It was not a night to spare expense. The firm had successfully defended against their twenty-fifth anti-trust suit earlier that afternoon and, to celebrate, the senior partners had brought out all the silver, and had sprung for the champagne. The party went through the natural life cycle of this sort of office get-together, starting with the tentative first introductions and flirtations, growing into the comfortable din of a dozen concurrent conversations, lapsing into silence as guests individually realized they had nothing more to say, and then dissipating as the elderly and the far too young slouched out under heavy felt coats and identical flat-brimmed hats. By three in the morning, the only ones left in the offices were the middle-aged, those not yet over the hill but right at the summit, and one young lawyer who wanted to ingratiate himself.

The brandy came out, as did the cigars, and soon, by the alcohol heat and Havana exhales, the men were pimpled with sweat over their laser-shaven cheeks. Their ties already were loosened, so they began unbuttoning their shirts and pumping the fabric over their chests like bellows, laughing and snorting and desperate not to fall asleep, for to sleep would be a waste of time.

When it got too hot to move, they started burning money. Everybody chipped in, emptying their pockets of chits until there was a pile the size of a pumpkin on the table between them. They took turns, as a family might take turns opening presents on Christmas morning, not out of a desire to see joy flash across their coworker’s face, but to build up suspense, to revel in the fascination.

The young lawyer was last in the circle. He had never burned with these men before. He stayed quiet, some small part of him fearing that the only reason he was still there was that they hadn’t noticed him yet. He laughed at the right times, though never too loudly, but didn’t say much of anything that he came up with on his own. He stared with the others as each man in the circle placed a chit against his temple and pressed, sending recorded electronic signatures through his brain, which scrambled to adapt to the new information and, quick as you can tell your lips to smile, copied wave for wave the emotion held inside the chit.

These were mostly wonders, joys, a few lusts, which were declining in value as the market realized that lust was not necessary to fabricate. It was almost the young lawyer’s turn. He watched the features of the man to his right settle and soften until the skin was no good for holding back tears. The man had grabbed the lone nostalgia. 

“Here Johnny,” said the man on the young lawyer’s left, passing him a chit. Johnny grinned to show willing, took it, and pressed it to his temple, his sweat sealing the connection. He didn’t see the fist-shielded chuckles of the few men whose artificial emotions had already wound down, and, though he heard the humor, it didn’t sound out of place. He shot the chit, using up its charge, rendering it worthless. 

Johnny Cousin wasn’t stupid. He was going places. He was a capable lawyer; he spoke to juries with a confidence he couldn’t find tonight. He had risen from assistantship to associate to trial lawyer in just a few years, and his first solo case was this coming Tuesday. He wasn’t stupid. There are plenty of gullible people who aren’t stupid.

The emotion hit him like a bullet — that is to say so quickly that he could neither identify nor examine it. He pitched forward and vomited. His spine crawled with the glares, the hunting focus of some invisible creature. He scrambled to his feet, slipping on the puke, and tried to run. He tripped over the armchair of a laughing attorney and fell into a crouch. His hands smelled like acid and alcohol.

“What’d you give him?” someone asked. “Oh shit, that’s hilarious. You’ve got one of those? It’s like a food stamp, brother.”

“I found it in the gutter,” someone else said.

Johnny sobbed into his hands and twisted up against a wall. There was a window. He slithered away from it, settling into a corner, his fingers laced over his eyes, too afraid to either open or close them.

“Should get this on camera. You got a camera?”

The dramatics were over, though. Johnny’s terrified mind calmed like an ocean, a small derivative, the waves still present just less forceful. He pulled his hands away from his eyes and focused on the other men and their tucked-up playground leers.

Johnny wiped his chin on his sleeve; the shirt was ruined anyhow. “You bastards,” he said, lightly, as though he were in on the joke. “You royal bastards.” And, far removed from his grudging laugh, he was thinking, And that’s what he feels? My god. My god. What have I done?

#

“You receive a pension for your son’s service, do you not?”

“For when he is released, ma’am, yes,” said Johnny. Throughout the last couple of days he had been unable to stop thinking about how he had felt that night. Memory stands apart from pain, the same as a noun stands apart from the thing it represents. Still, the memory was potent and made his sinuses hurt. He hadn’t been focused on his job, on the preparations for his trial on Tuesday. Some of his coworkers, the ones who had been there that night, had come up to him and nudged him in his ribs, joked about the look on his face, pulled their own faces into rude caricatures. Johnny’s reserve of humor ran out in mere hours, and after that he just replied with, Yeah, that was great.

“And why do you want to terminate his employment prematurely?” Johnny was standing in front of the desk of a secretary to one of the senior partners; several steps removed from power, but he could feel it, the ability to effect a change, pulsing in the conditioned air.

The secretary was leaning forward on her desk, elbows on the blotter, her thin glasses centered on her eyes. She was young, or looked it; no more than a couple years older than Johnny. Her expression invited him to fill the silence; he chose to fill it with excuses.

“I didn’t realize what I was doing. The tests said he gave strong reactions and would be ideal for the mint, but—”

“So you signed him over. Terror, you said?”

“Yes,” said Johnny. The secretary nodded as if hearing from him a condemnation in that one syllable and agreeing with it, though not without sympathy. She pressed a finger into her right ear, the better to hear from the microspeaker embedded there.

“Excuse me for just one moment, mister Cousin.” The secretary left through a door behind her desk. The door clicked shut. Johnny thought of shutting doors, of putting the past in its place and locking it there, of dark impenetrable wood behind which is hidden whatever you please, of the room in the corner of a house, out of sight so the mind can gradually flush its memories away.

The door opened; the secretary breezed back to her desk. She swiveled in her chair, settling it in the right position, then smiled.

“Did you know that they now manipulate their dreams, as well? So, in essence, they are working twenty-four hours a day. That must be . . . terrible.” The secretary smiled again. “Or terrific, depending on who you are, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

Where Johnny would have rustled a sheet of paper or glanced at his watch, she fixed him on the two points of her eyes and waited for her next thought to form into words. “And your wife?” she said.

“We’re no longer together,” said Johnny. “I have full legal custody.”

“Good. That will make this less complicated.”

“You can do something?”

“We can do something, mister Cousin. But it will require an effort on your part, as well. You like your work, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Johnny, and it was partly true. He liked what the job allowed him to do; that is, he liked attending parties, and he liked being a part of the winning team, and he liked coming home way too late to a bottle of bourbon and a house, built large so as to enclose the maximum amount of silence, and with silence, comfort.

The work itself was a tool, a commodity, something for him to sell in exchange for every docile fantasy he had.

“You have done a satisfactory job in the past few months. It hasn’t escaped the notice of the senior partners.”

“Thank you,” said Johnny.

“Your first solo is on Tuesday, is it not?”

“That’s correct,” said Johnny.

“Good. The senior partners would like you to throw it.”

“What? Why?”

“I hardly think I need tell you, mister Cousin, that in some instances there can come profit from loss.” The secretary was smiling; her eyes said, I know you really are smart enough to know that, and Johnny almost believed her. An expression like that could have sold cars; it was so full of camaraderie, of earnest kinship born of shared experience.

“No,” replied Johnny.

“Good. Do not turn it into a mistrial. Weaken your case, discredit your own witnesses, hem and haw to the jury. Make a few bad jokes.” Her voice had taken on the mad Mosaic timbre of someone dispensing commandments from on high. Behind her words, Johnny could hear the low whine of the speaker in her ear. One of the senior partners telling her what to say; this woman existed only to keep supplicants at arm’s length from the power. Johnny was not a praying man, but right then he wondered how frustrating it must have been to accompany each prayer with a sacrifice, an extra wing of potency, without which the prayer would flutter helplessly in the mezzanine, easy prey for circling doubts, far removed from the shrouded presence of an Old Testament god.

Johnny almost bowed as he left. On the way out, he passed a platinum reproduction of Winged Victory of Thrace. He reflected on the meeting — his knees shaking as they had his first time addressing a judge — and what it would cost him, which was, to his estimation, fairly large. A handful of terrors made a plastic chatter in his jacket pocket. He reflected, misshapen, in winged victory.

#

The guys in the office gave Johnny pats on the back and buck up pep talks. Everyone stopped by to congratulate him on a job well done, too bad the twelve went in for the other guy, but sometimes that can’t be helped. Johnny was tired and gracious and said, Just gotta get back up on the horse, he couldn’t guess how many times. The distractions came at fifteen minute intervals, sometimes the same guys more than once. No hard feelings, said the guy who had slipped him the terror that night, and it wasn’t a question. No hard feelings, said Johnny, patting the chits in his pocket.

He was annoyed at the distractions, but he didn’t know what he would have done without them. He couldn’t concentrate on the work; his monitor kept deforming every time he blinked, waves of misguided electrons sheeting to the bottom. Somewhere in the office was a crying baby, and the susurrus of its client mother hushing it up, her sibilance matching the disturbed frequency of Johnny’s screen. 

His phone rang, throwing off the baby’s howl, the mother’s whisper. He answered it.

“Mister Cousin,” said the secretary on the other end. “Have you been keeping up with the news?”

He hadn’t been. Preparing for his case had been more important in the way that circumvents any method of prioritizing; but even without the thrown case, he wasn’t much of a news hound. The things he needed to know filtered through other people to his ears, and at the end of the day he went home to a quiet house with no TV. He said as much, aware that outside of his head it sounded like rambling.

“Nine days ago, a vigilante group raided the Pac-Nor mint in Bellingham. The group’s apparent aim was to liberate the staff. Your son was one of those liberated.”

“Where is he, now?”

“Local police conducted an area search. You should read it for yourself. They turned up Contentment—” referring to the kid by the emotion she was tapped for “—huddled in an alleyway trying to wrap a sheet of rotten drywall around herself. The others didn’t turn up in the county.”

After a compliment on a job well done — which felt to Johnny no more or less than the pats on the back — the secretary hung up, saying she would leave him to it, whatever it was. His son was nine days gone from the mint. How far can a kid run in nine days? How far can a kid — who has been stuck in his own mind for fifteen years and whose only experience with running has come from escaping the monsters that visited inside injected fever dreams — go in nine days?

If it had been me, Johnny realized, I would have gone until my lungs caved in.

Rubbing his temples, he caught up on the news. As it turned out, some of the kids had gone home, authorities assuming the vigilantes had told them where to go. Anger burned a tree house down and was in custody. The mints didn’t want the kids back, now; they were spoiled goods, once earthbound and now released into the great wide unknown. The air they had known would never taste the same again.

Johnny cut out early and sped home. He pulled onto his street with the sun in his eyes and saw the silhouette of his house undamaged and was relieved.

#

Grady pulled up out front in his near-silent car; Johnny wouldn’t have noticed had he not been waiting for the man. It was a couple of weeks later, and Johnny still hadn’t decided what to do about his son, whom he had taken to calling Trey, thanks to the circling strange abstraction of the brain which turns a word around until its syllables overlap and its meaning takes second seat to the sounds themselves.

He strolled down the front walk to greet Grady. Grady wasn’t from around here; he wasn’t an American. He spoke English haltingly and with a grammar all his own. He made you feel as though every gap in communication was your fault for not speaking clearly, while your brain protested that it was his fault for fouling up the language in his head. Still, he was the best private investigator in the area and he had worked with Johnny’s firm on a number of occasions, so Johnny at least knew him by sight, as well as by his reputation.

He told himself he was collecting information, in order to make an informed decision, and couldn’t help feeling as though he were betraying someone, or, more accurately, some thing, some wordless ideal. By not upping stakes and running to Bellingham? he asked himself. Unreasonable, misguided, emotional. Came the response: how better to find your son, who has lived his whole life unreasonably, without guidance, submerged in an emotion much more powerful — therefore more valuable — than the paternal instinct.

“Nice car,” said Johnny as he extended his hand to Grady. Grady took it, then released it as though he had decided not to shake after all. He turned and examined his car from hood to trunk, then returned his attention to Johnny.

“Yes,” he said. “I enjoy a good car.”

“What is it? A Freya roadster, right? Love the color.”

“Good running,” said Grady. “Take me inside.” He was holding a black leather briefcase in one hand. He used it to gesture at Johnny’s house. 

“Right. Please, come in,” said Johnny.

Grady went immediately to the dining room table and sat, opening his briefcase and laying out a series of contracts and forms for Johnny to sign. Johnny, meanwhile, got himself a drink.

“Want a drink?” he asked.

Grady waved his negative. “For the driving,” he said. “Sign your life,” he said, tapping his finger on the nearest sheet of paper, then pulling a pen from his breast pocket and repeating the gesture.

“Excuse me?” Johnny took a sip of his drink and sat down opposite Grady.

“Sign your life,” said the PI. “For payment.”

Johnny couldn’t quite place Grady’s accent. There were the rolled Rs, the swallowed vowels of Russia; but he also tended to emphasize the second syllable, as Germans or Scotsmen do. The man’s looks didn’t clear anything up. His hair was gray, but looked as though it could have been artificially so. His eyebrows were triangular, pointing upwards, shadowing his eyes. His face was smooth and square and carried the sort of contemplative neutral expression that once upon a time may have caused swoons in the girls of his native land, wherever that was. 

“Sign my life?” said Johnny. Grady stared at him, licked his lips, blinked, returned to staring. Johnny bent and started reading the contracts. When he was halfway through, Grady spoke.

“I am going from America,” he said. “Tell the word around. After your money. I am going.” Johnny kept reading. “Stupid America,” Grady went on. “Sensitive to light, to shadow, to food. Babies that cry. And worthless money.”

“Worthless,” said Johnny, glancing meaningfully around his sleek unsullied rooms. 

“Gold is worthless,” said Grady. “No bullets to be made, no walls will stand. Too soft. So is your new money. Worthless.”

“Is that why you ask for so much of it?” Johnny had finished reading the contracts. Grady grinned, boxy teeth shoving his lips apart. He replied something about moving that Johnny didn’t understand and let disappear without response. He began inking his initials and names over the sheets of the contract.

When he was finished, Grady collected his copies and snapped them into the briefcase. Johnny wrote up a bank authorization, asking, “What do you want it in?”

“Wonder,” said Grady. Johnny made it so and handed over the note.

“Remember,” he said. “I don’t want him to know that his dad is looking for him. I mean, I don’t know what he’d do. I don’t want him to run. Just tell me where— just tell me if he’s all right and where he is.”

Grady nodded. “It’s in the contract.” He let himself out.

Johnny sat hunched forward on his couch, elbows on his knees. He listened to Grady’s car purr off. After a while, he got up and, shoving the loose contract aside, opened his own briefcase and caught up on a little work, scribbling notes with one hand while the other made plastic chirps with the terror in his pocket.

#

Three weeks later, Grady was sitting on Johnny’s couch, sipping a water. Johnny was sitting across from him on the corner of the coffee table, flipping through the pages of notes and photographs that Grady had brought with him.

“Oliver Kyle Cousin,” said Johnny.

“He names himself O.K.,” said Grady.

“He kept the surname.”

Johnny looked at the face of his son and recognized nothing in its features. It was wholly unique — a stranger’s face, smiling, holding a milkshake in one hand. A girl was sitting next to him with her chin in her netted fingers, dimly reflecting O.K.’s smile.

“Who is the girl?” asked Johnny.

Grady had a mouthful of water. He spit it back into the glass. After a length of silence, Johnny looked up from the picture to see what was taking so long. Grady was rubbing two wonders together between his thumb and middle finger. He nodded significantly at the chits. Johnny got the hint. Grady slipped the chits back into his pocket.

“Her house,” he said. “He eats next to her and sleeps in her window.”

“In her window?”

Grady took another drink of water. He made a face of disgust and spit this mouthful out, too.

“I am done,” he said. “Yes. Tell the word around. No more days of your independence. No more of your wives, daughters, husbands, and sons. I hate. You are the last I hate. I am tired of this hate. I need new hate, far from here.” He stood up, placing his glass on the table next to Johnny. Johnny didn’t move. “Look at you,” said Grady. “You are sitting. This is why I will leave America. Your son is in your hand and you sit down.”

Johnny picked up the water glass and set it on a coaster. Then he looked up. “You don’t understand. A decision can’t be rushed; time has to pass.”

“No. An idiot would say so. Decisions, such as decisions in a court, yes, are made long before time. Guilty, yes?”

“What are you saying?”

Grady smiled thinly, in that instant so like a grandfather, dying, prepared to leave behind a legacy of righteous fury if nothing else would stick.

“I say you should have no secrets from your son.”

Then Grady left, taking his echoes with him. Johnny moved to the couch. He thought, for quite some time, in two minds: one was a scale weighing the choices that were in front of him; the other sat in judgment on the first, growing ever more blood-fired and angry that he could even consider there to be a choice in the matter at all.

#

Wonder — the kid’s name was Delicate Jones — and her folks lived a bit north of Ashland, Oregon. According to Grady’s report, she and O.K. had jumped freight trains down from Bellingham. A conductor had spotted them in Portland, recognized them from their photos on the news, but hadn’t told the authorities; turned out he was a disgruntled citizen and had taken some pride at telling Grady of his naughty deed. The kids had thanked him. He said that the girl looked tired and was huddled into the guy. She may have been sick. The guy seemed all right. Both of them were bald.

Johnny spent the plane ride reading the report and, once the words began the give him a concentration headache, gazing at the pictures. There was one of O.K. and Delicate seen from a distance; they were sitting on the green hill of some park. It was taken on a sunny day, but they were pressed together, sealing all space between them like two hands clenched together, as though a blizzard were falling around them.

On the ground, Johnny checked into a hotel in Ashland. He ate a quick dinner in the hum of a Shakespeare-themed restaurant. He had Steak-upon-Onions. He left the waitress, who had had bad comedic timing, a joy, though he thought she’d probably burn it with her friends later that night. It was dark by the time he returned to his hotel and lay on the room’s thin bed. 

The street ran close to his first-floor window. The sound of passing cars didn’t so much bother him as the vibrations that they transmitted from street to earth to wall to bed. He found himself unable to sleep. More than once he was close, but each time came a youth with a perversely loud bottom end, or a diesel hauler, and startled him so that he felt his eyes yanked back to him from dreamland as if they were attached to his sockets by rubber bands.

He turned on the TV to distract himself. He found a movie that, after a few lines, he recognized as being one that his co-workers frequently quoted to each other around the office. It was awful. There was a laugh track.

Johnny got out of bed. When he wasn’t lying down, he didn’t feel the vibrations so strongly. They passed through his feet, up his tibia and then, though he didn’t realize it, were obliterated by the quaking in his knees.

# 

In the end, he just went ahead and did it. He waited around a frozen yogurt shop Grady had observed the kids frequenting and got a coffee. He was there when the shop opened at ten in the morning; he kept ordering coffees until O.K. and Delicate slouched in at two. Johnny tried not to look at O.K. as his son waited in a short line to order for the both of them. Delicate sat down at a table in the corner and leaned her head against the wall. She had eyes as round and dead as two pennies. Her hair was coming in, a light blonde fuzz. She was staring right at Johnny. After a few moments, he tried giving her a wink, but it wasn’t something he had practiced and it felt slow and weak.

O.K. slid into the seat across from her, back to his father. He talked quickly, barreling over the cracks in his pubescent voice. He had stories to tell — dreams to be remembered in the sugared cool air, to be exposed for the absurdities they were. He had a phrase that Johnny had never heard before: Cut the rope, man. He said it over and over. The whole shop heard them; Johnny caught the cashier grinning once. He went up to get another coffee.

“That kid come in a lot?” he asked.

“O.K.? Yeah. He’s new around here. Kid has the strangest dreams. My brother owns a bookshop on seventh; I keep trying to get O.K. to show up for the open mic nights. He’d be a treat.”

When Johnny sat down, he chose a table closer to the kids. Now he could hear Delicate, too, with her soft interjections. Her laugh came through her nose in soft chuffs like a dog sighing. O.K. had a laugh that filled the room with descending cadences. Sometimes he slapped the table, setting their spoons to vibrating.

“Let’s go to the park,” O.K. suggested when their dishes were empty. Delicate nodded. She moved as though through gauze, and her slow eyes seemed clouded by the same. O.K. took her hand and escorted her out the door. Johnny followed.

The kids walked, O.K.’s right hand entwined with Delicate’s left. With his free hand, O.K. gestured and pointed, as though conducting a symphony of his own words. The park was nearby, not much more than a small hill on a triangular lot bordered by traffic. The kids sidestepped a pair of frolicking dogs and a sunbather on her stomach with her top undone. Johnny leaned against a tree just off the sidewalk.

O.K.’s hand came unbound from Delicate’s and signaled a crescendo of his laughter. Delicate shook her head, mock dismayed at whatever joke O.K. had just told. Her eyes settled on Johnny. He tried to turn away, but his own traitor eyes kept flicking back to the top of the hill to see if it was safe, if she had let her gaze drift. She hadn’t. 

So Johnny took a walk. Three blocks to the south, six blocks north, three blocks south again. He ended up at the same tree. The kids were still there, but lying on their backs, looking up at the few wispy clouds that were too faint and too high to be images of anything. Nevertheless, O.K. was pointing, tracing designs.

Johnny went halfway up the hill, past the sunbather, who looked up at him and smiled, and sat within earshot of the kids. They were silent. In that moment, Johnny was nearly content. The silence of the sun light and the silence of the children and the silence of the woman on her stomach were heavy like a drowsy lover’s body. Even the noise of traffic almost faded into background, but then the profane honking of a horn made his heart beat arrhythmic and he coughed to set the pumping right again. 

A swish of fabric came from behind. He turned in time to catch Delicate, in her flowered summer skirt, approaching. He leaned back onto his elbows, feigning comfort. She sat down beside him, cross-legged.

“I know what you want,” she said. She didn’t look up. “You want him.” The conviction in her voice was like an order. Johnny took a breath to tell her what a crazy kid she was, but she turned her face away as though expecting his protest and refusing to accept it. She stared at O.K. She spoke haltingly, and she slurred as though her tongue were too slow for the thoughts that propelled it. She said, “Please. I love him,” and, “I need him.” She turned back to Johnny, who had lost all thoughts now of anything but silence, and squeezed her eyes shut, working the muscles to force saline onto her eyelashes, staining them dark brown. She said, “I wake up,” and, “In the morning and all I have to do is roll over,” and, “I can see him through my window, on the grass,” and “You don’t know me,” and, “I used to be an angel. Yeah, I used to be an angel,” and, “Now I’m not. I need to roll over and see him. I feel so lost in the morning. It’s like heaven pulls back in the night,” and, ‘This boring world— I need him. Please. I need him. You adults can change things. You can change people. I think I understand. Please don’t change him,” and, “Please please don’t look at him again.”

She smelled of hospital air, thick with uncertainty, sickness, and skin. For her sake, Johnny resisted an urge to glance over his shoulder.

“I just wanted to apologize. Will you tell him—”

“No, please, no I won’t,” said Delicate. Then she stood up and her dress played a hush over the grass and Johnny heard her say, Hey wake up sleepy head.

That was that, then. Johnny stood up. He dug in his trouser pocket for a pair of wonders. He tossed them lightly on the grass where they’d find them if they returned the way they came.

Again, he didn’t sleep that night. He paced, thinking of writing a letter to O.K., imagining the thousands of expressions that could cross his son’s face upon reading it, and about how only one would. He went for a walk and wound up at the late night mall. Shaved heads were in this year. He saw versions of O.K. in every shop, all hunch-shouldered and loud and leaning in towards a girl’s affections.

At the arcade he dumped his pocketfuls of terror on a little boy and his friend, saying, He doesn’t need this anymore. The kids’ faces lit up for a moment before they realized how worthless all that plastic was to them. Johnny watched them lug it to the counter and trade it into a couple tokens for the games; then he watched them spend the tokens on pops of color and gunfire.

In the morning, he took a cab to the airport and bought a ticket home. While he waited for his plane to board, he leaned against the observation windows, watching the jets coast back and forth across the tarmac. Their swept-back wings summoned the constant illusion of movement, of speed, of victory. 

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Guess,” I said. I pulled off my hiking boots, scattering grass seeds over the doormat. The boots were only a couple of weeks old, not yet broken in. My feet were covered in hot spots, some of them already turning into blisters. I peeled off my socks and rubbed the red skin underneath.

“Don’t leave your shit in the middle of the floor this time,” said Marshal. He was sitting at the table, flipping through a sporting equipment catalogue. Since he was being so free with his language, I knew mom wasn’t around.

“Where’d mom go?” 

“Fuck if I know.” I would have bet he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

I balled up my socks and tossed them into the laundry room, then kicked my shoes into the closet. There wasn’t much room for them. I owned two pair: my hiking boots and my school shoes. Until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even have the boots. The rest of the closet was for Marshal’s football shoes, soccer cleats, white Sketchers, black Sketchers, and ski boots. Mom had started keeping all her shoes in her room.

“I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Thanks for letting me know.” Marshal took a Sharpie and circled something in the catalogue. Then he took a Post-It and used it to mark the page. That night, he would leave the thing on mom’s bedside table. A week later, a package would arrive. 

In two years, he would be old enough to get his own credit card. My guess was he wouldn’t bother signing up for it, or wouldn’t need to if mom kept it up.

I undressed in the bathroom I shared with Marshal. Like the closet, the sink was overcrowded with his products, leaving just a small square of porcelain for my deodorant and razor. Until a couple of weeks ago, I would get angry every morning, not only at having to share a bathroom with my twin but at having my share valued around ten percent, if that. Just one of those little things that start the day out on the wrong foot, like rolling over in bed and realizing a power outage has reset your clock, or being rattled awake at three in the morning because your brother snores like Moses.

Like I said, until a couple of weeks ago, my days were full of those kinds of wrong feet. Then, something happened that made me feel as if I had lowered both to the starting line, wrong and right, and every day since had started out all right. 

I stepped into the shower and cranked open both taps, relishing the quick — and quickly replaced — stab of cold from the water that had been sitting in the pipes. As always, I was amazed at how much dirt sluiced around my feet, and at how dark it was, like charcoal, at first, then lightening to the color of caramel before going invisible. I hadn’t been sent far that day, but the layer of grime was as thick as ever. Most of it came from the cave, from its close walls coated in ancient dust.

Every day since that Saturday when I had sort of run away from home, I had gone to the cave. I had gone down on my hands and knees, like a pilgrim, and scraped forward into the tight, cool path inside the rock. Crossing the threshold was like going to bed late in summer with the windows open and the sprinklers on outside. It was peace, held tight to the bosom of the mountain. It was old peace, with air that hadn’t moved for centuries. 

More importantly, it was mine. Something possessed me when I first laid eyes on the cave’s small, pursed mouth, something like what my fourth grade teacher had tried to instill in us when she dressed us up in buckskin and had us blaze Lewis’ and Clark’s trail across a deserted park. I didn’t have a flag, but I planted a twig of blooming forsythia at the threshold to mark it, and took note of the trees and boulders around so I could find my way back. 

But, for a second there as I ducked my head into the hole for the first time, I thought maybe I had gotten myself all excited for nothing. There was light coming from the other side, maybe twenty feet in. A short tunnel, hardly worth naming, much less discovering. I sat back on my heels. 

As soon as I let my focus slip from the cave to the backdrop of the hillside surrounding it, my temples began to throb. The ache pushed toward my sinuses, making my eyes feel as if they were about to pop out of their sockets with every beat of my heart. The last time I had felt a pain so sudden and specific it had been at an amusement park, watching a movie that was supposed to be in 3D. I had burned the tops of my ears, playing too hard in the sun, and it hurt to wear the special glasses, so I just watched the show with them off. Images that my brain knew were supposed to fit together had divided like cells across a screen too big for me to take in all at once. 

I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my thumbs, igniting puffs of color as I dug in harder. The pain faded, and so did the colors.

When I reopened my eyes, it all made sense. The headache came back, of course, because there’s a long path between sense and understanding, but I could see why it had come on.

The cave opened up into the side of the mountain like a belly button. The skin of the hillside was smooth and flat behind it, occasionally spotted by boulders, but with no gullies, no channels to cut through behind the cave’s throat. It opened up right into the heart, or bowels, of the mountain. There was no way light should be filtering into the other end of the tunnel, not unless it was being reflected, or descending through a hole in its ceiling.

That’s what I mean by making sense of the situation: I was clueless, knew it, and was getting closer to a migraine by the second. Sense wasn’t enough to cure what ailed me. Understanding was at the point of light in the cave’s throat. I leaned forward, took a deep breath, felt the cool ancient peace work on my headache like medicine, and disappeared into the ground.

#

Marshal and I never shared much in the way of interests. That summer, while I explored my cave, he sat on the couch playing Madden. We excelled in different areas at school, he in history and current world problems, me in geology. We played different sports; he liked them all except badminton, and I liked badminton. I think it was the silent N that did it for me.

Despite all that, our circles of friends overlapped almost completely. It was kind of hard for them not to, in a school the size of ours where even I could be the second ranked birdhound, but it’s still worth noting that when we went out to hang with friends, we almost always went together. 

After a month or so of spending my days on the far side of the cave, the carnival came to town. For three nights, we didn’t do much more than dine on elephant ears and puke up our guts after long runs on The Zipper. 

If there was one common point between Marshal’s friends and mine it was Carlotta Hernandez. She was at the center of the overlapping rings, the star which we all orbited. That metaphor works especially well for me, because the girl had gravity. Not like mass — though she called herself a “chub” all the time, for no good reason I could ever see — but that she drew intangible things like attention, admiration, and lust to her without effort, by some dint of the natural world. 

That summer, a lot of my friends were out of town. They were visiting one half of their parents or the other, counseling at camp, working on their grandpa’s farm, that sort of thing. Not Carlotta, though; she had two babies to take care of — a cousin and a sister — not to mention the other, older children, and a house to help keep clean and stocked while her parents worked. The carnival was her chance to relax, to let loose, to get the smell of baby poop off her hands and replace it with the stink of sweat, old candy, and beer.

On the last night of the carnival, there were about a dozen of us altogether. It was getting close to midnight, and the barkers were putting out flags in the lines to mark when the ride would shut down. A few of us were waiting for The Zipper; I wasn’t going to ride, but I stood in line to bullshit with Carlotta and a couple of others, including Marshal. The barker dropped the flag right in front of us and shrugged as an apology.

As soon as the barker turned his back, Marshal picked up the cloth flag and threw it over his shoulder. It landed further back in the line, where someone else picked it up. A flash of white fabric, like a gull catching bread in midair, and the flag was gone again. 

“He’s gonna remember what you look like,” I said. 

“Screw him. This is the last chance for me ‘n Carly.” All weekend long, Carlotta had been promising to ride The Zipper with him, only to chicken out every time it was her turn. Even then, more than fifteen minutes back in the line with a dozen people in front of us, her eyes were wide with apprehension. She kept tilting her head back to watch the ride as it spun and bucked.

If you’ve never ridden The Zipper, here’s what you’re missing: Imagine a chainsaw. The chain whips around the long, narrow blade. Pretend that there are tiny people nestled in every tooth of the chain. Now start those teeth spinning as if they were themselves little buzz-saws. Pretty bad, huh? And that’s not even considering that the whole contraption is flipping end over end, as if being juggled.

I couldn’t blame Carlotta for being nervous, especially since the rotation of the two-person cabins was entirely dependent on the sadism or masochism of its occupants, who could shift their weight forward and back to send the little metal box whirring like a pinwheel. Marshal wasn’t one to much mind throwing his weight around.

The closer we got to the front of the line, the harder she gripped Marshal’s hand, and the louder she laughed at everyone’s jokes. She had a shrill laugh, a banshee sort of keening, which I only just caught myself from mentioning to her. It wasn’t very pleasant, to be honest; easy, sure, but not very nice. 

It was almost a relief when they reached the entrance gate. The barker eyed them suspiciously, but didn’t bust them, even though Marshal gave him a big ol’ toothy grin.

“In you go,” the barker said in a voice with so little enthusiasm it made me wonder if he had ever had any. He yanked open the green metal grille that held the passengers in their coffin-sized cabin during the ride. The hinges made a sound like nails on a chalkboard only wish they could.

“I dunno,” said Carlotta.

“Come on,” said Marshal. “We’re the last ones. He’s tired. He’ll go easy.”

“Get in or clear out,” said the barker. “I’ve got to close up.”

At those words, the rest of the group behind us kind of disintegrated. The line stretching behind us snapped in a dozen places, coalescing again in as many pockets, thin conversations running like at the end of a long party.

I was about to offer Carlotta a word of encouragement — her young cousins and nieces and nephews would hold her in reverence when she told them about braving The Mighty Zipper — when she shook out her long hair, as if clearing out cobwebs, and punched Marshal in the upper arm. “You throw us around and I’ll kill you,” she said.

Once they were seated, the barker slammed the grille shut and pinned it in place with a bent piece of steel no larger than my thumb. That was the only part that made me nervous.

The other cabins were empty. As the machine ground into life I saw Carlotta sniff her hand, which had been gripping the oh-shit bar, and make a face. Metal and old vomit and sweat. I smelled it, too, or thought I could.

Then they were off, and I realized I was all alone, the leftovers from the line vanished from behind me and the barker, one hand on the machine’s simple controls, with his back to me.

I backed away, found a low metal railing to lean against and watched Carlotta and Marshal go around as best I could. It wasn’t easy; the old beast could still hit a pretty good clip, and all those wheels within wheels made it hard to keep my focus. I could hear them, though. Carlotta, anyway. Her high, thin laugh seemed to come from everywhere, so much like a scream that a few other carnival stragglers shot glances over their shoulders in her direction.

Even I, as accustomed to Carlotta’s laughter as I was, had trouble marking the cutoff between mirth and abject terror, especially when Marshal started their cabin rocking, then flipping end-over-end.

The banshee howl formed words, briefly: “Marshal, stop!” He didn’t.

After a few minutes, the barker brought the ride to a halt. The cabin’s hinges protested twice more, open and closed, and then Marshal and Carlotta were staggering toward me. Marshal had his arm around her neck. Neither could stop giggling, building off of each other, until Carlotta capped it off with one last, delighted screech, which brought the night to a close.

#

The first time I passed through the cave, it spit me out on the other side of the mountain.   It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, but I was all right once I recognized the foothills in the distance, the long cut off of the forest service road in the ridge to my left, and the stream in the valley below. I had entered the mountain on one side, crawled for twenty feet, and come out half a mile further. 

The first thing I did was spin on my heels and check on the cave from this side. Okay, that’s not quite true; the very first thing I did was enjoy the soft heat of the sun on the skin of my arms, but that was only for a fraction of a second. Bending down, I peered into the cave’s mouth.

There was nothing there. No, again I’m misspeaking. If there had been nothing, I would have been all right. What there was was dirt, and rock: a dead end that made the hole a small burrow instead of the entrance to a cave. 

For a panicked moment, I clawed at the dirt, but didn’t make an inch of progress. I had to face it; there was no cave. I calmed down once I remembered that I wasn’t far from home, and that I had been here — or nearby — dozens of times before. It was just that usually I had hiked the intervening distance. 

I was late getting home that day. Mom gave me the silent treatment for not being there to set the table, like I was supposed to. I only wish Marshal had followed her example.

The next day, I couldn’t wait to get back up onto the mountain, to find my cave and study it. I brought a notebook and a pen with me, and scribbled some thoughts that I’m sure, at the time, seemed relevant and profound. Then I crawled through again, the light at the end of the cave drawing me forward twenty-odd feet on my hands and knees.

This time, when I climbed to my feet on the other side I was dead lost. Nothing looked familiar. A steep bluff shot up to my left, and a thick stand of firs huddled in close in every other direction. I checked, just in case, but the cave’s mouth had sealed up again. No going back that way.

It took me most of the afternoon to get to the top of the bluff, picking my way up the side like a young mountain goat, unsure on its feet. Once I had gained the high ground, I was pretty much home free. There was my mountain, a couple miles in the distance, and the forest service road ran just a hundred feet past where I stood. I followed the road back home, but this time it was after dark before I made it in the front door. Mom wasn’t happy, and grounded me for the rest of the week. Marshal was ecstatic. I smelled beer on his breath.

When I was allowed out of the house again, I couldn’t help but plan another trip to my cave. This time, though, I was cautious, in case the cave spit me out even further from home. I packed a backpack with water, food, a compass, and a lighter. I took off early in the morning, hiked to my cave, and dove right in. 

This time, upon exiting, I was struck by a sense of familiarity, rather than the usual disorientation. I was at the top of a mountain; the cave had opened for me between a pair of granite boulders just below the summit. Sweet, cool wind brushed past me, in a hurry to go nowhere special. I scrambled to the top of one of the boulders and looked down.

There was my house, down at the base. Marshal was mowing the lawn. I could see him, but not clearly; he moved like a blob of mercury, sliding across the grass as one cohesive, unchanging shape. 

No point in wasting good preparation, I figured, so I turned around to look over the valley behind the mountain, planted myself in the lee of the stone, and busted out the food and water I had packed. In the silence, I thought maybe I ought to be terrified, in the same absent way that remembering a near-collision makes your mind race, but not your heart. There was no explanation for the cave’s behavior. I’ve never been one to get scared of the unknown, but jumping into it with no tether ought to at least have creeped me out a bit.

There was a big distance between knowing I should be scared and feeling it. Instead, I felt strong, accomplished, as if I were a subscriber to the ends justifying the means and it had turned out the universe was, too. I sat there, watching cloud shadows make two-dimensional shapes on the rocks, at peace. I guess partly because I hadn’t had to hike much at all, and so wasn’t tired out. Still, it’s one of the first moments that comes to mind whenever someone tells me to relax. 

As the sun dipped lower, I headed for home. It occurred to me, on the way down, that playing with my cave was the riskiest thing I had ever done, and, for no reason I could put to words just then, that made me very sad.

#

By the time the carnival season ended, mom had stopped caring when I stayed out so late on my hikes. I don’t think it was for any reason having to do with me, exactly; it was that Marshal had started staying out later and later with Carlotta, and mom figured if she wasn’t going to rag on Marshal, she couldn’t very well pick on me. That suited me fine. I spent less and less time around our few friends, and more time exploring. As if to quell even those small tremors of fear I had felt on the mountaintop, the cave never sent me further than a few miles from home. The furthest was ten, by my guess. 

Not that I was trying to turn into a recluse, of course. You know how habits start? Because they’re the easy thing to do. You don’t form a habit of difficult tasks; maybe you repeat them, consciously, until they become easy, but they don’t turn into habits until there’s so little resistance from your body that they go automatic. That’s how it was with the cave. It was so easy to slip into the ground, to come up someplace far away, to own all the sunlight, breeze, and birdsong for miles around.

I only realized that hiking had become a habit when Carlotta invited me to her birthday party, and I almost made an excuse to miss it. It was her sixteenth; I couldn’t just bow out. I said I would be there, and she sounded so pleased I didn’t want to hang up. We chatted for a while longer. Marshal was still asleep from the night before. We didn’t talk about him. Instead, we fell into the topic of her family and stayed there. Her youngest cousin, Jacob, was a precocious little thing of three, so she told me stories about him while I made a sandwich and a glass of milk and carried them out to the back porch.

Jacob had taught himself to tie a half-hitch. Jacob had said a bad word with such perfect timing Carlotta couldn’t help but laugh. Jacob had detuned their little upright piano so it sounded as if it were underwater. 

By the time my sandwich was gone, we were on to how Jacob had asked Carlotta what had happened to his mother, and Carlotta hadn’t been able to answer with anything like the truth, and how she could see so much of his father in him, and how scared that made her. I hadn’t known the dad — he had been four grades ahead of us in school — but I knew his reputation.

There was a long silence after her fear was out in the open. She was the one to break it. “I hate how I always tell you my problems.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, I mean I hate that you don’t tell me yours. It’s… weird, I guess. Like you’re not really a person.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We said our goodbyes, I said I was sorry, and that I would see her at her party. “I’m glad,” she said, but that was it.

#

Summer wound to a close. Our friends started reappearing in town, back from their summer jobs and vacations, each one of a them a little bit changed from the time and distance. I heard about them mostly through Marshal. “Damn! Trina lost her baby fat at the beach. Marty’s spending all his time on the phone with some chick he met in New York. Bree’s a stuck-up bitch, now, since her dad spoiled her the whole summer upstate.”

I was too far gone by then, too caught up in my habit. In the last week before school started up again, I spent almost every waking moment up in the mountains, sometimes leaving home before the sun was up and not coming back in until the moon was high or setting.

That Friday — the last weekday of freedom, thirteen days before Carlotta’s party — was the end of a week of light days. On Thursday, the cave cave sent me an easy six miles out, along the floor of the valley. I followed a stream back, enjoying the lively sound of clean water over sparkling stones. My reflection caught my attention now and again. I couldn’t help feeling a bit like Marshal must have on a good day, in the best shape of my life, slim and balanced. Not much muscle on my frame, not so you could see, but plenty on the inside. Strong heart and lungs. 

By the time I reached the back side of my mountain, I was full enough of pride to float right to the top. It was a strange sensation, impossible to reproduce in any other way. The confidence that my body could handle whatever hit it. Sun, time, distance, whatever. 

I got home well before dinner, and took a shower. Marshal was in the living room, playing a video game, so I borrowed some of his free weights and then gave Carlotta a call to see what she was up to that evening. Busy with kids, it turned out, but I went to bed happy anyway.

Friday promised to be another lovely day of hiking, with a high sun shining through thin clouds, dappling the world like a careless painter. Reaching the easy slope at the base of the mountain, I pushed into the thin path I had stamped into the underbrush over my many trips. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a voice say: “Ow!” followed by a quick gasp, which didn’t seem to last long enough to have been of pain. It was lower-pitched, more like a breath. It had come from nearby, off to my right, somewhere in the wild juniper bushes. 

I held my own breath and tiptoed off the path. Thin, dry brambles whipped my bare arms, stinging. They must have cut more deeply than I thought, but I didn’t notice that until after. Right then, I just tried to ignore the itches they left behind so I could concentrate on moving quietly. 

Ten feet in, the vegetation was thick enough to conceal pretty much everything of the world beyond, but a bit short, so it only did so from my chest down. The voice had become two voices, each exhaling rapidly, but neither seeming to pause long enough to breathe in. They were nearby, but I couldn’t guess how close. I froze, because I sure as hell didn’t want to stumble right into the two of them. 

I heard Marshal’s voice say: “Yeah,” like victory. That’s when I turned and crashed back to the path. I didn’t care if they heard me. 

You know how, when you go indoors after a day spent under the brightest sun, your house seems dim and full of pockets of the dullest shades of red and blue? That’s how I saw the path ahead of me as I slouched ahead, up the first easy slope of the mountain. I doubt the world itself was any dimmer, but the embarrassed blood and the angry blood mixed behind my eyes, darkening everything by increasing degrees. 

Before I knew it, I was standing hang-dog in front of the cave. Suddenly, I felt too hot in my skin. I shrugged my pack off, unable to stand its weight for a moment longer. I slid headfirst into the welcoming dark and the cool, dead air. Something smelled like rain. The far end of the cave seemed to float like a promise, which only time or distance keeps from being fulfilled.

I pulled myself to the surface, taking a moment to catch my breath before checking my surroundings. My backpack lay on the ground right in front of me, collapsed and shapeless. I turned around. The cave’s mouth remained open. All it had done was turn me around. Some of the sick energy had lifted out of me, maybe leeched into the guts of the mountain. I sat with my legs crossed, my face into the wind.

That’s when I noticed that my arms had been cut by the undergrowth, and some time in between then and now I had pressed them against my shirt. Cross-hatched lines of blood stained my white T-shirt, overlapping like the teeth of a zipper.

#

On the morning of her birthday, Carlotta called around to cancel the party. She wasn’t feeling well, she said, and didn’t want to have a bunch of people over. We had spent hours at her house the day before, putting up decorations. By “we,” I mean “I.” Marshal was there to start with, but as soon as the scissors, tape, and glue came out, he was off to the convenience store to buy a pop. It took him hours to choose a flavor, I guess.

So, when Carlotta called it off, I offered to come and undecorate for her. Her entire family was out of town, visiting yet more relatives. Carlotta had volunteered to stay behind and sit the house. If I knew her family like I thought I did, they probably wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to tell her no parties, what with trying to shuffle all the various children into the minivan. Still, they wouldn’t appreciate coming back to a house full of streamers and balloons. With a trace of reluctance that even I picked up on, Carlotta agreed to let me help. 

I biked down the hill into town, getting a little sweaty in the process. At the time, I still believed a healthy musk held some sort of attractive power over the opposite sex, some sort of gravity I could harness. She answered the door in her pajama-bottoms, a gray sweatshirt, and big pink slippers. I hate to say it, but she looked awful. Her hair looked brittle, cracked at weird angles, and with no makeup her face looked as if it had lost all its depth and weight. 

“Where can I start?” I asked. 

“Whatever,” she said with the ghost of a smile. I could smell vomit on her breath. Hugging herself, she went into the living room. It was as clean as I had ever seen it, thanks to our efforts the day before. All the kids’ toys sorted and put into drawers, the carpet vacuumed, the dozens of family pictures dusted. There were still spots, origin unknown, staining the floor around the couch and coffee table, and the whole place smelled faintly of sulphur, but it might as well have been immaculate. Compared to how it usually was, it felt like another world, and not a bad one. 

Carlotta curled herself up on the couch, her face half-buried in a pillow, while I hauled a chair in from the dining room. I climbed up and started pulling out the pushpins that held the streamers in place. Point-by-point, they came loose and dangled limply, some held in place by more pins down the line. 

“Sorry you don’t get to have your party,” I said. “That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“I was looking forward to it.”

Pretty soon, a curtain of multicolored crepe paper hung between Carlotta and me. I kept on talking about nothing much, which was more than she had to say. In a long moment of silence, I considered bringing up some of my problems, like real people do, but they all started with Marshal. Instead, I talked about things we would both remember. That time when Mr. Beeheimer caught us gluing bugs to our desks. Or the year I sat behind her in English and we passed notes using our feet. Hiding from bullies inside the big tires at recess. The middle-school dance when I asked her for the last one, and she said all right because Marshal was out sneaking a cigarette. 

I retrieved the last few pushpins. The streamers slipped to the floor, puddling on the carpet. Carlotta was looking at me. I tried to read the expression in her eyes, but without something on her face to bolster it I couldn’t even begin to guess. Suddenly self-conscious, I fidgeted with the pins I had slipped into my pocket.

“This is one of those times,” she said. 

“Which times?”

Instead of answering, she sniffed loudly. I could hear junk in her sinuses. Stepping down off the chair, I set about gathering up the streamers. “You want to save them?” I asked.

Carlotta shook her head. 

When my back was to her, as I bent, wrapping my fingers in strips of every color, she said: “I should have gone with you,” as if she were second-guessed the answer she had picked on a quiz. It made me smile and shut up.

#

Call me oblivious, but I didn’t figure out Carlotta was pregnant until the second week of school. She and I weren’t in any classes together that semester, so I picked up on it through our circle of friends. I’ve got to stop putting myself in a good light like that; when I say I “picked up on it,” I mean that Dominic sat down at the table where we were eating lunch — Marshal, me, and a couple others — and said:

“Carly’s keeping it, man.”

“No, she ain’t,” Marshal snapped back, with no hesitation.

Dominic raised his hands. “Just what I heard from Heather. Shit, it’s not like they’ll notice around her house.”

“It ain’t even been a month,” said Marshal. “She’s faking.”

“Puked her guts up first period,” offered one of the other boys, in a so-what voice.

“Yeah, ‘cause she been sick!” Half of it came out in a squeak, Marshal’s voice cracking as his frustration climbed. It vanished too quickly into the other shouts and laughter of the lunch room. Silence should have descended. People would have paid attention. Instead, Dominic and the other boys just shrugged and set back to their food. “God,” said Marshal, exasperated. That’s what pushed me over the edge, that he had the audacity to be annoyed.

I leaned over the table and slapped him, open-palm, across the cheek. My finger nails caught above his lip, two of them leaving red, stick-thin lines. Startled, he pushed backward from the bench, landing on his tailbone. He had had a fork in his hand when I hit him, and had held onto it as he fell. With a snarl, he threw it overhand at my head. I twisted out of the way, but not fast enough. It must have been the tines that connected, because afterward I found two bloody streaks just beside my nose.

I launched myself right over the table, slipping on Marshal’s lunch tray, but at least hitting the floor right side up. By then, Marshal was on his feet. We didn’t circle, didn’t size each other up. There was no grace between us, not even the beautiful, animal ferocity that some folks show in a good, noble fight. We just fell on each other, swinging, kicking, biting, and none of it worth remembering beyond that he bruised my left eye, and I gave him a hell of a shiner on his right.

A varsity linebacker pulled us apart. “What the fuck? What the fuck!” Marshal kept repeating as we were separated. It started off as a question, but I don’t think that’s how it ended up. It sounded more as if he were trying to get the words to come out strong enough that he could beat me with them. I didn’t say anything. 

The vice principal suspended us both for a week, but decided that, rather than send us both home, he would keep Marshal on in-house detention, and let mom deal with me. He called her in. While we waited, the school nurse checked us out for sprains. My anger ran low, then died. I apologized, quietly, to the vice principal. My mouth almost kept going, almost said: “Sorry,” to Marshal, but I caught myself in time.

Mom had some words for me on the drive home. “How could you? He’s your brother.” But he hadn’t been my brother for a long time, not since dad died. Mom kept us together, confined us all in the same house, as if place could make family. Maybe it could, like with Carlotta and the dozen people that called themselves her family. I didn’t want to take the chance. Mom was the force that kept us together; it would have to be another that drove us apart.

#

Four days into my suspension, while mom was at work and Marshal was at school, I gave Carlotta’s house a call. One of her nieces answered, and told me that Carlotta was out shopping, but she’d call me back when she got home. I heard Carlotta’s voice, wordless, in amongst the background hiss, and then a loud crackling as the phone changed hands.

“Hello?” 

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Okay, today.” She sounded cautious. 

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” Casting the word out like a grapnel. It landed, but shakily.

“It’s all right.”

“And see if you had the time to listen to a problem I’m having.”

“I don’t have time–”

“I know it’s Marshal’s baby,” I said, trying to also make it sound as if I didn’t care that it was Marshal’s baby. “He bragged about it,” I lied. “And he’s the problem.” Silence on the other end of the line. “Can you come up?”

“Yeah, okay,” said Carlotta. It came out as a sigh. “Mom left me the car.”

She took her time, showing up forty minutes later, made-up and wearing her favorite jeans. I gave her a hug, which she returned, lightly. 

“Want to go for a walk?” 

“Okay,” she said. 

I took her along the path I had blazed all through that summer. We exchanged only a few words as we walked. I led the way, so I couldn’t see her face, but I thought — or imagined — I could hear her steps getting lighter the further up the mountain we went. 

I stopped just beside the sprig of forsythia I had planted as a marker, only a few feet away from my cave, and turned to look out over the town. Carlotta pulled up beside me, breathing hard. 

“You’re out of shape,” I teased. She punched me in the upper arm. 

We sat down on a granite shelf and breathed easily. The air was only a little colder and thinner there, but it was enough to notice. I took a long moment to order my thoughts.

“Don’t,” said Carlotta, as if she had been watching the gears in my head tick, though she had barely looked at me since we stopped climbing.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I want to share a secret with you.”

“I know you hate Marshal.”

“Yeah, that’s not a secret. Gimme a bit of credit.”

“So, what is it?”

“No, I have to show it to you. It’s a place.” I got to my feet and held out a hand to help her up. Then I led her past the bush and up to the cave’s mouth. “Through there,” I said.

“Gross.”

“It’s not very far. If you look in, you can see the light on the other side.”

She bent at the waist and peered in, like I said. “It’s straight down,” she said.

“Just an optical illusion. It’s actually pretty flat, and most of it’s rock. And on the other side, well–” I finished with a shrug and got down on my hands-and-knees. 

“That’s all right,” she said, taking a step back. 

“Sure,” I said. “You trust Marshal on The Zipper, but you don’t trust me enough to go twenty feet into a cave?” I made it sound as if my feelings were hurt, just as a joke, but I think she took it seriously. Muttering a weightless complaint, she crouched and moved like a spider behind me, hands and feet splayed out, into the hole. 

A few feet into the darkness, she giggled. “Like hiding in the big tires at recess,” she said. Her voice sounded as if her lips were right against my ear. A shiver ran up my spine. We kept going. 

“I wanna be that old again,” I said, and maybe she didn’t hear me. We were at the far side. I grabbed thick stand of cheat grass at the roots and pulled myself out into the spotty sunlight. The place I stood up in was unfamiliar, but a recognized a couple of the peaks nearby. Not far from home. A couple ridgelines at most.

I turned around to help Carlotta out and came face to face with a bare wall of rock. The cave was gone, had maybe disappeared the moment I left it. In the space of a single beat, my heart went to a dead run, pumping quick blood that burned against my suddenly frozen skin. “Carlotta?” I half-yelled, then gave it all up. “Carlotta!” I pounded on the rock, but only managed to cut holes in my fists. 

I knew better than to think the cave was still open behind the rock; it just took me a moment to realize. When I did, I scrambled up the hillside as fast as I could. It was a deceptive slope; I counted three false summits before I made it to the actual top. Breathless, I turned in circles. The nearest peak was more than a mile away. I must have gone around six or seven times before my darting eyes caught the shape of another person outlined at the top of the ridge nearest the town.

It was Carlotta, I was sure. The cave hadn’t sent her far, maybe hadn’t sent her anywhere at all.

“Are you OK?” I screamed, but the wind was against me, catching my words and force-feeding them back to me. I coughed, my throat suddenly bone-dry. In the space of an eye-blink she disappeared over the lip of the summit, the clarity of her motion swallowed by the thickness of the air, the waves of heat falling between us.

I started out at a dead run; I had to catch her, to explain what I could to her. But what had happened? What could I say? I slowed to catch my breath, and the realization hit me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me.

I took the rest of the hike home at an easier pace; head down, sure, and not looking up much from my feet, but unhurried.

When I finally made it home, the driveway was empty. It was after five o’clock; school was out, and mom should have been home from work. The house welcomed me with a puff of cold air as I opened the door.

Inside, I thought about giving Carlotta a call. As I reached for the phone, I saw that the message light was blinking on the answering machine. I pressed the play button.”

“Honey.” It was mom. “We’re at the emergency room. Marshal has appendicitis, and they think they’re going to have to operate.” She was just letting me know where they were, not asking me to come. Without thinking much about it, except to remember to lock the door behind me, I got on my bike and started down the hill.

I pedaled slowly at first, letting the revolutions of my legs drive the engine of my thoughts. They started with the times I had spent in the hospital when dad was dying. I turned down the slope into town, picking up speed. Dad had apologized to all of us, for whatever he could set his mind on at the time. The spokes on my wheels blurred to invisible. For the week after he died, we were like the center of a star, Marshal, mom, and me. Held together by a force much older than all of us added up. I kept my feet going steady, even as the slope lessened and flattened out; my thighs burned. I thought that maybe if I hit a bump in the road, I’d fly out into orbit, or past, maybe escaping the Earth altogether.

#

Marshal was already out of surgery when I got to the hospital. I asked for his room number at the nurse’s station, but didn’t really need to because mom was sitting on a bench outside his door. Her head was in her hands, and one foot bounced restlessly against the dirty tile floor. I gave her a hug almost before she realized I was there. 

“He okay?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “Bad infection.” 

“Can I go in?” 

She nodded, the same rate as her juggling foot, for just a moment. 

Marshal’s eyes were closed when I slipped inside, and the lights were off. A sliver of orange from a streetlamp outside slipped in between the room’s hanging blinds like a dagger through a ribcage. He still had his black eye, and I still had mine. I stood beside his bed for a long moment, with nothing at all on my mind. I think everything like intention had fled my mind the moment when I had turned and saw only the rock wall behind me instead of Carlotta. Since then, I had been operating by paths of least resistance, inventing reason after the fact, when imagination could win out fully.

Marshal opened his eyes long enough to turn them away from me. I sat down in an uncomfortable chair by his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, letting the words hang alone until even I started to think it was all I had to say. I had traveled so many miles, gone such a distance. Even though I ended up right back at home, I was so far away in another sense that the only force capable of acting on my body was my body itself, and the mind inside. Not mom’s desperate gravity, not Carlotta’s starlight, not the vacuum that dad had left behind. But which way should I propel myself? I took a deep breath.

“I told mom you didn’t cry when dad died.”

Marshal puffed out through his nose, scornful. “I showed her where you keep your porn.”

This was it. “I told everyone the last time you wet your bed.”

“I wish I hadn’t pulled you out of the creek, that time you were eight.”

“I laugh when you get tackled at practice.”

“I know you’ve had a crush on Carlotta since Kindergarten.”

We went on like that, back-and-forth with all the ammunition we had, heavy and light. At some point, the streetlamp burned out, and all that was left was our voices, separated by a gulf of nothingness, rumbling at each other like cannon-fire.