Free And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass

of its own), Jasper made steaks on the grill. He said to Kit, “Next weekend, I’ll drive you over to stay with her.” He aimed a forbidding look at Kit. “You’ll go every other weekend at the very least. If it means missing meets, dropping the team, that’s what you’ll do. That’s the sacrifice you’ll make for her, and you will not complain. I’m glad you’re staying—I think it’s best, no matter what your reasons—but you won’t break her heart completely. Enough of that goin’ on around here as it is.”
    That was the last time Kit heard Jasper say more than a sentence about his wife, who was already, though Kit didn’t know it, filing for a divorce. There was so much he pieced together later: years later.
    The following week, Kit dropped out of cross-country. By the third weekend he spent with his mother, he figured out her real reason for leaving (or her incentive): Bart, the principal at his mother’s school, a guy who had shaken Jasper’s hand dozens of times at all the concerts, plays, and graduations they attended with Kit’s mother. That Christmas, after she invited Bart to come along to Nana and Papa’s for the caroling and the eggnog, she announced to Kit, in the privacy of her old room, where coats were stacked high on the twin beds, that as soon as the divorce came through, she and Bart would be getting married. Nothing fancy, she assured him; just a civil ceremony (as if he could possibly care how big a party there’d be, what his mother would wear, what vows she would say in front of what higher power). And then she would move into Bart’s house. “And that will be yournew home, too, whenever you come back from college. Bart is very fond of you. Bart has the makings of a terrific dad.”
    Which he would be to Kit’s half sister, June, who was born just after Kit’s freshman year at Beloit. His mother was thirty-seven years old, a perfectly normal age, by the standards of her generation, at which to have a baby.
    Soon after hearing that she was pregnant, after piecing together his mother’s actions and what he could decipher of her emotions, he understood—as he had when she became engaged to Jasper ten years before—that this was something for which she had been hoping all along. Now, looking dispassionately at his mother’s life, he can see how she must have spent most of her young adulthood trying to compensate in deliberate choices for the accident that produced Kit.
    Each time Will turns in his sleep, Kit sees the mattress shift overhead, hears the slats creak faintly. In the past year, Fanny has surpassed her brother in height, but he’s grown stockier. His body has begun to look distinctly male in its dialogue with the ground. On the soccer field, he plays low and fast; his feet, small for his age, are nimble.
    Will is the age Kit was when his mother married Jasper. Twenty years in the future, Will may tell a serious girlfriend,
I was nine when my mother made my dad move out. She couldn’t stand that he never found out who his real father was. She thought it would make him stronger
. (Or
She thought it would fix their marriage
.) Just as Kit had told his own comparable story to Sandra, and to a few girlfriends before her. It will be late one night, Will and the girl—the young woman—leaning shoulder to shoulder on a lumpy futon after a party (or, face it, in a tousled bed after sex). They will be adding beads and charms, even precious stones, to the complex chains of their respective autobiographies.
    The childhood stories Kit has told about himself most often feature, among other milestones, the move after his mother’s marriage to Jasper, the calm he discovered in running, his pride at learning how to train and then drive a pack of sled dogs (though he hasn’t driven a sled in decades), and his shock, during his first year away at college, when he found out his mother would be having a baby.
    There is also the story he tells if someone asks,
Why art