“I’ll just go in there and get a dish towel to stop the bleeding,” Jamie said, for her lip and her scalp were oozing.

  But when he rose, she grabbed his leg again.

  “It’s okay,” he assured her. “I’ll be right back.”

  The hallway was even colder. These old houses had no insulation, and the kitchen was especially chilly. There was even more blood on the floor, especially around Hal Brooks’ body, which was right in front of the stove. Jamie tried not to look too closely. He grabbed a dish towel, ran cold water over it, then brought it back to Rosalyn. He wondered if he had stepped in the blood and if it was on the soles of his boots, if he’d left tracks down the hall. Then he stopped wondering. He put those thoughts aside. Rosalyn was sitting on the floor now, the coat buttoned; when he handed her the dish towel, she held it up to her lip.

  “What do you want to do with him?” Jamie said.

  Outside, the blue was turning into darkness. A black night. So quiet you could hear the cardinals nesting in the hedges outside the Brookses’ window. The snow fell harder. Jamie figured his father was up on the main road with his plow by now.

  They sat there in silence in the cold house.

  “I’ll shovel your path, and then I’ll come back,” Jamie said. “You think about what you want to do.”

  “Okay,” Rosalyn said. “I will.”

  Jamie went out and shoveled hard and fast. It was heavy snow, thick and dense, the kind that he would have thought was good for snowball fights on any other occasion. He wasn’t thinking that way now. He was thinking of the pond beyond the field. In the old days, food could be stored in the summer kitchen right up until July if enough ice was stacked against the walls. He’d heard the old woman who’d lived in their house a while back had hauled blocks of ice from the pond until her horse, the one who’d lived in the barn they’d begun to tear down, slipped through the ice and drowned.

  The kitchen floor at the Brookses’ was already clean when Jamie came back inside. Rosalyn Brooks had mopped up, then washed her face and pulled back her honey-colored hair. There were still streaks of blood in her scalp, but Jamie Farrell didn’t have the heart to tell her. Rosalyn went to check on her daughter, then she came back downstairs and put on her husband’s workboots. She looked even more delicate wearing them. She didn’t bother with gloves. At least there was a blanket around Mr. Brooks, and Jamie was grateful for that. They tried to pull him along the floor, and when that didn’t work, Jamie went and got the wheelbarrow from the garage. He was so hot he felt like taking off his hat and his scarf, but if he misplaced them, his mother would have his head.

  It took all their combined strength to push the wheelbarrow through the snow. The thick, heavy snow that they quietly cursed. They stopped for a break halfway across the field; they both looked up at the falling snow. Rosalyn put her arms out, and tilted her head back. Jamie had never thought about the future, who he was, what he would do. It had all been a haze. Now he saw that blood was still seeping through Rosalyn’s hair and he thought she probably needed stitches. He saw that his future was almost here.

  There were pine trees and holly around the far side of the pond, and that’s where they went. They had to drag him along over the frozen weeds. They put stones in his pockets, heavy black stones, the kind Jamie and Hank liked best for their slingshots. Rosalyn took off the workboots she’d been wearing and filled them with stones as well, then put the boots on her husband, laced them and carefully tied a knot, then a double-knot.

  “Your feet will freeze on the way back,” Jamie whispered.

  She didn’t seem to care. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them they were still slits. The snow was making things quieter all the time. They pulled him into the pond and watched him sink. There was a gulping noise at first, then there was nothing. Only the quiet.

  “You go home,” Rosalyn said to Jamie. “Go on. Your mother will be worried.”

  He hated to leave her like that, barefoot, bleeding.

  She leaned over and kissed him, on the lips, in gratitude.

  Jamie Farrell ran the rest of the way, his hot breath rattling against his ribs. His boots and pants legs were wet and mucky. There was pond water in his boots, fetid, cold stuff. He was shivering and couldn’t stop. Worst of all, his mother was waiting for him.

  “What took you so long?” Grace demanded. “It’s after eight. You missed your TV show.” Then, looking at him carefully, “Where’s the shovel?”

  “I forgot it.” Jamie turned back to the door. “I’m sorry. I’ll go get it if you want.”

  His mother stopped him. She looked at him harder still. “I’ll go. You do your homework and get ready for bed.”

  “I can get the shovel in the morning,” Jamie offered, an edge of panic inside him. But Grace was already getting her coat. She had stepped into her warm black boots. After she left, Jamie went up to the bedroom he shared with his brother. It was as though he’d just walked out of a dream and here he was, melting in the overheated second floor of his family’s house. He thought of all the wounded people there were in this world, people he’d never even know, and he felt helpless.

  “What if I was an accessory to murder?” he asked Hank, who was already in bed, more than half asleep as he gazed at his history book.

  “What if you were the biggest moron that ever lived?” Hank shot back, a question for which there was no answer, at least not on this night.

  It was nearly midnight by the time Grace came home. The snow was tapering off, and she brushed the flakes from her coat and stomped on the welcome mat to dislodge the ice from her boots. Usually, Jim didn’t get back till dawn, but tonight he’d come home earlier. The storm wasn’t as bad as the meteorologists had predicted. His men could take care of the rest of the cleanup.

  “Where were you? The boys are in bed, and when you weren’t here, I didn’t know what to think.”

  But that wasn’t true. For a moment, what he’d thought was that she’d left him. Just disappeared into that other life she seemed to be thinking about sometimes. They stared at each other now, their breath hot. Outside, the drifts leaned against the house; winter here stayed a long time.

  “I went over and heated up the tomato soup for Rosalyn.”

  “Did you?”

  Grace sat down at the table. Everyone had known what was going on, and no one had done a damn thing about it.

  “Hal up and left. No money, no warning, nothing. She thinks he may have re-enlisted.”

  Jim was looking out the window; two deer had just now wandered into their field. He hoped the snow wasn’t deep enough to prevent them from unearthing the last withered sweet peas, thought to be delicious by anything wild. “I guess it’s none of our business,” he said. From this distance, the winterberries almost looked tropical, the fruit of another place entirely.

  “So you say.”

  Grace Farrell still had snow in her hair, but it would melt when they got into bed, and she’d never even know it had been there. When she thought back to this night, she wouldn’t even remember it had been snowing, she’d only remember the look on her husband’s face, the concentration she loved, the man she could turn to, even on a night as cold as this.

  INDIA

  MY MOTHER TOLD ME THAT THE BLACKBIRDS were singing on the day they found the house. You could hear them from the road. It was a wave of sound, black and blue and sweet. Like a bruise that was healing, nothing but peace and harmony. That was how my parents knew they had reached their destination. It was a November day at the very end of nineteen sixty-nine; the earth and sky were gray, and my parents were at the very tip of the world, or so it seemed.

  My father had been born John Adams- Cooper, but he called himself Risha, which was Hindu for those whose birthdays fall under the sign of the bull. When we were teenagers, my brother and I used to say it was actually the sign for bullshit. All the same, my father had a dumb-animal acceptance of things, good or bad, and if that made him a bull, so be it. He had studied with a yogi in Cambridge, but was still suffering from exhaustion and post-traumatic stress. He had decided that cities were bad for humanity, so my parents had taken to the road and kept moving, from Vermont, to New Hampshire, to the far reaches of the Cape, where at last those blackbirds stopped them cold. It was an omen, my mother was certain of it. Twenty-four blackbirds in a row on the roof of the house, one for every hour of every day. One of the birds appeared to be white, and surely that must be a sign of good fortune to come. My father had just inherited some money from the aunt who’d raised him, an unexpected windfall. The house was destiny, my mother told me; the path that was meant to be.

  Of course, anyone with the least bit of sense would have been instantly aware that this ramshackle farm was no one’s shining path. It had been on the market for five years, the family house of the doctor in town, sold when he moved his family to a larger place in the village. It appealed to none of the locals. People said it was haunted. Boys threw stones at the windows; girls vowed that if you had the nerve to walk past the big old pear tree, then turn around twice, the man you were destined to marry would appear on the road.

  The place was a wreck, that much was certain, not that my parents noticed. The heater had been torn out. The roof was leaking. The plumbing ceased to function whenever the temperature went below freezing, so that the outhouse was still utilized, even though you could freeze your bum in a matter of minutes. All the same, no one could dissuade my mother, who had once been Naomi Shapiro of Great Neck, Long Island, but who had become someone else completely. She was a woman who saw what she wanted to see: Therefore, it was love that had drawn them to the house where my brother and I grew up. It was fortune, perfection, nothing less than bliss.

  My mother often got things backward; I knew that early on. She made irrevocable mistakes, such as going to Boston one weekend when she was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Vassar and meeting my father on the Common and falling in love when it was the last thing in the world she should have done. It was crazy, the act of a foolish, impressionable girl. If Naomi had really understood omens she would have recognized these signs: My father was thirty-five when she met him, far too old for her, much too damaged. He’d served in Vietnam and hadn’t held a job since his return to Massachusetts. Was this her destiny? Naomi Shapiro read tarot cards. Did she not see exactly what the future would bring?

  All the same, my father had a beautiful face, with strong features my mother mistook for inner strength. She didn’t know until they spent the night together that he cried himself to sleep. He had such terrible nightmares that he ground his teeth until the enamel cracked. But after that first night, embracing each other on the floor of an apartment belonging to someone they barely knew, it was probably too late to walk away. The more wounded my father was, the more tightly my mother was tied to him. If she’d been wiser or older or simply more experienced, she would have known that any man who professes his love for you half an hour after he meets you is a man who has his feet planted squarely in his dreams. In my father’s case, all of those dreams were nightmares, nothing anyone should be destined to share, no future to wish for, no destiny to desire.

  My mother was also mistaken about those blackbirds that were perched along the roof of our house. They were bad luck, not good. Everyone knows a white blackbird is nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of what it ought to be. And that line of birds didn’t signify twenty-four hours, but twenty-four years, for that was how long my parents were married. My brother, Kalkin, and I, one year apart, were both born in the summer kitchen, a shed with a dirt floor at the rear of the property. My parents didn’t believe in hospitals; they believed in meditation and in the natural order of things. My father had remained a devotee of the Maharishi and of Krishna consciousness; therefore, simplicity was the path. My father was convinced that babies in India came into this world easily, while the mothers focused on a single bead of sweat; too much fuss was made here in the U.S. But my brother, Kalkin, was always difficult; even before he was born, he didn’t abide by my father’s plans. Kalkin had to be turned and persuaded to leave the womb. Fortunately, our neighbor, Josephine Brooks, came to check in on my mother, and Miss Brooks ran back to her house to phone Dr. Farrell. The doctor, having grown up in this same house, was most likely shocked by its current state when he came to deliver my brother, after Kal refused to be born naturally. Dr. Farrell returned the following year, for safety’s sake, surely as an afterthought, for me.

  For years Kal and I went to the shed, stunned that we’d been born there. Was it possible, in this day and age? Was it even legal to do such a thing? We watched TV at Nancy Lanahan’s house whenever we had the chance. We knew children were supposed to be born in clean hospital rooms with nurses hovering over the laboring mothers and medical equipment available in case of emergency. We knew our parents were not like other people. Every day, in every way, they proved this to us. We had simple longings, Kalkin and I, for store-bought white bread, for ironed clothes and boxes of chocolates, the kind my mother said would rot a person’s teeth and make him hyperactive.

  My father had no job; his idea of work was to cut down the tall grass in our field at the end of the summer, then store the hay in the shed where we’d been born. My mother now kept two sheep there, for their wool. She supported us with her weavings—intricate, beautiful things—but it wasn’t enough. We were poor, although that wasn’t the problem: it was how prideful our parents were about our lowly circumstances, as though our lack of possessions made us better somehow. We were superior beings because we used the woodstove to heat the downstairs in winter, and piled up blankets on our beds so we wouldn’t freeze during the night. We ate rice and beans at the end of every month. We wore our clothes until they all but disintegrated, and even then my mother, who had grown up with a closet full of clothes I would have coveted, cashmere and leather and lace, sewed gingham patches on our jeans, which my brother ripped off the minute he left the house.

  Fuck this, he would say. Kalkin seemed harder with every year, as though he had a shell around him, one nothing could penetrate. The cold no longer affected him. He never wore a winter coat. He refused to bother with a hat or an umbrella. He was invincible, that was Kalkin, and he would manage to outwit our parents someday. The holes in his clothes only clarified matters—he was too good for the life we were living. He had been misplaced somehow, left on a doorstep, born in a shed, meant for another world entirely.

  We were supposedly vegetarians, but Kalkin and I wolfed down hamburgers and beef stew at our friend Nancy Lanahan’s house whenever we were lucky enough to be invited to dinner. The Lanahans’ place was a modest ranch half a mile down our street, but to us it was perfect. There was a telephone, a television, two parents who worked, food in the refrigerator, what more could anyone ask for? We would have moved into Nancy’s house if given half the chance. We hated our farm, our parents, our lives. We especially hated our sheep, Padma and Brownie, who were terribly stupid. They ate my mother’s garden, got trapped in the nettle, were often stuck in the mud at the shore of the pond. The sheep panicked whenever Kal and I crept up on them, bolting as though we were wolves rather than children. It was somehow thrilling to chase those silly creatures through the meadow shouting Lamb chops!, racing through the milkweed until we thought our hearts would burst and we felt flushed with a vague sense of embarrassment. It wasn’t the lambs who were our enemies; why take it out on them?

  One winter, when Kal was sixteen and I fifteen, he made a vow that he would move away to Los Angeles. It was December, a clear, starry night, and we were walking home from Nancy’s house. The snow crunched under our boots; the air was so salty and cold every breath we took hurt. By then, Nancy was in love with my brother. Although Nancy swore they had almost gone all the way while I was busy watching Dallas on the family’s TV and they were hidden beneath a quilt, Kal was not about to be tied down. When he made his vow to leave home, I felt like crying. I knew he would keep his promise. He was like that, strong in the face of weakness, as reliable as he was unforgiving. It was almost as though he were already gone when he was right there beside me, walking down the road, our collars turned up, our jeans so worn the wind cut right through the fabric.

  Most of the kids in town knew that our father was growing marijuana in the field beyond our house, that he smoked it daily before he went out to meditate in the summer kitchen or down near the shoreline, where the tall reeds grew. They thought it was funny, an old man still at it. They thought we were lucky not to have rules and regulations, not even any expectations, it seemed. Now we could hear our father chanting down at the pond. I wished my parents knew I preferred those rich, snotty people on Dallas to them. I ached to be living at South Fork right then and there, my hair dyed blond and poufed way out, diamond rings on every one of my fingers.

  “Fucking idiot,” my brother said of Risha on that cold night. “I cannot be genetically related to him. I’m getting out of here, Maya. If you’re smart, you will, too.”

  My brother had inherited my father’s jawline, from the Adams-Cooper side of the family. He was beautiful, but he didn’t know it, with golden hair that turned nearly white in the summers. I had my mother’s curly dark hair, my father’s gray eyes, and nothing else that belonged to them. Unlike most of the kids we knew, my brother and I didn’t smoke pot or get into trouble at school. We disdained those who did. My brother especially wanted to prove his heredity was a mistake; therefore, fun was out of the question. Foolish actions unthinkable. I was more cautious. Why should I work hard when I wasn’t certain we would ever escape our parents’ legacy? I let my brother be the guinea pig, waiting to see if he could right all that was wrong in our lives. He worked at the gas station, sold Christmas trees culled from our property, and later on, when he was a senior in high school, started selling our father’s homegrown. He earned enough of a profit to allow him to move to Los Angeles two weeks after high-school graduation.