Marianne liked to think of how much worse it could be. She made lists in her head while massaging her clients. Lucas was not setting fires, he was not running away from home, he was not beating people with bricks or bats, he was not mugging people or raping people or torturing animals. He was only a little bit crazy.

What a word, she thought. She had said it many times—that, and others. Insane. Freak. Psychopath. Now they fell from her mouth by accident, like frogs. She felt the words slip out and drop to the floor. It would take a moment or two for Marianne to recover from saying them. Meanwhile, her client on the massage table would be rolling over, ready for the other side. Marianne swallowed down the swampy feeling in her throat and covered her palms in oil.

When Richard was a teenager, he saw a dog in the road one night and purposely ran it over. It was a sheepdog, white and fluffy, a gray spot over its left eye. He stopped the car afterward to look. The dog smelled like an old couch. It had a worn leather collar with a new tag around its neck. Richard touched the dead animal’s fur and thought about his father. They had been fighting before he left home. He knew somehow that this is what had made him kill the dog. He stood on the side of the road in the dim blue light of morning and remembered the eyes of the animal reflecting back his headlights; the well of anger flowing into his chest, down his arms, through his hands to the wheel, and how the bump, the thud, the roll of the car beneath him, had lifted his spirits and made it all go away.

Richard wondered now if this is what happened to Lucas. If he did these things to find relief. Richard had never found any, and his father had never found any, and his father’s father had never found any; this he knew. Before he died in the nursing home, Richard’s father had talked about his own father. Gramps beat the family regularly and spent every night out in the barn, eating straw and screaming. They found the body hanging in the rafters after a hard winter, the old man’s face purple, bits of alfalfa stuck to his lips. There was something in the family blood. But Richard had found ways to manage. He had held down a job and had children. When his wife put Lucas in his arms for the first time, Richard had cried. He had wanted a son that badly.