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to take my charm bracelet, with its tiny silverhourglass containing real sand, but the bracelet got lost during a school trip to Washington. In a way, I was relieved. It would only have been a burden.
    My life has been a history of casting off encumbrances, paring down to the bare essentials, stripping for the journey. Possessions make me anxious. When Saul gave me my engagement ring, I worried for months. How would I hide it? For surely I should take it with me; I could sell it for food. But wouldn’t it tempt bandits as I lay sleeping by the roadside? In their haste they might cut off my finger, and I carried no medical supplies. I was glad when times got hard and we had to sell the ring back to Arkin’s Jewelers.
    A husband was another encumbrance; I often thought that. And children even more so. (Not to mention their equipment: their sweaters, Band-Aids, stuffed animals, vitamins.) How did I end up with so much, when I had thrown so much away? I looked at my children with the same mixture of love and resentment that I used to feel for my Sleepy Doll. I would have liked to strip myself of people, too. I was pleased when I lost any friends.
    My only important belonging since I have grown up is a pair of excellent walking shoes.
    Nobody, of course, knew anything about this trip of mine, but often when I was thinking of it my mother complained that my eyes had turned flat. “I don’t understand you,” she used to say. “What makes you get that expression? It seems you’ve … folded up your
looks
, Charlotte. What’s happened? You weren’t always like this. Why, ever since, I don’t know …”
    Ever since my kidnapping, was what she meant. Except she didn’t call it a kidnapping. She confused me. Sometimes she said I’d wandered to the midway out of contrariness; sometimes she said the fair people had maliciously lost me. Till I didn’t really know any more: what had happened? What did it mean?
    I had been kidnapped, I was almost certain, but when I tried to remember I was not so sure who had done it. I’d been kidnapped and placed on a dining room table, imprisoned in an eyelet dress; set on a splintery gold-painted throne; rushed through a field by a man in a leather jacket; hurried into a pickup truck by a fat lady who talked on and on: “I never had such a fright in my life. I thought we had lost you. Our only, single child, our little girl. I thought, ‘How will we ever …’ I thought you were dead, smothered maybe or strangled. You’re so thin, it wouldn’t take much to … you were thin even as a baby and I worried night and day over you. Thin as a stick. Thin as a wire. When they brought you to me I said, ‘She’s so thin!’ You had this very straight dark hair, I had never seen so much hair on a baby. You had a forceps mark on your temple that stayed there till you were two years old. Remember, Murray? I said, ‘What is that mark?
My
baby didn’t have forceps, she slipped right out. The doctor told me so himself.’ Oh, why don’t they answer your questions?”
    She let her hands fall into her lap. My father sighed. The two of them stared out at the night while the pickup rattled on, stealing me away.

5
    We came to one of those city-type service stations, all fluorescent lights, scroungy blue-jeaned boy pumping gas, German shepherd in the plate glass window. Jake Simms walked slowly and kept looking it over, I didn’t know what for. Then he said, “This’ll do.” He cut in across the concrete, pushing me ahead of him. “I got to go to the john,” he said. “Got some other things to do besides. Ask the boy for the keys.”
    “What?”
    “The keys, keys. Ask him for the keys to the john.”
    I asked. The boy was washing a windshield now and he stopped and listened, as if he couldn’t do more than one thing at a time. His ruffled yellow head tilted toward me; his knuckles were soiled and leathery. “I want the key,” I told him.
    “Keys!”
Jake hissed behind me.
    “Both