Category: Literary Features

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.

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.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Sorry, Dad,” his son replied.

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“I had to itch my nose,” Becky said.

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

The elevator only went to the second floor.

 

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

 

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

 

Janet doled out the respirators as they climbed.

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“But we’re already paying—”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“How did you—”

 

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

 

“But the manager said it was safe.”

 

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

 

“Are you serious?”

 

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

 

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

 

The pirate ride no longer held the same appeal.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

“Excuse me?”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Okay.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

“You look like a mom,” Emma said.

 

“Well, that’s refreshing.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

Adam asked if she might want to do more things out of the house—join the school’s PTA, see if there were any local volunteer opportunities. He couldn’t imagine what she did all day in the house. It was fine, he stressed, after working hard for so many years. He just couldn’t believe she was satisfied with so little to do. Mira did not debate her husband on the exhaustiveness of domestic duties. She did not tell him things were moving in their house, all the time, and that it was more than enough to keep her occupied.

 

There was a spiraling structure to what was happening, the items always moving in the same counter-clockwise manner. Pictures of the Ayer family, arranged in a deliberately casual manner above the living room mantle, left their position and traveled across the bifold door. They passed over the dining room, the thin stretch of wall above the open kitchen, and orbited back to their original spot by the time the children returned from school.

 

The largest concentration of activity was in the living room and lessened as it radiated outward to the surrounding rooms, the decorations and furnishings moving at a slower pace in the kitchen and bedrooms. Mira sat for hours in the living room trying to catch the movement but she could not—not out of the corners of her eyes, not even as she was sure the couch itself had shifted while she was on it. If she had some way to graph the movement, she was certain it would have a natural symmetry, like the innate geometry of a nautilus shell.

 

The objects in the side room—the room that had evaded major renovation—did not move at all. Mira had furnished it sparsely when they first moved in, and now she brought in additional decorations to see if anything would change, but the room remained still. Mira didn’t know what to think of it, this static refuge in an ever-moving house. She ran her hands over its walls, trying to find a pulse, but instead the brimming shocks in her hands quieted.

 

Her fingers found the wall’s mirrored lip, and this seemed to be a clue, an invitation even. Mira retrieved a screwdriver from the garage and picked at the edge. A chunk of the mirror broke off, and as Mira turned the piece over in her hand she caught a glimpse of her own face. When she saw herself she felt the electricity return, whisking the blood back and forth in her veins. She was overcome with the need to see the mirror in its entirety.

 

Mira drove to the drugstore and filled her cart with nail polish remover. The checker hesitated as he rang the last bottles up but said nothing. Though she intended to start the next day once everyone was out of the house, as soon as she returned home she doused a rag with the remover and held it to a section of the wall. She scrubbed furiously with the rag and scraped at the loosened paint with her fingernails.

 

There were layers of paint—not just the warm gray Ken’s painters had applied, but a light peacock hue Beverly must have chosen. Mira was covered in sweat and slightly high from the fumes of the acetone. She scrubbed until she saw her own face in the speckled mirror, blurry, as though it had not yet found its final shape. She could see the channels of the marsh behind her in the mirror, even as she knew the marsh was in the wrong position; it would not be reflected here. Mira’s eyes followed the winding lines of the water in the mirror until she was dazzled. The room had gone humid. She scoured and scraped until she felt the walls of the room start to awaken.

 

“Mom.” Emma’s exasperated voice cut through the thickened air. “Mom, I can’t find my….” Her voice trailed off. “Dad!” she shouted. “Mom has scratched up the wall! Come and see it.”

 

Adam shuffled in, and seeing the mirrored wall, was quiet. “I thought we were going for beachy minimalist,” he finally said.

 

—

 

Adam’s company was having its annual employee review period, and for two weeks he would have to work extended hours. After sitting down with him and bearing his interrogations about her afternoon with the wall, Mira convinced him she had only suffered a moment of renovator’s remorse, exacerbated by the inactivity of her days.

 

Mira stayed out of the side room and volunteered at the children’s school. When she came home in the afternoons with Willy and Emma, the house’s silent admonishment pressed upon her. Mira had grown uncertain after her day in the room; she did not trust herself or the house. She remembered what Ken had said about bringing the children into the house, and it occurred to her that she had failed them on some basic maternal level of protection.

 

But the children remained blissfully unaware of anything that did not revolve around them. They were mildly embarrassed to have Mira in their classrooms, re-shelving books and filing paperwork for their teachers. Emma did not acknowledge Mira on school grounds, and Willy gently asked if she wouldn’t want a real job, like she used to have. Being in the classroom was unbearably dull, and Mira wondered what the house’s decorations were doing, if they had frozen in her absence or if they continued in their fatalistic pattern.

 

Adam left early for work Monday morning, and Mira decided she would not join the children at school that day. After dropping them off, she stood on the pavement outside the house, its half-drawn windows staring back at her. John Brodie was watching her from the window of his living room and raised a hand of greeting.

 

Two crows perched on her porch’s railing. Mira was sure they were the same crows she saw when they bought the house, but they were no longer awkward—they were fully formed and beautiful. Brodie, his face stern, beckoned to her through his window, clawing the air as though he could pull her to him. Mira’s hands, static since her afternoon in the side room, were tingling. She turned from Brodie and made her way up the stairs. As she approached, the crows launched themselves into the sky, their feathers gleaming like oil slicks.

 

Adam had kept the door to the side room closed after Mira’s incident, but now it was open, and Mira entered and sat before the mirrored wall. At first she saw only her own reflection. She stayed there so long she memorized every line of her body, even as it changed before her eyes. Mira stayed in that same place until something within her constricted, and time circled and doubled back on itself. Parts of her were trickling out, and new parts washing in.

 

—

 

The sounds of her family on the other side of the door, increasingly distinct, pulled at Mira. When she emerged from the side room, it was night. All the lights in the house had been turned on. The contents of their home, all the furniture and knickknacks, were in a violent circle of disarray, as though they had been placed in a giant blender with no lid.

 

Willy let out a cry when he saw her, and Emma pressed against her father’s side. Adam stared at her nakedly, unable to wrest his gaze from her face. She was irresistible now. The hallway mirror reflected what her family saw: her body had devoured the little shocks. Her face and chest were a droughted landscape, raised and scarred. But her feet—her feet were just skimming the ground. She was strong and graceful, like a dancer. Mira laughed, and that too was new: percussive, an echoing rasp of a sound. Behind her in the mirror, the waters of the marsh had broken free of their forced channels and were lapping at the back porch.

 

Her body was molten, and the cooling waters of the marsh beckoned. Mira swept past Adam and the children into the awaiting evening, her electric fingers propelling her forward through the night like a breaststroke.

 

It’s not a departure, it’s a transition, the bracing air sang. She wasn’t leaving—there was no here or there anymore. The waters of the marsh held a duplicate of the night sky. They met Mira with the grace of a practiced host, welcoming her home, and removing the rest of her burden like a cloak.

The week Amy got her first disciple was the same as many others that year. The morning radio talked about the eruption of Kilauea off in Hawaii, and at Glendening Elementary, Ms. Welch read the third graders Twenty-One Balloons and Lizard Music so they could better understand the nature of volcanoes. All Amy knew of them she had learned from a children’s science program on PBS where they had shown how life was returning twenty years after the last eruption of a mountain (whose name she couldn’t remember), but the pretty host of the show was wrapped in a blue duffle coat and green leg warmers, so it must have been someplace cold. Later the volcano had blown again, she couldn’t remember when, and all she could think of was how silly the gophers had been to move back, to settle in as if the danger was over. Silly, silly pocket gophers, it’s never over, she had thought. Their babies must have died too. If she was a pocket gopher she would protect all the babies from eruptions big and small, then build them houses on something quiet and sedimentary, just like sweet Jesus did.

 

The idea of Peter being Jesus’s rock had comforted her almost as much as hearing that if she put a quarter in the basket and sang on key she would eventually go to a place where there was no screaming, only harps and wings and songs with regular measures. She had looked around for a rock on which to build but had been disappointed in what she found. Her brother Michael would make a poor rock on account of him being obstinate and swearing all the time.

 

Amy certainly was with her babysitter enough for her to be a good candidate, but Diana was a shaky foundation at best, being always five seconds away from a major meltdown. Plus, the way she kept her fingernails filed to points and painted cherry red wasn’t all that church-like, and Jesus probably didn’t approve of how she treated the baby. Then again, she was making the decisions here, not Jesus, but she agreed with Jesus on this one, so, no, Diana just wouldn’t do. Ms. Welch was calm and orderly, which Amy appreciated, but after 3:00 p.m. she went her own way and Amy went hers. A part-time rock was like no rock at all. After looking most of the week, she finally broke down Thursday morning and asked her mother.

 

“I’m starting a religion, Mom. Would you be my rock after they crucify me?”

 

The rusted Mustang struggled up the incline in the 5:00 a.m. dark of the winter morning. Her mother was silent, face focused forward on the skyline of the city in the distance.

 

“Really, Mom, I need someone to do this, okay? I don’t want to go around setting up people for glory just to find out later I didn’t have the right rock so nobody cared. Okay? Okay, Mom, okay?”

 

“Amy, please, it’s early, have a little pity.”

 

Although she’d been told many times that her mother’s nerves were shot from nightly data entry classes at the vocational school; even though she’d been told that no one likes a blabbermouth like her cousin Charlie’s wife, Lynn, who, it was said, could’ve helped the boys win last year’s Labor Day raft race if only they’d used her mouth as a motor; and even though she hadn’t even written her own commandments yet, so wasn’t entirely sure what her religion would require, she continued talking.

 

“It wouldn’t take much, Mom. You’d just need to walk around telling people how great I’d been and, well, come out and meet me when I come back. That’s a big part. I’d like it if maybe you could bring some chocolate milk with you when you come meet me on the road. I’ll probably be pretty thirsty after being dead three days and all. Okay?”

 

“I’ll get you a rock all right,” Michael murmured from the back seat, “upside your head.” The summer before he had entered a new level of cool, being eleven and all. During lunch recess, he and his friends would jump the back fence and smoke by the creek. When Amy would try to follow, they’d say, “No, teachers’ll miss your mouth.” He listened to Aerosmith and Stevie Ray Vaughn and took down all his Michael Jackson and Culture Club posters.

 

“Well, you’re not going to be my rock, so there.”

 

He pushed on the back of her seat, jostling her forward and causing her neck to struggle against the seatbelt.

 

“Fuck you.” He hit the seat again.

 

“Watch that mouth.” Their mother came out of her traffic-induced haze and adjusted the heater vent, sending a blast of warm air toward the back seat.

 

“Why? What’s it gonna do? Tricks?”

 

“I mean it. Diana says she won’t take either of you anymore if you mouth off again. Says the other kids are picking it up.”

 

“What? That slut Tracy’s only 16 and’s got a kid already. There’s a bad influence around there, but it ain’t me.”

 

“Michael, hush.”

 

“You know Diana offered me macaroni and cheese for a week if I’d go throw a bag of dog shit on the dude’s porch?”
Amy perked up at the mention of macaroni and cheese. She thought she heard her mother whisper “trash.”

 

“I wish I had the money to keep you over at Judy’s, but she’s asking more than I’ve got.”

 

“Why, Mom? What’s wrong with Diana’s?” Amy asked.

 

“Huh? Oh Amy, don’t worry about it. And don’t you go saying anything to her about what I said either.”

 

Their mother went back to focusing on the traffic, waiting for it to ease up so she could make the left-hand turn into the babysitter’s driveway. The children opened their doors and said their goodbyes, and their mother pulled away into the morning traffic that would take her the half hour to the Dyserts’ fertilizer factory out on Route 33. Amy liked that her mother was working for the Dyserts now, not only because the pay was more regular than temping as a secretary, but also because all the pennies in her pockets came back green, which Amy took as a sure sign her mother was magical and indeed worthy of being her rock.

 

Once inside the coal and wood fire-scented coziness and chaos of Diana’s, they went into their regular routine. Michael headed for the new addition, where the black and orange afghan was already waiting for him, still crumpled on the edge of the couch where he’d left it the night before. There were plans to add siding sometime soon, but for now the addition was just the old back porch enclosed with Tyvek and drywall. Although the word seemed a bit much for the space, Diana liked the sound of “the addition,” like things were on their way to adding up to something grand. On most mornings there were six of them, nine if you counted Diana’s two still at home, but since the Stoudts didn’t come until nearly eight, almost time to catch the bus anyway, there was plenty of space. Michael in the addition, Amy on the brown nubby sofa in the living room, and Tracy’s baby in a pen in the kitchen.

 

“This kid ever go home?”

 

Amy leaned into the pen to get a better look at the splotch of dried pea on the baby’s cheek.

 

“You ever shut up?” Diana asked as she chopped something tough and brown on the cutting board. The voice of Dusty Rhodes on 700 WLW (The Voice of Ohio River Valley) was deep and soothing. Amy could see why Diana still listened to him even though the station was coming from down to Cincinnati. He described the smoke that warned of a coming new eruption and the evacuation of people living near, but neither Amy nor Diana paid much attention and let his voice be a comforting drone in the background.

 

“It stinks. You should clean it.”

 

“Well, thank you, Miss Blondie. I’ll make sure to get around to that.”

 

The way Diana called her Miss Blondie confused Amy since all she could think of was that singer her cousin Dustin listened to, who seemed, by all accounts, attractive and successful. She said it with a note of blame, a note of disgust, a note of disdain which led Amy to believe that where Diana was from it must have meant something else. Since she couldn’t figure it out, and Diana just walked away whenever she’d asked, Amy took it as a compliment.

 

Amy pushed herself up to see onto the counter.

 

“That looks like last night’s liver.”

 

“Because it is.”

 

Diana chopped the pieces smaller and smaller until each was only the size of a single bite, something that could almost be swallowed without chewing, something that would not go down easy, but would go down all the same.

Amy still remembered the gritty taste from the night before, how hard it had been to make herself chew it thirty-two times before forcing it the rest of the way down.

 

“For Christ sake, just swallow it,” Diana had said in response to her faces of exaggerated chewing and disgust. But Ms. Welch had said “chew 32,” so chew 32 was what she would do. There are ways things should be and ways they shouldn’t. Michael hadn’t eaten his and had nearly flung the plate on the floor, but Diana’s husband Clint had raised his hand, a warning none of the kids ignored more than once.

 

“This is shit. Cheap shit.”

 

He’d walked out to the addition to finish House of Danger, the Choose Your Own Adventure book he’d started that morning. Diana had picked up the liver with her long thick nails, real but so good looking you would have thought they were press-ons. She put it in a small orange Tupperware with a clear lid which now sat empty beside the cutting board as she chopped.

 

“This isn’t for breakfast is it? Because Commandment Number 5 of Amyanity clearly states Thou shalt eat no liver on Thursdays before noon. Now, Fruity Pebble, Fruity Pebbles would be excellent. If you have Fruity Pebbles, I would accept those as an appropriate tithe.”

 

“This is Michael’s breakfast, you’ll get yours when you wake back up. Now go on, get to your couch.”

 

“Tuck me in?”

 

“In a minute.”

 

Satisfied, Amy went to the living room to lie down. The thought of liver two days in a row would have been too much and she was glad she’d been quick enough to think to add that commandment. As she snuggled under the Dutch girl quilt, she began to hope there’d be grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner that night. Even though she knew Commodities didn’t get passed out until Saturday and the possibility of any of the cheese being left on a Thursday evening was slim, she was sure that if she hoped hard enough, it would be there. She’d get done with her homework and there on her plate would be the warm melting deliciousness, maybe even with macaroni salad made with the shells instead of the little elbow pastas, the shells that trapped the mayo and celery inside so you didn’t know you were getting some until it was in your mouth. It was comforting to know that sometimes good things were hidden, but that eventually you would bite down and have yourself a mouthful. And Coke, maybe there would be Coke still in the can too, with a little drop of water coming down the side like in the commercials. She wouldn’t share any of it with Michael. Not sharing was selfish though, she probably should share. Maybe she’d share with the baby, she liked the baby. Yes, it was settled, she would share the Coke with the baby. And maybe Clint would have to work late and Diana would let her talk during dinner. The daydream grew and grew, as daydreams do.

 

Since she couldn’t sleep, she focused on what the evening would be like with its grilled cheese and Coke, trying not to hear what was happening in the addition. The “I won’ts”, “you wills,” and “fuck yous,” soft things hitting the walls, hard things hitting the walls, and finally the sound of a mouth being held shut against its will, which is to say, stillness. Soon Diana, flustered but victorious, came to check on her and put an extra log in the fireplace. Amy didn’t ask about the noise, just stayed quiet waiting for any cue from Diana. She knew not to question, but could she talk at all? Tell her about her next commandment, which would run something like thou shalt not scuffle between sundown and sunup on the Sabbath, every day being the Sabbath in Amyanity?

 

“Good night, Diana,” she said, finally figuring this was safe enough.

 

“It’s morning, Amy.”

 

She caught a glimpse of the brown liver lodged beneath Diana’s red thumbnail.

 

“Oh, well then, good night/good morning.”

 

Diana shook her head. “Okay kid, good night/good morning,” and she walked back to the kitchen to wipe down the cutting board and listen to the radio announcer report on the distant volcano disrupting the lives of others.

 

“Diana?” Amy called.

 

“Don’t sound like you’re sleeping.”

 

Amy slid into the kitchen. “Diana, I’m worried about the volcano. Will we get evacuated?”

 

She sighed, answered anyway, “We’ll get some heavy rains our way, that’s about it.”

 

“Any ash?”

 

“Ash? How strong you think the winds are?”

 

“Ms. Welch said that when Krakatoa blew, they had ash in Connecticut and snow in July in Cleveland. Cleveland! I’m just saying I don’t want snow in July like those people got back then. I’m sick of winter already. I want to be warm when it’s supposed to be warm.”

 

“No, Amy, it’s just on the radio. It ain’t happening to you.”

 

“Then why do they keep talking about it?”

 

Diana paused and, having no answer, returned to her original stance.

 

“You don’t look like you’re sleeping.” She turned Amy toward the living room with a gentle scootch.

 

That night for dinner they had Johnny Marzetti with pintos instead of beef, even though it was better with kidneys. Dreaming of grilled cheese during arithmetic had been nice and thinking of the Coke, a pleasant distraction during recess when Michael was showing his friends the scratches on his arms and face. Michael’s badass status, for the day at least, turned the fight into a win-win. Amy’s list of commandants grew: thou shalt not build a fire when the coal furnace is running lest the smells conflict and thou shalt have no scratches. The redness of the lines on Michael’s arms worried her, like maybe they could get infected or leave a scar. He ate his dinner that night without a fuss. Then again, it wasn’t liver. The evening would have been reasonably pleasant except for the baby’s crying that drowned out everything, from the sound of T.C.’s helicopter on Magnum to the filing of Diana’s nails in the living room.

 

“Shut it up or call its mama to come get it.” Clint had little patience now that his own three were in their teens and learned their lessons long ago. Diana held the baby tightly, hoping the weight of her body would comfort it, but this did no good. The baby didn’t know that Furnace Two had gone down at the plant that day. The steel had begun to set in the vat and not in the wheel molds. The baby didn’t know that Clint was looking at a long, hot weekend, as everyone on B Crew would pull double shifts to get the vat cleared out and ready for another week of steel and fire. The baby didn’t know that Clint’s oldest girl, Shelly, had announced at dinner that she wasn’t going into the Army after graduation as planned, but instead was keeping her job at Central Hardware to be closer to her boyfriend. The baby didn’t know that it wasn’t the only one who just needed a good nap and some clean underwear.

 

“When’s Tracy getting off tonight?”

 

“Ten.”

 

“What?”

 

“Ten.” The louder she spoke, the louder the baby cried.

 

“When?”

 

“Oh, Jesus, ten o’clock, Clint. Tracy will be back around ten and Rod’s not got the sense God gave a cricket.”

Diana went into the kitchen to heft the baby into the pen and Amy followed.

 

“In my religion, babies can cry whenever they want and no one will yell. You can be my first disciple.” The baby was not comforted by this promise.

 

“You can be my disciple, too.” Amy placed her hand on Diana’s shoulders as she hunched over the Formica countertop, hands raised, eyes closed for a moment. Amy tried to reach up to pat her head, but could not quite make it.

 

“Special Commandment 73: All babysitters will have assistant babysitters. I could be your helper, Diana. Take the baby for walks, play peek-a-boo, clean her up after supper.”

 

“She don’t want to play peek-a-boo and can’t tell the difference between dirty and clean.”

 

“Oh.”

 

The solution had seemed so reasonable, Amy was unsure where to go next, so she went to her couch to sleep until nine when her mother would get out of class. To sleep meant she couldn’t hear whatever was happening in the kitchen. But she still knew. It was the same thing that happened every night and it never ended well for the baby. Diana never seemed more relaxed, but things were quieter, which was something. When she arrived, her mother said nothing about the scratches and neither Amy nor Michael brought them up.

 

The next day was Friday, which meant her mother would pick them up at six and they would have dinner at their own house sitting around the little maple table Granny Mingus had passed down after she’d gotten that government grant to update the house. It had looked so small in the new space that her kids had pitched in to buy a new one that fit better. They had gotten the old one with its years of gum stuck to the underside and its mismatched center leaf. The thought of that dinner could get Amy through the day. Commandment 87: Thou shalt eat pizza at home each Friday with milk and salad (cucumbers and radishes optional). She liked the way that sounded. Her commandments were coming together nicely. It felt good to have a list, to know that X and Y could and would add up to Z, even if she had to write the equation herself. She hadn’t decided yet what the afterlife in Amyanity would bring, but it would be more interesting than angels and harps and less time consuming than reincarnation.

 

Friday morning Amy was ready to move to this next step. “Mom, what should Heaven be like? I think I’ve got my rules, now I just need the reward. No one will do anything without a reward.”

 

Her mother cranked the engine and pulled the car out toward Diana’s.

 

“What should it be, Mom? There’ll definitely be no homework and maybe no rain or snow. What else, Mom? What else?”

 

“Quiet. Heaven will be a very quiet place.”

 

“Oh, but what about birds? Won’t there be birds in Heaven? My Heaven should definitely have birds.”

 

“Take a fucking hint you moron,” Michael pushed the base of his hand into the seatback, then once again for good measure, and the car was quiet the rest of the drive.

 

Truly, Amy hadn’t planned to steal the baby that day. After she’d said “goodnight/ goodmorning” to Diana, she lay on the couch picking at its large decorative buttons, unable to sleep. Usually the house was quiet in the morning except for the radio and small kitchen noises as Diana packed her children’s lunches and fixed their breakfasts. The evenings were the loud times, when Clint was home and the TV was on. But today the baby was crying. Diana had yelled first, then turned the radio up, then yelled again. When Amy heard the slap over the Dusty Rhodes Show, she felt a commandment she’d forgotten to write had been broken. One about mornings, and quiet, and babies getting to be babies.

 

She was tired of people not respecting Amyanity. At this rate none of them would get to Heaven. After Diana passed through the living room toward the back hallway, Amy snuck to the kitchen and lifted the baby from her pen. She hadn’t been expecting it to weigh so much, or maybe she had been expecting herself to be stronger. The baby was surprised to silence, assessing the new situation. It was too cold to walk outside without taking time to get their winter gear on, by then Diana would be back from the bathroom. So she took the baby downstairs where no one ever went except to put more coal in the furnace or to do laundry. She hunkered down under Tracy’s old clothes hanging from the water pipe, the red corduroy overalls making a cozy fort. The concrete cold seeped through her jeans making her chilled even though the furnace was not far away.

 

“It’ll be okay. Don’t you worry now.” She sat the baby, all squiggly arms and flailing legs, in her lap. It made soft guttural noises of escape and reached its arms toward the ground. She heard her name being called from above and then the sound of the backdoor opening. Attempting peek-a-boo with the baby did not distract it from reaching for the hot, bright metal of the furnace not two feet away. It was not a very good disciple; it didn’t care if she ever reappeared from behind her hands. The door reopened and she heard the quick movement of feet above her and the older children being roused from their sleep. Her name some more, doors being opened, doors being closed, the word “Hell” a few times, her name some more.

 

“Let’s go somewhere where there’s no yelling, okay? What do you think of that, baby? Not a quiet place, just no yelling. Except you, you can yell all you want. Yell your head off. And me too, I can yell. We can yell our fool heads off. What do you think of that, baby, what do you think of that?” She took the coo as an assent and smiled. Although she was still unsure where such a place was, knowing it might be out there was comforting.

 

“No, baby, that’s hot,” and she struggled to pull the baby’s arm back toward her and away from the furnace. It began to cry and push her away. The word “basement” and the scuffle of four pairs of feet came from above. No shushing or bouncing would stop it, so she held the baby loose to her chest to muffle the sound, but it squirmed even more.

 

“I don’t hear her anymore,” Michael said when he was halfway down the steps. Amy pressed the baby tighter as she’d seen Diana do, it was still. She tucked her feet under and let Tracy’s old clothes engulf them both as Michael moved around the room shifting boxes of old Barbie gear and Star Wars toys for just a minute to sound like he was giving a good search.

 

“Maybe it was coming from outside?”

 

“Keep looking.”

 

He sighed and put his hands on an old T-ball uniform and a ballerina skirt then slid the clothes back and forth, his eyes never leaving the ceiling.

 

“Nope, not down here.”

 

He huffed his way back up the steps and Amy heard four pairs of feet heading out in the winter dark. The sun was just beginning to rise over the east edge of town, catching the light off the well-meaning but not quite right skyscraper of the LeVeque Tower. They would all go to school soon and Diana would take a nap before Price Is Right. Breakfast, kids off, nap, Showcase Showdown, lunch, and Days of Our Lives with tidying during the commercials. That was the way it had gone when Amy had been home sick from school, and she was counting on that being Diana’s ritual. She could probably get the baby down the hill and to her house while Diana was sleeping. There would be the spare key to get in, and she could hide out until her mom got off work. Her mom would know what to do; otherwise she wouldn’t be the rock. She’d bring the baby chocolate milk and show Amy how to get the peas from its face and how to soothe it when it cried. After a few minutes, Amy relaxed her hold and took a deep breath. The baby reached up and patted her face. She crossed her eyes and rolled her tongue to make it giggle.

 

Unsure what else to do, she sat and waited for the baby to grow restless again, for the sound of the game show to start, for someone to realize that half-assed was the only way Michael ever did anything and come double-check the basement. While she waited she made a new commandment, one that was the best one yet. Commandment 125: Everything turns out okay in the end. It has to, it just has to.

 

He sat across from me at that tiny table, in that tiny apartment, gesticulating and performing for others, and how I wished it would all fade away, every pixel in the scene blank except for him and me. I was buzzed from one beer, a worrying feat, and my suspicion was that the smell of him changed my brain chemistry.

 

The first time I saw him—truly saw him—came weeks before that night in the apartment. I was at work, on my way to the bathroom, when I saw him hunched over a computer a few cubicles down. There was something in the shape of his bearded jaw, its almost leporine nature, that stopped me. In the ensuing weeks, I subsisted on crumbs: listening to him talk about his favorite books, ones I hated but assumed I just wasn’t cultured enough to understand; examining the meditative photos he took of the city’s rare natural landscapes and posted on Instagram; gushing about him to anyone who would listen and watching the disinterest build up in their eyes like cataracts.

 

That night in our mutual friend’s apartment was the first time I’d seen him outside of the office, and for that reason I had expectations. But after an hour of sharing him with others, I felt like a failure for not already getting him home with me. I excused myself to the bathroom.

 

Gazing into the mirror, I took stock of my face. There was a seriousness in it that I was unaccustomed to, a tired look that had nothing to do with my lack of sleep.

 

I’d always known that the difference between lust and love is what remains after orgasm. Many times, I tried to come and forget, to toss my intoxicating obsession with him away as easily as a wadded-up paper towel. After all, that method had proven itself depressingly effective in neutralizing my feelings for the many boys I’d bedded in New York: the gay nightclub residents and queer, “non-scene” academics I’d met in cafes or libraries alike. But it never worked with him.

 

I left the bathroom, skirting around a circle of conversation that included my close friend, the one who had expressed mere minutes ago that she was bad at meeting new people, whom I had invited under the guise of getting her to meet my coworkers when she was actually there as emotional support. Our eyes met, and I smiled. It stood to reason that if I didn’t look guilty for abandoning her, then she wouldn’t feel abandoned. She smiled back, and I found my place at the table.

 

He was quiet now, listening in that intense way of his that I had come to adore. He wasn’t simply waiting for his turn to talk, itching to give his hot take. He was reacting, supporting, absorbing. It was I who was impatient to speak. I was onstage at Madison Square Garden, and he was the only person in the audience. Every laugh was a step closer to my bed.

 

And that’s when I had to ask myself if a night with him would be water or gasoline for the flames that eagerly licked my chest. I had imagined it, of course, but only for a few seconds at a time. Images of us intertwined strobed in my brain at night when I couldn’t fall asleep. But if we went through with it, if I tasted him as hungrily as I wanted to, what would remain?

 

I tried to picture it as realistically as possible—yes, at that table, surrounded by others—and I knew my answer. After the climax, after he’d come, his monopoly on my desire would remain. His face didn’t change in my mind’s eye, it never became hollow and disfigured like the faces of so many one-night stands. The touch of his phantom limb, my tactile approximation, never failed to give me chills. My compulsive need to expel my traumas as fast as my lips could spew them to his ivory ears never lessened, it never ceased.

 

Gasoline.

 

We left the apartment, all of us, and went to a bar. I sat next to my friend, knowing I had some damage control to do. We discussed her job. How stressful it was, how rewarding and taxing and stimulating and frustrating and fitting. And I realized that loving him was exactly the same.

 

He sat at the other end of the table, once again gesturing and speaking animatedly, and I considered begging God to release me from this captivity of want. I had learned as a child in church that through Him all things are possible, that you only needed to pray with enough conviction. And He had done it before. There were boys I believed I’d never forget whom I barely thought about now: the real estate agent who lived with his boyfriend in Philly, the poet in Austin I stopped texting once I was sure he hadn’t killed himself.

 

But without my current toxic affection, what would I be left with? My feelings for him were the only valence in my life. The only time I rose above numb was when he hurt me or flattered me, always without him noticing.

 

My friend had said something to me, something to which I was supposed to respond, and I heard the slight pleading in her voice, pressing me, Be here.

 

I made a pithy comment, some offhand ironic statement that bordered on self-parody, and the response was a smatter of laughs. Had he noticed? I wondered. Did it make him wish he’d heard what I’d said?

 

I got up to get another drink.

 

A strange phenomenon had occurred the moment I stepped inside the bar. The bright flashing of sports games on TVs and the loud chatter of patrons caused an almost instantaneous rush of sobriety. I had become clearheaded, hyperaware, conscious in the most disconcerting of ways. The three whisky-somethings I had downed since our arrival did little to improve my condition.

 

There were a number of strangers whom I would have pined for on any other night, a diverse array of God’s finest creations, His divine flexing, but lowercase “he” had long supplanted my usual need for “someone.”

 

The bartender came closest to making me forget him. She was beautiful in a striking way, like time didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to me. And I could tell that she understood me based on the slight smile on her face when she heard me order cinnamon whisky, the drink that eclipsed all others in terms of abetting bad decisions and bone-aching hangovers. She knew immediately. I was running. I wanted out, I wanted to leave. And this was my ticket.

 

Her knowing that made her all the more attractive, all the more otherworldly, and a part of me yearned to bare myself to her, to tell her how the loneliness and fear and isolation made me ravenous for love, or even a facsimile of it. I wanted her in a way I had only wanted a few women before, but there wasn’t any more room in me for not-him.

 

Glass in hand, I walked back. A few of our party announced their departures, and after the goodbyes, our group numbered few enough that we were able to begin a shared conversation. And suddenly I didn’t want to escape. This was my World Series. Here I was, stepping to the plate, pointing to him, in the stands at the other end of the field, and saying, This one’s for you.

 

I was charming. I was funny. After a group chuckle I’d lean into my friend and whisper an inside joke that would make her choke on her drink. I complimented his hair, like it had only suddenly occurred to me how beautiful his auburn ringlets were, like those strands of dead cells hadn’t made me want to pull out my own at times. He complimented the character of my nose and for the rest of the night it was my favorite part of my body.

 

But nights like these always ended too soon for me, and one person’s “Early day tomorrow…” was an impetus for everyone but myself to express similar sentiments.

 

As we walked to the train, I kept waiting for a moment when things would take flight, when a touch or a look would change my mind about the reciprocity of my obsession. But there were people between us and in front of us, and we kept pinballing past each other in the herd. I cursed the narrow, cockblocking sidewalks and stewed in the brisk, October air.

 

I said goodbye to him last and couldn’t quite catch the seconds as they ticked by, as if I were forgetting in real time. I knew this much: it was brief, too brief, tragically, horribly brief. Did we shake hands? Did we hug? Did we nod?

 

I’m standing on the corner of 110th and Broadway. I am alone and far from home, the ache in my chest my only company.

At the time, everyone’s partner had the same name—David.

 

There was no good reason for it. Initially, we joked that the name had been in vogue the year they were born, but that couldn’t be true: the Davids were set apart in years, the youngest being Alena’s boyfriend at nineteen, and the oldest being Audre’s secret, at fifty-eight. Perhaps the first of the sisters to procure a David—Audrey, at thirty-two, who had been courted for eight months by an age-appropriate David at the swimming club where she tuned her finely muscled thighs every weekday evening—had set some kind of subconscious example for the rest. Whatever it was, within a year of Audrey’s formal introduction of the First David to the family, Adalyn and Alena had both found Davids of their own, followed by Ayla, and then, when they all turned to Audre, the eldest, thinking wouldn’t it be funny if she found someone after so long and that person turned out to be a David, too, it came out that she’d been carrying on with a married man this entire time, their father’s wife’s orthopedist. Who, of course, was named David.

 

There were five of them, Audre, Ayla, Audrey, Alena, and Adalyn. It’d just been Audre and Ayla at first, but their father’s second wife had come packaged with the indomitable Audrey. When Wife #2 passed quite suddenly from belatedly discovered leptomeningeal disease, he brought the three girls, aged twelve, seventeen, and twenty-one, to get their meningitis vaccinations, which, no two ways about it, was where he met the woman who was to be his third wife. Me.

 

By the time the twins arrived, it’d been decided that they’d continue the tradition of names beginning with A. Myself, I thought it’d be nice to break away. Didn’t mind a Darby, or a Christine. But the older girls sensed my discomfort and pressed down hard, insisting on keeping with convention. In private, I consulted with their father. You already have an Audre and an Audrey. Are you sure? Truthfully, I was afraid he’d mix them up. He wasn’t getting any younger, and his memory had never been crystal. The thought of five similarly named girls wandering around in that big house just seemed like a trap. You want to know the worst part? Ask me my name.

 

Call me Anita, I said, before the battle lines had been drawn. I was only twenty-three, I had no peers to consult with. All my girlfriends had found men still on their first go. Later, they’d say: you should have established authority first thing. Don’t try to be their friend. Where was this advice when I was first inducted into the family? Not yet hatched, I suppose. Anyway, being authoritarian wouldn’t have worked. And the girls knew it. Anita, they’d say, we’re out of eggs. Or, You’re so cute—Anita. Wielded at a distance, as if to remind me that my presence in the house was but a passing amusement to them. Even the twins didn’t anchor me: the other wives had come and gone, too.

 

Audre, the eldest, is saying it now. Don’t mind Anita, she takes a while to process things. The way she always says it, Ah-ni-ta, the ta a harsh spit. I look to David, but he is of no help. He’s in that spot men eventually all find themselves in, between enamored and guilty. It’s the first we’re hearing of the affair, and looking at Audre, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a smugness in her eyes, a certain challenge in the set of her chin. She crosses her legs, her hand snakes into his. I can’t believe how reckless they’re being. Life can’t be lived on a whim. And yet. David is one of my oldest friends, and I had no clue. Even though it’s been a while since I’ve had to see him for my herniated disc, I meet him and Celine at least once a month for lunch. Celine. Oh god, Celine. I look at him again. His eyes are pleading. I can tell he’s asking permission to smile, to take Audre’s side. So, it’s that fresh. A fifty-eight-year-old man, still hanging on the tail end of his mistress’s every sentence. Audre says it again: Earth, earth to Anita. And laughs. It’s the laugh that does it for me. I put a hand on my husband’s lap, turn to my old friend and orthopedist, David, and say, You know, darling, we should all have lunch.

 

—

 

The lunch is set for the first Friday of the following month. We can’t do weekends, because then Celine will want to know where her husband is. The other four girls and their Davids have flexible schedules and somehow make it work. In the lead up to that lunch, I often wonder if Audre regrets announcing the relationship to her father and me in that way. I turn that analytical eye on myself, too. What is it in me that drove me to propose that disaster, lay that trap?

 

Was I conscious of what I was doing? The girls think so, I’m sure.

 

Just shy of a decade later, at their father’s funeral, Audre will say, flatly, while picking at a cucumber and egg sandwich, Now you’re free, Anita. She doesn’t clarify, but we both know she’s referring to that lunch. I don’t want to look at her, so I stare at her sandwich instead. Cucumber and egg, her father’s favorite. Deceptively simple, but hard to get right. The cucumbers have to be pickled in rice vinegar, sunomono style. And the eggs boiled for ten-and-a-half minutes, then whipped with kewpie mayonnaise.

 

When Friday comes, I spend all morning perfecting the sandwiches, then arranging them on the lunch tray. When my husband tries to steal one, I send him out for fruits. It’s a last-minute decision, and I give him a list of what I want, in order of priority: mango, and if that’s not available, then jackfruit, or rambutan. I can only breathe easy when I hear the car pull out of the driveway.

 

He returns with the first set of Davids. He found the twins wandering around the market with them, trying to settle on an appropriate gift. They tumble out of the car, all limbs and laughter, and together the Davids present me a massive bouquet of wildflowers. Double the size for double the girls, they say. As for my husband, he’s found the mango, my first choice. I peel and dice it, populating the table with small dishes of yellow flesh, when Audrey walks in with her David. They’ve brought wine, and I feel defensive as I send her to decant the bottle into a carafe.

 

Then, Audre and my old friend David arrive. They come empty-handed, as if to assume the position of host and hostess, as if to claim this lunch as thrown for their benefit. The younger Davids giggle nervously; the twins must have given them the background. I don’t let it get to me. I offer them a drink, which the traitor David accepts. We all take our seats, and wait.

 

Ayla flies in half an hour late, corresponding David in tow, and looks disappointed that we’re all still civil. Anita, David, David, Anita. Dad. Ayla has a laugh like a horse. It puts you on edge. To ask her why she’s late would be to offer her an opportunity to humiliate—No. We return to the conversation at hand, which vaguely, but also clearly, includes dear, absent, hapless, betrayed, Celine.

 

I don’t even like Celine. If you asked me directly, I wouldn’t be able to name one compelling thing about her. We met in church, after my wedding, when the twins were still germinating secretly under the frou-frou of my corset. She was a friend of the family, inducted by Wife #2. So I inherited her. She’d pressed her husband’s card into my hand, told me to call if I ever needed company or orthopaedic work. What kind of woman outsources friendship to her husband? Though it’s true that Celine’s David and I got along swimmingly. From our first appointment, I knew. He had the reassuring air of an anchor, weighty and rooted, from which Celine ballooned. Even though she was absent in that treatment room, David’s steadiness conjured her; it made you, a female, feel safe. In friendship with him, you were sexless, and could release yourself from the trappings of charm. Very quickly, over the course of treatment for a pinched nerve, David and I became close friends, bedrocked on his commitment to Celine.

 

Where is she during this lunch, Celine? She is back at the church, cross-stitching bible verses on the dresses of dolls, to be distributed at the Christmas service in two weeks. Every perfect and good gift is from God above. James 1:17. Poor, boring, good Celine. She’s been doing this for years. There isn’t a family within a hundred-meter radius without one of those dolls. When children bring them home, the idea is that they’ll carry these verses with them too, and, worrying the dolls over and over, that the verses will catch, and grow. That she’ll plant these beacons of morality in homes all throughout town. That’s Celine for you. She’s been volunteering at the church for as long as I’ve known her, and even after the divorce, she will stay. But we will go. We will drive twenty minutes more to attend Sunday service at another church, which is helmed by a fire-and-brimstone sort. I look at her David, who is no longer hers, though she does not know it yet. He’s looking at Audre, my oldest. The others are all looking at me, at him, at Audre, their gazes flickering between us, as if afraid to miss the slightest blink.

 

Audrey’s David gets up to pour the wine.

 

I’m sure the twins drink, but in front of me, their faces are stone as the carafe passes them over. Everyone remarks on how similar we are, how perfectly they take after me, but already the twins must be keeping secrets from me, maybe even from each other. Their Davids will only last one and three months more, and then they will refer to this period as the Davidic era, and laugh and laugh and laugh.

 

“It’s a common enough name.” This is Audrey’s David, the wine-pouring David. He says it apologetically; he’s a therapist with a reasonable attitude toward everything. “I was in school with two other Davids, myself.”

 

“But all five!” I say. He just shrugs: everything about this situation is unusual. The twins interject. Alena, older by twelve-and-a-half minutes, punches her David in the shin.

 

“I picked you because of your name.”

 

Adalyn: “And me, because it’d be funny.”

 

The twins glance at each other, and say, perfectly synced: “We’re collecting Davids.” They dissolve into laughter.

 

I’m embarrassed. I say, “What one does, the other has to do. You should see their rooms. It’s a compulsion.” I mean to say that with them, everything is a game, but that their playfulness is simply a byproduct of a sheltered youth and shouldn’t be taken to heart. Their Davids don’t seem to mind.

 

Therapist David sets the carafe down and settles back into his seat. I can see Audrey resting a hand on his thigh, gratefully. He speaks directly to Ayla’s David, the latecomer, making general, safe inquiries about his family. I find myself leaning forward. I know nothing of Ayla’s David. I hadn’t paid him any attention.

 

“One brother. Older. Nathaniel. And then I think my mother just went down the Book, picked the most normal sounding name out of the lot. Nathaniel’s other brothers in the Bible were all things like, Shimmy, or somet’n.”

 

“Shimea.” It’s my friend David. Just like that, Celine is with us, again.

 

Ayla’s David looks at him with interest. “You a deacon, or the like?”

 

“No, an orthopaedist. But I attend.”

 

I can’t help it, I snort. It’s very funny. And I know David has said it for my benefit, establishing a private bubble between us, of warmth and banter. For a moment, I feel like nothing has changed. But when I look up, it’s Audre smirking, Audre amused. Audre, just two years my junior, with her limp, dirty hair, which she shaved off once, after I ran my hands through it, absentmindedly petting her head as I introduced her at a gathering as my oldest step-daughter.

 

David relents. He tells Ayla’s David: “It’s a good name, it means beloved.”

 

Ayla’s David looks vaguely comforted. “My mother said he was a king.”

 

“And a womanizer.” Audre is smiling now, audacious, as she leans into David’s chest. She hasn’t even touched her wine. How could they do this to Celine? To me? I reach for another sandwich, pick at it. Technically, Audre has known David for as long as I have, though they’d never spoken outside of absolute necessity. But two years back, I’d rung David and asked if he could please have a quick look at Audre’s wrist, which had been giving her trouble. Carpal tunnel was easy enough to diagnose, and she really just needed a prescription. I remember ringing him again to complain, afterward. Audre hadn’t even thanked me. She treats me like a secretary, I told him. She always has. My old friend David had hummed on the phone, then said it’d been tendonitis. Not carpal tunnel. Though the two were so similar that they were easily mistaken, one for the other.

 

We are done with lunch. The sandwiches I’ve so painstakingly labored over, demolished. The mango, gone. Audre turns to my David and squeezes his bicep, bringing it sharply into existence. I blink, stunned.

 

“The strudel,” she says.

 

He smiles at us, then goes to retrieve it from his car. So they did bring something after all. They’ve kept it in the boot, a surprise.

 

“It’s your favorite,” Audre continues, in David’s absence. She’s speaking to her father. As if I’m not there. “Dave and I drove way out of town to get it. It was his idea; he knew you’d been craving it.” Dave? I hear a waver in her voice, I look at Audre more closely.

 

But a buzz of distractible excitement has settled over the table.

 

I’m momentarily confused, until I hear Ayla explaining to her David: “It’s this place we used to go to, as kids. It’s by our first house, when we were still living with Mom. We haven’t had it in years.” She turns to her older sister. “How’d you know it’d still be good? I wouldn’t dare. I’d be so afraid it’d disappoint.”

 

Before Audre can reply, David returns with two long boxes of pale yellow. He heats it up in the oven for ten minutes, then the strudels are unveiled with ceremony, one apple, one mango. He looks at me apologetically. “We didn’t know you’d be serving mango.” Puts a slice of the apple strudel on my plate.

 

It’s warm. I can see the glazing winking at me, the brushed sugar melted slightly from the heat. Beside me, my husband digs his fork in, bringing a big wedge up to his mouth. He’s delighted and seems to have no compunction about the scene unfolding before him. We’re all adults here, he said, when I’d raised my objections in private. What they choose to get up to is their business. He chews loudly. The twins exchange glances of wonder: the strudel is very good. Still? Ayla is smiling, so it must live up to memory. A David, not my David, is exclaiming, asking for the baker’s address. I look back down at my slice.

 

—

 

Nobody really understood, when I married my husband. Of course, you could argue that those were different times. These days, a girl can go with a man twice her age without the world blinking, and separate just as easily. Not I. Sometimes, when you look back on your life, you think to yourself: what else could I have done with the options that I’d had? Back then, I knew how people talked, but I’d been determined to weather it through. I married for affection, but, yes, also for agency. And haven’t I played my part? I remade myself in the image of a perfect wife, I committed to becoming a step mother when I was barely past twenty myself, I’ve always been faithful, even when I’ve had occasion to stray. I stayed. People can say what they want, but I gave myself and the twins a life not otherwise possible, and there’s no shame in that.

 

A year after his funeral, Audrey will call me. My overachieving, perfectly sculpted middle child. She wants my recipe for the cucumber and egg sandwiches. She’s tried pickling the cucumbers several ways, but can never quite get it how he liked it. Of course, she admits, it could just be her memory. After all, so much time has passed. It could be that they were perfectly ordinary sandwiches, and she’s inflated them in her mind over the years, enhanced by her step-father’s enthusiastic appreciation. I give her the recipe; there is no longer reason for me to withhold. A few days after that, she calls again. They are exactly as she remembers. Perfect.

 

I invite her back to the house, where I live alone. The twins, who everyone said resembled me so, have flown the coop. Ayla married her David, and they’ve moved to Germany. Audre and I keep out of each other’s way. When Audrey shows up, I am surprised to see that she is very pregnant. It hadn’t worked out with therapist David precisely because he wanted kids and she didn’t, but I suppose the right person can correct a wrong situation. Her new husband is apparently very nurturing. As we sit together, eating sliced cucumber, Audrey asks to see the dolls again.

 

How does she know I wouldn’t have tossed them? She reads the question in my eyes and says, You’ve always been one to punish yourself, Anita. Her smile is mirthless and tired.

 

—

 

After the strudels are done with, there’ll be a moment of awkward limbo, a pause. Then, someone, one of the twins’ Davids, asks to see their room, picking up on an earlier thread. We all troop upstairs, my husband and I, the five girls, their Davids. Push open their door. Enter the room. The twins are vibrating with mischief, excitement. Nothing is serious to them yet, they have no skin in the game. The world bears no stakes.

 

It had once been two rooms, but we knocked the middle wall down, so the effect is that of perfect symmetry. A long room, folded in half, one side leaving a precise imprint on the other. Their beds, desks, even the random entrails of their mess, mirrored exactly on each side. I turn and see Audre’s hand on my David’s lower back, rubbing it slowly, an act of intimacy that makes me feel awfully vulnerable.

 

But by then it is already too late.

 

The twins run up to David, their eyes shining. They see him as a funny old family friend, and throughout the lunch, they’ve been watching him with growing amusement as he affects a veneer of cool, trying to keep up with the younger boyfriends. I’ve seen them exchange glances at his occasional stumble and looked away, burning from secondhand embarrassment. But David has taken it in stride, played along. He doesn’t blink until that moment. In their hands, the twins hold a pair of Celine’s dolls, worn soft from years of attachment. Do you remember, they say. Do you?

 

—

 

A decade later, in that same room, Audrey will turn the dolls over in her hand, flip one of their dresses up. Along the hem: James 1:17. Every perfect and good gift is from God above. She reads it out softly. They really take after you, she tells me, finally. She puts a hand on her belly, and asks: Can I have this one?

 

—

 

The strudel, it turns out, has gone bad. Perhaps it is the fact that it has been sitting in the car throughout lunch, cooking slowly. Perhaps it is the burden of what it was called to do. After Audre’s David, Celine’s David, my David, mine, throws up all over the doorway of the twin’s room, something shatters. My friend David sees the flash of dismay in Audre’s eyes and in it, his own pitifulness reflected. The twins snatch the dolls away.

 

By the time the mop is retrieved and the cleaning cloths wrung and sponged, it is already over. The hopefulness of the afternoon has been punctured. An air of frailty overcomes David. He puts one hand on each twin’s head heavily, first Adalyn, then Alena, without seeing them: they are the same to him. Says goodbye to the rest of us, politely. Audre climbs into the car with him and they drive off a little way, before parking behind the church and separating quietly.

 

He is a good person, my David. He returns and confesses everything to Celine, who cannot forgive him. They file for divorce shortly after, and David transfers to a different clinic, out of town, for the remainder of his practice. Neither of them speak to me again; they ignore my calls. I respect them for that, at least. And if there are any significant developments in Audre’s personal life after that, I am never privy to them. Whatever relationship we might have had is lost with that lunch party.

 

—

 

But all of that is later. Before the end, the apple strudel sits, untouched, on my plate. Everyone has already gone for seconds, and it’s becoming uncomfortably clear that I don’t mean to eat mine. My husband, who’s already had a slice of the apple, then the mango, then the apple again, tries to make a joke of it. “If you’re not eating that.…”

 

The only David that really exists in that room is quiet. He’s looking at me, and I know in his face I will see that same pleading expression, betraying his naive desire for everything to be okay. Despite the disaster of the affair. Despite the fact that this is a small town, that it cannot last. Despite the fact that we have an unspoken understanding, he and I, of solidity, of accountability. Our friendship built on the assurance of things being exactly as they should.

 

In that moment, if I take a bite, he thinks, it will somehow all work out. It will resolve itself. He cannot possibly believe this, but he does.

 

I am not looking at him. If I see that plea in his eyes, my resolve will tremble. I know this much about myself. I am not looking anywhere, except resolutely at my plate, where the shiny slice of pastry sits.

 

Already the twins are scheming. Already the die is cast. My hands twitch by my sides, and I grip the edges of my skirt to steady them. Audrey, my perfectly poised child, gets up and begins clearing the plates. She gestures to her David, who collects the glasses and carafe. There’s a scraping of chairs. Everyone is up, now, except me, starting the dishwasher, cracking jokes, whipping the dishcloths between them.

 

My friend David gets up too, to use the bathroom. He hesitates, then leaves a kiss on Audre’s forehead, a chaste compromise. It’s just Audre and I now. I raise my eyes, we look at each other. I am shocked to see that her gaze is fierce, fervent.

 

“Mum,” she says, her voice controlled and low, and suddenly I can see that I’ve gotten it all wrong, but that it’s too late, and has been too late for some time now, “please.”

 

We could start the story here: Phillipa Pirrip at thirteen, walking into her eighth-grade dorm room for the first time. In the middle of this room stands Phillipa’s roommate—Minji—who introduces herself with a slight bow. Over the next five years, Minji will nickname Phillipa Pip, and she’ll pass Pip Korean lessons written on graph paper between bell rings in the main school building. At night in their room, Pip will teach Minji how to cornrow hair like Pip does for all of the other Black girls in their dorm, and Minji will cook Shin Ramyun on Pip’s desk as she grades those Korean lessons, gesturing with her chopsticks and splashing spicy, orange soup across Pip’s awkwardly scrawled Hangul letters. Here, on this campus, Pip and Minji will run through horse pastures in the black of November nights, warm their hands in each other’s pockets, and pantomime smoking with their ashy breaths. Perched on splintered, wooden fences, Minji will teach Pip the word for family, the word for death, the word for love, the word for ghost.

 

Then senior year hits like a flashbang. In the abandoned barn at the edge of campus, they will lie on sawdust floors. Watching the clouds of their breaths mushroom together, Pip will say in accented Korean, “I want to live in Seoul one day.”

 

Minji will hook arms with Pip and say, “Let’s do it! Let’s live there together.” And then six months after that December day, somewhere in the desolation of Delaware, Minji will die in a Dodge Durango. Three days after the memorial, Pip will sit on a stage in a cap and gown, feeling Minji’s absence in the empty seat next to her as hot as an open oven.

 

—

 

Or maybe we’ll begin here: Pip at twenty-two, running from security guards in France. Inside the Palais—the convention center at the heart of the Cannes Film Festival—Pip carries her screenplay in her hands. Surrounded by hi-tech booths for film distribution companies like Sony, Film4, and Lionsgate, Pip darts through the crowd in the Distributor’s Market. Her low-level festival pass swings from her neck, announcing to anyone who knows better that she is somewhere she does not belong. She catches her breath behind a white pillar that conceals her from the large men in khaki suits coming for her. If these men take away her badge, she will be barred from the remaining festival screenings. Already this deep in the Palais, escaping is not an option; she has to hide. Pip looks at the elaborate booths with their promo-playing television screens and the logos that she has only seen in theaters before movie trailers. Her gaze stops on the tri-colored logo for CJ Entertainment—a South Korean distribution company. At this booth, a young woman in an expensive suit organizes the flyers on the table, and a man in his fifties flips through an art book behind her.

 

It’s wild, but Pip has to give it a shot.

 

She peeks around the pillar to make sure the guards aren’t looking. Her heart beating in her throat, she walks up to the woman at the CJ Entertainment booth, bows, and says in the language she has been studying for the last ten years, “Annyeonghaseyo? I’m sorry to bother you. But there are bad people looking for me. May I hide here for just a minute?”

 

The woman’s mouth drops open, and the stack of flyers fall from her hands. Maybe that lie was a little too serious. Or maybe her shock came from the fact that she has never seen a Black person speak Korean as well as Pip does.

 

The woman doesn’t respond right away, but the man behind her walks over with his disheveled, curly hair and square, frameless glasses. “What’s going on?”

 

“She says she needs to hide from nappeun saramdeul,” the woman says.

 

“Nappeun saramdeul?” The man looks out at the crowd to find these “bad people,” and Pip follows his gaze to the security guards talking into their radios. He then glances down at Pip’s badge, and she covers it too late with her script. Laughing, he says in English, “So, by bad people you mean the men doing their jobs?”

 

Pip gives him a deflated smile and nods. “Ne, I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”

 

The man shakes his head. “Jamkkanman.” He waves her into the booth and gestures for her to hide under the table. “It’s okay. Come in.”

 

Pip bows again in thanks. “Gamsahabnida.” She crawls under the table and sits with her knees to her chest.

 

“How did you get in here without the proper badge?”

 

“I just walked in.”

 

“You just walked in?”

 

“Ne, if you pretend like you belong, people will think that you do.”

 

He laughs and says to himself, “Ah, this girl. Really?” He looks up and puts a finger to his lips.

 

In the shadows under the table, Pip hears one of the French guards say in uncertain English, “Pardon, have you seen a suspicious Black girl come by?”

 

The man pauses as if to really consider the question. “Yes, I saw her. She went downstairs towards the exit.”

 

“Ah, merci.”

 

The man watches the guards walk away for a long minute before giving Pip the okay-sign. “Coast is clear,” he says in English and then in Korean: “You speak Korean well. How did you learn?”

 

This question—as it always does—lances through the scar tissue in Pip’s heart where all the memories of Minji live. “My roommate in boarding school taught me. And then I studied in college.”

 

He makes a sound like he finds this information interesting. “What’s this?” he asks, nodding to the script in her hands.

 

“My screenplay. I’m here to network.”

 

“Juseyo.”

 

Pip hands him the script, and he flips through it. “You wrote this?” She nods. “It’s too bad I don’t read English well. What do you want to become?”

 

Pip translates this poorly in her head, and it takes her a second to understand that he is asking what she wants to be when she grows up. “I want to become a writer and director.”

 

“Geuraeyo? Do you have a demo reel?”

 

She pulls a silver flash drive out of her festival tote and hands it to him. He leads her to a table at the back of the booth where he sits and plugs the flash drive into a laptop. Pip guides him through the folders until a QuickTime Window pops up, and he presses play. There are a couple of shots that Pip could have color corrected better, but she is proud of her work and stands by it as a representation of what she can do, will do, as a filmmaker.

 

When the player stops and the screen goes black, the man sits in silence with his chin in his hand for the longest minute of Pip’s life. Pip, of course, expects nothing from this man; he has already shown her a great deal of kindness by letting her hide under his table, by lying to get the guards off her back. But still, to watch even a compilation of her films is to see inside her mind, deeper than she would ever consciously allow. There is a nakedness to sharing your art that is both frightening and addicting. No, Pip doesn’t need validation from a stranger, but she also doesn’t need cruelty from one either. Just when she is about to snatch back her flash drive and go about her day, the man looks up and says, “I’m impressed.”

 

“Jinjjayo?”

 

“Ne, very impressed. How old are you?”

 

“Twenty-two American years.”

 

“Have you graduated from college?”

 

“Yes, two weeks ago.”

 

“Job isseoyo?”

 

She shakes her head. “Anio. I haven’t found a job yet.”

 

“Good.” He takes a ticket and business card out of a messenger bag on the table and gives them to Pip. “My film premieres tomorrow night at 8:00 p.m. You should come. I’ll bring a better badge for you.”

 

Pip runs her thumb over his name and title engraved on the business card: 배영철 감독. Bae Young-chul. Director.

 

Two days later, at a cafe overlooking the Bay of Cannes, Director Bae offers Pip a job. A week after the festival ends, Pip boards a plane to Seoul, thinking about Minji’s arm hooked in hers, and how—in this small way—she can keep the promise they made to each other.

 

—

 

Or start here: seven years later, on the precipice of a marriage proposal in an aquarium in Seoul. There, in Coex Aquarium, Pip follows Hong-gi into the tunnel where stingrays wide as cars glide over them in serene, simulated underwater silence. Then, standing in a black gallery before a theater of sharks and fish, Hong-gi laces his fingers in hers and says, “Let’s go to Busan tomorrow. I want you to meet our Umma.” Pip has lived in Korea long enough to know that meeting Hong-gi’s mother would be no ordinary meeting. The two of them had talked about marriage, and Pip—for the most part—was open to the idea. Although whenever Hong-gi wanted to talk specifics, talk timeline, talk concrete plans for the future, Pip always pushed off those conversations with sex as a distraction. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Hong-gi; she just loved her own dreams a little more.

 

When she first came to Korea all those years ago to crew on Director Bae’s film, she was twenty-two and couldn’t see that starting a film career in Korea, that working on eight films in five years, that forging a name for herself in this industry as the heukin—Black—camera director would delay the start of her film career in the US. After five years of hopping film to film and supplementing her income by tutoring outrageously wealthy children in Seoul, Pip grew tired of the hustle and job instability. In retrospect, this was when she should have gone back to the US. But what was waiting for her back in America? Two dead parents and a drunk sister meaner than a junkyard dog. As hard as it was to be a waygookin filmmaker in Korea, moving to LA with no connections, no prospects, no Director Bae to help her find her footing seemed all the more difficult. Just when Pip was about to give up and try her luck again in America, she met Hong-gi on the subway platform in Dogok, a place he would normally never be but his car happened to have broken down next to the station. On the train, they talked so long and enthusiastically about which Taika Waititi and Bong Joon Ho films were the best that she missed her chance to transfer at Yaksu and his at Jongno, and they have been inseparable ever since. And so Pip asked Director Bae for help finding more stable work, and he got her a job as a camera director on a Kpop group’s reality television show. Assigned to the maknae—the youngest member of the group—Pip has spent the last two years in Korea chasing a teenage boy around with a camera and occasionally joining the group on tour to document their backstage shenanigans for their cleverly named fanbase.

 

Yes, Pip put off marriage because she didn’t want to just be a camera operator; she wanted to direct her own films, write scripts, tear her hair out over plot holes and characters that wouldn’t behave the way she wanted them to. But now, seven years into a career in a foreign country, Pip can see that a dream could be a person, and in this person holding her hand in front of a menagerie of blue lit sand sharks and tiny, zippy fish, she believes she can find a reflection of happiness. She believes this because Hong-gi, with his whole-hearted love for life, for adventure, for Pip, represents the possibility for something Pip never had: family. With a mother dead after childbirth and a father blipped from this earth by a heart attack shortly thereafter, Pip has no family to speak of. Of course there is her much older sister, Josie. But the only thing Josie loves more than liquor is coke, and when Pip was young, Josie always made sure to beat Pip’s ass when she was lacking in either. Yes, Hong-gi is her family. Pip spent so much time curating found families in boarding school dorm rooms, in college common rooms, in the casts and crews of film projects.

 

Now, she has found one in Hong-gi, and for the first time, she isn’t worried he will drop dead like Mama, like Daddy, like Minji. Yes, Pip no longer needs fame and fortune; she doesn’t need anything as long as she has a family. The only obstacle now is his mother’s approval. And then, there, in the undulating light of the aquarium, as if waking from a nice dream, Pip realizes how large of an obstacle that would be.

 

The next day, Pip and Hong-gi take an early morning KTX train to Busan, make it to their beachside Airbnb by the afternoon, and walk along the warm, late spring water, swinging their held hands as if they had given each of their hearts to truly understand the others’. But there was hesitation in Pip’s giving because there is a question she needs to ask him, a question that once asked can never be unasked.

 

Pip waits until they’re back in the Airbnb, getting dressed for this first dinner with his mother. “Oppa, hok-si,” she says, fastening one of his cufflinks. “Does your mother know that I am heukin?”

 

Hong-gi fastens the cufflink resting on his prosthetic wrist and checks his slicked-back hair in the mirror. “She knows that you’re American.”

 

Good god, this man hasn’t told his mother he wants to marry a Black woman. Pip thinks back to the three people she dated seriously in college. Two were white and one was Cuban, and Pip’s Blackness was an issue for each of their families. It didn’t matter that Pip went to Johns Hopkins, maintained a 4.0 GPA, and spoke Korean. Nothing could impress a parent at a dinner table when all they saw was a Black person—someone they saw as less than human—sitting next to their child. Though the biggest shock was when Pip met Cecilia’s mother, who didn’t seem to mind that her daughter was queer but very much minded that she was dating a Black woman.

 

“Wae? Why haven’t you told her?” Pip asks even though she very well knows why. He knew it would be a problem. He didn’t tell her because he thought he could somehow ambush her, bully her into acceptance.

 

“Why does she need to know beforehand?” He is playing dumb now, avoiding the question the same way Pip avoided asking him in the first place. “I mean what’s the worst she can do? Disinherit me? She won’t do that. I already have Appa’s company.”

 

Hong-gi’s father was the founding CEO of a video gaming company until 2001, when he died in the car crash that took Hong-gi’s right arm. The accident killed both Hong-gi’s father and his twin brother when they were ten years old. His mother was also in the car, but she walked away with just a broken arm and a face full of glass. After the crash, Hong-gi’s uncle ran the company and groomed Hong-gi to take over once he finished university.

 

Hong-gi walks over to Pip now and kisses her on the forehead. “I love you. Don’t worry. Okay? Oppa will take care of it.” And then something like the sudden realization of a thing he had always known to be true settles on his face. “She won’t disown me anyway. I’m all she has left.” He says this sadly, matter-of-factly because it is a sad, matter of fact. In this moment, Pip squeezes his hand and bears both his loss and her own, for her parents, for Minji.

 

“Have you told your uncle?”

 

“Ne, he said that I’ve had a hard life and I should be able to marry who I want.”

 

“What about your mother’s side of the family?”

 

“Our grandparents died before we were born. She has no siblings.” Even though he hasn’t been a twin in almost two decades, he still speaks as if he were one. Hong-gi slips his hand out of hers and walks to the foyer when he says, “It was her fault, you know. She picked a fight with Appa over something stupid and they were arguing. She wasn’t paying attention to the road when the truck swerved into our lane and she turned the car to protect our side while Appa and Hong-joo took the hit.” This is new information to Pip; he had never told her the specifics of the accident. Only the details of his amputation, which bones his mother had broken, and the fact that his father and brother lost more than that. No, he had never told her that—all these years later—he still blames his mother.

 

Hong-gi puts on his shoes, looks up at Pip, and says, “Are you ready?”

 

—

 

Hong-gi’s family home is a modern, multi-million dollar monstrosity shaped into a rectangular concrete prism with smooth, sterile curves. This place looks more like a prison than a home. The house’s gray exterior has an aura so cold, it reminds Pip of walking barefoot on winter sidewalks, of stepping in silvery seafoam on off-season shores, of watching muted rain through a clean window. Pip stands in front of a black, slatted gate, her hand in Hong-gi’s. The sea laps at the docks behind them, and private CCTV cameras glare down from above. Pip looks up past the cameras at the third-floor balcony set deep into the concrete structure of the house. The windows of a house always remind Pip of eyes; this house’s eyes are empty and dead.

 

Hong-gi lets go of her hand to ring the doorbell.

 

“Ah, Mr. President. Please come in,” a woman, presumably the housekeeper says, almost teasing.

 

Pip pokes him in the side and teases him too. “Mr. President,” she says. She is used to hearing people—his colleagues, his employees, and sometimes his friends as a joke—call him Daepyonim, Mr. President, but since she rarely sees him in a professional capacity, there is something hilarious about this goofy person she loves being addressed so formally.

 

A buzz sounds, and the black gates yawn open.

 

Inside, the house maintains its drab color scheme of slate and gray with occasional pops of dark wood. Everything about the minimalist interior design is just as disinviting as the exterior. This house has the same energy as a museum, an energy that tells you to whisper, to walk quietly, to keep your hands to yourself or it’ll cost you something dear. Though Pip has never experienced a great deal of wealth herself, between attending a rich-ass boarding school on scholarship and filming the lives of worldwide famous Kpop stars, the wealth of others no longer intimidates her, but there are small moments like this one when she wonders: What is it like to have a housekeeper? To grow up more than comfortable?

 

The housekeeper greets Pip and Hong-gi at the door. She looks at Pip and does her best to control the surprise on her face. Hong-gi gestures to Pip. “Ms. Han, this is Pip.”

 

“Pip?” she says, her voice high with surprise.

 

“Ne, bangabseubnida,” Pip says with a bow.

 

“It’s nice to meet you too.”

 

Hong-gi leans over to Pip and says as if it’s a big secret, “Ms. Han has been with our family since I was in high school.”

 

Pip smiles at Ms. Han. “Geuraeyo? Then I bet you can tell me all of the embarrassing stories about Hong-gi ssi.”

 

Ms. Han laughs. “So many embarrassing stories! Let’s see, where should I start—”

 

A door upstairs closes, and Ms. Han stops talking mid-sentence, almost as if the sound—or more specifically whoever made it—has startled her. They all turn towards the staircase, a strange, jailed thing with thin, floor-to-ceiling balustrades lining the steps like cell bars. Hong-gi’s mother appears in the cage at the top of the steps, and Hong-gi noticeably stiffens beside Pip. Pip tries to read the profile of his face for any clues of what to expect, and it occurs to her that he’s told her very little about his mother. An orphan herself, Pip didn’t think anything of it before because the absence of her own parents is both something that she constantly thinks of and seldom discusses. But that is because their deaths haunt her. Could someone be haunted in the same way by the living? Watching him watch his mother descend the steps, she can’t tell what he is thinking the way she usually can.

 

Ms. Shim enters the foyer wearing a gray dress with a severe, boxy silhouette that matches the house in both color and warmth. Even though Ms. Shim’s face is meticulously made up, Pip can see deep divots in the skin, what Pip assumes are scars from the car accident. Ms. Shim smiles widely at her son, but the corners of her mouth dip when she sees Pip. She collects her composure with a dead-eyed smile, and Pip greets her with a deep bow.

 

“Annyeonghaseyo. My name is Pip. It is such a pleasure to meet you.”

 

“Pip the American?” she says, looking at Hong-gi like he has lied to her. She looks at Pip again, her mouth tight, the wrinkles around it straining as she holds back whatever she really wants to say. Pip swallows hard to steel herself for the night to come and offers Ms. Shim a tense smile.

 

Aggressively civil, Ms. Shim turns to the housekeeper and says, “Is dinner ready?”

 

—

 

One wall in the dining room is a giant window that overlooks the water and the flamed sun sinking behind hills and skyscrapers. The three of them sit at one end of a long, fourteen-person table. Leaving the head of the table open, Ms. Shim sits across from Pip and Hong-gi. Plates filled with tteok kalbi and banchan fill the table between them. There is an awkward silence that Hong-gi doesn’t jump to fill, and Pip decides it’s best to keep her mouth shut until she’s spoken to.

 

“Pip ssi,” Ms. Shim says, and Pip does her best not to flinch at the sound of her own name. “Our Hong-gi hasn’t told me much about you. He said that you work in the film industry?”

 

“Ne, I am a camera director on a Kpop group’s show.”

 

“Which group?”

 

Pip tells her, and Hong-gi sings a line from their most popular song to jog her memory.

 

“Wow, that’s a famous group. Very impressive.” Pip and Hong-gi smile at each other in this small victory, and she wonders if she is worried for nothing. Ms. Shim continues, “They must travel a lot. Do you travel with them?”

 

“Yes. Not always. But often.” Pip fills Ms. Shim’s water glass and then Hong-gi’s.

 

Ms. Shim frowns and says, “All that traveling must be very hard on you. It’s difficult to be a good wife if you travel a lot.” She side eyes Hong-gi as if she has made a great point, and something folds deep within Pip, just like it did when she was the only Black kid in her class and picked last for everything, just like it did when her class studied the Civil Rights movement and everyone turned to her for answers, just like it did when she first arrived in Seoul and people on the street would stop to take photos of her without asking. For Pip, to be Black is to fight the constant urge to shrink into yourself until you disappear.

 

Hong-gi speaks up now. “Umma, I’m not a child. I’m not looking for a babysitter. We’re partners. Equal partners.”

 

Ms. Shim breaks off a piece of her tteok kalbi with her chopsticks and changes the subject. “You speak Korean incredibly well. How long have you been living here?”

 

“Seven years.”

 

“Seven years! Wow, when do you plan to move back to America?”

 

“I don’t plan to. I like it here. I’m very happy here.” Pip and Hong-gi share another smile.

 

“Don’t your parents miss you?”

 

Hong-gi holds his breath, but Pip smiles that I’m-totally-okay smile she has rehearsed since childhood. “They passed away when I was a kid.”

 

This shakes Ms. Shim because she hesitates with her chopsticks at her mouth, sets the food down, and looks at Pip like she’s really seeing her for the first time, like they have something common to share, even if that common thing is pain. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

 

“Gwaenchanhayo. It was a long time ago.”

 

“Do you have any brothers? Sisters?”

 

“Anio,” she lies. Josie isn’t worth mentioning. They haven’t spoken to each other in seven years.

 

Ms. Shim sighs, staring down at her plate. “You poor thing. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have our Hong-gi. You see, family is very important to me, to us.” She looks at Hong-gi for him to back her up, but he just narrows his eyes at her. Where is she going with this? “Family is water. Family is air. It nurtures us. How is family important to you?”

 

“Umma,” Hong-gi warns, hearing the same question under the question that Pip does: how can you join a family if you’ve never been in one?

 

“What? It’s a fair question. Family is a priority to us. I want to hear how it’s a priority to Pip ssi.”

 

The porcelain on the table clatters as Hong-gi slams down his metal chopsticks and stands. “Umma, we need to talk.”

 

Ms. Shim shakes her head. “Don’t be rude. We’re still eating.” She nods to his chair. “Anja.”

 

“No. Now.” Hong-gi says, his voice colored with a scary seriousness that Pip hasn’t heard before.

 

Hong-gi leaves the room, and his mother puts her napkin on the table and follows.

 

Alone at this enormous mahogany table, Pip dabs at her eyes. She feels her soul suck into itself, crumpling like paper in a fist. God, she loves this man more than anything she could want or dream for herself, and if it comes to it, she doesn’t want to be the thing that breaks him apart from his mother. Yes, if it comes to it Pip will lose everything to stop herself from taking the one thing from Hong-gi that she never had—a parent to fight with, a parent to love, a parent to hate, a parent to unfold you from within yourself and iron you out until you’re new again, until you’re you again.

 

At the thought of losing Hong-gi, Pip doubles over, about to retch. She’s crying now, hard, and scrambles to her feet, feeling her shrinky dink soul rattle within her like change in a tin can. Pip starts down a hallway in this titanic house, the concrete walls towering over her, threatening to fall. The hallway is dark. She cannot find a light switch, and so she runs a hand along the wall to support herself, to guide her to a bathroom where she can sit in a corner with her shrinky dink soul and wish for the nth time that no one would ever see her again.

 

Then in that dark hallway, she hears Hong-gi’s voice rise above the chaos of her own mind: “I love her. I’m going to marry her. Please accept this.”

 

Pip stops in her tracks and covers her mouth to mute the sound of her own breath raking up and down her throat. She should go back to the dining room or try another hallway for a bathroom in this stupidly large house. She knows this. But for the same reasons you pick at a scab or chew your cuticles bloody raw, she stays in the shadow of the hall to wound herself.

 

“Aren’t you worried that your children won’t look Korean?” Ms. Shim says.

 

“I don’t care about that. They will look like us, and that’s what matters.”

 

“Don’t you know how hard it is for biracial children to grow up in this country? Don’t you worry that they’ll be bullied? That they won’t have friends? That they won’t be happy?”

 

“Pip and I have discussed this. Our children will go to school in America.”

 

Ms. Shim gasps. “You’re moving to America?”

 

“Ani, they will go to boarding school. They will stay here long enough to learn Korean and then they will go to boarding school like Pip did.”

 

“Hong-gi, this is a bad idea. I won’t let you do this. I forbid you from doing this.”

 

Christ, Pip can barely stand.

 

“You forbid me? Umma, this is ridiculous. Pip is—”

 

“What would your father think?”

 

Hong-gi spits his response back to her with palpable venom. “Well, he’s not here, is he?”

 

A long beat of hostile silence sits in the air stagnant like standing water until Ms. Shim says, “I won’t speak to you ever again if you do this.”

 

“Jinjjayo? You won’t speak to me.”

 

“No. I won’t.”

 

Pip hears her own breathing loud like gunshots.

 

“Fine,” Hong-gi says. “I don’t need you.” And then he pauses to consider his next few words before he says them like he means it: “At least she won’t make our son lose his arm.”

 

Truly believing she is going to vomit, Pip staggers away from the sound of their voices into another dark hallway. There, in the shadows, she feels the weight of the blackness the way she feels the weight of her own Blackness. There were few times in her life where it felt this heavy, where she thought it might crush her. Before now, that weight was at its heaviest when she was a junior at Hopkins, watching the coverage of the 2015 Baltimore Protests in her best friend’s apartment. As Pip and Jamie watched the news, Pip’s pulse choked her with its throat-high beating, and for the first time in her life, she felt true, unadulterated fear. Jamie—who was white—must have seen it on Pip’s face because she put her arms around Pip, and they just sat there on the couch as two people who knew exactly where one of their experiences began and the other’s ended.

 

Now, in the love of her life’s family home, she feels just as small and alone. Finally finding a bathroom, she locks herself in it and crawls into a marbled corner to quietly feel this horrible monster of humiliation, of hurt, of spurn, of anger—she cannot find the right name for this pain, this slight, this smart—god knows what its name is. She leans her head against the wall, craving a cry, but there is a heat to all that she feels, one that makes her stamp her feet, hit the wall, and take a hard twist of her hair, so bitter are her feelings and so sharp is this unnamed smart that makes her feel so small in her Blackness.

 

Growing up Black made Pip both hard and sensitive—hard to the small injustices you face and sensitive in the moments you face them. Yes, you are small, and the world is small, but you cannot let this small world make you smaller, make you shrinky dink, make you blip away like they want you to. Packing away her injured feelings for the time, Pip stands and wipes her eyes. At the sink, she splashes water on her face. She looks at herself in the mirror, forces a smile, and holds it until the second wind of that smart without a name blows past. Then she opens the door.

 

In the unlit hall, a warm, yellow light spills out from a doorway. Pip approaches the door. Inside the room—a beautiful study mismatched to the rest of the house with its classic, dark wood shelves and inviting leather armchairs—Ms. Shim paces with a glass of whiskey in her hand. “He doesn’t need me?” she mutters to herself. “That ungrateful little shit.” In her pacing, she steps hard and angry, her upright, dignified posture replaced with a mean slouch. “He doesn’t need me?” She scoffs and pauses in her pacing. Pip takes a step back, but from the hallway, she can still see the profile of Ms. Shim’s face, the ghostly remnants of her scars, the way the ire on her face relaxes into something else—something new that Pip can’t quite make out. Ms. Shim scoffs again, not with spite but with epiphany. She steps backward, blindly, into an armchair and collapses—the whiskey in her hands sloshing but never spilling. Ms. Shim stares into the middle distance between her and Pip, and her face softens—Pip can see it now—with pain, with devastation, with clarity. “He doesn’t need me,” she says again, the words a soft breath quietly punched out of her. A single tear streaks her cheek, and her grip on the glass goes slack. The tumbler falls from her hand. Pip closes her eyes, expecting it to shatter, but the glass clacks against the hardwood floor without breaking. Ms. Shim sniffs and wipes her face with the heels of her palm. When she stands and walks toward the door, Pip sprints back to the bathroom.

 

Pip leans against the closed bathroom door, her heart thudding in her ears. She counts to fifty to calm herself, to prepare herself to find Hong-gi, to come to terms with letting him go. Taking a deep breath to still her heart, she opens the door again.

 

Ms. Shim is standing on the other side and startles Pip. “I’m sorry. I was about to knock,” she says, the wounded look on her face speaking volume to the rest of the conversation Pip didn’t overhear. She then adds with a sad smile: “Will you walk with me?”

 

Ms. Shim leads Pip through the barren house to the balcony. Outside, the night air cools whatever frustration still simmers in Pip, and she follows Ms. Shim up to the glass barrier. They both rest their hands on the railing and look out at the water. Night has fallen on the cove, and moonlight shimmers on the restless water below.

 

“It’s a nice night, isn’t it?” Ms. Shim says this like an offering, like an olive branch, like a kind of treaty to be signed between them.

 

Pip accepts this kindness for what it is: Ms. Shim trying. “It is. Busan is one of my favorite places in the world.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Ne, I always wanted to live here, but it never worked out with my work.”

 

“You said you’ve been here seven years?” Pip nods. “Such a long time. Don’t you miss America?”

 

“No, I don’t.” Pip reads her face, trying to judge the moment, trying to judge how honest she can be, how honest Ms. Shim wants her to be. “There’s nothing there for me.”

 

Ms. Shim stares out at the water and Pip does the same, the silence rooting between them so long that it becomes almost comfortable. “It never goes away, does it? The missing.”

 

An image of Minji sitting in a desk chair as Pip cornrows her hair comes to mind, and that missing Ms. Shim speaks of blooms in Pip’s chest. “No, I don’t think it does.”

 

“I just thought our lives would play out differently.”

 

Pip does her best to sidestep the hurt of her implication, that if the dead weren’t dead, Hong-gi and Pip would have never met, but Pip understands. Her life is a dark road lit by headlights that only show her so much of where she is heading. The two of them look at one another sadly enough, but there is hope—for in this blue moonlight, Ms. Shim’s face and her voice give Pip the assurance that the cause of each of their suffering will not be each other.

The wind, always on the hunt for a new location, combed the straw-yellow grass. The prairie withstood the wind as the gale blasted the grains, turning the invisible visible. Colorado Springs lay patiently close to the earth, as if prepared to love it.

 

Visitors gathered at the base of the mountains, taking pictures of the Beware of Rattlesnake signs caught between the bayonet shrubs gathered around the buttes. The tourists came from Denver, in search of awe. Deserted windmills from the gold rush jutted out from the small valley outside the mountain. Vincent stood at the edge of the cliff, looking outward, his phone turned off. His jacket, strained from his newly trained biceps, rippled between his body and the wind.

 

A stranger approached him, wearing a cloth face mask and holding a disposable camera. Vincent stood up almost preemptively, watching her walk toward the edge of the cliff, watching how her feet moved clumsily along the grooves of the hill.

 

“Could you take our picture?” Her sunglasses had sunflowers printed along the sides.

 

Vincent nodded and pointed, asking where the best angle for the snapshot would be.

 

He took pictures of the small ragtag team she had come with. Her boyfriend posed with his hands in his pockets, leaning only slightly toward his fellow travelers. The other guy, white like his companions, laughed as they joked about the wind.

 

“Where are you from?” the boyfriend said, yelling against the air.

 

“Out east,” Vincent shouted back.

 

They were friendly. They showed him the pictures he had taken alongside videos of them driving on the road south and even of the bus ride from the Denver airport terminal. Vincent’s large frame stood over them, with only the third traveler tall enough to look him in the eye. They asked about his job and how long he’d been in Colorado.

 

“Three years, I’d say.” They asked about his age. “I’m thirty-four, and you?”

 

He didn’t remember their names, nor their answers to his questions. Tourists to Colorado were always cheerful, ready to spark up a conversation. They were happy to be there, around the long Rockies, where the shadows of the range could be seen from a distance.

 

The woman laughed and turned to him, asking if he wanted something, a small pill that she had pulled from a backpack. “We’re here for a while, would you like to climb the hill with us?” she asked, a warm smile underneath her shades. She had partially removed the cloth face mask, the rose-pink fabric now dangling off her ear.

 

Vincent stared at her for a moment and then laughed, his voice coming out deeply. “Thank you, but no thank you. You should know, I am that lone tower.” He said this softly, looking over her shoulder. His hands lay relaxed by his sides.

 

She blinked, startled. Vincent did not know if she could hear the drift of his Chinese accent. She excused herself and walked off, looking over her shoulder as she made her path back to her flock, where they stood around in the small lot below with the boyfriend smoking a cigarette. Vincent watched the blue van move away and went back to sitting so quietly, with his back toward the grain of the stones behind him. The valley’s wind blew, catching the sides of his head, refreshing and cold.

 

—

 

On the drive back, Vincent could see the mountains, looming high over the small grassland of Colorado Springs. Their gray shadows stretched out like columns, like an open jaw. To his left were even wider plains, the corridors of the earth that carried travelers as far east as Kansas.

 

To the north, a blue glacier was assembling, the color of Mt. Everest. But having lived there for years, Vincent knew in an instant it was the great fires in the Rocky Mountains. The avalanche of smoke looked like a castle in the sky, the plumes of smog rising forward and into a long tail that carried itself east toward oblivion. Vincent drove on, almost closing his eyes to avoid looking at the mass growing in the distance.

 

—

 

At night, Vincent had been having dreams, ones from which he’d awake calmly, before turning his face deeper into the pillow, laying himself back into those worlds.

 

In one dream, he was older. His head had been shaved completely bald, and he had gained weight, more weight beyond even that of a bodybuilder, and he would look down at the body of what felt like a fully grown bear of a man. He sported a large brown beard, like the white and black wrestlers he had seen on WWE as a teen.

 

He was living in the future, in a two-floor log cabin out even further into the country, in Ozark-land possibly. The pines would surround the house, and a small stone road would take this house back toward smaller roads, situated far from any highway or gas station. Here, young families would come, often just a woman and a man, sometimes just one woman. They would give him a baby wrapped in a small blanket. He would carry the infant down to the fireplace room, as they drove away. He would hold the newly given infant, gently speaking to it, walking to a room farther back. A nursery was there, where small cradles were neatly organized into rows. He would bring this child to their new place. In this world, he would hold them each gently, attending to small medical charts written on cheap paper and a small wooden pencil. He listened attentively to each of the tiny voices, and when he held one with the bottle, his chest would be so close to their mouths and it was as if the milk was his. The dream was suspended in just one hour of a day. Vincent never truly achieved the sight of this home after or during sundown. Always in the deep afternoon, the moment would stop promptly when his eye fell on where the one lone window for the fireplace room would shelter sunlight, the dust moving slowly along the rocking chair.

 

—

 

Xiao Hu lai le. Xiao Hu was taking the airplane for the first time in seven years, due to his nerves, and despite his nerves. The chemistry courses in New Jersey were proving to be remarkably challenging, and while he worked hard enough to squeeze top marks for the semester, Xiao Hu needed time away from college life. Over fall break it was decided that he would fly over, by himself, as Vincent waited to catch him.

 

Vincent’s mother had called last week, around 7:00 p.m., as they had a system set to adjust to the two-hour time difference. She often called from the kitchen, and he could hear the buzzing of the washing machine in the back.

 

“Ke neng Xiao Hu jiu xu yao yi dian ren bang lai kan ta.” Her voice was steady, indifferent, as if  her arms were casually crossed. Just a small errand, really, to chaperone the student around. “Ni zhi dao ta de baba xiang se me yang.”

 

Xiao Hu’s father, the prominent pharmaceutical director. He was generous, outgoing. He was known to bring German beer kegs to the Thanksgiving potlucks, where five or six Chinese families would gather each year. His mirth, matched only by his wife’s generous helpings of her own saran-wrapped meals, would bring a splash of color to the existing variety at the table. The families would never elect to meet at the Hu household, though, as the Chen’s were allergic to cats, which the Hu’s had three of.

 

While Vincent’s family didn’t need any help, they admired Mr Hu’s personality. It’d be good luck to exchange kindness, in this way.

 

He’d be arriving in Denver in about a week. Characteristic of Xiao Hu, it had been a plan made only in the blink of a month. Apparently Mrs. Hu almost booked a ticket for herself to come along.

 

Like observing a comet cast from the sky, Vincent counted the days as he waited for an imminent arrival.

 

—

 

Vincent had heard about the first breakdown over the phone, years back when he was in college and Xiao Hu had been in secondary school. One night, after a long week of basketball tryouts, Xiao Hu had cracked under the pressure and needed to be admitted into the hospital in Piscataway. Vincent’s mother described the apparent agony the parents had to go through, wrestling with the questions that the doctors were posing for them: How much was he eating? How often did he stay awake at night, rocking back and forth?

 

Xiao Hu stayed at home often after that, but the house was sizable enough for a teenager to live comfortably by himself. Once, when the Hu’s invited Vincent’s family over, the high schooler showed off his National Geographic magazines, which took up an entire bookshelf, spanning over a decade.

 

As they flipped through the images of red-tailed hawks and the wide, double-page spreads of the Michigan landscape, Xiao Hu spoke energetically about how he had discovered a mistake on the Lake Erie Wikipedia. He had proudly retraced the actual timeline of the watershed and found that there was enough evidence in two geological surveys to prove that Lake Erie was much older than the webpage claimed.

 

Xiao Hu sat very comfortably, it seemed, near the older Vincent. Vincent would move slowly away, as his junior spoke sometimes so quickly that their bodies would get close, much closer than Vincent felt comfortable.

 

That Thanksgiving, Xiao Hu also described the panic he felt during the basketball tryouts. “I had set up shop in the garage, making marks using charcoal to see how high I can jump,” he explained. “I was so prepared.”

 

“Was it the coach?” Vincent asked. They did not grow up in the same school districts, but he was aware that Xiao Hu’s high school was particularly competitive, known for cut-throat academics. The Hu family had invested heavily in college essay preparations, soon after Xiao Hu turned thirteen.

 

“No, no, it was the people.” There hadn’t been many East Asians trying out alongside him. “Some of them were really muscular, but also really nice.” Xiao Hu smiled as he remembered. “Those guys were funny, and told these jokes to each other. I remember I kept laughing at this one joke, and for some reason when it was my turn in the final round, I thought about it and started getting nervous. I was worried I’d laugh, or yell, or something.”

 

Xiao Hu ended up leaving early, and when the roster was announced the next day, Xiao Hu was not at school. His parents found him in his room, unable to speak, lying down in his bed with his eyes wide open.

 

When he didn’t respond, an ambulance had to be called. Only on the ER gurney did Xiao Hu start to talk, quietly, about his failure at the basketball tryout.

 

—

 

Vincent was engaged to a woman named Esther four years before. The way the engagement ended between Vincent and Esther was a gradual process, which surprised him. They had met and shared their first date in the course of weeks, but the finale of their relationship spanned much longer than its beginning. There was something structural about the breakup, as if the decline had been built, deliberately by hand.

 

Esther had met him through a mutual friend. She knew Trina, who knew Rishi, who knew James, who in turn knew Vincent. The string of connections allowed a sense of trust, and by the time they had gone on their first date they had already known so much about the other. Esther knew of Vincent’s background studying computers, and he knew of her love for origami and the graphic design degree  she never talked about.

 

She enjoyed discussing movies, particularly classics, like Breakfast At Tiffany’s. She looked like Audrey Hepburn and complained about how she wished she could wear the twin tails as well as the actress did in the film. She was shy about how she looked when she wore her hair anything other than straight down.

 

But ultimately they were both attractive in the way one would expect. Both of them were very tall, he was bulky and she was slim. The couple looked good together, and when they waited in line at the Korean bakery sometimes teenagers would point at them and giggle.

 

“They’re jealous,” Esther would say, “but they’re more jealous of you. I’m the pretty one.” She would giggle, which had a mischievous shishishi sound. He liked this about her, how she was more playful than him from the start, but he was used to this kind of dating, where the girl took the lead.

 

They were both East Asian. Esther was Taiwanese and would joke about the food in Taipei, teasing him for having never seen it. His parents were raised in mainland China, and with only one or two international outings that he could not remember, he had stayed largely content in his birthplace in Northern New Jersey. They met often in New York, where he worked for a while and she would commute from Union City.

 

It worked well, especially given that she was Vincent’s type. One of the best things, during their short time living together in Union City, was the routine. He would sometimes touch her thighs as she was getting dressed, as he lay on his stomach at the corner of the queen-sized bed, and she would smile without looking at him. In the mornings she would play music as she brushed her hair.

 

Vincent had an odd habit of getting annoyed in the shower. He would, since high school, lash out if the shampoo bottle would fall too quickly off the shower shelf, hitting the floor loudly. Something about the sound startled him, and he would yell, sometimes scream at the bottle, the shower. Even the hot water that touched his back, which had previously been comfortable, suddenly became unbearable. Sometimes he would pick the bottle up just to throw it as hard as he could into the ground. He would occasionally buy one, maybe two bottles in a week.

 

But while he was living with Esther, he had to share this life. He was terrified of being seen like this, naked, with his body so big that his head reached over the shower separation. He admired how his feelings for her changed his behavior; he suddenly knew more about the nature of even the most private spaces in life. He learned in this way how odd he had always been, so quiet. She would sometimes see it, as they got ready in the morning.

 

“You’re so emotionally constipated,” she said as they walked to the elevator apartment. Esther eyed him from the side. “But you know I get annoyed too.”

 

Sometimes she would interrogate him. One time they had a fight, walking back from a sushi restaurant. She pushed him on the topic as he sat, his sweatshirt pulled up to cover his mouth.

 

“Where’s all this coming from? You get so quiet? Like, what do I even make of it?” They were both drunk.

 

“Does it matter?” he replied. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

 

—

 

Xiao Hu arrived at Terminal B, and Vincent waited outside for him. It was raining, the sun barely visible through the clouds setting quickly. In Denver, the Mile-High City, the weather was unpredictable. During the summer, Vincent had observed entire blazing afternoons followed by nights where it felt freezing, blistering cold.

 

“I just can’t handle it.” Xiao Hu laughed, putting on his seatbelt. “I just can’t handle it anymore.” He collapsed into the seat, chatting away about the airplane as Vincent drove onto Interstate 70, the windshield groaning against the strain of the wind.

 

Xiao Hu’s slim build had grown even skinnier, and during the pandemic he had grown his hair out into a spiky length. Vincent had been accustomed to his bowl-cut, but the younger man had now a more wild, feral appearance.

 

“Was the airplane bumpy?” Vincent asked.

 

“It was alright.” Xiao Hu’s hand covered his forehead, and he looked out into the Colorado landscape. They were passing by the massive plains over by Arsenal, as the car headed west. The straw-yellow land stretched out for miles. “It’s so wide, I didn’t expect that. Everything feels like it’s on a bigger screen here. I’ve never been to Colorado, you know.”

 

Vincent focused on the road, the sounds of trucks passing along, of the rainwater that surrounded them.

 

—

 

Vincent lived in the basement of a two-floor house owned by a Chinese couple in their late fifties whose children had moved away. The house was complete with an upper middle-class set of hedges, which grew athletically. The area, close to Aurora, had seen a boom in the East Asian population. Especially in the shopping plazas, where nearby restaurants were now becoming more Korean in what they sold and who shopped there.

 

Xiao Hu would be sleeping on a small two-person couch across the room. Despite the support pillars in the basement, it was spacious. Vincent even had a bathroom to himself, newly remodeled. He thought suddenly how he’d have to behave himself in the shower once again, as he didn’t want to upset a nineteen-year-old.

 

“Do you mind if I study here at night?” Xiao Hu had set up his toiletries and taken a shower before Vincent. His wet hair was pressed straight down, and he had on a Ramapo College sweatshirt.

 

“You’re only staying here for four days, and then you’re flying back, right? Why do you need to work at all?” Vincent lay on his mattress, his arms crossed behind his head.

 

“I became a research assistant over the summer, after freshman year. I’m studying ecology.” He paused. “But I might switch to something more cool, like botany. There’s even a toxicology major at my college, but that might prove to be too difficult.”

 

Xiao Hu started muttering to himself, typing entries into his silver laptop. The screen lit a red and yellow glare onto his glasses, and from the distance of the room, Vincent could see water from the shower still dripping from the ends of his hair.

 

—

 

There was a stray pipe from the roof’s gutter that always held a surplus of water when it rained. The tip tap of drops hitting the backyard’s bricks below would sometimes wake Vincent early. He would always check if it was an insect or a cat. Instead, he would always find the tip tap of the droplets falling eight feet onto the ground. It was in these instances he thought about Esther.

 

Xiao Hu asked him the next morning what that sound had been. But then Xiao Hu himself forgot, busying himself with his laptop.

 

—

 

Vincent took Xiao Hu out west of Denver, closer to the long line of the Rocky Mountains.

 

“God, look at that,” Xiao Hu said. “The shrubbery here is purple, isn’t that something? In Jersey, it’s mainly marshes, swamps. But here, everything is so dry.” Xiao Hu said this while slowly breathing in and out. He had read about altitude sickness, tourists flying in from out-of-state and being unable to adjust to the oxygen levels in the mountains.

 

They stopped for lunch near the Red Rocks Amphitheater. At the turn of the twentieth century the rocks were known for their massive, cascading formation. The pillars of stone came jutting out like an upside-down cliff, far into the sky. The series of bedrock was known as the Garden of Angels, the Garden of the Gods. Xiao Hu walked with Vincent to the sitting areas, large steps made adjacent to the butte. Their bodies were dwarfed by the sheer height of the butte, a golden-red wall so huge it felt to the student the size of a skyscraper.

 

“It’s even larger than I had thought,” Xiao Hu said, making his way down to the amphitheater’s bottom row. “I know, mentally, that this probably isn’t bigger than the Empire State Building, but it feels just as huge. I think it’s the fact that the whole rock is one uniform color.”

 

He looked up again and realized even if he rolled his whole head back he would only be able to visually capture just a section of it with his eyes.

 

Vincent and Xiao Hu had gone to the local H-mart in Aurora for lunch, bringing with them an assortment of sandwiches and bread. They ate fluffy red-bean buns with ham and cheese inside the toasted loaves. They chewed quietly and chatted about Xiao Hu’s classes at Ramapo. A small black beetle crawled toward the crumbs of the bread left on the grass.

 

“I have this professor who always yells at me,” Xiao Hu said, picking sesame bits off his pants, his hand clutching a half-eaten bun. “She studies these bugs, tapeworms, actually. I hope you don’t mind me talking about something so gross.”

 

Vincent smiled. “Push my limits.”

 

“I say too much sometimes. You know, I was so worried about climate change for the longest time. I was going to ask you about the fires here. I’d been reading about them on the news.”

 

Vincent looked out into the open plains and said nothing. The sky was peacefully blue, with a matrix of clouds streaming out into the world above them.

 

“My professor told me that I worry too much,” Xiao Hu continued. “She said, ‘You know, if there really was a natural disaster, if you worried like that, you’d be the first to go.’ In her office there were all these jars filled with taxidermied parasites and preserving liquid.”

 

Vincent squinted from the sunlight at Xiao Hu, listening. The wind was picking up, and Xiao Hu’s bangs started to float as he spoke.

 

“She said, ‘Look at these parasites. Some of these could kill you in seconds. Life thrives anyway.’” Xiao Hu stared down at the concrete platform they were sitting on. “I think she was saying we have this symbiotic relationship with nature, but also we don’t.” Xiao Hu started to stand up and stretch, and took a few steps out into the open plains before them. “I had this one professor who took us out over the summer to sit by a basketball court. One of those crappy ones. He said, ‘Look at the grass, growing from the separations and cracks of the court.’” There was even this flower that grew from a crack. It was so dramatic.” Xiao Hu started to walk along the stone platform, poking at the small plants growing against the height of the steps, out of patches of sand. “He was one of those white, cool professors, who talks while sitting on the desk instead of a chair. The professor with the parasites was Asian. Thai, maybe?”

 

Vincent pulled his sweatshirt closer to his body. He watched as Xiao Hu’s sneakers made imprints on the grass.

 

Xiao Hu looked up at the massive butte above them. “We need nature to survive. But nature itself? It doesn’t care what it becomes.” The clouds above them moved quickly, their form changing to a shape more perpendicular to the angle of the rocks.

 

—

 

It wasn’t Vincent’s anger, ultimately, that ended the relationship with Esther. She had started to grow restless at her job in New York. She would go out for long walks during the mornings, wearing jogging clothes. More and more, she left her professional blazers at home. She quit her job suddenly, after she stopped wearing blouses to the office, just polo shirts.

 

She was moving to Rhode Island, she announced one day. She had quietly been applying to MFA programs in sculpture, and even interviewed that fall during a weekend at her parents’ house in Basking Ridge. It felt, to Vincent, like this would be a transition to a long-distance relationship. He helped her pack, which was slow process, not noticing how many of her belongings she was taking. That day, she still kissed him, holding him closely, and then she took her family minivan to RISD.

 

Once she was gone, the text messages quickly dried up. He would ask to call, but she didn’t want to, said she was tired or busy. Weeks dragged on until the fall semester. By the time they broke up, she had stopped using his name. He panicked, for a while.

 

Vincent looked back on moments of the relationship and realized there were points he could’ve seen this coming. Once, over wine, her friend Jiyoung described to the couple her new job as an art gallery co-owner. When Jiyoung asked if Vincent liked art, Esther suddenly became quiet, looking down at her hands. Vincent stared blankly at his guest, surprised for a long moment, and then laughed nervously, saying, No, no, I don’t know too much about that stuff.

 

After she left he decided, abruptly, to move to Colorado. He looked around his empty apartment and realized he needed so little, he could have been alone this whole time. Vincent saw that he could be anywhere, be by himself in any way he wanted.

 

—

 

The next day, Vincent cooked a home-made meal for Xiao Hu and himself. He was proud of his dishes, which were mainly built on greens. Chinese celery, eggplant with oyster sauce, and tofu.

 

He was surprised by his own thoughts as he placed the dinner plate down. He wanted to say, My wife cooks much better than me. But of course he didn’t have a wife.

 

They retired early at night, turning off the lights except for the bathroom, which was kept open by a slight crack. Xiao Hu lay on the couch, checking his phone while Vincent rested on the mattress.

 

Into the darkness, Vincent said, “You know, I thought about what you said, about nature.”

 

“Oh yeah?” Xiao Hu put his phone away, letting it lay underneath him, his head now supported by his elbow. He was facing the wall, his back to Vincent.

 

“Last year they introduced gray wolves back into the Rockies. There’s this whole conservation attempt going on, over near Boulder. They’re even taking them off the endangered species list soon.”

 

Xiao Hu was silent.

 

“I don’t know. People are worried here, about Denver and Aurora getting too crowded. This year, those fires out west? They’re apparently the worst that this state has ever seen.”

 

A few seconds passed. Despite the fact that it was a basement, moonlight crept into the space through small windows seated at the top of the walls.

 

“You know,” Xiao Hu said, “it’s a headache anyways, what the professors say.” Vincent was surprised at the serious tone in which he said this, as if he wasn’t smiling as usual.”I just don’t care sometimes. I really don’t.”

 

Vincent turned to look over, straining in the dark to see that Xiao Hu’s arm was tracing long circles on the wall next to him.

 

—

 

The day before Xiao Hu had to fly back to New Jersey, Vincent planned a small tour up north, near Boulder. But the fires had started to grow worse overnight, the wind must’ve brought the flames even farther through the Rockies. Throughout the state, emergency vehicles and C-130 forces cast their wave of personnel. Reporters from local news stations went on duty, too, relaying information to national media outlets.

 

The sky was faintly yellow, and it appeared as if it was sundown, although it was only 3:00 p.m. Xiao Hu watched from the convenience store, where they were both wearing face masks and drinking carefully from cans of iced tea.

 

“I want to see the fires,” Xiao Hu said.

 

Vincent looked over, surprised. “Why? It’s pretty dangerous, I hear. The dust, the particulates.”

 

“I don’t know. I’m only out here for a few days, and I don’t know the next time I’ll come back.” He looked over quickly at Vincent. “The next time I’ll be able to come back, I mean. I like it here, it’s been fun.”

 

Vincent flicked the rim of the iced tea can with his right hand. On the other hand, his fingers traced the car keys in his jacket.

 

—

 

The plan was to take State Highway 93 up north, far past Eldorado Springs and even Buckingham Park, before continuing onward. As Vincent drove, they played music as the clouds got darker. They passed by Boulder, where the city shined and flickered.

 

They were passing by the small stores, still displaying shoes and coffee signs outside the brick-and-stone apartments. Pearl Street Mall popped by, as Vincent’s SUV slowed down then sped up to catch the ramp onto Route 119.

 

Vincent recognized the route, at first. He knew the direction toward Platt Rogers Memorial Park, after he had gone camping with coworkers for a winter afternoon two years ago. But suddenly, the climb up with the car became tedious. Throughout the drive, he had seen smoke, rising out of the sky, and there were more firetrucks stationed around Boulder than usual.

 

The car made sounds as he shifted the gears, the vehicle twisting around small bends of the road. He had started to sweat. He rolled up the windows to prevent the smell of fire from entering the car, and turned off the music that had been playing aimlessly as noise.

 

Xiao Hu was quiet for most of this trip, although he sat relaxed now, feeling the bumps and turns of the highway move his body along the track. He simply looked out from his passenger window, watching the smoke and the trees that blossomed from the side of the road blink and then pass by him.

 

Thirty minutes up this road, the highway’s exits toward the surrounding forest area were blocked off with black-and-red fences. Road maintenance vehicles guarded the new gate, and men in helmets motioned to the car to turn over. Vincent saw a man, white and over forty years old, shaking his head. They made a K-turn, back onto the road.

When the car was almost immediately upon the pass, Xiao Hu tapped Vincent on the shoulder. “Pull over. I was wondering if I could walk around a little.”

 

“You’re crazy.” Vincent was too surprised to even be angry. “I’m not letting you out of this car.”

 

“I need to go to the bathroom. We drank too much water on the way over here.” Xiao Hu laughed as he said this, but there was an impatience to his voice. “I’m being serious, I’ve really got to go.”

 

“Just make it quick.” Vincent turned on his hazard sign as he parked along the side of the road, near the small stretches of land marked by the white stones of the cliffs and forests on the other side.

 

“Thanks, but also, I really just want a close look around,” and by the time Xiao Hu had finished this sentence, he had already left his seat. For a moment, Vincent was terrified he’d fling himself over the side of the cliff, but instead Xiao Hu made a turn and ran, laughing, into the woods. All around them, the smog was starting to get thick, and the sky was turning quickly from yellow to soft blue. Evening was approaching.

 

Vincent unbuckled his seatbelt in a hurry, noticing how much his hands were shaking as he did this. He got out, standing by his vehicle, before pocketing his keys and running toward the other side of the road, where over the steel bars, small forest plateaus were formed and unformed by ditches.

 

Xiao Hu was still laughing. Vincent could see his small figure disappear over the mounds. All around him, he realized how difficult it was to make out the sight of the forest. The shadows of conifer trees dominated his vision, and Xiao Hu had now made it past two large slopes in the hill, and he could no longer see him.

 

“Xiao Hu! I swear to God!” Fear started to truly hit him, and he felt an itch rush his back. He thought about Mr. Hu, and screamed, hoping an echo could be made this high up in the mountain. “Xiao Hu ni hui lai! Ni zhe me ban ne? Ni hui lai xian zai—“

 

Vincent started to lose his balance as his feet caught between the ditch made from the main road to the natural forest ground below him. He felt himself almost fall, and he had to catch the metal rail. He looked out, panting. He considered calling 911 or rushing back to his car.

 

Two minutes later, he saw Xiao Hu coming out from the woods, on a higher angle of the small forest hill. Xiao Hu was panting, and his sweatshirt was wrapped around his waist.

 

“I’m coming, don’t worry, I’m coming.” Xiao Hu descended the mound and hurried toward the car.

 

They both sat in the car, breathing heavily. Vincent didn’t say anything, just started the car and drove away with his hands trembling.

 

“Dude, what the hell. Dude, what was that?” Vincent finally said as the car made a steady climb back down the mountain.

 

“I’m sorry, I really thought it would be okay.” Xiao Hu wiped his nose with his sleeve. His eyes were dry, but his breathing was scared. “I was there for just a moment, and then I realized I didn’t know where I was. I just thought…if I could see the fires a bit, or smell them better. I don’t know.”

 

The two started down a series of bends in the path.

 

“Did you really shout Chinese at me?” Xiao Hu asked.

 

Vincent didn’t reply.

 

Xiao Hu locked the door to his right. He later would say he worried he’d fall right out of the car, or even get pushed out.

 

“You’re not laughing at me, are you?” Xiao Hu finally asked.

 

“No,” Vincent said. “No, that’s very far from how I’m feeling right now.”

 

This time, he’d plan on taking the highway directly back to Aurora, without making a stop to see Main Street at night. He was breathing deeply, not heavily now, and focused on getting the car back before the smog got any stronger.

Vincent turned the windshield wipers on, despite the fact that it wasn’t raining. Around them, dust started to descend upon the car. The windshield wipers hit the dry glass, rocking the front slightly. What what what, the sound seemed to say. What what what, the machine said. The car made another turn toward the main roads, toward the apartment, or someone’s home, or somewhere, anywhere away from the forest above.

The first rock wall Esme Andersen built was in 1975 when she’d just turned twenty and was halfway through an engineering degree. Her father had been diagnosed with MS, and she was home from college for the summer. People said she was pregnant—“Look how bloated that belly is”—but she’d never been with a man. She just passed clots and passed out a lot. “That’s why they scraped her out,” Dad said. “Ended up taking everything. It’s a pity, you know.”

 

I didn’t quite know.

 

She and her dad took trips to the creek bed every day for two weeks, gathered up flat rocks from the slippery bottom of the Sidle. The rumor was Esme kept adding stones on days she felt well, sometimes only a few—toiling over making the fit right, a half turn here and there. When she was poor and in pain, she claimed she felt the hum of protection within the kissing stones of her very own rampart.

 

After her father died, Esme ended up living alone behind that dry-stacked wall, being called strange, a fool. But I adored the wall, how it held.

 

—

 

Back when we first moved next to Sidle Creek—not a large creek but cool enough for trout—a man who’d been blinded by welder’s flash got his sight back when he fell into its water. When Dad gave directions to our house he’d say, “Follow Sidle from the bridge near Colwell’s Cemetery about three quarters of a mile out Stone Church Road. If you get to the old pump station, you got out too far.” He’d add, “You won’t see our house from the road so just turn right where the creek takes a sharp bend to the left—where Prichard got his sight back—and you’ll see our drive.” How strangers could have been helped by his directions was lost on me, but no one questioned them, and every time someone said, “What do you mean got his sight back?” Dad would tell the story about how the Sidle’s water cured Mr. Prichard.

 

—

 

Granddad had a bleed at the muddy bank of the Sidle the same year my mom left. His best fishing buddy, Lee, gave him sips of whiskey thinking it was a clot that could thin, but it was a different kind of stroke. “Hemorrhagic” read the death notice. Dad repeated the word three times, slow. Dad said Lee couldn’t have known when he held the bottle’s lip to Granddad’s he was making his death come swifter. For a long time he wondered what might’ve happened had Lee let Granddad drink some of the Sidle’s water instead, but decided it was all good. “He didn’t have to suffer years of half a life, unable to talk or walk or dance or fish. No one should have to suffer.”

 

But when Granddad showed up in everyone’s dreams, even the neighbors’, he had dirt all over him. “Just that dried-out topsoil from trying to get back to us from his grave. Not the muddy silt from the Sidle,” Dad said. “Don’t you worry. He didn’t fault the creek. He loved it pret’ near as much as he loved us.”

 

—

 

Before my Uncle Bobby went away to the pen, back before his layoff at the mine and his broken marriage and the drug bust and the helicopters hovering over the hunting camp while state boys dragged him from the attic with bits of pink insulation stuck to his shirt, we all fished together at Granddad’s spot, like some happy family. But the truth is my dad might have sooner just gone alone. We kids were too loud. Spooked everything. And Uncle Bobby used weird things for bait that day. Hot dogs, Pop-Tarts, bubblegum, carrots.

 

—

 

Late-season snow runoff, and a bout with the wrong side of manic, sent Miss Turner into the deepest channel of the Sidle with stones from the Allegheny River weighting her coat. “She’d given it some thought,” Dad said. Those river stones were smooth and small—unlike the bulky, irregular creek stone covered up in the high-water rush—and she could fit them nicely into the woolen coat she’d sewn with extra-deep pockets, some said, exactly for this deed. Two anglers scouting for spots to stock rainbows tried to pull her from the high cold. One of the Colwell boys, a newly minted volunteer fireman who’d completed fifty-two of seventy-two passes in the final game of his senior year, overhanded a throw bag to each of them, landing them right at their chins. Still all three abided feverish shivering fits of hypothermia for a handful of days in ICU. Miss Turner lived three more years before something like cancer nettled into her woman parts and offed her slow and terrible. Dad blamed Miss Turner for using the creek wrong. He blamed her for the fact that the browns weren’t taking nightcrawlers that season. He swore her actions cursed the line, cursed the hooks.

 

—

 

Dad always said attractor dries were best for catching wild browns. I tried every fly in the box, every single one clatched to my hat. Caught my best brown once when the stream was high and thick after a hailstorm. Filled my waders, nearly drowned. I cried out for help but no one heard. “You got yourself out. Found good footing on that creek bed. That’s what counts,” Dad said, patting me on the shoulder, then hugged me tighter than he ever had in my whole thirteen years.

 

That night I dreamed I kept finding something stuck on the undersides of rocks, stuck to the slippery green of them, and how it stuck I couldn’t figure; I worried it would tack over the whole run. It was stuck to everything. When I woke up, my panties were full of blood. I told Dad and he said, “That’s natural. It’s time. Go to Mom’s closet and get her napkins in a pink box,” and I did. They were right beside the pretty purses and shoes in boxes she’d left behind when she left me behind too, two years before. He said, “Let’s go see how they’re runnin’ today.”

 

I knew the blood would come. I’d learned about it a few years before. I just thought it was much, much more than it should be.

 

—

 

Shiners, in the minnow bucket, darted left and right. Nightcrawlers we filched by the light of night’s moon tunneled dirt in the coffee can. Bait. “Live things to catch live things,” Dad always said each time he slipped the thin hook through a slippery body, but I heard it different that day.

 

He cast. Set the pole in the wooden wye he carved from a cherry tree branch.

 

“Always use thin wire hooks and rig close to the tail so it can still move a lot. Or through the top of its back. You want it lively in the water. Just as it would be if it wasn’t on the hook.”

 

I nodded and straightened my back, rubbed at my spine. He glanced at me then grabbed a minnow from the bucket and placed it in my palm.

 

“Hold onto that for a sec,” he said. He pulled his lighter from his shirt pocket and relit the charred end of his cigarette. Took in a long drag. I watched the smoke come out his nose and thought of gills, of the insides of our lungs and wondered if they were red, too. The minnow’s tickle made my throat burn, made me want to clamp tighter, but I didn’t want it dead. I blinked. I swallowed all that extra saliva. I thought about where he’d slip the hook through the one I held.

 

That’s when he said, “Uncle Fatso takes them close to the eyeball and through the snout. They’ll wiggle then.” He laughed. “Here,” he said. I opened my hand and watched its shine flip to the ground. “Son of a bitch,” he said, stopping it with his boot from flip-flopping its way toward the water’s edge. He grabbed it after two tries and handed it to me again. “Don’t worry, you can use them like this, too. Hook straight through both lips. See?” I rolled my lips in while he slid the dead minnow on my line’s hook. “Living or dead they still look good to the trout.” He took in another drag and winked.

 

We moved to nightcrawlers then. We waited for a hit while the other worms burrowed deep to the bottom of the can, away from the light splashing through the trees that lined the bank. I couldn’t help staring into the minnow bucket, watching their frantic flickers, their wild eyes.

 

—

 

Five bleeds later, I got hints when it would come on. Angry at my cowlick. Lonely. Fish looked sad. It scared me, this thing happening to me. Hurt all over. Made me slow. Run down.

 

“Maybe flow’s off a little,” Dad said. “Maybe it’ll straighten out.” Though he told me before Mom left us for Jesus and moved to a place in upstate New York to be nearer His Grace and Love, that she’d had the exact same kind of pains. He wanted to take me to Crazy Miss Jean for a tincture, but I was so scared of her that I refused to go.

 

So, again, he took me fishing. We caught our limit quick. Let the gutted fish soak in saltwater in the sink all day. After supper, Dad said, “Let’s have a sundae.” I couldn’t bring myself to grab the maraschino cherry jar that always sat next to the salmon eggs after I spotted the canned plums. They looked too much like the clots that dropped from inside me.

 

“Hot fudge is plenty,” I said.

 

In those five months, I’d learned to hate all things red.

 

That frightening leaking out came again just as I was halfway done with the sundae, sending the bowl clanging into the sink and me running to the bathroom. When I sat on the toilet I imagined my own eggs sliding to the bottom of the porcelain while I peed.

 

“You okay?” Dad said from behind the bathroom door.

 

“I’m fine,” I said, shoring up my voice box to keep at bay any sound of stupid crying.

 

—

 

After eight bleeds, Dad told me to head out to the Sidle, wade in the water some. Might cure me from bleeding so much. But I worried the Sidle couldn’t help me, and I didn’t want to use the creek wrong like Miss Turner, didn’t want to spook the fish away. He said, “Regular season’s over. They’ve slowed by now.”

 

—

 

Cramps woke me. Cramps kept me home from school. Headaches weighted my eye sockets.

 

Snow came early. I tried to think about the cool creek water, how oxygen would be swelling, how trout hens would be building nests in the gravels, deep in the redds, to home their eggs.

 

—

 

A year more passed when Dad said, “I can’t have you suffer,” and went to Crazy Miss Jean without me. She said it was a malady no one aspired to study for a long time. She said she had it, too, ‘til she went through the change. She said people still think it’s fake, a lie. She told him what kinds of stones to find at the Sidle, gave him a bottle of paregoric and told him to mix it with sugar.

 

“It tastes like black licorice gone bad,” he said and held the tiny whiskey glass to my lips. I forced myself to drink it.

Warm, warmer. Cramps eased, eyelids drooped. Rest came. Until pain rippled again.

 

Miss Jean told Dad to “search for a keen doctor who’ll listen.” She said it may take years. She gave the awful thing a name. “Endometriosis, endometriosis, endometriosis,” Dad said.

 

I repeated it. It didn’t sound half as mean as it was.

 

Dad said, “It’s a dirty rotten shame.”

 

In my floating self, I said, real quiet, “Will you help me build a wall, Dad, from both creek rock and river rock? It’ll be knee-high and I’ll plant flowers to line it.”

 

“Sure will,” he said.

 

From the steeped water in the pot, Dad took the smooth flat stones he found near the redds where the trout laid eggs. He placed the warm stones right on top of my belly where Miss Jean said my ovaries and uterus ached underneath. I could feel the Sidle’s love walking deep inside. It made me want to live.

 

I stared at the rainbow Dad had mounted on my wall. I’d caught it on opening day near the bend where Lee cut the line on his palomino when he saw Granddad slump, where he held whiskey to Granddad’s lip. The shininess, those pretty dots, that magenta line the length of it. Its colors buoyed me. It stared back at me with its hopeful eye.