“Hello Sparrow”

A fifty page selection from my new novel:

One

She calls these the almost days, when it is not summer or fall, not winter or spring, but all of them developing like one of her Polaroids, where you are not quite sure what you’ll see, when you have to wait for what will appear. She says these days are bad for my bones. She tells me, “Stay inside, away from the river. The damp will get you.” But I am good at sneaking out. I find things on these days. I found a crow wing as big as my arm one day last March. I found a baby shoe half buried in the mud near the river. I found a folded piece of paper, notes from some class at the college about the origin of square dancing and then at the bottom someone had written, “Jason Reynolds is a Fucking Cocksucker” and under that someone else had written, “Girl, he does NOT deserve you AT ALL.”

I brought each one home to her. She would only look away, tell me in that tangled voice, “I should have just thrown you away when I had the chance, you know.” But then her face would turn smooth as glass and she would look out the window and say, “It is better here Mayka, I don’t hear them so much.” And she would go quiet, her eyes tracking across the sky, running past me to places I could not follow.

The air wakes me. It smells of loneliness, like sweaters left to rot in attic trunks. I know it will rain, my bones are talismans, they sing with it. I need to get out of the house, to the shelter of trees and river before it starts. It is too hard to walk in the rain. It hurts me. I call for Aika but she ignores me as usual. When she doesn’t come, I can only use my slip-ons, which are not as comfortable as my boots. I curse her, dumb cow, which I’m forced to do pretty much every day. I wrestle into the red coat I like best, though it is not the warmest, and start down the hall. Leda’s door is open and as I pass, I can see her sitting on the window ledge, smoking a cigarette, the ashes grown long in her raised hand, the ribs of her naked back desperate as any animal’s. Without turning my mother says, “May, I made eggs, they’re on the table.” She has not slept. Her voice rustles like dead leaves. In the kitchen, the eggs are grey and glutinous, hours old. I give them a wide berth. Outside the sky reaches its cold fingers down toward me, straining to break itself open. I head down the slope of tangled yard. The river is high this year, loud enough to hear from the house. When it is like this it drowns the sounds of crying and silences the girl with the black hair and then Leda is calm. I reach the trees and disappear. There is the path.

It is one of the first projects of Papa’s. He made a path down to the bank and was going to connect it all the way to the town road but never finished. There’s only about a hundred feet and it’s edged with odds and ends. Mostly he used old bottles and dishes but I added the baby shoe and an old award of Lev’s in the shape of a brick. I work on the path as much as possible, with a spade and my good hand. I have cleared a few feet past the property line of the house now.

I tire quickly, can feel the sky fall, the fog wind itself around me until the ache creeps up my back, the weight of it in my lunatic bones. I decide not to cross the river, cut through the dwarf apple trees instead and over to the cave, which isn’t really a cave but a flat rock large enough to stretch out on, etched right into the bank and shielded from view by willow branches. I like to lie there with my cheek on the smooth rock, eyelevel with the water, watching the silver minnows circle the side depths. I watch their see–through skin, their fragile bones, the pumping of their miniscule hearts. We are the same, the minnows and me.

The rain becomes a single streaked windowpane above the river. It makes me sleepy, the sound of water upon water, the sulfur smell of mud splashing up from the bank. It is cold pushed back against the rock but I keep myself from shivering, knowing how dangerous it is, how little it takes to break me.

Suddenly I see her. I am thinking about the cow skull I found in the orchard, how I will get it home and where I will put it.  And then a brightness catches my eye, like a penny in the sun, and I lift myself up on one elbow. It is moving fast, cutting through the water like a bronzed salmon and I reach out, plunging my hand into the cold of the creek, feeling my fingers tangle in something slick. It pulls me, forces me to let go. I realize it is hair, yellow hair, and I recognize the pale blur of her face. I struggle to sit up but when I look back, she is gone.

Without her, my mother’s room smells only of smoke and the abandoned wine in her coffee cup. Aika keeps patting my knee, saying that Leda had just gone to town and that I am a stupid girl to imagine such bad things, but that it wasn’t my fault, after all what did anyone expect. She keeps repeating it, her Russian slurring, her ancient face as shiny and wooden as the pictures of orthodox saints she keeps in her room. When she falls silent, we sit there, not looking at each other. Finally, she leaves me, goes down to the kitchen. In my mind I see my mother’s open eyes, see the rain falling into them as indifferently as into the water around her. But I didn’t see that. Couldn’t have. The phone interrupts with its shrill scream. I can hear Aika’s voice, though she is trying to be quiet. I struggle to the bureau, my bones stiff and crackling, and manage to open the top drawer. Inside is a cedar box that has always held a photograph of the first brother and Leda’s wedding ring. I know the box is empty before I open it, but I open it anyway and sit there holding it until Aika comes and takes it from me. She tells me that they have found the car abandoned along the side of the road up near the Gregory Bridge. I say nothing. I concentrate on the way she is wringing her old peasant hands together, as if trying to warm them, the rosary wrapped around them like a bandage. She says it is bad, that she should call Lev. I nod, seeing my brother’s golden head in my mind, a beacon, a lantern. My better, brighter half.

And all I can think is, well he has to come home now.

* * *

Lev told Finn about his mother on the day Leda died. He told her of his sister the day after that. She remembered the sun was coming through the kitchen window, that it was six o’clock in the evening and the light had turned golden how it does in that too-bright city. A reprieve. A surrender. Finn had cut herself slicing potatoes and was holding a paper towel against her thumb, watching the pattern the blood made, the red flower on its snowy background. Lev came up the back steps and into the kitchen, slowly, a ship lolling.

“I cut myself,” and the words themselves seemed to push him back onto his heels. “I cut myself, look.” She held her thumb up to him.

Lev stared dully at her poised hand and then twisted behind him, reaching for something in his back pocket. Then, as if he thought better of it, he brought his hand up empty, rubbed at the grease-smeared knuckles of his other hand instead.

Finn could smell the liquor on him. She moved forward carefully, lifting her injured hand toward his face. “Look.”

“My mother died this morning.” The words were an anchor falling, catching Finn up short, the familiar timbre of his voice seeming to echo in that small kitchen.

Her hand hovered there between them, abandoned. “What?”

“Aika found me at work. It was so strange hearing her voice. I could hardly understand her, that’s how long it’s been…” He trailed off, scrubbed at his hand more vigorously. There was a healing cut there, a neat even gouge that Finn hadn’t noticed before. “Of course, you wouldn’t know her. Anyway, there’s this call ten minutes after I get to work, and she says that she had some very important and terrible news to tell me, and I say ‘okay sure’ thinking that she is one bat shit crazy old babushka, thinking about how I can get her off the goddamn phone before Elvis finds me taking a personal call at work. That’s all I need right?” Lev ran a hand through his pale hair. “And then she says, ‘Levka, your mother threw herself into the river and they have not found her body, but she is most probably dead.’’” His voice took on the “little old Russian lady” act and he pantomimed how he did whenever he gave advice. And then he laughed shrilly. Finn noticed the strip of skin behind his ear, exposed from his recent haircut, pale. He kept rocking back and forth, from toes to heels, his hands shoved deep in his pants pockets  She studied the grease stains at his knees, remembered how she used to work so hard to get them out. Holding the paper towel to her hand, Finn could feel the blood seeping through, the wide, throbbing pain of the cut. “Are you joking?” she asked too harshly. She lowered her voice, “Because that is not something to joke about.”

He shrugged.

“Your mother died when you were six. Of cancer.” Finn felt the room tilt slightly, like in one of those old carnival funhouses. She thought of the stories he had told her, terse and skeletal descriptions of hospital wards and chemotherapy. She assumed it had been too painful for him to talk about at length.

Lev laughed again, a quick and ugly bark, and looked at the ceiling. There was no humor in that laugh. “Yeah, well you know, I didn’t really want to get you involved in all this shit.” He squeezed his eyes shut on the word shit, as if it were a word he had said every second, all day, a word he was sick to death of saying.

“What shit? What are you talking about?” Finn traded the paper towel for a kitchen rag, watched Lev pitch heavily to one side, his hip coming to rest against the counter. “What about your father, did he really not die either?” she asked, the dead weight in her belly beginning to spread outward through her body, toward her heart.

Lev stood straighter and smiled as if it hurt to do so. “No, he‘s really dead. He really died.” He reached up and touched the counter where she had been cutting. He puzzled over the smear of blood and starch on his finger and then rubbed it against the leg of his pants.

Finn reached out with the kitchen rag too late. She pulled her arm back and watched him. Lev’s face was grey and she could see tiny blue veins on his eyelids. His face seemed suddenly too thin, the bones pushing out sharply against his skin and Finn thought how strange it was that he could look so foreign to her, so deflated, somehow. She had the vague urge to walk silently out the back door then, away from him, to go walk down to the river or along the railroad tracks, to come back later when the house was dark and cool, to be one of those people with the luxury of pretending that everything would be fine. The kitchen felt too small but she couldn’t move, just pressed the towel harder against her thumb.

“We have to go there,” Lev said, opening his eyes and focusing on her for the first time.

“Go where?”

“We have to go home. Aika said they were having a memorial even though there’s no body,” Lev ran a hand across his face.

“I’m sorry.” Finn looked past him, out the window, letting the late sun blind her. She saw the patch of yard, the leaves of the crabapple tree withered and brown, clinging to their branches as if afraid to fall. There were voices in the alley behind the yard, two kids arguing. She heard Mrs. Trujillo yell out her window, heard the kids whoop and then their footfalls. There was a blur of red through the gate.

There was something she couldn’t grasp; it wound itself around her mind, thick as a blanket. Her face was too warm. She turned and saw just his silhouette, the dark outline of his stooped shoulder. She moved to the counter across from him, out of the sun, and there was his face again, familiar now. The face she knew. She tried to imagine what she looked like, the woman who was his mother, the woman he had hid from her. She wondered whether Lev looked like her. “We have to go?” She wasn’t sure if she said it aloud.

“Please.” Lev looked straight at her. For a moment, she saw something quick and sharp in his eyes, which turned to relief the moment she agreed to go home with him.

They took the train. Lev paced the platform, scanning the grey sky whose expanse, he said once, would always make him nervous. They had gotten last-minute tickets on a train called the Mountain Spirit, which specialized in narrated journeys across the Rockies, to Sacramento and back. This particular journey, the representative had told Finn over the phone, was being catered to “Golden Citizens,” and unless they were sixty-five or older they were, unfortunately, asked not to book tickets on the Mountain Spirit. Finn lied their way on board. Now, leaning against the cool glass wall of the station, she watched chattering groups of grandmothers in matching satin jackets, the backs of which read “Bloomington Ladies Pinochle” in embroidered gold glitter. Their perms flew about in the strong wind and they leaned into it steady as bowsprits, their arms linked fiercely, oblivious.

“What the hell are all these old people doing here?” Lev muttered, scanning the women as he came over to her. Finn shrugged, moving away from the smoke smell of him. “So the plan is, hey—are you listening?”

She nodded, caught the smell of manure suddenly in the air, from the farming towns to the north—the sure prelude to snow. First snow of the year, she thought, pulling the ragged sleeves of her sweater down around her fists.

“So Aika will come down to Sacramento and drive us up—it’s a pain to take the local busses and I think she’ll be alright for that one day.”

“Who’ll be alright?” Finn asked. The wind had blown Lev’s hair across his forehead and she had to stop herself from reaching out to smooth it. He ducked his head anyway as if she had.

“My sister.”

Finn noticed the bird then, inside the depot. A sparrow. It hopped close to the automatic doors before skittering away when they opened. Skating up to the window it cocked its head at her and pecked the glass, once and then again with its beak. The sound of it seemed amplified, its strength surprising to Finn. “I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said, not looking away from the bird.

And so Lev told her about May.

Two

It was raining when the train arrived, so that it seemed to Finn that the city materialized around them out of the fog, as if they had traveled nowhere. ‘First rain of the season’ the luggage clerk had said with too much cheer as he handed over their suitcases. Finn looked out from under the depot roof at the cars maneuvering the clogged lanes before her. Same cars, same loud horns, same faces invisible behind slick windshields. As if she had left one place only to arrive back at the same place and everything in between just a dream. The two days on the train had left her feeling jumpy, as if she had spent it drinking cup after cup of coffee. She didn’t look at Lev when he took the suitcase from her hand. A cacophony of car horns made her look left and she saw the woman pumping her arms back and forth, dressed in too tight blue running pants and a yellow slicker, her hair safe under a transparent plastic hood. She hardly seemed big enough to drive the red Volvo on whose hood she was half–perched.  Finn prodded Lev and he turned and waved. When she saw him, the woman made a high keening sound and hurried forward, oblivious to the traffic between them. A car honked and she made a spitting motion and waved it away with one hand. When she reached them, she grabbed Lev and held his head in her hands while she kissed both his cheeks.  She turned, looked Finn over and said something quickly that Finn couldn’t hear.

“Her mother’s people were Latvian,” Lev said to the woman in Russian, not looking at Finn. There was a thick pull of tension between them still, raw and dull with the lack of sleep, the confines of the train.

The woman gripped Finn’s hand tightly between her own.  They were smooth and brown as a nut, the palms etched wells that seemed formed around a lifetime’s worth of broom and skillet handles.  Finn wanted to say something in Russian, some form of greeting, but was too tired. Instead, she just let herself be herded toward the car, staring down at the woman’s dyed red hair, at the grey roots and pink scalp through the plastic hood.

Aika was silent the entire ride but for the constant sucking of teeth and the clicking of yellowed fingernails against each other as they rested on her immense bosom. When they reached New Leningrad, she broke the silence to point out places in town. She jerked her chin toward a squat adobe structure. “That was the first clinic. Lev got all the shots there. Peter did not like that guy, remember Levka?” she asked in careful English, her voice pitched low. Lev was silent, leaning far forward over the wheel as if he were lost.

“That is the good market…and the laundry that lost Leda’s coat, the one from her mother…my god, can you believe it… And the college where Peter worked, but you won’t see the buildings at all unless you walk there…” she tapped the glass, pointing as Lev maneuvered the car through town.

“That coat was ancient. Moth graveyard,” Lev said, his red-rimmed eyes scanning either side of the road.

Finn stared out at the town through the fogged glass of the window. He had told her so little of his childhood, she realized, and nothing of this town. It was surprisingly small. They had passed through the main street in a matter of minutes, just a few buildings and then a square with squat trees and men huddled over tables, their faces hidden by umbrellas and rain hoods. The car took a left and they began climbing. Hulking pines shielded either side of the road. Still she found it easy to think of him growing up here, isolated from everything, surrounded by forests. It was the geographical equivalent of that leaden reserve she so often came up against.

Lev turned again, onto a dirt road and it came at them slowly out of the rain, a pale apparition at the end of a long, gravel drive. Close up, the house was weathered wood, the remnants of a cheerful blue paint visible only in the gingerbread grooves of the trim. But it was a beautiful house anyway, compact and tall, like a ship. The whole thing swayed slightly, as if buffeted by waves. Lev parked under a high elm near the side of the house and before he could get out of the car, Aika put a hand on his arm and spoke to him in Russian. Finn continued to stare out the window. “Levka…maybe you should talk to the girl about May, because she has been not so good.” She said this out the side of her mouth.

“It’s fine.” Lev opened the door, “She’ll be okay.”

Finn didn’t know if he was talking about her or his sister.

He held the front door for her but she turned on the porch and looked out. The land sloped away around the house so that it seemed as if they were balancing on the top of a narrow apex, squeezed in and up by trees on all sides, the sky a sliver of charcoal resting on the pointed tops of cedars and pines. There was the static of nearby water, a rushing echo in her ears and it seemed as if the whole world were suddenly closing in on her. Finn backed up, her feet tripping heavily on the rough wood of the porch, and had to grab hold of the doorframe to keep from falling. Lev frowned at her and there was his hand, clammy on the back of her arm, pushing her forward into the house.

There was a gloomy entryway in front of her cool and thick, and an overwhelming smell, something she couldn’t quite place, a ubiquitous vegetative damp and under that, the smell of copper or blood, like pennies clutched in a dirty hand. It seemed to come from the plank floor, the papered walls, the molded ceilings with their deep corners.  Lev steered Finn left, through an arched entryway and then went back outside for their bags. Small and square, this front room was a domestic replica of the claustrophobic landscape surrounding the house. Drawing room was the name that sprung quaintly to mind. A window ran the length and height of the far wall but was covered over in a sheet of billowing cracked plastic, giving a curious amber light to a room that seemed not to want it, seemed to resent any light at all. It was an old maid of a room, a faded flower, all stiff furniture and threadbare upholstery. A fern had grown wild from its brass stand and spread across the window, clinging with dusty fingers to the plastic and to the gold drapes that sagged along either side.  Finn walked to it, her boots padded by ragged rugs, reached out and felt its feathery dryness beneath her hand, let it tickle her palm. She vaguely thought of watering it and then turned, saw that the other walls were weighed down by photographs, their mismatched frames butting up against each other, creating a sort of quilt against the strips of olive wallpaper. Every photograph seemed faded, bleached by time or distance, seemed to be of places that could not possibly exist. There were no photographs of Lev, she found quickly. They were, instead, all pictures of seemingly the same woman, a progression of age and time. In one, she was a young girl, standing with a long faced man in high–waist pants and suspenders. She was dressed in a too short jumper, her hair in pale braids that bent toward her hips. Though they were smiling, their lips pressed tightly together and the man’s hand seemed a claw around the girl’s shoulder.  Another, the girl older, her hair unbound, falling in diaphanous waves down her narrow back. She was looking over her left shoulder, as if someone had called her name and surprised her with the camera. There was a naked look in her eye and Finn turned away, unfathomably embarrassed.  Then several of the girl grown up, the face of a woman shifting, Finn saw, from raw and severe toward a kind of formlessness so that in the last photographs she was incapable of being captured by the lens. Even looking straight at her the woman appeared fuzzy, out of focus. Caught from above, looking straight up, her hair long and streaked with silver, she appeared to be gazing past the camera, somewhere very far away.

“Those are of my mother.” The voice broke through the weariness of the room, struggled with itself, as if unsure of its own ability to be heard. It took Finn a moment, even in that small room, to locate its owner. She noticed a certain luminescence first, coming from behind the door, a gypsy moth glow of fabric and pale skin. And then the dark hair sheathing off from the rest of the gloom, a shade darker. It was a girl, she saw all at once then, materializing out of the corner like a ship’s masthead through mist.

She stood frozen; an oversized porcelain doll in a high-collared yellowed lace dress, her lips and cheeks a consumptive red.  One arm was twisted behind her back as if she were trying to grab her opposite elbow. With the other, she clutched the top of the chair next to her. May. Finn had the thought then that it was the wrong month for her, that she should have been named January, the month of stillness and ice. The girl moved in a crablike shuffle until she met the wall where Finn stood. She nodded once with her small sharp chin at the photographs there.

“That one right in front of you, that’s the Volya Bridge. The architect threw himself into the river because everyone laughed at how he sculpted the lions.” She threw Finn a barbed glance. “It’s true.”

Finn shifted slightly toward her. “I didn’t know that. I’m Finn by the way–.”

May interrupted her. “Obviously,” she said her hoarse voice overburdened, too weak to hold the intended sarcasm. She pointed. “And that is my brother there, he died”.

Finn turned toward a picture of the woman standing on the end of a bridge, her hair short and wind whipped.  There was the dark block of her coat, the fur trim up high around her chin. In her arms was a swaddled infant, his face hidden by cloth and shadow. The woman’s face was one of deprivation, all cheekbones and taut skin, her mouth a slash of tense shadow.  “How did he die?”

The girl struggled toward Finn, her steps a physical murmur, her hand flat against the wall. Finn saw something of Lev in her face as she came closer, the same razor thin bones, the too-wide eyes, though May’s were so dark they seemed to suck the light from the room. The girl smiled, a grudging movement of her lips. “The one there, that’s her wedding day.”

Finn took in the uneven hair, the glazed eyes. She should feel something for this woman, she thought, who they had travelled so far for, but she felt nothing but an amorphous curiosity and a slight revulsion that she would paper the walls of a room with photographs of herself.

The man in the photograph had Lev’s pale hair and light eyes, his same sober countenance. “Is this your father?” She asked, tapping the glass.

“Don’t touch those. She wouldn’t like it,” May said.

Finn paused, her finger still above the photograph, but May had turned away.

“Those, there, next to the window, those are all Leda’s ballet pictures.  She was supposed to be famous. She was so good, like a feather dancing, her teachers told her that, and when she met him, they said be careful, and then they shrugged and said ‘see’ and they sighed.” The girl shrugged her shoulders and it seemed in that instant, a caricature of someone else, someone older. The light broke through the clouds and it came through the window dirty as patchwork, settling in planes across May’s face. It lit up the tiny shell of her ear, nudged at the purple smudges under her eyes. Finn suddenly saw that, though she was small as a child, she had a woman‘s face.  Faint lines ran across her forehead and down either side of her nose. She was very still, staring with her dark head tilted to one side, a curious bird. And then slowly she took her left hand off the wall and reaching behind her, pulled her other arm out to rest in front of her. Finn heard Lev at the station then, his explanations for what was wrong with this girl, set it out in front of her as a buffer between them. She kept her face blank, her hands by her sides. The long sleeves of May’s dress had been hacked off at the shoulder and her arm shot out crookedly and too white, as though it had been kept hidden somewhere. A bandage was wrapped tightly around the elbow, the skin bulging on either side, but in other places as well. Her arm looked like nothing so much as a tree branch, a curved willow branch with tiny buds growing here and there from it.  Her fingers curled, one toward her palm, one away from it, one bent at the tip, oddly. “I’m sure Lev told you, I’m very sick. Did he tell you?” She began moving, half dragging herself toward the center of the room, her good hand helping her left leg along. “He didn’t mention I was a freak?” She was smiling now, her doll lips pulled back to show tiny pearl teeth, perfect teeth, a vicious smile. Finn looked toward the door then, though she knew Lev wasn’t there.  She’s doing this on purpose, she realized suddenly, focusing on the snaking blue vein that pulsed across the girl’s temple. It’s a performance. A flash then in her mind, she’s standing next to her father watching a group of men whose black hair shines like oil in the sun, their faces obscured by bird masks. “The Going Home ceremony”, her father’s whispered voice says, covering her face with a blanket. “Don’t move.”   Now, going slowly, as though she were setting about approaching a wild horse, Finn said, “May, I’m so sorry about your mother. And I don’t think you’re a freak-”

“I am a freak though, Miss Nobody Cares Who You Are,” the girl whispered fiercely, “See?”  And she half turned to show Finn her back. It plunged to brittle looking points, as if her spine had been trying to sprout wings and failed. May darted out suddenly, grabbed Finn’s forearm with her twisted hand and though it was very weak, Finn felt a strange gripping strength in it. Her smile hard, May leaned her head in and said with all the saccharine sweetness of a beauty queen, “why did you come here? See I don’t want to pretend that I care about you at all, and I don’t want you looking at me like that.”

Finn stared down at the girl’s hand, saw the perfect seashell nails on those broken fingers. There was the smell of something grassy and sweet from May’s hair. “Like how?” She asked. She eased her arm out from under May’s grasp and the girl let her go.

“Like you maybe could help me, like you know just how it feels and knowing makes it somehow okay for you to be here. None of this has anything, at all, to do with you.” Finn felt the tightness of the long trip in her muscles, a spasm in her lower back. There was the sound of a door opening and Lev’s voice in the hall, calling his sister. May shook her head once and then dragged herself quickly out of the room without looking back.  Standing still in the middle of the room, Finn listened to the wave of their voices.  Lev’s was warmer than she had ever heard it, an effusive, affected cadence that was unpleasant. And though she was shocked by the aggressiveness of the girl, she was more shocked by her shy responses to her brother. As if he was a distant uncle or cousin who she held slightly in awe. Finn heard her own name, a murmured response, and a thin laugh from Lev. She felt her face flush. And then Lev was standing there beside the door, the look of the pompous elder still on his face. When he smiled at her she noticed, as if for the first time, his perfect small teeth and how sharp and white they seemed.

“You met May?” his voice was a broom sweeping any response quickly away.

Finn stared at his mouth. Had she never noticed his teeth in all this time? He patted her shoulder. “Good. I know she’s kind of hard to look at but you get used to it and then it’s like she’s perfectly fine.”

They walked back through a narrow hallway that gave out into a shotgun series of rooms. Lev ran one hand along the cracks in the plaster walls as they walked. He explained that a series of earthquakes had damaged the foundation, which was why the house swayed so badly. “We’re coming unmoored here,” he said, leading Finn through a nearly empty dining room whose leaded windows were enveloped in ivy, the muscled branches clotted against the glass, straining, pushing.  At the back, the house opened up into a warm, yellow–walled kitchen. It seemed it was the one place in the house that was alive. There was a thick butcher-block table pushed against one wall, yellow roses as its centerpiece. Finn smelled onions and baking bread, though the huge archaic oven was cold. The same leaded windows looked out toward the steep slope of a yard, a tangle of clover and bushes that merged with the stand of trees. There was a small shed crowded to one side, painted a brilliant blue that glowed preternaturally in the grey light. From the kitchen, a set of stairs led upward into darkness. They paused on the narrow landing of the second floor. Closed doors and a flickering hall light were all Finn saw before they climbed another short stairwell, the wood unpainted, and were suddenly in a large attic.

Lev reached past her and flipped a switch. A bare bulb illuminated a room partitioned from the rest of the attic by a long bookshelf. There was a twin bed with a comforter patterned in a solar system of faded stars and planets, a painted dresser, a matching desk. “My room,” Lev said, setting the bags down. On the other side of the bookshelf the light thinned and Finn could make out only the bulky shapes of boxes and the crooked shadows of broken furniture. She skirted the bed and idly opened the drawers of the desk but they were empty. Occupying the bookshelf was a short row of books held vertical by a canning jar full of loose change. She ran her hands along their spines, coating her fingers with dust. Nature guides, of course: ‘Birds of North America’, ‘Identifying Poisonous Plants’, ‘The Mushroom Hunter’s Handbook of Medicinal and Edible Fungi’, ‘Scat and Tracks of the Northwest’. Their covers were bubbled from water damage, pages mildewed. Finn remembered how Lev smelled coming in from those night walks along the river and the feel of his chapped cheeks against her neck, waking her. Thought about the hours he spent in their tiny backyard garden, humming to himself while he staked tomatoes and cucumbers, how his whole self brightened along the quiet foothill paths where he bent down close to the deer tracks or ran his hand along the branches of bushes, holding their leaves up to the light to identify them. He was most fully himself then but completely unavailable to her. It was a paradox she could never quite wrap her mind around. Maybe she thought coming here with him would illuminate him for her but so far it hadn’t, there was nothing here that mirrored the familiar parts of Lev.

Finn moved back against the wall as Lev crowded the room with his suitcase. The attic light tattooed his face in strange cobwebs of shadows, made the skin hang strangely off his cheekbones. His hair was crushed against one side of his head and his face was pinched, older looking than she had ever seen it. His thin shoulders seemed almost to shiver with fatigue. She thought of reaching out for him but something stopped her, it was as if her hand was moving through a thick veil of cotton and she lowered it uselessly to her side; breathed in the smells of dust and old paint and, fainter, those of water and rotting leaves. She looked down at her thumb, the cut there angry and red and thought of the train.

As soon as they boarded Lev made his way to the lounge car and ordered them both Cokes. He filled the plastic cups with bourbon from the flask Finn had given him the Christmas before.  Finn faced the large windows, watched as the mountains ceded to desert. She followed the disembodied female voice as it narrated their journey above the din of the crowd surrounding her; listened to the description of how the red spires and arches were formed and saw in front of her the shrinking of a great ancient sea, a surrendering to dust. She felt it as if it were inside her, the wind battering against the emerging hills, whittling them away to candlesticks of sand.  She listened and watched their reflections materialize like a puzzle piece in the window as the afternoon bled into dusk.

When he spoke his voice was impassive. He was held back inside of himself, peeking over walls. His explanations were not answers but ciphers that spiraled back on themselves. He said, “I left and never wanted to go back,” said, “I left and it was truly as if they were dead to me. Or maybe it was that I had died.” He spoke and the words took on the jerking rhythm of the train. He said that the only chance he had was in leaving it all behind before it ate him up. But that it ate him up anyway. And she could understand that, couldn’t she?  At this Finn turned from watching Lev’s reflection and looked at him.  He was propped up against the seat, had long ago finished both drinks and gone back for two more. His eyes were unfocused, shot through with red. He sipped at the bourbon like it was too hot coffee.  The narrator had moved on and another, a man with a twang of an accent, was telling a history about a wagon train attacked by Indians. A group of octogenarians wearing sea captain hats were playing poker in the seats next to them and shouting at each other in worn out voices.

“Can’t you?” Lev pressed her, a sickly smile pulling his mouth taut in the flickering lounge light. “You did the same thing Finn. You left him behind.”

The wave of anger that rode up inside her was so sudden and hot that it claimed all the anxiety and unknowingness of the last days inside itself. The force of it surprised her. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “He left me, Lev.” She said, finally. “He left me, like you left them.”

He blinked and reached over toward her, but she stood.  “I’m going to try to sleep,” she said.  And then, halfway down the aisle, she turned back, “For all I know he could be lying and saying he doesn’t even have a daughter.”

Lev looked away as if he didn’t hear her. Later he swayed clumsily back to their coach seats and Finn closed her eyes against him. But the sleeping sighs of other passengers, the wide-awake conversations of elderly women sharing their collective insomnia, kept her from sleeping. She watched her own reflection in the dark window, watched Lev sleeping, his head flung back against the seat, his mouth a tight grimace. The muscles of his exposed throat. She matched her own breathe to his, an unconscious reflex, and in this way fell into a fitful sleep.

The train sighed to a stop in the middle of the night, held close in a grasp of looming rock walls. The silence woke her, and for a moment Finn was confused as to where she was. Then she turned and could see Lev awake and looking at her in the dim runner lights. “I shouldn’t have said that. About your father.” His voice was hoarse from the bourbon, the canned air.

She remembered then that time when they had just barely known each other, when he had convinced her to climb a small but difficult mountain peak with him. They had gotten to the top and were descending when he had slipped hopping across a boulder field and hurt his foot.  He wouldn’t let her go down the mountain for help. They had argued and he said that he needed her with him, that he needed her to stay there. Then we are both going to die of hypothermia or something stupid like that, she had told him, only half joking, watching with trepidation as heavy grey clouds bullied over the summit and down toward them. But he had closed his eyes and told her that it was fine as long as she didn’t leave.  In the end, they walked all the way down, Finn holding his weight, propping him against her hip. She remembered how the doctor had said that the walk down had probably been what snapped the bones of his foot into so many pieces that he had needed surgery to repair the damage. She thought of that and she looked at him there in the still car of the train, thought of the line of bruises from where his sharp bones had leaned into her on the walk down the mountain. And then she reached for his hand and held it, alien and cold, in her own, and closed her eyes against her own reflection in the window.

She awoke in the morning to find the train still wedged in the tracks. The other passengers complained that there wouldn’t be enough time to go shopping when they reached Sacramento. Lev was remote, his face haggard and yellow in the morning light. He scowled at the lopsided bouffants around him and made his way in silence to the lounge car. They hardly spoke the rest of the trip. Finn watched him retreat until by the end it was as if he had disappeared entirely. They were polite as strangers, as careful. She knew this routine, knew that he only needed her when she wasn’t there.

Finn watched Lev change out of his shirt. His rib bones like a xylophone, reminding her of May.  She told herself that it had only been three days and it would be only a few more until they were home again.  “What now?” she asked herself and realized she had said it aloud only when Lev spoke.

“I’ve got to go down to the funeral hall before it gets too late. Find some family friends; make sure everything is square for the memorial service. See how some people are holding up.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Lev shook his head, busied himself with his wallet. “It’s okay. Just stay here and relax. Aika’s making dinner.”

“I really would rather get out of here for awhile,” Finn said. She felt the beginnings of a swirling panic deep in her stomach.

“I don’t have time for this. If you are here to help, you’ll stay here. And relax.” He didn’t look at her, only squeezed her arm as he slipped by. She listened to the angry sound of his boots on the wooden stairs, listened until she heard the sound of the key in the ignition of the Volvo and found that she was still pressed up against the wall next to the door. She felt as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath. There was the ache of the train, of all that sitting, and the dampness of this place in her bones. She raised a hand to the wallpaper. It had probably once been a cheerful match to the comforter, but was now like its twin, a faded galaxy whose planets were vague oblong smears of orange and chalky blue. Finn felt along its smooth surface, looked at her palm, half surprised that the shapes had not rubbed off.

She moved to the bed, slouched to lean her head against the slope of attic roof, half-listened for other noises in the house but it was oppressive in its silence, only giving back to her the mirrored whirling whine of her thoughts. And then one broke free, breached the still surface of her consciousness. He knew it, knew he could ask this of her. Hadn’t she always been fascinated by those stories her father read to her, of the hero followed around by the man whose life he had once saved. Being protected by him until that man saved his life back and they were even? Maybe this was the same, maybe this made them even. One debt for another. Finn worried the edge of the comforter where it had come unraveled from itself, the pale blues and reds curling away from their back. But what debt, she asked herself, did she exactly owe him? Whatever it was, it felt like she had been repaying it nearly her whole life. A moth flung itself repeatedly against the bare bulb above her, a dull thumping sound. Lev’s room. She saw him then, a tow-headed boy with eyes such a bright blue they took over his face. She had to imagine since she had never seen a picture. He owned none. So she imagined him here, hidden away in this house pressed upwards out of the forest. And then saw him roaming that same forest in search of the minute, those things both bigger and smaller than himself. Her mind moved him forward through the years, past the blank spaces of which she knew nothing, to the moment when they had first met. Or not met exactly, because she had been living in that house for months, but the moment when they first became aware of each other as more than just strangers.  She thought about the first thing Lev really said to her, in the kitchen that would become her own.

She had been filling a bowl with cereal, had seen him come through the back door from the corner of her eye. She mumbled a hello but he didn’t answer. He stood there with one hand on the doorknob and then he said, “Your hair”.  It startled her into turning toward him, one hand raised toward her head. “What? What’s wrong?” she asked.

Lev smiled and shook his head. “No, nothing. It’s just real nice. I‘ve never seen a color like it. I wouldn’t even know what color to call it.”

Finn stood there with the milk carton paused in mid air for a long moment and then finally she said, lamely it seemed to her later, “It’s the same color as my mother’s,” and with that admission she startled herself into missing the bowl, splashed the milk across the countertop. Lev had laughed, she remembered, but it wasn’t a cruel laugh.

He invited her to take a walk with him, up the hill past the crumbling houses with their chain link fences and dead lawns, past the wide brown river and along the railroad tracks. She followed the glow of his hair in the dark, the flash of teeth as he smiled at some unspoken thought.  What would she have said in those first days, she thought now, if he had asked her where she had come from, who she was, if he had asked anything about herself at all.

Finn didn’t want to think about the answer, pushed it back down within her. She busied herself instead with finding a clean pair of jeans and a sweatshirt in her hastily packed suitcase. She gathered her hair back into a tight bun, liked the sensation of it pulling from her temples, the sharpness of that. There was a sense of neatness to it all even though she could smell the trip, the train on herself. She smoothed her bangs back and caught sight of her face in the mirror above the dresser. It was an old mirror, the glass rubbed matte, reflecting Finn back to herself but skewed. She examined her wide face turned long and narrow, her cheekbones soft, her eyes dark caves, touched her mouth with one hand and felt the roughness of her lips. She wandered the room, feeling aimless as a Sunday morning, knelt down in front of the boxes on the other side of the attic, examined the gaping contents idly, found them to be mostly old clothes. Finally feeling the weariness of the long days of travel, she curled herself up in Lev’s comforter, missing the smell of her own bed, and fell asleep on the sprung mattress, listening to the staccato sound of the rain against the high attic window.

She dreamed of her father.  She was standing at the lip of a red dust valley, looking at a partially dug excavation. The pitched roof of a house seized upward through the crust of sand, a fist. Her father was climbing the roof with a red flag in his hand. Even from such a distance, Finn could see the tattered corners and streaks of dirt on it. She called out to him but the wind ripped the words away in the opposite direction. In a hurry to reach him, she slid down the sandstone face of the valley wall, rocks disintegrating into powder under her feet. She came to a ledge where she could go no further. The floor was still far below and she looked toward her father and started waving her hands. He was at the top of the roof, the flag in one hand, and he turned toward her, stretched out his other arm as if to help her down or maybe give her something. She strained to see what it was, but the sun was too bright, glaring off the rocks, the wind pushing her hair into her eyes. She stepped forward, wanting to tell him to be careful, but then she was falling, the rocks giving way under her grasping hands, over the edge toward the valley floor.

She awoke, curled into a tight ball, her hands shielding her head, her heart beating ferociously in her chest. The sun was gone behind the trees, the clouds tarnished. Finn struggled to make sense of the dream, saw her father’s face over and again, his mouth moving, handing her something across a long void. The pitched stomach feel of falling.  The blanket around her was clammy, too close and she kicked at it with her feet.  A voice was singing along to the radio in the kitchen below, a long, fiddled ballad, a scratched record of a voice that brought surprising hot tears to her eyes. She had the feeling suddenly, the same one she so often had, that somewhere along the way things had gone horribly wrong, mushroomed out of control, but she couldn’t quite see what they were, what events had led her here. Finn forced herself to breath. She sat up, placed her forehead on the window; felt the condensation bead her brow as if with sweat. She drew trees in the fog, and then her name and then Lev’s. As she looked out the window, it seemed that the day was quietly closing in on her until there was nothing left but the window and her own reflection. It was in that waning light that she saw a glint of yellow on the lawn below. Pushing up onto her knees, Finn cleared the pictures from the glass and peered down. It was a bird, a large, awkward bird, and it was dragging itself toward the river, its wings pulled behind its body. Finn squinted at it, open-mouthed, and then she saw it turn, saw the pale face glance up at her window.  She felt she could sense those black eyes staring right into her own and she was very still. After a long while, May turned back and pulling the hood of the yellow raincoat further over her head, continued toward the river.

The following are three additional samples of the novel. The first is a section of chapter five, about Finn coming to terms with Lev’s disappearance, which has suddenly jarred memories of her own past, which is still veiled. The second selection is the first part of chapter seven, in which Finn finds Leda’s journal and begins reading her story. The final selection is another of Finn’s memories, jarred loose like a boat from its dock, in which she meets Lev for the first time. I really love these sections and believe that they are indicative my abilities. I hope that they make sense without the intervening prose.

Five

Looking back, Finn wasn’t certain when she knew for sure that Lev had gone. There was dinner at the kitchen table, a crimson borscht that smelled sour and thick slices of black bread with butter. The three of them sat silently, waiting. Finn couldn’t help but stare at the fuchsia lipstick pooling in the creases and corners of Aika’s mouth as the woman spoke to May in Russian and May pretended not to understand her. Russian always sounded angry to Finn, made her think of when she was very small and they had lived on the old orange tree plantation in the middle of the desert. They had the upper story of the servant’s quarters and there was a man from Moscow who lived underneath, in the chauffeur’s apartment. Her mother was there then, though Finn now only held vague images of her, memories bleached by the sun. An image of her mother’s leg next to her as they walked to the store, a red pair of shorts that were left behind, shorts Finn still had, somewhere. There had been heated exchanges between her mother and the man in Russian. About what, Finn never knew, though her father once said that it was because Francis kept flushing her cigarette butts down the toilet and they ended up coming out of his faucet. But he was kind to Finn, gave her too-sweet caramels and taught her to play chess. He spoke to her in that harsh language, insisted that she eat the candy before she left. And so Finn would unwrap a caramel, hot and melted from her hand, and place it in her mouth and as soon as the old man shut the door, she would spit it into the bushes to make her mother happy.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of watching May stir her soup but never actually eat any of it, Finn had had enough. She scraped back her chair, ignoring the startled looks of the others’, and escaped to the back porch, cool from the river. It was windy and she could feel the sway of the house at her back. Waiting. She had Lev’s cigarettes, the dark brown ones he liked, and she methodically smoked them, one after another, furiously staring at the pines as they lost form, became blurred with darkness and sleep. When she woke, it was to a silence that she knew like an old friend. She had been dreaming in slow motion, not of Lev but of a boy with eyes green as bottles. She could no longer remember his voice. She had not thought of him for a long time.

Her father had moved them to a town inland from his latest university, safe from the salt and wind of the sea. A town in a clearing of damp and heavy air cut from the swamps and moss-strangled cypress trees. School was a joke, a lazy regurgitation of everything she had learned two years before, in a different town, nearly across the country. She walked home on streets with no sidewalks, always too hot, past the girl who didn’t go to school, but sat all day on her front porch, her skin flaking off like paper, chalky with medicine. She brought cookies one day, soon after they moved in, and Finn didn’t have the heart to throw them out or to eat them, and so they sat on the table for two weeks until the ants got them.

She thought of her father at night, talking slowly, eased back in his chair at the table under the grapefruit trees. A silent movie. She no longer remembered his voice either. Pictures would be spread out on the table, an upcoming expedition, mummies encased in ice. Children with frozen grins and collapsed eyelids. They thought the mountains were gods.

There was a debate about whether she would like to go. Should she stay he would give her the car and she could go to the beach every day with her friends, both of them pretending she had friends. She made up stories about them and their lives, how they drank Cokes in icy bottles and watched the space shuttle blast off, though it only looked like a distant plume of smoke. She would be fine, she told him, as usual. And it was only three months he added.

It was that summer, living alone in a strange house, that the boy came into her life as if she had sketched him out of thin air. First a rough oval of a head, an arm, a position of a hand. She knew he had been on the perimeters of her life somehow and so the first time she talked with him, outside of a house that she was only walking past, it was with the feeling of the last brush stroke, of standing back and observing the finished work. He was drinking from a red plastic cup.

“Oh hey, aren’t you Melissa’s friend?” is what he said. She stopped, almost past the house, and shook her head. “Then who do you know here?”

“I don’t know anyone, I’m not going there.”

“You’re not here for the party?” She shook her head again. He jumped up from the curb and came closer, “Don’t you go to South Brandon?”

“I Did. I graduated.”

“And you don’t know Melissa and you’re not going to the party?”

Finn shrugged. “Nope.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Walking.” She couldn’t really see his face. She kept edging down the sidewalk and he followed.

“Well, can I walk with you then?”

She stopped. “Why?”

He shoved his free hand in the pocket of his jeans. “Dunno. Bored. This party sucks.”

Finn looked up then and for some reason she reached out and lifted the baseball hat off his head. He ducked a bit, into the light. She thought he looked familiar, couldn’t place it.

“Alright, but I’m just going home.”  And so he walked her home.

The next week he came by her house and they drove to a beach she had never been to, clear across the coast. Jupiter Beach. It was all rocks and dirty deserted sand. They jumped from rock to rock for a while, neither of them saying anything. Finn took to looking at him out of the corner of her eye, at his longish hair and his nose, which was almost too big for his face. He had a scar across his temple, sickle-shaped. Finally, he just stopped and turned to her. He was wearing a sweatshirt even though it was a warm night. “So.”

Finn looked at him. His eyes were green, the color of sea glass. “So,” she echoed.

“So, lately I’ve been thinking. This place is a horrible place.”

“Yeah?” Finn watched his fingers fumbling for a cigarette, heard the sound of the cellophane under and over the waves, a nice sound. She felt the urge to take the pack from him, to crackle the plastic with her own fingers.

“I mean don’t you think? I thought maybe you would think so too.” He sat down on a rock and pulled out a tarnished silver lighter. Finn sat down next to him and looked out at the waves. There were no waves on the gulf side. She waited for him to keep talking, liked the twang of the words in his mouth, the swamp-tinged roll of them on his tongue, but he just sat there staring and smoking.

“Yeah, I guess it’s pretty horrible. I dunno, it’s just a place, though.”

He nodded.

“And you can always leave.”

“There are better places right?”

Finn smiled, bent over and looked at her shoes. It was funny to be talking. She hadn’t talked to anybody, it seemed, in a long time. Maybe never, not really. Her words seemed to evaporate as they hit her tongue. “I’ve lived in seventeen places,” she said.

“No shit.” He handed her something, a bottle. Smell of old wood and burning.

“Seventeen, not counting the glorious state of Florida.” She sipped tentatively from the bottle, felt the burn of the liquor race down her throat.

“Military?”

“My dad’s an anthropologist, he studies primitive history, ancient civilizations, things like that. Right now he’s in South America cataloguing some mummies they found frozen in the mountains.” Finn sipped from the bottle again. It was easier. The waves were coming up high, almost crashing on the rocks. His back was to the ocean. “We should probably go,” Finn said, standing.

He shook his head, reached his arm out far for the bottle. “No this is where it gets fun. Come on, come out here.”

“What? No. No way.”

His hand went around her wrist. It felt cool and chapped. “C’mon, now just turn around and look up.”

“This is stupid. We’re going to drown.”

“We are not going to drown. Don’t move.”

And so Finn let herself stand there, the bottle still in her hand. The sound of the waves pressed up around her, enveloped her. She felt water on the back of her legs, the grit of it. She stepped forward.

“Don’t move.”

She froze. The sky above them was deep purple, the time of night she loved, that made her calm. She shut her eyes, felt the water slam into her hips, push her, but he had her around the shoulders now, tight against him. The next wave hit her across the lower back and her legs slid out from under her. For a moment still he held her, and then the next instant she was free. The waves had her, were pulling her back with them and then forward. She slammed once into something hard. Rocks she thought, scrambling with her hands for a hold that didn’t exist. The water was above her now and dark and in her nose, her mouth, stinging her eyes. Something scraped the side of her face. And then a hand, strong, pulling at her shirt, pulling her down. She fought against it, sinking her nails down deep, kicking her body. Then she was out, lying facedown on sand. Coughing, still kicking her legs. He was next to her. Finn heard him laughing. “God damn,” he was saying, “You nearly tore my hand off.”

She turned over on her back, felt the air coming back into her lungs, the salt burn in her throat. His laughter still, in her ears. Above her the moon was rising, yellow and needle sharp, in the dark sky.

“Finn, Finn. Huck Finn. Finn short for Finnegan.” May was curled up in the wicker chair across from her, holding one of Lev‘s brown cigarettes, unlit.

Finn jerked. “I didn’t see you there.”

May drew in on the cigarette. “What were you thinking about?”

Finn hesitated. “Somebody I knew a long time ago, and a dream I had, just a little bit ago. Where’s Lev, is he back?”

May shrugged. She was wearing a fur hat, dirty and matted on one side. It was too big for her and she kept pushing it back up her forehead. “Dunno, Finnegan. Nobody knows. Aika is going insane. Well, in her way. Did you see that lipstick, by the way, at dinner? That was my mother’s, from probably twenty years ago. Aika went and filched it out of her drawer. The woman’s not hardly even dead and the help is stealing her things.” She drew in hard on the cigarette. “Atrocious color, don’t you think?”

Finn’s head was pounding, the memory of waves and salt in her rigid body still. “Do you want a lighter, May…for the cigarette?”

“Not allowed.”

“To smoke?”

“To have the lighter…but if you light it for me, I could smoke it.”

“Huh. Okay.” Finn reached out toward May and lit the cigarette.

“Thanks, Finnegan.”

“Sure. It’s just Finn, actually. My father named me after the Irish hero, Finn McCool, who slayed monsters.”

“Really?” May watched the smoke spiral out of her mouth.

“Yep. What time is it?”

“Past midnight. Aika went to sleep.”

It had started to rain again, the kind of rain, Finn remembered, that Lev said once he loved, that was like being kissed by champagne. She felt exhaustion, a big blank canvas of tiredness. And under that, an apprehension and an anger she could hardly touch. “So where do you think he is?” she asked.

May looked away from her. “I think, possibly, that it’s none of your business, like I said before,” she said softly.

“How is it none of my business, May?” Finn sat up straighter. “He asked me to come here, he begged me to come here and then he took off. I sure as hell think that if it’s anyone’s business, it’s mine. Now where do you think he went?”

May was looking at her wide–eyed. “Like I said, he went to find her.”

“Your mother?”

May nodded, once. She stared out into the darkness for a long while and when she looked back her face had changed, had softened. She studied Finn for a moment, her eyes roaming her face as if she were reading a book. Her voice, when she spoke, sounded far away, muted. “There are a lot of hiding places. I always knew about some of them, probably through osmosis, the womb and all. I found the rest, but they kept changing. It was a game we played together, though she pretended not to know that.” She smiled slightly and it was a lovely thing in its sadness. Then she shrugged and scooted down further in her chair. “She liked to hide things. Money for one. Keys. She had keys made that fit no locks I knew about, I checked them all. Strings of numbers and dates on pieces of paper. Food and clothing in duffel bags. Stuffed in chimneys and bushes, scattered by raccoons. I found bits of her forgotten dresses woven in bird nests. I would bring them home and set them carefully on the quilt of her bed. They were always gone by morning.” Finn studied the girl, noticed her hands perfectly still and white, the cigarette burning too close to her fingers. She watched her face tense.  “You don’t know what it was like, living with her. She became enraptured, lost in the curving away of her life, unable to tell the difference between what had happened and what was to come. What had happened and what had never happened. What was dead and gone and what was right in front of her face. She was impossible then, angry at me, but she knew that she couldn’t touch me. To touch me was to break me and so she would just stare like that, arms holding ghosts.” May laughed deep in her chest, harshly. Finn lit another cigarette, reached out and traded it with the one in May’s hand. May seemed not to notice. She kept talking, facing straight ahead. “Sometimes she would just be gone. And Lev would come to my room in the morning to help me out of bed and there was a silence that lasted then, God I hated it, underneath Aika’s constant chattering, between the two of us. I knew the routine. It was my brother who would take the call and leave without a word to come bring her home. Sometimes there was no call and he would just set out looking for her. Or sometimes she would just appear in the yard, stock still, staring at the roses, this certain look on her face. Can’t explain it. And sometimes she was lovely, you know, her eyes looking at the surfaces of things, planting flowers, riding her bike to town. She would stroke my hair and tell me stories of people she used to know, funny little stories about her aunt, sad stories of her brother. She was like a frosted cake then, perfect, but she couldn’t hide her feelings completely. She thought I was a monster. I know that.”

May stopped. She seemed to shrink back into the chair. After a moment she passed her hand over her face, tugged her hat down. “He’s just doing what he knows. He’s just going to find her. And she won’t be there. I know that too.” She looked at Finn then. “You really should just go home,” she said. “You know?”

Finn just nodded. Home. The mist and the smell of smoke and pine needles heavy in her throat prevented her from saying anything at all.

Chapter Seven.

. Finn took out the first notebook then hid the bag under the bed. She stared at the cover, touched the surface with the flat of her palms and felt, in that moment, a strange panic. She opened the book carefully to that first, pasted-in page and read, haltingly–

Life is a series of stories. We are just telling stories, and what we say and what we do form around us, harden until we say, “Look, this is what I am,” hold it in our cupped hands, see it all as generals, watching our battles from hills far away.

These stories are yours as they have always been, the telling of them creating me to myself. I understand that who I am is only who I am to you. It has nearly always been so and I am not sure how to untangle the threads. They have woven so closely, my story and yours. As closely as roots of trees underground. As closely as my legs had woven around your body before. And if there ever was a beginning it was then.

Finn looked up, frowned and reread the handwritten inscription. Then she turned to the notebook itself and skimmed the first few pages. It was a letter. A long letter. She pulled the comforter up around her and turned back to the first page, just looked at the words. She had always loved the Russian alphabet, the foreign curls and dips, an etched ice-skater moving gracefully across the page. She had a brief image of her mother then, one of the few, sitting with her at a low table. Her thin hand was over Finn’s, guiding her finger across the page, sounding out the words. Her hair a flame, a bright flower coiled there on the table, and Finn remembered the feel of it in her hand.  The book was an old one with intricate pictures in faded jeweled tones, full of fairytales. She was reading her favorite, the story of an orphaned owl that goes looking for her mother among all the other birds. “Hello, goose,” her mother would whisper in her ear. Her baby owl voice was Finn’s favorite. “Hello, goose, hello silly goose,” Finn whispered back. Behind her, there was the smell of her mother’s perfume like lilies and behind that something sweet but antiseptic. Finn never realized what it was until she smelled it on Lev’s breath one night when they were going out, that smell of liquor masked by cologne. “Hello, sparrow,” Frances said. “Hello sparrow,” Finn mimicked, burrowing deeper into her mother’s lap, “Hello brave sparrow.”

She shook the memory off and bent down again to the page, smoothing the damp wrinkled paper out with one hand. Below her, she could hear the sound of the music and the rising and falling murmur of voices. She felt suddenly calm for the first time in days. She read, her finger moving along the page, her lips unconsciously forming around the words.

I never told you how it really was in that house with her. All the pretty pictures I gave you were stories only of how I wished it to have been. You needed something to hang on to, a life that was different from the one you had known. And I needed, needed different memories. We all need meaning. Without it, our lives become just so much noise. We create them so that we may go on living while being able to look at what has come before head on. To place it in our hands and say, “see, this is why. And this is how” Without it we are animals. We are free, sure, just like you used to say. But that freedom costs too much. Hardly any of us are capable of accepting that. I give this to you so that I may be willing to let go. To live finally into that freedom.

Listen. I will tell you the truth from the only beginning I know.

My mother named me after the maid. This is my first memory—there is a grey room and I am playing with a doll that my father has made me. She is sitting in the chair by the window, brushing her hair. It is the color of the statue in the garden, the one I love to touch. It is so smooth and old and forgotten. Her hair grabs the weak light, absorbs it until it is the only thing in the room that is shining. I love my mother’s hair. She sets the brush down and calls to me. I go to her and she picks me up and I am in her lap. There is the smell of her. The yeast scent like baking bread and the darker smell, like the film pinecones leave on my hands on a warm day, the smell of the thick plants on the banks of the creek. I turn my face toward her, burrowing. But she pushes me forward, begins to brush my hair with long firm strokes that bring tears to my eyes though I don’t call out. To do so would be to break the spell. To do so would mean being away from her. She is singing and it is a sad song, her voice harsh and too quick as if she cannot quite catch her breath. She brushes harder. And then she begins to talk.

Chapter Nine

And so Finn trawled into that high city as if from a newly landed ship, stepped out of the train into thin air, blue light refracted over the stretched sky making her blink, as if she were looking through a prism. She wandered the streets near the station, sheltered in the scaffolded shade of a dozen skyscrapers, touched, handled almost, by the jostling puffed-out men in brown suits and laminated company IDs, down into the sun, drawn moth-like to the golden dome of the capitol building. She slept in a park near the low forehead that was the river and continued on, down still, downhill into worn neighborhoods that comforted her, the brown adobes of her memory. She stopped to admire the deep green and orange of nasturtiums splayed against the shade of a rough mud wall, a chain link fence and rusted hubcaps sculpted into a crude dragon or horse, she couldn’t tell.

It seemed a city of sun and shadow, a quilt, a hopscotch chalked in air. She practiced jumping, felt the long damp miles lift in layers off her dirty skin, the wind a constant, licking her with the dust of all those prairies she had been through, the great expanse named Middle America. She felt the decades of homesteads that had up and lifted, blown away with their topsoil, covered the level distances until they dead-ended against the purple hard rise of mountains, gathering inch by inch dirt and sweat and now-dead storied dreams until a city was born.

Further down, following the river, past the boarded up former rubber plants, button factories, slaughterhouses, the sun pushing low and the rising sweet rot smell of marshes, she was drawn toward the firefly lights of the bottomed-out neighborhoods with their back alleys and sidewalks that gave out onto grass paths, a whole street ending abruptly at a vacant lot. The river snaked away there but before it did, Finn caught sight of a broken-down old paddleboat, moored in the muck of shore, a curlicued name faded to rust and unreadable in the gloom. A bottleneck of streets and then the reassuring familiarity of houses, wooden now, with their slap of screen doors and the disembodied voices and blue slow lights of televisions. A man laughing. The thick smell of wet laundry and then meat frying on a stove. She heard her stomach then, put one hand on her cool belly and realized she was hungry. She had not been hungry in weeks now. On a corner, she found a diner, sat herself in a plastic booth that smelled like sour rags. She took out the old leather wallet and looked inside, more from curiosity than anything. As if she had just found the wallet and was wondering whom it belonged to and whether she should give it back. She fingered the neat row of bills, Good Samaritan that she was, and laughed aloud, which surprised her, the sound of her voice in the air rougher than that in her head. Realized all of these days she was invisible, passing like a ghost across time and miles. Nothing quite real, until now. The girl who came to take her order was so real Finn could barely look at her, shiny and new looking as she was. She would come to find that many people there looked like this, it was the height, the blood thinned and close to the surface, the skin polished to a tight shine by the wind.

She ordered a hamburger and coffee and then sat staring out the window as the steady wave of cars thinned out and the light began to play its cycle of green yellow red for an empty street. She watched a low loud car idle for a few moments before gunning itself through the intersection in a squeal of tires and exhaust. She turned back to the table. At some point, her food had arrived and it sat there congealed in its cold grease. She picked it apart how she liked to, first eating the soggy bun, torn into small squares, and then the limp lettuce. She pushed the tomato aside and examined the shrunken disk of meat, a perfect circle of flattened grey, before covering it with her napkin. When the girl came again she asked if something was wrong. When Finn blinked up at her, she inclined her long head at the plate.

“Oh, no,” Finn cleared her throat, “I just like the taste of it on the other things. It’s alright.”

The girl stared and Finn looked up into her face, taken aback by the pale blue of eyes under a black swoop of hair. A shrug and the eyes flicked back over a shoulder. She grabbed the plate.

When the view offered no more cars or people walking, Finn gathered toothpicks and sugar packets and with deftness she was no longer aware of, began to build a house. A pink and white twisted and torn-sided house of slender bleached twigs. And when the chairs were scraped onto tables and the sour rags came out she hoisted the old backpack and left. She found a high bramble of lilac bushes and wedged herself deep inside. Her back to a chain link fence, she held branches like a blanket close to her body and fell asleep to the smell of faded flowers.

Finn walked those long days, from the time the close heat woke her until the sun plummeted from its perch and sunk into the mountains. She discovered what is true of all cities, something that seemed unique to this one since it was her first—that the city itself was hidden within a mirage and that the mirage was what most people saw, a flat expanse of concrete and dusty trees, of asphalt and shimmering “let’s all work harder” glass. But dig deeper and walk farther and one could discover real things. Finn found a seemingly abandoned building containing a hundred years of discontinued cowboy shirts—racks and racks of lavishly embroidered roses and pearl buttons, turquoise shoulders patched with black suede fringe. Or a dim store full of bins and cellophane packages of Indian herbs and bottles of oil promising “Buena suerte” or “Amor.” A parrot in a tall iron cage who sang out “Soledad, Soledad, donde estas mi cielo, mi vida,” so sad as to make a lump rise from stomach to throat. A headdress on a faceless mannequin, feathers dyed bright as jewels or jelly beans—vermillion, ochre, grass green. A small bakery smelling of fish sauce and steamed pork buns, with water beading across the glass-fronted windows, half-hiding the naked lengths of lassoed and naked ducks. And one day, under a neon blinking hand, a fortuneteller. Finn hurried from the woman. She did not want a fortune, did not want anyone to tell her about a life she no longer knew or inhabited.

She began to leave her bag hidden among the lilacs so she could walk farther, down the river paths, past half arches of crumbling railroad bridges down to where the river widened into estuaries of statue-like herons and colonies of savage mosquitoes. Twice she bathed in the river, warm as a mouth, and came out clean and smelling of sulfur.

In this way, long and sinuous as the days, Finn was brought back to herself until, sitting in the grass under cottonwoods she felt a slow flutter and blinked, brought her hands up to her face. Studying the blue-green veins held up against the sun she realized that yes they were her own hands and felt suddenly the need to be somewhere inside walls, cool and dark. She walked to the diner where she had gone every night for its quiet and its big windows. It was early, a different waitress, who didn’t look at her when she took the order or the plate away. On the street, the crowd was young mothers, leaning on rugged strollers or dragging toddlers by the hand while holding a phone close to the ear. All shorts and carefully tanned legs, the particular waddle of flip-flops, faces hidden behind sunglasses.

“You’re early,” a voice said and there across from Finn in the booth was the girl, her usual waitress. Only up close she wasn’t a girl at all, but had fine cracks just beginning to spider out from her windowpane eyes. There was a wonderful kind of calm tiredness all about her.

“Here, it’s a mistake,” and she pushed a half-melted dish of ice cream toward her with chewed and chipped black-painted fingernails. Finn tried to smile and the girl laughed. “It’s strawberry.”

Finn took the spoon and lifted the ice cream up and then let it fall back down into the dish. She liked the sound, the solid wet plop of it. She thought about what to say to this woman sitting in front of her, awkward at the new knowledge of her age, not such a gap but enough for her to be sitting there with a motherly look on her face, the look Finn was used to all her life, given to her by Hope and the others. The look that made her feel at first hopeful and then guilty because she knew what these women did not, that they were temporary and then finally angry because who were they to look at her like that, as if there was something they could give her, as if they needed to give her anything she didn’t already have.

“I like your little buildings,” the woman said out of the corner of her mouth as she bent and lit a cigarette. She pushed the pack forward. Finn tried to smile again, shook her head slightly.

“Do you live around here?”

“No, not really.”

“Thinking about it?” and there was that smile again, a naked half moon. A fly landed on the ice cream and they watched it intently as it rubbed its hooked arms together.

“Oh, maybe. You know.”

Then, “Do you have any money?”

“I’m fine, really, I don’t need your…“

“Because I’m looking to rent out a room. It’s a whole attic, really hot this time of year but a lot of space and super cheap. My roommate split without paying and I’m in a bind or I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Oh.”

“And if you are looking, well I thought maybe it would be a good deal, even if you don’t want to stay. You know, month to month, leave whenever you want. I’ve been there.” She stopped abruptly and frowned down at the ashtray, stubbed out her cigarette.

Finn looked out the window, saw from the corner of her eye the woman shrug and scoot as if to stand and leave.

“Is it close?”

“Just down the block. It’s a whole house, with a yard if you’re interested in that kind of thing. A garden. There’s all my furniture, which isn’t much and some nice plants. It’s just my boyfriend and me. And obviously it’s quiet at night since I’m here. There’s a mattress I can let you borrow.”

Finn had the fleeting image then of four walls and a window looking out onto a dark expanse of sky. She had never had an attic, felt a swell of sentimentality for the notion itself. She could stay. There was nowhere else to go, really, now that she had ran straight up against that brick wall of mountains. Like the dust. Like the farms blown away.

The woman grabbed her bag from the booth and pushed back her dyed black bangs. “So, are you interested or what?” half joking, her voice impatient, her left hand nervous around a gold chain at her neck.

Finn looked back out the window toward the street, realized she liked the invisibility of this city.

“Well, you can think about it…”

“I’ll stay.”

“Yeah?” the smile brighter and lovely. “Do you want to come back tonight?”

Finn shrugged, nodded.

“And it’s alright if you need a couple of weeks to find work and money, it’s my boyfriend’s place so there’s no landlord or anything…”

“I have money.”

“Great.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” The woman walked away and then turned. “I’m Cecily by the way.”

She said her own name as if it were a poison, the word scrunched sourly in her mouth. Finn looked up sharply.

“That was my mother’s name,” though she was not sure she said it aloud because the woman just sat there blinking her windowpane eyes at her.

Finn cleared her throat and said, “It’s a pretty name, Cecily.”

A pause and then the worn smile. “Yeah?”

Finn nodded.

“I’ve always hated it, don’t know why.” A pause and then, “And you are?” drawn out, again half joking, half-impatient.

Finn paused only a second. “My name is Frances.”

Cecily smiled. “Nice name on a girl. All right. Frances.” And nodded firmly before walking away.

Finn waited, stood outside the diner as Cecily closed up and then the two of them walked, two blocks over and one up, to Florida Street of all places, to a low whitewashed house with a deep yard. Finn could feel the overgrown grass against her arms as they went up the dark walk toward a narrow porch and a set of steps where a man sat, smoking and fiddling with something, his hair pale even in the dim light that peeked through the front window. Cecily bent down and kissed the man on the top of his head.

“This is Frances, she’s taking over Lea’s room. She’s traveling through, maybe’ll stay awhile if she likes it.”

The man peeked out from around Cecily’s skirt and looked at her. Finn saw that his eyes were the same unbearably light color as Cecily’s own, a color she had never seen before and had seen twice tonight. Those eyes made her nervous, she realized; it was hard to guess emotion in eyes like that, they seemed to reflect you back to yourself. And then an image came to her, eyes like bottles, like sea glass, flat and soft and full of an almost joy that wasn’t quite, what was it they were if not joy, something harder, more disappointed—but the man was saying something to her.

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked where you are traveling from.” He lit a cigarette and held it out for Cecily and then lit another for himself.

“…Around.”

He smiled a cool, long smile. “Well you look like you came from hell,” and then, when Cecily scolded him and hit him lightly on the shoulder, “Okay, Frances from Around, do you want to see your new home?” Standing, he set aside the object on his lap, which looked like a radio, and walked inside. Cecily nodded “You first” and so Finn followed Lev through the open doorway.