Find Me (23 page)

“There are people living in there.” Nelson points at the windows. “People with means.”

“People who aren't invisible like us,” Darcie says. “We are against people with means.”

Ever wanted to test your own level of invisibility? Write out your obituary and see how many people you are survived by.

We go around to the back of the post office, to the large Dumpster pressed against the brick. We watch Nelson and Darcie climb into the Dumpster and stand knee-deep in trash. Darcie's wings bob on her back. Nelson fishes out a withered apple and tosses it to Marcus. A plastic bag holding a quarter loaf of bread, the crust spongy with green mold, follows. A jar with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter inside. I get to hold the jar and can already feel the thick nutty paste on my tongue. There is something gummy on the label and little black bugs are crawling through it. They get inside the gardening gloves and nip at my hands.

Nelson finds a pack of sparklers too. The package has a cartoon of a white wolf on the front. He draws a sparkler from the pack and sniffs it, then passes it to Darcie. I think of the slender antenna glowing blue on my mother's ship, the St. Elmo's fire.

“Abracadabra.” Darcie waves the sparkler over her head. “Hocus pocus.”

Even when she's smiling, her eyes are glassy and rolling, like she's not really thinking about the
here
but about all the fearful things off in the distance, on the edges of the land.

What kind of spell is she casting?

*   *   *

That night, we light the sparklers in the backyard. We're all wearing garbage bag jackets. Underneath the plastic, Darcie's wings are a dark mass. Nelson ignites the first sparkler with a match, nudges the tip of his against the rest. Four globes of light that make our faces glow. I catch Darcie in profile and for a moment she looks like the girl who attacked me in the bathroom in Mission Hill, but then the light changes and she turns back into herself again.

Tricks, I think.

Nelson is the first to break from the group, yelping and bolting toward the trees. We run around the yard. We slip in the cold mud, leaving behind arcs of gold.

Earlier, on the second floor, I opened the copy of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
The spine creaked. The pages were crusted with water stains. I read: “In the very heart of an extinct volcano, the interior of which has been invaded by the sea, after some great convulsion of the earth. Whilst you were sleeping, Professor, the Nautilus penetrated this lagoon by a natural canal, which opens about ten yards beneath the surface of the ocean.”

A great convulsion of the earth, or at least our American corner of it. Isn't that what we have all lived through?

I closed the book and stuck my mother's photo and the postcard between the pages.

In the backyard, I can feel the space between past and future growing larger, like we have been crossing a river by hopping from one little island of rock to another and now the distance between the islands is expanding and we know that if we miscalculate our next jump, if we fall into the water, the river will twist itself around our ankles and drag us under. So for now we are staying still, Marcus and me. Still.

My sparkler has burned down to a black nothing and the heat stings my fingers. I drop it and the light fizzles. The magic is over, at least for tonight. Soon I lose sight of Darcie. Only Marcus and Nelson are still burning. I stand in the massive shadow of the Mansion and watch Marcus cut through the darkness. His mask is a streak of white, his body slender and quick. I hear the zap of his sparkler going out and his rabbit face vanishes, like we are lights that are being turned off one at a time.

As I listen to us move through the yard, the crunch of slush, the sucking sound of shoes on mud, I think about how this is what our childhoods could have been like if it had been all kids and no parents or people pretending to be.

*   *   *

The twin paradox isn't Nelson's only theory. He lives at the very top of the Mansion, in the attic bedroom, a cramped space with a low roof. Up there I see few signs of it being a place where a person actually sleeps. It looks more like a laboratory: cloudy beakers, a long pair of metal tongs, an eyedropper, a cutting knife, goggles scattered across the floor, the lenses scratched and fogged.

A small oval window, like a porthole on a ship, overlooks the gray-green front yard, the grass lightly marbled with snow. From the window I can see the scaffolding. Nelson tells us that he knows the dimensions of this room so well, he can work in here at night, going by feel.

Three white bowling pins and a black ball are jammed into a corner. “Bowling helps me concentrate,” Nelson says when he sees me nudging the ball around with my toe.

“Concentrate on what?” I ask.

“Darcie had the sickness,” he tells us. He's not wearing his garbage bag jacket, just a white T-shirt, sweat dark around the underarms, and gray pants. I can see that his body has been stripped to the essentials. Every part is sharp and shadow thin. “But I got to her in time. She forgot, but she didn't die.”

Darcie is sitting in a corner, her angel wings smushed against the wall, and picking mud out from under her fingernails. “It's true. He found me on the side of the road in Cordova, in Tennessee, and brought me here.”

She gathers the mud on a knuckle. Once she has made a little dark lump, she eats it.

“Darcie is what we call
lucky
,” Nelson says.

She tells us that the memories had been pouring from her for days, like a chemical you sweat out. She didn't know how to stop it, how to hold on to what she knew. She didn't know where she was headed or where she had come from or why she was wearing angel wings or if the road she was walking could even be called a road. Surely she had the sickness. Surely she should have died.

“There are other things that can make you forget.” I look at the horseshoe-shaped burn marks on the floor. Every time someone moves, the boards creak and I imagine the house keeping track of our whereabouts.

“But what are the odds?” Darcie gathers her hair on one side of her neck and pulls it like a rope. “What are the odds of forgetting for some other reason during an epidemic of forgetting?”

“It's true.” Marcus picks up the tongs. He makes them open and close like a beak. “What she's saying about odds.”

“In the Mansion, she started to remember.” Nelson taps the side of his skull. “We got the blood flow redirected, got those capillaries snapping again. Got her consciousness back.”

My unconscious mind is very powerful and it wants me to keep living, I do not tell them.

When we ask Nelson what he did before the sickness, he says that person is gone. Not forgotten—just gone. He picks up a pair of goggles and puts them on, like he's ready to get to work. He moves with the authority of a person who is used to being in charge of other people, while Darcie has the meek manner of someone who has never known what it's like to have power over another person and maybe not even over herself.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” I bend down to touch a beaker. The inside is crusted with salt.

“We found it in the basement,” Nelson says. “Has Darcie shown you the basement yet?”

Marcus and I shake our heads.

“Darcie loves the basement,” Nelson says. “That's where she thinks she can talk to God.”

 

29.

Our nights are filled with games.

Here are the rules for cops and robbers: the cops cop and the robbers rob. Marcus and I get to play the robbers, which I like. We're naturals in the role. Have I ever been a natural at anything before? We run away from Darcie and Nelson and the toy gun, screaming. It feels good, all that running and screaming. Sometimes Marcus grabs my hand and I think we're escaping for real, to a place where we will find my mother. I imagine us running outside and the woods parting and spotting her island among the trees like a pearl in an oyster, waiting to be found.

When we get caught, Darcie and Nelson press us against the wall and twist our arms behind our backs. I taste the chalkiness of the plaster, get dust up my nose. It is the best kind of capture, because nothing happens; there are no consequences for our stealing. No stern warnings, no fines, no jail. We are released into the night, to do it all over again.

Hide-and-go-seek, that's another one. Darcie always wins hide-and-go-seek. We check every room in the Mansion, all the secret compartments, until we finally give up and tell her to come out. If she doesn't come out right away, Nelson gets impatient and starts banging around the house, slamming doors, kicking over carpets, tearing up and down the stairs. In the dark, his silver hair glows. He smacks the wall and we hear plaster crumbling. He tells her to come out right fucking now or she can just forget about ever being fully cured.

“I was in the basement,” Darcie always says, even though we've already looked down there.

In the Mansion, Marcus and I are starting to become very curious about this basement.

There is no electricity, but there is an oil lamp that we light and carry around with us at night—or rather, Nelson carries it around. “Whoever has the light has the power,” he sings. Sometimes, after the games end, we drink the alcohol Nelson has cooked up in his lab. He says it's made from yeast and table sugar, but I only know that it sloshes around in a green bottle and burns when I drink it. It smells sweet like the Robitussin and after it goes down, faces turn into bright blurs, like the world is a wet canvas someone can't stop touching.

In the Mansion, our nights are long. We have started going in reverse: winter is leaving, yet our window of daylight keeps growing smaller. During these windows, we are busy. We are busy stomping through the woods, pulling up dandelion and chickweed and creeping charlie. Thistles with thorny leaves and soft purple flowers. We are busy measuring our water supply. We are busy suffocating cockroaches by coating them with the lye Nelson stores in his lab. The roaches flop over onto their backs, tiny legs kicking. We watch until the kicking stops. We are busy standing in the Dumpster and picking out what the people with means do not want. We go to bed near dawn and wake just before sunset. We are turning nocturnal. We are no longer in sync with the outside world, with the patterns of nature, but aligned with the rhythms of this house.

*   *   *

As it turns out, Darcie doesn't think she can talk to God in the basement.

In the basement, there is a steel door and behind that door, a tunnel. The floor is cool dirt. The walls are dark and smooth. The ceiling is rounded and just high enough to walk upright. You can go thirty steps before the tunnel ends, cut off by a stone wall. The wall is old and the rocks are coming loose. No one knows what's on the other side. It is in this tunnel that Darcie hears the voice of her mother, who is dead.

I wonder if the people who built this house intended the tunnel to be a safe room or fallout shelter, a place to go when the world ends.

“Dead from the sickness?” I ask Darcie, who shakes her head.

“She died a long time ago.”

She tells me and Marcus about the tunnel in the living room. Nelson is upstairs, working in the attic. We can hear the bowling ball knocking down pins. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Darcie is balled inside the trap door, her chin resting on her knees. Her hair is tucked behind her ears, her roots black and oily. It's dusk. I look up and see tiny crystalline stars through the skylight.

“How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you hear her?”

She shrugs. Her wings rub the floor.

“It's private,” she says. “It's mine.”

“My mother is gone,” I say, choosing to not elaborate on what I mean by gone.

She looks at us. She chews her upper lip.

“His too,” I add, nodding at Marcus.

“Like I said, it's my tunnel.” Darcie sniffs. “Besides, it's not as simple as walking in and saying hello. There's an entire ritual.”

“We can learn,” I tell her.

“You can watch.” She pauses, looks across the room. “And that's as close as you're going to get.”

In the basement, the ritual starts with Darcie putting four drops of a sweet-smelling liquid under her tongue. It's something Nelson has given her, to help her remember, to help her become fully cured. On her own, she discovered that if she takes the drops and goes into the tunnel, she can hear things. Like voices. Like her mother's voice.

“The first time it was an accident,” she tells us. “I didn't even know there was a tunnel down here. I was just doing what Nelson said I should do. I was just wandering around and trying to remember.”

The liquid in the eyedropper is clear as water. It looks like a serious drug, like GHB or ketamine, which I have never taken before, because
being
dead and wanting to
feel
dead are not the same thing. In Mission Hill, I heard stories about girls getting drugged with GHB and waking up half-naked in backyards and in parks and in parking lots, always outdoors it seemed, only they didn't call it GHB. It was Cherry Meth or Easy Lay or Grievous Bodily Harm.

“Hm.” I flick a finger at the eyedropper. “I've seen the end of
that
movie.”

“What movie?” Darcie says.

I'm scared of this liquid, but just because it is not something I would have taken before, in the land where there was an endless supply of cough syrup and no mother to reach, doesn't mean I wouldn't be willing to do it now.

“You sure you don't want some company in there?” I do the same finger-flick at the steel door.

“In the tunnel, there is no such thing as company,” Darcie says.

She squeezes the liquid into her mouth. Next she takes off her clothes. She pulls her sweater over her head, unzips her pants. She has nothing on underneath. She doesn't blush or turn away. She is not shy around us. I can see the fine bones in her back and the strange shape of her kneecaps. Her nipples are pinpricks of brown.