“Jesus!” he says as the motorcycle disappears somewhere ahead and the noise fades.

  He takes a deep breath.

  “Everybody has ups and downs,” Fred says.

  “Story of my life,” Adam says.

  “Well,” Fred says, telling him one more thing about the program, “you’ll be with a lot of ups and downs.”

  They’ve been driving for more than an hour now, and as they emerge from the high hills and head north past the town of Napa into a landscape of vineyards, Adam says to Fred, “It just feels like I’m in another country.”

  “I’ve never seen a tree like these,” he says a few minutes later.

  “I’m so damn nervous.”

  Now Fred is pointing again. This time it’s at a hill, on the slope of which is a collection of white buildings. Inside one of them is Adam’s room. It has a mattress, a closet, a sink, and a window, and outside the window is a hundred-foot-high palm tree that Adam will soon be obsessed with climbing to the very top.

  Maybe he’ll just jump.

  Maybe a swan dive.

  “There’s the Pathway Home,” Fred says, turning toward the entrance, and a few minutes later, Adam is inside.

  A week later, the flower on the nightstand dying, Saskia sends her vanished husband a text message, sends him another, sends another saying “Call me,” sends another, calls him and leaves a message on his voice mail, wonders if he’s not answering because he’s in therapy, wonders if he’s out fishing, wonders if he’s out bowling, wonders if he’s at a restaurant, wonders if he’s picking up a knife pretending to cut into a steak, wonders if he’s aiming it at his chest instead, wonders if he’s stabbing himself, wonders how she’ll tell the kids, wonders what she’ll do now that he’s dead, and after sending twenty texts without getting an answer, her stomach hurting, her nerves shot, she says: “It’s not going well. I’m a mess. A hot mess. Right now, I’ve probably lost five or six pounds since he left. I have yet to eat a meal. We constantly fight. If I see Patti Walker, I might punch her in the face. We’ve been fighting all week. Yesterday afternoon we kind of patched things up. At five-thirty, I called him and said, ‘You need to talk to Zoe. She’s not listening to me.’ He talked to her, and then I got back on the phone and he started yelling at me. Screaming. You could hear him smashing things. You could hear things breaking.”

  She says: “I can’t do this anymore. I’m an absolute mess. He never should have gone out there in the first place, and it irritates the hell out of me that Patti Walker is his little pawn. She called the other day and asked if I needed yard work to be done. Well, I can do the fucking yard work. I told her how bad he was doing, and she said, ‘Well, you have to be patient.’ I’ll tell you what. If one more person tells me to be patient, I’m going to need a fucking institution. I mean I know she’s trying to help, but she’s influencing him. The ‘stay strong, you’re a soldier’s wife’? I could have taken a gun and killed her that day. He’s not a soldier anymore. He’s fucking screwed up.”

  She says: “I knew this thing was a bad idea from the start. When I have a bad feeling about something, I’m usually right.”

  She says: “I’m pissed. I’m pissed. I really am fucking pissed. I won’t get over it. He gets to go fishing. He gets to go out on weekends. I can’t do any of that. I’m always getting the short end of the stick. I am here, taking care of everything. This is not why I got married and had kids, to do this on my own. If I could take it all back, I would. I wish I had never met the man.”

  She says: “I’d like to stay in a hospital for a couple of weeks. And sleep. That would be great. Medicate me.”

  She says: “Fuck. I didn’t even have any help after I had a baby. And then he dropped him.”

  She says: “I feel like my heart is ready to explode.”

  She says: “I hate that man so much right now.”

  She says: “All I can think about is how much I hate him but how much I want him home.”

  When did she become this way? That’s something else she keeps wondering, because ten years ago, when she was the girl about to meet Adam, she had a vision of how her life was going to go and it didn’t include such rage. The basement where she was living was supposed to be a first stop, not a continuing theme. She had moved there straight out of high school because she was tired of having a curfew and it was what she could afford. “I had fun. Partied. Drank. Hung out with completely older people. I wasn’t bad, though. I didn’t do stupid stuff. I didn’t drink and drive. I didn’t sleep around,” she says of the girl she once was. She understood that some people paid attention to her because of her looks, and she didn’t mind that, but she had her own way of seeing herself. She was going to have a career of some sort, in some kind of office, and a closet full of business clothes. Single, strong, dependent on no one—that kind of life. She’d start in a basement, save money, go to school, and end up wherever. She was open to anything. She glowed in those days. She had so much confidence, and compassion, too, and now the most compassion she can muster is when she is running errands around town and sees young wives with their soldier husbands. You poor fuck, she thinks. You have no idea what it will be like in five years.

  With Adam gone now, she is back to doing it all, just like in a deployment. The difference is that in a deployment, doing everything felt like a contribution, even a source of pride. Why, this time, is she telling no one about where Adam has gone? Her family knows a little, but, weirdly, the person so far she has been the most honest with was a stranger at Walmart who was sitting at a fold-out table, collecting donations to help hospitalized soldiers with their bills. “My husband’s hospitalized right now,” she surprised herself by telling him, and then she handed over fifteen dollars, even though the wiser thing would have been to ask him if he had any money for her.

  The truth is that they have no money at all, and she is worried about losing the house and cars in these four months while Adam is fishing and bowling and doing God knows what else out there. Just as Adam will be obsessing about the tree outside of his window, she will soon begin obsessing about the growing pile of past-due notices on the dining room table. There will be no paychecks while Adam is away. Hoping to bridge that, Patti Walker arranged for an e-mail to be sent out army-wide asking for people to donate leave time to “Mr. Adam Schumann,” a wounded ex-soldier “approved as a voluntary leave transfer program recipient under 5 CFR 630.904,” but Saskia knows that similar requests go out all the time, and she’s not holding her breath that anyone will read such a message, much less respond.

  Her solution, since she is the one who will have to solve it: to work, and to bring in enough money to cover day care costs and keep an inch in front of the collection agencies. Even before Adam left for California, she had been thinking about this. With his help writing some of her papers, she had gotten a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from a school based in Iowa that offered distance learning. Then she began applying for whatever jobs were out there in Junction City, including a data processing job with a local mental health agency. To her surprise, they called her in for an interview, and to her greater surprise, they offered her a job—not as a data processor but as a case manager.

  A case manager? she thought. Like Adam has? Me?

  The pay was lousy, but there was a part of her that was flattered to be wanted, and so she went in one day to find out about whose cases she would be managing. These are some of the poorest, saddest, and neediest people in Junction City, she was told, and then came an example: a woman who had been raped and abused, and as if that weren’t enough her cat had been burned to death in front of her. That kind of thing. Saskia sat there, trying to imagine what she could do for such a woman. “She’s deathly afraid of men,” the person telling this to Saskia said, and added, “Maybe you’re the one she needs.”

  Well, maybe so, Saskia decided. Maybe this was the way her compassion could return, and her life could become what she had intended it to be.

  She said yes to the job. She bought a few clothes to look professional, arranged day care for Jaxson and after-school care for Zoe, trained for a week, and got her first client. It was the woman. They met at the mental health agency so the woman could decide if she wanted Saskia as her case manager.

  “Are you going to tell your boss everything I say?” she asked.

  “It depends what you say,” Saskia answered.

  “If I say I’m going to kill myself?”

  “If you—”

  “I’m joking,” the woman said. “If I say I’m going to kill myself, I’m joking. It’s when I’m quiet, you need to worry.”

  What have I gotten myself into, Saskia thought.

  “I think I’ll take her,” the woman said to Saskia’s boss when he came into the room.

  She got a second client and a third, and by the time Adam was on his way to California, she was up to a dozen. Her job wasn’t to counsel them—psychologists were supposed to do that—but to sit with them in their lonesome homes, run them to the grocery store or the pharmacy, do whatever they needed to help them get through their days. Several had been sexually assaulted. Several had multiple personalities. All had been traumatized in one way or another and diagnosed with severe and per sis tent mental illness.

  These were becoming the people filling her days now that Adam was away.

  She wakes up before sunrise now and is slowly getting used to it. She likes to be at the office before anyone else, do her paperwork, grab the keys to the van they want her to use, and haul out of there before any of the others arrive and can trap her in a conversation. “How Am I Driving?” reads the bumper sticker on the van, and the answer is the same as ever, except now, instead of tailgating her way along the interstate to another appointment for Adam at the Topeka VA, she is turning into a trailer park, this one on the outskirts of town near the strip clubs. All these years in Junction City and she never realized until she got this job how many trailer parks a little town could have.

  This one, one of the oldest, surely is one of the worst. Everything is cockeyed, knocked around, and dented. Weeds and puddles have the run of the place, and some of the trailers have been abandoned. One yard is decorated with the flipped-over cab of a pickup truck, rusting and filled with sofa cushions. Saskia drives past a woman leaning on a cane and giving her the evil eye. She turns left on a sort-of street, where the road sign is obscured by a torn shirt someone has wrapped around it. She approaches a particularly shabby trailer with an American flag and a Tweety Bird in the window. An older woman without teeth is sitting on the steps leading to the front door, reading a Louis L’Amour paperback, and when she looks up and waves to Saskia, Saskia waves back.

  The woman is her first client of the day, and Saskia is glad to see that she’s already outside, because inside there’s nowhere to sit. Junk and paper stacks are everywhere. So are roaches. The floors have rotted through in parts, and the smell suggests that something else is rotting, too. The first time Saskia came inside and saw all of this, she asked the woman why she didn’t do dishes more than once a week, and the woman said that she knew she ought to but it’s easier to keep watching TV. Her depression runs deep, she explained, to the point of not wanting to bother with very much at all. Nonetheless, she has fixed herself up today for the only visitor she gets, brushing her graying hair and tucking a purple shirt into her blue jeans.

  “You look nice,” Saskia tells her. She is scheduled to be with the woman for an hour, to do anything the woman needs other than wash her dishes and kill her roaches, and when the woman says she has twenty-five dollars and wants to go to the grocery store, Saskia takes her to the grocery store. The woman leads the way on a walker, and Saskia follows with a cart. With limitless patience, she watches the woman pay. She loads the bags into the van. She helps the woman into the passenger seat. Back at the trailer, she takes the groceries and the walker inside. The hour is up. The woman settles back onto the steps with her book. Saskia gets in the van, ready to go, and then, thinking for a moment, steps back out and walks over to the woman. “I’ll see you Friday,” she says.

  From there, she goes to see another client, this one a forty-year-old woman who lives in a small wooden house so crowded with relatives that she sleeps on the living room couch. Her house stinks, too, of cigarette smoke, and when she asks Saskia to take her somewhere so she can get away from all of the people living with her, Saskia is happy to oblige. They go to a park with a few scattered picnic tables. The woman is obese and sickly and can walk only a few steps before pausing to catch her breath, but, again, Saskia shows none of the impatience she shows with Adam and the kids and drivers on the interstate and everyone else in her life. She takes the woman’s arm and helps her along, and when they are at last sitting and the woman is saying how depressed she is, how she was abused as a child, how she cuts herself sometimes and wishes she were dead, Saskia listens to every word.

  Her next appointment takes her to an old apartment complex not far from where she and Adam live. The client waiting for her is her most difficult, who fifteen minutes into their very first meeting lifted her skirt, pulled down her underpants, and said, “You want to see my scar?” At least it was a real scar, from a hernia operation, but still. And it got worse from there. Saskia took her to a doctor’s appointment that day, and when the woman asked her to come into the bathroom to see if there was blood in her urine, Saskia sent Adam a text message.

  “This lady I’m with is nuts.”

  “Well I’m stuck in a building with 35 nuts,” he wrote back.

  “I think this 1 might have you topped.”

  “Really?”

  “She made me look at her piss, her vag at the doctor’s, and then told me about all of her traumatic events. Fucking cuckoo.”

  “Wow.”

  Now that Saskia was getting to know the woman, though, and the woman was trusting her, she regretted how coarse her reaction had been. She was feeling a little tenderly about all of them, actually. In their own oddball ways, there was something honorable about them, Saskia was realizing, which she had first noticed on a day when they were all at the mental health facility, gathered at tables and working on a craft project. One of the women who was using some beads to make a rosary for herself tried to say something and began stuttering, and Saskia fully expected the others to make fun of her. That’s what people did to stutterers, at least the people Saskia had grown up with. Instead, these people listened in silence as the woman stammered on, continuing with their business as if she weren’t taking forever to get to the end of a sentence, and when she finally finished her thought and sighed, one of them said, “Good job,” and several others clapped for her. “You’re doing awesome,” another said, and as the woman beamed, Saskia found herself unexpectedly moved.

  Fucking cuckoo or not, they were decent people, she thought that day, and in some ways it made her more irritated with Adam than ever.

  Now, this day, she spends an hour with the pee woman, as Saskia refers to her, who talks about how much she hates herself, and then she heads to an appointment with a new client she will be meeting for the first time. From what she knows, it is a twenty-eight-year-old woman with three kids who has just been released from a lockdown psychiatric facility. She had been hallucinating, apparently. Something about her husband being abusive, or maybe her ex-husband. For some reason, she hadn’t slept for weeks and had finally melted down.

  In Saskia goes to meet her, and an hour later she emerges knowing a little more.

  The woman’s husband turns out to be a soldier who had returned from a deployment and steadily grew more abusive until she finally got him out of the house with the help of a restraining order. That hadn’t stopped him, however. While she was in the shower one night, she heard the sound of a window being smashed, and there he was, in the house, in the bathroom, screaming that he wanted his children.

  She was terrified, she told Saskia. She had never had a problem in her life, rarely had a bad dream, never seen a therapist, nothing like that, and suddenly she was breaking down so thoroughly that she had to be placed in a psychiatric facility. She spent two weeks there, and now she was home, unable to sleep.

  She kept talking as Saskia took in the surroundings.

  An immaculate apartment. Not much furniture. An old TV. A painted kitchen table. A couch with a slight tear in it. Three well-dressed children, listening politely as their mother said she hears him knocking at the door all night long.

  She hears his footsteps.

  She hears his voice.

  Now, afterward, Saskia seems a little shaken.

  “I mean, I’m the same way at night,” she says.

  She goes back to the office and does some paperwork. She picks up the kids and throws some fast food on the table for dinner. She feeds the dogs and changes Jax’s diaper and tells Zoe for the third time to do her homework. She does the dishes and takes out the trash and gets the kids to sleep and texts Adam and texts him again and texts him again and feels her panic rising while waiting for his reply until she is clutching her stomach. It has been twenty-four hours since she last heard from him.

  “Group was okay,” he had written from the land of the velvet hills. “Just finished some meditation and relaxation. Ready for another nap before bowling tonight. lol.”

  What is he doing? she wonders. What kind of program is this?

  It’s been two weeks, and the only person she’s heard from, other than Adam, was a family therapist who called after they’d had a fight to say that the cause of his erratic behavior was PTSD. “Well, no shit,” Saskia said after hanging up. “I’m not an idiot.”