Summary:
Alice Goodwin is the wife of Howard, a midwestern dairy farmer, the mother of two daughters aged five and three, and the nurse at a local elementary school. She and her friend, Theresa Collins, a family therapist who lives in the nearby suburbs, take turns watching each other's children. One morning, while Alice is momentarily distracted, Theresa's two-year-old daughter, Lizzy, falls into the pond on the Goodwin farm. Despite Alice's attempts to resuscitate her, she dies after three days in the hospital.
Not long after, while she is severely depressed, Alice is arrested on (false) charges of sexually abusing some of the schoolchildren in her care. Confused, and thinking only of Lizzy's drowning, Alice says to the police, "I hurt everybody." They take this to be a confession.
She spends three months in prison awaiting trial, until Howard sells the farm to pay her bond. The novel gives us both Alice's experiences in prison--in a world she had hardly imagined--and Howard's struggle to take care of their children. Theresa, who seems never to have blamed Alice for her child's death, helps him and they develop a powerful bond. The novel ends with the trial, in which Alice is exonerated, and their family's tentative beginning of a new, urban life.
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