WHERE WE GO

It was June, and Lonnie and Moto were walking the streets. They’d done it the past couple of summers. Propelled by boredom and curiosity and blinding teenage desire, Lonnie and Moto, long tired of their own dumb yards and their own stupid rooms, hit the busted sidewalks just to go some place, any place, but this year something was different.

This year, they were fifteen. Lonnie’s shorts were shorter, tighter. Moto hadn’t grown much, but now she had a dog, a lanky husky pup ill-suited for the swampy climate of Black Creek, South Carolina. These things weren’t the same as they were, but they also didn’t make any real difference. The real difference was something else, something that Moto couldn’t quite name but was just as tangible as Lonnie’s long legs or the panting dog or the rain that didn’t fall but hung in the air and made a haze of everything. The real difference moved the hair on the back of Moto’s neck. It curled around and tightened against her throat. At night, when she was alone with the pup, she could hardly stand the weight of this new and uncertain fear.

She’s so stupid, Lonnie said about her mother. She walked a few steps ahead, and Moto saw the pink flash of her bare feet, the yellow polish on her toes. Lonnie said she didn’t need shoes and rolled her eyes when Moto said something about rocks and nails. Don’t be a baby, Lonnie said.

Moto watched the feet, the ankles and the more delicate bones, the cords that held everything together.

You’re lucky, Lonnie said. She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to.

Shut up, Moto said.

Lonnie shot her a look. You know what I mean.

Moto was going to say something, but she coughed and swallowed instead. She didn’t let other people say things like that, but Lonnie didn’t have a dad, and there were other factors that added up to Lonnie being able to talk to Moto like other people couldn’t. They’d been friends since the fifth grade. Sometimes she and Moto talked to each other without even speaking at all.

If I were you, Lonnie said, I’d do whatever I wanted.

The pup stopped to sniff the bottom of a rusting mailbox. Moto pulled on his leash. For a second, he tried digging in, setting his stance for the long sniff. But when Moto said, Come on, the pup looked at her. Then the muscles in his hips relaxed, and he did. He came on.

Lonnie was talking about some concert she wanted to go to. Moto didn’t know the band, but she pretended. I’ve heard of them, she said. I think I have.

Yeah. So my mom says she won’t take me because I didn’t do the dishes or some shit. I don’t know.

Moto wrapped the leash around her wrist, one loop and then another.

So, Lonnie said.

Maybe you could wash the dishes. Maybe then she’d let you go.

Lonnie looked back over her shoulder. She was glaring. You always take the other person’s side.

Do not.

Do, Lonnie mocked.

Somebody had thrown out a bottle. It was shattered there on the sidewalk, and Moto saw it glittering up ahead. She was about to say something. She was about to give some kind of warning, but Lonnie just walked right through. She never stopped talking, and it was hard to say if she saw the glass and stepped in all the right places or if she just got lucky, but there was Lonnie on the other side and no worse for it.

Moto pulled the pup, guiding him out and around the sharpest pieces. The slivers glittered in the sun, and it was hard to believe it was never anything more than a beer bottle.

They were at the corner of Quinby now and turning down the sidewalk that lined Ferry Road. It was an old street lined with antebellum mansions and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. A few of the houses were in good condition, one kept up by an orthopedic surgeon with a casual interest in real estate. Another by a retired judge turned eccentric. But these nicer homes were closer to the courthouse, and Lonnie and Moto were headed in the other direction.

Down this part of the street, the houses were just as big—some as many as four stories with built-on rooms and attics and wide front porches. But these houses hadn’t been painted in years, decades even. The boards were rotted. Sections of roofs were draped in frayed blue tarps. Porch columns leaned and threatened to give way.

As many as six or seven cars crowded around the nearly condemned houses, many of which had been divided into apartments, and in one of these houses, in one of these makeshift apartments, lived a boy with a blue Mohawk that Lonnie was trying, she said, to hook. She pulled up her shorts, rolled down the waistband. Her back went stiff, as if something there hurt when she stepped a certain way.

Mohawk was the bass guitarist in the band that was playing the concert that Lonnie couldn’t go to because she didn’t wash the dishes, and Moto shouldn’t have felt too bad because hardly anyone had ever heard of them, but, Lonnie said, one day, everybody would be singing their songs. He’ll be famous, Lonnie said, and the way she said it, being famous seemed like the best thing anyone could be.

Mohawk hadn’t lived in the house long. Lonnie had seen him for the first time one day last week. She’d been out walking the streets alone because what else was there? Moto was busy, something with her grandmother.

Lonnie had seen him there on the end of the porch. She told Moto that he was sitting on the rail, plucking a guitar, not a bass. His ultimate goal, Lonnie said, was to be the lead. Lonnie could hear him humming. It sounded a lot like this one song by another band Moto didn’t know, but it was probably something else, something really original, Lonnie said.

So Mohawk was playing this guitar, and when he looked up and saw Lonnie, he stopped. She pretended not to see him at first, of course, because that’s what you do, but when he waved, she waved back. And then he said hey, and then she said hey, and that’s when he told her about the band and the concert, which was this Saturday.

That’s it? Moto said when Lonnie finished the telling.

What do you mean that’s it? Lonnie said. She made a face that said Moto couldn’t be dumber. She seemed almost angry. That is everything.

Now Lonnie was focusing. She threw out her hips and pointed her chin up in the air. In the sun, the pimples across her forehead were an even deeper shade of red. A dry rash crept up from her tank top and spread across her wide bony shoulders. Lonnie was thin, and her legs were long, but she was not a pretty girl, and there was something about her that made the cheerleaders and the beauty queens turn up their noses, as if, about Lonnie, there was a certain and repelling odor. They acted the same way around Moto, but Moto didn’t much care about the girls and their clothes and their lip gloss and their boyfriends. Lonnie still cared, though. Lonnie cared a lot.

It was one of these houses, Moto couldn’t remember which one exactly, where there used to live an old woman and her brother. Some people said they were witches, but who did those same folks run to, Moto’s grandmother said, when they got into trouble? When come Saturday night, they lost their minds and laid down with dogs, Mama Powell said. They didn’t wake up praying. That’s for sure. They woke up Sunday, and there they were with them dogs and a nest of fleas, or there they were on their way to having some pup, and then those same folks who liked to say witch-this and witch-that were hotfooting it down to Old Man and Sister. That’s what Mama Powell said.

Moto tried to tell Lonnie this story once, but she started at the wrong place—when the woman was a teacher before anybody knew she was a witch—and Lonnie said, Nobody cares about all that old stuff.

Ahead, Moto saw Lonnie’s shoulders slump. Her butt went flat, and her walk went back to the familiar heavy drag. Mohawk was nowhere to be found.

The pup pulled. He wasn’t full-grown, but he wasn’t little anymore either, and his muscles were tight ropes. A few houses down, there was a woman who kept a flock of geese. The pup scented the air, let loose a thin whimper.

Want to make the block? Moto said, but Lonnie was already turning around.

Let’s just go, she said. She doubled back on Moto, passed her. This is stupid.

Lonnie walked on, and Moto stood there a minute between her friend and the pup. She could have kept going on her own. She didn’t have to stay with Lonnie, but something pulled her back. It was the thing she couldn’t name, the difference that made her feel like she might scream as she saw Lonnie getting further and further away. Moto had the sense that both of them were walking along a steep edge even though there was the sidewalk and there was the street, same as it had always been.

She jerked the leash, harder than she meant to, and the pup, caught off guard, lurched and scrambled on long legs to catch himself. Come on, Moto said, as if either of them had a choice.

We could, Moto said, go to the park.

The park was not the kind of park with a slide and swings and a merry-go-round. It was a nature park, swampland mostly that was all around Black Creek. Lonnie always said it was so ugly.

Maybe we’ll see a snake, Moto said.

Lonnie didn’t answer. She just kept moving.

Moto tried again. We go to the cemetery.

I don’t believe in that junk, Lonnie said. I’m over it.

To hear Lonnie talk, a person would think years had passed, but it was just that spring they’d hauled a box of candles and a blanket up to the cemetery. They’d sat on one of the graves and, holding each other’s hands, they’d tried to perform a séance like something Moto had seen on TV. Nothing had happened, but maybe there were things they couldn’t sense, things they couldn’t measure. They didn’t have all the right equipment. If we just had a thermal imager, Moto had said, which was something else she’d seen on TV. She remembered the heat of Lonnie’s hands in her own, the flinch of Lonnie’s thumb.

Now Moto wasn’t sure what she believed. Were there really such things as witches, or was it just a story that, like a lot of stories, her grandmother had made up to scare her? Once, Moto thought she’d seen her mother, a kind of quick-moving shadow in the corner. She slept in her mother’s old room, so it made sense, but then again, Moto’s mother wasn’t dead. She was just gone.

I hate this place, Lonnie said.

They were making the corner again and now stepping over the same broken glass. Only this time, Lonnie wasn’t so lucky. This time, she stepped just right or, really, just wrong, and when Moto heard the yelp, she already knew what had happened.

Moto ran to catch up. The pup, excited by the quickness of Moto’s pace, strained. He was sniffing the air, the blood—a thick dark line that traced its way from the ball of Lonnie’s foot where a shard of thick green glass was stuck deep.

Lonnie’s face twisted in pain. She swiveled her body and sat down in the grass. She held her foot in the air, and a heavy drop of blood fell and splattered against the hot cement.

Moto felt a lurching in her chest. The hand that held the leash was a fist, and she wanted to hit Lonnie with it. I told you, she said.

Lonnie narrowed her eyes. Air came out through her teeth.

Moto passed the leash to her other hand. She uncurled her fingers and reached out. Even before she’d touched the foot, Lonnie howled.

I’m gonna pull it out, Moto said. We have to.

Lonnie started screaming even more then. She tried to jerk away—Let me go! she yelled—but Moto held on. Be still, Moto said. She had to shout to be heard, and they were this way—like much younger children, screaming at each other and wrestling there on the side of the road—when the man came up behind them.

Here, he said, let me.

His voice wasn’t deep, but all the same, there was something authoritative about it. Or maybe it was his impressive height or the baldness or the way he seemed to simply appear when they needed someone the most. Whatever it was, both girls responded with a kind of surprised and obedient silence, and when he stepped between them, Moto sort of staggered backward with a feeling that only later, she would recognize as relief. She reached down for the pup, and although he had not barked or even growled, Moto was surprised to find that the hair on the back of his neck was stiff.

I'm David, he said

Like in the Bible, Lonnie said

David looked at her. Like my uncle.

David squatted down. He looked at Lonnie’s foot, but he didn’t touch it. Yellow is nice, he said. Yellow’s my favorite color.

It’s green, Moto went to say, thinking he meant the glass, but then she remembered the polish on Lonnie’s toes. It was a nasty shade like what the sky turned just before a storm.

Yellow like yell out, David said. That’s where the word comes from.

Lonnie blinked. Mellow yellow, she said. That’s all I know. She laughed and sniffed all at once.

Moto hadn’t noticed until now, but at some point, Lonnie must have been crying.

David was smiling. Lost your shoes?

Lonnie’s cheeks were wet. Her bottom lip was puffy. I forgot ’em, she said.

You didn’t forget, Moto said, but nobody seemed to hear.

Well, David said, bet you remember from now on. Sometimes we gotta learn the hard way.

He told them he had some tweezers and peroxide. Right over there, he said, and tipped his chin toward the red brick house. It had a little front porch with an arched doorway, like something out of a fairy tale if you didn’t look too close.

We’re okay, Moto said. She adjusted her grip on the pup’s collar. She could take the glass out herself. She knew she could. Thanks anyway.

David turned toward her. He was a big man, but his eyes were small, and they seemed to dull when he turned them on Moto. Where’d you get the wolf? he asked.

Moto looked down at the pup. He’s not a wolf.

I know a wolf when I see one.

Lonnie moaned, and it was a sound like a cat made. It was hard to tell what it meant. She can’t walk like this, David said.

She can hop, Moto said.

Will it hurt? Lonnie asked, and David said not for long. He bent down and picked her up, and she might have been nothing at all for what little pause her body caused him.

Wait, Moto said as David carried Lonnie across the street.

Moto was about to say more, but over David’s shoulder, Lonnie was making a clear and distinct face. She was talking without talking. David was making his way up the stairs now. The closer Moto got, the more teeth Lonnie showed.

At the door, he stopped and turned. Sorry, he said and glanced at the pup, allergies.

Moto looked down. The pup’s mouth was open. His long pink tongue dripped. I’ll tie him up, Moto said.

No! Lonnie said. She yelled it, but when David looked down at her, she added, in a changed voice, He’ll run away.

The pup had broken loose before, twice since Moto had gotten him—once to chase a squirrel, the other time to chase a car.

I’ll take him home then. I’ll put him in the house.

This won’t be a minute, David said, and Lonnie said, Yeah, Moto. Just a minute, all right?

Lonnie and David were inside the house now, and there was a certain smell that came from the paneled darkness, and it wasn’t terrible exactly, but even still, Moto didn’t like it, and the words seemed to burst out of her like the swift swing of a fist that’s bound to miss: We don’t know you!

David had eased Lonnie down on her one good foot. Lonnie stood there, with her knee bent like some delicate bird, and David stared at Moto, studied her. He was sorry again, this time for shutting the door. Air conditioning, he explained. He explained everything, and even though Moto was thinking the worst—kidnappers and abusers and molesters—it was true that those sorts of things didn’t really happen in Black Creek, and David looked pretty much like a regular guy. David was big, but he didn’t leer or drool like the videos of perverts they showed in school. When Moto looked at him, she really didn’t see much of an expression at all, and once he’d shut the door, she wasn’t sure she could even describe him if someone had asked. Squinty eyes, she might say. Bald. He could have been her math teacher. Or the principal. Or the mailman.

For a minute, Moto stared at her own reflection in the door’s glass pane. She was trying to figure out what to do. She might have barged in after them. If the door was locked, she could have broken the window and turned the knob from the inside. The important part was to wrap your hand in a T-shirt. She’d seen that in a movie and was pretty sure she could do it. She had a cell phone in her pocket. She could dial 9-1-1 and say her friend had been abducted, but had she?

Over David’s shoulder, Lonnie had given Moto a hard look, and the message was clear. Tell him we love him, Lonnie had said that day at the cemetery. No matter what Lonnie said now, Moto knew there was a minute when she wanted to believe. Tell him we loved him. That might work.

In the glass, Moto’s face was round. Her hair was in a ponytail. She might have been twelve, eleven even.

She spun around, yanking hard on the leash. She fell into one of the chairs on the porch. There was an ashtray full of butts. Moto took one of the filters, sniffed it, and threw it back on the pile. Sometimes she thought Lonnie was right. Sometimes she hated this place, too.

Moto waited, listening but hearing nothing except the birds in the trees. Across the street, a woman was working in her yard. She had a shovel, and she nearly stood on the end of the blade to cut into the dirt. She bent and hefted, and in her thin pale arms, the shovel seemed very heavy, but the woman just kept working. Her face was a shadow under a hat. Her overalls hung loose. Moto imagined the woman was digging a grave. Then she imagined that she was that woman, that she was the one holding the shovel.

The pup was thirsty. He licked at her fingers, and Moto patted him on the head. She told him it was okay, even though she didn’t think it was, and right then, she wasn’t sure it ever would be again.

Moto’s grandmother was dying and had been for some time now. Mama Powell had known it from the beginning, when she first started feeling the pains in her belly. She reminded Moto of all the things she’d done for her, namely taking her in when no one else would. Moto would be in the wind if it weren't for her. She made Moto promise, made her swear that she wouldn’t take her to some hospital or over to Twilight, where she’d get filled up with needles and tubes and medicine that would only make her sicker. She wanted to die at home, in her own bed, quietly and with some peace. Swear to me, Makeisha, she said because this was the girl’s real name and not something some other fool girl—Lonnie—had made up. Swear to me on your mother.

And Moto did swear, though at the time, she couldn’t know all that her promise would mean.

Mama Powell, true to her intuition, had gotten sicker and sicker, and when she could no longer get out of bed, Moto half-expected the rush of a crowd. A doctor. A preacher. Other old ladies. But her grandmother was a private woman who, after a certain preacher left, quit going to church though Moto believed the truth was that her grandmother didn’t much feel like going anymore. No one knew she was ill, and sometimes Moto wondered if anyone even knew they existed. Mostly at night when the street lights were the shade of the sun caught behind a thunderhead and beyond their odd glow, the darkness was cast even deeper, it seemed to Moto like she and her grandmother were the last people in the world.

And now Mama Powell hardly seemed like a person at all. She didn’t talk anymore or in any way fend for herself. Moto fed her spoonfuls of chicken broth and changed her diapers and did her best, with a bucket of warm soapy water, to give her grandmother a bath.

This had been terrible at first, the baths somehow even more embarrassing than the diapers, but now, Moto was used to it. Though her grandmother’s skin was old and loose and miraculously wrinkled, it was, to Moto, no different than a child’s, and she cleansed it out of love and necessity and ritual. Gently, she ran the rag across her grandmother’s chest and the soft belly where, she sometimes remembered, her own mother had once been.

It’s amazing, Lonnie said, to be that close to a person.

It was Friday, the day after Lonnie had cut her foot, and in that time, she’d told Moto—multiple times and in great detail—all of what had happened between her and David inside the red brick house. It had started in the bathroom where, true to his word, David had taken out the piece of glass. He hadn’t had peroxide after all but only a bottle of alcohol, which had burned. When Lonnie said so, said that she was hurting worse than she’d ever hurt before, he’d blown on her heel. Then he’d kissed her foot—Imagine, Lonnie said—and then her leg and then other parts of her, and then he’d carried her to the bedroom, to the water bed. It was, she said, everything she thought it would be. I get it now, she said. I get all of it.

Moto wanted to ask what there was to get, but she didn’t.

They were at the cemetery, not because they were trying to talk to ghosts—Lonnie didn’t do that stuff anymore—but because the cemetery was their meeting place. Lonnie sat on a thick granite tombstone with her foot propped on the head of an angel.

Moto listened to the story until it was finished. Her breath came quick. There was a soreness at the back of her throat, but her face must not have registered the thrill or the admiration or whatever it was that Lonnie was after.

Lonnie scraped at a pimple on her forehead in the way that she always did when she was irritated. In the past, she might have yelled at Moto. And now, she opened her mouth, but she seemed to catch herself. She smiled instead and said that Moto just didn’t get it. She wasn’t mature enough. One day, Lonnie said, Moto would understand. One day, Moto would understand everything.

Moto was pacing around a certain plot she favored. The pup was laying in the shade. His tongue lolled, and though he sometimes looked at Moto, his tail did not move, and she had the sense he was not seeing her at all.

That wolf, Lonnie said. You got a name for it yet?

There wasn’t any thought in what Moto did next. She just moved, lunged at Lonnie and grabbed her by the front of the shirt. He ain’t no wolf, she said.

Their faces were close together, and Moto could feel Lonnie’s breath on her face, and Lonnie was mad, but Moto was madder.

Let me go, Lonnie said, and when Moto still held her, she said it again. Let me go, I said!

Finally, Moto turned loose, and Lonnie staggered back. She rolled her shoulders, adjusted the neck of her shirt. She squinted at Moto.

I said we shouldn’t come here anymore. It’s stupid.

Moto looked around at the stones. She knew the names and even some of the dates by heart.

But this is where we go. This is what we do.

Lonnie shrugged.

And now, Saturday, Lonnie was gone. Her mother had taken her to Mohawk’s concert after all. Moto couldn’t go, not because she wasn’t allowed but because she had to take care of her grandmother. Lonnie said she’d just go by herself then, but Moto wasn’t so sure. Moto thought maybe Lonnie had asked some other girl.

Moto finished with her grandmother’s bath. She set the bucket of soapy water down on the rag rug. She took the soft thin towel and dried the places that were still wet. Then she squeezed out some lotion and warmed it between her hands before rubbing it into her grandmother’s elbows, her knees, her ankles.

The old woman barely blinked. There was something in her eyes that reminded Moto of an animal, a bear she’d seen on a field trip to the zoo. Even though the bear turned in a circle and kicked a soccer ball, and played dead, he looked like, at any moment, he might bite.

There was one person who knew about her grandmother’s condition, and that was Moto’s father. Jerry dropped by at times that were never predictable. Sometimes, he came twice a month, but a year might pass when Moto didn’t see him at all. He and Mama Powell had never gotten along. The old woman didn’t think Jerry was good enough for her daughter, Moto’s mother, and there was a time, early on, when she was probably right. Occasionally, Jerry brought money when he came, but most of the time, he asked for it.

Moto signed her grandmother’s social security checks and cashed them at the gas station down by the bridge, and out of this, she’d give her father ten dollars, sometimes five if she felt it was all she could spare. You got a heart of gold, girl, Jerry told her once, but Moto knew this wasn’t true.

Her grandmother wore a thin cross around her neck, and it shone and caught the light even in the dark bedroom. It was gold, and no matter how long Moto stared at it, it was nothing like what she felt. Whatever was in Moto’s chest was sharp and cold, and lately it seemed to grow and turn upon itself in ways that made Moto feel like something terrible was happening.

Things change, Lonnie had said. It seemed like the worst part of the world, and yet there were times when it was all Moto wanted, for everything to be different than what it was.

She looked down at her grandmother, this naked, wasted body that did not speak, that only stared without seeing. It could be over. Fast and easy. It was, like breaking into houses, a trick she’d learned from the movies. Moto’s hands moved for the pillow. Or she might have done it with the necklace, turning it, tightening it until it was over. No, it could not have been gold in Moto’s heart, but what it was would remain there, a twisted scrap, because from outside, from that impenetrable night, came a yelp and a snap.

The sound stopped Moto where she was and then drew her to the porch where she’d tied the pup and where now, from the cheap metal rail, hung only a section of rope. Moto looked out into that darkness. During the day, Black Creek was so humid, you’d swear you were walking through a cloud, but some nights, the air seemed to thin, and like a kind of vacuum, it could take your breath away. In the streetlight, the moths and the June bugs floated and spun like motes, nearly weightless.

There was no sign of the dog, there or beyond, but Moto went out anyway. She glanced back, but from here, she couldn’t see her grandmother. She stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her.

She went out into that black night. The other times the pup had broken loose, he hadn’t gone far—just to the stop sign or to the bottom of an ancient oak tree where in the branches a tensed squirrel crouched in a last posture of defense. But now, the dog was nowhere Moto could see, and she could barely see at all.

Still, as if playing by the rules of some unusual gravity, she half-walked and half-ran the streets alone, whistling in that way that was meant to draw things. It must have been nearly midnight. Most of the houses were dark, but in one, lit from within, the curtains moved and a face appeared. A face appeared but no door opened.

Moto searched the darkness for some glimmer, some reflection. The pup had been a present from her father. He’d got it up in Minnesota on one of what he called his routes. He told her that it was a purebred husky, papered he’d said, but he’d lost all that somewhere between there and here, and now the pup’s eyes weren’t as blue as they had been, and he’d thinned out considerably. He didn’t look like the pictures of huskies Moto had seen. She’d checked some books out from the library. She was afraid he really might be something else, something wild.

And now that she loved him, now that she’d lost him, she didn’t know what to do. Those streets that she’d walked with Lonnie a thousand times had turned to paths cut in the thickets of some other planet. She felt that clinch in her throat. The air in her chest came even faster, shorter.

She very nearly ran down Quinby and then Ferry Road, by the very house where the witches had lived. People thought the woman might have put a curse on Black Creek, but Mama Powell said that was dumb stuff. The whole world was cursed and that had happened nearly two thousand years ago, and the best anybody could do was try to find some peace.

Moto wasn’t sure what peace really was, but maybe it had something to do with everything Moto was supposed to understand, the it Lonnie said she would get one day.

Moto was never more alone than in that moment, and yet, she sensed she was being watched. If only she could find the pup. If only Lonnie was there, if only someone was.

Glass broke beneath her shoes. She had made the turn and was back on Quinby. There ahead was the house where she’d seen the woman in the yard, the woman digging. And there across the street was the red brick where she’d sat with the pup.

She whistled again, as if the dog might have come back to this familiar place, but it was Moto who was being drawn. It was Moto who moved by instinct.

She crossed the road. She moved from one side to the other, and she did not look both ways or even any way. She was climbing those steps and knocking on the door, and when David appeared she said, I want you to do to me what you did to Lonnie.

David did not turn on the porch light, and so in that darkness, Moto could not see his face. She didn’t need to.

What I did, he said.

I told you, she said. I want you to do it to me, too.

Maybe a minute passed. Maybe it was only a few seconds. But eventually, David stepped back and Moto stepped in.

Lonnie had said that one day Moto would understand, and this was what Moto wanted more than anything. She wanted to stop imagining what things could be. She wanted to make sense of the way things were. She wanted to be grown because grown people didn’t seem to hurt as much. They didn’t seem to feel a whole lot of anything, and maybe this was it. Maybe this was peace.

David made almost no noise on top of her. It happened fast and indistinctly, and it didn’t matter that none of Lonnie’s details were right—that it wasn’t a waterbed, that David didn’t have a blue fish in a jar or a mirror on the ceiling. All of this was just a part of a story and nothing that made a difference, not even the toy planes which hung suspended over the bed.

There was a time when Moto thought this moment would make her more like Lonnie, more like all the other people in the world, but lying there in the bed and staring up at the ceiling, she thought only of her grandmother. Pain and then a welcome numbness spread throughout her body. She thought it came from outside, from some distance, that series of yips and the long lowering howl. Moto’s eyes were open, and like an animal’s, caught the light and she saw then that even when it came fast—as sudden as a pillow over the face or a gold chain pulled taut—a person didn’t go out of this world all at once. The leaving started early and it happened in pieces that were as mean and jagged and beautiful as broken glass, and once some things were gone, it didn’t matter if you knew what had been lost. There was still no way to call it back.