INTERLUDE

THE PHONE CALL

Rain hammers the phone booth.

Miriam, sixteen, holds the receiver against her ear. Her jaw shivers.

It rings and rings. She doesn’t want anyone to answer. Go to the answering machine, she thinks. It’s like a prayer. A mantra. Go to the answering machine. Go to the answering machine. Go to the answering machine. It starts to sound absurd in the echo chamber of her own head.

Click.

“Miriam?” her mother’s voice. Small and afraid. She’s never afraid. It’s like something’s been stolen from her. And maybe it has.

“The baby’s dead, mother.”

“I know. I know.” Of course she knows. She was there at the hospital. “God will take care of him now.”

“Mother—”

“Where are you?”

“God can’t be real,” Miriam says, throat raw, eyes puffy. Every part of her feels like a tooth that’s been cracked in half, the nerve ending exposed.

“Don’t you say that. Come home to me.”

“I can’t. Something’s wrong.” Something she doesn’t understand. The baby died inside her but something remained. Some little ghost, some little demon, fragile like the skeleton of a baby bird. It’s changed her. Turned her very touch into a sponge, a sponge that draws poison. A sponge that soaks up death the way a gauze soaks up blood.

She doesn’t understand it: Every time someone touches her— one of the nurses, a doctor, the security guard outside the hospital— she sees the most awful things. Visions of how they die. And when. They can’t be true.

But they feel true.

All the more proof her mind is lost. It’s like a moth—touch a moth and a powder comes off the wings, and once that powder’s off, the moth can no longer fly.

The powder, she thinks, is off her wings.

“Just tell me where you are. I’ll come get you.”

“I’m leaving.”

“Please, Miriam. God will protect us. He’ll help us get through this.”

“This. This? This is all proof he’s just a . . . a bedtime story, Mother. To make you feel better about the way you are.” She wants to tell her mother how horrible she is, how she’s just a bitter pill, a mean little rodent, but she can’t muster the words. She wants to yell about how her mother was never nice to her, not until she got pregnant—which means now that the baby’s dead, the old ways will return, the dismissals and the insults and God’s love blinding her like the beam of a too-bright spotlight. By now, Miriam’s crying again. She can’t believe she has more tears, more spit, more snot, but here it comes, just as the pain of unstoppable grief is again hitting her in the chest like a sledgehammer. She doubles over. “I won’t. I won’t go back. I won’t come back.”

“Miriam, I’ll do better.”

And then she says the final words: “No. You won’t. Because I won’t give you the chance.” She slams the phone down. With her back against the inside of the booth, she slides to the rubber mat and huddles next to the cigarette butts, the candy wrappers, the dead moths.

It’s there she stays until morning.