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one would believe it, but as long as he was all right, they wouldn’t bother trying to prove otherwise. Then her mother’s voice repeated in her mind, reverberating with wider significance.

    “Hush before the baby hears you.”

    The clouds of doubt and hesitation lifted like veils of illusion and she saw Averill’s hands squeeze the throat of an innocent newborn. Compassion was cowardice, morality, an extravagance. Her spirit was bankrupted. She couldn’t afford loftier sentiment.

    Her eye caught something still and purple and gold just above the tall grass where the yard gave over to woods. It might have been a butterfly, but this was April. Whatever it was, she felt a coolness rushing toward her,an inexplicable calm that overspread the surreal afternoon. A moment ago, she was shaking, hyperventilating and muttering to herself. She had begun to slide away from reality. Now things made sense again.

    She wanted to investigate the source of this unexpected rationality. She hadn’t taken ten steps before she understood it all. It was her mother’s Siberian iris. She had pulled a handful of stalks the morning she left home. She had thrown them there in the crook of those tree roots the way she could remember her mother and grandmother pitching them around the bases of trees in cemeteries.

    Theirs flourished. Hers had withered—all but one. She had forgotten it. Now it seemed impossible and significant. Why? Because such beauty still existed? Was it a sign that the Creator still had better plans for the world? Or a remnant of Eden? Maybe it was just a flower and it really didn’t mean anything or matter. Maybe nothing did. She had lost all direction and meaning so long ago that when she leaned down to breathe in the exquisite perfume of the floating purple wonder with its brilliant gold throat, she half expected it to disappear like a mirage in the desert. Instead she drew in the essence of her childhood.

    How could it be the same excessive sweetness? How had that survived when all the rest was gone?

    She began to drift back to a world she had inhabited until a few years ago. It was a world where an iris was a small wonder and people meant what they said. She felt a strange hope blending with light green shadows mingling with overwhelming sorrow for all she had lost. This impossible loveliness reminded her of that striving happiness people back in that believing world took for granted. Somehow there you could get aches and painsballed up with happiness. You could shrug, or smile with irony at all but the very occasional worst things. Now her head began to flow with a great river of people and things she had somehow forgotten or misplaced in this bleak present tense existence where there was neither humor nor hope to sustain you.

    It wasn’t the memories that stunned her, but the contrast between life then and now. How had she become habituated to this unfeeling hell where she touched no one or nothing real? When had she become this cunning wretch? Worst of all, what was the source of this driving obsession to carry out Averill’s death? She had to think. Yet she couldn’t. The woods had become a meaningless void, an alien terrain or island where fate had rolled her off its inexplicable tide. What was this murderous impulse that blinded her?

    There was a light breeze. It was humid and there was a gathering haze from the woods. It was going to rain. She felt an inexplicable urge to pray—something she hadn’t done since she married the preacher. It wasn’t the desire to bow her head and attempt to communicate with God. It was a deep longing for the faith to attempt it. Aside from the necessity of seeing this careful, homicidal passion through, Leona didn’t believe in anything. Not for herself. Of course, she knew that life still held a great deal of joy and meaning for other people. She didn’t see any point debating whether they were more foolish or wiser than her.

    Leona had to live by what was in her