Idaho

Kindness that is nothing special is the rarest and most honest.

How quickly someone else's life can enter through the cracks we don't know are there until this foreign thing is inside of us. We are more porous than we know.

The revelation of kindness hurts worse than cruelty. There is no way to equal it. Nowhere to put her gratitude, and so it thrashes in her body.

He whispered, “Life.” And so she lived. Is living still. Will go on living, to the end of that whisper.

sibling laughter–he can hear it– not the laughter of school friends or neighbors or cousins. Something secret in that laughter, private, edged with meanness and devotion

But that was long ago. She has long since lost interest in motives, in the details of other women's crimes. Even the hatchet makes its usual sense. A mother who loves her child with all her self is only so far from the hatchet anyway; one casual swing and it's done. Hatred, love, all muddled up in that space inside a whisper, when the words don't matter anymore, when the baby's half asleep and you can carry it all the way there if you want, on nothing but the tone of your voice. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Sing it as softly as you like—the words clench their own teeth. The child still falls.

Perhaps it's what both their hearts have been wanting all along—to be broken. In order to know that they are whole enough to break.

He has lost his daughters, but he has also lost the memory of losing them. But he has not lost the loss. Pain is as present in his body as his signature is in his hand. He can sign his name perfectly, but he can't print it. W, he tries. But the a is impossible without the cursive tilt, the remembered motion of the letter before. He knows his name but can't see, can't feel, the separate parts, which are only possible from the inertia of his hand. He knows his grief, too, but its source is also lost without its movement. It is a static thing, unrecognizable, disconnected.

Theirs is a devotion that is possible only because of their equal disappointments in each other and the knowledge they share that at one time, to the one who mattered, they were each separately enough.

She learned how to deal with the moments when his memory lapsed. Sometimes, she felt it happen even without him saying a word. On a sunny fall day, she lay next to him on the ground, and as he dozed she felt his old life, his memories, radiate off his skin. She felt everything leave him but her. She shed her own life, too, to match him. They lay there together like a point in time. A cloud drifted in front of the sun and things to shift inside of him, and when she sensed this, she allowed things to shift inside of her, too. They became their regular selves again, still warm from the lost memory of a minute ago. But underneath her happiness was a dread that one day this would be all they had. All associations would be lost: the smell of the gloves, the sound of the truck door slamming shut. All the details she still wanted to know. Everything reduced to nothing more than itself.

Jenny's absence seems to describe her better than her presence does; she is a looming vessel of her own withholding.

Take you picture off the wall And carry it away Dye your hair the shades of fall Don't let time turn it to gray Don't think of me, I'll be all right Seems I've always done okay Just give me one more kiss good night For the last time, turn away

How could this word be a party of May's vocabulary if neither one ever taught her? Just like that, she has deepened. Beneath her blond-white hair are these two new eyes that see what he can't guess. She is capable of withholding, then revealing. How has she learned to be this new thing that she is? He cups his hand to the back of her head, and holds her close, feeling already that all of it will pass too soon, that she is already becoming her own self, composed of secret knowledge.

He knows the names of all those mountains he can see, every name of every mountain except the one he's standing on.

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom. It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June. We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder. She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

murmuring their laughter, sibling laughter—he can hear it—not the laughter of school friends or neighbors or cousins. Something secret in that laughter, private, edged with meanness and devotion, a fear of the knowledge each has of the other.

I could take care of you,” she said softly. She was very surprised to hear herself say this, but even so her voice was calm, as if she had been intending to say it all along. But

He sings so softly. Almost a whisper. Not like her father at all. Like the voices they give to the dolls, the men.

But now, seeing these letters his father wrote to June Bailey Roe, seeing his father's painful devotion to someone who simply wasn't real - a daughter he never had - Wade is unable to suppress his dread. All that love, all those feelings, all that pain, fastened to nothing, a terrible, drifting chaos. His future loss of mind becomes the new premise of his life, and he feels, already, the loss of the things he loves, feels himself trying to find some other way to hold on to them.

Because Wade had thrown everything away - drawings, clothes, toys - each accidental remnant loomed in Ann's mind with unspeakable importance. Four moldy dolls buried in the sawdust of a rotten stump. A high-heeled Barbie shoe that fell from the drainpipe. A neon toothbrush in a doghouse. Then, finally, the half-finished drawing in a book. Artifacts heavy with importance they didn't deserve, but which they took on because of their frightening scarcity; they built up against her, making stories of themselves, memories inside her head that should have remained in Wade's.

La revelación de la bondad duele más que la crueldad. No hay manera de corresponder a ella.

Loved one, the faceless, sexless, helpless focus of her heart: A loved one is the person you will lose.

This is not the way to teach a dog. It's true that she might not kill a hen again, but it will be a different kind of not-killing. It will be out of fear, of you. But make a dog learn out of love, then the not-killing it learns will be out of love, too.

But how hard, how nearly impossible, it had been to breathe.

If only the winter could have opened up to show her it was vulnerable, too.

She feels in fact that Wade's death is the very end of her heart. It is strange to arrive here at the end after all this time, and also strange to realize she hasn't been here before.

There was a coldness in his unwavering ease, his constant and impersonal joy.

The distortion of time, made possible by periodic reassignment, is something she is grateful for. It is a kind of distraction that renders chronology idiotic. And that is what she needs to go on living. That is how she copes with what she's done. The events that got her here exist inside another year, a distant year, a year that she's not living, and never will again.

Minutes pass, and between the minutes, June is slashing out the possibilities. She is narrowing her sister's life down to its essentials. The first to go is the vet's office where May might have worked, which is a loss, but the next to go is the mansion that May has been inside of in her dreams, a terrible, vast, cold place where the pictures are old and of other families. And so it is a relief to see it go, slashed out, burned to the ground with the hot friction of June's pencil. Then there is the loss of all possible sons, which is a tremendous relief, and then the crossing out of husbands, one by one, save one.