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Everything Natalie said seemed, to herself, to have been said better by him. He was less fond of speaking, however, than he was of hitting people in the face, which seemed a more likely source of her love to those of us who were in speech class with him. It could be, we reasoned, she was in love with the kind of things he might say if he spoke more often.

It was easy for someone like David Dion to be casual about fate. He was still in junior high, but high school girls picked him up in their daddies’ cars and had sex with him out at the pit. No one I spoke to on a regular basis had even been to the pit. He was not anyone’s boyfriend, didn’t need to be. It was hard to guess how old he was if you didn’t already know, if he hadn’t tumbled down into your grade from the grade above when he was held back. He couldn’t be that smart, you could tell, from the way he grinned at himself, but he was smart enough to know he didn’t have to be loyal to any one girl.

Dion fought high school boys all the time; that was nothing; once he broke his fist against the face of a man in his twenties before getting his own nose smashed against the pavement. In school he sat two seats away from me in homeroom, where he spilled over his desk, stroking his thin mustache and cracking his knuckles, one handed, one finger at a time. In wood shop we were partners, making a gun rack. I made the rack, he kept it. He slouched back in his chair, his elbows on the sill, looking out the window from the corner of his eye like a prisoner. Not even the shop teacher said anything. They were related, kids said. He was related all over, mostly in the next county, where every other ice fisherman was an uncle, every other woman behind the cash register an aunt, and the rest cousins. He could walk into any store out there and borrow ten bucks; he owed everyone, even me, at least that much. I lent him one dollar at a time. He rolled the bills into joints and smoked them or sold them for two dollars, making a few bucks, he said, for later at the bar.

When Mr. Dawson of Dawson’s Variety was told by one of his basketball players that Dion, their center, was in love with Natalie, he pictured the ridge of her muscle extending up from her knee into her track shorts. He had seen her the day before with Ron, the high school boy she went with, who was going to drop out to start in the air-conditioning business with his father so he and Natalie could get married as soon as possible. Her best friend, Denise, whose information was no better than second hand at this point, said, Well, it wasn’t Love with Ron. Mr. Dawson overheard this. Denise was standing in his store with her friends Kristy and Francis waiting to buy a diet soda.

“I thought,” Mr. Dawson said from behind the counter, “she was with that boy Ron.”

“Well, she was,” Denise said, secretly pleased at being the center of attention. “It just wasn’t love,” she said, her voice rising. “Anything but. Just a thing. This is Love.”

My friend Andy’s mother said, shaking her head while sitting at their kitchen table with a half dozen of her friends, that Natalie had bloomed too early. That’s why people thought she should stay with Ron, who was a good thing in the long run, even though he was homely, with a protruding jaw and blemishes over his cheeks, and he was older. He was one of the Catholic boys, who would wait, and by the time they were ready and married she would have lost her looks, be heavy and distended, those legs thick as posts; just when no one else wanted her he would be there with enough desire stored up to blind his true sight for a lifetime.

One of the things Natalie loved about Dion was that he always let the other guy have the first shot. He never in his life coldcocked a guy. He let them know first, sometimes days in advance. Someone would tell the guy, and they would meet. If the guy went down, the fight was over. That was one of the things she loved about him. Dion walked away, or sometimes helped the guy to his feet. Once you get over the fear of getting hit, the same every time, he told me in wood shop, it doesn’t matter what happens.

When Natalie’s mother first heard that her daughter was in love with Dion, she said nothing, only stared at the wall. She was one of the last to know; people were afraid to tell her at first. Finally Mrs. Dawson called up to tell her while pretending she must already know. “You mean you don’t know? Oh, my.” Maybe, Mrs. Dawson was thinking, Natalie’s mother will do something now.

Most of Natalie’s clothes came directly from her mother’s sewing machine, but they were not cheap looking on her. Every article was made to fit every precocious curve. Her father, on disability from the Bath Iron Works, was rarely seen except at the Wharf having a few or driving around in his truck scratching his beard with his CAT hat low over his brow. He could only see out of one eye.

Before Dion, she and Ron would walk down the hill after school, passing my house, crossing the tracks, on their way to the public library, which was where a lot of us went, strange to say, when we had nothing else to do. They walked alone, holding hands, had been going out since she was in sixth grade, he in junior high. In sixth grade people kissed on the playground, Missy D. and Kevin R. yelling at each other across the lunch room, the curses from their lips exactly the opposite of the intoxicated delight and fear on their faces, and there was even a story of David M., the short calm kid, getting a hand job at the movie theater. But no one went out, went steady, held hands in public at that age, except them. Ms. Hegel, the librarian, had no worries when they sat down to hold hands across the top of the reading table. Others had to be watched and checked on, would be up to nasty business in the stacks among the geography books. Ron and Natalie would only kiss each other for half a minute on the grass in front of the library while waiting for his mother to pick him up for dinner, and then her mother would come pick her up. Later they would talk on the phone for thirty minutes, no longer, according to his mother’s rules. His mother worried that her mother made no rules. A girl should have rules, his mother said.

Occasionally people saw them kissing in front of the library. Mr. Wally drove by and happened to stop at the corner and look in their direction. Mr. Dawson, on his way to practice, saw them once. Her father saw them once, other kids saw them. I saw them, as I stepped out of the library door. They did not realize I was there. They sat on the steps two feet apart and strained their necks sideways to have their lips meet for this one moment, no more, before he checked to see if his mother was rounding the corner yet. Her mother was often late, and once did not arrive at all. Mr. Dawson, returning from practice, just before dusk, saw her sitting there, knees pulled up, and offered her a ride home.

My mother must have forgotten, she said, with her hands clamped between her knees, palms out. But Mr. Dawson suspected it was more than that—everyone suspected, and he asked her if everything, honestly, everything, was all right. Everyone knew everything was not what it should be in that vinyl-sided house at the edge of a field her grandfather had once owned but father had sold off one piece at a time. Mr. Dawson, Ron’s former coach, said she could talk candidly, that she could trust him, but not even Ron had ever been inside her house. When asked this time by Mr. Dawson, she responded in the same way she always did: Everything is fine. I’m just tired is all.

*  *  *  *  *

At first it was hard to believe she and Dion were together at all. No one saw them holding hands or even talking in the daylight. Denise reported seeing them kissing in the dark behind the school, and she was the first to confront Natalie about it, about Ron. Ron’s over, she said. How? Denise wanted to know. How did this happen? Natalie shrugged her shoulders.

When she and Dion first got together, she insisted: Not in the daylight, not on Central Street by Dawson’s or Tom’s Pizza, not in his brother’s car, which he drove only at night because he didn’t have a license, even if his father’s brother was a cop and didn’t care. People saw them, though, at the fringe of the bonfire’s light out at the pit or down by the river at the landing on one of the benches out of reach of the fluorescent lights.

At the same time Mr. Dawson heard that she was in love with Dion, he heard that Dion had quit his basketball team. He went into the back room after Denise and her friends left and leaned his forehead into his hand. They are in love, Denise had said. Nothing from her mouth had ever interested him before this statement. He tried not to think of Natalie. She ran track; she had been into the store with her mother, with Ron. Ron with acne. When he closed his eyes he saw her tanned thigh last summer as she sat on the bench outside the store, her blue shorts scrunched up above a pale line, the knob of her shoulder beneath her yellow sweater, and the curve at the corner of her mouth, which would harden into a battered smirk, he knew, by the time she was his age—by the time she was half his age.

That afternoon the basketball team stood on the court in their practice gear, not bouncing the ball, staring off in different directions, in disbelief that Dion had quit for her. Mr. Dawson was late; he was never late. They couldn’t believe Dion was with her right now. Maybe off in his brother’s car or at his cousin’s house, where both parents worked, or off in Vaughn woods by the pond, or out by the pit waiting for it to get dark, or down by the river near the landing waiting for it to get dark. Any of them would have traded places with Dion. The game of basketball suddenly seemed pointless next to the thought of his hand on her hip, and she in her green slacks and yellow sweater burying her face in his flannel shirt, curling her fingers into his back, closing her eyes to hide, even from herself, how much she loved him.

When Mr. Dawson arrived, the team was sitting on their practice balls and on the bench, with their heads low. They hadn’t noticed him come in, fingers splayed out in the air. The game of basketball seemed to him a cruel drama written to parody his frustration, and now he was forced to be its director.

They had only been together for a day, but it seemed to Natalie as if they had been together forever. There seemed no need to tell him anything, with one glance she knew he knew the years they had not been together were little more than preparation for this moment. She could tell from the turn of his hand hanging out the window of his brother’s car what he was thinking about. He was thinking about her. When he looked at her she had to look away. When he thought about her, she was thinking about him. When he looked away, she looked at him; when she looked away, she could feel him looking at her. She realized now that she had always been looking for him, even though they had been in school together, sitting just a few seats away, standing across the playground from each other, he with his friends at the comer of the school parking lot by the Dumpster, she with hers by the swing sets. She had seen him but not seen him. She had been alive but not alive, until now.

On the second day she was not in school in the yellow linen shorts her mother had sewn together from Mrs. Nason’s old drapes. There were only a few places she could be.

Two days later there was a teacher’s meeting after school to discuss the situation, about which no one, least of all the principal, a tall man with Baptist visions, had anything to say. What can we do? Mr. Wally pleaded, his voice gruffer than usual. This was not, in other words, a passing thing. They could not just hold their breaths. The basketball team would not get to the championship, and every day, the men knew, glancing quickly at each other, they would have to see her leaving at the end of the day, as the days got warmer toward June, in her pink flannel shorts, or the blue satin ones, and the white silk shirt or the tank tops, the red bands holding her hair back from her cheeks, walking down the hill, not with Ron, but to be with him in all the dark crannies of the town, wrapped in nothing but his old jacket, arcing her pale stomach toward the moon, her open mouth barely giving voice to her thought: Dion.

“What about your mother?” Dion asked as they were walking by the river. “She comes to pick you up outside the library.”

She was surprised he knew this, that he had been paying attention to her long before today. Maybe she was right about the way love worked; it had been planned all along.

“My mother can wait,” she said and pulled him forward, down toward the trees. She leaned into him with her hands flat against his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Her lips tasted a little of spaghetti sauce. He pulled her closer and she let her body stand flat against his for a moment before pushing away. He reached for her pants, but she pushed his hand back, explaining to him that love has its natural course. She took both his hands in hers and stood very close to him without touching him. She explained that if they rushed love it would shatter like glass.

“Like glass,” he repeated, amazed at the way she put it. She was like no one he had ever met. He closed his eyes as she touched his face, covered his lips with her fingers. When he opened his eyes again, she was running back up the trail.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she yelled and was gone.

The rotting smell of the riverbank came to him, and he noticed for the first time that the sky was cloudy and the air quickly growing cool. But everything seemed different, somehow luminescent, awash with mercurial light. He sat down on a rock and watched the water swirl in the current.

In the following days she formed a list of things she wanted to have and do and be, without Ron. A boat, but not any boat, a giant motor sailer they could take all the way down the coast to Florida, so big there could be a storm and they wouldn’t even notice down in their cabin below, where there would be a fireplace and a television-VCR in one. Who would be sailing the boat? Dion wanted to know. They would hire someone for that. But the rest of their life was imagined in modest proportions: dogs, golden collie mixes, not pure at all; three children; a house where everyone had a bedroom and there was one extra for a guest; and some land with a view of the hills around town. She didn’t want to live down by the river or so close to a neighbor that you could see in their window at night. She had never thought of living anywhere else? He had thought of Montana. Montana—the word sounded chewed in her mouth. God, she said, shaking her head. Other places. Gardner? Farmingdale? Monmouth? Those places, the only other places she knew, were bad enough. Imagine what people were like even further away. No, she wanted to go to Florida, though. Not to live, just to go there as the Nasons did every winter, taking their daughter Julie with them so that she came back with a tan, even if she did look like a squirrel. And no matter what time of year it was Natalie would have fresh flowers in every room of the house. This idea from her mother, of how people really lived. And a horse in a red barn for her daughter. And light blue carpeting in every room. Our room, she said, with a canopy bed, but he didn’t know what one was. It has a kind of roof, like a tent, she explained He didn’t see the point but pictured it anyway, a bed with a tent in a room that already had a ceiling and above that a roof. He had pictured a cabin in Montana where you could look up and see the nails from the roof shingles coming through. And lavender, she said. No one would be allowed to smoke. Every room would smell of lavender. Like me, she said, and pressed her wrist to his nose. This was the smell of their future.

None of us had been in love, not really, until now. Anything we had called love came back to us as mockery in the face of this sudden flight from reason. Andy had said he was in love with Missy, and it was a shame Missy was not in love with him. A daily lament rose from him like the steam of the heat from the pipes at school. Andy’s mother hit the counter with her fist. “They’re too young,” she said, talking about Natalie and Dion, and we knew she was talking about their tongues running along the inside of each other’s teeth and the suddenly anxious too-tight grip of her hand between his legs, and the taste of each other’s skin, and the smell of each other’s bodies, and the feel of him slipping inside her and her settling down over him, the shape of her mouth, the shape of his. She was talking about their bodies but thinking about the words they had used. Everyone knew. “Love,” she finally growled, as if the creature itself had risen from her dreams to take over her kitchen. She gripped a package of spaghetti as if it was a club and stared at the wall, paralyzed by the idea of them out there.

They hadn’t been going out for a week when she got in his brother’s car and rode out to the next county. They ate at a Howard Johnson’s. She ordered an ice cream sundae and he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich to go, in case she wanted to go all of a sudden. She ate her sundae and ordered a milk shake; he couldn’t eat. He bought her a blue shirt in a fancy store, a boutique. It’s a nice shirt, he said. It looks nice on you. It’s a blouse, she said, turning for him in the parking lot with her eyes closed. A blouse, be repeated.

She made him drive faster, clinging to his arm, with her lips pecking gently against the nape of his neck. God, she said, God. Her breath smelled of chocolate. His eyes watered when she rested her hand on his knee and started to rub his thigh as if he were cold. She rubbed until his leg burned. Her stomach rose and sank over the gentle slopes as Dion pressed down harder on the pedal. The road to Monmouth was straight and rolling, the Firebird rising and falling as if with the swells of a heavy sea, the shocks rattling in a drum roll. Slow down, she said, but he didn’t. What’s in Monmouth? she wanted to know but didn’t want to know. There was no reason to know, even though she had heard and did know. The bar everyone had heard about, the Chanticleer, that no one, at least no one from Bigelow Junior High, had been to. We heard it smelled of a cellar after a flood, the sweet twinge of wet walls and soaked carpets on a warm day.

It was a low windowless building tucked under a maple tree between the side of the road and a trickling stream, no light outside except the one BUD sign. This beer, golden from the tap, was sweeter than what Ron had given her, stolen from his father’s icebox. She sat in the back of the room, far away from the others at the pool table, and stared down into her glass. She took a sip and put the mug down. He came over from the pool table and traced his finger along her lower lip, leaned over to kiss her. He loved her in that yellow sweater, her breasts weighted, pushing against the soft fabric, her yellow hair, each strand distinct, falling around her chin. She didn’t want him to put on any music, she didn’t want to play pool, she didn’t want to have another beer, she didn’t want to sit alone so many miles from home, she didn’t want to be sitting under the bar light, dissected in its brightness at the end of this numberless dark road. So he took the keys to the car, the hell with the rest and they drove all the way up to Monmouth over the Kennebec River and back again.

They held hands all the way; he said nothing and she loved the way he said it. She didn’t want to go home, and so they kept going in another direction. All the roads looked the same at night. She said it clearly to him, LOVE, just before dawn, and he was afraid as they parked by a river, further away from home than she had ever been, of touching her. So she touched him as she had seen herself touch him in her mind, and just as she had imagined he held absolutely still. If he said anything, he said what she thought he would say, he said what she wanted him to say, what we all wanted to hear, things he had never said to anyone before, words he had never thought before, whose meaning he would not have been able to explain but felt as he said them as clearly as he felt her breath on his neck, as surely sweet as her hair was soft, as clearly as he felt he was not the same and would not ever want anything, anyone, as much as he wanted her.

The night she didn’t come home, the first night ever, people thought of her bruised and bleeding in the corner of some motel room halfway between Vaughn and Mississippi. Others thought of her in the Hyatt in Boston, or they wouldn’t wait so long: the Marriott in Portsmouth. Or they were on a cruise, on the Scotia Prince headed for Halifax, gambling in black tie and satin dress. And still others said, shaking their heads, No, no, she was gone, long gone from us, lying somewhere by the railway tracks. The man in the caboose will find her the next time we hear the Boston and Maine. She’s somewhere between Haymarket and Bangor, bleeding into the gravel, her linens smudged, silk torn, the blush of her cheeks chalk white, and Dion halfway to Mexico. Andy was the only one who got it right, the more obvious answer: they lay side by side in the back of his brother’s car parked on the edge of a field in the next county. She pulled the blanket beneath her chin as he pulled her head against his chest and ran a single finger through her hair. When she tilted her head, only her bangs and her lips caught the moonlight.

Everywhere Andy and I went was in search of her, just as Mr. Dawson drove up and down Litchfield Road and all the way across town to the quarry and back saying to himself he was on an errand when he was really hoping, just for a moment, to catch a glimpse of her. Her father was out looking for her now, too, in the truck, rifle at his side. Two of her uncles were on opposite sides of the town, covering all the roads leading in and out. Her mother told herself she had known the time would come; but not like this, she said to herself. Not with him. She had thought of Ron and the wedding, the white dress she would sew (had already spent hours, days, years, shaping it in her mind). Even if they found her, she would not be the same now.

The members of the basketball team, sure now that they would lose the final game of the season and miss the playoffs, were home with their parents watching television or eating potato chips or talking on the phone or listening to their parents talking in the next room or lying on their backs thinking of Dion out there with her; they listened to the sound of crickets and cars passing and shouts from up the street and dogs lurking and pots clinking in the sink and footsteps of sisters on stairways while they thought of him out there touching her neck with the tips of his fingers before looking away to drive the car or order another beer or wave to his brother, as if the practicalities of living could distract him, even for a second, from where he would touch her next.

“He took her, he took her.” Natalie’s mother moaned over and over to her husband and his brothers.

“He dragged her off. He threw her in his car and took her away.” Natalie’s father was on the phone, calling Sheriff Chuck Sheldon and everyone he knew, which was everyone, the fathers of all the basketball players, fathers of daughters who were Natalie’s friends, younger brothers of fathers of Natalie’s friends and basketball players, fathers of girls not yet old enough to be in junior high, though when they were another Dion would be waiting for them.

All over town parents of girls who would be like or wanted to be like her and boys who might think of doing what he had done lay in bed staring at the ceiling, saying a few words to each other: What do you think? We’ll find them tomorrow. What will you do? Don’t know. Do you think she’s all right? I really don’t know. They didn’t mention what they were thinking to their children, listening to them talk from the next room, giving voice to their thoughts of what might be happening out there, what he might be doing to her. No image, no story, once started, would complete itself in their minds: she was tied in the backseat, the purple, no the pink silk shirt ripped down the front and her pale breasts shivering in the moonlight with her nipples like cherries on cream pie—where was he? Hovering above her. Just a hand comes into view; he was gentle now that he had what wanted. Or she was running down the road in front of his headlights. They had pulled off the road, and she had gotten away, though just for a moment. Her blouse had been stripped off and was lying torn somewhere out of view, probably in the backseat or on the side of the road, and she ran just in her white panties with the cloth riding up between her cheeks above the tan line of her bikini, the point where everyone’s eyes had previously been turned back briefly exposed now. Her head turned, her face flushed and mouth open, her eyes wide and wild, like a cat in high beams: he was catching up. And when he did catch up she would be in the backseat or on the side of the road, her back pressed against the ground, her breath taken away by the weight of his body, all her mother’s clothing, so carefully sewn together, made well enough for her daughter’s children to wear as costumes of a previous era, lying in shreds, and her face tied in a knot, biting her lower lip, eyes pulled into her skull, as he lowered himself.

*  *  *  *  *

In our minds love had gone bad, but not in theirs. “No,” she said, pushing off his chest. “Not here. I want it to be perfect.” He didn’t understand, though he obeyed her, and she pulled him back against her on the seat where they lay together, her lips traveling over his face. “Just hold still,” she said. “I always knew,” she said, “it would be like this.” He didn’t know what it was or what this was, only that he had been chosen. He closed his eyes as she pressed his face against her sweater. All he could smell was her. “I love you,” she said again and again until the sound of her voice covered him like a blanket. “I want to hear you say it.” He said he had already said it, but she wanted him to say it again, so he did, repeating it into her sweater, into her breasts. “You do,” she said, “don’t you?”

She told him to hold his hands at his sides no matter what she did. He smiled at her, as if she was kidding. You trust me, she said. It was a question. He nodded in a way that made her love him even more. He was her child. He asked her what was the matter. Her eyes had watered. She told him nothing and ran her hand over his eyelids, smoothing them closed. “Hold still.” He nodded. “You nodded!” she scolded and he tried not to smile. She sat on his lap, feeling her shorts ride up. She ran her finger along his forearm. His fingers twitched. Abruptly she laid her palms flat against his chest and pushed, angling her chin up. She took one shoulder in each hand and ran her hands down his arms as if she were wringing out wet clothes. He grinned. “Stop that!” she said. She undid her blouse and bra then put one hand on his shoulder, one against the side of his check, and lowered her chest against his face wrapping her arms around the back of his head. He raised his hands, she pushed them back down; he raised them again, she took them and sat on them. “There,” she said. She leaned forward, pulling his nose between her breasts, his mustache tickling her skin, and found the edge of his knuckle between her legs.

They rocked together as if in an embrace of grief until her breaths came in quick, panicked bursts, as if she was short of breath, not him. She squeezed the back of his head so tightly he yelled into her chest. She rolled off him, backing against the far door, pulling her blouse over her chest. Her face was scrunched up, smeared.

“Don’t tell anyone what happened,” she mumbled.

His mind raced for something to say, not the wrong thing. “What?” he said. “What happened?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. Whatever had happened it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She was cold. The windows had steamed up but were now frosted over. “It’s all right,” she said thinking of the movies, TV. It had all gone just like that until now. She tried to think of what would happen next. “I’m scared,” she said, trying to follow the script. “Hold me.” He moved over on the seat. Already, part of her didn’t want him to touch her, but this couldn’t be true.

She knew when she fell in love with him that she would be in love forever just as she knew when she woke up in the backseat the next morning, cramped and headachy, and looked at Dion sleeping with his mouth open that she was no longer in love with him and never would be. She opened the door and stepped out into the damp morning air. She began to think of Ron’s long fingers resting on the steering wheel of his father’s Mercury, his thin legs and gray slacks as they drove to the movies and held hands in the dark. She thought of his thin lips brushing against hers, his hand resting carefully on her shoulder, and of his parents reading in bed waiting for him to come home, his father’s air-conditioning.

Dion stretched, scrunching his eyes, his limbs snaking around the corners of the seats up to the back dash. His T-shirt pulled up to show his stomach. He opened his eyes and watched her standing in the open doorway. He smiled.

“We should go,” she said. “I’m afraid someone will find us here.” He shrugged. Obviously he cared nothing for what people thought. How had she missed this before? He moved like an oaf, like her father, slowly opening the door, as if there was no hurry. Digging the keys out of his pocket. Finally he started the car and launched them forward, speeding. At least they were moving; she rolled the window down and stuck her face into the breeze as if into a splash of water. Poor Ron. What was he doing now?

“I’m not feeling well,” she said, making a show suddenly of holding her stomach.

He leaned forward over the wheel and shot her a glance. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said irritably, as if it was all his fault. He recoiled a little against his door and leaned his elbow out the window, steering with one thumb.

As they neared her house, he started to get nervous, leaning forward over the wheel.

“When am I going to see you again?”

She looked at the dashboard as if she hadn’t heard. He pulled over to the side of the road and turned to her, the words she had been saying—his own name, and I love you, I love you—playing through his head. He wasn’t going to say them, they were her words, and he didn’t want to tell her to say them, but he needed her to keep saying them.

She put her hand on the door. He watched it resting there. “I can walk from here,” she said and stepped out of the car.

“Where are you going?” He screamed so loudly she stumbled off the road. She could see her house from here, across the road and down the field.

“I don’t love you anymore.”

He was out of the car now with his hands on the roof, just looking at her.

She repeated it. Her bellow drew out and continued as a groan as she bent over with her knees together and hands pulled around her stomach. Tears burst down her cheeks, her blonde strands sticking to her lips.

It seemed now that he must have known all along what would happen. He could have made a noise like the sudden roar of gravel pouring from a dump truck at the construction site where his father worked. This much force and more had built up in his chest. He could have crushed her words with his own. He could have screamed so loudly she would have ceased to exist, but he was silent.

She sensed him stumbling through the field after her. Her mother came to the window, saw her, and called her father who arrived at the window with his shotgun. Seeing her father, Natalie ran away from the house toward the woods. Her mother came out onto the front steps and screamed, “Natalie!” Natalie tripped and vanished into the blonde straw. By the time she stood, her father was on the phone, calling. His friends ran for their trucks and cars, funneling from Central Street, Winthrop Road, and Water Street onto Litchfield Road.

Dion tripped on a log and twisted his ankle. She was out of sight. These were her woods; she had grown up playing here. He stood with his arms apart, hunkered down, and screamed her name as loud as he could.

She stopped running and looked up at the sky washing over the treetops. They could probably hear her name all the way in Bath, she thought. He loved her, he really did. She ran on, but stopped when her name sounded again and again, moaning through the trees like a foghorn, his voice seeming more desperate and distant. He was headed in the wrong direction. She almost called out to him.

Mr. Dawson opened his door and stepped out before putting his truck in park; it lurched forward slightly before he could hit the brake. No one was watching. His neighbor, Mr. Shumaker, ran across the lawn, taking long, even strides. Their boots crunched over the dried leaves and grass with the sound of falling water; all of them headed toward Natalie’s father standing at the edge of the woods. “This way,” he called and ran into the shadows. They all stopped running when Dion’s voice called for Natalie. His voice, her name. They leaned over their knees, listening to their own heavy breathing. The smell of their own musty heat escaped from beneath their shirt collars.

A few of them had guns. He stopped calling her name. She turned at the edge of Nason’s field when she heard the silence. When she listened harder she heard the voices of her father, her uncles, their friends, and the fathers of her friends calling to one another. For a moment she wanted to take it all back. She did love him. Then she wanted to take it all the way back to never having loved him to begin with. She couldn’t say now how it had started. Ron would never forgive her. No one would.

They caught up with him, all the men shouting at once, stumbling and waving. Dion couldn’t hear what any one of them said, only fragments of words and phrases. Finally Natalie’s father appeared and Dion could see the resemblance in the shape of his face, thin but sagging near the jowls. Her father was the only one not shouting as the rest formed a circle around him, the ends of their waving gun barrels like dark eyes. Dion raised his hands as the police had told him to one night in Monmouth. He closed his eyes and pictured the house he and Natalie were going to have, every room smelling of her wrist, the bed with the tent, and the red barn with the horse, the boat with the captain taking them down the coast toward the sun. He could see it all so clearly it seemed as if these things had already happened and he was looking back now after a lifetime together.

“David Dion.” It was her father’s voice rising above the others. The father had a right to speak. He was the one wronged; anything he did might be excused later. Dion looked briefly at her father and the others. Her father’s eyes darted around the woods, skipping off Dion’s face every few seconds. Dion lowered his chin and closed his eyes again, holding his arms out so they would know he was unarmed. It seemed he had been waiting his entire short life to accept blame. “David Dion.” His name again, and the picture Dion had formed on the backs of his closed lids of her father pointing a finger at him, eyes red with anger, almost with tears, was more accurate than the real thing. Dion waited for his name, imagining her father’s mouth opening, his jagged teeth bated. Instead there was the deafening crack of a shotgun blast, and in the total silence that followed Dion found himself floating in the treetops, uncertain if he was dreaming or dying. The maple and oak leaves turned toward him and shivered. He saw the field beyond the woods where a burst of wind sliced a path through the grass like an invisible hand combing through hair. At the edge of the field near the road Natalie stood looking back. She made him so sad he had to look away, into the sun. When he looked back down it was too late: the image of the sun was burned into everything he saw.

I was outside our house throwing a tennis ball against the wall, pretending I was the star of a baseball game with scouts ready to sign me up, and was just winding up for another pitch when I heard the crack of the gunshot echo across town. My mother flew out the back door and grabbed hold of me, searching my arms and chest to see if I had been hit.

Mrs. Dawson dropped a sandwich roll at Dawson’s, ran outside with the customers, and looked up at the sky. Natalie’s mother fell to the floor in her kitchen. In her mind they were all dead: her husband, her daughter, and Dion. The police chief stood up from his desk and looked at the receptionist. He had been afraid of what might happen if people took the law into their own hands. This was the consummation of our relief.

When Dion opened his eyes he was still there, kneeling before his accusers, handfuls of dirt and pebbles sprinkled over his shoulders. All the men’s eyes searched his body for wounds or blood, but there were none. Natalie’s uncle had fired his shotgun by accident, blowing a hole in the ground and kicking up a cloud, nothing more.

Gazing back across the field to the woods where he lay dying, Natalie found it impossible to accept at first that they had shot him. But then it made sense, and she decided she would bear the mark of his death by never smiling again for the rest of her life. For her, the siren approaching from across town was the sound of an ambulance arriving too late, the second siren, which came a moment later, the sound of the police coming for her. She raised her chin and removed the strands of hair from her face to see if Dion’s soul was rising out of his body over the treetops and into the sky. In court, as in her prayers to him, she would beg for mercy, for pardon. She would admit everything, absolving everyone but herself. For a few moments this morning she had been a fool thinking love was not real, thinking she could live without him, and now she had lost everything.