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beautiful.
    After I left the doctor's office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn't remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the traffic whipping past me. I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do. Not Thomas, not anyone I know. Someone is just going to get in the car beside me and say, Martha Rose, this is what we're going to do here. And I'd have done it, I swear to God, but no one came. Not even a cop to see if I was okay. For three years I hadn't been able to say what was wrong with my life, but at that moment it all became very clear. I had married a man I did not love. I was mistaken in my sign. I would have to have something else because this could not possibly be my life.
    In a way I thought it would get easier from then on, because knowing is easier. But how I would have rather known three months before, when I could have left with nothing inside me but guilt and sorrow. I kneaded my flat stomach with my hand. I dug the heel of my hand into the skin until I could feel a small pain, and then I pressed harder.
    I slept at home that night and never said a word. In the morning Thomas sat at the breakfast table, grading a stack of papers. He was teaching summer school. "Show your work," he wrote on the top of a paper, and then worked the problem at the bottom the way it should be done, line after line of numbers and letters I couldn't understand. I had never done well in geometry.
    "She got the answer right," he said. "See that."
    I looked at the paper. The girl had nice handwriting. I wondered if she was in love with him.
    "Are you going to work today?" he asked.
    "At a lawyer's office," I said. "It should last all week."
    "Rose, Rose," he said and leaned over the table, over the cereal bowls and cups of coffee, and kissed my cheek, my mouth.
    A lump came up in my throat. He was never a bad man. No one will ever say that Thomas Clinton was a bad man. "Come on," I said. "We need to get going."
    When we got to school he told me not to worry about picking him up. "It's a nice day," he said. But in Marina del Rey they were all nice days.
    "Make them all smarter," I said, because it's what I said every morning when he left.
    "I'll do my best."
    And then he was gone, mingling in with a sea of children. He was twenty-six years old.
     
     
    When I went to Father O'Donnell, it was not to confess but to make him my accomplice. I needed the name of a place to go, someplace far away, where women had babies and left them behind, like pieces of furniture too heavy to move. A place that gave the babies to remarkable people, so fit to be parents that their sterility was unconscionable. I also wanted him to tell Thomas, when he came looking for me, that my desire to leave was sincere and he should let me go without ever telling him where I had gone. I'm making this sound very easy, when in fact it was not. It was sad enough to change my life for good, to make the blood reverse the course of its flow in my veins.
    I was going to Saint Elizabeth's. Father O'Donnell had a file, which he brought out with great difficulty. It contained fliers, nearly advertisements, that addressed the problems of unfortunate Catholic girls. Words like comfort and prayer were scattered through the texts, along with moral guidance. But I was interested in the location more than the description. Saint Elizabeth's was in Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me.
    "Tell me you'll wait until tomorrow," Father O'Donnell said. "Go home to Thomas, just for tonight, or go to your mother's. This