* * *

  —

  When my father was finished with his bowl of cereal, he said he had to go to the Superior Court clerk’s office and get Betsy Harvey’s arrest affidavit.

  We went to the clerk’s office. There was one person in front of us. We waited until she was done, and then my father stepped up and said to the clerk, “I just came over from the jail across the street for an arrest affidavit pertinent to my client.”

  The clerk explained how he should get the affidavit. There were computers on the desk behind us where he could log on and enter the case number. There was a sheet of directions taped to the wall behind the computers if he had questions. At the end of his search, he should click on the document he wanted and choose the print icon. At that point, the document would print out behind the counter where she was standing, he would re-approach, she would produce the document, he would pay a fee of five cents per page, she would give him the document and a receipt, and we would be on our way.

  My father said, “The lady over there in the jail is named Betsy Harvey.” He spelled “Harvey.” “I don’t know anything about computers, so, if it isn’t asking too much, could we just do it the way where I give you the name in person and you give me the affidavit?”

  “Okay,” said the clerk. “There’s nobody behind you, so let’s do that.”

  While she was gone, we stepped back a little. Leaning toward me, lowering his voice, my father said, “When you’re young, you have a big advantage. You’re the new kid. Then, in your middle years, there’s no getting around it—people think you’re a jerk. Then you get along in years like me, and, fortunately, the picture brightens. They all think you’re out of it, which is true to some extent, so they’re nice again, like in the old days.”

  The clerk brought the affidavit. My father put on his reading glasses, examined the cover sheet, and took from his pocket a handful of coins. “This is definitely it,” he said to the clerk. “Thank you for putting up with me.”

  We left the courthouse. My father didn’t put away his reading glasses. In fact, as we stood on a street corner waiting for the light to change, he slid them on again and perused the affidavit. “Let’s go to this place,” he said.

  He put his forefinger under an address. I read the sentence it was in: “At 0010 hrs, Skagit County deputies responded to a 911 call at 7279 Stone Lane near Sedro-Woolley.” My father moved his forefinger to “0010 hrs.” “Late,” he said. “Ten minutes after midnight.”

  I drove toward Sedro-Woolley. I knew where it was because on more than one occasion I’d passed through it, or by it, on my way over the Cascade Range. It’s a town built on timber, coal mining, rail freight, and a steel-and-ironworks company that once made logging yarders. It has a sodden aspect, and looks forlorn, as if under duress. To me it feels isolated from the rest of Skagit County. It’s high above the floodplain, and far from the wide fields of the delta. It sits where large-scale agriculture ends and tall trees close in. During peak tourist season, when, each year, more than a million people tool around nearby to see tulips in bloom, few come there. It’s far off the “Tulip Route,” and has a name, frankly, averse to appeal. Visitors prefer the farmers’ markets on the amiable plain to Sedro-Woolley’s Woodfest, with its chain-saw carvings, and to its Loggerodeo, with its logging exhibition. A mental institution, Northern State Hospital, once operated just outside of Sedro-Woolley, on a site selected, in part, for its remoteness; a driver now passing its former campus on Highway 20, following the Skagit River upstream, is headed into dense, lonely mountains. All of this makes Sedro-Woolley feel like the last outpost on the Skagit, which in certain ways it is.

  As far off the beaten track as Sedro-Woolley is, though, it still has cell service, so I was able to get directions to Stone Lane. We drove north on Garden of Eden Road, which runs uphill, doglegs over railroad tracks, and ends at a T. On Mosier Road, we came into a landscape of a mud-booted cast—trampled pastures, rotting stumps, wire fences, moss-roofed mobile homes. Cow paths wound through brush. The ferns were laid down by blackberry stickers. We descended, from there, steeply, into woods. The pavement, crumbling on one side, crossed a creek. We were on what felt like a paved-over logging spur, passing modest homes with cropped lawns amid the dishevelment of cut timber—brush, weeds, bramble, thickets—all of it beneath the march of power lines strung in hanging curves from stanchions.

  We came to 7279 Stone Lane. The driveway was blocked by wind-flailed yellow tape, because beyond it, now, lay a crime scene. Beside the driveway were some incipient fruit trees that someone had netted against the inroads of birds. Mostly what we saw was bramble. There was no view of the yard where the adopted girl from Ethiopia had died, and no view of the house where the Harveys had lived.

  “We can walk down the driveway to the house,” said my father. “That wouldn’t be out of line for us, as long as we don’t touch anything.”

  We walked down the driveway. My father brought the affidavit. What we saw first was the back of the house, a rambler. A floodlight was posted on a pole in the yard. There was a modest barn, a tool shed, a chicken run, and—strangely—a port-a-potty. I could hear, overhead, the power lines crackling.

  We stood on a patio. There was a padlocked chest freezer, a cylinder-style smoker on wheels, a folding aluminum picnic table, a garbage can filled with bats and balls, and a large box that had once held broccoli but now held empty plastic milk jugs. My father turned a page in the affidavit. “This is where she died,” he said. “Right here. At the edge of this patio.”

  He handed me the affidavit. I read the sentence about the 911 call that included the address on Stone Lane. Betsy Harvey had called 911 to report that her daughter had staggered around in the dark, fallen, taken off her clothes, and ended up facedown with mud in her mouth. The dispatcher, on hearing this, had called the sheriff, and deputies had been dispatched. By midnight, an aid car had been dispatched, too, and by 1:30 a.m., the adopted girl from Ethiopia, called Abigail Harvey by her adoptive parents, was dead on a table at Skagit Valley Hospital.

  * * *

  —

  I drove my father home and followed him inside. My mother, who had a frozen shoulder, glaucoma, swollen feet, and tremors, pecked him on the cheek, and then me as well, and said that while we were gone the tow-truck company had towed the car to Chuck at Safety Service Center. Chuck had called at eleven-thirty. He needed time, he’d said. He had other cars to fix ahead of theirs, a lot of them. He’d take a look, though, and figure out the price. After that there’d been another call, but my mother hadn’t gotten to it in time, because she’d been in the basement organizing things—it was an insurance agent, the other person’s, the person whose parked car had been damaged, we could listen to the message but it was long and garbled. Other than that, my mother had walked to the senior center for her Spanish Group meeting and, on her way home, gone to the grocery store, since she and my father were out of tea, bread, cheese, tomatoes, and dental floss, all of which she’d stocked up on—especially the floss, because it was on sale—so, in a while, if anyone wanted to, we could eat toasted cheese sandwiches, but she wasn’t hungry at the moment. And another thing. She’d been thinking all day about a problem, which was the problem of how her husband was going to get to work the next morning and the next morning and the next morning and the next, and home at night, too, until Chuck got the car fixed, and so, about that, she’d asked around at the senior center, where so many people were helpful, but also where so many people talked so much about things that weren’t an answer to the question. Fortunately, there was a desk at the senior center expressly committed to the gathering of information, a place where a coherent, sane, reasonable volunteer sat behind a computer she knew exactly what to do with, and this volunteer, whose name was Linda, had searched around and printed things out and gathered materials, all of which my mother had lugged home and now had sitting in a pile by the sofa, where, later that night, she and my father could go through them together and figure out the solution, and these included bus schedules, car-pool programs, phone numbers for taxi companies, and brochures about senior transportation services.

  My mother, on hearing of our day’s excursion, made reference to journeys she’d undertaken to see tulips in bloom in Skagit County, but her eyes narrowed, and she pursed her lips, when she heard about the substance of the case there. “That’s among the ugliest things I’ve heard,” she said with a wince. “Doing things like that to a child. It’s completely beyond my comprehension as to why our government allows people who believe in that ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ hokum—it’s beyond my comprehension as to why it’s legal for them to adopt.”

  I stayed and ate a toasted cheese sandwich. We watched a local news show. I noticed on the side table of my parents’ sofa a novel called The Late George Apley, by John P. Marquand, and picked it up, and then recognized it as a Time Reading Program Special Edition, the Time Reading Program having provided my mother with a book once a month during the middle of her life, each selected by Time, and each with an editor’s preface. “I’m reading that for the second time,” my mother said. “Or at least I think it’s the second time.” She took the book from my hands and turned back its pages. “It says here,” she said, “in the preface material, that The Late George Apley is a coruscating satire on Boston Brahmin society. And maybe it is. It could well be. But here’s the thing: I don’t remember reading it. I might have read it, but I can’t remember. And I’m not trying to coruscate John P. Marquand with that. I’m trying to point out something about me, not him. Think of the time I spent reading books! As if it was the most important thing in the world! I remember thinking that if I could just find an hour during the course of a day to read, great, perfect, my life had purpose, I was going somewhere—where I couldn’t say, but I was reading, and that was progress and self-improvement. Whereas cooking or doing laundry or whatever, all the stuff I did running a household, all that stuff was spinning in place. I’m not complaining. I have no problem with having been a housekeeper and a mother. All the work around here, okay, fine, but what I’m trying to say is, it always seemed like if I got time to read during the day it was salvation, it was like I had a future in front of me where I would be a somebody. And I’m not trying to say this was some kind of illusion, because I learned a lot from reading, I deepened myself, I pushed myself. I read all sorts of challenging books, because I wanted to stay with it and be up on what was going on in the world, and I don’t have any regrets about that, but, really, did I read this book or not? The Late George Apley?”

  * * *

  —

  The next afternoon, while it rained hard, I dropped in on my sister, Danielle.

  It’s easy to drop in on Danielle because she owns and manages a tea shop called Cajovna—Czech for “teahouse” (we’re of Czech descent on my mother’s side)—that she’s tricked out to simulate Prague. It’s in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, on Bagley North, around the corner from the Sea Monster Lounge, in a building that used to house a Turkish restaurant. All I have to do to talk to Danielle is walk over there—it takes fifteen minutes—and hang around until she has time for me. On this day, Cajovna was busy, no doubt because of the rain, so I had to wait for a while in the rear alcove, where there is a single long table with a top made from a slab of maple worn to a sheen and battered by heavy use, even gouged in places, but indomitably sturdy: an artifact with endurance. I say all of this about the table because the table reminds me of Danielle.

  Danielle, in high school, had been the center on her basketball team. She’d been a bear to contest. Her elbows were always somehow in the way. She once set a record by scoring forty-two points in a play-off game. I was there, and I would say that at least thirty-six of those points were the result of unimpeded, point-blank layups. Most of the girls corralled their hair one way or another, but Danielle just cut hers, with office scissors, to the length of a sandy Beatles mop, and called it good. Her hair is longer now, but she’s still tall enough to darken doorways, and looks, by a tea table, woodenly immense. In the rear alcove at Cajovna, she put her hand to her heart, bowed with the restraint of an English butler, and said to me, “Good afternoon.”

  I asked her to sit. She did, no doubt with her big knees pinched against the table. Danielle has three children—two in college, one in the Peace Corps—and a methodical approach to nearly everything. At Cajovna, she manages five employees and does all of the accounting, payroll, and buying. Her husband, Leonard, owns a company dedicated to pouring concrete. He and his crew work in big, new developments. His back is bad from bending over a screed board and kicking wet concrete around in heavy boots. Danielle started Cajovna after becoming convinced that Leonard was wearing out and that tea had the potential to take off in Seattle the way coffee had. She soon came to accept, though, that in her case it meant half a living if she slaved at it. During summers, Cajovna operated in the red. Once the rain came, things got better.

  In her tea shop’s rear alcove, Danielle and I traded notes. Like me, she’d been apprised of our father’s accident, but, unlike me, she also knew—because our mother had spoken to Danielle on the phone about an hour before I’d walked into Cajovna—that my father was no longer insurable and wouldn’t be driving anymore. “Big problem,” Danielle said. “Our parents don’t drive.”

  She went for tea. When she came back, carrying a pot and two cups, she said, “Hey, normally when you come here you bring a notebook, am I right?”

  She was right. I did normally bring a notebook to Cajovna. I had a place to write at home—my office—but sometimes, just to change things, I’d written at Cajovna. The confines were cozy there on a wintry afternoon, the tapestries were Slovak, and tea was on the house. It was conducive, but those days were over now.

  I told Danielle why I didn’t have my notebook. “Well,” she said, “now you have time for other things, don’t you.”

  We drank tea and nattered. Above us, on a large chalkboard high on the wall, was this, in purple chalk, from Alexander Pushkin:

  ’Twas growing dark; upon the table, shining,

  there hisses the evening samovar,

  warming the Chinese teapot;

  light vapor undulated under it.

  Poured out by Olga’s hand,

  into the cups, in a dark stream,

  the fragrant tea already ran,

  and a footboy served the cream.

  Danielle told me that, on reading this, one of her employees had commented, “That’s beautiful, such a blissful, domestic scene,” to which a young socialist, also in her employ, had replied that she couldn’t endorse the idea of bliss contingent on the availability of footboys. A third employee, phone in hand, had thrown into this mix, “I put in ‘Russian footboy’ and the first six entries are all porn,” and then laughed at her own commentary. But the socialist wasn’t having it. “I’m serious,” she’d countered. “Bliss on the backs of other people isn’t bliss.” There’d ensued a tense discussion. No one backed down. Their shift ended. They all agreed to disagree and left. Bliss on the backs of other people remained in flux. There was no resolution to the controversy over it. “But I’ve got a new quote up my sleeve,” Danielle told me, “from William Cowper. I’m going to erase the controversial footboy later today and…Let me get this for you on my phone.” She fiddled with her phone and then read:

  Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

  Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

  And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

  Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

  That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

  So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.

  Danielle threw up her big basketball mitts. “That should cause less of an uproar,” she said. “That oughta be less controversial. Although, in our current climate, everything’s controversial. I guess you could say that in those lines from Cowper there’s an insufferable bourgeois smug satisfaction, and a privileged cluelessness about who picked the tea leaves.”

  When we were done, we ducked through the rear alcove’s curtain and lingered through goodbyes by the displays of bulk teas Danielle carried. Here, again high on a wall, and again in purple, on a second chalkboard, were lines from Proust:

  But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists,

  after the people are dead, after the things are broken

  and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but

  more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent,

  more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls.

  Danielle saw me reading that and said, “As in Dad’s bran flakes—am I right or what?”

  * * *

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