by Kelly Link
Shanna shook her head. “No. Sort of squarish.”
Caroline hadn’t drawn in a while. She’d managed to teach a couple of photography classes out of grad school, though it wasn’t really her skillset, after another instructor dropped out at the last minute. And those photo courses had turned into a few more, which had turned into a semireliable cluster of adjunct courses at the liberal arts college twenty-or-so miles south, teaching digital photo and (weirdly specifically) black-and-white rural landscapes. She’d developed an accidental specialty in photography and her grad school projects had gone by the wayside. But she found herself wishing she’d brought a pen and Moleskine, wishing she could stop and sketch the streetlight and the flag.
New light washed over them. She blinked and followed it back to its source, a bobbing orange eye on the sidewalk across the street, a lantern in the hands of a silhouette. Caroline remembered her knife, gripped the handle.
“Let me talk,” Shanna murmured to Caroline.
“Hello?” said the shade. He lowered his light. An older man in a Nike windbreaker stared at them from across the road. White-stubbled, stocky. “Hello?” he asked, as if he was uncertain that this was the right word, the right question. “What are your names?”
“It’s Shanna Miller,” said Shanna. “Angie’s girl. Hey, Jamie.”
A pause. “Couldn’t hardly see you in the dark.”
“This is my friend Caroline. Brought her to meet my mama.”
Again, the pale man waited a beat before he answered. “A pleasure, Caroline. I’m Jamie Harding.” He turned to Shanna again. “Wondered if you might be the Phillips girl back with supplies. You see her in the forest?”
Shanna shook her head. She seemed distracted, all of a sudden.
Jamie directed his attention back to Caroline. “Every time we see Shanna here, we hope she’s gonna stay with us this time. Maybe you can persuade her.”
Caroline laughed softly. What she hoped was a polite laugh.
“You’re very welcome here,” said Jamie. “I want you to know.”
“Thank you,” said Caroline.
“A lot of towns like ours, you hear of everything going to drugs and rot. But we’ve kept some business and civility here.”
Caroline started to look around her, as if to say, Where? Stopped herself.
“Jamie,” said Shanna, “how’s your brother doing?”
The pale man in the windbreaker didn’t answer for a moment. He worked his jaw before he spoke. “Roger passed on two weeks ago.”
Shanna handed Caroline her lantern, then approached Jamie, gave him an uncertain, one-armed hug. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Jamie stood stiffly, still holding his own lantern down by his side. Shanna withdrew. “What happened?” she asked. The way she said happened made Caroline think this had not been expected.
“Stroke,” he said simply. “Phillips girl and a few boys from the diner helped carry him through the forest and drive him to the hospital. But it wasn’t . . .” He trailed off. Shanna squeezed his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Won’t be the same without him.”
“No,” he said quietly.
“Is there anything we can do for you?”
“No.” He stood there holding his lantern by his side, staring past them.
“We got to be going,” said Shanna. Her voice soft, her accent coming out. “We’ll talk soon, all right? You can show me where Roger’s buried, if that’s okay.”
“He’s ashes on the farm,” said Jamie. “Say hi to your mama for me.”
The orange eye of his lantern bobbed a goodbye. Shanna was quiet as they walked away.
When they were out of earshot, she murmured, “Preservation Society.”
Her relationship with Shanna wasn’t quite Caroline’s longest. But there was a translucency between them that she’d never felt before, a sense that Shanna might see what was in her head. Or some of it, anyway, like a faraway broadcast.
At first, she had wondered if this was the sign of a true connection, the breakdown of opacity between minds. But by their third year, by the time of too much wine and stupid spats, it left her more paranoid than pleased, particularly when her thoughts turned disloyal. In the car, on the way back from an opulent holiday party held by the long-ago-tenured: I’m thirty-four and a photo adjunct and I’m only here for her.
She glanced at Shanna and imagined she saw her forehead crease. A twist of anger at the corner of her mouth. “You okay?” Caroline asked.
Shanna nodded. “Fine.”
“You seem pissed.”
A pause. “You were a little tipsy, is all.”
“Oh, come on. Half the people there were a few sips from being on their asses.”
“They weren’t all bitching about their jobs the entire time.”
Caroline stared at her. Bewildered. Shanna was not exactly a serial defender of their college’s administration. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean, Jesus, baby, some of those people are department heads. You want something full-time down the road, you can’t just be whining drunk.”
Caroline, slowly: “You get a couple teachers in a room, ragging on the school’s about the first thing that happens. I wasn’t the only one. Fact, some of those department heads—”
“Are whiners too.”
Silence again.
“I guess,” said Shanna at last, “I don’t have a lot of patience for hearing you complain that you could be on food stamps. When you’re . . .” She trailed off.
Caroline felt cold. “I could be.”
“Your family is fine. They can buy you an SUV. You can afford—” She stopped herself.
Caroline wanted to tell her that she was being unfair. But she felt ashamed. She held her silence.
“No,” said Shanna, her tone more even now. “No, I’m sorry, that’s not it. Honestly, honestly, what I’m pissed about is your telling all those people that we’re talking about leaving.”
“We have talked about leaving.”
“Like once. Like a fantasy, a joke.” Staring straight ahead. “I mean, you know I can’t leave, right? My shit’s tenure-track. I got my mom.” Her accent came out. “I’m here. I worked for this. I can’t just float from city to city like you. You can’t be telling fucking department heads that I’m thinking about leaving. I’m not.”
“Ah,” said Caroline.
Already she imagined herself in some new city, maybe Chicago. Somewhere that wasn’t occluded yet.
“Left on Lapham,” said Shanna, pointing to a street sign. “She’s not far off Main.”
No parting of trees this time, but they still followed the line of Shanna’s finger. Down Lapham, where one house had a candlelight flickering in a caged window. The yard unsettlingly mowed. The manual mower lying on the grass, a resurrected artifact. “Not here,” said Shanna. “Couple more blocks.” But Caroline was transfixed, staring at the house: two-story, paint peeling from navy blue shutters.
They walked in the middle of the street, Shanna still holding her lantern aloft. They turned twice more, then stopped in front of a lime-green box of a house. Small, one story, lawn mowed but not recently. A dead Oldsmobile in the driveway. No candle in the window.
“Well,” said Shanna. “What do you think?”
The yard was half-familiar from some childhood photos Caroline had seen, two-year-old and too-cute Shanna squealing in the spray of a sprinkler, her hair much blonder than it would become. Decades before the town turned into a lacuna. Still, Caroline had a hard time bringing the scene to life in her mind, imagining that Shanna on this grass.
“You ready?” asked Caroline.
“Nope.” Shanna fished a ring of keys from her pocket and opened the front door.
Shanna’s mother was awake. She sat in a La-Z-Boy in the dark. Dressed in her nightgown, hair in curlers. Squinting in the lanternlight.
“Oh lord,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’re early. I didn’t think you would be here this early. I w
ould’ve put on some lights.”
Her hair was red streaked with gray. The shape of her face more similar to Shanna’s than Caroline, for whatever reason, had imagined. She’d pictured Angie Miller as much older, haggard. But the woman looked lively. She held a gray long-haired cat, who appeared to be asleep.
Shanna set down the lantern on a coffee table, beside a glass bowl full of M&Ms. “No worries, Mama. We got some light here.” She gestured for Caroline to sit on the couch and took to lighting tea candles. “This is Caroline, Mama. Caroline, this is my mom.”
Caroline wondered if she was meant to stand up, lean over, and shake Shanna’s mother’s hand. She was bad at this kind of thing. Or felt bad at this kind of thing. She inclined her head and smiled. “Very nice to meet you.”
“Lovely to meet you. Please call me Angie or Mama or whatever suits you best.”
Caroline hadn’t been sure how much friendliness she should expect. According to Shanna, Angie had not always been so enthusiastic about the women in her daughter’s life. “But you’re coming in at a good time,” Shanna had said. “She liked my last two exes so much, she’s all set to love you.” Caroline hadn’t quite known how to parse that.
“Can I get you something to eat? Drink? Shanna, have I got anything for the young lady to eat?”
Shanna slid the bowl of M&Ms toward her. She set down the last of the lit candles, pulled out her ponytail. She still had her backpack on. “All right,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I’ll be back.” Traipsed off into another room, maybe to light more candles. Caroline looked at Angie, smiled uncertainly.
“I’d give you a tour of the house,” she said, “but my room’s a bit of a sty, and there ain’t much else to see besides Shanna’s. Figured she’d want to show you that herself. Don’t know where she got off to. My knee’s not up for much walking, besides.”
“Oh,” Caroline said, “that’s okay. I like your books.”
The coffee table, the couch, the carpet were all too clean, too tidy, but the walls were covered with shelves that heaved with books in no obvious order: hardcovers wrapped in library plastic, yellowed paperbacks, old leatherbound volumes and new-looking trade paperbacks, mysteries and cookbooks, biographies and decades-old science fiction digests.
“I like to think I’m not very, you know, acquisitive or possessive, but I suppose my library is my weakness. Handful of folks have been coming by and trading with me, or asking if they could check something out.” She grinned proudly. “The Phillips girl, she said I had a better library than the library. How do you like that?”
A fist clenched in Caroline’s stomach. She’d been prepared for an argument, for Shanna and Angie to shout one another down. Now she couldn’t imagine how they would even get Angie out the door, down the street. She was lively, but she was rooted. Proud curator of a library in a lost place. My knee’s not up for much walking, besides. How could Caroline even help bear or compel her through the woods if she was hardly aware of walking in the first place, gone in her forest fugue?
Angie asked her about her job, how it was going. Caroline gave her the upbeat version: tough market, lucky to have work, getting some good experience. She tried to change the topic.
“We met a man, Jamie. He said to say hi.”
Angie didn’t respond for a moment. A strange expression crossed her face, hard to read in the light of the tea candle.
“Sad,” she said, “about his brother. Did he tell you?”
“He did.”
Shanna came back to the den, sat down on the couch and listened. This time, Angie seemed to want to change the subject. “You ought to show Caroline around the house,” she said to Shanna. “Let her see where you grew up. I got the bed ready, too, if you’re tired.”
The fist in Caroline’s stomach clenched tighter. She agreed that Shanna should show her to her bedroom. So they walked down a short hallway, across creaky hardwood, Shanna leading the way with a tea candle. She opened the door to her bedroom, smiled nervously and beckoned inside with a jokey flourish.
The room was small, much of the space filled with a twin-bed, covered with an ancient-looking quilt. Neko Case album sleeve on the wall, The Virginian. More bookshelves, more books, these more precisely organized. Careful blocks of American Girl, Dianne Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett. A fuzzy blue pillow-chair beside a now-decorative record player in the corner.
“What do you think?” Shanna asked.
“You told me we were taking her.”
Shanna was quiet.
“You asked me to help you take her away from here. And I agreed. Are we going to be doing that?”
Shanna turned away. Faced her bookshelf, like she was bored. “I don’t know,” she said quietly.
“Because of her knee?”
Shanna knelt and touched the top of one of the American Girl books with her forefinger, like she was going to pull it out. “She doesn’t want to go.”
“You can’t keep coming in and out. What are you gonna do if she falls? If she needs to go to the hospital? Like—” She felt self-conscious about using a stranger’s name. “Like the man’s brother.”
“She likes it here.”
“So what did you bring me for?”
Shanna stared at her. Her face blank, but Caroline knew this was her anger: a stillness. She called out, “Mama, I’m gonna show Caroline the yard,” all mechanical brightness. Angie yelled back for her to remember the drop-off on the last step.
The clouds had cleared partway from the moon, coloring the backyard in dim blue. Shanna sat on the end of a lawn chair, looking down at the grass. Caroline watched the towels flap on the clothesline.
“You lied to me,” Caroline said.
“To get you to come. I figured you’d want to be able to feel like you were doing something good. Like you were helping.” Her voice stony.
“I begged you to bring me here. For two, three years.”
“And then you stopped asking.”
“Because everything was almost—” She waved at the air in front of her, like the rest was obvious. But she couldn’t find the word.
“Almost what,” Shanna said.
“Almost over.”
Shanna stood up. Walked to the fence, opened the gate, and left. Across the grass and into the middle of the street. Caroline wavered for a moment and then jogged to catch up. Shanna didn’t turn around. Didn’t look at her.
“I found all your applications,” Shanna said. “All the files and scans and stuff on your laptop. Colorado. Chicago.”
“Ah,” said Caroline.
“I thought you’d tell me eventually,” said Shanna. “I thought we’d talk about it, thought we’d find some kind of middle ground. I didn’t think we were at the end of the line.” She stopped. “This isn’t about you or us. I got to do what’s best for my mom.”
“I know.”
“Part of me gets where my mom’s coming from. She wants to be rooted. Sometimes I feel the same. Part of me is tired of coming and going. Walking through the forest. Part of me feels like I belong here. Like if I tried I could make this place work.”
Down the block, Caroline saw the house with the mowed lawn, the lights still in the windows. She wasn’t sure what to say. Neither of them said anything for a while.
“The thing is I’ve got this theory about the occlusions,” said Shanna, “and I can’t get it out of my head.”
“Yeah?”
“I think maybe the towns don’t change our memories, but the other way around. We change and the towns die. Like maybe it’s because we don’t know how our machines work, not just machines but the big machines, the roads and, you know, the histories and communities and things, maybe we don’t know how to will ourselves together anymore. Maybe this is what happens when humanity gets too old. We forget how to run the big machines, we’re like cells falling apart, we’re too old to hold on to one another. We don’t know how to make the world make sense.”
Caroline shivered. The thought that she was part
of something very old, one bone in a body that was on the cusp of forgetting itself. She reached out and took Shanna’s hand and gripped it for anchor, and Shanna frowned distractedly, either at the same thought or the wetness of her palm or something else entirely. Shanna pulled her hand away.
“Go back to the house,” she said.
“What?”
“Go back and stay with my mom. I want to be alone.”
“Where—”
“I want to be alone.”
She said it with a quiet vehemence that Caroline couldn’t answer. “Okay,” she said. But Shanna had already started down the street.
The thought: she was stuck here. If something happened to Shanna, if Shanna simply decided to leave, Caroline would have to find someone else to bear her through the forest. Jamie, the one-man Preservation Society, didn’t seem quite up to it. There were teenagers, Shanna had said. Boys at the diner. “The Phillips girl.” But those were just shadows, ideas, vaguer than strangers. How many people lived here in the occlusion? She realized she didn’t know.
She went back inside. Paced slowly through the hallway of Angie’s home, the hardwood creaking beneath her feet. She considered hiding and waiting in Shanna’s room, decided that would be too awkward, too rude. She returned to the living room, found Angie reading by tea candle. A mystery.
“Shanna had an errand,” said Caroline, preempting the question. “She’ll be back.”
Angie set her book aside, beamed. “I’d hoped we might get some time alone, if I’m completely honest with you. I was all set to grill you.”
Caroline smiled nervously. “Oh no.”
Angie waved her hand side to side, just kidding.
“Has she told you what she sees?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?” said Caroline.
“In the woods. When she walks. Has she told you what she sees?”
Caroline shook her head.
“Me neither. She’s giving of herself, you know, so giving, but she’s not always very giving of herself.”
Caroline considered that for a moment. “What do you mean,” she asked, “by what Shanna sees?”
