LIGHTNING STRUCK AND I flinched. The rain came down in hard pellets, but I kept watching Abe and Miho as they drifted away. I waited until they disappeared into town before I walked inside my house, dripping wet. The sound of the storm was a steady roar on the cedar shingles above me, but the stone walls, silent and still, filled me with a sense of safety. I didn’t light any lamps, and the gray afternoon filtered in through the windows.
There was a small open area inside the front door of my house. To the left, a fireplace along the outside wall. To the right was a rather long, galley-style kitchen, and at the end of it a narrow space where I ate and wrote and spent time thinking. The wide double doors that faced out the back were open, but they were sheltered by the eaves of the house so the water wasn’t coming in. I stared at the plains sweeping away in a graceful downhill for a long, long way, covered in a dense curtain of rain that hit the ground before rising in a ghostly mist.
I went into my bedroom, the only separate space in the house, and changed into dry clothes. I tried to think of other things, but my mind kept coming back around to the conversation I had with Abe and Miho.
Mary was leaving.
Mary was leaving.
After she left, it would only be Abe and Miho and me, plus Miss B, John, Misha, Circe, Po . . . was that everyone? I ran through the names again in my mind as I walked to where my desk was pushed up under the large window facing the mountain. I thought back through a handful of the people who had left a long time ago, and it filled me with a deep melancholy.
I sat there at my desk and watched the rain run in rivulets down the glass, pooling above each mullion, dripping down to the next pane. The wind came and went, rattling the wooden frames. Lightning flashed and thunder followed. It was a good afternoon to be alone.
I pulled one of my many journals from the back corner of the desk. I picked up a pen and played with it, ran it over my fingers, took off the cap and put it back on again. It was still dark in the house except for the gray light, and I didn’t write anything. I thought of my brother. I wondered where he was in that moment, if it was raining on him too, in the mountain. I wondered if he was alone. I hoped he was alone. I couldn’t remember much from my time there, but I did remember wanting solitude, and the terror that came when those who were in charge paid you any attention.
My house was so close to the mountain that when I was inside, I could barely see the top of the steep range through the windows. My eyes drifted over to the left, to the mouth of the canyon, the place from which all of us had emerged at some point.
I stood, stared harder through the rain. What was it? Could it be . . . someone was coming out of the mountain? I leaned closer to the glass, held my breath, willed the rain to stop.
There, I saw the movement again.
A hunched form stooped and leaned against one of the last boulders barely outside the canyon. They stopped right beside the wooden sign someone had posted next to the canyon opening a long, long time ago. I had read it many times, because I often walked to the canyon mouth and willed my brother to appear.
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST
And then a few lines that were no longer legible, faded as they were, followed by one final line at the bottom:
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE
Why would anyone ever enter there? Why would anyone ever go back?
The person who had just come through the canyon tried to take a step forward, but they tripped, fell onto all fours. They crawled a few feet and lay down in the rain.
Could it be Adam? A flutter of hope tried to rise in me, but I shoved it down. I stood, willed the person to keep coming, but I didn’t move from my spot. It wasn’t worth trying to help them yet—they had to find their own way at first, like a newborn calf finding its footing. I remembered coming through that gap and seeing the plains and the small stone houses and feeling like I could finally breathe again. I had wept and cried in agony and crawled down the grassy path when I could no longer walk. Abe had welcomed me.
Yes, it had been Abe. The memory came up from some deep place. It had been Abe. I would tell him that the next time I saw him, that I remembered it had been him welcoming me, helping me down from the canyon to his own house in the village.
This strange, unexpected person crawled down the greenway, and I could see now that the form was a woman. A stabbing sense of sadness moved through me—This is not my brother—and I no longer held my breath. She was all knobby bones and stretched, naked skin, typical of those who came out. There was so little food in the mountain, and no spare clothes were ever handed out, at least not that I remembered. She was covered only by her own long black hair draping over her torso. She got to her feet, shaking. She walked like a toddler, one unsteady foot in front of the other, and came closer. Closer. After what seemed like an eternity, she reached the part of the greenway that ran directly in front of my house.
She stopped.
She was a pillar of pale skin and jet-black hair, and I couldn’t see her face. She turned off the grassy lane toward my front door, wobbling with each step, and disappeared into that area close to the front door that I couldn’t see through the window. I heard a weak knock.
It had been so long since someone had come out of the mountain. I hesitated.
I knew I should immediately lead her down to Abe’s house—this was my main responsibility in the village, to keep watch for refugees who came down out of the mountain. Abe could assess her, help her decide what to do next, where to go, where to live if she wanted to stay. But all of that came later. First, I needed to take her to Abe.
But I felt a hesitancy I had never felt before, and it was strange, this reluctance. It scared me. She needed to go to Abe. So why did I want to keep her at the house with me? Where was this hesitation coming from?
I opened the door with a shaking hand, and the roaring sound of the rain surrounded me through both the front and back doors. Small spits of it swirled into the shadows, small as the eye of a needle, then rose back up in the confused air. And there she was, waiting, her arms hanging helplessly at her sides. Thick black hair draped over her upper half. She raised her arms and clutched her sides, shivering, trying to cover herself. I noticed that the water where it left her feet was tinted red, blood still washing off.
“Come in, please,” I said quietly. A subtle terror rose in me, and confusion beside it. Why was I inviting her in? Where did those words come from?
And why was I afraid of this helpless woman?
I should have been walking her down to Abe’s, rain or no rain. But I turned and grabbed a small blanket from the rocking chair, moved toward her, and offered it to her. She shrank from my approach, seemed to be as scared of me as I was unsettled by her. As the blanket came to rest around her shoulders, her head tilted back, one hand pushed a part in the curtain of her hair, and she looked through. Her irises were dark like unlit tunnels, and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot, streaked with lightning-shaped capillaries. There were cuts on her face, red and swollen so that I couldn’t easily recognize her features. She shivered, not the gentle movement of someone slightly cold, but the deep, convulsive shuddering of someone hypothermic. Her knees locked and unlocked, jerking her body this way and that like a marionette in an unwitting dance.
She opened her mouth to speak. I wanted to help her, but it was important that I let her process this new place. When I had first started welcoming people from the other side, I tried too hard to make it easy on them, and they fought me or balked from the help I offered. I learned to wait. I shouldn’t have given her the blanket—even that small interference could have caused her to veer into hysterics—but she had seemed so cold and disoriented by her own nakedness. Still, I should have waited. I knew this, even now, but I couldn’t take the blanket back from her.
Mary St. Clair. I remembered again that she was leaving, and I remembered when it had been her crawling down the grassy lane, the first words she said, how her name tripped its way out from between cracked lips, how her nose bled down into her mouth as she stuttered, “Mmm . . . Mmm . . . Mary. Mary Say-Say-Say. Mary Say-Saint. Clair.”
I’d always had a soft spot for Mary.
But this woman couldn’t even speak, and my fear died a little inside of me. Sounds simply wouldn’t come out. She closed her mouth and stared hard at the ground, then met my gaze again and opened her lips. I found myself nodding slightly, coaxing her to speak. It was like watching a baby chick break out of its own egg. I wanted to reach in and help, but it wasn’t time. Not yet.
“Go ahead,” I whispered, not able to help myself. I reached out and touched her elbow.
That’s when I blacked out.
HUGE BOULDERS SIT along the walls of a gorge. Unrest fills the space, along with crushed rocks and sparse bits of crabgrass and tall cedars that are nothing more than spindly trunks sprouting dead, snapped-off branches. They stretch up forty, fifty, sixty feet to the top of the gorge where green needles dust their uppermost limbs. Through all of this, a woman comes walking, the same dark-haired woman I welcomed into my house. She’s in pain. A lot of pain.
She looks broken, like the stones. She holds herself in a perpetual hug as she walks, her forearms self-consciously covering her chest. Her long black hair falls down all around her naked form, covering her arms and back, tangled and matted with something that looks like tar or dried blood. Because her hair is so long and thick, she almost looks armless.
A small dove watches the stumbling woman’s progress, hopping along the top of the gorge. It flies ahead of her, following each of her steps with interest, its head cocked to one side or the other. Gradually she passes under the gaze of the bird and walks farther ahead, only for the bird to dance along the top of the gorge, catching up. But as the woman approaches the opening where the gorge spills out into the valley, out from the mountain, the dove suddenly stops, pecks two or three times at a red vein in a silver rock, then flies away, disappearing in the cliffs.
The black-haired woman limps out through a fracture in the mountain, and as she turns the corner, finally coming out from the canyon, there is the village and a home. My village. My home. This is the woman who came to my house, and I am watching her approach, but from the canyon.
What is going on? I stir, but I cannot escape. I see a leopard creep along the edge of the gorge. A hungry lion bends over its prey, hidden among the boulders. A pregnant she-wolf, lean and starving, collapses onto her side, moaning in the shadows.
I cry out.
I WOKE UP, opened my eyes. I was covered in sweat. Somehow, I was sitting in the armchair facing the still-open back doors, facing the plains. I couldn’t shake the eeriness of the . . . what was it? Dream? Vision? Memory? The house was darker than it had been before, but not as cold. Everything was completely still—the rain had stopped, and the silence left behind was like its own sound. I could feel my pulse fluttering, and a chill spread through my body, not from the cool breeze but from something else, something deeper inside of me.
I heard a sound behind me, at the front door. A moan. I jumped out of my chair, still woozy from the dream, and turned. The front door remained wide open. There was a puddle of water on the threshold. The dark-haired woman was on the floor in the water, under the blanket I had given her, unconscious.
I took a step in her direction but stopped. I turned around, went to the back doors, and closed them. The house grew even darker. I made my way back to the woman, slowly, slowly. She still hadn’t moved. I reached down to shake her shoulder, perhaps push her hair back, but that deep fear returned, made my hand tremble, and I didn’t touch her.
That’s when I saw it on the floor, barely outside the reach of one of her extended hands. A skeleton key, the kind used in old houses, with a small circle at the top, a long shaft, and uneven teeth at the other end. I reached for it. Her fingers were so close. I took the key and lifted it without a sound, stared at it, and slipped it into my pocket.
I had to tell Abe about this.
I eased my way around the woman’s body, my eyes on her the whole time. I justified my decision to leave her by telling myself she would be fine. She wouldn’t regain consciousness while I was away. I went through the front door and closed it gently behind me. The air outside was fresh and cool and the greenway grass was all bent over, heavy with moisture that soaked my shoes and the bottom of my trousers. I didn’t run. But I wanted to.
There were dozens of houses in the village, including mine, and nearly all of them were empty, but we kept even the empty ones tidy, at least on the outside. There were flowers in the window boxes that we transplanted from various spots on the plains, and we swept the dust from the eaves, but there was no denying the emptiness of shades always drawn and footpaths overgrown. The tall grass from the plains had begun encroaching on our small town, growing high where the walking of so many people, so many old friends, used to keep it low.
As I walked down to the homes, all the doors were closed, blinds drawn. Dusk approached and the light dimmed. We didn’t visit with each other as much as we used to. I had to admit that it seemed we were growing apart.
Miss B opened her door as I walked past, and the loud sound of the latch made me jump.
“Hello, Dan,” she said in her rich voice, her dark freckles dancing, her dreadlocked hair pulled up in a massive knot above her head. She seemed to be as old as Abe, but she didn’t take things as seriously as he did. She floated along, rarely offering an opinion or criticism of any kind.
“Miss B, hi.” I turned toward her, slowing but not stopping. “Everything okay?”
“Where you off to? You think you’re going to pass on by without giving me a hug?”
I smiled, laughed to myself, and it felt good. I took a deep breath, turned around, and approached Miss B on the short path that led off the greenway to her front door. She was a large woman, and she gathered me in. She was warm and smelled of lavender.
I returned the hug and took a step back. “Have you seen Abe?” I asked, trying not to sound worried.
“I think he went all the way down to Miho’s,” she said, slow and steady. “You heard about Mary?”
I nodded, started to walk away.
“Finally leaving, our dear Mary,” she said in a singsong voice, and I could tell she thought it was just about the best thing, miraculous even. And maybe it was. Maybe it was the miracle we’d all been waiting for. But it was hard for me to see it that way.
“I’ll see you soon,” I said.
“That was quite a storm,” she said as I walked away. I waved again over my shoulder, but then a strange thing happened.
“Dan,” Miss B said, and her voice was different. Completely different. Before, she had sounded airy, light, as if nothing about the day could go wrong. But in that whispered word, everything had changed. Her voice was strained. Her shoulders were slumped, and she was using a broom to hold herself up.
“Dan,” she said again.
“Miss B?” I jogged back over to her and took hold of one of her large arms, wrapped it around my shoulders. “Miss B. Are you okay?”
“Help me down. Here’s fine.” She motioned to the thick grass beside the front door of her house. “Oh, yes, that’s good. That’s good.”
I brought her down and nestled her into a spot, her back against the wall of her house, both of her hands planted into the ground beside her.
“Mmm-mmm,” she exclaimed. “That came on fast.”
“Are you okay?” I asked again. “Maybe I should go get Abe.” I wanted to leave. I wanted to get away from her. I had never seen Miss B like that before, and it made my stomach churn. Her sudden weakness reminded me too much of the woman lying in my entryway, how that woman had made me feel.
Miss B kneaded her hands, as if trying to rub out the anxiety, and swayed forward and back. “No, no,” she said in the breathless voice of someone who had run a marathon. “I’ll mosey on over to Abe’s a little later. He’ll want to know.”
“Know what, Miss B?”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted them back. I wanted to swallow them and walk away. There was too much going on—what was happening? I wanted to keep everything as it was, nothing new. But it was too late. Mary was leaving and there was a strange woman lying on the floor in my house and Miss B was having some kind of a breakdown, emotional or physical or both.
“I really think I should go get Abe,” I insisted, trying to backtrack from my question.
“I remember now,” she said, and I realized that what I had mistaken for weariness in her voice was actually a kind of bliss.
Miss B was enraptured.
“I remember what happened,” she said, amazement in her voice.