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too long and shaggy and the stink of whiskey on him; Lucius with his earnest face, good shoes, and carefully trimmed mustache; Martin, who limped in, shoulders slumped, looking pathetic and ruined.
    Go away
, I longed to say.
Get out of my house
.
    I wanted to turn back time, keep Gertie wrapped up in my arms, soft and warm under the covers.
    Martin took me by the hand, asked me to sit down.
    “We found her,” he said, and I covered my mouth, thinking I would scream, but no sound came.
    All three men stood frozen, hats in their hands, six sad eyes all on me.
    T here is an old well at the far-eastern edge of the Bemises’ property, something that ran dry years ago. I remember Auntie and I went there once, when I was a girl not much older than Gertie, to drop stones down and listen for the sound of them hitting bottom. I leaned against the rough circle of stones and tried to see the bottom, but it was too dark. There was a dank smell coming out of it, and I could almost imagine feeling a cool breeze.
    “How far down do you think it goes?” I asked Auntie.
    Auntie smiled. “Maybe all the way through to the other side of the world.”
    “That’s impossible,” I told her.
    “Or maybe,” she said, tossing another pebble down, “it leads to another world altogether.”
    I leaned farther down, desperate to see, and Auntie grabbed the back of my dress and pulled me upright. “Be careful, Sara. Wherever it goes, I don’t think it’s anywhere you want to be.”
    C larence said Gertie was curled up at its bottom so sweetly, as if she’d just fallen asleep.
    “She didn’t suffer,” Lucius said, his voice low and calm as he put his hand on top of mine. His hand was soft and powdery, not a callus or a scar on it. He was there when they hauled my Gertie out, and this seemed all wrong to me, that Lucius was there when they pulled her out, and not me. They sent Jeremiah Bemis down by rope, and he tied it round her waist. I closed my eyes. Tried not to imagine her small body swinging, banging against the curved wall of the well, as they hoisted her up out of the darkness.
    “She died instantly,” Lucius said, as if it would be a comfort.
    But it is no comfort. Because, over and over, I think of those stones I once dropped, and how long it took for them to reach the bottom.
    I imagine what it must have been like, falling.
    Surrounded by a circle of stone, falling, falling into the darkness.



Ruthie
    The snowflakes were spinning, drifting, doing their own drunken pirouettes, illuminated by the headlights of Buzz’s truck. The studded tires bit into the snow, but he took the corners fast enough that they fishtailed dangerously close to the high snowbanks that lined the single-lane dirt roads.
    “Turn off the lights,” Ruthie said, because they were close now, and she didn’t want her mother knowing she was out past curfew again. She was nineteen years old. Who did her mom think she was anyway, giving Ruthie a goddamn curfew?
    Ruthie reached down, grabbed the bottle of peppermint schnapps that Buzz held between his thighs, and took a good slug of it. She rummaged through the pockets of her parka and pulled out the Visine, tilted back her head, and put three drops in each eye.
    They’d been out partying at Tracer’s barn, finishing up the keg left over from the big New Year’s Eve bash. Emily had brought pot, and they’d huddled around the kerosene heater, talking about how much winter sucked and how everything was going to change in the spring. They’d all graduated the June before, and here they were, still stuck in West Freaking Hall, Vermont, the black hole in the center of the universe. All their friends had gone on to college, or moved to big cities in warm places: Miami, Santa Cruz.
    It wasn’t that Ruthie hadn’t tried. She’d applied to schools in California and New Mexico, places with good business-administration programs, but her mother said that it wouldn’t work right now, that they just didn’t have