Issue 12 – Fiction

I was six when I learned that life wasn’t the fairytale people made it out to be, but a minefield of hidden sink­holes. The more you carried, the higher the risk of falling in.
I slipped my naked Barbie into a toilet-paper gown and squiggled a bowtie with a Sharpie on a lighter named, “Prince Bic.” The family of bottle caps sat in rows on the groom’s side, the prescription vials on the bride’s, and President Obama served as pastor in the center—a newspaper cut-out I taped to the wall. There was a perfect spot where the smears in the floral wall­paper crossed like my own crucifix and stained glass window. My fa­vorite book rested beneath—the bi­ble for the ceremony.
After the newlyweds shared a kiss, they flew off in a car­riage to a glass palace to live happily ever after. It was my fa­vorite scene from my favorite book. Except my carriage was a broken heel and my palace was a tower of plastic vodka bottles. That was the beauty of pretend. If I submerged into the fiction deep enough, I could even blur the meaty slaps and heated groans vibrating at the bathroom door.
That is . . . until the doorknob jiggled, and it all shattered like a glass rose.
I snatched Bic and Barbie, scrambled to our mattress, and slid under the covers, flat on my stomach. It was my stop, drop, and roll. I peeked through a snag in the blanket as the rusty brass time bomb twisted around.

Ma staggered out first. Imagine drowned road kill. Her fried blonde hair had dampened, the ends knotted and dripping. Her hot-red lipstick had smudged on to her hol­low cheeks like the remnants of a bad nosebleed. Her grey T-shirt—and only piece of clothing—was stained between the breasts, blackened by sweat. She leaned against the door­frame and flipped through some crumpled cash, a panty dan­gling from her pinky. This was Ma’s version of a yard sale. Bruised bony legs and a deflated ass for a couple bucks each. Everything used of course.
I knew the man stepped out when the musty stench of rotted onions pricked the inside of my nose. I blocked the snag with my palm and hunkered down. I figured that one of Ma’s visitors could be my dad, and if so, I’d rather not see. There was no avoiding the sounds though. I knew those by heart. The jingle of a belt buckle. A zip at the crotch. The mindless bickering that would end in a door slam.
“No tip?” Ma asked, trying a seductive tone through her cracked sandy voice.
“Look at you,” he said. “Someone should tip me.”
“Asshole.”
“I’m an asshole that can go somewhere else too.”
“You know I’m just playin’, baby.” She tried her schoolgirl voice this time. “I’ll see you next week?” The door slammed shut and his boots thudded down the hall. In truth, I hoped he would come back. We might not eat otherwise.
I poked my head out to Ma stampeding around the apart­ment—the usual after she got some cash. She went from hopping on one foot as she tugged on sweatpants, to shuf­fling through a mound of lingerie for keys, to swatting emp­ty beer cans and bottles in search of a single cigarette. My stomach pricked.
“Momma?”
“Oh hey, baby,” she said without looking over. She plucked a half-singed cigarette off the floor, her eyes glistening as if she’d found a cure for her despair. She blew over it twice for dust, and then pinched the butt between her lips.
“I’m hungry,” I said. I crawled out with Barbie and Bic, one in each hand.
“Well, Momma’s hungry too.” She dropped on all fours, her cheek squished against the hardwood as she plunged arm-deep under the fridge, under the armchair, behind the toilet bowl. “Where the hell is it?” Then I realized; she needed something else for that smoke. My fingers tightened around Prince Bic as I drifted him stealthily behind my back.
“Are you gonna get some breakfast?” I asked.
“Lila, can you just shut up for a sec? I’ll get something.”
She stomped into a pair of black fuzzy slippers and tugged the front door open. I thought I was in the clear. That she was going to leave and come back with some pancakes may­be. Then midway out the door, she stopped, like some reve­lation had poured out of the ceiling and over her head. Her eyes curled back around and drilled into mine.
“What do you have behind your back?” she asked. My chin sank. Her slippers strutted forward until they settled at my toes. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you.”
“N–Nothing,” I stuttered. Her long pink fingernails clamped into my arm, so I winced. She bent over, her face so close to mine that I smelled the rotted onion seeping out of her breath.
“Liar,” she said. Her hand yanked forward so hard that Prince Bic tumbled out of my palm and on to the floor. When he slid to a stop at her feet, all I could think was, I’m doomed. I didn’t need to look up to feel Ma’s pulverizing glare. I crumbled just the same.
“I’m sorry!” I blurted out, my head still tucked into my body. “But that’s Prince Bic, and–and him and Barbie just got married”—I pointed to the wedding—“and so, they’re supposed to go on their honeymoon now!” I rambled so fast that I didn’t even notice Ma’s hand rise—WHACK! Her palm against my cheek sounded like a snapping branch. My head whipped to the side. I dropped Barbie so my hands could shield up for cover. My cheek burned like a nest of fire ants was gnawing away at it.
Ma swiped Bic off the floor and held him at my face as she scolded. “I’m dyin’ here, tryin’ to have a drag, and you’re hiding my lighter for some bullshit!?” I stood hunched, head down, tears cascading from my drenched eyes. She whipped around and stormed towards the wedding. “Get these stupid ideas out of that retarded little head of yours. You hear me?” Her slippers kicked the wedding guests across the floor. She picked up my book and flung it, the pages flapping through the air. I tried to hold it in, but tears leaked anyway.
I usually liked the quiet that came when Ma left. But that day, after the door slammed behind her, I huddled in bed with Barbie and we cried together. It was the last time we saw Prince Bic.
The deadbolt unclasped in the middle of the night. I scur­ried to our only lamp and flicked it on, hoping it was time to eat. Ma wobbled in like an infant learning to walk. She was empty-handed, her palms sliding against the wall, sup­porting her body as she lugged her feet across the room. Her knees dropped into the mattress. Her face followed, headfirst into the covers. I noticed a white bandage wrapped around her elbow. That was where the food went.
“Momma, did you bring anything?”
“Oh, hey baby.” She smiled with glossy half-sunken eyes. They looked like they were floating somewhere off in the distant universe.
“My tummy feels like it’s dying.”
Ma sighed and flopped over on to her back. Then, with her eyes still closed, she spoke with a voice lighter than she ever used before. So gentle that it felt genuine. “Sorry, baby…but sometimes, you gotta just let things die.” I just stood there for a few seconds afterwards, wondering, Did she mean me? 
My stomach stung like it was digesting daggers. I searched her things, digging through her pockets, but there was noth­ing. No food. No money. I needed to eat. I had to. So I picked up Barbie, wedged my book into my armpit, and tiptoed over to the front door.
“Don’t you ever go outside without me,” Ma scolded once. “There’s bad people out there,” she said. There were bad peo­ple here, too, I decided.
I dragged a stool over, stepped up to unlock the deadbolt, and twisted the knob. It was my first time leaving without Ma, but I wasn’t scared. I was too hungry to be. I climbed down three flights of creaky stairs until my feet soaked from the cold, wet concrete. It had just stopped raining. I spotted a police car half a block away. Ma didn’t like them, but I knew they were supposed to help. So I ran, Barbie and book clutched tight, my head swiveling back and forth to make sure she wasn’t following. The officer saw me right away.
“Hey there,” he said. “What’re you doing out this late?” He scanned the area, probably searching for my parents. I pointed to my building, still panting.
“My Momma”–I paused for another deep breath–“She wants to let me die.”
Over the next month, I heard these words as I moved around: abuse as grounds, termination of parental rights, no next of kin, ward of the state. All in that order, which led me to Brimmer and May Orphanage for Girls, where I lived until right after my tenth birthday. By that time, I was con­sidered by eight sets of parents, actually considered by three, and not even looked at by over a hundred. But at least I had three meals a day.
I sat on my bed at the orphanage, my nose stuck into the newly released sequel of my favorite book, whispering along as I read the last lines, “And the queen rested beside her king, as they held their beautiful newborn princess, gazing into each other’s eyes. This was what they were meant for. This was the greatest gift given—to cherish, to care, to love.” I eased the book shut and sighed out the butterflies. If I left Ma earlier, Barbie and Prince Bic would’ve had a baby by now, I thought.
Then, like stepping on broken glass at the beach, the door creaked open. Miss Rita, our afroed caretaker, wobbled her hot air balloon body down the aisle of bunks. She had the sacred clipboard in hand, which meant that every girl in the room would prop up and gaze with sparkling hopeful eyes, waiting for her to announce the lottery winners.
“The O’Connells will be here in two hours,” she said. “Af­ter their visit last week, they want to meet with”—I could hear the drum roll in my head—“Shannon, Emily, Immogen, and . . . Lila.” With each name called, the winners sprung up as the rest of the girls slumped back into misery. Shannon performed an electrified running-in-place. Emily wiggled her hips in a dance. Immogen gave a subtle grin, although we all knew the mischievous plans scuttling through her mind. I stayed seated, my book in my lap, Barbie beside me.
I didn’t know this until I lived it, but when prospective parents came to an orphanage, the whole place transformed into a mudslinging Miss Universe pageant with claws. The difference was that we didn’t compete for status or a crown. We competed for a life.
“Miss Rita,” I called, raising my hand. “I’m going to pass this time.”
She and everyone else gawked like I’d been stripped of all sanity. “Are you sure?” she asked. “They were a sweet couple.”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, it’s up to you, of course.” Miss Rita scratched her pen over my name on the clipboard. When she left the room, Shannon, Emily, and Immogen shoved through the other girls and charged over. They cornered me. A pretty pack of pit bulls.
“What do you know?” Immogen interrogated.
“Did you see bruises on the wife or something?” Emily snipped.
“Maybe she googled them,” added Shannon. “Did you google them?”
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing. I just didn’t really like them.”
“What’s not to like?” asked Emily. “They drove a Benz.”
“I don’t care about that stuff,” I said. I looked down at Barbie to avoid eye contact. The girls had made fun of the toilet paper gown, so she wore a schoolgirl uniform now, one I made out of paper and colored with crayons. The only prob­lem was that her right leg was missing.
“Forget it,” said Immogen. “Let’s go. We all know she’s stupid. Her druggy mom didn’t let her go to school, remem­ber?” The girls nodded in agreement like it all made sense now.
I felt a twinge in my chest. It hurt when I thought about Ma.
I waited thirty minutes before I crept into the bathroom and found Immogen where I knew she’d be—in front of the mirror. She was one of the few girls already proficient in makeup. That was her thing, like others prepared a song or sewed bows on to their favorite dresses.
“Want me to do yours?” she taunted when she noticed me in the reflection.
“Not after what you did to Beth,” I said.
“Come on,” she laughed. “She’s only been here a couple weeks. It wouldn’t be fair if she got picked already.” She pow­dered her forehead. “So are you going to use the bathroom, or just stare at me?”
“Actually, I came to tell you something–”
“–Tell me what,” she cut in, her hand stuck in midair with a brush.
“I–I overheard Shannon and Emily talking. And what they said about you, it sounded horrible.”
“What? What’d they say?”
“I heard them say they were gonna make something up about you . . . so that the O’Connells would choose between them instead.”
“Like what?” She marched over with her forehead still splotchy. I gestured for her to come closer and then whis­pered it into her ear. “Those bitches! I’m gonna kill them!” She tossed her brush into the sink and stomped towards the door, but I stepped in front of her.
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“If you do something to them, it’s really gonna look like, well, you know.” She stopped, realizing I was right. “Why don’t you just do what they were gonna do?”
“You mean. . . . ”
“Whoever says it first wins, right? Anyway, I thought you should know, and . . .” I hesitated, my eyes drooping to the tile.
“And?”
“And I thought maybe . . . I could have it back.”
“Ha! I can’t believe you actually care about that thing.” Her hand burrowed into her makeup bag and pulled out Barbie’s missing leg. She tossed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said. I knew it was only a piece of plastic, but it felt great to have it back.
“Hey, Lila,” she called as I headed for the door. “Why’d you really drop out?”
“I know what you girls do. I’d rather wait than go against you three.”
“Maybe you’re smarter than I thought,” she chuckled.
“Maybe I am.”
The door swung closed behind me and I headed back down the hall. Shannon happened to be walking the other direction towards me. She gave me a smirk, and then as she passed, she leaned in and whispered, “Thanks again for let­ting me know.” I nodded and smirked back.
When I got back to the bedroom, I went straight to the girl whose thing was hair.
“Hey Charlotte, can I borrow your curling iron?” I asked.
“I thought you weren’t meeting with this family,” she said.
“It’s not for today. I just want to try it out for next time.”
“Oh, okay.” She handed it to me, so I took it to my bunk.
I looked around and when no one was watching, I stripped one of my pillowcases off and wrapped it around the curling iron. Then I snuck with it to the pantry in the back of the cafeteria—the place for veggies and things like that.
Immogen, Shannon, and Emily stamped into the bed­room minutes apart, a half hour before the O’Connells ar­rived. They glared back and forth at one another, sitting pret­ty on their beds, waiting for their moments to strike. Miss Rita poked her head through the door exactly on time.
“Alright, girls,” she hollered. “The O’Connells are here. Please make your way to the–” Before Miss Rita could finish, the three girls bolted off their mattresses and sprinted to the door. They nearly knocked her over as they squeezed passed, snarling and pushing.
“I’m going first!” shouted Immogen.
“No, I am!” Shannon and Emily followed, one after the other.
“Girls! Calm down!” Miss Rita bellowed.
When the door clicked shut, I made my move. I tore off my pajamas, slipped into a dress, and then slid my hand un­der the mattress for a peeled onion—one I stole from the pantry. I held it up to my eyes as I paced to the door. The rest was like a masterful symphony. I gathered the perfect amount of tears and sniffles, tossed the onion into the trash, and then listened to the mayhem through a crack in the door.
“Those two have been touching my private parts!” screamed Immogen.
“She’s a liar!” shouted Emily. “They’ve been touching mine!”
“No! That’s not true!” yelled Shannon. “They always touch mine!”
I peeked down the hall to the three wild girls, tugging and jerking at Mr. and Mrs. O’Connell, who both paled like they were surrounded by banshees. Miss Rita’s eyes bulged so far out of her sockets that I thought they might fall out.
“Girls!” she roared. “To my office! Now!”
The girls shriveled the way we all did when Miss Rita’s ti­gress emerged. She apologized over and over to the O’Con­nells as the girls dragged their feet to the office. They nudged and pinched one another until they disappeared through the door. When I poked my head out, Mrs. O’Connell recog­nized me right away.
“Lila?” she called. She still seemed startled, but she ges­tured for me to come out, so I did. I crept around the corner and sauntered down the hall, keeping my eyes anchored to the floor. Still sniffling, still teary-eyed.
“I thought you didn’t want to meet,” said Miss Rita when I reached them.
“The girls threatened me,” I said, sniffling some more. “They told me that they’d do it again if I tried to meet with the same family as them.”
Mrs. O’Connell squatted beside me and took my hand in hers. “Do what, dear? You don’t have to be afraid. We’re here now.”
I pulled my dress up to show them the curling iron burn on my thigh.
I became a princess after that day, and my fantasy includ­ed mansions, picnics at the park, trips to Hawaii, birthday parties, hugs, kisses, grandparents, puppies—the works. Even Barbie had it good. Mom and Dad bought her a real school uniform our first week together. Plaid skirt, cute white but­ton-up, stockings and a book bag. It wasn’t until I was sixteen when I witnessed it.
I was tucked under the duvet in my bedroom, giggling through the third novel in my favorite series when I flinched from the crash of a broken glass. I put the book down and propped up. It sounded like it had come from downstairs, so I slipped out of bed and tiptoed forward. Muffled voices came from behind the door. I turned the knob, pulled, and then it blared in. My parents were shouting, screaming even.
“You’re such an arrogant shit!” Mom screamed. “Think you’re some kind of king because of your money.”
“You get what you ask for, baby,” shouted Dad. “Don’t think I don’t know why you married me. With the life I’ve given you, you should treat me like a king. Small-town girl lives like a queen now, and all she does is bitch.”
“You make me sick. I can’t believe I thought adopting a child would fix this marriage.”
“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?”
I shut the door.
The next morning, I brushed up with lightning speed, threw on my clothes, and darted down the stairs. I saw through the window that Dad’s Benz was already gone, but Mom’s hairdryer still whirred from her bathroom. I didn’t want to see either of them.
“Bye, Mom!” I shouted as I leapt out of the front door.
“Bye, sweetheart!” she shouted back.
I’d walked nearly all the way to school when I stopped for a frantic toss through my book bag. She wasn’t there. I was so flustered that I’d forgotten Barbie—one of the only times in my life. I decided to go back. I’d gotten to school early any­way and I could probably avoid Mom if I was quiet enough.
I stepped on to the front porch and peeked through the window to the first floor. No one was there. Mom was prob­ably still in her room, which hopefully meant she wouldn’t hear me. I creaked the door open. No response, so I contin­ued up the stairs, hunched like a burglar. When I reached the top, Mom giggled from her room. Perfect. She was on the phone.
I slipped into my bedroom and grabbed Barbie off the bed. Then another giggle, but this time, I froze. It was a man’s giggle, which meant Mom wasn’t on the phone. I checked out the window to the driveway. Dad’s Benz was still gone.
The giggling turned to laughter, then to kissing, until it all melded into sounds I knew too well. I eased the door shut and slumped into the carpet against the foot of my bed, just watching the doorknob. Tears welled, but I wouldn’t let them spill. Not this time. I rubbed my eyes and when I placed my hand down, it landed on something solid. It was my book. I picked it up and peeled it open. I flipped through some of the pages as I waited for the sounds to settle back into laughter, then chatter, then silence. Mom’s car hummed out of the driveway.
I stood up with the opened book in hand, tightened my grip, and then ripped along the spine as hard as I could. I threw the torn halves in the trash.
During the following weeks, I couldn’t help but investi­gate. I left early for school, without actually leaving, hiding in the bushes instead to see what car that man drove, listening to his laughs and conversations with Mom as they both left the house, learning what he did for work. Then I realized that maybe when Dad left in the mornings he was driving to some woman’s house too. With each day that passed, a pain grew in my chest like someone’s hand was gripped around my heart, occasionally clenching, free to crush it at any time. I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to get rid of it.
I waited in the kitchen for Dad to get home.
“Hey Dad?” I said as soon as he stepped in.
“Oh hey, Lila, what’s up?”
“I need to tell you something.”
He put his suitcase down and walked up to me, looking concerned. “Are you alright? What is it?”
I swallowed a heavy gulp and then I leaned closer. “I–I think. . . . ”
“Go ahead, Lila. You can talk to me.”
“I think I need to see a doctor.”
“What? Why? What’s wrong?”
“My chest hurts, and it won’t stop.”
Two months later, a couple days after my seventeenth birthday, I laid in a hospital bed while Dr. Goldberg studied my file through his thick glasses. My head and eyebrows had been shaved cleanly off.
“Can you explain it once more?” I asked.
He took a deep breath and tugged at his shirt collar. “It’s called bronchogenic carcinoma,” he said. He kept his eyes in the file as he spoke. “Lung cancer. Stage four, which means the cancer has already spread to the rest of the body. The timeline can range anywhere from weeks to days. It’s hard to say.”
“And this makes sense because my birth mother smoked around me so much?”
“That’s correct.”
“Is there anything else?”
“That’s it,” he said, closing the file. “You sure this is what you want?”
“Positive. It’s exactly what I want.”
“Alright, well, he should be here soon. Should I just let him in?”
“Please. And doctor, don’t feel too bad. Things happen. It’s life.”
He gave a frail nod, stepped out, and then closed the door behind him. While I waited, I admired Barbie and brushed her thick blonde hair with my hand. She was different now. Sunglasses, a scarf, a trench coat and a handbag—the things I requested for my birthday this year. Barbie finally looked how I always wished she would.
Someone knocked and the door creaked open.
“Can I come in?” asked an older raspy voice.
“Please,” I answered.
A thin man with a peppery beard stepped in. “May I?” he asked, pointing to the chair beside me.
“Of course.” I put my hand out when he sat down. “Lila,” I said.
“Jake Martin,” he replied, shaking it. “So, my story is your wish, huh?”
“Yes, sir,” I chuckled. “It is the most read series of all time. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I used to recreate your scenes with my Barbie,” I showed her to him.
“I’m flattered,” he laughed. “So, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself since you probably already know a little about me?”
“Didn’t they send you my letter?”
He laughed again. “I guess I know a little bit about you too.”
“I think this is all I left out”—I pointed to my bald head— “I’ve got bronchogenic carcinoma. Stage four lung cancer. My birth mother smoked around me when I was little. That’s just life I guess. Not everyone gets your fairytale endings,” I chuckled.
Martin smiled and then scooted his chair closer. “I’m go­ing to be honest, Lila. I wasn’t totally comfortable with this at first, but I’ve decided to trust you with it. After the foun­dation told me your story, I have to say, the things you’ve been through and endured, it’s more valuable than any piece of fiction could ever be. So, I don’t plan on finishing the series for at least another ten years, but I do have most of it mapped out and I’m honored to share it with you as your wish.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Let’s get to it then.”
I snuggled deep into the mattress with Barbie in my arms, closed my eyes, and listened.
At the end of the two hours, when Jake Martin said the words, “The end,” I let my tears flow one last time. I knew now that stories like these weren’t real, but it was still one of the most beautiful endings. Truly a masterful creation. I thanked Mr. Martin, he gave me a hug, and then we said our goodbyes.
When he left, it was Barbie’s turn. I tidied up her coat and accessories. I thanked her with a small peck on the cheek. One more snuggle. One more tear. And then I broke her down. Head. Arms. Legs. Torso. Each piece fell to the bot­tom of the trashcan beside me, and like that, she was gone. I wiped my face as I waited for Dr. Goldberg to return.
“Get what you wanted?” he asked, stepping in.
“Yup.” I tugged the blanket off and swung out of bed on to my feet. The doctor’s face wilted like someone had died.
“How much will you get for it?” he asked.
“Hopefully enough for me to be on my own.” I reached behind the pillow and pulled out an audio-recorder.
Dr. Goldberg shook his head. He held the diagnosis file up. “I’ll process the death in a week. If anything, this didn’t come from me.”
“Of course not. And you haven’t been fucking my mom either.”
His eyes settled on the audio-recorder in my hand. “You’re really going to do this, huh?”
I smirked. “It’s just a story.”
“Yeah, but your life isn’t.”
“That’s exactly right, doctor.”
On a fall afternoon, ten years later, I sat in a coffee shop with a trench coat draped over the back of my chair and a scarf wrapped around my neck. My sunglasses rested on the table. My handbag sat in the chair beside me. I noticed a girl walking by, holding the newly released final novel to Jake Martin’s series.
“Is it better than the version that leaked?” I asked, pointing to the book. She stopped and held it out.
“No,” she chuckled. “But still good.”
“What’s good about it?”
“It’s much darker, but in a way, it makes it feel more real compared to his others. I think there’s something to appre­ciate about that.”
“That’s how fiction works, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s never real, but somehow, we always find a way to fall for it.” The girl nodded in thought. “Anyway, I’d better let you get back to it.”
“Beth,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Trina,” I said, shaking it. “I hope you enjoy the ending.” She smiled and then left.
I loved those types of days: my peaceful moments alone. Settled and relaxed without anything to do, without needing to move forward or back. Nothing and no one to affect. I lifted my latte to take a sip.
“Lila?” said a woman’s voice.
I put the coffee back down before looking up. It was an older blonde woman in a barista uniform—green apron and visor. Her hair was sleek and tied into a tight ponytail. A sweet white smile stretched into her wrinkled cheeks as her eyes honed into mine, glossing over, but with such a different gloss than the one I’d known.
“I–I can’t believe it’s you,” she said. “It’s me. Momma.”
“Excuse me?” I tilted my head.
“I’m sober now,” she urged. “It’s not like before. I’ve been working. See?” She looked down at her clothes.
“I’m really sorry, ma’am, but . . . my name’s Trina.”
“No, Lila, you don’t understand. I’m different now.” Tears trickled down her face as she pleaded. I sighed and put on my sunglasses. Then I stood up, swung the trench coat over my shoulders, and slung the bag on my forearm. I leaned towards her, so close that I could feel her shivering breaths against my neck.
“Sorry baby,” I whispered. “But sometimes, you gotta just let things die.”

My mom usually asked me to wait in the yard while she performed miracles. Sometimes she’d come out onto the patio once it was all over, still wearing the purple bathrobe she embellished with sequins and beads, a cigarette wedged in her sturdy potato-stick fingers. The cloud billowed up into the cool vaporous atmosphere, sneaking off with the chim­ney smoke from the neighbor’s house. She’d see me peering at her from the swing set and with her wicked red lipstick mouth she would say: “That’s the miracle vapors floating away.” She’d flick her cigarette in the wind, wave her potato fingers up to the heavens. “Bye bye!”
Other times, I waited in the basement, which was covered with carpet squares she found at a church flea market, or my bedroom, seasoned with incense. It was self-preservation, her keeping me away from the one good thing she could do.
I should have been in the basement when Ruby appeared outside the living room window, coming up the porch steps. My mother’s houseplants were engaging in their daily ritual with the sun before the blinds crushed against their waxy arms. Mom yanked on the cord and the plastic rungs slapped down to the sill. She lifted me off the ground by my arm­pits as if I were much younger than thirteen. My feet slid on the hardwood floor a few times before I could stand and yank away from her fingers. “Out, Jocelyn, gone with you!” she ordered, giving me a second to disappear, enough time for her voice to melt back into the sticky, throaty melody of green tea drenched in honey. She opened the door, and from the hallway, I could hear her voice lean up against the snowy silence seeping inside.
Ruby was with her mother, whom I had never met, but I knew Ruby from elementary school when we rummaged around in the lost and found, stalling for time until recess ended. We both skipped when it was cold outside but acted like we were trying really hard to find something that was missing. It was weeks before we spoke, coming clean about having never lost anything, laughing at the ridiculousness, me thinking I had made a friend. That had been years ago. Through the window, she looked like a wisp of her mother, a lean shadow following her inside.
I caught Ruby’s eye through the slats in the blinds before my mother banished me. Her eyelashes looked like the deli­cate combs braided into the black hair of the woman on our world history textbook. When she blinked it reminded me of kissing.
Ruby and I never talked anymore, our relationship cryp­tic or maybe nonexistent. I didn’t know where we stood. I remembered her teeth from the time we went on a field trip to the orthodontist office across the street from the school. They crammed wet alginate in our faces to take molds of our smiles. Little ceramic trophies to take home to our mothers and show them the evidence—”I need braces, mom,” I came home and pleaded. “Please, please, please!” She pocketed my mouth and told me, “Braces are for rich girls.” She squished 44 
my cheeks in her finger and thumb and said, “You smile just fine.” I found my teeth later in the loose change bowl on the dryer, a chip in the left incisor.
In the classroom, after the little plaster trophies had dried, we played, “Guess whose mouth that is?” holding our class­mates’ teeth in our palms. The spaces between my teeth looked like two pieces of corn had been knocked out of their row on the cob, a bunch of deformed little kernels clustering around them. Ruby’s mold was made of straight little pony beads all strung up in a crescent-moon row. I ran my hand across the rough cement of her smile and wished people would think her teeth were mine.
My mother ushered Ruby and her mom inside. I could hear their footsteps creaking above me. Most of the time, I didn’t mind being banished from the main house when my mother performed readings, so I could pretend she was at an office somewhere, at some made-up “real” job. My pretend mother, who could drive herself to work, who went to of­fice parties and made deviled eggs and casseroles and didn’t wear anything veiled or sequined. But this was not my moth­er whose too-long acrylic nails made it hard to even peel a hard-boiled egg without butchering it.
Once they were on the patio, I crept back upstairs, loitered a moment in the kitchen as their voices drifted in through the screen door. The leaves on the big oak turned inside out and the tea candles flickered. Mom’s hands always got almost too close, stirring up some drama in the psychic atmosphere without setting anything on fire. This trio—a psychic, a mom, and her daughter—looked diced and fractured through the screen window. She left the glass door cracked open, so their words wafted inside. I pretended to myself that I was just passing through to get a drink of water, that I wasn’t paying attention, that I didn’t care. I opened and shut the cabinet doors. But what did it matter? Nothing my mother ever said was true, anyway.
When I was nine or ten, Mom would wake me up by swat­ting me with the paper, horoscope page folded over so I could read them to her before we began our days. We were both Tauruses. She liked to hear the pretty little verses inscribed to us so she could relate to the supernatural scriptures. She would close her eyes, tap her cigarette in an ashtray next to my covers and say, “Mmmm, tell me more, sweet girl. What’s in store for us?” if she liked what she was hearing. I learned to only read her the Taurus horoscope if there was something good in it, and for all the other times, I read her the best parts of the other signs. I quit trying to make it coherent after a while. I told her contradictory things, and she just closed her eyes. Like a coherent life wasn’t the one she was looking for.
On the patio, my mother’s own little incoherent lies drenched the tablecloth more thickly than the rain that even­tually poured all over Ruby’s mother’s reading. Her mother was crying, this starched and stoic woman with blonde hair wearing a blonde suit as she choked through a story about making Jell-O for her son.
“He slumped over when I had my back turned, into the bowl of unsettled Jell-O. His sleepy face covered in red, in­animate—I knew right away something serious was wrong and took him to the doctor. The tests came back a couple weeks later, and that was when we learned. . . .”
She shook her head, fidgeting with a tissue in her lap. My mother said, “A bad omen, the red stain.”
“They say he won’t live past childhood.”
My mother linked hands with mother and daughter so they formed a chain, a perfect trifecta of spiritual energy. Her body quivered. She threw her head back, too elegantly, I thought—too much like a model in a shampoo commer­cial, her hair falling lavishly in the rain. It was too artificially beautiful to be convincing, but mother and daughter’s eyes were too obscured in tears to notice. Mom bowed her head and said, “There was . . . darkness surrounding you both when you came into my house. Darkness surrounding your boy. But it has been lifted.” She used combinations of words that sounded mystic, insightful: “inflictions of the aura,” “shaking off those demons,” “the haunts at his bedside.”
Later on, after they were gone and my mother’s feet were boiling in a foot spa with her shows blaring in the sitting room, I said behind her back, “What are you, an exorcist now?” loud enough so she would maybe hear. She didn’t.
Even so, standing there beside the patio door, feeling her voice and the rain pounding inside my chest, I admit I closed my eyes too and tried to ride away with them on their strange belief.
Ruby slid a piece of folded paper into my notebook. The whisper of paper touching paper sounded like her voice ask­ing a question. I thought at first that she was asking me to her birthday, which I knew was soon. Birthday parties at our school were all-inclusive because there weren’t very many of us. For mine last April, I invited all the girls in my class to go bowling—this year I was considering roller skating or ice skating, anything to keep them out of the house. But usually the other girls had them at home, their mothers lingering in the kitchen comparing recipe notes about lemon cupcake frosting. We wore the newest J.C. Penney dresses or thrift store knock-offs if we could get away with it.
Ruby paused a moment, her hand still sitting on my note­book, a folded little teepee. She dismantled the connection one joint at a time, pulling her fingers away. It was really much quicker than this, but I was so absorbed in the gesture.
But when I looked closer, it wasn’t an invitation. It was a folded piece of scratch paper that opened to a drawing of a ghost, the gray smudgy lines intersecting the stark blue ones. It looked like me, the shape of its face similar, rounded, but maybe that had been accidental.
“What is that?” Tanya, my friend since second grade, poked her bug-eyed face over my shoulder to see the mes­sage and frowned like it wasn’t juicy enough for her. Then her eyes followed Ruby to her locker. “Oh, a Ruby scribbling. She’s a real lezo, ya’ know.”
I spotted an actual invitation wedged in Tanya’s pocket and grabbed it before she could dodge. “From her?” I said.
“You bet. You going?”
“I don’t know. Are her parents going to be there?” I thought of her mom’s streaky face in the rain, the Jell-O on her broth­er’s cheeks that I wasn’t supposed to know about.
“Yeah, but whaddya think, bet I can get away with smug­gling in wine coolers?”
“I’ll bring some thermoses,” I said.
I had to climb up onto a chair to reach them, but most of the thermoses had cartoon characters or picnic themed spreads—red and white check prints with lines of march­ing ants obstructing the symmetry. In the way back were my dad’s old flasks, which seemed a sleeker, bolder solution. I held one loosely when I heard my mother coming in and dropped it quickly in favor of a Mickey Mouse thermos.
“What’s all this about?” She reached over and shut the cabinet as I pulled back, thermos in hand.
“Tanya and I are bringing orange juice to the party. All Ruby’s parents’ have is filtered water to drink.”
Mom didn’t comment, just scooted the chair back into the kitchen table. I almost wanted to ask her about the reading she had with Ruby and her mother, to hear it straight from her mouth rather than the filtered version I heard through the screen, but I was afraid there would be variations or that her lies would surface plainly before me—that she would tell something differently from what I heard. I wondered if there had been anything about ghosts in the reading that I had somehow missed.
Ruby really did scribble lots of different things—animals and faces, mostly, on locker doors and other people’s class notes (hers were diligent, neat)—a tiny rebellious streak or a desperate attempt to be heard. I wasn’t the only one to ever receive her graffiti. But the ghost was specific. It existed in my mother’s world.
There used to be three people who came to my mother asking her about the apparitions they saw floating out of walls and floors at night. One woman had silver wispy spir­its inhabiting her carpet. She tried sprinkling diatomaceous earth in the corners of her home, but they didn’t go away— they just started crying. Another woman claimed they were messing with her vision, making lights appear in the corners of her eyes whenever she looked at her dead husband’s pic­ture. Then there was a man with ghost problems who didn’t really think they were a problem—he just wanted them to quit being so flighty and sit down with him for a beer and a cigar sometime. My mother said a lot of people with ghosts are just lonely.
If Ruby had ghosts and was trying to tell me, I could men­tor her through it. Not like my mother who would confirm their reality and banish them. No, I would do what people were meant to do—I would sleep over at her house on her tandem bed (which I imagined she had), stuff notes in her locker, stop her from being lonely. She would realize there were never any ghosts to begin with.
Tanya knocked on the front door. Mom ushered us both into the basement before her clients arrived.
“I couldn’t find any wine coolers,” Tanya admitted once the door shut.
“That’s okay. My mom’s wine cellar is down here.” We browsed through the cabinet by her antique turntable, read­ing labels and pretending we could evaluate the aromas through the sealed bottles. We settled for a pink wine, most likely a gift she’d never miss because she only drank red, and squeezed Capri-Suns and Daffy Duck orange juice into it. We poured a Dixie cup to sample, swirled it around in the cup and each took a sip. It didn’t taste like alcohol or like juice, but Tanya said it tasted different enough from anything else the other girls were used to, so they would believe us when we said it was mostly alcohol.
“Sangria!” Tanya said. “That’s what we’ll tell them it is. They’ll believe anything.”
I checked my watch to see when we needed to leave. Tanya started listing the people she thought would be there.
“Oh god! I forgot . . . what about her brother? He won’t be there, right? I heard he’s super contagious. Why would they even have the party at her house?”
“He’s not contagious, he’s terminal,” I corrected her. “There’s a difference.”
“How do you know? He could be contagious.” Tanya sniffed the thermos before taking another sip. I kicked over an old microwave box, climbed onto it and looked out the glass block window. A slushy rain was starting to pick up.
“We’d better start walking if we want to get there in time,” I said.
My mother couldn’t drive. The more miracles she pumped out, the less practical things her body could do, like there were two women inside of her fighting for control. She used to drive. I knew because she told me stories about when she delivered pizzas, about how she looked in all the customers’ coat closets while they were getting the money and stole for­gotten dollars out of their pockets. But when she divorced my father, she couldn’t afford to keep her car, and then it didn’t matter anymore if we had one or not.
We went to an old man’s house a year ago to look at the car he was selling. We had to take a bus all the way to his neigh­borhood and walked until we found the address listed on Craigslist, but when she got in, her hands—her miracle-giv­ing hands, they just gave out. “What is all this? That man must have been tampering with it,” she said angrily, looking at the perfectly normal controls. But then she quit lying to herself and started sobbing, saying, “What do I do, Jocelyn?” Her hands hovered over the wheel, looking plastic and stiff. She couldn’t even figure out how to put it in reverse to get it out of his yard.
She cancelled all her sessions with clients that week be­cause she said she needed the sleep and then came back two inches taller with gems punched into an old pair of heels from the back of her closet.
I could hear the floorboards creaking as she stomped above us, probably joining hands with the client and swaying or circling around a spiral-bound notebook or an old cigar box the client said was cursed until my mother deemed it safe. Her best miracles were the ones that called for theatrics, a chance to dance around in her bedazzled shoes.
Maybe it was her curse, that she had to become extraordi­nary, that she could not be a pizza delivery girl, a petty thief, my father’s wife—she had to be something else. And magic was what she chose.
Tanya and I slipped out into the rain through the empty garage, leaving my mother to her flirtations with the sticky magic in her living room.
Ruby’s house was pristine, antiseptic. The ceilings were all high and cavernous, etched with a rough texture in the plaster—rolling peaks splayed out like flowers. They had no paintings, no plants, no music boxes, or Precious Moments statuettes, just tepid little studio photographs of their family that might as well have been spritzed with sanitizer. In the adjoined living room, Ruby’s younger brother was confined to a hospital bed with tubes that wound around like crazy straws stuck all over him. Everyone else was huddled in the dining room playing Cranium when we got there. I thought Ruby’s brother was asleep, but every time the girls yelled or laughed, a shadow of life would pass over him, and he would smile, watching. I didn’t see the parents anywhere. I won­dered if this was him on a good day—the rumors all played out a scenario where he was comatose. I had pictured him drawn in faint lines, powdery white and ghost-like, but his cheeks held color ever so delicately.
They were too far into the game to let us join, so Tanya and I sat at the table and watched. Tanya whispered some­thing that I couldn’t hear to the girl next to us, Katie, and then handed her the thermos. Katie cringed when she sipped it and then giggled, wiping her mouth with her hand. She was wearing a red and white chevron patterned dress, made out of that stretchy fabric you can buy off the bolt and sew up the seam to make a dress that looks like it came from a department store. Lots of moms made their daughters dress­es like that.
Katie looked at me with a smirk. “The guest of honor ar­rives! Finally.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that Ruby has the hots for you. Can’t stop talking about Jocelyn. I’d watch out if I were you unless you want to kiss her.” Katie and some girls listening in broke into giggles. Then it was Katie’s turn to roll—she winked and blew a kiss before prancing around on her toes until someone guessed that she was a gazelle.
“Katie’s full of shit,” Tanya said under her breath to me.
But a part of me wanted it to be true. I wanted to have a secret and for that secret to be Ruby—the victim of my mother’s false prophesies. I could comfort her through her grieving when she found out Mom was a fraud. If she loved me (or thought she did), she would see that I didn’t have anything to do with it. That meant I would have to come clean, to confess that my mom was a liar and that her brother was a ghost who wouldn’t pass over into the living world just because my mom said so. She would probably cry, maybe even want to hurt me at first, to punch me in the eye, which would be understandable. We would work through it, over time. It was possible she wouldn’t forgive me for years.
I had dug around in my mother’s jewelry box for hours that morning trying to find something beautiful to give her. All I found was a silly pin shaped like a cat with a long skin­ny neck and a wobbly head. I knew she wouldn’t like it—no­body could—but I wanted to hear what she would say, what she would write me later if her parents made her send out thank-yous. Maybe she would think I was trying to start an inside joke with her, and she would smile understandingly as she peeled back the wrapping paper.
My mom never disclosed any personal details about her clients to me—I had to give her credit for that, at least. I didn’t know what was medically wrong with Ruby’s broth­er. At school other kids would whisper their speculations, standing just close enough to Ruby so she could see their lips moving but not hear. “Car accident, maybe?” “No, nothing that middle class. Probably he’s allergic to money or something.” “I heard it’s contagious—have you seen those marks on Ruby’s face? I bet she’s getting it.” Lately Ruby would come to his defense, as if the accusations of sickness were the reason behind his decline. She would say things like, “He’s on track to get better,” and “It won’t be obvious, but he’s coming around.”
The parents wheeled his bed around in the living room so he was facing the party while Ruby opened presents, but his eyes were droopy, and a tuft of straight blond hair stuck up at an odd angle. Everyone in the living room tiptoed around him as if his bed housed a collection of precious teacups they couldn’t afford to replace.
They were so hyper-vigilant of these things, and Tanya so possessive of the thermos, that they didn’t notice me sneak­ing upstairs. I wanted to see her open the present from me, but more than that I wanted her to look around the room when she opened it and see that I wasn’t there. I wanted to make her come looking for me.
Besides the vases full of fake flowers on almost every sur­face, Ruby’s bedroom reflected her parents’ style of striving to appear unlived-in, untouched. None of the drawers peeked open with spilled over sleeves. The furniture was sleek and modern, nothing leftover from childhood. She had perfume bottles on her nightstand, which I thought made her very el­egant, like she was an old soul or someone who would some­day date college boys even while she was still in high school.
Some people downstairs laughed, and I wondered if Ruby had opened the cat pin. I didn’t go back down. I promised myself then that I wouldn’t, that I would wait for Ruby, and then there was the part of me that felt like I was hiding from Ruby instead, that she wouldn’t come upstairs at all.
I leaned back and thought about the clean walls that sur­rounded Ruby’s existence. I loved the house, the order of it, the way everything was where you would expect it to be. Even with her sick brother and the smell of rubbing alcohol braided into the afghan on the couch—those things were predictable and they belonged. And there on her dresser was the perfect set of pony bead teeth. I closed my eyes and tried to be so still it would seem like I was asleep, and then at some point I was.
The door creaked loud enough to wake me when Ruby slid inside. She stood over me but did not look alarmed. “I saw the light on from the hall,” she said. “Tanya’s been look­ing for you. I think she already left.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“So I guess you work for your mother, right? You’re her se­cret spy or something. That’s what I always think when I see you in school.” Ruby ran a brush through her hair, recoated her candy pink lips with shimmery lip balm.
“It’s not really. . . . ”
“No, it makes perfect sense. You’re making sure the magic is working. I knew you would be here.” She pulled out every blonde strand from the hairbrush and shook them off her fingers into the trash before she sat on the bed next to me.
“Let me look at your hands,” she said.
These were my mother’s words, her lure. It was the warmth of another hand that made people feel assured when she is­sued the verdicts of their palm lines.
Now Ruby was saying these words, her knees folded and socked feet wedged into the gray and yellow patchwork quilt.
I put my palms out for her to see, and she took them, picking them up like two bags of soap beads, careful not to crush what was inside. “This is what your mom did when we came to your house, but she could read the lines.”
“She can’t really read the lines,” I murmured, taking my hands back. “She’s a fraud. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Ruby shook her head. “My mom doesn’t think so. Your mom was right about everything.”
She turned around to reach for a red pen off of her night­stand and unfurled my fingers, taking back my palms and tracing tributaries in red all over the creases. “Here. There you go. Now you do mine.”
Ruby took me outside to her backyard. I felt like there should have been gates and manicured bushes lining the house, but instead there was a wilderness nestled outside the back porch, the beginnings of a pine grove swathed in foggy blankets. The trees held each other, their shadows leaning into us, and Ruby held my hand. I thought the trees and the fog were everything she wanted to show me. I felt like I was on the edge of understanding something from seeing it, but then she tugged on my wrist to stop me and shook my hand roughly.
“We have to do the thing!” she said. “To make the positive energy surround us like your mom taught us to do. I’ve been coming out here and doing it everyday to make the dead hamsters come back.” She knelt down into the pine needles and brushed away the muddy slush. The dirt and needles were loose like someone had been scratching around in it. “See where they’re trying to get out?”
I tried to be gentle, tried to hold her hand again, but she was faraway and gazing at the hamster ruts. I touched her dirty fingernails and said, “I don’t think it works like that.”
“You said your mom was a fraud, but she’s not. She can bring people back to life, like what she did to Tony, waking him up from the coma. In a couple days, he should be able to get out of bed, the doctors say.” She crossed her legs like she was about to meditate, and I tried to inhale the smell of her perfume, but the fog had carried it all away. I wanted to tell her to stop behaving like a child. “I remember when my mom spent the end of her pregnancy in that hospital bed from complications. It used to be in my parents’ bedroom where she would sleep all day, and then it moved to the spare room—Tony’s bedroom—and then all around the house, fol­lowing me. Now where will it go?”
My feet crunched the pine needles as I stood up. I felt surrounded by the possibility of hamsters coming out of the earth. I didn’t want to have to explain them. “I think I have to get home soon.”
Ruby was still planted in the earth. “Did you notice how he’s there but not there?”
I shrugged. “Maybe just don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s really lucky, that’s all—a miracle. You’ll be happy later. But it has nothing to do with my mom.”
She looked down at the scratch marks, touched the dirt, and said, “Maybe.” Her body started swaying like it was moved by something else, something she had found on my patio when my mother trilled about positive energy, and Ruby just closed her eyes. The dirt quivered just a bit, ready to turn over.

Sarah Hendess
Fondly Do We Hope

Washington City
August 1865

Dr. Jacob Carter barely recognized his old neigh­borhood. Once echoing with life, most of the tall houses on the oak-lined street were shuttered and dark, as silent as the residents of the new cemetery on the hill across the Po­tomac. The former inhabitants, most of them Confederate sympathizers, had fled as the war turned against them and this once—Southern city turned its face forever northward. The Carters’ house—home to one of only three Unionist families on the block—sat in the middle of the row, as quiet and lifeless as the rest.
His eyes welled as he gazed upon his home for the first time in four years. He wasn’t sure what he had expected—wreckage, perhaps, or widows weeping in the street—but it hadn’t been this. Not this unrelenting emptiness.
But it turned out it wasn’t empty, not quite. As Jacob stepped out of the carriage and onto the muddy street, he dodged a steaming pile of cow paddies, which he promptly jumped into when a pig darted out from behind a house and rushed toward him, cutting to one side at the last second. Wrinkling his nose, he wiped his boots off on the wheel of the carriage.
“Well, Hannah,” he muttered as he adjusted his rucksack on his shoulder. “I’m home. Such as it is.”
A snarling dog shot past with a half-eaten piglet clamped in its jaws, and Jacob rested his right hand on the grip of his Colt .36, taking comfort in the cold metal strapped to his hip. It was the one memento of his army service he had kept. He’d thrown his bloodstained uniform into a campfire a week ago.
He heaved a sigh and strode toward his house. He near­ly tripped over a grimy man lying motionless in the gut­ter nearby. The man’s scraggly, unkempt beard hung halfway down his chest, and the uniform he wore was so muddy and tattered that it was impossible to tell whether it was Union or Confederate. Flies buzzed around his head—never a good sign. Though he never wanted to tend to another soldier, Ja­cob instinctively knelt down and felt for a pulse.
“Whassa matter wi’ you?” the man demanded, snapping awake. “Can’t a fellow get any sleep ‘round here?”
“Sorry,” Jacob mumbled. “Just seeing if you were all right.”
The man told Jacob where he could go and what he should do with his mother when he got there and then rolled over and went back to sleep.
Shaking his head, Jacob dug a brass key out of his pocket and trudged toward the house. The porch creaked under his weight as he approached the front door. The lock was cranky from neglect, and he had to jiggle the key a few times to make the sliders click into place so he could swing the door open.
Dust wafted down from the chandelier overhead as he stepped into the dark foyer, and he sneezed twice as he lit a lantern on the hall table—the shuttered windows blocked all 132 
daylight from coming into the house. An elderly neighbor had promised to keep an eye on the place while he’d been away at war, but like most of the neighborhood’s residents, the man had left town a few months ago. He’d written to say he was moving in with relatives in Baltimore and that if the government had any sense they would move the capital and abandon Washington. Seeing the town for himself, Ja­cob had to agree.
As his eyes adjusted to the lantern’s glow, Jacob stepped into the sitting room and set his rucksack on the floor. Like all the furniture in the house, the sofa and armchairs were draped with sheets, once brilliant white but now dingy with dust. He strode to the fireplace and ripped the protective sheet off the large portrait that hung over the mantle.
“Hello, ladies,” he whispered to the figures smiling down at him. He gazed up into the eyes of his late wife, Hannah. In the portrait, she stood behind their daughter, Josephine, then nine years old, seated in a chair. After Hannah’s death, her older sister had tried to persuade Jacob to sell the large home and move to a smaller house near hers in Boston, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the house that Hannah had loved so dearly. The house was Hannah. She had selected every stick of furniture, every curtain, every tablecloth. She had given birth to Josie in an upstairs bedroom where she died ten years later. It was home.
He shifted his gaze to Josie’s grinning image, and an ache settled in his chest. He hadn’t seen his daughter since he’d sent her away from Washington at the outset of the war. Now twenty years old, she’d written to him often from his brother’s cattle ranch in California, her most recent letter asking when he might send for her. She’d loved California, but she missed her father desperately. Jacob could get the house back in order easily enough, but there was nothing he could do to reverse the city’s decay. He and Josie could both tolerate the mud and the crumbling buildings, he supposed, if not for that god-awful smell. Washington City’s sewage had barely been adequate before the war, and he was certain that much of the excrement now lying in the streets was of human origin as well as animal.
“It’s all right, Josie,” he whispered. “We’ll work through it, you and me. Just like we’ve always done.”
Too exhausted to start opening up and cleaning the house, Jacob trudged upstairs, yanked the protective coverings off of his bed, and lay down on top of the musty quilt. He pulled out his pocket watch and opened it to the small portrait of Han­nah that he kept tucked into the case. He laid it on his night table and dropped his head onto his pillows. He ignored the puff of dust that wafted up around his head. Though it was only late afternoon, he closed his eyes and quickly dropped off to sleep.
He did not sleep well.
He hadn’t slept well for two years.
Being a surgeon had amplified the horrors of the war for Dr. Jacob Carter. The bloody day at Antietam had been bad enough, but it was the three long days at Gettysburg that haunted him most. Three days with no sleep and little food as he dodged bullets while trying to treat soldiers on the bat­tlefield as the fighting raged. Most of those men—boys, re­ally—had not survived anyway. Almost 3,200 Union soldiers had lost their lives, often after suffering at the blade of a bone saw as Jacob and his fellow surgeons frantically tried to save them.
He woke up screaming four times that night.
In the morning, he headed to his clinic a few blocks away. Many of his fellow Army surgeons had gone to work in Washington’s Army hospitals, treating returning soldiers, but Jacob had wanted only to return to his private practice. He’d had enough of gangrene and amputated limbs. The boarding house that sat next to his clinic, once a respectable estab­lishment favored by congressmen, had at some time during the war been put to other purposes. The new proprietor had transformed the first floor into a large saloon, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the rooms up­stairs were being used for. In the absence of law enforcement, sex and liquor were the only two businesses still thriving in Washington.
Jacob let out a long breath when he found his own build­ing unmolested. Squatters had infested many of the city’s closed businesses, and he wasn’t keen to use the revolver still strapped to his hip—he knew too well what bullets could do to a human body. The air inside the clinic was musty from being boarded up, but it was better than the air outside; The new saloon stank of urine and stale beer. All the same, he needed light, so after placing a small portrait of Hannah on his desk, he pried the shutters off the windows and spent the rest of the morning sweeping out the dust and creating a list of medicines and supplies he needed to order. He had to reopen his practice if he wanted to bring Josie home.
At midday, he walked to the post office to collect his mail.
He should have hailed a carriage. Its closed window cur­tains could have blocked the view of the shantytown he was passing. The carriage driver yesterday had told him the locals called it Murder Bay.
“Sprung up when all them freedmen came into the city after President Lincoln issued that damned Emancipation Proclamation,” the man had grumbled. “Police don’t even bother tryin’ to arrest murderers there. Too many scoundrels and not enough officers. Ain’t gonna get no better now that we got all these soldiers comin’ home an’ lookin’ for work that ain’t there.”
As he walked past Murder Bay, Jacob pulled his shirt col­lar over his nose to try to block the stench from the old city canal that ran alongside the shantytown. Its original pur­pose forgotten, the canal was now a sewer and storm drain, reeking of feces. Surely it couldn’t be long before typhoid, cholera, and dysentery swept through the already desperate population.
He glanced to his left at the looming figure of the White House and then back at Murder Bay. Two young colored boys, neither of them older than ten, fought in the mud over half an apple core.
He would have laughed at the irony of the situation had it not been so sad.
“Hundreds of thousands of lives lost,” he muttered. “For what?” The freed Negroes must feel so cheated.
He quickened his pace, wanting to leave the destitution behind as quickly as possible.
When he reached the post office, the postman surprised him by handing him a small sack of mail. Jacob hadn’t ex­pected much—his family and friends had all known to write to him care of the Army of the Potomac. Back in his clinic, he dug into it to discover a small archive of periodicals from the past four years; he hadn’t thought to cancel his subscrip­tions before he’d left. But mixed in with old issues of Scientif­ic American and The New York Times was a recent letter from his brother, William, in California. He wrote that he hoped Jacob had returned home safely and that Josie was looking forward to seeing him again.
“We’d all love to see you,” William’s letter read. “Come to California, Jacob. Spend some time here on the ranch before going back to your work. You deserve a respite.”
“Older brothers,” Jacob muttered with the first little smile he’d broken in months. “I’m forty-six years old, and he still thinks he can tell me what to do.”
He stayed late at the clinic, trying to avoid the emptiness of the large, dusty house. Someone started playing the piano in the saloon next door, and he soon wearied of the drunken shouting. Tossing the old newspapers into the stove to burn the next day—he had no desire to relive the war through four years of headlines—he stepped out onto the porch. As he turned to lock the door, the skin on the back of his neck prickled.
“Hey fella,” a sultry voice purred. Jacob started. “Sorry about that.” The woman laid a hand on his shoulder. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” She stepped closer, her hot breath waft­ing over his ear. It smelled of cheap liquor. “You feeling lone­ly, fella?”
There was something familiar about the woman’s voice, and he turned around, squinting through the waning light.
“Alice?”
The woman jumped back, her hand snapping away from his shoulder. “Dr. Carter?” Even in the twilight, Jacob could see her blushing. “Dr. Carter, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you, I-” She spun on her heel and fled toward the saloon. Jacob sprinted after her, catching her after only a few yards.
“Alice.” He searched for words, but for a moment could only point at the saloon. “Why are you working here? What happened to Henry?” He flinched. He shouldn’t have asked. He already knew the answer.
“Henry’s dead. Sammy, too.”
“Sammy? What happened to Sammy? He would only be what? Six?”
“Seven. Typhoid. Last winter.” Her tone was flat and emo­tionless.
“Oh, Alice, I’m so sorry.” Jacob dug into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin. He pressed it into her hand.
She took it without acknowledgement and tucked it into her low-cut bodice. “Where’s Josie?”
“California with my brother. I’m sending for her tomor­row.”
“Don’t bring her home. Don’t let her see this.” She ges­tured to the street with a sweep of one hand. From some­where behind them, a baby cried.
“You don’t have to work here. Do you need a place to stay?”
“Goodnight, Dr. Carter.” She disappeared under the shad­owy eaves of the saloon.
Jacob looked around at the street, once smooth and flat, now covered in six inches of sticky muck, the boarded-up businesses, and in the distance, the noxious fog rising off the canal. The city itself reflected the war’s brutality on its in­habitants. His eyes glazed over as his mind drifted back to the hilly battlefields of Maryland and Pennsylvania. When the crash of shattering glass rang out from the saloon, he dropped flat onto the rotting wooden sidewalk. He threw his arms over his head and lay there trembling until he felt a nudge in his ribs. In one swift motion, he ripped his Colt from its holster and aimed at the dark shadow looming over him.
“Easy there, mister,” a deep voice drawled. “War’s over.”
He jammed the gun back in its holster and apologized. After receiving Jacob’s assurances that he was all right, the man continued his shuffle toward the saloon. Jacob almost followed him—maybe a drink would settle him down—but he turned and raced for home, one hand on the grip of his Colt the entire way.
After another restless night, Jacob emerged from his cav­ernous home and set off to wire his daughter. The path to the telegraph office took him past the unfinished Washing­ton Monument, whose grounds the Army had turned into a slaughterhouse during the war. He ripped his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his nose to block the me­tallic odor of gallons of fresh blood. So much like Gettys­burg. A pig squealed as a butcher slit its throat, and he col­lapsed onto the splintering sidewalk, his hands clutching the sides of his head as the screams of maimed soldiers rattled his brain. He dug into his pocket again and pulled out his watch. Flipping the cover open, he focused on his wife’s por­trait. As his heart slowed, he forced himself to his feet and continued down the street, still staring at Hannah’s picture.
Halfway to the telegraph office, Jacob remembered he’d left his list of needed supplies at his clinic the night before, and as long as he was wiring Josie, he might as well wire the apothecary in New York City too. He took the long way back to his clinic to avoid going past the slaughterhouse again, and as he approached the clinic, he saw a few overnight patrons stumbling out of the saloon. He cringed. At least one of the scruffy men had probably spent the night in Alice’s room.
He was so distracted that he nearly stepped on the little bundle in front of his door. At first, he thought it was just a dirty shawl that someone had dropped, probably as its owner reeled out of the saloon. He was about to kick it aside when the bundle began to cry. He dropped to his knees and un­wrapped the dingy blanket to reveal the red, howling face of an infant. The baby screwed up its face as its toothless mouth gaped open, sending up an ear-blistering squall. Without a moment’s hesitation, Jacob scooped up the child, unlocked his clinic with his free hand, and burst inside.
With the screeching baby tucked under one arm, he began pumping water into the sink of the little kitchen at the back of the building. As the water flowed, he pulled his hand­kerchief—still clean, thank goodness—out of his pocket and dampened a corner. Sitting down at the small kitchen table, he twisted up the wet corner of the handkerchief and poked it into the infant’s mouth. The baby’s eyes popped open, and the tiny mouth instinctively began sucking on the damp cloth.
“Sorry it isn’t milk, little one.” Jacob caressed the baby’s downy head. “But it’ll have to do for the moment. Now, where did you come from?”
Hoping to find some clue to the baby’s identity, he un­wrapped the gray blanket. He presumed it was once white, but like everything else in Washington, had lost its luster to the war. Underneath, the baby was wearing nothing but a soggy diaper. He spread the blanket on the floor, lay the baby on it, and searched his cabinets for a diaper. Surely he still had one around someplace, or at least some bandages large enough to serve as one until he could buy some. The baby suckled happily on his handkerchief while he scoured his cabinets. Finally, in the very last cabinet, Jacob found a stack of diapers. The top one was dusty, so he grabbed one from the middle of the stack along with some pins and knelt on the floor to change the baby.
“Congratulations, Dr. Carter, it’s a girl,” he chuckled as he pulled off the wet diaper and swapped in the dry one. The baby spit out the handkerchief and smiled at the sound of his laugh. Her brilliant blue eyes stood out in sharp contrast to the wisps of black hair on her head, and Jacob smiled back at her. “You look just like Josie did as a baby,” he told the child. She smiled at him again. “Let’s get you something to eat and then see if we can figure out where you came from.”
He picked her up and wrapped the blanket back around her. Fortunately, the general store only a block away was still in business, and in less than thirty minutes, Jacob had pur­chased a bottle and several cans of condensed milk. He sat down on a bench outside the store and cradled the baby in one arm as he held the bottle to her mouth with the oth­er. The little girl placed a chubby hand on each side of the bottle and stared up at him as she drank. For a moment, he was twenty-six years old again, feeding his infant daughter to give his exhausted wife a break.
“Oh, Hannah, I sure wish you were here right now,” he whispered.
When the baby finished her meal, Jacob deposited the empty bottle and the extra cans of milk at his clinic and walked to the police station. When he stepped through the doors, the young man at the counter didn’t even look up from his paperwork.
“Whatcha need, mister?”
Jacob held up the baby. “I need to report an abandoned infant.”
The clerk glanced briefly at the baby and then looked at Jacob. “Whatcha expect us to do about it?”
Jacob’s jaw dropped. “Find her mother, of course! Charge her with abandoning a child and then find some relatives to care for this baby!”
The young man laughed in his face.
“Mister, we ain’t even got enough men to go after all the murderers in this town. You think we got time to deal with a baby?” When Jacob’s mouth gaped again, the clerk explained. “You ain’t been in town long, have you? There’s at least a doz­en babies abandoned every month. Ain’t unusual to come across a dead one as you’re just walkin’ down the street.”
Jacob’s toes curled in his boots. He gazed down into the face of the sleeping child and then back up at the clerk. “Why don’t they get taken to the orphanage?”
“Orphanage is full. War left so many kids without parents that they’re near to bursting.”
“What about a church? Any of them taking children?”
The clerk shook his head. “Most are treatin’ soldiers.”
“What am I supposed to do with her?”
“Way I see it, you got two choices: keep her yourself or put her back where you found her.” He returned to his paper­work, making it clear that the conversation was over.
Jacob’s shoulders slumped, and he carried the baby back outside. He headed to the telegraph office and wired the or­phanage in Baltimore to see if they could take a baby. He sent Josie a telegram, too, letting her know he was home safely but that she should sit tight in California for now. He was all the way back to his clinic before he realized he hadn’t wired the apothecary for new supplies.
Jacob spent the afternoon cleaning his clinic, taking breaks to feed or change the little girl as needed. When the pair ar­rived home that evening, Jacob set the baby on a blanket on his bedroom floor while he scrabbled around the attic for Josie’s old cradle. Next to the cradle, he found a carton of Josie’s baby clothes. He smiled as he pulled the tiny items out of the box. He hadn’t known Hannah had saved them, but he was grateful she had. They would see new use in the coming days. Before retiring, he gave the baby a bath, buttoned her up in one of Josie’s old sleepers, and laid her in the cradle next to his bed.
“Good night, little one,” he whispered, kissing the baby’s soft forehead. “Tomorrow we’ll figure out what to do.”
He woke up four times that night, but not to his own screaming. The baby demanded food at midnight, three o’clock, and six o’clock and a fresh diaper at one-thirty. But Jacob didn’t mind. Each time he lit the oil lamp next to his bed and gazed down at the tiny red-faced human in the cra­dle, he smiled. He’d raised a daughter of his own and deliv­ered and treated hundreds of infants over the years, but he still marveled at the baby’s hands, her tiny toes, the way the tip of her nose turned up ever so slightly. She was so beau­tifully formed and so—there was no other word to describe her—intact.
He took her with him to the clinic again the next day and alternated between tending to the baby and scrubbing his exam room. It occurred to him that one of the girls at the saloon next door—perhaps even Alice—would know the baby’s origins. But then again, the child’s mother had aban­doned her. What good would it do to confront her with her shame? It wouldn’t make the poor woman better able to care for the child. Still, he shouldn’t get too attached. The orphan­age in Baltimore might have space for the baby, in which case, it would be the best place for her. They could find her a home with two young parents.
Three days ticked by, and Jacob and the baby fell into a pattern. They would spend the day at the clinic and return home in the evening for supper, a little playtime, a bath, and bed. He even started receiving patients—all civilians—at his clinic again. A few of his colleagues had expressed thin­ly-veiled contempt for his refusal to continue his service at the military hospitals, but one look around the city made it clear that the civilians were in dire need of medical attention, too —and sprained ankles and bumps on the head didn’t ag­gravate his nightmares. He still hadn’t wired the apothecary in New York, but the local druggist had had enough quinine, Epsom salts, iodine, and bandages for him to tend to the simple ailments the citizens arrived with.
On the fourth day, Jacob received a telegram from the Bal­timore orphanage saying that they, too, were past capacity. Perhaps he should try one of the establishments in New York City which were sending children on trains to the Midwest to find families. Jacob glanced down at the little girl, who was chewing happily on her fist. Based on her size and the two little nubs trying to push their way through her bottom gum, Jacob guessed she was about four months old. He tried to picture her in the lap of some stranger as she steamed west on a train to be taken in by more strangers, and his chest ached. He set her in his lap and looked in her eyes.
“I’ll be an old man by the time you’re all grown up,” he said. “But I’d be honored if you’d have me as your papa.”
The little girl cooed, and Jacob cuddled her close to his chest as tears streamed down his face.
“We better go wire Josie and tell her to come home. We’re gonna need her help. Should probably think about nam­ing you, too.” A frantic pounding on the clinic door cut his chuckles short. He set the baby in the crib he’d purchased secondhand and ran to the door. On the porch stood a man about his own age holding the limp figure of a young wom­an. The left arm of the girl’s dress was soaked with blood like she’d taken a bullet. Jacob recoiled.
“Dr. Carter!” the man sobbed. “You have to help us! Please, my daughter!”
Jacob saw himself in the man’s eyes, and he snatched up the girl and carried her into the exam room. Swallowing the bile that had risen in his throat, he laid her on the table and sliced off the sleeve of her dress with his pocketknife. The young lady moaned but did not open her eyes.
“What happened?”
“We were attacked.” The man trembled so violently that Jacob worried he’d fall over, and he pointed him toward a chair. The man sat down and continued. A man, he tried to rob us. Amy was too slow giving up her handbag, and he stabbed her!” He buried his face in his hands and broke down.
Jacob examined the wound. Amy was lucky. The knife had gone through the fleshy part of her shoulder, missing her artery. She had lost a lot of blood, but she’d pull through. His heart pounded, the familiar terror trying to seize him, and Jacob shifted his gaze to the young woman’s face. Her blond hair swirled like a halo around her head; her long eyelashes brushed her cheekbones. Nothing like a soldier, and yet an­other casualty of the war. But she was one he could save. His pulse slowed as his practiced hands moved almost of their own accord to stop the bleeding and stitch up the gash. The young lady came around soon after, and Jacob gave her some brandy and told her to lie still for a while. When the girl and her father left a few hours later with instructions for her to rest for the next several days, Jacob snatched the baby out of her crib, held her close, and wept for the second time that day.
His nightmares left him alone that night because he never slept. He spent the night prowling through the house, his Colt belted around his hips. He jumped at every sound and once drew his gun on a mouse in a hall closet. The baby cried only twice, and after the second feeding, Jacob went into Josie’s bedroom, yanked the protective cover off of her bed, and wrapped up in the musty quilt that Hannah had made when she’d discovered she was pregnant with Josie all those years ago. He lay there, wide awake, until the sun rose.
After breakfast, Jacob gathered up the baby and hailed a carriage to carry them to his attorney’s office.
“Jacob!” Abner Lawson greeted him, arms wide. Jacob’s arms were full of baby, so Abner pulled him into an awkward half-hug. “Good to see you! I’d heard you were back in town, and I hoped you’d drop by. Who’s this?”
Jacob explained how he’d found the baby and had decided to keep her. Abner raised an eyebrow, and Jacob knew he was thinking of the legalities that should be conducted to estab­lish his guardianship of the child.
“No one’s going to ask, Abner. This town has bigger prob­lems.”
“That much is certain. But what really brought you down here? Something tells me this isn’t a social call.”
“It isn’t. I need you to sell my house and clinic.”
Abner’s other eyebrow shot up and nearly disappeared into his hairline—a remarkable feat given how quickly his hairline was retreating from his forehead.
“But you love that house. And what about Josie? Isn’t she coming home?”
“I can’t bring her back here.” Jacob thought of Amy. “She’d be nothing but a target.”
“What about you? And your new friend here?”
“We’re leaving. This city is dying, and I’ll not stand around and watch it tear itself apart. I’ve seen enough death.”
Abner’s eyebrows dropped to their usual latitude, and he laid a hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “Yeah, I guess you have. I’ll take care of everything, but I have to warn you. There are few people around here with the money to purchase a house like yours, and those who do have the good sense not to live here.”
“It’s got plenty of rooms. I’m sure someone could turn it into a brothel. We’ll be out in two weeks.”
Abner nodded and bid his friend goodbye, reminding him to write when he was settled and let him know where to reach him. Jacob thanked him and turned to leave. As his hand reached the door latch, Abner called him back.
“You said she was four months old?” He pointed to the baby.
“Near as I can figure.”
Abner smiled. “You know that puts her birthday. . . .”
“Right around the end of the war. I know.”
“What have you decided to call her?”
Jacob had puzzled over this exact question for much of his sleepless night. He’d considered naming her Hannah, but when Abner asked him so directly, a different name slipped out of his mouth before he even knew what he was saying.
“Hope. Goodbye, Abner.”
That afternoon, Jacob boarded his clinic back up and re­turned home, where he spent the next two weeks packing up the house. He didn’t keep much: Hannah and Josie’s portrait, his medical texts, and his and Hope’s clothes. Everything else he donated to local charities that were helping soldiers put their lives back together. Halfway through the process he received and ignored a telegram from Josie begging him to let her come home.
On the last morning, he gazed around his empty house.
He’d hired a carriage to carry him and Hope to the train sta­tion where they would catch a train to Baltimore. From there they would board a ship to ferry them southward down the coast, around Florida to the Gulf of Mexico, and across to Panama. Another train would bear them across the isthmus, where they would catch a second ship to San Francisco, and from there, a stagecoach for the final leg of their journey.
As Jacob carried Hope out to their waiting carriage, he turned and gazed one last time upon his wife’s house.
“I’m sorry, Hannah,” he whispered. “But this isn’t our home anymore.”
On the way to the train station, Jacob asked the carriage driver to stop at the telegraph office. It took him only a mo­ment to send a brief message to his brother:
TO: William Carter, Lucky Star Ranch, Placerville, California
FROM: Jacob Carter, Washington City
MESSAGE: Coming to you STOP Will wire from Panama STOP Jacob
Balancing little Hope on his hip, Jacob climbed back into the carriage, beckoned to the driver, and left the ravaged, stinking city behind.