Even in the most terrible chapters of my life I have always known a certain, savage beauty—in the color of the sky, the sense of birds flying close to my ear, the feel of the soft-loam earth and the joy of running through the untended woods until I became more animal than spirit.

Maybe I was finally beginning to figure out how to untie the impossible knot of a problem that had tied me up, for all the years of my life—beginning with my original sin, the death of Agnes. When I finally did find a way to untie that impossible knot, then all the most important questions in life would be answered. Why we love. Why we suffer. How

Come to me, her friend would say. Whenever Margaret looked at the empty space where her finger used to be, she couldn’t help but remember the wild insouciant girl who had thrown herself back into the mud. She remembered the way her friend’s hair had spread itself out on the clotted surface like a muddy, golden fan, and she remembered how happy she