Lina wished the ninety-six-year-old woman was her favorite sculptor; she deserved to be, she worked so hard. But Lina preferred Eva Hesse and Barbara Hepworth. Was she, unconsciously, following the crowd? Lina wanted her taste to be original, for hard work to equal great work, and to love what deserved to be loved.

  The woman was still working, but Lina began to discern small problems. One day, the woman’s shirt was backwards. Another, her shoes on the wrong feet. Lina began to arrive earlier, let herself in with her key to help the sculptor wash and dress.

  * * *

  —

  Her Saturday-morning armory class at the Met resumed.

  “Windows are anathemas,” her supervisor said, walking through a gallery where workmen stood on ladders, painting walls. The art had to be set far back from sunbeams. “We want only light we can control.”

  “Like a casino,” Lina said. “Where you can’t tell whether it’s day or night. Nature is the enemy.” These were small facts she’d picked up long ago from her father, probably generic casino lore, but they’d been new to her. And they were new to her supervisor, who laughed for three long minutes and then started over again.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, Lina turned in to a store. A branch was suspended in the window over a long pillow made from an old kimono sleeve. It smelled like lavender and could fit two close heads. Lina bought it for Walter and Susan, remembering the champagne glasses probably still in the back of Sacha’s closet. She felt adult handing over her credit card; it was the first time she’d been this excited about a gift. Usually, she’d felt vaguely deprived.

  * * *

  —

  The sculptor asked Lina what she was eating. Lina offered her a bite. Tabouli with sprouts. The old lady ate more than half. A Filipina housekeeper arrived daily, swept the bedroom and kitchen, and left a meal on a plate, covered with a paper towel. Lina noticed these plates accumulating in the refrigerator. Lina bought her a Macoun apple. An almond-butter sandwich. “California food,” she told her.

  Thank you, the sculptor said, every time.

  * * *

  —

  On a Saturday in November, walking to class, Lina saw him. Sacha. On Madison Avenue at eleven in the morning. He was alone, across the park from his apartment. They said hello and walked by each other on the sidewalk. Her hair wasn’t washed.

  They would have been married two months.

  When Lina called Jess that day, she heard something new in her friend’s voice. Jess, she could tell, was getting better. Soon, Lina would be alone in this unexplainable place.

  * * *

  —

  The hospital shall keep all patients until they are completely recovered. All costs are to be borne by the hospital whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, low or high, employed or unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate. Upon discharge the patient is to be given food and money as a compensation for the wages he lost during his stay. This was the policy of the bimaristan of al-Mansur Qalawun. His hospital used music as a form of therapy for mental patients. It remained operational through the fifteenth century and still stood in Cairo.

  Another Egyptian bimaristan introduced the safekeeping of personal items during a patient’s convalescence. These Islamic hospitals were the first to treat convicts.

  * * *

  —

  One day in December, Lina let herself into the loft and the sculptor wasn’t there. By noon, the three assistants learned that their boss had fallen in the night and crawled to the phone to call an ambulance. She was in Lenox Hill Hospital. They decided to keep working, to get as far as they could. The Filipina housekeeper came and left her plate covered with a paper towel. The next day, they found out that the sculptor had died, her staircase only three-fifths done. They worked again until after midnight to complete the construction prescribed by her last sketch. After that, they had only drawings. But they would make it their mission to finish.

  The next morning when they arrived, a lawyer was standing outside the building. She wrote checks against her skirted thighs. They told her that they’d continue to work, without pay, until the piece was finished. Lina surprised herself with her ardor—before, she’d thought of this as only a job—but the lawyer said she couldn’t let them. She had instructions from the estate to lock up. They would be in touch with dealers, she said. Realtors. The loft might be worth more than the artwork. She wrote down their phone numbers and said she would pass along their offer. She asked them each for their keys.

  Lina never heard from the lawyer. For years, she saw that unfinished staircase in dreams.

  * * *

  —

  “I spent too much time in my life thinking about blouses,” Lina said to Troy. “I’d be a better artist if I had a clearer soul…”

  “And then what?”

  “Maybe I’d still be with Sacha.”

  “You ever think that he’s gay?” Troy said. “That would have nothing to do with your soul. You went to California a lot. Maybe one of those times he hooked up with someone.”

  She left a message asking Sacha to meet for coffee. He suggested an indifferent diner, where they talked awkwardly for forty-five minutes. He kept saying he was sorry. He was walking to the subway when she called, “Wait,” and started over. “Are you gay now?”

  “I don’t think I’m gay.” He exhaled. “I have been thinking about men again. But there’s nothing to compete with us.”

  He evidently thought he had to endure this for a set number of minutes and then would be released. This would be their last meeting. Troy had been right. He didn’t love her.

  Like Walter, Lina believed that the people you loved you would love forever.

  * * *

  —

  “Has something happened?” she asked Jess on the phone. “You sound different.”

  “Oh, nothing. I guess I’m finally getting over it.”

  Lina went outside. She walked to the bookstore and bought six self-help books. Etienne wasn’t there and she paid. It was just beginning to snow. She couldn’t drag Jess into her despair any longer. Consciousness, she supposed, was full of dispositions, slips of paper in a hat. You picked one: fury, joy, boredom, maybe you could drop it, reach in and try another.

  * * *

  —

  Walter called. “I renegotiated the lease of a school a few years ago and they asked me to join their board. They found out their principal is moving to Idaho. They tell me this school is an artistic place.” Lina waited for the punch line. “I could get you an interview.”

  “To run a school? I can’t run a school.”

  “Sure you could. You’d teach art and train up the next generation. It might be a nice life. I’d like that if I were you. Have you met somebody? Is that why you don’t want to consider moving?”

  “No comment,” Lina said.

  At the end of their talk, Walter said that Donnie had called to say: I’ve made a friend. An older person, a professor he’d met at a twelve-step meeting. She was in for something else. Not drugs or drinking. Money, Walter thought.

  * * *

  —

  She took the bus home from the library, ate a banana for dinner, took a shower, and then read more. She’d turned the walk-in closet into a sleeping alcove with hooks for clothes. She used liver-colored rubber bands to keep her hair back when she began to draw again. She no longer felt larky premonitions that she could make something fast and get rich and famous. Had she ever believed that? She’d been so immature.

  On the telephone, Julie said that Walter got her mother talking about why she—Lina—never wore dresses. They’d had almost a regular conversation.

  “I’m on the other side of the country,” Lina said. “How does Walter even know what I wear?” She had on her old jeans, a black T-shirt, washed to gray. It was true; she didn’t wear dresses. But he didn’t know that.

  “Well, I thought it was good she was talking. They’re taking them on a field trip to the County Art Museum.”

  Lina hated the thought of her mother in a group of mental patients going to the museum like overgrown children with their hands in loops on a rope.

  She had once worried about her mother’s looks. It had been years since her mother cared about her own body.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie still had his dog. In the hospital, he’d started running with her. They were up to five miles a day. He still commuted to the hospital to see their mother. Lina wanted to ask him about working up to a full course load. But at family week, he’d promised her he would quit smoking after a year. She wouldn’t press him about anything else yet. Donnie told her that Walter was planning his wedding.

  For all Lina knew, she would never be married. In fact, she decided that. She remembered details. Cake. Flowers. Dried bees. Days spent on frivolity.

  Happiness, she’d thought at the time.

  Book 6

  The Commons

  71.

  Donnie’s first week in the mixed unit (drugs and crazy), a girl threw a TV set out the window because she thought it was criticizing her. Donnie walked to the window to look. “Probably was,” he mumbled. He’d grown up with a mother who came alive when insulted. The guy sleeping across the room, who’d dealt heroin with his now-jailed dad, woke up from the noise and asked, “Are we dead yet?”

  “No. You’re just sleeping,” Donnie told him, and the boy’s eyes closed, a thin arm with a tattoo of a serpent hanging down.

  Donnie had been terrified when his sister and brother left. Julie stayed, but he didn’t see her every day. She seemed to have her own business at the hospital. He ran into her once near the big central kitchen where they baked bread. That was as far into the adult wards as they let him go. The whole first month, he couldn’t see his mother. He didn’t want her seeing him like this anyway. He wondered if she knew he was here.

  There was a girl on the southwest corner of the unit who turned into a horse. She moved on all fours, neighing. Rearing. You had to walk around her.

  All day long, they herded him into groups with the other drug people, telling each other the story of how they became bad. It made sense he’d ended up here. He’d been aiming at something for a long time—he just hadn’t understood that this place was the target. He liked being on the same grounds with his mother. Even if she didn’t know he was here. Some moments, remembering she was less than a mile away, he felt safe. Julie bobbed up, too, surprising him with a sandwich she’d bought at a cheese store. He and Julie had had a lot of laughs in their apartment. It had been a surprise discovering that he could love two people. One day he’d thought of Julie as something inert but useful, like a chair, and the next, they were under a net of love. Once, after the meeting at school, he saw Julie cry. From then on, he tried to stay out of trouble, but that was like walking a balance beam. He had to be always careful.

  Eventually, he fell off and followed some kids to the beach. They taught him to surf. Currents ran up from the bottoms of his feet. It felt like he’d been in a whole-body fight, clobbered, then washed up onshore somehow still joined. The rest of the day, his body felt looser. He didn’t befriend people one by one, the way he’d once befriended Evan. They made fires at night and, around those circles, a joint traveled hand to hand. Donnie passed it along. But then eventually he fell again. Trouble became his natural habitat. From one toke on the beach to being high all the time took only a heartbeat.

  They told him in the unit that that was one of the ways to know. That he was an addict. Most people came from families of addicts, but his had insanity, not addiction. His mother had sipped crème de menthe once in a blue moon from a tiny glass. But he was marked. Lina and Walter had always wondered if he was their full brother. Maybe somewhere in the world he had a junkie dad. Would’ve explained a lot.

  Everyone in high school had found out what happened to his mother. He’d never told, but they knew. Girls wanted to talk about it, their voices pitying, hands eager. For the first time, he had the impulse to sock a person. He never touched those girls who wanted to soothe him. He turned remote because he would have liked to hurt them.

  Julie had looked into his pupils and he’d fallen back, saying, “Wha—what?” And then cracked up to a joke only he could hear. She couldn’t help but trust him.

  It was a relief that Julie knew now. She still refused to be mad. But anger had to be rattling in there somewhere.

  * * *

  —

  The unit had incredibly glossy floors. Donnie asked one of the hospital janitors how he kept it up. A block of wood covered with a towel at the end of a pole was all. They let him keep one in his room to polish his end of the hall. He liked the back-and-forth motion. He did the homework here, in a way he hadn’t in college, tried to write out the past. Some of it was radioactive, memories that, when he approached, sent out hairline shocks warning Get down, avoid, divert, detour. A house in the Palisades Highlands. Xs dotting the coastline, Malibu to Long Beach.

  People talked in group. Donnie kept quiet.

  * * *

  —

  Caseworkers shuffled them into a van bound for a gym, off grounds. One guy stood with a clipboard, directing people to the machines or to trainers, for kids who had paying parents. Donnie’s name turned up on that list. After the second Thursday, he asked the trainer, a pert, tiny, muscular mother of three, if she could write down a program for him to do by himself. She looked sad, so he said more. “The lady who pays, she’s not my mom. And probably has to stretch to do it.” He thought of his mother. He was pretty sure she knew he was here.

  “Do you ever run? That’s how I get my cardio. You’re outside, you see things.”

  He’d hated going around the track in school, but he built the habit every morning and by the third week felt the return loop of reward. His dog, Sylvie, began to trot along.

  Running was the first skill he learned in rehab that he could keep.

  * * *

  —

  In group, he finally shared how he’d been happy. On a board out on an empty sea. He remembered the college town on the hill, yellow light pouring out of buildings, old people dressed as if they were young. Donnie saw the homeless with their dogs, shabby men with crescent faces, their dogs happy and bounding. Homeless dogs seemed the happiest dogs in LA.

  Everyone around the circle nodded. They knew what he meant.

  * * *

  —

  He saw his mother for the first time and told her he lived here now, within the same chain-link fence. He called it the Humble Place. He told her what he knew she could take. He explained how Sylvie had saved him. They first saw each other on the beach. Donnie was stoned, but he was always stoned then. There was a crusader, with a breastplate and staff, long ringlet hair, bare legs from the knees down, a man’s legs with hair. Man on the bottom, girl on top. And a dog, which looked back over its shoulder to Donnie. They trudged on in the fog. Some of the people he followed scared him, but he was wrong about them. They were broken to kindness. When they were far ahead, the dog still looked back. Donnie wanted to steal her, but he couldn’t have a dog; he lived in the apartment with Julie and her cats. The dog—she wasn’t Sylvie yet—had sores all over her coat. Donnie knew then he had to move. In a lightning-bolt flash, he thought: college. Sylvie before she was Sylvie made him go. Two years after that first visitation, he was low again, enrolled but living on the beach with other people who meant nothing to him, and one day he saw a pack of dogs, near the water. No humans. He’d lost track of distinct days. It was foggy and he’d been stalking alone with a sleeping bag over his shoulders. He’d had one shoe. On the surf, he saw her. He called to the dogs and only she came bounding. “You’ll be my luck,” he told her.

  A week later, police delivered him to Walter. His mother patted Sylvie. Animals went to her instinctively.

  * * *

  —

  While he picked apart wet memories for Step Two, Donnie wondered what the crazies did all day. Did they have groups, too? He asked Horsegirl. She kicked Sylvie with hard heels.

  Horsegirl hated Sylvie. She’d bared teeth and bucked at her once before, when Julie brought her in on a leash wearing a bandanna from the groomer.

  The night of the youth dance in James Hall, Donnie tried to talk to Horsegirl again. “What do they make you do all day?”

  She neighed and two warm words dropped out of the snuffling: “Stupid stuff.”

  She wasn’t going to the dance. Donnie asked if she wanted to see a movie. Caseworkers had hooked up speakers on the unit’s roof to hear the movies visible from the drive-in over the fence. They lay on the roof with blankets watching Ghostbusters while Sylvie waited on Donnie’s cot.

  Horsegirl had seen Julie when she picked up Sylvie or brought her back. Donnie had to explain: Julie was not his mother. He told her his mother was here, in the hospital.

  “Here, where?” Horsegirl asked. Most of the kids in the unit barely registered that there was a whole hospital here that had nothing to do with them. His mother had come before any of this and they’d gone to live at Julie’s. They, he had to explain, were his brother and sister, who lived far away now. Julie had moved, too, to a cabin in the north woods. She’d had a sad goodbye with Donnie’s mother. “I really did love two people. I loved her as much as my mom.” He was crying then. Donnie hadn’t known until he said it to Horsegirl how hard it had been when Julie moved. The apartment wasn’t theirs anymore. Other people lived there, cooked their own dinners. He’d gone to college, but she’d always been the same, the same place, the same upbeat questions, and now that life had been folded like a towel and taken away.