When Claire was seventeen and pregnant she flew to Hawaii to visit her boyfriend. He was in the Navy. When she arrived, she found out his leave was delayed three days. Claire passed the time waiting for him by eating pineapples, throwing up, and shuffling around the court house listening to gossip about a famous murder trial. She wore her favorite lilac dress.

Claire eats a gray and soggy tuna salad sandwich in the courthouse cafeteria. The room is well-lit and filled with the thunder of journalists writing, of people talking while they drink blood warm coffee and blood warm coke. In the air-conditioning, she is not hot, but she still smells the sweat that has been weaving itself into her lilac dress. She has a spoonful of the pineapples that the cafeteria serves in a cup. They are sweet and soothe her stomach. She's been enduring erratic morning sickness for four months and tries to keep her stomach calm. She pushes the sandwich away and watches the people around her. She sings a song to herself about airplanes.

The dress is polyester. It wasn't made for pregnant women. She wishes she'd gotten something bigger. The elastic band presses red dents into her belly. She wonders if tight clothes make you feel sicker and licks pineapple syrup off the spoon.

The airport lost her luggage so the lilac dress's been on her body for sixteen hours --not counting over-night. She showered at the hotel and rubbed deodorant onto the dress's armpit seam but the flaky perfume just trapped in the sweat. She's conscious of her smell. But she' glad she threw away her underpants and bought new hose because at least she's not going to have to spend the day smelling her cunt. The crowbar that killed Kati Roland was stuffed into a neighbors garbage can. Black hair and cheekbone fragments were pasted on it with blood.

Claire's table is next to a window so she can see the sky becoming overcast. She thinks it looks like the color of ghosts but in her mouth she tastes steel. In Hawaii, before it rains, the sky's the color of steel, she thinks to herself. This is a discovery but not relevant to the murder trial. The steel crowbar didn't look like this sky because it was painted green. The crowbar struck Kati Roland's pelvis and then her face. It crashed through the bones of her hip and then shattered her cheekbones and jaw socket and eardrum. The second blow killed her.

Claire looks at her legs. They are thin and short. She is small though having a baby inside her makes her more aware of the space she takes up. She pats her belly.

Two men behind Claire are talking.
"Christ four seasons with that same stupid monkey, poor Dave."
"No no no. It wasn't the same monkey. I think that was the third monkey they've had. The first one kept eating asphalt and pissed over everyone's lunch. The producer sold it to a children's zoo. The second one was a crazy fucker who almost bit off Dave's arm. They had to keep it sedated so it couldn't water ski."
"What'd they do with that one?"
"I'm not sure. I think they sold it to a children's zoo, too."

The pineapples rattle around in Claire's stomach. Her first meal at the hotel was pineapples and ham and chicken. Then at breakfast, pineapples and ice-cream. Maybe too many pineapples, she thinks. She drinks water and thinks about her baby. Patty if it's a girl; Daryl if it's a boy. Patty for her favorite Aunt who made a morbid amount of sex with sheep jokes. Daryl because when Claire was little she was hypnotized by rainy dirt. The name Daryl evokes for her dark dense mysteries. Claire pushes aside her cup of pineapples. She drinks some more water and her stomach settles a little. She pats her belly and says no more pineapples for you, honey.

Claire lists all the things she knows about David Roland and Kati Roland:

Katie Roland is dead. The skin on Claire's neck is steeped in heat. Katie Roland was tall and dyed her brown hair black to look more dramatic. She was stunning and had breast implants. She was worried about leaking silicone coating her ribs and lungs. David Roland was first and only husband. She was killed with a crowbar.

David Roland has a beautiful jawline and a dark wood colored tan. He was deeply loved by the public because he was always kind to the water skiing chimpanzee who helped him solve murders on his syndicated, internationally successful Honalulu Persuit. The show is especially popular in countries that are soupy and cold like Scotland and Denmark. It has clear oceans and hibiscus and no rainy cities. Also the chimpanzee's skiing instructor has perfect, almost magical teeth and a dazzling surgically enhanced figure. Three hours after the police found his wife's body, David Roland confessed to her murder.

Claire wonders about David Roland. Why? Because he loved her and spent hours at work wanting to brush her black hair and lick her collar bone? Because he hated her? Because she would leave and his thinking about her absence stewed a terror thick as silicon that leaked in his chest and clogged his ribs so his lungs couldn't get air? Because he wanted to breathe? Because he hated her controlling his breathing? Because his future unrolled before him in increments of monkey piss and cocaine? Because he hated how her cunt smelled and how he smelled when she was around him?

Patty or Daryl must be kicking the hell out of those pineapples. Claire doesn't know how to make them stop so she looks at her watch. 12:15. Her watch is silver and small and elegant and has hands that look like tiny needles circling smoothly. It doesn't tick and she realizes that she's never been surrounded by ticking. No grandfather clocks, no noisy kitchen clocks, no metradomes. In the air conditioning she thinks about the heat outside that feels like summer to her but is really early spring to everyone in Hawaii. For her, time doesn't divide itself into ticks. It unrolls like the tapes in the VCR she just hooked up. It forwards and pauses in stops and starts and seasons that don't exist in Hawaii. She is amazed and a little terrified to think that two weeks ago she was in Xenia drinking coffee and being surprised at the heater's new silence and smelling spring. Two weeks ago Kati Roland was being killed. The shock of Kati Roland's final STOP knocks Claire in the face. It seems that time shatters into crashing disjunctions. Everyone is dizzy rotating around different hubs like electrons around a nucleus. People fall out of orbit and collide, smashing the delicate network of gravity. Claire doesn't belong in Hawaii. She doesn't notice her stomach's new knocking.

Patty or Daryl rests in a small skeleton. Claire thinks about how small she is. It makes her feel vulnerable. She could shatter. She wonders at how tall Kati Roland is--almost six feet. She wonders if she felt less vulnerable in such a large skeleton. Probably not. Probably all the spaces the woman's skeleton contained, between her ribs, behind her teeth, in her pelvis, made her feel fragile. Claire touches her hip and then her stomach and thinks about Patty or Daryl. Her heart is beating fast. Outside, it's storming. The steel sky shakes and the palm trees bend. The sky looks like a huge gray belly restless children are trying to kick through. She thinks about David Roland trying to beat his way back into his wife's body and feels violently nautious. She gets up and run past the two men. She runs into the bathroom.

Outside the sky flashes and churns. She closes her eyes and feels hot and stuffs her hand between her legs in case her baby falls out. She feels dizzy and sick. She opens her mouth so her stomach can force out the yellow and gray swamp of half digested pineapples and tuna. In her heaving she knows the sky is shaking. Doubled over the toilet, she feels herself shake and thinks Patty----Daryl don't fall out---don't fall out on me---oh baby don't fall...