BRIAN

From two wooden hangers he hung the hair suit, a clotted mess of mud and cheatgrass and pine needles. This morning the smell of it fills the room, a pungent mix of paint thinner and wet dog that has seeped into the sponge of his skin so that even after his shower, when he fingers shampoo through his hair and soaps his armpits, the smell lingers, reminding him of her, helping him keep his focus when three people call this morning. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Things are just crazy around here. So many locks to pick.” He gives them the name of a competitor and wishes them well.

He spoons through a bowl of oatmeal and drinks a half pot of black coffee before walking to his father’s room. The bed, with its duck-and-cattail-patterned comforter, is crisply made. The green-carpeted floor is vacuumed. The clothes—jeans, flannel shirts, Gold Toe socks—are folded neatly in the drawers of the oak dresser his father built in the garage. The mirror above it reveals Brian as he walks to the night table and picks up the clock radio. The power went out briefly the other day, during the storm, and the clock flashes red, a nonsense code of numbers. He checks his watch and sets the clock to 7:36 and blows the dust off it—a wisp of yellow, like some sorcerer’s magic dust, cast into the air to conjure the dead. “I met someone,” he says to the clock. Somewhere within it a wire-tangled brain hums with electricity.

By eight o’clock he is driving along O.B. Riley. The road cuts through a great hump of earth and basaltic bedrock, exposing strata, the thickest of them the gray cake of Mazama ash, nearly eight thousand years old, expelled from the belly of what is now Crater Lake. He imagines the air swarming with fireflies of ash, the ground bubbling over with a red porridge of magma—a world so much different from this one—the evidence of it imprinted below the calm surface, seen only when the earth is stripped back to reveal its red-muscled, white-boned interior.

There is a cindered track of Forest Service road fifty yards up the hill from her home. He parks there, hidden among the pines, and waits. He keeps a rifle scope in his glove box and he withdraws it now to study the windows, where lights glow but no bodies move. The pumpkin is gone from the porch. There is a two-door garage and one of the doors is open. In it sits a white Subaru wagon. The hatch is open and full of what looks like camping gear—bright-colored backpacks, the blue pupae of rolled sleeping bags. A minute passes before a door opens and the husband—the idiot—appears in the dim light of the garage, struggling with the weight of a plastic cooler. He heaves it into the back of the Subaru and then pushes the bags around to accommodate its size. He is wearing jeans and a red thermal long-sleeve under a gray T-shirt. He slams shut the hatch—the muted thump of it audible even to Brian—and then yells something into the house before reentering it, absent
a few seconds before returning with a boy. He looks about ten, pale and slightly built. Brian catches a glimpse of him before he climbs into the car, joined by his father. The engine coughs to life and before long they are a sun flash in the distance, traveling away.

His phone rings and he turns down another customer and thanks her for her time and just when he hits the red button, END, the door to the house opens and Karen appears. She pauses there, half in, half out, testing the door, making certain it is unlocked, before closing it. She wears a white visor and tank top, the pink running shorts from the other day. Brian lifts the scope to his eye once more and observes her as she grabs one foot—pulling it back, stretching her thigh—and then the other. She does a few lunges. She rotates her head and windmills her arms. She uses the porch stair to do some calf raises. And then, with a small jump, she is off, her fists striking the air while her feet beat the ground, as she approaches the end of the driveway. There Brian entertains a wish no different from that of a girl pulling petals from a daisy, murmuring, Loves me, loves me not. Karen will make a choice—left or right—either moving toward her husband or moving toward Brian. He wills her to turn right, clenching up his face in concentration, trying to manipulate her muscles, her very bones, and when they appear to listen to him, sending her up the hill, toward him, he feels his expression go through a remarkable transformation. His eyes go wide. His face loosens, slack with bewilderment. And then his lips pull back and a smile creeps up his cheeks. He is smiling. He touches it as if to marvel at its rareness.

Karen grows larger in the scope until he can see a crooked lower tooth, the pores on her nose, flashing in and out of sight as the trees interrupt his view. She is moving closer. Soon she will pass the road where he is parked. But he doesn’t worry about her spotting him. He almost welcomes it, imagining her pace slowing, her arm rising in a wave, the bright flash of a smile on her face to match his.