"I'm in love with you."

"What?" she said. The band had started up again, and she had to shout over the music.

"I'm in love with you!" I said.

She grinned. "I'm in love with you too, fool!"

"Listen, though." I paused, trying to figure out how to put it. An image of Anne came back to me: Anne lying curled up on the bed, crying. Screaming at me through her hands.

"Why are you doing this?" she yells. "Why are you ruining us?"

And I can see myself standing over her, not caring, saying terrible things to her.

"Who are you?" Anne says through the cage of her fingers. "For eight months everything's great, and then, one day, out of nowhere, you're saying these things to me. You're killing me!"

And I don't know what to tell her. I only know that something in me has changed and I don't want to be with her anymore. Instead I want to hurt her, to lash out and cut deeper until she never wants to see me again. I want to tear her apart.

"I have problems, sometimes," I said to Laura. "I have trouble..."

"Shh," she said. She ran the back of her hand down my cheek. "We're just getting started, right? n.o.body's buying rings yet?"

I felt a tremendous grat.i.tude. "No. n.o.body's buying rings," I said.

Coincidentally, though, a week earlier, an aunt of mine had died and I'd ended up inheriting, among other things, her engagement ring-a plain gold band crowned with a one-carat diamond-which I've been waiting to give to Laura ever since.

In our old apartment, I kept the ring hidden in a drawer in my desk. In our new house, I keep it in a small room off the main hallway, one of the dark, empty rooms Laura never goes into. I hid the ring beneath the floorboards-I pried one up and placed the wrapped ring box in the dark hollow. It makes me feel good when we get into bed at night to know that the ring is nearby, that it's tucked like a seed deep inside our home.

There are moments, though, when I'm tempted to throw all this caution to the wind. Moments when I want to just go ahead with it. Laura and I will be lying in bed, talking, or taking a shower together, and suddenly I'll feel this great urge to give her the ring-to go dig it up from beneath the floor and offer it to her right then.

But I tamp the urge down. I remind myself of what can happen when you rush things, when you're not careful. I think of examples, such as a certain photograph Laura brought home from work not long ago. The photograph showed a killer whale stretched out in the middle of a country road. The whale was lying on its side, one fin in the air, the other crushed between its body and the ground.

The picture was taken at the site of an accident the aquarium's transportation crew had. They were driving the whale from a water park in Jacksonville, speeding, and they lost control of the truck. When the cab jackknifed, the whale's aqua hammock broke and the animal came crashing out into the road, tumbling over itself, its bones cracking, before it finally rolled to a stop. The whale lay there wheezing, insects crawling over its skin, for a full hour before the rescue team came. Every now and then it would shriek through its blowhole.

I remember that picture and think: See, a.s.shole? See? That's what happens when you act too fast. When you don't go step by step by step.

iii.

THE HOUSE IS COMING ALONG. IT'S AMAZING TO WATCH THE place change, week by week. Just nine months after moving in, we've finished most of the major work; we sc.r.a.ped the rot out of the second-floor walls, replaced the floor in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Marco and Jesus and Jesus's brothers came by and helped for a fee.

As expected, there are things about the house that will take years to fix: the slight, undulating warp in the upstairs floors, the sag in the attic ceiling. But our goal was to make it livable by the end of the first year, and here we are.

The only thing bothering me is that the prison has turned out to be something other than what Joyce said it was. I've learned that there's more to the place than she originally let on.

From almost the moment we moved in, I made a hobby of studying the prison and its residents-looking up all the women, getting to know who they were, what their lives had been like before they ended up incarcerated. Almost every one of them had an interesting story: the chef had tried to burn down her own restaurant for the insurance money; the owner of the baseball team had been caught trying to smuggle drugs into the country on her private plane.

I enjoyed getting to know them, one by one: finding out about them on my computer at work, looking up their stories, then coming home and getting to watch them in person, through the keyhole of my telescope.

But there was one group of women, a tiny subset, that I didn't become aware of-didn't even see-until long after Laura and I were already settled in. After those first months of spying, I started to notice, every now and then, and only in glimpses, a different kind of resident wandering the grounds: I became aware of a small handful of women who were much older than the rest, actual elderly people, white-haired and wrinkled. There were only three of them on the grounds, I learned after watching the prison more closely. During the summer these women must have been indoors, where it was air-conditioned. But as autumn closed in and the weather grew cooler, they began to come out into the yard, lingering for just a few minutes at a time, smoking a cigarette by the vegetable garden, playing a quick hand of cards at the picnic tables, before heading back inside.

None of the younger inmates seemed to want anything to do with them. At first, I a.s.sumed the giant age difference was the reason. It took me a while to learn that they stayed away from the old ladies because they were frightened.

As it turned out, the three old women were transfers from another Florida penitentiary-a real prison, with guard towers and searchlights, bars and razor wire. They were all violent offenders too, killers who'd spent thirty, forty, even fifty years in maximum-security prisons. They'd simply been transferred over to the camp because by now it was a.s.sumed that they were too old to do harm anymore. And because at their age they needed certain amenities that were difficult to provide in real jail.

"It's not like there are any thugs in there," Joyce had said. "No real criminals."

But these women were murderers. All three of them had killed in cold blood. Two of them had murdered their husbands. One had done it for money, the other for no good reason at all. And the last lady, the oldest of the three, turned out to be a serial murderer. Her name was Rose Deach, and as a young woman in the 1940s she had killed over thirty people. If the war hadn't been going on she likely would have made national headlines, because her crimes were particularly heinous.

Rose had started out working in the nursery of the Volusia county hospital, up the coast, not far from Daytona. She'd been a physician's a.s.sistant, a pretty young girl who watched over newborns until they were ready to go home. Some babies she apparently took good care of. She checked their temperatures, their breathing; she fed them, did whatever she was supposed to do to keep them healthy. Other babies, though, Rose killed by clamping her hands over their faces in the middle of the night.

For three and a half years Rose moved from hospital to hospital, caring for some, killing others. When she was finally caught, she didn't seem to understand what she'd done wrong. She'd only killed the bad babies, she said. She claimed she could tell which ones were going to grow up to be good people, and which ones were bad seeds.

"I don't understand it myself, but it's so," she was quoted as saying from jail in June of 1944.

"I press my hand to a child's chest and right off I can feel what kind of character they've got. Right in my palm. I can tell whether they're going to add goodness to the world, or subtract from it. And so," she said, "the bad ones I go ahead and press out of the world. Who needs them here? Right?"

In the 1940s Rose Deach was a scary story that parents and nannies around Florida told misbehaving children, a fairy-tale villain. Kids used her name to frighten each other.

Rose Deach knows you're a bad boy. She's coming to get you. She's sneaking inside your closet right now, closing the door behind her with those bony hands. She's waiting for you to fall asleep....

I watch as Rose and the other two murderesses emerge from the barracks. I watch them make their way to the picnic table, so skinny, all three of them, shrunken, tiny women, their skin pale and crinkly as tracing paper. The orange jumpsuits hang on them-Rose is so small, she has to wear hers cuffed at the ends of the pants legs to keep from tripping. And as they near the exercise path, I see all the other women part and let them pa.s.s.

Who can blame the younger ones, though? I'm frightened myself. It makes me angry to think that Joyce didn't tell us about the murderesses. Laura doesn't seem to understand. To her the murderesses are just three little old women hobbling around. They're harmless. But for me, there's something deeply scary about them. They remind me of a certain kind of car that shows up at the wrecking yard once, maybe twice a year. A kind of car that all of us are very careful around.

Like at most wrecking yards, the majority of the vehicles we acquire we get at insurance auctions. We buy them ourselves, junkers that we purchase for parts. An old Honda or Ford, for example, might have the back smashed to garbage but the front still full of usable machinery-a transmission, a fan belt, a dirty radiator. We're scavengers, for the most part. We buy dead cars and gut them for pieces, catalog them, then stack them on the bone piles, wait for the aluminum prices to go up before selling the sc.r.a.p in tonnage.

A few times a week people will bring cars to us. A guy looking to get rid of his dead grandmother's clunker. A kid going off to school who doesn't need the old station wagon anymore. But once in a while, someone will come to the yard with a different kind of car altogether. They'll come by with the kind of car that they shouldn't be bringing to a place like ours-nice, new cars with purring engines and smooth, shiny bodies.

Again, this happens three times a year at most. A guy will drive up in an expensive car, maybe a brand-new Cadillac SUV, and when he gets out, he tells us to just take it away from him. Sometimes he'll want us to buy the car for some ludicrously low price: a thousand dollars, a hundred, maybe even less.

"Just give me a dollar and you can have it. Please, get it away from me," he'll say, already walking away from the car. Like it's cursed.

Usually when they come by like this, when they're frantic just to get rid of a car, they want a guarantee that we'll destroy it. They don't care if we gut it for parts, but they don't want the car driving the streets anymore. They don't want to have to see it ever again. One time a woman came by with a '68 Mustang in perfect shape, jet black with a silver racing stripe down the center, and paid a hundred dollars to watch us flatten it in the crusher. Another time, two years ago, I came out of the office to find an empty 1972 Cadillac Eldorado idling in front of the gate. It had a glazed, b.u.t.ter cream exterior, red leather trim. The car was worth at least nine thousand dollars, just sitting there by the curb with the engine purring. A note taped to the windshield read, Wreck it.

Marco and Jesus call cars like that Voodoos. They like to try to guess what happened between the cars and the people who brought them in.

"I'll bet it's his lady's car. Probably dumped him in it."

"He was sadder than all that, man. It must have belonged to someone who died. A brother or a sister. Someone he loved. Maybe they offed themselves in it. You saw his face."

Sometimes we dare each other to drive a Voodoo, or to take one home. A 1970 Cutla.s.s SS will come in, triple black, and before we load it into the crusher, I'll tease Marco, who drives a broken-down Chevy truck, about what a nice ride it'd be to bring home to his wife.

"Go on," I'll say. "Take it. You deserve it. I won't tell."

He'll laugh and shake his head. "No, no. You'd look better in this one. A Cutla.s.s is your style."

"I insist," I'll say.

"So do I," he'll say, even as I push the b.u.t.ton that starts the crusher.

That's what Rose and the other two remind me of-Voodoos. Cars you know can't really be that dangerous, but you avoid all the same. I look through the telescope at Rose-small, bony Rose, hobbling across the gra.s.s, stooped, the other old women at her side-and I am fascinated.

"Jacob, how long have you been up here?" Laura asked.

This was just the other day. I was watching the women get ready to take a sculpture cla.s.s. There were seven of them sitting around a picnic table with a big bowl of water in the center. In front of each woman sat a gray, brain-like lump on a paper plate.

"Not so long," I said. I swung the telescope to the left a little, to see which one of the women was going to pose for the others, and I spied the money manager already standing on the far picnic table, getting nude. She was not one of my favorites. Young and attractive, she had long blond hair and a slender, graceful body, but even so, there was something slightly repugnant about her. Maybe it was the hint of sn.o.bbishness in her face, the upturned nose, the small, darting eyes always a.s.sessing people. She'd stolen millions of dollars from her clients, investing their money in risky stocks without telling them. She would reside at the camp for seven more years.

I watched as she stepped out of her jumpsuit, then peeled off her panties. Her body gleamed, so pale in the sun. She was a little small, a bit bowlegged, but her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were full, the nipples bright pink. The hair between her legs was trimmed in a perfect diamond.

The telescope went black. I looked up to see Laura's hand clamped over the lens.

"What's the deal?" I said.

"Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute, that's all."

"The women are taking a sculpture cla.s.s. The three killers, too."

"Jacob, are you sure you're all right?" Laura said.

"Of course," I said. "What are you talking about?"

"I don't know. You're just a little distant lately. And you haven't been sleeping."

The night before, I'd had a dream about being chased by a man on fire. He was driving behind me on the highway, flames streaming from his eyes and nose and open mouth.

Laura ran a hand through my hair. "And you've just been spending a lot of time in here. You've been spending a lot of time inside your head."

"I'm spying on the prison. I'm relaxing."

She put her hands up. "Okay. Sorry. I was just checking in. Want to eat soon?"

I turned back to the telescope. "Just two more minutes. Roger, Kitty Kat?"

"Sure," she said, waiting there. "Roger." Then she headed downstairs.

I went on watching the women sculpt for a few more minutes, enjoying the last of the sun, the warm breeze coming through the window. Most of the sculptures were hopeless, deformed and mangled, but a couple were quite good. It was a thrill to observe the better sculptors, to watch them slowly draw human figures up from the clay, tease out arms and legs. The eye surgeon was working on a bust that looked more and more like the money manager with every pa.s.s of her hands. I was impressed by how carefully she molded the facial features-smoothing out the money manager's brow, pinching up the b.u.mp in her nose.

Rose was sitting at the far end of one of the tables. I watched as she molded her flattened clay into a square gray slab, all the while thinking about what those hands of hers had done. As soon as she finished shaping the corners, she began plucking out the slab's edges, picking the clay apart with her spidery fingers. She worked quickly, s.n.a.t.c.hing at bits of clay, now and then shooting a glance up at the naked money manager, studying her.

Soon enough Rose peeled her sculpture off the table and stood it up. It was a twisted shape, almost like a gnarled, barren tree, or a system of veins squiggling off from a single artery. Nothing human to the shape at all. Still, there was something about those squirmy, desperate tentacles that reminded me very much of the money manager standing on the table. Maybe it was the way the sculpture seemed to speak of greed, a kind of veiny, slurping greed. I don't know. But Rose Deach got it right. She saw right through to the money manager's ugly heart.

iv.

THE DAYS SLIP BY. THEY SLIDE INTO ONE ANOTHER AND DISSOLVE. The wrecking yard is only a few miles from the aquarium, so most afternoons I'm able to visit Laura at work for lunch. Sometimes we eat in her office, other times we eat outside, in the aquarium's amphitheater, where the shows happen. Jed, the trainer, rides across a pool on a chariot of dolphins. Baby sea lions tumble through the air like footb.a.l.l.s.

I worry that one day soon I'll break Laura's heart. And not by accident either. I'm afraid I'll do it violently, bust her heart wide open.

I've done it before. I've dated a woman, fallen in love, and then turned on her. I don't know why.

It always happens the same way. I'm going along fine with someone. One month goes by, two, six. I'm attached. I care now. I think about her all the time. I look forward to seeing her. She starts leaving things at my house: a hair clip, earrings; she starts bringing things over: a toothbrush, an extra pair of gla.s.ses to leave on the nightstand, old sneakers to go biking in.

And wham: I start waking up sweaty in the middle of the night with a strange crackling in my chest; waking up angry, even furious, my fists clenched, aching. And from there it all starts to slide. I feel it happening and don't know how to stop it. The fear and resentment, the rage; I feel them all blooming in me so fast, like something from a fairy tale, a vine sprouting overnight, its black leaves slapping open.

But that's too pretty a way to describe what happens to me. The change is much uglier than that.

Does this ever happen to you? You're going about your day with the person you love, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your spouse; maybe you're in the car together, on your way to the home improvement store to pick up supplies: paper towels, gla.s.s cleaner, lightbulbs, dusting rags, a plunger. You're waiting at a traffic light together. Your person is talking to you, saying something about a musician they like, or a commercial they saw, and you're listening to them, watching them talk, and all of a sudden the strangest sensation comes over you. This feeling of total disorientation, almost like you're seeing your life through a new set of eyes, like you're watching yourself from afar. And what you see is so unfamiliar to you, so wrong. This is you? This is your car? These are your hands on the wheel?

And who the f.u.c.k is this person sitting next to you, talking to you? Who are they? Of course you know they're the person you love-you know that-but right now, at this moment, they're unrecognizable, a total stranger. Some kind of mistake has been made; you shouldn't be here with them. But they're keeping you here, keeping you from your real life, which is happening somewhere else, with someone more attractive, someone wilder; not in this car, not here, in this line of people waiting for a traffic light, listening to the tick, tick, tick of your own turning signal. And so you hate this person all of a sudden. You want to smash them. Because their face is a trap. Their face is a cage.

But then someone behind you hits their horn and breaks the spell.

"It's green," says your person, who's beautiful to you now. Just as they were seconds before.

"Hey," they say. "You can go."

I understand that moments like this are common enough; that they happen to most people at one time or another. But what if the moment didn't end for you? What if you couldn't find your way out?

That's what happens with me. The feeling hits me and it won't go away. I get angry and mean and, most of all, restless. Everywhere I look I see chances to go back and correct my life, chances to start over alone or with someone new. I see opportunity in the starry night painted across the checkout girl's fingernails. I see it in the cars brought into the yard, especially the Voodoos. The '76 Triumph motorcycle standing in the lot, gleaming beneath the spotlights. The feel of the helmet, the way the world looks through the visor.

There are so many places I want to go, all of a sudden. So many scenarios I want to live out. The feeling is like standing beneath an active electromagnet at the wrecking yard. I don't know if it's the iron in the blood or what, but the magnet creates a sensation like something gently sucking on your insides.

And soon enough, there's my girlfriend, asleep in our apartment, and here I am, drinking with some woman in a bar all the way out by the airport. The woman has a flower plucked from a c.o.c.ktail in her hair.

But this was all a long time ago, before Laura. I used to move too fast. Let things barrel forward with no brakes. Laura and I have been together almost five years and I understand that she is the best thing in my life. I look at her and I know that. So I'm making sure we're doing things right, building slowly. And I'm close now. I'm almost there. I've taken to carrying the ring around with me during the day, instead of leaving it at home, beneath the floor. I keep it in the pocket of my bag, zipped into the side. I can feel the b.u.mp beneath the canvas. I could pull the ring out any day now.

Sometimes I get scared, though. I get scared that something in me will react and change and push Laura away. If the worries get to me, if they keep me up at night, which is when they come most often, I'll go for a walk around the house to calm down. I'll take my walkie-talkie in case Laura wakes up, and put on my robe and creep down the winding staircase, careful not to let the boards creak.

I try to find something active to do, to keep me busy. I'll do push-ups in the den. I'll ride the exercise bike. Most of the time, I do something simple, something quiet. I'll organize our record collection, or riffle through our bills. I'll check the inventory for the yard. Occasionally I end up looking through the old photo books. Laura has a whole book of photographs devoted to her grandparents and even her great-grandparents. Black-and-white images with that silvery gloss to them, the people's eyes blank as old lightbulbs.

I only have three photographs of my grandfather. One shows him posing with my grandmother. He's sitting in a wooden chair on a porch, wearing his suit and tie. She's standing next to him and he's got one arm around her thighs, squeezing her, making her laugh. In another photo, my grandfather is holding up his neon star. He's pretending to shade his face from the bright light.

The photo I like best (and the only one in which his face hasn't been scratched out) shows my grandfather as he was in the 1920s, still a young man, lean with sleek black hair. He's sitting in the back of a flatbed truck, parked at a general store in the middle of nowhere. The sky is huge and cloudless. In the corner of the picture you can see a pair of hands emptying a can of petrol into the truck's tank. My grandfather is sitting on top of a crate of grapes in the back of the truck in his undershirt and suspenders, the sun gleaming on his thin chest. He's grinning, mugging for the camera, holding a grape sprig high over his face, as though waiting for one of the grapes to drop right into his mouth.

I often wonder, as I stare at the photo late at night, unable to sleep: was he content with his life? I ask myself: Did it make him happy-really happy-to always be leaving things behind, homes and friends and girls who loved him, girls like my grandmother, who'd hate him once he drove away? And if it didn't make him happy, why did he do it? Did he leave because he just didn't give a s.h.i.t about anyone but himself? Because he was a selfish, l.u.s.ty motherf.u.c.ker? Or were there other reasons? Did he leave because he was scared? Scared that if he stuck around he'd be an even bigger disappointment to the person he loved? Because he was afraid of hurting her even worse?

The last time my grandmother heard any mention of him was in 1949. A detective called the house where she was living with her new husband and children and told her that a vehicle belonging to my grandfather, a Ford A Roadster, had been found abandoned near San Francisco. The car had been discovered parked on a bluff overlooking the ocean, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. There was nothing inside it at all, no wallet, no suitcase.

Someone had burned the car, the detective explained. The Ford's exterior was charred and bubbled. The interior was all melted, the seats blackened husks, the steering wheel a drooping mess. The police suspected that the fire had been started by teenagers who found the car sitting vacant at the edge of the bluff, but they weren't sure. It's possible, said the man on the phone, that my grandfather set the car on fire himself. Still, there were no clues. Just a burned-out car sitting on a cliff.

What the police were really trying to figure out, of course, was what had happened to my grandfather himself. Had he committed suicide, jumped off the cliff into the ocean? Had he lit the car on fire and then just walked away, on to somewhere else?

As the detective a.s.sumed that my grandmother hadn't heard from my grandfather in some time, he didn't expect her to be much help. But, if she did have any information about my grandfather that might help him with the investigation, she should call him right away. My grandmother didn't even bother to write down the detective's number.

v.

FINALLY, I DECIDED TO JUST GO AHEAD AND PROPOSE.

Enough time had pa.s.sed. Our days had fallen into a warm, familiar pattern. And I felt good. Everything felt right. After nine months in the new house, it was almost finished, everything except the far portion of the backyard, which was still tangled and overgrown.