By Nicholas Sheppard

Miriam had spent Memorial Day weekend driving through west Missouri. Stores decorated with flags and bunting, ceremonies in squares and Veterans halls, in one town a rifle salute echoing off brick facades. No one had paid much heed to the woman cruising in an old Subaru, looking for something beyond the high-school bands, buglers, mayors, veterans in caps. It was in the fourth town, during a mid-afternoon lull, that she happened on the right place.

It was a women’s clothing boutique and consignment shop at the southern edge of the main strip. Only one of the metal doors was open, gleaming in the hard, flat prairie light. A clothes rack outside. There were no cameras in the street – none of those dark orbs attached to poles she’d seen in larger towns – but perhaps a closed-circuit camera aimed at the counter, figures captured in low-frame-rate increments. In the car, across the street, she had made out narrow aisles, a bulky sunglasses stand just inside.

Occasionally she got out of the car and drifted to a verge that had once been a rail spur. She would smoke a cigarette, looking to where the town receded in a low scatter of roofs and poles and gave way to gravel, fences and a line of cottonwoods. Beyond, the prairie spread, wheat and stubble bleaching under the sun, fields stitched with windbreaks and stock tanks flashing dull light, the heat laying a thin tremor across everything. She kept her large sunglasses on at all times.

The moment came suddenly. But she was listless from tossing and turning on the poor mattress in the hotel half an hour’s drive away, throat parched, head dull and aching. She had a need to relieve herself and had been mulling whether to drive a mile up the road to a coffee shop or fast food outlet. During the weltering nights at the hotel, she had almost talked herself out of the idea, or at least imagined she might falter if the opportunity came. But noticing the figure approaching through thick shadows and harsh sparkles of sun, she felt she might never get a better chance. It was a woman, early thirties, in white jeans and hair in a ponytail. The stroller was a three-wheeler, the hood extended for shade. No sign of movement from the seat. Though she was hard to make out in the glare, Miriam felt the woman was tired, the trip out of the house probably aimless, a need for fresh air and a quiet change of scene. Miriam looked but didn’t look. She abstracted the person and assessed the form. Her heart was throbbing, and the corners of her lips were drawn down, wretchedly fixed. Within the anxiety was a strange newness: she had never fixated on anything in her life, never sought after anything, always supposed the world would be unavailing. A life that was mostly omission.

She watched the woman push the stroller to the metal doors of the little boutique. She paused at the clothes rack. A string of cheap dresses, a coat or two. She twitched and dragged at the hangers with one hand, dallied over a cream dress. She drew it part-way out, the lower half still bound between other garments, then replaced it, leaving it jutting out slightly in sagging folds. Miriam watched raptly. There was a step up into the shop. The door was narrow; there was no one around. She watched the mother’s momentary deliberation, one hand on the curved rim of the stroller. For a dreadful instant she seemed to vaguely take in the car, though from her angle she would likely only see the sun-struck windshield. She took a few steps into the boutique.

Miriam’s tongue adhered to the roof of her mouth. The steering wheel had a film of sweat and grime. She turned the ignition and eased the car from the curb. She glanced in the rear-view mirror: if there were a pickup or old runabout approaching, she would abandon what she was doing. She would park again and traipse up to the nearby church annex, in hopes of there being a restroom, and if there were none she would squat in a bushy little declivity just behind, too forlorn to care much for her dignity.

In the rear view mirror the broad road was empty, patched with darker tar. Beyond, the fields ran out pale and level. She steered across the street, brought the car to a stop just before the boutique, then cracked the door open. The air was hot, with a crisp edge. She paced to the stroller and crouched down. The first thing she saw was a plump, pale leg, then the body of the baby. It looked about two, though she really had no idea – of children she knew next to nothing. On its head was a wavy, pale-blue hat with picot trim. It was asleep. In an instant she was fumbling for it – the central catch gave way easily enough, but there were five little straps, and it was a terrible strain trying to ease the limp limbs around and through, especially as her hands were shaking, almost shuddering. The baby was surprisingly heavy; its head lolled back as she tried to lift it out. She had one knee painfully pressed into the sidewalk. The last strap was half-coiled around a thigh. She couldn’t quite support the baby against her shoulder, or chest. Then there was a clatter: a little plastic drink cup had tumbled out and bounced on the concrete, again, then again.

She thought this was the last feasible moment she could stop – if the mother stepped out suddenly, she could claim the drink cup had fallen out and she was setting it back. But then she realised she was too far gone, the straps were undone, the baby was in her grasp. She loped back to the car. The door she’d left fractionally ajar had clicked back into place, and she had to fumble at the latch with one hand, the child gripped unsteadily. She got the door open, clambered in, anxious and ungainly, shifted the baby past the steering wheel and lay it on the passenger seat. Gasping in heaves, stricken, she turned the engine on and drew the car away. She realised she was heading in the wrong direction, away from the freeway. She was too beside herself to turn around in the street, so she accelerated to the first left turn and drove around the block, re-emerging in the street just down from the boutique. As she gained speed, toward the edge of the town, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw the woman, one hand gripping the handle of the stroller, the other gesturing hysterically. The woman registered the car – Miriam could see her shrieking – then she bounded down the sidewalk and into the street, arms outstretched, as if begging for mercy.

For the first few miles she was scared witless the woman might flag down a pickup, or the boutique owner’s car would be parked in a side street. She kept glancing behind. She was not confident driving fast, rarely did so, and her greatest concern was the welfare of the child lying on the passenger seat. South-west of town was a row of low houses with chain-link yards burned pale. Soybeans stretched on either side, short and dusty, here and there fields of corn. Grain bins on concrete pads. She bore on a few more miles. Farmhouses sat back from the road. A white clapboard, then a two-story Victorian. Then the intervals between houses grew longer. A vast sweep of sky opened up, a washed-out blue with high cloud streaks barely moving.

She was reeling, and the need to urinate had become painful. She pulled over, jouncing across tyre ruts on a verge of grass and gravel. A driveway sloped slightly to a gate ten feet away. She took some fast food napkins from the glovebox, got out and paced around to the passenger side. She worked her pants and underwear down, squatted, and closed her eyes for a moment, feeling heat rise to her face. The highway was empty.

She tugged her clothes up, trudged back into the car and sat for a moment, waiting for her heart to settle. She felt the urgency to get back on the road, but for a long spell she looked almost breathlessly at the little child, on its back with its arms up beside its head, fists loosely curled. She felt it was almost too precious to touch, but dared a little caress of its cheek and then, with a few brisk movements discovered it was a boy. She was pleased. His breathing was steady and a little nasal, with an occasional catch or sniffle. He shifted, turning his head to one side, pulled his knees up toward his chest, then stretched out again. His cheeks were flushed and warm, his hair damp at the hairline. He let out something between a whimper and a sigh, tensed for a second then eased back. His hands slowly opened and closed. One foot kicked. There was the airy rush of a passing pickup.

Miriam was awestruck. Then fiercely possessive. She roused, unsure how long she had been gazing. She peered back the way she’d come and, seeing no vehicles, set out again. Gravel churned and spat as she bore the car back up the little slope, onto the highway. The child stirred. His eyes opened halfway and he made a small, confused sound, looking around without seeming to see anything. He pushed himself more upright, one hand rubbing at his face. His hair stuck up on one side.

Miriam had known the Midwest her whole life and could feel when the atmosphere was loaded, when the sky looked calm longer than it should. The clouds moved fast but didn’t immediately thicken. High, broken cumulus slid across the blue, their undersides darkening like rising bruises. Plump drops first; widely spaced splatters on the windshield. The first, single track of the wipers left smears of dampened dust. The rain didn’t arrive evenly. It came in shafts. One field soaked, the next dry. She could see a fume discharging, heavy enough to blur the road, but sunlight visible at the edges, a harsh clarity amid the murk. There was only one peal of thunder, a low roll far off. She knew that in the passing fields the smell of hot soil would be sharpening, an odour as familiar to her as the straightness of the roads.

The boy whimpered and reached about, his movements clumsy and slow. He said no a few times, not to anything in particular, just the word he seemed to know best. He started to cry: a grizzled fussing. He kicked his feet and twisted, trying to get comfortable or trying to get out. The crying got louder. He arched his back and pushed against the seat, his face red and crumpling. Down, he said, clearer now. Down, down. He began to thrash and kick. He threw his head back and wailed, the sound piercing in the small interior.

Miriam eased the car onto another verge, sluicing through brimming ruts that reflected the sky. With the engine still running she tried to get the seatbelt around the child, but he was far too small – the lap belt rode up near his chest instead of across his hips and the shoulder belt cut across his neck and face. He fought it from the start – arching his back, going rigid, wriggling free, the belt riding up under his armpits. She worried it could end up around his neck if he twisted enough, or he’d push it away entirely and end up standing on the seat or trying to climb into the back or onto the floor. His nose was running. He wiped it with his whole arm and kept crying. His legs pistoned against the seat and dashboard, and he twisted hard to one side, trying to see out the window or just moving because he didn’t know what else to do.

Miriam was shaking and distraught. She had intended to cross the Nebraska state line to some kind of safety before the civil dusk, but the scale of her act had left her reeling. Her head ached. The lack of sleep was taking its toll. It would be dangerous to keep driving with the child so shrill and unsettled. Even when she crossed the state line, there would still be another hour or two until she reached the old homestead. She pressed on for another twenty miles. She veered off the main highway and into a small settlement. The child wailed and whimpered and slid on his belly down to the floor, arms outstretched over the seat.

There was a roadside motel, very old, a block of rooms on two levels, a diamond-shaped plastic sign. The forecourt, already dry in patches, was cracked, and there were weeds along a chain-link fence. Half a dozen cars and pickups were outside, beaded and glossy from the rain. The child was listless, but more subdued. She needed a moment to gather herself. She went to the back of the Subaru, drew out her packet of cigarettes and lit one. She closed her eyes with the first soothing inhalation of smoke. She slid a palm down her forehead and over her nose, was struck by how greasy her face was, and supposed she looked terribly drawn and unkempt. Organising a night at the motel seemed straightforward enough, but her thoughts were scattered; besides an occasional thank you she hadn’t spoken to another person in two days. She struggled to focus, unable to recall the last time she’d stayed in such a place. Would she have to show some ID? She hadn’t done much in the way of preparation, other than buying a packet of diapers, a tub of baby formula and a bottle, and some squeeze pouches of applesauce and animal crackers. She had no stroller, no little backpack stowed with suitable things. If someone passed by and saw there was no car seat there would likely be questions. Fifty metres away a truck with a trailer clattered over train tracks. A plane passed over, a slow rippling twinkle, the sound coming and going on the mind. She finished the cigarette and dropped the butt onto the forecourt. She sniffed and gathered herself, then went into the little office, feeling it would be alright to leave the child unattended for a moment.

Worn linoleum, curled up an inch or so at the edges, a blistered veneer counter, a ring binder with laminated House Rules.

The clerk was a man in his sixties in jeans and a black T-shirt.

‘Hello there. Just you?’

‘Yes. I mean me and the kid.’

‘Oh, so you and a little one.’

‘Yes please.’

A television was just beyond: commercial music, the shape of words without the sense.

‘I’ll give you Room 12, which is on the ground floor, so you won’t have to worry yourself with the stairs. They can be tricky when we’ve had a bit of rain.’

‘Thank you.’

He didn’t ask for any ID and did not mind that she paid in cash. She was an unremarkable middle-aged woman.

‘Looks like you’re due a rest.’

She made a quick, wan smile. The room key was tied to a small wooden block.

‘If you’re feeling too worn-out to put something together, there’s Clarence’s down the end of the road, they’ll fix you a decent meal. They won’t mind you having your kid with you. They’ve got high chairs and whatever else might suit you.’

‘That’s very helpful, thank you.’

She returned to the car. The boy was stirring, whimpering. She drew him up and held him, marvelling at the warmth of the little body, the husky breaths, the lentor of his movements. She carried him to the door of Room 12 and fidgeted with the key. The knob was loose and required little probings and twitches. The boy started saying mama, softly, confused. She got inside and set him on the closest of the two single beds. He immediately tried to slide off, was unstable on his feet. The room was dingy: a stale smell of trapped warmth and old fabric, densely patterned bedspreads and curtains, drawstring blinds at a slight slew. She took all of this in with a few glances, then made for the door to quickly gather the half a dozen things from the car. The child toddled towards the door too, wanting out, starting to cry. She swept him up, returned him to the quilt. For a second, she looked back and was struck by the sight of the little boy hunched and solemnly wide-eyed on the end of the bed. She went out to the car, grabbed the items and carried them back in.

It was then that she realised the smell: the diaper was heavily soiled, probably an hour old. She dropped the items on the other bed and laid the boy down. He fought, arching his back. She opened the diaper: the mess was overwhelming. She used much of the pack of wet wipes she’d brought in. Then she fetched out a new diaper. She thought she’d fastened it mostly right, but he began to pull at it, uncomfortable, crying harder now. Then screaming. She shushed and made little pats, but the child was hot and wretched. Outside, the light was fading into dusk. Through the window, below the sagging blind, the sky had shifted from washed blue to a pale, colourless band at the horizon, darkening overhead to rich red and purple. The sun had dropped behind the low commercial buildings across the street. A switchback up the only hill.

With the child still wailing, she took a formula tub to the counter of the little kitchenette. She wasn’t sure how to mix it. She tried tap water in the bottle but couldn’t seem to get the proportions right; she was flustered by the boy’s screeching. She worried she’d made the formula too thick. The bottle tip was either the wrong size or type – the boy couldn’t suck properly and then refused it entirely. He batted it away, screaming mama. She tried an applesauce pouch: he took a few sucks, then refused. She tried to coax him with an animal cracker – he took one, threw it. She recoiled at the full brunt of a scream in her ear. The boy teetered in her grasp for a second, squirmed. For a good minute she was too overwhelmed to think anything – the screaming was at such a pitch she could hardly cope, her eyes were wide and her heart was racing.

She flinched. There was a thumping against the wall – a muffled, indistinguishable protest about the noise. She tried to shush the boy, but he was hysterical. After a spell there was a knock on the door. She went over, jiggling the boy on her hip, and opened the latch with her free hand. Through the three or so inches she saw the man from reception.

‘Ma’am? I’m sorry to trouble you. We’ve had a bit of a complaint about the noise.’ He was weary, not unkind. ‘Everything okay? Baby sick?’

‘We’re fine, truly. He’ll settle.’

The man wavered. The baby moaned then squealed.

‘Guest in 13 has work early. Can I move you to Room 4? End unit, no neighbours.’

She really had no choice, so she gathered up the few things, put them in a plastic rubbish bag to carry in one hand and carried the screaming boy across the parking lot. A guest smoking outside watched her, an orange mote, a face that loomed in a gloomy flicker then receded back into darkness. The end unit was more isolated; the only difference was a large watercolour of a boat on a shingle beach. The man had gone on ahead of her and turned on the light.

The screaming went on for another hour. When the boy began to exhaust himself, winding down to whimpers, she felt raw, depleted. The light in the room was sallow and shadowed, in the kitchenette it was stark and blotting. She tried the bottle again. This time he took a little. She held him stiffly on the bed. He was too tired to fight, and slumped against her sullenly. She laid him down. He didn’t protest. She lay next to him, careful not to get too comfortable, feeling that if she closed her eyes for more than a moment she would lapse into sleep. She watched him. Nose crusted. Face blotchy and tear-stained. But beautiful.

Within ten minutes he was asleep. She roused herself, felt how stiff her body was, and traipsed to the bathroom to splash water on her face. She returned to the room, went to the window and gazed out. The streetlights came on, vapor turning the air beneath them a vague amber. Beyond the buildings the land ran out flat and dark, fields and distant tree lines. Heat lightning pulsed once on the horizon, soundless, illuminating nothing. A pickup turned into the lot. Its headlights swept the row of motel room doors, then went out. The engine ticked as it cooled. The window showed only her reflection and the dim shapes of the room behind her.

Her reflection: the face people had seen when they stepped into the non-bank lending agency. Central Plains Lending Office. Not payday loans, not bank loans, the middle zone where people went when they didn’t qualify at the bank, needed money for equipment or medical bills, were in a temporary bind, or didn’t want a credit check that showed up elsewhere. She was someone talked to only when things were tight, someone it was hoped would never be needed again. The men, brought low, could be stiff and unforthcoming. In grocery stores and post offices there would be an averted glance, a half wave turned into hair tucking. A film of erasure.

She switched off the light. From the bathroom a patch of yellow reached as far as the single bed closest to the kitchenette. On the other bed the child was quiet and still. She lowered herself onto the quilt, worn beyond her limits, a spinning tiredness. In her daze, she became aware of a hum overlaid with an airy sound: an outside industrial fan, or more distant generator, a sound that seemed to swell in the vastness of the night. Almost asleep, she thought of the ocean, the one and only time she had travelled with her family to the coast. She heard the steady rumble of the sea, the roiling immanence beyond the surf. She remembered the tide was high, the waves seeming not to crash but to burst, the flung spume splattering the surface. The bigger breakers bashing and tumbling over themselves. At waist height the waves had struck her, she’d had to totter and hop. Strange lulls, sometimes a minute or more, the ocean eerily calm, the slop and whoosh of her forearm through the water sounding artificially distinct, an enclosed sound. One ear had been clogged, muffling the sound of the surf. She had turned and waded back to shore. It had been strangely quiet. She had been too fatigued to notice the sudden drawing away of water. The freak wave had struck her from behind. In the first seconds she hadn’t been aware of it as a wave at all, only a thrusting, surging turmoil. She had lost any sense of which way was up, she was threshed around, her limbs wrenched in all directions. The wave had spasmed and surged twice, three times; all the breath was out of her.

She woke in shock – there was knocking at the door, a quick, incessant rapping. She went rigid, hot with fear, her scalp prickling. She peered at the crack below the door, expecting to see the light cut across by shoes. She began to apprehend that the sound was further off: a train was clattering rhythmically over the tracks behind the stores on the other side of the street. It took a long moment for the panic to subside. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. What on earth was she doing in this place? People would remember the commotion of before. It wasn’t safe to stay. She was achingly tired and vividly awake. Getting her shoes on again took a minute – there was a kind of lag, as if sound had slipped a fraction ahead of shape. The child was quiet. She hurriedly collected everything.

There was a musty shawl in the back of the car. She laid the child in the passenger seat and wrapped him up loosely. His head lolled forward and she set it back with a little caress of his curls. For a moment, she was struck by the eeriness of the scene and time of night. The quiet, the child’s face in the streetlight, the faint gleam of the car’s fixtures, the ignition and the scraping rasp of the tires turning on the forecourt strangely ostensible upon the silence. Insects flitted in the headlights. She breathed out with a ragged catch in her throat. She turned into the street, back toward the highway.

It came to her that there would likely be police cruisers out on the roads. Her lack of resilience, her diffidence – it was bound to end before it had even properly begun. Most likely, she supposed, with a flicker of lights, a single staccato blare of a siren, and she would come to a halt and collapse within herself, some estranged, lapsed little thing, ushered this way and that. Occasionally a silo loomed out of the black. When a vehicle passed, its headlights flared harshly, revealing a second or two of detail: grass, gravel shoulder, a road sign. She contemplated the child’s face in the sheen then recession between sparsely sequenced lights. As her head swam, she wondered if she might pull over into some dirt road or rural bypass and simply sleep alongside the child for one night, before her discovery, and everything impinged upon her.

The highway remained empty. The boy woke suddenly. Not gradual, just awake, disoriented, terrified. He didn’t know where he was.

‘Mama. Mama.’

It started as a whimper and rose to screaming within half a minute. He arched his back, pushed against the seat. He fought at the shawl, got more entangled.

‘No! No! Mama!’

He tried to sit up but kept sliding. The seat was slightly reclined and he couldn’t get purchase. This frustrated him more.

‘No, sit down—’

He kicked at the glove compartment – it flopped open. She reached across and pushed it shut. The bawling was so harsh she had to wince and assert herself against it. He managed to get to his knees, facing the back seat. His leg caught on the centre console. He was wedged awkwardly, half sitting, half lying, one leg bent at a bad angle. The screaming reached a new pitch. He’d hurt himself, or was just terrified, she couldn’t tell.

Ten miles on, the screams began to shorten. The boy subsided into long, sobbing gasps. He would go quiet for a second or two, breathing fast and shallow. The shift was so abrupt she feared something might be wrong. He drooped sideways, and his jaw slackened. Shuddery breaths, drool, coughing. A final sigh and long exhale.

The Missouri-Nebraska line barely announced itself. A green sign rose briefly out of the dark. There was no gate, no town, just the same blacktop. Cornfields and pasture offered no silhouettes, no elevation, nothing to frame the sky. It seemed to sit directly on the earth, rich and immense. The stars seemed low because there was nothing competing with them, no hills, no trees tall enough to matter. Miriam stared out at the expanse. She thought she might turn on the radio, to revive herself a little, but decided not to, fearing she might hear a snippet about the thing earlier in the day. Mostly, she didn’t want to wake the boy.

Hylas, Nebraska was a town of about 3,500. The pure sandhills of Valentine and Hyannis to the west were too stark for Miriam: dune grass, sky and cattle. In places the wind had stripped the bleached grass away entirely, exposing pale, chalky sand. Hylas had such sandhills to the west, but to the east the land grew more verdant.

She had only visited her Uncle Wallace’s rural home a few times as a child. It was eight miles outside Hylas, and twenty from Broken Bow. Travelling across state to see her unexpected inheritance, she had driven past grain elevators and rail lines. She had seen grassy dunes in moonlight and wind-lashed prairie. The house was off the blacktop, on a dirt road, partially visible through a line of cottonwoods. Two storey, white clapboard, a full-width front porch enclosed by balustrades. On the upstairs level, the sash windows tapered up to slight decorative curves. Much of what she recalled of her uncle were substituted memories, reimaginings with trace resonances of the originals. Walking mostly in silence, through the countryside, his sturdy, callused hands guiding her up the wooden planks of a stile and over a fence. Strips of plastic from baleage, curled and crusted with dust. The alabaster limbs of dead trees, sharp boughs and twigs. At the Little Blue River, they caught a tadpole in a jar, and there was an embossed flower in the glass. When they raised it, sunlight struck through the glass flower and shone through the twitching tadpole, its pale, jelly tissues, a reddish tint where blood vessels ran, the tail translucent. In recent years she had visited him at the rest home, playing bridge and helping him tend to the curlicue-edged flower beds of the tiny garden. Sinew and bone and denim. Pinkish styes and the huge old hands, the fingers thinner, but the veins plumper.

She had travelled back and forth half a dozen times: organising paperwork and formalities, and then, after she’d sold her modest apartment in Missouri, she had transported some furniture. During those strange, liminal days she’d felt unweighted and centreless. In the local library, the children’s section was a shallow pit, with beanbags and large picture books with gold spines and capering friendly witches, and covers with little patches of creature fur, and a book held by a child, damp curls, pages not lifted but slithered across in bunching ridges and streakily slid away. Her first impulse to buy something was nostalgic. A beloved Saturday morning TV show, one of the last whimsical ones with heart before the garish intrusion of the Nickelodeon channel. Lightning Lucien – a sweet boy’s adventures in a world of prairies and old prospecting caves and abandoned houses. Simple mysteries, each episode concluding with the world set to rights, and Lucien and his friends cycling to the river, or county fairs, Lucien with his denim shorts and elfin features. She had gone online and bought second-hand copies of the Lightning Lucien children’s books. Little inscriptions: To Jemma from Auntie Cath… Amy Longwell, 1992. In a massive department store she had looked at rows of infantwear on hangers. Without really knowing why, she had bought a few garments – perhaps with some idea of gifting them to expecting parents, though she couldn’t think who.

Almost a month on, in the pallid light of early dawn, she drove through the town of Hylas, and five or so minutes later she turned into the side road, cruised slowly over crunching gravel and made the last turn into the little driveway overhung with hackberry trees. She turned off the engine and leant forward, eyes closed, listening to the rustle of leaves above. Her lips quivered and her breathing was shallow. The child was asleep. She unclicked her seatbelt and it slunk away with a little clatter at the shoulder loop. She got out, unsteady on her feet, her body wracked with aches. Chilly fresh air. She thought of taking up the plastic bag of things from the back, but knew it would be beyond her strength to manage it as well as the boy. She went around to the passenger side, opened the door and collected the boy in the musty, sleep-scented shawl. The child whimpered, his breath husky. There was a broad area of grass with little violets, black in the dimness, and through the middle of it a dirt path leading up to the house. Beyond was a thick tree line, and far in the distance, rugged escarpments.

She stood for a while, as the first sparkling glare appeared over the ridges, and in the nascence of the day there was a vividness of shadow and gold. She nestled the boy close. And then, with a gleeful gasp, she bobbed the child, swayed in a little half circle and trekked the rest of the way up to the porch.

Old houses revealed themselves slowly. Inhabiting the place was different from assessing visits; she was received not so much in hours as moments. A spartan upstairs room she had first seen on a cloudy afternoon was bright in the diffuse morning light, and she came to like the sharply sloped ceiling, the prints of prairie life in pearwood frames and the pale blue armoire with a crest of chipped gold and drawers with rattling catches.

She cleared out most of the Farm Journals and Reader’s Digests, but kept quaint seed catalogues, Louis L’Amour-type paperbacks with cracked spines. She cleaned: flies on sills; yellowed curtains stiff in brocaded bands.

On the third day, a delivery man had arrived with the big boxes for the crib, the playpen and the plastic highchair. The delivery man – young, ponytail, disinterested – had pushed the piled boxes streakily and grittily into the room. He’d drawn out a palette knife and slit open the tight blue packing tape. She was happy to see him go, and as she heard the rasp and clunk of the van’s side door, she resolved that he would be the last stranger to enter the house for some time.

That afternoon, the sky was a vivid blue. Miriam lay in the mix of sun and shade of the cottonwood some way from the house. Ten yards behind her was tussocky growth and then the trees that lined the dirt road. Behind the house, the escarpment was a rampart of earth and grass, the long line drawn across the prairie broken by the silhouettes of trees on its slopes. She was on a blanket, resting back on her forearms, her elbows on the grass. The windows of the house were agleam.

The child bumped her from behind. She felt a little dimpled hand on her shoulder, heard husky breaths.

‘Oh… Hello.’

The hand slid away. The boy ambled around to her side, not looking at her much, more absorbed by the tassels of the blanket, and then the grass. He stooped, then rose up jerkily, seemed about to wander off again. He scrunched up his face then came to her. He didn’t so much offer her the little plucked violet as press it at her shoulder, bracing himself as he did so.

Miriam made a little indrawn breath. ‘For me?’

The child stood.

She sniffed at the violet. ‘Thank you, Lucien.’

The boy tottered away, toward the base of a bush near the garden path. Miriam turned the little violet around in her fingers. She stared out at the escarpment, rugged, sheer and wavy in the midday heat.

About the Author

Nicholas Sheppard is the author of the novels Broken Play and How to Disappear Completely. He is a freelance opinion-editorialist, article writer and book editor.