Trigger Warning
Author: Jacinda Townsend
Date: 2025-10-15 00:00:00+00:00
Description: A new novel about the enduring trauma of police brutality by the award-winning author of Mother Country She'd gotten no trigger warning. And her entire life, she wanted to scream now, had deserved a trigger warning. Early in life, Ruth survived a series of devastating events: Her little brother died from a childhood illness, her mother died of grief, and then her father was shot by the police right in front of their home. In the years following her father's murder, Ruth pushes her past underground. She changes her name and moves to Kentucky, marries a man named Myron, and together they raise a
Publisher: Graywolf Press

Advance Praise for Trigger Warning

“Rarely does a novel sound like now with such force, speak so unsafely to the contours of our lives as the consequence of a too peculiar past, with parents, as parents, as children of parents and partners in whatever we claim to be doing in semi-social life. With incredible humor and all the interpersonal salt a reader could ask for, Jacinda Townsend’s Trigger Warning is among the richest additions to serious literature, and asks us to take care with how we take care, especially against the empty signifiers we rely on for comfort and governance.”

—Joseph Earl Thomas, author of God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

“Ruth, the embattled heroine of Jacinda Townsend’s irresistible new novel, has endured more tragedy than most mere mortals can stand. When the losses of the past come thundering back, she takes to the road, heartbreak and roaring flames in her rearview mirror. Landscapes may change, she realizes, but grief, like time, is ever present and unrelenting. Complicated, contradictory, and compelling, Ruth gives the phrase ‘ride or die’ an unforgettable new dimension.”

—Jabari Asim, author of Yonder

“Jacinda Townsend once again captivates with the intricate tale of the Hurleys—a seemingly ordinary family grappling with deeply buried traumas, fractured relationships, a turbulent divorce, and the complexities of teenage dysphoria. In this searing and unflinching exploration of identity and country, Trigger Warning offers a poignant and profound reminder: A better life is forged by facing each moment with the full spectrum of emotions it demands.”

—Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last

“The characters in Jacinda Townsend’s Trigger Warning are complicated, messy people that you won’t want to turn away from. They are also funny, human, and broken in the ways we all are. This book is both a journey and a reckoning.”

—Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You

“Jacinda Townsend’s lush sentences sweep and dive and crawl into the very soul of a reader. In Trigger Warning, she gives us an unleashed salt-of-the-earth Ruth whose regrets are sometimes too hard to carry and whose desires for change, for novelty, for freedom, are immediately recognizable. With deliciously paced revelations, Townsend builds Ruth as a woman with a haunted past whose willingness to embrace a terrifyingly unpredictable future makes her the tough and tender literary heroine we need at this time.”

—Lauren Francis Sharma, author of Casualties of Truth

“I became addicted to the characters in Jacinda Townsend’s Trigger Warning, each of them so beautifully sculpted, flawed, wonderful, and specific. This is juicy and intelligent fiction about history, family, secrets, and the elusive search for the authentic self.”

—Asali Solomon, author of The Days of Afrekete

TRIGGER WARNING

Also by Jacinda Townsend

Mother Country

Saint Monkey

TRIGGER WARNING
a novel

Jacinda Townsend

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2025 by Jacinda Townsend

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Published by Graywolf Press

212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-64445-354-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64445-355-1 (ebook)

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2025

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Townsend, Jacinda, author.

Title: Trigger warning : a novel / Jacinda Townsend.

Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2025.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025005745 (print) | LCCN 2025005746 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644453544 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781644453551 (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3620.O9596 T75 2025 (print) | LCC PS3620.O9596 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20250210

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025005745

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025005746

Cover design and art: Kimberly Glyder

For

Ryan Gainer (2024)

Sonya Massey (2024)

Dexter Reed Jr. (2024)

Dijon Kizzee (2020)

Breonna Taylor (2020)

Atatiana Jefferson (2019)

Elijah McClain (2019)

Marshall Miles (2018)

Philando Castile (2016)

Renee Davis (2016)

Korryn Gaines (2016)

Kisha Michael (2016)

Marquintan Sandlin (2016)

Keith Lamont Scott (2016)

Sandra Bland (2015)

Natasha McKenna (2015)

Tamir Rice (2014)

Laquan McDonald (2014)

Rekia Boyd (2012)

Timothy Russell (2012)

Malissa Williams (2012)

Aiyana Jones (2010)

Sean Bell (2006)

Timothy Thomas (2001)

Ismael Mena (1999)

Margaret Mitchell (1999)

Malik Jones (1997)

Eulia Mae Love (1979)

Leonard Spann (1970)

Jerry Lee Amie (1970)

Mark Clark (1969)

Fred Hampton (1969)

Bobby Hutton (1969)

Spurgeon Winters (1969)

Cynthia Scott (1963)

J. Thomas Shipp (1930)

Abraham Smith (1930)

Mary Turner, Hayes Turner, and the Turners’ unborn baby (1918)

Cordelia Stevenson (1915)

and the incalculable number of others who’ve suffered and died under the heel of state-sponsored terrorism since the very inception of the state. And for their families, and their communities, and all of us who struggle to heal.

CONTENTS

PART ONE      TRIGGER WARNING

PART TWO     THE DISTANT PAST

PART THREE  THE FUTURE

TRIGGER WARNING

PART ONE

TRIGGER WARNING

ONE

Ruth

During the phone call she’d spilled kale smoothie on her new black pants, the worsted wool pair she’d bought just last week, and now cold green sludge spread across her thigh, counterpoint, almost, to the terrible things the detective had said on the call, the information that had warmed her left collarbone to the point of baking. There in the Smoothie King’s parking lot she’d rolled down her window, stretching bowback against her car seat to cool her body in high winds. Over time, as mom to an ungainly child, she’d collected a ream of McDonald’s napkins in her center console. But when she tried wiping her pant legs clean, she left behind tiny white pills of pulp.

She found, in her mind, her father, and the three dime-sized drips of blood she’d left on her blue jeans for years after he was shot. She’d refused to either wash or toss them; she’d worn them, blood and all, for all the years she’d never acknowledged his death. Even after she changed her name and moved across the country, she wore them: to her college classes, and on dates with boys, and to her job as a typist in the college’s main library.

She knew that if ever she highlighted the blood to another person, even all those years later when the jeans began to yellow and fray and turn filthy, they wouldn’t have known what to say. It was 1997 then, and no one had known the helpful words. People would just listen to your complaint or your concern or your history and maybe say “bless your heart” before walking away, leaving you with your mouth hanging agape, swallowing air into the psychic wound you’d opened. Not that it was any better nowadays: If you said this to someone in 2023, she thought, if you said, “Hey, a cop shot my dad and he died on the hot pavement gasping for air like a hooked fish,” people would say you should have given them notice. You should have called trigger warning, they’d say.

Ruth saw it all over the unit packets her kid’s teacher sent home—Trigger Warning: teen suicide, or TW: the Holocaust—because the American eighth grade was now composed of brittle children whose parents had bubble-wrapped their minds, sealing them off against material existence. Ruth hated all those little shits in need of their warnings, hated the way young people could no longer digest anything that was reality. She hated the way Enix was allowed by the school to be late on an almost daily basis with no consequences whatsoever for their truancy, and she hated the way everyone in Enix’s class, it seemed, had a 504 plan that allowed for their math anxiety.

Who would lead this country when she was in the nursing home? Ruth wanted to know. Who, of these easily triggered little people, would have the temerity to even work in one? Neither Enix nor their classmates would even know to be on time for work at the nursing home. None of them would be able to wrestle an Alzheimer’s patient back into bed: The hard feelings would be too much. And anyway, they’d all be on their phones.

But then Ruth also hated this thirtysomething detective she’d spoken with on the phone and all his questions: Had she been anywhere near Rosalind, California, in the past forty-eight hours? Had she had any contact with Ralph O’Brien in the twenty-six years since he’d shot her father? And how, in 2023, after Philando Castile and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, he wanted to know, did Ruth feel about law enforcement, which Ruth had taken as a hostile question. She’d told the detective as much and asked him why she was even being questioned. “The law treats every suicide as a homicide,” he’d told her, “until evidence proves it otherwise.”

The detective had been Black too—Ruth had heard the sweet, Southern residue of westward migration in his vowels—and because he knew Ruth was Black, because her father’s execution had had its fifteen minutes of recurring and reigniting notoriety, she guessed, he told her more than he was supposed to. “O’Brien left a twenty-page suicide note,” he told her. “Numbered sheets of notebook paper, taped to his kitchen cabinets. Your father wasn’t mentioned by name, but Ralph wrote about killing three civilians. We’re calling all descendants. It’s standard protocol.”

Survivors, Ruth wanted to say, in correction, but she listened, let him continue his story. O’Brien’s body, the detective told her, had been found on his sofa, partially liquefied. Partially, in fact, leaked into the hardwood floor beneath. The cleanup bill, so far, was upward of $30,000. “And that ain’t even where he’d been sleeping,” the detective said.

“Ew,” said Ruth. “Where?”

“There was a little cubby in the wall. For books. So small, you wouldn’t believe a body would fit in it. But there was Ralph’s sheet and blanket, with a cock ring and a Fleshlight on top.”

“Good Lord,” Ruth had said, and it was at that point that she’d tried repositioning her straw and accidentally upended the smoothie, sent it flying. “Well,” she said furiously. “It wasn’t me who killed him.” Though I don’t know why I never did, she wanted to add, but knew better than to joke with the law. “Listen,” she said. “This all has nothing to do with me, and I’ve got to go.”

“All right,” the detective had said. The wet place on Ruth’s pants stuck to her thigh; in the sunlight, the stain showed up a lurid, nuclear-waste green, a shade not at all like kale. Three teenagers not much older than her own were taking hits off a vape in front of the Smoothie King. She heard a stealthy disdain in the detective’s voice when he said, “I have any more questions, I guess I know where to find you.” The call ended, flashed its duration: eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds.

Ruth had outgrown her bloody jeans as she’d filled out in college and become womanly, and then a lover had hustled them into a plastic bag when she wasn’t looking and taken them to Goodwill. “They were so old, I thought you wouldn’t care,” he told her, as she cried. She raced to the Goodwill but never found them. They were gone, just disappeared, perhaps thrown out by a well-meaning employee who saw that they were too old and worn, even, to sell at a thrift shop. She’d gotten no trigger warning. And her entire life, she wanted to scream now, had deserved a trigger warning.

And she hadn’t, not until now, intentionally generated anyone else’s trauma, though she supposed that in filing for divorce, she’d finally earned villain points. Myron had never seen it coming—she knew that. He’d had no call to believe he’d ever be a divorced man. He hadn’t hidden money, or beaten her, or fucked her best friend. He’d been a good provider—really, he had—and terrific in bed.

But he was basic. Miasmic. Someone whose depths you could reach for, only to have your hand come straight out the other side. At the same time he’d been so hardened, like a garden gnome whose ginger face you wanted to slap. He had no dropped anchor, no axis on which she could shift and recalibrate herself. She’d made a mistake, thinking of him as a starter husband. What he really was, was a starter worldview.

When they were still living together, and sharing one soggy, organically sourced mattress, Ruth would wake at dawn to find him staring at her. He’d be lying on his side, his head propped level atop the adjacent pillow, his blank face impervious to the screaming birds then wrapping the earth in their pleas. But his eyes would be shining moist, afire with condemnation. She’d know, then, that she’d revealed herself to him in sleep. Again.

She was a somniloquist, a sleep talker who often let frightening bits of truth come punching their way out of her subconscious. It was hereditary, she’d read, but it seemed such an evolutionary disadvantage, to unravel and spool out truths in one’s most vulnerable state. Ruth had, Myron told her, relayed long lists of random numbers while sleeping. She’d sung the verses to old hymns, and she’d once recited the final stanza of Hugo’s “Tomorrow, At Dawn” in its original French. She imagined herself, there at the end of their marriage, breaking the quiet of their bedroom with the version of Ruth she’d always meant to keep from him; all the secrets of her distant past drifting through air, traveling forth only to find themselves pinned in by walls. Coming back to settle in the seats of her husband’s ears, making him wonder.

It had been funny before they were married, in Myron’s tiny, cinder-block dorm room at the University of Kentucky, where they’d met. “You talk in your sleep,” he’d said, his face tightening with the advanced humor of it. She’d been initially afraid she might have mentioned Edison Daniels, with whom she wasn’t sleeping, yet hoping to. Edison had gone suddenly blind in their freshman year, victim of a freak artery occlusion, and Ruth had been there his first day back, in their Appalachian Folk seminar.

She’d seen her own father die, as suddenly as a shock of lightning, so she knew how a life could change in an instant. She helped Edison navigate toward the lunchroom, where she watched for the break in steam when he removed his ramen noodles from the microwave. “Thank you,” he said, flatly. He was tall and lanky, with skin so dark and smooth, it seemed he’d been carved from basalt. By the end of two months, he’d learned Grade Two Braille and asked her to stop guiding his elbow on the way home from class. It wouldn’t be possible to sleep with him, she reckoned. Still, she’d laughed nervously when Myron told her about her dream-laced speech. “What’d I say?” she asked.

“I couldn’t make it out,” Myron said, and flipped over against her, landing a cold hand to rest on her ass. They were a new couple then, trying on early adulthood, and that’s all it had taken to silence him. It was only toward the end of their marriage, when she performed leg stretches in the morning and wore collagen cream on her eyes, that he pressed. He brought his forehead in close to hers, pinned her in his hothouse gaze of accusation. “Who’s Wendy?” he asked.

“No idea. You think this all means something, but I was asleep. Firing off stale neurons.”

She’d feign outrage. She’d get out of bed to open or close the window, which never needed opening or closing. Their bedroom overlooked a copse of trees in a public park, and after a joyless sigh, Ruth would survey the line of dead trees—three of them. Bare-branched, still somehow standing on a fault line of lethal soil amidst the greenery all around them.

“Is it even someone named Wendy?” he asked.

“How should I know, if I’m asleep? Myron. You’re harassing me.”

She wasn’t lying, after all. She was keeping a secret. That was different. And if you hadn’t told a man about your own twin, she wondered, had you ever been married to him at all? She and Wendy weren’t twins, not in the biological, dizygotic sense. But in the plane of watching their father die, they’d come to inhabit the same mind.

Ruth would look at the people in stores—wide-eyed, nervous people, men and women pushing their carts along, their shoulders hunched in private misery—and she’d wonder whether they, too, had witnessed a state-sponsored murder. But then she’d draw closer, forcing her cart’s one rickety wheel to move across the floor, trailing it diagonally into their slipstreams, and decide they hadn’t. Their gait wasn’t studied enough in damage. Their eyes weren’t sketched enough in knowing. For most everyone else, she realized, the world still sprung a bit plush.

Wendy alone shared that hunted look of witness, as if the entire sun had capsized in the sky as she watched. Wendy had tried so hard to uncleave herself from the family. She’d been embarrassed at just how large the land of their middle-class misfortune was; she’d been heartless and caustic about it even. But Ruth guessed that even now, Wendy hadn’t quite rinsed off the dirt of her past. Ruth had mourned the loss of her sister even as she herself cremated the relationship, but she’d scratched enough sawdust over it in the years since, so Wendy wasn’t a daytime thought. Nights, Myron was telling her, she still mourned.

“Maybe my subconscious is none of your business,” she’d told him at last.

“Maybe you should sleep in your office.”

She began to fall asleep by first willing her mind to a more recent part of the distant past. She positioned herself in her memory as a young, nervous spinster, free to drink beer and skip meals. She went to bed with Vintage Radio in her earbuds, its actors speaking their canned Sputnik-era lines into the soil of her dreams.

Now, mid-divorce, with Myron gone, reclaiming the recent past had become harder. Pandemic terror had fuzzed the sharp lines of perimenopause and sunk them between a relentless current of bad and worse news. But there was also her own personal malaise, a nerve net of needles fused painfully through her hands and feet. She’d seen two neurologists, three rheumatologists, an acupuncturist, and a chiropractor, all of whom had offered nothing.

“Are you just starving for attention?” Myron had asked, in the joke-as-serious-statement tone she’d heard him use with DMV agents and bad waiters, but she kept up her trajectory of painful diagnostic procedures, most recently a nerve conduction test in the hospital. Electrodes had been placed on her skin, a needle then positioned back and forth and deeper into the layers beneath, until she yelped in pain. She’d heard her own muscles, their twitches amplified on the office speaker. She’d left the exam room gating back tears and walked through the hospital art gallery on her way to the parking lot. A sculptor named Brantley. Weathered metal faces done in bronze, patches of wires where should have been the apples of cheeks. She agreed. The body, she was coming to realize, was a trap.

Her nerves were conducting fine, she’d been told a few days later, in the patient portal, but still she felt molten. Napalm shot down the sides of each of her legs and up her spine, occasionally out through her left eye, lava across the bridge of her nose. Once, in traffic, she felt warmth curling around the knob of her ear and removed her glasses, wondering whether her body hadn’t become curious enough to melt them. She consulted the internet. Upped her vitamin B_1. Overdosed on B_6 until she developed a twitching in her jaw. She stretched into Vinyasa poses and leaned her ears into her knees, pulled her elbows against her back like broken wings.

None of this worked. The pain moved up her arms and back down, keeping her awake at night. It kept her from her nightly dose of the recent past, and the withdrawal kept her from sleep. Nothing was strong enough to jog her back. She went to bed trying, but failing, to count sheep. The flock she built was sturdy and gray; they bleated, one by one, when confronted with the rickety fence she built. They milled about, munched grass, and refused to jump. It’s okay, little sheep, Ruth told them as they stood their ground. I deserve this.

Now, as the sun took its position, she pulled her hair into a ponytail so tight it tugged the skin at the corners of her eyes. She sat in the relative seclusion of her second-floor patio, waiting for the top of the hour, when they’d all be speaking into the digital air of her office’s morning teams meeting. Neither the elms nor the oaks had done their thing yet, here in mid-April, and through the bare branches, Ruth could see and be seen from the street. She’d been in the apartment a month now, and was growing accustomed to the relative lack of privacy. She’d have her home back soon enough, she hoped: her house and its hosta-eating neighborhood deer, free and clear of her wound-down marriage. A neighbor walked by with twin Great Pyrenees, raising his leash-bound hand in a sort of wave. Ruth waved back. Hit the Join Meeting button. Watched the circle pursue itself around the app’s progress. The digital entrance chime, and the abrupt pop of sound that was the chief of warrants singing to her toddler, made Ruth jump a bit in her porch chair. She reduced her laptop’s decibels. Heard the sand of work/life grief in Lisa’s voice. You are my sunshine, she sang, my only sunshine.

As others joined the call, Ruth clicked her mouse down a row to check their faces. There was Jory, the young paralegal with the royal blue afro, and Robert, the office predator, thwarted in his sexual harassment now that staff meetings could go virtual. There was Joel, one of the prosecutors, in the orange baseball cap he wore even on the steps of the courthouse. Again, her neighbor passed, walking the big white fluff of his dogs in the return direction. He disappeared down the street in the long shadows cast by the other apartment buildings. Ruth found a bass line that had taken up in her head: the low, rich chord of the distant past. The family she’d grown up with, who’d been picked off one by one until there was only her sister. Over the years, Ruth had received letters. From Wendy. From Sacramento. She’d never written back, but the letters kept coming. They revealed nothing, neither whether Wendy had elevated her life to the Rockefeller status to which she’d aspired, nor whether she’d done more ordinary things: taken up knitting, started a family. The letters were simply begging, at times almost keening. We had a scorched past, read one. But I believe we could still be sisters. If you’d just write me back. Remembering them, now, made her so sad for Wendy’s pleading that she involuntarily shook her head.

She slid the patio door open and found her kid, sitting at the small chrome table they’d bought at Pier 1 and humped up the stairs when they moved. Today, Enix was pretty solidly Enix, and maybe 2 percent Annie: They were in a green army jacket they’d gotten from the surplus store, their breasts bound with an Ace bandage that Ruth could see under the tank top. A couple of dogtags swung across their flattened chest. Annie, who’d been between genders for months was now Enix again, Ruth’s son. They were gender fluid, they’d explained wearily, when Ruth asked, and they’d made Ruth search Amazon for a giant flag, rainbowed in pink, blue, and purple, which they’d positioned in their bedroom window as a curtain. They might be a son for a day or a week or forever, but they always signaled with clothes, so Ruth didn’t have to fumble, and for this clarity, she was grateful.

“Hey, Mom,” Enix said. They bunched over like a prisoner, eating the bowl of fruit Ruth had sectioned and put in the refrigerator for them the night before.

“You’re up early.”

“Getting the worm.” Enix had grown as tall as Ruth and developed the same molten shade of red hair; they’d hatched the same exact constellation of freckles on their left cheek. “Dad texted me. He said he’d pick me up from school,” they said, as if reading Ruth’s mind.

“He didn’t even ask.”

Enix heard, or didn’t hear. They scrolled up, then up again on their phone.

“It’s bad co-parenting,” said Ruth.

Enix popped a blackberry in their mouth, looking earnestly at her. “Can I have coffee?” they asked. “If I have to get up this early for school, I deserve coffee.”

“You’re thirteen,” Ruth said, laying her laptop on the counter, opening a window to the CNN livestream. Her other colleagues were on mute, their video feeds canceled, but Lisa still sang. There were two minutes left until the meeting officially started. Ruth filled a bowl with fruit and removed a fork from the drawer. Sat down across from Enix.

“We’re all going to die someday anyway,” they said. “What does it matter if I have coffee at thirteen?”

“Ha. No one’s dying. You have an entire future ahead of you. So you’re going to need to sit up straighter than that.” Ruth pressed her palm against the part of Enix’s cheek where the freckles echoed her own. “When you’re sixteen, I’ll let you have coffee.”

Enix set themselves back into a slouch. “A bitch can dream,” they said, misgendering themselves.

On CNN Matthew Chance laid into the numbers of people dead in a Los Angeles mass shooting, and Ruth imagined, without wanting to, her sister dead, at long last, of the grief of surviving. Buried somewhere in Rosalind, an elaborate headstone marking the length of her body. She then imagined Wendy alive and thriving, having forgotten Ruth entirely, balancing a fulfilling career with three handsome children. She imagined Wendy middle-aged and single, on a beach in France, tossing pebbles into sea-foam, wondering if Ruth herself were dead or alive. All three possibilities were a Schrödinger’s truth of sorts. Ruth had pushed away her past and clung, for such a long time now, to a certain rock of stability. In leaving Myron she was climbing down the cliff, looking around to determine what else might yet hold steady.

She pulled her hand from Enix’s cheek and leaned back against her chair. She stared into Enix’s eyes, their light brown flecked with so much green. “A bitch should never dream,” she said. “That’s dangerous.”

TWO

Myron

Ruth had said she’d be waiting for him in the parking lot, and she was, sitting on the trunk of her car, oblivious to his arrival. The Tesla had been her first car purchase independent of him, and she treated it as a teenager might treat a ’68 Ford Mustang. She washed it in their driveway every Saturday, drying it with a special chamois she’d bought at AutoZone. Myron got out of his car now and studied the back of her head, the tight, neat French braid she’d put there. Her hair was more carroty, even, than Enix’s; when he first met her, he’d looked for the statistically likely lone brown strand per fifty and found none. Ruth had never been able to tolerate sunlight, which had been a joke among their White friends in college. There had been Ruth, smearing SPF 50, buying sombreros at beaches. After college, when they were first living together and then married, she locked the front door in broad daylight. She set the emergency brake in her car even when she was just parking in their driveway.

All of it, all of Ruth’s secret and unpredictable foci, had grated on Myron during their marriage. If it could be said that everyone on earth was secretly fighting a battle inside, Ruth was fighting five hundred. She couldn’t be helped, though it had taken him all these years to realize. He saw her, from behind and then, as he approached, from the side, saw she had her thousand-dollar Canon strapped across her chest. He saw her as she saw him, a man now unneeded, a prong who no longer fit any outlet in her soul. She wore a sharp, dark lipstick he’d never seen, and a walnut suede skirt that matched the darker glaze she’d put over her hair.

She looked down and fiddled with her camera’s telephoto lens, her elbows bowed out from her body as wings from a delicate moth. He’d never wanted her as badly when they were married as he wanted her now.

He got closer. Tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey,” he said.

She did not rise. “Enix has homework this weekend,” she said, wearily. He felt his shoulders hunching into the childhood version of himself, which was the model he most hated. Ruth picked up the camera, took aim at him, rotated her lens. Dropped the camera’s body back to her chest. “Have a good time,” she said. “I’ll pick them up Sunday.”

Myron nodded. If he opened his mouth, or even just his throat, to murmur assent, he’d open some seventh seal of misery that would pour out and flood the world.

The final straw between them had been a piece of bullshit he’d doodled on a tablet. He’d been watching an online CLE seminar and was bored toward actual tears, which he felt in his eyes as he yawned. But he never should have penciled the joke to paper in the first place, never should have left it on his desk where Ruth could find it. Then again, he knew there were deeper issues, ones Ruth was simply refusing to disclose. She hadn’t deigned to offer him truth. She’d simply filed, and in typical Ruth fashion, never looked back.

She’d been the one to plant all her belongings in a giant U-Haul and flee the family home, but not before asking for it back. From her new luxury apartment in East Louisville, she filed motions for her promise of half his pension. She wanted alimony. She wanted sole decision-making power over Enix’s educational future. His lawyer, upon reading her initial petition aloud to Myron, had nicknamed her the Bulldog.

Most distressingly, she wanted the church pew, a mahogany antique they’d had trucked home on a whim from an estate sale. They’d had no plans for its placement; when it arrived at the house, they’d settled it indifferently in the foyer. He couldn’t remember any of them ever sitting on it; like most of the trappings of their marriage, it had gone unused. But Ruth wanted, now, to stuff it in her catalog of war prizes, and Myron found himself surprised at the emotion with which he told his lawyer she couldn’t. She’d also asked for half of Enix’s summer camp fees, and his agreement to provide transportation to all lessons. He’d gladly pay fees, and he’d gladly drive Enix anywhere they needed to go. But because the spiteful, humiliated monkey in his heart had so few answers, he told his lawyer that all three of these things were nonnegotiable. Divorces were no-fault these days, sure, but this one was the fault of Ruth’s grinchy soul.

He made an exercise now of remembering her as she was in their first little house, the one they rented right after they got married, the single-story bungalow she filled with plants and more plants. She’d started out with a huge cactus on the front porch, almost as caricature, but then she’d filled the front yard with cacti, and added rhododendron bushes and dragon trees. She put a towering ficus in the corner of their living room near the television, and a chili pepper plant on the kitchen windowsill. She put small, square pots of thyme and sage on the porch columns.

After Annie was born, she filled the backyard, and she filled Annie’s nursery even, with greenery, and it seemed that every time Annie napped, Ruth spent the hour or two tending her various gardens rather than talking to him. Finally, there came the day when he yelled out to her to put down her watering jug and come in—hurry!—because PBS was rerunning The Black Power Mixtape.

“Plants won’t water themselves,” she yelled back at him.

He heard this for the ruse it was. Ruth had always eschewed the political, refusing to attend college anti-apartheid rallies with him, waving voter registration volunteers out of her path when they approached on street corners. She didn’t seem to understand this part of Blackness, though he’d come to find this flaw as endearing as it was regrettable. But the tone. Her tone. It was the tone that had made him ask, “Why are you turning this house into a fucking arboretum anyway?”

He heard the plastic clatter as the watering jug fell to the porch. She came and stood in the open back door and fanned her neck, whipping up a breeze that lifted the ends of her hair. “I just want to nurture something that’s not pooping or screaming at me,” she said. Her nose turned red and she started crying, sobbing in big gulps of air. “I want to raise something that’s not going to need therapy later because I looked at it the wrong way. Is that okay with you, Sir Myron?”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“What feelings. I don’t have feelings anymore. There isn’t time.”

As Annie had grown, Ruth had let the plants, one by one, wither and die, and when she and Myron left the rented house and moved into their own, they had only to take with them the old front porch cactus that had been the original plant. In those five years Ruth had somehow transferred her neuroses cleanly and neatly into parenting, which is why Myron wasn’t surprised when she said now, “I need to know what time to pick Enix up on Sunday. I mean exactly. It’s what all the divorce books say. You need to give me an exact time.”

“What—is Enix performing surgery?”

“Good fences make good neighbors,” she said. She was still seated on the trunk of her car, which made her taller than him. It felt like some sort of power move. She scratched the end of her nose with the heel of her hand. She didn’t give a shit about his feelings. It was possible she never had.

He winced. Visibly and, he hoped, purposefully. “Fine. I mean, here’s a day of the week when no one has anywhere to be, but whatever. How about three?”

“That’s so late to be starting homework.”

“I can supervise homework. It’s still in my job description.”

Ruth transmitted a look of catlike satisfaction. “Thank you,” she said. “Their math book’s in their bag.”

Enix’s backpack, blue with its indigo Lincoln School logo, was on the ground beside the car, and he hoisted it over his shoulder, then bent down and picked up their clarinet case. Band class was the one thing Enix still enjoyed about Lincoln, an all-girls’ school they themselves had chosen when they were still solidly Annie. They were first chair clarinet this year and had finagled their way into playing a solo at the eighth-grade graduation.

“Enix,” he said now, for they’d descended from the passenger seat of their mother’s car with the army jacket around their shoulders and dogtags swinging. Enix turned their face to the sky, closed their eyes as if to shut out their parents. Ruth came in for a hug, but Enix held stiff against the goodbye, their arms limp at their sides. “Go, Mom,” they said. Their neck was turning red. “See you Sunday.”

Days earlier, Myron had made an appointment with his lawyer, Melani Sutton, and now, on his way downtown, he cracked the car windows to let in the pollinated spring. The unusually fierce winter had worn their minds to thread, but now, driving down Brownsboro toward I-71S, he could smell the promise of honeysuckle. He remembered himself as a kid, pulling the flower’s stigma to suck nectar from the middle. He was so far from that now. He was a man growing old, trimming his ear hair, losing his sense of smell, drying out of testosterone.

He’d heard from Melani that morning: Ruth was rejecting his settlement offer. She should have been especially agitated when they met up to transfer Enix, but she hadn’t been. True, the relative quiet of the pandemic and its aftermath had thrown cover over the small, frenetic bird in Ruth’s mind. But her calm made him wonder what she knew that he didn’t. She’d always held, in the tuck of her elbow, in the set of her mouth, a certain ether of unoffered information; she was a chambered nautilus of secrecy She had a line of freckles under one eye that made her look, perpetually, as if she’d been crying, and when she answered his deeper questions—did she miss her dead mother, was she devastated that Enix was failing world science—she’d roll off casual responses that made him unable to decide what she wasn’t telling him. Sex with her was at times celebratory at the same time it was like fucking someone he didn’t know, and he often wondered if a prostitute, at least, might whimper into a couch pillow afterward and tell him about her abusive stepmother. The only thing she’d told him about her past was that when she was six years old, her parents had died, entwined together on a hot, sticky floor, on their way out of the Hollywood Supper Club. Myron had vaguely remembered the huge tragedy: 165 dead, many of them trampled on their way out of the fire. But as Ruth relayed her parents’ singular story to him, just a community college janitor out for a rare night on the town, what had been a major news event turned Technicolor real in his head. “Dad used to be the last person in every building,” she’d told him. “It was so spooky to watch, the way he had to shut off all the lights until he got to the one that would let him see his way out the door. And then, for him and Mom to die like that? In perfect darkness? Well.”

Ruth had told him how her four grandparents had collected her parents’ charred bodies, the way she then bounced between the two sets of them, Baileys on school nights, Carrs on the weekends. Really, she said, when she saw his eyes widen, it was an unremarkable childhood. She sipped her Stella, and Myron felt himself continuing to stare at her. She felt it too. She shrugged her shoulders and looked off into space.

The next day he’d sat outside her dorm room for hours, hoping to casually run into her on her way to the shower. She’d be shrouded in towels, he knew, but the prospect of her nakedness wasn’t the point. He wanted to experience the raw, magnetic truth of her, her bare feet, her wet hair. He didn’t love her, necessarily, but he respected her presence in a way that frightened him. “What are you doing here, you creep,” a hallmate had finally said, in passing, and he left the hall. But it was a disappointment. Ruth moved in a space of puzzlement she’d never let him crack, so he married it. Hoping one day to be close enough, he could break in and burglarize.

He hadn’t. And now, Melani Sutton was telling him, he wouldn’t. He could scratch Ruth off his bucket list. They were in Melani’s office, at her law firm, which was so close to his own, in a fifteen-story building that clotted the sun from the street below. Myron situated Enix and their things in a chair in the outer hall, followed the working lights of the trail of recessed ceiling bars leading to Melani’s door.

“Howdy,” she said. “Have a seat.”

He wheeled his chair closer to her door before sitting, so he could still look down the hall and watch Enix, who was now fingering the shiny metal keys of their clarinet. He watched the light trained on the crown of his kid’s head, how it set the highlights of their hair to brilliance. Enix arched their fingers to hold a long whole note before flying through a crescendo of sixteenths, and Myron felt a prod of resentment against their musicianship, their ability to float so far above the cloying world, to drift above their parents’ divorce and an all-girls’ school that was more Lord of the Flies than Facts of Life, trailing thirty-second notes and fermatas behind them.

“This is all pretty standard,” Melani was saying. Her voice was unnaturally high. A cartoon voice, a voice on helium. “And I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but she’s changing her name back to Cottam.”

“Cottam?”

“Cottam.”

He didn’t understand. He’d married a Ruth Bailey. Ruth Elizabeth Bailey, he thought he’d married, but now, even her middle name wasn’t holding still. It was in twelve-point font, three paragraphs down a sheet of paper Melani was sliding toward him: Ruth Louise Cottam.

“Her maiden name,” Melani said slowly, as if they were no longer speaking English. He needed to relieve his bladder, but he was the client this time, pinned in place.

“Cottam?” he asked again, this time with sourness, and Melani cocked her head, stared into his eyes. She was assessing his pupils, he knew. He couldn’t bear to look back at her, and instead watched as the air-conditioning trapped one wiry strand of her hair in its current.

Ruth had her camera; Enix, their clarinet.

What Myron had was television. Lots and loads of it.

With his spare time he consumed, rather than creating. He might have crafted some interest to sustain his soul in old age: He might have volunteered at a soup kitchen, or learned how to tie sailors’ knots, or even—thanks, Grandma Moses—started painting. He’d read all the research about saving the aging brain: He might have taken up a language on Duolingo. But he found, at age forty-six, that he no longer cared to fill his brain cells. Those hungry little bastards were crammed too full already.

He binge-watched series like Grey’s Anatomy and Jane the Virgin, and, on federal holidays, curated hours of pure network television. The Presidents’ Day after Ruth moved out, he’d chosen NBC. Started with scrambled eggs and oatmeal over the Today Show, then watched all the previously taped episodes of all courtroom reality: Judge Hatchett, Judge Mathis, Judge Judy, The People’s Court. He himself was now a defendant, which made him take the verdicts seriously.

He lunched with the local news at noon and then watched a couple of soap operas. He leaned in for Dr. Phil and The Talk. Caught up with the 5:30 news, which hadn’t changed much since noon, then washed his five-cheese nachos and beer down with even trashier television: The Real Housewives of New Jersey. In the shower, he heard the noises but could not make out words: The television’s output was like Charlie Brown’s mother, offering nondescript guidance. He fell asleep on the couch listening to Lester Holt. Beyond his closed eyelids, Holt’s crisp midwestern vowels stamped themselves onto his subconscious, and he felt not one bit terrible when he woke the next morning with Today once again spreading its feel-good propaganda across the musty space of his living room. He was American. Watching ridiculous television. As Americans do.

So while other men, he supposed, had their marriages and their outdoor hobbies and their intact senses of self, Myron had his ton of television, and the lightness of that ton included The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which he began binging on Hulu. He watched Aunt Viv tell Carlton that neither he nor his friends were going to MacArthur Park at night to sell stolen Gucci bags, and it took Myron back to the version of himself that had believed an apple and a basketball fell at the same rate of speed. He’d believed his father had married his mother because she was the most efficient girl at the dance. He’d believed Boba Fett’s jetpack was one of a kind.

When he was twenty-four, he’d believed he was an adult. He’d gotten down on one knee in the wet grass of a city park and proposed to Ruth, believing that in doing so, he’d instantly become even more of whatever an American man was supposed to be. He’d master her mystery, after all: He’d earn a master’s degree in Ruth Bailey. He’d hitch his wagon to hers and together they’d plant life in some clay. That life would outgrow its pot, he believed; over the decades it would spring high, dangle its succulent fruit. They’d replant in ever bigger pots, then root themselves in open ground.

There hadn’t been decades. And now, he could see how neither of them had grown a damn thing. Belief, that villain. It always overshot itself.

THREE

Ruth

Ruth held out her gloved hands to Clarisse, wiggled her latex-sheathed fingers. “No risk,” she’d said, pointing to her mask. She felt like an astronaut. Three years post-quarantine, the pandemic had become endemic, yet Clarisse had not yet let anyone into her home. Ruth waved a gloved hand in the air as entreaty to the standoff, but Clarisse stood still behind her screen door, a certain determination glowing in her eyes. “You’re my one friend on the planet,” she said, “and I’m glad you’re here again in my two-thousandth hour of need. But social distancing still means social distancing.”

Ruth both had and had not expected as much. Clarisse had always been the kind of germ freak who never allowed shoes in her house, who tucked alcohol wipes in her bra before she went to a bar so she could wipe the rim of her mug before drinking. Ruth had seen Clarisse sanitize her hands so many times—after pumping gas, after handling her own bank card in a restaurant—that she wondered whether she’d yet leached away the oils of her own skin, worn away the whorls of her fingerprints. Clarisse was just back from two weeks in a psychiatric rehabilitation facility, and Ruth couldn’t imagine how she’d handled it: the physical contact with strangers, the lunches in a cafeteria setting. But here she was, back home and still standing her pandemic ground. Ruth felt corrected, as might a small child. She heard a noise from her stomach that sounded like a plunger being forced down a clogged drain.

Her throat tickled in a way she hoped was simply the manifestation of seasonal allergies, and she was holding back a cough that desperately wanted its way out of the chute. She envisioned her bronchial tubes as tiny balloon animals, twisted into the shapes of dachshunds. She swallowed her own phlegm and breathed deeply.

Clarisse stepped aside from the door and back into her house, then reappeared holding the kind of folding chair she might have taken to a tailgate party. “How about we do this?” she said, handing it through the door. Clarisse’s house faced a busy street, and as Ruth unfolded the chair onto the porch, a bus passed behind her, its engine sounding so much like rain that she looked to her car to make sure she’d rolled up its windows.

Clarisse plopped down on her own hardwood foyer, crisscross applesauce, and Ruth tried hard, so hard, not to look at her legs, because they were orange. Ruth couldn’t decide whether it was a mistake of the wrong shade of clashing pantyhose, or a sudden inability to match the stockings to the other elements of her clothing, but either way it was an indicator of slippage.

Ruth had had her doubts about the aftermath of Clarisse’s fifth stay in rehab. She’d been transferred to the facility, a clot of inconclusive-looking tract homes on the edge of Shelby County, after the EMTs had filled her stomach with charcoal and told her just how fucking lucky she was to have good health insurance because most people got chucked right back out the door. Clarisse’s first and only telephone call from Rivendell, three days into her stay, had been to Ruth.

“Rooth,” she’d slurred into the phone, at 33⅓ rpm. “Come get me. No, that’s wrong. Come see me.”

She was Ruth’s oldest friend on earth, the only person who’d known her when she still had a brother. A sister. A mother. A father. Ruth could never understand how it was that her family had suffered the consumptive tragedy, but it was Clarisse who’d grown up and stepped aside from her mind. Where Ruth had spent most of her fifth-grade year watching her little brother dwindling away in hospital after more comprehensive hospital, Clarisse had been disassembling and reassembling her Lego Millennium Falcon. Clarisse had been popular with boys and graduated third in their high school class: The worst thing Ruth could remember happening to her was a suspension for wearing a miniskirt.

And so it had been hard to watch Clarisse’s slow roll down the hill; in youth, Clarisse had always been the better one. The stronger one. The faster one. She stood five feet nine by the end of junior high yet refused, when asked repeatedly, to play on the girls’ basketball team. “You know they’re asking because I’m Black,” she told Ruth. Even now, Ruth could remember how the intensity of everything Clarisse said back then showed up behind her face. She cut off all her hair in seventh grade, shaved it close to her scalp like a boy’s. The haircut burned away all the softness of childhood, revealing a ferocity to the shape of her eyes and the cliffs of her cheekbones that made the adults all around them suddenly afraid. When the basketball coach had asked her to join the team, he’d spoken softly, Ruth noticed. He’d used the conditional: You might consider. He’d said please. “If I was White,” Clarisse told Ruth after he’d walked away, “they’d just leave me alone and let me make good grades.”

And Clarisse always knew where to position a cut. “You’re going to be sorry you don’t have her,” she’d told Ruth, in college, where Ruth had first started to delete Wendy from her consciousness.

Ruth had said nothing. Clarisse had then been applying a chemical straightener to Ruth’s hair, both of them wondering, on a whim, what it might do. Clarisse snapped off one glove, then the other, then stood apart from Ruth, surveying the process. “She’s the only family you have left,” said Clarisse.

Ruth’s scalp began to tingle. She felt small sparks of pain. “What’s family?” she said. “You’re my family now.”

“It’s not the same,” Clarisse said, “and you know it. You and Wendy went through everything together. Everything.”

Ruth had felt like telling Clarisse how it hadn’t been like that at all, how Wendy had wanted so badly to excuse herself from their family in the first place, how she’d asked aloud once if it were possible she might have been switched in the hospital, swiped from a family of millionaires. In middle school Wendy had copied haircuts from Vogue magazine and stopped talking like the rest of them, pronouncing words with a bent that aimed for Posh British but made her sound even more like Disaffected Valley Girl. Aside from the particulars, even, Ruth felt like explaining how family was simply a happenstance of biology, a stain that one might, after an interval of time, wash clean from one’s hands.

“You’ll regret it,” Clarisse said. “One day, you’ll think of Wendy and it’ll kill you.” She held the nitrile gloves dangling from between two fingers. They were bright blue, like a robin’s egg, though the straightener had turned the fingers roan.

Ruth squirmed in her chair. “My head is burning,” she said.

“And then, when you want her back in your life, you won’t be able to find her. Mark my words.”

“My head, Clarisse. My fucking head.”

The gloves landed with a chack when Clarisse threw them against the floor. She slammed the door closed on her way out. Ruth ran to the hall bathtub and stuck her head under the faucet, closing her eyes tight to keep out the chemicals. When she’d finally massaged her hair back to freedom, she stood and looked in the bathroom mirror. Her hair, which had sprung lush and curly on either side of her chin since childhood, now hung limply, past her shoulders. She no longer looked at all like her family. She was pleased to find herself looking a bit like Tyra Banks. With freckles.

And it was Clarisse who’d started the web-growing, without meaning to. She’d graduated from high school with a 4.0, a 1490 on the SAT, and a full ride to the University of Kentucky. She could have taken full rides, too, at Bryn Mawr, UCLA, and the University of Arizona, but she’d taken Ruth by the hand and helped her type up an application, then hustled both of them all the way across the country, where, she told Ruth, “You can be whoever you want. Reinvent yourself. People are expecting you to fall apart. You will, if you stay.”

Clarisse had been speaking of a small, psychic shift, but Ruth had swept away the ashes and become an entirely new phoenix. She’d cleared the entire state of California from her personal history, paid to change her surname of record, burned off the years of compounded tragedy. After college, Clarisse moved from sleepy Lexington to progressive Louisville. Ruth followed.

Like an expanding star, Clarisse still burned up the world around her. Ruth watched as she got her MBA, took a job at Humana, bought a three-bedroom house in the historic district. Ruth floundered; Clarisse flew. The same year Ruth flunked out of law school, Clarisse paid off her mortgage and quit her job to go teach second graders at Greathouse/Shryock. She spun gold with early literacy. Won Kentucky Teacher of the Year. But now, it was as though things had gotten mixed up, and a part of Clarisse’s helium had ground itself down into Ruth’s hydrogen, as if Clarisse had caught a disease that Ruth had refused.

She was pulling her hands into their shirtsleeves now, so far back that Ruth could see only her bitten-down fingernails. “Thanks for coming by,” she was saying. “You know I cherish you.”

“Back at ya,” Ruth said, putting her hand on the screen door’s wire netting as proxy for physical contact. Clarisse’s fourth time in Rivendell, just before Thanksgiving, Ruth had visited and found a sort of shadow Clarisse, drugged beyond existential meaning, sucking on a grape Popsicle in the hospital garden. She’d retracted her hands all the way into her sleeves, so that she was holding the Popsicle stick through her shirt fabric. Ruth cheered herself now by noting that Clarisse’s hands were at least partially exposed. She was better, then. And maybe it was okay if she no longer had the penchant for coordinating an outfit. The skill might return to her.

Ruth removed her hand from the screen and leaned against the canvas backing of her chair. “You good these days?” she asked.

“I’m staying out of trouble, if that’s what you mean. What about you, Ruth? Things looking up?”

“I’m fine. I mean, my lawyer’s still costing too much money. But there’s nothing worse than sleeping in a bed with someone who can’t stand you.”

“Come on. Myron adores you. He does. It’s not that he doesn’t love you—”

“Baby. Darlin’. It was right there in his CLE notes.”

“I still say he was joking.”

She’d stepped into Myron’s office one afternoon when he’d just gone down the hall to the bathroom: He was in the middle of a tedious online session on revocable trusts, and as she heard the lawyer droning on onscreen, blinking her eyes rapidly as if she were boring even herself, Ruth became grateful all over again that Myron had been the one who’d finished law school, strapping himself to this cross for the both of them. She looked over the envelopes on his desk, searching for a bill from her dermatologist, but when she reached over his notepad, she couldn’t help but settle her eyes on what he’d scribbled in the margins, three times: I hate ruth. The last time he’d written it, he’d underlined it, then outlined the entire series with a square made of curlicues. It had been so shocking that at first, she laughed.

She heard the toilet flush; he hadn’t closed the door, marital familiarity excusing the formality of clandestine pissing. She scrambled away from his desk, not wanting a confrontation in the moment. “Whatchawantforsupper?” she heard herself say. “Howaboutsomecodloin?” The words mashed together on their way out of her brain, and she couldn’t remember why she needed the dermatologist bill, couldn’t remember what bills were, what dermatologists did. All her circuits were jammed.

“Whatever you please,” Myron said, smiling, and she backed to the door, gelling together a smile of her own. Just before she got to the hall, she saw him flip his tablet over, face down. He turned and smiled at her again. Looked back to the droning lawyer, the Kentucky Bar Association logo in the corner of the screen. “How about asparagus with that?” he said.

He scribbled on the cardboard back of his tablet as if he were taking notes, but he was pretending—she saw that. She’d been married to him long enough to know how he pissed and how he lied.

“Surething,” she said. “Asparagussurething.”

It turned out there was neither cod nor asparagus in the house, and when she sent him to the supermarket for both she went practical, logging into his laptop to check all his open apps, scroll through his gmail for further proof that their marriage was over. Correspondence with another woman, perhaps she’d find, or details on an extra life insurance policy. She found Enix’s homework notifications from school. ACLU petitions he had and had not signed. Requests for his presence at an NAACP mixer. She hadn’t known what to do, but she’d known that her one and only phone call should be to Clarisse, and so Clarisse it was who, over the course of a fortnight, echo-chambered Ruth toward a reckoning.

“That, you don’t need in your life,” Clarisse said. “‘I hate Ruth’? Fuck that. Leave him. Take half.”

After she told him, Myron wrote Ruth a final, torrid love letter on college-ruled paper he’d ripped out of one of Enix’s school composition books. It was a joke, Ruth. I was joking. If you leave me, I will die of grief. You hold my bleeding heart in your hands like a slab of raw meat.

Ruth crossed through both lines with red ink. You have your hand. It’s five fingers, she wrote back. She left the sheet of paper in his chair.

Now a breeze came, and Ruth felt again the familiar tickle in her lungs, the miniature balloons tightening themselves into cocktail straws. She swallowed once, twice, frantically. She thought of baseballs soaring over stadiums, canals opening their legs for large boats. Still, it came. A cough.

Clarisse scrabbled back on the floor like a crab. “Hey, Typhoid Mary,” she said.

“It’s allergies.”

“How do you know that? You don’t even know that.”

“Clarisse, I’m just here to support you right now.”

“Support me or support you?” Clarisse pushed herself to standing, raised one knee and then the next, as if she were a flamingo. “Sorry,” she said, “but you got to go.”

And so Ruth did. She stood and pushed a hand into the seat of her canvas chair, which then closed itself smoothly around her forearm. She picked it up by its center and slid it just inside Clarisse’s screen door. “See ya,” she said.

She made it to the sidewalk before Clarisse spoke. “Rooth,” she said.

Ruth pivoted on one foot.

“Wendy’s kinda sick.”

“You’ve heard from her?”

Clarisse was leaning into her screen door, her nose pressed to the crosshatch of wire. She pressed the palms of her hands into the screen and they became bulges of white flesh. “I’ve been in touch with Wendy for years,” she said. “Sorry.” If Clarisse offered the door her full weight, Ruth thought, looking at her, the screen would give way. Go ahead, door, she thought. Fall.

Ruth hadn’t seen Wendy for decades, but she’d figuratively been with her, on the receiving end of interview requests from true crime show producers, and in the “To” fields of emails from the political left. Ruth could never conclusively figure out how anyone traced her to Louisville, Kentucky, how they found her married name or phone number, but she always suspected Wendy. Ruth never twitched toward response. She ripped up letters, deleted voicemails, reported correspondence as spam. But she’d searched YouTube once and typed in her father’s name, only to find her sister yelling into a megaphone at a Black Lives Matter rally, telling the story of their father’s murder at 110 decibels. A story like theirs deserved quiet, Ruth thought. But there was Wendy, having gotten over and past and through the quiet part. Her grief running wild in the literal streets. It was nothing the millionaires of Vogue magazine would have tolerated.

“She’s sick?” Ruth asked. “Sick how?”

Clarisse spoke slowly then, with an arrest of speech that made Ruth wonder whether one of her many psychotropic drugs wasn’t kicking in. “M … S. She started feeling … funny, Ruth … She walked across the room … fell straight into a wall … They did an M … R … I …”

“Is she okay?”

Ruth snapped back to conversational attention. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “You know sick people never tell the exact truth. They’re always daring to hope. I just know there are lesions. On her brain.”

Ruth felt her weight sinking to one side, listing as if one of her legs might fall through the concrete.

“You didn’t know?” said Clarisse. “The body doesn’t last forever. Call her, Ruth. Go see her. It’s been years. A lifetime. She’s your sister, for fuck’s sake. Go see her.”

“I—” Ruth began, but the word can’t refused to join the end of her sentence.

Clarisse took a hand from the screen door and clapped it over her mouth. With the other, she waved goodbye.

Ruth turned to the sidewalk and clicked her key fob on the approach to her car. She heard the chirp of the lock, the punky knock of the latch releasing. She opened the door and sat, then coughed. She coughed until coughing was no longer real, until her throat burned with its own stage direction. She coughed sympathetically with herself until pity became punishment, and only then did she stop.

Come with me to Kroger? Clarisse texted the next morning. Help me navigate the madding crowd?

Can’t, Ruth texted back. I found your sister. Gonna spend ten years talking to her behind your back

Clarisse was an only child. She’d get the point.

Ruth waited a couple of hours, listened to a Canadian comedy writer flub every single trivia question on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, then decided it was still early enough on a Saturday afternoon, half a chance Myron and Enix were home but a bigger chance they weren’t. Now that he was seeing the kid only every other weekend he made a military schedule out of it, the Bakehouse at 0900 hours and the farmers’ market by 1030, chess in the park at 1200 (sharp!), and the ice rink in Oldham County by 1330. Myron had not explored these quadrants of the city until his home cracked open and fell in two, and Ruth hoped it might be a lovely, wondrous time of attachment for them both. But Enix sent texts: Where does dad think I’ll use a public bathroom. Mom I’m tired this morning why can’t dad just let me sleep. Mom why do I have to come to dad’s house in the first place. Mom why

Ruth passed the driveway that was still hers and saw no car that wasn’t. Myron hadn’t yet asked her to return the garage door opener, and it was such a relief when the door rolled open to emptiness: no Toyota and no man and no kid, just a ladder in the corner and yard tools hanging from the two metal strips Myron had drilled into the wall’s studs. She turned her key in the inner door, listened for the click of the shaft, sighed with relief that Myron hadn’t thought to change the locks. She opened the door and found herself standing in their kitchen, site of so much hope and angst and failure, the granite counters and Mediterranean backsplash accusing her. Hadn’t this been what she’d wanted in a life? The microwave door was open, its interior light showing up the grated screen. Inside she found a bowl of sweet potatoes, furred over with the beginnings of mold. She decided not to dump them. Closed the door, literally, on her responsibility to do so. Already, without her in it, the house smelled different. More like Myron, more like his staid, corporate life. The house was coming to smell like an actual office.

On one counter sat a houseplant, a Mother’s Day gift from Myron’s mother, a simple snake plant that belied the complexity of Donna Lee’s animosity. There was the soil Ruth had dutifully fed over the years, the thick leaves she’d sprayed with mist: It had been the last houseplant she’d nursed and kept in health. She remembered back when her nerve pain had first started, snapping the plant’s leaves to rub them hopefully on her fingertips, finding the staticky pain yet uneased. “That’s because it’s all in your head,” Myron had told her. Gently, at first, and then with impatience: “It’s just stress.” He’d watched her smearing the lymph on the backs of her hands and sighed. Ruth hated that he’d been right: The shoot had not cured her. Still, the plant was a living thing that had been hers, and she thought to take it back, now that Myron wasn’t home: It would have been a type of begging, she thought, carrying her own things out of the house as he watched.

But when she got closer to the counter and turned the blinds to allow sunlight, she saw the rot of Myron’s neglect, the leaves of her plant turned pithy. Its stems drooped, their healing properties checked. It was unable to save even itself, this plant; it was one more casualty of their marriage. She left the kitchen and continued to search downstairs, walking between rooms. She checked the den, the woven baskets they’d bought on a trip to Spain and the sofa that was the color of blood. They’d fought over it, she and Myron: She’d told him the color was trendy, then instantly regretted it when the couch appeared in her living room. She’d kept regret to herself, dug in, in fact, about how great it looked, but now felt sorry that the wrong color would be squarely his.

She checked the den, the decorative iron poker they’d bought at a bazaar in Chicago. There was the bright, happy Gee’s Bend quilt she’d hung years back, its geometric improvisation something Annie had traced time and time and over again with her small child’s fingers. There, the Polish pottery she’d put on the mantelpiece, and there, the cherry sideboard that had belonged to Myron’s great-grandmother. All the souvenirs from a life Ruth had thought might continue forever. She wanted none of them.

She climbed the stairs and wandered—first, through her and Myron’s bedroom, its close air now clotted with the bachelor version of Myron. His aftershave hung thickly in the bathroom, and she noticed a new, high-end soap that would account for the scent of sandalwood. She looked under the bathroom cabinet, found a box of OURTONE Band-Aids. He’d specially ordered them off the internet, she guessed: They’d work on his darker skin color, but not hers. She took them and put them in the pocket of her jacket. She’d take them home for Enix. If he cut himself, he’d just have to go to CVS and put White people’s plastic on his skin.

She entered his home office, went through his desk drawers, found nothing more significant than a tin of old golf tees. The last room was Enix’s. The only difficulty. The one part of her old life she felt like gathering under both arms, in bags, in suitcases. The Apples to Apples game still perched on Enix’s bookshelf, the snow globe Ruth had given them for their eighth birthday, still holding its murky yellow water there on the nightstand. The canopy bed that had been Enix’s since she was still very much an Annie, the Star Wars sheets she’d demanded in second grade now traded for an androgynous shade of kelly green. At the base of her spine, Ruth felt a current of pain that made her stand straight at attention, and she wished Myron were there, to witness its reality. The pain shot quickly up to her neck, and she heard Enix’s overhead light fizzle out, the air pump in their aquarium flip silent. It was nothing Myron would ever have felt, or even believed—she knew that. She ticked the switch on the wall, to make sure of what, she wasn’t certain, but nothing happened. She thought to check the fuse box in the laundry room, then thought better: She’d leave this for Myron. It was the job of the nonbeliever, to handle the physical, rational world.

She ran downstairs, the bandage tin clinking in her pocket with each step, then past the living room and out the kitchen door. She doubted her body was substantial enough to affect a house’s entire electric grid: It seemed like the stuff of cartoons. But every time it happened, well, it happened.

She backed out of the garage and clicked the button, but the door did not roll itself back down. She turned off the car, clicked the button again, listened for any grinding of gears that would indicate it was getting juice, at least. She heard silence. She left the door open. She’d let Myron think he’d left it so. Hope that would tell him something about himself, either way. And as for the dead electricity, he’d figure out to check the fuse box.

FOUR

Myron

In the car on the way to the house, he’d texted Ruth: Cottam?

He’d made the forty minutes home and was in his driveway, marveling at the open mouth of his garage, when she texted back. There is much you don’t know, she’d typed. Relax. Nothing between us matters anymore

He felt a fool, the yawning garage he’d left open further proof of his misspent mind. He wanted, so badly, to understand that Ruth was the one, a wreck of a person who’d lied to him all these years. He wanted to believe it was her brainlessness that would now cost them both, would detonate Enix’s childhood. But that was just an understanding, one a friend might lay on his consciousness to make him feel better. A friend might also tell him to take the high road, but he sat in his feelings now in a way that made him want to pour kerosene on any good thing that had ever floated between them. He hit his steering wheel with the palm of his hand, hoping Ruth could register his enmity from all the way across the city, as if it were an airborne toxin.

She hadn’t cheated on him with a man. She’d cheated on him with a self, and that was so much more treacherous. Ruth, as it turned out, wasn’t Ruth. Which meant he, who’d loved her for seventeen years, was not Myron. If he’d gotten her this wrong, what did he know about himself?

There’d been a Christmas card a few years earlier, dispatched from a W. DePaulo, from 1365 Cielo Drive in Sacramento, California. The intended addressees were Mrs. Ruth Hurley and Family, so he’d opened it, feeling that it was, in fact, addressed to him. Within, he found a scrawled note. Ruth, I scanned this picture. I dream of speaking to you. There, in the copy of a photo whose aged pigment had reddened time, was young Ruth, freckled, undeniable Ruth, flanked by two other children: a dark-haired girl who might have been a friend, and a boy who had Ruth’s same sandy hair, her same set jaw, her same, so obviously Black, nose.

“Who’s DePaulo?” he’d asked her, when she came home.

“How should I know?”

But it had rolled off her tongue in such a casual manner that he’d pressed. “These kids”— he said, picking up the stack of mail on the counter, riffling through until he found the card—“one of them’s you.” He removed the photo, held it out to her. “Look.”

“Who?” she’d said, snatching the card from his hand. “Not me. I don’t know.”

She ripped the photo into two clean halves, which she tossed in the pedal bin atop the week’s garbage. Myron knew not to protest. She was like a clam. If he stuck an arm too deep in her past, he might lose it.

In the middle of the night, awakened by winter lightning, he’d gone downstairs to the kitchen. Under the sink he found the lemon yellow rubber gloves they used for nasty tasks: He went to the trash can and moved his hands through the layers of dinnertime detritus. The leftover scales of tilapia, some mushed blueberries Enix had spat into a napkin, broken glass he’d gingerly removed from the sink drain with a pair of tongs. He heard the bolts of lightning striking the earth outside, tenderizing the ground. The light from outside left the kitchen murky and dim, but when he found the photo, its two ripped halves, he fit them together on the counter and found that the girl in the middle was undeniably Ruth. A version of Ruth that was happier than any version he’d seen. He was inside the house, protected from the lightning, yet still he felt pulverized.

And she’d tried to let him know, hadn’t she? They’d been on their way to a dueling piano concert when she’d broken loose from civility, asked him if he was sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life tapping his knee and whistling every time he drove over a bridge.

“Is it skin off your nose?” he’d asked.

“Okay, I guess it is your knee,” she’d said, though when she said it, he felt pebbles rolling in his stomach. She could no longer understand his anxiety, he thought, and when you lost empathy for a person, didn’t that mean you’d lost love? Not long thereafter, they’d meant to go see his mother on a Sunday, and Ruth had refused to go, told him he should take Enix instead. He remembered glaring at her, in what he now saw was an unfair way.

“Why do we always have to act like I don’t have a family?” he’d said, and he winced, now, remembering. Ruth didn’t have parents. He had no idea what it was to have in-laws.

Ruth had said okay, she’d gotten in the back seat of the car and buckled up her seatbelt as Enix got in the front seat, but halfway there, when he turned onto I-64, he’d heard her voice, low under the sound of the air-conditioner: “What is it that you even want from me?”

A bolt of sadness struck him. He felt his nose turning red, and he willed himself to man up. “Well,” he said, “whatever it is, I guess I’ll never get it.”

Enix had stepped in as referee. “Hey, hey,” they said. “Dad. It’s okay. Let it go.” They’d peered over at him for what felt like an eternity. “Hey, Dad,” they said. “You know what we learned about at school last week? Object permanence. It’s when babies finally figure out that something’s there, even if they can’t see it. Dad. It’s okay to let things go, you know?”

The following night had brought rain, and Myron made love to Ruth for the first time in months. She’d barely looked at his face, he remembered, even as he unbuttoned her blouse, kissing her. She’d switched off the bedside lamp and backed herself up against him on the mattress, winding in wild, quick movements, as if she were a different woman.

And now, he understood: She was a trick floor, pulled out from under his feet. A photographer’s stop bath, an era of herself only temporarily arrested. And now she’d evolved in some way he hadn’t. She’d run in another direction, past where he was standing. She’d asked for half the house. Unmoored from his port to sail clear.

Myron stood at the door of the Brown Hotel’s Secretariat Ballroom, scrolling through Lexis+ in order to play it cool. He hadn’t yet signed into this speed-dating event. He wanted to assess the cattle chute first. And he wanted to look, in the suit and tie he never really wore to work, like a man who had more important business to attend to, anyway, than being rejected by one of the many women who might sneer at him and speed right along.

He’d felt ridiculous, parking on Fourth Street in his little Honda Civic. He needed a muscle car for Derby City Speed Dating, possibly something American—a Corvette, or at least a Mustang. He might even actually meet someone, he imagined, but then she’d walk out of the hotel chatting with him, get a gander at his tiny, energy-efficient car, stop mid-sentence, and say “Awww. Cute. You must have kids.”

About thirty people had signed in ahead of him and gotten their name tags; he’d watched them bending over the welcome table, writing their names hopefully on generic labels, the women pushing their purses back up their shoulders, the men shoving their hands in their pockets, taking them out, shoving them back in. Most of them were younger, in their thirties, and he wondered if this would matter as the evening danced forth. One of his colleagues, Mark Wisniewski, had promised him that he’d be a hit—the thirtysomethings all have daddy issues, he’d said—and Wisniewski had been so often right about so many things. Myron swallowed the juice of his nerves, felt a sheen of moisture in his armpits. He smelled the amplification of his cologne, a smell not of his own unwashed body but of his cologne as if heated stovetop in a pan: It was doing its job, then.

He might. He might meet a woman.

He stepped to the table, scanned the event’s QR code, paid his forty-five dollars. “Welcome,” said an event staffer, a woman who looked to be half his age. She slipped a label toward him, and he wrote Myron at the top of the tag, in tiny enough letters that he could include Hurley at the bottom, then thought better of it—who, at that sort of thing, would reveal their last name. He thought of writing a new name tag in correction, but decided against it. The tiny letters were a broadcast. He had no complexes about his size.

He stepped into the room, where had formed two gender-sorted lines, like a Shaker meeting: He was to proceed from the fore to the aft, he saw, of this Soul Train of heterosexual courtship. He shook hands with each woman as he passed himself down their queue. Two were named Jenn. One of the Jenns had applied a provocative amount of lipstick, and wore a tight black dress whose shoulders didn’t quite cover the blue strap of her bra. The other Jenn, with her wire-rimmed glasses, tennis shoes, baggy pants, and limp handshake, seemed to have just rolled out of bed. He shook the hands of women in shorts, women in miniskirts, women in jeggings. Women who looked like a very good time and women who looked like too good of a time. He was realizing, in a way he hadn’t previously, that he was an ass man.

The men, too, were an assortment. Only one other wore a suit and tie; Myron took him for his lone socioeconomic competitor. He was about ten years younger than Myron, and had gelled his jet-black hair down to look like a Valentino. His suit fit him in a way that suggested hours at a gym. He was an all-powerful bishop that Myron might nonetheless rook out of the way. Everyone had sorted themselves out nicely, Myron thought. It was a revelation.

He’d wondered whether he wasn’t, as a newly single man, playing checkers, jumping over women on his way to wholeness. Or perhaps playing chess, hoping to end up with a cleared board at the end, only one queen to protect him. But the piece he ended up with was a woman named Mathylde, who messaged him after Derby City Speed Dating, and whom he’d messaged back, he knew now, in a fit of madness. But fucking a stranger seemed far more manly than fucking a woman you’d known since you were eighteen, and for the preceding two decades that was all he’d done with his sex life. Though when Mathylde showed up at Starbucks, both of her bare arms sleeved in the tattoos he’d since forgotten, he wondered if he’d ever catch up to men his age.

Instead of hugging him or shaking his hand, Mathylde pinched his shirt collar between her fingers, zipped them over, ran a hand down his chest. “Mmmm,” she said. “Expensive. You said you’re a lawyer, right? My parents would love you.”

“Nice to see you again,” he said. She laughed.

Mathylde was high on something, he could tell by the glaze of her eyes and the way she rocked back and forth while standing in line, moving her hips as if she were surfing waves. When at last they had their coffees and he was walking toward a table, she swatted his ass. “Take me to your car,” she said.

He obeyed, because there were so many things he had yet to do with his penis, and Mathylde was the shining example of all of them. He imagined she’d say yes to anal sex, which he’d never had. He noted the way she’d chopped her hair off just before her hips, where both it and the hips would draw the most attention, and he imagined her ringing up some tattooed sister for a ménage à trois.

“A threesome?” he asked her, when she got in his car and kissed him. “You ever done a threesome?”

“Oh my,” she said. Her laugh was a chainsaw that started and stopped in fits. He felt his dick getting hard. “You been smoking the good kush too,” she said.

She lay back in her seat then, closed her eyes, and smiled. And instantly fell asleep. He meant to slide his hand up her thigh; instead, he found himself smoothing her skirt closed where it had fallen open. He heard a rushing trickle of water, saw it dribble out of his car seat at the exact same time the parental memory came: This was the sound of piss. “Hey!” he yelled. He pushed her arm where an image of Fidel Castro stared at him. “Hey Mathylde, you’re pissing in my car!”

She woke up, all apologies. She got out of his car crying and ran away. Myron went home and mixed aquavit, ginger ale, and blackberry syrup in a drink he called a Black Viking, and as he got drunker and drunker, he became ever more sure that marriage, that undemanding stasis, had ruined him for adult dating. It required a kind of forgiving and forgetting that only fish had.

Still, there were other kinds of hope, and Myron had gone to bed thinking it was the last day of the dowdy part of his life. Saturday would begin the rest of it; God’s last day of work was the day Myron would start anew.

He’d lumbered through a Friday afternoon appointment with Heather Viresky, a coffee heiress who sought to bar her ex-husband from her funeral. “I can write the clause in your will, sure,” Myron had told her. “But I’m advising you, it won’t be binding.”

“What do you mean?” Viresky asked. She’d shellacked dark color onto her lips and sealed it with gloss, overshooting her top lip so far on each side that her mouth was a desire, rather than a real mouth. She tossed up an arm and her twin tennis bracelets clinked together. “You mean to tell me you could write this, and Rick could still just show up?”

“He could attend, yes,” Myron told her. “I’ll write it in, but no court would uphold this. I’m sorry. If you die first, you’re just depending on his common decency.”

Seven years earlier, when Myron had drafted her initial codicil, she’d been jollier. In a polka dot sundress and sandals, her micromanaging father freshly deceased, this husband, Rick—her third—freshly married. Myron himself had then had a child in the first grade, a wife who diced apples each morning and sealed them into Tupperware with an air kiss. Oops I did it again, he and Annie would sing along with Britney Spears, on their way to Annie’s school. The pandemic hadn’t yet happened, nor had Trump. The world’s ingredients had been so much fresher, for everyone.

Viresky leaned in across his desk, so far toward her own knees that he could see the reflection of her chin in the varnish. “So I keep him out how?” she asked. She smelled like new leather, and it made Myron tired. His heart had been beating for two thousand weeks. The pupils of his eyes had widened to admit ten million faces. He had so little yet left of life, yet people used his time to file their obnoxious requests.

He stood. He lied. “I’ll write it in,” he said. “And God forbid you die before the both of us, I’ll personally show up and stop Rick at the door.” Viresky smirked, but did not move.

Myron dropped a hand to his desk and rapped his fingertips. He stepped forward and touched her on the elbow. “We’ll keep him out,” he said, leaning in as closely as she had, singing her this legal lullaby: “No worries.”

Viresky had taken this as concession enough that she let Myron usher her to his office door and out into her own troubled airspace. He’d waved at her back as she walked down the hall, then returned to his desk and opened a new window on his laptop. He booked himself into what was advertised, there in the first Google result, as a “Kayak Adventure,” with four group classes that would culminate in a communal whitewater weekend. There’d been one spot still open in the class, and he’d taken it. He’d sought to be a good provider, he thought, and though Ruth had revealed her willingness to leave all he offered, he held out the vain hope that he wouldn’t permanently lose, too, that stolid feeling of heading an American household. She’d come to her financial senses at least, he hoped, and return. Go with him to counseling. Work on things. Grow better fruit. But in the meantime, it left him with this extra money, to paddle down a river exploring his manhood. The right time, the right place, the right price: It was providence.

Days later, as he parked himself on the dock of McNeely Lake and sneezed away pollen, he looked to his classmates with great hope. The man to his left, white hair sprouting from his ears, stood hunched, looking with skepticism toward the expanse of water beyond, but a robust woman with strawberry hair spilling over the top of her khaki vest was already dipping her paddle through the air. Myron looked forward to ripping through the waters of the Upper Gauley with these strangers, the cold river spray on his face.

Winsome red beetles had colonized the deck, and when the instructor came to lead the class, he smashed his foot into a school of thirty on a post. He laughed at the red smear he left behind. “All those souls,” he said, his chuckle going deep, then rising, like that of a madman. One of the other students gasped, audibly. Some of the beetles still yet lived, and Myron watched them writhe on the post as the instructor looked to the sky and sniffed. “Gorgeous day for startin’ stuff,” he said.

And indeed, the forecast had predicted seventy-eight-degree weather, but when Myron twisted into the lake again and again to practice righting his boat, the cold was shocking, and the water pooled behind his eardrum. The class lasted four hours, and when it ended, Myron turned his head so his ear was parallel to the ground, but no water trickled out: What he found there, instead, was a pressure that was blooming to vertigo. He’d disturbed the tiny hairs of his inner peace, and he limped to the car, closing his eyes periodically to shut out the spinning horizon. Ruth had set his heart off balance and now he’d manifested this disequilibrium on the outside, for all the world to see.

Enix would be fine post-divorce, Myron thought. Ruth had planted them in solid bedrock before ripping away the topsoil. He remembered them as a seven-month-old at a city playground, not yet crawling but sitting up in Ruth’s lap next to him on the green park bench, trying in vain to remove the goldenrod-yellow Robeez Ruth had put on their feet. Annie’s concentration on the shoes had been broken when another child began throwing cardboard bricks through the air across the sandbox, and Myron remembered the way Annie had looked at him in awe, the way she crooked her pale, blond, invisible eyebrows at this child who was behaving so irrationally. How observant, he thought then, how fucking smart, was this baby of his.

Ruth had thrown Past Ruth under a bus and reconstructed Present Ruth for public consumption. She’d brought a New Ruth to life and let her live in her lingerie, in her bedroom. Ruth had lied to him and she’d lied to Enix, though that wasn’t what most irked him. What really jerked his head off his neck was that he could no longer trust the one person he’d most trusted: Myron Hurley. He’d picked Ruth out of the sea of women he’d known back then, and since he had, he couldn’t trust himself, not in past or present tense.

She wasn’t who she’d been, and it was for the best that he let her go. But Enix? Losing Enix would kill him in the long run. It was Saturday now, visiting hours, and as he watched them carry their backpack and clarinet into his house, an aneurysm of grief burst somewhere in his right ventricle and traveled up to drown the left side of his brain. Enix. Annie. Letting Ruth just have them, for half of the rest of their childhood, would be losing all incarnations of them. He’d be losing all the Saturday mornings he called six-year-old Annie downstairs and took her to the Bakehouse for muffins and juice, all the witching hours in all the nights when toddler-sized Annie had shaken herself awake to come sleep in their bed. He’d be losing Thursday’s family game night and Troop 397’s s’mores. He’d live on for a year or two, perhaps, sustaining some surface level of joint-custodial cheer, but eventually his half portion of childlessness would close in on him like a trash compactor, crushing him in its lonely jaws.

Even on this custodial visit, Ruth was like a poltergeist. Enix had played scales their first hour of settling back into home, and they were then putting their clarinet away, packing it up, cleaning its neck. “You did a good job,” he said, to fill the silence.

“Dad. I never do a good job. I mean, didn’t you hear me?”

“Well, I was sitting right there in the next room, so I’d say yes, I did.”

Enix sighed into the living room. “You’re my dad. You have to say I did a good job.”

“What if I told you that I wasn’t your dad?”

At this, they both laughed. Enix had Ruth’s fragile, sun-resistant skin, but they had Myron’s broad face, Myron’s wide, African lips, Myron’s eyebrows that stopped mid-arch to trail off to nothing. He’d file for sole custody. He’d manufacture something terrible that Ruth had done, parent-wise, and he’d take it to court. He was a lawyer, for fuck’s sake. He knew how people used the blades of the legal system to cut others’ lives to shreds. He’d fight Ruth. Ruthlessly.

“Seriously, though,” he said to Enix now. “You’re fine. You’re a good egg. Relax.”

Enix refused dinner—they often did, when steeped in masculinity—but they drank an entire two-liter bottle of root beer and the two of them watched a movie that had just come to Netflix. An hour in, Enix fell asleep on the couch. They hadn’t brushed their teeth or washed their face, and this gave Myron a perverse pleasure: Enix was his kid, after all, with only a half dose of Ruth’s neuroses. He gathered a blanket to cover them and took himself upstairs to bed.

Between his sheets, he felt his soul bob and weave about his stomach, as if it were a boat, a small dinghy that had broken apart on the shore of an island, only to be duct-taped back together. A destroyer that had been shot at in war, drifted across hostile seas to this point where now, thanks to his wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, he guessed, it would be sunk.

When he woke it was 2:38, a digital read of the clock that he’d never forget. His mouth was dry. His throat, like a cave. He closed his eyes again, but he sensed that he shouldn’t. Something was terribly wrong. He needed a glass of water, he thought. A tall glass of water. A bucket of it. He was having a cardiac episode. Or contracting COVID. He was—he was … He heard a crackle, as of paper curling. He was opening his eyes. Looking at the orange glow on the wall outside his bedroom, the shadows of smoke drifting across. Shadows. Smoke. “Annie,” he said.

And then he screamed it. “Annie. Annie. Enix!”

FIVE

Ruth

That Clarisse would shoo her back out into the pandemic wasn’t so surprising. She’d been the same way in the hospital where Ruth’s father lay in the morgue—heedless of all but her own feelings. Clarisse and her mother had shown up then, Clarisse running across the Kaiser cafeteria where they’d been directed to find Ruth and Wendy. Ruth had stood, bracing herself for Clarisse’s affection; Wendy, medicated to ward off reality, stayed seated in her orange plastic chair. Wendy. Wendy. Wendy, of the expensive haircuts and seventy-dollar high heels, had grown world-weary, with mossy teeth and fraying cornrows. Reckless with the boys at their high school.

Before Ruth could completely stand from the table, Clarisse was throwing both arms around her, pushing Ruth’s body into a propulsive hug, knocking her bowl of hospital-grade chicken tetrazzini to the floor. “Jesus, I’m so sorry,” Clarisse had said, as the plastic bowl clattered around the circumference of the rim.

“Watch the Jesus,” said her mother. The bowl quieted herself.

Mrs. Johns gave Clarisse a fistful of napkins, and they both got down on hands and knees to wipe up the smeared alfredo and chicken, stopping when a hospital custodian came with a mop. Even then, they quietly watched him work rather than resume conversation, and Ruth knew they were grateful for the emergency of spilled food. They had no idea what to say: She knew, because she, too, had no words. Trying human language would have been like standing in the middle of a dangerous mountain pass, trying to lift a slab of solid granite.

Ruth watched Clarisse watch the janitor, and she tried a feeble smile. It had been six hours since the police officer had shot her father four times, and the short pop-pop-pop-pop, nimble as a scherzo, was on instant replay in her mind. She’d been lying outside in the grass watching the sky for low-altitude flights from San Francisco, and when she heard the report of the gun, she flopped wildly over to her stomach, thinking the shots were coming from across the privacy fence, from Mrs. Cortopassi’s cactus garden. The moment in which she hesitated, the moment it took her to figure out the shots were coming from somewhere within her very own house, was the moment her mind began learning to revise itself. Should she cower out of sight, she wondered, should she save herself. And then she thought of her father, her father, her one living parent, and in the next second she was running, screaming Dad? Dad! Dad! because she already knew, and for a long time she’d think she knew because she held her father just that closely in her consciousness, but years later, in college, she’d take Psychology 4 and learn about distant sensory perception, and she’d wonder if she’d heard, on the wind, a disturbance of sound wave as her boyfriend Bob scaled the fence to get to her bedroom and her father argued with him and a neighbor saw this entire sequence of events and called the police, had she smelled, on the air, the fine, microscopic particles of gunpowder as the sheriff took his high-range rifle, got out of his cop car, and aimed at the darker man’s chest.

By the time she ran through the back door, through the kitchen, through the living room and out the front door, her father was stooped in the driveway. He wore his favorite shirt, the white one with intersecting purple, green, and gray stripes, the shirt she liked to think of as graphing paper, and she could see the circles of blood breaking more and more of the ninety-degree angles the stripes made, spreading across his shoulder like the sample stain in a Wisk commercial. From behind him, she could see the policeman still pointing his gun at her father, she could see Bob standing with his hands straight up in the air, his multiracial skin turned, through the shadows of leaves, to its more African undertones, his hazel eyes turned, in the remaining sunshine, a queasy iron; tears easing out of them. From behind, she saw her father’s arm bent at the elbow where he was clutching some part of his own anterior, and she saw the defeated sag in the legs of the brown pants he’d worn the day he spoke to her sixth-grade class about accounting as a career, and the day he told her and Wendy to go outside and rake the leaves in the front yard or else, and the day he picked Russell up from his sixteenth and last stay at Riley. She saw her father again in this realm, she heard his head smack against the blacktop of the driveway he’d just resealed with Henry’s, she saw the blood fly out of his mouth, little droplets of her father’s heart turned to beads of airborne liquid.

Time slowed, then, in a way she’d always be ashamed of, and it wasn’t until she heard the crackling voice on the cop’s car radio that she screamed. She ran to her father in big gulpy steps, but then met three cops ricocheting against her chest before she could even touch him: They wrestled her to the hot asphalt alongside her father and someone clicked open a pair of handcuffs. Someone sat on the back of her legs and wrenched her shoulders backward, and even as the pain shooting through her spinal column blocked out almost everything else, she heard the second metallic click, of the handcuffs they were fastening on her father. His face was a foot away from hers. Dad, she said, or thought she said. Dad, I won’t let them hurt you anymore, but then they were dragging her to the cop car, dragging her before she could even stand, so that first her knees and then the toes of her tennis shoes skidded against the pavement, the sidewalk, the street. She tried to kick and when she couldn’t, the screams came, and then they were shoving her in the back seat of the cop car that smelled of corn chips and stale vomit, the female officer telling her watch that head, nigger, and then she saw, from the back seat, through the windshield, her sister, Wendy, who’d been upstairs working on her Chem II model, shoved into the cop car ahead of her.

She saw two cops handcuffing Bob Bradley while a third took his statement into a mini recorder, she saw a fourth officer unwinding yellow tape from a roll, and nowhere, nowhere, nowhere did she see an ambulance. “Did one of you motherfuckers call 911?” she asked the cop driving her. The cop told her to watch her mouth. She asked him five more times and never would he answer her, and then they were off, far across town in the police station, which she’d never seen.

She and Wendy were hauled out of the respective cars in a synchronized drag and taken to two different interrogation rooms, and she wasn’t uncuffed until she vomited from the pain, and they were held for hours upon unkind hours. There was no clock in Ruth’s room, but she knew the passage of time because she fell hungry, and it felt inappropriate to say so; she was thirsty and thought she might die if she didn’t get water; she asked for it; the policeman chuckled and his eyes flashed ice. She had to pee, she told him he was a sonofabitch and she would piss right there in his chair; he told her to be his guest; she doubted she’d get a change of clothes and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction; she held it. A fat, bald detective with the mustache of a pervert entered, walked across the polished yellow concrete floor in eager taps, and asked about her sexual encounters with Bob Bradley; she spilled all, because she was sixteen years old and unsure of what else to do. She entertained the superstitious hope that each salacious detail might, like a Catholic novena, right some physical wrong that had fallen upon her father: Thinking the detective then owed her something, she asked whether her father was still alive and was told that’s not our concern here.

When finally she was let out into the relatively fresh air of the police station proper, when she was transported to Kaiser, when she saw Clarisse Johns running toward her, heard her chicken clatter to the floor, when she heard the words slumber party fly out of her best friend’s mouth, Ruth told herself there was no way Clarisse knew any of this. It was possible Clarisse knew very little, or even nothing at all. But she must have known that the policeman had shot her father—that’s why they were all standing in a police station, wasn’t it?—and so the wrongness of what she said reverberated in Ruth’s head for months afterward, until Ruth’s entire life had changed into something so unrecognizable that even her memories would need to be tidied away.

All that had happened became a place deep in her hippocampus, a place no one on earth could ever visit, a place so remote that no one would ever even find it. Bob Bradley had been right there, had witnessed the whole thing, had even, by trying to sneak into her second-floor bedroom in broad daylight, pulled the chain that started the motor on it, and yet his memory of the day stood in a place of its own making. “You understand,” she told him when he asked her to the prom. “I don’t ever want to see or talk to you again.”

He’d respected her enough to take his guilt and vanish. Poof.

Clarisse she’d kept, though at the time, she couldn’t have said why. Clarisse asked Ruth questions that Ruth would never answer. “It’s too difficult to remember, isn’t it?” she said one day, years later, then promised never to ask again. But it wasn’t remembering that was the difficulty. Clarisse had been warm, in her pursuit of the remote place in Ruth’s mind, but she’d never get there. Clarisse was camping somewhere nearby, but behind a large, old tree, obscured. Obscuring.

She’d not much admitted herself into that place over the years either; when she thought of her father propped against hospital pillows, neither opening nor closing his eyes, centimeters away from death, her palms began to sweat. Deep breaths never stopped them, nor did the consumption of water: Memory made her heart beat like a hummingbird’s. As she’d grown older, the memory made sparks shoot down her legs and through her toes; she didn’t dare touch the outside of her shoes, which she knew held an intense heat. Ten years earlier, on her father’s birthday, which was an anniversary her heart always marked to spite her mind, she’d been in the kitchen cutting celery, remembering the sound of her father’s voice in song. Annie had just entered preschool that week, and Ruth had been alone, and she’d felt such a strong presence of heat in her body that she’d dropped the knife. As its blade clattered to the tile floor and her body trembled, the electricity above her head had fizzed out, the refrigerator gone quiet, so chillingly quiet.

She found the circuit breaker, its one thrown fuse, and she willed herself not to think about her dad. She’d lost control of her own body, as if she were a truck speeding downhill, looking for an off-ramp. It might have been coincidence, but it seemed she had thrown the house’s current. Grief was a danger to the house; it was a danger to her very own body. And if she were going to die or kill her house, dwelling with the truth of the past, she’d just stop thinking.

Only small, hurtful details came to her now and then, jogged by certain colors she saw in the supermarket, or certain situations. Like this tattooed teenage girl she sees now, driving back from Clarisse’s, holding up one thumb, trying to hitchhike from under the Story Avenue overpass, how the girl summons her memory of the way Wendy sat, so newly stiffened, in the cafeteria’s orange chair. She’d been drugged beyond sentience then, but the defiance in her posture had already solidified into something more adult, more codified, something that knew everything it needed to know about the injustice of the universe. But Ruth doesn’t remember what happened next, how Wendy came back to consciousness. Ruth doesn’t remember whether Wendy ate her chicken or drank her apple juice. The catalog of memory goes blank in her mind like the end of a television programming day. Fizz. Fuzz.

Back in her apartment, in her bathroom, she watches a strand of her own blond hair, the rare one out of fifty reds, float to the floor and blend into the pale tan tile. She hates Myron. But here in the middle of it all she wants to touch him in the worst way, a way that will remind him how much she once loved him while at the same time communicating to him just how much she understands about the planet. She wants to hold her sister, she wants to remind her of the misspelled love notes Wendy wrote her from kindergarten, she wants to whisper in her ear all of the complicated turns of feeling she’s had since their father passed out of this world. She rocks a little on the toilet and feels neither great nor terrible. She thinks nothing, nothing, nothing. She forgets the strand of hair. It’s as invisible as truth.

The terrible wonder of nothing continues after she removes herself from the bathroom and goes to bed; she thinks of nothing at all, just outer space, until she gets Myron’s call, at three thirty in the morning. “It’s Enix,” he says, the words gushing out so fast their ends touch. “The house. There was a fire.”

SIX

Clarisse

Time.

Ruth’s fought it with aliases and U-Haul boxes, enlisting a tall tale in her defense against the passage of real life. Why eat grief when you might have to eat it again tomorrow, she thinks, and I think she might benefit from a stay at Rivendell. Though back in college, when she was feverishly making up fairy tales about herself, I used to look at her sweet, pinched eyes and wonder whether she wasn’t the sane one.

But now we know, don’t we, now that the tortured pockets of ice have ripped through and frozen over my temper: She is. The doctors at residential suggested that maybe I’ve eaten too much of my own grief really, and that’s why they put me on 60 mg of fluoxetine, with 20 mg of Abilify, with added “prescription” for a sixteen-count breathing exercise, some mindfulness bullshit I’d have to break into every five minutes in order to kill all the sad roaches crawling around in my mind.

Glory.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a different life. My mom was a teacher at my elementary school—this was before she either quit or got fired, she never said—and when my father was in Phoenix for a sales convention, she took me for a day at Six Flags with my principal. We all rode the Log Flume together and the two of them told knock-knock jokes that weren’t funny and otherwise pretended they weren’t fucking, but I knew; even at eight years old, I found it there in the way they were looking at each other, both as plain and as blazing as the risen sun. We left the park in separate cars, just as we’d come, but when Mom dropped me off at home she said she was going to the grocery store, and then she stayed gone for four hours. Dad came home from Arizona the next day and I watched her snake around him in the kitchen, and I saw it then, how the adults all around me had always been thus: people who didn’t want anything they had. I decided I’d aim for better.

I imagined it all. A rewarding career and a tall, dark husband, and a farm in the county, and ten big dogs. I wanted kids. I wanted kids. I wanted kids. Kentucky Teacher of the Year came with a cast iron trophy and a photo op onstage with Governor Bevin, who gripped my hand and shook it. He wasn’t that bad looking in person, and the tapas at the reception were tremendous, but what ripped through all that pomp and circumstance, when I saw the photos afterward, was that my grin for the cameras was nothing like my mother’s. My mother had small teeth under an outsized gumline, and her best moments were in her grins, in laughing with me, her best friend. On a porch, or in the car, or at a picnic table or in front of Saturday Night Live, laughing, making swaths of time when glory seemed to practically rise from the crown of my mother’s head. She might not have wanted my father, she might not have wanted the moldering little split-level ranch we lived in, she might not have wanted to spit her toothpaste into its chipped bathroom sink, but in those moments when she grinned, she had something. I wanted that. I wanted that kind of glory. That truth of a smile. But you know, you can’t always get what you want. Most of the time, you won’t even get what you need.

Ruth’s dad would know, because he didn’t get to do enough smiling in this lifetime. Maybe he lay in that driveway dying, thinking, someone please help me finish this life, or maybe, oh shit, forty-three years, and now off I go.

Breathe in four. Hold four. Exhale four. Hold four.

Maybe he panicked about the electric bill he hadn’t paid or the dirtied knees of the pants he was wearing or the high school graduation he was going to miss. Maybe he saw before him the great sea that now sat between the continents of intention and fulfillment.

Breathe in four—

I don’t want to go back to Rivendell. Germs everywhere. They won’t let you wear shower shoes into the bathroom. It’s freezing, and they never give you enough blankets. Hold four. Exhale. Hold four more.

They called my mother from the police station just afterward, when Ruth was released on her own recognizance, so I never have to wonder what she thought. I watched her hunt up her own wrongdoing in the whole thing, watched her blame not Bob Bradley or even the police but herself, watched her shake her bedroom drawer into a suitcase, pick out the two condoms she’d hidden under her clothes, and run downstairs to toss them in the kitchen trash can. “You’re putting a lot of responsibility on yourself,” I told her, and she waved me away. Literally waved the dove of her hand, and raised her eyebrows at me. Her eyes went glassy, like an eel’s. I didn’t want to watch her face. I walked myself to the outdoors, to whatever future still held for either one of us.

Hold four. Do not exhale. Exhale. Hold four. Stay out of residential. Fifth time. Last time.

Ruth carries this same shit with Enix. She tells me forty times a year what a shitty mom she is, how she’s falling down on the job, but there’s a lot Ruth doesn’t know about her own kid that might make her feel better, a lot that Enix has opened herself up to, apart from their mother. I know because my friend Anna Kate teaches at Enix’s school, but Ruth doesn’t know that either. I know Anna Kate because she was a student teacher with me at DuPont Manual. She made all her students call her Anna Kate instead of Ms. Song, which was the first indication that she hadn’t been ready for anything a bunch of teenagers were about to throw her way. She began each class period by telling them that she was thrilled to be their teacher, which was the second.

The other teachers all around us had long gone sour, their faces warped by the acid of school gossip under the stairwells, the worn lines of their jean pockets revealing the shapes of the cigarette packs they were taking into the teachers’ lounge. They gave off the charred smell of no longer wanting to be in a high school.

Anna Kate’s capillaries showed up every day red with health. She commemorated the assassination of Fred Hampton one day in class by reading a paragraph from one of his speeches. “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution,” she read, while snow fell in wet darts against her classroom windows, and then the Jefferson County Public Schools seemed to have tossed her file in a place where no one would ever find it, and she had to go teach at an all-girls’ school named Lincoln.

“That’s always seemed like some throwback to the fifties,” I told her, and then, when I told her my best friend’s kid was there, she told me well, then, I had to come get a load of THIS, so I did. I volunteered to drop Enix off one day, on that leafy, congested corner of Hillsdale and Sherburn. The head of school stood in the circle, greeting students as they disembarked from their showy cars. She was a tall, mannish woman whose slightly peppered salt made her look like a turkey vulture. She had a careful way of dressing that hinted at a desire to be more than what she was, but her square-shaped haircut only helped cube the shape of her head. When Enix got out of the car I waved at her, for shits and giggles, and when she smiled at me she did so quickly, as if happiness were a finite, squanderable resource. To have her be the first person all the parents saw each morning was to convey confirmation that, actually, they were sending their girls to school aboard the Death Star.

And truly, Anna Kate told me, Lincoln was the set of Mean Girls, and Enix had fallen prey to a girl everyone called Crista Pimenta, on whom, Anna Kate reported, Enix seemed to have a sort of deep crush. “But I think they’re going to be okay,” Anna Kate said. “Enix is one of the good ones. They march in here in the morning with the hem of their skirt shredded over their khaki pants and I can tell. The Force is strong in that one.”

The way she said it, Enix became one of my safe spaces of hope. Breathe in. Hold it. Hold. It.

I’ve watched Ruth drive through a blizzard to get Benadryl for Enix’s peanut allergy, and I’ve heard her read a million bedtime stories while I was downstairs on the couch watching her glass of wine warm, heard her voice go all animated when acting as Mr. Fox, who didn’t care about her pinot grigio. I’ve watched her grin, felt the glory rise off of her, through Infant Annie and Toddler Annie and Terrible Threes and Elementary School Meltdown Annie. I watched her teach Myron how Enix wasn’t Annie anymore, watched him screw up their name a thousand times, even watched him, at a trivia benefit night we were all attending as a team, ask Enix why they were now wearing dresses. But I’ve never heard Myron call himself a terrible dad, not once.

It may be a thing all moms have to do, this beating down of the self. I wouldn’t know. I had a lover in my late thirties who promised to make a baby with me. Because he was married, he was my secret, or I was his secret, or something that made my stomach hurt for years afterward.

I asked him to donate sperm. First he thought I was joking, so I pretended I was.

Then I asked a second time; he said, stop playing.

The third time, when we were sitting together naked in my hot tub, he looked worried.

The fourth time, he said yes. He said, yes, okay? which didn’t quite sound like a yes. But I promised him that after I went through IVF and had the baby, he’d never see me again. We even signed a contract.

The clinic gave me one round that failed and after the second round, I miscarried. “Are you defective?” he asked, when he brought me home from the D&C. He thought he was joking. He and his wife had three kids—of course, he thought he was joking. He pulled into my driveway but didn’t get out to help me in, so I closed the door behind me without waving goodbye. And I cried all weekend.

Stay out of residential. Do not return. There’s a $13,000 co-pay on $65,000. Breathe in, breathe in, breathe back in.

He called that Monday and asked would I please rip up the contract, would I please ask the clinic to dispose of his sperm. I wondered what skin off his nose was his precious sperm, since he hadn’t wanted any part of me going forward, anyhow. I never told him, but I tried one more round. With his sperm. Nothing happened.

I don’t want to go back to Rivendell, I really don’t. Residential is hard, so hard. They make you do the work, they make you dissect it all, they make you watch other people’s dissections, even. But one thing they taught me there this time was to close my eyes and imagine a safe place when I remember the painful things, and so I

California

Ocean

Waves

Clamshell ear to mine

I

I

I’m not sure what love is. I’ve never been. And after the mindful seconds, it all comes out in a rush, so you will please to excuse me when I say that Ruth carries all this shame for no reason could let it go could let it flow down the river with sardines and trout it serves no purpose.

One day, I’ll tell her.

And

And

Babbling brook

Singing birds

And

Myron is the same age now as Donnie was when he was killed. One father and one husband, both killed at the hands of the police, would be long odds even for a Black woman, and we can probably rest assured that Myron gets to grow old and live his life, but I’d tell Ruth this: If anything ever happens to him, she’ll still be the constant. Even here and now, feeding Enix cheeseburgers and omissions and an all-girls’ prison that’s pretending to be a high school, Ruth is the guardrail.

SEVEN

Ruth

1992

“Absolutely not,” Ruth’s mother said, without conviction.

No one else stood at the top of the stairs, where she and Ruth had met accidentally on their way between floors, but she wasn’t talking to Ruth. She was just saying it, as she did no fewer than thirty times a week now that Russell had been sent to Riley.

“Absolutely not,” she’d say in response to nothing, as she was folding laundry, or stacking china, or scrubbing a clot of tomato paste out of the sink. The first few times, she caught herself and blinked, and Ruth could tell she’d been taken aback by the machinations of her own mind: She hadn’t meant to issue the words audibly.

But Cora soon lost shame. She started saying it seemingly at random, producing the phrase from some secret, outraged vein of thought. “Absolutely not,” she said one morning at dawn, in the kitchen, where Ruth had crept up behind her as she was loading the coffeemaker. When Cora heard her she turned around. Her posture seemed confrontational, as though she were hiding something.

When Ruth got closer and looked, it was just the percolating machine on the counter behind her. Cora turned back around. “Absolutely not,” she whispered to the coffee, and Ruth forgot what she needed from the refrigerator. Backward out of the kitchen, she walked. Back to bed. Back to her patchy sleep.

When her mother said it in response to an actual question, after Wendy asked if she could have a brand-new stereo system for Christmas, Ruth started crying. “Absolutely not,” Cora said then, in response to her tears, and Ruth bolted upstairs to her bedroom.

She no longer shared her room with her brother, Russell, so much as she shared it with the echo of Russell, since neither her parents nor Wendy would touch anything in his room. Ruth noted the dust on his swim participation trophies, the beginnings of mold on the lopsided clay masks he’d made in the third grade. No one had even changed his bedsheets: They’d lain, hastily rolled to one side, for the three days after he’d collapsed on the stairs and been taken away in an ambulance. Finally, the morning after his funeral, her mother had come into the room and made his bed to hotel standards. When Ruth came home from school and tossed a quarter at the sheets, it bounced once before landing.

It took a week for Ruth to grow tired of watching the stiff bed, so empty of her brother, and she sat on it then, hard, hoping to leave an impression of her own living, breathing ass. She lay on his pillow and rolled onto her face. She left rumpling, dimpling. During the cold, sleety week that followed, she began to reassemble his things into piles: plastic cowboy collection in the northeast corner of the room, Spider-Man comic books in the southwest corner, near the head of her own bed. The room might never again be his, but it was no longer hers either. Now that he was dead it was just a room, four walls a floor a ceiling and an exactly square window hurtling with her around the center of the planet through different points of time; since no one but her entered the room now, she’d been left as gatekeeper, contemplating the limitations of the human references the room still contained. The things left weren’t a shrine to her sick brother so much as they were now a shrine to impossibility, and the failed hope for all the things Russell had so rarely touched when he was alive, even when he was well, when he was just a laughing, troublesome boy. She felt irreparably vicious, scooting aside his Lego cabin with the edge of her bare foot, but she persisted in pushing it to the wall, even as it fell in half and then crumbled into chunks of joined brick.

She went through all his old socks and found the ones with holes and discarded them in the outside trash bin, where her parents wouldn’t find them: She arranged the clothes hanging in the closet, first by color and then by size within the color, and then, if she couldn’t remember having seen Russell wearing them in the two years since he’d fallen ill, ripped them beyond the possibility of wearing and tossed them on a growing pile in the southwest corner of the room. Over time, she discarded and rearranged his effects until she’d assembled several assorted piles of Russell, which someone came and cleared one day while she was at school. She opened the door to find it all gone and she gasped, audibly—the mess itself had become a living, breathing human, so that when it was gone, she missed it. She came home two days later to find Russell’s bed and nightstand similarly disappeared. She didn’t dare ask what had happened. She wouldn’t have called herself relieved. She hadn’t wanted to clear her brother from her life: She’d simply wanted to proceed with her own.

Her parents were still paying hospital bills for a dead child, and the financial difficulties showed up incrementally: her mother’s “absolutely not” when Ruth asked if they were going on a vacation that summer, her father’s uncharacteristic purchase of a lottery ticket, which she found hidden in his office drawer when she went looking for a sharpened pencil. Her father took on a night job, keeping the ledgers for an offtrack betting facility in Salinas. Ruth saw Donnie, working into the night, scribbling figures on the fronts of folders. She wanted to ask him how it worked, keeping the books, but she figured it was a profane question: What he was doing, hunched over his desk at midnight, was trying to keep his remaining family under its roof. It took six months for Cora to tell them that eating off paper plates might be cheaper than running the dishwasher, and another four for her to run out of money at the supermarket.

Ruth had been helping unload provisions from the cart when she noticed the man behind them, who had joined the line after they queued for the register. He seemed to be appraising her, and she felt embarrassed to be unloading such an intimate item as Safeway brand toilet paper. When he looked away to the row of tabloids, Ruth inspected his face, then felt her own cheeks hardening with recognition. It was Ralph O’Brien, their next-door neighbor, a police officer whom she often saw coming home from lunch in his blue-and-white-lettered City of Rosalind squad car.

When they’d first moved into the neighborhood, Mr. O’Brien had yelled at her and Wendy. Not at them so much as at the place where they were standing on the sidewalk, because the sun was blazing high noon over all their heads such that no one could see anyone’s face, just hollows where should have been eyes, and the dappled light at the top of all their respective hairlines.

“What are you girls doing here,” he’d said, from his place in his own yard. He was wearing a cowboy hat while weeding, and to look at him, they’d had to turn directly into the retinal eclipse of sun: Instead of a face she saw nothing, just the space of shadow beneath the rim of his hat.

“We live here,” said Wendy.

Ruth could only gawk at the faceless man.

“You live where?” he said, and they pointed to their own yard, their own new house, its new coat of paint. The new shutters flanking their clean new windows.

Mr. O’Brien considered the house silently, as if seeing it for the first time. He looked to its roof and frowned, furrowing his brow as if he’d seen something giant and monstrous, but he did not respond. He returned to his weeds.

There in the supermarket, he took a few steps back to scan the other checkouts for a shorter wait but, seeing nothing, remained in line behind them: As Ruth removed the twenty-eight ounces of canned peas (which, in the new family economy, replaced sixteen ounces of frozen), he shifted impatiently from his heels to his toes, from foot to foot, a beefy man’s ballet. Ruth tried not to glare. He seemed to know nothing about the patience that grief demanded of people.

“Sixty-four thirty-nine,” the clerk told Cora, after she’d punched in the last of their order and totaled.

Ruth saw her mother’s shoulders slacken. Cora counted and then recounted the three twenties in her hand as though another one might magically appear. She took her purse off her shoulder and plumbed its depths. Ruth could see all the new gray hair at her temples glistening under the supermarket’s fluorescent lights.

“Put back the eggs,” she told Ruth.

Ruth took the eggs and prepared to walk to the dairy section in the rear of the store, but before she could get around him Mr. O’Brien was handing Cora a five-dollar bill. “Please,” he said. His voice was gentler than she’d imagined it to be, but Ruth was afraid. She was afraid that her mother was going to take money from this impatient White man. It was so critical that she didn’t.

“Absolutely not,” her mother said, but with such little conviction that Mr. O’Brien handed his five past her shoulder to the cashier. Cora turned weakly toward him and said, “Thank you. Thank you so much,” and Ruth knew that her mother had lost, in that moment, the small amount of power she had left in the world.

Five brown paper bags sat at the end of the line. Ruth hadn’t noticed anyone’s having bagged them. Beyond the cashier’s handing Mr. O’Brien his change from the five, beyond the buffeted look on her mother’s face, Ruth hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Good luck,” Mr. O’Brien said, as she and her mother put the bags into their cart and proceeded out into what, in Northern California, counted as winter.

“Yup,” Cora said, trying to be flip. To Ruth, it sounded like an earthquake.

2023

Whatever Enix had going on wasn’t at all serious. It wouldn’t kill them. Wouldn’t wreck Ruth’s finances. Still, the fire had tapped Ruth on the shoulder and notified her that danger never ended, that death would be hovering in a corner grinning and whispering, so long as there was life. What I wouldn’t give for a crystal ball, she heard people saying offhandedly, but a broadcast of the future was the last thing she wanted. What would she see, swimming there in the aleph, but the end of all things? The end of her marriage, the end of Enix’s childhood, the ends of all their lives, the polar-bear-starved end of the planet. The great global recession that NPR said was coming, now that the Fed was toying around with interest rates. The bread lines in Caracas. Russians eating grass near Chernobyl. There it all would be, whirling around the contents of the glass, and if she saw it all, how it would all end, she’d make a few last gasps for oxygen and collapse in the corner of the hospital room, curl into a ball on the cold vinyl floor and cry, and cry, and cry.

As it was, air got in. Mixed with crude. Ignited her engine and kept her marching. She’d activated call forwarding so she could hunker down with Enix while running her caseload, and there in Enix’s semiprivate room, at 8:30 as actual clockwork, Ms. Ina Stavins called about her son Martin. “The judge watched that video yet?” she asked, as she had every month for the preceding six.

“Ms. Stavins,” Ruth said, stalling the lie. “Are you okay today? How’s that rain treating your arthritis?”

“Oh, you know. I reckon this new weather’s going to kill us all, one way or another.”

Ms. Stavins’s joints always flared when it rained—not before or during the rain, she reported, but just after, when the sun came out and the earth warmed. The mixed blessing, Ruth thought, was that any amount of precipitation whatsoever prevented her from visiting Martin, who was doing time in West Liberty. Ms. Stavins was always worse after she saw him, sadder and more emotionally threadbare. Martin had gained fifty pounds in jail, according to his mother. He was pissing his sheets and needed a prostate exam. Martin’s just rotting away in there, she’d say. His arteries are going hard. And he ain’t even done nothing. Once, after seeing him, she’d broken her monologue to tell Ruth, sotto voce, that she had to leave off the call momentarily and pour herself a glass of vermouth.

Ruth, who was good at neither math nor music, had gone to law school inertially: The LSAT, she figured, was there for anyone without talent. It wasn’t until the end of her first year Criminal Procedure class that she probed more deeply and found this pain point: She was there to avenge her father. Dropping out, though, and eight years as a paralegal, had taught her otherwise. What she was doing—what any of them were doing, really—was enforcing injustice. You didn’t run up against a machine without becoming grease in its wheels.

Stavins, according to his mother, had been a model child, a gifted math student, even, who’d somehow ushered himself into a bad crowd his freshman year of high school. “He never washed clean of them friends,” his mother had told Ruth, and though Ruth heard similar things from inmates’ families every day of her working life, something in the shakiness of Stavins’s mother had perforated the edges of Ruth’s soul.

Stavins had videotaped his best friend’s arrest, walked behind filming it with his iPhone all the way from the Louisville Slugger Museum to the police department on Jefferson. Filming an arrest was legal in the state of Kentucky but what wasn’t, not at all, was carrying a concealed weapon in a police station, and the minute he hit the perimeter the cops had shaken him down, smashed his phone, found his Canik TP9. The video had gone straight to Stavins’s Google Drive so it had been easy to recover, but his criminal history had been less easily solvable: Because he’d once brandished his SIG Sauer during a road rage incident, his concealed carry charge ate itself upward, from misdemeanor to felony.

She’d made Myron read through Stavins’s file, looking for ways to accelerate the trial, but Myron had come up with nothing she hadn’t already. “Not my expertise,” Myron said, clicking out of the public defender’s worksite to a tab she had open to Ava Estell. Myron looked at her comically, said, “Does he need a will?”

She glared at him. It wasn’t funny. He’d grabbed her leg, pulled her in close, hugged her around the waist, in a way that made her have to drop her chin to the top of his head. She felt the fuzz of his hair, warming her skin. “He’s lucky to have you on his case,” Myron said. It had been one of the few moments she’d felt seen. What she kept to herself was that her dead father lighted in her head each time she opened the file, to cheer both her and Stavins from the great beyond.

She’d explain to Ms. Stavins every month, anew, that her office had lost five attorneys in seven years, thanks to the Kentucky legislature’s ever-crueler state budget. There was no way to tell Ms. Stavins that her son, sitting on time for a crime that wasn’t even a crime, a crime the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department was manufacturing in vengeance, was one of many, no way to tell her that coming up with 10 percent of the $100,000 bail was nonnegotiable. The backlog for discovery was such that the video wasn’t scheduled for examination until after he’d already finished his sentence. There was no way to tell any of this to Ms. Stavins. It would kill her.

“We’re on it,” Ruth said there in the hospital, as she watched her own child sleep. Enix looked fine there on the soft pillow, their ears sprung free from their earbuds, their curls gone tight in the dry hospital air. Ruth hung up the phone wondering why God was testing Ms. Stavins, what spiritual good he saw in wringing her dry in her golden years.

Enix’s left arm, where they’d pressed into the metal door of the house and rushed their way out of the fire, was bandaged from shoulder to wrist. They were knocked out with heavy pain medication—Demerol, Ruth felt she’d heard—and Ruth went to sit beside them and pat the arm that wasn’t burned, marveling at how smooth it was, still just a child’s hand, no matter how many times Enix used it to text the word shit to their friends on Snapchat.

There sat a tray of food that had been wheeled in by a nurse, with a bowl of tomato soup and a piece of desiccated yellow cornbread Enix would never eat. When they woke Ruth planned to feed them the soup, spoon it into their mouth as if they were a little bird, because Enix was left-handed but it was their left hand they now had to keep stationary and elevated against fluid buildup.

As Ruth studied the thick grain of the bandage, she felt guilt pooling in her esophagus. Felt it snake up her vagus nerve, bunch across both shoulders. Guilt knitted itself down her arms and skipped across all ten fingers and then turned itself into realization: This unruly body of hers had started the fire.

But then, she thought, no. It was too outlandish. And there’d been too much of a delay between her presence in the house and its burning to char. Real life wasn’t a Stephen King novel.

But then, wait, she thought again. Real life was always crazier than it was supposed to be. And the world just beyond the real one, the world that did not accord with rules of physics or justice or decency? That was the world that seemed to determine everything.

Enix was lucky. It was just, thank God, a first-degree burn. In a couple of weeks, the doctor told them, after the blisters had sunk back into lymph and the arm’s coloring returned to some semblance of olive, it would seem as though the burn never happened. Still, Ruth thought of fighting Myron harder for sole custody. The house fire that almost killed his child had happened in his no-longer-hers house, on his now-completely-his-weekend watch.

“Dear God, Ruth, I’m so sorry,” he’d said in a rush, when she’d first made it up to the fourth floor of Norton and past the nurse’s station, to room 412, whose blue door she’d pushed open only to have Myron come rushing toward her, gating off her entrance, blocking her view of her very own child under the bedcovers. She’d never heard him cry before, and she went queasy at the sound of his ugliness. He sounded like a goose. One up for slaughter. It was such ugly crying, with his eyelids turned mauve and snot glistening in the caves of his nostrils, that she almost told him none of it was his fault. She knew he loved Enix. Of course he did. She knew he was a competent adult.

But she wouldn’t say that out loud. And she’d certainly not explain this new circuitry of her body: He’d think she was crazy. Instead, she’d let him burn. She wouldn’t tell him it was okay, or he was okay, or that anything was going to be all right. This was the bargain of getting divorced: Grace was no longer an allowable feeling. They had lawyers now, and temporary child support orders, and document production. There’d be no profit in mercy.

Now, Myron gave Ruth a sad face that she saw as an offering. The new power differential, his having almost killed their only child, decreased any psychic debt she owed him. He let her walk past as he went to the tiny, bleach-scented bathroom in Enix’s room. The ping of his urine rang against the low water level in the bowl, and Ruth matched it to the note Enix held for two measures in her current orchestra solo: C-sharp. He flushed and she heard him blow his nose: He was still crying, then. He came out of the bathroom with the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes. When at last he broke his sobs, she put the steel in her voice to ask how the fire had happened.

He leveled his eyes to hers, then rose and went to the window, where he put his forehead against the glass. “They don’t know yet,” he said.

Ruth imagined the window pressing coolly against his forehead, but the sun screamed as it sank, setting the edges of his silhouette ablaze in goldenrod. It lit his green sweater, making the patch on his shoulder completely white.

“The marshal has to come out when the structure is stable,” he said. “Do a full investigation.”

“The structure? You mean our house?”

Myron started crying again, in soft honks, and it took several stops and starts of his voice for him to tell her. “It’s gone. The crew’s there now, chopping into the walls to stop any leftover embers. Ripping up carpet,” he said, his voice going high in his Adam’s apple to stanch a new break of weeping.

Ruth’s cute brick Tudor, where, the day after closing, she’d stepped through the door into her perfectly empty living room and decided she’d become even less of Old, Historied Ruth than she already was. “What do you mean, it’s gone?” she asked.

Myron hid his eyes behind his hand. His shoulders quaked.

Ruth’s two-story house with its bay window, where she’d squatted and laid more and ever more tales about her past, tiny eggs of lies that hatched and took on life. “It burned that fast?” she asked.

From Myron, more weeping. Ruth couldn’t believe how unattractive he was as a crier, how she’d ever fucked and then married this quaking man.

Ruth’s house with its kitchen door frame, with her daughter’s annual height marked in pencil. She saw now, pointillized in her memory, her kid’s benchmarks, the point at which Annie’s height had surpassed Russell’s—and here, she felt Historied Ruth leave her as if cleansed by wind. All of that was gone. All that Resurfaced Ruth, all that bathroom tile, all that finished basement where she’d planted backstory and let it grow. All of it, gone. Ruth couldn’t bear to hear Myron cry any harder, so she dropped her line of questioning.

Outside, through the hospital room’s lone small window, she saw a driving rain. It had been falling for hours, since before she arrived, and she winced at the happenstance of it not saving her house, coming a half hour too late in the morning. She imagined the clouds gathering in the darkness above, their divinity watching her house spark and then blaze. She imagined the rolling thunder that broke the white noise of the flames. Myron smelled like a chimney sweep, and his eyes were as wild as she’d ever seen them. She accepted silence.

He came to stand behind her, and in this cache of physical proximity, he made an excited retelling of his brush with death, the language of disaster spooling out rapid-fire like the clicks of a photograph carousel. Ruth couldn’t see him but she could almost feel him, her tactile memory of the muscles he’d built in the past few months since he’d been hitting the gym as a single man. In the minutes before the fire department arrived, he was telling her, he and Enix huddled together on the sidewalk and watched the destruction through the house’s front door. “That big of a fire is shiny,” he said. “Like, if you touched it, your hand would come back wet. We just stood there and watched the flames coming out of the roof, and Ruth, all you could think about, if you’d seen it, was just how many times you’d walked there, in that part of the upstairs. How many times you’d stood in that bathroom brushing your teeth, and now smoke was just pouring out of it.”

Enix had been awake, but only in the vaguest way, when he started talking; as he continued, Ruth saw their eyelids flicker, then lose themselves to sleep, felled under the weight of the Demerol. Myron was watching Enix, too, she guessed, over her shoulder, and he’d moved close enough behind her that she could smell the soot in his hair. The Red Cross had given him a change of clothes, but he had yet to shower. He’d been at the hospital through the night.

“I left the door open when I ran out,” he said, “but that was the dumbest thing.”

“Because?”

“Fire sucks oxygen through an open door. Just like a vacuum cleaner.” He stopped. “Oh God, Ruth. You knew that. Oh God oh God, I’m so sorry.”

She’d actually forgotten, after all these years of not having to tell the lie, that she was supposed to be traumatized by fire. She stiffened her neck, remembering that it was what Myron thought killed her parents that night, at the Hollywood Supper Club: An unsuspecting employee had opened the door to the inner room, where fire was still smoldering in the roof, and let it out into the rest of the complex.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It was so long ago.” It felt good to forgive something she didn’t need to forgive. Whenever real life ran across this, the largest of her lies, she was stunned at the perverse pleasure.

As she spoke, the nurse who’d brought the painkillers came in to check Enix’s monitor, and, when she saw Myron standing so close, gave Ruth a smile. She’d misinterpreted their physicality as intimacy, and Ruth determined, then, to hate the nurse, with her large round eyes and perfect fish’s mouth. This was maybe also the balance of a divorce, she thought, that you had to hate everyone who wasn’t cheering you on in it.

Myron continued, telling her how the fire had fed itself through the door and kicked into higher gear once they were outside: He and Enix had watched high tongues torch and blanket the living room ceiling, and they’d heard glass tinkling from the rear of the house, where, they assumed, the upstairs windows were acquiescing to the party of flames.

“I couldn’t believe the house was burning down. And then the roof fell in. Or I shouldn’t say ‘fell,’ because that’s not what it did. The house just sucked the roof right down its throat. Ruth. Can you stand to hear about this? I mean, a fire?”

“I was in kindergarten. I barely remember my parents. It’s okay, Myron. I need to hear this.”

“It took me so long, after the roof crashed in, to grab Enix. And then it was like I had to remember to run. That’s the worst part, thinking that if we’d been standing any closer, we might have died.”

He was a good enough storyteller that Ruth felt exhausted. As though she’d been there with him, dodging danger. She turned around to face him, angled her head to look up and make one slow, pronounced bat of her eyelashes that she hoped came across as profound nastiness. “Some mistakes,” she heard herself say, “you have to die in order to fix.”

Myron stopped crying then. He stopped crying and stared at her. She saw his jaw clench, saw him take a swallow of what could only have been air.

“And hey,” she continued. “After all that, I don’t see you spooning food carefully down a burn victim’s throat. Why don’t you make yourself useful? Press the call button over there and ask the nurse for more—”

But the nurse was already there, in a cheery blue mask with little bears doing gymnastic tumbles on its fabric. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but one of you has to go. Leftover COVID policy. One visitor per room.”

Ruth followed Myron to the door and watched him walk past the nurses’ station, take a left, and disappear behind the wall of the elevator bank. Bridges always froze before roadways, she thought. They would stop getting along, and then lose content altogether. She sprawled on the hospital couch with one of her legs bent over its arm in a way that made her feel like she was growing out of the blue pleather, as if the sofa was some sort of Ruth planter.

When Enix woke, Ruth would have to tell them. She’d tell them that guess what, they didn’t have to put laundry away when they got home because now, they had no laundry. And no home. She’d explain to them that it wasn’t that bad. The past was now free and clear. They had no ribbons from the gymnastic meets they’d stopped attending in a fifth-grade, loss-inspired rage; no pink comforter from their grandmother Donna Lee, no fraying polyester edges to scratch their chin in sleep. No school library book list they’d intended on drudging through over the course of the term, no Wallace and Gromit DVDs collecting dust on the bookshelf, making them feel childish. Everything that hadn’t burned or melted had been drowned in the fire department’s water. No mementos from the trodden path; nothing, ever, to call it to mind.

Ruth remembered forgetting that Russell had ever been a normal, healthy kid, and forgetting that she’d ever shared a room with him. She remembered the procedure she used to forget his smell, the way she told herself aloud that the smell belonged to other things, even as she sorted and rearranged the clothes and toys and artwork that was undeniably Russell’s. It’s just peanut butter, she’d say, when his scent drifted through the air. It’s just Tide. She remembered how, even after someone came and removed all of Russell’s clothes, his smell lingered in the closet, a smell of saltines and new grass and boyhood, molecules of things that had touched a well and happy Russell, and she told herself that it was just scent through an open window. She remembered that first August that was his second stay at Riley, when the temperature rose and the well and happy Russell seemed to be everywhere in the room, she’d repeat to herself over and over again that on some level, it meant the well and happy Russell had never been anywhere.

Eventually, everything had dissipated—the root beer, the Johnson & Johnson, the dried clay, all the smells of Russell. She pushed memories down before they could even emerge half-formed, until she just forgot to remember. Because here’s what she’d learned. Remembering? It could kill you.

EIGHT

Myron

Home ownership had been Ruth’s idea, conceived almost the minute she became pregnant: It had taken her only one bout of morning sickness to start resenting the plant-infested bungalow they were renting, to start reminding him how impossible it was to heat the house’s back rooms. She’d vomited into the bathroom’s pedestal sink one morning and started weeping, pronouncing the house’s lone full bath too small and old-fashioned for the magnitude of what was happening to her body. Myron saw homebuying as one more move along a game board full of static squares whose unhappy end was his crypt being lowered into a grave, but Ruth argued that they were flushing money down the toilet a dozen different ways, lining the landlady’s pockets ahead of their own. It had taken them a couple more years to piece together a down payment, but in that time, Myron took on Ruth’s American dream as his own, perking his ears at interest rate dips, covertly eyeing the real estate circulars he found at the supermarket.

He wasn’t altogether surprised, then, to feel a bachelor’s lack of regret at watching his house burn. A neighbor, Walt Meyers, pushed his wife to the sidewalk in her wheelchair to watch the fire just as something deep in the living room caterwauled before exploding. Walt stopped her abruptly, yet no part of her body lurched forward; Myron found that his anima, too, stayed parked in neutral. His sensibilities, as the roof crashed to the foundation, fell to clinical analysis: He was intrigued at the idea of the power drill in his garage becoming hot enough to melt, and wondered at the thought that flames must, at that very moment, have been shooting out of the splintered screen of his plasma television.

Yet even if he himself failed to be moved to regret the loss of the house—the French doors they’d had installed between living and dining rooms, the crown moldings that had sold Ruth on the house in the first place—there was Enix. How sorry he was for them now, and how worried for their mind. They’d watched the fire with a look of puzzled wonder on their face, their mouth slightly ajar, the sodium glow of the street light glinting off their braces. But when things went irrevocable, when the roof fell, and then the fire truck dragged into their front yard leaving two deep, muddy ruts behind it, Enix turned into a puddle of a child.

Six firemen rushed out with two huge, gray nozzles and hooked the hose to the hydrant, and Myron took Enix’s hand. He felt them swoon a little next to him, as though the square of sidewalk they were standing on had sunk into the recently rained-on earth. They didn’t cry, but Myron picked up the weight of them as he hadn’t been able to in many years. He let their head sink into the crook of his neck and felt their legs dangling past his knees, felt them spread into a slow smear of emotion that pooled against his own body and made him lightheaded.

Their hair was so smoke-filled that he felt strangled. It was to be expected: Enix had been sleeping downstairs, and the fire had come up from the basement. But he found, too, that close to them, a sweet baby smell that could only have been his imagination, a corrupted memory of having held Baby Annie all those years before. Only through Annie did he feel the loss of the house, the death of the kitchen doorframe where they’d penciled notches to mark her jumps in height, the shattering of the patio door where she’d spent so many summer mornings sitting with her back against the glass, eating cereal out of a mug.

Already, Enix was traversing two houses and two sets of rules, having to become emotionally ambidextrous, all because he’d chosen the wrong woman, the one most attracted to impermanence.

He sat now in the Holiday Inn, eating the tin of honey-coated almonds that had been gifted to him by the sympathetic desk clerk, mindlessly patting his buzzing phone as if it were a baby, as if he could somehow calm its loud insistence. His old friend Anthony Sidoti had heard about his divorce through their grapevine of college classmates, and had come out of the woodwork to say he’d tried to warn him. She played you, Anthony texted him, out of the blue. You never could get that chick in line

Nice to hear from you, Myron texted back, then shut down his phone. But when he turned it on again, fifteen minutes later, it buzzed with a parade of messages. My barber’s sending a guy out, began the final series. He hasn’t reopened since COVID, if you can believe. Get your buzzed too? Come to my house, brother

Myron winced. After all these years, Anthony was still claiming honorary membership in the Black community. But he was one of Myron’s oldest friends. Freshman year of college, Anthony had sat coxswain as Myron rowed through his drinking problems, Anthony restraining Myron’s shoulders on several occasions as he heaved into the toilet on the men’s floor of their dormitory. And then there was the night at a bar on Limestone, when, after Myron won five pool games in a row, a crew of White frat boys had announced they “were gonna beat the shit out of that nigger.” Anthony had intervened, swinging his pool cue like a samurai sword as they advanced, then hoisting himself atop a pool table to sing Frank Sinatra, distracting the entire bar with his two booming verses of “New York, New York” for a long enough time that Myron was able to slip out the front door unnoticed. Even now, Myron could remember run-walking down the street outside the bar, counting out $200 of Phi Kappa Psi’s money, folding the twenties into his pockets as whistles and applause breached the sound barrier of the bar’s front window.

All these twenty-five years later, Anthony had massaged his way into some sort of vice presidency at UPS. As his star had risen, so had his hairline receded, but Myron supposed that was all the more reason for him to need a regular haircut.

Myron cleared the messages, then used his right-hand fingers to drum the beat of “Green Onions” onto his knee. His phone’s wallpaper was a photo of Ruth and Enix when Enix was still Annie: From the left quarter, Ruth smiled sleepily at the world, holding Toddler Annie on her hip in front of the giraffe pen at the Louisville Zoo. Ruth’s sweetness, frozen in perpetuity.

When Annie had first announced themselves as Enix, Ruth had grown impatient with his skipping, old mind that could wrap itself around Annie’s new pronouns only when it was uncluttered. She herself had been bringing a book called Found in Transition to bed with her, and the night she finished, she flung it at him before turning over to lie on her side. “How would you like it if someone kept calling you Myrick,” she said. “I mean, really.”

He watched her shoulder slide into further relaxation, found the red curls flowing into the mattress, and felt choked with emotion. “It’s not intentional,” he said. “My indifference curve on her gender is completely flat. I mean, if this gets Annie equal pay one day at work, I’m happy. I fully support Annie. Enix. Both of them.”

“That’s just it,” Ruth had said, miserably. “There’s not a ‘both of them.’ Just an Enix.”

He’d taken his mind to the gym, then sat in his office muttering “Enix they them” over and over to himself; he’d taken an empty lemonade bottle and turned it into a pronoun jar, putting a dollar bill in every time he misgendered Enix: The first week, Enix had taken the seventeen dollars and bought themselves a pair of rainbow leg warmers. He’d changed their name in his phone and added pronouns. “ENIX THEY THEM,” he’d say aloud, each time it popped up.

The money Enix collected in the pronoun jar dwindled to nothing, and what then became indelible in his memory was what Ruth had said to him after she threw the book. She’d rolled over in bed, her eyes still closed, but the tone of her voice was intent. “What if I told you I wasn’t who you think I am? Would you do that to me, Myron? Would you continue to get it wrong on purpose? What if I told you everything you knew about me was just a construct?”

“Ruth,” he’d said, laughing. He hadn’t then been able to imagine anything as large as not knowing his own wife, not grasping her true mind. “Ruth, come on. But you’d never do that.”

She’d turned back over, he remembered, but then rose from bed, put on a hoodie, and gone downstairs, where he found her, thirty minutes later, sitting on the couch, finishing off an entire bag of potato chips.

“Come on, Ruth,” he’d said gently. He descended to the bottom stair. “Come back to bed.”

“Later,” she told him. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking hard.”

Reticence hung constantly about Ruth, like bar smoke; hers was a love that could never bring them closer. Now, with Anthony’s chiding reverberating through his frontal lobe, Myron changed his phone’s wallpaper, deleting from his gallery altogether a photo of Ruth tossing her head back in laughter while holding a toddler-sized Annie. He swiped through to find one of his favorites, a shot of eight-year-old Annie alone, pitching him a softball, and plugged it in his settings.

He was finishing the process when the phone rang. It was a tone he’d coded in jest, the theme music to Jaws. This meant it was Anthony. “Hey,” he said, regret dimming his voice. “The guy’s coming in a couple of hours. Best my man could do on short notice.”

“Oh, I’m close to you, anyway,” Myron found himself saying. “At the Holiday Inn on Hurstbourne.”

“Boy, what you doing at the—”

“My house burned down. I’m wearing clothes from the Salvation Army.”

“Brother, what?”

“Yeah. Down to the ground. Everything gone. Poof.”

“You know you can stay here if you need.”

“Lined up for an apartment already,” Myron lied. “I’m fine.”

“Well, listen. You got a lot going on, but it’s not gonna help, walking around with some jungle afro. You gonna make it over?”

“Yeah,” Myron said, aware that he was adopting Anthony’s phony New York accent. Neither man had much lived outside the state of Kentucky, but when Anthony turned it on, it spread like an infection. Myron wondered if he was in any emotional shape to throw up all the resistance he’d need to sit in Anthony’s presence.

When he arrived, he found Anthony sitting in his living room, an old boxing match roaring from his television. Anthony sat Myron down and shushed him, throwing his hands to the screen in supplication. Fury downed Wilder, the referee raised his arm in victory, and Anthony took his remote and switched off the screen. He sat upright on his sofa and sucked in his paunch, a move he’d crafted to smoothness in middle age. “So listen,” he said. “You’re homeless. I get it. But how’s your love life? You back on the market yet?”

“Nope. There’s no one. You?”

Anthony held out a hand and closed his eyes in the gesture that historically indicated he had a long story. He disappeared into his kitchen, came back with two tumblers of ice and a bottle of Woodford Reserve. He poured, dramatically. Said, “I was fucking this sister—”

“You were fucking your sister?”

“A sister. A Black chick. I was fucking this sister, but I could never figure out where she was and she’d never call me back, so I just started sitting around at night, smoking a lot of weed, drinking …”

“You still messed up about her?”

“Nah. When I finally caught up with her, she was living with her moms. And the mom was a real manhater, you know, that type. Real piece a work.”

Habitually, Anthony presented Myron with the conversational impossibility of giving what he had just taken. Myron looked glumly down into his lap. “Sounds like you’re better off without her,” he said.

“I dunno. It’s been six months and I feel like I’ll never find anybody again.”

“You will. You’ll find someone as many times as you need to.”

Anthony laughed, but it was the laugh of a dead man, a man who’d poured his life into the mold of a corporate ladder and watched it come away yet unformed. Myron watched his bourbon sweat through his glass, its malaise seeping out into the ether. When the doorbell rang, it was a relief.

The barber’s guy turned out to be a young woman whose mouth pursed disdainfully, yet so beautiful it defied belief. Anthony paraded her into the living room, downed his drink, then poured a third. “Look at this work of art,” he said, still standing next to her. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” He leaned over her to look at the gold-plated script of her necklace, then answered his own question: “Marina.”

“Yup,” she said, pursing her lips into an even angrier heart, one dense enough to pulse. “Marina all day.”

“Marina,” said Anthony. “That means you got a boat somewhere?”

“No. It means I’m Portuguese.”

Myron could see the mump of her tongue, placed angrily into her own cheek. Her irritation was exquisite; it floated above the entire city.

“Portuguese,” Anthony said. “I wouldn’t a guessed that. You ever been to Rhode Island? Lots of Portuguese up there. But they’re really all from this one little island. Government relocation.”

“Never been to Rhode Island, I just came to cut your hair,” she said. She glared at Myron. He felt falsely indicted. Marina was no longer floating anywhere; the exchange had settled back into a real world of sexual harassment and dirty old men. Marina cut both their heads and went away, taking with her a fifty-dollar tip on two fifteen-dollar haircuts. Myron thought of Twitter hashtags. #MeToo. He felt his heart contract.

“Mah,” Anthony said, as he closed the door behind her. “You can’t find true love unless you’re stationed in the army.”

Myron heard, in Anthony’s affectation, the deep misery of his trying to make a way in a world where both women and understanding were routinely denied him. Myron felt knocked over with grief: There’d be no Ruth to tell all this to when he got home, no Ruth to compare notes with, or bounce his own strange realizations against, forever and ever amen.

“Hey you know,” Anthony said conspiratorially, in the exact way of Corleone. “You ain’t the only person from the class of ’01 getting a divorce.”

“I’m sure I’m not. Statistically speaking, sixty percent of the country and I are getting a divorce.”

“Be serious,” Anthony said, pouring more bourbon, pitching the tumbler to the back of his throat. “You remember Paulina Wray?”

“Paulina. Hnnnh. Paulina. Paulina …” Paulina Wray walked across his mind suddenly, as if put there by a bolt of lightning. “Paulina! What happened?”

“Who knows. Maybe Danny Todd turned out to be a shithead just like the rest of us.”

Paulina Wray had been holding her Bible the last time Myron saw her. He’d known her as a freshman on the women’s floor of their dormitory—she’d come to UK all the way from Trigg County, and risen quickly through some mysterious, churchy ranks to lead the campus homeless outreach ministry. Paulina hadn’t been the prettiest girl in their class: She was short, almost neckless, and wore her purse slung across her body like a bandolier. But Paulina, with her religious fervor, was the most unachievable woman they knew, and thus the most consistently noticeable.

Danny Todd, goofy, smelly Danny Todd, with his Tetris addiction and his hobby of intentionally gluing the men’s bathroom door shut, had set out like a conquistador. He joined Paulina’s outreach, wrapping two hundred individual care packages for the homeless in one rainy Lexington weekend. Danny lodged his way into Paulina’s heart that month and stayed there: They were married sophomore year of college. She was into permanence, Paulina was. Kingdom living. Eternity. She was a woman Myron should have chosen all those years ago. At the very least, with both their marriages imploding and his house burned down, Myron guessed Paulina might have an intact flat screen television.

“I’ve got her phone number,” Anthony whispered, looking around his own house as if it were a crowded bar. He removed his phone from his pocket and rotated it in the air. Once, twice. “Just for you, my man, I’ve got her number.”

“What are you doing with her number?”

“We actually do business,” Anthony said, satisfaction edging his voice. “Blythe and Sheridan is one of our local firms. How about that.”

“So why haven’t you called her?”

“Paulina would never go out with a White guy. She ain’t one a those. She doesn’t swirl.”

“Well.” Myron reached into his jacket pocket and put his phone on the coffee table between them. He wondered idly whether Paulina and Danny had ever gotten around to having children. He and Ruth had started late with Enix, but Paulina’s kids, if she had any, might be college-aged themselves by now. Out of his way. He imagined Paulina home alone, Danny Todd’s abandoned power drill hanging from a hook in her garage. “Sure,” he told Anthony. “Put her number in. I’ll call her. Maybe.”

“Hey. No pressure. No skin off my nose, either way.” Anthony scrolled through his phone, then peered down and input digits into Myron’s. “I’m just trying to help a brother out. But remember—if you don’t call Paulina? Someone else will. You ain’t seen her lately, but that piece won’t stay on the market long.”

Myron took his phone back and noted the time. “Hey. My man. I gotta get going.”

He’d almost called him brother.

At the door both men hugged, clapping each other on the backs in unison. A gesture, Myron thought, leftover from the time of apes.

Back at the Holiday Inn, in his houseless, hotel room future, Myron passed the front desk, noted a besuited man whose puckered, unbuttoned shirt collar spoke of a tie that was no longer there. The man was just standing there, at reception, in a pair of earbuds, and he tapped the toe of his shoe against the floor in some sort of rock/pop time, a leather metronome. Myron veered away to put six feet between them but still he heard the man whisper. “Home stretch home stretch home stretch,” the man said, as if chanting it into the dusty hotel lobby might propel him all the way there.

NINE

Anthony

In Rhode Island, my mind took a walk through hell. It was my sophomore year of high school, and my moms had hauled us north to live with her parents. Moms was always a piece of stray wire; ten years before we moved up, she’d gone on one of her bennie hunts and left me in La Grange with her boyfriend, who promptly left me in the parking lot of a gas station in Prospect. Douglas—that was Moms’s boyfriend, she’d known him for six days—was ornery and stupid all at the same time, but the state never charged him. Instead, the po-po found Moms over across the river in New Albany and hustled her back to Kentucky, where they put her away for a month on one count of abandonment. The law didn’t care who was responsible. It cared who’d popped out the puppy in the first place.

It was vexing and satisfying all at once. I’d wanted to watch Douglas rot in hell, sure, but the upside was that the state got Moms to clean herself up and start paying attention. I was six years old when it happened, and I can’t say it’s the Avengers of Justice part that made me want to be a lawyer, but when I was sitting in the public defender’s office, it was the most quiet I’d ever heard in one room. The office had a wooden block set that I believed was just for me, and a child-height sink where I let cool water out into a purple cup. It was like they’d hustled me off to a secret mountaintop temple instead of just downtown to a musty old building painted the color of mustard. The lawyer they assigned to Moms was a woman about her age, but calm like I’d never seen a woman be calm. She lifted her chin when she smiled, a little like Moms always did, but when the lawyer did it, it was the difference between a thunderstorm and a night of fireflies.

Growing up to be a lawyer was still an almost invisible question mark in my mind when we moved to Rhode Island, and my grandparents didn’t help. If it’d been up to them, I’d be sweeping the morgue. They were both off-the-boat Italian, and my nonna spoke four words of English: no, stupid, useless, and cigarette. Not understanding the rest was fine with me, since my moms had told me before we even got there that nothing nice ever came out of her mouth, and I could see it in the way she beat her hand on the arm of her chair every time she spoke. Not understanding Nonna was the best part of the deal. I even forgave her a little, because the sky over Pawtucket was always the color of galvanized steel, smoke pouring out of factory roofs all over the place. It would have made anybody feel evil.

My nonno, though, he spoke plenty of English. Complicated English. Political English. Bill-Clinton-moolinyah-hating English. All of it. In English, he judged my moms for ever leaving Rhode Island in the first place, judged her because my stepdad had left her for a twenty-year-old he met at the bowling alley. When he said to my moms, “You might as well kill yourself,” I knew. They didn’t love her now, and they never had. Whatever his lesson was, it fell dead in my ears. It just made me look at the gray sky and wish I was home, on Fifth Street, or on the Waterfront, watching the Belle of Louisville paddle itself down the Ohio.

By extension, my grandparents judged me, too, even if they spoke whispering Italian while they did it. Every darkly batted eyelash, every untranslated insult followed by laughter, every slammed cabinet I got when I drank out of the soda bottle, felt like another cut on my skin until there were a thousand of them, eating me under my coat when I walked down the street, oozing coagulant into the nylon of my shorts when I changed for PE class. I felt the wounds when I slept at night, woke up with them aching and raw. I’d look down at my arms and legs and be surprised they weren’t really there.

By March, Moms had hustled us back to Louisville. It turned out all those months, she’d been hanging out on the phone with some moony bastard she knew from work, so we hightailed it out of Rhode Island. But also by March, I hadn’t wanted to leave. By then I’d met Leah, Leah of the camel miniskirts and rainbow leg warmers, Leah for whom I asked my moms if I could just stay there in Pawtucket and finish high school. Leah who I could never make love me.

I’d snuck cigarettes out of my nonna’s purse and brought them to woodshop for Leah, I’d even sent her those carnations that the school paper sold on Valentine’s Day. Leah had this messy blond hair that she’d bunch up at the base of her head in a knot while fanning her neck. She wasn’t one of the popular kids. She didn’t have a car and her clothes weren’t from a department store. But Leah belonged. She had three sisters who’d gone ahead of her in school, clearing her placement in the hierarchy. She wasn’t top of the heap but she was comfortable where she was. She belonged to Shea High School in a way I’d never belonged to anyone anywhere, and when she talked to me, when she giggled with me on a bleacher while smoking my nonna’s Newports, I felt like someone was finally taking Anthony Sidoti seriously.

And she was saucy as a Heinz 57 bottle, that one; she was a girl who never bored me, a girl I knew could never, ever bore me, even if I knew her a hundred years. Our geometry teacher asked her to come to the board and offer a proof she’d just gone over in class, but Leah just sat there, chewing her gum.

“Prove my mind?” she said, taking the plug of gum out of her jaw to stick atop her desk. She stood. Brought a finger to her head and tapped her temple. “Well, I’ll be damned. Turns out all the good thinkin’ wants to stay in there.” She sat down and closed her eyes for the remaining minutes of class. When the bell rang for fourth period, the green wad of her gum was still fixed to the desktop.

I’ve been chasing the echo of Leah all my life.

I’ve been lucky, because Kentucky women are their own special kind of thunder, strong like bourbon and well-built like horses—they ain’t hard to want to chase. There’s nothing more thrilling than the way a chick from Kentucky says “bless your heart.” It ain’t a North Carolina bless-your-heart and it ain’t even an Indiana bless-your-heart. The way a Kentucky woman says “bless your heart,” it’s a revelation about yourself that you’d better heed.

Ruth said it the first time she heard me call Myron my brother. “Bless your heart, do you think you’re Black?” she said.

I looked her up and down, making sure she knew my eyes were marking checkpoints at the red hair and the freckles and the biscuit-dough color of her neck. “Do you think you’re Black?” I asked her. “Who decides who’s part of the community, anyway? There’s a judge sitting in robes somewhere? Can I see him?” I held my arm against hers, to show her whose was darker: mine. “If you get to be Black,” I said, “why don’t I?”

Myron had to physically stop her from clapping back. She opened her mouth and actually leaned forward into what she was about to say, actually moved her center of gravity from the balls of her feet to her toes, but Myron put a hand on her chest and chuckled. Said, “Isn’t Anthony funny?” And now I’ll never know what she might have said, which is a shame, because Ruth never flinches. She never lies. She’s all truth, whether you want it or not.

What’s cute about Ruth, too, is how hard she makes other people run true, the way she fights so hard for all those crooks she represents at the PD, how we’d be just chilling in their backyard and she’d be talking about case files. She’s got a jailhouse crush on this dude Martin Stavins, who she was crisping on about right before she left Myron. We were at their crib, it was February but one of those surprise springtime days between two hard snows, and the Hurleys were grilling me burgers, and Ruth was talking about how Martin Stavins’s mama kept calling her, how the woman was falling apart with arthritis, how her son Little Arthritis was rotting away in jail, when he’d just been taping the police so they’d do the right thing, how his mama made him sound like a loser who just lived and watched porn in her basement, said she heard it one time coming out the TV.

“People in this country are punished for nothing,” Ruth said, like it wasn’t something we’d all known since the first day of law school. She was letting the spatula dangle from between two fingers, and steam was hissing everywhere like it was a Kingsford commercial, and I smelled one of the patties starting to be too well done and I had to whisper, “Ruth, honey, the meat” to bring her back down to mission control.

When Myron got married, I was his best man. It surprised me that he asked, because we didn’t talk much after he tripped and fell into Ruth, but when he asked me to stand with him, it was like the plates of our continent drifted back together. I stood with him at that altar, watched him tap one nervous hand against his pants. When the preacher walked in, we both turned and looked past him, to Black Jesus, hanging up there on that cross, watching us all. And I’d always figured that once you got married, the next big party that you threw was your funeral, and it was a thing I wasn’t trying to do, but when the organist transitioned from “How Great Thou Art” to “Septembro,” and Ruth came down that aisle looking like a damn supermodel, I got jealous. And that surprised me. Myron was standing there with his eyes all shiny with whatever was running through his head, whether it was joy or awe or Soulstice, and I got a little upset, thinking whatever that thing was, it would never get around to me.

I told my moms about it after the wedding. Just a little, I told her. “It like to made me want to get married too,” I said.

“Well, my Tony, it’s not such a big deal. It’s like getting a driver’s license. Everybody does it, in the end. You could just go find yourself a woman, you know.”

But the truth is, I never could. I can’t get soft on women because in the end, their minds always end up putting mine to sleep. It’s a cycle: They’re hot as fuck, they confuse me, then they annoy the shit out of me; they get boring, I dump them, all their little friends call me a pig.

The other day, after our haircuts, I took Myron to Dairy Queen. We sat there on the curb with cones of vanilla twisted with chocolate, two forty-six-year-old disasters who knew we’d be sucking down Rolaids on our way home.

“My brother,” I said. “Welcome back to freedom.”

He tipped his head and made a face I’ve seen so many times in twenty years, a face of sadness, a face of funerals. He opened his lips to tell me something I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear.

But then a woman in the parking lot revved the engine of her pickup, painting over whatever Myron had been thinking. He raised his cone in the air like it was a glass of champagne, and I toasted him back. A rivulet of chocolate cream ran down the side of his cone cup, and he licked it. We were back in our youth, when food solved everything.

TEN

Ruth

“Rooth,” Clarisse was saying, from somewhere. “Rooth.”

Ruth was walking too slowly to understand that she’d rolled over and swiped open her phone. Instead, she was dreaming that she was using the rotary dial in her grandma Agnes’s warm, stale living room, her grandmother’s booklets of S&H Green Stamps stacked on an end table.

“Ruth, are you there? Did you answer?” Clarisse spoke back to the seventies. “Ruth, I don’t want to. But I think I might have to check myself back into the hospital.”

Ruth had also dreamed of Wendy and as the bars rose on her brain’s morning signal, the dream reloaded itself into her consciousness. Wendy had been happily meditating on a beach, her hair dappled with California sun. Ruth had awakened to find herself weeping, then gone back to sleep. The power of both dreams now faded into the syrupy darkness of her bedroom as she found her voice. Asked Clarisse, “You okay?”

“No. Fuck no. Look around, Ruth. Gas is at five dollars a gallon. Nothing’s open anymore. California’s on fire half the year. I don’t want to watch the end of the world anymore. I think I might need to go back to Rivendell. I was wondering whether you can drive me? Wait … no. Maybe … wait.”

Ruth listened, with a soggy sense of fear, to the space of silence Clarisse left on the other end of the call. She propped herself on one elbow and felt a runnel of sweat drop down her side. Modern dogs hadn’t stopped being wolves so much as they’d started being a new kind of wolf. In much the same way, Clarisse, lodged in the hiccups of bipolar disorder, stopped being a person with rational motivations. The pandemic had broken her down, sure, but it hadn’t meant collapse. Clarisse had been speaking of her final exit for years now, and Ruth held a continual, low-level fear that she’d commit suicide for a reason as simple as wanting to see what would work.

Ruth registered a pair of headlights thrown first on her wall and then dragged across her ceiling, but she found herself awakening into emotion rather than sensory detail. She was waking into the recall of her child’s leg, the name they’d carved, the week before, into their own soft, blank screen of skin. The lines of blood that had dried and scabbed over on Enix’s thigh, the name then crimson and perforated at the corners of its letters: C-R-I-S-T-A. Ruth had discovered it the week before, when Enix had forgone their filthy khakis and worn the school skirt, the blue-and-purple plaid of it riding up their leg in the car. “What the absolute hell,” Ruth had said then, and Enix had uncrossed their legs, unrolled the top of their skirt so it fell back to their knees.

“Mom,” they said. “You’re not supposed to make a big deal out of it, or I’ll just cut more.”

Crista it was, too, who’d sold Enix a vape pen, which had been reported to the head of the school, who then called Ruth and Myron in for a conference in which she’d questioned their parenting, asked whether perhaps it was Ruth who’d bought her the vape pen, asked her if Enix had a therapist, if they themselves had therapists.

“I’m thinking everyone at this godforsaken school could use a therapist, including its administration,” Ruth had told Myron in the car. Are you sure you want to do that? Ruth had asked then-Annie the year before, when she’d announced that she wanted to attend the Lincoln School. Ruth had been thinking of a cathouse, pissing contests everywhere, but it turned out to be more like a henhouse, with girls pecking one another’s eyes out in a constant Olympics of meanness. Even apart from Annie’s transition to gender fluidity, enrolling at an all-girls’ school had been a terrible choice. It had been an Annie-driven choice, a decision Ruth had let her make, as an eager twelve-year-old: Lincoln had an astronomy class, then-Annie had pointed out, and what kind of monster would Ruth have been to stop the planetary exploration whirling around in her child’s head? And while astronomy had turned out to be thrilling (their very first writing assignment: a short essay on the question of whether Pluto might, after all, be a respectable planet), the rest of school had gone poorly, almost from Day One. Crista Pimento was Enix’s lone friend at the school: Crista Pimento who made movie dates she then canceled an hour beforehand, Crista Pimento who talked badly about Enix on social media, Crista Pimento who Enix strongly believed had turned her in for having bought the vape pen.

Ruth was waking into the imperative of calling Crista Pimento’s parents, of giving them a piece of her mind, and of once again begging Enix to leave Lincoln and go back to the softer, gentler world of public school. But when Ruth became awake enough to remember that Enix was in the hospital, she became awake enough to know she was going to do no such thing: There were more important mistakes at hand, because she was waking into the recall of Enix’s arm, the two quarter-sized blisters that had popped the day before, spilling their precious lymph into the bandages. Her own culpability, her own complicity in having ruined—almost killed—her own child. The specter of another Trump presidency, her rent a 40 percent increase over what she might have paid in 2020. The small child who’d called her office that morning to ask whether they’d yet watched the movie.

“What movie?” Ruth asked.

“My daddy’s. His name’s Martin.”

“Martin Stavins?”

“Yes ma’am, that is him. My auntie says he’s about to die of corona-virus with all them men sleeping in the same room. She says it’s only a matter of time.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy. How’s your grandma?”

“She passed. Last week.”

“Oh my goodness, baby,” Ruth said, genuinely shocked. Mrs. Stavins, on the telephone, had seemed immortal. In her head, Ruth’s father shook his. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, me too, lady. Y’all got to get my daddy out the pen before they send me to a group home. I’m with my aunt Dixie now, but she can’t keep me.”

All Ruth’s thoughts vaporized in the silence the girl left on the other end of the line. There was no telling this child that the public defender of Jefferson County was on top of anything. “How old are you, honey?” Ruth asked, afraid of the answer.

“Me, I’m eight. How old are you?”

Ruth giggled. “Forty-six,” she said.

“But have y’all watched that movie? My mamaw always said we was just waiting for the judge to watch the movie and know the police was out to get him for making it, ’fore my daddy could come out the pen.”

It was the obvious defense, that the police had executed an illegal search and sought a trumped-up charge in retaliation for Martin’s having taped them. But cases like these were backed up for years. The judge hadn’t yet watched the video. It wasn’t clear to Ruth when he would.

“We’re working, baby,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I promise,” Ruth whispered.

“Lady, I can’t hear you.”

Ruth stayed quiet. The girl yelled into the phone twice more before she hung up.

Before bed, Ruth opened the tap in her bathroom to its hottest position and washed her hands, rinsing them with the scalding water until they were lobster red, holding them under until her reflexes made her involuntarily pull them away. She punched the bathroom mirror on repeat, but her hands and the mirror stood five times unbroken. She felt her hands now, in the darkness, to see whether they’d succumbed overnight, whether she’d finally formed herself into some evidence of harm. She rubbed them together to find the peeling skin, the sore, bruised knuckles, but felt nothing; her hands were fine. She woke fully then, into the gathering certainty that she was now about to listen, in real time, to her best friend’s suicide.

“Clarisse?” she said softly, but she heard a tin voice in the background that wasn’t her friend’s. A male voice refracted through electronic broadcast. She couldn’t make out words.

Clarisse came back on. “Wait, Ruth?” she said. “Better idea. There was a man just now on the radio, for the Preston Arts Center. They went down a list of online classes. There’s knitting and collage making and charcoal drawing. Take a class with me? Which one sounds interesting?”

None of them did. Ruth had bought $2,000 worth of camera equipment in the last eighteen months. She couldn’t have said why then, but now, with her marriage crumbled to powder and the past oozing through like toxic waste, she’d become interested in the gritty scum that eventually formed over all reality. She felt, angling her camera, enlarging and cropping the digital product, not so much that she was altering a worldview to create magic, so much as she was helping to reflect all the magic that the world, second by second, lost to darkness.

What Clarisse seemed to want to do, on the other hand, was tune out reality, as if doing so was some kind of superpower. Ruth imagined herself bumbling through six to eight weeks of charcoal drawing in a Zoom window and felt a sweat break out on her nose. But she was interested in saving Clarisse’s life, so she told the digital glow of her phone, “Sure. In fact, I’d love to. It’d be the best thing right now, for both of us.”

“And Ruth? I think I had a breakthrough in therapy yesterday. I think I figured something out. I can’t look at small children anymore. I need to teach high school.”

Clarisse had chosen, when she began teaching, the second grade, and no small part of it was that she’d entered the teaching profession with maternal designs of her own: Seven and eight were the years before they turned, Clarisse said; seven and eight were sweet mouths sticking the tips of their tongues out while performing short division problems. Clarisse was going to get married, get pregnant, and produce second graders of her own. She’d picked out names: Claude, Colette. Ruth had winced inwardly when Clarisse shared this information. She’d wanted to tell Clarisse what Russell looked like in the minutes before he died, how his neck had stiffened into a permanent angle of surrender; she wanted to warn her about the futility of going forth to multiply into a universe that was interested only in en-tropic cruelty.

Clarisse’s twenties passed, and then her thirties: no husband, no children. Come her fortieth birthday, she told Ruth that some part of her had died. “I can’t decide whether it’s a progression or a regression,” she said, over a bottle of red wine at Masterson’s, “but the desire to have children has left me. Poof.”

Ruth heard Clarisse crying softly into the phone now. She was saying something, but it was difficult to make out over her shuddering breaths. Ruth had heard her cry before, but this was the furthest she’d ever heard her from wholeness. She thought of Myron, crying for the first time in front of her in Enix’s hospital room. The real adults weren’t there anymore, in the modern age—they’d left the room to set fires and down Haldol.

She waited for the break of Clarisse blowing her nose to say, “It’s hard, your forties. Everything changes. Everything. When does the knitting course begin?”

“Hold on,” Clarisse said. “I’m putting you on speaker.” Clarisse was holding her phone at a distance, Ruth heard, while scrolling through its internet connection. “It’s tomorrow,” she said. “Knitting’s at five thirty. Can you make that?”

No, she decided instantly. She refused to knit. It was too much like playing with bones, conjuring death through granny squares. But collaging would require scissors, at the very least. Blades, to make it efficient. She wondered if Clarisse should be around sharp edges, whether avoiding them wasn’t part of her home safety plan, but then told herself that Clarisse was an adult, capable of making her own decisions. She read the course description for Collage I, which sounded just open-ended enough to allow for her lack of native talent. And so Ruth showed up in the Zoom window at 6:29 p.m. the next evening. She was relieved, at 6:31, to find Clarisse, her head and shoulders backlit, her face darkened, her posture deceptively buoyant.

The instructor was an obscenely tall man named Kit, who had situated himself far enough from his webcam that they could all see his full height. He came close at 6:33, to adjust his screen’s brightness, and Ruth could see how well shaped his goatee was. Green leaked into one of Kit’s blue eyes but not the other, and Ruth wondered whether he’d been punched in a brawl. Looking at the other women in the meeting windows, Ruth calculated that she and Clarisse were the only ones under the age of sixty.

Per the instructions in the course catalog, Ruth had gathered magazine pages and old photographs; she’d picked up an Exacto blade curbside at Michaels. “There’s no right or wrong,” Kit told them, as he spoke of scale and storytelling, as he asked each of them, with his deep Appalachian accent, to show what they’d done so far. Ruth watched Clarisse in her window, applying fabric glue to the back of a strip of neon teal. A snow-haired woman in the bottom center of her gallery view accidentally knocked the cardboard backing of her project to the floor, but did so in such a liquid, stately motion that Ruth envied her at her advanced age. Ruth watched the woman’s body disappear into a lean until the only visible part of her was her Aqua-Netted beehive. “Tryna relax,” she said, when she reappeared. Only Kit laughed, and he did so thinly.

Ruth sliced and glued, and found, in her placement of materials, the deep, precious impression of her own heart. She reached for her blade, shaped her magazine pieces into thick L’s and rectangles so misshapen they looked pregnant. She’d found an eggshell piece of cardstock Enix had used in an art project at school, and now, she cut thin strips of it as backing between her darker pieces.

“All right, ladies,” Kit said, with only ten class minutes left. “Let’s see whatcha got. Feel free to talk about the why, but remember—there’s no explaining when it comes to art. Your audience makes its own meaning.”

Ruth raised her hand to go first. She felt giddy, like a primary school student. “It’s my sister,” she said breathlessly, holding her piece up to her laptop’s camera, shifting it to the left and to the right, pulling it toward her chin until the entirety of it showed up in her Zoom window. The curve of Wendy’s cheek was covered with magazine font. Her eyes were the eyes of a model in a Fenty ad.

Clarisse coughed, then raised her eyebrows. Relaxed her face into equanimity.

“I spent the happiest part of my life with my sister,” Ruth told the class. It wasn’t a lie. Not hardly. But she’d not admitted to those years, not in decades: She’d not admitted she had a living sister, a dead brother. She’d not admitted to the existence of the city of Rosalind, California, nor to all that had happened there. She’d known, all these years, that remembering would have frozen her along the trench of her father’s killing, run her down its groove over and over again. Except now she was growing somewhere inside, stretching; she felt herself unknowing it.

Wendy, somehow, somewhere, on a beach or not, held peace, and Ruth needed to find her. She needed to be there in Wendy’s hard time, listen to whatever Wendy wanted to relay about the dissolution of her body, help her cook, perhaps, tend her garden, fertilize her sister’s soul while they still shared a planet. Present Ruth needed to be gentle with Past Ruth at the same time she needed to mend wavelengths with someone she’d once loved. She needed, now, to show her work; she needed to step to the board and write the proof.

“Our relationship fell apart,” she told her webcam now, “but we had so much fun when we were kids.” She was no longer telling the class. She was telling herself. “I love my sister dearly.” It wasn’t until she’d set her cursor on the “Leave Meeting” button and clicked, until she was out on her apartment’s balcony, standing under the blue clouds turning evening purple, that she thought to add: My sister fell. And I need to go help her stand.

His third-grade year, Russell attended school less and less frequently. It started as a cold that turned into a burning in his chest that cost him two solid days of attendance. A racking, painful cough, revealed on X-ray as a case of pleurisy, cast him into bed for eight days; a broken wrist that refused to heal kept him home for three weeks. By the time he had his aneurysm, he was down to one day of attendance per month. It was March by then; the school had already notified Ruth’s parents that Russell would have to repeat the year, and she guessed that was why no one seemed to mind that he still showed up for after-school drum lessons with Mr. Peters, an aging, ponytailed hippie who had worked out a deal to offer lessons in the archway between the cafeteria and the class hall.

“Should we still be doing this?” Ruth heard her father ask her mother one afternoon as she warmed the station wagon for its Monday trip across town. Donnie was just returned from work, leaning over the car’s roof, speaking loudly enough into the passenger-side window that he could be heard over the motor. The promise of winter sun had made Ruth open her upstairs window to let out some of the inside heat. Over the silence of hibernating animals and migrated birds her father’s voice had come, clear as a bell.

In the next yard, Mr. O’Brien was working over his topiary with a pair of clippers, and though he must have seen—and heard—Cora and Donnie, he neither said hello nor waved. His odd shifts often left him pulling his patrol car into his driveway just as his twin daughters were walking to the bus stop. Mildred and Mary were fraternal, distinguished only by Mildred’s relative height. But they both had light brown curls that stood atop their heads in a fluff, and when Mr. O’Brien came cruising down the street in the morning, the twins would pause on their path to the bus stop. Mr. O’Brien rolled down his window. The twins would sandwich his face in a kiss.

“We can’t play with y’all anymore,” Millie had reported on the bus one day, about a month after the Cottams had shown up with their moving truck, the caravan of them wobbling in furniture and boxes. “My dad says we can sit on the bus with you, but we can’t play after school. He said there are White kids in this neighborhood and surely, we can find them.”

Millie had reported this without temperature. As if it were something Ruth would surely accept, something she’d even heard before or thought of on her own. It had come to Ruth in an instant—in public, people didn’t often know she was Black. But when it lumped her in with her family, the world made a difference.

She hadn’t told Cora or Donnie. But she was glad, now, that Mr. O’Brien never greeted them when he was outside, because it wouldn’t have been at all true.

That spring day of Russell’s drum lesson, Cora exited the car. And the punky, airtight noise of the door came to Ruth’s window with such clarity it was as though she herself had closed it. Cora faced Donnie across the car’s roof and said, “Russell’s fine to go. His wrist has mended.”

Donnie said nothing. That hadn’t been his question.

Ruth watched her father’s back, his dark brown sweater, his corduroy pants that had started, in his months of fathering a sick child, to sag. He stood—looking at what, Ruth couldn’t possibly know—but he seemed to be locked, as she was, on the fraction of her mother’s body that was visible over the top of the car: her resigned face, her neck hunched under its deepening realization of loss. The other, sadder question hung between them like a fruit ready to fall. She heard her mother answer it. “The doctors don’t know one damn thing, Donnie. They don’t even know what he has. Russell might be with us until he’s twenty. Or they’ll figure it out and find a cure and then, may Russell outlive us all. You want him to have a hobby in his old age, don’t you?”

Ruth imagined her brother recovering, his hair that was even redder than hers growing out into a bushy afro. She saw him in black jeans and a T-shirt drumming on a stage until he was marinated in sweat; she saw the groupies waiting for him behind the speakers. But it wasn’t reality. Just something she was making up for herself. Russell was dying, she thought. That was perfectly clear. Even his face had changed. His eyes were so sunken that his eyelids looked like cups his eyes were floating in, barely holding them in place.

Her parents were coming back up the long sidewalk to the house now, Cora following a few paces behind Donnie. The car was still running, warming itself. Ruth rested her elbows on the eggshell-blue paint of her windowsill and waited to see her mother come back out, walk back down the sidewalk with Russell in front of her. He was dying, Ruth wanted to scream, and they were all just going to have to watch.

He made it to third-grade graduation, where Ruth, from one row behind, watched her mother’s back. Cora leaned to the left, one side of her hair made longer than the other. Ruth noted how her mother’s black curls draped over her delicate shoulder blade, how girlishly thin her mother still was. Never in all her young days, Ruth was sure, had she worked up such a nightmare as giving birth to a dying child.

The teachers had organized a postgraduation potluck, and when Ruth went for her mother’s brownies she found Wendy standing near the table, conjured as if by magic. Wendy scratched the back of her head with one hand while stuffing a brownie into her mouth with the other. She smelled like skunk. “The fuck,” she said. “Mom left eggshell in the brownies.”

Ruth took a big bite, perceived nothing untoward. “Maybe that’s just dirt you left in your own mouth,” she said, but then she took a further bite, and felt the grit scraping her hard palate. “They’re still good. It’s just eggshell. It won’t kill you.”

“Yeah, but it’s embarrassing. I mean damn. It ain’t that hard to crack an egg.”

“Well, then, maybe you could have made them for her.” Ruth took a plastic cup of fruit punch to wash it down. Said, “Sometimes I wish it was you who was sick. Maybe then you’d shut up for ten minutes.”

“Bucktoothed little shit,” Wendy said. She walked away, across the room and out the door, vanishing back into the flum of her teenaged life.

Ruth took another of her mother’s flawed brownies from the metallized plastic tray and put the rhombus of it as far into her mouth as she could, for maximum bite. Sank her teeth. Felt no shell. Was sorry for how pure and moist it was.

Ruth has willed herself to delete, from the storage cache of her mind, the investigative photos Myron sent her. Two or three shots of each charred room, taken at differing angles: thirty-eight in all. She’d seen and then promptly forgotten her melted blender on the kitchen counter, the sunken donut, its knob left in its plastic lid. The charred floorboards sticking up ashen gray from the living room floor, where the roof crashed. The neat row of dime-sized blisters that bubbled up from the surface of the mustard-yellow paint in Enix’s bathroom.

My baby survived, she thinks instead. My baby will be fourteen and then fifteen and then sixteen. My baby will graduate from high school. College. And her apartment had turned out, so far, to be not half-bad: She had a pool within walking distance. And a creekside path for hiking just beyond her building’s entry. Ruth had no lawn to mow, ever, no home maintenance that was her responsibility, so long as she could keep affording the eighteen hundred a month. There was talk—there always was—that the public defender’s office was going to eliminate even more positions. But she was a paralegal, far less dispensable than the attorneys with their higher salaries. She’d weathered eight state budgets now, even as bombs dropped all around her. The house was so far gone that there was no conclusively knowing where the fire had started, or how. She could tuck away guilt and forget it, moving on with her life and with Enix’s. She may have burned down her own house, but she was still standing. Standing well, if not high.

She was grateful that each apartment had its own closed-circuit camera, and when the digital voice came, she looked out to find Myron and Enix sitting on the steps outside her entry. She took to the stairs, descending at hazardous speed. She still could not, not yet, abide Myron in her freed living space.

“Enix!” she said, trying to hug her kid, but Enix scampered past. “The hospital gave us pain meds,” Myron said, handing Ruth a prescription for narcotics. “They said to follow up in a couple of weeks with the pediatrician.”

The chill of spring had given way to gracious warmth, and from a distant pond she heard the loud calls of small frogs as Myron told her the fire marshal had closed the investigation. “It started in the basement,” he said, and through her own open window she heard a clink of dishes from the kitchen, Enix, a newly released inmate, pouring chips into a bowl. “There was a short somewhere. The marshal said maybe a wire near the sink. I’m sorry,” he said. He looked down at his feet like he was a little boy, then looked back up at her with an intensity that suggested he was sorry not only for every way in which he’d ever wronged her, but for his very existence. He ratcheted the look down. Scratched the scalp on the side of his head. Looked around at her neighborhood, the cinnamon-colored doors of twenty other apartment buildings.

“How can they pinpoint it that precisely?”

He shrugged. “That’s their job. I’m sure it’s a science.”

“Weird, don’t you think?” she asked, and she heard the rim of dishonesty around her own voice.

They’d driven down to Mammoth Cave once when Annie was little, right after she lost her first tooth, and Annie had insisted on going to one of the little bungalow tourist shops, where she made Ruth buy her small rocks glued to labeled cards. Igneous, read her favorite, a card affixed with a teardrop of black rock. Ruth wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in a Ziploc bag so that Annie could take it to school for show-and-tell. That rock you’re holding? she remembered telling her. It was liquid when it came out of the middle of the earth. Like raspberry filling, but so hot you couldn’t have held it or even gotten near. If you’d held it then, when it first oozed out, it would have melted your hand down to bone.

“Will insurance pay?” she asked Myron now.

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, it was still an accident.”

“Well,” she said. She still hadn’t made him feel better. Myron stood straight from where his feet had been planted in front of him, so that his face was suddenly inches from hers. She couldn’t move because she wouldn’t move. She had the obscene urge to kiss him, and she quickly reorganized the desire as belonging less to anything that had ever happened between them and more to banal physical default. “Bye, Myron,” she said, and she disappeared into her apartment entryway. She climbed the stairs by twos to the second-floor landing and entered her own small living room.

It would be exhausting, trying to reconstruct an even newer version of Ruth. She’d lost her house, its furniture, its photograph of a random Black girl on a covered bridge that she’d told Myron was her mother as a teen. She’d lost the wrought iron porch table she’d picked up at an estate sale in Buckner and said it was her Grandma Bailey’s.

“Pack,” she told Enix, slamming the door behind her so hard she could hear the echo of its now-defunct bell. “I mean,” she said, fixing pleasantries to her voice, “pack.” She hoped it came out sounding calm. Motherly. The inner voice was different, an automaton, instructing her: Enix had been out of the hospital for over an hour, and Ruth needed to excise all that trauma, all the mistakes she and Myron were making. She needed to remove them from their shitty little antiquated finishing school. She needed to show them the open road. Teach them how to make a bolder life than the one she’d spent twenty years squaring herself into. “We’re going away for the week,” Ruth heard herself say. She didn’t know what would come out of her mouth next, until she said it. “A little mini-vacation. How’s that?”

Despite their bright red hair, Enix’s eyebrows had sprouted, over time, as dark as Myron’s, and now they looked at Ruth savagely, their eyebrows ruching in the middle. “But I just got home,” they said, backing out of the living room, away from Ruth.

“So then you don’t even have to pack.” Ruth threw her arms into devil-may-care. “All the better.”

Though Enix did. They went to their new bedroom that Ruth had so carefully arranged to look like their old one, with stuffed animals in their habitual order across their long yellow body pillow, and they dumped all the contents of their little suitcase painted over with its cartoon depiction of the North American continent. They replaced what Ruth had brought to the hospital—a toothbrush, floss threaders, a change of clothes—with new clothes, ones of their choosing. Brandnew breast binders, newly bought books, the new electric razor they’d asked for, in hopes of one day having a beard.

Ruth sifted herself for reasons as she got out the big, plain blue suitcase she’d had for decades and threw in things both solid and irrational: pantyhose, a hair dryer. Two of Enix’s old baby books she’d had the foresight to save from a fire she hadn’t even predicted setting. She was bewildered at the speed at which she was packing even as the reasons came to her, like pins wedged centimeters under her skin. There was more for them out there, she reckoned, even if it wasn’t Old Ruth. They’d find Wendy, and she’d find something, even if it wasn’t serenity, even if it wasn’t the answer to a question she’d not previously known to ask. She and Enix exited Ruth’s new home that had already started to feel like an old home, Ruth locking the door behind them. She felt, as she turned the key, that she was locking up an entire life. She had little intention of returning. If carnies could raise their kids on the road, so could she.

She and Enix wheeled their suitcases to the landing and carried them down the stairs, Enix trudging gently behind her, and they went out the entryway door to the parking lot. Ruth hoisted the suitcases into the Tesla’s trunk while Enix got in the car, and then she slid in behind her steering wheel and smiled. “I love you,” she told Enix. “We’re going away for a while. How exciting.” She’d get time alone now with Enix. She’d cruise the country under her full-body sunroof, which was made for the road. She’d escape the mountains of case files on her desk at work. She could feel her eyes glowing.

She drove five miles east and was almost to Shelby County when she started to wonder where she was going. Enix had left their iPod en queue, and now Lil Peep was laying himself atop Lil Tracy’s verse on “Castles,” and then Lil Uzi Vert was talking about his girl, and then Lil Loaded was talking about his bloods. All the rappers were Lil All the Things now, she thought, all of them so little, and she wondered when that had happened. I-265 South was out there somewhere, and I-64 West beyond it, in the murky morning mist, but she didn’t feel like activating her GPS. Nicer girls at public schools were out there for her headlamps to find and send Enix for friendship. California was due west, and her sister somewhere within it; home was inside her, still. If she were doing the right thing, her sense of flight path would be like the filament of a bird’s beak. She’d just keep driving, and Rosalind, California, would show up. She turned on her blinker for the no one who was behind them on a Wednesday morning in East Louisville, and she made a hairpin turn in the middle of the road.

That far east, the streetlights came in measures of miles rather than in feet, but Enix’s braces glowed along with their forehead in the light from the waning moon. Ruth couldn’t make out their pupils, but she could see her kid’s eyes, spread wide. “Mom!” Enix said. “That’s dangerous.”

“No, baby. It’s only dangerous if someone else does it. I’m your mom. And I know exactly what I’m doing.”

ELEVEN

Myron

From his place just behind her on the splintered, narrow dock, Myron could see the truth as Paulina had arranged it: She’d combed a severe, scalp-revealing part on the left side of her hair, which she’d then piled atop her head in a lump, the lump secured by a pair of polished, monogrammed utensils that Myron thought she might have been able to remove from her hair in order to eat Chinese food. The lump wasn’t as uptight as Paulina was, and it bulged unevenly on the side with the part, making her neck appear even tinier and more delicate than he’d understood. If the dock somehow broke and spilled the two of them, it would be the end of her, he thought, even with the blue water shoes she’d buckled onto her feet.

She’d held on to her looks in a way he appreciated: The dewy gloss of her skin made him forget how old he was. Just that morning, he’d awakened with the old pain in his hip, the first site of his bursitis. He could never help but to roll onto that side in his sleep. He’d curl into the fetal position, his hands balled up near his face like a boxer’s. “Your spine might break from all that,” his physical therapist had told him, after asking how he slept, but Myron found himself unable to rest any other way. He went to bed on his back, face up, as advised, but felt as if he were lying in a coffin. By the middle of the night he’d be bent, yet again, like a comma, pinching his own spine, pressing all the following day’s worries into the crook of his back.

Falling apart like he was, he appreciated Paulina’s suggestion that they row. He needed, sorely, to be out on a lake with this girlish woman, paddling the cares and years out of his body. He needed to fjord streams with her, kayak down rough waters, grill bear meat over a fire. He needed to be looking into the whorls of her hair, noting its heft, its lack of gray roots.

He’d called her the very evening Anthony offered up her phone number. He’d had to fortify his nerves with Jack and Coke: Much as he wanted back on the market, he feared Paulina’s long-standing tendency toward eternal commitment. She was a beginning who might also want an end, possibly a fast march down an aisle, steps toward his reincarceration.

“Paulina?” he’d said, after dialing. His phone whirred into hers again, and he realized he’d spoken to the place between rings. He was already drunk.

“Hello.” Her voice had come, after the third ring.

“Paulina Wray?”

“Yes. Please, who is this?”

“Myron. Hurley.” He stood up from the hotel bed, walked toward the large industrial window in order to have something to do with his body. He almost tripped on the desk chair. Realized he might have to become more systematic about reclaiming his manhood. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but Anthony Sidoti gave me your phone number.”

“Ah yes,” she said. “He told you the church lady is divorced.”

“I’m sorry to be so forward, calling you, but I don’t remember you like that, not at all.” He swallowed, folded his tongue on its back for an aftertaste of liquor. “You had so much light in you, like a lantern, showing us all the way, but no, Paulina, I do not remember you as the church lady.” He hadn’t spoken to a woman like this in twenty years. The whiskey felt warm in his stomach. He hoped he wasn’t slurring his words.

“Well, we can’t go out now, anyway,” she said. “I’ve got chicken pox.”

“I will stay six feet away from you at all times. Scout’s honor.”

She laughed, dryly. “Chicken pox doesn’t work like that. But we can’t go anywhere. I just don’t feel like it.”

“Well, you can come to my house,” he said, then remembered he didn’t have a house. “Better yet, I’ll come to yours. We can have dinner, no big deal. We’ll eat, and I’ll come back home.”

Paulina was silent, deathly silent. Myron could not believe how badly the conversation had skidded on takeoff. At last, she spoke. “I baked all this leftover sourdough. And now there’s too much bread for me to eat all by myself.”

She was like any thirsty woman, then. Hansel and Gretel’s witch, out there with all that food. She made him a dinner of Cornish hen with Moroccan spices, and then they ate bread, so much bread. The pox showed up just under her skin, like the result of a complicated scarification ritual. The way the burgundy dots outlined her face was stunning; he wanted to reach out and touch each one. Her house was full of ferns and small trees, like an arboretum, though his heart sank when he rubbed the leaves of her ficus. Women would forever, he thought, be reminding him of Ruth.

But after a week of communicating with Paulina, a week made more intense by her texts, which gummed in the emotional space between her long, sickly silences, he found that she wasn’t at all like the wife he was losing. All with Paulina was light and air, as though the years of life had hollowed rather than filled her, and again, when he imagined the dock giving way, he did not imagine his delicate new girlfriend swimming to shore, dipping her swallow’s neck and her chemically straightened hair underwater to stroke. He imagined her, rather, floating helplessly, her arms held high above her dry head, drifting all the way across the great expanse of Taylorsville Lake and into the mouth of the Salt River beyond.

In the car, he’d plugged in the comedy channel, and they spent fifteen minutes laughing at Jackie Fabulous before she spoke. “Hey,” she said as they sped down 265. “You remember the first week of freshman year? That first day? Would you believe you’re the first Black person I met at UK? I bet you don’t even remember where we were.”

“Honors Quad?”

She laughed. “Easy guess, since we both lived there. I mean specifically, do you remember where?”

Myron scanned his memories for Young Paulina, but could come up with only the foot-high stack of Bibles outside the door of her dormitory suite, her dry-erase board bisected with a southward-pointing arrow, the neat script above it: TAKE ONE FOR YOUR SOUL AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING. The entire stack had been stolen several times, as he recalled, and each time Paulina, undeterred, had written on her board THIEVES I AM PRAYING FOR YOU. Days later, each time, she’d stacked the Bibles anew.

“I’m sorry,” he said now. “I have a terrible memory. Ask my—”

“Wife?”

He was ruining things. He lifted his gaze from the median, its two continuous yellow danger lines spooling up the hill before them, and found the calm, blue, stabilizing sky above. “Ex-wife,” he said, recovering. “Soon-to-be. Yes, she’d tell you. I have a crappy memory.”

“Hmkay. I’ll tell you where. We were both in line at the ice cream social. I asked you what was your favorite flavor, and you couldn’t come up with an answer. I didn’t see you again for months.”

“Wow.”

“You got vanilla.”

“I did?”

“You don’t like vanilla?”

Myron chuckled. “No.”

“Well, then. I guess once upon a time, you were a man who took whatever the world gave you.”

She smiled then, filling the car with the warmth of their conjured youth, and Myron wondered if he’d overvalued, in women, Ruth’s kind of intensity. He saw it in Enix sometimes, the anxieties that Ruth had passed down. He saw them in Enix’s inability to ever just sit in a chair and relax, in the neuroses that seemed, even in infancy, to hover centimeters ahead of their worried gaze. Enix was a child pressed between lab slides, he and Ruth chemists hunched over a light, watching their specimen grow.

What Paulina had was the power to fill him with equanimity. She had the un-Ruth-like ability to make him feel, with her words, that the world would be fine. She had an old, halting German shepherd named Rinehart, who greeted him at the door when he rang the bell, and now, sitting behind her, he counted several wiry gray dog hairs caught in the weave of her shirt. He’d decided, on the spot, not to tell her he was allergic to dogs. She had such a smooth surface. He did not wish to crack it.

Myron’s Garmin directed him to make a left, and they eased up on the large, diamondheaded sign for Taylorsville Lake State Park. Paulina began to talk about her previous trips down, the egrets on the banks, the cattails tall as men. “Every trip is a different trip,” she said, “but it’s always transcendent.”

They parked near the long dock, where Myron walked past an overhanging office with the words BOAT RENTAL etched in green paint on its door. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, someone had handwritten on tape that crisscrossed the doorknob. Paulina walked before him, her blue slippers sprouting out of the legs of her black yoga pants, her backpack hanging from her left shoulder. It held two bags of trail mix and three sixteen-ounce bottles of water. Two caprese sandwiches, handmade by Paulina, and two Bramble Mules from Cardinal Spirits. Enough provisions to counterweight the thick, wet grief of Myron’s soul.

He liked Paulina. But he felt edged into this road trip, just as he’d felt shoved into contacting her in the first place. He felt outwardly propelled, first by Anthony, and now by Paulina herself. What if Myron might like to rediscover Myron for a few ten or twenty years, he imagined telling them both. What if Myron wanted to buy a new sports car, drive along Route 66, find the Texas State Fair, and fuck the tall, powerful girl manning the Ferris wheel.

“Shhh,” Paulina said now, though he hadn’t been talking. “You hear that cardinal?”

He nodded, though she was turned away from him. The state bird, and he’d never listened to it in all his life. In the quietude of the lake, his other senses were heightened: He saw what looked to be an otter, scampering on the far shore; he smelled the distant rot of lake fungus. “This is your cathedral,” he said.

“That it is.”

The thin isthmus of the dock did not allow him to stand anywhere but behind her, but he could hear her smiling as she said it. She was a smiler. For someone in her forties she had so much leftover goodness, so much outward optimism, and he wondered if this was directed by her confidence about the afterlife. Yet in a full week, she hadn’t once mentioned Jesus. She’d listened to Jackie Fabulous’s foul mouth and not so much as blinked. “Is this what you usually do on Sundays?” he asked.

“I’m not so religious anymore, if that’s what you’re asking. After a while, I reckoned, hell. I trusted God’s plan and God sent me Danny Todd. I started feeling like divinity isn’t mysterious ways so much as it’s random and accidental. And that interpretation don’t accord too well with Southern Baptist theology.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m fine,” she said. She swiveled her head around so she could wink at him. “God wanted to make a believer out of me, he might’ve sent me you.”

Asthmatic tears bathed Myron’s eyes. He got a glimpse of his own armpit, the pancake-sized circle of sweat that had bled through his shirt. He checked the time on his phone. “Wanna see my old house when we get back to Louisville?” he asked.

“The one that burned down?”

“Frame’s still there. They haven’t finished razing it. It’s a whole process.” He was sure she’d been to the lake countless times, with or without Danny Todd, with or without other men, men she’d never mention, men they’d never discuss. But he was also sure she’d never known a man who’d survived a fire. It was what he had to offer women now. Bare, blackened holly bushes. Drywall springing up from the ground like the set of a horror movie.

“Sure, why not?” she said. “I’ve never seen a ruined house.”

Though it turned out, after they’d finished their picnic, sobered up atop a lakeside slab, and made the long evening drive back to Myron’s old neighborhood on the outer edges of Louisville, there was little to see. At a gas station in Mount Eden, they’d switched seats. Myron told her he was tired, that the sunshine had worn him out. The truth embarrassed him: He was having a hard time seeing the road in the dimming evening. He determined to make an appointment with his eye doctor. He was heading, he knew, into a long sunset of fighting off his grandfather’s glaucoma.

When he got to his old neighborhood and found his lot parcel razed almost bare, he wanted to believe he’d misseen. He closed his eyes, as if to effect a software reboot, but when he opened them, all the nothing was still there. They’d knocked down his house, after all. “Gone,” he told Paulina, as she drove slowly past the lot. He asked her to make a U-turn in the middle of his old street, and again she lifted her foot from the accelerator so they could take in the slow-motion repeat. “Just gone,” he said again. “I can’t believe it.”

Though he could, and what he’d not said to Ruth, or to the fire marshal, or even to himself, was that it was his fault. He’d heard the click of the in-sink disposal when it stopped, heard its whir when it started again, sometimes minutes later. He’d let Ruth believe the cause of the fire was a mystery, an act of God, but he knew. It was his fault. He’d ignored the fault in his kitchen just as he’d ignored the fault in his marriage, and now both things were gone.

What came to him, looking at the razed land that had once been his house, was an actual memory of an actual day: the first time Annie had ridden a bike without his help. He remembered her copper hair set to shimmering in the springtime sun, blowing behind her like a windsock. Her adorable his-nose, bent wry in wit. That life, those memories, and all his remaining hope had been chucked into the rented dumpster that now abutted the curb beside his old driveway. The rear wall, the one that had divided the kitchen from the backyard where Ruth had refused ever to replant a garden, was the only wall left.

The kitchen door, astonishingly, still stood in the wall, with a bit of singed curtain left to flap in the evening wind. But whoever had jackhammered the foundation and bulldozed the rubble had wedged it closed with a high mound of gravel and dirt. It had been 5:00, Myron imagined—quitting time—and the man behind the wheel of the bulldozer had kicked off the unfinished job, leaving this one bit of their lives intact. In the late sunset he saw a furred, springy head burrowing into the top of the mound where the leftovers of his house met the wall. Paulina pulled onto his driveway, now a pier extending into high grass, and tuned up his high beams. The head stopped moving, looked up and stared at them both. It was a raccoon. The only mammal life at 832 Talbot Way was now a fucking raccoon.

“I’ll be damned,” he said to Paulina. “I can’t believe nobody called me.” It was Sunday: The house had been down two days. It had been obvious from the night of the fire, even, that it was a wash, but he was just now registering the loss. He felt like a small child, full of wonder and anger and fear all at the same time.

Paulina reached for his arm. He was staring at the serrated edges of concrete, the abbreviation of his old wall, but her hand was soft, so soft.

“I’m sorry—I just—” he started, but there was nothing he just. Not one thing.

“It’s perfectly okay,” she said, staring with him at the house’s remains. “Perfectly understandable. If you need a moment.”

He felt her hand, its animal softness as she ran it slowly back and forth across his forearm. They’d go rowing another day, he hoped. His hip wouldn’t ache. He’d be able to see some surreally long distance from their boat; he’d spot badgers, track whippoorwills. “I’m fine,” he said. “What’s past is past. My house is done, but here’s where it was anyway. I lived everything, right here in this spot.”

She backed out of the driveway, and Myron reset his Garmin as she drove down his old street. It set a course for her house, commanding her to turn, switch lanes, merge. Stevie Wonder sang of his part-time lover, but Myron didn’t hear a word.

“Hey, I still have a house,” she said, when they arrived at her address and the Garmin told them it had finished. She fixed a stray ply of her hair. Fish swam in his stomach. “Won’t you come in?” she asked.

The darkness of her front porch caused him a basal level of fear that was only partially about her dog, and he stood closely behind her as she fumbled through her keys to find the right one. He stood so close that he could see, despite the darkness, the bright red pattern of chevrons on her hairpins. The chopsticks hadn’t moved, in all those hours; for the most part the hair hadn’t either. Without asking, he touched the soft pile of it, spreading his hand so that he could feel the top of her ears. “You’re lovely, you know that?” he said. “You’ve always been.” He didn’t feel her ears rise in the stretch of smiling, but he felt her take a deep breath before she continued sawing the key in the lock.

She didn’t refasten the door from the other side when they entered, nor did she ask what he might want to drink. She didn’t switch on any lights. When her dog, Sammy, tapped himself across the kitchen tile, she opened the patio door and let him into her backyard, much to Myron’s relief. She led Myron to the middle of her living room and turned into him, making a collision, then allowed him to undress her in what small light the streetlamp allowed. He carefully unbuttoned her denim shirt and slid it down her shoulders to the floor; he slid her camisole over her head, loosened each of her ankles as she stepped out of the opposing pant leg. When he stood back up he slid his hands behind her neck to undo the clasp of her necklace; he removed the silver owl pendant she now had hanging where once, he remembered, she’d worn a straightforward gold cross, a white porcelain Jesus nailed to its face.

She led him to her sofa, where they made love, and there was none of the sport that he remembered having played with the women he’d been with before Ruth; none of the prince’s reckoning he’d had to shoot with Ruth herself. No game. No manipulation. No outscoring. No history and no future. No neurosis and no inhibition. No pretense; no motive; no woman claiming, in her fingers and toes, sparks of electricity that he never, ever felt. He and Paulina made love, briefly, like two middle-aged people who’d long been stripped of intent.

TWELVE

Myron

Myron was trying to decide whether homelessness bloomed seasonally, or whether he hadn’t previously noticed it because the suburbs had rendered him sensorily blind, or whether the dozen or so people sitting in a traffic jam of grocery carts on his new street weren’t some symptom of having made America great again. He’d noticed a couple of them individually, once or twice since he moved in, walking as if they weren’t quite awake, pushing their wire carts down the street as if they’d gone on a shopping run for stuffed bags and blankets. Now, come this first hot Saturday of the year. Myron found a complete encampment. They were cooking out, even, in 70 percent humidity, with a weekend-size grill connected via hose to a small propane tank.

He’d walked past on his way to the Aspen’s gated dumpster enclosure and nodded hello. On the return trip, free and clear of his garbage, he breathed in the smell of their cooking: beef with a hint of onions. He admired their enterprise. He couldn’t imagine where they’d gotten a Weekender, or how they’d managed to haul it to his street corner. As he followed the sidewalk and passed through the knot of them, he collected the thick, meaty smoke in his hair, on his clothes. The aroma of burning flesh reminded him of a vacation he and Ruth had taken in Mexico City; the remembrance was a miracle. When he got to his own entryway he remained outside his door, standing, inhaling deeply of something he no longer had.

A cubist white van pulled up to the corner and Thomas, Myron’s new mailman, hopped out of its door. Thomas wore shorts with a blue ribbon down his thigh and blue plastic gloves that didn’t quite match his uniform. He’d confided in Myron that he was a two-time pancreatic cancer survivor, and as he slung his gray mailbag across his body, Myron worried for the way its bulk sat so snugly in his groin.

“Got a certified for you,” Thomas said. Summer’s sudden preview had brought sweat to condense on his broad forehead. Under the man’s many freckles, his cheeks had reddened from exposure. Still, he wore his heavy postal-issue jacket.

Myron had found himself involved in conversation with Thomas the very first day he’d moved into the Aspen with no furniture and no suitcases and no family, all the nothing he was now tasked with diffusing through a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment. He’d signed his lease in the Aspen’s office that first day of his new life and driven over to his new covered parking space, aware that the things he’d resisted transferring from his car the afternoon preceding the fire (two cans of Sprite, a gym bag full of sweaty socks, a stack of copies from his tax accountant) were now all he owned.

He’d gotten out of his car that day holding the handle of his gym bag painfully between his clenched teeth, the thirty-seven pages of his 2022 tax return splayed between both hands. Thomas, sorting mail into the row of metal boxes that he’d magically opened with one of the decades of keys on his chain, had pointed to the Bats cap Myron had bought at a convenience store. “What do you think of this year’s roster?” he asked.

Myron didn’t follow minor league baseball, but he was so grateful for this connection of normal conversation, he almost cried. For two days, Myron had worked from home while fielding calls from insurance adjusters and worried neighbors; Thomas’s arrival with the mail had been, each of those days, a signal for him to get out, away from his computer spreadsheets and claim PDFs; the tabulations and projections of the life he’d lost; that, and all the viable, credible numbers pointing to the sheer impossibility of its replacement. The arrival of Thomas’s mail truck became a break in his day that signaled the need to replenish and renew: Where before, he’d never noticed the way letters arrived, he now became a person who eagerly met his mail.

There’d come the second day of his residence at the Aspen, when Myron cataloged the value of his vinyl record collection, pushed back from the table, and wept. The weeping was overdue, Myron knew, and knowing that he’d kept himself from it in the days since the fire made him push harder with his tears; he pressed his eyes shut so he could feel them brim over. But when he heard the postal van grind to a halt in front of his building, he went to the kitchen sink and rinsed his face clean so he could meet Thomas. It would be a disappointment, when his week of working virtually was over, to find his watch reading 4:15 and know that the mail delivery was going on without him.

Thomas reached into the bag now and found a banded batch of letters.

“That can’t be all mine,” said Myron.

“No such luck. It’s for your whole building.” Thomas bent the letters back to find Myron’s. He took out two small, innocent commercial solicitations and a Bass Pro catalog, then found the last item. The certified letter with its official green patch.

“Hold it up for me before I sign it.”

“Lawyer,” Thomas said, feigning disgust.

“Oh, even if I wasn’t. My mama didn’t raise no fool.”

Thomas held the envelope a few inches from Myron’s face. “You in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

“Yeah. I knocked up this girl. Problem is, I married her first.”

“That’s the worst.”

The envelope’s return address read Tull, Ewart and Moehlmann, a combination of names that filled Myron’s throat with bile. “Excuse me,” he told Thomas, “but I need to go open this thing. See what she’s trying to take me for this week.”

“Heh. I feel you. Deep down. They’re all the same woman.”

Myron’s building housed only eight apartments, units 17 through 24, and by the time Myron made it up the stairs, Thomas had finished filling all eight slots and was now locking the row of them back, turning his tiny key in the master cylinder.

“Have a good evening,” Myron yelled down at him from the landing, as Thomas crossed outside through the entry door.

Thomas put his arm back through the doorway for a final wave. Through the foyer’s upstairs window, Myron watched him walk down the sidewalk to his van. He could perceive the smallest variation in his walk, a limp he’d collected from life. Thomas leaned his left foot unevenly into the sidewalk, and Myron felt the air in his own middle-aged lungs soften.

Ruth wasn’t taking him anew for anything: The letter, when he tore it open at his vinyl-topped card table, advised him of a final court date. No further machinations or bullshit; Ruth agreed to the terms, which meant she agreed with herself that they should no longer be married. She agreed that he was no longer her rock, or even her flat, sanded pebble. She agreed that there was no niche in herself that needed or even wanted him wedged in it. Rationally, Myron had known that she would never change her mind, but now he found his chances of having her back dissipating, fading into the air like smoke. In twenty-eight days. The letter told him, provided the courts had reopened, he’d walk into the Jefferson County Judicial Center and agree to divorce his wife. His Ruth.

His beautiful, complicated Ruth, who’d always stood out in crowds because of her carroty afro. In four years of college, he’d seen her in textbook lines and across crowded basketball arenas and felt nothing. There was a semester he’d crossed paths with her three times a week, on his way to his Monday Wednesday Friday lower division literature course; she’d been walking, always, with her blind friend Edison. Sophomore year, Myron found her at a snow-covered bus shelter, for once sans Edison, wearing a stark white wool overcoat, against which her auburn curls fell as if fringe. Against the coat, her creamy skin cast itself darkly: He felt that he could, if he had a few hours, count each one of her freckles.

He nodded politely. His heart raced. “How about all this snow?” It was a version of an old man’s question about the weather. He was a clown.

She turned to him, and he did—he started counting them, all the stars of her face. He got to eight before she spoke. “When you stand across from that field of snow in all this sunshine,” she said, “do you wish to turn away?”

He looked from the twelfth freckle to the vacant lot she referenced, the one directly across from them, whose snow the sun was dimpling with shadows. “It’s so bright,” he said. “I’ll shield my eyes.”

“Well,” she said, planting half a smile on her face. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, he counted. “I’ll stand here next to you,” she said, “and tell you what I’m seeing as I go blind.”

By the end of the semester it wasn’t Edison who walked with his cane but Ruth; she held the aluminum pole aloft, casually, as Edison held her elbow in the way of a lover. Still, Myron hadn’t spent even one of his brain cells speculating. He’d been mired down in Keisha Temple, his first serious girlfriend; elitist, social-climbing Keisha Temple whose father was a cardiothoracic surgeon in Louisville.

Keisha took riding lessons on Saturdays and had grown up in Jack and Jill and flew to Atlanta eight times a year to renew her hair weave, and she wore an actual nightgown when they went to bed together. It was all, literally, they did—go to bed—for he was allowed to touch every inch of the nightgown. But not that much of Keisha. When she came to La Grange to meet his parents, she walked through the living room doorway straight into the kitchen and raised her eyebrows. “Cute little house!” she said to his mother.

“This will never work,” his mother whispered to him in the kitchen, as they cut onions together while Keisha sat in the living room, chattering to Myron’s father about her summer in Turin. “And if it does? I’ll beat you senseless.”

Still, Myron allowed Keisha to dangle her virginity in front of him for three years, from the second semester of their freshman year to the summer before they were seniors. They broke up occasionally and got back together, and though Myron got plenty of trim during those offseasons, he found it electrifying each time, the question of whether a short break might have made her reconsider the answer of the clinging nightgown.

Keisha was still a virgin when, after senior year, they split for good. She went off to the University of Chicago for a master’s in art history, writing Myron one final goodbye letter soaked through with happy condescension. Water rises to its own level, she’d typed, unironically. May you find your own water.

He’d met Ruth again their first year of law school, when they were both working in the legal aid clinic. Ruth had straightened her hair but he would have recognized her anywhere: the freckles, so elegantly sprinkled on the apples of her cheeks; the flounder-strength side-eye she tended to give when classmates spoke nonsense; the acid-washed jean jacket she’d worn all through college, probably since high school. He bet she smoked. He bet she had the ability to blow not just smoke rings but smoke castles. She was his opposite, he sensed, and like a magnet, he was attracted to her negative pole.

There in the legal aid office she was filling out a form on a manual typewriter, stopping occasionally to turn the delicate gold bracelet that surrounded the cuff of her jacket. Each time she got to the end of a line and made the carriage ping, Myron felt he’d hit some unnameable jackpot. “Do you drink?” he asked her.

“Sure I do,” she said. She kept her eyes on her typing. In profile she was mysterious yet perfect, like an Egyptian hieroglyph.

She was raw, he found out over beer and peanuts at Garvey’s; she was a disaster. She didn’t care about Bill Clinton, she told him; she wasn’t even registered to vote. She was a Marxist. She’d been on academic probation for three of her eight semesters at UK. “It was my LSAT scores, that’s how I got in this place,” she said, massaging the salt off a peanut she’d later, drunkenly, place back in the bowl. She hated injustice, which made her hate law school. She hated pretense and fakery and their Con Law professor’s bow tie. She remembered Keisha Temple, she confessed. And she hated girls like Keisha Temple.

She dropped out of their first year of law school to go work in a stationer, and because he understood that she would just as soon erase herself from his life as not, he asked her, come summer, to marry him. “Sure, but I don’t have any living family,” she said, “so let’s do city hall. Save that money for our honeymoon. I want to go back to Paris.”

And so they traveled across the Atlantic, far from their known lives, to France, where she claimed that once upon a time, she’d been transformed. “But I was in high school then,” she said as they waited in baggage claim. She wrapped him from behind in an embrace. “So whatever’s romantic about Paris is still delicately unknown to moi.”

They stayed one week, and on their second-to-last day, she flipped through their Guide Michelin and asked if they could go to the Pont des Arts. “When I saw it back then, I knew nothing of love,” she said. Even her syntax had changed, he noted, after only four days in Paris. Keisha Temple would be speaking the same sentences, in exactly the same way, for the rest of her life.

Ruth told him about the first time she’d gone, how lovers would go to the Pont with locks that they’d hook around the bridge’s interwoven railings before tossing the little keys in the river that flowed, murkily, beneath it. She found a hardware store near their little hotel in the 10th arrondissement and tasked Myron with going in to buy a padlock. She’d read in the guide that some couples even had their locks engraved, but there she and Myron were, lacking in French-language skills, with only one night left in Paris.

“You know it’s in the first, right? It’s going to suck up most of our evening just getting there and back.”

“You only get married once,” she said. “You only go on one honeymoon. Maybe. I guess.”

And so the following afternoon they taxied to the bridge, locked their marriage forever on its span, and kissed, clumsily, as Myron blindly threw the key out into the sunset reflected off the Seine.

“Well,” he said, when finally he pulled his lips away from hers. “There it goes.” But they hadn’t seen the key drop or sink. It was so tiny they hadn’t even heard it break the water.

And the kiss itself had run false. Myron wondered if Ruth felt the same. It wouldn’t matter to him until much later that they hadn’t engraved their names on the lock, though in the weeks after Ruth finally asked him for a divorce, he’d thought of the day again and again, as some sort of indicator. Their love had been nameless, nonspecific. It could have been anyone’s love, and that’s why it didn’t last.

Afterward, they’d had tea in a nearby shop where, for eight euros, they also got a plate of powdered sugar cookies, and then they’d walked down the Canal Saint-Martin, passing the cafés and nightclubs all around them, until they reached an emptier, more industrial quarter of warehouses and lofts; Ruth began whistling a tune but stopped a few measures in. She wasn’t a great whistler, and Myron couldn’t place it. The street, as they walked its length, emptied of pedestrians, yet they kept walking. Myron thought on the one hand how nice it was that they could find comfort even in each other’s silences, but then how awful, that it meant Ruth was thinking things private enough not to share aloud.

There was, too, the way Ruth had started whistling again, tunelessly, swiveling her head to look at every dark entrance to every alley. The way she’d been more nervous in Paris than he’d ever seen her, the way she hadn’t known to keep up with her customs forms when they landed at Orly, the telltale wonder she’d arrested on her face when they arrived at the Eiffel Tower. “Just like I remember it,” she’d said, but her speech had the flowing rapidity of a lie. The first night, as she slept, he’d flipped through her passport and found nothing save the stamp from Orly. It could have been a renewal, of course, but he doubted that. Ruth hadn’t been to France. It was a lie she told to get in league with Keisha Temple.

At last a taxi slowed, and Ruth hailed it. “So,” Myron asked her, fastening the heavy door, “what’s the agenda for the last day?” He went on to etch it himself in the blank Paris landscape, their flight from Orly and their layover in Amsterdam, their dinner and their breakfast on the plane over the Atlantic. Ruth offered only her deep breaths. Her silence in the empty street had been fear.

He watched her repack her suitcase one last time, transferring her Parisian souvenirs from her purse to the long side pocket of her suitcase. She fell asleep instantly, without brushing her teeth. He extinguished the light and lay beside her, but he watched the ceiling, thinking about her false words.

For a couple of years after, he’d search the eyes of couples he found sitting in boutique coffeehouses or doctors’ waiting rooms. He dreamlessly eavesdropped on conversations between people with wedding rings, slowing his walks past benches in malls in order to watch wives pass froyo cones to their husbands. Then came Baby Annie, then Toddler Annie, and then came the time when both he and Ruth carried the sour residues of their shared hostilities, and he’d excuse himself to the bathroom during Saturday Story Hour just so he could find a square of couches and sit, pressing the cool palms of his hands to his hot eyes.

In all those years, he turned up nothing that would explain what other people chose to call love, no answer to the question of why anyone at all ever got married, why humans had chosen to transform nebulous human emotion into formed legal vehicle. He had a notarized document. Affixed with the seal of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Grocery lists that Ruth would put behind refrigerator magnets. Permission slips from school with spaces for Parent I and Parent II. This elusive thing called love, he supposed, could be reduced to the trappings of American capitalism.

There lived wealthy college students at the Aspen, Chinese and South Korean undergraduates who tooled around in vintage Ferraris and Porsches that the leasing manager told Myron they tended to pay cash for as soon as they arrived at the airport. Now, at six o’clock on a Tuesday night, as he contemplated the idea that he and Ruth, in twenty-eight days, would be free of all that bound them, Myron heard one of the students crying out. “Where is my kay-ey?” he yelled drunkenly, at no one, all the cool of having flown over from a healthier economy drained completely from his voice.

Myron rarely heard the students speak English—they seemed to socialize only with other international students who tooled over and parked their own Ferraris in the wrong covered parking spaces—but here this young man was, sitting on the hood of his newly washed Maserati, calling out for his housekey. Someone had dropped him off in front of the Aspen and just left him there. The leasing office closed at five. The young man tried both doors of his car, but they were locked. “Where is my kay-ey?” he yelled again, before crumpling into a sobbing heap on the hood of his car. Myron wondered if he should go explain about American locksmiths.

PART TWO

THE DISTANT PAST

THIRTEEN

Ruth

The butterflies came out of nowhere. They fluttered across the interstate in one lemon-yellow shoal, flying from one crop to another, smearing across Ruth’s windshield, dying at the average speed of seventy miles an hour. In death, the ones already hit ahead of her floated to the road like party trim. She drove through, and by the time she discovered they weren’t an isolated patch but a mile-long school of suicidal butterflies, it was too late to slow down or stop. They felt like a metaphor for something: She just didn’t know what. Her newly freed life. Or the fact that there was no way she was going back to work on Monday. Or better yet, the truth. That she’d absconded to nowhere with Myron’s only child, and they’d already crossed two state lines, yet there was no pin on the map in her head. She was driving west, toward the land that had killed her family, yet the choice of direction felt random, autopiloted by some lizard part of her brain. She was just driving, charging her car battery every two hundred miles so she could drive farther, intending neither end point nor return trip. Motoring. Cruising. Plowing through butterflies.

She was glad Enix wasn’t awake to contend with the cognitive dissonance of death gone this beautiful, these insects floating to the hot asphalt in their big yellow blizzard of mortality. At the extreme end of western Kentucky, a few miles past Paducah, talk between them had pickled. Ruth had seen the edge of a tan patch just under Enix’s shirt sleeve, leaned herself in for a look and yelled, “What is that?” She swerved far enough over the dotted lane marker that the driver of a Chevy Suburban lay on his horn; she let him pass.

“It’s a nicotine patch,” Enix said. She flipped down her sun visor. “Crista sold me a box after she turned me in for vaping.”

What could Ruth have said, when the patch at least meant the child was no longer smoking? She tuned up a dramatic sniffling that she hoped would make Enix feel guilty notwithstanding. When Enix commenced a full-on cry, Ruth did too. She and Enix bawled wordlessly, like cows, and Ruth found that it felt fine actually, in the change of outdoor environment and pollen spores, to bathe her eyes in tears. Enix rolled the passenger seat back to a full 180 degrees and eventually buckled themselves into sleep, and now their mouth hung open slightly, as if they were ready to deliver a speech. The quality of a sleeping face, Ruth noted, changed little from infancy: Enix’s still looked as though it had been gently and carefully peeled. The concept of love, Ruth had read somewhere, lodged in a tegmental area somewhere near the base of the brain. Love lived so near hunger and thirst, it could be explained away as a chemical addiction. Yet there Ruth was, looking at Enix’s face, thinking how she would so easily throw herself in front of an oncoming train for this child, how she would willingly never eat or drink again if it meant that Enix survived a famine. In the final analysis, love made no chemical sense.

Though as an addiction, it didn’t universally hold. Ruth’s father had died right there on the pavement at her feet; she’d watched his body the entire time and never seen his soul leave it, never felt the un-cleaving. In her peripheral vision she saw Enix stir, retrieving their head from the uncomfortable angle to which it had fallen. Enix was almost as old as Ruth had been when her father was killed, she realized. She imagined Enix’s suddenly losing Myron, the way they would fall to the ground and wail, as she herself had been unable. The way Enix’s hair might thin out and fall straight, the sad notes Ruth might discover if she pried open their little red journal, Enix’s stingy, cramped hand recording love so profoundly lost. It was something Ruth had never allowed herself to do, writing about her father. Not a word, after he died.

And she’d spoken to the detective who’d called that Friday with Ralph O’Brien’s suicide note and hadn’t even remembered to ask whether her sister was living or dead, whether the detective had talked to Wendy, how she was doing and what happiness she might have held in her speaking voice. Then again, wasn’t she now driving west to look after her? Or was it just curiosity? she wondered. But wasn’t love just that? Curiosity about another person? She had no answers. The biggest answer was that she didn’t love Myron, and that it was possible she never had. She’d needed an emotional shell trick, and Myron had stood in. It was possible she was altogether incapable of love. It was possible she wasn’t a good enough person, or a person with enough imagination. It was possible the base of her brain didn’t work.

But then there was sleeping Enix. All of Ruth’s heart, right there in their face. If not love, then what?

“Where are we going really?” they’d asked Ruth just before they fell asleep. They’d emphasized the word really, as did Ruth, when she answered that she really didn’t know. Ruth didn’t know, either, what was in Enix’s suitcase, whether the dog tags and army jackets might have been stuffed somewhere within, but Enix had awakened that morning at the Marriott and slipped into a lime-green dress, signaling another repaneling of gender. “How long really,” Enix said now, probing further, “will we be gone?”

“Don’t you want to see the Wild West? Don’t you wanna hang out with your mom?”

“Not really,” they said. Turning thirteen had made them frightfully, painfully honest. In a Macy’s dressing room on Valentine’s Day, they’d told Ruth that the outfit Ruth was so pleased with, the fashion-forward dress with vertical slotting on its flounce, made her look like a lampshade. Ruth had left the dressing room to hang it on the discard rack, where it could commiserate with all the other unwanted clothes. But she’d wondered what had happened to her quietly attached baby, who would have reached out for the slots in the dress with wide-eyed wonder. “The West,” Enix said now, with venom. “I mean, aren’t there just a bunch of men with star studs on their boots?”

“Well, there are. But there are other people there too. And no worries—we’ll be back Monday night.” Ruth already knew this to be a lie. When would they be back? Ruth hoped never.

The car was telling her it needed a charge, its little battery bar bitten down to a blip, the number of surviving miles now down to a dangerous thirty-eight. She’d been so sunk in her own wildness she hadn’t noticed, and now she typed in a random destination: Phoenix. Her great luck: The car offered a supercharger station at a Target eighteen miles west.

She lined her car up to the space and was backing slowly toward the pump when she noticed him—the man in the next slot, sitting in his car, flicking a lighter under a spoon. His Tesla shone a metallic blue that almost shimmied, as if painted with seawater. He was lean and blond, with an expensive haircut, and he lined his eyes up with hers, trying to hold them. Reluctantly, she looked at the car’s screen as she inched back slowly, to avoid hitting the pump. By the time she looked back at him, he’d removed a glass pipe and lodged it in his mouth.

Two plates of window glass separated them, and she wondered if she should nudge Enix awake, let them witness this version of the Wild West, the Smoking Man zoo exhibit, visible from the relative safety of their car. Let sleeping babies sleep, Myron had always said to her, and so she now did. It may have been, in any case, that she was the only one in need of adventure. She’d hidden from sadness by mooring herself to a series of tame lies, and it may have been that what hadn’t killed her had made her awfully boring.

The man continued to watch her own darting eyes as he went deep on his inhale. Ruth counted one, two, three, four, then blinked. From his place in relative shade he looked from her to Enix, the pupils of his eyes still frontlit by his car’s dash panel. He hunched his shoulders, exhaled. His window filled with smoke, and she could no longer see his face.

She didn’t dare get out of the car, and she didn’t dare stay in. She started her engine, which was now at twenty-three miles of battery. She headed back across the Target lot, hooked a left onto the main road. Again, she punched in Phoenix. Scrolled down to the next charging station, which stood twenty-nine miles away. She wouldn’t make it then. She pulled into a gas station alongside a regular pump, her dying electric car turned grotesque conservative joke. She propped the door ajar and closed it, heard the engine lose its hum. She closed her drying eyes and listened to Enix snoring, a sound like a jacket being zipped. Her scalp felt tight in her ponytail, though she’d been wearing it for at least a hundred and fifty miles; she released it, fixing the rubber band around her wrist. Her hair fell hot against her cheeks and she shook it until it felt like her hair again, rather than something recently baked.

She entered the store and wandered toward the rear cooler, where she found herself a bottled tea. Caffeine, she thought, would keep her thinking. At the counter, a woman stood holding a diapered but otherwise naked baby on one hip. Next to her stood a shoeless little girl, aged three or four, whirling back and forth to watch the current of air coming from a box fan afront the counter. The baby twirled the woman’s hair around and around its finger, twisting until Ruth thought either thing would break—the hair, or the mother.

The clerk’s name tag read “Clark.” Clark leaned over the counter, grabbed the baby’s tiny wrist, said, “You leave your mama alone.” No one laughed. It hadn’t been a joke. The baby looked to its sister, who dropped her dress; the dress parachuted back to her legs. The sister passed a hatchet-chopping motion over her own face, at which point the baby unwound its fist, setting the hair free.

The power of the unsaid, Ruth saw. The shared telepathy between those who’d once lived in the same womb, even in different years. Wendy had two boys now, Ruth knew from her letters, but neither woman had known her sister as a mother. Ruth hadn’t met her nephews, and couldn’t know whether Wendy had grafted onto them her boldness, or whether they continued their mother’s boxing match against the world. Neither Ruth nor Wendy had ever babysat little nieces or nephews, or held each other’s vomiting children at a beach. She’d be there now, though, when Wendy most needed her, at this onset of illness. They could begin, together, the long mortal slide.

Ruth paid for her tea, then went back out into the humidity. A station wagon wheeled by, one or more of its axles whirring, a sonorous death trap. She got back in her own car and checked her phone: She’d killed ten minutes. She had no idea how long it took to freebase cocaine, no idea, after that, how much charge this man and his oceanically detailed car might have needed. But she decided on this gamble: that the car might be gone.

It was.

She plugged the pump into her own car’s port and hurried to get back inside, checking her fellow chargers all around her. Three spaces right, a woman slept in her driver’s seat; to Ruth’s left, in the next space, a teenager flipped through a magazine. Ruth typed Rosalind, CA into her navigation bar, and the car told her where, in the next two hundred miles, it should be charged. She made a silent deal with it that going forward, she’d mind its warnings. She could almost feel the car thanking her. She patted her dash in assent and sank into the headrest while the engine took life.

The late afternoon sun was such that once she was back on the interstate, she had to close the car’s sunshade: The open road, this far west, was all about avoiding sunlight. The highway in front of Ruth sprang its mirages, robbing time of its properties. As the landscape changed on either side of her, from stately firs to loblolly pines, from the lush green of the Bluegrass State to the dead brown of Arkansas, Ruth found herself forgetting, completely, where she’d been these last twenty years. She’d so carefully built a life in Kentucky, but she’d even more carefully constructed the fable of the territory she’d lived before. Only Clarisse knew that there was no Grandpa Bailey’s farm in Knob Lick and not even a Grandpa Bailey, no dad who’d been a janitor at Barren River Community College, no mom trampled to death in the Hollywood Supper Club. And only rarely did Ruth remember, as she was remembering now, the thing about lies: We told them to be free, but they constrained us more than anything that was real.

Though so many people, Ruth found, cared about neither the truth nor the fable. Even Myron, his face so initially broad and open with lust, showed little interest in where she’d come from or what she’d already lived before the glancing miracle of their first conversation. The White people in her social circles didn’t much care; they simply looked at her and made all the usual assumptions. Unlike the other Black students all around her, she’d ever so happily allowed them.

When she first arrived as a freshman at the University of Kentucky, she’d sat down one night and written herself a biography that would satisfy the curious few; over the course of a week, she recited this tale before a mirror, then added to and embellished it. At the end of the week, she bought a package of brand-new colored pencils and drew an elaborate, many-branched family tree, which she taped to the inside of her suitcase. Alone in the evenings, she studied it, poring over her manufactured relations for another few days before she ripped both the tree and the biography into tiny pieces of paper that she flushed down the toilet in Donovan Hall’s dark, haunted basement.

All of it, here on the open road, she regretted. But as she watched Enix’s hand jerk twice in sleep, she resisted the urge to open this dam of honesty. How to tell your kid you’d lied to them since the moment they were born? The enormity of it was like the sky before her, too big to do anything but marvel at.

A little blue Corolla dragged along in front of them now on I-80, and Ruth made assessments. She felt like she’d been driving for weeks, but her car told her she was but eight hours from whatever “home” had been. She could still turn around and go back, tell more lies: Tell Enix she felt sick to her stomach or she’d forgotten a dinner date with Clarisse—she was terrific at lying now, she deserved some sort of Oscar for it really—or she could keep driving.

She and Myron still had a healthy joint bank account. Out of a sense of etiquette and propriety, she hadn’t touched it since she filed, but with Enix as hostage, she could do what she wanted; there was no way Myron would cut her off. She was free as a bird, then. For quite some time, though Monday morning would roll around in less than twelve hours. She needed to call in, formally resign, apologize. But in the meantime, there was this burning asphalt, the white blip of the median disappearing hypnotically down the length of her side of the car. Static played as Ruth dialed the radio between Country and Christian. She stopped on “Body Like a Back Road,” drove past a time-hollowed mountain that looked like a giant table. “Enix, look,” she whispered; Enix woke. Ruth listened to her kid’s hiss of wonder, and she forgave herself.

By the time Clarisse called they were nearing Henryetta, and the turnoff for US Route 75 north to Tulsa, a place Ruth thought they might profitably spend the night. Cars had worn sparse on the road and Ruth had let herself hog both lanes of highway, zipping over the median and back to keep herself awake. Now, a bottleneck of traffic was slowing down for exit 240, pouring a long trail of brake lights that stamped on and off again against the mythic sky, a giant switchboard of congestion.

The jam telegraphed some sort of trouble from the future: road construction, perhaps, or a terrible accident. But after all, there was nowhere they had to be, and so the telephone’s rattle in the cupholder sounded like a sign from God. They’d take the exit so she could join in the clogged traffic and talk, and she’d finally have some adult conversation after so long riding beside a sleeping teen. They’d find a hotel in Tulsa and spend the night. She’d sit on bleached sheets in a king-sized bed with Enix, watching CNN’s news from Kyiv. She would come clean with Enix about her childhood. She might look up Bob Bradley there in Tulsa and ask if he wanted to picnic. Optimistically, probing these thoughts of cleansing and renewal, she fumbled for the phone and passed it to Enix’s lap.

Enix turned to her and frowned. Ruth heard the subtle vibration of the phone against her kid’s thigh. They were refusing the handoff.

“What?” Ruth said. “I’m driving.”

“Oh. Like you’ve never answered a phone while driving before.”

“This is highway driving. It’s different. For Christ’s sake. I’m trying to be your fucking role model.”

“Oh,” Enix said. “When did that start?” Ruth heard the whine reverberating through their teenage-sized cavities. Enix’s skin blazed under their freckles, out of either anger or windowburn, Ruth couldn’t tell.

“Enough. Who is it?”

Enix looked down to their lap, to the face of the ringing phone. “Clarisse.”

“Well, then, answer, before she goes away!”

“Or kills herself!” Enix frowned again at Ruth and the phone stopped ringing, mid-vibration.

“What. Are you hungry? Do you want dinner now? Are you punishing me because you’re hungry?”

Enix turned their head so firmly toward the windshield that their curls shook.

“The last good exit for food was Checotah, but you were asleep. What was I supposed to do? If I woke you up, you’d be even more pissed.”

Enix sank their face into their hands and began to cry in soft chirps, and the phone revved back into buzzing. Ruth tried to focus on the road ahead, but in her peripheral vision she saw Enix’s shoulders quake. The open road with its promise of freedom had taken this sudden turn, into Sturm und Drang. “Could you just do your old mom a favor and answer that?” Ruth said. “You can eat like a queen once we get to Tulsa. I promise. The first good exit.”

Enix sat up, wiped their eyes with the sleeve of their T-shirt. They took a gobble of air and touched the phone’s talk screen. “Hello?” they said.

The caller seemed to respond, at length, to their greeting, but all sound was drowned in the gasp of air brakes coming from the tractor trailer that was streaming along beside them. Ruth had driven through the night, and she took in the shame of her own sourness now at the same time she took delight in Enix’s. Her kid’s funk was relatively innocent, the aura of a child who hadn’t yet mastered the spacing of antiperspirant. It was a hopeful, wondrous smell of Enix’s that filled the car, the smell of Ruth having lifted her out of the humdrum void.

“Oh God, Clarisse,” Ruth heard Enix say, furiously. “This isn’t Ruth, it’s Enix. You didn’t even ask. And you didn’t ask how we are doing, but I’m going to tell you. My mom brought me on this crazy trip I didn’t ask to go on, and now we’re in the middle of nowhere, and we smell bad, and I’m hungry, and I’m supposed to be at least e-learning, but there’s no way to get to Wi-Fi. And my mom doesn’t care about any of that, but here. Let me hand you over.” Enix pushed the phone straight into the flesh of Ruth’s upper arm.

Ruth pried the phone from where Enix was pressing it. It had left a print, a large, squat impression of a phone screen. Enix themselves had sensitive skin. They’d known where to inflict a measure of damage. “Hello?” Ruth said.

“Rooth.”

“It’s me. You okay?”

“Yup. On account of I fucked Kit. Doing fine now.”

“You what?”

As Clarisse gushed excitedly into the phone, offering Ruth layers of explicit detail, Enix reached over again. This time, they positioned their thumb and index finger together against Ruth’s arm and pinched. Ruth screamed into the phone. Clarisse screamed back.

“I can hear her,” Enix said, through gritted teeth. “I can hear everything she’s saying. She’s crazy and she’s a slut.”

Ruth removed her phone from her mouth and pressed it into her own bosom. “Put your headphones on,” she said.

“My battery ran out in Tennessee. Or don’t you even remember?”

“Use mine. Skip the explicit tracks.”

“Right. I’m sure I’ll do that.”

Enix took Ruth’s iPod out of the car’s glove compartment and slid the headphones across their heat-frizzed hair. “Mom,” they said. “Do you know you’re sleepwalking?”

“What? I’m driving.”

“No, I mean at night. In your apartment. You sleepwalk, did you know that? Are you even paying attention to yourself?”

Clarisse’s voice came out of Ruth’s phone squawky and high-pitched, the voice of a bird in a cartoon. “Hey, where are you?” she asked. “Are you really in Oklahoma?”

“Almost at Tulsa.”

Clarisse gave a low whistle. “Will you see Bob?” she asked.

Ruth chuckled. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

On a large black road screen, a series of dots moved themselves into an arrow, designating the closure of the left lane, and a car with Nevada plates wove itself in front of Ruth’s. The door of its hatchback was riddled with what appeared to be bullet holes—someone out there was having an even sketchier life than she was. She herself no longer had a future, but she still had a past. She had two. The one more recent, and the other, the truer one, more distant. The farther she got from Louisville, the more that distant past solidified, crystallized into something she could access.

Like Bob.

No one but Clarisse would have connected Tulsa to Bob Bradley, but Clarisse had caped so hard for Ruth to fuck Bob in the first place. He was dangerous, they’d known it from the beginning: He was the only boy in their high school class who’d actually been in jail. He’d spent an entire night there, even, for vandalizing a mailbox in the town’s prissiest neighborhood. Bob always wore mud-caked boots and flannel shirts in dark colors. The Monday after he’d gotten out of jail, he leaned against his new black pickup, tapped the side of its long bed with the silver-mounted skull he wore on his middle finger. “Sonofabitch sold me this truck but changed out the tires,” he said.

But Bob’s truest side was that of a soft little boy, which Ruth discovered when he picked her up a couple of days later and took her for a ride out in the county. He stopped at a Circle K to buy SnoBalls and Twinkies, and then, over a can of syrupy Mello Yello, he kissed her. “You’re going to homecoming with me,” he told her. “I ain’t asking, on account of I know you’ll just say yes.”

Maybe I wouldn’t have, Ruth wanted to tell him, but it would have been a lie. The truth was as he’d said. Every time Ruth looked at him across a crowded room, she felt a river run through her.

They knew better than to have him pick Ruth up at her house, whose air of tragedy had bred, in her father, an outsized puritanism. But homecoming night, he showed up on her street corner with Ho Hos and Mike and Ikes in the passenger seat of his truck. They drove past the high school and out into the county, out into fields of tall sunflowers and shorter alfalfa, and Bob found a turnoff of gravel where he turned off his lights and parked. A rain was gathering from the west, and the wind rustled through the rows of pale-yellow ocean. He reached over to his glove box and brought out a bottle of Maker’s Mark and two plastic cups with hearts drawn on their sides, and it was this magical pairing of sugar and whiskey that made Ruth crawl behind him, through his double-paned back window and into the bed of his truck, where she slipped her panties down around her ankles and kissed him as he tried to put the finger with the skull ring between her legs.

“Let me protect you,” he whispered into her ear, and in a sequence of shadows, she watched him tear a Lifestyles out of its wrapper and roll it onto his penis. He squeezed the tip to take out the air and Ruth noted the mechanical routine of his movements. Clouds had cleared, leaving raw, exposed stars. The moon was a sliver of a fingernail. A combine came out of nowhere, clearing the height of alfalfa with sudden violation. It was fine, she thought, to lose her virginity this way, to some shining knight of defloration, because losing it in the bed of a late-model pickup truck was a one-of-a-kind experience. She couldn’t wait to tell Clarisse.

They went back to the high school afterward, but the football game was over, their team’s loss 13–4, so Bob took the dance tickets out of his pockets and presented them to Mr. Ross, their anatomy and physiology teacher, who was manning the door.

“Come in, young people,” Mr. Ross told them. But once they did, once they breached the heavy metal doors and promenaded themselves into the cold, airy gymnasium, Bob all but ignored her. He huddled at a table with his Skoal-chewing buddies, all of them transformed in their suits and ties, such that they looked like an under-aged mafia syndicate. The boys stepped out as a group to smoke cigarettes, leaving their dates behind, and since Ruth knew none of these other girls she was left alone, watching the other laughing, cavorting couples.

Milly and Molly O’Brien were there, with each other. They’d grown into what everyone called the Guppy Twins, their noses no longer cute little rodent noses but thinned out and mashed, now, like the buds of trampled flowers. Mr. O’Brien had long since dislodged a disc in his spine and been laid off eight months: Mrs. O’Brien had taken a second job, gift wrapping at Sears. The growing abyss that was the guppy twins’ lives lent them a hoisted dignity in Ruth’s eyes, even as they stood in the gymnasium puffy-haired, pastel-clad, and dateless.

Ruth looked around at the other girls. The other dresses, some of them plain organza, others awash in rhinestones. She’d thought her own dress, purple with sequins offsetting the gold tones of her skin, was perfect, but now she saw she was just another girl at a gym dance. One more of Bob’s virgins. She imagined he’d say something afterward, something she couldn’t manage to script in her own mind, something that would make her feel blessed by his physical union, something that would make her feel like a girl whose brother and mother were still alive and well. Instead, he’d waited one febrile minute, pulled himself out of her, and kissed her sloppily, in a practiced way. He’d said nothing then, just helped her out of the truck bed and installed himself back in the driver’s seat. She’d held an ache in her throat all the way to the dance; she’d held tears. After homecoming, she knew he’d dump her like a bedful of dirt.

Except that he didn’t. He showed up outside her chemistry lab the following week to walk her to AP History, and he came, after school, to lean against the big yellow bus that took her home, to her now-motherless house, in order to kiss her. “I’m real sorry about your mama,” he said again and again in the months that followed, even though Ruth’s mother had died two years earlier, when she was in the eighth grade. They’d be speaking of nothing in particular, nothing even related to death or her mother—maybe the color of her jeans as compared to his, or which songs he thought should be on Van Halen’s greatest hits album—and Bob would say it: I’m real sorry about your mama, Ruth. His own mother still packed his lunch, which he brought to the cafeteria but never ate. Bob’s mom washed his muddy jeans and cleaned the failed homework out of his backpack. She played bridge on Wednesday evenings with a group from the dental office where she worked, and she hated Ruth.

Eventually Bob came to visit Ruth’s house. “Whassup,” he said, leaning into a dip of his knee when Donnie offered his hand for shaking. They stood in the foyer. The afternoon light shone through the windows, flanking the front door, and came to settle on the pearline buttons of Bob’s flannel shirt. Bob turned the skull ring so that its empty eye sockets were face up in her father’s palm, then turned his own hand sideways to offer a soul shake.

Donnie put his hand in his pants pocket and raised an eyebrow at Ruth, but then he turned, silently, and went back to his place on the couch, where he lost himself each evening in a television-soaked grief. The second time Bob visited her house, he parked his pickup in their driveway, leaving the radio on so loud it made the front windows vibrate. Still, Donnie didn’t notice him. Wendy had left for Cal State by then, and it was just the three of them now: Ruth, Donnie, and the television. Ruth listened to the disturbance of Bob’s bass as she watched the blue-and-red glow of ESPN reflected off her father’s glasses, and when the doorbell rang, she didn’t bother to tell him she was going out.

She was an attendant that summer at the miniature golf course, and she watched the sky between tasks, reading the clouds like tea leaves. Before untangling gum from the astroturf, Ruth read in the sky that there were other horny teenage boys in town, ones who didn’t often smell of horse shit. “How about let’s have some space,” she told Bob Bradley, over Michelob and Sugar Logs. “For the summer anyway. Let’s see what it feels like.” She was sitting in his lap in the bed of his truck, far enough out into the county that they’d had to stop for extra gas. The crops were still deep in the ground, the rows between plantings wide enough for two people to walk down them without touching. The moon was new, in hiding.

“Whatever you want,” Bob said. He bent his middle knuckle to his mouth and sucked on the skull ring. “But just so you know,” he said, and she heard his voice break, “I’ll never drift any farther than you.”

The week before their junior year of high school, when the temperature had held at three digits for a week and the soil of Northern California had turned to powder, Bob’s vices caught up with him, and he had to have a molar pulled. He stopped at Ruth’s house on his way home from the dentist, pulled up to the garage, and honked. Ruth was grateful her father couldn’t hear the horn, couldn’t see her scurrying across the kitchen to the back door, as if summoned by an emperor. A determined half of her hurried so that she herself could see Bob as soon as possible. She went out to the garage, pushed the button. Saw first the toes of Bob’s boots. And then, as the panel scrolled upward, his skinny, bird legs, the shirttails of his blue-and-black flannel.

“Look,” he said, as he ducked his head under the door to clear it. He leaned over, opened his mouth, and let a clot of blood fall to the pristine concrete floor of her father’s garage.

“For God’s sake, stop,” said Ruth. She pressed the button a second time and stood, arms crossed, as Bob ducked under the sinking door and got back to his truck. In retreat, she saw the back of his shirt, then his ass, then the wrinkled, dirty place where his jeans bent into his knees, the logo on the bottom of his boots. She stood at the open door and looked at the empty garage that her father had cleared of Russell’s and Cora’s things, of anything that would have reminded him. The garage was empty of all but her father’s Toyota. When the rubber lips of the door finally met the concrete, it echoed.

She went upstairs and watched from her small dormer window as Bob drove off, his truck spewing all of its power into soundwaves of mechanical combustion. Time closed, semipermanently, on this image of Bob. She’d seen him one more time after that, of course, but she’d willed herself never to remember it. To remember was a verb, and she’d chosen, after her father’s murder, not to.

Her phone rang now, the permutations of all her present-day problems reverberating into the car’s interior. Enix picked it up, flipped it to its face. “Who is it?” Ruth asked.

“Stavins, D.”

“Don’t answer that.”

Enix answered it. “Hello?” they said. “I’m Ruth Hurley’s secretary. She doesn’t pay me enough to work under these conditions, but may I help you?” They shifted their eyes from left to right as they listened to the caller and leaned physically into the call, their head against the door of the glove compartment. “Sure. That’s important. She can talk.”

Ruth shook her head, then waved her hand, no.

“Well, okay, my mom’s supposed to protect people from the cops, but apparently she’s not doing that today. I will have her call you back, though. I promise.”

Ruth couldn’t feel her father, not in any part of her. She absorbed the blankness of the sky, so transparent that she could see the outline of the coming moon, but she could not feel her father’s presence. On beautiful days, he’d always asked the three of them—her, Russell, and Wendy—how they could look up at the sky and maintain such bad moods. But then he’d died on exactly such a day, a spot of seventy-five-degree spring when the sky was the color of cornflowers and clouds tufted in the wind like cotton candy.

“How old are you anyway?” Enix said into the phone. “Eight? Oh my. Bye-bye, sweetie pie.” They hung up, turned to Ruth. “She’s eight years old and her dad’s in prison for nothing, and you won’t even answer the call?” They unshoed themselves and folded up into a V, their bare feet against the windshield. Ruth knew they’d leave toeprints. But the squeak they made was one they made only when they were happy: “Muhnamuhnamunahmuh. Mom, you’re kind of a dick.”

Listening to them, Ruth split into two people, the one she’d always been and some sore, regretful drifter.

FOURTEEN

Ruth

Ruth’s memory was a tricky little assembly line that liked to nail each person from the more distant past together as their simplest, most distilled selves. Russell needs every single thing that every single person in this family can give him right now, she remembered her father saying to them all, the year Russell’s illness turned to rot. Adult Ruth most remembered her father this way, standing straight as a rod, his arms folded into a practiced look of determination, as if he were the captain of a storm-battered ship.

Leaning further into the distant past, she was able to expand her father, brick him back into Freestanding Donnie, who’d once lived apart from her own sadness. He’d never let any of them into his world of cars, but he’d made his way to the Rosalind Speedway every summer Friday night. “The race is too loud for kids,” he’d say when he left, theatrically plugging his ears with orange foam before he waved and walked out the front door.

On one level, Ruth hadn’t cared. Those summer Fridays she had her own thing, of collecting ladybug beetles in a jar, punching holes in the top so they could breathe during their night of missed mating. It wasn’t until she heard the beginning of the race, and the roar of the cars that lasted well after it got dark, that she imagined her father, a world away from his wife and children, his earplugs happily dumped in his shirt pocket. She’d go to sleep, the thrum of the speedway coming through her open window like a summertime lullaby, the ground vibrating all the way to their house, congealing into this surprise of sound. She’d listen to the beetles tick around in the Mason jar. She’d set them free the following morning, go downstairs, find her father at the table, reading the newspaper.

And then suddenly one summer there’d been no races and no beetles, no Car and Driver magazine that her father sat with in his recliner as soon as he got it out of the mail. There’d been simply worry, and semi-audible conversations with cardiologists, and when she thinks of that time she remembers Child Ruth, too, still in plain cutout form: She remembers how her parents’ pronouncements about Russell landed in such shallow heartsoil that jealousy still grew all around them. “We don’t want Russell hungry in this weather,” her mother might say, if they were swinging in a city park, and Ruth would feel her own stomach contract and growl.

I am jealous of my own dying brother, she’d tell herself, after Russell had vomited. She’d fetch the rubber pail and the Sunday funnies for him to read as he lay on the floor, rolled up in the tan-and-gold blanket their grandmother had crocheted while praying, and she’d feel a column of concern that nonetheless lacked empathy. I am jealous of my brother, who is dying, she’d think. Some days, Russell vomited repeatedly, until the liquid remainder of his stomach ran green. Bile, Ruth thought, caused a person to be surrounded with unconditional love.

It turned out to be the way with Bob, as well, that Ruth remembered only his one standard emotion: wildness. Navigation told her that his house was less than four minutes away from her car, and the fear of what she might find when she landed caught in her throat; she had a hard time imagining Bob as an adult. He was doing donuts in his cul-de-sac, she supposed. Standing in his own front yard, breaking glass with a crowbar. As they turned down the main road that bisected an upscale joining of malls, the GPS lost its little cobalt mind, which seemed like evidence. It routed and rerouted, told her to double back at the light, then asked her to make a second, contradictory turn. At last it failed completely, and Ruth and Enix became a nondescript blue caret driving off-road in the middle of the mall. Ruth made a right into a stream of traffic, hoping to reunite herself with herself-as-arrow, and finally the GPS recovered, but she felt more lost and alone than she’d ever felt. Like a tiny dandelion fluff of Ruth.

“Where is it we’re trying to go?” Enix asked.

“Relax.” Ruth tried to sound like an adult. “I got this.”

She didn’t. She didn’t have this or anything else. Five days prior she’d been nagging Enix about their earth sciences grade, and now here she was, flying free with her kid, zero plans on deck. The enormity of being someone’s mother was that one never had time to think about the enormity of being a mother, but now that Ruth had time on the open road, she felt like curling into a ball. That morning, Enix had been the one to tell Ruth to buckle up when they started on the highway. Enix had refused a stop for ice cream, telling Ruth they had their teeth to think about, the enamel both under and around their brace brackets. Ruth felt criminal. The road trip wasn’t helping Enix to grow; it was giving them anxiety. It was the exact wrong answer to the rows of dominoes Ruth had already scattered.

She and Enix drove off into the mild wind, watched the tallest tips of the pines swaying in the coming rain. Ruth moved her tongue against her teeth over and over again, telling herself silently 5120 5120 5120, partially out of fear of somehow forgetting Bob’s address, partially in hopes that the repetition of it might, like a Hail Mary, replenish her courage.

“Who is this person we’re going to see?” Enix asked. “Is this why we drove all the way to Oklahoma?”

“His name is Bob, and no, he’s not why. Not hardly. Or, well, not really.”

“Well, who is he? Does Dad know this dude?”

Ruth patted Enix’s knee. “Relax,” she said. “Bob’s just a very old friend. Bob need not worry you that way. Or any way.”

And when they reached 5120’s majestic front door, they found its occupants very intentionally ignoring their arrival. Ruth and Enix stood on the doorstep, which was deep-red brick, neatly mortared into a large semicircle. Twin concrete lions on brick risers flanked them on either side, at eye level, making Ruth and Enix subconsciously press closer to each other. Evening had fallen, and each light in each of the house’s twenty front windows was on, blazing. Ruth had rung the doorbell once, only to see, through the door curtain, a silhouette come to the foyer, pull back the curtain, look, leave. Ruth had only glimpsed but she’d seen that the silhouette was slight, a slip of a body. A woman, then. Bob had a woman. She’d heard the light footsteps receding, delicate as pins, and then a man’s angry voice.

Ruth would not be denied: She rang the doorbell a second time. After all that had happened, all that Bob had set in motion—her father’s death, and then the extensive renovation of her own personal history—she had the right. She waited, counted to ten, rang a third time. Silence. She rang a fourth time, and then a fifth.

At last came a heavier set of footsteps, and then the porch light being flipped on over their heads, the curtain being bunched away from the window. The weatherstrip pulled free from the doorframe with a kiss, and there stood Bob. “Can I help you?” he said. He’d gone bald, at the same time he had on a Nirvana T-shirt that was too young for him. X’s for the eyes of the blue smiley face, but Bob’s own eyes rimmed with a lighter blue than she remembered. Bob’s father had lived a shade between rose gold and copper, but Bob was wearing old age as had his mother, his skin having paled to a shade like biscuits, wiry green veins showing through his bare feet. Yet still unmistakably Bob, with Bob’s blue eyes, Bob’s muppety eyebrows, Bob’s smirk that had always shone through, even in anger.

“It’s Ruth, Bob. It’s me, Ruth.”

“I know,” he said. “I see all them freckles you still got.” His eyes flitted nervously toward Enix, to whom he nodded slightly in greeting, but then he trained himself back on Ruth. “Right pleased to see you, here at the end of the world. But how in the Sam Hill hell did you find me?”

“Google.”

“Damn,” Bob said, wedging a hand in the space that had once been his hair. “Google ain’t nobody’s friend, is it?”

Ruth read Bob’s face as a map of his years—the crow’s feet from so many harvests of mirth; the crease in the center of his brows, a repetition of unnamed worries. She tried to summon, from the distant past, the last time they’d actually talked, but she could remember only what should have been the last time, the blur of revolving ambulance lights and yellow crime scene tape, herself and Wendy handcuffed and tossed into the backs of police cruisers, her ass on the car’s hard, plastic seat. Bob had been in the back of a different police car, the cautionary street flares in front of her father’s house reflected in his wide, frightened eyes. Her father’s death hadn’t been Bob’s fault, but it had been very much Bob’s production. Yet he stood now, at his front door, all these sad years later, treating her like an interloper.

He raised an arm to motion to his house beyond the foyer. “Well, come on in,” he said, a bit unkindly, she thought. She entered, followed him down his long hallways and into a large, free-plan kitchen. Across from the stove, the slight figure stood at a tilted island cutting a board full of zucchini, her thick, dark ponytail swishing past her swan’s neck with each cut.

“Cindy, this is Ruth,” said Bob. “Friend of mine from high school.”

“Oh, you know these crazy people?” Cindy said. She turned around to face them, wiped her cinnamon-colored hands on her blue jeans. “You know what manner of plague they might bring into this house?”

Cindy wore no makeup, and had stuck a purple band-aid above her eyebrow. She’d have the courage to wear a purple Band-Aid, Ruth thought, of course she would. On account of her being so much younger than Bob.

“Cindy,” Bob said. He was pouring lemonade into glasses. “That ain’t how we treat old friends.” He overpoured into one, making a pool he had to wipe up with a paper towel. He threw out the entire glass of it in one dash of waste, repoured. Ruth could see his hands were shaking. “Ruth’s clean,” he said. “Ruth’s always been clean. I’m the one that’s dirty.” He winked at them, both women at once.

The rain had commenced at a slant, and they could hear it beating the large picture window, though in the darkness of the storm, they couldn’t see it. Ruth felt something crawling along her forearm and tried to brush it to the floor in one deft, secretive motion, but when she looked down she saw more of them on her shirt. Four small mites, blown down from the trees outside Bob’s front door. She brushed them to the floor, with no regard for Bob’s or Cindy’s embarrassment. They’d left her outside so long, it was what they deserved.

“Have a seat,” said Cindy. “I’ll warm up some dinner. Y’all hungry?”

“I am,” said Enix. “I’ve been hungry for two days.”

Ruth rolled her eyes at Enix, and they both sat at the table. Bob dragged out a chair to sit with them. He folded his arms and hunched over like a caveman, with his hands clasped between his knees. All this big old house, Ruth thought, and he still sat at a dinner table like he was in prison.

Cindy brought them a plate of summer vegetables on a bed of rice, a spread of crackers and cheese on a separate plate. A glass of red wine for Ruth and orange soda for Enix. “You ladies been driving a long piece?” she asked, as she sat.

“From Kentucky,” said Enix. “And I’m not a lady.”

Cindy cast a look of horror at Bob, who shrugged his shoulders. “My apologies,” she said. She put her hand to her chest. “I mean, not apologizing for your not being a lady. I mean … oh God.”

“You’re good,” Enix said, in the satisfied manner of having the upper hand. “It’s prolly the barrettes that threw you.”

Cindy and Bob watched them eat, and they all traded stories. Ruth learned that what had been wayward in Bob had turned surprisingly efficient. He’d never gone to college. Instead, he’d started selling farm machinery right out of high school and worked his way up the local John Deere ladder until he’d made enough money and investor goodwill to start his own company. “And once you’re out on your own, you know, the money’s all yours. It’s unlimited, what you can grow.”

They talked into the night, and it was mostly Bob and Ruth doing the talking, laughing about things they’d done in high school, the clean things, things they could talk about at a dinner table. The small square of window that rose clear of the curtains turned orange, then purple, then nighttime black. Ruth watched Enix watch her, absorbing the truth that contradicted everything they’d known about their mother. It amazed Ruth, the way the recent past was so much less vivid: The distant past had suddenly shown up and washed her back into Technicolor. She’d have to call Clarisse in the morning and tell her. She really would.

Cindy excused herself first. “I teach sunrise yoga,” she said, the syrup on her accent turning yoga into three syllables. “I’ma put y’all some towels out in the guest bathroom.”

“Oh no, we were just dropping by to say howdy—” Ruth began.

“Lord hammercy,” Bob said, as Cindy disappeared toward the stairs, “if you ain’t staying here tonight. That ain’t the way we was raised. And you know I always did love you to pieces.”

Ruth found a rush in her ears at the word love. The sound of it, off Bob’s tongue, was like turning ice around in a warm mouth.

“And you look tired,” he said, looking at Enix. “It’s a couple of rooms upstairs we keep made up.” He pushed an arm gently into the air to make directions. “Take that one on the left.”

“I’m not tired in the least,” Enix said. “I could listen to this allll night.”

“Shh. Go to bed,” Ruth said. “We’ve got a long ride tomorrow.”

The sleigh bed was so new, Ruth could smell its heartwood. Enix huddled under the chenille bedspread. “This is nice,” they said. “He was your boyfriend. Why didn’t you marry him?”

Ruth patted Enix’s hair. Kissed their forehead.

Enix pulled away from her touch. “And California?” they said, slyly. “You grew up in California? Ha! Dad definitely does not know. Does he?”

“My life before is a whole story. But not a bedtime story. Go to sleep, love. We’ve got miles upon miles.”

Enix looked at her with eager, inquisitive eyes.

“And hey—what’s this about me sleepwalking? How long have I been doing that?”

“Just the other night, about a week ago. In the living room. It was scary, Mom. You looked possessed. I thought you were awake, but when I said ‘Mom,’ you didn’t answer. You walked to the window and then back to bed.”

“Enix, I’m sorry about all this. If you want to tell me how you’re feeling about—”

But there was the child’s phone, which they’d plugged into a corner of the bedroom to charge, and which now had enough battery strength to issue a long series of notification chimes. Enix rushed over to it, sat down, propped their back against the wall. Began to tap with both thumbs. Giggled. Put one hand over their mouth and the other over their abdomen and giggled some more. The difference in time zones meant their friends in Louisville had been put to bed for the night, and were now free to chat about whatever lives they were able to live while still chained to their phones. Enix tapped, then scrolled, then forgot their mother existed.

“Cute kid,” Bob said, when Ruth came back downstairs. He’d replenished the wine in her glass, and uncapped himself another bottle of IPA. He chuckled. “And you done raised yourself one a them three spirits.”

He held his palm up for a high five, and Ruth leaned forward, obliging. “Thank you,” she said.

They raised their glasses in unison, though not in toast. Together they sipped, and she could see the disquiet in his eyes. He scooted his chair closer to hers, took her hand, and brought it to his mouth for a kiss, for minutes that felt like hours. “The sorry I am,” he whispered, when he removed his lips. “It’s like a deep well. There ain’t been one day, Ruth, not one, that I ain’t thought of you and your daddy. Not one day.”

A Tiffany lamp hung down from the ceiling in a tasteful glaze of chartreuse and gray, and its bulb illuminated the sudden moisture in his eyes. I’m really sorry about your mama, Ruth remembered his telling her, over and again, but this was more. She saw now that he hadn’t been sorry her mother died so much as he hadn’t been able to imagine anyone’s mother dying. But her father—he’d seen her dad die. They’d all seen it.

“And I felt like since somebody died on account of my dumb ass, I ought to figure out some way to save a life or two, make things even. But then I ain’t managed to pay back the world nohow. Just selling combines. And that makes me even sorrier.” He looked back to her hand that he was holding, and carefully stroked his thumb softly across the tops of her fingers. “When you showed up at my door? I was cold on account of I hate surprises, but it was the best present ever, Ruth. This is incredible. And I want to find some way—”

“Listen. It’s okay. It happened. I put it all behind me. The best thing you can do for me now, and for my father, is to never speak of it again. Enix doesn’t know. No one does. Because how do you tell anybody at all a thing like that? How do you tell your kid or your husband or your dentist? It’s okay, Bob. Life moved along and so did I. And so, my love, should you.”

Bob took her in an embrace and Ruth felt, in the staccato rhythm of his breath, that he was crying. She sank into him. She held on. The rain had stopped, and birds called out the evening. Ruth heard every note.

“You don’t have to go,” he whispered.

“I do. I didn’t know it when I left Louisville. I was just driving then. But if I can just get back to California, if I can set foot on the ground where everything happened, and not have it kill me? Then everything else just might be all right.”

“You’re sure you’re gonna be okay, all the way to California?”

“Bob. I’m an old lady.” She put her hand on the back of Bob’s neck and felt his cool, low pulse. She ran her finger along his jawline, just as she had in high school. If time had its way, if it followed the gnarled, inexplicable vine toward the great unknowing, it would be the last she’d see him. And time, in Ruth’s world, seemed always to have its way.

She hadn’t slept in the same bed as Enix for years, so to feel them stir in the night, to have Enix turn over and stop a sleep-dead arm against her chest, was to relive the sweetest part of the recent past. Though Ruth remembered, too, the horror, when Annie was a toddler: how she’d lie there, with Annie’s hand stopping the free flow of her breath, until she’d counted to five hundred and could be sure that Annie had fallen asleep again.

Circumstance lodged inside time like a funhouse mirror, she thought: The passengers aboard the Titanic would have been glad for global warming. She’d never wish away the more recent past, the thousands of bright, crisp days she’d spent growing a child and launching a career, but it was such a delicious surprise, to feel the space and time before her father died calling her back, as if she were better equipped to live it.

Bob had set his air-conditioning to Siberian temperatures, but when Ruth looked at Enix she found their hair stuck to their temples, the youthful creases of their eyelids glistening with sweat. “Where am I?” Enix asked, without opening their eyes.

“Louisville, baby,” Ruth lied. “We’re in Louisville.”

“Oh,” Enix said, and fell immediately back to sleep.

Ruth felt herself springing with florid lies. She’d be an old woman on her deathbed, still sparking whoppers. Stuffed with lies the way a mattress is stuffed with feathers. She turned back into the pillow, hoping to take more sleep for the long miles ahead, but her mind hauled her back into the problems she’d made. She closed her eyes into the full wakefulness of her rapidly beating heart. She lay on her side, curled into a fetal curve, and pulled the bedspread over the crown of her head. When the earliest birds began to tweet, she flopped to her back and stared at the ceiling, hoping to divine meaning from its plaster ridges.

Enix slept soundly. They snored. They slept until the sun cleared the horizon, then sat straight up in bed. “Oh wow, look at that,” they said, pointing out the picture window.

Ruth saw the clipped back end of a sports car that was the exact color of salmon, its license plate stamped with the letters CINDY36.

“You can’t generally afford a Porsche on a yoga instructor’s salary, huh,” Enix said.

“That’s my smart little lamb,” said Ruth. “Lessons everywhere.”

A day into the trip, with two states and one starry sky between her and Louisville, Ruth was beginning to understand that the way forward was shrouded in fog. She had no solid intentions and no clear end point, so she was relieved that she hadn’t had to suggest that Enix take a shower in Bob’s house. The child just knew, instinctively, that the day ahead was open to contingencies, bless their heart. They saw that their mother was a wild turkey, strutting toward nonsense.

They’d said something while they were in the shower—they’d asked something, actually, Ruth heard the questioning tone of their voice—but Ruth hadn’t been able to hear it over the water.

“My hearing is going,” she yelled back. “I’m elderly. Ask me again when you get out.”

But they’d forgotten, both of them. And by the time Ruth remembered, about thirty-five miles west of Tulsa, she wondered if the question was best left unasked, because Enix had plenty else to say. “Mom,” they began, as the morning sky cracked wide with lightning, and thunder rumbled under Frank Ocean’s voice. “I’m in awe of your storytelling abilities. I really am. But have you ever seen that meme? ‘I’m not mad you lied; I’m mad that now, I can’t believe you.’ You ever scrolled past that one, Mom? Did you ever read that one and think about how this might hurt your kid?”

“Anniebean.”

“Enix. I’m Enix. I haven’t been Anniebean for six months.”

“Enix. I’m sorry. But some things, you just have to put away and get over, you know? If you don’t, you’ll be hurting every minute of every day.”

Enix slid on their wireless headphones and turned their face into the window, so that Ruth had to check on the reflection there, to make sure they weren’t crying. They were just thinking, she saw, their eyes glued to the increasingly red dirt of Oklahoma.

They got to Checotah around lunchtime, and when Ruth pulled into a Denny’s, she took her phone out of the cupholder and found a text from Myron. You’re not home, it read, simply, but she heard it in her head as if he’d spoken it in his voice, in the short tone he used when he wanted to convey his impatience. It wasn’t a statement so much as a jab. She wouldn’t text back, because she needed to talk. Even at her highest levels of hating him, Myron’s voice always cleared her senses. “Call that number on the sign,” she told Enix, shooing them out of the car, “and order us curbside.”

Ruth stayed out on the sidewalk, watching a man in an Uncle Sam costume park and back out and repark several times in one space. She went into Myron’s text and pressed the tiny receiver logo that would return it as a call.

“Well,” she said, when he answered. “It’s you.”

“The very one.” She heard loud music in his background, intense drumming, a wailing singer. He was in his bachelor’s world, then. She imagined a roach smoking in a glass ashtray, beer cans stacked against the wall behind his sink. She imagined him in sweat pants and a ripped T-shirt and found the afterimage attractive, almost erotic. “I came to take Enix to the lake,” he said, “but you weren’t home. I came to take Enix for ice cream, but you weren’t home. I drove by this morning to at least say hello to my kid, but you weren’t home.”

“Yeah. We’re not home.”

“And now, I’ve found out—” he began, but then switched his decibel to a calm that Ruth didn’t quite trust. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Within my rights,” she said, hanging up on him.

But she hadn’t. Or he’d called her right back. Or one of them had put some sort of technological curd in the soup, because she saw HURLEY, MYRON spread out again at the top of her screen. When the waitress came with their two paper sacks, she shut off her phone to join Enix in the car, where they ate their greasy food and cut it with soda. When she turned on her phone again there was a message from Myron, but its playback was as from the bottom of a well: She heard him on the other end, his voice burbling, incomprehensible. Again she heard the music in the background, and then his laughter. A higher, softer voice laughed with him. A woman. A woman. Neither he nor the woman was speaking to the phone; they were speaking—laughing—with each other. This had been an accident. A literal ass dial. Ruth heard their joint laughter, the happiness between them like some sort of violation. Ruth hadn’t, not in years, considered that side of him. She held the button on the side of her phone to power it off. She had Enix text him back from their own phone: Mom says tell your lady friend she said hello

And then there was the shame atop the shame that she’d let her offspring in on her petty jealousy. It drowned the depth of the morning and marred the miles between McLean and Groom, made the white-blipped median seem, in Ruth’s estimation, as a perforation of roadway.

In Groom, they stopped at a charging station outside a Reasor’s where, after Ruth found the charger stuck to her port, a wiry, middle-aged man in blue jeans and a long shirt came and asked her to pop open her trunk, felt his way around its rim, showed her where the port’s release cord was.

“Who knew?” she asked him.

“I been watching,” he said.

His name was Gene, he told her when she tried to high-five him. She’d put up the palm of her hand, the universal symbol for trifling successes, but Gene had kept his hand, fishlike, on the hip of his jeans. “Where you headed?” he asked.

She looked at his mouth. It seemed honest. “California,” she told him. It was a big state. What could the revelation hurt?

Gene asked to ride with them “a ways,” and Ruth was startled to find herself answering yes. In her rearview mirror she saw Enix’s mouth make a surprised little o, then spread into a grin. As Gene loaded his bag in her car’s front-end trunk, Enix gave her a silent thumbs-up. What Jesus would do and what a cool mom would do, in this instance, were one and the same thing, and as Gene got in the front passenger seat and fell completely to sleep, Ruth regretted nothing.

After a while, Ruth noticed Gene’s stoic expression slipping, in his sleep, into some form of pain. In his sleep he held his belly as if it housed grief, but gingerly, as if it also held multitudes. Ruth drove past mile markers, watching Gene in flashes, her inner eye observing what was fallen about them both. Before sleeping, Gene had told her he’d left a wife and a fleet of alpaca behind to chase no good reason, and Ruth, of course, had set her own trail of ruination: her flattened marriage, her abandoned job, the trench she’d axed into Enix’s psyche. She found she wanted to touch Gene, but not sexually. She wanted to touch him brightly, in the way of a seraph. She wanted to bestow sunlight.

As if in counter to her wish, the midday sky passed through a cloudy and expectant dark minute, the rumble of thunder flushing Ruth’s feet with sweat. She was so overcome by the urge to pat Gene’s leg that she did. She laid a hand lightly on his thigh, on the worn denim of his jeans, and tapped, twice. Gene shifted in his sleep, pressing his scalp farther into the leather headrest, and she wondered if he’d felt the current of her personal electricity.

In an instant he retook his snoring, stopping only when his head drifted forward, revealing the back of his neck, which was bright red, even in early spring, his wrinkles a cracking white. He jerked backward but did not wake. Involuntarily, his hand flopped toward the door handle, as if in his sleep, he might launch himself from the car. But still, he did not wake. Ruth pushed her right hand back into her coat pocket to feel the warmth there. She steered with her left hand, feeling surprised at its strength. She discovered the knotted veins along her knuckles: When had she gotten this old? She put her foot on the gas and revved up to eighty.

Gene had told her about his mother, about their trip north through the West Virginia mountains, about how they’d been stuck in the blizzard of ’78, caught on the highway in a Greyhound bus. “Leaving your man is a perfect thing,” he’d said to her as he sucked down a strawberry Frosty. “Was the best thing my mom ever did was leave my old man.” In their overnight trapped on the snowy highway, he told Ruth, he’d slept on the bus floor, atop cigarette butts, watching a coke can that rolled between feet across the aisle each time the bus advanced. Between dreams he heard someone step on it, crunching it to its final flatness.

His mother sat in her seat, a marine on leave having left his row to join her: They made out; he left a hickey. Gene saw it the next morning, two spots where the marine’s teeth had been, a vampire bite turning puffy. When traffic started moving again the bus churned back to greater warmth, and Gene and his mother landed in Huntington, spilling off the bus with their coats in their arms, blinking their eyes against all the sunlight the snow reflected. His mother got a job decorating cakes in a bakery and they stayed eight months, until she got into a supermarket deli brawl with the mayor’s wife and had to skip town ahead of a warrant.

After that, he said, they lived their lives running. State to state. Biome to biome. North Carolina to New Mexico to Wisconsin, forest to desert to prairie. His mother became a river whose current ran stronger with each coming year.

Gene had with him a banjo, though it had no case and, exposed to the elements, had lost its sound. Gene tuned it in the back seat of the Tesla, and the imprecision made Ruth turn up the volume on her radio. How deep was her love, the BeeGees wanted to know. She wanted to tell them to fuck off. She punched the tracking button until it hit a better station, and Gene looked at her in the rearview mirror as if what she was doing were unspeakably rude. But she believed in keeping up fourth walls: If he was going to perform, she’d wait.

And it was her car, she wanted to tell him, the one tangible possession she had left. It was her and Enix’s home now, a moving omnibus of doubt and imprecision. Ruth was driving them farther and farther away. Away from delusion. Toward further delusion. Gene was a part of it now. She’d picked him up from the side of the road so he could join.

They stopped for the day on the outskirts of Amarillo, where they found a Best Western, its outdoor pool visible from the parking lot, but cordoned off with police tape.

“Sorry, Gene. I’ve been driving for two days now and I need a shower. But I don’t have money for a second room, and—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare ask,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

Ruth checked the way the sunset illuminated Gene’s neck, noticed for the first time the small pebbles and hollows of his skin. He’d crossed the bridge to an age that was harmless, but she couldn’t let him stay with them in the hotel room. It would be too wild, she thought, she wouldn’t be able to look at her kid with a straight face afterward. Embarrassed at her own conservative leanings, she offered him her car for sleeping.

Gene smiled. His eyes twinkled. “It’s perfectly okay, kiddo,” he said. “I’ll see you two in the morning.”

He removed his suitcase from her trunk and crunched himself across the parking lot towards the Flying J, and Ruth felt the mushy understanding that they’d probably never see him again. But after all, this was responsible parenting. Pruning away wildness. Their lives would continue. Enix’s teeth would stand straight.

As Enix slept, Ruth tried to check into the hotel but her card was declined, there at the counter, the festive notes of soft jazz floating down from the ceiling as accompaniment to the drama. “So sorry,” the desk clerk had said, her various mouth piercings glinting in the hotel’s soft lighting, her cheeks reddened with schadenfreude.

Ruth had been so relieved that Enix was outside, in the hotel’s circular driveway, asleep in the car. “There’s plenty of money in that account,” she said. “Try it again.”

Yet after the clerk slid the card again, with a deep groove of mock concentration creasing her forehead, the card was again declined.

“Weird,” Ruth said. “You take cash?”

The clerk held her lips open, trout-like. Her mouth had opened to say something her thoughts weren’t gathering fast enough to express. “I’m sorry,” she said, when she finally spoke. “We don’t.” Her voice dipped to a hush of tragedy. “It’s policy, ma’am. The entire chain.”

“Jesus. It’s money. It spends.”

“There’s a Quality Inn a few miles down, at exit 78. They take money.”

Ruth thanked her and slunk back out to the car, where Enix was still asleep, curled like a comma in the passenger seat. When Ruth started the engine their hand jerked twice but they didn’t wake, and Ruth was thankful for the miracle of not having to make disclosure. She’d call the bank in the morning to confirm, but a part of her already knew. She and Myron had plenty of money in the bank: At some point since she’d left, he’d smacked a daily limit on the credit card that drew from their joint account. It was a house of cards they were now inhabiting. At the New Circle Road Quality Inn, she handed over four of the twelve twenties she’d been saving in case of road emergency and received, in return, the key to a second-floor room that reeked of cigarette smoke. She sat in the room’s one armchair, felt aroma lift all around her. The room’s lone window overlooked a lawn of no grass. She’d left the suitcases in the trunk, but when she peered into the bathroom’s tub she decided not to go back for them; they’d stay cleaner if they didn’t shower.

Instead, Ruth found a second-floor laundry facility, a dryer stacked atop a washer in such a way that made it hard, when the cycle ended, for her to reach in and retrieve the tiny load with its two days’ worth of clothes.

As she walked down the hallway, bundling her and Enix’s underwear and T-shirts between her arms, she looked straight into the sinking Texas sun, pouring itself through an open window at the end of the hall. You weren’t supposed to look into the sun, people always said, but now all she saw were harmless, drifting dust motes, unsettled by a recent vacuuming. A pain started in her forearm, traveled down her wrist, turned electric in the first knuckle of her thumb. She willed it to stop. She didn’t need to burn down a hotel.

She thought about Bob, how the past had bound them so closely together even as it sent them to their separate futures. She thought about all the disparate moments that strung together and made a life, and how she’d managed to cut the string into filaments and make so many different lives out of the one. The one she was making now, with just her and Enix and a Tesla full of stored voltage, might be the most brilliant yet. She stopped and watched the hall. The motes drifted. They settled. In the fire of the coming sunset, each shone like a tiny diamond.

FIFTEEN

Myron

1989

From his hiding place behind the boundary fence, Myron heard his name come again and again out of his mother’s mouth. Each time, she added different end punctuation. There came the clipped, exasperated Myron! that betrayed her frustration at not being able to find him, and there came the Myron. that marked her resignation. The period muted her calls into relative quiet so that they became one more animal sound in the night, such that the neighbors might not discover, as they slept, that she’d misplaced her only son. Then came the more imploring Myron? and all the questions it wrapped into the air around his name: Had he permanently snapped the umbilical cord? Would he be back? Did he still love her? Would he understand that despite it all, despite beatings, and the torture of her choosing his school clothes, and this most recent transgression, of her sending him out to the tool-shed that he was so deathly afraid of in the dark, that she loved him in the way of all mothers?

Myron hated his name when it came out of his mother’s mouth. He woke sometimes from nightmares wherein she was yelling his name. Myron! she hissed now. He’d heard the hall monitor in his grade telling the other boys that you could legally change your name when you turned eighteen. Myron vowed to do so. He’d taken a quarter to city hall with him so that he could telephone his mother with the news.

She kept herself on the porch, crossing and uncrossing her legs, trying to look ladylike for some imagined complement of witnesses, though every window in every house on their street stood completely dark. The new neighborhood was predominantly Black, and after living in their previous house, flanked on either side by Whites, Myron appreciated his newfound ability to breathe. That the neighborhood was now sleeping through his mother’s calls was confirmation that he was safe here, that everyone on the street knew everyone else, without danger or animus or concern.

The pauses between his mother’s calls stretched into a Fibonacci sequence, until fifteen and then twenty minutes passed between them, and Myron found that he was gradually falling asleep with his cheek against the scratchy wooden gate. Myron, his mother repeated, and as he reopened himself to consciousness, he felt a small fur on his arm, and looked down to find a dime-sized spider flitting toward his wrist.

He shut the spigot to a coming scream because his fear of being found by his mother was greater. He brushed the eight-legs to the grass and tried to track it, as the moonlight was enough to see where it had landed, but he could not see it. He scooted a foot to the left in the dewy grass and prayed into his moist pajama sleeve the Lord be his Shepherd. The spider might have bitten him farther up, on the soft place near his armpit, and gotten nothing but the series of welts his mother had left that afternoon. Mosquitoes often chose to bite there, on the soft, hidden places where his mother left her anger. He couldn’t understand it, but when his mother beat him, she left everything that insects would take.

On the porch, his mother looked to the stars, sighed, rubbed her eyes. She went back into the house, letting the wood-framed screen door slam behind her, and returned with a cigarette. She lit it, and the high match flame illuminated the caves of worry under her eyes. His hiding spot was close enough to the side of the porch that after she’d drawn three or four breaths, he could smell the tobacco; the nicotine, when it concentrated in his own lungs, gave him a rush. Yet his mother hadn’t sensed him there, which meant there was less between them than between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, who could sense each other across galaxies. She hadn’t come off the porch to look for him because she was afraid of the dark, more afraid of the dark even than he was, more afraid of the dark than of not loving her son.

Through the side window he saw the initials of the digital clock in the kitchen, the colon between the 5 and the 36 looking like the two wicked eyes of a demon. She was, he realized suddenly, afraid of all things. More afraid even than he was, though she’d had twenty-eight more years in the world to know she was safe. She was a tea bag, steeping in her own nerves.

And she could be made to be afraid of him too.

He slid down gradually, pressing more and more deeply against the fence, until he’d closed his left eye against wood. With his right eye, he could look through the piece of latticework and see his mother. She sat on the porch for clockless minutes, until a sun-iced blue illuminated the small hole of sky he could see. When a fiery line at last drew itself along the horizon, she stood. “Well, then,” she said, angrily, but not quietly. She went back in the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.

Myron had outlasted her. The name she’d given him before she’d even known who he was, he’d removed from her mouth. At dawn, he’d become a man. Now, he could climb over the fence and go home.

He entered, slamming the front door, but no one came downstairs. He walked up to the toilet, and as he relieved himself he heard, beyond the force of his own stream, the churning of someone rising from the bedsprings on the other side of the wall. Terse voices. “Myron,” he heard his father say, with no punctuation.

He paused at the top of the breaths that followed, noting the smell of the open bottle of mouthwash on the sink, the scent of his father’s tin of Duke pomade. He smelled the clay of his mother’s cake of blue eyeshadow and her square of mauve blush. He ushered in more breath. Shuttered it, used, back into the daybreak. The Lord was his Shepherd. He would not want.

When at last he pulled up his pajamas and exited the bathroom, his father was there, at the door. “What do you think you were doing out there?” he asked. It wasn’t a reproach so much as a real question.

Myron shrugged his shoulders. Said, “She doesn’t get to chop me down.”

Myron saw, in his father’s thinning hair, the weakness of his own future. He’d never forget this moment—his father, standing sadly in worn house slippers, his mother creeping up behind him, as if he couldn’t have heard her steps on the old knotted wood of the floor. His parents weren’t frightening anymore. They were a long-running joke, with no accessible punch line.

He sensed that his mother would touch him, and he turned before she could. He saw her draw back two steps to the linen closet. He saw the rosy end of her nose and knew that she’d been crying. “I didn’t call the police,” she said, “because what would they have done with a little Black boy once they found him?”

“I’m not a boy.”

“You are. And a little one.”

“I am not.”

She sniffled, opened the door of the linen closet, and removed a washcloth. “You better get that behind ready,” she said.

“I won’t.”

And he’d meant it as a dare to himself.

But then his mother said “Okay” and fixed the cloth against her thigh. She bent her head in concentration, and he saw the crown of her hair, the mark a half inch from her scalp where she’d last covered her gray. She creased the rag into thirds of itself, then halved the thirds in a way she never folded linens. “But you’re going to do something extra for me today. I haven’t decided what.”

He ran his right hand over the good skin of his left arm, recalling the sting of welts as she had delivered them. She was so off script now that he wondered if he might prefer her nastiness; she’d been a rhythm, one he’d been able to trust.

The months of summer passed and she didn’t hit him. She didn’t tell him to do things so much as she asked. “Run to the store and get me an onion,” she’d say, putting a question mark atop the period, leaning forward slightly in anticipation of his saying no. She began to talk to him in a way she never had, opening up a keyhole through which he could look into her past. He’d never thought of her as anything other than his mother, but now she spoke of baling tobacco, losing kites to the trees, and braiding her grandmother’s hair the day the woman died. “My stepmother didn’t love herself,” she told him, “so she couldn’t love me.” Even as she retold the sad parts of her life she smiled with the relief of finally plugging herself into her son, but Myron didn’t smile back. If he smiled back she’d stop talking, perhaps permanently. It was like a trick mirror he’d seen at a science museum—a simple manipulation of glass that let you see yourself as others saw you. The reverse image was less flattering; its revelation of lifelong misperception, disturbing. He still remembered, and so he didn’t want to show his mother what she looked like when she was nice.

The more his mother talked, the more she ran her past self between poles of indignity and triumph, the more she pressed Myron into the service of doing nothing more, that summer, than live. She let him loaf on the couch watching soap operas, and when he asked, she let him stop his trumpet lessons. The balance of power between them became such that there was no power.

He surprised her one Sunday morning, knotting his own tie for church, setting the table, and cooking her favorite breakfast of sunny-side eggs and toast. He was scouring the pan when she came downstairs. She smoothed her dress, smiled, said, “My word.” He saw the sun make her eyes the same color it made his, and he smiled back, not caring what she saw reflected in his face.

And so, when he peers up toward the balcony of Ruth’s apartment and tallies the days that neither she nor Enix has been there, when he receives email from Enix’s teacher asking him why they’ve been absent for three days, his head begins to ache in the sure knowledge that Ruth has kidnapped them, taken his kid off to some new life that is a lie.

When Enix texts him, tells him Ruth has picked up a hitchhiker, asks him to report her to CPS, get their photo on a direct mail flyer, do whatever it takes to get them back to Louisville so they can go to the spring dance and graduate from eighth grade, he has this hope, that rises momentarily, hovers in the sky, and then sinks, molten and dripping, under what he recalls of Ruth’s power over him.

He’ll telephone her and get no answer. He’ll text her and get a two-word reply—Talk soon—that answers nothing. But there’s also the ache of his being home again, home in that place where mothers do bad things to their own children and can’t, for the love of all that is good, help it.

There was this, in his skipped beat of parenting, that Myron had time to linger at Starbucks in the morning over his coffee and Courier-Journal, sit absorbing the ambient jazz, study the retirees who gathered over what he hoped, for their sakes, was decaffeinated. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday he’d found these pensioners, the different permutations of them like kids at a junior high lunch table, jockeying for conversational positions in a way working adults never did. They stabilized their shaking palms over the tops of their cups of cooling coffee. Drew their lips apart when they laughed, betraying advanced dental work. When they excused themselves to the restroom, they carefully scooted their chairs back under the table. They were un-harried and joyful, and Myron wanted to be them.

This morning’s group was four, sitting in an exact square of gay calm, but they rose to leave shortly after he arrived. The last one wore an apricot sweater and, as he walked away, cradled a boutique loaf of bread in both arms. Starbucks didn’t sell bread—the loaf must have been a gift, or perhaps the man hadn’t wanted to leave anything perishable in the oven of his locked car. As he pushed the door open he doddered slightly, dropping the bread in his effort to regain balance. He bent to catch it, but as it skidded across the sidewalk he missed, then fell to the pavement himself, rolling into a rehearsed, protective crouch that Myron found touching. He rose to assist, though by the time he made it to the door, the man was up already, on one knee, pressing his hand to the brick of the building to brace himself while he stumped to first one foot, and then the other.

“You okay?” Myron asked.

The man looked at him in a profane way. “Don’t I look okay?” he said.

Myron felt his own hands stretched in the air and felt embarrassed. “Just wanted to make sure,” he said, dusting the front of his pants as if he were the one who’d stumbled.

The man waved Myron away as if whisking a fly from his ear. “You young people,” he said, “think you rule the world.”

Nothing, Myron thought, could be further from the truth. Middle age was being ridden and put away wet; his late forties were wearing him out. These old people at Starbucks, they had friends. They had hobbies. He, in contrast, had nothing. No interests, no bridge buddies, and now, not even a wife. Just yardwork and a job. And now, not even the yardwork. He was a lawyer, when he’d never really wanted to be one.

He reentered the coffee shop, shoved aside by his own thoughts. He stopped before the community bulletin board and surveyed all that lived under its thumbtacks. There was a wellness group in Oxmoor. A Jefferson Community and Technical College lecture on environmental sustainability. A sheet of lined notebook paper advertising guitar lessons in blue Magic Marker, lined at the bottom with ten identical, slotted phone numbers. He ripped off one of the tabs, knowing all the while that any of these things would be too tame for his purposes. He could take all the lessons he wanted, he’d still be a trusts and estates lawyer with a dad bod and white socks riding over his brown sneakers. An inconsequential speck, floating through the universe.

The transaction of trying to assist the man had ruined the circle of life in his head. He needed to recover some youth. Sail the oceans. Do the new drugs. After he stood, the old man had picked up his bread, tucked it back into the folds of his sweater arms, and fastened himself into a nondescript Toyota Prius. If the man had done middle age properly, Myron thought, he’d be happily dead by now. Instead, he was driving around in a tiny electric can, cradling a loaf of bread. The voice came to Myron’s head in a cartoonish yet authoritative whisper, a voice at once knowing its aim yet understanding its own trepidation. Myron, the voice said, shakily. My man. We ain’t going out like that.

SIXTEEN

Myron

Myron wondered if it said something about Anthony’s functional alcoholism that he’d so many times watched a fly land in his drink. Each time, Anthony pointed to the fly as a harbinger of good luck; each time, Myron pointed out that the luck didn’t mean Anthony had to finish his drink.

They were having the exchange again, this time on Anthony’s back porch, a raised deck that fronted the eighth hole of a gated golfing community near Simpson County. “He fell in alcohol,” Anthony said. “Which is like hand sanitizer. Which means he’s clean.”

“It’s your stomach,” Myron said, leaning back in his rocker. “Your circus.”

He’d driven straight to Anthony’s house after another meeting with Melani Sutton. “She abducted my kid,” he’d told her. “And now she’s endangering her by picking up hitchhikers.” Melani had looked at him incredulously, a smirk burning the left side of her mouth. “No really,” he said. He took out his phone, clicked on the first of a stream of photos Enix had sent, handed it across Melani’s desk. “Look at these. They’re in Texas.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Melani whispered, her surprise disrobing the West Virginia that usually hid in her voice. “Is she stupid?” She scrolled and tapped, sending each photo to her own email address for later use. There was a photo Enix had taken of the back of Gene’s head, Myron knew. He suppressed a smile, remembering, but happy warmth spread just under his skin.

“She’s full of bad ideas,” he said. “That’s why you’re going to win me full custody.”

Melani slid her glasses down her nose and shook her head. “Myron. You know no judge in this whole state is going to—”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours. You’re paying me. But you need to be realistic.”

“Texas. Are you kidding? Fucking Texas. I could call the Lonestar Flatfeet if I wanted. Put her on all kinds of blast. I’m telling you. Full custody.” He thought to add a phrase Enix and her friends often used with him: “Period.”

He’d reminded Melani about the church pew, offering her some bullshit about its spiritual significance. The truth was they’d not prayed on it or sung hymns. They’d never even sat on it to remove their shoes in the hallway. They’d never used anything they should have in their marriage. They hadn’t been intentional about one damn thing.

“She lied to me all those years,” he told Anthony now. “Fuck her.”

Anthony raised his glass in a toast.

A party of four had bumped up to the eighth hole in their cart; now they fumbled with their bags, one of them already with an iron out, but stooped over, bent in some sort of sciatic spasm the rest of them pretended, out of respect, to ignore. “You know what, what if I was dying?” Myron said. “What if I was really sick? She couldn’t divorce me then.”

“Oh, I dunno. Last time I checked the American legal system, she still could.” Anthony peered down into his glass with childlike concentration, then stuck his index finger into the ice, chasing after the dead fly.

“Well. What if we tested her?”

“What’s this we? We weren’t married to her. You want to get into some petty bullshit, I’ma let you step into that with LaMyron.”

Brother, Anthony had called him just that morning on the phone. My brother. No one was real, Myron was learning. Not one single human on the face of the planet.

Myron was a senior in high school when his father was let go from his job at the head of a January blizzard, the top of a three days’ pounding of snow that Myron couldn’t see through when he looked out his bedroom window. In calmer weather he could see, from upstairs, the two adjacent backyards and the line of trees that hemmed them all into precinct, but the snow cut him off from this portrait of security, that and the chance sighting of the top of Mrs. Bastien’s straw hat, the futility of her cutting grass with her old rotary blade mower. The storm held its malice all three of the days it fell. Its sheer force left Myron stranded inside, watching his mother’s television programs.

His father came home from work that first day and removed his boots to leave outside the front door, though he must have known it to be cold enough outside that the ice on his soles wouldn’t melt overnight. He ate his steak and potatoes and cleared his own plate and told Myron and Donna Lee nothing. After dinner, he sat down to finish the morning paper. He fed the fire, hiked up his pants, and returned to a slat in his recliner. He stuffed tobacco in his pipe and otherwise acted according to script: Enter from stage left Pat Hurley, father of Myron, husband to Donna Lee, solid citizen of Georgetown, Kentucky.

Donna Lee had moved her quilting table from the sunporch to the garage for the winter, leaving no space to shelter Pat’s Buick, and when he went out to the driveway the next morning to start it, he warmed the engine for its normal ten minutes. He scraped the car’s windshield, backed it to the end of the driveway, got out to brush away the inch of snow that had already recoated the glass. He got back in his car, turned to a better radio station, and drove off to work.

He sat down to his oatmeal that third morning and read the paper, loudly riffling through pages, all the way up until the stovetop announced its preset seven forty-five alarm, at which point he frowned, per his usual, as if bothered by the interruption, and folded his paper inside out to preserve his stopping place.

That last day of the storm, he left for work again at eight and returned at five thirty, and it wasn’t until his mother’s friend Bernadine mentioned in passing that she’d seen his father at the Winn-Dixie, and wasn’t that something, that the snow had been enough to shut down the line over at Honeycutt, that they knew his father had never been to work.

“What is this?” his mother said, when she confronted him.

His father looked at her with the terror of a man who’d met a bear in the forest. “I was laid off,” he said.

“Temporarily? For the week?”

“Let go. For good.”

His mother looked wildly around the kitchen for a few minutes, her eyes tangling themselves on the series of decorative tiles she’d grouted into a diamond in the wall. Down, across, up, across, and down went her eyes, until finally they rested on his father. “Well, what the hell, Pat? What in the absolute hell? Did they lay off anyone else?”

“No. They still need four engineers. But the fourth is now the shift foreman’s son who just graduated from Ohio State.”

Myron had submitted college applications the week before, to the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt, and now the submissions took on an outsized importance, as if his future had been cast into a dark alley with a dim flashlight.

His mother’s shoulders softened. The one thing she couldn’t blame his father for was being Black. “You had seniority,” she said. “You could sue.”

But his father stayed in character. He didn’t sue. He collected his final paycheck from the mailbox and refused to accept calls from anyone he’d worked with at Honeycutt. He stayed home in the daytime, applying for jobs in contiguous states, and in the evening attended dinners at the Elks, coming home from the lodge only to spread down the length of a recliner with a highball. He retook his newspaper then, flipping through with great leisurely motions of his hands, and Myron suspected that he was much happier unemployed.

His mother cried, and broke things, and told Myron too much. “Just like that, we’re going to starve,” she said. “I could’ve married anybody, but I stuck with steady-ass Pat. Steady, steady. Guess what? In real life, the turtle loses the race every time.”

She screamed at his father for leaving ketchup on a dish until it hardened. When Pat tried to mop up leaked rain with an old T-shirt, she called him a moron. “I guess now we’ll just have to wait ’til the roof falls in on us,” she said. When, on Easter Sunday, the dishwasher broke down, she pulled out a dirty coffee mug and threw it against the wall, breaking it into four distinct pieces, leaving a stain of coffee grounds like a Rorschach test on the wall. “Fucking dummy,” Myron and his father heard her say. Neither man dared look at the other; neither wanted to discover in the other’s eyes that the epithet was actually aimed at both of them.

Myron shrank back into being Donna Lee’s frightened son. He rode out the end of high school as if steering a boat in high winds. He not only maintained his 4.0 but earned the end-of-year high average certificates in each of his seven classes.

Come July, his father found a job in Lexington, and come August, Myron started college at the University of Kentucky; two or three times a month, father and son would share a long, leisurely downtown lunch. But mostly, both men kept their noses to a grindstone made of solid fear. By the time Myron met Ruth, he’d been sapped of anything he had left to give to a woman. But he knew, after his time being dragged along behind the parade float of Keisha Temple’s virginity, that he liked this girl Ruth, this brash redhead with her acid jean jacket and her dependable, solid hips. And he understood this now, how his father’s lie had saved them that first week of his unemployment, how his mother’s insistence on truth and reality had then come along to maim them all. He might forgive himself now, he thought, for ignoring the warning signs of Ruth in the first place. In a sense, he’d been primed.

“You don’t really know me, you know,” she’d told him, the first night she slept in his bottom bunk. Sterling, his roommate, had gone home for the weekend; he’d changed the sheets and taken Sterling’s bottom bunk. “You don’t know me at all,” she said, smoothing a finger across the slats above her head. “I could be an ax murderer.”

“What more is there to know? We go to school together. We were born the same year, three weeks apart. You’re Black. From Kentucky. In terms of statistical occurrence, we’re identical twins.”

She laughed, savagely. “You don’t know shit about me. Not one damn thing. There are things you’ll never know about me. We could get married, have ten children, live happily ever after until we’re eighty, and there are things I’d never, ever tell you.”

He hadn’t believed it.

Now, Ruth was washing clear to him, like warplane wreckage in a melting glacier. Within my rights, she’d said to him, evil being not a new function of Ruth but a side of her he’d previously denied himself the shock of acknowledging. They were now plaintiff and defendant; they no longer knew each other as civilians. And having lived with his father through a long, jobless winter, Myron felt the cruel wonder of Ruth’s possibly having left her job. He’d heard it as a rumor, that she’d submitted a letter of resignation to the public defender. There was the small satisfaction that this meant others were also now uncovering the real Ruth, the dirtier Ruth, the callous Ruth with no respect for an essential government office. There was his very personal anger, that she’d made herself jobless and therefore a good looker for alimony. But there was also the larger feeling, that one didn’t simply toss away a career, a set of colleagues, a life. The trickery of it, Ruth’s disregard for the world’s workings, infuriated him.

In college, he’d seen flashes that he came to think of as Moments Aside from Ruth, instances of her being softer than he knew her to be, minutes of her drifting away from conversation until he fixed his eyes directly on hers. Once, she tripped over the root of a tree and fell, commencing a crying jag far outsized to the fall. She prostrated herself, forehead to the ground, like a praying Muslim. “The world is a vampire,” she said, through sobs. Her momentary lapses felt sexy then, rather than dangerous, and sometimes he’d turn up the hip-hop on his car stereo and hear its thumping bass and think of Ruth, stepping out of a pair of burgundy panties that matched the freckles on her knees, and all the secrets she’d never reveal to him, no matter how many times she let him inside her body. She’d promised always to be a puzzle, to never throw the realest part of herself across a kitchen.

There came nights he’d turn to her and put his lips on hers to make sure she was asleep; he’d ask her questions about her past: Had her father been in Scotland Yard? Was she a Cuban refugee? He’d pat her cheeks and muss her hair to get her to speak, but sometimes, it turned out, she just slept.

And then he’d want to fuck her. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He’d been to campus rape prevention sessions. He was a gentleman. What’s more, he’d loved her. And even if he didn’t, wouldn’t was the operative term.

Every morning she woke and still wanted to be with him. It was the best surprise, that he had anything to give a woman, so he ended up giving her all of it. He ran her library reserve errands and he gave her the part of the cone that was still full of melted cream. He was on lock. He was Ruth’s. He was comprehensively and solidly hers.

Except now he wasn’t, because twenty years later, Ruth no longer wanted him. When Thomas came limping into the Aspen with Myron’s mail, he found not a postcard from Ruth or Enix but the thickly enveloped pages of the second interrogatory from Ruth’s lawyer. Where there had been Moments Aside from Ruth, there was now the Negative Space of Ruth.

He heard a squirrel rustling in the gutter on the other side of his wall. He found himself craving human contact, with such a mustardy, precise hunger that he reached over to touch the chevron on Thomas’s jacket. “Something happen to your leg?” he asked. He chuckled. “Dog bite?”

“Cancer,” Thomas said, slotting the other residents’ mail. “Turns out, all that time I was without health insurance? It came back. They took a node out of my groin last week. It’s spread.”

“Well, take care, man,” Myron said, and he knew, the moment it hit the air, that what he’d said was terrible. “Take good care,” he said, trying to find purchase on a better set of words. What you couldn’t say, to a person you barely knew: I need you.

His brain thumped itself, telling him that silence was better than any of the language he was messing over. Thomas started out of the atrium, but stopped and turned to Myron when he reached the exit. He nodded, then walked through the door and out into the rest of his day.

Their first year of marriage, Ruth had planned an anniversary return trip to Paris. It would be their tradition, she said, and she bought guidebooks and mailed away for brochures and planned it all out, a bicycle tour of the Loire Valley and three days in Paris, only to have Myron kill her plans. “We don’t have that kind of money,” he’d said, when she showed him a back-page American Airlines sale, though they both knew it to be a lie. He’d clerked all summer at Alpert, Nelson and Scruggs. One week’s pay would have been enough to cover both tickets.

He hadn’t, not then, wanted to reexperience the Parisian version of Moments Aside from Ruth, the diving board off which she sometimes jumped. He’d wanted to cloister her there in their little American bungalow, protect her from the past that claimed her at odd times. Though now, with her final, physical departure from his life, he could confess to himself that if he hadn’t loved the diving board, then he hadn’t loved her. She’d known. He knew that now too.

A month before their first wedding anniversary. Myron had peered into the kitchen trash and found Ruth’s Loire Valley Biking brochure, the photo of a helmeted couple covered almost completely by the coffee grounds Ruth had tossed in after it. He felt satisfied then: Not taking her to Paris had been the most important case he’d worked on to date, and he’d won.

Now he knew better: He was a bastard. He’d long been a bastard, the good angel on his right shoulder said, and he wasn’t going to go for his wife’s jugular. The bad angel perched on his left told him Ruth was a liar who’d told him tall tales; he should walk in that courtroom and throttle her. The good angel hopped across Myron’s neck, taped shut the bad angel’s grinding mouth. Myron would, the good angel said, do no such kind of these things. He’d answer his wife’s fucking interrogatory and let her kick him altogether out of her life. For once, he’d love her in a way that recognized every single part of her soul.

But first, Myron told both shoulders, he’d dig through the Kentucky Revised Statutes, find himself the guidelines for issuance of an alert. There was love, he told the angels, and then there was what a person so richly deserved.

SEVENTEEN

Ruth

On a monotonous stretch of highway near Santa Rosa, Ruth’s body choked. A pain lit her third toe, as if it were a fish suddenly hooked, and the radio sparked down to silence. The lights of the speedometer disappeared, and the car’s battery bar surged from 48 to 93 percent. Ruth couldn’t imagine what further consequences her body might lay on the Tesla; she thanked her stars she was driving in twilight. Against reflective road signs her headlights had faded to brown and then black, and she heard the low grind of the engine as it continued. She pulled over on the shoulder of the road to gather faith, to listen to the hum of the machinery that might still power her forward.

So this was fear, then, her old comrade; she hadn’t felt it in years. But Enix had sent this warning shot a few hours earlier, that they wanted to go home, that they weren’t thinking of this as an adventure, that they weren’t at all appreciating Ruth’s bag of tricks. “Just to be clear,” they’d said, whirling suddenly away from the face of their phone, “you’ve basically kidnapped me.” Ruth had heard in their voice a certain lawyerly whine, a shade of tricky combativeness she hadn’t heard since the day, their first year of law school, she’d watched Myron stand up and argue his point in moot court. Looking like a natural, though he’d lost his moot case, and then decided trusts and estates was a cleaner, more genteel way to make a living. “Like, this wasn’t my idea. And a reasonable person might say that all available evidence indicates I’ve been abducted,” Enix continued, and there it was, Myron’s pugnacious whine, wasted professionally yet transferred down to the next generation.

“Why are you asking that?” Ruth said. “Why does it sound like I’m on trial?”

“Yes or no, rational mother, yes or no.”

“No. But I haven’t abducted you. I’m your mother. Jesus. You can’t abduct your own kid.”

Enix raised one eyebrow. It was a special talent the kid had, that they were able to leave the other flat.

“What the hell,” Ruth said. But a certain sticky jam had spread from a nerve in her left jaw to the joint of her left thigh, because she knew that technically, yes, she’d abducted her own child. But hadn’t every parent in the history of history, at one point or another? It wasn’t like toddlers actually asked to go have their measles vaccine. Ruth waved the thought away, and willed her nerves to behave.

“You know,” she began, testing the air. “I had a brother. And a sister.”

“Holy hell, Mom. Why haven’t I met them?”

“My brother’s dead.”

“And your sister?”

“Living. In California. I believe she is, anyway.”

“Mom. How can you just not know like that? How can you just—how can you just throw people away? Would you ever do that to me?”

Ruth reached back, smoothed a patch of Enix’s curls. “You’re my baby,” Ruth said. “I could literally not live without you.”

But they’d smiled wanly, in a look of mistrust that they’d developed since they’d been on the road. They were splayed across the back seat now, their hair lying like the head of a mop over their face. In the passenger seat Gene snored at low volume, his chest zagging, a hive of bees within. Gene, as it turned out, needed to stop for a smoke every forty-five miles. He’d added hours to the trip, but he’d brought a lapping calm that Ruth wanted to keep. When he’d first gotten into her car, she’d noticed his uppers coming unmoored from their insoles and assumed he’d smell strongly of feet. Which he hadn’t. Instead, he and his clothes were awash in the smell of Pall Malls, which meant that so was her car—the three of them were swimming, now, in molecules of nicotine and its additives. Her seats were real leather; she’d never get it out; she didn’t care. When Enix got out in Brixton to stretch their legs they’d swallowed Ruth in a surprise hug that left Ruth sniffing their hair, finding the faint bouquet of Gene’s cigarettes. She’d smiled. It was the smell of freedom. It made her hug her kid even tighter. One day, she thought, Enix would appreciate every mile of the ride.

She looked out the window of her slain car now and checked the road opposite, where she saw an empty wreck of a small plane lying like a dead cicada, the wiring ripped out of its cockpit in tufts. Black streaks had been seared along the length of its tail, where the flames of a crash had melted its identification number. A Cessna: Ruth recognized the logo on its tailsweep. She imagined the person who’d flown it, the passengers who’d been along for their trip, how they’d been literally hit, as the plane went down, with the failings of their money. Their old house was like that for Myron now, she knew: an empty shell of lost cash. He wouldn’t get any deeper than that. He would not, lump that he was, digest real loss.

The grief of losing the house wasn’t, for Ruth, in the ruination of objects. Not in losing Enix’s tree, the one they’d planted themselves as a sapling in their backyard, the one that had grown tall with Annie, and been damaged in the fire, and now had to be felled and chipped down to mulch. The grief wasn’t either in the loss of people—the neighbors she’d never see again, the family in the middle of the cul-de-sac whose children had ridden the elementary school bus on either side of Annie, or the retired couple across the street who, each spring, obsessed over their bed of bright yellow tulips.

None of that hurt too awfully, not losing the place or the people. The worst, she understood now, was that she’d lost time. She’d lost the past. She’d lost the time Annie had fallen, giggling, out of the tire swing Myron had fixed to her tree. She’d lost every single repeat of every single time the retired couple had waved hello, every time their big, bounding Weimaraner had crossed both lawns to come pant at her crotch, every twinned bong her doorbell made when the woman of the couple brought half a batch of cookies to her front door. She’d lost the first year Myron woke on an April morning, shocked at the thousand yellow and red tulips that had bloomed, overnight, in the catty-corner yard.

She’d lost the present, because here Enix was, sitting with her on the interstate in a car stuffed with dirty clothes and potato chip bags, Neutral Milk Hotel crooning how much they loved Jesus Christ through the car speakers, while the lovely things of her room—the 1970s suitcase stereo, the porcelain earring tree, the wooden artist’s easel—lay charred and dissembled in the mobile pod. She’d lost the future: the eight-foot Douglas fir they would have trimmed in the living room that Christmas; the night, three years hence, that Enix would bring her junior prom date into the foyer for photos; the day they’d depart from their driveway to Enix’s freshman year of college.

No matter how well or how poorly she’d live from this point on, Ruth had lost place and she’d lost time, and so, her being a mere reincarnation of herself in the first place, she’d lost it all. Again. Having worked so hard to reconstruct herself once she got to the University of Kentucky, she’d never completely empathized with the bewildered looks of refugees she saw on the television news. They’d escaped what they were fleeing, she thought. Thank God. But now she understood this about them: when the sounds of bombs receded into the distance, when the people hustled themselves and their children across the sea and off the sinking rubber boats? Then came the hollow sucking sound. The sound that meant you’ve lost it all. Good luck rebuilding any of that. Ruth knew it now. Restocking any of the meaning back into her life would be like trying to hold on to the static of an increasingly distant radio station.

As they climbed a steep mountain grade, the car’s electrical system restored itself, component by blessed component. Ruth watched the dark blue of the evening blend into the blacker indigo of night like oil into ink. Where, in a previous life, she’d turned up the car radio to drown Annie’s toddler-outsized tantrums, she now increased its volume to drown the teen’s hateful silences. She searched blue exit markers for the Quality Inn logo; she wouldn’t even try the bankcard. She let Gene wander off to his own devices as she checked herself and Enix into another Quality, waited until Enix had fallen asleep, then drove back out into the desert, to the nearest CVS, where she bought herself a bottle of tequila. As Enix slept, Ruth watched a rented movie and drank a quarter of the fifth. The movie was a romcom called Please Whisper, about a woman finding her soulmate in the stacks of a library, but it failed to arrest Ruth’s attention. Instead, she watched her sleeping child, their red hair, the dough beneath their freckles. She drew a swig off her tequila, wondered if Enix’s body, too, could stop the electrical world. Then wondered, again, whether people needed that kind of power when they weren’t holding on to lies.

When the movie credits started to roll, Ruth poured the rest of her liquor into the bathroom sink and took the empty glass to the lobby trash. Just outside the lobby was an ATM, and she thought she’d better withdraw another two hundred. She’d put all the day’s meals on her credit card, racking up debt there, siphoning money out of the account to pay bits of that total, hoping Myron wouldn’t notice. She counted her twenties. Six left. They made her feel like a clever woman. The world drifted away, and the iron bolts of her happiness ripped apart from the moorings of her sobriety. She’d be driving hungover the next day, then.

She woke when Enix’s phone did and was initially disoriented by the hotel room’s layout, the door opposite where the door stood in her own bedroom, the hotel’s bathroom fan still whirring the way she’d left it when she fell drunkenly into bed. She closed her eyes into a headache that must have started in her sleep. She was still a capable adult, she reminded herself.

“Mom,” Enix said from across the room. “I want a drink, too.”

“What inna hell are you talking about.”

“I’m serious. It would help me. I am tortured, Mother. Gimme a swig.”

“No.”

“Mom,” Enix said again. “Mom, are you going to shower today?”

“What’s it to you if I don’t?”

“Mom, I am so tired of you looking like a homeless woman.”

“Well, my young alcoholic. I think we kind of are homeless right now.”

“What do you mean? We’ve got an apartment. That we’re going back to.” They put a firm edge to their voice. “That we are going back to. Right?” Both their neck and the border of irritated skin around the burn on their arm had turned red in a way that felt, to Ruth, as accusation. Ruth walked to the part of the room that held the sink, so that the rectangle of closet space might partition her off from her angry kid. Enix had long since divorced Ruth from their interior: When asked questions about their life, they either lied or told Ruth nothing. Literally: nothing. Even when the question made the word grammatically and logically impossible, Enix would say it: nothing.

“How’s math going?” Ruth would ask, and Enix would reply,

“Nothing.”

“What are you wearing to the school dance?”

“Nothing.”

Enix would glare at her. Make their face into Posh Spice.

“Mom,” they said now. “You’re lying to me. Aren’t you?”

“I’m your mom. I’d not lie.”

“If they’re not lies, they’re some awfully thin truths.”

“Enix. Baby. What kind of a mom—”

“You. You’ve lied to me a million times. Some of them I don’t even know, but a lot of them I do now. I don’t expect much from you at this point.”

“What did I do that’s making you this vicious?”

But Enix smiled sweetly. Said, gently, “Nothing.”

As quickly as they’d fixed the smile, Enix condensed their face into a gaze of fury. A glare that said that in some far-off future, karma would come for Ruth, and it would not be kind.

They collected Gene, who was sitting at the stern of her car with his suitcase, and they left Aurora. They were three days away from Louisville now, nearing Denver, and she hadn’t been perfectly settled on where they were going or why, but when she checked the rest area wall map she found this clarifying answer: in Albuquerque they had this forking choice, to drive I-25 south toward Mexico or north toward Canada. She was being drawn, as by tractor beam, to drive north, into cooler air and less mountainous roads. From there she could take I-80 passing through Sacramento, an hour north of the dusty tangleweed of Rosalind, where she’d grown up. She felt Northern California calling her, with all its nonsensical vibration. She felt her sister beckoning, though the open road had previously felt so full of possibility that she hadn’t imagined a route, even, so much as the surreal, child’s notion of driving endless loops between California and Kentucky. She was headed home, then. To reconstruct what she’d once so carefully and comprehensively deconstructed.

Ahead of them, the robin’s-egg blue of the sky blended into an upper layer of icy clouds. Behind her, in the back seat, Gene picked his yellowed fingernails. Beside her, Enix typed into their glowing phone, curating their digital life. Ruth had watched them, over the course of the trip, capture a dozen selfies a day. They’d held actual tumble-weeds up with one hand while skillfully shooting themselves with the other; they’d taken shots of themselves in profile, looking away toward distant mountains. There were photos they’d taken of themselves in front of rusty pickup trucks and kitschy restaurant signs: At a truck stop, Enix had begged Ruth to buy them a sixty-dollar cowboy hat, for photographic purposes. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” Ruth had told them, before handing over three of her twenties.

“It does,” Enix said. “I’ve seen footage.” They topped themselves off with the hat and snapped a photo of themselves wearing it next to Freddy Steakhouse’s neon cowboy boot.

While Gene disembarked and went out to seek smokes they stayed parked there at Freddy, where Ruth asked Enix to split a curbside order of Snakebite Poutine, only to have them refuse. “Mom. Gross,” they said.

“Okay. How about let’s take an ussie in front of the boot?”

“Stop trying to be cool,” they said. “You’re never funny. No matter how many people are in the photo, it’s still called a selfie.”

Enix’s notifications poured out in a vibrating rush every morning at six thirty, when they’d set the phone to wake, and over the continental breakfast tables of their various chain hotels they set anew each morning trying to stand astride their social life, reconnecting with the version of Enix Hurley they were trying to build on Instagram. With hearts and emojis, they puttied the void of their absence.

Ruth’s phone was less friendly, more informational. She’d been reminded via form text of Enix’s orthodontist appointment, the one they’d miss in exactly eighteen hours. She’d been notified, too, that she was still paying for it—the forty dollars had been removed from her and Myron’s joint bank account, and the debit had gone through as an email that came to her as a beep. Leaving an adulthood involved so much logistical upset. Where would they be living next month? How would she finish straightening her kid’s teeth? What was Enix learning from all this? Twenty years from now, would they still talk about it in therapy?

“I’m going to grow up and be just like you,” Enix said suddenly, as if reading her mind. “Run away from home. Join the circus. Get a sleeve of tattoos inked on my arm.”

“Tattoos? Plural?” Gene said. “You can get a tattoo of your mom’s broken heart. That can be your first.”

But Enix had a point, Ruth thought: She wasn’t, not now, serving up an example of good life choices. It was possible, in fact, that she never had. She tried to remember things she’d shown Enix, about scheduling oil changes and balancing checkbooks and committing real-life uses of algebra, but the thing that kept returning to her was the day she’d cried in front of them, in a Pier 1 of all places, over a broken Peter Rabbit figurine.

“Enix. We’ve got to get your teeth tightened.”

“Oh yeah that’s tomorrow, huh. Oh well. Way to go, thoughtful mother.”

From the back seat, Gene coughed laughter. Ruth felt her intestines move toward the need for a restroom. Her utilities were on auto-pay, but she’d have to stop at a post office in Denver and mail her rent check. “We could reschedule, sure, but I don’t know for when.” She patted the steering wheel. She hoped Enix understood what she was telling them. They might never return. “And I don’t want you to have to wear those braces one more day than you have to.” She reached in the car door and passed Enix her phone. “Go to Google and put in ‘orthodontists Denver.’ Let’s see what we can do.”

“Are you shitting me? You’re just going to ring up some random orthodontist?”

“Teeth are teeth. They’re teeth in Denver, too.”

“Orthodontists Denver,” Enix spoke into Ruth’s phone, and from the menu that appeared, she chose the closest office, hit the phone receiver icon, and passed the phone back to Ruth.

“Suisun Orthodontics,” came the voice. “May I help you?”

The receptionist’s use of proper grammar cut its way through Ruth’s headache and sharpened the point of the stake through her head. “We’d like an appointment,” she said.

“New patient?”

“In a way of speaking, yes. We’re on the road for a while. It’s kind of an emergency.” She put a panhandler’s tone to her voice. “I’ll pay, if that’s the problem. I’ll pay out of pocket. Whatever you want for one appointment, I’ve got it. I’ll pay.”

Ruth heard a shifting of the phone, as if it were brushing against the receptionist’s clothes. She heard the clack of a keyboard. A shot of giggling in the background. “Ma’am?” said the receptionist. “It’s a course of treatment. Recalibrations based on an entire patient history. It’s not like giving a perm. I’m sorry.”

Ruth hung up, breathed deeply of her own failure, put her phone on the car’s charging pad. The phone rattled the plastic. Rattled it a second time and then a third before she picked it up. It was Clarisse. “Where are you guys?” she asked.

“Denver.”

“Are you going to see Wendy?”

Ruth heard the shards of excitement in Clarisse’s voice and wanted to smash them. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Why would you assume—”

“My God, Ruth. You’re going back to Rosalind, aren’t you? Aren’t you? After all this time happy, you’re going back there.”

“How are you coming up with that? Denver’s a long way from Rosalind.” Ruth heard the bile in her own voice.

“Ruth, stop. I knew you’d do this. People get divorced, they move to the past before they move to the future. But Ruth. You haven’t processed either. You’re not ready. Just go to Sacramento, introduce your kid to your sister, and call it a day. You’re not going to find anything in Rosalind except shit that’s going to make you real, real sad.”

“I can’t stay away forever. I’m going back to my name. And I want to show Enix our old house. See where Dad’s buried. That’s my dad. My kid’s granddad. I need to tell them what they did to him. I need to sink into that and let myself feel it in a way you and I never let me. What’s it to you?”

“It’s bullshit. You’ve never done anything this stupid.” Clarisse sighed, made a sound like steam from an iron. “But if you’re bent on doing it, just know this. It’s a thing I learned last time at Rivendell. When people return to a situation, they think they’re going to win this time. They rarely do. Make sure you win this time, Ruth. Make sure you win.” Ruth felt hot tears coming to her eyes, but it was Clarisse who coughed out a sob. “Because I won’t be there to pick up the scattered little pieces of you this time. Not like before, when I was the only one strong enough to hold you.” Clarisse was crying so hard now, she lost her breath. “Call me when you get there,” she whispered. “I want to be there when you see it. Call me. Promise.”

Ruth clicked off. Tried to focus on the bright Denver day, the birds of prey circling the sky over a mountain. Found instead, in her mind, the murky future, with all its sand traps. She was so old to be running.

An eighteen-wheeler passed her on the left, close enough that the car autobraked; her car, it was going to automatically take care of things. ’Twas the lone certainty. The one thing she was allowed to know about the future.

A few hours before her father died he’d been in their basement, minding his business, slouched over his basement desk with a cup of coffee, finishing his quarterly tax audit for Sakura Electronics. He’d looked out the window and caught Bob Bradley with his one leg already astraddle the privacy fence, and he’d done what any father would have done, protecting his castle, saving the princesses within.

The day before he died, her father had been making them ice cream, Ruth and Wendy’s favorite, pistachio. He’d stand over the counter grinding the greenish nuts as if entranced; he’d mix them with the milk, the eggs, the sugar, beating them all with a metal whisk, his arm loosely arced as if he were a ballerino, executing onstage. When he poured the whole of it through the strainer it was an adagio he repeated not once but thrice, and when Ruth looked in on him from the living room, she knew that his point wasn’t even eating.

The week before he died, he’d been calling Eastern Air Lines, pricing three tickets to Las Vegas: He’d always wanted them all to see a show, he said, and now that Russell and Cora were gone, he felt the urge ticking his ears like a gong. September, he’d half asked, half told them, when it’s cool? Wendy had rolled her eyes. Vegas is so pedestrian, she’d said. For that kind of money, we could spend a week in Banff. Wendy’d never been to Vegas. None of them had.

A month prior, her father had asked her to clean the kitchen sink. It was the dirtiest place in a house, full of food-borne pathogens: He’d seen Dr. Oz on Oprah right around the time Russell fell ill, and taught them to be meticulous about cleaning. First Comet and then Lysol, he said, not one microbe to survive. He asked Ruth to clean it that Saturday and then he left for an errand at Ace Hardware. Did she need anything from the Safeway? he asked, and Ruth said no. She listened to the front door close behind him, and then she got out the Windex and sprayed it all over everything, sink and adjoining countertops and refrigerator door handles. She wiped it down, called it a day. She sat in the living room watching Thundercats, pondering the shiny field of germs she’d left alive.

A year before that there’d been no Sakura Electronics in their basement, because the family hadn’t needed a third side hustle. But then her father had watched his wife die, or, more accurately, he’d gotten a phone call from someone who had. She’d collapsed in the lobby at work, they told him, and someone from the bank downstairs had done chest compressions and rescue breaths. She’s only forty-eight years old, Ruth heard her father say, in a firm, unwavering voice, as if offering this simple fact would render the rest of the phone call untrue, make the caller say You know what? You’re right. This didn’t happen, but the caller continued: They’d called 911 and the fire department, and then the EMTs had accessed every power they knew. They applied the defibrillator, shocking her over and over again, trying to revive a heart that wasn’t meant to work after it saw its own child sicken and die. They shocked her once, twice, so many times. Ruth heard her father say thank you just before he hung up the call. He slumped into the wall, pressing his forehead against the plaster. He clutched his own thigh as if it otherwise might leave his body. Ruth stood watching, not understanding what she should say. She watched him take a few minutes of forever, before he gathered his keys and got them both in the car. The next morning, at 7:00 sharp, Ruth heard her mother’s bedside clock alarm, which had been set to ring as wind chimes. The alarm chimed and chimed. It chimed for minutes. Maybe hours. Ruth couldn’t remember which of them had eventually shut it off.

Before that, Donnie had had two children, a wife. He’d watched Cora ask Ruth to go outside and rake leaves, had watched Ruth tell Cora that the leaves were probably good for the grass, actually. Watched Cora ask Ruth really, and hadn’t she ever seen the forest floor, how bare it was? He watched, but neither intervened nor took a side: The way to womanhood, he figured, was through a girl’s mother.

And before that, in a time of cable television and wall phones, her father had one child. Gwendolyn, they’d named her, Gwendolyn was a character in a book her mother was reading, and Cora said this meant they’d call her Wendy. As in Wendy from Peter Pan, who was another character her mother had never gotten enough of. Her father, who’d had only brothers, hadn’t known what to do with a daughter. He thought fathering a girl was buying barrettes, taking Girl Scout cookie sheets to work. Wendy had gotten to eighteen months sweetly sleeping through the night, rarely crying, and then she’d bitten him once, right on the face. He ran to the mirror to examine his cheek and found the indentation of her teeth, all twelve of them, and he congratulated himself for having a child who’d met this dental milestone. Her fifth birthday, he enrolled her in a community karate class. She made it to green belt, then quit. She didn’t like how the class messed up her hair.

A lifetime before that, before Russell, before Ruth, before Wendy, before Cora, even, her father had had a motorcycle. He’d snaked around county roads, with and without a helmet; he’d parked his cycle at the beach along Big Sur and wept at the sight of sunset. He’d given girls long rides to nowhere, their arms around his waist, constricting his easy breaths. He was tall and quiet and he’d discovered in his early twenties that women loved both things, but he wasn’t sure he could ever return the sentiment. When will you get married? his mother would ask him. Her faculties were fading, but she asked the question more and more fervently the less of her was left, until Donnie began to think of it as the sturdiest wall left standing. She asked countless times, until he began to hear the question when he was just walking down the street, or popping warm bread out of the toaster.

He met Cora at a restaurant at which neither of them were eating. They’d both stopped in for takeout; they’d both scanned the laminated menus they’d been handed and decided no, thank you. Cora followed Donnie out to the parking lot, complimented him on his motorcycle, and said she’d like to go for a ride someday, though by the time their relationship took its more serious turn she’d already asked him was he crazy, told him she couldn’t marry a suicidal maniac. She made him retire the motorcycle, first to his mother’s garage, and then, when she became pregnant, to a For Sale ad in the paper.

But that day. The day she’d asked the officer whether her father was still alive, Ruth had already known, even there at the station, that he was going. He’d always been burrowed there, deep in her heart, but now he was only there, beating inside.

EIGHTEEN

Myron

Kentucky Revised Statutes §16.175: Abduction of Children—Kentucky Amber Alert System

(1) The Department of Kentucky State Police, in cooperation with the Transportation Cabinet, the Division of Emergency Management, the Kentucky Broadcasters Association, and the Kentucky Press Association, shall operate a system to notify the public when a child has been abducted and the department determines that public notification might aid in the recovery of the child.…

(2) The system shall utilize existing resources, including but not limited to electronic highway signs, the emergency broadcast system, law enforcement communications systems, and local, regional, and statewide media providers.

(3) No public alert using the system shall be issued unless the department, in consultation with the law enforcement agency in the jurisdiction in which the abduction of a minor occurred, has determined:

(a) That the minor has actually been abducted or that all available evidence strongly indicates that the minor has been abducted;

(b) That public notification is the most appropriate method of recovering the child in a safe and efficient manner; and—

He was reading the statute on his phone again, though Melani Sutton had told him he could not pursue this. “One of the guidelines,” she’d said, pausing to lean more heavily into her prohibition, “is that the minor be in imminent danger. Imminent. Danger. Of serious bodily injury or death.”

“But Ruth’s picked up a hitchhiker. I’d say that qualifies as danger.”

“Myron,” she’d said. “Be nice. She’ll be back.”

But that was the thing, he’d wanted to tell her. Even if Ruth returned, she’d never be back. She’d never again be his wife.

Enix, who could rarely be counted on to respond even to the most urgent of texts, had been sending him a steady stream from the road. They detailed how their mother was driving (like a cowboy), what their mother was feeding them (no green vegetables yet), and who they were meeting up with (some dude named Bob Bradley, Dad. I bet she never told you about him). They told him that Ruth had been callously lying to them both, for years (but Dad. Her baby brother died. That makes me feel kinda bad for her, actually), and they texted him memes about breakups. His favorite was a quote from an S. C. Lourie: Darling, you have outgrown the circus. He didn’t know who this S. C. was, but he assumed they were a woman, since all the happy people running free of their relationships these days were women. And he thought Enix was sending memes about Christa Pimenta, but they’d indirectly hit his target too. Ruth was indeed the circus. She was its juggler in chief. If he got permanently wrecked about a divorce, at his age, it would propel him to his literal end.

Where r u guys now? he texted. Is Mom taking pix again? But Enix didn’t answer. He imagined them sitting in the front seat next to Ruth, watching mountains whiz by their window, the cacti tall as men, the antelope with their ears cocked to the vibrations of passing eighteen-wheelers. Or maybe they were sitting in a hotel room watching Ruth rearrange the contents of her suitcase, in the hungover frenzy he himself had seen on family vacations. Enix said Ruth would sleep through the hotel breakfasts, every time, and ask them to bring coffee back up from the lobby.

The Department of Kentucky State Police, he texted Ruth, in cooperation with the Transportation Cabinet, shall operate a system to notify the public when a child has been abducted. The system shall utilize existing resources, including but not limited to electronic highway signs, the emergency broadcast system, and law enforcement communications.

He pressed the send button, then recoded her number in his phone, tapping backward to delete h-t-u-R. The Circus, she now was, at 502-645-9320. He shoved his phone back into his pants pocket and stood himself upright, set his face into what he hoped was a knight’s smile. He’d let the Circus see what he was getting at. He’d let the Circus sweat for a while. Forty-six was old, yes, but it was also young. And he wanted to think of this time, at points in his future, without regret.

NINETEEN

Clarisse

50 mg

Pristiq builds a wall in my brain. Or maybe builds is the wrong word, since the wall’s long been standing. I give myself credit: I built that wall when I was a kid.

Bricks are easier to come by if you grew up in good times in the first place, and I’ll be the first to tell you I had a pretty snoozy childhood, really, right out of a backyard garden hose, nothing really explosive happening in the Johns house, not ever, nothing more exciting than someone leaving a hot dish in the oven too long.

At Rivendell, they try to talk me out of this. Didn’t your mom have an affair? they ask. Weren’t you six feet tall when you were twelve? Hey, aren’t you Black? You must feel so oppressed.

More than the soggy meatloaf, or the damp they let through the windows at night, this is the thing I hate about Rivendell—these glorified babysitters with master’s degrees. They want me to make up reasons so they can write them down. They want to categorize my mind into codes for insurance. They could never taxonomize me, not even if they were to break into my head and binge-watch, but they never give up trying.

Mom’s sex life never hurt me: I told them only because it made her human. Mom’s slip was a one-off that lasted two months—she wasn’t exactly a whore. My height, I loved lording over people. When you’re tall, it’s always thy will be done forever more. I noticed it the minute I hit a growth spurt. And as for being Black? It’s a White person’s imagining, that this is in the negative column. We have our own Vacation Bible Schools, our own house parties, our own district meetings. Our own newspapers, and our own national anthem; we have Black Expo. We have our own radio stations, our own soul food restaurants, our own underground community calendar. Our lists of Black business and Soul on Ice on our moms’ shelves; Jet and Ebony stacked on the bottom rack of our grandmamas’ coffee tables. To leave off being around White people Monday through Friday and then go out on a Saturday to be in an auditorium full of Links, all in five-hundred-dollar hats from Formé, is to want to weep, it’s such glory. We have a whole systematic beatitude going in this country, beautiful beyond the White imagining.

I built my wall for reasons so ordinary that the average babysitter with a master’s degree wouldn’t even think about them. Any infant with an ounce of sense starts building their wall the minute they get jabbed with vitamin K.

What the people at Rivendell don’t understand is how even the happiest mind can fall down into brackish well water, how, if you care enough to notice, everything that’s wrong in the world can become an unending bell in the brain, always ringing in F-sharp.

Ruth doesn’t understand either. I watch her watching me when she picks me up from residential, and I know she thinks she’s the one who deserves a week doing arts and crafts in gripper socks, she’s the one who deserves to play ping-pong while G-rated movies play in the background. In high school, I thought we were closer sistren even than she and Wendy, but now I know we’re not related. She doesn’t see things the same way I do. She doesn’t even see the same things I do. The tiny spikes that radiate from all reality don’t so much as snag her mental stockings. Crocodiles swallow stones to swim at greater depths. Some of us already have the stones.

I watch a video of a six-year-old tunneling through a hole no bigger than his body in order to mine the cobalt for my iPhone, and cracks form like tendrils.

I read up on the diminishing capabilities of the oceanic carbon sink, and how we’re all pretty much doomed from this point on: The cracks grow to finger length.

My man doesn’t manage to impregnate me, and then dumps me anyway: little pieces of caulk fall out of my wall in chunks. A mind can’t turn itself back, but Pristiq walks along all the little crevices and trowels cement. Both the wall and I stand without buckling.

It’s not great cement. It’s low grade. Made in Turkey. It turns my thoughts into cotton candy, and it doesn’t leave me happy so much as it leaves me cloudy, the kind of overcast that can never bring itself to rain. According to the rules of pharmaceuticals, the opposite of depressed isn’t happy; it’s numb. Here in late-stage capitalism, here at the end of the world, it’s how we like our people: benumbed. So they can shut up and go to work.

Which I am. Going to work, that is. And staying out of residential, thanks to this 50 mgs. The breathing exercises are still there. I do them every once in a while, when I’m in heavy traffic and my stomach starts wringing itself into a rope, but mostly, the sharp edges of everything are gone.

It’s hard to think about bad things when you can’t even think.

Dope

Defending people who’ve committed crimes might just make you more suspicious that everyone else is committing crimes, too, an occupational hazard for Ruth, because she can’t lay off Christa Pimenta. She called from I-80 to tell me how Enix got a text chime, tapped their phone, then screamed that they needed to pull over right in the middle of the highway. “Mom. NOW,” they said, and when Ruth did, when she slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the very next exit, they jumped out of the car, walked a hundred yards across the red dirt of Texas, and made a phone call.

Gene got out to smoke, of course, while Enix walked this distance, thinking they wouldn’t be heard. But they hadn’t counted on the fact that that far west, with no working wind or water, you can still hear a conversation from a mile away. “Well, what’s your side of the story?” they screamed into the phone, and then launched into a spout of crying, wiping their eyes on their shirt. Ruth said she could hear the faintest trace of Christa Pimenta’s voice, its tone of self-satisfaction. She watched Enix walk with their phone, shaking their head in misery, the dark green of their shirt the only fresh thing on the Texas horizon. When they finished the call they flung their phone into the air as far as they could, but then watched with her hands held anxiously out as it landed, mercifully not on rocks. They scrambled over to reclaim it from the desert and got back into the car still crying. Ruth handed them a napkin, into which they blew their angst.

“I’m going to call this little bitch’s parents,” Ruth told me on the phone, after Enix fell asleep. “Tell them to tell their kid to leave mine the fuck alone.”

“You will do no such thing,” I told her. “You’ve got to let Enix handle this one themselves.”

“Do you know that Stavins was a model child?” she said. “A literal altar boy at Saint Agnes. And his mom’s such a sweet lady on the phone, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Couldn’t have raised a felon. But I guess she let him handle things on his own, huh? Because he got caught up in high school and then it was game over for little Martin, no more quarters.” Ruth smacked her lips and continued, in an alarming whisper. “Do you want that for Enix, Clarisse? Do you want them to do all these wrong things with these wrong girls? All because I sent them to that fucking Facts of Life school and let Christa Pimenta have her way?”

Anna Kate had told me the girl’s real name wasn’t Christa Pimenta. It was Kristen Parks, or something like that. Without the real last name, Ruth wouldn’t be able to find the parents in the directory, and I wanted to tell her. But my mouth wouldn’t move. It couldn’t. Ruth’s whisper had gotten so loud, her voice just bounced off the Pristiq.

And when you’re little and you go to bed, I tried to telepath to her, you just pray the Lord your soul to take. You grow up and it’s emergency contacts and revocable trusts, and covering the next generation with bubble wrap. Lord, may my death be picturesque. May I have a mass gospel choir at my funeral. But how about we go back to Ruth’s own little soul? I was trying to tell her, through the airspace. Sometimes, she takes motherhood too seriously.

Did He Actually Raise His Thumb

Let alone that she has an actual, honest-to-God hitchhiker in the car with her now. It could be an indie film, for fuck’s sake: A Hitchhiker Named Eugene. He has a banjo on the road with him, and he has to get out of the car and smoke at the top of every hour, and it’s nothing that Enix would do, and nothing that I’d do—who needs the babysitters now?

Gene’s redeemable, though, because it turns out he’s perfect for sniffing out bullshit. He’s the one who figured it out.

About Myron.

About Myron’s nuts.

Well, one of his nuts. The left one. The one I guess the devil was sitting on when Myron decided to pull this shit.

Myron texted Ruth a photo of an ultrasound, a transverse scan of the tissue in his testicle, a grainy tumor lodged there like a little pea. Probably cancer, he texted. Doctor thinks so. Which I was thinking was nothing a doctor would ever actually say. Ruth said Myron followed it all with a little frowny face emoticon, which she somehow interpreted as bravery. Flippancy in the face of his mortality. “It looks like a really big nodule too,” she told me over the phone.

“Calm down,” I said. “The supermoon takes up more than its fair share of the sky, but it’s still just as small compared to earth. Maybe ultrasounds are like porn. All angles and lighting.”

“Brrf,” she said, though she’d really said something else. I could tell she was biting her nails because of the way her voice kept going all muffled, the way it used to when we were on the phone in high school, trading notes for a history test she was going to fail.

“They did a biopsy?” I asked.

“He’s waiting.”

And then I heard him. Gene. The hitchhiker. The legend. The hero. “Gimme the phone,” he said. He kind of spat it out in a drawl.

Ruth’s voice came unmuffled and went lively, and I could hear that she was smiling. “I didn’t know you were awake,” she said. “Here. Here’s what he sent.”

I heard the phone thunk on something, heard Ruth giggle, heard her say “butterfingers.” Then, Gene was on. “I’m putting you on speaker,” he said. “Hold on.”

“Nice to meet you,” I told him. I hoped my voice didn’t sound like my real opinion.

I waited a long couple of minutes for Gene to bring the photo back, to find his way to Myron’s testicle, and my mind turned other ways: to the way Kit was starting to let his goatee turn into a beard, the way he used it to intentionally torture me down there before we got to the main event. He’d told me all kinds of things about his life, how he no longer felt like an artist, how he wondered if he should trade Bitcoin for a living, manage real estate. I was beginning to feel like I belonged to Kit. It was a nice feeling. Kit was washing over me like a beachy day when Gene came back on, said, “There. Check this. I put them side by side, so you can see.”

And then Ruth was back on the phone. Angry Ruth. Burned Ruth. A Ruth I hadn’t encountered in years. “Fuck him,” she said. And then, to me, “Gene just searched Google Images. Myron got that ultrasound off the fucking internet.”

“There was just something bullshitty about it,” Gene said, raising his voice so I could hear him, so we could all three be in conversational communion.

“Wow,” I said, though what I was thinking was this: It takes two bullshitters to know another bullshitter. All that lying Ruth’s done, and she finds it inexcusable when Myron finally joins the club.

But I was glad he was there, this Eugene.

I’ve tried to be there so many times. I tried the day Ruth’s dad died. I tried when Russell fell ill, and when Cora passed, and I was never able, I guess, to be there in quite the right way. I tried to bring cheer and glad tidings. But glad tidings don’t build a wall.

The other night I asked Kit if we could try some role play, if we could pretend I owed the IRS and he was the tax collector. We had fuzzy handcuffs already. I thought it would be fun. Kit said no. “You tune out reality like pretending is some kind of superpower,” he said.

Which maybe is why he can’t be an artist anymore. But I didn’t say that.

Maybe Ruth just needed me to stand in the soup with her, maybe she needed me to hold her and cry along, instead of bringing great cheer. Maybe she needed me to help her make up all those stories she told about her life: Maybe I should have been in the writers’ room with her, coming up with last names and dates and locations. Maybe she needed me to truly be with her, to feel the depths that made her tell all these lies in the first place. Maybe Ruth needed me just to bear witness.

Then again, I’m the one gone soggy because Ruth’s not here troweling up cracks with me. Maybe I’m making up Ruth’s reasons. Maybe I’m the only one who needs a witness.

We’ll never know. Neither of us can sit still that long.

TWENTY

Ruth

Sunday ice cream

Saturday chicken

Friday fresh fish

Thursday roast beef

Wednesday zooooup!

Tuesday spaghetti

Monday string beans

All you hungry children

Come and eat it up

As they crossed the state line, a chorus of children sang in Ruth’s head, accusing her: what had she fed her own, these last few days? Granted, the chorus was getting an awful imbalance of protein and a ton of starch, she couldn’t understand how the children in the song weren’t terribly constipated, but she hadn’t done much better for her own. She stopped at a gas station in Dillon, where she found a bag of dried cranberries in the snack aisle: the fruit group she could scratch off the list. She got back in the car and rattled the bag in front of Enix’s face. They seemed delighted.

“Mom,” they said. “Did you know they squeeze the juice out of these, then freeze them, then bring them back to room temperature, then inject the juice back in? No kidding. Ms. Moloney told us in biology. We’re eating food that’s died and been brought back to life. These berries are Han Solo.” They stuck out their tongue, revealing a mass of chewed cranberries. There were children who were old souls, Ruth thought. Hers wasn’t one of them.

But she was satisfied. She switched on the radio, caught the tail end of an NPR interview with Kate Winslet. Switched to Vail’s Hottest Hits, and watched Gene wince as she and Enix began to sing along to “Super Freaky Girl.” Elegant bitch with a ho glow, they sang, so loudly she felt the feedback in her own ears, so loudly that she saw it long before she heard it, the approaching police car. The revolving lights seemed so benign, there, in the bright light of day, but as the lights got closer, as they landed exactly in the center of her own rearview mirror, her heart stopped altogether. She had to remove one hand from the steering wheel and press it into her chest to ensure it was still beating.

Myron had warned her via text the night before, lefthandedly promising to have her prosecuted for abduction. As she slowed onto the shoulder she felt a current shooting down her thigh, and as the officer opened his door angrily and stomped forward, it spread around her calf like a piece of hot wire. She hadn’t yet put her car in park, and she thought of mashing her foot to the accelerator, leaving the officer choking on desert dust. But then she imagined him giving chase, imagining the convoy of cops who’d join the pursuit. She saw the metal teeth they’d litter onto the highway to puncture her tires, and she imagined one aspirational cop shooting them all, herself and then Gene and then Enix … she kept her foot on the brake. Put her car in reverse, and then park. The officer tapped on her window. She lowered it halfway.

“Well, howdy,” he said. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. His were transition lenses, though they weren’t transitioning well. Under the brim of his white cowboy hat she could still see his eyes, their blue coronas, their pinpoint pupils. He had a beer belly that challenged the bottom two buttons of his shirt, and a fuzz of mustache covering a jagged scar on his upper lip. “Do you know why I’m stopping you?” he asked.

She looked away. Prey never looked a predator in the eye. “I believe I do,” she said, “and I’d like a chance to explain.”

She pressed her eyes closed and tried to summon a tale. But the officer must have looked toward the back seat, he must have, because the next thing she heard was Gene’s voice. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “Allow me to apologize. We have to be in LA by tomorrow.”

The officer leaned closer to the car, peering in at Gene. “What the hell’s on fire in LA?” he said. “I clocked you going ninety-two in a seventy.”

Ruth’s heart unfastened its grip on itself, and the cord around her calf cooled. Myron hadn’t yet filed the alert, then. And she knew the cop wasn’t lying. After a lifetime of traveling five miles below any speed limit, of repairing her taillight the minute it died, the unpopulated roads of the American Southwest had lulled her into oblivion. She’d been exceeding the speed limit this entire trip. Freedom would do that to a person.

“My mother died,” said Gene. “We got to make the funeral. Been driving all night.”

The officer removed his hat. “My condolences,” he said. “And under the circumstances, I’m just going to give you a warning. Your license, ma’am? I’ll be right back with it.”

When he returned he handed her back the license atop a carbon copy citation. “Be careful out here,” he said. “And again, my sympathies.”

“Thank you,” Ruth told him. “I did love my mother-in-law.”

It was Wendy who’d come home from driver’s ed and told Ruth how you’re supposed to take off ahead of the cop if you get stopped, but Ruth did no such thing. She felt the food rising up from her stomach, and she let the cruiser proceed into the distance. She didn’t open her door until she could no longer see it, and then she got out and tipped herself to the rear of her own car. She vomited, a pink stream of Fruit Punch Powerade mixed with undigested chunks of a gas station banana muffin. She’d been lucky, she thought, that Gene was with them, that there’d been a White man in the back seat to make the officer call them ma’am and sir. With Gene in tow, the officer had assumed they were all White. He’d released them. They were fish too small to eat.

And even if there were a description of her and Enix floating around apart from her license plate, she realized, the copy would have detailed them both as Black. White people rarely envisioned the scope of the Black diaspora; Myron’s description, in the White imagination, meant both she and Enix were as dark as one of the Cosby kids. The Five-O would never imagine them as redheads. They might be safer from Myron’s intentions than he supposed.

“You all right?” Gene said. He’d gotten out of the car waving a cigarette. He waited for her answer before he wandered off into the red Utah dirt.

She nodded. She could feel, on her feet, the points at which she’d splashed tiny drops of her stomach’s wild contents. But it felt good, so good, to purge herself of this past that had turned into the present.

Back in the car, back on the road, she ran down a list with Enix. “Always tell them you’re unarmed,” she said, and she was ashamed of herself, then, for not having done this before, given Enix the talk. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel the whole time,” she said. New items came to her as she drove: “Keep your license and registration in the sun visor so you don’t have to reach. Don’t roll your window down all the way. And don’t ever, ever ask why.”

“Above all, stay calm,” she said, about twenty miles from the stop. “Not all of them are killers,” but she realized Enix, with Gene, had fallen asleep. Under this cover of secrecy, she whispered, “They murdered your grandfather, you know. Shot him. Killed him like he was a dog. One day, I’ll tell you. Soon. I swear.”

She considered, as Enix dozed next to her, that they owned the plot. In full. This road trip might foreshorten the eighth grade, might lower their ACES score, but in the long run, it was Enix who most deserved this real estate, the unmanicured lawn of their mother’s past. “You’re the person I most want to tell,” she whispered, knowing that Enix would never hear it over Gene’s snoring, and the lullaby of the tires meeting the road.

That third day on the road, freedom again became a film of dirt. Ruth’s face felt greasy and her crotch itched when she shifted gears. She passed a dead hawk, its feathers fanning out of the shoulder gravel like the coils of a slinky, and she felt the heat of a shower calling for her. She stopped at a Pilot truck stop, where she put her name in queue and waited for the announcer to call her name over the store’s loudspeaker: Ruth Cottam. Bay Four. Gene had explained to her how it worked, how the showers were cleaner than you’d think, with tile flooring and scented soaps.

She’d stepped out of the stall feeling both cleaner and dirtier; somewhere between soaping her left arm and washing her hair, she’d wandered through a conjured forest of all the letters she’d received from Wendy, all of them discarded in the trash or better yet, in her active fireplace. She hadn’t recycled them, even, because she hadn’t wanted Myron to find them in the bin; they’d not gotten a chance to live another day as cardboard boxes or environmentally responsible toilet paper.

There’d been one Wendy had mailed from Venice, stamped Poste Italiane, that had made Ruth inordinately happy. Her sister had finally gotten there, then, to plush highlife. There’d been a photo with the letter, reprinted on cardstock: Wendy and two boys on a boat, a handsome gondolier in tight pants behind them, his arm crooked atop the boat’s curlicued dolphin. Someone had shot the photo from the boat’s bow, Ruth saw. Some husband, she guessed. Her very own brother-in-law, whom she’d never met, and she wished then, suddenly, furiously, that they could have a conversation. She told you about our family, she would have asked, and you stuck around this tragic girl anyway? Like, you never imagined it might rub off and stick? She built other questions, question upon question, an interrogative chain. But her thoughts dissolved at the end into something inarticulable, something that stuck in her mind only as How dare you?

When Forty-Six-Year-Old Ruth wandered through the thicket of letters, she was outraged at Forty-Five-Year-Old Ruth for not answering them. Mad at Forty-Three-Year-Old Ruth, and Thirty-Six-Year-Old Ruth, and Ruth-from-Every-Year-She’d-Rejected-Her-Own-Sister. She’d aimed to grow up to be Good-Person Ruth, but it hadn’t been until the moral crisis of Wendy’s multiple sclerosis showed up that she’d been willing to offer a proof. There were journeys you took only when you were a better person, she thought, and Younger-Adult Ruth hadn’t been principled enough to think beyond a Friday night.

But then Even-More-Adult Ruth wanted to extend some compassion. And Ruth-with-a-Teenager-of-Her-Own acknowledged that when she’d first dismissed Wendy from her life, she’d been nineteen. Heedless of the idea that one’s silence could harm another person. Younger Ruth had simply wanted to tuck away trauma. She hadn’t imagined that Wendy might need her, that the people all around her, too, skated on such thin emotional ice.

In the distance now, on either side of her piece of highway, were high mountains, standing in infinite wisdom, like elders who’d been reincarnated to stay there, watching over the evolution of humanity. They were millions of years old and it was only in the ancient times that you could be thus repurposed, Ruth thought; humans had gotten stupider since. Her proof: The only wisdom she could spitball, in the moment, was that she had thirty miles until her car needed another charge.

She and Enix had fought for hours that day, Enix begging her at each stop for a convenience store malt liquor. “You’re doing so much to me right now, Mom. I need a drink,” they said, and Ruth had knitted her fingers nervously against the steering wheel, because the child had a point. The last time Ruth had said no, Enix had gone mysteriously content. They sat in the back seat drinking a compromise, virginal 7Up, their AirPods curled around each of their ears, their hair burnished by sun into a special shade of rust. Ruth knew without looking that the shade belonged, in that moment, identically to her own hair. Same time of day, same sun, same hair: a genetic echo of the present.

Gene, too, had been a vexation. She’d spied him smoking that morning in the yard of a rest stop, and his eyes had blazed with anger when he saw her. He was like a cat caught pooping in a litter box, being caught out for what he was. Now, he sat quietly in the passenger seat, leaning over a Newsweek.

Ruth noted the increased barrenness of the passing desert, its conveyance of the drought that had made all this in the first place. It would unmake the world again soon enough, she thought, if it wasn’t fire first, or unending rain. But here she was in the twenty-first century, in her air-conditioned Tesla, Alice Merton singing angrily into the air. Ruth’s family had never owned that kind of car. They’d kept a series of beat-up station wagons, cars whose sunroofs leaked around the edges when it rained, cars that sometimes dripped oil or threw a rod, cars they could all pile into on their way to Muir Woods, so long as they prayed. Ruth wondered whether her parents had ever watched their children in the back seat and thought, We’re all safe. If so, it had been a delusion.

Night fell across the desert and the view beyond changed from the revelation of full color to the guesswork of shadow. Ruth pressed her radio’s scan button and caught the tail end of “Tainted Love,” the part where the chord structure changed and the song became “Where Did Our Love Go.” She was halfway between Elko and Winnemucca, where she hoped to find a hotel for the night. Getting ever closer to Reno, where they’d meet the part of Nevada that became the High Sierras, and then the state of California beyond. In the cover of night, hit by the car’s low beams, the white dashes of highway median dulled. I-80 became not so much road but so much time, time that wove and dipped like a bird.

Already, they’d met palm trees, and though it was still the desert, Ruth had seen that they were real palm trees turned somehow pink, injected with dye to make them toxically neon. “How do you think they got that way?” she’d asked Enix. “You think they put pink dye into the soil? Or do you think they put it in the leaves?”

Enix had looked over at Ruth with something akin to a glare but not quite, something blank and jaded.

“Did something happen on Snapchat?” Ruth asked.

Enix looked back through the windshield. “No, Mom. Something’s happened between us.”

Now, Enix dozed. Their mouth hung inches open. The innards of their throat zagged under the volume of the car radio. Please don’t leave me all by myself was such a different lyric from Sometimes I feel I’ve got to. Run away. Ruth wanted to shove Enix to wakefulness and tell them.

He’d been born sickly, her brother, spitting up his food even as a toddler, tearing the ligaments of his ankle while doing normal childhood things, like playing dodgeball or jumping on a trampoline. At school, he peered through his thick glasses to decipher letter combinations he’d never quite learn to decode. Their pediatrician, kind, cartoon-voiced Dr. Malone, had left the room one day after listening to Russell’s heart at a routine appointment, only to return, ten minutes later, with a referral to Jewish Hospital. Jewish sent Russell up the chain to Packard: Packard sent him to Mayo, where Ruth learned sitting on I-90 in a rental car, with Cora humming mournfully in the front seat, that traffic could move slowly enough for starlings to swoop down and roost on the median.

Nowhere, it turned out, could anyone find an answer. “We must enjoy Russell as long as we can,” her father said, one night after Russell turned up short of breath after a simple walk up the stairs. “We can’t possibly know how much longer we have with him.”

Still, the end came with a suddenness that surprised all of them. It had started after school on a Monday, a day Ruth initially relived more often than she liked, with a certain ringing at the base of her skull that told her that to recall was to open a void, to push herself into the jaws of a bulldozer. When she gave in to the past she felt, each time, the school bus seat sticking to her sweaty bottom; she saw Russell boarding, climbing the steps with his empty backpack, finding her three rows back, in the seat they always shared. “My head hurts,” he’d told her, as he slid his hips in alongside hers. “It hurts real bad.” The only thing that changed, in Ruth’s reliving it, was that each time, she felt even more scorched with regret at having said nothing to her brother then, not having hugged him or touched his head: It had seemed to her, that afternoon, not like a medical emergency so much as another afternoon of malaise.

By the time the bus turned into their neighborhood, Russell was crying. “I want to lick the cold, cold floor,” he told Cora when he cleared the front door. Cora gave him an aspirin and sent him to bed, but not even an hour later, Wendy passed his room and heard him taking shallow, desperate breaths. “For the love of God,” she screamed downstairs. “You can’t hear him? One of you people needs to call a fucking ambulance.” Ruth had run upstairs after Wendy screamed; she’d touched Russell there in his bed, and instantly knew. He was ready to leave them.

Though she couldn’t possibly have known the details, the way the surgeons would repair his ruptured aorta in a nine-hour surgery that would, even after insurance, bankrupt them; that post-surgery, he’d linger on in the hospital for thirty-nine of the longest hours imaginable opening his eyes every so often to register them all as they hid behind one another like a Fosse frame, speaking what they hoped were soothing words. “It’s okay, Russ,” Cora said. “We love you forever.”

But what good would their loving him or wishing for him do, Ruth thought, as he rocketed off to the frightening realm that lay beyond life? She hadn’t been confident that Russell was even looking at them, there in his bed, because his eyes were composed of nothing save sheer, shimmering terror. “He’s at peace now,” her mother said that Wednesday, when she had the school office call Ruth out of her French class to speak on the telephone. But Ruth wondered if he wasn’t. At the funeral, as they lowered the casket down into upper earth, Ruth felt that if it suddenly fell open, what she’d be looking at was the fear in her brother’s wide-set eyes.

Which is what had made the Christmas card from Sacramento so cruel, though Wendy couldn’t have known that Ruth had put them all so squarely away. She couldn’t have known that looking at her brother’s eyes, all these years later, had turned Ruth’s toes and fingertips cold. That Ruth’s husband, whom Wendy had never met, would see the card first, and recognize Young Ruth as captured on Kodak paper, that he’d inquire about the other two children in the photo, that each millisecond of his query would lower her body temperature by half a degree, until her feet and then her calves felt like blocks of ice. She ripped the photo in two, tossed it in the bin, and stood shivering, numb in places, hoping Myron would just shush, be quiet. Her family’s bad luck was none of his business. Being caught in the truth would be so much worse than being caught in the lie.

Ruth felt herself sink into sadness now, driving through small-town Nevada toward a supercharger, past parents walking their intact, happy children through shop doors. She saw, hurrying across a crosswalk, a young girl with her rich, shiny hair cut into a Dora the Explorer–style wedge; the girl held tight to their mother’s hand as they ran, the knot of their hands swinging aloft, and the bridge of Ruth’s nose warmed. This mother might have known small, quotidian sadness, sure, but her daughter was whole. For people like Ruth, distant memory was a cache under an Olympic-sized pool of grief, filled with years they’d not let themselves relive. She felt it physically now, as she merged onto the interstate, as an electric spark in her fingertips made her loosen her grip on the steering wheel.

After Russell’s death, Wendy had grown even nastier. More uncooperative. “You can’t even keep your son alive,” she told Cora, when she confronted Wendy about her report card. “How the hell are you trying to give me parental guidance?” Ruth remembered her watching her remove her retainer one morning in their shared bathroom, and being astonished at what a tiny bit of plastic it was, coming out of Wendy’s big mouth. Just a very small arc, holding all of Wendy in at night.

The dead kid’s family, they’d become at the hospital. At church, they were the dead kid’s family. At school. At the supermarket. On the bus, she’d be the dead kid’s sister. Her father would be the dead kid’s dad. The dead kid’s mom. The dead kid’s bicycle. The dead kid’s books. The dead kid.

She decided by nightfall that she wouldn’t let Russell’s death hem her in as one thing or another. Going forward, moving on to new situations in life, she told no one. In the Public Cosmology of Ruth, she had no siblings. My parents always wanted another kid, she’d tell people. She’d unravel this half-truth: They desperately wanted a son. By the time she met Myron, both her parents had passed on, young, in their fifties. After she lost Wendy, it had been easy to simply omit the information. She erased it so cleanly from the part of her mind that accessed language, Russell became present only as a figure of cellular memory, almost completely missing until she became pregnant with Annie, and then what had come to her was that none of it had been her parents’ fault. All those years they’d blamed themselves for a trick of genetics, for what she found out later, after science began to reveal all the new diseases, was a missing chromosomal period. A tiny hiccup of nature that had cost her family everything.

When, in her first trimester of pregnancy, she thought of Russell sitting propped against the bleached pillows in his very last hospital bed, looking dead already, neither opening nor closing his eyes, her palms began to sweat. And when Annie turned six, and Ruth marked her height on the kitchen wall as 4’10”, which was one inch shorter than Russell had been when he died, her heart began to race.

As it did now. She could never have imagined this present day, in the new millennium, when she’d comb through profiles on Facebook and find her own sister there under the search bar, smiling wearily at the camera, or the pang she felt clicking on that photo because doing so would spring the latch on that broiling dimension of grief. She couldn’t have imagined this time even later than that, when she thought of the disease scarring her sister’s brain and wonder at how late in life she’d decided to make good. She couldn’t have imagined the feeling that the 840 revolutions per minute of her tires weren’t propelling her fast enough. She couldn’t have imagined a time when she’d completely lost contact with Wendy, a universe wherein if her sister, her one and only sister, stumbled across a room and fell, she could not be there to pick her up.

She found the exit the GPS was directing her toward, the supercharger station a promising dot, but she could see already that the exit’s other side didn’t lead directly back to the highway. The car would get her back, she guessed—it always did—but it would be one more detour. Warmth flushed her cheeks. Brittled its way down her legs, into the bones of her feet.

TWENTY-ONE

Myron

Myron was learning.

The smaller lessons he was gathering had come to him over the years in small moments of Ruth, inconsistencies of fact and temperament and history, installments of truth he’d ignored to suit his own needs.

The larger lesson was coming to him fast, so fast his learning curve felt like the outer loop of a shuttle-tracked roller coaster. His wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, had killed her own past in a way he found stunning. Neither her truth nor any other held fast. He put eggs in for scrambling but they hardened into an omelet as he stared at them, thinking about her. In a second pan he spooned dollops of a zucchini mix he’d made and refrigerated the night before; they were ingredients he’d copied from a New York Times recipe, ingredients he’d intended. But the cakes were crumbling now in the oil, falling apart just like his life.

He’d gone to a second session at McNeely Lake, from which he’d emerged dripping deathy cold; he’d driven to Paulina’s because her house was closer. In the foyer, she peeled off his wet clothes; he then backed her across the carpet, his penis gone hard and airborne, and made her remove hers. Her shorts and panties, she dropped in one smooth move. She unbuttoned her shirt and tossed it across the living room—it sailed. They held hands as they ran up her stairs, where he unfastened her bra and crawled into bed with her, but when his legs made contact with hers he found this: Knowing Ruth for such an archly complicated person now made him less attracted to Paulina. Paulina was happy no matter what, like a puppy.

She’d left Rinehart with a friend in order to accommodate Myron’s allergies, she told him, as he pulled the sheet up around them both. The gift was permanent, she said—if they got serious, she didn’t want to confuse Rinehart by making him go back and forth. And she knew even the smallest bit of dog hair would set off Myron’s lungs. “Rinehart was a good season in my life,” she said. “We had good times. I let him go in peace and joy.” She’d be just as evergreen happy, just as full of smiles and platitudes and Iyanla Vanzant, if he dumped her. He knew this already, and so he didn’t feel guilty in advance of his not feeling guilty. Paulina was an emotional drawbridge he’d lowered in order to exit his marriage.

Enix had told him over the telephone, in a hasty call they made from a rest area bathroom in Utah. “Dad,” they whispered. “It’s Enix.”

He’d answered them from sleep, as he’d been midafternoon napping with his upper body pressed against Paulina’s and his phone on the sheet between them. The phone’s insistent vibration against the mattress had woken him, and when he reached over and picked it up he saw his child’s new name flashing across the top of his blue screen: Enix. He thought, after all these days with only the briefest of texts between them, that he might be dreaming their voice into being. “Anniebean,” he said. “Is this really you?”

They hissed like bus brakes. “Shhhhhhh. I mean shh. I’m in a toilet stall—it echoes. I don’t know if Mom followed me in the building, so shh. She might be in the lobby. And no, this isn’t Anniebean anymore. It’s Enix. Dad.”

“Sorry. Where are you?”

“Utah. The other side of Salt Lake. Did you cancel my orthodontist’s appointment?”

“Wait—you’re all the way in Utah, and this is your worry?” Though he loved their sense of ethics. They’d already outmatured their mother. “You sound fine,” he said, trying hard, very hard, to sound aloof. It was the way with a teenager, he’d learned—if you wanted to know a thing, you had to act like you didn’t. “And since you sound fine, I’m just going to assume that you are. What are you guys doing there,
in Utah?”

“Well, first of all, Dad, get a load of this. She’s not at all who she says she is. I mean, her name’s Ruth. Well, maybe her name is Ruth. I don’t know anymore. But like I said, she’s been lying to us about everything else. Like, everything.”

Enix told him about Bob Bradley’s girlfriend, and about traveling toward Rosalind, and what more Ruth had told them about Wendy and Russell, Donnie and Cora. They told him about the Hollywood Supper Club, how none of it had ever happened. “Well, I mean it happened to those hundred and sixty-five people,” they said. “But not to Mom’s parents.” They told him about Gene, the way they’d walked out of their hotel one morning and discovered he’d been sleeping all those nights atop Ruth’s Tesla, spread out across its glass roof. They told him about Ruth’s endless snapping of photos, how two thousand miles had stretched into a four-day photographic adventure, and how Ruth kept the Canon hanging from her neck sometimes even while driving, how they’d sometimes make it only thirty miles before Gene would request a smoke break, how Ruth would then hop out of the car to snap yet one more photo of one more herd of cattle, grazing beneath the mythic western sky.

Enix’s words were muffled enough by their attempt at low tones that he couldn’t make out every word; he pressed the phone into his ear and felt the warmth of its innards as it connected with poor tower strength. Enix was quiet enough that Paulina still lay sleeping, her hair falling over her eyes in a way that made it impossible to see anything but her nose and her lips in profile against the pillow. That morning, they’d had a round of magnificent sex, sex like two high schoolers might lather into being, and he wanted to text Ruth and tell her about it, tell her he was finally being served properly, but the better part of him knocked the worse part of him aside. The truth of his body would always be the truth of Ruth’s, for the rest of his life amen. He already knew that. Even if the rest of her was a far worse lie than the one he wanted to tap into the phone.

He wanted to flick Paulina’s hair aside, shake her awake, ask her whether all women were such liars. Ask her what she’d already lied to him about that very day. He rose from her bed and walked across the room. Pulled the phone away from his ear, noted the two bars out of five, put it back. He imagined radiation pouring the proverbial quarter inch into his brain. “And holy shit,” Enix said. “Dad, this will blow your mind. Dad, this might hurt you. It has hurt me a lot. I can barely wrap my mind around it—”

But then they broke to silence.

“Hello?” he whispered. He felt like a criminal. “Anni—Enix?”

“She’s in here,” they whispered, converting back to air brakes. “Gotta go.” And they hung up.

He stood with his back against Paulina’s bedroom wall, watching her sleep, the sound of helicopter blades passing over her house. He’d had a daughter all those years; suddenly, he did not. And while it had long been his fantasy to have a son, to have someone to instruct in the ways of knotting ties and aiming at urinals, it was ticking in his mind like a bomb, that his kid would be going away to college in four years, that parenthood was almost over. Now, Ruth was taking away even that short bit of time. Involuntarily sometimes his body walked itself to the smaller second bedroom of his apartment to ask Enix if they wanted pizza for dinner, isn’t that, ha ha, what divorced dads fed their kids, but then he’d find their room empty and in a gush of anguish, he’d remember.

After two days of texts, Enix’s voice had been the most brilliant gift. And now it looked like it might be a day like Christmas, because Paulina was warming the shaft of his penis with her gentle, shea-softened hands, and he hadn’t even known she was awake but she pushed herself up, slung a leg over his body to straddle him.

“Hey,” she said. He felt the tingly ache of blood rushing to his dick for the second time since daybreak. He’d led himself to believe, during his marriage, that the march of old age had stopped his back-to-back sexual capabilities, but Paulina had proved this false. “Hey,” she said again. She leaned over so that her nipples were right in his face: He’d long gathered that she’d long since gathered that he was a breast man too. She kissed him high on the forehead, very near to the vulnerable centimeters of his receding hairline. He grabbed her hips, and she moved over his groin, gently grazing the lip of his foreskin. “Hey,” she said again, raising her hips in the air. “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“For you? Anything.”

She brought her hips back down, straightening her back so that her breasts perked back up into airspace. She looked like a Maidenform, jutting out from the prow of a ship. She kneaded his bicep, tilted her head so that her hair fell down and covered an aureole. Definitely and detrimentally, she knew he was a breast man. “Come to my cousin’s wedding this Saturday?” she said. “I need a date.”

“Of course,” he said, and truly, it wasn’t the problem it would have been when he was twenty and skirting romantic stability. “I’d be your date any day of the week. I mean. I think I’m your date. We are dating, aren’t we?”

“Well,” she said, tossing her head so that her torso became a straightened column. She was making small motions with her hips. He wanted to preserve the minutes, hold on to the feeling she was making.

She maneuvered herself so that the very tip of his dick was lodged in the folds of her labia. He felt himself beating in time. “What do you want me to wear?” he asked her. His voice broke.

And then she was lazily smiling, kissing him; they both moved, stretching and stretching the rubber band at the base of his brain until it snapped loose, flying across the sky. He felt his own semen, warm and sticky inside her. Then he wondered, because if they’d gotten to this stage of raw, condomless trust already, what further things might she expect? The thought sat on a stool in his mind.

Paulina rolled off of him and went to the bathroom, and in the sound of water tinkling onto her shower’s sandstone floor, in the high timbre of her happy humming, he heard that he was being ridiculous. He couldn’t place the tune she was making, but he was musically literate enough to recognize it as Broadway. This sex with Paulina was so different from the foreordained routine he and Ruth had endlessly rehearsed over the years, the stale beat of his asking if she wasn’t too tired, the familiar bodily motions they made in order for Ruth to come, the cloud of resentment that hovered over them afterward. Why shouldn’t he want Paulina’s lazy smiles and biblical peace? What, in the years of his fraught marriage, had made him feel that happiness was too pedestrian? If his mother were still alive, she’d be asking him if he had one lick of sense. Paulina was a partner at her law firm. She had a timeshare in Destin. His mother would be telling him he ought to stay with Paulina for the rest of his life.

“Dinner?” Paulina said, rolling back into bed next to him. She smelled of her soap, which was called Honey and Milk but smelled like soap.

“I can’t possibly do that again.”

“No, I mean really, dinner. Literal dinner. Food. We’ve been lying here for hours. Even porn stars eat on set. What kind of thing are you in the mood for?”

And it was that simple. They’d order dinner, he’d tip the Grubhub driver, or she would, and then he’d go back to the Aspen, or he wouldn’t. There was no joint savings account, no cosignatory, no blank in the beneficiary space on his life insurance policy. No second credit card account, no additional car on his auto insurance, no second name on Annie’s birth certificate. No matching platinum band, no third- and fourth-filled drawer in the antique dresser that had been his first. No majority share in his walk-in closet. Paulina might not have been the truth of his truth, but she was a fresh, happy slate. Clean as spring grass.

TWENTY-TWO

Ruth

In the quiet air of West Arizona, Ruth heard the motor on her Nikkor D make its slight shift toward autofocus. The sparse demographics held so little interstate traffic; the rock-drowned soil fed so few species of chattering bird. Wind didn’t exist; only heat, and heat was soundless. Ruth shot her photos, feeling each revolution of her camera’s motor as a cathedral of meditation. Everyone, she thought, took photos of their children and their puppies, photos on their birthdays, and at weddings, and at girls’ night out at TGI Fridays. Only people like her were documenting the way objects, through their sharp angles and raw colors, washed hope bare.

Back out West after so many years, she was stealth-focusing on shots of sad men pumping gas, or women in threadbare jeans walking out of casinos. She wondered at the way a mind could be exposed in pixels, the way unhappy souls fed their own emptiness. She was thrilled to be in the desert, absorbing the brine of scorched animals and peat turned to sediment. She heard her Nikkor whir one last time as she captured the promontory hanging over the man-made lake at which she’d stopped, closed her eyes, and smiled.

The night before, she’d succumbed to a Zoom invite from her coworker Lisa Jenkins, who’d taken a call from Martin Stavins’s daughter and had questions. On entering the window, Lisa’s voice came apart from her image in Daliesque distortion. “Are you ever coming back to work?” Lisa had asked.

Her voice was masked reverb, as if she were too close to a hot mike, and it took Ruth a long minute to understand what had been said, but eventually she answered. “Sure,” she lied. “I just need a few days. It’s nearing the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fire that killed my parents, and reporters have been calling. It’s just been a hard time.” She was happy for the way the story could suddenly be of concrete.

“I’m so sorry,” Lisa said. “I know it’s hard.”

“I’m good,” Ruth said, putting a hard chirp in her voice. “But here’s the deal with Martin Stavins—they just removed half his foot. Gangrene. Diabetes. He needs a compassionate release. You could file a motion? He’s sick enough. His mother said so, a million times. High blood sugar, low blood sugar, kidney failure, the whole nine interrelated yards. And that kid who keeps calling? Where is she calling from?”

“Group home.”

“So she’s an orphan now. And we can’t let the state ruin another kid’s life. Not on our watch.” Ruth watched Lisa shift uncomfortably in the Zoom window, look down at her lap as if reading a commandment. Ruth imagined Stavins filming her father’s murder, filming Korryn Gaines’s, and Breonna Taylor’s, filming all these executions in a line all the way back to the first slave patrols. Stavins was a hero. He needed to be back out there, maintaining order, stopping the state. Her father was with her now. He said amen. “I have a brother who died too,” Ruth said. She didn’t understand why this non sequitur had flown out of her mouth, but she saw Lisa sit in closer attention.

“Dear Lord,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Not really, no,” Ruth said. She looked directly into her laptop’s camera. “He died thirty years ago,” she said. “He was ten years old.” She was derailing things, and she wasn’t sorry. “Oh and also, I have a sister named Wendy. I haven’t spoken to her in twenty years, but I can guarantee you she’s not okay, either.” Ruth felt her face redden. Lisa took a long swig from a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew that had been sitting somewhere off camera. Her throat moved in large gulps.

“I’ll let you go now,” Ruth said.

Ruth clicked the Leave Meeting button and flipped her laptop closed. She was satisfied, deeply so. If no one knew her real story, then no one had ever truly seen her. Without one real thing to tell, she’d been walking the earth as a haunt.

It was her fourth evening on the road, and she thought about taking another shower. She didn’t feel that she needed one, but she could also smell that one wouldn’t hurt. She felt this sudden electric prickle about Myron, that she’d never once, in fifteen years, smelled his filth. She projected this olfactory still—Myron dressed for work, fogged slightly in fresh aftershave and shoe polish—but she couldn’t stop this fault of memory, that it so involuntarily flicked to the newest, rawest emotion. The carousel stopped on Myron’s new, postdivorce hours at the gym, all the New Marital Status New Me bullshit Enix had flashed at her from Myron’s Instagram, and the cardboard dividers in her brain went soggy. It was like being Lot’s wife. She’d looked back and become the very salt she was rubbing into her wound.

She wouldn’t send him another text, not ever, though recalling his new muscles, she had to battle herself not to. The next morning, when she availed herself of the rest stop bathroom just past Winnemucca, she left her phone in the car. The facilities had declined in quality the farther west they’d traveled, and this one housed only two stalls and smelled faintly of fecal matter. Water pooled in the recesses of the brown stucco floor, and when she passed the first stall, she discovered why: Its cracked tank lay on the floor in three jagged shards, and several bullet holes were lodged in the time-yellowed seat and its accompanying lid. She counted six holes in all. Someone had shot a toilet. Someone had taken angry satisfaction in the sound of breaking porcelain, the sight of water sloshing out of the bowl. Counting the shot that had shattered the tank, she saw that someone had shot a toilet seven times.

She looked closer and found that the gunwoman had shot an eighth and a ninth set of holes in the bowl itself, springing leaks deep down its drain, where things would never heal. This toilet was right here before her, leaking to death. The state of Nevada would simply have to come and remove it. All the effort the world put into its own preservation, all the ways people held tightly to themselves and their own flawed system of ethics, yet here someone had gone and shot a toilet. The Wild West, she wondered. Where America had always gone to lose itself.

At a WinCo just outside Sparks, they stopped to charge. They’d just passed through a time of day Ruth always thought of as sundrunk, when the sun’s proximity to the equator strengthened its portraiture. Enix had hit a clot of sadness in the middle of Melanie Martinez’s new album and cried themselves to sleep; Ruth had let them, reaching over occasionally with her non-driving hand to tuck a small blanket farther between Enix’s shoulder and the seat. Now Enix snored, heavily. Ruth made a mental note to have their tonsils checked somewhere in California, in some picturesque mountain town.

Near the charging station a woman—or perhaps a girl—sat on the curb. She wore a fringed leather jacket in eighty-degree heat, and her Doc Martens had sprung a hole over her left toe. Her face was wind-chapped in a way that obscured her age: She could have been seventeen or she could have been fifty. Her hair, dyed a deep purple, didn’t aid in the determination. The girl noticed Ruth noticing her and rose. Came to tap Ruth’s car window. Ruth cracked it.

“Aw, come on, lady,” the girl said, stepping back, spreading her arms in surrender. “I ain’t gonna kill ya. Not here in the parking lot, anyway.”

Embarrassed at her own conservative leanings, Ruth fully lowered her window. She checked the way the sunlight illuminated the girl’s neck, noted the small pebbles and hollows of her skin. This girl was a woman, Ruth decided. She’d definitely crossed the bridge.

“Got any cash?”

Ruth couldn’t help herself: She cackled. “In honesty,” she said, “I have none to spare.”

The woman leaned in closer. She smelled like cigarettes and beer and other murky, indeterminate sins. She looked at Ruth in a penetrating way. “You’re sitting here in this fancy car, with that silk shirt on, and you got ‘none to spare.’” She said “none to spare” in a nasty way, and Ruth found a certain gall rising within herself, that this White girl, this girl whose brother probably hadn’t died in childhood, whose mother hadn’t then died of a heart attack, whose father hadn’t then been gunned down by the state apparatus of this country, that this young woman who seemed still to be making her own wrong choices, would insist that Ruth, who’d overcome so much, owed her even one penny.

But she wanted, too, for this woman to take her offending odor and leave, so she scraped in her cupholder, found a dollar-fifty’s worth of dimes and quarters, and dumped it in the woman’s hand. As she rolled up her window she felt the woman still standing there, staring. She refused to acknowledge her presence. Turned to Gene.

He shrugged. “Where are you going, anyway?” he asked. “You’ve never really said. I get the feeling you just threw a dart on a map, but then you threw a second and a third. I think you throw a new dart every day, doncha?”

Ruth sighed, looked out the windshield. In the distance she saw that the panhandling woman had removed her boots and held them dangling by their joined laces from one hand, her weathered purse swinging below them. “I’m going to California. I’ve decided that maybe I love my sister. But I won’t know until I get there.”

“You won’t know whether you love your own sister? Whatsit she did to you?”

Ruth had told Gene nothing about her family of origin because he hadn’t asked, but she felt now a stabbing pressure in her retina. “It’s not that. Not anything she did. I just can’t decide what love is.”

She got out and unplugged the charger, then got back on the highway, headed west. In the back seat Enix had slept through the whole stop, and Ruth was grateful. In Winnemucca, Ruth had let them drive around a parking lot for an hour. Energized by this promise of a future, Enix had stayed awake most of the night, marveling when they liked the same music (Duran Duran), tutting that they were both craving the wrong food (sauerkraut), and questioning whether they both missed the same people (Dad, Ruth lied, and said yes). Ruth determined to allow Enix more illegal activities, if that’s what got them to open up. Once they got to California, she figured, she’d buy them that beer.

“Love,” Gene said, looking away from Ruth to the open road. He raised his eyebrows and whistled at the size and complication of the concept. “Love.” Miles passed before he spoke again. “Ain’t love just getting somebody? And having another person get you?”

“I get Amy Winehouse. I don’t love her.”

“Is it respecting someone, even if you don’t agree with them?”

“I don’t love Joe Biden.”

“Well, what is it?” Gene asked. “What could love possibly be?”

“Maybe it’s … knowing someone has your back. Knowing you can be yourself in front of them. Knowing they deeply know you, and still, they’ll be there when things turn to shit.”

“Well. You were here for me this week, Ruth. You got me all the way out here from Arkansas.”

“Do you think I love you?”

“Maybe, for a minute, you decided to. And maybe when you get to your sister? You’ll love her, too. You might not know, but you’ll choose to.”

Enix’s voice came like an explosion between them. “Mom, I am done smoking this bitch.”

“What bitch where?”

“Christa. She just Airdropped a picture of me crying. Mom. I was crying on Facetime. I was crying to her, over her, and she took a shot of it and dropped it to like everyone in fourth period. And then she put text under it. Dis bitch got a honker when she cries. Mom. She is not even treating me like a human. Wait, Mom. Can we switch to my phone and put on Billie Eilish? Wait, though. You know what Christa will never treat me like a human. I’m just one of her games. I’m a game on Christa’s phone.”

Ruth switched the car’s audio to Enix’s Magical Music Machine, and let Billie Eilish lead her child in venomous rhyme. Enix belted “Happier Than Ever” with zeal, as if the lyrics had taken form and come to life in their body. But their pitch was off, so off. Ruth should have put her in voice lessons. It was one more parental failure.

She remembered a day when she and Wendy had been little kids at the Rosalind City Pool, a day they swam for what felt like years, but couldn’t have been more than an hour. Ruth had been little enough to swallow chlorine, and as she toweled off, her belly had felt distended by the volume of it. Cora had given Wendy five dollars for the snack bar, and Wendy had bought them both hot dogs. The nitrates hit the chlorine just right in Ruth’s stomach, she remembered; that particular bun and that particular mayonnaise had been the best food she’d ever tasted. All these years later, she remembered how Wendy had seen the yearning on her face when she’d finished. Ruth hadn’t said anything. Wendy took the rest of the money and bought her a second hot dog.

Everything could turn to shit all over again, and this time, it would be fine. She wouldn’t leave again.

Gene stayed with them until Carson City, at which point he got out at a Denny’s, claiming he needed to use the men’s room, and disappeared. Ruth might have known—he’d taken his banjo. She and Enix took turns walking the perimeter of the restaurant and standing outside the men’s room door, asking strangers whether Gene was within, possibly sick and slumped in a corner. Ruth walked along the serving counter, turned chairs as if doing so might make him materialize. She moved to the front door and stood with her nose an inch from the glass, wrote his name in the film of vapor her breath made. The moisture receded but there it was still, G-E-N-E, a greasy series she knew would hold until the door was next Windexed. She pushed through, to the spring heat beyond.

“Gray hair and a beard,” she heard Enix telling the driver of an eighteen-wheeler with the Dollar General logo on it. Enix was standing on their tiptoes, shouting up into the cab of the truck. The driver shook his head. “It’s a bathroom the size of a doghouse in there,” he said. “Woulda seen him. You sure y’all ain’t makin’ this up?”

Both Ruth and Enix wondered at how Gene had escaped—what trick door had he used? With whom had he caught a ride? And when had they themselves not been looking, watching the front door for him to return? Neither of them dared ask the question drifting in the stale air of springtime: Why? Why had he wanted to leave them? They looked to the field of dandelions adjacent to the restaurant, but they didn’t look for Gene. He hadn’t even performed. Just tuned them all up for it.

An hour they stayed, until the sun started to shift toward the omen of evening, and then Ruth went into her trunk and removed his suitcase. It was old, sharkskin-covered plastic, and when she lifted it she found it weighed nothing, it was as if she were picking up a cat, or a baby. She unzipped it and found dirty underwear, a fake book of Beatles songs, and a Ziploc bag half filled with weed. She removed the nickel bag and stuffed it in her jacket pocket. Walked the suitcase to the edge of the parking lot, then tossed it into the dandelions. She hoped no one had seen her. It wasn’t a proper thing, she’d done. Denny’s wasn’t a place you left someone’s life.

TWENTY-THREE

Myron

Myron knows there are parents whose children have died in hospitals. Whose children have been snatched out of their beds in the middle of the night as if by aliens, kidnapped in one country and sold in the next. He’s not in that kind of shape, because he can still call or text Enix anytime he wishes. And hey, he knew judges—if he really wanted to blow all this into a big, hot mess, he could put out the alert, have Ruth arrested, make it so that she’d never see Enix again. He has no call to feel anything like a permanent sense of loss. That there’s something new about life you want to show your children every single day. Things you want your children to show you.

He and Paulina have met up with Anthony a second time, for a Wednesday night happy hour on Paulina’s back porch, where Anthony sat a requisite safe distance from both of them, in an uncoupled metal porch chair. “Damn, girl, you smokin’,” he said, before he’d even cleared the side gate. He walked up the eight stairs to the patio and air-kissed Paulina on both cheeks: Myron couldn’t believe he had such bad sense. He sat down and began to talk about his most recent Tinder match. “She’s fit,” he told them, sliding his beer bottle across the table between his hands, as if it were a hockey puck. He looked at the bottle’s label and grinned as if his girlfriend’s nude body were painted on it. “She’s especially fit down there,” he said. He looked at Paulina. Winked. “Kegels.”

Myron winced. Being promoted to the C-suite had solidified Anthony’s poor taste: The bigger the fish, the more mercury within. And his crudeness had never been halved by the presence of a woman, but somehow doubled. “Mixed company, brother,” Myron said, but Paulina was laughing in a careful, practiced way that suggested she’d long since accepted life in this nation of pussy gropers. Myron blushed to realize that his ex-wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, would have slapped Anthony hard enough to leave a handprint.

He’d never repeat Anthony’s words if he got Enix back, but he would tell them this: Don’t go out with a man who says nothing while he’s watching you be less than you are. Don’t go out with a man who can’t find your edge. Don’t go out with a man who knows he’ll never be in love with you. Don’t go out with a man who’ll always love his ex-wife more.

By the time Enix called again, the quality of their voice had changed. It was a sandier voice Myron heard, a voice that had digested trouble of some sort and carted it inward. “Dad,” it said. “Dad, can you talk right now?”

Enix wasn’t whispering, but he’d gotten so used to whispering back to them, he did. “Enix, there will never be a time, not in all your life, that I can’t talk to you,” he said, careful not to let his voice rise to its normal volume.

Paulina was napping on the sofa next to him, the ravages of dinner lying on his coffee table, the Chinese takeout order, its tangle of lo mein strung over adjacent box flaps. Across the room, from the confines of a decorative iron cage, sang the male of his pair of canaries. After Ruth’s first interrogatory he’d bought Mister and Celie in an attempt to fill the silence of his apartment, and Mister had delivered immediately, singing so much and so loudly that Myron had taken to draping a tablecloth over the cage at night. Mostly, though, he’d grown used to the noise, and he supposed Paulina had as well, since it no longer woke her.

He had an arm laid over her stomach now, and he thought for the hundredth time how much trimmer Paulina was there than Ruth. He thought about Ruth’s swollen, middle-aged, once-pregnant belly, that she mostly had come to hide from him. The belly he saw occasionally, when he slid the shower door open and saw her wanding her mascara, the belly she’d grown to hate and fight over the decades they’d spent together, the belly about which he’d told her to relax. Much to his horror, Celie had laid a clutch of eggs shortly after the birds’ arrival. He opened the top of the cage each afternoon to allow them free flight, but Celie never left her eggs. Mister hopped across the perch to her assistance, regurgitating seeds into her mouth. It was a sturdy and solid little bird marriage they had going. He wondered if Celie ever thought of just flying away.

“You don’t have to whisper,” Enix said, “because Mom’s not in the car.”

“Sure thing.” He unspooned himself from Paulina’s body and rose from the couch. “Let’s talk normal,” he said at an ordinary pitch, over Mister’s evening song. “You still there?”

He heard Enix sniffle.

“Annie June, what is it?” he said. “Everything okay?”

“Enix! And no, Dad. Nothing’s okay. My own mother has kidnapped me. I’m sick of eating cheeseburgers. And Mom just rear-ended a Ferrari.”

“A what?”

“Yeah, I know. It’s so Mom. She couldn’t just hit a Nissan. It’s a Ferrari. Or at least it was. It was a beautiful fucking Ferrari.”

“Enix, baby. Your mouth.”

But this made them fall into crying in a way he’d never quite heard them cry. It was adult crying. More sharp intakes of breath than actual sound.

“Say whatever you need to say, birdie. Get it all out, okay? I’ll listen. I can shut up and listen.”

“Okay. Sorry. She’s out there talking to the driver now. He’s, like, Pakistani or something. He looks pissed, Dad.”

Paulina had gotten up to start shoving the Chinese food cartons into one another like Russian nesting dolls. She scraped them all to the exact corner of the table and then leaned back into the sofa, bringing her legs into a curled position under her ass, as if she were a giant, nesting bird. Myron felt angry, too, at Ruth, but worried about her all at the same time. He felt sorry for her Jenga tower of lies, the way it was collapsing. He was almost angry at Enix, even. What he was feeling now wasn’t one long German word, but three. “Is Mom okay?” he asked. “I mean, this guy doesn’t look like he’ll shoot her or anything, does he?”

“Nothing like that. He’s just some little guy. Mom could take him. He doesn’t look threatening—just really, super pissed.”

“Well, I guess he is—it’s a fucking Ferrari,” Myron said, trying, and failing, to get a laugh out of them. “And is Mom okay okay?” he asked. “I mean, how’s her head these days?”

Enix laughed, a short, bitter blast. “Mom’s lost it. Obviously. But you’d be amazed at how functional a crazy person is. I mean she just keeps swiping her bank card and charging the car and smiling, tra-la-la, putting cities and hotel chains into her phone. She really likes La Quinta, Dad. We stayed in one last night. I can’t imagine how this is all going to end.”

“I doubt she can either, birdie. I don’t think Mom’s thinking too hard these days.”

Enix sniffled again, and their voice rose to something scalded. “Now they’re taking pictures of each other’s insurance cards,” they said. “The other guy’s got his phone out, but Mom’s using her million-dollar camera. Mom’s so crazy. Hey Dad, they’re not going to be much longer. I gotta go. But Dad, Dad, I want to come home. Can you please make that happen?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Dad, why are there birds singing in the background? Are you outside?”

He looked at the tent of Paulina’s legs against his thigh. She wiggled her feet under his knee. That morning, out of curiosity, he’d taken an egg out of the food bin, which Celie had repurposed for a nest. Celie’d gone crazy, rising up and down on her little bird legs, singing, singing. “It’s all going to be all right,” he told the phone now. “Keep your seatbelt buckled. And answer my texts.”

He got a missive an hour later, after Paulina had gone home, and he was clearing the smell of leftover takeout from his apartment. What a glory, he thought, as he walked to the dumpster, that he didn’t even know what trash day was at the Aspen, where its collection was someone else’s issue. He’d shoved his phone in his pocket; with his child kidnapped, he was on call, like a surgeon. He felt a buzzing against his thigh and he set the bags down on the curb to take out his phone and read. We’re in Placerville CA turns out something really wrong with car

Will research, he tapped, and he ran the trash to the dumpster like an NFL halfback. He reentered his apartment, sat before his laptop, and discovered that his kid was now on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas. How many mountain ranges away was that? He wanted to jump through the phone. He Googled. He Expediaed. He called American Airlines, talked to an agent whose voice was lost to a cold. You’re 45 minutes from the Sacramento airport, he texted Enix. I pay the extra 250 you fly as unaccompanied minor

He waited for another buzz, sitting tense at his kitchen table. He typed more text into his phone: Leave tomorrow you’ll be home Sunday

How do I get there

American arriving at Standiford

No dad the Sacramento airport how do I get there

He thought. Lyft? he texted. Install Lyft

Okay I need $

And he recognized the bad idea of putting his bank card number directly into digital airspace but fuck all those thieving hackers, he needed his kid back. He returned to his laptop, bought an airline ticket worth three of his billable hours. He couldn’t believe he’d have his kid home in less than twenty-four hours. It had been that easy. Yet in all the days Enix had been gone, it hadn’t occurred to either one of them.

Dad

Enix

When will I be home

2

Are you sure

You got somewhere to be?

There’s a dance it starts at 7

R u kidding me. He listened to a squirrel rustling somewhere up a gutter. U have got to be kidding me, he texted.

But really, he’d been waiting, all this time, for the thirteen-year-old in them to kick back into gear. He laughed a full, guttural laugh that felt like an extra layer of cream atop his joy. He hadn’t laughed, not fully, in all the days since Ruth left. It felt good, expansive, like butterscotch rolling across the back of his throat.

Wow. Priorities, he texted back, because he was still the parent here. But really, he felt them. They’d just spent six days in the Wilderness of Ruth, and he was going to try like hell to get them to that dance.

Paulina showed up at his door Saturday morning with the most perfect press of hair woven into rolls atop her head. The sparkling grains of her violet eye shadow reminded him of galaxies, and her lipstick was a shade so perfectly matched to her skin color, it called into question God’s natural shade assignment. He knew, taking in the curve of her ass in the tight, champagne-colored dress, that he’d never before noticed the detail of her, not truly, not how long were her eyelashes nor how smooth, still, was the skin of her forty-seven-year-old neck. She was dessert in an upscale restaurant: perfectly plated. He wanted to look more than he wanted to take a bite.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her smile determined, its intentions mixed. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

“Enix,” he said.

“Enix?”

“They’re landing at ten.”

“Exquise me?” said Paulina. “I thought you said she’d be here at six.”

“They,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, swallowing. “I thought you said they’d be here at six.”

“And even that was going to be cutting it close. But they got themselves away from Ruth and to the airport at three-thirty in the morning, and I was able to change them to a flight connecting at O’Hare.”

Paulina shifted to lean back on one heel. “Must’ve cost you a fortune,” she said. The sun glinted across one of her rhinestone-coated barrettes, and she put both feet back down flat. “You must really love her,” she said, as if she’d just come by this as new information. “The—you must really love them.”

“I’m sorry, Lina. I can’t go.”

He had sense enough to know, from the tight way her face was drawn, that she was mostly riding anger. All the weeks he’d been waiting for her to show this sort of spunk to reveal that she was real, living machinery, yet somehow, now that she was showing him, he wanted to dump her even faster.

“I really can’t help this,” he said. “And it’s not like anyone in your family even knows me.”

She turned to fix the storm of her eyes on the nonchalance in his. She frowned, slowly and deliberately, and he felt the air change between them. “I’ll miss you,” she said. “What if I’ll miss you.” She pushed an imaginary strand of hair behind one ear and looked down to the carpet. “Everyone was so happy for me. They were like, ‘Oh, how extra sweet, you’ve known him since college.’ And now I have to go to this wedding all by myself, with some bullshit excuse about your kid suddenly coming home on a plane, and they’re gonna think it’s a lie. Like you’re Mr. Snuffleupagus.”

With this show of anger, Myron was impressed. It was like he was just meeting her for the first time. “It’s not a lie,” he protested. “Why would anyone think it’s a lie?”

She waved a hand, brought it to settle on his chest. She pushed. “It’s a lie because fuck you, Myron, that’s why. You’re a dick just like every other dick.”

She began crying, and he wondered how he was supposed to handle it, being the receptacle for all this emotion. “Well, then,” he said.

She bowed her head and closed her eyes as if praying. “If you had a dog,” she said quietly, “I wouldn’t even want yours to play with mine.”

“Lina?”

She clenched and unclenched her fist, this person he didn’t love, trying to take first place in front of a person he very much did.

“Lina.”

She kept her eyes closed, raising her head to a position that allowed her to look at the striations of plaster on the ceiling. She took a long, deep breath, let it back out. She walked across the atrium, as elegant a figure as he’d ever seen in his real life. He studied the elaborate latticework on the lace of her dress and found a fleur-de-lis covering her shoulder blade. Away she walked, out of his life, out the front door of his building and down the Aspen’s concrete sidewalk.

And he let her.

He wouldn’t call her back. Would never protest. Why latch on to the past, with all the life yet ahead.

PART THREE

THE FUTURE

TWENTY-FOUR

Ruth

Over the course of her freshman year in college, Ruth had twisted a new past around in her mind like taffy. Had she ever worn a pair of gum boots, someone might ask, and she’d have to run back to her dorm room through the snow just to sit on her bed and breathe, to close her eyes and reimagine a day she might have done so. “You want a Boylan’s?” asked a boy at a party, and she’d stood there, blinking at him, deciding whether Past Ruth had or hadn’t liked root beer.

Each new data point occasioned more writing on the memory pad in her brain, and she’d lucked into the Hollywood Supper Club in the reading for a class called The Evolution of American Media. There, buried in an academic article on the invisibility of class identification in cases of arson, was mention of the fire and its subsequent news coverage. That night, she went to a meeting her RA had called and tried it out during the icebreaker. “Tell your neighbor one fun fact about yourself,” the RA said.

“I lost both my parents,” Ruth told a girl named Winsome Galimore, “in the Hollywood Supper Club fire.”

Winsome had looked instantly curious, yet she hadn’t probed. In her eyes Ruth saw so many questions, but in the way she put a hand absently to her cheek and nodded once before saying “I’m so sorry,” Ruth saw that a fire was a perfect kind of tragedy. Local enough, happening as it had in northern Kentucky. A fire people remembered for its sheer scale—165 people dead, most of them stacked like cordwood inside the lone door from which they’d tried to escape, then pulled to a makeshift morgue the next morning. Her parents would have been there to see John Davidson, an actor no one would even remember come 1998. It was such a ridiculous, bullshit tragedy, people wouldn’t probe. Ruth wouldn’t let them. She’d immediately change the subject each time she made the reveal. She’d stammer clumsily, in an Oscar-worthy repression of grief.

She hadn’t expected the power the story brought her. She hadn’t intended it. Tell people you were orphaned at the age of six, she discovered, you become a human who walks on air. An untouchable. She was allowed moodiness she hadn’t previously dared. She felt this relief, too, that in the new land, there was only Black and White. No Latinos or Asians or Multiracials, so no one, in the new place, would presume that her red hair and freckles meant anything other than Black. Ruth got to stay entirely in community, with no need of restructuring a racial self.

And if racism was like fine wine, she appreciated Kentucky’s varietal. It was distanced from so much of the racism she’d encountered in California, where racism sat atop classism. Donnie and Cora had migrated from Texas having bought into this lie, that West Coast race relations were more chill, at such a distance from Jim Crow, but what they found when they got there was the way California segregated itself with such concrete intention. She and Wendy had been two of only ten students at her high school. In Kentucky, where Porsches sat next to pickups, her world became a wider place, a place where Ruth was free to be whatever she said she was. No one in the new land cared enough to check.

Now, she was back in Cali, where it was important to say whether you were from Elmira or El Cerrito, where almost every White person she encountered would assume she was from some ghetto they’d instantly created in their minds. She’d have to resettle herself into it, because though she’d mailed her rent check from Denver, she had no intention of going back. She wanted neither the things nor the life, even if she was infuriated at herself for the way she’d ruined it. “Shit,” she said, thumping the metallized logo on her steering wheel with the butt of her fist. She upended her Perrier and drained its last. “Fucking shit,” she said. Then she went quiet. She could say whatever she wanted, now that Enix was gone. But no amount or level of profanity was going to be enough.

On the way from Reno to Placerville she’d left Enix in the car and tipped herself into a Safeway. Inside, she’d bought a family-sized bag of Pirate’s Booty and a bottle of wine for the road, thinking she’d share it when they arrived in Rosalind. She’d be having emotions, she knew. Trepidations. Feelings. She’d wash them away with a sip of Gewūrztraminer and drive them around Rosalind while she finally unburdened herself, uncorking her family’s past for Enix’s consumption, letting out the light, sweet crude Enix needed to oil the machinery of a family legacy. She’d dull their nerves, is what she’d planned, and that’s how they’d get by. And then there’d be the next day, when she’d visit her old house and her brother’s grave, and the next, when she’d visit the nearby plot where they’d buried her mother’s hardening body and her father’s ashes, and then the next day, when she’d decide how she and Enix could go about building a life in California.

But when she got back to the car, there’d been no Enix: just Enix’s neat, squarish handwriting on a hotel notepad. Sorry Mom, they’d written. When you get back here you can think about how you basically STOLE me from Dad. I’m flying back to Louisville. Dad paid for it and everything and I’m gone. By the time you read this, I’ll already be at the airport, but I’m not saying which one because I said for a LONG WEEKEND. Thank you for the cheeseburgers, and thank you for reading this. Bye bye mother I hate you and I love you a little bit

Ruth heard a truck bumping over a grate and it made the sound of a bomb falling on her heart. She tried squeezing out tears; she felt like that was what a normal mother would have done in the situation, but the physical mechanism of her tear ducts no longer worked. So much had happened in this life. On this road trip, even, so much had happened. Instead of crying, Ruth started driving; she wound her way to a CVS, because she couldn’t stand the thought of being in a hotel room alone. She parked, turned off the car. Turned on the radio, cried. Tried to restart the car, but under the harsh lights of the CVS parking lot, discovered that it would not budge. The Ferrari she’d hit had sustained only the minor damage of a football-shaped dent in the rear fender, so neatly inverted into the Ferrari’s body, like a slight frown. Her car, on the other hand, had taken the impact like a papier-mâché art project. She’d give it its credit—it was a Tesla, after all, and neither she nor Enix had sustained any injuries, but its hood had actually buckled into two distinct planes, so that on her way to the Holiday Inn after the collision, she’d had to sit up straight, with her shoulders squared to the seat, in order to see over the hood’s new angle. There’d been a Low Coolant script that faded to black after a couple of minutes on the interstate. But when she came back out of the CVS she saw, under her car, the leak that the impact had sprung. She hit the steering wheel again now, yelled “fuck” at the inside of her windshield. “Motherfuck,” she yelled. She’d killed everything else: job, house, marriage, her child’s trust, and now she wanted to kill her car, which belonged so squarely to the Recent Past.

Ruth patted her jacket pocket for the nickel bag Gene had left behind. She reckoned she might buy rolling papers and a lighter, sit outside smoking, reading her fortune in the patterned clouds of weed, close her eyes and absorb, knock some edge off. But in giving herself this pat-down, she found herself just tapping her own chest; the pocket was empty. She bent over the driver’s seat, thinking it had maybe fallen out somehow while she was driving, or paying at a fast-food window. She ran a hand between the seat and the center console, climbed over and checked under the front passenger seat. There was nothing. Had she forgotten that she’d found a better hiding place? She checked the glove compartment. Nothing. She wondered if she’d rolled and smoked it in her sleep.

She got out of the car with her empty Perrier bottle, dangling her keys precariously between her thumb and forefinger. She struck the driver’s side window, but the bottle didn’t break the glass. It ricocheted, and broke her. The neck of the bottle had sliced into the meat on the back of her hand, which had split itself into a deep white trench of flesh. Blood formed a thin line that pooled and fell to the asphalt. Bright, highly oxygenated drops, red against black like the wings of a ladybug, reversed. The tear in her skin looked like the jagged furrow of an ocean floor. She stuck out her hand so she could see it better under the area light, and she admired the gash. Already, she was proud of it. Things had happened to her and she’d lived. Nerves fizzed all over her body. She felt pain in places far removed from the wound itself: a trembling in her right ear, a tingling in her front teeth. She heard the pop as the lot light shut itself down, she closed her eyes and waited for more of them to respond to her body’s negative charge, for the entire parking lot to go dark. She’d kill the entire electric grid with her pain. For fuck’s sake. She was a solar flare.

Back in her car, she pressed the button to pop her trunk, and said a silent prayer of thanks that so many of the car’s systems simply depended on its battery. Given the new shape of her hood, the leak was probably several leaks: The Tesla was totaled, and maybe she was lucky it hadn’t outright exploded. She’d never get a service appointment on such short notice, and a bill of that magnitude, with the daily limit Myron had slapped on the bank card, would take two weeks of bank withdrawals. It was still a fine automobile, covered with sensors, finished with a sport back end that reminded her of a woman’s very nice ass. But. She just wanted done with it. With that whole part of her life.

Under a stack of Enix’s old artwork she found the tire iron Myron had put in her trunk “in case of emergency.” She brought it out and up into the air above her head. She stood, poised to strike her back windshield, and waited for some warning thought to run through her head, some epiphany about how adulthood was better than this. But what came to her was that Myron had left the tire iron for emergencies, and this was an emergency. She was a firefly in a Mason jar, trapped in a purgatory of Ruth. She needed to break the glass.

“I,” she said, as she brought the iron down.

“Will,” she said the second time she struck the rear windshield, because the glass hadn’t shattered, but patterned itself into a checkerboard.

“Fuck,” she said the third time, because the glass had broken, but only in the middle, right where she’d struck it.

“Me,” she said, knocking out the glass on the right side of its initial position of injury.

“Up,” she said finally, and she cleared the rest of the glass from its frame, she heard it tinkle from formation like a hailstorm on metal deck chairs; she watched tiny pieces of glass skitter across the back seat like pebbles.

She moved on to the back window on the driver’s side. It shattered easily. Next she took to her own window, the one she’d looked out so many times while driving, when she’d noticed two cows fucking, or one majestic egret in a pond, about to take flight. She remembered pointing out a pack of coyotes once to Enix, before Enix was even Enix, Enix who might now never know all she finally wanted to tell, Enix who was no longer on this journey with her.

She moved on to the front windshield, which took a longer period of sustained force. She noticed, for the first time, a brown recluse who’d taken up residence in the impossible crevice between the glass and the dashboard. She brought the tire iron down again and again. The web remained intact, though the spider did stir its many-jointed legs. It wasn’t until she took the smaller end of the iron and knocked out all of the glass in the corner that the spider stretched to its full size and crawled away to some less exposed piece of dashboard.

“Fuck!” she yelled, when she brought the iron down on the passenger side glass, and again when she brought it down on the lone remaining window. Her hand was throbbing. It all felt right and just and meet. The only shock was that no one was trying to stop her, for a small crowd had gathered, and they were huddled together now under one of the parking lot’s orangey, dying lights.

She’d heard them out of the corner of her ear and noticed in her peripheral vision that they’d crossed the lot to congregate there under the light. They’d been strangers, braving the dark of evening; she was pleased to think that her violence had brought them together. An older woman with white hair and the gravity of wrinkles on her forehead stood in front of the rest of them. She wore a thin blue raincoat, and her skinny, corded neck and surgically perky breasts made Ruth feel sorry that the women of California felt they had perpetually to look this young.

Behind her stood a man in a hoodie, pointing at Ruth as though to fix everyone else’s attention. A middle-aged woman with socks mashed into her Birkenstocks stood next to him, assessing, grabbing her own ponytail with one hand, swishing it across her own back. A man she’d noticed when she first entered the drugstore had put down his HOMELESS VETERAN sign and was now videotaping her with his cell phone.

“Well, what are you looking at?” Ruth screamed at them. She heard the pop of an overhead light, glass falling to the asphalt meters away from where she was standing. The crowd mumbled its surprise and backed up in a herd, as one unit.

“Watch this!” Ruth stomped forward suddenly and threw out her arms. The four of them flinched, in unison, but the other lights in the parking lot stayed solidly, blessedly alive.

The bwap bwap bwap of her car’s alarm had been kiting its decrescendo since her first hit, and she knew that one of the people in her audience had probably already dialed 911. She wanted straight out of the parking lot, then, outside the purview of the law.

Enix had escaped with the suitcase and tote bag they’d had in the hotel room, so there was now almost nothing even left in the Tesla. Ruth went back into the trunk and hoisted out her own suitcase, stuffed Enix’s childhood artwork into its front pocket. From the car, she grabbed her cell phone and the road map of the United States that she’d bought at a Walmart outside Paducah. Her camera, with all its lenses and paraphernalia, was in a case she’d shoved under the front seat, but this wave of surprise passed over her—she no longer wanted it. She pressed the Lyft icon on her phone and watched the graphic of a car skating along its blue line. Six minutes away, her phone told her. Probably closer than the police. She sat lotus position in the island beside her car and waited.

The grass she sat on was freshly cut, the tops of its blades notched by mowing, and where her shins stuck out of her capris and made contact, her legs itched. She listened as the sprinklers kicked into life, training a spray of water across the grass. It was spring in California just as it was spring in Kentucky, though here in seasonless Cali, it meant nothing.

She felt a rumbling near her ass, then the rain on her shoulders as the sprinklers arced over her head. The water caught her in its flight path, holding the shine of the full moon as it fell, slicking straight the curls of her hair, dripping from her nose onto her chest. The stream stalled at the edge of the island, where concrete formed a ridge, and came backward, wetting her body—head, neck, shoulders, straw-bent knees. She stuck her arm into the air so her injured hand might be cleansed by this accident of wet grace, and the second time the water passed over her, it stung the trench of exposed dermal layer, making her blood run temporarily pink. The pain radiated from her hand to strafe her entire body, but she stifled her reflexes to pull it back: Detaching from her physical being was the first step on a path she was just beginning to understand. She felt her pants sticking to the grass, and willed her hips not to itch. By the time her Lyft showed up, she looked like she’d been swimming.

The car was black, with CA plates JAIPUR20, and its driver rolled down his window. He was just a kid, college-aged, one of the many young people thrown into the gig economy. “Are you … ,” he said, looking at his phone. “Are you the Ruth?”

“On this plane of existence, yes, that’s me,” she said, rising to stand. She no longer felt clever. She tried to smooth her wet pants with her hands, but they stuck, wrinkled into vines that ran across the front of her thighs.

Before she got in, the driver popped his trunk and offered her a pink baby blanket with small white rabbits hopping along its edges. He smoothed it along his back seat, carefully tucking its edge into the crevice in order to fix it from sliding. “Okay, madam,” he said. “Please sit.” He smiled uneasily, said, “Can I put your suitcase in the trunk?”

“I prefer it with me.” Ruth shoved it over the back seat’s center hump and then climbed in herself, seeing what she hadn’t seen before, that each hopping bunny on the blanket was also clutching a large carrot in its mouth. Such talented, multitasking rabbits.

The driver closed her door and got back behind the wheel, then eased out of the parking lot. In the distance he was carrying her from the noise of her car alarm, she could hear its bwap fall three notes and then change keys altogether. She heard the soft strains of Top 40 radio. “Whose baby blanket?” she asked. “You got kids?”

“One.”

“How old?”

“Four.”

“Kids always break your heart, you know. They’re not alive unless they’re killing you.”

The driver chuckled with soft animosity. He hadn’t yet made it to this apex of middle age, where he’d find himself ripening and then burning under the autumn sun..

“Madam Ruth? Do you have children?”

“One.”

“Girl? Boy?”

“They’re a they. A them.”

“Yes, madam. So many of them are that now.”

She went silent then in the hope he wouldn’t probe further, because she was in this Schrödinger’s cat stage of parenting, now that Enix had fled: She was a mother, but she was not. It was one way with a teenager, and then another way with a teenager who’d left you with malice aforethought and a note on a hotel writing pad. Enix didn’t need her anymore, not to feed them or clothe them or help them with math. A snake, she’d read somewhere, would eat you whole, even if you were still alive.

“How old?” the driver asked.

“Old enough to bury me,” she said.

He continued the route in silence; Ruth forgave him in advance. She went into her bag and dug out her phone. Logged herself into Facebook and typed Wendy Cottam DePaulo into the site’s search bar. Her sister loaded onto her screen as a small square space of hope, now that Ruth was so far from Kentucky, with no car and low money.

Wendy had changed her profile photo in the months since Ruth had last executed this search, and now, instead of her children, she was flanked by two large, slobbery dogs. Ruth wondered if Wendy, too, had been recently felled by the hollow-point bullet of late-stage motherhood. Wendy grinned into the amplification of herself as People-You-May-Know Wendy, and Ruth digested the familiar, freakish length of her sister’s laterals, wondering if her vampiric overbite wasn’t just one more justification for the mean way Wendy had picked on her when they were kids.

After Donnie was killed, Wendy and Ruth had grown into small adults, their lives so marred by loss that neither could find the smallest seed of envy. Wendy had been unable to eat for months afterward, but when she came to Ruth at school, looking like a supermodel in her tight-waisted dress, Ruth had begged her to eat. “Have my sandwich,” she said. “Hodge isn’t feeding you.”

Hodge was Wendy’s boyfriend, who didn’t care how skinny she was. Wendy had ended up with Hodge because she hadn’t wanted to come live with Mr. and Mrs. Johns, and no adult was left to stop her. True, there’d been Family. Family had come from Texas to pack up Cora and Donnie’s valuables, to haul away the cherry dresser and her mother’s wedding ring and the Honda minivan, which they’d sell at the local automall for half its list price. Family had left the rest of the items with the jobber to sell or destroy, and Family had sold Cora and Donnie’s house and put the money in a trust, of which neither Ruth nor Wendy ever again heard tell. Family had left Ruth and Wendy right there in California; Family had said it was because the girls needed the stability of finishing school at home. “They’re just glad to be rid of the California Cottams,” Wendy had told Ruth, the day Family loaded itself back into its rental car for the long drive back to Texas. “They told Mom and Dad not to bring their Black asses out here, and look: They were right.”

Ruth pressed the site’s radio button: Add Friend. She needed Wendy. She’d always need Wendy, just as Wendy would always need her. Still, she felt nauseated pressing the plus sign, downright pukey, as if she were suddenly pregnant with Facebook’s baby. She knew that she and Wendy would exchange phone numbers, and now that there were mere hours separating the two of them, the only question about meeting would be how soon. She’d find herself sunk in Wendy. Sunk in a Distant-Past Wendy whose more recent past she’d missed. Sunk in a Present Wendy whose sorrows she could not anticipate.

“You were wanting to go to the La Quinta, madam? Is this the right one?” They’d arrived that quickly, in the mountainy darkness of Placerville, and the driver pulled into the hotel’s circular drive. The bright lights fixed under the hotel’s awning shone through the car’s rear window and hurt Ruth’s retina.

“All righty then,” she said. She leaned over for her suitcase and found it wedged too tightly against the recline of the front seat. She heard the driver open his door, then hers.

“Let me help you,” he said.

“It’s okay. Really. No worries. You’ll get my five stars!” She wiggled and pulled at her suitcase until it was free, then got out of the car and rolled it to the lobby, where she found the most beautiful young woman she’d ever seen standing behind the counter. The woman held the receiver of a landline telephone to her ear, pressing it down against a curtain of black hair. “I can schedule your wake-up call, yes,” she was saying. Her face was a poured, smooth brown that had never seen strife, and her eyes were amber, with small, surprised pupils like points of ink: The La Quinta’s lighting was also too bright in its lobby.

“Vacancies?” Ruth asked, and when the woman raised her head, she looked into Ruth’s eyes in a way strangers rarely look at strangers, as if she were offering Ruth something that would make her reclaim her very self. “Vacancies,” Ruth said again, quieter, more stupidly. Her wet clothes crawled cold under the hotel’s air-conditioning. She needed a room, not a spiritual experience.

“I got one left,” the woman said. She looked, still, right into Ruth’s eyes, but the vulgarity of her New York accent had broken the spell. “It’s a king, disabled, with a Jacuzzi. One seventy-four for the night.”

“Damn,” Ruth said. But she handed over her card. The young woman had exited the otherworld and now existed as a barrier. Ruth didn’t know how the daily two hundred was calculated, whether the Lyft could have amounted to more than twenty-six dollars, but she chose to brim confidence. There was the beat of suspense when the woman swiped her card and looked into the screen. Ruth saw a flash of green reflected in her pupils. She started typing again into her computer and handed Ruth a car registration form in triplicate: The card had cleared.

“Just put down your make and model where it asks about your car,” she said. “Never mind about the plates.”

Ruth took a deep breath that puffed her body full. “No car,” she said brightly. “No worries!”

She took her magnetic keys and wheeled her suitcase into the elevator, stopping to fill a cup of water the hotel had left in a tank full of lemons. Ruth shot herself up to the top and third floor, then wheeled herself down the empty, carpeted hallway to Room 301. At three in the morning there wasn’t even the sound of warring television sets to make her feel less alone. She opened the door to 301 and found that it smelled of nothing, no cigarette smoke or cleaning fluids, just a blankness that was neither sanitary nor unsullied, the cleared, blanked slate of previous guests. People had cried in that room. People had laughed there and fucked there and watched blood bead atop the water while they soaked up heroin in the disabled king’s Jacuzzi. Ruth pulled her suitcase inside, then noticed the guidance of streetlights coming through the picture window’s gauzy screen. She walked across the room and fell face down onto the scratchy duvet, felt the moisture in her blouse turn her chest warm. She felt the electricity in her leg, then felt her leg fall asleep, felt her full body following it. She didn’t even bother to remove her shoes. She might need them to run in her sleep.

TWENTY-FIVE

Ruth

She’d always held a short person’s dissatisfaction with her own body, and now, behind the wheel of the Fiat she was renting at the airport Hertz counter, Ruth couldn’t decide whether she felt more like a little girl playing grownup or an old woman in need of a seat riser. And that was where her life was now, through every fault of her own: She had no business trying to belong to the dignified sorority of middle-aged women. No car, no home, no access to more than $200 at a time: She was there in the purgatory of California, wading backward through emotional time, checking her Facebook to find that she and her sister were now Friends.

The Fiat’s interior baked her, heating the blood in her veins, and she sat in Hertz’s airport lot because there was nowhere, quite, to go: She’d driven across the country and found the point where, just beyond the Vaca Mountains, she’d find cliffs. Beyond that, she guessed, she could drive right into the Pacific, right off the end of the continent. And so she’d wait for the universe to tell her, via telephone, where to go, though driving off the cliffs at Big Sur sounded marginally appealing. Exit with a splash. Ploof.

She’d been half hoping Wendy hadn’t accepted the request, yet wholly hoping she had, and those hopes had stacked atop each other and added up to something like 150 percent, and if she’d had to put a name to the 50 percent overage, she’d call it Stupidity. Each time she turned the idea of reestablishing contact around in her mouth, it tasted like Doom. She touched the Messenger logo and found a missal screaming at her in all caps: RUTH PLEASE CALL 916-599-8524 I HAVE SO MUCH TO SAY THERE’S NO WAY I COULD TYPE IT ALL PLEASE JUST CALL I LOVE YOU. Wendy had also gone through and placed a heart emoticon under each of Ruth’s 54 photos. Her desperation made Ruth a little embarrassed.

Computer code had automatically underlined Wendy’s phone number, and Ruth had the option of simply clicking on the selected text in order to call. But this felt too easy, after twenty-seven years with no contact, too undersized an action for the gravity. Instead, she clicked over to open the one message waiting for her in Texts. It was from Clarisse. Kit went back to his girlfriend, it read, of course. And you’re not here to scoop me up off the floor.

Ruth took one of her dead, baking hands and slapped her own face. He was a fidiot, she texted back. An artistic fiery bullshitter.

You can’t fucking call me? Clarisse texted back. We have to process this via text?

And so Ruth called. “What time is it there?” she asked. She knew—it was an easy t-3—but history had taught her that it was helpful to get Clarisse to focus on something other than her own emotions.

“It’s 11:46. They don’t have clocks anymore in California?”

“Ha. Ha.”

“He wasn’t, Ruth. He wasn’t an idiot.”

“You said so yourself. That night he let you pay for his dinner. You should have closed your legs right then and there.”

“He wasn’t perfect. But he made a wonderful spinach omelet, he liked the way I laughed, and I’m going to miss him. You just want to suppress every feeling that comes to you. You always have. So live your own way. Don’t hang that on me.”

Ruth had taken a butterscotch from the dish at the hotel’s front desk that morning, and now she took it out of her cupholder, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth. “So many fish in the sea, Clarisse. Let’s keep it moving.”

“Ruth, stop. Just for a minute, stop. Breathe. Think. Listen to me.”

Ruth turned the candy around on her tongue and listened. But Clarisse said nothing. Ruth heard the background noise of the call, the clink of heavy metal, two television voices locked atop sound. “Okay, I’m waiting,” she said.

“Just listen,” said Clarisse.

There was the whorl of the wind. She foraged for Clarisse’s voice, heard nothing. “I’m listening,” she said.

“You’re not, Ruth. You’re incapable. Now, listen. Not for what I’m about to say. Listen to what I already said. Listen to my quiet. Listen to what you’re feeling. To the beating of your heart and the air in your lungs, just listen. Its okay. I loved Kit and he dumped me. Your brother passed. Your mom died. The police killed your dad. You lost Myron. Myron lost you. Please just breathe and listen to the world.”

But Ruth couldn’t. She wouldn’t. A condor flew by in the distance with a pizza box hanging from its beak; it had nothing on the terrifying creatures that populated the sea of her mind. “Why are we talking about me at all?” she asked. “We were talking about Kit. Let’s talk about you. Maybe you don’t need a man at all. You ever thought that?”

“Ruth. Not nice.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. What I meant was, it’s been a special mercy for me, to realize I have graduated from the entire romantic realm. I’m just some middle-aged woman with one kid and no personal savings. Keanu Reeves could come knock down my door, I’d yawn.”

“Ruth. I’m being serious. You keep punting.”

“Okay what shall I say then? I mean, since you’re no longer accepting me as I am.” She put a singsongy pitch to her voice. “Clarisse, Clarisse. Don’t be so soggy over this Kit monster. Get back out there and find you another.”

“Too soon.”

“Get out of that house. It’s Friday. And Friday rhymes with alcohol. Go for a beer. If you don’t, you’ll lose something about yourself as a woman.”

“But I thought, uh, you just said, uh, you were all into Ruth’s Way of Singlehood right now.”

Ruth rolled her eyes so far under their lids that she could feel the strain of their muscles. “I lied,” she lied, to get herself off the phone. “I think it’s all just an act, an act I’m putting on for myself. You’ve caught me out.” She hated how practiced she was at lying. She wondered that Clarisse still believed a word that came out of her mouth. “Check your Match account today and let me know who’s in there. Promise?”

“Deal,” Clarisse said, and rang off.

Ruth started the Fiat and began to back out, though she was still unsure where she was headed. She needed, at least, to get out of the parking lot, though when she found herself going the wrong way down the exit lane, against the street arrow, she pulled into a different space just to breathe. She wasn’t ready.

She stared ahead, at the sign that proclaimed her space Hybrid Vehicle Only, and she remembered with a jolt how regulation-crazy Californians were, with rules upon the rules within their rules. Part of her wanted to recline her seat and stay in the space for a few hours’ nap. But she backed up and pulled out. She followed the street arrow this time. Down the exit lane, into her merge, onto I-80, and into the morning.

Her phone buzzed again, with a new Messenger notification. RUTH I SAW YOU SAW MY MESSAGE SO JUST CALL. The font was a bullhorn, screaming. It was as if they were kids again, and Wendy was banging on the bathroom door. The tiny checkmark, of course, had revealed all: Ruth hated the way technology encouraged social intrusion. She touched the highlighted text, which then registered itself directly onto her call screen. She had only to press the little handset symbol to spring the trap, to open up a whole world of Wendy Through Time and whatever lay beyond. She waited. She passed a California Highway Patrol van. She pressed Talk.

“Ruth,” Wendy said, breathlessly. “Is it you? Is it really you?”

“It is,” Ruth said. She hadn’t yet hit the AC, and she heard her voice cracking under the car’s heat. Her words felt like dry and brittle twigs fallen off a tree.

“Ruth, where are you? Are you … well, I … I know you live in Louisville, right? Sorry to be stalkery, but you’re my sister.”

Ruth hadn’t known what it would feel like, regaining touch. But she recognized, now, what she wanted. She wanted to throw her numbness at Wendy and have it come back absolved of its flaws: She wanted to prove that Wendy had been wrong to crawl through the tunnel of tragedy and emerge out of its other end with the very same mind. She remembered the morning of her father’s funeral, when Wendy made her scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast for breakfast. She felt the tears burbling up behind her sinuses, and she tried the deep breath that might stop them. “Wendy,” she said. “I’m here.” She breathed. Stopped the car on the shoulder. Listened. Breathed again. Let the building tears roll out of her eyes. “I’m in California.”

“Oh my God. Where?”

“Sacramento. Twenty miles north of it.”

“Where, Ruth? Exactly where? Stop your car and I’ll come get you right this minute. My darling sister. Returned from the living.”

TWENTY-SIX

Myron

2009

Ruth had just come through this hard time, of blood and vomit and pain and a spinal and two attending OBs and pushing out a baby, and Myron was ashamed of his thoughts. He sat there, in the polished, hard-backed chair, holding this mottled, platinum-blond infant, this innocent new entrant into the hustles of the universe. He looked into Annabelle’s eyes, said, “Welcome to the world, baby.” All the time guessing, with 95 percent certainty, this baby wasn’t his.

Which meant he was making himself into the liar here, because he didn’t dare air these feelings. How could he? How to accuse a woman who was napping under a peak of bedsheets after twenty-seven hours of labor? How, even, to broach the topic, without having Ruth collapse, right there in the hospital, into a crying mound of caught-out misery? How to bring it up with her even after he’d helped her repack her overnight bag, gathered her and her redheaded infant, and wheeled her downstairs to his waiting car? He’d accepted so much of Ruth, so many Moments Apart from Ruth, so much Reticent-About-Revelation Ruth. He knew she was lying to him one more time, sinking him in the ultimate deception. He’d been cuckolded, he knew it; he felt the itching places on his scalp where the horns would grow.

He found, those first few months with this stranger’s baby in his home, that he wasn’t even waiting. He wasn’t waiting for her to look like anything except Ruth, or maybe the combination of Ruth and some other man who looked like Ruth. He wasn’t waiting for Annabelle to darken, or for her hair to wrap a curl pattern, or for her to have an innate appreciation for vintage Negro spirituals. He wasn’t waiting for anything. He was just going to accept this final, ultimate lie, because this baby was already growing her foreign DNA under his skin and into his heart.

And because he wasn’t waiting, he was surprised when it happened. The first thing was that Annie did darken. Nicely. Her skin turned from a doughy white to a dark, enviable olive, and then her hair—what little of it there was—began to ring itself into corkscrews, even as it remained so light as to be barely visible.

Then came, finally, the joyous frenetic time of Annie’s crawling. It wasn’t a crawl so much as a lumber: Annie put her feet under her body instead of her knees, scooping herself forward on her hands like a caveman. It was fine, the pediatrician said, just how some babies handled business. There then came her walking, her pushing off from Myron’s hands and toddling a few steps across a room, then all the way into the next, then all over the house, upstairs and down, so that they had need of the safety gate whose complicated latch they always cursed. Then finally, Annie ran. She ran, and ran some more. Myron threw a tiny, baby-sized football across the backyard at her, and Ruth seized her body over in laughter.

“What is it?” he asked.

“She runs just like you.”

And he saw it. The knock-kneed, tortuous run that had embarrassed him all his life, the stride that had locked him away from organized sport tryouts and made him feign lengthy pisses in the locker room during junior high PE class. Ruth was laughing. Cleanly. Innocently. And his little girl was running just like him now, like a pigeon, his little girl. His little girl. His little girl.

His child whom he’d now saved from a fire, his child whom he’d rescued from her mother. He loved her more than he hated Ruth, so much more than the viciousness between them. He felt bad, now, for putting a limit on Ruth’s bank card. He loved his kid more than his pride. He loved them more than he’d known it was possible to love.

2011

He’d heard of synesthesia, but never guessed the condition might one day buckle onto his brain. Now, Myron was seeing the saxophone over the elevator’s muzak as a grassy, kelly green. The snick of the doors, as they opened onto the nineteenth floor, bloomed a sharp, royal red; the computer-generated announcement, an ochre yellow. He’d never experienced this turn of sensation before, and already knew he never would again—it was a trick of light and sound he was perceiving only against his heightened emotions.

As the elevator continued its rapid ascent and the earth took weight from his feet, he registered his brain’s temporarily high bar. He was amused to find, as the elevator stopped on his floor and he stepped out onto the carpet, that the shade of yellow changed. It didn’t move along a spectrum: It got neither deeper nor lighter. The ochre stayed essentially the same, yet its quality grew more bothersome.

At the thirty-fourth floor he presented his key card and entered, and the click of the magnetic lock took on not only color but also shape. In his mind, it was an orange cone. He found the thirty-fourth floor receptionist staring at him, froglike. “Mr. Hurley,” she said. He tried to find the shape of her voice in his mind, but it was a jiggling blob. He’d never memorized her name but he could see, from feet away, the width of her frightened pupils. “Mr. Hurley, call your wife,” she said. She held out a Post-it with a telephone number. It was Ruth’s cell, a number he already knew. He took it nonetheless, to make the woman feel useful.

He half ran, half walked to his office and put his coat on the deskside hanging tree, then closed the door softly behind himself. He dialed. “Ruth?” he said.

“Myron.” Her voice was hot pink. Like the walls of a fifties’ hair salon.

“You heard something?”

His father was at Jewish, living the immediate aftermath of a stroke whose level of severity was yet unknown. His mother had called that morning, with apologies for not having called the night before, she hadn’t wanted to worry him, his father was fine, really he was, they hadn’t even known, at that point, that it was a stroke.

Donna Lee hadn’t yet lost her faculties. Years later, he’d have to keep from her that Tina Turner was dead, he’d hear her relive the great loss of Tina on the phone three times in a repeated loop, and decide that that much loss was enough. “Go to court,” his mother had said, the day of his father’s stroke. “I’ll call Ruth.”

There on the thirty-fourth floor, he heard Ruth take breath slowly, he heard the minutiae of her breathing, each sound molecule of the exhale turning violet in his mind. “I’ve heard nothing,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have called your mom by now. To ask.” The pieces of her voice turned blue. Tiny azure triangles, coming out of the earpiece at him, stringing themselves into a pattern he knew was a lie.

The triangles gathered behind his lips to push them apart, made him say, “It’s okay, baby. Everything is as it should be. Let’s remember that. My father, he’s lived a full life.” The triangles asked him to click off the call, they urged him to hurry back, down on the elevator, into the building’s parking garage, into his Audi, and across town to Jewish.

There, in a sun-dappled room in the cardiac wing, he found his mother, crying as she stroked his father’s forearm. “Ruth didn’t tell you?” she said. “He might never walk again. The whole left side of his body.”

Which turned out not to come true: His father pushed through a recovery and had another two years of life, during which he rose to become more garrulous even than he’d ever been. But it’s this omission of truth that he thinks of when he takes Ruth’s call from California. “Myron,” she says.

He doesn’t respond. He listens for her breath, which he cannot now hear. He wishes for its molecules to take on a color, string itself into a pattern, one that would explain every single lie she’s ever told him. But he knows that day was a one-off; all these years later, his synesthetic abilities are dead. He’s left with this garden-variety discernment: Ruth can only lie. She’s constitutionally incapable of truth. “Ruth,” he says now. “How can I help you?”

“Well, you can start by taking the limit off this—”

“No.”

“Well, okay then,” she says, rounding the words into one jolly stream. “Where’s Enix?”

“Ha. Banking first, your child second. They’re here. They wanted to come home. Surprise. They didn’t appreciate being kidnapped.”

“You can’t kidnap your own kid.”

“Ruth. Stop. Just stop the whole thing. I can’t trust you. I never could. It turns out I’ve never, not ever, known you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and the way her voice quavers to a low trill, he half expects her to burst into tears. He half wants her to. He wants her to display even one normal human emotion. But then, that isn’t Ruth. Instead, she says slowly, as if she’s an English-language learner, “I could not handle it, Myron. I don’t expect you to understand this at all, but I just could not handle the world as it was. And it’s because I love you so much—”

“Please, let’s not go there.” He rubs the top of his own head, feels the smooth new difference of skin at his hairline. He thinks he might still have her prosecuted for taking Enix, but then thinks no, he won’t. Ruth has spent so much of herself trying to keep people out of the system, and he’s not going to put her in. He thinks this not even as her ex-husband, her soon-to-be ex-husband, or as anyone who’s ever loved her. He thinks this as a fellow Black person: He’s not turning her in to anyone, anywhere, not ever. Instead, he raises his voice. Says, “It’s none of my business whether you ever aim to be married again, but I will submit to you … I will propose to you …” Submit. Propose. Words he uses in court. They feel milky and unworkable now, spooling out toward Ruth, but he continues. “The thing is, Ruth. It hurts. Here’s what I thought. I thought you thought I was cool. I thought you loved me enough to want to be with me an entire lifetime. I submit to you that what I’ve learned, in the last few days, is that you were here because you’d voted me Man Most likely to Believe Ruth’s Stand of Fables. Not gonna lie. It hurts.”

“Myron. What if I told you I did love you? What if I told you it had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me? After everything I’d been through, didn’t I deserve to live my own glimmering life?”

Mathylde had never called him back. He’d not returned to the lake since his third kayak lesson; he’d gotten his ear unpacked during a visit to his primary care physician, but he hadn’t quite lost the sinking feeling of vertigo, that sensation he has, while walking across a parking lot, that the earth has been upended. Mister and Celie have given up on their clutch of eggs; Celie flies freely now about his apartment, shitting on windowsills … Mister lets her feed herself. Time rushes along toward its terrible end despite his best efforts. And Ruth is gone. He’d woken up and said it to himself that very morning: My wife has left me. Simply speaking the words aloud, in Standard Midwestern English, made it undeniably true. Object permanence, Enix had told him. When babies finally figure out that something’s there, even if they can’t see it. He was a baby, he guessed, a simple baby. “You don’t love people,” he told Ruth now, “when you lie to them. If you can’t tell someone your fundamental truths? That’s not love.”

“You have the truth now. You know about my parents, my brother, California. Does that not change the way you feel about me?”

“What changed is the way I feel about you,” he says, leaning into his own knees, he’s so angry at her, “is that someone else had to tell me. How am I supposed to share a child with such a person? How am I ever even supposed to speak to you again, Ruth? I can’t. I won’t. From here on in, we’re talking through counsel.”

And that does it. She starts crying. At last, he’s broken her into comprehensible pieces.

“What if,” she whispers, through her shaken voice, “what if I told you that I lied because I loved me? What if I told you I was protecting myself?”

“From what?”

“From me, Myron. I was trying to protect myself from me. Would you believe that?”

His knees can’t handle his anger; he rises to standing. “I don’t believe anything anymore,” he says. “I don’t believe you even exist.”

She sniffles misery, then yelps a sob, then hangs up. Her sniffle burns white in his mind. Which, he thinks, is no color at all. But then he remembers, from school—it’s the entire river of Roy G. Biv all at once.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Ruth

In a previous life, Ruth resented the way Wendy swooped down from on high to collect her. She hated the way Wendy hovered over her table in the drawing class they took together at the public library, the way she’d take the eraser gum to her paper and say, Now Ruth, that’s not what you do at all. She hated that Wendy had found her once, standing against the A-frame of their school’s swing set, locked into a battle of stares with one of the girls from her class. Come on, Ruth, Wendy had said, prying her away. Let that bitch stew in her own juice.

Whenever Wendy was around, Ruth felt deprived of her own anger, robbed of her own agency. Even after Donnie died, Wendy had upstaged Ruth’s grief—she’d refused food for days chained to weeks, until the knobs of her spine were visible through the back of her shirt, and Hodge’s mother was threatening to send her to a hospital meeting for anorexics. Come fall, Wendy’s hair thinned out along with the trees, and Ruth would see her drifting across the parking lot at the Safeway, hunched over into her misery, her hair bunched into an ever-thinner setup of ponytail. What had been a thick, swinging fist of hair had, by Christmas, come to look like the tip of a paint brush.

Wendy didn’t start eating again until Hodge broke up with her, and the awkwardness of living in his house without sexually servicing him turned into an accidental generosity on his part, one against which Wendy felt she had to steel herself.

“You’re getting your figure back,” Ruth told her.

“Got to get back to fighting weight, so I can get out of Hodge’s house.”

Valentine’s Day, with money she’d made waiting tables at Denny’s, she did. She moved out of Hodge’s house and into her own apartment, which was a private room in an old Victorian in downtown Rosalind. Ruth bumped Wendy’s futon frame up the house’s thirteen wood stairs, helped her mount posters with low-adhesive 3M squares. When she got up on a chair to fix Wendy’s glass Bauhaus mobile to the ceiling with fishing wire, Wendy tapped her leg. “You look all right these days,” she told Ruth. “You are all right, aren’t you?”

“I’m leaving Cali. I haven’t applied to one college west of Nebraska.”

“Good for you. I wish I had the mind.”

“Why not? You can go anywhere you want. Clean slate. Blank life.”

Wendy had been standing with her feet a good distance apart, holding a hammer by the proper end of its handle, and now she let its neck slip through her fingers so that the two claws of its head formed an arc over the back of her hand. “So much has happened,” she said, turning to the pieces of Target plywood desk that were waiting for assembly. She joined the two slabs with a countersunk screw and hammered three times. “I feel like damn,” she said, pulling another screw from the plastic. “I just want to sit still. Maybe, out of the two of us left standing, you’re the stronger one.”

It had felt good to hear this from her sister, and for months, Ruth decided to believe its absolute truth. After all, she’d never stopped eating. In the year since her father’s death, she’d gained two inches of height. Outgrown pants. Done her homework. Slept a very productive seven hours a night, because she spent most of her days hanging in the vague, purgatorial funk of pretending that nothing had happened. She was shocked, sometimes, to stop at the full-length mirror in the Johns’ upstairs hallway and see her own haunted eyes, to catch the physical version of herself on which tragedy had indeed fallen and stuck. She loved hearing it—you look fine—because it proved the mirror wrong. Yet the more they echoed in her head as words that belonged only and specifically to Wendy, the more she felt corrected, straightened into some sort of line that Wendy thought she’d made by absorbing Ruth’s grief for the both of them.

As she circled the pump islands of the 66 station where she’d agreed to rendezvous, a bench of bad feeling spread across her stomach. How would she feel when Wendy showed up? It would be worse now, even, because what kind of forty-seven-year-old woman needed to be gathered by her forty-nine-year-old sister?

A half hour later Wendy arrived, in a long maroon minivan. She jumped out of her door and sprinted to Ruth’s parking space, making a high, dainty squeal. She embraced Ruth, and it was like being cosseted by angels. She was wearing a thick, pleated coat, even in the spring heat, and as she hugged Ruth tighter, forcing her face into the high fold of her astrakhan collar, Ruth found the smell of lambs stuffing her nose.

“I’ve dreamed of this,” said Wendy. “I’ve literally dreamed of this moment. A thousand times over, I have.”

She stepped back and looked at Ruth. Ruth knew what Wendy was seeing because she’d just seen it in her car’s rear-view mirror: herself, middle-aged Ruth. Who hadn’t done drugs or foregone dental care or been in a terrible car accident, and so looked just like Ruth, Ruth with a softer jaw and fleshier arms, Ruth done up in computer-generated age progression on the side of a milk carton. Ruth wondered if Wendy had any idea what Ruth was looking at, because Ruth was looking at a Wendy who’d made the cover of Vogue. Even standing outside a 66 gas station with her sandal planted atop an amoebic spread of motor oil, Wendy was a vision. Her skin was preternaturally youthful, and her waist was tiny; she’d silk pressed her hair and smoothed away all imperfection with high-end makeup. Present Wendy’s hair grew out her head a deep, dark mocha, its strands perfectly uniform in the way of professional color. Wendy no longer looked Black. She looked, rather, like every other Black woman from California: mixed. Mixed not with anything other than Black. Mixed with high-grade moisturizer and the whisper of plastic surgery. Ruth had run from her feelings, but Wendy had run from age. She was everything that was trying to keep itself beautiful, which meant she was less beautiful than the thing that Ruth remembered.

“You look disappointed,” Wendy said. “What’s wrong, prodigal gal? This isn’t like you thought it would be?”

“Wendy.”

“Twenty-five years, Ruth. You never wrote back. You never picked up. What you did was cruel.”

Ruth couldn’t look Wendy in the eye. She looked at the shell of her sister’s ear, the way sunlight burned away its color. “I could say I’m sorry all day,” she said, “and you still wouldn’t understand the depth of it.”

Wendy patted Ruth’s shoulder, looked around. “It’s okay,” she said. She crossed her arms and leaned a bit to the right, establishing that she was the one who’d do the forgiving here, putting Ruth in her place. It reminded Ruth of the day she’d marched her and Russell down the shore away from their parents, the three of them like ducklings on a beach, and ordered them both to make little round cakes of sand. She’d circled above them, telling them “good, good” or “rounder,” making a perfect performance as the oldest sibling among them. “Sing Happy Birthday,” she said, when they both finished, and when Ruth opened her mouth to sing, Wendy picked up one of the sand cakes and shoved it right in. Cora had spent a good half hour with a crying Ruth and a bottle of water, having Ruth repeatedly rinse and spit into the Pacific. Everything had changed since then except Wendy’s ability to pin Ruth down under her pecking order. In this, they’d both stood perfectly still.

“Coffee?” Wendy asked.

Ruth felt like a zombie. Caffeine was the last thing she wanted. But her only choice was “yes.”

She got back in the Fiat and followed Wendy out of the 66. They made a right, a left, then another right. Sailed through three traffic lights of a major thoroughfare, each turn of direction reminding Ruth of one more way Wendy might have guided her through life. Had Ruth ever answered her letters, Wendy might have warned her about the financial ruin of her early twenties, then celebrated with her the ease of her mid-thirties. She might have explained to Ruth, in advance, the roller coaster of perimenopause, told her what was motherhood to a child who no longer wanted a packed lunch. When they arrived at the coffee shop, Ruth followed Wendy through the café and out to the dining patio. There was a small picnic table, under a tree whose trunk grew straight out of a large, hot-sawed hole in its middle. “We can sit there, right?” Ruth asked.

“Yup.”

When the barista brought their order, Ruth swirled her coffee round and round, watching the tiny white aphid that had fallen within.

Wendy lifted her cup’s lid, peeking in at her oolong, breaking its steep. “So, what are you doing back here?” she asked.

Ruth had looked it all up on WebMD, she knew that MS took different courses in different people; she knew that it was rare that it just beat a person down quickly, fastening them into beds and wheelchairs. There was a kind that remitted and there was a kind that even went away after a phase, possibly never to return. Finding her sister’s fluid movements and good looks had washed into focus the deeper truth: Ruth had come not just for Wendy but for herself. She’d come, a little bit, to love. But she’d come, too, to be loved. “I actually don’t know,” she confessed. “I’m breaking up with my husband. My house burned down. He’s taken up with another woman already. It seemed like a good time for a vacation.”

Wendy smirked. “Welp. If you’re mentioning the other woman, you must still care. What’s his name?”

“Myron.”

“Myron?” Wendy laughed. “How old is this guy? Eighty? How long were you married?”

“Too long.” Ruth did the math. “Fifteen years.”

“That’s cray,” Wendy said, still smiling. She took a cautious sip of tea.

“Well, what did he do?”

“He stopped loving me.”

“Come on. Everyone thinks that.”

“Oh, I’m a special case. I have actual proof. He wrote it on a notepad. I hate ruth. I found it by accident.”

Wendy turned her mouth serious, its fishlike quality suddenly melting away. “Well, I guess you know what you’re talking about, since you were the one married to him.” She smiled again, and widened her eyes, and the sun glistened on her thick mascara. “How long are you staying? And you know you’re staying with me, right? We’ll turn your car back in at the rental agency.”

Ruth had known it would happen. Wendy was swooping. “I can’t drive a minivan,” she said. “And I didn’t come out here to be anyone’s burden.” Having spoken the one truth she had left, Ruth felt hunger wash over her suddenly, like a storm. “They have breakfast here?”

“Sure.”

Wendy ordered Ruth’s eggs and toast, and another oolong for herself. She called for two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice that were going to cost them eight dollars apiece. A man rode by on a bike, looking so much like the man who did DHL deliveries at Ruth’s office that she had to stop herself from calling out his name. John Earl. Who she’d never see again. She’d not see her boss, or her coworkers, nor any of the moms at Enix’s school. Not the friendly cashier at Kroger who always asked her how was this or that frozen waffle brand she was putting onto the belt, not the barista who knew her order and started it as soon as she walked through the door. She could feel it already, that she’d come just as unmoored from Recent-Past Ruth as that Ruth had been from Distant-Past Ruth.

“Why did you leave?” Wendy asked “Why did you never write? Not to bring up deep tracks, but are you equipped to answer that now?”

At the next table, a man sat with two cell phones plugged into both terminals of an electric outlet. He had no food, no drink. Close as he was, Ruth could smell him: sand mixed with urine. The café had an old piano sitting right outside the sliding doors, and a cat sprang out of nowhere and walked across its lowest two octaves, revealing keys that were cartoonishly out of tune.

“What else was I going to do?” Ruth said. “First Russell, then Mom then Dad. We had to split up, or one of us was going to die, too.”

She hadn’t dared to believe Enix, but now she could see it was true: She was, in fact, sleepwalking. She found herself in the middle of the night in Wendy’s upstairs office, wheeling herself forward in the metal chair so that her chest was squared against her sister’s rococo secretary. Her hand had poised itself atop the antique surface in a way that suggested she’d been riffling through her sister’s personal effects. Full, horrifying consciousness fell on her like a stone slab. Two thousand miles west of Louisville, she’d lost her own body.

She worried herself over what Wendy’s papers might have looked like before she let herself into the room. The bills and slips sat in messy piles, stacks she might have altered or even created. And then there lay the possibility that they’d been previously ordered in this exact fashion, and she’d done nothing—for all she knew, she’d awakened at the moment of lowering herself into the chair. She put her hand to her throat and said shit. Took the middle ground of half squaring the stacks into neater, more symmetrical piles. She walked back to the door she had apparently closed on herself after entering the room, and she turned the knob slowly so as not to make noise. It took long, excruciating minutes to turn and release, and then she left the door half-open, half-closed, a coda of indecisions. She prayed, as she launched herself back into her sister’s upstairs hallway, that no one would hear her footsteps on the carpet. She cursed it for having such low pile.

The rest of the house was palatial, but in this way Wendy’s house was no different from the house in Rosalind, the one where they’d grown up, the one where orange-and-green carpet sprouted from the floor like the fur of mammoths. The house where mail was delivered to a slim metal box on the front porch, such that the envelopes and even the letters inside them always got wet. You’d open a greeting card, Ruth remembered, only to find smeared handwriting; you’d find that the cardstock had gotten soft and pulpy. Wendy’s mailbox, in the twenty-first century, was waterproof and rubber. Sitting atop a column of brick. A monument.

The guest room where she’d lodged Ruth featured a French provincial bed with actual fleurs-de-lis on each leg. The adjoining guest bath, where Ruth went now to relieve herself, was papered a modern, pastel green that reminded Ruth of dish candy. Ruth tried to urinate politely and quietly into the toilet, knowing someone in Wendy’s house might be standing near, listening and appraising. Ahead of her, two candy-pink towels hung from a metal bar, and Ruth saw, in the contrast, that the wallpaper was broken by tiny, lighter green dots. The overall effect was one of forced cheer, and Wendy’s bathroom put her personal transformation in concrete, visual terms: She was the one who’d more solidly shed the past. Present Ruth was still, constitutionally, Past Ruth. Sad, haunted Ruth, who would always choose a foreign drama at the Speed when asked to go to the movies.

Wendy came the next morning in a different jacket, quilted canvas, with smears of glitter added strategically to the back, so that each time she turned, she looked like she was wearing a galaxy. She sat on the bed, her head turned atop her spine so that Ruth could see a quarter of her stars. Wendy was fine. Whatever had attacked her central nervous system, she seemed to have beaten it off through sheer will. “Got any plans today?” she whispered, as if Ruth wasn’t already awake.

Ruth found a mental barrier against talking to Wendy whilst lying on her back: To regain some advantage, she turned over and jacked herself up on one elbow. The malaise she felt in the presence of her very own sister saddened her, but after all, it had been twenty-five years. Babies, Enix had told Ruth once while writing a science paper, were born with thirty bones. By the time they became adults, Ruth thought, they’d fused all their anger and disillusionment into 206. “I got nothing,” Ruth told Wendy, wedging her chin farther into her hand, so that she wouldn’t have to make eye contact. “I just need to go to the ATM, I guess, and get my two hundred bucks.”

Wendy stood, cut the air dismissively with her hand. “You need money, you don’t have to ask that jackass—what’s his name? Myrick? We have plenty here. Joey’s in gas and oil.” She didn’t elaborate, but in her faint smile, Ruth found the information that Joey DePaulo wasn’t a gas station attendant. “And you’re my sister. Really, Ruth, you’re welcome to whatever you need.” Wendy paused and looked Ruth in the eyes for effect. “Anything, Ruth. Just ask.”

“Thanks.” Ruth pushed herself to sitting, and stretched in a way she hoped didn’t look false. She desperately wanted Wendy to leave.

“All right,” Wendy said. She turned at the very moment the rising sun shone through the windows, and the light threw the glittery back of her jacket against the wall, projecting a full constellation. “I’ll leave you be. All that driving, you must be exhausted.”

Ruth had met Wendy’s boys the night before. There was a dark-haired son taller than the refrigerator, and a shorter, younger boy whose black eyebrows grew in contrast to the red cast of his hair. The taller boy had pointed to his brother, who stood next to him, grinning wickedly, showing off his long canines. “His name’s Paul,” he’d said.

“His name’s Richard,” said the younger, stepping on his brother’s foot, “but you should call him Dick.”

The older boy had punched the younger one on the shoulder with a level of force. Later, at the dinner table, each suggested the other was developmentally disabled. Paul relayed the exact number of times Richard had been able to leave the bench during an entire soccer season: The number was a single digit. They bickered and cursed and tossed such shade at each other that Ruth blushed. They were talkative and rough even on their way to bed, so Ruth knew now, in the house’s quiet, that they must be already loaded and off to school.

Wendy backed toward the door now, still with her eyes nailed to Ruth’s. “There’s stuff in the fridge,” she said. “Eat whatever you like.” She blew a kiss and disappeared around the door frame. Ruth heard her run downstairs, open and then close a cabinet, rattle dishes, set plates. Ruth was alone. Completely alone.

Her first thought was to call Enix, and then her better thought was to not. Enix had neither called nor messaged in the twenty-six hours since Ruth had last seen them, despite Ruth’s voicemails. Enix didn’t want to be bothered, and there was something about Present Enix that Ruth didn’t quite want to be bothered with.

Wendy had also introduced Ruth to her dog, Miami, a giant calico mastiff who now trotted through the bedroom door, whining and wanting to be rubbed. Ruth gathered Miami’s thick fur between her second and third fingers. Over and over again she grabbed and lifted, leaving the fur in peaky tufts. When she rolled up to sitting, Miami went straight for her crotch, and she realized she needed a shower. She unplugged her phone from its charger and called Enix.

“Hello,” she said, when the sound of silence broke the buggy rings.

There was a small, tritoned blip, which the person on the other end disconnected. She wondered if the person pushing her over this telephonic cliff could really have been Anniebean, her sweet little redheaded twin who’d run out of the preschool classroom each afternoon to meet her, her tears soaking Ruth’s blouse as if she were meeting her mother for the very first time.

It couldn’t have been Enix, she decided. It was Myron.

Myron didn’t—couldn’t—care about her feelings. He hadn’t called her once in the four days they’d been on the road, though now she knew the treachery, that he’d been in touch with Enix the entire time. Without one vapor of love in him, he’d carted away the one bit of happiness Ruth had left in her life. He’d flown her kid away from her like a bag of rice.

She called Enix again but this time, her call went straight to voice-mail. She wouldn’t call a third time. There’d be no point. She closed her phone app and opened a long text from Clarisse. There was no hello how are you, no Ruth are you there. It was just a poem, parted into four different transmissions of text:

Wine-Soaked Free Verse for the Permanent End of My Sex Life

It’s not you, it’s me

And this Frantz Fanon book I’m really into

Maybe Fanon is my soulmate

Which would be brilliant

Because he’s dead

And I don’t know what I’ll tell Ruth

Who said if I didn’t meet men

I’d be missing a chip

And instead of speaking my mind

I let Ruth ooooooother me

Oho, Ruth!

I still have a vagina

I still make 77 cents on a man’s dollar

I’m chipped for life

So Ruth

Please stuff it up your ass

It turns out if you close the store for a minute

It looks more appealing to go out of business altogether

It was wild, the amount of time Clarisse had to have spent tapping this into her phone, breaking the lines according to her breaths of outrage, but that was Clarisse. Ruth had to laugh. Yes sister I feel you, she typed back. It wasn’t worth arguing her innocence.

Ruth showered and went back to bed, and didn’t wake again until nightfall. Between absurdist realms she felt someone enter the room, saying nothing; twice, she heard the doorknob turn itself back into the catch. Later, she heard bodies bumping clumsily against the door, the deep-throated giggles of the boys. She heard them enter, she heard their torched, breathy laughter. Shut up, she heard one of them say, and then they both stopped, but stayed in the room, no doubt fascinated by the specter of a middle-aged woman sleeping face up under the sheets.

They left, closing the door with malicious quiet, and Ruth opened her eyes fully; it was late afternoon, and she could see the additive mixture of colors making blue shadows on the ceiling; she could see, through the slats of the blinds, the screaming orange sunset. Had her body caused an electrical outage, she wondered, but then decided no, the household had just allowed her her sleep. The day was over; her life was over; there was no point. She pressed her eyes back closed and felt the muscles of her eyelids wriggle.

“Lazarus. Back from the dead,” Wendy said later that night, when Ruth woke and went downstairs. The kitchen was dark, the only light coming from the open refrigerator where Wendy was bent, putting away a Tupperware bowl with Saran wrap spread across its top. Ruth had slept so late, she’d missed dinner.

In the living room, DePaulo was watching Sportscenter. A replay of the X Games, women on skis wheeling themselves into somersaults. DePaulo was beefy only in the chest and shoulders, top-heavy, an inverted triangle of a man whose pale bird legs poked out of his shorts like stilts. “Give her some leftovers,” he said. “They’re not even cold yet.”

“It’s okay,” said Ruth. “I mean, no thank you. I need a drive, to clear my head. Don’t wait up for me.”

She got her purse and jacket and walked out to her little Fiat, which she’d parked streetside. The tank was on E, though she could have sworn it had gas the night before, about half a tank. She hoped it was Parallel Ruth, out sleepdriving, having fun, causing explosions at electrical substations. Getting her cougar on, carousing with sailors. She put the car in gear and headed down Wendy’s street, Temple Road, which was sown with Spanish Mission and Mediterranean-thatched roofs, huge bay windows and frosted glass doors. She looked to the end of the street and saw something glow red. It wasn’t a moon, as she’d thought, but a stop sign. It was a trick of memory to forget she wasn’t in Kentucky, where the moon so often ruled its full quadrant of night sky.

From deep within her purse, her phone buzzed. She tapped her foot against the brake and pulled it out. Mom r u coming home?

The maternal reflex to answer one’s own child, that ancient biological directive to stop a crying spell or solve a phlegmy cough, sat heavy on Ruth’s heart. But she tucked the phone’s case closed and shoved it back in her purse. It wasn’t that Enix didn’t deserve an answer, though they had, after all, gone away of their own volition. It was more that Ruth didn’t know, anymore, what home might be. What was a home? Was it something a person needed, like water or oxygen? Home. What was that? She took the phone back out, logged into its Verizon Tech Wizard, and disabled Enix’s text capabilities. In the distance, a possum ran circles at the side of the road. Possibly distempered, she thought: It wouldn’t last much longer in the wild. Nature was brutal. It needed a trigger warning. She, by contrast, had the human privilege of just getting her shit together and running a straight line.

A car had pulled up behind her. It honked. She moved on. She determined the way to Rosalind almost instinctually, as if she were a bird with filings in her beak. She merged onto 15, then branched off on CA 99 going north, then spiraled off exit 315, taking up such speed on the off ramp that she felt momentarily orbital. She turned down avenues, then streets; she saw a man walking off a drunk, stumbling angrily on the poles of his legs. She passed a twenty-four-hour diner with its neon sign blinking hazard orange. Rosalind had always been a bedroom community, but over the course of three decades, it had lost its luster.

She passed a city park where headlamps threw themselves across the smiles of two plastic dinosaurs, lost in prehistoric happiness. She remembered when Russell was a little kid, the years he’d climbed atop the bigger dino and held on for dear life. She cut her motor, open and shut the car’s doors so its interior lights would die. She sat in the dark, listening to the crickets, felt a mosquito brush her ankle—it had found her that quickly. She hadn’t realized it as a kid, that the dinosaurs’ plastic absorbed a day’s sunlight. In the dark, they glowed.

She brought her car back to life and made her way to the older, stateliest part of town where she’d grown up, found her old street. It was a short one, Summer Street, only six blocks long, and it was easy to find her parents’ house, there amidst trees that now lived high and full. 4311. When they’d lived in it, its four brass numbers had been affixed to the mailbox, but the new people inside had removed those. Instead, under the glare of the streetlight, she found the house number spray-painted in black, on the curb at the end of the driveway. She slowed to a crawl and passed 4311 once, then twice. She rolled to a stop in front of it, as if drawn by a magnet. Someone had planted a foam sign in the front yard: Rosalind High, Class of ’23. Neither she nor Wendy nor Russell had graduated from high school while living in 4311.

She wouldn’t get out of the car, but she killed her lights and then her engine and sat there, staring, saddened by the house’s chipping white paint. She could make out, in the full moonlight, the worn shingles of 4311’s roof. When the Cottams had moved in, the house was newer, and they’d nailed calendars to its ice white walls. Hidden kitchen appliances inside cabinets whose insides still smelled freshly sawed. Ruth imagined her parents, aged and absolved of tragedy, within 4311’s walls. They’d have been what, now—sixty-five? Seventy? She imagined them walking out the house’s front door into the night, their backs hunched, their night vision gone dull, their senses of humor gone mellow. She noted the house’s darkened windows, imagined the new family sleeping inside. Wondered if ever, in the quiet of a midnight, they felt the leftover energy of the Cottams, her dead brother and her mother felled by grief, her father murdered in the driveway, shocked at his own sudden departure.

But after all, it was just a house she was looking at. The carpet wouldn’t be the same after thirty years, she knew that. The bathrooms would have been renovated, the refrigerator with its faulty bulb and the dishwasher’s grinding motor replaced. It was just brick and wood and walls and aluminum she was looking at, when all this time, she’d remembered 4311 as an abyss.

The cemetery that held the dead Cottams wasn’t far, and once she restarted her engine, she found the three easy turns that got her there. She eased through its open stone archway and down the lane toward the rear section, where her parents and brother rested. She stepped out of her car but the dry, hot air made her hesitate, and the scent of fresh flowers came so narcotically strong that she doubted her presence. She herself had a plot there, in the grim backfield: Having lost one child, Cora and Donnie had thought to prepare for every eventuality. But Ruth knew with suddenness she would not spend eternity here in Rosalind Memorial Gardens. Perhaps she’d never be buried at all. Perhaps she’d forever zip around the sun alone, a bit of restless, ashen space junk.

The moon shone too bright for stars, but she could see Jupiter, a few skyscape inches to the moon’s left, showing itself out, and then her brain tumbled itself back to another Jupiter-ruled night, decades earlier, when nothing terrible had yet happened at 4311.

“It doesn’t revolve around the sun,” Donnie was saying. “It’s too big.”

“What do you mean?” Ruth asked. She was looking through the family’s new telescope, marveling at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. She imagined aliens in a three-hundred-year-old storm, little green girls tired of wearing their raincoats. Mommies with little green babies in prams, waiting for the sun to come poking through the scarlet clouds.

“It revolves around a center of gravity that’s very near the sun. But Jupiter’s so big, it pushes the sun out of its way.”

“How many times a year?”

“How many times a century. The next time it gets to this place, you’ll be … twenty-two.”

She was then ten, just starting the fifth grade. Russell was sick but not terminally so: She remembered her mother wondering aloud whether it was a small failure of muscle tissue that might be remedied with medications. Rehabilitation. Her mother was still a mother at that point. Brushing mercurochrome on skinned knees. Mending the pockets of pants with smiley face patches. Not yet pushed out of the habitation of her own mind. Ruth’s dad was still her dad, her dad who smelled of Grey Flannel aftershave and Maker’s Mark bourbon and, occasionally, Bengay. Her dad who, before he bought the telescope, hiked her atop his shoulders and taught her the constellations: Orion, Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor. Her dad who hugged her every night before bedtime and told her to pray for mercy. He put a hand on one of her shoulders. It was time to turn the scope elsewhere.

“Don’t fret,” he said, as he leaned over and put his eye in, scooted the mount a few inches. He coughed, leaned in again, shifted the tube. “We’re all starstuff, did you know it? You and I are made up of the same carbon as stars.” He rotated the knob, took a deep breath. “When we die, we turn into soil, which turns into rock. Which eventually turns back into us. We’ll always be here. We’ve always been.”

And he was, Ruth guessed, as she looked at his stone, still. There was the persistent grief of her father having been killed by the state apparatus, her continual fear and mistrust, afterward, of soldiers, airport security agents, desk guards—anyone dispatched to do her country’s perennially dirty business. Her general terror of a world that had proved itself so false. Life was easier, she found, if you anticipated its cruelty.

But her dad was still in there, too, helping her out. Donald Wayne Cottam, read his stone. 1954–1997. His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night.

She got back in the car, turned on her phone, texted Enix. Per the restriction parameters she’d set, she supposed, the text would arrive buzzing into her child’s head at six in the morning. Of course I’m coming back, she typed. I know you’d rather be raised by wolves but you still have a mom, sorry. She imagined Enix rolling their eyes when they got it, telling Ruth she was never half as funny as she thought she was.

On her way back to Wendy’s, she rolled down the window to take in the last of what was, in California, early summer. In Louisville, it was still spring. Hay fever season. Soon would come the drifting fireflies of summer and the smell of young mint on the wind. And here Enix was, inviting Ruth back into her life. They’d watch the Perseids from their apartment balcony. They’d catch the harvest moon that would be back in the fall, so much larger and heart-cracking, as though it had held itself hidden during these months of pestilence.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ruth

Monday baked unbearably hot, one of those apocalyptic California days when the heat index was slated to look like an NBA score. Somewhere deep under the bones of Wendy’s house, the irrigation system set itself off in stages. The pumps kicked themselves into gear in the heavily manicured front yard, and Ruth heard the wicketwicketwicket of spray coming from the patch of garden that grew under her guest room window. Northern California wanted so badly to dry itself to desert, but no one would let it. Its humans sucked water from far beneath their own feet, forcing the dying land back into its seams of gold.

DePaulo went to work early. Under the heavy attack of the pumps, she heard him running a softer stream of water in the master bath. She heard something fall to the floor and shatter, heard DePaulo say fuck. She looked at the clock: 5:48. There were plantation slaves who’d slept later. She went back to sleep, and by the time she heard Wendy ordering the boys around the kitchen, the sun was already making its way through the blinds. The boys wormed around the foyer, their voices wriggling into quarrels. The door opened and slammed shut, slammed shut a second time: The boys were gone to school, then. Ruth sat in the relative quiet with Miami, whose whining, by nine thirty, began to undo her nerves.

Wendy, it turned out, was a billing supervisor at Kaiser Permanente, still working remotely in her upstairs bedroom. She’d told Ruth the night before that she could have the whole downstairs to herself, and now Ruth drifted down, switched on the giant living room console, and watched three hours of nothing. Hoarders. My 600 Lb. Life. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She skipped breakfast, letting the real antics of real people fill her stomach.

She took the remote and switched off the television. She listened to the sounds of the quiet house—Miami, tapping himself across the kitchen tile to his water bowl; the buzzing refrigerator, so shockingly loud when one was listening for it; the air conditioner, which kicked itself off and then quickly back on in its war against early summer. Ruth closed her eyes and sighed, listening to the allergic rattle of her breath leaving her own lungs.

On her way back to Wendy’s house the night before, she’d seen the sign for Target and felt homesick enough to cruise the parking lot, driving the longitudes of its marked spaces. She found a station wagon with New Jersey plates and wondered why they’d driven all the way across the country, whether they were lost too. She made her way back down the dusty frontage road, watching moths fly across the cast of her headlights, and thought about how inescapable, really, was the cumulative quality of time. She wanted to get back to Kentucky, but she wanted Enix to be a little kid when she got there. She wanted her divorce to finish within the month, but she wanted to hold on to that time when she and Myron were still limping along as a couple, that ace in time when Myron was sleeping downstairs on the sofa and they were pretending in front of their child, that time when her house, and all that was in it, still stood.

The fire marshal had let them near the taped-off maze of the house two days after it fell, and she remembered finding the hot ashes, remains not smoldering but still dangerously hot, rubble she was warned against walking across because it could burst back into flame at any moment. Now that she had the joint custody paperwork, with all its strikethrough lines and renegotiated terms, she knew that a marriage was like that, too, even after it ended, an emotional tripwire one had, so gingerly, to step over. There was the looming prove-up date that she’d miss if she stayed much longer in California, and when she thought of going before the judge to confirm the end of her marriage, she imagined it would be just like viewing her charred house, digesting the ashen color of everything that had once been vibrant and warm.

She’d been able to make out their possessions—the old Singer that Donna Lee had given her on her first wedding anniversary, the American Girl doll that Annie had begged for, for her sixth Christmas—but it had all been melted to the uniform color of Hershey’s dark chocolate. It hadn’t rained in the two intervening days, and the smell of plastic was overpowering. The upstairs had crashed to the first floor and she could see, sticking out of a pile of ash, that the box springs of her mattress had fused together in the heat; the divisions of its chunky coils had fused into smooth cylinders. She found the notches where the firemen had axed into walls; breaking the wood, she was told, helped keep fire from reigniting. She saw an outlet cover that had melted into the house’s one remaining wall, a residue of white plastic dotting the seared paint in a trail, like hot candle wax.

It was the way with Myron, too—part of the emotional structure of their marriage would always still stand, the mutual attraction they’d once held, like a concrete slab that would not burn. All else lay ruined, charred beyond recognition. She couldn’t know the day that Myron had started to hate her, but she remembered, vividly, the day everything she’d invested in him had begun moistening toward rot. It was a day she’d scrubbed the dried applesauce from the wooden floor of their little living room so that the house might look respectable enough for a babysitter. Annie was still an infant, sleeping only in fits, and Ruth resented their hiring a sitter just to go to a bar and listen to Anthony’s crude commentary, but after all isn’t that what you did when you were young, with a young husband: You tolerated his friends for the sake of keeping the peace.

“You look good,” Anthony said to her, when they arrived. It was what everyone had said after she had Annie, as though giving birth were some sort of war from which a woman returned with missing limbs and teeth. Ruth had just taken off her coat, and couldn’t imagine what Anthony’d been looking at beyond her milk-bloated bosom. It was the mouse click of compliments. She’d thought nothing of it.

Myron, however, took offense. “What looks good on her?” he snapped. “Why are you looking?”

“Just appreciatin’,” said Anthony.

Ruth went livid. They were crossing and dotting over her like tomcats. And it wasn’t the way Myron felt about her, not at all. That very morning, when she’d tried to kiss him before work, he’d ducked away, citing her sour breath. With Annie screaming through the night and her breasts constantly leaking through her T-shirt, there lay little sexual charge between them; whatever Myron was being proprietary about now had to do with Myron, and not with Ruth at all.

“What can I get you?” Myron asked her. Without looking at him, he held a palm to Anthony’s face. Said, “Not you. You can go get your own. Brother.”

Anthony chose to chuckle, the staccato notes of his laughter chipping the ice shelf that had formed between them.

“I’ll have a Stella,” she said.

“Ruthie,” said Myron. “The milk.”

Ruth stilled her eyes to keep them from rolling involuntarily into her head. “One beer’s not going to kill a baby, Myron. One beer’s going to cost her something like point zero three IQ points.”

Myron got up from their booth, disappearing almost immediately into the hot, thick crowd of twentysomethings. He looked like someone’s dad, Ruth thought, then realized—he was.

Anthony came to sit on her side of the table, on the couch. She felt her own cushion rise slightly as his sank. “Know what?” he said. Crazily, he leaned in and kissed her full on the lips. She let him. Beat her head into the force of it, even. Clutched the lapels of his jacket to pull him closer. It felt like the end of the world, the scrape of the bartender’s ice scoop like the hail of the Seventh Plague. When she drew her head back, when she looked at Anthony through her hooded lids, she realized what a caged animal she’d become.

Anthony moved back to his side of the table and she forgot all about it: She downed her first Stella and then her second, and by the time they were half an hour into conversation, Anthony’s kiss became just one more strange thing that had happened to her in a downtown bar.

But years later, when she and Anthony met by accident in a city park, she remembered. She’d been sitting on a bench with Linda Couilibailly, the willowy, beautiful mother of Allison Grace, Annie’s best kindergarten friend. Against Linda, who was six foot one with smooth ebony skin, Ruth always felt plain: She was a kewpie doll to Linda’s Barbie, a Betty to her Veronica. But as Anthony walked toward them, pausing to rest his arm atop the spikes of the green metal fence, he looked directly at Ruth. It was an early September day but the wind had already kicked up a drift of winter. Anthony was dashing in his London Fog, and had she not known who he was, she might have felt her pulse quicken. He looked directly at her, as if Linda wasn’t there. Said, “We should have a playdate just for us.”

Annie and Allison were building igloos in a nearby sandbox, and in the silence that followed Anthony’s words, Ruth heard them giggling; otherwise, time stopped. She laughed uncomfortably and Anthony walked away; when Linda asked who was that man, Ruth lied and said she couldn’t possibly know, she didn’t remember him from anywhere. But when she went home that afternoon and again got down on hands and knees to scrub the wooden floor, this time stained with grape juice that seemed to want a permanent place in their lives, she replayed the scene in her mind and discovered that her marriage was already over.

It wasn’t that she was attracted to Anthony so much as that she was in love with freedom, and waywardness, and running, yet again running. Not so much craving Anthony’s touch so much as craving the surprise of where another person’s fingers might wander. Suds rolled across the floor and she thought, Fuck this. She put her whole body into the scrub. Myron will never know me, she thought, and I will never know Myron. Two people can never know each other. It’s impossible. There was bedevilment in knowing it, because she knew you didn’t just leave someone over a vague feeling. But she pulled the thought out of its drawer more and more as Annie progressed through elementary grades and Myron rounded out more softly around his middle, as the house began to smell of must. I’ll just get out. I’ll escape. The thought rutted itself into a deep groove in her head that she turned to when she needed it, a track with its own Favorites rating.

When she remembered, she knew the way she felt safe there in California was a cheat stitch in time, with no repercussions. No consequences. No questions of personal growth or forward movement. In California, she could still be Distant-Past Ruth, arrested forever in time as a mourning high schooler.

She refused herself lunch, knowing it was too hot to go out. The Fiat’s carpeted seats would be ruined with heat by now, its steering wheel molten: Waiting for its AC to kick in seemed too much of an expenditure of patience.

Around one, she heard a car stop in front of Wendy’s house, saw its giant DoorDash topper. She heard the garage door track itself open, turned to find Wendy running down the stairs. “Hey,” she said, dipping out the inner door. “Be right back.”

She returned with two paper bags, one of which was wholly bottomed in grease. “I ordered Chinese. I remember how much you like it.” Wendy smiled, actually remembering. She removed the cartons from the paper bag and they began to eat, in the kind of comfortable silence that suggested the canyons between them had never existed. “So,” Wendy said, after they’d both finished one plate of food and served themselves seconds. “What are you thinking, Ruth? Are you moving back here?”

Ruth chewed, taking note of the sweet-and-sour sauce that oozed out of each broccoli floret. To Wendy’s question, she had no answer. In a distant corner of her mind, a music box cranked itself up and a metal ballerina turned. She sensed the red velvet interior, the dancer’s carefully sculpted topknot, the costume necklaces sprawled across both halves of the box. It had been Wendy’s, and she’d always coveted it. She’d let Wendy down when she left. She might let Wendy down again by not staying. She had no answer, not one that was socially workable.

Wendy filled Ruth’s silence with concrete. “Ruth, do you ever think about what might have happened if you’d stayed?”

“What do you mean? I had to go to college somewhere. Why not there? I can’t see how life would’ve been any different.”

“Of course you can. Or you wouldn’t have run away.”

Ruth let her fork fall into her rice and stick vertically. “Wendy,” she said. But there was no way of reproaching her, because she was right. Ruth had run away. A grief shared might have been a grief halved, but she’d run cleanly away from her starving sister and never looked back.

“I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t fair. But I’m not you. I was never strong like you are. I wouldn’t have made it.”

“Ruth. I’m no stronger than you are, baby. I almost died, grieving. You kidding? I almost died.”

“But you’re fine now. Look at you. This beautiful house, your boys, DePaulo …” Though Ruth had decided the night before, when DePaulo started talking about his sneaky Chinese coworkers, that she didn’t like him. He was the kind of man who thought different human ethnicities were like different breeds of dogs.

“I thought if I hid from the grieving, it wouldn’t follow me,” Ruth said. “And it didn’t. Not until now.”

Wendy got up, scraped the rest of her food into the trash, and rinsed her plate into the sink. She opened the dishwasher and bent over, shoving the plate in its row. “And that’s why you’re here,” she said, slamming the dishwasher shut, turning against it to park her ass. “You thought you’d take a vacation from this endless parade of mortality and impermanence? Ha. Good luck. And you left your job? You’ve just given yourself some life-ruining distraction, girlie.”

Wendy crossed her arms, looked at the wall ahead of her. “I’m not some magical Negro, but what I did learn after Dad died is that the only way through grief is time. You can’t work it away or drink it away or fuck it away. I tried to sleep it away and smoke it away the whole time I was at Hodge’s, but guess what? You can’t do that either. You can run from sadness, but you can’t kill it.”

“I did.”

“Well. Looks like it rose from the dead and caught up with you.”

Wendy came back to sit in her chair, got her face so close to Ruth’s that Ruth could smell the garlic she’d eaten.

“You’re wrong,” Ruth said. “I’m done. I was done when I left here.”

“You’re not done. Because you never began.”

The garlic would have been so offensive on anyone else’s breath, but this was her sister, trying to help her, trying to spoon her rice cereal again, from a baby cup. “You cheated it for a while,” Wendy said, “but you can’t control how long it’ll take now that it’s here. You can’t shorten it by going back to Kentucky, turning back into someone who isn’t even you. Time is what fucked you over in the first place, right? That wild second when O’Brien shot Dad? And now it’s why you’re here, because it’s just fucking you over again. Your hair turned gray and your car depreciated and your kid grew up and your roof started to leak and the NASDAQ took a dip and you needed a root canal. And so here you are, back in California, trying to stop all that? But you can’t. You won’t. Sorry.”

TWENTY-NINE

Anthony

This year, for my forty-ninth birthday, Moms gave me a book. Not that it was my birthday, because that was back in February. But I’m a Leap Year baby, and come the off years, she celebrates whatever day she pleases. True, it means one time we went to Daytona Beach in the middle of April, and another year Moms went four months without saying a thing, then bought $1,000 worth of fireworks on the Fourth of July, plus a three-story cake that said Happy Birthday Bambino, so we did it up with that synergy, of celebrating America’s birthday with mine. She says she does it this way so it’ll always be a surprise. I say she does it this way because she fucking forgets.

Anyway, this book she just gave me, on the occasion of my forty-nine unmarried years on this earth? It’s called Attached. There’s a big red heart on the cover, which is how I knew I was in trouble. And sure enough, it’s subtitled. Right under the heart: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love.

I took it to the crapper and read a couple of paragraphs, then got interested. In the intro, the shrinks who wrote it were badmouthing their friend Tamara, who sounded like the queen of bad choices in men, and I got all invested, and wanted to hear the end of her story. But before they got to that they started crisping on about how the need to be in a committed relationship is embedded in your DNA, how it comes from the time of monkeys, and when I got off the throne I drove that book down Flat Rock Road and put it in somebody’s Little Free Library.

Then I drove back, in the middle of the night, and got it out.

I’m reading it. But I told my moms I wasn’t. I told her I didn’t have time. She’s figuring she’s got a year ’til I’m a fifty-year-old bachelor, past my sell-by date, and she just wants me married. It’d make her DNA feel better if I was.

Back in the winter, pretty close to my real birthday, actually, she fixed me up with this girl she knows from church. This girl’s name was Mary. Moms warned me that Mary was visually impaired, told me I’d have to pick her up at her house told me to make sure I yelled out it was me when I knocked on the door. I was thinking, damn. What kind of grown woman lets herself be fixed up by some old vecchia at church, and is there anything more cliché than a strict, blind Catholic who’s likely a virgin, but anyway I went ahead and took Mary to Stoney River Steakhouse because I wanted to be able to tell Moms I gave it a try. It upsets her even more when I give it a try before I say no.

So I take Mary to this restaurant, where she gets out her phone, which makes this cool trick of reading the menu to her out loud as she scans, and then she’s fiddling with her hair, the way chicks do when they’re flirting with you, but instead of giggling into her plate or checking that her sweater’s snug enough at the shoulder, she’s looking me dead in the eye, talking about news stories she’s heard on NPR and books she’s reading on real estate investment, telling me how she’s speaking Arabic in her spare time, and part of me wondered whether she was staring at me because she had to focus on one point in her field of vision, or if it was because she was trying to confirm that I was more boring than anything she knew.

I tried bringing up the Cards game. A show I’d watched about outboard motors. But she said she didn’t know much about baseball or boats. And she was so fucking smart, that one, but Moms had told me she was a middle school librarian, and the house I’d picked her up in was one of those two-bedroom no-baths over near the old water tower, and I was thinking that the real drama of the gifted child was that when they grew up, they never made enough money, and there she was, staring right through me, like she could see, without completely seeing me, what a dog I was. When the waiter asked if we wanted dessert, I said, “I doubt we do,” and then I took her home and told her to take care. I wasn’t up to doing that kind of work on myself. It’s behavior the book would call avoidant, but fuck that book. The book also says only half of all people are what they call secure, the kids they’re giving the gold stars, but I guess it ain’t occurred to those shrinks that that means half of all people are just fine with their attachment styles. Just out here living our lives.

Myron was married all those years, but I’m not sure even he’s what that book would call secure. He’s at my house more and more since Paulina dumped him, like he’s trying to crawl back to some good time we were having before he met Ruth. Hell, that boy would crawl back into the womb if he could. And he thinks nobody can see it, but I bet you women can smell that coming out of his pores: His attachment style is very much insecure. That fifteen-year marriage is the proof. He knew Ruth was too good for him, but he was out there doing all that hard work anyway.

Though “I just didn’t feel like all that shit” is what he said when I asked him about Lina. “She wanted more than I did.” But he’s still feeling Ruth. He’s feeling her hard. He’d walk across hot coals for that one, and I can understand why. Ruth’s one of them chicks who would stare at you at the Stoney River Steakhouse and not let go until you broke. She’s never brooked any bullshit. Being around her is like being stripped of your skin, and then your muscles and the blood vessels beneath them, it’s like going back in time to the day before, when you lied to your secretary about why she couldn’t have a raise, and then the week before that, when you saw an old lady about to park in the Whole Foods but you turned into the spot ahead of her because you were in a hurry. Ruth says something like, “Come on, Anthony, let’s be real here,” and I feel my heart judder. Around Ruth, I understand that every single time I cross my arms at a meeting and lean back to look like the bigger animal, every single time I look in the mirror and practice the power look, every single minute of my workday and my travel time and my golf game is all just a hot mess of pretense. Ruth is about burning a pinhole in the thing and then letting that fire burn until it wholly consumes. Myron doesn’t deserve her. No one does.

That don’t mean Ruth ain’t, on her lower levels, a liar. It turns out she very much is. Every part of the story Myron tells me just gets wilder and wilder, and you can’t believe some quiet little paralegal made up a whole life like that for twenty years: It’s like Ruth ought to be writing Lifetime movies instead of answering writs of habeas corpus. Myron feels like he never even knew her. He wants to know how he could have loved someone he didn’t know.

But one night I took him out to the Seafood Lady to get him to listen instead of just talking and I told him, when he finally stuck a hush puppy in his trap, that first off, you ain’t got to know someone deep to love them deeply. And second off, he did know her. Because what her daddy did for a living and what her baby brother died of don’t mean shit compared to the fact that all those years she could have run back to her life, she stayed with him. “There’s the truth,” I said, “whether you got too much sour grapes to acknowledge it or not.” The people who wrote that book didn’t offer an attachment style called I-Don’t-Give-a-Shit, but that’s what Ruth’s is. And yet she stopped taking her law school exams and stayed with him anyway.

“I don’t know,” he said. He was swirling his fish around in tartar sauce. “I think she just enjoyed playing dress-up.”

It might be hereditary, because Enix is less and less of who she ever was. And I don’t mean this boy/girl/fluid business. I mean, now she’s listening to soft jazz and quoting lines from The Godfather, and she’s got piercings all over her face, through the septum of her nose and above one eyebrow and in five different places on one ear, and Myron’s just letting her. In fact, Myron’s taking her, since she’s a minor, and when Ruth gets home, I know she’s going to die just looking at it. And it might be Enix’s way of punishing her for all that lying, because the more they tell me they’ve looked up on the internet about Donald Cottam and everything that happened to him, the more they do to that face, the more colors they slap on their fingernails, the more they shred the knees of their jeans. She probably feels like if her moms can’t be who she said she was, then why should she? Her. Their. Whatever. Damn. My point is, the kid is pissed. Piercing your face isn’t anything like telling people you’re a whole other person, but the kid is trying. They’re trying hard.

It’s going to be hard for them to reinvent themself when people are fine with their reinvention. Ruth didn’t have any parents left, so she had to go hard. She didn’t have roots, so she pulled what was left right out of the ground. Enix has people taking them to the tattoo parlor and using their proper pronouns. Poor kid. I’m not sure how they’ll ever piss these two off. Myron’s trying to get back at Ruth, and Ruth is barely paying attention. Enix said she might not even be coming home. While he’s single parenting, Myron brings Enix over to my house sometimes and the three of us sit there, all of us single guys now. My neighbor’s dog Beep Beep comes over, too. Myron and I sit our beers across the table from Enix’s Mountain Dew, and while it all fizzes and foams, Beep Beep runs over and curls up in the triangle between all our feet like he’s some kind of prayer. “When your mom comes home,” I tell Enix, “you’ll just have to give her a lie detector test.”

They laugh really loud, then, so loud that Beep Beep barks at them. “That woman needs a whole truckload of lie detector tests,” they say. They take a gluten-free pretzel and dunk it in their Mountain Dew, canceling out something, I’m sure, though I don’t know what.

And I mean, my roots are rotten, but they’re there. Moms lives right across town, where I can keep an eye on her. But Enix? She’s got to deal with all that Ruth has wrought. And if Ruth ever comes back, she’s going to have to build all that back without any of us, because we’re all in various stages of sliding away from her. And maybe what she’s learnt, flying across the country, is that the past can’t give you what you’re looking for. A hitchhiker can’t, an ex-boyfriend can’t, a sister can’t, probably the whole state of California can’t, either. What Ruth’s looking for is a self, and she’s going to have to find that in the present. She’s just going to have to drive back here and show up in it, hope her husband doesn’t get sole custody and her kid will speak to her again.

And as for Myron, I want to tell him that his attachment style is just fine, he’s not the crazy one, but I’d die if anyone knew I was reading this book. I want to tell my moms to stop fixing me up with women like Mary. I want to tell my moms to stop fixing me up with anyone at all. I don’t want a woman. A woman might leave me at a gas station. In fact, if I’m to believe everything I’ve read in that book so far, my moms is the problem she wants that book to fix.

The last time Myron came without Enix, we ordered takeout from Dasha Barbours. Myron ate one slider, then a second, and when he moved on to his fries I told him this, not to be so hard on Ruth. I told him a lot of people would’ve taken all that childhood tragedy and pushed half of it off in therapy, then taken the other half and drank themselves to death or gone high on heroin. But Ruth felt it like that monk in Vietnam did. Right before he set himself on fire. She felt it so hard and so true, it turned into a space that was impossible for her to live in. “And would you have wanted her to burn, instead?” I asked him.

There’s this funny bone of information Myron doesn’t have, that I have kissed his wife on two different occasions. Once in reality, at a bar, right after she had Annie, and then another time, in my head, for a long, long time, when I found her on a city park bench. That second time was the best: I held the small of her back, and the kiss went on and on, and I turned my head so it was two centimeters closer to her shoulder, where I could smell all the things she did to her skin after her bath. That second time was so real, I’ve remembered it for years, even though it didn’t happen. But here’s something that did: She told me she was on birth control. Myron was all over her for a second kid, she told me, when he went back in the house for a bucket of ice. “But how can I be a mom to two kids when I can barely be a mom to one?” she asked me, like the idea disgusted her.

At the time I thought it was terrible, how she was making him feel like he was shooting blanks but now, I get it. How could she be anyone’s mom when she wasn’t even herself?

I was thinking it so hard there in my backyard, under the sound of all them screaming birds, that I might’ve said it out loud, but when I looked over at Myron he was at peace. He’d moved on to his chocolate brownie. I’d never noticed he ate his food one thing at a time like that. It stoked some bromance. “Aren’t you kind of relieved she’s gone?” I said. “Off in her authentic self?”

He shook his head at me, miserably, and I could tell he hadn’t been paying me any mind.

But that’s Myron. And he’s my brother. And I’m his. I’ll just keep talking, whether he’s listening or not. And I’ll just keep listening to him talk.

THIRTY

Enix

Hannah was pinning a mum to Enix’s jacket for the homecoming dance, her bone-thin fingers finding, then losing their way. “Hold still, dummy,” Hannah said, the sharp edges of her normal speaking voice lost to the straight pin she held in her mouth. As her working fist trembled against the blue crepe of Enix’s lapel, her voice took on even more helium. Floated somewhere near the ceiling. “Hold still, or I’m gonna stick you right in your bandaged-down boob.”

Enix was embarrassed. Not because they were dressing butch again, and here Hannah’s mom had gone and bought them a corsage. And not because the bloom, still in its plastic Kroger carton, was so clearly a last-minute pity gift. They were sheepish about the mum because after a week riding through the desert in Ruth’s car, the corsage seemed, to Enix, like such redundancy. It was such a gorgeous spring they were having, a spring their English teacher, Mr. Erickson, might have described as “bountiful.” Flowers bloomed on every bush and bunnies hopped out of thickets to spring across ditches; both afternoons they’d been back had produced rainstorms, complete with thunderclaps that Enix now understood never to happen west of the Rockies. Why did they need to insert mums into this scene in order to go dancing? Why could Hannah not infer that the flower wire was fashioned as an actual calyx, so that she could just stick the pin through? Enix felt the back of their neck flushing red. They could not understand either thing.

They’d arrived at Standiford Field at six o’clock that morning and found their father waiting for them at the gate. Already, they’d felt wrong in their dress, its hem brushing their knees in a way that made them want to dash their entire body against a rock. Because Myron had paid the unaccompanied minor fee, he’d gotten special dispensation to check through security and meet them. They hadn’t known this, no one had told them on the other end of the trip, and so they hadn’t been quite ready for the extra dramatic flair it added to their arrival. But they found, when they were enveloped in their father’s arms, with the stubble of his five-o’clock shadow bristling against their own bare cheek, that they were as relieved to be back home with their dad as they were ashamed to be receiving this public display of affection in front of the hot college student who’d been sitting next to them in row 26.

“What an adventure, huh, Annie?”

“It’s Enix.”

They registered a fractional change in their father’s face. The tears in his eyes glistened in the sunlight coming through the airport window, and Enix knew that if he started crying, they’d swivel into a hole right there in the carpet. They’d watched so much parental drama these past few months. Their dad could not let go of their mom, it was clear. And their mom thought she’d run away from their dad, but she hadn’t, though it was clear she desperately wanted to. But they were phonies, even to themselves. They didn’t know squat about each other; Enix had known this since they were Annie, watching her dad squirt ketchup on the side of her mother’s scrambled eggs in a restaurant, watching her mom look up at him, glare, say, “Myron, I think I’ve said it fifty times since I’ve known you. Ketchup on eggs is something abhorrent.”

They were both the biggest phonies, Enix had always known, and now, they couldn’t even keep their name straight. They couldn’t keep each other straight, really; they’d never quite trapped each other under glass. Enix wanted them both to stop crying, stop emoting, go back to work, save for their college education.

Their parents had stepped out of their pasteboard cutouts and become what Mr. Erickson called dynamic characters, and Enix just wanted them to stop. They needed them quiet. They needed them responsible. They needed them in their places. They needed them flat. “Thanks for bringing me home,” they said, hoping the calm measure of their voice would stop whatever tide of emotion their dad had started.

In their peripheral vision Enix saw the boy, the U of L student—they’d been afraid to talk to him, but they’d seen the university’s embroidery on his backpack when he put it in the overhead bin—pass on his way out of the gate. He ducked his head and turned slightly, making eye contact. Enix knew he was straight, they’d felt the boy’s heterosexuality radiating outward all six hours of the flight, and they were grateful then for the dress, because they knew that outfitted as a boy, they’d not have drawn his attention. As it was, it was the end of the world, the oceans had started to sink under the weight of melted glaciers, but if he walked back this way, if Enix asked for his digits and opened his mind to pansexuality, they could still fall in love. When the stewardess came down the aisle with the drink cart, Enix had been asleep; the young man had touched them on the arm to alert them. Enix hadn’t been fully conscious, but neither had they been fully asleep, and every time they remembered the way he touched them, gently as he had, in contravention of CDC guidelines, small drops of dew melted off their heart. Off the tarmac now he gave Enix a slight smile as he walked, and they felt their entire face open into its predictable redness. They felt their blood vessels opening, as they habitually did, into a tableau for their freckles. Turn away, Enix thought, turn away. He did. They were relieved.

They didn’t like boys their age, not ever. Now they’d been away with their mother, on the lam, seeing the country, middle school boys felt even sillier. They’d been wanting to go to the dance because Kevin, a boy from Saint X, was going too. Enix and Hannah had heard it from a group of Saint X boys they hung around with in Snapchat, how Kevin’s dad had been convicted of embezzling $280,000 from the state and sent to a fancy correctional facility in Ashland. Kevin had gone quiet, shed his friends, quit the football team. Enix had seen there, in Kevin’s intense silence and thrift store black leather jacket, their entire future. They and Kevin were both too old for the children all around them, they’d thought. They should run away together. Their parents, consumed as they were with starting fires and robbing Kentucky, would never figure it out.

Except that now that they’d hurtled across the desert in their mother’s Tesla, smelled the alcohol on Ruth’s breath, watched her get out of bed in her T-shirt and panties and sleepwalk across a hotel room, even Kevin seemed beneath them, distantly small as an ant. They still wanted to go to the dance because now they had a killer suit, but when they knocked on the wood of the idea in their head, that was the evening’s only enticement. It would be a hollow event, dead already, just one more chance at ritual with their friends before they all went to high school.

They’d learned, on the lam, that most of life was going to be like that. Dead wood.

When they’d first gotten home from the airport, they’d stood with their dad in the Aspen’s upstairs atrium with its tight smell of new carpet. Their dad had keyed into his door but there’d been no mother for Enix to come back to in Kentucky, because they no longer had a mother. They hadn’t known a person could be so angry that the emotion was physically experienced. The back of their throat wore bitter, and they rolled their tongue to scrape it against itself. They had no home to return to because it was no longer standing. With the help of Silvadene, the burned place on their arm had healed over into a dark, leaf-shaped scar, and they rubbed it gently it as they went to their dad’s guest bedroom and readied themselves for a shower, but when they peeled off their clothes, it felt like being flayed. “Can I spend the night at Hannah’s after the dance?” they yelled.

“What?” Myron yelled back, though the apartment was so small—just one floor with two bedrooms—that they were sure he’d heard. He was sitting on the couch in the living room, but he’d put the television at such low volume that Enix could hear his knee crack when he stood. “You just got home,” he said.

“And I’m happy to be here,” Enix lied. “But it would just be nice if I spent the night with Hannah.” It was logically empty, what they were saying. They hoped he wouldn’t press them.

“Okay,” he said. He had a toilet paper roll in the bathroom that had been uncored, robbed of itself so that tissue unspooled from its limp inside, and since they’d been back from California, their father had seemed like that: de-spined. They heard his knee pop again when he sat back down. His feelings were hurt. Enix knew it. They didn’t care. They hurt too. They hurt all over. They hurt so much, their skin had been grated with a crosshatch of anger. Hurt was steaming out of their pores, diffusing into the air.

Hannah was daubing concealer on Enix’s cheek now, smoothing away not only all the freckles, but all the anger that had piled up beneath them. Brazilian samba floated up from the downstairs family room where Hannah’s parents kept a collection of canaries and geckos in painted wire cages, and Enix felt floaty and ethereal standing above the music and birdcall. They might migrate to the Amazon themselves one day, now that they knew a person could just drift away from their regular lives and survive. They imagined themselves in a couple of hours, walking into the school dance, feeling three inches taller than they’d stood when they left, and they smiled. “Stop that,” Hannah said, “or I’ll mess up your eyes.”

Enix dropped most of their grin, though the apples of their cheeks, they left taut. It was easy not to smile, with all the thoughts running through their mind. The state said they needed parents until they turned eighteen, but one thing they’d learned from Ruth on the road was that truth was always up for a revision. They didn’t need a mom anyway. Even before they’d discovered Ruth’s manifesto of lies, even before they’d left for parts unknown and ended up in the middle of the desert, they hadn’t needed a mom. They’d been packing their own lunch since fourth grade. They could blow their own hair straight, pick out their own coat sizes. Ruth couldn’t even help them with math anymore; Enix had a tutor, a girl from Sacred Heart who carried a big yellow Fendi purse and didn’t seem to need the money. When Ruth asked Enix what math Heather had helped them with, they would always tell her, nothing. It didn’t even make grammatical sense, which is what their mother so richly deserved.

Nothing. It’s what they needed from Ruth now. They remembered years back when they’d been playing My Little Pony, they’d written a note from the ponies on a three-by-five-inch card they’d taken from Myron’s home office. The problem is our mom, they’d written in ballpoint red, channeling themselves through the ponies. We want to live somewhere else

They’d left it in the MLP castle, on the balcony, and Ruth had discovered it while straightening her room. “Is this true?” she’d asked, barreling into the kitchen, because Deadname had left off playing to come eat her plate of cheese crackers. “This is how you feel about me?”

Ruth had laughed, then cried, actual tears—shocking tears—and Enix remembered dropping a half-eaten cracker, walking over to Ruth, patting her back with what must have been her very small hand. “It was a joke,” Deadname said. “I mean, from the ponies. The ponies were joking.”

There’d been a sudden, compensatory trip to the zoo, their mother’s zipping their windbreaker and bundling them both up into the Volvo station wagon, Earth Wind and Fire marking their miles down the expressway, their arrival at the large compound on Trevilian Way. They remembered their mother’s red curls blowing in the wind as they opened the back door and unbuckled Deadame from her booster seat, her own hair gusting across her face as they crossed the parking lot. At the entrance gate, Ruth riddled her. “What’s the most common animal here?” she asked.

Deadname had thought. She’d shoved her raw, chilled hands into her jacket pockets, and she’d thought and thought. Ruth paid their admission and was handed a pair of tickets through a slot in the window glass: She gave Deadname her ticket to hand to the clerk herself, so that Deadname might have a measure of independence. “Birds?” Deadname asked.

“Nope.”

“Fish? There’s a lot of fish swimming.”

Ruth smiled down at her, took Deadname’s hand in her own. “That’s a good guess, but no.” Ruth got out the map, as she never did, and asked Deadname what she wanted to see first.

“Monkey house!”

Deadname was relieved Ruth had dropped the riddle. Like many of her mother’s points, it seemed to fly permanently over her head.

They walked what would have been the radius of the zoo’s circular path and ended up in an area that had been fashioned to look like the African savannah. “So what’s it?” Ruth asked, retaking her question. “What’s the most common animal here?”

Deadname shrugged. “Mommy. Just tell me.”

“Human!” Ruth bent over to tickle Deadname, who wriggled away from her. Ruth turned herself toward the gorilla exhibit. It was really just one gorilla, lying in dry dirt, not playing, not scratching, not looking to mate with any imaginary second gorilla crossing the fake savannah. He’d just been fed, looked like. Or drugged. “That one must be male,” Ruth joked. She seemed pleased with herself.

And then Deadname remembered feeling something on her neck, a small tight dot, a hardening under her skin that spread instantly into throbbing pain, all the way across her shoulder. She was so embarrassed, in front of all these strangers at the zoo, but her voice would not allow her to stop screaming. “Mom!” she screamed. She couldn’t move. She screamed in a rhythm. “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

Other moms and dads and even other kids looked on in awe, as though they themselves never cried. A man in a Louisville Zoo oxford shirt stopped sweeping his patch of sidewalk just to look at her. The more people she found looking, the louder she screamed. It was a closed drum of fear.

Ruth gently lifted her hair, said, “Hold still, love.” Deadname felt her mother’s fingernails scrape her skin in one expert move, the pain scaling down to a localized ache. “You got stung,” Ruth said, holding out a tiny brown nub no longer than a grape seed. She turned her palm, dropping it to the ground, and wiped Deadname’s tears with the back of her hand.

Deadname heard her mother hiccup, and she looked up into Ruth’s reddened face. Ruth patted Deadname’s back in a rhythm, with the same cadence she used to put her down for a nap. But Ruth’s face. It was horrifying. Her face told Deadname, I have no idea how to be your mom.

“Hey,” she said. “When a bee stings you, it kills itself. If it left its stinger, it’s dead. So you won, Annie. You killed it.”

It had made Deadname feel better to have won that round, but she knew that if her family was normal, it wouldn’t have. Her mother was bent, like a faulty crowbar. And now all these years later here was one more proof, that their mother wasn’t here to help them ready for their eighth-grade dance, because she was lost out in God-Knew-Where, California.

Then again, once the mother died in a Disney movie, there was always more adventure. And they had the nickel bag they’d taken from their mother’s jacket, the one they’d smoke tonight at the dance while telling all their friends they’d gotten it off an actual, honest-to-God hitchhiker.

“Good Lord you are so bad at holding still,” Hannah was saying. She dusted a spread of pressed powder off Enix’s chest, and they both turned to the full-length mirror on Hannah’s bedroom wall. Enix looked like a boy, but a pretty boy. Pretty enough that Kevin would still look at them. It was Enix’s turn to do Hannah, who always went out with a full face of makeup and tight jeggings. Hannah was habitually so much more resplendent than Enix, but without makeup, in sweatpants and a tank top, Hannah stood plain, plainer than Enix could believe.

Enix saw themselves as they’d be seen at the dance. They looked like they were twenty. Felt like they were fifty. No, they didn’t need a mom. They hadn’t needed a mom in years. If their mom had ever bothered to watch My Little Pony she would have known: The ponies did lots of things, but they never lied.

THIRTY-ONE

Myron

Myron sat slumped in his chair, watching Trevor Noah yet terrifically aware of his own wandering thoughts. Enix had come back taller—not physically, but emotionally. His only child had taken their first day back with him and dashed it against the rocks of a school dance. With Enix gone, he kept reliving the words to Goodnight Moon.

Goodnight room, he thought. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow, jumping over the moon.

They were away at the dance with their friend Hannah, no doubt gathered with two or three friends in front of a large plastic punch bowl, all of them looking no doubt for Kevin, of whom Myron had heard tell while spying on Enix’s TikTok. Kevin always got his face too close to his cell phone and looked into its camera eye as if he were a pirate, and Myron hated him without knowing much else. He imagined this Kevin under Mylar balloons and streamers, looking for Enix, shooting his piratey gaze across the gymnasium.

Goodnight clocks, and goodnight socks.

His wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, was gone, out west, following some crazy trail to her past. Enix had texted him from places with names like Ogallala and Winnemucca, places whose names he felt might properly be the province of absurdist literature. But then, that’s what they were now living, in the wreckage of the pandemic, in the time of Ruth’s disappearance. Enix had told him Ruth’s whole backstory, the one Ruth had managed to keep from him over the course of three decades and the bump of a new millennium. There was no Hollywood Supper Club fire, no farm in Metcalfe County. Ruth’s baby brother had died of a mysterious childhood disease, Enix told him, and her mother had then died of actual heartbreak. Her father, crucified by the local police. Shot by his own neighbor. That Ruth’s dad had been a CPA had been a special shock: Of all the details she’d fabricated about her past, the lie that her father had been a custodian at the local community college now seemed especially inventive. “Mom just built herself out of thin air,” Enix had explained, and he’d been surprised to find not anger but tenderness. Getting to know her, now, would have been like learning to walk all over again, but he was perfectly willing to try.

He imagined Ruth as a wide-eyed, redheaded kid, watching so much sadness spool out in front of her, and he couldn’t explain it, not even to himself, because he was supposed to hate her—he’d spent $20,000 already opposing her in court—but he loved her even more. In fact, he wanted, after Enix told him the story, to hold Ruth in his arms. He wanted to wedge his hand in the curls of her hair, and undo every bad thing that ever happened to her. Every single solitary thing, including himself.

But he knew how it was now. They’d go to the prove-up and stand before Judge Martinez and agree to dissolve their marriage. They’d walk out of the courtroom and into the hall looking like a couple of zombies, and some young law student maybe standing on the wall with his stack of pro bono file folders would look at them and wonder, as Myron had all those years ago, how two people who once loved each other enough to be married, two people who’d literally been inside each other hundreds of times, two people who’d listened to each other spit and fart and weep in the shower, how these two people could walk out of a courtroom separately, no longer speaking, having cleaved their fortunes into two neat parcels.

Goodnight, little mouse. And goodnight house.

And now the world was full of microplastics and artificial intelligence, the humans having decided not only that they no longer wanted to live, but perhaps had never enjoyed being human in the first place. The humans had never quite fallen in love with themselves, Myron thought, and were now collectively shutting themselves down.

He’d been lectured by George Leander, at George Leander’s retirement party, where George Leander was supposed to be yukking it up with his teenaged grandchildren. “You need to start loosening your grip,” George had said. George had a cold that made him overshoot his own voice until he sounded like Marlon Brando. “You’re developing a reputation,” George said, the smallest smear of red frosting holding at the corner of his lip, “for holding on to litigation. The junior partners, they need rain too. Don’t squeeze them out.” There was the future of the firm to think about, George told him. The training of the next generation. “Relax. Go golfing. You fish? No? Learn. Retirement’s gonna get you too,” George had said, ever so gently, as if this thought might knock Myron to the floor, “and you don’t want to go into it not knowing yourself.”

Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.

Anthony had notified him that he and Lina had ended up kicking it, of course they had, Lina holding the ability to sponsor a world Anthony couldn’t fail in, and Anthony serving as Lina’s ultimate low-ROI project. He’d gone with Lina to get Rinehart back, he said, and he didn’t know how, they ended up in bed that very night.

I guess you slipped on a banana peel, Myron had texted him. Just kinda fell in.

Brother, Anthony fired back. You’re the asshole who let her give away her dog.

Myron would never tell Anthony, but he wasn’t jealous. He was neither happy for the two of them nor unhappy for himself. Their hooking up was too absurd for him to claim indifference, exactly, but he found himself floating in a soupy bliss of knowing he was now, at age forty-eight, even more of a bachelor than Anthony Sidoti.

He was living Goodnight Moon, as if in a full-scale diorama of the book, with the kittens, and their mittens, and the old lady rabbit in the rocking chair, whispering Hush. Enix would begin college in four short years and then he wouldn’t have even the ten days of summer. They’d fall in love with whatever little college town they ended up in, or they’d fall in love with a girl, or a boy, or they’d fall in love with an internship at Google, and never come home at all. As it was, they’d gotten off the plane from Sacramento looking so worldly, rolling their suitcase down the tarmac. They’d gotten into the front seat of his car with the air of a foreign war correspondent, the collar of their jacket turned so neatly down, their hair tumbling over its lapels in a loose way he’d never before noticed.

Goodnight stars, he thought. Goodnight air.

He’d had to pretend, when Enix left for the dance, that he was happy they were going, that he didn’t know about Kevin, that he wouldn’t be sitting here as he was now, imagining worst possible scenarios. Enix and Kevin sneaking out of the dance to make out at a local park, Kevin breaking Enix’s heart in the short space of two hours, Kevin alluding to all this by posting one of his terrible smirky close-ups on Instagram.

Myron was waiting for a text that would never arrive; he was hoping so fervently for this missive that he’d written it in his own mind: Dad. Dad. Pick me up. I don’t want to spend the night at Hannah’s. He’d gotten a similar text just a few short years earlier, when Annie came home early from her very first slumber party because she’d been afraid of Jilly Morrison’s closet yet even more afraid of simply asking Jilly to get up and close its sliding door.

He’d probably gotten all such texts he was going to get in this lifetime, he realized. There’d be no more rescuing Annie because Annie—Enix, excuse him—would need no more rescuing. He’d wait until eleven, he decided; he’d take the eleven o’clock hour as the all clear that he was no longer needed, and he’d go to sleep, if he was able. He sank lower in his chair, visibly lower, until he felt like his own grandfather. He sank into realizations of how fleeting was this whole gig. The days had been full of diapers, and last-minute science projects, and afternoons of telling Annie she had one last (this time, really the last!) trip down the slide. But the years? They’d been short. They’d flown.

With Enix gone it would have been a good night to talk to Ruth, but he didn’t know whether that was now off-limits. It was only seven thirty in California: For all he knew, Ruth was sitting in an upscale bar somewhere in Sacramento, ignoring Dr. Fauci’s advice, giggling into a martini, telling all her secrets to some fifty-year-old version of a pirate. He’d spoken to her on the phone only once since she’d left Kentucky. She’d told him she was within her rights to kidnap his daughter, and he’d thought then that his living room walls might start bleeding.

She’d hung up on him, and he’d texted Enix three minutes later. She’s not even thinking, Enix had texted back. Ruth was just living on automatic, Enix reported, just driving highways and eating fast food and listening to trap music on the radio. They’d driven four days, and he’d texted Enix the whole time—Ruth was so self-absorbed, she no longer had room for suspicion—and Enix had told him about the tequila that was on Ruth’s breath every morning when she came down for her hotel breakfast.

Your mom has the sense of a fruit fly, he’d texted.

Dad. That’s an insult to the fruit flies.

Truth. We’re the only species that goes out of its way to keep its weak alive, he typed, then backspace-deleted.

He suspected it was some sort of psychological bad news to bad mouth the other divorced/divorcing parent, but in the moment, he didn’t care. And anyway, Enix should know: It was true. Ruth no longer had the gift of foresight. She’d become an unfit parent. She was just flitting around between points in time; she’d barely known where she and Enix were driving off to next. It had all been so terrible. He’d had no prouder moment in his life than when he’d plucked Enix off that return flight.

Goodnight comb, and goodnight brush.

He called her.

“Myron,” she said.

“The very one.”

She giggled into the phone, low and throaty and sexy. The sound of it twisted a bolt in his heart.

“Ruth, are you coming home? You know we go to court in … what. Twenty-three days? Don’t you want your church pew?”

Against her prolonged silence he closed his eyes, listening for something he couldn’t have named. He wasn’t listening for where she was or who she might be with, not for the clinking of glasses in a restaurant or the spills of jazz in a club or the rolling waves along the shore of an ocean. He didn’t care, not now, about her being with anyone else. He’d come to understand that he wasn’t competing with another man. He’d lost Ruth to two thousand miles of North American continent and thirty-five years of time; he’d lost, when matched against her past, his very stardust. He was listening now for something else, something beyond the classification and taxonomy of modern monogamy, something that would be traveling through her breath. Her heart. Her mind. The way she still felt about him, he was listening now for that. “Yes,” she said.

But he’d forgotten what he’d asked. “Where are you now?” he said, in substitution.

“The airport. The Sacramento one. The one I guess you know, since you booked my kid’s flight from it.”

“They asked me to.”

“And you did your job. Congrats, Papa.”

He closed his eyes again, blocking out all except what was behind her silence: a nondescript voice on an intercom, an announcement shorter than a flight being called. A lost child being paged, or an instruction not to park next to the curb. He heard not Ruth’s heart but another familiar sound of Ruth. “Ruth,” he said, “you’re crying?”

“To know you is to cry.”

“I’m sorry. But you’re the one who’s dumping me.”

“You’ve got the kid. You win.” Her voice went to whimper. “You’ve got everything.”

He set out trying to recall the good times, the parties they’d gone to together at UK, movies they’d rented in their first bungalow, the flooring project they’d undertaken in the house now burned down. The fall festivals they’d gone to with Annie, all the times the three of them had sat around the kitchen table playing Sorry and Yahtzee and Apples to Apples. He tried to remember a look of excitement in Ruth’s eyes when he’d tossed Annie up in the air and caught her, tried to recognize what the Ruth he remembered might have been feeling then, but he couldn’t. That hadn’t been Ruth. He’d never known Ruth. He remembered her face, but it was a sketch artist’s rendering.

That Ruth hadn’t been the real Ruth, and she hadn’t been looking at the real Myron. He’d been a point in Ruth Time. A relationship she’d constructed at age twenty-one, to survive a new iteration of herself. When he met her, he’d felt like he was meeting another world. But it was a world Ruth had collapsed and unfolded until she no longer needed it. He was snakeskin. She’d molted. He hated her.

Goodnight stars, goodnight air.

“Where’s Annie?” she asked.

“Enix.”

“Yes. Where are they?”

“Hannah’s.”

“Enix really loves that child.”

“Indeed they do.”

“Did you hug them before they left? I imagine you did not.” Ruth’s physicality toward Enix was a new issue between the two of them. When Enix flinched from Ruth’s touch, Ruth accused them of maternal rejection.

“I didn’t hug them. They’re thirteen years old and calling themselves a new name, and I did not hug them.”

Ruth launched into a fit of sobbing and clicked off, and Myron looked up at the TV but Trevor Noah had finished; there was just an episode of South Park. Cartman was eating fish sticks, licking his knobby cartoon fingers.

Myron hated Ruth.

He hadn’t hated her when he wrote it on his CLE notepad, not really. Ruth had sent him out for minced shallots and he’d asked her why he couldn’t just get the intact shallots and dice them himself, they were so much cheaper in their natural form, and then they’d argued about the ten-dollar price difference, him telling her it was cheaper to just go out for dinner than it was to be lazy about cooking, her chafing then, telling him that he was perfectly welcome to go out to dinner all by himself. I hate ruth had been his own little internal joke, a secret jour-naling of the sentiment.

Now she was leaving him? He truly hated her. Loathed her. Despised her. There weren’t enough English words, even, for his hatred: He needed a language like Inuit, which maybe offered fifty shades of hating. The rich irony, that neither Ruth nor her parents had ever even come close to a house fire, and now he himself could smell smoke from miles away. So many lies. So many whoppers. With the shields of marriage down, he hated her now in so many ways, for so many different reasons. There had to be Brazilian Portuguese that approximated the complications of his hatred.

He hated her because there’d been a day Annie hadn’t made it to school, a day the Montessori had called him at work, and he’d rushed over and then back home, finding neither Annie nor Ruth. He’d gotten back in his car and was calling Ruth a fifth time when he found Annie crying, walking down the street behind the school, crying because when Ruth dropped her off that morning she’d told her, in exasperation, that without breakfast, her mind was ruined. Annie had sat there, apparently, outside the school, still crying after Ruth drove off, crying until the morning bell rang and she’d turned back through the trees beyond the school’s parking lot.

And he’d found her there by accident on the street behind the school and he’d had to laugh. He’d laughed with relief, and he’d laughed because that was Ruth, Wild and Honest Ruth, His Ruth. The stubborn, hyperbolic woman he’d fallen in love with and married. With some distance, over the years, he’d seen that she’d never meant them any harm: Fever was just her way. He hated her now because she’d left him and she wasn’t coming back. He hated her because he still wanted to be Her Myron. He hated her because he still loved her. Myron loved Ruth. If God had taken the woman, then God needed to take the pain.

He used his remote to kill the television, and he listened to the noises of his neighbor in the next apartment. He heard, through the wall, one voice in conversation with itself. He hoped the man was talking on the telephone. Myron loved her. He loved Ruth. And she was never coming back.

He pulled off his socks to get ready for bed. Bunched the teal duvet under his chin.

Goodnight, noises everywhere, he thought he heard someone say, but it was just himself.

THIRTY-TWO

Ruth

Ruth looked into her rearview mirror and found that the front of the car behind her was a skull. No headers, no nose panels—all had been lost, perhaps in some long-happened crash. What stared at Ruth, there in the elongated mirror, were two headlights like eye sockets and a metal grill whose fender was missing, such that the car had no mouth. It was a sugar skull, a poison warning, a memento mori. And it was inching ever closer to her own car’s rear bumper. She tapped her horn. Only tapped, since there were other parents in the car line, and she didn’t want to call notice.

“Watch yourself, mister,” she mouthed into the mirror, but the car’s driver wasn’t watching her. He was bent over, staring at something in his lap, so that all Ruth could see was the crown of his head. His cropped afro. Sunlight glinting off the ocean of his tiny curls. He was drawn forward, driving in distraction because he was texting someone, Ruth thought. Or watching a baseball game on his phone. Porn, maybe he was watching, sneaking it in before his kid or his niece or his neighbor’s bridge partner’s son walked across the stage to become an eighth-grade graduate.

“Watch it,” she mouthed again, though she didn’t tap the horn this time. She was lucky, so lucky, to have been welcomed back into Enix’s life in the first place, and she didn’t want to embarrass them on this of all days. She wanted to tuck herself back into the blue-and-gold-painted normalcy of Chenoweth Elementary and pretend that the past month had never happened.

She’d said goodbye to Wendy at the airport and there’d been the slight smack of a kiss between them, the faintest bit of lipstick wax on her own cheek, the empty promise that they’d see each other again soon. Ruth was sure they would not. Not just owing to distance, but because Wendy didn’t need her. Wendy was reading The Wahl’s Protocol. Following the Myers Way. She’d dumped refined sugar and gluten in a quest toward remission.

What’s more, after all that had happened in the Recent Past, all that Ruth had ruined, she knew Wendy wasn’t, not right now, a way forward. Ruth had four years yet with Enix, four years to host her kid in her small apartment every other week and repair all the trust she’d damaged during four days in the desert. A year for each day. A month per every two drunken hours. Enix’s anger would scab over. Eventually. Somehow.

Ruth parked her car and walked down the school’s front sidewalk, pausing to look at her reflection in the glass of the double door. She looked girlish and alone, she saw. Humidity had frizzed her hair into a hedgey sort of square, and her jacket was too big for all the weight that anxiety had whipped off of her. Her purse was positioned all wrong, she saw, and clearly about to slide down her right shoulder. She walked back to the car and retrieved her travel cup, whose contents had gone cold. But she didn’t need to drink the coffee, she thought. She just needed to look like an adult.

She came back to the doors and walked through, and found the front office staff staring at her, holding their collective breath. Atop their respective school spirit surgical masks, Ruth saw all their eyes dramatically pointed. At her. So news had traveled. She was a living mug shot. The smell of extinguished cigarettes rose from the air to settle between her and the stares, and she fought the urge to look down at her feet, which seemed, of their own volition, to want to run. It wasn’t like what you’re thinking, she wanted to scream. You can’t imagine what led up to it. But what she did instead was to hold her head aloft, as if she were walking a pageant runway. She waved at them, grinning. They looked away instantly, in all different directions, caught like a herd of deer after the headlights went dead.

She lurched forward, foot by foot on the heels of her pumps. It was what walking must feel like in purgatory, she thought, because she was so afraid of seeing Myron. Myron was a real adult, responsible and dignified, a solid block she might never shape into. He had no hidden past because he’d never had to: His family hadn’t ended up on page 5A of the San Francisco Chronicle. Myron it was who was sorting through State Farm paperwork. Myron it was who’d detailed every item lost to the fire. He’d been the one who’d saved up and made the down payment on the house in the first place. Ruth was Enix’s mother, but it had been Myron who’d found the annual schools issue of Louisville Magazine and used the numerical data to decide which school’s test scores would be worth their mortgage.

Ruth was some terrible, hotheaded accident that had befallen him. She hadn’t belonged in his life, and she hoped, in some small, pure part of her heart, that he’d stick to another woman, recover himself. Measuring the distance now between them she sighed, taking herself down the hall in quick, robin-bird steps. Come on, Woodstock, Myron had joked with her, midway through their marriage He hadn’t meant it as a term of endearment.

The last time they had sex, he’d cried afterward. “Can we, Ruth?” he’d asked beforehand. He’d unbuttoned a halfway point on her pajama blouse, slid in a hand to cup her breast. It had been a snow day for all of them, with the wind howling outside and the plows scraping the streets, and the sun not yet fully shown itself over the city, even at eight in the morning. She’d been making hot cider, and she turned off her boiling chicory as Myron came to stand behind her. She felt his hardness, his positioning it into the groove of her shorts. She turned to kiss him, but even she could feel the annoyed bend of her nose; she hadn’t wanted to wake Enix; she’d wanted quiet time to herself. There beneath him, on the kitchen tile, she felt like a piece of wood. She’d seen a heifer once out in the county, being steadily ridden by a bull, not asked for her small cow feelings but simply mounted, needed, appraised for her udder and rump. It had been like that. When Myron finished, Ruth patted him on the cheek twice, resettled her pajamas on her body, and got up to finish her cider.

Myron lay on the floor in silence. After a time, he stood. “What was that?” he asked.

“Myron. You didn’t even ask.”

“I did,” he said. “I said ‘Can we?’”

He was still naked, his penis hanging sadly between his thighs. “That’s asking?” she said.

“You didn’t want to?”

The end of his nose had turned red, and though she’d never seen him cry, she was someone’s mother, after all, and she felt it coming. She slammed her hand on the stove. It was okay now, if Enix woke. “Myron, you have never, not once, actually heard me. You’ve not listened. You’ve not seen me, because you haven’t really looked. When you see me, you’re looking in a mirror. It’s not me looking back. It’s someone you wish you were looking at.”

“Fine,” he whispered. He turned his back to her and slumped himself against the kitchen’s far wall. “Maybe I’ve not known you,” he said, dropping his head, “but I’ve tried.”

She’d been satisfied, then, to have lit the inner wire of him, to open some small spigot of his remorse. Now, remembering, she felt terrible. She’d not let Myron know her. She’d created that restless spot between them, and she was, at long last, sorry. She’d gotten a text from the detective: The autopsy had proved all the pills Ralph O’Brien had swallowed. There was a sense of justice Ruth got, knowing O’Brien’s life had turned out so miserably, that made her want to turn out a Better Ruth, even if it was to the selfsame Myron. When you finally had peace, you wanted the rest of the world to have it. Unconditionally.

She entered the gymnasium and collected her program from one of the student ushers, then looked to a high unpopulated bleacher as a focal point to keep her from eye contact with any parents she might know. She climbed the aisle one half step at a time and sat, scanning for Myron, and appraising the easy way the other parents greeted one another. The school had rolled out a small stage on risers, and even from where she was sitting, she could make out the detail of the floral spray that someone had placed stage right. Blue ribbons with white roses and delphinium, an almost exact replica of her father’s casket cover. She’d felt so hollowed after the undertaker had closed the lid on her father’s face.

No one would further know what had said the fraternity tattoo on her father’s left bicep, no one would ever again need his Social Security card or his driver’s license or his pass card from work, nor his mother’s maiden name nor his country of origin nor which race and ethnicity he’d last checked on the United States census. Donnie Cottam was dead. They’d closed the casket with the pretty floral spread and shoveled dirt over him: No further information necessary. Ruth had filed it away so she could stop thinking about it.

All those years she’d been able to live because Ruth Hurley didn’t have Ruth Cottam’s memories, and she could not, then, have lived with the truth, but now she knew she could no longer live with the lie. And now here she was at Enix’s graduation, back from her sister’s psychic instructions and indulgences, allowing herself this huge bay of grief. Delphinium. Carnations. Lime green. It pierced her, this feeling, and she wondered if she might fall on it, pressing it all the way through her body and out the back of her spine. Instead she turned inward, into Present-Ruth-Who-Was-Learning-to-Handle-Big-Feelings, and she closed her eyes and breathed.

She touched her own arm: The arm was there. She put the palm of her hand on her own thigh, gently enough that someone passing might not have noticed she was doing it: her legs were still there too. The water pressure of her shower that morning had been so full and lovely after all the hotel showering she’d done in the desert, and she’d put her clothes on while she was still wet. She felt now the clean, dry space between her and her clothes, the toweled-off, real space of life there. She was still in one piece, there at her child’s commencement.

Clarisse had been readmitted to the hospital but sent home that very evening: there’d be no Rivendell this time, no two-week stay. Just a small, two-hundred-dollar copay after a twenty-four-hour hold and the promise that Ruth would keep her sharp knives in a box. With Clarisse sitting safely in Ruth’s phone, texting every half hour to say she was there, Ruth listened to the porous wall of sound all around her. The laughter of other parents, their footsteps on the aluminum bleachers. She blinked, heavily, to watch spots drifting behind her closed eyelids. Let the tears gather. Promised herself that if they rolled out of her eyes, this time, she’d let them.

She opened the program and was relieved to miss Enix’s name on the list of awardees. Enix still had straight A’s—Ruth knew their lack of printed congratulations didn’t indicate failure—but they had no spelling bee prowess, no art contest leanings, no highest average grade in chemistry, and this made Ruth relax more deeply into the spread of her seat, that her child had flown so low under the radar. The bleachers filled, row by row, until someone was forced to sit on hers. She was a woman Ruth’s age, a doughy, portly mom whose long bangs highlighted her doe eyes. Thick mascara streaked across her eyelids, as though she’d tried to wash her face and given up halfway through the task. Ruth understood. Graduations were mass funerals for the end points of parenting.

Sun streamed through the high windows near the roof of the gymnasium, and Ruth caught a version of her own hair shining fiery in the sunlight: It was Enix, running across the gymnasium floor to embrace Hannah in a hug. Ruth saw Hannah’s squeal, though she couldn’t hear it. They had no parents now; they were both wolves. Ruth watched her young, slender twin, now so tall and fully formed, in the blue crepe pantsuit Ruth had bought for them. Enix’s hair fell in such nice contrast to the rich blue, and Ruth thought, how lucky. She’d lied and pretended and misled people, and here she was with a brilliant, gorgeous kid to show for it. Sometimes people made shitty decisions and got, in return, beautiful gifts from the universe. Divinity was a random walk, she thought, and if time never moved, if tragedy never struck, you’d never meet all the life you were owed. You’d never move. Never learn. Never grow.

She heard, from a bleacher below her, the opening chords of King Crimson’s “Red,” some parent’s cool quirky ringtone, at the same time she was registering Myron’s appearance before her in the aisle. The Church had banned the tritone during the Middle Ages because priests thought such chords could summon the presence of the devil, and now Ruth understood why. “Ruth,” said her devil. She hadn’t seen him since she got back, which meant she hadn’t seen him in a month. She hadn’t seen him since she was Recent-Past Ruth. He looked good, better than she remembered.

“Myron,” she said. “Want a seat?”

He sank obediently beside her, and she took stock. He smelled like success, like an actual parent. He leaned into her conspiratorially, in a way she recognized from the early days of Myron and Ruth, when he’d been flirting. He opened his program, flipped to its middle, found the name Ruth had searched for. “Annick Hurley,” he said, laughing. “They told them Annick. They take what you made them. And totally change it.”

She patted his knee. “They improve it?” she said. “They cure and perfect it?”

“They gonna give you your job back?”

“Nope. But I did get Martin Stavins out of jail.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. His toe fell off and we put in for compassionate release. He’s back with his kid.”

“Miracles happen, huh?” Myron looked at her intently, but she turned her eyes out into the gymnasium, to the vista of happy eighth graders ahead of them. He leaned over, whispered in her ear. “We had something special, didn’t we?”

Ruth tipped her head until her hair meshed with his. She motioned toward the seats. “Look at them, Myron. We have something special. Always.”

And then it was over, and Enix had played their clarinet solo, eight bars in the middle of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the crowd of children had broken up, their one redheaded darling floating back to them. As they got closer Ruth could see, in the constellation of Enix’s freckles, their quandary, at being so embarrassed to have parents at all, yet needing to share this moment with the people who’d made them. They approached them both, but stood closer to Myron. “What do I have to do to get my phone back?” they said, miserably.

“Such manipulation,” said Myron, “to come with this at graduation.”

“They’re a freshman!” said Ruth. “Let them out of the gulag.”

Myron shot her a look. She nodded in perfect understanding.

Ruth hugged Enix goodbye and Enix went off with Myron, and then Ruth was in her car and down Brownsboro Road, then flying east on 64, watching the dips and rises of roadway before her. In a backyard abutting the expressway burned a pile of leaves, a pile high enough and wide enough to be an entire winter’s worth, and Ruth’s heart fluttered at the birth of rising flame, which recreated itself with each new gust of wind. She remembered counting down exits on I-80, but now she was back in Louisville, time had lost all of its qualities.

Pain boiled itself into a point just above her right knee and marbled its way down her calf. The quality of sensation was unchanged, but she no longer feared its properties. No doctor had figured her out and they might never. But in the meantime, she’d learned that wonder was superior to fright. Her body was changing, churling however quickly or slowly to its own turn toward stardust, and she didn’t want to debase the mystery of whatever she was becoming. Everyone lived, she knew now, however briefly. Everyone died. There was no perfect. No solution. Just time you got to live. Time you had to live.

She’d be ten minutes getting home on the highway, then two hours watching the movie she’d rented, then another thirty-six before her job interview at Anthony’s firm, where he’d been kind enough to push her résumé. Another seventy-two before the prove-up, then she and Myron would have to decide, together, which weekend they’d start the official joint custody rotation. Then there’d be the four years of having Enix every other week, then their Christmas breaks home from college, their graduation, their wedding. Ruth was going to be present for all of it. She’d love through all of it. She’d grieve when she had to, but she’d accept everything that came.

An electronic sign stretched across the limestone bridge at Grinstead Avenue, telling her it would take fifteen minutes to get downtown, if she wanted to go. But she was no longer looking at signs, or highways, or time. She was looking, now, at truth. She who had witnessed so much that was so rotten, so much death and decay, knew now that nothing would ever be so light as the time before. But always, after grief, laughter returned. And that first laugh, after each small death, was special, a quality of laugh that could be described only with a long German word. A word meaning after the bombs fell, we felt the rich, dark mirth of staying alive long enough to taste the gunpowder on the wind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So much gratitude I lay at the feet of my children, Rhianna and Fadzai Gides, who have hung in there with me through all of the everything. My brilliant daughters, I hope you know that you are both treasures beyond belief. Thank you for letting me be your mom. I couldn’t do any of this without you.

I am grateful to Anni Liu and Carmen Giménez for ushering this book into being, and for their gifted editing and careful attention to my words, and I’m grateful to Elizabeth Wales for understanding this book’s political mission, and for simply being her powerful self.

Thank you to James Bernard Short and S. Kerene Moore, both of whom helped me trouble and complicate these characters, and to Tamara Fish, who has encouraged me to keep on keeping on since we were just kids writing in a Bronxville coffeeshop.

Thank you to Valerie Bell, Sherita Jackson, Maureen Miles, Samaria Rice, and Jackie Turner, who spoke to me about their grief: I pray that I’ve done right by it. Thank you to Carla Bower and Al Jazeera for publishing the article that grew into this novel.

I’m eternally grateful to everyone with whom I shared the work in a reincarnation of the Black Panther Party in New York City in the late nineties, and to all those who rolled up their sleeves and did the thing with us in Black Lives Matter Bloomington and Black Lives Matter Sacramento. I’m grateful to Kato Cooks, an original member of the Black Panther Party, for being a mentor over gosh, how many decades now? And I’m grateful for all the survivors of police brutality, victims who have taken their grief and made hard work out of it, and all of the ancestors who have fought the state for so long and so hard in order to make life easier for those of us who came after. I’m grateful to my parents, Angela and Wendell Townsend, for instilling in me the belief that art—and all else—is in service. I’m grateful to those who survived and those who gave their lives to the struggle. You’re why we’re still here, and I thank God for you all.

JACINDA TOWNSEND is the author of Mother Country, winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and Saint Monkey, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. A former broadcast journalist, antitrust lawyer, and elected official, Townsend teaches at Brown University.

Graywolf Press publishes risk-taking, visionary writers who transform culture through literature. As a nonprofit organization, Graywolf relies on the generous support of its donors to bring books like this one into the world.

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