was only half true. She’d been one of the maids of honor when we got married, and I’d spent an evening or two during our courtship with her. Chelsea and her family were some of Deedie’s oldest friends. After Deedie had been orphaned at a relatively young age, Chelsea’s parents—along with a few other devoted Washington friends of the Finney family—had tried to step into the gap left by Tom and Sally Finney’s absence.
The door swung open. There was Chelsea’s mother, Shirley, who even at this midday hour looked elegant. Chelsea was coming down the stairs behind her, looking just as poised. Even before I entered the house I could see that everything in it was carefully arranged. It was like something out of Architectural Digest.
“Deirdre!” said Shirley.
“Deedie!” shouted Chelsea.
Everyone hugged my wife. I stood behind her with the dog on a leash, bouncing up and down. Another drop of Lucy fell upon the flagstones. “Hello, James!” said Shirley, and I leaned in for a hug. “Come in! Come in!”
I looked at the floor. It was a pure white carpet, thick and rich. I looked at the dog. Then I looked at the carpet again.
“And who do we have here?” asked Shirley, bending down to pat the dog on the head.
“This is Lucy,” I said.
“She’s divine!” said Chelsea.
“Come in!” said Shirley.
“Okay,” I said, and in we went.
In the living room was a Christmas tree out of Martha Stewart Living, glowing with illuminated lamps in the shapes of icicles and trimmed in gold. It looked as if it had arrived here from the ice queen’s palace in Narnia.
The pristine white rug beneath the tree seemed like a blanket of new-fallen snow. Lucy raised her tail.
* * *
After we left the District, we presented ourselves in a state of panic at a veterinarian’s office and left there with a kind of doggy diaper. This device wrapped around Lucy’s back end. There was a place where special dog Kotex could be emplaced. And there was a hole in it for her tail. This solved the problem of the dripping for the moment. But it did not address the other issue, which was that our dog Lucy was now a Love Machine.
It was impossible to walk the dog anywhere without other dogs—male ones, I should say—presenting themselves and saying, Hey, babe, ya wanna boogie? Before we left D.C. we’d tried to walk Lucy across the National Mall, from the Lincoln Memorial to the reflecting pool—but we’d had to beat a hasty retreat when a pack of strange dogs appeared, each one ready to go.
“We need to get out of here,” I said to Deedie. She knew what that meant.
We got ourselves back in the car (we were driving Deedie’s Honda Prelude, an extremely hot sports car with the kind of headlights that popped out of the hood like a pair of eyes suddenly opening upon the world) and drove north. Our plan was to go as far as we could the first night, hole up in a motel somewhere, and then finish the drive to Maine the next day. But first, we had one more stop to make.
My first novel, The Planets, had been out for six months now, and I was still struggling with the sequel, The Constellations. I figured that one more research trip to the town where those novels were set, Centralia, would help jump-start my writing. Centralia was a town in Pennsylvania coal country, not far from where I’d grown up, where a mine fire had been burning out of control, underground, for twenty years.
And so it was that Deedie and I and our menstrual dog pulled into Centralia on a day in late December 1991 and parked just next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. The day was cold, and mist and fog hovered in the air. Smoke from the mine fire rose from boreholes at the graveyard’s perimeter.
A huge sign in leering red letters stood next to the cemetery. MINE FIRE IS OUR FUTURE, it read.
It had been a half dozen years since I had last been in Centralia, and in the intervening years, the underground fire had continued to erase the town. Now, it appeared as if the strategy had become to put out the town rather than the fire. Residents’ homes were bought out and then razed. There was block after block where there were driveways and sidewalks but no houses. One or two diehards remained in town, but on the whole the town looked ghostly and