by one, lucky break after lucky break, cupping her mother’s butt with his hands when he kissed her in the kitchen. Of course, the business was evolving, the sport struggling to hold an audience. Her parents were getting older. Nature itself seemed at times to have withdrawn its promise to support the little universe that sustained them. It was already years ago that some alchemy of the cherry trees in early flower and the leavings of an invasion of tent caterpillars had frozen an unfathomable number of area foals in the womb; Four Corners alone had suffered forty or so stillbirths the first season of the MRLS epidemic, and some mares had died, too, in the bargain. That mystery had been defined as a syndrome, given its own name, and the cherry trees had all been cut down, but the sun shone hotter than ever this summer; the snowless winter had been too short; many claimed the foals were born faster and weaker each year; Ned kept wanting to marry her. At thirty-one, Knox was getting old, too, really, she knew it—climbing up to that crow’s nest beyond which the only real choice was to look around at the view and climb back down again, into actual middle age. She could hold fast against certain encroachments, but others—time, fate, the weather—felt too vast for her to combat, and, on her worst days, she didn’t know how much longer she could hold out. The view out the bedroom window of her cabin was different from the view she’d had as a girl, dominated not by a magnolia but by a half-dead catalpa—trash trees, her father called them, but this one flowered into glory every May despite the insult. Instead of squinting as she used to, she performed an act of imagination that excised all evidence of impermanence from her thoughts, until she’d made all her fears about the end of the world disappear, just like the roofline of her neighbor’s house all those years ago. Ned would call it stubbornness. Knox thought of it as survival, and, though her safe choices were plain for anyone to see, she felt she carried a hot secret when she engaged in this willfully naïve thinking, and that at her core lay something defiant—not safe, but radical, even dangerous. To put things in her Bible-studying mother’s terms: if Eve had been able to live as if she’d never tasted the forbidden fruit, innocent in her actions if no longer in her mind or in the eyes of God, wouldn’t that have been noble? The way a child could be seen as noble when, desiring to hide, he stood in place and plastered his hands over his eyes, defying all natural law by placing faith in the totality of his own perspective.
Try explaining that to somebody like Marlene. Knox would sound crazy. Hell, maybe she was.
KNOX HAD SOME PARENT REPORTS to finish. She could either stand in place like an imbecile, the phone still in her hand, or get to them while she had a chance, considering she might not even be in the state tomorrow. There was nothing she could do, for the moment, and she already had plans to join her parents for dinner. In the meanwhile, she ached for some distraction from the whirl in her head.
She crossed the yard, passing too close to the edge of the pond and causing the swan to unfold its neck from across the length of its back, where it rested during sleep.
Kwaa, kwaa! Kwa kwa ka!
“Quiet, bird,” Knox said, noting the theatrical sternness in her voice. She occasionally caught herself playing to an imagined audience, throwing language into the air as if the burnt land was the back of a packed theater. She skirted the bank and began to walk up the road that led to the Parrish Barn, where a computer was housed in the observation room. She didn’t have a computer in her cabin but was welcome to walk in the direction of her parents’ house, up the other slope of the shallow cleft she lived in; there was one in her father’s study. Still, Knox liked the Parrish Barn, a quarantine barn for sick and barren mares, virtually deserted in the early evenings, and she longed for silence at the moment.
She grazed her fingers along a middle rail as she moved up the fence line; her fingertips were blackened with dried paint when she lifted them away. During the few summers she’d been