of a blunt paean to seagulls and soft winds when someone—she told herself this story slowly, as he had told it, and her heart raced a little as it always did—the someone who was Lisa Fay approached his table.
“Hey, mister. You through with that paper?”
Arlyn looked up. “I’ve seen you before,” he said to the bony girl who stood so closely composed beside his booth.
She squinted at him. Then her eyes lit on the hardshell horn case resting on the bench beside him and she brightened with recognition. “You’re The Hook,” she said. “Aren’t you? You play at Spec’s.”
Arlyn reddened. “Not professional or nothing.” He peered down at the bottom of his empty coffee cup. “Sometimes they let me sit in.”
She nodded. Stood there an awkward minute longer. “So,” she said. “Can I have that paper?”
Arlyn stumbled over himself passing it to her. An uneaten hot dog lay on its paper plate beside his elbow. Arlyn watched her gaze flick toward the food and he nudged the plate closer to her. “Go ahead.”
Lisa Fay looked dubious. “Aren’t you going to eat it?”
“Please,” Arlyn said. He gestured to the other bench. “Have a seat.”
She lowered herself gingerly to the vinyl. She kept her gaze on the food. “It’s my birthday,” she said.
And with great formality and magnanimity and what could only be the most noble and generous of thoughts, The Hook said, “Happy birthday.”
Lisa Fay blinked in her bunk. What was the opposite of celebration? Today marked a bitter anniversary. Five years to the day since her catastrophe and she could remember the smell of the grass in the park as she lay there, her hands roughly cuffed behind her and her sobs unanswered. That grass was real, all right. The dirt under it was real. She had tried to stuff her mouth with it.
Five years ago, she had started the day a mother. By the end of the day she was not.
Lisa Fay sat up stiffly, careful not to wake Delfine. She eased her feet to the floor. It was a familiar routine, rising before her cellmate, before any of the others awoke. She felt under her bunk for the Bible and slid the Bic pen from the book’s cracked spine. Lisa Fay plucked the plastic plug from the rear of the pen, unclasped the safety pin she kept clipped to her tunic, and plunged the sharp end of the pin into the tube of ink.
The row of dots started on top of the big toe of her right foot, just before the nail. One dot. Two dots. Three dots, each composed of dozens of pinpricks saturated with ink, a tattoo to keep track of the time. On and on the dots wound, a row of refugees ejected from their homes and sent wandering. The line continued, each dot a rough quarter inch from its neighbor, across the sensitive skin on the top of her foot. Dipped beneath the anklebone, circled the ankle itself, and continued, a spiral, up her calf. It circled her knee. Made four revolutions about her thigh. Crossed her hip, circled her waist.
They made her body a calendar. The dot with a circle around it, that meant one month. A circle blackened with short rays that sprung from its perimeter—a symbol that looked like a bomb, exploding—that meant a year had passed. Lisa Fay had one of those on the ridge of her shin. Another behind her knee. A third on her creamy inside thigh. The last just below her hip.
And now, today, a fifth. Five years to the day since she’d touched his skin, watched his smile gape across his face.
The line of dots had arrived now at the stretch-marked skin of her belly. That was fitting, she thought. Five years. And here, where she’d held him. She wedged the ink tube upright with the pin in it into the narrow gap where the mattress met the bed frame, and then she opened the bible and lifted a photograph from its pages. It was the only precious thing Lisa Fay owned. A gift, of sorts. An exchange.
The boy in the photograph had the same slope to his cheek and his brow as her son. He was squatting on the hood of a broken-down car, raising a hand to something in the distance, his mouth shaped mid-speech, his body coiled as though ready to spring. The tail of a dog waved a blurry smudge through the corner of the shot. Sunlight struck a path through the