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Valerie opened the door to her casita, just out of bed, with a clear pillow mark on her cheek. She wore a t-shirt advertising a Cambridge feminist documentary series and faded leggings. I was very sweaty, seven miles of hard running up and down hills, the early morning beginning to reflect the heat. I had dreamed of Luke, a tiny baby marooned on a miniature island, the water rising rapidly. "Momma," he cried, holding his small hands, reaching towards emptiness, the water just at his fingertips.

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A small snake was in my shower, but snakes terrified me — small ones, dead ones, grass snakes, and garter snakes. Catherine once claimed it was all about Freud. I jumped out of the stall and went to the office to tell the director, who called the maintenance person. The director put the maintenance man on his speakerphone.
“A poisonous snake?”
“I don’t know.”
“What color is it?”
“Green.”
“Sounds like a garden snake.”
“He isn’t in the garden. He’s in my shower.”
“Is he dead?”

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Driving to Abiquiu, my mind circled the idea of being left. My parents were constantly leaving me and my sisters while they toured Italy or Ireland or drove west to stay for an entire month in New Mexico, leaving us with our grandparents. Kevin had traveled for work while I had remained static, stoking those proverbial home fires, welcoming him back with eagerness to hear his stories of the outside world, a magical place free of bottles, diapers, and mundane domestic problems. I had little to tell him about: bottles, diapers, nonsense conversations, coffee with other mommies exiled to baby land while he spoke of terrorists, political negotiations, and staying in nice hotels. I bored myself, so how could I expect Kevin to be enthralled about the tiny world I now inhabited with an incoherent, temperamental being who found dust and his own toes fascinating?

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