Barry

November 2, 2018

Barry Sutton pulls over into the fire lane at the main entrance of the Poe Building, an Art Deco tower glowing white in the illumination of its exterior sconces. He climbs out of his Crown Vic, rushes across the sidewalk, and pushes through the revolving door into the lobby.

The night watchman is standing by the bank of elevators, holding one open as Barry hurries toward him, his shoes echoing off the marble.

“What floor?” Barry asks as he steps into the elevator car

“Forty-one. When you get up there, take a right and go all the way down the hall.

“More cops will be here in a minute. Tell them I said to hang back until I give a signal.”

The elevator races upward, belying the age of the building around it, and Barry’s ears pop after a few seconds. When the doors finally part, he moves past a sign for a law firm. There’s a light on here and there, but the floor stands mostly dark. He runs along the carpet, passing silent offices, a conference room, a break room, a library. The hallway finally opens into a reception area that’s paired with the largest office.

In the dim light, the details are all in shades of gray. A sprawling mahogany desk buried under files and paperwork. A circular table covered in notepads and mugs of cold, bitter-smelling coffee. A wet bar stocked with expensive-looking bottles of scotch. A glowing aquarium that hums on the far side of the room and contains a small shark and several tropical fish.

As Barry approaches the French doors, he silences his phone and removes his shoes. Taking the handle, he eases the door open and slips out onto the terrace.

The surrounding skyscrapers of the Upper West Side look mystical in their luminous shrouds of fog. The noise of the city is loud and close–car horns ricocheting between the buildings and distant ambulances racing toward some other tragedy. The pinnacle of the Poe Building is less than fifty feet above—a crown of glass and steel and gothic masonry

The woman sits fifteen feet away beside an eroding gargoyle, her back to Barry, her legs dangling over the edge.

He inches closer, the wet flagstones soaking through his socks. If he can get close enough without detection, he’ll drag her off the edge before she knows what–

“I smell your cologne,” she says without looking back.

He stops.

She looks back at him, says, “Another step and I’m gone.”

It’s difficult to tell in the ambient light, but she appears to be in the vicinity of forty. She wears a dark blazer and matching skirt, and she must have been sitting out here for a while, because her hair has been flattened by the mist.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Barry Sutton. I’m a detective in the Central Robbery Division of NYPD.”

“They sent someone from the Robbery—?”

“I happened to be closest. What’s your name?”

“Ann Voss Peters.”

“May I call you Ann?”

“Sure.”

“Is there anyone I can call for you?”

She shakes her head.

“I’m going to step over here so you don’t have to keep straining your neck to look at me.”

Barry moves away from her at an angle that also brings him to the parapet, eight feet down from where she’s sitting. He glances once over the edge, his insides contracting.

“All right, let’s hear it,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Aren’t you here to talk me off? Give it your best shot.”

He decided what he would say riding up in the elevator, recalling his suicide training. Now, squarely in the moment, he feels less confident. The only thing he’s sure of is that his feet are freezing.

“I know everything feels hopeless to you in this moment, but this is just a moment, and moments pass.”

Ann stares straight down the side of the building, four hundred feet to the street below, her palms flat against the stone that has been weathered by decades of acid rain. All she would have to do is push off. He suspects she’s walking herself through the motions, tiptoeing up to the thought of doing it. Amassing that final head of steam.

He notices she’s shivering.

“May I give you my jacket?” he asks.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to come any closer, Detective.”

“Why is that?”

“I have FMS.”

Barry resists the urge to run. Of course he’s heard of False Memory Syndrome, but he’s never known or met someone with the affliction. Never breathed the same air. He isn’t sure he should attempt to grab her now. Doesn’t even want to be this close. No, f*** that. If she moves to jump, he’ll try to save her, and if he contracts FMS in the process, so be it. That’s the risk you take becoming a cop.

“How long have you had it?” he asks.

“One morning, about a month ago, instead of my home in Middlebury, Vermont, I was suddenly in an apartment here in the city, with a stabbing pain in my head and a terrible nosebleed. At first, I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered . . . this life too. Here and now, I’m single, an investment banker, I live under my maiden name. But I have . . .”—she visibly braces herself against the emotion—“memories of my other life in Vermont. I was a mother to a nine-year-old boy named Sam. I ran a landscaping business with my husband, Joe Behrman. I was Ann Behrman. We were as happy as anyone has a right to be.”

“What does it feel like?” Barry asks, taking a clandestine step closer.

“What does what feel like?”

“Your false memories of this Vermont life.”
“I don’t just remember my wedding. I remember the fight over the design for the cake. I remember the smallest details of our home. Our son. Every moment of his birth. His laugh. The birthmark on his left cheek. His first day of school and how he didn’t want me to leave him. But when I try to picture Sam, he’s in black and white. There’s no color in his eyes. I tell myself they were blue. I only see black.

1956
Bethie

By the time she was eleven, Bethie Kaufman knew that it was her destiny to be a star. She had shiny brown hair that her mother curled with rags at night. Her eyes were a pretty shade of blue-green, and her eyebrows were naturally arched, but it was her smile that everyone wanted to see. “Give us a smile!” the hairnetted ladies at Knudsen’s Danish Bakery would say when Bethie came in with her mother to buy an almond tea ring, and they’d give Bethie a sprinkle cookie when she obliged.

“Here comes a pretty little miss,” Stan Danovich, who owned Stan’s Meats on 11 Mile Road, would say, and he’d fold up a slice of turkey or bologna for Bethie to eat. Mr. Tartaglia at the five-and-dime would put extra peppermints in her bag, and Iris, who came to clean three times a week, called her Miss America and brought clip-on earrings for Bethie to wear until it was time for her to go home.

Bethie is a kind and conscientious student with many friends, Miss Keyes wrote on her fourth-grade report card, in her beautiful, flowing blue script. Bethie is a gifted musician who sings in tune, Mrs. Lambert, her music teacher, said. By fifth grade, two boys had kissed her in the cloakroom, and a third had carried her books home for a week, where she’d gotten the solo in the winter concert and had sung a whole verse of “Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland” by herself.

Bethie loved being a girl. She loved skirts that flared out when she twirled; she loved the look of her clean white socks against her black and white saddle shoes. She loved the charm bracelet she’d gotten for her birthday. She only had two charms so far, a tiny Eiffel tower and a little Scottie dog, but she hoped to get more for Chanukah.

Bethie was pretty, Bethie was popular, and so it was only natural that when, at Hebrew school, the sign-up sheet for auditions for the spring Purimspiel was posted, Bethie put her name down for the role of Queen Esther, the biggest girl’s part in the production.

The Hebrew school students performed the play each year. Bethie knew the story by heart: Once upon a time in the kingdom of Shushan, a not-very-smart king put his disobedient wife aside and found himself in need of a replacement. He held a beauty pageant to find the prettiest girl in all the land, so that he could marry her. (“Isn’t that kind of superficial?” Jo had asked, and Sarah had said, “It was how they did things back then.”) The winner was a girl named Esther, and her big secret was that she was Jewish, only the king didn’t know. After Esther became the queen she overheard Haman, the king’s wicked advisor, telling the king that he should kill all the Jews. Only then did Esther reveal herself, and because the king loved her, he let the Jews live, and killed Haman instead.

There were lots of parts for boys in the show—the silly king, whose name, Ahasuerus, sounded like a sneeze, and Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, who urged Esther to enter the pageant and then, after she was married, to tell the king the truth, and Haman, the bad guy, who was always played by a boy with a black-eyeliner mustache. Every time Haman’s name was spoken, the audience was supposed to hiss or boo, or stamp their feet, or shake their groggers, which were homemade noisemakers, paper plates filled with dried lentil beans, folded over and stapled shut.

All of the girls wanted to be Queen Esther, but for two years in a row, the role had gone to Cheryl Goldfarb, who was in sixth grade and whose father was a lawyer. Cheryl lived in an enormous house in Sherwood Forest, where some of the wealthiest Jewish families in Detroit lived. Bethie had never been to Cheryl’s house, but her friend Barbara Simoneaux had, and Barbara said that Cheryl had a queen-sized bed with a pink coverlet and a stuffed pink bear that was almost as big as she was. Cheryl took dance lessons twice a week at Miss Vicki’s Academy of Dance on Woodward Avenue (Bethie had begged her mother to let her take tap or ballet, and Sarah had sighed and smoothed Bethie’s hair and said maybe next year). Cheryl had a white rabbit-fur coat that came with a matching muff, and every time she passed it in the coatroom Bethie would give it a quick stroke, thinking it was so much softer than her own scratchy gray wool. Cheryl had done a good job at the audition, but Bethie had been better. Not only had she memorized every single line of the entire play, but she’d actually cried in the scene where she fell to her knees and begged to King Ahasuerus to spare the lives of her people. “For we may call God by a different name, but all of us are his children,” Bethie said, as tears ran from her eyes and Charlie Farber stared down at her, looking alarmed.

When the cast list was posted, Cheryl’s face turned the color of a brick. “I should be Esther!” Bethie heard her wailing through the door of Mrs. Jacobs’s classroom. “I’m older than she is!”

“You’ll make a wonderful Queen Vashti,” Mrs. Jacobs said. Vashti was the king’s first wife, the one the king put aside after she refused to dance and display herself to the court. Vashti was the only other girl’s part in the Purimspiel. The girl who played her got to wear a long, shiny black wig, like Elizabeth Taylor’s in Cleopatra, and even more eyeliner than Haman. Cheryl should have been happy with that, but instead she just yelled louder.

“Queen Vashti only has one line. One word! It isn’t fair!” It sounded like she was crying. Should’ve done that for the audition, Bethie thought, imagining how she would look onstage, with her hair all in curls and a gold foil crown on her head.

The students rehearsed the Purim play for weeks. The morning of the show, Bethie was too nervous to eat even a single bite of Wheatena. “You’ll be terrific,” her mother told her, brushing rouge on her cheeks, then wetting the curved mascara wand, rubbing it into the black cake of mascara and stroking it onto Bethie’s lashes. In the white silk dress with sparkling silver sequins that was kept in the synagogue’s costume closet and smelled like mothballs, Bethie thought that she looked beautiful, and very grown-up.

Bethie saw her father tuck a bouquet of carnations into the trunk of the car before he drove them to the synagogue. “Break a leg,” her mother whispered, and Jo said, “You’ve got it made in the shade.” Cheryl, in Queen Vashti’s red dress, glared at Bethie backstage, but Bethie didn’t care. She practiced smiling, imagining taking her bows, and how the crowd would applaud after her song, as Mrs. Jacobs introduced the show.

“Once upon a time, in the far-off land of Shushan, there lived a king and his queen,” the narrator, Donald Gitter, said. Charlie Farber, who was wearing what looked like his father’s brown bathrobe, with a tinfoil crown, stepped onto the stage.

“His queen’s name was Vashti, and she would not obey the king’s command to entertain his royal guests,” said Donald. That was the cue for Charlie’s first line.

“Dance!” said the king. “Or away you must go.”

The narrator said, “And to everyone’s shock, Queen Vashti said . . .” Charlie turned to Cheryl, who was supposed to walk onstage and say her single line— “No.” Instead, Cheryl snakehipped her way onto the stage, gave Charlie a big, fake-sweet smile, and said, “Anything you want, O my king.”

And then, as the members of the court and the audience of parents and siblings watched in shocked silence, Cheryl began to dance. With her arms arched over her head, Cheryl jumped.

She spun. She twirled down the stage and leaped back up it. She did a few high kicks, a few pliés, several shuffle-ball-changes, and concluded her performance by leaping straight up in the air and landing in a clumsy split on the floor, right in front of King Ahasuerus, who stared down at her in shock.

“Um,” Charlie said. His next line was supposed to be, “Away with you, then, if you will not obey.” Except Vashti had obeyed and was looking up at him expectantly, her cheeks flushed and her chest going up and down underneath her red dress.

“See?” she said. “I danced! So now you don’t even need another wife!”

Bethie heard laughter ripple through the audience, and a terrible thought flashed through her mind. Cheryl was stealing the show. Bethie had heard that expression a million times, but she’d never realized what it felt like, how it was as if something real was being taken away from her, stolen right our from under her nose. I can’t let this happen, Bethie thought. And so, head held high and her crown in place, she strode out onto the stage, grabbed Cheryl by the shoulders, and pulled her to her feet.

“Kings don’t like show-offs.” She smiled at Charlie. Charlie, who was obviously waiting to be told what to do, shot a desperate look toward the wings. “Just banish her!” Bethie whispered, and her voice must have been loud enough for the people in the front rows to hear, because they started to laugh.

“Um,” said Charlie.

Red-faced, Cheryl put her hands on her hips and said, “I’m his wife and he still loves me!” Turning to Charlie, she said, “I danced for you, didn’t I? So you don’t need her.”

“Um,” Charlie said again.

“I’m the prettiest girl in all of Shushan!” Bethie reminded him. It was bragging, which she knew was bad manners, but the real Esther had won the beauty contest, and Bethie couldn’t figure out how else to get show-off Cheryl off the stage.

Finally, Charlie decided to take action. Lifting his staff, he said, in his deepest voice, “Queen Vashti, I banish you from Shushan.”

“How come?” Cheryl asked. When Charlie didn’t answer, she said, “You told me to dance for the court, and I did. So now everything’s fine!”

I guess it’s up to me, Bethie thought. “The king just banished you!” she said, giving Cheryl a shove. “It doesn’t matter why! He’s the king, and you have to do what the king says!”

“You can’t marry Esther!” Cheryl wailed, grabbing at Charlie’s bathrobe sleeve. “Because she’s lying to you!” She sucked in a breath, and Bethie knew what she was going to say before she said it. “Esther is Jewish!” she blared.

“Big deal. So are you,” Bethie shot back.

In the front row, Bethie saw one of the fathers laughing so hard that his sides were shaking. A few of the mothers were pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes, and her big sister’s face was red with glee.

From the corner of the stage, Mrs. Jacobs was making frantic shooing motions at Cheryl. “Fine!” Cheryl said, tossing her hair. “But you’ll be sorry!” She lifted her chin and marched off the stage. The audience began to clap, and even though it wasn’t in the script, Bethie turned, gathering her skirt in her hands, and gave them an elegant bow.

When the play was over, Bethie and her parents and her sister walked through the parking lot. Jo was still chuckling and recounting her favorite unscripted moments. “I wonder if Queen Vashti really did say, ‘You’ll be sorry’?” Bethie was holding her carnations. She felt like she was floating, not walking. She had never been so happy in her life. They had almost reached their car when Bethie saw Cheryl’s father, Mr. Goldfarb, standing in front of it with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Ken,” Sarah said, putting her hand on her husband’s forearm, as Mr. Goldfarb stepped forward. He wasn’t a big man, but he looked all puffed up inside his suit, with his bald head almost glowing with rage.

“I’ll bet you feel like a big shot,” he said in a loud, angry voice as he waved his thick finger at Bethie. “Humiliating Cheryl like that.”

Bethie cringed backward. Ken moved so that he was standing in front of her.

“I think your daughter humiliated herself,” he said. His own voice was very calm.

“Cheryl’s taken tap and classical dance lessons for five years,” said Mr. Goldfarb. “She should’ve had the bigger part.”

“I think the crowd got to appreciate her dancing,” Bethie’s father said mildly.

“That’s not the point and you know it!” Spit sprayed from Mr. Goldfarb’s mouth as he shouted.

“Maybe she should have been Queen Esther. I didn’t see the auditions, so I can’t say for sure. But what I can tell you . . .” Bethie held her breath as her father pulled her forward, settling his hands protectively on her shoulders, “is that my little girl was fantastic.”

Mr. Goldfarb muttered some more about favoritism and dance lessons before giving Bethie one final poisonous glare and stomping away.

“Don’t let him bother you,” her father told her. “You were very good and very funny. Now, who wants to go to Saunders for an ice-cream sundae?”

It turned out that everyone did.

“Just a kiss?”

Excitement thrummed through my veins as I tugged my gaze from the TV screen to Clay Armstrong. It took a moment for my wonky vision to focus and piece Clay’s face together.

Just a few months older than me, he was beyond cute, with light brown hair that was always flopping over his forehead and just begging for my fingers to run through it.

Then again, I’d never seen an unattractive Warden even though I didn’t have it in me to do the mental gymnastics to figure out how they looked like a human and then like a Warden.

Clay sat beside me on the couch in his parents’ living room. We were alone, and I wasn’t quite sure what life choices I’d made to end up with me sitting here beside him, our thighs touching. Like all Wardens, he was so incredibly bigger than me, even though I was five foot eight and not what one would normally consider a short girl.

Clay had always been friendlier toward me than most of the Wardens, flirty even, and I liked it—he gave me the kind of attention that I saw between others but never had been on the receiving end of until now. No one in the Warden community besides my friend Jada, and of course Misha, paid much attention to me, and neither of them wanted to kiss me.

But Clay was always nice, complimenting me even when I knew I looked like a hot mess, and for the past couple of weeks, he’d sought me out a lot. I liked it.

And there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with that.

So, when he’d approached me at the Pit, which was just a really large fire pit where younger Wardens gathered at night to hang out, and asked if I wanted to come back to his place to watch a movie, I didn’t have to be asked twice.

Now Clay wanted to kiss me.

And I wanted to be kissed.

“Trinity?” he said, and I flinched when I saw that his fingers were suddenly close to my face. He caught a piece of hair that had fallen against my cheek and tucked it behind my ear. His hand lingered. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Disappearing on me,” he said. I had, and I did that a lot. “Where’d you go?”

I smiled. “Nowhere. I’m here.”

Those Warden eyes, a bright sky blue, peered into mine. “Good.”

My smile grew.

“Just a kiss?” he repeated.

The excitement went up a notch and I exhaled slowly. “Just a kiss.”

He smiled as he leaned in, tilting his head so our mouths lined up. Mine parted in anticipation. I’d been kissed before. Once. Well, I’d done the kissing. I’d kissed Misha when I was sixteen, and he’d kissed me back, but then it became really weird because he was like a brother to me, and neither of us were about that kind of life.

Plus, things weren’t supposed to be like that between Misha and me, because of what he was.

Because of what I was.

Clay’s lips touched mine, and they were warm and…dry. Surprise flickered through me. I thought they’d be, I don’t know, wetter. But it was…nice, especially when the pressure of the kiss increased and his lips parted mine, and then it was more. His mouth moved against mine, and I kissed him back.

I didn’t want to stop him when the hand along the nape of my neck slid down my back, to my hip. That felt nice, too, and when he eased me down, I went with it, placing my hands on his shoulders as he hovered over me, using his arm to support his weight so he didn’t crush me.

Wardens’ body temperatures ran high—higher than humans, higher than mine—but he seemed hotter, like he was about to burn up.

And I…I felt sort of…lukewarm.

We kissed and kissed, and those kisses weren’t dry anymore, and I liked the way his lower body had settled over mine, how it moved against mine, a mysterious rhythm that felt like it should be, could be, more—if I wanted that.

And that was…nice.

Nice like when he’d held my hand on the way to his place. So was the candle he’d lit that smelled like watermelon and lemonade—there was something romantic about that, and about the way his hand opened and closed on my hip. I felt warm and pleasant, not rip my clothes off and let’s get it on kind of excited, but this was… It was really nice.

Then his hand was under my shirt and up, over my breast.

Hold up.

Amy

Monday, May 2

I am standing by the window of our small apartment in Queens, watching as Ma and Pa leave for their jobs. Half-hidden by the worn curtains Ma sewed herself, I see them walk side by side to the subway station down the street. At the entrance, they pause and look at each other for a moment. Here, I always hold my breath, waiting for Pa to touch Ma’s cheek, or for Ma to burst into tears, or for either of them to give some small sign of the truth of their relationship. Instead, Ma raises her hand in an awkward wave, the drape of her black shawl exposing her slender forearm, and Pa shuffles into the open mouth of the station as the morning traffic roars down our busy street. Then Ma ducks her head and continues her walk to the local dry cleaners where she works.

I sigh and step away from the window. I should be doing something more productive. Why am I still spying on my parents? Because I’m an adult living at home and have nothing better to do. If I don’t watch out, I’m going to turn into Ma. Timid, dutiful, toiling at a job that pays nothing. And yet, I’ve caught glimpses of another Ma and Pa over the years. The passion that flickers over her face as she reads Chinese romance novels in the night, the ones Pa scorns. The way Pa reaches for her elbow when he walks behind her, catches himself, and pulls back his hand. I pass by my closet of a bedroom, and the poster that hangs on the wall catches my eye—barely visible behind the teetering piles of papers and laundry. It’s a quote I’ve always loved from Willa Cather: “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.” I’m not sure I believe the sentiment but her words never fail to unsettle me.

Our cramped apartment still smells faintly of the incense Ma burned this morning in front of her mother’s altar. Grandma died in Amsterdam a week ago. She lived there with the Tan family: Ma’s cousin Helena; Helena’s husband, Willem; and their son, Lukas, who is thirty-three years old, the same age as my older sister, Sylvie. I never met Grandma but Ma’s grief has poured over me like a waterfall until my own heart overflows as well. The skin around Ma’s eyes is rubbed red and raw. The past few evenings, while Pa hid in their bedroom, I held Ma’s hand as she huddled on the sofa, stifling her sobs, attempting to stem the endless stream of tears with an old, crumpled tissue. I wear black today too, for Ma’s sake, while Pa dresses in his normal clothing. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that he can’t show us that he does.

Sylvie lived with Grandma and Helena’s family in the Netherlands for the first nine years of her life, and flew back there a month ago, as soon as she heard Grandma was ill. She’s handling a consultancy project for her firm there as well. Dazzling Sylvie, seven years older than me, yanked from her glamorous life in Europe back to our cabbage-scented apartment in Queens when I was only two years old. Often there’s a dichotomy between the beautiful sister and the smart one, but in our family, both of those qualities belong to my sister. And me, I am only a shadow, an afterthought, a faltering echo. If I didn’t love Sylvie so much, I’d hate her.

How did a brilliant creature like Sylvie arise from such mundane stock as our ma and pa? Any time I had a teacher in elementary or high school who’d taught Sylvie, they’d say, “Ah, you’re Sylvie Lee’s little sister,” rife with anticipation. I would then watch as their high hopes turned to bewilderment at my stuttering slowness. This was followed by their disappointment and, finally, their indifference. Sylvie went to Princeton undergrad, earned a master’s in chemical engineering from MIT, worked a few years, then went back to school for her MBA from Harvard. Now she’s a management consultant, which is a profession I’ll never understand no matter how many times she tries to explain it. Like me, Sylvie adores all sweets, but unlike me, she never gains an ounce. I have watched her eat one egg tart after another without any effect on her elegant hips, as if the sheer intensity of her will burns the calories, consuming everything she touches. She used to have a lazy eye when she was little and wore an eye patch for years. Now the only imperfection in her lovely face is that her right eye still shifts slightly outward when she’s tired. Most people don’t even notice, but I sometimes console myself with this tiny fault of Sylvie’s—See, she’s not so perfect after all.

I go to the pockmarked cabinet where I have carefully wrapped and hidden a cluster of small orange loquat fruits. If I’d left them on the vinyl kitchen tabletop and Pa had caught sight of the vulnerable snail hidden among the pear-shaped fruit, he would have killed it. Pa works in a fish market in Chinatown. He’s been forced to become insensitive to death—all those fish gasping on the wooden chopping block until he ends them with his cleaver.

The tiny snail with its translucent shell is still perched on one of the loquats and seems fine. Anything strong enough to survive such an arduous journey from China deserves a chance to make a life for itself. I take a used plastic bag, gently lower the loquat and snail into it, and head for the door. I shrug into a light jacket and grab my wallet and cell phone. Before I step outside, I remove my thick purple glasses and shove them into my pocket. I don’t bother to put in my contacts. Vanity plus laziness add up to my living in a blurry world much of the time.

I trudge the few blocks to the small park near our home. It’s early enough that some of the shops are still gated and I shiver as a chilly breeze sweeps down the concrete sidewalk. A bitter stink arises from the wide impersonal asphalt of the road, lined by blank buildings that have always intimidated me. A mother dragging a small, grubby child behind her averts her eyes as she passes. No one makes eye contact in this densely populated, lonely, and dispiriting place—no one except for guys trying to hit on you. A group of them are hanging out now in front of a broken store window with a large sign that says something about fifty percent off. They are mere bruises in my peripheral vision as they yell after me, “Ni hao! Can I put my egg roll in your rice patty?” and then break into raucous laughter. Do they have to say the same dumb thing every day? As long as they maintain their distance, the vagueness of my vision is as comforting as a cocoon. When I’m practically blind, I can pretend I’m deaf too.

One day, I’m going to return to my program at CUNY and finish my teaching credential so I can get out of this place. I’ll move Ma and Pa too. It doesn’t matter that I dropped out last year. I can do it. I already have my master’s in English; I’m almost there. I can see myself standing in front of a class of kids: they are riveted, laughing at my jokes, eyes wide at the brilliance of the literature they are reading, and I don’t trip over a single word.

Wake up, Amy. All you are now is a savior of snails, which is not necessarily a bad development.

Sylvie and I were both raised Buddhist, and some ideas, like all life being precious, have stayed with us. When we were little, we’d race around the apartment with butterfly nets, catching flies and releasing them outdoors. However, as evidenced by Pa and the killing-fish-and-many-other-sea-creatures thing, religion only goes so far when confronted by the harsh grind of daily life.

The park is still recovering from the severe winter we had and I struggle to find a nice, leafy area. I am bending down with the snail held gingerly between forefinger and thumb when my cell phone rings. I jump and almost drop the snail. I set it down, manage to pull my phone out of my jacket, and squint to read the number. I am just about to answer when the caller hangs up. The number’s long, beginning with +31. I’ve seen this before on Sylvie’s phone. It’s someone from the Netherlands—probably my distant cousin Lukas, except he’s never called me before. He only speaks to Sylvie.

I consider the cost of calling Lukas in Amsterdam and wince. Hopefully he’ll try me again soon. Instead, I head for the local music shop. I love to linger in one of their listening stations but almost never buy anything. My stomach clenches at the thought of my staggering mountain of student loans, built up degree by degree. Years of flailing around, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life before deciding on teaching—and then, that old stutter of mine resurfacing as I stood in front of the group practicing my teaching assignments. I have outgrown it, most of the time anyway, but the fear of my stutter proved to be as powerful as the thing itself: all those blank faces, my panic suffocating me like a thick blanket. Sometimes I think I should have stayed an uneducated immigrant like Ma and Pa. Some fledglings leave the nest and soar, like Sylvie; others flutter, and flutter, then tumble to the ground. In the end, I couldn’t face my classmates and teachers anymore. And Sylvie, of course, was the one who bailed me out when my loans passed their grace period. She took over the payments without a word.

Sylvie’s rich, at least compared to me, but she’s not so wealthy that she can shoulder that burden without feeling it. She and her husband, Jim, are even more weighed down with student debt than I am, and Jim doesn’t make much money as a guidance counselor at a public school in Brooklyn. Even though he’s from old money, Jim’s parents believe their kids should make it on their own, so he won’t see a cent of his wealth until they pass on. That is, except for the ridiculous present they gave him when he married Sylvie. As for me, instead of helping Ma and Pa, who have already spent so many years working their fingers to the bone, I’m living in their apartment and eating their food. I temp here and there but despite my ability to type really fast, the only true skill I have, work has been scarce. It’s the economy, I tell everyone, but of course I know better. It’s me. Sylvie tells me I’m not fulfilling my potential and I tell her to shut up and leave me alone.

Inside the shop, I head for the classical section and begin to relax as soon as I hear the lustrous and velvety voice of Anna Netrebko floating from the loudspeakers. She’s singing Verdi. Neat racks of CDs sit beside rows of musical scores and bin after bin of vinyl records. Old guitars and violins line the walls. I love the way it smells of paper, lacquer, and lemon detergent. Zach, the cute guy, is working again. At least, I believe he’s attractive. It’s hard to be sure without my glasses, which I wouldn’t be caught dead in around him. To me, the lines of his face and body are appealing, and I love his voice—warm, rich, and clear. He always sounds like he’s smiling at me.

“Hey, Amy. What would you like to listen to this week?”

I try to express friendliness with my face but think I’ve wound up contorting my features into something extremely awkward. “D-do you have any suggestions?”

He’s only supposed to allow paying customers to sample the music but never seems to mind my lingering visits. “Well, how about some Joseph Szigeti?”

In my enthusiasm, I forget to be shy. “I just read an article about his version of the Prokofiev Concerto no. 1 in D.”

“It’s phenomenal,” he says, pulling out a CD. “He’s proof that technical perfection isn’t everything.”

But as we walk over to the listening station together, my phone rings.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumble. “I have to take this call.” I duck my head and leave the store. I manage to answer my cell in time and the moment I hear Lukas’s voice, I know something is wrong.

The line is full of static, probably due to the transatlantic call. I cover my other ear with my hand to try to hear him more clearly.

“Amy, I must speak to Sylvie right away,” Lukas says. His voice is strained with urgency and his Dutch accent is heavier than I’d expected.

I wrinkle my brow. “But she’s in the Netherlands right now, with you.”

He breathes in so sharply I can hear it over the phone. “What? No, she is not. She flew back on Saturday. She should have arrived by now. Have you not heard from her?”

“W-we didn’t even know she was coming home. I just spoke with her after Grandma’s funeral. When was that? Thursday, right? I thought she’d stay awhile longer. She also mentioned her project there wasn’t finished yet.”

“Sylvie is not answering her phone. I want very to speak with her.”

Precise, responsible Sylvie would have let us know right away if she were back. She would have come to see Ma and tell her about Grandma. My heart starts to throb like a wound underneath my skin.

There must be some simple explanation. I try to sound reassuring. “Don’t worry, I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“Yes, please see what the situation is. When you find her, ask her to call me, okay? Immediately.” There is a painful pause. “I hope she is all right.”

I quickly put on my glasses and hurry to the dry cleaners where Ma works. The faint smell of steam and chemicals engulfs me as I push open the door. I find Ma standing behind the long counter, talking in her broken English to a well-dressed woman with sleek, honey-blond hair.

“We were quite horrified to find one of the buttons loose after we picked this up,” the customer says, pushing a man’s pin-striped shirt toward Ma.

“So sorry.” Ma’s small face looks wan and pale against her black clothing, her eyes puffy from crying. “I fix.”

The woman taps a manicured nail against the countertop. Her tone is both irritated and condescending, as if she’s speaking to a child who has misbehaved. “It’s not really the quality we expect, especially after your prices went up.”

“So sorry,” Ma repeats.

I glare at the woman’s bony back. I want to tell her that the owner hiked up the prices. Ma had nothing to do with it. She’s never even gotten a raise in the long years she’s worked here—standing on her feet all day, lifting heavy bundles of clothing, steaming, ironing, and mending. But I keep my mouth shut. I wait until the customer finishes berating Ma and leaves.

Once we got home, dinner was served.

“All I am saying,” Celeste said as she picked up her burger, “is that I want you to be careful.”

“Mom,” my cousin Bailey replied. “You don’t have to give me this same lecture every summer.”

“Apparently, I do. Because you’re already hanging out with yacht club boys.”

“They’re not all alike, you know.”

“They’re alike enough,” Aunt Celeste told her. Mimi, at the head of the table, shot her a look over the bowl of potato salad between them. “What? You know what I’m worried about. I mean, we all know what happened when Waver—”

There was the sound of a thump under the table, and Celeste winced. The sudden silence that followed was awkward, not only for the kick Mimi had just given her, but the fact that we all knew it was to protect my feelings.

This was actually the second time my mom had come up since I’d left the raft. The first had been when I was riding back with Roo. Unlike when I’d gone out with Jack, we were side by side. So I was able to get quick glimpses of him, taking in the way his white-blond hair stuck up a bit in the back, the tattoo on one calf that was a series of numbers, and the way that he waved at every boat we passed, flashing a big grin. For all my own glances, he wasn’t looking at me at all, instead squinting ahead, the back of his T-shirt rippling in the strong wind coming off the water. When he finally spoke, it took me by surprise.

“I’m sorry about your mom.”

Even though it had been five years and some days, I worried I’d moved on too much. And then there were times like this, when just a mention of her gave me a pinch in my heart. “Thanks,” I said. “I miss her.”

Now he did look at me: I could see it out of the corner of my eye, even as I watched Mimi’s dock—marked with a sign that said FOR USE BY CALVANDER’S GUESTS ONLY—approach. “She and my dad were friends in high school. Chris Price.”

I nodded, as if I’d heard this name, even though I hadn’t. “He still lives here?”

He looked at me for a second. “No, not anymore. I live with my mom.” He pointed to a line of houses down the shore from Mimi’s, each painted a different bright color—yellow, blue, pink, red, and green—and trimmed with white. “Ours is the green one.”

“Who has the pink?”

“Renters, usually,” he said. “Season just started, though.”

“How many people live here year-round?” I asked.

He was slowing the engine now. “More than you’d think. A lot, like Celeste, have houses they rent out for summer.”

“I thought she lived with Mimi,” I said.

“Only from June to August,” he replied. “The rest of the time they have a place up by Blackwood Station, right on the water.”

“Blackwood Station,” I said. “I feel like I’ve heard of that.”

“You probably have. It’s the only boatyard in town. Plus the arcade is right there, and the public beach.”

I looked in that direction, getting my bearings, then back up at Mimi’s house, now right in front of us. As I did, I saw Celeste, standing in the grass, one hand shading her eyes as she looked out at us. I couldn’t make out her expression.

“And Celeste is a Blackwood, right?” I asked.

“She was. Her ex-husband, Silas, runs the boatyard and gas station. Been in his family for generations.”

Now I had something else to add to my family tree. “But you’re not a Blackwood or Calvander,” I said, clarifying.

“Nope.” He cut the engine, letting us drift up to the dock. “Silas, Celeste, my dad, my mom, and yours all went to high school together. There’s only one, the same one we all go to now.”

I tried to picture my own parents at my school, Jackson High, walking the same halls I did with Ryan and Bridget. I couldn’t. Nana Payne and my dad lived in Massachusetts when he was in high school, and my mom was, well, here.

“It’s a lot, all this new information,” I said. “I’m honestly having some trouble keeping up.”

“Well, then you need to start asking people their five sentences.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Their what?”

“It’s a lake thing,” he explained. “The basic idea is that since you meet a ton of people at the beginning of every summer, everyone has to condense their bio down to the main ideas. Thus, five sentences.”

“Right,” I said slowly. “What’s yours?”

He cleared his throat. “Born and bred here at North Lake. High school senior this fall. Work multiple jobs. Want to go to journalism school. Allergic to shellfish.”

“Wow,” I said. “Didn’t see that shellfish part coming.”

“An element of surprise and oddity is crucial with this,” he told me. “Hit me with yours.”

“I need five in all?”

“Start with one.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking it over. “Well, I’m from Lakeview. Also about to be a high school senior.”

“Coming out strong,” he said as we hit a wave, water splashing over the bow. “I like it. Go on.”

“My mom grew up here at the lake,” I continued, “but this is my first real visit. I came once as a kid, but I don’t really remember.”

“Nice,” he said. “Facts and intrigue. Now you need something random and memorable.”

I thought for a second. “People don’t get my humor.”

“Meaning?”

“I think I’m funny, but other people often don’t laugh.”

“I know that feeling,” he said.

“You do?” I hadn’t met anyone who could relate before.

“Yep,” he said. “Okay, now for the strong finish. Your shellfish allergy, so to speak. What’s it going to be?”

I had to admit, I was feeling the pressure. Especially as the seconds ticked by and nothing came. What could I say? I was nervous to the point of obsessive? I liked organizing things?

Roo did not rush me. He just waited.

Finally, I had it. “I read the obituaries every day.”

His eyes widened. “Seriously?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“Okay, that is good,” he said, then held his hand up for a high five. I slapped it. “You, in five sentences. Nicely done.”

Me, in five sentences. All facts, some informative, some colorful. Not really all that different from the obits themselves, now that I thought of it. Only shorter, while you’re living, and still have time to add more.

Dear Ma—

Let me begin again.

I am writing because it’s late.

Because it’s 9:52 p.m. on a Tuesday and you must be walking home after the closing shift.

I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain.

For the first time in a long time, I’m trying to believe in heaven, in a place we can be together after all this blows over up.

They say every snowflake is different— but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned.

I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty- handed.

You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes.

Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl.

I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.

Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss— the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them— never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven- hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard- issue apron.

Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen.

OxyContin, first mass- produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is an opioid, essentially making it heroin in pill form.

I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.

Take it or leave it. The body, I mean.

Take a left on Harris St., where all that’s left of the house that burned down that summer during a thunderstorm is a chain-linked dirt lot.

The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned- out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended— she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.

After a month on the Oxy, Trevor’s ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly. Once, after my fourteenth birthday, crouched between the seats of an abandoned school bus in the woods, I filled my life with a line of cocaine. A white letter “I” glowed on the seat’s peeling leather. Inside me the “I” became a switchblade— and something tore. My stomach forced up but it was too late. In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.

The truth is none of us are enough enough. But you know this already.

The truth is I came here hoping for a reason to stay.

Sometimes those reasons are small: the way you pronounce spaghetti as “bahgeddy.”

It’s late in the season— which means the winter roses, in full bloom along the national bank, are suicide notes.

Write that down.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

Are you there? Are you still walking?

They say nothing lasts forever but I’m writing you in the voice of an endangered species.

The truth is I’m worried they will get us before they get us.

Tell me where it hurts. You have my word.

Back in Hartford, I used to wander the streets at night by myself. Sleepless, I’d get dressed, climb through the window— and just walk.

Some nights I would hear an animal shuffling, unseen, behind garbage bags, or the wind unexpectedly strong overhead, a rush of leaves clicking down, the scrape of branches from a maple out of sight. But mostly, there were only my footsteps on the pavement steaming with fresh rain, the scent of decade- old tar, or the dirt on a baseball field under a few stars, the gentle brush of grass on the soles of my Vans on a highway median.

But one night I heard someone praying.

Through the lightless window of a street- level apartment, a man’s voice in Arabic. I recognized the word Allah. I knew it was a prayer by the tone he used to lift it, as if the tongue was the smallest arm from which a word like that could be offered. I imagined it floating above his head as I sat there on the curb, waiting for the soft clink I knew was coming. I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine, but it didn’t. His voice, it went higher and higher, and my hands, they grew pinker with each inflection. I watched my skin intensify until, at last, I looked up— and it was dawn. It was over. I was blazed in the blood of light.

Salat al- fajr: a prayer before sunrise. “Whoever prays the dawn prayer in congregation,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “it is as if he had prayed the whole night long.”

I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it— perhaps even hold it up, like a tongue at the end of its word.

First developed as a painkiller for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, OxyContin, along with its generic forms, was soon prescribed for all bodily pain: arthritis, muscle spasms, and migraines.

Trevor was into The Shawshank Redemption and Jolly Ranchers, Call of Duty and his one- eyed border collie, Mandy. Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, “I think I just deep- throated an invisible cock,” and we both cracked up like it wasn’t December and we weren’t under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange. Trevor was a boy who had a name, who wanted to go to community college to study physical therapy. Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was.

Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.

But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.”

One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. “Why they die themselves like that?” she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know it’s a cliff.

“Maybe they should have a stop sign then.”

We had many stop signs on our block. They weren’t always there.

There was this woman named Marsha down the street. She was overweight and had hair like a rancher’s widow, a kind of mullet cut with thick bangs. She would go door- to- door, hobbling on her bad leg, gathering signatures for a petition to put up stop signs in the neighborhood. She has two boys herself, she told you at the door, and she wants all the kids to be safe when they play.

Her sons were Kevin and Kyle. Kevin, two years older than me, overdosed on heroin. Five years later, Kyle, the younger one, also overdosed. After that Marsha moved to a mobile park in Coventry with her sister. The stop signs remain.

The truth is we don’t have to die if we don’t feel like it.

Just kidding.

Do you remember the morning, after a night of snow, when we found the letters FAG4LIFE scrawled in red spray paint across our front door?

The icicles caught the light and everything looked nice and about to break.

“What does it mean?” you asked, coatless and shivering. “It says ‘Merry Christmas,’ Ma,” I said, pointing. “See? That’s why it’s red. For luck.”

They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.”

The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine? 

It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be yet another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.

There was a war, the man on TV said, but it’s “lowered” now.

Yay, I think, swallowing my pills.

The truth is my recklessness is body- width.

Once, the anklebone of a blond boy underwater.

There was a greenish light in that line and you saw it.

The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.

I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. “Looks like you dropped your tampon.” Then he winked, smiled— and faded back into the dream he made of himself.

Using a multimillion- dollar ad campaign, Purdue sold OxyContin to doctors as a safe, “abuse- resistant” means of managing pain. The company went on to claim that less than one percent of users became addicted, which was a lie. By 2002, prescriptions of Oxy-Contin for noncancer pain increased nearly ten times, with total sales reaching over $3 billion.

What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets? 

What if art was not measured?

The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.

The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.

The first time I saw a man naked he seemed forever.

He was my father, undressing after work. I am trying to end the memory. But the thing about forever is you can’t take it back.

Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even.

Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.

“Emily!” Adam shouted.

Her cousin was standing by a barouche, a barouche so shiny and new that the black lacquer dazzled the eyes.

To be fair, Emily’s eyes were dazzled already, sun-blind, rainbows dancing everywhere; she felt dizzy with wonder and delight.

When they anchored in Carlisle Bay just after noon, the island had seemed a fairyland drawn in pastels, houses bleached by the sunlight rising in tiers on the hills that circled the town, broad-leaved trees swaying on delicate trunks, the fronds casting their shadows over the blue waters, an illustration from a picture book, beautiful and remote.

But now they were here, unmistakably here, the brilliant sunshine like nothing Emily had ever seen, the heat baking through the heavy fabric of her dress and making the hair at the nape of her neck curl. The houses weren’t pastels at all, but vibrant orange and yellow, blue and green and pink. The illusion of space had been just that, an illusion; people pressed close about, dressed in brightly colored kerchiefs, carrying baskets, chickens and donkeys getting underfoot, everyone talking, laughing, arguing, crying their wares.

Emily wanted to see it all, to peer into the baskets of fruit for which she had no name, to figure out whether the patterns on the handkerchiefs being shoved beneath her nose and waved about were seeds or beads or something else entirely.

But her cousin was waiting, his fair-skinned face flushed with heat and agitation. They were to dine at the house of her grandfather’s oldest business associate, and Adam had worked himself into a pelter about it, chivvying them from ship to hotel and into evening dress, in a horror that they might be late.

“Emily!” Adam called again, jiggling from one foot to the other. His wife, Laura, was already in the barouche. “Are you coming?”

Emily made a face at him through the throng. Never mind that a new world pressed around them, strange and wonderful. A business contract was waiting. “I’m trying!”

The liveried coachman shouted, and the hawkers fell away, parting like the Red Sea. Emily gathered her skirts and made her way through the gap before it could close, glancing back over her shoulder as the crowd formed again, the hawkers descending on one of their fellow passengers from the Renown, who looked like she was destined to buy some fancywork whether she intended to or not.

“Do take your time, Emily.” Adam shoved her up into the carriage with more vigor than finesse. “Is there anyone you’d like to stop and talk to before we go? A cold collation, perhaps?”

“Adam . . .” Laura moved aside to make room for Emily on the forward-facing seat. “Come, sit by me.”

Emily squeezed her own modest skirts into the space beside Laura’s flounces, as Adam tripped on the hem of her skirt and dropped, red-faced, into the seat opposite.

“It wouldn’t do to be late. Not after Mr. Turner sent his own coach.” Lowering his voice, Adam leaned forward. “They say he’s the richest man in Barbados—the richest man in the West Indies. His fortune makes Grandfather seem like a pauper.”

“Grandfather wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” pointed out Emily as the coach paused to let two women cross the road, large jugs balanced on their heads.

“No, he wouldn’t, would he?” said Adam, and there was a catch in his voice that was audible even over the cries of the street vendors. “I keep thinking he’s still there. That we’ll go back and he’ll be there in the house at Queen Street, barking orders to his clerks.”

Emily felt an ache in her chest. She could picture it too, too well. Her autocratic, rough-mannered tyrant of a grandfather, who had loved her more than anyone in the world. He had been a self-made man, Jonathan Fenty, who had raised himself from poverty to riches through pure strength of will.

Well, will and an advantageous marriage. But mostly will.

No one, including their grandfather, had ever thought he might succumb to anything so mundane as death.

But he had, and there was a stylized angel in the churchyard to prove it, the carving raw and new, the chisel marks fresh on the stone, as the rain wept down, seeping into the newly turned earth. He was gone and they were here, in the land of their grandfather’s birth, where the sun shone in February and strange birds sang. The heat and colors pressed around her, the women with their bright kerchiefs and the baskets balanced on top of their heads, the lilting voices and bright colors, a world away from the winter city they had left.

“Grandfather would be glad to see you carrying on,” said Emily quietly. “It was what he wanted.”

It shouldn’t have stung to know that Fenty and Company would be Adam’s. It was what she had always known. He was a boy, and a Fenty. Never mind that her grandfather had always said she was the most like him. That didn’t extend to commerce. But he had left her a legacy of her own, one she had never expected.

Beth

I hit my blinker and merge onto the Muskogee Turnpike, and for the first time in seven long years, I take a breath. A real, full-body breath that blows up my lungs like a beach ball. So much breath that it burns.

It tastes like freedom.

Four hours on the road, two hundred and eighty-three miles of space between us, and it’s nowhere near enough. I still hear the clink of your keys when you toss them on the table, still tense at the thud of your shoes when you come closer to the kitchen. Still feel the fear slithering, snake-like, just under the surface of my skin.

You have three moods lately: offensive, enraged, or violent. That moment when you come around that corner and I see which one it is always inches bile up my throat. It’s the worst part of my day.

I tell myself, no more. No more tiptoeing around your temper, no more dodging your blows.

Those days, like Arkansas, are in my rearview mirror.

For early afternoon on a Wednesday, the highway is busy, dusty semis rumbling by on both sides, and I hold my hands at ten and two and keep the tires between the lines.

Oklahoma is crisscrossed with turnpikes like this one, four-lane highways dotted with cameras for speeding and toll violations. It’s too soon still for one of them to be clocking every black sedan with Arkansas plates that whizzes by, but I’m also not giving them any reason to. I use my blinkers and hold my speed well under the limit, even though what I’d really like to do is haul ass.

I hit the button for the windows, letting the highway air wash away the smell of you, of home. At sixty-four miles an hour, the wind is brutal, hot and steamy and oppressive. It reeks of pasture and exhaust, of nature and chemicals, none of it pleasant. It whips up a whirlwind in the car, blowing my hair and my clothes and the map on the passenger’s seat, rocking it in the air like a paper plane. I reach down, shimmy out of a shoe and smack it to the seat as a paperweight. You’re serious about holding on to me, which means I need to hold on to that map.

It may be old-school, but at least a map can’t be traced. Not that you’d have already discovered the number for the burner phone charging in the cup holder, but still. Better to not take any chances. I took the phone out of the package but haven’t powered it up—not yet. Not until I get where I’m going. I haven’t made it this far into my new life only to be hauled back into the old one.

So far, this state looks exactly like the one I left behind—fields and farms and endless belts of faded asphalt. Sounds the same, too. Local radio stations offer one of two choices, country music or preachers. I listen to a deep voice glorifying the power of forgiveness, but it’s a subject I can no longer get behind. I toggle up the dial, stopping on a Miranda Lambert anthem that’s much more my speed these days— gunpowder and lead—and give a hard twist to the volume dial.

For the record, I never wanted this. Running away. Leaving everything and everyone behind. I try not to think about all the things I’ll miss, all the faces I’ll miss, even if they won’t miss mine. Part of the planning was putting some space between me and people I love most, not letting them in on the truth. It’s the one thing I can’t blame you for—the way I drove a wedge into those friendships all by myself so you wouldn’t go after them, too. There’s only one person who knows I’m gone, and everyone else… It’ll be days, maybe weeks until they wonder where I am.

You’re smart, so I have to be smarter. Cunning, so I have to be more cunning. Not exactly a skill I possessed when we walked down the aisle all those years ago, when I was so squishy in love. I looked into those eyes of yours and promised till death would we part, and I meant every word. Divorce was never an option—until it was.

But the first time I mentioned the word, you shoved me to the floor, jammed a gun into my mouth and dared me to say it again. Divorce. Divorce divorce divorce divorce. I never said the word out loud again, though I will admit it’s been an awful lot on my mind.

I picture you walking through the door at home, looking for me. I see you going from room to room, hollering and cursing and finally, calling my cell. I see you following its muffled rings into the kitchen, scowling when you realize they’re coming from the cabinet under the sink. I see you wrenching open the doors and dumping out the trash and digging through sludgy coffee grounds and the remains of last night’s stir-fry until you find my old iPhone, and I smile. I smile so damn hard my cheeks try to tear in two.

I wasn’t always this vindictive, but you weren’t always this mean. When we met, you were charming, warming up my car on cold mornings or grilling up the most perfect strip steak for my birthday. You can still be sweet and charming when you want to be. You’re like the cocaine they slip the dogs that patrol the cars at the border; you gave me just enough of what I craved to keep me searching for more. That’s part of what took me so long to leave. The other part was the gun.

So no, I didn’t want to do this, but I did plan for it. Oh, how I planned for this day.

My first day of freedom.

Jeffrey

When I pull into the driveway after four days on the road, I spot three things all at once.

First, the garbage bins are helter-skelter in front of the garage door two days after pickup, rather than where they belong, lined up neatly along the inside right wall. The living room curtains are drawn against the last of the afternoon light, which means they’ve probably been like that since last night, or maybe all the nights I’ve been gone. And despite the low-lying sun, the porch lights are on—correction: one of them is on. The left-side bulb is dead, its glass smoky and dark, making it seem like the people who live here couldn’t be bothered with changing it, which is inaccurate. Only one of us couldn’t be bothered, and her name is Sabine.

I stop. Shake it off. No more complaining—it’s a promise I’ve made to myself. No more fighting. I grab my suitcase from the trunk and head inside.

“Sabine?”

I stand completely still, listening for sounds upstairs. A shower, a hair dryer, music or TV, but there’s nothing. Only silence.

I toss my keys on the table next to a pile of mail three inches thick. “Sabine, you here?” I head farther into the house.

I think back to our phone conversation earlier this morning, trying to recall if she told me she’d be home late. Even on the best days, her schedule is a moving target, and Sabine doesn’t always remember to update our shared calendar.

She’d prattled on for ten endless minutes about the open house she’d just held for her latest listing, some newly constructed monstrosity on the north side of town. She went on and on about the generous millwork and slate-tile roof, the pocket doors and oak plank flooring and a whole bunch of other features I couldn’t give a crap about because I was rushing through the Atlanta airport to make a tight connection, and it’s quite possible that by then I wasn’t really listening. Sabine’s rambling is something I found adorable when we first started dating, but lately sparks an urge to chuck my phone into the Arkansas River, just to cut off one of her eternal, run-on sentences. When I got to my gate and saw my plane was already boarding, I hung up.

I peek out the window into the garage. Sabine’s black Mercedes isn’t there. Looks like I beat her home.

I head into the kitchen, which is a disaster. A pile of dirty dishes crawling up the sink and onto the countertop. A week’s worth of newspapers spread across the table like a card trick. Dead, drooping roses marinating in a vase of murky green water. Sabine knows how much I hate coming home to a dirty kitchen. I pick up this morning’s cereal bowl, where the dregs of her breakfast have fused to the porcelain like nuclear waste, putrefied and solid. I fill it with water at the sink and fume.

The trash bins, the kitchen, not leaving me a note telling me where she is—it’s all punishment for something. Sabine’s passive-aggressive way of telling me she’s still pissed. I don’t even remember what we were arguing about. Something trivial, probably, like all the arguments seem to be these days. Crumbs on the couch, hairs in the drain, who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning or drank the last of the orange juice. Stupid stuff. Shit that shouldn’t matter, but in that hot, quicksilver moment, somehow always does.

I slide my cell phone from my pocket and scroll through our messages, dispatches of a mundane married life.

Did you remember to pay the light bill?
The microwave is on the fritz again.
I’m placing an order for office supplies, need anything?

I land on the last one to me and bingo, it’s the message I’m looking for.

Showing tonight. Be home by 9.

I spend the next half hour righting Sabine’s mess. What doesn’t go into the dishwasher I pitch in the trash, then toss the bags into the garbage bins I line up. And then I haul my suitcase upstairs.

The bed is unmade, Sabine’s side of the closet a pigsty. I try to ignore the chaos she left everywhere: kicked-off shoes and shirts with inside-out sleeves, shoved on lopsided hangers. Nothing like the neat, exacting lines on my side. How difficult is it to put things back where they belong? To line the clothes up by color?

Ten minutes later I’m in shorts and a T-shirt, sneakers pounding up the path in an angry sprint west along the river. The truth is, I am perfectly aware I’m not the easiest person to live with. Sabine has told me more times than I’d care to admit. I can’t help that I like things the way I like them—the cars washed, the house clean, dinner hot and waiting when I get home from work. Sabine is a great cook when she wants to be, when her job isn’t sucking up most of her day, which lately seems like all the time. I can’t remember the last night I came home to one of her home-cooked meals, the ones that take all day to prepare. Once upon a time, she would serve them to me in an apron and nothing else.

I’ve spent a lot of hours thinking about how to bring us back to the way we used to be. Easy. Sexy. Surprising. Before my job dead-ended at a human resources company that sells buggy, overpriced software nobody wants to buy. Before Sabine got her broker’s license, which I used to laugh off as a hobby. Now, on a good month, her salary is more than double mine. I’d tell her to quit, but honestly, we’ve gotten used to the money. It’s like moving into a house with extra closet space—you always use it up.

In our case, the money made us cocky, and we sank far too much of it into our house, a split- level eyesore with too-tiny windows and crumbling siding. The inside was even worse. Cheap paneling and shaggy carpet on the floors, climbing the walls, creeping up the staircase.

“You have got to be shitting me,” I said as she led me through the cramped, musty rooms. It looked like a seventies porn set. It looked like the destitute version of Hugh Hefner would be coming around the corner in his tattered bathrobe any second. No way were we going to live here.

But then she took me to the back porch and I got a load of the view, a sweeping panorama of the Arkansas River. She’d already done the math: a thirty-year mortgage based on the estimated value after a head-to-toe renovation, an amount that made my eyes bulge. We bought it on the spot.

So now we’re proud owners of a beautiful Craftsman-style bungalow on the river, even though as children of Pine Bluff, a working-class town wedged between farms and factories, we should have known better. The house is on the wrong side of town, a castle compared to the split-level shacks on either side of the street, and no renovation, no matter how extensive, could change the fact that there aren’t many people in town who can afford to buy the thing. Not that we’ll ever be able to sell. Our house doesn’t just overlook the river, it is on the river, the ropy currents so close they swell up the back steps every time there’s a sudden rain.

But the point is, Sabine’s job, which began as a fun little way to provide some extra income, is now a necessity.

My cell phone buzzes against my hip, and I slow to a stop on the trail. I check the screen, and my gut burns with irritation when I see it’s not Sabine but her sister. I pick up, my breath coming in sharp, sweat-humid puffs.

“Hello, Ingrid.”

My greeting is cool and formal, because my relationship with Ingrid is cool and formal. All those things I admire about my wife—her golden chestnut hair, her thin thighs and tiny waist, the way her skin smells of vanilla and sugar—are glaring deficiencies in her twin. Ingrid is shorter, sturdier, less polished. The wallflower to Sabine’s prom queen. The heifer to her blue- ribbon cow. Ingrid has never resented Sabine for being the prettier sister, but she sure as hell blames the rest of us for noticing.

“I’m trying to reach Sabine,” Ingrid says, her Midwestern twang testy with hurry. “Have you talked to her today?”

A speedboat roars by on the river, and I wait for it to pass.

“I’m fine, Ingrid, thank you. And yes, though it was a quick conversation because I’ve been in Florida all week for a conference. I just got home, and she’s got a showing. Have you tried her cell?”

Ingrid makes a sound low in her throat, the kind of sound that comes right before an eye roll. “Of course I’ve tried her cell, at least a million times. When’s the last time you talked to her?”

“About an hour ago.” The lie is instant and automatic. Ingrid might already know I hung up on her sister this morning and she might not, but one thing is certain: she’s not going to hear it from me. “Sabine said she’d be home by nine, so you might want to try her then. Either way, I’ll make sure to tell her you called.”

And with that I hit End, dial up the music on my headphones to deafening and take off running into the setting sun.