Category: Fiction

Snake Eyes

We found the snake lying stretched across the road, a black gash extending from the sewage grate on one side of the street to the rain gutter on the other, and I wondered what it would be like to fill space, to lounge, to occupy more than the boundaries allotted to me.

 

It was a muggy afternoon in the middle of July, and heat radiated off the asphalt in waves. The air smelled of tar and leaves, and of something else, something sweet and vegetal. Sweat dripped between my shoulder blades and pooled in the small of my back, soaking the waistband of my shorts. From where I stood near the foot of the driveway, I could see the snake’s tongue, flicking in and out of its mouth, as if to sample the air.

 

Abhi, who stood beside me, took a tentative step forward. I could tell from the look on his face that he was planning something stupid. He would be thirteen in September and thought much of this fact, all puffed up with the pride of impending manhood that was his inheritance. Just that morning, he had insisted on having coffee with his breakfast, insisted too on having it without sugar or milk. He’d taken a big gulp but ended up spitting it right back into the cup. He was all bluster.

 

Predictably, Roshni wanted us to shoo the snake away. “It’s going to get in the house if we don’t do something,” she said. She kept a good several yards back from the snake, turned half toward it and half toward us, one eye trained on it, warily, the other on us, no less wary.

 

At seventeen, Roshni was the de facto leader of our little group. I say group, but that makes it sound more organized and volitional than it was. In reality, it was just the three of us, Roshni, Abhi, and me, together only because of the circumstance of birth—me and Roshni to the same parents; Abhi to our dad’s sister—together only because it was summer and Roshni was in charge while our parents were at work.

 

“It’s not doing anything. This is so retarded,” Abhi said, with a slight whine that irritated me to no end.

 

“Abhi! You can’t say that,” I said, shoving his arm. “That’s really offensive. You’re such a jerk.”

 

“You’re really annoying, you know that, Poonam?”

 

“You’re really ugly, you know that, Abhi?” I said. Back then, my verbal sparring prowess was no better than Abhi’s, and I exhibited all of the sophistication one might expect of a fourteen-year-old.

 

“You can’t call me ugly. That’s offensive to ugly people,” he said.

 

I took another step towards Abhi, thinking a good shove toward the snake was just the thing to put him in his place. Everything about him infuriated me—his insufferable voice, the way he wore his T-shirt tucked into his cargo shorts and his socks pulled up almost to his knees, the way he always insisted on explaining things to me like I was an incompetent, vacuous idiot, as if I wasn’t fifteen months older than him. He’d been staying with us for a week, and by that point, I was sick of him. It didn’t used to be that way—back when we were younger, we’d been inseparable. I don’t know when I’d started to hate his guts.

 

“Cut it out,” Roshni said. She jerked me back, pulling my arm hard. She wouldn’t have been so rough with anyone else, of course—wouldn’t risk Abhi telling our parents on her. Me, she knew she had under her thumb.

 

I rubbed my arm where she had grabbed me and took a grudging step away from Abhi.

 

“I’m going to poke it,” Abhi said. He bent to pick up a fallen branch from the side of the road and thrust it out in front of him, wielding it like a sword as he approached the snake.

 

“Stop it, Abhi. You’re going to get hurt,” Roshni said. She tried to reach for him, but he was too far away, and she was too afraid of the snake to move from where she was rooted.

 

It seemed like the whole neighborhood and the entire surrounding mountainside had fallen still, the birdsong and chatter of squirrels and cicadas silent as every creature waited with bated breath.

 

The snake lay motionless too, its thick form still roped across the asphalt. At some point, it had raised the front of its body off the road and turned to look in our direction, hovering in an s-curl, poised and ready to strike.

 

Abhi alone was still moving, and he inched slowly toward the snake. The branch trembled in his hands as he lowered it. Roshni and I watched, entranced by his audacity and his stupidity. A clump of dead leaves and grass dangled from one end of the branch and quivered in the air, threatening to fall, hanging on by a blade.

 

Abhi took another step forward, and then I don’t know what came first: Roshni’s scream, Abhi’s scream, the snake’s disappearance, Abhi lying on the ground clutching his left leg, the bite.

 

Probably the bite.

 

—

 

“Mummy, you need to come home right now,” Roshni was saying into the kitchen phone. “Abhi needs to go to the hospital.”

 

She sounded surprisingly calm for someone who, only a few minutes earlier, had been screaming like she’d just witnessed a murder or was about to become the victim of one.

 

After the bite, we had rushed Abhi up the driveway and into the house. Roshni made Abhi lie down in the living room and wrapped a tea towel around his calf. Two red specks bloomed on the white and gray checkered fabric. Abhi was still clutching his leg and moaning almost continuously. Snot bubbled out from his nose. Some of it had already dried in a beige, boogery patch on the tip of it and smeared across his cheek.

 

“Do you want ice?” I asked. “Does it hurt?” I stood well away from where he was lying, keeping the coffee table between us. I wanted to be useful, but I also hated sick people, and the latter feeling was winning out. Something soft brushed my foot. I looked down and realized I’d unwittingly carried Abhi’s branch inside; the clump of leaves and grass hanging from it had fallen onto my foot. I set the branch down on the coffee table.

 

“No, don’t give him ice. Are you stupid or what?” Roshni yelled from the kitchen. “What if it stops the blood flow and the poison just stays there and he gets gangrene or something? The tissue could die. He could lose his leg.”

 

As soon as our parents had agreed that Roshni could go to UNC in the fall, she’d announced her plan to be pre-med. She’d let it go to her head. I suspected that she had no idea what she was talking about.

 

“Nothing, Mummy, it’s fine. Poonam was just being annoying,” Roshni said into the phone.

 

“Venom,” Abhi said, his voice strained and croaking.

 

“What?” I asked him.

 

“It’s venom. Poison is absorbed. Venom is injected,” he said, lifting his head up off of the faded flowered armrest. He sounded more cogent, the feebleness gone from his voice.

 

“What?” I repeated. I was still feeling dazed and overexcited from all that had happened, and thinking felt strangely like wading through molasses. “Why are you giving me a science lesson?”

 

“God, you are stupid.”

 

“Mummy and Pappa are on their way,” Roshni said as she came back into the room. She sat down on the coffee table, on the couch side.

 

“Ooooh, my leg,” Abhi said, letting his head fall back against the armrest. “Oooh, the pain.” He flung an arm over his forehead and closed his eyes, grimacing.

 

“Don’t just stand there—make yourself useful. Get him some water and the ibuprofen,” Roshni said to me. Then, turning back to Abhi, she said, her voice softer, “Does it hurt a lot? Can you still feel your leg? Can you wriggle your toes?”

 

I left Roshni to minister to Abhi and went into my parents’ bathroom down the hall to look for the ibuprofen. As I rummaged through the medicine cabinet, I could still hear them both, their voices only a little muffled through the thin wall separating the bathroom from the living room.

 

“Did you see where the snake went? Should we try to find it? In case they need to make an antidote?” Roshni was saying.

 

I rolled my eyes. I suspected the snake wasn’t venomous—it just looked like a rat snake—but I wasn’t going to tell them that. I knew all too well that Abhi and Roshni wouldn’t believe me. They were both enjoying themselves far too much to be persuaded to see reason.

 

When I returned to the living room, Roshni was telling Abhi not to elevate his leg. “It’ll make the poison flow backwards into your bloodstream. It could eventually reach your heart. Or even your brain.”

 

“Here,” I said, holding the bottle out to Abhi. He just looked at me blankly, unmoving.

 

“Here, let me,” Roshni said, snatching the bottle from me. “Is he supposed to take this without water?” she asked, with her back to me.

 

I rolled my eyes again and stormed away, muttering to myself. I hated when Roshni ordered me around, but I knew if I didn’t do as she said, I’d have hell to pay later.

 

From the kitchen, I could still hear Abhi’s moans. “Oooh, it hurts.” I opened a cabinet door more forcefully than was necessary, and it slammed against the cabinet beside it. “Oooh, my leg.” He was milking this. He would be so much more unbearable now than he already was.

 

“Maybe I should make a tourniquet. Maybe it’ll stop the poison from spreading,” Roshni was saying when I returned with a glass of water.

 

Luckily for Abhi, that was when we heard my parents pull into the driveway.

 

“Can you hold the glass to my mouth, Poonam?” Abhi said, fluttering his eyes weakly open, his arm still flung over his forehead. “I’d do it myself but—ooooh—I’m too weak to do—oooh, my leg—to do anything.”

 

—

 

The hospital was halfway between our town and the neighboring one. It would take us a good forty minutes to drive there on our own, but my parents hadn’t wanted to call an ambulance.

 

“We’ll be left with a bill for close to $1,000,” I’d heard my father tell my mother when they’d gotten home. “We don’t have that kind of money.”

 

“Varun could afford it. It’s his own son.”

 

But my father had made up his mind, so we’d all packed into the car. Roshni wouldn’t hear of being left behind, and my parents wouldn’t hear of my staying home alone, no matter how much I begged them. “How can you even think of staying home when your cousin is hurt?” they’d said. “How could you be so heartless?”

 

Easily.

 

On the drive to the hospital, Abhi sat between me and Roshni, with his leg extended and resting on the center console. I held my torso as rigidly as possible and had squeezed close to the window so that no part of me was touching Abhi. He disgusted me. And what if obnoxiousness was contagious?

 

“Who’s at the store?” I asked my parents when we passed Main Street and turned onto the only road out of town. They ran a convenience store a few blocks away, back in the other direction, an off brand 7/11 of sorts, only smaller and less corporate.

 

“We had to close up. It was Pratik’s day off,” my father said, with a little snort. I heard the usual note of bitterness that inflected his words whenever he mentioned Pratik.

 

Pratik was a recent hire—one of those friend of a friend of a friend deals, a fresh transplant from a village outside of Ahmedabad, where we’d moved from. Pratik had worked nearly every day at first, taking only five days off a month, which he said he spent at a temple down in Atlanta. But then five days became six, then seven, then eight, and so on, until he took more days off than he worked.

 

It had seemed obvious to me from the start that Pratik wasn’t praying on his days off. I’d seen him wipe up spilled coffee with the yellowing print of Ganesh that my mother kept taped to the side of the cash register for good luck. Once, when Roshni and I were waiting for my parents at the store, he’d asked Roshni to accompany him to Atlanta. Roshni had reddened and didn’t have a chance to answer before my parents came back out from the backroom, where they had their office. I don’t think Roshni ever told them about the invitation. They would probably have found a way to blame her for Pratik’s creepiness. They were always making excuses for him.

 

I tried to catch my sister’s eye, but Roshni was intently looking out the window on the other side and pretending not to listen. Her right ear, which peeked through her hair, had grown pink.

 

“Why don’t you just fire him?” I asked my parents. Even if Pratik weren’t so creepy, I still would have disliked him. At that age, it didn’t take much for me to develop strong aversions to people, and to me, Pratik was especially gross—he had a paunch; at thirty, already had hair tufting from his ears; and he smelled perpetually of cabbage and tobacco. He always wore short-sleeve button-down shirts with the top three buttons undone, revealing a thick gold chain and his chest hair. I didn’t understand how my parents could bear to keep him around. “Does he even do any work?”

 

“He’s threatened to turn us in to the police,” my father said, still with the same bitterness. He gripped the steering wheel more tightly, his knuckles pale from the effort. “He’s here illegally. He said he’d tell them that we’ve been paying him under the table. We could lose everything.”

 

“But he wouldn’t do that—he’d get deported,” I said.

 

“Leave it,” my mother said, turning to me from the passenger seat. “Your father doesn’t want to think about that good for nothing man.”

 

“Ooooh,” Abhi said, sounding like an especially irritating ghost, but for once I was glad he was there.

 

“We’re almost there,” my mother said. “Does it hurt a lot?”

 

“Is there any weakness?” my father asked. “Can you move your toes?”

 

“I—I think so,” Abhi said, his words thin and shaky. “Oooh, my leg.”

 

I couldn’t stand listening to them anymore. They were all so annoying—they never focused on what was important. I put my headphones in and spent the rest of the car ride looking out the window.

 

The mountains were an effulgence of green. The road twisted and wound its way through thick forest, and at times the deciduous trees were so dense around us that it seemed like we were making our way through a tunnel of leaves. I was beginning to feel nauseous—my father was driving more aggressively than usual and kept rounding the bends sharply—so I was relieved when the sign marking the turn to the hospital came into sight.

 

My father pulled into the hospital complex, and he told us to wait outside until he found a place to park.

 

“I could park—I need to practice for my driver’s test,” Roshni said, hopefully, but my father drove away, dousing her optimism.

 

“Oooh, my leg,” Abhi said, as if in send off, almost cheerful.

 

My mother, Roshni, Abhi, and I stood to one side of the entrance, near an overflowing trashcan that smelled like overripe bananas and rotten eggs. Birdsong sounded from the trees, joyful and incessant. The air was humid and damp, and my shirt clung to me. I scowled up at the big red letters that spelled Emergency over the door. The day was just becoming more and more annoying.

 

—

 

Inside the hospital, we all went up to the check-in window. The woman who worked there was in the middle of a conversation and didn’t look our way. Roshni pushed past me to stand in front, next to our father. She was standing taller than usual, her chin tilted up ever so slightly. She kept looking around, taking it all in—the gray carpeting, the fluorescent lighting, the fake lemon tree sprouting from a dinky plastic pot, the clipboard with a chewed-up pen tied to the metal clip, the tiny American flag planted on the counter.

 

The rest of us crowded behind them. Abhi was no longer moaning, and my mother seemed to shrink into herself. She, like Roshni, kept looking around her, but furtively. I couldn’t help but think of a dog, shamefaced and frightened, cowering. I tried to wipe the image from my mind but couldn’t.

 

My father, who’d been drumming his fingers against his legs, cleared his throat. The receptionist finally turned our way. She was an older woman, probably at least in her fifties, and heavily made up, with her gray roots showing through her purplish-red hair. Her long fake nails were painted a garish fuchsia.

 

“Oh, my,” she said when she saw us, startled.

 

“My nephew was bitten by a snake,” my father said.

 

“It happened at around oh-two-hundred hours,” my sister said. “The specimen was black. I’d say eight to nine feet long. Scaly.” She either ignored or didn’t see the angry look my father shot at her. “I had the patient keep his leg lower than his heart, but there’s no telling what kind of damage there’s been.”

 

“It was more like six feet,” I said. “She’s just exaggerating.”

 

To my right, my mother said to my father, “We weren’t there when it happened. Can you tell her that? Tell her Roshni is old enough to watch them both. We had to work. It was an accident. Can you tell her that?”

 

“Oooh, my leg,” Abhi said.

 

It was the receptionist’s turn to clear her throat, but no one heard her over the chatter. I could see a vein in my father’s forehead had started to pulse, and with one hand, he rubbed his neck and shoulders, as if to smooth away his tension.

 

The waiting room was empty except for an older couple. Both of them watched us intently, like we were aliens, like they’d never seen a spectacle quite like us before. I felt myself getting warm, and I stepped back and to one side, separating myself from the rest of the group.

 

The receptionist cleared her throat again, and my father shhhed the others.

 

“Look, you can’t all be at the window. One of you sign the injured person in and we’ll be right with you.” She picked up the clipboard on the desk to show us and then put it down again, slamming it with a loud thwap.

 

“What happened? What did she say?” my mother asked. “Do they think it’s our fault?”

 

My father shook his head at her and waved us all away. We walked hesitantly to the waiting area. The only remaining seats were arranged in two groups of three on opposite ends of the space, so my mother went with Abhi to one set, and Roshni and I went to the other end, closer to where the older couple was sitting. They were still staring openly at us. I was used to the attention—back then, we were still one of the only non-white families in town—but most people were more discreet. I stuck my tongue out at them, and the woman, flushing, looked away; the man glowered at me but looked away too.

 

—

 

It was a good hour before anyone came to get Abhi. I was bored out of my mind. The TV that hung in one corner of the waiting room was turned to the weather, and I must have watched at least five cycles of their afternoon loop—local weather, commercial, county weather, commercial, repeat. I had looked through probably every magazine they had there and was flipping idly through an old National Geographic with a picture of a lion on its cover, my eyes glazed over, the words a blur.

 

Over on the other side of the waiting room, Abhi had fallen asleep in his chair with his mouth open. He still had snot dried on his face, and now he had dried spit too, a white splotch near the corner of his mouth. My parents sat on either side of Abhi, silent and stony-faced, staring at the TV.

 

Roshni, amazingly, seemed to be enjoying herself. She had wandered over to the coffee and tea station. She didn’t drink either beverage, but the station was set up right by the check-in desk, and from the surreptitious glances she kept casting in that direction, I could tell she was only heating up water so she could listen to the gossip of the women working behind the window. I couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, but it sounded like some nurse or orderly was having an affair with a doctor. I couldn’t tell if they were talking about real life or about a soap opera.

 

A door near the check-in desk opened, and a woman emerged, looking at her clipboard, frowning. She wore scrubs the same shade of fuchsia as the receptionist’s nails, and a pair of earrings shaped like hot air balloons dangled from her ears.

 

“Pay-tell. Pat—Petal?” she said. She looked up from the clipboard and looked around the room. “Petal?” she repeated, more confidently this time.

 

We all looked at each other and then around the waiting room. We were the only ones there—the older couple was long gone and no one else had come in after us.

 

“Patel?” my dad said, half standing from his seat. “Abhi?”

 

“Must be,” the woman said. She pushed the door open further and stood to one side. Her earrings twirled like two tiny spinning beach balls.

 

“Come on, Abhi,” my father said.

 

My mother gently shook Abhi awake. He yawned and got to his feet, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

 

“Can I come too?” Roshni asked.

 

When my father shrugged his response, she set her Styrofoam cup down next to the coffee pot a little too enthusiastically, sloshing hot water onto the table, too delighted to mind the drops that splashed her hand. All four of them disappeared through the swinging door.

 

A plume of steam floated over Roshni’s abandoned cup. From somewhere behind the check-in window, something beeped—a microwave, I guessed, from the garlic-y, tomato-y smell that soon permeated the room. On the other side of the waiting area, across from me, my mother stared mutely at the television, its blue fluorescence reflected on her glasses. I turned to the National Geographic on my lap and tried to read again.

 

“—wet afternoon. A few lingering thunderstorms until evening—”

 

—

 

Abhi was the first to emerge from the swinging door an hour later, limping slightly, his left leg bandaged. My father followed closely behind, and my sister behind him, but holding back a little. She looked grim, and when she approached, I could see her eyes were red and puffy, like she’d been crying.

 

“Let’s go,” my father said, pausing only long enough to jerk his head in the direction of the exit. He brushed past Abhi and out the door, leaving the rest of us to hurry to catch up.

 

Outside, it was even stickier than before. An afternoon thunderstorm had swept through, leaving the parking lot shiny and slick and the air smelling of petrichor. Water had pooled in spots where the ground dipped. Abhi, who walked beside me, tromped through a puddle, splashing brown rainwater on me. I started to say something but thought better of it—my father was watching us from where he stood near the car, stern and tight-lipped.

 

We piled into the car again, and this time, I was forced into the middle. I noticed my mother glance at my father, but she looked quickly away when he turned to check behind him before pulling out of the parking spot.

 

No one spoke, not even Abhi, for the rest of the drive home. I heard my sister sniffle a couple of times, and once, Abhi had a sneezing fit. Otherwise, the only sounds were the spray of water, the clatter of traffic, the low, distant rumble of thunder.

 

When we pulled into the driveway at home, Roshni was the first one out of the car, before my father had even shifted into park. She slammed the car door closed behind her. I noticed a muscle in my father’s neck tense, the clench of his jaw, but he didn’t say anything.

 

“What’s her problem?” I asked, unable to hold my tongue any longer. Everyone was being so weird—even Abhi had been more subdued than I’d ever known him to be. He hadn’t moaned about his leg even once on the whole drive home.

 

“Roshni’s mad she can’t volunteer at the hosp—”

 

“Abhi,” my father said, a note of warning clearly discernible, and Abhi cut himself off.

 

That may have been enough to shut Abhi up, but it wasn’t enough for me. I kept pressing.

 

“Why can’t she? She’s going to be a doctor. She’s going to be pre-med.”

 

“Don’t you start too now,” my father said. He sighed, seeming suddenly weary and old, and got out of the car.

 

—

 

I found Roshni in our room, lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were no longer red, but the skin around them was still puffy and swollen, looking a little bruised.

 

“They’re so annoying,” I said, collapsing onto my own bed. “I can’t wait to get out of here. You’re so lucky you get to leave soon.”

 

Roshni made a noise somewhere between a cough and a laugh.

 

“What?”

 

“Keep dreaming.”

 

“What do you mean?” I sat up and swung my legs off my mattress, dangling them into the space between our twin beds. The room was so cramped and our beds so close together that I could touch Roshni’s bed frame without having to extend my legs. I gripped the metal frame with my toes, flexing and unflexing my feet. “What does dreaming have anything to do with it?”

 

“You know what Pappa said when we were in there and waiting for the doctor?”

 

“Abhi said something about not being able to volunteer at the hospital. So what? That’s not the end of the world.”

 

“That’s not all he said.”

 

“Oh. So what did he say?” I asked, though a slight nagging, tugging sensation told me I knew the answer already.

 

“You’re so slow sometimes. Figure it out yourself.”

 

With that, Roshni climbed down from her bed and left the room.

 

Light streamed in through the worn bedroom curtains, filtered and fluttering, casting long shadows across Roshni’s crumpled comforter and the carpet. Elsewhere in the house, life had moved on. The faint aroma of onions and ghee and cumin suffused the air, and familiar house noises drifted through the open door—the clatter of dishes, the steamy hiss of the pressure cooker, a Jagjit Singh ghazal, a sitcom laugh track. There was no comfort in these smells or noises, no comfort in what they stood for or what they offered, and I lay back down on my bed, feeling strangely empty.

 

—

 

The next day was Friday, and I woke to find myself alone in the house. My parents were usually long gone by the time I woke up in the mornings, but I was surprised that Roshni and Abhi were nowhere to be found. The air conditioner hummed as I creaked through the house, ducked my head into my parents’ bedroom, the hall bathroom, the living room.

 

In the kitchen, I found two cereal bowls next to the sink, the milk still left behind in one of them, tinged the color of wheat fields ready for harvest, a few bloated Cheerios huddled together, bobbing on the surface.

 

I was ready to give up and make myself some toast when I heard voices coming from out in the backyard. It had to be them.

 

Outside, the air, muggy and wet, suggested rain. A thick mist had descended on the mountain, obscuring the surrounding trees and rhododendron thickets. I ran around to the back of the house, following the sound of their voices, the damp earth soft beneath my bare feet.

 

“Maybe it slithered into that rotten log,” Abhi was saying when I found them, pointing a few yards away. His voice seemed peculiar, almost giddy. “Should we look there?”

 

“I’ll check,” Roshni said, yelling the words, sounding as keyed up as Abhi. She wielded a branch like the one Abhi’d had the day before and was using it to push her way through the underbrush, the look of a huntress about her. “We’ll teach that stupid snake not to mess with us.”

 

There was something in the way she spoke, or perhaps the set of her figure, that made me think that looking for the snake had been her idea, that this was her battle.

 

They had their backs to me and hadn’t seen me yet. I kept away, cleaving close to the house. For some reason, I knew that I shouldn’t interfere. It wasn’t my place to get involved. I wouldn’t tell them that they were wasting their time, and that there was little they could do, that the snake was long gone. I suspected that Roshni knew that already, deep down, in some inner recess. But it felt good, even if for a morning, even if for a moment, to pretend to forget.

 

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The Second Story

I got the call from Liam just before dusk, and the sun shut down by the time I made it back to Times Square, to that bar with the tiny sagging stage, where Liam and I stood waiting for the first joke, Short, the six-foot-seven owner of the club who had pink tattoos and a mean resting glare. (This is a comedy club? I’d asked Liam when we’d walked in days before. No, it’s a comedy cellar, he’d corrected with a smirk.) Short had been the one to call Liam, and the point of their conversation was that none of it could wait, that coming back was urgent. “Urgent” was the word I’d have used to describe the conversation I’d been trying to have with Liam for months, a conversation he had avoided with some real talent before we took our seats in that same cellar days before. For a moronic moment I thought the whole reason I was back in this place seventy-two hours after drunkenly yelling You’re not David fucking Sedaris! in the post-punchline quiet at the man I claimed for sixteen years to love was to turn back the clock and find a way to save it all. To save us. To follow Liam to the broken plate of our relationship (which okay, I had thrown), and put it back together so I could keep laughing at his archive of jokes over dinner, which were somehow both colder and deader than whatever discount bass he’d brought home from the market.

 

“It’s the footage,” Short said. “Come on back, I’ll show you.”

 

I waited for Short to walk out of earshot, his head ducking under a low partition and into the other room. I looked at Liam, who looked away.

 

“Do either of you need anything?” Short yelled. “A drink?” The real joke, and I let myself laugh.

 

The back had the feel of a photo darkroom—just enough light to see, the caustic smell of something like bleach making it hard to breathe and harder to focus on the small television monitor Short was looking into, the pixelly blue glow of it on his concerned face. I had spent the entire train ride down to 42nd avoiding the idea that I was obviously the one to blame, which had begun to metastasize out of nowhere, blunt and irrefutable, into a fact.

 

The video showed the audience, and sure enough, there were Liam and me, at a table in the far corner. After thirty seconds, I heard Short inhale sharply and pause the tape.

 

“There,” he said quickly. “You see that? On the wall—”

 

Liam gasped.

 

“I don’t see anything,” I said. I had been intently watching myself, my face, to see if it gave away my disgust about midway through the set, catching the petering trail of laughter after a few efforts at a punchline.

 

“Watch the wall,” Liam said. “Rewind it, watch the wall.”

 

Short cut the footage back fifteen seconds; I watched the wall. After a few deep breaths, in the clip, three white marks appeared over our heads, clawing in jagged lines up for a few seconds before turning a blood red hue, then vanishing.

 

I looked at Liam. “Do you remember this?”

 

“I was right next to you. I didn’t feel a thing.”

 

“What do you want us to do about this?” I said, turning to Short, who held one hand over his mouth, though his demeanor was oddly calm, as if he might have realized it had been nothing at all.

 

“Well, we saw what happened afterward,” Short said. He cut forward on the clip. “It doesn’t come back. The marks I mean. But a few lights burned out. We caught it because we were gonna put it online, the show.”

 

“Sorry, what?” Liam and I said, in different iterations.

 

“We were going to, and then we saw this, so we’re not going to. I want to know what happened the rest of your night.” Short sat back, then stood, his head hitting a hanging bulb; its flicker made us jump. “If this place is haunted we aren’t renewing the fucking lease.”

 

Short clicked off the small television with a fresh expression of concern. What had happened later that night, moments after those marks, was coolly blurred by the martinis the host had served, one after another, and only barely memorable now: the speeding cab howling up the interstate alone, the high pop of a cork echoing quickly in my kitchen, and somewhere among all of this, or between it—before it?—whatever lines I had said, the point of which were that I no longer loved Liam, that wasn’t it time to get honest about our lives, and give up the act? Give up the act was the phrase that hooked on me as I had uncorked that old bottle of port, a sickly sweetness sliding down my throat, like sugary blood. And later that night I was sleeping so well, but when I turned over in bed, my arm had reached instinctively for Liam and landed on a pillow, startling my body awake. As if I’d encountered a ghost.

 

—

 

I had moved to the West Village with Liam halfway through our twenties, in a middle-of-the-night stunt that I felt would change us. And to seem like the kind of people we in truth already were back in Western Mass: well-off, well-dressed, well-poised to, on any given Friday night, blink and find ourselves among affable investment bankers and lawyers and their children, whose idea of danger was wearing white pants to a catered fundraiser they playfully called a barbecue.

 

I did not return until nearly sixteen years later, after my father simply stopped breathing in a reclining chair after drinking one too many bourbons, heart racing from one too many arguments. What I’d heard from a family friend, the pitiful gossip, was that his brain had gone to dementia, and he’d spent the last few years spinning family histories, weird, incoherent stories about his grandparents; his death was a shameless relief, the small home he had left me a burden.

 

After a long morning drive north, Liam and I stood with a man named Greg, whom we’d hired to help with the take/toss for my father’s rusted shovels and peeling horseshoes, whose dumb obliviousness to our gayness made him seem vaguely bisexual. The oil paintings had been done on expensive white canvas and fell with a loud wooden clatter to the ground when I first pried open the old door to the shed in my father’s backyard. Liam took each painting out of the shed and laid it very gently in the grass, a few dozen squares gridding the lawn. Greg took hold of a wheelbarrow in the back and made a surprised “oof.”

 

“Unlucky guy,” Greg remarked at the carcass. He screeched something metal along the floor. “Raccoon, maybe possum. When’d you last get in here?”

 

“Few years,” I lied. I’d last been in the shed as a child, when I caught my finger on one of my father’s deep sea fishing hooks, bleeding a line of red to our front door.

 

The gallery of paintings growing on the lawn—their swirling browns and blues, psychedelic neon reds splashed across cream, the loud pops of yellow like splatters of blood—puzzled me. My father decorated his bedroom with heads of bucks mounted on the walls with rifles and flags. There was a long pause, punctuated by the sound of Greg sweeping up the remains. A pigeon shit on a shingle. For a while, I tried to let the purging register as cathartic, but ultimately I felt nothing. It was like helping a friend move from one side of town to another, if that friend had decided to cut out the hassle of propping their life back up someplace else.

 

“These all say LT, in the corner,” Liam said. He squatted to the ground, eyes flashing from one painting to another. His body registered the name, shocked alert. He looked up at me. “Oh my god, Mark. Laura. Your mom did these!”

 

—

 

The next morning I shuddered awake, as if shaking something off me. I washed my hands. I avoided my reflection in the bathroom mirror and then stared intently into it, two bulls locked by invisible horns. I called Liam and hung up after one ring, two rings. I texted him to be sure he knew it was an accident. I waited for him to reply. I asked him if he had noticed anything strange. I watched, from the window, a man dressed in a tuxedo walk slowly into the foggy park. I tried to make sense of this. I waited for the man to return. I sat down on my bed and noticed a long scratch on my arm. I panicked. I made a note of every trio of things in my apartment, which held their haunted charge. I became suspicious of soup bowls. I vigorously cleaned my counter and sink. I drank a bottle of cheap, caustic wine. I wrote a note apologizing to Liam and dramatically burned it with a lighter, the flame singeing my fingertips. I called Short at Comik. I listened to him tell me he was scared. I missed Liam terribly. I missed him with an addict’s love, in a way outside my own body. I sensed myself cooling, like ice. A knock came at my door—a young man holding a handle of vodka, looking for a party. He apologized and left.

 

For a long while I stood at the sink, my face unrecognizable in the shining metal, and then I slept on the couch. I knew Liam wasn’t coming back.

 

—

 

Twenty-three paintings, stacked neatly in the garage. As Greg pulled out of the driveway for a last haul to the garbage dump and we both sat down to a discount lemon cake for Liam’s thirty-fifth, Liam asked which I wanted to take. The question felt like a test. What I wanted Liam to know of my mother was what I knew: almost nothing. She was sweet, and motherly, in what I could remember of her. It seemed like a lie, that this was all I could recall. There had to be something more, underneath so much else I did not know either. Clues under clues, and all I had were a few photos in their silver frames, tinted slightly with age.

 

“Keep the blues, the quieter ones, the forest green?” I asked him. “The others are so loud. I still doubt she did them, by the way.”

 

“LT,” Liam said, communicating again the obviousness of the attribution.

 

“Anyway, I vote blues, maybe greens.”

 

“They’re nice,” he said.

 

“You don’t sound impressed.”

 

“I have secret hobbies too,” Liam said.

 

I’d later learn the secret hobbies included hoarding VHS tapes of old standup comedians’ late night sets, which played with a fuzzy static so many years later behind the confession that this was what he wanted to do: pursue comedy. When it finally came out of him, it was in this seriously unfunny way, so desperate it nearly made me laugh. The pursuit of anything held the edge of the ridiculous. In that kitchen, Liam embodied the pitiful warmth of someone who thought I was on his side, who would let us grow together.

 

I rejected the playfulness by asking about the cake. Liam said it was fine. Greg showed back up with his empty pickup, and we took three of the paintings with us—two deep ocean blues with fine gray lines as if to indicate breaking waves, a green with translucent ovals, a forest seen through raindrops—clacking against each other as we began the hundred miles or so back to the Village. When we got home, I couldn’t sleep. I walked to the kitchen and took a slice of cake from the fridge. It was awful, and when I went to spit it out, Liam was behind me, his eyes closed in sleep. As I dropped the plate, he woke from a trance. He hadn’t sleepwalked before, or since. We went back to bed. Liam lay awake as I regarded the fine waves, rising in their dark block from the corner of the room, until I could smell a salty breeze, until I felt the sun shimmer sweetly on my closed lids, until finally, at last, I slept.

 

—

 

Liam and I met our first day at Granite High, a collection of brick buildings that at night resembled the hospital both our dads worked at, without the orbit of screaming sirens or freak deaths from the nearby ski resort. Liam was shy in an easily ignorable way, and we successfully ignored each other often: during phys ed and pre-calculus and lunch, but both found ourselves in the same mindlessly easy home economics class junior year, taught by a jittery, white-haired woman named Suzie who frequently stopped class to talk about a summer in Paris that seemed to exist outside of time. The elements were almost absurd in their inconsistencies. The selection of Paris was the sort of desperately romantic lie you really couldn’t help but pity, and Liam got to making various references to his Parisian upbringing whenever Suzie was within earshot, testing the limits of her patience.

 

“These cookies remind me of the croissant I had on the top of the Eiffel Tower,” Liam said one day while stirring a bowl of over-floured dough, powder spitting from the bowl with each stir. “That time the wind blew off my beret onto the Louvre, and I was wearing black and white stripes for no reason.”

 

I only joined him in detention to ask him if he ever got the beret back. He told me it was run over by a wheel of brie. It felt as if I’d met someone entirely new, and later that day, we stood next to each other washing our hands in the bathroom, avoiding the dangerous desire we eventually confronted the night after prom the next year. College together, the same dorm, down the hall, roommates, all the late nights with pizza and cheap vodka that burned our fingernails and turned our eyes bright red. And then the day after that Liam was stepping out of the shower and asking if I planned to make the bed before we headed down for his set at Comik.

 

Sometimes, when I was in a good mood, I told him I couldn’t hear him from across the Atlantic.

 

—

 

A week passed since that night with Short, without Liam, and each time I began to forget, or heal, or complete whatever transformation was required of me to get from life with him to someplace where this was all behind us, something appeared, briefly and cruelly, to remind me of his gentleness, his sweetness, his love of ducks and the color purple, the way the subway doors shut so suddenly they can trap you in their grip, as they’d done just years ago with one of Liam’s leather photo bags, dragged down to Soho exposed to the dirty, frozen air. My heart spun back days, or weeks, a stranger to the breeze outside my apartment, the snow falling on the familiar trees.

 

I opened Liam’s bedside drawer one night to discover The Standup Standup, an annotated paperback guide to becoming a comic. I tore ravenously through the different steps one is meant to take to find themselves as a comedian. Again and again the author advised that the whole point of any joke is to flip expectation, as extremely as possible. Most of the advice to this end seemed to boil down to various broadly applicable platitudes, but Liam’s earnest notes suggested he took the text to heart. Most interesting to me, though Liam hadn’t marked any of it up, was the glossary, all these terms. A “roll” was when a comedian delivers jokes in rapid succession for sustained laughter, a “topper,” alluding to and building off a previous setup that itself had to be assembled with just enough strength to be memorable, without requiring extensive explanation. The “first story”—what the audience imagines based on a joke’s setup—and the “second story,” what they see after the punchline, when the joke is complete. I presumed Liam had not noticed the glossary or felt it was not of great value. He had scrawled the beginnings of presumably original material on the margins throughout the chapter “Getting to Know the Comic in You.”

 

I was driving down the interstate and I saw a [illegible]

 

New York apartment prices [crossed out]

 

And then:

 

My ex’s mom was a painter, let me tell you something about painters

 

—

 

The lemon cake disappeared from the fridge, which we forgot about easily enough. It seemed possible one of us had disposed of it, just tossed it, unthinking. But then came the nightmares for Liam, of hearing dirt fall over the thick wood of a coffin, of waking in a cold forest of pines that glowed with low, white mist when he walked. His dreams, as I began to refer to them, seemed to possess a certain unspeakable vividness that made me uneasy.

 

We set the paintings on the curb one night. By morning his visions were gone, and so, by lunchtime, were they.

 

—

 

And I had begun to think of his friends. Liam’s closest was a psychic and medium whose string of messy relationships Liam had occasionally disclosed. I’d met him several times, despite frequent efforts at avoiding him—Adaem, lanky and spikey-haired, who had amended his own name at thirty-six, “for intrigue,” and enjoyed a high-paying client roster of gay men who needed healthy friendships and wives who desperately needed to know if their second husbands were really attending this many corporate retreats. (They really are, Adaem had told Liam. It’s quite absurd.) His services were highly rated, and as much as Liam liked to play off his divinatory powers, Adaem had once been featured on a popular morning show with a grieving widow who gasped at each vague, perfunctory message from the beyond, and though I once could only ever roll my eyes at his ordering from a cocktail menu, I found I now could not summon the slightest skepticism of any potential prophecy. Whatever had repulsively magnetized me from him had suddenly, unstoppably flipped, and now, I was pulled to him. I needed to know what he knew, urgently. I found myself awake late, watching clips online entitled “Walk into your soul’s mist.”

 

“Oh sweetie,” he said, regarding the space he’d seen before. “I’m just going to say it. You know it. I know it. You have terrible energy. What’s been in here? This place is full of rot.”

 

“I don’t agree with that?” I said, certain he was right. “Can you fix it?”

 

He gave me a look, slow, as if to say he was getting to that.

 

“I was getting to that. No.”

 

“I’m paying you fifteen hundred dollars.”

 

“I couldn’t do it for five times that. Can’t. Your heart is not pure. It is, however, as I am sure you know, a very reasonable rate.”

 

“My heart is ‘not pure’?”

 

“No.”

 

“How do you purify a heart?”

 

“Have you ever been in love, dear?”

 

“What?”

 

He put a hand on the counter, then lifted it quickly off, as if it were a metal hotter than he had expected.

 

“That was acting, the marble is nice; it’s really held up. Other people will wow you with theatrics, not me. Love, my dear!”

 

“Yes. I’ve been in love.”

 

He eyed me skeptically. “I don’t think that is true. Be careful what you call things, dear.”

 

“Then what?”

 

“Listen.”

 

“I’m listening.”

 

“What did I tell you just a moment ago?”

 

“You told me to listen.”

 

“I asked,” he said, barely concealing a deeper annoyance than he wanted known, “for you to be careful what you call things. Return in half an hour. I am starting in the bathroom. I will do what I can.” I opened the door to leave, and he added, “I really should charge you more for this, hun, but. He’s not coming back.”

 

“Excuse me?” I hesitated in the frame, shocked by his boldness. “Who are you to be giving me advice?”

 

“Ah, Liam filled you in. You know, it’s true. There’s such a thing as saying too much.” He paused for a moment, and ran the sink. Over the sound of rushing water, as I closed the door, he added, as if just to himself, “And, of course, knowing too much.”

 

—

 

The reorganization project was Adaem’s idea, or his prescription, to cement the bond I shared with this new space. He suggested, very briefly, that I place the old life behind me. Have I changed the lighting? My morning routine? Have I changed the shower curtains, the laundry basket, the meals I make at dusk? I’ve tried it, I had told him, but in fact I had not ever thought about abandoning those habits which were mine all along. There was no difference, or if there was, I was not aware of it, and I began to obsess over the way I had been unpacking boxes with Liam at twenty-six. The candles without their holders, the cheap bulbs busted in their box. The way I could recall in an instant the scene of that empty living room and shining wood hallway, the vine growing in through a crack in the brick, but could not remember his face then, or when I had last seen my mother, and what’s worse, very nearly did not care, as if the life I’d yanked us into had been her parting gift to me, penance for her absence, an inheritance I was owed.

 

I put the television on the other side of the room. I moved the desk drawer, placed the espresso machine and blender opposite their usual spots on the marble counter. I set the small fig tree with its wilting leaves in the kitchen and the steel trash can in the living room. When I was done, it looked as if I’d tossed the contents of my apartment randomly about the space.

 

Later, I realized the porcelain Madonna Liam had forgotten to take lay in its regular spot on the mantle. I laughed until it hurt to smile.

 

—

 

It was hard to make out Short’s voicemail. It sounded as if he was laughing through strangulation. When I rang him back, it was that same voice.

 

“Buddy,” he said, though we were in no way friends. “Buddy, too funny.”

 

“What’s going on?” I asked. A nervous break—I’d feared one myself.

 

“You know that video? Those marks.” He paused very deliberately to take a breath. “One of the interns fucked with the tape. Final Cut Pro. Can you believe. We’re all dying here.”

 

I heard boisterous laughter from the bar. “You can’t be serious.”

 

“Tell your boyfriend,” he said. “I tried to call him but he’s recording something for radio. NPR? He hung up before I got to it. Big shot. After that set we did not see that coming.”

 

I thanked Short and hung up. I imagined him replaying the tape, a joke behind our heads each time. I clicked open the DVD player I’d rarely used, removed an instructional cooking series Liam must have been watching, and replaced it with an intense at-home fitness plan someone had gifted me years ago during the peak of the fad. The console made a loud crunch as it processed the disc. A tan man with synthetically blue eyes appeared on the screen. “Heya,” he barked off the main menu, thrilled by his own energy. “I’m Rick. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” He said this while striking his knees against downturned palms.

 

For the next forty-five minutes I pressed my body to the floor in increasingly straining positions at Rick’s command, lagging every so often behind what seemed more like backup dancers than athletes. Rick never broke a sweat, but at the end of my last set, I felt a hard cramp up my chest, a tightness just under my heart. The living room clock struck midnight. I lay on the floor, pleasantly sore. A gust of wind made a fast ghost of the curtains. I fell asleep there, with the same effort I had used to punish myself into another set of pushups. I made myself think, as I watched that porcelain figure, at least now it’s the second day of the rest of my life.

 

—

 

Later that night, I waited on my sofa with an old radio turned to the station, listening to eccentric, lonely people phone in with wrong answers to sports trivia, eager to hear Liam’s voice come through over the air. At last, he was introduced, and the sound of applause came through behind him, one of the audiences from a recent show. I wanted to know, insanely, if Liam would mention me, if an inflection might offer a tell. But he was different. He was solid, unwavering, and warm. He sounded as if all his years had been leading to this moment, and I was shocked to find that beyond all jealousy, all the ruthless memory I could drudge up from the rotting detritus of our past, I was proud of him for what he’d accomplished, and more than that, I believe he deserved all of it.

 

“The show is called Three Strikes,” the host said.

 

“Well,” Liam said. “I am out.”

 

“In all seriousness, it really is uncanny,” the interviewer said with genuine admiration. “Your knack for this vulnerability that just… explodes into something hilarious.”

 

“Expires even,” Liam said. I was relieved to feel Liam come across charming but, ultimately, basic. The host laughed, then thought aloud—“I’m trying to think of someone with your style for this, and I’m coming up empty. But of course, my colleague and I were reminded of Sedaris.”

 

“I’ve found,” Liam said with a thoughtfulness that verged on condescending, “that it’s about extending the set up past its obvious punchline, its easy resolution. The joke is always someplace you didn’t think at first. Usually, if you just keep going, it’ll come to you.”

 

I think we need to talk, I texted Liam. I found something.

 

I knew his thrill at the segment made him susceptible to engagement. He replied a moment later: I can come by around nine.

 

—

 

Liam arrived a half hour late, proving his ability to act like me. Cold, hard rain had begun to fall, knocking the roof. If it had been a few degrees cooler, it would have been snow, melting against the warm window. Instead, brown leaves shook violently with the wind, thunder growling across the dark sky.

 

He hung his raincoat and sat down across from me, the formality set, like an interview. I hoped something would loosen the knot in the air between us, but each of our movements seemed to tighten it like a noose. I stayed perfectly still. A branch cracked loudly outside.

 

“You got all your things?” I said.

 

“Oh, yeah. Or I could live without them. Thanks. That was a rainy day too,” Liam said. “But not like this.”

 

“It was.”

 

“I was so freaked out. The thunder made me jump into the bathtub.” Liam laughed.

 

“I slept with the lights on,” I said, pretending this no longer humiliated me. “You left stuff though. I read the joke book. I still have it if—”

 

He grimaced. “I read a lot. Used to at least. Something to learn in the mess, you know.”

 

“I like the thing about the Second Story. About building up to a punchline,” I said. “How you can give it a name like that. I didn’t know there’s terminology. Comedy’s a science too.”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s storytelling. It’s really not easy.”

 

“Almost hard,” I said, with a recuperative edge of rudeness.

 

Liam smiled, very kindly. “Did you invite me here to insult me?”

 

“Incredibly, no,” I said. “In that book you wrote this joke, about my mom, and painters.”

 

“The ex comment, god,” he said, flush with genuine apology I couldn’t pretend was something else. “I’m sorry.”

 

“How did you know?”

 

“The same way you did,” he said.

 

This felt true but I rejected it. Whatever happened that night had been my mistake, though I wasn’t ever able to fully recover it. I felt nauseous from the idea he had wanted it too.

 

“I just keep thinking. That day, in home ec,” I started, frazzled and unraveling. “Like what even was that? You never even spoke before then. I had never noticed you.”

 

“I noticed you,” Liam said, a bit too sadly. He wet a cloth and began to wipe down the sinkhead, then the blender in its corner. “God, I can’t believe I remember it. It’s like, embarrassing.”

 

“Oh, come on,” I said.

 

“Well, I did.”

 

“Why did you say that stuff?” I asked. “It was like a whole different person. It was amazing but, I don’t know. I didn’t know you at all, and I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for that day.”

 

“Honestly? I knew you’d like it.”

 

“What?”

 

“I wasn’t being funny,” Liam said, swiping the marble counter where he’d already polished it to a reflective shine. He turned to look at me. “That day? I know you don’t believe anything I say, but Mark. Honest to God, I was just being mean. Anyway, I need to go, but I had something to tell you. I’m moving. Sydney, next month. New job.”

 

“Wow,” I said. “Congrats. Kangaroos punch, by the way.”

 

He laughed sweetly. I believed everything he said. I wanted him to keep talking. The knot tightened one last time, and he shrugged on his raincoat and left me there with it, along with those drying bootprints I followed, later that night, pointless and imbecilic, to the foot of the elevator. He might as well have been across the ocean.

 

—

 

The part I have to underline is that I had intended to break up with him, in public, which I thought (I recognize the irony now) ran the least chance of having us make a scene. A few weeks before those marks at Comik, before terror streaked bright red onto the walls of our lives, I had met Liam after work at the bar next to his office, where suited men and their wives spoke over each other until the sound of a full plate dropping on the floor was rendered inaudible in the din. I had felt my desire to see him waning, inventing excuses and then dismissing them, cowardly, throughout the day. Breaking up with Liam would require, in the space, a degree of shouting that was sure to unnecessarily escalate whatever conflict was to follow, and the apathy into which I had settled became comfortable whenever I wasn’t actively considering it, like a splinter that had begun to live in skin.

 

After three cocktails, we stepped outside, the cold wind howling around us down to the Hudson. We walked, and he told me jokes that he hoped to try out at some open mic. They were offshoots of previous jokes he’d told at the few mics I’d attended, ones that made audience members loudly and uncomfortably “ha.” Liam confessed that he’d been placed on a performance improvement plan at work, was caught in a recent meeting smirking at something he’d written, which had then turned into something else. The casual way he disclosed these things, as if they were the setup to a joke, astonished me. He had worked for years to be at those meetings, to sit where he did at those tables, and now, he could not be bothered to care. There was an agreement here, unspoken if hard as the concrete we walked, that for as long as we were together (and it didn’t matter what I’d been about to do), we would incur the suffering and indignity and pain of the lives we’d chosen without discussion or even recognition.

 

The memory of alcohol stung me from the inside, lashing the back of my throat. We walked until we found ourselves in front of the Whitney, its bright lobby crowded for a newly returned Warhol installation. Liam and I maneuvered through the clusters of families inside, numb from the cold. The lights grew dim near a glow-in-the-dark installation, before our eyes adjusted to a loud pop of light. We moved from room to room, avoiding then re-seeing each other, when I heard Liam gasp. On a far wall behind red velvet rope, those three paintings. A small plaque on next to the blue: Original Lana Tristan (b. 1880). Work of the painter and murderess, who was rumored to have been buried alive. Discovered next to garbage, West Village, New York, 2019.

 

Bile-coated laughter rose in my throat. “OK, you have to admit,” I said to Liam, whose face had gone pale. “Now that’s kind of funny.”

 

—

 

Comik didn’t renew the lease, something I learned on my way to meet Clark, an overdressed friend of a friend visiting from Miami who owned a string of condo complexes and posted jokes about eviction on his social media. We were supposed to meet at a place a few blocks away from my stop; I took an accidental left out of the subway onto that wrong street. Of course I thought of the club often (cellar, I sometimes corrected on Liam’s behalf), but hadn’t expected to see it now. Its exterior looked usual but advertised a large sign in bright yellow script: Improv now! An acting school. One large room through the window, a streetlight reflecting off a long mirror, my silhouette standing dumb in the back of a laughless room.

 

Later than night, over a third cocktail, while Clark went on about a tenant’s cocker spaniel that had gleefully leapt into the community pool from a third floor balcony, I found myself thinking of that room with its oak floor, the groups of students learning to make each other laugh. All those years. I blinked and saw myself in front of that dark mirror, waiting—wanting?—for those marks to appear behind me, and finally mean something. I blinked again, and Clark asked me if I was okay. At his place, while he slept, I watched the ceiling change from yellow to black as the cars passed from headlights bright on the interstate. After a few hours, I got dressed and left, careful not to wake him, and rode a jostling subway home next to a discarded plastic bag that read I LOVE NY. I could see it caught between the doors, flapping wildly. I could feel Liam’s laugh inside me, or maybe it was my own.

 

—

 

Rick with the fake blue eyes was right; the next day it really was the rest of my life. I started visiting my mom in her cemetery, driving up the interstate late, listening to weather reports, adjusting the dial whenever the host attempted a joke. I brought her pink and yellow tulips in spring, wreaths that collected snow like sugar as it fell late one January, headlights veering out behind me, breaking the view as the headstones cut one after another with their long shadows for me to be with her, alone. I spent time looking up Liam on the internet—the little photos I could see on his profile of him with a short, wide-mouthed man named Tom whose integrity felt evident in his selection of polos and lack of online footprint. Photos of koalas and sunsets, so many memories. Then suddenly, one day, as if it were just the next, the marriage, Liam’s hand, which I was chilled to find I could recognize, on a shining silver blade making its clean cut into a large white cake. And the flowers on Valentine’s Day, all the kindnesses I withheld from him, or offered at a belated time, proof he had never been enough for me to remember, cursing me now that I could not forget him.

 

And that was around the time I met you, yellow crocuses and melting snow in Central Park, catching each other on the wide lawn. Coffee followed by drinks, a lifting feeling that made me aware of my body. Like thawing out, madly. I waited months for you to return, to meet you at this hotel, to be in this bed. And even though I know you’re leaving for Boston tomorrow, and to Chicago with your wife after that, I wanted to try to tell you, in this hotel room, maybe just to practice it in front of a mirror, this first story of how we never know what’s really true, or maybe just get to decide what is by living with it, or through it. And even though maybe it’s something people just say—When did you know you were in love?—you were the one who asked, and for once I want to answer. For once I know.

 

When you went to the bathroom for a towel, I watched the hairs on my forearm stand up in the sudden cold, the churning air conditioner compensating for that crazy heat outside making gray mirages of the street, joyful screams around a broken fire hydrant gushing water, neon lights from Times Square turning the curtains blue, then orange, then a bright, holy red. My second story—well, I guess it was easy to see now, impossible as it was to explain. It was the story of me—the man who fell in love and out of it, the whole time without a clue of what love really was, not the faintest idea he was living it. And feeling the real force of that love hit him in the gut, like a fit of uncontrollable laughter right now, out of nowhere from across the sea, all these years later. And the funny part is that even though in a moment you’ll be right next to me, and even though you asked, I won’t be able to tell you. From now on it will always be the one story, and then it’s three: you and me, and the him behind the mic—a ghost just out of my vision, shapeless marks I can’t quite see.

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The Call of Gideon

The deacon’s arrival was unexpected—a Tuesday morning, pounding at the screen door, trying the doorbell (which did not work). The deacon said he called Father Thomas B. Durr on the drive from Syracuse, but there had been no messages, no missed calls. The deacon sits in the kitchen, still in his boots and coat. He has come to tell Father Durr, at the request of Bishop Cunningham, that St. Matthews Catholic Church of Tunis, New York, will close.

 

“I guess we’ve reached a sort of…point of no return here,” the deacon says. “It sounds like the finance council has talked to you about the possibility, and of course the bishop has talked to you about it, but I wanted to get your blessing before we actually started moving on anything.”

 

The deacon wears a black and maroon bomber jacket and a skull cap fronted with the green shield of the Syracuse Diocese. In one hand he holds a blue folder, in the other a folded newspaper.

 

“Maintenance had a contractor come out just to assess the roof,” the deacon says, “and it’s, we’re talking six figures alone there. Plus sub-zero temps in the mornings, the heating this winter has just soared.”

 

“Contributions won’t hold up until summer?”

 

“They’re barely covering the church downtown.”

 

The diocese bungalow is spartan and cold, mostly furnished with bookshelves and plastic idols of Jesus and the apostles. There’s a clock above the sink, a gift from a parishioner in Nevada, with a different songbird at each hour. And the kitchen table is a padded folding table, the one Father Durr has carried with him since he first left Tunis, which he’s never wanted to replace because he knows the church would buy him one.

 

The deacon slides off his hat. “We’re looking at less money everywhere in the diocese. We’re certainly not alone in this, but we’ve got to let ourselves accept the idea that it’s only going to get worse. Plus there’s the, I’m sure you’ve seen the bill in the state legislature that opens up the look-back window for priests.”

 

Father Durr offers the deacon a cup of coffee, but he declines. So Father Durr makes one for himself in a machine he bought for Christmas—he lifts a lever and a small mouth appears, and this is where he puts the little cup filled with coffee grounds.

 

“There’s no doubt there will be effects to the diocese,” the deacon adds, “and it’s sad, really, but we’re at a point where decisions like this have to be made. All I’m asking is that you acknowledge it’s going to close, Father, and maybe just start mentioning something at Mass.”

 

“St. Matthews was the first Catholic Church in Tunis,” Father Durr says. He clears his throat. “Did you know that?”

 

The deacon opens the blue folder. “I didn’t.”

 

Father Durr explains that the turn of the twentieth century established the entire cultural trajectory of Tunis. In a ten-year span the city’s population had almost doubled with European immigrants, who were lured away from New York City by the prospect of more lucrative construction and manufacturing jobs (and aided west by the advent of the electric railway). In 1912 the bricks that would become the foundation of St. Matthews were laid by a handful of Sicilians and Campanians, agrarians who had fled the penury caused by Crispi’s colonization policies. Many intended to work in America for a few years and return home. Few actually did. Instead, they recruited their families to cross the Atlantic and live in a twenty-block radius around the church, a neighborhood that exploded with schools and bars and restaurants that filled with second- and then third-generation Italians who learned English at school and Italian from their grandparents—Italians who discussed the legacy of DiMaggio and the correct amount of baking powder in struffoli dough. Most of the third generation eventually moved to Tunis suburbs like Elmfield and Van Buren, leaving their ancestral homes for new waves of immigrants: Bosnians, Vietnamese, and Syrians (among others). That was partially why Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church was built downtown, really a kind of sociopolitical backhand to—

 

“There,” the deacon says. He slides a piece of paper across the table. “The estimate for the roof.”

 

Father Durr looks down at the paper, looks up at the deacon. The deacon’s head is a tuffet of white gray, smoothed back. Teeth too large, too aligned to be original. His pale neck like the melted coil of a car’s suspension.

 

They are all old. Every one of them, old and tired.

 

“I guess my point is that the church has history,” Father Durr says, “and that I’d be remiss if we didn’t explore any other option to keep it open in some capacity.”

 

The deacon slaps the newspaper on the table. “History! I remember Easter masses at the Cathedral, people sweating through their shirts, damn near fainting from the body heat. Part of the reason we printed out the hymns were so people had something to fan themselves with.”

 

“The stations of the cross,” Father Durr says. “We’ve the stations built into the windows at Matthews. How do you replicate that?”

 

“The bishop says not even half of Matthews was full for Christmas.”

 

Father Durr nods, sips his coffee. In the deacon’s hand the newspaper unfurls, in slow stretches, like a pulp snail. Father Durr looks at the clock, then out to the backyard, which is covered in snow.

 

“I will have to let you go, deacon. I have confession at eleven and I try to pray my hours before it starts.”

 

The deacon stands. “I am not trying to be cruel here, Father. These are simply hard times, you understand?”

 

“I do.”

 

“Then you will tell them?”

 

Father Durr places his cup on the counter. Inside: shattered spangles, roiling coins.

 

“It’s probably selfish of me to say, but if it were going to be anyone to say anything, I would…rather it be me.”

 

“I am sorry.” The deacon rolls the newspaper, places it under his arm with the folder. “No one, and I mean no one, is happy about this.”

 

The deacon opens the door. He makes a slight, respectful bow before he closes it tightly behind him.

 

—

 

And really it was the sound more than anything that kept Father Durr up at night. This was long before he had come back to Tunis, long before the deacon visited him on a morning in January. It was the summer after graduating seminary at St. Bernard’s; after Bishop Joseph Hogan, who had studied canon law with an ordained archbishop in Washington, had assigned Father Durr to a small church in Logandale, Nevada. Bishop Hogan had told Father Durr there was the possibility he could return to Tunis when there was a vacancy for priests, which Father Durr had recalled the first time he crossed the Arizona border, into the region called the Valley of Fire, an irony that seemed especially apposite considering the sun and the endless sky and the dark ridge of the Arrow Canyon Range that met it.

 

The Reno bishop was a spirited man named Norman Francis McFarland; he had round, ruddy cheeks and cotton-white hair that belied an intensity for order and accountability. The bishop had told him the biggest challenge for a priest in Logandale was the ability to blend in—the parishioners, he said, did not respond to anything that challenged their sense of alienation. So Father Durr spent a majority of his first few months trying to ape the mannerisms of the fifty or so regular men who came to Mass wearing flannels and jeans stained with tobacco chaw or elaborate suits of garish plaid. (At the same time he tried to learn Spanish from a series on cassette, tried very hard but ultimately gleaned only a handful of phrases he awkwardly deployed to his growing Latino members.) The women, meanwhile, frightened him. He was nervous of their allure and flighty in their presence, as if he needed, for his sanity, to tell them he was a priest bound to spiritual laws, and as such forbidden from any immodest propositions (as if they didn’t already know).

 

Which is to say that the entire transition and subsequent adaption to Logandale was brutally stressful, dangerous in how it changed him. He began eating less. He caught himself grinding his teeth at idle moments of the day, and for a few months drank gin to stop it. He spent hours on walks behind the church, on dirt roads that snaked through creosote bushes filled with cicadas and scorpions, returning when the streetlights flicked on. His prayers before bed became convoluted, inane things. Because once they were done—once he was on his mattress, in the quiet of his bedroom—he began to hear the drops.

 

The drops began small, a slow, hollow pluck in a dry sink. But they always grew louder, wetter, a splashy echo to them like a basin filling with something viscous. In his first few days in Logandale Father Durr would get out of bed to see if he had left a faucet on (the kitchen, the bathroom, the shower stall always dry). It started again when he sat down—became faster, the drops multiplying in number, uniform in sound. Something filling, filling, until Father Durr heard an entirely different set of drops filling an entirely different space. Another room, a farther room. The drops varied in pitch, like words he could not understand jousting each other in a busy street. Dropping and plucking and growing until they became a torrent. Pushing into invisible places, filling turbulent pools. By then the pain of digging his fingernails into his palms migrated into a band at the back of his head, creating an array of phosphenes on the ceiling—wide, vague circles as transparent as the shadows of stained glass. Pinks, teals, golds spinning in the sound of falling water, falling into a pool of inscrutable width and depth, until everything faded in the sun and Father Durr stepped out of bed, clammy with anxious sweat.

 

The seminary had not made him credulous to the possibility of miracles. What happened at night was certainly an oddity, an enigma. But it was not inexplicable. After Masses he waited for parishioners in the church vestibule (as he had been trained to do), but instead of the usual course of small talk Father Durr asked them about the dripping. He figured it was from planes or helicopters passing overhead, the roar of their engines warped by radiation (there were rumors of a nuclear test site nearby). At first the parishioners ignored his questions, dismissing them as tasteless jokes, but they soon became suspicious. Attendance began to drop. One woman, whose husband had borrowed Father Durr a copy of The Keys of the Kingdom, wondered if he wasn’t suffering from a prolonged kind of heat stroke.

 

He prayed for a way to decode the sounds, and when this didn’t work he prayed for them to cease. He analyzed his pallor in the naked light bulb of the bathroom, rubbed the hollows beneath his cheekbones, felt the novel sensation of his ribs through his skin. Perhaps God was speaking to him about his calling. Perhaps other things were happening in his head, like a psychologist had suspected when he was a teen.

 

The answer came to him the day he decided to talk to Bishop McFarland. What he would have told the bishop, what he would have asked if he had arrived in Reno, he wasn’t sure. On his drive Father Durr stopped for gas at a Chevron in Crystal Springs. Inside the store, on a small rack below the counter, he spotted a foldable map of Nevada. He paid for the gas and the map. In his car he approximated the location of the parish house, drew an imaginary line out of his bedroom window, through county highway markers and t-crossed railroad routes, into an intricate cross of major thruways. Within this nest was a large dot with a circle around it for Las Vegas, and to the right of this, at the end of a blue crescent that began near Logandale, a red star that marked the location of the Hoover Dam.

 

He laughed hysterically and turned the car around. On his way home he bought a pair of ear plugs and a cassette of nature sounds. He never asked himself how the dripping might have transmitted all the way from the Colorado River; how it might have bent and twisted over fifty or so miles of undulating land. He was simply relieved that it had stopped — relieved he could sleep again, eat again, and talk about anything else.

 

—

 

Modern heating, cooling systems, lighting. Sure, Our Lady of Mercy has all of that, but it has a lowered ceiling, too. Put the organ and the woman who’s practicing it in a business park for a sense of how the sounds die. Like Muzak, Father Durr thinks, listening to the muted chords from the confessional, a small room on the back wall of the church.

 

His second confession of the afternoon knocks before entering. Because he is behind the large screen used for anonymous confessions he can only see a small pair of white sketchers. A woman’s voice asks if he is still holding confessions. He says that he is. She kneels on the bench before the screen. She makes the sign of the cross, then places her nose between her laced fingers and thumbs.

 

“Bless me Father,” she says, “for I have sinned.”

 

The voice is young, maybe late thirties. East Coast without the nasal twang found west of Albany. He straightens in his chair. “How long has it been since your last confession?”

 

“Ten, fifteen years, maybe, I’m not sure.”

 

“And what sins do you confess to since then?”

 

The woman says nothing. He rubs his knuckles, which are sore at the joints. They’ve been sore since noon.

 

“There is no need to be nervous,” he says. “There is no such thing as a bad confession, only one that isn’t—”

 

“I have engaged in sins of detraction against members of the church.”

 

Father Durr nods so that she can see. It is nothing he hasn’t heard before, nothing he won’t again. But the nod helps them get it out, helps them clear their conscience. He leans forward in false gravitas and looks directly at where her face would be without the screen.

 

“How did you perform detraction?”

 

“I am an editor at a newspaper.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“And we’ve published stories like them before, Father.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Her breaths gain weight. Her head vacillates. She unfastens her tongue from the roof of her mouth and inhales.

 

“On what?” he finally asks.

 

“On sexual assaults by priests of the diocese.”

 

The sounds of the organ fade. Her shadow collapses to a single point on the screen, as do the walls and floor, his knobby hands — form a single waving mass like a mirror on a riverbed.

 

“What diocese?”

 

“This one.”

 

“What priests?”

 

“The ones we’ve written about before.”

 

“And the paper? The paper this is going in?”

 

She does not respond, which is how he knows it is local.

 

“A story,” he says.

 

“Like a look-back,” she says. “A—a retrospect, something that combines all the things we’ve reported on while also looking ahead.”

 

“Something big,” he says.

 

This is not expected, not allowed. His questions are out of the normal routine of confession. They have taken away his vestments and presented him as something simple and pathetic. Something small.

 

He digs his thumb into his palm.

 

“I mean it’s, the whole thing isn’t for sure yet,” she says, “but one of our reporters—every week a reporter has to present a Sunday story package to editors like me. And we have to decide whether it should be printed.”

 

“And you’re here because you think it’s fit to print.”

 

“Yes.”

 

He thinks about the church. Thinks about any one of the parishioners leaving Sunday Mass to kitchens and living rooms, to televisions or computer screens. He imagines them all as the deacon pulling open the rolled newsprint and seeing the names and pictures of priests they’ve known. Priests that have baptized them, confirmed them, their children. The connections they will make to St. Matthews.

 

The editor says, “Right now the new angle is that the story will look at the impacts of the allegations on local Catholics. The reactions, the attendance. Since the abuses happened for years.”

 

“They did.”

 

“And the stories of the abuses need to be told, but I see the impacts they have on the churches and the dioceses, and I wonder if this is too much. I know feeling bad isn’t always indicative of a sin, but it just feels like a sin does. And it’s painful, Father, it’s all just deeply painful.”

 

He sits back in his chair, runs his fingers over his scalp. “What about the closing?”

 

“What closing?” she asks.

 

Really the first thing he thought of was St. Matthews. The Easter Masses full of people in pastels, shoulder-to-shoulder, the miasma of perfume and sweat. The baptisms and funerals, the weddings he’s officiated. He thinks about a night many years before Nevada, before the seminary, when he was just a boy, maybe twelve, after midnight in St. Matthews. No exit signs above the doors then, no ceiling fans hanging from the vault. There was only him, eyes closed, teeth vulning his shoulder—no sound but the blood pushing through his ears and the small mutterings he occasionally made to hear himself pray.

 

“I’ve gone to church for years with my parents,” the editor adds, “and all of this stuff is just killing them, which is part of the guilt, part of the reason it feels like a sin.”

 

“Do you believe it’s a sin?”

 

“Is it?”

 

He was praying to forget. Father Durr remembers that. Something that happened on a farm that belonged to a soybean farmer north of Tunis. The farmer’s land bordered a clutch of acres purchased by Father Durr’s grandfather, who was in the process of building up a dairy farm (he had owned a buffalo farm in Italy). Father Durr’s dad sent him there to work over the summer. He fed chickens, cleaned horse droppings from the stalls, and sat through long, tedious conversations about Italian politics.

 

It was one of the weekends his grandpa had given him the day to play with the soybean farmer’s son, a boy Father Durr’s age with an almond-shaped head and bleach-blond eyebrows. Inspired by a Jean Latham novel Father Durr had read, they traipsed through the uncleared brush at the far end of the farmer’s land. This was how they found the pond—a long extant body of water that fed into the Mohawk River nearby.

 

“Father?”

 

“Yes, I’m sorry.” Father Durr wipes his face with his hands. “Detraction, as a mortal sin, centers around another person’s reputation. It’s like gossip that’s true, that truth being what separates it from calumny.”

 

“But these are—”

 

“Knowing that you will damage someone’s reputation, and knowing that act will constitute detraction before you do it, makes it a sin. Unless there is a more pure intention behind the act, is how I interpret it.”

 

She unlatches her fingers, scratches her nose, reconfigures.

 

“So how do you interpret the story?”

 

And Father Durr cannot remember whether he had wagered the boy to swim to the middle of the pond or if the boy had boasted that he could. Instead he remembers the water, black and wind-raked, and the dead tree limbs around the shore, speckled with green like moldy fingers. The way the boy had grinned and said that it was nothing to him to swim to the middle. The way the boy walked into the water in his overalls and shirt.

 

“In Job it is said that wicked men are tormented for the rest of their lives,” he says, “that they live in houses that crumble to clay.”

 

“Job,” she repeats.

 

The boy swam choppy and slow, his cupped hands pulling a heavy, spumous wake. Father Durr could see what would happen, how it would happen—the boy’s trajectory, the slowing rate of his pace, how his arms and legs compensated for those conclusions. A matter, Father Durr remembers thinking, of simple math. The boy had almost made it halfway before turning around. Spitting water, more and more of it, flailing, trying to lift himself above the waves he made. Father Durr saw the boy recognize the distance to the shore, saw him recognize Father Durr, who was unsure what to do. He tilted his head skyward, and the muscles in his face slackened. Like a person in sleep. It was something Father Durr would see many times again, when he was called to perform last rites—the painful recognition of the self as a mess of bones and tendons and its brief place in time.

 

Then the rough bark of the stick Father Durr grabbed from the shore, the water’s screaming cold as he swam to the boy. Seeing the boy’s head, and then not seeing the boy’s head, instead a knot of bubbles that had healed by the time he arrived.

 

“And Father?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“If that’s the case, do you think that sins are sometimes necessary?”

 

“I think I’m not in a position to really…make those kinds of decisions.”

 

“I see.”

 

Father Durr runs his thumb nail through a channel of palm skin. Looks up at the shadow on the screen. He asks, “Are those all your sins?”

 

“What?”

 

“Are those all the sins you’ve made since your last confession?”

 

“I think so.”

 

“Pray an act of contrition and ten Hail Marys.”

 

She bows her head and makes the sign of the cross. She turns to the door.

 

“Ma’am?”

 

The editor turns around. She walks close to the edge of the screen, so close he can see the toes of her sneakers. He considers it a miracle that she does not walk into view.

 

“Please be kind,” Father Durr says.

 

The door opens, closes. The room is quiet. Father Durr feels his fingers, the bones. Feels the joints, the bumps like beads, knobby but soft in their sleeve of wrinkled skin. He turns his wrist, expecting his watch, but instead finds a pressed mat of white hair. The watch is in the pocket of his jeans, the place he’s kept it for confessions since he became a priest.

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The Addition

Three Mrs. Smiths barreled into the Duane Reade on East 2nd Street. The younger Mrs. Smiths, married three months ago, and the elder Mrs. Smith, who resented the new Mrs. Smith and preferred her only daughter, Ellie, to remain a Ms. Smith as long as possible, considered the sugar-free breath mints together. A ruse for something, the eldest Mrs. Smith knew; the newest Smith had a jittery air about her, picking up the same nougat bar and returning it to the dusty shelf again and again. Mischievous. Though her daughter reminded her to please leave her bad energy in the domestic terminal at JFK, the eldest Mrs. Smith felt certain it was actually the newest Smith who carried something off about her. The way she handled that nougat bar—demonic? Not good, not good.

 

Anyway, the eldest Mrs. Smith wouldn’t want them to break up now, what with her being against divorce. Even gay divorce? her husband, Mr. Smith, asked the night before she flew from Virginia to New York to visit the new Mrs. Smiths. A girl’s weekend, her daughter insisted. She missed her mom, or at least wanted her company to brave the IKEA in Red Hook for the younger Smiths’ move. She had news, too, the promise of which she floated not on the phone but over text, a choice that did not evade Mrs. Smith’s notice; news three months into a marriage could only mean so many things, which Mrs. Smith knew damned well, being both married and a mother herself.

 

Mr. Smith looked so flummoxed the evening before Mrs. Smith left, holding his fork and knife straight up in front of himself at the table, considering the ethics of homosexual divorce. Their church wasn’t happy about divorce, sure. The Smiths had gotten that lecture from the lead pastor more than once. But they were not so thrilled about same-sex marriage, either. So, was gay divorce actually preferable? Mr. Smith stared at his wife, whom he’d known since they were college sophomores, three decades ago. He frowned. He opened and closed his mouth, releasing hot spit to his bare chin. He adored his only child. Finally, he asked only the third woman he had known biblically: A baby is better than a divorce, isn’t it?

 

Mrs. Smith told her husband, Obviously, it’s better than a divorce, and took his plate away, though he had hardly started in on his meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

 

—

 

In the Duane Reade, the eldest Mrs. Smith pulled her favorite forum up on her phone. She intended to stand in the incontinence aisle for more privacy, but the younger Mrs. Smiths would not let up their closeness. The pair of them held hands as they trailed around the store behind her, picking up dark chocolate bars, refrigerated Gatorades, travel-size toothbrushes. All were discarded in the wrong places.

 

From over her shoulder, the eldest Mrs. Smith felt stares coming from not just the duo, but a young man in a black puffer jacket and heavy-looking headphones whose face carried a fixed interest. In another life, the eldest Mrs. Smith could not help but think, this might be the person her daughter had married; a man with focused, curious eyes and trimmed stubble. The eldest Mrs. Smith felt a precarious pride at watching him watch her daughter; who doesn’t want their offspring to inspire some healthy desire, after all? She would ask the forum if this sensation was wrong, or perhaps a misguided value, if only the young Mrs. Smiths would give her a moment’s breath.

 

Maybe someone will think it’s fate, Mrs. Smith’s daughter offered, slipping a sports drink behind a box of jumbo tampons, having seen her mother’s glare. They wouldn’t have known they were craving a light blue Gatorade, and then, there it is!

 

Sure, the eldest Mrs. Smith said flatly. She made eye contact with the man behind her daughters as the newest Mrs. Smith gave her offspring a kiss on the cheek. He disappeared in a blink.

 

If we’re going to walk to dinner, I’d like to leave with enough time, Mrs. Smith said, keeping her voice clipped and kind. She felt exposed suddenly, and ashamed. On past trips, her daughter had hustled down cramped side streets, leaving her overstimulated and spooked. Only tourists actually took cabs, her daughter explained, to which Mrs. Smith quietly swallowed that she, herself, was a tourist.

 

The newest Mrs. Smith piped up: I need to buy something…private. She gave the two natural Smiths a plaintive look; Mrs. Smith thought of her third-graders, the search of affirmation in their eyes when they recited lines for a class play, vulnerable and uneasy with their memories. Teacher, their faces said, tell us you love us. Not: Give me a good grade. Not: Did I get an A? Only: Show me with your face, in front of everybody in this room, that I’ve done right. Mrs. Smith wanted to ask how many pregnancy tests they’d already purchased, had they been to a doctor yet for a blood test? She sucked the skin of her cheeks and bit, figuring they wanted just one more positive before telling her the obvious.

 

Her daughter nodded at her wife and said, Let’s share one outside, Mom, and flicked at her coat pocket. At the automated doors, the eldest Mrs. Smith looked back at the newest Mrs. Smith and fancied herself a soothsayer. There the newest addition went, legs going like crazy down the family planning aisle.

 

The mother fingered her phone in her pocket, even more eager, now, to update the forum. She imagined the title she would give the post: How to support lesbian moms (30s, F, NYC?), and then the follow ups: Are both lesbian moms “mom” without exception, as well as, Let’s be honest: What do I do when child of lesbian moms (now unborn fetus) asks the big D question? (ETA: D as in “dad”!!) She imagined getting lots of comments, most positive, some not so much; the thought of a bright, bright screen warmed her with a pride she did not often allow herself to access.

 

Outside, mother and daughter passed a clove cigarette between one another. It’s vanilla flavored, her daughter said.

 

Her mother replied: Nice.

 

The Smith women had been sharing cigarettes since the younger Mrs. Smith was in high school. Her mother, a sprinter in youth and later a casual jogger, drove her to field hockey games even when she was old enough to drive herself; she didn’t trust other drivers on the road, Mrs. Smith said, but what she really wanted was time to sit in quiet with her daughter. Her daughter became mysterious to her in those years, confident and stretched beyond the child-self her mother understood. She went to the mall with friends, stayed up late on the family desktop, typing away to people Mrs. Smith assumed were classmates, whispered on the landline in the kitchen. By her senior year, then-Miss Smith dawdled getting into the car, sneaking off to hover in the garage. Finally, Mrs. Smith caught her smoking. She looked so young in her high school sweatpants, with all that black eyeliner. Get in the car, she said, and they did. Mrs. Smith didn’t say anything when her daughter lit the next cigarette, hunched and scowled in the front seat. When her daughter handed the filtered cigarette to her, the eldest Mrs. Smith took a few puffs, and passed it back. For months, their little joy.

 

Mom, her only child said as they stood outside the fluorescent Duane Reade, January’s depression thick around them. This is so important to me. A few feet behind her, a straight couple took a selfie; the man’s arm stretched long, and the woman used her gloved hand to adjust the tilt of the screen.

 

Her daughter continued: I know you might not understand at first, but try to stay open minded. The eldest Mrs. Smith squinted at the asphalt but kept listening; her daughter never got on the phone anymore, so how could she pass up a chance to hear that voice? She could recognize rehearsal in it, that her Ellie had practiced this, whether to a mirror or to the new addition, the eldest Mrs. Smith did not know.

 

Families are changing, Mom, Ellie added, but it’s the same love.

 

Mrs. Smith ruffled; same love? Was her daughter quoting commercials now? Anyway. Mrs. Smith found it all to be just fine. A baby, sure. A grandmother. Fine, fine, fine. She did not appreciate all of the hullabaloo over hiding this pregnancy. Probably, the eldest Mrs. Smith bet, they were going to raise the baby all gender neutral; yellow and green onesies, sure, the eldest Mrs. Smith could do that. She had gotten pretty damn good at they as a default, at risk of patting herself on the back. Mrs. Smith took an extra drag of the cigarette, knowing her daughter was watching and wanting.

 

I know, was all the eldest Mrs. Smith said, believing that she did. I know

 

Mrs. Smith looked at Mrs. Smith. Their faces just the same: brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin, both still with acne scars. Red, red cheeks in the city’s cold. The younger Mrs. Smith stood taller, like her father. The eldest Mrs. Smith knew her daughter inherited her father’s long, thin feet as well. She imagined, briefly, the newest Mrs. Smith rubbing ointment on her daughter’s scabbed heels; they bruised in new shoes so easily, and her daughter had always been impatient to break in what was still stiff. Bandaids, bandaids. Would the newest Mrs. Smith massage her daughter’s callouses, or only rub disinfectant in her blood? Mrs. Smith’s desire to know this intimacy embarrassed her more than her refusal to ask.

 

Mrs. Smith tried to see hot life in her daughter but couldn’t. Both women were gaunt, still. She figured it was the newer Mrs. Smith who had gotten pregnant, but she hoped it was actually her daughter, her blood. From her forum, she knew not to ask questions of biology, because it implied one mother was more real than the other. Still, while the younger Mrs. Smiths checked directions to the restaurant, the eldest Mrs. Smith typed: How to celebrate lesbian moms (31F, 33F) having baby? No, she thought. She should not have to ask that. She deleted it and typed: How to celebrate lesbian pregnancy of daughter in law when baby isn’t blood? No, still wrong. She deleted again, then switched to her not-private browser and ordered more cotton briefs for her husband.

 

I’m glad you’re feeling up for dinner, right after your flight and all, the newest Mrs. Smith said when she came outside. Mrs. Smith nodded and said thank you, completing the circle of polite conversion the two of them had entertained for the last few years. When the Mrs. Smiths held hands and walked down the sidewalk, the eldest Mrs. Smith stared hard at the plastic bag. It had to be a pregnancy test, she thought. She hoped it would tear, drop, spill. She only wanted confirmation of a thing she might understand, an entry point. The newest Mrs. Smith held on, held on.

 

—

 

At the restaurant, a third gaunt woman joined them as Mrs. Smith’s daughter confirmed the reservation with the hostess. For four? the hostess asked dully, and to Mrs. Smith’s confusion, all three stretched smiles wide and agreed.

 

Oh, Mrs. Smith said. Could her daughter not pity her shyness? Some personalities aren’t outgrown. I’m so glad your friend can join us, she said, giving her daughter a brief look of reproach. In return, her daughter named her friend, voice full of a funny anxiety. The eldest Mrs. Smith told the new person hello and realized she had already forgotten their name.

 

The three women looked at Mrs. Smith with a terrible vulnerability, causing her to experience a swing into both fear and resentment. She was trying, wasn’t she? What to say to this strange addition. The trio appeared to her as three long coats. Three sets of eyes, for once not glued to phone screens. Three mouths that had all worn braces, she could tell. Mrs. Smith repeated herself, that she was very glad their friend could spend dinner with them, and something in all of the women’s eyes shriveled into an ache Mrs. Smith could not understand.

 

Once at their booth, Mrs. Smith considered the seating an unnecessary tangle. In the end, she sat beside her Ellie, and the new Mrs. Smith and their friend sat opposite them. The new Mrs. Smiths tended to hold hands and share plates, which Mrs. Smith found particularly saccharine and was privately relieved to not have to witness it tonight. Still, this new woman puzzled her. Was she a surrogate? An emotional support decoy? Their couples’ therapist? The eldest Mrs. Smith wished she had a Facebook account so she could slip into the bathroom and do some digging.

 

When their water glasses came, Mrs. Smith narrowed her eyes in on the new woman’s layered hemp bracelets. A birth doula, maybe. The message board made living seem easy. People followed group rules. Age, relationship, one-liner summary. Mrs. Smith read the TL;DRs first, then went back and reread all of the details; people don’t always know how to pull out what was really the main issue in their lives. Mrs. Smith did not comment or post, but she did read. Admittedly, she skimmed the ones with titles she did not understand: situationships, throuples, polyams, kinksters. Fine for them, she reasoned, though she felt they should have a sub-group, so as not to clog her main page. At this dinner, she felt betrayed; the forums had not prepared her for these queer circumstances. Especially not the raw menu in front of her.

 

With forced cheer, she asked, When it says it’s all plant-based and raw, that means it’ll come cold? Mrs. Smith resented having to ask these questions but had stopped asking her daughter to bring her to that cheesecake place she loved in Times Square; she could only be mocked so many times for being a tourist, what with her wanting of cabs and cooked meals.

 

It’s room temp, the newest Mrs. Smith said. The eldest Mrs. Smith hid her grimace behind the menu; it was involuntary, she told herself, this sharp reaction to the young woman’s hoarse voice. She had intended to ask her daughter, and thought her intent was obvious. The eldest Mrs. Smith soothed her inner beast by reminding herself that the crackling young woman was carrying her grandchild.

 

Still, her daughter stepped in to save her. It’s all vegan and focused around plants, so fruits and vegetables, but the dishes are really very Americana, explained her offspring, who spent childhood years dipping string cheese into bowls of shelf-stable shredded parmesan. I’m going to try the queso plate, she added with an excitement her mother sensed held no irony.

 

The meatloaf, the eldest Mrs. Smith said. The table felt clipped, tense; too quiet, too much attention on one another’s brief movements. Had her own pregnancy announcement been so bizarre? She could not quite remember the air around her parents’ living room, when she and her husband delivered the news to them; she’d been happy, or terrified, or resting on the fine line between those states, then, she was sure, but how she appeared to those around her, she could not place. Feeling three heads turned on her, she pushed out the words, What is the meat?

 

It’s a pea protein, Mom, but don’t focus on that. The dish is actually just like what you and Dad like. You know, with the spices. Her daughter gestured her hands in front of her hunched chest, as she had whenever she argued a theoretical point or on behalf of getting takeout, and the eldest Mrs. Smith wanted to lie down beneath the table and spoon her, as they had on the couch when she was young. The eldest Mrs. Smith knew she could not ask for such a thing; someone would call the manager, if not the police, and so she reminded her daughter that she cooked her meatloaf, and that the spices she used were ketchup.

 

—

 

All except for the newest Mrs. Smith ordered a glass of organic, vegan wine. When isn’t wine vegan? the oldest Mrs. Smith asked after the sommelier, a lean, frantic-looking man with studs in both nostrils, returned and placed the glasses on the table. She had wanted to ask when he was running through the list, but her daughter looked close to ill in her nerves, eyes shifting from face to face at their table, and she did not want to irritate her into snapping.

Her daughter said, It has to do with the bugs, or something. The eldest Mrs. Smith watched her daughter take a gulp and wipe her mouth with the back of her hand. The eldest Mrs. Smith watched the newest Mrs. Smith sip at her water, and glanced to their friend, who was sniffing and staring at her wine but not ingesting it.

 

You can drink up, the eldest Mrs. Smith said loudly, causing the unexpected addition to the group to startle. There are no bugs to check for; isn’t that right, dear? She turned on her daughter, who held the stem of a wine glass like a softball glove.

 

Her daughter looked at her wife and the friend nervously, then back at her mother. The eldest Mrs. Smith was surprised her daughter did not jab back in her friend’s honor; she found the eldest Mrs. Smith’s lighthearted teasing to be baiting and rude, when in fact, the eldest Mrs. Smith felt she only wanted to be a little less kind without losing affection. Mom, her daughter said instead. We have to tell you something.

 

With six eyes on her, Mrs. Smith suddenly felt very important. She was grateful for her bugless wine. It tasted light and fresh, she thought. Those words were only implants, really, because she preferred box wine, and also because she felt that she did not understand the world around her. Why was the friend here? How far along was her daughter-in-law? Was this friend the nanny? Was she a surrogate? Nothing quite made sense. She encouraged the sommelier, who filtered back in as though trained to pick on such delicate family rifts, to fill her glass a little extra. He obliged without question. She took a long drink, and said, Yes?

 

The younger women appeared baby faced, suddenly, without much makeup. Just the flick of winged eyeliner, a bright red lipstick. Their faces looked unbalanced, unfinished; she guessed intentionally. Mrs. Smith had worn her full face, including powder, as she had for years. In the tea lights, she worried she looked like a ghost.

 

Well, her daughter started. The women looked at one another again when she paused, letting the eldest Mrs. Smith simmer. The eldest Mrs. Smith was prepared to simmer, simmer, until the youngest Mrs. Smith, the newest Mrs. Smith, and their strange friend held hands. Quite ceremonious, the eldest Mrs. Smith thought before feeling she was being made a fool.

 

I’m very happy for you, she said unhappily. And I understand this probably feels like very big news to give me, but of course I understand.

 

The women looked at one another, then back at her.

 

The newest Mrs. Smith repeated her unsteadily: You understand?

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith finished her wine. She drank her water glass to the bottom. She felt her bladder seize, a reminder of her infallibility.. I’m very, very happy for you girls, she said, but I am a little offended that you’re having such a hard time telling me the truth.

 

Her one daughter spoke to her very slowly, as though she were a child with a dirty foot in its mouth: What exactly are you happy about, Mom?

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith felt regret before she said, The baby. After all, it was their news to give, not hers. But why had they made the night so difficult? Why this particularly odd restaurant? Why the awkward friend? Why draw out the reveal? The eldest Mrs. Smith worried why her own daughter thought her own mother would need such buttering up; was it those bad years, the hung up calls, the mentions of the sons of her friends who were so polite, and so single, the use of friend over and over and over? The eldest Mrs. Smith put her empty wine glass to her mouth. She did not want to think about those years and their bruising.

 

The newest Mrs. Smith looked at the other women, then said loudly and cheerfully, as though repeating her order at the counter of a loud cafe, There’s actually not a baby.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith stopped herself from rolling her eyes. She said: Okay, the fetus.

 

Her daughter grabbed her hand when she said, Mom, no, you don’t understand what’s going on.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith wondered where her meatloaf was; how could raw food take so long? It wasn’t even cooked! She wanted to kick the table up into the ceiling. She held her daughter’s hand back. She could not remember the last time they had grabbed for one another. Speaking each syllable fully, she said: Explain it in the simplest terms, will you?

 

The friend leaned forward and chirped, Oh, Mrs. Smith. We’re a trio.

 

A trio, the eldest Mrs. Smith repeated flatly. With her free hand, she held her wine in front of her face, as though it were a shield. She stared into the bottom of the glass and swore she saw her child self staring back at her, forlorn and meager, always steps behind, always left out, the haunting of a miserable only child. She placed the glass on the table. She said, What?

 

Like, instead of a couple, the newest Mrs. Smith cut in. We’re a trio. The three of them nodded at one another, then at the eldest Mrs. Smith.

 

Behind the eldest Mrs. Smith, the sommelier explained the wine pairings to a table that had just been seated. She listened to the string of happy voices; two couples, she guessed, one old, one young, enjoying a family meal. No trios. No sad old women. Tofu, perhaps. But not all of this. She repeated, What?

 

No one is having a baby, her daughter said, this time, her voice all shake. We’re not pregnant, or adopting, or anything like that. But our family is growing, and it’s important to me that you accept that.

 

What, she thought, incredulously. She asked, A fourth Mrs. Smith?

 

Mom, Jesus. We haven’t talked about that yet.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith turned to the new addition. It’s your baby?

 

There’s no baby, Mom.

 

No baby, she repeated, feeling dumb.

 

Mom, we just need you to accept…all of it, us, and the um, the lack of a baby, too.

 

Accept it, the eldest Mrs. Smith repeated. She hesitated, then took the newest addition’s full glass and drank from hers.

 

Mom!

 

Mrs. Smith shrugged and held onto the stolen glass. She said: Accept it, and her daughter rolled her eyes.

 

I really appreciate you being so nice about this, the newest addition said, ignoring the pilfered wine. The eldest Mrs. Smith had gotten to know when younger people had prepared their words, irrespective of anything else that might happen before the envisioned moment became the present. I mean, the hemp-adorned woman continued, I know it’s a lot to take in, but you’re handling it a lot better than my mom did.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith looked at the pilfered wine glass. Despite herself, she said, Really?

 

Really! And, besides, we don’t know what the future holds, any of us. The addition said this very wisely, and the eldest Mrs. Smith felt certain that this was the sort of woman her daughter was ceaselessly attracted to: lots of wisdoms, lots of organics, lots of mild emotional stressors in stimulating environments, like the IKEA she was now sure the addition would accompany them to.

 

Tell me more, Mrs. Smith said. Her face felt warm from the wine. She comforted herself: This is a fling, an exploration. A phase. She thought about the newest Mrs. Smiths; her daughter, just 31, and her wife, a reasonable 33. They had a few good years yet. She finished the wine and noticed her daughter drain her own glass.

 

You know, about having kids. I mean, who knows, none of us are parents right now, but we don’t know—

 

Babe, her daughter said loudly. The newest Mrs. Smith shook her head diplomatically and smiled with both rows of her teeth out. Definitely still wore her retainer, the eldest Mrs. Smith thought. Absolutely mother material.

 

When she did not add a just kidding, ha, ha, the three Mrs. Smiths eyed the addition curiously. The newest asked, What do you mean, the same time the daughter asked, Haven’t we talked about this, but probably no one heard them over the eldest Mrs. Smith, who simply asked: Turkey baster or IVF?

 

—

 

When the three Mrs. Smiths and their new addition—who her daughter pointedly clarified was named Alyssa, and wanted to be called it, instead of the friend—left the restaurant, the eldest Mrs. Smith could not help herself. She’d ordered two more glasses of wine. She’d polished off her meatloaf, which, she noted to the waiter with pleasure, was actually warmer than she’d expected. Her daughter was, in her mind, one step away from being a polygamist.

 

The pregnancy test, she said as they congregated on the narrow, smoky sidewalk, feeling dumb. You were so cagey in that store, she said, regarding her daughter-in-law face to face, emboldened by the wine.

 

The newest Mrs. Smith brought her pointer finger to her mouth and picked at her lips. Oh, she said. I’ve had some vaginal dryness.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith was too focused (and too drunk) to be deterred. And you didn’t order wine, she continued.

I’m on an antibiotic, you know, she said, giving her wife a pleading look. For the dryness.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith let this information settle on their walk back to her hotel in midtown, where the girls were leaving her for the night. As her daughter explained, the new addition—Alyssa, the eldest Mrs. Smith kept as a refrain, Alyssa—hadn’t moved in yet, but would when they moved to the new place.

 

We’re buying the furniture, the eldest Mrs. Smith said, pronouncing each word as though waiting for a stern correction. But her daughter offered none, and instead described the new home as she held her wife’s hand. An additional bedroom and a half-bathroom, a minuscule yard. A deck that could fit three adults and a tall plant. It had seemed to the eldest Mrs. Smith she had gotten one guess right: IKEA, the shopping, the anxiety.This ability to perceive a thing comforted her.

 

The four women stopped at a crosswalk. The wind was flat and empty, just cold air hanging steady as they walked through. The eldest Mrs. Smith longed for some city snow, but all around her feet, dirty remnants. A big, dark car slowed at the curb, and a man rushed up from behind them and launched into the backseat. The eldest Mrs. Smith had felt a presence up close behind her, and assumed it was the new one—Alyssa, Alyssa—lurking hard, but in orienting herself to the present moment, realized Alyssa had actually been holding her daughter’s other hand.

 

The car hovered. The man from the Duane Reade, the one who carried hot blood the eldest Mrs. Smith understood at first as a blessing, leaned his face out of the window. That hot blood looked so young, then, childish in its evil, in its disregard for empathy. Later, the eldest Mrs. Smith would understand it as worse than a lack of empathy; the intention was all cruelty, all power that was not a naive pushing of boundaries, but of choice and intent.

 

Her girls didn’t react when they heard the slur; it rang through all of them, no one had to ask to clarify it, or to repeat it, or to question if it was a trick of the city noise, but only the eldest Mrs. Smith reacted when the man yelled dykes from the backseat as the car merged into traffic.

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith ran. It came back easier than she thought, the rhythm. Feet on the ground like she controlled the pace of the present. The lungs, even, remember what it is to become mightier in expansion. When the car stilled at the traffic light, the eldest Mrs. Smith soared, vaulted, it felt like, to catch up. She kicked the trunk of the car. Her foot throbbed and she kicked again. She slammed her purse against the rear window. Inside, her Midol and chapsticks rattled.

 

The man put his head out of the window. Lady, he said, blank-eyed. What the fuck?

 

The eldest Mrs. Smith hit her purse against the backdoor of the car as he shouted at the driver to raise his window. He could not figure out how to get it up himself. Of course, she realized, this man had taken an Uber and not a cab. Of course. The eldest Mrs. Smith did not emit noise from her throat. The eldest Mrs. Smith heard noises, distantly; the driver, laughing loudly, the man in the backseat, yelling about customer service, the two new Mrs. Smiths, and, she reasoned, the perhaps soon-to-be Mrs. Smith, being loud in an emotional state the eldest Mrs. Smith could not, at the moment her purse smacked into the man’s face through his still-open window, parse out. She was beyond.

The eldest Mrs. Smith felt her bladder release a little urine; all of the momentum, all of the wine. A little urine is fine, she thought. A little urine detracts from almost nothing.

 

She heard herself yelling things like eat shit, motherfucker, and I’ll report you, and even, surreally, a promise that she would come for him. Come for him where? How? The eldest Mrs. Smith had no idea where such ideas entered her mind, but it did not matter. He laughed, as the driver finally turned his window up, but he looked nervous, too; the eldest Mrs. Smith taught sophomores biology one semester. She knew what nervous young people looked like. Sure, he was probably in his twenties, but young enough to feel intrinsic unease from the steady rage of an older person. Especially one that had slammed his face with the bottom of a faux leather handbag.

 

Fuck you, lady, he yelled as the window sealed him. Seconds later, the car merged back into traffic. The eldest Mrs. Smith yelled, The name’s Anne Marie, bitch, and believed the entire island heard her.

 

The Mrs. Smiths and their girlfriend shrieked around Mrs. Smith the whole walk back through the West Village, the only place in Manhattan the eldest Mrs. Smith felt she understood, a bit, though, as her daughter explained, it was also the only neighborhood not on the grid. Her daughter put a few crushed cigarettes in her hand and repeated, Mom, shit, Mom, holy shit! The eldest Mrs. Smith released a little more urine, from all of the commotion, and didn’t care at all if the odor permeated the night.

 

In the hotel lobby, Alyssa asked for the eldest Mrs. Smith’s phone number so she could text her the video. I recorded it, she said. In case he hit you. The eldest Mrs. Smith embraced each of the women with her eyes shut, face sucking in the scent of their shampoos: almond, summer rain, green mellow mango. Mothers know these things without asking. She mumbled, I love you, and they all murmured it, or something like it, back.

 

—

 

In her hotel room, Anne Marie changed into one of two hanging robes, leaving her pajamas folded in her suitcase. She left her underwear to soak in sudsy water in the wide-mouthed sink. She did not put on a new pair. She ignored the laminated No Smoking signs and hovered by the cracked window to light up. She watched the video over and over, admiring her bear self, her peculiar, cosmic domination. She opened a miniature bottle of tequila and sipped it, wincing at its punch. She opened her computer and went to the forum. She typed: I (56F) defended my daughters (31F, 33F, 27?F) against a bigot. Feedback?? Anne Marie attached the video and hit post, then closed her computer and fingered a second cigarette, victorious.

 

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Here in North, in Our Dorm, 3C

Who was going at it? Who had put out the word?

 

When the riots popped off in South, we heard the modules filled with burning mats and brawling, that CO had stormed in, flashing riot gear, shooting bean bags, rubber bullets, and gas. We could picture it happening, vividly. We’d read all about it on a kite snuck in, passed from hand to hand. We could smell the smoke on the paper.

 

The populations in South would be stripped, searched, sorted, and reprocessed. Soon the world would be changing. Its politics would be shifting—into what configurations we could only guess. What we knew was that there would be consequences. We would feel them too, here in North, in our dorm, 3C.

 

We waited for the word to come down, for the bloodshed to happen.

 

We had to make plans.

 

We held our meetings at night, while the others lay all around us, among slanting shadows, on racks too close by, trying to listen. We knew they were trying. We wanted them to hear. We wanted them to know we’d be ready.

 

We looked for hitches in the patterns, how they trooped into the dayroom, regimented in red, forming up between shifts in the kitchen and laundry. Who gathered with whom, who would whisper, shake hands. We watched the red shirts swirling through our dorm along currents, into telltale dispersions and groupings.

 

We had to stay vigilant.

 

We could sense things occurring in traded glances behind us, like during count-times, when we had to hold still, while CO dotted our distant heads with a pencil, as if trying to pin us more firmly back into place.

 

What did they know but clipboards and checklists?

 

It was happening out there. It would happen here too.

 

We could feel it the way we could feel the weather, or the touch of a loving hand on our skin, when we would daydream on our racks about clouds, lost in memory, while we watched the inner blacks of our eyelids. We would press our hands to the concrete walls of our lockup, to feel the cold and think, It’s raining.

 

We would become odder, with intentions impossible to fathom—more so than the others—for our own good.

 

We would knock on the darkened booth and, when the man had stepped away from his monitors, snap apart plastic razors to collect the thin blades. We would hold them in our mouths, like Communion, blessed, and smile, with no trace of silver, behind the walls of our teeth.

 

This was how we had to be, but who had decided? Were the riots really to blame?

 

Was it the paisas?

 

The Eses?

 

Was it the ‘Woods?

 

In fact, who’d started this shit in the first place?

 

When we asked what was happening, CO would tell us, Step back. When trustees from other modules rolled in carts for our books or dirty trays, we would nod at them. Wussup? They’d lift a chin at the cameras in the corners, look away.

 

We knew to imagine ourselves through those lenses, our lives all flattened into dull, droning video, on whole banks of glowing monitors, for those men in darkened booths. We were learning to live accordingly.

 

So what would be ours to keep?

 

We watched the work shifts go out. We watched the work shifts come in.

 

We were lining up and playing cards, sitting down and writing letters. To anyone watching, ourselves included, we were behaving the best we could.

 

We wanted to go home, despite our bracing for the violence to come, some of us more than others, but we did. And when we would, before it had, we’d wander back into the world, feeling our way along as though our vision had dimmed, and wonder where it might be hiding—if not in the thinness of a turning page, the lightness of the rain, nor in the steadiness of the passing days—and when it would be released.

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Fish Run

We were an inch onto the Van Wyck Expressway when the boro taxi barreled past us down the left lane—going sixty, maybe sixty-five. I’m only guessing, since Jack Sr. braked so hard to dodge it that my head hit the dashboard with a smack like fireworks behind my eyes. I wasn’t much for thought afterwards. James, who was sitting in the back of the van with the dolly and the netting, let out a bark of a laugh that cracked the air. Jack Sr. swore, guiding us onto the shoulder, yelling—“For God’s sake, James, stop laughing, Ren, are you okay? Jesus Christ, can you hear me, Ren?”—while I tried desperately not to puke, as I had never been hit so hard in my life. In my mind, I was still thinking of first impressions. I’d only just met Jack Sr. and his grandson James, only just disembarked the red-eye from Seattle-Tacoma an hour ago and climbed into their van from the January night. If I puked all over Jack Sr.’s dash and windshield I’d be forgiven, probably, but not forgotten. Jack Jr. would never let me live it down. Fucking Jack Jr. It was his fault I was here, alone in a van with his father, in the first place. I reminded myself that I loved him or some shit.

 

We’d been stopped on the shoulder for a couple minutes. I opened my eyes, the top of my head pounding viciously under my fingers. “I’m okay,” I managed to say. Another taxi sped past, jamming its horn for four uninterrupted seconds to let us know we were motherfuckers. I tried to find my hands stretched out in front of me. The dizziness had mostly abated, not quite the pain. “Wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. My fault. I’m okay.”

 

“Oh, Jesus, fuck, oh, Jesus,” said Jack Sr. a couple more times, working through—I assumed—how to tell his absent son that his boyfriend had been hospitalized after only eighteen paltry minutes in wintertime Queens. We went on like this, not listening to each other, until gradually the road and the blue-black sky sat completely still and solid in my view. It was about to snow.

 

—

 

It had been Jack Jr.’s idea for us to visit his family. I would fly to JFK from Seattle; Jack Jr. would come straight from his work trip in Toronto. “Easy,” Jack Jr. called it on the phone as we bought our tickets. “Spend the weekend with my parents, go home together. This is what richies do, fly all over, compound their airtime.”

 

“Who the fuck says that?”

 

I had packed, made my way to the airport, called Jack Jr. one last time, boarded. My phone blared when I turned my cellular back on when we touched ground at three a.m. Five missed calls, two texts. Snowstorm. Blocked in. A slew of voicemails documenting an hour-long fight to get to the airport through the Canada snowdrift, after which a saga of delays and road closures had resulted in Jack Jr. being marooned at the hotel until at least the afternoon. Which led me, alone and palpitating, to baggage claim, then the Terminal 2 pick-up carpool where Jack Sr.—the sixty-five-year-old, shaved-headed Korean fishmonger—clapped me on the back, herded me into his refrigerated van, and gave me what was now feeling like a concussion. This was all very funny to James, who was recording a video of us with his phone.

 

“Don’t sleep.” Jack Sr.’s palm was cold as a pumice stone on my forehead. “Definitely don’t sleep. I heard that’s bad for you.”

 

Behind us, more cars swerved, screeching their horns. Jack Sr. appeared afraid to move us any farther. I didn’t know anything about New York. There were hospitals in the city, of course, but did I dare ask to be taken to one? Was I a pussy? Jack Jr. would say I was, I know he would.

 

“You know what?” Jack Sr. said suddenly, posing the question with a mischievous smile before he’d even asked. I saw it a mile away. He was about to ask me to come along for the deliveries. “Why don’t you come along with James and me this morning for the deliveries? Fish market’s only an hour from here. This way I can keep an eye on you, make sure you’re okay.”

 

Jack Jr.’s family owned a sushi restaurant in Fort Lee. He’d told me this on our first date the previous year. “Huge Korean population, Fort Lee.”

 

“But,” I remembered saying, “sushi is—”

 

“Sushi is whatever the white man says it is,” Jack Jr. said. “Haven’t you heard? They can’t tell us apart.”

 

Jack Jr. said things. This got him into trouble, but also made him one of the more memorable people I’d ever met. That’s what I ended up telling my friends about him. Meanwhile Jack Sr. still ran the place himself. Still made the trip across two rivers to the New Fulton Fish Market in Hunts Point in the middle of the night twice a week to secure the fresh catch. “He loves talking about it,” Jack Jr. said to me. “Loves. I’m really sorry.”

 

Back in the van, Jack Sr. was still waiting for an answer. James was busy editing his footage. I forced a smile. Jack Sr. beamed as though I’d just asked to be adopted. He jerked the van back into gear, and as we rocketed off down the freeway, he started asking me where I’d grown up and did I speak Korean okay and were my parents still around. While I, jet-lagged, tried to keep my eyes open and wished that Jack Jr. had made his goddamn flight.

 

—

 

They made the fish run every Tuesday and Thursday, Jack Sr. told me over the van’s deafening engine. Always Tuesday and Thursday, around two or three in the morning before the best of the vendors sold out. He listed them off his fingers: sea bream, snapper, Scottish salmon, Spanish mackerel, sweet shrimp, king crab legs, trout roe, littleneck clams, razor clams, abalone. “Tuna, Jesus, the tuna,” Jack Sr. said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Fifty pounds of tuna a week. It’s all people want to eat. Can’t make it fast enough. You like spicy tuna, Ren? Nice sriracha mayonnaise, scallions—”

 

“Not my favorite,” I managed to say.

 

Jack Sr. got a twinkle in his eye. “You know, Jack and I did the fish run for eight years, up until he left for college. I think he got used to it by the end, maybe even liked it. That, or he lied better than his brothers.”

 

He let out a booming, forceful laugh, which I didn’t doubt for its authenticity. Jack Sr. seemed like the kind of guy who laughed like that no matter the joke. He tapped the mesh behind us. “You okay, James?” James nodded silently, engrossed in a portable PlayStation. He was decked in black sweats, socks, the same slippers I’d worn to the shower in my college dorms. He had soundly ignored us after the initial hysteria of my head injury.

 

“My eldest boy’s son,” Jack Sr. indicated as quietly as he could over the engine. “He’s some kind of…whatever the fuck it’s called—Ticker Tocker. Right, James? How many page-hits on that video of Ren hitting his head?”

 

“That’s not what they’re called,” said James.

 

“You know, he gets stopped outside the mall for pictures,” Jack Sr. added. “He’ll take that video down if you want him to.”

 

“It’s really no trouble,” I said.

 

We hit a new patch of the highway that screamed against the wheels at regular intervals.

 

“Four boys, you know,” Jack Sr. said. “I’ve got hope one’ll come back to Jersey. But I suppose Jack loves Seattle.”

 

He said this while looking at me, waiting, I thought, for me to respond. I could give him only a placating nod, afraid to tell a lie. Fuck if I knew what Jack Jr. wanted.

 

—

 

Jack Sr. didn’t have an accent. He told me as we rounded the river how he’d come over when he was three and had only been back to Seoul twice in his life. He’d lived in and around the tri-state area for sixty years, furthest being Seneca Falls for a period in his teens. He unfolded a long-winded account of the all-white high school of his youth, and I gritted my teeth against an ache in my neck that hadn’t gone away since the plane. I guess it hadn’t been Jack Jr.’s fault about the snow. He’d been nervous about the work trip anyway. I hoped he was at least sleeping well, one of us ought to. We turned off the highway, coasted onto a sprawling flat of asphalt, miles wide. In the distance loomed the green-topped mile-long warehouse, serviced by slow-moving trucks that pulled away from the industrial loading bays on its side. We slowed to a stop across two parking spaces. Jack Sr. ordered me to sit tight while he and James opened up the van. With a wave he summoned me, put an arm around my shoulder and walked me up, leaving James to lug the dolly up the incline. I stamped my frozen feet against the ground. Our breaths dispersed chains of fog around our heads.

 

“Shit,” Jack Sr. said, looking at me. “You got a hat?”

 

He clicked his tongue, not waiting for an answer, and swiped his own. Over my protests he jammed it on me. After the roar of the van and the hollow din of the freeway, my ears rang as they adjusted to the silence. There were a couple others, guys working in pairs and groups of three. Several were already on their way back, dollies laden high with cellophane-wrapped iceboxes on wooden pallets. The market had moved from the Financial District in 2005 and was now twice the drive for them, Jack Sr. told me as they approached. “Worth it for the quality, you know,” he said—rubbed his pointer finger and thumb together in front of my face as he said this, illustrating for me. “You wouldn’t believe how many scam artists buy frozen,” he said. “Five-star restaurants in Manhattan! All frozen.”

 

He pointed up to the shadowy guys loading the trucks up front. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. Almost definitely mob guys. I mean, it’s the Bronx.”

 

James, tugging the dolly, batted Jack Sr.’s arm down before I could.

 

Inside, the warehouse swelled into view, colder than the chill outside. Down an open walkway in the middle lay hundreds of tables, stacked boxes packed with ice, tanks spilling water out onto the floor and into the drains. We were hit by the smell first, nothing like the supermarket: entrails, brine, chum. Scallops pulsing in saltwater vats. An octopus wholesaler, laying each tangle of white and purple tentacles out like cabbages. Away from the tables were teams of guys breaking up the larger catches. Gleaming portions of red tuna cut straight from the carcass by samurai sword. Grouper and Pacific halibut speared on hooks and hoisted into the air by chains. Every so often Jack Sr. stopped near one of the tables, engaging in hushed conversation, after which several sleepy-eyed men in rubber aprons and boots would load an icebox onto James’s dolly. Jack Sr. opened each one, taking a metal hook off the dolly’s handle and hoisting a fish out of the ice by the gills, examining it carefully before laying it back down. We moved further inward, beyond the traditional fare: the specialty guys cracking open sea urchins flown in from Hokkaido, Santa Barbara, orange flesh bared to the lights as we passed. Tanks of red frog crabs, flat fish carpeting the bottoms of the glass, snails in buckets on the floor, jellyfish, red-spined sea cucumber.

 

“Anything special you like? We’re doing a little dinner in the restaurant, when Jack gets in.”

 

I declined, politely, avoiding eye contact with a tank of conger eels. I could tell it disappointed him. We crossed to the other end of the hangar, by which time James’s dolly was full. I could hear him struggling to drag it alongside us. “He’s okay,” Jack Sr. assured me, when I stooped to help. “Kid doesn’t play any sports. Told his dad it was a mistake.”

 

I couldn’t remember if Jack Jr. had ever told me he had a nephew. More than one, I was sure. He was the youngest of his brothers. It was something of his that I’d envied, shut up in my room when I visited home, reminded of the quiet nights, my own parents in bed by nine, television to fill the silence. I had never even shared a beer with my father. Jack Sr., now, he could talk for days if somebody let him.

 

“You should hear him go on about you, Ren,” Jack Sr. said to me. We were out of the warehouse through the hangar doors. I caught James’s eye for a moment, mutual commiseration, pleased to think that for a split second we could be allies. We reached the van and started loading. It was nearing four in the morning.

 

“Jack’s never brought anybody home before,” Jack Sr. said, tossing James a bundle of bike cables to tie it all down. “We were worried for a while whether he ever wanted to…you know—”

 

Of course, we’d only been together a year. I hadn’t even realized his birthday was coming around until I’d looked it up myself. And here I was. It was fast but not unreasonable. I hoped. Anyway, Jack Jr. would surely not meet my own father until way, way further down the line, considering my parents barely spoke English. My father asked only occasionally if I was dating these days, wanting no more than a yes or a no, and—I’m sure—only because my mother had made him.

 

It had happened so quietly, the week after I’d come home after college and told them. I didn’t know the word in Korean. After several failed attempts I gave up. “Ho-mo-sex-u-al,” I said carefully, looking between them across the kitchen table. My mother made dinner that night, my father bloviated over the news. He was in high spirits that weekend as the South Korean president had recently been imprisoned. We said goodnight and the next morning continued on without interruption. A month later, while I looked for roommates in Seattle, my father said something about a sum of money they’d saved up for my wedding that they wanted me to use to pay rent. “Why now?” I’d said.

 

“It’s not like you’ll—” my father trailed off, realizing I was looking straight at him. After a minute or so, he shuffled away to the kitchen. It took him another week after I’d started working to call me again. “I didn’t mean,” he said in English, which is what he did to avoid long conversations.

 

“I know,” I told him. He hung up.

 

Jack Sr. laughed, nervously, as I hadn’t said anything.

 

“Hey, Ren,” he offered, timidly, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

 

“No,” I told him, coming to. “No, it’s not that, it’s—”

 

We ran out of things to say. James shouted from the other side of the van.

 

—

 

The restaurant, still dark, was tucked behind a Chinese bakery. James, nodding off in the back with the fish, let me relieve him, and at six a.m., Jack Sr. and I hauled the pallets to the kitchen. A crew of sleepy young guys met us there, rubbing their eyes in with their forearms. They grunted in agreement with Jack Sr.’s observations, double-stock of the salmon this week for the white customers, dirt-cheap mackerel for the Asians. They set to work breaking it all down, filling the glass bar out in front with fresh cuts. It was almost five. The place was small, barely enough room for ten tables, but smelled warm and real. Jack Sr. had a few newspaper clippings up by the doors, reviews from their opening weekend, a feature in the local Fort Lee Times. A pot boiling on the stove. Jack Sr. pressed a bowl into my hands. Kimchi jjigae like my mother made, simmered a couple hours with tofu and pork belly. I brought breakfast out to James in the back of the van and sat with him, slurping the dregs and last grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl.

 

“I can’t believe you let him take you along today,” James said, after a while.

 

I shrugged. “I think I’d rather have the coma, in hindsight.”

 

James smiled, fleetingly. “He wants to give it to Jack, the restaurant,” he said.

 

“That’s good.”

 

“He really did like it,” James said. “That wasn’t a lie. Before he moved to Seattle they did all the runs together.”

 

The soup, scalding hot, felt good collecting in my stomach. My fingers, which had been numb for hours, were starting to regain their color.

 

“How many views on that video, by the way?”

 

James dug out his phone. “14K. Nobody’s awake.” He looked at me. “I really will take it down if you want.”

 

—

 

The van putted through the polished development by the river. I glanced up at the houses, wondering if anybody could hear, remembering that if Jack Sr. had been clanging and roaring through Bergen County in his demented fish van for twenty years already, he wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. We let James off by a white house near a dense line of trees. They’d all be over for dinner: James’s father, Jack Jr.’s two older brothers. I felt relieved. There wasn’t much more I could do to embarrass myself. James said his goodbyes. Seized with a whoosh of hot blood through my ears I held my fist out through the open window. James considered it, then bumped his knuckles against mine. A fresh dust of snow had fallen over the green lawns as we pulled away. The sun peeked lazily up over the suburbs and their manufactured tree lines. Jack Sr. slowed us to a stop in front of the left side of a brick duplex along a massively inclined road. I felt the van’s weight redistribute as its brakes groaned their last whisper. I made a move to open the door.

 

“I hope I didn’t scare you back there, Ren.”

 

I glanced longingly up at the house, the beds inside. Jack Sr. made a couple motions in the air with his hands, starting and stopping to say what he wanted. My limbs felt filled with sand. I tried to let him know I understood.

 

“Your parents must be happy about you guys.”

 

I went to nod again, but looking across the seat divider at Jack Sr., staring fondly at me, stopped myself. I was speaking before I realized I was. I didn’t want to say it, too tired to stop myself. “They love me,” I said. “It’s just…I don’t get the feeling they understand, sometimes.”

 

It had come out of me in one breath. Shame bloomed up inside me. I wanted to be shown to a bed as fast as possible. Jack Sr. took his key out of the ignition. I realized that I was still wearing his hat and pulled it off me, handing it to him.

 

“You know,” Jack Sr. said, kneading the wool cap between his fingers, “Jack didn’t live with us for about three weeks after he came out to his mother and me. We never told him to go and he never said he was going to, but—” He tried to laugh. “We were different, things were different, which…well, you know.”

 

And I nodded, because I did know.

 

“He came back, we said we were sorry and he said he understood. Pretty soon after he started coming along for the fish runs again.” Jack Sr. smiled at me.

 

The van gave a click as he unlocked our doors and slid out to the ground. I followed him up to the front door where we left our shoes and tiptoed onto white prefab carpeting. Jack Sr. ushered me through the door closest to the kitchen, still dark, imbued all throughout with the cool blue light of the morning. Jack’s childhood room. A desk stood pushed to the corner, facing the window out to the street. Snow was starting to fall heavy outside, blanketing the van and the curb. The room looked sanitized, a space once made for four boys, dwindling as each left home, repurposed now for the erstwhile son home for a couple days at a time. Just one bed left. Still some books on the shelving above the bed. Plastic soccer trophy on the windowsill. Jack Sr. put his hand on my shoulder. One last time he felt my head, the back of my neck, and I let him.

 

“I’ll wake you if Jack calls.” The door shut behind him.

 

I stayed put, thinking Jack Jr., if he were here, might have put me on the sofa outside or at least might have swept the room before I’d come in. I’d seen only one picture of his from high school. A lanky kid cradling a basketball, T-shirt under the school jersey, gaps in his face and arms where he’d since filled out, grown to size. I wondered if this was the very same bed and suspected that it was if the soccer trophy—on further inspection, National Storytelling League trophy—was any indication. I lifted the covers, maneuvering myself inside. I didn’t fool myself thinking the pillow smelled like him, it couldn’t have. I lay still, looking up at the dark crease, the meeting of the wall and the ceiling above. I closed my eyes, turning my head to push my nose into the sheets, and thought about what I was going to tell him.

 

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Scranton 1929/Pontelandolfo 1861

Of the many ways in which the old man is disappointed with his daughter-in-law, her cooking is actually the worst. So when he enters his son’s apartment and is greeted by Emilia—an Austrian!—who breezily announces, “I made something special for you, Pop,” it takes all his restraint to nod, to smile, to use his stilted control of English—the only language they share—to say, “Thank you. This makes me happy.”

 

His son’s apartment, however, is no disappointment. Wood paneling, open space, a mild improvement over their first place in Wilkes-Barre, his grandsons huddled around the Philco enjoying a ball game. The old man has never appreciated baseball, but he’s proud Tony and Frankie do, that they’re American in a way he never could be. He nods at them—he has never given affection to little boys—and shakes his son’s hand. Carlo’s grip is strong, and the old man reddens when his son pulls him in for a hug, how free he is with his emotions not only with his family, but with everyone he encounters as one of Scranton’s premier plumbers. Once a week during the old man’s visits to the Cataldo Club, he is annoyed when someone compliments his son’s handiwork and says how friendly he is. Friendly. It’s not an Italian word.

 

The old man joins his son at the table and wishes he didn’t have to smell whatever it is Emilia is cooking. The whole apartment reeks of garlic and tomatoes, and he knows exactly where this is headed. “It’s red sauce and meatballs,” Carlo says to confirm. How many times he’s been served red sauce and meatballs by smiling buffoons even though no one in Italy would ever serve red sauce with meatballs. “Yes,” the old man says, agreeing that red sauce and meatballs is indeed what his daughter-in-law is preparing, “red sauce and meatballs.”

 

“So,” his son says, leaning back, “the boys were asking about the old country today. Weren’t you, boys? Come here to Pop.”

 

“No, we weren’t,” Tony pleads in his singsong voice.

 

“The Yankees!” Frankie cries.

 

“Boys.” Carlo snaps his fingers, and they turn off the radio and fall in line around the table. At least Carlo isn’t friendly with his sons. The humiliation! “Tell them something, Pop. Come on. Anything.”

 

Emilia calls from the stove. “You ever run into my parents visiting from Austria?”

 

An Italian would only greet an Austrian with spit or gunfire, and the old man is astonished that the next generation can name all of the New York Yankees while understanding so little about where they came from. The old man knows he has to reveal something but finds himself drawing a blank. He doesn’t like remembering life in the before time. How to convey an entire sunken world through one single memory? He looks at his family, and the same image as always rises—chicken, not prepared by a family member, not served in a bar, but a freshly butchered bird roasting over open flames, the way the flesh popped, how it smelled beneath the stars among the camaraderie of other soldiers. The old man remembers not Favazzina, the southern village where he grew up, not his fisherman father or the stiff stench of his clothes, not his mother forever in a nightgown, making the sign of the cross no matter what news was delivered, not even the caresses of curly-haired Gianna, the girl he assumed he’d one day marry. No, the old man remembers being summoned from his parents’ home, conscripted by the northern government post-unification. He remembers Pontelandolfo, a village very much like his own, how the powers-that-be explained that revolts across the southern half of the peninsula had to be crushed, that the citizens of Pontelandolfo had banded together and murdered forty soldiers. A message must be delivered. Unification, no, the entire soul of newborn Italy depended upon it!

 

The old man observes his grandchildren and their occasional glances at the silent Philco. He looks at Carlo and Emilia, wondering what they picture when they hear words like “Italy” or “Austria,” perhaps some vague dream of a simpler life, holy soil they know they’ll never step foot in. How could any of them understand marching as a group of five hundred, entering Pontelandolfo armed and ordered to kill? How could they imagine the old man as a young man surrounded by his comrades, mostly teenagers unaware that they’d even been liberated, how they opened fire on the town’s clergy, men, women, and children? His family couldn’t feel the weight of the torches, how the old man and his giddy friends hurled them through the open windows of houses, the dissonance of screams, how the heat from the burning village coupled with the August sun made the old man feel like he’d tumbled outside of his body arriving somewhere that didn’t count, not really, where anything could happen and where everything would be forgiven. They burned Pontelandolfo to dust, and, as they listened to the gunfire and cries, they feasted. Chicken roasting on open flames just beyond the fighting and all the wine they could drink. Later, the old man wondered if the government had plied them with food and alcohol just in case the soldiers were considering joining up with the people of Pontelandolfo, who resembled their own families praying for their safe returns back home. But the truth was they would’ve followed orders no matter what, that they loved being told what to do, that at the end of the day none of these decisions were theirs. It was the north. Always the north.

 

The old man remembers the priest they hung outside the village, how for the rest of the evening he and his friends took turns shooting at the rope above his snapped neck, how they missed and missed, laughed and laughed. He looks at his moon-faced family and wonders what exactly to say about that.

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The Ballet Audition

She appeared in our Leningrad apartment one afternoon, at the start of my summer break, when I was ten years old. I was showing my self-made Mary Poppins costume to our next-door neighbor Nata, leaving the door into our apartment wide open. When I came back, she was sitting in our kitchen. My mother was fussing with the tea cups wearing her ancient blue sports pants with the material on the knees stretched out like two deflated balloons. Mom said, “Say hi to Galina Vasilievna.”

 

Galina Vasilievna came to borrow the 500+ page JCPenny catalogue; its cover showed a model in a white beret, white sweater and a white coat. It was 1985 in Leningrad and women loaned to each other fashion magazines from beyond the Soviet border: mostly Burda from Eastern Germany, or, more rarely: Bazaar, Vogue, Elle. The most coveted magazine was always the fat American catalogue because it allowed the fullest entry into the Western fairy tale. Catalogues showed beautifully proportioned tables, chairs, sofas, dolls, dog mats, and human beings built for ordinary lives and attainable for anyone in the US, for a price. That week was my mom’s turn to keep, for four long days, the catalogue that came to us from a friend of a friend of a friend. It was our last day to host it.

 

“I hear that everyone in France is into bold, large patterns and bright colors. Orange, black, yellow. Stripes! That kind of thing makes you look years younger,” my mom said.

 

Galina Vasilievna did not respond, but smiled politely. Her long neck and straight back made her look regal, even haughty, but her eyes displayed a restrained playfulness, the kind you see on the face of a kid waiting for her turn to use the swing on the playground. A large oval amber pin in her low bun pulled her entire physical presence together with precise dignified finality. She was not in a hurry at all and seemed to enjoy herself sitting on our too-low-for-the-dining-table sofa with a red brick replacing a missing leg. At the same time I was certain that she would never visit us again. This certainty felt vaguely connected to my feeling of shame because we had an old, stained oilcloth with lilacs on the dining table while she was wearing an ivory silk blouse with three pearl buttons on its cuffs. It was as if she flew into our kitchen straight from The Hermitage ballroom. Only a short moment ago she sat at a grand piano in a long, light blue dress and played a nocturne by Chopin, simultaneously reciting Pushkin’s poetry.

 

I thought my mother should feel envy sitting next to this woman who was about her age, but, observing my mother, I could tell that she didn’t feel it. It was a disappointing realization for it was proof that important things were beyond my mother. The thing beyond her, right in front of us, was the elegance of this woman. Of course I didn’t call it elegance then, and while I didn’t know the right word I did ask the right question.

 

“Are you a ballerina?”

 

I asked this question still wearing the Mary Poppins costume: my friend’s mom’s long brown dress, with a belt to keep it in place, and a large collar I made out of ivory linen napkins with lace trimmings. On my head I had a gray men’s hat that my neighbor Nadia let me borrow. Mom waved her hand behind Galina Vasilievna, signaling to me to take off the hat because it was not polite to talk with someone indoors wearing a hat. But I knew the real reason: she thought the hat looked ridiculous and now felt embarrassed on my behalf. I stubbornly pretended I didn’t see mom’s signals and kept the hat on. I kept it on because I loved it. I imagined it made me look sophisticated.

 

Galina Vasilievna asked me to sit next to her and then told me that she used to be a ballerina and danced in the corps de ballet of the Mariinsky Theater, and that now she taught ballet at the House of Culture Ballet School. She asked me about my costume and it turned out that she adored everything about it. “You have a good taste,” she told me. I could hardly breathe inside the fog of euphoria, and my voice sounded unnaturally high when I blurted to her that I wanted to be a ballerina too.

 

I went to the Mariinski Theater twice with my classmates, our school’s “culture outing” program. We saw The Sleeping Beauty in the first grade and The Swan Lake in the second grade. More recently, while visiting my friend Vera, I watched the TV ballet Anuta, based on a Chekhov short story “Anna on the Neck.” It was one of those ballet productions made for TV only; they were very popular back in the day and completely ignored in my own family. That night, every female member of Vera’s family—two sisters, her mother, aunt, two grandmothers—sat down to eat dinner in front of the TV to watch that ballet, but after the mushroom soup Vera was eager to make an escape back to my flat. I wanted to stay to watch Anuta to the end, but Vera said that ballet is the dumbest art form because dancers are mute. “Watching a Chekhov short story ballet is like watching an orchestra and not hearing a peep,” she concluded. I couldn’t get her cruel comment out of my head, and, later, when she offered to let me read her copy of Great Expectations, I told her that I no longer like Dickens because he is “stupidly judgmental and can’t enjoy things in the moment.”

 

That day, in our kitchen, Galina Vasilievna asked me to dance for her and point my feet, and do a split, and then a “bridge,” a deep bend backwards. I took off my hat and performed each request with a manic grin on my face. At one point my linen collar fell on the floor because it was not stitched to the dress. I was ready to do anything for her and was hoping for more requests or maybe even corrections, but suddenly she turned to my mom, and her tone of voice changed from a violin to a bass.

 

“Your daughter has remarkable feet and she is very flexible. Would you consider enrolling her at our school? We are auditioning girls her age in two weeks.”

 

That night I pulled the blanket over my head and entered the living room of the great Maurice Petipa, the choreographer behind The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and other classics. I saw his room on TV in the film about Anna Pavlova, who was born in 1881 and became one of the most famous ballerinas of all time. In the film, Petipa’s living room is exquisitely furnished in pastel colors, and the great man himself, in a white vest with a black bow, is elderly, bearded, and aristocratic. He presides over harmony, refinement, and culture. In this room, ten-year-old Anna Pavlova stands before Petipa, an enormous painting of Tzar Alexander III behind her. Petipa bows to Anna, and her audition for the Imperial School of Ballet commences. She shows him her flexibility, her eyes radiate pure deadly voltage of happiness, and she wears a long navy dress with a tiny white lace collar snugly wrapping her neck. Afterwards Petipa concludes that she is ready to be admitted into the ballet school.

 

Two days before my audition a very unpleasant thing happened to me. That day I was sent to my grandma’s for the weekend and accompanied her when she went to her hairdresser, located inside a supermarket, a ten-minute walk from her flat. Grandma, or babyshka, as I always called her, had weak, swollen feet, and it always took us forever to walk because she had to make frequent stops to rest. Our trail was muddy since that particular suburban housing area was relatively new, still under ongoing or abandoned construction, and it had rained recently. Every time I jumped over the mud puddle babyshka predicted that next time I would slip and fall. Babyshka’s weak legs could not jump over puddles and sometimes she ended up stepping right in the middle of them. As we walked she was telling me, again, about walking to the Neva River with a metal bucket for water in freezing cold during WWII when Leningrad was under the Siege.

 

On the way to the main artery Budapeshtksaya Street, where the hair salon was located, we took a short cut through an inner courtyard surrounded by Soviet-style block apartment buildings. When we passed through this courtyard we walked by a big, black rectangular bunker, a leftover relic from WWII. Being near that bunker made me feel cold horror every time. Babyshka often told me about the war, and the Leningrad Siege: about babies in tiny coffins on sleds, and how all the cats, dogs, and rats were eaten and all the furniture burned to stay warm. That bunker was once a place of safety, but it was jet black, had no windows, and its corners were rounded, making it look even creepier. I once saw a scary old man without a leg peeing into the lilac bush next to the bunker. He was wailing quietly, pitifully, like an abandoned, hurt animal.

 

At the hair salon it turned out that babyshka had arranged a haircut for me as well, free of charge. I rejected this plan because I was growing my hair out for a ballet bun. It was already difficult to do a bun with my shoulder-length hair. Babyshka and the hairdresser took turns trying to talk me into the haircut, “a little clean trim,” but I refused to budge from my decision. Our walk back was longer than eternity because babyshka did not utter a single word, stopped even more frequently, and sighed deeply.

 

When my mom arrived to pick me up she was furious. When will we have another opportunity to visit a hairdresser? Free of charge! And by the way, according to experts, trimming hair regularly helps hair grow fuller. And why did I have to upset babyshka, babyshka who wants me to look my best, babyshka with a weak heart, elevated blood pressure, and swollen feet. I pretended that I hadn’t been listening, but in fact I heard everything distinctly, saw each word in my mind’s eye as if it were written in large, red, throbbing neon letters. I began to worry about babyshka and watched her every move, half-expecting to see her collapse before my eyes. I knew I was a criminal and secretly feared that I would now suffer a punishment I deserved. Just in case God existed I prayed to him to punish me in absolutely any way he wanted, but not during the ballet audition. I then began to feel really ashamed of myself. How could I be so cold and heartless and think about my audition when babyshka’s health was more important than all of ballet and opera combined?

 

Back at our place, while my mom chatted on the phone with her best friend, I locked myself in the bathroom. I had a big scab on my knee from the time I fell from my friend’s tall bike. Earlier that day babyshka would strike my hand every time I wanted to remove even a tiny bit of that scab. So, while my mom was on the phone, I got to work and successfully removed the entire scab, and then enlarged the wound, removing healthy skin all around it. The area on my knee was large, red, and throbbing. I looked at it and imagined the audition committee, including Galina Vasilievna, looking at my knee with revulsion and pity. It was painful to bend the leg. I wanted to scream because—obviously—I was a complete idiot.

 

The day of the audition arrived and we exited Petrogradskaya subway station and then stood in a long line full of girls, ballet buns, tight-lipped moms spilling out of the building onto the street. Moms were checking out other girls to assess their thinness. Girls were checking out other moms to assess thinness of girls in the future. Looking around I thought that every mom in line was far inferior to my mom. My mom was beautiful and very thin. Natasha, my classmate, once told me that when she grows up she wants to look exactly like my mom. This memory made me feel a little better, but I was still amidst the sea of thin girls, many flexible like chewing gum because they took gymnastics at elite Soviet gymnastics studios, having been stretched by their parents for ballet and gymnastics in their infancy. Yet, I was certain that Maurice Petipa would never want a chewing gum.

 

House of Culture Ballet School was not the impossible-to-get-into Vaganova Ballet Academy, previously The Imperial Ballet School from which Anna Pavlova had graduated, but it was easily second best in Leningrad. Ballet was the USSR’s space program inside the Imperial Russia spacesuit, and only a handful of schools were allowed to carry out its mission. At these schools bodies were trained to fly for swan roles, training was free of charge, and the mission rested on a belief that ballet ought to be developed only in the right body. Those who got in were Chosen for the Future.

 

In the dressing room I got undressed down to my tank top and underwear, affixed a new Band-Aid to my knee, and entered the studio when my name was called. The judges presided over a long table. One of them was Galina Vasilievna. She wore the ivory blouse I remembered, and her head was lowered to her notebook, where she was making notes. My heart was jumping out through my throat, but I managed to do the plies, the tandus, I pointed my feet, arched my back, jumped up from the first position, then from the second, galloped across the room. When I lifted my right leg to the side, the woman who had measured my height, neck, and length of arms, held my leg by the ankle, slapping my knee hard, on the Band-Aid, to make me keep it straight and then lifted the leg as high as it could go. It went so high I could see my toes just by slightly turning my eyes to the upper right, but when she let go of my foot it did not want to stay in the high spot and fell to the floor with a forceful bang. In panic I looked at the judges, wanting to see Galina Vasilievna’s reaction, and saw that the ivory blouse was not Galina Vasilievna at all. Inside the blouse was an old woman with a skinny neck and a long, pointed nose.

 

Afterwards, in the foyer, I waited forever for the results to be posted. At last, the woman who had slapped me on the knee pinned the list to the wall next to the closed door of the studio. Girls and moms poured to the list, and most girls were crying. At first I couldn’t see anything, and then I could, and read the list again and again because my name wasn’t there. I kept re-reading, stubbornly, refusing to budge from my spot, and other girls were pushing me to make room for them.

 

My mother came up to me, held my hand, and we walked outside. We walked back to Petrogradskaya subway in silence. She then said, “You know, dear, these people are experts, they know best and they can tell if ballet is right for you. What about diving? I know you love it too. You can start with a diving group at a SKA pool in the fall. My friend Lusya knows someone who coaches the diving team and they can probably take you.”

 

Her words helped me enormously. I held onto what she said as if it were a rope I could use to climb out of a dark pit. I started thinking about Lake Kruglovskoe and imagined climbing to that secret high spot we discovered with Masha and Lera, the spot we called “insanity flight.” I pictured myself walking along the south side of the cliff, where an old bicycle could be seen sticking through the water because it was the shallow side of the lake, ankle-deep. I imagined walking to the highest point and then jumping into the lake, straight onto the rocks, feeling my legs break when I land. I lie on the rocks with my legs broken, no: one leg broken, shattered to pieces below the knee. I’m looking up at the sky, hearing someone call my name, searching for me, but I’m lying there completely still and silent, slowly slipping out of consciousness.

 

Interrupting my story my mom said, “Well, what did you expect, dear? It’s no use grieving so dramatically. Mary Poppins would never despair like that.”

 

“Mary Poppins graduated from the world-famous ballet school of Madame Corry,” I said.

 

I never read the book by Travers; my knowledge about Mary Poppins derived entirely from a popular Soviet film loosely based on that book. In that film Mary Poppins takes the children to her old ballet school and introduces them to her beloved ballet teacher Madame Corry, who never ages. The actress playing Madame Corry was a Bolshoi Ballet ballerina in real life.

 

I wanted to be left alone with my story and not talk, so I said, “It’s okay. The upside is that now I can get a haircut. A short bob with bangs, like on that model you liked.”

 

In my story my mom was rushing to the cliff looking for me and eventually she saw me from above. I was very small, very still, and way below.  She saw that my leg had been totally shattered and thought that I might be dead. When I got to this point in my story I started to cry in real life. My whole face was wet, even my hands, even my dress.

When we reached Pionerskaya subway station I suddenly realized, with a satisfying jolt of insight, that the stone I land on after I jump is covered with slimy moss. When I land I slide off the stone with full force.

 

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We Regret to Inform You

We heard from Amanda in sales that a gurney had been sent up to the third floor this morning. We received the email from HR after lunch.

 

“We regret to inform you,” the email stated, “that Mark Lawson, senior director of communications, passed away this morning. Mark has been with the company for 24 years. He will be missed. A grief therapist will be available tomorrow in the conference space next to the break room for anyone who would like her services.”

 

It looked just like the HR emails that reminded us of upcoming holidays and that skin cancer screenings were available on the top floor. Navy blue font, no orange exclamation point. It blended in with the rest of our inboxes. We could have missed it had we not been waiting for it.

 

We all went back to work. No one in the contracts department knew Mark that well. Ellison had only been at his position for three months. Yasmina had been here almost a year, the longest of us new hires. We were young and promising and ready to go over terms and clauses. The only time any of us had contacted Mark was when our boss told Julie to check with the communications department on a stipulation involving a client and a third party.

 

“That’s a marketing question,” Mark had replied via email.

 

For the rest of the day, we heard whispers about how this man we’d never met had collapsed at his desk. We gave our condolences whenever we passed anyone from the communications team in the hallways. We asked Amanda what she had seen, but she told us that she hadn’t gotten a good look at him as he was wheeled out of the building. There had been a wall of EMTs and HR representatives surrounding Mark as if he were the eye of a storm, as if they were shielding us from witnessing something unsightly.

 

We knew our morbid excitement over the email had marked us as immature and unprofessional to ourselves and to each other. We fidgeted at our desks and spoke in soft tones, worried that raising our voices would further our insensitivity. Amanda, meanwhile, had been with the company for seven years and was unphased by anything that happened in the office. Her heels made the same measured clack across the floor; her smile held the same welcoming broadness. At the end of the day, she told us how relieved she was to have completed a huge campaign.

 

She was older than us and yet young enough for us to feel comfortable inviting her to lunch, complaining to her about our department, and asking her for dating advice. Julie had taken to wearing her stringy blond hair into a top bun like Amanda’s, while Wes had adopted the same smirk Amanda used when someone asked for help on their projects.

 

John, in the accounts payable department next to ours, took the news harder than we did. He paced our floor and muttered to himself, his bald head sweating.

 

“Mark was three years from retirement,” John said. “I’m ten years younger than he was.”

 

“It’s so sad, John,” we said to him.

 

“Cardiovascular problems run in my family,” John said.

 

“Don’t worry, John,” we said.

 

“I should exercise more,” John continued. “My wife takes spin classes. We have a stability ball in storage.”

 

“Sounds good, John,” we said.

 

John replaced his chair with the stability ball the following day. When he left his cubicle to attend a meeting, we took the ball, formed a circle, and rolled it back and forth to each other.

 

It was a rare moment during which we had somehow scanned and duplicated each contract, updated the statuses of all our business deals, triple-checked for signatures on every line. Yasmina’s shoulders relaxed after so many months of them tense near her ears, and Randall had stopped sighing at the top of each hour. We talked about what hobbies we had, which home towns we had come from, whether we were using this job as a step toward a better company or grad school. As we let the ball travel across the floor, Axel heard us laughing and left his office to see what we were up to.

 

“So new here, all of you,” Axel said. He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his gelled hair. We smiled nervously. “And so strong as a team! You’ll all need each other to stick it through. It’s hard to find a workplace that really functions as a second home.”

 

He looked at us one by one before heading into the boss’s office to discuss some nonstandard client agreement. We returned to our desks. As soon as we emailed Amanda to joke about how Axel’s life lessons must contribute to the department’s high turnover rate, we received two more emails from HR, one after the other.

 

“We regret to inform you,” the email started again.

 

“That Susan Shields passed away this morning.”

 

“That Chris Pall passed away earlier today.”

 

They were both in accounting. Julie asked if any of us knew the difference between accounting and accounts payable. Our boss walked by as she asked the question and frowned. None of us knew, and none of us asked John, either, when he returned from his meeting even sweatier and paler than usual.

 

“I’m taking the stairs now,” he said. “I’ve got to keep my health up.”

 

Amanda hadn’t heard how Susan or Chris died, but she did know them both and told us she wouldn’t be joining us for drinks after work that night. After our boss gave us each a new stack of assignments an hour before the end of the day, none of us went out for drinks either. We stayed until 7:30 and went home straight after.

 

We had moved to the city to work here, all of us young and promising contracts people. Wes’s fiancé had been living in the city two years prior to complete his master’s. Ellison’s family was on the other side of the country, and he planned to keep it that way. Sunny had an abuela in the suburbs. Our friends and mentors and older brothers had gushed about the city before the move.

 

“There’s energy in everything,” they had said. “So many people, so many things to do, so many adventures to have.”

Our bedrooms were the sizes of halal carts, and the rest of our apartments weren’t much larger. Our roommates were polite and out of the way, even if at night our walls were so thin we could hear each other typing on keyboards.

 

“Can they hear us?” we asked our partners after sex.

 

“Probably,” they answered. “We can hear them.”

 

They would go to sleep while we lay awake, listening to our roommates’ phone calls home, the foreign music of the restaurant on the ground floor, laughing groups leaving the movie theater down the block, food delivery boys flying past on their bicycles. We hoped the experience would feel less strange with time.

 

We tried inviting each other, us new hires, to the same clubs and festivals and parties that our friends and lovers would take us to, but we often found ourselves too tired to do much more than take the subway home and stay there.

 

When we arrived in the office the next day, HR had sent six more emails.

 

“We regret to inform you,” they began. Someone from the copywriting department, another from communications, three from production. The sixth was to let us know the elevator was under repair after its cord snapped. When we had walked in that morning, there was a single yellow band stretched across the elevator doors.

 

Randall complained that HR should switch up the emails a little, change the font color or add a picture or something, after he nearly forwarded one of the emails to a client awaiting approval on a rider. We nodded, as we had almost done the same thing.

 

A seventh email came: a memorial service would be held at the end of the month for everyone who had passed away, and a voluntary company-wide meeting would take place in the ground floor event space tomorrow morning for anyone concerned about the state of the office.

 

“I can’t work like this,” Mallory said. “Whatever is going on, I can’t deal with it.”

 

She told us she was taking a walk, but she never came back. We spent our lunch break that day waiting in line for the grief therapist.

 

“I don’t think it’s affecting my work, but is it bad that I’m bad at my work?” Ellison asked.

 

“Can we get more than ten minutes of time with you?” April asked.

 

“I know you’re here because you specialize in grief, but can we come to you for other non-grief-related problems?” Julie asked.

 

We saw Amanda in line for the therapist on our way back to our floor. Her face looked just as emotionless as ever, which we admired, and we told her we were excited to catch up with her soon. She grinned with a stiff precision that frightened us and said she wouldn’t be available for drinks again until the weekend.

 

While we ate lunch at our desks and filed our work, we asked each other about the loved ones we’d lost. Our lists were short, but we were young. And promising. The boss came by to ask how we were all doing, then walked back into his office. We watched him shut the door and heard him turn his lock.

 

“I sent my two weeks’ notice yesterday,” Victor said. “To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll even stay two weeks longer.”

 

Two of us nodded, having also sent our two weeks’ in. We thought about Mallory. Yasmina said she was ready to just quit with no notice, just like her. None of them had other positions lined up yet, but they were done with the company, done with the thankless work. The rest of us looked down, wondering whether what we were feeling for them was panic or jealousy.

 

At the company-wide meeting, we sat in a group at the back of the event space and tried not to think of how late we would have to stay that evening. Our phones buzzed with four more emails from HR. One in public outreach, three in sales. From our spot, we watched Amanda’s smooth, placid face from across the room as she checked her phone.

 

A row of chairs lined the right side of the stage. As the graying CEO asked the room to quiet down from his spot at the center of the stage, the chairs filled with small, nervous women in pale cardigans and paisley dresses. They introduced themselves as the HR department, saying their names down the line as if they were doing roll call in grade school. Somewhere near the front, we heard Axel let out a low whistle. After some brief remarks on the arrangements being made for the memorial service, the CEO asked if anyone wanted to voice their questions or concerns.

 

“Have the elevator shafts been checked? How about the fire alarms? The stairwells?”

 

“How does HR learn about these deaths before my department does?”

 

“Is it true that the building’s haunted?”

 

“Where do the bodies go?”

 

“Why do these deaths keep happening?”

 

As the room grew louder, the HR department stood up from their chairs quietly and filed out of the room. The last of the nervous women pulled her phone from her cardigan pocket and let out a sob as the door closed behind her. A second later, the room filled with various chimes and buzzes. Another email from communications. The room exploded with questions being shouted over those who were weeping.

 

“That’s it,” Yasmina said. “I quit.”

 

Wes, Sunny, and Adrian agreed. They walked out of the building, as did a few others from departments we’d never been in touch with. The rest of us went back up to the top floor to continue working.

 

The boss came by and asked if everything was alright, ignoring the empty desks. He didn’t wait for our replies, instead walking briskly into his office to lock himself in again. One by one, the HR emails began to appear in our inboxes by the hour, still bearing names of people we never met, hardly knew, and couldn’t find in ourselves to mourn. One by one, more of us got up from our desks and left, sliding letters of resignation under our boss’s door. We were down to a handful of people by the end of the day.

 

On our way out of the building, we ran into Amanda. She flashed a perfect smile at us and mentioned that she was on her way to celebrate another successful campaign.

 

“I can’t wrap my head around what’s going on,” Julie said. “How are we expected to handle this?”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, her eyes wide. “Everything is fine.”

 

“Everyone is dying,” we told her.

 

“I worked hard on this campaign,” she said. “I can’t focus on anything else.”

 

She turned her back on us and left, the clack of her heels echoing across the building floor. Except for Julie, who was crying, we did what Amanda had done and pretended nothing had gone wrong.

 

Once we had gone our separate ways, I loosened my tie. There was a park by the office that I would go to when it was a particularly nice day. It had a fountain, some men who played chess, a dog run. I sat on the lip of the fountain, watching other people file in and out of skyscrapers. I stayed there until the sun went down, looking at my office, wondering if the lights inside always stayed on or if there was ever a moment when the whole building went dark.

 

The next day, I was the only one who returned to the office. The boss’s door remained closed. Axel came by to ask how I was doing, what the team was up to, what it was like to be so young, so promising, with so much left to look forward to.

 

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How This Works

When Betsy gets back from the nondenominational church, she boils water for tea and slides open a kitchen drawer to find a teaspoon. But most of the teaspoons have disappeared. There is only one in the slot where eight should be nested in a thick pile. The single spoon left has been ravaged by the garbage disposal, the oval mouth of it chewed up and spit out.

 

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but Betsy jolts when she sees it. This used to be a safe neighborhood, the kind of place where children turned cartwheels in the front yards. But the past few months the neighborhood has been plagued by small thefts. A baseball bat left under a squat palm tree gone along with several low hanging fronds, a collar slipped off the neck of an outdoor cat, tulips cut with the precision of an exacto blade from a side yard.

 

And now this.

 

She will tell her husband about the spoons, and he will be pleased that she noticed. So many little thefts. They must be recorded. Greg is in charge of the recording and the neighborhood watch. He is the Captain. He is so busy with the neighborhood watch he calls in sick to work. He has been a mortgage broker for their entire marriage and, before this, has never used sick leave. He used to talk about rolling it over, cashing it out when he retires. But now, she hears him on the phone in the mornings faking a cough, lying about a fever. “I’ll work on that at home if I feel up to it,” her husband says. “No, no. I’ve got everything downloaded.”

 

Betsy’s husband is so busy as Captain of the neighborhood watch he has barely noticed that their 19-year-old daughter, Charlotte, left home in the middle of her spring break from college and disappeared, has been missing from their lives now for two months. Certainly she is back at college. Betsy has logged into the small amount of parent access she’s allowed online and watched Charlotte’s meal plan dollars continue to dwindle. But she doesn’t answer texts or phone calls or emails.

 

I should have been more patient, Betsy thinks. I should have taken her sadness over that boy in college more seriously. Every day Betsy thinks these same thoughts. Sometimes she adds new ones. I should have sent her to an all-girls college. I should have given her a sibling. I should have gotten her a Persian cat.

 

Betsy stirs her tea with the spoon upside down, so the gnawed-up mouth doesn’t rip open the tea bag. The string comes loose from the rim of the cup and loops around the spoon’s stem.

 

In truth, Betsy never liked this flatware. She would have preferred something plainer than the braided floral design. Something truly flat. She remembers registering for it quickly before she and Greg got married, when picking bath towels and a toaster oven and flatware were equal parts momentous and dull. When all they really wanted to do was go back to Greg’s apartment and pull shut the black-out blinds and sink deep into each other’s bodies, amazed at their single-minded good luck.

 

Now, two decades later, her husband’s body is as familiar and tuneless to Betsy as a dining room chair, a dishwasher, a potted plant. When she bumps into him, it is by accident, as she does now in the kitchen when he walks in and takes a beer out of the refrigerator.

 

“The teaspoons,” she says.

 

“I didn’t see you there,” he says.

 

“They’re gone.”

 

“Time to run the dishwasher maybe,” he says.

 

Betsy opens the dishwasher and stares at seven teaspoons draped across the cup rack. “Oh,” she says. “Of course.”

 

Her husband is carrying a clipboard in one hand, his beer in the other. “Making some notes,” he says. “It’s important to keep track.”

 

“I thought I was,” Betsy says, but he has already left the kitchen.

 

Greg is walking through the house and out the front door. His beer is balancing on his clipboard and he is pulling out a pen from behind his ear and walking down the block slowly, shuffling really, as if he might be older than he is, as if he might be his own father, stopping and inching his beer over on the clipboard where it is balanced, so he can write things down. So he can make notes.

 

Betsy boots up her computer. She has been lurking in an online group for parents of missing teen and young adult children. She haunts the edges of the conversations, not sure if she belongs here. The children are runaways and drug addicts, living on the streets, and their parents are sick with worry.

 

There are other groups where she definitely doesn’t belong, groups for children who have disappeared from bus stops, groups for children who have been kidnapped and taken to other countries in the middle of custody battles. And the groups for children who have died from cancer, car accidents, botched deliveries.

 

Many of the adult children—Betsy has learned from the forum this means eighteen or older—disappeared for no discernable reason at all, and these are the parents whose comments Betsy reads and avoids reading. I don’t know what I did wrong, the parents write. Tell me. What could I have done differently?

 

These parents are sleepless and oversleeping and they are breaking out in rashes and hives and their stomachs are twisted tight. They have developed ulcers and migraines and aches deep in their bones, aches that feel like some new kind of cancer. The parents in the online forum have hair that is thinning and falling out in clumps. Their children will not talk to them because the parents have failed in ways that are too countless to list.

 

The parents try to list them anyway, all the ways they have failed.

 

I worked too many hours. I was home too much. I didn’t let him breathe. I didn’t notice how sad she was. I shouldn’t have gotten divorced. I am a terrible mother. I was a lousy father. I should never have had children. I should have had more children. Her father was too strict. We should have moved from the suburbs. We should have been more consistent. I never really wanted children. I always wanted to be a mother, that’s all I ever wanted. We shouldn’t have moved to the suburbs. I shouldn’t have made him cut his hair. I shouldn’t have made her wear that dress. I should have let her get that piercing. We should have been more flexible. I should have made her stay in Sunday school. I should have volunteered in the classroom more when he was younger, when I could. I should have left her father. I should have pulled her from that school. I shouldn’t have gone back to work. Her father was too lenient. I should have made my son unlock that bedroom door. I shouldn’t have taken off the door. I should have let her lock her door. I thought it could have been worse. I didn’t know it was going to get worse.

 

I thought it was normal for teenagers.

 

I thought I was normal.

 

I thought she was normal.

 

I thought he was normal.

 

Is it normal to feel this way?

 

I thought this was normal.

 

Thanks for making me feel more normal.

 

Hello, is anyone out there today?

 

Betsy quickly logs off before she is spotted, although she doesn’t know if this is possible, how this works. She is new to online forums. She is not a joiner. For the past nineteen years of her life, she has been Charlotte’s mother. She knows she should have been something else, too, should do something else now, but she cannot remember what else she knows how to do.

 

Her phone is beeping on the desk, and she is afraid to look at it. She decides to let it beep a second time, the way it does when you miss a text. She makes a deal with herself that if she waits to look, it will be Charlotte texting. Her daughter will say she’s sorry. She’s been so busy. Come down to school and we can have lunch, Charlotte will say. Betsy will say, Of course. I’m on my way, pleased how smart she was to just hover around the edges of the online group, that this group of parents, of lost parents really, was not her group at all.

 

Even though Betsy counts to sixty before she looks, the text is not from her daughter. It’s from the lady at the little church one town over where Betsy helped clean the chairs that morning. When they were done working, the lady took her into the church kitchen and made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat across from Betsy in the middle of the day, at a thick, dented table and watched Betsy try to chew and swallow. When the lady asked, Betsy remembers now she had typed her name into the woman’s phone before she left.

 

Just checking to see if you made it home safely.

 

You are not my daughter, Betsy types back and then erases. She took valium earlier in the day, but the sweet, blurry effects have worn off.

 

Yes, she types. Here I am. Safely home.

 

Betsy wants to say there is nothing safe about home, that things have gone missing all over the neighborhood. Chimes have disappeared from side yard gates. Just yesterday, a neighbor reported spokes gone missing from the wheels of her daughter’s first two-wheeler. Betsy walks outside to find her husband. Maybe she can help him make notes, she thinks.

 

But she doesn’t see him when she looks down the block. Instead, she sees a little girl pushing a plastic shopping cart back and forth in front of a rental house. There are other rental houses on the block, but people have lived in those for years. This house has a regular turnover. Usually it’s young couples who start out with doormats that scream WELCOME TO OUR HOME before the letters fade to gray and hanging pots of begonias dry out on the front porch.  And then there’s a U-Haul truck or somebody’s brother’s pick-up or both because it’s over now, and they’re moving to separate places. And the garbage cans in front of the house overflow with soiled throw rugs and yellowed pillows as if they’ve lived there many years instead of just one year, or even less. And then they’re gone, and a few weeks later, after the painter spreads a new coat of paint over the bruised living room walls, it all starts again.

 

This time it’s a small family, a mother and father and preschooler. The little girl chalks the sidewalk in front of their house with pink hearts and yellow smiles. She draws a crooked hopscotch with angled squares that are not squares at all.

 

Today the little girl is pushing a plastic shopping cart. When Betsy gets closer, she sees the cart is full of baby dolls that once belonged to her own daughter. Betsy recognizes the matted hair and blurred eyes, the result of Charlotte playing with them in the bathtub despite the fact that the dolls were not made for water. Betsy remembers leaving them out on the curb at the end of a yard sale last summer before this family moved in.

 

Charlotte was home over the summer, and the yard sale had been her idea.  “I want to clean out my room,” she said. “Can I keep the money?”

 

The dolls that weren’t ruined were purchased for a dollar each by a woman from Leisure World who planned to make clothes for them and give them to the women who missed their own children and grandchildren who rarely visited. The woman stroked a doll’s dark hair and said, You’d be surprised what comfort a doll can bring.

 

Seeing her daughter’s ruined baby dolls being pushed in the plastic shopping cart brings Betsy no comfort. “Where did you get those?” she asks the little girl.

 

“They’re my babies,” the little girl says.

 

“No, they’re not,” Betsy says.

 

The little girl’s eyes have welled up, and she is grabbing the dolls from the cart and hugging them, but they are tumbling to the ground.

 

“I’m sorry,” Betsy says as the front door of the rental house opens. “We were just chatting,” Betsy says to the woman who glares at her. “You have to be careful. There have been thefts here recently. It used to be safer.”

 

The woman is shooing her daughter inside, and the little girl is hiding behind her mother’s legs now.

 

“I live down the block.” Betsy points in the wrong direction and walks that way with purpose.

 

She walks all the way around the block and sneaks back into her own house. In the online support group some of the parents of missing children count absences in holidays: three Christmases, the fourth Thanksgiving, a sister’s bat mitzvah, a quinceanera. Others count in tangible losses: dogs and grandparents, a lemon tree gone to rot. A cat is eaten by a coyote that wandered down from the mountains through the public golf course.

 

They’ve missed so much, the parents write. It doesn’t make sense, they say. How can they stand it?

 

 We can’t stand it, they write

 

Betsy’s mother is planning an anniversary party for Betsy and Greg. She is full of questions Betsy doesn’t answer. We need to pin down the time, she says on a voicemail. We need to finalize the guest list.

 

Her husband is standing in the entranceway when Betsy sneaks back into her own house after accusing a preschooler of taking her daughter’s ruined dolls. He is holding up Betsy’s housekeys.

 

“You left the door unlocked,” he says.

 

“I’m sorry,” Betsy says. She looks around for his clipboard and finds it on the stairs. The paper clipped onto the board is full of house numbers, check marks and asterisks, and notes written in tiny script, her husband’s empty beer can tilted-over on its side on top of it.

 

“A Mexican tile is missing from that front stoop,” Greg says. “You know the one. Down the block.”

 

“I was just saying hi to the new neighbors,” Betsy says.

 

“It’s important to keep track,” he says.

 

“The ones with the little girl. I think she’s about four. Maybe five. I can’t remember what four looks like exactly.”

 

“A reflector is missing from a child’s bike.”

 

“Was she always so sensitive?” Betsy asks.

 

“You can’t assume just because you’re down the block, things are safe here.”

 

“It’s been two months. How much longer, do you think? It’s like I’m holding my breath.”

 

“You’ve got to remember to lock up,” Greg says.

 

“I was just out for a minute.” Betsy wishes she had never agreed to the yard sale last summer, that she had made her daughter keep it all, every bright pink jacket, every framed poster of a kitten, every boy band key chain.

 

“That’s how it happens,” Greg says. Her husband is staring past her, his eyes flat and focused.

 

I’m right here, Betsy thinks but doesn’t say.

 

“That’s how fast,” he says. “That’s exactly how it happens.”

 

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