Find Me

23

After the Hospital, I run through stands of trees that have been turned into white skeletons by winter, the branches grabbing at my sweatshirt sleeves. I fight through drifts that swallow my knees and want to keep me with them forever. After the Hospital, I slip up a rise, clutching icy brush I can feel but not see in the night, frozen stems slicing open my palms. I slide down on my back and the rocks sticking out of the snow like horns scrape skin off my spine. I get snow in my hair and under my shirt and in my shoes and in my pockets and in my mouth.

After the Hospital, there is no one to warn me of the dangers, to protect me from the flaws in my judgment, and so I don’t realize I am running across a frozen lake until the ice creaks. I stop. My lungs are burning. Ribbons of blood are hardening on my hands. The ice trembles underneath me. I have no idea how far I am from solid ground, if I am inches away from stepping through a gauzy circle of ice, into a deep and endless freeze.

After the Hospital, I watch dawn turn treetops and power lines gold, light up the ice-slick road that I will follow to La Harpe. I see a deer leaping across a frozen stream and rushing into the woods. I feel every nerve curled under every fingernail. I see crisscrossing contrails in the tender peach-colored sky, even though there is no sign of a plane.

In La Harpe, the streets are rivers of brown slush. The sidewalks are ghosted. The tops of the buildings are wrapped in smoky fog. I don’t see any passing cars, no way to hitch a ride. I find a covered bus stop on a corner. There is no posted schedule; the routes and times are a mystery. I fall onto a bench and feel the wild pulse of my heart, beating at a speed that might be fatal, but I am away from the Hospital, my mother’s photo in my back pocket, and I remember everything that happened there.

* * *

The bus that slows in front of the stop groans and leaks exhaust. The windows are dark. The hubcaps are crusted in mud. Can it take me anywhere worth going?

The door pops open and a driver in a tan uniform stares down at me. He is a lean man with sunken eyes. “You plan on getting in?” he says.

“I’m considering my options.”

“You’re about to consider yourself out of a ride.”

There are no other passengers. A long skinny aisle runs between the rows of seats. The rubber matting on the floor looks sticky. The driver says the bus is headed for Kansas City, which is a start. After I pay, I am down to twenty-five dollars in cash. I take a seat in the back and the bus lurches forward. The skin on my fingertips is waxy and gray, a color I have never seen on skin before.

I think about my infant self in the cardboard supermarket box, waiting to be found. I think about the burn of the cold on my tiny fingertips, all the pain I must have felt, the pain I was too young to remember.

Outside La Harpe we move through a white sea. The bus skids on the ice. I see another deer, but this one is dead, spread out on the roadside, its middle split open. The guts are a dark purple mush, the borders of the flesh bright red with blood. It looks like something in the wet middle of the deer is still moving, and I watch a snake slither out from the intestines and down the side of the road.

A list of what I know about dead bodies: after you die, your cells explode. After you die, your organs eat themselves. As a result, the bacteria in your body does not die at all; it keeps right on living. There are five stages of decay. They begin with bloat, end with bone.

I see green Christmas garlands twisted around a barbed-wire fence. I see an orange car rusting in a field. The tires are missing; the metal body is sinking into the land. Brown cattle rooting around in the snow. A windmill, the blades turning in a great slow circle.

On the bus, there is the feeling of passing from one self into another, like a ship moving from a bay into the vastness of open water.

I only know where my mother lives and that she is alive. Alive! I feel like shouting that word out the bus window. In Florida, when I find her, it is possible she will not be happy to see me. I know this. It is possible that whenever a strange young woman approaches, she feels a current of dread.

I have thousands of miles to travel. I don’t know how many days those miles will take.

In time, she’ll see that I’m worth keeping around.

“Do you know about existence affirmations?” the bus driver calls back to me.

I move up a few rows. The fog twists over the road in a way that makes me think it’s not just air and water but something alive.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“If you affirm your existence daily, it will continue to be true.” He drums his fingers on the wide black wheel. “Every day when I wake up I look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I am alive I am alive I am alive.’”

It sounds like this man is doing one of the Pathologist’s meditations. I wonder what he would think of Dr. Bek and his theories about the unconscious mind.

In Paola, Kansas, two horses gallop into our path. One is white, the other sorrel. They seem to come out of nowhere. The driver hits the brakes and yanks the wheel. The bus shoots to the side. I’m thrown forward in my seat. I bite my bottom lip and taste blood. The horses slip on the road, heads raised high, manes billowing. Their running is frantic, without sense or direction. The bus stills. I press my hands against the window and think about how I used to dream of me and Louis leaving the Hospital together and boarding a bus just like this one and watching the landscape pass.

My hands leave twin palm prints behind on the window, the fingers bleeding into each other.

I lean my head against the glass and close my eyes, wanting to drift off, wanting to dream about anything other than the Hospital. I remember Rick’s Laws of the Road, him telling me to never sleep in the company of strangers, but on the bus his voice gets smaller and smaller until it’s gone.

When I wake, there are woods on either side of the road. I look out and see two black tires hanging from the branches of a tree, secured by thick hay-colored rope. The rubber circles sway on the branches. They look like nooses.

We break through the woods, surrounded once more by flat white fields. I see a young man in a flannel jacket, standing by an old hatchback on the side of the road. Louis, I think for a moment, touching the cold glass. He calls out and waves. The bus gains speed as we pass, spraying his pants with snow.

24

The first sign of the city is the Missouri River, the water black and snaking in the night. A rail yard with tracks like thick veins in the ground and smokestacks netted in tiny orange lights. White loops of rising smoke. A tall silver skyline in the distance.

In Shawnee, we pick up a man wearing glasses so large and dark I think he must be blind. He sits next to me, even though the bus is still empty, and I consider the questions I could ask him, as a test. Do I look like I’ve always had this haircut? Do I look like I have a mother? Do I look like I have all my memories? Do I look scared? Does the skin on my fingers look dead?

In Kansas City, we pass an empty square and a bronze statue of a winged horse. In the Hospital, I imagined the cities were once again filled with brightness, the clatter of alive bodies, but this one looks dark and hollow, an underground system that’s just been pulled into the light.

I decide to get off on Seventh Street. As I move down the aisle, I think of what I could say to the driver. I want to tell him those affirmations, those meditations, never worked out for me or for anyone else in the Hospital I left behind. I am still living not because of what I thought but because I moved.

“I am alive,” I say instead.

On the street, I am dazed by the height of the buildings. It feels like being dropped in the center of a tall and intricate maze. On the corner, a man in a trench coat is selling hardback books titled Does Death End It All? I don’t see a single person in a suit or a mask.

In a trash can, I find a pair of green gardening gloves, the palms stained with oil. They smell like gasoline. I put them on.

A block down, there’s a motel called the Walnut. From the parking lot, the building is U-shaped and I count three concrete levels, each bordered by a railing. I find my way to a dim front lobby. The carpet, a pattern of red and gold diamonds, is musty and damp. I think of all the good our Floor Group could do in here, with our caddies of cleaning supplies.

No one is at the font desk. On the counter, there is a little ceramic dish of mints. I eat one and it turns into a sweet cloud on my tongue. A white plaque advertises a heated swimming pool, only “heated” is spelled “hated.” I ring a buzzer and a man with a little black mustache zips out from behind the curtain, quick as a minnow. His skin is smooth and pale and rolled with fat.

“How much for a room?” I ask. My voice sounds hoarse and strange.

“Seventy,” he says. “Call it the postdisaster discount.”

I tell him I can’t pay for a room up front. A fly buzzes around the man’s head.

“We’re not a shelter,” he says.

“There are shelters? Around here?” A shelter sounds like exactly what I need, even though I know words aren’t always what they claim to be.

The man shakes his head, starts shuffling papers. The fly shoots away and gets lost in the curtains. He’s losing interest in me.

“I can get you the money.” The words come in a rush. Of course, I have no idea about getting anyone any money. What about the duties of Floor Groups and proper procedures in the Dining Hall and tests? I’m not used to a world where the rules change as often as the weather, a world that runs on cash.

The man stops shuffling and looks at me. I notice a dot of blood in the corner of his eye.

“I mean it.” I press my hands on the counter and am startled by the green gloves. Where did these hands come from? “You can trust me.”

“Trust is out of style.” The man fusses with the collar of his sweater. He lets out a little laugh. “Or was it ever stylish? I can’t say that I remember.”

I lean against the counter, because my body has gotten very heavy. I’ve never been to Kansas City before and the longer I stand there, in the murky light of the lobby, the less certain I become that Kansas City is where I really am. I can still feel myself walking the Hospital halls, my slippers sliding across the floors, my fingers moving over that patch of bubbled wallpaper, the cold on the windows.

I look again at the man. I do not know where to go or what to do.

“There must be something you need as much as money. I could wash dishes. I could clean rooms.”

The man picks a ball of lint off his sweater. “What exactly are your skills?”

“Anything,” I say. “I’m a fast learner.”

“I’m no teacher.”

“I can run for miles without stopping. I can memorize all kinds of lists.” I point at the sign for the pool. “I can spell.”

My unconscious mind is very powerful and it wants me to keep living, I do not tell him.

He taps a fat finger against his cheek, then pushes back the curtain and shouts for someone called No Name. I remember Ms. Neuman telling me and Marcus to never trust anyone without a proper Christian name.

* * *

No Name is tall as a giant. He has silver rings in his nose and in his bottom lip, one in each eyebrow. He’s dressed in black jeans and a black hoodie and black sneakers without laces. In exchange for helping him, I will get a room for the night. It’s unclear what he needs help with. In fact, he doesn’t seem to think he needs help at all.

“I don’t want her,” he says when the manager introduces us.

“You were almost caught the last time.” The manager hands No Name a sheet of paper, folded in half. “You need a lookout.”

He jams the paper into his pocket. “You sure these are empty?”

“I’m sure,” the manager says. “I just called them. Twice.”

No Name stalks into a concrete courtyard, where shriveled brown plants sit frozen in clay pots. We pass a swimming pool that looks like no pool I have ever seen before. A giant pink clamshell hangs over it like a very beautiful awning. I stop and watch the water lap at the edges of the night.

“Keep up,” No Name calls over his shoulder, and I forget about the pool and chase after him.

We walk along an open hallway, to a corner room on the ground floor. He slips a key into the door and we disappear inside. The room is dark. I move through a cloud of tiny bugs. I can’t see them, but I can feel the itch of infestation move down a finger, across the back of my neck. One bug gets stuck in my eye. I’m supposed to stay by the door and listen for voices, footsteps. If someone tries to enter the room, I’m supposed to say that I work for the motel and there is a plumbing emergency under way inside and it is not a thing anyone would want to smell or see. He starts with the drawers by the TV and I catch the gold glint of a watch. The lights from outside wash the blinds in a soft glow.

“People always hide things in Bibles,” No Name whispers in the dark.

He does a quick sweep of the bathroom and the closet and then we’re off to our next room, on the second floor. He finds a wedding ring hidden inside a pair of socks — according to No Name, people are always leaving wedding rings in their room too — and a ten-dollar bill on the bathroom counter. We’re about to leave when I hear footsteps coming down the hall and go rigid.

“Hey,” I whisper, touching a finger to my mouth.

No Name flattens himself against the wall. I silently recite my lines about the plumbing emergency. We both wait, our breath drawn inside us, and listen to the footsteps pass. We hear them stop at the other end of the hall. A door opens and shuts.

“You’re not terrible at this,” No Name says when we’re back outside and moving down another hallway, the lights above wavering like the ones inside the T cars in Boston.

“What’s the closest you’ve ever come?”

“Once a woman came back to her room. I was in the bathroom when I heard the door and I had to hide in the shower until she left. She was walking around the room and talking to herself. She kept saying that she had done wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If she found me, I knew there would be no way out, no way to explain. That was when it was decided I needed someone like you.”

I whistle. My heels are rubbed raw. The insides of my pockets are still wet from the snow. “That’s pretty close.”

“I’ve come closer with other things,” he says.

* * *

At ten, No Name announces it’s time for a break. He unlocks a vacant room with a king bed. He sits down on the bed and takes out a pack of cigarettes. Soon the room is clotted with gray.

Smoking is not allowed in the Hospital, I want to tell him.

Sitting on the bed might suggest something I don’t want to suggest, so I stay on my feet, by the door. I take off the gardening gloves and examine the grooves of dirt and blood on my knuckles, the black under my fingernails. Do I look like I escaped from someplace awful? Do I look like I ever had a home?

“What did you do before the sickness?” The red carpet is damp, like the one in the lobby, and I can feel a chill coming off the walls.

“Same kind of thing. Only bigger.” He’s smoking one cigarette after another and putting them out on the bedspread. The comforter is dotted with small, dark holes. I smell burnt polyester.

“What about during?”

No Name tells me that he was living here, in this motel in Kansas City, when the sickness came. Was there a better place to be? He had a bed, a shower, a TV, a telephone. If you knew where to look, there were endless supplies of bottled water, bar soap, towels, saltine crackers in plastic pouches. From the window, he could monitor what was happening outside. After the sickness ended, he decided to stay. He had been on the move his whole life — why not try living in one place? And then once the recovery began and travelers started filling the rooms, he and the manager saw an opportunity.

I ask No Name what he knows about Kansas City and he tells me this place is nicknamed the City of Fountains because there are hundreds of fountains. The cowboy boot was invented here. Kansas City is home to one of the world’s largest roller coasters.

“Not just one of the largest in the country,” he says, shaking his cigarette. “But in the world.”

“Not bad,” I say back. No Name seems to be fond of Kansas City.

“My turn to ask a question.” He blows smoke from the side of his mouth. “How long are you sticking around?”

“Only one night. I have someplace to be.”

Kansas City is just the first stop. Tomorrow I will keep pushing south.

“Someplace to be?” A pierced eyebrow pops up. He puts out another cigarette and the bed hisses. “Well aren’t you fancy.”

I hear sirens outside. I go over to the TV and try to turn it on, but the set is dead, defective, like the one I left behind in the Hospital.

“If I wanted a room with a TV, I would have gotten us a room with a TV,” No Name says. “I’m real fucking tired of the news.”

I ask him for a cigarette. He lights a fresh one and holds it out. I reach, but I’m standing too far away and he’s not coming to me; I have to get closer. I take the cigarette and sit down on the floor and feel the wet of the carpet seeping into my jeans.

“So,” I say, taking a drag. “What were things like before around here? How is it different now?”

He waves his cigarette and I follow the gray swirls. “What do you mean how?”

I want to tell him I’ve been in a Hospital for months and I have almost forgotten what it feels like to wear regular clothes and to breathe in city air and to stand in the tall shadows of buildings and to see people who are not patients, who have never been patients. I have almost forgotten there are people out there who smoke. I don’t know what it was like a week after the sickness ended or a month after. I don’t know if the emptiness and the rot is a new situation or if things have always been this way out here.

“I’m not very well traveled,” I say instead.

“What’s your theory?” he wants to know.

“My theory?”

“Of the sickness. Why it happened.”

“I don’t like to speculate,” I tell him in place of the truth, which is: I have no idea. I let the line of ash get longer. I didn’t really want to smoke. I just needed something to do. Outside the Hospital, conversation feels like a bright light in my face and I want to get away from the glare.

“Here’s what I think.” No Name kneels in front of me. His hood slips back and I see a red birthmark, vaguely Florida-shaped, on his temple. His cigarette has burned down to a white stub. “I think someone out there wanted very badly for another person to forget what they knew. I think someone started this whole goddamn thing just to make one person forget.”

“That seems like a lot of trouble for just one person.”

“Doesn’t it?” No Name nods like we’re agreeing. He puts out his cigarette and once again the bed sizzles. I’m starting to feel sick from the smoke. My body is not used to pollutants. I’m not sure how much longer I can stand being on break.

He takes out his list and calls the motel manager. He nixes one room and adds another.

“Back to work,” he says after he hangs up.

What’s your real name? I know better than to ask.

“I want the next room.” My cigarette has gone dead between my fingers. My lap is dusted in ash.

“We’ll see,” says No Name.

* * *

When we hit our last room for the night, I get to do the stealing. I start with the dresser drawers. Empty. I move on to the bathroom, where I find a single pearl earring on the counter. The pearl is large and light, definitely fake, but I scoop it anyway. I wonder if the earring means this room belongs to a woman — if she is out here on her own, like me.

The first thing I ever stole was a comb. In Roxbury, I watched a girl run this comb through her hair day after day and coveted the pink plastic teeth. One morning she left the comb on her pillow and I took it without thinking, in a blaze of want.

I never felt bad for stealing cough syrup from the Stop & Shop. They always seemed to have too much of everything.

In the bedside drawers, I find a postcard stuck between the pages of the Bible. I’m about to call it quits when I notice a coat draped over a chair. The inside breast pocket holds two crisp fifties and a map of American highways, folded into a tiny square.

We examine our haul in the break room. We close the blinds and flick on the lights and dump everything on the king bed. We kneel together on the floor, breathless, sifting through our loot. The air is still heavy with smoke.

He counts the money: three hundred and seventy-five dollars. The coating on the fake pearl is peeling and faded. Neither of us want it; we took it for nothing. The postcard is a black-and-white image of waves breaking on a beach. The sky is caked with cloud except in the center, where flecks of light have burned through. Someone somewhere wrote an address and a message on the back, but the ink has bled.

No Name hands me a thin stack of bills. “This is for you.”

A hundred dollars, plus the map.

I stare at the back of the postcard, trying to decipher the dark smudges. “I think this was addressed to someone in Virginia.”

What an elegant, gentle-sounding name for a place, Virginia.

“Take it if you want.” No Name pulls out his cigarettes and beats the bottom of the pack. “It’s worthless.”

* * *

In exchange for my work, I get a room on the third floor. I strip and hang my clothes in the little closet by the bathroom. In the mirror, my skin is chalk white. My bangs have grown down to my eyebrows. My legs are coated in rough fuzz. The hair in my armpits and around my crotch is a dark tangle. I rub the tender veins in my arms.

In the shower, I scrub myself with a washcloth until my skin is throbbing and pink, as though the cells hold memories I want to erase. I stand under the showerhead and let the water beat my shoulders for a while, waiting for someone to come and tell me that I’m taking too long or that it’s time for a Community Meeting or Lights Out. Time to do the Romberg.

No one does.

It takes me a while to get the temperature right. For a while, the water either scalds or freezes.

I forget to put down a bath mat and leave wet footprints on the tile floor.

Once, in Roxbury, there was an outbreak of head lice and it was decided the cure was drenching our hair in mayonnaise and waving hot dryers over our heads until our scalps were burning.

I remember this when I see the gun-shaped hair dryer under the motel sink.

After the shower, I sit on the bed and line up the postcard and my mother’s photo. They look right together, the captain and her sea.

I turn on the TV, hoping for Mysteries of the Sea, but instead an “outbreak retrospective” is on the news. A number of survivors have, in the last month, vanished. Some have moved across the country, abandoning jobs and mortgages and families, leaving behind only a letter to explain or just disappearing in the middle of the night. There are empty cubicles in office buildings and dogs tied to mailboxes and mounds of newspapers in their dewy plastic packaging on doorsteps. Others have committed suicide. Approximately five hundred people, to date. The news calls it a “microepidemic.”

In an interview, a mental health expert explains that some survivors can’t make sense of what they’ve lived through, of why they’ve lived through it, so they shed their life and assume another or shed their life and assume death. This man has a neat beard and a sweater-vest and I’m skeptical he knows very much about what it’s like to live through unbearable things.

Images from the sickness come next: long lumps under white sheets; patients cowering behind plastic tents, tubes springing from their arms, skin brilliant with silver sores; helicopters sweeping cities; an army of yellow hazmat suits flooding a wide street. I don’t want to keep watching, but I can’t seem to make myself change the channel.

The final death toll was close to four hundred thousand, more than half the population of Boston. Now there is debate about whether the “microepidemic” victims should be added to that count or if they demand a count of their own.

A woman standing on a street corner, the wind whipping around her. A tissue crumpled in her hand. A flush is spreading down her nose and across her cheeks. She looks to be about the same age as my own mother. Her son survived the sickness, then dove off the Golden Gate Bridge. He left a note telling her he couldn’t trust the world anymore.

What would Dr. Bek have to say about this man, about his unconscious mind?

She looks into the camera. A clear stream runs from her nose.

“When could we ever?” she says.

* * *

In the middle of the night, I get up and go down to the swimming pool. Under the clamshell, the water looks as soft and pink as a tongue. I smell the bitterness of chlorine. There’s a crack in the concrete bottom shaped like a bolt of lightning. The white lounge chairs surrounding the pool are heaped with snow. No one else is in the courtyard. All the floors are silent.

Again I take off my clothes. I don’t know what else to do with all this freedom.

The pool is barely lukewarm. The advertised heating feels like a lie. Like something to hate. My body is different than it was on land — lighter, more nimble, like all the blood in my veins has been replaced with air. My nipples are purple and hard.

In Somerville, I used to hear stories about the evangelical church baptizing new congregants in Foss Park. They had water that they had turned holy and they poured it over the person’s head. They said a prayer and somehow that ritual was supposed to leave that person changed.

I always envied those people, envied the certainty of their faith, their ability to believe they were moving through life with a purpose.

If I stand upright, the water covers my waist, the rise of my stomach, and I feel the lethal chill of winter, so I sink down into the shadow of the clamshell. From there the clothing piled on the concrete edge of the pool looks far away.

I inhale, go under. I touch the lightning-shaped crack. I see the faded blue dolphins painted on the sides of the pool, flippers and noses bleached with time. I notice a freckle on my ring finger that did not exist before. My eyes are on fire from the chlorine and it is my choice to let them keep burning or not.

My choice, my choice.

Finally I get out and put on my bra and my jeans. I run back to my room, sweatshirt clutched to my chest, bare feet slapping the concrete.

I race past a woman standing by the ice machine in a nightgown, filling a plastic cup. When she sees me, the wet, shirtless girl running toward her, she screams and drops the cup and cubes scatter down the hallway, glinting like diamonds under the light.

In my room, I bolt the door and get in bed and wrap myself up in the sheets and the polyester comforter even though I know it has not been washed in a hundred years. Another little bug has gotten stuck to my collarbone and it leaves a dark streak when I wipe it away. I shiver and I shake until I have exhausted myself and fallen asleep, and a while later I wake certain of a presence outside my room. A presence that wants to get in. An intruder, the bolt of panic you feel before a strange man strikes you in the head or drugs you with chloroform, the nightmare that starts and ends and starts again when you wake in a basement, or never has a chance to start again because you don’t wake at all.

The green numbers on the bedside clock say 3:05 a.m. and outside someone is pounding on my door. I am hazy with sleep, slow at first to register the sound. The knob is shaking so hard, I think it’s going to fall off. I hear a boot striking, someone trying to kick their way inside.

In Mission Hill, the older girls kicked down bathroom doors while the younger girls were inside. This was one of the many ways they convinced us of their power. Every girl in Mission Hill learned how to finish peeing in twenty seconds flat, from squat to flush.

As I got older, I waited for that feeling of power to come alive inside me. I thought it would sprout on its own, like breasts or the downy hair on my legs. I didn’t understand that it had to be claimed.

I creep up to the peephole and see No Name thrashing against the door. His face is warped through the glass, turning the proportions strange. His nose is a jutting ridge, his eyes are dark pools. The rings in his face glow silver. He’s wearing the same clothes and his body is a black blur as he beats on the door. Something has happened to him since we worked those rooms together. He has changed, or maybe this person was there the whole time, smoking cigarettes and counting money in the break room, waiting to get out.

He stops for a moment. His mouth is open, his throat pale and tight. I can see that he’s breathing hard. I wonder if he can sense that I’m right there, just behind the door. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

He licks the silver ring in his lip and then throws his shoulder against the door. The security chain jangles and I back away, afraid that somehow he can see me standing half-naked in my room and is already thinking, Come on, girl. Could you make this any easier?

I can’t call the front desk because I know the manager will be on the side of No Name and will maybe even give him the key he needs to open this door, to make the jangling security chain the only thing between him and me. So I don’t pick up the phone. I don’t turn on a light. I put on the green gardening gloves. I get on my knees and crawl into the bathroom, moving slowly, my head animal low, and lock myself inside. The carpet leaves red marks on my knees. The floor is still wet from my watery footprints. I huddle in the tub. I cover myself with the bath mat. I rub away the dark streak on my collarbone. “Be still,” I say. My new meditation.

I wait in there until the noise stops, and I go out into the room and see light slipping through the blinds like a rescue.

25

At dawn, I walk to the bus station. All the floors are quiet. The pool sits empty. There is no sign of the manager or No Name. There is no man in a trench coat selling books. I’m still wearing the gardening gloves. The city looks abandoned in the early-morning light.

Down the street from the motel I find an empty lot with circles of ice as large and dark as oil slicks. There are spidery cracks along the perimeter of one circle, a sharp plunge in the center. Farther down I see clusters of brick factories with tall glass windows and slender chimneys. What kinds of lives are happening here? The sun is a pale gold disc in the sky.

I board a bus bound for Birmingham, Alabama. I wonder what I will do or what will be done to me the next time I need cash.

In Columbia, Missouri, we collect more passengers. A man in bifocals sits down next to me and digs a ringing cell phone out of his pocket. “Fuck the guilt,” he says to the person on the other end of the line. “It’s no way to live.”

He hangs up and turns the phone over in his hands.

I sink into my seat and watch the slim points of tree branches bend in the wind.

The bus stops. The passengers change. The man in bifocals disappears into the day and a nun sits down next to me and starts talking about the immortal soul. She says we worry too much about the body, about where we take sacraments and pray, but the immortal soul isn’t inside us, isn’t in the body.

“Where is it then?” I ask her, and she says it can exist anywhere, that we have to go in search.

I wonder how it’s possible for the soul to live outside the body. Will I find it on my mother’s island? Will I see it drifting over the water like smoke?

The nun gets off in Jefferson City. At a rest stop, I buy chips and a Coke from the vending machines. I nearly miss the bus from spending too long touching the warm buttons, trying to remember how to choose.

We pass a small airport. The tarmac is a jumble of machinery, rusting engines and squat white trucks and carts with black wheels. A little green plane sits at the end of a runway, the wings heavy with snow.

After the airport, the landscape turns rural. In the fields, sprigs of brush stick up through the snow. These fields are surrounded by disintegrating wood fences, panels that have fallen to the ground like dislocated body parts. A steel grain silo. More brown cows, scruffy and sick-looking and weaving through the winter muck.

I see distant lines of trees, the silhouettes slight and charcoal black, like they’ve been burned. I see power lines, the cords sparking and swaying in the wind.

A mist rolls in and covers the trees. The windows fog. It feels like we’re driving through a cloud.

I unfold the map of American highways and follow the lines that will lead me south. From Birmingham, I’ll ride down to the Gulf Coast, pass into Florida through the Panhandle, and keep going.

When I look up from the map, I notice a man three rows ahead. I don’t remember seeing him get on in Jefferson City. He’s sitting in the window seat. He’s staring out and I wonder if he is seeing anything through the fog or if his view is as dense and white as mine and he too is pretending that we are no longer on earth.

No one is sitting next to him. He is alone, like me.

I remember the masked man standing on the street corner in Chinatown and the masked man I followed all around the Stop & Shop in the middle of the night. I remember wearing the vampire mask in my basement apartment and thinking that if I never took it off I would just slowly suffocate under the heavy sweet smell of the rubber.

I fold up the map and tuck it into my pocket. I leave my seat and sit down next to this man. He is wearing a rabbit mask. The round eyeholes are surrounded by swirls of white plastic fur. The ears are a pair of white points, the cheeks mounds of pink. The lips are plump and rosy. A nice healthy rabbit. He looks like a cartoon character or a make-believe bandit — except I am touching the pointed ears and he is not yelling or telling me to get away. Behind the mask he is breathing deep and slow.

He’s wearing black pants and a puffy maroon coat with a hole in the stomach, so the cotton stuffing spills out. I watch him reach into his lap and push the yellowed guts of his coat back inside.

I remember him showing me how the life line on my palm ran long and deep. I remember the white tuft of hair, which I know is hidden somewhere under that rabbit mask. I want to reach inside and find it. I remember the Real-Life Ghost Stories and the hair dye on our fingernails and Latin homework and the sweaty smell of his boy body in the bathtub.

I remember.

He pulls off the green gardening gloves, one at a time, and looks at my hands.

The bus slows. The air is thick with fog. Something inside me collapses, goes warm and soft, and there is a wet heat on my face. Never have I wanted someone to remember me as much as I want to be remembered now.

“Marcus,” I say.

* * *

In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman liked to play the Powerball lottery. Marcus and I would sit on the floor, just beyond the light of the TV, and braid the shag carpeting. We would watch little white balls jump around in a plastic bowl and a man in a tuxedo call out the winning combinations. Ms. Neuman always played the same numbers. We didn’t know what those numbers meant to her; we only knew that she never won a dime. Once Marcus whispered a set of numbers to me, the bloodied lips of a zombie mask brushing my ear, and then I saw that same sequence appear on the TV. He did it again, a month later. Here Ms. Neuman had spent years trying to guess right and Marcus had done it twice in a row. That was the first time I realized his mind didn’t work the same as everyone else’s. The second time was when he woke me in the middle of the night already knowing Ms. Neuman was unconscious on the floor.

* * *

We don’t say anything for the longest time. We stare straight ahead and watch the fog begin to lift and the road unfurl like a scroll before us.

I’m the first to speak, to ask how he found me. Marcus has no way to explain. After the sickness ended, he started traveling the country by bus, moving from one city to another to another until he ended up here.

“I wanted to get out there,” he tells me. “I wanted to see.”

He has passed through Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, through places called Cuba and Brazil and Lebanon. Cities named for countries. He felt a westward pull, though he never made it as far west as Kansas.

A list of what he has seen: a helicopter crashed on the white edge of a field; an abandoned watchtower, the clock hands stuck at noon; a replica of the Statue of Liberty, only instead of standing on an island and holding a torch, this lady was outside a church and holding a giant wood cross. He has seen hitchhikers and shooting stars and a bleating goat tied to a fence and a nightfall that closed around him like a fist. A woman sitting on the side of the road, a sleeping bag draped over her shoulders. A gas mask discarded in a parking lot.

For both of us, these long hours on buses have shown us more of America than we have ever seen.

We pass a field with humps in the snow, like there is a creature living underneath all that white.

When Marcus wants to know where I’m going, what I’m doing here, I look at him and say, “I have a mother.”

I catch a road sign for Indianapolis, which doesn’t seem right at all. According to my map of American highways, we should be seeing signs for Fayetteville and Little Rock and Jackson, but then again what do I know about cross-country bus routes.

A damp snow starts falling. It covers the yellow highway lines.

“You have a mother? Since when?”

“Since two months ago.”

“Where is she?”

“Florida,” I tell him. “Shadow Key. That’s where I’m going.”

“I’ve never been to an island before,” Marcus says.

I look down at his hand. I reach for his fingers and squeeze. His skin has the same soft feeling I remember from childhood.

Soon there is another river, wide and glossy with ice. A light fog hovers over the river and it looks like the water is breathing. The trees on the banks are stooped and gray. They have an ancient way about them.

I see a distant bridge and wonder when’s the last time somebody jumped.

“What about you? Where are you trying to end up?”

“Nowhere,” he says.

* * *

In Dayton, it becomes clear that all along this bus has been going in the wrong direction, that it has no intention of taking me to Birmingham. I go up front to talk to the driver and he tells me this bus is going east and has always been going east and he doesn’t know where I got my ideas about Birmingham. I ask about the next stop and he tells me it’s Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, unless I want to be let out on the side of the road, in which case he will be perfectly happy to oblige.

I have a feeling this driver does not believe in existence affirmations.

“We’re going to Pennsylvania,” I tell Marcus when I return to my seat, and I am squeezed tight by the fear that the forces of nature are trying to drag me back to Massachusetts, to Somerville and the Stop & Shop, and away from my mother.

It takes us three hours to get out of Ohio, to cross over the Pennsylvania state line. We pass signs for Pittsburgh, a city divided by a river, and after a while the highway tapers into a narrow road bordered by forest. I look into the trees and see dark darting things through the branches. This road leads us to a town where the streetlights are burned out and the power lines are drooping and the earth beneath the sidewalks has swelled, pushing up the concrete squares so they look like rising waves. We pass a block of little houses with rusted awnings and crumbling foundations. White sheets with black x’s cover windows. Yellow notices hang from doors.

The bus stops in the middle of the road. The sky is a swamp of gray. I look toward the front and see that the driver has a map of his own. He is frowning and turning it this way and that. After a while he takes out a cell phone and clicks around. Eventually he puts away the map and the phone and we start moving again, but now there is no mistaking that we are lost.

We pass smoking hillsides, as though great fires are raging behind the rises. At a stop sign, I look to the right, to the road that extends east, and see that the asphalt is rippled and brown weeds have shot up between the cracks. A fallen tree blocks the path. The roots are black and frozen. White steam, thick as the hillside smoke, pours out of the metal grates in the ground.

We pass signs that read DANGER: TOXIC GASES PRESENT and WARNING: GROUND PRONE TO SUDDEN COLLAPSE. Outside, dusk is falling.

“My god,” the woman sitting behind us says. “We’re in Centralia.”

Marcus and I twist around in our seats and ask what she means by Centralia and the woman tells us that this used to be a mining town but many years ago the landfill caught fire and the fire spread through the network of mines underground. Those underground fires couldn’t be put out and there were problems with poisonous gases and sinkholes, just like those signs said. She stabs at the air above her. The town was condemned; the underground fires never stopped burning. This is not damage done by the sickness. This we did all on our own.

“Centralia,” the woman says again. “It’s famous, this place.” She touches her window. She has a faraway look in her eye.

I am terrified by the idea of sinkholes, of being consumed by the earth.

Marcus and I sit back down in our seats and look at each other and I wish one of us knew what to do. I keep watch through the window and when we pass another block of condemned houses I think I see a woman standing on an icy lawn, waving at us through the smoke. She is wearing some kind of soft wrap or maybe a bathrobe and she is barefoot like that one pilgrim I saw from the Dining Hall window in the Hospital.

“Look,” I say to Marcus, but the bus is moving and the smoke is getting thicker and there is no way to tell if she is still there, if she was ever there at all.

The other passengers start objecting to the driver’s course of action. The ones who have been asleep wake and open their mouths like animals trying to lose a strange taste. When they look out the windows, at the hot smoking ground, their muscles shed the looseness of sleep. They grab the backs of seats, knock on windows, call up to the driver. “Go left!” “Go right!” “Turn around!” “Get us out of here!”

The driver hunches over the wheel. The bus starts going faster.

We roll onto an unpaved road. A clunking sound and we’re back to slow.

White dust blooms around us, luminous in the headlights. I smell rotten eggs and feel heat coming up through the floor.

“The other way!” someone shouts from the back of the bus.

The driver sends us in reverse, the tires crunching over gravel, and starts down another road. By then we are surrounded by nothing but night and all the things that night is capable of hiding.

26

During an Internet Session in the Hospital, I found a video of my mother talking about the day she almost died. She was diving and rose too quickly. She knew all about decompression sickness, but she saw a spar wedged in a reef of brain coral and she was young and she got excited. During the ascent, her interval stops weren’t long enough. On deck, she knew something was wrong. Her legs felt thick and numb. She heard a strange ringing, like bells were sounding on the ship, and said, “Where are the bells?” Her crew looked at her and turned over their palms, as though to prove they weren’t hiding the sound in their hands. What bells? All she wanted was to lie on the cot in the lower cabin, but she didn’t even make it down the stairs. She slumped against the wall. She clawed at the wood paneling. She wet herself inside her dive suit. She felt a sharp pain in her knees and elbows and in the bones in her feet; the pain spread like a rash, into her hips and spine. They were in the middle of the Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the coast of the Dry Tortugas. She knew how to prevent this, she had been trained, but she had forgotten and now, because of that one mistake, that one moment of forgetting, she was slipping away.

Mud sliding down a mountain in springtime, as Dr. Bek once said, his hands making that little dive.

She remembered the white stretcher that carried her out of the stairwell, the hands that fastened the straps. The circle of freckles, the knuckles soft with hair, the scar on the thenar, the crooked ring finger. All these hands working in harmony, as though they belonged to the same body. The smell of salt.

In her memory, the orange coast guard helicopter was noiseless. She only remembered the water churning white beneath her and the sensation of being lifted and then lifted higher and the ocean looking like an enormous blue disc that stretched on into eternity.

* * *

In Harrisburg, Marcus gets off the bus with me. He has no place to go. I have no one else to go with. The choice to leave this bus together, to get away from this lost driver, who took all night to find Harrisburg, into the light of the day, is so easy it doesn’t feel like a choice at all.

The morning is pale and cold. All the buses are going west or north; nobody seems to want to go south. When I say “Florida,” the drivers look at me like I’ve asked if a bus can swim across the ocean, if a bus can take us to Hawaii. Finally we get on a bus headed for Charleston, West Virginia. It takes eight hours to get there and by the time this new city is in sight, the afternoon is winding down into dusk.

We pass yet another river, the Kanawha, according to the signs, and a bronze statue of a man with a sword. All cities, I’m learning, are filled with their monuments.

With the money I earned in Kansas City, we get a room at an Econo Lodge. The lobby is cluttered with fake ferns, as though someone wanted to give the appearance of entering a jungle. At the front desk, there is a stack of brochures that tell us about the history of the Econo Lodge. The Econo Lodge was founded in Norfolk, Virginia, by a man named Vernon Myers and his son, Vernon Junior. They were the first motel chain to put beds on boxes instead of legs, an innovation in motel management at the time.

I close the brochure and have a funny thought: does anyone care about history anymore?

Our room is small and dark and smells like chlorine, even though there is no swimming pool. I’m tired in a way that feels permanent. I take off my sneakers. My toes are swollen, the pads tender. On my soles I find blisters filled with white fluid and think about the barnacles hugging the bottom of my mother’s ship. If you open barnacles up, do you find something soft inside?

Our room has double beds with forest green comforters and headboards that are slabs of honey-colored wood. In the center of each headboard, there is a lattice cut of a bear walking through a forest. We sit on a bed, facing each other, and Marcus tells me about an exercise that can help you find a person you are looking for. It goes like this:

First, close your eyes and picture a movie screen. You are sitting in the audience, in the dark of the theater. Imagine this person appearing on the screen. See her face. Second, imagine a phone booth in the corner of the screen. See the doors to the booth open. Hear the phone ringing. Third, see yourself leaving the audience and entering the screen. See yourself answering the ringing phone. See yourself saying, Hello, where are you? Imagine you are hearing this person speaking back.

In this imaginary theater, I sink into the seat and wait for my mother to appear.

“How did it go?” Marcus asks when I open my eyes.

I don’t tell him that I couldn’t get past my mother’s face on the movie screen, couldn’t get to the booth and the ringing phone. My imagination is only feeling so cooperative.

“It went,” I say.

In the evening, Marcus wants to walk, to move: on the buses, we sat still for unnaturally long periods of time. We have energy stored inside us. We go out into the streets and watch clouds slip across a fat moon.

At this hour in Boston, on the brink of dusk, the windows in the buildings would start to shine bright as jewels. Here the skyline is low and the windows stay dark.

We wander down a broad empty street, the river, the Kanawha, on one side. We find our way to a white building with columns and a domed roof. It looks like an official building of some kind, powerful and secretive. I’ve forgotten the gardening gloves and my hands are cold. We walk up the steps and stand between the columns and look out at the river winding through the powdery blue light.

We continue on, under an overpass, the concrete pillars stained with bird shit, where we can hear the low hum of traffic. We find a little park with a fountain in the center. The tops of the trees are flat and dark like mushroom caps. They cast large shadows on the ground. The ice-crusted grass has become a net for trapping cigarette butts and the metal tongues of beer cans. The fountain is dry. Green pennies are stuck to the bottom. The paint is cracked and tiny weeds are forcing their way through the concrete. We climb into the base of the fountain and look out at the world around us.

“I was in a Hospital,” I tell Marcus. “I didn’t think I was ever going to leave.”

I stand there and absorb the force of that feeling. It is a physical recognition, a warm pressure in the center of my belly. In the Hospital, in the unending cold of winter, I began to believe that I would never again see another city or park or monument or river. I began to believe that version of my story, but that version turned out to be wrong, because here I am in the capital of West Virginia, with Marcus, on my way to find my mother.

I should be free of that feeling now, hundreds of miles from the Hospital, but the shadow of it hangs over me, like there’s a part of me that is still locked up and will never be anything but locked up.

“You got out.” Marcus rubs his plastic lips. “You’ll always get out.”

“I got out,” I say, hoping to convince that locked-up part of myself.

I jump onto the edge of the fountain. I place my hands on my belly. I feel the warm pressure building. I stare out into the night and scream and am stunned by my own loudness. Marcus jumps up beside me. He grabs my hand, hot and slick, and we scream together. I see our voices rising into the trees and getting tangled up in the branches, making nests of sound.

Eventually we walk away, calling out everything we know about rabbits. Rabbits are excellent at leaping and digging and running. For their entire lives, their teeth keep growing. They can live everywhere except for in Antarctica. They can infect people with rabbit fever, a disease that makes the patients sweat and itch. They like the dark. They do not like to be alone.

Just when the city is starting to feel like it belongs to us, the city sets us straight.

We are away from the park, wandering down a narrow side street, when a mob of people dressed in black, their faces painted a ghoulish white, rush out from behind the corner of a building. A cavalry of acrobats, I think, even though I know enough to know “cavalry” and “acrobat” are not two words that belong together.

We stop in the center of the street. These people are charging toward us and before we can escape, we are in the thick of the pack. I see holes in their black shirts and patches where the white paint has faded, revealing the humanness beneath. Wild eyes. Beneath us the asphalt rumbles. Marcus is carried away from me. I see the yellow fluff spilling from his coat. We cast our arms forward like swimmers in a roiling sea, trying to fight our way back to each other.

These people don’t stop or speak or try to take us with them. They run with animal indifference, like those horses in Paola. I don’t know who they are or what they have decided to be.

For a second, I am tempted to follow them.

Marcus disappears from sight. I tumble toward the edge of the group. I try to break free. My toes get stomped on, a jab to my tailbone makes me howl, the vibrations of their running moves like electricity through my body. I tuck my chin to my chest and push my way through.

There is a moment that must be like the eye of a storm, where the noise of the footsteps is so loud, so overwhelming to the senses, it becomes a kind of silence. I turn inside the dark swirl. Mouths open, feet strike asphalt, and I can’t hear any of it. I see an orange helicopter hovering over an ocean and the white froth of the water below and my mother on a stretcher, sealed inside a world where there is no noise and all the hands working the straps belong to one body and the borders of the ocean are not borders at all, because they are endless.

* * *

The stampede leaves our hearts pounding and our hands shaking and that warm pressure in my belly is being replaced with something as cold and hard as stone. Marcus’s rabbit mask has gotten twisted on his face. An eyehole has been displaced to a temple. I watch him put his features back in order. We stand on the empty side street until the vibrations have dripped out of our bodies and the asphalt has gone still under out feet.

We start back to the Econo Lodge, but we get lost. We go down street after street. In the dark all the buildings look the same. For a while, we run like the people in black, but eventually we get tired and fall into a stumbling walk. Who are we kidding? We find ourselves under the same overpass, back in the same park with the mushroom trees, back inside the fountain, circling and circling. This time we don’t jump inside and scream.

Panic creeps in, winds its way around my bones. What if we are searching like this forever? What if morning never comes? In the park, Marcus closes his eyes and tries to see our street and our motel and the way back, but his imagination is not feeling cooperative either.

We wander down a street where all the traffic lights are a dull red. We see a little white building called Johnny’s Luncheonette, a gas station called Stop & Go. Instead of being tucked into the pumps, the nozzles are all lying on the ground like they were once an alive thing that someone has killed. The inside of the station is aglow with light.

Behind the counter we find a man in a Kiss T-shirt. His chin is barbed with dark hair. He has a lazy eye. We tell him that we’re lost.

“What are you trying to find?”

“The Econo Lodge. Washington Street.”

A plastic container filled with vials of black rocks sit on the counter. The man picks one up and shakes it. W. VA COAL is painted across the vial in small red letters.

“This isn’t real coal,” the man tells us, one eye drifting toward the door. “But it sure looks real, doesn’t it?”

Marcus and I are starting to think this man in the Kiss T-shirt is not someone who can help us, but then he starts drawing a map on a brown paper napkin. He tells us we’re close to where we want to be. He sketches out a tight maze of streets and adds arrows to show us where to go.

“Have you seen those people with painted faces running around?” I ask the man. “What are they?”

“Oh, those people,” the man says, shaking his head.

We wait, but he doesn’t give us anything more.

We thank him and head back out into the night.

“Mountaineers are always free,” he calls after us.

We have no idea what that means.

We follow his map back to the white building with the domed roof, but then we get turned around again. We end up sitting on the steps of the building and blowing hot air on our fingers. I can feel the blisters growing inside my sneakers. We watch the sun rise over the river and soak the water in light. We set out again with our little gas station map and this time we don’t walk for long before we find ourselves, as if by magic, standing right outside the place we are supposed to be.

* * *

In our motel room, I get into one of the beds. The curtains are thick and block the rising sun; in here it is endless night. Marcus is sitting on the other bed and scratching the skin behind his mask.

I turn on the TV, where a reporter is chronicling all the ways people have tried to find cures. One man concocted an antidote from household cleaning supplies and poisoned his entire family. After the sickness ended, they were found lying in a circle on their living room floor, feet pointed at the wall, heads pointed at the center of the circle, like they were playing a game or doing a meditation exercise or taking a nap from which they would, at any moment, wake.

Next door a man is shouting. The noise is too much. My mother seems very far away. I feel the world grow duller, feel sound melt into a fuzz, and it occurs to me that this might be what it’s like when you begin to die.

When I wake, Marcus is kneeling next to me and holding a finger under my nose. He blinks at me from inside the rabbit mask. My feet push at the empty space at the bottom of the bed. I feel slow and thirsty, like I have been away on a very long adventure I can no longer recall.

“Are you alive in there?” Marcus says.

I sit up and the sleep peels away like sand falling out of my hair.

“You’ve been asleep for twelve hours.” He pulls his hand back. “Ten hours is a coma. I was starting to get worried.”

I look at the bedside clock. Already another day is slipping past. Outside the Hospital the rules of time are confusing to me. Maybe in my sleep I was swimming toward that new self I know is out there.

The TV is still on, but muted. A camera pans across a purple mountain range, an advertisement for a special kind of oxygen-enriched air. This air is called Super Air and it promises to help you get what we all want: more time on earth.

“Yes,” I say, for the second time since leaving the Hospital. “I am alive.”

* * *

When I was alone, the act of calling my mother’s number, of pressing that particular sequence of buttons, seemed impossible. With Marcus, I feel braver.

Still, I don’t call right away. He walks me through the phone visualization exercise again and this time I get as far as the booth and the ringing; I just can’t get myself to walk on the screen and answer. We each take showers and we wash our shirts in the sink and dry them with the hair dryer in our room, which is long and white instead of dark and gun-shaped. In the bathroom mirror, we stand side by side and look at our reflections. I can see my nipples through the thin cotton of my bra and I don’t feel exposed and I don’t feel ashamed. Marcus’s body is still boyish. His torso is pale and hairless except for the soft ring around his bellybutton and the freckle over his right nipple. With his masked face I think he looks like a wrestler and tell him so.

“What would your wrestling name be?” I ask. “Marcus the Marauder. Marcus the Murderer.”

“Marcus the Monster!”

“Marcus the Monsoon!”

“Rabbits are vicious,” he says.

We laugh and in the mirror our stomachs ripple.

I’m so starved that my body feels like it has been emptied, like I contain nothing but dust. We get dressed and go outside, driven by hunger, and find the same white-faced mob standing on a street corner and passing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and Styrofoam cups filled with cold coffee. The day is the color of slate. We drink the coffee and chew the stale bread. Marcus slips everything under his mask with an expertise that makes it look like a magic trick. These provisions are free and right now anything free feels like a blessing.

When we ask these people if they remember us from the night before, if they remember nearly running us the fuck over, the bright white faces stare back, uncomprehending. When we ask them what they’re doing out here, they tell us that this is their city and they are saving it. When we ask them why they run in the night, they tell us they do it because they are so glad to still be among the living.

Inside the motel we pass a woman cleaning the fake ferns with a sponge, and when she sees our sandwiches, she points the sponge at us and says, “Goddamn those people. They are terrorizing this city.” She tells us the sandwiches are probably poisoned. We each ate two sandwiches apiece and we don’t know what to believe. What if the acrobats are part of some kind of cult? What if they are trying to incite mass suicide? In our room, we sit on a bed and hold our stomachs. We suffer no ill effects.

Calling my mother is the last thing I do before we leave. I pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone. I start pressing the numbers. The phone rings and rings. I count to twelve and hang up.

“No one’s there.”

“Try again,” Marcus says.

The phone rings three times before someone answers. They don’t say anything, but I can hear them breathing on the line. Is this my mother? Does she know who I am?

“Hello,” I say.

There is just breath and breath and breath.

* * *

On the road there are certain things we learn to count on. There are the water fountains with the rotten egg smell and the low-pressure ones that force your lips too close to the spout. The rough brown paper towels we use to clean our faces and necks and armpits and between our legs in the bathrooms, except for when the dispenser is empty and what you want is a wet crumple on the floor. In that case, we use toilet paper or little white napkins or go without. There are the bathrooms that are clean and the ones that look like a tiny apocalypse. In Horse Cave, Kentucky, I see a cardboard core of a toilet paper roll soaked in blood. There’s the thin gas station coffee we doctor with sugar and cream. The vending machines that eat your change and the ones that give you double Cheetos, which feels like cosmic balance. The shifting configuration of the riders, like a party where the pool of guests keeps getting made over, except no one is talking or laughing or having any fun. There is the smell of exhaust, the smell of unclean bodies, the smell of hot dogs roasting on gas station counters, the skin crisped and gleaming, the smell of the tall boys passengers crack open late at night. The road is alive. There are people in rest area parking lots, filling up tanks, spreading maps across hoods. There are Jehovah’s Witnesses handing out pamphlets and telling us that God cares about the individual burden of our suffering. There are cars and pickup trucks and semis rolling alongside us on the highway. Everyone is trying to get somewhere.

27

In Memphis, the bus drops us on the outskirts of the city. We have been riding for nine hours, passing through towns with names like Cattlesberg and Hurricane and Coalton. We are down to seven dollars and fifteen cents.

We passed the Olympia State Forest and signs for Dinosaur World and I thought about the books in the Hospital library, about asteroids and epidemics and continental drift. In Black Rock, Arkansas, we passed a lake with a tiny forest in the center. I looked into the dense dark trees and wondered what kinds of things might be living in there. In a gas station bathroom, I saw a sign that said USE THE RECOVERY POSITION, with a drawing of one person standing over another and rolling them onto their side.

Somewhere in Tennessee, on I-40, the driver pulled onto the shoulder and got out. What is wrong with these drivers? He stood in the cold, staring at the barbed-wire fence and the snowy field beyond it. The wire points on the fence looked like tiny stars. I watched his breath rise above him in white clouds. The passengers cupped their hands and peered out the frosted windows, waiting for something to happen.

Marcus and I rapped the panes. A few people went out and tried to see what was going on. A woman wanted to get the keys and drive the bus herself, to leave this man behind, if that’s what he wanted, but the driver wouldn’t hand over the keys and no one seemed willing to take them by force.

After two hours, the driver got back on the bus and continued down the highway. No one knew what changed within him, why he stopped in the first place or why he decided to keep driving.

Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?

Now the sun is sinking, another night-soaked arrival in a strange place. That is the pattern of our days, not clock time, but the cycles of light and dark. For a while we walk along a river and Marcus tells me about how, before the sickness, he bounced around shelters in Cambridge, played chess for cash in Harvard Square. He beat the mental patients and the teenage geniuses and the punks and the professors. He had an uncanny ability to predict his opponent’s next move. For a while, he belonged to a group at a community center that was supposed to teach its members life skills, but when they got together all they did was stand around and hug each other.

“You mean like sex?” I say, not wanting to imagine all those lost people groping each other on some musty basement carpet.

“No, I mean like this,” he says, and wraps his arms around my shoulders.

In darkness, we climb a steep hill. We find train tracks to follow and hope they will lead us somewhere, to lights, to people, but everything we pass looks deserted. A string of little houses with screened porches and soft, sunken roofs. Impenetrable thickets of bramble and tree. An abandoned barn.

I remember waiting for the T one night, at a stop where the trains went above ground, and seeing a man with a backpack trudging up the tracks, into the distant dark. I shouted “Watch out for the trains!” and felt ridiculous for warning him of such an obvious danger. Didn’t I know the worst dangers weren’t the obvious ones?

We leave the tracks and head in the direction of the barn. We get snagged on roots, brush against the rough trunks of trees. There is no light anywhere around us.

“Fucking shit,” we say.

We are lost. There is no getting away from that. We decide to sleep in the barn. At least it is a structure, with four walls and a roof. We walk through a doorway that is missing its door, into an enormous space as dark as an underground cave or a black hole in outer space or the Hospital at night.

The floor is blanketed in frozen leaves. As we go down, they crunch like tiny bones.

I dream about the Hospital. I’m alone, in one of those white hallways, the window a distant arch at the end. I’m standing under a speaker and the most terrible noise is pouring into me. It is Dr. Bek’s rasping breath, only much louder than before, like a team of hazmatted people are standing around a microphone and speaking into it. In the dream, I have been in this hallway, listening to this noise, for many years. I want to stop the noise, to knock the speaker off the wall, to tear out the wires, but I have no way to do such a thing. I don’t have any of the right skills and that seems like the worst part, my inability to save myself.

When I stop dreaming, I’m grabbing at leaves and daylight is streaming through two coffin-shaped windows and large hawkish birds are perched on the wooden beams above. I can see light coming through the holes in the walls. I hear a rustling in the corners and the wind outside.

I sit up. A pebble falls out of my ear. Leaves are trapped in my hair. My mouth feels like it’s full of gravel. Dirt is stuck to my arms. There is a sloshing in my stomach. One of the hawkish birds swoops down and lands on the ground. It pushes the leaves around and then flies away with a small squirming thing clutched in its beak.

I shake Marcus awake.

We get up. We look around. We touch the walls of the barn, searching for liquid, condensation, melting ice. We are that thirsty. That desperate to get what we need to survive. On the walls, there is no liquid, just dust that sticks to our fingers. It hurts to walk, to bend down, to look up, to breathe. Outside we find small patches of snow and we eat them. I take off my gardening gloves and scoop the ice into my palms and lap at it like a dog. The snow has rocks in it and tastes like dirt.

* * *

When we leave the barn, the afternoon sun is low and fading, like all the color is being slowly sucked out, and we realize we are on the edge of a property. From a distance, we can see an old house on a hill, a two-story with a dormer roof and a sagging wraparound porch. The dark splotches on the roof where shingles are missing look like water curving around land on a map. The white paint is peeling. The front door is knobless. A neon yellow skull has been graffitied in the center. A tall metal frame stands to the left of the house, as though the structure was abandoned mid-renovation.

A young woman is on the porch in a nubby sweater and corduroy pants and rubber boots. I appreciate the soft look of her clothing. On the road softness is something I miss.

There is something strange about her body, something misshapen, and it’s not until we reach the edge of the front yard that I see the white angel wings hanging from her back.

She waves to us, this woman.

We cross the yard, through the mud and slush. We watch the woman pet her wings. We tell the woman our names. We say we’re looking for a place to sleep. We ask if she can help us.

The woman’s name is Darcie. She has freckles on her eyelids. The tips of her front teeth are stained caramel. She lives here with a man, Nelson, and they call this place the Mansion. She tells us we can stay for as long as we like.

“The Mansion always has room,” she says, opening the door.

Inside she gives us water in Mason jars. There’s grit floating in the bottom, but we couldn’t care less. We hold our jars with both hands and gulp the water. I close my eyes and feel the cool slip down my throat. I chew the grit when it gets stuck in my teeth. Exhaustion has brought on strange pains in my face: aches in the jaw, along my hairline, in the spaces between my eyes.

There is no sign of this other person, this Nelson. The Mansion is warm and quiet.

“Where did you come from?” Darcie wants to know.

We’re standing in a dim kitchen, and I can make out a big metal sink and long windows. White candles, burned to waxy nubs, on the sills. An old boxy refrigerator. The door is ajar and I catch the scent of rot.

A blue tile floor streaked with mud, like a sky with a storm rolling in.

“From the west,” we reply.

Darcie rests a fist under her chin, like she’s giving careful thought to our origins, to what it means to have come from the west. Two downy feathers fall from her wings and into the shadows below.

When we ask where she came from, she tells us that she cannot remember.

* * *

Darcie gives us a room on the second floor. This room is empty except for a bare mattress with a white sheet. The floorboards are swollen. The walls are peeling. A window overlooks the backyard, a small sprawl of land surrounded by a halo of leafless trees and then dark woods, the rounded treetops stretching into the beyond. On one wall, we find a series of stick figures drawn in pencil. The figures are taking shits and fucking and choking each other. LIFE WHO NEEDS IT someone has written below them in big jagged letters.

Once we’re alone, the sky turning dark outside, Marcus asks how I’m feeling and I tell him I’m feeling sad.

I sit down on the mattress. “I thought we would have gotten farther by now.” When I left the Hospital I thought I would just keep going and going, all the way to Florida. I didn’t foresee being so thoroughly beaten by the elements, for my mother to still feel so far away.

“Here’s something,” Marcus says. “In a bathroom in West Virginia, I saw a sign telling people to not use toilet water for drinking. There was a drawing of a man dunking his head in the toilet with a big red X over it.”

I laugh and tell him about the recovery position sign I saw in a bathroom, and then he grabs my waist and we take turns rolling each other onto our sides, into the position of recovery. The skin on his arms is cold and gummy. My intestines twist around.

We should be exhausted, tranquilized with sleep, but instead we keep assuming the recovery position. After all, we have so much to recover from. Finally we settle down on the mattress, still quivering with laughter, nearly delirious. We lie on our backs, the sheet tucked under our arms, our feet sticking out. The mattress fabric is printed with pink and green flowers, the stems faded. I pull off the gardening gloves. My fingertips are pruned.

“Right now I don’t feel like I will ever be able to move again,” I tell Marcus.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll feel better tomorrow.”

We fall asleep on our backs, our feet hanging over the edge of the mattress, heels touching the floor. We do not dream.

In the morning, Marcus and I wake curled on the mattress. In our sleep, our bodies have taken on new positions. We are facing each other, legs tucked, full of aches and hunger. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. My stomach makes a rumbling so loud it startles me. The soles of my feet are so blistered and bruised, it looks like they’re evolving into something not quite human, concentric circles of dead skin, bright purple blotches.

My toenails are sharp.

I lie awake for a long time before I feel capable of moving. I face away from the window and watch a black beetle scuttle up the wall and think about how this house could be our recovery position.

We find Darcie at the foot of the stairs. Her hair is long and blonde, dark at the roots, the ends tangled in her angel wings. She wants to know about our dreams, but we tell her that we didn’t dream anything or at least not anything we can remember.

“Just you wait,” Darcie says.

In the Mansion, it is dry. In the Mansion, we have a place to sleep and it does not cost money. There is food. A mushy piece of fruit. A can of cold tomato soup, opened with a pocketknife, the blade dull with rust. On the second floor, a claw-foot bathtub that can be filled with the rainwater Darcie and Nelson collect in black plastic tubs.

Out there we don’t know what will happen to us. The cities are strange, the bus drivers unreliable. We have been temporarily slowed by the needs of the body, the body that doesn’t care that my mother is still far away in Florida, that she is still in need of finding. The body that only cares for food, water, sleep.

In the kitchen, we each eat a piece of brown bread and a sour orange. Marcus peels his orange carefully and eats one wedge at a time. I don’t take off the skin. I bite right into the peel and juice spills down my chin.

After we finish, Darcie tells us that she wants to give us a tour.

In the living room, one side of the wall is papered with gold leaves. The other side is bare plaster, marked with lines of rust and brown clay that look like streaks of shit. Silver lamps, black with tarnish, sit on the floor. A red velvet armchair with a fist-size hole in the seat stands in a corner. The fabric at the bottom of the chair sags. More holes in the floorboards, the edges splintered. In the center of the ceiling, a skylight. The clouds above are gray and swirling. The fireplace is made of beautiful blue marble, the hearth packed with sticks and leaves and ash.

“This house will play tricks on you,” she says.

We keep looking around. Rain clicks against the skylight. The ceiling darkens and swells.

Darcie bends down, picks up the thin string lying on the floor, and pulls. The trap door that opens is the size of a dumbwaiter. She crouches inside it. Marcus and I move toward her, inspecting. Up close her feathers are dingy and frayed.

“See?” she says from inside the door, raising her hands. She is a woman of average size, but her hands are small as a child’s. “Tricks.”

Next we go into the kitchen, to the corner where the walls don’t meet in a smooth line, but are separated by a slim column, like a body with an extra feature: a sixth finger, a surplus molar. There’s a small hook on the wall, something you’d hang a coat on, and when Darcie pulls the hook, the column, which is some kind of mechanized door, slides open. There is the scent of cedar, a wave of dust.

The last thing she shows us is a little alcove off the living room with shelves built into the walls. The shelves are filled with books of all kinds: hardbacks in their dust jackets, grocery store paperbacks, linen-bound ones that make me think of the books in the Psychologist’s bedroom. Marcus and I move around inside the alcove, examining the spines. I pull out a paperback titled Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. On the cover there is a submarine descending into the ocean, into the tentacles of the octopus waiting below. When Darcie turns away, I slip the book into my pocket.

Back in the kitchen, a door slams and a man skids into the room. He looks young, like the rest of us, except his hair and eyebrows have already gone silver. His eyes are quick and violet. I can see blue networks of veins and arteries in his wrists and along his pale throat, evidence of a working body. He’s wearing a poncho made from a black garbage bag, the plastic beaded with rain.

“Nelson,” Darcie says.

Nelson is holding a toy gun. It has a red handle and a metal barrel. He looks at me and then at Marcus, looks carefully at his rabbit face, as though he’s trying to decide which one of us to shoot first.

“These people, they’re going to stay with us for a while.” Darcie moves her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a bird fluffing its feathers. Orange pulp has dried around my lips.

Nelson aims the toy gun at me. “Bang!”

I put my hand over my heart, pretend to fall.

“Cops and robbers,” Darcie says. She smiles and claps. “Nelson loves to play cops and robbers.”

* * *

On that first morning, the four of us sit on the sticky kitchen floor, holding strips of white cloth soaked in rainwater. We shove the cloth into our mouths and scrub our teeth and gums. We don’t say anything. We watch each other disappear into our own strangeness. Hands stretch cheeks, air gushes through nostrils. We scrub and grunt. I can see Marcus’s hand pushing around under his mask. I haven’t cleaned my teeth since I left the Hospital, haven’t done more than swirl tap water around in my mouth. I taste blood on my gums, I feel a warm drip on my bottom lip, but I don’t stop for anything.

28

Darcie and Nelson have much to teach us about survival and we are interested in being taught. They know how to purify the rainwater they collect by boiling it on the gas stove. They show us how to make garbage bag jackets of our own and how to take a bath in the claw-foot tub. The porcelain bottom is padded with rust. The first time I clean myself in there, I look down into the red water and think I’m bleeding.

They pull up weeds and eat them. Their favorites are dandelion and thistle and fat hen. They have learned the hard way about what will make them feel sick and what will make them feel well. In the alcove library, they show us a book with drawings called Wicked Botany. We turn the pages and I see black-and-white illustrations of spade-shaped leaves drawn in meticulous detail, fibrous roots, blossoms dangling from stems like tiny bells.

They seem to know a lot about the state of Tennessee. Shelby County has more horses than any other county in America. Murfreesboro is the geographical center of the state. In Tennessee, there are over three thousand caves. Lake County is the turtle capital of the world. There is a replica of the Parthenon in Nashville.

I memorize these facts about Tennessee and repeat them to myself on the nights I have trouble sleeping — which is every night.

One afternoon, they lead us away from the Mansion, down a wide dirt road that runs behind a water tower and an abandoned trailer park. Someone has painted an enormous red smiley face on the tower. The trailers are being consumed by moss and vine. The windows are rectangles of green fuzz. They look like they’re being absorbed into the earth.

The water tower and the trailer park are surprises in the landscape. In my imagination, we have been situated in the middle of nowhere, with nothing around for many miles. My internal geography adjusts, makes room for these new details.

We have been in the Mansion for three days, time slipping by like a river over stones. In his Laws of the Road, Rick did not mention how long you should stay in any one place before you move on.

On the dirt road, Nelson starts telling us about the twin paradox, one of Einstein’s thought experiments.

“Imagine a pair of twins,” he begins, kicking up dust.

This part is not hard for me to do.

One twin is sent on a journey into outer space. The twin experiences a slowing of time and when he returns, he appears younger than the twin who stayed behind, which is the paradox. But in fact two have become three: the twin who stays home, the twin who leaves, and the twin who comes back. The twin who leaves is not the same twin who returns. That is a physical impossibility. Nelson says the experiment has to do with how we change. We go on a journey and we are never the same person when we come home.

I imagine Current Me sitting next to Stop & Shop Me on an MBTA bus. Current Me looks at her with tenderness, touches her cheek, tucks her hair, her still beautiful hair, behind her ear. There is so much this Stop & Shop Me does not yet know. Together the Mes look out at the other passengers and the construction rising from the ground and the people playing pool in Laundry World and the evangelical church, swollen with song. They stop at a red light and that is when Current Me leans in and whispers, One day all of this will be gone.

“I’m doing my own experiments,” Nelson says.

I’ve gone missing inside myself. I focus on the rhythm of sneakers hitting dirt, the little shocks of energy, and find my way back.

“What kind of experiments?” Marcus is walking beside him, hands deep in his pockets. I notice a dark smudge on his rabbit nose.

“I’m going to find a cure,” Nelson says.

“Is there anything left to cure?” I ask. Deep dirt trenches run along the sides of the road. They look like they’ve been created by a machine.

“There is everything left to cure,” Darcie says.

We walk by a small construction pit. An orange cement truck is parked next to it, along with low stacks of metal beams, yet it seems like the actual construction never started. There is just a cavernous hole in the earth.

We keep going until we come to a small post office, a square brick building with an American flag and a sign that reads MICHIE TN out front. There is nothing else around. No other houses or stores. The window shades are drawn tight.

Is that where we are right now? Michie?

“There are people living in there.” Nelson points at the windows. “People with means.”

“People who aren’t invisible like us,” Darcie says. “We are against people with means.”

Ever wanted to test your own level of invisibility? Write out your obituary and see how many people you are survived by.

We go around to the back of the post office, to the large Dumpster pressed against the brick. We watch Nelson and Darcie climb into the Dumpster and stand knee-deep in trash. Darcie’s wings bob on her back. Nelson fishes out a withered apple and tosses it to Marcus. A plastic bag holding a quarter loaf of bread, the crust spongy with green mold, follows. A jar with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter inside. I get to hold the jar and can already feel the thick nutty paste on my tongue. There is something gummy on the label and little black bugs are crawling through it. They get inside the gardening gloves and nip at my hands.

Nelson finds a pack of sparklers too. The package has a cartoon of a white wolf on the front. He draws a sparkler from the pack and sniffs it, then passes it to Darcie. I think of the slender antenna glowing blue on my mother’s ship, the St. Elmo’s fire.

“Abracadabra.” Darcie waves the sparkler over her head. “Hocus pocus.”

Even when she’s smiling, her eyes are glassy and rolling, like she’s not really thinking about the here but about all the fearful things off in the distance, on the edges of the land.

What kind of spell is she casting?

* * *

That night, we light the sparklers in the backyard. We’re all wearing garbage bag jackets. Underneath the plastic, Darcie’s wings are a dark mass. Nelson ignites the first sparkler with a match, nudges the tip of his against the rest. Four globes of light that make our faces glow. I catch Darcie in profile and for a moment she looks like the girl who attacked me in the bathroom in Mission Hill, but then the light changes and she turns back into herself again.

Tricks, I think.

Nelson is the first to break from the group, yelping and bolting toward the trees. We run around the yard. We slip in the cold mud, leaving behind arcs of gold.

Earlier, on the second floor, I opened the copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The spine creaked. The pages were crusted with water stains. I read: “In the very heart of an extinct volcano, the interior of which has been invaded by the sea, after some great convulsion of the earth. Whilst you were sleeping, Professor, the Nautilus penetrated this lagoon by a natural canal, which opens about ten yards beneath the surface of the ocean.”

A great convulsion of the earth, or at least our American corner of it. Isn’t that what we have all lived through?

I closed the book and stuck my mother’s photo and the postcard between the pages.

In the backyard, I can feel the space between past and future growing larger, like we have been crossing a river by hopping from one little island of rock to another and now the distance between the islands is expanding and we know that if we miscalculate our next jump, if we fall into the water, the river will twist itself around our ankles and drag us under. So for now we are staying still, Marcus and me. Still.

My sparkler has burned down to a black nothing and the heat stings my fingers. I drop it and the light fizzles. The magic is over, at least for tonight. Soon I lose sight of Darcie. Only Marcus and Nelson are still burning. I stand in the massive shadow of the Mansion and watch Marcus cut through the darkness. His mask is a streak of white, his body slender and quick. I hear the zap of his sparkler going out and his rabbit face vanishes, like we are lights that are being turned off one at a time.

As I listen to us move through the yard, the crunch of slush, the sucking sound of shoes on mud, I think about how this is what our childhoods could have been like if it had been all kids and no parents or people pretending to be.

* * *

The twin paradox isn’t Nelson’s only theory. He lives at the very top of the Mansion, in the attic bedroom, a cramped space with a low roof. Up there I see few signs of it being a place where a person actually sleeps. It looks more like a laboratory: cloudy beakers, a long pair of metal tongs, an eyedropper, a cutting knife, goggles scattered across the floor, the lenses scratched and fogged.

A small oval window, like a porthole on a ship, overlooks the gray-green front yard, the grass lightly marbled with snow. From the window I can see the scaffolding. Nelson tells us that he knows the dimensions of this room so well, he can work in here at night, going by feel.

Three white bowling pins and a black ball are jammed into a corner. “Bowling helps me concentrate,” Nelson says when he sees me nudging the ball around with my toe.

“Concentrate on what?” I ask.

“Darcie had the sickness,” he tells us. He’s not wearing his garbage bag jacket, just a white T-shirt, sweat dark around the underarms, and gray pants. I can see that his body has been stripped to the essentials. Every part is sharp and shadow thin. “But I got to her in time. She forgot, but she didn’t die.”

Darcie is sitting in a corner, her angel wings smushed against the wall, and picking mud out from under her fingernails. “It’s true. He found me on the side of the road in Cordova, in Tennessee, and brought me here.”

She gathers the mud on a knuckle. Once she has made a little dark lump, she eats it.

“Darcie is what we call lucky,” Nelson says.

She tells us that the memories had been pouring from her for days, like a chemical you sweat out. She didn’t know how to stop it, how to hold on to what she knew. She didn’t know where she was headed or where she had come from or why she was wearing angel wings or if the road she was walking could even be called a road. Surely she had the sickness. Surely she should have died.

“There are other things that can make you forget.” I look at the horseshoe-shaped burn marks on the floor. Every time someone moves, the boards creak and I imagine the house keeping track of our whereabouts.

“But what are the odds?” Darcie gathers her hair on one side of her neck and pulls it like a rope. “What are the odds of forgetting for some other reason during an epidemic of forgetting?”

“It’s true.” Marcus picks up the tongs. He makes them open and close like a beak. “What she’s saying about odds.”

“In the Mansion, she started to remember.” Nelson taps the side of his skull. “We got the blood flow redirected, got those capillaries snapping again. Got her consciousness back.”

My unconscious mind is very powerful and it wants me to keep living, I do not tell them.

When we ask Nelson what he did before the sickness, he says that person is gone. Not forgotten — just gone. He picks up a pair of goggles and puts them on, like he’s ready to get to work. He moves with the authority of a person who is used to being in charge of other people, while Darcie has the meek manner of someone who has never known what it’s like to have power over another person and maybe not even over herself.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” I bend down to touch a beaker. The inside is crusted with salt.

“We found it in the basement,” Nelson says. “Has Darcie shown you the basement yet?”

Marcus and I shake our heads.

“Darcie loves the basement,” Nelson says. “That’s where she thinks she can talk to God.”

29

Our nights are filled with games.

Here are the rules for cops and robbers: the cops cop and the robbers rob. Marcus and I get to play the robbers, which I like. We’re naturals in the role. Have I ever been a natural at anything before? We run away from Darcie and Nelson and the toy gun, screaming. It feels good, all that running and screaming. Sometimes Marcus grabs my hand and I think we’re escaping for real, to a place where we will find my mother. I imagine us running outside and the woods parting and spotting her island among the trees like a pearl in an oyster, waiting to be found.

When we get caught, Darcie and Nelson press us against the wall and twist our arms behind our backs. I taste the chalkiness of the plaster, get dust up my nose. It is the best kind of capture, because nothing happens; there are no consequences for our stealing. No stern warnings, no fines, no jail. We are released into the night, to do it all over again.

Hide-and-go-seek, that’s another one. Darcie always wins hide-and-go-seek. We check every room in the Mansion, all the secret compartments, until we finally give up and tell her to come out. If she doesn’t come out right away, Nelson gets impatient and starts banging around the house, slamming doors, kicking over carpets, tearing up and down the stairs. In the dark, his silver hair glows. He smacks the wall and we hear plaster crumbling. He tells her to come out right fucking now or she can just forget about ever being fully cured.

“I was in the basement,” Darcie always says, even though we’ve already looked down there.

In the Mansion, Marcus and I are starting to become very curious about this basement.

There is no electricity, but there is an oil lamp that we light and carry around with us at night — or rather, Nelson carries it around. “Whoever has the light has the power,” he sings. Sometimes, after the games end, we drink the alcohol Nelson has cooked up in his lab. He says it’s made from yeast and table sugar, but I only know that it sloshes around in a green bottle and burns when I drink it. It smells sweet like the Robitussin and after it goes down, faces turn into bright blurs, like the world is a wet canvas someone can’t stop touching.

In the Mansion, our nights are long. We have started going in reverse: winter is leaving, yet our window of daylight keeps growing smaller. During these windows, we are busy. We are busy stomping through the woods, pulling up dandelion and chickweed and creeping charlie. Thistles with thorny leaves and soft purple flowers. We are busy measuring our water supply. We are busy suffocating cockroaches by coating them with the lye Nelson stores in his lab. The roaches flop over onto their backs, tiny legs kicking. We watch until the kicking stops. We are busy standing in the Dumpster and picking out what the people with means do not want. We go to bed near dawn and wake just before sunset. We are turning nocturnal. We are no longer in sync with the outside world, with the patterns of nature, but aligned with the rhythms of this house.

* * *

As it turns out, Darcie doesn’t think she can talk to God in the basement.

In the basement, there is a steel door and behind that door, a tunnel. The floor is cool dirt. The walls are dark and smooth. The ceiling is rounded and just high enough to walk upright. You can go thirty steps before the tunnel ends, cut off by a stone wall. The wall is old and the rocks are coming loose. No one knows what’s on the other side. It is in this tunnel that Darcie hears the voice of her mother, who is dead.

I wonder if the people who built this house intended the tunnel to be a safe room or fallout shelter, a place to go when the world ends.

“Dead from the sickness?” I ask Darcie, who shakes her head.

“She died a long time ago.”

She tells me and Marcus about the tunnel in the living room. Nelson is upstairs, working in the attic. We can hear the bowling ball knocking down pins. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Darcie is balled inside the trap door, her chin resting on her knees. Her hair is tucked behind her ears, her roots black and oily. It’s dusk. I look up and see tiny crystalline stars through the skylight.

“How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you hear her?”

She shrugs. Her wings rub the floor.

“It’s private,” she says. “It’s mine.”

“My mother is gone,” I say, choosing to not elaborate on what I mean by gone.

She looks at us. She chews her upper lip.

“His too,” I add, nodding at Marcus.

“Like I said, it’s my tunnel.” Darcie sniffs. “Besides, it’s not as simple as walking in and saying hello. There’s an entire ritual.”

“We can learn,” I tell her.

“You can watch.” She pauses, looks across the room. “And that’s as close as you’re going to get.”

In the basement, the ritual starts with Darcie putting four drops of a sweet-smelling liquid under her tongue. It’s something Nelson has given her, to help her remember, to help her become fully cured. On her own, she discovered that if she takes the drops and goes into the tunnel, she can hear things. Like voices. Like her mother’s voice.

“The first time it was an accident,” she tells us. “I didn’t even know there was a tunnel down here. I was just doing what Nelson said I should do. I was just wandering around and trying to remember.”

The liquid in the eyedropper is clear as water. It looks like a serious drug, like GHB or ketamine, which I have never taken before, because being dead and wanting to feel dead are not the same thing. In Mission Hill, I heard stories about girls getting drugged with GHB and waking up half-naked in backyards and in parks and in parking lots, always outdoors it seemed, only they didn’t call it GHB. It was Cherry Meth or Easy Lay or Grievous Bodily Harm.

“Hm.” I flick a finger at the eyedropper. “I’ve seen the end of that movie.”

“What movie?” Darcie says.

I’m scared of this liquid, but just because it is not something I would have taken before, in the land where there was an endless supply of cough syrup and no mother to reach, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be willing to do it now.

“You sure you don’t want some company in there?” I do the same finger-flick at the steel door.

“In the tunnel, there is no such thing as company,” Darcie says.

She squeezes the liquid into her mouth. Next she takes off her clothes. She pulls her sweater over her head, unzips her pants. She has nothing on underneath. She doesn’t blush or turn away. She is not shy around us. I can see the fine bones in her back and the strange shape of her kneecaps. Her nipples are pinpricks of brown.

It’s cold in the basement. Cobwebs sag from the ceiling like dead skin.

We can’t help it. We stare at Darcie.

“I told you there was a ritual,” she says, as though that explains everything.

We watch her open the steel door and slip inside the tunnel. She’s gone for a long time. I look at Marcus and imagine him naked in the basement. I see his long thighs and the tight mass of his balls. The strangeness of a masked face against all that hairless skin. I pick up the eyedropper and look at the residue inside. It smells like nothing.

“I want to go in there,” I say to Marcus.

“I remember my mother well enough,” he says. “I don’t need to hear her voice.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say.

In a corner, we find a plastic baby doll with a missing arm and a dark bow-shaped mouth. We take turns putting on Darcie’s wings. I walk around the basement with the weight of them on my back. We wait for the door to open and for Darcie to come out and tell us all about what she’s heard in there.

When the door finally creaks open and Darcie spills into the basement, she’s crying. Her hair is stuck to her cheeks. She crosses her arms over her stomach and shivers.

“What’s wrong?” we want to know.

I pick up her sweater and try handing it to her. Above us there is the rumble of falling pins. “Did you not hear her?”

“Sometimes you don’t hear what you wish you would,” Darcie says.

* * *

One night, in the living room, Darcie tells us about this idea she has for a city with only one building. When we point out that a city with only one building can’t really be considered a city, she says we don’t understand.

We are taking turns drinking from the green bottle. The oil lamp is stationed on the floor and I watch an ant crawl through the circle of light. It looks injured.

“Everything cities have would exist in this one building.” Darcie reaches into the fireplace. She finds a stick and starts drawing her city in the air. A large moth touches down on a lamp shade, then flies over to a window and beats the glass with its wings.

“The building would be so tall, it would reach the stratosphere. That’s between the troposphere and the mesosphere, in case you didn’t know. It would hold millions of people, no, billions, billions of people, and roads and schools and police stations and museums and train stations and airports and restaurants.”

“That sounds crowded,” Marcus says.

“It’s a stupid idea for a city.” Nelson reaches for the bottle, his pale arm thrusting into the light.

Babylon, I think, imagining a stone tower ascending into the clouds. Where have I heard about Babylon before?

“No one would ever be lost,” Darcie says, as though she hasn’t heard our misgivings. She gets the bottle next.

“Imagine this instead,” Nelson tells us, taking over.

He tells us to imagine getting so tangled up inside yourself that you would do anything for a way out. To imagine the lure of forgetting, of wiping it all away. He tells us that what separates us from animals is not logical thought but our ability to set our own traps. What if we could get away from all that? None of the infected remember how they contracted the sickness — how could they? The sickness was designed to erase who we were. Who could say how it all started?

“It started with Clara Sue Borden.” I slurp from the green bottle and feel the words turn to syrup in my mouth. “Everyone knows that. It started with California.”

“Imagine,” Nelson says, raising a finger. “That this is something we did to ourselves.”

Rain beats the skylight. I hear scratching in the walls.

“Take Darcie here,” he continues. By now Darcie has forgotten all about her city with only one building. She is lying on the floor. The tops of her wings are brushing her ears. Her mouth is open. Her eyes look wet and empty. “The trick was getting her so far outside herself that she was able to stand back and see that she could still remember, could always remember. That she could see that she was well.”

On the floor, Darcie does not look well.

“I went to an official place, to try and talk to official people, but no one wanted to hear about it.”

“Where?” I put the green bottle down. I feel a shiver of curiosity.

“Where what?”

“Where was this official place?”

“Far away. Someplace far away and cold.” Nelson claws at his arms. His skin is dotted with little red sores. “Those official people didn’t want what I knew, so now Darcie gets to have it.”

She rolls over on her back, crushing her wings. Feathers shoot out from underneath her arms.

Nelson starts talking about the rash of postepidemic suicides. Arlington Memorial Bridge, Tobin Bridge, Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. Bayonne Bridge, where the jumper self-immolated, so that when she leaped she was a burning ball of light, so there would be zero chance of survival. He tells us the sickness is over and everywhere people are using bridges not for crossing but for jumping and what are we supposed to think about that.

“So, as I am illustrating, there is still a lot to be cured.”

The bottle is almost empty. Nelson spins it around in his hands.

“How have you done such a good job of keeping up with the news?” I want to know.

I don’t want to admit that I’ve been thinking about all the suicides and disappearances too, trying to calculate how much damage a person can take before it becomes unsurvivable.

“The people with means,” Darcie mumbles from the floor. “They play their radio way too loud.”

Nelson tells us about his old job, at a facility that cared for people who didn’t belong in a hospital, but didn’t belong on their own either. Assisted living, you could call it. I wonder if that’s the kind of place Ms. Neuman ended up in.

At this facility, they had a patient who woke every morning coated in bruises. The doctors checked her out and worked up her blood; no one could understand the cause. The facility installed a camera in her room, thinking they might catch one of their own staff mistreating this patient, but instead on the footage they watched this woman get up in the middle of the night and ram her body into the bed posts, the dresser corners, the closet door. The whole time she was doing it to herself.

I think of the cutters in the homes, the girls who sliced themselves up in the night and came to breakfast with long red cuts on the undersides of their arms, the skin hot and raised. Those were the girls who wanted to get noticed, to show off how much pain they could take. The ones who didn’t wore long-sleeved shirts in the summertime and used loose razor blades to sever the skin between their toes.

I think about those girls and Dr. Bek and the hospital in Oslo, about how it all connects back to the unconscious mind.

Nelson finishes the bottle. He stands and steps out of the light. I raise the lamp and watch him do one perfect cartwheel.

I keep holding up the lamp. I feel myself melt into the floor.

He lands light on his feet. He takes a small, swooping bow.

“Imagine,” he says, “that we are just a nation of people with a deep desire to die.”

* * *

In our room on the second floor, alone with Marcus, I open the book and read to him: “The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.”

Terrestrial, I keep thinking, still woozy from the green bottle. The word feels strange inside my brain.

Is the sea still everything to my mother? Is she still pure and healthy?

“Yes,” Marcus says, and I realize I’ve been speaking aloud.

Marcus has started adding to the drawings on our bedroom wall, only in his drawing there are no people. He uses a pencil he borrowed from Nelson’s lab. From the mattress, I watch him sit alongside the wall, like he’s in a canoe, and squeeze the pencil tight. Next to the person taking a shit, he is sketching a sailboat. It is empty of passengers and floating on waves shaped like teeth.

I have gotten used to him sleeping next to me, gotten used to the weight and warmth of another body. He smells like a city after a rain. His left foot jerks when he dreams. Sometimes we wake with our legs twisted together or our hands touching, damp and warm, or with his rosy rabbit lips pressed against the back of my neck. Every night we are close, but I am his sister still.

When I’m alone in the Mansion, I find myself standing at the top of the basement steps. I think about the cold and the nets of cobwebs and Darcie filling the eyedropper with a liquid that has no color and no smell. I think about how Cherry Meth sounds like it could be candy and how the Mission Hill girls said there was a stretch of time when it felt glorious, like someone had given them an amazing gift and they were going to dream forever. How can Darcie be convinced? I look at the dark stairs and wonder what it would be possible for me to hear down there, to remember.

* * *

I have the dream about me and my mother swimming in the ocean. I smell grass. There is no land, no fear, no limit to how long we can hold our breath — same as before. Only this time my mother swims up behind me and lashes her arm around my chest and hauls me under the water. Suddenly I have limits. Suddenly my air is running out. I twist and I kick. I bite her muscled forearm. I try to get loose, to turn in the water and see her face or what her face has been replaced with. She holds me under until the shadows at the bottom of the sea start rising toward me. I feel the cold on the soles of my feet and when I wake my feet are cold like they’ve been soaked in ice and I’m breathing fast and in the dark of our room it’s Marcus who has lashed his arm around me. He is holding me as tight as my mother did in my dream, only he is saying, “Easy easy,” and I know he isn’t trying to sink me but bring me up.

* * *

One week it feels like spring outside and our games move into the yard, a race through the woods behind the Mansion, the halo of bare trees the starting point, the creek at the bottom of the slope the finish. We line up in the shadow of the house and Nelson shouts, “Go!” and we all take off. The slush is melting, uncovering the world that has been sleeping beneath, a vast map of root and mud and branch and leaf and weed. Nelson is fast, and for a while he’s right beside me, but then something in me shifts and I’m gone. My steps grow longer. I feel my body gaining speed. I bounce through the mud, over fallen logs. I smack against the ferns. I skid downhill. I leave everyone behind.

I don’t stop when I hit the creek. I splash through and continue up the bank. At the top of a small rise, I finally stop and turn around. Nelson is sloshing through the creek. In the distance, I can see the pale flicker of Darcie’s wings. I wait to see Marcus winding through the trees, wait for the white flash of his mask, but he stays invisible.

Nelson comes up the rise first. He bends over and grabs his knees, gasping.

“You weren’t supposed to win,” he says after he gets his breath. His sneakers are slick with mud.

“You should have run faster,” I say back.

I am still looking for Marcus. I forget about Nelson. I stand tall on the rise and make Xs with my arms.

“Where is he?” I ask Darcie as she climbs the rise, struggling under the weight of her wings. She says that she doesn’t know, that he was ahead of her and then she lost sight of him. She thought he would be up here by now, waiting with the rest of us.

I stop waving. I pull my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands.

“I’m the slowest.” She holds up her palms. “I can’t be held responsible.”

I remember one of the Pathologist’s meditations: A PANICKED HEART IS NOT A WELL HEART.

I try to listen.

We wait for the sound of footsteps moving through the trees. We wait to see a figure crossing the creek, the water spraying silver around his ankles. I pace on the rise. I chew my nails. No one comes.

“Uh-oh,” Darcie says.

I run back into the woods. I weave around the trees like I’m on an obstacle course. I race around the trucks, kicking up leaves. I fall over the roots. Fuck the Pathologist and his meditations, because now the panic is a cold burn in the pit of my stomach and I can feel it poisoning me, making my heart unwell. I reach into bushes. I look behind fallen logs. The land feels emptier than it did before and I have this terrible feeling that I have lost him, that I have lost Marcus, all because I didn’t stay with him, all because I decided I wanted to be the fastest, to win, and now he has disappeared into some unfindable place. I say his name and then I call his name and then I scream his name, because my voice has to be loud enough to reach into that unfindable place and pull him out.

The woods are getting darker and I am running wildly and I don’t know how I will ever stop with Marcus in that unfindable place until I run right into something solid. The force knocks me onto the cold ground, wind pushed out. I touch my forehead and feel the wet of blood. Two figures are standing over me, watery, like I’m looking through the glass bottom of a boat. Behind them I see a tall tree. I squirm on my back. All language is trapped in my throat. They kneel beside me, one on either side, and touch the blood on my forehead and tell me that the woods will never give me what I want if I don’t know how to ask.

Darcie and Nelson take me back to the Mansion. I thought it was the middle of the night, but when I look up I see that the sky is starting to fade into dawn. I don’t want to go back to the house, I want to keep looking, but Nelson insists that to find is not an act of will, but an act of submission.

“The trick to finding is to stop looking.” He is leading me by the elbow. His grip is not gentle. I want to shake free, but don’t trust myself to walk on my own. The energy in my body wants only to charge through the trees and to scream and to bleed.

“What bullshit,” I say to Nelson. “What absolute bullshit.”

To be looked for is to matter.

Every girl on every missing persons flyer has mattered more than me.

“Think what you want,” he says, squeezing. The blood on my forehead is drying into a sticky red line.

In the living room, we discover Marcus sitting in front of the fireplace and I feel the burn in my stomach turn hot. He has been right here, in a very findable place! How could he have left me alone in the woods? I get away from Nelson. I stomp my feet and plaster slides down the wall and makes white poofs on the floor, like tiny bombs are detonating.

“What’s the matter with you?” The terror I felt in the woods, how can I even begin to explain that to him. “I thought my fucking heart was going to stop.”

Marcus sits with his shoulders rounded, like a child in time-out. He tilts his head, so I can see the white edge of his mask, and pushes the stuffing around inside his coat.

“I don’t like races,” he says without turning around.

I feel Darcie’s eyes on me. She runs her tongue over her stained front teeth. She smoothes her feathers.

“Maybe the tunnel has something to teach you after all,” she says.

30

I should be cold in the basement, but after the eyedropper I feel warm inside. I undress in front of Darcie and Marcus, stepping out of my jeans, wrestling out of my sweatshirt. That moment when the sweatshirt comes over my head, the seconds of blindness followed by the return of sight, feels like another kind of passage. I do it all slowly. I want them to see me, to remember.

Darcie watches. She pulls a feather out of her wings and chews the quill. Marcus stares at the doll with the missing arm.

On the road, the weight has fallen away. I’m surprised at how small I am without my clothes, board straight except for the bulges of breast and belly. I pinch my collarbone and the sharp lines of my hips. I feel the veins on my stomach.

The liquid has no aftertaste. It disappears on my tongue. I try to think Cherry Meth and not Grievous Bodily Harm.

Darcie leads me into the tunnel. She closes the door behind me. I start walking. My toes grind into the dirt. In the narrowness of the tunnel, I begin to feel thirsty and dizzy and like I am not still inside a house but wandering into some distant land.

A wave nearly knocks me down. A wave of what, I’m not sure, but it makes me hot and sick. I stop walking. My stomach lurches. I want to get close to the ground and put my head between my knees, but the cold of the dirt drives me away.

What if all of this is wrong? What if we have gotten lost?

I can imagine these questions, but I am in no way equipped to answer them, because my brain is a blue jellyfish that has crawled out through my ear and is hovering somewhere along the roof of the tunnel, happy to finally be free of the body.

“Come back here,” I say to the jellyfish. I snatch at the air above and scrape my knuckles on the top of the tunnel.

Echoes.

Deeper inside, the cold hits. I start to shiver. My teeth clank together. The cut on my forehead pulses. I feel a sharp ache in the bone, like something is trying to burrow into the soft matter. Grit on my heels. I want to turn around, to run back to the door, but it’s like the path behind me has disintegrated and now the only way to go is forward.

I reach the end and touch the stone and the empty place where a stone used to be. The blue jellyfish brain returns for a moment, the tentacles twisting around my hair, before floating away again. I turn and find that the path back is still real and solid and I picture Darcie and Marcus standing behind the steel door, waiting.

I’m halfway there when I hear the voice — faint at first, like the tendrils of language you catch through static on a radio. I stop walking. I listen to the gradual swell of sound. The voice is singing something. It sounds like a nursery rhyme. I make out the words “billy goat” and “ax” and “wooden leg.”

I smell burning rubber. Another waves comes.

I lose all sense of the minute and the hour, become trapped inside some strange pocket of time, like the watchtower with the stopped hands that Marcus saw from a bus window. I try to find the source of the singing, but it’s everywhere, in front and behind and on my skin and in the air and in my plasma. There is no getting away from it and I’m not even sure I want to get away, because maybe this is my mother speaking and maybe I will want to crawl inside this voice and live there forever.

My high keeps stretching on. I feel vibrations under my skin. My eyes are running, but in a way that almost feels good, like a toxin is being released.

“Don’t leave,” I say in the tunnel, reaching into the emptiness in front of me.

The voice disappears. Like my mother, it doesn’t give a damn what I want.

* * *

In the basement, I lean over and vomit on the floor. My body acts without warning, a sneak attack. The liquid splatters up the naked insides of my legs. Marcus throws my black sweatshirt over my shoulders.

“What did you give me?” I cry out to Darcie.

She is supposed to go in the tunnel next. She still has her clothes on, but from the look in her eyes, the expanding pupils, I can tell that she has already swallowed the liquid.

She stands in front of me, on the edge of the vomit. She grabs my chin and lifts my face, so we’re looking each other in the eye. “What have you been eating in the woods?” she says back.

I’m squatting and hunched, my lips wet. “Nothing you haven’t been eating.”

She lets go of my face and steps away, disgusted. Now her basement is going to smell. I wipe my mouth. Another wave is coming. I clutch at my stomach and feel something move inside me.

* * *

I keep going into the tunnel. Every time, I hear the singing. Every time, it fades into nothing. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Once Darcie comes out crying so hard, she starts hiccupping. Marcus and I crowd around her and I pull her naked body close and feel her jerk in my arms, like something is trying to kick its way out.

Marcus has become a kind of facilitator. He folds our clothes and screws the eyedropper on the vial and waits on the other side of the door for whatever we bring back with us. I wonder what he and Darcie talk about when they’re alone and waiting on me. I wonder if she asks to see his face and if he shows her and if they come up with their own theories of the sickness, their own ideas about who or what is to blame.

“I’m scared of rabbits. Aren’t you scared of rabbits?” I heard Darcie say to him once.

“Rabbits are afraid of everything,” he replied. “That’s what makes them dangerous.”

Away from the tunnel, “billy goat” and “ax” and “wooden leg” keep playing in my mind. I arrange and rearrange the words like puzzle pieces, wait for them to start making sense. I lie on the mattress and smell that grass scent and look at my mother’s photo and try to remember. I am moved by the idea of her singing to me, but troubled by the question that must follow: why did she stop?

Sometimes, when I’m in the tunnel, I can picture her so clearly, I trick myself into thinking she’s right there, standing against the stone wall, and all I need to do is reach out and touch her.

If I think about the tunnel for too long, the Psychologist walks into the scene, with his electrodes and his Plácido Domingo records, and wrecks everything. These two people don’t belong together, I try to tell my memory, my unconscious mind, but it never listens and I have to put my mother’s photo away. I stay on my back and press my stomach, searching for the source of those distressing waves, and listen to the pipes in the Mansion groan.

The liquid from the eyedropper is not at all like guzzling Robitussin in the bathroom of the Stop & Shop. It makes the laws of gravity disappear. It makes my brain a blue jellyfish. It doesn’t blur the world, but vanishes it. I understand what those girls in Mission Hill meant when they talked about thinking they were going to dream forever, if that kind of absence can be called a dream.

In the Mansion, on my lesser days, I think I want to dream forever too.

* * *

In our room, on the second floor, Marcus and I come up with our own games to play.

A new version of hide-and-go-seek: we hide Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea around the bedroom and close our eyes and guess where it is. Before we guess we are supposed to relax our thoughts, to not think about where the object might be but feel it. We are supposed to find its energy and follow that current with our mind. Does it feel hidden under the mattress? Does it feel hidden in a corner? Does it feel hidden in a person’s hands? Does it feel sweaty? Does it feel hidden outside the window? Does it feel cold? I guess right 50 percent of the time, because there are only so many places to hide the book.

Once I pretend my mother is hiding somewhere in our room. I shut my eyes and try to feel her energy. Is she under the sheet? Standing in the corner? Behind the door? Is she sitting in the windowsill, admiring the shapes of the trees? Is she underwater or on land? Is she anywhere near me?

* * *

The next time I’m in the tunnel, I hear the twins.

At first, everything is the same, dark and strange and cold, but then instead of the singing, Christopher is there, or his voice is there, and telling me all about the origins of my name. Old French and Latin, popularized by Puritans in the seventeenth century. They believed it meant to be “joyful in the Lord.”

“Are you joyful in the Lord?” It sounds like he’s speaking from the bottom of a stairwell, his voice tinny and small.

I stop. I can’t go forward or back. The path around me is disintegrating again.

Where are you? I want to ask. What’s it like there?

“Everything was okay at first,” Sam says, and I wonder how I asked the question without asking the question. “But now.” He stops and I know he’s waiting for his brother to finish his sentence, like he used to in the Hospital.

“But now,” Christopher says, “we are just so bored.”

31

The grand obituary, that is another game. We play it in bed at night, when we should be sleeping. We don’t share it with Darcie and Nelson. Here are the rules: we make up a name. This is the person who is getting the obituary. We go back and forth, adding detail after detail, until we have made the grandest obituary imaginable.

“Erica Hall,” I begin.

“Of Dover, Massachusetts,” Marcus says.

“At one hundred and thirteen years of age.”

“Passed away peacefully in her sleep, in a room overlooking the sea.”

“She battled no diseases. She felt very satisfied with life.”

“She felt she got plenty of time.”

“She is survived by three daughters and nine grandchildren.”

“She was the mayor of Dover and during her tenure she did everything right.”

“She put Dover on the map. Dover would not be Dover without Erica Hall.”

“She fed the homeless.”

“She believed in God.”

“She was a champion tennis player.”

“She traveled the world. To Africa, even.”

“She will live inside the hearts of all Doverians forever.”

I think about an obituary I once read in the newspaper, written by a woman who knew she was dying, so instead of leaving it to someone else, she wrote out her own, to be published after she was gone. In the obituary, she talked about how for a long time she was angry about dying, since she was only fifty and never smoked and it all seemed too soon, but by the time she wrote her obituary she wasn’t angry anymore. All she wanted was to share what she had learned about life.

I still remember the last lesson on her list: death will always take us by surprise.

In this game, Marcus and I are not allowed to use our own names. We will never be the recipients of a grand obituary.

My mother might.

* * *

The next time we’re all in the basement together, Darcie goes into the tunnel first. Marcus and I are sitting on the floor, our backs against the wall. I’m anxious for my turn to take the drops. I rest my head on Marcus’s shoulder. I roll my tongue around in my mouth. A lump of nausea grows in my stomach. We don’t hear Darcie moving in the tunnel, don’t hear the door opening, and even though there are no clocks in the Mansion, no way to be certain about the time, we start to feel sure she’s been gone for many hours.

We crack open the metal door. It feels wrong to enter the tunnel clothed and clear-headed, to go against Darcie’s rituals. To interrupt whatever it is she might be doing. The light from the basement illuminates the opening of the tunnel and I can see little black bugs squirming on the floor. We lean inside. We call Darcie’s name. There are no echoes; the tunnel swallows the sound of us.

We slam the door. We hear footsteps above and shoot up the dusty staircase. I’m thinking we’re going to have to tell Nelson that Darcie is no longer in the tunnel, that she has vanished into that unfindable place or maybe her mother’s voice has eaten her or maybe she’s had too much Grievous Bodily Harm and is collapsed by the wall with the stones hanging out like loose teeth and we were just too chickenshit to go in there and find her.

Nelson is in the living room, wearing his goggles. He is kneeling in front of the fireplace, trying to get a fire going. After it catches, he picks up a pair of tongs and uses them to push a beaker into the heat.

He isn’t the only one in the living room. Darcie is there too, fully dressed, her wings on her back.

“It’s going to rain soon,” she says.

We stop in the doorway. I grab on to Marcus’s arm. I shake his jacket sleeve. His rabbit face bobs. We saw her go into the tunnel. We waited on the other side of the door. No one came out.

“How did you get up here?” I ask.

She turns and looks at us like she doesn’t know who we are.

I hear a crackling in the fireplace. I smell burning leaves. The room is suddenly very warm.

I watch Darcie by the window. I watch her tap her finger against the glass. I wonder if the real Darcie is still somewhere in that tunnel, if the woman who has materialized in the living room isn’t even her, but some kind of double.

* * *

Darcie is right about the weather. It pours rain for the rest of the day. Upstairs I sit on the floral mattress and listen to water drip on the floor and keep reading about the sea.

I remember my mother speaking on another video I found during an Internet Session, the feeling of her voice being branded into my memory: In another life, I could have been an oceanographer. I love the sea. In another life, I could have been a pirate. I have a mercenary side.

Do I have a mercenary side too? I think I must, with all that stealing.

In our bedroom, I list the things I still do not know about myself.

Later I try to match the voice that lives in my memory to the voice I’ve been hearing in the tunnel, but one is a speaking voice and one is a singing voice and how can I possibly compare those two things?

I look up and Darcie is standing in the doorway. I put the book down.

She sits next to me, her wings drooping over the edge of the mattress. I stroke the soft feathers. She smells of mildew and I know that I probably smell that way too, like something damp and old. I check for signs that it’s really her — the freckles on her eyelids, the stained front teeth — but I don’t get far before she starts telling me about her mother.

“I remember everything about her now,” she says.

When Darcie was a child, her mother would leave her alone for days, and when she returned, the scent of smoke trapped in her hair, she would say that she had met a little girl who was a far better little girl than Darcie. It’s a miracle I ever came back for you, she would say. Why should I want to come back to a lesser little girl?

“I’m cured or getting close to it.” She lies down beside me. She squints and tries to slip an index finger in my mouth. I press my teeth together, blocking her. Her skin has a bitter taste.

No one has ever touched my teeth before.

“How did you get out of the tunnel?” I ask. “Where did you go?”

“I don’t know.” She pulls her hand away. Her face darkens. She looks like she’s about to cry. “I was there and then I wasn’t.”

Fragments of the song drift through me. I can’t decide if Darcie is lying or telling the truth. If this house is a perfectly normal house and she is the one who likes to play these tricks.

My mother’s photo is between us on the mattress. Darcie picks it up.

“Who is this?” she asks.

“I’m still figuring that out.”

“I don’t ever want to go down there again,” she says, still looking at the photo.

32

A list of things the girl hates about Allston: the old Twin Donut sign; Frederick Law Olmsted’s Ringer Playground, where sometimes people get murdered; the frozen yogurt place on Brighton Ave. that is always out of vanilla; the martial arts center on Harvard Ave. where people who are not her get to learn about self-defense.

* * *

The girl stands on the Psychologist’s bedroom floor. She is not wearing any clothes. What are clothes? she sometimes thinks, to try to make it all feel more normal. If clothes do not exist in this world, how can she be expected to wear them?

He is kneeling in front of her and dabbing white electrodes on her skin. Where have all these electrodes come from? There’s one on each nipple, one on her knee, a constellation of them on her stomach, all round and cold. The Psychologist is dressed as usual, in his khaki pants and blue collared shirt. His socks are striped like the coat of a tiger. She remembers the wing-shaped sweat marks on his stomach. She remembers his hot rotten breath.

“One hundred billion neurons,” he tells her. “All of them have to be trained.”

She is older than she was the last time she saw herself, but not as old as she will be on the farm in Walpole. This is the in-between.

They are alone in the house. The room is silent. There is no Spanish singing, no Plácido Domingo, and she almost misses him. She misses the familiarity as they move into this strange and terrifying new phase.

The first time they did it this way, he took off her clothes one piece at a time. Her socks were the last to go.

His glasses keep sliding down his nose. He slips an electrode inside her. He sits back on his heels, wipes his forehead with his wrist. This stage is finished. He goes to his computer and she waits for the tiny pulses. Forget her mind. She waits to see what this will do to her body.

A whale sound comes on. She has heard the same wet moans and snorts on a marine life video she saw in school. He tells her she is controlling the sound with her mind. He tells her to keep thinking about the happy thing. To do as he has taught her.

She imagines her hands batting at a ball, trying to keep it high in the air.

Even after the electrodes are peeled away and her clothes returned, she knows the evidence of these sessions will remain; it will cling to her, it will never leave, and there will be no other option except to live her life exactly the way she will end up living it, with a memory that is like a tunnel where you can only get so far before you are blocked by a wall.

One day she will knock that wall down. One day she will be ready.

For months they do this and he tells her that her brain is being forever changed and she believes him. She can feel it happening.

Here is one way she is changing: she is being trained to believe happiness is not real, but a thing that exists only to cover up the ugly.

Here is another way: color is starting to look different — the grass, the sky, the red Twin Donut sign she hates. More precisely, color is disappearing. When she looks at the sky, the borders are a white fuzz, like a drawing someone has started to erase.

* * *

When they are in their separate rooms at night, she hears the blare of his TV. She hears the action movie actors shouting and the bombs exploding and the screeching car chases — Doesn’t this keep his parents awake? Why don’t they complain? — and later when she finds herself living in a Hospital, when she hears people scream in the night, instead of What the fuck? a small part of her will think, There is something familiar here.

What kind of upbringing does it take for any part of being hospitalized in the middle of nowhere during an epidemic of historic proportions to feel at all familiar?

Her kind.

Something else about this girl: when she is older she will forget the cautions against the burning stove and the steaming soups and the busy streets and being outside after a certain hour of the night; instead of warnings she will remember heat singeing her fingertips and the tip of her tongue. She will remember the whoosh of the car coming around a corner, into the space that held her seconds ago. She will never wait for cross signs or for anything to cool or put her seat belt on. She will stand on the edges of T platforms, in easy reach of a homicidal pusher or a suicidal impulse. She will forget her coat in the dead of winter.

She will forget all the warnings, because another small part of her is always thinking, What else can you do to me? Who knew how important all these small parts would turn out to be.

Another thing: one evening, when this girl is all grown up, she will see a woman with a child on the T. An ordinary sight, but it is rush hour and the passengers are all pressed together and somehow this woman has put herself between the child and the bodies of these strangers. The child’s face is pressed against the woman’s stomach. Her tiny fingers are hooked around her belt loops. The T stops and more passengers get on and the woman pulls the child closer and covers her with her coat.

The grown-up girl will see this and feel a rage that could shake the train right off the tracks, into the river below.

* * *

Once he takes the girl to Revere Beach. It is warm outside, but not yet summer. May. She is supposed to be in school, but he explains that he talked to her teachers and got permission. He says that he knows all the teachers at her school.

In the car, he lists the things they will find at Revere Beach: kites shaped like dolphins, chocolate ice cream, roast beef sandwiches, hungry seagulls.

They keep the windows down. They listen to a baseball game on the radio. The thunder of the crowd. The clink of a bat striking a ball. He does not say why he is bringing her to the beach, if it is a reward or another part of his experiment or if it has something to do with her changing brain.

“Will Plácido Domingo be there?” she asks.

He laughs and changes the station.

A folk song comes on. The rhythm is soothing but there are words like “ax” in the song that are not soothing at all.

Through the windshield, the sky has that faded look.

On the way, they stop at a drugstore and he buys her a purple bathing suit with a ruffled waist, the first bathing suit she has ever owned.

At the beach, he tells her that he doesn’t want to go into the ocean. He doesn’t like to swim. He just wants to watch her out there, in her brand-new bathing suit. He sits in the hot sand, in his pants and one of his sea-colored polos. He wraps his arms around his knees.

She swims out. The farther she goes, the more his figure looks like a small, sad lump, like something forgotten on the shore. She can only see the vague shape of his body. She can’t see his face. He begins to lose his power over her.

She’s treading water when she gets the idea to escape. This is her chance. The water is calm. She is a good, strong swimmer. One of the best at her school. She just needs to slip past the buoys and keep swimming until she finds a boat or a coast guard or divers. Anyone who can help her.

She swims the breaststroke. She counts her breaths. She gets past the buoys. The sun is hot on her back. The chop picks up. Her arms start to feel heavy, like someone has tied bricks to her wrists, but she doesn’t stop. She knows this is the kind of chance that doesn’t come twice.

She hears a shrill whistle. She turns in the water. There are figures standing on the beach, waving. She keeps swimming.

She hears the whistle again and again. By now there is nothing but water around her. She treads and looks. There are no boats, but maybe if she keeps going.

She keeps going.

The ocean turns icy. The waves start rolling over her. She comes up for air and gets a mouthful of brine.

When the lifeguard hooks his arm around her, she says “no, no, no.” She bites his wrist. She plunges underwater and pretends that she is hidden, that the ocean is camouflage. She watches his legs kick at the darkness below.

He came from land, so he cannot be trusted.

The lifeguard hooks her again and they start swimming back to shore. His chest is hairless and cool. Her arms are jelly. She can’t get away. She knows this is the end. There is not and there will never be a woman to cover her with a coat.

He keeps bringing her in. She feels like a fish on a line.

On the beach, the Psychologist is waiting with a soft towel. He wraps it around her shoulders. Sweat is rolling down his cheeks. His gaze is murderous. He thanks the lifeguard for saving his little girl. He even tries to give the lifeguard money, as though to demonstrate how valuable the girl is to him, but the lifeguard turns it away.

“The kids never swim where you tell them to swim,” the lifeguard says. He looks at the money and then down at the girl. He shakes a thick finger at her. “You might have an Olympic swimmer on your hands there.”

“I’ll bet you’re right about that,” says the Psychologist, tucking the money back into his wallet. “I’ll bet you’ve seen it all.”

The girl shivers under the towel. She knows they will never come to the beach again. She knows she should apologize, but she has not yet learned how to apologize for things she is not sorry for.

The girl rides back to Allston in the trunk.

* * *

Again they are home alone. This time skinny black wires — they remind the girl of snakes — connect the Psychologist’s laptop to the TV in his bedroom. The familiar sound comes on and the Psychologist tells her to concentrate on her happy thing, to concentrate harder than she ever has before, to not let other thoughts trespass into her mind. She listens to the bellow of the whales and thinks as hard as she can and then one appears on TV. A whale! Right in front of her! Blue and massive and crashing through the water. The eye of the whale is small and savage and its body is crusted in white shells, a deep-sea monster for sure. The whale disappears and the Psychologist tells her that she lost her concentration, that she made it leave.

She’s naked again, the white electrodes stuck all over her body.

She gets back into the right headspace. It’s like standing on one foot and fixing your sight on a specific thing until you find your balance, except the balancing is happening in her mind. She wants to stop and listen to the whale. She wants to see it spout water and gulp fish, to see what it’s like to be a fearsome creature of the deep (could she ever learn to be a fearsome creature of the deep?), but this time she knows the whale is not there for her.

This girl stays awake at night remembering the sensation of swimming out, away from the sandy coast of Revere Beach, into the cold dark of open water. She keeps rewriting the endings. Keeps telling herself stories.

In one, she joins a band of pirates. In another, she grows gills and learns to breathe underwater. In another, she is picked up by a wealthy couple who have always wanted a child. In another, she drowns.

She stares down at her bare toes. She digs them into the carpet. In his bedroom, these alternate endings are the happy thing she thinks about.

When she looks up, she sees Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, which is not possible. She blinks and they’re still there, frozen in the doorway in their gray guard uniforms. She didn’t hear them come home. She didn’t hear anyone coming up the stairs. Mr. Carroll is holding a six-pack. His shirt is untucked. Mrs. Carroll is reaching for the wall. Her lipstick is a red smear on her mouth. They are still wearing their museum nametags.

They aren’t usually home until after dark, so either the Psychologist has gotten confused about time or Mr. and Mrs. Carroll have changed their schedule. She doesn’t know what is true.

She also doesn’t know how long they’ve been watching and now there is something about their watching, about seeing their expression take on the wrongness of what is happening and reflect that wrongness back at her, that makes her feel like her organs are being rearranged. Her liver and her lungs switch places. Her spleen is in her elbow. Her heart is in her knee.

Mr. and Mrs. Carroll make no move to help her.

The whale vanishes from the screen.

The Psychologist is busy recording new data on his laptop. He doesn’t yet know that his parents are in the room, that they are approaching from behind, slow and slack with shock, and very soon this girl will be sent away.

She sees them coming. She sees the wrongness grow. Piss runs down her legs and darkens the carpet. She feels the hot liquid curve around the edge of her foot.

She sees herself in the trunk of the car. The air was too hot and thick to breathe. It turned to cotton candy in her lungs.

She is going to pass out on the bedroom floor and wake up on a farm. It sounds impossible, but that is what is going to happen.

She will never understand what the Psychologist wanted from her, the nature of his experiment, but she knows what he took and that he kept taking it long after she left Allston.

His parents keep getting closer.

The Psychologist keeps clicking away.

“Look at you, my little monster,” he says. “Look at what I’ve trained you to do.”

33

A theory on why we stop remembering: there is a part of our story that we do not know how to tell to ourselves and we will away its existence for so long that finally our brain agrees to a trade: I will let you forget this, but you will never feel whole.

* * *

What is a memory but the telling of a story?

* * *

In middle school, I went on a field trip to a whale watch at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. When we saw the first sign of a whale, the spray of white, the great V-shaped tail smacking the water, I screamed in terror and did not know why.

* * *

In high school, I kicked a boy in the chest when he tried to touch between my legs.

* * *

It was never my mother in the tunnel. It was always him.

* * *

Does this mean he’s dead?

* * *

Ask me if I feel bad for hoping he is. Just ask.

* * *

When I stop remembering, I’m not in the Mansion. I’m standing in the woods, breathing fast. The land is heavy with silence. The tree branches are reaching toward each other like fingers and through them the sky is the opposite of faded. It is such a deep shade of blue that it almost looks unreal, like a screen that could be split open. I don’t remember leaving the Mansion and walking outside. I don’t remember crossing the yard and moving past the halo of bare trees. The woods feel like shelter.

The ground is damp and the heels of my sneakers are sinking into it. I stand on a mass of tree roots, like a person seeking high ground. The woods smell faintly of smoke. I listen to the rushing sound of the creek. I wrap my arms around the trunk and think of Marcus and feel my heart begin to slow.

A bird with a yellow chest flies from one branch to another, on the run from something. The ferns have left little wet handprints on my jeans.

Now it’s like this: you look at yourself in the mirror and watch your reflection take off a mask. You look hard at all the wrongness in this new face, you look hard at the ways that wrongness has shaped it, and you have to decide if this new face is something you can live with.

If you decide no, you dissolve into yourself. If you decide yes, a small thing inside you is set free.

34

In the Mansion, there are animals all around us. I’ve seen the scurry of whiskered rats, snakes in the grass, possums with spindly white tails stalking the backyard after dark. I’ve seen birds in the trees, the ones that sit hunched on the broad low branches, buzzards or something related. There are alive things in the house too. I keep hearing the tick tick tick of nails on the floor, a scraping in the walls. It’s only a matter of time before one gets stuck inside.

In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman was always setting out cages for mice. Once they were in the cages, she would feed them cheddar cheese with poison inside. If Marcus and I found a trapped mouse sniffing at the bars, we carried the cage outside and let it go.

In the living room, when a raccoon gets stuck inside the trap door, Nelson says it will make a great tool for an experiment. The four of us stand around the closed trap door, having been drawn into the room by the sound of the animal’s thrashing. I can feel the raccoon racing around beneath us. I can feel it slamming against the walls. A pulse, an aliveness, rises from the floor.

“You probably aren’t aware that the history of animal experimentation goes back to the Greeks,” Nelson tells us, sensing our hesitation. “That the rhesus monkey helped find a vaccine for polio? That heart valve replacement surgery was tested on dogs?”

I can see that Nelson thinks of the Mansion as a kind of Hospital, its inhabitants the patients, and I do not need another Hospital or another doctor trying to pry his way inside. I’ve had it with scientific inquiry.

“We should let it go,” I say.

“Yes,” says Marcus, who has always had sympathy for trapped things. “I vote to let it go too.”

“Who said anything about voting?” Nelson stands on the trap door and crosses his arms, unwilling to give up his prize. Earlier he was outside. His pants are streaked with fresh mud. “You just got here. You don’t know how things work.”

Somehow, in the middle of all this, Darcie continues with her remembering.

“I was in a basement,” she says, loud enough to get our attention. We stop arguing about what to do with the raccoon and look at her. She’s pulling feathers out of her wings. “I was living down there. I couldn’t get away. I was tied to something.”

“When?” I ask her. I don’t know if she means the basement downstairs or some other place, if she was in a basement before Nelson found her on the side of the road in Cordova. The raccoon is whining now, a shrill plea.

“Sometime before. I think.” Darcie’s eyes widen and she looks like she’s about to tell us more, but then she stops and sinks down into the velvet chair, her wings bursting over the arms. She’s holding fistfuls of feathers. There are bald spots on the ridges of her wings.

“See!” Nelson claps his hands. “She’s remembering. She’s getting fully cured.”

Marcus and I look at each other. We’re not sure we like this idea of what it means to be cured.

“Oh no,” Darcie cries. She drops the feathers and pushes her face into her hands. “Oh no.”

A Real-Life Ghost Story, I think. That’s what she’s remembering now.

The animal claws around inside the trap door. The floorboards shudder. Darcie runs upstairs and into the bathroom. We chase after her and find her sitting in the rusted tub and rubbing her arms like she’s washing herself, even though there’s no water.

“Don’t kill it,” she says when she sees us huddled in the doorway. She leans back in the tub and rests her black-soled feet on the porcelain edge. “Don’t you dare kill it.”

“But what about progress?” Nelson asks.

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. For the moment she is the one with the power.

We decide to leave the raccoon alone for now.

* * *

That night, there are no games. No drinking, no copping and robbing, no hiding, no tunnel. Instead we vanish into our separate corners. Darcie stays in the bathroom, pretending to wash herself in the tub. Nelson retreats into the attic and soon after I hear the bowling ball rolling across the floor, the clatter of pins. The raccoon stays locked inside the trap door, thrashing. Marcus and I are in our room. I’m reading on the mattress. He’s sitting silent on the floor.

My body is leaden. I am sleeping more and dreaming less. I am unsure if this is progress. The waist of my jeans has started digging into my stomach, leaving behind a mark that looks like a second bellybutton.

We don’t speak. We don’t draw. We don’t play hide-and-go-seek or grand obituary, at least not aloud. I know we’re not supposed to use our own names for obituaries, but silently I do them for my eight-year-old self and my Stop & Shop self and the self that is still locked up in the Hospital. All the little selves I want to kill and bury deep.

In the middle of the night, I wake up alone. The room is dark. From the cold of the mattress, I know Marcus is gone. I push open the window and climb into the sill. I drink in the mineral smell of the night. The moon is a white sphere in the sky. I watch the light shift, the pattern of shadows on the ground. I think about how easy it would be for me and Marcus to slip out of this house and away.

Marcus steps into the backyard, carrying a burlap sack. His steps are long and slow. From the way he’s holding the sack in his arms, I know it’s not empty. He walks past the halo of trees and stops at the top of the slope.

The raccoon is dead. It suffocated under the floor or bashed itself in the head. It did not survive us. Marcus stops walking and I think he’s going to take out the dead raccoon and dig a grave or leave it for other animals to eat, let it return to the earth, but then he kneels and opens the sack and the raccoon leaps out, fully alive. In the moonlight, I can see the little black paws, the fluff of tail. The animal stands on its hind legs. Its head jerks left and then right. It opens and closes its mouth, tasting the air. It darts into the woods and is swallowed up by the night.

Marcus rolls up the burlap sack and slings it over his shoulder, but he doesn’t come inside right away. He stays there long after the raccoon is gone. At first, I think he’s just getting some fresh air or contemplating our current situation, how much longer we can stay in this house with Nelson and his experiments, with Darcie and her memories, or maybe even having a memory of his own, but then he kneels and starts pushing the dirt around with a stick and I know it’s something else. I almost call to him, but I can tell he’s really concentrating, that whatever he’s doing feels important. He is looking very hard at something in the ground.

* * *

When I lose sight of Marcus from the window, I start to worry about him disappearing again. I don’t get back into bed. I sit at the top of the stairs and wait for the door to open and close, for movement on the floorboards. At the foot of the stairs, he stops and watches me, his mask glinting. I see the burlap sack. I smell the dirt and sweat. I hear him breathing. He moves toward me one step at a time. On each new level he pauses and I think of my mother coming up from a dive, the interval stops. I stand and open my arms, and maybe it is because he did not disappear this time or maybe because he is taking so long to reach me or maybe it is all the remembering that makes a welling in my body, a pressure behind my eyes, that unmistakable feeling of being on the verge of tears that are going to come so full and so hot you think you are going to flood the house.

* * *

Nelson blames Darcie for releasing the raccoon. In the morning, we hear shouting from our bedroom and go downstairs, into the kitchen. Through the window we see that Nelson has Darcie cornered on the front porch. He is telling her that he is trying to do something meaningful and she agreed to help him but of course she can’t really understand what that means because she has never done anything meaningful in all her sorry life.

We watch from the kitchen window. The sink is filled with Mason jars. A line of red ants marches up a dirty wall. My scalp itches.

“You know this about yourself.” Nelson has her pressed against a railing, the wood dark and soft with rot. “You know this is true, now that you can remember.” Darcie is shaking her head and doing her hiccup-cry. Her back is bare.

We go outside, looking to break up the fight. We stand in front of the knobless front door, the neon yellow skull. When Nelson sees us he shrugs and takes a step back, casual, like this is all a misunderstanding. “Go away,” Darcie says, and at first I think she’s talking to Nelson, but then I realize she is looking at us.

We’re about to tell Nelson that Darcie is not responsible for the raccoon going free, that we are to blame, but then we notice a gray haze all around us, settling over the house and yard like a fog.

We walk into the yard. We see a wild bloom of orange.

The ground squishes under our feet. We follow a path of footsteps through the mud. New grass has started coming up along the edges of the lawn, a sparse green fringe. The buds on the tree branches are tight as fists. I smell chemicals. I smell death. A wind blows the heat toward us and I feel it on my stomach and on my face. Swirls of ember and ash. A charcoal taste in my mouth.

We stop in front of the burning thing. The feathers are gone, but I can still make out the metal frames on the ground. They are glowing with fire. They are melting into nothing. Darcie’s angel wings, alight on the front lawn.

35

That night we leave the Mansion under the cover of a moonless sky. I take only what I brought with me. I can’t be sure if the pages of the book are tainted with the trickiness of the Mansion, so I leave the sea behind. We stay away from the train tracks. We go out the back of the house, into the woods, down the slope. We follow the creek in the opposite direction, through a wet, brown valley. We stay close to the low rush of water.

There was a comfort to staying in the Mansion and watching the outside world recede, but after I started remembering, after Marcus showed me what he found in the woods, I thought of Ms. Neuman telling me I could be any kind of person I wanted and the thought of choosing wrong scared me more than being back out on the road.

In the woods, I am not as fast as I used to be. My breasts ache, push against the thin cotton of my bra. I feel the downward pull of gravity. I have become heavy and slow. I can no longer deny the signs, can no longer deny the newness in my body, which is swollen and tender with Louis’s child.

Eventually the woods fall away. Eventually we find Memphis. Another river, another bridge. A strip of neon signs for BLACK DIAMOND and KING’S PALACE CAFE and GUS’S FRIED CHICKEN. The lights sting my eyes. We see a man in a wheelchair. He is wearing a sweatshirt that says GOD BLESS AMERICA and spinning himself in circles. We see people wandering the streets, masked by night. They stand under the signs with lit cigarettes, the smoke rising and disappearing into the above.

We go into a Bojangles’ for water and toilets and in the bathroom I find a woman lying on her back under the sinks. Condensation is dripping from the pipes and hitting her in the face. A tiny syringe is sticking out of her arm. I stand over her. She is blinking very slowly and sliding her head back and forth across the linoleum. There’s wet toilet paper all over the floor. The tiles are a sick shade of green. I remember the RECOVERY POSITION sign, remember practicing the action with Marcus, and roll the woman onto her side. She is heavy and hard to move. Her skin feels like putty. I run out of the bathroom and tell the man behind the counter that he has a problem in there.

Back outside I take breaths so deep my lungs burn with oxygen.

We board a bus and don’t stop. There will be no more motel rooms, no more houses, no more detours. No more chances to become lost. This is our thinking now. At rest stops, I slip into bathrooms and vomit into toilets. I slosh water around in my mouth and wipe my face with wads of toilet paper and try to understand how my body is changing.

On the bus, a woman sitting across from us is reading a book titled Almost a Psychopath, and I wonder where the line is.

In Tupelo, Mississippi, I look at myself in the mirror of a gas station bathroom. I look hard. I am surprised by the length of my hair. The dark tips brush my shoulders. I can tuck my bangs behind my ears. The evidence of Raul’s sheepdog haircut, the evidence of that locked-up person, is almost gone.

I comb my hair with my fingers and remember the feeling of his hot, rough hands moving over my scalp.

In the light of the bathroom, I see lines on my face. They almost look like scars except I’ve never been cut by anything but time.

When I meet this child, will I want to do what my mother did? Will I want to leave it behind?

On the bus, Marcus takes off his rabbit mask and puts it on me. The elastic band digs into the back of my scalp. It’s night again. I can feel the heat his skin has left on the plastic. I concentrate on the movement of the bus underneath, the light that cuts in and out. I feel like the bandit now.

I don’t think so, I decide, touching my stomach. I turn my head and watch the landscape pass through a window. I don’t think I’ll be that kind of person.

At a gas station in Tuscaloosa, I’m in line to pay for coffee. We are almost out of cash. A little black TV sits on a stack of blue milk crates behind the counter, the volume blaring. In the Mansion, there was no TV — how long has it been since I’ve seen one? The news is on. I hear about a virulent strain of the flu that has put a town in Texas in isolation. A rash of suicides by cyanide in Michigan. A woman quarantined at the Boston airport because she was showing signs of the sickness. A false alarm, but it makes a person wonder: what will we do if it comes back? An infant found abandoned in a sewage pipe in Virginia. I add that to my list of things a mother can do that are worse than leaving.

A new headline, “Kansas Project Exposed,” snakes along the bottom of the screen.

“Stop,” I say even though no one in the line is moving. I ask the cashier to turn up the volume.

“Do you want us all to go deaf?” he says, but does what I want anyway.

The broadcaster says news outlets are searching for details about a hospital near La Harpe, Kansas. Inside this hospital authorities have discovered eighty bodies. There were eighty-four people in the hospital when I left, which means four more must have died of the sickness after I was gone. These bodies were found tucked in their beds, slumped against walls, in hallways. According to the preliminary reports, the patients and staff appear to have died within twenty-four hours of each other. The cause is unknown, but the theories include: experimental vaccine, toxins in the water or food supplies, psychosis brought on by excessive winter, mass suicide. Casualties of the microepidemic.

There is a still of Dr. Bek in a simple white doctor’s coat. Without the silver bulk of his suit, he looks frail and old. His eyes are different than I remember. They are a darker shade of blue, impenetrable as lake water.

A camera moves across the exterior of the Hospital. It looks just as it did when I arrived and just as it did when I left — tall, fortresslike, surrounded by the plains, the land white with snow. I try to imagine the vast emptiness inside. The silent halls. The bare mattresses. The dead TV in the Common Room. The microwaves in the Dining Hall. The hole in the twins’ room that leads to nowhere.

If I had stayed, they would be talking about my own death, which would have been anonymous, a small shift in the total. The difference between eighty and eighty-one.

I drop the coffees. Brown liquid sloshes across the gas station floor. The cashier stands up from his stool and shouts.

I bolt outside and behind the gas station, into the stench of Dumpster garbage. I lean against a concrete wall and I can almost feel Louis coming up behind me, his hand on my spine, but then the ghost of his touch disappears and I am alone.

I close my eyes. I can hear Marcus calling my name.

I get sick behind the gas station. I am sick of the road. I am sick of TVs, of the news they keep bringing. I bend over and my body heaves and this time I know it’s not from the child.

* * *

At night, we pass through Montgomery and Columbia, edge out of Alabama and South Carolina and into Georgia. While the rest of the bus drifts, I creep to the front, where a sleeping man has left a backpack by his feet. I unzip, reach inside, find a wallet. I take all the cash, moving once again inside a blaze of want. We will need money to get all the way to Florida. We will need money to find my mother. These are the facts. I tuck the bills into my back pocket and return the wallet to where it came from.

At first light, the man is still asleep and I’m counting the bills in the back of the bus. I’m expecting to see tens and twenties, but these bills are hundreds, crisp and clean, the cleanest bills I’ve ever seen. I count and recount, disbelieving. The sleeping man had two thousand dollars in his wallet.

I wake Marcus up. I watch him come to life behind the mask. Two thousand dollars is enough to cause a problem. There will be consequences once the man realizes his money is gone. He will come around to all the passengers. He will take his case to the driver. He will demand to know.

When the bus docks at a rest stop in Macon, we get off. Down here the air is wet and warm. I smell gasoline. The parking lot is filled with semi trucks. The drivers are standings outside, leaning against cabs, chewing toothpicks, the brims of their baseball caps pulled low. As we pass, they turn to stare at Marcus in his mask.

We walk up to a driver in a red baseball cap and a T-shirt that says PROUD TRUCKA. His jeans are too tight around the crotch. I look at the back of his semi and wonder where he’s headed, what he might be hauling. He watches us watch him and spits a white glob on the asphalt.

“You want some company out there?” I ask.

The man stands back and looks us over.

“What’s with that mask?” he asks.

“Childhood,” we say.

“Rabbits stink,” the man says. “Rabbits can be scared to death.”

He rubs his hands together and spits again. I hear honking, the rumble of engines, as some trucks begin to pull out of the lot, back onto the open road. He jingles his keys in his hands. He tells us to get inside.

36

“Florida!” the man says when we tell him where we’re going. Marcus is up front, rubbing one of his rabbit ears. I’m in the back, trying not to feel sick. I spread out my map of highways and follow the lines that lead south. If I puke on this man’s floor mats, I know we’ll be out of here.

“Here’s what I know about Florida,” he tells us.

His mother grew up in Nassau, the biggest city in the Bahamas. Years ago, when she was dying, she told her children that she wanted her ashes scattered in the water surrounding the island. This man and his sister drove from South Carolina to Miami with an urn strapped down in the backseat. In Florida, they planned to rent a boat, but private charters were too expensive, so instead one night they got on a party boat called Bottoms Up, bound for Nassau.

“You should have seen it,” the man says in a sleepy drawl. “People were taking Jell-O shots and dancing and glow-in-the-dark hula hooping and screaming ‘Eat my dick!’ whenever we passed another boat. And then there was my sister and me, stone-cold sober, holding this urn filled with our mother’s ashes.”

When the island was in sight, they opened the urn and let her go. A drunk bumped into them while this was going on and they dropped the urn in the ocean, which wasn’t part of the plan, but that was okay, they decided in the end. Let it go. Let it all go.

“So,” he says. “That’s my story about Florida.”

I can tell from the way he talks about his sister that she is dead too, but I don’t ask.

Next the man tells us his theory of the sickness. He thinks it’s something the government did to weed out the weak, the citizens that have been holding this nation back, the citizens they no longer wanted. To harm America in order to save it. A controlled burn, like firefighters do with forests, except of course this did not stay in control.

“Save America from what?” I ask. Earlier he shared a jar of peanuts with us. Now my mouth is dry and my fingertips are pebbled with salt.

He does not answer. My sister was not weak, I know he is thinking.

“I was standing in my yard in Greenville when I saw these planes pass over,” he tells us. “There were six of them, all military, and they were spraying something on the fields. A light, fine mist. I went inside and closed the blinds. I stuffed towels under the doors. I sealed up the cracks. When I saw those planes, I knew in my heart this sickness was something they were doing to us.”

He does not answer. He pounds his fist against his chest. The semi drifts toward a silver guard rail.

We did it to ourselves or someone did it to us: that is how all the theories break down.

A heavy rain is falling and we can’t see the road ahead or the highway signs or other cars. The windows look like they’re melting. The darkness around the headlights is immense. We have no way to monitor our situation, to know if this man is really taking us to Florida or someplace of his own design.

Later I watch Marcus sleep. His hands are folded in his lap. His head lists to the side. I can still see the boy inside him when he sleeps.

I wonder if he loves that boy or if he wants to kill him and bury him deep.

The rain keeps coming. Lightning cuts the sky. Each time it looks like an explosion. The radio is on. I listen for something more about the Hospital, but there is only talk of the weather, which has turned strange everywhere: snow in Los Angeles, tornadoes in the mountains of Vermont. Volcanic activity in New Mexico, in the Sierra Blanca. A sinkhole that swallowed an entire neighborhood in Delaware. The station changes and someone is talking about a prehistoric forest that has been discovered in a faraway country, filled with petrified trees that have been dead for thousands of years. Trees are lucky: they do not have to worry about what they leave behind. I put on the gardening gloves and lie down in the cab. It is just me and this man, alone in the night.

“No one is waiting,” I think I hear him say. The rain makes it hard to tell. It sounds like we’re stuck inside a car wash.

“What?” I say, sitting up.

“What?” he says back.

* * *

In the woods behind the Mansion, Marcus took me to the spot where he set the raccoon free, just past the halo of trees, behind a large bush with shriveled berries hanging from the branches. The soil had been turned. We bent down and I saw the smooth milky edge of a bone. We were afraid to touch it; we used sticks to nudge it out of the dirt. It was unmistakably human, long and knobbed at the ends, a femur or a tibia. We pushed the bone back into the earth.

“There’s more down there,” Marcus said. “A lot more. A whole person, maybe.”

I leaned back on my heels. I crossed my arms and held on to my elbows. We didn’t say anything for a while. We just stared down at the soft ridges in the soil.

We didn’t know where the bones came from or who they belonged to, if the sickness or old age or Nelson or something else was to blame. It didn’t matter. We knew there wasn’t a cure for anything in the Mansion, or at least not a cure we could ever want. We knew it was time to stop being lost.

As I looked at the turned soil, I thought about how, if it weren’t for Rick, this was how the twins might have ended up, a secret in the earth for someone to find.

* * *

When we wake, the truck is parked in a field. I hear the swoosh of cars passing on the highway, but I can’t see the road. Marcus and I sit up at the same time. We yawn, stretch stiff arms, look around. I rub my face, brush rough crystals from the corners of my eyes. I roll my head in circles and listen to my bones crack. My neck is sore.

The rain has stopped, but recently: there is still water beading on the windshield. The engine is off and the keys are missing from the ignition and the driver is gone. His door is hanging open and when we get out, we find a cluster of footprints around the semi and a trail of flattened grass, leading out into the field.

Maybe the truck broke down. Maybe he needed to find a place to piss or jerk off. If we knew his name, we might have called it.

Instead we follow the trail into the field. We cannot resist the dewy grass or the lush canopy of trees in the distance. All that aliveness.

In the canopy, we hear a rustling and look up. There are children in the trees, maybe a dozen. Some are nestled in the treetops. Others lie flat against the branches, their slim legs and arms wrapped around the wood. They are wide-eyed and silent, waiting for the danger to pass.

Did the driver look up and see these children too? Is this what lured him away?

We wave at the children. They don’t wave back.

“Come down,” Marcus says. “We won’t hurt you.”

The children don’t move from the trees. They have heard this line before.

37

We start back to the highway. We pass the truck. There is still no sign of the driver. According to the road signs we are near Birmingham, back in Alabama, and now signs for Birmingham mean we have been going in the wrong direction, just as wrong as Centralia.

From the road, we try to find our next ride, and it is just as Rick said. One person is easy to pick up, especially if that person is a woman, especially if the driver is the kind who does not see a woman standing on the side of the highway, but prey. Two people is more complicated, especially if one of them doesn’t want to show you his face. There is an air of danger about us. Together we might make a plan. Together we might have the power to overtake.

For a while, no one stops or even slows down. We drift a little too close to the highway and a car honks. A man with a beard rolls down the window and shouts something about rabbits that gets lost in the air. We stumble back into the bed of rock and thin green weeds.

We’re picked up by a choir bus. It’s an old GM, shaped like a bread box, the pink paint stained with rust, something from another century. Inside we find a flock of men and women in white robes. The only empty seats are in the very back. As we walk down the aisle, these people reach out and touch us. Their fingers are hot.

They tell us they are traveling across America. In each state, they stop someplace and sing. They started in Maryland and have been working their way through the south: Virginia, the Carolinas, over into Kentucky and Tennessee. After Florida, they are heading west, all the way to the salt flats of Utah and the deserts of California and then north, to Alaska.

They tell us about the highway that leads to Alaska. It runs just over 1,400 miles, passing through British Columbia and the Yukon and the Delta Junction. It ends in Fairbanks, near the North Pole. Do we have any idea how cold it is in the North Pole? The highway was built in 1942, during the war. Before, you could only reach Alaska by water, which made the state feel like it was not part of America, but free to be its own country. From the windows of the bus, they expect to see bears and caribou and wolves.

They want to keep going past Fairbanks, to a place called Deadhorse, on the Beaufort Sea. They tell us they will sing to the animals, if there’s no one else to listen. They will not be afraid of the wild.

In Georgia, in Valdosta, they pull in to a rest stop. They get out and stand in the center of the parking lot, on a mound of brown grass, and sing. Marcus and I watch from the bus windows and I remember the first pilgrims who came to the Hospital, the sound of their voices rising up to our floor. The air is blue with dusk.

At night, back on the bus, they keep singing. They clap and stomp. Even the driver rocks in his seat. They sing “Let the Praise Begin.” They sing “If God Is Dead.” The bus windows are cracked open. I smell exhaust. It is a relief to know there are people out there who will always choose living.

I turn to Marcus. I put his hands on my stomach and ask him to tell me what he feels.

38

At first, Florida is a kingdom of green. We pass through the forests of Tallahassee, the trees draped with moss, and the gentle hills of Ocala. In the center of the state, the land flattens and we settle into another network of gray highways. I don’t sleep. We drive through the darkness and I count the headlights of the other cars and wonder what all these people are searching for.

In Miami, the dawn sky is dramatic, with rafts of enormous pink-bellied clouds. Do clouds ever die? It seems like clouds must get to live forever.

A list of things that must get to live forever: clouds, volcanoes, fossils, certain insects, the sea.

The bus weaves through the shadows of skyscrapers and crosses a drawbridge with tiny limestone guard towers. A canal runs under the bridge, the water a brilliant green. A tugboat called The Jean Ruth slips under the bridge and putters out toward the Atlantic. The colors of Miami are nothing like the colors of the other places we have been. They are lime, they are butter yellow, they are citrus orange, they are candy pink. A shade of blue that is like the most beautiful clear sky. I imagine my mother living inside this landscape of color. I see her as a silhouette on a balcony, a figure on a bridge, a body on a boat deck turning to face the sun.

The singers have taken us as far as they can. At the bus station, across the street from a strip mall, we learn the next bus to Key West isn’t leaving for six hours. The day is ours. We are dazed by the new colors and the heat and the palm trees, the leaves long and fringed, and the fat iguanas dragging themselves across the sidewalk. What is this place? We’ve never seen anything like it before.

“It’s a girl,” Marcus told me on the bus.

In the night, I started another letter to my mother. I’ve been collecting scraps of paper, carrying around the pen I pinched from a gas station in South Carolina, in Troy. I want so badly to tell her about my life, about the kind of person I am becoming.

We go over to the strip mall and peer inside the windows. One plain face and one rabbit face stare back. Everything is closed. In a store, we see a group of mannequins jumbled together on the floor. Their heads are arranged at strange, deadly angles, their limbs twisted together. I want to set these mannequins right, to free them of each other, but the door is locked and we have to keep walking.

We pass an empty parking lot with a small pearl-colored carousel, the kind of thing you’d see at a fair, languishing in a black pool. We climb onto the carousel and stroke the five white horses with gold saddles. Their nostrils are pink and flared, their eyes wide and afraid. There there, I think, petting a muzzle. The sixth horse is missing from its station. I imagine someone carrying it away on their shoulders and another person watching from a distance, unable to see the human body holding the creature up. They only see the white horse with the rich gold saddle riding into the city and believe themselves to be in the presence of magic. They are wrong, this theoretical person, but they will believe it anyway.

We follow a broad sidewalk that leads us deeper into the city. We pass a church made of yellow stone with a pair of blue archways, a white cross perched on the roof. A group of young people are standing under the arches. They come over and offer us little paper cups filled with apple juice, which we are in no position to refuse. We drink the juice in a single swallow. They want us to come into the church and watch a video. They tell us there is more apple juice inside.

In a small, dark room in the back of the church, we sit on a carpeted floor and watch their video. The video tells us the sickness was just a test, a way for God to find the true believers. There is another sickness coming and this time it won’t be a test. It will not burn out. There will be no recovery. Only those on the side of God will be saved.

God is watching, the video tells us. God is seeing everything.

There are clips of the sickness and preachers preaching the Word and people collapsing into prayer, into the ecstasy of salvation. Somewhere inside the church incense is burning. I watch these preachers chant and sweat. I watch the life fire up inside them and wonder how many are still among the living.

I was never supposed to make it this far. I was never supposed to make it out of childhood. Out of Kansas.

Fuck all of you, I can’t help but think. I outlived you all.

When the video ends, the young people want us to stay and talk. They want us to tell them how we feel about what we’ve just seen, but they have no more apple juice and so it’s time for us to go. These poor young people, I think as we wave good-bye. They have no idea who anyone really is.

I’m still a young person too, I know that, but I don’t think I will ever again feel young.

39

From Miami, the bus follows Highway 1 until we are just riding a thin strip of concrete extending across the Atlantic, until we are surrounded by ocean. The sky is knotted with cloud. We see the hulking silhouettes of cargo ships. It rains again and the water around us turns dark and roiling. The bus shakes on the highway. I keep working on the letter to my mother.

The bus driver has the radio turned up and I catch something about more snow where there is not supposed to be snow and E. coli in a New Hampshire town’s water supply and fires on the plains of Nebraska that can’t be put out, because no one can identify the source.

Ghost fires.

I have started to think of the sickness not as a single, contained catastrophe, but as part of a series of waves. We are still burning. What will be the wave that puts us out? I feel the heat of my mother’s photo in my pocket and try not to think about what might be coming next.

Marcus is no longer wearing his mask. The scarred skin around the damaged eye looks like melted wax. He left the mask in Miami, the rabbit face floating in the water. I didn’t ask him to explain. I know what it’s like to want to leave part of yourself behind.

I am shedding too. I left the gardening gloves on the choir bus. I don’t need them anymore, now that we are away from the cold.

In Key West, the palm trees are storm-battered. Green fronds have gone missing, bark tongues flop away from trunks. The ocean is clearer and I can see dark masses of seaweed floating in the water like continents. The beach is not a smooth white crescent like the one in Miami, but a narrow sandy strip, rough with broken shells and driftwood, guarded by a concrete seawall.

We pass a graveyard with stone mausoleums sitting on the grass like little houses. A row of folding chairs and a tent are set up in one corner of the graveyard, the mark of a service that has already happened or has yet to begin.

We pass the Key West weather station, an L-shaped concrete building with a radar dish. I imagine people scurrying around inside, going crazy trying to keep up with the changes in the atmosphere. We pass a museum devoted to shipwrecks. I wonder if any of my mother’s finds are in there. I picture us standing on the decks of wrecked ships, climbing the lookouts, crawling through the cool dark of the hulls. We pass an elementary school painted with red hibiscuses, houses standing on cinder blocks, houses surrounded by faded picket fences that make me think of shark’s teeth, a house with a tree growing through the roof, the thin branches twisted together and dripping with brown, hair-like moss. We pass a Laundromat where all the dryer doors are hanging open like mouths awaiting permission to speak.

Wild roosters peck at the sidewalks, their red tail feathers swaying. A calico cat stands on its hind legs and watches the passing bus.

Imagine a world where the animals are slowly taking over.

Imagine a world where the weather does whatever it pleases. Blizzards in summer. Heat waves in winter.

Imagine a world where you can go to a store and pick out a new person to be. You can buy that person off the rack and just become them. A new face, a new name, a new soul. In this world, it is that easy.

Imagine a world where ghosts get to stay real.

Imagine a world without mothers.

The bus stops at Mallory Square, a brick marina lined with skeletal palm trees. A road sign announces MILE MARKER ZERO. We have reached the southernmost tip of the Florida highway. The bus is full. We are not the only ones who wanted to get far away from the mainland, far away from wherever we were before.

The passengers scatter into the streets. The bus speeds away. Above us electrical wires crackle. There is something thrilling about being on the coast, on the edge of the land.

The lone boat at the marina is a party boat, just like the one the man in the semi told us about, only this one has a different name. It’s a white double-decker with BOOZE CRUISE painted across the side in red letters. When we talk to the captain, we learn that we are the only interested passengers. There is no schedule, no set route. You simply pay and tell him where you want to go.

I give the captain a hundred dollars and tell him Shadow Key.

The party boat captain is barefoot. The tops of his feet are tan. His toenails are pitted and yellow. He’s wearing ragged denim shorts and a white captain’s hat and a white shirt with gold buttons. He tucks the money into his shirt pocket and tells us that he used to have a boat called The Lion’s Paw, but he lost it in a storm and now he has this one instead. The old boat was named after a children’s book about three orphans who run away together and live on a sloop.

“Do you know it?”

We shake our heads.

“It’s a beautiful story,” he tells us.

The Booze Cruise does not have a story.

Marcus takes my hand and we climb aboard. The boat sways. We launch from the marina, into a white spray of water, a biting wind. I wonder if there will be whales. We look out at the stony beaches and the rock fingers that jut into the water, dark and pocked like volcanic rock or what I imagine volcanic rock to be.

A child in yellow shorts stands at the end of one of the fingers, waving.

We wave back. We don’t know if we will ever return.

The wind lifts my hair off my shoulders. I lean against the railing and feel the spray on my face. I taste the salt. I listen to the churn of the engine. When I look back toward the marina, the wake is a wide white tail behind us.

A green cooler stands against the helm. Back when the Booze Cruise was a real party boat, I imagine the cooler was filled with ice and beer. When we look inside, it’s empty and dry. Lit up tiki torches have been staked in the deck corners. Sweet smoke curls into the sky. The fire flickers in the wind, but finds a way to keep burning. A song about margaritas plays over a speaker. It is not a song that does justice to the gravity of our moment. I touch the slight roundness under my sweatshirt and think about the months that lie ahead, the ways my body will become alien to me.

I imagine me and Marcus stepping onto my mother’s houseboat, my hands cupping my stomach, and offering her another path. I imagine all of us grabbing this new life and living it and living it and living it.

We wander to the upper level. We sit down. The blue vinyl on the seats is peeling. I pull back a gummy strip and try to see what’s underneath. I feel the vibrations of the engine against my thighs. The margarita music is louder up here and I think about the Pathologist’s voice crackling over the Hospital speakers, dripping into the rooms and hallways, all the lies he told us.

“I can’t stay up here,” I say to Marcus. He touches my forehead like he’s checking for a fever. I want to kiss him. I go back down to the deck, stern side.

A mist rolls across the water. The sky is marble. The clouds look like mountains. Birds hover above. Birds with orange feet and black wings. Birds with white feathers and slim elegant beaks. I feel a pang in my chest, like a muscle is cramping up, and want to believe that one of the birds is Louis, that the end is not really the end but a chance to become something new. The birds make big swooping circles. I watch until I get dizzy.

We enter a pocket of fog and it is like navigating through one of those mountainous clouds. My hair is damp. A cold creeps up my belly. The fog turns thick as smoke. I breathe it in and my heart surges and the world grows empty.

40

I remember everything I do not want to remember and everything I do.

* * *

I remember the boy I loved and never saw again.

* * *

What is a baby but a ghost turning real inside you?

* * *

I remember the flyer of the missing girl in the T station. I see the masking tape on the post. I see the frayed edges of the paper. I see her face and I see her face turn into my own. I imagine myself picking up a phone and dialing the number. A woman answers. I imagine her voice is familiar.

* * *

This girl you’re looking for? I hear myself say. Yes. Yes. I’ve just seen her.

* * *

I remember my theory of the sickness: for the immune the flaws in our memory protected us. Take me. Already my mind had washed away what it could not stand to remember. The sickness circled me and took a whiff and decided that my own memory was already doing the work it wanted to do, the work of forgetting. That I was already too far gone.

* * *

When the fog lifts, I raise my hand from the railing and point at the thin line of coast ahead. “Land,” I say to no one.

* * *

There is a rumble that sounds like an underwater earthquake. A freezing wind. A sudden purple sky. Lightning that looks like a creature thrashing behind the clouds. An ocean that is blue electric against the darkening horizon.

A curtain of water surrounds the boat. The distant coast disappears. The tiki torches go out with a hiss. The music stops. My body is filled with the drumming of the storm. I turn around and look for the Booze Cruise captain inside the helm. I see a silver spinning wheel and the pale blur of his hands moving over it.

The nose of the boat dips down. My clothes are heavy and dripping. I slip to my knees. I spit water. Ocean gushes from my sneakers. The cooler slides across the deck and crashes into the railing.

A tiki torch leaps from its holster and does a suicide jump into the water.

The roar of the engine mixes with the thunder of the storm, a big hurtling ball of noise. The boat rocks back and forth. Water spreads across the deck, slick as oil. I see myself swimming out in Revere, the waves rising over my head. I see those same waves growing larger and rising over this railing and swallowing us up. I am sure the boat is going under.

* * *

What if the boat disappears inside the storm? What if my mother is the one sent looking? What if the boat sinks to the bottom, never to be seen again? What if we turn into mystery, myth?

* * *

Maybe I wouldn’t mind becoming a myth.

* * *

The storm is a squall, quick and brutal. It leaves me drenched and gasping. I grab the stomach of my sweatshirt and squeeze out the water. The ocean is murky and churning. I imagine sand and seaweed and fragments of shipwrecks being dredged up from the bottom and scattered.

My mother says water is neutral, that it doesn’t have wants, but what about these storms that want you and everything you have? That want your life? I add this to my list of questions to ask her.

We drift closer to the island. I see a faraway line of boats. One of them is my mother’s houseboat. She is tucked inside, dry and warm, unable to shake the feeling that something is closing in. She stands up and goes outside. She begins to wait. She feels my energy traveling toward her. This is what I imagine.

Again the sky rumbles. The captain keeps turning the silver wheel.

“Land,” I say to the child.

I see a silhouette on a boat deck, a slight still point in the distance. This I am not imagining. I will the figure to be a woman.

A ship horn bellows. The dark clouds slide over the party boat, satisfied with what they’ve done here, in search of new destruction. The water clears and I see a darting school of fish, a tangerine flicker.

I keep expecting the figure to turn, to vanish, to reveal itself as a figment of the mind, but she stays.

I feel a rage that could sink this boat faster than any storm.

I make the choice and feel the small thing inside go free.

“My name is Joy,” I say, practicing.

The woman is a dark speck at first, an idea of a person, but slowly she takes shape. I can make out the straight line of her legs, the curves of her shoulders. Whoever she turns out to be, I will ask her my questions and see how she answers.

Where will I even start? Here is where I will start.

I will ask her who she is and what she remembers. I will ask her if I seem familiar and how long has she been waiting and did she ever give me a name. I will ask her what she knows about consequences and when she tells me what she thinks she knows I will tell her she has no idea and then I will say, Fuck the guilt, it’s no way to live. Do you know the secrets of your unconscious mind and the parts of yourself you want to kill and bury deep and can I help you with that shovel? Did you really think you could ever bury me? Do you think it is possible to love someone you don’t know and do you think it is possible to love a ghost and are you really missing if there is no one there to look?

I’m here, I will tell her.

Look.