved from hand to hand. Finally, he slumped into a kitchen chair, his jacket still on, his eyes fixed on the door. After a short pause, Crystal turned to him. “You go now. Take care of that.”

He felt he stood up too quickly, too eagerly. “Do you need anything?”

Crystal shook her head.

“You might need more, I don’t know, good medicine or whatever you’ve brought along there.”

“Good medicine?” Crystal snorted. She turned back to the bedroom door, back to her soft chant meant for Marla, leaving Marsden to feel an instant banishment he should know he deserved. He sensed Crystal’s intention narrow to include only Marla, to leave him out of the work she was doing here. He watched the halo of shine in her hair sway over the crown of her head, watched her loop the strands at her cheek over her ear as she kept a steady sing-songy patter going to let Marla know she was there, she was still there, and she was staying there.

Finally she glanced back at Marsden and shook her paper bag at him. “You go. You go, or I’ll get you with my medicine bag here.” She took a step toward him and shook the paper bag, eyes shining, “My bag full of good ham sandwich medicine.”

Marsden faltered, ran his hand over his head, stepped embarrassed to the door to the garage and opened it. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness and walked through to the freezer. He felt for the padlock key on his keyring and fit it in. The chain clattered to the garage floor and sent up the flinty smell of chipped concrete. His hands easily found the bundle he had made of the baby. He scuttled it forward and onto his forearms. Ice crystals fell from the folds of the towel onto his bare wrists, making him shudder. Crystal’s voice carried to the place he stood in the dark, “Marla, my name is Crystal Dandy.” But in the next moment he heard a shift in her tone, he heard her follow with, “You see? I’m here to help you. You see that.” He tilted his head to peer back inside the door he’d come through. He watched as a sliver of light knifed across the kitchen from the bedroom door as it opened slightly and Crystal flattened and wafted through the slender gap like smoke.

The mortuary in Blanding had a doorbell at a side door to ring for someone after hours. The kid who answered wasn’t more than a senior at the local high school and unsure what to tell Marsden. The boy left him standing outside, promising to come back as soon as he could get one of the Laurentsen brothers on the phone. Ben’s truck purred and pumped exhaust into the cold night air. As he waited fear took hold of Marsden that the boy might have walked away, judging him, hoping Marsden would just get in his truck and leave. “I have the money! I can pay for this!” Marsden shouted at the curtained glass door the boy had disappeared behind.

An occasional car puttered by on the main street in front of the mortuary. In the windows of the combination dry cleaner and video rental store across the street, Marsden could see the red neon of the “Laurentsen Brothers Mortuary” sign wavering in the glass. His breath rose in puffs and mingled with the smoky rings exhaled by the mortuary’s outdoor light over the door where he stood. Marsden looked along the side of the building toward the intake bay and imagined how bodies came and went from there. He stepped back and tried to take in the whole look of the pinkish stuccoed building. It was a building the same color, Marsden thought, as the red-dirt cemetery in Tuba City, in Blanding, in every small town wrinkled into the sandstone landscape of the Colorado Plateau where he’d lived the past few years. The dirt in those patches, he knew, only changed to darker red with spring rains, or brief winter snows that melted off quickly, the soil for miles and miles hot with uranium molecules blown from the tailings of the old mines.

In no more than ten minutes with Marsden standing in the cold, Eldon Laurentsen pulled into the parking lot and introduced himself as he pushed the door open for Marsden and motioned him inside. He had come straight from the bowling alley two blocks away, a wrinkled suit jacket over his nylon Lucky Strikers bowling shirt. And after Marsden had explained what he could of his situation, no blame, no judgment came with Eldon’s transfer of the bundle from the floor of the truck to a tiny gurney rolled out to the truck and back inside, past Marsden and down the hallway into a room where a bright slash of light cut across the linoleum. Marsden remained near the door, not moving toward or away from anything. The light in the room down the hall flicked off and he watched the mortician return. He listened to him talk in a voice so calm and sure that Marsden let it sink into him, knowing that this man understood that Marsden may at any second bolt out the door or break down in surprising grief. Marsden wondered how there came to be men like this. Men who seemed to know what a person needed and what actions were right to take. And in this case, how he knew not to push Marsden to sit or fill out forms or attempt to know much at all about him. It was a comfort Eldon provided, Marsden thought. It helped him to clearly hear the words Eldon spoke as he listed the options Marsden had – a coffin, a burial plot, a cremation, any one of these free in these cases, as Eldon called them.

Marsden had not expected anything free. He was baffled. “We haven’t talked.” Marsden looked pained. “I don’t know yet.” He fingered the envelope in his jacket pocket that held the bills the SUV driver had handed him.

“With stillbirths there’s often no time or way for parents to think of the baby in the usual way. Sometimes not even a name is given.”

A brief streak of panic stiffened Marsden, wondering if he would have to provide a name.

The mortician immediately sensed his worry, and added, “We can help parents in these cases, as I’ve mentioned. It’s very common for families to be caught without means.”

“This was our first,” Marsden said.

“I’m sorry. It happens. Why don’t you call me in a day or so.” The mortician fished his wallet out of his pants pocket and slid a business card from a slot inside and offered it to Marsden. “You’ll sort it out.”

Marsden took the card and then pulled the envelope with his money free from his pocket and handed it to the mortician. “In case I don’t come back, use this to cover what you have to do. All right?”

“There’s no need for this now,” Eldon said, and tried to press the envelope back into Marsden’s hand.

“No, in case I don’t come back, I said, just keep that.”

“Happy to hold onto it for you until you’ve had more time, if you like.” Eldon pulled open a drawer at a desk near the door and placed the envelope inside. “It’ll be right here for you.”

Eldon’s calm made Marsden twitch. He couldn’t understand how a man wouldn’t take the money, money that Marsden didn’t want to be holding anymore. The money seemed tainted to him in a way he couldn’t explain. He hadn’t made it, he couldn’t make that kind of money, he had to get it from losing something else along the way. He found himself making a decision in his head, in return for the kindness he’d received, and then he committed it to speech, “If you need a name to call him, you can say it was Garth. I think that’s what we wanted.”

Marsden bounced his chin in a sharp nod, then ducked out the mortuary door and back to Ben’s truck. He drove out of town toward Feldspar as if pulled along the curves of the desert road by an invisible cord speedily retracting him back to a starting place he knew, the star-flocked sky seeming to kite along behind him. He glanced once at the rubber floor mat in the glow of the dashboard lights where the icy bundle had traveled with him to Blanding. A saucer-sized puddle rolled side to side there now with each twist of the road. It was enough to make Marsden let up on the accelerator as if he had disturbed a stillness he shouldn’t, set something in motion he shouldn’t have, and as he came closer and closer to Feldspar the truck no longer seemed to be fleeing, but returning.

In the time he waited outside his house in the bitter cold, he watched the water in the mat freeze again into a patch of crystals that hovered in the darkness before his eyes. He wasn’t sure how much longer it was before Crystal and Marla opened the passenger door and sent the truck’s dome light shooting into his eyes, but with their shapes shimmering in front of him he knew they were more than ghosts, more solid than anything he’d been himself the last few days. He heard himself say to Marla, “We’ll sort it out.” Words he had never thought to say before, but words that felt right and new now. Words, he was satisfied, that were worth every one of the hundred dollar bills he had paid for them.