Nibbler rushes forward and nuzzles her face, and all Anvi can think is, No, you’ll fall too.
And then Linda is there, throwing herself onto her knees to take Anvi’s wrists in an iron grip. She pulls, dragging Anvi’s chest against the edge. Anvi kicks off the wall and swings her leg up and over. Together, she and Linda scramble away from the broken stairs.
Anvi’s heart thuds again, and now all she can feel is its panicked racing and the tile floor cold and solid beneath her. Then the pain hits: her hands, her shin. Survivable pain, but loud.
“Thanks,” she says to Linda. Nibbler crams his face into hers, licking. Anvi pats his warm side. “Yes, you helped too.” She sits up, hanging her head over her knees to catch her breath. Linda is stone-still beside her, watching. After a bit more huffing and nuzzling, Nibbler settles his flank against Anvi’s shoulder. His tail wags nervously in her face.
Anvi pulls up her left pant leg to reveal an ugly dripping wound along her shin. It hurts worse now that she sees it, and she sucks in a breath to keep her stomach steady.
Nibbler twists around to sniff the wound, and Anvi pushes his head away.
“Any chance there’s a first-aid kit lying around here?” she asks Linda. It’s a joke—mostly—but Linda answers with a serious shake of her head, then starts fiddling with the sleeve of her oversized jacket. Anvi looks back at the cut, half-wishing she were the kind of woman who carried around a handbag stuffed with handkerchiefs and breath mints. She could clean herself up and get the taste of her fear out of her mouth.
Linda shoots forward and presses a sleeve-covered palm against Anvi’s shin. Hard.
Anvi yelps, less from the pain than in surprise—Linda moving so quickly is like a statue coming to life—and then she steadies, watching. Linda’s brown hair is hanging forward, hiding most of her face, but Anvi can see one eye. It’s flashing with concentration—and so much confidence, it makes her look like a different person.
Anvi watches that steady eye, fascinated. Finally, Linda peels her hand away. The bleeding has stopped. “We should wash and bind the wound,” says Linda.
Anvi limps upright and turns toward the kitchen sink. Her shin is shrieking. “Want to place any bets on whether or not there’s running water?” she asks.
“The indoor water stopped working years before I left,” says Linda.
Anvi doesn’t even try to hide her shock. Freshman year of undergrad, some friends in the agriculture program convinced her to go deep-woods camping with them. There were a handful of sublime moments—the image of a spotted fawn rising out of invisibility is stamped in her memory as one of the most beautiful things she’s ever seen—but the lack of plumbing ensured it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Enough years have passed that she has trouble believing she really did it—that she went days without washing her hair, that she dropped trou behind a tree stump and buried her excrement in the earth just as her nomadic ancestors might have done generations ago. Though they were probably a lot less worried about getting shit on their jeans.
“How did you drink?” she asks Linda. “Or bathe? Or anything?”
“There’s a pond and a creek,” says Linda. “This way.” She heads out onto the rotting back deck.
Anvi hobbles after her. With every step, her shin hurts more. She tucks her hand under her sweater and touches the lesser pains there. She doesn’t feel any blood, but she suspects there will be bruises. At least this will make a fabulous story, she thinks. It would be good for Linda’s image too: her doing something proactive, helpful—saving Anvi from a broken leg or neck. All the Clone Girl stories Anvi has found are of Linda shying from the camera or doing something socially awkward. There’s one particularly cringeworthy video of her as a teenager. She’s at a charity function with her father, and Arthur is speaking with big sweeping gestures to a journalist. Linda’s standing beside him, blank-faced, and then her eyes flick up and she startles, her face falling into toddler-like fascination. It’s obvious she’s staring at a novel stimulus. Then there’s a twitch to her eye and mouth that could be read in so many ways, but one interpretation—the worst possible interpretation—is as finding the stimulus repellent. The camera pans to reveal that she’s staring at a black man in a wheelchair. Both of his legs are amputated at the knees, and his face is heavily scarred.
The man was an employee of the nonprofit at the center of that night’s event; he’d been injured years prior in a terrorist bombing abroad. Anvi couldn’t find any record of his response to the video, but this occurred at the height of call-out culture, where a portion of the population reveled in identifying social missteps and labeling even the smallest infraction as bigotry. In their eyes, there could be no ignorance, only hate—and despite her father’s wealth and privilege, Linda was still exceedingly ignorant. They pounced on the video, proclaiming Clone Girl’s unguarded gaze a window to her ableist—and probably racist—soul.
Anvi gets it: She remembers the tension of those years. How she felt compelled not only to action but to continually signal her involvement. Online, she maintained a data-centric persona, sharing infographics, nonprofits she believed in, and well-reasoned arguments more than passion. Passion she saved for her father’s side of the family, where she had a chance of achieving conversation instead of just an exchange of rhetoric.
What a terrible time to emerge ignorant into the world, she thinks. Not only did Linda have to contend with religious fanatics and everyday trolls, but the opposite extreme also exulted in finding fault. Between the two, Linda’s every stumble was a fall into an abyss.
Anvi limps down the porch steps. Linda keeps moving, apparently confident in Anvi’s ability to keep up. She can so far—barely.
If people knew about Linda throwing herself across the floor and heaving Anvi to safety—it would be an entirely new Clone Girl narrative. A positive one about something Linda did instead of what she doesn’t know or who her parents are.
Not that Anvi can tell this story publicly. She can’t even tell her mother.
As she follows Linda across the overgrown yard, she tries to imagine her doting, health-obsessed physician mother living here. Doing any of the things Lorelei Niequist is said to have done and not done.
It’s remarkable Linda survived, she thinks. It’s remarkable she can speak in full sentences and live on her own.
Linda stops, her feet straddling a slump of dead grass. Anvi stands beside her. Her leg is killing her and it’s getting harder to walk. It makes the most sense to go back to the car. The navigation system showed a downtown area nearby, and she wouldn’t mind some gauze and an antibiotic cleanser.
But confidence is still flashing in Linda’s eyes, and she’s standing straighter than Anvi’s ever seen. Even more than Anvi wants to clean her leg, she wants to see what Linda’s going to do next.
She sucks back her pain and waits.
The tree line is denser than Linda remembers. Whatever path once existed is now as wild as the rest. So she estimates, striking out where she thinks the path to the pond used to be.
As Linda pushes past a sapling, Anvi calls, “Linda.” Her voice is soft, and Linda turns around to find her hunched over, breathing heavily. Linda can’t see her face. She backtracks to Anvi’s side.
“Any chance you can give me a hand?” asks Anvi. “I hate to be a wimp, but my leg fucking hurts.” She laughs. It isn’t her usual laugh.
“Okay,” says Linda, and Anvi slings her arm over Linda’s shoulder, so that her weight sags onto her. The scent of char wafts up from Anvi’s hand, and Linda notices that her fingernails are painted a glittering opal. You would never know she was just clawing at floorboards to catch herself, except that the ring finger’s nail is torn. Linda feels Anvi’s coat brushing her back, the heat of her body.
Underneath these physical sensations is something else: a warm feeling that makes Linda want to be worthy of the trust Anvi is giving her.
The trees thin and the pond comes into view. The years have transformed what Linda remembers as a clear and cool body of water into a murky bamboo-choked swamp. The cattails are gone. As they limp closer, Linda sees the dock poking from the edge of the grass like a bucktooth jutting toward the water.
They reach a large rock Linda recognizes. “Wait here,” she says, easing Anvi down. Nibbler dashes ahead. His nails clack atop the dock. Anvi’s pant leg is bunched around her knee, and the cut is bleeding again. Her leg is a swath of crimson, her sock soaked where it peeks above her boot.
“You should sit on the ground and rest your leg on the rock while applying pressure to the wound,” says Linda. She helps Anvi shift her position. She isn’t sure what to use to apply pressure.
Anvi squirms. For a second Linda thinks it’s from pain, but she’s taking off her coat. Anvi rolls the jacket into a ball and jams it against the wound. “Ow,” she says. When she sees Linda’s surprised look, she adds, “It’s ruined anyway. At least now it’ll go out like a champ.”
Linda nods. “I’ll be right back.”
As she moves to investigate the pond more closely, she realizes the feeling she wasn’t able to identify while helping Anvi was that of being needed. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she feels useful. It’s a good feeling, and she wants to get this right. Which means she needs clean water to flush out the wound, and then she has to bind it.
When Anvi fell, it was as though time stopped. Then Linda saw Nibbler clatter forward, heard his whine of concern, and she caught a flash of panic in Anvi’s golden eyes. Suddenly she was running forward and throwing herself to her knees. She doesn’t remember deciding to help; it just happened.
She reaches the dock and finds it half-sunken. Nibbler is back with Anvi, sitting with his head pressed to her side. The water is atrociously murky. Linda doubts even fish live here anymore. Maybe some frogs do. This water won’t work. She circles the pond, pushing through thick clumps of brown grass, searching for the inlet. A third of the way around she finds it: a trickle. But the water is clean.
She needs a vessel. She has to go back to the house. She looks at Anvi, who is still applying pressure to her raised leg.
When Linda first saw the blood, it all came back to her, how she used to treat her injuries as a child—those she’d actually incurred as well as those she only pretended to. She would follow instructions from a book she’d loved and had completely forgotten about until this moment. That’s what’s rotting in her tree hidey-hole: her old first-aid book.
A remembered phrase: Almost all external bleeding stops with firm, direct pressure.
Linda pushes through the foliage, away from the water, beelining for the house. The brush is so thick, her pace is barely more than a walk; then she reaches the woods and quickens to a jog. She dodges trees, moving faster than she has in years. When she reaches the overgrown field, she lets loose, pumping her arms and legs, zipping through wild grass that tries to snag her sneakers. Her calves cry out, aching and free. She gasps and huffs and runs, the house looming larger, closer. She takes the porch steps two at a time. Pounding through the door into the kitchen, she slides to her knees at the cupboard by the sink. The huge pot she remembers is there, gloriously there, just as it should be. She yanks out the pot and is about to run back to the pond when she pauses. Think, she tells herself. What can she use to bind Anvi’s leg? The towel in the basement pops to mind, but even if she could reach it, it’s likely covered in mold.
She walks toward the laundry room. She used the machines sporadically as a child—the dryer until it started to smoke and smell, and the washer until the water stopped running. Then she kept her clothing in two piles on the couch room floor: clean enough and not. When the not pile got too big, she’d take an armful down to the pond and scrub, leaving them splayed on the dock to dry. She sometimes dropped bits here and there, leaving a trail of T-shirts and socks between the house and the pond. Anything out there is part of the earth now. And if any of the clothing is still in the living room, it’s burned up or buried in torn-down drywall. But she may have left something in the laundry room.
The walls are lined with blooms of mold and netted with cobwebs. But Linda finds a single gray sock crumpled inside the dryer. There’s a hole at the toe and another at the heel, but it’s probably the cleanest item in the house. She crams the sock into her coat pocket and collects the pot from the kitchen, then runs back to the pond’s tiny inlet. Anvi hasn’t moved. Nibbler is nestled to her side.
Long minutes pass as Linda holds the pot to the trickle of clean water, trying not to upset the silt at the waterway’s bottom. She can’t get the pot submerged enough to fill it. She decides to follow the inlet upstream and look for a deeper pool. After only a minute or two of hiking through ferns and deadwood, she reaches a spot where the inlet opens up. Not much, but enough that she can get the pot a solid inch under the surface of the water. She fills it as much as she can, then hefts the pot up into her arms and hurries back to Anvi.
“Is it still bleeding?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” says Anvi. Her voice quakes slightly.
“Can I see?”
Anvi peels off the blood-soaked coat, breathing tightly as the cloth pulls away from the wound. There is a fresh dribble of blood, but it looks like it’s just because the cloth adhered.
“I’m going to clean it,” says Linda. “Let’s have you sit on the rock again.” She helps Anvi up. Anvi extends her leg and looks away. Linda picks up the pot of water and dumps it over the heart of the wound in one quick gush.
Nibbler scrambles to his feet as Anvi yelps and kicks her opposite heel sharply into the ground. “For fuck’s sake,” she hisses. “Ow.”
Maybe she was supposed to have given more warning, but it’s too late. Linda sets the pot aside and peers at Anvi’s leg. She can see the gash more clearly now that some of the blood has been washed away, and she realizes it isn’t just a gash; there is a thick black splinter jammed in on one side.
“We need to get this out,” she says.
“Get what out?” asks Anvi. Then she sees it. “Yikes. I think I can grab it.” She leans forward and pinches the end of the splinter between her fingers. Her hand is trembling. She hisses as she pulls, and the splinter slides out cleanly, a solid inch and a half long. “Gross,” breathes Anvi. She flings the splinter aside and takes a handful of deep breaths.
Linda’s trying to decide if she should flush the wound again, since Anvi touched it with her dirty fingers. Probably. She tells Anvi what she’s thinking, then rushes off to refill the pot. When she returns, Anvi is hunched over with her head hanging toward her knees, shivering. Linda suddenly realizes that the quaking, the trembling, the tremor in Anvi’s voice—it isn’t from fear or pain; she’s cold.
Of course she’s cold: It’s in the mid-forties, her coat is a sodden rag pressed to her shin, and she just had a pot of icy water poured over her leg. Linda puts down the water and takes off her jacket. “Here,” she says, helping Anvi into the sleeves. She feels stupid for not offering it sooner. She rinses Anvi’s leg again, then asks Anvi to hand her the sock in the coat’s left pocket.
“Where did you get this?”
“I found it in the warm machine.” Linda pauses, cursing herself silently. “The dryer, I mean. Inside.” She folds the old sock, then reconsiders the wound. The skin is split pretty far; she doesn’t know if it will knit together on its own or if Anvi needs stitches. But she can’t do anything about the latter possibility; she presses the folded sock to the wound, then uses handfuls of long, twisted-together grass to tie it in place.
“That looks pretty badass,” says Anvi. She’s still shivering.
“We should get you warm,” says Linda. “Let’s go back to the car.” She helps Anvi up and they walk slowly together back to the driveway. Linda’s eyes are drawn to her sister’s fingerprints as they pass the overturned kitchen table.
“How do you know so much about first aid?” asks Anvi.
“One of the books I had here was a first-aid guide,” says Linda. “I must have read it a thousand times growing up.” But she also has a vague memory of doing something like this before. Anvi’s cut didn’t surprise her or scare her. The gushing blood felt almost familiar. Perhaps from the fit in which she cut her elbow at Arthur’s, but that doesn’t feel quite right. She didn’t treat that wound herself. She was too upset to care about a little blood, a little physical pain. After she calmed down, Arthur took her to a doctor. Five stitches. Anvi might need more. She might not need any.
Lorelei. It comes at her like a slap: At some point Lorelei came to her with a wound. It was well after Emmer was gone, well after Lorelei had stopped talking to her other than to tell her to be scarce. She emerged from the basement, silent and red, dripping blood from her throat—no, from her forehead, but it was running down her face and throat, dyeing the collar of her shirt and pooling in the divots of her collarbones. Young Linda had for a moment thought the blood was exploding from her mother’s throat, traveling both up and down.
She doesn’t remember being scared, though. Linda stanched the wound—she pulled sections of Lorelei’s hair, yanking her scalp closed like a butterfly bandage, could that be right?—then cleaned and dressed it. Afterward, her mother retreated without explanation or thanks.
The memory feels like winter, and it chills her: How could she have forgotten something as momentous as Lorelei needing her help and allowing her to touch her?
Walking with Anvi, she feels weak. Her flush of competency is gone, replaced by a sickly fear: What else doesn’t she remember?
They pass through the gate and reach the car. Anvi pats her pants pocket, then stiffens. “Crap,” she says. “The fob’s in my coat. I left it by the lake.”
Pond, Linda corrects internally. Lakes are bigger, are magical. Are places where children go to swim and climb and play and not be alone anymore. She shakes away the thought and says, “I’ll get it.”
She leaves Anvi at the car and jogs down the driveway, relishing the quick crunch crunch crunch beneath her. Nibbler follows as far as the gate, excited by her running, then Anvi calls him and he darts back. Linda runs past the table to the side of the house, then down the path they made like a game trail through the dead grass. The pond pops into view and she stumbles to a stop.
Halfway around the west side of the pond, there’s a man.