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supernatural wrath or judgment?”
    “What do you mean? Like God?” Mom had converted from Lutheranism to Judaism after marrying my father, but she knew I had never
     been a believer. “You believe in God now?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “You think God’s taking time out of his busy day to ruin your life?”
    “Or something. It seems too focused, too directed to be random.”
    “What exactly are you being punished for?”
Theology required German, as did money discussions or family secrets.
“Did you do anything so monumentally evil?”
    I shrugged. Evil was so hard to define. Perhaps there was something I had done to cause the miscarriage, something unconscious.
     That was where it all started. Everything else that had gone wrong in our lives had resulted from that. Tim had punched that
     man and lost his job. Tim had murdered all those people. Tim had been killed. Everything was dead: my baby, my man, my practice,
     my future, my hope. My cat.
    I hadn’t noticed how bad Tim was, how close to the edge since the miscarriage. I’d lived with the man, for Christ’s sake,
     I’d slept with him every night butt-to-belly and I hadn’t known he was capable of this. I was a professional at diagnosing
     illness and I’d noticed nothing in the person I loved most in the world. My evil was the evil of neglect: I had neglected
     my baby and then my lover, and both had died as a result. What use was I? But I couldn’t say any of this to my mother. She
     had grown up in a warand lost a twelve-year-old son. She knew about loss and getting on with life.
    “Answer me, Season,” Mother said. “What evil could you possibly have done to bring down such wrath?”
    “Never mind,” I said.
    “You ever stop to think maybe it’s me who’s being punished,” she said. “Or your father. Maybe it’s worse punishment to see
     your child suffer than to suffer yourself?”
    I let go of her hands and sat back against the sofa.
    “Popcorn?” she asked, tilting the can.
    I grabbed a handful of caramel and crammed almost all of it into my mouth. We stared dumbly at Jenny Jones and her enraged
     guests.
    Tim was heavily insured, thanks to his dad being an insurance agent, and a not-too-successful one at that. Tim had bought
     the policies more to make his dad feel good than because he wanted so much insurance. Whatever the reason, I now had the condo
     and all our credit cards paid off and about $600,000 in the bank. I could open my pediatrics practice now, the one we’d always
     planned on. Except I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the responsibility of other women’s children. I didn’t want to diagnosis,
     treat, and worry over children that weren’t mine and weren’t Tim’s. And I didn’t have any confidence in my abilities as a
     doctor anymore. I’d let Tim down; I didn’t want to add to the list of fatalities. Besides, for the first time in my life I
     could afford not to work. To do nothing. To do nothing is to be nothing, my father always said.
    Sounded good.
    Jenny Jones returned from a commercial to introduce her last guest. Blue waddled in from the kitchen where she’d been eating
     dry food. He jumped on Mom’s lap and Mom raked her fingers through Blue’s dark gray fur, leaving a yellow cheese dust trail.
    “…and extraordinary tale of abuse,” Jenny said. “I know we like to think of small-town America as the heartland ofmorality and good neighbors, a place where people move to so their children can grow up normal. But my next guest says one
     young girl made her entire childhood such a hell that it was like a concentration camp. From Williamsport, Pennsylvania, please
     welcome Tanya Zdunn.”
    “Williamsport?” Mom said, leaning forward at the mention of our town. “You know this girl, Season?”
    Indeed I did. Tanya Zdunn was one grade behind me all through junior and senior high school, part of the group of lumpy students
     no one noticed unless we were bored. I had never considered myself