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It was eleven hours of driving to get to where Luke was staying with Kevin’s brother and sister-in-law. If you went in a straight line, it was eleven hours. I would have made it before dark If the highway wasn’t under construction if I hadn’t stopped for gas and water and the bathroom and called Scott to yell at him for the mixed tape that featured song after Canadian Irish love song featuring a male vocalist with a heartbreaking voice. These instrumentals expressed longing, regret, grieving, and lust. I should have stayed in a motel and finished driving the next day. I didn’t listen to Scott’s tape until I had listened to a call-in radio show for the relatives of drug addicts, my tapes which included The Cranberries and Enya, but Enya was the soundtrack of my birth, Seventy-two hours of labor with Enya chanting unintelligible Gaelic words. I pulled into a general store to get gas.

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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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