For the first thirty-three days after Luz left, Ana spent every night in the kitchen pantry.
She did not sleep.
Sleeping would have come easier if her shoulder blades hadn’t been pressed against wooden shelving, or if she hadn’t been coughing on unsettled puffs of cinnamon and paprika every time she jostled the spice rack, or if she could ever have convinced herself that turning off the dangling ceiling bulb was a good idea.
Sleeping would come easier if she could bring herself to close her eyes.
Ana didn’t really do that anymore, not when she could help it. Those two wetlands had become deserts. If she ran into her seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Chilton, maybe she could joke about that: “There’s been a complete biome shift, Mr. Chilton.”
But Ana wasn’t in junior high anymore, and she didn’t know who any of her teachers would be. And Ana didn’t make jokes anymore.
For jokes to land, usually you have to look your audience in the eye. There were red asterisks where Ana’s eyes used to be, webs as vast and complicated as constellations. No one could bear to look into them.
A handful of quiet doctors had made house calls since July. Ana had been given eye drops and therapy and medication. Last week, a small man in green had passed through the entrance of the fumigation tent and then the front door and pulled an actual pendulum from his pocket.
He attempted hypnosis.
The small man closed his eyes long before Ana did, rubbing tears from them and excusing himself. Dr. Ruby stood up from the threadbare recliner beside the door and shook his hand, accepting his apologies with what looked to Ana like a small smile.
Half of Dr. Ruby’s face was a mess of shiny pink burn scars. That smile may have been anything but. Ana’s eyesight was blurry these days.
Since Luz’s departure, Ana blinked only when her body forced her to. But blinking is necessary, and fighting a necessary thing for so long meant that every time she did succumb, Ana’s eyelids scraped her eyeballs like sandpaper might.
Short flickers of sharp pain: this was what Ana deserved for losing Luz.
They say if you stare into stars you go blind.
Ana wondered about that. If she lost her sight, maybe she would learn to let darkness exist again. Could she move away from dimly lit nights in the pantry, back into the cool black of the bedroom she shared with her mother? Could the sound of Mom’s whistling breath be enough to lull her to sleep again?
Or would the darkness of sleep mean seeing Dad?
For ages after Dad left, all the way up until Luz appeared, Ana had dreamed about Dad nightly, in memories looped like unspooling film. The day Dad let her braid and put hair clips in his beard unspun into a memory of Dad taking her to the book fair after her first parent-teacher conference, then unspun into the morning Ana had walked into the bathroom to find Milo standing next to the yellowing shower curtain, peering at the drain as if Dad had been sucked down it.
In Mr. Chilton’s class, Ana had learned that nature abhors a vacuum. Potholes are the first places puddles form. Pores always get clogged. Empty things wish they weren’t.
Ana wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was afraid of the emptiness behind her eyelids. She was afraid of what might fill that emptiness if she closed her eyes.
She was afraid it would not be Luz.
On the last night of summer break, after weeks of sitting in cupboards and refusing to leave the funereal quiet of the house, Ana found the duct tape. It had been hidden from her inside one of the pockets of her mother’s hanging shoe rack. She peeled two segments free and smoothed them across her forehead and upper eyelids, relished the stickiness on her lashes and eyebrows, the rawness of air on her exposed eyeballs.
The duct tape clung especially to a grisly scab over her right eye. At least the stitches had been removed. Last time, the black thread had stuck fast to the tape, even when Mom tore it away. What a complete mess.
Ana tucked the roll into her hoodie pocket and walked the distance from gritty bedroom carpet to worn hallway carpet to the kitchen’s peeling linoleum. Mom didn’t look up as Ana passed behind her; she was rubbing peroxide into the stained patch of floor in front of the sink again. Milo dozed at the table, Spaghetti-Os slipping from his spoon, headphones blaring loud enough to echo, short legs kicking table legs.
Neither of them noticed the blocks of silver holding Ana’s eyelids up as she opened the pantry door and shut it behind her.