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Carry the One: A Novel
Carry the One: A Novel
Carry the One: A Novel
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Carry the One: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Hailed as “beautifully observed” (The New York Times) and “a brilliant feat of storytelling” (The Boston Globe), Carol Anshaw’s New York Times bestselling novel is one of the most acclaimed books of the year.

“When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”

Following a devastating moment in the hours after Carmen’s wedding, three siblings and their friends move through the next twenty-five years under its long shadow. Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another, and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect. Whether they take refuge in art, drugs, social justice, or love, Carol Anshaw’s characters are sympathetic, funny, and uncannily familiar as they reflect back to us our deepest pain and longings, our joys, and our transcendent moments of understanding.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 6, 2012
ISBN9781451636895
Author

Carol Anshaw

Carol Anshaw is the author of Aquamarine and Seven Moves, both Lambda Award finalists. She has won the Carl Sandburg Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, she reviews books for major newspapers nationwide.

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Reviews for Carry the One

Rating: 3.409604561581921 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

354 ratings51 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book was okay. It didn't suck me in like most books I like. It starts out with a wedding between Carmen and Matt. Their sisters Maude and Alice get in a car with Alice and Carmen's brother Nick, who is high and his girlfriend Olivia who is also high and gets behind the wheel. They soon hit a girl and kill her. The book then goes through there lives over the next 20 years. You don't really grasp time passing along unless you catch an age of someone or a major event. Or even the book said "2 years later" other then that it was an "oh, we've jumped ahead."

    I was expecting this book to be more about how the death of the young girl affects their lives and how one incident can change someone for life but they all were already on the paths they were headed before the accident.

    The book is a little boring and was just a look at the life of these messed up people. It's pretty much focused on Carmen, Alice and Nick and Alice is the main character featured. Not a bad book, I've just read better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    On way home from Carmen's wedding, siblings and their friends/lovers hit and kill a young girl. This novel traces their stories -- relationships, careers, addictions, etc. -- and the ongoing effect the accident has on Carmen and the five people in the car. The characters are well developed and complex; the writing is strong. The novel shows how one event can change your perspective on life, and how different people are affected differently by the same event. I'd like to read more by this author.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is a story about a cast of characters and what happens in their lives after a common tragedy. Not sure if I want to give this two or three stars. I had very high expectations, so I was let down by the lack of emotion it brought out in me. But if I hadn't have heard the hype, I might be more apt to have enjoyed it simply for what it was, and rate it with three.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very well done in terms of writing style and choices, and the concept was interesting. This book follows several people who all feel that they participated in the accidental death of a child. The single night of her death haunts them for twenty years; each handles that event in different ways.
    It was very difficult over the first 100 pages and even at points later to remember who was who, though. I struggled to keep track of the individuals, their histories, and the tracks of their lives. That was particularly annoying as I got further into the book. But in the end, I was glad to have read this.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The “one” purportedly being carried in this novel is a 10-year-old girl, killed by a car of guests leaving a wedding reception in 1983. The guests include Alice and Nick, sister and brother of Carmen, the pregnant bride. Years later, when the car’s occupants find themselves together again, one of them comments, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”But, in fact, only peripheral characters are affected significantly by the girl’s death. Carmen exhibits no guilt over letting her obviously impaired brother and sister drive away in the middle of the night. After the event, Alice’s toxic and mostly sexual relationship with Maude continues unabated. Nick is intelligent enough to do something brilliant with his life but his only real goal remains getting high. Memories of the incident surface sporadically, particularly in Alice’s paintings, but after twenty-five years, the siblings are exactly the same people they might have been if the accident never occurred. Carol Anshaw’s ability to write insightful, sharp dialogue and evocative description is never in question. But her skill in crafting a sentence is wasted on self-absorbed, unrealistic, and repetitive characters whose only purpose is to carry on with their meaningless lives. Unless Anshaw’s intent is demonstrating the destructive power of narcissism, she misses the mark.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    ***This was an advanced readers copy, so final printing may differ from review.A wedding. Too much booze. Too much drugs. And a long drive home. When a young girl is killed, hit by a car, bounced from the windshield, and lies dead by the side of the road, each passenger, and the driver of the car carries a bit of the dead girl away.Guilt harbors within, and each require the others just to survive. An elite club if you will.This is an excellent story of a violent death and the mad race to try to outrun its shadows. Spanning several years, it examines love, obsession, siblings, political convictions, the struggles of an artist, drug addicton, and homosexuality.This book seaks to the heart. I didn't want to put it down!I give this book Five Stars and a big Thumbs Up!****DISCLOSURE: This book was provided by Amazon Vine in exchange for an independent and non-biased review.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really liked the idea of this book: an accident involving lots of drunk/stoned people in a car that hits and kills a young girl. Technically, only the driver is guilty by law, but the others carry their own guilt. No one made good decisions that night. Each of the characters takes away a bit of the dead girl that night and each deals with her presence in their lives in different ways. Anshaw paints a vivid portrait of the accident's impact on the characters' lives. Not only how they are individually altered, but also how the shared experience shapes their interactions with each other. The author is adept at handling a multitude of characters - all were interesting and individualized so I never was confused about who was who or why they made the choices they did. And the paths the characters lives took were all believable and understandable. For me, the only downfall was that I didn't like the characters. To the one they were too self-centered and felt cold. So, I never really connected emotionally to the story.Bottom line: a well written and enjoyable story with less than likable (to me) characters. I'd definitely read another book by Carol Anshaw.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was expecting this novel to move me in some way. I was expecting to read about a family coming to grips with a tragedy of their own making, seeking a way to move on with their lives in the wake of their poor choices that ultimately took an innocent life. Instead, I read a rather ho-hum tale of 3 siblings (Carmen, Nick and Alice) and their rather unexciting paths to adulthood. While the author attempted to weave Casey (the young girl killed by the group's drunk driving accident) into the story and make it seem as though the three adults were struggling with her memory every day, her inclusion felt more like an afterthought. The novel is structured rather bizarrely, with frenetic jumps among people, places and times. I didn't find the characters to be particularly moving, nor their lives or struggles to be realistic or thought-provoking. All in all, this book was a bit of a disappointment, despite Anshaw's occasionally exquisite use of language.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Incredibly well written........thought provoking. Would definitely recommend. I want to read more by her. Loved her writing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I don't know what to say about this book. The blurb and numerous comments by authors and other reviewers in the preface of the novel made me think I was in for a good read.It begins dramatically enough.....a laid back wedding reception, drunk and stoned guests who get into a car to drive home. Sadly, they knock down and kill a ten year old girl and this apparently shapes the rest of their lives, as you would expect it to.We follow the main characters for the next twenty five years through ups and downs, but I didn't get the impression that the ghastly accident had affected them too much. One is an artist, and she paints the girl as if she were growing up and as she thinks she may look through those stages of her life. Aside from that, there isn't too much reference and the actual driver of the car that night barely gets a mention.The writing is competent, but I found the form a little stylised and almost gave the impression of trying to be too clever. The novel dips after the accident and doesn't pick up until near the end of the book.A disppointment really and I was loooking for more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Careless accident -- but does it really ruin everyone's lives, or would they have ruined them anyway?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the small hours of the morning on an otherwise deserted country road, a carload of wedding celebrants, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, crashes into a ten year old girl, killing her. One life is ended by the impact, but the ramifications of the accident echo and multiply in the years that follow in the lives of each of the car’s occupants. For one it means prison. For the others, their guilt and their punishment takes various forms. But for each there can be little doubt that one event will come to dominate the rest of their lives.Carol Anshaw follows the lives of three siblings over the course of the next twenty-five years: Carmen, whose wedding the others had attended; Alice, who was in the back seat of the car with her lover, Maude; and Nick, who was in the front passenger seat. Each chapter focuses on a different sibling, returning again and again over the years. Swooping between a regal third person, where the course of a character’s life can be announced magisterially, and a close third person narration from virtually inside the head of the character, Anshaw invites us to feel their anguish, doubt, and disappointment. Writing in a lush, lyric mode, she brings her principal characters viscerally to life. So much so that they feel hauntingly, even distressingly, real.In their separate ways, each character must deal with the fallout from that initial horrific accident. For Alice, a burgeoning artist, the life that might have been for the dead girl begins to play itself out in her paintings. For Carmen, her marriage disintegrates, but she finds solace in her young son. For Nick, the downward spiral is unrelenting. But the effects go far beyond these principal characters.Certainly an impressive and emotional novel that must be highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It was an okay book, not my favorite ever, but not bad either. Some of it was quite intense, and some of it uh... well, it was too flower-y for me, not to mention the small fact that at the beginning there were so many characters introduced all at once, so it got a bit overwhelming.Still, despite the ton and a half of characters, most of them were interesting and different. Not all cut from the same cloth that's for sure. A solid three star book.Also, I usually don't care what format it's in, but the copy that I won had a nice heft to it that isn't always apparent these days, even with hardbacks.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Joy's review: What a thought and emotion provoking book! What is forgiveness? Are some things unforgiveable? What do we 'owe' our family? Can events tie us together forever? All these deep questions AND it's very well written; Anshaw has great descriptive power.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book has a similar issue to Seating Arrangements, not sure why I kept reading but I did. Unlike Seating Arrangements, I liked these characters -- especially Carmen and Alice. I just wish there had been more there, I kept expecting things to happen and nothing really did. Still a good book, but not one of my favorites.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I don't even know where to start with this book. For a short story, it was painfully long. I think the elements of the story would have worked better in a better format possibly. I just didn't care for how the story bounced around. I couldn't stand how in one chapter I was reading about this time frame and the very next chapter could jump anywhere from 1-5 years away and it didn't express that until at least a few paragraphs into the chapter. And the ending...what the heck kind of ending was that? It kind of came out of nowhere and it wasn't that of a great surprise ending. I would have been happy without the whole last chapter, or at least for it to have gone a completely different direction!

    The characters weren't the most likable characters in a book. I understand that the storyline is that of a tough nature, but it was so hard to fall in love with any of the characters!

    I do think that this story does have potential and does pull at some heart strings, however, I just couldn't stay interested and make myself happy about having to continue to read it!

    This just wasn't a book for me! I get the point behind it, really I do, and I think written differently, it could be brilliant!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novel is structured in a similar way to David Nicholls’ “One Day” – a story that moves forward in time with each chapter, and captures the characters at a particular moment in their lives. In this case however there is a wider cast of characters, and the time leaps are less precise. Any chronological pointers you have to hang on to for dear life for they are doled out sparingly. I did find the brevity of the sections hard to deal with – I found myself wanting to know more, for these were all interesting and well rounded characters. What does help however is the excellent writing – here is an author who extracts high work rate from every word.I would perhaps have liked a bit more detail about what people looked like earlier on in the story as it was hard to separate them without this basic information, but it’s a minor gripe. This is a very intelligent and well written investigation of the business of guilt, addiction, family, relationships and lesbianism in startlingly tactile form. It’s not quite “One Day” but it’s close.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is my first Carol Anshaw book and I thought it was excellent. It is always interesting to see reviews and it is inevitable that people that give bad reviews don't like the characters or are looking for a plot when the book is a character study. Bottom line is that the writing was great. Good humor and although the characters were tightly drawn as being liberal, artistic, and addictive, the book was interesting and I recommend it. Good use of history and how the backdrop of events impacted the characters. The accident was a constant that was always out there but it didn't overwhelm everyone except for Nick. I look forward to reading more books by Carol Anshaw.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I initially had trouble being interested in the characters - as presented - a couple of a siblings, belonging to a couple of families are involved in a car accident that leaves a young girl dead. Missing their back stories? Thinking the book would be more of a thriller?When I got hooked, I was HOOKED.The accident remains mostly in the background, but always there. Anshaw crosses decades deftly in advancing the life stories of the main characters. She does all the right things to allow the reader to NOT feel like she is jumping around haphazardly. Rather, she drops into their lives with enough subtle clues to tell the reader exactly what is going on and why.I'm not sure if I should blame the author or my preconceptions for feeling like the novel was a slow starter, but that's why I gave it three stars, rather than four. Reminded me a LOT of Without a Backward Glance by Kate Veitch, which I enjoyed a bit more than Carry the One.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm always surprised when I read or hear from a reader that they didn't "like" the characters. Characters can be well written and interesting without being likable. In fact, characters can be boring because they are boring. I liked the concept of the book and found it well written. Powerful events shape different people in different ways.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this book although it was a bit hard to keep all the characters straight and their relationships to each other. In the beginning I wasn't sure if Jean was a friend or a sister. Turns out she was a friend of the sister. I didn't love the characters like I sometimes do but the author did a great job pacing the novel. Each chapter moves the story along deftly, sometimes in years and sometimes much less. I have paraphrased my favorite line from the book: "The past is resistant to revision." I love that! I also thought the last chapter was perfect! To end the book with another character would have been wrong.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Begins in the hours following Carmen's wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road. For the next 25 years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, craft their lives in response to this single tragic moment. As one character says, "When you add us up, you always have to carry the one."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was eagerly anticipating this book, but it was just okay. The writing is fine, nothing spectacular, but the characters' voices seemed too flat and undifferentiated to me. And although the author tells us many times about the impact that the precipitating event had on the characters' lives, we don't really see it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Carry The One is a story about a group of people who leave a wedding reception one night and end up killing a little girl on a dark country road. this changes all their lives. i only gave this book 2 stars because I found the book boring and the characters unlikeable. The only one who had their life changed would be Olivia who was driving the car that night. The rest were superficial. i really wanted to like this book but just couldn't.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'd read rave reviews, and loved her other books, so I was excited to read this. Unfortunately I was disappointed, though I'm not quite sure why. The characters just didn't grab me; I wasn't interested in their stories; the writing was just okay. Good but not great.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Really interesting and unusual book. It's supposedly about an accident early in the story, but it's really about different forms of addiction, perhaps springing from the accident. The characters were expertly drawn, the narrative had a certain wry humor, and the romance was steamy. I'd definitely be interested in seeing what she writes next.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book should make no. 1 for best book 2012. I am not sure what made it so compelling. Maybe it was the simple event and how it impacts people's lives or maybe it was the walk through recent history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I finished Carry The One nearly a month ago, but I've had a hard time trying to figure out how to write about it. It's well-crafted, beautifully written and nicely-paced. The characters are engaging and the story believable. I have a lot of really complementary things to say about Carry The One, but ultimately I didn't love it.Carry The One is a family drama that focuses primarily on three siblings: Carmen, Alice and Nick. The story begins after Carmen's wedding, when Nick, Alice and their friends and girlfriends load up in a car and go racing into the night. When they hit and kill a young girl, the guilt follows them for the rest of their lives. The story follows Alice, Carmen and Nick for the next 25 years as they fall in and out of love, live through failure and success and seem to find some kind of resolution in the end.This is a book about characters and this may sound strange, but I know it's a good book when I don't like one of the characters. I'm not talking about when a character does something irritating or is just kind of annoying, I'm talking about when a character is so fully-realized that I feel like I know them and I understand them. In Carry The One that character is Carmen. She's the kind of person that is never happy with what they have, never happy with the current state of the world, and never really appreciates all of the wonderful gifts in her life. She's a mother, a crusader and is supposed to be the sensible one of the bunch. She the least obviously affected by the death of the girl, but her struggle is more subtle and her character arc isn't as clearly resolved.Alice is the artist of the family. She spends most of the novel escaping the shadow of her artist father, falling in and out of bed with Maude (who can't seem to fully come out of the closet and whose "fascination with hypothetical versions of herself was bottomless.") and coming to the rescue of her siblings. She's fun and funny, but she also loves harder than anyone else in the book. She loves her siblings, she loves Maude. She even seems to love her parents more than her brother and sister.I feel like I was supposed to love Alice the most, but it turns out that Nick was the one I cared about the most. After the accident, Nick goes from a heavy drug user to a full-blown addict. I felt like his character was built from a flimsy stereotype, but I cared much more about what happened to him. When he's clean he's a very successful astronomer, but when he's using drugs, he's as down and out as it gets. Nick's story is the most heart-breaking because he is unable to channel the guilt and grief he feels over the death of the girl. His only response is to self-destruct. This could have easily been a fluff novel, designed to pull at your heart-strings and manipulate you into shedding tears for two-dimensional characters, but Carol Anshaw pulls it off in way that feels real.I said earlier that I didn't love Carry The One. I've been trying to figure out where the book and I missed each other and I've realized that it just wasn't written for me. I don't know if it's because I'm male and the book seems to be more geared towards female readers or if it's just a matter connecting to the story. Maybe it's both. I certainly think Carry The One will appeal more to women than men, but I hesitate to say that it's explicitly a book for women either. In the end, Carry The One is a good book and I liked it. The characters are strong and relatable, the writing is quite good and the story feels fresh. Some readers will really love this book and others, like me, will probably appreciate, but not ultimately fall for its charms.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    How does one horrible incident redirect the trajectory of our lives? How is our character reshaped by tragedy? These are the questions that Carol Anshaw explores in “Carry the One,” a stunning novel about how a drunk driving incident influences the lives of the characters. The novel begins on the night of Matt and Carmen’s wedding, when a car filled with sleepy and stoned wedding guests crashes into a young girl, Casey, on a dark country road. The girl dies instantly, and the specter of her memory haunts those involved in the accident. Alice, Carmen’s sister, responds by fearing emotional commitment and drifts from relationship to relationship, including a volatile on-again-off-again affair with Maude, who was also in the car on the night of the crash. Alice is a painter who becomes increasingly well known in the art world as the story unfolds. Her best work, though, is portraits of Casey living the life she never had a chance to experience. These paintings torment Alice and she refuses to place them on exhibit. Withholding that which would bring her the most fame is her atonement for the girl’s death. Carmen and Alice’s brother Nick, whose girlfriend Olivia was driving, is tortured by guilt - he saw the girl but was too stoned to do anything to prevent the accident. He descends further and further into drug addiction and alcoholism. His guilt prevents him from allowing himself any form of happiness and he destroys a promising career in astronomy and his relationship with Olivia. And in his awkward junkie way, he tries to make amends to Casey's parents. Carmen’s reaction to the accident is a compulsion to save the world; she is a militant social worker and a crusading political activist. But she is helpless to save those she most wants to rescue - her sister, her brother, and the young girl who died. “Carry the One” is subtle and understated, yet incredibly powerful. Anshaw knows just what to say and what to leave unsaid. The writing is compelling and beautiful. Every word, every phrase is perfect. The world the author creates becomes something real. The characters are complex and utterly believable. Their pain and their emotional battles are perfectly conveyed. I was completely captivated by this novel. Even after I’ve finished, I feel the lingering presence of the characters, and my mind resounds with the questions Anshaw posed: why is my life what is it and what has made me who I am? Caution to potential readers: If you are at all homophobic, you will not be comfortable reading this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Almost feels like the reader is a voyeur peering on these characters lives. The writing is so smooth and the characters are two sister and a brother who are involved in a fatal accident which effects them in different way throughout their lives. We peer in on them in increments of several years, finding out where they are at, how they are facing their challenges. Actually quite structurally perfect and apparent simpleness of the novel is deceptive.

Book preview

Carry the One - Carol Anshaw

hat dance

So Carmen was married, just. She sat under a huge butter moon, on a windless night in the summer of 1983, at a table, in front of the remains of some chicken cordon bleu. She looked toward the improvised dance floor where her very new husband was doing the Mexican hat dance with several other large men, three of them his brothers, other Sloans. Matt was a plodding hat-dancer; his kicks threw the others off the beat. In spite of this lack of aptitude, he was waving her over, beckoning her to join in. She waved back as though she thought he was just saying hi. She was hoping to sit out this early phase of her marriage, the mortifying dances segment.

Don’t be discouraged. Everything will get better from here.

This was Jean Arbuthnot, who sat next to Carmen, tapping the ash off her cigarette, onto her rice pilaf. Jean and Alice, Carmen’s sister, were among the artists who had taken over this old farm in the middle of Wisconsin. Jean played and recorded traditional folk music in a workshop on the edge of the property. Alice painted in a studio that occupied half the barn.

Bad dancer doesn’t mean anything else, does it? Carmen said. Matt was now doing a white-guy boogie to a bad cover of Let’s Get Physical, shooting his hands out in an incoherent semaphore. Like being bad at parallel parking means you’re bad in bed? She pushed back her chair. I’ve got to pee. This is apparently a big part of being pregnant. I didn’t know that before.

Just use the outhouse.

I did that. Once.

You looked in. You can’t look in, Jean said.

I am going up to the house, where looking in is not a problem.

Jean took Carmen’s hand for a moment, then let go. They were old friends, which made this brief touch a little slip of regular in the middle of these unfamiliar, celebratory events. Seated on Jean’s other side was Tom Ferris, a minor Chicago folksinger. At the moment he was banging his forehead softly on the table, to indicate he couldn’t abide the terrible cover band. Even though it was now definitely night, he was still wearing his signature accessory—Wayfarer shades. Today he sang while Carmen and Matt exchanged rings. Some Scottish ballad about a pirate and a bonny bride, a ship on stormy seas. Jean backed him up on a dulcimer. The two of them were fiercely committed to preserving traditional music. Superficially, that was their whole connection. Their covert connection was being tragic lovers, the tragedy being that Tom was married, with small kids. Carmen thought Tom was a total waste of Jean’s time, but of course didn’t express this opinion to Jean.

I wonder where our backup bride has gone off to? Carmen looked around as she stood up. Her brother, Nick, had shown up for the occasion in a thrift-shop wedding dress. His new girlfriend, Olivia, was wearing a Vegas-y, powder-blue tux. Some nose-thumbing at gender roles, or one of Nick’s elaborate, obscure jokes. Neither of them was in evidence among the crowd.

Or your bridesmaids for that matter? Jean observed, meaning Carmen’s sister Alice, Matt’s sister Maude. Many lost siblings tonight.

Carmen entered the farmhouse by the back door into the kitchen, which at the moment was vacant of humans, going about a life of its own. An ancient refrigerator emitted a low, steady buzz. The pump spigot dripped into a sink whose original porcelain was, in a circle around the drain, worn down to the iron beneath. A fat fly idled around the open window amid dangling pieces of stained glass. The room sighed out its own smell—a blend of burnt wood and wet clay. Trace elements of blackstrap molasses, tahini, apples, and dirty socks were also in the mix.

She passed through the living room with its brick-and-board bookshelves, walls filled with paintings by Alice and the other painters who lived here. In the corner, a giant wood stove hulked (the house had no central heating). The only undisguised piece of furniture was a ruby red velvet sofa from the 1930s, left by some distant, previous tenants. Everything else had been brought up from city apartments—cheap, rickety furniture draped with feed-sack quilts. A coffee table littered with seeds and rolling papers and a stagnant bong.

She headed up the stairs.

•  •  •

Alice was going to have to pull herself together, get herself outside, get her feet back on solid ground, she knew that. Instead she was lingering in surprising circumstances, having been dragged out of the ordinary progress of life into a hurtling, and (of course) sexual, detour. Which accounted for her not properly participating in her sister’s wedding reception. Not living up to her duties as maid of honor. Particularly, currently, not doing the Mexican hat dance, whose ridiculously peppy melody drifted up from the dance floor, through the screen of her bedroom window, audible in spite of the giant box fan wobbling on the floor. Rather she found herself naked, face down on her bed, pinned beneath the groom’s sister.

So far, this was the best moment of her life.

Draped over the edge of the bed, she looked down at their abandoned clothes. The parachute pants and slinky silk tops she and Maude bought together a couple of weeks ago—the day they met as bridesmaids—lay in a shimmery clutter on the plank floor. They hadn’t seen each other again until this afternoon when they walked together down the petal path, then stood side by side witnessing the ceremony. When Maude’s bare arm brushed against Alice’s for the third time, Alice decided not to take it as an accident.

And now, with a few intermediate steps, they had arrived exactly here. The evening was nearly as hot as the day it had come out of. The box fan had been running on high and was angled toward the bed, but still both of them were slick with sweat, also a little surprised to find themselves in their current situation. Still neither blamed it on the stunning weed they smoked just before the ceremony. Something had happened, they just weren’t sure what.

We should probably get back out there. Maude said this, but in an unconvincing voice, and without making a move to go anywhere.

I don’t know what to say about this, Alice said.

Maude was cupping Alice’s buttocks and had worked her fingertips lightly between Alice’s legs, teasing. It could just be a one-wedding stand.

While the fingers slid in, then out, Alice asked, Could you stay over tonight?

I have a shoot tomorrow afternoon in the city. Maude was in nursing school, but was also a model, for Field’s. Carmen had shown Alice a brochure. In it Maude’s hair was puffed and sprayed into a housewife helmet. The problem, according to Carmen, was that Maude was too gorgeous for a department store. They had to suppress her wild looks, tamp her down to pleasant and purchase-inducing. Then they could prop her next to coffee makers and bathroom vanities, in small-print dresses, quilted robes.

In this particular moment, Alice didn’t think she could ever get enough of her. She lay very still, listening for rejection in Maude’s excuse, but all she could hear were the soundless fingers. Then Maude said, Maybe you could come back to the city with me? Stay overnight? And Alice flooded with a goofy euphoria.

As they passed a cigarette back and forth while they shimmied back into their wedding gear, Alice was a slightly different person than she had been an hour earlier, more alive. Medical tests, she was sure, would show her pulse elevated, her blood thicker with platelets.

We could maybe get a ride with my brother and his girlfriend, Alice said. I mean I don’t particularly want to spend the next three hours in your parents’ backseat with the Blessed Virgin statue. When they came up the drive, I thought she was some elderly relative.

They didn’t like the outdoor wedding concept. They wanted it to seem more like a church. What can I say? They’re religious maniacs.

•  •  •

Above Alice and Maude, in the attic of the farmhouse, far enough up and away that the music and crowd noise outside was filtered through several parts rural nighttime, Alice and Carmen’s brother, Nick, stretched luxuriantly, aroused for a moment by the slippery sensation of satin between his legs. He felt sexy in his gown. Sexy and majestic. His arms, in the low light from a single bulb hanging within a Japanese paper shade, looked black. He had been working construction all summer; everything about him was either tanned or bleached white.

I’m glad you found your way up here, into our small parallel universe, he said. To pay respect to the shadow bride.

And his groom, Olivia said, tugging her lavender cummerbund down.

Their audience—temporary acquaintances, teenage cousins from the groom’s side—nodded. They were beached against huge floor cushions patterned with Warhol’s Mao and Marilyn Monroe. Neither kid had done mushrooms before. Nick had brought these back from a trip to Holland last year for an astrophysics conference in The Hague. He gave a paper on dark energy. He loved mushrooms.

One of the cousins had discovered that the shag carpet in the attic was tonal. Listen, he tried to make the rest of them understand, if you press it here. Then here.

Nick smiled and gave the kid a thumbs-up. Nothing he enjoyed more than turning people on. He’d skipped about half the grades along his academic way and so, although only nineteen, he was now a graduate student at the University of Chicago, studying astronomy. On his off nights he explored—through doors opened by hallucinogens and opiates—an inner universe. On drugs, he experienced no anxiety in the company of other humans, and did great with women. Olivia was new. At the moment, she was curled against him like a cat. They had only been seeing each other a few weeks. He had met her at a party. She was a mail lady. It was a job she said she could do better if she was high. Until Nick met her, he hadn’t thought of mail carriers going around stoned, but now he wondered if they all did. He could imagine them sorting so carefully, this letter here, that bill exactly there. Then walking their routes with deliberation, attuned to everything—the subtly changing colors of the leaves, the light rustle of the wind.

Olivia grew up in Wisconsin. I know this stretch of road like the back of my hand, she told him on the way up. So she drove while he just stared out at the wide fields edging the road, high with corn, low with soybeans. The sun-bleached sky, the tape deck whining out Willie Nelson, a hash pipe passing back and forth between them, angel flying too close to the ground. Could life get any better?

Now Nick looked down at her satin shirt spilling from the front of her tux jacket like Reddi-wip. He dipped a finger into the folds to test whether it was cloth or cream. He suspected Olivia would be new to him for a little while, then gone. Okay by him. He wasn’t looking for anything long term. He enjoyed moving through experiences, traveling without having to go anywhere. Other people and their lives were countries he visited. So far, Olivia’s main attraction, her local color, was the way she was always subtly touching him. The other excellent thing about her, of course, was her easy access to drugs.

•  •  •

The upstairs was a maze of narrow hallways. The only sounds were the heavy whir of a fan in one of the bedrooms, and a thumping bass coming down through the ceiling. Carmen found the bathroom, and used the toilet, which was painted to make it appear melted in a Daliesque way. She washed her hands in a paint-splattered sink with a large, misshapen bar of soap the color of glue. She inspected her makeup in the mirror, decided against using any of the extremely funky hairbrushes in a basketful on the windowsill, and made do with running wet fingers through her hair. She closed the toilet lid and sat sideways so she could press her forehead to the chilled porcelain of the sink. She suddenly found herself wobbly in the middle of all this tradition rigged up around something she wasn’t all that sure about. Child brides in India came to mind, kidnapped brides in tribal cultures, and mail-order brides for pioneer farmers. The vulnerable nature of bridehood in general. Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. Forward was the only available direction.

•  •  •

We cut with the knife upside-down, then we feed a piece to each other. Matt told Carmen this as if she was a foreign exchange student just off the plane. His mother had given him this information. She was the boss of this wedding, the commandant. The only thing Carmen got was the location—behind the farmhouse in the dreamy flower garden, a relic from some earlier incarnation of the farm. Wood and wire fences submerged beneath waves of climbing roses, Boston ivy, clematis. Stone paths mossed over, the surface of the small pond at the back burnished ochre with algae, paved with water lilies. Throughout the wedding, in the late hours of this afternoon, the scent rolled off the flowers in sheets that nearly rippled the air. A small threat of rain was held to a smudge at the horizon. Just this once, Carmen got perfection. Now though, things seemed to be slipping off that peak.

Maybe we could just skip the cake-feeding thing? she said to Matt, trying to gauge how drunk he was. A little, maybe.

Oh, my aunts really want it, he said. I couldn’t say no to them. Carmen could see these women gathering, clutching their Instamatics, tears already pooling in the corners of their eyes, tourists on an emotional safari, eager to bag a bride.

It suddenly occurred to her that Matt was a stranger. This was not some nervous, paranoid overreaction. The truth was she had known him only a few months, as yet had only his general outlines. He was a volunteer on the suicide hotline she ran. She trained him through nights drinking burnt coffee while talking down or bringing in or referring out kids on bad drug trips, guys who’d gambled away the family savings, women despairing in abusive marriages, gay guys and lesbians running the gauntlet of coming out—all of these callers sitting in motel rooms with some stash of pills they hoped would do the job, or looking out a high window they planned to use as a door.

Like Carmen, Matt believed in the social contract, in reaching out to those in need. He wanted to do his part; he was a good guy. Also she was pregnant, which was an accident, but they were both going with it. She was optimistic about heading into the future with him, but still, he was basically a stranger.

Now his aunts were clamoring—waving stragglers left and right—to gather a lineup of the bride and groom and his parents. Carmen’s parents were hipsters and atheists, way too cool for weddings. They were not present today.

•  •  •

Fatigue hit Carmen like a medicine ball; she was a bride, but also a woman in the middle months of pregnancy, and even ordinary days tired her out. Everyone had had their fun, and now she just wanted them all to go home. She wanted to be teleported to the squeaky bed in the room at a Bates sort of motel Alice had found for them nearby; it was slim pickings for tourist lodgings this far from a main highway. It was okay that it wasn’t a romantic setting. This was more of a symbolic wedding night. They’d been living together since February, sleeping together since about three weeks after they met. Tomorrow they were going fishing. Matt loved to fish and had brought rods and a metal box of lures. Carmen tried to imagine herself fishing. It was a whole new world she was walking into. Everything important was just beginning. Her earlier fears gave way to little slips of the giddiness that comes with potential.

•  •  •

Setting everyone off in the right direction, getting cars out of the yard by the barn, washing casserole dishes and ladles, and making sure they went off with their proper owners was a huge project, like getting the Conestogas out of Maryland, setting the wagon train off toward Missouri. Although it was nearly three a.m., the moonlight in the cloudless summer sky set up a weak, alternate version of day. Olivia’s cavernous old Dodge had room for a few stragglers, refugees from already-departed carloads. Tom Ferris stowed his guitar in the trunk—filled, Carmen noticed, with a high tide of what appeared to be undelivered mail—and got into the backseat along with Maude and—a little surprise—Alice, who Carmen wouldn’t have thought needed a ride anywhere, as she was already home. Carmen tried to make eye contact with her sister, but Alice ducked. She and Maude looked softened by sleepiness and lust; they were holding hands as they tumbled into the car one after the other, like bear cubs. Carmen was clearly way out of the loop on this.

She thanked Tom for singing at the ceremony. He stretched himself a little ways out the car window to bless Carmen with a sign of the cross. I only perform at weddings of people I think were made for each other. My blessing on you both. Almost everything Tom said came off as pompous.

She walked around to see how her brother was doing—still pie-eyed on something. He had twisted himself so the back of his head rested on the frame of the open passenger window. The sky was alive with stars and he was lost in them, like when he was a kid. Carmen pinched his ear, but he didn’t so much as blink. She couldn’t get a read on Olivia, who was starting up the engine, which faltered a couple of times before kicking in and required a bit of accelerator-tapping to keep it going.

You okay? Carmen asked her, peering past her brother so she could get a better look.

Oh yes, Olivia said brightly, maybe a little too brightly, but then Carmen didn’t know her well enough to know how she usually was at three in the morning. Everything’s copacetic. She flipped Carmen a little salute of confidence, and shifted into drive.

Carmen watched them weave down the long dirt road that led to the highway. They were the last of the guests to go. Billy Joel was on the car’s tape deck, Uptown Girl getting smaller and tinnier as the car drifted away, Nick’s head still poking out the open window. Carmen could see only the vague yellow of the car’s fog lamps ahead of it. Hey! she shouted. Your lights!

When the car disappeared from view, Matt said, She’ll figure it out eventually. And then he picked Carmen up.

To the cave, woman! he said, carrying her to his car, where he set her gently on the hood. He kissed her and said, Don’t get me wrong. This whole thing was great. But I am so glad it’s over.

Oh, me too, Carmen said. All I want is a good-looking husband and a bed and about fifty hours’ sleep. Some of the time when she talked to Matt, she felt as if she was in a movie scripted by lazy screenwriters. The two of them were still generic characters in each other’s stories. Girlfriend/boyfriend. Bride/groom. Wife/husband. But maybe that’s all marriage was—you fell into a groove already worn for you. You had a place now. The music had stopped and you’d gotten a chair.

•  •  •

By the time the car reached the end of the dirt road, everyone had grown quiet. Alice looked around at her fellow passengers. Maude was sleepy against her, within the circle of her arm. Nick was zoned out in the front, watching a mosquito flit up and down his forearm. Tom Ferris, on the other side of Maude, was staring out the side window, tapping down, pulling up, tapping down the door lock. Olivia turned left onto the two-lane—Route 14—and let it rip. Alice stuck her head a little ways out the window thinking there was nothing like traveling a country road at night. The sky was so clear, the moon so high and luscious.

A few miles on, the road dipped a little, then cut through a stand of trees. The leaves shimmered in the high moonlight, and now Billy Joel was singing You’re Always a Woman to Me. The first Alice saw of the girl was not her standing on the side of the road, or even running across it, but already thudding onto the hood of the car. A jumble of knees and elbows, and then her face, frozen in surprise, eyes wide open, huge on the other side of the windshield.

route 14

No owls hooted, no nocturnal animals skittered, no wind shivered through the leaves heavy on branches. It was as though, for an instant, everything had been stunned. The moon, a few slivers shy of fullness, hung ghostly white, referring out a pale, insubstantial light that made the surrounding sky appear navy blue.

The Dodge, in attempting to occupy the same space as a massive oak, had been thwarted by the laws of physics. It now rested on its side, front bumper embedded in the trunk of the tree. Its tires had stopped spinning, the passengers inside were as still as sacks of flour. This was a small inhalation, a bracing for the immediate future, which was racing in.

•  •  •

Alice both came into consciousness and wasn’t sure she had even been knocked out. She wiggled her fingers and flexed her feet and concluded she was not seriously hurt, just banged up a little. She could feel bruises purpling. The back of her head ached, her elbows, her butt. She craned her head out the window, which was now above rather than beside her. She found she was the top human in a pancake stack of three. Maude was beneath her; her hand—in a leftover gesture—was stuck inside Alice’s bra, still palming a nipple as if it was a coin in a magic trick. Any world where sleepy sex play might have occurred now seemed very far off, part of another epoch or universe.

She suddenly remembered the kid. She was out there somewhere in the surrounding darkness.

You okay? Maude said in a pinched voice beneath Alice’s shoulder.

I think so. Alice turned as much to her left as she could. You?

Something’s wrong with my ankle. It’s jammed under the front seat. The guy, the singer, he’s underneath me, knocked out. Breathing, but there’s blood coming from his head. I’m going to try—

I’m awake, Tom said. I might be dying, though. Really.

Head wounds just bleed like crazy, Maude said, wiping the blood away with her hand. I don’t think this is deep. She pulled her silver scarf from around her neck and tied it tight around his head. There. Just keep pressing your hand against the cut.

Alice said, The big problem is there’s a kid, a girl, I think. We hit her. She’s outside somewhere. Then to Maude, I know this isn’t great, but I’m going to have to step on you a little to pull myself through the window.

S’okay, Maude said, but groaned as Alice stood on her arm.

Once she hoisted herself out, Alice reached in and slipped her hands under Maude’s arms, pulled her to where she could boost herself up the rest of the way. In the front seat, the satin and polyester of Nick’s and Olivia’s costumes shushed against each other. Alice looked inside, and tried to rally them.

What about you guys? Can you get yourselves out? There’s a little kid out here somewhere.

I didn’t see her, and then she was just hitting the car. I thought maybe she was an angel. Olivia’s voice was coy and whispery. Like Marilyn Monroe’s. Given the circumstances, this voice was extremely annoying.

Nick turned from where he had settled, nearly behind the steering wheel, crushing Olivia, and looked up at Alice, smiling sheepishly, reaching a hand up toward her in a sort of semi-wave. She saw he was trying to approximate sociability. As though that was what was being asked of him.

They’re useless, Alice turned to tell Maude, then looked at Maude’s ankle, which was only minorly cut, but quite swollen. Can you walk on that?

Maude took a few test steps, inhaling sharply with each one, but said, Let’s go. Let’s find her.

This wasn’t difficult. The girl lay maybe thirty feet behind the car, in the ditch that bordered the gravel shoulder of the road. She looked to be about nine or ten, although she had the adult features of kids from rougher places. She was quite beautiful, with a mop of hair bleached white by half a summer, green eyes staring at absolutely nothing. She was wearing denim cutoffs and a plaid madras shirt, a crosshatch of pinks and greens. Indian moccasins patterned with colored beads. Her clothes were blackened by the earth she had fallen onto, skidded through. There was very little blood, just scrapes here and there. She could be napping but for the position of her body, which looked something like an extremely advanced yoga pose, limbs bent in unlikely ways. Also,

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