There was a billboard her father had once told her about, off Interstate 87 in Denver. It was for Barnum and Bailey Circus, and on top of it, there was a woman: a trapeze artist in glittering green sequins. This was 1990; Opal Delavan was six years old, about to turn seven. Operation Desert Shield streamed endless sand across the television screens. Home Alone was new. Her parents—divorced since she was three.

     And this woman, she had perched there precariously with her arms outstretched, one leg bent slightly. Like a Flamingo, she said. Like a flamingo, her father nodded.

     Perfectly still and 3-Dimensional, it wasn’t like any billboard he’d ever seen. He had a red Chevrolet pickup, rust just beginning to graze its seams and his DUI keeping him without a license, though he drove anyway.

     Seat belt on, he’d say. Seat belt on, she’d repeat.

     Her father had pulled off Interstate 87, below the billboard to where another man had parked his car and sat on his hood, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the lady. Her father smoked too, joining the man, and together they questioned if she was real.

      But they both couldn’t tell. They thought when they’d pulled off the interstate that she was, that this must be some stunt for the circus. Safety ties had her harnessed in, somehow.

      The other man never gave his name, and the woman never moved.

      The longer they waited, the longer she waited them out. This woman in emerald-green, 3-Dimensional and sending her sequins scattering, refracting sunlight out onto the endless stream of cars passing by underneath—she was only a dream of reality.

      The other man, he finished his cigarette and so did her father, stamping them out into the summer grass. They’d looked at each other, nodded. It had been a mirage, and they didn’t have to worry about her any longer. Even if she fell, her plastic pieces would end up in the ditch off the highway. In a tornado, she could have ended up on a beige, monotonous plain in Nebraska. But this was a mountain state.

      And her father, and this other man, they were mountain men, used to altitude changes and radical shifts in temperature. They weren’t going to mourn her surreality any longer. They agreed, her changeless nature and her absolute immobility were not of human capability. The other man used this word. Human capa-bility, he pronounced it.

      They both got back in their cars, merged back into traffic and continued along the highway, accelerating back into their separate lives. They exchanged no numbers. They would never meet again. They were two men who had been taken by a billboard, that was all they shared—a mannequin.

     Her father told her this as a bedtime story in her room she’d stay when she visited. Opal listened, staring at a poster for Northern Exposure. What was that? She’d asked.

     A sitcom, he’d said, about a fish-out-of-water.

     What is a fish out of water? A person, he explained, who finds themselves out of place. This doctor, he goes up to Alaska, and he’s in this little town, but he’s used to the big city. That was Northern Exposure.

     But the woman, she could still be real? Opal asked.

     Maybe that was why she was so still; she couldn’t move because she was afraid of what might happen—she’d never been balanced on the edge of a billboard before. A fish-out-of-water.

     No, she was faux

     What did faux mean?

     Faux meant fake. The woman wasn’t a woman at all.

     At 26, Opal Delavan pulled over to look at her own life, tried to stare at it until it began to seem real. Her father had found a way to disguise when he’d been drinking. He owned a parrot who spoke for him when he would slur if he said anything. So, he was silent. The bird spoke. His name was Stanley, and he was an enabler, letting her father continue to slur into eternity. Communication—delegated to a lilac-crowned amazon.

     She told her mother this, crumbling with it all along the insides of coping, finally.

     It’s going to come out, her mother stated.

     What? What? Opal asked, but her mother wouldn’t answer.

     What was going to come out?

     It was something she said she’d never planned to tell her.

     Is he not my father? Opal said.

     Her mother didn’t answer.

     Then Opal repeated herself.

     Her mother nodded, tears welled in her eyes.

     He’s not, her mother told her.

     A wind of time surged against Opal though she did not cry; over two decades of facing northern exposure. A fish-out-of-water, but she’d always swam.

     Her father was a man her mother met in Mexico and had never told of Opal’s existence.

     Her faux father then became a man her mother met in rehab. They were married 8 1/2 months before Opal was born.

     You’re half-Italian, her mother told her.

     The result of her addictions, her demons. This all was, her mother said.

     Opal’s birth father—the Cancun locals called him Superman. He was that tall and everything about him like Christopher Reeve.

     He was there to buy a boat. Mafia ties, maybe, her mother said. She didn’t know but was sure he’d wanted a catamaran.

     Opal wondered about this new father, where it was the wind had taken him.

     But mostly, she thought about the lady in emerald on the billboard, how she wished she could have been there in that preternatural moment in time.

     She’s not real, the man she’d thought was her father asked the man who’d stood beside him on the side of the highway, except it wasn’t a question. He knew she wasn’t; it was the hope that she was that made him stare, which made him ask. And hope swept him back onto the highway to live another day.

     She’s just a glittering lie, my friend. That was all the nameless man had to say.