Smoke rises somewhere close, another phantom fire in the night. Sasha sits in Autumn’s window seat, peering at the sky. She wraps her arms around her knees.
How long has the road been closed?
The darkness feels loaded, some faint tinge of gunpowder on the breeze. A sharp hiss swiftly becomes a shriek—but it’s only Autumn’s kettle. Sasha tries to force herself to relax, but that’s not the kind of thing that can be bullied.
It feels like she’s just killing time tonight. And some hysteria in her sticks on that phrase. “Killing time.” Like “stealing time.” Why is time a victim of all these crimes?
How about “make time”?
Break time.
Autumn’s apartment above the bakery hasn’t changed at all since Sasha was last here. She fingers a flap of peeling wallpaper, navy blue, shimmering with weathered amber birds and rusty blooms. In the bathroom, there’s a stained-glass window of a dahlia. Autumn filled this place with squashy secondhand furniture and lined the kitchen counter with old diner stools, where Sasha would perch as she baked. And here, nestled into the sloped gable, a window seat where the two of them used to sit in the evenings.
She finds Autumn when the sun is going down, her clothes smelling of that riverbed mud after running the ferry all day, and Autumn pulls her upstairs with a sad twist in her smile.
“There’s always something special about your first apartment, isn’t there?” she says. “After all these years, I almost forgot what it looked like. I was so young here…” She sits Sasha down at the breakfast counter and makes sandwiches on a loaf of fresh sourdough. Autumn always has odds and ends around from experimenting with baking mix-ins: tomato slices, fresh basil pesto, and mozzarella.
Sasha shifts uneasily. The day began with a revelation, and it seems like it’s going to end with one too. Too bad she isn’t ready for any more. It feels like she’s about to be broken up with, and that reminds her of Linda, her similar sad, ironic smile that last day before they parted and all Sasha had left of three years was a photograph of a shattered mirror and a faded face.
Autumn has a purpose here. Whatever thoughts she has been distilling over the past days are done. She is ready to share. So Sasha waits.
Autumn sets Sasha’s mug on the windowsill and settles across from her with the other one balanced on her knee. “I don’t know how to say it,” she says finally. The moonlight through windowpanes fragment her into segments. Her ear. A blue eye turned slate gray with the nighttime. It isn’t just moonlight that gathers in her skin, the side of her face, the hollow of her collarbone. There’s some inner fire there too, blood and blush, maybe. “I’ve been thinking about it for so long. Longer than you know.” She taps one finger on the mug. Traces around the rim. “I came back for a reason. But at first, just being here shook me up. It disoriented me. My friend Matt calls it the Homecoming Effect…” She trails off. “But I’ve remembered now. What I want to say, even if I don’t know how.”
They gaze at one another. Sasha’s tea is far too hot to drink, but she hovers her fingertips over it anyway, bathing them in the steam. “Just start anywhere,” she bursts out at that. “First page. Last page. I don’t care. Spit it out, Pip.” She wants to nudge her feet against Autumn’s, just to feel her, but the room is too still.
Autumn’s expression is brimming with sadness, and no small amount of fear. “I’ve missed you. Even after how long it’s been, I never stopped thinking of you. But I didn’t think you’d be here. I really didn’t—” She cuts herself off. “This isn’t going to make sense,” she says, more to herself than Sasha. “I don’t know how to make it make sense—Wyn.” She tries desperately. “I’ve been looking for him. And we talked to Lou, about the pecan children? I haven’t been able to tell you, really tell you, why it mattered so much to me—” She pauses again. Swallows. “No. That’s not right either, is it? That still won’t make sense.”
Sasha is reminded, suddenly, of her own stumbling attempts to tell Lil she loved women and not men, all the avenues into the topic that ended up being dead ends, all the convoluted stories she’s told herself so long to excuse it. It was hard to find her way out. And, as Lil waited, patient for once, for Sasha to get to the point, it became obvious to them both that she’d known all along anyway. They’d been keeping that secret together. Sasha waits, putting the mask of Lil’s patience over her own face, and lets Autumn untangle herself from her stories.
Autumn has turned inward, taking several deep breaths. “I’m spitting it out, I promise. Because really, the thing I have to tell you—the hardest thing—is this.” And then, she reaches out, catches Sasha’s fingers over the steam. She holds her gaze with rare intensity. “Sasha, there is something wrong. Here. With this place. This town. And it’s been wrong for a very long time.”
“Of course there is,” Sasha says slowly, feeling dumb. “Same thing that’s wrong with all of small-town America. Reaganomics, pressure on the small-time farmers to sell to corporations, no infrastructure, no opportunities…” She trails off, because something desperate is sparking in Autumn’s eyes. It’s a flicker of gold, and it shivers there like the gilded pecans in the tree, the tree that is an arm, reaching, offering something.
Something with a cost that is too high.
“Sasha, how long has it been since you last saw me?” Autumn asks.
“A year, maybe. The birthday before last.” The day is a haze in Sasha’s head, a memory so well-worn it’s starting to have holes. “Why are you asking? You were there.”
Autumn rests the tips of her fingers on Sasha’s watch. “Really think. How long has it been?”
Sasha pulls her hand back, gut twisting. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” she says. “I don’t—”
“We have to.” Autumn is gentle even in her ruthlessness. And Sasha can’t think. It wasn’t so long ago, was it? “It isn’t safe here. You’ve seen the phantom fires. We’ve heard from Wyn that the children like him are disappearing. So I’m sorry, but it’s time to wake up.” Autumn keeps her hand where it is, open between them, in case Sasha decides to reach out again. “Do you remember your thirtieth birthday party? The first one I ever skipped?”
“Of course I do,” Sasha snaps. “That was my last birthday. That just happened.”
It just happened. Hadn’t it?
She scrabbles, searching back. She doesn’t want to do this; she just wants to sit in comfortable silence with Autumn and not do this.
How long has the road been closed?
“No,” says Autumn, who stood on the banks of the river like a mirage just days (weeks? months?) ago and found her way to town all on her own. Found her way back to Sasha. “I tried to call you after that. For a while. But you never called back. I used to wonder…but it wasn’t that you were mad at me or done with me.”
“Never.” Sasha hears it from below her. Far below her, she sees the two of them, huddled in that window seat. “I could never be done with you.”
“It was something worse.” Each word rings like a slap. Sasha’s floating, up in the crook of the gable.
A tendril of rosy hair, curling over her neck.
Don’t say it, Sasha begs.
“Sasha. Your thirtieth birthday—that was twenty-nine years ago.”