Free Amor and Psycho: Stories by Carolyn Cooke

than most, smoother, whiter. It had holes bored into it that certain mollusks make. Then she found another stone, and then another; it was like finding mushrooms—once you knew how to look, you saw them everywhere.
    She brought stones inside and put them away. Moving stones made her tired, and after she worked she slept.
    *   *   *
    IN ONE OF her vivid reveries, Babe met a rock star as he drove toward the highway in a low-slung sports car, a vintage Corvette. Babe walked along the road, gathering stones, and the rock star pulled up alongside her and rolled his window down. “I have a cabin,” he told her. “I hardly ever use it. Go down there whenever you want and hang loose.”
    Babe walked farther down the road. Immediately the landscape changed and became wild. Vultures circled overhead. Sharp rocks jutted up fifty feet into a sky that glowed yellow, like the moon. A small reptilian animal chased her, baring its sharp teeth. Babe knew that the animal would attack, and it did: It charged and bit her hand. The wound left a trail of blood behind her, but now the terrible thing Babe had known would happen had happened, and she could relax. The mad animal seemed calmer, too. They walked down the road together like old friends, but no cabin waited at the end where Babe could hang loose.
    SOME EVENINGS , she carried only three or four stones up the ravine. She piled them on the fireplace or used one to hold down a stack of bills on a table. Other times, she gathered more and stored them around the house. One day, she filled the whole fireplace with stones. Then—because she could use the outdoor shower—she filled the bathtub. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes she felt ashamed. She carried stones into her house the way people drank or did junk. She thought about not doing it; sometimes shestopped for a few hours or a day and began to feel calm and free. But then the day darkened and she went outside, imagining herself simply going out to gather firewood, knowing that a fire was impossible. Just the weight of the stones in her hands, in her house, comforted her. From the void of black space where she lived (in her body), they brought her, even, to the edge of bliss.
    AS A LITTLE BOY , Harald used to climb into her bed in the evenings to read. Once, when she asked him why, he said, “Because it’s warm.” Babe said, “We haven’t been in bed for fifteen hours!” And Harald shrugged and said, “It’s
still
warm.”
    More recently, Babe remembered his brown eyes looking up at her from over the top of some book—
Nausea
, by Jean-Paul Sartre, or
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, by Goethe, or
Pain
,
Sex and Time
, by Gerald Heard, or
Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae
, by whomever—the humor there, the bit of perversity. He said, “Mom, you should smile more.”
    Babe yelled, “Are you kidding? I am the only person in this family who smiles every single day! I smile at customers! I smile at you!”
    Harald said, “No, I mean you should smile—for fun.” And he smiled his dazzling rare smile, because he’d caught her shouting, at the end of her rope.
    *   *   *
    ONE AFTERNOON , Georgie called and asked how Harald was doing in the hospital. “About as badly as possible,” said Babe. “What else is new?”
    Georgie said, “I found out this morning that I have breast cancer.” When Georgie said the words
breast cancer
, Babe looked at the stone in her hand—a five-pounder. A window closed, leaving just a tiny aperture through which Babe saw her hand and the stone in her hand.
    “Left-handed women are more likely to get it,” Georgie went on in a clinical voice. “Something to do with asymmetry in the female, more hormones gathering in vessels on the left side, near the spleen. The left arm acts as a kind of hormone switch, turning the estrogen off and on.”
    “Who told you that?” asked Babe.
    “I was up all night, reading.”
    Babe thought of Georgie’s left hand always in motion,