the tarp, the suction and the stickiness as she pulled herself free. It was this crackle that got her sober, made her realize that this was not normal behavior, that most people didn’t piss the bed every night. Her moment of clarity about the tarps came on a Monday morning, and she called the AA number, her hands shaking so badly she had to redial several times. She had not realized that her entire back and buttocks had become slightly stained, bluish, until Athena pointed it out on a day trip to the natural hot springs, two weeks into her sobriety.
Rachel deserved this bed. She had earned this bed, and now she owned fitted sheets and a duvet. She clung to this bed like she clung to her sobriety—it was a white-knuckled sort of ownership. Now, overwhelmed, Rachel turned on the bedroom light and threw herself onto the bed. There would never be enough paper for her new to-do list. The town was a creature unto itself, wild and woolly. The people who lived there were unpredictable and could never be crossed off, conquered. Rachel could not organize and proceed methodically—she had learned in sobriety that people, places, and things were impossible to control. The world never did what you wanted. She buried her face in the pillow and recited every prayer she had learned over the past year, silently and desperately. The Fourth-Step Prayer, the Seventh-Step Prayer, the Serenity Prayer. She asked for strength to continue, and for a new bathtub. Then she felt bad for asking for things, so she tried to name all the things she was grateful for, and it was a short list, so she repeated it over and over until she finally fell asleep.
* * *
The next morning, Rachel sat on the front porch and drank her coffee. She did not notice the rosary at first, only spotted it hanging from her doorknob when she returned indoors for a refill. She wasn’t sure who had left it—probably a religious fanatic determined to ward off her bad energy. She left it hanging, because it was a beautiful thing, the only decorative object on the entire property. Rachel fingered the yellow glass beads and drank more coffee.
It was a strangely warm day for February, and it revealed the swamp of a backyard. Lacy crusts of ice collected in the corners of the fence, and Rachel’s feet sunk in the muck as she examined her property. There was no lawn here. The mud was studded with blackened clumps of dandelions, frostbitten patches of clover, and skeletal stalks of tiny aspen trees, saplings taken root.
These were a new set of problems, these things she owned. In Missoula, she left behind Athena, her home group, credit card debt, the paycheck from cleaning hotel rooms, a house that smelled like urine even though it had been bleached and all the carpet pulled. She had left behind a weekly poker game on Sunday nights with a group of middle-aged women, a sober bowling league for which she had finally paid off her shoes, the keys to three different church basements—two Lutheran and one Methodist. Now she owned a trailer house, and guilt and shame. It had been her choice, and she had felt it necessary.
She looked up at the sky and was going to offer up a prayer, but she heard dim music and realized that she was not alone.
A boy was sitting on the roof of Bert’s house, squeezed into a tiny lawn chair. Rachel wasn’t sure what Bert’s disability was, but it had not stopped him from breeding. The boy wore an unzipped silver snowsuit, bright red moon boots, and a white kerchief tied loosely around his neck. He was so close to her that she could see the book he was reading: Lady Boss by Jackie Collins. She approved.
He was oblivious to her, his headphones blaring out tinny beats, pop music. His hair was so blond that it seemed silver, his face so delicate and his expression so dreamy that he could have been mistaken for a girl.
She watched him. He was a ferocious reader, and turned the pages so quickly that she briefly wondered if he was faking it. He clutched at the book as if it might be ripped out of his hands at any moment.
Rachel understood how it was to cling to things so desperately. She knew that she must cling to her sobriety, even if the pain rose over the banks, even if there