Dedication

DEDICATION

For Leigh and Henry Bienen

Epigraph

EPIGRAPH

My first act of freedom will be to believe in freedom.

—WILLIAM JAMES

One

ONE

It was a night of patchy dreams, strangers’ voices, rain hammering on the tarpaper roof close overhead. Before Marya was awake she could see through her trembling eyelids her mother’s swaying figure in the doorway; she could hear a hoarse level murmuring—not words, not recognizable words, only sounds. Her mother’s angry breath catching in her throat. Half sobbing. Coughing. Earlier, through much of the long night, Marya had been hearing voices and footsteps outside the house, the noise of car motors, car doors slamming shut, the churning of tires in gravel. She waited for her father’s raised voice—he often shouted if somebody was backing out of their driveway crooked, headed for the deep ditch by the road—but she hadn’t heard him. She had heard her mother instead.

Several times during the past summer Marya had wakened frightened from sleep—there were often men in the house, her father’s friends, co-workers, union organizers—and she’d run out of the house to hide in the cab of a derelict pickup truck in the field next door. She was safe there in the truck: she could sleep on the seat until morning, nobody would know she was gone. Once, when she’d been particularly frightened at the loud drunken talk and laughter, she had taken her brother Davy with her—but he cried too much, he wet his pajamas like a baby, she hated him sucking his thumb the way he did and nudging his head up against her. She wasn’t sure if she cared what happened to him: him or the new baby either.

“You! You and you and you! I don’t give a shit about you, I wish you were all dead,” Marya’s mother once screamed at them, but right away afterward she said she was sorry. She hugged them, kissed them all over like crazy; “You know I didn’t mean it,” she said, and Marya believed her.