Saint sat in her small apartment and stared at the map.
It was large, covered half the floor, and she stepped carefully around it with bare feet. She had not slept or eaten, just climbed into her car and made the drive back to Kansas, where she stepped beneath a warm shower and did not dare look in the mirror.
“You didn’t come see me?” her grandmother said on the telephone that evening.
Norma could not see the swelling around her eyes, the torn lip and the cut by her ear. The way it hurt to sit, to speak, like Jimmy had dragged from inside each thing that made her.
She still tasted blood. “I had to get back to work.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I have a cold coming.”
“You work too hard.”
“I know, Grandma.”
Saint looked at her nails, short, functional. In her bag she kept mascara and lip gloss and a light perfume she’d bought for her last birthday.
She thought of her tree in Norma’s yard, how she would sit beneath the threadbare canopy and let the rain speck her coat. Where she had once jarred her honey and completed her schoolwork and dreamed of other kids coming over so she might dazzle them with her facts. She tried to see it but knew now that nothing would be alike. No memory would be clean because her path had led her so far from home.
She knew of cognitive dissonance. She knew that negative associations could be unlearned and unlinked. She knew so much.
“Are you okay?” Norma said.
“I am.”
“When you come by, I’ll take you for ice cream at Lacey’s Diner.”
Saint smiled and felt the sharp ache in her jaw, her tooth still loose. “I’m too old for ice cream.”