Category: Fiction

Mother and Child

Kyle is on her way home for Christmas. Home home, as in, where she grew up. She sits stiff in her bulkhead window seat, chewing on the teat of her water bottle and watching other passengers file in. She’s got her dog with her on the flight, her big retriever, the first time she’s flown with him, and she almost wishes a stranger would complain about it. Just enough for an excuse to get mad back at someone out loud. The only reason she didn’t take Iggy when she flew home last year was because her mom doesn’t like dogs, and this time—well.

            A flight attendant presses a coffeepot button and Iggy whines at the beep. The attendant turns, looks maybe admonishing, and Kyle puts a defensive, ready hand on Iggy’s neck. The attendant just winks and says, “He knows the coffee’s bad.”

            Kyle sighs. She grips Iggy’s collar’s leather strap. She could ask to have a drink before takeoff. Even at twenty-nine, airplane mini-whiskeys always seem riskily grown-up. She raises two shy fingers, but the attendant is looking away now. He’s smiling at the cabin doors. Another attendant escorts a young girl onboard.

            The girl has stringy blond hair, and a backpack, and a plastic pouch of papers on a lanyard around her neck. An unidentified minor—isn’t that what they call it? She could be five or she could be ten. Older than Kyle’s sister’s twins, but by how much? Kyle’s girlfriends would be able to tell, probably. Those trivia games at baby showers these days when everyone else knows, without guessing, about diaper tallies and babies seeing in black and white. Last time she was home, when she’d just broken up with Saul, Kyle’s sister asked over dinner, Was it because he wanted kids? and Kyle couldn’t explain how it didn’t feel that simple.

            That night, at that dinner, Kyle’s dad switched the subject on her behalf. He took her out for ice cream after and got her mind off things.

            He’s in Reno this year, with his brother’s family through New Year’s.

            Kyle prays the attendant will walk this little girl past her row—the airline has open seating—but the girl sees Iggy and her face lights up.

            The attendant whispers, “Do you want to sit with the doggie, sweetie?”

            The kid takes her seat slow. Her feet don’t touch the plane floor. She says, “Can I pet him?” and she puts her hand out carefully, calmly, settling her fingers on Iggy’s taut forehead. Kyle almost tells her, Be gentle. He’s anxious.

            Iggy nuzzles, softening under the girl’s touch.

            The girl says, “I’m Pearl.” She points at Kye’s wrist, the Series 6 Kyle bought herself as a holiday present. “I like your fancy watch.”

            Kyle shakes her wrist to adjust the band.

            Pearl asks for Iggy’s name, and then Kyle’s. “I knew someone named Kyle who’s a boy,” she says, not good or bad, the way Kyle’s nephews say, I am dancing. “Boston’s where my mom is and she had a dog Polka who couldn’t go with her when she moved.”

            “What happened to her?”

            “She went to live with Roger.”

            Kyle nods, like, Okay. But, the mom or the dog?

            The sky’s going dark outside the porthole windows. The aisle jams with elbowing passengers. A graying man in a safari shirt stops at the bulkhead row and asks Kyle if the aisle is free. “I like the legroom,” he says. He stows a camera bag in the overhead, leaves the satchel’s strap hanging down without seeming to notice. He’s about Kyle’s dad’s age, with crow’s feet and an easy grin, and a ring, the soft of his finger grown comfortably around it. His arms and legs fall lazy, splaying into Pearl’s seat space, and he registers Iggy with lukewarm surprise, as if, impossibly, obliviously, he hasn’t noticed the dog until now.

            The man nods at the lanyard around Pearl’s neck. “You must be a professional flyer.”

            Pearl grins. She tells him, “It’s my first time on an airplane.”

            The man looks at Kyle, an impressed face. Why didn’t you say so! He assumes they’re together, Kyle can see. She wishes she could just read her book. She wonders about her own first flight, vaguely remembers some long-ago trip where she’s small in a middle seat, her parents on either side playing rummy across her table. The memory hurts.

            “Pearl was just talking about going to see her mom in Boston,” Kyle says, to clarify.

            “Well, Pearl. I’m Roy.”

            When the plane lurches, beginning its taxi, Iggy cants forward unprepared. His nose bumps Pearl’s knee. There’s a rip in the knee of Pearl’s jeans that Kyle hadn’t noticed, a rim of dried blood on the denim hole and a scab on the skin underneath. Pearl sees Kyle looking and says, “It’s OK.” She touches the scab with a careful finger. “I was supposed to fly yesterday, but we missed it. I fell when I was running with my bag.”

            And no one put her in a new pair today, Kyle thinks. That’s bad, right?

            Pearl points at an old scar on Kyle’s elbow, as if to say, You fall too.

            When the attendant asks for Kyle or Roy’s confirmation they’ll assist Pearl—in an emergency, with any big problems—Roy looks at Pearl and smiles and raises his eyebrows. He says, “I don’t know, kid. You can swim, right?”

            Pearl frowns. “Like at the Y?”

            It’s the same as when Shannon texts teasing, haha videos of the boys doing things they don’t get are funny. Kyle feels bad. She gives the attendant a nod, but he needs to hear her say it. “Yeah,” she answers. “Yes.”

 

—

 

            Yes, Kyle’s mom has been seeing someone. That’s the sadness, the great Donne family drama. But the problem is that Kyle knew about Brian years ago, and her mom promised it had stopped.

            One night, when she was seventeen, Kyle burned through a computer cord and went to her mom’s office after hours, to pick up a spare. She found her mom and Brian, the receptionist, in an exam room, on a table. Kyle’s mom was beside herself afterward. She apologized, profusely. She called it weakness. Her humanity. Something Kyle would understand when she was older, a frustrating cliché Kyle has kept hoping will come true.

            Kyle’s mom said if the rest of the family knew, it would destroy everything, for nothing. And Kyle needed to believe her. She didn’t know how she could tell anyone—like, actually tell them. So, when it came out in June about her mom’s “mistake” with “Brian who she used to work with,” Kyle couldn’t say to her devastated father, her blindsided sister, that she knew more than they did. That she’d known, without knowing it, for twelve years. That it was so much more and worse than they thought.

            If you’ve been long holding a bomb that goes off in a crowd, probably no one forgives you if you tell them, I’m hurt too, or, But I believed it was dead.

 

—

 

            The plane wobbles going up. Pearl squeals and clasps her hands.

            Most people settle apathetic into books or sleep or laptops. Roy puts his headphones in and snags his bag from the overhead—Pearl gasps, pointing at the seatbelt sign—and begins cleaning his camera with a little swab. The kind of leisurely routine you’ve perfected on regular flights to worry-free destinations, Kyle thinks, a little indignant.

            Pearl tap-dances her feet across Iggy’s back and says, “Look at the clouds!”

            Pearl asks Kyle how cold it is outside the airplane window. Cold enough for snow? Will Kyle do snowy things over Christmas with her family in Massachusetts? Kyle asks has Pearl ever seen snow before, mostly to bumper the talk away from her own family’s activities, and Pearl shakes her head no. “There was snow in Boston last night that Daddy said I missed because I made us late,” she says. “He drove me three hours to the airport twice. Yesterday, and today all over again.” She adds this proudly, like it was nice that he went out of his way.

            That’s something Kyle’s dad always says—Need anything from the grocery store, Dad? What do you want for your birthday? Don’t go out of your way, as in, Let’s not worry about me.

            Kyle keeps Pearl talking about herself. Pearl likes school. Her best school friends are Lee and Ty. She likes this school better than two others she’s gone to because they hold after-school outside, and her favorite school subject is science, because they did an animal unit last month—“Mammals are all different kinds but they all have fur and the mothers do nursing.” She lives with her dad in Louisiana, and they had to drive so far because Houston is the nearest airport.

            When Kyle asks Pearl if she’s always lived in Louisiana, Pearl says yes, and Iggy sits up.

            “Mom used to live there too, before she went to live in Boston. I stayed with Sasha and Jax for a while until Daddy found out and I went to live with him.”

            Kyle asks slowly, “How long ago was that?”

            Pearl is matter of fact. “Two years.”

            While Kyle works out the sad math—never been to Boston, Mom’s in Boston two years—Pearl bends and stretches for a book by Kyle’s feet, the one Kyle planned to spend the flight reading. Kyle watches Pearl study the angry cover, a young woman smashing an old clock.

            Kyle clears her throat. She tells Pearl, whispering, just the two of them, “My dad’s in Nevada for Christmas.”

            Pearl considers this a moment. “Yeah,” she says, nodding. Understanding. “Las Vegas.”

            The metal drink cart rouses Roy from his camera screen. He pulls out his headphones and reaches for his wallet, announcing to the attendant, “Ian, let me treat my friends here.” Kyle just wants a water, but her will to pick a fight has faded. When the drinks arrive, they’re chocolate milk for Pearl and cranberry soda for Kyle, with a little airplane vodka for Kyle on the side. Roy winks and says, “I took a guess.” He ordered a tea for himself, and he turns to chat with Ian as he dips the bag in the hot water.

            The plane shudders. Iggy sniffs the rippling liquid in Pearl’s cup. Pearl whispers, “Kyle” and leans toward Kyle’s shoulder. “I only like strawberry. I don’t like chocolate.”

            Once, in the grocery store, when they were picking out a cake for Shannon’s birthday, Kyle’s mom said kids who don’t like chocolate aren’t kids. She said it like a joke. Kyle’s older than Shannon, and she remembers thinking, If she’s not a kid then what am I?

            Roy gets up for the bathroom. Kyle slips the tiny vodka in her purse. She hands Pearl the pink soda and tells her, “We can switch.”

            Pearl twirls the soda straw. “Like what Daddy makes for Joy,” she says.

            The surprising tastes and smells that evoke old memories are never the ones Kyle thinks they’ll be. She cradles the chocolate drink and takes a slow sip. She’s eight, at the kitchen table after day camp, drinking Nesquik with her pancakes. A nice morning. Simple. Black and white.

            The first mouthful of flavor fades away, and she takes another sip to try and get it back.

 

—

 

            Kyle has been mostly ignoring her mom’s texts and emails, after a few accusatory phone conversations right when the part-truth broke. So Shannon called, Mom’s envoy, to summon Kyle home for Christmas. She guilted Kyle for acting childish about the separation. “Marriages are long,” she said. “Mistakes happen.” Shannon, who’s twenty months younger than Kyle, and doesn’t know she doesn’t know the full story, and has only been married four years herself.

            When Kyle said it wouldn’t feel like Christmas, Shannon said, “There’s more about Christmas than walks with Dad.” Normal Christmases since Kyle moved away for college have meant walks with her father around the old neighborhood, sometimes several loops a day. He gets sentimental over the holidays, calls her Kylie and waxes nostalgic about when she was young enough that he knew her friends. He always points out new construction and says, They must have just put that up! If he does it to make her feel like the place isn’t changing too much without her, or because he actually hasn’t noticed the changes before, Kyle can never tell.

            Kyle sat on her couch, on the phone, Iggy nudging her with an orange boomerang toy. Shannon said, “Give me one good reason for staying in Houston by yourself.” Her tactic was, You are alone. You are not a girlfriend or a partner or a wife. You are not a caregiver. This was partly what Kyle was afraid of—face to face with Shannon for the whole Christmas week, Shannon taunting, Give me one good reason, and Kyle unloading what she knew about good reasons, making things worse just to prove Shannon’s insulting theories wrong.

            “It’s not as easy as just blaming Mom. You not talking to her is making it worse,” Shannon said. “What am I supposed to tell the boys if you’re not here? They’ll say, Aunt Ky’s not here for Santa, and where am I supposed to tell them that you are? What do you tell kids about something like that?”

 

—

 

            Kyle and Pearl share a bag of airplane pretzels and take turns feeding Iggy. One from Kyle, one from Pearl. Happy Iggy takes each bite like its own treat. Roy, watching over a magazine, smiles and says, “Poor thing doesn’t know they’re just pretzels.”

            Kyle feeds Iggy a big piece. “I think it’s nice.”

            Pearl cocks her head at Kyle’s brusque tone.

            They all watch Iggy lick the salt from Pearl’s little palm. The dog’s loved salty food since he was a puppy. The vet said he’d grow out of it and he hasn’t yet.

            The plane bumps over a surprise air pocket and Pearl says, “I bet my mom will pick me up from the airport in Boston.”

            They’re somewhere above Charleston—the cartoon arc on the TV map says it’s just over halfway. Roy turns his magazine page, and laughs, like Pearl was kidding, but Kyle rummages in the pretzel bag for a few more broken chips. She hands Pearl a piece carefully. “Was there something that had you thinking she wouldn’t?”

            “She was supposed to visit over the summer,” Pearl says. She holds her hand out for Iggy’s tongue. “We did the bed on the couch all made up for her. The other sheets because that’s her favorite, purple. And she never came and when we called her she said she had to take care of Mr. Petrezzi, but I know they were the days we planned because Daddy let me put the stickers on those days on my room calendar.”

            Roy picks a pretzel piece from up off the floor. He crumbles it absentmindedly into a dust that falls back down. He says, “Your mom will come get you,” and Pearl says “Okay” so easily convinced that Kyle hates to think what will happen if Roy’s simple promise is wrong.

            The guy Kyle really dated, Saul, said once toward the end that needing promises and being in love were opposite ideas, and Kyle asked him what promises he resented making. He told her she was proving his point.

            Pearl says, “Iggy’s thirsty” and holds out her empty soda cup. Kyle pours it full from what’s left in her Nalgene and Pearl tilts the cup for Iggy like a baby bottle. Pearl tells Iggy, “You’re a mammal.”

            Kyle wonders how old Pearl’s mom might be—Kyle’s same age? A Kyle-sized Pearl with Pearl’s stringy hair? Imagine Pearl walking into baggage claim and there’s no one there for her. Kyle hopes it would be true if she said to Pearl, Things shouldn’t be this complicated for you already. But what does she know?

 

—

 

            Kyle’s dad’s car waits for her in airport parking. He left it when he flew to Reno and mailed her a key. It will be after midnight by the time Kyle finds the car, and warms it up, and drives it out to the house. She’ll park in her dad’s old spot in the driveway, by the tree her mom once planted.

            Everyone will be asleep inside, so Kyle will try to be quiet, keeping the lights off, guiding Iggy upstairs in the dark—muscle memory—and slipping into her old kid bed. Her parents have never changed her room much at all. Still the same ratty stuffies and pre-teen wall posters and striped sheets from high school. The headboard has a worn patch where she used to rub her thumb when she went to sleep nervous, and she’ll try it, to see, but it won’t work like it used to. Iggy will take up the foot space, and Kyle will feel big in a small bed.

            In the morning, Christmas Eve, Kyle will get up first. Before even her sister’s little boys. She’ll put on a pot of coffee and wait in the kitchen for people to come down, elbows on the island counter, studying the water as it boils. The twins’ rocket toys have been left out on the floor by the table, and a pot is soaking in the sink. She’ll have expected them to make a bigger deal of her arrival, but maybe this is better. More real. Maybe it’ll help that it almost feels like a regular day in the familiar house.

 

—

 

            Over Baltimore, the pilot turns off the cabin lights. Roy pulls his camera out again. He scrolls Pearl through his bright pictures and talks to her about his Hanukkah plans, the gelt and video games he packed for his grandkids’ presents. Pearl squints at the glare of the digital screen in the dark. Before she can ask about one image, Roy is on to the next.

            He describes his daughter’s farm in Sherborn where his family is gathering. “It’s like the Cape without the water.”

            Pearl asks, “What’s the Cape mean?”

            Roy smiles. He picks up his jacket and tosses it over his shoulders like a cape cape.

            Pearl touches the jacket fabric.

            Kyle says, “She’s actually asking.”

            A man across the aisle falls asleep. His head tips back, and he starts to snore. Looking at him, Pearl points one finger at Roy’s camera and another at the overhead compartment and asks, “Am I allowed to get something out?” It’s clear by the way she receives her backpack from the attendant that the bag is light, and she extracts a single plastic folder. She lays the bag down on the floor and says to Iggy, “A pillow.”

            Kyle reaches for the seat light so Pearl can see.

            Pearl tilts the folder toward Kyle’s seat.

            The folder looks empty at first. Pearl pries back the pocket to reveal an assortment of photographs tucked below the flap. They’re softened, worn, but clean. No fingerprints. Handled with great care. Like Kyle’s mom with Kodaks after childhood trips—By the edges! Pearl searches for a specific photo, filing through them individually, and about ten prints in she stops and says, “This one!” She positions it under the spotlight. An image of a man asleep on a couch, a woman behind him doing bunny ears. Pearl whispers, “Cody was sleeping!” and holds the photo up toward the snoring man across the aisle, like, They look similar.

            Kyle says, “Can I?”

            She accepts the folder as if it’s fragile. The photos are glossy, on professional stock. She can’t think when she last held a developed picture, and it’s unsettling. Time-traveling, almost.

            There are school photos of friends, little rectangles with kid signatures on the back. The mismatched rectangle sizes and backdrop colors make what Pearl said about changing several schools feel real.

            There are a few candid group shots. One of Pearl at a bonfire in a whole group of children, the rest of them older. Middle or early high school, even. The most teenaged-looking girl with a plastic cup in her hands. One photo in a raggedy waterpark, a young woman dangling a laughing, bathing-suited Pearl off a deep-end diving board.

            “At night in the summer,” Pearl says. “Me and Nina at the pool.”

            In the photos of Pearl by herself, she looks so eerily unattended. Alone in a field with a water gun, shot from across a busy street. Posing thumbs-up for a New Dawn “All Gave Some” plaque. Cutting her own hair with brown hedge shears. Kyle accidentally presses her thumb on the haircut picture and the oil of her fingerprint sticks to the picture gloss when she pulls it back, leaving a smudge.

            Kyle tells Pearl, “I’m sorry.”

            Roy reaches for the waterpark picture. “Fun in the sun!”

            If Kyle could just shake him and say, You’re blind! You’re blind! Imagine Pearl packing all of these to bring with her, like show and tell. Mom, this is where I live. This is where I go to school. This is when they waved at me across a speeding boulevard. But, at the same time, who looks better—the mom-person who wasn’t there when these were taken, or the one who was?

            Kyle says, “Thank you for letting me see.” She hooks a wary finger through Iggy’s leather collar and tugs. It’s not her business. If she disapproves, she can’t tell of who. She has Pearl walk her through each photo one by one until the plane lands in Boston, and still she isn’t sure she’s done Pearl’s unknowing vulnerability justice.

 

—

 

            Christmas Eve morning, Shannon will come down first, and then her husband with the boys, and then Kyle’s mom. Kyle will hug her mom because it would look weird not to. Her mom will smell the same, the Baby Soft perfume her dad’s been gifting since forever. She’ll still have her ring on.

            Other than asking about the trip, Kyle’s mom will mostly hang back, watching the twins wrestle with Iggy. Kyle will pour Shannon coffee and tell her, “I did the roast half and half.”

            Shannon will say, “Two years ago we couldn’t get you up before noon.” She’ll point to their mom in the corner, mouthing, Talk to her.

            Kyle’s nephews say Houston like Ooston. “What’s far away as Ooston? Santa’s far as Ooston?” The T-shirts Kyle gave them last year still fit, so she must have guessed their size too big before, which is funny—they seem like babies now, compared to the fresh idea of Pearl on the plane. Kyle will tell them they have to come visit Texas and see it’s not so far, her brother-in-law looking at her like, We’ve heard that before.

            When the boys say, “Aunt Ky plays Duplos?” and Kyle’s about to say yes, Shannon will tell them, “Not Aunt Ky, boys. Go easy on Aunt Ky. What did we say?”

            There will be a lull in the late morning, the time Kyle and her dad would usually take one of their Christmas walks. Kyle will think about driving his car around the neighborhood instead, but then the idea seems cheesy. Like what she might have done if she was mad in high school. She’ll go from room to room noting the persisting signs of him. She imagined the house scrubbed Dad-clean, cut and dry, but he’s still in the pictures on the wall. His cereal’s still in the pantry. Some of his coats are still in the closet, tucked toward the back.

            Shannon will find Kyle in the Florida room, thumbing through an old Guitar World of his, and she’ll ask, “Where’s Mom?” accusingly, like Kyle’s banished her mother somewhere.

            Kyle will say, “I’ll go look.”

 

—

 

            They’re the first ones to deboard, because of their row. Pearl leads Kyle and Iggy down the jetway, saying, “You get to meet her now!” and Roy trails behind them, on the phone, unconcerned. The more Pearl skips and pulls her along, the more it convinces Kyle that even if Pearl’s mom does show up, she’ll be late or unexcited in a way that will complicate Pearl’s familiarity with disappointment.

            They emerge from the passage and Pearl’s mom is there, beside a TSA agent, shifting from one waiting foot to another. She’s just different enough from what Kyle was picturing to be surprising. Despite her hard face, Kyle guesses the woman is a few years younger than her—around Shannon’s age. She has a lanyard around her neck that matches Pearl’s. She has well drawn-on eyebrows that have smeared a bit throughout her day, and a shoulder-bag that saddles her skinny frame. Her clothes are black shoes and black jeans and a white dress shirt that bows open between the buttons, the kind of outfit that is probably a uniform and makes Kyle guilty in her leisurely plane clothes. Pearl’s mom looks tired and nervous. She holds a pink milkshake, in a cup with an orange TSA sticker, like she went through special screening to get it past security.

            Pearl sees her and runs forward. They hug, a tight hug, and stay holding each other for several seconds. Pearl’s mom says tenderly, “You’re taller,” and she wipes her cheek. She touches a finger to the knee rip in Pearl’s jeans. She hands Pearl the strawberry drink.

            Pearl says, “You remembered.”

            Iggy pulls his leash and Kyle holds him back, embarrassed at the choke in her own throat. Roy strolls past waving a contented, told-you-so goodbye.

            Pearl calls Kyle over, saying, “Kyle’s from my flight! And her dog!”

            Kyle inches forward, trying to keep a respectful distance. She snaps for Iggy to sit. She wraps her right hand around her left wrist to cover the fancy new watch, but then she’s afraid Pearl’s mom saw her do it. Pearl’s mom frowns and puts a protective hand on Pearl’s shoulder.

            Kyle says, “She did great,” and it sounds presumptuous out loud. “I mean, the plane didn’t scare her is all I meant.”

            Pearl’s mom says, “They assigned you to sit with her?”

            “I think they just thought she’d like my dog.” Kyle coils Iggy’s leash tight around her arm. “All she talked about was how excited she is for Boston. For your guys’ Christmas.”

            Pearl’s mom says, “I know.” She hoists the heavy purse on her shoulder, ready to leave.

            Kyle stands there with them. She knows she should say goodbye, and she doesn’t understand what she’s waiting for.

 

—

 

            Kyle will find her mom in bed, on top of the sheets, curled away from the door. Kyle won’t immediately step forward, but she also won’t back away. She’ll hold out her mug and say, “Do you need coffee?”

            It will be clear her mom’s been crying by the careening way she says Kyle’s name.

            Iggy, who follows Kyle in, will hop onto the end of the bed and sit, glancing between them. Kyle’s mom won’t shoo him off like she might have last year. Kyle will walk around to the other side of the mattress—her dad’s side—and get in. Face to face.

            Kyle will scoot forward, reluctantly. Nervously. She’ll budge one hand between her mom’s head and the pillow, wrap it around her mom’s back. She’ll use her other hand to lift her mom’s top arm and drape it across her own shoulders. They’ll lie that way a few moments, each of them holding with one arm and being held with another.

            “Iggy’s on my feet,” Kyle’s mom will say. “It’s warm.”

            “She’s good at that.”

            They’ll both wait for the other to say something more. Downstairs, the boys yelling something and Shannon yelling back. The metronome clock on Kyle’s mom’s dresser ticking. The stiff pillowcase cotton crinkling under the weight of their two heads.

            Kyle’s mom will say, “I know you’re mad at me.”

            “Yeah.”

            The clock clicks. Her mom does look pretty when she cries. Have men told her that? Kyle will wonder. How many? And who? And where? And when?

            “I’m mad at me too,” Kyle’s mom will tell her.

            “I can see that.”

            One of them squeezing the other one. Hard to tell which, their long, close limbs.

            “The last time you climbed in bed with me,” Kyle’s mom will say, “you were small enough to tickle my shins with your socks.” A shaky breath. “It doesn’t feel like Christmas.”

            Kyle will study her mom’s sad, pretty face. Up this close, it’s hard to tell the parts that have aged and the ones that haven’t. Kyle will say, “I miss him too.” She’ll wish her mom would say she’s sorry. She’ll want her to say it the two ways—I apologize, and also, I know you do sweetie. There, there. Child and mother, mother and child. Both, at the same time.

            Kyle’s mom asks, “Will you let me talk to you about it?”

 

—

 

            While they linger at the gate, Pearl’s mom says, “—Well.” And Kyle wishes she could apologize to this tired, unknown woman. For interrupting the moment. For having believed she might not come. But Kyle also wishes there was a way she could ask, What kind of mother are you? Half in the shameful, condescending way of still judging for the bits she does know, and half in the way of really wanting—needing—to understand about the give and take. The moving away, and the showing up. The strawberry milkshake remembered. The long road getting here. The full story.

 

—

 

            With her head crooked on her arm on the pillow, Kyle’s neck will ache, but she won’t move. She’ll stay, hurt, listening, for longer than she would have thought she’d be willing to.

 
 
 
 

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Another Sanié

On the 14th floor of an unremarkable Chicago skyscraper, fourteen women and two men sat in small cubicles receiving phone calls from people searching for intimacy in a place free from shame. And it wasn’t all people, if you want to be specific. It was men, mostly middle-aged men, mostly professional men, mostly white men, mostly meaning that from time to time, operators received calls from these men’s sons.

            Among the sixteen phone operators, a young woman sat three rows from the eastern wall in the second cubicle from the front desk. She, Sanié, wore her chemically red hair in an uncombed shag, a black T-shirt on which a dead, cartoon fish floated to the top of its tank, and loose black jeans that fit no part of her body. With a landline tucked between her shoulder and her ear, she online shopped from her cell, looking for a new walker for her baba. To her unique credit, she could multitask without pause, as though of two minds.

            “Oh daddy, yes, I’d love to fuck you in space,” she said to the caller, who allegedly used to be an astronaut. She said, “I wanna see your cock float up toward me in zero gravity,” and clicked through the screens toward her checkout.

            She’d already done the hard work of listening to the man’s problems for twenty minutes. That’s where the money was.

            Sanié said what she said on the phone with complete abandon, knowing that were she to break character, laugh, or hesitate, the person on the other line would hang up. Ultimately, it also made it more interesting for her, the experimentation with an alternative embodiment. They’d been on the phone for a little over ten minutes. If a customer hung up shortly after calling, it meant a lower average on her call time. A lower hourly rate for her. Currently, she averaged the third longest call time in the office, a fact she was not outwardly proud of though she occasionally imagined herself at the top of the list—to improve her hourly wage.

            While she told the anonymous man on the phone the planets they’d see, the aliens who might join in his fantasy, the meteors they’d narrowly avoid while leaving the ship on autopilot, an intruder claiming to be a pizza delivery man (one can imagine how clever he thought his disguise) was attempting to get past the front desk as the guard, David, repeatedly told him, “Man, you gotta have the name of whose pizza this is or you leave it with me.”

            When David called up, the receptionist, Sandra, whose voice had squeaked in an off-brand Barbie imitation since the ’70s, answered. She told him no one on the floor ordered a pizza from, and she hesitated, “Steve Buscemi’s.”

            Unsuccessful in his attempt, the intruder left the building and took out a slice of the sausage pie while leaning on one of the modern columns out front. The pizza was good, though cold. It was from the place on his block in Roger’s Park. He removed a strand of his oily black hair off the slice before taking a second bite.

            In the meantime, Sanié took another twenty minutes with her caller, creating subplots based on Star Wars that took them out of the original fantasy and into action. “Baby, figure out a condom while I fight back these Laputians, don’t stop touching yourself!” At thirty-four minutes, she surpassed her call average. When she was done, she asked Sandra if there were calls waiting to be picked up.

            “Nah, sweetie, we’ve been in a lull for the last twenty minutes or so.”

            At 6:00, bored husbands would be returning from their salaried jobs. Sanié could either leave to take calls from home or else hang out for another couple hours. She opted to leave. Coming into the office was mostly a way for her to get out of her parents’ house. She said goodbyes to Sandra and then David at the downstairs desk.

            As she left the building, she saw a man leaned against a column eating a pizza from the box. Putting on her headphones, she let him know he had sauce on his chin. He looked at her as she walked away then ran up, tapping her shoulder. She jumped back, said, “Fuck.”

            The man’s eyes lit. “It’s you!” He spoke with the intonation of a child. “I didn’t think I was going to find you!” He was panting. The pizza box was abandoned by the column. “I had the disguise and everything,” he continued.

            Sanié stopped, looked at his face. He looked Desi-ish. Someone whose family she grew up with, maybe. She asked him if she knew him, and he nodded vigorously, started talking about an encounter they’d had last week that she had no recollection of. Something about a trampoline. The circus. This is when Sanié began to feel creeped out. Knowing how quickly she needed to deescalate the situation, she asked, “Why are you here? How do you know where I work?” She moved slightly toward the building to make sure she and the man could be seen by the security cameras affixed to the columns.

            “Girl, you told me last week,” he grinned,  speaking in an accent that didn’t match his body but rather, likely, his friends’ growing up, “when we met.”

Sanié was not pleased to be called girl by this stranger, but she kept her gaze empty, confused.

            The man hesitated. “Or I think it was you. You got a twin? Pink hair? Sweet voice? Big ass?” He talked with stiff straight hands that emphasized the parentheses of this hypothetical ass.

            Sanié took two steps backward. “No twin.”

            Moments like this were not meant to happen in Sanié’s world. The point of phone sex was distant intimacy. For both parties. A caller shared their kinks, their innermost fantasies. An operator made that fantasy come true. Caller came. Caller hung up. Operator got paid their hourly rate for the minutes they were on the phone. Maybe a caller became a regular client, but they never met their operators. If they met, see, then Sanié couldn’t pretend that the man or woman on the other line had a fat cock or that she was an eighteen-year-old blonde. Today’s conjured fantasy in which “Horny Astronaut” wrapped two navel oranges in a T-shirt in an effort to mimic playing with DD’s in a zero-gravity chamber would’ve been impossible.

            The dude looked embarrassed. “This just doesn’t make sense, you know?”

            Sanié tried to let him down easy. Some version of her had made an impact, even if it was in this man’s head, even if she had spent years working so that she would be distinguishable in most settings. “Okay, sweetie, listen,” she began, taking on her operator’s voice, “I appreciate you coming all this way to, uh, follow up with me on whatever date you think we had.” He interrupted, but she wouldn’t let him speak. Raised a finger. Changed tactics. “Most women will find it creepy if a man goes to a her place of work when she isn’t calling him back or anything, but I don’t think you’re a creep,” quieting her voice, she said “I’m gonna go now. Be well, and stay away from the hard stuff.”

            But the small speech, which should have worked to throw him off guard, made him  insistent. He faced her even as she turned away.

            “You told me to come here. You told me to do some role play, come to your office, and find you. And now,” he hesitated, stepping back as he rethought his earlier assessment, “you’re acting like,” and his voice trailed off.

            Sanié finished his sentence, “Like I don’t know you.”

            Something in his eyes was earnest, she would’ve seen if she’d looked closely. Equally as puzzled as she was. Knowing where she worked? Knowing her face? Instead, she found the clarity that suited her.

            “Oh shit.” She laughed. “Andrea put you up to this, didn’t she?” Sanie laughed a coughing sort of laugh, “Fuck her, wow. Okay, honestly for a second you had me going. Whatta bitch.” The puzzle solved, she began walking away. “Tell her she wins.”
The man didn’t laugh. “Who’s Andrea?”

            Just then Sanié’s bus turned the corner. She waved at the man. “Don’t be too good at your job.” Smiling big, she got to the stop. The pigeons perched on building balconies seemed to laugh with her as she boarded. The man did not follow, just stared after her.

—

Sanié forgot about the incident on the bus. She didn’t bother texting Andrea about the prank because she knew Andrea had lost her phone three nights ago after some show at Lincoln Hall. She didn’t think twice about why anyone would prank her or why the man wouldn’t have some finish planned for the kind of nonexistent joke. She arrived home, where her mother, eternally stationed at the linoleum kitchen counter in her red flip flops and blue flannel robe, asked why she hadn’t put away her dishes after breakfast.

            “It was a long day, Mama,” she said ignoring the question and not looking toward her mother’s shaking head in the kitchen, not even a glance to the white roots growing into her coarse black hair. Sanié went to her room, like a teenager. Which is what her baba, eternally stationed in the living room in slippers and a green version of her mother’s robe, yelled after her.

            Her mother cooked dinner, but Sanié let her parents eat alone and told them she would clean up. When she heard them finishing, she went out to make sure each of them had their meds for the evening and cleaned up after their meal. She took a small bowl of pulao back to her room and ate in bed. She took two, mundane calls. She contemplated texting some friends to see if there was anything happening that night, but decided against it.

            Her chest felt tense, as it did sometimes, like she’d been holding something ahead of her too long waiting for someone to open a door. She ate her pulao and watched bad standup for an hour and a half—nothing put her to bed quite like it. Afterward, she lay in the dark holding a violet dildo against her clit. She tried to empty her mind. Pushed the black of the room past waves of thought and breath until she came. Her sleep was dreamless, her ability to put a day into her subconscious untouched by the events of her afternoon.

—

The next day, Sanié decided to stay home from the office. It was an unreasonably cold April Wednesday, and the forecast called for hail. Sanié had never left the Midwest, though she once took a cruise to the Caribbean with her cousins. That was some years ago. They’d spent most of the vacation drinking artificially flavored daiquiris and telling stories about the ass-backward men her cousins dated, aspiring doctors and CEO’s and, sometimes, lawyers with mommy complexes and drinking problems and fraternity brothers or whatever the fuck. She rarely dated brown men anymore. She rarely dated any men anymore. There wasn’t much of a point. Why go out of one’s way for a relationship doomed to fail. Doomed to end with her, still in her parents’ home, still obligated.

            Her parents, of course, asked her about these things, encouraged her to meet so-and-so’s son who was studying at Northwestern. She took the conversations as cues for her to leave the house, her childhood bedroom. Cues she didn’t take. She’d move but she couldn’t leave her life here—not when her parents needed her to take care of the house, make sure the bills were paid on time, manage their insurance, make sure they didn’t get scammed. She had a responsibility, she’d decided sometime after she’d had to move home from college.

            She loved her family, though perhaps not in the conventional way. She didn’t know if people actually could.

            She took three calls that afternoon from the desk in her bedroom—slow. Two dudes who wanted a conventionally submissive bimbo, the second of whom she persuaded to have her play a sex robot, just to shake things up and keep him on the line longer. Then one man who called weekly just to chat about his life, his job, the trip him and his family had just taken to Montauk. He was kind, if not boring. Sanié listened and asked him questions and laughed at his bad jokes. She thought of telling him he could pay a therapist, but that may not be what therapists were for and she might have been more affordable than one.

            It was funny when she thought about it, that she found this job in one of Baba’s newspapers. She’d been going through listings a year and a half ago after a particularly annoying day at the health food store. A kid had flushed half a sandwich down the toilet and clogged it, and Sanié was the one to plunge it up—it wasn’t appetizing to see whole tomatoes and slices of turkey come up a pipe like that. The ad stated plainly: “WANTED: VOICE ACTRESSES AND STORYTELLERS FOR TELEPHONE SALES.” Well, Sanié had always been told she had a nice voice and had a particular love for well-placed dupes, so she called. Her parents were proud when she told them she found a new job. They took her to her favorite Thai restaurant off Argyle just to celebrate. Mama told them the latest gossip circulating the catty group of aunties she visited with, and Baba, eyeing the bowl from across the table, asked Sanié if he could taste her seafood soup. She remembered lifting her spoon to his eager mouth with a smile.

            Between calls, she watched reality TV and shared an asynchronous lunch of aloo gosht with her parents. When she decided to be done for the day, she thought about going out and decided against it. Too much effort for an escape that never felt free.

            On Thursday, Sanié went into the office around 2:30. She ran into Andrea, who sat two cubicles down from her, in the elevator and was reminded of the man with the pizza. When she asked about it, Andrea played it off, chuckling slightly. Had Sanié wanted to see it, she’d have noticed that the lack of knowledge felt genuine. Andrea turned to her, the blue braided into her hair catching in the light. She asked if Sanié had met the person who’d started the day before.

            Sanié had not. There was a new person in the office every couple months or so. Low retention or whatever. And it made sense. The way that the operation worked. Management, tucked away in corner offices that never seemed occupied, took a significant cut of what people paid. Even if your hourly rate was as high as Sanié’s, it wasn’t enough to survive on. She still took a Sunday shift at the health food store when calls were light during the week.

            Sanié and Andrea were greeted by Sandra at the front, and then each woman headed to her desk. But when Sanié turned the corner toward her cubicle, someone was in her chair. She tapped her shoulder. Said, “Hey sorry, this is my seat.”

            The woman turned around in her chair slowly, with a soft, “Oh,” and Sanié blinked to be sure of her eyes. “My bad. I’m new and didn’t realize this desk was taken.”

            She waved her hand, smiling a remorseful smile, pointing to the emptiness of the desk. Sanié saw that it did not look like she’d ever occupied it. The woman continued. “Do you mind if I sit here for the day? I’ll clear it out in a couple of hours. Promise.”

            She smiled at Sanié with all her teeth, revealing dimples Sanié remembered she once had. Her hands were pressed into one another like a prayer. Her voice sounded like pie or a velour sweatsuit.

            Sanié acquiesced, walked away. She found a desk in the fourth row from the wall that was unoccupied. She sat down, placed her bag on the desk in front of her. She still wore her coat. At her desk, at her real desk—it was her. Or, the person that looked like her was at her desk. Or, at her desk there was a mirror and none of her movements were matching up and it was good, really good, that she had walked away from her.

            Her, but pink haired. Her, but soft-spoken. Her, but smiling, non-sarcastic, accommodating, fat-assed (unconfirmed, but yes). Her, but not her. Sanié sat for a moment. She thought she ought to say something but couldn’t think of anything to say. She went to the front desk, greeted Sandra and her blond pouf halfheartedly.

            “Sandra,” she said, “the new girl?”

            Sandra smiled. “So sweet, right!” It was not a question. Sanié agreed, met Sandra’s friendly, searching eyes.

            “She,” Sanié began.

            “Sanié,” Sandra interjected.

            “Yes?”

            “No, that’s her name. Sanié.”
Sanié paused a moment. “Strange,” she managed.

            Sandra gave Sanié a confused stare, “Is it?”

            “Maybe?”

            Sandra pointed out that there were multiple Rachel’s in the office, and this was true, but the equivalency felt like a stretch.

            “Maybe not,” Sanié said anyway. “Will she get my calls if she’s at my desk?” she asked, finding a reason to be where she was.

            Sandra frowned, unimpressed by any sense of competition in the room—this was a friendly workplace. She told Sanié the calls don’t belong to anyone, that they were a community.

            Sanié saw the upset in front of her, tried to negotiate. “Yeah of course. I was just thinking I have regular clients who contact me. How will they—”

            Sandra interrupted. “Don’t get short with me, please. I’m just working the desk. Your regulars, if they ask for you, will be transferred to you. Until then, we distribute calls evenly between the desks. Now if you don’t mind.” Sandra’s hands gestured to the desk around her, and Sanié was reminded of the other woman’s similar gesture.

            “Alright,” Sanié said, beginning to step away, not wanting to ask how Sandra would know the difference between the two Sanié’s. She thanked Sandra and walked to her new desk. On her way, she passed the other Sanié sitting at her desk, laughing with Andrea two desks down. When they met eyes, the other Sanié smiled and gave her a wave over.

            Sanié obliged. Her discomfort was palpable, but the other Sanié seemed not to notice.

            “Hi hi! Andrea was just telling me that everyone is getting drinks tonight, are you coming?” This other Sanié had an eagerness to her. She smiled bright and kept her posture upright.

            Andrea gave the other Sanié a warning look, while Sanié looked at Andrea in surprise. “Oh, really? I didn’t realize. I must not have gotten the text.”
Andrea shrugged, admitted that she hadn’t texted because Sanié rarely joined anymore. Sanié knew that it was true. The other Sanié remained adamant.

            “Woah, why not?” she exclaimed. “You should totally come. I’m new to the city and would love to hang out with you.” She had the countenance of a cheerleader. Sanié hated to see it on her own face.

            “New to the city, huh?”

A phone started ringing one desk over, and the other Sanié gasped. “That’s me! Sorry, guys!”

            “Sorry about that,” Andrea said as the other Sanié left, “My phone’s been weird, you know.” Then, “Don’t you have calls or something?”

            Sanié understood she was dismissed. She overheard the other Sanié’s call, her giggling voice. Artless, really. No creativity to the storyline, just “What else do you want me to do, Daddy?” They’d see how the call averages came out.

            Back at her desk, the phone was silent. Sanié sat only a moment before going back to the elevator.

            “I’ll be right back, Sandra.”

            She entered the elevator, went to the lobby, and at the front desk, said to David, “I had someone try to deliver a pizza to me yesterday, but gave the wrong directions. Do you have the number they signed in with so I can give them a call?”

            “Sure, mija,” David said, handing her a binder beneath the desk. The old man liked Sanié, who brought him coffee every Monday from the spot by the train.

            Retrieving the number, Sanié thanked David and went outside to make a call.

            “Hey, creep,” said Sanié when the phone picked up. Of course, he recognized her voice. Began a hopeful greeting before Sanié interrupted. “Listen, where did you say you met me? The other night?”

            The voice on the other line attempted alertness though it seemed to barely flash through the haze of what Sanié imagined was a midday high. “Yeah totally,” he said, “if you want to meet again just say the word, we don’t even have to go back there.”

            Sanié rolled her eyes, impatient. “No, it was not me,” she reminded him. “Where did you meet the other person?”
“Isn’t it your job to be nice to strangers on the phone, jeez.” The man who gets no ass becomes instantly macho when their pinky so much as grazes one. “We met when I was scalping tickets outside the circus. Remember? Trampolines.”

            Sanié hung up. Realizing this man had no information for her. She returned upstairs, and when the doors opened on the 14th floor, the other Sanié was waiting.

            “Oh hey, look at that! Long time no see.” The pink-haired, tooth-smiling woman had Sanié’s face, stood at her height, and yet it was clear that the woman vibrated on a very different frequency. “Thanks for letting me use your desk today. I felt super welcomed. The job was kind of easy! Men really just want one thing, huh?” The grin never left her face.

            “Are you leaving? Didn’t the day just start?”

            The other Sanié nodded enthusiastically. “I just have so many things to do today, getting settled and all. You know how it is.”

            Sanié knew she had a distinct desire to cut through whatever tub of frosting had landed on her life in the form of this woman. She grabbed her unsuspecting doppelganger by the elbow and steered her to an empty corner.

            “Whatever joke you’re playing has gone too far, okay. Tell me what the hell you’re doing here.” Sanié had spent years cultivating a persona to intimidate. As a teenager, she practiced snarling in the mirror. She pierced her own ears to prove that she didn’t mind pain. She was out of practice now–she called herself old and tired–but the instinct was there.

            The other Sanié’s smile left as the questions tripped forward. “I don’t know what you mean, I—”

            “Why are you here?” Sanié interrupted, and the other woman looked genuinely surprised at the tone, as though she didn’t see the mirror she was looking into.

            “Honestly, I just needed a job. I figured since you were so successful here, you know, maybe I could just work until I landed on my feet.” The smile slowly returned, lifting the corners of the woman’s concerned eyes toward her dark eyebrows.
Sanié registered the words. Tried to follow up with a how did you know, but as Sanié began to ask, a phone started ringing. Looking back, a small red light at the desk she now occupied blinked blankly at her.

            “I think your phone is ringing,” said the other woman, suddenly looking brighter-eyed and somehow, distinct. “Good timing, too! I have a lunch date.” She waved a pert goodbye and walked to the elevator. Sanié, dazed, hurried to her desk.

“Hello,” she answered, her voice demurring into a purr. All of her instinctive selves making their appearances as they needed to.

            The voice on the other line was panting, and she realized she needed to cool him down for the call to last more than five minutes. She asked him logistical questions about what he wanted, who he wanted her to be. He wanted her to treat him like a baby, and so she asked about his diaper, offered to put a lolly in his butt, soothed him when he threw a tantrum. She told him to spend time with blocks and describe what he was building. It bought time. As an only child, Sanié never had younger siblings to care for, but she babysat for her parents’ friends in high school. At least she knew how to play at childcare.

            When he started on a long tantrum, which seemed to revolve mainly on the injustice of the world treating him as an adult, Sanié remembered the conversation she’d been called from. The man spoke and she googled doppelgängers. She found a list of TV tropes: evil twins, selves from parallel universes, androids, illegally developed clones, impersonators. These were her options for what was happening. The man would notice if Sanié went too deep into these, so she returned to the call, trying not to think about the possibility that pink-haired Sanié could be trying to kill her and take over her life.

            The man hung up abruptly after coming in his diaper twenty minutes later. Solid time, she noted.

            Sanié sat at her desk, the low hum of dirty talk around her, wondering at the appearance of this doppelgänger who less than an hour ago sat in this seat. She left the thoughts unresolved. She entered the self she needed to get her work done.

In the afternoon, her mother texted her asking her to pick up parsley and mozzarella for a baked ziti her baba particularly loved. Ten minutes passed and still no calls. It wasn’t surprising. It was only 4:30, and a weekday. The good thing about this office was that she could act as though she had a day job. Her parents thought she was in sales and were happier for it. She packed up her things and headed home, wordlessly waving goodbye to Sandra and David on her way out. She averted her eyes from everything pink, keeping her eyes to the ground on the commute.

            When she walked in she smelled the familiarity of pre-shredded cheese bubbling over tomato sauce in the oven, the sound of Baba’s TV humming. She often resented coming home to this apartment. Hated the furniture they’d had since she was a child. The old white wallpaper laying a border of ivy near the ceiling. But in that moment, it was comforting to be at home. She went in and sat down next to him, the pleather squelching beneath her.

            “Where’s Mama?” It was a demand more than a question.
He smiled. “Salaam, bete.”

            “Walaikum as-Salaam. Where’s Mama?” she repeated.

            “I think next door. Miss Pettis offered her a loaf of that banana bread.”
That banana bread was infamous. The crust. The center. It would never last more than an hour in the house. Sanié smiled for the first time that day.

            “You have a good day, janum?”
“No, Baba.”

            He hummed. His eyes stayed on the TV. Sanié let hers glaze over as a bald, white man onscreen showed them how to spatchcock a chicken.

            Mama came in a few minutes later, walking straight up to the armchair, and grabbed the remote out of her husband’s hands, turning off the TV.

            Sanié laid the table, as Mama tossed a salad. When Miss Pettis knocked at the door, Baba, with his walker, opened it for her with a smile. Miss Deniece Pettis, now an old lady, but once a spry babysitter, a lender of books, a keeper of calm in more tumultuous years of this household simply by the nature of her internal calm, diffused the tension Sanié had been feeling at her neck since seeing whoever that pink-haired person was at her desk.

            “Hey sweetie,” said Miss Pettis, gliding up to give the twenty-two year old a swift kiss on the cheek. “You ain’t never stop by these days, where’ve you been?” Miss Pettis’s family came from Mobile to Chicago when she was thirteen.
Sanié evaded the question, returning to the kitchen to grab four glasses. “You know. Here and there, working. How’ve you been?”
Pleasantries were exchanged, the family sat together with their guest, and ziti was served. Miss Pettis led the conversation, talking about her grandkids and the block party happening next month. Sanié waited for the inevitable turn towards her.

            “How’s work, Sanié?”

            “Oh, you know. It is what it is.” Sanié took a large spoonful of pasta and cheese to her mouth, hoping it could end there.

            “I don’t even remember what you do,” Miss Pettis said, searching. <p

            “You said sales?”

Sanié hummed her affirmation.

            “Ignore her, Deniece. She doesn’t like to share details,” Mama said.

            “That’s not right. Who can you talk to if not your family?” said the other woman.

            Anyone else, Sanié thought. And then realized she hadn’t been talking to anyone at all. “Well, a really weird thing happened today,” she said, surprising herself.

            “Did it now,” said Miss Pettis.

            “A girl started working with us. She looks just like me. She sat at my desk.” Sanié looked around, expectations low for any meaningful response.

            “Interesting timing,” said Miss Pettis, looking toward Mama with a glint in her eye. “Khuya, doesn’t that sound just like those qareen you were telling me about just now?”

            Mama chuckled into her napkin, “Could be. You’re more superstitious than me now, aren’t you?” Mama was smiling at her friend.

            Sanié looked confused. “Qareen?”
“Djinn, sweetie. I shouldn’t know your culture better than you.” She laughed. “Your Mom was just telling me today about that story with your grandmother.”
“Mama, what?”

            Her mama waved off the concern with two swishes of her hand. “You never listen Sanié or you’d know. I’m sure I’ve told you.”

            “I’m sure you’ve not,” Sanié interjected.

            “Tell her, Khuya,” Miss Pettis said as Baba laughed into his napkin.

            “Djinn, like genies?” Sanié asked.

            Baba laughed harder.
“Don’t laugh, Baba!” insisted Sanié. “It’s your guys’ fault I don’t know anything about our culture, damn.”

            “Uff Allah, Sanié, so dramatic,” Mama said. She told the room to quiet and it did. She sipped her water. “Djinn are beings made from fire that has no smoke,” she began. “They can be good or bad. You would’ve known if you hadn’t skipped your Quran lessons.”
“Okay, and what’s a qareen?”
“Everyone has a qareen. It is the shadow of yourself. A djinn spirit attached to your soul.”

            “Okay, and they’re also human?”

            “Nahin, of course not,” said Baba.

            “Well now, Ahmed. Your wife was just telling me something different. What about your mother-in-law?”
“Amma?” asked Sanié.

            Mama clarified. “Yes, well Amma says that her grandmother was visited by her djinn. It looked just like her. A qareen, there to take over her life, is what she said.”

            “Well what happened? What’d she do?”

            Her mother looked at her a moment, then grabbed the knife on the placemat. She pointed it straight toward Sanié. “Stabbed it in the heart.”

            Baba made a gesture with his hands as if a ghost entered the room, before laughing. Ever the realist. “If you believe any of these things, of course.”
“You don’t,” his daughter asked.

            “Eh, I’m sure she met some long-lost twin or some whatnot and this was a good story to tell the children” he replied.

            “I believe it,” said Miss Pettis. “We don’t know about the spirits that follow us. A soul is a powerful thing. Who’s to say one of the spirits we carry with us couldn’t become real? That we don’t have to kill off some of our demons every once in awhile?”
Sanié echoed. The conversation drifted, and Sanié silently began collecting dishes. They ate slices of banana bread for dessert, and Sanié listened as her parents and their friend talked about the growing sense of doom in today’s politics, ultimately saying it’s no worse than it ever was before moving on to the need for renovations in the building.

            In bed that night, Sanié tried to watch TV but was too distracted. She googled qareen, found an obscure forum in Urdu where people were reportedly sharing stories of their hauntings.

            “Ridiculous,” she told herself. But as she fell asleep, the vision of the other Sanié bloomed pink at the forefront of her mind.

—

Sanié had not remembered her dreams in years, though sometimes she wished she would wake up screaming if only to be heard. Instead, she woke up soundlessly, first with the finches nested outside her window, then second a few hours later as the sound of the morning news filtered through the space beneath her door. Her eyes still felt heavy, but she needed to be. She debated whether it was a need.

            Returning to her bed, her feet now cold, she had made up her mind not to go into work today, instead determining by some strange reasoning that she’d find a landmark on the train. Not an escape, but an adventure. And why not?

            Running her hands along the map, she found her way to green, then to the conservatory at Garfield Park. When she told her mother where she was going, she was given a confused stare. “Really? For what?” to which Sanié snapped, “Am I not allowed to go anywhere besides here and work?”

            No one saw the room blacken with her frustration, but they felt it. Her mother said nothing, the wrinkles at her throat reaching toward her chin. She sighed deeply, letting go of her hold on her daughter’s gaze. “Do what you want, Sanié. I’m not trying to fight you today.” She turned away, putting a piece of toast in the toaster.

            Sanié she walked past her mother, not seeing her, the bag on her shoulder bumping loudly against a dining table chair too close to the door.

            The L would take an hour to get there, she discovered. The last time she’d gone there was in high school, and she thought that they must have driven. She put on her headphones, stark white against her red hair. She put her library on shuffle, listening to mostly house shit, remnants from the times she spent pregaming for nights out. Taking out a small bottle of nail polish from her bag, she coated her nails in a chameleon sort of green. When the train arrived at the Garfield Park stop, she jumped out, leaving her headphones on as she entered the conservatory.

            She liked the way the air felt—warm and humid, sinking into her skin. She took off her coat, draping it over her forearm as she walked past the tall banana trees toward the fern room. Inside, she heard running water, everything was green, the air heavy enough to taste. She stopped for a moment. She wondered if her parents had ever come here together. If they ever went as a family. Something there felt familiar, but memories had a way of collapsing. Maybe they’d been here, or maybe she was just recalling a one-time trip to Florida. Regardless, she felt herself unsure of how to move. Whether to go fast as though she were just on a walk or slow like there was something to see. The trees called her to pause before each fern, but the fear of seeming odd tugged her forward like a child on a parent’s shirttail. Around her, people in groups chatted as they walked, stopping by the edge of the pond in the center of the room. She would stay but she didn’t know how to stand still. She left the room and found a bench.

            Her phone was in her hands, which were in her lap, folded. Her shoulders were hunched, and then she straightened them. She thought about posting a photo of the flowers in front of her then changed her mind. She got up, began walking again, found herself in a room full of tropical fruit trees. The placard in front of her told her this was a sour cherry tree. Accordingly there were bright red patches of small red berries in front of her. No one else was in the room. She plucked one off the tree, putting it in her mouth. She gagged, the taste chemical on her tongue.

            “I think all of these trees are really heavily coated in pesticides,” a voice said behind her. She turned and nearly jumped when she saw the head of pink hair. She spat the mashed red fruit out onto the concrete path.

            “What the fuck!” she exclaimed, the taste of the chemicals migrating to the back of her throat. “Are you following me?”
“Not intentionally, no. But it’s nice to see you here. I wouldn’t have thought you’d like a place like this.”

            “A place like this,” Sanié repeated.

            “You know, somewhere peaceful and quiet. There are so many beautiful things here.” The look on her counterparts face was kind—genuinely so, as though she were truly curious about the happenstance of running into her new coworker. Sanié paused. Her coat was growing hot on her arm, so she shifted it to the other one.

            “Your name is Sanié,” she said after the moment.

            “So is yours,” laughed the woman with the pink hair. Sanié watched as her eyes, more awake on the other woman’s face, drifted overhead to the canopy shading them. “Do you want to walk around?”

            She didn’t know why she said yes, but she nodded. They found their way to a room full of cacti. The air was warm, dry. The cacti sat patient as cats in the sun.

            “Wow, look at how gorgeous,” said the other Sanié, pointing to a small succulent in bloom. “Look at how it matches my hair!”

            Sanié did not laugh, but she did see the comparison. The other woman’s smile reached her eyes, and Sanié tried to see if she could do the same, seeking some kind of joy somewhere to channel. She couldn’t. She felt restless, paused there only a few feet into the long room.

            “How long have you been in Chicago?” she asked.

            The woman’s response was nonchalant, pleasantly distracted. “Oh, as long as I can remember.”

            “Well, were you born here?” Sanié was determined to know the specifics.

            She received a smile in return. “Sure.”

            They walked in silence, every so often pausing as pink hair swooshed down toward broad leaves to excitedly examine the perfect holes cut into giant monstera or particularly lovely flowers blooming from the fruit trees.

            “Do you ever wish you were a flower?” asked the other Sanié.

            “The fuck kind of question is that?” Sanié asked, her eyes tense on the soil beds beside the path.

            The other woman smiled kindly. “Just trying to get to know you. Some people wish they could live different lives, you know.”

            Sanié laughed, really a scoff. “Not me.”
“No?”

            She hesitated, her eyes looking toward a couple holding hands on a bench taking a selfie together. “I mean, sometimes, I guess.”

            “Not a flower though?”

            Sanié felt discomfort scratch between her shoulders. “Is that what you’d want to be?”

            “Maybe. It seems peaceful. Bloom for a short while, give joy to the passersby. By November, you lay back down in the soil and get eaten by worms.”

            A laugh again, now genuine but surprised at that fact. “That’s an ideal?”
“No,” the other woman replied, her voice sing song. “The ideal is to be the best version of myself, I guess. It’s nice to walk around in the snow and have good sex and eat good food, etcetera.”

            The two of them walked past the couple on the bench. “Maybe for some people.”

            “Not for you?” The other Sanié turned to face her, eyes questioning. She was wearing a long sleeve white shirt tucked into a gray skirt that floated beneath her knees. She looked beautiful. Sanié wore all black. She saw how messily her nails had been painted. She spoke quietly.

            “It’s not like my life has been perfect.”

            “So who’s would you have? What would be better?”

            “I mean, it would be cool to be rich. Not famous or anything, but like enough money to go on vacations and get manicures and shit.”

            “That’s it?” the other woman asked.

            Sanié was surprised at the response. “What else?”

            “Love? Purpose? Fulfillment?”

            “I’m happy without them,” Sanié said looking at the ground and smirking.

            “You don’t sound happy,” the other woman replied, something approximating kindness in her eyes.

            Sanié thought at this. Was she? Happy? Sometimes, not always, but who was this woman to tell her anything about that. “You sound like a bitch.” She rose. She started walking away.

            “Aw, wait,” said the other woman, jogging to catch up. “Wait, stop.” She put her hand on Sanié’s shoulder and from nowhere, Sanié felt her face get hot, her throat seize up. “I’m sorry, I was too blunt.”

            “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Sanié would not make eye contact.

            “I think I’ll leave for the office soon. Do you?”

            Sanié didn’t answer.

            “You know, Sanié, I wonder why you stay here at all,” said the pink-haired woman, solemn for the first time in their conversation.

            “I like the way the air feels,” she murmured.

            The other woman continued as though she hadn’t heard her. “No one asks you to, everyone would be fine without you. Maybe you could be happy.”

            When Sanié raised her gaze, the other Sanié’s pink lips were still smiling. “I should go now,” she said. “One of us has to work, right?” She stood to walk away.

            Suddenly aware of the heaviness of the air, Sanié found words, “Hey, have you been sleeping around? People think I’m you, and it’s not cool.” She tried to be angry.

            The other Sanié’s mouth stretched cartoonishly, its edges pulling towards her jaw. “Oh no! What a mess,” she called back, turning on her heels and continuing to walk away. “I’ll try to let them know we are not the same.”

            Sanié stood near the entrance for a moment, watching as the other woman turned toward the train station. She put her coat back on slowly, barely noticing the drop in temperature as she left the greenhouse for the lobby, the dryness of the air. She waited for her bus, then boarded it, looking out the window the entire ride.

            It was rare to be asked why one stays in the life they are handed, perhaps even more rare to recognize that one even has a choice. Imagine Sanié—twenty-three, having barely left the house, her only conception of herself what others have told her or seen in her. And of course, she could claim that she knew herself. She could point to the music she liked to listen to, the kind of lover that attracted her, the taste she had in clothes. What would be more difficult would be trying to answer what the lyrics of her favorite grunge songs said about the thoughts she was drawn to, or what exactly attracted her to the lank men, half-okay men, half-bad men, half-men who disappear after a few nights of rough, impersonal sex, harder to say what was covered when she bleached the roots of her hair. One might say that Sanié had only ever sought to know herself by constructing how others could see her, by shading over the parts of herself she did not want to know.

            When she arrived home, her key slid noiselessly into the door, which cracked open equally silently. This had always been of benefit to Sanié, who needed the aid sneaking out for many years of her life. As the door opened, she heard her name, her parents’ voices coming from the living room.

            “How would I know where she’s gone, Yasser? She talks to me as infrequently as she does you.”
Sanié paused, recognizing that she hadn’t been heard.

            “You’re her mother, Khuya. How can you not find a way to relate?”

            Sanié heard her mother’s voice rise, then soften. “I’ve tried! Allah knows I’ve tried.”

            They were silent for a moment. Sanié still. “I know, janum. I’m sorry. We’ve both tried as we could. How she can disappear and ignore and yell like we never gave her anything, all of it is beyond me.” Sanié felt black behind her eyes, heard the hum of the TV murmuring beneath the voices.

            Her mother said it in a whisper, in Urdu, a mother-tongue Sanié always recognized and turned away from until one day her tongue couldn’t form it. Do you think we’ve failed? The question felt like an admission that felt like it should never have been said.

            A choking, the sense that the air was thickening. No tears, never tears. Silently, Sanié moved away from the door, pulling it closed with the smallest of clicks. She walked down the stairs of the old building toward the front entrance, her head moving in on itself.

            Her parents never knew how to raise her—an American-born teenager with black nails and a cursing mouth, a rupture in what they expected of a girl. It was their misfortune to have only created one opportunity for the child they dreamed. When she failed out of school, they didn’t understand what happened. They opened the letter that came to the house saying she was on academic probation, and Baba yelled at her for not valuing the opportunities she’d been given. Mama fumed in the corner, wondering how her little gap-toothed girl who’d wanted nothing more than to be a veterinarian became a young woman with a series of shit boyfriends she’d hide from her parents and no sense of who she wanted to be.

            She didn’t know where she was going but found her way to the office.

            “I don’t have my badge, David.”

            “No worries, mija. Go on up,” he nodded, then, calling after her. “You okay?”

            “Yeah.”

            She rode the elevator up, picking at the clumping nail polish at her cuticles. When she arrived she nodded to Sandra, went to her desk. It was empty. So empty she understood how another person could occupy it with no one saying a thing. No Sanié anywhere, not a pink strand in sight. She sat. Ten minutes passed and no one spoke to her. She received a call. Simple. A man who wanted to be called Daddy, who wanted to be told how she wanted to be fucked. But as she prepared to take on the character, her voice was empty, as though the person she’d been on every call before this had found a door out of her mind and exited, soundless. The call ended after six minutes. Six. She imagined a visible ticking down of her call average.

            Sanié got up from her desk and went to the bathroom. She sat in the stall, pants still on, moving as though this were the moment she’d break. She heard the sink begin to run, sat still for a moment, then flushed the toilet. Walking out, she saw the familiar cascade of pink down the woman’s back. She approached the sink next to her, looking into her face doubled in the mirror. The other Sanié smiled.

            “Hey there.”

            “I know you’re a djinn,” said Sanié.

            “Oh?” the other woman turned off the tap and walked toward the roll of paper towels near the door. She began wiping her hands.

            “Yes. I am not afraid to do what needs to be done.”

            “Hm.” The other Sanié laughed. “That must be new for you.” All hints of her innocence dissipated like sugar into tea. She finished wiping her hands. “I suppose the question remains of what needs to be done, then.” She smiled and left the bathroom.

            Sanié looked at her face in the mirror. She saw the beginning of a long crease making its way across her forehead, saw her mother’s long straight nose bisecting her face, the black-lined eyes so brown they could be black. She left the bathroom too, returning to her desk. When she looked around, the other woman seemed to have left. Sanié knew it was time to return home. To prepare. Her life could not be dismantled this easily.

            The apartment felt unfamiliar when she walked in. Her parents sat silently in front of the TV, as though they had been there since the conversation she’d overheard. She took off her boots by the entrance and walked into the room. “As-salaam-u-alaikum.”

            They both looked up, wished peace upon her as well. They looked old to her in that moment, though they were both just over fifty. Their eyes were tired, bagged down toward their chins. Even their robes were somehow more faded than before. Mama’s back started to show signs of a permanent bend, a leaning over toward kitchen countertops and her husband’s chairs and the ground in prayers. Sanié never saw her pray.

            “I’ll be in my room. Let me know when dinner is on the table,” she said in a voice not quite her own. She went to her room. She set down the bag she’d packed in the morning, sat fully clothed on her bed. Sanié imagined if not-her walked in. She imagined her double bringing joy to the darkly lit, near windowless space. Imagined her learning Mama’s recipes for ras gullahs and pyaaz gosht, watching the History channel with Baba, sharing his love for the documentaries on the Elizabethan era. If the other Sanié was a shadow of herself, could she not too do those things? It felt too late. Too much had happened. That part of herself existed outside of her, beyond her choices by now, surely.

            Sanié remembered the question posed to her at the conservatory. “Why do you stay here at all?” She thought she’d known. Remembered feeling that she was needed. But in what universe was someone who made their parent’s feel they had failed needed in their home. She thought she’d done it for them—her one redeeming feature. And yet, she’d always known they’d rather her build a life apart from theirs, better than theirs. Could she still do that, she wondered?

            That night, they ate a silent dinner together. Sanié’s mother began to ask her why she painted her nails such an awful color, but Sanié looked at her with a silencing glare. She immediately felt guilty. After ten minutes, Sanié offered to do the dishes.

            “Nahin, bete. I’ll do them. I have a particular way,” Mama replied, her voice tired.

            “You could show me,” she offered, trying. “It’s not fair to do it alone.”

            “I’m happy to, janum.”

            It was the end of the conversation. Her mother gathered the plates and rose. Sanié sat with Baba at the table silent for a moment before rising herself.

            “I’m going out,” she said, as though to herself.

            “Where?” asked Baba from the table.

            Sanié ignored the question. Went to her room and packed her bags. On her way out, she went through the kitchen. Put her hand on Mama’s back. Mama looked around a moment but did not say anything, turning back to the dishes she was loading in the dishwasher. She grabbed a knife from the wooden holder, placing it in her bag. She would change. Of course she could change.

            Leaving the building, she did not know where she was going. Her body told her it did not matter. The sun had set, the air was cool. She zipped up her coat. Walked to the train and took it south, finding herself at a dive bar in Lincoln Park near the lake. She went in, sat down at the counter, and waited.

            It took fifteen minutes for her double to come and sit next to her. The other woman squeezed her forearm as she sat, giving her a smile, before raising the arm to wave over the bartender.

            “You didn’t get a drink yet?”
“Not yet.”

            When the bartender came over, the other Sanié asked for a menu. He obliged, smiling at her and walking away.

            “I know what you are,” Sanié said to her double when he was at a distance.

            “You already said that, silly.”

            “You need to leave.”

            “Aw, Sanié—” she began to say.

            “I’m serious. I don’t want to have to kill you.” Sanié had decided she could. She imagined the weight of the knife in her bag.

            “Stab me in the heart?”

            “If that’s what it takes.”
“Ah, Sanié. I thought we were becoming friends.” Her eyes seemed genuinely sad. “I’m only here because you needed me, you called me.”

            A pause. “I never called you,” Sanié said. “You show up wherever I am, I never ask anything of you, but you’re out here sleeping with random fuckboys like my body is just yours, my memories just yours.” There had been no preparation for this apparition, no incline before the drop of the cliff.

            “Didn’t you, though? Didn’t you want another version of yourself? One to talk on the phone for you when you wanted to be somewhere else? One to talk to your parents when being in the apartment made you feel spaceless?” A cocktail menu arrived, and the double glanced at it. All the drinks were named after the zodiac.

            A memory. Sanié, drunk after work at a happy hour. Asking Andrea if she ever wished someone else could come and live the boring parts of life for her. “Like a stunt double?” her coworker asked.

            “Yes exactly.”

            “Sure, and you get to have sex and eat brunch and watch TV. Sounds like a dream.”

            A dream.

            “The Gemini please,” the other Sanié said to the bartender, flipping her hair. “I love rum,” she said to Sanié. “Anyways, you did didn’t you? Want another version of yourself?” It seemed as if the woman’s body had come into greater focus, her eyes brighter, her presence enlarged. “I only came to give you the option. Go sink into whatever you want to sink into.” She smiled, the smile flashing like a knife. A knife in her bag. Her mind too scattered to think to grab it.

            Sanié’s voice was weak. “I don’t want anything else.” The cocktail arrived, a pale orange garnished with a sprig of mint. Sanié took a sip.

            “Maybe that’s the issue, hm? You don’t seem to want anything. That would confuse anyone. You haven’t wanted anything since,” a pause, a raised eyebrow, “well, since that situation with Uncle Umar in high school. But there are so many things I want! Wouldn’t it just be better if I took over?”

            Sanié sat horrified for a moment, then said, “And I would, what? Just walk away?”

            “Maybe you’d actually start your life. Do what you said you’d do if you could escape.

            Sanié’s breath stilled, her hand rested on the bar counter. She let a finger find its way to a drag of condensation that marked where the double’s glass had sat for a moment. She felt its wet. She forgot the knife.

—

Two days passed. Sanié sat in her room pondering the pile of clothes still left by the wardrobe. She should pack them, she thought to herself. Though, the other Sanié might find use for them. She skipped work that day. She wondered if Sandra would notice. David? Did she want them to care? She thought she did. It was a fair point that there were things she knew she have could tried to want the way she wanted the people at the office to think about where she was, even though the reality of her line of work was to be invisible. Maybe she wanted, though, to find love somewhere, to live on her own—maybe she was meant to be an artist. She would go straight to the airport. She’d book a flight to LA. Landing on the sun, she would call a friend she hadn’t seen in four years to stay on their couch. She was having the thoughts. What would she even do in another life? Wouldn’t she be the same? Or would the new place change her. Would she stop working phones? But there was nothing wrong with working a phone. Telling stories that meant something to someone even if they weren’t shared with the world. At least she could tell when she was appreciated. But she could do that from anywhere. And when she was honest, she had not been in a place to devote herself to that work either, no matter how natural it had felt to begin it.

            Mama and Baba—they would be fine. The other Sanié was more loving, would be kinder to them. More patient with their expectations and wants. Sandra, David, Andrea—they’d be fine too. David liked anyone. Sandra seemed to prefer the other Sanié. Andrea—were they really even friends? The other Sanié wouldn’t stay on the phones long, regardless. Maybe she’d go into sales for real. Start a marketing gig. Whatever people who are attractive and smart enough do. The other Sanié would find love—she was be more open to love than Sanié—even unconventional love—as willing as she was to be intimate with the men Sanié spun lies for. The other Sanié would find truth in the life that Sanié built in deception. And Sanié would try to build something true elsewhere. She could, right? Because anyone could. And even if she had decided to stay, would anything change? She would be on the phones again tonight. She would be eating a silent breakfast with her parents again in the morning.

            She thought she could cry, but Sanié did not cry. She had no time to pity anyone, much less herself. Sanié heard a knock at the door. She knew it was Sanié. She picked up the canvas bag by the bed, the one she packed the night before. Phone, wallet, keys. She left the keys. She grabbed a passport. The knife was still in the bag. She hesitated, seeing it there. Another knock at the door. Baba groaned. “I’ll get it, Baba.” The knife was dull, never once sharpened in twenty-five years in this building. She was still holding it when she opens the door.

            “Hey there, stranger.”

            Sanié gave herself another day in her world. She spent most of it watching TV with Baba and ignoring the calls from the health food store wondering why she hadn’t shown up for her shift. Mama made dal chawal for dinner, and they talked about a cousin’s wedding set for December.

            She welcomed the other person into the house. “Take off your shoes. Baba, this is Sanié, she’ll be staying here for awhile,” she said to her father.

            “Wow, another Sanié. Hello, bete.”

            “Arrhe,” said Mama, coming in from the dining room where she’d been working on her computer. “Who’s your friend, Sanié. What a beautiful girl.” Both parents had smiles on their faces.

            “I’ll be leaving now,” Sanié said to empty ears as Sanié greets her parents. She gave them kisses on each cheek.

            She walked toward the door, shut it silently behind her.

            Standing on the landing, she heard laughter from inside. The knife was still in her bag. The door was still unlocked. She couldn’t hear the birds or the traffic but she could see them from the hallway window. She took a step on the carpeted floor and rubbed her boot into its weave. There was not much to turn back for, her mind told her. Go, said her legs. But she didn’t. She turned around and lifted a hand to the door.

            Sanié opened it, the question lingering on her smile. Grasping the knife, Sanié thrusted upwards, heartwards, wondering if it would reach the double’s or her own. When the moment passed, a plume of smoke hovered before Sanié. The single remnant of a choice dissipating into the air, inevitable.

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Portal

“What about these?” Lucy said, holding up a pair of deep blue pants. We were surrounded by pants—there must’ve been hundreds of them, in all colors and sizes, all stacked in tidy piles on the tables around us, a true pants emporium. It had been over a year since the last time we were in a department store and I couldn’t stop myself from touching the fabric. I held the pants at my waist, and it appeared they might be the right size. My girlfriend had a knack for picking out clothes for me, so I took the pair to the dressing room.

 

Every part of the mall felt cooled and brightly lit, like a dream. The attendant checked how many items I had, gave me a plastic card with a black 1 on both sides, and showed me to my stall, near the back of the room by a triptych of mirrors.

 

I searched for a lock on the door, but evidently it was one that locked automatically. I was halfway through taking off my jeans when I heard a faint sound from the stall next to mine. It sounded like a woman’s voice, familiar but too distant for me to place. It was probably just interference coming from the speakers that piped in wordless pop hits. “Say you love me,” she said. There was a murmured response and then a rustling, like covers or bed sheets. This time it really sounded like it came from the stall next to mine. Maybe I’d somehow ended up in the women’s dressing room by accident. I tried to ignore it and finished taking off my pants.

 

“Say you love me,” she moaned, and this time I recognized the woman’s voice as belonging to my mother, which was, of course, impossible, and so I guided my foot down the right leg of the pants my girlfriend had picked out.

 

“I love you,” a soft voice said. “I love you for all time.” There was no mistaking it: the voice was my father’s, which was, of course, also impossible due to several obvious reasons but chiefly among them the fact that my parents divorced two years after I was born, although I’d never quite understood why. Never feeling close enough to either to ask why, I carried it with all the other unknowns of my life that I’d accepted, unknowns like what were my ancestors doing in 783 A.D.? Or how much do my memories weigh? Unfortunately, there was only one way to know what was happening over there. As quietly as I could, I stepped up onto the bench where I’d set my belt and keys and phone. On my tiptoes, I’d be tall enough to peer over, which I’d only need to do for a second. Then came the click of a lighter and a deep exhale. I took a deep breath and braced myself for whatever was on the other side. The most notable thing about the stall next to mine was how large it was, big enough to hold a bed, and indeed, there was a bed in there with two people rolling around in it. The man, who looked just like the man in the photos of my father holding me as a baby, was smoking a cigarette and looked directly at me with his green eyes. I ducked back onto my side.

 

Had I been spotted? Would they call security? What would Lucy think? Not good, I thought, not good and very dumb move on my part! I remained totally motionless, like some sad animal whose only remaining defense was to play dead. I listened. “I don’t feel so good,” the woman said. “Oh god not good I think I’m going to—” But then another person was there soothing her, telling her she’d be fine and that a doctor was on the way. “It’s been months of this,” she said. “I hate it.”

 

There was a knock on the door. I struggled to slide my other leg into the pants. My calf squeezed, thighs felt like sausages, butt cheeks pressed together. “Just a second!” I yelled. There’d been no new sounds from next door.

 

“You doing okay in there?” Lucy asked. “Taking forever. Let me see.”

 

I’d barely zippered up when I opened the door and stumbled out.

 

“Oh,” Lucy said, disappointed. “They’re…definitely too small.”

 

“What if they’re high-waisted,” I said and tried hiking them up, remembering an episode of The Twilight Zone where some fellas had their trousers up past their belly buttons.

 

“No,” Lucy said, with a concerned look. “Stop that. Do you want to try another pair?”

 

“Thanks, that’s alright,” I said. “I’m getting hungry.”

 

Lucy left, and I closed the door so I could squirt myself out of the pants like toothpaste, but as soon as the door closed I heard wailing. Back at my post on the bench, I knew I had to peer over one last time. Down below me, on a couch in a sparse apartment, sat a woman that looked just like my mother, trying to get a baby to latch on her breast. “Ow!” she said. “Fuck. Carl, he bit me. Carl? Where are you? Carl, I’m bleeding.” And while she fed the baby she started to cry, and then said, “No. Nope, no,” and brushed her cheeks with the back of her hand.

 

It could have been that I was standing on my toes for too long, or that the pants had cut off the blood to my feet, but I felt them sparkle and tingle. I got down and peeled off the pants as quickly as I could. On my way out of the dressing rooms I peeked under the stall next to mine. No one was there.

 

Back on the floor, Lucy had another pair of pants in her hand and sized them up on me.

 

“What about these?” she said.

 

They were very nice pants, there was no disputing that: a nice cut, not too baggy, nothing pre-distressed, demanding to be broken-in, glowing with potential. I told her they were great but not for me. Someone else would love them, I could already see it.

 

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Lines

We’re smoking again when my mother calls. Clothed in the bare minimum on Dean’s balcony, we’ve got on just enough to look decent. Even at night, the stucco behind our backs is still hot from a full day of direct sun. The few stars that manage to penetrate the sky through the lights of the distant Vegas Strip shine faintly above us, but under the balcony lights Dean’s neighbors might see us, might be watching us right now through their blinds. And why wouldn’t they? We’re young and fit, with just enough muscle and just enough cushion in the right places that we’re sure anyone past their prime would stare at us, envious. But we’re not really thinking of his neighbors—our neighbors, he sometimes calls them, and when he does, I don’t correct him—when my mother calls again. We’re thinking about the lights bouncing off our freshly re-filled wine glasses, and how satisfying the post-orgasm breathlessness feels when exacerbated by the smoke we draw deep into our lungs.

 

On the phone, my mother sounds out of breath, too. “Can I come over?” She asks me this in Hungarian, our shared language that is as natural to me inside our house as seeing my father in his bathrobe on the couch, but in public, our mother tongue is like a neon orange raincoat: it keeps what my parents and I share with each other secret while also making the sounds that leave our mouths painfully visible.

 

“Come here? Why?” I respond in Hungarian.

 

“Your father just left to go drinking with his buddies, and I can’t stand to be left at home alone like this anymore,” she says, a plea, a demand, anything but a statement. “I have work in the morning. I’ll be gone by then.”

 

I sigh.

 

Dean’s words don’t falter when he tells me my mother can stay the night, but I can see the hesitation in his eyes. He’s only shook hands with my parents, never really spoken to them. We haven’t been together long, just a few months really, and it’s never felt like the right time to bring the four of us together, especially with my dad so often gone. Why should Dean have to host my mother just because I practically live here now? But he takes my chin in his hand and says, “It’s fine, I swear,” and pecks me on the lips. Then we scrub our stains off the couch before my mother sits on it and draw the curtains closed over the sliding glass door, so she won’t have to see the mound of cigarette butts on the plate out there.

 

My mother’s known I smoke for a few years, but she doesn’t like to see evidence of it. Rather, I don’t like for her to see the evidence, because it provokes her to search my face and tell me that my skin is aging from the nicotine, or that my teeth are yellowing, or that I’ll be infertile if I keep it up. She often emails me articles on the harmful effects of tobacco, but she crowds my inbox less frequently when I don’t leave my cigarettes lying around the house.

 

My mother calls once more on her way over, and I raise my voice trying to get her to listen to my directions, aware how harsh Hungarian can sound to an American ear at such a volume, while Dean straightens up around me. Eventually, my mother shows at Dean’s front door, which I have a key to that hasn’t made its way onto my keychain yet. Somehow that would make it all too real.

 

Sweat tracks my mother’s blond hairline. She sports a multicolored backpack that was once mine and has a bottle of ginger kombucha tucked into her arm. She kisses Dean on both of his cheeks like they’re familiar and must register shock on his face because she says, “No worry, my husband don’t know where I am.” Then she laughs. “I joke, he don’t care where I am.”

 

I don’t dare look to see what Dean makes of this. I wonder where my dad thinks my mother is, whether he has her on his mind at all right now. I suddenly realize how long it’s been since I worried about my parents like this, like how hearing an old song brings back memories you forgot you had. And like how hearing that old song makes you realize that the music you’ve listened to in the past few years is so different now, a stark contrast to your past tastes.

 

My mother sits on the futon while Dean and I settle on the carpet. We set our wine glasses on the scratched coffee table before us. Dean offers my mother wine, but she declines.

 

“When did you quit drinking?” I ask.

 

“When Dad start smoking,” she says. And there it is: she hasn’t even taken off her shoes yet and already she’s told me more than I wanted to know. I push her comment away like you do with the pain of a pulsing ankle after stumbling on the sidewalk. As a smoker myself, she might regard me an accomplice. It’s territory I’d rather steer clear of.

 

“Did you just come from the gym?” I ask, referencing the sweat.

 

She shakes her straight bangs across her forehead, curtains swaying in the wind. “I do Zumba on YouTube after he leave. Before I call you.”

 

Because my mother always speaks Hungarian with me, it’s a constant surprise to hear her English. Her accent is harsher than my father’s. She chops English syllables into angular squares, whereas my father’s English is more garbled. If he speaks too fast, he trips over liquid consonants. My mother never speaks fast in English, weighing each word as it tumbles out her thin lips. Once, when we were at a drive-thru a few years ago, the cashier told her she would have to learn English before she orders at their establishment. She told him, “English is my fifth language. How many language you know? You think you smart? Ask some order in Hungarian. Try.”

 

My mother rests her elbows on her knees and says, “The class I am taking at The Center, you know, our teacher say sweat clean emotions, chakras, and alcohol clog them, so I don’t drink while I finish this level of class. The kombucha,” she points to the glass bottle on the coffee table, “is okay.”

 

“What kind of class is this?” Dean asks, and I want to kiss him for entertaining my mother on a night she interrupted our plans. I already sense he’s sniffing down the wrong trail though.

 

My mother discovered The Center through a friend at the all-you-can-eat buffet where she works. The Center is actually more like an adobe-style house in a residential neighborhood in Spring Valley. The woman who runs it, a retired showgirl named Sherry, is about my mother’s age and lives there alone. I attended some of their by-donation sessions on meditation and positive thinking with my mother before I met Dean.

 

My mother dragged my father along to a group session once, too, after which he apparently complained about “the stench of those dirty hippies.” The fact that he hasn’t returned to The Center may not be the worst thing, because for the first time since we moved to the States my mother at least gets together with people who aren’t my father’s friends.

 

“We’re learning much, much things,” my mother says. “Right now, we learn palm reading.”

 

I glance at Dean, expecting to catch him rolling his eyes at this hippy-dippy stuff, because when I asked him what his horoscope was back when we met in Intro to Psych last semester, he scrunched up his shoulders and said, “Don’t know. Don’t care.” I later found out he’s a Taurus. Now the wine glass is to his mouth, his head tilted back, his eyebrows high on his face. Curious is preferable to haughty. I’ll take what I can get.

 

My mother retrieves a white textbook from her backpack and deposits it on the coffee table with a thud. The cover bears a hand drawn in black with a series of lines crossing the palms, like a messy intersection of freeways.

 

“You know basics,” my mother says to me. “Heart line, head line, life line.” She points to each corresponding black line on the book cover.

 

Dean puts his hand on my knee, like he might want to hold me back from dark forces. Beads of sweat form instantly between our skin.

 

“But do you know line of marriage?” my mother asks.

 

I shake my head, certain I can feel the wine sloshing around in my brain. I look to Dean, excited.

 

“I don’t know about any of this,” he says. Now he sounds more cautious than curious.

 

“Number of marriage lines is number of marriages,” my mother says. “But not only line is important, also how deep. It show how good.” My mother holds up her hand and points somewhere below the crook of her pinkie and ring fingers. She sits too far away for me to make out the lines. Or else the wine is blurring my vision. She reaches for Dean’s hand, and he leans closer. “See,” she points, “you will do one good marriage.”

 

I scoot in to see the deep, red line, no longer than a pin, and I’m amazed I never noticed it before. It’s so dark. I’m hesitant to look him in the eye, seeing as how we’ve never talked about marriage, and all this vaguely implies me, but when I look up, he’s wiggling his fingers at me like I’ve just proposed to him. I want to tell him he’s going to make a beautiful bride someday, but before I can, my mother grabs my hand.

 

She squints, then holds it out far before drawing it close again. “You don’t have.” She looks at me, practically disappointed, the corners of her mouth drooping.

 

“Thanks,” I say.

 

Dean pats my arm. “I’m sure that’s not true. May just take a while for it to come in,” he says, and I think he’s taking a jab at me about my age again. We’ve got six years between us. Dean had already lived a whole other life dealing cards at the MGM Grand before he decided to go back to school, where we met. My parents weren’t elated about the age difference until they rationalized that having an older man by my side might mean I’d become financially independent a lot sooner. They swear they’re not trying to push me out of the house, but the air is so still when they’re both home that it’s enough to keep me at Dean’s for weeks on end.

 

“You don’t believe in this anyway,” I say to Dean, suddenly protective. Of what, I don’t know.

 

He stares a hole into my cheek, then pours the remaining drops from the bottle into his glass and disappears into the kitchen with it.

 

“What about you?” I ask my mother.

 

She holds her palms against each other.

 

I scoot along the carpet and settle at her knees. “Come on.”

 

She shows me her right hand. Her line is much lighter than Dean’s and more frayed. It fans out at the edge of her hand into smaller, even less pronounced lines. She shows me her left to compare. It’s got two thick, pronounced lines.

 

“What does this mean? How come they don’t look the same?”

 

My mother flips to one of the yellow sticky notes that marks a passage in her book. “According to this,” she says in Hungarian, “the left hand shows the potential while the right hand shows what you’ve done with that potential.”

 

I sidestep the obvious remark, silently note my awe at how our relationships leave tracks on our bodies, wonder what it might mean for us that Dean hasn’t left a visible impression on me yet. Instead, I ask, “So, who’s the other line on your left?”

 

“Your father is the only man I’ve ever been with,” my mother says evenly, almost sternly, as if I’ve hinted at infidelity. If I had, it wasn’t intentional. I want to correct myself, tell her that I was insinuating the future, not the past, but I don’t want to dig myself any deeper than I already am.

 

My mother has often recounted the story of how she’d been one of few girls in town with a suitor from the city. My father would roll in on his shiny motorcycle and whisk her away to various tourist destinations around Hungary, and once, even to Italy. She says that his ride and his pilot’s jacket hooked her, but what got her to marry him was how much farther he could see than any other man she’d met. He was always looking for ways to get beyond the cards he’d been dealt, striking up conversations with the smartest looking men, always amiable and gracious, but always with the latent intent of finding the ticket to achieving more. Once the Iron Curtain fell, he stacked these connections like dominoes to come to America. It happened one day to the next apparently. He showed up unannounced at her parents’ house on his motorcycle and declared she had two days to pack if he wanted to join her in Los Angeles. It took them five years and a series of odd jobs before they settled in Las Vegas.

 

Dean turns off the lights in the kitchen and strolls out to the living room, hands empty of his wine glass. He grabs bedding and a towel from the linen closet and hands them to my mother. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says. “I’m headed to bed.”

 

I get up from the carpet, my ass sore. “We don’t have class tomorrow, so we’ll probably be sleeping when you get up.” We tell my mother good night and head into Dean’s bedroom.

 

I collapse on his bed atop the sheets and blankets carelessly strewn about. I check my phone for notifications from my dad but don’t find any. I can’t articulate why I’m surprised that my mother was right: he’s not looking for her.
Dean closes the door carefully, takes off his shirt, and lays down next to me. A plane flies overhead and rattles the walls, and once again I feel like we’re in a flimsy doll house. Dean positions my head on his chest. I know the move; I used it last week to get him to forgive me for staying out late with friends without answering any of his texts or calls. I’d told him I couldn’t feel it vibrate, but the truth is I just wanted something from my life before him that still felt entirely my own. I felt like I’d gained hours in which to be a formal self.

 

He strokes my hair. His fingers are soft, but every so often he gets tangled in a knot. By the third time, we’re laughing about it, little bursts of laughter that make us tremble.

 

I take his hand off my head and place it on the crease where my hip meets my waist. He moves down my back and caresses me in circles, like polishing a crystal ball. I give in to the motion, try to imagine what hazy future scene of my life he might be seeing on my crystal-ball-back. When a clear scene doesn’t come to my head, I lean onto my elbow and slide his basketball shorts down his thighs, take him in. He fills the anxious space inside me. What quivers, he makes still. When I rock on top of him, I picture for a moment that we share the organs where our bodies meet. What blood pumps through me pumps through him too.

 

When we are done, I notice that there is no light from the living room seeping through the crack under the door. Dean gets up and dresses. While he pulls his shirt over his head, I ponder dates. The last time my father picked up smoking, was it before, after, or during the time he commuted to Phoenix for his newest business venture, the next big thing that’d make us rich: screen printing T-shirts? And when was it, exactly, that my mother and I spent those weeks looking for an apartment for the two of us to move into? Dean’s hand is on the doorknob and he’s just asked me, I think, about whether I’m going to join him for a smoke when I say, “You know, I was a sophomore in high school when my mother tried moving me and her out of the house.”

 

Dean sits down on the edge of the bed, silent. I’m only aware of the weight being redistributed on the mattress, and the top of the brown hairs on his head, where I’m looking. “I mean, not really move us out. It felt serious when we’d drive around to different apartment complexes. She’d handed me a stack paper with stats about each apartment that she’d found online. We never went inside any of them. Never met with anyone to show us around. It was kind of as if she was in some—”

 

“—like a fantasy,” Dean says.

 

“Yeah,” I look into his green eyes finally. What I don’t want to admit, though, is how much I started to revel in the fantasy, too, and not only because living in an apartment just my mother and me would’ve meant not waking up to my parents’ yelling in the middle of the night anymore. There were other, juvenile reasons why I was excited. Like that many of the apartment complexes we were looking at were closer to my friends’ houses. Or that while driving around a neighborhood there’d be a boy on his skateboard who’d catch my eye, and I’d imagine climbing a ladder to his bedroom while my mother was working the graveyard shift.

 

“That was around the time I started smoking, actually.”

 

Dean looks at me in surprise. “I didn’t pick it up until I started dealing cards. It made being enveloped in cigarette smoke all day a lot more enjoyable. I actually forced myself to get addicted just to keep the job.”

 

I laugh at the ludicrousness of that. “I’d steal smokes from the packs my dad would hide in his jacket or in his car on the weekends he’d be home. I don’t think he knew about it, but it kind of felt good to have a secret with him too.”

 

“To even the scales,” Dean says.

 

“Something like that. I don’t know what got my mom to stay in the end. I doubt she ever told my dad about her plan to leave. If she left him today, I don’t even know if she would stay in America. But moving back to Hungary alone after being here so long, I have trouble picturing it.” I don’t, actually. I picture her in her hometown, taking care of her aging parents. I picture meeting her in ankle-deep snow for Christmas. I picture myself taking a junior year abroad in Budapest. It’s Dean that I have trouble picturing there with me.

 

Dean places his hand on my foot over the blanket. He’ll inch closer any minute and hold me without saying anything. What could he say anyway? I’d probably cut him off and just keep blabbering. And I don’t wanna blabber. I want a cigarette.

 

We tiptoe past the thick comforter on the futon. I lift the latch to unlock the sliding glass door slowly. Then we scoot it open just enough to fit our bodies through it sideways.

 

Outside, an empty bottle of kombucha rests beside the pack of cigarettes on the end table. I glance to my left, momentarily shocked to see someone sitting in the lawn chair beside the messy ashtray. My mother suddenly looks to me like a teenager at a music festival. By the light of the neighbor’s lamp, her hair looks orange. She rocks her head ever so slightly to a beat only she can hear. I have to remind myself that this is my mother so that I can see the woman sitting on the lawn chair as I’ve known her all my life. And I have to remind myself of her age so that I know how to speak to her and so that this unfamiliar feeling can leave me.

 

“You smoking, too?” I follow my words with a chuckle.

 

She chuckles along with me. “I never understand smoking,” she says. And with that, my mother has returned. I brace myself, ready to take whatever she’ll throw at me next while Dean and I light our cigarettes, feeling weightless from the initial hit of nicotine. I’m conscious of her looking at my face as I do.

 

“You can try it,” Dean says to her, his mouth slanted with a smirk. “Might help you get what it’s all about.”

 

“I try it in high school at the disco,” my mother says. “I holded it in my hand the whole time because when I put it to my mouth my eyes burning.”

 

“That happens,” I say, doing my best to sound natural, “but then you just close your eyes.”

 

She closes her eyes now, and I wonder if she’s misunderstood my English. Then, it almost looks as if she’s reaching for the smokes on the table beside her. Instead, she grabs the handle of the armchair and says, “Okay, I really sleep now,” and goes inside.

 

I cross the balcony to snag her chair. A white cigarette stands out against the blue canvas of the seat. I can’t know if she grabbed it from the pack or if it fell out before she sat down and she just never noticed it, but I sit down anyway, and take another drag to pacify myself.

 

“What did she come out here for, I wonder?” Dean says.

 

“I don’t know.” I stare at the overflowing ashtray beside me. Stacks of white and gray ash rest at its rim, flecks mark the cracking wood below it.

 

“I imagine she’s having a hard time shutting her brain off.”

 

“Maybe.” The ashtray smells more stale than smoky. Now that I’ve looked at it, I can’t un-smell it. “I’m surprised she didn’t say anything about us smoking.”

 

“Well, she must know that she can’t do anything about it. She can’t force you to quit.” He’s got his elbows up and behind him, resting on the handrail, so that he’s facing me.

 

“You don’t understand,” I say. “She never lets up. If she so much as catches a glimpse of my lighter, she’ll start going on about how she can see the skin around my eyes turning yellow or how my grandfather died of emphysema.”

 

“So why didn’t she say anything now? Because I’m here?”

 

“No, that’s not it,” I say.

 

“Then what is it?”

 

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

 

Between the blinds, I spot her feeling her way around the kitchen, looking for the light switch. I almost get up to help her, but then I see her find the handle of the fridge, open it up, and use the light of it to guide her way to the cupboard with the cups. Her movements are quick, almost careless, like she could be drunk. Like she’s finished off the rest of our wine in the time I haven’t been looking. Then I take a deep drag, let it fill my lungs to capacity, tilt my head back so my neck muscles are taut, and blow the smoke high above my head, waiting for the rumble of the next plane.

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Armadillo Island

Colt said that to make up for it he’d take me on a trip. I chose Savannah because I’d always loved the name; I remember sitting in AP U.S. History (“ey push,” as my American classmates called it) and learning about Sherman’s pyromaniacal March to the Sea. How he’d spared just one city, the one called Savannah.

 

In my mind Savannah was golden grasslands, arid heat, and hazy turquoise seas, some hybrid between National Geographic footage and biblical resort town. It was all wrong, of course—the fantasy of an immigrant teen stuck in gray northeastern suburbs. By now, because of work, I’d stayed in many a small-town Marriott in the southeast industrial belt, and my understanding of the South had taken on the dripping gloom of True Detective. Still, I’d never made it to Savannah, and held onto it as some kind of metaphor for exceptional salvation. Savannah, too beautiful to burn.

 

After landing and renting the car, we’d barely gotten on the highway when Colt said he was hungry. We stopped at a three-lane-wide Chick-Fil-A drive-thru. I saw Colt checking out the teenager handing over orders in the rearview mirror. We ate our Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in the parking lot of a nearby gas station, overlooking a Walmart.

 

“You want the rest of your Polynesian sauce?” Colt asked, mouth full. He’d torn off half his sandwich in one bite.

 

“I do,” I said.

 

He gave me a funny look. The sauce was red and sticky around the corners of his mouth. I counted to three—the clenches of his jaw. Then he was up, slamming the car door. “Taking a piss,” I heard through the glass. I threw my half-full packet of Polynesian sauce into the grease-soaked bag.

 

I stared out the windshield and counted the number of camouflage outfits. People wishing to be one with and undetected in nature, decked out in pixelated brown-green vests and baseball caps, sticking out like eyesores on the sun-baked concrete of the Walmart parking lot. Even an idling Domino’s pizza truck was sheathed in camo print.

I was once a tree in a middle school play, and all I remember from the performance was the gratitude I felt looking at the back of the glossy blond heads of the children who played lead roles. I wasn’t them. I wasn’t needed; I could slip offstage, and nothing would have changed.

 

Colt said he played Brick in a high school production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “Wrong production. I’d have been a better Stanley Kowalski,” he said. He was right. Colt was tall, dense, always hungry, more Stanley than melancholy Brick. His appetites and moods changed quickly. Not an hour after we’d stopped for food, he was already chugging a plastic pouch of TastyBites from Costco. He clenched the pouch so it was tube-shaped in his fist, and when he squeezed, the brown beany mixtures shot up and the smell of chana masala permeated the car. “Indian gogurt,” he laughed. A dribble of it ran down his knuckles. “Funny, right?”

 

I squinted at the skinny pines that stood like hair from swampy waters by the highway. The swamp was covered with a thin sheen that, in the slanted light, reflected the swirling iridescence of petroleum.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”

 

—

 

Colt and I lived in New York. We’d met at a recruiting event, when he was an associate and I was a college senior. He later confessed that he’d pulled strings so I’d be hired onto his team, which specialized in automotives, which meant endless business trips together to the South. We always flew into Atlanta, dabbed sweat off our foreheads as we pulled our suitcases across the rental car lot, checked into separate hotel rooms. We never flirted in front of our colleagues.

 

Those were the happy times. Now I was no longer at the firm, and travel was no longer business class on domestic airlines, secretly thrilling. I had a Van Cleef and Arpels ring, and Colt had been named VP and was “dealing with a lot of stress.” We spent a lot and drank a lot. After the first time it happened, Colt took me to Turks and Caicos. The second time, to Venice. And this time I said why not Savannah, why not the South, why not just go and see if it does us good. The South was special for us.

 

We checked into a victorian house a block off Forsyth Park, and Colt said he’d take me to a pre-dinner drink. “You’re so tense,” he said, his thumb digging into the hollow of the bone behind my ear. He liked to hold my face when we kissed, a forceful grip cradling the length of my jawline and the base of my skull. I once described this to my girlfriends as sexy, and they’d nodded uncertainly. Colt and I are happy, I’d said defensively, and showed them the ring.

 

The Savannah guesthouse was one Jackie O. once stayed in. I prided myself on being a good trip researcher, on making informed choices. “Colt, I read about this bar on the rooftop of the Perry Lane Hotel,” I said. “We could go there.”

 

“Where did you read about it?”

 

“Condé Nast Traveler.”

 

“Baby, speak English.”

 

I knew he was being funny again. His smile in the mirror was huge as he watched me tap the concealer along the bridge of my nose, around the edges of my mouth, and underneath my eyes, two taps underneath the right eye and five taps underneath the left eye, where the bruise was still fading, then smooth it over like a game of connect the dots, only it was my face I was outlining into existence.

 

—

 

From the rooftop bar, dusk was a splendid gradient of burnt orange to dark red, and I tried to notice the lights the way an old painting teacher told me to: the lit-up white of the church steeple, the neon lights spelling out SAVANNAH on the side of a windowless concrete building, the red blinks of cranes and oil refineries, the interior of a brightly lit Pottery Barn. I could take a picture and post it for our New York friends to see, caption it something arty. The trip had been last-minute; they didn’t know we were here. Impromptu, just us, a getaway from the stress that was getting to him, Colt had whispered the morning after that awful night.

 

I put my phone away. It had gotten chilly, night falling too suddenly over Savannah. It was as if someone had hit a switch and everything suddenly became banal, the string lights, the Latin jazz music from the rooftop speakers, the Corpse Reviver cocktails in our hands.

 

We ate at a restaurant with starched tablecloths that specialized in exotic meats. Colt ordered antelope steak. The antelopes were raised on a farm in Texas, we were told, so they wouldn’t be gamey, but more like lean red beef. This didn’t deter Colt—if there was antelope, Colt would get antelope. I imagined this farm, a flat grassland amidst oil rigs, the delicate horned creatures imported and bred for slaughter.

 

Colt had a habit of chatting up waiters about “the good stuff only locals know,” a line of questioning that, in our consulting days, usually yielded recommendations to roadside BBQ joints or seedy strip clubs. I used to smile politely while he did this, as the men around the table belched and grinned. It was on a business trip in St. Louis that Colt and I first got together. He’d stayed after our colleagues left to close out the round with his corporate Amex. As always, after I’d gotten drunk, I’d started crying. Colt had pulled me into his arms in the deserted lobby bar, whispered into my hair: “I know. I know you had to work harder than anybody else.”

 

I always thought back to that moment. The moment I kissed the man who’d given me my job, the man whose Murray Hill apartment I now lived in, the man who said he’d take care of me, of everything.

 

The waiter, having delivered Colt’s antelope and my scallops, answered Colt with no hesitation: “Go to Armadillo Island. You’ve gotta take the ferry from Euclid. It’s got all these abandoned mansions and wild horses.”

 

“Wild horses?” Colt perked up.

 

“Is it safe?” I asked.

 

“Oh yes, ma’am,” the waiter said. He was a tall, elderly man with a slight hunch. “Run by the National Park Service as a wildlife refuge. Pack in, pack out.”

 

“Let’s go tomorrow,” Colt said, turning to me.

 

“I already booked a tour of the Mercer house for tomorrow,” I said. “We can go Sunday.”

 

“You know yourself. If we wait there’ll be a reason not to go.” Colt pulled out his phone. “I’ll buy the ferry tickets online right now.”

 

“It really is worth it, sir.” The waiter said. “Would you like another glass of wine?” The old man turned abruptly toward me.

 

I massaged the patch of skin underneath my left eye. The vein there was throbbing. “What about the Mercer house?” I asked Colt.

 

The waiter averted his gaze. “She’ll have another.” Colt told him jovially.

 

I crossed my arms and said nothing. Colt ate his antelope. The new glass of wine sat there, untouched, until Colt snapped the leather bill-holder shut over a pair of crisp twenties. He was always big-hearted with waiters.

 

—

 

Euclid had only a smattering of kitschy seafood cafés that wouldn’t open until lunch, and there was nowhere to get coffee, not even a vending machine. My temples were hurting. We’d driven down the Georgia coast in the dark in order to make the morning ferry, and a boy in a park ranger outfit greeted us outside the NPS visitor center. “The ferry will be leaving from the dock in half an hour.” He addressed Colt but was obviously trying not to stare at me. He really looked so young, like a boy scout. “Make sure not to miss it, there’s only one.”

 

“Got it,” Colt said. “And there’s no food on the island?”

 

“No food for retail, sir.” The boy scout blinked. “It’s pack-in, pack-out.”

 

“We’ve got sandwiches,” I said. We’d stopped by a Kroger the previous night for Boar’s Head gouda and deli meat and some Hawaiian rolls. Colt didn’t like sweet bread, but the store was closing and so that’s what I picked up while he waited in the car.

 

“Good,” the boy scout said, still not looking at my face. “And remember, don’t feed the wild horses. Best to keep a distance.”

 

“Sure,” Colt said. He squinted at the marshes. There was a thick cloud layer hanging low over the water, giving the morning a gray glare. “Weather gonna clear up?”

 

“It’s coastal weather, sir. Could shift easily.”

 

There was an old couple on the ferry and no other passengers. The captain was a man with dirty blond strands and a plaid shirt. It wasn’t a pretty ride. The mouth of the river split open into marshes and industrial refineries clotted over the horizon. Colt started talking loudly about the time he took the Provincetown Ferry and it hit and killed a great white shark. I’d heard the story before. I think he wanted to impress the captain, but the captain only stared ahead dead-eyed. The woman in the old couple was studying Colt with pursed lips, but when I made eye contact, she looked down.

 

I took out my phone and tapped the camera icon so it became a mirror. Then I saw. Colt looked away as I discreetly reapplied the foundation that must’ve rubbed off when I was dozing in the car. He hadn’t made any comments. Of course, he couldn’t bring himself to. Ironically, he’d always been the kind of man who claimed he liked his women “natural,” not caked with concealer.

 

We slowed as we approached a dock jutting out of an enormous landmass of low palms and dense oaks. The old couple didn’t get up. I wondered if they were retired, riding the ferry back-and-forth just to wait out their days in this Georgia town.

 

“Four p.m.’s the last ferry, right?” I asked the captain as Colt and I stepped off the boat.

 

“The only one,” he said. “And we don’t wait.”

 

“But we’re the only passengers getting off,” I said. The captain was already untying the rope from the post. He shrugged. “Are there more people on the island?” I pressed. “Camping?”

 

“No overnights allowed,” he said. “Everybody who comes needs to go. One in, one out.” And with that he was back into the boat cabin, and I watched as the ferry pulled away, puttering in the gray water until it disappeared into the marshes. So we really were alone.

 

Colt had gone beyond the dock to inspect a pile of rusty bicycles. The wind by the shore whipped the trees wildly, and a clump of Spanish moss landed on the ground right next to him, nearly hitting his head. He didn’t notice. “Check out these bikes!” He was calling.

 

“Are there trails?” I asked. Colt had stayed up stalking the internet about this island, his face carved upside-down in the cellphone’s glow. I’d done the same, and I knew there were trails, but Colt liked to think he was in control.

 

“Sure,” he said. “Here’s a bike with a decent chain; take it.”

 

I took a step toward the rattling thing he had propped up for me. It had no brake. “You trust it?”

 

Colt was already astride his own bike, his long legs deploying in slow motion as he pedaled around me in a circle. “I’ll carry you if it breaks down. How about that?”

 

We set forth on the main path, a bumpy trail of dredged sand and shell bits and shark teeth. The island really did feel primordial, the old growth forests joining branches above the path, draped with gray-green moss strands that swayed lightly in the wind. It was winter and the greenery was faded save for the vibrant palmettos, their leaves like blades of green fanned out over the low canopy. I pumped my pedals hard after Colt, who was speeding ahead with childlike glee. “Let’s go find the wild horses!” he shouted.

 

For miles and miles we cycled. The nature became monotonous along the straight path. At one point we passed by what looked like an abandoned airfield, where the forest had been razed. But there were no horses. Colt stopped to drink some water and pointed to something in the bushes. “There’s a trail there,” he said. “A horse trail, probably. Maybe they don’t like to hang out by the main path. They can smell the human presence.”

 

The wild grass in the airfield bristled in the wind. The air smelled of something rotten, and it made me light-headed. “Okay,” I said, “but not far.” We tossed our bicycles onto the razed field and followed the trail into the forest. The ground was covered with bristly pine needles and gnarled roots. Colt walked ahead, pushing thorny stems aside with his fingers and holding them until I passed so they wouldn’t snag at me. After a few minutes, I touched his arm. “Let’s turn around,” I said. “There are no horses here. I don’t like being this far off-path.”

 

“But we’re almost by the water. I can smell it.”

 

It was true—the soil was looser, moister. The water reached inland with tentacular streams; it was all swamp, no beach. We were standing on a clearing next to a big oak tree and there was nowhere farther to go. “Let’s have lunch,” Colt said. I took the cheese and deli meat and bread out of my backpack and lay them on a flat rock. “Make them fast, before the ants get to them,” Colt said. I started slicing a tomato with the knife I’d taken from the rental. Colt was still staring at the spread.

 

“You know I don’t like Hawaiian rolls,” he said.

 

“The ants,” I said. “Hurry.”

 

“Every goddamn time.”

 

I ignored him. I assembled a sandwich and handed it to Colt, then made my own. He was like a big child, or rather a sulking teenager, scrolling on his phone as he chewed. But there was no data; I’d just checked.

 

“Apparently there’s an abandoned church along the path,” I said after a while. “I saw it on the map at the dock. But maybe there won’t be enough time to see it.”

 

“We have to be back for the ferry at 4:00 p.m. Plenty of time.”

 

“If you say so,” I said.

 

Colt was dragging at the ground with the tip of his boot, unearthing an oyster shell. “It’s funny,” he said. “The shells make a big circle around this tree. It’s like someone was here. Shucking and eating oysters. You think it’s one of the island’s secret residents?” He scooted closer to me on the rock, giving me a nudge of the hip. “A ritiual of these horses we can’t see?”

 

I busied myself with putting the food back into ziplock bags. “They’re probably just a myth made up to lure tourists.”

 

“You wanna bet?” His fingers were loosening my scarf, his mouth nuzzling my neck. I sighed and let myself go soft, pliable. He pulled me onto his lap, facing him and the old growth forest behind him. He undid our zippers and pulled down my pants. I closed my eyes. He clenched my hips and the pain was sharper than I expected. He’d spit on his hands but it wasn’t enough, it was not like before, a tangle of organs slick with lust. Sweetbread also means thymus and pancreas, I thought. When I opened my eyes again the Spanish moss was swaying overhead like prayer flags, and I had the acute sense that someone was watching us.

 

“Colt,” I said. “Colt, stop.”

 

“What?” His breath was short against my ear.

 

“I heard something.” And indeed there was a louder rustling of leaves, and I jumped off Colt’s lap, pulling my pants up, and he sprung to his feet as well.

 

“Is that a horse?” he shouted, but we couldn’t see anything. The rustling started up again, and he pointed at a bush. “There!”

 

It was a very large rat with an insect’s scaly carapace, digging its snout into the fecund soil.

 

“Armadillo. It doesn’t care about us,” Colt said with amazement. “It’s not even aware that we’re these big scary animals.”

 

“Or maybe it’s used to it,” I said, strapping my backpack on. “Let’s get back to the bikes.” I wanted to get far away from the armored rat, for us to keep moving.

 

“I read about them online,” Colt said. “You know why it’s covered with scales? So if a predator attacks, the armadillo can jump into a thornbush, and the predator can’t follow.”

 

The creature hobbled away, a mutant from the Jurassic era. “Let’s go,” I repeated. This time I ploughed ahead along the horse trail, not caring about thorns. I felt the prickle of tears, but Colt hated it when I cried. I wondered if the old couple would still be on the ferry. It was only when the airfield came back into view that I turned around to see if Colt was following. He was, and he held something misshapen in his hand.

 

“Guess what,” he said.

 

He shoved the misshapen object closer to my face. It was soiled and scaly, with a wet rat-like snout. A small armadillo, an infant. I shrieked and he dropped the thing, laughing.

 

“What did you do?” I gasped. “Did you kill it?”

 

“I did nothing,” he said. “It was there on the trail. You walked right over it.”

 

“Why did you pick it up?” I couldn’t even look at the carcass. “That thing is dirty. The bacteria. Why did you touch it?”

 

He stretched out his arms and lumbered toward me, grunting, trying to wipe his fingers on my shirt. “Leprosy!” he grimaced. “Armadillos carry leprosy!”

 

“Stop!” I said. I didn’t realize I’d actually started crying until I saw that familiar contrite look on his face.

 

“Come on. It’s funny.”

 

I tried to steady my breath. “It’s not funny.”

 

Colt kicked the dead armadillo aside like a deflated soccer ball. “Hey,” he said. “Why did you ask me if I killed it?”

 

“The air on this island—” I said. “It’s so humid it’s giving me a headache. I know you didn’t kill it. I’m sorry.”

 

He got back on his bike, not looking at me. “I would never kill a living thing.”

 

“I know. I’m sorry.”

 

“I’m just trying to make you laugh. You never laugh, not anymore.” He was still talking, head-down, to his pedals.

 

“It’s okay, Colt,” I said. I flung my leg over the bike, and my pelvis felt sore and raw over the seat.

 

He sighed and plowed forward. “If you say so,” I heard him sing-song.

 

The white path stretched ahead, potholed with deep puddles from a recent rain. When we rode across them it was like gravity itself was slowing us down, dragging us into the mud. We would never make it to that abandoned church, I thought. But suddenly Colt came to a hard brake ahead of me.

 

“I saw something,” he said. “It was definitely tall enough to be a horse.” He got off his bike. “Let’s follow it.”

 

“Colt, no. Let’s just stick to the path.”

 

But he’d already taken a few steps into the bushes. “There!” he called out with excitement. “I see the steeple! Didn’t you want to see the church? Right over there.”

 

I followed close after him. The trail opened up to a depressed clearing, like the ground had sunk ever so slightly, and in the middle of it was an enormous white building with wide steps and columns and porches and a tall steeple. Colt ran toward it. The white paint looked unchipped and fresh, so fresh it had a minty tint to it. The live oaks surrounding the church were enormous, their branches low and horizontal. There was an old picnic table underneath one of them, not far from the church entrance, and I sat there while Colt circled the building. “Doesn’t look abandoned at all,” he said. He was pressing his face against one of the windows. “Can’t see inside though. The windows are treated with some kind of black tint.”

 

“You can’t see them, but they can see you,” I said.

 

He didn’t hear me. He circled toward the front porch. “There’s an announcement on the door.” He leaned in to read, then shook his head and came back to the picnic table. “Funny. Says there are two services a day. One at three thirty and one at midnight. Maybe the horses come here for midnight mass.”

 

I checked my watch. It was 3:29 p.m.

 

Right then the church bell chimed. Colt’s eyes opened wide, and at first I thought it was the eeriness of wondering who was striking the bell, but then I saw he was staring at something beyond my head. “Don’t move,” he said. “Or move slowly. There’s one. There’s one right behind you.”

 

I froze. My fingers clutched my backpack. “It’s so skinny,” Colt said. “It doesn’t look healthy. Something wrong with its eyes.”

 

Slowly I turned my head. There was a horse, coming around the church, its coat black and patchy, like it had fought and was barely healing. It was small, so emaciated it looked skeletal. Its eyes were a cloudy white.

 

“Give me your backpack,” Colt said.

 

“Colt, no.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

 

“It’s starving. It wants something.” He wasn’t bothering to be quiet. He ripped the backpack from my hands and turned it upside down, emptying out its contents on the picnic table. His hands were shaking, fumbling around the objects, then he found the Boar’s Head ham and started tearing at the meat. “Bet that’s why they killed the armadillo. Starving to death.”

 

“Colt, you know it didn’t kill the armadillo.”

 

The horse slowly turned its head toward us, hearing the noise. But with its cloudy eyes it was impossible to tell whether it was looking at us. Colt flung a shred of meat toward it.

 

The horse’s nostrils flared. “You’re going to make it angry,” I said. “The ranger told us not to feed them. We’re going to miss the ferry.”

 

“We’re going to miss the ferry!” He repeated, nasally. The horse was sniffing at the piece of meat on the ground. The horse was eating the meat. It can’t be, I thought. Its jowls clenched, and its eyes stayed open, staring at us or not at all, impossibly white. When it finished chewing it reared its head in our direction.

 

“My hands are all slimy,” Colt said. He picked up another shred of meat, dangling it. A muscle in the horse’s neck spasmed. It took a small step closer.

 

“Put it down,” I pleaded, my eyes on the horse. Its tongue was lolling. “We’ve got to go. Something’s wrong with this horse.”

 

Colt let the shredded meat drop to the floor, then turned slowly to me. There was that glint in his eyes that I knew well. “Something’s wrong? Something’s always wrong.”

 

“Colt, don’t,” I begged.

 

“Something’s wrong with you for thinking I fucking killed that armadillo.”

 

The horse was advancing toward us now. It wanted more meat. Like a reflex my hands shot up to my face.

 

“The horse!” I screamed, trying to fight out of Colt’s grip. The knife was on the table, next to the half-tomato shaped like a red heart, and Colt screamed too, and the horse was ghostlike behind him, teeth out. It wanted more meat. There was no one around for miles, and this time it would be death, I thought. For a split second Colt loosened his grip and I leapt free, scrambling for the knife. Then survival was the only white hot force pitting me against the ghostly, snarling horse. I stabbed the blade deep into the horse’s flanks, slicing a long gash along its protruding rib, and it let out a terrible noise, so shrill and anguished that it shook the moss and pierced through the canopy of oaks and reverberated around the entire island, so shrill and anguished it sounded almost human. Its cloudy eyes rolled in its skull, thick red blood oozing from the gash, but my arm came down again, and again, slashing into its coat. It was all bones. Its hind legs buckled as it let out another noise, more of a whimper this time, and I kept slashing because I knew it was me or him, I slashed until its entire flank was a mess of lacerated muscle and blood, until it was just a carcass on the ground, fur and bones and ribs. Its eyes never closed, white as the sky.

 

When I came to Colt was on the grass, next to the knife, his big robust limbs limp yet twitching like jelly. Tears streaked down his cheeks. He was reaching out for me. “He wanted more meat,” I said, my voice hoarse and alien. “We’ve got to go. It’s four.”

 

I sank down next to Colt, the palmetto and oak forest around us bristling and bending in the wind. His shirt was stained crimson by blood, all the blood that ghostly emaciated horse had shed, but when I looked for the horse I couldn’t find it, and instead, through the oaks and the low afternoon fog that had seeped from the sea, I saw the dock. Somehow we had cycled back to the dock. The ferry was at the dock’s end, engine rumbling, and I could see the two huddled white heads of the old couple through the condensation on the cabin window. The captain was on the deck, rope in one hand, ready to unmoor. He checked his watch, squinted, then waved impatiently. One in, one out, he’d said.

 

“Go,” I told Colt.

 

Colt’s eyes were wide and unblinking. I remembered how he always used the hand he’d raised and ran his thumb gently along my left cheekbone, where the concealer had long eroded, and I could tell he was always really sorry.

The ferry blew its horn again. I knew it would take him. Dusk was approaching and the old growth forest stirred with shadows. The horse carcass was gone from its pool of blood. One in, one out. One push, one pull. Like the pulsations of arteries that feed into the million broken pieces of an organ that nonetheless keeps pumping. I picked myself up. I started, arduously at first, back up the path, then broke into a trot, eyes set on the church steeple amidst the darkening foliage. I knew the wild horses were waiting.

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Roundabout

It’s his son’s first time driving a roundabout. It’s a Friday just before rush hour, and Nate has drawn the short straw of showing Liam how to do it. Leah was so anxious that she made them go by themselves, saying that she was tired, that the forecast wasn’t great, that she’d stay home. It does look like rain, the sky blown into stone, the air on the verge of slick. As they back out of the drive, Nate stares at the house, thinking of the desiccated remnants of his latest apology. He thinks of Leah leaning over their daughter, Sylvia, of Sadie, their standard-issue goldendoodle, with her tongue lolling stupidly. He thinks of what more he could possibly say.

 

—

 

Then there they are, at the edge of the roundabout, and when it’s Liam’s turn, he freezes. Behind them, a car honks its dissonant horn. Nate can see a man in sunglasses with both hands in the air.  He tries to keep his voice level, a nervous heat quavering in his throat.

 

“Liam, go,” Nate says.

 

“I can’t,” Liam says.

 

“Just wait for this one to pass.”

 

Nate watches Liam’s leg stiffen on the brake.

 

Leah had said he wasn’t ready, asked Nate if he was sure he wanted to do this. And Nate had said that he needs to learn, that she might want some time alone anyway. She’d said fine. On this fundamental point it seemed they were agreed, that it would be best if he weren’t around.

 

“Liam, you gotta go,” Nate says, his voice dusted with exasperation. Behind them, the line of cars grows from one to two. Then two to five, the honking monotone, laced with invective. “Do you want to switch?” Nate asks.

 

It’s nearing rush hour. The traffic is only going to get worse.

 

“No,” Liam says. “I want to do it.”

 

“Alright,”  Nate says, looking back at a gigantic truck on a menacing lift kit. The first note of rain hits the windshield.

 

“You sure?”

 

“Yeah,” Liam says shakily.

 

Finally, a break in the traffic. It’s clear. The allegro of rain pounds as Nate watches his son’s foot ease off the break and onto the accelerator.  He can almost feel the relief in the other cars even as thunder slides past the clouds overhead.

 

Now they’re in it. Hand slaps of rain peppering the windshield. Nate is trying not to shake, as he finally understands Leah’s trepidation in full. His hand slips into his pocket for his phone, the entire world swirling in watercolor as they round the first bend.

 

—

 

Then the roads leading into and out of the roundabout are gone, along with the line of cars behind them. They’re at what used to be the second exit arcing around, but it’s gone as well, as though the earth had opened to absorb it. The darkness of the storm presses.

 

“Just keep going,” Nate says, thumb jamming the phone, dialing Leah.

 

The streets are gone. There’s a nothingness outside the roundabout, father and son locked inside.

 

“Dad,” Liam says.

 

“Drive,” Nate says, not wanting to give away that this was, in fact, worse than any fear Leah could have possibly dreamed up.

 

Finally, Leah picks up. She’s on speaker.

 

“Hey,” she says flatly. Unperturbed. Always on solid ground.

 

“Hey,” Nate says. They drift around for a second lap in the rain.

 

“What?” she asks.

 

“I don’t know,” Nate says. “It’s just…”

 

“What, Nate?” she asks.

 

“We’re stuck,” Liam blurts.

 

Nate observes his own knuckles, the alien strings of the tendons in his hands tensing. In the background there’s the lilting sounds of Sylvia humming an indistinct tune.

 

“What do you mean?” she asks. “Like in a ditch?”

 

“106th street roundabout,” Nate says. “We can’t get out.”

 

They round the same, manicured median for another pass. In the middle juts a pristine concrete sundial engraved with the silhouette of a blue heron.

 

“You need to tell someone,” Nate says.

 

“The fuck, Nate?” she gasps.

 

He can feel her voice growing distant as they continue to circle. He can tell she doesn’t believe him. Again. Probably for good reason. They have their normal problems, their middle-America woes. As they make yet another lap, Nate realizes this is the beginning of a whole new set of troubles. Yet he can’t help imagining, as he has so many other times, their heads close together, a damp defense drifting from him into her, a breathy, tentative reconciliation.

 

“I know how it sounds,” Nate says.

 

“Who the hell would I even call? Goddammit, Nate,” she yells. “For real?” Sylvia’s humming extinguishes.

 

It’s only been a couple weeks. He should have gathered this would sound like a lie. Everything for a while will sound like a lie. Maybe it is.

 

“I don’t know how long my phone will hold a charge. Liam, turn yours off. We’re going to slow down and think about this. I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Nate says.

 

On the other end ethereal static.

 

“I love you,” Nate says.

 

“Yeah, I love you too,” Leah whispers. “Be careful.”

 

The rain slows.

 

“Slow down,” Nate says.

 

“Dad,” says Liam. “What the fuck are we gonna do?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

All of the strip mall corners are gone, all the whitewashed brick and towering billboards, the crush of conformity. It’s just them, circling. Around them a new sameness of boundless meadow where there once were streets crisscrossing and winding toward the highway. Everything flat and gouged out by ancient glacier. Green and tepid, flowing monochromatic. The sky above still gray. Luckily, Nate notes, a full tank, charged phones.

 

Goddammit, Nate, he can’t stop thinking in his wife’s voice.

 

He lets Liam keep driving, watching the landscape ripple, the world spin smaller into the absurd ease with which they now sat in silence, winding around the circle, thinking of what to do next. It’s been nearly an hour of silence and revolving. He can tell Liam is afraid.

 

“Should we call Mom again?” Liam asks.

 

“Nah,” Nate says.

 

He knows this is the last thing they need here, and in their own way, they seem to be adjusting already. The concrete circle. The smooth grass. Except Nate’s arms and torso feeling bounded and tight, lower back knotting up against the upholstery. He strains his eyes toward the horizon line, looking for anything.

 

“Are you and Mom okay?” Liam asks.

 

“We’re fine. Just one of those things.”

 

The rain stops, the lie gliding out of his mouth so easily. As he says this, the world seems to shift around them, a low luminescence brimming at the edges of the gloom left from the brief storm. Just the promise of shimmer.

 

“Maybe we should stop the car,” Nate says.

 

“Why?” Liam asks.

 

“To save gas,” Nate says.

 

“We have a full tank,” Liam says.

 

“I don’t know, bud,” Nate says. “Just stop. I need to get out and walk for a minute.”

 

He watches Liam pull over. However, behind his son’s straight face Nate can sense the roiling fear pooling in his jaw muscles.

 

“Turn the car off,” Nate says.

 

“I want to listen to the radio,” he says.

 

“Liam,” Nate says, thinking of his next set of lies, the way he might maneuver things back to normal, the way he might be able to get things back to the way before.

 

They stop. Liam gets out of the car, pulls out his phone, and holds it arm’s length in front of him. Nate watches him walking to the median then back across the concrete and out into the meadow, watches the steady light of his phone screen.

 

Nate’s phone goes off. A text.

 

Leah: Liam is streaming. What happened

 

Nate: No idea.

 

Leah: Call someone.

 

Nate: Why? They can’t get here. There’s no road.

 

He knows their marriage can’t take something like this. She’s typing again, the three dots holding his sanity. The sun breaks through the clouds.

 

Leah: I don’t know what to do

 

Nate: Me either

 

Leah: I’m sorry

 

Nate: Me too.

 

—

 

“Just tell me. What’s going on between you and Mom?” Liam asks when he returns.

 

“Nothing,” Nate says. He thinks of the slinking ease of his wife’s laughter.

 

In the distance, a chunk of meadowland rends itself from gravity, shoots upward into the sky. A green and tan mess zooming up. He watches it into the sky, hearing his son shouting behind him. Liam is there with his phone outstretched, breathing wildly, capturing the whole thing.

 

Then the shakes are over, his phone rings. It’s Leah, and he doesn’t know what he’ll say, so he lets it ring. In his mind he can still hear his justification, feel the heat of his face during the fight. The resignation of her limp arms as she sat on the bed, tearless. How he’d begged and pleaded with no real hope.

 

“Dad,” Liam shouts.

 

The earth shakes. He feels heavy, replete with an exhaustion so absolute that he crumbles and sinks to his knees, a sense of loss careening into his stomach, his collarbones.

 

“I’m calling Mom,” Liam says.

 

“No,” Nate shouts back.

 

“Why? What the hell is going on?”

 

“It’s just one of those things. We had a fight.”

 

“That’s not—” Liam says.

 

“Let’s get back in the car.”

 

“And go where?” Liam yells. “Dad!”

 

“I don’t know,” Nate says.

 

The ground trembles yet again, and another chunk of earth splits in the distance, rockets upward.

 

A new text.

 

Leah: It’s all over the news. Everyone saw you disappear.

 

Nate: Did you feel the earthquake?

 

Leah: What?

 

Nate: Nvm. I’m sorry

 

—

 

They’ve found there is a limit, an ethereal plane extending into the heavens near where the earth had blown itself upward at the very beginning.

 

But eventually those outside find a way in, at least to get them supplies. Gas cans appear. Razors and bottles of water, non-perishables. Car batteries and tools to install them. They pile what comes in heaps, Liam constantly reorganizing the boxy remnants like firewood. Reams of business cards and half-complete first-aid kits. They’ve found that they can’t send anything out, but they can receive. They still have cell service, but Leah hasn’t called to talk directly to Nate since their last conversation. Instead, she texts to tell him that she can’t get through on Liam’s phone anymore because of his constant streaming. He braces himself against the car. He’s tried to call, but she won’t pick up. He can feel the dispossession in his toes, the creeping ankle pain as he limps around the sundial when they hang up. He monitors Liam in the distance as he patrols the meadow, arms and phone locked in place, his head bobbing excitedly.

 

The narrative drags on in the media. It’s t like a hostage situation.

 

Liam gains millions of viewers on his live stream.

 

“Dad,” he says in an increasingly rare moment without his phone. “Please. Just tell me.”

 

“We’ve been through this, son,” Nate says. He’s taken to calling him son instead of bud or buddy or his name. The formality between them a growing cavern.

 

“Dad.”

 

The earth rumbles beneath them, and they both crouch next to the car, cover their heads as the sound of moving earth envelops them in a fetal white noise, threatening to break the very air they breathe as it moves through their open, screaming mouths.

 

Then it stops.

 

When they emerge, there’s a fully grown, ancient-looking forest crowning hills off in the distance, the same direction of where the ground seemed to threaten to come apart and shoot into the sky all at once.

 

Nate’s phone goes off.

 

Leah: We felt that one.

 

Nate: Can we talk?

 

Leah: No.

 

Nate: What about Liam?

 

Leah: We’ve been through this. I’m working on it.

 

—

 

Eventually they stop tracking the passage of days and are just glued to their phones, watching the coverage of their situation. On screen, the barrier shows itself as a resplendent cylinder around the 106th Street roundabout, gossamer cells of writhing light. The crowds swell by the day. Nate and Liam eat what they can, save their batteries, turn on the car only to charge their phones. They’ve traversed the entire meadow, explored the forest, breathed in all the scents of the wood, climbed to the top of the tallest trees they dared. Nate’s back is starting to hurt all the time, his muscles seeming to pile up on themselves in a way they never did even just a few years ago. Liam has all but stopped speaking to him, and yet Nate is glad he has his son with him.

 

He’s sitting in the passenger side of the car with the seat leaned all the way back when Liam comes up to the door and taps on the window. It’s gotten unseasonably hot outside. The air seems to be dripping.

 

“Dad, what happened?” Liam says. The pleading in his eyes, the longing to return to his half-open, sixteen-year-old life.

 

And yet a mysterious glint. His son’s hand gingerly wrapped around his phone.

 

“I told you it’s best not to talk about it.”

 

—

 

They’re sitting together in the car with the A/C cranked.

 

“Dad, please,” Liam says.

 

The sun beats down.

 

“Honestly, son, I don’t even know anymore,” Nate says. He ventures the half-lie into the stale air between them. The heat languid to the point the air glimmers outside the car. Sweat tingling on his collarbone.

 

A tremor beneath them. Nate closes his eyes. It’s over quickly. Nate raises his head, looks around the meadow, over the tops of the trees. Fire. Black soot seeps over top of the treeline, spiraling up in great smiles of smoke.

 

His phone goes off.

 

Leah: Some people think there’s a way.

 

Nate: Do you even want me to come?

 

Leah: I’m not doing this.

 

The fire burns the entire forest, but it’s been contained by something, leaving a stark, black line of ash in the grass. Deer, hawks, a cavalcade of insects run out of the blaze and vanish into thin air; as soon as they hit the barrier, there’s nothing left, not even a sound. Conversely, piles of fire extinguishers, USB chargers, takeout boxes grow into three small hillocks. It’s a one-way. Nate watches his son’s face lighting up when he turns the camera around with an effortless tap. Watches him casually pick over the latest food offerings and come up to the driver’s side door just as the moon glides into the sky.

 

—

 

The next night, his phone goes off as he’s on a walk back from the barrier. In the distance, Nate can see the oceanic light of Liam’s phone beaming from the driver’s side window.

 

Leah: They think there’s an opening. Are you coming?

 

Nate: I’m sorry.

 

Leah: Me too. I just can’t do this anymore.

 

Nate: What?

 

Leah: All of it. I’m so tired.

 

Nate: Do you think I wanted this?

 

As he nears the roundabout, Nate sees the light of Liam’s phone go out, hears the car ignition sputter. Then the car drops into gear, begins going in circles, headlights rotating at steady pace. Then the engine flares, a squeal of tires as Liam picks up speed.

 

“Hey,” Nate shouts. The light of Liam’s cell phone still flashing in his mind, the finality of his marriage brewing. His back burning as he runs. Perhaps this rift is too great to cross, too absolute. He can’t imagine a scenario in which they go back to the way things used to be.

 

The engine revs to deafening power just as he gets to the edge of the roundabout, and Nate is sure Liam will lose control. He has all the intention of just standing in the way, of just putting his entire body on the line, as he’s unable to offer much else. But as the screaming tires pass, he can’t bring himself to take the final step.

 

He screams at his son, unloading his guilt in great heaves as his breath tumbles out, his shoulders shake. Around him, he can feel wind pick up. Liam keeps driving around at speed. As Nate screams, the truth roars inside him. He can’t even remember what happened, now, what the origin of the rift was, how he’d been able to so utterly obliterate the life he’d fallen into, the family they’d made. All he knows is that the damage is irrevocable, that his cowardice is so complete. He screams and screams, the wind picking up, his skin roiling. He wants to shed himself, to just simply step outside himself and float into a billion particles without intention of reassembly.

 

The car is tilting dangerously. He still can’t bring himself to step in front of it. His legs won’t work, and he wonders if he secretly has no desire to do so, tries to convince himself that he would, yes, of course, do anything to stop his son harming himself. But this wondering breaks him and he falls to his knees, his throat seemingly on the verge of tearing as he just keeps on yelling.

 

Without warning, the car quiets and slows, pulls over into the grass. He hauls himself up from the damp ground and runs to the door, sees his son doubled over the steering wheel, the most magnificent tears he’s ever seen budding in Liam’s eyes.

 

—

 

The world around them shimmers into a vibrato of sobs. Liam keeps asking what happened, and Nate’s mind is murky as creek water. All he knows is that the memory is sliding, burning the base of his skull as he holds his son through the coming storm.

 

“Why won’t you tell me?” Liam asks, the quakes subsiding past anger into resignation. Nate sees the film over his son’s eyes through his own crying.

 

“I truly don’t know,” Nate says.

 

“That’s bullshit,” Liam says.

 

“I know,” Nate says.

 

“Just tell me, Dad,” Liam says.

 

Hearing the word ‘dad’ come out of his mouth sends a tremor through him. Nate’s arms slip from behind his son’s neck as he falls to his knees yet again, looking in the distance at what looks like a tear in the barrier. For a moment, he can see thousands of camera flashes, hear the twittering sounds of a crowd floating on the hot wind.

 

His phone goes off.

 

Leah: Did you see?

 

Nate: Yeah.

 

Leah: They say they’re ready.

 

“Dad,” Liam shouts above the tumult gathering on the wind.

 

“Let’s go,” Nate shouts back. “Move.”

 

The tear has grown wider, and the crowd is a mass of faces swaying in the oncoming storm. The whole scene wreathed in static light, the barrier finally giving way.

 

Nate takes the wheel. Whatever his sins, he will get his son out of this.

 

He checks his phone.

 

Leah: Are you coming?

 

Nate: On the way.

 

They clamber tearily into the car, and Nate slams the gas, drives around the pile of supplies just as the earth starts to shake again, gigantic stones floating upward just as they had that first day. In the rearview mirror, he can see an opening in the ground swallow all their provisions, mountains of sustenance and novelty tumbling down. The rain sheets as the world throws itself upward. As he drives, he realizes that he can barely remember his life up to this point, much less how all this started.

 

They’re past the copse of trees and wheeling toward the barrier opening. There are armored trucks, toneless voices booming through speakers, untold numbers of uniformed people walking in silhouette. He’s looking for Leah and Sylvia, remembering their presence, the lightness of their hands. The wind picks up and threatens to topple them just as they reach the technicolor opening, barging through into a bizarre mirror of the roundabout they’ve been living in. The same, all the signs of suburbia intact, reassembled from memory and solid as bone.

 

Liam opens the door and crashes to the pavement, lying flat. Paramedics rush in, and their voices are so quiet in the suddenly dry air, barely able to penetrate Nate’s senses. He can see a fist knocking on his window, mouths moving, but he clutches the steering wheel, trying to remember. He looks at his phone. Nothing. There’s a throbbing in his ears.

 

Sylvia and Leah are being ushered through the crowd, and when they emerge, they fall upon Liam in a mess of limbs. Boom mics are everywhere, it seems, vans and other vehicles, a crowd with a crush of voices stretching for what seems like miles. The knocking on his window grows louder, more insistent. Nate keeps checking his phone, waiting for the next message, the resolution, then watches his family embrace, the relief palpable in the way their shoulders move freely as they cry. His arms are heavy, laced with the faint tug of weeping exhaustion. His back burns. Coiled in his chest a smoky iteration of his guilt. He can’t grasp it, can’t get out and join them.

 

Then his family is falling away, a new barrier piling on top of itself around the car, a gilded web forming. The fists and knocks dissipating, the low hum of voices casting off into a watery silence as the rain returns to a plain highway lined with green. When everything settles, he’s on a straightaway with no end in sight.

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The Herbalist

Before we met up in Rome, I hadn’t seen Samuel in ten years, and most of what I recalled from our conversations on smoke breaks and at parties were details about his girlfriends—the one with the long nipples whom he had loved and who’d eventually left him for her high school sweetheart; the one with a dead little brother and a penchant for being choked; the one who was ethically non-monogamous yet completely obsessed with him. Did I remember these stories because I’d been a little in love with him? Or had he simply repeated them so many times?

 

During my library fellowship in Padua, I had spent my days in the dark of the archives taking photographs of very old books about plants and my nights walking back to my apartment through the rain to eat pasta and sausage and drink vino sfuso from the two-liter plastic bottles that I had refilled every Wednesday. I knew my last week in Italy would be greener as I ventured south to Rome, but I wanted it to be different, too. I had visions of myself like Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, suddenly young and trembling underneath someone’s hands. Why not Samuel’s? He was the only person I knew who lived in Europe, and I hadn’t been with anyone since my last relationship, the one that had made me want to flee my life in the first place. When I messaged him on Facebook, I didn’t explicitly say it was a fuck trip, but he agreed to meet me there and accepted the offer to stay in my Airbnb.

 

His flight from Berlin got in before my train, so he met me at Termini, where I was disorientated by all the flashing billboards and signs, reminding me of Times Square in a way that made me feel both comfortable and homesick. And then there was him, another flash of the familiar, a face I’d known so many years before. His blond curls were shorn, and he had a man’s face now, the boyish softness I’d once liked supplanted by a network of fine lines that extended out from the corner of his eyes toward his temples and down along his cheeks—many more lines than I had, in fact. His blue eyes lit up with his smile, and soon he was hugging me and telling me that I looked “great, really great,” which was a relief to hear after all the pasta and wine. “You too,” I told him, and then I asked if he’d ever been to Rome.

 

“Four or five times,” he said.

 

“Oh. So this is familiar.”

 

“It’s been a while. Actually, one of my best mates lives here, George, and I haven’t seen him in three years. I don’t know where the time goes.”

 

“Yeah? Did you two make plans?”

 

“Nothing concrete. I figured I’d see what you had in mind.”

 

I told him somewhat abashedly that it was my first time, and I wanted to see the sights—but he didn’t have to come with me, of course.

 

“I’d love to tag along,” he said. “The Colosseum never gets old.” The dad joke pleased me, as did the ease of speaking in English again, even though he had a bit of an affected European accent now, as vague and placeless as I suddenly felt.

 

I planned to take a cab to the Airbnb, but being less intimidated by the public transit system than I was, Samuel directed us to the proper machine to buy tickets, and then to the right bus, and after thirty minutes of swaying and conversation about the book I was writing on herbal remedies for grief and what he’d been doing in Germany—he was a sommelier, it turned out—we arrived in a one-bedroom apartment in Trieste, smaller than it had looked in the photographs, but not too small. We put our things in the entryway and explored the unit, recently remodeled to look like an Ikea showroom, white and ordinary. The only signs of life were the corn plant in the bathroom and the succulents in the bedroom window, although even they were only visible when the blinds were open. I was relieved when he suggested we go for a drink right away.

 

As we walked to the restaurants on the closest piazza, the sun broke out from behind the rain clouds that had followed me for most of the fall. No longer trapped inside a bus or underneath the arc of an umbrella, I turned my eyes toward the palm trees and umbrella pines that arced above the tops of ochre buildings up to the sky. If we were brave enough, we could sit on a patio beneath them, tempting the rain to come again.

 

We were.

 

Samuel made everything easy by speaking to the waiters in English, making no effort to go through the charade of attempting Italian after the first obligatory ciao. Focaccia and hummus arrived along with our wine, and I didn’t feel hungry, but within twenty minutes, everything before us was gone, so we ordered more.

 

It turned out that Samuel remembered more than I did from the nine months we’d worked at the same restaurant. He asked me about my brother, my parents, and of course our manager Mark, who I’d been dating at the time. “There was always something off with that guy,” he said. And there had been, but I didn’t want to tell him about the time Mark shook me so hard I bit my tongue, spitting blood out in his sink, the pink stream mingling with his beard trimmings. I should’ve quit right away, but I’d just gone on with life and the effort of loving him until it became too much. I’d kept my graduate school admission a secret, staying until the day my father drove up to help me move, and then I left forever.

 

As Samuel asked me questions, images came back to me in uncertain flashes. Besides the alley behind the restaurant, we had once talked on a brown sofa, and once on a staircase strung with Christmas lights. I’d forgotten almost everything about that time, but he remembered so much of me and who I had been then, a person I almost never thought of, and a person who was in many ways lost to me. I felt bees take up residence in my chest. I didn’t even want to remember those years when I was living them.

 

Another memory floated to the surface. Samuel had once gone to the airport without his passport and asked me to bring it from his apartment. I had searched through boxes and drawers, then sat on his white comforter in the morning light. I must have found it—it was on that trip, after all, that he’d met the girlfriend he followed to Berlin. So I asked Samuel about her.

 

He let out a long sigh and looked up at the sky, blue except for a cluster of gray clouds crowding together in the distance. He shook his head. “Fuck this,” he muttered.

 

I didn’t know what to say. “Sorry?” I asked, trying not to be offended.

 

“No, no, it’s not you. I just can’t keep talking about this shit.”

 

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t really want to, either.”

 

“God! Thank you!” he said, relieved. He lowered his eyes to mine again. “When you see old friends, there’s always this ritual, as if we can’t enjoy ourselves now without resurrecting our memories first, trying to crawl back into who we were.”

 

I knew what he meant, yet I now felt annoyed and a little embarrassed. I could feel my face hot, probably red. If we weren’t going to talk about the past, what was left? Maybe this had all been a mistake.

 

I could feel Samuel looking at me. Then, he half-stood, leaning over the table and bracing himself with one hand as he kissed me. It was a long kiss, and I could taste the wine in his mouth, rich and leathery. He pulled back and sat down again, his stained lips still slightly parted.

 

“Sorry,” he said.

 

I laughed and told him, “Don’t be sorry.”

 

We could have gone back to the apartment right away and taken off our clothes, but I think both of us knew that that would be less satisfying than prolonging the feeling between us and the question of whether or not we would sleep together—although of course we would. Really the question was whether it would be full of passion and desire, the urge to wring something out of each other, or whether it would be ugly and awkward, the simultaneous consummation and death of another part of our youth. The longer we waited, the more the desire would grow. So we walked toward the Borghese gardens.

 

Now, there was a levity to our conversation. I could feel the laughter bubbling out of my throat as we walked side by side, or sometimes, through a crowd, with him slightly ahead of me. His phone was out as he navigated the streets, so I didn’t have his full attention, but I wasn’t sure I could bear it if I did.

 

When we got to the gardens, he stopped at a picturesque cart to get us two plastic cups of wine, and then we were wandering past the Villa Borghese, which I’d bought tickets to visit the following Saturday. We walked down a long, wide sidewalk with cloud-like pine clusters above it. Soon, the sound of harp music was in the air, and we were navigating around puddles to get a view of the Temple of Aesculapius, the water reflecting the purple-streaked sky and the gathering clouds. We stood at the fence and gazed out toward the figure obscured behind the columns, but my eyes kept flitting back to my own reflection, our reflection. I remembered one particular photograph of us together at twenty-two, his arm around my shoulders. The last few hours revealed that I’d barely known him, but something had inspired that embrace and my bright gaze within it, perhaps precisely the same things that inspired the image I was looking at now in the water. Perhaps there was really something there, here.

 

Samuel looked down, and then he kissed me again, his hand on the back of my neck, and I used my free arm to pull him as close as I could, to feel the realness of him, nearly dropping my wine in the process. After a minute, though, he seemed to remember our surroundings. There were other tourists clumped around the harp player, children splashing in the puddles in their little yellow boots.

 

It started to rain. We ran back toward the museum, where there were men selling umbrellas for two euros a piece. We each got one and then, for the walk back, we were forced to stay in our own circles of protection. It wasn’t a romantic rain but a miserable one—I was wearing my suede boots with the little heels for the occasion, and they were soon soaked. I could feel my socks getting wet underneath them, my feet becoming cold, then numb.

 

When we got back, we were both drenched from the shoulders down. Samuel broke the coldness that had crept between us, taking off his jacket, his shoes and socks, all while still standing in the foyer, and then turning toward me as he took off his shirt. I saw the expanse of his chest, his lungs heaving beneath his bony ribcage, and then he picked me up and carried me to the bed in my wet layers, which he peeled off one by one. I giggled, I laughed, I tried to protest that I could do it myself, but he was in a serious mood as he warmed up each of my hands between his palms, lifted my shirt, and started to drag his hot breath down my ribs, down past the waistband of my jeans as he helped me shimmy them off.

 

You come back to that first time with someone again and again. The moment when desire was at its peak and you held yourself taut, waiting to see if it could be fulfilled. That time, it was. I realized I had wanted this for a decade. With him, I became my younger self again, but not naïve or open to abuse—just unashamed, ready to grasp what pleasure I could take without worrying overmuch about the consequences.

 

“Wow,” he said afterward. “I didn’t expect this.”

 

“Then why’d you bring condoms?” I asked jokingly.

 

“Well, I thought it would take more effort to seduce you, at least.”

 

We kissed, and I asked for him to warm me up again.

 

The first night was lost to love. I didn’t leave the room again, although he briefly put on his raincoat and pants, too rushed to get fully dressed before dashing down to buy a few slices of pizza and another bottle of wine. We went to sleep in the wee hours of the morning, and I kept startling awake from dreams. In one, we were making love on the floor of the Basilica of St. Anthony, the saint’s preserved tongue falling from its reliquary to get between us. In another, we were apart, me trapped in the belly of a strawberry bush, Samuel eating the fruit rather than cutting me out. After each, I woke and found him next to me, wound my arms around him. I couldn’t get close enough.

 

The next day, we reemerged into the world. We walked to see the obvious sites. Each one seemed less beautiful than the prospect of losing myself with him again. But Samuel had made reservations for lunch on the opposite side of the city, so we spent all day out in the bright cold, kissing in front of strangers and staring at each other and laughing at the surprise of it all. What was art next to this? All of culture, really, existed simply to try and capture the feeling that was in our chests, waiting to be looked at and stoked into flames again and again. The next day in Vatican City, I looked up at the Sistine Chapel and thought, meh.

 

By the fifth day, we had given up on the world. We tried to order in pizza, but instead we got two plastic containers of burrata, each with different accoutrement—peppers, pieces of basil, a whole tomato. We ate them laughing. I wanted to stay inside those moments forever, but of course, another urge was rising, too. I wanted to ask him, What next? He wasn’t going back to the States for the holidays, he told me—his parents were coming to Germany. And a small, irrational part of me thought that perhaps I could come, too. Nothing was waiting for me in my apartment back home, except for the gift my subletter had left on my counter. She’d sent me a photo of it along with the keys, and from the size of the box, I guessed it was a mug. Perhaps—definitely—it was too soon to meet his family, but I was willing to pay the ticket change fee for even another day, another night.

 

When the sun fell that evening, I was ravenous. Samuel had a restaurant in mind, and after a three-course meal down the street from the Pantheon—a building I had still not set foot inside—we ran through the cold to the bus stop to wait for the vehicle that would take us back to our temporary home. We found two seats, one in front of the other. Samuel sat down behind me. As the bus drove past the glorious fountains, the ancient architecture done up in wreaths and ribbon and lights, all I could think about was how to voice the whispers in my heart.

 

He leaned over my shoulder. “Hey. What do you think about going over to George’s tonight?”

 

“George?”

 

“You know, my friend who lives in Rome.”

 

“Oh. Where does he live again?”

 

He told me the neighborhood was on the other side of the river, in the opposite direction from the one we were heading in. It was past 10:00 p.m. already—not that we’d been going to bed early—and going back out into the cold was the last thing on my mind. If Samuel sensed my hesitance, he pushed right through it. He told me about meeting his friend in Berlin, and the crazy nights they’d had together in their twenties, and the fact that he’d been feeling guilty because George’s fiancée had just left him. With just two nights left in the city, he wanted to get the visit over with. That way, he and I could enjoy the rest of our time together. I didn’t have to come if I didn’t want to.

 

“No, no,” I said. “I can come.” The truth was that I couldn’t bear to be away from him.

 

We got off the bus at the next stop and hailed a cab. We held hands in the back seat, and I asked Samuel what to expect. He told me George was “a riot.” When we arrived, he leaned on the doorbell, and then we stood in the cold outside an ancient stucco building. We waited for so long I started to doubt we had the right address, but just before I asked Samuel to call, a man came down. He was short with a little bushy beard and a beanie pushed over his brow.

 

“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said to Samuel. I expected George to be American, but no, he was British. “This wanker!” he exclaimed, standing on his tiptoes to ruffle Samuel’s thinning hair.

 

“And you must be Hannah.”

 

He walked us through the lobby and up the five flights of stairs, past peeling paint and the sounds of television sets coming through the doors. Panting, we arrived at a tiny, split-level apartment with a sofa and a kitchenette beneath a spiral staircase that led, I assume, to a lofted bed. There was so little in the apartment that it was hard not to notice everything in it—the dishes in the sink, the Clockwork Orange poster on the wall, the coke on the table. I wasn’t aware it would be that kind of night, but almost as soon as we sat down, both men had done lines.

 

I hesitated, and then told them I’d have just the tiniest bit. George offered us wine, too, and I accepted, then perched opposite the sofa on a little, leather, heart-shaped ottoman while the two men caught up.

 

George told the story of his jilting with a certain hysteria, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He and Anna had known each other for a year, been engaged for six months. He’d never thought he’d get married at all, but she’d been so jealous, and in June, when he’d gone on a trip to Marseilles, she’d been convinced he was cheating. Knowing this tale was not meant, really, for my ears, I made myself small. I looked at my phone, scrolling through the photos we’d taken. George was telling Samuel how Anna had left him the first time, via text, and he’d flown back right away to swear his love and win her back. She’d thrown the ring he’d bought onto the ground. It hadn’t been good enough for her, she told him, it was a fucking piece of crap. And it had been—he’d just grabbed something pretty from a vintage store in the neighborhood; he’d thought it was about the gesture. In one of my photos, Samuel was in front of the Trevi Fountain. In another, I was in front of a blooming oak leaf hydrangea. There were none of us together. As I scrolled, I half-heard the tale of George and Anna’s reunion, how they’d finally bought a proper ring and she’d moved into his flat—this one, although it was hard to imagine a second person’s possessions inside it—and they had started actually planning the wedding, her mom visiting from Naples and sleeping on the sofa, as if there were room for that.

 

“Fuck. Women,” George said.

 

“I know it,” Samuel said.

 

“Is she your girlfriend?” George asked, and I realized he was talking about me. Trying not to look too interested in Samuel’s response, I stood up and started looking for a glass. Samuel didn’t say anything, and when I sat back down with my water, George pressed him.

 

“Well, is she or not? Would you share her?”

 

Samuel just smiled and rolled his eyes. When we made eye contact again, he winked at me. It was true that even I could see George was just heated up, but I wished someone would try and tamp it down.

 

My new love and his old friend drank more, did lines, talked. Mostly George talked, going on and on about Anna’s mom’s visits. I drank water; I drank wine. We heard about the way she kept the house, the things she made and didn’t make for breakfast, the way she made it impossible to fuck with her snores and sighs. Maybe there were signs earlier, something he’d missed.

 

“Signs of what?” Samuel asked.

 

His ex-future mother-in-law had had a dream a few weeks prior to Anna’s departure. In it, the family dog had been pregnant with puppies, but she hadn’t ultimately given birth to them. Her swollen stomach disappeared, and Anna was the one who had the litter. There were four of them, tiny and brown, and the dog was so jealous she could barely be kept out of the nursery. She scratched and scratched at the door, the paint peeling up underneath her claws, and the puppies whimpering behind it. Anna didn’t have enough milk, the right milk, and the dogs began to grow up thin and angry, their cries an unceasing, hideous peal.

 

At first, George had thought it was funny. They didn’t have a nursery, and Anna wasn’t going to have puppies, or kids, or anything. She had an IUD. Slowly, he started to understand that she was actually upset about it. She thought it was some portent of what they would give birth to together. He’d tried to make light of it, tell her he could wear a condom. Or if there was something wrong with their kids, so what? They could raise a differently abled child together, couldn’t they? As long as it wasn’t actually a dog. Hell, even if it was. But Anna couldn’t let it go. For a week, she wouldn’t have sex with him, and then when she finally did, she spent the whole time staring up at the ceiling. She cried afterwards, making him feel guilty as shit. A week later, she moved out of the apartment without warning. He didn’t know where she’d gone, George told Samuel. He hadn’t looked, yet, but maybe he should start with her parents’ place in the south.

 

Underneath the tannins of the wine, I could still feel the numb drip at the back of my throat. I wanted to relax—just an hour before, I had felt so stupidly happy—but now, the bees were back again.

 

“I don’t think you should do that, man,” Samuel counseled. “It sounds like all you can do is move on.” He tried to get me involved in the conversation, to tell George about my research. “Is there an herb he could take?”

 

“I’m a historian, not an herbalist,” I said.

 

George leaned across the table toward me and told me, “I bet you could help me forget.” Then he turned back and asked Samuel, “Seriously, is she fair game?”

 

“Ask her,” Samuel said. “She speaks for herself.” I went into the bathroom and shut the door.

 

Sitting on the toilet with my tights around my ankles, I messaged him from my phone, which I’d had the foresight to keep in my hand. I’m ready to go, I typed. I listened to the muffled talking—George was on again—and waited for a response.

 

It didn’t come.

 

I went back out and took my seat on the ottoman. I kept my phone in my hand. Now, George was leaning back against the sofa, his red face jutting toward the sloped ceiling and the square pane of glass set into it. When Samuel glanced in my direction, I widened my eyes, can we go? and he gave me a subtle shake of his head, no, not now. Or maybe we didn’t know each other well enough to silently communicate. Maybe he had no clue what I was saying. Instead of trying to figure it out, he laughed at George’s stories. He offered me more wine, and I refused.

 

“She’s not very fun,” George said.

 

And Samuel looked at me brightly and said, “She can be.”

 

“Well, what’s her fucking problem tonight?”

 

I had had enough. I stood up. “I think I’m ready to leave,” I said. And then I put on my coat and went down the stairs, my legs trembling.

 

On the ground floor, I messaged Samuel again, but he hadn’t even seen the last two. Maybe his phone was in his coat pocket. Or maybe he knew that as soon as he took it out, George would grab it.

 

I stood there and looked through my email. I read the news. I gave Samuel all the time in the world to come down and get me, but he didn’t. So I went back out into the night and tried to remember the path the car had taken. I’d been relying on Samuel to know where I was, and now I was as good as lost. I looked at my phone again and again, toggling between my messages and the map that would get me to the appropriate bus stop, but I kept taking wrong turns onto narrow, darkened little streets. What was wrong with me? Why did I feel like this? It was late, now, but as I wandered on, I began to pass couples, to see orbs of light suspended above the street. And soon, I realized I was by the American University, young people still milling around at the end of the semester. They came in groups of twos and threes and fours, everyone a part of something—as I had always hoped to be, as I had always failed to have been.

 

Finally, I gave up and called an Uber.

 

Back in the Airbnb, I took off my shoes and crawled into bed with my coat on. I clutched my phone in front of me, reading through our whole exchange on WhatsApp since October. But since we’d spent every moment together for five days, there was no record of our affair in text. I tried to think through it from beginning to end, from the first kiss to the last one just before we’d gotten on the bus. As I wrapped myself in these recollections, I first worried that Samuel would be angry at me when he came back. Or maybe he wouldn’t come back at all. Then, remembering the suitcase spilling open just to the side of mine, I began to dread the certainty that he would. I fell asleep composing a speech in my head.

 

At six that morning, the doorbell rang. It took me several minutes to find the light switch, my shoes, and the key. I took my coat off. When I arrived at the front door, Samuel had an apologetic little smile on his face. A smirk, some would say.

 

“Did you have fun?” I asked.

 

“I did. Sorry George bugged you, though.”

 

“I wanted to leave.”

 

“And you left.”

 

What was there to say after that?

 

We had only one more full day together, and he spent most of it asleep in bed.

 

Late that afternoon, we went to the Villa Borghese at our appointed time despite the fact that Samuel was hungover, actually wrecked. A part of me wanted to confront him, but another part felt pity for the way he winced in the sunlight, the lines etched more deeply on his face than the day before. And another part knew that all confrontation would accomplish was the utter destruction of the bright, sparkling feeling that had breathed between us for five days. There was still a glimmer of it as we stood side by side looking at Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo, more beautiful than I had imagined. This was the stuff of myth—pursuit and desire so intense that they make us inhuman.

 

Samuel’s flight left in the early hours of the morning, and I don’t think he woke me up before he left. If he did, the moment receded into the landscape of my dreams, which had become boring again. In them, I was arranging my photographs into files, trying to decipher lines of curling text, checking my email. When I woke up, I remembered that I preferred them to be that way. I cleaned the apartment. I packed my bags with my clothes, my souvenirs, my toiletries, and a clip from the Haworthia that grew by the window.

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The Burnt Floor

Bronski and Janet saved for three years but could only afford a room on the burnt floor. The hotel was a fifteen-minute drive from the amusement park, all those lanky spotted mammals behind high fences, the wavelike rollercoasters plummeting from frozen peaks. The first two floors were four-star accommodations. The third, one point five.

 

The room contained two beds, frames scarred black. The ceiling was veined charcoal, the rugs blossoming with scorch marks, black ripples on a white pond. Only one wall retained its original green-and-white wallpaper. The rest curled, blackened, exposing pale sheetrock beneath.

 

At least the beds had clean sheets. They looked clean, anyway—Bronski couldn’t smell much of anything through the respirator. Each of the kids wore one, too, in a child’s size. The clear plastic window obscured little Becky’s face, dimming her eyes, swallowing her cheeks beneath twin filters. Jeremy’s was too small; the rubber straps sank into his neck, reddening his pale skin.

 

When they first started planning this vacation, years ago, Bronski and Janet had smiled at each other over the

freedom it would bring, the shrugging off of responsibilities and anxieties. But then Janet’s hours were reduced and Bronski’s company stopped handing out Christmas bonuses, and by the time they checked the online box for the burnt room, they were no longer smiling.

 

Jeremy attempted to view the park from their window, but the smoked haze of the pane was too clotted. There was a spot at the corner where a previous guest had tried to scrape away the singed layer with a razor blade. It was the only clear spot, a window within a window. Jeremy bent, removing his respirator, unburdening his irritated skin, pressing his bare cheek to the pane, squinting.

 

Bronski sprinted to his son’s side, snapping the mask back in place. “What did we say?” he asked.

 

“Sorry, Dad,” his son replied.

 

“You can take it off outside. In here, you’ve got to be safe.”

 

Then Bronski lowered himself to the small clear pane, searching for the castles of plastic and synthetic stone, those birthday cake lights strung along turrets. But he could only see his own reflection, framed by that ring of black char.

 

—

 

On the first day, they rode the roller coasters. Afterward, little Becky attempted to pet the lanky spotted mammals, a smile painted on her face. Bronski kept raising her up over his head, helping her get those extra feet. A staff member in a safari hat and cargo shorts scolded them, threatened to have them kicked out, but their family knew something about evasion and bled back into the crowd, an estuary emptying into the open sea.

 

Jeremy said it was the best day of his life, even though he’d thrown up all over himself and Becky after round three of rollercoastering.

 

Becky agreed as she wrung out her dress over a fountain with a marble shrew at its center.

 

“At least it doesn’t smell as bad as the room,” Becky said after adjusting her sodden outfit.

 

“Did you take your mask off?” Janet asked, turning on their daughter.

 

They’d told the kids the same thing that was in the waiver they signed at the front desk: the rooms were only carcinogenic if the air wasn’t filtered.

 

“I had to itch my nose,” Becky said.

 

Bronski shook his head, careful to not unseat the animal ears his children forced him to buy. “Just don’t do it again, alright?”

 

—

 

Upon returning, they crossed through the immaculately draped entranceway, thick crimson carpet beneath their feet, golden curtains obscuring unblemished windows, the waft of chlorine spilling over from the indoor swimming pool. They passed two golden sphinxes on their way to the stairwell.

 

The elevator only went to the second floor.

 

Before they could push open the heavy, pneumatic door, a bellhop ran over and sprayed them down with perfumed rose water. The children coughed and wiped at their eyes. Bronski made sure to hold his breath. The hotel called the practice scent therapy, as if it were for the good of those residing on the burnt floor rather than the rest of their guests and the world at large. An employee sprayed the concoction whenever their family entered or exited the building, like passing through a carwash.

 

Bronski held open the stairwell door with one hand, drying his lips with the other.

 

Janet doled out the respirators as they climbed.

 

—

 

In the early morning, Bronski woke to what he thought were bird songs, maybe those swamp crows he’d read about in the guidebook. After the haze of sleep receded, the noise more closely resembled the sound of his children giggling, the elastic twang of rubber snapping into place over bare flesh. Bronski sat up, turning to where his two children lay in bed. They were still, frozen beneath the sheets, masks possibly askew. It was dark, made all the darker by the burnt sky overhead. Bronski wondered if it was his fear driving an auditory hallucination, all those whispered jokes from his coworkers about fire-retardant swimwear. The kids were probably fine.

 

Nestling back into his pillow, Bronski had flashes of what their vacation could have been if there were only more hours in the day or an eighth day of the week on which to earn overtime. But his company no longer offered overtime, just regular time, and the burnt floor was all they’d ever be able to afford. He tried to push the whispers from his mind.

 

He rolled over and slung an arm around Janet, pulling her close, letting himself believe he’d done right.

 

—

 

The next day was more rollercoastering. Banks of screens showed the kids as they screamed down long drops, as they screamed at boogeymen who emerged from behind fiberglass crypts, as they screamed as their spacecraft fell from orbit. Like everyone else in the park, Janet and Bronski never purchased the photos, only snapping grainy duplicates with their cellphones. A souvenir was still a souvenir.

 

Bronski hoped that was the only thing they carried home with them. He started to worry when little Becky began to cough uncontrollably after exiting a western-themed Hey-Hey sing-along cart ride. The cough went on and on, wet and dry at the same time. Harsh to the ear.

 

“Too much singing, honey?” Janet asked, stooping to Becky’s level, pulling her close.

 

“They played all my favorite songs,” Becky stammered between coughs, a ropey line of snot connecting their shirts in a spiderweb weave. “I couldn’t help it.”

 

“You sang beautifully dear,” Janet replied, catching Bronski’s eye, her brows furrowed in concern.

 

Everyone said you had to take the kids to the park before they got too old, before the magic wouldn’t be magic. The years weren’t slowing. If he had put off the trip a few more months, he would have put it off a few more months after that, and so on and so forth until he found himself crying at songs from their childhood as he dropped little Becky off at college.

 

No, now was the only time, regardless of the money, regardless of the room, regardless of the rash that was spreading around the contours of his mask where the gasket pressed tight to his cheeks. The kids deserved their three days at the park and Bronski deserved those three days where he could be present in their lives, not some blur rushing out the door at five in the morning, only reappearing after dinner had been cleared from the table.

 

—

 

“It’s a great deal, but not that great,” the woman behind the front desk said, a fake smile stretching her cheeks. She toyed with a pen and sketchpad, doodling little caricatures of human faces.

 

“But I thought we had access to the pool?” Bronski said, hand on Jeremy’s shirtless shoulder, his swim trunks laced tight around his stomach, towel in hand.

 

“If you selected the upgraded package, yes, the pool would be all yours, but your reservation says you chose our economy option.”

 

“Can’t you just let us in, just this once? No one will notice.”

 

“Oh, people will definitely notice, but I can bump you up to full access for another fifty dollars a night. This covers the sanitation fees for our third-floor guests. Would that work?” the woman asked, her doodle beginning to resemble Bronski, his sleep-deprived baggy eyes, the desperate frown carving his face.

 

“But we’re already paying—”

 

Bronski’s reply was cut short by a series of sneezes from Jeremy followed by a chorus of coughs. His son covered his face with his towel, bending low toward the plush carpets. The fit wouldn’t stop.

 

“You should probably get that looked at,” the woman said. “Somewhere not right in front of my desk.”

 

Bronski wanted to scream, to tear the notepad from her hands and scribble out the insult of himself etched there, replacing the drawing with his own rendition of the woman and what he thought about her subpar service, but he couldn’t ignore Jeremy’s distress. Without another word, he steered his son toward the stairwell, through the perfumed mist of rose water.

 

“We’ll just get you into the shower, right bud? A shower’s basically the same thing as a swimming pool, yeah? Just as good, I promise.”

 

—

 

The third day was less rollercoastering, more snapshots with park fixtures. Men and women dressed as fairytale characters. Ridiculous confectionary streets. Castles that seemed to blot out the sun. Janet wanted to get a shot of their children in front of each landmark.

 

“Just put your arms around each other,” Janet said, waving the children together before a man-made waterfall, an animatronic orangutan eternally peeling bananas to their left.

 

“Haven’t we taken enough pictures?” Jeremy asked, his sunburned cheeks glistening, a labored wheeze accompanying the question. The kids had been lethargic since breakfast.

 

“There will never be enough pictures,” Janet muttered as she snapped the shot, quiet enough only Bronski could hear her.

 

“Can we go to the pirate ship again?” Becky asked.

 

“Yeah, let’s do the pirate thing again,” Jeremy added, before a skull rattling sneeze escaped from his mouth and nose.

 

Unlike the day before, a stream of black mucus coated his shirtfront, snot mixed with coal dust and char, a river of oil dripping onto the downtown sidewalk. He raised his hands, touching his nose, inspecting the black webbing, eyes growing wider with each second. Then he was screaming, and little Becky was screaming, and Janet was screaming, and a man dressed like a pantless opossum was escorting them to a white-walled service station behind the so-called lollipop factory. A tiny rhino attendant appeared from inside, wiping at Jeremy’s face with a towel, mopping up the black mucus, smothering his screams until they faded to whimpers.

 

“Staying on the burnt floor?” the pantless opossum asked Bronski, pulling him aside as the rhino gave the children and Janet rainbow-colored lollipops the size of basketballs.

 

“How did you—”

 

“This happens all the time. We have a protocol now,” the opossum said as he scratched his distended belly.

 

“But the manager said it was safe.”

 

“Hey, I’m not casting judgement, but I need you and yours out of my clean-up room. We charge by the minute.”

 

“Are you serious?”

 

“Don’t worry, the lollipops are on the house. Just get going, alright?”

 

Bronski never imagined he’d be intimidated by a giant pantless opossum, but he also never imagined he’d put his family at risk for a few blurry photos on a water slide and a shot of his kids hugging a stranger dressed like a cute, moderately stoned alien. He thanked the opossum, shook the rhino’s hand, then escorted his family back into the sweltering summer sun.

 

The pirate ride no longer held the same appeal.

 

“We’re leaving,” Janet yell-whispered into Bronski’s ear, carting little Becky away toward the parking lot, Jeremy following in a half daze at their heels, gnawing on his lollipop with sluggish bites. “You need to find us somewhere to sleep.”

 

Bronski sighed. “I can do that,” he replied, unlocking their rental minivan. The respirators were piled on the back seat, those empty plastic eyes staring back at Bronski from the upholstery as if he were the world’s biggest idiot, as if he’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

 

“Great deal. Real great,” he muttered as he pushed the masks onto the floor, making space so Jeremy could stretch out on the seat, the A/C breathing down from twin vents in the ceiling.

 

—

 

That night, they didn’t return to the burnt floor. Instead, Bronski found a public park, one with a lot of trees. They’d sleep beneath the open sky, the far-off arches of the rollercoasters hidden by citrus groves and palms, the firework show muted by distance and several freeways.

 

They found a flat stretch of ground far enough from any wetlands. All the ponds and rivers in the area had signs warning of alligators, of water snakes, of parasitic fish. Bronski laid out blankets on a layer of mulch and drying fronds, smoothing out the pointed leaves before his family could take their place.

 

The night sky resembled the charred ceiling in some distant way, the eroding blackness of it, but each breath Bronski sucked down was light in his lungs, the synthetic plastic replaced by his wife and children’s sweat, the fried chicken-finger scent clinging to their mouths.

 

“Are we going back for our stuff?” Jeremy asked, half asleep.

 

“I’ll go up and get the bags,” Bronski said.

 

“That place smelled,” Jeremy muttered, tucking his face into his mother’s side.    

 

Bronski could almost smell the smoke on the wind, but for the moment, the scent of char was far off, a concern for later. He sucked in another lungful of air and lay quiet, listening for something moving in the bushes, something from those warning signs with scales, sharp teeth, mouths that could easily fit a child. He’d stay awake all night if he had to. He’d been careless with his family’s safety once.

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On the Other Side Is Everything

Mira Ayer knew the previous owner of the house had died there. She and her husband Adam, the new owners, were not concerned with this detail—in the current market, anything that might deter other buyers was a boon. Beverly Franklin’s middle-aged daughter and a fierce-faced granddaughter turned up for the final walkthrough with the Ayer family to hand over an impossible number of keys and an ancient garage opener.

 

“Oh,” said Mira. “I’m sure we’ll replace the garage door before we move in. But thanks.” Beverly’s daughter, eyes brimming and clutching a dried bundle of herbs that left a trail of crumbs, stayed close as Mira made her way through the house with the realtor. Mira did not want to look at the bundle or the woman; the daughter’s desperation for conversation was palpable, and Mira hoped to avoid any maudlin outbursts.

 

The granddaughter pointed out the best features of the overgrown garden to Willy and Emma: an excellent climbing tree in the front yard with strong, low branches and a homemade rope swing, and two gnarled plum trees in the side yard. Emma stared steadfastly at her cell phone while her younger brother Willy attempted to listen. Mira, at once provoked and impressed by her daughter’s rudeness, said nothing; she didn’t want to give these people the impression that they would be welcome to drop in in the future.

 

There had been little to disclose: an abandoned sump pump in the crawlspace, a broken hinge on the door of the outside shed. The house was built in 1951 and had aged accordingly. It was at least built with more of an eye toward longevity than some of the former vacation homes they had viewed above Miwok Valley’s old shipyard district. The floor had a slight tilt Mira noted during their first visit, and the geologist she hired for the final walkthrough spent an hour underneath the house to inspect the foundation. When he emerged from the crawlspace, suspiciously clean, his conclusion was the house was in no danger of moving; at some point in the past it had just settled.

 

“Didn’t we all,” Mira said, but the geologist kept his gaze fixed on his clipboard as he added up the figures on his invoice. “Excuse me,” she said to Beverly’s daughter, sniffling beside her. Mira gestured to the phone in her hand as if to make a call and walked alone to the back of the house.

 

Marshlands ran beyond the back porch, a series of looping waterways that moved up and down with the tides. Mira’s eyes followed the course of the smaller straits as they wove into the largest channel, which poured into the unseen bay. She could only trace the water’s path so far until it seemed to dissolve into the dazzling hem of the sky.

 

A spasm of movement on the pavers caught Mira’s attention. It was a pair of crows—they were having difficulty flying, flapping awkwardly to gain a foot of altitude before landing roughly on the ground. They bleated at her, their pebbled eyes imploring. Mira’s realtor and Beverly’s daughter approached from the side yard, and the crows squawked and hopped away.

 

“There’s something wrong with those crows,” Mira said. “They can’t fly. They’re just stumbling around.”

 

“Maybe they’re drunk,” said the realtor, laughing uproariously at her joke. She was in a celebratory mood, bolstered by a generous helping of the champagne Adam brought.

 

“They’re fledglings,” said Beverly’s daughter. “They’re learning how to fly. The crows used to nest in the old fir tree. My mother fed them leftovers.” Her eyes moistened once more. Mira gave the realtor a look, and despite her impairment the realtor caught its significance.

 

“Mira, I have some last documents for you to sign. If you would just follow me.”

 

Adam and the children were inside the house, drinking sparkling cider. Through the sliding glass door, Mira could see Beverly’s daughter on the back porch. The granddaughter came to collect her, and Beverly’s daughter cast a final doleful glance at the house. She produced the crushed bundle of herbs once more, and with a yodeling scream that made the realtor drop her champagne glass, threw them like confetti over the back porch.

 

—

 

Renovating the house was Mira’s project. Earlier that year the company Mira co-founded was acquired and her position made obsolete. Representatives from the new company came in on planes from the Midwest, smooth-faced occupiers who mentally measured the ends of her office and spoke to her of their wives while Martin, her old partner, sat with the head of the new company in the conference room. It’s not a departure, it’s a transition, Martin had said, and Mira imagined for a moment how she might burn everything to the ground, not only incinerate the office but release proprietary information to their competitors, send certain photos of Martin to his wife. When they offered her a figurehead position as a non-voting board member, she declined.

 

Adam came up with the idea that buying a fixer-upper in Miwok Valley would be a fresh start, an opportunity for Mira to “funnel her executive skills into creating something of value” for their family. Mira, while unenthused at the idea, couldn’t think of a compelling reason to stay in their cramped North Beach condo where there was not enough room to politely ignore one another. She and Adam were in the throes of something neither was inclined to address.

 

Where a younger couple would have had a baby to fix the problem, they bought a house. Mira had given up resisting the waves of inevitability; Miwok Valley was where all upper middle-class families ended up.

 

Still, she had a nagging feeling that buying this property and moving into the suburbs was an irreversible mistake. There was a tightening in this house, an invisible tether being fastened. Even Mira’s body seemed foreign to her: her pants fit differently, pulling awkwardly across her stomach and hips, her chin had lost its shape and gained a down, and the hair on her head was coarser, with more silver streaks to be kept at bay.

 

She did not expect any real difficulty renovating the house: it was only a matter of updating appliances and hardware, removing the kitschy ’70s remodel details, choosing the new paint colors. Mira had ten spreadsheets for the renovation before they closed. Yet almost immediately, she and the house were at odds. Their new home was full of rude surprises below the surface—a hidden asbestos chimney, faulty wiring in the kitchen. One of the walls in the small room that adjoined the master bedroom had an inexplicable lip; when she examined it with a flashlight Mira realized the entire wall had been mirrored and then painted over. There was a sneakiness to this house, and things that should have been easy were difficult and stubborn.

 

Adam hired Ken Russo, a local contractor who had done a job for one of Adam’s co-workers, to head up the renovation. Mira disliked Ken from the start, but Adam insisted he came highly recommended; Adam wanted to “take something off her plate.” This was the dance they were stuck in, Adam and Mira: strained niceties on an eggshell floor. Mira was unsure if Ken was even licensed—Ken was vague when questioned on his credentials, referring always to Adam’s co-worker’s recommendation. This was the coven of men, Mira thought: unspoken agreements and invisible courtesies that skittered from female observation like minnows.

 

Ken was a head shorter than Mira, with bandy legs and a chest that strained against his collared shirts. He called her “Myrna” instead of Mira so often she stopped correcting him, and then began giving her jocular nicknames on the false name. Ken was a ringmaster when he showed the work from the previous day, grandiose and eager for praise, but less articulate when it came to explaining the rising cost of the construction. His wife often accompanied him, as beautiful and forbidding as a sphinx, stationed at a little round table Ken placed in the dining room.

 

The kitchen remodel began one month into general construction. The beige relic of an oven was removed and the centers of the weight-bearing walls scooped out so the kitchen would overlook the dining room, and beyond that, the marsh.

 

“See, Myrn,” Ken said to her. “I got all that wall down for you. It’s nice and open now like you wanted. And we’re ready for the countertops, ahead of schedule. Just waiting for those countertop people you hired.”

 

“Is it—does it look crooked? There, that plywood where the countertop is going to go.”

 

Ken shifted from one foot to the other, and Mira found herself staring at his shoes, polished and heeled, as diminutive as a child’s. “Oh, no. That won’t be a problem. Once the countertops go in, it’s all going to be first class. And see.” He pointed to a spot, discolored and uneven, higher on the kitchen wall. “We—I got up in the attic yesterday and went through all the venting. It’s extra work for me but I closed up that vent you don’t need and drywalled the hole. I did that extra for you, no charge.”

 

Mira frowned. “Why wouldn’t I need that vent?”

 

“Well, you know, there’s that other vent right there in the living room. And now everything’s nice and open for you.”

 

“It’s a kitchen, Ken. It gets hot and smelly. I’m not sure why you would think we wouldn’t need a vent.”

 

Ken glanced around at the workers on the periphery and his wife, glowering at her phone on the table. “You could always get a fan. Lots of good little fans you could put right on the counter there. I can pick some up for you at the hardware store.”

 

—

 

Mira walked the neighborhood while Ken and his workers took their lunch; she knew they needed a break from her as much as she needed one from them. She traced the children’s path to their new middle school and took photos of gardens she liked. On the sidewalk near her house a graying specter in blocky sunglasses and a faded fishing hat stood frozen, holding an equally grizzled dog at the end of a lead. Mira raised a hand in greeting, but he remained in place, as still as an egret.

 

“Who are you waiting for to die?” he called out to her.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Who are you waiting for to die so you can snap up their house?”

 

“I’m your next-door neighbor,” Mira said, stepping closer to him. “We bought Beverly Franklin’s old house a month ago. We’re still renovating and not quite moved in.”

 

“I thought you were a realtor,” the old man said. “They circle like vultures. Looking for dirt lawns and Cadillacs. Waiting for someone to die so they can buy a house for cheap.”

 

“I’m afraid we’re one of those,” said Mira.

 

“Oh well,” he said. “Come over for a cup of tea once you’ve moved in.”

 

—

 

The side room connected to the master bedroom was a vestige from the days when women did their hair and makeup in a separate space to preserve the mysteries of female beauty. Mira had had every intention of prying the mirror off the one wall and knocking out another wall to enlarge the bedroom, but her desire to rid herself of Ken outweighed anything else. The number of necessary projects was dwindling, and with no small amount of satisfaction Mira gave Ken a final deadline of two weeks to complete his work, hoping he would be done in three.

 

Ken met her that morning with a grave face. Mira had become accustomed to the underlying intent of his theatrics; she suspected he was behind schedule, or ready to show her a fresh problem that required more money.

 

“Myrna, I have something serious to tell you.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Last night, the guys and I were working here late. Because you know, you’re on that tight schedule, and even though these things take time we’re trying to do that for you. We were sitting there in the living room, having a little dinner break, and we start hearing these noises above us in the attic. Knocks and scraping and stuff. The guys got real spooked. You know, they’re spiritual, like me.” Ken produced a cross, gold and enameled, from beneath his shirt. It looked to Mira as though it had come from a vending machine.

 

“Probably raccoons,” Mira said. “I’ll do some research and call someone.”

 

Ken’s face furrowed. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Not raccoons. I’m religious but also what you call intuitive. I can feel energy. And there’s a bad energy here. All the guys left last night after the noises started. But I can handle this for you, Myrn. No problem. I’ve done this sort of thing before.”

 

Mira regarded Ken with incredulity. The previous week she had brought him to tears when they went over the bills and his updated estimate, even as she kept her voice low and reminded him it was business, nothing personal. Ken called Adam later that night to discuss the bill, saying Mira had grown emotional when discussing it and that he hoped the two of them could work out the business end of it. And yet here he was, resilient as ever, with a new line item for ghost busting.

 

“It’s fine,” Mira said. “Let’s move on. What’s the status of the bifold door?”

 

“Myrna, this is a real problem. I don’t know if I can get the crew to stay on. And you got children moving into this house. It’s no good. But I can take care of it for you.”

 

“Give me a ladder. I’ll check it out now.”

 

The attic was oppressively airless, and Mira’s shirt soon stuck damply to her back and breasts. The low ceiling forced her to crouch as she shone the flashlight of her phone into the attic’s dusty corners. There was a tangle of electrical wiring against a wall and a single vintage mousetrap, but no fresh tracks or scat to suggest any visitors.

 

“Nothing,” she said as she climbed down the ladder. “Other than a potential fire hazard. What’s going on with those wires?” Ken gave her a look of great sadness. He worked half-heartedly for the rest of the day, emitting the occasional sigh and leaving early. Mira knew he would not call Adam about this specific issue.

 

The children were starting school in less than a month. Mira paid Ken what she hoped was his final bill and hired a locksmith to change the locks. The moving company transferred all the items from their house in the city a week later. Mira unpacked the boxes with renewed vigor, reveling in her solitude and efficiency, the broken-down cardboard out with the recycling that Friday.

 

—

 

On their first night in the house Willy woke up screaming for Adam in a way he had not done since he was a toddler with night terrors. Mira, restless in her own bed, ran half-awake across the hall to her son’s room. He was in a dream-like state, wailing and incoherent, vaguely dissatisfied that she was not his father. She gathered him to her chest awkwardly, his long legs hanging off the bed. Through his sobs he tried to describe a nightmare, crying harder every time he spoke of it. Mira rocked and shushed him until he fell asleep, his gentle hiccups at her back as she closed the door.

 

She paused in the living room, gazing out through the glass patio door. Outside the marsh and night sky were an inky monolith, dimly lit by an unseen moon. It was unaccountably stuffy in the living room, the air thick and pressing upon her. There was a pressure building in Mira’s chest and she realized she was holding her breath, listening for one of Ken’s phantom noises. She returned to her bedroom, musing as she got into bed that she would have to get into the usual things—yoga, meditation, acupuncture—whatever people did when they were having some sort of midlife crisis.

 

—

 

Mira had taken to visiting John Brodie, their ancient neighbor, in the afternoons before picking the kids up from school. He had waited for her one day on the pavement outside her house. “I’ve come to collect on our deal,” he told Mira. His dog had died and he needed someone to converse with.

 

On her initial visits Brodie served Mira tea, but they soon fell into conviviality and stiff drinks in etched tumblers. The friendship surprised Mira. She normally found the paternalism of older men irksome, but Brodie had a plain way of speaking she enjoyed, one that did not treat her as young or old or incapable of understanding or arguing with anything he said. Mira thought he must understand women in a way few men did.

 

Brodie had lived in his house for nearly sixty years and knew much of the history of the neighborhood and its inhabitants. His memory of past and present events had a certain fluidity, as if all time existed on the same plane in the boozy glow of their afternoons. He told Mira the channels in their backyards were man made. Before the township cut the channels, storms and king tides would bring the waters of the bay right up to their doorsteps. Herons and egrets overtook the backyards of the houses bordering the marsh and Brodie could fish from his patio, once even catching a small leopard shark. The constant threat of flooding made the neighborhood a wilder place, but also a more interesting one.

 

Mira offered to host some afternoons at her house, but he always refused. Brodie had a strange hostility about her house, as though it were a neighbor he had had a falling out with.

 

“Bad juju at your place,” he said. “I haven’t been since before Beverly died.”

 

“Jesus,” Mira said. “You’re as bad as that sham contractor.”

 

—

 

The Ayer family had been living in Miwok Valley for nearly half a year when the smaller things in their house, knickknacks and decorations, started to rearrange themselves. It was as if everything in the living room had shifted, only slightly. It was so imperceptible that Mira wondered how long it had been happening before she noticed. Her first impulse was to dismiss it as her imagination, or to credit it as the collective work of her husband and children.

But one day she realized the wall clock in the living room had moved at least six inches from its point of origin. The clock was memorable because Mira had agonized about where to place it; it required a sturdier nail for hanging, and she did not want to pockmark the wall with her mistakes. There was now no evidence or nail mark at its original position, no scrapes across the fresh paint to record its journey. Adam sometimes took it in his head to tackle a minor house project without notice, but this was not his work. This was elegantly and invisibly done.

 

The smaller objects of the house shifted fractions of centimeters each day, as if on the same plane of some gently twirling surface. Mira did not understand how the items moved; she only observed each day that they had done so. She said nothing to her family, waiting to see if one of them would comment on the changes in their home. It should have been obvious to them; they spent more time out of the house than she did. But her children were too absorbed in their new school, their activities, and their social lives. Adam also said nothing, even as he had to scoot the rolling chair in their home office to match the slowly moving desk.

 

—

 

“Do I look different to you?” Mira asked Emma. Adam was staying late in the city for drinks with his co-workers, and Mira and the children were waiting for dinner to finish up in the oven. Mira had subscribed to one of those meal delivery kits that condensed meal preparation to opening plastic bags and heating their contents. Tonight’s chicken parmesan was beige when it came out of the package, so Mira chopped up garlic and added the purple potatoes she bought at the farmer’s market. Emma, sitting at the dining room table, looked up from her homework and considered Mira.

 

“You look like a mom,” Emma said.

 

“Well, that’s refreshing.”

 

“Like a mom mom,” Emma clarified. “Not like one of those underage hot moms.”

 

Mira stood before the hallway mirror, the reflection of the marsh behind her. She knew she was becoming objectively less attractive. It wasn’t her imagination: Adam had difficulty looking at her directly, as if she were a too bright sun. Her entire face was different, changing in small but accelerated degrees. These things happened to women; they lost their youth and the world averted its eyes so it wouldn’t have to witness such a thing.

 

Mira felt curiously dispassionate when she considered it. She was more interested in tracking the recession of her beauty than chasing it. She was noticeably older—at once brittle and soft—but her skin was brimming with electricity. She got little shocks when she touched things: the decorations that kept moving, the children, Adam. It was the glimmering of something, a shoot pushing through resistive earth.

 

—

 

After discovering the house’s movement Mira spent most of her days inside, leaving only to take the children to school or to run the most necessary of errands. She stopped visiting John Brodie; it was enough of an effort to keep up with her family’s conversations. The house was still her secret, but Brodie might be able to pry it out of her. Sometimes he would pause at the pavement in front of her house, coming no closer than the farthest edge of the walkway before moving along.

 

Adam asked if she might want to do more things out of the house—join the school’s PTA, see if there were any local volunteer opportunities. He couldn’t imagine what she did all day in the house. It was fine, he stressed, after working hard for so many years. He just couldn’t believe she was satisfied with so little to do. Mira did not debate her husband on the exhaustiveness of domestic duties. She did not tell him things were moving in their house, all the time, and that it was more than enough to keep her occupied.

 

There was a spiraling structure to what was happening, the items always moving in the same counter-clockwise manner. Pictures of the Ayer family, arranged in a deliberately casual manner above the living room mantle, left their position and traveled across the bifold door. They passed over the dining room, the thin stretch of wall above the open kitchen, and orbited back to their original spot by the time the children returned from school.

 

The largest concentration of activity was in the living room and lessened as it radiated outward to the surrounding rooms, the decorations and furnishings moving at a slower pace in the kitchen and bedrooms. Mira sat for hours in the living room trying to catch the movement but she could not—not out of the corners of her eyes, not even as she was sure the couch itself had shifted while she was on it. If she had some way to graph the movement, she was certain it would have a natural symmetry, like the innate geometry of a nautilus shell.

 

The objects in the side room—the room that had evaded major renovation—did not move at all. Mira had furnished it sparsely when they first moved in, and now she brought in additional decorations to see if anything would change, but the room remained still. Mira didn’t know what to think of it, this static refuge in an ever-moving house. She ran her hands over its walls, trying to find a pulse, but instead the brimming shocks in her hands quieted.

 

Her fingers found the wall’s mirrored lip, and this seemed to be a clue, an invitation even. Mira retrieved a screwdriver from the garage and picked at the edge. A chunk of the mirror broke off, and as Mira turned the piece over in her hand she caught a glimpse of her own face. When she saw herself she felt the electricity return, whisking the blood back and forth in her veins. She was overcome with the need to see the mirror in its entirety.

 

Mira drove to the drugstore and filled her cart with nail polish remover. The checker hesitated as he rang the last bottles up but said nothing. Though she intended to start the next day once everyone was out of the house, as soon as she returned home she doused a rag with the remover and held it to a section of the wall. She scrubbed furiously with the rag and scraped at the loosened paint with her fingernails.

 

There were layers of paint—not just the warm gray Ken’s painters had applied, but a light peacock hue Beverly must have chosen. Mira was covered in sweat and slightly high from the fumes of the acetone. She scrubbed until she saw her own face in the speckled mirror, blurry, as though it had not yet found its final shape. She could see the channels of the marsh behind her in the mirror, even as she knew the marsh was in the wrong position; it would not be reflected here. Mira’s eyes followed the winding lines of the water in the mirror until she was dazzled. The room had gone humid. She scoured and scraped until she felt the walls of the room start to awaken.

 

“Mom.” Emma’s exasperated voice cut through the thickened air. “Mom, I can’t find my….” Her voice trailed off. “Dad!” she shouted. “Mom has scratched up the wall! Come and see it.”

 

Adam shuffled in, and seeing the mirrored wall, was quiet. “I thought we were going for beachy minimalist,” he finally said.

 

—

 

Adam’s company was having its annual employee review period, and for two weeks he would have to work extended hours. After sitting down with him and bearing his interrogations about her afternoon with the wall, Mira convinced him she had only suffered a moment of renovator’s remorse, exacerbated by the inactivity of her days.

 

Mira stayed out of the side room and volunteered at the children’s school. When she came home in the afternoons with Willy and Emma, the house’s silent admonishment pressed upon her. Mira had grown uncertain after her day in the room; she did not trust herself or the house. She remembered what Ken had said about bringing the children into the house, and it occurred to her that she had failed them on some basic maternal level of protection.

 

But the children remained blissfully unaware of anything that did not revolve around them. They were mildly embarrassed to have Mira in their classrooms, re-shelving books and filing paperwork for their teachers. Emma did not acknowledge Mira on school grounds, and Willy gently asked if she wouldn’t want a real job, like she used to have. Being in the classroom was unbearably dull, and Mira wondered what the house’s decorations were doing, if they had frozen in her absence or if they continued in their fatalistic pattern.

 

Adam left early for work Monday morning, and Mira decided she would not join the children at school that day. After dropping them off, she stood on the pavement outside the house, its half-drawn windows staring back at her. John Brodie was watching her from the window of his living room and raised a hand of greeting.

 

Two crows perched on her porch’s railing. Mira was sure they were the same crows she saw when they bought the house, but they were no longer awkward—they were fully formed and beautiful. Brodie, his face stern, beckoned to her through his window, clawing the air as though he could pull her to him. Mira’s hands, static since her afternoon in the side room, were tingling. She turned from Brodie and made her way up the stairs. As she approached, the crows launched themselves into the sky, their feathers gleaming like oil slicks.

 

Adam had kept the door to the side room closed after Mira’s incident, but now it was open, and Mira entered and sat before the mirrored wall. At first she saw only her own reflection. She stayed there so long she memorized every line of her body, even as it changed before her eyes. Mira stayed in that same place until something within her constricted, and time circled and doubled back on itself. Parts of her were trickling out, and new parts washing in.

 

—

 

The sounds of her family on the other side of the door, increasingly distinct, pulled at Mira. When she emerged from the side room, it was night. All the lights in the house had been turned on. The contents of their home, all the furniture and knickknacks, were in a violent circle of disarray, as though they had been placed in a giant blender with no lid.

 

Willy let out a cry when he saw her, and Emma pressed against her father’s side. Adam stared at her nakedly, unable to wrest his gaze from her face. She was irresistible now. The hallway mirror reflected what her family saw: her body had devoured the little shocks. Her face and chest were a droughted landscape, raised and scarred. But her feet—her feet were just skimming the ground. She was strong and graceful, like a dancer. Mira laughed, and that too was new: percussive, an echoing rasp of a sound. Behind her in the mirror, the waters of the marsh had broken free of their forced channels and were lapping at the back porch.

 

Her body was molten, and the cooling waters of the marsh beckoned. Mira swept past Adam and the children into the awaiting evening, her electric fingers propelling her forward through the night like a breaststroke.

 

It’s not a departure, it’s a transition, the bracing air sang. She wasn’t leaving—there was no here or there anymore. The waters of the marsh held a duplicate of the night sky. They met Mira with the grace of a practiced host, welcoming her home, and removing the rest of her burden like a cloak.

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The 125th Commandment

The week Amy got her first disciple was the same as many others that year. The morning radio talked about the eruption of Kilauea off in Hawaii, and at Glendening Elementary, Ms. Welch read the third graders Twenty-One Balloons and Lizard Music so they could better understand the nature of volcanoes. All Amy knew of them she had learned from a children’s science program on PBS where they had shown how life was returning twenty years after the last eruption of a mountain (whose name she couldn’t remember), but the pretty host of the show was wrapped in a blue duffle coat and green leg warmers, so it must have been someplace cold. Later the volcano had blown again, she couldn’t remember when, and all she could think of was how silly the gophers had been to move back, to settle in as if the danger was over. Silly, silly pocket gophers, it’s never over, she had thought. Their babies must have died too. If she was a pocket gopher she would protect all the babies from eruptions big and small, then build them houses on something quiet and sedimentary, just like sweet Jesus did.

 

The idea of Peter being Jesus’s rock had comforted her almost as much as hearing that if she put a quarter in the basket and sang on key she would eventually go to a place where there was no screaming, only harps and wings and songs with regular measures. She had looked around for a rock on which to build but had been disappointed in what she found. Her brother Michael would make a poor rock on account of him being obstinate and swearing all the time.

 

Amy certainly was with her babysitter enough for her to be a good candidate, but Diana was a shaky foundation at best, being always five seconds away from a major meltdown. Plus, the way she kept her fingernails filed to points and painted cherry red wasn’t all that church-like, and Jesus probably didn’t approve of how she treated the baby. Then again, she was making the decisions here, not Jesus, but she agreed with Jesus on this one, so, no, Diana just wouldn’t do. Ms. Welch was calm and orderly, which Amy appreciated, but after 3:00 p.m. she went her own way and Amy went hers. A part-time rock was like no rock at all. After looking most of the week, she finally broke down Thursday morning and asked her mother.

 

“I’m starting a religion, Mom. Would you be my rock after they crucify me?”

 

The rusted Mustang struggled up the incline in the 5:00 a.m. dark of the winter morning. Her mother was silent, face focused forward on the skyline of the city in the distance.

 

“Really, Mom, I need someone to do this, okay? I don’t want to go around setting up people for glory just to find out later I didn’t have the right rock so nobody cared. Okay? Okay, Mom, okay?”

 

“Amy, please, it’s early, have a little pity.”

 

Although she’d been told many times that her mother’s nerves were shot from nightly data entry classes at the vocational school; even though she’d been told that no one likes a blabbermouth like her cousin Charlie’s wife, Lynn, who, it was said, could’ve helped the boys win last year’s Labor Day raft race if only they’d used her mouth as a motor; and even though she hadn’t even written her own commandments yet, so wasn’t entirely sure what her religion would require, she continued talking.

 

“It wouldn’t take much, Mom. You’d just need to walk around telling people how great I’d been and, well, come out and meet me when I come back. That’s a big part. I’d like it if maybe you could bring some chocolate milk with you when you come meet me on the road. I’ll probably be pretty thirsty after being dead three days and all. Okay?”

 

“I’ll get you a rock all right,” Michael murmured from the back seat, “upside your head.” The summer before he had entered a new level of cool, being eleven and all. During lunch recess, he and his friends would jump the back fence and smoke by the creek. When Amy would try to follow, they’d say, “No, teachers’ll miss your mouth.” He listened to Aerosmith and Stevie Ray Vaughn and took down all his Michael Jackson and Culture Club posters.

 

“Well, you’re not going to be my rock, so there.”

 

He pushed on the back of her seat, jostling her forward and causing her neck to struggle against the seatbelt.

 

“Fuck you.” He hit the seat again.

 

“Watch that mouth.” Their mother came out of her traffic-induced haze and adjusted the heater vent, sending a blast of warm air toward the back seat.

 

“Why? What’s it gonna do? Tricks?”

 

“I mean it. Diana says she won’t take either of you anymore if you mouth off again. Says the other kids are picking it up.”

 

“What? That slut Tracy’s only 16 and’s got a kid already. There’s a bad influence around there, but it ain’t me.”

 

“Michael, hush.”

 

“You know Diana offered me macaroni and cheese for a week if I’d go throw a bag of dog shit on the dude’s porch?”
Amy perked up at the mention of macaroni and cheese. She thought she heard her mother whisper “trash.”

 

“I wish I had the money to keep you over at Judy’s, but she’s asking more than I’ve got.”

 

“Why, Mom? What’s wrong with Diana’s?” Amy asked.

 

“Huh? Oh Amy, don’t worry about it. And don’t you go saying anything to her about what I said either.”

 

Their mother went back to focusing on the traffic, waiting for it to ease up so she could make the left-hand turn into the babysitter’s driveway. The children opened their doors and said their goodbyes, and their mother pulled away into the morning traffic that would take her the half hour to the Dyserts’ fertilizer factory out on Route 33. Amy liked that her mother was working for the Dyserts now, not only because the pay was more regular than temping as a secretary, but also because all the pennies in her pockets came back green, which Amy took as a sure sign her mother was magical and indeed worthy of being her rock.

 

Once inside the coal and wood fire-scented coziness and chaos of Diana’s, they went into their regular routine. Michael headed for the new addition, where the black and orange afghan was already waiting for him, still crumpled on the edge of the couch where he’d left it the night before. There were plans to add siding sometime soon, but for now the addition was just the old back porch enclosed with Tyvek and drywall. Although the word seemed a bit much for the space, Diana liked the sound of “the addition,” like things were on their way to adding up to something grand. On most mornings there were six of them, nine if you counted Diana’s two still at home, but since the Stoudts didn’t come until nearly eight, almost time to catch the bus anyway, there was plenty of space. Michael in the addition, Amy on the brown nubby sofa in the living room, and Tracy’s baby in a pen in the kitchen.

 

“This kid ever go home?”

 

Amy leaned into the pen to get a better look at the splotch of dried pea on the baby’s cheek.

 

“You ever shut up?” Diana asked as she chopped something tough and brown on the cutting board. The voice of Dusty Rhodes on 700 WLW (The Voice of Ohio River Valley) was deep and soothing. Amy could see why Diana still listened to him even though the station was coming from down to Cincinnati. He described the smoke that warned of a coming new eruption and the evacuation of people living near, but neither Amy nor Diana paid much attention and let his voice be a comforting drone in the background.

 

“It stinks. You should clean it.”

 

“Well, thank you, Miss Blondie. I’ll make sure to get around to that.”

 

The way Diana called her Miss Blondie confused Amy since all she could think of was that singer her cousin Dustin listened to, who seemed, by all accounts, attractive and successful. She said it with a note of blame, a note of disgust, a note of disdain which led Amy to believe that where Diana was from it must have meant something else. Since she couldn’t figure it out, and Diana just walked away whenever she’d asked, Amy took it as a compliment.

 

Amy pushed herself up to see onto the counter.

 

“That looks like last night’s liver.”

 

“Because it is.”

 

Diana chopped the pieces smaller and smaller until each was only the size of a single bite, something that could almost be swallowed without chewing, something that would not go down easy, but would go down all the same.

Amy still remembered the gritty taste from the night before, how hard it had been to make herself chew it thirty-two times before forcing it the rest of the way down.

 

“For Christ sake, just swallow it,” Diana had said in response to her faces of exaggerated chewing and disgust. But Ms. Welch had said “chew 32,” so chew 32 was what she would do. There are ways things should be and ways they shouldn’t. Michael hadn’t eaten his and had nearly flung the plate on the floor, but Diana’s husband Clint had raised his hand, a warning none of the kids ignored more than once.

 

“This is shit. Cheap shit.”

 

He’d walked out to the addition to finish House of Danger, the Choose Your Own Adventure book he’d started that morning. Diana had picked up the liver with her long thick nails, real but so good looking you would have thought they were press-ons. She put it in a small orange Tupperware with a clear lid which now sat empty beside the cutting board as she chopped.

 

“This isn’t for breakfast is it? Because Commandment Number 5 of Amyanity clearly states Thou shalt eat no liver on Thursdays before noon. Now, Fruity Pebble, Fruity Pebbles would be excellent. If you have Fruity Pebbles, I would accept those as an appropriate tithe.”

 

“This is Michael’s breakfast, you’ll get yours when you wake back up. Now go on, get to your couch.”

 

“Tuck me in?”

 

“In a minute.”

 

Satisfied, Amy went to the living room to lie down. The thought of liver two days in a row would have been too much and she was glad she’d been quick enough to think to add that commandment. As she snuggled under the Dutch girl quilt, she began to hope there’d be grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner that night. Even though she knew Commodities didn’t get passed out until Saturday and the possibility of any of the cheese being left on a Thursday evening was slim, she was sure that if she hoped hard enough, it would be there. She’d get done with her homework and there on her plate would be the warm melting deliciousness, maybe even with macaroni salad made with the shells instead of the little elbow pastas, the shells that trapped the mayo and celery inside so you didn’t know you were getting some until it was in your mouth. It was comforting to know that sometimes good things were hidden, but that eventually you would bite down and have yourself a mouthful. And Coke, maybe there would be Coke still in the can too, with a little drop of water coming down the side like in the commercials. She wouldn’t share any of it with Michael. Not sharing was selfish though, she probably should share. Maybe she’d share with the baby, she liked the baby. Yes, it was settled, she would share the Coke with the baby. And maybe Clint would have to work late and Diana would let her talk during dinner. The daydream grew and grew, as daydreams do.

 

Since she couldn’t sleep, she focused on what the evening would be like with its grilled cheese and Coke, trying not to hear what was happening in the addition. The “I won’ts”, “you wills,” and “fuck yous,” soft things hitting the walls, hard things hitting the walls, and finally the sound of a mouth being held shut against its will, which is to say, stillness. Soon Diana, flustered but victorious, came to check on her and put an extra log in the fireplace. Amy didn’t ask about the noise, just stayed quiet waiting for any cue from Diana. She knew not to question, but could she talk at all? Tell her about her next commandment, which would run something like thou shalt not scuffle between sundown and sunup on the Sabbath, every day being the Sabbath in Amyanity?

 

“Good night, Diana,” she said, finally figuring this was safe enough.

 

“It’s morning, Amy.”

 

She caught a glimpse of the brown liver lodged beneath Diana’s red thumbnail.

 

“Oh, well then, good night/good morning.”

 

Diana shook her head. “Okay kid, good night/good morning,” and she walked back to the kitchen to wipe down the cutting board and listen to the radio announcer report on the distant volcano disrupting the lives of others.

 

“Diana?” Amy called.

 

“Don’t sound like you’re sleeping.”

 

Amy slid into the kitchen. “Diana, I’m worried about the volcano. Will we get evacuated?”

 

She sighed, answered anyway, “We’ll get some heavy rains our way, that’s about it.”

 

“Any ash?”

 

“Ash? How strong you think the winds are?”

 

“Ms. Welch said that when Krakatoa blew, they had ash in Connecticut and snow in July in Cleveland. Cleveland! I’m just saying I don’t want snow in July like those people got back then. I’m sick of winter already. I want to be warm when it’s supposed to be warm.”

 

“No, Amy, it’s just on the radio. It ain’t happening to you.”

 

“Then why do they keep talking about it?”

 

Diana paused and, having no answer, returned to her original stance.

 

“You don’t look like you’re sleeping.” She turned Amy toward the living room with a gentle scootch.

 

That night for dinner they had Johnny Marzetti with pintos instead of beef, even though it was better with kidneys. Dreaming of grilled cheese during arithmetic had been nice and thinking of the Coke, a pleasant distraction during recess when Michael was showing his friends the scratches on his arms and face. Michael’s badass status, for the day at least, turned the fight into a win-win. Amy’s list of commandants grew: thou shalt not build a fire when the coal furnace is running lest the smells conflict and thou shalt have no scratches. The redness of the lines on Michael’s arms worried her, like maybe they could get infected or leave a scar. He ate his dinner that night without a fuss. Then again, it wasn’t liver. The evening would have been reasonably pleasant except for the baby’s crying that drowned out everything, from the sound of T.C.’s helicopter on Magnum to the filing of Diana’s nails in the living room.

 

“Shut it up or call its mama to come get it.” Clint had little patience now that his own three were in their teens and learned their lessons long ago. Diana held the baby tightly, hoping the weight of her body would comfort it, but this did no good. The baby didn’t know that Furnace Two had gone down at the plant that day. The steel had begun to set in the vat and not in the wheel molds. The baby didn’t know that Clint was looking at a long, hot weekend, as everyone on B Crew would pull double shifts to get the vat cleared out and ready for another week of steel and fire. The baby didn’t know that Clint’s oldest girl, Shelly, had announced at dinner that she wasn’t going into the Army after graduation as planned, but instead was keeping her job at Central Hardware to be closer to her boyfriend. The baby didn’t know that it wasn’t the only one who just needed a good nap and some clean underwear.

 

“When’s Tracy getting off tonight?”

 

“Ten.”

 

“What?”

 

“Ten.” The louder she spoke, the louder the baby cried.

 

“When?”

 

“Oh, Jesus, ten o’clock, Clint. Tracy will be back around ten and Rod’s not got the sense God gave a cricket.”

Diana went into the kitchen to heft the baby into the pen and Amy followed.

 

“In my religion, babies can cry whenever they want and no one will yell. You can be my first disciple.” The baby was not comforted by this promise.

 

“You can be my disciple, too.” Amy placed her hand on Diana’s shoulders as she hunched over the Formica countertop, hands raised, eyes closed for a moment. Amy tried to reach up to pat her head, but could not quite make it.

 

“Special Commandment 73: All babysitters will have assistant babysitters. I could be your helper, Diana. Take the baby for walks, play peek-a-boo, clean her up after supper.”

 

“She don’t want to play peek-a-boo and can’t tell the difference between dirty and clean.”

 

“Oh.”

 

The solution had seemed so reasonable, Amy was unsure where to go next, so she went to her couch to sleep until nine when her mother would get out of class. To sleep meant she couldn’t hear whatever was happening in the kitchen. But she still knew. It was the same thing that happened every night and it never ended well for the baby. Diana never seemed more relaxed, but things were quieter, which was something. When she arrived, her mother said nothing about the scratches and neither Amy nor Michael brought them up.

 

The next day was Friday, which meant her mother would pick them up at six and they would have dinner at their own house sitting around the little maple table Granny Mingus had passed down after she’d gotten that government grant to update the house. It had looked so small in the new space that her kids had pitched in to buy a new one that fit better. They had gotten the old one with its years of gum stuck to the underside and its mismatched center leaf. The thought of that dinner could get Amy through the day. Commandment 87: Thou shalt eat pizza at home each Friday with milk and salad (cucumbers and radishes optional). She liked the way that sounded. Her commandments were coming together nicely. It felt good to have a list, to know that X and Y could and would add up to Z, even if she had to write the equation herself. She hadn’t decided yet what the afterlife in Amyanity would bring, but it would be more interesting than angels and harps and less time consuming than reincarnation.

 

Friday morning Amy was ready to move to this next step. “Mom, what should Heaven be like? I think I’ve got my rules, now I just need the reward. No one will do anything without a reward.”

 

Her mother cranked the engine and pulled the car out toward Diana’s.

 

“What should it be, Mom? There’ll definitely be no homework and maybe no rain or snow. What else, Mom? What else?”

 

“Quiet. Heaven will be a very quiet place.”

 

“Oh, but what about birds? Won’t there be birds in Heaven? My Heaven should definitely have birds.”

 

“Take a fucking hint you moron,” Michael pushed the base of his hand into the seatback, then once again for good measure, and the car was quiet the rest of the drive.

 

Truly, Amy hadn’t planned to steal the baby that day. After she’d said “goodnight/ goodmorning” to Diana, she lay on the couch picking at its large decorative buttons, unable to sleep. Usually the house was quiet in the morning except for the radio and small kitchen noises as Diana packed her children’s lunches and fixed their breakfasts. The evenings were the loud times, when Clint was home and the TV was on. But today the baby was crying. Diana had yelled first, then turned the radio up, then yelled again. When Amy heard the slap over the Dusty Rhodes Show, she felt a commandment she’d forgotten to write had been broken. One about mornings, and quiet, and babies getting to be babies.

 

She was tired of people not respecting Amyanity. At this rate none of them would get to Heaven. After Diana passed through the living room toward the back hallway, Amy snuck to the kitchen and lifted the baby from her pen. She hadn’t been expecting it to weigh so much, or maybe she had been expecting herself to be stronger. The baby was surprised to silence, assessing the new situation. It was too cold to walk outside without taking time to get their winter gear on, by then Diana would be back from the bathroom. So she took the baby downstairs where no one ever went except to put more coal in the furnace or to do laundry. She hunkered down under Tracy’s old clothes hanging from the water pipe, the red corduroy overalls making a cozy fort. The concrete cold seeped through her jeans making her chilled even though the furnace was not far away.

 

“It’ll be okay. Don’t you worry now.” She sat the baby, all squiggly arms and flailing legs, in her lap. It made soft guttural noises of escape and reached its arms toward the ground. She heard her name being called from above and then the sound of the backdoor opening. Attempting peek-a-boo with the baby did not distract it from reaching for the hot, bright metal of the furnace not two feet away. It was not a very good disciple; it didn’t care if she ever reappeared from behind her hands. The door reopened and she heard the quick movement of feet above her and the older children being roused from their sleep. Her name some more, doors being opened, doors being closed, the word “Hell” a few times, her name some more.

 

“Let’s go somewhere where there’s no yelling, okay? What do you think of that, baby? Not a quiet place, just no yelling. Except you, you can yell all you want. Yell your head off. And me too, I can yell. We can yell our fool heads off. What do you think of that, baby, what do you think of that?” She took the coo as an assent and smiled. Although she was still unsure where such a place was, knowing it might be out there was comforting.

 

“No, baby, that’s hot,” and she struggled to pull the baby’s arm back toward her and away from the furnace. It began to cry and push her away. The word “basement” and the scuffle of four pairs of feet came from above. No shushing or bouncing would stop it, so she held the baby loose to her chest to muffle the sound, but it squirmed even more.

 

“I don’t hear her anymore,” Michael said when he was halfway down the steps. Amy pressed the baby tighter as she’d seen Diana do, it was still. She tucked her feet under and let Tracy’s old clothes engulf them both as Michael moved around the room shifting boxes of old Barbie gear and Star Wars toys for just a minute to sound like he was giving a good search.

 

“Maybe it was coming from outside?”

 

“Keep looking.”

 

He sighed and put his hands on an old T-ball uniform and a ballerina skirt then slid the clothes back and forth, his eyes never leaving the ceiling.

 

“Nope, not down here.”

 

He huffed his way back up the steps and Amy heard four pairs of feet heading out in the winter dark. The sun was just beginning to rise over the east edge of town, catching the light off the well-meaning but not quite right skyscraper of the LeVeque Tower. They would all go to school soon and Diana would take a nap before Price Is Right. Breakfast, kids off, nap, Showcase Showdown, lunch, and Days of Our Lives with tidying during the commercials. That was the way it had gone when Amy had been home sick from school, and she was counting on that being Diana’s ritual. She could probably get the baby down the hill and to her house while Diana was sleeping. There would be the spare key to get in, and she could hide out until her mom got off work. Her mom would know what to do; otherwise she wouldn’t be the rock. She’d bring the baby chocolate milk and show Amy how to get the peas from its face and how to soothe it when it cried. After a few minutes, Amy relaxed her hold and took a deep breath. The baby reached up and patted her face. She crossed her eyes and rolled her tongue to make it giggle.

 

Unsure what else to do, she sat and waited for the baby to grow restless again, for the sound of the game show to start, for someone to realize that half-assed was the only way Michael ever did anything and come double-check the basement. While she waited she made a new commandment, one that was the best one yet. Commandment 125: Everything turns out okay in the end. It has to, it just has to.

 

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