Enjoy your life after I’m gone, Jon would tell Rachel. Go to the theater with rich widowers. Travel. Just promise me you won’t die first. But then her cancer returned, and she tried to prepare him, explaining where the passwords were filed, how to use Venmo and WAZE, telling him which of her widowed friends would be best for him. He wasn’t interested. Not in talking about a future without her. Not in any of her lady friends.

 

When the doctors say they’ve done all they can, Rachel asks to spend her last days at the lake house, the place where she and Jon had wed and where they’ve spent every summer of their married life. Although it is only September and the days are still mild, she lies shivering in their bed, swaddled like an infant in wool blankets. On good days, she asks to be propped on pillows so she can gaze out the window at the garden they built at the top of the dune, the stone staircase winding down to the macadam brick road, and the tufted beach grass stretching to the shore beyond. On the afternoon of September 14, a week before their fifty-third wedding anniversary, Jon tiptoes up the stairs to check on her. He asks whether he can get her anything: water, a popsicle, her Oxy.

“Tea would be nice,” she tells him.

When he returns with the steaming cup, she is gone.

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

 

I was seventeen and a half when I took part in my first and only orgy.

It was 1991. My family and I, originally from Belgium, lived in Rwanda, where my father worked as an epidemiologist mapping the HIV-AIDS pandemic. In November that year, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive; a few weeks later, Freddie Mercury died. Those events were huge, because AIDS was still a taboo subject. In Rwanda, no one ever died of it, but of a “long illness” instead. Most people had no clue how the disease was transmitted. Handshakes were avoided, toilet seats disinfected.

This ignorance wasn’t confined to Africa. In the US, three young kids—the Ray brothers—had contracted HIV through blood transfusions and were not allowed to attend school for fear they would spread the disease. The ban was overturned in court, but one week after they were allowed to go back to school, their home was burned down. Even after the family moved from Arcadia to Sarasota, they had to cope with protests from groups like Citizens Against AIDS. In 1992, one of the Ray brothers died, just 15 years of age.

In my family, I would say we were better informed about AIDS—thanks to Dad’s job, but also because Mom would not stop talking about it. With two teenage sons, she had taken it upon herself to educate us about the dangers of sex––and she did a pretty good job. For my brother and I, sex was no longer about freedom and experimentation, like it had been for my parents in the 1970s. It wasn’t just about reproduction anymore. Instead, sex had become something you should fear because, quite simply, it could kill you. There were times I worried that losing my virginity would be an act of suicide.

As a reminder of the threat my budding sexuality posed to me, as well as to her—Mom kept repeating there was nothing worse than losing a child—she provided me with an endless supply of condoms. I am not sure what kind of person Mom thought I was, but to my embarrassment and frustration, the condoms never got used and piled up in my bedside drawer—apart from maybe one or two I had tried on while masturbating. Watching my sperm collect in the tip of the condom had excited me. It was also reassuring. Presumably, if nothing could come out, nothing could enter, and so condoms seemed to offer pretty good protection. To get rid of the evidence, I had wrapped each used condom in endless layers of toilet paper—like a shriveled, little mummy—and flushed it down the toilet. I’d been lucky not to block it.

Another tactic Mom used to freak us out about sex, was to talk about what was happening to Immaculée, our maid. Her full name was Immaculée Conception, but that was too long to pronounce, so we just called her Immaculée. Despite being only seven or eight years older than I, she was married and had two children. I remember her husband coming to our gate once, asking to see her. His eyes were bloodshot and he reeked of banana beer. As soon as Immaculée appeared, he pounced upon her and knocked her to the ground. Our guards had to restrain him. I finally understood the source of the bruises Immaculée sometimes had on her body when she came to work.

Mom didn’t talk to us about Immaculée to warn us against the perils of marriage, or to moralize about domestic violence. “Did you see that?” she would whisper when Immaculée had left the room. “She has a sore on her leg.” On other occasions, Mom pointed out her blotched skin or weight loss. While we couldn’t be sure, we were pretty confident that Immaculée had AIDS, and that it had been passed on to her by her whoring husband. We’d often spot him at a kiosk on Friday night, spending his weekly wages on drink and women. “I just hope her poor children don’t have it,” Mom would say.

One day, when I was playing video games, Mom asked me to fetch Immaculée from the outhouse at the back of our garden, where our staff went to rest. There was a camp bed and a hole-in-the-ground toilet combined with shower, that always reeked of detergent and moldy mopping cloths. Outside, under the banana trees, corn roasted on an open fire.

Since no one answered when I knocked on the door, I let myself in and barged into Immaculée standing naked in the shower. In the split second before she had a chance to cover herself  and I had the decency to look away, the picture of her body, ravaged by disease, was printed on my retina: her thin arms and large joints; the protruding hip bones; and her flattened breasts that bore no resemblance to the fleshy curves of the women in the porn magazines I kept under my mattress. I mumbled apologies as I pulled the door partway shut and remembered to add that Mom was looking for her.

Back in my room, I took a while to compose myself. I had just seen a naked woman, but there had been nothing sexy about it. I drew the curtains and reached for one of my magazines to erase the image from my mind and disassociate it from my idea of sex. The women on the page stared at me, offering their breasts, pouting their lips, spreading their legs and everything in between. But all I could see were nature’s snares, poisonous tricks to ambush the innocent. Their vulvae looked like venus flytraps, their mouths like leeches. I couldn’t get it up and closed the magazine again. I slept badly for weeks.

A few months after the shower incident, there was a knock at our gate. We didn’t have a bell, so people hit the metal with pebbles to announce their presence. It was early morning and I’d had another nightmare. The rest of my family were still asleep, so I got up to check who it was. When I came down, the guard had already opened the gate and let in a young girl—she must have been eight or so—carrying a baby on her back in a kanga. By her cowrie eyes and teardrop-shaped head, I concluded she must be Immaculée’s daughter.

“Maman is ill,” the girl said. “She can’t come to work today, so I’ve come to clean.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I woke Mom. When she saw the girl, who had probably walked several miles carrying a baby on her back, she hurried her into the kitchen and prepared hot chocolate and eggs on toast. Meanwhile, I was tasked with holding the baby. I had no idea whether I was doing this right—the child kept fidgeting and drooling on my shoulder. Even though Dad had said HIV did not transmit that way, I couldn’t help worrying about the saliva on my skin. I decided to change my shirt and take a shower afterwards. Immaculée’s daughter was the size of a shrew, but she had the appetite of a starved elephant. While she ate, Mom took the baby from me, changed her, and fed her some mashed banana. When the children had regained energy, Mom said she would drive them home. She took a bag of groceries, as well as some painkillers and money. “Tell Dad I will be back for lunch,” she said.

Later that day, after Mom had done some of the household work, she drove me to the tennis club. She said Immaculée would probably be alright and back at work within a week. “What an awful disease,” Mom said as she parked the car and pulled the hand break. I grabbed my tennis bag and stepped out of the car, when Mom added, “Benjamin, please be careful with these things. One mistake and you see what can happen.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mom, I’m only going to play tennis.”

“I know,” she said, “I know. I’m just saying. This disease…”

“Alright,” I cut her off. “Can you come pick me up at six?”

Down by the courts, I spotted my best friend, Eros. We were playing a doubles semi-final that day and he was hopping from leg to leg as part of his warm-up routine. “Ah, there you are!” he shouted, while hitting the side of his shoes with his racket to remove the clay from his soles. They were nice shoes—the kind that Agassi wore. Eros’ parents worked for the European Commission, where they made a killing managing projects for AIDS orphans. They drove a Mercedes-Benz in Kigali and owned three flats back in Rome.

“So, are you ready?” he grinned with the Italian kind of confidence that wins you games and breaks girls’ hearts. I was better than Eros at tennis. But he still beat me every time through psychological warfare. He’d use dirty tricks, like pumping his fist when he won a point or shouting the score out loud when he was in the lead. While those may have seemed insignificant in and of themselves, cumulatively, they threw me off balance. My wrist would tense up and I’d hit double faults or net backhands that against any other opponent would have been easy winners.

When it came to sex, Mom and Eros were, respectively, the angel and devil on my shoulder. While Mom did everything within her powers to freak me out, Eros made sure to pile on the pressure to lose my virginity. He pricked my curiosity and fueled my insecurity with stories about his sexual exploits. In practice, these were hard to fact-check since, allegedly, they had all taken place during his summer holidays in Italy, when I was not around. The acts he claimed to have carried out with these girls also bore a striking resemblance to some of the scenes in the porn movies he stole from his father, and which we sometimes watched together when his parents were out, in lieu of doing homework. Still, Eros spoke about his conquests with such confidence that I had little choice but to believe him.

Regardless of whether Eros was still a virgin or not, he used to tease me for being one. Once, when he was over at my house playing video games, Immaculée had come into the room to clean. As she bent over, we both caught a glimpse of her breasts down her blouse. Eros elbowed me and said, “She offers it to you on a plate, and you’re still a virgin!” Then he laughed so loud that, even though Immaculée may not have understood what he said, she must have sensed the joke was at her expense.

The other thing that bothered me was that Eros had a girlfriend, and I didn’t. She was a petite, round-faced girl from Québec, called Marie-Lys, who was as crazy about horse-riding as I was about her. No one knew I had a crush on her, least of all Eros. He and I would sometimes go to the stables and watch her ride. “I’m telling you,” he’d say, “She really knows how to control a thousand-pound animal between her legs.” I told him to stop, but he’d go on, “Seriously, man, she loves being on top, riding like a cowgirl. Oh, and when she gets out that whip…”

I convinced myself these things couldn’t be true. Eros and I spent nearly all of our time together, so when would he have had a chance to sleep with her? Besides, Marie-Lys was too pure, too innocent for anything like that. In my mind, she was the kind of girl who would keep her virginity for someone special. Still, the images Eros conjured hurt, especially because I sometimes had the impression my feelings for Marie-Lys were reciprocated. There were occasions when I caught her eye and we would look at each other for longer than was comfortable between two teenagers of the opposite sex. But Eros was my best friend, so I considered her off limits.

“Are you ready to get your ass whipped?”

Eros and I turned to see our doubles opponents walk onto the court. The tall one was Augustin Duquesne Wathelet de Wynendale, who looked like he had stepped out of a Lacoste Summer catalogue: waxed hair, pastel green polo shirt, shades parked on top of his head. Augustin wasn’t the brightest kid in school and we suspected he scraped through only because he was the son of the Belgian ambassador. His family was Flemish, but they spoke French at home—that is what posh families in Belgium do––so we called him “the Baron.”

The other kid was the Baron’s best friend, Dimitrios Voulgaropoulos. I doubted that Augustin’s parents approved of this friendship. Dimitrios’ father owned the only supermarket in Kigali and he was rumored to catch stray cats and dogs and grind them to sell as beef to unsuspecting expats and Rwandan nouveaux-riches. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that story were true; Dimitrios himself was a dirty little cheater—calling balls out that were in, questioning line calls, miscounting the score. Still, his drop shots were magic and his lobs were the finest that the Cercle Sportif of Kigali had ever seen, so we admired him nonetheless. He also had a way with girls, which is probably the main reason the Baron chose to hang out with him.

The four of us hit a few balls from the baseline to warm up, but just as we started practicing our serves, the sky turned dark. “Don’t worry,” Dimitrios said when thunder rumbled in the distance, “We’ll double-bagel you before it starts to rain.” Sure enough, Dimitrios and the Baron soon led by four games to love. Then the heavens opened. We ran for shelter under the giant strangler fig by the entrance to the club. It was a proper, tropical storm. The courts turned into an orange mud bath. There was no way we would be able to finish the game that day, so the Baron suggested we all go to his house to play table football for the rest of the afternoon.

The Baron’s invitation came as a surprise. None of us had ever been to his house—not even Dimitrios. The ambassador always had important guests or urgent matters to deal with and his children were never allowed anyone over. But, that week, Augustin’s family was away on safari and he had the house to himself. Dimitrios—who lived in a small flat above his dad’s supermarket, together with his four siblings and his ninety-nine-year old grandmother—nearly had to collect his jaw from the floor when he saw the ambassador’s residence. But he wasn’t jealous or resentful about the tennis court and Jacuzzi, the games room with snooker, ping pong, and table football. He just kept oohing and aahing, and when he saw the swimming pool with the view over Kigali in the valley, he could no longer contain himself.

“Man, man, man,” he said, shaking his head and raising an eyebrow. “You know what this place would be perfect for?”

The Baron looked the way he did when Mr. Dubois, our maths teacher, asked him a question—his mouth half-open, eyes glazed over.

“A party!” Dimitrios said when he realized the Baron had reached the limits of his imagination.

The Baron was still puzzled, “A party?”

“Yes, dumbass, a party! Just imagine…” Dimitrios said, turning towards the pool with his arms spread, “Music, food, dancing—with this pool and that view. And, of course…” He turned back to face us, his eyes sparkling like disco balls.

“What?” the Baron asked, a little uncomfortable at Dimitrios’ excitement.

“And girls!” Dimitrios said.

An idiotic smile spread across the Baron’s face. “Yes,” he whispered, “And girls…”

“And some of us,” Eros added, slapping my back, “might finally lose their virginity!”

***

              We agreed to hold the party the coming Saturday, while Augustin’s parents were still away. Dimitrios orchestrated everything, commanding the ambassador’s army of staff—three guards, two cleaners, a gardener and a cook. The Baron volunteered to do the music; Eros and I were left in charge of the invitations. We designed flyers on my dad’s Macintosh, with pixilated images of balloons, champagne bottles and confetti, as well as a wild mixture of fonts that should have come with an epilepsy warning.

Before we knew it, Saturday had arrived. Around 5 p.m., I started getting ready—Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, button fly jeans, Nike Airs. So much gel in my hair I looked like a troll doll and a toxic amount of Davidoff aftershave stolen from my Dad. I was packing my sleepover bag when a car hooted outside—Mom’s signal that she was ready to take me.

“The party doesn’t start for another hour?” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I need to take Immaculée to the hospital. She’s unwell. So I will pick her up on the way. I don’t want to have to do the journey twice.”

Reluctantly, I grabbed my bag and jumped into the passenger seat.

We took the tarmacked road out of the Kacyiru district towards the center of town. Halfway, we turned into a dirt road towards Gisozi. The stone houses gradually made way for mud huts marked off by bamboo fences. The streets narrowed and the potholes multiplied as we approached Immaculée’s place. Mom drove slowly to avoid hitting the chickens and children crisscrossing in front of our car, and then she pulled over. Immaculée’s daughter stood outside, holding her baby sister on her hip. “Maman is inside,” she said.

We pushed through the plastic fly curtain and found Immaculée lying on a straw mat. Mom knelt down and I stood behind her, gazing at the sparsely decorated room. An old, stained mattress, with a couple of soft toys that used to belong to me, was where the children slept. On the opposite side were a few plastic chairs, dented aluminum pots and other kitchen utensils—the wall blackened by the cooking fire. In the corner, a doorless doorway that led to the parental bedroom. The only item on the walls was a photograph of John Paul II, taken during his visit to Rwanda in 1990. I remembered being there, in the stands of the Amahoro stadium, watching thousands of young people hang on every word the Pope said. Mom was horrified when he started blaming the pandemic on homosexuality and championed faithfulness, not condoms, in the fight against AIDS.

“Can you give me a hand?” Mom said. “Let’s take her to the car.” We each slipped one of Immaculée’s arms around our neck and then helped her stand up. She smelled of cassava and sweat, and I became painfully aware of my Davidoff aftershave. Her bones poked me through her dress. Immaculée shuffled along with great difficulty, wheezing and grimacing. When we lowered her into the back of the car, she suppressed a shriek. Her daughter, still standing by the door, observed the whole scene. Although she kept a brave face, I could see her eyes watering.

We drove towards town, up the hill and past the colorful kiosks selling beer and soft drinks, the petrol stations and garages overflowing with rusty spare parts rescued from crashed and abandoned cars, and hardware shops trading a random selection of imported goods. Pedestrians fled from the reckless maneuvers of the twegerane—mini-van taxis—which were trying to pick up as many passengers as possible. Then all would make way for the hulky menace of a green bus, huffing and puffing up the hill, bloated with people and packages, sometimes even chickens and goats, leaving a cloud of pestilent smoke in its wake. Motorcycles zigzagged through the mayhem with the speed and unpredictability of water striders.

We stopped at the traffic light and small children swarmed the car, peddling chewing gum and cigarettes from cardboard boxes. A beggar lay on the ground, his arms and torso muscled from dragging around his weak, stumpy legs. The light turned green and we drove past the French cultural centre, the Hotel Mille Collines, and then down the hill again until we arrived at the ambassador’s residence. Mom blew the horn, the guards opened the gate, and I jumped out.

“Have a good time,” she said, and then, half-jokingly, “Don’t forget about safe sex!”

I could have sunk in the ground. “Mom…”

As she drove off, I caught one last glimpse of Immaculée’s ghostlike figure in the back of the car. She had fallen asleep, like a child on a long journey. When the car had disappeared out of sight, I put my hand in my pocket, to make sure I hadn’t forgotten the pack of Durex condoms.

“Mwirime,” one of the guards greeted me.

“Mwirime,” I replied and I asked him how he was, “Amakuru?”

“Ni meza,” he said, but I could see that he, too, was as thin as Immaculée—sunken cheeks, hollow temples, deep smile lines on the side of his mouth. His uniform looked smart, but the soles of his shoes were coming loose. I returned a pitying, and likely condescending, smile.

The gates clanged shut behind me and I found myself in the driveway, lit by a row of floodlights. It was 8 p.m. and pitch dark. I could hear music coming from the front of the house and the buzz of people talking. The party was well underway. I took the small path by the side of the house that led through a tunnel of bougainvillea, brimming with cicadas—their clicking so loud it almost drowned out the music.

I emerged on the other side, into what seemed like another world. Paper lanterns, like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale, guided me towards the crystal-blue pool which looked enchanting in the dark. Two candelabra trees, wrapped in string lights, rose high into the sky, like giant, tropical Christmas trees, and Kigali twinkled in the valley below.

A hundred or so people were gathered around the pool, chattering and dancing. My body shook with each vibration of the bass as I squeezed between groups of laughing guests, their sweat rubbing off on me. A symphony of aftershaves and perfumes hung in the air. Through the crowd, I spotted the Baron behind his DJ equipment, bobbing his head to the rhythm of the music. With his height and slimness, and his hair gelled into spikes, he reminded me of a crowned crane. I tried to wave, but he didn’t see me. Not far from him, behind another table, Dimitrios shook glitzy cocktails and poured them ostentatiously into the glasses of half a dozen girls who were giggling at his jokes. When he saw me, he beckoned me over.

“Here, take that,” he said, pushing a deep red drink into my hands.

“What is it?” I shouted over the music.

“Trust me,” he smiled and set me to work cutting lemons, passion fruit and mint. Each time I passed him a batch, he replenished my glass in appreciation. I soon felt warm inside and everything became even more beautiful—the fairy lights, the pool, the lanterns, the stars: it all dazzled and sparked. I turned jovial and chatty. I even talked to some of the girls queuing up for drinks.

Dimitrios elbowed me. “Check her out!” he said, and nodded to his left. I followed his line of sight to the middle of the crowd, where a girl with short blonde hair and a tight-fitting dress was dancing, surrounded by a few twelfth-graders trying to impress her with their moves. Her name was Aude and she was known as the school nymphomaniac. She reveled in the attention of the boys around her and teased them one at a time, making them feel special and raising their hopes of getting lucky that night. She rubbed her back seductively against one of them, leaning her head on his shoulder. Then she lifted her glass high in the air and spilled champagne all around, like a human fountain. Despite the loud music and party noise, her sensuous laughter travelled all the way to where Dimitrios and I were standing.

Everyone knew about Aude and her behavior—even my parents. “What do you expect,” Dad would say, “with a mother like hers?” Her mom worked for Doctors Without Borders, so Dad sometimes interacted with her on a professional basis. He told us she was an alcoholic. “To be fair,” he said, “I would drink like a fish too if I had her job.” Every day, streams of patients would come to her—emaciated, with hollow eyes.  But there was nothing she could do. All she could offer, was hope based on lies—the only medicine she had. So she drank at night, to forget the horrors of her day.

“Can you take over for a second?” Dimitrios said, as he headed over to dance with Aude. I hadn’t the faintest clue how to make cocktails, so I cracked open a beer, put another in my pocket, and deserted the bar as well. I hadn’t seen Eros all night and decided to go look for him. It was approaching midnight. The party was beginning to degenerate. Slurred singing, people falling over, some ending up in the pool. A couple of girls were taking part in a wet t-shirt competition, cheered on loudly by the guys from the school football team. Empty bottles and broken glass littered the floor. A tenth-grader was vomiting behind a flower pot.

The ambassador’s cleaners, turned waitresses for the occasion, navigated this chaos, careful not to knock over their silver trays stacked with hors d’oeuvres—imported salmon, caviar and foie gras––that Dimitrios had stolen from the ambassador’s pantry. One of those trays probably held the equivalent of three months of their wages.

I climbed the stairs to the patio where it was quieter and I had a good view over the party. I rested my arms on the balustrade, downed my beer in one go and opened the second can. My head was spinning, my senses clouded with a thick layer of mist—like the hills of Kigali in the early morning. In the middle of the dancing crowd, Dimitrios was kissing Aude, one hand squeezing her bum.

“Enjoying the party?”

I spat out the beer I had in my mouth and nearly dropped my can. I hadn’t heard Marie-Lys sneak up behind me.

“I was getting a little bored down there,” she said, leaning over the balustrade next to me. “Mind if I have a sip?” She reached over to grab my beer and, as she did so, the strap of her dress slipped off her shoulder.

“Have you seen Eros anywhere?” I asked, my heart still pounding from the shock, but also from nervousness at talking to Marie-Lys. Her perfume was like an orange grove in spring. She seemed to be standing very close, so I moved a little to the side.

“No idea where he is,” she said, as she handed the beer back to me and readjusted her strap. When I brought the can to my lips, I could smell and taste her mouth on the metal.

“Looks like he’s abandoned me,” Marie-Lys said, staring straight at me. When she reached for the beer again, her hand brushed against mine.

“I think I’d better go look for him,”  I blurted out. “I worry that something might have happened to him.” I rushed off towards the house, abandoning Marie-Lys on the patio.

I stumbled into the dining room and found half a dozen people playing beer pong, cheering each time their adversaries had to drink up. One of the maids was on her knees, collecting pieces of broken glass. In the living room, the lights were low and the music filtered through in muted tones. There was no one there, apart from one of the Baron’s dogs, scoffing down canapés from a silver tray left on the coffee table. I walked through the kitchen where the cook, in his white uniform, was doing dishes and tidying up. Heading upstairs, I opened each door I came across, like an advent calendar. There were people making out, arguing, passed out on beds, or on the floor. Everything seemed like a dream. I felt like I was wading through thick, invisible treacle. The sounds came to me as though they’d travelled underwater. In one of the rooms, a group of kids were smoking dope and the smell made me so sick I rushed to the nearest toilet. I have no idea how long I was in there for, but it was half past one when I checked my watch, so I figured I must have lost consciousness for a while. I remembered that I was looking for Eros, so I got up and staggered towards the only room I hadn’t checked so far—the ambassador’s suite.

This was the largest room of all, with windows wall-to-wall offering a spectacular view over Kigali. Moonlight lacquered the furniture and everything was still, apart from the white voile curtains swaying in the breeze. There seemed to be nobody here and I was about to turn round, when I heard a noise at the far end of the room. Through the mosquito canopy hanging over the giant wooden bed, I thought I could make out the silhouette of someone and I wondered: was it Eros who had fallen asleep?

I crept closer, careful not to wake whoever was lying there. Then the shape stirred and it looked like there might not be one, but two persons on the bed. I hastened my step, parted the material of the mosquito net, and found Dimitrios lying starfish, grinning back at me, his trousers down on his ankles and Aude bent over him. Then Eros’ head popped up from behind Aude. “There you are!” he shouted. “I’ve been looking for you all night!”

“You’ve been looking for me?” I said. “Seriously, I thought I’d lost you!”

“Come here,” Eros said as he grabbed my arm and pulled me onto the bed. “Let’s see if we can make you lose something else!”

I fell on top of Aude and Dimitrios, who both burst into giggles.

Eros said, “Come on, help me!” as he tried to pin me down. Dimitrios grabbed my feet and Aude climbed on top of me, bringing her face so close I could smell the alcohol on her breath.

“Please, guys, let me go!” I tried, but Aude bit my bottom lip to silence me. Dimitrios found this excruciatingly funny and started playing percussion on Aude’s bum.

Unperturbed, Aude slid her hand down my chest, over my stomach, and towards the buttons of my jeans, which she proceeded to undo, one by one. Despite the state I was in, I could feel myself getting hard. Aude let go of my lip and I whispered, “Please …” But, by then, my resistance was disingenuous. A heat spread through my body as Aude kissed her way down. Eros and Dimitrios cheered. Then Aude took me into her mouth. I closed my eyes and everything turned like a spinning top. The last thing I remembered before passing out, was Eros and Dimitrios jumping on the bed, belting out Handel’s Hallelujah.

***

              I woke next morning from the breeze blowing the mosquito net across my face, tickling my nose. My head was pounding and, outside, I could hear the gardener sweep up dust and leaves with his corn broom. Wood pigeons mocked me with their coo. Someone snored loudly behind me—it was Dimitrios—and the events of the previous night suddenly came back to me. I sat up and saw Eros was also there. Quietly, I slipped out of bed and collected my clothes. As I put on my trousers, I noticed the pack of condoms lying on the floor, unused.

Downstairs, the staff were up—or had been up all night—tidying. They said breakfast was served outside, but I wasn’t hungry and I asked them where the telephone was. I called Mom to pick me up. As I waited for her, I reflected on what had happened the previous night. Technically, I had taken part in an orgy, but did it count as losing my virginity? I wasn’t even sure I had come. Either way, I felt a little smug about it all, glowing almost. Finally, I had become a man. Finally, Eros would stop teasing me. I spent the rest of the day lightheaded from lack of sleep and dreamy with disbelief.

By evening, however, my excitement gradually made way for worry and I couldn’t sleep that night. I replayed the events of the party frame by frame and started to freak out as I realized that, despite Mom’s warnings, I had engaged in unprotected sex. I twisted and turned in my bed. By 3:00 a.m., my doubts had taken on monstrous proportions and I had managed to convince myself that Aude had AIDS and that she probably had been bleeding from ulcers in her mouth when she gave me that blowjob. Shining a torch under my sheet, I inspected my penis over and over again; the more I looked, the more I imagined red spots and lesions through which the virus could have entered my body.

Next day at school, Eros looked equally disheveled and nervous, not his usual, confident self. It made me feel better, to think that I wasn’t alone in this.

“Didn’t sleep well?” I asked.

“No…” he said.

“Same here. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“Terrible. I really wish this hadn’t happened.”

“I know…”

“I’m so worried…” Eros said.

“So am I!”

He looked puzzled at me for a while, then finished his sentence, “… that Marie-Lys will find out about this.”

“Oh…” I said, realizing we weren’t talking about the same thing.

“Promise me you won’t mention it to her?”

“No, of course not,” I said. And he walked off, seemingly relieved.

That week, I didn’t sleep through a single night. By the end of it, I was a wreck. The more I worried, the less I slept, and the less I slept, the more I worried. My thoughts went in circles, my anxiety snowballed. I started having palpitations and lost my appetite. By Saturday morning, I felt like the Nyiragongo volcano—ready to erupt. I was so desperate, I could only see one solution: I had to tell Mom. She might get angry, but it would be short-lived. More likely, she’d offer me the comfort that I needed so much. Maybe we could see van den Broeck, the embassy doctor, and he could do a blood test to take away the uncertainty—because it was the uncertainty, more than anything else, that was the source of my distress.

“There you are!” Mom said when I walked into the dining room. A bag lay open on the table, which she packed while speaking. “I was about to wake you. Immaculée’s daughter is here. Her mom has taken a turn for the worse and she’s been in A&E for about six hours, but nobody has attended to her. I’m going to head over and see what I can do. I’d like you to come with me, if you don’t mind, so there’s someone to look after her while I try and find a doctor or nurse.” Mom pressed some sheets and towels into the bag, closed the zip, and then looked at me.

“Benjamin?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you OK? You look pale…”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You don’t look fine to me…”

“I’m fine, Mom… It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Let me help you with that bag.” And I accompanied Mom and Immaculée’s daughter to the car.

When we arrived at the hospital, we parked outside and walked across the gardens towards the A&E unit. There was a light drizzle and the wet plants looked miserable in the gray morning light. Under the porous umbrella of an acacia tree, two men in green overalls cut grass with machetes, the chopping of their blades rhythmic like the ticking of a clock.

A stench hit us when we entered the block where Immaculée lay—a sickening mixture of unhealed wounds and pus, of bodily fluids and decay. Nobody checked who we were; we walked in, no questions asked. Immaculée’s daughter guided us down a long, dark corridor, lit only by an occasional, flickering light. Paint was peeling off the walls in sheets. Big, meaty flies buzzed around our heads.

At the end of the hallway, we turned into a ward that felt more like Kigali Central Market than a hospital. It was packed with people—women carrying children on their backs, men sitting on the ground with their head in their hands, cleaners mopping up unidentified liquids. I struggled to breathe the thick, moist air. There was such a din that I didn’t hear, but could only see Immaculée’s daughter say, “There she is,” as she pointed to a thin, emaciated body lying in the far right corner of the room. For a moment, we thought we had come too late. Immaculée’s eyes were wide open, unblinking, staring at the ceiling. Then a gentle heaving of her chest betrayed the obstinate presence of life.

Mom ran off to seek help, leaving me with Immaculée and her daughter. “Would you like something to drink?” I tried, but Immaculée didn’t respond. I stood awkwardly holding the bottle of water, until her daughter took it from me, wetted a handkerchief, and dabbed her mother’s paper-dry lips. Immaculée turned her head, but looked straight through us. She was far away already. I began to feel agitated about what to do if she died while Mom was away, and my anxiety from the previous week flared up, about everything that had happened and the awful consequences I’d imagined.

“Mom!” I called, but she was on the opposite side of the ward and couldn’t hear. She was gesticulating, trying to get the attention of medical staff. At long last, a nurse stopped and nodded with sympathy when Mom pointed in our direction. But the nurse disappeared again, and never returned. Then Mom ran back to me and said, out of breath, “Can you stay here for a while? I’m going to see whether Doctor van den Broeck can come—I’ll drive to his house.” She headed for the exit.

“Mom!” I shouted after her. “I need to tell you something!”

She turned around and said, “Not now, Benjamin, not now. There’s no time.” And she disappeared out of sight.

Left on my own, the horror of this place hit me. There were people ill like Immaculée everywhere: on beds and stretchers, on straw mats, even on the bare floor—people whose lives were slowly ebbing way, slipping into darkness. I saw their thin bodies, their eyes sunk deep into their sockets. I heard people wailing, praying. Small children standing by their dying parents, not knowing that, soon, they would be orphans. Women holding their husbands’ hands, worrying about who would provide for the family once they were gone. Men bidding farewell to their beloved wives, their only solace being that they would soon join them in death. Elderly people wondering why their sons and daughters had to go before them.

The worst thing was that nothing could be done to help them. There was no cure for AIDS, and even if there had been a drug, there wouldn’t have been enough for the deluge of patients that arrived here every day. As cruel as it sounds, the medical staff knew this, and with just one look, they triaged those whose lives could still be extended, from those for whom all hope was lost. Sadly, Immaculée was no longer a patient worth spending scarce time and resources on.

When I turned back to look at Immaculée and her daughter, they were holding hands and the little girl kept repeating, “Maman… Maman…” But Immaculée was too weak to respond. Her eyes were still open—big hollows of fear—but the movement of her chest had become less noticeable, less frequent.

Around twenty minutes after she had left, Mom came back—without Doctor van den Broeck. He was the embassy doctor and his job was to look after Belgian expats, not locals. In any case, it was too late. Immaculée had left this world. Nothing remained but a thin, half-naked body, ravaged by an invisible enemy. I was terrified. I wanted to hug Mom. But she went straight past me, knelt, and took Immaculée’s daughter in her arms. They sobbed until the girl had no tears left in her. Eventually, a nurse came and covered Immaculée’s body with a sheet. She handed us some paperwork, and then we left the hospital.

Back home, we ate dinner in silence. The chirping of crickets outside did not have its usual, soothing effect. It was unnerving. We took a meal out of the freezer—it was one that Immaculée had prepared. I barely managed a few mouthfuls. The images of the hospital kept going round my head. When my brother had gone to bed, I broke down and told my mom what had happened at the party.

“Oh, Benjamin…” Mom said as she hugged me. She assured me everything would be alright. She made an appointment with Doctor van den Broeck, who would see us first thing Monday morning. When we arrived, there was no queue, and van den Broeck welcomed us in his bright, modern consulting room with all the latest equipment, shelves full of medicine, classical music playing in the background, and a photograph of the Belgian King hanging on the wall. I gave him a watered-down version of what had happened, and van den Broeck confirmed I had nothing to worry about. But, if it would make me feel better, he would do all the necessary tests and check-ups. That night, I slept a full fourteen hours without waking up.

***

              Immaculée’s funeral took place on top of a hill, early the following Sunday. The mists filled the valley and the sun’s rays dragged over the hilltops, tired and hesitant. The priest mumbled the scriptures and the extended family wailed around a hole in the red earth. There was a small window in the coffin through which Immaculée’s face could be seen. All those years I had known Immaculée, I had seen her as our maid or the person who had AIDS. She had occupied a small space in the background of my life. Now, in death, I finally came to see her as a person, an equal, someone for whom life had been a lot less kind. I remembered that time when Eros had mocked her in her presence, and how I had done nothing about it. I wished I had acted differently.

As the coffin was lowered into the ground, her husband sobbed, his eyes twisted by alcohol. Immaculée’s daughter stood next to him, expressionless. At only eight years old, she would now have to take responsibility for the household work. She held her little sister on her hip and I could see she was exhausted, so I walked over and took the baby into my arms. The small child, dried snot on her lip, was chewing on her fists. Copious amounts of drool dripped onto my shirt. She must have been teething. I stroked her flushed cheek and she grabbed my finger, putting it into her mouth. Then she lay her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes to sleep. The poor thing had no idea how different life would be from then on.

Immaculée was laid to rest in the more affluent part of the cemetery, where the graves were cemented and tiled, because Mom and Dad had offered to pay for it. The poor lay further down the hill, in neatly lined graves marked by simple wooden crosses. As we walked back to the car, I looked at the inscriptions on the markers and subtracted the years of death from the years of birth. Most had died in their twenties or thirties, and the majority of graves were recent. A tsunami of illness was hitting the country. The hospitals were at breaking point. Immaculée was a drop in the ocean, her children two orphans amongst many. People were dying by the thousands, even before the genocide hit Rwanda.

But that is another story.

2005

Bruce Kuipers found the baklava on his porch, plated and wrapped. It sat on the table, under the eight-point rack of antlers, and his retriever sniffed at it with a wagging tail. The plate was heavier than he expected, and he nearly spilled its contents kicking off his sandy shoes in the mudroom. In the kitchen, dried egg crusted on the stovetop’s cast iron skillet. His Cessna’s transponder sat on the table, colored wires snaking from its backside, copper tips poking from their ends. He set the plate on an avionics manual and fished one of the treats from its Saran wrap cocoon. He brought it to his nose, the sugar and pistachio scents melding with the motor oil sponged into his skin. When he bit into the moist pastry, flakes of it tumbled to the floor. The dog was quick to lick them up, leaving the hardwood wet, with no trace of what had been consumed.

A salad was next, in an ornate bowl Linda would have liked, the glass a quilt work of protruding squares. It was almost July. His own chard and lettuce heads had begun to wilt in the heat. He could tell the spinach and arugula were store-bought through the plastic, but the vinaigrette smelled homemade. The salad had come with two tubs of feta cheese and spiced olives bathing in their own oil. When he popped the lid from the latter, Tolkien whined like a panhandler.

He drew the line at lamb chops, half a platter waiting for him when he returned from Ace Hardware with fittings. The meat was still warm, dripping in a lemon sauce and starred with oregano.

“Down!” he said when Tolkien rose on his hind legs, a line of drool dribbling from his jowls.

Bruce set the plate on top of the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk. She had done this when Jonah had passed, almost six years ago, but even then, not with such excess. After eating the lamb chops for dinner and lunch again the next day, he washed the serving dish and the glass bowl and knocked on her door.

“Yassou?” said a voice. “Come in.”

Bruce opened the door and stepped inside. The hall was a peach pastel color, pictures and paintings postmarking it in frames. Classical music echoed from the kitchen, a plinking piano over deep strings, the kind of thing Linda had playing in the house when Jonah was a toddler. Over it was the ringing of pots and pans and the sliding of metal sheets. It smelled of cinnamon and oranges.

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

At first, when I held you in my hands, you drew into your shell. But, after some time, you stuck out your head and looked at me with these tiny, ringed eyes. I petted you and asked if you could feel my touch because I read that turtle shells are like skin, living cells crackling with nerve endings. You seemed to nod and reach out to me with your fin-like hands. I drew a shallow bath and placed you in the tub with some rocks from the rain garden outside the apartment. You quickly perched yourself on a rock and basked in the sunlight streaming in through the bathroom window. I cut carrots and lettuce into small pieces and let you eat the bits out of my hand.

When I got home from work, you were human again, pink and naked, asleep in the tub. I woke you and you looked around and stretched, arms and legs pressing up against the basin and wall tile. What was I this time? you asked, hanging a leg over the edge. I helped you out of the tub and, as you dressed, I showed you the notes I had taken.

I think you recognized me, but I don’t know. Do you remember anything?

I wanted to feel safe, you said.

We ate dinner on the floor among boxes we still haven’t unpacked. Since downsizing to a one-bedroom, we will have to get rid of most of our things. Just throw it all out, you said. But I can’t. Not yet. At night, while I graded papers, you rested your head on my shoulder and said you’re sorry you can’t work anymore, that we had to move here. I stroked you, your hair, your soft human skin.

The next morning you were an ocelot. You paced the length of the bedroom along the foot of the bed. Back and forth you went. Your long slender body rippling. I said your name and you swung your head to me. Your muscles tensed under your dappled fur like a tightly wrung rag. You let out a low growl and sized me up with your big eyes and, after a few moments, you resumed your pacing.

I got ready for work, moving slowly and quietly so as not to startle you, threaten you. I showered with the bathroom door closed and made my lunch facing the bedroom where you continued to pace like the wild cats at the zoo. Captive and bored. Aware of being studied. Before I left, I set a raw chicken breast on the kitchen floor with a dish of water.

I taught a class about foxes in my ethology class. How, through selective breeding, a Russian scientist was able to domesticate silver foxes over the course of sixty years. A student asked, When people turn into foxes, do they turn into domesticated foxes or wild foxes?

The time you turned into a silver fox, we were watching the news. The anchor announced that, following months of conjecture, the WHO had officially classified the Serenity Virus as a sexually transmitted disease. People could take off their masks and use less hand sanitizer. I looked over and you were curled into the corner of the couch, your shirt still hanging off your sleek body. I tried to touch you, but you yipped and tore down the hall. A slithery streak of black. This was when we still had our house. You rushed from room to room, searching for a way out. And when you couldn’t find one, you tried burrowing into the couch cushions.

They turn into wild foxes, I told the student.

When Serenity Retreats first developed their treatment for mental illness, they found that wild breeds, ones that had evolved without human interference, produced the best results. Spending a week as a frog or a lioness proved to be more therapeutic than spending the same amount of time as a bulldog or a cow.

For a few years, it was just a thing rich people did. They would go on the retreat and then talk about it on podcasts. How being a ferret for a week had cured them of their depression or their schizophrenia. But then the virus became transmissible and mutated into something it was never intended to be as it passed from person to person.

At lunch, a colleague came to my office, and we ate our sandwiches together.

How’s your research paper coming along? he asked.

I have a lot of notes, I replied. And not a lot of conclusions.

I chewed on my ham and cheese. My colleague waited for me to continue.

She’s turning more frequently, I told him. Almost every day now.

Do you recognize her when she does?

That’s the question, isn’t it? What I see when she turns, is it her, or am I projecting something that isn’t there onto a wild animal? Humans love to project human traits onto non-human things.

It’s a problem, he said.

It is.

So how are you going to solve it?

Domesticated foxes have a white patch of fur on their foreheads, which differentiates them from wild foxes. Other researchers who study turnings have been looking for a physiological hallmark that differentiates a person who has turned from an ordinary animal. These are studies with large sample sizes conducted across the world. But I’m an ethologist. My sample size is just her. I’m trying to draw a map of her, so I can trace an ethos that remains present in every form she takes.

Maybe you need to expand your sample size.

Maybe.

I heard there’s a home opening for turners who have nowhere else to go, my colleague said. The directors might let you observe the guests if you give them a call.

I shrugged. Couldn’t hurt.

When I got home you were human. On the couch, reading a book.

I must have just finished eating something terrible when I turned back, you said. As soon as I woke, I threw up all over the floor.

It was raw chicken, I said as I peered around the corner at the kitchen.

Don’t worry, I cleaned it up. I’m at least good for the occasional house chore.

I didn’t mean to—

It’s fine.

I dug my notebook and a pen out of my shoulder bag and sat down across from you.

I don’t remember much, you said, closing the book in your lap and crossing your arms over its cover. I was carnivorous. Hungry. Even after I’d eaten, I was thinking about my next kill.

Did you recognize me?

You shook your head. I made a note.

Do you know what you were?

You shrugged. A cat maybe.

I nodded. Ocelot.

You made a face.

It’s like a small panther, I said. About the size of a Maine Coon.

A Maine Coon?

I held up my hands a few feet apart to demonstrate the size.

Yeah, a Maine Coon.

Okay.

That night, in bed, you draped an arm across my chest and said, Aren’t you afraid one day you’ll wake up and I’ll be a bear or a wolf or something else that might hurt you?

You wouldn’t hurt me.

Wouldn’t I?

Your breath was warm on my neck. I thought of the first time you turned. You were a gecko, perched on my nose. The virus and speculation on how it spread had been all over the news for weeks. I held you and felt your tiny heart beating fast against my finger. I could have crushed you if I wanted.

I canceled classes and went to the St. Francis Home for Turners. It was a large facility converted from a mansion outside the city, nestled into a hillside of lush gardens and artificial habitats. One of the directors met me in the lobby. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Dr. Venkata. He gave me a tour of the facility. We started in the guests’ quarters, where they lived while in human form. Then we entered a great room filled with terrariums customized to nearly every climate, all big enough to fit a human comfortably. Most were empty, but I noticed a desert snake basking under a heat lamp in one terrarium and a bright tree frog hanging from a wet leaf in another.

We passed through a few rooms that smelled of sawdust with cages meant for rodents and rabbits. Then we went outside and Dr. Venkata showed me the aviary. A few colorful birds darted around the large, netted enclosure. Off to the side, within the aviary, but sectioned off from the other birds, a hawk was perched on the highest branch of a tree. That’s Samuel, Dr. Venkata said. He’s been like that for a couple weeks now. We are planning to build a larger aviary just for raptors soon. Hate to see him unable to stretch his wings in there.

Could he stay like that forever? I asked.

It’s possible, Dr. Venkata replied.

Would you ever release him?

Dr. Venkata grew very serious.

If Samuel were to ever turn back mid-flight he would almost certainly die.

Samuel gazed down on us as we passed below him. He flapped his wings, rising a few inches off the tree branch, and bit at the netting between his enclosure and the sky.

Next, we saw habitats built for large mammals, semi-aquatic mammals, even one for penguins, though it was empty. Beyond that, there was a fenced-in pasture where a couple horses and a sheep grazed. We finished the tour at the outdoor visitor area.

Many of our guests come to us because their families don’t have the means to take care of them anymore, Dr. Venkata explained. Most people would prefer to visit their loved ones while they’re in human form. But as the turnings become more frequent, it sometimes isn’t possible. So, we have set up this space for the guests to interact with their families in their current forms. And of course, we have an indoor visiting area as well.

A woman sat in the grass with an armadillo. A father and his child fed vegetables to a goat, speaking to it in soft voices. But what caught my eye was an old woman sitting in a lawn chair with a silver fox resting at her side. She pet the fox and the fox licked her hand. As we got closer, I looked for a leash. Dr. Venkata suddenly grabbed my arm.

Oh no, he said. You shouldn’t approach them.

The fox heard us and sat up on its haunches and bared its teeth. Its forehead was perfectly black. No patch of white fur. No leash. The old woman shot us a look and we backed away.

That fox is tame, I said as we went back into the facility.

With her, he is.

When I got home you were a roadrunner, hiding behind some boxes. You had a beautiful plume of feathers on your head and bright, intelligent eyes. After some time, you let me take you in my hands and carry you outside. I’ve read that roadrunners fly low to the ground and for only a few seconds at a time. So there was no danger of you falling out of the sky. I set you on the grass and you sped away, darting under bushes and around trees. You ran across the playground in the middle of the complex and into the parking lot, where you stopped between two cars. I trailed you, like an ornithologist.

As I got closer, you ran across the street into an undeveloped plot of land, spreading your wings every once and a while, taking off and diving down to catch crickets in the grass. Your wings caught the sun and they glowed a bright auburn. It’s like you were dancing. Leaping and diving. When you grew tired, I caught up with you and we went home.

I made you a nest out of a towel and set it behind a stack of boxes. I sat and waited for you to find the nest and settle into it. I touched your wing and said, I’m sorry. For thinking you could be mapped like the stars.

The next day you were still a roadrunner, and the day after that. I prepared for lectures, finished my research paper, and fed you insects I bought from the pet store. Finally, on the third day you were human again when I got home from work. You wanted to take a hike before the sun set so we drove to a trailhead that would lead up to a view of the city and the whole valley.

When we reached the overlook, we sat in silence for a long time. From so high up, everything below appeared to be unfolding in slow motion. The cars on the road, the people on the sidewalk, the trees swaying in the wind.

It looks like someone took a scoop out of the earth, you said.

Kind of does, yeah.

Another silence.

I finished my paper.

Yeah?

Yeah.

A chipmunk skittered through the dead leaves behind us.

I said, You were a roadrunner this time.

I remember wanting to be free.

You tossed a rock over the ledge.

One day I won’t turn back, you said.

I know.

Promise that you’ll bring me here.

I thought of all the cages at the home for turners. The way you can fit into the palm of my hand sometimes. You looked at me, all squinty-eyed in the sunlight. Wild as the day we met. A bit of your hair fell across your face and caught the sunlight just as your wings did. And we sat there, listening to the forest, the animals.

Someday when I come here, I’ll be listening for you. But not yet. We got up to hike back, dusting the leaves and bits of the forest floor from our pants. You lingered for a moment on the ledge. I was about to call to you when a red-tailed hawk screeched overhead and dove into the great basin below.

This little girl, who has no right to remind you of yourself, stands whining by the terrarium with grubby fingers smearing the glass. Grubby, you think, not to mean dirty or soiled but instead as a term of relative comparison to denote resemblance to a grub. You have not yet chosen the week’s vocabulary words for the homework assignment. Last week’s—relay, coward, sensitive, predator—remain in increasingly permanent dry-erase marker on the board. Patrice, with her fat, pale fingers layered in playground dirt, is here with a two-fold announcement: the snail has escaped; you are falling far, far behind.

“So get a new one,” the principal told you when you visited her office during recess. “Or don’t. We are not in the habit of supplying classroom snails. Mr. Kennedy’s terrarium is his own responsibility.”

And when you called Mr. Kennedy in his hospital room, he only sighed and shook his head as machines beeped in the background. “Jeez. Not again. Tell them he went on vacation or something. I’ll bring a new one when I come back. Better yet, buy a new one tonight and I’ll reimburse you.” He sounded old—the kind of age that has seen snails come and go.

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

The rain drives so hard that Nick imagines it puncturing the roof of the Saab. He peers through the wiper blades swatting at the windshield and rechecks the gas level. The Texaco shouldn’t be much farther. Just beyond the McDonalds and that bail bonds place. If only they could get through this intersection. He’s lost count of how many cycles of green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red they’ve sat through already. Clouds the color of charcoal edge across the midday sky, and with every spark of lightning and clap of thunder comes that shriek, so goddamned predictable.

“You okay, Roxy?” Nick glances back at his daughter snug in her car seat. Her eyes find his through a chaotic mass of brown curls, and she pushes the sides of her mouth into that maniacal grin she’s been wearing lately. “It’s not funny, Roxanne,” he says. “If you don’t like the thunder, put your fingers in your ears. No screaming. Daddy can’t focus on the road with you doing that.”

“It’s your fault we’re here,” Joelle tells Roxy. “You and your stupid mouth.”

“Enough,” Nick says, though Jo’s not wrong. Both girls are supposed to be at YMCA day camp, improving their swimming, or learning how to tie knots, or macramé, or whatever the hell they do there. It lasted two days before the call came.

“She’s just too much of a distraction,” Pam, the camp’s director, explained when Nick picked them up that afternoon.

He had tried to assure Pam that Roxy’s behavior was temporary — the screaming, the foul language — that she’d calm down eventually. He suspected Roxy was acting out, in part, because Lisa was gone for one or two weeks. Maybe more. His wife had been emphatically vague when she left their Galveston Island home for a conference of some kind in the Hill Country. Or maybe it was a spa. She said she’d done all she could for him. Needed space. Nick got that — he wouldn’t want to be around him anymore either.

But he didn’t lay such speculation on Pam, of course, so she just nodded and gave him one of those solemn, meaningful looks he found so irritating. “Temporary or not, she can’t stay. Maybe she’ll be ready next summer,” Pam said, staring at Nick for what felt like too long.

Nick estimates that it’s another 400 feet to the gas station. They should make it. Then again, the car’s running on fumes. He can hear Lisa chiding him for not filling the tank yesterday, using the same tone she gets when asking whether he’s remembered to take his medication, or if he’s contacted that headhunter, or would it kill him to do a load of laundry and wash the dishes since he’s going to be home all day.

Nick hates that his life has devolved into an endless charade, the perpetual remolding of himself into someone qualified for something — anything other than teaching. Yet there’s no hiding the fact that his job as the physical science teacher at Stephen F. Austin Middle School represents his single professional credit. What does he know about anything else? For fifteen years, he’d relished introducing young minds to the scientific method, atomic structure, chemical bonding, matter in motion. He’d believed this would remain his mission until retirement, or at least through the Reagan administration.

He just wasn’t prepared to explain the physics of how certain materials could balloon under the stress of ignition. How the collapse of a fuel tank could release liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the atmosphere, causing them to detonate into a ball of fire thousands of feet in the air. How a shuttle’s component parts could break apart and shred from the pull and thrust of this matter in motion, volatile, destined to fly. His brain had tried to comprehend those initial moments of horror, the recognition seeping in as he and his students watched the unthinkable unfurl live on CNN.

The media and public would comfort themselves believing that the seven crew members, a fellow teacher among them, had died the instant those white blades of smoke and gas sliced through the winter blue sky, but Nick knew otherwise.

It should’ve been him up there.

He could recite from memory the lesson he was prepared to give had he made it past the final round of interviews. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he was still proud that he had been one of the ten remaining candidates. But after five months of trying to reconcile what he should know with what he couldn’t accept, he’d lost the desire to recite or explain anything to anyone. His students deserved better than his paralysis. His principal thought a three-month leave of absence would help get his mind right. Nick didn’t tell her he might go permanently.

Now, he’s got to get his daughters to his mother’s house on the mainland, so he can spend the next week scanning the phone book and newspaper ads for temp agencies before falling asleep in front of All in the Family reruns. He’s promised Lisa that he’ll have something lined up before handing in his official letter of resignation.

The car makes it through the congested intersection, and Nick feels it pull up. The engine coughs, and the car slows and sputters to a stop. “What the…No. No-no-no. Shit!”

“No-no-no, shit,” echoes from the back seat.

“Roxy, so help me…”

“Are we out of gas?” Jo asks. Her eyes dart from Nick to the gas gauge and back to Nick. The car rocks in the percussive rain, and Nick looks at his oldest daughter, small for her seven years but smart enough to know they’re screwed.

“Yes,” he says, amid the blare of car horns behind them.

“What are we going to do?”

Nick doesn’t answer. Gusts of wind yank the car from its rain-battered rhythm, and his heart drums a rapid staccato in time with the windshield wipers.

“Dad,” Jo says again.

“Yeah. Yes. I’m…I’m thinking.” He needs to get them out of the road, but the steps to accomplish that goal elude him. He puts the car in neutral and lifts the parking brake. “I’ll push it the rest of the way,” he says finally. They’re positioned in the innermost lane of three lanes of traffic on a six-lane thoroughfare. He needs to push the car almost the length of a football field to get it across three oncoming lanes and to the station.

Nick hits the flashers, unbuckles his seatbelt, and inches the door open. Rain thrashes the inside of the car, and he feels the rush of water underneath, four to five inches deep. Has it really risen that quickly? Of course, it has. Twelve hours of rain collects then flows with the urgency of a ruptured dam. Matter in motion. Soon the car won’t need gas to move from its present location.

He steps into the road and feels the water seep into his shoes and soak the bottoms of his pant legs. He stares into the cars steering around him, honking, frantic and indignant. They lurch through the intersection, heaving water at his knees, each driver ignoring his pleas for help.

Nick returns to the car and collapses into his seat. “Fuck!” He punches the steering wheel, causing Jo to jump. He pounds again, repeatedly, until the stinging forces him to stop. He waits for the anticipated response from Roxy, but it doesn’t come. When he turns to face her, she stares back, eyes wide, tiny hands cupped over her ears.

“I’m sorry,” he says, mostly because nothing else comes to mind. “It’s gonna be okay, girls. Has to be.” Nick exhales and looks down at Jo. He wonders whether her feet will reach the brake pedal, whether she’s strong enough to hold the brake and wheel in place. Why hadn’t he opted for a model with power steering? He’ll move the seat all the way up.

He tries not to think about the rising water. Or how far it is to the gas station. Or what Lisa would say of their situation. The forecasters said the storm — no, tropical depression — wouldn’t come ashore for another six hours. But knowing others thought it was safe to drive won’t lessen his wife’s judgment. It isn’t lessening his.

“Okay, Jo, you’re going to slide over here,” he says.

“What? No Daddy, I can’t drive.”

“You’re not going to drive. You’re going to help me guide the car.”

“No, I can’t.” She shakes her head and shrinks away from him into her seat.

“Yes. Yes, you can, honey. Sit up, Jo-Jo. Look at me. We need to do this now. The water’s rising, we need to get the car to higher ground, and we don’t have a lot of time.” He suspects he sounds more agitated than reassuring.

Joelle nods slowly, wincing at a jagged bolt of lightning. Storms have always frightened her. He should say something comforting, but Lisa is the one who usually calms her down, who coaxes her back to sleep when the skies erupt at night.

“It’s going to be okay, you guys. I promise,” he says.

Nick lowers the steering wheel and gets out of the car. Jo crawls into the driver’s seat; her feet dangle just above the floor mat. He pulls the seat forward.

“Now, put your foot here on the brake pedal,” he tells her. “Press down and leave it there until you hear me tell you to lift it. Got it?”

“I think so,” she says. Nick hears the hesitation in her voice. He brushes a strand of hair hovering over her left eye and tucks it behind her ear. Her hands tremble, but she clasps the steering wheel, scoots to the edge of the seat, and presses her foot against the brake pedal.

Nick releases the parking brake. “Good. That’s good. Foot on the brake until I say lift it. Keep the wheel where it is; hands ten and two. If it wobbles, just hold on tight.”

Joelle nods, says nothing. Such a compliant kid. She’d given Nick and Lisa premature confidence in their parenting skills before Roxy bounded into their lives and met their every instruction with attitude and suspicion. Nick looks into Jo’s pleading eyes, sees his own staring back. The rain pummels the back of his head and streams down his neck. He should close the door now, but it feels like he’s leaving them. He leans in and kisses Jo’s forehead. “You’re a good girl,” he says. “You too, Roxy.” She gives him a half-smile, hands still over her ears, and Nick shuts the door and wades around to the back of the car.

“Okay, lift your foot up, Jo,” he shouts, as the wind slaps his jacket collar against his chin and whips rain into his eyes. He pushes, but the car won’t budge. Maybe she didn’t hear him. “Now, Joelle,” he shouts louder into the squall. He pushes again, and this time the car begins to ease through the murky water now swirling about his shins.

The thick stench of motor oil, salt, and sewage shrouds the air. Cars swerve around them, scattering water like glitter in the steady blaze of lightning. Nick pushes the car through the muck — five feet, ten feet, twenty. After several minutes, he begins counting the beats of his heart, then each step. How many feet to go? 300? 250? The blinding rain and flashes of light make it difficult to estimate. But he can see the Golden Arches ahead, and the car wash, and the drive-thru bank, and that surf shop Jo’s always bugging him to take her to.

He wonders whether the wailing car horns exist only in his mind, whether they signal more than just the other motorists’ aggravation. Could one of them end up pinning him to this trunk? A shard of pain cuts through his arms to his shoulder and neck. His saliva tastes like metal. Or maybe that’s blood. Maybe he’s bitten his lip.

Nick opens his mouth and lets the water slide in and around and onto his tongue, warm but bitter. Every breath is a negotiation. He might as well move the car through a river of molasses. His hands stiffen and tingle, so he adjusts his grip. What had his shrink told him last week? You need to allow yourself to feel, Nick. Well, he sure as shit can feel everything now. In his neck, shoulder, arms, legs, even his groin, and he hasn’t felt anything in that region in several months, reason enough for Lisa to want to leave. Maybe he’s given himself a hernia.

With every step, every inch of road, the destination appears to retreat farther into that obsidian void. As if he can see the end coming but no light. Maybe it was like this for the crew, bracing against the force of gravity, against the free fall, anticipating the inevitable plunge into blackness.

Maybe the water will swallow him, too.

Nick doesn’t know how long the car’s been stopped when he hears Jo’s cry, muffled but unmistakable, the sound knifing him in the gut and forcing his hands off the car. His eyes strain into the sheets of gray as he calls her name. No answer. He doesn’t know what he notices first: the water suddenly at his thighs; the folks ahead bailing out of cars that drift and circle each other in a slow-motion tango; or his own car filling with water, rotating away from him, unmoored. He doesn’t know if his mind or limbs react first, but he pulls open the door, unfastens the car seat, and lifts Roxy into his arms, then wades around to grab Jo who is both petrified and determined, insisting she can walk on her own, promising to hold on tight and never let go, not ever.

Nick hoists Roxy onto his shoulders and steadies himself within the roiling brown water. Roxy tugs at his jacket collar as he grips her legs with his left arm and presses them into his chest. Jo clings to his right arm with both hands, tight enough to cut off his circulation. He has no idea where to go; he only knows to move. Ahead he sees scattered hordes of stranded motorists begin to converge and migrate towards what he assumes is higher ground, and he follows. The water is chest-high on Jo — if it rises higher, he’ll have to carry her, too.

He wishes they could move faster, wishes they had a raft, wishes he could just let go and allow the water to carry him wherever he’s meant to be.

But then he has a vision of himself as a child, with his friends, trudging through the surf, far into the Gulf, diving over the arcing waves only to be swept back and deposited ashore in white foam and seaweed. Once, near a fishing pier, a rip current caught him and drew him slowly, steadily away from shore. He’d been warned this could happen. A friend of a friend had died after being dragged down by the undertow; he’d been told. But Nick knew the term was a misnomer — you couldn’t really be pulled under. Somehow, he knew not to panic or resist but to swim parallel to the shore until he was out of the current’s grip.

Nick’s legs buckle as the road seems to collapse beneath him, and Roxy’s fingers fan across his eyes and press against his temples, squeezing his head as though she thinks it will keep them upright. He peels her fingers away from his face and back to his shoulders and tries to regain his footing. But from below the surface of the water other hands grab at his legs, and he realizes that Jo has slipped from his grasp and is under him, bobbing and sputtering. Nick holds his breath as he crouches and reaches and swipes and misses, again, and again, his thighs burning to maintain his balance, until he catches Jo’s outstretched hand and pulls her back to her feet.

“You’re okay; I gotcha,” he says. He draws her trembling frame against his waist. She coughs into his stomach and rests her head awkwardly next to Roxy’s leg. “We’re almost there,” he says, not knowing where there is. “Almost.”

“Hey, heads up!” a voice calls to him. Nick looks to his left and sees a man standing in the bed of a pickup parked in front of the surf shop. “Take this and head there,” the man says. He tosses Nick a black inner tube and points to a side street just beyond the shop. Nick pulls the tube in; Jo grabs onto it. He looks down the side street and sees a 7-Eleven lit up like Vegas. Higher ground. Nick maneuvers them around clusters of cars listing in the water like abandoned bath toys. He sees other folks headed in the same direction, while others remain atop their cars, viewing the scene like it’s some cinematic version of the apocalypse.

“Thanks, man,” Nick says to him.

“No problem,” he says. “Hell of a thing. It’s like the water rose from fuckin’ nowhere.”

“Yeah.”

“Daddy, he said ‘fuck,’ Roxy notes. “Fuck. Fucky, fuck, fucker…”

“I know, Roxy, I heard him. Let’s get you guys dry.”

 

Inside the 7-Eleven, they’re surrounded by beleaguered eyes and soaked bodies, clustered among the aisles of junk food, comics, and motor oil. Cigarette smoke drifts and coils into the unforgiving light. Nick spots the payphone towards the back of the store. “Girls, stay here near the register,” he says. “I’m gonna call Mom. Then I’ll get us something to eat.”

At the phone, Nick touches his back pocket and feels for his wallet where he’s placed the paper with the phone number Lisa gave him. Only his wallet is gone. Of course. It’s either buried with the car or on its way out to the Bay and Gulf and beyond.

Nick has no plan B. Why can’t he ever have a plan B? He has a quarter in his pocket, so he lifts the receiver, deposits the coin, and punches the zero. A disinterested alto answers. “Operator. How may I assist?”

“Hi. Hello. Okay,” Nick stammers. “See, my wife is at a conference — I think it’s at a hotel near Austin, but I don’t know the name, and my car is…My daughters and I…Look, can you maybe find me the number?”

“Sir, you’re going to need to be more specific. What’s the name of the hotel?”

“So, that’s the thing. I don’t know. It was on a piece of paper in my wallet. But I don’t have it, and I thought maybe you could look it up and…”

“No, sir. Not without the name of the hotel. You need to give me a name.”

“Look, you don’t understand. I don’t have the name. I don’t have anything. That’s why I need to talk to my wife.” The numbers on the dial pad blur and crisscross, and Nick closes and opens his eyes, willing them to focus.

“Sir, I can’t find a number without the name…”

“I just need to talk to my wife. I need my wife.” Gulf waves crash in his ears, and his voice sounds like he’s speaking underwater.

“And I need you to give me the name of…”

“Listen to me. Please listen. I need to talk to my wife. I need to explain to her that I didn’t see it coming. I wasn’t prepared. Okay? Can you just tell her that? I didn’t see any of this coming.” The throbbing in his head feels like nails that pierce his nasal cavity and melt into his mouth. He places his hand against the booth to steady himself.

“Sir, we don’t relay messages. I’m disconnecting you.”

At the drone of the dial tone, Nick replaces the receiver and rests his head against it. He needs the spinning to stop. He needs water. Better yet, a stiff drink and a cigarette.

“Hey there. Other folks are waiting for that phone,” a man calls from behind him. “You ain’t the only one in here.”

“Yeah. I know,” Nick barks back. He could deck the guy, but he hasn’t any strength left in his arms, nor the energy to feel genuine rage.

Nick stumbles down the aisle, brushing past wet elbows and shoulders. At the end of the line, a tattooed arm shoves a roll of paper towels into his chest. Nick doesn’t look up but stops, takes the roll, and leans against the shelf next to a rack of sunglasses. He studies his reflection in the curved mirror above the rack. Sees his defeated, stubborn eyes. His chapped lips. His cheeks blotched with rain and sweat, making it appear as though he’s been crying, absolving the real tears that, for the last several months, have refused to come. The pain in his head has dulled, and he inhales and exhales, slowly, deliberately, summoning long columns of air from deep within his gut until it, too, begins to unclench.
Nick wanders back towards the front of the store where he finds Jo and Roxy sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the Donkey Kong machine. Somehow, they’ve managed to score bright red Slurpees and a bag of Doritos.

“Where’d you get those?” he asks.

Roxy points to a man behind the cash register. Manuel, Manager, his name tag reads.

“He said we could pick out whatever we wanted,” Joelle explains, her voice calm and matter of fact.

“But I told him we’d share the chips. There’s a lot of other people here.”

“Right.” He notices the tranquility of the room, everyone milling about, wringing water out of clothes, shedding the heaviness of the day, accepting that the loss of their surroundings in a pool of darkness is an inescapable element of nature and nothing more.

Nick rips off two sheets of towels and hands them to Joelle. He tears off another, drops to his knees, and blots the water from Roxy’s matted curls. “We’re okay, Daddy,” she says between chews. Dorito crumbs dot the corners of her mouth. He looks into her eyes and nods. He’s about to go the register to thank Manuel when someone taps him on the shoulder. He turns and sees a young woman, or older teenager. She looks familiar, and Nick realizes she’s a former student, from five or six years ago. What was her name? Started with a D – Dahlia, Darla?

“Hey, Mr. K. You all right? Remember me? Delia.” Her blonde hair is mostly wet and gathered into a loose ponytail. Faded turquoise-blue shadow crowns her bloodshot eyes, and she smells vaguely of weed. “Looks like you could use one of these,” she says, sliding a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes and pointing it at him. She stands uncomfortably close, but Nick doesn’t move. He briefly wonders whether she’s a hallucination.

Nick looks down at the girls. They don’t know that smoking was once a habit of his, one he’d given up as soon as he and Lisa decided to start a family. He clears his throat and takes the cigarette. Roxy looks up at him but remains silent, then wraps her Slurpee-stained lips around the fat straw and begins to make those loud sucking sounds that drive Lisa insane.

“Thank you,” Nick says. Delia offers him a light, and he accepts — his first drag in almost eight years. It’s not the sweet relief he’d anticipated, but it feels like the only appropriate response to the absurdity of the situation.

“You still teaching at Stephen F?” Delia asks.

“Yeah. I mean, no. Not really. Not for a while. It’s complicated.”

“Huh. Well, if you aren’t, that’s too bad. I mean, I know I wasn’t all that there — man, you were so patient, but…Hey, you sure you’re okay, Mr. Kerrigan?”

“Yes, Dahlia.”

“Delia.”

“Delia. Sorry. Yes. I am. I’m getting there. I think. I’m just going to sit down with my girls now. If you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, okay, sure. Y’all take care.”

Nick slumps to the floor and stretches out his legs. The cigarette dangles from his lips; droplets of water crawl down his scalp. He should continue drying off, but it feels like forever since he’s sat. He doesn’t know the time, or whether it’s day or night. Any marker he might rely on to draw such distinctions has dissolved in a watery grave. Maybe this should make him feel cleansed, renewed, redeemed — his shrink will have an apt metaphor.

Mostly, he just feels drowned. He doesn’t know what comes next, can’t remember the last time he did. But if they have to sleep and eat and wait on this cold, mud-streaked floor until the rain stops and the water recedes, that’s what they’ll do. That’s his plan: Slurpees and strangers and a cigarette haze, his daughters’ arms holding on, never letting go. Because the one thing he remembers is to not steer himself against the tide.

I.

 

Lexi was reluctant to be Matthias Gerner’s accompanist for the gala concert, but not for the reasons her colleagues at the Manila Youth Conservatory imagined. It wasn’t that she missed the limelight and wanted center stage for herself, or that she had nerves about performing. She simply didn’t know if she could trust him.

He was the most popular concert pianist in the world. Young-looking even at forty, muscular, with a disarming smile, he had been the darling of classical music fans, young and old, for almost twenty years, until a mysterious falling-out with a conductor named Elias Wojciekowski. At the last concert they were supposed to do together, Wojciekowski walked off the podium without even touching his baton. Matthias remained to conduct and play on his own, which had the audience in an uproar of admiration by the end. Not long afterward, Wojciekowski completely disappeared from the public eye, and Matthias took a noticeable break from performing and moved to Osaka to be guest faculty at the music school. The move, such a long way from Vienna, struck Lexi as odd, and a fundraising gala in the Philippines after some master classes with young Filipino musicians seemed like a convenient redemptive photo op.

“Maybe he’s just a nice, generous guy who cares about young artists all over the world,” Lexi’s best friend, Cherry, suggested in the car on the way to the conservatory.

“Maybe,” said Lexi.

Cherry pulled into a parking spot behind the main building and retrieved her oboe case from behind the driver’s seat. Lexi got out of the passenger’s side with a shoulder bag and the oboe sonata by Saint-Saëns. The two went up the stairs to the rear entrance, where the guard, who had worked there for a decade, raised a hand to greet the distinctive pair – Cherry with her loud ‘70’s blouse, flare pants, and a frizzy bob dyed green at the edges, and Lexi, at 5’6” taller than most Filipinas, in white pants and a sleeveless cornflower blue top, her black hair in a long, high ponytail that hung to her ribcage.

“And you did turn the gig down,” Cherry pointed out as they entered the elevator.

“Because someone who quit performing before her career really went anywhere shouldn’t be putting her name in front of the phrase ‘master class.’”

“You won an international competition!”

“That was a lifetime ago.”

“1991. Twelve years. Then when you recorded your CD people compared your Chopin interpretations to Rubinstein and your Liszt to Brendel, for God’s sake.” The elevator pinged as they arrived at the fourth floor. “Ugh. I hate that it pings in G instead of A.”

 

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

I

Justine is nineteen and living in Toronto when she learns her mother has been killed. It’s November and she’s pretending to love chemistry when what she really wants to do is act. She works at a pub to pay for the scene study classes that she takes in secret. Her sister is the only one who knows. Justine never told her mother. Now, she never will.

In those last moments before she becomes a girl without a mother, Justine is discussing Angels in America with her teacher. She’s been assigned to play Harper, the unhappy wife of the conflicted Joe. Harper is Mormon, which is another way of saying she’s in a miserable marriage she cannot leave.

“Why does she stay?” asks the acting teacher.

“Because marriage is a trap,” says Justine. “It swallows you and you’re stuck.”

“You can’t play marriage is a trap. Acting is about verbs, not philosophy. What does Harper want from Joe? Does she love him?”

“I don’t see how she could.”

“Then why fight for the marriage?”

“I imagine she wants to go to the celestial kingdom.”

“Aha! Now you have something to fight for. Go on, Justine. Save your goddamn soul.”

It’s then that her phone rings. That Justine left her cell phone on would be a problem if they were in the acting studio, but they are in his bedroom – she’s been sleeping with Darcy Porter for almost a month. Darcy is tall and bald and his apartment is littered with the weights he uses to stay in shape. Justine steps around the dumbbells and takes the call in the kitchen. Uncle Duke’s voice is cool as he delivers the news. This is just his way but it’s the sort of resolve that lives in the genes. Justine can do it too. Her only response is to ask about her sister. Iris will be in a battle now. Justine and her mother were the only ones who became fluent in ASL.

“Iris is staying with us,” says Duke. “The accident was at the house.”

“Put her on.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened?”

 

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

Myra and Tom fanned their faces with wadded newspapers as they made their way through Jaipur’s City Palace. The tour guide aggressively ushered them through the palace, saying “Take picture take picture take picture,” seizing their camera and asking them to “Cheeseburger smile” in front of the marble elephants, Diwan-I-Khas, huge silver water jugs one of the old Kings traveled with. Their sunglasses were useless against the unforgiving sun. Older Indian women waded around them slowly, clutching their saris to their body protectively as if this would make the sun less hot. Children ran around them in circles. Myra told herself not to look at them.

Their hands were smudgy and black from holding the newspapers for so long. The tour guide led them through to the Pitam Niwas Chowk, proudly displaying the four gates representative of each season as if he had painted them himself. Myra stared at the Autumn Gate, one of the peacocks staring back motionlessly. The colors—blues, greens, ambers—caused her heart to sigh and sit down. When the guide motioned for them to stand in front of the gate for another picture, Myra sighed again, this time out loud.

“Nahin dhanyavaad.” Tom was proud of his dusty Hindi and asked for the camera back. The tour guide was persistent but thrust it back, motioning for them to follow him yet again. Tom strung his arm around Mrya as they followed, the unspoken lying between them. Myra knew framing any of these photos would feel like a betrayal but wasn’t so sure Tom agreed.

They were to be in India for two weeks. Delhi was their intended city of travel, but they were taking their time to get there.

***

Myra watched Tom as he moved back and forth across their hotel room, gradually adding layers of clothing as he adjusted to the air-conditioning. They had had drinks at the hotel bar before walking back, the heat thick around them. A wedding procession had been starting up, the bells and drums and voices becoming the night’s symphony. Myra thought if she listened hard enough now, she could still hear them. But she knew that could be in her imagination.

She felt guilty being joyful over anything.

“We could ride those elephants tomorrow.”

“Hmm?” Myra asked. Tom plopped down in bed beside her, his blonde hair falling in his eyes momentarily.

“You know, at Amber Fort. If you go in the morning, you can ride the elephants to the fort.”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of walking.” Tom’s voice was clipped, as if the answer had been obvious. Myra looked away.

“I don’t know.” She pushed her body down further in the bed until she was completely on her side, her back facing Tom. Silence fell between them. A few moments later, Tom placed his hand on her side, gently.

“Graham loved elephants.”

“I know that.” Myra spat out her words; she couldn’t help it. “You don’t think I know that?” She moved her head slightly, Tom able to see the edges of her left eye. His hand remained on her side, but it felt heavy, like a weight that he couldn’t move.

“I just thought—”

“I know what my son liked.” Her eyes didn’t move as she said this, her body stiff. She moved her head back to the full resting position, biting her tongue so she wouldn’t cry, a trick her sister had taught her in primary school.

All the lights were still on in their room. After some time, Tom got out of bed to turn them off and brush his teeth. When he returned, he knew his wife wasn’t asleep, even though her body was deathly motionless. He gingerly wrapped his arm around her side and pulled himself close to her. Myra let go of her tongue.

***

When Myra looked back on her life, she saw it like this: before, during, and after. Now was the after. Her first trip to India had marked the start of the during. Before, she had drifted through college (Oxford, on her parents’ insistence) like someone drifts through an unfamiliar city, aimlessly drinking in coffee shops and pubs. Being away from her parents for the first time gave her space to breathe and make decisions on her own. Of all the family traditions she eschewed, the only one that stuck was her desire to be a mother. Sometimes, she felt in burning inside of her, a dream she couldn’t shake.

After graduation, Myra withdrew part of inheritance and bought a plane ticket to India with two of her girlfriends. She had never been outside of Europe. She was 21, the age when almost everyone else in her family had done the “respectable” thing, like get married or start working a job that supplied reliable income, time off for holiday. To Myra, this kind of existence sounded joyless.

India had changed the way she felt and thought about everything. They had traveled in the summer and the hazy heat seemed to follow them wherever they went. In England, she felt as if she was permanently living inside of a cold, rank fish; in contrast, India exposed itself like a lotus, spreading its fingers far and wide anywhere she went, revealing colors and spices she had never noticed before. And people, so many people. The constant voices forced on her an awareness of every single moment. Never in her life had she felt more awake.

A man—Tom Schlafly, she would later learn—approached her on the steps of Jama Masjid to ask for directions to the Old Delhi train station. She was sweltering under the long-sleeved clothes required to enter the mosque. He said he was due to catch a train to Udaipur but had broken away from his group because he had wanted to visit the mosque as many times as possible. He was American, a graduate student in architecture. He was particularly interested in Mughal design.

Her two friends smirked as they eavesdropped on Myra’s interaction with Tom. The sun approached the middle of the sky. In hindsight, she knew he really hadn’t needed directions anywhere, as he was two months into his six-month study in India and spoke almost perfect Hindi. But she found she couldn’t stop smiling while talking to him, the rest of the mosque fading away until it was just the two of them.

She extended her stay in India and four months later, flew to America with him. He became her during.

***

Myra and Tom traveled by taxi from Jaipur to Chand Baori. Outside, the scenery alternated between endless patches of dust and scrubby greenery, villages appearing at random. The intense decrease in people left Myra feeling exposed, and the sudden ring of her phone made her jump. It was her sister. The driver had the windows rolled down and it was hard to hear at first. She rolled her window up until she could hear her sister practically yelling.

“You’re still alive, right?”

“You know that joke’s not funny.”

Myra could picture Elizabeth shrugging her shoulders. Even when they were kids, Elizabeth believed in hiding emotions. “You know what I mean. How’s the trip going?”

“Oh, you know.” Myra pictured herself in a locked room, thousands of feet underground. “It’s just as beautiful as I remembered.” She looked out the window to the white sky, the sun so bright it threatened to disappear the landscape. In the areas absent of city fog, this almost seemed possible. She wondered what would happen if the end of the world started here, if anyone would notice the disappearance of these little pocket towns, everything turning to dust.

“Have you made it to Delhi yet?” Her sister’s tone suggested she was repeating the question.

Myra swallowed hard. “We’re…getting there. Chand Baori is supposed to be really amazing, though. We’re in a car there right now.” Tom turned around momentarily from the front seat to smile. He had books spread out over his lap and had been carrying on a conversation with the driver in Hindi. “Tom says hi.”

“Tell him I want an ancient relic from an ancient place.” Someone was yelling on her end. Elizabeth shuffled the phone and Myra could hear her voice, muffled, and a child crying. Myra knew it was probably her youngest niece, so she closed her eyes until Elizabeth’s voice became normal again. “Okay, sorry I’ve got to run so fast, but major pigtails catastrophe. Call me later?”

“Wait—” The word choked out before Myra even registered it and now that it was here she had to do something with it. “How’s it going?” Her voice was thick. “You know, the case.”

“Oh!” Elizabeth coughed. “Well, the case is over, darling.”

“Please stop trying to be funny.”

“You know…the usual. The kid was finally moved to his permanent detention center a couple of days ago. Warranted a small blurb in the newspaper.” Elizabeth’s voice had sobered up considerably.

“Oh, ok. Good.” She opened her eyes just enough to see Tom looking back at her, his face worried. She could make out his facial features easily even in the all-consuming sun. “And has anyone asked questions?”

“If anyone asks questions, they know what to expect.” Elizabeth was eager to pull out her My husband is a lawyer card when necessary.

Myra nodded slowly. “Good. Good.” She certainly didn’t feel good. “Well, call you later.”

Myra held the phone to her ear long after the call ended.  She knew Tom would have questions, so she closed her eyes and let her head fall back. A few moments later, she felt his hand on her knee.

***

Graham had rushed home from school one day, excited to show Myra something in one of his textbooks. It had been India week in his Social Studies class and he had taken a different souvenir from his parents’ collection to class every day. They’d made a game of it: Graham would win the challenge when a site or monument was discussed in class that his parents had never visited.

“I’ve found it.” Graham announced, sitting down across from his mom at the kitchen table with his backpack and coat still on, using his gloved fingers to turn the pages until he found the earmarked one. “Chand Baori.” He pronounced the words awkwardly. He shoved the book across the table to Myra.

“Well, will you look at that.” She vaguely recognized the stepwell in the photo, she and her friends having considered visiting it when in Jaipur. She ran her fingers over the steps in the picture, as if expecting to feel tiny ridges under her fingertips.

“Right?” Graham asked, his eyebrows arched excitedly. He slid his backpack off him and let it drop to the floor.

Myra smirked. Tom hadn’t made the visit out there either, meaning Graham had won the challenge. His award would be a puppy. He’d been begging for one for months. They were using the challenge as a way to consent.

“Well, you know we’ll have to wait until Dad gets home.” Myra hid her smile.

That had been in November. By May of the next year, he was gone, his bedroom forever frozen in time.

Myra tried not to think about this as she shielded her eyes and looked at the green water pooled at the stepwell’s bottom. The intricately designed stepwell climbed up into the sky around her. What would happen if a giant lid was pushed over the top of them, she wondered. Could they climb the steps fast enough to get out?

A child screeched for his mother across the pond and Myra snapped back to the present. Tom was a few feet away from her, discretely taking pictures of a family shadowed by the steps behind them. Their driver was smoking at the car, she knew.

Graham’s smile when he realized he had won the challenge flashed through her mind. He had been so excited to win that he hung a printed-out picture of Chand Baori on his bedroom wall.

“I feel guilty for coming here.”

“Hmm?” Tom asked, momentarily glancing at her before turning his full focus to his wife, switching his mind from stair designs to Myra’s slumped shoulders. The trip to India had been Elizabeth’s idea, and it wasn’t until they were on the flight that Tom had questioned if Myra was really ready for an immersive international trip. But now that they were here, Tom found himself distracted by the architecture, his mind called back to why he had originally visited India all those years ago. He often had to forcibly switch that part of his brain off, and only then did he see Myra clearly. The horrible truth was that he often found himself at a loss for how to comfort her, when he was still unsure how to comfort himself. Something, of course, he knew he would never tell her.

“Graham wanted to come here, I—I don’t know if we should have come here.”

Tom let his camera swing around his neck, pulling Myra to him. “We don’t have to stay any longer.”

They climbed the steps together, but Myra couldn’t help feeling something was pulling her back down, like a child’s fingers wrapped around her forearm, pulling hard.

***

Tom had never really considered being a father. He started a master’s program because he wanted to compete in the job market with all the other aspiring architects in the large cities to which he was drawn. He had grown up in Wyoming, accustomed to his parents’ complaints when they ventured into a big city to go shopping, tssking over the sizes of the buildings, the clutter, the abundance of small windows glittering like diamonds. But he instead saw design, an intricate interweaving of concrete and brick structured perfectly to fit together just right.

He chose the India program from a list of campus connections around the globe. His plan was to study there for half a year, and return a budding expert on the architecture of one of the oldest places on Earth. This was the upper hand he needed. But after knowing Myra for just a month, he knew he wanted her in his life for all the months to come. He was willing to change his plans for hers.

But Myra just wanted to be a mother. She moved with him to Boston for his first big job, and they were pregnant soon after.

Graham loved his dad’s passion even at five years of age, begging to come along with him on new building sites. At the groundbreaking ceremony for a new building, Graham convinced his mother to dress him in a three-piece suit, like his Dad. In his wallet Tom carried a picture of the pair, donning their suits, its edges crinkled from being forced to fit alongside business cards and loose change.

They had a game they played together—Graham would be the architect and Tom would be the contractor and together they planned a building. The challenge was making sure it would not only fit in with its surroundings, but that it wasn’t identical to another building in the area.

They later learned during the court case in England that this was the game Graham and the other boy had been playing before his death. Before the other boy suggested a new game.

Like most other sensational news stories, the boy’s name was printed right alongside Graham’s, as if the two were interchangeable, the newsprint not seeming to care that one was the victim and one was the perpetrator. For weeks now, he had heard that boy’s name over and over, threatening to drown out the name of his own son. But Tom refused to call that boy by name.

***

When Tom and Myra reached Agra, their trip’s halfway point, they were too exhausted to deal with the rush of cab drivers that greeted them when they exited the train station, so they simply accepted the first reasonably priced offer. The man ushered them to his cab, a small orange car, two young girls in dirty saris following them. Myra only gave them coins because they were persistent in their poking and begging, muttering half-alive words. She refused to look at them but heard them arguing over who got the most coins.

“God, I don’t remember it being like this last time,” Tom commented wearily once they were in the car, taking in the overwhelming crowd of cabs and autos cluttered around the train station like chickens at a feeding station. Myra nodded in agreement, thinking it was easier to see the sky last time. This time all she saw were people, trees, dust, people. A small hole at the top that provided breathing space.

It wasn’t fair that so many survived here, when the person she cared about most in the world had not made it ten years.

“Do you?” Tom looked at Myra, expectantly.

Myra shook her head again. She leaned her head against the hot window, watching welcoming signs to “The City of the Taj Mahal” as the cab passed underneath. All around them, the city was moving, sluggishly, yet she felt still, immobile, and not in a calming way. Like in the way when you’re the only one seated at a busy airport.

Tom nodded, his mind racing. “I think our hotel has a view.”

Myra wanted to care, wanted to be excited, but she wasn’t. She found it hard to believe that among all this traffic, sky foggy from pollution, cable wires hung from building to building, dust and trash on the street, people moving in every direction like ants fighting to reach the mound first, that one of the Wonders of the World lay hidden. Graham had loved things like that, finding treasures in in the most unlikely, incongruent places. Opening Matryoshka dolls hoping to find something other than air inside. Opening all the boxes in the house yearning to find something, anything, even if it was just tissue paper from an old present. One summer, he dug holes all over the backyard hoping to find more arrowheads to match the one he had stumbled upon in a stroke of luck. Tom had been furious over the pockets in their yard, but he was too amused at the same time to let it show. They never lost anything because Graham always found it. Myra was terrified of losing anything in the future because she knew it would be gone forever.

***

Graham and Myra had decided in December the year prior that enough time had passed between their last England trip and that it was time to visit again. Graham would turn eight in March, and they figured this meant he was old enough to actually remember the trip this time. They cleared their schedules at the end of May and flew out of Boston two days after Graham finished the second grade.

Myra’s family lived in London and prepared Myra’s old bedroom for her and Tom to stay in while they were there. After much debating, the couple agreed to let Graham stay at Elizabeth’s, where he would share the bunk bed with her middle child. The boys were the same age with almost identical faces.

Sometimes Myra tried to justify the way her son died by how closely he resembled Jonathan, Elizabeth’s son. That maybe the other boy had actually been after Jonathan and had just made a mistake. But she always felt horrible for thinking this and never told anyone.

The boys quickly bonded, Graham following Jonathan to the nearest parks, playing the games he played, practicing each other’s accents. Things would have been fine if they had been able to stay together the whole trip. But halfway through, Elizabeth took her kids to visit their father, who was working on location on Edinburgh, and Graham came to stay with Myra, Tom, and his grandparents. They were gone for just two days.

Graham was obedient, often taping classroom rules on the refrigerator before Myra even got the chance to read the list. When he didn’t return from the park near Myra’s parents when he promised he would, she immediately began to worry. She lingered by the kitchen window as her mother told a story from her bridge club, unable to keep her eyes from looking outside constantly. It was unusually bright, the plants in the front garden reaching eagerly up to the sun.

“Let’s just go to the park,” Tom finally suggested, opening the front door as he spoke. “He probably just lost track of time.”

“But he wears a watch,” Myra said, as if this made all the difference. The windowpanes were imprinted on her eyes. Later, she remembered how irritated her words must have sounded.

“But he’s also an 8-year-old outside on a nice day.” Myra remembered Tom chuckling when he said this. Laughing, as if they would eventually take the whole situation lightly. The laughter of innocence, of not knowing. “Come on, let’s go.”

The only reason they caught the boy was because he lingered by Graham’s body, like some museumgoer admiring a painting. The park was unusually empty that day and when they found the two boys, there was no one else around. One boy alive and one dead. No one to interfere with Myra’s path as she broke out into a run toward Graham’s body, skidding as she landed beside him. She remembered how floppy his head felt, how much already gone he was.

The other boy backed away but didn’t flee. It was as if he was in a trance. Myra didn’t give him any mind until she noticed blood on his hands, the same color of blood that was pooling around Graham’s head and sticking to his blonde hair. Later, Myra remembered how Tom didn’t have to notice the blood to understand something had gone horribly wrong. How he grabbed the other boy’s upper arms and squeezed, so tightly Myra expected his arms to pop out, like a doll’s if you yanked too hard.

They later found out that a few others had passed the two boys as it was happening, but no one stopped. No one bothered to interfere as the boy beat Graham with a rock. Repeatedly. “I just wanted to see what would happen,” the boy kept saying, his voice soft, unclear if it was purposely affected or truly distraught.

He entered an insanity plea. Something about a sociopathic disorder; words like dissociative, antisocial, emotionally stunted littered the psychiatric reports. When Myra focused in on the name of the words themselves, her mind started spinning, unable to rectify something so logical sounding with her son dying in a way that would never make sense.

Right after it happened, Myra wanted to hate this boy. Wanted to hate Elizabeth for leaving for the weekend. Wanted to hate Tom for suggesting too late that they go find Graham. But instead she hated herself, and she wasn’t sure the feeling would ever go away.

***

Elizabeth called constantly after Myra and Tom returned to Boston, three suitcases in tow for two people. “She’s doing okay,” Tom said their first week home, the house empty and huge around him. “She put his suitcase in his room and closed the door. I think it’s—too hard for her right now.”

“I can come, you know. Within 24 hours, I’ll be at your front door.”

“No—it’s okay.” Tom appreciated Elizabeth’s sympathy, especially since it was so rare. “I just think time…time will help, I think.”

He wasn’t sure. But someone had to be, so he elected himself.

After he got off the phone, he stood in the doorway of their bedroom. Myra had the covers pulled over her head, the room dark save for the light streaming in from the window. Graham’s Labrador, less than half a year old, was curled up at the end of the bed, his head resting on his front paws. Tom considered joining her and experiencing for himself the allure of the enclosed darkness. Instead, he walked to Graham’s room and perched on his twin bed until it was time for dinner.

A few months had passed when Elizabeth suggested they make the trip to India. Visit the place they talked about so much and so fondly. Return to the steps where they met. It wasn’t that she saw any need to rekindle a fire in their relationship, she said. She just didn’t want them to become prisoners of their house, where they had all the time in the world to relive the death. At least a vacation would allow time for movement, a change of pace, things to distract them. Tom had agreed eagerly, at a loss himself on how to both move forward without drowning and also help his grieving wife. He usually felt ill-equipped to take on just one of those tasks; two felt impossible. Myra agreed with little hesitation, but he wasn’t convinced it was because she was eager to go. Even when he tried his hardest to share her grief, his body switched back into survival mode.

***

As Myra listened to the street moving outside, smelled the hot, musty, all-consuming air, literally felt the world moving around her, she was stuck. Like a car that couldn’t shift gears.

“Oh, there’s a vegetable vendor right outside.” Tom was excited, sticking his nose out of the window that faced the street outside the hotel gates. The other window had a small view of the Taj Mahal. A miniature version, one that you could pluck in your thumb and forefinger and pocket forever.

Something Graham would have loved.

“Hmm?”

The vendor’s voice rang out, aloo, gobi, tamatar, gajar. Tom didn’t repeat, just remained in place with his head sticking out the window, letting in the outside world. Myra placed her hands over her ears until the noise stopped.

She felt trapped.

“Why are we here?”

“What?” Tom shifted to face her, the sun collecting in beams around him.

“Why did we come here?” Myra had expected her voice to be angry, but instead it was just sad.

Tom shrugged his shoulders. “You know, to get away and everything. To visit the place we love so much—”

“I know that’s what Elizabeth said. But why did we come?”

Tom slowly sat down on the edge of the bed, his mouth twitching as if he was afraid to answer.

“I mean, I know why Elizabeth wanted us to come. But I never stopped to consider whether I wanted to do this, I just listened.” For a moment, Myra imagined the room opening up, revealing the light outside, but the feeling quickly passed.

Tom moved closer to her in the bed, until they were facing each other, both cross-legged, like kids sharing secrets in kindergarten. He reached forward and cupped her cheek in his palm. She was thinner than she had been before they met, her bones sticking out at awkward angles. Any time he held her, he felt like he was holding a pile of tinker toys wrapped in clothes. His heart ached. He had spent months ruminating on the right things to say, but now his brain was blank, frantic. He blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“You know we haven’t said I love you to each other the whole time we’ve been here?”

Myra tried to wrap her head around the statement, understand why Tom thought it was important in the moment.

“I mean,” he laughed softly, “It’s a lot different from our first trip here.” Even as the words came out, Tom heard how slimy they were, and averted his eyes so he wouldn’t have to witness Myra’s response, her recognition of her husband’s failure at comforting.

But instead, Myra’s thoughts went to their first visit together, the weeks spent staying together in inexpensive guesthouses and Tom’s small apartment in Delhi, how morning and night were marked by the movement of the sun on their bed sheets, finding it hard even when in public to not do things that made Indian women pull their saris over their mouths.

She noticed a sliver of sunlight snaking up the right side of their bed, the curtains closed partially over the open window.

It was so hot she could barely breathe.

“Why would you bring that up?”

Tom stuttered. “You know I love you.”

“That’s not the point here though. Tom, I asked why we came here?” She paused. A melody of car horns floating through the window. “Why did we come here?”

He focused on the wall behind Myra. He realized his hand was still cupping her cheek, so he dropped it, let it rest on her thin leg. “To see the country.”

“We’ve already seen the country.”

“To save ourselves.”

“Don’t say that.”

Tom leaned forward, hoping to coax Myra’s eyes to look away from her lap. What if they grew old here? In a country so crowded even family members sometimes couldn’t find one another? Would anyone miss them? Would anyone notice? Surely no one would ever be able to find them. They could do it. Disappear, slip into this hot lifestyle that only demanded you be able to survive through the beating sun every day.

But she would never do that. She would never live somewhere where Graham hadn’t existed, not wanting to assume a lifestyle that ignored their son.

He regretted ever starting down this road. He hadn’t planned on having this discussion until they were well back in America, in Graham’s time zone, in Graham’s house, with Graham’s dog. But now they were in the midst of it, and Myra had never been someone to change topics in the middle of a conversation.

“I know you blame yourself.” Tom’s hand grazed her chin, trying to coax her face. “That if we had gone looking for him just a little bit earlier, maybe he would have—”

“No. No. Don’t say that.” Myra instinctively pulled back, her hand pointing, aggressively, shaking.

“Would have lived.”

Myra remained motionless for a few moments, her finger slowly moving toward his chest until it crashed into it. Then, it was as if her finger was the impetus holding together a trigger-release bomb: tears flowed down her face like a sudden summer rainfall.

Tom knew he should say something, apologize for the blatancy of his last statement, admit that he really blamed himself. That if he hadn’t brushed off her worries than they would have made it to the park on time. Before the rock. Before the blood.

But instead, he cried too. Created their own monsoon in a place that was still covered in dust.

***

Graham had pretended not to be impressed by the Taj Mahal when he learned about it in Social Studies class. He didn’t want to like the monument because everyone liked the monument. He had been tasked to create a miniature Taj Mahal for class, rolling his eyes as they picked out the materials at the crafts store. White Styrofoam for the columns and domes. Blue felt for the water.

“I bet aliens really did make it,” he commented while in the fake greenery aisle.

“What are you talking about?” Myra picked up two different fake grass patches, one darker than the other, and held them up for Graham’s inspection. He picked the lighter one, leaning half-heartedly against the other side of the aisle. But Myra noticed he continued to keep an attentive eye on the fake grass as she placed it in the shopping cart.

“That’s what this kid in my class said, Johnny Mascowitz. He said that the Taj Mahal was too perfect to have been built by humans. That God sent aliens down here to do it who disintegrated after its completion.” Graham stumbled over disintegrated. Myra couldn’t help but laugh, Graham’s serious expression making it all the funnier. “What?” He asked.

“Well, I think you should tell Johnny that aliens probably have more interest in weapons and destroying our energy sources.” She moved out of the aisle and Graham followed her. “Besides, how would you explain Jama Masjid then?”

“What?”

“You know, where your dad and I met.”

“Yeah, I know that.” Graham loved this story, finding it fascinating that his parents, both from different countries, had met in a foreign place, by chance. The story was almost too perfect. “What about it?”

They stopped their cart when they reached the check-out line, the windows revealing the sun that had started to slip into the earth. Myra looked directly at her son, who was fingering the items in the cart. “Well, the same Emperor executed the design of both of those places.”

“Really?” Graham’s head shot up, his eyes meeting hers. They were sparkling with excitement. “Which was built first?”

Myra considered this. “Hmm…the Taj, I believe.”

Graham’s forehead was scrunched up, as if he was mentally viewing pictures of both structures in his mind. “They do look alike. Was that on purpose?”

Myra laughed, again. “I’m not sure, honey.” Ever since he was young enough to put together full sentences, he had questioned everything. Tom had joked that it was for people like Graham that Wikipedia was invented in the first place. “We can look it up when we get home.”

“Okay.” He suddenly couldn’t take his eyes off the materials for the miniature Taj Mahal.

Over the next few days, he insisted on talking about the subject any time the three of them were together, quizzing them on what they remembered about visiting both places. Jama Masjid again performed miracles in their lives, turning the story of the Taj Mahal into something magical. Something that existed outside of India, outside of textbooks. Something that was real.

On their first visit to the Taj Mahal, Myra remembered standing in awe for hours, taking in the structure from every angle. They moved from bench to bench on the grounds, staring at the sparkling white that was nearly blinding in the morning sun. The green grass, the majestically blue pools. She couldn’t believe that this was it, the structure that caused hearts to skip a beat, that drew in millions of visitors a year. But there She was, shimmering and silent, as if waiting for someone to uncover her secrets. Find the secret tomb within the mausoleum and expose the world’s stories.

This time, Myra found all she could concentrate on was the other stuff. The tour guide that followed them until Tom told him firmly, Nahi, Nahi. How the teenage boys with their cell phones pushed you out of the way to take pictures if you lingered too long, purposefully including you in their photos if you didn’t move fast enough. She felt herself being pushed along in the group of people systematically moving through the grounds. The sun was hotter than it had ever been, threatening to turn them all into a melted pool of skin, expose their secrets to the known universe. Reveal to everyone that they had one dead child and had never been able to have another.

Graham had been buried in the family plot in London. Gravestone. No white marble palace to protect him. Just dirt and grass. And that, eventually, rains away into mud. Then to nothingness.

She was about to ask to leave, return to the security guards that had snatched up electronics at the entrance like they were collecting toys for a Christmas drive, risk the pickpockets disguised as tour guides that tricked money out of unknowing tourists, when Tom handed his camera to another white tourist, and motioned for Myra to take a picture with him. Even though they put their arms around each other, she didn’t feel him. She almost expected to see Graham in between them when they looked at the picture in the camera.

But, instead, it was just the two of them, dwarfed by the massive white. Their smiles disgusted her.

***

She told herself that Graham would have found something he hated about India. Complained about the heat. Found the beggars annoying. Asked to eat at McDonald’s. That they would have traveled to India without him anyway, so it was okay to be here now. They would have talked on the phone every night, sharing kisses before going to bed just as he started another day.

But she knew none of this was true.

They had flown into Delhi nine days earlier and now returned there, Myra watching wearily as their auto maneuvered through the congested city streets, the morning sky hazy with pollution, the sun more an idea than an actual thing. Motorbikes slipped by the cab, ten to one, zipping off in a flurry of noise. Any time a car paused more than a second, people started crossing the street, not bothered by the impressive amount of metal that thrusted eagerly forward.

Myra found it nearly unbelievable that so many millions lived in this city. She watched people cross the street, looking for Graham’s face in every single one of them.

***

They had decided on their morning train from Agra to Delhi that there was no point in pretending visiting Jama Masjid hadn’t been the purpose of the entire trip, and so they headed there almost immediately after arriving. The streets of Old Delhi were unbelievably crowded, people pressing up against their auto as the driver pushed through, like squeezing a marble out of straw. She noticed the driver wasn’t wearing any shoes, his sandals placed neatly beside his feet. Everything seemed to be making noise, conversations whizzing by, tunes from car horns and storefronts, the screech of tires. At one point, Myra looked to her left to find a man less than six inches away staring back at her. She could have reached out and pushed him off his rickshaw if she had wanted to.

She didn’t see Jama Masjid until they were right on top of it, the minarets and marble domes appearing in the sky like apparitions. The sky hung lazily behind the mosque. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Last time, she had been the most excited among her friends to visit the mosque, already mesmerized by the enormous domes, the countless archways. They all donned long sleeves and skirts and packed themselves tightly into autos.

She looked down at her body now, the auto shaking them both back and forth. She was wearing short sleeves.

Looking over at Tom, she noticed his eyes and his camera facing out, the street turning into watercolors around them as their speed increased. Ever since their Agra hotel conversation, Tom had stopped ignoring the reality of their lives when around her, as if before she had been protected by a wall of glass that had now shattered. Even though he continued to place his hands on her knees or back or face protectively, his skin felt all the more real.

The driver stopped directly in front of the steps, in a tangle of autos and people pushing through, shoulder to shoulder, to continue walking. Some entered the mosque, ascending the wide stairs, which were dull in the afternoon sun. Most walked right by it, not even turning their heads to look, accustomed to passing the largest mosque in India on a regular basis. Myra got out of the auto, her eyes on the steps, as Tom handed the driver a few crumpled rupees. For years after they married, Myra daydreamed about the steps fondly, idealized them even. She fantasized revisiting, she and Tom reliving their first encounter with the impressive red gate looming over them. She had expected her heart to stop like it did last time, thinking of all the times she had shared this story with Graham, painting the mosque as a magical place every time.

“Like Disney World?” he had asked once, when he was four. She had said yes, like Disney World. Like Cinderella’s palace.

Thinking of this, her heart jolted forward, as if something was calling her from inside. She had never been a religious person, finding religion more overwhelming than helpful. Faith had always perplexed her; she was bothered by how something she considered private was always turned into a family matter among certain groups. She had never felt God tugging at her heart, like so many people described when having a religious experience, no matter their particular faith. The only times she had ever had such a feeling were when it came to her own family.

She quickly eyed the spot where she and Tom had first spoken. An Indian family was sitting there, the young children sharing an ice cream cone. Almost immediately, the youngest dropped the cone, as if Myra’s eyes had been the trigger that released this action. Surely the ice cream would immediately melt on the warm stone. The mother scolded the child, rapping her lightly on the back of her head. Myra looked away. She began to deliberately ascend the steps on the opposite side, following the thing that attached itself around her heart and was pulling hard.

Men in white and women covered in long saris were streaming down the steps, a group of people cluttered by the front entrance as they readjusted their shoes, re-wrapped shawls around their necks. Hearing the bells, Myra realized afternoon prayer had just ended. Those who had been praying inside now descended the steps. They disappeared into the tangle of store awnings, dangling electric wires, and water stands. The travelers began to stand, slowly disappearing through the entrance, guarded by a few men wearing white, their arms crossed and their faces sour, and into the vast emptiness beyond. She remembered learning last time that 25,000 people could fit inside if they wanted to. Even just the number made Myra feel suffocated.

She took a breath.

“Wait—should we get a picture on the steps?” Tom asked just as they reached the line at the entrance, a few girls picking through the long tunics required to don if your clothing wasn’t sufficiently modest. Myra shaded her eyes as she looked at her husband, shrugged her shoulders. She felt on the verge of tears but didn’t know why. She didn’t really feel like crying. She didn’t feel like standing still either. He passed his camera to another traveler, who captured the two of them, arms around each other, the mosque disappearing into the sky behind them. She was very aware of their sweaty skin sticking to each other.

“I don’t feel like—”

“I know.” Tom strung the camera back around his neck and placed his hand on her back, turning toward the entrance.

“Three hundred rupee,” one of the men, sitting, a gut poking out of his tunic, barked at them, another younger man holding out his hand aggressively.

“Lekin yaha per likha hai ki entry free hai.” Tom said, pointing to the sign that read NO ENTRY FEE. The older man waved his hand demurely, while the younger man pointed at Tom’s camera before holding out his hand again. Tom glanced at Myra before digging the money out of his pocket. He knew what she wanted. Last time they hadn’t actually visited the inside together, just the steps.

This time she wanted it to be different.

After Tom had paid, the younger man pointed at Myra and then at the long tunics, colors piled on top of each other. She was putting on a blue tunic when she noticed a sign advertising a look-out point from the minaret currently towering directly over them.

She pointed at the sign. “Let’s do this first.” The words choked themselves out, as if spoken by a different being. Before he fully registered what was happening, she had disappeared behind the entrance to the minaret.

The steps were steep and winding, constantly turning inside the thin structure. She placed her hands on both sides of the wall, stumbling over the cloth as she made her way to the top. She felt as if something was pulling her higher and higher, a force she couldn’t detect, an all-consuming power that only allowed her to go up.

Or a child’s fingers wrapped around her forearm, pulling hard.

Halfway, they emerged on a flat platform that provided a perfect view of the mosque. She stopped to take in the structure, spread out wide, tiny people in bright colors spreading themselves over every inch. The far gate, nearly identical to the Taj Mahal’s South Gate, stood impressively. As if it was smiling at her, waiting to share something. She felt Tom’s presence on her left and looked to find him taking pictures of all the others below them.

“Wow.” The wind whipped momentarily around them before falling deathly still again, as it had been all day. Sluggish. “Makes you feel powerful, huh?”

Myra’s eyes on the gate, she suddenly felt as if it was shaking its head, telling her to continue going up. “Let’s keep going.” They re-entered the minaret, the cool stone wrapping around them, disappearing all the street sounds from below, the hundreds of conversations and endless noise. Silent, even when they reached the line of travelers pushing to make their way to the top, eliminating any notion of private space.

A silence that was actually silent, as opposed to all her recent silences that had been threateningly loud.

As if pushed by some force from behind, Myra and Tom finally broke through the crowd to the landing. But unlike the motion of the crowds at the Taj Mahal, this was different. A persistent force that was also gentle, patient, that let her go just as she reached the far windows, facing back onto the steps they had just come from.

From above, she noticed how the thrash of autos started just as the steps ended. Like the edge of land meeting water, or two forces colliding.

At first, she didn’t understand what had led her here, just to look back on the place where she had come from. She was about to turn away when she stopped. Her heart paused and sat down.

There was Graham, standing on the exact spot she and Tom had met, waving and smiling at her. The blood was gone and every hair was in place, the same clothes he had been wearing before his death. His smile was so big it was almost painful. He was waving and waving, and smiling, and waving, and she no longer noticed the chaos of Old Delhi, or the outside world that stopped just at the base of the mosque, as if some invisible force was rejecting it. She only noticed him, who looked so much like Tom she started crying, tears crashing down on her tunic and disappearing into the blue.

Something inside of her released and let go. Sun rays pushed through the clouds in great, jagged stripes, everything breathing around her.

Myra blinked. And like that, he was gone, their meeting space vacant, the remnants of their footsteps so many years ago covered with millions of others. She stared motionlessly at the spot, the mosque around her taking a breath before settling down again, as if it had been holding in the same air breathed on the last day they had been there together. When she had begun her during. Tom appeared, and she peripherally noticed his face change, his hands reaching up to wipe tears from her cheeks, but she kept her gaze on the steps.

Below, the streets continued moving, the horns continued honking, the children continued yelling. Maybe it was their high position in the sky, or the sun’s emergence through the haze, but Myra felt that they were above it all, the darkness receding.

 

 

 

Though you grew up in the city, you always liked to look up at the stars.

On those rare visits to Grandma in the country, you’d always take the time to sit on the porch at night once she fell asleep, open-mouthed in front of the TV.

Lightning bugs would pop off like spark plugs in the field, and you would trace the constellations with your pointer finger. You liked the idea that way out there, galaxies away, they had their own planets spinning around them. From where you were standing, they were small enough to be afterthoughts, inconsequential. Yet they were still beautiful, still worth tracing with your finger. You’d always liked that.

Though, you liked them less with the dirt in your mouth. The muddy sticks piercing your back.

And even less with his hands around your throat, squeezing.

You didn’t see his face. You hadn’t the entire time. It’s not as if he had covered it, so you had in fact seen it. Still it floated at the edge of your mind – a shape beneath the surface of the water, dark and distant. You could smell him, though. Sweat and desperation. His breath reeked of cigarettes. He had offered you one. You wondered where that butt was, imagining it smoldering in the wet grass, maybe seething between the cushions of his passenger seat. It felt like the smoke was burning your lungs. You scratched at his hands, knowing your fingernails were broken, but that made them sharp. You hoped they hurt.

Even when the switch turned off and you were gone, your eyes stayed open. Looking at the stars.

 

You don’t remember being told you were dead. You just knew. You were dead and sitting in a chair and there was a woman in front of you and you didn’t understand that, because you were dead. Welcome, Graciela, the woman said, or she must have, though it didn’t look like she had.

On instinct, Gracie.

Welcome, Graciela.

I’m dead.

Yes.

Okay. What else are you supposed to say?

I’ll show you to your room.

You got up and followed her because, again, you didn’t have any idea what else to do. Walking as a dead person didn’t feel any different than walking as a living person. At least not yet. You were in a long hallway that did not turn, did not twist. There were doors far as you could see. The woman opened one. This is where you’ll stay for now.

Why?

No one knows you’re dead yet. This is the first step.

The room was long and skinny and full of girls. All girls no one knew were dead. There was some furniture, but as you’d learn, you didn’t have to sleep or eat or do anything bodily anymore, so it was more for show than for use. When you turned around to ask where you actually were, the woman was gone, but in her place was another girl. She looked like she was blown out of brown sugar and air.

I’m Trina. She told you she’d been dead for two months. Welcome to Saint Maria’s Home for Murdered Girls.

 

Time flowed differently when you’re dead. It seemed to be passing all at once and not at all. You learned the ropes fairly quickly. Your room designation depended on where your case stood. You were in “dead, not presumed dead.” There was “dead, presumed dead,” and “dead, body found,” and then “dead, no leads,” “dead, suspect identified,” and on and on and on, a million different doors for a million different situations for a million different girls.

Where do you go at the end? you asked Trina

The end?

When your case is solved.

Into the case solved room.

You never leave?

Only when you get justice.

And that isn’t always when your case is solved?

No. Usually isn’t.

For the most part, girls couldn’t go from room to room freely, but there were special circumstances, special girls. Normally if their case was infamous. If they were martyrs of legend. One in particular jumped around, bleeding through the walls, standing behind you until you turned around, whispering in your ear.

My name is Elizabeth Short; maybe you’ve heard of me.

No.

Well, they’ve made a lot of movies about me. Books and shows, too.

Oh.

Elizabeth seemed a little too old to be in a home for girls, but what do you know? She sought out newcomers. She acted drunk, delirious, always too close, always too happy. She had been dead for almost seventy-five years.  Do you know what he did with my tattoo? He cut it off and he put it up my-

You always tried to plug your ears whenever she was around. But of course, you could hear her anyway.

You spent most of your time with Trina, trying to do things that normal girls would do, like sit or talk. You tried braiding her hair once, but your hands couldn’t grasp onto anything solid. The brown strands just sifted right through your fingers like sand through an hourglass, spiderwebs in air. You gave up on that idea quickly.

Trina was killed by her stepfather. Her body was behind his work shed, disintegrating under feet of gravel and dirt. He convinced her mother she had run away.

She doesn’t realize what he did?

She never realized what he was doing.

Why did he do it?

Because I said I would tell her.

It felt to you that there was nothing more transient than the life of a girl. You’re there until you’re not anymore. Until someone doesn’t want you there anymore.

Every so often, you met with Maria to talk about your murder. She met with everyone; the first time Maria summoned you, you asked Trina who she was, and she reacted as if you were supposed to know. As if it was natural that a saint did something as benign as show you to your room or call you to chat. Even though that was the name of the home, you didn’t realize that she was the actual Saint Maria. You wished, not for the first time, that you had paid more attention in Sunday School.

Saint Maria was old and young all at once, morphing from a waxen-faced child to a wooden-faced woman in the same instant, never one or the other long enough to definitively be either. She asked you if you knew the man who killed you. You told her you didn’t know.

I want you to think about it, the girl told her. Then the old lady, really try.

You remembered asking for a ride. You remembered the stain on the passenger seat armrest. The cigarette, the wet leaves, his hands on your neck squeezing squeezing squeezing. He still had no face. You remembered until you didn’t want to remember anything else.

She let you go.

 

That morning had been one of those oppressively hot daybreaks only a Midwestern August can deliver. By the time you got up – not unreasonably late you thought, though Mama disagreed – everything was flattened under the weight of the humidity. The cicadas were even taking the day off, their crescendo of sound barely registering. The rising heat made the pavement swim before your eyes as you biked down Fourth Street, your drawstring bag secured over one shoulder, the other cords flying out behind you.

You were taking algebra that summer, surprisingly your own choice. By taking summer school, you freed up your semester enough to sign up for woodshop. You were in the second six-week session, July to mid-August. As the temperature ticked well into the nineties, you sat in an unair-conditioned classroom with two dozen other fuck ups and early planners, learning about quadratic equations with sweat pooling in the crooks of your elbows. You weren’t bad at algebra, you actually didn’t mind it, but the long days and the teacher’s droning voice were enough to make anyone want to crawl out of the open yet ineffective windows. But it was Friday, and that meant you had the day off.

As you pedaled past the Buckhead Strip Mall, you contemplated stopping to get a Big-Gulp but knew that Isabella was probably already waiting for you. The 7-Eleven was nestled between a beef jerky outlet and the Diamond Deli and Video Gaming, a place you went to once before realizing that ham sandwiches and arcade games are too strange a combination. You kept going.

 

Sometimes you visited your body. Or what was left of it. Even the lowly maggot had to eat, and on you, they feasted. You hadn’t thought about doing it until you once looked down and the sinews of your fingers were exposed, all bones and gaping flesh. You thought there might be something crawling under your skin.

Trina told you that a lot of your existence at Saint Maria’s depended on what was going on down there. If there was energy in your case, then you had energy. You looked as you did before death. Like a person. But the longer time went on when no one was looking, or nothing was happening, or it went cold, then your energy began to wilt. You didn’t have the stamina to keep up appearances. You could see that in the girls who died decades ago, just skeletons, but honestly, they weren’t so bad. It was the recent girls that no one cared about at all that were the worst. Rotting. Mangled. Especially if their death had been brutal. Some were missing pieces.

You could use your energy to check in on things on earth if you wanted.

So far, you hadn’t looked in on your parents or Isabella because you thought it would make you sad. So, you went to see yourself instead, the watery images coming to you when you closed your eyes, like peering through a slightly mottled mirror.

You were still lying face up. He had covered you with dirt, but barely. No one came out here but to hunt, and it wasn’t deer season yet. Your lips were gone, and that was the part that perhaps scared you the most, more so than your eyes or other fleshy bits. Without your lips, you looked old. Without your lips, your teeth, slightly crooked, which still bothered you even though you had better things to worry about at that point, were exposed for all to see. One of them was chipped, which was new. It must have happened during that night. You must have swallowed it.

You wondered what your Mama would do when they found your body. Perhaps if. When Abuela had died, Mama yelled at your dad when he even suggested cremation. They were still together then. Over her shoulder, the clock on the kitchen wall had ticked loudly, slightly crooked. It fell into one of the angles of the crucifix nailed below, giving the illusion that the splintered wooden cross held it up.

You couldn’t imagine your Mama letting them bury you like this. At least you hoped she wouldn’t. You didn’t want anyone to see you like that. But at the rate it was going, you wouldn’t have to worry about that for a while. She didn’t even know you were dead.

 

The community pool was nothing special, a lap pool with two diving boards on one end and a snack shack in a corner of the cement lot. But in the summers, it was the only place to be if you were in high school with even a grain of a social life. You and Isabella always claimed chairs near the boards, which had prime views of anybody taking the plunge. Sometimes Isabella would take a turn, but not you. You never went off the high dive. It felt too high, too precarious, and you always had the sneaking image of the water turning to concrete beneath you as you fell, a splat instead of a splash. You preferred to watch instead.

“You’re late.” Isabella didn’t look up from her phone, oversized sunglasses perched on her head. You knew she wasn’t mad, though. She’d saved your chair with a towel.

“My apologies,” you said with mock formality. You peeled your tank top over your head, unbuttoned your shorts. “What did I miss?”

From across the pool, you could feel Mr. Gregson’s eyes on you. He had been the sole operator of the snack shack for as long as you could remember, and he’d never been shy about looking just a little too long at girls’ chests, just a little too hungrily. Sometimes you and Isabella joked about flirting with him for free food, but you never actually did.

Isabella adjusted her top, blue with frills, definitely a push-up even though she claimed otherwise. Her nail polish was chipped. “There’s a Barn Party tonight, did you hear?”

Barn Parties were notorious, though not true to name. They took place not in a barn but in a fallow field about a half-hour west. There used to be a barn there a long time ago, and the name stuck long after it rotted. Current high schoolers and graduates alike went to those parties, and they were said to get wild. One of your homeroom friends went last month, and she said there were college boys there. You had never been. Neither had Isabella.

“I didn’t know.”

“We’re going, right?” She swung her legs over the side of the chaise, leaned over. “It’s probably the last one of the summer. Jason said he could give us a ride.”

Her brother was a few years older than Isabella and you. He’d always been friendly enough, if kind of awkward.

“Are we going to know anybody there?” you asked.

Isabella nodded a little too hard, her sunglasses slipping from their spot on her head. “We’re almost sophomores; anybody who is anybody starts going now. If we want to meet people, this is the way.”

She looked at you expectantly. You looked over at Mr. Gregson. He was looking at one of the lifeguards, her hip cocked, whistle in her mouth.

You turned back to Isabella. “Barn Party, here we come.”

 

After you’d been dead for about three weeks, the police still weren’t looking for you.  Your parents had been worried. Very worried, in fact. When you hadn’t shown up at the party, Isabella had tried calling you, but you didn’t answer. The next morning, she went to your house. Mama ran up the stairs before Isabella finished speaking, throwing open your empty bedroom door. She called your dad. Then, she called the police.

They told her that, in all likelihood, you had run away and would show up again soon, either back home or at your Dad’s, and that they should just be patient. In any case, they had to wait forty-eight hours to file a missing person’s report. As soon as the time allowed, your parents filed a report. Nothing came from it.

There were over a hundred missed calls on your phone. You didn’t know where he put it.

If you had enough energy, you could stir up interest in your case from the dead. It was called giving a nudge. You could target anyone, parents or detectives or reporters, to renew interest in the case. The more energy you had, the more nudges you could give your investigation, but you got all your energy from the effort being put into your case. A snake eating its own tail. At the moment, the police just considered you a runaway. You wanted them to care.

Everyone said that a girl named Caroline was the best person to talk to if you wanted guidance on how to give a nudge. Considering she, too, was still in the “dead, not presumed dead” room, you wondered how helpful she could actually be, but Trina swore by her. Apparently, two of the girls she had guided got their cases featured on podcasts, so she sounded reliable enough to you. Elizabeth also offered you opinions because, you know, she was on so many TV shows, but you didn’t want her advice.

You sat down with Caroline. She looked pretty enough; occasionally, she would glitch, and you caught a glimpse of a nasty hole in her head, but she seemed to keep it under control pretty well. Someone told you that her boyfriend killed her. He was older.

You told her you wanted to know how to get the police to look into your case.

Were you a cheerleader?

No.

What about an animal lover?

Not particularly.

She pouted a bit. Did you ever win a science fair or something? Anything to stand out?

I was pretty average, I guess. I didn’t like school that much. What you didn’t say is that you sometimes did run away, though just for a day or so at a time, jumping from one parent’s house to the next. What you didn’t say is that you occasionally smoked with some older kids behind the 7-Eleven, but when they offered you anything harder than weed, you refused. What you didn’t say is that sometimes you were tempted by the harder drugs.

Did that matter now?

Well, what about your parents? She crossed her skinny arms. Are they rich or important or anything like that?

Not really. They’re split up. My dad lives in Rockford now. You realized that she probably didn’t know anything about Rockford, but your tone of voice got the point across that it sucked.

 I don’t think I can help you right now. She shrugged. Maybe just wait and see if your mom or dad can get them going. I’d save your energy for when your case really gets underway.

Anger felt the same dead as alive. So, you’re saying I should do nothing?

What I’m saying is that you don’t exactly look like a Miss Teen USA, and there aren’t any photos of you smiling with a piglet in 4H club. Caroline looked down at her hands as if to pick at a nail. You realized, then, that she didn’t have any.

Look, she tried again, softer this time. Have you ever seen a crime show? The richer, the whiter, the weirder your disappearance is, the more people care, and we’re both out of luck in those departments. I wouldn’t waste energy trying to get the police to reconsider your case.

Then what do I do?

They’ll think you’re a runaway until they find your body. She looked back up to you, cocked her head. I hope he didn’t hide it too well.

 

You learned that even if there wasn’t sex, there was always sex. It was just disguised as stabbing or choking or burning.

Saint Maria encouraged you to keep checking in on your loved ones. It helps you feel more connected, she said. It was easy to see the people you loved in life; it required little energy. If you had enough juice, you could even check in on him. See what he was doing now. Where he was. What he had done with your things. You weren’t sure if you wanted to. But you kept returning to your body, watching yourself wither and wilt and melt and be devoured. Turn to dirt. To bone.

Why were you in his car? Where were you going? Why him?

Why you?

 

The fight had been about something stupid. It always was. When Dad still lived with you, he’d always say that you and Mama were his “two strong-willed women,” though you didn’t know if that was what you would call your frequent arguments. Little ones that spilled and roiled and sharpened into screaming. This one might have started when you remembered that you were supposed to drop off a new year enrollment form at the school that afternoon. You’d forgotten.

In any case, there was no way in hell that Mama was allowing you to go to that party, but as you slammed the door to your room, you knew that wasn’t going to stop you. She went to bed early, she was eternally tired, and in the morning, you two would act like nothing had happened as you always did. She would kiss you on the cheek on the way out the door, her scrubs always immaculately pressed.

The house was old, creaked when the wind blew, or when it rained, or the sun shone. But if you stepped just so, foot by foot along the far edges of the hallway, arms spread wide to support yourself, you could minimize the creaking. Make it down the stairs, out the door. It wasn’t the first time. You knew she had gone to sleep once the TV in her room turned off, but that night it was taking longer than usual. You checked your phone. Isabella had sent you four texts, variations of, “Where are you?” You were supposed to meet her at her house a half-hour ago.

Finally, you heard the low hum of the news fade away, a light snoring soon after. You made your break. Outside, the night air was crisper, wetter than it had seemed possible during the day. You made your way quickly down the quiet street, tennis shoes making a light, rubbery thunk with every step. The streetlights look like melted sunlight on the pavement.

 

When North High started again, Isabella put up missing flyers around school. The bulletin boards, doors, the light posts outside. Bring Gracie Home. She’d chosen one of your favorite photos. She had taken it during the school trip into the city, on the deck of one of the architectural tour riverboats, your hair slightly wild around you, the background a mixture of water and glittering steel. Mama loved that photo, too.

In those first couple of days, the attention your posters got did increase your energy level. You could feel it, a hum of electricity under your skin that wasn’t really skin. You wondered what your classmates were thinking about you or if they thought of you at all once they turned away from the posters. If they thought you ran away. If they even knew who you were – most did not. The missing sophomore, that girl, Graciela, Gracie. You were more popular now than you had ever been. People parted the halls when Isabella walked past. It was the attention you’d always wanted. This isn’t how you wanted it.

But despite the attention, the weeks turned into months and then several. Your parents kept appealing to the police, but not much came of it. Isabella had talked to them too, showing them your last texts from that night, which they thanked her for. You felt even more buzzing after that, but still, no leads. The longer you were in the “dead, not presumed dead” room, the more the skeletonized girls scared you; you didn’t want to become like them, disjointed wrists and elbows and knees, pits where eyes should be. A visual reminder of how little you were worth. Since Caroline wasn’t any help to you, you and Trina hatched a new plan.

As much as it pained you, you had to give Elizabeth some credit. You overheard her talking to another newcomer who hadn’t yet learned to turn away fast enough. She was going on about her movies, her shows, did you know there are internet sleuths now? And that’s when it came to you.

It didn’t take as much energy to nudge Isabella because she did love you. She was always on her phone, during classes, at lunch, and you knew if anyone could start a social media campaign, it would be her. You found Caroline again, and this time you asked her how to actually give a nudge. Your conversation was much more helpful this time around, now that she wasn’t reminding you how little people cared about you being dead. After your last meeting, you had wondered if it was possible to dye your hair post-mortem.

To give a nudge, Caroline explained, you just have to concentrate really hard on that person. Once you can see them, imagine that you’re speaking to them. Whatever you have to say will pop into their mind like their own thoughts.

You sat back. That’s it? You imagined something a little more complicated than that. It was pretty much the same as checking in on someone, only this time you spoke.

Yeah, that’s it.

Then, thanks, I guess.

You retreated further into the room, trying to find a quiet spot to concentrate. Two skeletonized girls who always kept to themselves waved at you as you passed. You called them Bones One and Bones Two. You were happy they had each other.

Once you had settled, you focused in on Isabella, sitting at her desk at home, her room still as pink as ever. Her assignment notebook was open with nothing checked off. You always joked that she liked writing her lists but never finishing them. Then, like Caroline suggested, you pretended you were talking to her. It felt weird speaking to someone when you were utterly dead and they were still alive, but you tried. You couldn’t tell if she heard any of it, if your nudge was working. But you felt like you were slowly deflating, your non-breath getting harder and harder, and you realized that you didn’t have enough energy to keep nudging. You stopped.

Trina asked you how it went. She was contemplating nudging her mother.

I don’t know yet. You hadn’t realized how wane Trina was getting. She looked almost translucent. I guess we’ll see.

 

You vaguely recognized him when he rolled down the window. Jason was getting annoyed about having to wait, and he didn’t want to pick you up because your house was in the exact opposite direction of the party. Isabella said he was close to leaving without you. You were walking as fast as you could, bordering on jogging, when he pulled up beside you.

“Hey, you go to North High, right?”

You kept walking, not looking over, thinking if you didn’t, he would eventually go away.

“Gracie. Gracie, right?”

The sound of your name drew your attention. When you looked at him again, closer this time, you realized you did recognize him. Someone’s cousin? You thought you smoked with him once or twice. He was older than you, early twenties maybe. He’d hand-rolled the joints and hadn’t made you pay for yours.

“Oh, hey,” you said. You stopped walking.

“Where are you headed in such a rush?” Some low-volume indie crap was coming from his speakers.

“The Barn Party tonight.”

“Oh, no way, I’m headed there myself.” He paused, then, “You need a ride?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“You sure?”

You looked down at your phone. Jason wasn’t going to wait for you, Isabella had texted. She was going to go with him. You didn’t know anyone else you could ask for a ride from.

“Actually, if you don’t mind.”

“Hop in.” He leaned over the passenger seat and popped the door open.

Your jean skirt was uncomfortably short when you sat down; the fabric of the passenger irritated the backs of your thighs. It felt slightly crusty. You hugged your flannel closer to your chest.

He flipped open a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth, offering you the pack with a lazy flick of his wrist across the console. You took one. Then you texted Isabella. “I found a ride.”

 

When you met with Maria again, she asked if you had put more thought into your murder. A sprig of forget-me-nots sat in a small glass bottle on her desk. You wondered if you grabbed it, would it feel like anything at all? You had a sudden craving for an Arizona iced tea.

Why does it matter so much if I remember it?

Why do you think I want you to remember? the old woman countered.

Her answer was so much like a teacher’s that you rolled your eyes, sparking a sudden funny feeling of your mother scolding you for disrespecting a saint. She probably would’ve melted on the spot.

I don’t know. Because it will somehow help.

Maria gave you a small smile, unfazed. The longer a case is open, the more narratives people create.

You looked down at your hands. You were having a good day; they looked whole.

If you know the truth of your case, no one can tell you differently. You don’t need anyone else’s version of what happened.

No one else has a version of what happened. No one has any clue at all.

When you looked back up, the child saint sat in front of you. Her feet didn’t touch the ground from where she sat on her chair. Just because they don’t have a clue what happened, doesn’t mean they don’t think they do.

You let your impulse get the better of you, and you reached for the bottle. It did feel remarkably like glass.

The old woman returned. Just think about it.

 

He wasn’t super weird at first. You hadn’t talked about much of anything, a few teachers that were still teaching back from when he went to North High, mostly. You confirmed that Mrs. Priestley, the European history teacher, was indeed “a real ballbuster.”

“You ever been to a Barn Party before?” he asked at one point.

“No, first one.”

“Got it, got it.” He tapped the steering wheel slightly offbeat to the music.

You wouldn’t say the ride was pleasant, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, either. You felt like it could’ve been worse. Then you felt his hand on your thigh.

You jerked your legs toward the door. “What are you doing?”

He laughed, but it sounded forced. “My bad, my bad. I was reaching for the CD on the floor by your feet. Can you grab it?”

You bent slightly and patted your hand around on the dirty floor mat, making sure to keep your face turned towards him. The carpet was slightly sticky near the console. You handed him the CD.

“Thanks.”

He put the CD in, even though the old one was only on track four. You tried to keep the conversation light. Your heart felt stiff in your chest. There was a crumpled paper birthday card laying on the passenger seat floor, crayon smiley faces leering up at you. “Who’s that from?”

“Kid sister.” Then he grabbed one of your upper arms, crossed over your chest, and rubbed his thumb over it. “What is this, flannel?”

“Don’t touch me!” Your voice came out higher than you intended. The car started to feel like it was shrinking around you, being crushed by one of those car compactors.

“All right, all right. Relax, would you? I’m not a creep.”

When he finally turned off the road, you were relieved. You shot Isabella a text saying you made it, but it didn’t go through. The service wasn’t good out here.

He parked in a small clearing, but there were no other cars. There was no music, even though you heard that the cops often busted the parties because of noise complaints. There were no other people.

“You said you would take me to the Barn Party.”

“It’s right up the road.” He turned the car off. The doors were still locked.

 

There was a news crew in front of your school. Isabella and your parents were holding pictures of you, some of the missing posters they had put up. In the background, other students cried for the camera.

Your parents didn’t fight anymore. They were just sad.

The scene was easy to see. You could feel the energy of all their thoughts buzzing. It was the most alive you’d felt since you’d been dead.

The crew focused on Mama’s tear-filled eyes. “My daughter has been missing since August 10th, and the police have done nothing but file a report. Please help us find Gracie.”

The reporter turned to Isabella. You could tell she’d curled her hair, put on the sparkly pink lip gloss you’d always borrowed from her. “Now, you’re Gracie’s friend who started the campaign, ‘Bring Gracie Home,’ the Facebook page that’s been shared more than forty-thousand times since you created it, asking people for any information they may have. How does it feel to think that you’ve done more investigating than local authorities?”

“I know Gracie didn’t run away. She was on her way to meet me when she disappeared.” Isabella was holding a photo taken earlier in the summer, the two of us sitting on her patio, cups of lemonade on the side table. “She said she had found a ride, but she never showed up.”

The reporter turned back to the cameras. “The police declined our request for comment, citing the ongoing investigation.”

After the interview with Isabella and your parents, the reporter stuck her microphone into your classmates’ faces.

“We were in summer school together. I always asked her for help on the homework, and she was super good at explaining it,” Ben Colson said.

“In fourth grade, she said she wanted to be a zookeeper when she grew up,” Hema Patel commented. “For some reason, that’s always stuck with me.”

Even Amy Cunningham, the girl who made fun of your legs in middle school gym class because Mama wouldn’t let you shave, had something to say. She had a tear roll down her perfect face as she talked. “We’ve been in school together since we were toddlers. It’s just so crazy to think something like this could happen.”

In a way, it was sweet. All these people, who you were never really friends with, had at least always registered that you were around. You had some sort of presence in homeroom or algebra or study hall. But the part you focused on was the fact you’d be remembered on national TV for wanting to shovel elephant shit for a living.

You thought about visiting your body again, imagining all this attention reanimating your limbs, imagined crawling out of the ground to dust yourself off, walking the long road home. But you knew that in reality, you were still laying there, perhaps a little scattered now; scraps of your flannel woven into birds’ nests like prayer flags, signaling X marks the grisly spot.

 

Do all the rooms look like this? you asked Trina.

Being disappeared opened a cavernous waiting game. You were not dead in the eyes of the world, of your family, just in your own little bubble. You were at the finish line, waiting for the others to catch up or to finally acknowledge you crossed the threshold. The sense of perpetual, purgatorial limbo was echoed by where they were, an empty room with empty girls, scant furniture that no one needed. The idea that this stretched on forever, over and over and over again until… Until what? You hoped the next room would look different if you ever got there.

I don’t know. Elizabeth will, she goes in them all the time. Trina’s mother and her boyfriend moved out of the house where her body was. She didn’t have a lot of energy to keep up appearances anymore. You made a point not to look at her neck; you knew she was embarrassed.

Why can she do that? You thought about Elizabeth, tripping through walls and over girls.

Because too many people are, like, obsessed with her death. It’s too much.

People loved a dead girl. People loved a beautiful dead girl even more.

Did you know that they gave her a new name after she was murdered? Most people don’t even know that her real name is Elizabeth.

What do they call her?

The Black Dahlia.

Oh. You had heard of her, then. Not that you would let her know that.

It’s kind of sad. That has to do something to your head, don’t you think?

You wanted people to care about you. You’d felt pretty good ever since Isabella had made the Facebook page and since your parents had been on the news. People were interested in what had happened to you. But what would happen if people theorized and obsessed and fetishized for years? How could those narratives not cloud your head, make you drunk, make your murder not yours anymore?

Whose story was it then?

 

You’d sworn to yourself that you weren’t going to check in on him, that he wasn’t worth straining your energy to see. If you were honest, you were scared to see him. But your campaign was picking up traction, your parents’ interview had been on the news last week, and you wanted to see what he was doing. You wanted to know if he was squirming. If he was scared.

When you focused in on him, he was in what you assumed was his living room, the TV turned to some game show, pillows and cans and plastic cups sprinkled around the floor. He was sitting next to a young girl on the couch, a light-yellow cap on her head. She had no eyebrows. There was an orange pill bottle on the side table. His face, which you never really had a great look at, was pale and scraggly, ingrown hairs on his chin forming angry red bumps. You still didn’t remember whose cousin he was. He was drinking a beer.

Yesterday’s newspaper was rolled up in the trash can, turned to a page with big block letters. “Local Girl Still Missing.”

 

“My little sister is sick. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My girlfriend left me. She couldn’t take it.”

“Please let me out.” You could feel your eyes fill with tears, despite your attempt to keep them back. You knew he hadn’t taken you to the Barn Party. The nervous energy around him choked you; he wouldn’t look you in the eye. This time when he grabbed your thigh, he leaned over the console, too, and kissed you. You let him. It was sour, but you couldn’t tell if it was him or the taste of your own fear. You wondered if he could feel your heart smashing into your rib cage, into his.

“I just want to talk,” he breathed in your ear when he pulled away.

“Can we talk outside?” you asked. You sat as still as possible, the passenger side door digging into your shoulder blade. The cigarette you had was no longer in your hand.

“You’re going to leave.”

“I won’t, I promise. I just need air. It’s stuffy in here.”

He looked at you then, so sadly that you almost felt bad for him, before he leaned back into his seat. “Okay.” He took the keys out of the ignition, unlocked only his door. He walked around the car and opened the passenger side, offering you his hand as if it were a date. You took it.

He put his mouth on yours again. You tried to push him, but he was surprisingly strong, and you were saying no, and his hands were under your skirt, and then your underwear, and his breath was shuddering in your ear as he pinned you to the car. “Please,” he said. “Please, please,” his pleading mirrored your own. The heat of unspilled tears gathered in your eyes as you went limp. You imagined you felt as TV static did, crackling but immobile.

As he reached down to unzip his pants, you knew that it was time to go. To run. Eyes, nose, underarms, groin – that’s what they’d told you in health class. As he looked down, you swiped at his face, raised your knee as fast as you could, and as he stumbled back the few paces you needed, you ran for the trees. You didn’t think to scream.

There were no lights ahead and no way to know where you were, but at the moment that didn’t matter to you so much. Yesterday’s rain had made everything muddy, and you realized too late that one of your shoelaces was untied. When you fell, your face collided with a protruding root, a thwacking sound that reverberated around your brain. The taste of iron bloomed in your mouth.

You could hear him behind you as you tried to turn over. You were crying now. There was mud in your eyes, caked in your lashes. He was repeating, “I’m going to be in so much trouble.” She could hear him crying too.

“I’m not going to tell anyone. I promise. Please.”

He didn’t believe you.

 

Around the time the police finally sat down with your parents to open a formal investigation, Trina left the room. The couple who had moved into her mom’s old house had been shocked to discover the skeleton of a twelve-year-old girl in the spot where they wanted to build an in-ground pool. Her stepfather was arrested quickly, at least in terms of the afterlife. You didn’t know where she was now. You didn’t get to say goodbye.

Where do we go at the end of all of this? you asked Maria, remembering your conversation with Trina all that time ago. You imagined her there, at the end. You wished her there.

That is not something I can tell you. You can only find out on your own.

And you can’t tell me where Trina is?

No.

It didn’t seem to you that she could tell you much of anything besides to figure things out by yourself.

You’ve remembered your murder.

Yes.

On her desk, the forget-me-nots seemed to glow, illuminate, botanic neon signs that yelled, Look at me, look at me! Like a small galaxy.

And how do you feel?

Pretty bad. Whenever you cried, Dad would bring you a glass of water to calm you down. The coolness was soothing. Take a deep breath, he would say. Your nose pricked and you knew that meant you were about to cry, which apparently you could still do in the afterlife. You wished you had a drink.

Maria didn’t say anything else, just peered at you with her old woman face.

It just feels so stupid, you continued, trying to push down the choking sensation in your throat. Like, what was the point of that?

The point of what?

Me dying. It came out a squeak, the tears you finally spilled constricting your voice.  I died going to a dumb party.  I got in the car with someone I didn’t know, and he killed me, and that’s just it. It makes everything leading up to it feel pointless too.

Do you really think your life was pointless?

You thought about Isabella, your parents, who would keep being your parents even though they didn’t get to have a child anymore. You shrugged. I guess not pointless. But you couldn’t say what it was.

Despite what people may claim, there often is no point in killing. It’s a coward’s phrase of justification. She pushed a glass of water across the desk towards you. You didn’t see where it came from. But it does not make you pointless, too.

She let you sit in silence, gratefully sipping. It was a foreign action now. You worried it would spill down your chin if you didn’t concentrate. As you sat, sipping, concentrating, staring at the flowers that looked like stars, you remembered your very last night sky. The word that came to mind, again, was inconsequential. You decided it was not that, either.

 

The woods he buried you in didn’t get many visitors. The orange of the hunter’s hat splashed violently against the muted backdrop of dead leaves and early morning frost; his footsteps, a light crunch, might as well have been a gunshot. His breath made specters in the air.

The doe he was tracking couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards away from him when he stepped on an unusually smooth branch. His foot rolled over it, causing him to stumble. He knew the doe had heard him. He only really looked at the branch as he kicked it, noticing it was just a little too white, a little too round.

When the police descended, they sent a flock of cedar waxwings into flight, their whistling like a serenade.

You followed Saint Maria into the hallway, expecting to turn into her office to talk. But she brushed past it, walking further down the hall, yawning like a mouth before her.

Where are we going?

Maria reached another door, opened it. Full of girls. New girls.

Full of girls everyone knew were dead.