"It's okay," he said, softly, gently. "I know you belong to him. Like I said, we just got—carried away. That's all."

She lay against his chest in silence for what seemed a long time.

"I don't know who I belong to anymore," she said.

And soon she slept and dreamed once again—in which she found herself making love to her husband in the shitty trailer house in Anchor Rock … which morphed into the ramshackle house in Lonepine and Will; which bled into the tent with Sammy and the vision … a vision to which she returned, lost, wandering, until she found the man in the dirty bandana. Until they, too, were making love, or a perversion of it, and she knew not in truth who she even was anymore, but sensed that she had become not just a woman but a focusing point, an epitome, a river of menstrual blood as dark as it was unpredictable—the mother and whore to the entire world.