Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth J. Church

Cover photograph © Getty Images / pixitive

Elizabeth J. Church asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008267933

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008267957

Version: 2019-04-01

Epigraph

Dance, when you’re broken open.

Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance when you’re perfectly free.

—Rumi

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Lily Decker

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Ruby Wilde

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Lily Decker

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Lily and Sloane

Santa Fe

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth J. Church

About the Publisher

1

The line of Aunt Tate’s jaw was fierce and unyielding, like a hammered steel length of railroad track, but her eyes were soft and puffy from furtive crying. “You can keep what you can carry,” she said and handed eight-year-old Lily a cardboard box. Lily stared into the shadows of the empty box as if it held answers to all of the mounting uncertainties that frightened her.

It was June 1957, and Uncle Miles and Aunt Tate were in Lily’s house in Salina, Kansas, picking through things like crows at the town dump. Lily wanted for them to leave everything the same as it was before, not to move her father’s copy of Andersonville from the nightstand or her big sister Dawn’s toothbrush and pink pajamas with the elephants that danced and wore silly hats. Mama’s dresser scarves should not be folded and packed in a box, and her hat with the white netting should not be wrapped in tissue paper and tucked away for Aunt Tate ’s church bazaar. Lily’s whole life was disappearing—all of her history, everything that fixed her feet to the earth and held her safe.

“C’mon, honey,” Aunt Tate said, trying to prod Lily into action. “The longer we stay here, the more it’s going to hurt. Let’s just get this over and done with, all right?” Aunt Tate clumsily patted Lily’s shoulder and picked up a box she’d packed for Uncle Miles to load onto the back of his pickup. “Get a move on, Lily,” Aunt Tate said, this time firmly, and then headed down the hallway.

There was no place Lily wanted to be, to stay, other than home. This home. Her home. But, standing in the middle of her former life, Lily realized she didn’t have a choice. She looked at her bed with the deep purple bedspread, the curtains Mama had made with the purple fringe running along the hem. Her stuffed animals, still sitting in a row on top of her pillow, just as she’d left them in her Before Life. Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, the gingerbread man with the nap rubbed into nonexistence by her love. The deliciously soft pink bunny rabbit that had appeared in her Easter basket one year. The desk her father made that was just her size with a cabinet door she could open and close. Her red leather jewelry box with the mirror inside the lid and the ballerina that twirled on one toe while a tinkling, silvery bell played “Frère Jacques.”

When Lily had asked Aunt Tate what would happen to the house and everything in it, Aunt Tate said, “That’s for the adults to decide.” Lily knew better than to push her luck, and so she let it be.

Dangling her legs in her apple-red pedal pushers, Lily sat on the edge of her bed and picked up the pink rabbit, tugging gently on his long satin ears. The things she wanted to put in the box wouldn’t fit. Her family couldn’t fit. The only home she ’d ever known could not be wedged within those four cardboard walls. Her swing set, the toy telephones she and Dawn used to call each other. The familiar view out her bedroom window, the way the leaves on the elm tree turned their silvery backs to the breezes just before a rainstorm. Her parents dancing in the living room while Brook Benton sang “Love Made Me Your Fool,” his voice rumbling smooth and low on the hi-fi; her father’s hands threaded into Mama’s thick gold hair; Mama’s full-skirted pastel dresses. The cool, apricot-colored satin lining of Mama’s best coat, and how it smelled of ripe pears and wisteria. No one was going to call Lily Scallywag—not anymore. And Lily couldn’t fold and pack Dawn’s skinny ankles turning cartwheels or her sister’s voice reciting the endless “Paul Revere’s Ride” until Lily wanted to scream. Nothing fit, including Lily. Lily no longer fit anywhere.

WHILE DADDY HAD brylcreemed his wavy hair and worn a suit and tie to work as manager of the rail yards, Uncle Miles was a diesel mechanic who wore overalls and plaid shirts and rolled his own cigarettes and later stuck his rough, callused fingers inside Lily and whispered with his sour breath, “Our secret.”

As for Mama’s older sister, Aunt Tate was too tall with wide shoulders and so maybe secretly a man, and she moved ponderously, as if someone had hit a slow-motion button on her life and put her at permanent half speed. She wore loose-fitting, pastel cotton housedresses that hung limp and lifeless below her knees, and sensible black lace-up shoes with low heels. The only jewelry Aunt Tate allowed herself was a plain gold wedding band, and she kept her lusterless brown hair short and tightly curled. She was formidable, strict and austere in a way that had always made Lily both shy and wary. “It was the Depression,” Mama once said. “It made your Aunt Tate hard. Deprivation made her think that being rigid was the only way to survive. But there’s a soft center there; she has a heart, I swear.” Still, Lily thought that even Mama had been more than a little cautious when faced with her sister’s perennial judgment.

WITHIN TWO WEEKS of the funeral, Aunt Tate had enrolled Lily in the July session of summer school, “To keep you out of my hair.” Lily’s aunt and uncle lived several blocks from Lily’s old house on Sycamore Street, but to Lily’s relief, she would still be able to attend her familiar elementary school. Before class on the first day, the kids gathered around Lily on the playground. “Did you see their guts?” “They said your sister was all tore up! Ground chuck!” Lily’s best friend, Beverly Ann, hung back from the others, seemingly frozen in place, nervously watching Lily’s reaction.

Lily ran into the breezeway, squeezed herself between a cool concrete pillar and the prickly leaves of a sumac bush, and waited until the bell rang. Mid-morning, Mrs. Tobias had the class put away their books and pencils, and then she conducted a ceremony in which Ray Bellamy carried a cage with a bright red bow and presented Lily with a chubby brown hamster bought and paid for with the sympathetic nickels and dimes of her classmates. Shannon Leary followed Ray, carrying a bag of wonderful-smelling cedar chips and a box of hamster food.

“You’ll have to keep his water bottle filled,” Mrs. Tobias said, her cool, composed hand on the back of Lily’s neck. “And take really good care of him.”

“What’s his name?” Lily asked, looking around the room at her classmates.

“That’s for you to decide, honey.” Mrs. Tobias walked to the blackboard. “But we can list possibilities, if you’d like.” She picked up a piece of chalk and began writing as Lily’s classmates shouted out suggestions.

When all was said and done, Lily chose Pickles. Dawn had loved the vinegary saltiness of their mother’s homemade pickles, and she’d sucked on them until her mouth was funny-looking, smoochy and all scrunched up. Dawn made the best faces, and the sisters would laugh until they got the hiccups. Pickles was a happy name. When Lily pressed her index finger between the bars of the cage, the hamster put his whiskery face up close, sniffed. It made Lily smile. Pickles let her stroke his soft fur, and with his little, rough tongue, he licked her finger.

The moment Lily walked through the kitchen door, Aunt Tate spotted the cage and said, “Not in my house. What were they thinking? Rodents? Your Uncle Miles will have something to say about this.” When Lily started for her room, Aunt Tate added, “Leave the cage here. The food and all, too. You won’t be needing it.”

As soon as Uncle Miles got home, he took the hamster cage to the backyard. Lily knelt on her bed and watched from the window as he cornered Pickles and pulled him from the cage. He twisted the hamster’s neck in a swift motion, and the little animal’s body wilted in his beefy hands—the same way the pullets did when he killed them for Aunt Tate ’s soup pot.

Lily was breathing fast, and she wanted to cry. Her stomach hurt. She sat back on her bed and found a tender spot on the inside of her thigh, just above the cuff of her seersucker shorts. She pinched it as hard as she could, watched the skin turn white, then a deep, purply red. She did it two more times, in different places. But Lily didn’t cry. She’d made herself a promise while sitting beneath the green awning in Gypsum Hill Cemetery where strangers—people who hadn’t lost what she’d lost—cried until their noses ran ugly and red and full of snot. Lily decided, then and there, that crying was weak, an unaffordable loss of control. No crying. Not ever again.

When it was nearly time for supper, Aunt Tate appeared at Lily’s bedroom door, wiped her wet hands on the front of her red-and-white-flowered apron, and looked at Lily wordlessly. Finally, she said, “Child, he only did what had to be done,” and Lily knew it was a sad excuse for an apology but likely the best she’d get. Avoiding her aunt’s gaze, Lily pushed out her lower lip and blew so that her dark cherry curls lifted briefly from her forehead. Aunt Tate continued, “Life is hard. You’ve had it easy, up until now. But—” Aunt Tate stopped talking.

Lily looked up at her aunt, who stood frozen in place like King Midas’ daughter in the aftermath of her father’s royal embrace. She watched her aunt frown briefly, as if she were suppressing tears, and then Lily saw real tears traveling down her aunt’s cheeks.

Aunt Tate cleared her throat. “It’s for your own good. Your mother didn’t do you any favors by coddling you all the time, and if you don’t toughen up, the world will eat you alive.” She sighed and perched on the bed beside Lily. Absentmindedly, Aunt Tate played with a length of Lily’s hair. “Look, honey, I know I seem mean to you, but I’m not. Neither is Uncle Miles. That’s not it, at all.” She let go of Lily’s hair and folded her hands in her lap. “You can’t let what’s happened make you a victim. People will want to see you that way; they’ll say, ‘Oh, that poor little girl. She’s so pathetic. Let’s just let her get away with anything and everything.’ But I don’t want for you to live your life trading on being a victim. I will not let that happen. You have to face life, head on.” Aunt Tate stood and squared her shoulders as if preparing to march. She held out a hand to Lily, who took it. Aunt Tate’s tone was softer now. “Come set the table. It can be your job from now on.”

Lily dutifully laid out four places, just as she’d done at home. Four plates. Four water glasses. Knives on the inside, sharp edge toward the plate, napkins folded neatly.

“Moron girl can’t count,” Uncle Miles said when called to the table for macaroni and cheese topped with a crisp bacon crust. “One. Two. Three,” he said slowly, pointing to Aunt Tate, Lily, and then his own broad chest. “Sister, did you check this one out of the dumb farm?” Uncle Miles asked, pretending it was a joke, only Lily knew better.

2

Lily lived for The Dinah Shore Show, starting with the NBC peacock, followed by the brass-heavy orchestra and the singer’s wide-toothed rendition of “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet!” … Lily would hum along, “Dadadadadadadadadadah!” Dinah Shore had a tiny waist just like Mama, and Lily thought the television star seemed really happy.

They watched on the black-and-white set with Aunt Tate’s milk-glass collection balanced precariously on top. Lily imagined the colors: Dinah Shore’s long, elegant gloves must be emerald green, her fine net flounces would be sparkly deep blues and greens. Fuchsia silk scarves, silver and gold sequins, beautiful high heels dyed to match Dinah’s gowns. Slit skirts revealing long legs, whirling skirts that flew up to show dancers’ underpants and elicited the occasional “Shameful!” from Aunt Tate.

But, oh, the best part was the dancing! Maracas and mambos and cha-cha-cha, handsome men lifting Dinah in the air and carrying her around the stage, her smile never faltering. The dancers’ hips swaying, feet moving in rococo patterns. It was a world mercifully far removed from the martyred, blood-red edges of Aunt Tate ’s Bible, her thick support hose, and Uncle Miles’ weight on the edge of Lily’s bed, the way he pulled down the covers, a prelude.

LILY FIRST RAN away when she was nine, the summer after third grade. She climbed up on a chair and pulled her suitcase from its shelf high in her bedroom closet. It was made of cheap, pressed cardboard painted in pastel shades, with a lamb that had a yellow bow perched gaily in the curls of each ear. Lily flipped the latches so that the case opened to its pink-and-white-checked interior, and then she looked around to decide what to pack. She put in Black Beauty and two of her Nancy Drew mysteries, followed by the miniature porcelain elephant her father had won at the state fair. She filled the rest of the space with plain white Carter’s panties and undershirts, a nightie decorated with daisies, a comb, and a cylinder of scented talcum powder that had belonged to her mother.

The last thing Lily included was her mother’s big black palmistry book with the line drawings of hands, the mounts of Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, and Venus. Mama used to run a ruby-red, manicured nail along the lines of Lily’s palm, pointing out the differences between what she’d been born with and what she would do with whatever the Fates sent her way. Lily had loved her mother’s touch, the way she prodded the pads of Lily’s fingers. “You have psychic hands, too, my Valentine’s Day child,” Mama had said, noting Lily’s long, tapered fingers and holding her own hand up for comparison. “Now, your sister Dawn, she’s a Leo—her hands are square, like your daddy’s. Practical, no nonsense. You’re the one, baby girl. The one like me.”

Lily got as far as the Petersons’ house, two streets away, before Uncle Miles happened by on his way to the drugstore for rolling papers and beef jerky.

“Get in,” he said, pulling over and pushing open the passenger door to his pickup truck. Lily hesitated, holding the hard plastic handle of her suitcase with both hands, already weary with the weight of it. She looked around, hoping someone would see her there, marooned in the shimmering summer heat. “Now,” her uncle commanded. Slowly, Lily climbed in, set the suitcase at her feet, and pulled the door shut behind her. “Don’t try that again.” He squeezed her upper arm until she cried out. “It’d be the death of your Aunt Tate.”

As he pulled away from the curb, Lily curled in on herself, trying not to smell Uncle Miles’ body next to hers. She glanced at his hands on the steering wheel, his thumbs like stubby, rounded clubs. When he said, “Stay put or else” and left her sitting in the truck while he went into the drugstore, she pulled out her mother’s book. Uncle Miles had what palmists called a clubbed hand. Such people, the book said, lacked willpower and were prone to criminal behavior.

She closed the volume when she saw her uncle lumbering back across the parking lot. He sat heavily behind the wheel and turned toward her, smiling so that his canines showed long and sharp. “You’re so sexy,” he said, using his husky, nighttime voice. “You make me lose control.” He scanned the parking lot and then crept his hand across the front seat toward her. Lily scooted so that her back was pressed against the passenger door. Surreptitiously, she tried to find the handle. “You’re not going anywhere,” Uncles Miles said as he started the truck. “You hear me?” He looked straight ahead through the windshield splattered with dead insects. When Lily failed to answer him, he slapped the seat between them, making dust rise. “Hear me? I said ‘NOWHERE.’ ”

“Yes,” Lily said, her voice small.

“Sir!”

“Sir,” she squeaked.

“Or else!”

“Or else,” Lily confirmed.

On the way back to the house, Uncle Miles took a detour. “Got something to show you,” he said as if he were giving her a gift. He drove until they reached a neighborhood of homes with big, welcoming front porches and shadowy green lawns. Uncle Miles slowed the truck, looking at house numbers. Finally, he stopped in front of a pale gray, two-story house with elaborate white trim. He let the engine idle and pointed.

“See that one?”

Lily nodded. It had broad flower beds with lilies, roses, and Mama’s favorite—peonies.

“That’s where he lives. The man who killed your family.”

Lily stared at the contrasting charcoal-gray front door with its inset diamond panes of leaded glass. She saw a lush fern hanging from the porch ceiling and two white wicker chairs angled toward each other, as if they were friends. Everything she saw from the window of Uncle Miles’ truck only deepened her curiosity about the man who’d collided with Lily’s family on that June night when dry lightning raked the horizon.

“You listening? I’m telling you that a murderer lives in that fancy house. These air force pilots think they can come to our town and lord it over the rest of us. You just remember,” Uncle Miles said as he took the truck out of neutral and slowly pulled away from the curb, “when you hear those sonic booms it’s probably that aviator, flying over you. The man who killed your family.”

Lily looked back at the Aviator’s house for as long as she could. She wanted for him to come out of the front door, to see her. She wanted to sit on his front steps and ask him things like Why? and How come? She wanted to beg Save me.

SHE HAD FEW memories of the night that broke her life into Before and After. She remembered that her allergies had been so severe that her nose bled, and so Mama made Lily lie down in the backseat, wrapped in a blanket patterned with stars and moons. As Lily drifted off to sleep, she watched Dawn stand, reach over the front seat, and begin to braid their mother’s hair.

Lily remembered waking up on the side of the road, curled into the arms of a stranger and seeing the Aviator standing near his car—the one with taillights set in wildly exaggerated fins that looked like some beast’s red, wicked eyes. She remembered her family’s motionless car, sparks of insects flashing in the headlight beams. Redwing blackbirds rising from fields of summer wheat, panicked by the commotion. The hiss of whitewall tires as they sighed last breaths; a violent whoosh of steam erupting from the radiator.

The Aviator had knelt beside Lily, holding a handkerchief to the top of his head. A thick shock of black hair hid his eyes. Lines of blood painted the contours of his face and ran into his mouth.

“What have you got there?” he had asked Lily—just as if he ’d met her on the street outside Hutchinson’s Ice Cream Store in downtown Salina.

Lily handed him her bouquet of four crayons, the ones she ’d held on to, tight, when the stranger lifted her from the car’s wreckage. “These ones are my favorites,” she said. Periwinkle, Carnation Pink, Cornflower, and Pine Green.

Mostly, Lily remembered that the Aviator hadn’t felt like a bad man. He felt like a sad one.

THERE WERE INTERMITTENT pools of rainwater relief, times when Lily smiled. Those times came when the parcels arrived in the mail, wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, and addressed in bold black ink to Miss Lily Decker. The first was Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles. It was an old book from 1904, with a battered cover and fine engravings of trees, cattails, birds, and clouds. Before beginning the novel, Lily hoisted herself onto the kitchen counter and sneaked exactly ten saltines from Aunt Tate’s larder. Then, she propped herself up on her bed with the book, eating the saltines as slowly as possible. As she sucked the salt from each cracker, she knew she was just like Freckles—crippled and unlovable. Still, she felt a little less lonely.

The mysterious books smelled of time, somehow held the breath of another reader, someone before Lily. The secrecy surrounding the identity of the book-giver made Lily feel special, somehow deserving. The books also let her travel far from the relentless flatlands of her life with Uncle Miles and Aunt Tate.

Pragmatic Aunt Tate didn’t abide mysteries, but if she wondered about the books’ origins, she never said anything to Lily. Aunt Tate dealt with the tangible world, the only exceptions being Jesus, the disciples, and the New Testament miracles. As for Lily, she thought the books might be from her elementary school librarian, who’d often commented on Lily’s avaricious appetite for books about pioneer girls who were held captive by Indians, or the wildly vengeful myths of the Greeks and Romans. In a way, it didn’t matter who sent the books, as long as whoever it was kept sending them.

IT TOOK SOME convincing, but finally Aunt Tate agreed to let Lily sleep over at Beverly Ann’s. The girls had been friends forever. They traded Cherry Ames books, shared after-school snacks of apple slices loaded with peanut butter, and played Chinese jump rope.

“We ’ve missed you, sweetheart,” Beverly Ann’s mother said, kissing Lily good night and promising that they’d have French toast in the morning.

When Mrs. McPherson pulled the door nearly closed so that only a thin pillar of light shone from the hallway, Lily felt a sudden moment of panic. She audibly sucked in her breath as a fleeting image of Uncle Miles’ probing hands crossed her mind. The image was there, he was there, even though she knew that at least for tonight she wouldn’t have to fear the drop of his weight on the bed like a gunnysack of river rocks.

“What’s wrong?” Beverly Ann asked, her voice sleepy.

Lily thought about telling. She could tell Beverly Ann about what happened in her bedroom, when the only noises in the house were crickets and the hum of the refrigerator. Sometimes the furnace clicking off or on. And Uncle Miles’ breath, his huh-huh-huh that got faster and faster.

But she couldn’t tell. It would make her sick to tell. Sicker to tell than not to tell. Beverly Ann would know how disgusting Lily was, and Lily would lose her best friend. And if she did tell, then what would happen? She had nowhere else to go.

“Nothing,” she said, finally, but Beverly Ann had already fallen asleep. Lily listened to her friend’s deep, regular breathing, the breathing of a girl who could trust, even in the dark. Lily felt her own eyes fluttering closed as she nestled in sheets that smelled of a sun-kissed clothesline.

The next morning, Lily came home from Beverly Ann’s begging for a pogo stick, but Aunt Tate said it was “too dear,” and Lily nearly stomped her feet. Beverly Ann got to have everything! Lily’s friend’s life was a constant reminder of all that Lily had lost, and sometimes—like this time—Lily felt her cheeks flame hot with jealousy and anger.

But a few weeks after the sleepover at Beverly Ann’s, Uncle Miles beckoned a hesitant Lily to join him in the backyard beside his workshop. In his hands, he held a pair of homemade stilts.

“I sanded the handles real good so you won’t get splinters,” he said, turning the stilts so that Lily could admire his workmanship. “And I know these aren’t the same as a pogo stick, but you can learn to do tricks on them. Here,” he said, motioning to Lily to come closer. “I’ll help you get up on them. You’ll learn fast cuz you’re real coordinated.”

He was right; it took Lily no time to learn how to walk steadily, and soon enough she could balance on one stilt and even hop on a single wooden pole while holding the other one in the air. She sang songs and made up dances she could do balanced high on the stilts.

“I still think they’re dangerous,” Aunt Tate said after one of Lily’s stunt shows, performed just before dinner.

“Lord, Tate. Let the girl have some fun,” Uncle Miles had said and then winked at Lily, which made her nervous, not a happy co-conspirator. Lily became convinced that Uncle Miles wanted something in exchange, that he was incapable of a simple kindness. Eventually, that persistent knock of fear led Lily to abandon the stilts next to the woodpile, against the back fence where the squirrels lived.

MAYBE UNCLE MILES loved Aunt Tate. Lily didn’t know. He did love his raspberries—all forty-eight bushes, lined up in rows like soldiers on parade. He inspected them for infestations, dusted them with a white powder that poisoned any bugs bold enough to alight on the sharp leaves. He fertilized. He shooed away sparrows who dared to feast on the ripe fruit. When frost was predicted, he used old pillowcases to shroud the bushes so that they stood like an eerie battalion of child-sized ghosts.

They weren’t pretty plants, not like the boldly bright dahlias that had filled Mama’s flower beds. They were thorny creatures that protected themselves by being nondescript, unwelcoming. But when the fruit came—the faceted gemstone berries with their lush lobes, the juice running down Lily’s chin—it was heavenly. Aunt Tate would ladle the berries over vanilla ice cream, and they’d sit out back, watching the soft evening descend. It was a puzzle Lily couldn’t solve—the fact that something delicious came from her uncle’s devotion.

3

Lily’s fourth-grade school portrait showed a tall, gangly ten-year-old with a long neck and indentations at her temples as if someone had pressed his palms to the sides of her skull and squeezed until the bone succumbed. The generous spread of her cheekbones gave her a clear, open gaze. Her indigo blue eyes were large, her child’s lips surprisingly luscious, and she faced the camera without flinching. If Lily had held a numbered placard in her hands, the school photo almost would have passed for a mug shot.

It had been nearly two years since the accident, and from time to time, she saw the Aviator around town. Lily liked to imagine that he was watching her, a presence like God or Jesus or Zeus or Santa Claus. Someone who knew her secrets but wouldn’t tell. He was a potent mystery—not an enemy, not quite a friend. Just there.

She discovered, finally, that it was the Aviator who was sending her the old books. When How They Carried the Mail arrived, it had the Aviator’s name in it, written elegantly in what Lily’s teacher called copperplate calligraphy. His name was Stirling Sloan, and he had once been a boy living on Magnolia Street in Dormont, Pennsylvania.

Holding the books from the Aviator’s childhood, turning the pages of his memories, Lily sent her mind to the places where his mind had been. She dogged his steps. And although she thought Stirling was a nice name, to Lily he remained always and forever the Aviator.

Mostly, it was curiosity that led her on a warm, late-April day to pedal all the way over to the Aviator’s street, put down her kickstand, and leave her bicycle tilted on the sidewalk that bordered his front lawn. She’d dressed up for him, pulling her hair back on the sides with a pair of pink butterfly barrettes, and she wore her best smocked cotton dress—the yellow one with a big sash she’d tied in back all by herself. Still, she was feeling less bold, now that she was actually at his house. Lily used the rubber toe of her Red Ball Jets tennis shoe to kick at a tuft of crabgrass that grew up through the sidewalk crack like a patch of unruly hair.

If she continued to linger out front, Lily realized, one of his nosy neighbors might come out and ask her questions she didn’t want to answer. Lily took a deep breath, marched up the front steps, and pressed the doorbell.

Nothing happened. She wasn’t sure how long she should wait. Feeling a nervous queasiness begin to slosh about in her stomach, she pushed the buzzer again. Again nothing. She saw the Aviator’s mail stuffed into his mailbox and realized he must still be at work. Maybe he was busy flying one of the jet-propelled B-47 bombers, part of the country’s Strategic Air Command they’d learned about at school.

Slowly, Lily descended the front porch. She hadn’t gotten what she wanted—an audience with the Aviator—and she couldn’t leave. Not yet. Maybe she’d just circle around back. Maybe she could wait there until he came home.

As Lily rounded the house, she could smell something overripe, on the edge of decay. Her tennis shoes slid on rotting apricots that had dropped from the neighbor’s tree. Lily picked up a piece of the fruit, brought it to her nose and grimaced. There were speckles of fruit flies all over the mushy flesh, and she dropped it quickly. She wiped her sticky fingers on some long, wet grass and then dried them on her dress.

Boldly, Lily climbed the Aviator’s back steps and sat on his porch swing. She pushed off with her feet and could hear the groan of the bolts that held it aloft.

He was taking forever to come home, and Lily wished she’d brought along Jane Eyre or A Girl of the Limberlost. She twiddled her thumbs for a while, and then she tried whistling. It came out slender, ineffectual. She wanted to learn to whistle so loudly that hordes of dogs from all over town would come running to her. She wanted to be able to whistle a tune when Dinah Shore came on the television and sang “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy.”

“Lily?”

She hadn’t heard his car. The Aviator pushed open the screen door and came out onto the porch. Lily stood guiltily.

“What are you doing here? Lily, does your aunt know you’re here?”

He’d said her name, twice. He did know her. She was so full of emotion that she was having trouble finding her voice.

“Sit down a minute,” the Aviator said, gently taking her arm and leading her back to the porch swing. “How did you know where to find me?”

“Uncle Miles showed me.”

“That’s your bike out front?”

“Yes.”

“But, Lily—do they know you’re here? They can’t possibly know you’re here.”

Lily shook her head.

“Oh, this is a bad idea,” he said. “You can’t be here. I’m so sorry. You just can’t be here.”

“But I came to ask you,” she said before he could make her leave unsatisfied. “I have to ask you something.” Lily clenched her fists in the way her mother had always said proved just how stubborn you can be, Scallywag. She was determined not to leave without asking him.

The Aviator took a deep breath. He was a handsome man with an omnipresent five-o’clock shadow, a nose so straight it looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler, and bruised-looking blue eyes. He sat with a ramrod-straight back, and he was wearing a military green flight suit that zipped up the front. On one sleeve was an embroidered patch picturing an armored fist that clasped an olive branch and three bright red lightning bolts.

“You may have three questions,” he said at last.

“Like three wishes with a genie?”

“Yes. And then you go home.” She could see he was afraid of her questions, but still he said, “Go ahead. Ask me.”

“My school is having a dance. Fathers bring their daughters.” She opened her hands, wiped her sweaty palms on the skirt of her dress. “I get to dress up and everything. And I wanted for you to take me.”

She’d been so happy when she’d concocted this plan to avoid humiliation. The other girls would be so jealous—even Beverly Ann. Lily would dance with a handsome pilot, handsomer even than the men on The Dinah Shore Show, and the fact that she had no father to take her would be completely overshadowed by the splendor of the Aviator.

The Aviator’s face went from one expression to another in an instant—as if clouds were first blotting out the sun and then letting it shine full force. She saw him pained and surprised and then frustrated. Maybe even angry, which scared her a little.

“I wish I could,” he said at last. “But I can’t.”

“Why not?” Lily stood and faced him.

The Aviator bit his lip, and for a minute Lily thought they both would cry. She felt violent and crazed disappointment thrashing about in her chest.

“Please,” she begged.

The Aviator stood quickly and pulled her into a hug. She pressed her face into the dark solidity of him, felt the zipper of his jumpsuit chafe her cheek.

“They would never let me,” he said, still holding her.

“Because they hate you,” she said, raising her face to look up at him.

“That’s right.”

“But wasn’t it an accident? Like when I spill the milk? Or when I trip and fall?”

He put his hand on the top of her head, as if blessing her. “I wish it were that simple,” he said.

“You didn’t mean to kill them, did you?”

The Aviator released her. “Come sit back down for a minute. Are you thirsty? Do you want a glass of water?”

Lily shook her head. What she wanted was answers.

“Okay. Well …” The Aviator rubbed his jaw with his knuckles. Lily thought she could hear the rasp of his beard’s stubble. “I was driving fast. Too fast. I do that sometimes—go out on the highway and fly along the asphalt, blow off steam. And I didn’t see them—you. There was a dip in the road, and I hit your car. I’d take it all back. I can’t—” His voice broke.

“If you really were a murdering bastard, you’d be in jail. That’s what I think.”

“Bastard?” She saw a fleeting smile cross the Aviator’s face. “Lily.” He shook his head.

She wouldn’t apologize for quoting Uncle Miles. “But you’re not in jail,” she repeated. “So it wasn’t on purpose.”

“I’m not in jail because it was an accident. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not sorry each and every day.”

They sat in silence until the Aviator said, “Lily, I’m so sorry I can’t take you to the dance. I would be honored, really and truly. Nothing would make me happier. But I can’t. It just won’t work, for reasons I can’t explain to your satisfaction.”

“I just wanted. I just wished.”

“I know,” he said, taking her hand in his. “But I will always do what I can. I am your friend, forever. And let me make you a promise, all right?” Lily looked up at him. “I will find a way to make it up to you. For the dance, I mean,” he said and then released her hand. He made an X across his heart with his index finger. “I promise.”

“I love the books you send me,” she said and smiled in a way she hoped would convey how much they meant to her. Then Lily took a deep, resigned breath. “Okay,” she said, grudgingly agreeing to his promise. “But don’t wait too long!”

He smiled and stood. “You’re a pretty good bargainer, you know that? But now you need to get home before it starts to get dark. Promise me you’ll be safe?”

“Umm hmm,” Lily said and instead of using the steps hopped off the side of the porch to show him how agile she was.

“You could come through the house,” he told her, but she’d already started to round the corner. The Aviator followed her out front, and Lily felt him watch her climb on her bicycle and ride away.

Lily pedaled as fast as she could—not to rush back, but just to feel the wind blow her clean. She decided she wouldn’t tell her aunt about the dance. She just wouldn’t go. Lily knew no one would have the nerve to ask why the fatherless girl had chosen not to attend.

And maybe in the Aviator’s promise she had something even better than a stupid old dance with a bunch of stupid old girls and their stupid old clumsy fathers. Lily believed the Aviator would come through for her. It felt glorious once more to believe in someone.

4

Aunt Tate said, “HOW COULD YOU?” and roughly flipped Lily over on her bed where she ’d been reading the Aviator’s latest gift, Beautiful Joe. Aunt Tate held Lily by the arm and struck her with the gut-flecked flyswatter. “That was my mother’s pitcher! My mother’s! You!”—whack—“ungrateful”—whack—“child!” Whack. “After all I’ve done for you!” Whack whack whack!

Lily had no idea what Aunt Tate was talking about. “I didn’t do anything!” Lily protested. “Aunt Tate, I didn’t do anything!”

“Don’t add the sin of lying.” Aunt Tate let go of Lily’s arm and gave Lily’s backside one more good whack. “No supper. Why I took you in is beyond me.” Aunt Tate slammed, opened, slammed the door several times. Bang!

Lily stayed still, as if she were playing freeze tag at school. She sucked in her cheeks and bit down, wondering if she could bite hard enough to tear out the sides of her mouth, chew and swallow the flesh. Her body burned in all the places where the flyswatter had landed. Lily remained there, perfectly still, breathing scant breaths. She fought back tears, ever mindful of her vow to keep control.

Later, when it was nearly dark and Lily was wondering if it might be safe to go pee, Aunt Tate came and stood beside Lily’s bed. “Uncle Miles told me.”

What? Lily panicked. What exactly had Uncle Miles said?

“He knocked the pitcher off of the mantel when he was looking for his matches. He told me you didn’t do it.”

Lily didn’t understand why Aunt Tate automatically believed such awful things about her. What was it about her that led Aunt Tate to assume the worst about Lily? Lily had never been a liar. Why didn’t Aunt Tate believe her?

Aunt Tate crossed her arms and held them against her middle as if she were suddenly cold, or maybe trying to hold something in or even protect herself; as if Lily might stand up and try to punch her in the stomach like they did sometimes on Roy Rogers when there was a fight in a saloon and cowboys smashed each other over the head with wooden chairs.

“I made a mistake,” Aunt Tate confessed. “I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

Lily thought about the Aviator’s Beautiful Joe and how Joe ’s cruel master cut off his ears and hurt him even though Joe was a kind and loyal dog. A good dog. Then Joe got rescued and lived in a good home where people loved and understood him. Beautiful Joe’s life was the opposite of Lily’s. But why? What was wrong with her? What had she done? What could she do differently so that Aunt Tate wouldn’t call her “The cross I have to bear”?

“Aunt Tate?” Lily dared.

Her aunt tightened her arms about her middle. “What is it?” she said, not unkindly.

“Why can’t you love me?”

“Honey.” Aunt Tate took a step toward Lily but stopped herself. “It’s because I love you that I’m hard on you. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t bother.”

Even though Aunt Tate had half-buried “love” in that brief statement, she had at least admitted it. Still, it didn’t feel like love to Lily. There were no soft, rounded edges to Aunt Tate’s love. It was uneasy, all spiky and fearful, like the sea urchin Tom Bradstone had brought back from his vacation in California.

“I know I’m not very patient with you.” Aunt Tate sighed. “To be honest, Lily, I don’t have much experience with children. Just watching over your mother when she was a young brat.” Aunt Tate nearly smiled. “But now come have a sandwich, and then we ’ll get you ready for bed.” She extended a conciliatory hand.

“Can I have tuna fish?”

“You may have grilled cheese.”

“Oh, with Velveeta.” Lily sighed with pleasure. Her aunt’s hand in hers was neither warm nor cold. It was like dry newspaper, and Lily almost thought she could hear her aunt’s skin crinkle when she squeezed it.

That night, Lily dreamed that she was sitting at the top of the playground slide, looking down the length of it. The polished metal chute went on for miles—down, down, and down to an abrupt end where children dropped off into some kind of a crack in the earth. Someone was behind her, prodding her to release her handhold and let gravity take her. She felt the insistent push of a hand. Tap. Tap. TAP!

Lily awoke to the deepest part of the night. Half asleep, she swatted at something wet that was touching her under her bunched-up nightie.

Uncle Miles clenched her wrist like a slave’s clevis and held it immobile until he finished. After he was gone, Lily fed her pillowcase into her mouth, bit down, and swallowed her cries so that they filled her stomach like sharp gravel.

WHEN SHE CAME home from school the next day, there was an entire box of cherry suckers on the nightstand beside her bed. The kind with the looped rope handles she liked best.

“Go ahead and have one,” Aunt Tate said from the doorway. “But just one, or you’ll spoil your supper.”

Lily stalled, looking uncertainly at her aunt. A part of her was afraid the candy was from Uncle Miles.

“Adults make mistakes, too,” Aunt Tate said. “I made a mistake yesterday, when I blamed you. I’m sorry for that.”

“It’s okay,” Lily said because she could see how badly Aunt Tate needed to hear it.

“And, I’ve made your favorite chicken and dumplings for dinner. Wash up and then come help me with the snap beans. It’s about time I taught you to cook.”

While Lily sat on the kitchen stool and broke the crisp beans into pieces in a big white mixing bowl, Aunt Tate told Lily stories from when Mama and Aunt Tate were girls. She even showed Lily a little sickle-shaped scar on the back of her left hand where Mama had used a willow whip to attack her big sister. “We didn’t always get along,” Aunt Tate said. “But I always loved your mama. I just want for you to remember that she was a real person, with real faults. We always put the dead on a pedestal, but they were real humans, just like us. They made mistakes, just like us.”

Lily had just finished setting the table when Uncle Miles came through the kitchen door carrying a teeny-tiny guitar under his arm. Lily couldn’t help but hope it was a gift for her, a reward for keeping their secret.

“Oh no! You didn’t!” Aunt Tate said, laughing. “Oh, this is just plain funny!”

Lily had never before seen her aunt get the giggles. Aunt Tate used the hem of her apron to wipe the tears from the corners of her eyes. “You don’t have a musical bone in your body, old man. What on earth possessed you?” To Lily, she said, “Don’t forget the bread.”

Lily opened the bread box and stacked six slices of Wonder Bread on a plate. She twirled the plastic bag closed and used Aunt Tate’s wooden clothespin to reseal it. From the corner of her eye, she watched as Uncle Miles set the child-sized guitar on the chair next to the prayer shawl Aunt Tate was knitting. He rolled up his sleeves before washing his hands.

“Got it at Pawn City,” he said, lathering his hands. “Dirt cheap.” He was clearly more than a little pleased with himself.

“It shoulda been free,” Aunt Tate said, carefully ladling the chicken and dumplings into a deep white tureen. “No one in their right mind would buy that. A ukulele, Miles?”

“This is a ukulele?” Lily asked, gingerly plucking a string on the instrument.

“It’s Hawaiian.” Uncle Miles pushed Lily’s hand away. “And it’s not a plaything.”

“You can’t even read music.” Aunt Tate sat down and scooted her chair in. “Here,” she said, handing him the tureen. “And what were you doing at the pawnshop?”

“Stopped in on my way home. Just lookin’.” Uncle Miles gave himself a generous helping of chicken and dumplings.

“Talk about money down the drain.” Aunt Tate shook her head.

Lily found it strange that any part of her could feel sorry for Uncle Miles. And to realize that it was Aunt Tate who held the upper hand, not her uncle.

“You’ll see,” he said. “And you’ll be begging me to serenade you.” Uncle Miles laid aside his knife and fork, floated one hand in the air, and began singing a Patsy Cline song.

His voice was awful, and Lily couldn’t help it—she laughed into her hand and looked across the table at her aunt, who stuck her fingers in her ears, rolled her eyes, and smiled right back at Lily.

AUNT TATE HAD been wrong about Lily being able to leave her sorrow behind in the house that used to be home. Sorrow was not so easily fooled; it stuck to the soles of Lily’s feet and dogged her every step. It was an undercurrent to every breath.

Lily stood on the sidewalk in front of Aunt Tate ’s American Beauty rosebush. Making sure that the coast was clear, she dropped down on all fours and began dragging her right knee along the rough pavement, shredding the skin. It burned, but she kept going, checked the raw skin often, and only stopped when she was certain that the wound was serious enough to merit Aunt Tate’s attention. The blood ran down Lily’s leg, into the top of her knee sock. Straightening her cotton twill dress, Lily picked up her schoolbooks and went inside.

Aunt Tate said, “You need to be more careful,” as she painted Lily’s knee with the bright red Mercurochrome that Dawn had called monkey’s blood. When Aunt Tate softly placed a square of gauze over the skinned knee, when she used the fingernail scissors to cut strips of white adhesive tape and was careful not to hurt Lily as she pressed the tape to Lily’s leg, Lily felt cared for, reassured. As if she mattered.

Lily created other injuries. She “fell” off of a curb and for good measure bravely struck her ankle three times with the heaviest rock she could find. She knocked her forehead against a doorknob. She burst her lower lip and gave herself a black eye on a rung of the playground ladder. Yet, it wasn’t until Aunt Tate taught Lily how to use a razor blade to scrape hard-water stains from windowpanes that Lily realized she could turn the blade on herself, at last finding blissful release.

LILY’S TEACHER ANNOUNCED that there was a special, last-day-of-school assembly. Along with her fourth-grade classmates, Lily sat on the polished gymnasium floor and then looked up to see the Aviator standing at the podium. He wore his navy blue dress uniform with the gold wings and rows of medals and ribbons, and in his hand was his uniform cap.

“I’m here today as the special guest of Lily Decker,” he said. “Lily, please stand and let your schoolmates thank you for making this happen.”

Basking in the glory, Lily stood, thinking her mouth could not stretch widely enough. All the kids who’d pointedly skirted around the girl of contagious calamity now cheered loudly.

The Aviator spoke about flying bombers over Europe during the war, of the new aircraft he was testing high above the plains of Kansas and the entire Midwest, and he cited facts and figures about the speed of the planes, what he saw when he catapulted beyond the clouds. The boys shouted questions about how many enemy cities he’d destroyed, and the girls—who were for the most part absurdly shy—asked questions about whether people on the ground really looked like ants, if the Aviator could see into windows and know what families were having for dinner.

When it was all over, the Aviator asked Lily to come up and stand beside him. She made sure her bobby socks weren’t drooping and smoothed her green-and-blue plaid dress as she walked to the front of the gymnasium. The Aviator held a small corsage with two white roses and some airy greenery.

“This is for my good friend Lily,” he announced as he pinned the corsage to the collar of her dress. Lily’s heart soared—high, into the stratosphere, venturing far beyond any altitude even the Aviator had ever sought.

AUNT TATE SAID Lily could go look at the elephants, but she had to be back in ten minutes. Lily hopped down the bleachers, holding her paper bag of popcorn against her chest so that she wouldn’t spill any. She could hardly wait for the show to begin, because there would be trapeze artists in sparkly costumes and maybe those girls in leotards who twirled on ropes.

Lily made her way past the man selling chameleons tethered on lengths of red thread, and then she stood in the straw in front of the elephants. She decided she liked the one named Bruno best. Lily wanted to run her hand across the terrain of his gray skin, to smooth away his wrinkles and try to make his eyes look less sad. Other kids were holding out fistfuls of peanuts, but Bruno ignored them all. He turned his head and stared morosely at the red-and-white wall of the canvas tent.

“How are you, Miss Lily?”

It was the Aviator, standing at Lily’s elbow. He wore a ball cap and a forest-green T-shirt, and Lily saw half circles of sweat beneath his arms. July’s heat was upon them. Soon enough, there would be days in a row of 100-degree temperatures that left everyone in Salina wet and wilting.

Lily grinned. “Hi,” she managed and then offered the Aviator some of her popcorn. He accepted a few kernels.

“Are you shy today?” he asked. Lily nodded, and he continued. “Well then, how about I ask you questions? All right? Let’s see,” he said, putting his finger to the center of his chin and pretending to be deep in thought. Lily giggled. “Tell me what you like to do. What’s your ten-and-a-half-year-old heart’s favorite pastime?”

Lily was thrilled that he knew enough to add that half year to her age, but she wasn’t used to being asked what she liked. She was used to doing what she was told or suffering the hairbrush—Uncle Miles’ favorite form of punishment, one he reserved for offenses like sassing back or stealing nutty chocolates from the box next to his ugly brown turd of a recliner.

“I like to dance,” Lily said, and then feeling braver, she handed him her bag of popcorn, wiped her hands on her purple shorts, and stepped back from the elephant enclosure. Lily showed the Aviator some of the steps she’d copied from Dinah Shore’s show. She pointed her toes, held her breath, and performed a passable pirouette.

“What’s your favorite kind of dance?” he asked.

“All kinds. Any kind,” she said. “I love the June Taylor Dancers. I’ve seen them on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“They’re pretty good,” he said, munching on a few more pieces of her popcorn.

“They kick like this.” She turned sideways, kicked as high as she could, kept her balance. “And when they make those patterns, like a kaleidoscope—I love that. They’re magic. Oh,” she added, “and the outfits. Sequins and feathers. Headdresses!” Lily could hear how fast the words were coming out of her mouth.

“So, dancing makes you happy.”

“More than that,” Lily said, looking up at him. “When I dance—when I dance, nothing else matters. Everything else disappears. There is only dancing.” That was it. Dancing took her to another world, a world that Uncle Miles could not reach. A world where her lost family was a faint shadow, not an omnipresent, weeping wound. When Lily danced, she was not a misfit. She belonged.

But she couldn’t bring herself to say all of this to the Aviator. Instead, she simply said, “I feel happy when I dance. Free.”

“All right then,” he said, just as the band began playing an upbeat song. Lily was torn—she had to get back to her aunt, but she wished she could ask him to come sit beside her.

“Here.” He handed her the popcorn. “You can’t miss the show.” He held out his hand, and she took it. “I was very glad to see you, Lily Decker. Now, you go have fun, and later you can tell me what you think of pink and green and blue and yellow trained poodles, all right?”

Lily laughed. There couldn’t possibly be such a thing. The Aviator was funny.

“I’m not kidding,” he said, touching the brim of his ball cap in a mock salute. “They dance, too, but not as well as you! Now, promise me you’ll have a good rest of the summer, all right?”

“I will!” Lily skipped a few steps toward the bleachers and then turned to wave to him one more time. She watched him cross the parking lot, stand beside his tuxedo-black Corvette, and light a cigarette.

A week later, Lily received a card in the mail that said she ’d been given a Tah-Dah! Dance Studio scholarship, along with a stipend to pay for a leotard, tights, and appropriate dance shoes. It was signed “Your Secret Benefactor.” Aunt Tate said, “Someone has money to burn” but otherwise manifested no curiosity. And so after school Lily rode her faded red bicycle to the studio. It gave her two days a week when she was out of the house, free from chores and the lead-weight sensation of knowing Uncle Miles was due to come through the kitchen door, smelling of oil and diesel and sweat.

UNCLE MILES SAID, “Tonight we experiment.”

September’s full moon through the window made everything silvery bright, lit the edges of things, made silhouettes of her desk lamp and her bureau with her ballerina jewelry box. Lily jammed the ends of her fingers into her mouth, bit down to keep quiet. She squeezed her eyes shut, tight. Warm tears eased their way from the corners of her eyes, ran into her hair, and wet her pillowcase.

Uncle Miles put his mouth to the center of her. He was moaning, which made a buzzing bee vibration that journeyed from his throat, his lips, to her core. And then she felt the growing heat of her own flesh in response. She fought against it but couldn’t help it. “Oh!” she cried, a surprised baby-bird voice. “Oh, oh, oh!” He held her pelvis as if it were a bowl.

She thought that she might explode, that she was descending, plummeting, and it was release and good and hot and out of her control and sick and bad a disease and the worst thing ever that Uncle Miles had done but it felt good. It felt good. It felt good. Oh, no—it felt good. How could her body betray her?

“You like it.” His whisper left a hot brand of accusation against the side of her neck.

Once he was gone, she told herself that tonight was the exception to the rule. Tonight, it was okay to cry. With her face pressed into the wet pillow to muffle the sound of her confusion, Lily cried her shame. Her need. She cried a poisonous blend of gratification and disgust, of wonderment that Uncle Miles had given her pleasure, which was more frightening than any of the painful, awful things he’d done in the past. She cried her rupture, her irreparable breakage.

5

The light from the gooseneck lamp on top of the church organ turned Mrs. Olson’s face cadaver white as she played “O God of Mercy, God of Might.” Seated next to Aunt Tate in the unforgiving wooden pew, twelve-year-old Lily wrapped her arms around her gut, which had harbored a deep, persistent ache since before the second hymn. Finally, Pastor Lester intoned the benediction and released the sanctified congregation.

Lily immediately headed downstairs to the church bathroom, which wasn’t much more than a stingy coat closet. When she looked at the crotch of her panties, she saw blood. Oh no oh no oh no oh no. A string of dark, thick blood dripped from inside her, and there was more blood in the toilet bowl.

Was this God’s doing? Was this one of the things that the all-powerful, vengeful God did to punish bad girls? She knew that what she did with Uncle Miles was evil, and God did seem so very fond of bloody atonement. Lily wadded toilet paper into her panties and then sat uncomfortably through her sixth-grade Sunday school lesson.

Aunt Tate was waiting in the car when Lily finished class. “What did you learn today?” she asked, waving to some of her Bible-study friends like Margaret Steepleton, who kept a handkerchief tucked between her bulwark breasts and blew her nose loudly at least seventeen thousand times during the pastor’s tedious sermon.

“The story of the prodigal son,” Lily dutifully reported. Then she took a deep breath, steeling herself to tell Aunt Tate about the blood and possible impending doom. “Aunt Tate? I’m bleeding.”

Aunt Tate turned to look at Lily. “Where? Did you fall?”

“No.” It was hard, but Lily knew she needed help, that something was horribly wrong. “Down there,” Lily whispered, looking out the windshield and across the street to the Texaco station, thinking about the smell of gasoline, the way oil puddles on the asphalt formed galaxies of rainbows. “It hurts,” she said, still avoiding her aunt’s stare and holding a hand to the ache in her belly.

“Between your legs.”

“Yes.”

Aunt Tate closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead rested on the steering wheel.

So, it was true. Lily was going to die. Or at least she was very sick, and there would be hospital bills. She’d bankrupt them. They would be roaming the streets, penniless.

Margaret Steepleton knocked on Aunt Tate’s window. “Tate, honey? You all right?”

Aunt Tate rolled down her window. “She ’s got the curse,” she said, tipping her head in Lily’s direction. “First time.”

Mrs. Steepleton leaned in the window and beamed across the seat at Lily, “Congratulations, sweetheart! Now you’re a woman!”

The curse? Since the accident, Lily had always known she was cursed. But was it a curse simply to be a woman?

“Lord, help me.” Aunt Tate sighed as Margaret Steepleton trundled off to join her husband and two boys. Her aunt’s voice was flat and unyielding, like the iron skillet that wouldn’t fit in the cupboard and so sat on the stove’s back burner, black, heavy, and inert.

They stopped at the drugstore on the way home, and Aunt Tate bought Lily a sanitary belt and a big box of napkins with a picture of a dreamy woman strolling through meadows of flowers. She showed Lily how to wear the belt low on her hips and had Lily practice attaching the napkin tabs snugly to the belt’s metal fittings.

“You’re growing up so fast. A young woman, nearly,” Aunt Tate said wistfully. “So much ahead of you,” she summed up.

“Does the aching go away?” Lily asked, and for a moment she saw confusion on her aunt’s face.

“Oh, the belly pain, you mean. Let’s get the hot water bottle.”

Aunt Tate helped Lily lie down with the soothing heat of the pig-pink water bottle planted squarely over her belly, and they split a special Almond Joy candy bar Aunt Tate called “medicinal under the circumstances.”

Lily fell asleep wondering about the connection between blood and womanhood. She hadn’t been able to make herself ask Aunt Tate why she was bleeding, if it had a purpose, other than inconvenience and ignominy. Was it something to do with God’s unending wrath toward Eve, the curse Aunt Tate talked about? Was that why only women harbored secret, open wounds?

ON SATURDAYS LILY swept and dusted. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen’s green and white linoleum. In the bathroom, she held her breath and washed away the yellow splashes of urine Uncle Miles left on the porcelain toilet bowl.

Alongside Aunt Tate, she learned how to make stew and soups, chipped beef on toast, casseroles, and hash from leftover pot roast. She mastered pastry, crimping a perfect blanket of crust over apples, cherries, or peaches. Aunt Tate taught her to fold laundry properly, how to iron simple things like sheets, pillowcases, and dresser scarves. When Lily conquered the straightforward items, she moved on to more difficult things like Uncle Miles’ work shirts and Aunt Tate ’s cotton blouses.

One afternoon, Lily opened the linen cupboard and shifted a pile of sheets to make room for her fresh ironing. Beneath the sheets, she found a cardboard folder that held a portrait of her parents. Her mother wore a light gray suit with a big chrysanthemum corsage, and her father had his arm about her mother’s shoulders, an unmistakable flash of joy in his eyes that Lily thought she remembered, even if she could no longer hear his voice.

There was a newspaper clipping folded inside, and Lily read the article from the Salina Journal dated June 10, 1957, four years ago. It featured a picture of her family’s car, mangled and topless. Another picture showed the Aviator’s brand-new, black 1957 Chrysler 300-C, which the caption said was a production-line muscle car with enough power to reach one hundred miles per hour in second gear. At the time of the accident, the Aviator was traveling an estimated 130 miles per hour.

Lily saw decapitated and ten-year-old Dawn Marie Decker thrown from the car and the miracle of Lily Francine Decker’s survival. Sheriff Ingram was described as having hot tears in his eyes when he said that no one would ever know why the Buick had been traveling on the wrong side of the road. “Could be the Deckers swerved to avoid hitting a coyote,” he’d said. “Maybe a raccoon or a skunk. But it’ll be a mystery, always.” Ingram said the thirty-seven-year-old Aviator would not be cited, although he ’d been cautioned to watch his speed. “No one to blame,” the sheriff concluded.

Decapitated. Lily felt the word as a sharp, unexpected blow to her solar plexus. She hadn’t known. They’d kept it from her—the gruesome death of her parents. And the Aviator hadn’t told her the truth, not the whole truth. The Aviator had let her believe that the accident was his fault, but Lily’s father had been driving on the wrong side of the road.

Lily tucked the clipping and portrait back beneath the sheets and closed the cupboard door. She put it all back where it was supposed to be, buried and hidden away.

SHE LICKED HER fingers and touched herself the way Uncle Miles had taught her. She wet her fingers in her mouth once more and sent them back as quickly as possible, not wanting to lose the sensation she was building, a skyscraper of guilty pleasure and release. She needed to keep the pressure steady and so had the idea to wedge the satiny edge of her blanket between her legs. She squeezed with her thighs, tightened, released and tightened her muscles until it arrived—that sensation of heat and freedom.

After Lily was done, she swore she would never do it again. She would stop. No one had told her it was a sin or bad or sick, but she knew it was. If it had to do with Uncle Miles, it was bad. The knowledge of her perversity was solid.

Lily didn’t understand any of it—not the irresistible impulse to engage or any reason behind the pleasure. It was a disgusting need that Uncle Miles had ignited within her. Surely other girls didn’t feel this way, know these things, do these things. Her very core was diseased.

“I’ve been looking forward to this all day,” he said one summer night when Lily felt a soft, cooling breeze coming through her open window. The Sorensons’ yippy little dog had just finished a protracted, panicked bout of barking. Uncle Miles pushed up her nightgown and ran his rough hand up her leg. “You’re getting such long legs,” he said. “Young filly.” Uncle Miles’ hand reached her crotch. “What’s this?” he said. “Off. Get them off of you.”

“But—”

“Then I’ll do it.” He slipped his hand into the waistband of her panties and yanked. The sanitary belt stayed with the panties, slid down with them as he tugged. He spotted the pad.

“You’ve got your monthlies?” he said, pulling back.

She was surprised that Aunt Tate hadn’t told him, but she was instantly grateful that her aunt had kept it to herself.

“Since when?” Uncle Miles asked, and Lily realized that for some incomprehensible reason, Uncle Miles was suddenly worried.

“A few months.”

“Oh.” He reached for the bedcovers and threw them over her exposed body. “Shit.”

With the exception of a sporadic “damnation” when the wrench slipped and cut him or when the lawn mower refused to start, Uncle Miles rarely swore.

“Then that’s that,” he said, standing and looking down at her. He walked out of her room and actually closed the door completely, the click of the latch an unprecedented explosion of sound.

Lily lay there, trying to comprehend. Some part of her knew Uncle Miles was gone forever, that he wouldn’t come back. But why not? What had she done? And why was even a fraction of her feeling sadly rejected, as if she’d failed? Why was she anything other than joyfully relieved? Now what had she done wrong?

THROUGHOUT LILY’S EARLY teenage years, the Aviator continued to pay her dance school tuition. Lily studied tap and modern dance, which Aunt Tate pronounced “a good deal of meaningless thrashing.” Lily learned ballroom dancing and started to work on ballet positions (à la seconde, effacé), but Aunt Tate couldn’t afford the toe shoes, and because Lily would never presume to ask the Aviator for more, ballet remained a dream. Still, she could jitterbug and do the Charleston and shimmy and mimic Gene Kelly’s easy, athletic leaps and Cyd Charisse ’s sexy, long-limbed elegance. An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain instantly became her favorite movies when she watched them as reruns on Dialing for Dollars after school.

The Aviator faithfully attended all of Lily’s Tah-Dah! dance performances, and Lily knew he ’d be at the upcoming recital of Enchanted Woodlands, too. Some of the younger girls chose to be squirrels. One was a big, clumsy bear, and several flitted across the stage as chattering birds. This time Lily was nervous—largely (and as usual) because of the pressure she’d put on herself. With hard work, she’d earned a solo, which meant she could choreograph the final piece of the evening for herself.

Lily wanted to be different, to perform something that transcended childhood and matched the fact that she would soon be moving on to high school. In the library, she learned the word diaphanous and read the myth of Daphne, the beautiful nymph who spurned every suitor, even Apollo. When Daphne asked her father, a river god, to help her escape from Apollo, her father turned her into a laurel tree. It was an abominable, cruel solution. A daughter asked for help, and her father’s incomprehensible response was to sentence her to eternity as a tree, with roots bound to the earth.

Lily wanted to free Daphne—at least for a while—and so Lily’s Daphne leapt onto the empty stage and danced as if escape were possible. She wore a green leotard, chestnut brown tights, and she’d sewn lengths of pink, rose, and fuchsia ribbons to the arms of her leotard. A diadem of leaves interspersed with ribbons crowned her loose, flowing hair. She felt free, transported. And beautiful.

Lily covered every corner of the boards with her leaps, and she let her arms float in graceful, ever-moving arcs so that her ribbons wove patterns about her. She threw her head back, closed her eyes in rapture as if she were thrusting her defiant face into Apollo’s sun. Then, in keeping with the myth’s inevitably, Lily began to freeze. Mustering great dramatic authority, Lily stuck her feet to the floor of the stage. Inch by inch, with exquisite control and painful slowness, Lily stilled her body until only her fingertips quivered with musical breezes. The ribbons hung lifeless. She held her mouth to the audience in a silent, open O—an arrested scream.

There was a long silence, and then they applauded. Someone even shouted “Bravo!” Lily bowed, letting her ribbons trail on the floor of the stage, and as she calmed her breath, she felt the audience’s energy lift her skyward. She kept her eyes closed as a beatific glow possessed her. When one of the younger dance students touched her arm, Lily opened her eyes to a bouquet of lilies and baby’s breath. She cradled the flowers in her arms and made a final bow, hoping the Aviator knew her thanks—her debt—was to him.

In the hushed car on the way home, Aunt Tate said, “What do you call that?”

“What?”

“That kind of flailing.”

“Interpretive dance. It was my interpretation of the character, through dance.”

Aunt Tate sighed. “Well, I guess as long as we ’re not paying for it.”

A voice inside Lily said, Don’t let her take this from you. Still, it hurt. Wasn’t there anything she could do that would make her aunt proud?

Back at the house, Aunt Tate said that lilies smelled of funerals, and so Lily gladly set the vase on the nightstand next to her bed, where the scent of the Aviator’s tribute would perfume her sleep. Lying in the dark, still too fired up to sleep, Lily relived her performance, and she knew Aunt Tate and Uncle Miles had not succeeded. Lily had found a way; she ’d done it. The audience had not only seen her, they’d loved her. Lily Decker was not invisible.

A COUPLE DAYS after her dance recital, Aunt Tate left a gift on Lily’s bedside table, next to the vase of fading lilies. When Lily tore open the wrapping paper, she found a crystalline box with a butterfly suspended inside, its wings spread wide as if in optimistic flight. The creature’s wings were a stunning sapphire blue—vibrant, even in death. A card written in her aunt’s cursive read To match your beautiful eyes, and because you have more spirit than I ever did. And then, the most amazing, bewildering part of all—Aunt Tate had written, “Love, Aunt Tate.” LOVE.

6

In high school, the bones of Lily’s face emerged like the visage of a goddess rising from a deep seabed. She was no longer merely pretty or interesting; her beauty arrested. When she walked the sidewalks of downtown Salina, men spun in their tracks to look at her. Women eyed her with a mixture of studied curiosity and envy. Once, when she was grocery shopping with Aunt Tate, a complete stranger stopped to say, “Now I understand what was meant by ‘the face that launched a thousand ships.’ ” To which Aunt Tate replied, “Well, we ’re in Kansas, and I don’t see any ocean, do you?” At that, the woman walked on, but she turned briefly to shake her head and give Lily a secret, understanding smile.

Any baby fat that had dared to linger now melted from Lily’s body. Standing five foot ten, she had a dancer’s slim hips, abundant breasts, and she wore her hair bobbed and blunt cut with glowering bangs. Although it was already passé, Lily cultivated beatnik black, morose cool, and mystery touched by a hint of simmering, bedrock rage. She lined her eyes heavily in black, and the look suited her in a way that the perky flips, teased mountaintops of hair, and bright polyester fashions of the midsixties did not.

The Aviator remained in her life, a steady presence, a secret ally. For her sixteenth birthday in 1965 he gave Lily a light blue suitcase record player and fifteen dollars she could use to buy whatever albums she wanted. It was Dylan who spoke most clearly. She took to heart his advice that if you weren’t busy being born, then you must be busy dying. She was a disciple of his cynicism, his challenges to everything from teachers to the president to God. Dylan was her fellow iconoclast; like Lily he distrusted absolutely everyone. With the volume turned down low to keep Uncle Miles from shouting at her, Lily dreamed of highways, of the infinite variety of mountains, of escape.

At age sixteen, Lily walked into Masterson’s Grocers and applied for a job. She needed spending money for makeup and sewing supplies, and Uncle Miles had decreed that it was time she contributed to her upkeep, which he set at thirty-five dollars per month. The manager, an already obese twenty-year-old named Harold, had dense patches of acne on his cheeks and daubs of ketchup on his mint-green clip-on bowtie. He hitched up his pants and slowly eyed the curves of Lily’s body, letting her know in no uncertain terms why he’d be hiring an inexperienced girl. Harold handed her two pink-and-white uniforms to try on for size, and as she undressed next to shelves of canned goods in a back stockroom, she wondered if he was standing at a peephole, watching. Lily imagined his gaping mouth, his widened eyes, and she took her time before choosing the shorter, tighter dress, the one that would best follow the contours of her body.

Harold assigned her to mark prices and stock shelves—an obvious ploy to have her bend over repeatedly, lean over cases with her box cutter and reveal her cleavage. She was on display, just like the towers of canned peaches and pyramids of apples and oranges on the This Week Only! promotions at the endcaps of the grocery aisles. But Lily didn’t mind. The grocery store was merely another stage, another setting in which she could experiment, learn what effect her lush body had on men.

She watched Harold’s face, the faces of men who came in weary from driving a combine all day, their necks and arms dusted in wheat chaff. Lily learned how to signal bashful innocence, along with a sort of vulnerable availability. She learned how to encourage men to help her when she couldn’t quite—not quite but almost—reach the shelves where the Corn Flakes, Froot Loops, and Alpha-Bits cereal boxes lived. She came to realize that men didn’t want to see competent independence; they wanted to see a slice of need. So she gave them that. Lily knew, too, that none of them considered that she might be intelligent. Her agile mind was not something a single, solitary man cared to consider.

EVERYONE WAS READING Truman Capote’s new book about the murders in Holcomb, just a couple hundred miles southwest of Salina. Even Uncle Miles had thumbed through the novel, afterwards puffing out his chest and announcing that those two killers would never have gotten through the door of his home. Lily imagined her uncle ineffectively bonking one of the killers over the head with his dusty Hawaiian ukulele, like the cartoon horse Quick Draw McGraw’s alter ego, the masked and black-caped El Kabong. Kabong!

Lily also thought a lot about the killer Perry Smith, about his childhood, his longing for love and his constant leg pain. It threw her—that Perry could be the sympathetic one in the duo, the one with artistic aspirations, but the one, ultimately, who did the butchering. Lily also wondered about the murdered teenage girl who had hidden her watch in the toe of her shoe. The unfairness of it all. Even if you followed all the rules—got straight A’s as Lily did—it was no guarantee against wanton destruction.

The state of Kansas had hanged the two men last year, in 1965. For so long, it seemed to be the only thing on the news. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock murdered Kansas’ innocence. They killed the myth of idyllic, small-town safety far from the big cities with their slums, poverty, and drugs. Now, people in Salina locked their doors at night. And yet, Lily didn’t share the titillating fears of the girls at school; she knew that danger didn’t necessarily come from a stranger.

LILY STOOD WITH a towel around her neck and used the ends to catch streams of sweat. They’d been practicing flick kicks, falls, and recovers. Effortlessly, she folded herself in half, stretching her hamstrings.

“Lily? Might we take a few minutes to talk about your future?” Mrs. Baumgarten, the owner of the Tah-Dah! Dance Studio, leaned against a nearby wall.

Lily was still awash in the complete relaxation she felt after a hard workout, and her thoughts had been elsewhere. “What?” she asked. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Baumgarten, I didn’t hear you.”

“I was saying that I know you plan to dance, but what kind of dance career do you have in mind? Where do you plan to go from here, when you leave Salina?”

Lily took a deep, luxurious breath and tilted her neck to one side until her ear nearly met her shoulder. “I was thinking Hollywood or New York, I guess.” It was the first time she’d ever dared to speak her dream.

Mrs. Baumgarten continued to watch Lily as she stretched. “Your forte is jazz. That’s where I see your skill, your aptitude. And it’s what best fits your body—you have to pair your body with the right movements. It’s as much about a look as it is about technique. And, actually, I have an idea for you. Are you ready?” Lily’s teacher smiled mischievously. “Viva Las Vegas!”

“Elvis? Ann-Margret?” Lily smiled.

“For you, for dance,” Mrs. Baumgarten replied. “Las Vegas is where there ’s an exciting, growing jazz dance scene. You’d find it easier to break in there than L.A. or New York. You’d gain valuable experience, build your dance résumé. Then you can try for the more competitive venues.”

“You think I should head to Sin City?” Lily could easily imagine her aunt and uncle ’s response to that particular plan.

Mrs. Baumgarten continued as if Lily hadn’t spoken. “The casinos compete with each other for floor shows, dance numbers. And celebrities flock there to perform, to see and be seen.” Lily’s teacher began counting off on her fingers. “Debbie Reynolds. Liberace. Judy Garland. The Rat Pack. Sammy Davis, Jr.,” she said with great emphasis, knowing that Lily was wild about his tap dancing. “Think what you could learn, what you’d see. The exposure you’d have.”

Before Lily left that night, Mrs. Baumgarten handed her a stack of Dance Magazine. Then she leaned close, and Lily felt her teacher’s kiss on her cheek, a brief brush of tenderness. “We’ll talk again,” she said.

At home in her room, Lily used the photos in Dance Magazine to prod her body into new, more complicated movements and configurations. Looking into the mirror above her dresser bureau, she mimicked the professional dancers’ hand gestures, the way they held their arms. She jutted her chin, narrowed her eyes, dared her mirror image the way that Nureyev dared the camera, and wished she had his boldness. She ’d been twelve when Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union, and she remembered watching news footage of him striding across an airfield in Paris, hearing Uncle Miles say that the sissy’s rejection served the commies right. “He can never go back? Never go home again?” she ’d asked her uncle. “Never,” Uncle Miles pronounced, his fingers dribbling flakes of tobacco into the fold of his cigarette paper. “He ’ll never see his family again,” he ’d said with an oddly self-satisfied smile.

Lily began to believe Las Vegas was the answer, and she started to plan. She pulled out the atlas in the school library, studied the route from Salina to Vegas, and counted the state lines she’d cross. She studied the figures in her savings passbook, totaled up how much more she’d be able to save between now and graduation, in just slightly over a year. She’d need bus fare, plus spending money to keep her afloat until she landed a job. Her columns of figures made the whole enterprise increasingly real, and Lily volunteered for extra shifts at the grocery store, just to see the totals multiply satisfyingly. Lily felt a burst of hope. The tallies told her she could do this—would do this. Escape was not only possible; it was within her grasp.

ONE EVENING WHEN Lily, now a senior in high school, got off work, the Aviator was waiting for her. He leaned against the waxed black shine of his car, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses.

“You need to watch yourself,” he said without preamble. “You’re asking for trouble.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“What you’re doing. With men. I’ve seen you,” he said, dropping the end of his cigarette to the asphalt and crushing it beneath his boot. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”

She couldn’t see his eyes, but the set jaw, the taut striations of his neck muscles, told her that he was dead serious.

“I’m not doing anything with men,” Lily said. “I don’t even date.” High school boys stared at Lily but were too intimidated to approach her, and she did nothing to encourage them.

“Boys are one thing.” The Aviator picked up the cigarette butt and folded it into his handkerchief. “Leading men on—men who would be only too happy to take what they see—that’s another story entirely.”

“You’re talking about flirting? You’re telling me not to flirt? Who do you think you are?” She paused and then daringly added, “It’s not as if you’re my father.”

The Aviator moved to within a foot of her, and she felt the implicit threat of his height, his muscles. His shadow covered her. But there was a surprising tenderness in his voice when he said, “No, Lily, I’m not your father. I am your friend, and I’m trying to watch out for you.”

Before she could come up with a sarcastic, dismissive response, he climbed into his car, started the engine, and left her there to decide.

LILY FREQUENTED THE thrift store in the basement of the Episcopal church. She’d just this year discovered that the wealthier women of the congregation regularly donated nearly new clothing; some pieces even bore designer labels. Lily had found a pair of Balenciaga boots’black suede that came up and over her knees—for just five dollars. And, there was more: silk blouses, sunglasses, fringed leather purses. She found more fashionable pieces and at better prices than she could at J.C. Penney or Sears, and no one was the wiser.

When she came across a particularly pretty cardigan sweater in a lovely teal, she brought it home for her aunt who, standing before her bedroom mirror, said, “But with this open weave. It’s a little impractical, isn’t it? What will the girls in Bible-study class say?”

In that moment, Lily felt sympathy for the girl who’d been named Tatum, who’d endured a younger sister who was much, much prettier than she, who’d had to watch her sister marry well. And then who’d been saddled with a bewildering, cast-off child and a husband who night after night sat in his chair, adhered like fungus to the Naugahyde. Lily saw her aunt’s stoicism, her self-defensive rigidity, how desperately she tried to conceal her confusion and fears of inadequacy. And Lily saw that her aunt would never, ever go anywhere. She would never leave Kansas.

It made Lily wonder. Would Mama be thick around the middle, and would Daddy be balding and forgetful? Would they still live in Salina, or would they have moved to a new town, to new sights? What would Dawn be like? Would she be in nursing college or married to a farmer or a railroad engineer or an aircraft mechanic? Would she already have toddlers who would call excitedly for Aunt Lily when she stopped by with Popsicles? Would Dawn make Mama’s Swedish meatball recipe and plan elaborate picnics next to the Smoky Hill River? Would she admire the dance costumes Lily designed and applaud when Lily stood on stage?

“Do you ever think about them?” Lily asked in her sentimental moment of weakness.

“Never,” Aunt Tate said, pulling her arms from the sweater and heading for her bedroom. “And you shouldn’t either,” she added. “Pure self-indulgence.”

Lily heard her aunt’s closet door open and close with finality, and she knew Aunt Tate would never permit herself the treat of the delicate sweater. She’d keep it in that closet, undisturbed, and she’d instead relish her ramrod austerity. Lily nearly went to embrace her aunt. Tate was suddenly such a sad creature, believing that her habitual ferocity could protect her from loss and pain. Walls, Lily thought, keep out the good as well as the bad. She was determined to remember that, not to let fear overtake her, never to risk losing her joy.

FOR THE FIRST Annual Tah-Dah! Dance Studio Scholarship Fundraiser, Mrs. Baumgarten rented the Fox-Watson movie theater on South Santa Fe Avenue and managed to get ahold of a print of Ocean’s 11 with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Angie Dickinson and—best of all—Sammy Davis, Jr. Lily sold all of the five-dollar tickets she could at school and work, and she bought a Simplicity pattern for a clean-lined, spaghetti-strap dress. She made it in dark gold satin and hemmed it so that it ended two thirds of the way up her thighs. Even though it was almost too warm for them, she paired the dress with the Balenciaga boots, and she tied a length of black satin ribbon around her neck as a choker. For added drama, Lily moistened her cake of black liner and outlined her eyes as usual, and then she added a third dark line along the crease of her eyelid, like Twiggy. Using an eyebrow pencil, she extended the outer edges of her eyebrows. She applied a pair of false eyelashes and a light-blue cream eye shadow, and finished with Yardley beige-pink lipstick.

“You’re not leaving my house dressed like a whore,” Uncle Miles said when he spied her trying to make a quick exit through the kitchen door. He put both his hands on her forearm and twisted them in opposite directions—a version of what the kids called an Indian burn. When he released her arm, Lily stepped back and accidentally smacked the back of her head against the furnace door.

She felt her upper lip reflexively lift into a snarl. “You’re calling me a whore?” she said, and then waited a meaningful beat. “Quite a statement for a man who Fucks. Little. Girls,” she spat, and then caught sight of Aunt Tate standing in the entry to the kitchen.

Aunt Tate sagged heavily against the doorjamb as if her skeleton had been dissolved in acid and all that was left of her was limp, loose skin. Lily cut past Uncle Miles and reached for her aunt’s arm.

“Stay away! Get away from me! I don’t need your help!” Heavy-limbed, Aunt Tate kept a balancing hand against the wall until she reached the kitchen stool and dropped into it. She pressed her lips together, looked from Lily to her husband and then back again. In her aunt’s eyes, Lily saw a teeter-totter of indecision, of weights and balances. And then, it happened. Lily knew before her aunt said a word, and so the words when they came were mere confirmation: “Your uncle ’s right. You look like a hooker.”

Lily closed her eyes, dropped her chin to her chest, and slumped against the wall. She wanted darkness. And tears. The release of ten years’ worth of tears—everything she’d held back seemingly forever. But she would never give them that. Instead, she envisioned using her nails to pinch the soft skin inside her upper arm and thought about the relief of leaving half-moon bruises. Or maybe stabbing a fork into her thigh. Razor blades. Any kind of distracting pain.

A thick silence settled over the kitchen. Lily thought she smelled the garlic and onion of ten thousand meals, the sulfur of rotting eggs, hamburger meat gone bad.

Don’t let them diminish you, Scallywag, she told herself, and then, wordlessly, Lily straightened her shoulders and left through the kitchen door. No one tried to stop her. When she reached the curb, she used trembling fingers to light a cigarette and stood in the spot where she habitually waited for her friend from dance class to come pick her up. Even though the evening was mild, she wrapped her arms around her shoulders and began shivering. Her whole body vibrated; she could feel her legs shaking, her lips trembling. She shuddered—big shudders that hunched her shoulders suddenly, made her throw her head back as if she were having a seizure. She stomped her feet, did a little softshoe to warm herself, tried to trick her body out of its inclination toward a state of shock. She felt as though she’d been hit, and hit hard, by something harsh and unforgiving.

Lily looked back at the scene that played out in the kitchen window. She saw Uncle Miles lower his bulk into one of the kitchen dinette chairs, Aunt Tate frozen in place on the pedestal of the kitchen step stool. They made her think of a brightly lit department-store window display—something some deluded romantic would call Domestic Bliss.

It had been coming, this revelation. Inevitable. Barreling down the pike toward them, for years. And now it was done. Anticlimactic.

She ’d been right never to have told Aunt Tate. Look at her there, diminished, stalled on that kitchen stool. Aunt Tate wouldn’t have stood up for a younger Lily any more than she did now. She wouldn’t have protected Lily. She wouldn’t have chosen Lily over her husband. No, instead she would have said, No, no, no. I don’t think so not the man I married. There was too much Aunt Tate would have to admit to herself, were she to hear what Lily had to say.

Anger born of rejection bubbled up, and Lily was tempted to go back inside. She wanted destruction. She wanted to pull down Aunt Tate ’s curtain rods, leave craters where the bolts had once fit so snugly within the wall. She wanted to empty the kitchen cabinets of the china Aunt Tate had bought using the Green Stamps Lily had so faithfully pasted into booklets. Lily pictured hurling those cheap plates against the wall. She imagined shackling Uncle Miles to a radiator, holding the flame of a lighter beneath his chin, and making Aunt Tate watch it all. But mostly, Lily wanted to make herself bleed. To slice the tender, sweet skin of her forearms until red rivers flowed and her true wounds were rendered visible.

THE FOX-WATSON THEATRE, where the Tah-Dah! fundraiser took place, was a wonderful art deco concoction of crystal chandeliers, a fantastic stairway, and luxurious, gold-leaf highlights. Still feeling an uneasy trembling in her legs, Lily stood in the lobby and leaned against the cigarette machine, taking it all in. Mrs. Baumgarten appeared in a silk caftan and turban, rings and bangles and long, dangling earrings. The silk was tangerine with a pattern of tumbling crimson tulips.

She kissed Lily on both cheeks and gently, inconspicuously, took Lily’s forearm in her hands. She held Lily’s arm between them, intimate. “Who?” she asked, indicating the bruise that was surfacing like lies long buried.

But Lily just smiled weakly into her teacher’s face. She didn’t want a scene, and it was too late for remedies. She just wanted out. Out of Salina in four weeks and six days. She covered her arm with the opposite hand, held it against her waist, and failed to come up with any response, even though her teacher’s sympathetic gaze lingered.

The movie was disappointing. Sammy Davis, Jr., sang, but he didn’t dance—not as he had in Robin and the 7 Hoods, when he twirled guns, tap-danced on and off of a bar and a roulette table, and exuded boundless energy. Still, there were Vegas dancers in the background in several scenes, and Lily focused on those segments, memorizing every detail. The girls’ outfits were perfect—lots of plumage, bared legs with beautiful pointed heels and sky-high kicks.

After the film, people milled about in the lobby saying their goodbyes. Lily spotted a lovely woman standing beside the Aviator. His date wore an aqua jacket and skirt, and the collar of a bone-colored silk blouse peeked shyly from beneath her short jacket. She had brown hair cut just below chin level and a delicate nose. Rarified, Lily thought, like Jackie Kennedy—sophisticated, simple. But maybe just a little bit dull and unimaginative.

The Aviator left his date’s side and crossed the room to Lily. He took in the tall suede boots, the now much-wrinkled homemade dress, and he ran a hand across her hair, smoothing flyaway strands. His touch sent a shock through her. “You’re beautiful,” he said. Then he seemed to sense the intimacy of his grooming of her, and he shoved his hand into the pocket of his blazer. “You’re so grown-up,” he said wistfully before turning to find his date.

Lily stood there, becalmed, as she watched him walk away. It had never before occurred to her that the Aviator could have any woman in his life, other than Lily.

A FEW AFTERNOONS later, Aunt Tate found Lily at the sewing machine in the corner of the dining room and asked, “What are you working on?”

Other than perfunctory, necessary phrases, it was the first time Aunt Tate had spoken to her since the night of the fundraiser. Lily recognized the overture, released the pressure on the sewing machine’s knee-operated control lever, and peered up at her aunt, who looked completely enervated, as if she hadn’t slept in weeks. Aunt Tate was pathetic, Lily realized—a weak, albino stalk of a flower struggling to grow in the dark of a closet shelf.

I’ll escape, Lily thought, but this poor woman will never leave. I’m stronger than the both of them. And so, feeling somewhat conciliatory, Lily said, “This is my final project for Miss Lambkin’s class.” She held up the deep rose brocade. “It’ll be a lined evening-dress jacket, something I can wear over a skirt, maybe dress up with a piece of costume jewelry.” She ’d already sewn a pair of bell-bottom pants out of the material and loved the way the fabric stretched across what some of the other dance students referred to as “the Grand Canyon of your hips.” That canyon took two hundred sit-ups a night on the rag rug next to Lily’s bed, but it was worth it.

“Pretty,” Aunt Tate said. “But it’s musty in here. You should open a window.” She touched Lily’s shoulder fleetingly, so lightly that it could instead have been the minute brush of a passing moth’s wings.

“Aunt Tate?”

Her aunt paused but kept her back to Lily as if she somehow knew that Lily was going to take that one, placatory gesture and use it to open a chasm in their lives.

“I’m not a liar. I never have been,” Lily said and watched her aunt’s back stiffen.

Without a word, Aunt Tate left the room, and soon Lily could hear her in the kitchen, putting together the evening meat loaf.

Lily sat with her hands in her lap. She picked a few spent threads from her jeans. It was only when she heard her aunt sniffle and then blow her nose that she knew Aunt Tate was remembering all the nights Uncle Miles had left their bed and made his way down the darkened hallway to Lily.

7

“But I do have a plan,” Lily said as the Aviator stood beside her. Although it was her day off, she was in the produce section of Masterson’s, doing Aunt Tate’s grocery shopping. A couple of women who’d been poking at the pears and cantaloupes looked up, but the Aviator charmed them with a smile, and they returned to their quest for peak ripeness. “I do have a plan,” Lily repeated.

“College?” He filled a paper produce bag with exactly seven Granny Smith apples and folded down the top with precision.

Lily snorted. “No.”

“Why not?”

“For starters, we can’t afford it.”

“But you can.”

“Right,” she said, looking at her aunt’s list, the one her uncle had added to in his left-handed, back-slanting cursive: dow nuts, choclut Marshmello cookys.

The radio station was playing the just released Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Lily heard the lyrics of “She’s Leaving Home.” It was as if the Beatles had written the song just for her. The girl in the song stepped outside her front door and was free. Soon, Lily would do the same.

Seeing her distraction, the Aviator said, “Let’s talk in the parking lot.”

Lily sat in the passenger seat of the Aviator’s Thunderbird and double-checked the change the clerk had given her. She folded the receipt and shoved it all into the front pocket of her hip-hugger jeans.

“You’re a bright, bright girl,” the Aviator began, and she could smell his aftershave—a tart, citrus scent. He was wearing camel-colored khakis and a soft, white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled loosely to his elbows. His fingernails were perfectly manicured, the nails buffed—a decided contrast to the decades of grease that accumulated beneath the nails of Uncle Miles’ sliced and diced mechanic’s hands.

“I’m a dancer. Not a college girl.”

“With an IQ of 155.”

“Who says?”

“Your guidance counselor.” He pushed in the cigarette lighter when he saw her shake a Salem from her pack.

“You were talking to Mrs. Holcomb about me?”

“I was.” He held the hot, orange coil of the lighter to the tip of her cigarette.

“I didn’t even know,” she said, rolling down the window and blowing smoke out into the parking lot. “I purposely did not go in to hear my scores.” Lily noticed that the Aviator smoked Marlboros. “Come to Marlboro Country,” she said, using her deepest voice to imitate the commercial. It fit the Aviator—the long, lean, isolated cowboy who was a man in every sense of the word. Took no guff, lived life his way.

He sighed. “I’m trying to have a meaningful conversation with you.”

“I know,” she said, pulling open the ashtray, tapping her cigarette. It didn’t surprise her that the Aviator’s ashtray looked as if it’d been washed clean in a sink. “You’re a bit of a neat freak, aren’t you?” she said.

“I like to do things right. Which is why I’m trying to talk to you.” Together they watched a young mother pushing a baby stroller while trying to pull up the strap of her shoulder bag. “You realize that 100 is average. A score of 155 is in what’s considered the very superior range.”

She hadn’t. All she knew was that when they took the test, she’d finished an easy twenty minutes before everyone else, and not because she’d put her pencil down and decided not to try.

“Let’s go at it from another angle,” the Aviator said, all efficiency and logic. “What is your plan?”

“To dance.”

“To dance.” He sighed. “A girl with an IQ of 155 should be capable of more specific planning. Even if she has been brought up by heathens.”

“You know, that’s what my dad called them. Heathens,” she said, looking at the Aviator, his upright posture, his flat abdomen. She saw something flash across his face—a mixture of pain and memory. “I’m sorry,” Lily said, touching his forearm. “I didn’t mean …”

“Do you see the irony of this?” he pleaded. “You? Apologizing to me?”

A soft rain had begun to fall, dotting the windshield with drops that ran until they randomly joined each other. Is that what people did, too? Lily wondered. Fall and drift until they collided with one another, the way the Aviator had collided with her ten years ago?

As he rested his fingertips between his brows, she realized her hand was still on his forearm, and she kept it there, increased the pressure. “You’ve been good to me,” she said. “Better to me than anyone else. I’ve always known I could depend on you.”

“Then let me help you. Let me help you with college. There’s money,” he said, now earnestly looking at her. “I’ve saved. You have a college fund. Please don’t throw your life away.”

She took back her hand, stared into her lap. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m grateful, really. But if you truly want to help me, then help me get to Las Vegas. To dance. That’s what I want.”

“Vegas?”

“Mrs. Baumgarten says it’s the best place for jazz dance. A place where I can learn from real pros. Accessible,” she said, coming up with the best word she could think of to summarize the perfection of her Baumgarten-assisted plan.

She watched him struggle with the idea, weighing his will against hers. Finally, he said, “That’s what you really want? You’re certain?”

“It’s the one thing I do know,” she said, simply.

“Well then. I won’t stand in the way of your dream.”

You can’t stand in my way, she thought but did not say. No one can.

She thought about explaining to him that dance was something she needed. How it purified her body. How, when she exerted herself physically, she felt the strength of her limbs, that they belonged only to her. That for however long she moved to music, Uncle Miles’ proprietary insistence became obsolete. But Lily didn’t explain. She could not pass through that stone wall from shameful shadow to bright sunlight—not even for the Aviator.

The rain came down more insistently, and through her open window it wet the sleeve of her paisley-patterned blouse. “I have to get going.” She used her sleeve to wipe water from the car upholstery. “Or I’ll catch hell.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” he said, his voice soft, sad.

Taking the grocery bag into her arms and opening the car door, Lily pretended not to understand.

At dance class the next day, Mrs. Baumgarten delivered one of the Aviator’s books to Lily. It was a gilt-edged 1942 edition of Walt Whitman’s collected poems, and on a plain white strip of paper intended as a bookmark, the Aviator had written “The hungry gnaw that eats me night and day.” I understand this is your need to dance. She saw the line embedded in the poem “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers.” The gift, Lily thought, was not the book. It was his understanding.

IN THE WEE hours of the morning after she graduated as one of the top ten in the class of 1967, Lily left a bouquet of daisies on the dining room table. She set it next to a blouse she’d made for her aunt, along with a card that said Thank You on the front in silver embossed letters. Inside, Lily had written a paragraph of gratitude for taking her in, teaching her, and providing for her. She signed it with love because the other options—sincerely, fondly, best wishes—all seemed needlessly cruel. And maybe—in fact, honestly—she did love her aunt, despite everything. It was no one ’s fault that they were mismatched, just as much or more so than Mama and Aunt Tate had been. And Aunt Tate really had done her best. She simply wasn’t capable of more—or she might long ago have left her husband. Escaped Salina.

Lily didn’t leave anything for Uncle Miles, certainly no forwarding address or information other than that she was leaving Kansas to dance. Then, Lily walked out of the house and climbed into the Aviator’s waiting car.

It was barely after four A.M. when she stood with him in the bus depot parking lot. About her neck Lily wore a fine gold chain on which she’d strung her mother’s engagement and wedding rings—a graduation gift from Aunt Tate. Lily pulled the rings from beneath her blouse, fingered them and thought of her mother’s hands dusted in flour, sewing a button on her father’s shirt, and teaching Lily how to tie her shoes. Had her mother braced those beautiful hands on the dashboard when she saw the Aviator’s car coming?

“I’m sorry I didn’t make you a gift,” Lily told him. “But nothing would have been enough, and I didn’t know what would say goodbye in the right way.”

The Aviator took her chin in his hand. He lifted her face, and for a moment she thought he might kiss her lips. A part of her wanted that. Instead, he slipped his thumb into the cleft of her chin, let it rest there, calm and steadying. She saw that he might cry, and so she took his wrist, closed her eyes, and kissed his beating pulse.

Leaving the Aviator was like leaving her real family, once and for all. The finality of it hit her, hard, and she felt her knees threatening to drop her to the pavement. Instead, she turned and walked into the bus terminal.

AT SOME POINT, every girl in Kansas dressed as Dorothy for Halloween. Pinafore, petticoat, simple white blouse, a straw basket for trick-or-treat candy, demure ankle socks, and red shoes. Goodbye, Dorothy, Lily thought, good riddance to you and all of your “There’s no place like home” bullshit.

Lily remembered when a teacher had told them that Kansas was once a vast inland sea. She ’d hunted fossils with Beverly Ann and tried to imagine how change could have occurred on such a massive scale. She remembered the tadpoles she and Dawn had caught and watched grow. If Kansas could go from sea to prairie, if a frog egg could radically transform itself from an almost-fish with gills to an amphibian that left water for land, then Lily could transform, too.

At the Colorado border Lily decided that her new self deserved a fresh name. Lily Decker would become Ruby Wilde. She thought it worked—her dark red hair, the elegance lent by that extra e, like shoppe.

Lily looked at her palm, studying the lines of influence on her Mount of Venus at the base of her thumb. The lines were said to represent the friends, teachers, enemies, and lovers who change and shape existences. Lily had countless fine lines on her palm, and many of the lines touched, even traveled across her life line. She recognized the deep lines of her childhood: Aunt Tate, Uncle Miles. The Aviator. Her parents. Dawn.

People come and go, Lily thought. Sometimes they vanish unwillingly, the resulting break adamant, like a sharp slap of the ruler across the palm—decisive, unequivocal. Others leave with as little thought as the tip of the finger that snuffs out the life of an ant crawling across a pantry shelf.

Beyond her window, Lily saw fence posts and dull-eyed cattle. Black hawks circled, eyeing the ground for deer mice and lizards. Clouds coalesced and broke into discrete puffs. It was June 9, 1967, exactly ten years since her family had dissolved like sugar stirred into iced tea. Lily settled back into her seat and relaxed. She’d done it. Ruby Wilde was on her way.

1

She waited until the bus was safely within the boundaries of Nevada before opening the Aviator’s envelope.

June 9, 1967

Dear Lily,

There is more where this came from, but this is a start. It should help you to pay your rent and eat decently for a few months, until you find your place in the limelight. You haven’t seen much of the world, and I don’t know if you realize what an unforgiving place it can be. Be careful and pay attention.

If you need anything, call me.

Yours,

Stirling

Unforgiving? He must be kidding. She had already plummeted into the depths of that word, deeper than the Aviator could ever imagine.

He’d enclosed four fifty-dollar bills that looked as if they’d never seen daylight. She discreetly tucked them into her pink leather wallet, wary of the prying eyes of the passenger next to her. Ever since he’d boarded the bus in Utah, she’d felt him watching her. She refolded the Aviator’s letter and slipped it into her fringed leather shoulder bag.

Although they were excruciatingly close to her final destination, the bus pulled into a rest stop in Glendale, Nevada. After freshening up, she sat at the luncheonette counter, smoking and thinking that even though it was after ten P.M., she needed either a chocolate malt or a cup of coffee.

“Would you mind?” the watchful man from the bus asked, pointing to the stool next to hers.

“No.” She crushed her cigarette and decided her first Nevada meal would be ice cream. She laid down the menu as a signal to the waitress. The man had shaved, and now he smelled of Right Guard and Aqua Velva.

“May I treat?” he asked.

Ruby spun her stool and looked at him. He was probably about forty, forty-five, wore a wrinkled gray suit, a burgundy tie, and a gold tie bar. His face was soft, round, and he was balding, with outsized red ears. The man’s smile was friendly, and she decided to let him be gentlemanly. “Sure,” she said, “but I’m a cheap date—just a chocolate malt.”

“Make it two,” he said to the waitress, who slipped the carbon paper between tickets in her book and jotted down their order.

There was a moment of awkward silence until the man said, “Mason.” He held out his hand. “Mason Maddox.”

She remembered to use her new name. “Ruby”—she smiled—“Wilde.”

“Nice to meetchya, Ruby Wilde.” He fiddled with the long-handled spoon the waitress set before him and unwrapped his paper straw. “Going to Vegas to spend all your hard-earned money?” he asked.

“I’m a dancer,” Ruby said, feeling warm, easy, as she opened into her new self. She had a quick vision of a full-blown cabbage rose—pink, luscious, the scent of early summer before the heat set in.

“My daughter Rose works in Vegas. On my way to visit her.”

“She dances?” The waitress placed two thick malts on the counter. Ruby plucked the cherry from the top of hers and dropped it into her mouth.

“Works reception at the new Caesars. She’s been in Vegas almost two years now.”

“Does she like it? Las Vegas?”

“Loves it. But to be fair, she ’s comparing it to Salt Lake City, and there ’s one hell of a difference.” He laughed to himself, sipped his milkshake. “Mind my askin’ how old you are, Ruby?”

“Eighteen.”

“Tell them you’re twenty. It’ll be easier for work in the casinos. And”—he looked critically at her face—“wear more makeup. It’ll make you look older.”

“Okay …”

“Do you know anyone there? Got a place to stay?”

Ruby hesitated.

“I’m just concerned about you,” Mason Maddox said. “My daughter’s only a couple a years older than you, and the stories she tells … Well, let me just say, Miss Ruby, that I know my Rose isn’t telling me everything, but what she does tell me is plenty. You gotta watch out for yourself. Don’t trust anyone.” He stirred his shake. “Everyone’s on the make. Everyone.”

Ruby quietly focused on her malt.

“How about I do this.” Mason eased a napkin from the dispenser. He wrote out Rose Maddox, carefully printed his daughter’s address and phone number, and slid the napkin to Ruby. “Just in case,” he said. “I’ll let her know you might be callin’. She’s a good girl. She’ll help you out, show you the ropes.”

“Thank you.” Ruby folded the napkin and slipped it into her purse. “I mean it,” she said. “You’re kind.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Mason said, standing. “It’s what I’d want someone to do for my Rose.”

She finished her malt, had one more cigarette, and climbed back onto the bus. Thanks to the ice cream, Ruby managed to doze until the brakes sounded and the bus pulled into Las Vegas just after midnight.

THE GREYHOUND TERMINAL was located within the Stardust Casino, and even though it was the middle of the night, people swarmed all about her. Standing with a heavy suitcase on either side of her, Ruby stalled, overwhelmed.

Slot machines were tucked into every nook and cranny, and most of them were occupied. Women’s hips oozed from the backs of their chairs and flowed like slow, lugubrious lava over the edges of their stools. Their eyes were transfixed, glazed over, as they grabbed the levers. She heard raucous bells, the jangle of coins falling into metal trays, and she saw flashing lights. Men with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, neglected ashen tips grown long, rolled up their sleeves, inserted more coins, and waited for the spinning to stop and land on their futures.

Ruby thought she saw hope mixed with despair, longing brushing away reality’s faint protestations. Their faces held an intense desire for something better, something else. She saw homeward-bound bus passengers standing in line with their emptied pockets, the light gone from their eyes. She saw insomniacs who let habit carry them someplace, nowhere.

With sudden clarity, she also saw herself, and she panicked. Her plan was inadequate. She was in the wrong place. This was a mistake. She would be consumed here, disappear like flash paper in a magician’s hands. She’d been a fool to follow Mrs. Baumgarten’s advice.

Moving to a wall, Ruby leaned against it, tried to catch her breath and force the encroaching tunnel vision to retreat. Her heart shouted. She cupped her hands about her nose and mouth, breathed. I’m just tired, she tried to convince herself. That’s all. Just tired, unwashed. Too many hours on the bus to sustain hope and optimism. Don’t panic.

“Looks like you could use a drink.” A sinewy man, wearing a short-sleeved white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes jammed into one rolled-up sleeve, started to reach for her arm. He had tight hills of biceps and his palms were suffused with blood, red hot.

Ruby pulled back. “No,” she said.

“C’mon. Beautiful newcomer like you. Let me carry your suitcases.” A rose tattoo lurked beneath the thick black fur of his forearm.

Ruby took hold of the handles of her bags, straightened herself. “Please go away.”

“Bet you could use a place to stay. I got room.” He grinned.

He was standing too close. She could smell grease and onions.

“Ruby!”

She heard the name, but it took a moment for her to realize that it was her name.

“Ruby Wilde!” Mason Maddox called again, stepping between her and the insistent creep. “Glad we found you.” He gave the other man a hardened stare, and the man walked away slowly, looked back once, shook his head as if it were Ruby’s loss, not his.

Ruby wished she ’d had something more sustaining than the milkshake, which now left her shaky and needful.

“Girl, this isn’t good. I knew it. Shouldna let you go off all alone.” Mason picked up one of her suitcases and added it to his own. “This settles things.” He turned, motioned to his daughter. “Rose? This here’s Ruby. Ruby, Rose. Now,” he said, nodding at his daughter, “you get her other bag.”

“But—” Ruby tried feebly.

“No ifs, ands, or buts. Rose’s got one of those teensy-weensy VW bugs. We’re gonna squeeze into it like a pack of sardines and give you a ride to wherever it is you’re going.”

Rose was elegant in tight jeans, with a bright red silk blouse, gold hoop earrings. She smelled good—something wistful, floral. Straight, golden-blonde hair was parted down the center and hung just past her shoulders. She had clear, grey-blue eyes that made Ruby think of rainbows and prisms.

“Daddy, hold on a minute. Let her talk.” Rose smiled a warm welcome. “Sometimes you can’t get a word in edgewise with Daddy. What do you want, Ruby?”

Ruby was tempted to say Rescue, or To get back on the bus, but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled from her purse the AAA guide the Aviator had given her, flipped to the page where he’d starred several entries with a ballpoint pen. “Do you know how I could get to one of these motels?” She handed Rose the directory.

Rose ran her finger down the page. “Bombay Motor Court is the decent one. It’s got kitchenettes and is close enough to let you walk or catch a bus between the casinos. While you look for work, I mean.” Rose handed the book back to Ruby. “Daddy says you’re a dancer. So cool. Why don’t we drive you there? You must be beat.”

“I’d be so grateful,” Ruby said with relief.

“Now, Daddy. Now we can help her.” Rose winked and picked up Ruby’s other scuffed thrift-store bag. “On the way, we ’ll show you a bit of Vegas.”

Outside the bus terminal, stupefying neon displays towered like mountain cliffs, and the superheated desert air burned her nostrils. The Stardust’s marquee featured a globe of blue-and-green neon, surrounded by pink-and-white rays; blue-and-pink stars twinkled off and on. Two times over it said Stardust in white lights, and planets whirled about the earth as if it were the center of the universe. Another brightly lit sign said, ’67 Lido of Paris—Grand Prix 67, and beneath that, a smaller sign read In the Lounge: Kim Sisters, Big Tiny Little, and Lou Styles. Ruby recognized Big Tiny Little as the piano player on Aunt Tate ’s dreadful Lawrence Welk Show, but he also played for Dinah Shore. His fingers flew across the piano as if the keys were electrified. She’d seen the Kim Sisters performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in their tight, satin cheongsam dresses. Maybe she’d seen them with Dean Martin, too. It was unreal. Ruby really was in the land of the famous.

Wedged into what passed for a backseat, her knees bumping the back of the bug’s front seats, she felt her flame reignite like a furnace’s pilot light bursting from a tiny blue maintenance flame to a full bar of fire. She could do this. She could and would dance on the same stage as Big Tiny Little and the Kim Sisters. Ruby smiled. She sounded like the children’s book—the little train. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. Well, there were worse mottos.

Rose caught Ruby’s smile in the rearview mirror. “Feeling better?”

“One hundred percent better,” Ruby said, and looked for a handle so that she could roll down the window, stick her head out, and see more of the neon-filled sky. She found an ashtray but no handle—the VW’s backseat window didn’t open. She sat back, thought about how the neon kept night at bay.

“So, this is the Strip, obviously,” Rose began. “The Frontier and the Desert Inn are behind us. Coming up is the Flamingo, and then across from it, my place. Also known as Caesars Palace.”

The Flamingo had a marvelous bubbly champagne tower that lit up gradually, like neon effervescence. Ruby had never had champagne; it was one of the things she intended to do—to let bubbles tickle her nose, fizz and pop on her tongue. She started a mental list of neverhads: avocado, lobster, baked Alaska.

But it was Caesars Palace that took her breath away. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Pretty spectacular, isn’t it?” Rose turned to look at Ruby.

“It’s giant!” Ruby gasped. A series of huge fountains and marble statues led toward a magnificent semicircle of columns that enfolded patrons in a generous embrace.

“Over thirty acres,” Rose said, slowing down to give Ruby a better chance to gawk. “The theater-restaurant seats a thousand, and there are several dining rooms, two health clubs, even a beauty salon. See the trees? Well, if not, you will in the daylight. Anyway, they’re genuine Italian cypress trees, imported. Several theaters—the Circus Maximus, Nero’s Nook, the Roman Theatre.”

“Good grief.”

“I know.”

“It literally leaves me breathless.”

“That’s what it’s meant to do,” Mason said. “You’re in another world.”

“Beauty salons and health spas?” Ruby asked.

“You never have to leave.”

“Also on purpose,” Mason pronounced, and Ruby heard the disapproval in his voice.

“Daddy doesn’t like Vegas.” Rose paused. “But what he doesn’t seem to understand,” she said, “is that people come here to escape. To get away. To feel a bit of magic for a little while.”

“People come here to be robbed of their hard-earned wages.”

“Isn’t it the place of dreams?” Ruby asked.

“Oh, dear girl,” Mason said, and then let it rest.

“Don’t listen to him,” Rose said. “Sometimes, Daddy can be such a square.”

“Realist,” he countered.

“No imagination.”

“No delusions.”

Ruby sat back, halfheartedly listening to the father-daughter banter while she reveled in the fact that she’d done it. She’d escaped. And now here she was, in Las Vegas. Scallywag’s stubborn determination had paid off.

Soon, the neon lights were spaced farther apart and the shouting edifices gave way to intermittent empty lots. Rose pulled into the Bombay Motor Court, and a reassuring neon arrow above a facsimile of a Moorish arch flashed VACANCY and FREE TV, HEATED POOL, IN-ROOM PHONES.

“We ’ll stay until you’re checked in, make sure everything’s set, all right?” Rose asked, and Ruby didn’t bother to protest. She felt some of her misgivings return as she thought about facing it all alone. But the room was clean, with a bright pink bedspread and white walls stenciled in gold with images of East Indian statuary and twining vines. She was able to get a room right by the pool, and she imagined how refreshing it would feel to cool her burning feet, to float and let the ripples and sun relax her.

“We ’ll call tomorrow,” Rose said, taking her father’s hand to tug him away. “Not because we think you need us,” she added quickly. “We ’ll call you because Daddy is a worrier, right?” She smiled at him.

“Right,” he said and then gave Ruby a brief hug. “I kinda feel responsible for you, kiddo.”

“I owe you,” Ruby said. “Big time.”

“You don’t,” Rose stated firmly. “It’s what people should do for each other, that’s all.”

Ruby waved to them from the doorway, and then she broke the paper strip across the toilet, peed, unwrapped the thin sliver of pink Camay soap, and took a long, hot shower before falling into bed. Feeling profligate, she dropped a quarter into the box next to the bed, and the Magic Fingers started up. “Ahhhhhh,” Ruby said, keeping her mouth and throat open so that the vibration of the bed made her voice waver wonderfully.

At last, it was her future to define, to take. Her life belonged only to her.

RUBY WALKED OVER to the motel office and bought a pack of cigarettes from the machine, along with a copy of the Las Vegas Sun and two postcards. Seated in the sweet morning air beside the pool, she read that the war in the Middle East might be coming to an end and that the Monkees had appeared at the Hollywood Bowl. She went through the newspaper’s want ads, found three promising-looking dance auditions, and circled them. Then she addressed the postcards. One, of a jackalope—some mythological jackrabbit with an antelope’s horns—she sent to Mrs. Baumgarten, and the other, a sun-drenched pool scene with huge fringed umbrellas and women strolling in bikinis and carrying cocktails, she sent to the Aviator. She signed them as Lily, and she gave the Aviator her temporary address and the motel’s phone number. Then, after going through the dollhouse cabinets of her kitchenette, she made a grocery list: coffee, cigarettes, cereal, milk, fruit, and a category she labeled actual food. Just after ten, she put on a pair of cutoffs and a cotton tank top and climbed onto the empty bus. She took a seat in the front, near the driver.

“Am I the only person who gets up before noon?” she asked the man, whose curly dark hair and bass-drum gut reminded her of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden.

“Just you and me, honey,” he said, looking at her in his rearview mirror. “Just us early birds.”

Ruby tucked her hair behind her ears, looked out the streaked window, and saw her first palm tree. The bark reminded her of the rough diamonds of pineapple hide. She craned her neck, looking for coconuts.

“First time?” the driver asked, although it was obvious.

“Just moved here.”

“Gonna work in the casinos?”

“I’m a dancer.”

“Oh,” he said, and this time he looked at her much harder, longer. “One of those dancers?”

Ruby wasn’t sure what he meant. “Like the June Taylor Dancers,” she said.

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “With your looks and all, I just assumed you’d be one of the other kind.”

What on earth? Did he think she was a stripper? Was that it? “I’m the kind of dancer who keeps her clothes on. A professional dancer,” she added for emphasis.

“Beg pardon.” He touched the back of his hand to his cap. “No offense intended.”

In the long run, he turned out to be helpful, pointing out the grocery store, a Laundromat, and a drugstore where she could buy stamps. “Watch yourself,” he advised as she left the bus. “Lotsa crazies out there, even before noon. Leftovers from the night before.”

Why did everyone keep telling her to be careful? If there was one thing she’d long ago learned, it was that no one could be trusted.

After a few hours of exploring on foot and trying hard not to look like a tourist, she found slot machines lining a section of the grocery store and decided to try her luck. Ruby loaded ten pennies and pulled the lever. On her third pile of pennies, the three reels landed on the same image: a yellow bird. She smiled as the hopper filled with coins—a whopping three dollars. Feeling lucky, Ruby climbed down from the stool and stopped while she was ahead.

She ’d never eaten TV dinners—Aunt Tate thought they were too expensive and designed only for self-indulgent, lazy people. Ruby bought a Swanson fried chicken dinner with mixed vegetables, another with chopped sirloin and French fries, one with sliced turkey and gravy, and another that had shrimp with cocktail sauce. She even bought Jiffy Pop—another forbidden extravagance—along with small jars of mayonnaise and mustard, and bologna for sandwiches. As she made her way down the cereal aisle, she caught herself humming Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” and dancing the quickstep.

This, Ruby realized, is what happiness feels like. Freedom. Bubbling champagne, yellow birds, music and dance and neon and possibility. Ruby grinned at everyone she saw—the cashier, the women with bristled curlers and miserable, snotty-faced toddlers, the gawky boys stocking shelves, and the heavy-jowled butcher weighing out three pounds of ground chuck. She made her way back to the motel, put away her groceries, practiced her dance steps until she rained sweat and felt the cathartic release of physical effort, and then she did stretches beside the pool. She took a quick, late-afternoon dip before heating up her shrimp TV dinner, lifting the foil when it was finished and salivating over the six tiny battered shrimp. She turned on the color television that was not pinned under Aunt Tate’s milk glass collection, and through her open window listened to kids released from the backseats of station wagons, mileage markers, license plate games, and highway rest stops, as they shrieked and played Marco Polo in the pool. Later, when the sun had gone down and the temperature relaxed below 95, Ruby sat on the lawn chair outside her room, savored a cigarette, and watched insects congregate beneath the lamps that lit the pool deck.

Tomorrow’s audition was at noon. She was nervous, but she reminded herself that nothing worth having comes without effort, without overcoming fears and doubts. And this was all about her dream, the talent and hard work that would take her away from all that had been. She fell asleep lying on her side, watching the slit in the curtain where pale moonlight shone through.

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