Somebody Else's Daughter

Let me tell you about love. Love is a kind of madness and you would follow it anywhere, you don't care.

Wooed by a vivid cover, she picked one up and leafed through it. She loved thee way it smelled, the ink, the fine paper, the oversized photographs.

Things didn't really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

His life in general had been a neatly wrapped package of lies.

She cried and he held her and he cried too. He didn't think that either could say what they were crying about, but it was something they needed to do, right now, together, and then, quite suddenly, they were laughing, hard, brash laughter that came up from someplace deep.

But you couldn't really start over. That was a huge, modern lie invented by talk-show hosts. Sure you could change things that improved your life, but all the bad stuff lingered. It lingered in your body compromising your organs.

He wanted to dig a hole and put the past inside it and cover it back up again. He didn't know if flowers would grow there or not. He hoped they would.

In situations of crisis, it was always best to rely on routine.

As corny as it sounds, Gallagher said, life is very long. You're supposed to mess up when you're young and other people sometimes benefit from your mistakes-as you did in this case. But things rarely stay the same. People grow up and change. They move on.

There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real.

Too many choices, that's the problem. Sometimes you get to a point, you know?" She looked at his face. His eyes seemed distant. "What do you mean?" He shook his head. "You wake up one day and nothing's the same. It's like you're in the wrong life or something. I don't know how to explain it.

Mrs. Heath wanted to sprinkle their minds with grass seed and watch the blades spike up through the earth, flat and predictable as a golf course. She wanted dependable students, well fed but not necessarily nourished. But he was not in that category. Admittedly, he could not count on his perceptions of letters and words, and he was not always accurate. He misused words most when he liked their sound. A sentence had a kind of music, and the word sounded right. The definitions were never as interesting as the sound they made coming out of your mouth. He rolled their flavors around on his tongue, tasting every nook and cranny, but he could not be trusted to deliver the right answer and she would never give him better than a C, no matter what genius work he produced. The way he saw it, his mind was a big unruly field of wildflowers. One day he would shower the world with blossoms.

By the way, I've decided there's no such thing as a simple life. It's futile to even pursue one.

Whenever he was around, she'd get this look on her face, this kind of radiance. She was a beer poured too fast, her golden liquid spilling over the edge.

People just want to be happy, she thought.

People wanted to be redeemed, she thought. Everyone did. We're only human.

I often ask the question: Is it impossible to have a simple life? The world is not simple, Claire said. The world is not simple. Joe repeated the phrase like the line of a great poem.

You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't.

It was early still, the sky white, nude.