I do not think it hyperbole to say that in 2018, the rapidly changing condition of American democracy has become an absorbing narrative of its own, one that features larger-than-life characters, nonstop conflict, breakneck pacing, and incredibly high stakes. On the day that I write this, April 16, 2018, the former head of the FBI is on a book tour, railing against what he calls our “morally unfit” president, the man who fired him a little less than a year ago. Five days ago, and without the consent of Congress, the president authorized an air strike of Syria after its president used chemical weapons against civilians near Damascus. Six days ago, two black men were arrested and detained for eight hours at a Philadelphia Starbucks after simply asking to use the restroom. Eight days ago, the FBI raided the office of the president’s longtime lawyer, seizing among many other things, evidence of hush money paid to a pornographic actress after an alleged affair with him. By the way, the FBI is also investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the role of Russian hackers and Facebook in the election, and most likely a laundry list of related alarming occurrences. On Valentine’s Day, a nineteen-year-old opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen people and injuring seventeen more.

Fiction writers are now faced with the significant challenge of producing work that will sustain a reader’s attention amid this larger narrative. Roxane Gay is just the right guest editor for this moment. With her keen eye for tension, voice, and structure, as well as her deep understanding of the forces at work in our culture, she chose stories that reflect and refract our time, stories that exhibit mastery of pacing, surprise, and rich characterization. Here are stories that hold their own in this day and age, no small feat, and they do so with devastating realism, honesty, humor, and courage.

Many of these short stories communicate deep longing. Maria Anderson describes the loneliness of a nineteen-year-old rural man whose father has disappeared. Cristina Henríquez writes of a Mexican woman who, after a grueling journey, crosses into the United States only to face a far darker journey: “Where has she gone and what has she become?” In Rivers Solomon’s story, “Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver,” a black woman meets her birth daughter, resuscitating memories of the girl’s white father, whose “words sound like truth to me, like something to be afraid of.” In Yoon Choi’s story, “The Art of Losing,” a husband and wife struggle with his excruciating memory loss: “Sometimes she felt that patience and kindness could be stretched so far in a marriage as to become their opposites.”

I first encountered this series when I was an undergraduate in college, and one of my favorite elements was the contributors’ notes at the back of the book. After reading a stellar story, I turned to the mini-essay that provided access to what seemed like secrets: confessions about the difficulties of writing, self-deprecating comments about the author’s obsessions; profound assessments of the themes of the stories. I admit that I still treasure the contributors’ notes. One by one, they fill my email inbox. After having fallen in love with a story, I savor these notes. Given the escalating conflicts in our country, I was unsurprised to see that this year, many authors described in their notes the nonfictional territory beneath their stories. Underlying Ann Glaviano’s hilarious story is the fact that wife camp is a verifiable thing. Jacob Guajardo writes, “Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it’s hard to hide that you are in love.” The bloody assault of a black college student by local law enforcement prompted Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Control Negro.” Describing the seed of his story, Matthew Lyons explains, “I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomenon of American male rage.” Alicia Elliott describes the vast dangers of Canadian colonialism to Indigenous people and culture. Canadian stories and writers have always been a part of this series; all stories submitted to me and written in English and published in North America are considered.

The stories in this book offer readers passageway inside contemporary and age-old questions of what it means to live together in a society, as well as what it takes to define and sustain oneself in difficult times. To read great fiction well is to live and breathe inside of it. A couple of years ago came scientific proof that reading literary fiction stimulates “theory of mind,” or emotional intelligence and empathy. Fiction offers truths and humane understanding not found elsewhere. When we ally with fictional characters, we enlarge our understanding of the world, something particularly crucial these days.

In last year’s foreword, I wrote about my reaction to the 2016 presidential election. I received a few letters requesting that I keep my politics out of my job. I read as any critic does, as a human being with a particular set of experiences. I read as the best reader that I can be, as someone who seeks out engrossing and important stories; beautiful, evocative, funny, or striking language; a sense that I am transported and unable to return to my life at least until I’ve finished reading, no matter the author, no matter the setting, nor the time period, nor the cultural or gender or sexual preferences expressed by the characters. As George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay, “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

I am grateful to share these twenty stories that engage, impress, and transport.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2017 and January 2018. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who have made the United States or Canada their home; (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publications or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, c/o The Best American Short Stories, 125 High Street, Boston, MA 02110 or files to thebestamericanshortstories@gmail.com as attachments.

We are in the midst of a significant cultural moment. Of course, there has rarely been a time when we haven’t been in the midst of a significant cultural moment. Donald Trump is president, and he is implementing his agenda with relative ease. He is subverting what we once knew as the presidency for his own personal gain. In the late spring of 2018 his wife, Melania Trump, wasn’t seen publicly for weeks, sparking all kinds of speculation about where she was and what had happened to her, because with a man like Trump it was plausible that harm had come to her or that she had simply left him. His adult children are feasting at a bountiful table funded by American taxpayers while his oldest daughter plays at diplomat and part-time First Lady. The cronies the president has installed in office are grifting the American people and they aren’t bothering to hide it, because they know that the Republican Congress is so enamored with the power they wield that they see no need to check and balance. Tensions are high in this country. Tensions are high nearly everywhere in the world. The news offers a constant barrage of terrible, overwhelming truths about the way things are. On social media, people parse all this information and become instant experts on everything from global warming to immigration law. The world feels like it is coming apart. For many vulnerable people, the world is coming apart.

In times of great personal or public upheaval, I turn to reading. I turn to fiction and how writers imagine the world as it is, was, or could be. I am not avoiding reality when I read fiction; I am strengthening my ability to cope with reality. I am allowing myself a much-needed buffer, a place of stillness and quiet. I read fiction to step away from the cacophony of the news and social media and the opinions of others. The reprieve fiction provides is a necessary grace.

Being chosen to edit this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories couldn’t have come at a better time. I craved the distraction, no matter how overwhelmed I was by the task of reading 120 stories and choosing only twenty upon which I could apply the imprimatur of excellence. First, though, I had to get over my surprise at being asked to edit this anthology. I’ve been reading the series for nearly twenty years, always wanting to see what the best short story writers in America have to offer. Sometimes I read the stories while filled with envy, coveting such literary recognition. Other times I read the stories in a given year and was more frustrated than anything else. After reading the 2010 volume edited by Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, I wrote about how too many of the stories focused on rich white people. I described that year’s offering as having a “profound sense of absence.” Despite the indisputable excellence of all the stories in 2010, I yearned for the collection to offer more, to better reflect the world beyond gilded existences. And then, when my own story “North Country” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012, I was gleeful. At the time, I was certain I had reached the pinnacle of my career. Then I called my mom and told her my story had been selected, and she asked, “What is Best American Short Stories?” The pinnacle was promptly dismantled. I was appropriately humbled.

As I read this year’s stories, I was thrilled by the opportunity. I was also thinking about this ongoing, unfathomable cultural moment and how, if at all, these stories might address it. Often, during significant cultural upheavals, critics wonder when and how fiction writers will respond. Such questions are often voiced immediately following the upheaval, with little regard for craft, as if writers were simply sitting around waiting for cultural crises to which they should respond. Soon after the initial thrust of the Iraq War, I remember reading several treatises that wondered where all the good war fiction was, implying that American letters was failing somehow because this fiction had not yet been published. Those treatises overlooked the fact that writing takes time. Writing often demands distance and space to process events before writers can interpret them creatively. I knew I would likely never write any war fiction and resented the implication that I was somehow falling short because my creative interests lay elsewhere. I also knew there were different ways for me to engage with the world’s turmoil. There were different ways for me to write politically.

Writers are divided on whether or not it is their responsibility to address the contretemps in their work. Some writers stubbornly cling to the idea that writing should not be sullied by politics. They labor under the impression that they can write fiction that isn’t political, or influenced in some way by politics, which is, whether they realize it or not, a political stance in and of itself. Other writers believe it is an inherent part of their craft to engage with the political. And then there are those writers, such as myself, who believe that the very act of writing from their subject position is political, regardless of what they write. I know, as a black, queer woman, that to write is a deeply political act, whether I am writing about the glory of the movie Magic Mike XXL, or a novel about a kidnapping in Haiti, or a short story about a woman eating expired yogurt while her husband suggests opening their marriage.

Nearly every major writer has something to say about whether they consider themselves or their writing political. I often return to Chinua Achebe’s thoughts on this matter. In a Paris Review interview Achebe noted, “There is something about important stories that is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of language. So it’s really a balance between your commitment, whether it’s political or economic or whatever, and your craft as an artist.” He succinctly addresses what naysayers love to bring up when the political is introduced into conversations about art—that somehow it is impossible to both write politically and make good art, as if the former compromises the latter.

When I am reading fiction, I am not always looking for the political. First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don’t know and need to know about the lives of others.

One of the first novels I read and recognized as political was Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy, a flawed but beautiful, unforgettable story, a sequel of sorts to The Color Purple, that deals with the repercussions of female genital mutilation. It is a novel about grief and trauma, as Tashi, the protagonist, grapples with the mutilation of her body as a young girl and years later trying to live in the world as a woman and wife, trying to make herself whole again. One of the most startling aspects of the story is the graphic way in which Walker details what Tashi endures as a young girl, the sheer physicality and pain of her experience. Because of those narrative choices, I understood exactly where the author stood on the issues she was addressing. This was not just a work of fiction. It was an indictment. It was a condemnation. It was the work of a writer using her craft to take a stand. When I read that book, I wanted to develop the confidence and skill to take such stands in my own fiction.

In the spring of 2017, I taught a graduate workshop on writing the political novel. I did so because I was still reeling from the results of the 2016 election and couldn’t fathom teaching a regular fiction workshop, pretending everything was just fine when such was not the case. The classroom felt like an ideal place to use my own craft to take a stand. It was a small act of defiance, if not resistance, but I needed to do something. I scrapped my original plan for the course and quickly developed a new syllabus. I was nervous about how students would respond to the course’s theme, having two years earlier taught a fairly disastrous workshop on writing “difference” and encouraging writers to use fiction to create interesting characters beyond their subject position. During that workshop, the students resented what they saw as a restriction of their creativity, and so this time around, I construed the political as broadly as I could without rendering the concept meaningless.

Our first task was to try to answer the question “What is a political novel?” The truth is, nearly anything could be considered political writing, given the right framing. We did, over the course of the semester, manage to come up with some interesting answers to this question. We identified common themes in political writing—protest, social critique or commentary, engagement with the world as it is and how a writer wants it to be, bearing witness, social responsibility, and, of course, creating accountability for those in power. We read several political novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, all novels that are explicitly political and beautifully crafted. We talked about strategies for balancing political ambitions and finding what Achebe so aptly termed “the felicity of language.” We also talked about the limits of the political novel and how to manage expectations about what literature might accomplish, thinking about the challenging but mindful arguments James Baldwin made in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” where he worried, understandably, about the idea that books could provide salvation simply by existing.

Alongside this reading, where we explored the political ambitions of each work and what it taught us about writing a political novel, the students wrote political novels of their own. They engaged with the Cuban diaspora, the natural world and its endangered status by way of global warming, how soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress when returning to their lives after war, technology and reproduction, the oppressive cultural norms women navigate, and homosexuality in China. The students produced astonishing work in such a short amount of time. They each wrote a story where something important was at stake for the characters and the world of their novel and the world into which they might someday publish that novel. They did so without compromising the level of craft demanded of a good novel. I couldn’t have been happier with how the workshop progressed and the ways in which these writers were willing to take their own stands.

As I considered the 120 stories I read for The Best American Short Stories 2018, I thought about this cultural moment and what it means to both write politically and read politically. If writers have a responsibility for how they narrate the world, certainly readers have a responsibility for what they consume and from whom. I wanted to read through these stories with as open a mind as possible, but I also wanted to make sure I was as open to stories from smaller, lesser-known magazines as I was to the reliably excellent stories published in The New Yorker and Granta and Tin House. I wanted to make sure that the diversity of identity was represented in terms of the writers I selected and the stories they told and how those stories were told. Reading for this year’s anthology was as much a political act, and a way of taking a stand, as my writing. I was comfortable reading this way because the excellence of these stories was the one known quantity.

The twenty stories I finally chose, after no small amount of tense deliberation, are all stories I still remember with distinct admiration, months after first reading them. They are stories that engage with the world and reflect the diversity of the world. They are stories that offer fascinating insights into the human condition and the terrible ways people can treat one another and how beautifully people can love. These writers accomplished great feats of imagination and wrote stories that surprised me in the most unexpected ways. These stories challenged me and reminded me of how vibrant the short story form can be.

In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Danielle Evans writes a sly, subtle story about friendship and grief, but also about race and youth and small transgressions that become unintended acts of damage and defiance. “Boys Go to Jupiter” is one of the finest short stories I’ve ever read, and it embodies the ways in which fiction can be political without being heavy-handed or unnecessarily didactic. Esmé Weijun Wang wrote the one story in this year’s anthology that explicitly addressed the 2016 election: “What Terrible Thing It Was.” The story is about far more than the election, but it captures so well the chaos and confusion of that November night when so many things changed, while also capturing the chaos and confusion of a woman dealing with mental illness.

I am always drawn to darkness in fiction, and “The Brothers Brujo,” by Matthew Lyons, did not disappoint with a story about dark magic and two hardscrabble brothers trying to survive their abusive father. The prose is brutal and bold. The story itself made me uncomfortable. It made me cringe. It made me read it three times, four, as it got under my skin. In “The Art of Losing,” by Yoon Choi, there is tenderness and poignancy as the author details a man losing his memory but trying hard to hold on to what he knows and who he is. “Control Negro,” by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, depicts a father using his son in a social experiment to challenge what he knows about race in America. The story is strange but funny in that way where you laugh rather than cry through painful truths. “Everything Is Far from Here,” by Cristina Henríquez, takes on immigration detention centers, where people are housed until the government decides whether or not to treat them like people. Many people are willfully excluded from the American dream because they have brown skin, and this story serves as a necessary reminder. My expectations were brilliantly upended by Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Prairie Wife,” and when I finished the story, I was forced to consider the assumptions I make when I am reading a story and think I know everything I need to know about a narrator.

In everything I read and ultimately selected for this year’s Best American Short Stories, writers were engaging with the political, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, always brilliantly and creatively. These writers used their craft to take a stand, and how. They represent the best of what short fiction can be.

Our trailer sat on cinder blocks in a half-acre lot a four-cigarette drive outside of town. There wasn’t much else around except Jenny’s trailer and forest that started at the end of the lot and went on for as far as you could see, dim and impenetrable. Dad kept pink healing quartz on the porch steps, rocks he’d found in the deepest parts of forests, back when there was still old-growth forest to be logged. He was a sad, quiet guy. Never argued with me or knocked me around like dads of guys I used to know. We played cards with his old logging friends when they came through town. Summers we shot coyotes in the Rattlesnakes. Slept outside without tents or bear spray. I never felt safer. We hunted elk and deer. I loved having my hands deep inside something just barely dead, seeing what organs and muscles and fat looked like from the inside. Better than any science class. We had a decent, quiet life in that trailer.

Dad’s logging operation went under. He got even quieter. When he wasn’t sleeping, he would drink Heinekens and sit in the living room, which was really just a wide hallway between the bedrooms and kitchen, and watch the forest through the window. Most dads I knew drank Bud, but mine liked Heineken and was okay with paying more for it. Koda would sit protectively next to him. She was a mute Pyrenees, who like my father was parted from her natural vocation—her ancestral duties were keeping livestock alive—and so cared for us instead, herding our trucks out of the driveway and guiding them back in whenever we returned, that kind of thing.

What was Dad thinking about when he sat like this? Just going over things in his head? All the trees he’d run chainsaws through with crews of guys from all over, the few women he’d slept with, wobbly nights driving back from Bonner bars with old logging buddies. Dad loved the woods, and, I think, for him, felling the oldest trees in the oldest forests didn’t mean he loved them any less. Maybe he was thinking about my mother, who left when I was two. Maybe he was just watching the trees and not thinking about anything at all. Maybe he was hoping to spot the cougar I’d seen a few times now, the one folks were saying killed Shively’s new colt and came back for the rest of her before they could get her buried.

Dad disappeared the day I got my senior pictures back. Late April. His wallet on the table with everything still in it, empty Heinekens in the sink. I checked the closet and was relieved to see the rifle and shotgun. His truck was still there, key in the ignition, old Copenhagen cans on the floor, orange juice bottles half-full of his spit, SunChip bags crammed into the seats. I touched the chewed passenger’s-side seat belt where Koda had worked on it all the way home from the pound. I pulled out my senior pictures. I was eighteen, but in them I looked like a kid. A dumb, smiling kid, because when people asked me to smile, that’s what I’d do. I spat on the shiny surface, rubbed the water around, and scratched off all my mouths.

Search and rescue never found a body. One member of the search committee, a homeless asshole there for the free lunch, pulled me aside and told me it was “them aliens” who took my father, the ones who doodled on all the trees. He pointed at a larch.

“That’s Dutch elm,” I said.

He nodded. Licked a yellow stain at the corner of his mouth and wiped the area dry with his sleeve. “Nope,” he said. Before he took off, he pressed fifteen dollars and the Snickers bar from his sack lunch into my hands.

The rifle was a gentle-looking black .22 semiautomatic. Polymer plastic blend. I associated it with the peaceful feeling of completing a hunt, the comfort of fresh-cooked meat. I carried it into the living room and pointed it out the window, hoping the cougar would choose this moment to stroll through. I peeled off a sock and clicked off the safety and aimed at my big toe. I stood there for what felt like hours, wondering what kind of hurt could come from something small as a toe. I tried to think about all the places Dad could have gone and might still be. Tried not to think about how he might have offed himself, if that’s what he’d done. I clicked on the safety, turned the gun around, and swung it from the barrel like a golf club into my ankle.

The pain felt like something else in the dark room, dim and sweet.

Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see any movie with his mother on a Friday night. Her expression went from pleading to irate. The boy said nothing more. With his head taking on weight, hung as though his neck couldn’t hold it, he followed as she went inside.

It was a chilly evening in November, the sky threatened by rain. Curtis blew warm breath into his cupped hands. Obedience, he thought, he could talk to the boy about that. He’d been making a list of topics they could discuss. The question of obedience was right for a boy of fifteen, when the man he would become was beginning to erupt out of him like horns. Though sometimes it was important to disobey. Curtis had known this since he was younger than the boy was now. Twelve years in prison hadn’t changed that, and so Curtis was here, doing what his mother had asked him that morning not to do anymore. He’d been seen watching Andre and Lena, and his mother’s friends were gossiping about what they saw. Maybe Curtis still had a grudge against Lena, they said, or maybe he simply couldn’t let go of the past. He didn’t care what his mother or her friends said. A man decided his own way, and there came a time when a boy growing into his manhood had to as well. Unless your balls haven’t dropped yet. Curtis could say that to the boy, teasing him the way he and the boy’s father, Marvin Caldwell, used to tease each other when they were young. Marvin dreamed most vividly of everything he would do for his mother one day, but even he knew to disobey her.

Curtis took a last look at the names of the movies and tried to guess which one Andre might have wanted to see, which one Lena would have chosen instead. He counted his money. He’d only spent twelve of the forty dollars his mother had left for him, so he decided to get a bite to eat while he waited for the movie to end. At the Downtown Bar and Grill, an old favorite, he ordered a hamburger and soda. Refills were no longer free, so Curtis kept asking for glasses of water. From where he sat he could still see the brilliance of the marquee.

The rain began before Andre and Lena came out of the theater, but they took a walk anyway. Curtis followed them. Lena opened an umbrella that was large enough for two, but as they strolled along the promenade Andre kept drifting away from her, exposing his body to the cold drizzle. Lena stopped at a bench and used a piece of newspaper to wipe it dry. Andre maintained a distance from her when they sat. Curtis stalled for a few moments, and then settled near the middle of the next bench. A large trash can partially blocked his view of them, but he could hear their conversation.

“Your daddy liked to come out here,” Lena was saying.

“You told me that before,” Andre said. Curtis had been following them for weeks, but had rarely been this close. He’d never heard them talk about Marvin.

“Well, it’s nice, isn’t it? Look at that view.”

Andre gestured at the rain. “I can’t see nothing.”

Curtis had been out on the promenade several times since he’d been released from prison. There was plenty to see, he thought. A great, unseen hand depressed the keys of the city, sounding notes held constant in the many windows, a thousand little squares of humming light. These seemed to float independently, since the tall buildings themselves, their outlines obscured, were indistinguishable from the black enamel seal of the sky. The night grew more thickly clouded by storm, but in the shifting bands of reflected light from the bridge and the city, Curtis could see the surface of the river alive and puckered like so many restless mouths. Given all the nights he’d spent here since getting out, it felt like a triumph that he no longer thought of feeding himself to the water.

“Why we out here, Ma?” Andre asked. “It’s wet. I’m cold.”

“It’s not so bad under the umbrella.”

“Can we go?”

“I just thought you’d like to stay out a while longer. Might as well enjoy it now. I need you to be at home tomorrow.”

“For what?”

“You know how the girls from work go out to Temptations after our shift,” Lena said. “Well, this time they finally invited me.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, Ma.”

“I know what day it is. And I need you to be at home. For my peace of mind.”

“While you out shaking your ass at the club.”

“What’d you say, boy?”

“Nothing,” Andre said. “I’m cold.” He stood and started walking back the way they’d come.

Lena chased after him, sounding pathetic as she called his name.

Curtis didn’t follow. After a while, he got up and strolled along the promenade in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only other person he saw was a man with an unsettling face. The man’s bouts of muttering formed clouds that flowered like visible emblems of his secret language before being pulled apart by the wind. But it was the way this man’s hands jumped within his dirty coat as he shuffled along that marked him as dangerous and insane. Curtis had been both of these things, in those months after Marvin died in the fire. Those months before Curtis went to prison. It was danger lurking in the man’s left pocket, he suspected, and insanity leaping around in the right. He liked the feeling of their passing him by.

Curtis huffed the name of his long departed friend—my dead friend, he told himself soberly—so he could see the wind take it, imagining that it too, along with the words steaming from the man’s mouth, drifted off and seeded the East River. The river was badly polluted, but he liked it anyway. It flowed in either direction, reaching both ways until it licked the sea. As the man prattled on, now some distance away, Curtis again said Marvin’s name, which rose from his lips and hovered there for a moment, clean as an unstrung bone.

He might have also said the name of the dead woman, the one he had struck with his car, the one who intruded on his dreams. But his life was for other things now, he’d been desperately telling himself, beautiful and wondrous things.

The rain began turning to sleet, the sound of it an exhalation steadily hushing the world. Curtis indulged his sense of feeling contained but not trapped. Under the capacious dome of sky he was free, but bounded, so his newly freed limbs wouldn’t fly apart. As much as he wanted to stay there on the promenade—often he stayed until the spell of night began to break—the sleet was penetrating his slicker and the thin coat he wore underneath. His hands and feet were already numb. Curtis shivered. It wouldn’t make any damn sense to get out of the clink just to turn around and catch his death of cold. He walked quickly to keep the chill from settling into his muscle and marrow.

Watch the boy, she had said.

Or had she? Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-Sae. His wife was Han Young-Ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina. They would always be his children but they were no longer kids. He had to keep remembering that.

Tunes. He was good with tunes. He could retrieve from memory music he hadn’t heard in decades. “The Mountain Rabbit,” “Ich Liebe Dich,” Aretha Franklin’s “Operation Heartbreak,” which he had first heard in his twenties on the Armed Forces Network in Korea. He had a good singing voice. He had been Tenor 1 in the church choir; years before that, he had led off the morning exercise song in the schoolyard. These performances had given him an appetite for praise and notice, although no one, seeing the old man he had become, would know it.

His wife had no particular distinction—had had none, even in youth. How could she? Her childhood task had been survival. She was the oldest of three sisters who were orphaned as they fled south during the Korean War. In Busan, she had worked on the rubber processing line, removing trapped air from rolled products. She told him about it years later, in another country, sitting on a weedy patch of campus lawn. Once, she had snapped a dandelion stem, allowing the milk to run. Did he know that the sap of the dandelion was a form of natural rubber? Latex? It was one of the few things he learned from her and he never forgot it. It altered in a small and precise way his notice of trivial things: the soles of his shoes, the elastic in his waistband.

They had met in Philadelphia—when was this, the 1960s?—through the area’s one Korean church. He was working toward a master’s in mechanical engineering; she tailored and mended for a dry cleaner. At church, he was a star. His fine singing voice, the impressive school he attended. But at the university, he was struck dumb. Every morning, he would tear out a page from his English dictionary, memorize it, and eat it. Still, the language would not take. And things grew worse. He began to dread not only the classroom, but also the grocery store, the post office, the blank pages of his dissertation.

One night, he had gone to Young-Ja’s rented room. As he removed his shoes, he noticed a hole in the toe of his sock, which he made no attempt to hide. He was too good for her—that much was assumed. She made no argument for herself. She had not made herself up or even changed after work. Her hair was short, like a man’s. Her hands were rough. Her dark sweater showed snips of thread and lint from altering other people’s clothes. In a glance, he could see the perimeters of her life: the toothbrush in a cup that she brought to the communal bathroom, the single hot plate, the twin mattress on the floor.

Yet she brought to the low table a fermented bean curd stew still bubbling in its clay pot. How had she come up with such a thing in Philadelphia? That smell. It was the bean paste. Soybeans, charcoal, and honey placed in an earthenware vessel, buried deep in the frozen ground and over the seasons grown elemental. It stank of home.

They helped themselves from the same pot, bringing the silken onion or softly crumbling potato onto their plates of rice. They dipped again and again into the pot with their spoons. And then, stinking softly of garlic, he took hold of her wrist, drawing her down as she rose to clear the table. She showed no surprise.

Afterward, she asked for his sock, to mend it. The meek look of her bent head, her fluency with the needle, his deflated sock in her hand, had caused a movement in his pride that he didn’t know then—or perhaps ever—to call love. Still, he began to spend nights, which he had previously devoted to his studies, at Young-Ja’s place. And when he received news through an aerogram that his mother had died, when she was no longer around to be disappointed that her only, late-born son would not live up to his educator father, his thoughts turned to marriage.

Yes. That was how it had transpired.

It was only November but holiday decorations were already starting to creep into the store displays: cutouts of Santa wearing sunglasses, windows poxed with fake snow, as if cold was just another joke. It hadn’t even rained since Alice moved here, the good weather holding. Back in her hometown, it was already grim and snowy, the sun behind her mother’s house setting by 5 p.m. This new city seemed like a fine alternative, the ceaseless blue sky and bare arms, the days passing frictionless and lovely. Of course, in a few years, when the reservoirs were empty and the lawns turned brown, she’d realize that there was no such thing as unending sunshine.

The employee entrance was around the back of the store, in an alley. This was before the lawsuits, when the brand was still popular and opening new stores. They sold cheap, slutty clothes in primary colors, clothes invoking a low-level athleticism—tube socks, track shorts—as if sex was an alternative sport. Alice worked at a flagship store, which meant it was bigger and busier, on a high-visibility corner near the ocean. People tracked in sand and sometimes beach tar that the cleaners had to scrub off the floors at the end of the night.

Employees were only allowed to wear the brand’s clothes, so Alice had gotten some for free when she started. Emptying the bag on her bed, she had been stirred by the pure abundance, but there was an awful caveat: her manager had picked them out, and everything was a little too tight, a size too small. The pants cut into her crotch and left red marks on her stomach in the exact outline of the zipper, the shirts creasing tight in her underarms. She left her pants undone on the drive to work, waiting until the last minute to suck in her stomach and button them up.

Inside, the store was bright white and shiny, a low-level hum in the background from the neon signs. It was like being inside a computer. She got there at 10 a.m. but already the lights and the music conjured a perpetual afternoon. On every wall were blown-up photographs in grainy black and white of women in the famous underpants, girls with knobby knees making eye contact with the camera, covering their small breasts with their hands. All the models’ hair looked a little greasy, their faces a little shiny. Alice supposed that was to make sex with them seem more likely.

Only young women worked the floor—the guys stayed in the back room, folding, unpacking and tagging shipments from the warehouse, managing stock. They had nothing to offer beyond their plain labor. It was the girls that management wanted out in front, girls who acted as shorthand to the entire brand. They roamed the floor in quadrants, wedging fingers between hangers to make sure items were hung at an equal distance, kicking dropped shirts out from under the partitions, hiding a leotard smeared with lipstick.

Before they put the clothes on the racks, they had to steam them, trying to reanimate the sheen of value. The first time Alice had opened a box of T-shirts from the warehouse, seeing the clothes there, all stuffed and flattened together in a cube without tags or prices, made their real worth suddenly clear—this was junk, all of it.

At her interview, Alice had brought a résumé, which she’d made some effort to print out at a copy store. She had also purchased a folder to transport the résumé intact but no one ever asked to see it. John, the manager, had barely asked about her employment history. At the end of their five-minute conversation, he instructed her to stand against a blank wall and took her picture with a digital camera.

“If you could just smile a little,” John said, and she did.

They sent the pictures to corporate for approval, Alice later discovered. If you made the cut, whoever did your interview got a $200 bonus.

Alice fell into an easy rhythm at her post. Feeding hanger after hanger onto the racks. Taking clothes from the hands of strangers, directing them to a fitting room that she had to open with a key on a lanyard around her wrist, the mildest of authorities. Her mind was glazing over, not unpleasantly, thoughts swimmy and hushed. She’d get paid tomorrow, which was good—rent was due in a week, plus a payment on her loans. Her room was cheap, at least, though the apartment, shared with four housemates, was disgusting. Alice’s room wasn’t so bad only because there was nothing in it—her mattress still on the floor, though she’d lived there for three months.

The store was empty for a while, one of the strange lulls that followed no logical pattern, until a father came in, pulled by his teenage daughter. He hovered at a wary distance while his daughter snatched up garment after garment. She handed him a sweatshirt, and the man read the price aloud, looking to Alice like it was her fault.

“It’s just a plain sweatshirt,” he said.

The daughter was embarrassed, Alice could tell, and she smiled at the father, bland but also forgiving, trying to communicate the sense that some things in this world were intractable. It was true that the clothes were overpriced. Alice could never have bought them herself. And the daughter’s expression was recognizable from her own adolescence, her mother’s constant commentary on the price of everything. The time they went to a restaurant for her brother’s eighth-grade graduation, a restaurant with a menu illuminated with some kind of LED lights, and her mother couldn’t help murmuring the prices aloud, trying to guess what the bill might be. Nothing could pass without being parsed and commented upon.

When the father relented and bought two pairs of leggings, the sweatshirt, and a metallic dress, Alice understood he had only been pretending to be put off by the prices. The daughter had never considered the possibility that she might not get what she wanted, and whatever solidarity Alice felt with the father dissipated as she watched the numbers add up on the register, the man handing her his credit card without even waiting to hear the total.

They found him while laying the groundwork for a fast food restaurant. She forgot the name as soon as the officer said it—not McDonald’s, not Wendy’s. No, it was something new, something flashy and fleeting. Whatever it was, the thought made her sick. She couldn’t shake the image of a child’s tooth being pounded into beef patties, or tiny brown limbs being thrown into an industrial-size grinder. Sour fluids burned their way up her esophagus. She started to gag.

“Are you alright, ma’am?” the officer asked.

Henry’s makeshift grave was on the grounds of the old residential school. Of course it was. Of course. What was that famous Sir John A. Macdonald quote? Kill the Indian, save the man? Turned out killing the Indian saved no one. It just killed Indians.

“Ma’am? I can call back if you want.”

It had been 55 years since he went missing. Their mother had been dead for 20. What was there to even remember about him at this point? He was named after their alcoholic grandfather, then he was five, then he was gone. Not much to hang any misplaced nostalgia on.

She swallowed, found a tissue and wiped at her mouth.

“I’m fine. Please continue.”

The officer was nice enough, if deceptive. All dirty details were declawed. How did they even know it was her brother? There were lots of kids that died at that school. Testing was still underway, of course, but they were pretty sure. The officer mentioned school records and death certificates and police reports (no doubt filed by her mother), then started talking about “closure” and “the ceremony Henry deserved.” That very artlessly segued into the date the remains would be released, and referrals of some affordable funeral homes. What the officer really meant was that she, Beth T———, a widow on a fixed income, could now pay for the disposal of her brother’s half-century-old remains. And no, the grave and empty casket her mother had spent the last of their grocery money on would not be acceptable for use. The law had problems with reusing those sorts of things, though strictly speaking it wasn’t used in the first place. Beth should really get in touch with one of those funeral homes. They would have more information. And if she didn’t claim the body? The officer’s voice became clipped. If she didn’t claim the body for whatever reason, the province would pay for a burial. Standard-issue, nothing personal. That was the kind of thing only family could provide.

“Do you need me to—” her stomach clenched, her palms sticky, “—identify the body?”

“I’d be surprised if you could identify anything at this point. But if you want…”

Beth’s mouth suddenly filled with the taste of carbon—a taste she’d always associated with Henry’s disappearance. Once he was gone her mother couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to everyday things like cooking. Henry was all that mattered anymore. Everything Beth ate was burnt black.

Before, she used to help their mother pound roasted white corn into flour, sift it, mix it with lard and hot water and maple syrup. Henry was too small to help, too impatient, so it was just the two of them. Beth wasn’t allowed to taste any while they were making it, though sometimes she’d sneak some when her mother turned away. She was hardly a clever thief—smacking her lips together luxuriously, sometimes letting out a little groan, but her mother, gracious as she was, pretended not to notice. Once the mush was ready Beth’s mother still offered her a giant spoonful, smiling. It tasted better than any food she’d ever had. She remembered having the corn mush for breakfast and sometimes lunch or dinner, if she begged.

Then there was no more homemade mush. There were only blackened scones, then cold bread, then nothing at all, every culinary decline another rejection, another sign her family was hurtling toward disaster and nothing and no one could stop it.

The bikini isn’t even Claire’s thing. Before this winter, if you had said Confederate flag, Claire would have thought of high school beach trips: rows and rows of tacky souvenir shops along the Ocean City Boardwalk, her best friend Angela muttering They know they lost, right? while Claire tried to remember which side of the Mason-Dixon Line Maryland was on. The flag stuff is Jackson’s, and she’s mostly seeing Jackson to piss off Puppy. Puppy, Claire’s almost-stepmother, is legally named Poppy; Puppy is supposedly a childhood nickname stemming from a baby sister’s mispronunciation, but Claire suspects that Puppy has made the whole thing up. Puppy deemed it wasteful to pay twice as much for a direct flight in order for Claire to avoid a layover, and her father listens to Puppy now, so for the first half of her trip, Claire had to go the wrong direction—to Florida from Vermont via Detroit.

Jackson has a drawl and a pickup truck and, in spite of his lack of farming experience, a farmer’s tan. Claire meets him at Burger Boy, the restaurant a few miles from her father’s house. Its chipping red-and-white tiles and musk of grease give it all the glamour of a truck-stop bathroom, but it’s a respite from the lemon-scented and pristine house that brought her father to St. Petersburg for retirement. At college, Claire mostly lives off of the salad bar, but here she picks up a burger and fries to go every afternoon. It is the kind of food Puppy says she can’t eat since she turned thirty, and Puppy, having no job and, from what Claire gathers, limited ambitions beyond strolling the house in expensive loungewear, is always home to miserably watch her eat it. On her fourth Burger Boy visit, Claire picks up Jackson too. They get high and make out in the pool house that afternoon, and the next and the next and the next.

At nineteen, Jackson is six months older than Claire, but still a senior in high school. They try hanging out at his house once, but Claire feels shamed by his mother’s scrutiny, assumes she wants to know what’s damaged or defective about Claire that has her screwing a high school boy. After that, when they cannot be alone at her house because her father is home (rarely) or Puppy is unbearable (frequently), they find places to park. He gives her the bikini at the end of the first week, after she complains that her father’s move to Florida caught her off guard—she is used to winters that at least make an effort to be winter, but her father’s new life in St. Pete is relentless sunshine, sunburn weather in December. Outside, by the pool, she has resigned herself to wearing T-shirts over one of Puppy’s old suits, which is spangled with faded glitter and sags over Claire’s bee-sting breasts. Jackson presents the bathing suit wadded up in a supermarket plastic bag, the sort of awkward non-gift you give someone in an awkward non-relationship—he bought it for five dollars on a spring-break trip, he says, for a girlfriend he subsequently found blowing one of his friends in their shared motel room and broke up with.

It isn’t much—three triangles and some string—but the tag is still attached and Jackson is beaming at her.

“You’d look so hot in this,” he says.

She does look pretty hot: like someone she is not, what with the stars and bars marking her tits and crotch, but a hot someone she is not.

“You look like white trash,” Puppy says to her the first time she sees the bikini.

“You would know,” Claire says back. The bathing suit becomes a habit, even after the temperature dips. Two days before she leaves town, she throws a pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt over it before she and Jackson leave the house, but when they get to the parking space—a clearing in a half-built, abandoned subdivision—she makes a show of stripping off the shorts and shirt. In the few minutes before he takes it off and fucks her in the truck’s cab, Jackson snaps a picture of Claire, radiant and smiling and leaning against the crisp foil-flash of the bumper, the bikini’s Xs making her body a tic-tac-toe board.

Every year at the family reunion—before Cousin Monique comes to your rescue—the uncles sit back in their folding chairs and napkin-necks and ask about your father. They take you in with age-soggy eyes, as you stand before them in a floppy blouson and skirt. You look different now than you did in 1970 or 1981 or 1997—though you still have what lyrical Aunt Vitrine calls your swan quality. Cousin Monique had wanted to ditch the reunion for the shopping mall in Auntsville; she has always been your wings and, as such, was born to ignore the uncles: in 1970, she set fire to the truck belonging to one uncle and claimed it was lightning; in 1981, she put Ex-Lax in their pound cake frosting. Now she is nowhere to be seen. There’s no reason we can’t have fun at the reunion, you told her the night before, when she picked you up at Raleigh Airport. You’re right, Monique replied, grinning in the dark, the car pulling faster and faster along the blind curves of the road. Slave food and rockheads. I don’t see why that would in any way be an obstacle to fun, cousin.

Your blouson sticks to your skin. The uncles lean forward as if to smell you—girls here only wear that kind of top if they are in trouble—but gradually their eyes drift over the dirt hills across the street, behind the Baptist church. They don’t care if you’re like every other girl down here: fast Monique and her sisters Mae and Wanita and Tarnisha and Lynette. Her cousins Meggie and Mercy and Shawnelle and Winsome. Their kids LaDonna and Kelly and Juan and Quanasia and Cedric and Colin. Tons more. Monique’s mom had given her a fancy name in the hopes that she would be better than the rest. But look what happened, your father once remarked. 1981? 1982?

The uncles want news about him. Word on the road is that their nephew wants to return to his roots in North Carolina. The prodigal son returning—what a laugh, the uncles concur.

You stretch your eyes across the property, exasperating because it is huge and small at the same time and fills you with a familiar hopelessness. Monique and a friend were supposed to meet you at dawn. You all were supposed to slip out of your respective houses (you are staying with Aunt Nephronia, and Monique and Kate are, of course, staying with Monique’s mom, Vitrine, two houses down; as a child, this road of relatives fascinated you)—but you overslept, in part due to the brutally hot North Carolina night, in part due to your tears. Can a dead person ever change? Can time remove a tiger’s stripes? Those foolish questions made you weep in your sleep last night; in the days before your father died, you’d been too stingy to say goodbye.

The uncles look at you and say, Your daddy ain’t set foot here in near twenty years. But tell him we forgive him if he wants.

You need to tell them that he somehow finagled all the land from Great-Grandma Elldine and left it all to you in a will. Something about an unpaid loan, the land not being worth spit. The letter actually read, But why not enjoy it as your own, Sasha Jean. I utterly wish I could give you more.

The uncles are suddenly worked up in clammy anger.

How come he don’t answer when Vitrine call? That ain’t no way to be treating your one sister on this earth!

He always thought he was the best at checkers. Well, he got another thing coming.

If he thinking about parking that damn Cadillac in my yard again, he even crazier.

That sucker!

You’d had a dream, coming back to the folks in North Carolina: that you’d get a chance to talk smoothly after they all finished eating and were in good spirits; that you’d lay out everything Bobby Lee’s scribbled will said, though in reality it was vague, not more than four sentences. The sun wouldn’t be too hot and the children wouldn’t be too unruly. Dogs, as they happened to wander back and forth from each house, would not frighten you with their larva-laden ears. This was your dream. In reality, you can’t recall a single time that the uncles, in their walking days, didn’t eventually get smashed drunk and start fighting with the women. The pig, burnt to a crisp on the outside but pink as a newborn on the inside, would turn your stomach. The same gospel songs would be sung, the same protests as to who would hold the mic, who would gather the children from their hiding places and force them to sing. It’s not Sunday, one of them would say, relenting under a smack upside the head. How could your dream stand up to these details? Your dream was like a story that was told in the pages of some huge, incomprehensible book, spread out on a lemon-wax table in the only good part of someone’s house or trailer. Everyone sensed it was there but knew how to avoid it.

That and still: you want to find the right time to tell them—what better place for sad family news than at a reunion?—and you’re hoping that since it didn’t happen last night (your arrival at Nephronia’s, with glasses of Harveys Bristol Cream) or this morning (gluten-free breakfast crepes—à la the Food Network—with Vitrine), a suitable moment will come today.

Everyone is in the backyard of Grandma Elldine’s decrepit Victorian. Random picnic tables have been set out and on them, flies chill over Tupperwares of mac salad and wings. Curlyhead, feverfew, and false foxglove dot the perimeter but everyone treats them like weeds. Already at eleven in the morning, it is 90 degrees; the relatives fan themselves with their hands until someone drags out a standing General Electric and plugs it (via two extension cords) into an unseen outlet.

I hope my brother don’t think we still in the prehistoric days, Aunt Vitrine had said at the breakfast table, her gray wig toppling. I’m learning to eat healthy, Sasha Jean. Buttermilk, no heavy cream. You go back and tell my brother that for me. We all gone live forever, like it or not.

In reality, it should be easy to tell everyone that your father died (in his armchair, surrounded only by his home healthcare aide and General Hospital playing on the tablet in her hands). Perhaps they will expect you to cry, and then for you to expect them to cry back. Ancient Hattie Mabel carries a mic (via three extension cords) out to the middle of the yard, preparing to gospel. We can forgive, the uncles say. But hell if we can forget.

You are silent; handed a plate of beans and rice by a young boy; pushed into a chair next to the uncles, in direct sunlight. You mention that your daddy plans on coming down to the reunion next year. That he misses everyone and longs for the red earth of his childhood. The uncles raise their brows and laugh. They tell you, don’t lie. Ancient Hattie Mabel removes her hand from your shoulders and starts in with “The Old Rugged Cross.” You notice that she still has on her overnight curlers, that her eyes are closed as she sways from side to side, as if in a godly stew. The fragrance of the beans and rice is heavy for this time of day, but still you lift a fork. The uncles say they’ve never known you to be untrue.

They have heard rumors all these years. Your father, the big gambler, every weekend in Las Vegas, thousands lost. Your father, owner of not one but two homes in Los Angeles. Your father, the lady’s man. He never paid child support. He called himself a minister on his tax forms and got caught by the government people. He tried talking Grandma Elldine into selling him this property just before she went into Pine Haven Home but luckily she resisted his advances. He wanted to tear down the old Victorian the first chance he got.

He got called on by the cops one time for “untoward deviousness.” He never said I’m sorry to anyone like he meant it.

The uncles tell you not to lie. Ain’t no way he’s coming back. Our Bobby Lee is gone for good.

The will—scribbled on a yellow legal pad and witnessed by Faith Akintola, Dept. of Aging Adult Services, Los Angeles County—indicates that you’re supposed to evict them. That you’re supposed to raze everything and then build a real house here, with functioning plumbing and privacy windows. Sit on your newly built porch and look out over the chicken hills across the street and invite loads of educated folks over for drinks and perhaps to hear those “short stories” you’ve been publishing in graduate school—you can read them aloud (that is, your father last said, if they really want to sit around on a firefly night and listen to that crap). You’re supposed to recall childhood summers here, laughing in Great-Grandma Elldine’s post bed with Monique while the other children went to work tobacco. (Why not make a story out of that, he demanded. Monique and her slut self. Lazy, that’s all. Monique’s sisters and their slut selves—chasing men like firehouse dogs. Those girls belonged to nobody and look where that got them. Four kids apiece and no guardian in sight.) You’re supposed to see why he turned out the way he did, and why you will never go down that particular path. Never ever. (You belong to me. My favorite. Forgive me. Forever and ever.)

In 1961, your father stood outside a small white house on a street empty of trees. He was bowing his head, quite uncharacteristic. But his mind went like: Thank you, God, for this is not Carolina red dirt or Carolina sun. Trees can be planted if people need them, and churches can be fucking avoided by simply watching the ball game on TV.

Your father rocked a carriage with one hand while looking over a brochure handed to him by the real estate agent. Pomegranate Estates, it read. Take a Bite of This Fruit.

In 1961, the real estate agent had called this Long Island neighborhood a “colored development,” shying away from words like community or housing project, as he didn’t want your father—already coming across as uppity—to get the wrong idea. These were normal houses for normal people, the agent claimed—some even had wooden shingles. People watered lawns here, drove cars into proper driveways. There would be no fists here, no spirituals or arms linked in arms or fires or Jackson Five records or Aretha Franklin passion in this part of Pomegranate Village. The agent waved his hand over the sea of three-bedroom-plus-den Cape Cods (there were actually thirty-five on this cul-de-sac) and said, If you all want something to do, think about painting the shutters a different color, or planting a little garden or something. No vegetables, no livestock, no front yard clotheslines. Just a row of marigolds or begonias.

Tell your closest friends, the brochure encouraged.

In the yard of your soon-to-be new house, your father ignored the agent. His job at that particular moment was to keep his eye on the carriage in which you lay. The sun beamed straight into your eyes, and you bawled; the carriage was a foot away from a struggling maple sapling, but your father made no attempt to wheel you into that bit of shade. He was, instead, listening for your mother.

Who was walking around the yard, wringing her hands, not believing her luck. Not only did the house have more than one bedroom and a bathtub and basement, it had all this land. Nearly a fifth of an acre. She imagined planting the gooseberries and potatoes she’d smuggled from her last trip home to Laboe. One patch here, another here, near the culvert. There was that annoying maple sapling in the front yard by the curb, but in the backyard, there was nothing. Plenty of room for German food.

In 1971, your mother announced that she hated trees.

You struggle to eat the beans and rice, only to have Aunt Cathy tuck a bowl of grits and eggs into your lap. For later, she says, winking. From the corner of your eye you notice Monique, her brown skin glistening with baby oil, hurrying in a dress and bare feet. There was that one time, in 1981, when she duct-taped shut the door to the church and wouldn’t let them out for over an hour. In 1982, she stole seven dump cakes from the church basement breakfast and threw them into the branches of the tall pines.

She is flying like a pterodactyl now, large brown wings outstretched in love. She is coming for you.

I love it, your mother cried, walking away from the men and the carriage toward the side of the house. There were huge lilac trees and a gutsy chain-link fence running from front to back. When can we move in, she cried, without once turning her head.

Just out of sight of the men, her hands went back into her coat pocket; she, too, began a quiet prayer. The house was a miracle—it would be her miracle. It was close to the others. It looked exactly like the others. Likely, when you opened every door, you saw the same walls, you noticed that the bathroom was in the same place, the kitchen fan made the same noise. But how fantastic was that? No useless standing out or drawing attention to the wrong things. Being the same meant being the same.

Your mother wandered back toward the front yard. I love this place, Bob, she whispered. Please say we never leave.

Elspeth, he murmured. His hand on the carriage, the baby that was you still bawling.

The real estate agent cleared his throat. It was not often that he saw a black man hold a white woman in his arms and live to tell about it. His own family was Connecticut stock by way of Georgia and New Mexico. We’ll take it, your father announced. Bring me the papers.

The agent again looked at him funny; just what did this colored man think, using a phrase like that? Bring me—what was he, the fucking King of Siam?

But still, the agent didn’t resist. That afternoon the three of them sat together in the office on Main Street in Pomegranate Village and signed the papers. In the carriage, you bawled even further.

What your father has left you is a deed to these dusty thirty-seven acres, populated by fallen-down prefabs and trailers, at least seven in total, and at the end of the road, a rusted old church. Faith Akintola sent you a letter with a copy of the signed will you’ve carried in your purse; the letter (dictated, in fact, to the aide during commercials) continued:

Monique is scowling at the uncles. Why you talking to these old skunks? she asks, yanking you toward the road. Her face is riddled with egg white, remnants of an acne cure she’d applied earlier that morning. Unlike almost everyone here, she is as slim as a model. Her skin bakes underneath your hand into pure chocolate custard.

You tell her you were just making small talk.

Small talk, Monique sighs, wincing. Those suckers don’t know nothing about no small talk. Try making BIG talk and see what happens.

Big talk?

They think they doing you a favor when in reality it’s no way to treat a baby girl they supposed to be loving. They think they doing you a favor. I wish I could kill them all.

When you get to the roadside, you vomit in an echinacea bush.

Let it out, don’t be afraid, Monique whispers, lifting your sweaty hair from your shoulder. She giggles, but the pulse of her hand is soothing. You knocked up, Sasha Jean? I would be so happy. You don’t know how long I been waiting to say to you: JOIN THE CLUB.

(Re: the uncles: later she will claim what she was talking about was the time the uncles were asked to watch her oldest daughters—Monique was doing two shifts at Target—but then fell asleep and let the baby girls wander off down the road—almost two miles on their own. She wanted to kick them in the dick, hurt them so they’d stay awake forever, damn stupid talkers.)

What’s going on? Monique asks, as you rest against an oak stump. She smiles. In 1981, she poured sugar in various gas tanks, and then told the uncles it was a case of ornery white men. Girl, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, she whispers, clasping your face between her hands. You attempt to smile an answer, but then the bile comes back up. Monique looks into your eyes, unwavering. Exactly what kind of bun, she asks, do you have in your oven?

There was a story before Long Island. In it, El boarded the plane with the Melitta in her suitcase.

She’d never been on a plane before, had never been spoken to by a stewardess bearing peanuts and napkins, had never left her home in the night like some common criminal. The stewardess brought around a cart of drinks, but El shook her head; all she could think of was Bobby, waiting for her at the end of the line, opening his arms to her so that she could melt inside. Liquor on the breath could possibly prevent that melting. The third time around, however, El gave in and said she would just adore a gin and tonic. She’d been gone from the Laboe farm for a little over six hours. Though her suitcase—the one from her dead father—was stowed solidly underneath her seat, she imagined she could hear the Melitta dishes clinking softly against each other.

El had taken the dishes in the middle of the night as her mother slept. She’d lifted the tea and coffee pots from the cabinet in the basement kitchen and wrapped them in a cotton nightgown, stowed the cake platter at the bottom of the suitcase, hoping the cushioned lining would prevent it from breaking. During the fourth gin and tonic, El gazed again out the window and imagined she saw the chocolate-wafer edge of America.

They landed sometime in the early day. The waiting room was loud, strewn with paper cups and newspapers. The sounds of planes overhead rattled the chairs. She stood looking for help, for Bobby, but there was nothing. Eventually, El slumped into a chair attached to a miniature TV; she was hungry and thirsty and tired. To watch the television cost two quarters per fifteen minutes, but since Bob had told her she wouldn’t need any money once she arrived, she’d only packed an emergency five-mark bill.

The clock on the wall moved slowly; next thing, it was eight and the sky outside the plate glass was pure black. The janitor sweeping at her feet told her it was time to close this waiting area, that she would have to go to Arrivals. He showed her to the escalator. Good luck, ma’am, don’t let nothing happen to you.

But she nearly toppled down the moving stairs. Her suitcase seemed heavier than before.

She felt tears form. This country, it was so loud, so ugly, so wildly placid. She wanted to find a stewardess and ask how she could return to Germany—to Laboe on the Baltic—because was this how they did things in America? The man who swore his devotion—vanished like a ghost?

At the bottom of the moving stairs, she quickly saw Bob. Now Elspeth.

He looked much different than she’d imagined him since their fifth meeting five months ago: gaunt, mustached, palpable. No longer Bobby Lee—she saw immediately that he was to be called Bob. Now Elspeth.

He reached out a hand to her. No embrace, no tongue in her ear, no touch of her breasts. In her mind they were practically married, she’d run away to be with him, had taken her future wedding dishes without permission. She expected Bob would at least put his hand under her elbow, leading her the correct way into the future. But instead, he walked in front of her toward the luggage carousel; and when they got there and stood side by side, and she reached over to caress his cheek, Bob stepped back and frowned. Now Elspeth. Isn’t it enough you made me look all over the damn airport for you? Don’t you know I have better things to do? Plus, I had to get up and go to work this morning, unlike some people I know who spend their days drinking cocktails on Lufthansa jets.

His voice was so different from the voice he’d used in the aerograms, the one that began each letter with Baby or Darling or Sugarpie and ended with Forever Yours. His last letter, dated April 29, 1961, had begun Dear Sugarpie, I saw you in my dreams last night. As the luggage began to tumble onto the carousel, Bob took out a cigarette. Life in America was tough, he said, did she think she could make it? Did she bring any money? If she didn’t think she could make it, she might as well get back on the plane.

El didn’t know why they stood there; she already had the yellow suitcase in hand. As if reading her thoughts, Bob quickly tossed his cigarette. He led her to the exit by her hand. All the while never looking her directly in the face. Had she ever seen a cockroach, he asked, because his mother’s apartment, it was a cockroach paradise. His mother’s apartment—you couldn’t call it a honeymoon suite unless you were crazy—was only one bedroom, with him on the couch, and collards and chicken-fried steak three times a week. Pork chops and gospel radio on Sunday. He hated it, sometimes. But that was what was on the table.

Did she think she could handle that—black life?

Baby, we will live off a love, the letter from April 29 insisted.

Bob wiped his forehead with his shoulder, and El then noticed the large perspiration stains in the armpits. He noticed her looking. Been hot as hell, he said. Here in America, summer’s no joke. My mother has a Westinghouse fan, yes. But no air-conditioning, if that’s what you’re expecting.

The letter from April 29 had ended with the words I don’t know if you will want me once you are on these shores, but I will pray every day that you will. Forever Yours.

They walked out to the parking lot under a half moon. Bob swung the suitcase into the trunk, and just then she thought she heard the platter crack, the little lids of the coffee and tea pots clatter together. What in the hell you got in there, Bob asked, laughing, as he started the car.

The drive was bland, a few lights sparkling over Jamaica Bay.

Monique makes sure you can stand on your own (how no one else saw you throw up is a mystery) and then leans you against a pine tree, saying she has to go back inside for just a minute; she’s afraid Kate (a white girl from Duke who has forever and a day wanted to experience this kind of family reunion) might have fallen prey to her cousin Stanley. You haven’t seen Stanley in years, Monique whispers. But he’s still the same. Thinks he’s gone get his hands on Kate. But that’ll only happen after I get my hands on her.

You’ll love Kate, she says. You’re different.

She hurries off in a cloud of roadside dust and pollen. You imagine Monique finding her white lover and kissing her under a pile of stale pillows, in a wrought-iron bed, under dozens of family photographs—the ancestors. Forgetting about you for whole hours. When you attend their commitment ceremony three years later—only one uncle will come to the church where two females are saying “I do”—you notice the same crystals of love in her eyes, the same spike of deliverance as you see on this day, the last reunion you’ll ever attend.

You were ten years old when you told your mother about the nighttime touching. She rolled her eyes into her head, as if this were the straw that literally broke the camel’s back. How could he do this to me? she blurted. Then: Oh, baby.

It was nothing more than a few weeks’ worth of touching. The moon came out from your Mother Goose window and stared in shock. His finger didn’t even make it in all the way. Do you like this, your father asked. No, you answered. It took another five and a half weeks for him to get that through his head.

Ach du meine Güte! Heaven, hear me.

Your mother said she would leave him, take you and your brothers back to Germany. There was no way she could stay with a child molester. A monster.

Heaven, don’t stop hearing me!

But then weeks, more than a year passed.

When they entered his mother’s apartment on Hoyt Street, Bob set the suitcase down. The shower was running, and a woman’s voice sang the sweetest melody El had ever heard. The only way that we can survive, we need the Lord on our side!

Bob kissed El on her forehead and said, More of this later; he pointed to his lips. The woman in the shower called out to Bob to make his girl comfortable.

Bob took the salami out of the suitcase, holding it to the ceiling. You know, he said, we got food over here too. No need to drag this sucker clear across the world. This here salami is Italian food. What’s a German girl doing with Italian food?

El fell on the plastic slipcovered couch and rubbed her eyes. Her stomach growled. And she fell into a faint, a short deep sleep. No dreams whatsoever. Minutes later she woke up to Bob’s mother applying a cold washcloth to her face. What did you eat, baby? You bony as a bird.

El slowly raised herself and shook her head; she didn’t know enough English without her pocket dictionary to tell the woman that in fact the only thing she’d eaten all day was four gin and tonics. I got a pork chop in the icebox, his mother said. Let me go and heat it up, baby.

Bob turned away. But El could see the Army still left over in his bones and she felt his anger. Mama, he said. We don’t want that country food. Let me show my girl what we got to offer in Brooklyn!

And despite his mother’s protests, he lugged El back out in the car again; it was nearly 11. Her eyes were fully open as she rolled down the window. By now, her mother would probably be pulling her hair out, weeping with utter and relentless despair. That’s how El liked to imagine her: writhing in regret. Her mother had once denied knowing that the Jewish girls who came by after the war were starving. They looked fine to me, she’d said, giving all the crab apples to the horses. Bob pulled into a restaurant that had a window on its side and a sullen girl stuck in that window. Hello my name is Maryann and welcome to Jack in the Box and can I take your order? Bob grinned at the girl, then turned back to El; Dry your eyes, girl, he said. You making me look bad.

They ate in the car while listening to Ray Charles on the radio. When they got home, his mother greeted them at the door in a caftan gown. El had never seen anyone so smart, a woman who looked like a magazine. You will make my son very happy, Barbara said. She kissed El’s ears with lips that felt like firm pin cushions. Bob’s mother was thirty-six years old.

She served El a slice of sweet potato pie on a chipped plate with cornflowers around the edge and spread out a blanket on the couch. It’s not a fold-out but I hope you will be comfortable, she said. I don’t believe in young folks pretending marriage. It’s my church upbringing, but don’t even mention the word church to Bob! Do, and he’ll give you a mouthful.

She embraced her full-on, a mother’s hug. Bob’s told me only a little about you, so tomorrow I hope you’ll fill in all the blanks, Barbara said. And that was the very last thing El heard.

She felt herself lifted into the air. She felt herself descending into the ground. After so many years of no dreams, she was bombarded that night by pictures she hadn’t seen for ages. Cows, fires, birch trees, coins.

Dreams are nothing but random images, an elderly Polish doctor would tell her years later. This is how they do things in America.

They want to be nice to you, all these relatives at the reunion in Spring Hope. Cleopatra and Susie and Katrina and Shequanna and Betty. Horace and Clotilda and Tanya and Dove. They want to be nice, in spite of the way your eyes are your father’s eyes, your nose flat brown and wide as his. When you talk, even the younger cousins say they can hear Cousin Bobby’s voice come alive in yours. You know these kids have never met him, that they only know him from tall tales. Still, you laugh when they say that if he were to step foot on Grandma Elldine’s land, they would kill him with a hatchet.

They can’t imagine, these young cousins say, what it would be like to live in California and never see North Carolina again.

No, they will have to carry me out, one eight-year-old boy announces.

The sun is starting to set over the field. You breathe in this air: a hint of sulfuric chicken farm, a drying watering hole but evergreens as far as the nose can smell. A hint of thimbleweed out the corner of your eye.

You loom alone at the picnic tables like an unlit candle. The women and the uncles are discussing an evening service at the Baptist church. Ancient Hattie Mabel wonders if you’d like to come. It’s about time you learned the words to all the songs they sing.

But then, deus ex machina, Cousin Meggie comes running from her pickup. A giant cross plops between her breasts.

Sasha Jean, she cries. I been praying you wouldn’t forget me!

She is as round as the proverbial barrel, and yet she moves storklike from the truck between the fading aunts and uncles. You’ve thought about her for years but haven’t picked up a pen or tapped on a keyboard. What would those hicks have to say to you? your father once asked. What would they have to say to anybody?

You stopped seeing him, despite his letters, his infrequent calls to your college dorm, your first apartment in Manhattan, your sublet in the Bronx. When you turned eighteen, you announced you were never going to see him again, and he laughed. Sasha, he said. People make mistakes. People get over things. It’s the course of life. Grudges are about as real as cotton candy.

But you kept true to your word. Years passed—and then you received notice that he’d died in his sleep. Next to Faith Akintola. In front of her favorite show: Luke and Laura, escaping on foot over the top of a jetliner. In the middle of the ocean. During a lunar eclipse.

Meggie squashes you with treacly hugs, doesn’t wait for any answers before immediately asking after your mom. Her skin is as light as a white person’s; her eyes, round and small (Mongoloid, your father once said), literally sparkle as she talks. She says your mom’s name, and her face is quickly awash in tears—she apologizes for not sending any kind of note when she heard of your mother’s death. Victuals always heal a broken heart, she says, leading you to the table with the hot sauce steak and loading another plate high. Crispy kale and artichoke hearts. You want to tell Meggie that now you officially belong to her, to them—what use is a girl without a parent to stake her in the landscape? But she is eyeing you up and down; too skinny, she concludes. Your mama would not be happy.

When you shake your head, Meggie frowns. Your mama was the best thing that ever happened to this earth, she says, waving over Aunt Quincy and her bowl of spicy pork barbecue.

El awoke the next Brooklyn morning not on the sofa but on a huge double bed. Striped sheets had crumpled under her armpits; a thin blanket straggled at her feet. El felt a terrible, lovely ache in her shoulders, in between her legs. Music sounded from the kitchen, from a radio on the table; later in the day someone would say, You mean you never heard gospel music before? Lord Have Mercy!

A car horn screeched the sunlight into her eyes. Bob, she called.

Later that day, El would sit in the front pew of the First Church of Christ on Avenue J and nod along as the choir sang, “Going Up Yonder.” She would be next to her future mother-in-law; her husband was at home, looking out the window.

The church mothers would cast glances her way, happy that a white person had finally sat in the pews without looking over their shoulder. The pastor, Melvin K. Ritter, commanded the congregation to stand and be thankful; El liked this. She liked standing and begging, slowly, not too fast, the pure act of supplication, of asking things of someone who might just actually fulfill her deepest wishes. Just before his final sermon, he introduced Bob’s bride-to-be to the entire congregation.

Child’s too small, said one church mother in the pew behind El. Better put some meat on that skeleton, said another, smiling at Bob’s mother. Them Krauts do indeed have it bad, after all this time.

When the sermons were done (there were five in all), the church people went to the basement and sat at a long table in front of several platters of minute steaks, cornbread stuffing, and okra; many wrinkled hands took hold of El’s, wishing her the best with Bob. Lord knows other girls have tried to get him to change his ways, the hands told her. Hopefully, El would be the lucky one.

You and Meggie head to the watering hole—Monique has texted that she will get there as soon as “lovingly possible.” Meggie blushes as she stuffs her phone into her bra. She says she’s all right with two ladies in love even though there is something creepy about it.

You enter the woods—about a half mile in is the bluestone watering hole, the one that is said (by Aunt Vitrine and others) to contain healing liquids. The trees hang low, and you notice that it is dark but not pitch; you can still find your way. You’d hoped for complete darkness—what would they say when they learned you hadn’t said a proper goodbye to the man? Down here, everyone deserves a proper goodbye, hated or no.

You hope for one of those legendary water moccasins to snake its way to your ankle and take out a huge chunk.

Would it be wrong to tell them that the last time you saw your father, you said nothing specific? That the words forgive and forget never made it past your lips? That you engaged the reams of selves who came before you—the little baby in the carriage, the kindergartner, the science project acolyte—and told them it was time to close up shop, as though your father had never ever existed? He once was alive, and was all things to those former selves. You, on the other hand, despise that idea. Was it wrong to turn your head away from the phone the last time he called? Was it wrong to crunch up the letter in which he explained he’d suffered a major heart attack and needed just a touch of kindness? You hate him for keeping your mother, and you hate your mother for having been kept. You have his last will and testament sewn into a seam of the blouson, sort of like the way slaves traveled with their papers. You’d read about slaves in the fifth grade. Your father tested you on their names for a social studies test. He patted your head when you got the answers correct.

This thirty-seven acres is yours.

Immediately as you step foot under the canopy of trees, you are eaten by mosquitoes. Meg has something in a small flask; she offers it to you, and you take it down fast, lemonade and something bathtubby. Meggie giggles uncontrollably and admits that she’s always wanted to visit California and start herself all over again.

But dreams cost, she suddenly moans, her lips puffed out with fake citrus.

At the next clearing, she stops and puts her cheek against your arm. You had the best mom in the world, Meggie says.

You tell her you know.

Meggie ignores you, saying, She saw me on one of your visits—I think you were only seven at the time. Your mama saw me and marched straight to my mama—God rest Evangeline’s soul but my mother was a dumbass—and told her I was having a quote unquote rough time of it. That I needed more taken care of. That she only had one Meggie in the world, and what was the sense in ignoring that?

Your mama, she says. She saw my belly bowling out like a sail in the wind. She saw my legs bow and the ringworm on my cheeks blossom like flowers. Your mama saw, Sasha Jean. And she said something. And at that point, my mama had no choice but to look at me.

You want to ask her what happened, but Meggie is already walking away. You remember Meggie’s family, the father whose eyes were so outlined in whiskey they looked like huge beetles on his face, the mother whose cough shook every house on the road of relatives. Once they both took you to church and called you their adopted daughter—Look at this good skin, they’d said, almost in unison. You laughed when they did this—was it 1970 or even earlier?

You arrive at a grove of pear trees, tucked away neatly in this back wood against a small bluestone quarry. Vines everywhere come alive as snakes and then go back dead as plants. This is where Grandma Elldine used to go for her canning fruit. You smell their fragrance, wish to reach for the fruit. Your mama, Meggie keeps saying, If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t’ve been alive.

Your mother died on her way to the VFW nursing home where she was a volunteer. She’d been planning to visit her own ailing mother in Kiel, had even booked her tickets. But then her heart conked out, and she had to be placed in the nursing home morgue. The veterans went crazy, sliding their wheelchairs into walls, throwing food at each other. How could Mrs. Elspeth be gone? And so young?

Try as he might, the Polish doctor in charge could not get those men to calm down for weeks and weeks.

You are ten and Fortunoff is the store of dreams. Like your Aunt Vitrine once said to you: don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach! Well, this is your mother in Fortunoff. She wants everything; as our neighbor Miss Jerldean sometimes says behind her back, Fifth Avenue tastes on a Bowery budget. It is a Saturday when the two of you escape here; your father lies in the backyard with a cold compress on his forehead; it was only the day before that you told your mother about the nighttime touching. In Fortunoff, you and she can forget the world.

Your mother admires the blue onion pattern of the Wedgwood, the clean dullness of the Rosenthal. Are you in the market for bone today, the salesgirl asks. Her tag says EVIE. It’s a bit early, but have you seen the Christmas Spode?

Your mother says as a matter of fact, she was in the Christmas mood right now. Who says you can’t have Christmas in July?

Here, Evie says, Feel this. Villeroy and Boch, straight from the Manhattan showroom. Hold one of these cups up to the light and you can see clear through, like it’s a veil.

Last spring, the Church Mothers of Pomegranate Baptist chipped in to get your mother a set of white coffee cups, a thank-you for being such an inspiration to the kids at Tuesday Teen Services. Who knew that hearing all that talk about life during the Big War would have made such a difference to these young folks? Always mouthing off as if they knew life better than everybody else—thank God for Miss El and her tales of woe at the hands of that Nazi scum! (The Church Mothers were not above occasionally using a swear word in their speech.) Four white mugs, supposedly out of pure Japanese china, had been stuffed in a Christmas box and tied together with twine. I seen those very same mugs in White’s Department Store, two for a dollar, said Bob. Why these females have to be so damn cheap? There isn’t a damn thing for you in that church.

Evie goes in the back and brings out a soup tureen. This is my personal favorite, she announces happily. Her lips, your mother notices, are the color of strawberries.

For those women not afraid to spend a little more on themselves, Evie adds, a bit louder; perhaps she has noticed your mother’s thick accent.

The trip to Fortunoff is a major departure. You both were supposed to go to the Fruit Tree, and then to White’s for some tube socks, and then to the doctor, the one who will tell your mother that IUDs don’t normally fail, and if she is in the family way, it is due to her own recklessness. Then on to the butcher for lamb chops, and finally to the dentist, where she would have that impacted wisdom tooth looked at.

So much to do.

But early this morning, when the dawn was sparkling with a few lights over Pomegranate treetops, something possessed your mother. She waited. She called Miss Jerldean and asked her to pick the boys up from school later—Johann from the first grade, little Keith from kindergarten; she pulled you from your bed and tossed you into the backseat; she drove at the speed limit to Westbury, where Fortunoff loomed like a Long Island Everest.

You’ve always wanted to come here. You’ve always wanted to go with your mother. But it would take until now, the day after you told your mother. In the store she doubles over the counter and begins to cry. To you she whispers that the word finger literally crushed her spine.

Ma’am, are you OK? Evie asks.

Utter exasperation. Your mother replies she’s fine, all the while caressing the bottom of the dark blue salad bowl on the counter. It isn’t the blue onion, but rather a blue fleur-de-lis. It is a pattern she is gradually and quickly falling in love with. The small bowl has a rounded bottom and soft, wavering edges. You touch your mother’s hand with your own.

Sorry, ma’am, you can’t just buy one piece. It comes in a five-piece place setting. Tureen, large cake platter, medium cake platter, teapot, coffee pot, creamer, sugar additional.

You look up and see the impatience in Evie’s eyes.

And can hear your mother’s thoughts, loud and clear, funneled into your own head, the small bowl in her hands: how wonderful it would be to run away, with just the girl. To come back in a few weeks for the other kids. But just have this girl, all to myself. To hear what the world has been saying all along.

The bowl is hard as a rock.

Your mother purchases an entire dinner service of the unnamed pattern, twenty pieces in all, but says she’ll have to come back at a later date for the soup tureen and cake platter. She is, after all, not made out of money.

With the first light of her first morning in America, El felt the wind blowing in from the open window. A train clanged by, as if the track were close by. Bob, she called out again.

She found her suitcase in the front room of the apartment, right where Bob had dropped it, and she immediately went for the lock she’d snapped shut after tossing the cufflinks back inside.

The tea and coffee pots were fine, maybe a tiny chip on the edge of one lid. The platter was broken in three places. With glue, it could be restored. A bit of glue and some sun, some fresh New York air. The skyline, the taxis, the restaurants, the department stores. Gin and tonic flowing like a gulfstream toward Jamaica Bay, and from there out to the beckoning Atlantic.

She laid the Melitta dishes—blue pansies etched on a white background—back into the suitcase and went into the kitchen. The radio played soft and loud at the same time. Outside this window, which was covered with an eyelet curtain, a woman and child walked by, laughing.

El’s hands felt damp. She smelled like Bob’s hair, his chest. Surely there was a tea kettle somewhere in this kitchen. Above the stove a small plaque bearing the face of a black man read: I’VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP.

She would have to shower, she would have to wash her hair.

The swim was more delicious than food; afterward, you all rest on your backs on the slick bluestone shore, you and Monique and Kate (high as kites off some pills they borrowed from Stanley) and Meggie, who can’t seem to stop crying. Her face has gone back to childhood, with its circles of ringworm and eye dirt. She says she will never get over the day your mother saved her life.

Once, she says, there was a family all living on top of each other in a double-wide but still there was no room. We ate Cap’n Crunch every day and felt hungry all the time. Then this lady appeared out of a cream-colored DeVille. She was wearing a blue scarf on her head, like a turban, and she smelled of lilacs.

Little girl, she said to me. Don’t make such a sad face.

She lifted me into her arms, and I could smell baby roses over those lilacs. The powder blue ones, the kinds with the thorns that don’t make any difference.

Little girl, she said, Would you like to come live with me?

And I was all set to drift asleep, let this fine lady take me with her, away from the smell of unwashed cereal bowls and all the feet of my brothers.

She was better than a fairy godmother. She was cleaner than a queen. There was a pot of summer rhubarb boiling somewhere. And just like that, I recall my mama having words with her. Saying some nonsense about how her daughter was not some African orphan in the desert.

The truth was, I would’ve gone to any desert.

My mama lived twenty years after that day. You know what happened to me. On her last day at Auntsville Rehabilitation, where she was fidgeting with her kidneys, she told me I looked like a million bucks. How was it I raised such a gorgeous gal, she asked. Her lips were like quarry silt.

You did such a good job, I told her. I didn’t want to bring up the cream DeVille. I didn’t want to talk about that blue scarf or the queen walking into every house like she owned it. I was afraid of seeing the last drop of my mama evaporate on the spot.

Quit that bellyaching, Monique says, laughing. We all been there. We never look back, dummy.

What you need is a baby, says Kate, who is the only one—besides you—who is childless. She adds, A baby to love in the right way.

Monique swats her cheek gently and says, Lucky for us, there will never be a shortage of kids. Take your pick you want another one. Myself, I got three I’d love to give you. And I think Sasha Jean about ready to tell us of the newest addition, isn’t that right?

No one waits for an answer: instead, they laugh faintly and remove their wet shirts and shorts. They are becoming mermaids, and for some reason, you can’t stand to watch. Is it ever too late? Would swimming be better than a life of feathers? You know you’re no different from the rest—so you get up and dive back into the hole, letting its blackness swallow you. Too late: at water’s touch, your arms become fins and your legs fuse together. Your belly feels cold as you plow through the underground ripples; your neck has grown bright brown scales. The others don’t seem to notice. But moments later, they call out to you, and then dive in themselves.

Do they change? You can’t really tell. Eventually, you all swim, however, with the same ease, the same ruffled glide, to a mangrove tree, the roots of which sit like umbrella handles above the water. When you come up for air, you all look strangely bloodless. Tell us, Monique finally says, resting one arm on a root, What would you say, Sasha Jean, to some extra cash?

When you raise your eyebrows, she says, I plan to empty out the uncles’ payday accounts tomorrow. I figured out a computer way.

Please don’t name me accomplice after the fact, Kate says, swooping over to kiss Monique on the lips. Meggie blushes.

You are quiet, bobbing your head halfway into the water. And then you plunge as deep as you can to the bottom. You can hear the girls shout after you—Rude Bitch, why can’t you answer the question! You gone tell on us?

It’s lonely down below but also green. Pallid, alive. You wonder, as you open your eyes, where all the green has come from. There must be snakes here, you think, as you pull yourself—with fin arms—down farther into the hole.

He will never love you like he used to, your mother told you.

But he says I’m his favorite.

You are an angel, she replies, wincing. I have to live with that.

Down below, you believe you see your mother’s bluestone eyes, feel her farm-toughened hand upon your forehead. In Laboe there is an authentic German submarine on display on the sand; you can read the plaque and you can wail but you can’t go in. You look past the motionless sea plants and recognize a knife in your mother’s apron pocket. If he ever says “finger” again, she warns, then lifts the knife to her breast. You reach out and she vanishes among the weeds—how could you tell her that he never once even uttered that word?

When you bubble up out from the depth—when you gasp for air and hold tightly to Meggie’s arm—you hear Kate, speaking in a thick Southern accent, imitating someone back at the reunion. Hattie or Cathy or LaWanda or Ancient Hattie Mabel. Chris or Daquan or Malik or Harris. You think they’ve forgotten you when suddenly Monique nods toward the reunion noise in the distance and says, If Bobby Lee intends to take back Grandma Elldine’s house, he’s got another thing coming. Family is family. We got our own ideas.

You and what army, Kate asks. That house needs bulldozed, plain and simple.

It’ll be a place for you and me one day, Monique announces, taking Kate’s hand and pressing it against her neck. You and me.

Y’all better cut that shit out, says Meggie. But don’t forget to make me bridesmaid.

They laugh. They touch. Sunbeams try hard to burst through the woods’ canopy. You’re supposed to evict them all.

Kate says, I like it here. I open my eyes and every day it’s a new surprise.

Only a white girl would say that, Meggie laughs.

Why don’t you say something, Monique suddenly asks.

But you’re sure you are saying something, that words are actually exiting your mouth and penetrating their ears. You’re pretty sure you’re telling them that as of nine months ago, you inherited everything here, as far as the eye can see. Thirty-seven acres. You paid for it. You can’t imagine ever wanting to set foot here again.

And perhaps they have heard. Monique flips her fins playfully in front of her. We’d miss you if you never came back, she says, not understanding. This is a sign. They hear what they want to hear. And that’s fine with you. You can never really be free, but you’re already there.

Crows and starlings screech through the landscape. In the distance there is the fragrance of the pig being roasted on the spit. You hear the old shingles peel off the Victorian and land in the elderberry hedge. The house will certainly die.

You clear your throat, make your way to the other side of the pond. The others release themselves from the umbrella handles and follow you, drifting on their backs. A child screams into the woods and waits for an answer. Ancient Hattie Mabel is shouting the words to “I’m Getting Ready.”

You all dive again, this time not needing to come up for air. This is the world and there is no need for stealing, kissing, anger at past wounds. This world operates on scales and silt.

You expect it to end. For the fins to melt, the tails to finally recede, the women to call you all back to the tables. Hair will be quickly braided or wrapped into shirts, skin smoothed back into order. You expect that soon you will all tramp slowly and un-eagerly through the forest—Kate will suddenly squeal in horror as she steps upon a harmless worm—and then it will take forever for Meggie and Monique to tame her cries with their hands.

A fantasy arises in which you all continue your walk, even with the brays and hollers of the slave women in these woods, their feet smashing snakes, their arms tattered by thorned vines, their minds agape with the babies they could not afford to carry. The slave women are deafening, the slave women are worse than ghosts. You wonder if your parents are trapped here with the slave women. Would they torture your parents like ghosts in a cheap horror flick? Would that make you feel any better?

But this is all so conveniently stashed away. The world you’re in now is all scales and silt. Meggie, Monique, and Kate dive deep, trail air bubbles behind them; their light and dark brown breasts hang over their bellies, not in perfect mermaid style, but in the style of girls who have longed to do this since the day they were born. Their hair floats in the depth like a series of snowballs. They remind you of Christmas. There is swimming, miles of it—and a surprise underground clearing, and giggles over mermaid nipples and moles, and promises, and some hope. Why ever resurface? Why not stay here for all time? Dandelion wine and nougat truffles. You could live like kings.

It’s tempting, but not going to happen. Land ho! Meggie screams, laughing as she runs on ahead; she’ll be the first one to fill up another plate and hug the kids. Kate and Monique touch fingers to lips behind every tree, vow to go to Stanley’s room and steal the rest of his “raw material.”

And over midnight margaritas on Aunt Nephronia’s roof, you tell them (these girls now your girls) in clear, cement words, that you have no idea what your father is planning on doing to the land. But you promise it won’t be anything bad.

El lifted her hand to her throat and felt the tiniest swell there, like a foamy wave bundling itself to the shore. She would have to go out and see Jamaica Bay up close. She would have to find that chocolate-wafer edge of the world, once again.

There in the afternoon sunlight of the kitchen table, El dared not move. She hated the feeling that life was a race—would it be possible to remain here like this, forever? She found a pack of cigarettes behind the toaster and took one out, a race to the finish.

Anyone there, called Bob, slamming open the front door to the apartment. He carried a bag of sweet rolls in his arm. I’m home. I’m home.

She rose from the table, allowing herself to swoon against the wall. Don’t I get no sugar, he asked, and she felt oddly moved by his stingy smile.

He buried his face in her neck. I’m a changed man, he whispered. Do you believe?

But El wasn’t listening. She was wondering, instead, if her mother had finally noticed that the dishes were gone. She kept seeing the old face, disappointed and yearning at the same time. Not at all the right punishment for the crime.

June 15

Dear Future Husband,

Please do not call me Josephine. I’m writing to you because that’s what we’re supposed to do right now in quiet hour. Captain Bev says I ought to tell you that I am waiting for you. My mother says it’s rude to keep someone waiting. She also says that I am an impatient girl. She promised that this camp had horses but I have not seen the horses yet.

Cordially, Fin

Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen. The beach is ours and all its coves and sandcastles. I have bug bites like beads of sap on my legs. It is June in Michigan and we giggle like princesses as we pull dresses on in the bedroom our single mothers share. We clip on earrings and hate their heaviness. We imagine our lives as women and say the things we think they would say. We tuck our penises between our skinny legs and walk with our thighs together. When we are through we hang the dresses up and put the earrings back inside their cedar boxes at his mother’s bedside. We promise not to tell anyone. There is a handshake, a promise with our bodies that I will not remember until years later when I see the neighbor boys slapping hands before they part for dinner.

The summer we are fourteen Rio kisses me for the first time as he zips me into a dress. The dress is blue and white polka dotted and the zipper snags on my tighty-whiteys. The kiss feels like a bug landing on my shoulder. He kisses my lips after he kisses my shoulder. The smell of his teeth is the smell of our shared lunch, fried bologna sandwiches and rice and beans. We made the sandwiches ourselves, the rice and beans we heated up in the microwave. He does not zip the dress up all the way. My shoulder will sting later—like it had been a bee on my shoulder, not the harmless fly I’d felt. It will not always feel like stinging. When my husband kisses my shoulder it will feel good.

We kiss when we think we are alone. We flip paddleboats on the beach and kiss beneath them, the seats dripping water on us. We kiss at the playground where there are secret places in the wooden infrastructure of the jungle gym. We get away with too much this summer.

We grow up on Marlin Street in swim-trunks. Our mothers drive their Chevy with every window down. The wind ruffles our hair like pages in a book. Years from now I will move away from Marlin Street. Not far—a few streets. Close enough that our mothers can walk, thumbing their rosaries, to my house and sip mimosas on the porch, where they will laugh like Spanish witches.

But we grow up on Marlin Street in a beach house. The beach house is blue and has a screened-in porch. On the porch there are two white plastic chairs and a second-hand end-table between them where our mothers sit with their sangrias. We sit on the splintered wood beside them or sit inside on the couch. Our mothers cannot afford to own two houses—will never be able to afford to own two houses. They sleep on two twin-beds in the master and Rio and I sleep together in our room on one queen size. We never have friends over from school.

Families rent out the beach houses for brief Michigan summers, but our mothers own a taquería on the boardwalk. We own our vacation home. Our mothers are known by locals as the Taco Sisters. They are not sisters. They are not sisters the way Rio and I are not brothers. They are childhood friends—immigrants’ daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers. They asked for what their parents could not. They are not sisters but they shared beds and sleeping bags on the floors of dirty shacks.

They tell us we washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan. They say they spotted us lit up by the lighthouse against the rocky shoreline. They say gulls carried us to their doorstep. They fit us with seafarers’ names. Mine is Delmar, his is Rio. Both our mothers’ names are Maria—Maria Carmen and Maria Blanca.

We will never know our fathers. We know that they were light-skinned and fair of hair. Rio’s hair looks like bleached coral. My hair is black but my skin might as well be butterscotch pudding. The only way we look like our mothers is our eyes. When we ask about our fathers they tell us, in English, that they are no longer a park of the picture—an idiom they’ve grown up saying wrong. We imagine our fathers must have been small men to leave such boisterous women. Our mothers never complained, never cursed men and their unwieldy cocks. I will ask about my father again when I am leaving Marlin Street for college and my mother will ask if they were not enough.

The locals gave the taquería the unofficial name Authentico. Our mothers had bought a neon sign to advertise their authentic Mexican cuisine: tacos el pescado, camarones rebozados, paella de marisco, arroz con pollo. The gaudy neon sign flickered over the walk-up window. They’d meant to name the place El Lago, but the loan from the bank bought them just one sign. We made fun of the unofficial name. We warned that someday a couple hermanos could open up a place called Genuino and ruin them. We sit outside the taquería on picnic tables and pick gum off the seats. We watch our mothers fry tortillas and wipe their hands on grease-licked aprons. Our mothers shoo us off the picnic table when the stand is busy. Years from now, when our mothers can’t spend every day making tacos for tourists anymore, and I tell them I am too busy to run the place, Authentico will close up. I will buy the sign from them and hang it in my garage.

The vacation families drive their cars too fast down Marlin Street. They are on their porches smoking sausages, or taking boats out on the lake. They are fucking on the beach inside murky coves. We hear them and call them monsters. We call anything we cannot explain that June monsters. In Michigan, summer is only a few months in the middle of the year, but our mothers love the beach year round. It means every winter we have to hear about some gringo trying to walk on the lake and drowning. One year the gringo will be a boy from our high school that we hate and they will never pull his body from the lake and we will feel bad for having hated the boy. Our mothers make the holy triangle up and down and side to side.

We break into the empty summer houses. We scare the spiders out and play house. We spend the night in the empty beds after our mothers pass out drunk from rum and Cokes. We make the beds every morning, fluffing up the pillows. We take things that do not belong to us. Things we think no one will miss. I take cards from Euchre decks and tape them inside a lined paper journal. Rio cuts buttons from Sunday bests and carries them around in a velvet bag like they are marbles. We are monsters. We carve our initials into the underbellies of the summer homes’ expensive wood furniture. We lie under the giant oak frames of the summertime beds with a set of keys and cut away at the bed flesh. We find out that if the wood has not cured long enough the furniture will bleed. When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child I will wonder what had gotten into us that summer and hope my child is not a monster.

When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child, my husband and I will drive up Marlin Street to show my mothers the first sonogram. The child will be growing inside a woman we have paid through an agency. The surrogate will be a healthy, Latina woman getting her PhD in women’s studies at the college in Kalamazoo. I will believe that this detail will make my mothers proud. I will struggle to find the best way to tell them. I will expect that they will not understand. I will expect that they will have questions I will not know the answers to. I will bring them a flyer from the agency complete with illustrations and a number to call should they have any questions. They will make the holy triangle, up and down and side to side.

Rio and his mother fly to Texas for the month of July to visit familia. My mother and I take them to the airport. Carmen has to stand on her toes to kiss my forehead. She holds my face in her hands and says, “We’ll be back before you can say Tenochtitlan.” My mother spends July harvesting the garden in our backyard. She does other things too, but mostly she is outside on her knees where she can pray in the dirt. I hear her say Carmen’s name to the tomatillos once. The tomatillos’ papery husks crack and flake when they are ready to be harvested. I watch my body do the same. I spend July under the paddleboats in the dark where I press my fingers to my lips and put my other hand down my shorts and say Rio’s name.

Rio comes back taller and darker. Beside me in our bed his skin is still hot from Texas. He kisses me, like we had so many times before. Then he takes my pants off and pulls my cock out and licks his hand and gets my cock wet and puts me inside of him. After that we are fucking everywhere. We are naked when our mothers are at work in the taco stand. We fumble around in the darkness for each other, like moths to the only light in a room. Our sex life will never again be as exciting as when we are fourteen and sharing a bed.

In August there is a summer camp in the city at the Baptist church. The campers are new every week. We are too poor to go to summer camp. The campers swim on a private beach. We think maybe they can walk on water. We see them splashing out by the buoys. We start to call the boys buoys. We walk up the shore and get as close as we can. They wave sometimes and others push their noses flat with their fingers and stick their tongues out. I have not said out loud what I am but I think about it all the time. Especially the summer when we are fourteen and watching the buoys throw footballs on the church’s private beach. I want to pick each mole from their pink backs and eat them like Raisinets. We walk ten minutes into Grand Haven to sit outside the chapel and listen to the Bible lessons. The pastor’s sermons scare us out from under the paddleboats for a few days. I think I am more scared than Rio. Rio is brave. Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen.

There are days I’m not up for cove crawling, buoy watching, kissing inside the belly of the yellow slide at the park. I stay inside and read instead. Rio is not much of a reader and heads out to adventure without me. He calls me a faggot first, and then the screen door slams.

We will not always get along. When we start high school he will start to play varsity baseball. Our mothers will go to every game. I will love the way he looks in a jockstrap. He will be trying too hard. I will tell him he is trying too hard and that nobody believes him and he will hate me. He will have the chance to be popular and he will take it. He will run away from home the summer he is fifteen. My tio, Valentino, will be visiting from Arizona. He will have rented a car. One night, when they are out walking the pier, Rio will take Tio Valentino’s rented car and drive it as far as Tennessee where a state trooper will pull him over. Rio will have just picked a car and followed. We will all drive down to Tennessee to pick him up from jail. Carmen will be furious. I will think he’s so fucking cool.

We are subscribed to Michigan Animal Magazine this summer. Really we are taking them from the Johnsons’ mailbox, reading them, and then putting them back. We learn that cougars used to be native to Michigan but we drove them out. We learn that the feral swine are a problem. We already know that the state bird is a robin, but we learn that cranes fly necks extended—herons fly necks drawn back. We learn that what we thought were owls are mourning doves hooting in the trees. We learn that a monarch’s wings are orange with black veins, not orange with black stripes. I look at my veins, blue beneath my skin, and wish I could fly.

Late August we are caught, giggling and naked, fucking in the preacher’s bed. From his house we’d collected sheets of cardstock paper with his parish’s name embossed along the top. He will tell the police officers hours later as we are being loaded into the backseats of the cop cars that he’d left a pair of good shoes at the lake house. This explained his unexpected visit. The preacher opens the door to the beach house and Rio and I jump from the bed, pulling on our swim-trunks. He grabs Rio by the hair and slams him into the wall. He thunders like a sermon. We get away and run and hide down in our spot by the paddleboats.

Before we go home and before the cops arrive we are walking the shoreline, panting. Rio sees something and points. “Look,” he tells me. I see a brown mass—fur and antlers. It doesn’t move. I am scared to get closer. He runs ahead, kicking up sand. The beach looks so big, like he could get lost in it. I do not want to lose him. I follow, my ankles buckling to the uncertainty of the sand. The brown mass is huge. It is a monster—it could rear its ugly head and tear us limb from limb. It looks dead for weeks, stinking and bloated, its blood has turned the sand and water black. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that this is a moose. Standing next to it Rio looks so small, but he is fourteen and taller and darker with skin still hot from Texas. He covers his mouth. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that moose are only found in small numbers in the Upper Peninsula. We figure that the moose died up north and the water carried him here.

Rio crouches, covering his nose. He says we have to do something. “What can we do?” I ask. He starts to gather twigs and shells, leaves and driftwood. He uses what we have: scattered branches, pebbles, brittle shells. He scatters them around the moose, creates a perimeter of earthly discharge to sanction off this bit of beach for the moose. I help him. I pull bentgrass up and pick flowers from the beach trees. We sit away from the moose and lean our heads on one another. We watch the shoreline for Wisconsin. The moose’s antlers have already begun to bleach clean in the sun.

Our mothers will struggle through the winter. They will rely on second jobs cleaning houses. They won’t trust us alone in the same room together. The cop had been able to speak Spanish and had told our mothers what we’d been doing. The preacher dropped the charges. Rio will start to sleep with his mother and I will sleep with mine. Rio will crawl the coves without me. He is the gringo who falls through the ice that winter, but he will pull himself out and walk, shivering, back to our house where I will tell him how fucking stupid he is. I will take his clothes off and take my clothes off and press myself against him inside a scratchy mohair blanket.

He will flunk out of college and move back home. Carmen will put him to work in the taquería. We will barely talk for months. He will become the kind of brave that says yes to everything. When I graduate college he will be in rehab fighting a heroin addiction. He will call saying that one of the steps is making amends and a week later we will end up fucking against the walls of the apartment I share with my boyfriend. He will break off in me like shells. I will meet my husband, Fisher, when I am twenty-six and he will meet Rio that same year at Thanksgiving and Rio will not be happy about it. In the kitchen, while Fisher is trying his best to speak with our mothers, Rio will tell me that no one can love me as hard and as real as he has every year since we were fourteen. I will say something to destroy him: “It took this long to find someone that could love the rest of you out of me.” Fisher will hear our voices rising and will step into the kitchen as Rio slams his fist against the laminate countertop. Fisher will ask if everything is all right. I will have to explain that night on the drive home about Rio and I.

The summer we are fourteen and playing dress-up with our mothers’ clothes in their bedroom with Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall, we talk about getting older. We sit on my mother’s bed, the dresses zipped up halfway and pooling around our waists. We have not become monsters yet. We have not stolen the Euchre cards and buttons. We have not called the boys buoys. The boy from school that we hate has not drowned in the lake. The moose has not washed up on the banks of Lake Michigan. We do not know that we will never know our fathers. We will wonder what got into us. Outside, though the curtains are closed tight and all we can see are the curtains’ stitches in the sun, we know the beach is clean because summer is just getting started and the summer families haven’t moved in. Rio has just kissed me for the first time.

“I’ll get a sex change,” Rio says. He gathers the dress up around his hips and clips at his penis with two fingers.

“I like you as a boy,” I tell him.

“Then you’re gay,” he says.

“Don’t you like me?” I ask.

“I love you,” he says. “It’s wrong though. We have to stop or something bad will happen.”

We take off the dresses and hang them in the closet.

On the first day, there’s a sense of relief. There are other feelings, too, but relief is among them. She has arrived, at least. After three weeks. After a broken sandal strap, sunburn on her cheeks, mud in her ears, bugs in her hair, blisters around her ankles, bruises on her hips, boiled eggs, bottled water, sour berries, pickup trucks and train cars and footsteps through the dirt, sunrises and sunsets, nagging doubt and crackling hope—she has arrived.

I was going to sleep in a museum—with any luck, next to Esau Abraham, a boy so gorgeously Jewish he held the entire Old Testament in his name, in the perfect contours of his face. I had this theory about boys, that if they just got close enough to me, and sort of focused in, they would forget about the obvious deterrents, the glasses, the frizzy hair, the underdeveloped body. I was zany, I really went for it, I knew all the good dick jokes. Everyone talks about personality like it’s a bad thing but the fact is, without one, you’ve got nowhere to go but ugly.

It’s the beautiful people, isn’t it, who most often wind up dead or alone.

We took a bus, not a yellow school bus but one of those real ones, with plush red seats and TVs, although we weren’t allowed to turn the TVs on. Esau Abraham’s mom, Mrs. Abraham, was on the bus, one of the parent chaperones. This was a problem but not necessarily a dealbreaker. She loved her son. She wanted what was best for him. We could be allies.

Someone opened up a giant bag of Cheetos. We were going to have dinner in the museum cafeteria but a bus ride demanded snacks. The bag got passed around, and soon the smell of powdered cheese was upon us all like a pollen. I knew even as a kid that kids were disgusting, the constant hand to mouth, the reckless tactility. Most of us did not wash our hands after we used the bathroom—a fact I’d empirically uncovered by spending a lot of time in the bathroom. I hid in stalls to avoid certain things, which was my right, which was all of our right.

The bus driver was a middle-aged woman who clipped her turns close. The second time we bounced off a curb, Mrs. Abraham jostled up to the front and rapped on the Plexiglas. “Hey,” she said. “This is a bus full of kids you’re driving. Can you please be more careful?”

“Lady, I been driving kids a long time. They love it rough.”

She wasn’t wrong. We did like it rough. The higher we bounced, the better.

The year before we’d gone to the planetarium. Esau Abraham wasn’t at our school then. I had big plans for Sam Bell—got behind him in line so that I could sit next to him—but as we entered the darkened room, Allison nudged ahead of me. “Sam,” she’d said. “Sam, you dropped this,” and handed him a VISITOR button. His VISITOR button was fastened to his shirt, so we all knew it was a big fat lie. But I gained a lot of admiration for her just then.

We hit a pothole and I flew a couple inches into the air. “Take it easy!” yelled Mrs. Abraham.

“Not much I can do about the roads!” the bus driver called back gleefully.

There was a rumor that the local news team would be at the museum when we got there, since this was the first time an elementary school class—or any class—had been invited to spend the night. As an event, it was just hitting all the right chords for me: a sleepover, not at my house, at the museum of natural history, with boys.

I just loved boys so much, it was a sickness, it was a secret. I had to pretend I didn’t love them as much as I actually did. I didn’t want to be boy crazy. Once boy craziness became your signifier you couldn’t be taken seriously. Your art would be ignored. I worked so hard on mine, I fully expected to have a gallery showing of my gouaches and charcoal sketches within the year. Esau Abraham was a really good drawer and I looked forward to our future collaborations, the font of mutual encouragement we would fill together.

When we pulled up to the museum and the bus came to an especially jarring stop, I slung my overnight bag over my shoulder, tucked my sleeping bag under my arm, and squeezed into the aisle behind Mrs. Abraham. I leaned in and breathed in to see if I could learn anything additional about Esau. She smelled like Vicks VapoRub and faintly, confusingly, bacon. In the dusk, we gathered on the wide sidewalk in front of the museum. Sure enough, a newsman was talking to Ms. Green, our teacher. What a moment for her, for all of us. She was smiling and talking with her hands, her rosy face exuberant. I could tell she felt famous, and honestly, I think we all did.

Once inside, we were led to the Discovery Room, where we were told to find a place for our bags and sleeping bags. I was startled; I did not expect this to happen so soon. The Discovery Room had a hodgepodge of hands-on exhibits, some insects and fish, a family of stuffed wolves behind glass, and an enormous sculpture of the human brain that you could walk inside. Each of the four lobes was a different color and came with a mini audio tour.

Obviously, the Discovery Room would also be where I “discovered” more about Esau Abraham, if you catch my drift.

Esau followed his mother to a small enclave created by an aquarium flanked by two bookshelves.

“Here, Esau, this is a good spot for us,” she said, taking his navy blue sleeping bag from him and laying it on the floor. “We can look at the fish while we fall asleep!” She unrolled hers—red with a tartan print on the inside—right next to his.

My unsinkable heart sank. I had to be strategic. I put my things down on the other side of the bookshelf closest to Esau. I quickly tested the space and realized that if I stretched all the way out, my head would be more or less in line with his, about four feet apart. Three feet and eleven and three-quarters inches too many.

What could I do but wait, which was of course the one thing I was terrible at. My great aunt told me once, when you dislike doing something, you have to do it more, do it over and over, any chance you got, until you not necessarily liked it—liking wasn’t the goal—but just felt neutral toward it. Neutrality, she said, was the whole purpose. Real Buddhist talk for a woman—my namesake—with a severe QVC addiction. But I thought of her now, and tried to make this situation apply. How to wait more? How to wait over and over? Impossible. Thanks for nothing, Aunt Jill.

Most of the other girls in the class had spread their stuff out in a long rectangle on the other side of the room, closer to the brain. Coyness was never a virtue I cared very much about. Once it was lights out, once Ms. Green and the other chaperones were asleep, those girls would have twice as much work to do, with twice as much risk. Me, I was staying right here, close to my target.

Mrs. Abraham was squeezing hand sanitizer onto Esau’s open palms. I had to be careful not to watch him too much when he was with his mother. It was a turn-off. I took off my glasses and cleaned them on the bottom of my shirt. The only thing worse than a girl with glasses, I reasoned, was a girl with dirty glasses.

I was good with boys because I knew what they wanted. I could enter the simple machines of their minds and see how their gears turned. Most of them needed a lot of oil. To be told, a lot, how correct their opinions were, because most of them believed that opinions were like facts—provable and true. Thinking something, for a boy, meant not-thinking all other things. When two even vaguely conflicting ideas rubbed together, they either quickly chose one and discarded the other, or abandoned them both for a new and better topic, often something they felt absolutely certain about, like a cool video game, or whose bra was visible beneath her shirt, or what was I even doing there anyway. Over time, I could make them talk to me, just by simply existing. I occupied a genderless place where I neither quickened the blood like the obvious girls, nor inspired the bravado often necessary around other boys. Around me, they got to take five. Being a safe harbor may seem dull and sexless (so to speak—nobody’s having sex) but it’s actually a place of power. Deep, hard, penetrating power.

(That’s the kind of riffing I had access to, for example.)

Mrs. Abraham went off to use the bathroom.

“Hi, Esau,” I said casually, coming from around the bookshelf.

“Hi,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be over there, with the other girls? It’s just boys over here.”

“Oh really? I didn’t even notice. It looks pretty crowded over there. I might just stay put.”

Esau rubbed his hands on his jeans. “I wish we could sleep in the brain.”

“Are we not allowed to?” This was a possibility I hadn’t considered.

“I don’t think so. There’s not really a lot of room in there.”

Mrs. Abraham came back from the bathroom. “Who’s this?” she asked brightly, glancing from Esau to me.

“Hi Mrs. Abraham,” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Jill.”

“Well hi, sweetie. Did you find a spot for your stuff? Looks like the girls are going to be on the other side of the room tonight. Probably a good idea, right?” Her eyes were roving over my shoulder to where I’d painstakingly placed my things. I noticed from this close distance that the majority of her eyebrows were drawn on. I was a mothers’ favorite and a grandmothers’ favorite and I had to decide whether I would risk my reputation and stay put, or oblige her and move. But before I could say or do anything, Ms. Green was summoning all of us to the doors. It was time to eat dinner, she said—pizzas had arrived—after which we had forty-five minutes to spend as we wished, in approved areas of the museum.

I got my two slices of pizza and fruit punch juice box and sat with a table of girls. My best friend Sarah was dabbing her pizza with a napkin.

“Why did you put your stuff on the boys’ side?” she asked.

I punctured the foil circle with my straw. “I didn’t actually realize there were ‘sides,’” I said. “Seems like the whole point of being here is to, you know, mix it up.”

Sarah chewed carefully. She was a very careful chewer. She told me once that you were supposed to chew every bite thirty-five times before swallowing it. “Well, I don’t think we’re allowed to sleep on the same side. They were supposed to put us in separate rooms but the other rooms have to be kept really cold or something, that’s what I heard.”

A girl named Caroline tossed her long, pretty hair. “They’ll probably come to our side after everyone’s asleep, and try to be gross. I heard Nick say he was going to steal our underwear.”

“Nick’s an idiot,” I said. “Who even brought underwear? It’s not like we’re staying here for a week.”

Caroline shrugged. “I brought extra, just in case. My mom always says to pack extra underwear, because you never know.”

“Yeah, like, you could pee your pants or something!” Lauren shouted out, and everyone laughed.

I didn’t laugh. I tried not to roll my eyes. Caroline definitely wanted her underwear to be stolen. I could see right through her. I didn’t like this kind of game-playing. I didn’t like silliness, the silliness so often ascribed to our sex. I was constantly trying to get out from under it, kill it as savagely as possible, like a slug you pour salt on even after it’s dead.

If you wanted a boy’s attention, you had to get it. You had to take it.

After dinner, I kept my eye on Esau. His mother was talking to Ms. Green and the two other parent chaperones. With a few other boys he headed toward Ornithology, which was fortunate, since it was adjacent to the Mineralogy wing, where I wanted to spend my time. I had some money to spend in the gift shop tomorrow and I was definitely going to get a few new polished rocks and minerals for my collection. Some agate, maybe. I did not want to lose sight of the educational purpose of this trip. I knew, deep in my bedrock layer, that Esau Abraham would come and Esau Abraham would go. I knew I had to keep a firm hold on my interests outside of boys. I stood looking at an exhibit containing necklaces of jade, peridot, and pink topaz, right next to the clusters of Mississippi pearls so creamy they seemed edible, and I felt stirred, filled with longing.

My desire for boys and my desire for certain other things—often inexplicable, sometimes beautiful, frequently plain, occasionally attainable, like a tiny plastic fifty-cent notebook charm complete with even tinier pencil, for my charm bracelet; sometimes not, like these exquisite jewels that came from places in the earth that no longer even exist—were knotted together as intricately as a DNA double helix. I wanted and wanted and wanted. I believed, like my Great Aunt Jill, that objects had the power to protect me from harm—the harm of loneliness and my own impermanence—and I believed that boys had the same power.

My little voice told me, take what you want. Take what you can. Heal in the long shadows of the taking. My little voice and Aunt Jill’s little voice, maybe, were the same.

I realized I was standing with my hands and forehead pressed to the glass. I heard a few people enter the room and then Esau’s voice, “Adam—wait up!”

“Where are you guys going?” I asked, straightening up.

“Adam wants to go to the dinosaur room, right?” Esau asked. Adam was a shy boy, shyer than Esau, and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln.

“I’m not sure we’re allowed upstairs. I think we’re supposed to stay just on this floor,” I said, unsure of why I was taking the rule-abiding position, especially since I was planning on breaking a few unspoken rules later that night.

Esau looked at Adam. “I could ask my mom,” he said.

“Let’s just go,” I said. Being alone with Esau plus Adam was better than being alone without Esau. And it was fun to take the lead, exciting. “We can pretend we didn’t know.”

The three of us walked quickly to the lighted exit sign. I opened the heavy door to the stairwell and held it for Adam and Esau. I saw Mrs. Abraham craning her neck behind a few kids wandering between Botany and Mineralogy, looking, surely, for her son.

We hurried up a flight of stairs, laughing, which was the sound of our nervous bodies trying to expel their nervousness.

The Vertebrate Paleontology wing was cold and very dimly lit. We fell silent immediately upon entering, tiny insects beneath the impossibly tall ceilings. The air smelled like stone—no, like bone. For a minute we stood there without moving, just inside the entrance. I felt a tingle in my body like a sustained high note, like I myself was an echo chamber for our collective giddiness. This would be a double trespass, I thought to myself. Once for being a forbidden area, twice for being an ancient era. We were moving through time in two directions, forward and backward. I wanted to be in charge of this moment, of being in this ideal place alone with two boys, like some better version of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of my all-time favorite books. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask, to believe, that here under the spell of these skeletons and this flattering lighting they would both fall in love with me, and that although I would choose Esau, we would all remain friends and vow to undertake future adventures together. What good was a relationship, after all, with nobody around to witness it?

Adam broke off, breaking my trance, and hastened toward the crown jewel of the entire wing: the seventy-two-foot long Haplocanthosaurus delfsi. His footsteps were loud and sloppy.

Esau started to follow.

“Wait, Esau,” I said, putting a hand on his arm. “Wanna see the T. rex’s cousin?”

I actually didn’t know anything about dinosaurs, but I had seen a sign earlier: the Late Cretaceous Nanotyrannus lancensis, for which the museum had recently acquired a skull.

Esau glanced over at Adam. “Sure—I just want to check out whatever-that-is real quick.”

“Oh—yeah. Definitely. Me, too.” I followed him, suddenly feeling less in charge. Esau stood close to Adam, his striking cheekbones slightly pink.

Adam reached with his index finger toward one of the dinosaur’s tail bones. He reached and reached, but was still at least a foot off. He hoisted himself up to kneel on the platform and tried again, giggling, reaching. When he started to lose his balance, Esau caught his arm, pulling him down. The two of them in a heap on the floor, their laughter eddying through the room like ink in water. I stood above them, surprised by my anger, which felt like a betrayal to all of us, the same kind of massive bummer that happens when an adult walks into a youth situation.

“Ha ha,” I joined in weakly, wanting them to get up off the floor.

Finally, they did. I tried not to look at how Esau was looking at Adam, tried not to register it as anything but boyish camaraderie. I felt a pang of something—sadness, but also panic, and desperation, like I’d been given the chance to re-enter a good dream and had messed it up somehow. I would do anything to get back in, is how I felt. I studied Adam, trying to memorize him so that I could be more like him, look more like him.

He started to say something, but was cut off by the jarring click of an intercom, a loud voice coming from the walls: All students please report to the Discovery Room. Once again, all students please report to the Discovery Room.

“Crap,” I said.

Esau’s face clouded over, exactly the way clouds cloud over the sky. “Let’s go,” he said.

We followed him quickly, wordlessly. When we got back down to the main floor, Mrs. Abraham was waiting outside the Discovery Room.

“Where were you?” she said. She grabbed Esau in a hug and cast a disapproving look toward Adam and me. “I was really starting to worry!”

“We just,” Esau mumbled, “we wanted to see the dinosaurs real quick. Sorry, Mom.”

Maybe I could win him back with righteousness, maybe I could get his mom on my side. “Yeah, I’m really sorry too, Mrs. Abraham. It was actually my idea.”

“I see,” she said. Her face did something I couldn’t decipher. “Well, you’re here now. Go get in line with the girls, Jill. It’s time for all of us to get ready for bed. Tomorrow morning they’re going to release the monarch butterflies, bright and early.”

Reluctantly, I moved my stuff across the room. I followed the other girls into the bathroom, where we changed into our pajamas and brushed our teeth.

“Where’d you go?” Sarah asked, when we were side by side at the sink. She was wearing a soft pink pajama set with satin trim.

“Just, upstairs. To the dinosaurs.” I spit. I was wearing a giant Snoopy nightshirt.

“Esau’s mom was freaking out. It was kind of funny,” she said, dabbing her mouth on a paper towel. “And, P.S., could you be any more obvious?”

We got in our sleeping bags. Ms. Green gave us one final lecture on good conduct, standing there in the center of the room wearing some kind of a sweatsuit. I lay and looked at the ceiling, listening to the whispers and giggles around me, and felt anxious. Across the way, the boys were mostly quiet. Someone let out an enormous belch, and there were staggered titters around the room. In less time than you would imagine, there was absolute silence, the climax of this much-anticipated day folding noiselessly into itself.

I was awake and grew more and more alert. I thought about Esau, I prickled with Esau. I needed his undivided attention. What was this broken mirror inside of me, that showed me I was ugly, showed me I was wrong, but persisted in its reflection that I was better than other people? Could low self-esteem loop all the way around and become narcissism?

I heard breathing, a body intermittently shifting, rolling over. I felt like I was part of the museum, part of an exhibit, the control group of an experiment—proximity to sleep as a kind of stimulant, maybe, since my head buzzed as if from caffeine. Surrounded by bodies, bones, all the inert matter proffered by our tiny planet, I felt neon.

I don’t know what time it was when I knelt cautiously on my sleeping bag, and then stood, and then tiptoed soundlessly to where Esau was lying. It seemed as though the darkness itself was carrying me. I squatted against the bookshelf and could just barely see him, his face wholly at rest, his lips slightly parted. If I could just get him away from his mother, if I could somehow communicate through the thick silence—

“Get back to bed, missy.” Mrs. Abraham’s voice was a sharp whisper.

I fled. I tried not to cry. I didn’t cry. I slept, a hideous sleep of humiliating dreams.

The next morning, we stood shivering in the damp grass of the museum courtyard, squinting at the early sun streaming into our faces. One of the other parent chaperones had lightly slapped my arm to wake me—apparently she and Sarah and several others had tried over the course of twenty minutes, but I wouldn’t budge, and now I was holding up the rest of the class—so I’d thrown on my clothes and rolled up my sleeping bag and raced to meet the line. My mouth felt mossy and the chilly, bright air made me feel extra exposed.

Predictably, Esau stood close to Adam. I watched them openly; I didn’t care about butterflies. Esau looked as though he had slept at a spa, his pretty skin glowing, his eyes fresh. Adam was oblivious, infuriatingly unremarkable—if this were a play he’d be chorus, back row—but what did my opinions matter? I wasn’t in charge of anything. I leaned a little against Sarah, whose tallness usually got on my nerves, and watched three men from the museum set down covered cages on the long table we were standing around. I leaned on Sarah a bit more, bracing myself for a long boring lecture about butterflies and their dumb habits. But the three men merely counted to three and unlatched the doors, and all of us were made to forget for a second, as wings filled the air, what was hurting.

By the time you read this, you may have figured it out. Perhaps your mother told you, though she was only privy to my timeworn thesis—never my aim or full intention. Still, maybe the truth of it breached your insides:

That I am your father, that you are my son.

In these typewritten pages, I mean to make manifest the truth, the whole. But please do not mistake this letter for some manner of veiled confession. I cannot afford to be sorry, not for any of it. I hope you’ll come to understand, it was all for a grander good.

You see, I needed a Control Negro, grotesque as that may sound—

You should know I was there on the day you were born, a reflection behind the nursery glass. I laid eyes on you while your mother rested, along with her husband—that man you must have accepted, at least for a time, as your father. You seemed to see me too, my blurred silhouette. Your birth (natural, vaginal) took place at the university’s teaching hospital. I noted your weight (7 lb., 7 oz.), your color (dark and florid), your temperament (outwardly placid) like mine.

I assisted with payment for your daycare as well, when you were so small, still in those plush, white Pampers. The facility sat at the edge of campus. So graduate students, like your mother, could enroll their young children while they worked or studied. And faculty, like me, could take guided tours and observe through mirrored one-way glass. I took mental notes on the room of children, a rainbow of faces, but my eyes hung on you: your mahogany skin and dark, keen eyes. Your fat, curled fingers grasping at blocks, trying to build something sturdy and true. I grew skilled at enduring the feeling you inspired, a seeping pride that filled my chest, then spilled into a painful ache.

Remember your season of Little League games, the ones at Washington Park, just down from the bus stop? I could always spot you, especially at a distance. You’d be standing at the plate, arms angled, aiming for the bright white ball, determined to hit it past every boundary we could see.

What I mean to say is that all this time I’ve watched you, or else had others watch in my stead. My TA did a practicum with your sixth-grade civics teacher. One of my graduate students tutored you in middle school at my suggestion that he “give something back.” He shared anecdotes of your progress, never suspecting that you were mine. Your sophomore year, I hired a college student, a young man of legal age but slight enough to pass for seventeen. You knew him as “David” from the neighboring county. Under my direction he befriended you, prodded you toward swimming (and away from the fraught cliché of basketball). He ferried me printouts of your correspondence, revealing your vernacular speech, the slant of your smile in cellphone pictures. Hearing this now, you might feel manipulated, violated, even. But I am almost certain that my determination to shape and groom, my attempts and failures to protect, aren’t terribly different from those of any other parent.

Everyone has an origin story and this is yours: you began as a thought fully formed and sprung from my head. No, you were more like a determined line of questions marching altogether toward a momentous thrashing. It was 1985, years before you were born, and I’d just come to work here on this campus. Mother died at the start of fall semester, her body inundated with cancer, undiagnosed until she had passed. Still numb, I traveled south to bury her, missing the initiation of my own first classes, returning as promptly as I could. I was only away for a week and a day, still a cold snap had scattered leaves onto the great lawn. My first afternoon back, I walked over to my office and was straightening the objects on my desk, my shirtsleeves rolled up, my back to the door. A man walked in and he startled when I turned to face him, so I startled too. He was—I learned a few minutes later—a senior colleague from my own department: history. He’d been away on sabbatical, and had come to my office to welcome me. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for a Professor Adams. Do you know where I can find him, buddy?” I realized what was happening a moment before he did, and forced myself to laugh, to try to put him at ease, though I fear my laughter came out as a strangled sound. You see, he’d mistaken me for one of the evening janitors.

But then, the next week, I stood before all of my bright young students. For the first time in a long time, I felt, if not settled, then at least situated. Soon afterward, in a morning seminar, I remember feeling hopeful as I collected an early set of in-class writings, our topic, nineteenth-century thinkers. I discovered a hand-drawn cartoon among the shuffle, no name in the corner, passed in on purpose or by accident—it was hard to tell which. It was nothing really, just a single frame of itchy graphite titled “Irony.” Within its borders, a history professor leaned over a lectern, looking quite like me—same jacket and bow tie—except with something primitive about his face. A thought bubble hovered over the room of students: “Darwin Taught to Men by an Ape.”

It’s nothing, I told myself again, walking back to my apartment that evening, though, in truth, I felt tired. What does it matter, I remember thinking. What does it matter how much I achieve, or how clearly I speak, or how carefully I conduct myself, if the brutal misjudgments remain regardless? What if, even here, they cannot bring themselves to see me, and instead see something oblique reflected where I thought I stood? Mother always told me, “Work hard, Cornelius. Work twice as hard and you can have something.” But there I was, a grown man, wondering what it was I could have, and what would forever be withheld.

What I needed, it occurred to me then, was to watch another man’s life unfold: a black boy not unlike me, but better than me—an African American who was otherwise equivalent to those broods of average American Caucasian Males who scudded through my classrooms. ACMs, I came to call them, and I wondered how they would measure up with this flawless young man as a watermark. No, it wasn’t them exactly—I wanted to test my own beloved country: given the right conditions, could America extend her promise of Life and Liberty to me too, to someone like me? What I needed was a control, a Control Negro. And given what I teach, it wasn’t lost on me, the agitation of those two words linked together, that archaic descriptor clanking off the end like a rusted shackle.

Those words struck in me and, from them, you grew.

That was the start of my true research, a secret second job hidden inside of the rigors of my first one. Evenings and weekends I searched library stacks, scoured journals and published studies. I focused on contemporary ACMs, looking for patterns, for cause and effect. An ACM’s access to adequate childhood nutrition up against disciplinary referrals resulting in primary-school suspensions. An ACM’s expected time with his father (watching the game, I imagined, practicing catch), versus police reports of petty vandalism, of said balls careening through a neighbor’s window. I was determined to measure the relationship of support, to action, to re-action, to autonomy in these young men. At some point it occurred to me to work backwards. I gathered a more intimate sample: twenty-five case files borrowed from the university’s records, culled from a larger random pool. These ACMs came from families of high-middle income, had average or slightly above average IQs, had faces that approached symmetry as determined by their student ID photos. In my pursuit to better understand them, I called suburban high schools, interviewed teachers, coaches, parents, even, always over the phone, under less than forthright pretenses, I concede. My ACMs were all “good” promising young men, but they were flawed too if you scratched the surface. My dredging uncovered attention deficit disorder, depression, vandalism, drug and alcohol abuse. In several cases, I found evidence of more serious transgressions: assault and battery, accusations of sexual misconduct. Not one of these young men was perfect, yet each held promise, and this promise, on balance, was enough to protect them and to buoy their young lives into the future. Five years of my life spent marveling at the resiliency of theirs.

Now all I had to do was monitor a boy who enjoyed, on average, the same lifted circumstances that my ACMs had experienced. Prenatal care and regular visits to the dentist. An educated mother and father (or father figure). Well-funded schools and a residence situated in a “good,” safe neighborhood. For his part, this young man would have to keep his grades up, have clear diction, wear his pants at an average perch on his waist. He would have to present a moderate temperament, maybe twice as moderate—just to be safe—as those bright boys he’d be buffed so hard to mirror.

What I aimed to do was to painstakingly mark the route of this black child, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.

About this time, I met your mother.

What can I say—she was, in her own way, a force of nature, and the sole woman of color in the graduate program for environmental studies that year. I spotted her one rainy afternoon in a dimly lit classroom. The door half open, she stood at the lectern rehearsing, her PowerPoint blinking furiously behind her, projecting light and shadow on her face. Slide after slide of washed-out shores and water rising. She looked up at me but did not lose her place. It would be only one more year before you were born.

Our first night together, your mother informed me she was married—she intended to remain married—which came as a relief. Those early years of struggle and I’d become a solitary sort of man. Nonetheless we continued to see one another, sporadically, into the spring. She wanted a child, I knew, and although her husband was likely the source of her childlessness, to protect his pride she alone bore the blame between them. That winter, when I found out you were growing inside her, part mine and a boy, we both agreed. I would contribute financially and keep silent about my paternity. She would keep you nearby and take my requests regarding you to heart. She knew about my ACMs, but never that I needed a boy to balance them. Right then and there, I realized who you would be.

There are many studies now about the cost of race in this great nation. Most convincing is the work from other departments: sociology, cultural anthropology. Researchers send out identical résumés or home loan applications, half of which are headed with “ethnic-sounding” names. They instruct black and white individuals to watch other black and white individuals receive a painful-looking shot. The needle digs into muscle and the researchers mark how much sweat leaks from the pores of the watchers. They measure who gets the job, the loan, who gets the lion’s share of salted, dank empathy. They mark which human-shaped targets get shot at by police, in study after study, no matter how innocuous the silhouetted objects they cradle. All these studies, I concede, are good, great work, but I wonder if there isn’t something flawed in them that makes the findings too easy to dismiss.

My research, by contrast, has been more personal, challenging me, at times, to re-examine my history. How different my life has been from the lives of my ACMs, and from your life. You grew up on that tree-lined cul-de-sac, while I was born in the backroom of a two-room house, in the sand hills of South Carolina. I was a dark-skinned bookish child—we both are only sons. My own mother didn’t have much money, but then again, no one had much. Certainly not any of the colored folks we knew, the only point of comparison one dared in those days. Most of my schoolmates had fathers, though, and mine had gone north, to Chicago, for work, and not come back. He was essentially a stranger. Even so, growing up, I felt his abandonment acutely, like hunger. I filled that hunger with reading.

Like you, I played baseball, if briefly. The summer I turned ten I joined the Negro Youth League. I went for the promised uniforms, which turned out to be sweat-stained cast-offs salvaged from a white church’s collection. Even so, thick patches had been sewn onto the chests, and underneath mine, my heart felt sanctioned. Our very first practice, I managed a decent hit, a satisfying thwack like an axe cleaving wood. Afterward, I should have walked back with the others, but instead I set off on my own, replaying my minuscule victory in my head until it felt epic and novel-worthy. I wandered down behind White Knoll, crossing Main, still dreaming. I didn’t realize where I was until I heard car doors slap shut behind me, felt the chilled shadows of strangers. Three young white men had gathered around me, their bodies blocking each path of escape I darted toward. “Where does this boy believe he’s going?” the one in the work boots said.

As they knocked and beat me to the ground, I couldn’t help but think of a boy we all knew of—Tully Jones—whose body had been found some summer before, floating in the river, his head bashed in. When these men finish killing me, they’ll drag my body down to the water too, I remember thinking. Please, don’t hold me down under that murky water—I can’t even swim! Why hadn’t I learned to swim? And how would Mother even find my body? What if she thought I’d run off, like my father had? Up close, the men reeked of peach brandy, the kind my schoolmates’ fathers would nurse Friday nights under the sycamores. When those men finished doing what they did to me, I lay chest and cheek in the sand, playing dead, as they staggered back to their car, breathless. Even after they pulled off, sending up a sharp spray of gravel over my body, I kept on playing dead, as if I were sunk down under that endless water, my skin a wrinkled softness that would soon scrape away or be eaten by crawfish, by those microscopic creatures that troubled the silted bottom, until no one could tell or else it didn’t matter what color I was.

The following fall, Mother insisted I attend a private boarding school, miles out of town. I wasn’t to live in the dormitory with the others. Instead, I woke before sunrise, walked out to the highway, and caught a ride with a deacon from our church, an elderly man who smelled of polishing oil. He was the boarding school’s custodian and the only other brown face to grace those halls besides mine. During the school day, we never looked at one another. I was always aware when he was in the same room, but I never let my eyes rest on his, not until we were far away from that place, and even then it was with a kind of shame.

The school’s headmaster—the man who had agreed to my admittance—had gone “up north” for some number of years. His surname was the name of the school, and everyone knew it was his family’s money that kept that dying boarding school from going under. At school assemblies, this headmaster would find excuses to parade me across the stage—my improbably strong elocution, the sharp crease in my uniform—defiant or oblivious to the contempt my visibility inspired. Even the dimmest boys were clever in their cruelty. Mother had been hired to cook and clean at the headmaster’s residence in town, and for this, the others mocked her mercilessly. What could I do, it was true—my scholarship was her bowed back, her bleach-bitten hands. Enrolling me there must have been an act of faith or desperation, like pressing a message into a bottle and floating it onto turbulent waters.

Even so I clung to my formal education, setting off at seventeen to a small all-black college, then going far north for graduate school. The boys I’d grown up with mostly stayed rooted. They married girls from church, worked hard to scrape together a living or get ahead. Some were shipped off to Vietnam, a few marched in bigger towns, facing police dogs and fire hoses. I devoted my life to scholarly truth, spending the majority of my adult life here at this esteemed institution. After you were born, I purchased my own home, just a two-bedroom bungalow, but in a good neighborhood not far from campus. I can walk to work, and sometimes I do. Whenever I walk my mind wanders. Occasionally I worry that I’ve been self-indulgent in my research, somehow selfish in my secret fatherhood. Walking, I think the world is surely a better place now than it used to be for people of color. Aren’t I myself living proof against my theories? Can’t I be satisfied?

But then, like current, I’ll feel it again, even now. It might be the guard at the campus market who follows me when I walk in to buy a carton of milk for my tea. Or a pair of young mothers who push their strollers widely around me on the great lawn. Mostly it’s a growing unease about my career. Yes, I was hired. Yes, I’ve managed to keep my head above water, but in these final years, they’ve burdened me with the lowliest committee assignments, filled my schedule with 100-level classes, as if I were an adjunct. Of course this might be a reflection of some defect in my performance—a failure to publish as well as some colleague down the hall, my secret research obscuring my official work. But how can I know for sure? How does anyone know if they are getting more or less than they deserve? All I know for certain is that, last September, a police car trailed me when I was walking home one brisk evening. Me, Professor Cornelius Adams, in my sixties, in my overcoat and loafers, my briefcase clutched beneath my arm. As you well know, cruisers often patrol the edges of campus, quieting fraternity parties, corralling drunken freshmen back onto grounds. They only pulsed their lights at me. When I turned, the one on the passenger side—a black officer—shouted from his window. Where was I going, he wanted to know. Before I could gather words to answer, a more urgent call must have come in. They turned on lights and sirens in earnest and sped away.

Here are our lives laid out together: At ten, while I flailed beneath the blows of work boots, you flew down a zip line at a well-rated day camp. At twelve, while I reread tattered spy novels on the bumpy ride back home from that boarding school, your baseball team placed second in the region. You brought home a trophy. Your mother took a photo of you lifting it. Eventually she sent it to me.

As you grew older, I continued to make certain wishes clear to your mother—about your friends, your schooling, about the crop and length of your hair. Only once did she truly bristle at my intervention, when I insisted you leave swim team your senior year. The swimming had been good at first, but then you placed at state, a dive so graceful a big-league coach courted you. For a season, you took private lessons, shearing your hair, waking before dawn. You excelled in the water, your mother said—you might get a scholarship or more, so why not let you continue? I could feel her picturing you, her black son, draped in red, white, and blue, holding gold. In truth, I entertained this vision too, but in the end, I couldn’t allow such a glaring deviation. When you were small, I’d worried you would sink below my ACMs, that you would be dragged down. But here you were, soaring too high for a fair comparison instead. Of course I did not say any of this to your mother. All I could do was remind her of my unwavering discretion: Hadn’t I held up my side of the bargain all those years? When I said this, she hung up on me, and for a long time we did not speak, though I soon found out that the swimming had stopped.

And so I was surprised when your mother called last August to inform me that you were transferring here to finish your degree. I was only startled to hear her voice. I already knew you were coming, of course—I’d seen it on your social media. Perhaps your return was an act of muscle memory: all the years spent here at daycare, then later, in the back offices with your mother. It’s possible too that you were persuaded by the slick recruiting packets I mailed to your PO box each semester. Two years you’d attended that out-of-state school, and while you were away, I followed you as best as I could, though less closely than felt comfortable. Like any parent whose child leaves for college, I was forced to let go of some of my sway—though this gap depressed me. Were you drinking too much? I wondered. Had you gotten in a fistfight, or fallen in love with somebody? I drove up to your campus once, but found the whole layout disconcerting—and never did set eyes on you. After that, I watched from a safer distance, monitoring arrest reports, subscribing to your local and school media sites. I hoped to catch a glimpse of your life. Did it resemble the lives of my ACMs, those boys I’d watched so ardently years earlier—their drunken escapades, their fearless hearts?

All I know is, when I spotted you here, you looked tall, so lithe. I did the math—your age against mine—and you’d just turned twenty-one. Whatever else had happened in the intervening years, you’d also become a man. Your visible ease in your own skin awakened something in me. Never mind those tragic stories from other towns and cities, young men lost and taken—they were not you, they were not mine. Your ascendance was a glimpse of what could be and their deaths felt submerged. I realized you had never been average: you were more like a line of poetry too lofty for me to decipher. With you here, I convinced myself that you’d made it out past an invisible trip wire, out to some safe and boundless future. Even if I could not be part of that future, I might still be able to revel in its promise. I was nearly ready to give up on my questions, or claim that they’d been answered favorably—those questions of mine, which had always been about hope.

But then—we both know what happened then.

As soon as I heard what they’d done to you, I wrote through that first long night and cancelled my next day’s classes. Decades of research became a single anguished letter detailing the difference I could now measure on your face. I wrote about the burden of Race—how it warps the lives of black and white people. I did not speak of my experiment directly. Instead I used what happened to you as an anchor for my findings. I could never have predicted that my essay would spread so widely, that inside of a week I’d be invited to appear on several networks and a handful of national radio shows. In studio after sound stage, I laid out my meticulous argument, supported by data and by true stories I’d witnessed with my own eyes. I thought they’d be convinced, but instead they interrupted with other stories, opposing conclusions. I thought they might believe me, but instead they held up a few undisciplined lines from my essay as proof that I was angry and absurd. Death threats flooded my inbox, along with crooning love letters from mothers and sisters, from fathers and sons. Still, last night, I was contacted with an offer of publication—not from a prestigious university press, as I’d always envisioned, but rather a two-book deal from a large, traditional publisher best known for true crime stories. Maybe there I can finally write what I want—if it’s all right by you—about what’s been done to me, about the things I’ve done.

As far as what happened to you: I saw the pictures like everyone else, I read every account. I studied the cellphone video, frame by bloody frame. Here is your face, in which I have always recognized fragments of my own.

Here is your blood, too bright and pouring. Even as you lie stock-still, pinned to the pavement, the police shout staccato commands, which they seem desperate for you to follow. The camera veers and I see them too, sauntering by in spotless sneakers, their ball caps askew. They look relieved that it’s you there on the ground, or else they flash faux gang signs at a camera only they seem to appreciate. The police made a statement before the video surfaced, in defiance of the fact that there is always a video nowadays. You seemed dangerous, they said, and I think of you as a swaddled newborn. They feared for their safety, they said, and perhaps this is true. Later, in a press conference, they admitted you had an ID, but there was some discrepancy. It was from a neighboring state and unfamiliar. You did not appear to be who you said you were.

Beyond all of this, I understood a separate truth, one not yet found in any publication. I knew that they had chosen you out of all those wasted students partying on the strip of college bars. I knew this because I’d worked late that night, the first warm evening of spring. I’d decided to walk home through the carnival of youth, and only by chance spotted you out front of that bar on the corner. You were right there in the fray of students, half swaying to music that spilled from an open patio. You tilted your head toward me. Did you see me, too? Did you recognize me? I can’t adequately explain it, but I must tell you now that I was the one who called the precinct, claiming to have seen a “suspicious young man” at the corner of University and Second. I called but I did not specify your height, your color. Afterward, I hurried home, reassuring myself. Nothing will come of this, I tried to tell myself—and I will finally be able to let it go, or be let go by it. Son, please believe this, if you believe nothing else I’ve written: this was a test for them—for the world!—not for you.

But here, again, we must take a step back, and remind ourselves that this has all been in service to something bigger—that someday our sons’ sons might be spared. Your mother used to say to me, “The seas are rising, whatever you believe. Soon we will all be wet together, and together we will gasp for air…”

I saw you again the other day, out on the lawn at the student-led protests. At first I didn’t recognize you, with that white bandage plastered across your head and the new bowed way you hold your body. But then they delivered you to the front and the small crowd swelled in support. I’ve read there have been other demonstrations on other campuses along the East Coast. A rainbow of faces chanting and wailing as if there are multitudes of watchers now. When I saw you, I knew that you would recover, and it felt like I could breathe again for the first time in a very long while. But even closer to the bone was a feeling of grace that may well soon release me. I mean, look at you—look at all you’ve accomplished, in spite of everything. You made it here, just like they did. And I saw you, Son, turning and wild—free, even—for a moment at least.

The funeral is a Day of the Dead fever dream, all crowns and skeletons and robes and icons burning in the shimmering, dying light of the west. Women in face paint urge the icon down the street as mourners come and pin slips of green paper to his bedazzled robes, their faces slashed with tears. Men beat their chests and howl like apes, women offer up quiet prayers. Children dressed like mutilated angels kiss foreheads and pass out cardboard blessings. The air is thick and cloying with the cheap sugar of dollar-store candles and cigar smoke. This will last all day and deep into the denial of night, carried by songs of redemption and resurrection.

The mayor is dead, and the town, a part of it at least, dies with him and screams to be reborn.

Standing outside her locked door, he scanned his memory for places Yasmine might have gone—a drink? A day-trip? He walked the forty blocks back to Port Authority, spending most of it knotted in regrets and daydreams. He adjusted his earbuds, turning up the sound on the 1970s Turkish folk player he had found, his late father’s colleague. The ragged old hippie droned in Rahad’s ear as he walked, the sound crossing oceans and decades. Every time he heard this song, he remembered the singer’s thick moustache, the way he seemed to sing through it. He missed Yas. Against all reason and recent memory, he had imagined her delighted to spend an afternoon together, indulging in a bottle of smoky red. If he had taught her nothing else, at least she had kept this: an hour isn’t squandered if you taste a good wine, if you fill your ears with good music. He had convinced himself that such a visit would be possible, if he could just survive her initial surprise and anger—he hadn’t considered that she may be spending the day elsewhere.

The last time he showed up unannounced, his welcome was a long, dramatic sigh. “I called, azizam,” he said, deflecting the lecture he knew was brewing in her head. He didn’t set down his overnight bag or sitar case for fear of her anger, but in the end, she invited him in. “I called many times,” he said and moved past her. “You don’t check your messages. I got tired of waiting.” That was months ago.

Today he had rung her doorbell again and again, shifted his bag and case to his left shoulder, and glanced up at her girlish, sea-green curtains, before turning north to catch a bus to Wilmington. His cheeks flushed—he had believed she would invite him to stay for a night or two. He had believed with such force. Never mind, he thought; that afternoon he would move into the Wilmington YMCA, his fourteenth in six years, but better not to make a spectacle of it. Since the death of her mother when she was six, Yasmine suffered from a kind of hysteria triggered only by his various superficial prospects.

He shook his phone for a new song, losing himself in one by Thom Yorke—oh, how he loved Western music. How glorious, whatever the style. Secretly, he liked it far more than the Iranian sitar classics he had played to spellbound crowds in Tehran. Maybe later he would post this song and collect the likes, lucky amulets to carry on the road. This meager attention helped him fend off the suffering over Yasmine and Iran, his vanished self, his music. His father, the elder ustad Sokouti, had been a world-renowned master of seven string instruments, and Rahad a celebrated sitarist and music teacher—but no ustad, no master. Still, he had a voice. But by the time the blood reached his daughter, it seemed all artistry had been strained out. Who, then, would remember those heady Tehran nights?

On the bus, he posted and waited. The song was bad bait—only four likes. He felt ashamed for the display: a serious Iranian musician, in his fifties no less, posting the songs of American teenagers who have no musical education. No, no, Yorke was good, and not even an American.

Now Yasmine appeared at the top of his feed. Ah. She was spending the weekend in Connecticut. He was tempted to like it, but refrained. She blocked so willy-nilly lately, and since he reopened his account, she had liked nothing of his. Where was the dignity of fatherhood? Yesterday, fifteen people had liked his post; but from her, nothing.

In Wilmington, the April air was crackling and fresh—none of the wet, cold residue of winter that covered New York—and the walk from the bus station revived him. Before long he saw it, the brown brick, the blue sign: YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION. He was neither a young man nor a Christian, though he was willing to pretend—in fact, he enjoyed it; there was great peace in disappearing. In Iran he had pretended to be a Muslim while spending every night in underground clubs. Once, in an Afghan village he had pretended to be his own father—all this in service of hunting the next great fog of music in which to disappear, a rhythm to shape that month or that year.

The facade of the YMCA building was graying in parts, blotched like the face of a pretty woman who has spent the day crying; he could see that it had recently been presentable. He entered and signed in, paid his twenty-five dollars, and accepted his key, nodding thanks to the receptionist, a young black woman with a tight, old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. Looking him up and down with almond eyes (almost Persian, like his), she licked her gleaming teeth in momentary confusion. What was he doing there, in his long black trench coat that might have cost something in better days, his elegantly battered leather shoulder bag and sitar case? He wanted to say to her, Surely, young lady, respectable people pass over rough soil now and then? But if he said this, he would likely botch the English, draining the words of their poetry. Besides, she must already know it; she offered rooms for twenty-five dollars a night.

“No needles, weed, or weapons in your room,” she said, her voice flat. “There’s a shared kitchen and bathroom, but you need your own dishes and soap.”

He walked through the dark corridor, past the communal bathroom and kitchenette, to his first-floor room. Before turning the key, he said a word in prayer (these days he said his prayers to Bob Marley, though the recipient changed often). Each new YMCA rekindled his dread of what that first swing of the door would reveal: in some states, he was met with a room as nice as a countryside motel, with a clean white duvet and a quaint photo on the wall; in others a hovel, hospital sheets and burned patches on factory carpets. Inside, he removed the trench, folded it twice, and placed it carefully on the twin bed. Eyeing the shadows on the crimson bedspread, he thought better of it, and placed the coat on the chair instead. He pulled back the bedding, lifted the mattress, and checked every seam and corner for insects. From his leather satchel, he removed a wrinkled garbage bag and a box of baking soda and peeled back the duct tape on the box’s mouth. He placed his folded coat in the bag, sprinkled it with baking soda, and tied the end in a knot. He shook the package a little and left it on a shelf, the only available surface besides the chair and the bed. Then, he began the work of examining his sitar, polishing it, tuning it. He mourned his lack of funds, as the sitar needed new strings. When he was finished, he put away the instrument and turned his chair toward the window. The curtains were thick, a fading floral pattern, and smelled of long-extinguished cigarettes. He didn’t want to touch them. Instead, he watched the cars disappear from the parking lot outside—the teenagers going home after basketball, mothers leaving a yoga class.

He craved a coffee but thought it better to wait until dinnertime, when he could have his coffee with a meal and perhaps find a cluster of computers nearby so he could check what the Internet was saying about him today. He regretted breaking his laptop. But things break; this is a reality of life. He didn’t want to waste his days puttering around online as Yasmine did, no matter what her job title. And yet, he had to admit, as he watched the basketball players and yogis rush home, their hours bound by routine but also simplified by it, that he did waste a precious lot of hours just surviving. Looking for a new neighborhood, beginning from zero for the fifth time in a year, coordinating his meals around Internet locations, finding Laundromats, hunting teaching gigs and motels outside of town, visiting friends and hoping they would invite him to stay for the night. This, every day for weeks, including winters. Then, always, back to the YMCA.

As a matter of habit, he spent most of his daytime hours at the public library looking up music, always remembering to check the three big websites dedicated to his own career that the Internet had created in the past few years. He admired the artful arrangement of his photos and videos; his biography in both languages; the muffled, sorrowful tune (his own composition) that played when he clicked on the first page. Finding the sites had been a welcome surprise. For so long, when the Internet thought of “ustad Sokouti,” they thought of his father, who already had dozens of websites to himself. They must be witnessing a resurgence of interest in more modern renditions of classic songs, Rahad thought when he first came upon the sites. He considered showing them to Yasmine, since they might give her a feeling of security. He longed to be an asset to her, like American parents. Not a burden. But he never spoke of it; such topics always turned into fights.

To Yasmine, it seemed that Rahad had stopped journeying along with the rest of society somewhere around 1998. He had given up, sat in the road, and fiddled with his sitar until the others were far out of sight. Progress was not his talent—he liked the 1960s, even the ’70s, but beyond that, he had to be dragged. He had no health insurance, no acumen for anything technical, and was apparently an Internet bumbler. He had an outdated, off-line smartphone for his music, an old flip phone that held fifteen text messages at a time, no voicemail, and an email address Yasmine had set up that he checked every few days. Even so, he succumbed to some kind of scam almost monthly, each time thinking that the Web must have its rules and standards. “I wish you’d be more savvy online, Baba joon. It’s full of con artists looking for someone just like you,” she’d say. “I want you to be safe.” He didn’t know what safety had to do with it. Still, he made promises. “I promise you, Yasi joon,” he wrote in an email, “I will acquire Internet skills and general American savvy.”

The next morning, after a deep but troubled sleep, Rahad spent an hour disinfecting every surface, rechecking the pillows for bedbugs, and spraying every corner with insect repellant. When he was finished, he lit a sandalwood candle and put the Abyssinians on his portable CD player. The sound barely reached the four corners of his room, but it took all of a minute for someone to knock.

“What you are hearing there, neighbor?” a cheerful voice with a mixed-up Indian accent traveled through the flimsy wooden door. Rahad clicked his travel broom back into its plastic casing. He opened the door and said a muted greeting, trying hard not to react to the overpowering scent of patchouli and citrus that assaulted his nose. A dark man around his own age but more weathered, with thick gray stubble and a T-shirt that seemed to be made from an American flag, was smiling widely, displaying three yellow teeth that alternated with his white ones, like piano keys. He stepped inside, slapped Rahad on the back, and said, “Bro, do one thing. Please be putting on ‘Forward Jah.’ That is my favorite of this album by ten thousand percent.” His mouth made wide, deliberate motions.

He introduced himself as Wyatt, wandered to Rahad’s bed, and sat without invitation. He asked about Rahad’s origins in a way that suggested he saw himself as the more American of the two.

“Tehran,” said Rahad as he flipped to the song Wyatt had requested. “And you?”

“I am coming from DC,” said Wyatt, rubbing his knees with his palm. “An agreeable city. A first-class city. But bitch work to be surviving there, you know?”

Rahad tried not to chuckle. He had known many Indians. Most had accents with a hint of British, dulled after decades abroad. This man sounded American, but forcibly so, as if he had left Calcutta last week and, afraid of sounding “fresh off the boat,” as they say, was trying to compel his accent to fit the patterns and rhythms of natives through a heavy regimen of mangled Americanisms and mouth exercises. “And the name Wyatt? How did you get it, sahib?”

“What you are meaning?” he said, eyes wide.

“I mean, tell me your good name,” Rahad said. He wanted this Wyatt to know that he had traveled to India, that he knew the world this man had left behind, and that the only way to be Rahad’s friend was to own up to the real story.

“My good name?” said Wyatt, making a twisting gesture with his hand—as if plucking a ripe fruit from the tree—that absolutely gave away his origins. He grinned toothily. “I have not the least good idea what you are meaning. What finds you in this establishment, brother? Here is only down in the lucks, immigrants, some pot smokers, and that sort. You seem like nice old Irani gentleman, no disrespect.”

Rahad coughed into his fist. “We are same age, I think. Fifty-four, fifty-five?”

“Oh no, no, sir,” Wyatt laughed, flashing his yellow teeth again. “I am just turning forty only. I am here temporarily. Who knows what is coming next for anyone.”

Having decided that the man suffered from some kind of mental illness, Rahad grew eager to expel him from his room. He wanted to gather his things and find an Internet café or library, but couldn’t overcome his Iranian manners—he would not kick out a fellow traveler. He nodded a few times and waited. But Wyatt only smiled and shook his head to the music. “Forward Jah!” he sang, not making the slightest motion to leave.

The next day Wyatt arrived at his door before breakfast. Apparently he had found naan, the soft, stretchy bread that Iranians and Indians share. “Do one thing. Eat this naan, Mr. Rahad, because you are surely missing your home.”

He hadn’t been home for two decades, but he didn’t mention this to Wyatt. Instead he focused on whether he should eat food offered by a crazy man. Would it be tainted? But what can you put in a chunk of plain naan? He ate some and agreed that it was good, freshly made like home. “You find tanoor around here? Where you buy this?”

Through a mouthful of bread Wyatt said, “No, no, is brick ovens here only. No tanoor. I am making dough in bathroom sink here, extra one I can be using all night for rising dough, then onward to my colleague at pizza joint for baking. Nice and fresher, cheaper breakfast than bagel or doughnut.”

“Clever,” Rahad muttered, giving the wet lump in his mouth a hard swallow.

Then Wyatt’s gaze fell on Rahad’s sitar in the corner of the room and his mouth hung open as if he had just seen a minor deity. “You have sitar? Holy shits!”

Rahad smiled. “And what does born-in-seventies DC native know about sitar?”

“I know every music, my friend,” said Wyatt, now bent at the waist, nose-to-nose with the instrument, struggling not to pluck a string. “Shall we be having jam sesh today later perhaps? I have familiarity on tambour, which is make-doable using large bucket. You play from Viguen. I order for brick oven. It will be first class.”

Rahad knew how to play Viguen. His father never played those songs, of course, since the legendary singer was his rival, and the old man felt obliged to dislike Viguen’s Westernized music and pop-star image. The elder ustad Sokouti was a classical sitarist of the most traditional school. He excelled on every ancient string instrument, but would never touch a modern guitar. “Yes, a nice idea,” he said.

One evening almost thirty years later, a call from an unknown number. The ringing brings your husband out of the kitchen, ladle still in hand. This is the prelude to the only scenario that keeps him up at night: some stranger, a kelp-rig medic perhaps, interrupting dinner to notify you that your son has been killed, washed overboard somewhere off the coast of Cambria amid the gray roil and boom of the Pacific.

To flaunt your immunity to these catastrophic fantasies, you let the phone ring and ring.

Tom’s smiling, but he doesn’t find it funny. “Pick up, Syl.” Then, after a moment: “Fine. Why don’t I just cancel our anniversary picnic and volunteer us for roadside cleanup instead? I know how you love scraping those possums off the freeway.”

When you finally lift the phone to your ear to deliver the usual greeting—“Rayles-Brennan residence, home of the Arbor Cottages in scenic Grey’s County!”—you get the wind knocked out of you. It’s not a medic. Not a telemarketer. Not the Mammalian Gene Bank of the Rocky Mountains inquiring if you’d like to increase your annual donation.

It’s Wade. Your Wade. So long-lost that his name overcomes you as first a sensation and then a smell before finally taking lettered form. Wade Dufrane. Calling from some other lifetime, his voice as familiar as your own, saying: “Syl?” And then: “I knew you’d sound exactly the same.”

In a minute, it will hit you that of course you sound the same. But for now—for this particular second—there’s just that one-note whiff of Fell Gulch in January, of pine and woodsmoke, of you at twenty, assisting your father up the narrow stairs to the office of Serenity Pods overlooking Main Street. Through his coat sleeve, Dad’s elbow feels like a bag of bolts. Somewhere outside, the Rendezvous Trio is fiddling an overzealous two-step for the benefit of the tourists.

Serenity Pods occupies the attic above the Well Digger’s Wallet Saloon, where your childhood friend Kenny Kostic tends bar. In the six years you’ve been helping him oust inebriates, you’ve never thought to investigate where the back stairwell leads.

Dad’s monstrous shirt hides the black threads of more than a dozen mole excisions. Six foot three and down to 140 pounds, he’s taken pale frailty to another level. And now here’s Wade Dufrane, tall and ginger-stubbled, good-looking in the way of people who don’t know it, manning the front desk in a white linen getup.

The place looks like a celestial break-room. Everything hums: the bare bulbs, the sleek computer panel, the wall painted up like a field of tree-brindled snow. At its center stands a thick black elm. Its roots twist around a subterranean teardrop, in which a glyphic body lies folded.

Wade maneuvers you both to the sofa with pamphlets and rank gray tea, then carefully sits between you.

“So—which of you is looking forward to reabsorption?”

While Wade talks your father through the marketing collateral, you try to smother your irritation. Let Dad get the reassurance he needs: that he’s doing the right thing, that pod burial restores soil nutrients, that you just don’t get this kind of solace from a coffin.

“Something about committing to reabsorption just gives folks a sense of peace,” Wade says. “I know it did for me.”

Conveniently, Wade’s own father had signed the entire family up for pod burial back when the process was still new. “Not to mention far more expensive,” Wade says, skirting around the price, “but I figured: if it could offset some of my parents’ debts to our world, worth every penny.”

You can’t help yourself: “Yet here you are, sucking air and drinking water—I guess that means your folks are still in arrears.”

Dad says: “Syl. Please.”

Wade, as it happens, came dangerously close to reabsorption when he was a teenager. Some vague cardiac incident briefly killed him en route to the hospital. He perceived himself floating up, above the gurney, above the bald EMT trying to resuscitate him. Of his three remaining sensations—besides filial love and the strange, sulfuric odor of his chest hair frying under the paddles—what stood out most was how complete he felt, knowing that he would soon give sustenance to a new tree. Even his miraculous return to his body, and the continuation of his life, haven’t dispelled the strength of that feeling.

Dad nods gravely. As if Wade’s story has firmed the legs of a newborn notion.

“We want to take a couple of days,” you say, standing to leave. “Consult with the rest of the family.”

The rest of the family consists of an uncle in Cleveland who hasn’t returned your father’s calls in years and the dog who’s been underfoot ever since the combined chaos of veterinary school and bartending forced Kenny to abandon her at your house.

Wade insists you take all the time you need. “It’s a tough mind-shift. In the end, we’re all just items awaiting protective enclosure. Most of us have a vision of what that is—a coffin, an urn. Not everyone can get used to the idea of a tree. But remember that with a Serenity Pod, the whole world is your memorial.”

The trouble is, he really means it. The spell is cast. All the way home, Dad rests his head dreamily against the window. The tram winds past the Refuge boundary, past Highness Park, with its cocoa stands and skate rentals and brightly bundled husks of winter tourists, and then up Painter’s Knoll, where the constellated hillside mansions recall the Fell Gulch of twenty years ago, when people were still able to convince themselves that everything would work itself out somehow, as it always had before.

Your father had been one of those people. Then came the Posterity Initiative, and a complete 180. He spent your entire childhood collecting prairie grasses for the Rocky Mountain Seed Vault, tallying pollinators, teaching you to culture penicillin. All the while bewailing what was lost: bacon and air travel and elephants. Things you would never have, thanks to his generation’s excesses.

You could never see the point of his retrospective hand-wringing.

At home, Dad fans the pamphlets out on the dining table. He shouts pull quotes over the crack of your knife on the cutting board: “Did you know that the average Serenity Pod offsets two peoples’ worth of carbon dioxide a year?”

“If it’s so clean, they should be paying you to commit to it. Not the other way around.”

“Ha.”

“Don’t you think this is all a bit premature?” He looks up from the blue columns of numbers on his napkin. “We haven’t got the biopsy results back. You’re probably not even dying.”

“Well,” he shrugs, “someday.”

The prospect of this “someday”—whose advent he’s attempted to accelerate at least twice—sends you back to Serenity Pods one cloudy afternoon a few days later. Alone this time.

Wade, still in his diaconal finest, tries to bring you around. “Tell me what’s giving you pause.”

“Guilt rules my father’s life. And now he’s got it in his head that putting twelve grand down on a burial he might not even need—knock wood—is the best way to square his ecological debts.”

“It’s not a bad place to start.”

“Yeah, well. We run a housekeeping service. It’s about all we can do to keep the lights on.”

Serenity Pods, it turns out, offers a payment plan. Wade pivots to show you the literature on making reabsorption accessible to everyone.

You tell him you have all the pamphlets at home. “I didn’t come here for more of the company line.”

He tilts his head a little, and says, “All right”—which is when you go all warm. You sit there, blowing ripples across the smoggy surface of your tea.

“How did you die?”

“Well, I guess in the end I didn’t.”

As he resumes his pitch about soil renewal and generational duty, you’re disappointed in his failure to intuit what you really want to know: whether there’s a crack of light and an eventual shore to dying, or just darkness like you suspect. When the time comes, will trenching your father in a shawl full of seeds, so that filaments and roots can suck away everything that made him who he was, somehow render the former more likely? You can’t bring yourself to say: I’m afraid my father will simply cease to exist.

“I’d like to hear more about burial from someone who doesn’t get commission selling it to me.”

Wade laughs outright—a real laugh, earnest enough to furrow his whole nose. “Believe it or not, there’s fuck-all money in pod sales.”

“Yeah? What about this?” You hook a finger under his tunic collar to reveal the strap of his FieldSight 5000s—the latest model, the one you’ve been eyeing for months—and you’re instantly embarrassed. Is it wrong to touch a man who dresses like a monk?

“Those are an oversight.” Somehow, he’s managed to catch your wrist. “They’re for my other job. I usually remember not to wear them here.”

“I didn’t think revenant pod people needed side gigs.”

He smiles that smile. Huge white teeth from here to doomsday. “If anything, this is the side gig. The other’s more of a calling.”

Which is how you get your start shed-hunting with Wade Dufrane.

Reverend Yates had awaited his coming, first for hours, then days and weeks. Now it was December and as cold as any in memory. When he’d lowered the metal well bucket, it clanged as if hitting iron. It took a leashed pitchfork, cast like a harpoon, to finally break the ice. He was bringing the water back to the manse when Jason Gunter came out of the woods on horseback. Reverend Yates took the water inside and returned with a shotgun that, until this moment, had never been aimed at anything other than a squirrel or rabbit.

Gunter saw the weapon but did not turn the horse. Even in the saddle the younger man swaggered, the reins loosely held, body rocking side to side. Not yet thirty, but already responsible for one wife’s death, nearly a second.

“That’s a mighty unneighborly way to be greeted,” Gunter said, smiling as he dismounted, “especially by a man of the cloth.”

“I figured it would be one you understood,” Reverend Yates replied.

Gunter opened his frock coat to show the absence of knife or pistol.

“I didn’t come for a tussle, Preacher.”

Gunter was dressed in much the same attire he’d arrived in four years ago—leather boots and wool breeches, white linen shirt and frogged gray coat. As then, his black hair was slicked back and glistening with oil, his fingernails trimmed, undarkened by dirt. A dandy, people had assumed, which caused many to expect Gunter to fail miserably when he’d bought the farm adjoining Eliza Vaughn’s property. But that hadn’t been the case at all. He had brought his wife with him, a woman clearly once attractive but now hunch-shouldered. Her eyes were striking, the color of wisteria, though she seldom raised them when in town. A month after they had come, she’d hanged herself from a crossbeam in the barn, or so the county sheriff concluded.

Reverend Yates lowered the shotgun so it rested in the crook of his arm, but the barrel still pointed in Gunter’s direction.

“If it’s about where Susanna is…”

“It ain’t about knowing where she is,” Gunter answered. “That’s over and done with.”

“What is it then?”

“I got need to be baptized.”

When Reverend Yates didn’t respond, the younger man quit smiling. For a few moments they stared at each other.

“If you want someone to baptize you,” Reverend Yates said, “there are plenty of other preachers who can do it.”

“Who said I wanted it?”

Gunter turned and placed two fingers in his mouth and gave a sharp whistle. Eliza Vaughn and her fourteen-year-old daughter Pearl came out of the woods and stood silently beside the horse’s haunches. Reverend Yates stared at her questioningly but she would not meet his gaze. Beneath a coat once worn by her husband, the woman shivered, and perhaps not just from the cold. He had warned her not to let Susanna marry Gunter, but despite what had happened to Gunter’s first wife, Eliza did not stop the marriage. Widowed, she’d been forced to raise her daughters on her own. Gunter was a broad-shouldered man strong enough to keep the farm running. The first wife’s death hadn’t been Gunter’s doing, Eliza claimed. He ain’t never drank a drop of liquor, she’d said, as if all men needed alcohol to summon their perfidy. After the marriage, Gunter helped support Eliza and Pearl, keeping them in firewood, helping plant and harvest crops, digging a new well.

But there had been a price. First a pumpknot swelling Susanna’s left brow, then two weeks later an arm so wrenched out of the socket that it hung useless at her side for weeks. Susanna did not claim she’d bumped her head entering a root cellar or twisted her arm restraining a rambunctious cow. She offered no explanation, nor did her mother or sister, even after several women in the congregation, out of curiosity or compassion, inquired. Her lot in life was to suffer, Susanna appeared to believe. But on that Sunday, watching her wince each time she moved the arm, Reverend Yates told her it was not her duty to suffer. Even then, Susanna had said nothing. She’d turned and walked back through town, past the manse and up the wooded path to where Gunter waited.

“Is this about your daughter, Eliza?” Reverend Yates asked sharply, “because if it is, I swore I’d never tell where she went, and I’ll honor that, even with her own mother.”

“It ain’t about that hussy that you helped run off from me,” Gunter said, looking at Eliza. “You tell him. You’re the one says I got to do it.”

“I want you to baptize Mr. Gunter,” Eliza said.

“Why would you want that, Eliza?” Reverend Yates asked.

“To marry Pearl,” the widow answered softly.

“She’s of a mind it’ll wash any devilment right out of me,” Gunter said. “I don’t think much is in me but it seems some folks do. Anyway, if getting doused puts a mother’s mind at ease I’ll abide it.”

“Pearl is a child,” Reverend Yates said. He looked at the girl, wrapped in a quilt she cinched tight around her neck. Like her mother, she stared at the ground.

“There’s many been married at her age, Preacher,” Gunter said. “There’s one in your own congregation.”

Reverend Yates looked at Pearl. She was not shivering but her cheeks glowed from the cold. He had baptized her and Susanna on the same July Sunday five years ago. A thin, delicate child, one often sick. He remembered how light she’d felt as he took her in his arms and lowered her into the river.

“You and your mother come into the house, child.”

“Nah,” Gunter said. “We need to be getting back. Some of us has to work more than just on Sundays.”

“Eliza,” Reverend Yates said.

She looked at him now, her pale face blank.

“This Sunday, Preacher,” Gunter said. “Douse me in the morning and me and Pearl will get the justice of the peace to marry us right after. I done got that set up.”

“Our baptisms are held in warmer weather.”

“I know for a fact you baptized Henry Cope last winter,” Gunter challenged.

“He was dying,” Reverend Yates answered. “Even then it wasn’t this cold.”

“I know that water will be cold,” Gunter said, grinning now, “but I figure Pearl will warm me up real good later.”

“It isn’t just the water that cleanses a man,” Reverend Yates answered. “It’s what is in the heart.”

“I know that, Preacher.”

“What if I won’t do it?”

“We’ll go to Boone,” Gunter answered. “There’s more than one preacher in this county. Of course that’s a mighty long walk for Eliza and Pearl, especially with the chance of more snow coming.” Gunter turned and nodded at Eliza and Pearl. “Go on now,” he said.

Reverend Yates watched mother and child walk out of the yard and into the woods, stepping in their earlier footprints as if in Gunter’s presence they dare not even disturb the snow.

“We’ll be seeing you Sunday, Preacher,” Gunter said, raising finger and thumb to tip his hat. He nodded at the shotgun. “I’m a forgiving man, maybe you ought be the same, especially since I wouldn’t be needing a wife if you’d not meddled in another man’s business.”

“I know my business, Gunter,” Reverend Yates replied, but the words sounded feeble.

“Good,” Gunter replied. “Do it come Sunday.”

Gunter jerked the reins and the horse turned. He kicked a bootheel against its flank and went back up the path. Even when Gunter was out of sight, Reverend Yates heard the crunching of snow under the horse’s hooves. He stared at the woods, the bare gray branches reaching upward like wailing women.

“Let’s make a bet,” my father said, on my fifteenth birthday. I remember very clearly being fifteen; or rather, I remember what fifteen feels like to a fifteen-year-old. The age is a diving board, a box half-opened.

We were sitting in stiff wooden chairs on the porch, watching the evening settle over the neighborhood, all of that harmless diffuse light softening the world.

“I bet you’ll leave here at eighteen and you’ll never come back,” he said. “Not once.”

We lived two hours outside of Los Angeles, in a suburb attached to a string of other suburbs, where the days rarely distinguished themselves unless you did it for them.

“You don’t even think I’ll come back and visit?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.” My father was a reasonable man. He did not generalize. He was not prone to big, grandiose statements, and he rarely gambled. I felt hurt and excited by the suggestion.

“What about Mom?” I asked.

“What about her?”

I shrugged. It seemed she had little to do with his prediction.

“And James?” I asked.

“Not sure about James,” he said. “I can’t bet on that one.”

James was—and still is—my younger brother. I felt little responsibility to him. At ten, he was brilliant and anxious and very much my parents’ problem. My mother adored him, though she thought she had fooled me into thinking we were equal. Make no mistake: we were equally loved but not equally preferred. If parents don’t have favorites, they do have allies.

Inside, my mother was cooking dinner while James followed her around the kitchen, handing her bits of paper he’d folded into unusual shapes. Even then, he had a knack for geometry.

“Where will I go?” I asked my father. My grades were aggressively mediocre. I’d planned—vaguely, at fifteen—to transfer somewhere after a few years at the local junior college.

“It doesn’t matter where,” he said, waving away a fly circling his nose.

Next door, the quiet neighbor kid, Carl, walked his miniature pinscher, also called Carl, back and forth across his lawn. The weather was balmy.

“What happens if I do come back?” I asked.

“You’ll lose,” he said. “You’ll automatically forfeit the bet.”

I hated to lose, and my father knew it.

“Will I see you again?” I asked. I felt nostalgic in a way that felt new, at fifteen, as though the day had already turned shadowy and distant, a predetermined memory. I felt nostalgic for my father and his partly bald head and his toothpaste breath, even as he sat next to me, running his palms over his hairy knees.

“Of course,” he said. “Your mother and I will visit.”

My mother appeared on the porch with my brother, his finger slung into the back pocket of her jeans. “Dinnertime,” she said, and I kissed my father’s cheek as though I were standing on a train platform. I spent all of dinner feeling that way too, staring at him from across the table, mouthing goodbye.

The understanding is that, after Casey’s iPhone alarm goes off at 6:15 a.m., Kirsten wakes the boys, nudges them to get dressed, and herds them downstairs, all while Casey is showering. The four of them eat breakfast as a family, deal with teeth-brushing and backpacks, and Casey, who is the principal of the middle school in the same district as the elementary school Jack and Ian attend, drives the boys to drop-off. Kirsten then takes her shower in the newly quiet house before leaving for work.

The reality is that, at 6:17, as soon as Casey shuts the bathroom door, Kirsten grabs her own iPhone from her nightstand and looks at Lucy Headrick’s Twitter feed. Clearly, Kirsten is not alone: Lucy has 3.1 million followers. (She follows a mere 533 accounts, many of which belong to fellow-celebrities.) Almost all of Lucy’s vast social-media empire, which of course is an extension of her life-style-brand empire (whatever the fuck a life-style brand is), drives Kirsten crazy. Its content is fake and pandering and boring and repetitive—how many times will Lucy post variations on the same recipe for buttermilk biscuits?—and Kirsten devours all of it, every day: Facebook and Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, the blog, the vlog, the TV show. Every night, Kirsten swears that she won’t devote another minute to Lucy, and every day she squanders hours. The reason that things go wrong so early in the morning, she has realized, is this: she’s pretty sure Twitter is the only place where real, actual Lucy is posting, Lucy whom Kirsten once knew. Lucy has insomnia, and, while all the other posts on all the other sites might be written by Lucy’s minions, Kirsten is certain that it was Lucy herself who, at 1:22 a.m., wrote, “Watching Splash on cable, oops I forgot to name one of my daughters Madison!” Or, at 3:14 a.m., accompanied by a photo of an organic candy bar: “Hmm could habit of eating chocolate in middle of night be part of reason I can’t sleep LOL!”

Morning, therefore, is when there’s new, genuine Lucy sustenance. So how can Kirsten resist? And then the day is Lucy-contaminated already, and there’s little incentive for Kirsten not to keep polluting it for the sixteen hours until she goes to bed with the bull-shitty folksiness in Lucy’s life: the acquisition of an Alpine goat, the canning of green beans, the baby shower that Lucy is planning for her young friend Jocelyn, who lives on a neighboring farm.

As it happens, Lucy has written (or “written”? Right? There’s no way) a memoir, with recipes—Dishin’ with the Prairie Wife—that is being published today, so Kirsten’s latest vow is that she’ll buy the book (she tried to reserve it from the library and learned that she was 305th in line), read it, and then be done with Lucy. Completely. Forever.

The memoir has been “embargoed”—as if Lucy is, like, Henry Kissinger—and, to promote it, Lucy traveled yesterday from her farm in Missouri to Los Angeles. (As she told Twitter, “BUMMM-PEE flyin over the mountains!!”) Today, she will appear on a hugely popular TV talk show on which she has been a guest more than once. Among last night’s tweets, posted while Kirsten was sleeping, was the following: “Omigosh you guys I’m so nervous + excited for Mariana!!! Wonder what she will ask…” The pseudo-nervousness, along with the “Omigosh”—never “Omigod,” or even “OMG”—galls Kirsten. Twenty years ago, Lucy swore like a normal person; but the Lucy of now, Kirsten thinks, resembles Casey, who, when their sons were younger, respectfully asked Kirsten to stop cursing in front of them. Indeed, the Lucy of now—beloved by evangelicals, homeschooler of her three daughters, wife of a man she refers to as the Stud in Overalls, who is a deacon in their church—uses such substitutes as “Jiminy Crickets!” and “Fudge Nuggets!” Once, while making a custard on-air, Lucy dropped a bit of eggshell into the mix and exclaimed, “Shnookerdookies!” Kirsten assumed that it was staged, or maybe not originally staged but definitely not edited out when it could have been. This made Kirsten feel such rage at Lucy that it was almost like lust.

Kirsten sees that, last night, Lucy, as she usually does, replied to a few dozen tweets sent to her by nobodies: Nicole in Seattle, who has thirty-one followers; Tara in Jacksonville, who’s a mom of two awesome boys. (Aren’t we all? Kirsten thinks.) Most of the fans’ tweets say some variation of “You’re so great!” or “It’s my birthday pretty please wish me a happy birthday?!” Most of Lucy’s responses say some variation of “Thank you for the kind words!” or “Happy Birthday!” Kirsten has never tweeted at Lucy; in fact, Kirsten has never tweeted. Her Twitter handle is not her name but “Minneap” plus the last three digits of her zip code, and, instead of uploading a photo of herself, she’s kept the generic egg avatar. She has three followers, all of whom appear to be bots.

Through the bathroom door, Kirsten can hear the shower running, and the minute that Casey turns it off—by this point, Kirsten is, as she also does daily, reading an article about how smartphones are destroying people’s ability to concentrate—she springs from bed, flicking on light switches in the master bedroom, the hall, and the boys’ rooms. When Casey appears, wet hair combed, completely dressed, and finds Ian still under the covers and Kirsten standing by his bureau, Kirsten frowns and says that both boys seem really tired this morning. Casey nods somberly, even though it’s what Kirsten says every morning. Is Casey clueless, inordinately patient, or both?

At breakfast, Jack, who is six, asks, “Do doctors ever get sick?”

“Of course,” Casey says. “Everyone gets sick.”

While packing the boys’ lunches, Kirsten says to Ian, who is nine, “I’m giving you Oreos again today, but you need to eat your cucumber slices, and if they’re still in your lunchbox when you come home you don’t get Oreos tomorrow.”

She kisses the three of them goodbye, and as soon as the door closes, even before she climbs the stairs, Kirsten knows that she’s going to get herself off using the handheld showerhead. She doesn’t consider getting herself off using the handheld showerhead morally problematic, but it presents two logistical complications, the first of which is that, the more often she does it, the more difficult it is for Casey to bring her to orgasm on the occasions when they’re feeling ambitious enough to have sex. The second complication is that it makes her late for work. If Kirsten leaves the house at 7:45, she has a fifteen-minute drive; if she leaves at or after 7:55, the drive is twice as long. But, seriously, what else is she supposed to do with her Lucy rage?

My kid walks down Blue Street Diner’s central aisle before slumping into a booth near the toilets. She’s on meds that make her urinate nonstop and requires round-the-clock access to the facilities. Her words.

“The name of the drug is spironolactone, if you’re wondering,” she’d said on our pre-meeting phone call. “Also, I’m trans. The name you gave me is dead and incinerated and I spread its ashes over the Hudson. Say it to my face, and you’ll meet the same fate. I’m Luciana now. Or Luz.”

“You mean trans, like, you’re transsexual?”

“Trans like gender is dead. When can we meet? Should I call you Mom or Jo?”

“Jo’s fine,” I’d said, though I find that name embarrassingly predictable in retrospect. It’s a name I picked for myself after reading Little Women, obsessed, like so many little girls, with the bookish, tomboyish heroine. I should have gone for Beth, or better yet, Amy or Meg.

“Luciana. I really like that. She’s only a minor figure in Catch-22, but something about her kind of sticks with you. Good choice,” I said.

“Whatever. I was just trying to think of a girl version of Lucifer.”

I meet her at Blue Street Diner because I’ve never been. Seemed appropriate to reunite with my stranger of a daughter on neutral ground.

An employee busses tables, pocketing pennies and dollar bills left under jars of Dijon mustard. The screams of a toddler fill the background. For my part there’s some throat clearing, a few aborted questions. Every few seconds I venture a glance in Luciana’s direction. This is the first time I’ve seen my daughter since shortly after she was born, and I am admittedly overwhelmed.

I keep one hand tucked into my handbag, palm secured around the handle of my revolver, ready to shoot if this girl, my child, has re-entered my life in order to harm me in some way, to exact vengeance because I chose to leave her in the care of the state.

Giving up on conversation, I hum the old bluegrass tune “Whiskey Before Breakfast” as I page through the menu. It’s the first song I taught myself on the fiddle, slowly and painfully, when I decided I did not belong to my parents after all and wanted to travel to the South in a caravan.

Mr. Wheelock, Luciana’s father, always wanted me to listen to blues and jazz. He said as a black girl I had no business not knowing Muddy Waters or Billie Holiday, but the fast-paced string melodies of country folk songs spoke to my youthful mania. I told him that as a white man, he had no business not knowing the Osborne Brothers or the Foggy Mountain Boys. Besides, black folks invented country and bluegrass, so I was just going back to the source.

That’s when he told me that I was the most mature young woman he’d ever met. If he’d known then that he’d be dead at my own hands, would he have introduced himself to me that first time? Or would he have gone for another girl? Prone toward awkwardness, I like to think that maybe I was too pretty to resist, that were he able to do it again, he’d choose me knowing I’d murder him.

I suppose that’s why I hated him most—that he found me pretty, and that made me want him. That he knew that and used it. The things an ugly black girl from Brooklyn will do to feel pretty. She’ll dismantle her soul, if it’s required.

“Can I get you guys started with some drinks?” a man says, holding a pen and pad of paper at me and Luz’s table.

“Coffee,” I say. “Says here you guys use a percolator, right? A stove top one?”

“Yeah, miss. And it’s fresh, too.”

“Cookies and cream milkshake, please,” says Luciana. The waiter scribbles down our order before leaving. “What’s a percolator?” Luciana asks.

“You serious?” I say.

“I mean I’m assuming it’s something that percolates, but I could do with a more precise definition.”

When Luciana first walked up the diner, I wondered how much her personality would match up with her appearance. A good deal of it, it turns out. Her hair, coarse red threads that tangle and twist in on each other, contrasts sharply against her noncommittally brown skin, and the effect is overall very striking. She’s got a wide jaw and a wide nose, big lips, like mine. Mascara and eyeliner. Rouge. She’s cute in a kind of dykey way, and I wonder if she’s gay like me. At least I passed down that gift.

My toes are ice-cold when I enter Wellbrook Psychiatric Hospital. I know without looking that they’ve gone deathly pale beneath my socks and shoes, as though shuttling blood to my vital organs will sustain me in this place that is not old enough to be quaint: stained orange carpet, cement walls, cottage-cheese ceiling. I think briefly of fleeing, and how no one would stop me because no laser-printed hospital bracelet has yet been clipped to my wrist. But I’ve promised to come, and I am attempting to be brave. I approach the front desk while fingering the tin milagro that dangles from my neck.

The receptionist raises her head and asks, “Can I help you?”

“I’m Wendy Chung. I have an ECT consult at 2 p.m. with Dr. Richards.”

“I see,” she says, typing. “That you do. Well, follow me.” She leads me to a group of hulking PCs, seating me at one of them. “You need to fill out these questionnaires before you see him. It’s simple, but feel free to ask me if you have any questions.” And then: “You know—I love your hair.”

I put my hand to the top of my head, as if to emphasize the location of my hair.

“I love how long and black it is,” she says. “Just beautiful. I always find it upsetting when Asian women dye their hair.”

She goes back to her desk. I sit and look at the middle of the screen before me, which reads, in blocky green type:

I press the return key. The next screen offers me four selections.

I glance at the receptionist as though she can help me, but she’s looking at her phone. She is perhaps checking the polls, which is what I would be doing if I weren’t obligated to complete an intake survey. I examine her face. Has she voted? If so, who did she vote for?

The first question stymies me because I’m not here for depression, which is what THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS are clearly meant to evaluate. Even a person without depression could answer I FEEL SAD for a galaxy of reasons. If this survey were about the election I might choose I AM SAD ALL THE TIME AND I CAN’T SNAP OUT OF IT, or even I AM SO SAD AND UNHAPPY THAT I CAN’T STAND IT, which are both interesting ways of describing inner turmoil. Who knows what we can and can’t stand. In my opinion, I’ve been able to stand it if I’m still alive, and maybe my psychiatrist was wrong and I don’t need this consultation for electroconvulsive therapy; on the other hand, perhaps I said yes to the consultation because I can no longer stand the voices and the visions.

In terms of depression, however, sadness is not so much my problem, in which case it might make the most sense to choose I DO NOT FEEL SAD. Yet it is my belief that this could never be the right answer as long as I am alive.

“Wendy?” a voice says, and I flinch so dramatically that I almost fall out of my chair. It’s the doctor. He is white, like the receptionist; his glasses are John Lennon spectacles; his smile is bland. He is handsome in an unexciting way, like a bachelor on a reality television show. Out of the corner of my eye I see glossy black shoes hanging, and involuntarily I turn to look at the nothing that is there.

“I’m sorry,” I say, composing myself.

His name is Dr. Richards. We shake hands with a grip. He says, “Come with me.”

MARIA ANDERSON’s fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in the Mississippi Review, the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, and the Atlas Review. She’s an editor at Essay Press, and she has been awarded residencies from Joshua Tree National Park, the AMK Ranch Research Center in Grand Teton National Park, and the Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

■ I lived in Missoula, Montana, for a short time and had always been fascinated by Bonner, the tiny town a couple miles east on the interstate where a few of our friends lived. I wanted to set a story there. I grew up on a cattle ranch outside of town, and spent a lot of time alone as a child, wandering through the woods with our German shepherd. I wanted to work through some of the feelings that go with this kind of deep-seated physical and emotional isolation.

I wrote the first draft of this story at Coal Creek Tap while doing my MFA in Laramie, at the University of Wyoming. It felt easier to focus with people drinking beer and playing cribbage around me. My early readers will remember several especially awful middles and endings to this story—a scene in a strip club with a dancer named Anaconda, a moment in a hotel where men attempt to steal dog semen from a fridge. But what I kept returning to was the main character, and how it feels to have a loved one vanish, whether emotionally or physically, and to know that this is one of the old mysteries you hear about. Someone is there one moment and irreversibly gone the next. Even if that person is right in front of you, you can feel the horror of having lost them already. The horror isn’t that they’re gone, but that this vanishing is unfair and unexplainable.

ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI,

Details. McSweeney’s Quarterly, no. 50.

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ZYZZYVA

Roxane Gay, guest editor, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger, which received the NBCC Members’ Choice Award; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. She is also the editor of the New York Times best-selling Not That Bad. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation, among others. She is the author of the World of Wakanda series for Marvel.

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“Cougar” by Maria Anderson. First published in the Iowa Review, 46/3. Copyright © 2017 by Maria Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Maria Anderson.

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