Peggy asked me if I had faith. I said no. Her goodness was plain: she winced, but was not critical or afraid, and leaned toward me, not away. She wanted me to have the strength and comfort of Jesus, and she couldn't see how I would find it anywhere else.

What a lovely woman, how comfortable in her weight and skin, as if her fat was necessary, to store her great compassion. I wanted to hold her, press against her, conform to her, soak in her gifts of lovingkindness. She listened with everything.

Her hands shook a little, her tears formed, as I described Molly's mother, Mirren, and her last years. When I got hinky, unsure, self-deceiving, her eyes retracted, lids lower, head cocked, shrewd, tired: all involuntary, a basilisk. Ready to hear anything because she has heard everything, and her undiminished responsiveness to love, and pain, and perseverance was a miracle.

Grateful for honesty, distrusting everything, day after day, surveying the arid rocks of Rehab. Encouraging the trampled and neglected and hopeless shoots, a disbelieving gardener, a pitiless examiner and cradler of hope, listening to liars, always, and loving, loving, loving.

How impossible she is. I speak to her the way I write: plainchant, simple, blunt, like a witness before a tribunal. She will only believe confessions of doubt, and it is all I have, so we are both moved: me by her surgical attention, her cautious held-breath gratitude for honesty; her by the sheer unique horror of Molly's banner story, verified at last.

She says to me: "Molly is a lovely girl." She says "Everyone who comes here must lay that banner down; it is Molly's essential work, and it is particularly hard for her because her story is so --"  she waits for the right, therapeutic, professional, constructive, true, expression, and fails -- "so bad..."

-- I purse my lips and nod, my eyes steady on her, and I realize she is at that moment confirmed for the truth of it, and I love her for the small heartbreak she shows, around her eyes --

"and so sad."

We sit together, in cracked green leather chairs, in a plain institutional office, the light of noon vague behind the old blinds.

"Molly has to know she has a life, she deserves a life, beyond that story. She doesn't need to carry it around anymore."

"And then neither do I..."

"I'm glad to hear you say that."

"I believe Molly has the core strength to do it."

"Yes. If she stays on her meds. She is --" again her brows tighten "--young. She will always be sort of young; it's a feature of her underlying illness."

She is not satisfied with this clinicism, so she straightens, and says with the shadings of a thousand bad outcomes, a hundred pointless lives, scores of stupid deaths, and handfuls of recoveries, coloring the syllable: "Yes." I am comforted by the primary light of Yes, on her face, in her hands and breasts and shoulders as she sits up, leans toward me and says again: "Yes, I think she does, I think she will make it."

We wait together for a moment. Then she Asks, and I Answer, and so I lay down the banner story, the bones for Peggy, for the Record. And perhaps I lay it down for good.

Molly's mother, Mirren, spent much of the last 15 years of her life institutionalized, psychotic, dissociative, childlike, under the influence. When stable and out she stayed with her dry, plodding mother, saving pennies, collecting buttons, constructing pointless decorations and boxes out of lovely bits and scraps, crocheting. Slow death by glue gun.

And then she would drift, go out, to the biker bars, the S&M clubs, and cocaine, speed, reefer, drink, poppers, the flat, dark sands of hip nothingness.

And then, eventually, days later, back to the quiet clock-tick and crafts table, the suburban basement, the parsimonious mother, the Scots reserve. Hung over from club drugs, still hallucinating, sleepless, deteriorating, off her meds, the sound of scissors and tins of beads, til 5 pm, picked up again by bad men and worse women, all impressed by her radical, breath-taking insanity.

And throughout it all she would cut herself: at home; with her friends; even at the hospital, delaying her re-re-releases; in her mother's bathroom, after mild disagreements about the dogs, or what's for lunch, or for no reason at all. Randomly, with straightened paper clips. Desperately, with broken glass and throwaway razors. Methodically, with her "kit". Ritually, to score cred at bars.

And for a while, to earn extra income from the middle-aged men and wealthy dykes who paid to beat her, she would slice herself as entertainment. Human pornography. Dispassion play for ghouls.

Her cuts crisscrossed her arms, legs, thighs, ankles, belly, breasts, til she was a fine lattice of scars, like a burn victim, rolled in and seared by cruel fabric. Eventually, there were parts missing. After several attempts to reconstruct veins and arteries, the surgeons gave up. What was the point, when she embellished their work before the wounds could heal.?

"She was a fixture in every ER in the front range, Peggy."

We sit, and wait, for the Lesson to rise, but none come. Peggy wants to tell me a useful thing, an enormous thing, bigger than bad and bloody and endless, but our time is almost over, so she says: "Molly has finally come to terms with her mother, here. It's safe here. Have you, has -- she wants to tell you, what she saw and experienced, when she was out there, visiting. It's hard for her, she is afraid you will feel...that you won't handle it well. I think you will."

I say Yes.