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Mira waits in the lobby of her building for the elevator, a canvas bag with an All Things

Considered logo over her right shoulder.   One of her neighbors, Arnie Paul, who has recently moved into the building, steps up beside her.  Also waiting is a pair of millennials who live on the third and fourth floors respectively, in condos the owners have rented out.  Both have their eyes fixed on their phones, checking messages, texting.  The elevator dings.  There is a slight pause between the signal that the car has arrived and when the door slides open.

Mira and Arnie start to enter the elevator simultaneously, playing “after you Alfonse” for a moment.  Then Mira yields and Arnie goes first.  The millennials follow her.  Arnie notices that Mira does not have her dog with her.  It is the first time Arnie has ever seen her without her Labrador snugged up against her leg.  Mira shifts the All Things Considered bag from right shoulder to left.  The bag holds the leash and collar of the missing dog, Jake.  Mira finds her spot, then stares at the floor.

Arnie pushes the button for the seventh floor, the floor on which they both live, she at 706, he at 702.  At the last minute, a man with a Roto-Rooter uniform enters.  He carries a toolbox and a drain snake.  He seems to have come from nowhere.  He chunks his toolbox onto the floor, pulls a folded up work order out of his shirt pocket, reads it, and stuffs it back in.

The door of the elevator glides shut.  There is a familiar click as the interior and exterior elevator doors disengage.  The Roto-Rooter man reaches over and pushes two.  Glancing up, Mira notices that the buttons for three, four, and seven are already pushed, but she has not seen that happen.  Arnie has pushed the seven for both of them.

As soon as the elevator starts to rise, Mira counts under her breath. She is counting backwards from forty-nine.  This is the second time she has counted down today. She is coming from the vet’s office.  The vet has cared for Jake for eleven years, ever since he was a puppy.  Dr. “Please call me Steve” Saylor, is solicitous and kind.  He sits on the linoleum floor during exams and procedures, getting down on the dog’s level, clearly a dog lover.

Mira looks at her shoes, hoping her neighbor does not talk to her.  She does not particularly like him and does not want to talk to anyone today.  Arnie has made it abundantly clear that he was not a dog lover.  Despite this, Mira feels sorry for him.  Arnie is the caretaker of his dying wife. Mira sometimes hears her moan when she passes their door on the way to her own apartment.

The five passengers ride in silence.  The whir of the motor and the winding sound of the lift cable fill the car. When Mira’s daughter comes to visit, she always complains about how long it takes for the elevator to make the climb from the ground to the top floor.  “That’s five minutes of my life I’ll never get back,” she says each time to her mother.  She has always been prone to exaggeration, though Mira cedes the point about the elevator’s speed.

The elevator dings as it stops at the second floor. The door opens. Mira pauses in her countdown. When Mira timed the ride years ago, she pushed start on her wristwatch timer precisely when they started to rise.  The trip clocked out at forty-nine seconds.  She checked and rechecked it a dozen times.  Since then, each time she rides she counts backwards under her breath from forty-nine, finding a kind of meditative purpose in it, her dog at heel, her hand scratching his head.  Today, waiting in the vet’s office, with Jake lying at her feet, she made a tally.  Four outings together a day, times two trips each time, one down and one up, times three hundred sixty five days a year, equals two thousand nine hundred twenty trips a year, times eleven years equals thirty two thousand, one hundred twenty trips up and down.  At forty nine seconds per trip, that’s one million five hundred seventy three thousand, eight hundred eighty seconds, divided by sixty seconds per minute equals twenty six thousand, two hundred thirty one minutes, divided by sixty is four hundred thirty seven hours, divided by twenty-four equals eighteen days.  Eighteen days of her life in forty-nine second increments.  If that isn’t proof of love, she thinks now, trying to comfort herself, but lets the thought go unfinished.

When the doors open on the second floor, the Roto-Rooter man hefts up his toolbox in a two handed, two-step move, like he is doing a clean-and-jerk, and exits.  He stands in the elevator foyer, looking down the hall.  Then the door closes.  He is gone forever, Mira thinks.  The elevator restarts. Mira resumes counting.

The elevator is a tasteful updating of the original gated freight lift that had been an advertised feature of the building when it opened as a shoe factory in 1916.  Restored during the condo conversion the year Mira bought in, it has a marble floor and a new door, but all of the sculpted brass fittings from the original have been preserved.  Having made as many trips as she has over the years, she understands her daughter’s pique; sometimes the elevator feels like it is glacially slow.  Today is such a day.  Because it was the only elevator in a building with fifty-four apartments, there are almost always other riders, and therefore multiple stops.  If it stops at every floor it can take as long as two minutes.  The car is rated for 2000 pounds, roughly the weight of six people.

Thinking of her calculations again, Mira begins to silently weep.  On her shoulder, the All

Things Considered bag is suddenly unbearably heavy.   The elevator dings as it stops at the third floor. Mira pauses in her counting. The door opens. One of the millennial kids gets off.  He never looks up from his phone, never says a word to the rest of them or acknowledges them in any way. The door closes.  The elevator starts; Mira resumes counting.

Years ago, Mira had given up engaging in the debate over whether dogs really understood language.  She knew they did.  She dismissed all the arguments against that position, from the history of the Harry the Horse case and all those false claims, to the idea that dogs only responded to tone of voice or body language and couldn’t understand words, and all of the other nonsense the unobservant or prejudicial spouted about dog understanding and response.  As far as she was concerned, anyone who claimed dogs could not understand language had never lived with one or tried to train one.

She knew her dogs understood words. Jake, the best of all of them, distinguished between them, and responded differently to different ones, no matter what tone of voice they were delivered in. Recently she had read in the Times that Finnish scientists using MRI’s on dog brains had demonstrated that trained dogs responded physiologically to words exactly the same way people did, no matter whose voice spoke them.  It pleased her to know that, under scientific scrutiny, dog brains lit up for words the same way her own brain did.  These same scientists had also demonstrated that hearing its owner’s voice made a dog’s brain light up in the same way human brains light up when they hear the voices of the ones they love.

At 71, Arnie still goes to his office for part of each day, if his wife is able to be without him. His wife, dying of breast cancer, is in home-hospice care, and cries constantly.  Now aware that Mira is silently crying, Arnie thinks ‘I am surrounded by weeping women.’  He decides not to ask Mira what’s the matter.

Arnie has been going to this same office for nearly forty-three years, a law firm that bears his name as one of the founding partners. The occasional matter he handles tends to require more hand holding of ancient clients than actual knowledge of law.  The younger partners handle the legal work now.  Though his briefcase is polished leather and looks like it contains items of importance, he is bringing it home empty except for an uneaten apple, a half full bottle of Ensure, and his keys.  These are not untypical contents.

Mira shifts the bag from her shoulder to her arms.  As she looks inside, a gasp catches audibly in her throat, causing Arnie to make momentary eye contact with her, then look away.  She could not explain why she wants to bring Jake’s gear home, or what use she could possibly have for it.

At the fourth floor, the elevator dings then stops again. Mira pauses in her counting. The door opens. The other kid gets off.  Then the elevator is empty other than Mira and Arnie.  They continue to avoid eye contact.  The door closes.  The elevator starts; Mira resumes counting.

As a child, in Reading, PA, Arnie had lived on the outskirts of town near an immense dairy farm.  The farmer had dogs, and their job was to scare off anything that came too close to the cows.  Or at least that’s how Arnie understood it.  In fact, most of the dogs on the dairy farm were herders, used to move cows from pasture to pasture when the grass in one area was eaten down to the nubs, or back to the barn for milking.  The farmers and his sons did not treat their dogs like pets, not like the people who lived in Arnie’s building now, who dressed their animals with absurd sweat shirts and elaborate collars.  Arnie had not liked the farm dogs, and had been chased and bitten as kid, but with distance and age he had come to admire them.  They were working animals, he told himself, not substitute children.  In his apartment building, even the hipsters cuddled and coddled their pooches as if they were family members, showing them deference and making excuses for them that they would not make for human children if they had any. Or maybe they would.  Even though Arnie recognized that Mira’s dog had been better behaved than most of the others in his building, he was purposeless as far as Arnie was concerned, and therefore essentially a resource waster, beneath his contempt.

Jake was the finest dog Mira had ever trained.  It was Jake for whom she had coined the term ‘Box’ as a command meaning ‘enter the elevator.’  ‘Box’ was part of the simplified, mostly monosyllabic vocabulary she spoke to direct his movement and activities.  The single word ‘Elevator,’ which Mira could have used as a command, seemed too cumbersome.  Inelegant. Inefficient.  Mira wanted to be sure that she could always control her dogs with simple verbal instructions.  Sit.  Wait.  Stay.  Okay.  Leash.  Chair.  Box.

Arnie knows that Mira has written a best-selling training guide specifically aimed at people who live in tight city apartments with large dogs.  The book brought Mira surprise fame and fortune at a time in her life when she would have least expected it.  Eleven years ago she had been 56, a refugee from the suburbs, a middle-aged widow living on the proceeds of her husband’s life insurance.

The elevator dings as it stops at the fifth floor.  The doors open, but there is no one on the elevator getting off and no one on the landing getting on.  Mira pauses in her counting, waiting for the door to cycle. It seems to take forever, but finally closes.

She could hardly have guessed when she started work on the dog book that she herself and her best boy, Jake, would become favorites on the local talk show circuit, or that her highly responsive but non- trick performing dog would become the model for the great urban house pet. The book had led to classes and workshops, the spreading of her training gospel.  But she had also heard her name raised in anger at community meetings where shop keepers and dog hating residents had accused her of “abetting” the large dog influx into center city apartments, with the attendant street-level problems of too much pee and poop.  “If Mira Hendricks hadn’t written that damned book about how easy it was to keep large dogs in apartments,” she heard one of her neighbors fume at one of those meetings, “we wouldn’t be doing the sidewalk ballet we do every morning to avoid the dog shit.” No one at that meeting seemed to know she was among them, though it was generally known that she lived in the neighborhood.  She learned to let these kinds of comments pass.  It was the humans, of course, who deserved her neighbors’ anger, for not picking up after their pets, but it was the dogs that got banned from buildings and parks as a result.

She wanted Jake to be a good citizen, to live unobtrusively among the humans with whom he shared sidewalks and lifts and hallways.  She taught him as a puppy not to jump up on people, not to respond to strangers inviting him over for pets or treats, unless she gave him permission

The command she used to allow Jake to respond to anyone’s offer to pet him was ‘Get love.’  Arnie had heard Mira say it the one time he had sought to pet Jake, the week after he moved in, a gesture of neighborliness he had no intention of repeating.  Labrador Retrievers, the breed Mira had as pets since childhood, responded best to short, clear commands they heard consistently in recognizable situations.   In this way Jake had been trained to understand the etiquette of the elevator.  At the threshold, on the single command, “sit”, he waited until the door opened.  He did not lunge when it did.  He waited until given permission to enter.  On the word “box” he entered and sat, waiting until the doors opened at the destination floor.  Once there, Mira said “okay,” meaning it was all right to exit. He never pulled her or strained on the leash.  Even Arnie noticed this.

The elevator dings as it passes the sixth floor.  The leash was never a restraint for Jake, but a signal that an out-of-apartment adventure was about to begin.  She used the word “leash” to mean ‘come and get geared up,’ to mean ‘let’s go out for our walk.’  He always came eagerly.

This morning, for the first time ever, calling him to the leash felt like a betrayal.  There would be no adventure.  There would be no return home.  It did not matter that in the last few weeks, when they walked, he would shit out a thin, bloody gruel and then lie down in the snow and close his eyes. Metastasized cancer, clearly dying, but unable to die.  It did not matter that he could not tell her in words that she had his permission, or that he signaled he was ready, that he knew his time had come. She knew what he was saying.

Arnie and Mira face in different directions as they ride to their floor.  Typically, Mira comes into the elevator with Jake at heel, turns to face forward with the dog by her side. Arnie nearly always rides with his back against the side wall, looking at the other riders in profile, if there are any.  Arnie wonders now, in the silence of their ascent, if this choice makes other passengers uncomfortable.  Making people uncomfortable is one of the many tactics he has used as an attorney to get the upper hand over his opponents. He has done it so long, and it is so deeply ingrained, that he barely notices that people stand off from him. Looking at Mira opposite him in the elevator car, he is struck by how youthful she looks.  Or perhaps it is that, in comparison to his wife, and despite her tears, Mira looks hale and hearty to him.

Nearing their floor the elevator slows.  Arnie turns toward the front. When he first moved in, Arnie thought living in a building would prove friendlier than the gated community where he and his wife had lived west of the city, before she became sick, before she could no longer manage.  At the ding on the seventh floor, the door opens.  Mira rushes out ahead of him, toward her apartment.  She does not hear any sounds coming from Arnie’s apartment as she passes, and tries not to think about what that silence might mean.

She already has the key in her hand when she reaches her door.  Arnie watches her from his door, takes a deep breath, steeling himself to go inside, then suddenly he calls out to Mira, “Are you all right?”  “No I am fucking not,” Mira wants to shout at him, “and I never will be,” but she simply cannot make the words come.

Before the vet gave Jake the injections, when they were all sitting together on the floor of the consultation room, the dog’s head in her lap, she leaned into his ear and whispered, “Get Love.”  The dog, nearly too weak to breathe, none-the-less licked her hand.  After the first shot of sedatives and the second of barbiturates, Mira counted down to Jake’s death.  She scratched his head and nuzzled his neck, an act of devotion, waiting for his heart to stop.  Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six.  She knew it was an arbitrary place to start, but it felt right to her, and she desperately wanted him to make it, one last time, to the end.  At twenty-four she knew he was gone, but she did not stop counting.  Twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one.  All the way down to zero. 

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Larry Loebell is a Philadelphia-based playwright, fiction writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He is a four-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in playwriting, and was a Barrymore nominee for his play, House, Divided. He wrote and directed the film, Dostoyevsky Man, and his second feature, Portrait Master, will premier in 2016. He has recently completed a short story collection, which includes 49 Seconds in the Box . Read more at larry@loebell.com. 

The first night her parents arrive from India is the one that means the most, because there is so much to look forward to, even now, even after everything that’s happened.

As the car turns into Swapna’s street, evening is creeping in on the neighborhood. The house that will soon belong exclusively to her is white with gold squares of light at the windows and stands at the end of the cul de sac. Even as families gather for dinner in the other homes, this one waits in silence. Swapna’s parents notice as soon as they climb out of the car.

“It’s so quiet,” says her mother, putting a hand to her chest. The crickets chirp in unison, emphasizing the silence when they pause.

“This is a residential neighborhood,” Swapna shrugs. “That’s why we – I – chose it.”

She opens the door with some hesitation. What she has grown accustomed to is likely to appear unnerving to her parents. They have always found America lonely. But tonight, the quiet desolation of the living room, which Linda cleaned only yesterday with such meticulous care, slams them in the face. Swapna catches a glimpse of their surprised and tired faces and wishes again that she hadn’t yielded to their requests to come and “help.”

Her father is too exhausted to reflect but her mother, never quite able to switch off her intuition or her concern for her daughter, looks around and sniffs. Swapna wonders with sudden panic if she is searching for Tom’s smell. Linda and she have sprayed bottles of bleach, window cleaner, floor polish, fabric softener, carpet stain remover, and other liquids in the last six months, in a maniacal bid to sanitize, but one never knows. Swapna hopes her mother cannot smell the debris of her marriage on her first night here.

The longer the interval between their meetings, the more significant the reunions become. She knows her parents feel it too, because even though they are so tired they feel like they are walking inside a cloud, they insist on staying up with her for a while. Eventually, when her father goes to bed, Swapna and her mother sit on the cream leather sofa. They barely talk, and every few minutes her mother lets out a yawn so wide and mournful that it makes Swapna want to curl up right there and doze off. Finally, her mother’s eyes start to close and Swapna nudges her towards her room gently.

“Tomorrow,” Ma says, as she stands up. “Tomorrow, we will talk about everything.”

Swapna goes to her own room and slips under the covers from where she can stare out at the large ghostly moon in the blue-black sky. Tonight she feels like a child again. She feels safe and warm and knows that unlike the last five months, tonight she will sleep through the night.

The next morning, as soon as she wakes up, Swapna remembers that some remnants of Tom linger around the house. The mug with the picture of the Eiffel Tower that he brought back from a European History conference stands among the other mugs on the top kitchen shelf. His toolbox lies in the garage for a time when Swapna might need to fix something even though she, like most other Indian women, has never learned to fix anything in her life. His faded brown corduroy jacket, which he wore on his walks every evening through the mild Atlanta winter, hangs in the closet. His books are in the library they built together over the years. Most of them are biographies. Of American presidents, European royalty, country musicians, baseball players. All of them have his name on the first page, scrawled in ink, alongside the dates and locations where he purchased them. Vienna, New Orleans, Toronto, New York, Jaipur. Somewhere there is a box full of Italian ties in various shades of red, the one vanity he permitted himself despite the jeers from his scholarly colleagues. When Swapna opens the top drawer of her dresser each morning, a blue Tiffany’s box stares at her. She never glances inside. She doesn’t need to. She knows what lies there, how it sparkles in the sun, and how it feels against her skin, hard and cold.

The way she speaks of Tom, anyone would think he were dead.

She wonders if her parents will discover any of these objects. It makes her almost smile to think how things remain the same over the years. The first time her parents visited her in the apartment she then shared with two roommates up north, back when Swapna was just a graduate student, she had removed things before they arrived. The bottle of whiskey from her bookshelf, the tube of KY Jelly from her bathroom closet, the packet of condoms from her nightstand, the subscription to the adult channels, and all pictures of Tom. This time, she did not bother to hide anything. That is the strange thing about marriage, even a failed one. It gives you a kind of legitimacy that no relationship can, at least not if you are Indian.

 She finds her father in the living room, studying the switch for the air conditioning.

“Why do you have it on all the time?” he asks. “How much is your electricity bill?”

The question irritates Swapna. The temperature is in the eighties outside, and soon the house will warm up. It’s summer in the deep south, she wants to tell him. Everyone uses air-conditioning. It’s not India. But she says nothing and goes into the kitchen where her mother is making tea.

“What will you eat for breakfast?” her mother asks.

“Ma,” Swapna protests. “It’s the first day. Don’t do chores.”

It’s no use of course. By the end of the day the kitchen looks different. Drops of water cover the sink and the counters, and even splash on the tile floor. The trashcan goes from empty to full. Swapna finds crumbs everywhere. She wonders why she bothered to get the house cleaned. When her parents go outside to admire the backyard, Swapna grabs a paper towel to and wipe the counters dry and mop up the floor. It is not India, she wants to say to her mother. Don’t make everything wet.

But when her father goes to bed right after dinner, her mother fights her jetlag and sits on the couch with her again. Swapna opens her Facebook page. They scroll down the newsfeed while she points out all her friends. Her colleagues, her grad school cohorts from Philly, and some of her old friends from Calcutta. Her mother looks intently and listens to every word, asking questions about the people she used to know. Where is she now? How old are her children? Are his parents alright? Then, suddenly, comes the question that catches Swapna off guard.

“Is Tom on Facebook?” her mother asks casually, without looking at her.

“No,” Swapna says.

There is no need to go into detail. Her mother does not need to know that she unfriended him the day they had the talk, back in the winter when the trees were bare and reached into the sky with skeletal arms. That night, still shaking from the confrontation, she hadn’t been sure if the unfriending was irreversible. But the gesture, ripe with symbolism, was not to be undone. Her mother does not need to know that she still goes to his profile sometimes, even though she can’t see his posts. Swapna looks at his profile picture, an old one, where he wears a red T-shirt and baseball cap and a two-day stubble, still looking like the Tom she knew. If she stares at the thumbnail photograph long enough, he morphs into a stranger. Her mother doesn’t have to know that Swapna needed to unfriend him, not out of anger or pride, but because she could not bear to see the girl’s casual posts on his wall. The photographs of helpless animals in shelters, the blogs about photography, the updates about running. And then his comments on those posts, so courteous, so decent.

“That,” her mother says, pointing. “Who is that?”

They both look at the picture of the Indian man with a receding hairline and a soft, round belly. He is not on Swapna’s friend list, but Facebook recommends that she add him.

“Joydeep,” her mother says peering.

And so it is. Despite the softening of his body and the roundness of his face, despite the thinning of hair, he still looks boyish and sweet. He is wearing a dress shirt tucked into black trousers, looking a lot more dapper than before. A pair of sunglasses hangs down the front of his shirt.

“Do you talk to him?” she asks, with the innocence of one who does not really understand the complicated mechanics of Facebook.

Even before she finishes the question, Swapna sends him a friend request. It has been so long. Surely, he has forgiven her by now. They are both middle-aged. They have found other people to direct all their strong emotions at in the past two decades.

It is after midnight when her mother finally goes to bed. Swapna keeps checking her Facebook page until Joydeep accepts her friend request. She lies in bed and looks at his photographs, trying to piece together a lifetime, when he sends her a one-line message saying, Good to hear from you, you look happy.

She takes her parents to see the Coca Cola museum, where they gaze at vintage ads. Her father and she stand in the tasting room side by side, sipping miniature plastic cups filled with different flavors of soda from around the world. Green tea from Japan, raspberry from New Zealand, candy pine nut from South Africa. He tastes each one with a serious look on his face and makes a brief comment as if the company’s future depends on him. Swapna watches him drink the fizzy liquids with the sincerity of a professional taster. His forehead is lined with creases and he looks frailer than she remembers from two years ago. He always looks less authoritative in America than in India. He speaks more softly and does not laugh as much. She wonders if it is the old uncertainty he feels in this foreign land, or if he is particularly debilitated because of her situation. He will turn seventy-seven in a few months. She should not have gone four years without seeing her parents.

He turns to her and says, “Try this one Buri. It’s very refreshing.”

He offers his cup. The soda is golden, like ginger ale. So many beverages on tap here in America, on every office floor, in public Laundromats, rest areas on the highway, the lobby of every apartment complex, and all over on university campuses. How Swapna had marveled at this when she first came here as a graduate student in the nineties. How jaded she has become since then. But when her father calls her by her pet name, Buri, for a moment she feels innocent again.

The last time Swapna was at the Coke museum was with a tourist friend from Germany, and Tom. Afterwards the three of them had gone to eat tapas. They drank two pitchers of sangria between them. Tom was a far better host than her, ensuring that their guest was constantly entertained. Swapna allows herself a little fantasy. If he were here now, he would walk ahead with her father, pointing out things to him, citing scientific facts about soda. Baba would keep up an endless stream of questioning, making Tom swell with the sense of his own importance. Meanwhile, her mother and she could have talked too.

There is so much Swapna wants to talk to her about, but where does one begin? On the night when she came home slightly drunk from the office Christmas party and extended an arm to Tom, only to be pushed away? Or on the afternoon at the gallery when she caught a glimpse of his former student, twenty-something and thin as a reed, laughing like she was high at something Tom said? Or maybe one begins much earlier, on the day when they bought this house when her bank balance was a third of his, and yet they decided to split the mortgage in equal halves because she fancied herself a feminist.

No, none of them is the beginning of course. Swapna knows that. She knows there was a morning back in Calcutta eighteen years ago, when her mother woke her up at first light of dawn for the turmeric bath. Bulu pishi led the other aunts on her father’s side to begin the ulu-uli, until the sound of their high-pitched voices rang out through all the rooms like a siren. The guests stared at the Americans. How the cousins nudged one another and giggled when Tom startled himself and everyone else by pricking his forefinger on a fishbone during lunch. Swapna apologized later for not having warned him but he simply laughed.

She had tried to see the wedding circus through Tom’s eyes. The heavy crimson sari and layers of gold jewelry that wore her down until she could barely move, the mournful notes of the shehnai that played all evening until the last guest was gone, the giant paan leaf she used to shield her face from the groom, the exchange of marigold garlands. Through it all, Swapna pretended she was an onlooker, white, foreign, fascinated, watching everything for the very first time. And despite her abhorrence of ritual, the sight of Tom, wrapped in a white and gold dhoti and silk kurta, made it quite charming.

Swapna finds herself thinking of that day for the first time in years, and wonders what she would do if she had a time machine. If she could go back to that day with the hindsight she now has, would she still go through with it? Her parents walk ahead, not speaking. Her father is almost a foot taller than her mother. The back of his head is bald and hers grey. Swapna watches them walk side-by-side, in sync. They have been married forty-eight years and they met only once before their wedding. It seems improbable but there it is. Yet another cliché from the country she has left behind, but all the sneering in the world cannot make her marriage more successful than theirs.

At night, a message from Joydeep pops up on her iPhone screen. He asks how she’s been. It’s a strange question, given how much time has passed since they last spoke. She considers the question, wondering how she has been since that night twenty years ago, when she hung up the phone after breaking up with him.

“Fine,” she tells him. “You?”

He tells her the basics. He moved to Bombay some years ago, to work for Microsoft, which she finds ironic because that’s what Indian men are supposed to do in America. He lives alone in a western suburb and has a small house in Goa where he spends many of his weekends.

“That sounds wonderful,” she says.

Swapna recalls the flat he shared with his parents when they were in college. It was right next to the busy market where hawkers set up their fly-by-night stands and sold oily fried snacks, cheap plastic jewelry, and produce. Sometimes, on their way back from college, Swapna and Joydeep would climb off the bus and stop at the market to buy guavas and oranges. During the frequent power cuts, the shopkeepers would light their kerosene lamps and lay them on the ground. The streets and houses stood in darkness, but the bazaar flickered with the yellow lights from the lamps.

 Now he drives a Honda City to his weekend house on the beach.

“So,” she types. “You finally became a capitalist.”

He adds a laughing emoticon. “If you can’t beat em, you know.” He sounds almost American. “Living in India is expensive now, especially Bombay. One has to survive.”

Swapna wonders when survival in the motherland became synonymous with vacation homes and Japanese sedans. But, immediately, she feels guilty. It is the guilt of the Non Resident Indian, the latent double standard of one who casually pulls out cans of soda from vending machines placed strategically for maximum consumption. Besides, something in Joydeep’s voice suggests a lack of contentment. Or maybe, in her misery, she is simply seeking company.

One morning, she wakes up to find her mother muttering as she opens shelves in the kitchen. She randomly takes out unopened cans and jars and reads labels. She starts to throw away things from the fridge.

“Buri,” she says decisively when she sees Swapna. “I need to cook. You cannot live like this. You are not a student any more. You are.” She does not complete the sentence, which makes Swapna wonder what she thinks she is. Scientist? Middle-aged? Divorced?

There is no stopping her mother now. She makes a list. They go to the grocery store. Her father comes along because he is fascinated by American grocery stores. He insists on calling them supermarkets. Swapna hopes they do not run into any black people because her father also refers to them by the wrong word. His idea of America has changed little from when she was a little girl. Now, he pushes the cart while Swapna leads the way and her mother makes the selections. The women pour over things and consult while her father stares at the rows of cereals. A customer barks at him to get out of the way because he’s blocking the aisle.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says instantly, ashamed and concerned about the breaching of grocery aisle propriety in America.

To compensate for his apologies, Swapna glares at the woman’s back as she walks away. How uncharacteristically rude she has just been for this gracious city.

Her mother leans toward her and whispers, “Racist?”

“Maybe she’s tired or frustrated about something or unhappy. Maybe,” she pauses. “Her husband left her for another woman.” She grins.

Her mother looks at her without smiling.

“I don’t think you should joke about serious things. This is your problem, this is why you annoy people,” she says, with her lips pursed.

Swapna avoids speaking to either of them for the remainder of the trip. The thought of carrying the tilapia filets, ground beef, spinach, carrots, and beets back home, makes her weary. She already bought all the things she thought her parents would enjoy, stocking up the fridge in the days before their arrival. Liver pate, prosciutto, various cheeses, portabella, asparagus. What was all that for?

“This is for you,” her mother says. “You need to eat the things you miss. Especially now that you don’t come to India.”

She wants to tell her mother she misses nothing, at least nothing edible. What she misses is not from India, and her mother can’t cook it up for her. But since she is trying not to have conversation, she says nothing. While they wait at the checkout counter, Swapna glances at her phone to see when Joydeep was last online.

That night, when she gets under the covers she feels an old familiar stirring. It is almost like excitement. As the computer lights up, she finds herself shivering a little.

“How can you chat at work?’ she asks.

“Don’t worry, I’m the boss.” He adds a smiley, fat, yellow, infinitely cheerful. “No one’s in my office. I can do whatever I want.”

“Why did you never marry?” It is only a faint curiosity.

“Never found the right person after you. I was too cynical and angry, then time passed, I got busy with work, and it seemed too much of an effort.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” She wonders if he will protest this intrusion, or say she has no right to ask him things like this.

“Yes. In Goa. I see her when I go.”

“Ah.”

“It’s fine. Life is fine. Just enjoy the moment.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

She thinks he must be a good lover. In college, Joydeep, Swapna and their friends often skipped classes and hung out at each other’s homes in the afternoons. The fun part about going to Swapna’s parents’ flat was the food her mother would make for them. Cheese pakoras, home made pizza, fish fry, potato tikkis. They would sit on the balcony and eat, drink numerous cups of tea, and talk. Sometimes, her mother would join them briefly. Her friends tried to include her in the conversations. Mashi, join us, they would say, making room. The food is delicious as always. Only Joydeep would look uncomfortable. He would stare at his scrawny hands or long feet, and not say a word while her mother was there. Later, he admitted that he was intimidated. It was the little things, he would say. The thin gold necklace her mother always wore. The piano in the living room, which he knew she played. The pipe her father smoked. Whenever her mother was around, he seemed to freeze. Swapna wanted so much for him to be lively, to tell his jokes and impress her with his knowledge of Marx and Jung and Derrida.

The Joydeep that Swapna knew privately was a boy of simple but acute pleasures. In India they did not have enough privacy for sex. Instead, they went to the movies. Mostly afternoon shows, when the sun beat down on the streets with unrelenting force. To escape the heat and humidity, they bought plastic packets of salted popcorn and hot chips, and sat in the cool darkness of Lighthouse or Globe or New Empire, the three theatres around New Market that played Hollywood movies a few months after their global release. In the darkness, Swapna glanced at Joydeep’s profile many times. His cheekbones were so sharp and his face so thin, they made him look ghostly in the blue light of the screen. His goatee made him look slightly older than his years. They sat with their elbows touching on the same armrest. He always watched the movie so intently, observing every detail of filmmaking, while she let her mind wonder. The seats around them at that time of day were nearly all empty. If he had wanted to, he could have kissed her. Many of their friends went to the movies for that. She waited for him to turn to her with blazing eyes, but at the movies he never did.

Some winter days, when the nip in the air chapped their lips and the sunshine actually felt good, they took a bus to the zoo. Swapna still remembers thinking that the animals looked uniformly depressed. And there is this one memory, an image, of monkey pairs searching one another for head lice. Joydeep and she spent hours outside the monkey arena, watching them do this. How carefully, how patiently, they would look for the lice. That is love, Joydeep once said to her. It was unlike him to speak overtly about emotions. When I grow up, he said, I want to be a monkey.

The cooking begins on Sunday. Her silent, cold kitchen is transformed into a cauldron of scents and sounds. The pressure cooker hisses and whistles. The microwave beeps. Oil sizzles in the pan. A cloud of steam rises from the pot. The kitchen smells of turmeric and cumin. Swapna chops vegetables on the counter facing the backyard. She can see the back of her father’s bald head as he sits out on the porch, reading the newspaper. The grass is lush after a night of rain. She watches her mother cook, hoping to acquire some magical culinary talent from the act of observing. Her mother in the kitchen is brisk and confident. Her fingers move swiftly. She asks Swapna for the garam masala. But Swapna has no idea where it is. It’s been so long since she made Indian food. Tom did most of the cooking until six months ago. Even the last night, before he left, he cooked spaghetti and meatballs. They drank a glass of wine. Swapna drank two. No, three. She drank a lot that night. She broke a glass. He stayed calm. He calmly cleared up the table, loaded the dishwasher, wiped the counters. He wanted to make sure, he said, that the house was tidy before he left. Because he knew how much she sucked at housework. He said it without malice.

Swapna is impressed with her mother’s efficiency in her foreign kitchen. It is not just about making food for her family, though that is her mother’s calling. It is the shrewd wisdom with which she senses things, what to buy, how much to pay, when to cook, when to eat, what medications to track, whether or not to nap. While she is here, Swapna is tempted to abandon all responsibility and let her make the decisions. She wants to simply crumple up like a used paper towel and yield. She is so tired of being self-sufficient.

“How is he doing?” her mother asks as the turmeric-coated tilapia fries in the hot oil.

“Who?”

She glances sideways at her daughter.

“Tom? He’s fine I think. We don’t communicate. His lawyer talks to my lawyer.”

“Surely he will pay you something? After what he did?”

“We’ll see. It’s hard to prove.”

“But he was? Wasn’t he?”

Why won’t her mother utter the words? Why won’t she say adultery or cheating or any of those words that would instantly condemn him to some Hindu hell? Swapna doesn’t respond at first because she doesn’t really know. What she wants more than anything else is to know. But she cannot bear the thought that his denials were true, that the marriage in fact disintegrated for other reasons.

“What do you think Ma?” She finally asks. “Do you think he was having an affair with that girl? They were always texting. They went to art events together. They had so much in common.”

“They were both American,” her mother says.

That’s all. That’s all she has to say. As if that is enough.

The kitchen smells of fried fish, warm and fragrant now, but tomorrow, and over the next few days, it will turn into a stink that will refuse to go despite copious quantities of air freshener. If Tom were here, he would have thrown a fit. Broil the fish, don’t fry it, he would yell. The house will stink for days. Perhaps her mother is right. Perhaps his American self couldn’t bear the burden of her any longer.

But now that they have broached the subject, her mother looks deflated. Her movements are suddenly slower. Swapna feels so sorry to have done this to her aging parents.

“It’s ok Ma. Lots of people get divorced nowadays. You should understand. You’re not like other people of your generation.” She wants to point out how her parents eat beef, how they read poetry, how they watch documentaries on the Middle East. How her mother has even exchanged her Bengali sari for the salwaar kameez. They should be fine with divorce.

“You don’t understand,” her mother says, laying down the wooden spatula with some force. “We will not live for long. Baba is nearly 77. I am 70. How long do we have? Then, what will you do?”

“I have friends.”

“Who? Where are these friends? No one visits you. You are always alone.”

“Not always,” Swapna protests. “They are busy with work and families. And besides, it’s the summer. You know that during the summer I don’t see people much.”

“You will have no one when we are gone.” She turns to the skillet, and carefully picks up each piece of fish and places it on a paper towel.

Swapna leaves the kitchen to demonstrate her anger, and joins Baba on the porch. They talk about the world news. He says nothing about Tom or her marriage or her lonely future. The grass is moist, and Swapna can see her mother cooking tilapia in yoghurt and a light meat stew with vegetables through the kitchen window, as she sits with her father and discusses current affairs. She could be sixteen, in a condo in south Calcutta, with a future as open as the sea.

In the middle of the night, with all the lights off except the blue from the computer, Facebook offers a virtual party, with videos, photographs, news reports, jokes, confessions, and recipes streaming constantly on her news feed. How can anyone ever feel alone again, she wonders, with all this stimuli from all these people playing endlessly in one’s bedroom? The inevitable thought occurs to her. If such a platform had existed when she first left India as a nervous young grad student, would she have kept going with Joydeep? If they could have talked on Skype on weekends and kept abreast of one another’s activities every second of the day, would they have stayed together?

The evening before she left India, twenty years ago, a college friend had invited them all over for a proper farewell. In the middle of the party, the group of friends ceremoniously handed her a goodbye gift. It was a brown and tan upright suitcase. Joydeep gave her nothing. When the others were preoccupied with their drinking, he pulled her into the bathroom and kissed her. They ran the tap so it would drown any sounds. He was a scrawny boy whose bristly goatee tickled her chin. She had stifled a laugh. The next day, after the airplane took off, leaving a trail of lights below, she thought of how the kiss felt and wept quietly in her seat.

They wrote letters for a while and gradually she wrote less and less. His became more and more desperate. His accounts of the unshaven, scruffy Bengali boys sitting on the steps of their fathers’ houses and smoking, talking about Communism and Kafka, began to fill her with disgust. No one went anywhere or did anything interesting in Calcutta. One day, she met Tom at a seminar on the French Revolution. He was nearly a foot taller than her, and so confident, and so curious about everything Indian. The first time she visited his parents in suburban Ohio, everything was so clean. The wine glasses shimmered on the table, the fireplace flickered all evening, and snow fell softly outside. Everything in her old life seemed to fade away in a few brief months.

But now Joydeep and Swapna chat like old friends, and she wonders if she erred in picking a midwestern white man over someone who grew up listening to the same music, speaking the same language, and smelling the same odors. How had she lost herself so, in just two years in the West?

The elections have just ended in India. Swapna’s newsfeed is crammed with reactions, celebratory and otherwise. Joydeep falls in the latter camp.

“Bloody rightwing Hindus,” he types. “They will fuck us and squeeze every shred of independent thinking from their followers and dignity from the rest of us.”

A wave of relief washes over Swapna. She can imagine the look of disgust on his face and the snarl in his voice. Here is the same old Joydeep, fiery and passionate about politics and human rights. She remembers how he marched across campus with the red Communist Party flag. She remembers his torn jeans and khadi tunic, and the canvas tote bags he swung across his shoulder. She is tempted to provoke him further, to drive him to a point of frenzy.

“But the economy? Your jobs? Aren’t those important? The new government is supposed to lure in foreign investors again. Doesn’t the prime minister have an impressive record in his home state?”

“Impressive record???!!!!”

Swapna pulls the comforter over her even though it is a warm and humid night. “You mean the murders and riots??? The rest is his crony media campaign. The poor haven’t benefitted. Muslims haven’t benefitted. What fucking record are you talking about?”

She smiles in the semi darkness. “You haven’t changed that much after all.”

“But you have.”

It catches her by surprise. “Really?”

“Yes, you’re calmer, and not in a good way. Like something’s left you. Spirit or romance or that innocent faith in the world.”

“I’m a realist now,” Swapna says.

“It’s not enough,” says Joydeep. “I will retire in a few years and move to Goa, where I can climb coconut trees and sip feni, watch the waves lap the shore, and write a book.”

Tears spring to her eyes at the vision. It is like the cover of a romance novel. So foolish, so embarrassing.

 “You should come visit me in Goa. Or better still, come live with me. Rekindle.”

“What?” Her heart may have stopped as she waits for his response. It has been a long time since anyone has flirted with her.

“Your romantic side,” he says. “Innocence.”

“What about your girlfriend?”

A chubby yellow smiley appears on the screen, before the chat abruptly ceases and the green light next to his name goes out.

The night before her parents leave, she finds it impossible to sleep. She gets out of bed in the middle of the night and wanders to the living room. It is raining softly and the large bay windows are fogged up. Swapna makes her way to the couch and finds her mother sitting there, staring out of the same window. She sits next to her and they gaze outside as if the window is a TV.

 “What will happen to you when we leave?” her mother asks.

“The same things that happened before you arrived Ma,” she says. But the truth is she is a little afraid too. This departure feels different, more significant somehow.

“How will you live alone?”

“Please Ma, I am not a child. I came here alone, when I knew no one and had nothing. Now look.” She waves her hand around the house. She is a senior researcher for the US government, she has colleagues and friends and even in laws though soon they will not be hers. Still, she has built a community in this country, and lives on her own terms. All this she wants to tell her mother but instead she simply waves her hand as if that gesture might encompass an entire existence.

“Perhaps it is our fault,” her mother says.

Swapna looks at her, surprised. She expected blame, not guilt.

“How can it be your fault?”

“We should not have allowed you to come here. You could have lived in India, married Joydeep or some other Bengali boy, and we would all have been nearby. We should have put our foot down when you wanted to marry an American.”

“Ma,” Swapna begins, startled by the anger rising in her breast. “Allowed? You would not have allowed me?” she pauses to collect herself. “What would I have done in India? Got a nine to five job and popped out a couple of babies? Or stayed at home and not even worked like so many of my old friends? I love my job, Ma. And you know, I did love Tom too. He was so interesting.” She yells out the last word and realizes only then that it is true.

Her mother starts to weep. Swapna shakes her head in frustration. Behind them a light comes on in the hallway. It is her father.

“What are you both doing? It is the last night.”

He stands in the arched doorway, silhouetted against the light.

“Stop crying. Stop,” he says abruptly to his wife. “This is not the time to cry.”

“Isn’t it our fault?” her mother asks him. “Your sisters had warned us before the wedding. Maybe we should have tried to stop her.”

He comes towards them in the dim light and Swapna sees that he is shaking his head. “Stop her from what Malati? It was twenty years ago. How could we know? No one knew what the future held, not even Tom. He was so sincere. Don’t you remember? He took the bus everywhere in Calcutta, and ate with his hands. Don’t you remember how he cooked with you in the kitchen and how he tried to learn Bengali? It must have been so hard for him, and yet I never heard him complain.”

Swapna feels her father’s hand on her head. It is surprisingly steady. She wills it to stay there awhile and tries to memorize its shape on her head. Her father strokes her hair and beside them her mother’s tears slowly subside into an occasional sniff. They stay like that for a while, and watch the sky. Tomorrow her parents will disappear into it. A day later, they will look at it from different hemispheres. But now, in this moment, they are united.

Swapna wonders what Joydeep would say if he knew that she has begun to think of him during the day. Or that she checks her phone for messages every few hours. There is a level of comfort in their online conversations that reminds her of a less complicated time. Despite the superficial changes, Joydeep and she belong to the same community, and share the same sensibility. This is what she had thought of Tom once.

He begins tonight’s chat with the most intimate of questions. “Where’s Tom now?”

“He lives with Julia,” she says. “She’s very young. And not even very pretty.”

“Who’s paying whom?

“She’s a student, works as a bartender to pay her bills. So he must take care of her.”

“No I mean you and he. Who’s paying? Settlement? Is the house yours?”

“Oh that. Our lawyers are working on that. I’ve been asked to stay single for a few months.” Swapna adds a smiley.

“You should squeeze him. Don’t let him get away. When in the States…”

“I don’t know if I care that much. I have a job. And in Georgia it’s all about how much either of us needs. I do have the house because it was half mine anyway.” Swapna looks around her room at the floral wallpaper, the shag carpet, and the furniture they had bought slowly, over months, with their first paychecks. The large window reveals the dark night sky over the backyard. The house has a sunroom, where Tom and she read on Sunday mornings after he brewed cappuccino for them both on his high-end espresso maker. The basement downstairs is full of their winter clothes which they haven’t used since they moved down south. Tom’s down coat and hers, their thick wool scarves and hats, and winter boots, lie entangled together in old boxes that haven’t been opened in a few years.  Yes, this house is hers, and she can live out her life in it, surrounded by their memories.

She glances back at the screen and sees Joydeep’s words waiting for her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s just that after all this time I still feel protective of you.”

It has been a long time since Swapna has had a man feel protective of her. This was the patriarchal impulse she had once fought. In Tom she had found the liberal white man who treated her as his equal and expected her to solve her own problems. How refreshing it had seemed then. But now, this instant, faced with the prospect of her parents leaving the next day and a future spent in solitude, she finds herself longing for a pair of protective arms around her.

“My parents leave tomorrow,” she says.

Joydeep sends her a little red heart. “It will be lonely. I wish I were there to keep you company.”

“Their being here has been so comforting. I didn’t realize just how much it would help.”

“After they leave, we can chat every night before you sleep.”

“You’re sweet. Thank you.” The thought of chatting with Joydeep relieves some of the weight that has lately settled in her chest. She wonders what might have happened if they had found each other online before Tom left. Then she thinks of destiny. Fate. Those Indian words she once sneered at. Is this how things were meant to be? With a return to her youth and to whatever she had left behind? In the next room, her parents sleep, her father’s gentle snores drift through the walls. In the morning, her mother will make a last cup of tea for her. Swapna wishes this night could last eternally.

“I hope your parents are heavy sleepers,” Joydeep types.

“Yes, unless Ma is up worrying about me.”

“How long has it been?”

“Six months.”

“You must miss things.”

“It’s only occasional now. The anger’s faded. Some days I’m really happy to be free.”

“But you must still miss some things.”

Swapna looks at the screen, a little confused about what he means.

“What was it like being married to an American?”

“I don’t know. How does one sum it up? Same as being married to anyone else I would think. Complicated.”

“But Americans are less traditional. Especially a man like Tom who married an India. He must have been very liberal.”

“Yes he was. That was one of the nice things about him.”

“How nice?”

“What?”

“What kind of things did you do? Did you experiment much?”

“Wait, what are you talking about? You mean like drugs?”

“No, I mean, did he teach you stuff? You’ve been in the States 22 years, you must know all kinds of things.”

The room suddenly feels cooler than before. Swapna tries to recall if she locked all the doors.

As if on cue, Joydeep types, “My door is locked. Tell me some of the things you did. While your parents are in the next room. More fun this way.”

“Joydeep,” Swapna begins. Her fingers hover over the keyboard, searching for words that might explain what she’s feeling now, or any of the emotions she has undergone in the past six months.

“Do you remember us kissing in Janani’s bathroom the night before you left for the States? How it turned us on but we couldn’t do anything because of all the people right outside? I have never been more aroused in my life.”

Her father’s snores get louder. The clock ticks on the nightstand next to her. Its metronomic beat sounds like someone’s heart.

When she doesn’t respond for several minutes, Joydeep types, “Tomorrow, after your parents leave, ping me. It’s ok if you wake me up.”

She still says nothing. Posts keep streaming on her newsfeed. Baby pictures, someone’s lunch menu, a conversation someone overheard in a coffee shop in Seattle. Minute-by-minute accounts of life around the globe pour in.

“I get lonely too Swapna. This corporate life, this traffic, the crowds, the noise. It’s all deafening. All I crave is a human connection.”

“This is your idea of a connection? Cyber sex?”

“Come on Swapna.” Everyone in India is doing it. Young, old, single, married, everyone. And you? You’re free, and in America. You of all people should not pretend to be a prude. We are both alone.”

“You girlfriend in Goa?”

“She’s sweet. Really shy and not very aggressive. Not a cosmopolitan, if you know what I mean.”

“I should sleep,” Swapna types. “I think you are not quite well. You sound a bit messed up.”

“I am not well? And what about you?”

She knows she should let it go, end the chat, and turn off the laptop, but she feels compelled to type something definitive, as if putting the words down on the screen will make her life’s decisions mean something.

“We have nothing in common Joydeep.”

The words come faster at her now, and Swapna notices how he misspells them. “Oh yah? And what did you hsve in commmon with Tom? You on your high hoarse. You think I need help? What about you? What will you do for the rest of your life?”

Swapna closes the chat abruptly without saying goodbye. She lies in bed, trying to swallow the queasy feeling that’s washing over her. Once or twice she gulps hard to push back the acid that’s climbing up her throat. The room is plunged in cool darkness now, free of the harsh glare of the computer screen. She lies there and ponders Joydeep’s final question to her. What will she do with the rest of her life, what will she do when her parents are dead and there is absolutely no one to call her own?

On the way to the airport, her parents argue about whether to leave the window up or down, whether her father has remembered the tickets, and whether they should grab a bite before boarding. Swapna drives absent-mindedly, listening to her mother scold her father for no reason.

“How can you fight constantly just when you’re leaving?” she finally asks.

Her father turns to her. His tone is gentle when he speaks. “It is because we are leaving. She is upset.”

This is how he sums up forty-eight years of marriage, Swapna thinks, with this primal understanding of the other person.

Swapna watches them leave at the airport, and bites her lower lip to concentrate on that pain. Their backs recede slowly out of sight. As always when her parents leave, she feels momentarily orphaned.

Instead of heading home, Swapna goes to the zoo for the first time in eleven years. She buys herself a ticket and walks slowly around the grounds. It is the peak of summer. Even the animals want to stay inside. Only a few other fools like her have ventured to the zoo today. Swapna makes her way to the primate section. They come in various sizes and shades. Drill, lemur, tamarin, macaque. Swapna stops suddenly in front of the orangutans. There are two of them. They are large, almost like adult humans, and they sit close together, their bodies touching. In fact, every time one of them moves slightly, so does the other, in tandem, as if tied with an invisible rope. They move slowly, inching their way across the large outdoor cage.

Swapna sits on a rock and watches them. A few other people walk by. A young mother pushing a stroller stops to look at the apes. Her baby stares at them from its seat and gurgles with what Swapna assumes must be pleasure, for instead of hurrying away, the mother lingers. If she had kids, Swapna might have been a regular at the zoo. The apes, dark brown and hairy, have long, mournful faces. One of them is slightly smaller than the other. The larger orangutan waits patiently for the smaller one to catch up. They touch each other constantly.

This southern summer is scorching and humid like the tropics. Sweat trickles down her back but she cannot turn away. The apes stop in the middle of the cage. The smaller one reaches up to the larger one and begins to search for lice. It works patiently, its fingers kneading through the other’s hair. Every now and then the apes glance up and blink slowly at the sun, as if bewildered by the world outside.

---

Oindrila Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University. She has worked as a journalist in Calcutta, India, and been the creative writing fellow in fiction at Emory University. She is a regular contributor to the Indian magazine Scroll, and is currently working on a novel set in India and a collection of stories about recent Indian immigrants in the U.S.

 

When the baby’s fever reached one hundred and five, they decided they could stand it no longer. A call to the pediatrician had reached an answering machine, and they’d waited an hour, but the child was hot as a charcoal briquette and had recently begun vomiting a white, mealy substance – a cross between grade school paste and cottage cheese – that was unlike any spit-up they’d seen. Finally they loaded the baby into the Volvo and drove to the emergency room. Thomas kept the accelerator to the floor, and Allison sat in back with their son. The boy cried hoarsely with each breath, and Allison asked if Thomas finally agreed the turkeys were to blame.

“Let’s not go off the deep end,” he said. “We’re not the doctor.”

“When this is over, you’re speaking to Danny Baker,” she said. “And don’t talk to me like I’m crazy.”

The emergency room doctor took the baby’s temperature – now one hundred and six – and declared that the first order of business was to cool the child down. Seizures were a possibility if the fever remained that high. Thomas spent the next half hour lowering his screaming son again and again into cool water while a nurse tracked his temperature. The boy held tightly to him with arms and legs between soakings, and to get him free Thomas had to break the child’s hold each time. He found himself panting and crying with his son, as Allison leaned against the wall in the mercilessly bright exam room, her face in her hands.

When the fever dropped to one hundred and two, the nurse wrapped the child in a towel and laid him in his mother’s arms, where he cried and then fell into a jerky, croaking sleep. The doctor, a ruddy man with watchful blue eyes, sat with them and asked how long the boy had been ill.

“We think it’s bird flu,” Allison said.

Thomas sighed and laid a hand on her arm. “Of course we don’t know what it is, Doctor. He’s been listless for two days, no appetite, his diapers soft and yellow. The fever came on late this morning and has been building all day.”

Allison swung toward him, the child against her breast like a shield. “I was on the patio with Declan four days ago,” she said, “where we allow turkeys – wild turkeys – to come right up to the house. He was on a blanket and I was reading, and I thought I’d swept all the disgusting droppings into the grass, when I looked down and saw him playing with one of them – one of the bowel movements, I mean.” She glared at Thomas. “It was at his mouth.”

The doctor’s eyes darted between them. This was good information, he said, though bird flu was doubtful. “Despite what you hear on the news, the transmission of avian influenza from bird to human is rare, and there are no reported cases in the United States. It’s more likely your boy has a case of the everyday flu, though we’ll need further – ”

“Can we at least acknowledge,” Allison cried, “that a five-month-old child handling bird shit is a bad idea? Can we at least acknowledge that?” She said “bird shit” so loudly that conversations outside the exam room went quiet.

The doctor blinked and lifted his palms. Yes, he said, handling bird feces was never a good thing. Several illnesses might result from such contact, and knowing that the child had done so would inform their testing. Allison’s face crumpled, and she began to weep so convulsively that Thomas took the baby from her, and the nurse helped her to the examination table where she could lie down.

In the hallway the doctor put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “This is hard on both of you. That’s perfectly understandable.”

Thomas sensed the man was prompting him to talk about Allison. He pressed his cheek against his son’s hot forehead and whispered, “It’s bad enough having Declan so miserable, but she always jumps to the worst – ”

“She’s right to be concerned,” the doctor said, dropping his hand to cup the baby’s skull. “This boy is very sick.”

Allison had always been fearful, though there’d been a time Thomas found her timidity appealing. She was blonde and honey-skinned and an inch taller than he, and she walked with the loping, pigeon-toed stride of a model on the runway. Her father owned three restaurants in Chicago and had played outfield for the White Sox, and he’d made it clear in word and deed that his daughter deserved better than a high school math teacher. When Allison turned girlish and needy it salved a raw spot in Thomas’s pride.

Once, soon after they were engaged, she made a roast beef dinner at her apartment, and when they sat down she asked if he would light the candles. When he looked at her curiously she told him she’d never struck a match in her life.

“Daddy always did it when we were little,” she said. “And then later on it became like a family custom, and before you know it I’m in high school and college and – ” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “I’ve still never done it.”

Thomas lit the candles and savored knowing he’d taken the old lion’s place. He bent to kiss Allison’s lovely cheeks in the firelight and said if she needed someone to strike matches for the rest of her life, he would be that man.

And he meant it. But in the four years since, her qualms and boundaries had begun to eat at him. If he stood at an open refrigerator door more than ten seconds, she worried the pork chops would spoil and give them trichinosis. If they were sitting on the patio in the evening and a bat flew overhead, she bolted for the house for fear the creature would tangle itself in her hair, leaving Thomas to either sit alone or gather the wine glasses and follow her inside.

But whenever he’d explained the flaws in her thinking – the few times he’d tried to help her face her fears logically – there’d been hell to pay.

Shortly after he’d begun his first teaching job, they spent a weekend in the city with another couple and visited the Sears Tower, where the observation deck promised a view of four states from its thirteen-hundred-foot perch. Better yet, you reached it by one of the world’s fastest elevators.

Allison stood at the ticket booth reading the description and biting her lip, but when their friends suggested going for it she shook her head. Thomas had drunk a second beer at lunch, and he laughed more loudly than he’d intended and said, “Of course not. We could all die.”

Allison scowled at him and walked away in the Wacker Drive lobby with her arms folded across her chest. He followed her – loaded with righteousness more than regret – and their argument in front of a Baskin Robbins had clerks staring and mothers gathering their toddlers close.

“You didn’t have to embarrass me,” she said when he caught up and took her elbow. She shook him off and stared at the travertine floor.

“Do just one thing for me,” he said. “Admit that this is ludicrous. On an intellectual level at least, admit there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“You treat me like a child.”

Thomas’s voice took on a tone he used in the classroom. “A child gives in to irrational fears, but an adult knows better. An adult knows there’s near zero chance the elevator will malfunction. An adult knows – ”

Her chin snapped up. “I know if you don’t leave me alone I’ll claw your eyes out. That’s what I know.”

He shook his head. “Have you ever once considered facing your demons and telling them to fuck off?”

She startled him by smiling. “Fuck off,” she said.

In the end she waited in a tea shop while Thomas and the other couple rode in silence to the top of the world. There, he put his forehead against the glass and looked over the seamless reaches of Lake Michigan and asked himself how Allison could name him as a tormentor, when no one cared for her like he did.

The boy’s temperature had begun to climb again, and the doctor suggested admitting him for a day or two. A regimen of anti-viral meds, fever reducers and a cool-mist vaporizer should do the trick. Allison insisted on staying, and Thomas said he would drive to the house and pack an overnight bag for both of them. She shook her head. “I want you to sleep at the house and talk to Danny Baker first thing,” she said. “I don’t want to see you again until you’ve talked to him.”

“I don’t think there’s any reason to – ” Thomas began, but she turned away, the child a sodden, reproachful weight on her shoulder.

Their neighbor Danny Baker was the town marshal. When he and his twelve-year-old son Mitch weren’t hunting or fishing, they stacked bales of straw at the wooded end of their back yard and shot steel-tipped arrows into them. They cleaned blue gills and smallmouth bass on their deck and threw the guts into the weeds, where raccoons feasted in plain sight. Lately Allison had seen Mitch spreading ears of field corn in the grass, so wild turkeys and quail would come out of the pines to feed.

But though the quail scurried for cover the moment Thomas or Allison opened the sliding door to the patio, the turkeys had grown bolder by the day. One early June evening Thomas and Danny Baker stood at the hydrangea bed that connected their back yards, and the man told him that springtime was the birds’ mating season, and the young males – “jakes,” he called them – were loaded with spunk.

“We’re either wives or rivals to them,” Danny Baker said. “They want to fuck us or fight us.” As if on cue, a male turkey stepped from the pines and strutted toward them, its head high and thrusting and its eyes fixed on their faces.

“Whoa now, uncle,” Danny Baker said. He broke off a woody hydrangea shoot and met the bird halfway. The turkey stretched its naked skull toward him, and the man stood tall and whipped the stick through the air so it made a whistling sound. “Shoo now, chief,” he said, and the bird bobbed and flounced and retreated into the trees, its ostrich-like legs muscular and springy.

“They have to know who’s top dog, is all,” Danny Baker said.

In the morning Allison called to tell him that Declan’s fever had spiked again overnight and they’d repeated the cooling baths. He had a rash and made no tears when he cried, so the doctor had ordered intravenous fluids.

“They couldn’t find a vein,” Allison said. “They poked him and poked him, and they finally had to go into his neck.” Her voice was monotonic and exhausted, but their conversation was less than a minute old when she asked him if he’d spoken to Danny Baker.

“Not yet,” Thomas said. He put down his coffee and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “His pickup’s still in the drive.” The line buzzed with a reproving silence, and Thomas looked out the window to see the marshal and his son hoisting a portable generator onto the truck bed. “Oops, there he is now,” he said, and hung up before she could respond.

Pregnancy had lifted Allison to the top of a green hill – her fears lightened by anticipation – but the birth itself had pushed her into a helpless, tumbling roll down the other side. Labor was a bruising, thirty-six-hour grind, and when Declan’s head got stuck in the birth canal the doctor gripped it with forceps and yanked the boy so violently into the world his cheek was bloodied. Thomas woke to find himself on the tile floor, a nurse swabbing his forehead with a cold towel and his son’s squalls in his ears. And though friends had told him how wonderful the moment would be when the boy was laid on his mother’s chest, Allison began to hemorrhage, and the room filled with shouting medical staff. The baby was hustled away and Thomas was sent – still in gown and mask – to a couch in the waiting area.

When mother and child finally came home, Allison slept in Declan’s room every night for three months. Even after nighttime feedings tapered off and she’d joined Thomas again in their bed, she continued to check the boy four and five times a night.

Once when they lay sleepless in the early dawn, she told Thomas about being a child and learning for the first time about glaciers. “I thought they were like rainstorms,” she said. “I thought you’d wake up one morning and there’d be a glacier on the horizon where a day before there was just sky.” She’d dreamed about her father picking her up and running, while behind them a wall of ice tore houses to pieces, gouged sidewalks from the earth, shredded trees.

“I’ve started having that dream again,” she said, pressing her damp face into his shoulder. “I’d forgotten about it, and now it’s back.”

Thomas pulled her to him and smoothed her hair and listened to Declan’s clotty breathing on the baby monitor, turned to full volume on the nightstand.

Now he stepped from his yard into Danny Baker’s gravel driveway and watched the man and his son wrestle the generator to the back of the truck bed and strap a gasoline can against it with a bungee cord. Only after they’d finished and jumped to the ground did the marshal acknowledge Thomas’s presence.

“How-do, professor,” he said, wiping his forehead with the back of his fist. He wore a sleeveless flannel shirt half open to his chest, and his biceps were round as softballs. “What can I do you for?”

Thomas told him that Declan was in the hospital, the doctors were trying to pin down what was making him feverish, Allison had spent the night with him there.

“That’s no good,” Danny Baker said. “I’ll tell Helen. We’ll be sending prayers your way for sure.” Mitch stood beside him and stared at Thomas. His hair was cut short to the same length all over his head and was so blonde it was nearly white.

“Anyway,” Thomas said. “The doctors think it might have something to do with the turkeys, with their droppings on our patio.”

“Is that right? That’s what the doctor said?”

“They think it’s a possibility. That’s correct,” Thomas said.

The man leaned against the truck and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “We’re sorry to hear the boy’s sick. Declan, is it?” He glanced at Mitch. The boy’s gaze hadn’t strayed from Thomas’s face. “I don’t think it’s the turkeys though, do you?”

“Probably not,” Thomas said, “but I have my orders.” He smiled, but when the marshal looked at him blankly he hurried on. “We’re going to try to keep them out of the yard, just to be on the safe side.”

“Shoot, man, that’s easy,” Danny Baker said. “Get you a tennis racket and run them off.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Thomas felt hot blood in his cheeks. “I’m teaching Drivers Ed this summer, and I can’t expect my wife to be chasing wild animals from the yard. Not with a new baby.”

“Wild animals,” Danny Baker repeated, and then his face brightened. “I tell you what. Get a dog. Turkeys can’t stand a yapping dog.”

Thomas sighed and gripped the truck bed rail with both hands. He leaned to and fro, making the pickup rock gently. “Allison doesn’t like – ” He felt the silence, then a breeze rustle high in the pines. “We’re not dog people,” he said.

Danny Baker glanced at the sky. “What is it you need from us, Tom?”

Thomas stepped around the wheel well so his back was to Mitch. He stared into the man’s eyes and spoke rapidly. “Look, it’s probably nothing, but my wife…we think it would be better if you didn’t spread corn in your yard. The birds are losing their fear of us, and if there’s the slightest possibility they carry disease – ”

“Done,” the man said. “If that’s all you need, we’re glad to help. More than glad.” He bent to retrieve a spade and pickaxe and threw both into the truck bed so they clattered heavily. “Is there anything else your wife needs? Anything Helen can do?”

Thomas stepped away from the pickup. “No, nothing else,” he said. “Thanks for understanding.”

“It’s nothing at all. You tell your wife she needn’t worry about turkey turds any longer,” Danny Baker said. He laughed, and Mitch smiled and unsmiled quickly.

When Thomas returned to the house he found a push broom and swept the patio clean of a fresh collection of gray-green droppings. When he turned to enter the house he saw Mitch watching him from the deck. Thomas nodded, but the boy stepped into the lawn with a rake and began scouring fiercely through the grass, sending naked corn cobs flying into the trees.

At the hospital Declan was sleeping open-mouthed, each inhalation a squeaking whimper. A tube snaked from an IV bag to a bruised place at his jugular. The pediatrician sat with Thomas and Allison and told them their son had a virus, most likely the flu, and would probably be better in a few days.

“What about the turkey droppings?” Allison said.

“That’s our conundrum,” the doctor said. “We’ve ruled out bird flu, of course, and the symptoms aren’t consistent with E. coli or salmonella. It’s possible he has a case of West Nile, and that’s no laughing matter.” The rash, the high fever and the dehydration all suggested the mosquito-borne virus.

Thomas stroked his son’s hot forehead and looked at Allison. “So it doesn’t come from the turkeys after all,” he said.

“On the contrary, it might,” the doctor said. “A mosquito bites an infected bird and then it bites us.” West Nile usually disappeared on its own, he continued, but in rare cases it turned to encephalitis, especially in infants. He asked if they had any standing water in the back yard – an unused goldfish pond, maybe, or an old tire swing – that might be a breeding place for mosquitos.

A cool feather brushed Thomas’s heart, but Allison responded that Declan was too young for a swing, and a pond wasn’t safe for a child. She looked at Thomas. “Is there anything else you can think – ”

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing else.” He felt the doctor eyeing him. “I’ll check though. Just to be sure.”

Allison rocked back and forth as the doctor recommended Declan stay in the hospital a few more days until they knew he was out of the woods. When the man left the room, she continued to rock, her hands twisting the waistband of her sweatshirt. “He’ll never be out of the woods,” she said.

“Of course he will,” Thomas said. “He said it was rare.” He stood and paced the room, squeezing fistfuls of hair until his scalp stung. He told her that Danny Baker had agreed to stop spreading corn in the yard. He’d seen Mitch raking the grass clean. Soon the turkeys would learn their place. “I’ll call off from Drivers Ed for a week,” he said. “I’ll show them who’s top dog.”

“We can’t keep our baby safe,” she said softly.

“Yes we can,” Thomas said. He knelt and grabbed her shoulders. She stared past him, and her bleakness nearly moved him to panic. He took her face in his hands and forced it to his. “I’ll fix this,” he cried. “I promise.”

Thomas drove from the hospital to a strip mall near the house. Allison had refused to go home to sleep, so he told her he would pick up a toothbrush and shampoo and return soon. Instead he went to Home Depot, where he bought one hundred feet of chicken wire, two dozen rebar stakes, a mini-sledge hammer, five citronella candles and a propane mosquito fogger.

He arrived at the house and went immediately to work. Since the turkeys had become aggressive he had stopped gardening, and his galvanized metal watering can and bird bath were full to the brim with rain water. An amber film coated both surfaces, and he dumped the watering can into the impatiens and flushed the bird bath clean with a hose. He climbed a stepladder to inspect the eaves troughs and found them full, choked with sodden pine needles. He circled the house with the ladder, scooping crud from the gutters with his hands and snaking the hose into each downspout until the clogs gave way and water flowed freely into gravel beds. He retrieved a leaf rake from the garage and swept the back yard clean of droppings, flinging them far into the pines. He used the mini-sledge to drive the rebar at intervals along the property line and stretched the chicken wire from stake to stake, anchoring it with ground staples.

He looked up once and saw Danny Baker watching him from the deck. The man called to him, but Thomas bent again to his task.

In the end the fence stood four-feet high and wove tautly from one corner of the back yard to the other. It spanned the width of the pine woods and sliced through the hydrangea bed. Thomas’s clothes were fouled by pine sludge, his hands nicked and bloodied from the wire, but he unpacked the citronella candles and placed one on the outdoor bistro table and the other four at each corner of the patio. The sun was low in the trees when he unboxed the fogger and filled the reservoir with insecticide. He lit the pilot light and walked from one edge of the yard to the other, sending clouds of poisonous smoke into the grass, the bushes, the trees. The fogger made a wet, throaty sound, and the breeze wafted the smoke skyward, where it disappeared into the green-black gloom.

When he was finished Thomas turned off the fogger and stood in the gathering dusk. The pines pressed in on him like a wall, the oldest more than eighty feet high. The woods extended a mile behind the house to wetlands beyond, and as the noise from the fogger died Thomas heard in the trees the drone of a billion crickets and katydids, peepers and toads. A flock of crows assembled in the uppermost branches and heckled him. Sand cranes called from the marsh.

He put the tools in the garage, then sat in the kitchen to call Allison. Declan was better, she said. His temperature was almost normal. They’d removed the IV from his neck. It was the flu all along.

“Oh, god. Oh, sweetheart.” Thomas sagged into his chair. He sucked in a huge lungful of air, and as he released it he began to cry and babble like a child. He described the fence, the candles, the fogger, and when she didn’t respond he gripped the phone and sobbed. “Did you hear me? Did you hear what I did?” His heart was full to bursting. “I won’t let anything bad happen to either of you. Don’t you know that?”

“I know,” she said quietly. “Take it easy.”

They hung up and Thomas sat for a few moments in the dark kitchen. Then he rose unsteadily, poured a scotch and walked back to the patio, where he lit the candles and fell into a padded deck chair. His eyes burned, and his bloody hands throbbed. The sun had fully set and a soft glow suffused everything. As he watched, a half dozen turkeys emerged from the pines onto Danny Baker’s lawn. They pecked and bobbed, snatching at the ground in reptilian syncopation. One of the jakes neared the fence, examined it briefly, then flared its wings and sprang lightly into Thomas’s yard. Soon another followed, and then another.

---

Robert Johnson holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. His stories have appeared in the online journals Wag’s Revue and Winning Writers. He was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2014 “Family Matters” fiction contest and a 1st Runner Up in Pinch Journal’s 2015 Literary Awards. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife Cindy and his retriever/lab mix Ellie. Much of his Monday-Friday career has been spent teaching, and in various creative capacities at the CBS affiliate in South Bend, WSBT-TV.

They honeymooned in a one-star Mississippi motel: a three-story dingy cube beside an asphalt lot scattered with El Caminos and Volkswagens, notable only for the towering neon sign spelling its name in phosphorescent pink glass tubes – S-U-N  K-I-S-T,  like the citrus – and the seven letters she bet always blinked beneath – V-A-C-A-N-C-Y. Originally, they had planned to drive all the way from Grand Isle to Florida, but they never made it because they got sick of driving – or, more accurately, because Odell’s fingers had been sending a tingling sensation and a string of goose bumps up her thigh since the Louisiana-Mississippi border. By the time he suggested they stop in Pass Christian, she wanted nothing more. She laughed when he pointed at the vacancy sign blinking over the Sun Kist, and she laughed even harder when he drove over the railroad tracks into the lot. And so it was that their son was conceived in Room 301 under the neon pink glow of that sign, while the wind off the dirty Gulf floated molecules of salt and seawater she could taste through the open balcony door. And so it is that, today, on the first anniversary of that night, Mrs. Odell LeBlanc is weaving through traffic into the lot.

Her knuckles white against the steering wheel, she sighs: at the glare of the sun off the dash, the tilt of the second C in VACANCY, which has in the past year all but fallen from the sign. The motor whines as she parks the car. She hurries through the black parking lot toward the office, jumping at the bell that rings as she opens the door.

The receptionist sits behind a desk, legs crossed, seashell-pink lips shimmering as she smiles lazily from beneath her monstrous beehive. Everything in the office is dark brown, apart from the linoleum floor. A fan on the desk oscillates. Pale threads of hair snaking up the woman’s scalp quiver, fuzzing out from her hairdo, that gravity-defying monument to all that is mod.

“Can I help you?” The receptionist hasn’t changed at all. That hairdo, that lipstick. Her fingernails are even the same color, fluttering seashell pink above her desk. Penny remembers giggling at them last summer as Odell held her hand and inquired about a room with the straightest face he could muster – which wasn’t very straight considering the LSD they had taken in the car. When the receptionist reached out to take their money, the pink of her fingernail polish had left traces of light in the air, marking the path of her hands.

“Penny Leblanc,” she says. “I have a reservation. Room 301.”

The woman checks a notepad. The oscillating fan turns, overwhelming Penny, briefly, with a sweet floral scent, the woman’s perfume. The receptionist nods, her beehive bobbing up and down, tiny threads dancing in the air like snakes being charmed. “By yourself?”

In the mirror behind her, Penny watches herself nod back. Originally, Odell was supposed to come with her. But he had called, the week before, to tell her that they were cutting his furlough, moving up his date so his whole battalion could take the same ship to Vietnam.

“Seven bucks,” the woman says.

She fishes around in her bag, watching her reflection as she hands the woman seven crumpled bills. She has been too busy, since Teller was born, to spend much time in front of the mirror. But looking at herself now, she realizes she has her mother’s figure, in addition to her eyes. With her hair pulled back in the fraying bun she’s worn since her son was born, it’s as if her mother is right there, watching her over the shades she bought at a gas station just outside Baton Rouge.

She pushes the glasses up on her nose, unsettled by the idea. Although almost a year has passed since her parents’ accident, the thought of either of her parents still has the capacity to bring her suddenly, and without warning, to tears.

“Can you believe this sky?” the woman asks as she puts the money in the register. “It’s so blue. And with that storm in the Gulf!”

She shakes her head, trying to feign disbelief as she worries whether she forgot her breast pump. Surely she took it out of Teller’s bag this morning before she left him with her mother-in-law. Surely it’s just outside in the trunk. Here she is, separated from him for the first time since he was born – and she knows how she’s supposed to feel, a new mother separated from her infant, she’s supposed to feel nervous, guilty, worried – but she feels relieved instead, unburdened, for the first time since Odell left for the Depot. Teller would be fine; Odell’s parents were thrilled when she asked them to keep him overnight.

The receptionist is staring at her.

Penny tries to remember what the woman has just said. “What storm?”

“Hurricane Camille.”

“That’s right.” She heard about it on the drive up, but didn’t pay much attention since it was headed for Florida. “The one that destroyed Castro’s crops.”

“That’s the one.” The woman sets the key on the counter, her seashell pink fingernails fluttering above it, as if she doesn’t want to let go. “Where you from?”

But in the time it takes her to ask, Penny has already swiped the key out from under her fingers, turned around, and pushed the door open, its awful bell ringing merrily as it swings toward the lot. She misses Odell. He was so good at talking. Whenever they were accosted by an inexplicably friendly stranger, all she had to do was stand beside him and smile. Whatever it was – the weather, the war, the fashions worn by astronauts’ wives – he could talk about it politely. “Grand Isle,” she mumbles over her shoulder, then stops, surprised to hear her husband’s hometown instead of her own. “But I’m originally from Pride.”

 

The sign makes her arms glow a psychedelic pink as she unlocks, then opens, the room door. A smell wafting out, a distinctly stale scent, which she doesn’t remember the room having before. She crinkles her nose, hurries in, opening the balcony doors to let in the smell of sea salt, the sound of seagulls, the brown waves crashing on the beach across the street.

She sits down on the bed, looks around: at the wide brown Gulf beyond the balcony, the ancient-looking radio on the bedside table, the rusty bathtub, the beat-up armoire, the brass handle falling off its door. Nevermind the state of the room, she has to admit, it feels good to be out of the house. Maybe this trip will do her good. Ever since Odell left, there has been something wrong with her brain. It’s gone haywire. Fuzzy. She has difficulty concentrating. Alone with Teller, all day, every day, her grief over her parents’ deaths has come back to haunt her, full force. It was a good thing babies cried when they were hungry. Twice, three times this week, she has put Teller down for a nap, gone to the kitchen to do the dishes, and jumped at the sound of his cries to find herself staring through the window at the brown bay, a full hour gone. Such a strange sensation, to snap to yourself and realize you’ve lost a whole hour. Where do you go when you’re thinking? Is that even thinking, zoned out like that, to stare at the sea?

She pulls out the pack of smokes she bought at a gas station on the way up. Odell’s brand. Lions paw the shield on the logo of the pack, where a slogan is engraved – per aspera ad astra – she doesn’t know Latin. She lights up, takes a drag, breathing in the familiar scent of the smoke, then ashes in the zodiac-shaped tray on the bedside table. There’s a cigarette burn on the quilt beside it, a small black hole in the pastel blue. Did they do that last summer? She can’t recall.

That’s the door they flung open, the threshold where they stood, staring in, on their wedding night. She remembers standing beside him. Auburn hair falling out of his ponytail. Dark eyes laughing as he pointed at the painting over the bed.

Now it’s gone, a rectangle of less-smoke-stained wall in its place. What was it? A sailboat, a print of a sailboat drifting on a perfect blue sea at sunset, which looked like it was painted by someone’s great aunt. She had pronounced it beautiful, noting the extra care the artist had taken to paint the name on the boat. But Odell had noted the unrealistic blue of the sea, which bore no trace of the telltale brown that stained the Gulf for a hundred miles around the mouth of the Mississippi, and they had fallen onto the bed, laughing at the contrast between this place and the suite his parents had reserved for them at the Pensacola White Sands Regal, where his parents said “the help” tossed rose-petals across the bed and brought unlimited champagne.

She stares at the empty rectangle on the wall, disappointed, suddenly, that they stopped here after all. This place was fun, but she’s still never been to Florida. Before she met Odell, she had never even left Pride. Odell would probably call the desire silly and bourgeois – he was always using that word when he talked about his parents – but she would’ve liked to stay at a place like the White Sands once in her life, at least on her honeymoon. Although come to think of it, it’s probably a good thing they didn’t. She couldn’t have gone back to Florida with that hurricane coming. Nor could she have afforded the room.

She leans back into the pillows, the mattress creaking beneath her. If only he could’ve met her here. What a different trip this would’ve been. When they were here, the year before, she had felt so giddy, so free.  As soon as they set down their things, he had pulled her onto the bed. She had reached out to run her hand through his hair and kiss him. But her hand had pawed the air between them, missing him completely, fingers closing instead on the pink-tinted twilight that streamed through the glass balcony doors like water. When he turned to smile at her fist full of twilight, she saw the strangest shapes in the dark green of his eyes, the strangest moving white shapes she couldn’t make sense of. What were those ghosts in his pupils? He held up his hand in a wave and smiled. Hello, he whispered. Thank you for joining us. I’ll be your husband this evening.

Her husband. The man whose laugh, mellow and echoing in her ear, set her whole body trembling. The man whose spirit had streamed out his mouth later that night, into hers, through her open lips, and made a baby. Not literally of course. She knows the biology. But there was this moment when they kissed, this surreal moment, later that night, on the beach. Her toes were muddy and wet and cold and she was thinking she couldn’t tell the difference between the sky and the ocean, everything was black and star-spattered as far as she could see. But when she leaned over to tell him, he had said I know before she had time to say anything. And when he kissed her, she could feel his spirit flowing in through her lips, like water, like the pink twilight through the glass doors, only this time she felt it instead of seeing it as she closed her eyes, let it in. Down her throat, twilight, air, to her belly, a yawn, in reverse, swelling up.

That man. He is missing from the letters he sent from the Depot and Camp Lejeune. Each week, since he left home, she’s gotten only one page, front and back. Seven short dated paragraphs, one for each night of the week. Every time she reads them, she aches, and she’s read them so often, the pages have torn and crumpled. She can tell he is scared They will read them, by the way he refers in this strange blithe way to Our Country and God and Duty with a capital D. But his signature. Each paragraph ends, Yours in spirit. And those three words feel more truthful than anything else he writes. As if he doesn’t want to admit his longing. As if he wishes that by inscribing those words, each day, like a mantra, he could encode his spirit in those letters and send it to her via post. But that’s impossible. Obviously. His spirit has shipped to the jungle with his flesh. When she gets home tomorrow, the house will echo even more with his absence – during the day, as she takes care of Teller; at night, as she sits up, sleepless, watching television. And she has come to this motel alone.

The house has felt so empty, these last couple months while he was in training. She’s been obsessed with the news, consumed by the danger he would face in Vietnam. She’s had trouble enjoying quiet moments with her son.

She fumbles through her bag for the vial Odell asked  her to find last week in the freezer, before he called back a few days later to say he couldn’t make this trip after all. Apparently he had hidden the vial in a bag of frozen okra, the summer before, after they realized she was pregnant, when she asked him to throw it away. She isn’t sure it’s such a brilliant idea to do this stuff alone, but she has felt so awful since he left for the Depot. She remembers the last night they did this stuff together, newlyweds sitting Indian-style beside a campfire, finding themselves in each other, in the flames.

There’s only a small bubble of transparent liquid at the bottom. Odell probably did the rest when he went camping with Pete, two days before they left for the Depot. That would explain his strange behavior the next day, his last with her. She tries to swallow her irritation at the long walk he went on by himself before sunrise, the way he seemed to avoid her eyes, that night, the last time they made love. Afterward, he made her promise not to hang onto his memory for too long, if it came to that. Teller will be needing a father, when he gets older. If something happens to me, you’ll want to find someone else. He had been so sincere about it, so desperate to hear her say yes, that she had nodded. But the truth is she can’t imagine being with anyone else.

His idea had been to relive their wedding night, tonight, to recapture the wonder, the freedom, they felt together before their son was born. But all she wants is to find herself, the girl who once took joy in everyday life. It’s not so different from the vision quests her mother talked about her ancestors doing, before they started going to church and trying to pass as white. She had always been drawn to that idea, the value of stepping out of yourself into a shadow world in search of the truth.

She squeezes the eyedropper, sucks up the rest of the liquid, and drops it on her tongue. Then she lies back down on the bed, tired, the length of the drive catching up with her. She closes her eyes, trying to forget the zodiac-shaped ash tray, the cigarette burn on the bed, the missing painting. The whole world, revolving, turning, spinning around her, against her. Squeezing her eyes tighter and tighter still, trying to see: not the ceiling, or the static on the backs of her eyelids, but him. Staring out of the porthole of a rocking ship on the bright blue ocean with the rest of his unit. Long hair shaved. Face gaunt, muscles taut. His eyes hard and tired. Her husband. In spirit. 

But the image of him that swims up is not what she expected. His eyes are hard and tired, empty, hollow, pale, as he stares out that porthole. And the pale hollow color of his irises has seeped into the skin around his left eye, staining his flesh a faint bottle-sea green. A bruise.

 

It’s hitting. She can feel it. The mattress has become springy beneath her. She props her head on her hand. Did she fall asleep? The room is alive with pink. The cigarette burn on the blanket glows, layered, starshaped. Outside the hard brown edge of the burn hole, she can see traces of the burn she couldn’t before. It’s translucent around the edges, lovely lace fading into untouched blanket like someone threw water on it before it quite burnt.

It was them who burnt the bed – she remembers, in a rush – they were lying naked on the quilt smoking when the cherry fell from the joint and Odell poured his whiskey to the blanket. A tiny orange zinnia had bloomed out of the bed for a second, until the water at the bottom of the glass put it out.

She gets up, unlocks the door. Gasps as the warm night air rushes in. It was light when she went in. The key, the key. Then she’s walking, one foot in front of the other, not entirely sure where she’s going, a calm steady rhythm of boot on pavement. Past the concrete staircase down the side of the building. Past the old blue Rambler sitting comfortable, angular, in the back lot, right where she parked it. Where else would it be?

She turns the corner toward the street where the neon sign glows candyapplepink against the night sky, amazing. At the edge of the highway, loud white headlights come around a curve in the road, speed her way. She stands there a long time, watching yellow and orange and peach lights come and go, speed and slow, blur and fade from both directions until the road goes dark.

Across the highway she goes, up the stairs to the little wooden boardwalk that rises over the dunes, where the sand makes the rhythm of her boots on the wood crumbly. Gritty. Toward the Gulf that looks just like it did last year, before she got pregnant, before her parents’ accident, before he got drafted. When the whole world seemed as lovely and simple as this glassy black sea. She runs down the hill, down the stairs, through the sand and the mud and the tide washing up. The sea knocks up and down as she runs. Goes still, when she stops to catch her breath.

In the dunes behind her, past the hightide mark, she sees something. Hears something. She tiptoes back there, best she can, in her boots, in this state. There’s a couple smoking pot behind one of the dunes. She can smell it. The boy’s laugh sounds like Odell’s, a low chuckle, as if he knows things no one else knows. She stands there for a moment, listening, wondering if it could be him. Then she shakes her head, remembering. It can’t be. He’s out there, on that ship. Looking out of that porthole, reaching for her. Fumbling, stumbling, into star-spattered black. Endless waves.

She walks out into the sea. Twilight. Water streaming. Until the wind sets in and the water turns cold and she sees herself shattered with the stars in the waves. Then she shakes her head, bites her lips, seasalt, sand, wanders back up the beach, boots muddy with tide, creatures, seaweed.

When the dune rises up to meet her, she realizes how much she hates the ocean. The cold. Everything that’s come between them. Especially those men, those terrible uniformed men who have trained him to use weapons, to kill. She scoops a fist full of sand, lets it sift from her fingers, remembering the bruise she saw on his face. Have they hit him?

No, she thinks. Not now. Stop it. You’re not in the right frame of mind for this. Dusting the sand from her fingers, she tries to pull off her boots. They make a loud sucking sound as they come off. She peels off her socks, lies back in the sand, and looks up at the starry sky. Before her parents’ accident, the stars were always a comfort to her. She would look up at those patterns and remember the stories her father told her. Now, when she sees those patterns, she sees her father, her mother. Grief.

Tonight, each star is surrounded by a faint nimbus of light of a slightly different color, something more than white – a halo of antique yellow, a circle of gauzy peach – and she can see all of them, even the faintest ghosts of stars light years away. The stars are so infinite in number, so close together that they merge and dance and play, faintly different colors bleeding and switching as she takes them all in. She sees no patterns, none of the constellations her father taught her.

She closes her eyes and remembers the afternoon Odell materialized beside her, a long-haired handsome stranger, as she walked past a bar on her way home from school. Six feet tall, the longest torso she had ever seen, an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulders. Miraculous. A dream. At first he had reminded her of old pictures of her father – his strong jaw, that wide chest – he even had her father’s red hair. It was the first week of senior year. When he fell into step beside her and asked her name, she couldn’t find her voice to answer. But he didn’t seem to care. I’m playing at The Blackwater tonight, he said. Do you smoke? And she had found herself trotting after him toward the forest, sharing a joint, letting him press her into a tree for a kiss. When he did, the earth had seemed to slip out from under her feet, and she thought she could feel their selves colliding. It was so intense she had stepped away, frightened, pretending to be interested in a red leaf on the forest floor. The reddest leaf she had ever seen, a sycamore leaf, fivepointed, shot with rust red at the center that faded to lemon at its tips. This beautiful pattern of veins threading through the leaf to feed it with sunlight and chlorophyll.

She looks up now and sees it in the stars, that beautiful threadlike pattern of light against the black of space, connecting the stars like veins. It lights up. Once, twice, three times. Pulsing. Then it disappears. Revealing a hole in the horizon, an inky black starless spot where the sea and sky seem to end. She watches it quietly, lying on her back on that dune, hands behind her head as it grows – is it growing? – it is, slowly but surely swallowing a few stars every minute, like a Rorschach, an inkblot spreading over the sea.

 

Her first impression upon waking is of light filtering down through the holes in her fingertips, a strange lime green haze. She blinks, shades her eyes from the strange light. Her throat dry. A streaking pain in her breasts; she needs to pump, and soon. She looks for the sun, wanting to know what time it is. But all she can see is this haze. She sits up, her neck stiff, brushes sand off her shirt, slaps the crust off her jeans. She doesn’t remember falling asleep. How late is it? She needs to get back to the breast pump in her car, back home to her son.

The wind carries a cloud of sand past her bare feet. Her boots. She remembers taking them off. She left them behind a sand dune. But which one? The dunes roll out before her, a thousand hills covered with seashells and crab grass.

It’s a long walk, barefoot, back to the motel, her heels sinking into warm sand as she hops over jellyfish and sea anemones. She tries to avoid broken shells, sticking as much as she can to the grass, her eyes on the sand. The wind whips her hair.

As she walks, she wonders if she found what she was looking for, last night, if she completed her quest. She doesn’t feel like her old self, exactly, this morning, but something about this day feels unusual. The whole world looks new, as if a veil has been lifted, and only now can she see it for real.

 

She hears the strip before she can see it. Hammers pounding nails. Raised voices on the wind. She picks up her pace, hurrying up the boardwalk. There’s an elderly couple in front of the Sun Kist, boarding up one last window with plywood on the first floor. Above them, the second and third floor balconies are crisscrossed with tape.

She hurries down the steps, crossing the empty highway, the railroad tracks, passing under the sign where the haze in the air glows a mysterious peach. The elderly woman turns and sees her, a gust of wind whipping her skirt, her white hair glowing pink. “You Room 301?”

Penny nods, out of breath.

“You left the door open!”

She opens her mouth, tastes the mist on her tongue, forgets to speak.

The old woman yells something indistinguishable from the noise of the hammer, then hurries over, her dark narrowed eyes betraying what she thinks of girls who stay out all night on the beach. “I said, I shut it. The door. Lord, girl. Got a key?”

Penny feels for it in the pocket of her jeans, then nods, embarrassed.

“You hear about the storm?”

She shakes her head.

“It turned last night. It’s headed straight for Pass Christian.” The woman shakes her head, glancing back at the man hammering at the window of the last first floor room.

Penny thinks of the inkblot she saw last night, swallowing the stars. Her stomach knots up.

“We’re pushing our luck,” the woman goes on, “staying behind to finish. How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

“You better get going.”

Penny blinks at the sun-ruined wrinkles of the old woman’s face. Her eyes are so dark, you can’t tell where her irises stop and her pupils begin.

“Go on, get!”

Penny hurries around the side of the building, past the single red car in the side lot, up the concrete staircase. She pauses at the door to her room, fighting down a shiver. That woman. Her eyes were unnerving.

She unlocks the door, the stale scent of the room bombarding her as she walks to the sink to wash her face. The room is just as she left it: zodiac-shaped ash tray, empty rectangle of wall over the bed, cigarette-burnt quilt. Except for her bag. The clothes she packed for today are scattered on the dresser, along with her cigarettes and chapstick. But she doesn’t remember unpacking. She checks the bag. There’s her wallet, sunglasses. Toothbrush, toothpaste. Everything but her car keys. And when she up-ends her bag, the keys don’t fall out. She grabs the bottom, shakes it. The bag doesn’t jingle. And it hits her. Why did that woman ask how she got here?

No. That’s all she can think as she rushes to the window to see the first drops of rain fall on the black asphalt square where her car should be. She blinks. First her boots, then the storm. Now her car stolen? She’d only planned to be apart from Teller for a day. And her breast pump is in there. Her chest aches. She folds her hands across her breasts, relieved at the pressure, the wetness, trying to think. Could she ride with that woman? She grabs her things, throws them in the bag, and hurries outside, down the hall to the staircase – where she slips on the water dripping down the top step, praying she doesn’t fall all the way down the stairs as she grabs for the railing – and she doesn’t – the railing shakes a little under her weight, but holds. She stands up, finishes her descent of the stairs more carefully, sliding her hands down the rails over warm beads of rain. Hands dripping wet, toe swelling, bleeding, she limps into the side lot – it’s empty, she realizes – and calls out. But the front of the motel is now as deserted as the lot, the tiny red car heading up the highway doesn’t slow, and her voice is swallowed by the wind that picks up as if in answer, slapping her cheeks with rain and sand until she bows her head and shades her face.

The rain is shooting down fast now, staccato, full tilt, hitting her forehead so hard it should sting. But she doesn’t feel it. She just hears the sound, the tapping. And then, as the rain soaks her through and her skin grows slimy and wet and beaded, she steps out of herself; she blinks and sees herself standing at the front of the lot. Her eyes empty, like his.

Her hand goes to her eye, and she snaps back to herself. What’s wrong with her brain? The trip’s over. Stop it! She limps through the side lot, makes her way up the stairs to her room. The space on the bedside table where the clock should be is empty. It’s missing. Or it never was there this visit. She has ridden out several hurricanes in Pride; they were never very bad out there. But she doesn’t know what it would be like on the beach. There was still damage all over the place in Grand Isle from Hurricane Betsy, when she first moved there. Piles of rubble, construction that had been going on for years. Odell said his parents had completely rebuilt their house. What if this one is just as bad? Didn’t they listen to a radio last year, one night, as they sat on the balcony?

There it is. On the other side of the bed. Behind the lamp. She flips it on, listens to the end of a pre-recorded message before it starts over and starts making sense:

Repeat, as of five o’clock this morning the National Hurricane Center revised its predictions for Hurricane Camille. The storm has changed course. This is Harrison County Civil Defense strongly, repeat, strongly advising all residents to evacuate. There’ll be winds up to 180 miles per hour, and a storm surge of up to 20 feet. Landfall will be late this afternoon or early evening. Repeat – 

180 mile-per-hour winds? A 20 foot storm surge? She changes the channel. The next station plays the same message, and the next. She picks up the phone to call for help, but the line is dead. She grabs her chapstick from the dresser, twists off the cap, smears the ointment on her lips. Suddenly chilly.  She walks out onto the balcony to look at the bones of this building: its concrete walls, its windows, its height. She walks out of the door to look out through the parking lot at the city of Pass Christian. Is there any other place for her to go? Somewhere more safe?

None of the buildings that she can see from balcony that overlooks the parking lot seem as sturdy as this one.  Not the tall ones. And she needs to be high up to survive a twenty foot storm surge. She stands there, looking out over the city, wondering if she should go further inland. But how far will she get without a car? Where can she go, if not here? Where else would she be able to keep out of the rain? She goes inside, changes into a t-shirt and jeans and sits on the bed to look at the storm through the taped glass doors. That haze is covering everything now. The sky over the sea is darker, a color she has never seen the sky be. A watery electric green. As her heartbeat slows to its regular pace, she sees a shape on the horizon, snake-like, pointillistic. Then it shifts in the wind, disappearing, becoming rain, simple rain, the color of her son’s eyes, of trees, coming down in sheets.

Soon the water will come. The great green whorl of water. Thundering over the beach, swallowing the dune where she slept, her boots, the dune where they kissed. But this building, she tells herself, will be safe. Please god let it be safe. It was built on a hill, or so sturdily that it will stand even in the sway of so much water. She takes a deep, shuddering breath, says a prayer her mother taught her long ago, one her mother taught her. Her fingertips press her flesh through her jeans. Until lightning flashes nearby, lighting up the balcony, and she remembers standing there with him.

The first morning they were here, they didn’t wake until almost noon, their bodies intertwined, the damp bedsheets twisted around them. They’d walked to the balcony and stood there a long time, wisps of auburn and black hair whipping in the breeze behind them as they let it dry their skin.

She can almost feel his fingertips, now, brushing concentric circles at her hip. Her skin tingles. She reaches down to touch the skin at her hip, feels the hairs standing on end, the goose bumps just above the waist of her low-cut jeans. But the denim reminds her where she is now, the year that has passed since, the terrible storm that’s on its way.

The room is dark now, outside and in. The power must’ve gone out. Even the faint pink glow of the sign outside is gone. Her stomach rumbles. Something shakes beneath her – she thinks – maybe not. The wind fades to a whistle. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. Cups her knees. She shouldn’t have come here; she shouldn’t have put herself in danger, for her son’s sake.  The memory of him, in her arms, before she handed him to her mother-in-law haunts her. Was that the last time she’d see him? She remembers staring down at his wide eyes, on the first day of his life, in the hospital room, touching his pale wisps of dark hair with awe and disbelief. His eyes followed her hand. Hello, she breathed.

The floor beneath her is shaking. She can feel it, jostling the sides of her feet. She puts her palm to the wood, the knot in her stomach growing tighter when she feels vibrations. But they stop almost as soon as they start.

She falls back in time to the hospital room, where her son had started crying. Loud and scary, a newborn who knows no other way to speak. She stared down at his screwed up red face, suddenly swept up in his fear, wondering if she’d scared him by speaking. Don’t cry, she whispered, her heart breaking for him. Don’t cry. Please. But he kept wailing, until she remembered what her mother told her about breastfeeding – that the baby would want to eat, right away – and pulled aside her gown. He went quiet almost immediately, started suckling. And she felt this tingling in her breast, and from deep within, an upsurge of feeling, of wonder, that he knew what to do.

She feels herself pitching backward, steadies herself on the floor with one hand. Noticing, all at once, the wetness inside her brassiere. Her breasts have leaked.

The floor rumbles beneath her. The building, she realizes, is shaking in the wind. She stands up, collects her things. One last glance at the room, and she steps outside. Down the hall, down the stairs, slow, be careful. Holding onto the wet rail, water streaming down her fingers. Long hair whipping from the building, the sea. She hears a loud crack, shields her face from the rain, and peers – slowly – toward the street, through the spaces between her fingers.

The sign. The wind has shattered the letter T. There’s a cranberry spray in the side lot, glowing slightly in the dark with a strange light, as if there is energy in the liquid itself. She holds onto the rail with her free hand, looking out. With another crack, the second S explodes in a merry arc of pink. Then the I. And the K. And the glowing pink arcs floating toward her on the wind are so beautiful and thin and watery in the dark, so like the pink twilight, the strands of memory and light that connect past to present, that she finds she can’t look away. She can only stand there in the hissing rain, holding onto the rail, watching the letters shatter – one by one, glass glittering – until they’ve all exploded.

Then she lets go and crosses the lot, which glows faintly in the dark as the rain bounces off it, a silvery mist at her feet. And although her back is a painful staccato of raindrops and her hair is pressed slick to her scalp, as she crosses the railroad tracks, she walks calmly, telling herself she’ll be safe, she’ll be safe. Until she hears a roar behind her and loses her nerve. There’s a road that runs north-south nearby. The one she took down here. She’ll take it to the big concrete building she passed on the way in, which is further from the beach. If no one’s there, she’ll break in.

The wind picks back up as she crosses that road, and she falls on her scraped hands and knees, her jeans ripping. She’s too scared to stand up; for a minute, two, she crouches, waiting for a break in the wind. Staring up at the shadowy shape of a boarded-up grocery long enough to remember she’s starving – her stomach! When was the last time she ate?

Crouching there, in the rain, she hears an ominous hissing behind her, under the sound of the wind. She has no idea what it is. But she doesn’t turn, doesn’t look at all, only stands up and starts running, wind be damned. When the water starts splashing her legs with each step, she’s relieved – it’s only a couple inches – until she realizes it’s deepening, faster than she thought water could deepen. She has to slow to a jog, then a walk, as it swells to her knees.

And she panics. Not because the water is rising, cool and wet, to her thighs and her hips, but because of its color. It’s glowing in near total darkness, a watery electric green. It’s here, she realizes, the inkblot she saw in the night sky, the creature she saw over the sea. She turns blindly into the wind and rain, bowing her face.

Something hits her thigh. Drags her down into wet, bubbling, burbling. A sharp pain. Salty green going up her nose, the scent, the taste of sea. She swallows. Eyes open, burning. In the wide underwater rush of mud and living bubbles, she kicks up through the muck, clawing her way to the surface. Gasping for air as she surges on a wave toward a tree.

Her fingernails dig into its bark as she climbs the wet ladder of its branches, bare feet slipping in the wet. She climbs, slowly, carefully, higher, higher still, to the highest branch she trusts. Where she clings, back to wind, trembling arms wrapped tightly around the trunk. Until the water rises to just below her feet, and in the not-dark of the glowing green water she begins to make out debris: a tire, a trash can, a table, a dead fish, an uprooted tree.

And the water keeps rising, slowly, submerging her legs, her knees. The branches above won’t support her. They’re too weak. Her arm muscles ache. If the water keeps rising, she’ll have to let go. She waits, watching the water, clinging to the tree trunk, deaf now to the wind and rain as the water seeps up to her thighs, her waist. She wills it not to rise any further, tells herself, over and over, she’ll be safe.

She closes her eyes, imagining her son in the bassinette she left at her mother-in-law’s, eyelids fluttering, smiling faintly in his sleep. His chest rises and falls with a regular rhythm. She breathes with him – in, out, in, out – as she clutches that tree.

Until her ears pop, and she’s stunned to hear – nothing – suddenly, weirdly, nothing but the dull distant echo of that roar in her ears. The air has gone still. It’s stopped raining. And through the now-bare branches of this tree, suddenly, she can see the night sky, like she’s looking up from the bottom of a well walled with wind. The eye, she thinks. Then the floodwater tickles her feet – it’s sinking – and the air around her goes strange. There are particles in the air, spinning, blood red, suspended in the still like energy. Glowing faintly. She reaches out with her left hand, eyes closed, certain she will feel a spark, but feeling only grit on her skin. Sand. Spinning in the dark like dust, whipped up by the wind, drifting to the rooftops revealed by sinking water. Glowing red, faint, flickering. Fire – she can smell it, ash, smoke, the pungent scent of gas, carbon, burning – see it, to the west, at the edge of this clearing.

She feels a pain in her thigh, sees the tear in her jeans, and beneath it, the soft gel pink of a wound. She wonders what cut her. Then the water sinks even lower, revealing the second floors of flickering buildings, piles of bricks, fallen trees. Until she forgets time and space. Until this strange red world flows straight through her, because she’s beside her son’s bassinette as he sleeps. She picks him up, careful not to wake him.

Her arms are so leaden, so heavy.

She presses her face into his, breathes in the soft pink scent of his skin. He looks up at her, smiling, his eyes the most beautiful green. For a moment, everything is perfect. There is nothing but his smile, his weight in her arms.

Then she’s blinded by a great roar, and she feels herself falling, weightless, wary, waiting for the splash she knows will sound as she hits.

 

The next morning, when she wakes, shivering, she doesn’t trust her memory. It doesn’t seem possible for her to be awake at all. But here she is, curled up atop a mound of trash in a strange world of uprooted trees. She remembers the moment she spent underwater, thrashing, kicking, when she plunged beneath the surface of the sea. She remembers surfacing just in time to see this mound of debris, then reaching up through the rain and the wet for something metal, something solid, and climbing up here. She looks up at the bright sky, now, and clears her mind, a rush of gratitude welling up inside her to the universe just to be. Her fingers pressing drowned wooden beams, a soggy mattress, she pushes herself up with her hands. The cool morning air gives her goose bumps. She smells mud, brine, compost. At the edge of the mound, as she scrambles off of it, she sees a half-buried sheet, something tangled up in it: a shirtsleeve, a gray finger, a wedding ring.

Bare feet sliding over muck, she runs from the body, her breasts hard nodes of pain, until she finds herself at the edge of a shallow lake. When she steps into the water, the cuts on her feet burn, and she’s forced to slow her pace. The pain reminds her of her son, her resolve to get home. Near the edge of the floodwater lake, she meets a starving wet dog, a Catahoula, one eye brown, one blue, both wild, who bares yellow  teeth. And she’s off, again, flying away through mud and mist until her feet touch metal and wood, and she looks down and sees the railroad tracks that pass directly in front of the Sun Kist.

She stops, stares down at the tracks, runs her bare toe over the rail. The icy cold, the dew of the metal, makes her shiver. Something rises in her throat, a puff of gray air, of nothing, a laugh that vanishes as it floats from her lips. Then she spreads out her arms, balancing like a trapeze artist, marveling at the strange upside-down forest around her, as she starts back down the tracks toward town, or what’s left of it.

 

---

Mary McMyne’s stories and poems have appeared or will soon in Los Angeles Review, Pedestal Magazine, Word Riot, Contrary Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Midwestern Gothic, Apex Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction has won the Faulkner Prize for a Novel in Progress and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award. Dancing Girl Press published her poetry chapbook, Wolf Skin, in 2014. Additional support for her writing has been awarded by New York University, Louisiana State University, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in northern Michigan, where she is an assistant professor of English and fiction editor of Border Crossing at Lake Superior State University. Learn more at marymcmyne.com.

When Libby’s last check from the bike shop came around, their rent was already two weeks past due. The guys offered to buy her lunch at the Crown and Anchor, but she told them she had to go, had to get moving, was afraid if she didn’t she might never. She gave them one-armed hugs, the envelope still in her hand, and she rode the five miles home, crossing the Colorado at the Longhorn Dam, blasting through Lakeshore Park and down Pleasant Valley Road to Riverside. At the bank, she found they had included a farewell gift of a hundred dollars in stiff twenties. It made her regret not going to lunch with them for a longer goodbye. She curled the bills into her pocket, cashed the paycheck, and went to the Taco Cabana for bean burritos. She read a few pages from her paperback before phoning a thank you.

“Don’t forget about us. You come back, you call us.”

“I will.”

“Alright. Go get it.”

She dumped her tray and rode around the corner to the row of townhomes. They had moved in with Trevor the month she started high school. Now she’d been out of high school a year, and her mother and Trevor were missing. What the detective meant was her mother and Trevor were dead. Three weeks and no word from them.

She took the pictures she wanted out of their frames and slipped them into one of Trevor’s old record jackets, Pink Floyd, leaving the black disk on the rug below his stereo. He wanted her to love his records, like he did, so she listened politely with him, for her mother’s sake. Last week she had decided the stereo was too heavy to take and too much hassle to sell. What money they left behind she had already spent on food, cigarettes, and shipping the television to her father, which was probably stupid, but seemed a decent plan at the time. She couldn’t bear going through her mother’s jewelry for long. Their bedroom began to overwhelm her: the beige carpet, worn to a smudge between the vanity and the foot of the bed; the walls her mother called Apartment White. She took a pair of crow earrings. But keep it real light, she thought. Don’t think, even. Keep moving. Her foam pillow, her sleeping bag. Her pack stuffed with tee shirts and socks and panties, her iPhone in the shaft of one of her Doc Martens. She remembered her father’s hunting knife, and she went back to the jewelry box and lifted the long felt tray where all these years her mother had kept it. He never hunted, she said. But here was something she could give him. Hey, Seth, remember your knife? Found it in Mom’s back. She slipped the thing into her boot, too.

She emptied what little was left in the cabinets into a cardboard box, along with one loose-handled pot, and salt and pepper, and put it in the back seat of the car. She strapped the bike rack onto the trunk and secured her Vilano with bungee hooks, testing it with pushes there in the hot drive before the tall homes whose shadows could tell time. Back inside, last chance, she turned the air off and unplugged the fridge and netted the six fish from the tank into an old Coleman water jug she drove to the river. The fish were stilled at first, pulsing in the shallows, but as she shook the last of the water out, they moved deeper for the current, their colors fleeing. She thought about them as she drove north for Dallas on I-35. Not the other way. Not the way Trevor and her mother had always gone, south, to San Antonio. To Nuevo Laredo. Past Nuevo.

*

Gunning the highway north of Knoxville, she was trying to find a sign that marked the turn. Her hands ached. Her back itched. Her twinging bladder kept her awake.

In a moment of lucidity, she admitted her memories of her father were not to be trusted. Most of them were her mother’s, passed along incidentally or accidentally, perhaps over take out, a few remember-when moments on car trips like this one, other anecdotes mumbled in late night trances after bowl hits with Trevor. They weren’t all bad. But they weren’t hers, either. Libby’s mind kept returning to the small framed photograph of him, which stood for years in rear rank on her vanity: Seth smiling and pointing a finger at the camera, as if pointing his finger at her dyed hair or black lipstick or the pierced eyebrow he had never gotten to see. That picture didn’t go into the Dark Side of the Moon with the others, it was in the glovebox, with the novel and the roadmaps, for quick reference. His hunting knife chattered in the wedge between dash and windshield. She looked down at the phone charging in her lap, and in that instant the car struck an orange construction barrel at the shoulder.

Shot through with adrenaline, she braked and slowed and looked back at the toppled thing through the spokes of her front bike wheel. No cars in either direction, she left it, kept going, accelerated. The relentless black curves came nauseously into the high beams. Just a damned barrel too close on the shoulder. She pressed on for the state park the atlas had marked with a green pine and tent. Who would ever know?

A stone wall with the sign flashed by before she knew she was upon it. She backed up the empty highway and made the turn uphill, through a split rail fence and a meadow that narrowed with encroaching forest. Yellowed notices were taped to the glass of the booth at the camp’s gate. No one was in it. She turned off the headlights and lurched over the speed humps. A cobwebbed park map cowered beneath a buzzing vapor light, the blue paint of a lake outlining the camp’s peninsula.

She puttered through sites carved left and right among the trees. The place was wholly empty. But when she snapped her headlights on to follow a turn, orange and red reflectors flashed like gems. A motorhome and a boat trailer. She put the lights out again and made her way by recall and moonlight past them to the back of the camp.

She pulled past a numbered post at the far end of the loop, and quickly went to squat in the pine needles. The ground was soft near the lake. When she was finished, she lit a cigarette and lay atop the picnic table, pointing her toes to stretch her back, a little ill from the block of cheddar she had pared one slice after another into her mouth, and a hot 7-Up, finished after all the coffee, a half hour ago. The crickets were wound up. The lake had a fishy smell. The day’s drive had been hot, but it was cooler up here in the hills.

On her back, she was watching the stars through the trees when her phone disrupted the stillness. A number she didn’t recognize.

“Do I call you Dad, or Seth, or what?”

“Whatever you like,” he said. “Dad?”

“I can tell you what we used to call you.”

“Probably not that.” She heard him take a breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got the tv and the note.”

“Well, she’s gone.” She went on before he could speak, to be sure he had her meaning.

At last he said, “Your mother?”

“Yes. Who else?” She waited. “Look, I’m just out of Knoxville tonight. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“How?”

“I’m driving. I’ll be in Philadelphia tomorrow,” she said.

“No. How?”

“I’ll tell you what I know when I get there. My phone’s dying. I got to go.”

“Wait-”

It took two cigarettes to stop the quivering. She regretted some of how she had said what she did, but it wasn’t fair he should call her at, what was it, eleven. She wanted to talk to him when she was fresh. She would see him tomorrow evening, maybe before sundown. She went to pee again, and returned to lie upon the table. Ashes glowed bluely in the fire ring, as if the gliding moon had just scraped them there as it made its way across the opening in the trees. Soon it would disappear in the weave of leaves on the other side.

“Hey.” A man stood on the road above the site. “You aint up to anything you aint supposed to. I hope. Are you?”

She sat up. “No. I’m okay. I just pulled in.”

“Yeah, I heard you come through. How long you staying for?”

“I’m leaving if I can get some sleep.”

He looked down the dark lane. He was carrying a guitar. The trees were still. “Well, I’m the watch.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I’m in charge. Nice to meet you.”

“Like the camp host?”

“Like the camp host.” He set the guitar on his boot. “It’s twenty dollars.”

“I’m not actually camping.” She tried a smile. “I just needed to pull off and rest.”

“Where you headed?”

“East.”

When he lifted his chin, his forehead gleamed palely. “Philadelphia, I heard.”

“None of your business,” she said. “I’ll be out before the sun comes up. Nobody the wiser.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I don’t have twenty dollars. How do I know you’re who you say you are, anyway? You got a badge or something?”

“You know you have to pay. Aint no free lunch.” He lifted his instrument by the neck and dragged a toe through the gravel. He spun the loose wheel of her bike and read the plate on the bumper. “Texas? You like music?” he asked.

She said nothing.

“You got another cigarette?”

They sat together on top of the picnic table, smoking in silence, and she listened to him play for ten or fifteen minutes. He didn’t sing anything. Nothing even seemed to be from a song. She felt he was at least thirty. She realized she couldn’t tell the difference between thirty and forty. Her mother was forty. What did fifty look like? Just older. He looked up from the frets at her and his face turned sad and he lost the thread of what he was strumming.

After a moment, he said, “You’re thinking nobody’s going to remember me for my guitar playing, aren’t you? It’s alright. You lose it if you don’t practice, and I haven’t practiced. When I was a kid, I used to be pretty good.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m really sleepy.”

He gave a little nod and rose from the table. “Things disappear on you.” He stopped at her car and looked in its open window. “You spare another cigarette?”

She walked the pack up the slope, holding it out, the lighter, too. “Here. Take them. We’ll call it even.”

He reached for them. His face still had the sad, slow look. He grabbed her wrist and pressed her against the warm car. The cigarettes and lighter fell, and he dropped the guitar, its steel strings sounding a deep tone that hung about under the pines. He pried the phone out of her fingers, and it fell to the ground, too.

“Quit it.” She mule kicked him, her boot glancing off his shin.

“It’s alright, Texas.” He was against her. “I won’t hurt you. It’s all alright.” His whiskers were at her collar.

*

When she arrived in Philadelphia, it was steamy. People sat smoldering on dark stoops, and air conditioners were humming and dripping over the sidewalks and in the alleyways. She was smoking on Seth’s couch, reading the manuscript he was keeping in a dented shirt box on an otherwise bookless bookshelf. She had their old tv on for company–she had gone out to the fire escape, where earlier she had sneaked in, and run a coaxial cable looped out there through the window, across the room to the set, but tv was just tv, and these pages, which were about the only evidence of her father in the place, she decided right away were not very good. It looked like an empty life: a water pitcher and a half bag of coffee in the fridge; a couple chipped plates in a dish rack; mousetraps in the crannies between appliances.

Outside the apartment’s door, a man was calling kitty, kitty, kitty. The summons stopped, a key sounded in the lock, and the door swung open. There he was, the man who would be her father. Before he even spoke, he was contemplating the taut black wire strung across his living room. She looked under it at him, but didn’t get up. “Your neighbors have cable,” she explained. She smudged her cigarette out in his cereal bowl. “Is there a cat?”

“No. There’s not a cat.” Even his voice was empty. “The old lady downstairs thinks she has a cat, and I look for it for her,” he said. “Welcome to Philadelphia.” He ducked under the cable, unable to close his mouth, from shock, she guessed. “Stranger,” he said. He stepped over the pages she had stacked sloppily on the hardwood floor. He grabbed her hands, running his thumbs briefly over the rings, and began to tug her from the couch.

“Hey, don’t pull me. Let go,” she said.

She stood on her own, and he opened his arms for a hug, which she hesitated to enter. He was taller than she thought he would be, and he didn’t look much like the old picture except around the eyes. He wrapped her in his arms. He was sticky with sweat and smelled a little of booze, but not badly. She could tell he was waiting to feel her return grip before he let go, so she gave one, a small one. She wasn’t processing his words. It was just wooden babble. She sniffled at the black window and asked could they do this in the morning, she was so tired. The exchange petered out. He straightened himself and led her to his room, behind the wall the television was on, and lowered the blind and she got in bed, and he pulled the sheet to her chin, all as he might have done fifteen years ago, carrying her in hot Austin, taking care not to knock her precious head. He resumed chattily, about the humidity, probably not knowing what he was saying exactly, either, as he turned the window unit on high and went back into the other room. The tv siphoning his neighbor’s programming was shut off, and she imagined she heard the sound of him gathering the pages on the floor and fitting them back into the box.

It was a story with her mother in it, but not as she recognized her. How old would her mother have been? Libby had stopped reading when the words started swimming on the page. So this is Seth, she thought, because she felt she now was the time to really contemplate him. Her father was a middle aged boy. Nothing but this crappy apartment. Part of her wanted this news to please her.

The air conditioner’s fuzzy rattle was like a prop plane that never passed, as if maybe she were not beneath it but flying in it, and it would go on like that all night. A fat housefly circling your head begging you to kill it. That kind of annoying. She pushed her foot from under the sheet and pressed her toe against the plastic grill to deaden the vibration. She thought she might be able to sleep that way, and it was about then she knew she would never tell anyone, never mention last night in Tennessee at all. Trevor had told her marijuana was the best way to go to sleep for him, and it would seem it was for her mother, too, since she had already fallen asleep on his chest there on the couch, Supertramp ringing bright layers through the Advents. Give a little bit… give a little bit… And the one lamp on that softly lit her mother’s sleeping head rising and falling on Trevor’s sloped chest as Libby said It doesn’t seem to put me to sleep, but it puts me in a place like sleep, but sleep with lights, like lighted sleep, like watching your dream in a theater but it’s just what you’re seeing right in front of you. Trevor smiled his high smile and stroked her mother’s hair. And then he had expired, too, their heads nestled together. He wasn’t a bad man. And she stayed like that all night, cradled Pietà-like in the overstuffed armchair, watching them folded together on the couch into dawn, the blue light coming through the long livingroom windows and over the glass coffeetable. And the noisy birds that had made her smile that morning but this morning in Tennessee had sounded so furious as she bent over the lake to wash herself, not wanting to walk that way, past his guitar on the ground, to use the bathhouse. She parked in front of his camper on the way out, but left the motor running. She beat the dash once. She found the leather sheath on the floor and put the knife in the glovebox. Inside the RV, a squalor of snack bags and ashtrays. DVDs on top of a small television. Little Feat cassettes. A centerfold hung beside the mirror on the bath closet. He had written things on her leg. An opened carton of cigarettes, which she took. She found a twenty folded in half on the countertop by the filthy range. She took it, too, and tossed it onto the passenger seat and left. The farther she drove, the less she wanted to touch it, not even when she had to refuel in Roanoke, not until she was shaky with hunger in Staunton and stopped at a drive-thru for a Whopper without meat and there was the way the kid in his uniform and headset in the window looked at her through his glasses as if he just knew, and she handed him the twenty from the seat where it had ridden nearly five hours untouched and drove away for the Pennsylvania Turnpike without waiting for any of its change. Nothing. And then she couldn’t even eat the food.

*

She was awakened by the sound of sirens, which put her in a small panic. She found Seth waiting on the couch in the other room, dressed and shaven. He offered her a fresh towel. After her shower, he took her to an early lunch.

Taking a quick look into the place, she decided it simpatico and went to a booth halfway down the wall of the dark saloon. He slid into the seat across from her, and suddenly she felt cornered. A waitress came from the tv to take their order. Seth introduced her as his daughter, Libby, from Texas. So, okay, she thought, and she said hello and ordered a 7-Up with olives and conceded, to herself, she was on his ground. “Just introduce me as Libby for a while, okay, Seth?”

“Sure,” he said, but his look was harder now.

She wanted to deflect his scrutiny. “I like this place. Looks like it hasn’t changed in fifty years.”

“No, no. They just built it like this last summer,” he told her. “Shabby-retro. I walked in at the grand opening, they were still spraying on the antiquity.” He twitched his finger at her.

She gazed at the table and pinched her straw. She wouldn’t smile.

“What is it with you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I admit all this is awkward, and I realize you might not want to talk about it, but I have to know what happened. I have a right to know, and you haven’t been all the way straight with me yet. You’ve barely talked to me.”

“You mean about Mom?” She had to send her memory back to the earlier misery. Her mind hadn’t been on it for two days. What right did he have to be demanding, anyway? Shouldn’t she be the one drilling him with fifteen years of questions?

“Yeah. I couldn’t even sleep.” He sat back. “You have to know it’s killing me. Even if you think I don’t deserve to know, which maybe I don’t-”

“Not much we can know, Seth.”

Now the hard look was an angry one. “Nice. I can see you’re no stranger to ambiguity.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means don’t be so goddamn condescending. Maybe you despise me,” he said. “Okay, fair enough. But never be so cavalier when you talk of the dead. Any dead. It dishonors her. It dishonors life altogether. Get me?”

She tried for a different tone. “She and Trevor would cross over for a weekend, or a week. But not a month. And she didn’t call once.” Her voice sounded just as hollow as his had last night.

“Mexico.”

“Yeah. They’d go to Mexico.” She waited to see what else he would ask, what they did in Mexico. “That long, she would have called by now if she was okay. Even Mom wouldn’t just…”

His blush was hot. Their drinks arrived, and he took a quick sip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Wouldn’t just disappear. Right.”

She had shamed him, but it didn’t feel as good as it should have. Her voice quavered. She looked at the ceiling to keep from crying.

He put his hand on hers. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m glad you’re here.” On the paper placemat were recipes for age old cocktails. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

She blew her nose in a napkin, more to dry her eyes, and started again. “They’re both gone. If I said dead, I didn’t mean to. The police said they’d let us know when they found anything. But a lot of times they never do. They said expect no news or expect bad news. I mean, no news is bad news, isn’t it?”

“Her family?”

“They know.”

“I should call them.” He repeated it, as if reminding himself. “My mother?”

“God, Dad, I haven’t seen you since I was a kid. You think I talk to Grandma?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t her fault. You might have.”

“She sent stuff for Christmas and on my birthday. She quit when Mom stopped reminding me to send thank yous, I think.”

“I see.”

“It’s not how you thought it would end, is it?” It should have made her feel like she had some power over him, but it didn’t, and if it did, she didn’t know what she’d do with it. She was squandering this moment, and felt a long way from home.

Seth was watching some people in the back corner, out of earshot but looking their way.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“Students I know.”

“You hang out where your students go?”

“Not usually.”

“So, okay,” she said. “New topic, please.”

“Alright. Tell me about my girl. What do you like? Judging from your gear, looks like you like outdoors stuff. Camping out?”

Her pause was heavy.

He gave a small shrug.

“How about you tell me,” she said. “What’s your version of why you left? I’ve always wanted to hear it.”

Now he was the one searching the paraphernalia on the walls. Lights and signage. Old boots. He made a small sound. Photographs of virile ballplayers in midswing. “You tell me your version first,” he said.

“Okay, Seth.” She rose to it. “Here’s how I remember. I remember you packing your bag in the middle of the night, but passing out in the driveway, behind the wheel of the car, the one with the ceiling felt coming down.”

“The Chrysler. You remember that? We used long strips of balsa, like ribs, to hold the felt up.”

She didn’t break her gaze.

“It worked,” he said.

“Whatever. Anyway, Mom finds you in the drive in the morning and won’t let you take the car. Practically pulls your ass through the window. Waking up the whole neighborhood. So you take off down the sidewalk with your bag. Walking in the sunshine. La la la.” She leaned back and waved at him across the table. “See you, Dad.”

There. She had rehearsed it from Texas to Tennessee, had been waiting to tell it. But from Tennessee to Philadelphia, there hadn’t been room for it in her mind. How it had tumbled out so quickly, like stones dumped from a barrel, and not nearly as eloquent as she had dreamt a few days ago. “I remember some phone calls,” she added. “Mom didn’t cry much after the first week, if you were wondering.”

“You don’t remember that.”

“How would you know? She told me not to dwell on you, though I always felt she said that because she needed to hear herself say it. I was four years old when you left. But we got by fine, you know. Great. It was all good. She said if I wanted to find you-”

“Okay, you found me. And I’m sure it wasn’t all good.”

“So what’s your fucking story?”

“Easy. Don’t give me language like that. Or at least not here. I’m not sure what you’ve come for, but you won’t get it with that tone. It was wrong what I did. But after I had done it, she told me to make it clean. No back and forth. End it. I sent some alimony I couldn’t afford. A joke, I know. But I sent you what I could save, and borrowed on a credit card, but when I went back to school I was out of money. We hadn’t talked. I didn’t know what was going on. Gradually, to move forward, a person quits looking back.”

“Just like that.”

“The short version.”

“You left us to go back to school?”

“No. Before. The plan wasn’t so clear as that. There was no plan.”

“What do you mean you quit looking back? Is that even possible?”

He slowed his answer. “With time. Years go by.”

“Oh yeah, right. The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

His eyelid was twitching. “You’ve read Faulkner.”

“No,” she said. “Mom. She used to say it. She said you used to say it all the time, but it was more like an excuse for shit you hadn’t done yet. And so like now, the other day, after fifteen years, you can just say you love me on the phone…” She had heard it last night, too, as he put her to sleep on his mattress.

“You think I can’t. I do. I love you.”

“But you’re conveniently skipping all sorts of stuff, Seth.”

“I’ve had to have you in the back of my mind, not the front. You hope and imagine things are well, but I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to die. I hadn’t expected your coming now. It’s…”

“Awkward.”

He nodded. “It doesn’t have to be.”

She raised her phone from her bag and snapped his picture. “When were you going to expect it, though? One of us had to do something. And I didn’t want to tell you about her, except to your face.” She took another picture. “Do you always dress like this?”

“No. Yes.”

“Can you get me an apartment?”

“Do you even miss her?”

“What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”

“You’re hard for me to read. She was a good woman.”

“She could be,” Libby said. “Not always, I wouldn’t say.”

When he glared at her, she clicked again.

She made a point to frown at the images.

He sat up in the booth. “Are you glad you’re here?”

“Sure. I’ve never seen Philadelphia.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean, do you want to stay in Philadelphia?”

She leaned across the table. “That’s not what you mean, either. Is it, Seth? Let me look around. How much are one-bedrooms?”

“Maybe more than you’ve got. Or I think. You can stay with me.”

“No offense, but if I stay here, I want my own place. How much does a place like yours go for?”

“How about just take my place,” he said. “Go on and take it for now. I’ve got somewhere else I can stay awhile.”

“A woman?”

“No, not a woman.”

“A man? That other address you sent me.”

“My friend’s. He and his wife are out of the country.”

She shrugged. When the food came, he ordered two lagers, one for her and one more for himself. She peeped under the sandwich bread. She’d restricted bacon from the BLT. “There a garage I can park my car?”

“No. But I can show you where to park without getting a ticket. I don’t have a car, myself.”

“How do you get groceries and shit?” She thought he laughed.

“Looks like I beg my daughter to take me. We’ll call it rent.”

“Call it even,” she said. Her words spooked her.

He raised his glass. “Cheers, then.”

She leaned close. “I don’t drink, Seth.”

So he drank hers, too. “Come on, I want to show you something. If I can find it.”

*

He called directions from where he had jotted them on the back of an envelope, up 76 to Bala Cynwyd. He ejected the disk she had in the dash player, Rainer Maria, and put in Skip James. She wanted to turn it down when she heard the barrage of pops and crackles, but she did not. He told her how, in the twenties and thirties, the record company sent the musicians north on trains to Wisconsin, and how they recorded almost as if in secret, blacks in a white town, so much of the north inhospitable to the great migration, before they were turned instantly around with a little cash in pocket and shipped back to Mississippi to await the modest release. Then the Depression. Libby pulled the car through the gate at the corner and set the parking brake on the hill. They walked between the memorials in the lumpy lots. He told her they were looking for Skip James’s stone.

“The guy we were just listening to? It’s funny how English teachers are always into the blues.”

“What do you mean funny?”

“Like, grammatically. To show they’re not uptight assholes.” She glanced at him to see if he had the hard look again. “Somebody else pointed it out to me. But it still kind of backfires, because only pretentious white guys-“

“Oh come on, Libby. Whom do you love?” He elbowed her, and she smiled. “Poor grammar can be dangerous, though. I heard tell of a convict killed in prison. Ended his sentence with a proposition.”

“I could learn to like the blues,” she said.

“Like learning to love a sickness.”

The hard ground was wildly uneven, churned and rechurned, and the grass was coarse and sparse. Many of the stones didn’t have concrete foundations and, here and there, were toppled or sunken. They paused a moment looking down the hill of them. A backhoe was parked in one of the lanes. “This place is a mess,” he said.

“Why do you want to see his grave? You’ve got his music.”

“I know. But why do we put up memorials at all?”

“Meh. Rocks are a silly way to remember the dead,” she said.

He chuffed. “How else should we do it?”

“I don’t know. Look, Chinese…”

There, below the road, was a whole section of their glyphs on stones, and at the center, a small dais. She began to step down toward it, but the very motion–and the slope, the table, the way the trees were grouped around the site—was familiar, and gave her a chill.

Her father didn’t notice. “How do you remember your mother?” he asked.

“Stop it, Seth.”

“Well?”

“I probably remember her better than you do.”

They passed through a cloud of gnats as he kept scanning left and right in the grass. “How?” he pushed.

“It’s not a fair question. But I remember her when I get high. Sometimes I’ll go online and listen to songs she used to like.”

“Like what songs?”

“Like Connells songs.”

“She liked the Connells.” He seemed to remember this about her. “So, smoking grass, listening to songs Rachel liked, works for you. What do these rocks do?”

“Nothing for me.”

“No, I mean think about it.”

She crossed her arms as they went on in the heat. “They’re like these permanent signs that you once existed.”

“Right. Of course, some are more permanent than others.”

“Some are bigger. The pyramids,” she said.

“Or Grant’s tomb. Sometimes the rock is commensurate with their stature…”

“How about this one?” she said. They looked at it at their feet. A black kid’s picture was glued to the surface of a baseless slant, which was tipped on its back in the weeds. Her father bent and pulled the stone upright. Up the hill, the groundsman in the open shed watched them without moving. “He was my age,” she said.

He looked away. “Where the heck’s Skip James?”

“We can keep looking, if you want. Or go ask that guy.”

“No. Let’s go.” He walked. He walked faster.

“Hey, you’ve always got the CD,” she called. “Wait up.”

He looked frustrated as he turned to her. “I take your point. But which do you think will last longer? The music, or a rock like that one there?”

“The music. You know these answers, professor. Are you okay?”

“Right, ars longa.” He was talking to the bright white sky. “But I’m not so sure. I mean, everyone knows what the pyramids look like. But I can’t name a single song from ancient Egypt.” He met her eye.

Together they looked up the steep rise of buried dead to where her small car was parked.

“I don’t know that’s a fair analogy,” she said.

“There’s no stone for your mother, for instance. How will she be remembered?”

She pulled her hair up off hot her neck, and found that even this common action was no longer hers. She felt the hand behind her in Tennessee. She let her hair drop. She would get it cut even shorter, soon, tomorrow. “Just by us who knew her, I guess.”

“And when we’re gone? What?”

“She won’t be remembered, Seth. That your point?”

He pursed his lips. “How about us?”

She wanted to go. “We won’t be remembered either. Nobody will remember anything about anybody. You need me to tell you this? People will just step over our rock, if we even have a rock. If someone is even around enough to get us one.” She marched past him, up the the lane for the car. She didn’t turn around to see if he were following. It was a steep hill , and she wouldn’t forget it, nor the way the sun beat on the ragged grass. “But, come on, being remembered isn’t even what’s important.”

“No? What is?”

“God, Seth. Being worth being remembered.”

 

*

Some weeks later, she had taken a job as a bike messenger. She was smoking with Judge in his apartment in Fishtown. She had been spending time with him, but it was the first time she had been to his place. He only smoked Turkish cigarettes, which she could never justify buying for herself, and he slid the box across the table, gifts for her, the moment she rubbed one out. “I remember your dad,” he said. “But I was only at that school like a couple months. Figured I could learn photography on my own, so that’s what I did, and hell of a lot cheaper.” He had turned his bike upside down on the floor and was cleaning the sprocket and chain with an oiled cloth.

She browsed his shelf, stacked with tattered books on photography. Most of them had library markings taped to the spines. A pile of comics. Tattoo magazines. His own script was blue on his black skin, which, at a distance looked like hair on his chest, but it wasn’t. His chest was smooth. Libra’s level scales on either pec.

“These cameras all work?”

He looked up from the sprocket. “Them my babies.”

“How’d you afford them?”

“Tell me, what’s he like, anyway? Your dad.”

He had spent ten minutes explaining why there was no point in her going to school, yet it still seemed he was trying to get his head around Seth. Feared him, maybe. Her father like a picket out in front of her. It occurred to her she might ask the same thing of him about her father. You sat in a class with him, what’s he like anyway? She raised a camera to test its heft. “Seth speaks in italics,” she said.

“He do what?” He hadn’t stopped looking at her. “Speaks in italics?”

“Like professors do. Professorial.”

“Aw, yeah. I hated that. Sage on a stage. You get along?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“But I’m not going to live there anymore.”

“Mm. You got people?”

“I have a lead.”

“A lead?” He put the back of his hand against her temple. “You can stay here until you’re set up.” She liked how his tough was a quiet, thoughtful tough. How his touch was gentle, despite his arms. “Or you can set up here.”

“I don’t have much stuff,” she said. He was moving in to kiss her again. She stayed him.

“It’s alright,” he said.

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say it’s alright?”

“If it’s alright, it’s alright. I’ll know it’s alright.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s go do this.” She rolled her sleeve up to her shoulder and looked at her bare arm. They were going to go to Chinatown.

“Okay,” he said. “After.”

*

She came down the stairs and met Seth at his own front door. He was wearing flip flops and a straw cowboy hat, which looked like it had been run over at least twice.

“You got mice,” she said.

“Yeah. Thought we’d go swimming. What’s that?”

The loose pattern of small skulls cascaded over her shoulder. Like a cluster of grapes, was how she had described it to the guy at the Chinatown shop. “New ink,” she said.

“You just got that?”

“Last night, with Judge. You like it?”

“The money I gave you,” he said, his voice hollow again. “I don’t know. Ask me in thirty years.”

She stopped smiling. “Fuck you.” She pulled her arm away. “I like it.”

“No, it’s cool. I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

“You didn’t say you did.”

“Sorry.”

“Nice hat.”

“It’s like a baby’s breath of blue heads,” he said. “Who’s the Judge?”

“Just Judge. This guy.”

“Well, I was hoping to take you swimming.”

“The beach?”

“No, not the beach. Some place more clinical.” He was squinting at the pavement. “Concrete and chlorine. I hate the beach.”

“Good. I hate the beach, too.”

“Right. We’re beach haters. Good.” He stepped back onto the sidewalk, a visitor at his own apartment. “I mean, I like the ocean plenty,” he said, as if it clarified something.

“Here.” She handed him the knife. “Happy Father’s Day. Look, I’ll go with you, but I can’t get in chlorine. You belong to some sort of club somewhere?”

They greeted the hotel’s doorman as though he should remember them and strode across the carpet right in front of the desk, past the ferns, and down the tiled hall. They boarded the elevator and went to the roof. No keycard, he knocked on the window. Two wet kids, seven or eight years old, sat on the nonslip concrete picking at their toes. One of them opened the door. Libby was hit with breeze and blue sky. The kid called the other to go. They had southern accents. They passed quickly under her father’s arm, leaving wet footprints to the elevators.

There, on top of the city, the cloudless sky was as blue as the pool she and Seth to themselves. She tossed the paperback from her bag onto a white patio table and sat. She hadn’t touched the book since Texas, could barely remember what it was about, and yet she considered how, whatever it was, its story was still intact there between the covers, immutable, complete, even as her life these past couple of months had endured a hundred revolutions. She turned her chin to her shoulder. This tattoo would stay, a constant.

She watched her father hang his towel near the deep end. He stood staring at the knife in his hand. She was glad he had it now. It made her feel safe that he had it. She had avoided the Internet as much as possible, staving what news might ever come from Tennessee.

Things disappear.

“You remember it?” she called.

“No,” he said. “Was this mine?” Still holding the knife, he rolled into the water like a fluke and sank all the way to the bottom. He sat there submerged on the blue floor. She couldn’t laugh, but she wanted to, a little.

She checked her tattoo again. She liked it. She hadn’t slept since getting it, had stayed up all night with Judge and the others afterwards, spray painting the bike entirely white, sharing smokes beneath the rasping speakers in the messengers’ garage. From a chair in the corner, she had watched them trying to recall anecdotes about the guy who had been struck. Nothing that memorable. What tears there were only seemed to acknowledge this lonesome fact about him. After a while most of them just stopped talking, drank their IPAs, and waited for the dawning to come incrementally through the glass blocks high on the wall.

At eight a.m. their peloton crept down Market en masse, motley of polyester, Judge in front with a traverse towing the riderless ghost bike, the fixie’s pedals paddling over the asphalt like drumbeats to some silent dirge. The lot of them was too egalitarian to ride rank, but Libby sensed the preferred outriders and kept her front wheel back. Their dogs trotted alongside. Judge hit the stoplights at greens and yellows and they rode through reds like a passing barge, just try it, not a single honk, and went down 19^th Street for a full lap around Rittenhouse Square before dropping deeper into South Philly. When they reached the corner where the messenger had been lost, they dismounted, and they quickly fastened the painted ghost to the stop sign, U-locks, padlocks, and chains. She thought someone might say something. Someone should say something. But all of them, thirty or forty, scattered like marbles through the chutes of Center City.

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Chad Willenborg teaches writing at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, though his resumé tracks stints as a bartender, a gravedigger, a dry ice blaster, and a wild game packer. His work appears in McSweeney’s, The Believer, Fugue, First City Review, and The Best of Philadelphia Stories (Vol. 2). Two excerpts from his novel, Suit of Lights, were finalists for CityPaper’s annual writing contest, and “Stone and Paper and Vinyl and Skin,” winner of the 2014 Marguerite McGlinn Prize, is a third excerpt from that novel. The author is at work on a book called The Sexton and a collection of “cover versions” of James Joyce’s Dubliner.