Two years ago, Janine’s school offered yoga to the teachers once a week as part of a stress-reduction initiative. Janine had not learned much more in class than the proper way of sitting in the lotus position, but she had looked forward to each class, especially the silence at the end, when the teacher would ring a small bell and they would sit with their eyes closed as sound reverberated in their chests. She’d been disappointed when her principal cut the funding, but had never attended a yoga class on her own after that.

Now she sat lotus style, her spine as straight as she could make it, her feet tucked against her thighs. Lorraine had said that this was poetry, sitting without expectation. She tried yoga breaths, taking deep bellyfuls of humid air then exhaling slowly, and hoped she didn’t look silly. She thought about the poem she wanted to write, about the security guard’s experience of watching Terri. It had been so awful to think about—guarding someone who was dying, guarding her from the people who wanted to save her—that it had been difficult to express what he might have felt. In the poem, the speaker forced himself to think about other things—going to his son’s T-ball game, grilling steak for dinner, the smell of his wife’s hair. The pleasures of being alive. But that had left her nowhere to go, using his voice, except guilt. He hadn’t faced Terri’s impending death and what it would mean. Janine hadn’t made him. That was why Lorraine crossed out most of her lines.

Janine longed for her pen and notebook, which she’d left back in her room. She began to get that feeling, a sort of pent-up but not unpleasant sensation, that always signified that a poem was coming. It was similar to the way she sometimes felt before initiating intimacy with Rick—something that seldom happened anymore but used to about once a month, during the fertile part of her cycle. The poem feeling was similar in the way that the desire surprised her, the way it seemed to come from nowhere, from everywhere. Also in its fragility.

“You okay?” asked the woman next to her. She offered Janine some of her water, but Janine shook her head.

“I’m okay,” she said, standing. “Just tired. I have to do some rewriting.”

The woman nodded, unsurprised and unimpressed. “Storm might be here by then, anyway,” she said. “That’d turn all his plans upside down, wouldn’t it? Have you been watching the weather?”

“My daughter studies meteorology,” Janine began, then stopped herself. She knew if started talking about her children, she would lose her momentum, her desire. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

17