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that has suffocated my soul. I watched my husband grow old and learn how to walk with his head bowed to the winds of the world. Not once in these years did we sit and talk about the pain and the missing and how we should somehow be able to go on. It was as if nothing else mattered after Annie, and I know now that it was wrong to let my life, my husband's life and the life of my wandering son pass me by. But I was helpless, so helpless I felt like a woman without limbs rocking on the edge of a wide cliff, afraid to look down, to do something as simple as to open my eyes.
    Richard never remembered anything about Annie. We told him as he grew older when he asked us why the other kids had brothers and sisters and he didn't. Somehow Richard did just fine, and I like to think that he never knew about my deep well of sadness, about the wall of anguish that separated me from his father.
    He became a bright shining star for me, went off to college, and traveled the world with his geology hammers and trucks filled with rocks. When I saw his first child, a daughter no bigger than half of my arm, I could barely bring myself to touch her because her face had the same soft lines and tiny nose of Annie Marie. Now they all live so far away, just so far away.
    Today on the highway the weather has been warm. By noon I could feel the heat rising out of the asphalt against my hands. When I put one foot in front of the other hour after hour, I have a feeling that I can almost fly, that I can lift my arms and soar the rest of my life as if I have never been troubled or burdened by anything.
    Somehow this feeling is familiar and I keep seeing myself lying in the brown fall grass fifty years ago with my hands on my swollen belly watching the hawks circle above the fields and thinking then that I could fly because I was so happy.
    I'm closer now to that long-absent feeling, closer with each step, and although we are walking forward together, I feel as if I am stepping back. Stepping back so that I can start over, from that time in the grass when I was happy and my heart flew with the birds.

 
    C HAPTER T WO
     
    M AYBE IT WAS THE SIGHT of Walter that threw Mary off course.
    He was the first living thing the women encountered as they not-so-silently moved up the highway from one telephone pole to another. They were counting stars, relishing the dark night that engulfed them and laughing heartily at the sight of an unused Tampax they discovered on the ground—as if someone had left it there as a marker for them.
    “Oh my God, look!” shouted Sandy, pushing at the feminine hygiene product with the toe of her dark tennis shoe. “This is a sign from heaven that we are on the correct highway.”
    Mary didn't laugh as the women gathered together, stopping simply because they wanted to, because they could, because now anything was possible. She stood back, hands on hips, eyes on the horizon, her heart beating wildly.
    Sandy queried, “Don't you all remember a thousand stories about the female reproductive system, cramps and babies, and the course and crimes of the uterus? How many of you have ever thrown a Tampax, used or unused, out of a car window?”
    “Dear,” Alice answered immediately, in a voice as proper and calm as the sky above them. “Women my age would never throw sanitary articles out of car windows. Didn't your mother and grandmother ever talk to you ladies about rags and wringer washing machines?” Alice had her hands clasped behind her, and she talked in a voice that her friends knew was not-so-serious, but they knew too that Alice has seen a side of life that they could barely comprehend. They knew as much of Alice as there was to know. These women would drag her from a burning car, take a bullet for her, jump off a cliff if they thought that any such actions would make Alice's life happier or easier. Despite their assorted miseries, the women perceive Alice as standing alone because she is the oldest and she has seen the most and