Autumn was stoned at an outdoor music festival when she had her epiphany. Some muzzy melody strung along in the background, an indie band she didn’t know who mixed accordions with electronics. Autumn floated, half-shut eyes falling on a girl in the crowd with a pierced navel and toffee hair, raising a clunky camera to capture the band.
Matt hissed, poking at the micro-wrinkles under his eye. “I swear they’re getting worse. Tell me honestly, can you see them?”
“Not really.” She stretched her arms in the cool and pleasantly waxy strands of grass. Clouds plodded across a blue New Mexico sky. Onstage, an accordion wheezed.
“Your skin is amazing,” he said, his gentle hand, slender fingers, one turquoise nail, carding through her swampy bangs, looking for frown lines. It was so hot that day, humid from the bodies of a hundred sweaty music fans. “You promise you’d tell me if these wrinkles were noticeable?”
“Promise.”
For all the ways being high softened the edges of the world, like Vaseline smeared around a camera lens, it also brought her such clarity. Because lying on that grass, while Matt complained about aging and their friends moving to the suburbs, Autumn remembered her hometown for the first time in ages.
She’s been busy. Culinary school. Work. Life. Mom and Dad moved away. She hadn’t had anyone to call, any friends left to visit.
But in that instant, the feeling of home returned, fresh and new. The flowers Mom grew on the borders of their small brick house. The family library of albums, something perpetually spinning on the record player. Dad fussing over a babka. Sasha’s eyes, very close, which whispered a sleepover confession that often played through her mind, the last words she’d hear before closing her eyes: You’re the only one who really knows me, Pip.
The only one.
When Autumn heard that old echo, her comeback was always a swift and bitter bite: If that’s true, where the hell did you go?
Autumn hovered, her body strung as tight as a guitar string. The beginning of a suspicion stirred in the back of her mind.
A question she did not want to ask, much less answer.
How long had it been…?
The day after the house-fire-that-wasn’t, Autumn rises, groggy with lack of sleep, and stumbles her way downstairs to her old bakery. She never gave up the prime Main Street location. Now, as she turns on the oven, she’s grateful.
Autumn spent years honing her skills in the bakery before striking out to try her luck outside of the support of parents and loyal grandmothers coming every Saturday morning for her challah bread. So she knows the world from behind her counter. What Cork liked to order with his coffee, and what nuts Cynthia liked in brownies and abhorred in cookies. Who couldn’t resist a cinnamon roll and who could only be swayed by old-fashioned apple turnovers.
She knows where everything goes. The two red patio tables she kept folded up in the alley with matching chairs. That old cash register that had to be smacked in just the right place to fully pop open. Even her emergency handle of bourbon kept in the drawer under that cash register. It’s all miraculously as she left it. Only a little dust.
Most people might have sold the bakery. Autumn rented it out rather than sell, but she hasn’t had a renter in a while. And by the look of their little town, she isn’t sure she’ll get another anytime soon.
As the oven heats, she forms a dough. It’ll be focaccia today. Focaccia is her thinking bread. Any stress, problems, questions, crushes—they are all baked into sweetly spongy bread with olives and mozzarella, finished with garlic and herbs and indecent amounts of olive oil. It was Dad’s thinking bread too. He taught her the recipe at six, using her fingers to press divots into the dough. Mom, without fail, hung on his shoulders whenever he pulled a batch out of the oven, teasing until he let her and Autumn pull off crusts that breathed steam.
By the time she’s sliding the first loaf into the oven, she is more alert. But the night before doesn’t make any more sense. She’s feeling it again. The same seed of suspicion that drove her here, the heaviness of a question that she does not want to ask. Only—
Only what was that question? It’s as if she can’t hold it in her head. She’s all jumbled. She’s been thrown off since she got back.
Now, maybe it’s been replaced altogether with: How can a fire snap at her fingers one moment, and the next, be gone?
Autumn stops. She presses the heels of her hands against the cool steel counter. Sasha hasn’t called.
Despite having so much time pass without Sasha in her life, Autumn is reattuned already, and it’s weird that they haven’t talked about what happened. Not that she knows what to say.
While her loaf bakes, Autumn steps out the back door into the alley where her dumpster sits empty and her trusty metal patio furniture has been waiting all this time.
The alley gives way almost immediately to a wide greenbelt where the weeds stretch tall, leading to trees. The openness of the space used to let her breathe. Sometimes she’d hear teenagers, or find broken bottles if she wandered there. Not today though. It’s an early hour, and the world is beginning to awaken. The best part of being a baker is that she rarely misses the glory of a sunrise in full bloom. It’s happening now, lifting the gauze of the early morning. There’s nothing like sunrise to banish the nighttime thoughts that creep in under windowsills to whisper all her despairs in her ear.
In the grass, near the seam of the tree line, something flashes by.
Autumn pushes off the building. She ventures nearer—but the ghost of smoke, of batting at illusory flames hooks in the back of her mind. Once, she would run around these woods like a stray, finding her own playmates, without fear. Now, she doesn’t remember how it feels to be so fearless.
She takes a step—a branch cracks under her foot and a figure in the grass rockets up.
It’s a child. He’s small, can’t be older than five at his size, his slenderness. Like a little forest creature with a mop of shaggy hair. Could he be a child who lives out beyond the tracks, some family still scrounging out there? Aren’t his parents looking for him?
“Hi,” she murmurs.
He sniffs the air. The aroma of baking bread has followed her outside.
“I’m Autumn,” she calls as gently as she can across the distance. Someone needs to care for his clothes; she can spot a tear in his faded shirt collar. Red-brown eyes watch Autumn. “I’ve got bread,” she tries. “Would you like some? There’s plenty—”
And just like that, he takes off, sprinting into the woods, nothing but the soles of his shoes flashing at her.
“Wait!” Autumn calls, but he’s already gone.
For a long time, she stays, watching, as sunlight illuminates the trees. But he doesn’t return. Nothing moves out there. She can’t understand the feeling that stirs in her, that this child is in need. Her heart pulls toward the fallow fields, and she thinks of the skinned squirrel. It may not be as safe out there as she remembers.
Autumn returns to the bakery, pulling her bread out of the oven not a moment too soon.
If she leaves it wrapped in cheesecloth on one of the red tables in the back alley, no one else has to know.
The uneasiness of the night before lingers all through the day, clinging to Sasha’s clothes like the smell of smoke. The ferry runs four times: there and back, there and back. Her shoulders itch, neck tickling every time she’s facing the other bank. She’d considered going to see Autumn at the bakery this morning, maybe even inviting her out on the boat for the day—but something stopped her. Yesterday, she’d been joy-drunk to see her friend. But it’s like the antennae on her emotional TV is constantly shifting out into static these days.
That disconnected feeling within, a kind of numbing that she usually masks with a joke, with a hasty one-off, feels like something that began here in the town where she grew up. Here, she is grounded enough if she keeps busy, if the things that matter are held up an inch before her eyes. There’s the elementary school where Sasha pushed Lil on the swings; there’s the Baptist church where they rescued the records of “devil’s music” waiting for a bonfire; here is home. Mom was here.
And out there? Out there, maybe because she’s out there, there’s no mask locked onto her face. She managed to have things: her place in the group show in Queens, showing her photos. A few kind oddball people who, bizarrely, wanted her around. Linda, a sculptor with a studio apartment and a great teaching gig, with books on art theory up to the ceiling and a wide-open, miraculously undamaged heart. Sasha would dive in, seize on to those bright-hot flares of the missing thing, wrap her fingers around an opportunity or a person or a place that seemed, for a moment or two, real—
But just as she secured her grasp, really sank her teeth in, whatever it was that had drawn her in was just gone. Those big-city folks, her rich art types, couldn’t understand her origin story. Of course they’d struggled, just like everyone does. But Sasha had different hurts, the pain of a small-town queer coming of age, of a mom who seemed to gravitate toward her sister instead of her, of the silent broken heart. Someone in New York would laugh at something a little too hard or say something glib about where she was from, and a vast canyon would open up in her. Sasha would be left in a room full of strangers—maybe one room, a bright, colorful apartment full of ideas, and just one stranger—full of expectations Sasha found she couldn’t rise to.
Autumn comes from here. She should understand. Except there was that one time in the tree house, all those years ago, when Sasha reached, and Pip ran. Today the happiness of her return feels dwarfed by the horror of that bizarre fire, and Sasha can’t risk seeing her, in case she turns out to be just another stranger.
So, as usual, she keeps busy. If there’s anything Sasha’s learned in this time at home, it’s that there’s always another task to be done around here, always something else to do so she doesn’t have to brood. She docks on this side of the river, waving off her passengers. Then comes the waiting. It’s the second to last run of the day, lights beginning to twinkle around her. On their side, there’s the ridge, but over here it’s only a low sandy bluff, and beyond, flat, flat, flat forever. Somewhere nearby, a crow complains in the trees. These idle moments waiting for the next run are almost enough to tempt her to develop a new smoking habit. She stares at the trees, that same wrongness from last night wrinkling over her.
“So where do I get a ticket for this thing?” someone drawls, and Sasha turns sharply. Theon is on the boat.
She has ridden enough deserted Q trains late at night to feign composure when a man skeeves her out. “It’s a public service until the road opens back up,” she says, looking past him at the bank. Please someone else come, she begs the empty lot. Ferrying Theon across the river should have been merely an irritation, but now that she is actually faced with the task of taking this man across on her own, it fills her with dread. “Never seen you on here before,” she realizes.
He flashes a smile, a knowing one, like her casualness might fool everyone else, but would never quite fool him. “I usually take the train.”
We don’t have a passenger train through town, she is about to say, but her hopes have been answered with the arrival of a few others, who file aboard with barely even a glance. And it isn’t worth getting into particulars with him.
Theon tips his head to a blank-eyed man passing. “Not a lively bunch, huh?”
For a long moment, Sasha thinks hard about just ignoring this too, but something in her can’t quite turn her back on him. Every time Theon has made an appearance at the orchard or in town, he’s approached Lil. Only Lil. As if Sasha isn’t an equal inheritor of the Clearwater family land. Now he’s come to see her, and Sasha is incapable of just staying mulishly silent. “It’s the after-work crowd,” she tells him, tossing the rope onto the dock and getting the little steamboat’s paddlewheel chirring again.
He snorts, glancing back at the shrinking occupants of those few places on the benches. “More like the afterlife crowd.” Theon slips his hands in his pockets, the picture of ease. “They might as well be headed straight over the Styx.” When she says nothing, irked by him, he just laughs more fully. “Hell, maybe they are.”
“What do you know about these people?” Sasha snaps suddenly. “What do you know about any of us?”
Theon pauses at her tone, cocking his head like a dog catching a scent. Water sloshes far below. When he replies, his voice is soft as twilight haze. “I know you don’t belong here.”
It’s like he’s seized her around the neck. Her hands are frozen on the wheel.
“They did a write-up in the paper the day you two were born. Did you know that?” He’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees, a private conference. He puts his hands up to pantomime a headline: “Clearwater TWINS?!” His mocking hands fall, and he shrugs. “Your mom didn’t know there were two of you. She only had one name planned. Didn’t she get ‘Sasha’ out of a magazine?”
Trying to force a swallow, Sasha fixes her eyes on the flickering lights along the ridge. It’s an old anecdote. He can’t hurt her with it.
“In old times, they would’ve left you out in the woods to appease the spirits,” he murmurs. His accent is flat, void. Like the voice in a recording or over an intercom. Like he’s from nowhere. “I remember. One to keep, one to give away.”
She can’t let him say any of this. In a hard jerk, she forces herself out of that throttling stillness. “Do I need to toss you in this river?” she growls. “You’re here by my say-so. The boat and the river are my places. So watch it, asshole.”
Theon raises his hands appeasingly, but he doesn’t shut up. “You’re the part of this that makes no sense. Her, I get.” It’s just a strange flicker, but in the instant he speaks of Lil, he looks transported. “So my question is, what are you still doing here?”
Sasha sees the pecan trees of the orchard, their canopies blotting out the light in her old bedroom window. Growing up, they always rustled out there, invading her dreams. In the deep night, those trees are dark as onyx. They made the stars look so faint and numerous they barely twinkled, a dusting of flour on a dark pan. And in the center of them, Mom and Lil, their whispered, late-night conversations. The two of them, vanishing in the trees together, loyally tending their secrets.
Maybe Theon says something else, but Sasha doesn’t hear.
A breeze slips along her cheek, carrying the tang of a bonfire.