Though the events leading up to it, even demanding it, are acrimonious to say the least and honestly sometimes violent—imagine plates shattering over the kitchen sink and bare little feet bleeding on the constellation of their fragments; imagine cops, “on behalf of the neighborhood,” shining white lights into everybody’s faces to quiet their screamed and rageful declarations of hatred (“I fucking hate you!”) and love (“I fucking love you!”)—the divorce itself, despite all that, is settled easily enough. Geri Anne and Pat are friends again when it’s over, with just the one lawyer between them to be paid—whom she pays—and with him, re-incarcerated, having only to sign the papers in his cell with his deconstructed prison pen (just the ballpoint tip and the tube of ink). He shuffles the pages on his lap and does what she’s asked him to do, scribbles his name in neat cursive on each of the lines their lawyer has highlighted for him. He has to admit that though he does feel a bit melancholy, just as she did when she wrote him, he feels a weight lifted from his shoulders too.

Even after their official status change, she writes him every week. He writes her back twice as often, and she mails him books of stamps. If when he calls her number collect she’s around, she always answers, and they talk like teenagers, not the teenagers they ever were but the teenagers they might have been had the universe been kinder. They’re doing it all backwards, they almost always say. He’s not her “ex” at all anymore, not to her mind; that guy’s gone and this one’s something new. And to him she is, more than she ever actually was, his “old lady.” Not his wife anymore, but something more available. He can’t explain it to any of the other guys in there with him, but it feels natural to him; it feels natural to her, too. 

Which isn’t to say she maintains some kind of monogamous celibacy; not at all. She dates.

There’s Gary, Eric, the two Richards, and Danny. Each man meets her kids over a casserole when he comes to stay the night, but they’re ephemeral figures, interchangeable, and she thinks nothing of accepting the charges for a collect phone call from a Florida state correctional institution, even when it means leaving one of these Richards alone in his golf shorts on the sofa in the next room. When are you gonna move on, girl? Pat asks, his voice getting deeper and slower as the months add up. I am moving on, she says, and mind your own damn business, though she likes it when he’s on her side.

Once a month, she packs the boy and the girl up into her Dodge Ramcharger and drives them out to Belle Glade where they wait in line in the sun to see him. They drink Coca Colas from the machine and maybe show him some drawings they’ve made—which he loves: It’s a shark! Amazing!—and the kids wonder why everybody is so happy. The picnic tables are crowded with the families of criminals and villains, and the last thing they want, the boy and the girl, is to be seen as part of that crowd.

That’s weekend stuff, though, the shame and long drives. During the week, Geri Anne answers phones for the Palm Beach county clerk. It’s work she likes, though in general she likes work, the way her personal problems get lost in the calm focus of filing yellow forms. The office is a tranquil space for her, all black walnut walls and air conditioning. When she gets into traffic in the mornings it’s like she’s liberated, she’s somebody else, in a skirt and heels and a blouse. She loads up her green screen, sips her free coffee, and answers the incoming calls. Yes, hello, and how can I help you? She’s integral to the network of the place and people like her, but then, like a switch, something changes, and rumors of her husband’s crimes shiver behind every awkward silence she walks in on, the way they look at her at lunch. Everybody knows everything. There are computers on every desk. Her divorce’s successful progress, her mobile home’s title’s status, the liens against it—it’s all in the system and they are all The System, so she leaves, takes a library job at the junior college. It’s in this new position she meets a guy she thinks might last. 

She mentions him accidentally in a letter: “Me and Danny,” “Danny and the kids,” and almost immediately she thinks—shit. She should scratch those lines out, scratch out that whole section, but she worries—there are rules about what a prisoner can receive; would such a bold black mark seem suspicious? To him? To the authorities? No, she’s already spilled her guts to the tune of four legal-sized pages. It’s fine. He can know about Danny, she thinks.

When he calls next—a surprise, but not really, as always—she sends the children out to play in the swamp. Pat wants to know one thing. One detail about the man.

He wears his hair long. 

Like I used to? 

Just like you, she says. 

Is he good with the kids? 

He’s an idiot but I think they like him, she says. She wipes mascara from her cheek; a tear—where’d that come from? 

That’s good, though, Pat says; right? 

It’s good, she says. 

And it is good. It’s fine.

Pat sighs a sigh so big on the line she thinks maybe there’s a problem with their connection. He’s happy for her, he says. He’s always gonna love her and he’s sorry for what he’s done to her, all the hurt and the embarrassment and the pain, but she wants to tell him, Stop! Stop! That’s not how she feels. She feels only the joy of meeting him, of seeing his tall muscular body shirtless in the street, on the skateboard, grinding that long curb for hours, or his dumb grin when they got married later that year and the judge said, “will you take her,” and he said, “I do,” so she had to say, “will!” “I will,” he said. “Yes, definitely, I will.”

—

On what would have been their fourth wedding anniversary, Geri Anne posts Pat a short thinking-of-you note. Things haven’t worked out with Danny, and the other guys, every last one of them, wanted too much. When she presses one on the handset to accept his inevitable call, she’s got that feeling like he’s the one for her and both of them are kids again. She’s been keeping a little flame, she feels, and now’s the time to feed it some paper. 

Pat’s giddy on the line. He’s getting out early, he can’t hardly believe it! How great, she says, genuinely joyful but somehow faking it too. She wraps the cord around her finger. What can she say? There’s so much quiet on the line. It’s like he’s gone, like she could just hang up and pretend he hadn’t called, but then, in the real world beyond their silence, here suddenly are her kids, practically kicking the front door down. Hours earlier than their father’s mother had promised to have them home, here they are. Mommy, mommy! They’ve got news. Not now, no, she says, hush, feeling her beloved spark start to smolder. I gotta go, she tells Pat. Call tomorrow and I’ll answer, okay? She hangs up before he can say goodbye, and her kids lay it on her—their father, her first husband, is back home again too, living only a few miles away with his mother. 

She has to lie down. Where the hell has he been hiding? Why can’t he just be dead? She can’t focus on her school work, her night classes, can’t focus on her work work, either. Weeks go by with her in bed or gazing off distantly. Is that his car idling in the drive? Is that his breath on her bedroom window in the middle of the night? She hangs thick curtains in her bedroom, and if the kids come in for a cookie or otherwise disrupt her darkness, she chews them out and slams the door. Something has to give. But also, she thinks, watching her kids so invested with the idea of him, he’s their father. Hasn’t he got some rights? Haven’t they? But, then again, she thinks, kicking the mattress with her head under the pillow, hasn’t she?

—

Pat—sober, employed, persistent—comes around and brings disorder. The kids are so glad to see him, the girl sits on his lap and the boy even suggests he’ll chase a football down if Pat will be the one to throw it. Things go so well that Geri Anne asks him to stay. In the morning while he showers, she decides to make him pancakes and whips up the batter in a large plastic bowl. Dressed only in a towel, he wraps his dripping arms around her waist and hums against her neck. She loves him, she thinks, flipping cakes, and this is perfect, she can do this, but then a knock on the door interrupts—you get it, she says, feeling him through the towel. Kids! he says. No, she says, laughing, let them sleep; you do it and you will be glad you did. 

Shiny and wet and with an erection obvious beneath the towel, he opens the door to his ex-wife’s ex-husband. Pat, he says, offering his hand, though the two men have met before.

Here to see my wife, the first husband says, searching the darkness inside. 

She ain’t your wife.

Geri Anne! the first husband shouts, and she freezes, misses the frying pan and pours batter onto the stovetop. It puddles and snuffs out half the burner’s jetting flames.

Where the hell did you come from, she shouts back, stomping into the blinding white hollow of her wide-open front door. She’d expected time to have nullified the past, but no. Here it is: a violent ghost on the crabgrass before her, steaming with dust and brown from the sun. 

Kids called and said it was breakfast time. Smells good, Geri Anne.

His lips are cracked and bleeding, his eyes bloodshot, and she can smell him like he’s on top of her and she shoves him from her in her mind.

Get out of here, she says. Go! 

She slams the door in his face and locks the deadbolt. Get dressed, she tells Pat, who’s just been standing there. She hooks the chain and stomps back through the smoke in the kitchen, the shrieking alarms, the pancakes burnt and burning blacker, and she disappears into the back of the trailer. 

Still in nothing but the towel, Pat dials off the burner and stands on a chair to disconnect the alarm. He knocks on the bathroom door. Geri Anne? he says. 

Just go, she says. 

He pulls his blue jeans on in the bedroom. To hell with his parole, he should have fought that other man! When he’s dressed he knocks on the bathroom door again. 

We’ll talk soon, she tells him, but, please, just go. 

So he goes, the kids watching him from behind the couch. 

Be good, he says, before stepping out into the sunlight. 

—

Pat stays with his mom and his brother Gil, who’s also divorced, recently released from prison, and sober. On Sundays, the two boys wash their mother’s car in the driveway of her ranch home with the same green garden hose she’s had since they were little, and they crank up the rock music on the boom box and all the kids in the cul-de-sac ride by on their bicycles, dancing with their heads to the tunes, and it feels like life might just be a good thing.

One night, Gil invites Pat fishing on a pier in the Atlantic, at 3:00 am in the pissing wet. Dozens of men are there already, bundled up in tarps. It’s winter, and the air is charged with the black radiance of a northern storm. Schools of pompano and tuna, snapper and scup race south before it in such a manic boil that the froth of every wave bursts jagged with fins. Though Pat himself is more fish than fisherman and would run south with the school if he could, he plays the man and opens a place on the railing among the others, for himself and for Gil, and their ball-caps pour rainwater on their wrists as they try the waves with twitching shrimp. Fish come and they fight them and their hearts pound and their knees bruise against the pilings. All around, men strike their catch with iron rods and wooden bats on the cement walkways of the pier. There is a feeling of joyful surfeit. They drink, in celebration, because there is so much to celebrate, and the sun rises and scares off the black clouds of night. 

One guy knows a Michelin-starred chef he swears will buy their fish right up, a suggestion Gil flat-out refuses. Pat, though, not crazy about seafood, accepts the offered ride and pockets the two hundred dollars out back of the restaurant by the dumpsters where the last of the storm sways the resident palms. I got one more stop to make, the guy says as they buckle up, and they spend the afternoon smoking cocaine and playing spades with this guy’s friends until the sun goes down. Later, when they need ice, they steal a Chrysler and drive it as fast as it’ll go. In the holding cell in the morning, Pat can’t remember whose car it was, only how it burned, how everybody ran when the upholstery caught fire and the sirens sounded, everybody but him. He stood there across the street in the public shrubs watching the dashboard curl in on itself, as if waiting for a sign.

—

Martin teaches business at the college, has a tenure-track position waiting for him just east of Seattle. He seems kind enough, says he understands her situation, says when you know you know, why wait? But it hardly matters what he says. She’s panicked. It’s time to go. She tells the kids, you’ve got a very big decision to make. You come with me and Martin, or you stay here on your own with your aunt. We don’t want you to go! they say. So come. But we don’t want to go either! Then you will have to stay.

The mountain town suffocates them. Their apartment is a closet whose windows stick from too much paint. The fresh mountain air they’ve thought so much about on their long drive north and west and north again to Washington soon grows rank with their breath. When they walk the neighborhood to consider the new angle of the sun, the gold of its color as it goes down late in the summer before the start of the school year, they see their new neighbors glaring at them, wrinkling their noses, refusing to look away.

Geri Anne decides she wants to keep some animals, dogs, mainly, but also perhaps a pair of goats or a llama, some cats for mousing. Martin rents a log cabin beyond his means and pays for half a dozen kennels to be installed beside the cord wood, under an awning made of steel.

Here, she thinks, we’ll settle here, we’ll be safe and happy here. 

She fills the kennels with the dogs she fosters, and they bay through the night, their muzzles thrusting through the lattice of the cage. 

That summer, her son kills a young skunk with the family car. It leaves behind a stink so toxic that, no matter how hot it gets, they ride with the windows down. Geri Anne tries to clean it out, but really, what can she do? She hangs a pink Christmas tree from the mirror and tells herself it helps, but it doesn’t, and the smell seeps into her blouses, and in her offices in the valley she smells it, and in the classrooms where at last she’s finishing her degree she’s sure the other students and the professors smell it too. Her husband shrugs and says he’s smelled worse. They’ve been marked by the place, and isn’t that why they’re there? You wanted country living!

Months later, fires overtake the neighboring hills and threaten their log cabin. She’s in the valley, in a drive-thru waiting for her lunch, when the radio tells her the news. She screams up the mountain, panic-eating her fries, until the thick whiteness of the smoke forces her to a crawl on the backroads. Headlights from a pickup briefly brighten the cloud, which she searches for faces, and there all at once they are, a mile and a half from home, her half-grown babies, holding hands, on the march, on the side of the road. It’s about time, the boy says, when she leaps from the idling car to hug him, and the girl says, God! It reeks in here, slamming her door, ready to go. 

They’ll stay in a hotel until the forest finishes its burning and the smoke finally clears, but long before that, even as she’s gunning it east on the freeway, away from the inferno, with the windows open wide and the thick gray wind blowing their hair, she feels her next letter to Pat composing itself inside her, her first in at least a year, one she’ll send the very next week, one that will contain the line, earnest and heartfelt—“I wish it were possible, even if it’s not, but can we pretend? Can’t we please start again?”

—

It’s destiny, he writes. All the physics of the universe is just the working out of the original Big Bang. It’s force and glide and this follows that, all the suns and moons. Even if it’s been years since he’s seen a real star at night with his own eyes, he knows asteroids go where they’re going on orbits outside their control. It’s math that says if they’ll ever touch each other again, or if they’ll break to dust, or pass each other by.

When Corrections sets him loose a few years later he has no place to go. His mom’s house is sold, Gil’s girlfriend doesn’t want him around. He bounces off that absence and works his way west, not following Geri Anne, exactly, but eager to stand on her same coast, to breathe what he imagines is her very same air. In a cowboy bar in Bakersfield, he meets a line dancer who, in the sparkling lights and boozy haze, looks just like her. 

In the diner where she leaves him the next morning, he drinks a cup of coffee, eats a plate of eggs, and tries to remember the night before. The real Geri Anne comes to mind instead, though, and he remembers the nights they sometimes used to share, in a rented room, after an expensive meal, the kids with her sister or her mom, when he’d bury himself into her, all the wrongs and rights of him, so they’d be hidden and he wouldn’t feel them or know them any longer. The two of them would lie there together, sweaty with each other’s sweat and giggling in the no-light the black-out curtains let in. He remembers her smile, the way she looked at him at first, when it was all new, like she was surprised the world still had something to offer, something she wanted, and he was that thing. 

You okay, can I get you something? the waitress asks him. 

Nah, he says, thinking of how she’d open the door to him in those early days and step out into the heat with him, to be with him, before letting him into the house where her kids held domain—that private minute together, so she could say, you clean up nice, or, the sitter’s not here yet, so . . . or just grab his hand and say nothing at all, for like five minutes, standing together in the shade and the breeze—and he was so young, he’d never wanted anything like that before, to be held—and he squeezed her to him, almost lifted her off the ground, smelling her hair, the lotion on her neck, until the kids made some noise inside and they both got shy again.

He’s a free man in California for maybe six months, doing day work, wake up before dawn and wait in the parking lot work; it’s hard and lonely and he doesn’t speak any Spanish. He fantasizes about robberies from the back of the truck. He imagines smashes and grabs. When he walks by an expensive convertible sports car he notes the merchandise within it, within his reach. He could do it but he doesn’t. He doesn’t do it, doesn’t do it, until one day he does. And then he does it again. And his pawn broker learns his name. A few hundred dollars a few times a week: it’s not enough, but for a little while it keeps him moving. 

One afternoon, though, after a half-hearted chase, a pair of beat cops grinds him into the pavement, and the whole familiar process starts again. Some months after the ordeal of the trial, when he’s finally transferred and in his new bunk, he writes to Geri Anne with the tip of a new pen, her last known address still carved into his memory like initials into a tree. He writes her name at the top of the page, the blank white page with no lines on it, but months—years—pass before he figures out what to say. Please, he eventually writes. Tell me you’re out there, that you still exist. 

—

His letter surprises her. It feels like such a long time. She’s not even in the same state or married to the same man anymore, but here it is despite all that, his envelope among the bills and catalogues in the P.O. box she shares with her latest husband. Her kids are both gone, done with school, working careers; they’re all adults and everything’s changed, but she sees his name and melts anyway. Who’s that from, the husband asks. Old flame, she says, and off they zoom in his fancy car, laughing with the top down along the water’s edge. 

A week earlier, she saw her first husband’s death certificate online—she’d been snooping around for it—and now this, Pat again. Why can’t everything ever be easy, she thinks, rubbing the edge of his unopened envelope. She has a big house now, full of light. She ought to be happy and fulfilled, unafraid and free, but it doesn’t work like that. The sun starts to set on the lake and the geese flock up from its surface. Her hair blows behind her in the convertible’s wind. The whole world smells only of unburnt cedar and pine and her latest husband’s cologne. She post-scripts her long note back to Pat the next day, “I miss you, Pat.” And then writes: “p.p.s.: Always.”

His response is a single long sentence. He’s obsessed with fire, rambling with the idea of it. How did it feel to stand face-to-face with such big flames, had she felt the heat on her skin, what was it like to breathe in all that smoke? He has, thanks to his clean-nosed good behavior and a tireless letter-writing campaign, been enrolled in a special training program in forest fire management. In a matter of days, he writes, he’ll be outside again with a shovel and a pick saving lives and property and looking up unimpeded at the star-dotted black night sky. 

It’s not so far, she thinks, looking up his fire camp’s location. She could go to him. She could drive. It’s a matter of hours, she could leave the latest husband behind and find Pat on some well-shaded roadside shoulder, beside a stone bridge, perhaps, overgrown with ivy, waiting for her; she could bury her face in his shoulder, smell the char on him; and they could drive off together. It’s crazy. It’s scary. It can’t happen. She watches the white curtains blowing through her open window in the cool ocean breeze and imagines them, and everything else, suddenly orange and hot, and she can’t do it. She can’t. In a vanishingly small card, she writes him back—“Be safe, Pat. Good luck.”

—

With the jacket on and the shovel in his hand he feels at last like a citizen, giving something back. He’s never seen such trees as the ones they torch in training—huge and beautiful, firs and hemlocks and spruce. They make him feel blessed or patriotic before they burn, like if they just work hard enough, fast enough, the little life left in these big mighty trees might end up being saved.

With the droughts and the heat there’s plenty to do all summer. He works on the hand crew, chopping out scrub and vegetation, scraping away the little low plants and the fallen-over dead kindling the fires crave. It’s hot and dry, sweaty, miserable work and, surprisingly, he loves it; the campfire smell of the world, the orange glow even the daytime takes on; the way, after a week of it, he can look back on the fire line he’s cleared and see the blankness that’s thanks to him, just yards and yards of barren earth, lifeless mineral plains to suffocate the blaze. In the evenings, he writes to Geri Anne, tries calling when he can, but no one accepts the charges and it’s probably not her number anymore anyway.

He feels her with him, though, reading through the few letters of hers he’s been able to bring along. He dreams up the old ones, the ones he’s lost, and he remembers them as they were and what it was like to receive them that first time. Maybe not word for word, but phrases have stuck with him, and staring at her handwriting, even just these few lines he has, as he lies on his cot in the bivouac, it’s like she’s out there, just out of sight in the darkness whispering to him. When he stares up at the stars in the night sky he can feel her gravity, the tug of their mutual orbits.

When he goes out into the foothills a few days later, the flames are hotter and moving faster than anyone predicted. A slash pine on the burn perimeter explodes from its boiling pitch, and the work crew digs its chainsaws into all the years-old fallen branches before it. When the fire charges the border they’ve made, it splits the team and sends Pat running for his life. Something about the heat, the smoke, the atmospheric pressure of the place, his own fear, chases him in the wrong direction, up the mountain as fast as he can go. When he recognizes his error, he turns around and barrels back down past their line and into a greensward, a steep valley with no fire. It’s so radiant and clean. Surrounded in ancient, mist-veiled, old growth sequoia, he enters the front garden of an enormous and unburning white palace.

As he’s coughing out the bad air, trying to catch his breath, Geri Anne—a hundred miles away—feels something, a dark melancholy, a gloom, cover over her as she sits in traffic, her cheek packed with blood and gauze, driving herself home from a root canal.

What is this feeling? Probably the drugs, she thinks, wearing off. A small black cloud in an otherwise blue sky has blocked the sun and for a moment, given everything a shadow color. All the world for just a moment recomposed, but just a moment; when the light returns to its brightness, she shivers at what it could have been.

Does she think of Pat? She does. She remembers the bristle of his mouth on hers, and she wishes he would call her again—she’d answer this time, she would. His last letter sits on her desk at home, but what can she say? She’s doing well? She’s done well for herself? She can’t bear to write it down, to have anybody, even him, especially him, read it. If he were here with her now, though, she’d tell him everything. She’d tell him how it is, and was, how it might still be. No, she promises, pressing her fingers into her unnumbing face, she will write back. She’ll write him everything, her whole life, before him and during and after, all the things he cannot know, everything that ever got left out. She will, she thinks, she will write it, even though she knows—in her bones, she knows—it won’t make any difference at all. 

She wipes her eyes and traffic progresses, and Pat, alone on the grass in the mansion’s garden, has no such similar doubts. Rather, when he peels back his helmet and shrugs off his jacket and drops his shovel and axe and approaches the building, he sees her there, already, waiting for him, waving from the upstairs window, and he waves, too, delighted to see her again once more in the flesh, something he’s so desperately wanted, but something he’s been certain he’d never again live to do. ■

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