Category: Literary Features

Mrs. Tsai

It was past eleven at night when my mother called. The rain came down in great big sheets, and I’d been curled up under three blankets with the heater on for hours, reading a book about digestion.

            “You’re still up,” she said.

            “It’s not that late. What are you doing?” and before she could answer I started guessing, “Watching a crime thriller?”

            “Ha,” she said. “A western. The one with the good-looking sheriff who’s in your yoga class. What are you doing?”

            “Reading and resting,” I said.

            “It’s raining a lot,” she said. “Reminds me of winter in Pingtung.”

            “CeCe and I planted bell peppers this week, so it’ll be nice to have them watered without me having to do it,” I told her.

            “Is she asleep?” she asked.

            “Of course. She’s right next to me,” I said.

            I thought about my mother sitting on her green corduroy sofa in her new apartment with Tuo-Ba, her mop-like dog, watching the Western. From time to time, she must wonder what she would do next now that she was alone, except for the dog. A dog was good at filling holes in a schedule. A lot of walks to punctuate the day. Random and intermittent socializing with other dog owners here and there. Buying dog food and treats, vet visits. My mother took Tuo-Ba to volunteer at the library with a team of other service dogs. Children arrived to read to the dogs once a week, eagerly sounding out syllables on a bright blue carpet lined with drowsing dogs.

            She cleared her throat a little. I heard Tuo-Ba by the tinkling of his little tag.

            “Are you okay?” I asked.

            “Fine,” she said, but cleared her throat again.

            “Are you sick?” I asked.

            “No, I’m not,” she said and cleared her throat.

            I heard her walking around, opening a drawer. A faucet turned on.

            “I need your help with something,” she said.

            “What?” I asked, my voice perched.

            “Someone came over earlier today,” she said. “And they fell. They’re still here.”

            “What do you mean?” I asked. “Who came over?”

            My first thought was that she had invited a man to her place.

            “Wen-Ting, from the building,” she said, and drank water. “I invited her up to have tea after dinner.”

            CeCe flipped her arm in the air and smacked my pillow. Had I been lying down it would have been my nose. Lately I had heard snippets from all kinds of parenting gurus via podcast or Instagram about not letting your kids sleep in your bed. Boundaries! Sleep hygiene! Blah blah, I thought. But how about a black eye or a broken nose as deterrent?

            “How did she fall?” I asked.

            “She was leaving and she fell down the stairs,” my mother said.

            I had often been frustrated by my mother’s opaqueness, but this was really a new level.

            “Is she okay?” I asked. “Did she have to go to the hospital?”

            “No,” my mother rebuffed gently, as if I’d asked whether she wanted to try paragliding tomorrow.

            “No, she’s not okay, or no, she didn’t go to the hospital?” I closed the book and set it against my lap. The heater clanked and I could hear it clank below, too, in the downstairs neighbor’s apartment.

            “She didn’t go to the hospital. I brought her back up here,” my mother said.

            I was already setting and resetting the scene. Mrs. Tsai had fallen down some of the stairs, and crying in pain, had hobbled back up the stairs to my mother’s apartment? Maybe the injury was a sprain, a fracture. Maybe my mother had iced her ankle or wrist, and Mrs. Tsai had fallen asleep on the couch, not wanting to sit in the ER all night.

            “Did she break anything?” I asked.

            “I’m not sure. She’s resting. I need your help. It’s important, but don’t come now. Just come in the morning,” my mother said. “It’s late. No need to wake up CeCe.”

            I moved some of the hair out of CeCe’s face. Her skin was creamy as a cashew aside from the little white dots that sometimes appeared on her cheek. The corner of her mouth glistened with spit.

            “Okay,” I told her. “I’ll come right when we wake up.”

 

—

 

            Driving in the rain proved to be difficult. A car accident jammed all the traffic into a single lane. CeCe complained from the backseat booster about having to leave home without getting to play Barbies. But when I told her that Nai Nai would probably have some delicious moon cakes there and that she’d get to play with Tuo-Ba, she eventually changed course.

            We circled the block and meandered up a side street before finding a parking spot. And then we trudged through the rain under CeCe’s clear umbrella. Rainwater gushed down into the gutters.

            The slippery lobby was posted with a sign about the elevator not running, so we climbed to the fifth floor, one floor smelling like paint, another of boiling cabbage.

            “We’re here!” CeCe announced when my mother opened the door.

            “Oh! Come in,” she chirped, the heat from her apartment pouring out into the hall. Tuo-Ba shuffled forward happily, rubbing his moustache on our shins.

            The small dining table was arranged with plates of sliced fruit and moon cakes, covered in plastic wrap.

            “CeCe, will you help me feed and dress Tuo-Ba? I’m going to give your mom some books,” my mother said. She showed CeCe the food scoop and bag and pointed to a green diamond sweater for the dog.

            I followed my mother into her bedroom and found Mrs. Tsai face down on the bed with her knees on the ground. She was completely still.

            “Is she dead?” I asked in disbelief.

            My mother nodded, frowning.

            “Why did you bring her up here?” I hissed. “Why didn’t you call an ambulance right away?”

            “She can’t pay an ambulance fee,” my mother said crossly. “And her son doesn’t work.”

            “But now she’s here, and her legs are–” I swept my hand over Mrs. Tsai’s body, “like this!”

            “I need your help to bring her downstairs,” my mother said. “She lives on the second floor. We can put her on her own bed. Like this. Then I can call her an ambulance.”

            “The paramedics can’t help her now,” I said.

            “That way it won’t look suspicious,” my mother said.

            “I can’t get the sweater on,” CeCe was calling from the kitchen. And then as if she could teleport, appeared behind the door. “What are you doing in there?”

            My mother stepped out and led her back into the kitchen. The dog sweater was on halfway, but backwards. They laughed. I shut the door.

            If we carried Mrs. Tsai’s body back to her own apartment, would it seem strange that my mother was calling an ambulance? They were having tea and she’d fallen down the stairs on the way back home. If my mother had called for help, Mrs. Tsai would be in a hospital, or maybe she’d still have ended up in the morgue.

            “It’s me,” my mother said and quickly opened the door. “CeCe is watering plants on the balcony. We can cover Wen-Ting with a sheet, take her down to the apartment – I know the keypad code to unlock her door. We can put her on her bed. Then I’ll call the ambulance later.”

            “Well, we can’t do it now, with CeCe,” I said.

            “We can do it tonight,” she said.

            “But what about her fall?” I asked. “Won’t the paramedics see she has an injury from falling down the stairs? And won’t it be strange that her knees are like that? What if they match the sheet fibers on her body to your bed?”

            My mother scoffed. “That’s stuff they do on murder shows,” she said. “This was an accident. I should’ve just dragged her to her own apartment when it happened. Come out.”

            She closed the door behind us and we called CeCe in. Sitting at the table eating fruit and cakes, and drinking tea, I felt like I was in a bad dream. And had my mother said dragged?

 

—

 

            I returned to my mother’s apartment in the evening as soon as I dropped CeCe at her dad’s. The rain had ceased long enough for me to walk through the cold without getting wet. I was thankful since CeCe had taken the umbrella with her.

            My mother and I pushed Mrs. Tsai into a seated position on the bed. She was absolutely rigid and startlingly cold. When I finally dared to look at her face, her eyes were open!

            “Oh my God!” Her eyes were hazy, grayish.

            My mother reached out and had to push the lids down twice.

            Draped with a sheet and in a permanent yogic chair pose, we lifted Mrs. Tsai to the door and then hurriedly shuttled down one flight after another.

            “What if you’re questioned by the police?” I asked.

            “I’ll tell them we were going to meet for tea last night. She never came. This morning, I go to her door and she doesn’t answer. So I get worried and call the police. In case she fell. And she did fall.”

            We passed the floor that smelled of boiling cabbage. A dog barked behind a door.

            “If someone sees us, we’re screwed!” I whispered, running around the curve so that I could keep Mrs. Tsai level.

            My mother started to laugh her silent laugh.

            “Imagine someone comes out of a door right now. ‘What are you carrying? Looks heavy. Let me help you,’” I said.

            “No one is going to help us,” she said between our shuffling.

            When we got to the second floor, we hurried down the hall to Mrs. Tsai’s door and my mother trembled, lifting her side of the body with one hand while punching in the code with the other. She got it wrong the first time and I started to panic, sweeping the hall and staircase with my eyes.

            “I really hope you know the code,” I said. “We can’t go up and down, up and down like this.”

            When the door opened, we hurried in and followed the familiar floor plan to the bedroom. Like my mother, Mrs. Tsai lived alone. Her little apartment was tidy and smelled of cedar and camphor. A rattan living room set with red cushions crowded around an old TV.

            In the single bedroom, a big red calendar with a single date on each rice paper-thin page, and a black and white photo of her family of origin hung on the wall. We lowered Mrs. Tsai onto the bed, face down, and then maneuvered the sheet out from under her.

            “Won’t it look strange to find her like this?” I asked.

            “Probably,” my mother said. “Probably strange to find anyone dead.” She patted down Mrs. Tsai’s hair and smoothed her blouse.

            A narrow gray cat slithered into the room.

            “Tu zi,” my mother said, folding up the sheet.

            “Rabbit?” I asked.

            “The cat jumps like a rabbit,” my mother said. “Mrs. Tsai was funny.”

            “Should we feed her?” I asked.

            My mother turned on the kitchen light. We rifled through the cabinets and found it well stocked with tins of sardines in tomato sauce, pickled vegetables, rice, pork floss, dry noodles, and a variety of soy sauces and vinegars. Nice French wines frosted in the refrigerator, along with glass containers of cooked porridge, poached chicken, and tea eggs.

            “You two drink together?” I asked.

            “Sometimes tea, sometimes wine,” my mother said.

            “Will you miss her?” I asked.

            “Yes,” my mother said, clearing her throat. “She was a nice woman.”

            Finally, underneath the sink, I found the cat food and scraped it into the cat’s dish. We slipped out then and locked the door behind us. My mother had always been friendly and likeable, lighthearted. She had friends from before my father’s death, a few she still met for lunch or coffee. But Mrs. Tsai was a friend she’d made in this new life on her own.

            “What will you do tonight?” I asked as we walked back through the hallway.

            “Maybe go on a walk with Tuo-Ba,” she said. “It’s not raining.”

            “I’ll walk with you and Tuo-Ba,” I told her.

            She looked tired but pleasantly calm. I followed her up the stairs and back into her apartment. I pulled on my jacket as she leashed Tuo-Ba and straightened out his sweater. On our way out, I picked up her old umbrella that sometimes opened too far out, but still worked.

 

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Murphy’s Law

30 rabies shots, my uncle got
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they
say—what can happen, will—Which is what
my dad was thinking when he passed the pub

so aptly named on the day they sawed
through my skull. This is the perversity
of the universe. You go outside

to catch your breath and butcher’s knives wink
in every window. Miles’ trumpet intones
So What while atom bombs dream of flouting

their dormancy. The night before surgery,
I lay on the plush hotel bed, staring
at a room service form. When I was

little, I was obsessed with opulence.
I wanted filet mignon, lobster
delivered to my imagined penthouse

as I watched cartoons: a toddler bobbing
along the steel girders of a nascent
skyscraper, pianos crashing down, turning teeth

into sonatas. Sometimes you have
to confront the world’s malice like a mouse
who’s been burned too many times by spring-

loaded-cheese. I remember assuming
the hospital’s food would be suspect.
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-

salted soup, but, I thought: that’s only
if they don’t slice into my temporal
lobe. If they don’t accidentally

give me a lobotomy, or cut my
head clean off. I’ll be lucky to gag
on pot pie while mom scrolls WebMD.
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Two Poems

On Our Date I Forget the “Birds of Prey” Exhibit is Closed Sunday

Grace is just life
caught in the throat. Imprinted
and broken winged.
Crow hit by my Toyota, muddy.
Peace and rehab three-syllable words

when slurred. Grace of certainty
in the sun’s smallness—small enough

to set behind your hand,
yet still lift like a hand
on her waist while facing a dark nerve.

 

Her to touch, a crow
not very much a crow, wingless
who must hop from branch to branch

as crippled form of grace,
as chapel wind is pious, bows
in gospel like fletching
post-launch, inalterable flight.
Who dares claim the feathers
of such a fucked-up bird for

violence?

 

Rhetorical questions claim
power from the empty, ellipses
lit like street lamps, spacing
regular pools through dark.
Anyways you forgot
your walking boots. Leave
like the cut that gliding scissors
pass. You came into this life
like chains deliver the flightless.
Like silence delivers a stillborn grace.

 

Touchpoints

The wanting child breaks a bowl
before he loses his first tooth. Research says

 

we regress before moving forward

 

the way white tides marshal themselves

before they break. A circle

 

opens into a spiral and the trauma

 

opens into an echo. But I don’t wanna

echo. But despite the begging

 

watch the hitting segue into bars

 

and showers full of right heat. The way

washing becomes a sloughing

 

or a person becomes a lesson.

 

 

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Junior Steaks

We both order junior steaks, and she asks the waiter to turn on the fight. She says it just like that, “the fight,” and he understands. He’s got a lumpy, bald head, peppered with drops of sweat and he goes over to tell the guy behind the bar. We are seated beside a wall. Across the restaurant, people are seated beside windows.

            She asks, “How’s your summer been?”

            I say, “I moved.”

            “Oh yeah? How was that?”

            For my last month or so living in the old house, they played the same Tom T. Hall song every day and suggested I didn’t leave. “Call the whole thing off,” they’d say, “It’s not too late.” And I would say it was fine, that people moved all the time, people just moved. Anyone who found somewhere that cheap so much closer to the city would be stupid not to take it. Then I’d go up to my room, close the door, open the window, and cry. I give her a brief lesson on the geography of the suburbs. Bridges I drive over now.

            She begins to tell me that her summer was fine, except that the guy she was seeing drowned. She glances at the fight, frowns, then back at me. Yes, it was pretty sad. Pretty shocking. Pretty tragic.

            “The guy you were seeing drowned?” I repeat. I can see it clearly. I must be remembering a scene in a movie. The man is wearing a 1920’s style bathing suit and has center-parted hair. A British accent. British teeth. We have whiskeys and are pushing the ice cubes around with black stirring straws. I think of the Titanic. Now that’s drowning.

            “We don’t need to dwell on it,” she says.

            “How long were you two together?”

            “A month and a half,”

            “Oh,”

            “See? It’s strange. It’s strange. I’m not sure what I’m grieving – a summer fling? A future? The children we could’ve had, I mean.” She looks down at her drink. It’s gone. So are the steaks. I wish we had just stopped talking long enough to enjoy them. We order more drinks, doubles this time, and fries to split. The sweat drops on the waiter’s head are bigger now, as if he’s crying from his scalp. “So now you’re on a trip?” She asks. That’s why I’m here. Passing through and staying at her place. Before we came out here for steaks, she laid a folded mattress topper on the floor beside her own unmade bed, then said “It’s like a side-car bed.”  Her place is down the road from the restaurant, close enough to walk. She’s got a window box herb garden and a rabbit named Misty and the whole place, an unairconditioned studio, smells like it. Her linens are the color of surgical scrubs and I can tell, somehow, that she took them from the hall closet the day she left her parents’ house.

            “Yeah,” I say. “Just, you know, to shake things up.” We were never very close. I realize this now, downing half my whiskey. It was only ever proximity and I try to conjure an image of it. There was the time we drove an hour away to see our professors present at an Environmental Studies conference. All I can remember is coming back, her maroon station wagon cresting a hill in the springtime. And I think we had discovered a commonality, lactose intolerance or left handedness, something that seemed to matter then. And now we are here, looking down at the wood laminate table, a little uncomfortable because lonely people are afraid of each other.

            “There are three rounds,” she says, picking up her steak knife and pointing it towards the television, “and a one-minute break between them.” I nod but don’t turn around. I am not sure if I don’t care, or if I do care and that’s why I can’t look.

            “So, tell me more about the house,” she urges, using her knife’s tip to draw a smiley face in the juices left on her plate.

            “The house?” I ask.

            “Yeah, the house, the one you just moved to.”

            I stare at her and nod and think about the place. How all of the cabinets are labeled and none of the women wear bras and at night we sit around with our breasts falling in all directions and talk about dogs until one of us cries – cries about how good dogs are. Then we talk about talking, about ourselves and our habits. We talk about how we always talk about dogs until one of us cries. How strange this is. How special we are. Then bedtime, and we walk around the kitchen without looking into each other’s eyes. “There’s a big front porch,” I say.

            “Hey, that’s great,” she says. Then I sigh and look at the wall. There is a small, framed map of the state. That’s all there is. If we were really friends, I would’ve insisted we sit by a window. I study the image of the state, floating on a white page, trying to remember the borders. Was it landlocked? Was that a lake coast, up at the top?  “It was a long, Catholic service,” she says, through the ice cube she’s chewing. I turn in time to watch her wipe a drip of water from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “Catholic with an open casket. And I hate open caskets and I hate Catholic services because all their songs sound like Broadway hits – I was raised Methodist, have I told you that?”

            “No, you haven’t.”

            “I was, and the music is better. Anyhow, I didn’t have anyone to sit with. None of my friends would come with me. I asked one and she said it wasn’t appropriate. She wasn’t family.” I finish the watery whiskey left in my glass. She does the same.

            On my last Saturday at the old house, I said that Tom T. Hall’s voice had an adolescent quality. It was a particular note, a strain of startling, boundless grief – the sort we are no longer capable of feeling once we reach adulthood but might be reminded of in a plotless dream. None of the others agreed, “not quite adolescent,” they said, frowning, “not adolescent, something else.” But there wasn’t much debate before we put the matter aside and drank coffee in the yard until only two of us were left. The shadow of the house was beginning to creep across the tufty lawn when he started in on it again, with waning conviction, saying it wasn’t too late.

            The whiskey floods me with affection for her – torrents of buoyant sympathy. I float on it like a lazy river at a waterpark, filled with Band-Aids and hair and timid children, too scared to ride the real attractions. The waiter wants to know if we want another drink. We don’t. He wants us to leave but doesn’t say as much. The droplets on his head are even bigger now, and they have multiplied. I take her hand. It is puffy and claw-like, with fingernails filed to points and I think of the man who drowned and wonder how it was to be attracted to a woman with hands like this. She’s going on in a stage whisper, leaning across the table, like a conspiracy theorist. She had nothing to wear to the service, she’d never met his mom, she didn’t know what to do – bring flowers? She’d been thinking of breaking up with him (actually, she’d decided on it).  She wasn’t close with his friends, and they were grieving so hard (that’s the adjective she chose: “hard”), harder than her. Should she have tried harder, she wants to know, tried harder to grieve harder? Should she have made some sort of performance? The front of her blouse is dragging in the ketchup on her plate.

            At church coffee hour as a child, I used to take the jelly donuts, suck the filling out, and then put them back on the platter. Their appearance was perfectly preserved, perfectly innocuous. But there was a backwash effect. With the saliva, I mean, if you can imagine that. It wasn’t kind.

            “Why are you crying?” she asks, a little incredulously, withdrawing her hand and leaning back in her seat.

            “I don’t know,” I say. She looks over my shoulder at the fight and I can see it reflected in her glasses, not in any great detail, of course – just flesh and bright lights.

 

            A few months after I make it back home autumn arrives over the course of a single weekend and in advance of the first frost, I ferry all the tropical plants from the big front porch into the living room and she texts me late one night to say that she found a dead opossum at the end of her street, that it was sweet, that it looked like it was sleeping. Before I can reply, she writes more, she says: “At any rate, it made me think of you.”

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On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen

my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet,
66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton.

My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches
into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game

my mother taught me when I was a teenager—
—find someone on the street who has my body—

Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be
vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing.

Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling
every morning, tracking miles.

How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke.
Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire

nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why
emptiness still comforts like nothing else.

I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter.
Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell.

Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body.

Who’s keeping count.
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The Wounds of Childhood

We are the last to arrive. Jonathan parks on the gravel shoulder and is halfway out of the car before he remembers to help with Ellie. “Go,” I say, though I will cash in on his choice later. Jonathan is shouting greetings to his buddies who are lobbing sacks at the cornhole boards while I crate Ellie across the lawn to a picnic table covered in gingham. Here are the remains of the adults’ dinners, empty glasses and crumpled napkins, though the women, Peggy and Andrea, are still spooning puréed foods into their babies’ mouths. I leave Ellie in her carseat on the grass and reach for the open bottle of rosé.

            “You made it,” Peggy says, deadpan.

            “Barely,” I say. I’m allowed one glass of wine because I am nursing, so I must drink it slowly. “Why didn’t we stay in Duck again? This place took so long to get to.”

            “It’s better up here. Quieter,” Peggy says. She looks tired. The skin under her eyes bags down like an old basset hound’s.

            Andrea plays her part, like she did in college, smoothing things over between us. She reassures Peggy that the house is cute and super nice, ignoring what I can see from here, even in the dwindling daylight: this rental is a downgrade, old and unwanted. Its siding is worn and salt-baked. Spiderwebs glaze the floodlights while weeds eat through the driveway. I can already feel how damp the bedrooms will be, with loud ceiling fans that can’t compete with the humidity.

            As Andrea praises Peggy for getting the house on such short notice—we hadn’t coordinated our schedules until late April, when most houses were already booked—her son sucks his thumb and stares at me. He is a dull, lifeless weight on Andrea’s knees. He wears a blue helmet that is reshaping his skull, which was mushed on its journey through Andrea’s birth canal. With his helmet and dulled expression, he looks like a stoned NATO peacekeeper.

            “What’s so funny?” Peggy asks me.

            Instead of sharing my thought, I say, “Remember the house we got after graduation? It had seven bedrooms and a hot tub. Remember that hot tub, Peggy?”

            Peggy reddens and glances across the street, toward the sound of waves crashing on a shore that we can’t see. In her firm but forbearing, good-mother voice, Peggy says, “No thank you, Tommy,” to the child in her lap, who is trying to rip the buttons off of her shirt.

            Peggy’s dutiful husband, Seth, appears then and picks up Tommy, throwing him in the air so that he squeals. Peggy is gearing up to lecture me, the last of them to get married, get pregnant, accept my fate.

            “We’re not twenty-two anymore,” Peggy says, as if I could forget. “We don’t need to be close to the bars. We need a place that’s family-friendly. This house is small, sure, but there aren’t stairs for the kids to fall down or, heaven forbid, hot tubs to drown in. If you really feel cramped though, there is an extra bedroom between our rooms you could use. It’s got a crib.”

            “Great,” I say. “I absolutely will. Ellie hasn’t slept in our room for three months.”

            While Jonathan plays one last lawn game, I find our bedroom, which contains a musty double bed and a particleboard dresser. Ellie is fussing, as usual—she is always fussing—and the spit bubble between her lips and the blushing skin under her eyebrows tells me she’s hungry, again. The mattress sags and the frame creaks as I lower myself onto it, wincing at the scrape of Ellie’s single tooth on my nipple.

            While she nurses, I take in the room. There are coarse wood planks, nailed diagonally across all four walls. I squint at one and notice black outlines, here and there, peppering the planks. At first, I mistake these half-circle outlines, upturned at both edges like crescent moons, for irregularities in the wood. Rotted whorls, maybe, or carpentry mistakes, but then I lean over and touch one and my finger is coated in ash.

            When Ellie’s eyelids sink, I scoot to the edge of the bed and lug myself up, then walk through the door that leads into the extra bedroom, which is so tiny that a crib and rocking chair crowd each other like commuters waiting for a train. The odd planks cover these walls too, only here, the blackened crescent moons appear in uniform rows up and down the planks.

            The room is cramped, but the crib looks clean enough, and Ellie, exhausted from the drive, is snuffed out like a match.

—

When I hear Ellie’s throaty cries just two hours later, I nudge Jonathan. He groans and rolls away from me, but I won’t let him win this. I had her all evening. He can deal with her at night.

            “Your turn,” I hiss, before squeezing my eyes shut and trying for sleep. “Dammit, Jonathan, go in there before she wakes up the whole house.”

            But then, the noise stops. Ellie has gone from hungry crying one second to complete silence the next. There is a void of sound, as if Ellie has disappeared.

            I shoot up in bed, deciding that Ellie truly has disappeared: suffocated, fallen out of the crib, that she is suddenly, infantly, dead. I rush through the door between the rooms, and my hands are gripping the crib’s rail. I look down and see Ellie, and see that she is okay. She is so okay, in fact, that she is practically glowing in the moonlight that streams through the window’s wavy panes, her chest rising and falling with each breath.

            I take a few steps back until I am standing in the doorway. I am watching her breathe and marking this night in my mind: the first night Ellie has soothed herself back to sleep.

            Jonathan won’t believe it.

            I have nearly turned away when a flicker of movement catches my eye and I realize that Peggy is here, in the room with Ellie. Peggy is standing in the corner, between crib and window. The black of her high-necked, long-sleeved gown has merged with the wall behind her so that I might not have noticed her at all if it weren’t for her pendant. The pendant hangs on a silver necklace and is big and gaudy, for preppy Peggy, wide as the palm of a hand, but curved like a crescent moon with sharp points. It is creamy white, its edges a garish red.

            “Peggy?” I whisper.

            In the shadow, I can’t see her face, but I see her hand as she lifts it to the pendant. I hear her as she breathes out, “Shhh.”

—

As soon as Jonathan hands Ellie to me with a grumble about missing tee time, she is clawing at my left breast. I shift her to my other arm and seek out Peggy among the adults in the kitchen. She is pouring coffee and humming softly. I touch her shoulder and say, “Hey, thanks for helping out last night. How did you get Ellie back to sleep so quick? She’s impossible.”

            Peggy looks like a beachy angel in a silky white cover-up, her hair blown out. “What are you talking about?”

            “You took care of Ellie,” I say, but I hesitate at her confused expression. “Remember? I went in to get her, but you were already there. You were wearing black.”

            Peggy blows across the top of her coffee and rolls her eyes. “Who wears black at the beach?”

            By evening, my woman in black is a joke. Around the picnic table, Peggy asks if the woman not only calms babies, but changes their diapers, too. Andrea wonders aloud how much ghosts charge an hour for babysitting. Jonathan shakes the ice in his glass and calls into the dusk that he could use a top-off.

            I spray on more bug repellent and keep my mouth shut. I know what I saw. At least, I think I do, though surrounded by the nursing babies, the ball-busting fathers, the woman in black doesn’t seem so real. Could she have been a product of my sleep deprivation, of post-partum whatever?

            When we all head inside, I change Ellie’s diaper and dress her in her pink pajamas, then pick her up and walk toward the door that links our room to hers.

            “You’re letting the ghost have her again?” Jonathan says to my back, an audible smirk in the question.

            “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say.

             But hours later, I wake up sweating, the sheets tightened around my knees. I grope for Ellie, then remember that she is not here. She is sleeping in the crib in the little room because I don’t like to sleep with her. I relish the time that I am free of her; Jonathan does, too, though he won’t admit it.

            That, and I don’t believe in ghosts.

            When Jonathan rolls toward me, vapors from his ginny breath mist over my face. I prop up on my elbow and listen for Ellie.

            After a few seconds, I hear the slightest whimper, or maybe it is a coo. Or it could be a whisper.

            In the little room, the rocking chair’s runners creak against the floor as the woman gentles my baby. Ellie’s hand reaches up for the pendant, and the woman accommodates her, letting the necklace fall so that it almost touches the space between Ellie’s collarbones, her pink pajamas burnished in the moonlight. When the woman bends down, her gowned body covers Ellie up, blots her out, swallows Ellie into her shadow until I can see no part of her, not her cloth-covered feet or fisted hands.

            Half of me is panicked, horrified by Ellie’s consumption into this woman’s shade, the other half embarrassed at the sentimental nonsense that is pouring from my mouth. “She’s mine,” I am pleading with the woman, but I am whispering too, because something about her demands that my resistance be quiet, like I’m negotiating with a nun or a grieving great-aunt.

            “She’s mine,” I whisper again. “She’s mine.”

            At this third plea, the woman’s torso rears back against the hard dowels of the rocker, and I am tripping over my feet, wrenching Ellie from her, not looking at the woman’s face, this woman who smells of dust and oleander.

            When Jonathan sits up in bed, I am clutching Ellie like she is my purse and someone tried to snatch her. Her chest is so warm that it burns.

            Dinner that evening is steaks on the grill, Peggy’s salad. I don’t help. I don’t pass out forks and knives, or pour the wine. I cuddle Ellie and sniff her hair. Instinct keeps drawing me back to the skin of her chest, which is the vulnerable shade of thawing ice, the blue blood coursing under it like a spring stream.

            Across from me, Peggy is tipsy, urging Jonathan to tell it again.

            As he tells it, I am the lunatic. I am the confused, attic-wandering mommy searching for her baby, one step from the asylum. “So then, she comes running into our room and tells me I have to scare away the ghost,” Jonathan says. “Only when I go in…”

            “…No one was there,” Peggy finishes. “I mean, obviously.”

            “Might explain why no one else had rented this place,” I snap back.

            Peggy groans. The wine has loosened her. She is no longer tolerating me, even though we once shared a kiss, immersed in a rental hot tub. When I put the tip of my tongue on hers, Peggy moaned and reached for me. She liked it more than I did.

            “It’s all in your head, and I’ll prove it,” Peggy says.

            “Oh, yeah? How?”

            “I’ll put Tommy to bed in there tonight.”

            She smiles up at her husband, who is swaying, the yellow liquid in his glass threatening to spill over. “We could use the night off, couldn’t we, babe?”

—

That night, in the salt air leaking through our bedroom window, I dream of ovals that flatten and bulge and wane to become crescents, of the moon juttering through its phases so quickly that it catches on fire, causing typhoon, mud slide, hurricane. I dream of a naked woman who has captured the moon and held it between her lactating breasts, can hold it there even though it burns. I dream of threes, of fairy tales, of the third night, when the humans fail and the witch wins.

            I wake up gasping, my throat burning. I yank off blankets to search for my asphyxiated baby but find her, soundly asleep, tucked against Jonathan. I breathe out, then ease myself back down, careful not to wake them, but I don’t sleep again, not for hours. Whenever I close my eyes, the phases of the moon whir by, full back to full again.

            Toward sunrise, I think of Peggy’s little boy, quietly asleep in the crib.

            I think of checking on him.

            I think of these things, and perhaps the thinking of them alone pulls me back into sleep, because soon I am drifting on soothing black swells.

—

The next morning, Peggy looks fresh and free in a purple tank top. She looks like the Peggy of old, who used to grind against strangers at The Wreck, who used to be a wreck herself. I am fuzzy from my dream, which feels silly now, in the dazzling gold of the morning, with Ellie happy in my arms, full of milk and tenderness.

            I am gathering myself to apologize to Peggy for a few things: for giving her crap about this sea-roughened house on the unfashionable end of this barrier island, for bringing her down with a ridiculous ghost story, for mocking her devotion to her son.

            I am about to apologize when Seth rushes into the room, holding Tommy around his belly as the child wails and rubs his chest, keening, mama mama mama, an incantation that starts quietly and expands to coat the walls.

            Peggy is a comet streaking toward them. She barks at Seth to put him down, and he does, holding him on the counter so that Peggy can unstick his pajamas from his body. When the little boy sees his own blood on his mother’s fingertip, he is stunned out of his wails. In the unholy silence that follows, the rest of us take in the blood and the charred, red-rimmed crescent moon now exposed on Tommy’s chest.

            I slap my hand over my mouth and do not say what I am thinking, instead rushing to gather up what Peggy needs, her phone, her insurance card, her shoes. And in the aftermath—through Peggy’s anxious updates from the burn unit, through all of the disappointments about the failed skin grafts and infections, through the questions that the skeptical woman from child protective services asks all of us—I never say what I am thinking.

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Mother and Child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Iggy nuzzles, softening under the girl’s touch.

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

            Kyle shakes her wrist to adjust the band.

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

            “What happened to her?”

            “She went to live with Roger.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Well, Pearl. I’m Roy.”

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

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

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

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

            Pearl frowns. “Like at the Y?”

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Pearl is matter of fact. “Two years.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

            Pearl cocks her head at Kyle’s brusque tone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

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

            Pearl touches the jacket fabric.

            Kyle says, “She’s actually asking.”

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

            Kyle reaches for the seat light so Pearl can see.

            Pearl tilts the folder toward Kyle’s seat.

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

            Kyle says, “Can I?”

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

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

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

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

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

            Kyle tells Pearl, “I’m sorry.”

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

            Pearl says, “You remembered.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

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

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

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

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

            “She’s good at that.”

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

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

            “Yeah.”

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

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

            “I can see that.”

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

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

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

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

 

—

 

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

 

—

 

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

 
 
 
 

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Two Poems

How It Is Now, How It Was 

as a boy panning the stream behind my house 
         for the minnows that drilled 
down the current in schools. They moved as one—
         muscular, thick, sequined—
so if I dipped down, I could nearly scoop 
         handfuls of their bounty up

to my chest like some dream of my hunter ancestors
          lost in the currents 
of my DNA. I imagine desire like this. 
          But whenever I stabbed 
my hand into that glacier water, they dispersed 
          at once, every one. And this entertained me 

until the day I did catch one, held its slim, jeweled body 
          inside my fist. The thrill 
of its tail flickering inside my palm 
          like candlelight, like a snake’s forked tongue
until I unclenched my hand to let it go and saw
          it was already gone.

Nurture

 

As souls in heaven, before inhabiting their bodies, children choose 

           their mothers. I heard my mother say this exactly twice. 

Once after we had fought in the car to cut the silent ride home. 

           And once on the phone with my aunt after my cousin shot himself 

through the mouth. I was born after a summer solstice 

           under a new moon. Rain thickened the green outside my window. 

Above my crib two portraits of angels hung.
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Another Sanié

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Sanié took two steps backward. “No twin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “She,” Sanié began.

            “Sanié,” Sandra interjected.

            “Yes?”

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

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

            “Maybe?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “New to the city, huh?”

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

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

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

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

            “I’ll be right back, Sandra.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “How’s work, Sanié?”

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

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

            “You said sales?”

Sanié hummed her affirmation.

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

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

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

            “Did it now,” said Miss Pettis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Djinn, like genies?” Sanié asked.

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

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

            “Okay, and they’re also human?”

            “Nahin, of course not,” said Baba.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “A place like this,” Sanié repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            She received a smile in return. “Sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Not a flower though?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Love? Purpose? Fulfillment?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Sanié didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Yeah.”

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

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

            “Hey there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “I’m happy to, janum.”

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

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

            “Where?” asked Baba from the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “You already said that, silly.”

            “You need to leave.”

            “Aw, Sanié—” she began to say.

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

            “Stab me in the heart?”

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

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

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

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

            “Yes exactly.”

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

            A dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

            “Hey there, stranger.”

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

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

            “Wow, another Sanié. Hello, bete.”

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

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

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

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

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

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Portal

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“What about these?” she said.

 

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

 

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Holiday 2

Winner of the 2021 Humboldt Poetry Prize; originally published in TFR 44.2

 

On this day that in my childhood we celebrated Christmas

I found myself this year on the Gulf of Mexico

with the sea gone as leaden as clay. It seemed to heave

with an inner dislike—at least from where I stood, three stories up

from the beach, a few expensive yards in

from the sand, the humid spray blocked

by the floor-to-ceiling windows,

and the barely moving palms. I was making

a dinner from my childhood. An egg batter you poured

in hot oil and closed inside the oven for a full

twenty minutes till inflated to crisp gold,

plus a wad of beef crosshatched and pressed with flour and salt.

As it cooked, I read my son the story of Midas, how

he wanted the idea of everything, and the lesson was

that everything was dangerous. Darwin wrote that late

in life he’d lost his taste for poetry, for the fat copy of Milton

he was said to take with him on that first trip, still particular

for all the living parts of earth and mind. The couch

I sat on thinking this was as long as the yachts

we’d seen that day at the marina. In their moorings

they were lined so tight and tidily they hardly bobbed, each the same

synthetic just-washed white and dark blue lettering.

We looked at all their given names. We saw some people walk their dog,

step off their bleached wood deck, onto the plastic dock,

as their small thing scampered merrily into the nearby grass,

the people calling after, calling after. Our boys ran ahead.

What is it to live at this cushioned here and now, these privileged

boundaries where everything that could be said, remembered,

can yet still lie ill or unexpressed: the page I read about the girls

who shaved their teacher’s head and stabbed at it with scissors,

the ink they poured upon it, I was scared to tell my husband

how it haunted me, it followed me all day, such cruelty,

and then the nothingness of ocean and the light’s jewels rippling on it,

at least on these high days when the sun shines.

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Lines

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I sigh.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“When did you quit drinking?” I ask.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Thanks,” I say.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“What about you?” I ask my mother.

 

She holds her palms against each other.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“—like a fantasy,” Dean says.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“To even the scales,” Dean says.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“No, that’s not it,” I say.

 

“Then what is it?”

 

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

 

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

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Armadillo Island

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“I do,” I said.

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Where did you read about it?”

 

“Condé Nast Traveler.”

 

“Baby, speak English.”

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Wild horses?” Colt perked up.

 

“Is it safe?” I asked.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“The ants,” I said. “Hurry.”

 

“Every goddamn time.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“If you say so,” I said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Colt,” I said. “Colt, stop.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Guess what,” he said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Come on. It’s funny.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“I know. I’m sorry.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Give me your backpack,” Colt said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Colt, don’t,” I begged.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Go,” I told Colt.

 

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

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

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Mother Tongue

“Mommy, you sound strange.” My five-year-old looks at me curiously as I sing in Hindi to her. “It sounds funny,” she says again. I smile and nod and try to explain to her the meaning of my words. But then she is distracted and runs away. This has happened a lot recently as I am trying harder to speak in Hindi with and around my children. I play Kishore Kumar songs from the 1950s to them in the car, and I read them Hindi comics that I used to enjoy as a child, bought for an eye-watering price over the internet. But then words often fail me, as I try to grasp wispy words and feathery nuances that sound alien to my own ears.

 

I am the only one who speaks and understands Hindi in my house. My husband’s repertoire is limited to the words he has learned while ordering takeaway from the local Indian “curry” place: samosa, aaloo, chana. I laugh at his accent and then sometimes find myself repeating the same accent when I make the call to the curry place, impersonating the pronunciation of words, confusedly meandering between the sound that I heard as a child and the ones I hear all around me now. I worry that with this I am losing a part of my childhood and my mother tongue, and my anxiety drowns my words when I worry that my children will never be able to speak Hindi, communicate with their grandmother in India, or watch Hindi movies without subtitles. Sometimes I try and watch Hindi movies alone late at night just to remind myself where I come from, to hear the sounds that are missing from my life. For those few minutes, hours, I feel like the person who used to watch Bollywood movies obsessively as a teenager, singing out loud, playing antakshari with my friends. Often the incongruity of the meaning expressed in the dialogue and its brutal translation that smoothes out all the subtleties and gradations make me laugh, sometimes cringe. But I also feel like an impersonator, an imposter who is pretending to be something I am not. Not anymore. At times I turn the subtitles on. I feel like I am fighting to own a language that is not mine anymore, as if the memory of that language is only an illusion. That person was me, of course. But this is me, too. Where does one end and the other start?

 

—

 

It is strange how language shapes our identity. Am I a different person when I speak in different languages, and are my thoughts mapped by the language that I use to think and to speak in? My eldest daughter has often told me that I resort to Hindi when I am angry. Even though I switch between Hindi and English fluidly without a flicker of a thought or hesitation, no doubt there are things I cannot think or feel in either. Do I take on a different persona, another shift of identity as English becomes my way of communicating in writing and in speech? And in dreams, which are never in Hindi anymore? The rhythm of each language works in different meters, and I slow down when I speak Hindi. There isn’t that rush to get the words out before I forget, the precariousness exacerbated by the ever-present awareness that my accent will always belie my notion of being at home in this English language. But does the core of myself change with these shifts? Do I become less funny, more opinionated, more at ease in one than the other?

 

I went to a school run by Irish Catholic nuns, all through my primary and secondary education, where we were penalized for speaking in Hindi, the deeply ingrained colonial hangover persisting. We were better if we spoke in a language that wasn’t our own, that marked the gentile from the ordinary. English was the only language that could help us make our way in a world where we were never the desirables. I realize the irony of this as I write now in English. My parents wanted me to be good at English because that was how I would make a place for myself in this world. My mother wanted me to be good at English because she didn’t think she was, and she wanted me to spread my wings in a world that wasn’t designed for women. My father would take me to the only bookshop in town, where they had a tiny selection of books in English: some Enid Blytons and Stephen Kings, occasionally classics such as Gone with the Wind. It was our ritual every month. I wanted to be good at English so that I could read all the books that showed me a world far beyond my own, those books with green pastures and Little Women who were fierce, independent, and strong-willed, the female protagonists of their own life. I wanted to drink elderflower juice and have afternoon tea, not knowing what it tasted like. I loved this window into a new world even as I felt my face flush with embarrassment when my father would proclaim with fatherly pride that “she only reads English books.” This felt like betrayal at times as I read about the imperial rule, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the centuries of British oppression in India. The marks left by colonial rule and partition had seared into our consciousness, and there was no escaping it.

 

This push and pull persisted as this language of our oppressors slowly became my home, even as Hindi was still the language that bridged the gap between my parents and me.

 

I still find it fascinating that we studied Hindi as a second language, even though it was our first: it was the language of the first word that I heard, the language of my ancestors, the one that our stories were written in. I keep wondering what the world would have looked like if it hadn’t been like this, if we did not grow up with this shame. And I wonder when I started dreaming and thinking in shapes and patterns that were alien and uncomfortable to my own mother.

 

My ma felt ashamed all her life that her spoken English wasn’t that good, an inferiority that she carried because my father could speak better English than she could. I have never thought about this deeply: how this shame marred her view of herself and her own place in society; of those times that she would stay quiet, only smiling shyly when she thought that she didn’t know how to talk in public or was anxious that she would say the wrong thing, come across as ignorant and uncouth. So much of that anxiety shaped her mothering, her lack of recognition of her talents. And perhaps that is why it took me so long to acknowledge all that is so luminous about her, as she hid her resplendence from everyone including herself.

 

—

 

Choosing the language we speak is also linked to our autonomy; our view of our body is shaped by the words we speak, the thoughts we think, the space we occupy, and the way our mind inhabits our body.

 

Growing up with this discomfort around a language that is your own mother’s tongue, hiding it as a dirty secret at home, while only speaking in English at school, creates a split personality, where one has to keep shifting between two worlds of thoughts, words, and dreams, at home in one, in both, and sometimes in neither. Most people I know speak in Hinglish, an amalgamation of both languages, stepping inside both worlds at the same time, equally comfortable with Premchand and Amrita Kaur as with Hilary Mantel or Margaret Atwood. But people carry this unconscious bias that those who can write or speak better English are also better people, this halo spilling over their other attributes, giving them opportunity and privilege, while making others tongue-tied and even more inhibited in their thoughts.

 

Would our stories be different if this comfort around our own language had not been seeded and planted from a young age, and would the stories we write and tell our children be any different? These switches have become part of my identity, and they are how I belong in both worlds. But sometimes I can feel like an alien in both.

 

I remember when my eldest daughter came back irate from school, saying that they had pronounced geography incorrectly because that is how they had always heard me say it: “jaw-gruphy.” I laughed, but they didn’t find it amusing at all, though now they have outgrown that adolescent shame of a mother who has accented English, compounded by their classmates giggling at their quirky pronunciation of words that they had grown up with. I still catch myself worrying about how to pronounce words, and whether the way I speak marks me out as other, often searching for the right expression to say what I feel. It takes a while to shift this persona when I am in India, a few days to overthrow this worry about speaking the wrong word or in the wrong accent. Instead, I find myself searching for the right word in Hindi, which has been buried deep inside the mists of my time away from this place. I find myself stuttering over expressions, feverishly searching for the word that would stop me from being marked as a foreigner, and slowly it comes back. I worry less about switching between languages, and it becomes second nature once again, jolting me into a recognition of myself that I keep abandoning as soon as I leave India and fly back to the UK, reminding me how much I miss these words, this language, the poetic sensibilities of expressions that say so much.

 

I worry about how we can give words to our children when we ourselves feel wobbly around the edges of our languages.

 

—

 

And then I find the five-year-old singing the lullaby that I sing to them on most nights, in her Scouse accent, words that sound jumbled up, but she stands up tall up on the table and performs for us. I clap not just because it is utterly adorable but because hearing her speak those few words of Hindi makes me feel like coming back home, as if I never left, as if the thread from my mother to her is still unbroken, as if my mother tongue might not be hers completely or even mine anymore, but it is still a language that shapes so much of who I am, and hopefully will shape her too. And even though I have fought for my right to belong here in this place and this language, to assimilate and fit in, and I have also struggled to continue to belong to my mother tongue, I can be both or none. My mother tongue still belongs to me even though its edges are tinted with exasperation and frustration at not knowing all the words or at my accent belying my origins. It is seared and etched into my very self and my skin, and I worry less about making my children feel at home with it, because I have to remember that they are never far from home when they are close to me.

 

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Faith Test

When the counselor asked her
disciples to gather around the bucket,
her head crowned in clover stems,
we all wanted to be anointed.
The Pentecost of chapel steps and snakes
expelled from little cabins
lined against the trees:
this was our church, our induction
into something greater
than youth group on Wednesday nights
where a teen with a bible taught us
to renounce sex, rated R movies,
the devil in a hot pink romper.
When the counselor dipped her hand
in the water we thought baptism, the bonfire
lit with praise hymns and acoustic guitar.
None of us imagined the goldfish,
its body of shingled scales,
such orange iridescent delight.
To be brave for the lord is to
combat any fear
How do you say no to a soulless tail,
the hand reaching out to say
you could be special too?
How she called on us
to grab the soft round and place it
on our tongues like communion,
like the body we cannibalized
week after week. This is the memory:
feeling the heart rate pulse
against my thumb,
the way my throat closed up
then pushed the belly down.

 

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Analog

Last October my mother clipped out
an article from the New York Times

 

about why millennials love plants and
I mocked her for the old-fashion. She

 

sent me a letter every week in the
month of June, although I had since

 

left the city, because I didn’t
pick up the phone. My mother

 

writes things on paper that she
would never say out loud. Her

 

letters read like the Book of Proverbs
and she always doodles on

 

the envelope. She says things like No I wouldn’t
take care of your cats but if you have babies

 

then give them to me. I grow older and further
from her portrait of my future

 

life lived. Too far to see
the disappointment crinkle

 

on her eye corners. Close
enough to hear a sigh over radio waves.

 

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Value-added

“Tree-huggers refuse to admit
Mother Nature can be
a bitch, or very blind
or simply is,” my father insists,

 

though he hikes
the Appalachian every weekend.
I’ve never gone with him.
“We are always at the mercy

 

of our environment,” he claims,
tells me he outraced a prairie fire
in the Sooner state, more hurricanes
than he can list,

 

though he’s always been tempted
to get caught up in some disaster,
miss delivering whichever speech
he’d been on his way to give. “Nature is,

 

I suppose, efficient,” he says, a word
that shows up more than any other
in his writing except “trash,” “waste”
or “recycling.” His boss will use

 

his rhetoric against him.
He and I argue about anything,
spring, its length, time
and lusciousness after a brief cold spell

 

as opposed to a short orgasm of color
after a long thaw. Storm-chasing.
A tornado will turn and stare
right at you, rain come down so hard

 

you can’t see the shoulder, but once,
and I believe the sentiment’s appropriate,
he saw a triple rainbow with my sister,
who shot an entire roll of film

 

beyond the Panhandle.
They were alone. Dramatic, yes,
even at home, even after a long night
of ordinary thunder and wind,

 

a tree uproots and smashes
my parents’ bedroom.
It must have all night tossed
violently in the storm,

 

and they slept through it,
except that once they woke
and saw it swaying, and swaying
was still the word they used

 

in the morning to describe
it was an accident they lived.

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Relative Risk

—A Golden Shovel after Katie Englehart’s “We Are Going to Keep You Safe Even if It Kills Your Spirit,” The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2021

 

No matter what the therapists say about dementia, how we
should know our half-blind mother can’t live alone, how they are
clear she can’t afford to fall—the only way to keep her going
on her own (not risk-free) is a scooter or a four-wheel walker, or to
move her to a place, they won’t say where—best to keep
the care type vague—helpful doctors will tell you
recommended choices: memory pills, life locked inside, a safe
space, always a mask, no rugs or dancing, hugs, even
if your loved one, if Mom, is vaccinated, if
we instead allow her finger-walking walls, her wandering, it
wouldn’t be the worst to drop and die at home, we’ll say—what kills
is a voice silenced or a vision atrophied, when all your
good intention stymies dignity, what we recall of spirit.

 

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Poisons and Medicines

“All things are poisons, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
–Paracelsus

During rituals of divination,
Mayan sorcerers and healers
induced risky hallucinations
with Brugmansia candida,
angel’s trumpet. The poison
in its white, waxy flowers
and dark green leaves,
ingested or absorbed through
the body’s mucous membranes,
causes convulsions, paralysis,
coma, and death.

 

To dilate the pupils of their eyes
and bring a flush to their cheeks,
fashionable ladies in medieval Europe
drank juice pressed from the berries
and leaves of Atropa belladonna,
the deadly nightshade.
To enhance their beauty,
they risked their lives with a poison
used since antiquity to alter potions
and tip arrows with lethal results.

 

Our ancestors felt more closely
than we the embrace
of science and mystery.
We are still looking
for the boundary.
Chemicals crossing
the blood-brain barrier
create effects in the brain
that achieve results in the body,
altering perceptions
of pleasure and pain.
Reliever of illness
or harbinger of death
is a matter of degree.

 

Digitalis from foxglove,
lily of the valley, and oleander
strengthens the heart’s contractions
while causing blurred and double vision
and hallucinations.
Taxol from the bark of the Pacific yew
destroys cancers of the breast
and ovaries but harms the liver.
Although it induces nausea,
vincristine, an alkaloid
from Madagascar periwinkle,
is the reason why most children
with leukemia now survive.

 

For the stomach spasms
I suffered as a child,
I was prescribed a daily dose
of a chalky green medicine
containing belladonna alkaloids
and phenobarbital
to prevent nausea and relax me.

 

Derived from salicin
in willow bark and meadowsweet,
aspirin reduces inflammation,
eases headache, and lowers fever.
Years ago, my great-aunt, sick of life,
swallowed the entire contents
of a bottle and bled to death.

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Grief Is a Sudden Room

Grief is a sudden room.
After flailing around, breaking
all the furniture inside it for years,
you can think you’ve shut
the ancient door behind you,
but the latch hasn’t worked for aeons,
it will just pop open anytime
you open a window, elsewhere
in your mind. No matter. The room
will arrange itself in your absence
and wait for your return.
You’ve never seen such patience.

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Two poems

A Robin at the Bus Station

Newly loose with death,
I can imagine her stomach, the give.
I bring her an oyster shell from the shore,
prop her head. A pine branch blanket.
You taught me how to care for the dead like this,
how to get quiet in their moment,
early January, no other willing witness.
It’s big work. And even I step away,
whisked back to life by the bus,
where in front of me a young man
video chats his girlfriend, who cries
the entire hour-long ride as he slumps
further into his seat, humming short responses.
A whole bus of us listen to her pleas,
and despite her foreign tongue
I can feel the ruptures, the cold valleys.
I press a warm thumb into the sea
spinning past the window. Bleached shell,
pine branch, stuttering connection.
With these tired hands, we can only
build beds, soft spaces to land.

 

Fall in Languedoc

Officials in Japan are running out
of storage space for the ocean water
used to cool down Fukushima’s
nuclear cores. Tens of thousands
of tons, all newly radioactive,
with talks of releasing it all back
into the ocean. Across the globe,

 

we fill a tractor load—two or three
tons of grapes—in four hours
with a team of eight. What would
a hundred tons of our juice look like;
a thousand? I try to measure the ruined
water in tractorfuls, but run out of room
in my mental valley. How diluted
does a radioactive ocean have to be
before it stops killing everything
it laps up? How much longer
will the waters stand us?

 

Here, the Hérault’s been low
all summer, thirsty, only two storms
filling her throat. The gorges dried,
scratchy. Her rocky bottom cuts
into my kayak’s belly, though
the carp are fat, the seaweed
an impenetrable forest. Here, slung

 

between the map’s bright red pins
that mark each nuclear throne,
I imagine the steel drums planted
beneath us, beating out a cold,
toxic tune. The foxes are hungry.
Tourist-trained, they visit us
at picnic hour, panting, patient,
catching grapes in their skinny mouths
swarmed by flies, fleas trampolining
from their fur as they polish
avocado peels of their fatty linings.

 

From a too-hot summer, the vines
have fried, harvest light this year.
The last fat bulbs were stripped
in the night by wild boars, though
Christian is diligent in his midnight
rounds, has caught half a dozen
perpetrators already. At lunch time,
he brings me their pink meat
in a small Tupperware, cut
neatly into strips.

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Roundabout

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

 

—

 

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

 

“Liam, go,” Nate says.

 

“I can’t,” Liam says.

 

“Just wait for this one to pass.”

 

Nate watches Liam’s leg stiffen on the brake.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“No,” Liam says. “I want to do it.”

 

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

 

“You sure?”

 

“Yeah,” Liam says shakily.

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Dad,” Liam says.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“What?” she asks.

 

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

 

“What, Nate?” she asks.

 

“We’re stuck,” Liam blurts.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“You need to tell someone,” Nate says.

 

“The fuck, Nate?” she gasps.

 

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

 

“I know how it sounds,” Nate says.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

On the other end ethereal static.

 

“I love you,” Nate says.

 

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

 

The rain slows.

 

“Slow down,” Nate says.

 

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

 

“I don’t know.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Should we call Mom again?” Liam asks.

 

“Nah,” Nate says.

 

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

 

“Are you and Mom okay?” Liam asks.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Why?” Liam asks.

 

“To save gas,” Nate says.

 

“We have a full tank,” Liam says.

 

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

 

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

 

“Turn the car off,” Nate says.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Nate’s phone goes off. A text.

 

Leah: Liam is streaming. What happened

 

Nate: No idea.

 

Leah: Call someone.

 

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

 

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

 

Leah: I don’t know what to do

 

Nate: Me either

 

Leah: I’m sorry

 

Nate: Me too.

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Dad,” Liam shouts.

 

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

 

“I’m calling Mom,” Liam says.

 

“No,” Nate shouts back.

 

“Why? What the hell is going on?”

 

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

 

“That’s not—” Liam says.

 

“Let’s get back in the car.”

 

“And go where?” Liam yells. “Dad!”

 

“I don’t know,” Nate says.

 

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

 

A new text.

 

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

 

Nate: Did you feel the earthquake?

 

Leah: What?

 

Nate: Nvm. I’m sorry

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Liam gains millions of viewers on his live stream.

 

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

 

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

 

“Dad.”

 

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

 

Then it stops.

 

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

 

Nate’s phone goes off.

 

Leah: We felt that one.

 

Nate: Can we talk?

 

Leah: No.

 

Nate: What about Liam?

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

“Dad, please,” Liam says.

 

The sun beats down.

 

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

 

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

 

His phone goes off.

 

Leah: Some people think there’s a way.

 

Nate: Do you even want me to come?

 

Leah: I’m not doing this.

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

Nate: I’m sorry.

 

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

 

Nate: What?

 

Leah: All of it. I’m so tired.

 

Nate: Do you think I wanted this?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

“I truly don’t know,” Nate says.

 

“That’s bullshit,” Liam says.

 

“I know,” Nate says.

 

“Just tell me, Dad,” Liam says.

 

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

 

His phone goes off.

 

Leah: Did you see?

 

Nate: Yeah.

 

Leah: They say they’re ready.

 

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

 

“Let’s go,” Nate shouts back. “Move.”

 

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

 

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

 

He checks his phone.

 

Leah: Are you coming?

 

Nate: On the way.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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the reckoning

CPH said, “too many” can be as few as three—

the magic number exposing how the trick is done,

light shifting from the blonde assistant to hands

concealed in the dark. the advertiser’s golden ratio

of aggregate melanin. the progressive tipping point

where the cool is lost from chic restaurants, the polish

from AP classroom. where they no longer feel

embarrassed for confusing Eunice for Jackie

for Miki. Julio for Erik for Hugo. where “diverse”

slippery slopes to “awkward,” “ghetto,” “overrun,” or

silent blue-eyed glances. the not flaxen straw

breaking the tolerant’s back. it’s a quaint thought.

but experience shows “too many” can be as few as

one.

 

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Gravida 3 para 1

When the nurse asks if I have a surgical history

I begin to form the word of my uterus and its

 

drawing out, consider inviting her into the recovery room

filled with women giddy from their return to somatic

 

solitude, then into the smoke-filled apartment with its

futon mattress and warm bottle of retsina, reward

 

just for time, passing from before to after

it. I begin to form the word, but the word—its roundness, its flat vacuum

 

of a face—swallows its own tail. After the medical abortion

I imagined a fish, small fry flapping, and still in some Boston Harbor

 

it haunts a stand of seagrass, is haunted in turn by its half-sibling

the surgically aborted, ripped from stories

 

too. Sibling’s sibling I do not speak of, my double-standard shame, my

ill-gotten fishlet, in my mind I hold you in loving kindness and say no

 

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When I Am Dorothy Gale

The curtain comes crashing down

and there I am, ruby-footed and murderous,

doing it all for the bloated shadow

of a little man. How foolish I have been

again and again, poppy-cocked

and clumsy, letting the boom of a voice, the cast

of a giant, tease me into storming

the castle to take what I never lacked. What is

more incarnadine: the glitter of these

shoes or the myth of blood now on my hands.

I look at the man and he looks back,

the fury of being caught pinking his cheeks.

I am not the heroine, and I know that

too late. He has no power to give me, after all,

the fading of his theatrics, and if he did,

I understand he’d keep it. We all fell for green,

called it real. There’s no place like money.

There’s no seduction like a beast of sewn-up skins,

a cotton ball on fire, a thrown voice

that tells us what we want to hear. Which of us

escapes? He told the lie; I did the killing.

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The Herbalist

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Four or five times,” he said.

 

“Oh. So this is familiar.”

 

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

 

“Yeah? Did you two make plans?”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

We were.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Sorry,” he said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“George?”

 

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

 

“Oh. Where does he live again?”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“And you must be Hannah.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Fuck. Women,” George said.

 

“I know it,” Samuel said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Signs of what?” Samuel asked.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

It didn’t come.

 

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

 

“She’s not very fun,” George said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Finally, I gave up and called an Uber.

 

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

 

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

 

“Did you have fun?” I asked.

 

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

 

“I wanted to leave.”

 

“And you left.”

 

What was there to say after that?

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Your Name in F# Major

A flamingo of a man in a pink-blush tux

plunked a single piano key repeatedly

 

for nearly an hour.

By the end of the evening

 

I heard such gorgeous silence

and sobbed. My mind

 

was in brambles and the notes he pecked

all hatched like eggs at once.

 

Every flap, every cheep

became your name and I became

 

a mockingbird. I said your name

as if I were your brother and just caught

 

you snooping in my desk

for the cigarettes I kept hidden.

 

Then I said your name

with the reverence of a child

 

learning his mother existed

as before-mother for the first time,

 

reconciling one identity with another.

Now I say it like we just met,

 

introduced by a mutual friend

we later admit we never liked.

 

I’m trying to commit

the syllables to memory

 

without making it obvious. Hi,

it’s nice to meet you. It’s nice

 

to see you again. Hi. It’s so nice. Your name.

I say it so often it loses meaning

 

the way cotton candy dissolves

so humbly and quickly

 

into a glass of water but the water

is delightfully altered, and I don’t remember

 

your face anymore

but you’re in the swirl,

 

and I drink and drink and

stay, please, with me, I am chapped,

 

chirping, I’m spun, oh sugar, oh

sweet, your

 

name, oh your name, your

sweet, invisible name.

 

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Don’t Mistake Human Remains for Cocaine

Aunt Glenda gave me and Cricket $200 to buy an urn for the ashes, and we fled. After suffering our closest (and richest) relations’ disdain and neglect from a thousand miles away our whole childhood, suddenly having them inside our small, shabby southwest Florida home micromanaging our mom’s last arrangements was a lot. But they thought we were too young to figure it all out on our own. We were twenty-two (Irish twins, eleven months apart) and fairly fucked up, so they may have been right.

 

Still.

 

Cricket and I had barely spoken since I ran away to college. Cricket and I had barely spoken before I ran away to college. Cricket and I had had little to do with each other, in fact, since we were around six years old and still building pillow forts in the over-abundant living room in the house that it turned out we couldn’t afford so we’d moved away after our mom (who was technically our grandmother) divorced her alcoholic second husband and buried her two real daughters. Having little left to give, our mom had split herself in two and given each of us half: I got her respect, but Cricket got her love.

 

So the two of us, likewise, split the universe in two and agreed to keep to our side. I drowned my adolescence in a pile of books; Cricket went with the more traditional sex and drugs. Cricket dropped out of high school; I escaped to college. But we were both burnt out by our aunt and uncle’s cloyingly perfect manners and good-breeding that day, so we were doing fine with each other for once.

 

We took the $200 and drove down to Fancy Street by the beach to find a container they would deem acceptable to inter with our mother’s ashes in the venerable family plot in Virginia. The day was moist and desolate. Hurricane Wilma had stopped by that weekend, downing nearly all the power and telephone lines, and the streets were strewn with flotsam. One whole tree had been plucked from the ground and lay on its side, its roots flipping off the sky.

 

We parked our mom’s indecorous yellow Toyota Matrix and wove our way into and out of stuffy boutiques, picking up hollow blown-glass artisanal pieces, fine, porcelain basins, and deceptively simple boxes imported all the way from Japan; in each, I tried to picture the woman who’d manhandled every moment of our childhoods, mostly from the comfort of her depression-bed, shutting up long enough to be called “at rest.” The well-coifed sales ladies looked at us askance, as well they should—we were obviously up to the worst kind of mischief—but they asked if they could help us, anyway. This sent us into peals of laughter. Could they help us? Could anyone help us? Were we even worth helping? Not according to most of our relations. What kind of help would have helped us, anyway?

 

Having no answers to these and other questions, we left before the cops could be called.

 

Cases, canisters, vessels, casks, repositories, barrels, bowls, tankards, pitchers, bins, and drums. We tried them all, but nothing was vibrant enough, irreverent enough, spiteful or woeful enough. We’d been at it for hours when our fractured nerves and our natural distrust for each other resurfaced. There were no contenders. We were at the end of Fancy Street, and it was clear that none of those ostentatious ladies believed our white-trash asses could pay for what they were selling.

 

We ended up by the pier where our mom used to bring us to play as kids, having escaped the respectable relations herself when she was much younger and Florida was still a string of quirky fishing villages. There was a kitschy tourist shack. We went in and immediately spotted a hideous pink-plastic flamingo vase for ten bucks. We bought it without conferring. Pocketed the rest of the money.

 

We brought the pink-plastic flamingo vase back to our aunt who was comme il faut in this and all things. Completely straight-faced, we handed it to her, knowing this would have made Mommy cackle. Watching Aunt Glenda’s perfectly manicured fingers shrink back, we pretended we were the idiots she thought we were.

 

“Perfect,” she said nobly.

 

—

 

In lieu of a funeral—our mom had been a rabid atheist—we had a gathering in the home. Even if the traditional news outlets had been functioning full-force, it would have been small. She spent her last decade razing bridges. One of her former friends, who we used to spend Christmas with, told us straight off she was there only to support me and Cricket. Our mom’s favorite cousin, in contrast, did not come because we were “two ungrateful bitches.” Neither our mom’s students nor the people she’d taught with for nearly forty years showed up. But the brassy old biddies with bad teeth and backs she’d slung fabric with at Jo-Ann’s when her retirement money wasn’t enough came out en masse toward the end of the night.

 

Aunt Glenda, bless her well-bred heart, greeted them with all the grace a Southern Lady could muster. I sat on the piano bench in the living room and tried to make small talk with everyone. It was Halloween. My one-year anniversary, exactly, with my girlfriend back at college. My brain kept catching on this fact. (When I asked her to come with me, she informed me the request was improper.)

 

Uncle Aaron said something disparaging about Provincetown.

 

“I love P-town,” I said, having gone there recently and discovered that women walked hand in hand all over town without anyone batting an eye.

 

“I bet you do,” he said, vehemently. And so my evening went.

 

Cricket got wasted instead.

 

Cricket is 4’11 and elfin—fair hair, green eyes, pointy ears, with a wyrd-witchy style. Besides our age for one month every year, and our birthright of intergenerational trauma, the only thing we share is our chest size. Though I’d never admitted this, in high school I had admired Cricket’s ability to try just enough of every drug to experience it and be liked, but never enough to get truly messed up. It was a sort of self-possession I never had. But this was not one of those nights. While Cricket was in the living room getting drunker and drunker, judgment oozed from our aunt and uncle. So Cricket sad “fuck it,” took several bottles, and went out to what used to be a garage but had more recently been our drug-dealer cousin’s room before he ostensibly killed himself in a shoot out with the police-who-never-fired-a-shot.

 

Cricket was staggering around beyond blackout drunk, so I called Little Crystal, one of Cricket’s best friends, to come over for support. She suggested Cricket try on the Pez dispenser costume that Cricket had put so much work into, and now wasn’t going to get to wear to any Halloween parties, after all. Cricket had collected Pez dispensers (and other small things) for years and had really done a great job with the Cricket-sized Big Bird Pez dispenser.

 

It fit perfectly.

 

Unfortunately, it had no arm holes.

 

And Cricket was hammered.

 

And the floor was concrete.

 

Cricket crashed down head-first. And then refused to go to the hospital. Cricket could barely speak through the alcohol and concussion but was adamant on that point. NO HOSPITAL. In hindsight, I suspect it was a fear about health insurance now that our mom had died. Even though Aunt Glenda and Uncle Aaron probably would have covered any hospital bill from that night, that would, obviously, have come with its own baggage.

 

But over the past four years, I had lost my mom, my cousin, the alcoholic second-husband, one of my best friends from high school, and even my childhood cat, who was eaten by the next door neighbor’s bull mastiff. Now Cricket, the last person I had left, was lying on the ground with a head-knot growing bigger than a grapefruit.

 

I flipped out and called an ambulance.

 

The paramedics came and examined Cricket. They told us that there was about a 50% chance of internal bleeding and long-term brain damage and a 50% chance everything would be fine. They also pointed out that Cricket’s stomach should probably be pumped. But they said they couldn’t legally force someone to go to the hospital, even if it would save their life.

 

—

 

Apparently, it takes more than alcohol poisoning and a concussion to kill a Watts.

 

Cricket hasn’t died yet.

 

Aunt Glenda and Uncle Aaron packed up and left—thank God—the next day. They took the flamingo and the bag of ashes, sans the little bit sealed up in a small wooden box that Cricket kept. (Though the flamingo had mysteriously disappeared a year later when they interred her in a muted marble urn.) I had taken the month off school to help pack up our mom’s things and deal with the details. But we didn’t do any of that. Cricket moved into our mom’s bedroom and then just went to sleep, like our mom had when her daughters died.

 

Week after week.

 

It had never actually been my house. They’d moved there after I went off to college to try to get our cousin away from his drug contacts, not that it worked. There wasn’t even a single drawing or stuffed animal of mine from grade school, let alone a bedroom—I slept in the fabric closet. I tried to get Cricket to do things that I thought would be helpful in the long-run, while I was there to be helpful. Cricket did not want to. Any more than our mom had wanted to. My whole life at home had been one interminable cycle of trying to make people do things they didn’t want to do so that I could survive and be happy.

 

I quit.

 

I went back to Wellesley. That semester was a mess. I took an incomplete in all my classes at my dean’s suggestion. My quantum mechanics professor demanded that I still come to lectures, so I told him I never got anything from his lectures and walked out. My girlfriend informed me that it had been very hard on her to have me gone for so long. As though I had timed my mother’s unexpected death of a cancer she’d been diagnosed with three weeks before she died in order to inconvenience my girlfriend.

 

And Cricket, who had never lived alone and unsupported, was left to figure it all out. A friend of a friend knew a friend who needed a place—a young guy around twenty—so he moved in to help cover the bills. A week later, Cricket went on a road trip. Maybe the air of depression lingered in the house when we were all gone. Maybe the guy chose that house because he was depressed.

 

Or maybe it was haunted.

 

Not long before our mom died, she reconnected with a man she’d had a crush on when they were kids. Nearly sixty years later, he was coming to visit to see if they might kindle something. Before he arrived, Mommy made Cricket take the decal of the squirrel with gigantic balls off the toilet seat. She said, “We wouldn’t want him to get the right impression of us.”

 

So Mommy would have found what happened next hilarious. And Cricket and I, well, we didn’t not. It wasn’t that the new roommate killed himself—that part, of course, was tragic. Cricket found him in the living room. But beside him, Cricket found the box of Mommy’s ashes pried open. A little was dribbled out on the floor beside him. Cricket realized he must have thought Mommy was cocaine. And tried to snort her.

 

—

 

Cricket and I sorted ourselves out, more or less, as the years went by. I earned three degrees, was baptized into the Episcopal church, and now live in California where I tutor rich kids, thereby assuring that those who have keep on having. Cricket moved to Atlanta and waited tables for a decade before moving to Portland and establishing a house-cleaning business that they work at when they aren’t rioting for political causes. Years later doctors found some neurological issues that may have been from that night or may have come from the beating Cricket took during more than a decade playing roller derby.

 

Cricket is the only person from my old life still alive. This is both a blessing and a curse. Otherwise, I could pretend that life never happened. Could pretend I have always been what the people here see when they look at me: a well-educated, middle-class writer and teacher, church leader, cat mother, singer, and friend. With perhaps a few more stories than average.

 

But Cricket calls and sounds like giving up, so I drop everything, in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of wild fire season, and drive up to Oregon, even now. And try to get them to do things that would be helpful, while they lie in bed and refuse.

 

—

 

Cricket kept our mom’s Toyota Matrix for years as it decayed. Someone busted in the passenger’s side door. The last time I saw it, there was no window, just a rainbow-colored fleece blanket duct-taped over where a window should have been. Despite that, someone bothered to “break in.”

 

The only thing they stole?

 

That box of Mommy’s ashes.

 

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