THE BREEZE RETURNED in the darkness, coming back at us from the plains, and it was sweet and melancholy. It pulled a deep sense of nostalgia from me, a kind of remembering, but not of specific things: nebulous, old memories of tears and great happiness, of devastation and celebrated rebuilding. I wondered if my memories of those old days would ever come back to me, if I would ever remember everything, or if they would always be made available in fits and starts, small pieces here and there.
The grass was nearly dry, and my feet swished along quickly as I ran first through the dark village, then through the short empty space that led to my house, and finally up to my front door. I opened it, breathless, just as Miho came out.
“Oh!” she shouted, jumping.
“I’m sorry,” I said, laughing nervously. “I’m sorry.” I looked into her eyes to see if she had found anything, to see if she had seen the strange woman in my house.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked with a laugh, raising one hand to her chest as if to slow her heart. “You scared me, Dan.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, bending over, still breathing hard. “I . . . I wanted to make sure you could find it.”
She held up the book by its spine, her laughter shifting into a small suspicion. “What is going on, Dan? You haven’t been yourself lately. What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t look up into her face or she would have convinced me without saying anything to tell her the truth, so I stayed bent over and stared down, catching my breath. “It’s Mary,” I said. “Just Mary. And now this girl.”
Miho put her hand on my head, a kind of blessing. “Dan,” she said in a quiet, breathless voice. “Oh, Dan.”
We stood there like that for longer than made sense. The two of us, I knew, were looking for something to connect to, someone to trust. And guilt seeped through my entire being. She was that for me. She was someone to trust. And I was so utterly not.
But the guilt was also compounded by a feeling of indignation that she knew more than she was telling me. I kept seeing in my mind that sketch of my brother on her table. What did she know? And why wasn’t she telling me? I felt this growing chasm between us, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“I have to go,” she said, regret in her voice. “I have to take this down to Abe.” She raised the book again. “Do you want me to come back up here? I feel like we need to catch up.”
Concern etched itself around her eyes. I felt it too, the distance.
“No,” I said, standing up and shifting so that I stood between her and the rest of the house. “That’s okay. Just grabbing a few things. I’ll be right behind you.”
She reached out and touched my arm, gave a small smile I could barely see in the dark, and drifted toward the village, swinging the book by her side while she walked.
I watched her disappear into the darkness. How could she remain so carefree? When I went inside and closed the door quietly, the latch barely made a sound.
I meandered around in the kitchen for a bit, taking out some bread and gnawing on the crust. I walked over to the rear door, opened it, and looked out over the plains. I couldn’t see very much in the dark, but the grass rustled in the wind.
I left the back door open and walked to my bedroom, paused for a moment, then went inside.
She was still there, and it looked like she had barely moved since I had left earlier in the day. She was on her side, eyes closed, hand still reaching over toward the chair where I had sat. I walked slowly to it and sat down. Why was I so afraid of her? What could she possibly do to hurt me?
Her eyes opened slowly. They were beautiful eyes. I could see this, finally, since they were healing. The redness had gone out of them. Her dark irises were soft, even inviting.
“What are you going to do?” she asked in a drowsy voice.
“About what?” I replied. There were so many things on my mind. I couldn’t narrow them down to what she might be referring to—telling everyone about her? Going east? Trying to find out more about the memories everyone was having and not telling me about? Finding out more about the girl?
“Your brother,” she stated.
“I don’t know.”
“Your brother needs you,” she said, and I felt like crying. What was there to do but wait? I couldn’t go back over the mountain, not back into that hellish place. When I thought of it, screams echoed in my mind. Pain frayed my nerves. I didn’t think I could bear it, going back in there.
“How did you make it out?” I asked. “Do you remember anything?”
She coughed, moved her hand to cover her mouth.
“Wait, let me get you some water.” I walked back to the kitchen and returned with a glass. “Would you like to sit up?”
She shook her head. She leaned to the side and managed to drink some water like a bird, tipping her head back. “I don’t remember much. I remember the path going up and up and up. I remember hiding. I don’t know how I did it.” Her eyes went momentarily wild.
“I wish we knew more about it,” I said, more to myself than to her. “I wish I could remember something.”
She coughed again. “When I left your brother, he was at the very bottom. The very bottom.” The darkness in her eyes shifted to sadness, the way a sunny day can suddenly dim.
I leaned toward her. Again I was taken by her beauty, her vulnerability.
“I wanted to bring him with me,” she said. She licked her lips, and they, too, were soft, healing. Tears formed in her eyes. I leaned closer. “But he wouldn’t come. He was too afraid.”
Something about her courage latched on and stirred up a longing in me. I moved to kiss her cheek at the same moment she turned to look up at me, and our mouths came together. She was warm, and she kissed me back. I felt a rush of confusion and the soft delight of intimacy.
I see him kneeling on a mound of rock, and he looks like he’s been there for a hundred years. His clothes are tattered, and when he looks up, his eyes are wild. I wonder if he’s sane anymore—there’s something about him that looks missing, vacant. I want to walk toward him, but something is between us, something is keeping us apart.
This vision was quick, like a stabbing pain. I leaned back in my chair, shocked, existing on some other plane.
“You should go get him,” she whispered. “You could convince him to follow you out.”
“I can’t go down there on my own,” I murmured, trying to catch my breath. My heart was pounding. I wanted to kiss her again but knew I shouldn’t. I thought of Miho. What was I doing?
“You wouldn’t have to go alone,” she said, and her voice was relaxing, mesmerizing, convincing. “You have friends here who would go with you if you asked them. If you all went together, you would be safe.”
“I couldn’t do that,” I said, but I didn’t sound convincing, not even to myself. Would they do that? Would they come with me? Maybe the horrible ones waiting on the other side wouldn’t expect us. Maybe we could sneak in unobserved and bring back Adam. Safely. All of us together.
My voice emerged empty, distracted. “If you want to get cleaned up, there’s a bath in there.” I pointed mechanically toward the bathroom no bigger than a closet.
I stood up. I had to get out, take a walk, clear my head. I moved to the door, but when I got there I stopped and turned. “You never told me your name.”
“You never told me your name,” I said again, this time in a whisper. I stared at her placid face, my hand on the doorknob. I wanted to stay, but I left.
IN THE MIDDLE of that dark night, Miho’s house became the new center of our small universe. Misha and Circe sat in the soft grass outside her front door, talking earnestly, quietly. Miss B walked in circles around the stone patio not far away, every so often looking down toward the house. As I walked up, John and Po passed by.
“Where are you guys going?” I asked, worried for a moment that they were leaving too.
“We’re going for wood,” John said.
“You’ll have to go a long way,” I warned them. “I was at the second tree and there wasn’t much left.”
“We’ll check it out,” Po said dismissively. There was an edge to his voice that seemed unwarranted.
“Everything okay?” I asked their backs as they walked away, but they didn’t reply.
“Should they be going out there right now, in the dark?” I asked Misha as she came up beside me. “I can’t even see the first tree.”
She shrugged. “What can we do?” Her voice was so slight that her words melted away.
I sighed. “Anything new in there?”
“The girl woke up a bit ago,” Circe said. She clenched her jaw. “I’ve been hounding Abe for an update. I’d love to know what they’re talking about.”
“Why would someone come from the east?” I asked. “After all this time, after all of these people leaving, why come back?”
Could it be there wasn’t anything on the other side of the plains? What if the promised haven didn’t even exist?
But if there wasn’t anything over there, why didn’t more people come back, and sooner? Were the people over there sending for help?
Miho’s face appeared at the door. “There you are,” she said to me in a calm, kind voice. “Thanks for the book. It’s helping her relax.”
“Is she okay?” Misha asked.
Miho nodded. “She’s sleeping now.”
Abe came out, walking past Miho. “Why don’t you all get some sleep,” he suggested. “There’s not much else going on here right now. Let’s meet at the patio in the morning. We’ll give you an update.”
“Sleep? Abe . . .” Circe replied, clearly ready to interrogate him about the woman, but he interrupted her with a tired voice.
“Circe, please. We’re all tired. Let’s talk in the morning.”
“Do we have that long?” she asked.
He stared at her for a moment. “In the morning, Circe.”
“The guys went out for wood,” I told him. “I think they’ll have to go out to the third or fourth tree.”
“I wish they hadn’t done that. Listen, let’s all stick together until tomorrow, okay? Stay in the village. Stay together. I’ll keep the fire going to make sure John and Po can find their way back.”
The women glanced at each other nervously.
“Can I stay with you?” Misha asked Circe.
Circe nodded as Miss B came over.
“Miss B, we’re having a slumber party,” Misha said, smiling, trying to lighten the mood. “You want to stay with me at Circe’s tonight?”
“And sleep on that godforsaken sofa of hers? No thank you, ma’am. I will enjoy my own bed quite well, thank you.”
Everyone laughed, and for a moment the air felt more breathable.
“Well,” Misha said, “can we at least walk you home?”
“Of course.”
The three women walked up the lonely greenway into the darkness. They walked slowly, accommodating Miss B’s easy pace. I made a mental list of where everyone was: Miss B at her own house; Misha and Circe at Circe’s house; John and Po on an unadvised wood run; Abe and Miho in the house with the girl. Who was I missing? I was convinced I was missing someone.
Oh, of course. Mary. But she was gone, walking east, somewhere in the dark, maybe at the fourth or fifth tree by now if she had walked straight, if she had found her way.
I turned to walk home, wondering if the woman in my house had fallen asleep for the night, but Abe called my name.
I turned around. He motioned for me to come back to Miho’s door. “You need to come in. We have to talk.”
THREE LAMPS LIT the inside of Miho’s house, and their softness caused a seed of homesickness to rise again. I loved our town, and I was heartbroken at how empty it had become. There were times we had picnicked out by the first tree, well over a hundred of us. Maybe even two hundred at one point. People had shared houses in those days. The greenway had always been full of people—barely green, in fact, usually trampled to dust by all of the coming and going, the visiting. There had been the constant sound of laughter and even, sometimes late at night, singing.
I could barely see the girl lying on the small couch against the wall, resting in the shadows. I took a step toward her, but Abe held out his arm like a small barrier. I stopped.
“Wait,” he said, motioning toward the table where Miho sat, her face in her hands. She looked up at us, her eyes tired, more tired than I’d ever seen them, and she gave me a sad, uncertain smile. She reached out her hand to me, and I crossed the space and took it with a pang of guilt, remembering how I had kissed the woman in my house. The woman without a name.
Abe pulled out a chair for me and I sat in it. I glanced around the table, but the sketch was gone, as was the note with the question about my brother. How could Miho possibly know what my brother looked like? Why was she waiting for him?
The three of us sat still for a few moments, saying nothing.
Abe broke the silence. “She can’t speak,” he said quietly, and I could tell he was trying to keep our words from reaching the girl.
“What?” I asked.
“Or won’t,” he clarified. “Can’t or won’t.”
“This isn’t good,” Miho whispered to herself, as if it was the only thing she had been saying since the girl arrived. “This isn’t good.”
Abe seemed to consider disagreeing, then thought better of it. “We don’t know what it means,” he said to me.
“But everyone’s already freaking out,” Miho said. “What will they do when they find out she can’t talk? What if she can’t talk because of something that happened to her on the other side of the plains?”
I knew immediately what she was implying—that the other mountain, the faraway respite we had heard so much about, might simply be a mirror image of the one we had escaped from. Another place of torment. If that was true, we were trapped in between them, mountains to the east, mountains to the west. Where could we go?
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Abe said firmly.
“But that’s the whole point,” I said, anger or cynicism or despair rising in my voice. Or all three. “We don’t know anything. She’s here, and we still don’t know anything. What could be more discouraging than that?”
We sat in the quiet. The lamp in the kitchen burned down too low and winked out, and the shadows that formed in its wake felt like living things drawing closer, predators closing in.
I felt the key in my pocket. I gathered myself. It was time to tell Abe and Miho the truth.
But then I heard a sound from the sofa. The girl was sitting up, staring at me with eyes wide open. She was either terrified of me or surprised to see me, and neither response made any sense.
“Hi,” I said to her, glancing nervously over at Abe. He nodded at me, encouraging me to keep going. I realized he was hoping we might get her to say something, to explain why she had come back.
She didn’t reply, so I tried something else. “Are you okay? Would you like something to eat?”
She stood up and limped toward me.
Again I thought of how far she must have come, the toll the journey must have taken on her small body. She moved more fully into the light, and when I saw her face, I felt the tug of familiarity, but it was a flash, here and gone. There were tears in her eyes as she raised her hand to touch my face, but just like that, the light went out of her eyes. Her hand fell back to her side, her mouth closed into a straight line, and her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. She turned and went back to the sofa, curling up under the blanket with her narrow back facing us.
I looked over at Abe and Miho. We stared at each other. No one knew what to say.
What I didn’t say was that I had experienced this before. I knew that old familiar feeling of someone looking at me, thinking they recognized me, only to apologize and walk away.
It happens often when you’re a twin.
So, she knew my brother. I considered telling Abe and Miho this revelation, but it became another nameless thing.
“Tomorrow morning,” Abe said, weariness in his voice, “let’s meet up at the patio. We’ll tell the others everything we know.”
“We don’t know anything,” Miho replied, but it wasn’t a protest of any kind, simply a statement of fact.
“And that’s what we’ll tell them.”
MY HOUSE WAS dark and quiet, and there was an undercurrent of something I couldn’t identify, like a high-pitched sound I heard for an instant and then lost track of. I assumed the woman was still sleeping in my bed, and I felt guilty because of my recent treasons, so I didn’t even go back into the room. I didn’t trust myself. Why should I? No one should trust me. Not anymore.
I pulled the armchair over to the back doors and opened them, sat in the chair, and stared out over the plains. Since it was night I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the wind moving madly through the grass. It whipped in the door and stirred the air in the house, so I got up, found a blanket, and sat back down.
I fell asleep, drifting into a shallow snooze. I tossed and turned all night. I even watched the sky brighten in fits and starts as I slept and woke up, slept and woke up. Finally, as light took over the morning, I found a place of deep sleep.
When I woke up, I had it. Another memory. One that filled me with dread and a deep, deep sadness.