Her grandson, Jeremiah Price, was four. She had poisoned him first, so he wouldn’t remember the pain. “Remember” being her word, the first word in the story she was telling herself about what she’d felt she’d had to do. But the story had no center, not to anyone but her. When we took her confession, we asked her the same question over and over. Why did you kill him? She could never tell us why.

—

In my dim room at the Travelodge, a rotary phone sits on the cheap, scarred bedside table with instructions for dialing out and the rate of long-distance charges. Brendan picks up on the second ring, his voice slow and thick, as if it’s coming through concrete. I’ve woken him up. “Where are you?”

“Santa Rosa. I didn’t get far.”

“You should get some sleep. You sound awful.”

“Yeah.” I look down at my bare legs on the bedspread, feeling the Brillo pad scratchiness of the cheap fabric against my thighs. My T-shirt is damp and wadded, stuck with sweat to the back of my neck. I’ve wrapped my breasts in a tourniquet of bandages, and the pain, in spite of all the Advil, sends a pinging ache through me with each heartbeat, a ragged sort of echolocation. “I don’t know what to do. This is awful. Why are you punishing me?”

“I’m not, it’s just—” There’s a long, freighted pause as he weighs his words. “You have to figure some things out for yourself.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“I can’t help you.” He sounds defeated, stretched to the breaking point. I can picture him on the side of our bed in dawn light, his body hunched over the phone, one hand in his thick dark hair. “I’ve been trying, and I’m tired, you know?”

“Just let me come home. We can fix this.”

“How?” he asks breathily. “Some things aren’t fixable, Anna. Let’s just both take some time. This doesn’t have to be forever.”

Something in his tone makes me wonder, though. As if he’s cut the cord but is afraid to acknowledge it. Because he doesn’t know what I’ll do. “How much time are we talking? A week or a month? A year?”

“I don’t know.” His sigh is frayed. “I have a lot of thinking to do.”

On the bed next to me, my own hand looks waxy and stiff, like something that belongs on a mannequin in a shopping mall. I look away, fixing on a point on the wall. “Do you remember when we first got married? That trip we took?”

He’s quiet for a minute, and then says, “I remember.”

“We slept in the desert under that huge cactus with all the birds living inside. You said it was a condominium.”