When he lopes away, Cheri feels strangely alone, but not unpleasantly so. Today the sky feels like company, and this winding orange-and-yellow trail. The diamond glints suddenly, causing her to gasp and squint her eyes. The pain sometimes is raucous, frightening; other times, it’s a dull glow in her chest, like she’s inhaling embers. It’s her spine she can’t stop thinking about, the recurring, disquieting image of being alive inside a dead body. Ursa turns toward home and Cheri follows at a distance, noticing how her knees bend and straighten with each step.

The girls are burning leaves next to the curb, great crackling piles of them. She sits on the front steps with her afternoon tea and watches, not speaking even when spoken to. She just wants to rest everything, her body, her mind. Unbidden, as she brings the white cup to her lips, a memory appears: Her refrigerator in an apartment down south, from the time when she worked in an airplane factory cleaning parts, up to her elbows in toxic gunk all day, despising it. A Suzuki quote, sent to her by a sympathetic friend, pinned to the scarred door of the fridge where she could see it each evening.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

The girls pause to lean on their rakes, Sarah talking, Katy shaking out her hair, retying it. The fire has reduced itself to a thin meandering plume, like cigarette smoke, while leaves continue drifting down from the sky. Burn yourself up completely. That’s it, then. She stands and looks at her daughters, raking coals in the waning light.

“I’m done,” she tells them.

She doesn’t think of it as killing herself; she thinks of it as killing the monster. That’s why a gun would be so satisfying. But impossible, of course, given her circumstances. With window-leaping, you have a crowd, and in Iowa City that could mean one or two acquaintances. Drowning isn’t possible; she tried it. In the bathtub, just as an experiment, to see if she’d have the nerve.

No one tells her not to do it. She isn’t the kind of person you say that sort of thing to. Instead, everyone grows silent and wary, both daughters vacating the house for long hours, coming home for meals, steamed vegetables and instant rice or carryout from a downtown restaurant. Burritos dumped on a platter, refried beans shoveled into a bowl. Katy serving it up, Sarah pushing it around her plate. Cheri sipping ice water, lost in the pros and cons of her afternoon’s research.

“Did you know a person of my weight would have to fall fifteen feet to break her neck?” she asks suddenly. That’s why people like to hang themselves in barns, where they can step off a rafter. Works better that way, otherwise you’ve got the problem of dangling there until suffocation occurs. No barns in the vicinity, unfortunately, but there is a garage. She’s still going back and forth on asphyxiation.