"Sleep gently," she told him.

Chapter Seventeen.

"My father used to pick blackberries out here," Jack said. "Told me when he was a kid a lot of this land was an apple orchard, loaded with apples and blackberries and other things."

"That's all gone now, I guess."

"Yeah, I wonder what happened."

They walked hand in hand amidst oaks, poplars, and maples. The setting sun cut between the leaves and branches in fragmented patterns, broken visuals like a partially completed jigsaw puzzle, half vibrant, half shadow, the light wind playing tricks on the eyes when it fluttered everything about.

"He and his brother used to spend hours out here playing hide-and-seek and war games and stuff," he said as they made their way up the lush, forested trail.

"That's cute," Shelley said as a gray rabbit hopped up and stopped a couple of yards in front of them, its nose rhythmically bobbing up and down like clockwork. They took a cautious step forward, and the rabbit hopped away.

"I've never been hiking here," Shelley said. "It's beautiful."

"My dad used to take me fishing on the lake," he told her. "And sometimes we'd go fishing in a pond not too far from here, over that way." He pointed. "Mostly we caught bass, but sometimes a good bluegill or pike would come up. People say there's catfish. I never saw one, though."

The trail veered to the left and sloped down. Deep grooves showed where rain had made paths for itself. A woodchuck zipped across the path and vanished as a hawk circled the sky overhead, and in the far distance ducks quacked.

They passed under a large low-hanging branch. When they came out the other side tension suddenly clogged the air.

"So why are we up here?"

Jack gave her an expression of uncertainty, then looked down to the grooves in the trail. He kicked at a stone. "I dunno. I guess I thought that maybe we could talk."

"If there's anything to talk about," Shelley said with a voice that quavered.

Jack asked her if she'd told her parents.

She shook her head. "No, not yet. I don't really know how to tell them. What about you?"

"No. I don't know what to say either."

"What about Mike?"

"What about Mike?"

"He won't even talk to me."

"Can you blame him?"

"He should at least talk to me. He's a part of this too."

"Do you know how this is gonna look, Shelley?" His own voice was strained and trembling. "Not only are you sixteen, but you don't even know who the real father is."

"I don't care how it looks, and I think it happened for a reason. And no.no, I could never live with myself if I got rid of it."

"You have to get rid of it, Shelley."

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do. Think about it. Think about the kind of life the child will have. Think about what it's gonna do to your life. What it's going to do to all of us, especially the baby's."

"I will love my baby with all my heart," she said.

"That's not entirely the point. Even if you love it with all your heart, how are you gonna provide for it? Do you think your parents will help you?"

"You guys will help me. We'll all get jobs and care for the baby together. I'll see if I can have my summer job at the Dairy Queen full-time."

"But one of us is innocent, Shelley. You can't bring us both in on something like this when only one of us is responsible."

"You both had your choice that night. You both took the responsibility then. You shouldn't have put it in me if you didn't know or like the consequences."

To the left was a patch of wildflowers, mostly blazing stars. Jack stopped and studied them, allowed their beauty to fill him, then closed his eyes and spoke. "You're right," he told her. "You're right, we should have known what might happen going in." He paused again, then said, "But I need to tell you something else."

"What?"

"It's hard for me to say."

"Has everything else been easy to say?"

He picked up and moved a fallen branch from the trail. He couldn't look directly at her, even though he really wanted to. "Even before that night," he said, "I had a crush on you. And since that night, I've fallen in love with you, I think. I mean, I have. At school, when you take my hand, or when you hug me, when we're walking together, I feel like the greatest man in the whole world. I think about you all the time, and I think about you and me developing something. And then I see you with Mike, and you act the same way towards him. It drives me crazy."

Her voice was taut when she said, "You love me?"

Tears suddenly filled his eyes. He held them back, nodded, and the fog of tension thickened around them.

"Jack," she said, "I don't think any of us will ever be able to be happy with this situation. I know that. The way I feel about both of you, well, it was one thing.but now it's something else. I don't see you and me ever being truly happy together. And I don't see that for me and Mike either. But I think we all have an obligation now, and I think we need to stick together, even if hearts are broken." She touched his chin and made him look at her. "I can't give this baby up, Jack. There's a part of me that wishes I could, but I can't."

Jack looked at her a moment longer, and in that moment he hated himself more than he had ever hated anyone in his life. He wanted to grab her, hold her tight and never let go. He wanted to kiss her on the lips and whisper "I love you" and hear her say the same words back at him. Instead he looked down to the path, and as a squirrel scaled a tree the two of them began walking again.

He felt nauseous. He felt angry. He felt completely out of his mind but he managed to hold the conversation at the right level, and asked her if she'd thought about names.

"If it's a boy, Benjamin. If it's a girl, Kelly."

"And what last name is Benjamin or Kelly gonna have?"

They veered left onto a secondary trail. The sky was growing gray.

"I was thinking we could hyphenate all three."

The pond came into view. There were ducks on the pond.

"That'll be a mouthful."

They reached the pond. It was surrounded by limestone and lush vegetation. The wind was gone now and everything was quiet until a duck quacked.

Jack looked at the duck, then looked at Shelley, then looked beyond Shelley and saw a shadow move amidst the foliage.

"Some people say a duck's quack doesn't echo," he told her, and saw the shadow move again.

"What?"

"Yeah, but it's not true." Jack watched the shadow emerge from the foliage, a large rock in its hands. "Yeah, I guess high frequency sounds bounce better and create stronger echoes. Ducks just have quacks without much high frequency, and as a result their echoes are very faint."

"Oh," Shelley said.

Jack looked at her, wanted to tell her again that he loved her and he didn't know what to do without her. He wanted to tell her to reconsider, get rid of the baby and let's try again. We'll have a baby someday, down the road, when we're ready. He wanted to tell her that she had just taken something very important and special away from him and it was something he could never find in the same way again but in spite of that fact he still loved her and wanted to be with her and if things could only be just a little bit different then maybe it could have all come true but minds were made up and things were to be done in a very certain way now and that's all there was to it and that's when the rock hit her on the back of the head.

Dempster snapped awake and heard a scream.

"God," Sandra said. "You scared me."

He blinked several times and finally remembered where he was. They were still on Interstate 25, headed south.

"What did I do?" he asked.

"You all of a sudden just thrashed about. I thought you were going to attack me."

"Sorry, just a bad dream."

They drove for a moment in silence, the Nissan moving at a steady seventy. The sky had lightened from blackness to lackluster and seemed to keep brightening before his eyes. There was still no sun, yet there was no moon that he could see. Clouds had moved in and were spreading about, adding melancholy hues to everything.

Then came the sign: EXIT 242 RIO RANCHO AND PLACITAS 1 1/2 Miles "That's where you wanna make a right," he said.

"I know, I'm not stupid," she told him.

He didn't look at her, just stared straight ahead, looking for the exit.

Then, "What do you have to do here, anyway?"

"I have to get rid of that suitcase."

She nodded, but it was clear she didn't quite understand.

"I take it to these guys here," he explained. "They give me my cut and work out the rest themselves, and we all go about our merry way."

"So you work for somebody," she said matter-of-factly.

"Everyone works for somebody," he said.

The exit came into view. Sandra drove the car onto the steep ramp and the speedometer dropped until it hit rock bottom and they halted at a stop sign. She checked for traffic, then turned right. It was still too early for traffic. There was hardly any at all. No residences of any kind around this part, chain restaurants and gas stations dominated the strip of road, giving it the look and feel of every other run-of-the-mill town in America.

"In a little while you're gonna see a casino on your right," he told her. "Right after that is a streetlight and there should be a sign that indicates the way to Corrales. Make a left there."

"All right," she said. Then she sighed, and her lips developed a tiny side-of-the-mouth smile.

"What?" he asked.

"I was just thinking how you said everyone works for somebody," she told him. "I wonder what my parents would think if they ever found out what I was doing right now."

"What about your aunt and uncle?"

"Yeah, them too." She looked at him, then back to the road. "Do you realize it's only been something like a week since we first met in Oklahoma?"

"Something like that, yeah. I finished your Goethe quote for you."

"You also told me not to be disappointed if I discovered I wasn't a genius." This made her laugh. He couldn't tell if it was genuine or covering up fear, but it was a pleasant sound.

He gave her a moment, then, "Have you discovered something?" he asked her.

"I've discovered that I'm not a genius," she said.

"Have you?"

"Or maybe I just don't care to try. I was never interested in being a genius. Like I told you that day, I'm interested in love and romance, life and death."

"There's been plenty of each," he said.

"Maybe I just want to live my life, spend my days with you and not really give a damn about anything other than being happy and living life the way I want to live it."

"I think that's genius right there," he told her.

"Life's gonna kill you," she said, "so we might as well enjoy it while we can."

They came to the casino. At the next light there was a sign for Corrales. She turned left. There was a lot of undeveloped land, and what was developed was residential. The road curved to the left then curved to the right and then straightened out.

"Your soul still intact?" he asked her.

"It is," she said. "I can feel it firmly attached to me."

"Good."

"How's your side?"

"It aches, nothing more."